2011

Yearly Archives

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    Poetry made prose at Drumcliff.

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    By Michael Smith. Sligo County Council and the National Roads Authority have ruined Yeats’ grave. Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! The most famous epitaph for a great literary Irishman is the last lines of Under Ben Bulben, for William Butler Yeats. In that poem, Yeats advocates “whatever is well made”, and disdains “the sort now growing up/All out of shape from toe to top”, while he imagines a future passer by, sometime in eternity, casting “a cold eye/On life, on death” near the poet’s imagined tomb in Drumcliff Cemetery. The poetry is tumultuously poignant; the importance of the place in time afforded Drumcliff momentous. It lends to Drumcliff churchyard universal and all-time significance. So we can assume the Cemetery and the grave have been treated with reverence, not to say imagination? The cemetery in 2010 is the child of Sligo County Council and the NRA. The half acre nearest the great man’s grave is now a tarmac car-park. It ends within a metre of the grave itself. You could put your foot on the grave and leave the other one rooted in the car-park. A hundred metres away, the new Sligo-Bundoran road channels the juggernauts of the North West on their noisy way. A constant drone of disharmony. The plaque commemorating Yeats at the entrance to the graveyard is sponsored by the National Roads Authority. Even the limestone is cut somewhat crassly and the capitalisation of “Life, Death and Eye just wrong. If ever a man is spinning in his grave (pern in gyre) it is the beloved bard Yeats, reinterred in 1948 nine years after burial in the far more favoured hilltop Roquebrune church yard in France where he died; now circumvolving within spitting distance of the tour buses and not a horseman in sight. Yeats Country beaten down. Inside the still-pleasant church beside the graveyard is a visitors’ book for comments on the Drumcliff experience. The gushing almost drowns out the traffic: “a peaceful place”, “an oasis in a world gone mad”, “I could feel the presence of the great poet” and so on. It is not, it is not and you cannot. Ne’er a fool like a pre-disposed tourist. I attended one of the, admittedly charming, Leonard Cohen weekend concerts In Lissadell over the summer. Cohen is allegedly a poet, the lyrics to his gravel-plated songs demanding, according to the comfortable demi-intellectuals who comprise his Irish audiences, reflection. I found his performances a little stage-urbane. Twice during his set that Saturday he introduced his band, stopping to praise each member in turn but somewhat disappointingly using precisely the same adjective for each member on both occasions. The “inspirational Bob Metzger”. The “irrepressible” Neil Larsen. Or whatever. The attractive, backing Webb Sisters he described as “sublime”. Twice. During his concert Cohen made clear his veneration of Yeats and quoted from his work. According to the Irish Times, “earlier on Saturday he had visited Drumcliff churchyard and paid his respects at the grave of Yeats, a poet whose work he had first read, as Cohen told his audience, ‘at home in Montreal, about 50 years ago’. He smiled his wry, rueful smile. In the visitors’ book at Drumcliff church he wrote ‘Leonard Cohen, Montreal’, and next to it a simple comment. “Sublime”. How unpoetic. 2010 (photo: James Eccles, courtesy Benedict Schlepper-Connolly)

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    Trusty Sean Barrett (now Ceann Comhairle) offers a conventional FG rightist perspective in pre-election Village

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    Interview: Seán Barrett: Still telling it straight.  By Derek Owens Fine Gael’s trusty Sean Barrett, spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, with 37 years in electoral politics,  champions the market and the European project. “You cannot make commitments like that to anybody… Governments don’t create jobs”, insisted Sean Barrett. He looked evenly at the studio audience (and particularly at a student, who’d asked how Fine Gael could ensure he’d have a job in four years) as he continued over the interruptions of his fellow Frontline panellists. “They create the environment where people can organise their business and create jobs”. The remark was as close as any candidate on the programme – a special episode devoted to the General Election in the Dun Laoghaire constituency – came to a succinct outline of their political philosophy. It was also the first time many viewers have seen a politician turning to a voter and flatly refusing to make a promise. Barrett’s performance on the programme was praised, even by sometime constituency rivals, as “assured” and “mature”. Where he stood out from other candidates in what Pat Kenny dubbed the “group of death”, though, was in his willingness to disagree with members of the audience – he had a back-and-forth challenge with the job-hungry student, and seemed to relish outing a different audience member as a supporter of another candidate – even as others fell over themselves to agree with all but the daftest contributions. The approach was distinctly old-school and, strangely perhaps, refreshing. If Barrett’s style in campaigning seems to belong to a different time, that’s probably because the 66-year-old first entered politics back in the 1970s. Having won election to the Dáil in 1981, he rose quickly in Garret FitzGerald’s Fine Gael to become Government Chief Whip and Minister for Sport in 1982, and held the job through the fractious lifetime of the Fine Gael-Labour Government. When Fine Gael returned to power again in 1994, he returned to the job for five months, before becoming Minister for Defence and the Marine. A sudden retirement in 2002 came as a surprise – so too did his successful return in 2007. Still, he remained a significant player behind the scenes during ‘retirement’, as a party trustee involved in fine Gael’s finances and in selecting candidates. Few politicians have held such influence on a party for so long while flying firmly below the radar of most political writers. Even in Gemma Hussey’s diaries, a soap-opera account of FitzGerald’s troubled 1982-7 coalition, Barrett is on the fringes of drama, a figure offering solace and emotional support to Fine Gael ministers who, like Hussey, wanted to do “the right thing.” (Most readers would take this to mean imposing harsher spending cuts than that Government actually did – Barrett, who says he hasn’t read the diaries, agrees with this interpretation). By his own account, that Government went through “traumatic experiences”, facing a controversial referendum on abortion and an economic picture that was almost as grim as is today. “It was a very, very tricky period. And an awful lot of good things were done. More probably could have been done in terms of bringing about the correction in the economy earlier”, he says. “Dick Spring had just taken over as leader of the Labour party… He couldn’t carry the sort of things that should have been done in the first year or two, that’s the reality of it. And in 1982, instead of making the savings early in the first two budgets by reducing expenditure and becoming more efficient, we shied away. We increased taxes, and it took much longer to recover as a result”. The Government from 1994 to 1997, by contrast, “was a bit of a cakewalk. The people who were in from 1994 to 1997 were mostly guys who’d been with us in 1982 to 1987. We all said ‘we’re not making the same mistakes this time as we made the last time’”. If this year’s general election throws up the Government that most people expect – a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour– there’ll be considerably fewer Government veterans around, particularly on the Fine Gael benches. Aside from Finance Spokesman Michael Noonan, Barrett has more ministerial experience than any other sitting TD, making it surprising that he only returned to the front bench (as Foreign Affairs spokesman) in the wake of Richard Bruton’s failed leadership challenge last year. Barrett, a personal friend of Enda Kenny, was one of the few Dublin TDs to support him. “I was in favour of the leader, yeah. It’s a very serious thing to change a leader, and we’ve had a bad experience of doing that as a party,” he says today. “People misunderstand, in my opinion, what a leader should be, or what a leader should be doing. A leader is more than a high-profile individual who gives the impression that they’re in charge of every department. When it comes to the actual day when you’re appointing a cabinet, what you need is a team of fifteen people, sixteen with a chief whip. The Taoiseach is not going to be running over to my department, or your department or everybody else’s department. No, he’s saying ‘I’m expecting you to do the job’. And then, when it comes to a cabinet, you need solidarity – you need to be able to bind people together to get decisions and to keep a good atmosphere, especially where there’s a coalition. And, you know, there are different types of people for those particular jobs. Enda Kenny, whether the people know it or understand it, has been very successful at running a team approach to things”. @font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Locally at least, Barrett has some experience of teams breaking down. In 2007, clashes between Fine Gael candidates in Dun Laoghaire were happily relayed by the local press, and sometimes got national coverage.

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    Abolish the €100m State funding for private schools. By Mark Lonergan (current edn, Village)

