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    The cost of costs

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    Real justice requires access to justice, which requires effective access to courts, which requires that courts be accessible without the threat of prohibitive costs. Some 90%, or an even higher percentage, of people in Ireland have no realistic access to justice, due to the prohibitiveness of the costs associated with legal actions via the courts. The Irish system of access to justice is permeated with unfair procedures, unconstitutional laws, and conflicts of interests, which means that most court users in Ireland are vulnerable users. BalaNCiNG CONFliCTiNG CONSTiTUTiONal RiGHTS: The English rule (Loser pays rule) on legal costs does not balance two conflicting rights – (1) the property rights of winning litigants, and (2) the right of persons to have access to the courts, without being threatened by unpredictable and prohibitive legal costs. Notionally, proponents of the English rule claim that winners are entitled to be 100% vindicated, and so be in a position to cover all their legal costs. However, this is a very narrow view, which fails to assess the big-picture consequences: (a) winners are also threatened, up to the point of winning, and can be threatened as defendants, in circumstances where they have no chance of recovery of costs from penny-less plaintiffs. (b) the English rule creates all sorts of conflicts of interests and market distortions, which enormously inflate the costs payable. (c) wealthy litigants can threaten persons of lessor wealth, with adverse costs, such that the case is determined more often by issues of fear, rather than justice. (d) the state, and most government actors become unaccountable, as the decision makers are immune from costs (lumped ontaxpayers, often, with little transparency), but can pursue political goals, or engage in abuse of power, with no financial downside, and can still threaten all challengers with financial ruin; this inequality of arms, means that citizens are generally unable to challenge the unconstitutional laws and conduct of government. HeNCe, THe eNGliSH RUle iS NOT COMPaTiBle WiTH a Real CONSTiTUTiONal deMOCRaCy: Costs Allocation Rules incentivise Unfair Adjudication Rules which also incentivise Inefficiencies into the system. Because the government is allowed to intimidate its challengers with unlimited adverse costs, it then wants to maximise those costs, so as to bolster its threat and avoid oversight; High Legal Costs has been the default weapon of choice for all governments since the commencement of the state; the “Big Stick” is maintained to bounce its opponents out of the ring, and this has so far been achieved with little condemnation by international institutions, which have largely failed to recognise the stealth threat that prohibitive costs represents as a threat to the rule of law. The Big Stick undemocratically deters citizens and/or NGOs from challenging the government when it passes unconstitutional laws, or acts unconstitutionally – this allows the government to pander to its own electoral constituency while depriving less well represented persons access to rights protection, leading to violations of minority rights and individual rights. When populist demands call for adjudicative processes which affect specific rights of connected groups, QUANGOs are often created in order to parry off populist demands for accessible justice. The substitute QUANGO justice can rarely be as independent as courts, and the outcomes are often secretised, thus bypassing democratic oversight. Hence, the government passes unfair laws for legal costs adjudication, so as to frighten all challengers – this allows it to exercise power with minimum oversight. THe Need FOR CCOS (COSTS CaPPiNG ORdeRS) In the ex parte application by Dymphna Maher [2012], the applicant effectively sought an assurance from the High Court that any adverse costs would not be prohibitively expensive, if her lawsuit was subsequently deemed not to have fallen under the ambit of the special costs regime (related to some environmental cases). Judge Hedigan insisted that there was no legal authority to permit him to make the order sought by the applicant. However, he observed that: “[It was] very arguable that the absence of some legal provision permitting an applicant to bring such a motion, without exposure to an order for costs, acts in such a way as to nullify the State’s efforts to comply with its obligation to ensure that costs in certain planning matters are not prohibitive. As things stand, I have no power to change this”. This case along with 12 other cases was appealed to the Supreme Court (SC) on an ex parte basis – where only one of the parties is heard. The SC held that it could not provide such an assurance, on an ex parte basis, as the other side (the EPA) needed to be heard first. The SC decision in the Coffey case means, in effect, that any person seeing to access the courts in Ireland is threatened with financial ruin, even if just seeking a CCO. The court failed proportionately to balance the right of access to the courts as a right conflicting with the property rights of government, particularly in the context of the need for real separation of powers. The judicial sphere of power is rendered inaccessible to most citizens, when the loser-pays rule is applied to challenges to executive