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    Ireland, Italy and the Disclosures Tribunal

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    Leonardo Sciascia was an Italian political journalist, an elected radical member of parliament and the most prominent anti-mafia critic. All of this features in his famous detective novels which are in fact anti-detective novels or works of political observation. Coupled with his masterly analysis of the assassination by the Red Brigade of the Christian Democrat conciliator and former Prime Minister Aldo Moro they amount to a sustained critique of Italian and Sicilian political and cultural life. They reflect the complex interstices of corruption and collusion between extreme-right-wing Catholicism, organised crime and the shadowy self-protection syndicates of big business, politics, a malevolent state bureaucracy and crime. His books show the lethal effects of innuendo, smoke, mirrors and sighs, the nefarious rumour mill, shadows. Sciascia was a specialist in the mafia and he demonstrated how they kill and destroy. First they isolate, disempower and then denigrate. They in effect demonise their prey. And those who seek to investigate them, such as Judge Giovanni Falcone, who act on principle are destroyed in the process. This is exquisitely detailed in ‘Equal Danger’, his best book. In Sciascia’s fiction, it is the detective, not the murderer, who is isolated and suspected. Ironically in the end Sciascia attacked the crusading judges as putting civil rights at stake in an article, when he was dying, that irredeemably punctured his reputation, by attacking Falcone as a celebrity judge. This is deeply relevant to Ireland. Our mafia are our corrupt politicians, bankers and lawyers and the toxic relationship of our shadow state of governance between the police and the justice department. Those who challenge corruption or blow the whistle are reputationally destroyed, personally attacked, framed, driven to self-destruction or simply disposed of. Ireland is Italy and “equal danger” a cautionary text. The smearing of the state knows no boundaries and frequent collusion with Tulsa a criminal conspiracy maintained by many lawyers who should be disbarred. Another Sciascia theme, particularly evident in his most famous text, ‘The day of the Owl’ is the Sicilian trait of anomie or indifference. A shrug of the shoulders. It is what it is. Life moves on. Principle, justice and the truth are a waste of time. In controlled societies such as Ireland and Italy Sciascia’s books show the lethal effects of innuendo, smoke, mirrors and sighs, the nefarious rumour mill, shadows, in Italy trivialisation amounts to a resigned admission that the victims of crime had it coming to them in some obscure way. It betrays a desire for yourself not to go the same way. Being principled in an unprincipled society is very difficult. We know more than 10 black sacks of shredding left the office of the Commissioner under the supervision of a superintendent who has given evidence twice already to the Tribunal. The phone of the two past heads of national intelligence, Callinan and Ms. O’Sullivan are gone…vanished, destroyed. Yet no issue of the destruction of crucial evidence seems to be of concern to the Tribunal. It was the husband of the former Commissioner O’Sullivan who was appointed to take charge of the investigation into Superintendent Taylor. The phone of the Superintendent was taken but that crucial evidence too is lost. It seems to be simply a matter of no consequence. A judge whose orientation in private practice was prosecutorial and who, on the bench, has been somewhat indulgent of changes to evidential exclusionary rules to the advantage of fact-gathering gardaí, risks steering a Tribunal away from the glaringly obvious criminality of the highest level of the Department of Justice and the police. Moreover Maurice McCabe is represented at the Tribunal by former Minister for Justice Michael McDowell SC, a long-time and visceral political defender of the police and law and order. If I were McCabe I would contemplate refreshing my legal representation and wonder how the now ascendant narrative is that a cock-up rather than obvious state criminality smeared him. He should dwell on whether it was in fact appropriate for him to concede that the evidence established that the inclusion of the false allegation against him of rape in the 2013 Tusla report “was some form of cut and paste error”, and that the error was not the result of any deliberate action or ill will. And he should consider how the damning evidence of the press secretary Dave Taylor was not addressed first, as the Tribunal’s first module, as dictated by the terms of reference; and how the sequence of modules was altered so the less clearcut Tusla model was heard first. Instead the Tribunal opened with an arbitrarily selected series of smokescreen narratives implying a cock-up by Tulsa, and culpability for outlying zealot Callinan perhaps. Noel Waters, former Secretary General of the Department of Justice, has suffered from amnesia. In his evidence to the Tribunal he declared he could not remember, on nearly 50 occasions. Most damningly, he spoke to Nóirín O’Sullivan at a crucial moment during the O’Higgins Commission