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    Acting Deep, and Acting Shallow

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    In September, Elisabeth Moss twice used the word “fuck” as she accepted the best-actress Emmy for her role in the TV series ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. As it was a live broadcast, the network (CBS) was using a time delay and so was able to bleep out the offending words. There were many reports online and on television in the hours and days that followed about the gaffe. None of them included the actual “fucks” as they were never broadcast, but then neither did practically all of the reporting outlets use the word either, opting for “f-bomb” or “f—” instead. Perhaps the attack on puritanism, which is at the heart of the show and the novel it is based on, is more necessary even than the liberal media establishment thinks. And yet, was it a gaffe? Two other gestures by Moss on that night may cast some light on the matter. First, the soles of her shoes had the handwritten message “off” on one shoe and, presumably, “fuck” on the other. The credit for this is perhaps equally due to her stylist, Karla Welch, who displayed the sole of the “off” shoe on Instagram with this message: “You”ll have to guess what the other shoes says.… our note to the patriarchy #teamresistance”. This “fuck” goes unseen, just as the other went unheard, but the message is clear enough. The other notable gesture by Moss from the same ceremony is captured in a cheekily smiling photo of her holding two award statues with her right middle finger raised to the camera. This did the rounds on Instagram too, after Moss posted it on her own profile. Those “fucks” seem a little less spontaneous now. And so what?, you may ask. The reason why this celebrity tittle-tattle is of interest is that Moss is a Scientologist, and her behaviour on the night was analysed by some commentators as being a deliberate Scientologist ploy. In a story that circulated in very similar versions on The Hollywood Reporter, Mashable, The New York Daily News and elsewhere, Moss’s speech is described as following the Scientologist practice of ‘going down the tone scale’ in public utterances, in order to make yourself more relatable to the average person. High-tone speech and behaviour are a turn-off, apparently, and Moss’s actions at the Emmys and various other on-camera bird-flipping incidents down the years are alleged to fit this kind of deceptive thinking. So what is real, and what is acted, in her actions? It’s an interesting question because her profession is to act, and she is undoubtedly excellent in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, as she has been in the two seasons of ‘Top of the Lake’, and as she was for years in ‘Mad Men’. In all of these, her major roles, Moss plays an obedient, or obedient-seeming, efficient performer of tasks expected of her, who occasionally and dramatically breaches the bounds that she ought to respect. These flashes are what keeps us interested in her. And they are the moments when we think we might be able to see the real actor, the common thread of her concerns working across various TV stories. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is the story of women who live as sex slaves and are forced to be surrogate mothers in a misogynistic near-future America. The problem that the dystopian society faces with these ‘handmaids’ is that they are impossible to live without, as they are the only fertile women left, and they are impossible to live with, as the narrative makes clear. As a result, they are made visible and invisible. They cannot be imprisoned in some cage in the basement because their role in society is sacred and ceremonialised. So they are imprisoned in a fully public, open prison. They may not speak out of turn, they may not show their faces and they may not have any independent existence. They do not even have enough power over their own lives to be able to end them. Their mode of speech and interacting with one another is a way of expressing this odd position. The costumes and the sexual politics, and the frontierism of a society under threat from an unnamed enemy, all point to puritanical America (and England). The characters must act a certain way with one another and speak in a highly coded manner. As part of their training for this new acting role in society, they are forced to publicly condemn each others’ previous lives in the abhorrent finishing school that is the segue between the end of their normal, pre-dystopia lives and the beginning of their lives as handmaids. Much of the enjoyment of watching the characters in this show comes from trying to interpret whether this emotional labour that the women are performing is merely on the surface, or deeply felt. The distinction is that between what is known as shallow acting, which is the smile and bare minimum of eye contact you get at a burger restaurant, and deep acting, where people in service positions really align their inner beliefs with those of the organisations they work for. In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, we gradually realise that all of the handmaids are engaged in shallow acting, and this realisation has the force of making them seem to be liberated on the inside, and lends optimism to their plight, and opens up the possibility of a second season (which is on the way). Many critics of Scientology, whose numbers are legion, have pointed out the irony that Moss is receiving accolades for her portrayal of a victim of a totalitarian cult. Viewing her in this light, and examining her actions and words on that Emmy night, are we confronted with the maniacal, glazed-eye, single-mindedness of the cult member, trapped inside a web of self-deceiving, selfimproving, self-belief that Scientology helps people be, as Moss herself has recently said, “a better you, not necessarily changing who you are”? Is any of this important? Does it matter that it is Moss who delivers

