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Village Idiot June 2017
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I have spoken to Fred Holroyd from time to time. Holroyd worked with the British army and MI6 in Ireland, 1973-75, and has written a book about his experience ‘War without Honour’. Incredibly, British spies are still meddling with his post. Holroyd has furnished me with a photograph of an envelope he received from me. It contained an academic book about the origins of the Troubles, something that interests Holroyd. To protect the book from damage, it was placed inside a bubblewrap cover and then slipped inside an ordinary white envelope. Somewhere along the line someone pierced both layers of the package with what was undoubtedly a micro camera wand to see what dangers to the Realm lurked inside. The misuse of precious resources Moreover spendthrift paranoia like this and the decades-long Special Branch monitoring of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott compromises scarce resources. Since Theresa May became home secretary in 2010 total police numbers in england and wales have fallen by 46,700 or 19.5%. In contrast to this, the overall budget of the Single Intelligence account – which covers expenditure on MI5, MI6 and the government monitoring service GCHQ – rose to £2.63bn in 2015 up from £2.48bn in 2014; in 2010, it stood at £2bn. As a result of these cutbacks, armed troops had to be placed under the con- trol of the police after the Manchester suicide bomb atrocity. Meanwhile, MI5 is making excuses for its failure. One of these is that it is overwhelmed and under resourced. A fact shouted from the rooftops is that it requires 30 officers to place a single suspect under surveillance 24/7. Since there are approximately 3,000 such threats, it would require 90,000 surveillance officers to watch them all. Yet, despite this MI5 is still able to find resources to interfere with Holroyd’s post; photograph its content; compile reports and send them to whatever departments analyses them. After this MI5 probably liaises with MI6 which in turn contacts its spies in Dublin to find out more about the threat posed by the sinister forces who sent a history book from Dublin. Holroyd’s phone is probably also monitored. Since he is scrutinised daily, a fair estimation is that 10 working hours are consumed daily. Why? The surveillance of Holroyd intensified after the pressure to reinvestigate the Kincora Boys Home scandal grew to the point where the Hart Inquiry into child abuse in NI was established. Holroyd’s handwritten notes from his time in NI confirm that he had been told that Loyalist politicians were visiting Kincora for sexual purposes. If Holroyd’s post is being surveilled, other Kincora whistleblowers who have featured in recent editions of Village such as Brian Gemmell and Colin Wallace are probably being scrutinised too; not to mention Kincora survivors such as Richard Kerr and Clint Massey. If only 30 individuals are being monitored, that means about 300 man hours are being consumed daily. This is only part of MI5 and MI6’s misuse of time, energy and gold. They have both had to prepare for the Hart Inquiry and the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual abuse (IICSA) in London. Their only interest was to maintain the cover-up of their sordid role in a swathe of child sex abuse blackmail scandals. Officers would have had to talk to serving and retired officers to get a full picture of what went on; trawl through records; cull embarrassing documents; liaise with Home office and Foreign office officials and pull the wool over the eyes of senior politicians; engage with lawyers; consider PR and propaganda initiatives; and last but not least: coach their witnesses to lie to these inquiries. Tens of thousands of man hours must have been spent, and this will continue to be the case as the IICSA looks like it will last another decade. An avoidable massacre There is no doubt that the Manchester massacre could have been avoided. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has stated that the bomber was “known” to the security services “up to a point”. His mother told them that he had been radicalised. Two of his friends called the police hotline in 2012 and warned that he believed that “being a suicide bomber was okay” and that he was “supporting terrorism”. He also made trips to Libya and, it now appears, Syria. In addition to wasting time on Holroyd et al, MI5 has a lamentable record of eavesdropping on trade unionists and other civil rights groups. one of those placed under the microscope was that well-known threat to the realm, Jeremy Corbyn. It’s anyone’s guess how much of this nonsense is still going on at the expense of British taxpayers while Isis terrorists gambol back-and-forth from the Middle east. The present Director-General of MI5 is Andrew Parker. He believes that MI5 is an honourable organisation. We will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that all the recent child-abuse skulduggery has taken place behind his back. Will someone now please tell