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In 2018 award-winning journalist Gemma O’Doherty wrote several articles for Village magazine. She was easy to work with and produced good copy. Like many contributors she generously did not charge the magazine for her work. She brought a large social-media followership with her, writing pieces on human-interest stories – on Madeleine McCann; on Sophie Toscan du Plantier; on sex abuse in Donegal and in a Dublin rugby school; and she wrote about her experience before the Charleton Tribunal, with which she was not impressed. She had given evidence about how she was removed from her position as Chief Features Writer of the Irish Independent in 2014 after she door-stepped the former Garda Commissioner about the wiping of his own penalty points. Around that time sadly her husband Peter Carvosso, a well-respected editor, who also worked for the Irish Independent, had died. It must have been a very difficult time for her. O’Doherty writes well. Some elements of the stories she submitted to Village were less definitively backed up than was ideal, though they were always scupulously researched and coherent. Her story on rugby trainer John McClean was excellent and was helpful in bringing about long-stalled charges against him for abusing boys in Terenure College. She never ventilated any sort of political view in these articles. When she ran for the Presidency on an anti-corruption ticket expressing her lack of faith in Irish media, Village felt the media should give her a hearing. There were mutterings that she was quietly anti-abortion, anti-vaccination but she denied this, particularly in interviews with online news service, Broadsheet.ie which supported her Presidency bid. She did not do well in the Presidency election – she only received one of the four requisite nominations – and was predictably snookered by the media she loathes for stating, without evidence, that journalist Veronica Guerin had been killed by “the State”. She never got a chance to air her politics or her platform. That was a pity, from all perspectives. It was after that election that her politics appears to have turned. Perhaps this was a reaction to the success of the nastiness of Peter Casey’s campaign which placed him second. She first toured the country with other anti-corruption activists giving talks, and more recently has established an ambitious new platform called Anti-Corruption Ireland with 2000 online members – a “political movement” which intends to field candidates at local, national and European elections. Village is driven by politics not personalities. It promotes equality and sustainability. Gemma O’Doherty derides the equality agenda, and believes climate action has gone too far and that wind farms are an over-subsidised scam. It is not clear how she funds herself: and she is peripatetic. Nor is it clear who she is accountable to or what she regards as her ethical parameters. She provocatively claimed that anti-racism protesters at a rally in Rooskey, Co Roscommon after an asylum centre was burnt, were not locals. A piece about this in Broadsheet was removed after legal correspondence. In early April she was cut off mid-stream by Sligo’s Ocean FM when she mentioned Mary Boyle. On the same trip to Sligo, she says Twitter shadowbanned the notice of the Anti-Corruption Ireland meeting. In mid-March a hotel in Cork cancelled a meeting she planned because she was inflaming the situation after the Christ church murders – and she has run into trouble with Youtube which closed down her channel because of her incendiary videos. She organised a small sit-in at Google, Youtube’s parent, in Dublin in protest. She loathes George Soros, an agent of global liberalism who “uses NGOs to undermine democracy”. Presumably she prefers direct democracy and its voguish manifestation, populism. She can’t get enough of the gilets jaunes. She lists an array of media and political villains: the Irish Times, RTÉ, INM, Communicorp, Virgin Media, FG, FF, Sinn Féin, Labour, the Green Party and she has a particular antipathy to the Social Democrats, People before Profit and the Anti-Austerity Alliance who, with others, she sees as ‘Cultural Marxists’. She has promoted protests outside the houses of political leaders including Bruton and Varadkar. As of now O’Doherty is promoting a God and Country agenda, though her journalism on McClean suggests she is no clericalist. She believes Ireland will become Muslim majority and questions the National Planning Framework which posits radical population targets that depend on wholesale immigration as part of an insidious globalist agenda. She dislikes secularism, highlights alleged high rape rates in Scandinavian countries linked to Muslim immigration and draws attention to violence perpetrated by Muslims in Western countries. She has no qualms retweeting people who believe Africans are inferior to Caucasians. She believes Irish people should “reclaim their Irishness”, saying “if that’s racist, great, bring it on!”. She considers the appalling Christchurch massacre was a “false flag’ operation designed to disguise the actual source of responsibility. She is in bed with conservative commentator John Waters who appears regularly on her long but rollocking podcasts. This relationship encapsulates her political trajectory. At one time she was lionised in Broadsheet.ie. a liberal website with a following that varies from libertarian to leftist but which does not embrace conservatism, the Church or John Waters who it has pilloried, characteristically and in particular for his stance on PantiBliss whose denigration of Waters as homophobic grounded a defamation payout. Now Waters and she make ideological twins and he appears regularly on her Youtube channel. In Irish terms this amounts to a 180-degree rotation. She also has an intense affiliation with someone called Amazing Polly, a Canadian version of herself who often appears on her videos, and she often retweets contrarian Katie Hopkins. Her approach is somewhat tribal and, though she is an attractive and fluid speaker, she also makes for an impressively lethal antagonist. Legal Blogger Gavin Sheridan recently ungallantly tweeted (a lot of this stuff happens in the ethereal world of social media): “If you’re still following Gemma O’Doherty after her descent into the abyss of far-right conspiracy nonsense, false narratives,

