Village Magazine Archives - Page 5 of 11

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Make sure of the facts

by Frankie Gaffney 5 April, 2018 0 Comments

There are two dominant interpretations of what’s come to be known as “call-out culture”. Many see it as an effective way of holding people, particularly public figures, to account for objectionable deeds and utterances that their status might otherwise have allowed them get away with. Social media has certainly played a massive role in an accelleration of accountability that is changing the way big organisations function. For the powers-that-be many styles of “cover-up” are simply no longer possible. One individual can go viral with their story in a matter of minutes. However, many others see call-out culture as trial by mob, a return to a medieval mentality, or puritanism in another guise – particularly when applied to individuals rather than institutions. Either way, I think – I hope – everyone can agree people shouldn’t be held to account for things they haven’t actually said or done. Yet over the past year it seems there is a disturbing new trend in the now conglomerated battlegrounds of media and social media. The values of call out culture – the idea that people should be made atone for perceived offence through group-shaming – are no longer a phenomenon of those periphery cultures largely concerned with traditional arenas of cultural theory: questions of gender, minorities, and identity. In 2017, call out culture went mainstream in a big way. I’m not referring to the Hollywood purge, which did aim to address gendered issues, and seems to have been long-overdue. The culture of the call-out – its language, style, mentality – started to intrude into new domains. The standard of offence became radically expanded, and the concept of proportionality (let the punishment fit the crime) went out the window. The most depressingly ridiculous example of this has to be the career ending decision of Barry McElduff to make a short video in a local shop, pretending not to be able to find a loaf of bread which was in fact balanced on his head. The video was posted the night before the, to be fair – fairly inauspicious – date of the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmills massacre. Kingsmills was one of the most despicable atrocities of The Troubles. A group of workers had been travelling on a bus home from a factory when they were stopped by what was ostensibly a British Army patrol. In one of the most poignant gestures of the Troubles, when the gunmen asked the single Catholic worker to identify himself, his Protestant co-workers tried to prevent him stepping forward, as they believed it to be a loyalist gang targetting Catholics. He identified himself nonetheless, but was spared. It was the 10 Protestant workers who were machine-gunned to death. Another man survived despite having been shot 18 times. After the the video was “called-out” on Twitter, condemnation of Kingsmills seemed immediately to become coterminous with condemnation of McElduff. Defence of McElduff was taken to be defence of the massacre. This is a fixture of this style of thinking – any query as to whether or not the accusation is accurate is taken as defence of the deed that has been alleged. Those who queried the likelihood the then MLA was performing some piece of bizarre Daliesque sectarian performance art, were met with rebuttals reasserting how wicked a deed the massacre was, and that it was no laughing matter. Surely true, but irrelevant to ascertaining whether or not McElduff was actually referencing Kingsmills when he put the loaf on his head. I watched in dismay as a number figures across the political spectrum – some of whom I’ve long admired – rushed to condemn McElduff, refusing to countenance the notion that this was an unfortunate coincidence. His own then ordained leader-to-be, Mary Lou-McDonald proved of the same mind-set as she condemned McElduff’s tweet as “crass”, “stupid”, and “unforgivable”. She of course had not condemned the numerous social media posts prior to this in which McElduff had balanced other comestibles on his head, although there were many – it seems to have been a running pantomime gag for the politician. When someone points me to the sectarian atrocity he was referencing when he took a photo with a Snickers balanced on his scalp, then I’ll believe there was ill-intent. It was instead his young daughter who was left to try and defend her father against the social media onslaught, explaining the photo was taken in the shop she worked in, the family always ate Kingsmills bread, etc etc, to absolutely no avail. Fixed thinking is another aspect of this praxis – no amount of evidence will exhonerate the accused, any defence offered is taken as further evidence of their guilt. What mattered to McDonald was not the facts of the matter, or loyalty to someone who dedicated their life to a political party she joined in the late 1990s, what mattered was assuaging the mob. And this has become the prime directive for many powerful people, not only in politics, but in the media and corporate world. This is regrettable, as another recurring theme is that the outrage is often so loud it entirely obfuscates the circumstances of the original incident. In another example, John Connors drew ire after tweeting that he personally wouldn’t call the police on someone for “robbing bread”. This was then completely conflated with events later that same day, when a stolen digger was used to smash and try to steal the safe from a Lidl which had earlier been looted of food and drink. No amount of clarification could convince many of the call-out crew that Connnors was not trying to downplay or justify an event that hadn’t even happened when he originally tweeted. Thankfully Connors is comparatively invulnerable to these tactics, unlike McElduff his career is not subject to the vicissitudes of political sensitivities. Lest anyone accuse me of being partisan, here’s an example of precisely the same style put to use in the opposite direction. When former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave died, RTE presenter Sean O’Rourke retold

