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    Nobody’s Child

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    PJ Rafferty’s mother Eileen was first brought to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in 1951, aged 27. Pregnant outside of marriage, Eileen was discretely ushered into the home by the local parish priest, anxious to avoid a scandal in the Galway town. In an era of a Catholic Ireland seemingly devoid of empathy, compassion or indeed Christianity, pregnancy outside of marriage was, as PJ points out, a crime “akin to murder”; under a patriarchal church, it was the women who were punished, filtered out and forgotten. Although PJ’s memory of the home is fragile – a fact he puts down to something “terrible” having happened there, his experience of the home was that it shaped his childhood and teenage years and his brief relationship with his mother. “When my mother got pregnant, rumours started flying around and somebody went down and told the priest; he came up to the house and told her that she wouldn’t be able to go to church any more, being pregnant outside of marriage. He told her that it was a bad influence on all the people around the town and she’d be better off if she was kept indoors till such time the baby was due. Then he told her parents there was a place in Tuam where there were nuns who looked after women who had babies outside of marriage”. PJ’s mother spent 12 months at the Bon Secours-run Mother and Baby Home before being forced to leave without her baby. The reason for staying those 12 months, according to PJ, was that the nuns were anxious for babies to be breastfed, because it would “save them the trouble of buying milk and that”, as well as the fact they could have the women work there, looking after other babies, cleaning and washing. “My mother had to leave after 12 months because they didn’t want the bonding, so she had to get out; she said she wanted to bring the baby with her, and the nuns said ‘you’re not fit to keep him, he’s going to be kept here and fostered out’, and they closed the door on her face. So rather than leave Tuam, she got work in the town as a cleaner. Every time she was off during the week she would take ten minutes and walk up to the home and knock on the door, pleading and begging with the nuns, ‘please hand out my son, please let me see him’, and they’d tell her to go away; she spent five and a half years doing that while I was there. To think that my mother, if she had money, could buy me out of there, if she had money to give the nuns and say ‘here you are’. And I mean where were you supposed to get 100 pounds in those days? Sure you wouldn’t have it. And she could buy me. Jesus Christ, to think that you could buy your own baby”. Although PJ finds it difficult to remember life in the home, he vividly remembers the mattresses leaning up against the home’s windows each day, drying out from where children had wet them. He also recalls the alienation he felt in school, where children from the home were treated differently to the other children: “We were put in a room on our own and were cornered off in a section of the playground, and the nuns were watching you to make sure you weren’t playing with the other children. The other kids would be kicking around and playing their games and that. We weren’t allowed to talk to the other children. We were kept away from them because a lot of the parents didn’t like us mixing with them. They had this thing of us maybe carrying diseases and that. We were filth, the dirt of the earth really and truly. That’s the way we were treated, like we were filthy dirty”. PJ, Patrick Joseph – from Menlough in Ballinasloe – was fostered at six years of age and remembers walking to a car hand-in-hand with his foster mother. He recalls seeing a dog for the first time, and chickens and hens on his foster parents’ farm. Now 65, he has only fond memories of his foster parents, how “great” they were, and that only for them he doesn’t know where he would have been, that perhaps he would have killed himself. When PJ was in his twenties, he discovered that his mother was living and working in England and, having received a letter from her, travelled to Brixton to meet her for the first time. In what was an emotional reunion, they chatted, exchanged stories and took photos, but although there was some contact afterwards, the letters eventually stopped. It would be 2010, after PJ’s foster parents passed away, before his mother wrote to him again, prompting him to travel with his wife back to Brixton unannounced. “So then out of the blue we got a letter from my mother, and she said that her husband had died shortly after we’d seen her before in the 1970s. She said she didn’t want to interfere but could she become part of my life, part of my family. We decided we’d go back then, but that we wouldn’t tell her, in case she mightn’t open the door, that she could be nervous. We decided to take a chance on it, so we got to Brixton and walked down the street where she was living, and we walked on the opposite side in case she was looking out and might see us and recognise me. As it happened we saw this small elderly woman leaning on the wall, and we crossed the road over to her. She said ‘good morning’ and we said ‘good morning’ to her. We said we were looking for the new neighbours that moved in next door. I walked over to her and said ‘it’s maybe you I’m looking for, do you know

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    Obituary: Terry Kelleher