which in 2015 was looking at allegations of poor policing in Cavan/ Monaghan made by Sergeant McCabe, phone records indicate. However, neither Waters nor O’Sullivan can remember the 14-minute call on May 15, 2015. The crucial moment was when O’Sullivan’s lawyers were asked by the commission to confirm that they had been instructed to attack Sergeant McCabe’s motivation, and the commission adjourned briefly so that she could be contacted. The Tribunal had previously heard that O’Sullivan “sought time to speak to the Department of Justice” before confirming her original instructions. The Department has maintained neither it nor then Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald had prior knowledge of, or input into, the legal strategy. Waters said he could not remember the call, and insisted the Department had played no role in the strategy. When it was put to him by Tribunal counsel, Diarmaid McGuinness SC, that it was reasonable to assume he and O’Sullivan discussed what was occurring at O’Higgins that day, Waters replied: “I have to say in response that I have no recollection of that at all”.

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    Village Idiot March 2018

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    His TV credits include ‘Dirty Money: The story of the Criminal Assets Bureau’ and ‘Paul Williams Investigates – ‘The Battle for the Gas Fields’ about the policing of the Corrib Gas protests. ‘Secret Love’ (1995) with Phylis Hamilton told the story of her secret 20-year love affair with Ireland’s most outspoken Catholic priest, Fr Michael Cleary. Williams always tells it as it is, or at least as the gardaí see it. He also writes books: ‘Gangland’ (1998), ‘Evil Empire’ (2001), ‘Crimelords’ (2003), ‘The Untouchables’ (2006), ‘Crime Wars’ (2008), ‘Badfellas’ (2011) and ‘Murder Inc’ (2014). He is known for bravely confronting crimelord John Gilligan about the murder of journalist, Veronica Guerin. The Sunday Tribune said as long ago as 2008 that a common criticism of Williams is that he is “little more than a cheerleader for the gardaí” and noted Williams’s tendency to steer away from any crime or corruption within the force. In 2013 he told an interviewer that “most of my friends are police”. He often explains that particular people are damningly “known to gardaí”. Williams has been criticised for his tendency to give nicknames such as “The Tosser”, “The Penguin”, “Babyface” and “Fatpuss” to the criminals he is reporting on as it tends to glamourise the criminals. In 2011 he joined the Irish Sun, as ‘Investigations Editor’. Since 2012, he has contributed to the Irish Independent where he’s a mate of the editor, as ‘Special Correspondent’. In 2016 Williams joined the newly revamped ‘Newstalk’ schedule as a co-presenter with Shane Coleman on the Breakfast Show. According to the Irish Times: “Williams’s chief asset remains his hard-boiled, fuming persona. It’s not just the criminal fraternity and the Garda hierarchy he takes aim at, but anyone who smacks of being lily-livered or politically correct. He talks about ‘the snobby world of literature’ and dismisses President Michael D Higgins’s voluntary pay cut with a curt ‘big bloody deal’, while constantly making cracks about ‘the Shinners’”. He described the Jobstown protesters on-air last July as “assholes”, “bastards”, “thugs” and “bullyboys”. The BAI didn’t like it. The Charleton (or Disclosures) tribunal is looking into whether Sergeant Maurice McCabe was the target of a smear campaign. Last year Williams told the Tribunal that it was “absolutely false” that he was “in some way acting as a puppet for the guards” in 2014 when he met Ms D, the woman who made allegations of abuse against McCabe in 2006. Her father, a garda at Bailieboro garda station, was moved to other duties after a disciplinary tribunal into his performance was launched after complaints from Sergeant McCabe. McCabe has told the tribunal of a 2016 meeting with Superintendent Dave Taylor of the Garda Press Office during which he said he was told “hundreds” or “thousands” of text messages had been composed by then-Commissioner Martin Callinan and forwarded to senior Garda officers, journalists, and politicians, on Callinan’s orders. “If there was an article praising me, Callinan would say ‘use your phone, do him down, he has to be buried’”. McCabe said Taylor said he would be encouraged to say that McCabe had been investigated for sexual assault. Taylor has specifically told the tribunal that he never sent any negative texts about McCabe to journalists and conveyed it all verbally. Williams told the tribunal that he was never negatively briefed against McCabe but rather, off the record, that there had been an investigation in 2006 into Ms D’s allegation and that the director of public prosecutions had decided not to bring proceedings. In March 2018 McCabe told the tribunal that when in 2014 an article by Paul Williams was published just a few months later containing an anonymised version of Ms D’s allegations, McCabe said he knew “exactly who it was pointing at”. He was not identified in the article, but said he knew it was about him and felt it was “payback”. The article started: “A young woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted as a child by a serving garda claims the incident was covered up through a botched investigation”. “Sure, it was awful. I mean, I have been cleared, completely, and I should have been left alone”, said McCabe. “I can’t prove it, but I knew it was in relation to what I was doing, in relation to penalty points”. TD Joan Collins has named Williams under Dáil privilege as one of those to benefit from having their penalty points cancelled by gardaí. Williams has previously given evidence that he was contacted directly by Ms D and was not negatively briefed about McCabe by Garda Headquarters.