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    Referendum Practice

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    The Government intends to hold seven referendums over the next two years, and the Citizens’ Convention is due to consider Ireland’s referendum practice before it winds up next spring. With a contentious abortion referendum looming up soon after that, this is a good time to consider how we run referendums. A code of good practice in referendums was adopted in 2007 by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission for Democracy through Law. The Supreme Court cited this code in its 2012 McCrystal judgment which found that a Government information booklet in the children’s rights referendum of that year contained significant errors and ruled that it had to be withdrawn. Referendums in Ireland are forms of direct legislation in which citizens vote on a Bill to amend the Constitution, the basic law of the State. It is the citizens, not TDs and Senators, who are making the law on these occasions. Once an issue is put before the People for decision, the Government, as Government, should not interfere. It should not, for example, spend public money, which comes from voters on both sides in a referendum, to push the side it favours, any more than it should be able to loot the Exchequer to bribe voters in elections. Of course the political parties that make up the Government can spend their own money for partisan purposes, but that is different from the Government, as Government, doing so. Between 1987 and 1995 Irish Governments massively abused the referendum process. In 1987 the Supreme Court in its Crotty judgment on the Single European Act (SEA) required the Government to put any treaty that entailed a surrender of sovereignty before the People for decision. As the People are the repositories of sovereignty, only they can surrender it – in the case of the SEA to the supranational EU. Voters at the time would have passed the SEA referendum comfortably, but to make assurance doubly sure the Charles Haughey-led Government of the day spent taxpayers’ money in full-page newpaper adverts: ‘Ten Reasons for Voting Yes’. This had never been done before in any of the eleven referendums that had been held since the Constitution was adopted in 1937. The same thing happened in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum on replacing the púnt with the euro. On that occasion the Albert Reynolds-led Government commissioned a private company to place the Vote Yes adverts. One of them read: ‘A Vote No Disempowers Women’! Patricia McKenna put a stop to this abuse of public funds by taking her famous case in the context of the 1995 Divorce Referendum. The Council of Europe’s Code of Good Practice in Referendums accords with the Supreme Court’s ruling in McKenna that partisan expenditure of public money in referendums is unconstitutional, undemocratic and unfair. The Government’s response was to establish a new statutory body, the Referendum Commission, to give citizens information in referendums. The 1998 Referendum Act that established the Referendum Commission charged it with producing and publicising two statements, one telling citizens what the referendum was about, and the other setting out the main arguments for and against the proposed constitutional amendment. The Referendum Commission is not a permanent body, although idealy it should be, as its UK equivalent is. It is called into being anew every time there is a referendum and the Government appoints a new chairman each time. Its four regular members are the Ombudsman, the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Clerks of the Dáil and Seanad. On the Commission’s first outings in the 1998 Amsterdam Treaty and Good Friday Agreement referendums and the 2001 and 2002 Nice Treaty referendums its chairman was Mr Justice T.A. Finlay. As a retired Chief Justice he was not open to subsequent Government patronage. Both sides recognised that Justice Finlay carried out his statutory duties impeccably. Since 2001 successive Referendum Commission chairmen have all been High Court judges, of which, unfortunately, the same cannot be said. When citizen-voters rejected the constitutional amendment to ratify the EU’s Nice Treaty in 2001 the Bertie Ahern-led Government of the day removed from the Referendum Commission its function of setting out the main Yes-side and No-side arguments. It did so because it judged that that had been too helpful to the No-side in Nice One and it wanted that function removed for the referendum re-run in Nice Two in 2002 so as to get a different result. With one day’s notice to the Opposition, the Government put all stages of the requisite change to the Referendum Act through both houses of the Oireachtas in a single day, the last day before rising for the Christmas holidays in December 2001, when most people were concentrating on the seasonal festivities. Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens voted against the change. Setting out the main pros and cons of any referendum proposition in a fair and objective manner is fully in accordance with the Council of Europe’s Code of Good Practice in Referendums. This states that in order to encourage a wellinformed citizenry on these occasions: “The best solution is for the authorities to provide voters with an explanatory text setting out not only their viewpoint or that of persons supporting it, but also the opposing viewpoint in a balanced way, or to send voters balanced campaign material from the proposal’s supporters and opponents”. It is surely a pity that Ireland’s pioneering step in encouraging more politically educated voters in referendums was brought to naught in the way described. It is unfortunate that the original remit of the Referendum Commission was not given more of a chance to prove itself, and that the Commission was deprived of its Yes-No function because it proved inconvenient for the Government in such a politically important referendum as that on the Nice Treaty. After all the need for citizens to be properly and fairly informed of the main Yes-side and No-side arguments applies in all referendums regardless of the issue. In carrying out its original Yes-No function Mr Justice Finlay’s Referendum Commission