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    Jerusalem in South County Dublin “the’best’ schools in the country are off limits to the children of  immigrants, members of the Travelling community or those with special needs” By Mark Lonergan The growing fiscal crisis demands cuts in State expenditure. One cut would actually enhance the common good. What better place to start than the present state subvention for private schools? The economic meltdown will  devastate average household budgets but leave intact the unassailable bastions that are our nation’s elite private schools which, according to figures released recently, still  managed to enrol over 26,000 pupils this year despite charging fees in the region of €6,000 a year for day students and up to €20,000 for boarders. These schools share certain characteristics that make them anathema to those who believe that equality ought to be the foundation of our education system. The  admissions policies of these schools are blatantly discriminatory as they give preference to the children of former students, siblings of current students, attendees of their fee-paying junior schools and relatives of their teaching staff. Even more intimidating for those outside the existing educational elite is the fact that many of these schools insist on interviewing both the applicant child and their parents as part of their admissions process. The result of all of this is that some of the’best’ schools in the country are off limits to the children of  immigrants, members of the Travelling community or those with special needs who would benefit most from having access to them and leads to a total lack of any meaningful diversity in the student body. Our private schools are facilitating educational Apardheid. In a democracy many would say that parents have every right to send their children to a far-from-free school. Harder to understand is the lavish State largesse that these fee-paying schools continue to receive – over €100 million a year, the bulk of which goes toward teachers’ salaries. The most up-to-date Department of Education figures show the 51 fee-paying schools received this support for teacher salaries in 2008/09 with an additional €2.1 million for capital or building works in 17 fee-paying schools last year. For example, St Andrew’s in Booterstown, Dublin  received over €5 million in State supports, including over €4.5 million for teacher salaries and €460,000 for building works; Blackrock College  received over €4.2 million from the State for teacher salaries and an additional €114,000 for building works. In an age when parents feel obliged to collect  vouchers for essential educational  equipment for schools, it is impossible to understand why the ordinary decent taxpayer should be forced to watch taxes being used to fund schools that have a deliberate policy of discriminating against their own offspring. Private schools  may spend excess funds on floodlights for the hockey pitches while poorer schools are  denied special-needs funding or conduct classes from damp prefabs. With teacher salaries paid by the State, many fee-paying schools enjoy much better facilities than their counterparts in the free second-level sector. Language Labs are the norm in South County Dublin, whereas the State school in North Tipperary has to make do with an antiquated tape recorder. Furthermore, the private secondary school model is predominantly a Dublin phenomenon: 37 of the fee-paying schools are in Dublin with  over 70% in its South County. Why is taxpayer’s money being diverted to the richest area of Ireland? At a very minimum fee-paying schools should be forced to choose between adopting an open and transparent admissions process or face the removal of all State funding. These schools will survive as they have access to money from both donations and fees – and from both alumni and parents. Sean Dunne famously gifted €1m to Clongowes Wood for an all- weather Rugby pitch. It is hard not to conclude that the decision of the rainbow coalition to abolish third level fees in 1996 represented a lazy apology for a decision. A quick jaunt around any Dublin university would have shown the main beneficiaries of free fees are not children from the poorest families but middle-class families who, relieved of the future burden of third-level fees, responded to  this windfall by reallocating their resources towards their kids’ secondary education.  And that this led to an unprecedented demand for fee-paying secondary schools with the consequence that some excellent State schools, such as Greendale in North Dublin, found they could not fill places and were forced to close. Having enjoyed such benefits at second-level it is hardly surprising that the majority of the alumni of these feeder schools motor on to third level.  They usually fill nine of the top 10 places in the broadsheet staple lists of feeder schools to   leading universities. In the face of such base unfairness surely  fiscal Armaggedon  compels an end to State subsidies for  private schools and the diversion of the €100 million savings to schools that are simply more deserving? Perhaps the reason this is never discussed is that our political and media masters have vested interests in upholding this scandalously counter-egalitarian educational tradition.

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    Doomed Nuclear ‘Renaissance’

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    Tony Lowes blogs on the ‘nuclear renaissance’ now underway around the world with nations and power companies, often global consortiums, scrambling to build more and more nuclear power stations – including the 113 reactors planned along the Asian Rim earthquake fault that just shifted and the 104 reactors built on fault lines in the USA. As George Mombiot writes that ‘As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology’, Lowes points out that the limited amount of uranium left means that in 60 years that too will run out – leaving us to count the cost in money and human health caused by not switching now to renewable energy.

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    Ireland’s rural pub trade is collapsing (March ’11 edn)

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    By Éibhir Mulqueen The village of Annascaul on the road to Dingle in Co Kerry is notable for two distinctive pubs: one, The South Pole Inn, was owned by the famous Antarctic explorer Tom Crean; the other, Dan Foley’s, was run by a retired magician. The pub’s garish pink, blue and red façade is famous for its picture of a gas cylinder and the words “it’s an illusion”, painted on as a magician’s hologram, was a staple of the Real Ireland Design postcard series. Both venues have entertained locals and visitors over the years. But the famous epigram now hints at a deeper, more profound meaning: Foley’s has been on the books of a Tralee auctioneers for the past four years, its colours are fading and the “Guinness is good for you” enamel sign is rusting. You can still purchase the original postcard on eBay but the more recent pictures available online of a slowly decaying premises with a ‘for sale’ sign now reflect a more up-to-date real Ireland. Closure has been the fate of 1,300 pubs throughout Ireland over the past five years or at the rate of nearly one per day, as the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI), representing 4,500 rural publicans, points out, while the return of mass emigration in rural areas means the outlook is bleak. In the past three years alone, Co Cork has lost 90 pubs, double the number of the counties with the next greatest losses, Kerry and Galway, which each lost 46. Mayo, Limerick, Donegal and Clare have also have seen high closure numbers. In contrast, Meath and Kildare have increased their pub numbers, if only by a small number as they benefit from the numbers living on the commuter belt. Along with local shops and post offices – around 600 sub post offices have closed in the past ten years – pubs have been an essential part of village life, a meeting point for friends and a place that have delighted foreign tourists, where they felt less of a walking commodity and more of a visitor having a genuine experience. Eileen Percival, a native of Annascaul who returned from England twelve years ago to lease the South Pole, tells a familiar tale of struggle, changed drinking habits and people less willing to pay for meals. She was employing seven staff up to three years ago during the summer. “Any staff that go I am not replacing them. I am just doing it myself because I cannot afford to. Times are really tough.” The effect is not just on the hundreds of family-run businesses that kept small numbers employed over generations. Apart from reducing Ireland’s appeal to visitors, pub closures amount to a loss of a social forum, most keenly felt by single, elderly men. President McAleese has highlighted how rural isolation is now a major social problem for older men in particular. “Yeats once said that this ‘is no country for old men’. I want to be sure he was wrong”, she said at a forum on the issue four years ago while pointing out that older men are now the second most at risk suicide group after young males. In some areas this has been reversed. South Kerry coroner Terence Casey pointed out recently that in his region most suicides since 2005 were among older age groups. “We have had a lot of discussions about this at our regional meetings. What has been identified is a male group typically aged between 50 and 80,” says Ted Tierney, deputy chief executive of Mental Health Ireland. “The disappearance of the rural pub and the drink driving laws is impacting on them. “With the closure of these pubs, their only social outlet in some cases is gone.” His organisation promotes a befriending project but he also underlines the need for a rural transport scheme to run between 9pm and midnight. “If you could walk to your pub and that closes, the next one could be four or six miles away,” he says. Meanwhile, the GAA Social Initiative began as a result of the President’s talk and is a reach-out project aiming to have every GAA club participating in social activities, often in a local pub if there is no clubhouse. Seán Kilbride, project manager for the initiative, has 90 clubs involved so far and hopes to have 150 by the year’s end that involve elderly men and, ultimately, all sections of the community in GAA social activities. “We do not want to be too formulaic. We would be a reminder to clubs that this should be a natural part of their philosophy”, he says. The VFI has campaigned for dedicated smoking rooms, reduced bureaucracy and lower rates to help pub owners, while pointing out that drinking at home often creates more problems than drinking in a pub. It wants a ban on supermarkets selling below-cost alcohol, an issue also taken up by grocery group RGDATA which refers to Tesco “selling beer cheaper than water”. The pub is as much an institution in Britain and there the trend is similar. One in ten pubs has closed in the past six years and closures are still running at 39 a week, according to the British Beer & Pub Association, which is also calling for government policies to support a sector promoting community life. Elsewhere too there are similar developments due to crackdowns on drink driving and teen drinking as well as smoking bans. In France food rather than alcohol has traditionally been at the centre of French community life and there family-run restaurants and bistros, along with café and bars have fallen by the wayside, as smokers are nudged outside and the ‘le fast food’ culture takes hold. In 1960 there were 200,000 cafés but that number was down to 38,600 by 2009, according to the National Federation of Cafes, Brasseries and Discotheques. Common factors in all countries are changing habits, urbanisation, the selling power of corporations and strictly-enforced drinking laws which have turned

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    Irish media failing over Corrib (2010)

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    By Miriam Cotton In April 2006, life-long native of Erris, Co Mayo, Willie Corduff was honoured to go to California to accept the coveted Goldman Environmental Prize – awarded to him for his efforts to protect his community from environmental and other threats it faces from the proposed Shell/ Statoil/ Marathon Consortium’s Corrib Gas project. The Goldman is awarded annually to just six people from around the world. Here was a big story: a source of national pride, with international significance and full of human and social interest. Yet there was only a relatively low-key murmur about it in the Irish national media. Three years later almost to the day Corduff allegedly found himself attacked and viciously beaten by a number of men in balaclavas. By the early hours of April 23rd, 2009, Corduff had spent much of the previous day trying to prevent the erection with dubious permission of fencing for a Shell compound above Glengad Beach in Broadhaven Bay, by sitting under a Shell works truck and so rendering it inoperative. The sandy beach cliff at Glengad is home to a much-loved population of sand martins but it is also the proposed landfall site for the 92km, globally unprecedented, pipeline of highly volatile raw gas – from seven well heads out in the Corrib field. Having hit the landfall at Glengad, Shell say the pressure will, if the project goes ahead, be reduced from the extremely high 345-bar pressure to 144-bar via a ‘reduction valve’ and then travel a further 9 kilometers inland, criss-crossing the exquisitely beautiful Broadhaven Bay, to a proposed refinery at Ballinaboy. Following the alleged assault on Corduff, again, the national media have been strangely reticent in key respects. Most reports, at first, relied on Garda statements which focused on a separate allegation that earlier the same night ‘an armed gang’ had frightened off two Shell security men and taken down the fencing – ‘with paramilitary precision’– but omitting mention of any attack on Corduff or of the beating sustained by his brother-in-law, Pete Lavelle, who says he had tried to help Corduff when he was attacked. As other accounts of the incident began to surface from alternative sources, further Garda statements mentioned that an ambulance had been called for Corduff to take him to Mayo General Hospital because he had been ‘feeling unwell’. An RTE report on the 23rd April is typical. Brian Dobson in Dublin and Teresa Mannion in Mayo emphasised at every turn the removal of the fencing while noticeably understating what Corduff believes was a serious attempt on his life. His wife, Mary Corduff, has expressed her dismay at how her interview with Mannion was presented – most of her testimony edited out and chopped to imply that her husband had been happily sitting under the truck until, as then qualified by Dobson, he was ‘led by gardai’ to an ambulance. According to Corduff, unable to stand or walk, he was carried by paramedics on a stretcher. Corduff says of his attackers ‘they knelt on the side of my head and neck and on the side of my chest, my airways were constricted and I couldn’t breathe. One of them jumped repeatedly on the inside of one leg. Eventually, my tongue fell out of my mouth and when they saw that, they stopped. I think they thought I was gone.’ Corduff says he heard one of them say “ ‘Stop now lads, he’s nearly finished’. I could see two gardai mingling with the people who attacked me who were still wearing the balaclavas but none were arrested.’” For the first five or six years of the ten-year-old dispute in north-west Mayo the media reaction was mainly one of indifference. That all changed when, in 2005, four farmers and a retired school principal – ‘The Rossport Five’ – including Willie Corduff, were jailed for refusing to comply with an injunction by Shell requiring them to allow access to their land for works on the project. The story was iconic: five Davids were taking on three colossal Goliaths on points of safety, environmental, social and national economic principle. Support for the men poured in from all over the country. After toughing out the negative media onslaught for 94 days, Shell, the majority shareholder in the project, was effectively forced to concede the public relations disaster their injunction had generated – though a face-saving explanation was found for lifting it – a course of action they had been adamant they could not and would not take. Shell is to go on trial in the US on the 26th of May for its activities in the Niger Delta where Ken Saro Wiwa, was hanged with eight other men by the Nigerian government following his determined opposition to Shell activities there. In his book about Corrib “The Price of our Souls: Gas, Shell and Ireland”, Michael McCaughan, who often writes for the Irish Times, though not about Rossport, quotes the observations of Kevin O’ Hara, the founder of the Centre for Social and Corporate Responsibility in Port Harcourt, Nigeria about what he saw in Mayo: “I pulled up in my car and people jumped out at me and were taking photographs of me and my car and my number plate…I realized, oh boy, here we go again, Shell in Ireland…I was very saddened to see all of the same mistakes, a repeat of what I saw in Nigeria and it was happening in County Mayo, Ireland”. Was there a planned, behind–the-scenes campaign to smear the reputation of the community in response to the popularity of The Rossport Five? In October 2006, almost exactly a year after their release, a large force of gardai was sent to Ballinaboy where they began to physically engage with local people participating in the ongoing, non violent direct action to prevent the construction of an onshore gas refinery. A baton charge ensued and many people were injured. Since then, the victims have, in the media narrative, become the aggressors. Community

