Frank Armstrong

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    Gonzagrievance

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    Revelations of sex abuse in all-male private schools in past decades have been powerfully conveyed across the Irish media. That barbarism should not, however, deflect attention from other enduring problems. I believe grave damage is still being done to the development of boys in ostensibly civilised institutions. Moreover, unequal educational provision maintains widening inequalities, underpinning a pervasive competitive individualism. I draw on painful memories of my own educational background in Gonzaga College SJ (Society of Jesus ie Jesuit) to provide a critique of private, all-male education. This is a personal account and others will have different perspectives. In his ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, James Joyce’s boyhood character disparages children from non-private schools as “Mickey Muck and Paddy Stink”. We have an enduring educational snobbery. Many a privately-schooled chap still dons the proverbial old school tie. By the 1920s, one of the leading Dublin Catholic secondary schools for boys of its time, O’Connell School on Richmond Street, recommended its pupils in the following terms: “Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possesses the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. This is an essential point. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team …”. The abiding ambition of most all-male private schools remains not only to produce good examination results, but also to develop a cast of mind disposed to “pull with the team”, rather than swim against the tide. Jesuit institutions have led the way in this regard. Since independence a disproportionate number of high office holders in this state have been educated in Jesuit schools, especially Clongowes Wood SJ in Kildare, Belvedere College SJ in Dublin, and after its foundation in 1950, my own alma mater Gonzaga College SJ, also in Dublin. All three of these are all-male and private, while the first is also a boarding school. The appointment of John Marcus O’Sullivan as Minister for Education in 1926 marked a tipping point such that non-combative Clongownians in the Cabinet outnumbered veterans of the 1916 Rising. Simon Coveney and Richard Bruton continue what is a long line of Clongownians, though the former was expelled, seemingly for underage drinking. This elite education is now more likely to produce managerial material for a thrusting private sector than diligent civil servants. But in these academic hothouses, creativity is still conflated with rebelliousness. After school, positions of influence, and wealth generation, are preserved by ‘old boy’ networks. Pressure is felt in middleclass families to reproduce this status in their sons and, to a lesser extent, daughters. A dominant Catholicism permitted horrific abuse against an older generation in Ireland. Nonetheless, professional lawyers applying Thomistic principles built a State founded on principles of universal justice. For good, and ill, Bunreacht na hEireann, our Constitution, is promulgated “in the name of the Holy Trinity”. The 1960s witnessed the advent of an era of unprecedented judicial activism. By then many of our judges were drawn from all-male, Catholic, especially Jesuit, schools. They ‘discovered’ “Unenumerated Rights”, based on a ‘Catholic’ Natural Law interpretation of the Constitution, an expansive approach the Court has since grown wary of. Moreover, Fine Gael’s ‘Towards a Just Society’ document, conceived by Declan Costello in the 1960s, aligned closely with Catholic social teaching after Vatican II, contemplating a society built on socialist principles, including state ownership of banks. There are still Jesuits, such as the visionary Father Peter McVerry, who maintain a missionary vocation for social justice. But arguments for a fair distribution of wealth did not figure prominently during my own ‘Jesuit’ education, where charitable activities tended to be characterised by noblesse oblige, and an assumption that it was valuable to witness how ‘the other half’ lived. Class divisions were, if anything, upheld by an awareness of a pronounced economic fault line. The 1990s was a peculiar era to be a teenager as Irish society embraced the conformities and staid hypocrisies, of 1950s America, which the beat poet Allen Ginsberg decried in his ‘Howl’ (1954). He asked: “What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”. In both, a hypocritical conformity was maintained. We abided: “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”. Binge drinking, and later bad hashish, were some of our preferred responses to a creeping sense of purposelessness. We stared agog at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and encountered foggy notions of an End of History. A pervasive popular culture, beholden to Mammon, including the exotic promise of sex in the sun played out on Australian soap operas, leached away instincts towards radical politics. The Leaving Certificate-obsessed and rugbybesotted Gonzaga I encountered demanded a dull conformity that did not give room for progressive post-Catholic ideas to flourish. Free-ranging speculation of a sort associated with the intellectual, or poet, was widely scorned. We passed from strangling religiosity to Neoliberal vacancy without coming up for breath. This has hobbled some of our best minds. Well before revelations of serious sexual misconduct, a Catholic ancien regime was already creaking, their pronouncements at odds with an upwardly-mobile generation of businessmen, who really ruled the roost. The emerging financial and technological sectors also boosted the professional classes, many of whose earnings spiralled. Gonzaga College SJ is still among the leading all-male secondary schools in the country, claiming a thoroughbred stable of academics, lawyers, and politicians such as Anthony Clare, Michael McDowell, and Peter Sutherland, the socalled “father of globalisation”. A sense of meritocracy was based on an entrance exam and Leaving Certificate results that often bred a preening elitism, without consideration of the worth of either. In my time, shades of Eton and Oxford cohabited with bog-Irish institutionalism, dissolving individuality into a corporate body toughened on rugby, and kept in check by cruel humour. Endowed with superficial polish, for many, meritocracy provided a fast train to plutocracy.

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    2008 not 2000-1

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    David McWilliams is a talented analytical polymath but he is egocentric and predictions of both boom and bust for Ireland have nearly all been wrong.

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    How the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring Trafficked Boys from Belfast to MPs and a TV star in Britain

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    In 2017 Village published a series of articles highlighting allegations of British Establishment complicity in child abuse in Ireland, particularly the crucially flawed Hart Report which was published in Northern Ireland (NI) a year ago. Judge Hart was tripped up by false evidence fed to him by MI5, MI6 and others for their own devious reasons. The problems manifest in his report make it an imperative that all of the activities of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring (A-IVR) be re-investigated by the London-based Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) which enjoys far greater powers of witness compulsion than Hart did. First, the IICSA should look afresh at the Kincora scandal on account of its multiple links to Westminster figures such as Sir Cyril Smith MP and Sir Peter Hayman of MI6, both of whom abused Richard Kerr, a former Kincora resident. Another former MP who is still alive abused Kerr while he was still at Kincora. He too should be included in these inquiries. In addition, the IICSA should examine the territory which Hart did not explore and call witnesses who were either overlooked or refused to co-operate with him. The trouble with the files Last month, Britain’s National Archive stated that it was withholding a file on Kincora from publication. We believe this vindicates our criticisms of the Hart Report. Hart was given solemn assurances by the UK intelligence, security and political communities that they would provide him with all the relevant files on Kincora for his work. It now appears that this one was not disclosed to him. If indeed it wasn’t, what is in it that is so sensitive that it was withheld from Hart? If, however, it was furnished to Hart, what influence did it have on his deliberations? Since we do not know what is in the file, these questions cannot be answered. In the absence of clarity, Village believes it is far more likely that the file was withheld in its entirety from the Hart Inquiry. In addition to the criticism Village published during the last year, we can now add that Hart missed the significance of some important information which was furnished to him. He was supplied with a copy of an interview with Hugh Mooney, a former ‘Information Adviser’ to the General Officer in Command of the British Army in NI which was published in The Sunday Correspondent. In it Mooney stated unambiguously that Colin Wallace, who worked at the British Army’s HQ at Lisburn as a PSYOPS officer, had told him about the abuse at Kincora. ‘I do know he mentioned it. He was dropping it in and feeling his way. He kept pushing it. But I could never understand why. I thought it was totally irrelevant to our concerns. I did get the feeling he was pushing this’. Hugh Mooney left NI in December 1973. Hence, Colin Wallace must have told him about the scandal before that date i.e. seven years before Hart concluded that the British Army knew about the abuse. This was also two years before Richard Kerr entered Kincora. Hugh Mooney did not appear at the Hart Inquiry. At page 88 of his report Hart stated that, ‘We are satisfied that it was not until 1980 [after the media exposed the Kincora scandal] that MI5, SIS, the MoD and the RUC Special Branch became aware that [William] McGrath [of Kincora] had been sexually abusing residents of Kincora when that became a public allegation”. Unfortunately, Hart made this finding despite knowing that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had destroyed all the PSYOPS files at Army HQ in Lisburn in 1981, or at least alleged that it had. Colin Wallace is clear in his memory that a number of the missing files concerned McGrath, his paramilitary organisation Tara and Kincora.   The IICSA will begin its probe into VIP abuse next month The IICSA was established in 2015 by Theresa May in her then capacity as UK Home Secretary. She pointedly refused to include Kincora within the remit of the IICSA despite being requested so to do by former Kincora victims. The IICSA came into being as a response to a plague of child-abuse cases linked to VIPs and the British Establishment, including that of Jimmy Saville. Since the instigation of the IICSA, an array of independent campaigning websites has pursued the story tenaciously while the mainstream UK media has largely steered away from any meaningful coverage of it. Its focus has, instead, been on reports about personnel changes on the staff of the IICSA. Meanwhile, elements of the pro-Establishment press, especially the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have seized a number of opportunities to undermine claims about elite complicity in the abuse. They have been supported by a handful of Tory Party grandees who have spoken out on radio and TV. Next month the IICSA will finally begin its probe of allegations about Westminster and VIP abuse; at least that is what is intended. On the basis of past performance, the Telegraph, Mail and their allies in the Tory Party will seize upon a series of stories which Village has long argued are nothing more than fictitious and entirely malicious plants designed to distract attention from the truth; worse still, designed to bring credible witnesses into disrepute by tainting them all with the same absurdist brush. A purported ‘witness’ known only as ‘Nick’ has, for example, poisoned the waters of credibility with absurd claims about sadistic murders – some with preposterous and laughable Occult overtones. ‘Nick’ was wheeled out by pro-Establishment commentators to undermine the findings of the Wiltshire Police last year that the late Edward Heath had abused young boys. We can expect to hear a lot more about ‘Nick’ & Co., in the coming months from the Telegraph, Mail and multifarious Tory grandees. Irrespective of what the IICSA ultimately determines, Village believes that much of the truth has already entered the public domain and there is no reason for this process to cease. The rest

