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The new issue of Village Magazine (April 2012) is in shops from Saturday 24th March. This is a 96-page issue, including an 18-page special on the Mahon Tribunal report, with analysis by Frank Connolly, Michael Smith, Elaine Byrne, John Gormley and others.
The independent Garda watchdog produced a report about the Corrib Garda ‘rape tape’ that misinformed the public and undermined the women who brought the recording to public attention. By William Hederman. It was one of the most extraordinary news stories of 2011. On March 31st, Gardaí in north Mayo arrested two anti-Shell campaigners and seized a video camera. The Garda sergeant and colleagues then inadvertently recorded themselves joking about threatening to rape and deport one of the two women in their custody before handing the camera back. The recording was posted online, where it was listened to by more than 100,000 people within days. It provided a disturbing glimpse into the minds of some of the very people to whom women are expected to report rape. However, the saga took a more worrying twist four months later. In late July, the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC), which was conducting a ‘public interest’ inquiry into the incident, announced it had sent an “Interim Progress Report” to the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter. Shatter published the report and, within hours, widespread media coverage had implanted several key pieces of false information in the public mind. This three-page report should be compulsory reading for students of PR and political spin. By cleverly juxtaposing several half-truths and omitting most of the crucial information, it created an impression that all was not as it seemed with the ‘rape tape’. It serves Garda interests by undermining the women and creating an impression that these Gardaí might have been victims of Shell to Sea shenanigans. Back in April, the ‘rape tape’ had provoked public outrage. The official Garda response was contrite: the Garda Commissioner apologised and reassured “victims of sexual crime” that they should continue to report those crimes to Gardaí. Behind the scenes, it was business as usual for Garda ‘sources’. Personal details of the two arrested women were leaked to the press (the women had initially hoped to remain out of the public eye). A reporter turned up at the family home of one of them, Jerrieann Sullivan. She said her parents were “extremely upset” by this. Meanwhile, Caoimhe Kerins of Dublin Shell to Sea says she received tip-offs from two crime correspondents that Gardaí were spreading a rumour that the women had shouted “rape” during the arrest. Kerins assured them it wasn’t true and the journalists didn’t print it. The rationale of Gardaí seemed to be that this rumour would mitigate the Garda behaviour in the public mind: a disturbing echo of the old notion that a woman is to blame for rape. This smear finally found its way into print 10 weeks later, when Jim Cusack published the rumour as fact in the Sunday Independent on June 19th. Sullivan complained to the Press Ombudsman and in October he ruled that Cusack’s article was “significantly misleading”. Some Gardaí and their allies had been seeking revenge. But surely GSOC would act more fairly and impartially? The signs were not promising. On April 17th, the News of the World quoted a “source” at GSOC, claiming Sullivan was refusing to hand over the camera. She says she was “shocked at how a supposedly independent public body could feed journalists with information that undermined a witness in its own investigation”. In fact, there was a short delay in handing over the camera, because of a dilemma facing Jerrieann Sullivan and lecturers at NUI Maynooth, where she was doing an MA degree. The camera belonged to the university and contained a research interview she had recorded three weeks before the “rape” recording. The interview was subject to confidentiality agreements with the participants: academic guidelines meant the confidentiality of the interview had to be protected. When GSOC demanded the camera, the university academics explained their predicament to GSOC and repeatedly offered to have the older file deleted in the presence of GSOC. However, they say GSOC ignored all offers and issued threats of criminal prosecution against Sullivan and her lecturers. A spokesman for GSOC told Village he could not comment because, “This is an ongoing investigation of a criminal nature and we are bound to protect the confidentiality of that investigation.” Jerrieann Sullivan was forced to hire a solicitor. She says that he was, in turn, threatened by GSOC “with a fine or imprisonment for not handing over the camera”. A statement from seven academics – Sullivan’s course directors at NUI Maynooth – describes GSOC’s attitude to Sullivan and the other woman (who has managed to remain anonymous) as “consistently hostile, recalling past treatment of the victims of sexual violence”. Nine days after the story broke in April, the older file , containing the recording of the research interview, was deleted from the camera in the academics’ presence, and the camera given to GSOC. The possible motives behind GSOC’s approach became clearer when the Interim Report appeared. The deletion of the older file was cleverly exploited to give the false impression that the recording of the rape comments had been “tampered with”. The Interim Report makes no mention of Sullivan’s and the academics’ explanations, nor of their offers to reach a compromise. It simply reports that files had been deleted from the camera, implying that this was mysterious: “The significance of these deleted files … was not known”. The report is misleading by implying that GSOC first became aware of the file deletion when examining the camera, whereas in fact Sullivan and the academics insist the file deletion had been explained to them in a series of oral and written communications, involving university authorities and solicitors. When this was put to GSOC, the spokesman pointed out that the interim report “doesn’t say that the recording from March 31st was interfered with.” The report also appears to weigh in behind the insidious Garda rumour that the women said rape first. Jerrieann says she was questioned by GSOC for almost five hours, but her testimony is not referred to in the report. The only person quoted in the report is an
