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    430,689 not 85,799

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    We need to face up to what mature countries call housing need by Rory Hearne   There is general acceptance that the housing crisis has reached unacceptable levels. However, the government’s current policies are inadequate to address the crisis because, firstly, they underestimate the scale of the crisis. Secondly, they deny the overall housing policy framework of ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ has failed. This article makes the case that the level of housing ‘need’ is much higher than current official estimates and that Rebuilding Ireland should be jettisoned, and a new housing policy developed. A new housing policy for Ireland should start with the aim of ensuring everyone in this country has their right to a home fulfilled i.e. access to affordable, quality and secure housing, and this is to be achieved by the state playing a central role in ensuring the building of large-scale ‘public housing’. This public housing should be a new form of social and affordable housing – available for a range of incomes considerably higher than allowed by current social housing rules. This would involve the state, mainly through local authorities, but also through not-for-profit housing associations and co-ops, and a new state house building agency, using public land to build high-quality, well planned and environmentally sustainable ‘communities’ of-different housing types for a range of households including workers of all incomes, families, students, the elderly and those with disabilities. Key associated issues include facilitating and funding the correct amount of this ‘public’ housing. Firstly, in regard to estimating the real housing need it is clear that there is a large number of households which cannot afford housing. However, estimates of housing need are restricted to the households that qualify for social housing – currently the 85,799 households on local authority lists. This list does not include tenants who are in the privaterental sector in receipt of social housing supports like the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) and the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS). These tenants do not have security of tenure (they can be evicted by landlords) and therefore they are still in housing need. Neither do the official lists include some homeless households, those in direct provision, and those in domestic-violence refuges, who are all clearly in housing need. Furthermore, there are approximately 35,000 home-owners over 360 days in arrears on their mortgages who are also clearly in major housing need. If you add these then the total social housing need becomes 185,505 households: over double current estimates of need. This figure demonstrates the real scale of the crisis. The problem is if policies are underestimating the real scale of need they are clearly going to be ineffective in meeting the actual level of need. However, we also know that the need for ‘affordable’ housing extends to many more households. It includes many renters in the private sector who are paying more than 30% of their income on rents (an internationally accepted definition of ‘affordable’ housing), it includes aspirant home owners who cannot afford current house prices, students and many adult children living at home with parents, couch-surfing, etc. While it is difficult to estimate how many households this includes, the ESRI notes that a third of renters in the private rental sector have ‘high’ housing costs. If you remove the 56,000 HAP and RAS households from the private rental sector, this equates to 85,000 households in need of affordable housing from the private-rental sector. Adding this to the estimate of housing need above gives a total of 270,505 households in need of social and affordable housing – three times the current social housing waiting list. Another way of estimating need is to compare how countries with effective housing systems assess it. In countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Denmark, social housing (non-market housing) comprises between 24% and 40% of all housing stock. In Ireland just 10% of housing stock is social housing. A good target for Ireland then, if we are to solve the housing crisis permanently, is to bring our stock of social housing up to around 30% of total housing stock. This would equate to approximately 606,800 units. However, our current social housing stock is only 176,178 units. So we would need to add 430,689 public affordable units. If we were to do this over a reasonable timeframe, say ten years, then that means providing approximately 43,000 units per year of new public housing. This could be approximately, 27,000 for those qualifying for ‘social’ housing and 16,000 for those on higher incomes. When we compare these to the Rebuilding Ireland targets and its approach to delivery we can see clearly why the Government and Department of Housing have failed to solve this crisis. Rebuilding Ireland aims to provide between 21,000 and 26,000 ‘new’ social housing units per annum. These are interesting and useful figures because providing 26,000 new social housing units per annum, over 10 years, gets close to meeting the level of actual social housing need I have calculated earlier (at 270,000 households, but this is a static figure based on current need and assumes that housing need does not grow. In the current climate we can see this is not the case. However, the Rebuilding Ireland figures are completely misleading because approximately 18,000, or 70%, of these ‘new’ units are not new social housing stock but just various forms of subsidised private rental housing via HAP or RAS schemes. This is a vital point to understand because not only do HAP and RAS not provide security for tenants, they constitute very poor value for money as the state is handing over almost €750m a year to private landlords. Worse, it exacerbates the crisis by adding to demand rather than supply. The housing crisis is a crisis of supply, but it is the lack of social and affordable supply that is at its heart. There is increasing cross-society consensus that the state must build more social and affordable housing in the form of new public housing through cost rental and other forms of social and