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    Phil Hogan interviewed (2009)

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    Interview: Phil Hogan wants to be Minister for the Environment but has a cautious agenda   Fine Gael’s environment spokesperson would leave well enough alone at local authority level   Tony Lowes Phil Hogan entered politics as a Kilkenny County Councillor on the death of his father,  when he was 22 years old, rising to be Chairman of the Council and a member of the South Eastern Health Board. After unsuccessfully standing in the 1987 general election, he was appointed to the Seanad from the Industrial and Commercial Panel. He was returned to the Dáil from the Carlow/Kilkenny constituency in 1989, holding a number of front-bench positions, including that of Minister of State at the Department of Finance with special responsibility for the Office of Public Works, a position he resigned after leaking details of the budget to journalists. He has been Chairman of the Fine Gael Party, was ruthlessly supportive of Enda Kenny in resisting Richard Bruton’s Summer 2010 coup and is currently Director of Elections and frontbench spokesman on the Environment. His website claims: ‘Hogan needs no slogan’.  Tony Lowes interviewed Hogan, a genial giant of a man, the day after the elections were called in the atrium of the new extension to Leinster House, a modern and airy glass and chrome building, underground. Tony Lowes: If you hadn’t gone into politics what do you think you would have done? Phil Hogan:  I had a small business in the earlier part of my life in insurance and auctioneering so I probably would have done that… Tony Lowes: And gone bust with everyone else? Phil Hogan:  Probably, but sure I might as well have gone down in style with the remnants of the Celtic Tiger Tony Lowes: Are you happy now? Phil Hogan:  Ah, this is an exciting time. Tony Lowes: And you have every confidence in your leader. Phil Hogan:  I have every confidence in my leader. He’s a very honest person and there is no doubt that he is interested in the people of the country rather than any vested interest. Tony Lowes: And of all the portfolios which one would you like to hold? Phil Hogan:  I’d like to be Minister for Environment, Heritage, and Local Government to deal with the reform of local and national politics that’s so essential for the country to get Ireland working again – and now I’ve worked-in the Fine Gael  slogan for the election! Tony Lowes: The climate change Bill is a big one for environmentalists. Is this a priority for you – or is it toxified now? Phil Hogan:  No – Fine Gael included it in its manifesto – we’re committed to a Climate Change Bill based on the all-party Bill from the Joint Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security  at the earliest possible opportunity. We believe that the climate change targets that have been set out with our partners in Europe are appropriate and we shouldn’t be putting ourselves in the position by which we’re going to cap the opportunities for food production where we have a distinctive competitive advantage. Tony Lowes: What do you think of the IFA’s response to the climate change bill? Phil Hogan:  I can understand the IFA’s response because the targets that were being presented and the assumptions which were being made were too vague. Certainly we have to take at face value what Teagasc – an independent part of the Government apparatus –  are saying to us:  it goes far beyond the competitors – far beyond our needs. We’re not going to step out into an uncompetitive environment. Tony Lowes: Is John Gormley’s emphasis on the regional and national imperatives for  local authority Development Plans something you would support? Phil Hogan:  Totally opposed to [a policy of]  all decision-making in the Custom’s House which is what the new Planning and Development Bill does. We have enough centralised control of the Department of the Environment in the past. It would worry me if the wrong Minister of the Environment was in office with huge powers that could influence the outcome of individual planning applications. We’ve had enough corruption in the planning system. With the centralised powers the Minister has given the Department of the Environment he can do anything he wishes in relation to planning. But I don’t believe that’s healthy for democracy and I don’t believe it’s healthy from a planning point of view. Tony Lowes: Do you support the investigations that Mr Gormley [recently-resigned Green Minister for the Environment] set up for certain Councils  including Dublin City – and Carlow. Phil Hogan:  Spuriously mostly. Tony Lowes: If you became Minister would you allow this process to go forward? Phil Hogan:  Absolutely – I think it’s very important that we have confidence in the system of public administration at official level and political level – we learned enough in the Mahon Tribunal to know that this is important – but we’re not going to get into the political business of trying to find scapegoats for political purposes which is what ex-Minister Gormley is intending to do. I’m aware of issues that have come before Carlow County Council but on the material that has come out of the investigations to date I don’t see anything. Tony Lowes: Do you support the proposals for a  new mayor for the whole of Dublin? Phil Hogan:  We’re for that – but not until we have proper devolution from the central to the local. We would look at the existing structures in Dublin. There is no way we would agree to putting in a Dublin mayor and a Regional Authority on top of the four existing local authorities. Tony Lowes: Would you fund this through a property tax and water charges? Phil Hogan:  Well in the EU/IMF deal there is going to be a property tax – that’s going to come into effect on January 1 2012 – so that’s a resource that’s available to Local Government. We also have been in favour of water

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    David McWilliams and the vindication of his impure capitalism (interview 2010).

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    By Miriam Cotton. “I’m not a pure capitalist”. “if Brian Lenihan lets the guarantee lapse after two years, which it is legally supposed to, then it has worked completely” I recently spoke to David McWilliams in his Volvo Estate in a church car-park in Dalkey.  In case that seems intriguing, the purpose of our meeting was to conduct an interview – on recording equipment that does not cope with background noise in public spaces like the coffee-shop we had just left.  McWilliams has a strong personal presence and is possibly one of the most cheerful people you are likely to meet.  He is greeted warmly in his locality where most people appear to know him.  During the last year alone, he has travelled the world on a punishing schedule while making the documentary ‘Addicted to Money’, chaired a series of the comedy show ‘The Panel’, finished writing his book ‘Follow the Money’ and organised the controversial Global Irish Economic Forum at Farmleigh – among many other things. MC: I want to ask your opinion about the economic crisis and Irish media coverage of it.   Morgan Kelly has referred to what he called ‘group-think’ by which he means how during the bubble there wasn’t much criticism of what was going on.  In the aftermath, we now have the ‘there-is-no-alternative’ to NAMA version of group-think . Who or what makes you angry about the way the media is behaving both during the boom and afterwards? DMcW:  I think it’s quite obvious what I thought during the Celtic Tiger because I was almost completely on my own in saying this is a huge bubble.  I’ve always thought that.  I was vilified – well maybe not vilified – but slagged off. Ireland is constantly terrorised by conventional wisdom and anybody who breaks with it can expect to go through a three-phase process: the first phase is ridicule; the second is violent opposition and the third phase is the universal truth phase when everyone says “sure we all knew it was a bubble at the time”.  And that’s what happened to me.  It’s no big deal. In Ireland we feel we need permission to ask the obvious.  It doesn’t really make me angry – but it makes me sad. MC:  With regard to the 2008 bank guarantee, people have accused you of inconsistency since at first you appeared to claim that the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, was acting on your advice but subsequently distanced yourself from the guarantee.  Did you change your mind? DMcW:  Well, first of all, I don’t think changing your mind is the end of the world.  The bank guarantee that I discussed with Brian Lenihan involved a guarantee that would be rescinded after two years specifically.  In a way it was a bluff, not a policy.   Once this guarantee started to be regarded as a blanket underpinning for all sorts of loans – then it changed materially from what I was discussing with the Minister for Finance.  The first thing is, if Brian Lenihan lets the guarantee lapse after two years, which it is legally supposed to, then it has worked completely.  Then we’re back to square one whereby we are in a position where we can simply get the creditors into the room and say “listen lads, we’ve no money”.  The whole idea was supposed to stop a run on the banks.  It’s like being a fireman in a forest fire where you have to ask yourself whether you stop it or let it blaze on. And the second thing is the guarantee has given two years to figure out how bad things are at the banks – and it’s not just Anglo; it’s across the board.  Once you’ve figured it out, you simply withdraw the credit and say to creditors “sorry guys you simply backed the wrong horse and let’s do a deal”.  And that’s capitalism.  But what’s happened in the last while is that it’s being said that what is good for the banks is automatically good for us. MC: But didn’t you depart from your capitalist principles by recommending a guarantee in the first place? DMcW : I’m not a pure capitalist.  I think that what you’ve got to do if you believe you can stop something traumatic from happening is do it.  I don’t believe in this Austrian School idea which says that all recessions are the seeds of the next recovery – or that humans are infinitely able to react to unemployment.  They’re not.  My father was laid off many years ago and I know exactly what it’s all about.  Humans are not machines.  One of the reasons a run on the bank is disastrous is that the big guys get out first.  The little guys are shafted.  So there is nothing inconsistent in what I’ve been saying. MC:  What is the distinction between Lenihan’s version of the guarantee and your own? DMcW:  I  hadn’t expected that the guarantee would extend to sub-prime debt.  If we let the guarantee lapse this coming September as it is supposed to, it will have achieved its aims.  It will not have been a flawless policy but the best we could have done in the circumstances. MC:  The least worst thing? DMcW: I don’t want to be wise after the event.  I was very vocal both privately and publicly in saying we had to do something quite radical and different – something that takes the markets by surprise.  Having worked in the markets I know what they are like.  In many ways this is just a bluffing mechanism.  You’ve got to hit them where it hurts – do something that is so outlandish that they back off – show them you are in control. MC: It surprised more than just the markets, though. DMcW: But what was the alternative?  To let the banks go bust? What the Europeans have just done with Greece and the Euro crisis is exactly the same thing – it’s effectively a blanket