power, and so the judicial sphere of power is inappropriately diminished; this undermines the checks and balances necessary in a liberal democracy between the legislative, executive an judicial functions. SePaRaTiON OF POWeRS By dividing power between these traditional three spheres, the courts, the government, and the Oireachtas, we help to disperse power and make less probable the accumulation of power to one person, or a small elite, as often happens in what are referred to as illiberal democracies. Diagram 1, above, displays the traditional Montesquieu view of three spheres of power. However the (Montesquieu) tripartite division of power, is a poor reflection of reality. This is largely because it generally fails to engage with the level of real power held by each of the three spheres, in practice. A second flaw, is that there should really be five spheres of power, and not three; the people should be seen

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    ‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’

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    ‘Reclaiming the State – a Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World’ is the title of what will surely come to be seen as one of the more important social science works of our time (Pluto Press, 2017, €23). In it Australian economics professor William Mitchell and Italian political theorist Thomas Fazi reconceptualise the Nation State as a vehicle for progressive change. They issue a highly topical challenge to progressives, leftwingers and genuine liberals to come to the defence of national sovereignty and not cede that issue to the populist right. For the thirty years from the end of World War 2 to the 1970s a left-oriented Keynesian consensus held sway in the developed world. Then, for reasons this book describes, the mainstream Left as represented by the mass Labour and Social Democrat parties in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere, and by the Democrats in the USA, ideologically disarmed themselves before rampant neoliberalism. Key neoliberal propositions were that national sovereignty had become irrelevant in today’s increasingly complex and interdependent international economy. Globalisation had made individual States increasingly powerless in face of market forces. The growth of multinational companies and the internationalisation of finance had eroded the ability of national States to pursue progressive social and economic policies and deliver prosperity for their peoples. Consequently the only hope of meaningful change was to “pool” State sovereignty and transfer it to supranational institutions such as the European Union, thereby regaining at supranational level the sovereignty that has been lost at the national level. Many who regarded themselves as progressive and on the Left came to share these views, stressing how neoliberalism has involved a retreat or a hollowing-out of the State, which found itself increasingly powerless in face of market forces. To cover their abandonment of criticism of capitalism as a social system, progressives and Left parties generally focused instead on issues such as racism, gender, homophobia, multiculturalism and environmentalism – social marginality being no longer described and opposed in terms of class but rather in terms of identity. This book analyses the political timidity, ideological opportunism and intellectual fallacies involved in this surrender. For example the decades of neoliberalism have seen little or no decline in State spending as a percentage of GDP – a key measure of the strength of the State in society. Even supposedly neoliberal governments such as Reagan’s or Thatcher’s did not reduce overall public spending, although they altered its composition, for example spending more on weaponry and less on welfare. As the authors point out, “even though neoliberalism as an ideology springs from a desire to curtail the State’s role, neoliberalism as political-economic practice has produced increasingly powerful interventionist regimes.” Neoliberalism has entailed extensive and permanent intervention by States and their Governments: for example the liberalization of goods and capital markets, the privatization of resources and public services, deregulation of finance, the reduction of workers’ rights in collective bargaining, cuts to social programmes and the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital at the expense of the middle and working classes. The authors show how neoliberal ideology, in its official anti-State guise, has been little more than a convenient alibi for what has been an essentially political and State-driven project aimed at placing the commanding heights of economic policy in the hands of capital and especially Finance Capital. Far from neoliberal globalisation making the Nation State out of date, all its key elements were the result of choices deliberately and consciously made by national governments as their ruling elites set out to limit State sovereign rights. The authors call this a process of “depoliticisation” of policy. Its principal elements were: the reduction of the power of parliaments via-a-vis the executive; making central banks formally independent of government; adopting constitutional limits on debt-to-GDP ratios and public spending, as with the 2012 Stability treaty, thereby limiting what politicians can do at the behest of their voters; enforcing