General

By Michael Smith. The only positive conclusion from the  immolation of Labour in Britain is that it was its leader and not its policies that forced the tragedy. In late November pollsters YouGov asked the British public questions about the popularity of Labour’s manifesto, published earlier in the month. The tax rises on the rich were very popular. The 50 per cent tax rate for earnings over £123,000 was supported by 64 per cent of voters, with just 20 per cent opposed and 16 per cent uncertain. The 45 per cent rate for earnings over £80,000 was popular: 60 per cent supported  it and  23 per cent opposed it. 56 per cent support nationalising railways and just 22 per cent opposed it. Water companies’ nationalisation attracted 50 per cent support and just 25 per cent opposition. Nationalising Openreach, and therefore broadband, attracted 32 per cent supporting and 31 per cent opposition -but  free broadband for all attracted 62 per cent support  and 22 per cent opposition. Jeremy Corbyn became a cult without stopping off to become understood, or clear. For an accomplished politician he is an exceptionally bad communicator.  When he speaks, his sincere passions seem contrived, he emphasises the wrong part of key sentences and, worse, he does not even attempt to answer inconvenient questions, like what he thinks about Brexit, or what his stance on Israel and Anti-Semitism is.  He could have answered these questions plausibly but he seemed more interested in bristling. Corbyn’s second-rate rhetoric failed to raise the great British public to the appropriate level of vitriol at the descent of politics into lies, base populism and wishful thinking. To convey that this was different from the Tories of yore. He did not appear to understand that Johnson and his gang are qualitatively worse even than Margaret Thatcher and hers, that Johnson  – puppeteered by the malign Dominic Cummings – like Trump, does not appear even to be a democrat. He failed to ram home a message of the scandal of the UK’s descent into a-morality and a-factuality.  He did not appear to understand the effects of manipulative and cynical populism. He did not appear to value evidence as the grounding for  ideology. He failed to rouse the UK into an obvious rage, against the charlatan Johnson. However, Corbyn’s unforgiveable failure was not of presentation but of substance.  He failed to point out how bad it is for  a once decent country to fall for a liar and bigot like Johnson.  He failed to point out how bad Brexit will be for the UK’s economy; and for its society and environment. And he didn’t seem up for a robust and analytical debate in which he would explain the benefits of egalitarianism versus capitalism. His argumentation was typically dogmatic not open. Brexit was not the cause of the Tory victory.  Brexit was the failure of the Labour party. And as to the election catastrophe, blame neither policy nor Brexit.  Blame Jeremy Corbyn.  It’s in the anecdotes and it’s in the statistics. At all material times he’s always been less popular than his Tory opponent. Never again must the Labour party put a leader with ratings of minus 50% into the fray. It’s inept to the point of being unethical. And that is really the only lesson from a dark December in Albion.

Village often gets frustrated by the weakness of the Left and of the Greens.  However, it aims in general terms to be supportive of them, particularly in their radical forms. This is because they come closest – though still not that close – to furthering the agenda of equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability that drives this magazine. Village, not having fought in the civil war, has always struggled to register the animating idea of our bigger parties.  The absence of ideology spawns cynicism as there is a risk that the big idea becomes doing favours for friends. Fianna Fáil in government has been a confusing mélange of left and right, so that Bertie Ahern, albeit outrageously, claimed he was a socialist.  Fianna Fáil did just enough with the state pension, free bus travel, and social and local partnerships to be able to claim that it didn’t only serve the well-off and the developers who really excited it and forged its policies. But it provided parochial and venal governance. During the mismanaged boom it seemed Fine Gael might offer salvation.  