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    Don’t soft-soap Suds

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    One does not wish to speak ill of the recently dead but one cannot help seeing the death of Peter Sutherland as symbolic of a change of mood globally about globalisation. Globalisation, which as an ideology means essentially uncontrolled free movement of capital, has gone too far. It is now a major threat to State sovereignty and to democracy and therefore to the lives and prosperity of millions of people who are not fortunate to be in the fast lane. John Bruton said on radio that what he admired about “Suds” was his ability to resist political pressure. Another way of putting that is to say Sutherland had contempt for democracy. He was one of the most powerful international figures of the last forty years but was never elected to anything. His failed encounter with the voters of Dublin South East as a young Fine Gael Dáil aspirant scarcely made him an enthusiast for elective democracy. His obituarists praised the nobility of his work of recent years on international migration, which he undertook on behalf of the UN and the Vatican. Yet in June 2012 he made the following extraordinary statement to the Committee on Migration of the British House of Lords: “The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others. And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine”. So in this sphere of his many-sided activity the intensely political Peter Sutherland was driven not just by humanitarianism but by a frankly admitted desire to undermine the cohesion of Europe’s national communities – that being necessary to advance the EU “cause” of which he was a fervent lifelong advocate. Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times roused the ire of some of Sutherland’s admirers when he wrote that no one personified quite as clearly as he did the two sides of neoliberal globalisation, “its phenomenal energy and its terrible destructiveness”. Quoting John Bruton’s remark that ”Taming nativist and nationalist trends was a daily battle of Peter’s life”, O’Toole wrote insightfully: “If so, it is is a battle he can hardly be said to have won. The nativist uprisings that now threaten the very existence of liberal democracy are not mere reactions to the kind of globalisation that Sutherland did so much to drive forward. They are products of it. If, as he did, you tie globalisation to a feral form of finance capitalism, you build into it the gross inequalities and the profound instabilities that undermine the democratic bargain. Much as he was disgusted by them, there is a sense in which Donald Trump, Brexit, Viktor Orban and Marine Le Pen are part of his legacy too”. That is a fair summing-up of Peter Sutherland’s legacy by one of Ireland’s leading intellectuals, but what is the democratic bargain that Fintan O’Toole refers to? He counterposes globalisation and feral finance capitalism on the one hand with “nativism” and “nationalism” on the other. He sees both as threats to “liberal democracy”. But what is that? Implicitly he seems to regard democracy as a matter of fairer income distribution and the elimination of “gross inequalities”. But is that an adequate definition? The paradox is that Peter Sutherland was, as Fintan O’ Toole very much is, a fervent supporter of the EU integration project and supranationalism, although perhaps for different subjective reasons. Yet the opposite of ideological globalisation is not nativism, nationalism and populism, but national democracy. National democracy is the only stable basis of modern States. And Fintan has remarkably little to say about it, even though it is an issue that is fundamental to the debate on the EU. The trouble is that he does not understand the national question. Fintan O’Toole is a New Statesman leftwinger whose radicalism encompasses all the liberal causes. There must be minimum public interference with the life-style choices of individuals. Tolerance is the highest value. His heart is in the right place when it comes to the misdeeds of Church and State, the ravages of feral finance, the exploitation of the undeveloped world, global warming and the rest. But his blind-spot is the EU, which is why he shares Peter Sutherland’s and John Bruton’s denigration of the opposition to supranational integration that is now growing across Europe as ”nativism”, “populism” and “right-wing”. He does not see this for what it really is: a manifestation of the basic and understandable democratic desire of the peoples of Europe to make their own laws through the public representatives they elect and to win back control of the State powers their national elites have handed over to Brussels during the past sixty years. The ABC of the national question is straightforward enough. Once mankind has passed beyond the clantribal stage of society in which political relations were based on kinship, the human race finds itself divided into nations. The right of nations to self-determination was first proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the 1789 French Revolution. That right is proclaimed again in the UN Charter and is a basic principle of modern international law. It is a collective human right and attaches to individuals as members of their national collectivity. Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg that democracy is “Government of the People, by the People, for the People”. But who are the People? The People is the ‘demos’, the political community where there is sufficient mutual identification, commonality of interest and natural solidarity between its members to induce minorities willingly to obey majority rule because it is ‘their’ majority and they identify with it for that reason. A ‘demos’ is a collective ‘We’. In Nation States this is primarily an ethnically-based community where people share a common language and national culture. In multinational States it is a civic community, a community of citizens, where people are still willing freely

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    It's different up here

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    Justice is not a motif found emblazoned around Donegal. Its outing accounts for much in my home town of Bundoran and elsewhere in the county. In particular the power the late sean McEniff had over local governance is very unsettling – through politics and wealth. He was Fianna Fáil’s longest-serving councillor and perhaps its richest man. His hotel empire extended to ten hotels countrywide including the Skylon in Dublin and the Great Southern in Bundoran. Journalist Gemma O’Doherty and others have alleged that McEniff interfered with the Garda investigation into the death in 1977 of six-year-old Mary Boyle, but it is the power his empire wields over the slot machines that have for fifty years dominated and blighted once-elegant Bundoran that particularly concerns me here. McEniff’s empire traces its foundation to slot machines. McEniff was by far the largest slot machine operator in the town, and ignored the law: his slots would make big pay-outs, just enough to keep the key punters, most of them poor or old – or both, hooked. In 2009 Bundoran town council adopted a submission from the slot-machine operators – McEniff being the largest – to the Department of Justice – as its own submission. the submission had been adopted by the council on the same day at a special meeting which had only three councillors present. The quorum for any meeting was four councillors to be present, though nobody called halt. The submission said Bundoran’s 1,000 machines were “an integral part of the overall Bundoran product, both on and off the season, and a key reason why visitors continue to be attracted to the town”. Growing up in Bundoran, I remember from a young age the dangers of gaming machines. A friend of my mother came down from the North on the bus with her wages on a Friday and rushed up to play gaming machines in the town. By Sunday evening she had to ask my mum for money to get back home, after losing everything. The 2008 Department of Justice report on ‘regulating Gaming in Ireland’ states “the committee is aware of the type of gaming machine which accepts €500 notes. The Act of 1956 provides a maximum stake in gaming machines of 6d and a maximum prize of 10 shillings. The Act is not being enforced and that brings the law into disrepute”. The Garda Síochána, the Revenue and the Council have long since abjured responsibility for enforcing the gaming laws. A 1985 ‘Today Tonight’ programme on RTÉ focused on Law and Order in south Donegal, particularly Seán McEniff’s gaming. Donegal county council sued RTÉ for defamation for what it said about the inappropriate relationship between Donegal [county] council and the Garda but a legal settlement saw it agree to remove the programme, on the steps of the High Court. One of the last convictions for illegal gaming in Bundoran was in 2000 after Charlie Bird did the exposé on illegal gaming here. The solicitor for McEniffs Bundoran Limited said to the Judge at the time that “Charlie Bird should be prosecuted” as he had played an illegal gaming machine. Poor Sean died last year but his empire remains in the family. I recently objected in the District court to renewal of the gaming licence to McEniffs Bundoran Limited. The first Judge and McEniffs’ solicitor removed themselves from the case, the solicitor coming off record after I raised a concern of conflict of interest. I objected as a member of the Public, though I have had my travails with sean McEniff when I was Bundoran’s traffic warden. When I objected that gaming machines accept notes while the 1956 act maximum is 20 cent, the solicitor for the McEniffs Gerry McGovern did not deny it. Instead he just noted that revenue issued certificates and that gardaí and fire officers had no objections. “If there was a difficulty, the gardaí and revenue wouldn’t be long moving in”, he said. But that is the core of the problem. As to my objection that there were too many machines in Bundoran, Judge Denis McLoughlin said that would only be valid in case of a new application. McGovern said it was an application that had been renewed umpteen times and hadn’t been changed. And in Donegal it seems that is the main thing. The Revenue’s webpage states that it up to the District court to “limit the amount of the stakes and prizes and limiting the number of gaming machines”. But Judge McLoughlin was not interested. I have been before the District, circuit and High Courts on occasion, always representing myself. In 2012 in Donegal Circuit Court, Judge Keenan Johnston highlighted that as a lay litigant “She`d be entering the court with one hand tied behind her back”. The dysfunctionality of Donegal from policing to planning to electoral fraud to unemployment to paedophila is now well documented. Sometimes you feel fighting for justice here leaves you very much alone. Patricia McCafferty

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    Seeking Justice for the Force

