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    Putin puts in the boot. The West and its weakest link here, Germany, face a formidable foe and test. By Eddie Hobbs.

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      By Eddie Hobbs   What is Putin’s big Disruption Strategy? To find out I’ve been engaging with geopolitical experts. I don’t dwell here upon the effectiveness of the mounting responses to Putin’s aggression.  He faces a coalition of overlapping opponents: the EU, UK, NATO, USA – many countries and multinational corporations. The military strategy of the West may be to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian, then do a deal;  but that strategy presupposes that Ukraine is his main objective.  After research, I don’t believe that is so.     Putin has been planning this meticulously for a long time, well over a decade. It is multi-faceted and, he has weaponised economics and finance as part of his plan. His objective is a multi-polar world with Russia the epicentre of the Eurasian sphere.   He seeks the diminution or disintegration of the EU. His chief target is Germany, its weakest link. His most potent weapon is energy supply.   Crippling the EU, he fractures NATO and diminishes the transatlantic alliance, disabling the USA, its economy and potentially its currency. This is a global financial and economic war, the kinetic theatre of which is Ukraine. Disruption to supplies of Russian hydrocarbons and Ukraine harvests will exacerbate inflationary forces. Both recession and stagflation are real risks. Central banks, led by the Fed raising rates to head off inflation add to the uncertainties. This is a climate of asymmetric risks, there is no safe haven.   Putin is a Christian Conservative and authoritarian, but first and foremost he is a Russian nationalist.  He despises what he determines to be fascist, but he also hates the extremes of the former USSR.   He is not irrational or insane when you examine the tensions created by the backing of liberal democracy, the EU and NATO up to his front door as he sees it.  This is not to excuse the invasion of a democratic neighbour despite its record of corruption and the prevalence of the far right.   Putin’s hero is Peter the Great – he determines Ukraine to be part of greater Russia, and an artificial creation. Ironically his invasion, faced with a skilled and determined opposition, is creating the foundation identity story for the remarkable people of Ukraine.   The truth is Putin doesn’t care whether political opposition in Europe and the USA is hard left or hard right, so long as he can foment instability by financing it.   He already has assisted in establishing what is a hard-right Tory administration in the UK which broke away from the EU.   Russian bankers have financed Marine Le Pen, Russian monies flow into far-right movements like the AfD in Germany and elsewhere including ethnic Russian populations in the Baltics.   Russian banks have financed Trump’s hard-right economic nationalism and Russian digital assets were deployed to support Trump’s candidacy.   Brexit was Putin’s greatest victory in the EU and since then he’s focused on Le Pen in France. Brexit reduced the EU to one nuclear power and isolated the other at its outer orbit.   He now hopes on foot of popular support for Le Pen and for the Left, that the French National Assembly elections in June will lead to political paralysis in France, and for the EU.   Putin is placing his chips on the inability of NATO to hold at the centre, he considers Germany Europe’s biggest and strongest economy to be weak at the centre.   Germany’s disastrous policy of reliance on Russian gas, oil and coal led by East German, Angela Merkel, and blinkered by Putin, puts Germany at the epicentre of his plans.   He expects that pragmatic Germans, faced with a horrible winter of rationing of industrial opening hours, autobahn driving, cooking and heating, will weaken in their resolve to remain in the EU and do a deal with the Russian sphere.   He is also banking on Hungary voting no in NATO, just as he banks on weakened subsidies to former East Germany to grow political extremes.  This is where the pro-Dexit (German EU Exit) and AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) have their stronghold as does Die Linke with roots through to the Marxist-Leninist ruling party of former East Germany.  Both are Russophiles but who may publicly say otherwise.  Sinn Féin and Die Linke, together with a host of communist and socialist parties form The Left grouping at the European Parliament.   He further understands the vulnerability of Target 2, (the ECB trade settlement system structured like the USSR Comecon) at the heart of the Eurozone.   Germany leaving the Euro or faced with France, Italy or Spain leaving would mirror the USSR breakup.   It would leave huge unpaid debt of over €1trillion owed by Central Banks across Europe to the Bundesbank and would leave behind inflation-ravaged replacement currencies, fertile ground to stoke old rivalries thought long dead in Europe.   