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    Closure through Disclosure

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    It is not a question of whether there was a Garda smear campaign against Sergeant Maurice McCabe. Rather, it is a matter of who planned and orchestrated it. For the first time since his prolonged agony began in 2008, McCabe was given the opportunity to speak publicly of his mistreatment by Garda management and some of his colleagues when he gave evidence at the Disclosures Tribunal in Dublin Castle on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th March last. It was not new but it was devastating. Leave aside the inevitable conflicts and confusion that have emerged as to what instructions the former Garda commissioners, Martin Callinan and Noirin O’Sullivan, did or did not make in order to discredit McCabe. The simple fact is that McCabe was the victim of a culture within the force that does down any member who does not abide by its code of loyalty. Not loyalty to the truth or the uniform but to protecting their own at all costs. When it came to speaking out about the abuse of the penalty points system by probably hundreds of gardaí, from the rank of commissioner down, McCabe crossed the thin blue line. His efforts to highlight the fact that members routinely cancelled penalty points for family, friends, politicians, journalists and Garda colleagues lit the fuse which ultimately led to a systematic campaign to destroy his career and his life. It is not so long ago that a garda who reported or charged another member for drink driving was committing a hangable offence, for the one doing his duty. It was beyond the bounds as it meant that the guilty drunkard would inevitably lose his job on conviction. So it did not happen. In McCabe’s case, when he discovered how the internal Garda computer system, Pulse, was regularly abused to destroy evidence which could otherwise lead to the conviction of hundreds or thousands of people for drink driving or other offences, he became the target. He was wrongly accused of failing to detain a man who went on to commit murder. He was blamed for disclosing a litany of failures by gardaí in the station in Bailieborough County Cavan when he was sergeant in charge in 2007. As was his duty, he had informed his district officer, Superintendent Mick Clancy, about the low standards of policing at his station and in particular the failure of members to investigate crimes, to execute warrants or to keep proper files. He found himself accused of heinous crimes including the sexual abuse of the daughter of a colleague. When he was cleared of this charge on the instruction of the DPP, he found that it resurfaced time and again, not least whenever he blew the whistle on wrong doing within the force. He found that complaints he was making to more senior officers were not being accurately reported and, in some cases, clearly distorted. On one notable occasion a reference he made to making a complaint “to Clancy” was wrongly described by an officer as McCabe making a complaint “against Clancy”. If he had not secretly taped this meeting with then Inspector, now Superintendent, Noel Cunningham, he would have been, in his own words, “buried”. When he brought his concerns to the confidential Garda recipient who was expected to deal with such matters ‘confidentially’, all hell broke loose. It was then that the orchestrated campaign against him commenced from the very top. It may be a coincidence that among those who, it is alleged, had their penalty points quashed was Martin Callinan, who, it is claimed, was determined to “bury” McCabe. Another was the Irish Independent journalist, Paul Williams who, in April 2014, revived the story of McCabe’s alleged abuse of a garda colleague’s daughter which the DPP had dismissed back in 2006. Williams was among those named in the Dáil as having had his penalty points quashed. Worse still, Callinan was accused of suggesting that McCabe had sexually abused his own children. Callinan had described the whistleblowing of McCabe and another garda, John Wilson, as “disgusting” behaviour when the then commissioner appeared before the Public Accounts Committee in January 2014. The following day Callinan met PAC chairman, John McGuinness TD, in the car park of the Red Cow hotel on the Naas Road in Dublin where the commissioner said, according to the politician, that McCabe couldn’t be trusted and had abused his own children and his nieces. In 2016, the former Garda press officer, Dave Taylor, told McCabe that he had been instructed by Callinan to destroy him by leaking the false child sexual-abuse claims far and wide. “He has to be buried”, Callinan had told Taylor. Then assistant commissioner, Noirin O’Sullivan was the “pusher” of this strategy. That is what McCabe claims he was told by Taylor. Taylor appears to have retracted some of his claims while McGuinness is supporting McCabe’s sensational allegations against Callinan. The smear campaign which was known to politicians, journalists and many members of the Garda, happened. It only remains to be seen who was ultimately responsible for it.   By Frank Connolly.

