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    Dublindictment: Dublin city centre is a mess

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    By Kevin Duff The look of shopfronts in Dublin City Centre is in freefall, owing to an absence of effective planning enforcement for shopfront planning permissions and unauthorised shopfronts, signage and uses. While Grafron St and environs and oft-maligned O’Connell St have developed some shopfront pride over the last decade, the streets nearest the Liffey – Capel St, Westmoreland Street, Dame Street, Parliament Street, Temple Bar generally and the Quays – are becoming black spots of lower-order shops and fast-food restaurants with cheap, garish shopfronts and signage. The increased problem of poor quality shopfronts is city- and country- wide, but is most insidious in these streets because they comprise the most visible areas of the city to visitors, right on the tourism nodes of Trinity College, Dublin Castle and our renowned ‘cultural quarter’, Temple Bar; and set a tone for the country beyond. The Council has granted permission for too many licensed premises and fast-food take-aways in the area in contradiction of its development-plan policies to ensure a balanced mix of uses on city streets and prevent an over-concentration of this use but it is also not good at maintaining the public spaces entrusted to it. For example the quality of the  pervasive new granite around the city is dubious – arguably it does not have any of the qualities, such as imperviousness, required of that substance. And the Council is not good at maintaining the beautiful old granite kerbing. The recession is creating a big increase in closure and vacancy rates, and a proliferation of discount shops, and other outlets who compete for the cheap and cheerful look that might just  denote better value, in an era when the signal it gives about quality is ignored. In this environment, increased vigilance is needed to uphold standards and prevent major deterioration in streets. Instead, there seems to be little planning enforcement in operation at all. The City Council’s never-too-dynamic Planning Enforcement department has been cut back and its staff reduced to a bare minimum. Enforcement is a ‘frontline’ planning service and should be the last area to be cut back. The City Council Roads Department, for example, would appear to be inefficient and profligate (a survey by An Taisce in September 2010 found more than one hundred bare and redundant traffic poles standing in prominent locations around the city centre. A pole costs the taxpayer €500 to erect!) The lack of enforcement and active management of streets contributes to the ongoing loss of independent shops and businesses with ‘personality’ – as exemplified by the recent closures of Guiney’s and Frawley’s, the Opus music store on South Great Georges St and the replacement in Temple Bar of Fitzers and then Frankie’s Steakhouse with a McDonalds and of Bruno’s restaurant  with a Café Costa. Dublin lacks ‘institutional’ stores and shops that are passed from one generation to the next. In a boom-town with feeble planning regulation, why not make Daddy’s toy-shop into a themed super pub (with toys in the window)? The condition of the area is at odds with the designations of Conservation Areas, Areas of Special Planning Control, Protected Structures, land-use zoning, the shopfront design guidelines etc.  During the boom years An Bord Pleanála could generally be relied upon to overturn and curtail the give-permission-at-all-cost approach of Dublin City Council planning department. However it has more recently reflected a permissive attitude concerning certain ‘lower order’ uses in the capital’s city centre. CASE STUDY: CENTRA, 46 WELLINGTON QUAY/13 TEMPLE BAR (PROTECTED STRUCTURE) The applicant stated in the cover letter with the plans: “The existing white colour of the façade uncharacteristic for the Quays would be replaced with a terracotta colour to re-establish the red-brick colour of the river front”. The façade has instead been repainted yellow which, apart from not complying with the planning permission, is visually inappropriate to the historic location and is uncharacteristic of the Liffey Quays. The proposed fascia lettering was to be of aluminium in a “pale colour” with caps measuring 350mm and lower case 300mm. The lettering as installed is significantly larger than this and is finished in a canary yellow colour. The large size and strong yellow colour of the signage, together with the yellow facade, create a cheap appearance ill-befitting the adjoining architectural composition of the Ha’penny Bridge and Merchants’ Hall which  is one of the images of the city and is endlessly photographed by tourists. There is a history of poor-quality presentation as a result of non-compliance with approved plans for shopfronts,signage and lighting by this operator at this address dating back to the mid-2000s. The Centra operator clearly feels it is a calculated risk to be granted permission by Dublin City Council for one thing and then to do something different.     