free movement of goods and capital, and, above, all shifting government powers from the national level to the supranational. Why did national politicians choose to ‘tie their hands’ in this way ? As the EU case epitomises, the creation of these self-imposed ‘external constraints’ allowed national politicians to reduce the political costs to themselves of neoliberal policies that were generally unpopular. It enabled them to ‘scapegoat’ these externally imposed rules and supranational and ‘independent’ institutions. These could be publicly presented as an inevitable outcome of the new harsh realities of globalisation, about which supposedly little or nothing could be done at national level. In this way national government choices and State macroeconomic policies were insulated from popular criticism and protest. Mitchell and Fazi contend that the war on sovereignty has been in essence a war on democracy. This process was brought to its most extreme in Europe where the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that created the euro-currency embedded neoliberalism into the EU’s very fabric, effectively outlawing in supranational EU law the Keynesian policies that had been commonplace in the previous decades. Given neoliberalism’s war against State sovereignty it is only natural that the revolt against neoliberalism should first and foremost take the form of demands for a ‘repoliticisation’ of national decision-making processes – that is, for more democratic control over politics and particularly over the destructive effects of the free movement of capital, goods and labour unleashed by neoliberalism. This necessarily can only be done at the national level by means of the national State in the absence of effective supranational mechanisms of representation. The latter are impossible to bring into being as long as people’s primary political identification is with their own nationality and State. Supranational structures will always lack democratic legitimacy because people do not identify with them as their own. The case of Iceland shows what even a tiny country can do when it used its State sovereignty, an independent currency, capital controls and sequestration of its banks to overcome an extreme economic crisis. The authors argue that progressives and the political Left should not regard Brexit –

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    Some devils got him

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    The Westminster terrorist attack on 22 March of last year, by lone attacker, Khalid Masood (52), who drove a car into pedestrians and fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer, is not the first time that terrorists have selected the Palace of Westminster, and its surrounds, to perpetrate an act of violence. 39 years ago, on 30 March 1979, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) murdered Airey Neave, Conservative MP and Margaret Thatcher’s shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, in a devastating car bomb attack. Apart from reaffirming Thatcher’s determination to defeat Republican paramilitaries, Neave’s assassination robbed the Conservative Party of one of its most open-minded, albeit controversial, thinkers on Northern Ireland. By the standards of the day, Neave was a remarkable figure. On the one hand, he was a public figure: war-hero, writer, barrister and politician. He had escaped from Colditz, a Nazi prisoner of war camp during the Second World War; was the author of five semi-autobiographical books; established a practice at the bar; and was Conservative Party MP for Abington, 1953-1979. On the other hand, he was an elusive and secretive individual, retaining close links to the British Secret Intelligence Service throughout his adult life. During the Second World War he worked for MI9, a subsidiary of MI6, later holding the rank of commanding officer of the Intelligence School 9, Territorial Army (TA). Neave’s greatest contribution to political life came in the autumn of his career, following his promotion as shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland in 1975. Neave’s appointment to Thatcher’s shadow cabinet, in the wake of her election as leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, had important ramifications for the Conservative Party’s Northern Ireland policy. From the moment he took up his new shadow cabinet portfolio, until his murder by the INLA, Neave’s “first priority”, as he noted in April 1978, was to defeat Republican terrorism. Although often preoccupied by security-related issues, and despite misguided arguments to the contrary, Neave remained committed to finding a workable solution in the hope of ending direct rule in Northern Ireland. As a pragmatist, confronted by the political reality that the mainstream political parties in Northern Ireland could not agree on the terms of devolution, he instead championed reform of local government in Northern Ireland, as an interim measure. By initially supporting the establishment of his so-called ‘Council of State’, subsequently followed by a proposal to create one or more Regional Councils in Northern Ireland, Neave sought to end, as he phrased it in November 1977, `’civil servants’ paradise`’, which existed under direct rule. Unfortunately, Neave’s assassination by the INLA robbed him of the opportunity to implement his proposals to reform local government in Northern Ireland.   