admin

Village names a retired judge who pursued a woman who appeared before him in family law proceedings

Bad policies lead to bad results

The Blueshirt who has inherited the most distinguished legal pedigree but lies about his background, worked for Big Tobacco and as a Commercial Lawyer, and broke electoral law

By Christopher Stanley, Litigation Consultant, KRW LAW LLP, Belfast* [i] In the last six months victims of violent abuse in Ireland have been ‘granted’ apologies. First, the Irish Taoiseach apologized to the victims and survivors of the Mother and Baby Homes. Writing in The Independent on 14 January 2021 Emer O’Toole noted: “On Wednesday, the Irish Taoiseach issued an apology to survivors, saying, rightfully, that “the shame was not theirs; it was ours”. While this state apology is important, the Taoiseach’s speech historicises the lack of respect for the dignity and rights of survivors. This trend continues across Irish political discourse, where emphasis is on closing a dark chapter in Ireland’s history. But survivors of Mother and Baby Homes and Irish adopted people are still not being listened to. They are still being denied their rights.” Second, the British Prime Minister apologized to the relatives of the victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre 1971 in which British troops shot and killed 11 civilians. Writing in The Irish Times on 25 May 2021 Sarah Burns reported that the families of the victims described the apology as “feeble and insincere”. It is widely believed, at least by the media and victims, survivors and relatives, that these apologies were hollow, weasel words, granted too late, absent of understanding, integrity or meaning. Words mouthed by politicians to an empty audience, as a gesture of apparent humility, amounting to nothing save for a ritual of vacant contrition. In terms of the violent legacy of systemic institutional abuse in Ireland (South and North) and the violent legacy of the Conflict (North and South) the apology for historic actions and inactions, acts and omissions, collusion and complicity and impunity by the State, is part of the State-sponsored system/process of Truth and Reconciliation. A societal Truth and Reconciliation process is an aspect of ‘moving on’ from the scene of violent incursion and of suturing a social wound so that such violations and breaches (of the social contract, of human rights) cannot be repeated. We Promise. Trust Us – we apologized to you. Truth and Reconciliation: Soft (Transitional) Justice. If there is a right to truth it must be a right to know why. Why was my body broken? Why was my baby forcibly removed? Why was my mammy shot by a British soldier? Why was my husband executed by the British state? This is not a Soft Right but rather it is a Hard Truth for those responsible, for those being held. “But it did not happen on my watch” says the Politician, the Civil Servant, the Bishop, the General. Therefore, the words of apology fall upon deaf ears. I reject your apology. I cannot forgive you. Is this wrong? Does it make the victim lesser than the abuser? [ii] The Oxford Reference website entry for the word ressentiment is as follows: “A vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have. The term, which might be translated as ‘resentment’, though in most places it is generally left in the original French, is usually associated with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who defined it as a slave morality. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as the core of Christian and Judaic thought and, consequently, the central facet of western thought more generally. In this context, ressentiment is more fully defined as the desire to live a pious existence and thereby position oneself to judge others, apportion blame, and determine responsibility.” (Ressentiment – Oxford Reference last accessed 11 June 2021) In psychological terms ressentiment is a profound sense of resentment, frustration, and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, generated by a sense of weakness/inferiority and feelings of jealousy/envy in the face of the ’cause’, that ultimately generates a rejecting/justifying ‘value system’ or morality that exists as a means of attacking or denying the perceived source of one’s own sense of inferiority. (Ressentiment last accessed 14 June 2021) Ressentiment is not resentment but rather a philosophical, ideological and psychological condition. It is the suffering of not understanding, the suffering of being located within a victim-hierarchy, and the suffering of not being able to forgive because of perceived self-weakness because I suffered. [iii] In the jurisprudence on the definition of torture (upon which there is an absolute prohibition) there is an important distinction between torture and inhuman and degrading treatment because of the stigma attached to torture. The victim of torture becomes stigmatized or scapegoated because they