HUNGRY HARRY’S TEMPLE BAR In the run-up to the opening of McDonald’s in its main square this summer, a fast food restaurant further along Temple Bar’s main strip – run by Pat McDonagh as Hungry Harry’s – brazenly rebranded itself as Supermac’s. The restaurant erected without planning permission a new ‘traditional style’ shopfront with plastic lettering in place of the Group 91 architects’ stone-and-steel, house-style shopfront, erected in the 1990s while Temple Bar was being regenerated. The fast-food takeaway use at Hungry Harry’s had already been refused four times over the course of two planning applications.         LOWER ORMOND QUAY This premises, formerly the riotous Town and Country auction  house, operated without planning permission for most  of 2012 as a casino, with an aesthetic that was as stylish as its clientele was grubby. In the end it was refused retention permission for a change of use from previous retail use at basement, ground and first floor to a ‘Private Members Club’, so in the last weeks it  has  reinvented itself as a tattoo parlour  with no  permission for its signage, the only illuminated plastic signage on this stretch of the  quays.   TEMPLE BAR PUB, TEMPLE BAR The frontage of this ‘traditional pub’ is a

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    Bogs and Booze in Bellanaboy and Belmullet

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    Risteard Ó Domhnaill “Shell was using OSSL to win hearts and minds in Mayo to progress the project but suddenly things changed, and tracks needed covering” Desmond Kane, OSSL Seventeen years ago this month, the Petrolia drilling rig hit a natural gas field 50 miles off the west coast of Mayo. According to Briain Ó Catháin, MD of Enterprise Energy, who made the find, “It was one of the biggest well-tests that Enterprise had ever done”. For Ó Catháin and other Irish people working in oil and gas around the world, it represented great hope that finally they could come home to work in the emerging Irish industry.   Ó Catháin, now heading the successful oil company, Petroceltic, did not get to see the Corrib project to fruition. Following Shell’s takeover of Enterprise and planning difficulties with Corrib, Ó Catháin moved on. With hindsight, it was a good move.   Shell might now feel a little unfortunate to have inherited the project in 2002. It came as part of the larger Enterprise portfolio, and by this time it was already encountering difficulties. Following a lengthy oral hearing, An Bord Pleanála inspector Kevin Moore recommended that permission to build a gas refinery on a bog be refused: “From a strategic planning perspective, this is the wrong site; from the perspective of Government policy which seeks to foster balanced regional development, this is the wrong site; from the perspective of minimising environmental impact, this is the wrong site; and consequently, from the perspective of sustainable development, this is the wrong site”.   Shell sought and was granted a meeting with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in Government Buildings on the 19 September 2003. At the meeting Tom Botts, CEO of Shell E&P Europe, received assurances that the Government would seek to facilitate the project, and that a re-submitted application would be processed “with all possible speed”. After amending proposals relating to the disposal of peat, planning permission was granted for the Bellanaboy gas refinery on the original site. Corrib was back on track – or so it thought!   A decade later and still no gas is flowing from Corrib into the now-complete Bellanaboy refinery. The project is set to eventually cost quadruple the original $800 million estimate, but the reputational damage internationally for the oil giants Shell and Statoil may be much higher.   Corrib has been beset by problems and controversies over the last ten years and, most notably, the jailing of five landowners in 2005, who came to be known as ‘The Rossport 5’. As of the time of writing, Shell’s onshore tunnelling operations  are suspended, following the death of a German maintenance engineer on the ‘Fionnuala’ tunnel-boring machine, some 15 metres below Sruwadaconn estuary.   As if Shell had insufficient headaches at the moment, the latest controversy in the long running Corrib saga has come from a most unlikely source. OSSL, a small services provider in the oil and gas industry, was taken on early in the project to provide personal protective safety equipment and “to perform and coordinate small-scale contracting works”. On 10 September 2012, however, OSSL began to release emails and information in which it claimed that its services extended beyond just site-construction-related activities, to dealing directly with key members of the receiving community.   In the first email published on the anti-Shell whistleblower website, royaldutchshellplc.com, OSSL alleges that a Shell contracts manager for Corrib “used OSSL to make payments of cash and gifts to various parties in Erris and beyond” and “gave instructions regarding the purchase of various items to be gifted to local householders with a view to advancing the project in a particularly difficult part of the construction program”.   