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    Pat Hickey as Moses

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    Reading a Pulitzer-winning New York biography over the summer it was difficult not to think of Pat Hickey and his control of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI). Hickey’s ego and ability to run rings around ministers is reminiscent, on a much smaller scale, of the way Robert Moses domineered in New York from the 1930s to the 1960s. Moses’ career is brilliantly expounded in Robert Caro’s outstanding, if at 1336 pages remarkably long, biography, ‘The Power Broker’. Moses unsuccessfully stood for New York State governor in 1934. But never achieving elected office didn’t stop him from becoming the most powerful man in New York. He rebuilt much of the city, in some ways positively, though he had little regard for the poor, and none for blacks. He created more public parks and recreational areas for New Yorkers, but in almost half a century he also committed the state to the car, building more roads, and starving public transport of investment, with predictable results. His story is one of remarkable power ostensibly based on the control of innocuous-sounding public authorities. His superior knowledge of rules, rules he often drafted himself, gave him control of these authorities. He collected information on every potential collaborator, who were, of course, also potential enemies. But most of all Moses organised the corruption of the city’s public works programmes. He ensured that anyone with any power had an interest in Moses’ success. He was able to defeat powerful enemies this way. And his successes made him powerful friends. In this perspective, the OCI ticketing scandal is pretty small beer. It might be a sign of how healthy our democracy is that we’re getting so exercised by it. More likely is that it happened in August and so, other than an underwhelming Irish performance at the Olympics, the media had little else to report. But it has become a scandal, and scandals create a vacuum that must be filled by the outrage of the overwrought. ‘Shell shocked’ ministers promised action. If Joe Duffy is currently pandering to the self-appointed morally superior, his interlocutors are sure to have been aghast. It will have provided proof for them, not that any was needed, that ‘they’re all the same’. And so to fill the vacuum, Shane Ross rushed in with an ‘independent’ inquiry. As a non-statutory inquiry it will depend on the goodwill of those it’s seeking to investigate. If there is wrongdoing, it is unlikely to find anything other than a lack of co-operation. It would be very hard for Pat Hickey to co-operate, should he want to, while under threat from the Brazilian criminal system. It does mean, however, that the OCI can’t sweep the matter away, which presumably it would prefer to do. But above all the purpose of the inquiry is to be seen to do something. Hopefully judge Carroll Moran will have the sense to see that and not drag it out longer than is needed. The real lessons are entirely predictable. When we look at the scandals that have emerged in Irish state-dependent organisations recently, a common thread is evident. The problems in Console, Rehab, the Central Remedial Clinic and the OCI – as well as Irish Nationwide, whether a result of corruption or mis-management, all happened in organisations that became dominated by one man or woman. They could get away it for so long because the dominant player controlled money, information and personnel and was dependent on absentee directors who showed little interest or taste in propriety. They went along usually because of the generous rewards associated with the roles. Sonia O’Sullivan’s admission that anything she knew about the OCI scandal she knew from the media shows a surprising lack of interest, given her position on its board. But badly managed organisations depend on the torpidity of others. The Irish scandals dwarf in comparison to Moses’ operation, but if we are serious about avoiding the excessive rewards and mismanagement of important Irish institutions, we need to think about regulation certainly, but even more about how directors operate and the terms of their leadership. Because many were overpaid we assume that no pay is the answer. This, it is thought, ensures that only the honest and genuinely interested will serve. But it means they may take it less seriously, and they may feel entitled to pursue other ways to get rewards. Moses made a big deal of the fact that he served in his many public jobs (except as New York City Parks Commissioner) without compensation, but he lived royally and enriched those around him in public and private life who aided him. Some pay is reasonable and desirable. Unless directors are made personally responsible for the activities of their organisations these scandals will continue. And if they are dominated by egotistical individuals, then scandal is almost a certainty. By Eoin O’Malley