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Capitalisteracy

by Harry Browne 4 April, 2018 0 Comments

Ireland has a dreadful, inequitable, dangerously failing healthcare system. The State’s answer is the likes of healthy Ireland, which runs a public campaign that, in essence, throws the responsibility for health on to individuals – who seemingly just need help from an initiative to ‘empower and motivate them’. February saw the launching conference – hosted by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) at Facebook Ireland HQ – of a new network, Media Literacy Ireland (disclosure: I’m in it). From the conference stage there was lots of talk about empowerment and not much talk exploring from whom it might be necessary to take power away. There was even a speaker from healthy Ireland, lest the analogy be missed. Don’t be surprised, then, to encounter an Irish campaign in the next year or two imploring you to the media equivalent of ‘eat your vegetables, get some exercise, don’t smoke cigarettes’. Something along the lines of ‘read the Irish Times, trust in Miriam, don’t tweet fake news’. Or maybe not. Media Literacy Ireland potentially has some of the hallmarks of industry-friendly campaigns like Drink Aware and Gamble Aware, plus the involvement of a regulator, the BAI, which might like a campaign that implicitly justifies light-touch regulation abetted by ‘greater public awareness’. On the other hand – and credit to its organisers for this – Media Literacy Ireland has come into being as a genuine network of interested researchers, activists, community-media practitioners and others. And most of us in it are not disposed to frame the problem with Irish media as one of public credulousness, to be addressed by offering tips for spotting ‘extremism’ online. Regular readers will know my view: that media (like healthcare) have a capitalism problem, and that everything from fake news to clickbait to inadequate investigative resources to Denis O’Brien ows from that basic source. But you don’t have to agree with me and name the underlying problem as capitalism to understand that there are structural causes for crises such as the one that erupted recently over Government ‘advertorial’. “I believe the Government is attempting to exploit the difficulties many local and regional titles are facing to promote their party interests”, said no less a media critic than Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley, the party’s spokesman on communications. (How sweetly old-fashioned that word ‘communications’ can sound as it grapples with the changing world.) Media literacy, if it is to be of any use, has to do more than implore us to look for the little ‘special feature’ tag on the top of a piece of paid corporate or government puffery, then to regard the ‘journalism’ below with due scepticism. It must mean understanding ‘the difficulties’ for all journalism that operates in the current market, especially one in which technological change has accelerated existing trends toward blurred lines, and in which advertisers have alternatives to local and regional newspapers when it comes to reaching eyeballs. If the most poignant aspect of that brief, quickly snowed-under ‘Ireland 2040’ crisis was the image of the Taoiseach issuing guidelines for labelling advertorial content – guidelines of which the most callow intern in a local newsroom should surely already be aware – we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that media have been operating at the edges of such guidelines for decades, for the benefit of advertisers looking to buy a little ersatz editorial credibility. How can this fail to be a lesson about how fragile, at best, any such credibility has become ? As the media may or may not have told you, global research shows trust in media is in tatters – media are less trusted than governments, NGOs, businesses – and Irish people are at the mistrustful end of the distribution. In this context, media literacy can hardly consist of legacy media saying ‘trust us, not them’. What can be done ? (Yes, short of getting rid of capitalism.) Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows what a frightening prospect it would be to try to earn the public’s trust with transparency and accountability about our editorial practices. On a daily basis, contingent and incomplete information is transformed into definitive statements of ringing certitude. That’s one sausage factory we don’t want you to see inside, especially since the work often consists of sticking our label on someone else’s meat. The irony is that the technology often over-simplistically blamed for creating the journalism crisis has long offered tools for remarkable transparency, tools that most journalists have chosen to use only in limited ways. What if hyperlinks in journalists’ stories led not to dull pages of cross-references or to Wikipedia, but rather to images of documents and notebook pages, audio of interviews, pictures of the journalist in the field ? It can be done and has been done, but the experiments in transparency of the early web – notably the extraordinary 1996 investigative series by the aptly named Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury news, about the CIA’s involvement in the cocaine trade – have rarely been repeated, let alone built upon. Such transparency would foster media literacy without the onus being placed on the audience. Whether it would foster trust is, of course, a matter of what audiences thought of the practices revealed by transparency. Interactivity and social media mean we have some tools whereby that reaction could be tested and gauged. Dublin Institute of Technology, thankfully, is prepared to put its money where my media-literacy mouth is: it’s funding a project that will will use the Liberty, a student- produced ‘hyperlocal’ newspaper and website for Dublin’s Liberties area, to innovate in the area of journalistic transparency. We’ll employ social media as a forum for sharing ‘the story behind the story’, with tweets, Facebook updates, Youtube videos and Instagram posts that unveil aspects of the production of journalism, from notebook pages to editing history, from who-was-interviewed to who-refused. A doctoral-level researcher will be responsible for implementation, monitoring, community engagement and evaluation of this project, which should help readers to understand better the process of news construction, and help journalists-in-training become accustomed to