In military terms Putin can move Russian assets along the Suwalki Gap, separating Poland from the Baltics in a line between Northwest Belarus and Kaliningrad, the headquarters of his Baltic Fleet, without breaking treaties.   Military exercises have ramped up in the Kaliningrad Oblast where he over twenty thousand troops and intermediate nuclear missiles.  He may be calculating that Poland wouldn’t wait for an Article 5 consensus vote or be delayed by German prevarication.   Poland would be unlikely to stand idly by and watch a repeat of Crimea in the Baltics especially when its historic links to Ukraine and its bloody history with Russia is considered.  A failure of consensus over Article 5 would end NATO as a functioning alliance. Poland, in Putin’s calculations, could be left isolated and vulnerable: a scenario in preparation for which he may be blooding his army in Ukraine.   To the Northwest of Kaliningrad lies the strategic island of Gotland part of Sweden but from which the Baltics can be dominated.   Directly north sitting at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia, that separates Sweden from Finland, lies

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    Letter sent to An Bord Pleanála by Village's editor, Michael Smith, concerning criminality and other ethical failures by its Deputy Chairman

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    6 Ormond Quay Upper Dublin 7 D07H324   The Secretary An Bord Pleanála 64 Marlborough St Dublin 1 D01 V902 14 April 2022. By email only to bord@pleanala.ie, communications@pleanala.ie Re: the imperative of An Bord Pleanála pursuing a criminal complaint under Sections 147-149 and 156-157 of the Planning and  Development Act 2000 (the “Act”) against Mr Paul Hyde, and acknowledging that he is no longer       a member of its board Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing giving you information sufficient to ground a criminal complaint under Sections 147 and 148 of the Act which can be prosecuted by An Bord Pleanála (ABP) with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions. I believe for ABP to prosecute would be appropriate in this instance in circumstances where the subject of this complaint is the deputy chairperson of ABP who has brought it into disrepute. I am attaching copies of all material in my possession relevant to this complaint. Background Deputy chairperson Paul Hyde has served as a board member of ABPsince 1 May 2014. He has also served as chairperson of the SHD division since December 2017. He has engaged in behaviour that cuts across his obligations under the Planning Acts , the criminal law and the ethics acts. Failure to declare interests Below is attached a list of developments where Mr Hyde had a conflict of interest. Land registry records attached indicate Mr Hyde is the owner of the following properties: 30 Lindeville, Cork; 4 Castlefield,Baltimore, Cork; Apt 30 Pope’s Hill, Blackpool, Cork; Apt 24 Pope’s Hill, Blackpool, Cork; 16 Watergold, Douglas, Cork; Unit 2 Maryborough Green, Douglas, Cork; land at Rathduff, Grenagh, Cork (co-owner) [see attachment]. Court and other records indicate receivers were appointed to dispose of Apartment 30 Pope’s Hill; 16 Watergold and the land at . There are pending transactions on two of the folios. There are no pending transactions on the land at Rathduff  although it is currently advertised for sale. Mr Hyde also has a 25 percent shareholding in H20 Property Holdings Ltd a company incorporated in Ireland on 16 November 2001 (CRO 350179). It was previously named Fingerpost Builders Ltd.It formally changed its name on 17 May The other 75 percent shareholding is owned by Mr Hyde’s father, Stephen Hyde. According to land registry records, the company is the registered owner of Folio CK106589F, a two-acre, partially developed, plot of land at Pope’s Hill. There are no pending transactions on the folio. Mr Hyde declared he had no interests in his 2021 and 2022 declarations of interest to ABP (submitted in accordance with section 147 of the Act) [attached below] On 9 March 2022 Mr Hyde voted on an SHD application for a development in Blackpool, Part of the land of the applicant in that case is located less than 50 metres from the land owned by Mr Hyde’s company (H20 Property Holdings Ltd). Mr Hyde did not declare a conflict of interest at the board meeting as required under section 148 of the Act. The Law Section 147 of the 2000 Act states at (1): It shall be the duty of a person to whom this section applies to give to the relevant body a declaration in the prescribed form, signed by him or her and containing particulars of every interest of his or hers which is an interest to which this section applies and for so long as he or she continues to be a person to whom this section applies it shall be his or her duty where there is a change regarding an interest particulars of which are