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MI5 grapples with anti-nuke Corbyn

by Joseph de Búrca 15 April, 2018

The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, has accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media in an extraordinary attack on its attempts to “weaponise information” in order to sow discord in the West, but Whitehall has been strangely quiet about past attempts by Britain’s own Intelligence Services to meddle in UK and Irish elections. 42 years ago this March the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, abruptly resigned from office during a whispering campaign orchestrated by elements within the British Intelligence Services alleging that he was a Soviet agent. It is highly ironic, therefore, that during the past few weeks the British media have been dominated by the ‘fake news’ story that the current Leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was an agent of the Soviet-controlled Czech Intelligence agency, the Statni Bezpecnost (ŠtB). Established in 1945, the StB was also closely linked with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The media campaign against Corbyn relies entirely on claims made by a former StB officer Jan Sarkocy, who served as a diplomat in Britain under the cover name ‘Jan Dymic during the 1980s’. Despite the media frenzy, the current director of the Czech Security Forces Archive, Svetlana Ptacnikova, issued a formal statement making it clear that Corbyn was neither registered by the ŠtB as a collaborator, nor does his alleged collaboration stem from anything in the archive. She said: “The files we have on him are kept in a folder that starts with the identification number one. Secret collaborators were allocated folders that start with the number four… He stayed in that basic category – and in fact he was still described as that, as a person of interest – in the final report issued by the ŠtB agent shortly before he [Sarkocy] was expelled from the UK in 1989”. A Czech Republic Defence Ministry official, Radek Schovánek, who currently has responsibility for examining the old ŠtB files, has also gone on record saying that the allegations against Corbyn are unfounded, as were the claims that Sarkocy signed up other members of the Labour leadership. It is almost certain that a number of MPs from all the British political parties were “persons of interest” to Czech Intelligence at that time. It is a bit like saying that some MPs are persons interest to the press! The current story bears all the hallmarks of a similar disinformation exercise run by British Intelligence in the 1960s. In 1968, another Czech Intelligence officer, Josef Frolik, defected to the CIA and provided the CIA and British Intelligence with questionable revelations about operations run by the ŠtB in the West. These included the alleged recruitment, or attempted recruitment, of British members of Parliament and Labour Party leaders. In his book: ‘The Memoirs of an Intelligence Agent’ Frolik claimed that there was a plot to blackmail Edward Heath over his sexual activities. According to Frolík, another ŠtB officer, Jan Mrázek, working out of the Czechoslovakian embassy in London, had devised a plan in the mid-1960s, which aimed to expose Heath to homosexual blackmail. Frolik claimed that Mrázek had prepared a homosexual honeytrap for Heath, in the form of a personal invitation from a handsome (and sexually versatile) young Czech organist, to visit and play the famous organ of the Church of St James in Prague. But Frolik claimed that Heath was tipped off by MI5 at the last moment, and cancelled the visit. Despite these claims, the ŠtB’s archives have no record of any plot to trap Heath, nor do they contain any files on Heath. Thefakeallegation is interesting because it not only drew attention to Edward Heath’s alleged sexual orientation, but also portrayed MI5 in a good light. The strong rebuttals issued by the Current Czech Republic authorities have not stopped right-wing elements of the British press from promoting the campaign of disinformation against Corbyn. So what is behind this fake news? To understand this, it is important to look at the events in the lead up to the 1974 General Election and to an uncanny similarity between the Corbyn smear and one used against Harold Wilson. It may now seem incredible to many people, but 30 years ago there really was an attempt to undermine the Government led by Wilson. One of the prime witnesses in support of that claim is a former Assistant Director of MI5, Peter Wright, who in his bestselling memoires, ‘Spycatcher’, explains how some of his colleagues set about undermining Wilson at the election in February 1974: “In the run-up to the election which, given the level of instability in Parliament, must be due within a matter of months, MI5 would arrange for selective details of the intelligence about leading Labour Party figures, but especially Wilson, to be leaked to sympathetic pressmen. Using our contacts in the press and among union officials, word of the material contained in MI5 files and the fact that Wilson was considered a security risk would be passed around. “Soundings in the office had already been taken, and up to thirty officers had given their approval to the scheme. Facsimile copies of some files were to be made and distributed to overseas newspapers, and the matter was to be raised in Parliament for maximum effect. It was a carbon copy of the Zinoviev letter, which had done so much to destroy the first Ramsay MacDonald Government in 1928”. The Zinoviev letter was a controversial forged document published by the Daily Mail newspaper four days before the general election in 1924. It purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, ordering it to engage in all sorts of seditious activities. Current scholarship sug- gests it probably originated in a Russian monarchist group. In May 1976 Wright’s allegations about the plot were confirmed personally to two BBC reporters, Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose, by Harold Wilson. He told them that the then head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield,

