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    How we discourage Irish thought

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    We hear calls for Irish intellectuals, not only economists, to produce new thinking about the present and future of Irish society and politics.  In effect these are calls for Irish intellectuals to help the nation by becoming creative thinkers about the human condition and its requirements in Ireland now.  Such calls are understandable in the present circumstances, but they leave out of account the discouraging environment for creative thinkers which our Republic offers.  There is no weekly or monthly magazine of ideas in which Irish thinkers might present their thought in a sustained manner and debate with each other.  And the existing mass media have been engaged in an intellectual dumbing down.  Moreover, insofar as the print media, radio and television publicise or discuss Irish writing, they confine themselves to prose fiction, poetry and plays; that is to say, to fictive writing, to the neglect of creative writing about human reality in Ireland or generally.  State funding of creative writing practises a similar discrimination.  Aosdána, a state-funded, self-electing assembly of creative individuals, admits writers to membership among others.  To those writers who can prove their need, it pays an annual stipend.  But they must be fictive writers; philosophical writers are excluded, even if they are an Irish Fukuyama or Freud. In the matter of book-publishing the Arts Council discriminates similarly.  On the grounds that sales would likely be small, Irish publishers are reluctant to accept works of thought.  To obviate a similar obstacle in the case of prose fiction, plays or poetry, the Arts Council subsidises the publication of such works.  But thinkers are left to fend for themselves, even if they are a new George Berkeley, Edmund Burke or Douglas Hyde.  A third state-funded agency, Culture Ireland, is charged with promoting and subsidising Irish culture internationally.  In the year 2008 it subsidised 282 Irish cultural events.  Insofar as these involved Irish writers, once again all of them were of the fictive kind.  In other words, the 282 events included none—not one—in which Culture Ireland subsidised an Irish thinker addressing a foreign audience about some aspect of reality; perennial, contemporary, or past.  Thus Irish culture is officially represented to the world as a culture lacking any notable thought. What all these discouragements, taken together, seem to amount to is the Irish establishment and its subordinate tiers working to confirm that very English notion, notably articulated by Matthew Arnold, of the imaginative, thoughtless Celts: gifted entertainers of their pensive Saxon masters cogitating on how to run the world.  Certainly our past history plays a role in all this.  The objective discouragements which we impose on Irish creative thought both grow out of, and reinforce, an inherited subjective discouragement present in many Irish people.  To engage in sustained creative thought requires confidence in one’s ability and right to discover truth independently.  But the legacy of centuries-long mental colonisation of the Catholic Irish—the great majority, the conquered ‘natives’—by the English, their colony in Ireland, and the Catholic clergy, deprives many of us of that dual confidence. Generations of our ancestors were trained in the belief that it was only ‘others’—the Anglo-Irish, the English, the priests—who had that ability and right: and this has left an inherited ingrained mark in many.  Thousands of those so marked are active in the Republic’s mass media, government, schools and seats of learning, and subliminally delivering a similar doctrine, with the privileged ‘others’ now located outside Ireland.  This goes far to explain why, when the Catholic Irish ultimately achieved the chance to call the shots, they created a republic that discourages home-grown creative thought, and makes its sustained expression a guerrilla enterprise.  The resulting Irish life, conducted on the basis of unscrutinised imported thinking, falls short of adult life and resembles that of minors guided by what adult elders elsewhere think. As we witness, distressed, the swollen numbers of young suicides and the regular or occasionally spectacular nights of self-destructive youthful frenzy, a voice is sometimes heard saying: ‘Now that in great measure our young people lack the guidance previously given by the Catholic Church operating through believing parents, teachers, clergy and religious, what a shame that we have not inherited a thought-out philosophy of life and ethical behaviour, with the result that we lack such a philosophy now!’ What is not added is: ‘and do everything we can to prevent its production’. Dr Fennell’s latest book is Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation, Athol Books online.  He is at www.desmondfennell.com

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    Paul McCartney: some spice amid the sugar