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    Dial MI5 for Murder

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    HAS SPOOK-TURNED-THRILLER WRITER DAME STELLA RIMMINGTON FORGOTTEN WHAT IS IN MI5’s TOP SECRET FILES? Dame Stella Rimmington has just published another of her bestselling Liz Carlyle spy yarns The Moscow Sleepers in time for the Christmas market. In it, the redoubtable Liz is set against some  very nasty men from Russia. This has all been done ten thousand times in one guise or another. This is all rather a shame because Stella Rimmington, a former Chair of the Judges for the Man Booker Prize, could probably produce a novel of real substance if she really put her mind to it. After all, she was theDirector-General of MI5, December 1991-1994, and spent a career knee deep in all sorts of skulduggery, including snooping on perfectly respectable MPs, trades unionists, civil rights groups and journalists. Since she joined MI5 in the late 1960s and left it in 1996, she must know virtually all of MI5’s most pitch-black secrets, especially those of the Troubles, though you certainly wouldn’t suspect this from her fictional output or her double-whitewashed 2001 memoirs, Open Secret, which may as well be a work of fiction. Rimmington is a dab hand at transforming fact into fiction; whether at a conscious or sub-conscious level is best left to the experts. Incredibly, she believes no one in MI5 ever lifted a finger to thwart the Labour PM Harold Wilson, seen by some in MI5 as a dastardly KGB stooge and traitor. This, despite the fact back that no less a figure than Lord John Hunt, the mighty and all-powerful Cabinet Secretary, 1973-79, acknowledged that it had indeed happened. In August 1996 Hunt told a Channel 4 documentary that, ‘There is no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5, people who should not have been there in the first place, a lot of them like Peter Wright who were right-wing, malicious and had serious personal grudges, gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government.’ THE FORMER TOP SPY WHO DRAWS NO INSPIRATION FROM THE REAL SPY WORLD Unless she was sleep-climbing during her ascent to the top of MI5’s blood-soaked pole, Dame Stella must have heard something along the way about: MI5’s collusion with Loyalists hoods in Northern Ireland such as the Glennane Gang; The MI5-RUC shoot-to-kill scandal that John Stalker, the honest, admirable and principled Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, investigated in the 1980s, only to be vilified as he edged closer to the truth about MI5’s complicity in the murder of a string of people including Michael Tighe, a 17 year-old with no links to any paramilitary group; The deeply sinister framing of Colin Wallace by Ian Cameron (Wallace wanted to stop MI5-protected child rape at Kincora Boys Home and other dirty tricks) and the pernicious vilification of Fred Holroyd – again perpetrated by Cameron – (Holroyd didn’t want to murder people for MI5); The