It appeared less corruptible albeit there remains a mystery about fundraising under Michael Lowry who was profoundly corrupt and its performance in local planning has always been developer-serving and often corrupt. Even John Bruton never answered for dodgy behaviour over rezonings as party leader. Beyond this Fine Gael always well represented the wealthy farmers who uphold the IFA. It was pro-EU, perhaps because of that. It was for law and order because of its fascist antecedents. It thought of itself as better and more competent than thou, though it probably never was (Sweepstakes/Children’s Hospital/PrinterGate/Dara Murphy). And it was for…the Treaty. It had not been clear what Fine Gael really stood for.  It had veered from fascist-friendly under the founding Presidency of Eoin O’Duffy  to socially conservative under Liam Cosgrave to left of centre under Garret FitzGerald to right under Bruton and Kenny.  Only really under Varadkar have its true colours been allowed to flourish, in a modern Ireland which affords it no excuses. Varadkar is a Thatcherite with regressive views on abortion and gay marriage who one day realised his attractive personality could ground an ambitious career and became Fine Gael Man for the 2010s with a shinier agenda embracing lifestyle modernism. With this leadership, unsurprisingly the party allows all sorts. Cosgrave, Scully, Flannery, Bailey: Fine Gael love the years has provided a home to the corrupt and the fraudulent, to the racist and the exploitative. His MEPs unblinkingly vote against life-saving search and rescue measures for migrants in the Mediterranean on obscure grounds.  His candidate in the imminent Wexford by-election considers there is no homelessness problem in her home town and that there should be no carbon tax (or Road Safety Authority) and is “under no illusion that Isis is a big part of the migrant population”, that some asylum-seekers need “deprogramming” and that immigration risks a “return to the type of conflict seen during the troubles in the North”.   But it is by his policies that Varadkar’s Fine Gael should be judged. In Ireland in 2019 the top 1 per cent of the population gets more than 5 per cent of the national income. The bottom 40 per cent gets 22 per cent. The State’s “unusually high” incidence of low pay and weak labour protections generates inequality, with the working and lower-middle classes struggling most to make ends meet, according to Tasc. Fine Gael abandoned any vision of universal healthcare.  In September there were more than 10,000 people waiting on hospital trolleys, twice the number a decade before. Ireland has had 10,000 homeless people for each of the last eight months. 85,000 people are on social housing lists. Yet hotels and student housing are rising all over the country’s capital. Average rents are 45% of average earnings. The government lies about how many houses it was building. It won’t deal with the problem because Fine Gael is ideologically opposed to social housing as there is nothing in it for its buy-to-let-fetishising members. Its solutions are all developer-facilitating.  Its Minister for Housing is in thrall to the building industry and will not consider compulsory purchase measures. Fine Gael has no chance of implementing a National Planning Framework as it is ideologically unable to assert national planning norms such as avoidance of sprawl into Leinster and one-off housing, which interfere with the property rights of developers and landowners. Varadkar’s Ireland is the second worst climate offender in the EU. It is extraordinary that in every case where it cannot or won’t effectively intervene it is the wealthiest who benefit from Fine Gael’s inertia. Fine Gael stands above all for property rights; it stands for sniffy intolerance of those economically and socially inferior to the party’s – now often youthful and cosmopolitan – hegemons: for those who get up early; it stands for laissez faire and deference to developers and multinationals; and for indulgence of those who are intolerant of migrants. The big parties seem to have seen off demagoguery, the economy is thriving, the demographics are favourable, and the church is on its knees: the government is its own agent, and now we can finally see what Fine Gael stands for. But it has no vision, no empathy and no radicalism. It is the Nasty Party. Time for real change.    

