For this episode, we have asked our friend and contributor, Greek journalist and filmmaker, Alexis Daloumis, to sit in for an interview with Luke Sheehan about his newly released Documentary Belki Sibe.
Back in 2015 Alexis travelled in northern Syria to Rojava, to join the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces and soon was deployed on the frontlines as a member of the International Freedom battalion.
His documentary depicts with unprecedented candour and rawness his eighteen-month journey through war and revolution, during the advances and victory against Isis, the liberation of Raqqa in 2017, until then, the Islamic State capital and stronghold.
The documentary also includes new footage and interviews from his subsequent visit in 2021 to the same places and cities where he once fought.
Now, as a journalist, his camera turns to scrutinize civil life and institutions under the autonomous Kurdish administration.
In light of recent developments, we asked Alexis to talk about the making of his documentary, his experiences on the frontlines and that of his comrades, as well as the potential dangers that loom over the area and its people, now that United States has withdrawn its support to the autonomous Kurdish administration in favour of the newly established Syrian Central Government after the fall of the Assad’s regime.
Jonathan O’Brien of City Kayaking says they began taking litter out of the River Liffey ten years ago. In that time he’s seen a change in the river.
City Kayaking was launched in order to offer people access to water activities in Dublin, but in the beginning there was a lot of what we used to call ‘legacy litter’ in the Liffey. It would have wildlife underneath it, or bottles would be full of barnacles. We don’t get that anymore. All the litter now comes out pretty clean, quite new. In the summer we take it out so quickly because we’re on the river so often. A McDonald’s bag will blow into the river and we’ll get it out before it’s even wet. Whereas ten years ago people got used to looking at a lot of trash when they saw the Liffey.
Today Jonathan pulls cans, plastic bottles and a few take away containers from the water while motoring up the river. ‘Small amounts of effort every day go a long way,’ he says.
The presence of Styrofoam is a recurring issue. Jonathan doesn’t know where it comes from, but he says it is as common as the seagulls: ‘there’s no pattern to it. It’s just there.’
Jonathan reckons most of the litter comes from the city itself, from along the quays, the boardwalk and new Dockland developments:
We can very easily predict where rubbish is going to be. Daily cleanups are just part of our routine now when guiding kayaking tours. For us, removing litter is a small step to leave the river cleaner than we found it. We’re also chipping away at negative perceptions people may have of the Liffey.
Sadly, Jonathan has encountered little expertise in Dublin City Council for managing this waterway: ‘I don’t see a department in there who are getting their teeth stuck in.’
Jonathan and his colleague Jamie have also been conducting tests on behalf of Dublin City University to monitor water quality. Over the past few years they have measured elevated levels of phosphate and nitrate, which washes downstream from farms and comes locally from urban runoff.
This nitrate and phosphate residue is invisible to people walking Dublin’s quays but Jonathan sees its effect on the river’s flora: ‘effectively it fertilises the river. Those blooms of algae grow. They grow very fast, and then they die off. And the secondary effect is that the ecosystem gets hammered.’ This he thinks is ‘a ticking bomb.’
Nonetheless, ‘ Ireland has never had heavy industry. We’ve never had coal or steel in any significant quantities, so we’ve never had the slag and the downstream problems with that.’
Thus, unlike major rivers in other European countries, such as the Thames the Rhine or the Seine, which have had heavy industry situated along them for centuries, the Liffey doesn’t have a long-term legacy of heavy metals or arsenic.
Originally Jonathan’s business found it far easier to get tourists onto their kayaks than to get Dubliners on board.
He now recognises that ‘Dubliners were always looking at the river and thinking it was filthy.’
But drawing attention to the problem of litter was a double-edged sword:
The last thing we needed to do was reinforce the bad reputation the Liffey had as a dirty river. There was a lot of litter, but litter in itself doesn’t make for bad water quality. It’s just litter. It’s like saying that the soil is bad because there’s rubbish on the surface. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. So we never spoke about it. We never tweeted about it. We never put pictures of it out. It’s only recently we’re kind of confident enough that the city’s attitude has changed to the water, that we can say, you know what, collectively we can clean it up.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused an abrupt drop in tourism and City Kayaking’s business, but this period also sparked Dubliners into rediscovering the Liffey and their local green spaces. Jonathan says they’ve seen more locals showing up to go paddling and it’s a trend he wants to continue. He finds the global attitude has changed:
The average Joe is much more environmentally aware than they used to be. They might not know exactly how to help, but they are still supportive of the idea of a sustainable environment. Floating the Liffey is an experience that brings things into focus — the beauty of nature alongside a few stray bits of litter, and our capacity to improve things. We’re not just kayaking, we’re opening minds.