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    It’s Time For Leaving Cert Reform

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    It’s that time of year again. The CAO applications deadline has just passed and the mock exams are about to begin for almost 60,000 sixth year students. It’s also the season for commentary on the Leaving Certificate from employers, those in the media and staff in further and higher education institutions. The main criticism centres on how the exam narrows student experience of teaching and learning and prevents them from developing the analytical skills or the ability to think critically that they will need in the workplace, further education and in wider society. The combination of a high-stakes exam and a hugely competitive points system means there is little emphasis on a more rounded education. Supporters of the existing Leaving Certificate model say that it is a level playing field for students who, regardless of gender, ethnicity or social class background, have an equal chance of success. The evidence for this suggests otherwise, as the following research shows.   What do we know about the Leaving Certificate? The ESRI’s Post-Primary Longitudinal Study is the most in-depth study of student experiences in second-level education in Ireland. The research followed a cohort of 900 students in 12 case-study schools from entry to secondary school to completion over the period 2001 to 2008. The schools were selected to reflect key factors in how students experience their education, such as subject choice, streaming, and how much support was available to them. By zeroing in on the sixth-year cohort, using a combination of questionnaires and focus-groups, we gained a deep insight into student experiences of school in the months leading up to the Leaving Certificate exam. In any discussions around Senior Cycle reform, the findings are central to understanding the impact of high-stakes exams, such as the Leaving Certificate, on different groups of students. Here are some of the most important findings of our study that offer some guidance of what to avoid if or when the time comes to overhaul the system.   Educational Inequality High-stakes exams such as the Leaving Certificate reproduce social inequalities because of their disproportionately negative impact on students from lower-income homes. Many argue that students from middle-class households are more familiar with the dominant culture, and so they fare better academically. By contrast, the mismatch between home and school cultures is a disadvantage for working-class students. Our sample of students shows that their experience of their final year leading up to their terminal exam varies according to social class. In sixth year, students begin to find their work more challenging. To cope with this, more middle-class students increase the time spent on their homework and study, with some students spending over four hours per night on homework. Middle-class students are also more likely to take grinds or private tuition outside school to improve their results. In other words, these students appear to use their cultural and financial capital to invest in activities which help them to succeed. Figure 1 shows a clear social class gradient in taking grinds, with extra tuition being much more prevalent among all professional social class groups and farmer groups. The evidence clearly shows social reproduction, where the most privileged consolidate their position at the expense of the chances of social mobility of those at the bottom. Wealthier sixth-year students have more access to the cultural resources that are needed to make the transition to higher education. Even when we take into account prior performance in school, it is clear that attending a predominantly workingclass school will diminish your chances of going on to higher education. The interviews with sixthyear students highlight how those in middle-class schools tend to draw on insider knowledge gained from siblings and other family members in making their decisions about colleges and types of courses. In contrast, students in more working-class schools whose families have no history of higher education are more reliant on advice from guidance counsellors, teachers and their friends in making a decision. These findings point to the importance of the institution of the school in providing relevant guidance and advice to students who most need it.   Stress and the Leaving Certificate The escalation in workload and squeeze on free time have a particular impact on young people’s ability to cope, resulting in high levels of exam related pressure, stress and worry. Many reduce their participation in sport, even though those who continued to take part in regular schoolbased sports have lower stress levels than their peers. Girls experience much higher stress levels than boys, with almost 40 per cent of girls reporting losing sleep with worry and over 50 per cent feeling constantly under strain or pressure in the months leading up to the Leaving Certificate (Figure 2). Female students were also more likely to report losing confidence in themselves and having problems concentrating. The findings also show that stress may be passed from one