You don’t understand incipient AI, and nor do I, but whatever it is it’s fast
Opinion
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Media and state agencies would be well advised to start building their followings outside the traditional social media silos before the storm clouds gather
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By Conor Lenihan On Friday night – in the aftermath of Thursday’s big riots, O’Connell Street was anything but calm, whatever spin the media were putting on it. A young female Garda told me “tonight it’s zero tolerance”. Earlier she had shown exactly what she meant as she clubbed a particularly troublesome lad to the ground. The suspect was quickly handcuffed on the ground and forcibly pushed to a waiting Garda van. Another man, giving cheek to the Guards, was swiftly surrounded and his pockets emptied for inspection. Drugs were found and he too was whisked away to another waiting van. There were anything from 40 to 80 gardaí in the vicinity of the GPO. They swarmed on groups of, predominantly young men, who were forming into sizeable gangs. If people gave lip or refused to move on they were brought to the van and their evening was over. On Friday the street was in the hands of a mixture of plain-clothes operatives, uniformed gardaí and imposing-looking members of the Public Order Unit following trouble-seeking youths down the streets off O’Connell Street. Media photographers and TV camera people lingered on in the hope of capturing another incident but after 9pm things quietened down. One garda confessed to me that they hadn’t gone in hard enough or early enough the night before. It seems to me that the riot in O’Connell Street has hit a raw nerve with the Garda – it’s as if people don’t believe anymore that they’re either willing or able to do the job they are meant to do – maintain public order. An example of the poor resourcing is that the Garda only got water cannons from the Police Service of Northern Ireland after the riot had already happened. Worse still they had these years ago but someone in authority said it would not be appropriate to use them – wrong signal and all that. The Garda need what other police forces have to deal with urban riots – tear gas, water cannons and special units that are permanently patrolling like the Public Order Unit. If these are used in trouble spots they are a significant deterrent. The anarchy, riots and burning of vehicles on O’Connell Street on Thursday are the inevitable result of a profound neglect of the North inner city over many, many years and ignoring the small far-right factions that exploit young urban men. Symptomatic of this neglect is the existence of a Garda office in a prominent location on the street – but it is rarely occupied. It was put in place years ago in response to crime attacks. Day or night, it is largely empty, with presumably an expensive lease being paid for its fig leaf presence. There is one Garda stationed there from daytime hours to 11pm at night. Public order and trained Garda members of the riots squad need to be based here. It is also the office of the Irish Tourist Assistance Service. The O’Connell Street office was an empty gesture by the authorities to suggest a permanent, substantial Garda presence. It has no deterrent value at this stage unless strengthened in numbers. The attack led to the US State Department warning American citizens not to visit Dublin. This week’s rioting follows in the wake of a daytime attack on an American tourist in July on nearby Talbot Street – a stone’s throw from Store Street Garda Station. The attack led to the US State Department warning American citizens not to visit Dublin. After Thursday it is easy to see why. The streets surrounding the capital’s busiest station are one of the most dangerous places to be at night-time. Far-right activists have proved very adept at harnessing communities against direct provision centres for asylum seekers and perpetrating arson attacks alongside hooligans of one sort or the other. The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee TD, took a high-profile walk around the area in the wake of that attack, but there has been no appreciable improvement in policing. The reality is the North inner city has become both a magnet and a dumping ground for a diverse set of social problems; including drug addiction, homelessness, street begging and people with mental illness with nowhere to go. Chronic underfunding and lack of appropriate treatment resources for decades have left vulnerable people on the streets as a direct consequence of the failures of government policy. The dumping of these problems on the country’s main street has brought its own day-to-day havoc as well as the horrific night-time rioting. Garda morale is at an all-time low. Resignations from the force are running at an all-time high and a lot of momentum was lost with the closure of Templemore during Covid; and indeed with the dubious suspension of the ‘head of human resources and people development’, John Barrett. The morning after the riots, the rank-and-file Garda Representative Association’s Brendan O’Connor was rather reserved, refusing to repeat his membership’s statement of lack of confidence in the Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris. In the circumstances he chose discretion. Nothing further needed to be added. Karl Ryan, who operates a restaurant on O’Connell Street, describes the country’s main thoroughfare as a “forgotten place”, relative to Grafton Street and the streets around it on the more salubrious Southside of the Liffey. The myriad of laneways around and adjacent to O’Connell Street are havens for drug addicts shooting up, illicit drinking and people defecating in pavements littered with empty needles. The urban decay is accentuated by the presence of derelict sites hidden from, but close to the main thoroughfares, a problem exacerbated by poor planning. Back in 2018, Shane Coleman’s morning programme on Newstalk accompanied me around these sites in an effort to highlight the sheer longstanding neglect. That build-up of neglect has been largely ignored. The physical shabbiness is at direct odds with the state of comparable streets in the South inner city. The prevalence of new hotels and the absence of new apartment blocks and social and affordable housing are