contained in the declaration or where he or she acquires any other interest to which this section applies, to give to the relevant body a fresh declaration. (2) A declaration under this section shall be given at least once a year. (3) (a) This section applies to the following persons: a member of the Board… Section 147(3)(b) requires a board member to declare “any estate or  interest which a person to whom this section applies has in any land, but excluding any interest in land consisting of any private home within the meaning of paragraph 1(4) of the Second Schedule to the Ethics in Public Office Act, 1995” and “any business of dealing in or developing land in which such a person is engaged or employed and any such business carried on by acompany or other body of which he or she, or any nominee of his or hers, is a member”. Failure to comply with the foregoing is anoffence under section 147(11) of the Act. Section 148(1) provides that “Where a member of the Board has a pecuniary or other beneficial interest in, or which is material to, any appeal, contribution, question, determination or dispute which falls to be decided or determined by the Board under any enactment, he or she shall comply with the following requirements: (a) he or she shall disclose to the Board the nature of his or her interest; (b) he or she shall take no part in the discussion or consideration of the matter; (c) he or she shall not vote or otherwise act as a member of the Board in relation to the matter; (d) he or she shall neither influence nor seek to influence a decision of the Board as regards the matter”.  Failure to comply with the foregoing is an offence under section 148 (10) of the Act. Section 149(1) provides that “proceedings for an offence under section 147 or 148 shall not be instituted except by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions”. Composition or arrangement with creditors Mr Hyde has clearly experienced compromising difficulties with several property investments since his appointment to ABP. According to The Ditch, in April 2015 Promontoria Aran took over the Ulster Bank mortgage on land in Rathduff, County Cork, owned by Mr Hyde and three co-investors. In March 2017 the distressed loan buyer issued High Court proceedings against Hyde and his co-investors but the

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    Rory O’Sullivan reviews Alberto Giacometti at the National Gallery: a genuinely philosophical artist.

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      a few hundred pages of hard books  – or else a few minutes with the sculptures of Giacometti Theorists try to understand the world as if unfolding in a giant process with certain rules, whereas for artists the point is to observe it as a spectacle of which any thoughts and representations are just shadows, like childhood memories. But digging in their ditches always they eventually find each other. Plato is beautiful and Shakespeare is wise. Eventually the theorist sits back and laughs and even in Kant there are pages where the argument is carried by nothing but sheer ecstasy, in their repetitions and motifs at last artists discover obscure laws of which the elaboration is their gift. like Jack Yeats, instead of shapes he saw the world as lines Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was a genuinely philosophical artist in this sense. Apart from the earliest  pieces those collected here have an obvious unity of purpose: he wanted to describe the human condition as the ground. His sculptures, rather than the free-standing and well-bodied Michelangelo’s David, are mostly trapped as if sinking, but also (if you look from the side rather than the front) as if in judgement, enthroned with gravity on the stream of clay. He was so much a sculptor that even his paintings and drawings look like sculptures. But like Jack Yeats, instead of shapes he saw the world as lines: from that torrential criss-crossing figures emerge, more substance than form, as if soon to vanish. The exhibition is divided according to the models Giacometti used: his wife, his brother, his friends, and a man named Isaku Yanaihara. The photos of each near their sculptures are interesting and revealing. If Giacometti chose the same people over and over it was not because he wanted to sculpt them: it was because, just like Giotto and Charles Swann, for him there were a few primordial faces that represented everything and which each time he sought to disclose. The word for such a thing, in which is contained all of Giacometti’s debt to ancient cultures, is God: neither God-the-Father, nor the stupid God-of-Fire and God-of-Sleep entities of the modern imagination of polytheism, but Gods like Roberto Calasso’s description of the Vedic Rishis: “those who know something and keep silent, those who see what is looming”. The sculptures of Giacometti never act, but he was careful to give them aura: they are severe and full of light but give nothing away. The face is at the heart