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    Funding Cuts: The Green Legacy

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    “Only 4% consider the environment the issue that will influence their vote”.

    Assessments carried out by expert ecologists for the European Commission in 2008 found that only 7% of Ireland’s habitats examined are in good status, with 46% inadequate and 47% bad. Yet Budget 2011 saw a fall the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s funding from €2.2 billion in 2010 to €1.6 billion in 2011 – a 28% cut. Under the National Recovery Programme, this will fall to €1 billion in 2014 – a reduction of more than 50% in 4 years…

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    Village will start a dedicated blog by Tony Lowes tomorrow. Here’s the first article.

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    Green/FF Legacy on environmental funding Cuts, cuts, cuts…and apathy By Tony Lowes Of all the species, man is the most destructive to the environment. Almost everything we do damages air, water, or soil. And other species are disappearing at an astonishing rate as mankind proliferates. Our water quality continues to fall, costing the exchequer more and more to meet higher and higher European standards under the Water Framework Directive, whose deadlines are typically 2015. Assessments carried out by expert ecologists for the European Commission in 2008 found that only 7% of the Irish habitats examined are in good status, with 46% inadequate and 47% bad. Many habitats associated with water were considered to be in bad condition, the Report noting “Even moderate declines in water quality makes rivers and lakes unsuitable for many fish and invertebrate species”.  And unsuitable for human consumption without expensive Water Treatments Plants. Facing this seemingly inexorable tide stand an Irish Constitution which never uses the word environment  and an electorate of which a recent poll showed that only 4% consider the environment the most important issue. Even the Irish Times has now abandoned ‘Horizons’, its Saturday Heritage Review. The Irish Times used to have an environmental correspondent as well as an environment editor but now retains only the latter. Since the end of 2010, RTE has  no longer employed an environment correspondent. Is it any wonder then that under the National Recovery Programme, the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s budget will see a fall from €1601 million in 2011 to €1070 million in 2014 – a reduction of a third? In 2011 alone, the Heritage Unit, which has responsibility for protected structures (including world heritage sites like the Skelligs) will be hit by a 77% budget cut. 56% was sliced from the National Parks and Wildlife budget. Their responsibility includes the 14% of the land mass designated for protection under EU law – as well as running all our National Parks. Although some of these cuts were due to a transfer of salary payments to central funds, the recruitment embargo on civil service replacements over the past few years has hit this Service particularly hard on the ground, where Rangers – whose specialised roles can not easily be found through transfers – are missing in many areas of the country. There are increasing gaps in line-management and some rangers are now confined to desk duties instead of patrolling their beats. Although the level of staffing is less than that in 2002, the workload continues to increase as further areas are designated and new Protocols to protect the Hen Harrier and the fresh water pearl mussel now legally require consultation and inspection to prevent further decline. The far-seeing ‘Farm Plan’ programme which targeted farmers in designated areas since 2005 and assisted them in adapting their practices to protect these sites is no longer accepting entries. A Circular from the Department of Finance warned that “Opening hours of offices, parks and centres will be reviewed in 2011, in line with business needs”. Observers fear that cuts to the heritage sector combined with cuts in school trips mean that the heritage even as an educational resource is at risk. The Planning and Development Act 2010 imposes more responsibilities on Local Authorities to ensure that wide-ranging ‘appropriate assessments’ are undertaken not only of projects that might damage protected areas and species, but of their own County and Local Development Plans. These assessments require specialised expertise that Local Authorities do not have in-house and can no longer afford from outside consultants. The Heritage Council, whose role is to protect, preserve and enhance Ireland’s national heritage, suffered a 47% cut on top of a 30% cut in 2010. While €3 million has been recently restored after vocal protests, research grants will vanish, archives are at risk, programs to curtain invasive species will end, and 50% of the educational and outreach programme is to go, even threatening their flagship publication. The Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management recently wrote to Minister John Gormley to draw his attention to the OECD note in their 2009 ‘Environmental Performance Review’ that nature protection has “remained the poor relative of Irish environmental policy”, warning that the proposed budget reductions will make this situation worse. And none of this actually makes economic sense. An Irish 2010 study showed that in 2009 over three million overseas visitors engaged in cultural/historical visits – and spent an estimated €1.9 billion while doing so – almost exactly the same net benefit a study last year showed for Wales. John Gormley’s own ‘The Economic and Social Aspects of Biodiversity: Benefits and Costs of Biodiversity in Ireland’, published in 2008, estimated the current marginal value of ecosystem services at over €2.6 billion per annum – not including benefits to human health and well-being. In an attempt to shore up their budget, both the Department of the Environment and the Environmental Protection Agency (27% decrease) claim that the “The reduction in exchequer grant for 2011 is expected to be compensated by way of an increased allocation from the Environment Fund”. The Environmental Fund is fed by the plastic bag levy (€22 million) and landfill levies (€32 million). But it is already fully assigned with half of it going to fund waste-management and recycling and the rest meeting a rag bag of demands from EPA research to funding environmental goups (NGOs). Recently, it has been tapped to address cost overruns in Cork’s Haulbowline Island ‘clean-up’ – and the current toxic fire at the Kerdiffstown Landfill in Co Kildare. This year’s increased allocations are actually coming from some €40 million in reserves which has been carried forward for some years, allowing a once-off increase in the 2011 funding of 55%. Unfortunately, although allocations were arranged, John Gormley omitted to sign the necessary Ministerial Order before he resigned, leaving the final distribution in limbo. That may be just as well, as on February 4 the EPA released a report it had commissioned from SKM

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    Village Interview: Micheál Martin, Leader, Fianna Fáil (from our election edition)

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    Micheál Martin is a non-ideological constitutional republican who derides equality of outcome and believes in equality of opportunity How would you describe your political philosophy? I’m a constitutional republican and believe strongly that economic growth and social progress are closely linked.  I believe the old left/right ideological divide has no real relevance for the 21st century. Is that different from the traditional politics of Fianna Fail? Are there areas where FF has been weak that you intend to emphasise? I think my political philosophy is very similar to that of the founding traditions of Fianna Fáil, which came from a revolutionary generation which understood the need for a radical change in both its programme and its approach to politics. In the General Election Manifesto I outlined a series of radical new proposals for political reform which will address the shortcomings in the present parliamentary system and are I believe vital for recovery. Fianna Fáil has always represented ordinary people. This is still the case.  The organisation is made up of ordinary people who work in their communities and take nothing from politics except a sense of making a contribution. Is that appealing to potential coalition partners? I am not concerned with appealing to potential coalition partners. We have proposed a series of costed proposals that I believe if implemented will return this country to growth. That is my only priority. Do you believe in equality of outcome?  If not, what do you understand by equality and do you support it? I don’t believe that there is a single example of a society which combines respect for human rights and high standards of living with enforced equality of outcomes.  I believe in equality of opportunity, part of which is the necessity for social supports which enable this. Who are your political heroes? My main hero is Seán Lemass.  He was a revolutionary and visionary who responded to the unique problems of the moment rather than being fixed to unchanging ideologies. How do you rate Enda Kenny? It’s not for me to rate Enda.  I don’t believe he is the best man to lead Ireland and the level of control which has allowed to those around him is of concern. How do you see the very basic differences between FF and FG? There are plenty of differences between us and Fine Gael. Their campaign is based on the worst type of cynical politics – lots of tough talk but a driving commitment to pandering to every group.  Their radical privatisation agenda for the health service and every part of state activity is actively dangerous.  Their budget figures don’t add up and their reform platform is all about gimmicks and not at all about real reform.  The plan to lay off 18,000 more public servants than any other party is ill-thought-out and will do immense damage to public services. What are the biggest dangers of a FG government? They have no credible plan to get Ireland through to recovery, they appear to be terrified of letting their leader have proper head-to-head debates with others and they are addicted to empty electoral gimmicks. Do you think on balance Ireland has been well governed since 1997? We have made mistakes and I fully acknowledge this and have apologised for them. However, I firmly believe that while we still face significant challenges Fianna Fáil in government has delivered real progress in many areas. Unemployment is unacceptably high but we must remember that there are still 1.86 million people working.  Due to our educated young workforce we are seen one of the best places in the world for foreign and direct investment which employs over 240,000 directly and indirectly in this country. We have put in place a world-class cancer-treatment and screening programme.  We now have a major new motorway network. We now have more Gardaí and more prison places.  Finally during our time in office we have overseen historic developments including the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the Hillsborough Agreement in February 2010 which led to the devolution of policing and justice powers from London to Belfast. What would you do to stop boom/bust cycles? Firstly, we must change politics. We also know now that the oversight mechanism in the banking sector were insufficient. We have reformed the banking and financial regulation and put in place two experts to do this: Professor Patrick Honohan in the central bank; and Financial regulator Mathew Elderfield. We are also committed to setting up a Fiscal Council made up of outside economic experts, independent of government to advise government on the budgetary situation and on the fiscal policies required to achieve fiscal sustainability. As a government it is now apparent that we relied too heavily on temporary revenues raised from stamp duty to finance increases in public spending. What is the difference between your solutions for unemployment and those of the other parties? The best way to get people back to work is to get our house in order – we are doing this by fixing the banks, stabilising the public finances and improving our competitiveness. We believe that Sinn Féin and Labour would jeopardise our public finances and prolong the crisis by extending the time-frame for tackling the deficit to 2016. Our five-year integrated plan for trade, tourism and investment will generate 150,000 jobs, and boost exports by one third.  Over the next four years we will invest over €16 billion in our infrastructure. We have set up a €500 million innovation fund which will support enterprise  development  and  job  creation  by  drawing  top venture capitalists to Ireland. The main plank of Labour’s jobs policy is to set up yet another Bank, the Strategic Investment Bank. We already have two banks that are almost owned by the state AIB and BOI, setting up another bank would only threaten our existing banks survival. Fine Gael’s plan has been dismissed by Michael Noonan as a PR gimmick. We are already making major inroads in this area. It is not