In September 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency releaseda report demonstrating that water quality declined nationally between 2016-2021. This included a downgrade in the ecological status of the Liffey estuary from “satisfactory” to “moderate” due to phytoplankton, or algae blooms.
With thanks to Jamie Brunkow for editorial assistance.
To meet ex-prison officer Sean O’Brien for the first time I drove through a sparse landscape of family homes, outside the town of Clara in County Offaly. Miles of narrow roads ran through cold and wet pasture, bog, and occasional patches of woodland, typical of the Midlands.
On June 14, 1988, Sean O’Brien disclosed to the Department of Justice various wrongdoings he claims to have witnessed over his years of service in Portlaoise Prison. During his time as a prison officer, between 1981 and 1989, the Northern Troubles were raging, and what went on in the prisons was generally hidden from public view.
Behind locked doors, staff and prisoners alike endured a parallel conflict, requiring physical and psychological resilience.
As is already in the public domain, there was a “Heavy Gang” among members of An Garda Síochána operating at that time. There was also a group of prison officers who went by the same name operating in Portlaoise Prison, and which enjoyed the tacit support of prison management. They were notorious for ‘unconventional’ methods, embedded in the prison system.
Unsafe and alienating working conditions, widespread bullying from top prison officials, as well as being pressurised, Sean claims, to produce a falsified report about a shooting incident in which he was involved, all left their marks on his mental health. Like many others that served as prison officers, he still suffers from those experiences.
Portlaoise Prison.
The Prison
The Portlaoise high security prison complex is one of the oldest penitentiaries in the State. Built in the 1830s, it is still fully operational. Regarded as one of the toughest prisons in the world, it contains the notorious E-Block: a wing dedicated to dissident Republicans, predominantly ex-members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the INLA.
Parallel to the prison’s official organization, during the Troubles prison officers had to understand and operate alongside the Republican’s own strict command structure. In the case of the E-Block, the prisoners’ relations with staff were filtered exclusively through the highest-ranking members of the PIRA. In 1988 that was Martin Ferris, who went on to become a T.D. for Kerry North between 2002-2020.
The history of Portlaoise Prison is chequered with multiple escape attempt, riots and blanket hunger strike campaigns. Allegations of prisoner mistreatment by a Heavy Gang first appeared at the Prison Officers Association convention of 1984.
On that occasion a delegate from Portlaoise Prison, Larry O’Neill told the Prison Officers’ conference in 1982: “If Hitler wanted generals today, he would find plenty of them in Portlaoise. After the war the Nazis said many of them were doing their duty and that is what the management in Portlaoise are saying today”.
Away from the public eye, the working conditions of prison staff, especially South of the Border, have rarely been covered. An official inquiry was carried out in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, but for reasons that remain unclear, Sean O’Brien’s testimony was excluded after he had initially been invited to testify. The resulting report falls short of exploring the extent of the human rights abuses that seem to have occurred behind the prison’s walls.
Irish Press, May 25, 1988.
PO Sean O’Brien
From a working-class family, Sean O’Brien began his career as a prison officer on February 16, 1980, aged twenty. The ‘job’ consisted of dealing with the most problematic, and in some cases dangerous, individuals in Irish society. Due to staff shortages, this work was mostly given to young and inexperienced men in their late teens or early twenties.
The training was basic, lasting just a few weeks, and involved a few meetings, active service in different prisons, physical exercise, and simple inductions on the regulations of the institution. None of this offered much value to someone beginning their work in the State’s prisons.
Sean clearly recalls spending his twenty-first birthday on duty with colleagues; as well as when he had to wear riot gear for the first time during a protest, despite having received no training for what to do in that event.
He also recalls working through the so-called ‘dirty protests’, when officers were forced to use power washers to clean inches of prisoners’ faeces off the walls; and when he was involved in, and witnessed, prisoners receiving unwarranted strip searches, punishment beatings and enduring conditions which he describes as contrary to the Geneva Convention.