him that he should redeploy his troops from Holroyd et al to Isis terrorists. The politics of the pirouette The demons unleashed by Britain’s destruction of Libya loom large in the story of the Manchester bomber. He had a Libyan background and was trained by Isis in Libya and/or Syria. Going back a few years, MI6 (which is responsible for overseas intelligence activity) failed to predict what was likely to happen in Libya when David Cameron was considering bombing Colonel Gadaffi’s forces in support of the rebels. It certainly didn’t impress this likelihood on him with sufficient force to prevent the bombing of Libya by the RAF. Chaos and civil war engulfed the country and created a haven for Isis. Overall, recent British-Libyan history defies belief. Gaddafi furnished the IRA with arms, his agents had planted a bomb on an airliner which exploded over Lockerbie and shot a police officer dead outside the Libyan embassy in London. On the other side of the fence, the US and UK plot against Gaddafi and on one
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As a younger, and perhaps wiser, Leo Varadkar once said: there is no messiah who will lead Fine Gael from the desert into the promised land. This did not prevent him from presenting a decidedly messianic image as he posed for the cameras following his decisive victory in the party’s leadership contest on 2 June. Since then politics and the media have obsessed over his choice for cabinet posts with one potential appointee after another scrambling for pole position beside the new leader to confirm their adoration for the man who holds their future in his hands. Soon forgotten was the uncomfortable truth that most of those among the party membership allowed to vote chose Simon Coveney from Carrigaline ahead of the man from Castleknock, and that Varadkar was elected through the over-whelming support of the parliamentary party and local councillors for the sole reason that they believe he is the most likely leader to ensure their re-election. The wider party it seems judged the candidates on policy, rather than geography or dare we suggest because the average blue shirt just is not ready yet for a gay man whose father comes from India as their particular cup of Barry’s tea. This is not to suggest that Fine Gael people are more likely to be homophobic or racist than any other group of political supporters but that they simply have not got their head around the rapid change in attitudes of a population with an average age of 38, which also happens to be Leo’s. For all this, Varadkar is as cautious and conservative as most in his party on both social and economic matters and is more likely to upset the wider LGBT community than endear himself to them. After all, he only came out as gay during the marriage equality referendum which many gay people saw as the culmination of decades of campaigning for their rights from which the young Leo had been silently absent. More importantly however, as Taoiseach, he is unlikely to deliver on a repeal of the eighth amendment which adequately meets the progressive demand for an end to church and State interference with reproductive rights or to tackle the huge range of discriminatory measures the State employs against women, children and minorities in health, education and social provision. There is little question that Varadkar will improve on the future prospects for his party colleagues and that they will go into the next election with greater expectations than if enda Kenny was still in charge. But that does not say much and neither does it take into account the harsh realities facing Fine Gael as it stumbles from one crisis to another while feeding from the life support provided by Fianna Fáil in government. Fianna Fáil is now looking at a general election next year and possibly ahead of the third budget it agreed to allow under the confidence and supply agreement which was negotiated by a less than enthusiastic Varadkar. His tendency to speak first and ask questions later will almost certainly cause some rocky moments over the coming months while his need to satisfy the many competing demands within his own ranks will also hinder any desire he may have to make innovative, not to mind radical, change. Varadkar will be really tested when it comes to the bigger issues facing the country and the first challenge he faces is how to deal with the ongoing and apparently unceasing crisis within the leadership of the Garda. He was among the first to criticise former commissioner, Martin Callinan, for describing the actions of whistleblower, Maurice McCabe as “disgusting”, and almost certainly precipitated the end of his long career in the force. Now he has to decide whether to allow the beleaguered Noirin O’Sullivan to remain in position. Varadkar will be happy to see the public service pay and pensions issue sorted before he takes full hold of the reins but the challenge posed by Brexit and its implications for the border and peace process would have been well outside his previous comfort zone. As to the insuperable health crisis as a medical doctor he might have been expected, when Minister for Health (2014-2016) to have led the delivery of the party’s plan for a universal health service to which he pays lip service, but there is a suspicion he ran out of ideas and little cause to think he will apply swift effective medicine as Taoiseach. Ultimately it will be his willingness to stand up to the vested private interests that sustain and feed the housing crisis, the rise in economic and tax inequality, precarious work and poverty that will test his imputed qualities as a radical young visionary. However, his party promotes the low tax, poor public service model that appeals to the very people he needs to survive in the cruel world of politics. Let’s call it Leo’s paradox. Frank Connolly