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The cost of costs

by Kieran Fitzpatrick 3 April, 2018 0 Comments

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’

by Anthony Coughlan 30 March, 2018 1 Comment

‘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

by Stephen Kelly 29 March, 2018 0 Comments

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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Dumb greens and unions

by Michael Smith 27 March, 2018 0 Comments

One of the things historians may dwell on is how the key December 2017 and February 2018 eu drafts of the Brexit agreement came to take the forms they did. It is all the more important since the inept UK Government of Theresa May failed to produce its own draft, though it might have been expected to do just that. Of course that suggests a lack of seriousness on the UK’s part about the agreement and perhaps that the EU Drafts may not go as far as we, and the EU, think, but that is a separate matter. In particular it is interesting that the drafts – the first a draft political agreement, the second a draft legal agreement with the same substance enshrine the EU’s rules for the customs union and single market but not its rules for multifarious other spheres of eu activity that bind the UK while it remains a member of the EU: most notably on the environment, labour and consumer affairs. The body politic and commentators have missed the following: the UK could become the trading neighbour from hell by ignoring EU environmental, health, labour etc standards – exploiting the competitive advantage over the eu you’d expect from a country saving money by keeping these standards low. It is interesting is that so many dogs have failed to bark. One might have expected the British trade unions to be shocked at the potential dangers to workers’ rights if EU standards are abolished and they become subject to the whims of a hawkish Tory party. But they didn’t because, like the British Labour party of course, they can only think of the superior standards Jeremy Corbyn will bring to the sphere. This is self- absorbedly naïve. Corbyn will not be in power for ever and the Tories won’t be going anywhere. When they return they will not have to observe the comfort blanket that EU standards provide. We know well the frustrations of the Tory party over the years with what used to be known as the EU’s ‘Social Chapter’. Nothing is as certain as that they will not observe its prescripts on issues like maternity and overtime if they return to power in some post-Brexit outturn. There are occasional insights into this thinking but mostly the protagonists remain mute. Surprising too that the Irish unions have made so little noise about it but then the Irish Congress of Trades Unions and SIPTU are both challenged by having members and remits both North and South of the border. You’d think they’d be on the warpath. Environmentalists and Green parties have said little perhaps because typically they languish far from the vehicles of power and tend not to be as forensic or aggressive as the circumstances here demand. Village tried to provoke the establishment media, most of RTÉ’s and the Irish Times’ Europe, Northern Ireland and Environment correspondents etc (by twitter) into recognising their failure to cover this issue but – to a man – they’re too complacent, and probably too immersed in politics and economics, to think about social and environmental rights and rules. The issue is clouded as terms like “a common regulatory area on the island of Ireland” and “a single regulatory space on the island of Ireland…” in themselves don’t do justice to the fact that there are important areas that will no longer be regulated by the EU. It’s also a bit difficult for many people to get their heads around as “regulatory alignment” of Northern Ireland with the EU is only envisaged as a ‘backstop’ if the UK can’t strike a more wide- ranging deal with Ireland and if a technological border solution proves impossible. Of course with only a year left to Brexit it’s looking increasingly like neither of the two contingencies will come to pass. The easiest way to avoid the backstop is for the UK as a whole to remain in the customs union and the single market. But the UK government insists this will not happen. Because the contingencies are uncertain they were left out of the draft Withdrawal Agreement which is a strictly legalistic document, thought they had appeared in the December political draft – and they remain politically possible. It’s complicating too that the Tories and Brexiteers so vociferously think the common regulatory area described in the EU draft goes too far rather than not far enough – though of course they are referring essentially to economic matters, not to environmental and social matters about which they may care little. It is clouded because it may well be that no deal is possible. It is important to note that, despite occasional diplomatic pleasantries, there has been little progress on the central conundrum of the negotiations: if the UK leaves the EU trading bloc, then a customs border is needed either on the island of Ireland or in the Irish Sea. One is ruled out by the EU drafts, the other by the UK. Theresa May asked Brussels if Britain could stay in the bits of the single market that she likes and exit the bits that she does not. The EU doesn’t have to, and won’t, run with that – no matter how self-righteous Brexiteers fume. On this basis it is very possible the EU’s draft terms form no element of the (WTO) arrangement that the UK falls back on. And it is clouded because confusingly the Draft Withdrawal Agreement refers, in its Article 12, to the Environment. Most people (not you dear reader) glaze over a little when contemplating the diktats of a customs union and single market. The customs union is an agreement among members to charge the same import duties as each other and usually to allow free trade between themselves. The single market guarantees the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour – the “four freedoms” – within the European Union. You couldn’t for example have goods which comprise some material, imported into Britain on the basis of a tariff-free agreement between Britain