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    How did Republicanism lose its way in the 1960s?

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    The IRA in the 1960s, led by Cathal Goulding the IRA Chief and Tomás MacGiolla who chaired Sinn Féin, initiated a reform towards radical democratic politics. This was supported by Seán Cronin, later an Irish Times correspondent, who had led the 1950s armed campaign. I know this because he contacted me in around 1959 after his release from internment, to discuss left-republican ideas which I had been promoting in the Plough, an innovative Left periodical of the time with trade-union links. I had earlier been associated with the Irish Workers League, a Marxist group which I had had a hand in setting up, with student-left support via the Trinity College Dublin Fabian Society. I was however seeking broad-left alternatives, and was supporting the Plough, avoiding the basically Stalinist Irish Worker League which superseded the Communist Party here for a while and was associated with Jim Larkin. In 1960 my TCD/Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies post-graduate research period in physics ended, and I worked in London up to 1963, when I returned to a job in Dublin. In London I had worked politically with the Connolly Association and interacted with Desmond Greaves, a pioneer Marxist focusing on national questions. Greaves had come up with the need to focus, in the Irish context, on the civil rights issue in Northern Ireland, as an escape from religious sectarian politics. After my return to Dublin, I cultivated links with the republican movement, initially via the Wolfe Tone 1963 bi-centenary events, which included broad-based seminars in the Mansion House. These were manifestations of the Goulding/MacGiolla/Cronin influence on IRA reconstructive reform. I interacted with the leadership and we came up with the ‘Wolfe Tone Societies’ concept as a promotional model for democratic reform. From this I went on to cultivate an active role in the leadership of a reforming republican movement, in which the Northern IRA activists set themselves up openly as Republican Clubs and supported the Civil Rights Movement. We now have the problem: how did this evolve in the 60s and how and why did it occasion the militarist ‘Provisional’ split? I will not attempt this here and now, but I did try with my book ‘Century of Endeavour’ published initially in the US in 2003, with a revised edition in Ireland in 2006. This covers the century from my perspective and that of my father, a Tyrone Presbyterian supporter of all-Ireland Home Rule in 1913, who made his subsequent career in the Free State and in 1938 helped to set up the Irish Association to promote an all-Ireland cultural identity in the spirit of the de Valera Constitution. There are 576 pages in ‘Century of Endeavour’ and the period of 1960s activism takes up about 150 pages for the 60s decade. There is much detail in the book about the 1960s politics of republican transformation, and I feel I need help in analysing the record of how it evolved into a ‘near miss’ of what now has, I hope, been achieved by Adams et al but could have happened then. Certainly I believe the split led by O Brádaigh and MacStiofáin who resisted moves to end abstentionism from the British, Irish and Northern Ireland parliaments, to form the ‘Provisional IRA’, was a disaster! Will anyone interested in helping to research how the 1960s politics evolved into decades of mayhem, and the current complex ‘hard border’ problem, please e-mail me with some comments on the above overview; I am contactable via roy@rjtechne.org; please do not phone as my hearing aid is not phone-friendly. You can usually get the ‘Century’ book in libraries; it is also still on the market, but I have some copies here that I can donate to people interested in analysing critically how the 1960s political problems were nearly deals with without the use of the gun! Roy Johnston Dr Roy HW Johnston (born 1929) is an Irish physicist. As a Marxist member of the IRA in the 1960s he argued for a National Liberation Strategy to unite the Catholic and Protestant working classes. He wrote extensively for such newspapers as The United Irishman and the Irish Times, remaining as a member of the Official IRA after the split. Johnston left the stickies in 1972 after the assassination of Northern Ireland Senator John Barnhill and joined the Communist Party of Ireland, which he left in 1977. He was later a member of the Labour Party, serving on their International Affairs Committee, and is currently a member of the Green Party. He wrote a bi-montly science column for the Irish Times in the 1970s.