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Charting the Charleton Tribunal
As the Tribunal of Inquiry into protected disclosures and Certain Other Matters prepares for its opening statement from counsel in mid-June, Peter Charleton must be wondering what he’s let himself in for. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Supreme Court justice initially agreed to chair a commission of inquiry, a much more sedate affair than a tribunal. Set up by Michael McDowell in 2004 during his tenure in the department of justice, commissions of investigation addressed several concerns at the time about tribunals of inquiry, principally their ratcheting costs. But commissions are held mostly behind closed doors, and when it emerged shortly after Charleton’s appointment that false allegations of child abuse had been made against whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe, the public clamour led the government to upgrade the commission to a tribunal of inquiry. A bigger deal altogether. He said there would be two modules in the tribunal – the first module will concern the reaction of Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan, former commissioner Martin Callinan and others at the highest command level to disclosures made by Sgt McCabe. Maurice McCabe rejected plans for a Commission of Investigation calling instead for the inquiry to be held. The second module will deal with members of the force who made protected disclosures and whether they were mistreated as a result. Fortunately, although fresh scandals continue to emerge from An Garda Síochána almost weekly, from investigations into breathalyser statistics and accounting practices in Templemore to reports of potential security breaches as senior officers use third- party email accounts from Gmail, the Tribunal has avoided attracting further terms of reference as each new report of alleged Garda misbehaviour emerged. Charleton is of course no stranger to Garda tribunals. He was the lead counsel for the Morris tribunal into Donegal Garda misbehaviour in its initial years. Set up in March 2002, the tribunal delivered its final report in 2008, although Charleton departed in 2006, appointed a judge to the High Court. A retired president of the High Court, Frederick Morris headed one of two Garda tribunals at the time, while Justice Robert Barr headed a tribunal into the Abbeylara siege which ended in the death of John Carthy, shot by gardaí. Coincidentally, Barr’s son Anthony, also a barrister, acted for the Morris tribunal alongside Charleton. The latest whisleblowers inquiry (or as it wishes to be known, the Disclosures tribunal, and as it will probably become known among journalists, the McCabe or Charleton Tribunal) has one advantage over the Morris Tribunal. While the Donegal inquiry looked at a wide range of issues covering over a decade, the terms of reference for – and indeed the events which are being scrutinised by – the latest probe are much narrower. Even so, it could take some time to complete its work. Justice Barr looked at the events of a 25-hour siege, and the events leading up to it. His inquiry ran for four years. Charleton moved swiftly from the first. First announced early in February, before month’s end he had delivered impressive opening remarks, pointedly observing that lies told to the tribunal would be a “waste of what ordinary men and women have paid for”, and that the Irish people expected the tribunal to do its work expediently. Lies are a big thing for him: in a 2006 book, ‘Lies in a Mirror: An Essay on Evil and Deceit’, Charleton reflected on the criminals he had worked with, developing the idea that lying opens up the evil within all of us. His opening remarks also sought to shut down the possibility of delays to the tribunal’s work by way of appeals to the High Court, arguing that because so many previous tribunals had led to appeals to the High Court and Supreme Court, most important issues relating to tribunals were pretty much settled law. He also sought to shut down any claims of journalistic privilege which might impede the tribunal’s investigations. An interim report followed in mid-May, dealing mostly with the logistics of setting up the tribunal. It did reveal that at least some early concerns about journalistic privilege had been allayed, as both former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan and his successor Nóirín O’Sullivan, and Garda press office superintendent David Taylor, had waived any privilege in relation to any allegedly confidential communication with journalists. Born in 1956, Charleton was educated at St Mary’s College, Dublin, Trinity College and King’s Inns, before being called to the bar in 1979. He has written several books on criminal law in Ireland, as well as articles for both Irish and international journals on family law, constitutional law, the law of evidence, criminal law and judicial review. He has lectured at King’s Inns, Trinity, Fordham University in New York and Beijing University. He is unpaid chairman of the National Archives advisory council. He was appointed from the High Court to the Supreme Court in 2014. A noted musician, he was a founder member of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, and is formerly a member of the board of the Irish Baroque Orchestra. He is often described as “off beat” and “quirky”, which may be legal code for “well rounded” and “has interests outside the law”. By Gerard Cunningham
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Leo Varadkar consistently asserts that he does not believe in equality of outcome but in equality of opportunity. He sees himself as “right” or “either centre right or a higher class of liberal… somebody who believes in personal freedom, someone who believes in a political economy and in a free market as the best way to create wealth”. He wants to lead a party, and we infer a country, for “people who get up early in the morning”. His highest-profile initiative came in late April, when as Minister for Social Protection he launched the fractious ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’ advertising and online campaign. It aims to encourage the reporting of suspected fraud to the Department of Social Protection anonymously. The image Varadkar, who was always going to win anyway, cultivated in his long tilt at the Fine Gael leadership is that of champion of equality of opportunity, liberalism… the right… those who get up early in the morning and aren’t part of the class responsible for welfare fraud. But above all Varadkar speaks the language of markets. However, the markets are a dead end. Neoliberalism is defined as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism” (Oxford). Like Scientology or some of the madder dogmas of religion, it is pseudo-science or bad science and it has been, as we shall see, comprehensively discredited. But this is too tart. Of course it has been discredited, but its hold on us grips our lives still, grips our incoming Taoiseach. So let us try and whisper in the world’s ears, and in the ears of the Taoiseach, why it is wrong and dangerous and pushing us to the edge. For a start there are better economic theories. John Maynard Keynes was in Saul Bellow’s phrase a man of “clairvoyant intelligence”. Keynes was prophetic in his great work ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ that predicted that the dire economic conditions forced on Germany after the war would lead to its economic collapse and political upheaval throughout Europe. It resonates in our times. Keynes’ ideas fuelled recovery after recovery after the mistakes which followed 1929. Recovery was needed after the market was shown in every instance to be deficient in providing macroeconomic efficiency, let alone broader societal goals. Keynes argued that aggregate demand determines the overall level of economic activity. Inadequate aggregate demand can lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Time Magazine has said of Keynes: “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism”. Keynes himself was reportedly disparaging about capitalism itself: “Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds”. The stagflation of the 1970s with the shocks to the Keynesian system generated by oil prices opened sowed dissent. Keynes fell out of fashion with the stranglehold of unionism and welfarism and the imposition of socialist dogma. It created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishistic privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of State subsidies. In the late 1970s much of this made superficial though never profound sense. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality leading to intolerance. After the Depression which started in 2007, Keynesianism actually underpinned some of the measures implemented in some countries – notably by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown in the US and UK. This was not the case in most of the world, particularly in Germany, which has learnt, and insisted that others learn, the wrong lesson from its own hyperinflation-driven catastrophe – or the EU, including Ireland which was an incubator for austerity. But it is Greece that was the laboratory. When the Greeks decided the ignominy was too unfair and pointless and elected a government firmly opposed to the hopeless conditions imposed upon them they were forced into an astonishing U-turn to accept further self-destructive bailout