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Lone Woulfe

by Frank Connolly 22 March, 2018 0 Comments

The Attorney-General, Séamus Woulfe, failed to disclose a “false” and “misleading” order made by the former Manager of Wicklow County Council (WCC) when he compiled a report for the Government on the controversial compulsory purchase of lands in 2013. Woulfe, who was a senior counsel at the time and a prominent member of Fine Gael, was asked by then environment minister, Phil Hogan, in early 2013 to carry out a review of the proposal by WCC to compulsorily purchase lands at the Three Trout Stream, at Charlesland near Greystones. In the course of his review, Woulfe was provided with substantial documentation by WCC, including a copy of two Manager’s orders setting out the reasons for, and putting into legal effect, the CPO. The Manager’s orders, dated November 2003 and November 2004, stated that the Council required the land for social housing as it only had an “existing land bank of 0.5 hectares in the Greystones area”. The orders were signed by then Wicklow County Manager, Eddie Sheehy. This statement was “false” and “misleading” according to submissions made by a barrister acting for Wicklow Councillor, Tommy Cullen and former Councillor Barry Nevin in their successful High Court defamation action against Sheehy and WCC last year. In her detailed judgment, Justice Marie Baker found that the Councillors had been defamed by Sheehy and the Council in a press release issued on the day the Woulfe report was published in April 2013. She found that the content of the release showed that Sheehy and the Council had acted with malice and improper purpose towards the Councillors. Woulfe had concluded that “almost all of the concerns raised by the Councillors” which led to his review were “not well founded or are misconceived”. This comment was repeated in a statement issued by Hogan and the Department of the Environment and in the press release issued by the Council following publication of the Woulfe report. However, the Council went further and accused the Councillors of wasting up to €200,000 in public monies by raising their “allegations” which prompted the commissioning by Hogan of the Woulfe review. Judge Baker found that the Woulfe report was “not evidence that the Councillors were wrong or acted in bad faith” in raising their concerns. She found that the Councillors had been wrongly accused of being responsible for “wasting money at a time when money was scarce” and awarded them damages of €20,000 each. She also said the claim that there was a €200,000 loss of public monies was an exaggeration on the part of the Council. Woulfe was paid €62,000 in fees for his work. In her judgment, Judge Baker also referred to the extensive documentation available to Woulfe for his review, but withheld from the Councillors, including the two Manager’s orders and various reports which confirmed that the Three Trout Stream lands were prone to flooding and unsuited to social housing. She specifically referenced the documents which proved that the Council owned a site of over 10 hectares (22 acres), zoned residential for housing and adjoining the Three Trout Stream lands. In his report, Woulfe also referred to the existing lands owned by the Council in the Greystones area. However, he did not point out the discrepancy between this fact and the statement in the Manager’s orders that the Council only had a landbank of 0.5 hectares in the area. The November 2004 order formed the legal basis for the CPO and the seizure of lands from the landowner and another local man who used the land to graze horses. Although Woulfe was called as a witness for Sheehy and WCC he was not asked about the incorrect assertion in the Manager’s orders. the plaintiffs only obtained copies of the orders after Woulfe had given his evidence. In his closing submission, Mark Harty SC, acting for the two politicians, said that the Manager’s order stating that the Council had a landbank of just 0.5 hectares in the area was “false” and “misleading”. “This unequivocal statement in an official statutory document was simply false. Certainly, it was misleading”, Harty submitted. “The situation is more serious given the core basis of the decision to confirm the CPO by an Bord Pleanála which is that it satisfied that the Council had established the need for housing and the need to buy land for housing”. It was also the basis for the State’s decision to seize the land from two citizens against their wishes. Judge Baker also raised questions about the conclusions made by Woulfe in his report, in particular in relation to his suggestion that “almost all of the concerns (of the two councillors) are not well founded or are misconceived”. Judge Baker said that “it was not true to say that on the information they had that the plaintiffs raised unnecessary or irresponsible concerns without cause”. The High Court judgment by Judge Baker overturned an earlier decision by the Circuit Court in April 2014 which dismissed the defamation claims. In January, Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, asked the Housing and Environment minister, Eoghan Murphy, if he would now remove the Woulfe report and the statement issued by his predecessor Phil Hogan when it was published, from the Department’s website in light of the High Court judgment. The Sinn Féin deputy suggested that Woulfe did not “establish the fact of his statement that ‘almost all of the concerns [raised by the named members of Wicklow County Council] are not well founded or are misconceived’”. McDonald also called for the establishment of a new independent investigation into the CPO of the lands at Charlesland in 2004. Murphy replied: “The public statement of my predecessor and the associated report were not the subject of the High Court judgment…The case in question concerned a statement made in a press release issued by the Council on 23 April 2013. The plaintiffs brought proceedings against the Council claiming that the last paragraph of the press release was defamatory towards them. This paragraph stated that a delay in sanctioning a loan to purchase a