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    kind of musician/composer is Paul McCartney? This may seem like an odd question, given that his unprecedented and unparalleled commercial success, even if it has not always been matched by concomitant critical approval, means that everyone thinks they have the story on Paul.  After all, McCartney is listed in The Guinness Book Of Records as the most successful musician and composer in popular music history, with 60 gold discs and sales of 100 million singles.  ‘Yesterday’ (credited to Lennon/McCartney, as all songs by either one as Beatles were, but composed entirely by McCartney) is listed as the most-covered song in history, by over 3,500 artists to date.  Wings’ 1977 single ‘Mull of Kintyre’ became the first single to sell more than two million copies in the UK, and remains the top selling non-charity single there.  He is the most successful songwriter in UK singles history, based on weeks that his compositions have spent on the charts.  As a performer or songwriter, McCartney has been responsible for 30 number-one singles on the US Hot 100 chart, 20 of them with The Beatles, the rest with Wings or as a solo artist.  You want someone for the British finale of Live Aid in 1985, and again for 2005’s 20th Anniversary Live 8 show, who you gonna call, Bob? The X-Factor final 2009? Fab Macca, of course.  And yet, who would care to define, accurately and based on a more than superficial knowledge, what his music is actually like? He’s been at it for a long time now, and his discography encompasses everything from charming folk to layered pop to amiable, household rock’n’roll to piledriving, uncompromising heavy metal to art-pop inclinations to lounge to classical.  He touched on the English folk tradition in songs like ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘Blackbird’, from 1968’s The Beatles (aka The White Album) and ‘Jenny Wren’ from 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, joining the dots between Davy Graham, Nick Drake and Richard Thompson.  There are the forays into blues, ‘Used To Be Bad’ and ‘Really Love You’, on 1997’s Flaming Pie.  The more arcane corners of his back catalogue stretch from the classical Liverpool Oratorio (1991) to the electronica-based Liverpool Sound Collage (2000), to say nothing of the little-heard Thrillington (1977), made up of easy listening, big-band swing orchestral/instrumental versions of songs from his second album (co-credited to Linda) Ram (1971), recorded under the alter-ego Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington.  Indeed, he has a penchant for adopting a persona for his more outré excursions from his cosily good-humoured public image, as the three pseudonymous collaborations as The Fireman, with ex-Killing Joke’s bassist and pioneering ambient house producer, Youth, demonstrate.  ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’, from Ram, sounds like nothing so much as Tom Waits’ junkyard clatter avant la lettre, which in turn sounds like…? Leadbelly? In interview, he has evinced mild annoyance at being dubbed ‘the greatest living composer of love songs’, maintaining such a view is based largely on a misconception, and that he has written his share of nasty songs as well.  “Remember ‘Helter Skelter’? That was me”, (Incidentally, the usually incisive Ian MacDonald, in his meticulous concordance of Beatles’ songs, Revolution in the Head, has a definite blind spot for this composition, failing to share its composer’s regard for it, declaring: “…their attempts at emulating the heavy style were without exception embarrassing”.) So, he is a chameleon, and there perhaps lies his problem with how he is perceived: people who can be all things to all men (and women) invite the accusation that they have no real self.  Devoid of essence, they don a series of masks, and tell you what you want to hear.  It is even possible to treat what should be a positive characteristic, this voracious musical curiosity and impulse towards experimentation/innovation, with suspicion: why does he need to pretend to be someone else when he is doing it, rather than using his own name? It seems he is torn between self-conscious commercialism and the kind of music he makes when he’s not trying too hard to sell records.  Then again, he hardly needs the money, so why worry if sales of a particular record are large or small? Is he afraid of confusing his fair-weather, mainstream audience? Or is it that he needs the status and recognition his continuing fame affords? Without being tiresomely Freudian about it, one of his bonding experiences with John Lennon was that they had in common the early deaths of their mothers (McCartney’s of cancer when he was 15, Lennon’s run over by a car when he was 19.) The psychology of public performing suggests that not only is taking to the stage in pursuit of the love and approval of millions a means of sublimating grief, but also a belated attempt to prove oneself to an absent parent. The chief arguments marshalled by his detractors begin with the assumption that the years of mediocre, formulaic pop were motivated primarily by avarice.  The term ‘filler’ – as used by mp3 single-track downloading kids about their parents’ album collections – could have been coined for much of McCartney’s solo output.  Then there is the fact that he can undoubtedly be lyrically facile.  His tendency towards whimsy and mawkish sentimentality are trying.  Has a major artist ever released a more cringingly banal single than ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’? And let’s not even get started on the ham-fisted pleas for togetherness, ‘Pipes of Peace’ and ‘Ebony and Ivory’, or the dubious 9/11 response, ‘Freedom’.  It can sometimes seem that if arch media prankster Victor Lewis-Smith’s assertion that the Beatles are dying in the wrong order has any validity, then Ringo will be next. However, there is much to be countered in his defence.  Firstly, when the group they formed as teenagers split up, The Beatles were all still young men: George 26, Paul 27, John 28, Ringo 29.  Apart from being an utterly jaw-dropping achievement, the revolutionary arc of their 12 studio albums and two dozen singles, all recorded