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    Villager March 2018

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    Cut off Villager is in favour of water charges so he doesn’t see why the water in the Village building was cut off for three days after the snow, even though next door is like Niagara/Poulaphouca. And why are they cutting it off anyway: it was snow not drought. Whatever, a hand hasn’t been washed in the office since the beginning of March. Tarmac on the hillsides Villager likes to bound around the hills and mountains of Wicklow when he can get out of the waterless dust and smoke of the Village office, particularly of a Sunday. Favourites are Luggala and the forgotten Kilruddery area between Bray and Greystones. He was shocked recently to see that many trees in the foothills near Kilruddery, where the Earls of Meath own the famous house, have been cut down. Just as bad, some of the verdant hillside has been tarmacked over, apparently for film studios, whose activities, being artistic you see, clearly do not concern Wicklow County Council. The same grey movie lorries and vans collected until recently on lands adjoining the JB Malone walk up above Garech de Brun’s land over Luggala, again with tarmacking the favoured terrain. Luggala Of course the Luggala estate is for sale and Denis O’Brien who famously liked to jog there with his so-called mates has been linked to a purchase, though it seems he has not bitten. Now there seem to be signals that Department of Culture and Heritage discussions with the trust that owns it may be going somewhere. An elusive Minister Josepha Madigan told Richard Boyd Barrett in the Dáil that the sticking point is price. Unfortunately it’s probably a mistake to think the State would improve this wilderness – it would probably install car-parks and other sterilising paraphernalia, though – despite Boyd Barrett’s fears – since the right of way down to Lough Dan is longstanding, any mogul buying the estate would have to observe it. Siteselfserving Taxpayers face a potential €100m bill for the investigation into the sale of building services group Siteserv to a Denis O’Brien company, according to a statement released by Mike Aynsley former IBRC chief executive – according to reports in the Irish Independent, Irish Times and RTE.ie. A commission headed by Judge Brian Cregan, apparently aided by up to 30 lawyers, is investigating the sale of Siteserv to the Denis O’Brien-controlled Millington in 2012 for €45.5 million. The State-owned Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) wrote off a €110m loan to the company following the deal. According to, Aynsley, the inquiry’s spiralling legal costs could leave taxpayers with a €100m tab. Aynsley was CEO of IBRC when it sold Siteserv. His views seem utterly self-serving. It is a tribute to press paranoia over Denis O’Brien that anyone would even report his comments. Aynsley now runs a consultancy called Prospera Associates in London. There’s a history of this sort of agenda-driven tribunal-mongering. In February 2007 the Irish Times reported that then Minister for Justice Michael McDowell was predicting the planning tribunal would cost “€1bn”. In fact the best current guess is that it cost €159 – not of course that it was worth it. More of the same an INM The new chairman of INM, whose largest shareholder is Denis O’Brien, is Glaswegian Murdoch MacLennan, former CEO (2003-2017) of Britain’s Telegraph group. Among other baubles, MacLennan is chairman of the Scottish Professional Football League and served on the Commission on Scottish Devolution. At the Telegraph he had a reputation for speaking the jargon: “smart working”, hot-desking” and “employee-friendly working practices” while pursuing a ruthless cost-cutting and employee-shedding agenda on behalf of the avaricious Barclay Brothers who own the newspapers. He made over 100 journalists redundant in 2006, nearly, but not quite, provoking a strike. The Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson was sacked and replaced by Sarah Sands in June 2005, but she lasted just nine months. They may miss Leslie Buckley yet. Hypocr/Tical The Irish Times castigated the dubious expediture of €1.5m by the Government’s Strategic Communications Unit on ‘Project 2040’. However, it has questions to answer about its own coverage under headlines including ‘National Development Plan’, ‘A Special Report in association with Project Ireland 2040, an initiative of the Goverment of Ireland’ and (in one small-print reference, ‘A Special Report’, over a page). Readers will make their own minds up as to whether the type sizes implied complicity. Certainly the usual Irish Times smugness masked a dollop of impurity. Change in Italy Just as Germany cobbles together an unexcited national unity government, a hung