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Panoramaphosa

by Séamus Martin 14 April, 2018

On a recent drive to Cape Town International airport the ‘Rainbow Nation’ was nowhere to be seen. Instead it was like old times when I was the Irish Times Correspondent there in the 1990s. The scene carried a strong message of the work that faces the country’s new President Cyril Ramaphosa. Along the motorway known as ‘Settlers Way’ there was a clear run out of town to deposit the hired car and catch the early-morning flight to Lanseria north of Johannesburg. The other carriageway, the one carrying traffic into the city centre, told an entirely different story. On that side the traffic was chock-a-block and consisted almost in its entirety of white minibuses carrying black workers from the vast townships of Gugulethu, Langa and elsewhere. They were travelling in their thousands to service the needs of the white population of the city and its wealthy suburbs. Earlier that week in Franschhoek, a tourist and wine-producing town , it was also like old times. The restaurants were full of white folk of retirement age being served by waiters from the Black and Cape Coloured Communities. In Johannesburg restaurants things were different but only slightly. There were tables occupied by white clients and tables occupied by black clients but no tables at which blacks and whites dined together. These casual and anecdotal observations don’t tell the full story but they are an indication of how deeply-ingrained apartheid and its legacy have been in South African society. It will take a very long time and a great deal of patience to make significant changes but there is no doubt that the country’s new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, is a patient man. -Nelson Mandela indicated that Ramaphosa was his preferred successor but the African National Congress (ANC) was, and still is, a very complicated organisation and as in most African countries ethnic loyalties played their part in the succession stakes. Ramaphosa is a member of the small Venda nation. His opponent for the vice- presidency and eventual presidency, Thabo Mbeki, was a Xhosa, a group that produced Mandela himself, his political partners Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu as well as the influential churchman Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Nelson Mandela merely indicated a preference for Ramaphosa but his estranged wife Winnie mobilised the ANC Youth League behind Mbeki’s candidacy. Ramaphosa’s time for campaigning had been limited due to his involvement in negotiations on a new Constitution. All these factors: tribes, internal ANC politics and time constraints played their part in his defeat by Mbeki. Ramaphosa had to wait until December of 2017 before he could make his move. Mbeki, a small bookish man with a penchant for the poetry of W B Yeats, fell under the spell of American pseudo-scientists who peddled the theory that HIV did not cause AIDS. The result for South Africa was disastrous but the ANC’s response was predictable. As a former liberation movement, loyalty had been vital to the organisation’s very existence during the struggle against the apartheid regime but it became a hindrance to progress after the party came to power. ANC loyalty kept Mbeki in power amid a catastrophic AIDS epidemic, just as it kept Jacob Zuma in a presidency that smacked of intense corruption and maladministration. After Mbeki had won the nomination to become Mandela’s vice-president, Ramaphosa made a rare rash decision. He refused to attend Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration in Pretoria in 1994. From then on, however, he matured and played a political waiting game, concentrating on business opportunities that made him one of South Africa’s wealthiest men with a personal fortune of more than $550 million. During that time Zuma, a member of the Zulu nation, the country’s largest ethnicity, became entangled in a web of deals with the Guptas, a wealthy Indian business family. Corruption allegations abounded and a new glossary of political terms was spawned, the most prominent of which was ‘State Capture’ suggesting much more than personal corruption. The phrase indicates the belief that the entire State and its institutions had been ‘captured’ by the Guptas and their allies in the ANC. And Zuma was not the only ‘captured’ ANC member. In Parliament, as the popular newspaper City Press recently put it, six ministers sat in what it has been tempted to call the “Gupta Corner” of the Government front bench. Ramaphosa has recaptured the cabinet in a quick reshuffle in order to get moving but by doing so has increased tensions and enmity within his own party. The ANC’s traditional loyalty to its leader in this instance could provide a positive counteraction to its negative effects in the past. He has got off to an energetic start, setting out on early-morning exercises in his Ronald McDonald socks in various parts of the country, ranging from the promenade at the prosperous Cape Town suburb of Sea Point, to the beach at East London; and on a long walk at 5.30 am in the Cape from the black Township of Gugulethu to the ‘coloured’ community of Athlone. In each case these were exercises in building up his profile in local communities as a man of the people instead of his image as a wealthy man who loves fast cars and good wine. In parliament his State of the Nation address was delivered without interruption, a very rare happening in a place where raucous heckling is frequent. In that address he touched on the country’s problems which he has vowed to solve. The education system is in a parlous state. Poverty abounds mainly in non-white areas but also amongst Afrikaans-speaking people who have always had a “poor white” section of their community. Health services need reform. Public transport is almost non-existent with Uber taking over its role especially in white areas. There have been a number of murders of white farmers, and Ramaphosa caused raised eyebrows among them by stating in his address that he would pursue the expropriation, without compensation, of land that had been confiscated from blacks. Right-wing commentators saw their chance and