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NIhillism

by Mark Kernan 6 March, 2018 0 Comments

It is forty three years since the now notorious Glenanne Gang murdered three members of the Miami Showband in July 1975. Two of the band survived -Stephen Travers and Des Lee. The Gang was made up of serving RUC and UDR personnel, plus members of the UVF. The leader on the night, the infamous Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson, was at the time in command of the UVF’s mid-Ulster Brigade. He was an ex-British-army soldier. Journalist David McKittrick attributes as many as 50 killings to Jackson, making him one of the most lethal, and most secretive, serial killers of the late 20th century you’ve probably never heard of. The gang is said to have been responsible for 120 murders, including those of the Reavey brothers and the O’Dowd family in January 1976. the next night the IRA murdered ten innocent Protestants at Kingsmill, another sectarian obscenity in Ulster’s murder triangle. Jackson was linked to the Miami Showband killings by the now defunct historical enquiries team in its 2011 report on the 1975 massacre. Jackson’s finger prints were found on the homemade silencer of a Luger gun used in the attack. The report also stated that Jackson claimed he had been “tipped off’” while in custody in May 1976 by an RUC Detective Superintendent, and that he “… should clear as there was a wee job up the country that I would be done for and there was no way out of it for me”. But Jackson didn’t “clear” anywhere; instead he went on to kill many more. Despite widespread rumours about Jackson’s killing career at the time and his virtual impunity from punishment, he remained practically untouched by the forces of law until his death in 1998, apart from a seven-year conviction in January 1981, of which he served only two. That may mean he spent two weeks per killing, in jail. John Weir a former member of the RUC and member of the gang, who was convicted for murder in 1980, called him probably the “best operator” during the troubles. In 1999 Weir made detailed allegations in an affidavit about security-force collusion, making disturbing suggestions about how Jackson and the Glenanne gang’s murderous rampage was not only known of, but also tolerated by, the security forces. Weir’s allegations were regarded by the 2006 Cassel’s report, an independent panel of international lawyers commissioned by the Pat Finucane Centreto look into collusion in the North, as credible. Others found him believable too, including the BBC’s ‘Spotlight’. The fundamental question though is: were Jackson and the Glenanne gang not only tolerated but actively orchestrated by elements of the British intelligence and security apparatus (MI5, Military Intelligence, RUC Special Branch) as a proxy counter-terror gang? For years it has been alleged that Jackson was a protected agent of the RUC’s Special Branch. The 2003 Barron report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, quoting British army whistleblower Colin Wallace, said as much. In his affidavit Weir implicated RUC Chief Inspector Harry Breen, who served as a sergeant