of this with its serene and perfectly divine expressionlessness. The name – ‘Half Length of a Man’, ‘Bust of a Woman with Folded Arms’ – like the face, is empty, and gives the observer not a single clue. Two shortages in this exhibition are walking sculptures and small sculptures. Giacometti once said “I can never make a woman in any other way than motionless, and a man always striding; when I model a woman, then motionless; a man, always walking”. The fact that no sculptures of men walk here is a shame, but it does make clear that Giacometti rather meant that in his work every woman is imposing and each man resigned. The obvious first- and second-sex connotations of this are certainly there. For Giacometti, women are imposing because of their intensity as desire-objects: this gives them a power that manifests in a few exceptional works in the exhibition. First, near the beginning, a small bust of his wife, painted blue and red – the childishness of feeling in the colours is extraordinary. Second, the ‘Bust of a Woman with Folded Arms’ – its model a woman named Francine Torrent – smiling. In her unique, closed smile there is jouissance, the bird flying in the air: an invitation and a threat. It is striking that Giacometti, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir, regularly at Les Deux Magots, repeated from a male point of view the precise terms of the difference between men and women that their society made seem natural and she eviscerated – whether to condemn or exalt it, I am not sure. As for small sculptures, more of them would have helped with understanding what Giacometti does with size: the large he always breaks down into fragments, the small he closes into unity, each disappearing and arising together and against each other from the generative cascading of the ground. The person who has come closest to Giacometti in this regard in theory was Gilles Deleuze, whose golden period as a philosopher began just two years before Giacometti died, in 1964, with Proust and Signs. That he never refers to Giacometti is completely beside the point: it was typical of Deleuze to speak about everything except what was profoundly nearest to him. Deleuze said things like “Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself” and “The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a closeup, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom”. To understand these lines it takes a few hundred pages of hard books like Difference and Repetition or A Thousand Plateaus – or else a few minutes with the sculptures of Giacometti. Giacometti: From Life is running at the National Gallery of Ireland 9 April – 4 September 2022. Tickets €5-17 with discounted rates on Tuesday mornings and Thursday evenings. Image: Alberto Giacometti Buste d’homme (Lotar II), c. 1964-1965 © Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris, 2022    

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    Tarry Flynn reviewed by Rory O’Sullivan: worthy, entertaining and physical:  every five minutes make you forget the previous five

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        In poetry the nearest figure to Patrick Kavanagh is Charles Baudelaire. Both were often destitute. Both found a verse that was above all music, not aspiring to music, like Walter Pater said of every art-form, but music itself made of words and because of it more profound.   For both men the heart of the effort was to make everything a spoken song, and a suspicion that it is one already; both made as much room for beauty as its privation.  But if Baudelaire’s main concern was to capture the putrid falseness of life in the modern city as an image of life everywhere Kavanagh’s was to dream of the true life gushing forth, the repose of memory and desire in happiness, too often misinterpreted as rural pantheism.   But both Kavanagh and Baudelaire succeed more often, if less thoroughly and famously, in their prose.   Baudelaire’s exalted dismissals of forgotten French painters are matched by Kavanagh’s invectives against Irish writers like WR Rodgers and FR Higgins (“Writing about FR Higgins is a problem – the problem of a labyrinth that leads nowhere”). With Baudelaire’s breath-taking asides on the French Revolution there are Kavanagh’s on the Irish question: “All of us who are sincere know that if we are unhappy, trying to forget our futility in pubs, it is due to no exterior cause, but to what is now popularly called the human condition. Society everywhere today and its beliefs are pastiche: there is no overall purpose, no large umbrella of serenity”.  And: “The questions we never ask ourselves in Ireland are: Do we believe in anything? Do we care for anything?”