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    Some books have their genesis in the craziest places, but the origin of ‘A Force For Justice’ is pretty mundane. I was at home one May evening in 2013, minding the kids when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognise. Answering these kind of calls is always a gamble. It could be somebody with a story, which might require patience, filtering, more patience, interjecting with a few questions, Job’s patience, and final realisation that the person on the other end of the line has a grievance but no story. It could be somebody with a story, an average guy who just wants an issue investigated, and is offering a few facts that might lead to more. Or it could be one of those rare times when you just strike lucky with the bones of an exceptional story. Sometimes, of course, the call is just from a voice demanding to know whether you’re happy with your broadband. On this occasion, the caller made himself known. He had some serious information about the ‘ticket fixing’ scandal that had been in the news. A few weeks previously the internal Garda report was published into how thousands of speeding tickets had been quashed. The general view was that there wasn’t a whole lot to see here, except a few disgruntled cops spreading manure. The man on the line was persuasive. He maintained that there was a story that was largely being ignored. The real story was that a scandal was being covered up. It was not just, he asserted, about well-connected people getting speeding tickets fixed. It was about widespread abuse, right across the Garda. That night in May 2013 changed it all. Against my better instincts, and probably to distract me from hyperactive kids, I told the voice at the end of the line to come to my home. He arrived and we sat down. He opened a cardboard folder and showed me details of the real story behind the recently published internal Garda report. The abuse of the ticket-fixing was widespread and the proof was accessible. This man kept me up half the night. My wife arrived home at some stage and inquired whether the kids had brushed their teeth before going to bed. “What kids?”, I replied. “Do you not realise that there are people out there having their speeding tickets fixed on the basis that they were returning home to stop ‘bees attacking livestock’,that they were ‘late for a swimming lesson’”. These were examples of the excuses inserted to sort out friends and acquaintances for their speeding tickets. From there it was just a matter of following the story. That required perseverance, sleepless nights and not a little stress, the kind of stuff endured in most jobs. Along the way, I met all sorts of people who left me with a lot of humility. Mary Lynch is a taxi driver who was viciously assaulted in 2007 by a man who murdered another woman some nine months later. Her case was mishandled by the gardaí operating out of Bailieboro Co Cavan. She was denied her day in court, she believes, because she would have publicly criticised the shortcomings in the investigation. Mary showed fortitude in dealing with what had befallen her. She was initially led to believe that Maurice McCabe was behind the mishandling. After meeting him, she realised the truth. Her case forms a chapter in ‘A Force For Justice’. Many other people whom I interviewed for the book, including both serving and retired members of An Garda Síochána, wished to remain anonymous but felt compelled to tell what they knew about what McCabe had been subjected to. There are three separate aspects to the Maurice McCabe story. In the first instance, there is the shoddy and incompetent work which left the victims of crime bereft. This strand also includes the corruption of the penalty-points system which saw favoured motorists let off scot free, arguably compromising efforts to bring safety to the roads. The second strand concerns McCabe’s efforts to have these issues addressed. Time and again, he came up against the impenetrable blue wall behind which the force operates. The most shocking strand is the efforts made to silence McCabe, to ostracise him from his colleagues and the institution that was his life. There were a number of attempts to boomerang blame for cock-ups back onto him. None of these succeeded. An insight into the lengths that some appeared to be willing to go to target the whistleblower is evident in the chapter about the missing computer. This featured in the O’Higgins Commission, but was first reported in the Irish Examiner in 2014. A computer seized from a priest, who was subsequently jailed for child abuse offences, went missing in Bailieboro station. McCabe had nothing to do with the investigation into the priest or the exhibits seized. Yet, when the vanished computer became an issue, a disciplinary process into McCabe was initiated. Through his courage and with the help of a colleague who had sympathy for what was being done to him, he managed to clear his name. The O’Higgins commission ruled that McCabe: “formed the view that there was a plot against him and other members of An Garda Síochána were out to blame him. While there is no evidence of any concerted attempt to blame Sergeant McCabe it is understandable that he might connect the commencement of disciplinary proceedings with the complaints he had made a short time earlier and that he might feel aggrieved”. Delving into the story was both challenging and rewarding. In the early days, there were times when I felt I was missing something. There was little take-up for the story elsewhere in the media. Rumours abounded about McCabe’s character. The spin machines, both in the force and among large swathes of the body politic, was working overtime against him. Now and then I was riddled with doubt. The evidence was clear. McCabe’s character suggested a serious and genuine

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    Funny Man

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    Sinn Féin’s disowning of West Tyrone MP Barry McElduff was unprecedented. The party has always previously defended erring members in public, then quietly dropped them. I must declare an interest: I know McElduff. When my late mother was ill, his constituency office was very helpful. He ran an excellent constituency service, for people across the community. The Sinn Féin leadership’s handling of the incident indicated he was severely out of favour. Michelle O’Neill issued a statement: “I made it clear to Barry that his tweet was ill-judged, indefensible and caused hurt and pain to the victims of Kingsmill. That it falls far short of the standard expected of Sinn Féin representatives and our members”. Then President-in-waiting Mary Lou McDonald said: “I do not for a moment defend the tweet, the very crass, very stupid tweet from Barry McElduff…We do not tolerated behaviour like that”. She called it “very hurtful” and “unforgiveable”. Sinn Féin’s National Chairman, Declan Kearney said: “What has happened is absolutely inexcusable and indefensible and the party leadership is taking this matter very seriously indeed. I would like to express my own and Sinn Féin’s very sincere regret for the very understandable offence caused as result of this tweet…What happened is absolutely irresponsible. Barry McElduff has already made an unreserved apology and that was the correct thing to do in these circumstances but the reality is huge offence has been caused and I and Sinn Fein strongly disapprove of what has happened”. After those statements, whatever about the three-month suspension, McElduff had no alternative except to resign. His difficulties with Sinn Féin seem to date back some time. From 2007 to 2011 he was Chair of the Assembly’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure Committee. He was recognised as Sinn Féin’s most effective committee chairman. Paradoxically, he was able to work well with the Unionist representatives on the Committee. Many expected him to become the Minister if Sinn Féin took the Department. However, after the 2011 Assembly election, Carál Ní Chuilín became minister. She is recognised as able and as a safe pair of hands, but had no background in culture. It would have been useful for Sinn Féin to keep an experienced member like McElduff on the Departmental Committee. It has never been fully explained why McElduff instead moved to the Department of Employment and Learning Committee. Many observers felt he was visibly not his usual self. Earlier, McElduff had been moved aside as Westminster candidate in West Tyrone. From the late 1980s, he had been an organiser in the area. He had fought its predecessor, the Mid-Ulster seat, in 1992. Instead of him, in 1997 Sinn Féin moved in its then Vice-President Pat Doherty, who lived in north Donegal. Doherty retired last year, and McElduff took the seat. McElduff always had a reputation for being jocular, bearing out the saying: “It takes a wise man to play the fool”. David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party suggested he be made ‘Minister for Fun’. In recent years, the jocular McElduff came more to the fore. He published two books, one entitled ‘Keep ‘Er Lit’. For a while he contributed regularly as a comic act to the Stephen Nolan show on Radio Ulster. It is understood that not all in Sinn Féin were amused. He posted a string of videos of himself online: in one he sneaked into the DUP corridor at Stormont and bought a Snickers bar from the vending machine. He also appeared as a stand-up comedian in a club. It was he who posted the offending video, which led to his resignation, online. The DUP played the issue cleverly. They knew an all-out attack could backfire, cloud issues, and rally nationalist support round McElduff. So attack dogs like Gregory Campbell and Sammy Wilson were muzzled. Emma Little Pengelly, MP for South Belfast and the most socially liberal DUP MP, was put to the front. McElduff will no longer have a front-line role in politics. As an abstentionist MP he is a paid employee of Sinn Féin and his contract is governed by employment law. He cannot simply be sacked. Not a man who ever comfortably fitted into the background, it remains to be seen how he will find a role away from frontline politics.

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    Time to redefine collusion

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    Judge McCloskey steps aside, in the end Last year Mr Justice Bernard McCloskey, in the High Court, ruled the part of the Northern Ireland Ombudsman’s report that found there had been police collusion in sectarian murders at Loughinisland was unlawul. He then ruled in late January that allegations he had acted as a lawyer for one of the retired police officers mounting the legal challenge in a 2002 case against the then Ombudsman over the Omagh bombings, did not give rise to an apparent bias. On that basis he would not recuse himself from discussions about what remedy was appropriate following the quashing. He pointed out that he had in fact not acted for the retired officer, who had taken no part in the legal action in 2002. He had been an officer in the Police Association at the time but had not ‘attended at consultations with Counsel or at Court, according to Solicitors who acted for the Police Association at the time’. Confusion about this arose due to a misreport in the Irish Times picked up by the BBC the judge said, though he might have added that he had indeed acted for the Officers’ Association. In any event the judge’s reasoning then took a turn: “It is essential for the court to detach itself as far as humanly possible from the conscientious and dispassionate judicial exercise which has given rise to its substantive judgment and, further, its assessment that the test for apparent bias is not satisfied. I consider that, in the truly unique and unprecedented circumstances of this case, the interests of justice will not be furthered by a formal and final outcome which gives effect to the court’s substantive judgment and choice of remedy… Following anxious reflection, my evaluative conclusion is that our legal system will not have served the families [of the murder victims] well if they are not given the opportunity of having this case heard by a differently constituted court”. And with that he has stepped aside. He was vituperative about the Ombudman’s legal team, noting that, on five occasions, when the issue was “consciously – and no doubt carefully – considered, experienced legal representatives were unanimous in the view that recusal action was not appropriate”. He scathingly referred to “the (unmistakable) impropriety involved” in an affidavit sworn by the Ombudsman’s director of legal services “purporting to depose the Ombudsman’s state of mind and knowledge”. He will not complete his judgment as to whether the Ombudsman’s report should be formally quashed, claiming his judgment was not binding on the replacement judge and instead should be viewed as “advisory”.   Murders in County Down The impugned Ombudsman’s report into the murders at the Heights Bar, in the small community of Loughinisland, near Downpatrick, County Down concerned notorious sectarian murders of six innocent people and the wounding of many more, when members of the UVF fired their weapons into the bar while the World Cup was on the television. No one has been convicted of the murders, and the families of the victims have always suspected collusion between police and informers. It’s known that at least one of the gang was an informer. RUC Special Branch values intelligence to the point of notoriously shielding informants from the legal process. The gang was a County Down-based UVF unit who were apparently engaged in a revenge shooting. They used at least one weapon, a highpower CZ58 rifle which came in a consignment imported from the Lebanon by Ulster Resistance, the UVF and the UDA in late 1987. As documented at length last year in Village, the weapons were distributed from Armagh, but – because of police collusion – many were never found. One of the alleged gunmen has been identified in a powerful documentary, made by Oscar-winning documentary-maker Alex Gibney called ‘No Stone Unturned’. He was a local man, Ronald Hawthorn, who lived near the victims. The families’ frustration at the lack of convictions and suspicion of collusion between the police and the UVF seemed to be confirmed by the Ombudsman’s Report on the murders which was published in June 2016.   The Ombudsman’s Findings The Ombudsman found unequivocally that collusion had been a feature of the RUC investigation. He found evidence had been destroyed, leads were not followed in a timely manner, documentation was missing and a vital exhibit – the getaway car – had been destroyed. A full forensic report had been done on the car but the report argued that a piece of twine could have been the subject of new DNA tests. The Ombudsman said he was hampered by a lack of co-operation from the members of the RUC many of whom had made a decision not to speak to his investigators. The report was divided into two parts. The first, dealing with the importation of arms into Northern Ireland in late 1987, tried to trace the loyalist weaponry from the pick-up, in Belfast, to delivery and distribution, in Armagh, to the 1994 murders, in Down. The second part dealt with the police investigation into the murders in Down. The first part of the report chiefly concerned H Division of the RUC which includes much of Armagh and part of Down; the second centred on G Division where the investigation took place.   Judicial Review by RUC Officers A Judicial Review was initiated in August 2016, by two retired police officers, Thomas Ronald Hawthorne (not associated with Ronald Hawthorn named above) and Raymond White. In the course of the hearings, the Ombudsman submitted a new affidavit which answered some questions raised by the Judge. As he described it, it “contains self-evidently important information and exhibits significant documents”. All this should have happened at an earlier stage, according to the judge, who made the damaging assertion that the Ombudsman’s first affidavit was “manifestly incomplete and therefore misleading”. The Ombudsman’s new affidavit made it clear that Mr Hawthorne, the investigating officer in the case, who believed despite the fact he’d been given a cipher