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    Terry Kelleher was born in 1948, in Dublin. His dad was a doctor in the British Army so he was educated in schools in Egypt, Austria, Germany, and eventually Wicklow. His elder brother John, later movie producer (‘Eat the Peach’) and film censor, recalls teaching him to walk, lured by sweets, on the Empress of Australia as it cruised to Egypt. They were close and later they would bunk into movie houses or, even better, act out the parts, and, as garrulous teenagers, interview each other. Terry spent six years in Clongowes Wood College in Kildare, winning prizes for Essays and Debating. He excelled at acting, famously featuring as loathsome Sir Richard Rich in ‘A Man for all Seasons’, amusingly opposite an older John Bruton as Cromwell. He did well academically and played prop on the Senior Cup Team. He was always strong. Perhaps under the usual parental pressure he completed a law degree in UCD though he never intended to practise it. He was a popular Director of DramSoc, working with Mary Finan and Veronica O’Mara (mother of actors Jason and Rebecca); and even acted a bit, including in ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’. The plays would go on in Newman House, in the Aula Maxima or Little Theatre (now the James Joyce centre). He became Deputy Editor of Hibernia Magazine in 1970 when it was in its heyday under the editorship of John Mulcahy, mostly writing about politics and culture and enjoying shepherding the often anonymous contributors. Hibernia in that period has been described as “a cross between the Good Wine Guide and Republican News” by Conor Cruise O’Brien, and as “irreverent”, “eclectic”, and “crusading” by John Horgan. Terry loved it. He moved on to the more workaday but, somewhat, better-paid Sunday Press around 1973. He wrote a guidebook to his beloved Dublin called ‘The Essential Dublin’. During the early stages of his relationship with Sheffield-born Rita, best friend of Terry’s sister Siún, he moved to London where he became a reporter in RTÉ’s London Office, on TV and, mostly, radio. Terry was outstanding. He married Rita and was a loving step-father to Rebecca and Dan. Jenni came along in 1981 and he could not have been more proud. In the mid-1970s he joined Thames Television, working first as a researcher, then a producer, later becoming Deputy Editor of ‘Thames News’. He was editor of Thames’ weekly magazine, London Reports and later its business affairs programme, ‘The City Programme’. He was made redundant with 2000 others when Thames lost its franchise and expired in 1991 in big-banging London. Hibernia in that period has been described as “a cross between the Good Wine Guide and Republican News” by Conor Cruise O’Brien, and as “irreverent”, “eclectic”, and “crusading” by John Horgan. Terry loved it. It was then that he entered his working prime – fuelled by a remarkable passion and integrity – establishing his own independent company, Platinum Productions, which made many high-quality programmes for Channel 4 and the BBC, including several editions of ‘Dispatches’ and specials for the ‘Money Programme’. In 1987 he produced and directed one of the most important miscarriage of justice documentaries ever made, presented by the formidable Paul Foot: ‘Murder at the Farm: Who Killed Carl Bridgewater?’. In 1978 13-year-old Carl Bridgewater had been shot in the head at close range at isolated Yew Tree farmhouse in Staffordshire as he did his paper-round. The Bridgewater Four were convicted of the killing during a burglary. Foot made the case that “Carl did not just interrupt the burglars or burglar, he knew them! The position in which the body was found indicates to me that someone asked or made Carl sit down. Then, he approached the boy and shot him at close range”. The thesis was convincing and in February 1997, after almost two decades of imprisonment, their convictions were overturned in the Court of appeal on technical grounds, and the three surviving defendants were released. The murder remains officially unsolved. In 2003 he upped sticks for St. Remy, one of the most charming towns in sun-kissed Provence, France, where Nostradamus was born and Vincent Van Gogh had been in the asylum. He spent perhaps his happiest years there, buying a house with a swimming pool and forging solid local friendships. Soccer-mad, he was thrilled when Jenni started working with the Football Association and later the Premiership in London. However, this was crowned when she got married to Tony Parks, one-time goalkeeper for Spurs, the hero who saved the final penalty in the shootout in the 1984 UEFA Cup final. The wedding was followed by revelries in the parkland of the gorgeous Hotel de l’Image in St. Remy. Little Lily was born three years ago. Terry was also best man at John’s wedding to Amanda last year in the town. These events were centrepieces of his last years. Sadly he had suffered ill health for decades. Having had run-ins with glaucoma and cancer while in London, he was diagnosed with Multiple sclerosis shortly after moving to St. Remy. This terrible disease sapped the energies of this, the most resilient of men, but his cheerfulness prevailed, year after year, even as he became painfully wheelchair-bound. It was too much in the end. The hospital in Arles told him he was losing the war and that all they could do was “accompany him”. At Easter, though not a religious man, he ‘celebrated’ the elevation of brother John’s long-suffering Sheffield United back into the Premiership, though he was a Wednesday man himself. He lapsed into a coma and by Easter Tuesday he was gone. All of his kids spoke proudly of him at the funeral in Nimes. A memorial service will be held in Dublin.