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    Stormont Should Correct HIAI Report to Reflect Police Paedophile Delinquency

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    In January 2017 the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI) reported on the treatment of children in care in Northern Ireland. The Inquiry, chaired by Sir Anthony Hart, conducted its extensive task with considerable speed and reported on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Inquiry shared something else with the then incumbent US president, a reluctance to process unwelcome information. The Inquiry ignored evidence that from 1971- 73 an accused and then convicted serial child-abuser named Dr Morris Fraser continued to work with vulnerable institutionalised children. The HIAI also refused to examine how and why police protected the internationally-known child psychiatrist from exposure and from professional censure, for a year after he was found guilty of abuse. The HIAI was asked to make recommendations and findings concerning institutional failings with regard to children in the care of the state and/or of its agencies. It was tasked also with indicating if failings were systemic. The HIAI failed to do so in the case of Morris Fraser. This is more than merely a story of out-of-date attitudes and of the embarrassing proclivities of wayward medical folk. It concerns something officially rotten in the state of Northern Ireland in 1972, that a public inquiry in 2016 felt unable to scrutinise. The HIAI Report, chapter 26, page 82, briefly considered and then dismissed discussion of Fraser’s work and of his official treatment. It found that: “… the way the medical authorities and the police dealt with Dr Fraser after his [May 1972] conviction in London are not matters that fall within the Terms of Reference of this Inquiry and we have not considered them” The finding was based on the Inquiry’s view that Fraser’s interaction with institutionalised children was peripheral to his main work with outpatient children. Volume seven of the HIAI Report dealt with Lissue Hospital’s in-patient child psychiatric unit, where abuse allegations were rife. Chapter 24, page 22, paragraph 84, stated: “It is probable that Dr Morris Fraser worked at Lissue Hospital as a Senior Psychiatric Registrar in the course of his training”. This is followed by error-strewn commentary on Fraser’s 1972 child-abuse conviction in the UK and, two years later, in the US. The HIAI stated that “Dr Fraser was convicted again of sexual offences against a child in New York in May 1973”. In fact, Fraser was convicted in June 1974 of abusing three boys, not one. He was merely arrested in May 1973. The complacent commentary concluded in paragraph 87 with: “Dr Fraser continued to work elsewhere as a psychiatrist, though not with children, and he then took early retirement”. In fact, the four-times convicted paedophile abused children and associated with abusers until he was persuaded to remove himself from the medical register in November 1995. Fraser made use of his medical status to groom children for his own use and for the benefit of other paedophiles. Paragraph 87 began, “there is no evidence of Dr Fraser’s work at Lissue…”. These nothing-to-see-here findings were partially based on 13 April 2016 testimony from Dr William Nelson at HIAI hearings. He was the first director of the new Lissue children’s psychiatric unit, that opened in 1971. Under remarkably brief and light questioning, Dr Nelson suggested, from memory, that Fraser might have been at Lissue for “a short time”, but that his “main work” was over 10 miles away, at the Royal Victoria Hospital “in out-patients”. There are two issues of concern. The first involves documentary evidence, in the HIAI’s possession, querying Dr Nelson’s recollection of events over four decades earlier. The HIAI ignored the documentation. The second relates to how Dr Fraser came to perform clearly established duties in Lissue, even though he was simultaneously (unbeknown to colleagues) a convicted paedophile offender. I will deal with each issue in turn. Some Background The reason for the HIAI’s curiosity about Fraser is because, on 17 May 1972 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court Dr Fraser pleaded guilty to having sexually abused in London in August 1971, a 13 year-old Belfast boy. Fraser had brought three boys from Belfast to London, ostensibly on a scouting trip. Fraser was conditionally discharged with a £50 fine and was bound over for three years. His co-accused, Ian Bell, whose case was considered separately. Bell pleaded not guilty at Bow Street to abusing a 10-year-old, and went on to Crown Court, where he was convicted after changing his plea. As is the case today, in 1972 police could either hide from, or present to, the public, an accused person and the crimes with which they were charged. In this case an internationally-known child psychiatrist was processed through a court late in the evening, after 9pm, without anyone noticing. Fraser started giving off signs of being an officially protected species of paedophile. Inexplicably, Dr Fraser continued to see children in the Royal Victoria Hospital, and to enjoy a prominent newspaper, radio and television profile in Ireland, Britain and the US. That is because police did not tell the NI Hospitals Authority, Fraser’s employer, of his abuse conviction. One year later, in May 1973 on the other side of the world, Fraser was stopped temporarily in his tracks. He was arrested in New York as part of an eight-man child abuse ring. Unlike Fraser’s effectively secret October 1971 arrest and May 1972 conviction, his 1973 New York arrest was covered in the US, followed by British and Irish, news media. In February 1974 in Suffolk County, NY, Fraser’s guilty plea, to abusing three boys, was reported briefly in the New York Times. Fraser was convicted in June 1974 and was again conditionally discharged. Disturbingly, the judge was not informed of Fraser’s 1972 London conviction. Fraser’s US conviction and subsequent deportation were ignored by news outlets. Fraser should have been, but was not then brought back before a UK court, having broken the terms of his May 1972 three-year ‘conditional’ discharge. The HIAI ignored all of this because it said that Fraser worked with outpatient children and not with