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Oxymoron

by Michael Smith and Emma Gilleece 13 April, 2018

By 2040 we expect that an additional one million people will live in Ireland, an additional two-thirds of a million people will work here. An ageing population and smaller family size mean that we will need an additional half a million homes to accommodate this growth. Project Ireland 2040 purports to address this. It consists of the National Planning Framework which sets out a spatial strategy for Ireland, to accommodate in a “sustainable and balanced” fashion these significant demographic changes. It is the overall Plan from which other, more detailed plans including city and county development plans and regional strategies will take their lead. Learning from past experience, the NPF is backed up by an infrastructure investment programme, the National Development Plan. This National Development Plan sets out the significant level of investment, almost €116 billion, which will underpin the NPF and drive its implementation over the next ten years. €91 billion in Exchequer funding for public capital investment has been allocated and will be supplemented with substantial investment by commercial State Owned Enterprises. This increased level of resources is expected to move Ireland close to the top of the international league table for public investment, from a low post-crash base. In short, the State’s infrastructure investment – the money – should be guided by and follow the Plan. That is what makes Project Ireland 2040 different and a significant innovation in Irish public policy. What is not different is that it does not have teeth, particularly to stop market-driven development that is incompatible with the vision. Project Ireland 2040 is about enabling all parts of Ireland to achieve their full potential. It seeks to move away from the current, developer-led, business as usual pattern of development, to one informed by the needs and requirements of society. This means seeking to disrupt trends that have been apparent over the last fifty years and have accelerated over the past twenty. It purports to aim to ensure that rather than have excessive population growth focused on Dublin – as is the current trend – that 75% of all population growth occurs in the rest of the country.The immediate priority is to increase overall housing supply to a baseline level of 25,000 homes a year by 2020, and then a likely level of 30-35,000 annually up to 2027. 112,000 households are expected to obtain social housing over the decade. A new €2 billion Urban Regeneration and Development Fund will aim to achieve sustainable growth in Ireland’s five cities – Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway – and other large urban centres, incentivising collaborative approaches to development by public and private sectors. It aims to secure at least 40% of future housing needs by building and renewing within our existing built-up areas, whether they be in the many villages and towns in need of regeneration or in our cities and larger towns where there are also huge opportunities for city and town centre regeneration. Of course the corollary of this is that an unsustainable 60% of future housing need will be met on green-field sites. It targets a level of growth in the Northern and Western, and Southern, Regions combined to at least match that projected for the East and Midland Region. It will support the future growth of Dublin as Ireland’s leading global city of scale, by better managing Ireland’s growth to ensure that more of it can be accommodated within and close to the city. It supports ambitious growth targets to enable the four cities of Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford to each grow by at least 50% to 2040 and to enhance their significant potential to become cities of scale. It recognises the extent to which Sligo in the North West and Athlone in the Midlands fulfil the role of regional centres. It recognises Letterkenny in the context of the North-West Gateway Initiative and Drogheda- Dundalk in the context of the Dublin- Belfast economic corridor. It seeks to strengthen our rural fabric, by reversing town/village and rural population decline, by encouraging new roles and functions for buildings, streets and sites, and supporting the sustainable growth of rural communities, to include development in rural areas. That’s one- off housing. Anyone who follows this will see that there’s not much sense of anything being ruled out, and indeed almost everything seems to be ruled in. That suggests it won’t all happen. And the determinant of what happens and what doesn’t will, as usual, be the market – which will skew to Dublin and its hinterland, and of course one-off housing whose site costs are negligible (for those lucky enough to own rural land) but which pose difficulties for sustainability: economic, social and environmental. It costs more to service far-flung housing with broadband, and everything else. One might quibble with elements of the plan. Dr Edgar Morgenroth – Professor of Economics at DCU and a primary author of the document – said that plans for the €850m motorway between Cork and Limerick would undermine the proper growth of “second tier” cities in Ireland. He rejected claims by An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that the motorway would encourage the cities to grow faster saying it would instead lead to sprawl. He told ‘Morning Ireland’ it was important “to put the infrastructure into the cities, not between them”. “Once you put the motorway between two cities what you’re doing is getting more sprawl. So you’re undermining your own strategy”, he said. Morgenroth also said that building a new motorway undermined a commitment by government to reduce carbon emissions. The NPF will also have “statutory backing” overseen, quasi-independently, by the new Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR) – a key recommendation of the Mahon Tribunal. Unfortunately this particulator Regulator will not regulate but rather advise others whose motivation may be political and short-termist. A regulator who does not regulate. There has been much light-free heat, led by Sinn Féin which even claimed to be seeking a legal opinion, about the failure of the government to put the NPF to a parliamentary vote but instead to include