are the victim of torture. The victim of torture cannot escape the scar imposed upon them and the violence inscribed upon their flesh. [iv] Kafka describes the infliction of punishment as the crime is inscribed upon the flesh of the body of the condemned in his short story In The Penal Colony: “Yes, the Harrow,” said the Officer. “The name fits. The needles are arranged as in a harrow, and the whole thing is driven like a harrow, although it stays in one place and is, in principle, much more artistic. You will understand in a moment. The condemned is laid out here on the Bed. First, I will describe the apparatus and only then let the procedure go to work. That way you will be able to follow it better. Also, a sprocket in the Inscriber is excessively worn. It really squeaks. When it is in motion one can hardly make oneself understood. Unfortunately, replacement parts are difficult to come by in this place. So, here is the Bed, as I said. The whole thing is completely covered with a layer of cotton wool, the purpose of which you will find out in a moment. The condemned man is laid out on his stomach on the cotton wool—naked, of course. There are straps for the hands here, for the feet here, and for the throat here, to tie him in securely. At the head of the Bed here, where the man, as I have mentioned, first lies face down, is this small protruding lump of felt, which can

THE STONE WAS MOVED AND DOMINIC CRAWLED OUT By Christopher Stanley So, we have this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying, ‘are we going to bomb Iraq?’, part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, the prime minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial  [i] After his Passion in the Rose Garden, the Stone was Moved and Dominic crawled out into the spotlight. A hybrid Jesus Christ/Sméagol/Gollum/Deranged Technocrat. His clawed hand nailed to a whiteboard of messianic data.  His name derived from the sound of his disgusting gurgling, choking cough (Gollum not Dom).  It might not have been on third day but it was near to the ‘anniversary’ of his Passion in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street when he ‘gave’ an unprecedented Press Conference to explain his travails/travels to Barnard Castle.  This week he ‘gave’ an unprecedent evidence session to politicians in Westminster. A stone’s throw from the scene (mise en scène) that marked the start of his departure from a public life of private office/devotion.  Dear Village Reader you may recall I took advantage of Dominic’s Passion to write a short series of opinion pieces about Type-Cummings, Project-Cummings and how his personality and conviction were shaping the modern English way of politics, governance, service to state and management of society and economy.  I described how Type-Cummings and Project-Cummings were centralising power in the Cabinet Office and not Whitehall, by way of Executive Dominance (the stranglehold of Elective Dictatorship choking those wretched constitutional checks and balances) over the Legislature (Parliament) and the Judiciary in the absence of any form of accountability, above law-morals-aesthetics, wheezing anomie.  The Odyssean-education of the synthesisers whose contempt for the Overseers (politicians and judges) was completed by Cummings Ascension to dominance is a (deliberately) complex phenomenon obscured by its own use of techno-bureaucratic language of post-modern managerial Machiavellianism. My analysis of ‘phenomenon Cummings’ was offered to Readers of Village as a warning of how a radical new fashion in how to Project-manage a complex democracy in an undemocratic Soviet-style planning of a post-industrial/digital/viral/voodoo economy is emerging. [ii] After the Summer, The Fall. Cummings fell/pushed dramatically and Icarus like.  He retreated into his Platonic cave in North London to do what he does best: Plan.  [iii] And two days after the anniversary of his Passion in the Rose Garden (25 May 2020) the Stone of the Cave moved and Dominic rose before a House of Commons Select Committee (27 May 2021) and he spoke: for seven hours. In the Rose Garden he was late and characteristically dishevelled (another nod of contempt for Establishment norms). In the Select Committee Room assigned for his return, he was open-necked and on time.  This was a joint session of Parliament’s health and social care and the science and technology Select Committees. Dominic appeared in person; some of his inquisitors appeared virtually. Dominic produced his whiteboard.  [iv] Dear Village Reader please remember Dominic Cummings was employed by the Conservative Party as a SPAD – a Special Advisor. He was not a civil servant. Rather an uncivil savant. He is beyond Spin. Therefore, in his Select Committee performance he appeared with no fixed mandate as a politician or a civil servant would.  