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    Ireland’s shocking sham carbon sinks

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    Frank Convery – Chairman of COMHAR, the Sustainability Development Council and Peter Clinch – now special advisor to the Taoiseach on economics, were the lead authors of a 2001 report that suggested Irish forestry could account for almost 10% of Ireland’s reduction target for greenhouse gas emissions.  Since then, as other justifications have been steadily undermined, the argument for 100% grants for forestry planting with 20 year subsidies – all tax free – has increasingly relied on this ‘sequestration’ benefit.  At the outset, a clear distinction must be made between ‘natural forests’ and ‘plantation forestry’.  Natural forests are self-regenerating: as older trees fall, younger ones spring up in the clearings, absorbing more greenhouses gases.  Soil disturbance is minimal, preserving the large soil carbon store.  Natural forests are magnificent environmentally.  They are excellent carbon stores. In Ireland 97% of our forest cover is industrial plantation forestry, the majority on peat soils.  The use of the land is changed, the soil drained, and an intensive, often fertilised crop of trees is planted and harvested in a short time frame: less than 35 years.  Because it disturbs the soil at the times of planting, road construction and harvesting, plantation forestry on these soils is bad for the environment.   Irish forestry policy is currently based on a 1996 document that requires 20,000 hectares of planting until 2030 to produce ‘critical mass’ to make a viable pulp or paper industry, a target repeated in successive Programmes for Government.  But forestry planting figures have not reached that figure since 1997 and have fallen steadily ever since.  Just over 5,000 hectares were planted in each of the last two years.  With grants recently cut by 8%, the figures are likely to fall further. An analysis of the forestry industry in 2003 by Peter Bacon – now special advisor to NAMA – held that 1996’s ‘critical mass’ would still be valid if 12,000-15,000 hectares a year could be maintained: warning of “serious implications in terms of the ongoing credibility of the policy”, if planting rates fell below that.  As the subsequent Malone report noted, “it is self-evident that if plantings fall below a certain threshold the future growth potential of the industry will be undermined”.  It is against this background that Clinch and Convery led the charge to replace the increasingly discredited 1996 policy’s grail of ‘critical mass’ with the value of trees in mopping up our spiralling greenhouse gas emissions.  This has led to 2009 figures from the Environmental Planning Agency (EPA) claiming that 9% of our required 2008-2020 carbon reductions will be accounted for by Ireland’s post-1990 forestry planting.  The problem is Ireland’s conifer plantations on peat soils are not sequestering carbon as quickly as they are diminishing our natural sinks – the peat soils of Ireland.  Studies suggest that globally peatlands may store more than three times the carbon stored in tropical rainforests.  Forestry that drains and regularly disturbs large areas of peat soils causes carbon emissions, or at best breaks even.  It does nothing to sequester carbon. The loss of Irish peatlands over the last 20 years has been catastrophic.  The Irish Peatland Conservation Council estimated in 1996 that 82% of our blanket bogs and 92% of our raised bogs had been disturbed.  The Parks and Wildlife Service recently reported to the European Commission that 36% of our raised bogs had been destroyed in the ten years since the Habitats Directive – intended to protect them – came into force in Ireland in 1997.  The EPA itself ironically published figures showing that the 1990–2000 loss of carbon from Irish soils was 27 million tons, more than 24 million of them from our peatlands.  If forestry on peat soils is so bad, how much of it have we planted? The European Environmental Agency [EEA] caused an uproar when it came out in 2004 with figures that showed 84% of Ireland’s forestry since 1990 (the only forestry we can count under Kyoto rules) had been planted on peat soils – contributing not to carbon sequestration but to carbon loss. How then did the EPA end up claiming carbon credits for Irish forestry on peat soils? Here’s how.  COFORD, the research body set up to serve the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, responded to the EEA’s report by producing a document called ‘Dispelling myths: the true extent of recent peatland afforestation in Ireland’.  That 2008 document claimed the percentage of planting on peat soils in that period was not 84% but 48% – giving 36% more of the planting on non-peat soils that might legitimately be claimed to be storing carbon.  But their figures are based on a misleading definition of peat soils.  The EU based Nitrates Directive defines peat soils as any soil with more than 20% organic matter.  But the Forest Service uses a different definition – soils with peat depth greater than 30cm, excluding vast areas of the thinner peat-based soils characteristic of Ireland’s uplands.  Next, the estimates of carbon sequestration were compiled using inflated planting figures.  Irish forestry has been struggling to plant 5,000 hectares a year for the last two years, and yet the 2008 calculations for carbon credits are based on a planting rate of 8,000 hectares per annum up to 2020, making a further exaggeration of the claim based on trees that are not being planted.  Then they claim the trees grow better than they do, and so are capable of taking up more carbon from the atmosphere than they actually do. Just as the areas planted on peat soils have been underestimated, the yield class [YC] – the measurement of what size a tree will become and so how much carbon it will absorb – have been grossly overestimated.  A 2003 COFORD report on plantations in the west stated that “almost one third of the total plantation area surveyed is only expected to reach a top height of 15 metres, while a further 43% may only reach a top height of 18 metres, before the risk of windthrow