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Punker

by John Gibbons 12 April, 2018

“Things can only get better”, went the lyrics to the hit by D:Ream which became the anthem of the incoming New Labour government in 1997, fronted by the relentlessly upbeat Tony Blair. Six years later, Blair joined the US in its illegal invasion of Iraq, a move that plunged the entire Middle East into a new era of violent instability and a refugee crisis that today, some 15 years later, shows little signs of abating. Things, it turns out, can also get worse. Statistics can, however, be schooled into presenting a beguilingly different picture of the true state of the world, and the darling of global optimism, psychologist and author Steven Pinker is a skilful inquisitor of data. His scholarship seems to have caught the zeitgeist of the latest wave of techno-optimism, and his data-fuelled Panglossian creed is being enthusiastically embraced by global influencers like billionaire Bill Gates. So excited were the editors of Time magazine that in January, for the first time in its more than 90-year history, it invited Gates to be guest editor of an edition, titled ‘The Optimists’. His editorial was essentially a re-heat of Pinker’s tome, ‘Enlightenment Now’, which, Gates gushed, was his “new favorite book of all time” and “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read”. High praise indeed. Gates’ benediction no doubt helped Pinker’s tome to become a runaway bestseller. What got the Microsoft über-nerd so excited is that: “this is not some naively optimistic view; it’s backed by data”. And Pinker cites data by the chartload, much of it undoubtedly painting an accurate picture of one species doing remarkably well. Life expectancy is a case in point. In just the last 28 years, the number of children dying before their fifth birthday has halved. Women’s and LGBT rights have made remarkable, if uneven, advances in recent decades. Fewer people are living in absolute poverty. Child labour, slavery and sexual abuse have not been eradicated globally but all indicators point towards major progress for millions of people. Catastrophic famines are rarer now; more people now live in democracies (Trump’s populism notwithstanding) than in all of human history and, while there are hundreds of deadly local and regional conflicts around the world, there are, mercifully, no full-scale wars between countries. Were an 18th or 19th century European to survey the region today, they would be astonished to find that the perpetually warring great powers – France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain – have enjoyed more than 75 years of peace, co-operation and prosperity, with just occasional insults now being hurled at one another, where until quite recently, disputes were routinely settled with bloodbaths and pogroms. So, all’s well with the world, it seems. Another contributor to the Time special edition was the estimable investor and billionaire Warren Buffett. He waxed about the astonishing economic progress that swept across the US in the 20th century. No argument there. “The game of economic miracles is in its early innings. Americans will benefit from far more and better ‘stuff’ in the future”, he opined. At this point, it’s time to take a deep breath and a sharp step backwards. How can such heavy-hitters as Pinker, Gates and Buffett have possibly discounted or ignored the ecological train-wreck hurtling ever closer towards humanity? Pinker’s book does indeed grapple – after a fashion – with environmental limits, but it’s hardly encouraging that someone who prides himself on offering numeracy as the cure for biases then launches – unprovoked – into a biased jeremiad against the “quasi-religious ideology” that is what he disparagingly terms “greenism”. For someone regarded as among the world’s great thinkers, this is dull fare indeed. Undeterred, Pinker lashes out at this “apocalyptic creed” which he finds to be “laced with misanthropy”. Quite why it was necessary for Pinker to denigrate environmentalism becomes clear as the narrative unfolds. The vehemence of his anti-environmental rhetoric is in inverse ratio to his ability to address the profound critiques of his beloved ‘progress’ posed by the findings of climate and environmental sciences. He points out – correctly – that as countries get richer, they usually clean up their own rivers and ease local pollution. The fact that rich countries simply outsource much of their dirty heavy industries and ship their wastes to the ‘developing’ world is glossed over. Climate change of course does not respect national borders; faced with the quite over-whelming evidence from the physical sciences (and he frequently claims to be an advocate for science), Pinker baulks at what he dismissively calls the “tragic” view that humanity may well destroy both industrial civilisation and itself in the process. Pinker concedes: “humanity has never faced a problem” like climate change. Rather than ponder this existential threat, he instead brandishes the magic wand of eco-modernism and waves away the gloomy ‘eco- pessimism’ he and his billionaire fan club find so objectionable. He points out that global carbon intensity has been static or declining slightly in recent years. The atmosphere is, however, indifferent to such subtle points. All that matters are the gross numbers, and these continue to climb inexorably. Science tells us we have a finite and rapidly reducing global ‘carbon budget’. The only way of avoiding irreversibly smashing through this budget in the next 10-20 years is drastic, compulsory, permanent and deeply unpleasant cuts in carbon, starting yesterday. Per capita, the greatest carbon polluters on the planet are the global elite, billionaires like Gates and fellow Microsoft founder, Paul Allen. The latter maintains three very large ocean-going yachts at all times, so that one is always fully staffed and equipped close to wherever in the world he might happen to jet. That’s an awful lot of carbon to have to forego. The eight richest billionaires control as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.7 billion people. Imagine then how pleased Gates will have been to read Pinker’s pronouncement that staggering and increasing wealth inequality is really not that big a deal. In common with Trump, Pinker also tries to blame the media for stoking “irrational pessimism” about the state of the world. I have long argued the opposite:

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Wicklow Manager bouncing Bray demolition

by Colum Kenny 11 April, 2018

Village last month reported that Wicklow County Council has agreed to sell a prime town-centre site in Bray to developer Paddy McKillen’s Navybrook Ltd for just €2.6m. The deal is contingent on Navybrook delivering a commercial development by the end of 2019. It is also a controversial sale that has raised questions about value for money. Most Councillors and most residents of Bray want the site developed. Known as the ‘Florentine’, it has been vacant for 20 years, but has also served meanwhile as a convenient car park with 225 spaces. A Council official in January told Wicklow County Council that the site is actually worth more as a paying car park than as a development site. “There’s not huge value in this for developers”, he claimed. But a related effect of the sale of that site to Navybrook is now proving controversial too. For it transpires that Council officials set aside a sum almost equivalent to the Florentine’s sale price to buy and demolish two large inhabited houses at Herbert Road nearby in order to extend another surface car park by up to 100 spaces. The proposed new spaces are seen by some residents as an incentive or subsidy to the purchaser of the Florentine site. The original Council budget for the extra spaces appears to have been only about 10% less than what that Navybrook has agreed to pay for the Florentine. Wicklow County Council might have insisted on any purchaser of the Florentine erecting a multi-storey with 356 car spaces, instead of the 256 now planned there. Had Wicklow County Council insisted on 100 more car spaces at the Florentine, it would still have been fewer than had been required as a condition, when planning permission was granted for the Florentine site to an earlier owner. One previous planning permission for an earlier proposed development on the Florentine site, one that included apartments, had required 417 parking spaces. Wicklow County Council acquired the site at a bargain-basement price during the recent crash. It believes that the Florentine will yield it commercial rates of up to half a million euros annually when completed. The County Council itself sought planning permission for the Florentine before selling the site to Navybrook. The inspector for An Bord Pleanála pointed out that objectors had stated that the Council was not making sufficient allowance for car parking, with provision being promised for just 256 spaces. The inspector’s report included a statement that applying car-parking standards in the, then-current, Wicklow county development plan 2010-2016 would have meant that “504 spaces would be required”. But Wicklow County Council insisted that 256 spaces were enough, and An Bord Pleanála accepted the Council’s assurances. Permission was granted last year. Just one month later the Council was engaged nearby in private negotiations to buy St Paul’s Lodge and another big house, both adjacent to the existing surface car park on Herbert Road which is an area zoned for mixed use. Local residents were not informed, but the prospective purchasers were told that Wicklow County Council wanted to buy their houses, and that the purpose for which the Council wanted them was additional parking. The owners first sought €1.5m each (as opposed to the€765,000 valuation that the Council’s own surveyor put on one of the houses last year). In the end, only the sale of St Paul’s Lodge went ahead, for €913,000 including the vendor’s legal and other costs (such as furniture removal to Spain). The Council thus acquired an Edwardian home and large garden that officials hope to clear for up to 47 hard-surface car spaces. Bray residents (including myself ) oppose the Council’s proposal to destroy St Paul’s Lodge, on architectural and social grounds among others, pointing out that it was reportedly designed by the architect of Farmleigh House, and that destroying family homes during a housing shortage pushes up the cost of new homes for everyone. Hearing rumours of the Council’s wish to destroy part of their neighbourhood, residents tried between June and October last year to elicit information from Wicklow County Council. We were told by the Council simply that, “We are examining all aspects of parking in the town at this time”. In fact Council officials were then intent on closing the purchase of St Paul’s Lodge as quickly as possible. Council officials concluded the purchase of St Paul’s Lodge unconditionally, despite the fact that it was bought solely “in order to raze it to the ground and build a car park on the site”, as the vendor’s solicitor put it last July. It is an extraordinary fact of current law that Council officials have great freedom to spend public money on acquisitions without the approval of elected representatives. However, approval is required to demolish or dispose of a building, and the process of securing approval in such a case requires public consultation under a provision known as ‘Part 8’. But what kind of consultation? In this case Wicklow County Council ignored expressions of concern by local residents and inserted no provision in the contract of sale contingent on Council approval. The Council closed the sale without first completing the consultation concerning possible demolition. This has put Councillors under pressure to approve demolition. The house could be put back on the market. There is a strong demand for such houses in the immediate vicinity, and at least one older and bigger house nearby (in bad shape) was recently bought and substantially renovated. But the fact that officials paid above what their surveyor considered to be the house’s normal market value could leave the Council out of pocket from any resale. Residents had their request for a meeting ignored by Council management, and have been forced to take an appeal to the Office of the Information Commissioner to get some documents eventually released that reveal details. The first site notices of planned demolition were not clearly visible from the road and none at all was put on the property of St Paul’s itself. A new notice was published when