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The egalitarian Niall Crowley. The report of the working group on the proposed merger of the Equality Authority and the Irish Human Rights Commission into the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC), commissioned in October 2011 was finally published in late March. It is comprehensive and expert and does put it up to Minister Alan Shatter to realise, as suggested by the working group, the opportunity offered by the merger “to develop an integrated body that can be stronger than the sum of the two existing bodies”. The Minister welcomed the “comprehensive and coherent package of recommendations”. So far so good. He then bizarrely chose to highlight that “the Group concludes that success of the new IHREC will be measured, not by the number of legal cases taken, but by their impact in promoting its strategic goals”. This reopens the suspicion that his agenda is to limit litigation by the new body, in particular litigation against the public sector. In any event, the Minister somewhat distorts the working group’s conclusion on this. The report does state that the “focus should be on strategic cases which are precedent-setting”. However, it is clear that it should be for the IHREC to decide which cases to take and that , sometimes, support to a number of individual cases on a single issue may be appropriate. The working group would have done better to acknowledge that sometimes a critical mass of cases is necessary to instil a culture of compliance among employers, service providers and other duty bearers. The Minister would have inspired more confidence had he chosen to recognise the four challenges posed in the report for a ‘feasible merger’. The new body will need to have: • Adequate resources. • Adequate and coherent functions and powers • Unifying strategies to ensure it does not function in two separate silos. • Appropriate career and personal development paths for staff. The working group is clear that the staffing levels for the two existing bodies are inadequate and that the new body “should be properly funded to perform its functions and exercise its powers”. It recommends that “the disproportionate cuts imposed in the past” are reversed. However, is it the dead hand of the Department of Justice, Equality and Defence that adds the proviso that this should be “as soon as possible”? The functions and powers for the new body are set out in detail in the report and it is established – crucially – that the same powers need to be available for both the human rights and equality agendas. New powers are also suggested for implementing an important new duty that is recommended be imposed on the public sector to “take due note of human rights and equality in carrying out their functions”. However, again the dead hand of the Department of Justice is seen. The new body can only “facilitate” and “support” public-sector bodies to meet these new obligations. There is to be no external monitoring or enforcement. The report is weak on how to integrate work on equality with work on human rights. It usefully recommends a structure that will unify legal, research and promotional work in the two fields. However, it does not capture an underpinning philosophy for the two fields. This will remain a challenge in integrating the new body. This seems to result from a limited understanding of equality. The report’s unhelpful definition is that “all persons being equal in dignity, rights and responsibilities”. This does not capture the reality that inequality touches a majority of people in our society nor the need to address inequality in the distribution of resources, power, status and standing and relationships of care and solidarity. It fails to recognise the importance of addressing the practical implications of diversity. And that the responsibilities of the wealthiest and most privileged are greatest. The report points out that international standards require that senior-level posts in the body should not be filled with secondees. It goes on to recommend that senior-level staff should be recruited by the IHREC directly through an open competition. Again aspiration is tempered by a proviso – “in future”. The Sociologist Mary Murphy. In ‘Shock Doctrine’ Naomi Klein chillingly describes the Right as always ready, waiting for moments of crisis, to move in and apply its prescriptive ideas. While the Left also expects opportunity in crisis, progressives have been found wanting by failing to grab the moment of crisis to popularise an alternative ideology to the one that caused the crisis. Writing last year Unger, for example, noted how there appears to be a lack of capacity to imagine and articulate alternatives and a tragic narrowing of political imagination and absence of progressive political projects. The Right and Centre simply claim there are no alternatives and successfully narrow political debate. They are aided by the Left’s collective failure to identify and popularise meaningful alternatives. Traditional political sources of progress like social democrats are backed into narrow defensive corners from where they tend to legitimate economic consensus. Marxist inspired alternatives often lack either credibility or vision. This is where civil society groups come in. Civil-society movements can work to popularise normative values or ideas about the good society and to build forums in which to deliberate and negotiate those ideas. Since 2010 Claiming our Future, for example, has attempted to create new public spheres where people can deliberate about alternatives. Over 1000 people met in the first event in the RDS in October 2010. Many more people have subsequently come together to reflect on and re-imagine democracy, local government and participation, new approaches to localism and achieving environmental sustainability, and fostering equality through minimum and maximum incomes. A common concern at all the events has been the Government’s ‘Plan A’, with its excessive focus on public expenditure cuts and its absence of both progressive taxation and investment in jobs and infrastructure. A constant theme for Claiming our Future is to argue that there are plausible and credible alternatives to this ‘Plan
The ready availability of pornography and sexual imagery desensitises men to real women
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Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney seems bent on leaving a biodiversity wasteland – and once again forcing the emigration of the last small farmers that keep the hills alive.