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    The logic of following the UK out

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    If Britain leaves the EU single market and customs union while the Republic stays in the EU, the North-South border within Ireland will become an EU land frontier, with customs controls inevitable and possibly passport controls. EU-based laws and standards, for example in relation to crime and justice, would prevail in the South and British-based ones in the North. Logically therefore the only way to avoid adding new dimensions to the North-South border post-Brexit is for Brexit to be accompanied by Irexit. This thought may be so novel it will shock many. EU membership has brought Ireland good things. Most Irish people have positive attitudes towards it. But if the North is leaving the EU along with Britain we should be able to consider dispassionately the advantages of leaving too – and the drawbacks of remaining in it without the UK as a fellow member. Irexit clearly has some benefits. It would save us money for one thing. Since 2014 the Republic has become a net contributor to the EU Budget: for the previous forty years we were major net recipients of EU cash, mainly through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. From now on money from Brussels will be Irish taxpayers’ money recycled, as is already the case with the UK. This removes what hitherto has been the principal basis of Irish europhilia, official and unofficial – namely cash. That has always been more important here than ideological enthusiasm for Eurofederalism or ‘the EU project’. If the Republic remains in the EU post-Brexit it will have to pay more to the EU Budget as its proportionate contribution to help compensate for the loss of the UK’s annual net payment. On the other hand a bonus of leaving is that we would get our sea fisheries back. The value of annual fish-catches by foreign boats in Irish waters is a several-times multiple of whatever money we have got from the EU. As regards trade and investment, the Republic sends 61% by value of its goods exports and 66% of its services exports to countries that are outside the continental EU26, mostly English-speaking. It gets two-thirds of its imports from outside the EU26. The USA is the most important single-country market for the Republic’s foreign-owned firms and the UK for its Irish-owned ones – the latter being especially important for employment. The UK and US markets together are comparable in importance to that of the EU26 post-Brexit. Taking other English-speaking markets into account makes trade with the English-speaking world much more important for the Republic than the EU26, with Britain gone. This is a consideration also for foreign investors coming to Ireland. Economically and psychologically, Ireland is closer to Boston than Berlin, and to the UK than Germany. This puts exaggerated talk of the EU’s ‘giant market of 500 million’ in perspective. That shrinks anyway to 435 million with the UK gone. Some 7 billion people live outside the EU. It is not of course a question of the Republic having to choose between one export market and another if it should decide to leave the EU along with the UK. If common sense prevails in the negotiations, there should be continuing free trade between the Republic, the EU and the UK in the context of any Brexit or Irexit. Without Britain beside her in the EU Council of Ministers the Republic would be in a weaker position to defend its low rate of company profits tax, important for attracting foreign investment, for which Germany and the Brussels Commission are now gunning. It would be less well able to defend its fishery interests, its trade interests, its distinctive Anglo-Saxon-based traditions in the area of law and justice, which the EU aims to harmonise, and its military neutrality. The main argument for staying in the EU when the UK leaves is the negative one that we are members of the Eurozone while the UK is not. When the euro was established in 1999 our politicians decided to adopt the currency of an area with which we do just one third of our trade. They thought at the time that Britain would be bound to adopt the euro-currency too and that by going first they would show how “communautaire” they were. The Republic now desperately needs to get its own currency back so that it can devalue it along with sterling and the dollar, and not be stuck with an implicitly overvalued euro that is hitting its exports and encouraging competing imports. Failing that the North-bound shopping queues will grow. This is why Dublin should aim to leave the Eurozone and re-establish an Irish currency in a planned concerted manner, negotiating its departure with Germany, the UK and the ECB in private behind the scenes as part of its move to leave the EU along with the UK, rather than be forced to abandon the euro anyhow in some future Eurozone financial crisis. The UK will presumably revert to its traditional cheap food policy when it leaves the EU. Contrary to some Irish commentary, there is nothing immoral in a country importing its food from wherever in the world it can buy good quality products cheaply. At the same time the British Government will want to support UK farmers for political reasons, presumably by means of direct farm subsidies to replace the price supports they now get from the EU’s CAP. Nearly half the Republic’s agricultural output goes to the UK market at present, so such a development will have major implications for us. Will Irish farm producers be displaced in the UK market post-Brexit by New Zealand lamb, Brazilian beef, American chicken etc? These are the main reasons why the focus of intelligent Irish policy should now be on negotiating a comprehensive deal with London for this State to leave the EU along with the UK, while maintaining maximum free trade with both EU and UK post-Brexit. Such a deal should guarantee continued free access for Irish food exports to the UK