student to another, becoming contagious among particular groups of (often high-performing) girls. One of the main drivers of this stress was the young people’s own desire to do well. Some of those interviewed spoke about the importance of the Leaving Certificate for their future, believing “it’s the biggest exam you’ll ever do in your life’ (Lang Street, co-ed school, working-class intake) and others felt ‘your whole life depends on it” (Wattle Street, boys’ school, mixed intake). But certain aspects of schooling also influence stress. Students frequently said that teachers who constantly emphasised the importance of the exams were a source of pressure. One student felt that “[teachers] just tell us how bad we are getting on instead of how good we are getting on, you know what I mean. That’s all they do” (Barrack Street, girls’ school, working-class intake). Describing their lack of free-time, another student said that “even the weekends, they’re telling you that you have to study the whole weekend as well” (Barrack Street, girls’ school, working-class intake). Interestingly, students who received more praise or positive feedback from their teachers had lower levels of stress, while some

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    Nama, the drama

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    Nama was inevitably going to be controversial. Set up to acquire loans from the Irish banks that had recklessly provided the finance for an almighty property boom and needing to be rescued when the inevitable happened, Nama was the vehicle created to work through getting some of the money back. In 2009 the property market in Ireland had more than crashed, it had ceased. With no credit available from broken banks , many businesses in existential trouble and incomes squeezed by higher taxes and government cutbacks, a shock hit the economy denuding the resources and confidence needed for property transactions. The concept behind Nama was to take the time to deal with the property issues and avoid all the collateral supporting bank loans becoming valueless in a market with no buyers. Time and a structured approach would allow the physical property assets backing the toxic loans to be sold in a recovering property market and mitigate losses. So called ‘bad banks’ had been established elsewhere in the wake of property busts but nothing on the scale of Nama. If the market was to get going again to facilitate this strategy, it would need brave foreign investment. In crisis there is always opportunity for some, and there are organisations whose very reason to exist is to exploit misfortune. It was Nama’s job to create the conditions where these organizations could come to Ireland and buy. In a great read about what happened as Nama did the necessary, Frank Connolly’s book ‘Namaland’ [Gill 2017: €16.99] does a good job of telling the story so far. Connolly states in the introduction that it did not work as planned and the book sets out to show that. Nama is seen as a secretive defensive organisation with an unwillingness to allow a sufficient degree of scrutiny, and there is a sense that it therefore must be hiding skeletons. Secrecy was always going to be part of the Nama story however, and no account could be as revealing as many who buy this book in the hope of exposures would like. Lending agreements are confidential and borrowers are entitled to their privacy even when loans are distressed. The business of Nama was inevitably going to be veiled, and full transparency was never going to be a feature of the deals Nama did. This in itself created a suspicion and a curiosity. Using journalistic sources Connolly has provided the reader with a coherent narrative often focused on individuals and their interactions; deals were done transferring fortunes to funds with names like Cerebus and CarVal that have become familiar to us all. Clearly Connolly did enormous research and a great job of putting together a comprehensible chronicle of events along the way. In my view, Nama and those who worked there, with what I think are very few exceptions, come out of all this pretty well; it could have gone very badly. There was the danger that Nama could have been a blanket for indigenous cronyism with its power and resources used to enrich insiders and the connected. This book does not make the case that this is what happened. A grave danger for Ireland at the time of the creation of Nama was that foreign funds would come to see the property market in Ireland as being rigged for insiders and political cronies. Certainly the size of Nama relative to the market was an issue. A functioning and transparent property market was needed to speed recovery, and Nama made a significant contribution to recreating a vibrant market in Irelandwhich in turn helped speed the recovery. This is why Nama was set up, and the recovered market is testimony to it having worked much as intended. Connolly’s coverage of Project Eagle and the dealings around it is very interesting. Some of the players on the fringes of Nama in the North are shown in very poor light and certainly there are questions there. The nexus of real estate, serious money, business and politics in a small and uneasy area such as Northern Ireland