parliament seems likely in Italy. The Five Star Movement (M5S) secured an impressive victory in its parliamentary elections in early March. Everyone inVillage is drilled with the mantra of equality, sustainability, accountability: Five Star’s version and the agenda underpinning it is: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, right to Internet access, and environmentalism – the ‘five stars’. Purporting to be neither left nor right and Euro-sceptic, it won more than 30% of the vote as the traditional centre-left and centre-right political parties flopped: Matteo Renzi’s Democratic got 19% of the vote, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia 14% though it is tied to several other right-wing parties, notably the anti-immigrant and anti-EU League, with 18%. It falls to the president, Sergio Mattarella, to knock heads together. Macau: Miaow Speaking to Parliament’s extraordinarily named ‘Exiting the EU select committee’ in Westminster, Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the WTO, the global capitalists’ trade union, said the UK’s decision to leave the customs union and single market, “will necessitate a border”. Lamy told MPs the idea the UK could operate an invisible border on the island of Ireland while also having different trade tariffs with the EU was unworkable. Lamy shot down the Government’s plan for a “virtual border”, saying such a customs arrangement does not exist anywhere in the world. He suggested one solution would be for the UK to give Northern Ireland the power to operate its own trade policy. He cited the example of

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    Ourland

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    The return of the Irish economy is not an accident. The fact there were no riots when in collapsed in 2008 in a sea of imploded vested interests was no happenstance. The fact this country has divided power since its instigation between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael wasn’t just luck. The repetition of the failures of the national spatial strategy in the National Planning Framework was predestined. The failure of any party to take on the rights of property and make them subject to the common good isn’t a random thing, it’s determined. This country isn’t Germany which went through industrialisation, Nazification and deNazification, and learnt that politics and the common good is a serious business. Nor are we like the US which takes itself so seriously that it can elect a politician on an America First platform, elect someone who’s utterly wrong about everything. Or the UK which tossed a reputation forged over a millennium for empirical pragmatism into the fires of Brexit because it had a serious gripe with Institutional Europe (and Johnny foreigner). Ireland lost half of its people in the famine five generations ago. There is a strong folk memory of apocalypse which imbues a national fear that workaday issues aren’t important, that politics doesn’t really matter, that anything good is transient, that there’s no point planting a tree, a flower. We also suffer from the residual malaise of the colonised. For 700 years decisions were taken not in the common good but in the interest of an alien political entity. Service for the government and its establishment was not service for the common good. This country is sceptical about the motivations of its politicians, and its politicians do not see their roles as ethical or principled. This can generate corruption. We also suffer from the overhang of over a millennium of pious religious adherence though arguably we are overcoming that fast, almost – though not quite – too fast. Ireland is not a serious country like Germany. Yes we’re big on the GDP that every country wants. Certainly, we can do capitalism if you ask us too, but it’s only because that’s a doctrine that depends on an independent competitive detachment. You don’t have to buy in to anything particular to practise capitalism. We’re good at giving international commerce and its IT companies and vulture funds what they want: from planning permissions to an utterly unethical system of corporate taxation. You never hear anyone in public life talk of morality or ethics, you rarely hear mention of the public interest or the common good. Or philosophy: we’re sort of middlebrow. It is taken for granted that the combined private interests of all somehow amounts to the public interest. It is assumed the needs of the present outweigh concerns for the future. We don’t have a language for ugliness even though we forge it everywhere. We don’t care about planning, we couldn’t give a fiddlers for the environment. We’re the worst climate-change offenders in Europe, one of the few EU countries to miss its 2020 emission reduction targets under the EU effort-sharing