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    Social History Isn’t History With Politics Left Out

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    2016 was inevitably an outstanding year for the history industry as publishers, writers, and those elements of the intelligentsia that love a good commemoration got to work on the Easter Rebellion’s hundredth anniversary. The Irish people have an interesting relationship with their own history. It is, like their relationship to Catholicism, frequently the subject of fervent debate, at certain period followed slavishly as orthodoxy, and on other occasions the subject of shame. In the more modern Ireland that began to emerge from the 1960s a new revisionism took hold about the history itself. Revisionism itself became a pejorative term as scepticism about our history joined forces with those who would be sceptical about the benefit of Catholic Ireland. In the 1970s liberalism, secularism and scepticism about nationalism ascended. The first historical-revisionist tract was produced by a Jesuit priest named Fr Francis Shaw. His scepticism about 1916 was so overt that it was thought best to delay publication for six years as the country was, in 1966, fervidly commemorating Easter Rising anniversaries. Fr Shaw’s revisionism seems mild by the yardstick of today – he blamed 1916 for the division of Ireland, the Civil War and the fact that little or no commemoration was possible of those who gave their lives in World War I. Eunan O’Halpin and Guy Beiner take us through the various commemorations in Irish life in their essay ‘Remembering and Forgetting’ as a final input to the exhaustive and very stimulating ‘Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland’. What this book reminds you of is the timely and regular nature through which historians not only review earlier conclusions but also attempt to put a new narrative account on what has previously been thought of as undisputed territory. it is noteworthy that one of the best-selling books on the 1916 centenary celebrations was a book about how children were treated though the week-long rebellion. The editors of the Cambridge Social History, Mary Daly, Professor Emeritus of Modern History at UCD, and Eugenio Biagini, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge, are quick to point out that social history is not just history with the ‘politics’ left out. That said, they are robustly critical of an over-emphasis on political, constitutional, and institutional histories of Ireland. “Our emphasis is on economic and social change, our focus on people and cultures, instead of institutions and political ideologies”, they assert in their introduction. The book suggests a purposeful placing of Irish history in the context of wider European and global events. This is challenging stuff but with 40 distinct contributors cover ground of interest to both academic and general readers. The wide-ranging topics include previously taboo subject matter like sex and class in Ireland. Thankfully, as historian Joe Lee acknowledged in his Irish Times review, this is not a textbook. More than half the contributors are based outside of Ireland, which again shows a purposeful focus on diversity of thought by the editors. Lee has said of this book that the historian’s delight is a reviewer’s nightmare. The book is not a rainy-day read. One of the great tragedies of recent Irish scholarship is the number of posts in economic and social history that have either fallen vacant or simply just not been continued. It is to be hoped that Irish universities and corporate philanthropy will re-discover the benefits of social and economic history and invest in it. My own view is that local history, as well as social and economic history, deserves investment to counterbalance the overarching political narrative. Amongst the essays included here is one by Terence Dooley, Professor of Modern History at Maynooth University, on the fate of the Big House, the preserve of the ascendancy class and a symbol of an Ireland that is now essentially gone. Dooley deals both with the social destruction of that class but also the physical destruction of its physical heritage. This still makes for sad reading, in particular, when one looks at the Department of Finance’s memorandum in 1929, declining to take Russborough House in Wicklow, one of Ireland’s greatest houses, into state ownership because it was only of interest to “connoisseurs of architecture” and had never been associated “with any outstanding events or personalities in Irish history”. Despite the obvious neurosis that afflicted the early state with regard to the Big House there should surely be now an argument for a much more comprehensive policy to preserve heritage properties of every description, if only to assuage tourism’s endless search for new venues and more enchanted and more promotable ways. Henry Patterson, Emeritus Professor of Irish Politics at Ulster University, takes up the challenge of Irish working class experience and why, despite the best efforts, this did not translate into support for the Irish Labour party. He quotes UCD economist Cormac O’Gráda as acknowledging that by 1939 Fianna Fáil had become the party of the working class. Even the 1970s were never socialist. Moreover, unsurprisingly the recent displacement of the Labour party has been at the hands of a resurgent Sinn Féin which is reaping an electoral harvest and an indelible presence in working-class areas, from peace in our time. Patterson (‘The Irish Working Class and the Role of the State, 1850-2016) acknowledges why working-class politics made so small an impression on Irish life, pointing to the obvious conservatism and anti-communism of the Catholic Church and the fact that James Connolly threw in his lot with nationalism as a progressive force in Irish life. The other reason that class consciousness never took hold in Ireland is probably the existence of the Big House and the ascendancy class. The fact that the ruling class in Irish society were not drawn from the majority Catholic population meant that for several hundred years radicals had no class enemy to tilt at but the ascendancy. Jennifer Todd, Professor of Politics at UCD, and Joseph Ruane, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at UCC, make a timely point (‘Elite Formation, the Professions, Industry and the Middle