is covered extensively. Local politics can be troublesome for big funds and certainly they were something of a minefield for Nama. The story of Nama is not yet over. In some years it will be examined by serious academics from both a political and financial perspective. I think it will come to be seen to have done the job it was set up to do. By any standards it was an enormous and difficult organization to operate. People working in Nama must have been under very great pressure and were certainly not popular, often wrongly seen as property market insiders with comprised intentions. If anything, this book will help readers understand the complexity of what was done. Nama was not inevitable and nor was it the only way toxic loans could be dealt with. It was a political choice. We can never know if another approach would have been better. We do know that the property market recovery was quicker than most expected. Certainly Nama made a contribution to that.   Tom Dunne is head of the School of Surveying and Construction Management at the Dublin Institute of Technology

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    NIhillism

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    It is forty three years since the now notorious Glenanne Gang murdered three members of the Miami Showband in July 1975. Two of the band survived -Stephen Travers and Des Lee. The Gang was made up of serving RUC and UDR personnel, plus members of the UVF. The leader on the night, the infamous Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson, was at the time in command of the UVF’s mid-Ulster Brigade. He was an ex-British-army soldier. Journalist David McKittrick attributes as many as 50 killings to Jackson, making him one of the most lethal, and most secretive, serial killers of the late 20th century you’ve probably never heard of. The gang is said to have been responsible for 120 murders, including those of the Reavey brothers and the O’Dowd family in January 1976. the next night the IRA murdered ten innocent Protestants at Kingsmill, another sectarian obscenity in Ulster’s murder triangle. Jackson was linked to the Miami Showband killings by the now defunct historical enquiries team in its 2011 report on the 1975 massacre. Jackson’s finger prints were found on the homemade silencer of a Luger gun used in the attack. The report also stated that Jackson claimed he had been “tipped off’” while in custody in May 1976 by an RUC Detective Superintendent, and that he “… should clear as there was a wee job up the country that I would be done for and there was no way out of it for me”. But Jackson didn’t “clear” anywhere; instead he went on to kill many more. Despite widespread rumours about Jackson’s killing career at the time and his virtual impunity from punishment, he remained practically untouched by the forces of law until his death in 1998, apart from a seven-year conviction in January 1981, of which he served only two. That may mean he spent two weeks per killing, in jail. John Weir a former member of the RUC and member of the gang, who was convicted for murder in 1980, called him probably the “best operator” during the troubles. In 1999 Weir made detailed allegations in an affidavit about security-force collusion, making disturbing suggestions about how Jackson and the Glenanne gang’s murderous rampage was not only known of, but also tolerated by, the security forces. Weir’s allegations were regarded by the 2006 Cassel’s report, an independent panel of international lawyers commissioned by the Pat Finucane Centreto look into collusion in the North, as credible. Others found him believable too, including the BBC’s ‘Spotlight’. The fundamental question though is: were Jackson and the Glenanne gang not only tolerated but actively orchestrated by elements of the British intelligence and security apparatus (MI5, Military Intelligence, RUC Special Branch) as a proxy counter-terror gang? For years it has been alleged that Jackson was a protected agent of the RUC’s Special Branch. The 2003 Barron report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, quoting British army whistleblower Colin Wallace, said as much. In his affidavit Weir implicated RUC Chief Inspector Harry Breen, who served as a sergeant in Newry and Banbridge in the 1970sas having direct knowledge of the Glenanne gang. More incredibly still, he claimed that Breen was supplying weapons to the gang through a far-right loyalist organisation called Down Orange Welfare. In a 2015 documentary on collusion BBC journalist Daragh McIntyre claimed that, while discussing the Glenanne gang, Jackson was “protected by one of the most senior police men in Northern Ireland”. Breen was later killed by the IRA in 1989. If he was referring to Breen, and given the geography, timing and Weir’s claims, it is very plausible that he was, it is an extraordinary allegation worth stating again – clearly. Was one of the most notorious sectarian killers in the troubles protected as a strategic asset by one of the most senior policemen in Northern Ireland ? Whatever about the alleged protection, Jackson enjoyed practical immunity from prosecution all through his killing years during the 1970s and 1980s. Why that was the case has. But more importantly, the