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    Berlusconi: Slug (from our Dec-Jan edn)

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    Silvio Berlusconi matted down the  hair-like thing between his tentacles with his fat slimy fingers, removed himself from an Umbrian nineteen-year old, and slithered down in the lapping waters of the bath just run for him by a harem of Tuscan sexworkers.  It was very late. The water gurgled gleefully in the Carrara-marbled lavatorium of the mansion he split three ways with the Ndrangheta mafia and Vladimir Putin. He ran the loofah down his fat oily thorax. It had been a long day, he reflected. He’d surfaced  at mid-day after the previous night’s dancing and rooting.   A disoriented roostering with one of his private secretaries.  He’d have lilies sent. Then  lunch  running Finninvest  on the phone, using his funny high-pitched voice so no one would realise it was him.  It was difficult to keep the voice high on his hangover. Those bloody Nazis in the regulator had stopped him administering his multi-billion-Euro business empire when he became  PM. Lunch had been paid for by some money-laundering lawyers   who he had re-writing the statute of limitations to help him avoid the 6900 criminal cases he faced. After lunch it was a long nap, a chat with his holiness,  and some rumpy pumpy with a mayor’s wife. One of his Masonic footmen had given her 2000 Euro on the way out and he’d blown a gasket: he thought it would be free – but it never seemed to be. Then he’d had a chin-lift, some  surgery on his antennae (local anaesthetic only today)  and a Thai massage. Bought some more TV stations. He’d launched some spurious libel actions and had some work done on his trail in the late afternoon. Then an hour pacifying that (ex-neo)-Fascist bore Gianconi Fini who was threatening to pull out of his coalition government unless he rebuilt Bologna.  He hated Fascists, no good in bed. The warm water felt good against his cold mucous skin.  Then a tea-time meeting and pick-up  with Ghadaffi. Brown paper bags for one of his banks. After that he’d had a go on the colonel’s Ukrainian nurse. 10,000 dinar, not bad. Tanned homosexual cuckold.  Ha Ha.  Only kidding. In the evening he’d watched his AC Milan at a packed San Siro with some Nigerian royalty, then eventually gone home to drink Asti Spumante out of the slippers of a pornstar he’d met in the second half.  Tomorrow he’d nominate her for State interior minister. At midnight he’d dealt with some parliamentary boxes – bloody economy still imploding, population down again. Yawn.Then two hours with a former popstar from Iskia who he’d found on the internet and her pet hamsters.  He’d make sure she only got a thousand for that, replacement hamsters included. Sometimes he wondered why he always had to pay.  Was it because he was 74-years old, corrupt and all fake?  Or was it because he was a slimy gastropod? At least he wasn’t gay, he joked again to himself (his favourite joke). The wife had been calling all day about the maintenance and that incident where he’d forgotten all his children’s names after meeting a cherub from Genoa: how he hated her. From three until now it had been party, party, party until his encrusted loins hurt. The nineteen-year-old was leaving now, with his wallet and watch. As the dawn came on, outside he could hear rioters among the statuary complaining he’d rigged the afternoon’s no-confidence vote. Let them eat Tiramisu. Now where was the judge from the criminal case he was facing in the morning who he’d left in his boudoir and the judge’s naked seventeen year old daughter he’d been lubricating on  bed number three? He de-oiled himself on a white cotton towel and left it suppurating on the marble.  The night was young. Man-Slug.

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    United Ireland

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    North’s planning and environmental protection as bad as Republic’s by Anton McCabe Environmental issues have been low in the North’s political agenda. They have, however, had political repercussions. First Minister Peter Robinson was perceived as close to developers in his East Belfast constituency. The main reason for his losing one of the safest seats in the UK Parliament after 31 years was the public perception that he and his wife, Iris, had been claiming excessive expenses; but a contributory factor was his support for building 300 houses on Knock Golf Club. Peter Carr from Dundonald Greenbelt Association said the grant of planning permission on this site was in breach of five major planning policies. “It was an extremely highly protected piece of land”, he says. “It was a ‘landscape wedge’ – higher than Greenbelt. It separates Dundonald from East Belfast. If that could be overturned, what was the value of any protection? Any green space in Northern Ireland was not safe”. Granting permission for such a large development in the North requires three senior planning officials to sign off on it. One of the three wrote that he was signing the planning permission under protest; this was unprecedented. The prurient aspects of Robinson’s wife, Iris Robinson’s, relationship with 19 year old Kirk McCambley, distracted attention from a more serious question. Two property developers had each paid cheques of £25,000 (€29,864.74) when she asked them Tillie and Henderson’s – mentioned in Das Kapital to assist McCambley. Clearly the developers believed it was useful to have influence with an MP and Assembly Member, whose husband was First Minister. The North’s planning system is, in many ways, even worse than in the Republic. It is biased in favour of developers. Objectors do not have the right of third-party appeal. The Planning Service, which is part of the Department of the Environment, is the North’s planning authority.  However, if developers are refused permission they have an automatic right of appeal to the Planning Appeals Commission. In the Republic both developers and third-parties can appeal. Thus, there is a perception that the Planning Service feels it is administratively easier to grant permission. To date, no planner in the North has ever been charged with, let alone convicted of, corruption. Rita Harkin of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society said: “The Planning System has been so heavily weighted in favour of developers (with its established policy presumption in favour of development) that it might be argued that there was no need for corruption”. Politicians are active on planning issues; this is usually on the side of the developer. A briefing document from the NIPSA trade union said much time and resources in the Planning Service were taken up with “The political involvement in the process through lobbying by MPs, MLAs etc which is not a feature in planning authorities in Great Britain”, though it surely is in the Republic. The pro-development bias extends to politicians, across the spectrum. There have been 284 objections to a proposed quarry at Mullaslin, Co Tyrone. It has received one letter of support – from local MP Pat Doherty of Sinn Féin: “Given that the current economic climate and the fact that the applicant is a contractor employing numerous workers, I am requesting that you once again look at the application with a view to fast tracking it” – the characteristic dynamic mirrors that in the Republic precisely. One of the legacies of more than a generation of Direct Rule from Britain was that unelected officials gathered huge power. That has produced a culture of unaccountability at the top of the public sector. A new Draft Planning Bill, now going through the Assembly, will return planning powers to local councils. It is planned to cut the present 26 councils to 11. Despite all the difficulties seen with planning powers vested in local councils in the Republic, this will mean at least there will be some degree of accountability to communities affected by decisions. There will still be no right of third-party appeal against grants of planning permission. The Planning Service faces this challenge having lost 270 staff to downsizing. That represents about 40% of planners. Inevitably, it is facing workload problems. In a briefing document, the NIPSA trade union told the Assembly’s Environment Committee: “Importantly, despite the recent fall in applications, average annual caseloads continue to be well above that recommended for planning authorities in GB in the Addison Report, commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister”. Budgetary constraints have meant it has had to cut back on enforcement. NIPSA’s document said: “The perversity of the proposed cuts is that, in the absence of sufficient commitment to funding enforcement activity, this revenue generating aspect will be compromised”. This may also leave the North open to infraction proceedings from the European Union. Currently, there are two major planning controversies in the North. They are a planned incinerator at Glenavy, Co Antrim, and the proposed A5 dual carriageway. In August, environment minister Edwin Poots of the DUP announced he was ‘minded’ to giver permission for the incinerator. Danny Moore of CALNI (Campaign Against the Lough Neagh Incinerator) said Poots was under pressure from agri-business interests in DUP. At the time of writing permission has not been given. The incinerator is proposed for a rural area outside Glenavy, on the east bank of Lough Neagh in south-west Antrim. It proposes to burn wastes from the North’s poultry industry, and will generate electricity. The developer is Rose Energy, owned by three agri-business companies. Lough Neagh supplies drinking water for 40% of the North’s population. Randox Laboratories, one of the biggest employers in the area, said it is considering moving some of its manufacturing to Donegal if the incinerator is built. CALNI has run a vigorous campaign. Objectors sent 6,782 letters of objection to Planning Service. CALNI has garnered unanimous support from Lisburn City Council, and all the North’s political parties. Moore and CALNI question the economic viability of the project. He said there