The email, from OSSL and addressed to the ‘contracts manager’ is dated 23 August 2012. It goes on to claim that another member of Shell Ireland subsequently “disguised” the nature of these purchases, and demanded that the relevant invoices be “falsified and diverted to Roadbridge [the main contractor on Corrib] so as to avoid any connection with Shell directly”. Some of these items are stated by OSSL to be cookers and televisions, and OSSL claims that it was ordered to transform the contents of the invoices to instead represent ‘safety wear’. The identities of ‘Project co-operators’, ie local landowners who were engaging or who had reached agreements with Shell regarding the use of their land for the pipeline, were to be disguised also. Finally, OSSL claim that it was threatened by the Shell employee who ordered the falsification of invoices. OSSL claims it was told that if this activity was ever disclosed, it “will result in OSSL never working in the oil and gas industry again”. The email is signed off on by the three main members of OSSL – Neil Rooney, Des Kane and his daughter Amanda.   The origins of this dispute go back to late 2009/ 2010, when OSSL was informed by Shell that its services were no longer required because construction on the Corrib Gas project was nearing completion. According to communications manager with Shell E&P Ireland, John Egan, “OSSL subsequently raised a court action against SEPIL (Shell E&P Ireland) and Roadbridge, claiming that there had been excessive tax withholding on invoices from 2007”. Then, in early 2010, Desmond Kane of OSSL contacted An Garda Síochána; not to report a crime, but to seek help in recovering payment from Shell for goods delivered to Belmullet Garda Station in 2007. In a  letter to the Chief Superintendent in Belmullet, Kane asked the Superintendent to confirm the “safe receipt” of “festival gifts” from the 2007 Christmas period.   According to Shell it was only in 2011, as the dispute dragged on, that OSSL pursued allegations against Shell regarding non-construction-related activities. According to John Egan, “OSSL alleged falsification of invoices and further, alleged delivery of alcohol to the Gardaí, as well as non business-related works and gifts for some local residents”.   Despite these very serious allegations, no action was taken by either

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    Third Level Education Founders

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    Over the last two decades, Irish economic growth has been driven by financial and investment bubbles. Each one was fuelled by the ad hoc nature of our policymakers’ responses to shifts in global economic trends and their penchant for fetishising international policy fads. by Constantin Gurdgiev In the mid-1990s, propelled by the US-led dot.com industry explosion, Ireland became the focal point of an investment bubble that saw state policies and funds inflating already unreal company valuations. Promising to plug our economy into the Internet of Things, entities from Baltimore Technologies to MediaLab Europe  were hoovering public and private funds in a race to frogmarch this sleepy island into the twenty-first century. In 2001, hungover from the implosion of dot.com, government investment became the new rage. Social Partners climbed over each other to get funding for awe-inspiring schemes usually described as Global Centres for Excellence. This bubble too was based on fads that came to Ireland from abroad, namely from Brussels. To continue funding our fetish for spending cash we built bungalows at an ever-increasing pace. From 2001 on, the Irish economy became an economy built on breezeblocks. With the bust and the ensuing Great Recession, one could have hoped for a mature review of past policies, and a shift away from our hallucinated grandiose plans. Yet, to-date, the response of two successive Governments to the bust has been just to feed our addiction. Even Budget 2009 announced amidst the ongoing implosion of the domestic economy aggressively promoted the concept of the Knowledge Economy as our salvation. But the truth is the Innovation Island is a Potemkin Village.  centralisation, budgetary pressures, politicisation, elitism and old-fashioned non-practical subject-specific, ivory-tower  teaching and lack of academic freedom and competition undermine our creativity and international  standing To see this we need look no further than at how we actually treat the basis for a knowledge-intensive economy: human capital. In my recent speech at educational conference, TEDx Dublin, I offered a template for assessing any economy’s potential for creating human capital. It is called C.A.R.E. – as it assesses how well a country can Create, Attract, Retain and Enable its workforce’s technical and social skills, talents, creativity, capacity to innovate and engage in entrepreneurship, and willingness and ability to take risks. In a nutshell C.A.R.E. is about systems that should put human beings and their abilities at the centre of our society and economy. Across the entire spectrum of C.A.R.E. systems, education plays a pivotal role. And it is exactly here that many of our policy gaps become painfully apparent. First, our education system does not facilitate a seamlessly continuous high-quality life-long cycle of learning and training. Second, our education system is incapable of developing such vital aspects of human capital as creativity, ability to manage