After one such strip searches, he recalls the Governor at the time, Bill Reilly – a man with a reputation for being particularly hard on Republicans – telling him and the late Chief Officer Brian Stack, who was working with him at the time, to “bait them again,” after Stack told him they had completed the searches. Sean recalls being reluctant to obey the order as his arm was exhausted from already meting out such beatings.
As a result of such distressing episodes, Sean claims that many prison staff turned to heavy drinking to cope with the stress that the ‘job’ entailed.
We cannot ascertain the extent of the human rights abuses in Irish prisons at the time as a veil of secrecy, or outright omertà, still hasn’t been lifted. In all likelihood, many episodes have never been made public, as it would involve the State accepting liability for its shortcomings.
What prison officers endured as a consequence of this environment ought to become public knowledge to ensure it does not re-occur, and so that the necessary redress process is put in place to assist victims of the State’s past failings.
Flash
In 1988, Sean O’Brien was living in a housing complex built by Portlaoise prison for officers and other employees a few yards away from the main gate.
Every morning on May 18, after the customary substantial bowl of porridge and large mug of coffee, the shift began as usual with a security search between the first two gates. This was followed by a meeting at the ‘Parade’, the canteen room, where all the officers on duty lined up to be assigned their positions and tasks for the day by the Duty Chief Officer.
That morning a crowd of protesters and foreign media had gathered at the main street entrance in front of the prison on the Dublin Road. Patrick McVeigh, a member of the PIRA – known as Flash – was scheduled to be released that day. However, he was expected to be re-arrested by the Gardaí as soon as he stepped outside the main gate, before being extradited to Northern Ireland.
Tensions were running high in the prison at the time, and the issue had garnered considerable public attention. McVeigh was a political prisoner, and extradition laws did not cover prisoners with such status. Nonetheless, the extradition machine was in motion, as well as another machine attempting to find a way to save McVeigh from the extradition.
As Flash left the building, a crowd of his sympathisers greeted him at the gate, along with media reporters and a Garda van, with doors open ready to receive the newly freed prisoner. Why there was no other way to handle the exchange remains unclear.
Sean had elbowed his way in through the unfriendly crowd a few minutes before McVeigh was escorted to the Gardaí waiting for him outside the gate. From there he would be conveyed to Court to finalize the extradition.
At this point McVeigh somehow evaded his escort and began running along the inner perimeter of the outer wall in the hope of jumping out on to the Dublin Road.
Contrary to the Governor’s orders, his Deputy Mick Horan physically pushed Sean and illegaly ordered him into a shoot-to-kill area of the prison operated by the Army, shouting, “after him”. Sean obliged along with prison officer Frank Muldowney.
McVeigh had earned the nickname Flash from his speed of foot. He ran along the inner perimeter of the outer wall, reaching the place where, from the outside, accomplices were hanging off the wall to lift him out, where a motorbike awaited.
It was then that Irish Army personnel, stationed on the roof of the prison at all times, shot a sequence of five shots, which can be clearly heard from RTÉ footage of the scene.
Sean felt the reverberations through his body from the flying bullets which, he says, only narrowly missed him. On the ground a few metres away, shots landed in a puff of smoke. Adrenaline overcame fear, and he managed to stop McVeigh before he could leap out on top of the wall.
With the help of Muldowney, Sean brought him into the custody of two Gardaí, and he then made his way into the main prison building to resume his shift.
Apart from O’Brien’s testimony, as of November 2022, we came into possession of two additional eye witness accounts of the events.
One is from Martin Ferris himself. In a letter he writes:
From where I was watching in recreational room E3, a number of bullets hit the space between Officer O’Brien and McVeigh. Pat McVeigh attempted to climb the farm wall onto Dublin Road with the help of some supporters from outside and certainly, would have succeeded only for Officer O’Brien grabbing his legs and preventing his escape.
The second source says he witnessed bullets hitting the ground and bits of tarmac flying up around Sean, and that the distance from Paddy McVeigh was seven feet. However, he wishes to remain anonymous, unless an official inquiry is carried out into why this version of events has been consistently denied by the Department of Justice, the Prison Service, and the Department of Defence.
Cork Examiner, May 25,1988.
Half Sheet and the Governor
Not long after Sean had caught his breath, he received an order from the radio room of E-Block to report to Governor Ned Harkin’s office. As Sean was on his way there he recalls being praised and cheered by some colleagues.
He had just prevented an escape. That would surely lead to a commendation. Instead what welcomed him as he walked into the Governor’s office was a freshly typed false version of that morning’s events, which Sean was ordered to make a copy of in his own hand-writing, right then and there.