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    Fragile

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    Shane Ross knows a thing or two about US multi-national corporations and the way they operate in this globalised economy. They avoid tax, in particular the 35% rate that applies in the US. No amount of huffing and puffing by Tim Cook, Michael Noonan or anyone else can alter that fact, and Ross knows it. As Joseph Stiglitz put it, the Irish government has been complicit in assisting Apple, or more precisely, its Irish subsidiary ASI, in massive tax avoidance: “The fact is you were avoiding tax and you knew it”, said the Nobel-prize-winning economist. “Whether the income was correctly attributed to Ireland is another matter. If Apple is saying that this is Irish income, you have an obligation to impose taxes on income that they say originated in Ireland”. Pocket the money and use it to meet the needs of the Irish people for homes, schools and hospitals, he told RTÉ. Put simply the EU commission has said to the Government that a Revenue ruling in 2007 was not based on any real figures but was more a negotiation with Apple that helped the giant corporation avoid paying any tax on profits it gained from sales of its products in countries across Europe and the world. The 2007 ruling was a negotiation with Apple based on earning projections provided by the company, the EU Commission argues. It was wrong in that it allowed Apple to declare income earned in other states as Irish income because it was booked in this country. The ruling was based on a similar 1991 letter of comfort provided by the Revenue Commissioners to Apple. The Minister for Finance in 1991 was Bertie Ahern and in 2007 it was Brian Cowen but it is unclear what knowledge or involvement either had in the deliberations between Apple and the Revenue. In 2007, the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners was Frank Daly, now head of NAMA, and it might be instructive to have his view on how a tax ruling by his officials at that time has ended up threatening the collapse of an already shaky government, in 2016. For Shane Ross and the Independent Alliance (IA) the issues are more immediate and stark. Fine Gael ministers and staffers have already conceded a recall of the Dáil which will provide the political cover for the coalition independents when they vote in favour of an appeal of the EU Commission ruling on Apple. That cover will be provided in the main by Fianna Fáil supporting the government in a Dáil vote. “Fianna Fáil are the crucial ones”, one IA source told Village as we went to print. The party’s finance spokesman, Michael McGrath has already indicated such support and that is hardly surprising as Fianna Fáil were in power when the controversial tax rulings were made and never expressed any concerns with the arrangements over the past 25 years. Fine Gael ministers are not so happy about the second demand by the IA which is for a “strong and decisive” motion on taxation policy which Noonan and his advisors argue has the potential to undermine decades of an industrial strategy based on foreign direct investment and the 340,000 jobs it supports across the country. As the internal coalition wrangling continues few in Leinster House believe that Ross et al. want to pull the government down or that he will not bring his troops across the line when it comes to the vote on an appeal of the EU ruling. What matters is the public perception of how the various parties and independents have acted in the face of an apparent gift to the exchequer of €13bn (plus €6bn interest). No one seriously believes either that this amount will somehow arrive in time for a budget anytime soon or that it would survive intact the legal challenges any transfer to the Irish state from Apple would meet from the company itself, from other states where the income was earned or from the US authorities. And of course Apple is to appeal the EU ruling. But there is no harm in seeking the sun, moon and stars. The €13bn Apple debacle comes on the back of the government turmoil over fatal foetal abnormalities before the summer and the recent trauma of the Olympic games when Ross was humiliated by the chairman of the Irish Olympic Committee before Patrick Hickey landed in Bangu jail in Rio for alleged ticket touting. Not for the first time the survival of this weak administration depends on Micheál Martin and his party. How long can this go on? By Frank Connolly