brutal assassination of the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane in 1989 in front of his wife and young children by acknowledged British agents; The setting fire to the offices of that other honest, admirable and principled cop, Sir John Stephens in Belfast in 1990. His office was torched during his investigations of MI5’s exploitation of the UDA as proxy assassins with the aid of Brian Nelson, the Head of the UDA’s Intelligence department; MI5’s network of contacts inside Garda Intelligence; The print journalists in Dublin who were fed stories by HMG’s spooks. Since MI5 co-operated with MI6 in the Republic, Dame Stella must know which journalists had their noses in the trough and who just was rewarded with a pat on the back at meetings of the British-Irish Association or over dinner at the Dublin Embassy; The MI5-Red Hand Commando (RHC) attempt to place a bomb on Charles Haughey’s boat in Dingle harbour in the summer of 1981 when the RHC was led by a serial killing MI5 psychopath called John Dunlop McKeague. Did Stella ever read McKeague’s file? And while we are at it, what about Haughey’s file? Surely Stella she had read it by the time she became D-G at the end of 1991. Haughey didn’t retire as Taoiseach until 11 February 1992. Why hasn’t Stella drawn on any of this remarkable source material for her hitherto run-of-the-mill fiction? Has she forgotten everything in the files? In Open Secret, she wrote – merely in passing it must be stressed that – ‘Loyalist terrorists too had developed their operations and were constantly looking to increase and upgrade their arms and equipment.’ (211) That’s all very fine Stella, but please:   what part did Ian Cameron and all the other psychos in MI5 who served in NI play in helping them; in directing them; in covering-up for them? THE CORRUPTION OF THE SOUL Regrettably, like that other spook-turned-author, John Le Carre, formerly of MI5 and MI6, Stella steers well clear of what HMG’s real-life spooks got up to in Ireland in both her fictional and factual outpourings. For his part, Le Carre has managed to convince himself that he has attempted to ‘explore’ Britain’s ‘psyche’ and that in so doing, ‘it’s Secret Service [was] not an unreasonable place to look’. Regrettably, he never set any of his – admittedly brilliant – novels in an Irish setting. Does he not believe the Troubles had an effect on the British ‘psyche’ or were the crimes of HMG’s spooks just too much to deal with? Anthony Cavendish, who served in both MI5 and MI6, certainly wasn’t afraid to confront the truth. He described in his memoirs, Inside Intelligence, how as ‘the years go by, the lies take over from the truth and morality accepts the other demands which are made on an [intelligence] officer to get the job done’ and that ‘theft, deception, lies, mutilation and even murder are considered if and when necessary’. So, just what is the point of promoting Rimmington on the cover of her Liz Carlyle books as the ‘Former Head of MI5’, if she