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Avoiding League Relegation

by Desmond Fennell 9 April, 2018

In Ireland, North and South. In the last 50 years no pub or shop has changed its language from English to Irish. In recent years, in the last pockets of the Gaeltacht, the young people have been switching to English. Clearly, the time has come for the Gaelic League, Conradh na Gaeilge, to take its last, this time decisive, action to save Irish, our ancestral language, from becoming a revered dead language like Latin, and instead keep it for the future spoken, written and joked in by thousands. The Gaelic League’s original aim in its glory days when it nourished the mind of the Irish Revolution was to make Irish again the language of the entire nation. After Independence, as the League realised that this was not going to happen, its aim became to preserve the Gaeltacht and to ensure that through the schools system and its own classes many thousands in the rest of Ireland would be able to speak and write Irish. That last aim has succeeded and it is now time to reap the harvest and put it to use. Many individuals, North and South, in many different occupations are now able to speak and write Irish well, and because they are in many different occupations they possess the Irish language more fully than the merely rural Gaeltacht did. In many cases, North and South, these persons amount to families where Irish is the family language. The League must seek out, for a start, 1500 of these people from the general population North and South and the Gaeltacht remnants; people who would pledge to speak and write Irish with each other and, if they have children, as their family language. Each of them above the age of twelve would wear a discreet badge to identify themselves to others. That for a start. Then each year, the elected committee of this community, which might call itself Na Caomhnóirí (Guardians), would hold an all-Ireland rally to coincide with Oireachtas na Gaeilge. Spaced through-out the year. Four regional committees would organise provincial gatherings. At these various coming togethers, they would discuss and decide what joint ventures – publications etc, – they would engage in. Na Caomhnóirí would call for new applicants and hold an annual entrance examination as a big public event. That annual event would give the secondary Gaelscoileanna and the university courses in Irish a concrete and prestigious goal to aim at. The entrance exam would be held each year until the number of members would reach 10,000. In this way, whatever else happens, the future of Irish as a spoken and written language would be assured into the future – into the new civilisation which will succeed the disintegrating European civilisation. And in that achievement the Gaelscoileanna, as feeder schools, would have a concrete goal to aim at. Unless action along these lines is taken, the so-called Irish language movement will plough ahead without any concrete goal to aim at and with diminishing support from a State that has lost interest. Probably TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta would continue for a while to broadcast and Irish would be spoken occasionally in the Dáil and as a cúpla focal at formal dinners. Latin, too, has its news media on the internet, and English football results are broadcast on radio in Latin. At important ceremonies of the Vatican and of many universities formal Latin is spoken. But because Latin is not spoken and joked in every day by a substantial living community, it is reckoned to be a dead language. To save Irish from becoming that and the League from becoming a historical curiosity, it is necessary to act decisively now in the manner I have outlined. Desmond Fennell Dr Desmond Fennell’s latest book is his autobiography ‘About Being Normal: My Life in Abnormal Circumstances’ (Somerville Press).