That version of events – insofar as Sean recalls – would have protected Deputy Governor Mick Horan, the officer in charge that morning of the release (and re-arrest) of McVeigh, and would attribute most of the blame to another prison officer Paddy Dunne, who was by then already being suspended, as a suspected accomplice to the escape.
Sean refused to comply then, and on dozens of occasions during subsequent days.
According to O’Brien’s protected disclosure:
The purpose of the Prison authorities ordering me to collaborate with their account as to ACO Dunne was to have him dismissed as not to shine a light on Deputy Horan who would have whole responsibility for Prisoner McVeigh escort on that day. Deputy Horan did not chase after the escaping prisoner. This is what Governor Harkins was covering up.
In response to Sean’s refusal to provide a false testimony, threats of dismissal such as “leave your uniform at the gate on the way out” from the Governor Ned Harkin became more and more frequent.
From then on he was not allowed to work on the landings where the prisoners were held. This meant that he was left doing nothing during shifts; waiting in a backroom for the end of the day to arrive. Day after day.
In that situation the first indications of deteriorating mental health became evident. This included frequent nightmares and strong paranoia, which started to make his days unbearable.
Sean knew that he wasn’t meant to catch McVeigh, and besides it would be normal to expect animosity towards him from some Republican prisoners. On top of being bullied for carrying out his job, he sensed a target on his back.
As Martin Ferris, in the aforementioned account, dated 12 November 2022, writes:
Tensions were high within the prison in the aftermath of this incident, and I, as the spokesperson for the republican prisoners, suggested to prison Governor Harkins that Officer O’Brien should not return to the prison landings until things calmed down. I personally never saw prison officer Sean O’Brien within the confines of Portlaoise Prison from that day forward.
It was at that stage that he asked the Prison Officer’s Association Representative Noel Touhy for assistance. He was told that it was not possible for the prison to dismiss him in that fashion. The Association was already pressurising the Department of Justice to reinstate Paddy Dunne, and trying to bring to light the dynamics at play in the attempted escape.
The Department of Defence consistently denied that the shooting could have endangered an officer on duty, as reported by the Cork Examiner on May 25, 1988.
Cork Examiner, May 25, 1988.
As recently as July 2022, Brian Stanley T.D. and Chair of the Public Accounts Committee asked the Minister for Justice “if there are any files being withheld for national security reasons that relate to the attempted escape of a prisoner on May 18 1988 at Portlaoise prison.”
The Minister responsed: “I am advised that the record in question was previously considered as not suitable for release by the Irish Prison Service.” (05/07/2022, Question number: 539, Question Ref: 36042/22)
The Office
On June 14, 1988, Sean O’Brien attended a meeting with Noel O’Beara in the Department of Justice in Dublin in order to: ‘[…] make them aware that the “Prison Administration” in Portlaoise Prison were ordering me to make a false report surrounding Assistance Chief Officer (ACO) Paddy Dunne’s involvement in the escape, to have him dismissed.’
Prior to the meeting, Sean O’Brien says O’Beara shook his hand and congratulated him, stating words to the effect of “you are going to get a medal, what type we don’t know, as one does not exist yet. The equivalent for the Gards is a Scott medal. You are the first prison officer to capture an escaping PIRA prisoner.”
But by this stage O’Brien was feeling his options were running out. The office to which he had been invited felt wrong from the moment he entered. He found no sign of personal effects – a family portrait, postcards, a sporting trophy or anything of that sort – such as one would expect in a regular office.
Despite a suspicion of being recorded without his consent, Sean gave as many details as possible, as well as disclosing the many wrongdoings he had witnessed during his years of service.
Essentially, he blew the whistle on what his superiors wanted him to do, and the wrongdoing within the prison system, while O’Beara listened and took notes. The meeting ended with a promise the matters would be investigated.
Sick Record
After this meeting, Sean O’Brian patiently waited for a change in his circumstances. Then he went on sick leave on September 12, 1988, for a stress-related illness. At that point his previous poor attendance record, in part due to a certified injury he had received while on duty, suddenly became an urgent matter within the Department of Justice and Prison Service.
Sean had already been referred by the Prisoner Governor and the Department of Justice to a psychiatrist (who also wishes to preserve his anonymity). He visited for the first time on September 8, 1988. This resulted in the first suggestion of a diagnosis of post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD), following the shooting incident.