New archival material from Neave’s personal papers and the National Archives of the UK iliuminate the events of 30 March 1979. Neave commenced his working day, like any other. Following breakfast, he left his at at Westminster Gardens, got into his powder-blue Vauxhall Cavalier saloon, and made the short journey to the houses of Parliament, the Palace of Westminster. His morning was spent preparing for the forthcoming British general election (scheduled for 3 May) and dealing with day-to-day constituency matters. Following lunch, he decided to stop for the day and return home to spend time with his wife Diana. It was in the members’ lobby that Neave held his last conversations, chatting to colleagues before crossing to the members’ exit and taking the lift to the five- floor underground car-park to pick up his car. At 2.58p.m., an enormous explosion engulfed New Palace Yard. Soon after, as Neave’s sole biographer Paul Routledge wrote, smoke was seen billowing from the smouldering wreckage of a Vauxhall car on the ramp leading up from the MP’s underground car-park. It was a “haunting image”, with sheets of headed house of Commons writing paper “blowing gently in the breeze”, recalled Lord Lexden, Neave’s former political advisor on Northern Ireland. Police officers rushed to the scene and came upon an unidentifiable man, dressed in a black coat and striped trousers. Initially, the victim was believed to be Alan Lee Williams, a Labour MP. In fact, in the car lay sixty-three-year-old Neave. Surveying the burning wreckage, the mangled frame of the car and the glassless windows, it was apparent that some type of bomb had exploded. “He’s still alive! Clear the area!”, a policeman shouted. Within minutes, an ambulance crew arrived to find the still unidentified figure, who was breathing, slumped over the steering wheel, his face burned beyond recognition. A doctor, nurse and firefighters soon joined the entourage, before Neave, with his right leg blown off below the knee, was eventually freed after half an hour. He was quickly taken to Westminster Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. It was too late. Neave died on the operating table. Thatcher received news of Neave’s murder while preparing for a party-political general-election broadcast at BBC headquarters. Her first thought was reportedly: “Please God, don’t let it be Airey”. When it was confirmed that Neave was indeed the victim Thatcher was described as “numb with shock”. Later that day she informed a BBC reporter that “… some devils got him and they must never, never, never be allowed to triumph, they must never prevail”. Following Neave’s murder, attention immediately turned to who had perpetrated this brutal crime. Initially, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) claimed responsibility. In fact, the real perpetrators were the INLA. Formed in 1975, with a pledge to establish a “republican and socialist” state, the movement had previously been known as the People’s Liberation Army, having sprung up in late 1974, when the Official IRA attacked members of the newly formed Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). At the time of Neave’s death, it was believed that the INLA had approximately 60 active members. The INLA basked in the publicity following Neave’s murder. A spokesperson for the terrorist organisation said that Neave’s assassination “had a tonic effect in Northern Ireland where there had been celebrations in Belfast,

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    John Imrie, MI5’s Flasher-General

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    Village has learnt that John L.L. Imrie, formerly of MI5 and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), died last summer without a whisper of his passing reaching the ears of the press. Imrie had the unique distinction of being the only British official ever linked to the Kincora Boys’ Home sex abuse scandal by name in the press during his lifetime. Imrie had served as an Assistant Secretary at the NIO in the early 1970s while the sexual abuse of boys at a number of homes in Northern Ireland including Kincora was rampant. Imrie did not provide evidence to the Hart Inquiry in 2016. Judge Hart, whose 2017 report is littered with factual inaccuracies, determined that MI5 had known nothing about the Kincora scandal until it was exposed by the media in January 1980. Imrie was one of many who – had he told the truth – could have put Hart straight. Privates on parade at victoria station Imrie was a convicted sex pest. In 1979 he went ‘cottaging’ in London, that is to say, looking for sex with random strangers in gentlemen’s lavatories. He was arrested at the gents at Victoria Station when, after an attempt to attract a sexual partner by displaying his genitals, he was charged with indecent exposure. The last thing MI5 needed in 1979 was a sordid scandal involving an MI5 officer who had served in Belfast. At this time the Kincora scandal was bubbling under the surface ready to erupt across National headlines. Howard Smith was D-G of MI5. He appreciated the full potential of the scandal because he had served as intelligence supremo in NI in the early 1970s when Imrie had been stationed in Belfast and the Kincora ‘honey trap’ operation was up and running. Two social workers had already provided details of the scandal to Peter McKenna of the Irish Independent. They had learnt about it from Richard Kerr, a