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    Myanmarmy Genocide

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    Irish observers of the Rohingya refugee crisis will find disturbing similarities between Myanmar’s mistreatment of the Rohingya and formative aspects of Ireland’s own history. Today the Rohingya are victims of a brutal Myanmar military crackdown that has led more than 600,000 to flee the country on foot since August. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights describes this forced displacement as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Human Rights Watch released satellite images showing almost 300 Rohingya villages razed and there are reports these burnings are ongoing. Amnesty International calls the crisis a “humanitarian catastrophe”. This is no exaggeration. I recently visited the Rohingya refugee camps on the Bangladesh/ Myanmar frontier and what I saw and heard there was heartbreaking. The scale and speed of the displacement is difficult to comprehend. Within eight weeks a shanty city of bamboo and tarpaulin has become home to more people than Dublin. These refugees have lost every material possession including their homes. Children, the old, and sick were carried by family members to these camps over mountains, through rivers and across a now land mined border. Their situation is dreadfully bleak. The weather is stiflingly hot and punctuated by the monsoon season’s torrential rain. They are wholly reliant on aid agencies for food, water and medicine. Providing adequate sanitation is an ongoing challenge making the threat of disease ever-present. There is mud and desperation everywhere. For the Rohingya this is the sad culmination of decades of discrimination by Myanmar’s authorities who deny the Muslim group’s centuries-long heritage in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Myanmar’s authorities deny the Rohingya citizenship, making them stateless, but also limit their human rights including by restricting their freedom to marry, practise their religion, obtain education and healthcare, and even to travel freely from one village to another. The Rohingya’s right to vote was taken away in 2015. Researchers at the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) in 2015 rightly concluded this was a process of genocide. The interviews I conducted with male residents of unregistered camps and at the registered Kutupalong Camp confirm this. They told heartbreaking stories of loss, violence and forced migration that no one should be forced to endure. One young man in his 20s explained his journey to the refugee camp involved being forced from village to village by the military who used a helicopter to burn homes: “When our village was burned we moved to another village, and then they came to burn that village, and we moved another village, and when they came to burn that village and we moved, and that’s how we came here at last. They used the helicopter to burn the villages”. I heard frequently how the military used helicopters to burn Rohingya villages and now young children in the refugee camps are drawing heartbreaking pictures with crayons of helicopters raining fire on their former homes. One elderly man, recently arrived in Kutupalong Camp, told me ten men were arrested in his village and their families had not heard from them since. He said the military bluntly told Rohingya villagers to leave: “they openly told us to go to Bangladesh – otherwise you will be killed”. This too was a depressingly familiar story among those I interviewed – the military arrived, fired their guns, killed some, arrested mostly young men but sometimes the young women too, and instructed the others to go to Bangladesh. More than 600,000 did. A 60-year-old man from Buthidaung township showed me his bandaged leg, a bullet injury he said. His story is disturbing: “Among my four sons, one was killed by the military in front of me, and one arrested, and one of my daughters – my adult daughter – was arrested but I don’t know where she is”. An understandably emotional farmer tells me: “I lost my two sons, and two daughters. At midnight the military come in my house and burnt the house, but first they raped my two daughters and they shot my two daughters in front of me. I have no words to express how it was for me to suffer to look at my daughters being raped and killed in front of me. My two sons were also killed by the government. I was not able to get the dead bodies of my daughters, it is a great sorrow for me”. These individual stories of recent abuses are heartbreaking, but camp residents talked too about years of discriminatory practices that will be all too familiar to readers of Ireland’s history – restrictions on education and religious practice, and land confiscations. Now Myanmar’s authorities plan to confiscate all burnt Rohingya villages and settle them with new residents. A plantation. It’s little wonder tens of thousands of Rohingya annually boarded dangerous boats to flee their homeland, knowing they would probably never return. Another experience all too common in Ireland’s history. Despite this, Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has shown little sympathy towards the Rohingya. It took ten weeks of crisis before she set foot in the state from where 600,000 of Myanmar’s Rohingya fled. Suu Kyi has delivered two televised addresses to the nation since the crisis began and each could have been scripted by the military. In her most recent address she told Myanmar, “no one can fully understand the situation of our country the way we do” echoing military claims they have not committed atrocities but are instead unfairly maligned by international media and the UN. Suu Kyi’s words ring hollow and she is increasingly seen as acting as a political shield for the military’s crimes – using her international reputation to hold back the tide of international condemnation. Suu Kyi also stubbornly denies visas to UN human-rights investigators to enter Myanmar. As Foreign Minister she could grant UN investigators access with the stroke of a pen. She chooses not to. Dr Thomas MacManus, an ISCI researcher from Dublin, is appalled by the behaviour of Aung San Suu Kyi and said, “She is a huge disappointment. Not only is