                          By Estelle Birdy. About 8,700 people in Ireland await a decision on asylum claims. 6,000 live in Direct Provision. Of these, 778 have received refugee status or ‘leave to remain’ but are unable to find alternative accommodation. Another 1,531 people live in 36 inferior,  emergency-accommodation centres opened in the past year. Between 1,200 and 2,000 asylum-seekers who do not need State accommodation are living outside Direct Provision. But this is the human story behind the statistics. It is the story of three towns and how they are dealing with people seeking asylum. Carrickmacross There had been murmurings around the town  about groups of men, foreign nationals, gathering on the Main Street.  And there’d been much discussion surrounding the alleged sexual assault of a woman in the town the previous week. Nevertheless, the apparent out-of-nowhere eruption of far-right sentiment in Carrick, on October 3  this year, took the townspeople by surprise. On that day, an online petition appeared, with the word Lawless, recalling the 1964 B-Western, scrawled across a background photo of   Carrick’s Main Street. The petition asked, “Do you feel intimidated while walking around Carrickmacross?”. People began to sign and comment.  Many comments were measured  but later additions turned to outright racism. A quick search for the text of the petition online found  it  being shared,  from the moment it was uploaded, by known far-right social-media accounts. A Facebook group,  established  under the name ‘Lawless’,  quickly became a focus for anti-immigrant organising.  Locals drawn to the Facebook group, found it already animated by far-right activists and anti-immigrant sympathisers. Several local group members , say they thought the group was “just a community discussion group”. It would prove to be much more than that. Soon the administrators were receiving requests to join the group from all over the world – a large number from the UK, the US and from around Ireland. By the afternoon of October 4, ex-British soldier and far-right activist, Rowan Croft, was livestreaming video from the town, linking a supposed lack of feminine security to immigration. Subsequently, right-wing media outlet, Gript, published a piece suggesting that   criminal gangs stalked the streets of Carrick, referencing the alleged sexual assault, stating that no one had been arrested in the investigation. This was untrue. A suspect had been in custody within 24 hours of the alleged incident. In the Lawless Facebook group, one name kept cropping up – Seamus ‘The Banty’ Mc Enaney, a local businessman,  contracted by the government since late 2018 to provide emergency accommodation for asylum-seekers in the area. A plethora of complaints about McEnaney   emerged. Some  professing interest in the welfare of asylum-seeking people, some angry at the money allegedly being earned by McEnaney to accommodate asylum-seekers. Another businessman, with links to the Yellow Vest Ireland movement, had prior beef, of a financial nature, with McEnaney. This man, highly active in the group, along with his proxies, agitated against both McEnaney and immigrant people. Gemma O’Doherty, of Anti-Corruption Ireland and Justin Barrett, leader of the far-right National Party, commented online about Carrickmacross, styling it as a matter of female safety. In fact, the National Party and assorted linked groups already had a small number of supporters living in Carrickmacross. Mark Malone of the ‘Far-Right Observatory’ says that what happened in Carrick had all the hallmarks of a pre-planned far-right attack. The speed at which the petition spread, the fact that Rowan Croft was filming from Carrick within hours of its publication and the numbers of people (1,300 at one stage) joining the Lawless group, all suggested advance preparation. Indeed, far-right and anti-immigrant activists were flushed with success   after a campaign in Oughterard, which saw protests there halting the provision of accommodation to 200 asylum-seeking people.. They were just waiting   to light the fuse and they used an alleged sexual assault as the match. Locals  began to question the credentials of some  active members of the Facebook group, some operating under false names. Questioning this or any  disinformation  being spread, resulted in locals and others being summarily banished. A week beforehand, Fiona Ryan and Jonathan Mathis, a mixed-race family who had appeared in a Lidl ad and had suffered racially motivated online abuse – notably from Gemma O’Doherty,    had been on the ‘Late Late Show’.  Somore people  were aware of the threat posed by racist, anti-immigrant campaigners.  EU and other foreign nationals, happily form a substantial percentage of the 5,000 strong population of Carrick .  The town has a history of welcoming asylum-seeking people – groups of (now long-established) Syrian and Congolese families were resoundingly welcomed. . Additionally, several humanitarian groups, both lay and religious, had been quietly operating in County Monaghan, as they have been in towns around Ireland. Officials say   that the Department of Justice is under pressure to meet Ireland’s international obligations to accommodate a small number of asylum-seekers. The recent McMahon Report on Direct Provision and the burning and blockading of some mooted accommodation centres, has forced many asylum-seekers into long-term emergency accommodation. Much of it unsuitable, cramped, rural accommodation with few transport links. Asylum-seekers have had to share beds with strangers and  are often moved to other locations at short notice, when   commercial guests require rooms. Asylum-seeking children have been unable to attend school for extended periods. This is happening currently in Carrickmacross. Asylum-seekers, like homeless families, are often segregated from other guests and must enter by the back entrance. Locals worked online countering racist and anti-immigrant claims and, crucially, working with SF local public representatives to disseminate accurate information  in the community One older local man says, “I never thought I’d have to fight the far-right in Carrick but that’s exactly what I was doing”. The following Saturday, anti-immigrant activists attempted  a protest in the town, calling it a local event. 25-30 people, in Dublin and Northern Ireland-registered cars and minivans, turned up. No locals took part, although some watched from a distance. The fact that the