As with his Press Conference, so with his spotlight part in the arena of Political Theatre. The Studio Space in this theatre (the Palace of Westminster as the Palace of Varieties) took precedence over the Main Space where the other dramatic personae in this performance were ‘doing’ Prime Minister’s Questions (the regular week in, week out of political repertory).  [v] And the inquisitors allowed him to vent. This was so unlike the Select Committee I attended many years ago (2009) when Iris Robinson MP (remember her?) let loose at Dennis Bradley, the co-author of the Eames-Bradley Consultation on the Past, who was giving evidence. It was reminiscent of a recent Parish Council meeting in the North of England. What was Dominic here for? Revisionism, Confession, Retribution, Justification,  Revenge, katharsis for The Fall? Or to explain why 128,000 people in the UK died of Covid-19? And in the shadow-context of that figure to exert his moral authority where others appeared to have abandoned their moral compasses, if they ever possessed them? For a person skilled in trench-warfare (recall he delivered ‘us’ – and I include you Dear Village Reader – BREXIT) he was prepared and planned for his attack.  In the Bunker of 10 Downing Street, I suspect the tin-helmets were being issued and the counterattack being prepared (Operation Chaos and Lies), even as the Great Leader spoke at the Palace of Varieties, as his Princess Nut Nut flicked through the wallpaper catalogues of Barrow and Fall.  [vi] So, the headline or salient points, Dom’s take on the management of a C21 pandemic. Blessed hindsight! Good old Auntie! Dominic Cummings: Five claims fact-checked – BBC News and Dominic Cummings: The seven most explosive claims – BBC News (last accessed 30 May 2021) The British government ‘failed’: “Tens of thousands of people died, who didn’t need to die” sorry for ministers, officials and advisers “like me” for falling “disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect”. “When the public needed us most the government failed”, apologising to “the families of those who died unnecessarily”.   The British Prime Minister was/is ‘not fit for office’: “The heart of the problem was, fundamentally, I regarded him as unfit for the job. And I was trying to create a structure around him to try and stop what I thought would have been bad decisions, and push things through against his wishes.” The British Health Secretary “should have been fired”:    “should have been fired for at least 15 to 20 things” and displayed “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” and “completely incapable of doing the job”.   First lockdown delay   “I bitterly regret that I didn’t hit the emergency panic button earlier than I did”.   Bombs, quarantine… and a dog called Dilyn   “So, we have this

Ballymurphy, the UK government’s proposals to deal with legacy issues, and the dogs on the streets. By Christopher Stanley, litigation consultant. Statute of Limitations In London today (11 May 2021), the British government set out its legislative agenda by way of the Queen’s Speech to the House of Lords. Unexpectedly, the British government remains intent on its ambitions to stop investigating Conflict-related Legacy deaths in Northern Ireland and to introduce a Statute of Limitations so that British army veterans will not face prosecution. The details of the proposals remain to be published. The British government also proposed to ‘review’ the Human Rights Act 1998 and legislate to restrict access to Judicial Review.  In Belfast today, Mrs Justice Keegan delivered her verdict in The Ballymurphy Massacre Inquest into the deaths of ten civilians shot by the British army in 1971. The judge found there had been a disproportionate use of force and the shootings violated Article 2 of the ECHR (the right to life).  She said “All the deceased were entirely innocent of any wrongdoings on the day in question”. Whilst the verdict of an inquest cannot attribute criminal responsibility or civil liability, the verdict can prompt an investigation by the prosecuting authority.  The Legacy of the Past – the Conflict – in Northern Ireland continues to shape the present and determine the future. In 2014 there was the possibility that the past could be ‘dealt with’ or ‘policed’ by way of The Stormont House Agreement and its mechanisms of investigation and truth-recovery. A mixture of Transitional Justice, Truth and Reconciliation, Hard Law and Soft Justice.  In 2021 that model was abandoned by the British government by way of its New Decade New Approach proposal. Today it is apparent that the British government wants to cease contentious investigations into contentious deaths and rely upon truth-recovery mechanisms, Hard Law trumped by Soft Justice. Truth Not all relatives of victims or survivors of the Conflict want the same thing. But access to the truth is one binding want. How the truth is achieved, if it can be, is the point of contest. Once the truth is ‘out’ what should be done with it? How can truth assist securing peace when “peace comes dropping slow” (Yeats).  