in Newry and Banbridge in the 1970sas having direct knowledge of the Glenanne gang. More incredibly still, he claimed that Breen was supplying weapons to the gang through a far-right loyalist organisation called Down Orange Welfare. In a 2015 documentary on collusion BBC journalist Daragh McIntyre claimed that, while discussing the Glenanne gang, Jackson was “protected by one of the most senior police men in Northern Ireland”. Breen was later killed by the IRA in 1989. If he was referring to Breen, and given the geography, timing and Weir’s claims, it is very plausible that he was, it is an extraordinary allegation worth stating again – clearly. Was one of the most notorious sectarian killers in the troubles protected as a strategic asset by one of the most senior policemen in Northern Ireland ? Whatever about the alleged protection, Jackson enjoyed practical immunity from prosecution all through his killing years during the 1970s and 1980s. Why that was the case has. But more importantly, the deeper question is who or what was protecting, or directing, or encouraging, the senior policeman ? As early as 1974 Colin Wallace, quoted again in the Barron report, said that Jackson and other leading Mid-Ulster UVF members “…were working closely with SB (Special Branch) and Int. (Military Intelligence) at that time”. Journalist Paul Footand Yorkshire TV’s 1993 documentary ‘The Hidden Hand – The Forgotten Massacre’ both suggested convincingly that Jackson and his gang, with members of the Belfast UVF, perpetrated the Dublin Bombings a year before the Miami massacre from their Glenanne base. The final report into the bombings published in March 2004 signposted obliquely that, “The possibility that the involvement of such army or police officers was covered-up at a higher level cannot be ruled out; but it is unlikely that any such decision would ever have been committed to writing”. As many have also pointed out, it is inconceivable that James Mitchell’s farm in Glenanne, South Armagh, the gang’s well known and notorious epicentre, would not have been under constant surveillance given what was common knowledge about the gang at the time in security and intelligence circles. Mitchell was an RUC reservist. John Weir claimed that the house was constantly watched by both RUC special branch and military intelligence: “basically everybody knew what was going on there…military intelligence was more often in the house than I was” yet to be seriously rebutted. Unfortunately the Barron report was signicantly handicapped from the beginning in its search for the truth. The British government is said to have over 65,000 potentially relevant files about the bombings, of which only a handful were ever handed over to the Inquiry. Writing of the murky, devious and labyrinth world of counter-insurgency in the North, Wallace, in a letter dated August 1975, printed in the Irish Mail on Sunday, on 10 December, 2006, stated that, ”it would appearthat loyalist paramilitaries and Int/SB members have formed some sort of pseudo gangs in an attempt to get paramilitaries on both sides to kill each other, and at the same time, prevent any future