deeper question is who or what was protecting, or directing, or encouraging, the senior policeman ? As early as 1974 Colin Wallace, quoted again in the Barron report, said that Jackson and other leading Mid-Ulster UVF members “…were working closely with SB (Special Branch) and Int. (Military Intelligence) at that time”. Journalist Paul Footand Yorkshire TV’s 1993 documentary ‘The Hidden Hand – The Forgotten Massacre’ both suggested convincingly that Jackson and his gang, with members of the Belfast UVF, perpetrated the Dublin Bombings a year before the Miami massacre from their Glenanne base. The final report into the bombings published in March 2004 signposted obliquely that, “The possibility that the involvement of such army or police officers was covered-up at a higher level cannot be ruled out; but it is unlikely that any such decision would ever have been committed to writing”. As many have also pointed out, it is inconceivable that James Mitchell’s farm in Glenanne, South Armagh, the gang’s well known and notorious epicentre, would not have been under constant surveillance given what was common knowledge about the gang at the time in security and intelligence circles. Mitchell was an RUC reservist. John Weir claimed that the house was constantly watched by both RUC special branch and military intelligence: “basically everybody knew what was going on there…military intelligence was more often in the house than I was” yet to be seriously rebutted. Unfortunately the Barron report was signicantly handicapped from the beginning in its search for the truth. The British government is said to have over 65,000 potentially relevant files about the bombings, of which only a handful were ever handed over to the Inquiry. Writing of the murky, devious and labyrinth world of counter-insurgency in the North, Wallace, in a letter dated August 1975, printed in the Irish Mail on Sunday, on 10 December, 2006, stated that, ”it would appearthat loyalist paramilitaries and Int/SB members have formed some sort of pseudo gangs in an attempt to get paramilitaries on both sides to kill each other, and at the same time, prevent any future

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    Eschatology, or the study of the end of times

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    Eschatology, or the study of the end of times, is at least as old as the written word. The concept spans many of the world’s major religions, usually referring to some future day of judgement or reckoning. Beyond the realms of theology, eschatology as a concept is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, especially after the tempestuous and chaotic first twelve months of the Trump regime. In this time, almost everything we once took for granted about inherent stability, even inevitability, of western democracies and the robustness of our institutions has been shaken profoundly. As if to add to the sense of impending calamity, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock for 2018 forward in late January– to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has ever been to the witching hour. The authors of the Bulletin excoriated the US government’s reckless nuclear brinksmanship, but poured special scorn on its efforts to derail international climate diplomacy. “Avowed climate denialists have been installed in top positions at the EPA and other agencies, and the administration has announced its plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In its rush to dismantle rational climate and energy policy, it has ignored scientific fact and well-founded economic analyses”. The Bulletin was particularly scathing of the role played by climate deniers in stymieing action. “Despite the sophisticated disinformation campaign run by climate denialists, the unfolding consequences of an altered climate are a harrowing testament to an undeniable reality: The science linking climate change to human activity is sound. The world continues to warm as costly impacts mount, and there is evidence that overall rates of sea level-rise are accelerating – regardless of protestations to the contrary”. The toxic wave of US science denialism has swept right across the Atlantic. As previously reported in Village, last May saw the first meeting in Dublin of the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) a denialist group with opaque membership and funding sources. February sees it host its fifth meeting in just 10 months, featuring a fringe Italian academic with strong ties to US neoliberal think tanks, the latest in a procession of climate contrarians to present new (thoroughly debunked) ‘findings’ to an eager audience mostly of Irish contrarians and deniers. Their agenda appears to be to hobble effective Irish government response to the existential threats posed by climate change. Their standard operating method is to cherry-pick data, float red herrings and exaggerate uncertainties in the scientific consensus often as political cover on behalf of special-interest groups, for continued inaction. Above all, groups like the ICSF are engaging in ‘post-truth’ assaults on reason itself. A recent edition of New Scientist magazine stated baldly: “There are disturbing hints that western civilization