In one way establishing a narrative of the Conflict which can be accepted across the communities in Northern Ireland contributes to cementing and securing the peace which was secured by way of the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement 1998 (GFA). But the truth is oft contested or denied by what Ian Cobain has described as The History Thieves. And truth has consequences: it cannot simply be archived by those very same History Thieves. It was dirty The Conflict in Northern Ireland was fought by three sides: Republicans, Loyalist and the British state. This is not a pernicious counter-narrative, as the exposure of collusion has pointed to, but rather a telling truth about the last Colonial adventure of the British Empire fought on the Narrow Ground of Ulster.  This last bloody campaign, Britain’s Dirty War as Martin Dillon described it, has left both a human-rights deficit in Northern Ireland, which the GFA seeks to address, and a Legacy of state-sponsored terror by way of collusion with both Republicans and Loyalists depending on the political temperature at a particular juncture or the security constituency policy prevailing at prevailing point in time (the two not necessarily aligned). The difficult question for Westminster politicians and Whitehall civil servants is that a Statute of Limitations for crimes committed during the Conflict before 1998 offends the letter and spirit of the GFA. Who will it apply to – To those British army veterans responsible for the Ballymurphy Massacre? To the Birmingham Pub Bombers? To Albert ‘Ginger’ Baker? To John Downey? – to paramilitaries, agents and informers, old soldiers? Not a witch-hunt The word ‘witchhunt’ has been used a lot in relation to the prosecution of British army veterans. It started to be used following the ‘persecution’ of British soldiers accused of crimes committed during the Iraq and Afghanistan ‘campaigns’. It is now extended to apply to British soldiers who served in Northern Ireland. A witchhunt implies a form of collective hysteria against a particular group – ‘hounding’ Let us be clear:  the number of prosecutions taken against former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland is low the decisions to prosecute in these cases were taken by independent law officers applying evidential thresholds. Who are the vicitms? The accused or the accusers? No hierarchy of victims In Northern Ireland there is a legislation which ensures there is no hierarchy of victims: A victim is “Someone who is or has been physically or psychologically injured as a result of or in consequence of a conflict-related incident” (The Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 Section 3(1)(a). The proposals of the British government will create a hierachy of victims (already in place regarding the eligibility criteria for the ‘Troubles’ Pension).  The Statute of Limitation proposals from the British government will create a de facto amnesty for perpetrators of Conflict-related criminality. Will this limitation also apply to state agents and informers employed by the British security forces? Will this limitation also apply to Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries who remain alive?  Whether these proposals violate the UK’s obligations under the ECHR seems of little consequence to the British government. HMG is intent on ‘reviewing’ the Human Rights Act 1998 and intends to limiting access to Judicial Review, as announced in today Queen’s Speech. Judicial Review is the legal application to challenge Executive decision-making. Judicial Review is a mechanism by which human rights concerns can be bought before the independent judiciary and which has been used extensively in Conflict-related Legacy litigation in Northern Ireland. Retribution not core demand One of the consequences of the process of truth-recovery can be a demand for retribution.  But that is only one consequence of the process and it is not a core demand for the majority of relatives of victims and survivors. Their demand is to know why and to know who – who

How I grew to see that without broad Marxism the arts and its unserious, networked and commodified lit-libs are for sale. An extract from the essay ‘Being a Marxist Poet in the Twenty-First Century’ by Kevin Higgins. More than a quarter of a century ago a man-child called Kevin retired from politics as he turned twenty seven. He had joined the then somewhat notorious Trotskyist group, the Militant Tendency[i], at the age of fifteen.  After twelve years of activism, which began in membership of Galway West Labour Youth the month the Falklands War kicked off and fizzled like the saddest of fireworks in London in the aftermath of Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax, against which he had been a somewhat obsessively focused campaigner, it was over. “Retirement” was the face-saving word he used to describe his departure from politics. From the inside it felt like a personal tragedy. And it was. After more than a decade as a fiercely loyal ‘comrade’, Kevin had had enough of Militant and they had had enough of him.  