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    Donegal courts fail to deal with illegal slot machines

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    Justice is not a motif found emblazoned around Donegal. Its flouting accounts for much in my home town of Bundoran and elsewhere in the county. In particular the power the late Sean McEniff had over local governance is very unsettling – through politics and wealth. He was Fianna Fáil’s longest-serving councillor and perhaps its richest man. His hotel empire extended to ten hotels countrywide including the Skylon in Dublin and the Great Southern in Bundoran.  Journalist Gemma O’Doherty and others have alleged that McEniff interfered with the Garda investigation into the death in 1977 of six-year-old Mary Boyle, but it is the power his empire wields over the slot machines that have for fifty years dominated and blighted once-elegant Bundoran that particularly concerns me here. McEniff’s empire traces its foundation to slot machines. McEniff was by far the largest slot machine operator in the town, and ignored the law: his slots would make big pay-outs, just enough to keep the key punters, most of them poor or old – or both, hooked. In 2009 Bundoran Town Council adopted a submission from the slot-machine operators – McEniff being the largest – to the Department of Justice – as its own submission. The submission had been adopted by the Council on the same day at a special meeting which had only three Councillors present. The quorum for any meeting was four Councillors to be present, though nobody called halt. The submission said Bundoran’s 1,000 machines were “an integral part of the overall Bundoran product, both on and off the season, and a key reason why visitors continue to be attracted to the town”. Growing up in Bundoran, I remember from a young age the dangers of gaming machines. A friend of my mother came down from the North on the bus with her wages on a Friday and rushed up to play gaming machines in the town. By Sunday evening she had to ask my mum for money to get back home, after losing everything. The 2008 Department of Justice report on ‘Regulating Gaming in Ireland’ states “The Committee is aware of the type of gaming machine which accepts €500 notes. The Act of 1956 provides a maximum stake in gaming machines of 6d and a maximum prize of 10 shillings. The Act is not being enforced and that brings the law into disrepute”. The Garda Síochána, the Revenue and the Council have long since abjured responsibility for enforcing the gaming laws. A 1985 ‘Today Tonight’ programme on RTÉ focused on Law and Order in South Donegal, particularly Seán McEniff’s gaming. Donegal County Council sued RTÉ for defamation for what it said about the inappropriate relationship between Donegal [County] Council and the Garda but a legal settlement saw it agree to remove the programme, on the steps of the High Court. One of the last convictions for illegal gaming in Bundoran was in 2000 after Charlie Bird did the exposé on illegal gaming here. The solicitor for McEniffs Bundoran Limited said to the Judge at the time that “Charlie Bird should be prosecuted” as he had played an illegal gaming machine. Poor Sean died last year but his empire remains in the family. I recently objected in the District Court to renewal of the gaming licence to McEniffs Bundoran Limited. The first Judge and McEniffs’ solicitor removed themselves from the case, the solicitor coming off record after I raised a concern of conflict of interest. I objected as a member of the Public, though I have had my travails with Sean McEniff when I was Bundoran’s traffic warden. When I objected that gaming machines accept notes while the 1956 Act maximum is 20 cent, the solicitor for the McEniffs Gerry McGovern did not deny it. Instead he just noted that Revenue issued Certificates and that gardaí and fire officers had no objections. “If there was a difficulty, the gardaí and revenue wouldn’t be long moving in”, he said. But that is the core of the problem. As to my objection that there were too many machines in Bundoran, Judge Denis McLoughlin said that would only be valid in case of a new application. McGovern said it was an application that had been renewed umpteen times and hadn’t been changed. And in Donegal it seems that is the main thing. The Revenue’s webpage states that it up to the District Court to “limit the amount of the stakes and prizes and limiting the number of gaming machines”. But Judge McLoughlin was not interested. I have been before the District, Circuit and High Courts on occasion, always representing myself. In 2012 in Donegal Circuit Court, Judge Keenan Johnston highlighted that as a lay litigant “She`d be entering the Court with one hand tied behind her back”. The dysfunctionality of Donegal from policing to planning to electoral fraud to unemployment to paedophila is now well documented. Sometimes you feel fighting for justice here leaves you very much alone.  By Patricia McCafferty

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    Unruly

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    The fragile rule of law in Ireland by David Langwallner What is meant by the Rule of Law and is such a concept honoured in Ireland today? I believe that the rule of law though arguably an unqualified good is not being adhered to in this state save mostly by the judiciary and that the legal system and erratic observance of legality by state officials renders our democracy fragile. In my view Ireland draws close to that amorphous notion, a failed state that cannot in reality uphold the rule of law. This opinion piecewill not be a comprehensive pathology but will point out many of the salient practical features which show how the rule of law is breaking down. The Rule of Law: Theoretical Incoherence? We first need to probe the many senses in which the rule of law is described. Joseph Raz, a legal positivist who believes in “perfectionistliberalism” has suggested that the rule of law ismerely a kind of shorthand description ofthe positive aspects of any given political system. From a different vantage point the fundamentalist Christian legal philosopher John Finnis considers that the rule of law is: “[t]he name commonly given to the state of affairs in which a legal system is legally in good shape”. Another philosopher Brian Tamanaha chimes to negative effect that the rule of law is “an exceedingly elusive notion” which leads to “rampant divergence of understandings” and is similar to the amorphous concept of Good in that “everyone is for it, but has contrasting convictions about what it is”. At bottom,there is no consensus: itis elusive at best: a form of smokescreen or professional hypocrisy at worst. But let us endeavour to be constructive. For example Carothers, though sceptical, adds a worthwhile positive definition of the rule of law as: ‘a system in which the laws are public knowledge, are clear in meaning, and apply equally to everyone. They enshrine and uphold the political and civil liberties that have gained status as universal human rights over the last half-century. In particular, anyone accused of a crime has the right to a fair, prompt hearing and is presumed innocent until proved guilty. The central institutions of the legal system, including courts, prosecutors, and police, are reasonably fair, competent, and efficient. Judges are impartial and independent, not subject to political influence or manipulation. Perhaps most important, the government is embedded in a comprehensive legal framework, its officials accept that the law will be applied to their own conduct, and the government seeks to be law-abiding”. Now let us stress-test certain aspects ofthis detailed expurgation against the patient – in this context Ireland Inc. Yes of course rights exist in our still fine, if shopworn, constitutional matrix and are enforced by the courts inmany instances butthere is also an undue deference to the executive that has led to the non-enforcement of social and economic rights particularly the right to housing by the courts. There is an excess of judicial caution on otherrights-based claims, particularly where issues of financial iniquity and the countervailing amorphous blob, public policy, are implicated. There is also widespread violation of privacy by the state and its police force, in particular. The overly sanguine way we as a nation have accepted, in effect, what has been police and state criminality with respect to privacy for the last thirty years without wide spread outcry is baffling. At least there are signals of an upsurge in civil disobedience,which when peaceful, as Habermas,the German sociologist of critical theory and pragmatist, would contend, leads to a vitalisation of democracy. Not here. Further, the scandal that is our banking structures, the disgrace of the banks varying interest-rate repayments in breach of agreements, the sometimes unconscionable evictions, are not conterminous with the rule of law. NAMA is a mess formulated by the neo-liberal club which did its best to avoid a proper new deal for the Irish people. The banking inquiry was a poorly performed French farce. What is desperately needed is a rightto housing. Eviction should be rare, require rehousing, and should only follow meaningful intervention by an arbitrator who can determine whether the consumer can repay and whether the bank – with or without the enlistment of a vulture fund – is bundling the mortgage at a bargain-basement rate to private-law profiteers. Further, many of our state institutions have major structural problems. The Garda are not progressive in training and intent: they do not seek justice or the truth, but rather a result. They, attimes spin, embellish or atworst, manufacture evidence – and, to be candid, at times act criminally and in violation of the rule of law. Finally, there are limited independent checks and far too close a nexus between politicians and the police. The recent moving of the deckchairs by the Garda Commissionerwill not change the culture or training of the force, its group think or, arguably, its competence. It needs a radical ovehaul and a redirection so primarily promotes truthseeking, investigative process. The impartiality and independence of our judiciary needs at times to be severely questioned because there is far too close a nexus between politics and judicial appointments. Though most are appointed on merit, many of our judges are appointed for their proximity to political parties. Further, some judges have an aggrandised sense of themselves: certainly they are not servants of the state as that is not a judicial function, butrather,they are the servants of the constitution which is a bulwark to protectthe people against state excess. Judges also need, in the interest of public confidence as to their impartiality, to declare their shareholdings and indebtedness to the banks. Moreover, parts of the government left itself open to the accusation, during the bugging crisis, that it was also mired in corruption. In the strictest sense it observed the rule of law but, inmanner, itlaid itself open to the criticism levelled elsewhere by the late great Christopher Hitchens of being crypto-fascist, pursuing a form of fascist authoritarianism but seeking to conceal what it really