decision, the worst per person in Europe. We love to litter. We’ve filled the countryside with unsustainable houses, allowed Dublin to leapfrog into much of Leinster. We’re going continue doing it. It would be draconian to tell anyone they can’t actually build somewhere. Climate, the environment and planning are at the sharp edge of our psychological weaknesses. We understand when someone fleeces the public purse – sure we’d do it ourselves. Even the parties of the left can’t bring themselves to support a property tax. For that would impinge on “the family home”. Does Richard Boyd Barrett not realise that that phrase betrays a millennium of weakness? Strangely we never hear that other assets shouldn’t be taxed – that stocks and shares shouldn’t be taxed because they’re “the family portfolio” but mention the family home in Ireland and a ‘Land League’ and a host of people who don’t realise they’re not leftists will come running to your aid, in your home or in the courts, even if you’re looking to remain in a gilded mansion, even if you have three homes. Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern, Enda Kenny, have been replaced with shiny new faces – Leo, the Simons, Eoghan. These tyros may have had radical, progressive or interesting ideas before they got into politics but it’s not an accident that they get beaten out of them by the time they stand for election, for the party. They’ll toe the party line, not the thinktank line on everything from housing to the drugs crisis to healthcare. They bought into Fine Gael (it might as well have been Fianna Fáil) atavistically. Sit on a bus in England or the US and the quality of the conversation overheard (‘innit?’, ‘So I’m Like’) shocks and bores. Not here. You’ll never meet a complete moron in Ireland. The left may not yield a property-tax agenda but then again the right hasn’t managed to muster much of an anti-immigration or even privatisation agenda. Most Irish people have lots of common sense, a fairly global outlook, a sense of humour and a cultural hinterland of some sort. Ireland isn’t serious enough to keep its quality of life as high as that in countries where the common good is the transcendent driver. But then again it’s not serious enough to say no to gay marriage – sure everyone likes someone who’s gay. Or serious enough to elect a Fascist or a tub-thumper. Ireland is a peculiar place. It’s not the worst place. But its history holds it back, and will for generations to come.

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    NIexit will reduce protections

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    Brexit brings a threat of the North accelerating in a race to the bottom in terms of the environment and employment, cutting costs in order to get economic advantage. In the face of this, much depends on when or if Devolution is reinstated. There is a particular concern on environmental matters because the EU has had a determining impact on the North’s environmental legislation. Even with EU membership, there is concern at a systemic failure to enforce environmental legislation. Sand has been dredged from Lough Neagh for years, without any planning process being applied. Currently about 1.5m tonnes per year is extracted. The Lough is the largest fresh-water lake in Ireland or Britain. It is a Special Protection Area. It is a Ramsar site, that is recognised as a wetland of international importance. Around 100,000 wild birds winter on and near it. It is one of only five lakes in the world where pollan are found. In June last year the North’s Court of Appeal allowed an appeal from Friends of the Earth against former Environment Minister Mark H Durkan’s decision not to order an immediate halt to the dredging. However, the Department of Infrastructure has said it is “not expedient” to stop dredging, which continues. In another regulatory failure, approximately one million tonnes of assorted waste was illegally dumped on a site at Mobuoy Road, Derry. Remediation will cost at least £20m (€22.4m), but may cost 12 times as much. The dump is beside the River Faughan, which provides drinking water for Derry City. Friends of the Earth has lodged a complaint with the European Commission against the North for systemic failure to enforce planning and environmental laws. The complaint is slowly making its way through the process. The North, like the rest of the UK, has no third-party right of appeal against planning decisions: developers have a right of appeal. That is contributing to pressures to restrict the right of appeal in the South. With this being the current situation, the North’s environmentalists are worried about developments after Brexit. They are particularly worried about the loss of the Habitats Directive. This has been key to their successes: in particular, their two