Editorial
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“Racist: A person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another” – Oxford English Dictionary GEMMA O’DOHERTY has become the it girl for Irish extremism: racism, anti-Islamism, homophobia and transphobia. Village published an article in our last edition, by the editor, establishing that there was little in common between O’Doherty and the ethos of this magazine. Since then, five months ago, she has veered further rightwards and, though ideally she should be starved of publicity, it is timely to address these further changes in a comprehensive piece, for the record, albeit in a small magazine. As is well known, O’Doherty (51) worked as a teacher and then spent twenty years as a journalist for the Irish Independent, rising to become an uncontroversial Chief Features Writer and writing some investigative pieces including most famously about the death of Fr Niall Molloy. She was fired in 2015 as a “rogue reporter” after visiting the Garda Commissioner’s house without editorial permission, to ask him about penalty points. She then took a successful Unfair Dismissals Case. Though most of the Irish media ignored it, it was embarrassing for the Irish Independent as its editor had himself had penalty points cancelled in dubious circumstances. In 2016 she independently produced a documentary about the death of toddler Mary Boyle. In late 2017 and 2018 she wrote several articles for Village magazine – on Madeleine McCann; on Sophie Toscan du Plantier; on sex abuse in Donegal and in a Dublin rugby school; and she wrote about her experience before the Charleton Tribunal, with which she was not impressed. Her cover story on rugby trainer John McClean was excellent and was helpful recently in bringing about his trial on indictment for allegedly abusing boys in Terenure College. She never ventilated any sort of political view in these articles. When last year she explicitly declared her intention to run for the Presidency on an anti-corruption ticket expressing her lack of faith in Irish media, Village felt the media should give her a hearing. There were mutterings that she was quietly anti- abortion, anti-vaccination but there was no pattern of this in her journalism and she denied it, particularly in interviews with online news service, Broadsheet.ie, which supported her Presidency bid. Beyond this there was never any suspicion of intolerance in private conversations with writers from this magazine. There was no sign of it in an interview she gave to progressive Podcast, Echochambers, in March 2018; in a Kitty Holland article in the Irish Times in 2016: ‘Mary Boyle’s disappearance and the 40-year fob-off’; or when on 16 September 2018 Roy Greenslade wrote in the Guardian: “She has built a reputation as a freelance investigative reporter…Now, in an attempt to raise the profile of her concerns about police practices and what she perceives as a lack of press freedom within Ireland, she is attempting to stand for the presidency”. There was none in a piece by a Washington-based history professor in the Journal of 26 September 2018. And none in a TEDTalk she herself gave in August 2018. As late as during her Presidential bid she was writing to Panti Bliss stating: “I have throughout my career supported the rights of minorities in Ireland including transgender communities, gay families, Travellers, Muslims and victims of state injustice I admire your talent hugely and found your speech about our repressive society inspiring”. This admiration would not last. An editorial in the October 2018 Village did not endorse O’Doherty for the Presidential election the next month. She appeared to be standing on an attractive anti-corruption and media-sceptical agenda with no right-wing component but Village editorialised that she was “damned for an undue emphasis on a number of conspiracy theories” and endorsed Michael D Higgins. She did not do well in the Presidential election – she only received one of the four requisite nominations – and was predictably snookered by the media she loathes for stating, without evidence, that journalist Veronica Guerin had been killed by “the State”. Her politics and her platform were never tested. That was a pity, from all perspectives. She just might have been taken down earlier and more directly during the campaign. It was after that election that her politics appears to have turned. Perhaps this was a reaction to the success of the nastiness of Peter Casey’s campaign which placed him second. She first toured the country with other anti-corruption activists giving talks, and earlier this year established Anti-Corruption Ireland (ACI) with online members – a “political movement” which promotes “truth, justice and integrity in public office” and which intends to field candidates at all elections though it has not yet registered as a political party. In April 2019, O’Doherty ran in the European elections as an independent, receiving 1.85% of first preferences in Dublin, finishing 12th out of 19 candidates – a respectable position in itself but not what she would have expected given her high profile and zealous support. She got in to bed with John Waters, moaning about societal change. In Irish terms this amounted to a 180-degree ideological rotation. For example while O’Doherty had been championed by the libertarian-leaning readership of online news site, Broadsheet.ie, Waters had been vilified. She also developed an affiliation with someone called Amazing Polly, a Canadian version of herself who often appears on her videos, she has a symbiotic relationship with Justin Barrett of the National Party, ‘citizen journalist’ ‘GrandTorino/Rowan Croft’ and Jim Corr of…the Corrs, she often retweets Katie Hopkins, and latterly Donald Trump. But it is her agenda that appals. She conjures a racial apocalypse on Twitter: On July 13 she Tweeted a video of what she said was “Illegal African migrants storm[ing] the#Pantheon in Paris. Welcome to open borders Europe. It will end in war”. She cites a counter-factual – open borders – and infers something as frightening as a future war. How is this intended to make citizens feel about immigrants? In May she tweeted