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    Brushstrokes of a war criminal

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    Donald Trump conjures such intense images that it is difficult to frame recollections of a man who made him possible. What memories flood back in your mind’s eye when you think of his Republican predecessor? Weapons of Mass Destruction? That awful expression, like a ghost stirring at the back of your mind? Perhaps you smile? Cringe? Do you imagine him as the strong president standing amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, bullhorn in hand, shouting that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon”? Perhaps as the struggling guy-next-door mispronouncing words like ‘nuclear’? Or perhaps as the most powerful man in the world giving a press conference in Baghdad in the waning hours of his presidency, ducking at the last minute while a shoe, thrown by an Iraqi journalist, sails past his head? The man who smashed international law and the Constitution of the United States has recently been feted by even ‘liberal’ television talk-show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen De Generes. It doesn’t matter; it’s all in the past. Shush! Marvel at his nice paintings, almost professional! Bush’s book of his paintings of servicemen, ‘Portraits of Courage’ currently sits atop the New York Times bestsellers list. Was there never a moment, in the words of Gore Vidal, when television’s cold, distorting eye was not relentlessly projecting a funhouse view of the world? “Pleikus” declared McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson’s National Security Advisor, “are like streetcars. Wait long enough and one will come sooner or later”. Bundy was referring to an incident during the Vietnam War when enemy soldiers attacked a poorly defended US military base in Pleiku, Central Vietnam. It was the pretext for President Johnson escalating the war in Vietnam, with disastrous results. Bush’s ‘Pleiku Incident’ was without doubt 9/11. In the 18 months after this attack, Bush set the US down a long road of unilateralism and ambivalence to international law and treaties. His administration declared the doctrine of “preventive war” and designated suspects captured in the War on Terror as “enemy combatants” – concepts unknown under international law. At the time of its establishment in January 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Guantanamo was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate detainees in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes. In reality, the site has long been used for indefinite detention without trial. The first international treaty to sense the acrid cigar-breath was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Signed with the Soviet Union in 1972 to ease Cold War tensions, Bush signalled his unilateral – in other words unlawful – intent to withdraw from it in December, 2001. Worse was to follow. Adrift now, Bush then declared in May, 2002 that the US was no longer bound by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which governs treaties between states. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent court, founded in 2002 by the Rome Statute to “bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide”, especially when national courts are unable or unwilling to do so, was next on the chopping board. Signed by President Clinton in December, 2000, Bush then took the astonishing step of retroactively un-signing it in May, 2002. The institution clearly panicked Bush, especially given what direction he knew US foreign policy would shortly take him and his buddies. Petrified of inadvertently doing something which might be construed as US acknowledgement of the ICC, Bush even barred US diplomat Richard Holbrooke from attending the court to give expert evidence in the trial of Serbian warlord, Slobodan Milosevic. This act alone ought to have warned everyone that even then Bush was dreaming of war and was taking steps to ensure that neither he nor any of his cronies could ever be hauled under the court’s scrupulous gaze. To make doubly sure, in August, 2002 Bush signed the American Services Members Protection Act which authorised the US to use force to free any member of its armed services arrested and detained at The Hague for war crimes. The Dutch government dubbed this the Netherlands Invasion Act. The bellicosity only increased. In November, 2002, furious that the international community would not support his Iraq war Bush issued an ultimatum: if the UN wouldn’t take action against Iraq, the US would, thus shredding international law which since 1946 had required that the UN Security Council issue a Resolution in favour of war before it could be initiated. Enemies now seemed to be everywhere, chief among them North Korea. The combined delicate efforts of both South Korea and Bill Clinton during the 1990s to bring North Korea in from the cold were blithely jettisoned as soon as Bush took office. Bush publicly declared that he “loathed Kim Jong Il” and that North Korea was now part of the ‘Axis of Evil’, alongside Iraq and Iran. Predictably alarmed, North Korea then withdrew from Nuclear Non-Proliferation talks and ejected weapons inspectors in January, 2003. When war came to Saddam in March, the North drew the obvious conclusion: the only way to deter the Americans was to acquire nuclear weapons. The catastrophic ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction generated the human horror of up to a million civilian deaths. When Iraqis rebelled against the invasion the US reacted with torture as in Abu Ghra’ib and massive violence in, for example, Fallujah and exploited sectarian divisions to maintain its fading power. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, remarked on German television in January 2009 that Bush had lost his head of state immunity and under international law and that the US could start criminal proceedings against all those involved in these violations of the UN Convention Against Torture. It was a minority view, or at least a view that was in the minority amonth those in a position to do

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    Theory of water services

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    Even with the likelihood of charges for wasteful use of water, as recommended by the Report on the Funding of Domestic Public, the State will remain much more central to water provision than under erring market environmentalist models.