is starting to crumble”. The article quotes intriguing research from Yale university, which examined the two broad modes of human thought: 1) fast, automatic and inflexible, and 2) slower, more analytical and flexible thinking. As flexible thinkers within society solve our various problems, from transport to energy, with complex technologies, this relieves the great bulk of the population from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking ensues as the population, in a sense, dumbs down, since technologies can create the beguiling illusion that life is magically simple. One of the psychologists who developed this theory, Jonathan Cohen, suggests this may help solve one of the great puzzles regarding societies heading for catastrophe: why do they persist with their self-destructive behaviour, in the face of overwhelming evidence of future harms? “The train had left the station”, according to Cohen, and the forward-thinking, analytical types were no longer at the controls. As flexible thinkers within society solve problems with complex technologies, the population is relieved from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking and dumbing-down, ensue Separately, computer modelling carried out at the University of Maryland in 2014 examining the mechanisms that can lead to local or even global system collapse, identified two key elements. The first, unsurprisingly, is ecological strain. The panoply of chronic environmental stressors, including resource depletion, widespread pollution, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are generally well understood, at least in expert circles. What was less widely known was the systemic risk posed by economic stratification or, in plain language, the rich getting richer at everyone else’s expense. In the scenario modelled, “elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour”, according to author Rachel Nuwer. Eventually, she argues, “the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities”. She notes that the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Here, extreme inequality and ecological stresses converge to form a toxic cocktail capable of crashing our civilisation into the dust. US academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published the influential book: ‘The Upside of Down’ in 2005. It presciently anticipated the global economic crash that occurred some three years later. The financial crisis was, he wrote, one of “five tectonic stresses which are accumulating deep beneath the surfaces of our societies”. Others include population, energy, pollution and resource exhaustion; and climate system stress. The 2008 economic crisis, along with more recent shocks, such as Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 can, according to Homer-Dixon, be seen as a series of non-linearities, or sudden and unexpected jolts to the assumed world order. These may be viewed as a random pattern of tremors presaging a truly global catastrophe, a word that derives from the Greek, meaning ‘to overturn’. To view catastrophe as imminent rather than already occurring requires a deeply anthropocentric perspective. The sequestration, plunder and simplification of the

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    €140m to clean up one of Ireland’s 450 contaminated sites

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    Silvermines, which the government spent €11m remediating in the 1990s, was back in the news in May 2017 as three cows were found dead of lead poisoning. A new inter-agency group involving the HSE, Department of Agriculture, Tipperary County Council, Environment Protection Agency, Teagasc, Irish Water, The Food Safety Authority and the Department of the Environment has since been set up again to address this new situation. It may be of little comfort to local farmers who find restrictions placed on their farms again and to local residents concerned about public health that Silvermines has had significant remediation already. At the same time as this old infamous contaminated site was rumbling again, Judge Richard Humphreys in the High Court was preparing his orders on Ireland’s largest illegal landfill at Whitestown in County Wicklow. The clean-up bill is now estimated at as high as €140m. The case, Brownfield Restoration Ltd versus Wicklow County Council, has been covered in previous issues of Village. Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring’ in 1962 is credited with drawing widespread attention to global environmental pollution. In the 1970s discovery of a toxic landfill in Love Canal near Niagara Falls in upstate New York became the impetus for the United States adopting a law called CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act) in 1980. It created a fund to address and eliminate the threat from contaminated sites all over the United States and then attempted to recover the monies from the entities that had caused the pollution. It has become known as Superfund. The Whitestown site in County Wicklow and Judge Humphreys’ order is perhaps our Love Canal moment. Do we need to create an Irish Superfund law? Judge Humphreys in his judgment last July said “a full account of this saga would be book length” and described the activities