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LEFT-WING MEANS favouring equality over unfettered freedom, redistribution of resources over property rights. If you’re on the left you’ll appreciate planning, taxation, minority rights and nationalisation. If you don’t maybe you’re anti-Establishment or anti-intellectual, or post-Left-and-Right or Fianna Fáil or just confused. Maybe a Trump figure or the gilets jaunes or the New Land League are for you. Ideology matters though in Ireland little is heard about ideas of any sort, much less the egalitarian ideas in the first paragraph. Being left-wing doesn’t mean you support every underdog, or rally behind the anti-establishment banner with the noisiest support whatever its colour. There is of course much ado about campaigns and that is fine. Campaigns are a good way of keeping a complacent government on its toes. However, if they are misdirected they can divert energy that might otherwise support more subversive, more long-lasting or more genuinely left-wing campaigns. There may be some short-term political gain and contrarian satisfaction. But little long-term gain for left-wing goals. Politics transcends campaigns. But it is the paucity of the gain to the Left and its policies since Ireland’s economic collapse that reveals how misdirected the post-collapse campaigns were. Village would prefer if the left had campaigned on increasing property and wealth taxes, revulsion at NAMA refloating Ireland’s dodo development community, and jailing white-collar criminals. Not against water charges, bin charges, property taxes and carbon taxes. (The polluters pay principle should be a Left-wing mantra because polluters take from the common good and the future). Championing ‘underdogs’ is not enough. Some campaigns favour underdogs who, in pursuit of right-wing goals like property speculation, generated their own demise. Some campaigns favour people who look like underdogs, often overdogs who were yesterday’s underdogs. Egalitarians should not favour capitalists – risk takers, less still those who have taken risks and lost. Village never took to Sean Quinn or to the billionaire scions of the Quinn family, wherever their woes took them. Village has no sympathy left for the mostly ungrateful builders bailed out by the State through NAMA. The insolvent NAMA brigade should have been reduced to below the average wage, and public housing; a roof over their heads. Instead they are back now with different but gargantuan portfolios bagged at knockdown prices. Certainly there is a right to housing, and homelessness is an abomination, but not a right to your particular mansion, if you gamble with it. Speculators have no moral claim to reinstatement of their lost capital. There should be no socialism of failed capitalism. In a capitalist society capitalists must pay their debts. This is all the more desirable when the State owns 75% of Permanent TSB, 71% of AIB and 14% of Bank of Ireland. All things being equal, Village’s money is on the State not the failed gamblers. It is a pity that these banks have not pursued more foreclosures on the wealthy and on second homes. It would have kept mortgage-interest rates lower. Property is a way the establishment preserves its historic privileges – a dangerous, and tedious, affliction that gets in the way of equality. After all, households in the bottom 25 per cent of income distribution spend half of their income on housing costs. Unfortunately, however, Ireland is obsessed – perhaps because it is a victim of history. The influence of famine evictions, the iniquities of having been a colony and the fact we are not ‘post-industrial’ infuse much current thinking. The common good rarely figures in the discourse. Sadly it means that property rights resonate more with most Irish people than any other rights. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil and their supporters unite in nothing so much as their aspiration to buy a second buy-to-let. That is why we are so hostile to renting and to planning restrictions. It is why the government has just announced deferral of increases in property tax, even though gains in property values are less honourably accrued than those through labour. Even many on the Irish left see principal private residences as “family homes” not as wealth that should be taxed. Even cosmopolitan socialist Richard Boyd Barrett believes, “there is no way of tweaking the property tax that will make it fair because by its nature, it is regressive and will hit low and middle-income families”. It’s as if only income signals wealth. Meanwhile, RTÉ can’t run a feature on anything involving property from the CPOing of lands along commuter routes into Dublin to the taking of houses for the Metro to occasionally thwarted one-off-housing builders – without making an issue of the devastating hard luck of the property owner, rather than the public interest. Far worse are the angry men of the property-rights groups. Jerry Beades of the New Land League, “a buddy system” for those in legal battles with the banks, backed the O’Donnell family when they lost their 10,220sq ft Dalkey home after the family amassed debts of 171 million to Bank of Ireland. Beades himself accrued debts of almost 116m during his career as a developer. Ben Gilroy, a tin-pot anti-eviction activist, who has been involved in at least 16 High Court actions against banks, usually citing the natural law, is currently in Mountjoy for ongoing contempt of courts. Village is out of sympathy – there are too many genuinely deserving causes. Unlike say the right to life, or the right to be treated equally, property is not really a right but an entitlement, perhaps sometimes necessary for economic predictability, but in all cases subject to the common good. Time to defetishise it and those who vaunt it, especially the angriest.