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    Crowley and Waters

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    Hello Niall,
    Before we begin, allow me to thank you for engaging in this discussion. My objective is to try to get at something I think important rather than create vast reserves of heat.
    My opening question, which I’ll outline in an attempt to define the central issue as I see it, relates to the concept of “equality” as referred to in contemporary socio-ideological discourse. I don’t mean the dictionary definition, with which I have no quarrel. My problem, as someone who has for many years written about issues affecting men, women and children, is that “equality” …

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    No ‘ladies’ need apply

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    Equality authority loses case against  Portmarnock golf club in Supreme Court Donncha O’Connell Some men need to play a version of golf called ‘male golf’ and can, in order to realise that need, run a golf club in which membership is open exclusively to male players of male golf on the understanding that the principal purpose of that club is to cater only for the needs of men. In practical terms, this means they can have a legal drink after or even before a game of male golf and cannot be punished or deprived in this connection by operation of some equality-proofed application of the licensing laws. To do so would probably kill the game of ‘male golf’ while realising the bolder dreams of golf egalitarians and some golf widows. It is matterless that such clubs allow women to play golf at appointed times and provide female-only locker rooms to facilitate that privilege. That is purely a matter of external relations and does not bear upon the internal workings of private golf clubs which, as well as benefiting from club status, enjoy certain tax advantages. That, in a nutshell, is what a majority (3:2) of the Irish Supreme Court decided in November in a case taken by the Equality Authority against Portmarnock Golf Club. Four of the judges wrote individual judgments with Ms Justice Macken agreeing with the two who held in favour of Portmarnock. The basis of her agreement with two differing majority judgments (those of judges Hardiman and Geoghegan) was not explained, which is regrettable given the pivotal nature of her ‘swing vote’ with the majority. She needs to work on her swing! The majority judgment that has attracted most attention is, unsurprisingly, that of Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman. His judgment is stinging in its criticism of the Equality Authority for taking the case against Portmarnock Golf Club and laced with the rhetorical flourishes of a once-great advocate. Holding in favour of Portmarnock Golf Club he tears into the arguments presented by Counsel for the Equality Authority, accusing the Authority of seeking to have Portmarnock ‘condemned’ as a discriminating club. What appears to animate his objection to the case being taken in the first place is the failure of the Authority to comply with a request by a former Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to design a code of practice for golf clubs instead of using targeted litigation to address a particular form of gender discrimination in a particular golf club. This, as Mr Justice Nial Fennelly rightly points out, is