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    Birdbrain internet

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    We live in an age of ephemera and digital myopia that befuddle our wits and have thrown up the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Britain departs the European, stage right, after a campaign marred by cynicism and misinformation. The Siren sounds of advertising impel us to consume beyond what we need and corporations and their despots exercise unaccountable power over vast, and growing, fortunes. In an effort to understand this cultural drift I turn to philosophy, evolution and the effect of changes in technology, for answers. In philosophy I attempt to harmonise two seemingly contradictory notions that inform my understanding. The first is a notion expressed by the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus (d 475 BCE) that “no man ever steps into the same river twice, for he’s not the same man and the river is not the same”. This phenomenological view rests on observation of a constantly evolving reality. It is a process similar to the gathering of scientific data. The second approach is ideological but might be seen as analogous to over-arching scientific laws. This is the idea of prior knowledge, an objective belief in identifiable forms of justice or beauty. In Western philosophy this is identified with Plato (d 347 BCE) and his successors who trained their ears to the strains of an elusive harmony. Inferring truth solely from observation of phenomena is problematic, especially where life is reduced to competition between individual genes for expression as expounded by Richard Dawkins in his formative, ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976). These competing ideas may be resolved by allowing for an evolving objectivity: a fleeting truth. That is to say that answers to questions posed in Ancient Greece are quite distinct from those we seek today. It is dangerous talk, no doubt, to assume that humans have a capacity to discern principles arising from observation of a shifting reality, but without that assumption there is little hope for us. We can reject that idea and see homo sapiens as no more than a primate with a powerful brain that has successfully stored knowledge over millennia, beginning with farming and proceeding through literacy into the Internet. But then there is a temptation to retreat into relativist angst and dismiss our thoughts as idle. Most political ideologies, Marxism not least, eschew nihilism and posit a Utopia that we should drive towards, the best acknowledging the word’s origins in Greek as ‘no place’, but an aspiration. For example Village magazine promotes equality and sustainability as substantial ideals necessarily shifting with the flow of events. Agreeing on principles is a treacherous business, not least in crooked Ireland. It requires serious engagement over time with a great range of information and disciplines. Moreover, we must also leave a space for mystery as most Ancient Greek philosophers assuredly did. It was in that Greece of Antiquity that it seems that ideal and reality – form and content – came into closest balance. Fifth-century Athens was not human perfection incarnate: slavery was commonplace and women were not seen as equal to men, but still their achievements are unparallelled in a host of domains, including architecture, where an accommodation with Nature appears to have been reached. In his ‘History of Western Philosophy’ (1945), Bertrand Russell wrote that: “nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilisation in Greece … What they achieved in art and literature is familiar to everybody, but what they achieved in the purely intellectual realm is even more exceptional”. How to comprehend the virtually simultaneous arrival of science, history and mathematics, the very fundaments of a dominant Western civilisation? The psychiatrist and literary scholar, Iain McGilchrist, in his ‘The Master and his Emissary’ (2009), proposes that a steep evolution occurred in Ancient Greece when an abrupt collective separation in function between the two hemispheres of the brain – broadly a creative right and rational left – occurred. To begin with the hemispheres achieved a beatific balance. But he argues that, since our Hellenic heights, left-brained rationality has emerged dominant over the creative right hemisphere. Thus we have developed extraordinary technologies but failed to use them wisely, bringing us to the brink of auto-destruction, a process that continues apace in the age of the Internet. McGilchrist writes that: “The Greeks began the process of standing back; and the beginnings of analytical philosophy, of theorising about the political state, of the development of maps, of the observation of the stars and the ‘objective’ natural world, all may be mediated by the left hemisphere; though the urge to do it at all comes from the right”. He also sees the origins of the individual “as distinct from, as well as bonded to, the community”. He wrote of this evolution in our minds: “My thesis is that the separation of the hemispheres brought with it both advantages and disadvantages. It made possible a standing outside of the ‘natural’ frame of reference, the common-sense everyday way in which we see the world. In doing so it enabled us to build up that ‘necessary distance’ from the world and from ourselves, achieved originally by the frontal lobes, and gave us insight into things that otherwise we could not have seen, even making it possible for us to form deeper empathic connections with one another and with the world at large. The best example of this is the fascinating rise of drama in the Greek world, in which the thoughts and feelings of ourselves and of others are apparently objectified, and yet returned as our own. A special sort of seeing arises, in which both distance and empathy are crucial”. However: “Separation also sowed the seeds of left-hemisphere isolationism … At this stage in cultural history, the two hemispheres were still working largely together, and so the benefits outweighed by a long way the disadvantages, but the disadvantages became more apparent over time”. A technological development that McGilchrist associates with the shift was the emergence of money currencies, reigning ascendant by the fourth century

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    The joy of personalisation