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SIR ANTHONY BLUNT, BRITAIN AND MI5’S ARCH TRAITOR, WORMED HIS WAY BACK INTO THE GOOD BOOKS OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE BY PROVIDING THEM WITH DETAILS OF A PAEDOPHILE NETWORK IN IRELAND OF WHICH HE WAS A MEMBER AND WHICH THEY LATER EXPLOITED FOR BLACKMAIL AND DESTABILISATION PURPOSES. THERESA MAY YET CLINGS TO POWER WITH THE AID OF THE DEMOCRATIC UNIONIST PARTY (DUP), AT LEAST ONE OF WHOSE MOST SENIOR MEMBERS FREQUENTED THE SAME SEEDY PAEDOPHILE UNDERWORLD AS BLUNT IN THE MID AND LATE 1970s. IF THE FULL TRUTH ABOUT THE VENAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN CARE IN NORTHERN IRELAND IN THE 1970s WAS TO EMERGE, IT WOULD THROW THE TORY-DUP CONFIDENCE AND SUPPLY ARRANGEMENT INTO TURMOIL. THERESA MAY’S NAIVETY AND LACK OF CURIOSITY, FIRST AS HOME SECRETARY AND NOW AS PRIME MINISTER, HAS ENABLED AN ON-GOING COVER-UP OF THIS FAR-REACHING SCANDAL. INTRODUCTION Last month Village described how Eric Witchell, the paedophile who ran Williamson House for orphans and neglected children in Belfast, was a key figure in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. There is as yet no indication that he will be questioned by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse despite the fact he is one of the most important living witnesses to the existence of a vice ring which supplied children to VIPs abusers. They included Enoch Powell MP and a mysterious ‘refined’ Englishman who was a visitor to Northern Ireland (NI). The victim of the ‘refined’ Englishman is certain he was Sir Anthony Blunt, the infamous MI5 traitor, paedophile and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures. Blunt was also a regular visitor to Ireland and active, albeit at a low level, in NI politics. He had an extensive circle of friends in Ireland, many of whom were also paedophiles. In Part 1 of this article we will look at aspects of Blunt’s background and some of his more sinister connections to Ireland before turning to the intriguing allegation that he was the ‘refined’ Englishman. In Part 2 we will describe the existence of a group of children who were defiled and broken by Witchell at Williamson House with the result they became sexually compliant playthings before they were sent to Kincora Boys Home where they became fodder in an MI5 blackmail operation. According to one of the victims, the operation revolved around a series of hotels including the Park Avenue and the Europa in Belfast, and the Queen’s Court in Bangor. Independent contemporaneous notes from a British Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) officer confirm the existence of a “prostitution ring supplying boys to hotels in Belfast and Bangor” at the time. The targets of the operation included working-class Loyalists from the UDA, UVF and DUP. We will refer to one of the DUP targets as “The Wife Beater”. He was a man with connections to paramilitaries and was despised by his party leader, Ian Paisley. In Part 3 we will tell the story of ‘Charles’, another of Witchell’s Williamson House victims. In 2017 the Hart Inquiry rejected the notion that a paedophile network had operated in Northern Ireland in the 1970s with official connivance. The Hart Report is littered with factual inaccuracies and has been shredded by commentators. Charles’ account – told here for the first time – undermines it even further. A WORLD OF PAIN Many of the boys who were sent to the hotels to satisfy the venal appetites of the strangers who preyed upon them at them and sometimes in their homes; and those who were abused inside the walls of Williamson House and/or Kincora by familiar staff members, were consigned to a life of depression, ill health, drug and alcohol abuse, isolation and – in a number of cases – suicide. Very few of the victims went on to form stable and lasting relationships or have families. It is now too late for one of them, Clint Massey, who lived a lonely and isolated existence. Towards the end of his life, he grew into a courageous Kincora campaigner. Sadly, he succumbed to cancer earlier this year without ever achieving justice. It was Massey who recalled a lot of “suits” arriving at Kincora, often in the evening. “In those days, there were loads of people over from London. I have always assumed they were senior figures from Whitehall. I certainly heard English accents”, he once revealed. None of the puppet masters in MI5, MI6, the Home Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Foreign Office or Whitehall, who were responsible for this world of pain, have ever been made to answer for their egregious crimes. THERESA MAY, A PM WHO CAN SEE NO EVIL Theresa May must shoulder the responsibility for the ongoing cover-up of this far-reaching scandal. When she was Home Secretary, she assigned the Kincora Boys Home probe to the Hart Inquiry which was not given the power to compel witnesses. Instead, she should have let the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse in London, which had such a power, deal with it. MI5 then proceeded to withhold the full truth about its penetration of the DUP from Hart and much more besides. A number of declassified files which were furnished to Hart reveal that the NIO (i.e. MI5) had informers inside the DUP. However, they raise more questions than answers. In particular, how many of MI5’s DUP informers were blackmail victims, i.e. men who were lured to the Park Avenue and the other hotels by Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, or his friend and fellow MI5 agent, John McKeague, to defile boys? See Village December 2017 and February 2018 for details about John McKeague’s links to MI5. THE DUP DOG THAT WAGS MAY’S TAIL Some DUP informers who were recruited while they were in their twenties are now in their sixties and early seventies and may still be active in the DUP. It would be a scandal if a single informer – recruited as a result of underage sexual blackmail – remains in the party that is now the tail that wags the British