risks, and sustainable innovation. Third, our education system is inherently elitist. This prevents it from ever becoming a truly functional creator and enabler of human capital economy. With elitism comes the death of innovation and creativity. Fourth, our education system is riddled with inefficiencies, protectionism and skewed incentives, which lead to sub-standard outcomes for both  learning and research. Let’s take some of these claims in detail. Since the Finance Act 2004, Irish governments have been working on expanding indigenous R&D (Research  and Development). In the last ten years, billions of euros were poured into  tax credits and investment supports. Billions went, in particular, to fund higher-education institutions’ R&D efforts . While some third-level institutions – our top four or five universities – have produced tangible results, the rest remain far behind. But even our top universities have performed weakly. The 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) lists only three universities for Ireland with the best performer, TCD, ranked in 201-300th place in the world. UCD and UCC rank in 301-400th places. After that, for ARWU, Ireland runs dry. Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) (formerly published with the Times Higher Education Supplement) list eight Irish universities in its top 600 in the world, with TCD ranked the highest in 61st place. Our second-best performer, UCD, ranks 139th. Only six Irish universities make it into the world’s top 300. Back in 2009, we had two universities in the top 100, and seven in the top 300. Something  has gone  badly wrong. For both teaching and research, absurd centralisation, budgetary pressures, and politicisation   have accelerated the brain drain from top Irish academic institutions in recent years. This, in part, is the driver for the poor ranking performance over recent years. However, even in 2005-2007, with cash abundant, Irish universities’ performance was far from stellar. Meanwhile, across the rest of the higher education sector, both teaching and research remain antediluvian. As to teaching, instead of developing modern, research-capable and skills-based adjunct and clinical faculties, most of our degree programmes continue to operate on the basis of FULL-TIME  faculty teaching OUT OF a textbook, and INTO a pre-set, STANDARDISED exam. Furthermore, programmes are often staffed with faculty members who do neither nor research nor  applied work related to their teaching.   While top universities around the world are aggressively moving to new teaching platforms and broadening their programmes by erasing the boundaries between diverse degrees, in Ireland we still treat a slide-projector as a technological enabler. Web-based apps, audio-visual tools, data visualisation and other core tech supports are virtually unheard of, even in top-ranked Irish universities. ‘Web-based apps, audio-visual tools, data visualisation and other core tech supports are virtually unheard of in even top-ranked Irish universities’ In many university classrooms, students are more technologically-enabled than their lecturers. Without modern strategies and technologies, Ireland has embraced the three-year degree system. If anything, the  lack of proper progress in developing teaching skills and tools should have led to an increase in the length of the degree programme to maintain the quality of the graduates. Instead we opted to trade down the learning curve in pursuit of higher  student numbers. All this  belies the fact that in our flagship universities there are some individual teaching and research programmes which

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    Inspiration, Intellectuals & Iconoclasts on the Internet: Interview with Colum McCaffery

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    By Ronan Lynch Follow Ronan Lynch on Twitter In an online profile, Colum McCaffery describes himself as “Lecturer, researcher, contrarian”, but his contrarian side is professional and in person he’s witty and agreeable. “Contrarian is something that other people call me”, he says. Born and reared in Inchicore in Dublin,  McCaffery trained as a technician and he worked for RTÉ, mostly in the engineering division, for 30 years. During that time he studied political communication and broadcasting and earned his PhD at UCD where he then taught Political Communication for 20 years. A socialist and Labour party member, he’s now retired but he still teaches adult education classes – and he’s a regular blogger. Colum, what inspired you to start blogging? I was encouraging my students to get out and participate and get involved in public debates, and one of them said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you do it yourself?’ So I started a blog. For a while it was the most ignored blog on earth but about two years ago, people began to mention to me something that they had read on the blog. The blogosphere is old hat now; these days it’s all about social media. But you can put the link from your blog on your Facebook site and it will attract some readers. You write about the impact of the Internet on political communication. It’s conventional wisdom that the Internet has increased the amount of information available to interested people but you dispute that view. With the arrival of the Internet, my course on political communication was becoming much more about citizenship. I talk about the average citizen having a think about things, and having information, and coming to judgment of an issue. But when we talk about information, going back to John Stuart Mill, we are not talking about bits of information, because information includes all the relevant arguments, in other words committed arguments on this side and this side and this side. Also, we’re not just talking about balancing one argument against the other, because there might be five arguments. The best way to look at it is that if you go into court, the defence has the same facts as the prosecution. Facts of themselves are not enough. What sways the jury is the arguments, the use of the facts. Yet people increasingly just don’t want to be bothered with all of that stuff. The technology of the past century, including the Internet, is facilitating closing down challenge and argument. When you talk of people ‘not being bothered’, you’re referring to these models of liberal and republican citizenship? [At this point, Colum hands me a book by Robert Hutton titled ‘Romps, Tots and Boffins’ and invites me to read a quote from the opening pages, by Evelyn Waugh: “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. It’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.”] That’s liberal citizenship: ‘I really don’t care. I want you to amuse me, to give me stuff to gossip about. But if there’s something that really threatens the way I live this life, that threatens my having a nice house and a nice car, then what I want you to do is ring the alarm bell.’ Now,  there is a totally different view of what it means to be a citizen, going back to Pericles in ancient Greece. Pericles said: “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics minds his own business. We say he has no business here at all.” Then you have the republican citizen who wants what I call the full spectrum service. This person wants to talk to his mates about everything that is going on. He wants to be part of a political opinion that means something. In your blogs you refer to the need for citizens to involve themselves in public controversies, but what do you mean by public controversy? A recent public controversy is the junior doctors’ dispute. I went all over the place, online, trying to find out about it. Is it about scheduling or money? Will rescheduling bring in a requirement for lots of new doctors, in which case the problem won’t be solvable in the near future? I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. I asked on Facebook if someone would please explain the dispute to me. One guy  explained that it was to do with the handover from one shift to the next, and that you need someone that continues all the way through. If you don’t have this, then it means bringing the consultants in more regularly, and they are opposed to that. Now, I didn’t find that explanation anywhere in the media. My point is that if, as a citizen, I want to decide which side I’m on, it is virtually impossible using today’s media to work this out. So what do you see as the role of the media in public controversies? Well, it’s no use telling me that there’s a whole pile of information on any particular controversy available on the web if I have to search to find it. You can’t expect the average interested person to do that. They need to have the important controversies plonked in front of them: here’s all the issues, here’s what you should be thinking about today. Journalists are the people that have the access to all the information and they have the time and it’s their job to sort that out so that I, who haven’t got the time, will know what this debate is about. So despite the increase in the availability of information through the Internet, the manner of presentation of that information is limiting? Well, have you ever bought anything on Amazon? When you buy something like a book, Amazon comes back with ‘Stuff recommended for you’. So what they have done is they have looked at the things that you have bought in the past,

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    Tensions rise as media standards fall

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    Media need to look to the facts, not ideology Richard O’Domhnaill Tensions between the local community and the Shell-led gas consortium in north-west Mayo have considerably deepened following the sinking of the shellfish boat owned by Pat ‘the Chief’ O’Donnell in mid June. The sinking of his boat and the arrest of his son, Jonathan, as they exercised their historic rights to fish in Broadhaven Bay have removed a key obstacle in the company’s attempts to lay a pipeline from Glengad to the Corrib gas field. Last summer, close observers of the controversy surrounding the proposed high pressure gas pipeline and terminal at Bellanaboy suspected that the withdrawal of the massive pipe-laying vessel, the Solitaire, was primarily influenced by a fear on Shell’s part that O’Donnell might be successful in a High Court application to protect his historic fishing rights. Shell to Sea activist, Maura Harrington, was for a