packages. Not even the IMF thinks that Greece can comply with these terms and successfully pay back its debt, especially when coupled with crippling austerity conditions. The latest figures show Greece’s debt stands at 179 percent of its gross domestic product, or about €315 bn. Naomi Klein in her bestseller ‘The Shock Doctrine’ analyses the growth and development of Neoliberalism across the world. An economic paradigm dubbed by the author ‘disaster capitalism’. Klein particularly homes in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s mate Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”. This describes the Greek decade. Moreover, Neoliberalism has contributed to the world order approaching a collapse at a startling velocity. As shown by Thomas Piketty decades of inexorably widening inequality lead to economic instability and social unrest. Trump, Le Pen and Brexit are the predictable fruits. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, anti-environmentalism and disdain for the truth are their imperatives and their currency. It isn’t hysterical to fear that the end of human civilisation is glaring us in the face while most people look away. Established parties of government in nearly all major countries have subscribed to the Neoliberal agenda and merely quibble about its implementation. A wild ballet of madness. Neoliberalism’s imprimatur for austerity has ineluctably led to social instability and fragmentation, the destruction of pension and welfare entitlements, poorer and often more expensive health care, homelessness, evictions and the corralling of our world into the very rich, and the rest. The ineluctability comes from its
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Technology neutralises our neutrality
Margaretta D’Arcy found herself jailed in January 2014 on the back of a protest she mounted at Shannon Airport in 2012. What was she protesting about? US troop aircraft using Shannon as a stopover on their journey to the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan among other things. D’Arcy is a rare stalewart against the steady erosion of Ireland’s vague understanding of its declared neutrality. The New Battlefields Unfortunately, in our increasingly connected technological world she was fighting the right battle on the wrong battlefield. Troops landing on the ground have increasingly been replaced by drones in the sky commanded by the video-game generation from air-conditioned facilities in the comfort of their own country. This arms-length war is conducted in part through the use of the numerous transatlantic cables that crisscross the seabed, many of which land in Ireland before continuing on their journey to the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. As to the number of deaths that can be attributed to commands that were routed through cables that land in Ireland we can only speculate, but as the Galway Alliance Against War statement asserted on the occasion of the conviction of Margaretta D’Arcy: “By allowing the US Military to use Irish airspace and Shannon airport to wage these wars we have become a willing accessory to mass murder. We have blood on our hands…”. By logical extension, by allowing the command and control systems to communicate across infrastructure that connects through Ireland we continue to support these military operations in opposition to the basic principles of our perceived neutrality. Not a New Problem The first transatlantic communications cable was laid between Newfoundland and Ireland in 1866. One of the first communications transmitted across that cable was from Queen Victoria to then President James Buchanan: “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia”. The cost of transmitting messages across the transatlantic cable was prohibitive, limiting its usefulness to the affluent, wealthy organisations and of course governments. The strategic value of the cable was further emphasised in the explicit agreement for the UK to retain the right to determine control of it after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. We might like to think that in the intervening years Ireland had grown to the point where it exercises control over the cables that land here. In 2014 Edward Snowden’s WikiLeaks revealed the degree to which the influence of Britain’s security services and General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has hardly diminished. The Irish Government has failed to address this issue. The actual number of cables connecting the US to its closest strategic partner, the UK, is startlingly few: discounting cables that form loops, there are seven. Eliminating those that connect through the rest of Europe, such as France or Denmark, the number reduces to four. Of those four three are routed through Ireland. The relevance of these connections can be easily understood when one looks at what traffic is going through these cables. Nippers and Slippers The United States Military operates a number of private networks, that are not connected to the public Internet. They have fantastic names such as JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System), Secure/Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SPIRNet or slipper), Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet or nipper) and National Security Agency Network (NSANet). These networks all fall under the umbrella of the Defence Information System Network (DISN), a worldwide system that connects US interests. These interests include in this case: command and control centres, intelligence agencies, embassies all the way out to Joint Task Force/Coalition Task Force troops on the ground. Included in the numerous global points to which slipper and nipper connect is the US Embassy in Dublin. You may wonder how the US Military managed to get access to all of the required jurisdictions to lay a private network of cables across the globe. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they didn’t. Instead they purchase services from private infrastructure companies which have already laid the required cables. Companies like those which land in the likes of Dublin, Cork or Sligo. These networks are designed to be ‘Airgapped’ i.e. they are intended to operate physically isolated from each other and physically separated from the public Internet. According to protocol, any device connected to slipper for example, is supposed to automatically fall under the control of the slipper protocols and by extension the DISN protocols. The allegations against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 elections specifically relating to the handling of secret information are based on her having access to information from slipper but using an insecure device. Slipper, nipper, JWICS and the rest leverage private infrastructure but are supposedly separated from the rest of the Internet, but there is some evidence to suggest that this isn’t entirely the case. Marines Building Tunnels In 2002, as the US was starting to land troops on their way to Afghanistan and the Middle East, in Shannon Airport, a resourceful team of Marines developed a new mechanism for accessing the nipper and slipper networks. In consultation with a private contractor, the Marines built a ‘tunnel’ that allowed a secure channel to be established to slipper from a lower classified network – lower classified networks include nipper of course but also the public internet. The tunnels are now understood to be Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that are in daily use by private industry. The implication of this ostensibly innocuous development is that the military themselves have transcended the security of their own private network using what is now off-the-shelf technology. Did You Lose Control of the Drones? At the intersection of the video-games universe and the US military is Creech Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. From there Air Force pilots remotely control the surveillance, information-gathering and ‘targeted killing’ Drone operations. Among the many different forms of information communicated to and from Creech is target-designation information – focusing on who is to be killed. This information is communicated via our now familiar
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Science ficsean
Ireland is known for its literature, but not for its science fiction. There is not a great number of Irish writers in the genre, but it is a puzzling fact that major international authors such as James White and Bob Shaw are barely known in their native Ireland. Science fiction often imagines alternative life-worlds, which give writers the chance to assess the present by composing thought experiments that explore the implications of a new technology, new social structures, or encounters with alien others. It might be a good idea, then, to look to Irish science fiction as a source of incisive critical comment on all aspects of Irish life. The first published catalogue of Irish science fiction came out as recently as 2014. ‘Irish Science Fiction’ by Jack Fennell of the University of Limerick traces the genre as far back as Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’ (1858) and Robert Cromie’s ‘A Plunge into Space’ (1891) all the way through to what he calls “the shape of Irish science fiction to come”. Fennell lists many strange and wonderful pickings from the Irish science-fiction tradition, such as Tom Greer’s ‘A Modern Daedalus’ from 1885, which outlines the invention of flying machines by a Dublin man and his inner conflict at using the technology to gain independence for Ireland, and James Creed Meredith’s ‘The Rainbow in the Valley’ (1939), in which Martian contact becomes a trigger for philosophical speculations and reflections on the War of Independence. Fennell also uncovers science fiction in Irish. The four Captaen Spéirling novels by Cathal Ó Sándair were space-going adventures written in the early 1960s for children. Fennell points to the optimism engendered by an economic upturn in Ireland in the period as crucial for understanding the stories, with Spéirling described as “nothing more than a gaelgeoir Buck Rogers or Dan Dare”. Fennell also points to an