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    An army of of taskforces is contemplated in the current Programme for Government, covering everything from electric cars to broadband rollout to mental health of young people. There is one among them that holds particular promise for people with disabilities.This is the taskforce promised on the implementation of “Personalised Budgets” for people with disabilities. There is a commitment in the Programme for Government to “devolve budgets to the person so they may shop beyond traditional service providers to better fit their needs”. The taskforce is to draw up an application system, brokerage models to assist people to connect with and purchase the services that meet their needs, systems of accountability, and practices to monitor the Personalised Budgets. This is a crucial development for people with disabilities. The taskforce is to be set up within three months of publication of the Programme for Government in May this year. It is to be led by public-service officials and to consult with civil society. After a period of five years, it could change into a national agency. One key concern is that people with a day-to-day experience of disability must be among the taskforce membership. Personalised Budgets are not a new idea. They can be traced back to the Independent Living Movement in the USA in the 1970s. They have been in operation in England for almost 20 years. They go by many different names such as ‘individualised funding’, ‘direct payments’ or ‘service brokerage’. All of these refer to different systems, but the key characteristic in all of them is the element of choice. It can be disquieting for those of us who receive, or will receive, a social care-service to know that, unless we have the means for private support, we have little choice over what services will be provided. For many people with disabilities this lack of choice is a lived ongoing experience. Personalised Budgets afford choice to people with disabilities about where, when, and how their needs are met. Personalised Budgets should be flexible to reflect a person’s changing needs over time. They must acknowledge that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. In some countries the Personalised Budget changes in certain circumstances such as upon reaching a certain age or moving from community living to nursing or residential care. The idea that a person should control his or her budget and therefore the services received is based on a social model of disability. This understands disability as being caused by the way society is organised and emphasises the need to remove barriers that restrict the life choices of people with disabilities. It departs from the charity model that pervades Irish disability services. Such choice should be a straightforward principle, but in practice progress on choice for people with disabilities has been slow in Ireland. A central problem is that nobody is actually entitled to a service to begin with. Therefore nobody is entitled to a Personalised Budget. While there is an entitlement to secondary education to age 18, there is no entitlement to any service following that. The Disability Act which was enacted in 2005 is not ‘rights-based’. This means that a person is entitled to an assessment of their need but has no corresponding entitlement to a service, therapy or support to address that need. You simply take what you are given and, at present, only children are covered for the assessment. Issues of cost have been raised as a barrier to introducing Personalised Budgets. However, in many jurisdictions – British Columbia for example, it has been has shown that Direct Payments cost the same as traditional services and, even where costs were initially higher, they evened out over time. An issue of legal, or more usually ‘mental’, capacity among people with intellectual disability in particular has also been cited as a barrier. However, the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act will alleviate many of these concerns about capacity once it is commenced. Its implementation will ensure people can get appropriate decision-making support. Research has shown the positive impact of such support on the physical and mental wellbeing of people with Personalised Budgets and how they feel more in control. This suggests further value for money. A 2012 Value for Money Report for the Department of Health, which looked at disability services, recommended a move away from block grants and towards disaggregation of services. This would facilitate a Personalised Budgets approach but has yet to happen. The taskforce is to be established to implement Personalised Budgets. The use of the word “implement” is critical in signifying action and delivery. We cannot be satisfied with further reports, scoping exercises or pilot projects. The task of the taskforce is to put Personalised Budgets into effect. Sarah Lennon is Training and Development Officer with Inclusion Ireland