as reminiscent of 1930s Chicago which prompted the plaintiff’s barrister to refer to the modern-day TV show ‘The Sopranos’ which prominently features gangster-related waste-management control. The Whitestown quarry is roughly the size of eight rugby fields. Up to twenty two companies were listed as having hauled waste there from all over Dublin including from hospitals. Wicklow County Council dumped there until the week of its closure. Now the 80,000 tonnes of waste rests like a giant toxic teabag mixed with a million tonnes of other soils from a botched remediation effort. This ‘teabag’ sits partially in the water table which fluctuates with the seasons by up to two metres. So rainfall and the fluctuating water table create a toxic blend called leachate. The off-gassing can be equally toxic and one investigator was overcome with fumes and hospitalised in the early days of discovery. While up to 93% of the waste (primarily roadworks materials) at the site was deposited by Wicklow County Council, the description of blood-stained hospital theatre waste strewn all over the site left many queasy. Two of the early investigators on site were Donal O’Laoire and Ronnie Russell of O’Laoire Russell & Associates Limited. O’Laoire had been hired by Wicklow County Council as consultant in 2001 to come up with a plan on remediation. Both O’Laoire and Russell, who gave evidence in the case, had also been directors of Eco-Safe Systems Limited since 1999. it was listed as one of the 22 contributors to the site. Eco-Safe specialised in hospital-waste disposal & sterilisation. Dr Russell as founder and president of the Irish Decontamination Institute in 1989 (then called the Irish Association of Sterile Services Managers) had established an important network for healthcare facilities dealing with these issues. O’Laoire and Russell had also founded an environmental management and auditing firm in the 1990s. At this time certifying the compliance with environmental laws was becoming an established area of expertise leading to the ISO 14000 standards for environmental management being set in 1996. O’Laoire has published for the UN on environmental management for developing countries particularly African countries. Russell continues to be a leading research scientist at Trinity College Dublin and recently published guideline Manuals on decontamination for Saudi Arabian healthcare professionals. He is current chair of the HSE National Decontamination Advisory Group and vice chairman of An Taisce’s Environmental Education Unit as well as representing Ireland at the UN in Geneva on disarmament issues as a technical expert on biological weapons. These are arguably two of the leading and trusted influential individuals on chemical environmental issues in the State, which makes the performance at Whitestown so disappointing. The problems created by the initial waste dumping then got exasperated by a “botched remediation” plan. The judge subsequently, in his finding of facts on the Whitestown dump, states: “Mr. O’Laoire developed a proposal which he himself correctly in evidence described as corrupt whereby he and his associates (variously described as a syndicate or consortium) would make a profit from a commercial venture designed to remediate the site… clearly he was engaged in a massive conflict of interest that was actual rather than potential”. Judge Humphreys later described how the Irish EPA placed itself in a compromising situation by being a part of the Technical Working Group on the remediation plan. The EPA was effectively being gentler to the public authority than it would be to a private operator. Wicklow County Council were hoping they would not have to remove all the contaminated soil even though they were requesting and celebrating judgments in other cases (eg case against Fenton, 2002) demanding defendants do just that at other illegal dumps. Judge Humphreys now had to assess the risk the site posed, using European and Irish guidelines as well as case-law. The Irish EPA guidelines gave him a scale to calculate risk. The 2007 Code of Practice: Environmental Risk Assessment for Unregulated Waste Disposal Sites authored primarily by Margaret Keegan, of the Office of Environmental Enforcement, ironically had Michael Boland of Wicklow County Council on its technical review committee. Boland was a key witness on the botched remediation-plan analysis. The risk model used by the EPA assigned ‘points’ to the

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    Lessons from Nuremberg