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    The Boy on the Meat Rack

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    A Life Derailed, Part 1 of the Story of Alan Kerr; By Joseph de Burca.  INTRODUCTION Alan Kerr was sexually abused by three men at Williamson House, a Belfast Corporation Welfare Department care home in Belfast. He was only six years of age when it started.  One of his abusers was Eric Witchell, the Office-in-Charge of the home. Witchell was a friend of both Joe Mains, the infamous paedophile and Warden of Kincora Boys’ Home and William McGrath, the Housefather at Kincora. Alan is the younger brother of Richard Kerr who has featured heavily in Village during the last two years. Alan did not realise he had a brother until he met Richard at Williamson House when he was six. He also met his sister at it and learned that he had another brother, and two other sisters; moreover, that both of his parents were still alive. Later, he was moved to Shore House where he was abused by another two men, one of whom may have been Witchell’s friend, William McGrath. Alan eventually fled from institutional care for a life on the streets of Belfast but it was no more than jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Having been neglected, groomed and abused throughout his childhood, and finding himself desperate for food and shelter while on the run, he fell into the hands of a network of calculating paedophiles who abused him. At one point in time he was manipulated into working for a while at a brothel off the Lisburn Road where boys as young as 13 were made available to Belfast’s paedophile community. Later again, he was trafficked to Birmingham and thence to London by Billy ‘B’, one of his abusers. Out of desperation and with neither an education nor any sort of a qualification, he would end up being exploited as a ‘rent boy’ at Victoria Station;  as  a ‘Dilly boy’ on the ‘Meat Rack’ at Piccadilly Circus;  and for approximately a year in a brothel in Earl’s Court alongside other boys who were younger than him; possibly even as young as 13 or 14. He also had a bizarre encounter with two members of the Royal Family. Alan’s life in London will be described in the next edition of Village. PART 1: A FOG OF FEAR AT BREFFNI NURSERY 1969-1974. ALAN AGED 0-6 INCARCERATING TODDLERS WHO CRIED AT NIGHT IN A PITCH-BLACK BOILER ROOM Alan Kerr was born on 8 May, 1968, and was taken into care at Breffni Nursery when he was only a few months old, sometime in late 1968 or early 1969. There was a lot of sobbing at night time in Breffni, a care home which catered for infants and pre-school children. Alan recalls how, if a child in the dormitory began to cry out loudly at night, some of the more brutal member of the night staff would put the child in a boiler room, well out of earshot. They were often left for hours alone in the pitch black. Alan often found himself crying because he was surrounded by cold strangers; had no family ‘to love me’; and had to cope with the unrelenting stress of a threatening environment. He too ended up in the boiler room on a number of occasions. He recalls one particular night when two of the night staff marched into the dormitory, hauled him out of bed and carried him to it, then pushed him inside and left him alone in the darkness four hours.   PART 2: RAPE AT WILLIAMSON HOUSE 1974-1978. ALAN AGED 6-9   ALAN KERR WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED ON HIS FIRST NIGHT AT WILLIAMSON HOUSE. HE WAS ONLY 6 YEARS OLD  A caveat must be entered before we proceed any further: Alan Kerr does not have access to his institutional records from Belfast and therefore cannot provide precise dates. Instead, he has done his best from memory. Alan left Breffni Nursery when he was about six, sometime in 1974, or thereabouts, and took up residence at Williamson House for the next two or three years. He describes it as being ‘worse’ than Breffni. ‘Things did happen there which I still can’t talk about.’ Alan would be abused by men who were not members of the staff at Williamson House; yet more proof of an organised child abuse ring operating in NI at this time. Astonishingly, the existing of a network has been dismissed by a series of lightweight inquiries which were no match for the corresponding heavyweight cover-ups organised by the British Establishment and which have lasted for nearly four decades. The most recent example of this was the mistake riddled Hart Report of January 2017, a document that even manages to contradict itself. ‘The abuse began on my first night at Williamson House when a man climbed into my bunk bed. I didn’t understand what was happening.’ The event was so traumatic, Alan manages to black it out most of the time and certainly prefers not to talk about it. Alan’s brother Richard and his sister were at Williamson House. Prior to his arrival, he had no idea that he had any family. He also discovered he had two other sisters and a brother. Alan, Richard and his sister were together for about a year before Richard was shipped out to Kincora Boys Home, perhaps the most concentrated cesspit of child sex abuse in Ireland at that time. Alan’s sister remained with him at Williamson House. He received his first visit – or at least the first visit he can remember – from his parents at the home. One of Alan’s abusers at Williamson House was Eric Witchell. He was a friend of Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, and William McGrath, the Housefather at Kincora. Although Witchell’s title was that of Officer-in-Charge, his responsibilities were confined to one of the two buildings at the institution, each of which was administered separately. Alan was not a resident on Witchell’s wing. Nonetheless, Witchell managed to lure

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    The Secret Barrister, reviewed by David Langwallner