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The Right to have Rights

by Seamus Deane 8 April, 2018

Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the right to have rights’ was coined in her 1958 book ‘The Human Condition’. The condition of being stateless, of being a displaced person, which began its modern history in Europe with World War I, has been experienced since by untold millions who have had to listen to the claim that ‘human rights’ are universal and fundamental – but not for them. Once we had the glamorous figure of the cosmopolitan, the person who belonged to the world, the global community; that figure has been displaced by the refugee, who belongs nowhere, but is to be found everywhere in the paradigmatic settings of the modern and contemporary world – the prison camp, the internment zone, the refugee camp, the ghetto, the jail, the arena of suspension where people live in a place that is always outside the country that it is inside. Arendt pointed out that the creation of such places and conditions is a political decision, not just a terrible catastrophe. It is the prevailing form of the penal colony, the new home that we have built to house the theory of human rights. Since Arendt, and most especially in the indebted work of Giorgio Agamben, it has become clear that the concentration camp of the twentieth century was not some historical anomaly, but that it is actually one of the paradigm sites of Western modernity. The internment camp is a zone of suspension, of ‘rendition’, a place that is always outside the country it is inside – Guantanamo is the best-known example, although there many such places – our best- known example was The Maze in Northern Ireland. Those entrapped there expose the hollowness of any claim to universal human rights, to having rights just on the basis of being human. Arendt said it plainly: the refugee, the displaced person, has regularly been denied the right to have rights. The denial is a political decision. It takes its most popular form in the denial that there are any ‘political prisoners’ in the denying country, although enemy countries are full of them. Its political nature has been counterpointed more clearly since 1948, since the United Nations began its series of declarations of Human Rights, unabated since that date; rights of men, women, children, of minorities, of the disabled, of all indeed who can be characterised as having been ‘excluded’, which means that even the ‘poor’, a constituency which enlarges globally by the hour, faster than ever since the almost perpendicular rise of neo-liberalism in the decades before and after the financial crash. Reading these rights, as ‘declared’ (whatever that means), in that bland United Nations universalistic rhetoric, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Such noble vacuities, such actual atrocities – produced by the same state systems that have prevailed since 1945. It was part of Arendt’s long argument, which began in 1943 with her essay “We Refugees” (about Jewish migrants who had become ‘stateless’, that condition in which they had no rights) that asked why European civilisation had so successfully produced the barbarism that made statelessness pandemic and human rights so unavailable to the millions of ‘displaced persons’ of World War II. Part of her answer was that this barbarism was so successful precisely because it was so concealed within or behind the declarations of universal rights and justice which the West, in the case of the American and the French Revolutions, had made central to the powerful ideology of what mutated into Western ‘freedom’. Arendt’s question then was: how could such an ideology be developed (as through the UN declarations) and simultaneously traduced (as in American foreign policy)? It is too feeble an explanation to put it down to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy on this scale occurs when the people who most sincerely believe in the peaceful principles are those who most regularly betray them in violent action. The British spent three centuries in perfecting their international reputation as hypocrites, a nation that believed itself to be peaceful even as it waged endless wars. Now that role has been assumed, largely, by the Americans. But, to achieve world domination is one thing; world hegemony is another. That’s what the World Wars were fought for. Arendt achieved notoriety with her reporting on the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which was published in book form as ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’, where she developed the central figure of the ‘desk-murderer’, the bureaucrat who administered the death-camps. But her key point was that this was a show-trial, that pretended to be an example of universal justice triumphing over universal evil. Rather, it was in fact a national victory of the Israelis over their Nazi persecutors. In this exemplary instance, we are shown how the language of universalism can be used as a disguise for a state’s policies. The jurist who had the ambition to do that for a successful Nazi state, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), described in his ‘Nomos of the Earth’ (1950), how the European system of international law had been replaced by an American one, with the UN as its legislature and the International Tribunal or Court as its executive. In effect, the language of universal rights was used to ratify the aims of American foreign policy; Nuremberg, Tokyo, Damascus, the Hague were, like the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, elaborate pretences that something objectively true was being defended from the current version of sectarian betrayal – war criminality, terrorism, the new terms of ‘war crime’ and its flourishing neighbourly companions, such as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Danilo Zolo has demonstrated in Victor’s Justice how the Kosovo war of 1999, that infamous intervention (to be followed by interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan , Libya and elsewhere, saving the ‘people’ of those countries for democracy, largely by killing and dispossessing them), with its International Court at the Hague, which could try anybody but Americans, is the most egregious example so far of how the language of universal rights has been perverted