resident at Kincora for whom they were responsible. Hence, Establishment pressure was exerted to drop the charges against Imrie for his performance at Victoria Station. The endeavour failed, proving yet again that MI5 is not always top dog when confronted by honest police officers and lawyers. Indeed, only last year we witnessed another example of this when the incorruptible Chief Constable of Wiltshire, Michael Veale, his Assistant Chief Constable Paul Mills, and their Operation Confier team reported that former British PM Edward Heath was a paedophile. (See Village October 2017.) The fact that Imrie was a figure whom Whitehall wanted to protect became public knowledge thanks to Private Eye magazine. On 17 August 1979 it reported that: “Up until the trial strong pressure was brought to bear by a variety of authorities to drop the charges in the national interest”. Ken Livingstone noticed a discrepancy in the way Imrie had been treated compared to the mauling Sir Maurice Oldfield had received after the exposure of his sexual predilections in 1980 Imrie was brought before the Magistrates’ Court at 70 Horseferry road, London, (now the City of Westminster Magistrates Court) where he pleaded not guilty to the charges preferred against him and submitted a preposterous defence maintaining that he had been caught short with a weak bladder and, fearing disastrous consequences on the train he intended to take at 11.10 to Sydneyham – which had no toilet – he had been compelled to display him- self to the gentlemen in the vicinity of the urinals. The presiding magistrate – another honourable individual who was prepared to do his job without fear or favour – concluded Imrie was lying since he had been arrested at 11.25, i.e. 15 minutes after the bladder-bursting train had departed. Imrie was convicted, conditionally discharged and ordered to pay £50 costs. Imrie was not the only senior intelligence officer arrested for misbehaviour in a public lavatory in London during this era. In 1984 Sir Peter Hayman, the reputed Deputy Chief of MI6, was also arrested for gross indecency, and convicted. Hayman was an abuser of Richard Kerr, details of which will be revealed in a later edition of Village. Sir Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, another pair of paedophiles from the ranks of both MI5 and the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring, were also members in good standing of MI5’s cottaging circuit. Imrie’s conviction did not deflect the upward trajectory of his career. After Kincora was exposed in January 1980, the RUC set out to track down the child molesters involved, or at least some honest officers in the RUC tried to do so before they were stifled. At least they managed to question Imrie before the vice grip of the cover-up took a hold. Against this background, it is hardly unfair to ask if Imrie was a pederast (i.e. an abuser of teenage males), if not an outright paedophile himself. Why else would the RUC have made inquiries about him? The answers to these questions may be found lurking in the pages of Imrie’s personnel file which gathers dust somewhere in the vaults of MI5. During the 1970s the RUC Special Branch officers who helped Joseph Mains, the Warden of Kincora, run the operation on the ground, are rumoured to have maintained a secret library of files as insurance in case anyone ever tried to prosecute them for trafficking the children involved to their abusers. The RUC Special Branch library may still be in existence and, if so, undoubtedly has bulging files on Imrie and others such as Peter England, also formerly of the NIO. The Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse in London still has an opportunity to demand sight of Imrie’s personnel file and that of england but time is running out fast. a career shrouded in mystery Inevitably, a cloud of mystery hangs over Imrie’s career. A little speculation must be forgiven. Despite claims to the contrary, he probably never worked for the Ministry of Defence (MoD). References to him in the Civil Service Yearbooks during the 1980s as an MoD employee were probably nothing more than a cover

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    The dark side of the media

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    The British media is aghast at revelations that a man called David Floyd was a Soviet spy. Floyd worked for the Foreign Office in the 1950s and was assigned to a string of Eastern European embassies. He confessed his treachery shortly after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald McClean to Moscow. Rather than admit to the Americans that yet another British official was a traitor, the British establishment hushed Floyd’s treachery up and MI5 set about finding a job for him. Malcom Muggeridge, the Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph, obliged – by providing a post for him at his paper. Muggeridge was an ex-MI6 officer, as was his editor, Sir Colin Coote. Floyd spent three decades at The Daily Telegraph where he reported on communist affairs and became known as ‘Pink’ Floyd. It is likely that having repented, he was obliged to do the bidding of MI5 (home Office) and MI6 (Foreign Office) to keep his post at the Telegraph. As such he joined the ranks of a legion of British journalists and broadcasters who have secretly worked for the various branches of British intelligence. The World is your lobster Lobster, a