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    I have for the last month been based in Eastern Europe, lecturing and contributing to the Anglo American University in Prague. The University has been very nice to me in light of the bedraggled and somewhat shaken image I must initially have presented. Prague, though it has its deficiencies as a city, is conveniently located in middle Europe, a kind of rarefied transport hub, a fractious, ravishing touristy polyglot cosmopolis. As someone of mixed Irish and Austrian blood I feel more at home and safe here than I do in Ireland, given some of the outrages that have been perpetrated upon me by the vicious bullyboy elements of that society, especially its state and at times thuggish professional classes. Nonetheless, I have not completely severed my ties. For over 16 years I lectured on Jurisprudence in Ireland and, for the last number of years, in particular I have been gradually winnowing my thoughts down on questions of moral good and evil and the intersection of such concepts with questions of legality. What are the good and bad things lawyers do? What is justice? In three hours or so from Prague you can be in Germany, or more precisely in Nuremberg, a city I have always wanted to visit but have never before been able to. “Nuremberg shines throughout Germany like a sun among the moon and stars”, according to the normally unimpressionable Martin Luther. Nuremberg was for centuries the undeclared capital of the Holy Roman Empire particularly because the Imperial Reichstag and courts met at Nuremberg Castle. It was the preferred residence of most German kings, who kept their crown jewels there. It was never a bastion of tolerance or Semitism. In 1298, the Jews of the town were accused of having desecrated the Christian host, and 698 of them were killed. In 1349, there was a pogrom of Nuremberg’s Jews. They were burned at the stake or expelled, and a marketplace was built over the former Jewish quarter. Rich and groaning with architectural wonders, it was also a magnet for famous artists. Albrecht Dürer, the great German painter of the Renaissance,was born here and we visited his house. By the 19th century, the city had become an engine room of Germany’s industrial revolution. The Nazis saw a perfect stage for their activities in working class Nuremberg. It was here that the boycott of Jewish businesses began and the infamous Nuremberg Laws outlawing German citizenship for Jewish people were enacted. Because of the city’s relevance to the Holy Roman Empire, the Nazi Party chose the city to be the site of huge Nazi Party rallies. On 2 January 1945, Allied bombers razed the entire city, killing 6000 people. After World War II the city was chosen as the site of the War Crimes Tribunal. Later, the painstaking reconstruction – using the original stone – of almost all the city’s main buildings returned the city to a measure of glory. Bavaria’s second-largest city and the unofficial capital of Franconia is an energetic place now where the nightlife is intense and the Reinheitsgebot determines that the wide-ranging drinking culture observes the highest quality standards. There are a number of ways of approaching Nuremberg but all depend on recognising that surfaces are very deceptive, starting with the resurrected architecture. My own instinct was to look at the city geographically and historically. The War Crimes court is some distance from the vibrant and wealthy re-created city centre. The historic footage gives the impression of a grand court but it is in fact quite small so the distances between the judges and the gallery of evil, condescending to the last, is arrestingly short – a matter of ten intimate feet. If you get a tram from the central station in the opposite direction to the court you come to the futuristic stadium of the infamous Nazi rallies, designed by Hitler’s deputy Albert Speer, and immortalised in the spectacular film, ‘Reichsparteitag – Nuernberg’ by Leni Riefenstahl, the memory of which flooded back to me as I climbed the steps and approached the podium where the Nazis spread their gospel of hate and evil to the enraptured, the hysterical and the merely cynical. It got me thinking about the failure of the European experiment and the recrudescence of fascism and extremism, in Russia and Hungary, in the US, the UK and incipiently in Western Europe, in Ireland. A new age of barbarism is upon us, the most forgetful generation. It advances on the foundation stones of civilisation. Ultimately globalism has ineluctably and insidiously led to growing economic liberalisation, the new age of robber-baron banks, vampire squids like Goldman, and bloodsucking multinational firms, including law firms. Under the guises of economic advance, internationalisation and anti-racist tolerance we have had a race to the bottom and the gradual destruction of the quality of life of many world citizens: longer working hours, short-term contracts, the sidelining of the elderly. The Nazis promulgated serfdom and unquestioning corporatism. Of course Weimar Republic stagflation and economic collapse, social unrest and meltdown may come to Ireland, a compliant population, controlled, self-satisfied, uncivilised and valueless. Our robotically-globalised social media- fetishing youth seems greedy and undirected. Ireland is its own epicentre of Social Darwinism, a technocratic, visionless society with no moral compass – a country that followed Bertie Ahern by Brian Cowen and then Enda Kenny. Of course the left, traditionally and wishfully, sees political quagmire as an opportunity, but in reality it too often leads to authoritarianism. Or dangerously right-wing populism of the sort that spawned Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump. The Nazi-era Christian pastor Martin Niemoller emphasised the following existential quandary: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Jew. Then

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