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    Nice Guys finish last

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    ‘The Nice Guys’ is a charmingly funny, buddy-comedy detective-thriller, written by Shane Black, of ‘Lethal Weapon’ fame. It stars Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger. The narrative is purposefully familiar: in 1977, Los Angeles, down-on-his-luck PI (Gosling’s pretty Holland March) and an enforcer for hire (Crowe’s grizzly Jackson Healy) find themselves working on opposing sides of an investigation involving a missing girl until, as the case goes on, they discover that they will need to work together, if it is to be solved. ‘The Nice Guys’ is Shane Black’s return to comedy after a short foray into the superhero genre (‘Iron Man 3’, 2013). ‘The Nice Guys’ is a bubbling admixture of styles, pulling, and balancing, influences from the likes of ‘Boogie Nights’ (PT Anderson, 1997), ‘Chinatown’ (Roman Polanski, 1974) and ‘Lethal Weapon’ (Richard Donner, 1987). Withal, it contrives to be both diverse and tonally consistent from beginning to end, despite its unconventional embrace of scenes involving a large talking bee and a ghostly former American president. Black’s blackish humour dominates, though perhaps he has attenuated the acerbity lately. Gosling reaches for, and finds, the comic timing and acting range that drove Academy Award winner ‘The Big Short’. The homespun chemistry between the main characters is at times electrifying. The film’s dialogue is realist and punchy – as where our heroes in an effort to coax information from a hotel-bar witness debate everything from contacting the police to eunuch existentialism, reminiscent of Tarantino’s earlier work (‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Jackie Brown’). The script indeed more Tarantino than Tarantino himself, these days. Sadly, ‘The Nice Guys’ won’t necessarily make money. The movie is floundering at the box office despite scoring a 91% critics’ rating on online review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, no trivial arbiter. So how can such a critical success fail so badly financially? Because critics don’t really matter. Budget is the biggest predictor. For a start an extra 10 percentage points on Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score is worth only $1m in extra box-office takings. Between 2006 and 2016 it averaged four times that. Admittedly a ten percentage point improvement in audience – not critics’ – reviews now generates $11.5m but it’s still not that significant as a force for profitability. ‘The Nice Guys’ merited 82% in audience review ratings but it hasn’t been enough, or much. A good point of comparison with ‘The Nice Guys’ is the egregious ‘Neighbors 2 (Sorority Rising)’, a Seth Rogen comedy film released on the same day (Rotten Tomatoes scores: 52% Critics; 62% Audience). One scathing review castigated: “we have seen all the jokes before and there’s nothing really that shocks or makes you laugh out loud”: but remember it doesn’t really matter. ‘The Nice Guys’ has struggled to barely pull a profit, but in contrast ‘Neighbors 2’ (called ‘Bad Neighbours’ in Europe) has almost tripled its budget in box-office revenue. Both movies were released at the same time – summer releases earn an average $15m more than others – and draw from the same broad comedy genre. So what is the major difference between the two films? One is a stand-alone film, not based on a popular pre-established franchise and the other a sequel to a recently released, commercially successful film. This of course echoes what Hollywood industry analysts have been pointing out for years, that – against a background where one in three movies is making less than half its production cost back – low-quality, cash-cow sequels and superhero movies, are killing off new, and in many cases, more creative, films. Studios are less inclined to produce a widerelease film based on an original idea, says Lynda Obst, author of ‘Sleepless in Hollywood’, a book which explores the industry’s sequel mania. Although in 1983 screenwriter William Goldman declared that in Hollywood “nobody knows anything”, a little is clear: the pulling power of Hollywood star actors is on the wane (except apparently in the burgeoning Chinese market), the $20m lead is rare and the voguish sureshot for Hollywood in 2016 is the franchise movie: the likes of ‘Captain America’, ‘Jurassic Park’, ‘James Bond’, ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Fast and Furious’. These films now account for one in five of the major studios’ outputs, up from one in twelve 20 years ago. 14 of them earned more than $500m last year, up from five in 2006. Their average production cost in 2014 was $150-200m. According to the Economist magazine: “All other things being equal, sequels earn $35m more than non-sequels at the box office. Franchise films increasingly depend on superhero characters. Hollywood made just eight superhero films between 1996 and 2000, but 19 in the last five years. A $200m-budget superhero film will earn $58m more at the box office than a non-superhero film of the same budget. Superhero films tend to be child-friendly, for good reason: films that receive an “R” (restricted) certificate typically earn $16m less in cinemas”. An interesting point of speculation is whether this phenomenon is an inevitable stage of a capitalist industry (little input, large output), which must be accepted, or if it is a fad which will pass. ‘Neighbors 2’ is an easily marketed sequel, which by all accounts, reprises the same formula as the original. Avoid By Brian Lenihan and Michael Smith

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    Our politics is broken not new!