radical underground British publication, printed a special edition entitled ‘A Who’s Who of the British Secret State’ in the late 1980s pinpointing hundreds of British spies, a huge number of whom had worked at the Dublin Embassy and the Northern Ireland Office. Lobster’s research was based on published materials and can only have brushed against the tip of the intelligence-media iceberg. To its credit, it named about ten Daily Telegraph hacks including David Floyd. Lobster reported that Floyd had disseminated propaganda prepared by the Information Research Department (IRD), which was attached to the Foreign Office, during his time as a specialist on Soviet affairs at the Telegraph and also at the Daily Mail, a fact that the mainstream British media is now ignoring. Overall, the Lobster special edition gave an insight into the disturbing depth of the media iceberg. In particular, it listed more than 30 individuals with strong connections to the British intelligence community who had worked for the BBC. The corruption of the BBC as an independent body stretched from head to toe. One of MI6’s most senior officers, Dame Daphne Park, (the ‘Dragon Lady’) sat on the BBC’s Board of Governors. While in MI6 she had acted as an adviser and ‘sounding board’ to the Chief of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, on Irish affairs. Her father came from Belfast. At a lower level, MI5 had a team based in room 105 at the BBC’s HQ in London. They vetted journalists seeking entry to the corporation and promotion for those already employed by it. They also monitored the activities of broadcasters and producers. Don’t expect MI5 to divulge the content of the files they accumulated on the likes of Jimmy Savile, Russell Harty or the other paedophiles at the Beeb to the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse in London or to anyone else. Did all of this result in the BBC serving as an instrument of the intelligence community? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is an emphatic ‘yes’. The BBC’s now acknowledged role in assisting the CIA and MI6 topple the government of Iran in 1953 has become a severe embarrassment to it. The reverberations of that operation are still being felt in Iran today where no one trusts anyone from the BBC. This fact has been ignored by the British media in its ongoing coverage of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, formerly of the BBC World Service trust who is currently serving a term of imprisonment for allegedly attempting to undermine the present Iranian administration. The BBC’s toxic relationship with MI6 has done a lot more than bring it into disrepute. In 1983 Amnesty International declared that the “government-instigated killings in Indonesia … rank among the most massive violations of Human Rights since the Second World War. A conservative estimate of the number of people killed in Indonesia is 500,000”. The BBC helped create an atmosphere conducive to the slaughter. The British Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland from 1966 to 1970 was Andrew Gilchrist. His last post before Dublin was as Ambassador to Indonesia. At the time the British Government of Harold McMillan was involved in a conspiracy to manipulate events in Indonesia. In 1965 Gilchrist informed the Foreign Office that a “little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change”. Gilchrist proceeded to work hand in glove with the IRD. Together they planted stories in the media claiming that communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta. There was no truth in the allegation which was beamed into Indonesia by the BBC and helped provide justication for the massacre that followed. Commenting on Gilchrist’s propaganda success via the BBC, Norman Reddaway of the IRD commented: “I wondered whether this was the first time in history that an Ambassador had been able to address the people of his country of work almost at will and virtually instantaneously”. Network television MI5 and MI6 were like two giant octopi with tentacles which reached into every pore of the media. Frank Steele, the former head of MI6’s Belfast Station, became the Chairman of network television after his ‘retirement’ from MI6. Steele was a real charmer. He once told Peter Taylor of the BBC that some good had come of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972. The militant Loyalists, were “cock-a-hoop”, that the “Brits” had finally got “tough”, he opined; also that “it did us quite a lot of good with the more bloody-minded of the Protestant community. The good thing that came out of it was that it enabled Direct Rule to be brought in”. Irish Times The tentacles reached over to Ireland where Major Thomas McDowell, a former officer in the British Army, and Chief executive and Chairman of the Irish Times during much of the troubles was an ex-MI5 officer. Declassified UK files reveal that the Major, born in Belfast in 1923, dubbed his

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    Fine Male