not relevant to a consideration of the central issues raised in the Portmarnock case – whether or not the club came within the exemption for so-called ‘discriminating clubs’ provided for by Sections 8 and 9 of the Equal Status Act. In other words, the sections apply whether or not a code of practice exists and do not exist as some kind of default provision only to be used in the event of non-compliance with a code that enjoys no more than the status of soft law. Apart from the fact that Mr Justice Hardiman’s point was irrelevant it was also unfair. In the absence of any significant  authorities on the delicate balance sought to be struck by Sections 8 and 9 of the Act – this was actually the first such case – it would have been impracticable and speculative to draft a code of practice of anything more than aspirational value. It is noteworthy that by the time the Equality Authority drafted its Code of Practice on Sexual Harassment & Harassment at Work there was voluminous case law on the subject making the exercise altogether more meaningful. It is quite clear from his judgment that Mr Justice Hardiman is no fan of the Equality Authority. He criticises it again and again in quite colourful terms describing one of the Authority’s submissions as ‘utterly reductive’ and castigating it for not ‘leaving the members (of Portmarnock) alone to work out their own salvation’. For a judge, who in cases involving socio-economic rights always insists that the expenditure of public funds is not a matter on which the judicial branch is appropriately qualified to adjudicate, he is trenchant in his criticism of the Authority for using taxpayers’ money for the purpose of litigation ‘especially in times of economic difficulty’. Again, this is quite unfair bearing in mind the totality of the statutory mandate under which the Authority operates which includes the duty to promote equality by various means including litigation. As a creature of statute it is entirely appropriate that such a body should take this part of its mandate seriously and it hardly warrants such vehement disapproval on the part of a judge faced with a demonstrably justiciable issue. For someone who felt the case should never have been taken Mr Justice Hardiman was at his prolix best in dispensing with it. Mr Justice Hardiman is untouchable in terms of expertise when it comes to rules of evidence but he is somewhat promiscuous in taking judicial notice of matters not quite amounting to hard evidence. For example, in looking at single gender associations and clubs he mentions The Emerald Warriors which he describes as a ‘gay mens’ [sic] Rugby Club’. A perusal of the website of that club reveals that Mr Justice Hardiman’s description is itself somewhat reductive. The club is described in the following terms: “…formed in August 2003 to provide gay, heterosexual and bisexual men the opportunity to play competitive rugby in Ireland and internationally”. There is obviously more to gay rugby than meets the judicial eye. In a genuflection, no doubt, to the status of The Irish Times as a paper of record, he quotes extensively from a 2005 opinion piece by Finola Meredith arguing for women-only spaces. This is then used to support a judicial surmise as to the growing number of women-only clubs in Ireland. Clearly, to borrow from an earlier second-hand phrase of Mr Justice Hardiman speaking (controversially) at