number of days also on hunger strike in protest at the presence of the ship in Irish waters before the sudden departure of the Solitaire last year although the company claimed that the pipe laying exercise was suspended due to technical problems. Many suspected that a court decision in favour of O’Donnell’s right to fish was a key consideration by Shell executives who feared that such a development could further delay by years an already seriously troubled project. Now with the forced removal of the O’Donnell’s from the water, however temporarily, and relatively mild weather conditions over the coming weeks Shell is hoping that the pipes close to shoreline can be laid without too much further disruption by opponents of the project. Pat O’Donnell and his son Jonathan have been arrested on a number of occasions and another of their boats seized since the shellfish boat Iona Isle was sunk on 11th June off Erris Head. There has yet to be a decision by An Bord Pleanála following its recent oral hearings into Shell’s renewed application for a revised pipe line route during which significant health and safety issues, similar to those raised over the previously unacceptable route, were raised by a number of interested parties. (see Michael McGaughan article page?). There has been some media speculation, fuelled by Shell advisors and spin doctors, that Pat O’Donnell may have sunk his own boat, and his livelihood, in the early hours of 11th June in order to gain sympathy for his position and of many others who want the proposed pipe line and terminal moved to a location where it does not threaten the health and safety of local people or the environment. This notion is rejected by O’Donnell and his crew member in the lengthy and detailed interview with Miriam Cotton which is reported in these pages. Both men are adamant that the boat was sunk when four armed and masked men with Eastern European accents boarded the trawler and held them at gun point while releasing water into the vessel. Similar allegations of attempted media manipulation by those opposed to Shell’s activities were made against local farmer, Willie Corduff, when he complained that he was beaten, again by masked men, after he emerged from under a truck where he was protesting against what he and others saw as Shell’s attempts to illegally fence off from the public an area at the Glengad landfall. In the early hours of April 23rd Corduff claimed that he was attacked and beaten around the head and body at the Glengad site by men wielding batons or heavy rubber instruments and subsequently hospitalised. Among the commentators to question the veracity of Corduff’s account was Peter Murtagh who suggested in The Irish Times that the former member of the Rossport 5 – who was jailed for ninety days in 2005 – was making it all up. Murtagh claimed that Corduff had not provided him with his hospital records which might substantiate his injury claims. The respected IT editorial executive did not record the fact that obtaining hospital records is not something that can be achieved within the deadline demands of a newspaper but can sometimes take weeks, as Village has learned. Witnesses including professional journalists who saw Corduff in hospital testified to his bruised condition as did a photograph published in The Irish Times on the day after the attack and s other photos published subsequently in Village magazine. The hospital and ambulance service records obtained and paid for by Willie and Mary Corduff and furnished to Village are consistent with his account of how he sustained injuries which left him in Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar for twenty-four hours. The diagnosis prepared by Mr Osama Elfaedy, the registrar to consultant surgeon Kevin Barry and sent to Corduff’s GP, Dr Brendan Molloy in Belmullet, records that Corduff suffered from bruising and had been kicked all over the body during an alleged assault at Glengad. Willie Corduff was suffering from kicks, headaches, nausea and vomiting upon his admission on 23 April. It also records that he had suffered a possible loss of consciousness. The hospital carried out a CT scan and X Rays on Corduff’s spine, chest and ankle where the bruising and pain were most pronounced. He also complained of pains to his legs and thigh. He was treated with pain reliefs and analgesia and advised to rest before his release from hospital on 24th April. Ambulance records note that Corduff complained of pains around his head and body when he was collected at Glengad and that he may have lost consciousness after he said he was beaten by masked security guards. In early July, Amnesty International reported that Shell and other oil producers in the Niger delta in Nigeria were responsible for serious environmental pollution along the routes of its pipelines in the West African country. Communities had been ravaged by leaks and explosions devastating farmland and ruining the environment and the health and safety of local people over many years. Amnesty accepted that there had also been a campaign by militants against the

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    An Bord Pleanala turns down memorial to abuse victims (27 Nov). In October Mannix Flynn explained why he opposed it.