. Kavanagh’s two prose-books are ‘The Green Fool’, an autobiography, a masterpiece; and ‘Tarry Flynn’, a novel nearly as good as his long poem, The Great Hunger, because it is the same thing but set in Cavan instead of Monaghan. The theme of all three is a tension Kavanagh’s two prose-books are ‘The Green Fool’, an autobiography, a masterpiece; and ‘Tarry Flynn’, a novel nearly as good as his long poem, The Great Hunger, because it is the same thing but set in Cavan instead of Monaghan. The theme of all three is a tension: Kavanagh or Flynn or Maguire is caught between the beautiful world of his heart where there are no words, and society, where there is work to be done and questions in need of answers.   Writers often aim to fill gaps in themselves: every school student has heard the maxim, ‘Write what you know’,  but a more honest one may be ‘Write what you need’.   Kavanagh needed this argument with himself: he was vicious and took no shortcuts, which was what gave his words energy, how he could say O the thrilling daisies in the sun-baked hoof-tracks. O the wonder of dry clay. O the mystery of Eternity stretching back is the same as its mystery stretching forward.   He hated theatre. Its root problem for him was the audience: like a congregation in the abstract it seems like a good thing, but without the individual’s sense of real life it falls for simplicities, pietisms, cheapness, and what he called “newspaper morality”. There is a certain foolishness as well as bravery in choosing to adapt for stage a novel whose almost entire appeal is its narrative sentences – with a result its author would certainly have despised.   But this is the twenty-first century: Kavanagh is dead, and the production of ‘Tarry Flynn’ by Livin’ Dred Theatre Company, touring the country, briefly in the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire, is lively, with huge range, impressively lurching from each thing – every five minutes make you forget the previous five – to the next, so that what comes out mostly is a theatrical sense of joy: a sense of play. this adaptation gets two important things right: it lets the words from the book do the talking (though with the ground artlessly salted here and there with lines from the poems), and it adds a lot of jumping and somersaulting to give the theatre-element. Originally by Conall Morrison and performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1997, this adaptation gets two important things right: it lets the words from the book do the talking (though with the ground artlessly salted here and there with lines from the poems), and it adds a lot of jumping and somersaulting to give the theatre-element. The worst bits are when it leans on tropes of Late Late Show Irishness: a Mammy, a spineless and severe priest, ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ – mercifully not as heavily or often as the kitschy Irish music at the performance’s start would mislead you to believe.   Mostly the show is entertaining singing, dancing and shouting interspersed with a few scenes and monologues by Tarry. In this production nine actors play fifty roles, which gives it a frenetic feeling and a sense of fun.   The weirdest part is when actors playing a bull and heifer act out having human-style sex to music in a cow-costume and bull-inflected gimp suit; the most touching are any of those when Tarry stands alone onstage simply talking about what is in his head.   The shame about this script and production is that it treats all its best parts the same way: raise the audience to a level of exalted feeling, bring them there with Tarry, and then pull the rug out immediately with his Mammy calling him to go to mass or pop a blister on her foot.   This makes the relation between the romance and the real, the inner and outer, tense but stable, easy to delineate and follow. On the other hand ‘Tarry Flynn’ the novel is about destabilising this, causing the real and romantic to spill into each other and contaminate both.   Which is why, at the end, when Tarry’s uncle sweeps him off to big life in the towns, his mother and he heartbroken, ‘Philadelphia Here I Come’–style, as

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    Frank Mulcahy, the media and Micheál Martin's lies

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    The Media’s treatment of the lies: an epic scandal ignored. It was March 1998. The RTE journalist Geraldine Harney informed me that I was to be dismissed by the ISME directors Peter Faulkner and Eoghan Hynes. She was doing the decent thing. Nevertheless, it was a preposterous suggestion and I told her so. However, in June her prediction materialised. Both Hynes and Faulkner demanded my resignation, with threats. The demand being unlawful, I refused to comply.   (On 11 August 1998 Mr Hynes privately, by fax, instructed the incoming ISME chair Seamus Butler, a Longford businessman, to get on side with my removal.)   