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    Fiona McLoughlin Healy persists, where Catherine Noone left off in drawing specific attention to sexist bullying – in Kildare County Council and the Kildare and Wicklow Educational Training Board By Frank Connolly It must be have been less than reassuring for Fine Gael Senator, Catherine Noone, to know that her complaints of bullying by a male party colleague are were being dealt with by the chairman of the parliamentary party, Martin Heydon. He is among the senior members of Fine Gael who have all but ignored complaints of harassment by another female member and former general-election candidate over the past two years. Noone recently announced she would not pursue a formal complaint. As reported in Village over recent months, Fiona Mc Loughlin Healy, has spent many months trying to get the party to rein in some of those members who have subjected her to misogynistic treatment, harassment and isolation tactics as she performed her role as an elected member of Kildare County Council and as an unsuccessful candidate for Fine Gael in the 2016 general election. Among those who may have felt threatened by the ambitious, media-friendly, young business woman, who was head hunted to stand for the party in Kildare South, was none other than Martin Heydon who is the sitting TD and who is well got with former leader Alan Dukes and his wife, Fionnuala. Party members who did not want her to succeed managed to ensure that McLoughlin Healy was sidelined when it came to meeting and being photographed with senior party figures before and during the election campaign.  These included Simon Coveney, Michael Noonan and Frances Fitzgerald on their high profile visits to the Kildare constituency. Fitzgerald did assist McLoughlin Healy in launching her new constituency office but that was just weeks before the February 2016 election and too late to make much impact. In reality, she did not have the vital support of her local party organisation, with one officer claiming that her imposition on the ticket as a woman candidate was something “North Korea would be proud of”. From the outset, hostile FG members ensured that Heydon’s vote transfers would go to their political opponents in Fianna Fáil or Labour before they went to McLoughlin Healy and that is what transpired on election day. More serious for McLoughlin Healy, though, was the manner in which her complaints of harassment and mistreatment by a senior party figure in the County and former mayor, Brendan Weld, were handled by the Fine Gael disciplinary committee and national executive. McLoughlin Healy has annoyed some of her party colleagues by her persistent queries concerning finance, governance and procurement issues involving KCC and the Kildare and Wicklow Education and Training Board (KWETB), of which Weld is a former chairman. He resigned in late 2017 as a major controversy erupted following an investigation by the Comptroller and Auditor General into procurement issues at the KWETB. After she made a complaint to the party hierarchy in 2015 that Weld had convened a meeting of the leaders of all political groups on the Council where he proposed that they should block motions put forward by McLoughlin Healy, she claims that she was roundly ignored. Worse still, when the whip was removed from her at the instigation of some of her party colleagues on KCC in July 2016, the party failed  properly to investigate her complaints. Instead, she was hauled before the Fine Gael disciplinary committee in November 2016 and had her suspension extended by six months. Among those who presided over this particular indignity was national executive member, Barry Walsh, who has since resigned from his position in the wake of complaints by Dublin Bay South TD, Kate O’Connell, over his misogynistic tweets about her and other female politicians. In July and November last year, McLoughlin Healy wrote to Leo Varadkar to complain about how she had been treated and listed the various complaints she had made and how she had been the person punished rather than her alleged abusers within the party.   During the same month, she met justice minister, Charlie Flanagan, at a conference appropriately entitled “Integrity at Work” where the senior party figure urged those present to speak out about wrongdoing in the workplace and called for support for whistleblowers. When McLoughlin Healy blew the whistle to Flanagan about the mistreatment of her by party members in Kildare and the failure of the national executive to deal with her complaints he promised to look into the matter. She has heard nothing from either of them since. Party general secretary, Tom Curran, did examine some of the issues she raised but, after a promising start, the inquiry sank into the sand. Curran, however, did inform her, some nine months after she first raised her concerns, that the national executive had decided to deal with her complaints against Weld and another Kildare Councillor, Darren Scully, by appointing a group of Councillors from outside the County to devise protocols which could inform party members, including some of her adversaries who have been in politics for decades, as to proper procedures in holding meetings. “Such a protocol would deal with the calling of group meetings, conduct of such meetings, minuting of decisions and communications among members. The said group of Councillors would also devise a protocol covering arrangements with other political groupings including the minuting of arrangements entered into”, Curran wrote. Curran even invited McLoughlin Healy to join the group of party reformers. However, some six months later she has still to hear how the radical proposal to deal with sexist behaviour in the party has progressed. Bullying goes on in Fine Gael in the shiny and modern era of Varadkar.    