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    Ghost Country

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    We don’t just have uninhabited estates, we have a largely uninhabited country by Terrence McDonough Recently several auctions around the country have been forestalled by hostility from  locals.  For example the auction of a farm in County Meath failed in the teeth of local opposition.  The auction, instituted by a bank in payment of arrears, was abandoned with only a single euro bid.  At first glance, it looked like a welcome rebirth of the kind of popular indignation that fuelled the Land League struggles of the 19th Century.  But a closer examination draws this parallel into question.  The land was not farmed by the owner though he did live nearby.  He was landlord to another person who rented the farm.  Far from being an indigent farmer in trouble, the owner was a property developer who had pledged the land as collateral for his bank loans.  In the Land War, neighbours defended families who inhabited the land but did not possess it.  In Meath the neighbours defended a man who possessed the land but did not inhabit it.  This confusion about the true character of mere possession is endemic in modern Ireland.  In Marie Jones’ Stones in his Pockets two Irish movie extras make great comic work of trying to follow an assistant director’s instruction to look “dispossessed” in the presence, on horseback, of the daughter of  the Manor.  What, they wonder, does dispossessed exactly look like. We, in turn, should wonder whether the opposite of dispossession should look like more than mere possession. The possession of land and territory is very much at the centre of a burning public debate.  Both hill farmers and hill walkers each feel potentially dispossessed by the other.  Mention the public acquisition of land before rezoning and you would have a ragged mob of farmers and developers quickly assembling outside the Dail.  Yet  in the absence of such public provision of land and housing, many were unable to afford a house and many others find themselves in negative equity and unable to service exorbitant mortgages.  The extension of the road system even in the face of recession displaces many but enriches others as tribunal testimony shows.  In many rural areas of Ireland it is safer now to be a card-carrying communist than a card-carrying member of An Taisce such is the opposition to the limitation of property rights in the name of landscape and heritage.  In Mayo one local commentator raised the spectre of the Land War, intimating that An Taisce adopted its policy of opposing one-off rural houses in order to keep the countryside safe for gentlemanly pursuits like stag and fox hunting. While the vision of An Taisce in mounted pursuit of the stag is a bizarre delusion, the historical fact of Irish dispossession at the hands of  a British colonial elite is real enough.  This history is of course well known and need not be rehearsed here.  Nevertheless, it is worth remarking on how late this fundamentally feudal land-holding system persisted.  Not only the landlord class was pre-modern but their antagonists on the land were also made up of an essentially feudal peasantry.  The economic and social dynamics of Ireland in the nineteenth century were written in the conflict between these two classes over the ownership, occupation and exploitation of land. It cannot be truly said that the Irish were dispossessed during the famine years for they did not in fact possess the land.  Rather the poorer classes, the landless labourers, cottiers, and small farmers were prevented from continuing to inhabit the land.  They were more than dispossessed.  They were banished either to the other side of the grave or the other side of the water.  For their part landlords adopted a new policy of pursuing rent through the consolidation of farms of optimal size and efficiency.  The old townland villages were broken up and larger farms occupied by individual families were created.  Only then did this newly prosperous group of farmers set about possessing Ireland. And they succeeded.  The Land War, recalled in distorted fashion by the Meath events, resulted in a succession of Land Acts which ended the feudal land-holding system and deliberately substituted a system of peasant proprietorship.  In order to make proprietorship a reality it was not only the landlords who had to be left behind.  It was also necessary to leave behind Michael Davitt’s more inclusive and egalitarian vision of land nationalisation.  Unfortunately, Davitt’s inadequately-landed constituency now lay in famine graves or dwelt far from the land in New York, Boston or Liverpool.  Similarly James Connolly’s natural socialist constituency also lived abroad as Irish workers swelled the industrial armies of other countries.  Ireland was to be possessed by a portion of the Irish nation but sadly only after the nation as a whole ceased to inhabit it. Through a long struggle the Irish have succeeded in possessing Ireland but have failed to inhabit it.  The commentator Fintan O’Toole has observed the Irish tendency to treat the land as if we were only passing through, anxious to make a few quid while the going is good, before moving on.  Seemingly someone else’s posterity will have to clean up the mess.  The post-colonial legacy within Irish society is complex and contested.  Many are understandably impatient with what is even now one of the wealthiest nations on the planet comparing itself with the currently wretched of the earth.  Yet the past, perhaps unlike the future, is immutable and inevitably poses problems for the present.  One of these problems is the crucial distinction between inhabiting and possessing the space of Ireland. It seems that Ireland can claim only what it has succeeded in snatching from the British.  These things include a national identity (even if part of that identity is a fascination with debating it) and a cultural heritage.  But as the controversy over the M3 and the despoliation of the Tara landscape makes clear there is a perilous disconnection between that national identity and cultural heritage and the physical

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    Village interviewed an uncertain Fintan O’Toole in December

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    “None of us know what to do” Fintan O’Toole has a brilliant agenda but doesn’t know how to implement it Michael Smith interviews Fintan O’Toole First of all, Fintan O’Toole is very charming.  He’s one of those people, like one of his Nemeses, Bertie Ahern, you think you know even if you’ve never met him. Because he is angry and a master of invective I’m expecting intensity, even testiness, and after a few unanswered emails and mutterings from some people who’ve met him I am a little nervous but, no: during our discussion over coffee and then lunch in the wine-bar below the Village office he’s almost disappointingly well-rounded, self-deprecatory, humorous, serious, a little shy. I open by asking him what he thinks of his Apres Match persona (all huffing and expansive angularity). He thinks it’s frighteningly like him. A lady in the chemist mistakenly congratulated him on “his” performance on the Late Late Show. I should say, during our extended interview, his arms remain exactly where you’d want them to be. Fintan O’Toole, of course,  is a columnist, assistant editor and drama critic with the Irish Times.  He has written over a dozen books, on drama, history and politics, including two in the last year.  Ship of Fools outlined many of Ireland’s main social and economic problems. The first part of  Enough is Enough again outlines the problems, centring on ‘Five Myths’ including that we live in a proper representative democracy when in fact “the Irish parliament is probably the weakest in the democratic world”. It’s the well-rehearsed exegesis of  how public waste, disadvantaged schools, inadequate infrastructure and a two-tier healthcare system co-exist with crass displays of personal wealth. The second, more original, part of the book outlines solutions centring on ‘Five Decencies’. So here’s the agenda.  He believes all the principles have been tried somewhere.  If you go to his website www.fintanotoole.ie you’ll find it expressed in ten points; if you go to his book it’s in fifty. 1 Establish a genuine system of local democracy. Introduce a property tax to fund it. 2 Transfer the useful functions of quangos to local councils. 3 Bring in legally binding national standards for planning and development and give the National Spatial Strategy statutory status. 4 Implement the Kenny report of 1974, allowing councils to purchase development land for its existing value plus 25 per cent. 5 Establish “deliberative democracy” experiments in every substantial community. 6 Severely limit the ability of governments to use the guillotine mechanism to pass legislation that has not been debated in parliament. 7 End the fiction that Ministers are responsible for everything that happens in their departments. Make them responsible for decisions they take and for information they ought to know. Make senior civil servants responsible for the decisions they take. 8 Restore the right of the Oireachtas to inquire into all activities involving the use of public money. 9 Make all appointments to state and public boards open to public competition and subject to Oireachtas scrutiny. 10 Reduce the size of the Dáil to 100 members. 11 Either make the Seanad representative of civil society, social partners and the new local councils within a short time frame or abolish it. 12 Change the Dáil electoral system to the additional-member system. 13 Introduce a gender quota of at least 30 per cent, to be enforced by reducing public payments to political parties by the degree to which they fail to introduce gender balance. 14 Hand primary schools over to local and democratic ownership and control. 15 Replace GDP as the primary measure of progress with a well-being index. 16 Radically curtail tax incentives for private pensions and stop putting money into the National Pension Reserve Fund. Use the money to increase the state pension for everyone to 40 per cent of pre-retirement income. 17 Switch spending from both social-welfare rent supplements and tax breaks for landlords to the provision of decent social housing. 18 Introduce a national system of social health insurance, abolishing the two-tier health system and radically reducing the size of the Health Service Executive. 19 Switch more health spending towards community and preventive services. Implement the primary-care strategy. 20 Charge university fees to those who can afford them. Increase grants for those who are currently excluded. 21 Expand adult and continuing education. Consider the idea of individual “education funds” attaching equally to each citizen. 22 Identify children at risk of failure from an early age and intervene immediately with personal and family supports. 23 Make the pay of those at the top a fixed percentage of that of those at the bottom. 24 Bring taxes up to average European levels. Reduce tax breaks to average EU levels, saving more than €5 billion. 25 Limit to three the number of directorships of public companies that any one individual can hold at the same time. 26 Give coherent legislative protection to bona-fide whistleblowers. 27 Restore the Freedom of Information Act to its former status. 28 Create a register of lobbyists and publish records of all meetings between lobbyists, ministers and public officials. 29 Review company law to end impunity for white-collar crime. 30 Ban all significant private donations to political parties and force all registered parties to publish full annual accounts. Like David McWilliams, and perhaps Shane Ross, Fintan O’Toole offers an analysis so acute that he has become a messiah.  Like them he is offering, more or less coyly, political solutions. So what drives the  thinking of the Cassandra of Ireland’s journalistic left? He says he’s “obviously a socialist”, though not a “scientific socialist” and he considers socialism evolves. He believes there are levels of income beyond which people should not be allowed to rise, though pointing to China where he has lived, O’Toole says that “the depradations of an attempt to impose equality are greater than those of the market”. He’s influenced by Fabianism and British views of socialism – “Victorian socialism”. Still he’s quite prepared to half-describe himself as a social

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    Prosecute a banker today!