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What is needed is foundation of a new party of the conventional Left: modern, common-good-embracing, quality-of-life-monitoring, taxing, planning, developing, accounting, envisioning
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Politics is a continuum from equality to freedom. If freedom is the vertical axis of a graph and equality the horizontal axis, every society – and every citizen – decides where the balance should be. A libertarian society tending towards survival of the fittest will not foster equality; an egalitarian society may need to be enforced by a strong state to the detriment of individual licence, and so on. Philosophers from Tocqueville to Hayek to mainstream liberals accept there is a trade-off. Village tends to the egalitarian end of the scale: truly free equality, after education and reflection – precise processes for which have been touted by many modern philosophers – is a mature and more stable goal than equal freedom. Workaday politics can be charted and defined on the graph. However, the same political action can be justified by different points on the graph. Issues like divorce, gay marriage, and abortion can be deemed imperatives of either freedom or equality. In this respect the language used is not a definitive indicator of the politics. A campaign can claim to be about equality but in fact on analysis be defined by positions only of freedom. Any campaign fronted by Simon Harris or Leo Varadkar – agents above all of the propertied, of the status quo for the wealthy – is unlikely to be rooted in any real substantive equality. It is perfectly legitimate to campaign for gay marriage or abortion because you want yourself or others to exercise rights to freedom to get married or have an abortion. Telltale signs if you do so you may include that you are less likely to make common cause with campaigns for others suffering discrimination of all sorts. You may ignore issues like racial equality, Travellers rights; you may express no concern about economic, social and educational inequalities. It is legitimate but it is not Village’s political motivation of preference. For Village recent referendums reached the right solutions but were disappointingly rooted in the politics of freedom rather than that of equality. The egregious wrongs in Irish society are best resolved by solutions driven by equality. This society above all facilitates those who are economically adroit. It provides opportunity for people who are strong; worse still it provides opportunity for them to make mistakes (trashing the environment is the one posterity will most register). It provides very little vision as to how they should exercise their freedoms. – this is in part the problem of 100 channels but nothing on the television. But on a societal scale. It is now time to move on to new agendas that are really radical. These include: agendas of radical redistribution of wealth in society, of radical changes to the opportunities available to those who have suffered traditional discrimination, including (still) to women and to those of minority sexual orientations, to racial minorities including Travellers; of educational opportunities facilitated by positive discrimination so even (or especially) the poorest in society can be whoever they want to be; of redistribution of power so it is exercised at the lowest, most local, most democratic levels; of attenuation of property rights so they are exercised in the common good. The goods in society should be distributed by that society so those least well off are most compensated. Everyone in society is morally equal, they should be treated by society in a way so they can participate in the fruits of the earth equally. It is a myth that the fruits of the earth are distributed in accordance with merit – they have been accumulated largely by force and luck. The idea that in 2018 a child’s future is determined by the time it reaches two years old is an abomination. Ireland is growing up politically. Ireland has waved good-bye to the invidious influence of an unrealistic Church and voted the right way on divorce, gay rights and abortion. However, these are really liberal causes focused on issues of identity. It is time we addressed the issues of endemic inequality enshrined down the generations. As regards the Constitution we do need to abolish Article 41 which recognises the woman’s life within the home, so devaluing women who choose not to work within the home; and to eliminate the part of the preamble which invokes the Constitution “in the name of the Holy Spirit”. Indeed the Constitution’s premises relate to another era and the whole document should be reconceived. More generally, materialism, capitalism and competition have had their day, it is time to welcome in a new agenda – of equality of outcome/condition: equality of wealth and power, of quality of life, of environment, of education, of fulfilment and happiness, of respect and opportunity. This should be achieved through politics and laws. The constitution should be amended to reflect it too. The most radical change would be to enshrine equality of outcome/condition as a constitutional imperative across the range.