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    Feminism rules

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    Germaine Greer Feminism is not a concept that requires definition.  To define it would be to limit it when it is still in the phase of development.  Rather too much time is being wasted already on arguing about whether this or that is true feminism or not.  The general discourse is not helped by the kind of naiveté that believes that history proceeds by decades.  Historically, ten years is not a significant unit.  To ask where feminism is at the end of the last decade, this decade or the next is not a sensible question.  It makes even less sense than asking where nationalism might be at the end of some decade or another.  The only possible answer is ‘still there and still alive’ and that means still changing.  There is, alas, no such easy answer to the question of where socialism is, now that we really need it. Equality feminism is profoundly conservative.  Its basic premise is that men have achieved everything that is possible under corporate capitalism and all that women need or want is what men have got already.  When we hear successful women demanding that women be equally represented at the highest level of government, civil service and multinational corporations, that we have as many female CEOs as we have males and even that we insist on ‘women only’ short lists and all female candidates for certain posts, we should understand that the people supporting such arguments are secure in the knowledge that simply putting women in positions created by and designed for men will have no effect on the underlying structures whatsoever. Remember Margaret Thatcher: the only man in her cabinet, warmonger, probably war criminal, architect and prime mover of the crooked Al Yamama arms deal? Did she change the British Conservative Party? Yes, she did.  She made it tough, pitiless and aggressive.  Did she change the British working class? Utterly.  She took it upon herself to break the power of the trades unions.  She only succeeded because the trades unions had already betrayed their own.  Sex did have something to do with it.  One of the factors in the defeat of the trades unions was their persistence in discriminating against women.  A huge pool of unrepresented female workers who had no way of defending their pay and conditions, and no choice but to accept whatever deal the employer offered had come into existence, and would work for a pittance.  When women workers went on strike against grotesque oppression in their workplaces, the élite trades unions left them to fend for themselves.  No flying pickets for them.  Jackboots are still jackboots, regardless of the sex of the wearer. Equality is not simply a conservative aim; it is also illusory.  Women who break into the ranks of male privilege very soon discover that they are intruders, and that the kernel of male solidarity remains impenetrable.  Women who were accepted as traders on the stock exchange found the masculinist culture of their fellow traders intimidating.  Bullying was endemic in the corporate culture; bullying of women took on a sexual character that many women experienced as utterly degrading.  Women admitted as partners in law chambers can tell a similar story.  Women in the police and women in the army can tell the same tale.  Even women in the church.  Yes, there are ways of seeking redress, but make no mistake, the women who seek the redress to which they are legally entitled for discrimination in the workplace will not get their old jobs back.  Most of them have had to kiss their career goodbye. I have never been an equality feminist.  I have never coveted the lives that men lead, whether they are down the mine, or on the corporate ladder.  Corporate capitalism creates far more losers than it does winners, because constructing the management élite is a process of elimination.  Management is the art of taking credit for other people’s work.  Women in the corporate world make the same mistakes that they made as high-achieving students: they work too hard.  When they delegate, they watch over the shoulder of the person to whom the task has been delegated, and blame themselves if they make a mess of it.  Many high-achieving women who have discovered that the corporate world is ruthless and unprincipled have not taken the money and shut up.  Instead they have blown the whistle, with the result that millions of innocent people lost their investments, a few individuals committed suicide and a few more went to jail.  Enron was just the first domino. Harriet Harman is Minister for Women and Equality in Gordon Brown’s cabinet in Britain.  The very title of her portfolio indicates confusion and contradiction, as if she was minister for difference and sameness or chalk and cheese.  Her latest speech in support of her own Equality Bill argues that “looking after your family is still the hardest and most important job in the world”.  Even as an avowedly feminist politician Harman still thinks of women as mothers, and as more important as mothers than in any other function.  Women who have yet to reproduce are marginal, and women who have brought up their families are invisible.  All indices tell us that women are having fewer children and are having them later and later, but for the minister they don’t figure until they are candidates for maternity leave. Maternity leave of 39 weeks and doubled maternity pay is not available to male parents, although male parents may now work the latter part of maternity leave if their partners want to go back to work.  Harman’s would appear to be the politics of difference, but they are not the politics of liberation.  Harman must know that nearly a quarter of British families consist of a single woman and her offspring, but she has not registered the possibility that this situation represents a genuine, radical upheaval, that will do more to drain the substance out of patriarchy than any legislation.  Harman’s vision is still essentially

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    Rossport campaigners vindicated yet again