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It's different up here

by Patricia McCafferty 20 February, 2018 0 Comments

Justice is not a motif found emblazoned around Donegal. Its outing accounts for much in my home town of Bundoran and elsewhere in the county. In particular the power the late sean McEniff had over local governance is very unsettling – through politics and wealth. He was Fianna Fáil’s longest-serving councillor and perhaps its richest man. His hotel empire extended to ten hotels countrywide including the Skylon in Dublin and the Great Southern in Bundoran. Journalist Gemma O’Doherty and others have alleged that McEniff interfered with the Garda investigation into the death in 1977 of six-year-old Mary Boyle, but it is the power his empire wields over the slot machines that have for fifty years dominated and blighted once-elegant Bundoran that particularly concerns me here. McEniff’s empire traces its foundation to slot machines. McEniff was by far the largest slot machine operator in the town, and ignored the law: his slots would make big pay-outs, just enough to keep the key punters, most of them poor or old – or both, hooked. In 2009 Bundoran town council adopted a submission from the slot-machine operators – McEniff being the largest – to the Department of Justice – as its own submission. the submission had been adopted by the council on the same day at a special meeting which had only three councillors present. The quorum for any meeting was four councillors to be present, though nobody called halt. The submission said Bundoran’s 1,000 machines were “an integral part of the overall Bundoran product, both on and off the season, and a key reason why visitors continue to be attracted to the town”. Growing up in Bundoran, I remember from a young age the dangers of gaming machines. A friend of my mother came down from the North on the bus with her wages on a Friday and rushed up to play gaming machines in the town. By Sunday evening she had to ask my mum for money to get back home, after losing everything. The 2008 Department of Justice report on ‘regulating Gaming in Ireland’ states “the committee is aware of the type of gaming machine which accepts €500 notes. The Act of 1956 provides a maximum stake in gaming machines of 6d and a maximum prize of 10 shillings. The Act is not being enforced and that brings the law into disrepute”. The Garda Síochána, the Revenue and the Council have long since abjured responsibility for enforcing the gaming laws. A 1985 ‘Today Tonight’ programme on RTÉ focused on Law and Order in south Donegal, particularly Seán McEniff’s gaming. Donegal county council sued RTÉ for defamation for what it said about the inappropriate relationship between Donegal [county] council and the Garda but a legal settlement saw it agree to remove the programme, on the steps of the High Court. One of the last convictions for illegal gaming in Bundoran was in 2000 after Charlie Bird did the exposé on illegal gaming here. The solicitor for McEniffs Bundoran Limited said to the Judge at the time that “Charlie Bird should be prosecuted” as he had played an illegal gaming machine. Poor Sean died last year but his empire remains in the family. I recently objected in the District court to renewal of the gaming licence to McEniffs Bundoran Limited. The first Judge and McEniffs’ solicitor removed themselves from the case, the solicitor coming off record after I raised a concern of conflict of interest. I objected as a member of the Public, though I have had my travails with sean McEniff when I was Bundoran’s traffic warden. When I objected that gaming machines accept notes while the 1956 act maximum is 20 cent, the solicitor for the McEniffs Gerry McGovern did not deny it. Instead he just noted that revenue issued certificates and that gardaí and fire officers had no objections. “If there was a difficulty, the gardaí and revenue wouldn’t be long moving in”, he said. But that is the core of the problem. As to my objection that there were too many machines in Bundoran, Judge Denis McLoughlin said that would only be valid in case of a new application. McGovern said it was an application that had been renewed umpteen times and hadn’t been changed. And in Donegal it seems that is the main thing. The Revenue’s webpage states that it up to the District court to “limit the amount of the stakes and prizes and limiting the number of gaming machines”. But Judge McLoughlin was not interested. I have been before the District, circuit and High Courts on occasion, always representing myself. In 2012 in Donegal Circuit Court, Judge Keenan Johnston highlighted that as a lay litigant “She`d be entering the court with one hand tied behind her back”. The dysfunctionality of Donegal from policing to planning to electoral fraud to unemployment to paedophila is now well documented. Sometimes you feel fighting for justice here leaves you very much alone. Patricia McCafferty