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    The talk these days is all about ‘new politics’. Claiming Our Future suggests we should be talking about ‘broken politics’. That is some gap to be bridged. It goes back to how we judge our politics. The ‘new politics’ seem to be confined to how the Dáil goes about making decisions. ‘Broken politics’ is more concerned with the decisions made. ‘New politics’ give us better debate at Dáil Committee level and the strange sight of the main opposition party keeping the Government in place. ‘Broken politics’ give us decisions that have no evident capacity to address the big issues of our day such as inequality or climate change. In convening a national deliberation for civil society activists and organisations Claiming Our Future recently chose to focus on ‘broken politics’. The deliberation, however, was not about politicians and political reform, but about how civil society organisations could best step up to the mark to advance their vision of transformative change for society in a context of ‘broken politics’. Participants celebrated the potential and creativity of civil society. This was based on testaments from an emerging disability movement, the People’s Energy Charter network, the challenge to the cultural sector to re-purpose itself, and the achievements of the Right2Change movement. In a context where change is elusive and hardship widespread, the need to inspire hope was emphasised and, within that, the importance of taking time to celebrate success. The event, however, was also one of reflection, a rare moment for people from across the different strands of civil society to talk together about the shared challenges faced in working and co-operating to make change happen. There were no speakers, only conversations involving people from community, trade-union, environmental, culture, and global-justice organisations. There was discussion about the agendas pursued by civil society and how these were developed. Tensions were pointed to in the agenda-setting process between paid workers and unpaid activists, between working-class communities and middle-class NGOs, and in the invisibility of some groups like people with disabilities. There was a strong sense that further action was needed to empower these agendas. There was a challenge posed to build a greater popular understanding of and commitment to the values and issues raised by organisations. The further development of civil-society media was suggested to enable this. The strategies being implemented by civil-society organisations were explored and analysed. The importance of mobilising people, engaging them in the issues and offering different ways and levels for them to get involved in seeking change was emphasised. Local activism needs to be stimulated and supported. There was a strong desire for greater creativity in strategies and the cultural sector was identified as holding potential in offering new ways of engaging and educating people. A challenge was posed to move outside the parameters set by the political and administrative system in seeking change. The need for civil society to connect and collaborate more effectively was debated. Fragmentation between the different parts of civil society was seen to have increased over the period of economic crisis. Leadership within civil society for greater collaboration was called for. Collaboration is not only needed between the different sectors of civil society, but also between the different levels of action (local, national, and international). A set of propositions emerged from the deliberation. The first focused on the need to build effective solidarity behind different campaigns currently being pursued. A task force of alliance-builders was proposed to identify the campaigns that civil society organisations could collaborate on to achieve greater impact. The need to create formal spaces where organisations can discuss and build collaboration on shared issues was put forward. Ideas for less formal networking were also mooted, using digital platforms to share information, advance campaigns and secure active solidarity between organisations. New structures, such as Public Participation Networks that include community, voluntary, cultural, and environmental organisations, could be used to build shared actions at local level. The value of creating new links for civil society with both politics and academia was stressed. These links need to be thought through to reflect new types of relationships. Organisations across all sectors need a relationship with politics that goes beyond lobbying and negotiation to include partnerships with those parts of politics that share their values. A more active engagement by academics with civil society could facilitate penetrating analysis and generate evidence to ground the call for action to seek change, fuelled by innovation. Claiming Our Future is now planning a ‘reflection’ meeting to consider the various propositions and how they might be implemented. By Niall Crowley