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    Banksters

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    The recent history of Irish banking and its regulation is so comprehensively negative we should now look to community banks by David Langwallner As the latest banking fraud, ripples across the beleaguered public con-sciousness it is salutary to recall that the concept of banking has always been counter-intuitive, an artificial entity with legal personality that charges and awards once-Church-condemned interest, whose purpose is to protect the assets of its shareholders. It has never prioritised the protection of those who use it, the customers and deposit holders who fuel capitalism, whose interests banking is imagined to wholeheartedly serve. Of course the enthusiasm of a bank to a customer varies in proportion to the size of your account and whether you are one of the 20% of customers who yield the banks 80% of their profits – indeed apparently the 20% actually lose the bank money. This underpins their contempt for ordinary users, consigned to queues and machines. The 20% may find themselves served by the contrived joys of ‘personal banking’. Lorenzo De Medici pioneered banks in Florence in the thirteenth century. The bank (Italian banca – a bench) was where the activity took place on the market square and if it went wrong and the bank went bankrupt– the bench would be symbolically broken (banca rupta). It was perfected by mercantilist capitalism. Now banks have not always been pariahs and if you throw your mind back to Jimmy Stewart and ‘It’s a Wonderful life’, Frank Capra’s classic film of depression-era America the bank saves the community and invests in people’s hopes, dreams and of course homes. The local bank in particular had a sense of civic responsibility and pride absent today. The fundamental point to appreciate is that the nature of banking shifted with the ascendancy of neo-liberalism. The US ‘Glass Seagall’ Banking Act of 1933 had severed most of the ties between commercial and investment banking. However, it was repealed in 1999 under President Bill Clinton on the dubious basis that this would “enhance the stability of our financial services system” by permitting financial firms to “diversify their product offerings and thus their sources of revenue” so making financial firms “better equipped to compete in global financial markets”. Greater stringency, including higher equity requirements and demands for clearer data, was introduced under Basel3  following the financial and economic collapses n 2008. In the US President Donald Trump aims to reduce this regulatory burden. Europe seems more inclined to hold its nerve. Commercial or retail ‘high-street’ banks cater to the general public and provide services such as deposits, loans and the provision of basic investment products. Investment banks are financial institutions that assist individuals, corporations, and governments in raising financial capital by underwriting or acting as the client’s agent in the issuance of securities (or both). Thus the historic function was to facilitate depositors and to lend money to enable people to build their dreams slowly, wisely, incrementally – popularly represented by the self-congratulatory bankers’ song celebrating frugal fiduciary investment, in ‘Mary Poppins’. Once the bank is transformed into an investment vehicle and speculators become intrinsic then all changes. The high-street banks aim to glean money from people to use for investment purposes. They will as soon invest your money in pension funds, insurance companies or subprime mortgages as re-invest it in your community. The banks, operating in an insufficiently regulated market encouraged customers to buy sub-standard or over-valued stock and mortgages which they could not repay. ‘Triple A’ ratings were conferred in the United States on sub-prime facilities and money was handed out like confetti. This lending madness was promoted and controlled by the investment banks such as the vampire squid Goldman Sachs which fed people sub-standard information, and reinforced by delinquent ratings agencies. All of this is documented thoroughly in such filmic works as ‘The Big Short’. It’s useful to look at the history of one bank, Ireland’s biggest – AIB, over the post- Glass-Sea-gall-repeal period. It is representative, sustained and appalling. Around 2002, John Rusnak, a “lone wolf” currency trader at Allfirst, racked up losses of almost US$700 million. It was Ireland’s biggest banking scandal and the fourth-biggest banking scandal in the world, when it came to light. The €90m settlement that AIB reached with the Revenue Commissioners in respect of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (‘Dirt’) evasion in 2000 was the highest tax settlement in the history of Ireland. The bank’s internal auditor, Tony Spollen had highlighted a Dirt liability of £100m for the period 1986 – 1991 but the group CEO at that time rubbished this estimate, describing it as “infantile”. The 1999 Oireachtas Sub-Committee Inquiry into DIRT concluded that it was “extraordinary” when the CEO told the Inquiry that he was unaware of the scale of the DIRT issue. In 2006, the Moriarty Tribunal found that AIB had settled a million-pound overdraft with former Taoiseach Charles Haughey on favourable terms for the politician just after he became Taoiseach in 1979. It found that the leniency shown by the bank in this case amounted to a benefit from the bank to Haughey. It noted that the bank showed an extraordinary degree of deference to Mr. Haughey despite his financial excesses. In 2004 it was revealed that the bank had been overcharging on foreign exchange transactions for up to ten years. AIB set aside €50m to cover the cost of refunds. On 12 February 2009 the Irish government arranged a €7bn rescue plan for AIB and Bank of Ireland. The bank’s capital value had fallen to €486m. The following year the National Pensions Reserve injected €3.7 billion of capital into Allied Irish Banks, becoming the majority shareholder and effectively nationalising the bank This smokescreen of misrepresentations led to over-borrowing and the present virus of evictions, dispossessions and receiverships. Now it is noticeable that the bailing out of the banks in many countries served to protect the shareholders and to impose the burden on the customers or more scandalously the public who bore no responsibility for this nonsense. Socialism for

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    Coping with transphobia in Dublin’s Silicon Docks.

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    Dublin seemed like a logical destination when tech entrepreneur Maja Stanislawska decided to leave her native Poland in 2013 to start again as a woman. Trying to transition at home in conservative Poland would have been difficult so Maja did her research about where would be best to relocate to live and work in peace. She had offers for work from Berlin and Paris, but Dublin felt like a better fit. It had a small but vibrant trans community and Maja thought it might be easier to get a job there given that the Irish capital is home to a growing number of global tech companies, which tout themselves as inclusive and equal-opportunity employers. “I was still a man, but I was already wearing make-up and I was looking for company where I could transition”, says Maja, who is 43 now. “Ireland looked like the best choice because it appeared to be the strongest in terms of trans rights”. Unfortunately, Maja believes she has been discriminated against and that she was offered better jobs and more money as a man. Despite there being a huge demand for software developers in Dublin, Maja was out of work for a year. Apart from illness, she had never wanted for work or job offers as a man. Maja has an impressive CV and her two-decade experience stretches from software development, to networking, infrastructure, internet-service provision, web development and voiceover internet protocol. She has started several companies and was co-founder and chief technical officer of Open-Net, an internet telecoms start-up now listed on a stock exchange in Warsaw with 150 employees. When she came to Dublin as a man, Maja decided to take the first job offered, working as a Quality Assurance consultant for a Vodafone contractor so she could get on her feet before transitioning. Problems started to emerge a month later when Maja began experimenting by wearing make-up and mascara. “At one point, one of my colleagues started to demand sexual services”, she says. “And when I rejected, I was told people like me should be allowed only to be beggars or prostitutes”. Maja complained to Vodafone and told she was only a sub-contractor. She tried to quit but they forced her to work her two-week notice period. The colleague relocated to London, but continued to hassle and bully her by phone and email and tried to get her to do more menial work. “I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to do”, she says. “Before I took this job, I looked at Vodafone and the contractor’s website and they are claiming they are equal opportunity employers. This story has since repeated itself many times in Ireland”. A spokeswoman for the subcontractor, didn’t reply to repeated emails and calls from Village seeking comment. A spokesperson for Vodafone Ireland said it didn’t comment on individual employees or third-party contractors. “However, Vodafone Ireland has a strong programme in place which celebrates and supports diversity of all kinds, and in particular for LGBT+ employees”, the spokesperson said. “In addition, we have a policy, and gender neutral bathrooms in place, to support gender transitioning”. From Chrzanów, a small industrial town in Southern Poland with a population of about 50,000 people, Maja had a good upbringing but felt more like a girl from the age of about eight. Her parents are both doctors and her brother is a doctor. “I probably developed a hatred towards the medical profession as I was harassed by doctors trying to fix me as a kid”, she jokes. “After a while, I decided to keep my feelings to myself”. From an early age Maja pursued an interest in computers and the nascent Internet. “Subconsciously, I was seeking people like me online”, she explains. When she was twelve, she took over a computer that her parents had bought so her brother could play chess, and started writing software and making adventure games. As a young teenager, she once fled unaccompanied across the country on a train to the city of Lublin, located four hours away, in order to buy a modem. At school, she used the modem to set up a BBS (Bulletin Board System), a server where people could dial up to a network and exchange mails and download stuff. This was well before the World Wide Web and AOL became mainstream and at a time when about only 200 people in Poland were involved in the Internet. Later at University, Maja came up with a business plan for setting up an ISP (Internet Service Provider) in her home town on the basis of her BBS. Maja found an accountant and a group of investors and set up Open-Net in 1997. She remains a shareholder in to this day and worked with up until 2014. “I brought the internet to my hometown”, she says. “We started with the dial-up services, which was revolutionary because we were cheaper than the national telecom provider”. Open-Net became bigger after merging and acquiring other telecoms and internet companies. However, not much of that experience has helped her career in Dublin. In fact, some recruiters have advised Maja to lower her expectations and ditch most of her CV. The same recruiters also started putting her forward for jobs worth €40-50,000 instead of the €60,000-90,000 range she commanded as a man. Maja’s concern goes deeper than just transphobia. She believes that sexism has also hampered her career development. “It’s hard to know sometimes how much of it is plain transphobia and how much is plain sexism”, she says. Maja retains an old email address from when she presented as a man and received at least two approaches this year from Amazon about potential roles, but didn’t make headway when she applied as herself. However, an Amazon recruiter did call her about a graduate test-analyst role worth about €20,000. Amazon says it has investigated Maja’s case but found no evidence of discrimination. Maja is constantly being offered low-paid jobs in QA (Quality Assurance) despite only have