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Keeping up with the changing times

by Séamus Martin 7 April, 2018

Those journalists of my vintage who have seen ‘The Post’ on the big screen were struck by memories of the ‘good old days’ of journalism and for once the term ‘good old days’ actually rings true. There were great performances from Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham the paper’s owner and publisher, Tom Hanks as the editor Ben Bradlee but what struck me most forcefully was how things have changed in the newspaper business since The Washington Post and the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. ‘The Post’’s newsroom in the movie would be familiar to journalists of my age but I wonder how many of those whose by-lines appear today would have recognised it. There were clunky machines called typewriters on the desks. Reporters battered the typewriter keys to produce their articles. The occasional expletive thundering above the rat-tat-tat of the typewriters gave the impression of being on a battlefield. The resultant reams of paper went to sub-editors (copy editors in the US) to be edited and then entered the special world of highly-unionised printers. Next came the clatter of the linotype machines where the articles were cast into slugs of metal before being assembled into page forms. There was a foundry, there were big paper-cutting machines and finally from the news-room the comforting roar of the presses could be heard to confirm that the first edition was on its way. Now there are no typewriters and no copy-paper. There are no linotype machines and no foundries. The comfortable roar of the presses is not heard in the newsroom because the presses are now sited at the edge of the city. Today’s newsrooms are quiet and far more reminiscent of Banks than Battlefields but despite the outward calmness certain battles continued after the change from hot-metal to electronic publishing. In my early days in The Irish Press, Independent Newspapers and The Sunday Tribune I was barely aware of these as I was learning my trade as a reporter and, at one stage, as a sub-editor. The battles took place between two sides of management: the Commercial Side, known as ‘The Suits’ and the Editorial Side known as ‘The Hacks’. The Suits did everything they could to influence the newspaper’s content and The Hacks did everything they could to stop them. In ‘The Post’ the clear winners at the end of the day were The Hacks. The managing director, the board members, the businessmen, the accountants, the lawyers and the other Suits all tried to use everything in their power to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers. In the end the decision fell to Katharine Graham the owner and publisher. She was no Suit. Although the movie does not mention it she was trained and had worked as a journalist. She decided to publish the Pentagon Papers. As I rose through the ranks in The Irish Times I became more and more aware of the battle between the Hacks and the Suits and eventually became a soldier in the struggle. The set-up in the The Irish Times in my time was different from that of The Washington Post in the movie. There was no owner and no publisher. The paper was controlled by a Trust similar to that which runs the Guardian but closer still to that of US Newspaper The Tampa Bay Times which is owned by the non-profit organisation The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. There was a strong commercial man in the form of the chairman of the board Major Thomas Bleakely McDowell, an Edwardian-style gentleman with sculpted hair and a waxed moustache. He had his foibles but he stayed well clear of interference in editorial matters. He was not technically a Suit although he wore one of pinstriped bespoke elegance and authority. He was simply The Major. There was a strong man on the editorial side too. Robert John Douglas Gageby was known by all as Mr Gageby to his face and The Editor in general conversation. To describe him as a Hack would have been to diminish his true stature but there was no doubt as to whose side he was on. When a big story broke and space was too tight to do it justice he had been known to pull advertisements from the paper to make room. Two of my experiences with him come to mind. When I became what is known nowadays as Features Editor (News Focus Editor was the official title) I was approached by two journalists, Maev Ann Wren and John Stanley, who wanted to run a series of articles illustrating the true nature of the real-estate business. I decided it should be published in the knowledge that the Suits would raise hell since property advertising was a major, if not the major, source of the paper’s advertising income. After the first article of the series appeared I happened to be in the Editor’s office when the Managing Director arrived to complain. He was sent away with a flea in his ear. The other occasion was when a businessman threatened to stop advertising because of articles I had written on the issue of sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. The businessman asked for a meeting with The Editor. The meeting took place and when it ended I received a phone call from Mr Gageby asking to meet him across the road which was a euphemism for the nearest pub. My worries on the subject were assuaged with the following words: “People advertise in the Irish Times because it’s good business to do so”. Any businessmen who would remove their advertising because they didn’t like someone’s articles would, he said, simply cut off their noses to spite their face. My articles opposing contacts with apartheid South Africa continued to be published and the businessman’s advertisements continued to appear. When Douglas Gageby retired as editor his place was taken by Conor Brady, the first person from the Irish Roman Catholic tradition to become Editor of the Irish Times since it was founded in 1859. Brady and I did not