Dialectics being the contradictory beasts they are, a total exit from active politics may have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to him right then. But it didn’t feel like that to him. Instead of world socialist revolution, with which history had refused to oblige him, the spectres haunting the little part of Europe with which Kevin was then mostly concerned were, from his point of view, disappointing: Tony Blair and the Celtic Tiger, which got given its name the same year Blair became UK Labour leader: 1994.  Kevin sloped back to Galway from London via the Holyhead ferry that April with a mouthful of bad teeth: he wasn’t much of a one for looking after himself then.   Though he would march to defend the NHS for other people until his shoes disintegrated; he did not partake of such services himself. Kevin arrived in Galway with no particular plans, apart from a notion that he might do something artistic. Not artistic in the prettifying sense:  he had no interest in describing the rocks around Connemara and the like. Indeed, he had little interest in any kind of beauty. Or so he thought. He wanted to express things he had been unable to say during his years as a (partly-self-appointed) leader of the vanguard of the North London semi-lumpen proletariat. Mostly, this would involve going into some detail about all the people and ideas and institutions he was against. It was no small list.  High on it was his endlessly-self-sacrificing former self, who had worked himself some of the way towards a possible early grave, in an attempt to fight the political tide of the early 1990s that was, in the end, more about masochism than socialism. By “doing something artistic”, he meant stuff to do with words – songs, poems, maybe plays, novels… In the last years of his activism, when he was Chair of Enfield Against The Poll Tax in the North London Borough then represented in the House of Commons by, among others, Michael Portillo[ii],he had become increasingly focused on how best to say what needed to be said. It wasn’t enough to say it. It had to be said well. And, if possible, said wittily. He didn’t know it at the time but writing political letters with a satirical bent to the local papers in Enfield in the very early 1990s was his beginning as a poet.  This Kevin, who was of course me, hoped to escape politics via poetry but also harboured illusions that he might somehow find a way of combining the two. It is a contradiction I have been working out ever since. From the inside it has felt more to be a case of this obvious contradiction working itself out using me as a somewhat extreme public example. Of late this contradiction has grown starker and as a result perhaps been somewhat resolved. In the course of my work as a poet, I regularly meet those strange creatures, the literary liberals, who ascribe to themselves every progressive and humane value while at the same time apparently finding no place in their imaginations for even the possibility of a world not run in the interests of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Apple Inc. They are the sort of people who, if they didn’t necessarily agree with her, would at least have understood where artist Tracy Emin was coming from when she called David Cameron’s coalition of 2010-15 “the best government…that we’ve ever had”. Politically, Emin may be an ignoramus. But her incontinent mouth is useful since it makes her spell out what others in the arts are only brave enough to occasionally think.  It has been my experience that, post-2008, most established literary creatives cannot imagine as possible a world in which a substantial percentage of the populations of countries such as Ireland, Britain, and the United States don’t live in Victorian levels of poverty. Just look at the queues of homeless being fed each Friday night outside the GPO in Dublin by the charity, Muslim Sisters of Éire. Despite such images, the idea of properly taxing the super-wealthy, and making sure they don’t find a way of avoiding that tax, is seen by your average sensible member of the literary classes as a notion only seriously held by annoying teenagers and people who think it’s still 1975.  According to this broad school of thought, if it can be called thought, there never was any other possible solution to 2008 but spending less on the lower orders and using that money to bail out JP Morgan, Anglo-Irish, and the Royal Bank of Scotland in the hope that the pre-slump status quo could somehow be restored.  So your average literary stuffed jacket, or pants-suit, tends to quietly cut characters such as Varadkar, Obama, and Cameron a huge amount of slack. As long as they give them things like a side of same-sex marriage to go with all those hungry schoolchildren