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    Geese to the Rescue

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    Clontarf/Raheny faces the loss of a big tranche of green space as a large residential development on lands currently used as sports facilities goes before An Bord Pleanála. What has been missed, in the turmoil of local antagonism, is that the development is illegal under Irish and European law as it threatens a famous, cherished and protected species, Brent Geese. The geese are afforded strict legal protection under the Special Protection Area designation for North Bull Island, arising out of the Habitats Directive. There are currently two planning applications under consideration on a site adjacent to St Anne’s Park and St Paul’s school in Clontarf/Raheny in Dublin. One is a proposed sports facility with permission sought from Dublin City Council. The other is a proposed large-scale (536 units: 104 houses and 432 apartments) residential development under a strategic housing development application to An Bord Pleanála. The two applications are interlinked; the sports facilities are being proposed to compensate for the loss to the residential development of the existing heavily-used sports pitches.   Land Ownership and Planning History of the Site The site was originally part of the St Anne’s estate, the home of the Guinness brewing family on which Lord Ardilaun forged a magnificent Palazzo out of the original seventeenth-century house. In the 1930s Dublin City Council CPO’d lands (which included this site) and used some of the lands for social housing, the rest became St Anne’s park. The great house burnt down in 1943. In the 1940s the Vincentian Fathers bought property nearby and developed a school; St. Paul’s. At the same time Dublin City Council wished to extend Vernon Avenue north to the Howth Road via Sybil Hill. A land swap occurred – the Vincentians got 15 acres of the park for a nominal sum and Dublin City Council were able to connect Vernon Avenue with the Howth Road via Sybil Hill. As to ownership of these lands, a post on the ‘I Love St Anne’s’ Facebook page dated 4 June 2016 (attached to the video clip of Councillor Ciaran O’Moore) states “Interestingly, the last time we checked, the 15 acres were still registered with the Land Registry as belonging to DCC. The legal dept of DCC carried out a title search on the lands last year, concluded that they belonged to DCC & registered them as such. We have been told that this is an irrelevant clerical error, presumably it’s a clerical error that would need to be resolved before Title on the land can pass to Crekav Developments who are rumoured to have paid in excess of €15 million to the Vincentians for it”. The lands have been used as sports pitches by St Paul’s school and up until very recently (i.e. the last few weeks) by local GAA, soccer and rugby clubs – many hundreds of children have been using these pitches at the weekends. The local sports clubs have now been told they may no longer use the lands. Up until 2001 the lands were open to, and contiguous with, St Anne’s park. In 2001 the Vincentians, citing insurance reasons, applied for and were granted permission to erect a fence around these lands, creating a barrier/ distinction between them and the park. Despite this separation, local people have always viewed these lands as an integral part of the amenity and facilities of St Anne’s park. In 2012 the Sisters of Charity won a court case against Dublin City Council about Z15 (i.e. Community and Institutional Resource Lands: Education, Recreation, Community, Green Infrastructure and Health – To protect and provide for institutional and community uses) zoning for lands of theirs in Sandymount, Dublin 4. The Sisters of Charity objected to a condition of the Z15 zoning which precluded development on their lands. All of the order’s 108 acres of lands in 18 separate parcels had been zoned Z15 in the city development plan. They said the Council had given no reasons for the restrictiveness of the zoning compared with other open space lands. The Commercial Court ruled that all Z15 zonings in the Dublin City Development Plan should be quashed, and the city Council did not have the nous to simply give reasons to Z15 landowners. A good one would have been that the citizenry had built up a dependence on the institutional lands for open space; and that many religious lands had been purchased by monies subscribed by the citizenry for purposes that might now be described as the common good. Accordingly, in May 2013 Dublin City Council amended its Development Plan and Z15 zonings including for the St Paul’s lands. The result was that the revised zoning allowed residential development as “open for consideration”. In 2015 the Vincentian Fathers sold the lands to a developer, Arklow-born Greg Kavanagh and Pat Crean from Kerry, through their New Generation Homes, for a reported €25,000,000. It appears that subsequently Greg Kavanagh and Pat Crean split, with Pat Crean now pushing the application at St Paul’s under Marlet Property Group, with financial backing from M&G, an investment-manager arm of the UK’s Prudential. In 2015 two planning application were lodged, but not pursued, by Crekav Landbank Developments Limited for sports facilities and a residential development (381 units). In Sept 2017 a planning application was lodged by Orsigny, a Company Limited by Guarantee, for sports facilities. This application is still live. Bizarrely, the Clontarf GAA (which until a few weeks ago had hundreds of children using the site at weekends and have now been told they cannot use the pitches) put in a letter of “full support” for the sports-facilities development. The sports facilities proposed are for two all-weather pitches and a sports hall – which will be a substantially inferior facility to the existing six or seven pitches which will be lost. However, it appears that the GAA club has now put in an objection to the residential application. It really must account for its approach which may say a lot about the approach of sporting bodies

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    Maddie: Did the BBC bend the truth?

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    On a cold May night in 2007, Martin Smith and his family were walking home after an evening out in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz. A retired businessman from Drogheda, Co Louth, he co-owned an apartment there and was a regular visitor to the Algarve town. The crowds of summer had yet to arrive and the normally bustling streets of the old quarter lay quiet. It was approaching 10pm when some members of the family of nine were suddenly struck by the sight of a man walking quickly towards them holding a small child uncomfortably in his arms. As he passed close by them on the narrow street, the child appeared to be in a deep sleep, her head placed over his shoulder and arms suspended down her body. She was blonde, aged around four and wearing pyjamas. Despite the chill in the air, her feet were bare. Martin and his daughter Aoife noted that her skin was very white. The man carrying the girl was middle-aged and more formally dressed than the average tourist, in beige trousers and a dark blazer-like top. A member of Martin’s family made a comment towards him that the child was sleeping but he did not respond or make eye contact, keeping his head down as he hurriedly headed in the direction of the coast. At the time, Martin did not realise the sighting had the potential to change the course of the world’s most high-profile missing-person case. The following morning, he got a text from his daughter in Ireland to tell him that a three-year old girl had gone missing in the resort. The approximate time frame and location he had witnessed the man and child appeared to match. By now, the mystery of what happened to Madeleine McCann was beginning to grip the world. Martin brought his mind back to the evening before and wondered if the child he saw could have been her. The girl certainly matched Madeleine’s description and the sighting had taken place at Rua da Escola Primaria, just 500 yards from the McCanns’ apartment. In time, Martin would become convinced he was correct. Over a decade has passed since Madeleine McCann went missing on May 3, 2007 yet the case of the British three-year-old remains mired in more questions than answers. The mainstream media, who have by and large backed Gerry and Kate McCann’s version of events with the support of several A-list celebrities and politicians, appear to have lost interest in a story they once could not get enough of. The very opposite is true on social media. The internet swirls with allegations and theories that the McCann story is littered with holes and does not stack up. Countless videos have been posted on YouTube by armchair detectives challenging the parents’ seemingly at times bizarre behaviour, in particular their reactions in certain interviews when the finger of blame shifts towards them. Some are compelling to watch and have highlighted what appear to be discrepancies and confusion in certain accounts given by the McCanns and some of their friends about what happened in the period before and after Madeleine disappeared.   “It was like watching an action replay” Gerry McCann, a consultant cardiologist from Scotland, and his Liverpool wife Kate, a GP and anaesthetist, said they had put their daughter and two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie to bed at around 7pm, had drinks together for almost an hour and then left the children alone to go to a tapas bar 50 yards from their apartment. There they met seven friends with whom they were on holiday. They told police that they and their friends checked on the children every half hour. Gerry said he went to the apartment at 9.05pm and all the children were sleeping soundly. He said Madeleine was lying on her left-hand side in exactly the same position she was in when they had left her. At 9.25pm, his friend, Dr Matthew Oldfield told police he went to check on the McCann children. He said afterwards he could not be certain that he saw Madeleine on that check. Kate McCann said she went back to the apartment at around 10pm, entering through the patio doors that they had left unlocked. She said she noticed that the door of the children’s bedroom was “completely open” and that the window was also open and the shutters raised. She said she scoured the apartment, then left the twins asleep in their beds before running back to her friends in the tapas bar and claiming Madeleine had been taken. At 10.41pm, her disappearance from Apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort was reported to police by hotel staff. Overnight the story made headlines around the world. Several days after Madeleine disappeared, the Smith family flew back home, but the sighting remained at the back of Martin’s mind. He discussed it with his wife Mary, son Peter and daughter Aoife who were with him that night. When they tallied the time and location, and the fact that the man they had seen had come from the direction of the Ocean Club complex where the McCanns were staying, they were convinced that it could have been Madeleine they had seen. They decided to inform investigating police, and at the end of May 2007, Martin, Aoife and Peter flew back out to Portugal to make statements. They gave similar accounts of the man they had witnessed: average build, short brown hair, beige trousers; and the child: blonde, around four, and wearing pyjamas. As the summer passed, the mystery of what happened to Madeleine McCann continued to perplex the world but life returned to normal for the Smiths. Then one Sunday evening in September, it came back to haunt Martin again. He was sitting at home watching TV when a report came on the BBC ‘News at Ten’ about the McCanns’ return to Britain. As he watched Gerry coming down the steps of the plane, carrying his two-year-old son in