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      The rage of London at the moment is a self-consciously anonymous blog called “The secret barrister” which is an exposé of the profession of a criminal barrister and indeed of the criminal justice system written by a junior counsel specialising in criminal law. This blog aims to provide a fly-on-the-wall view of the criminal justice system, and of life at the Criminal Bar in general. He writes for the New Statesman, The Sun, The Mirror and Huffington Post. His first book, ‘Stories of The Law and How It’s Broken, published in March, is a bestseller.     If the author had named himself the professional repercussions would not have stinted so, sagely, he has not. The book is written with an avowed sense of sadness, indignation and anger grounded in an overarching desire to secure a measure of fairness within the criminal justice system.  The morphology of the book is to take a criminal case from inception to conclusion to show what goes wrong – to demonstrate that which is unfair.   The book’s argument, delphically stated and perhaps not fleshed out in the detail it should, is that we are moving from a criminal justice system to a criminal system which risks presumptions of guilt. The presumption of innocence which is a British creation is central to justice in a civilised system. But the scruple-based process has become telescoped and mere accusation is now criminalisation. The hallowed, flawed system is losing its protections and safeguards. There is, in criminal justice possibly more than any other sphere of public life, a devastating lack of public education, exacerbated by inaccurate, ill-informed media reports and political pronouncements that betray an ignorance of the legal system that stretches up to the very top of government. This lack of understanding means that politicians escape scrutiny when terrible things are wreaked upon criminal justice – such as the policy that you can be wrongly accused of an offence, denied legal aid and then denied the cost of your private legal fees even when acquitted – and that, when we see a legal story reported in the press – such as the latest ‘look at how much legal aid this murderer received from your taxes – we often lack the tools to critically evaluate it”.     Now I agree with all this and it corresponds with my professional experience in Ireland and the United Kingdom. We are not far from the point that corrupt and (in Ireland) criminal state authorities use an accusation to create a snowball effect,  Often an accusation alone touted and reinforced by a dirty and compliant media is enough to destroy. Once the machinery of mediocrity and state incompetence gets a half baked sense of an accusation the whole thing trundles along and guilt or innocence are merely matters of happenstance. This is augmented by the cult of the pseudo-expert: a three-week training course alone underpinning the pontificator’s cant. This is accentuated in Ireland by our deeply corrupt and criminal professional classes and as we have seen the toxic relationship between  TUSLA, the Department of Injustice and the bar with its illusory independence. In the UK I have not seen not overt state criminality though I recognise the book’s theme of derelict state disclosure of favourable unused material in the practice of the criminal bar here in London where I am now working. In an extraordinary 87 per cent of cases audit trails show the disclosure of evidence to defence lawyers from the police or Crown Prosecution Service to be unsatisfactory, In my view this is systemic, as the police, social services, academics and an over-burdened professional class are making decisions in conditions of radical uncertainty and often with limited training.   Putting victims first, witness protection and the prohibition of hard and intimidating cross-examination is very dangerous. It protects liars and fabricators. A cloak of protection engineered by police, social workers and a dumbed down culture protecting those who enlist the nanny state of the semi competent.   Advocates have a right to annihilate people and not to be stopped in their tracks, as I was recently, if they reduce someone to tears where necessary.     Through lack of training, under-resourcing, lack of motivation and a drop in standards the system is descending in both jurisdictions into chaos.   The system’s flaws flaws are not those of the people who work within it, but are imposed: by the state. Each flaw is “either deliberately designed – such as the Innocence Tax, (the Legal Aid Act 2012 under which defendants find themselves massively out of pocket even when found not guilty)  or the restriction of compensation for miscarriages of justice – or is the product of populist, tough-on-crime, anti-defendant posturing, or betrays warped spending priorities where politicians persuade voters that one penny off a pint of lager is a better investment than a working justice system”.     Moreover, as the Secret Barrister notes, “Part of the problem, as well, is the legal profession. We do a stunningly poor job of explaining to people what the law is, and why it matters. Too many of us are content to busy ourselves in our own work, safe in the knowledge that what we do is important, but without feeling the need to deconstruct for the man on the street why two wigged figures incanting Latin before an old man wearing a giant purple robe, and the obscured codes and rules governing this mediaeval ritual, has any relevance to their everyday life. We then wonder why there is an obvious disconnect between the legal system and the people it exists to serve and protect”.   He is concerned about the ethical compass of vulture solicitors, as am I.   He does not say much about the art of the advocate per se but much about how cuts over time and an increasing workload have diminished the quality of justice and the profession.  He is scathing of minor prosecutions: “Much prosecuting in the

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    THE DUP SKELETONS IN THERESA MAY’S CLOSET

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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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    Law is boring