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    The Unionists are British

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    The fact that the West’s European civilisation is ending need not prevent us from thinking constructively about problems that have concerned us and that linger on. Nothing more useful is left for us to do. The Northern Ireland problem is an instance. It became a problem when Irish nationalism and the Irish State opposed a partitioned Ireland and insisted on a “united Ireland”. By that they meant what Wolfe Tone had called for: an Irish nation that would “abolish the memory of all past dissensions and substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter”. The trouble with that formally generous intention was twofold: the misuse of the word “Irishman” to mean someone who lives in Ireland; second, the ignoring of the fact that Ulster and later Northern Ireland, besides being a collection of individuals adhering to those religions, was more importantly a combination of two nationalities; one Irish, the other British. So the idea that those Britishers would agree to become members of an all-Ireland state and accept the national description “Irish” was fantasy, It could be brought about only by force and compulsion – as the Provisional IRA, inspired by Wolfe Tone, attempted to do. In August 1969 when, as we say, the North exploded, I was living in South Connemara and engaged with others in launching the “Gaeltacht revolution” of the following years. We had realised that the first prerequisite for changing a defective socio-political situation for the better is to observe and recognise its existing features realistically. So as the bombs began exploding in the North I wrote an article for The Irish Times called ‘A Plea for Realism’. It began: “The first basic fact that needs to be recognised is that Northern Ireland contains two historic peoples, or rather one such people, the Ulster Protestants, and part of another. Only the accident that both of them speak English obscures the fact that they are peoples as real and distinct as, say, the Austrians and the Czechs. But for an accident of history they would differ in language as do the Flemings and Walloons in Belgium”. I knew, because he had proclaimed it editorially, that the Editor, Douglas Gageby, a Protesant, was a Wolfe Tone republican, so I wondered how he would take my article. He told me to go on writing on the North and before the end of the month he had published two more articles by me on the subject. He was that kind of man. In the early 1970s in my column in the Sunday Press I pushed for settling the Northern problem by means of a British-Irish condominium of Northern Ireland. The new Northern nationalist party, the SDLP, in the persons of Ivan Cooper and John Hume, got in touch with me and in the Ostán Gaoth Dobhair in County Donegal they told me they would propose condominium as the solution for the North while making it more widely intelligible as a “British-Irish joint sovereignty”. Shortly after, at a press conference in Dublin, they did so. This initiative, although brushed aside at the time as the war in the North rumbled on, ensured that never again would efforts at a Northern settlement treat Northern Ireland as a collection of people differing only or mainly in religion. Through the 1970s into the 1990s Sunningdale, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and finally the Good Friday Agreement were sovereign Irish-British affairs which treated Northern Ireland as a matter of two opposed communities, Irish nationalist and British unionist, and provided for institutional input from Dublin and London, with the latter remaining sovereign. The Good Friday Agreement came into effect in December 1999. It provided, among other things the right of “the people of Northern Ireland” to “identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both” as well as their right to hold “either or both British and/or Irish citizenship”. The Agreement also provided that if referendums showed majorities in Northern Ireland and the Republic in favour of a united Ireland, the British and Irish governments would collaborate to bring that about. It seems then that a united Ireland is within reach. It requires only a majority popular vote in its favour, North and South, to set in motion the British and Irish steps needed to accomplish it. It would probably take the form, at least initially, of the transfer from London to Dublin of sovereignty over Northern Ireland while the Assembly and Executive there remain in place.   Dr Desmond Fennel’s autobiography, ‘About Being Normal: My Life in Abnormal Circumstances’, was published this year.