biggest. These were the A5, the North’s biggest-ever road project, which was halted after a court challenge: and the court action on the Lough Neagh dredging. The Habitats Directive is particularly important because it contains the precautionary principle. Politically, there is no great will to protect the environment. The two dominant parties, the DUP and Sinn Féin, have shown little commitment. Famously the first measure the Paisley/McGuinness devolved administration introduced was a relaxation on the former Northern Ireland Minister’s restrictions on one-off housing. In 2008 Arlene Foster as Environment Minister rejected a report ‘Review of Environmental Governance. One of the recommendations was for an independent environmental protection agency, and a limited third party right of appeal. Former DUP Environment Minister Sammy Wilson has said people would “look back at this whole climate change debate and ask ourselves how on Earth were we ever conned into spending the billions of pounds” on policy changes. Sinn Féin has not denied climate change, but has been the main party pushing the A5 project. The party’s attitude to the environment is typically ad hoc. This is more worrying because the North’s environmentalists are not a major lobby group. The Assembly elected last year contains only two Greens, from 90 members. Only a handful of others have any significant interest in environmental matters. The effects on workers’ rights will partly depend on when or if devolution is restored. Certainly, trade unionists are seen as a better – organised lobby than environmentalists. They have had certain limited successes. The Executive parties rejected introducing proposed legislation further restricting the right to strike being introduced by the UK government. It did not follow the British parliament in extending the time limit for the right to claim unfair dismissal. On the other side, Northern wages are lower. The median weekly wage is £501 (€562.50), in contrast to €734.60 in South. The minimum wage, which is UK-wide, is £7.83 (€8.79) and only comes into operation at 25. In the South it is €9.55. It seems Northern Ireland is facing into a future without the threshold protections of for example the EU Working Time Directive 2003 which requires a minimum of four weeks paid holidays annually and a maximum 48-hour working week unless a worker individually consents; of the The Parental Leave Directive 2010 which prescribes four months of unpaid leave for parents to care for children before they turn eight years old, and of the Pregnant Workers Directive 1992 which creates a right for mothers to a minimum of 14 weeks paid leave to care for children. There will be continued pressure to reduce wages and protections. That will be strengthened by the tendency not to let a good crisis go by without seizing the chance to cut pay and conditions. Anton McCabe

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    Referee!

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    On-side Rugby is religion for Limerick. The city mercifully did not inherit the class exclusivity associated with the sport. In the latter decades of the twentieth century Munster victories, usually over Leinster, sustained Limerick’s morale in the face of prejudice. In gratitude its City and County Council has granted permission for a rugby museum which will shoehorn a seven-storey show-stopper into a Georgian streetscape. With a rugby hero and a billionaire philanthropist tax-exile fronting the project they have the public on side. Does the new class of money and celebrity overrule our planning laws? The Players A new sports museum for Limerick, was announced in December 2016. Its applicants were Rugby World Experience Ltd set up that same year with a registered address in Lucan, Co. Dublin. It has three Directors: Chairman Paul O’Connell, Paul Foley and Sue-Ann Foley. Former Ireland, Munster and Irish Lions captain Paul O’Connell, Limerick native, basso profundo, family giant, Lidl man of squeaky cleanliness is the perfect frontman. Paul Foley is a former Limerick City Council Senior Executive Officer in the Department of Economic and Planning Development. Sue-Ann Foley is the daughter of JP McManus. Limerick’s greatest/richest son, and Chair of the JP McManus Benevolent Fund. The Coach John Patrick ‘JP’ McManus, money-trader and gambler, hails from humble beginnings but has for 30 years been resident in tax-friendly Geneva, Switzerland, while retaining a suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London. He is a doughty force in Limerick, particularly in Limerick City and County Council which even has a hall named after his most famous horse, Istabraq. His charity has funded schools, palliative care units, and every type of local sports clubs. Any criticism against a JP McManus