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Thousands have marched in solidarity with Palestine following the conflict in Gaza, but Ireland’s support of the Palestinian cause was not always so straightforward. By Diarmuid Breatnach Palestinian flags fluttering at demonstrations and rallies across Ireland, passing drivers beeping their horns in solidarity; Israeli Ambassadors complaining and even criticising the President of the Irish State; Irish politicians, out of step with the US-led consensus, calling for an unconditional ceasefire while an extremist Israeli Minister calls for the wiping out of the Gaza Palestinians or their expulsion to Ireland. There is little doubt where lie the sympathies of the majority of the Irish public. When asked why this is, most people point to the long struggle of the Irish against invasion, occupation and sectarianism. But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, not so long ago, the Irish public was mostly pro-Israel. In the early decades of the Irish state, most people’s sympathy with Jews, because of their history of oppression and the horror of the Holocaust, transferred easily enough to the creation of the State of Israel. In addition, there were important Irish political and cultural connections with the new state and finally, Hollywood played an important part in the moulding of Irish public opinion. State Politics The 1937 Constitution established under De Valera specifically mentioned Judaism in Article 44.1 and protected it from persecution while he himself had good relations with the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Chaim Herzog, who had an important role in relation to the founding of Israel. Nevertheless, the Irish State was wary of granting recognition to Israel, conscious that Palestine had been an Arab colonial possession or ‘mandate’ of the UK, many of whose other possessions around the world were being de-colonised. Five years after the founding of Israel, the Irish State was hardly encouraged to recognise it following the attack on Egypt, along with imperialist France and the UK, following an Egyptian attempt to nationalise the Suez Canal. The US, keen to show that the balance of world power had changed since the Second World War, publicly condemned the attack, especially chastising the old colonial powers and previous world masters, the British and French. President Eisenhower refused to intervene in the foreign-exchange markets to defend the plummeting value of the pound and the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Irish-language supporters and campaigners who wished to have the Irish language spoken throughout Ireland and not only in the Gaeltacht areas, admired the Israeli State for its achievement in restoring Hebrew as a daily-spoken language The Irish State of course had friendly relations with the US but the Israeli State had some important Irish connections too. The Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, was late of Belfast and Dublin, where he had also been Chief Rabbi of Ireland. One of his sons, Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast and raised in Dublin, before becoming the sixth President of Israel. His own son serves as the current President. Robert Briscoe (1894-1967), an Irish Republican, former prominent IRA Volunteer, TD (1927-1961), and twice Lord Mayor of Dublin (1956/7, and 1961/2), not only supported the creation of the Israeli State but was a special adviser to Menachem Begin after the Second World War. He advised Begin in the transformation of the terrorist Irgun organisation into a parliamentary political movement in the form of Herut in the new Israeli state; the party later became Likud. Briscoe had also fundraised for the Irgun in the US (as he had for the IRA during the Irish War of Independence). Republican Politics During the 1960s there was a US and European fashion, especially among young middle-class students both Jewish and Gentile, of going to work in Israeli-dominated Palestine, in collectively-owned agricultural communities, known as kibbutzim. Also, Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land (holy to all three strands of the Abrahamic tradition: Christians, Jews and Muslims) went by permission of the Israeli State and had a very narrow and sanitised experience (if any at all) of what life was like there for the Palestinians. But by the late 1960s most left-wing thinking around Europe was clear that the Palestinians were oppressed and fighting a liberation struggle. Official Sinn Féin sent a delegate to conferences in Jordan and Kuwait in 1970/1. In 1970 an article in the party’s weekly United Irishman described Ireland, like Palestine, as engaged in a national liberation struggle. The Official IRA prisoners in Mountjoy Prison supported the Palestinians in their journal An Eochair in 1973 and Palestinians were among the guerrilla groups represented in the second Anti-Imperialist Festival organised by the Officials in July 1976. Nevertheless, the election manifesto of the Workers’ Party, successor to Official Sinn Féin, in 1983 accepted the recognition of the State of Israel, although that contradicted party policy and the involvement of its members in the Irish Friends of Palestine organisation, which was committed to supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). However, party policy was soon publicly and internally reoriented in solidarity with Palestine. Around this time, the British and Irish Communist Organisation, a small but influential organisation, had a pro-Israel position. However, it was reversed in the late 1980s, shortly before its demise. In the 1970s, Provisional Sinn Féin’s weekly newspaper An Phoblacht often featured articles sympathetic to the Irish struggle from a US-based correspondent signing himself as Fred Burns O’Brien, one of which was notably favourable in its reference to the Israeli state. However, once the Provisionals declared themselves to be in favour of socialism, they became pro-Palestinian and since the 1990s Palestinian representatives have attended Provisional Sinn Féin’s Ard-Fheiseanna (Annual Congresses), most recently when Palestinian ambassador to Ireland, Dr Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid, addressed the party’s gathering this month. In the early decades of the Irish State, most people’s sympathy with Jews, because of their history of oppression and the horror of the Holocaust, transferred easily enough to creation of the State of Israel The PLO, dominated by Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah party, recognised the State of Israel