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    My Vision of the Future of the Green Party

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    The Green movement was born when we looked back on our planet for the first time and realised the threat we posed to our own natural world. It was a child of the 1960s, embracing and promoting civil, racial, feminist, gay, and animal rights. It was into making love not war and thinking globally, while acting locally. The movement was inspired by Rachel Carson and her warnings that we faced a ‘Silent Spring’ if the use of pesticides and fertilisers by industrial agriculture went on unchecked. It came of age with ‘systems thinking’ from the Club of Rome in the early 1970s, which used the most advanced computers to look ahead 100 years and measure our future use of resources – and came back with the rational conclusion that there are real limits to growth on this finite planet of ours. Green economics is not easily categorised on a left/right ideological divide. It assumes that future progress must be made in terms of the things that really count rather than the things that are merely countable. It values our quality of life rather than just increases in the quantity of goods that are consumed. The movement found political form in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Green parties were set up in just about every country. In Ireland the Ecology Party of Ireland was formed at a meeting in Dublin’s Central Hotel in 1981. The founding principles were agreed at a second meeting a few months later in the Glencree Peace and Reconciliation centre. Those principles are still relevant today. • We have the responsibility to pass the Earth on to our successors in a fit and healthy state. • Unrestricted economic growth must be replaced by an ecologically and socially regulated economy. • Decisions should as far as possible be on the basis of consensus and respect for the rights of minorities. • Society should be guided by self-reliance and cooperation at all levels. • The need for world peace and justice overrides national and commercial interests. • There is no place for violence or threat of violence in the democratic political process. The fortunes of the party have ebbed and flowed over the last three decades in tandem with varying levels of public support for the wider environmental agenda. The first Green Party councillor was elected in Killarney at the same time the Bruntland commission defined sustainable development – as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Our first TD was elected in 1991, just before the signing of the Rio declaration, which combined commitments to protect our environment with ambitions to address global poverty. The tide then ebbed during the boom years of the late nineties as oil became cheap again. We were told we were at the end of history and all public services had to do was clear the path so markets could pave the way. Our Dáil representation grew with the greater understanding of the scale and importance of this climate issue. We entered Government in 2007 determined to do what we could to position Ireland as a leader in responding to the challenge we all face. We learnt a lot in the process and it was not all negative. First of all, it imbued us with a healthy dose of humility. The last thing anyone wants is public representatives who think they know it all. We also learnt how you can get things done in Government. It requires showing respect to both colleagues and officials so you earn their trust, while still sticking up for your convictions and asking the right awkward questions, so that big ideas can be progressed and that decisions do not go through on the nod. I stand up for Green politics because I have seen how we have made a real difference over the years. In the last four decades road deaths have fallen by two thirds. We can’t claim responsibility for that outcome but we were there every step of the way supporting better road designs and new safety regulations. We also changed waste policy. I remember a Council engineer arguing against the introduction of green and brown bins in Dublin, on the grounds that Irish people would never take to recycling. I like the fact that we all proved him wrong. Similarly, I look at the way my German Green colleagues changed the course of history by initiating a clean renewable-energy revolution that will not now be stopped. I am equally happy we were there at Pride Parade long before most other parties or big corporations showed up for the day. Last but not least, I like the fact that we are an all-island party, which gets to canvass on both the Shankill and the Falls. That non sectarian outlook comes from our 1960s roots. We may not be the biggest party but we are friends with every other European Green Party and are based in every county here at home. We now have two great teams back in the Oireachtas and Stormont. We are disciplined and motivated with a new ambition to become a mainstream political choice for people right across this island. In the North the first job is to get the Assembly back in action. In the South we want to triple our representation in the next Dáil and perhaps more importantly triple the number of Green Party Councillors who are elected at the next local elections in 2019. We are setting ourselves such goals because in truth we are losing on the big battles which inspired us into action in the first place. For all the achievements I have mentioned, the reality is that the world has lost almost half of all wildlife over the last forty years. In the same geological blink of an eye, we’ve seen the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increase by a third. For the first time in years, the global number