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    Boyes will be Boyes

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    Stephen Boyes is on the run from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). He is flitting between hotels and the homes of friends across the border. He claims that he is in danger of arrest and imprisonment because he is refusing to cede control of 110 acres and other land he claims he owns near his family home in Moira, county Down. On 5 January, police officers assisting bank-appointed receivers arrested his children William and Laura at their house on Glenavy Road, Moira; and held them overnight in Musgrave Street Police Station in Belfast before releasing them on bail the following morning. It was the latest in a series of heavy-handed police raids and the latest development in a bizarre sequence of events that has forced Stephen Boyes to leave the jurisdiction and his wife Doreen and children. The most notable and visual feature on the lands bordering counties Down and Antrim is Maghaberry jail which sits on 140 acres and, over recent decades, has housed political and criminal prisoners in conditions of high security. The Boyes claim that they own the 140 acres on which the prison is located, through a legal trust and the surrounding 110 acres which their family has farmed for generations. Their formidable opponents who refuse to accept their claim of ownership include the Northern Ireland Department of Justice, the Prison Service and the PSNI. The family also claim that their quest to establish their proper ownership of the Maghaberry lands and those on which their family home sits a mile away in Moira have been frustrated by among others: Allied Irish Bank (known as First Trust in NI) and assorted solicitors, auctioneers, receivers, and members of the judiciary in the North. To follow the intricate history of the long battle by the Boyes family to retain control of these land holdings and properties, it is necessary to go back to the last century: the early 1940s and the Second World War. In 1941, the Boyes family owned 340 acres of land at what is now the site of Maghaberry jail of which 270 acres was acquired through compulsory purchase order by the British government for an RAF airfield. The US air force provided the necessary aircraft, pilots and troops to operate the base and provide cover against German aerial attack. In 1957, Edward Thomas Boyes, grandfather of Stephen, purchased the 270 acres back from the State with full title. Three years later, in 1960, and just three years before his death, Edward Boyes appointed two of his nephews, Arthur Eddie Swain and James Morrison Swain as trustees over the land while conferring life tenancy on his son, Brian Boyes. Brian Boyes built a house and grazed cattle on the land and his only son, Stephen, was born there in 1962 and was to inherit the property on his father’s death in April 2000. Stephen Boyes grew up with the Troubles and was twelve years old when the Maze internment camp and prison outside Lisburn, just two miles from his home, was burned down in 1974. In 1974, the Prison Service announced plans to build a new high-security jail on the site of the former Maghaberry Airfield and, despite local objections and following a public inquiry, the land, including the Boyes family home, was acquired under a vesting order. A total of 270 acres owned by Brian Boyes and an adjoining 46 acres owned by his brother, William, were taken over by the prison service for two proposed adult prisons to house both men and women including criminal and political prisoners. A plan to construct a detention centre for young offenders on the site did not proceed. In compensation for losing control of much of the land the trust, through the Swain brothers, was paid £285,000 by the NI Ministry of Finance in 1979 in a deal brokered by solicitors A S Merrick and Sons of Wellington Place, Belfast. Stephen Boyes claims the Trust to have retained the freehold interest in the lands. When Brian Boyes heard of the paltry compensation for the loss of his 270 acres he complained bitterly to the firm’s Robin Merrick who assured him that, notwithstanding the compensation payment, which was for ‘use’ only, the land remained in the possession of the Trust which retained the freehold. Boyes purchased a house and farmyard on 14 acres on the airport road at Moira and continued to graze cattle on the remaining 110 acres at the airfield site which were not occupied by the new jail. In 1988, the Swains were replaced as trustees by solicitor Robin Merrick and an accountant, Frank Ledwidge. In 1994, Stephen Boyes approached the Prison Service seeking to purchase 170 acres of land which he was farming around the jail. Informed by Merrick that the purchase had to be made to the Trust, Boyes paid Robin Merrick £1.4m for the 170 acres of land (including his uncle’s holding) around Maghaberry. After completing the purchase and getting title of the airfield lands, Boyes went on to sell a portion of the land to two developers in 2001. They built houses on the 47 acres they purchased for £2m. Boyes retained ownership and title of 110 acres and borrowed £850,000 from First Trust (AIB) with a view to obtaining planning permission for commercial development on 20 acres of the land which would have increased its value to around £8m. By 2007, he had built two warehouses on another portion of the former airfield land with full planning permission. The planners devising the Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan agreed informally in March 2008 to zone the 20 acres for commercial use. Following the crash in September 2008, however, the Belfast branch of AIB called in his £850,000 loan. However, according to Boyes, the bank agreed not to call in the borrowings until the Metropolitan Area Plan for greater Belfast area was agreed by the local council. Under the proposals for the plan it was envisaged that the 20 acres

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    Banksters

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    As the latest banking fraud ripples across the beleaguered public consciousness it is salutary to recall that the concept of banking has always been counter-intuitive. Artificial entities with legal personality that charge and pay out interest, but whose purpose is to protect the assets of its shareholders. Banking has never prioritised the protection of those who use it, the customers and deposit holders who fuel capitalism, whose interests banking is imagined to wholeheartedly serve. Of course the enthusiasm of a bank for you the customer varies in proportion to the size of your account and whether you are one of the 20% of customers who yield the banks 80% of their profits – indeed apparently the 20% actually lose the bank money. This underpins their contempt for ordinary users, consigned to queues and machines while the 20% find themselves served by the contrived joys of ‘personal banking’. Lorenzo De Medici pioneered banks in Florence in the thirteenth century. The bank (Italian banca – a bench) was where the activity took place on the market square and if it went wrong and the bank went bankrupt– the bench would be symbolically broken (banca rupta). It was perfected by mercantilist capitalism. Tellingly banks have not always been pariahs and if you throw your mind back to Jimmy Stewart and ‘It’s a Wonderful life’, Frank Capra’s classic film of depression-era America, the bank saves the community and invests in people’s hopes, dreams and of course homes. The local bank in particular had a sense of civic responsibility and pride absent today. The point is that the nature of banking shifted with the ascendancy of neo-liberalism.  The US ‘Glass Seagall’ Banking Act of 1933 had severed most of the ties between commercial and investment banking. However, it was repealed in 1999 under President Bill Clinton on the dubious basis that this would “enhance the stability of our financial services system” by permitting financial firms to “diversify their product offerings and thus their sources of revenue” so making financial firms “better equipped to compete in global financial markets”. Greater stringency, including higher equity requirements and demands for clearer data, was introduced under Basel 3 following the financial and economic collapses in 2008. In the US President Donald Trump aims to reduce this regulatory burden. Europe seems more inclined to hold its nerve. Commercial or retail ‘high-street’ banks cater to the general public and provide services such as deposits, loans and the provision of basic investment products. Investment banks are financial institutions that assist individuals, corporations, and governments in raising financial capital by underwriting or acting as the client’s agent in the issuance of securities (or both). Thus the historic function was to facilitate depositors and to lend money to enable people to build their dreams slowly, wisely, incrementally – popularly represented by the self-congratulatory bankers’ song celebrating frugal fiduciary investment, in ‘Mary Poppins’. Once the bank is transformed into an investment vehicle and speculators become intrinsic then all changes. The high-street banks aim to glean money from people to use for investment purposes. They will as soon invest your money in pension funds, insurance companies or sub-prime mortgages as re-invest it in your community. The banks, operating in an insufficiently regulated market encouraged customers to buy sub-standard or over-valued stock and mortgages which they could not repay. ‘Triple A’ ratings were conferred in the United States on sub-prime facilities and money was handed out like confetti. This lending madness was promoted and controlled by the investment banks such as the vampire squid Goldman Sachs which fed people sub-standard information, and reinforced by delinquent ratings agencies. All of this is documented thoroughly in such filmic works as ‘The Big Short’. It’s useful to look at the history of one bank, Ireland’s biggest – AIB – over the post- Glass-Seagall-repeal period. It is representative and appalling. Around 2002, John Rusnak, a ‘lone wolf’ currency trader at Allfirst, racked up losses of almost US$700 million. It was Ireland’s biggest banking scandal and the fourth-biggest banking scandal in the world, when it came to light. The €90m settlement that AIB reached with the Revenue Commissioners in respect of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (‘Dirt’) evasion in 2000 was the highest tax settlement in the history of Ireland. The bank’s internal auditor, Tony Spollen had highlighted a Dirt liability of £100m for the period 1986 – 1991 but the group CEO at that time rubbished this estimate, describing it as “infantile”. The 1999 Oireachtas Sub-Committee Inquiry into DIRT concluded that it was “extraordinary” when the CEO told the Inquiry that he was unaware of the scale of the DIRT issue. In 2006, the Moriarty Tribunal found that AIB had settled a million-pound overdraft with former Taoiseach Charles Haughey on favourable terms for the politician just after he became Taoiseach in 1979. It found that the leniency shown by the bank in this case amounted to a benefit from the bank to Haughey. It noted that the bank showed an extraordinary degree of deference to Mr. Haughey despite his financial excesses. In 2004 it was revealed that the bank had been overcharging on foreign exchange transactions for up to ten years. AIB set aside €50m to cover the cost of refunds. On 12 February 2009 the Irish government arranged a €7bn rescue plan for AIB and Bank of Ireland. The bank’s capital value had fallen to €486m. The following year the  National Pensions Reserve injected €3.7 billion of capital into Allied Irish Banks, becoming the majority shareholder and effectively nationalising the bank. This smokescreen of misrepresentations led to over-borrowing and the present virus of evictions, dispossessions and receiverships. Now it is noticeable that the bailing out of the banks in many countries served to protect the shareholders and to impose the burden on the customers or more scandalously the public who bore no responsibility for this nonsense. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The culprits with a few exceptions got off scot free and of course used Nama, Ireland’s (very) bad bank,

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    Democracy Works

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    It’s been a bad couple of years for democracy. The Brexit fiasco was the most humiliating British retreat from Europe since Dunkirk, but this time, entirely self-inflicted. Yet, rather than an alarm, Brexit instead turned out to be a blueprint for the bloodless US coup that followed, where right-wing extremism seized the world’s most powerful political office. Some 95 million Americans didn’t vote in November 2016. “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”, is how Greek philosopher, Plato presciently put it. And while not riven by such gaping wounds of xenophobia and extremism, Irish democracy is also profoundly dysfunctional, and nowhere is this clearer than in its record of abject failure on climate policy. A decade ago, it looked like Ireland was beginning to get its act together, yet by the time Enda Kenny led Fine Gael into power in 2011, the environmental agenda hadn’t so much been scrapped as bleached. Fast forward to 2017. Ireland is now the third worst per-capita greenhouse-gas emitter in the EU and one of only four countries certain to miss its 2020 targets. Massive EU compliance fines are looming, and our only plan is to try to weasel out of paying, rather than tackling our underlying carbon-pollution crisis. It didn’t have to be like this. Professor Andy Keen of Edinburgh University told the Citizens’ Assembly earlier this month how Scotland, with cross-party political support, in 2009 set the highly ambitious target of cutting its national emissions by 42% by 2020. This is more than twice Ireland’s 20% target for the same period. While we will struggle to achieve a maximum 4-5% cut, Scotland actually hit its 42% target in 2015, five years ahead of schedule. It is now pushing hard to achieve 100% renewable electrical production by 2025, and will probably succeed. Scotland has no natural advantages over Ireland. That’s the difference between politics that works and politics that is broken. Any notions that Irish people are innately unconcerned and indifferent to climate change were well and truly scotched by the outcome of the Citizens’ Assembly, which sat again over two weekends in October and November, under the gimlet legal eye of Justice Mary Laffoy. Instead of the usual circus of lobbyists and their client politicians, the Assembly instead only heard from disinterested experts, and its round-table format allowed the 99 citizens to discuss what they had heard among themselves, and then ask searching questions of the experts. I sat through almost eight hours of presentations and discussions on a Saturday in November, and watched these volunteer citizens, young and old, from all walks of life, as they engaged with the process for hour after hour. No fiddling with phones, dozing or absent-mindedly gazing into the distance. This is what direct democracy looks like up close. In a word: inspiring. Even more impressive was that the citizens agreed and then voted in a secret ballot on 13 recommendations and, incredibly, all were carried – in most cases, by thumping majorities. Everyone knows Irish people won’t accept paying new carbon taxes. Wrong. This idea was carried by an 80% majority. Everyone knows that agri-emissions are a special case. Wrong again. Some 89% of Assembly voted in favour of taxing carbon-intensive agriculture, and rewarding farming methods that cut carbon. On industrial peat burning, a whopping 97% of citizens voted to end all State subsidies supporting this madness. And despite our supposedly unbreakable love affair with the private car, 92% of citizens voted for the State to favour developing public transport ahead of new road infrastructure at the rate of no less than 2:1. A recommendation allowing micro-producers of clean (solar) electricity to be allowed sell their surplus back to the grid was backed by 99% of citizens. Meanwhile, ‘Climate Action’ Minister Denis Naughten, has once again excluded small-scale rooftop solar from even being considered in the national consultation on renewable energy. The Citizens’ Assembly may have been set up by the government in the hope it would become another dull talking shop. If so, its radical recommendations, first on abortion rights and now on climate change, have shown that, given half a chance, we Irish are entirely capable of sober civic engagement with complex issues. Who would have guessed?   John Gibbons is an environmental commentator and tweets @think_or_swim