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    An Bord Pleanála and the Garda Ombudsman criticise Shell and the gardai respectively Michael McCaughan An Bord Pleanála (ABP) has rejected the proposed route for the Corrib pipeline as “unacceptable” on safety grounds. The ruling was unequivocal: houses along the route were “within the hazard range of the pipeline should a failure occur”, while “design documentation” and “risk assessment” fail to “present a complete, transparent and adequate demonstration that the pipeline does not pose an unacceptable risk to the public”. The decision  also noted that Shell failed to include part of the onshore pipeline route in its application. The ruling vindicated a ten-year campaign which has seen local residents become experts on complex, technical aspects of gas production, while they also learnt a thing or two about state persecution and political treachery. While An Bord Pleanála’s statement clearly dismissed the project in its current form, it also contained a disturbing conclusion, that “provisionally” the board would “approve the proposed onshore pipeline development should certain ‘alterations’ be made”. Shell must respond by February 2010 but their options are limited as the company has already discounted alternative routes on financial and environmental grounds. If the board decision vindicated the campaign to halt the project on health and safety grounds, the Garda Ombudsman Commission report performed the same service on the issue of civil disobedience. The Commission upheld 75% of complaints by citizens against gardaí, acknowledging that the number and nature of complaints were unprecedented. From the commonage in Rossport to the refinery site at Bellanaboy; from the solidarity camp at Glengad to the high seas beyond, gardaí display deference and loyalty to Shell, while acting aggressively against local people engaged in civil disobedience. Colm Henry, a resident of Glengad, made a complaint to gardaí in 2008 when Shell security repeatedly filmed his grandchildren as they undressed on Glengad beach. Inspector John Gilligan promised to do something about it. “If this was happening near my home I’d probably be doing the very same as you are” confided Gilligan. The garda complaint was followed by more intense surveillance as security workers returned with cameras and binoculars focused on the Henry household. The following day, when Mr Henry returned to the garda station, Inspector Gilligan threw his hands in the air: “I know what you’re going to tell me”, he said, “I’m really sorry about it”. Henry believes that Gilligan was genuinely unhappy at the situation but was powerless to interfere with Shell’s security operation. Gilligan’s prior assurances to the Henry family arose from personal assurances from a senior Shell employee, an entirely inappropriate procedure from a member of the gardaí. On another occasion, members of the community obstructed drilling work by Shell on a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) but when police arrived they ordered the locals to leave under threat of arrest and allowed Shell to resume work. The Garda Ombudsman Commission forwarded seven files to the DPP of which one case resulted in a recommendation of punishment against a senior garda. The 111 complaints made to the commission represent only a small sample of popular grievances. The Ombudsman Commission’s press spokesman, Graham Doyle, explained that a survey identified two factors which kept many people from making formal complaints: people believed nothing would be done or that it would make matters worse for them in relation to the Gardai. Garda sources have consistently given statements to the press which indicate their loyalty to the developer: “If we didn’t have some of the outside agitators coming in there wouldn’t be a problem with the handful of locals that oppose the project”, Supt Michael Larkin told the Sunday Times. In late November fisherman Pat O’Donnell received a curt letter from Superintendent Larkin at Belmullet garda station, informing him that “the DPP has directed that there will be no prosecution in relation to the sinking of the Iona Isle”, a reference to O’Donnell’s boat, which was sunk last June. At the time of the incident garda and media speculated freely that O’Donnell had scuttled his own boat, with solid leads being pursued and imminent arrests ahead. The bluster concluded with the 19-word statement above, which the media duly ignored. There is no indication that the garda inquiry into the lost boat extended to private security operatives at Glengad who allegedly recruited Irishman Michael Dwyer for a Bolivian mission ,which resulted in his death. A recent Prime Time report into the Dwyer affair showed Dwyer’s boss, Eduardo Rozsa Flores, angrily lamenting on camera a missed opportunity to blow up a boat carrying members of the Bolivian government. Just a coincidence? Christmas came early to Mayo and Pat O’Donnell received another letter, this time inviting him to a festive dinner for “stakeholders and supporters” of the Corrib gas project. This belated counter-factual acknowledgment of O’Donnell’s “support”  for the project is apt recognition that the hard work of many Erris residents will secure a safer gas project, its terms renegotiated to ensure a better deal for the Irish state.

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