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    It’s Time For Leaving Cert Reform

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    It’s that time of year again. The CAO applications deadline has just passed and the mock exams are about to begin for almost 60,000 sixth year students. It’s also the season for commentary on the Leaving Certificate from employers, those in the media and staff in further and higher education institutions. The main criticism centres on how the exam narrows student experience of teaching and learning and prevents them from developing the analytical skills or the ability to think critically that they will need in the workplace, further education and in wider society. The combination of a high-stakes exam and a hugely competitive points system means there is little emphasis on a more rounded education. Supporters of the existing Leaving Certificate model say that it is a level playing field for students who, regardless of gender, ethnicity or social class background, have an equal chance of success. The evidence for this suggests otherwise, as the following research shows.   What do we know about the Leaving Certificate? The ESRI’s Post-Primary Longitudinal Study is the most in-depth study of student experiences in second-level education in Ireland. The research followed a cohort of 900 students in 12 case-study schools from entry to secondary school to completion over the period 2001 to 2008. The schools were selected to reflect key factors in how students experience their education, such as subject choice, streaming, and how much support was available to them. By zeroing in on the sixth-year cohort, using a combination of questionnaires and focus-groups, we gained a deep insight into student experiences of school in the months leading up to the Leaving Certificate exam. In any discussions around Senior Cycle reform, the findings are central to understanding the impact of high-stakes exams, such as the Leaving Certificate, on different groups of students. Here are some of the most important findings of our study that offer some guidance of what to avoid if or when the time comes to overhaul the system.   Educational Inequality High-stakes exams such as the Leaving Certificate reproduce social inequalities because of their disproportionately negative impact on students from lower-income homes. Many argue that students from middle-class households are more familiar with the dominant culture, and so they fare better academically. By contrast, the mismatch between home and school cultures is a disadvantage for working-class students. Our sample of students shows that their experience of their final year leading up to their terminal exam varies according to social class. In sixth year, students begin to find their work more challenging. To cope with this, more middle-class students increase the time spent on their homework and study, with some students spending over four hours per night on homework. Middle-class students are also more likely to take grinds or private tuition outside school to improve their results. In other words, these students appear to use their cultural and financial capital to invest in activities which help them to succeed. Figure 1 shows a clear social class gradient in taking grinds, with extra tuition being much more prevalent among all professional social class groups and farmer groups. The evidence clearly shows social reproduction, where the most privileged consolidate their position at the expense of the chances of social mobility of those at the bottom. Wealthier sixth-year students have more access to the cultural resources that are needed to make the transition to higher education. Even when we take into account prior performance in school, it is clear that attending a predominantly workingclass school will diminish your chances of going on to higher education. The interviews with sixthyear students highlight how those in middle-class schools tend to draw on insider knowledge gained from siblings and other family members in making their decisions about colleges and types of courses. In contrast, students in more working-class schools whose families have no history of higher education are more reliant on advice from guidance counsellors, teachers and their friends in making a decision. These findings point to the importance of the institution of the school in providing relevant guidance and advice to students who most need it.   Stress and the Leaving Certificate The escalation in workload and squeeze on free time have a particular impact on young people’s ability to cope, resulting in high levels of exam related pressure, stress and worry. Many reduce their participation in sport, even though those who continued to take part in regular schoolbased sports have lower stress levels than their peers. Girls experience much higher stress levels than boys, with almost 40 per cent of girls reporting losing sleep with worry and over 50 per cent feeling constantly under strain or pressure in the months leading up to the Leaving Certificate (Figure 2). Female students were also more likely to report losing confidence in themselves and having problems concentrating. The findings also show that stress may be passed from one student to another, becoming contagious among particular groups of (often high-performing) girls. One of the main drivers of this stress was the young people’s own desire to do well. Some of those interviewed spoke about the importance of the Leaving Certificate for their future, believing “it’s the biggest exam you’ll ever do in your life’ (Lang Street, co-ed school, working-class intake) and others felt ‘your whole life depends on it” (Wattle Street, boys’ school, mixed intake). But certain aspects of schooling also influence stress. Students frequently said that teachers who constantly emphasised the importance of the exams were a source of pressure. One student felt that “[teachers] just tell us how bad we are getting on instead of how good we are getting on, you know what I mean. That’s all they do” (Barrack Street, girls’ school, working-class intake). Describing their lack of free-time, another student said that “even the weekends, they’re telling you that you have to study the whole weekend as well” (Barrack Street, girls’ school, working-class intake). Interestingly, students who received more praise or positive feedback from their teachers had lower levels of stress, while some

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