imperialist theme throughout the Spéirling series, with the suggestion in the novels that Ireland’s history as a colony will ensure that aliens on any inhabited planets will be treated with the utmost respect when an Irish interplanetary imperialist project is established. One author not covered in Fennell’s volume is Joseph O’Neill, whose ‘Wind from the North’ (1934), ‘Land Under England’ (1935) and ‘Day of Wrath’ (1936) arguably also belong to the genre. A friend of W.B. Yeats, O’Neill was the Secretary of the Department of Education in the early Irish Free State. In The Irish Press in 1944, O’Neill reminisced about his younger days as a member of the Gaelic League, travelling the countryside with his boyhood friend, Pádraig Pearse, collecting stories and handing out cash prizes to anyone who could speak Gaelic. However, O’Neill’s interest in Gaelic antiquity never translated into political action. The O’Neill expert Kelly Flynn Lynch writes that at Easter 1916, the author was “incapable of evincing a passion or even an enthusiasm for popular Irish causes”. But O’Neill did have a passion for the science fiction of H.G. Wells. Upon publication of ‘Land Under England’, he sent the father of modern science fiction a copy of the book with a letter telling him that “‘Land Under England’ in so far as it has value, owes it to you more than to all other writers put together, because it is your works, the early ones as well as the later, that kindled my imagination to the point at which I felt that I wanted to create”. ‘Land Under England’ provides a fascinating inverse view of the newly independent Ireland. The novel details the adventures of a young Englishman who follows his father into a secret cavern beneath Hadrian’s Wall. His father’s obsession with the ancient Romans has led to the discovery of a hollow beneath the historic wall into which Roman civilisation has retreated. In their isolation, the Romans have evolved telepathic mind-control techniques in order to control their subjects and exist as a society of automatons. The novel is usually connected to the rise of fascism in Europe, but it also echoes events closer to home, in what Diarmaid Ferriter calls the “frenzied and paranoid” atmosphere of 1930s Ireland. Indeed, after its publication, reviewers wondered whether its depiction of Roman automatons was a sly critique of Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party, or his rivals in the fascist Blueshirts. In his role in the Department of Education, O’Neill was said to have been one of Archbishop McQuaid’s favourite civil servants, and O’Neill’s official writings on education and the church certainly bear this out. However, O’Neill’s final novel ‘The Black Shore’, published posthumously in 2000, reveals a more sardonic take on the relationship between church and State in Ireland, and perhaps adds a new dimension to the metaphorical significance of O’Neill’s Roman automatons. The bulk of Irish science-fiction literature has been produced by three Belfast writers: Bob Shaw and James White, who both wrote from the mid-twentieth century to its end, and Ian McDonald, whose career spans from 1989 to the present. Science fiction is a genre that tends to arrive with late modernity, so it is probably no surprise that a science-fiction tradition would take root in Belfast, given the history of industrialisation in the city. Bob Shaw and James White were friends who worked together at the Shorts aerospace company. White set up the Irish science-fiction group Irish Fandom in 1947 with his friend Walt Willis, with Shaw joining the group soon after. White and Willis met through the pages of the British speculative fiction magazine Fantasy, when White noticed a Belfast address in one of the letters to the editor and tracked Willis down. Irish Fandom was nominally a non-sectarian grouping, although White remained the only Catholic member throughout its existence. The group self-published the science-fiction fanzine Slant, which was printed using a hand-levered flatbed printing press. White made prints using woodcuts of rocket ships, astronauts and planets for the illustrations. White saw his science fiction as an antidote to the violent and
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Obituary: Sean McEniff, 1936 – 2017
The death at 81 of Sean McEniff removes one of the last old-style political fixers from Ireland’s political landscape. McEniff was the co-owner of the Tyrconnell Group, a hotel chain. In 2007 Tyrconnell had merged with the Brian McEniff Hotel Group, owned by his brother, Brian McEniff, an All-Ireland-winning manager of Donegal football team, to form McEniff Hotels. McEniff served as chairman of Bord Fáilte, the tourist marketing board 1993-1998 and at one time was a Lloyds’ ‘name’ though he lost at least €8m there. His hotel empire extended to ten hotels countrywide including the Skylon, Grand Canal and Camden Court in Dublin, the Yeats Country Hotel in Rosses Point, Sligo, the Westport Woods in Mayo. But the core of the empire was Donegal, where the company owns the Mount Errigal in Letterkenny, and the Allingham