With Germany reluctant to allow debt write-downs least of all by Ireland it’s interesting, as Patrick Guinness notes in a comment on Constantin Gurdgiev’s recent article, how little attention has focused on Ireland’s signature on a 1953 bailout for Germany. The London Agreement on German External Debts between the Federal Republic of Germany on one part and Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Pakistan, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Union of South Africa, the UK, the USA, and Yugoslavia among others. The Agreement comprehended a number of different types of debt from before and after the second World War. Some of them arose directly out of the efforts to finance the reparations system, while others reflect extensive lending, mostly by US investors, to German firms and governments. In the London Agreement, the (Western) German government under Chancellor Adenauer undertook to repay the external debts incurred by German government between 1919-1945 The total under negotiation was 16 billion marks of debts from the 1920s which had defaulted in the 1930s, but which Germany decided to repay to restore its reputation. This money was owed to government and private banks in the U.S., France and Britain. Another 16 billion marks represented postwar loans by the U.S. Under the London Debts Agreement of 1953, the repayable amount was reduced by 50% to about 15 billion marks and prolonged over 30 years, and in the context of a fast-growing German economy was of minor impact. The agreement significantly contributed to the growth of its post-war industry and allowed Germany to enter international economic institutions such as Gatt, the IMF and the World Bank. Germany finally cleared its First World War debt by repaying nearly €80 million in October 2010. The reparations were set by the Allied victors as compensation and punishment for the 1914-18 war. The reparations were set at the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, by the Allied victors – mostly Britain, France and America. Most of the money was intended to go to Belgium and France, whose land, towns and villages were devastated by the war, and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging it. The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919 was 226billion Reichsmarks which was later reduced to 132 billion.
The State must provide for abortion Since a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, known as the X case, abortion has been theoretically legal in Ireland if there is a risk to the life of a pregnant woman. Bunreacht na hÉireann now allows Dáil Éireann to legislate on this; however, no political party has dared to, and the Irish Medical Council cravenly considers it malpractice for any doctor to perform an abortion: “The deliberate and intentional destruction of the unborn child is professional misconduct. Should a child in utero lose its life as a side-effect of standard medical treatment of the mother, then this is not unethical”. Remarkably, this edict extends to where the pregnancy does not involve the agency of the woman, such as cases of rape and incest. Meanwhile, the numbers of Irish women seeking abortions in Britain seem to be 150-200 weekly, though figures are unreliable. In May 2007, a pregnant 17-year-old girl, known only as “Miss D”, whose foetus suffered from anencephaly, was prevented from travelling to Britain by the Health Service Executive. The High Court eventually ruled that she could not be prevented from travelling merely because she was a ward of the state, but clearly women’s rights are under practical threat. In 2005, three Irish women who had previously travelled to England for abortions won their case in the European Court of Human Rights, that restrictive and unclear Irish laws violate several provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case, A, B and C v Ireland, held there is no right for women to an abortion, although Ireland had violated the Convention by failing to provide an accessible and effective procedure for a woman to establish whether she qualifies for a legal abortion under current Irish law. A recent Private Members’ Bill, put forward by Socialist Party TD Clare Daly, People Before Profit TD Joan Collins and Independent TD Mick Wallace, sought to create a legal framework for abortion in Ireland where a woman’s life is at risk, including from suicide. The vote was opposed by Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil. It was backed by Sinn Féin and number of independents, though many of them made it clear they were determined to provide only for abortion in the case of threats to the life of the woman. A recent and moving Irish Times article also notably dealt only with women whose lives had been threatened by pregnancy and who had therefore had abortions. There does not seem to be much of a constituency for abortion in other circumstances. In any event, Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly, rejected the Bill on the grounds that the House should await the report of an expert group on the matter, which will report within months. Abortion is complicated and involves a weighing of the rights of a woman with those of an unborn foetus. We do not even have a language for rights outside human rights and many, particularly in Anglophone countries outside Ireland, believe that the position of a foetus must yield to that of the woman, where her life, her health, her emotional welfare including in circumstances of rape or incest or even just her life plans (at least in the first trimester) demand it. As part of our acceptance that life is complex and circumstances often far from ideal, Village considers that the logic of sympathising with a woman who believes there is an imperative to have a first-trimester abortion extends to a legislative and constitutional imperative to provide for first-trimester abortion where a woman demands it. Ireland should legislate for X and move to provide in the medium-term, through constitutional change, for first-trimester abortions. No country that exports its moral issues in circumstances of great human pain can call itself a Republic.
Denis O’Brien sent the following letter to the Village editor in response to an article published in the November 2011 issue of the magazine. The letter is published without comment and will also be reproduced in our January 2012 edition.