In September the Irish Times  journalist Barry O’ Keeffe printed a story that I had cheated on my expenses. I was not afforded the opportunity to refute the allegation. He apologised stating that he had been placed under inordinate pressure. There followed  a stream of front-page stories in the Sunday Business Post stating in turn that I had stolen a suit, insurance and pension payments, a 1996 bonus and other frauds. In September too Aileen Hickey in Business Plus Magazine ran a cover story, blazoned ‘Gunning for Mulcahy’. As with Miss Harney it predicted the future. The article referenced pending accusations so sensitive that they couldn’t be revealed at that stage. I had no idea of what I was being accused of, or was expected to disprove.   (In September Seamus Butler offered me £100,000 to resign with threats that I would “never work in this country again” if I did not oblige.)   In October 1998 Irish Irish Independent journalist Gerry Flynn published several intimidatory faxes that I had received from Eoghan Hynes. Flynn had a reputation for being forthright. Initially, the Independent committed to standing by their journalist. They advised,  “we will be fighting your case”. However, in the end management paid Mr Hynes £20,000 simply for publishing his abusive faxes. A form of apology was printed. I was damaged.   (Nevertheless, in October and November the ISME Finance Committee publicly withdrew the allegations. The ISME members dictated that  I was to be fully reinstated by the AGM in April 1999. When Hynes objected, several council members recorded him explaining his corrupt “game plan”. The council member Pat Coen had possession of the tape. His brother was a respected ranking Garda who had been kept in the loop. The tape was my reassurance. I was advised not to react to the daily provocations; to get to the AGM in April.)   On Saturday 26 January 1999 I was walking on Killiney beach at 6.05 (PM) with the civil servant Diarmaid Breathnach when my phone went wild. It transpired that Seamus Butler, had announced on RTE’s early evening news that I had been sacked because I had fiddled my expenses. The story was utter nonsense. Butler had been interviewed by his neighbour the Longford-based RTE journalist Kieran Mullooly. I had not been afforded the opportunity to refute the charge.  The following day I rang the RTE newsroom. George Lee answered. I registered my complaint – orally – at what had occurred. That evening Pat Coen collapsed and died. The tape was secured by his brother, Garda Sergeant Coen, with whom I later spoke. A year on RTE advised that I should have put my concerns in writing. (In February the Revenue Commissioners attended ISME at Butler’s request.  Yet within an hour Revenue walked out believing that they were being used to damage me. On being informed, I arranged to meet the same officials. I provided them with my expenses file and the procedures laid down by Eoghan Hynes which I had followed. They replied, “we were never shown that file”.)   The date for my reinstatement was fast approaching. However, at noon on 5 March 1999 Seamus Butler rang the then Irish Independent journalist David Murphy. Butler apologised for “lying” to him the previous day when he had denied removing the audit signatory Don Curry as an ISME director. He was, he said, making good by offering Murphy a scoop. He disclosed that he had called in the Garda in respect of his latest complaint, namely that I had defrauded the EU Commission. I had no prior knowledge of that allegation whatsoever. Aileen Hickey’s prediction had come to pass.   (In April two gardaí visited my home. I provided them with evidence of the faxed threats and the £100,000 inducement. I directed them to Sgt Coen and the tape recording, to the Revenue Commissioner’s conclusion, to the ISME auditors and the audit signatories who affirmed the vexatious nature of the complaint. We expected that the fraud squad would charge Butler with, at the least, wasting police time.)   On 2 May 1999, as the Garda commenced their investigation, I received a call from the editor of the Irish Times business page Cliff Taylor. He disclosed that he had been invited to the ISME board room the previous Thursday, with the offer of yet another “scoop”, namely that I was to be sacked on 6 May. Consequently, my lawyers threatened an “injunction”.  Butler postponed the board meeting of that day.   (Nevertheless, on 6 May ISME’s solicitors recorded Ercus Stewart SC stating “the board has been forced to dismiss Frank and that has been done. He should have sought an injunction but he didn’t…The only question now is how much he will be awarded by a court”. Clearly ISME had lied to my then lawyers, Binchys, and their lawyer Ercus Stewart SC.)   In November 2005 the daily press reported in passing that the EU courts had penalised Rehab  20 million euros because of its maladministration of European grants.The Department of Enterprise spun the story that that penalty was somehow a win for Ireland. Despite my pleas that something was badly wrong, nobody was inclined to look under the hood. Rehab analogy to ISME What follows is the statement by the National Learning Network, a subsidiary of Rehab in relation to grants under the Human Resources Development

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