Arms, Holyrood and Great Southern in Bundoran. The group weathered the economic downturn well. McEniff ruled his home town of Bundoran with a rod of iron, and ran a network of companies based on hotels, gambling arcades and holiday accommodation which together undermined the charm of Donegal’s leading resort. At the time of his death, he was Ireland’s longest-serving councillor, having been first elected to Bundoran Urban District Council in the early 1960s, then to Donegal County Council in 1967. That’s more than half a century. He ensured political decisions were taken to benefit him and his family. He was also a racist and bully. He once told local radio that Travellers “wreck homes” and should be housed away from other people. He said “there should be an isolated community of them some place – and give them houses and keep them all together”. “You wouldn’t want them beside you and I don’t want them beside me”. He was complaining about a house being bought in Ballyshannon for a Traveller family, and said it was “par for the course”: the house would eventually be “wrecked”. The house was burned in an arson attack after his outburst. In fairness, he condemned the arson attack. He believed he could bully state institutions. In November 2005 he threatened to take legal action against Met Éireann because it issued a severe weather warning. He claimed the tourist industry in Donegal suffered heavy losses. His own business was hit, as fewer than expected turned up to a music festival in one of his Bundoran hotels. “There was damn all snow in Donegal”, he said. “The Met Office has shafted us”. He was vindictive. When one local taxi driver fell foul of him, he instructed the three McEniff hotels in Bundoran that, if guests were seeking a taxi, this driver was not to be sent for. When the Council’s feisty traffic warden objected to several developments by McEniff and others, she was dismissed. She is currently in legal dispute with some former councilors, including McEniff. His empire traced its foundation to slot machines. These machines don’t just operate during the summer holiday season. In winter, buses run to Bundoran from several towns in the North bringing gamblers, mostly elderly, poor, or both. Under legislation, the maximum legal payout from a slot machine is less than €1. McEniff was by far the largest slot machine operator in the town, and ignored the law: his slots would make big pay-outs, just enough to keep the key punters hooked. The now-abolished Bundoran Town Council (formerly known as Bundoran Urban Council) has the job of licensing ‘the slots’. In 2009 it adopted a submission from the slot-machine operators – McEniff being the largest – to the Department of Justice as its own submission. The submission said Bundoran had 1,000 machines which are “an integral part of the overall Bundoran product, both on and off the season, and a key reason why visitors continue to be attracted to the town…the central importance of the sector is that it also directly supports most of the rest of the tourism and service sector. McEniff treated the Council as family property, and used electoral fraud. He put people living outside Bundoran, some in the North, on the voter register. On election day, cars would be sent for them. They would vote, get a meal, then a free bar. The tactic was effective. For the 2004 local elections, Bundoran Town Council had an electorate of 1,528. At the 2002 census, there had been 1,665 people in the town: 415 were under eighteen. That gave a population over eighteen of under 1,300. Thirty-three names were added to the register in February 2004 after the Electoral Review Court finalised late applications – but these names did not go through it, which is normal practice. All gave addresses at the McEniff-owned Great Northern Hotel. General Manager Philip McGlynn was McEniff’s brother-in-law and a Fianna Fáil candidate for the Town Council. A journalist rang the Great Northern Hotel to speak to one of the persons added to the Register. “She hasn’t been working here in over a year and she’s gone to America”, the receptionist who answered the phone said. McGlynn said he approached the Donegal County Registrar after the Electoral Revision Court. “I had twenty people working in the Great Northern Hotel, who had been working here two, three, four years”, he said. “The County Registrar said if these people filled in forms to register they could send them to the County House in Lifford. Nobody is living in the Great Northern Hotel (our emphasis). They are employed in the Great Northern Hotel and living in Bundoran. They have got four Council houses off Bundoran Town Council. Every one of these people is entitled to vote”. The Registration Department of Donegal County Council said voters had to live at the address at which they were registered. In that election, Fianna Fáil won five of the nine seats on the Council. The lowest-elected received 79 first-preference votes. Three of the five Fianna Fáilers were members of the McEniff family. A dynasty. While Bundoran Town Council existed, it was the planning authority for