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    You can’t have a memorial of something that is not  yet history An Bord Pleanála should say no to commemorating  residential abuse with a tunnel next to the military memorial on Parnell Square ‘the Journey of Light is drab, unimaginative, insensitive,  visionless – and grandiose’ Mannix Flynn In late September, An Bord Pleanála heard appeals against the decision by Dublin City Council to give permission to the Office of Public Works for the €500,000 ‘Journey of Light’ memorial – to the victims of residential  abuse.  It will be  a covered passageway, lit at night and flanked by fossilised limestone walls and waterfalls running through Oisín Kelly’s Children of Lir monument commemorating the 1916 Rising in the Garden Of Remembrance, Parnell Square in Dublin. A memorial was a recommendation of the Ryan report, after generations  of abuse and decades of inquiries into child abuse including the Ferns report, the Murphy report, the Cloyne report, the Raphoe report, and  the Dublin Dioceses report. The hearing was extremely intense at times, hostile and defensive. It seemed to me as an observer and objector that the case for going ahead with this memorial was rather heavy-handed and oppressive. This was not a holistic process designed to give healing and create reconciliation.  It was evident that no real consideration had been given to the impact  and  integration of what can only be described as an entrance tunnel to the hallowed Garden of Remembrance. Multiple theoretical and visual aesthetic concerns were ventilated. For me the Journey of Light is drab, unimaginative, insensitive,  visionless – and grandiose. Independent TD, Maureen O’Sullivan maintained: “It is demeaning to the survivors not to give them their own space but to ask them to share with a memorial that is celebratory. And it is demeaning to those who fought for the principles of democracy, our independence, to ask them to share with this dark chapter of abuse”. Will soldiers at future  state occasions  have  to turn  their backs to  this  memorial? The Irish Georgian Society objected to the effect the proposal would have on the surrounding historic eighteenth-century square, and to the interventions in the garden. Parnell Square should eventually be reimagined with the  feel of a park. An Environmental Impact Statement would have been useful and should probably have  been required, legally.   Statements were also given by historian Tim Pat Coogan and John Connolly, grand nephew of James, against the proposal . The City Council was somewhat confused in its evidence. It had granted the permission despite a motion passed unanimously by all Councillors in December 2012, to make the site a protected structure. The ethical problem which sweeps aesthetic concerns in its path here is that there have in fact been no serious consequences for the individual perpetrators of the  residential abuse being memorialised. Or for the congregations of religious or the Irish Catholic Church or indeed the state departments that were involved in joint ventures in this diabolical delinquency, and which then indemnified the religious. Yet now the co-accused, the State as oppressor, is proposing this ill conceived, premature, insulting and unwanted gesture. Justice Seán Ryan in the Ryan report ensured in his recommendation that the then Taoiseach’s apology should be enshrined in any memorial expression. So the words of Bertie Ahern, a man who serially betrayed us all, are to be enshrined forever more on this state memorial that is supposed to heal us and acknowledge our suffering. This is a grandiose gesture from a bankrupt state. An unnecessary spend of money. A contempt to those children who are homeless on our streets this very day, who are still dying in our State care system. Who are unprotected and unsafe in their own homes. This state indifference is itself an abuse. There is a potential conflict of interest insofar as the Minister for Education, the department that is making the application for the memorial, appointed two of the memorial committee members to the Residential Institutions Statutory Fund (RISF). The memorial omits  mention of the Magdalene women,  the mother and baby homes, the banished babies, the Bethany home, the mental institutions: Grangegorman, Ballinasloe, and the Midlands. History here is being presented and created by the State, by a conspiracy of the OPW, the besmirched Department of Education  and Dublin  City Council, as the triumphant victor over oppression: the rescuer. In fact  this is a grab by the state, a monumental memorial cover-up by a co-accused that has evaded any accountability to this day. Beware of the state bearing monuments. We place great faith in the independence of An Bord Pleanála and believe it will reject this proposal in its entirety on planning grounds. But more importantly on ethical and moral grounds, on the grounds of contempt to the very idea of what memorial and monument can be and as further injury to the wounds of the many who are unfortunate enough to have been selected for incarceration in the regimes of state-run residential institutions that contained and brutalised those of us that were deemed surplus to need. As James Young wrote about the Holocaust, “once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember”. Memorials are about the past and the issues of physical, emotional and sexual abuse in Irish institutions are not yet historical.