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    Don’t Bank On Justice

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    Ivan Preston and Danske Bank In the first case, the North’s Police Ombudsman found police misconduct in the treatment of a Bangor businessman, Ivan Preston, who had his 2014 conviction for harassment overturned on appeal. Preston had sent 357 emails in a year to a senior Danske Bank official, querying the awarding of a contract for courier services by the Northern Ireland Interbank Forum (representing. and co-ordinating services for, the four main banks). The senior official, Elwyn Thompson, said in his statement to police that the “content of the contact being made by Mr Preston is directed mostly against the ethics of banking practices…”. Thompson did not allege that any of the emails contained threats and all email providers allow for mail from a specific address to be blocked. Preston had no previous convictions, but was convicted in January 2014. The judge imposed a conditional discharge. Four months later the conviction was quashed on appeal. On foot of a complaint from Preston, the North’s Police Ombudsman found there were “factual inaccuracies” in evidential materials which police had gathered. Two police officers were disciplined. One of them received a sanction in respect of his original statement regarding Preston’s attitude. Preston’s problems began when the Northern Ireland Interbank Forum ended the courier contract of the Preston family firm and awarded it to DHL. Preston was concerned that this company did not offer workers the same pay and conditions his firm did. In a statement to police on December 7 2012, Thompson said: “A full Audit was independently conducted into the tendering process that fully justified the outcome as originally reached in the awarding of the new collection contract [to DHL not the Preston family]”. However, a letter of February 23 this year on behalf of Ulster Bank Chief Executive, Gerry Mallon, to Lady Sylvia Hermon MP differed significantly. This said “RBS [Royal Bank of Scotland] UK & I[reland [which owns Ulster Bank]] completed an internal view of the tender process in 2012 as part of our audit requirements and no discrepancies were found”. In other words the audit was internal not independent. Lars-Johan Sandvik, a director of Danske Bank, Ulster Bank’s Danish parent, emailed Preston a week before Thompson’s statement: “You have already filed a ‘whistleblower’ case, and it is being investigated”. Danske Bank seems to have been heavy-handed with Preston on the basis of a flimsy internal audit and despite the fact his case was still being investigated. The prosecution and appeal have apparently been stressful for Preston. His GP, Dr Joanne Drew, has written that his health has suffered. “He has lost his positive outlook on life, become more insular and less able to cope with demands of daily living”, she wrote. Stephen Boyes and First Trust (AIB) Separately, Stephen Boyes, a farmer from Maghaberry, County Antrim, is currently living in the South, as he would face immediate imprisonment if he set foot in the North, for defying a court order to surrender land. This relates to a loan he took out from First Trust (AIB in the North) for £850,000. In November 2009, the bank’s lawyers wrote a ‘without prejudice’ letter to Boyes: “Upon publication of (Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan), if the 20 acre portion of your client’s land is owned [presumably in error for ‘zoned’]for employment/industry, your client will immediately and actively market this for sale for such sum as will insure the repayment in full of the debt due to our client…”. In April 2012, the North’s former Justice Minister David Ford announced that Magilligan, the North’s second-largest prison, was to close. Closure of Magilligan would mean Maghaberry would have to expand. This would increase the value of the lands, which landlocked the prison and were owned by Boyes, and his family, through a trust. Shortly after the announcement, Boyes received notification that the Bank had appointed a receiver to those lands. He maintains the bank’s actions were draconian where he and his family were on the verge of a windfall. Boyes has also produced a report from a handwriting expert, querying the authenticity of his signature on one of the leases the bank relies on. His family has made several complaints to the Police Ombudsman, as large numbers of police have accompanied the receiver, which they claim to find intimidating. A PSNI spokesperson said it does not comment on the operational deployment of officers. In April, the Irish News reported that the PSNI is investigating allegations regarding ownership of the lands on which the prison has been built.   Anton McCabe

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