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    Eschatological ruminations

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    Eschatology, or the study of the end of times, is at least as old as the written word. The concept spans many of the world’s major religions, usually referring to some future day of judgement or reckoning. Beyond the realms of theology, eschatology as a concept is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, especially after the tempestuous and chaotic first twelve months of the Trump regime. In this time, almost everything we once took for granted about inherent stability, even inevitability, of western democracies and the robustness of our institutions has been shaken profoundly. As if to add to the sense of impending calamity, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock for 2018 forward in late January– to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has ever been to the witching hour. The authors of the Bulletin excoriated the US government’s reckless nuclear brinksmanship, but poured special scorn on its efforts to derail international climate diplomacy. “Avowed climate denialists have been installed in top positions at the EPA and other agencies, and the administration has announced its plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In its rush to dismantle rational climate and energy policy, it has ignored scientific fact and well-founded economic analyses”. The Bulletin was particularly scathing of the role played by climate deniers in stymieing action. “Despite the sophisticated disinformation campaign run by climate denialists, the unfolding consequences of an altered climate are a harrowing testament to an undeniable reality: The science linking climate change to human activity is sound. The world continues to warm as costly impacts mount, and there is evidence that overall rates of sea level-rise are accelerating – regardless of protestations to the contrary”. The toxic wave of US science denialism has swept right across the Atlantic. As previously reported in Village, last May saw the first meeting in Dublin of the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) a denialist group with opaque membership and funding sources. February sees it host its fifth meeting in just 10 months, featuring a fringe Italian academic with strong ties to US neoliberal think tanks, the latest in a procession of climate contrarians to present new (thoroughly debunked) ‘findings’ to an eager audience mostly of Irish contrarians and deniers. Their agenda appears to be to hobble effective Irish government response to the existential threats posed by climate change. Their standard operating method is to cherry-pick data, float red herrings and exaggerate uncertainties in the scientific consensus often as political cover on behalf of special-interest groups, for continued inaction. Above all, groups like the ICSF are engaging in ‘post-truth’ assaults on reason itself. A recent edition of New Scientist magazine stated baldly: “There are disturbing hints that western civilization is starting to crumble”. The article quotes intriguing research from Yale university, which examined the two broad modes of human thought: 1) fast, automatic and inflexible, and 2) slower, more analytical and flexible thinking. As flexible thinkers within society solve our various problems, from transport to energy, with complex technologies, this relieves the great bulk of the population from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking ensues as the population, in a sense, dumbs down, since technologies can create the beguiling illusion that life is magically simple. One of the psychologists who developed this theory, Jonathan Cohen, suggests this may help solve one of the great puzzles regarding societies heading for catastrophe: why do they persist with their self-destructive behaviour, in the face of overwhelming evidence of future harms? “The train had left the station”, according to Cohen, and the forward-thinking, analytical types were no longer at the controls. Separately, computer modelling carried out at the University of Maryland in 2014 examining the mechanisms that can lead to local or even global system collapse, identified two key elements. The first, unsurprisingly, is ecological strain. The panoply of chronic environmental stressors, including resource depletion, widespread pollution, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are generally well understood, at least in expert circles. What was less widely known was the systemic risk posed by economic stratification or, in plain language, the rich getting richer at everyone else’s expense. In the scenario modelled, “elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour”, according to author Rachel Nuwer. Eventually, she argues, “the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities”. She notes that the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Here, extreme inequality and ecological stresses converge to form a toxic cocktail capable of crashing our civilisation into the dust. US academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published the influential book: ‘The Upside of Down’ in 2005. It presciently anticipated the global economic crash that occurred some three years later. The financial crisis was, he wrote, one of “five tectonic stresses which are accumulating deep beneath the surfaces of our societies”. Others include population, energy, pollution and resource exhaustion; and climate system stress. The 2008 economic crisis, along with more recent shocks, such as Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 can, according to Homer-Dixon, be seen as a series of non-linearities, or sudden and unexpected jolts to the assumed world order. These may be viewed as a random pattern of tremors presaging a truly global catastrophe, a word that derives from the Greek, meaning ‘to overturn’. To view catastrophe as imminent rather than already occurring requires a deeply anthropocentric perspective. The sequestration, plunder and simplification of the entire biosphere by a single species is without parallel in a billion years of Earth, let alone human, history. Irrespective of our own narrow fate, the human stain will be etched

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    IR FU(EU)

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    The nineteenth Six Nations tournament begins on February 3 but one man who won’t feature is Simon Zebo. It was announced in October that Zebo will be leaving Munster at the end of this season and moving to Paris to play for Racing 92 in the French Top 14 league. The announcement of his planned move abroad resulted in Zebo being excluded from the November Tests series, and now his exclusion from the Six Nations Squad. Joe Schmidt claimed at the official launch of this year’s championship that Zebo has been left out of the squad due to his form rather than the fact that he is about to leave the country, with prodigious Leinster young gun Jordan Larmour his preferred option as reserve. Larmour could well be a fullback great, but Zebo still has plenty to offer his national team as he is only 27 years old and in his prime. The IRFU has a policy, which the current Irish management helped to devise, of only selecting home-based players. This is in part to safeguard provincial rugby and as a way of preventing the top players accepting lucrative contracts with foreign teams. This policy has only come into play in recent years, in part due to the struggles Ireland had with Johnny Sexton during the 2014 and 2015 Six Nations Campaigns when he played for Racing 92 – Zebo’s home from June 2018. Sexton missed vital training sessions as he had to report back to Paris for the two rest-week periods during the Six Nations and to play club games in France: not ideal preparation despite the fact that Ireland was victorious in both of these campaigns. It is something Schmidt is wary of ever repeating. Zebo is Munster’s all-time leading try-scorer, and has become an established member of the Irish squad in recent years, scoring 9 tries in his 35 caps for Ireland. He played all but 5 minutes of the 2017 Six Nations Championship. There has been a clamour for Zebo to be brought back into the squad for the Six Nations but Joe Schmidt and the IRFU have stuck firm. There are a number of other players who ply their trade abroad who could easily be picked for the squad if the policy were to be scrapped, such as Donnacha Ryan at Racing 92, Tadhg Beirne at the Scarlets, Ian Madigan at Bristol and Marty Moore at Wasps. The policy appears to breach the legal requirement of Freedom of Movement and Residence for persons in the EU or, at the very least, its spirit. Freedom of movement and residence for persons in the EU is the cornerstone of the internal market and indeed of European Union citizenship, which originated in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. Today, the provisions governing the free movement of persons are laid down in Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of EU citizens and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States. Restrictions are only permitted if they are a proportionate response to an inherent need in a sport. One need only look to how ludicrous it would be to impose the same restriction on soccer players to detect a lack of proportion. Zebo, and all the other players who could theoretically be picked by Ireland if the IRFU’s policy were to be changed, are being blocked from significant earning potential. While many people might not have too much sympathy for the players considering they are highly paid and get to enjoy sport for a living, it is worth noting that the Irish players will not receive match or training fees from the IRFU, but a Grand Slam win would see each of them receive a bonus of over €70,000. By excluding Zebo from the team due to his move to France, the IRFU are directly affecting his earning potential from winning, and also from additional sponsorship opportunities that come with being included in the national team. Remarkably, English players get a much better deal: they will earn £22,000 per game from match fees, training fees and image rights. This means that for any team member who appears in all five games will be guaranteed to be paid £110,000 each. The result is that Zebo has been ruled out of international consideration and has now sacrificed any dreams he may have had to represent Ireland in the 2019 World Cup in Japan. Ireland kick off this campaign against the French in Paris – a fixture we have only won three times in 46 years. A player of Zebo’s quality and skills could have been the key to unlocking the French defence. In fact we can expect a fourth win to be added come 3 February – due to the current state of the French team. In the long run the IRFU policy seems to serve Irish rugby well, irrespective of the EU Spirit. The top players are incentivised to stay in Ireland, their game time gets managed punctiliously and they are always made available by their clubs for training camps, no matter what time of year. Another benefit for Irish rugby is the Prodigal Son pardon that is bestowed upon anyone who returns to an Irish provincial team – they can be immediately included for the national side. This can act as a major incentive as there are examples where individuals came back to Irish teams much improved from the time spent away from home in a different environment learning from new coaches and strategies. Tommy Bowe developed immensely from his time in Wales, and look out for Tadhg Beirne once he leaves Scarlets for Munster next season. He appears to have slipped through the cracks for Leinster, he has been nominated for European Player of the Year and has dramatically enhanced his performance level due to the freedom he is allowed in the Scarlets team. Ireland look set to be the best placed team to push favourites England all the way in this year’s

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