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    Prosecute a banker (A DIY guide for Village readers) By Gary Fitzgerald Since the beginning of the banking crisis in September 2008, the government’s strategy has been to protect the banks at all costs.  With the IMF/EU deal announced recently, it is now clear that the government intends that the taxpayer will pay for bank losses irrespective of the impact on public services and on the wider economy.  The final cost of this policy is not yet known, and it may never be known.  We have lost track of the billions of euro already spent and the billions more promised.  The government’s decisions may lead to national bankruptcy.  The voters will get a chance to express their opinion on this policy in the upcoming general election. It is also clear that there will not be any criminal prosecution of senior bankers under this government.  More than two years have passed since this crisis began and apart from a little grandstanding by the Gardaí in March 2010 (with the arrest of Sean FitzPatrick) and the occasional public statement by the Gardaí, nothing appears to have happened.  In a previous article I wrote about how some of these criminal offences were not very complex.  Two in particular carry jail terms of up to 5 years and a number of board members from both Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life and Permanent could be prosecuted and face jail terms of up to 35 years.  Voters may take direct action against politicians on polling day, but is there any direct action they may take to prosecute white-collar criminals? The general rule in criminal law is that the State prosecutes the defendant on behalf of the people.  For serious cases the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) initiates the prosecution and for minor offences it is the responsibility of the individual Garda who is in charge of the case to initiate a prosecution. But audit  is not the only possible source of criminality that could ground an action; and the Financial Regulator is, for example, investigating allegations that banks provided “false and misleading information” to NAMA about the value of their toxic property loans. But there is a little-used process whereby any individual may initiate a criminal prosecution.  This is known as the right of Common Informer.  Over recent years the rights of the Common Informer have been limited by Acts of the Oireachtas, but the basic right still exists.  The rest of this article will set out the process involved in taking a criminal case by way of Common Informer.  But first, it is necessary to explain some principles of sentencing in criminal law. Sentencing offenders A summary offence is a minor offence, triable in the District Court, with the judge acting as both judge and jury.  The maximum penalty is two years in jail or a fine of up to €5,000.  An indictable offence is a serious offence, triable in the Circuit Criminal Court or the Central Criminal Court.  The case is heard by a judge and jury and there is no limit on jail term or fine.  The punishment available for any individual offence is set out in the relevant statute.  For many crimes the statute sets out a punishment if the case is tried in the District Court and a heavier punishment if the case is heard in the Circuit Criminal Court.  The choice of court is, in general, determined by the prosecuting authority (such as the DPP). For example, S197 of the Companies Act 1990 makes it an offence for an officer of a company to give a false statement to the company’s auditors.  S240 (as amended) sets the punishment for that offence as follows: Summary offence a fine of €1,900 and/or up to 1 year in jail Indictable offence a fine of €12,600 and/or up to 5 years in jail Should more than one false statement be given to auditors, for example, were a false statement made in each of 7 different years, the defendant could be charged with 7 instances of the same offence.  Were the prosecution to be successful, it would be up to the judge to determine if the sentences should be served concurrently or consecutively.  Were the former chosen then the defendant would serve a 5 year jail term, while in the latter case he would serve a 35 year jail term (5 years x 7 offences).  The normal procedure is for concurrent sentences to be handed down but if the offences are serious enough then the judge may impose a consecutive sentence, or a combination of both. The Common Informer procedure Any private individual may initiate a criminal prosecution as a Common Informer.  The process begins with the making of a complaint under S10 of the Petty Sessions Act 1851.  That act states that a complaint is made to a judge of the District Court.  If the judge is satisfied that there is a prima facia case then he must issue a summons for the defendant to appear in court to answer the complaint.  The judge must ensure that there is substance to the complaint and may refuse to issue a summons.  But the evidential threshold that the Common Informer must reach at this stage is low.  There is no time-limit on the making of the complaint by the Common Informer for offences that may be tried either in the District Court or the Circuit Criminal Court. Right at the outset the Common Informer has an important decision to make.  He may seek a prosecution for summary offences only.  In this case the Common Informer has full control of the prosecution and the DPP cannot interfere with the prosecution.  Or the Common Informer may seek to try the offences as indictable offences.  Here the Common Informer has control of the early stage of the proceedings but thereafter the DPP is obliged to take over.  The DPP may either continue with the prosecution or decide to stop it. This decision is a difficult one.  On

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    Michael D Higgins, Ireland’s ‘political intellectual’

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    Interview by Paul Dillon Michael D Higgins, veteran polymath TD for Galway West,  was born in Limerick in 1941. His father, a lifelong republican, had been sentenced to death by the Free State for blowing up Mallow Bridge, but reprieved, the Cork Examiner having called for his execution.  His father left his family and the very young Higgins who has written that while “there are images [of Limerick] which I retain, such as the pleasure of being brought up past Janesboro to the public park in Limerick, [that] memory  fades into insignificance when I consider the implications for all concerned of the leave-taking that was involved in the break-up of our family”. Raised in Newtown-Mount-Fergus, County Clare, from the age of 5 by an aunt and uncle,  Higgins  had  a nanny with an Anglo-Irish accent – trained in a Limerick ‘big house’, accounting perhaps for his unusual dialect, though not his intermittent shrillness. He was educated at St. Flannan’s College, Ennis, Co. Clare, University College, Galway, Indiana University and Manchester University. He is Married to Sabina Coyne, a founder member of the Focus Theatre and Stanislavsky Studio in Dublin. They have one daughter and three sons. Politician Higgins was active in Fianna Fáil as a student in UCG but in the end stood (unsuccessfully) for the Labour Party in the 1973 general election despite a fresh-faced Éamon Gilmore canvassing for him. A former member of Galway County Council (1974-1993), he has twice been Mayor of Galway. As Chairman of the Labour Party 1977-1987, he opposed coalitions with Fine Gael.  Higgins was a  member of Seanad Éireann 1973-1977 and 1982-1987 and was elected to Dáil Éireann in 1981 and 1982; and re-elected in 1987, 1989, 1992 and 1997.  In 1992 he thought of joining Democratic Left but stayed with Labour and became Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht 1993 -1997.  Dessie O’Malley said he’d ‘go mad’ in a ministry but he didn’t quite. Indeed he is highly regarded in arts circles for his achievements in office.   Currently he is President of the Labour Party and Party Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs. He will not stand in the imminent general election as he has his sights, not for the first time, on the Presidency.  A straw poll in the Sunday Times showed an overwhelming preference in the parliamentary Labour Party for the intellectualised Higgins over his party rival, the more worldly Fergus Finlay. Sociologist Higgins is Honorary Adjunct Professor at Large in Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and former Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Illinois. Writer/Poet HIs first collection of poems, ‘The Betrayal’, was published in 1990. His second book of poems ‘The Season of Fire’ was published in 1993.  The Irish Times’ reviewer wrote: “T]hough Higgins declares in one poem his dedication to “the blinding light/ Of the ordinary”, too many of the poems are damaged by his use of a language that doesn’t practise what he preaches. So even a poem of affecting memory can slide into a language that distances us from its experience, is clotted with abstractions”. A selection of his writing, speeches and academic work, ‘Causes for Concern’ was published in 2006. He is currently preparing a new academic work on political theory and practice, emphasising the necessity for an integrated approach and stressing the hegemony of values. Human Rights Activist Michael D  Higgins has campaigned for human rights and written of conflict in many parts of the world, including such areas as Turkey, Western Sahara, Nicaragua, Chile, Gaza, The West Bank, Peru, El Salvador, Iraq and Somalia.. In recognition of his work for peace with justice, he became the first recipient of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize of the International Peace Bureau in Helsinki in 1992. He has been an active feminist for all of his political life. Former Labour leader, Frank Cluskey once was told, when he asked why Higgins was not at a party meeting, “he is in El Salvador”, prompting the response that when given the choice of saving the world or the Labour Party, Higgins always took the easy option. This reflects the party’s sometimes  testy, but always respectful, indulgence of a man sometimes seen as the conscience of a party that perpetually wrestles it  and wins. What were your early political achievements and interests? When I first stood for election in 1969, I was 28. I made a conscious decision at that time to bring in economic rights and social rights to the discourse I was developing. I became a Senator in 1973 and I was very much involved in personal-rights issues, such as family planning. I recall the first attempt to abolish the status of illegitimacy. Between ‘77 and ‘81, my work was quite internal within the Labour Party and I was out of electoral politics. In ‘81, I was elected as a TD for Galway West and I won the seat on quite a left-wing agenda. There were 3 elections in 18 months. In the first election in 1982, I surviveD But then in the second, I lost my seat. I had been targeted by the Christian Political Action movement. The other people who were targeted by that group in that election were Jim Kemmy and Mary Robinson. No change in Ireland happened by accident and none of the thinking around change happened by accident. It was based on a very solid foundation of work on a rights-based agenda. How did your association with Central America begin? In 1980, you had the shooting of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador. Éamon Casey was involved in Trócaire and I was invited to go to El Salvador. And then I went to Nicaragua and it was then I began my long association with the Sandinistas. That began a relationship with Central America that would develop. Much later, I was part of an international delegation which met with Senator Ted Kennedy. It was Kennedy who put down the motion in the US Congress which ended the