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This week’s Consultative Forum report is nothing more than of academic interest because the DFA set its policy strategy weeks in advance of the public debate. By J Vivian Cooke On Tuesday, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) published the report of the Consultative Forum on International Security Policy. It is a balanced, thoughtful and worthy document consistent with the proceedings of the Forum that were, themselves, balanced, thoughtful and worthy. The Forum and its Chair, Louise Richardson, have succeeded admirably within its terms of reference. Over the course of four days, the Forum hosted 12 panel discussions featuring around 50 experts and heard numerous contributions from members of the audience attending. In addition, the Forum received 835 written submissions. Richardson has done well to herd these conceptual cats into a report that brings far more clarity and order to the diverse opinions expressed, characteristics that are not so evident in my own recollection or notes. The report provides a paragraph summary of each panel discussed before sketching out the contending opinions on what emerged as the key themes of the debate. In all, it is a fair representation of a public consultation that was run well. Unfortunately, it is the Forum’s terms of reference that doom this report to anything more than academic interest It transpires that there is a very broad-based consensus about the parameters within which Irish foreign policy operates. There is a near-unanimous agreement that Neutrality should be preserved; that foreign policy should be pursued on a multilateral basis; and that there is an urgent requirement for significant increases in Ireland’s defence spending. In fact, any sharp points of discord are only discernable at the margins of this national consensus; with the opposing extremes respectively embracing with enthusiasm or being repelled in horror by the very suggestion that Ireland would deepen its security cooperation with the US and/or European countries, through the institutional framework of either NATO or the EU. Such divisions that do exist within the settled field of Irish foreign policy tend to reflect how far individuals are willing to trust any government of the day with discretionary powers to respond flexibly to rapid, evolving crises in opposition to the exercise of parliamentary and public oversight and restraint. In practical terms, this expresses itself in the debate about the Triple Lock and the proposal, received in written submissions but not much discussed in the Forum, to enshrine the policy of neutrality in the constitution. The note of disapproval in the normally impeccably impartial Richardson is unmistakable in her comment: “It will be important to ensure that future Irish governments have maximum flexibility to respond with deliberation and speed when called upon to ensure the safety and security of our citizens” is positively damning. Unfortunately, it is the Forum’s terms of reference that doom this report to anything more than academic interest. These terms state bluntly that only “the Tanaiste will consider the report produced by the Chairperson and will decide whether to bring recommendations to Government.” It was, as the Chairperson noted “a national conversation” but, crucially, “it is not the purpose of the report to make policy recommendations to the Government.” Although Micheál Martin promised a whole-of-government approach to the exercise, he failed to deliver even a whole-of-department approach. The cabinet approved the Forum on 5 April 2023, yet, on 1 June, a mere three weeks before the Forum held its first session, the Department of Foreign Affairs published its Statement of Strategy 2023-2025. The DFA’s impatience to fix its strategy for the next two years denied it the valuable insights that they themselves were trying so hard to cultivate. And their desultory, uninspiring and unimaginative Statement of Strategy is manifestly poorer for that lacuna. During this period, nine other departments (Justice, Children, Housing, Tourism, Further and Higher Education, Transport, Agriculture, Enterprise and Social Protection) engaged in far less elaborate public consultations in preparing their statements of strategies. Despite the imminent start of a public forum to debate its strategy, the DFA pushed on with its statement without any public input of any kind. The contradiction inherent in the DFA’s rush to publish its Statement of Strategy ineluctably casts the relevance of the whole Forum process into doubt. Although Micheál Martin promised a whole-of-government approach to the exercise, he failed to deliver even a whole-of-department approach The Terms of Reference for the Forum stated that “the Consultative Forum is designed to build public understanding and generate discussions on the link between the State’s foreign, security and defence policies.” Village Magazine can attest that the sessions were nuanced and well-informed by practitioners and academics who embraced the complexities of navigating international relations as a small European wealthy island. The report is a valuable document for anyone interested in Irish foreign and defence policies. The tragedy is that the DFA would have benefitted in delaying publishing their statement had they bothered to listen to the national debate they had spent so much time and effort informing.
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