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Paschal Donohoe is a decent man: modest, cultured, the cleverest man in the room, according to a senior Fianna Fáil figure who spoke to Fiach Kelly in the Irish Times recently: the man other politicians envy, and a safe pair of hands. At 43, he has graduated with first-class honours from Trinity college, lived abroad, pursued a career in the private sector and risen without obstacle from local politics in Dublin city council to the heights of government, and the Ministry of Finance. Unlike his even younger boss Leo Varadkar he doesn’t have the sheen of a cultivated image. he has never attracted any suspicion of impropriety, never been excoriated, even in the unpleasant role of frugal Minister for Public expenditure (which he sure-footedly merged with the Finance brief when he took it over). When Village interviewed him he was open, generous with his time, eloquent. He reads progressive Irish fiction, has some quirky tastes, knows what is going on in his constituency about whose substandard welfare he remains committed. He even says he reads Village. Village’s agenda is equality, sustainability, accountability and it is wide and all-embracing enough that any political force, as Mr Donohoe certainly is, can be assessed against its imperatives. He is certainly in relative terms a model of accountability and openness. But what of equality and sustainability? Paschal Donohoe serves the politics of Fine Gael faithfully. He implies that Fianna Fáil is economically fickle, not always pro-european or outward looking and, increasingly implausibly now, that its attitude to ethics is demonstrably inferior to that of Fine Gael. He believes in Europe, the Open Society of Declan Costello, in an embracing attitude to outsiders. He believes in a balance between the markets and the state and, creditably from the perspective of this magazine, thinks the momentum has moved too far to the markets and needs to move back to the state, globally at least. He takes a robust attitude, as did his hero Declan Costello, to the obligations of the state. It will intervene to incentivise or nudge those who do the right thing, it will not perpetrate evil itself. He was passionate in defending the coherence of this attitude, in his interview. Mr Donohoe believes in the rights of property but will interfere at the edges, as with site-value and sugary drinks taxes. The state needs to plan systematically for development of its own lands. On national planning he was reluctant to stay how he would stop unsustainable development – such as the sprawl of Dublin into counties Meath, Wicklow, Kildare and beyond, as opposed to merely incentivise and encourage sustainable development – for example of cities and towns outside Leinster. He does not seem engaged by the environmental and climate-change agendas, though he knows its rhetoric. He rarely acknowledges, in policy, that Ireland is the laggard in Europe on climate, plastic waste and many other environmental performances. He does not seem zealous to revive the across-the-board indicators of social and environmental success, not just economics, that even the Fianna Fáil and Fianna Fáil-Green governments toyed with a decade ago. Failing them, it is likely we will continue to be a model of unsustainable, joyless growth, a paradigm of how to nearly get it right. As to equality, Mr Donohoe is exercised by the plight of those who cannot put themselves in a position to benefit from the equality of opportunity that those with strength crave. He knows from his Dublin central constituency that intergenerational inequality is difficult to mitigate. But his credo is equality of opportunity and he and his party are never going to be forces for radical redistribution, for equality of outcome. He is a decent man of the “strong centre”. He and his party have done some service bringing back elusive economic success to this country bankrupted by the now shiny principal opposition party. It has been argued that Fine Gael, with its visceral fetish for the rights of property, so well-enjoyed by its protagonists and indeed its voters, is ill-equipped to deal with the crises of housing and homelessness that do much to undermine the fabric of society in 2018. It is ideologically too wedded to the private sector to provide homes on the scale required on public lands. Mr Donohoe, in fairness, claims that he has far-reaching proposals to do just that. We’ll see. Ireland is lucky to have such an open, decent, youthful and thoughtful politician in the Department of Finance as the risen fiscal pendulum suggests we can once again explore a national Vision. But it is impossible to be radical from the centre, however strong, and – for Village, Mr Donohoe would do well to address the social and environmental agendas as stringently and competently as he continues to promote and foster the purely economic agenda.