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    Facebook owns you

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    Around 25% of the population of the earth use Facebook. Its latest accounts, presenting figures up to December 31st 2016, reveal that, at peak, there were 1.83 billion active users, 1.74 billion of those connecting from a mobile device. Figures for Ireland are less clear-cut, but 65% to 78% of the adult population is estimated to be using the service. Stand on the main street of any town in Ireland. If you’re not on Facebook the likelihood is that the person next to you is. The latest figures for 2016 show revenues hitting $27.7bn. A little bit of maths, taking into account regular active users at approximately 75%, reveals that Facebook makes between $18 and $20 per active user every year. That’s pretty impressive for a company that offers a free service. Conventional wisdom suggests that a company can only be making money by selling something; so what exactly is Facebook selling?   Facebook’s real product Facebook is selling you. Not the real you, but the virtual you that lives and works online. Facebook, among others, has turned you into a product, and it sells the ability not just to reach you, but to very specifically target you based on a surprisingly intimate knowledge of what would make you a potential customer. Facebook has become so good at selling you, over and over again, that 84% of its revenue comes from advertising. You have been analysed, categorised, matched and packaged into a commodity that advertisers can turn their sights on using the tools that Facebook provides. You can be found based on your gender, age and ethnicity; your relationship and employment status; your education level and any interesting life events, such as birthdays, anniversaries, whether you’re newly engaged or recently married. Of course, for the 1.74 billion mobile users you can also be found based on where you are, where you were recently or on whether you are visiting a location or are at home. This is before it even gets started on your interests, your work, and your entertainment and social preferences. From food to hobbies to political affiliations a cursory examination of the various ways you can be targeted reveals no less than 250 criteria that can be selected. All for the sole purpose of grouping you into consumer groups with the intention of presenting advertising so specifically tailored to you that the likelihood of a sale increases. How much does that likelihood increase when you’re so targeted? 200%-300% is the conservative estimate.   How do you become a product? If you are only realising now that you have been ‘productised’ I wouldn’t be overly shocked as most of Facebook’s users are largely oblivious to what’s happened. In Facebook’s defence though, they are quite explicit in their terms and conditions: “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it”. That’s right, worldwide and royalty free; you gave over the information and agreed to let Facebook use it for free. Moreover, scrutinising the various sub-areas of the terms and conditions, specifically the data policy, we find: “When we have location information, we use it to tailor our Services for you and others, like helping you to check-in and find local events or offers in your area or tell your friends that you are nearby. We conduct surveys and research, test features in development, and analyse the information we have to evaluate and improve products and services, develop new products or features, and conduct audits and troubleshooting activities”. Not only did you give it to them, you agreed to let them use it almost without restriction: your profile information; your messages; your likes and, though not often considered, your photographs. Facebook estimates that it receives 134,000 new photographs along with nearly 300,000 status updates every minute of every day. Facebook users are literally keeping the company informed of their every move. For Facebook, the challenge is simply to gather up as much information as it can about you as quickly and as easily as possible.   How to get people to monitor themselves Facebook has to convince you that you want to give it the information. It can’t directly ask you for it, you need to volunteer it. The process starts the moment you create an account, give over your name, age and gender. So far so good. Next, for the purposes of making it convenient to connect with your friends, you’re afforded the opportunity to import your contacts from your phone or your email system or from other networks such as LinkedIn. Excellent, now Facebook knows not only about you, but also all of your contacts including, maybe, some it didn’t know about before. Did you remember to remove phone numbers from your contact list before uploading it to Facebook? Of course you didn’t. Facebook now has an additional piece of information that can uniquely identify a person. Imagine if your friend explicitly didn’t add their phone number, or their address, not to worry: you just fixed that outstanding issue. For Facebook. Congratulations! You are now a data source and of course an early stage product. You could be a better product if you could be convinced to offer up more information about yourself. Your friends like this music and these movies, but how about you? Any other music or movies you like? Where did you go to school? How about university? Look: here’s a group of people who went there also. When did you say you attended? The greatest trick Facebook has managed to pull off is the omnipresent ‘Like’ button. Read an article;

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    Nailing Harry Breen

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    RUC Chief Superintendent whose death was the Smithwick Tribunal’s focus, was not as innocent as the tribunal extraordinarily contrived to believe. Smithwick failed to ascertain how and why he was murdered and credible sources are now telling Village why Harry Breen may have been of particular interest to the IRA.

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