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    New Constituti-on/off

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    1:Need for Change There has been much public discussion as to whether or not our Constitution is in need of replacement. Various attempts at reform including those conducted by the Constitutional Review Group and the Labour-Party-promoted Constitutional Convention have led to little change. The recommendations merely unleashed a great deal of well-intentioned hot air, all of which is largely ignored by our political classes. When there is a referendum to amend the constitution it is often dictated by Europe or is a result of a political spat or a flavour-of-the month response. None of these cosmetic, sometimes ill-considered referendum proposals have constituted fundamental solutions. It was a diversion to institute referenda on judges’ salaries and the age of the president, for example, when there were much more important and pressing issues at hand. In fact, our state-sponsored referenda to the existing text often skirt away from important issues of structural reform and hijack a designer, populist issue, like gay marraige. In the interests of clarity such a remark is not intended to diminish the importance of substantive equality, but simply to question what the motives behind the referendum were. I am of two minds as to whether a new constitution is needed to present us with a fresh vibrant document for the 21st century or whether we can tinker with the old one in such a fashion as to effect the requisite structural change. The South African Constitution is the model here but it derived from a new societal dispensation. I am, however, absolutely convinced that structural change is needed. Of course the document has been developed historically by the judiciary through creation of unspecified rights from 1965 until about 2001. This process of modernisation to the construction of the document – a ‘living instrument’ approach – led the judges to ‘read in’ rights that were not there – dividing academic opinion. This practice, mirrored in the general current interpretation of the US Constitution, freshens up the document. Its merits are that such fundamentally important rights as privacy, the protection against inhumane and degrading treatment and the prohibition against torture, were read into a dated document by an expansionist judiciary. The document was modernised by judicial construction largely to mirror international-humanrights instruments. The problem is that this process of teleological (aims-based) construction has been aborted and, since 2001, no new rights have been created, with neo-conservatives having taken over the judiciary. Little is left of judicial activism or progressivism. Ideologically-conservative judges are in general anxious, above all else, to uphold the status quo, to mask judicial inaction as deference to the separation of powers. We are therefore unlikely to see a modernisation of the Constitution by the judiciary, unless some liberal judges are appointed to balance what is an unrepresentative and unbalanced, conservative judiciary. For example, many important Constitutional cases are heard by Judge Gerard Hogan, now of the Court of Appeal, formerly of the High Court and one-time Trinity academic – probably Ireland’s leading Constitutional expert and in some respects the most progressive of the existing bench. He starts from the self-restrained vantage point of literalism and a textualistic approach to the document. He is against adding new rights, confining himself to the precise language of the text. In effect he sees innovations as an overstepping of the judicial function and an interference in executive decision-making processes: a breach of separation of powers with the courts acting as quasi-legislators. Though in his case such language can often be manipulated to achieve socially just outcomes, the language restrains and prevents the expansion of the document, literally. Judge Hogan and indeed former Chief Justice Keane (in the TD case) have in effect brought into question the whole power of the courts to declare unspecified rights. Judge Hogan, with other members of the Court of Appeal, sought to revive an under-utilised section of the document, in Article 40.3 the protection of the person clause, most noticeably in their judgment in Fleming (the right-to-die euthanasia case), to suggest that such obviously important rights as privacy and bodily integrity, rather than being separately declared as unspecified rights, could be adequately embraced within the specified rubric of protection of the person. Though these views were not in substance endorsed by the Supreme Court, nor were they specifically rejected. Thus, there is judicial inertia about modernising the document to create new rights prompting questions about whether we need a new constitution. If our new breed of judges won’t do it out of constitutional necessity, it must be done through political initiative. 2: The Reform of The Existing Provisions I propose to go through the document from beginning to end, highlighting what I believe needs to be revamped and also what needs to be added, making some salient points about the incompatibility of aspects of the document with our present fragmented, divided, mildly chaotic and multi-cultural society. The preamble, which is non-binding, starts off as a declaration of the aims of the document and invokes “Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ” and “The Most Holy Trinity”. The preamble cannot be amended as it is not an official part of the text, but a new constitution would, of necessity, delete these unmandated phrases. We are not all Christians. Some of us are agnostic or atheist. Some of us deeply distrust the effect organised religion has had on our society. Some of us might regard religion, as Christopher Hitchens did or Richard Dawkins does, as evil. Some of us are Islamic, for example, and might be somewhat perturbed at the words of the preamble being as confined as it is to the Christian religion. The Trinity is a particular focus of the Roman Catholic, not other Christian churches. I propose as part of an overall metric of considerations, that we adopt a strict severance of Church and State and that such phrases in the preamble be deleted. This disentanglement or disestablishment is what the architects of constitutionalism, the Americans and the French, settled on. In the preamble there is