Fantasy Indictment: Peter Sutherland for moral offences against the economy, the environment and human rights by David Langwallner and Michael Smith   Christopher Hitchens, no stranger to contrarian positions, once wrote a remarkable polemic called ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’ impugning Kissinger for being as guilty as any common war criminal of crimes against humanity. In evidence Hitchens proffered his inculpation in the murder of democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende. After General Pinochet assumed power Kissinger told Richard Nixon that the US “didn’t do it”, but “we helped them…created the conditions as great as possible”. Hitchens also marshalled in evidence Kissinger’s sponsoring of the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, and his and Gerald Ford’s oblique tolerance, and perhaps approval, of genocide in Indonesia. At the time the book had an incendiary effect but the allegations were not immediately directed into concrete legal action. Ultimately of course Kissinger had to leave France with unseemly haste with an arrest warrant pending and return to the safe refuge of the US where he thrives as a nonagenarian staple of talk shows, the idol of Fox News and a totemic visionary of Realpolitik. Such is the shadow existence of a once lethal global potentate. But Kissinger is old news, disempowered, with the historic crimes fading over time and mercifully, absent a call from Trump, out of harm’s way. Though you never know, such is the plausibility in our unethical world of the king of statecraft. Realpolitik has moved on from such crude seventies tactics as murdering a head of state to simply disemboweling him metaphorically – as with Tsipras – with the panoply of capitalism. Moreover we have, some of us, moved on to business-craft. From the modernist, almost industrial complex of building that is UCD stands out a splendid new addition, the Sutherland school of law, a sleek new premises which “incorporates teaching and learning facilities which are purpose built to foster and support more experiential styles of learning”. This is most apparent in the Clinical Legal Education Centre which incorporates a trial room suitable for mock trials, though not of its benefactors of course. If Peter Sutherland were a building it would be this building for, though well-upholstered, it’s a little top-heavy. Why do we never name schools of law after true heroes, or at least flawed ones? The Mansfield School of law, The Sean McBride or Mary Robinson School of law? Of course international businessmen and plutocrats of all sort seek, in the dusk of lives dedicated to the pursuit of money, to have their reputations magnified for future generations. Tony O’ Reilly, by far the most elegant of the Irish philanthropists, has his sponsored buildings in Trinity and UCD, named – perhaps – after his parents. But these things are done better and with fewer strings in the US, where the culture and indeed the tax regime are more conducive: Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are charitable icons and are scrupulously divesting themselves of their assets in the common good; many US universities depend on philanthropy. Naturally the Sutherland school seems a bit more business- friendly than its fuddy-duddy anonymous predecessor: it aims to make “our teaching and learning challenging, rewarding, relevant, and critical in engaging with the challenges of law in Irish and international business, social, political and economic life”. If Goldman Sachs did law faculties it might probably do this one. It is not clear whether the minions and opinion-formers, rushing to their lectures, have been encouraged to downgrade human rights, the environment and culture as part of the process of embracing their exciting challenges. Peter Sutherland is a unique case; a pasha of world fuzzy democracy, a knight of the British realm described in the Financial Times in 2009 as “at the centre of the establishment in all its forms”, a querulous and basilisk Buddha, looking down from a great height at the mortals of the world and their fig-leaves of democracy and national sovereignty, barriers to the elevation of trade that his career has so eminently promoted. But let us construct a narrative for this man. Gonzaga, UCD and King’s Inns educated and aggressively-rugby-playing, he became Attorney General of Ireland in his 30s, after a brief and unsuccessful electoral dalliance with Fine Gael; and then was made the youngest ever EU commissioner – for Competition, in which capacity he was famously dynamic, driving competition in the airline, telecoms and energy sectors, and attracting the admiration of federalist Commission President, Jacques Delors. He chaired the Committee that produced The Sutherland Report on the completion of the Internal Market of the EEC. Only Ireland’s dreary civil-war politics deprived Sutherland of the job he coveted most when, back in 1994, the UK recommended him for the post of European Commission president. His strings to Fine Gael meant he did not enjoy the support of his own country’s government, then led by petfood Taoiseach Albert Reynolds. Tellingly, he once told the Financial Times: “I do absolutely believe in the European project. I think it’s the most noble political ideal in European history in a thousand years”. The Competition Commissionership was the first step in his championing of globalisation, internationalisation, sovereign fluidity, and the promotion of economic liberalisation. Of course Sutherland can surely speak the language of progress and ethics – and he is even, as a Good Catholic, an economic advisor to the Vatican, Consultor of the Extraordinary Section of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (and President of the International Catholic Migration Commission). Nevertheless his work – and even his lifestyle – bespeaks slavery to the amoral deities of capital, profligacy and greed. Globetrotting private jets, secret meetings in the Vatican or with the Bilderberg Group, carefully regulated and deliberately evasive public appearances: bread and butter for decades for this warrior for the business agenda. It is of course an ambivalent existence – grey: not a matter black and white. He is an agent of liberalisations the upshot of which he feels no obligation to take responsibility