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    by David Langwallner   I-am-a-lawyer. I’ve said it. You may feel that positions me on the level of an amoeba or vermin but I believe I am ethical, professionally competent, creative and that I and many of my colleagues often do good things fighting on behalf of the voiceless and the victimised. But I must admit there are problems within the profession domestically and worldwide. This article intends to illustrate some of the best and worst legal practice. Show me a lawyer who is genuinely intellectually interested for example in mergers and acquisitions law, save perhaps as the by-product of a professional skill well exercised, and I will call the person to book as a boor or a charlatan: not interested in mergers and acquisitions, but in the money to be got from fabricating an interest in mergers and acquisitions. The interest is fake. In fact an interest in mergers and acquisitions or taxation law connotes a deep-seated psychological malaise. There are far more interesting things in life and indeed law. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate sweat shop, as I have – a place called Hughes, Hubbard and Reed in No 1 Wall Street “Hughes, Cupboard and Greed” – will confirm that to acquire the lucre you so assiduously seek you are boxed in a gilded corporate cage like a puffed battery hen spending as much time calculating the billable hours as actually working. Your friends think it is glamorous but you know it is ignominious. Much more important than the quality of work produced is the amount of time spent. And quality dedicated to securities and derivatives or mergers and acquisitions Oh super. Have you ever seen this stuff? You will serve as the twentieth-person backup in a deal represented by a composite document that is laboriously copy-checked and footnoted drawn from a crucial well-tested all-important template to produce something that might end up in a short hearing which you will probably not be involved in. Anyone interested in advocacy should steer far away from corporate law. There will be no showtime or theatrics. You will have no stake. This is anally-retentive churning, soul-destroying work. Practitioners of such ephemera subject themselves to endless, pointless work and no holidays. A good friend of mine, a corporate lawyer in New York, visited me for the first time in ten years on his first holiday in that time – a five-day break in Dublin – and he had to be at the computer for a few hours every day! Further, many lawyers I met on Wall Street in particular – but elsewhere too – seemed drawn unmitigated from the novel ‘American Psycho’, dangerously psycho- or socio-pathic – overorganised and compartmentalised, rigid and fetishistic. For the sake of completeness you may care to note that sex for these forensic Gordon Gekkos was a bookable appointment, boring and consumerised, between meetings. Dirty love in the afternoon. Don’t think of the day-to-day reality of the new you: shrivelled and desexed. Commodified. Ossified. Bored. Sold-out. Ascending the corporate law ladder: a misspent youth. For those who care for more gentlemanly or ladylike times there has been a foul but gradual, insidious penetration of American work practices into Ireland, blind to our native frugality, scrupulousness and indeed noble tradition of law dating back to bardic times. The IFSC is full of the elites of South County Dublin, lucubrating over the tedious clippings of global corporate avarice. Solicitors in the ‘big five’ firms are as specialist and hungry as any attorney on the seventieth story in Manhattan. They have even affected the jargon of brash US firms: corporate responsibility, doing a meeting and a range of moronic baseball analogies: touch base, rain check, curveball. In Ireland lawyers once loved – once had to love – language. Symptomatically, this country, the land of the Book of Kells and the monkish scripts, of Beckett and Joyce, characteristically generates poorly-written mass-produced textbooks like wallpaper: heavy on the facts of the law but low on criticism or analysis. In the end, anyone can write an Irish textbook on The Law of Dogs or of Parks, with a brief introduction by judge, probably over a bottle of wine, who skim-read the effort, expressing gratitude, nay respect, for the important contribution to our law. Better rather that someone should unleash The Irish Rumpole or true crime as Stig Larsen did in Sweden or as Scott Thorow and Grisham do in the states. Let us focus on law in reality not the paper rules of mass-produced textbooks. In fairness there is some civilised life at the Irish Bar. Adrian Hardiman was a famous Joycean. Frank Callinan, a senior counsel and Brian Cregan, a High Court judge, have tried their hand at Parnell with some éclat. John O’Donnell SC writes poetry and serves on the Arts Council. Not enough. Where is the Nell McCafferty who documented the dysfunctionalities of the lower courts a generation ago? We need a Dickens to chronicle the contemporary Jarnydyce v Jarnydyce that is our banking and debt collection mess. Corporate Law My East-End client was perfectly polite until after the acquittal. Then asked to meet for a ‘sing-song’ in a seedy alehouse: “I didn’t want to say it to you but you are Irish, and if you had messed up I would not have taken it kindly. Know what I mean son?” The threat was very clear. Needless to say I did not go for the pints. In any event it needs to be be said that police officers have issued me threats even more sinister – insinuating that I was some sort of juvenile delinquent gone wrong for anti-State work or Garda criticism; bugging my phones – an occupational hazard of a human rights lawyer, expressing their closeness to lower court officials and high ranking civil servants, perhaps issuing a death threat, as if we lived in a third-world police state. Nonetheless, give me an outing in criminal law for the Kray clan any time, over

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