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    Hackery at the Irish Sunday Times by Michael Smith

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    For once, a broadsheet is talking about Village’s initiative to prosecute possible offences arising from the planning and payments tribunals and banking collapses. To be specific, it’s the Sunday Times, and we welcome their interest. The next step, when we have our press conference, will be to get some accurate coverage. This morning I wrote to the Sunday Times explaining that I was disappointed with coverage of Village’s prosecutions initiative in the prominent Atticus political gossip column in last Sunday’s newspaper which, I said, was “damaging and largely inaccurate”. The author of the column, well-regarded news editor Colin Coyle, replied unabashedly saying he was merely reporting what someone else said. He wasn’t and, even if he was, if he had more professional journalistic values he’d publish the necessary corrections rather than fobbing me off with the breezy suggestion that I submit a letter. This seems typical of the low standards that are indulged in Irish journalism. A few weeks ago the same newspaper wrote that Village had gone out of business! I’ll write to the editor now but it may well ultimately be a job for the Press Ombudsman/Council [Ed’s note:  the ST editor in the end agreed to publish an op-ed article in reply] – to be published on 24 Nov]   Have a read of the Sunday Times Atticus coverage below along with my reply: “’Man from the Village still wants his day of judgment’ We are still waiting for Michael Smith, editor of Village Magazine, to unveil the details of his promised public prosecutions against ‘tribunal villains and allegedly dishonest bankers’.       Smith promised an announcement in September if the DPP did not take action against named individuals. He plans to exploit a little-used common law mechanism allowing members of the public to take private criminal prosecutions and hopes this will ‘change the prosecuting authorities’ attitudes to alleged white collar crime’. Last week though, he admitted the process was ‘slow moving’ but said a well known solicitors’ firm and an ‘eminent and dynamic’ senior counsel has been hired, while a witness is preparing an affidavit. Joseph B Mannix, a solicitor, writing in the Kerryman recently, doesn’t fancy Village’s chances of success. He points out a recent High Court judgement ruled that a private prosecution taken by a hotelier against two IBRC officials could not go ahead without the consent of the DPP. Without consent, the prosecution must be struck out by the District Court”. My reply I wrote that the article: “is damaging and largely inaccurate.  The thrust of it posits quixotic me and my team of under-prepared eminences being struck out by the District Court, because we ludicrously weren’t aware of the consent requirement that sage Mr Mannix, and Atticus on behalf of the Sunday Times, could have told us about. The key line, I’m sure you’ll agree, is ‘Without consent, the prosecution must be struck out by the District Court’. In fact, consent is not required. Nor does the IBRC case referred to by Mr Mannix say it is generally required.   It is required for certain cases which we will avoid.  One of those is fraud, which was the issue in the IBRC case. Crime is dealt with either summarily or on indictment. In neither case is ‘consent’ required as a rule. In fact a private prosecutor can carry the matter all the way to conviction if it is a summary offence. For  indictable offences s/he can take it to the return for trial and then the DPP has the option of issuing a nolle prosequi, which may be susceptible to judicial review. I conveyed this in my short email last week to you where I said ‘The objective is to take a case as far as we can’. But choosing the right offence is one of the issues occupying our lawyers. The IBRC case, contrary to the implication in the column, is generally seen as (very) liberal for common informers and was reported as such by the Sunday Independent over the summer.  I include below links to that article, to the case itself in full, and to a Goodbody synopsis, which confirm what I am saying. Nor am I looking for my ‘day of judgment’ as the second most important line in the article – which leads the whole column, states. As I said ‘The objective is to take a case as far as we can’, for reasons stated. And no-one ever said I would unveil details of ‘public’ prosecutions as the article states, but of ‘private’ ones. I’m sure  you can concede this is complex and that care is needed in dealing with it, as well as in covering it. I’m sure you’d agree this fragile, though potentially important, initiative deserves better. Do you think you could please engineer corrections, of the same (considerable) prominence as the mistakes, in this weekend’s edition? I think it could be helpful if I was consulted about the wording. All the best, Michael Kelly v Distict Court Judge Ryan http://courts.ie/Judgments.nsf/09859e7a3f34669680256ef3004a27de/96091e90305ef8fa80257baa003d2e6e?OpenDocument; http://www.algoodbody.ie/insightspublications/high_court_permits_private_prosecution_against_bank_officials; http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/court-clears-way-for-people-to-sue-individual-bankers-29453856.html”   And the Sunday Times’ response “Michael, Colin Coyle here. [I received] your email. Feel free to write a letter to us for publication. I disagree that the piece is damaging and inaccurate. I simply report what Mr Mannix has published already. If you want to take issue with his view, set it out in your letter. Colin Colin Coyle News Editor The Sunday Times 4th Floor Bishop’s Square Redmond’s Hill Dublin 2 Ireland +353 1 479 2437″    

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