project in Limerick is an attack on Santa Claus. It is McManus’ €10m seed funding that is making this project happen. O’Connell has said the rugby museum was a notion put to him by JP McManus during his playing days, but the idea has gained momentum since he retired. The Dashing Out-Half An unexpected dash for Rugby World Experience was the commissioning of renowned London-based, Irish-born architect Níall McLaughlin, twice shortlisted for the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize. His work includes the extension to the National History Museum London, the Carmelite Prayer room in St Teresa’s Church Dublin and college buildings in Oxford and Cambridge. Try The museum would be of scintillating contemporary design with, it is hoped, a sensitive palette of materials, mainly brick in keeping with the Georgian aesthetic. However, the architect’s report admits that “the brick selection and brickwork quality will present a challenge and it may be decided to use precast panels”. High Tackle The proposal is for a seven-storey building, 32-metres high (the architect originally intended the tower to be 36 metres in height), with a two-storey portico fronting O’Connell Street, and a two-storey block to the rear. There would be a three-storey block built over the existing Fine’s Jewellers, at the junction of O’Connell Street and Cecil Street. Inside, the development would see the existing buildings’ 1335sqm floor area increased to 2787 sqm “multi-media visitor experience, exhibition and education space”, plus retail (81sqm) and café (83sqm) at ground-floor level. The scheme is context-free: a bold attempt to subvert an aesthetic built up over centuries by breaching the established building height on Limerick’s main street, its beating heart. The design also self-consciously does not replicate the Georgian fenestration rhythm perhaps in an effort to minimise the perception of extra floors. Spear tackle The plan involves the razing of 40 and 41 O’Connell Street, and of 1 Cecil Street, a corner site on two prominent streetscapes within Newtown Pery, Limerick’s Georgian area. The Beautiful Game Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary of 1837 called Limerick’s Newtown Pery “one of the handsomest modern towns in Ireland”. The historic Georgian city is an example of ambitious eighteenth-century Italian-inspired town planning whose integrity should be respected through the retention of the characteristic continuous heights and building-frontage alignment that contributes to a quality unrivalled anywhere in the world, albeit that it has been allowed to dilapidate. Substitution The buildings that stand in the way are not protected but are listed on the National Inventory for Architectural Heritage, an indication that national government thinks they merit protection. There have been some changes to them over the second half of the twentieth century, including the cement-rendering of the façade, the replacement of an earlier shop front and the blocking up of window openings on the side elevation. These could easily be removed. The off-side rule Both sides of this site sit within an Architectural Conservation Area (ACA), protected under Section 81 of the Planning and Development Act 2000-2008 which states that an ACA is: “a place, area, group of structures or townscape, taking account of building lines and heights, that is of special architectural, historical, archaeological, artistic, cultural, scientific, social or technical interest”. ACA protections extend to the carrying out of works to the exterior of a building within the Area regardless of whether or not it’s a protected structure. The aim of designating areas is to protect their “special characteristics and distinctive features” from inappropriate actions. The ‘Statement of Character and Identification of Key Threats’ set out in Chapter 10 of the Limerick City and County Development Plan 2010-2016 notes: “This ACA constitutes the core heart of Limerick City’s Georgian Heritage within the City Centre…The streets of Newtown Pery represent a unique example of eighteenth and nineteenth-century planning in Ireland…The streets leading to The Crescent and Pery Square conform to eighteenth-century town planning, defining the streetscape by their adherence to fixed proportions and ordered harmonious symmetry. They combine to form an architectural heritage of great urbanity and considerable beauty”. This appears damning for McLaughlin’s acontextual, proportionately unfixed, asymetrical and inharmonious effort. But the ACA statement goes on: “The irregularity which emerged in relation to the treatment of heights, facades, and type of buildings combined with the rigid street pattern gives Georgian Limerick a distinct sense of place…All of these

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