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    Time’s up for the elite

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    It attests to the eccentricity and archaic nature of British democracy that it has taken all of 13 years to finally receive an independent report from John Chilcot on why Britain was dragged into supporting the George W Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003. Viewed from the perspective of today it is not unfair to conclude that the war on Iraq was “another time, another place”. A similar phenomenon registered in Ireland with both the Mahon inquiry into planning corruption and the Moriarity Tribunal into Mr Haughey’s money-taking. Back in 2003 I was a backbench government member of the Dáil, making speeches, and writing sometimes controversial articles for the Evening Herald that were, in some cases, critical of the government I was mandated to support. As to the War in Iraq I was strident in my support of the US position but justified it on the basis of the record of Saddam Husssein rather than any spurious resort to the idea that he held or was ready to deploy chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. In short I believed him to be a nasty dictator, quite capable of twinning up with terrorist networks like those who had carried out the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. During my 14 years in the Dáil, the only occasion on which Bertie Ahern rang each of his deputies in turn, was before the Dáil vote on the use of Shannon Airport by the US Army to transport troops and military materiel to Iraq. Keeping Shannon open to the Americans was a vital national interest in the context of US support for our peace process, Foreign Direct Investment from the states and the historic connection between the two countries. Bertie Ahern was taking no chances with the relationship. It was hardly necessary that he ring me given my very public support for the US. Many of us were hugely spooked by the huge demonstration that occurred in Shannon and the effect it had on some of our US investor friends. Quite a few leading US business people rang me as minister to complain of the protest, as if we in the government were somehow responsible for the large turnout when in fact we were the subject of the ire of those demonstrating precisely because we insisted on facilitating the US troops there. When America goes to war everyone, even sane-minded businessmen, closes ranks. Meanwhile Tony Blair was performing all sorts of gymnastics in his efforts to ensure that the UK would be quids in with its long-term partners on their latest military adventure. Chilcot’s report reinforces what we already suspected: that private notes written by Tony Blair to George Bush, well before the military intervention required justification, had pledged the UK to join the war effort no matter what the circumstances. Tony Blair was prepared to gamble everything, including his own long-term credibility, on supporting the US because he clearly felt that the vital or ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK superseded all other considerations. Depending on your view of Blair and the war itself this was either a very brave or foolish decision. It is certainly one that has dogged Blair in retirement but on the other hand underpinned huge fees and earnings in his political afterlife as international advisor and investment professional. It is deeply ironic that the Chilcot report should come out precisely at a time when Britain is going through its own, distinct, existential crisis caused by the electorate’s decision to vote to exit the European Union. The war in Iraq led to a puncturing of the ‘politics of spin’ so adroitly deployed by both Bill Clinton and then Tony Blair. Blair and Clinton were the world’s high priests of a political art that has enjoyed a prolonged life. Its final destruction is evident in the recent referendum result in the UK and the sundering of David Cameron’s career as Prime Minister. Cameron continued the largely value-free politics of Blair and Clinton, reinforced by the gloss of the old Etonian, one who had worked directly as a professional in the public relations industry. Cameron, superficially, believed he could both spin the EU into major concessions on how it would reform itself and then win the referendum. He came back with meagre fare and the electorate believed it was being sold a pup. He was prepared to risk selling his country and his legacy for his party and, now this has been detected, there is every danger his party will be the greatest loser of all. Under a new Conservative leader the UK is likely to get a Norway-style deal from Brussels, with a face-saving, but totemic, gesture made to accommodate it on the hot-temperature issue of immigration. Few in the EU will enjoy appeasing the UK but the importance of the City of London and the trading-investment relationships make it foolhardy to push it out altogether. We are in the middle of the collapse of the period of politics when everything the electorate did or said was monitored by focus groups so the political elite could play it back for the electorate, to maximum political advantage at least in the short term. This was the era when Blair and figures such as Peter Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness, shaped a politics which, in effect, suppressed the truth to the point where every mistake, contradiction and error could be justified or apologised – parallel to the truth. They were in effect creatively re-working what had already happened in the private sector – advanced customer care meets mendacious marketing by way of polling research. In many ways it was the triumph of ephemeral, commercial, values over substantial political, and public, service. In the US, George Bush and his neo-conservative supporters and friends became the first major victims of the souring of the Iraq War and its aftermath. It is quite clear that the Neocons (Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc.) had in a real sense captured the President’s

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