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    Fr Chesney defamed

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    Fr Chesney defamed Contrary to lazy reports, the NI Ombudsman’s report on the 1972 ‘bloody Monday’ bombings in Claudy did not damn local priest, Fr James Chesney by Anton McCabe “Media confusion seems to have begun because the press statement from the Ombudsman’s office had a significantly different emphasis to the report” Media coverage of the Northern police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombing of 1972, when nine civilians were killed, was marked by an acceptance that Fr James Chesney was one of the bombers. This is at variance with one of the conclusions of the Ombudsman’s report: that detaining Fr Chesney “might have either implicated him in or eliminated him from the enquiry” (emphasis added). This media coverage did not just come from the usual conservative British outlets. The Guardian and the Irish Times carried a profile of Fr Chesney, beginning: “Fr James Chesney was as unlikely a character to fit the stereotype of a brooding terrorist as might be imagined”. Failing to grasp that there is no evidence the priest was a terrorist, brooding or otherwise. The profile then went on to quote as fact a description of a confession Fr Chesney allegedly made to an individual calling himself ‘Fr Liam’: “This horrible affair has been with me now for 30 years and it has been hanging over me like a black cloud. I must talk to someone in authority before I die . . . I must meet my maker with a clear conscience. The souls of the deceased are crying out not for vengeance but for justice”. This ‘Fr Liam’ sent a letter to a Claudy victim, which led to the Ombudsman’s investigation. The BBC News website says: “Fr Liam, who has not been identified”. The Ombudsman’s report is explicit that the letter was a forgery: “The Police Ombudsman has concluded that the letter was unlikely to have been from a Catholic Priest. The letter contained significant errors including the description of Father Chesney’s forename as ‘John’ when he was known as James or Jim. It also stated that Father Chesney was posted to Malin Head in the summer of 1972, which is incorrect”. The Ombudsman also established that no priest exists with the details ‘Fr Liam’ had given about himself. Thus a more useful question is: why did the Ombudsman carry out a lengthy and costly investigation based on a forged letter? Media reports, almost without exception, accepted ‘police intelligence’ from 1972 regarding Fr Chesney as fact. In Northern Ireland in 1972 internment was in operation, based on this police intelligence. At any one time, up to 2,000 were being held, nearly all young Catholic males. Even many Unionist politicians now accept many internees were totally uninvolved with either the Provisional or Official IRAs. Police actions in 1972 did not tally with their believing the intelligence on Fr Chesney. The priest was accepted as an alibi witness for a man being questioned about the Claudy bombing; now one of the police questioning the man says he believed at the time Fr Chesney was involved in Claudy. It beggars belief that the Northern police would free an IRA member because another IRA member provided an alibi – for a bombing both were involved in. Two months after Claudy, a police sniffer dog at a checkpoint reacted to traces of a substance similar to explosive in Fr Chesney’s car. At this time, police intelligence said Fr Chesney was both director of operations and quartermaster of the South Derry Brigade of the IRA (Provisional). But he was then allowed to go on his way. In the conditions of 1972, police were not going to free someone they believed was a senior IRA member after finding traces of explosives in his car. In October, police intelligence was reporting Fr Chesney’s  ‘Independent’ unit of the IRA. This says a lot about the quality of the intelligence. The ‘Independent’ unit was the former South Derry Brigade of the Official IRA. It had split away because of the Official IRA ceasefire. It had nothing to do with the IRA (Provisional), of which Fr Chesney was supposedly a local leader. The report is clear Fr Chesney was not moved to Donegal to prevent police detaining him for questioning. On 4 December 1972 the late Cardinal William Conway had a meeting with the late William Whitelaw, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The police had asked Whitelaw to speak to the Cardinal regarding Fr Chesney. The Cardinal noted in his diary: “…rather disturbing tete-a-tete at the end about C”; showing he knew the priest, not for a positive reason. However, there was no agreement to transfer Fr Chesney. A Northern Ireland Office note to a police officer states: “The Cardinal mentioned the possibility (emphasis added) of transferring him to Donegal”. The Cardinal spoke to Fr Chesney’s superior (probably then Bishop Neil Farren of Derry), who in turn questioned the priest. After this, according to the report: “The Superior, however ,had given him orders to stay where he was (Bellaghy in south Derry) on sick leave until further notice”. Nearly all media outlets reported Fr Chesney was moved to Donegal as a result of this meeting; the report says this was not until a year after the meeting. Bishop Farren’s successor, Dr Edward Daly, with the Vicar General for the diocese, questioned Fr Chesney in April or May 1974. They uncovered nothing to make them suspect the priest was a Claudy bomber. Dr Daly said police actions were inconsistent with believing Fr Chesney was a mass murderer: “He travelled almost every week from 1973 until his death in 1980 to visit his mother in Maghera (Co Derry). He went through checkpoints. He could have been arrested any time the security forces wanted to. You couldn’t have got from Donegal to Maghera without going through a checkpoint. It is clear from the Ombudsman’s report that there was not a shred of evidence against him.” He also believes Fr Chesney was an unlikely IRA man:

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    Serbia Alone

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    A journey through the complexity of former Yugoslavia By Frank Shouldice Agnostic Yugoslavs suddenly became Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs or Bosnian Moslems. These differences were masterfully exploited by political leaders clinging to nationalist agendas – most especially by Milosevic in Serbia and Franco Tudjman in Croatia. The train that flits through the backwaters of northern Serbia is quaint but functional. Running twice a day it chugs along a single track for 40 kilometres to connect the Serbian city of Subotica with the city of Szeged in Hungary. The engine and carriage operate as one so the train feels more like a bus. Our driver sits hunched over controls at the front, peering into the baleful night while wipers squeak across his windscreen. A conductor finishes checking tickets and sits alongside the driver, the draughty interior of the carriage gloomy under low wattage lighting. At Horgos the Serbian border guard is mildly curious about seeing an Irish passport. It’s rare enough to find anyone far-flung on such a local line but he stamps it and hands it back without a fuss. Northern Serbia is not exactly a magnet for tourism but EU nationals no longer need a visa to go there. The conductor removes a wad of notes from his jacket pocket and counts the takings into separate currencies — Serbian dinar and Hungarian florint. The driver gives up on the wipers so all that’s left is a howling wind and the heavy percussion of rain. He knows many of his passengers by name, making random stops in the middle of nowhere to let people off. It’s the Balkan rail equivalent of the Lough Swilly bus. We reach Subotica in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. Among 27 different ethnic groupings here is a large ethnic Hungarian population. Thousands fled back across the border during Yugoslavia’s civil war, fearing an influx of Serbian refugees from Bosnia and Croatia. Generally however it’s relatively harmonious and in some ways Vojvodina offers rare evidence that former President Josep Broz Tito’s dream for Yugoslavia might have lasted. But of course it did not. The federation Tito nurtured now comprises seven states – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, most recently, Kosovo. Convulsions that started in May 1991, when the first shots rang out in Vukovar (now part of Croatia), continue to rumble and simmer, most particularly between Kosovar Serbs and Albanians. “Once upon a time there was a country and its capital was Belgrade”, runs the opening line of Emir Kusturica’s ‘Underground’, a magnificent dirge to former Yugoslavia. The Sarajevo-born film-maker weaves a mesmerising tale that captures the complex tragedy that is the Balkans. “With pain, sorrow and joy we shall remember our country”, concludes the narrator, a Belgrade zookeeper. “As we tell our children stories that start like fairytales — Once upon a time there was a country — this story has no end”. There is indeed a circularity about history in these parts. Following Tito’s death in 1980, the charismatic leader was buried in a white-marble mausoleum named ‘Kuca Cveka’ (House of Flowers). The memorial is located on Bulevar Mira, a couple of miles from Belgrade city centre. On a visit in 1988 I joined a steady procession of visitors to the mansion — a cross between the Whitehouse and Graceland — paying tribute to the man whose 35-year reign made Yugoslavia a unique but imperfect success. Tito’s successor Slobodan Milosevic, a Serb nationalist, later took up residence on Bulevar Mira. For privacy he built a high wall between the house and the mausoleum. The former museum was cut off from the people and most of the artefacts simply disappeared. It was an audacious gesture witnessed with mute public disapproval. Milosevic and his wife Mira acted more like Yugoslav royalty, occupying a mansion high on the hill while Tito’s faithful made pilgrimages to a lower altitude. By the late 1990s the writing was on the wall for Milosevic. Through his 13-year reign he played a key role in sparking the disastrous civil war that ultimately brought Yugoslavia to an end. Reviving his lost pursuit for Greater Serbia he turned his attention to subduing ethnic Albanian separatists in Serbia’s southern province. NATO responded to Serbia’s policy of aggression in Kosovo by bombing Belgrade in 1999. Key offices, such as the Department of the Interior, Secret Police HQ and the national broadcaster, RTS, were surgically targeted during 78 days of bombardment. Eleven years later many of these vast buildings still totter precariously in downtown Belgrade, fenced-off reminders of the power beyond these borders. Visitors to ‘Kuca Cveka’ today will notice how few people still attend the mausoleum. Put it down to despondency or disillusionment but it’s not the shrine it used to be. Tito’s resting place went unscathed when the presidential mansion took a direct NATO hit but the adjacent gardens are full of weeds and a dry fountain peels in rust. It’s as though Tito’s dream died with him. While there is a degree of anger that the partisan hero failed to ensure stable succession the most pervasive feeling is regret for a bygone era that Serbs — and ex-Yugoslavs in general — realise will never be achieved again. Irrespective of origin, many citizens are still shocked at how quickly Yugoslavia tore itself apart. They recall how questions previously unasked — such as ethnicity or religious beliefs – suddenly became defining identities. Agnostic Yugoslavs suddenly became Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs or Bosnian Moslems. These differences were masterfully exploited by political leaders clinging to nationalist agendas – most especially by Milosevic in Serbia and Franco Tudjman in Croatia. Balkan unity, capricious at the best of times, was doomed. Such was the inspiration for Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andric. He based ‘The Bridge on the Drina’ on conflict between Moslems and Christians in the mountainous Bosnian village of Visegrad. Published in 1945 the Andric classic centres on events at the magnificent 11-arch bridge built by the Ottomans in 1577. At this beautiful idyll it is

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