Nonetheless, behind the scenes, in a correspondence between the prison welfare office and the Department of Justice, his dismissal was being considered; while the full diagnosis of PTSD, resulting from a consultancy sought by the Prison Management itself, was completely ignored.
Correspondence which we have obtained includes a letter dated February 13, 1987, one year prior to the shooting, where the prison management tell Sean O’Brien that although the Minister had considered his dismissal, he also ‘noted the improvement in your sick leave record.’ It also states that his ‘late attendance has been unacceptably high since September 1986,’ and that his case will continue to be closely monitored.
Any management is likely to deal with a poor attendance record, but Sean O’Brien’s prior record seems to have been used to inform a response to his attendance after the shooting incident. It blatantly ignores the diagnosis of PTSD, or any other duty of care mandate that the prison service welfare office would have, or ought to have, had at the time.
A letter, dated March 29, 1989 directly from the Department of Justice, outlines the reasons why it cannot any longer accept the standard of the previous evaluation of a ‘marked improvement on an already atrocious pattern of sick absence.’
It continues by saying: ‘The result, if such a standard became the norm, would be to push the cost of absenteeism in the Prison Service from its present £3m. (approx) per annum closer to £4m.’
Thus, despite referring to sick absence, there is no sign of any attention to his medical condition to be found in this letter, which reads like a preparation for a dismissal.
In a subseqent letter, dated April 14, 1989, O’Brien’s dismissal was actively being sought. The prison’s Personnel Section writes to the Chief Medical Officer that:
It would be helpful if a definite medical opinion could be obtained as regards to the absences relating to the officer’s metacarpal injury as the orthopaedic surgeon does not appear to have totally ruled out the possibility that this injury could be a recurring one.
This injury occurred in 1983 and since then he had required recurring treatment and suffered constant pain. Thus, some of the absences being used to prove his poor record seem to have been a direct consequence of this injury.
The letter ends with a pointed request:
Perhaps you would confirm that Officer O’Brien does not have an on-going health problem.It would be appreciated if you would also say if you agreed that absenteeism is the problem in this case.”
Apart from the recurring physical injury, the year between the shooting incident and his dismissal is constellated with absences, arguably caused by his deteriorating mental health.
Debilitating insomnia, extreme paranoia, crippling anxiety, flashbacks; all these symptoms have led to a diagnosis of PTSD, but again there’s no sign of a duty of care wherein the psychological damage received while on duty is recognised.
Instead, on May 23, 1989, at approximately 3pm, a knock arrived on the door of O’Brien’s parental home. It was Senior Prison Officer Mick Horan and Garda Sergeant Kevin Ford. They are looking for Sean and Hugh O’Brien (Sean’s brother, also employed at Portlaoise Prison) to tell them that they were both being dismissed. They are asked not to turn up at work the following day. His parents are instructed “to tell Sean to leave his uniform at the gate”.
So Sean O’Brien and his brother were dismissed from the Irish Prison Service with a verbal notice delivered to their bewildered parents, without any official document being issued by the Cabinet of the Irish government.
Following this we discover from the letters obtained from St. Patrick’s Hospital that the prison’s chief medical officer John Geoghegan did not even see Sean O’Brian before his dismissal had been finalized. And we find more indications that his mental health injuries suffered while on duty had been completely ignored by the Prison Service in considering such a dismissal.
The Void
At the beginning of my interaction with Sean O’Brien, I timidly inquired about the long period running from his dismissal in 1989 to 2017, when he was approached by the former President of the Prison Officers’ Association P. J. McEvoy, who instructed a solicitor to pursue his requests for a Duty of Care under the 1956 Regulations, and recognition for his actions on duty, at a point when Sean’s mental health inhibited him from pursuing the case.
During that period, Sean O’Brien claims he was not in the right mental state to follow up on his case. It seems he let it slide. What he had endured by then in terms of psychological distress he is reluctant to recollect, apart from to liken it to hell.
After his dismissal, an alter ego emerged in his personality. All we know is that this alter ego opened a security firm with his brother and that at some point in 2007, he landed a helicopter onto the roof of a shopping centre, in his own words, to “collect a set of keys”.
The Missing File
The proceedings against the DOJ that began in 1991 were interrupted in 2008 when O’Brien’s solicitor, David O’Shey was placed under arrest.
Then, O’Shey’s documents, including those in relation to the case of Sean O Brien vs The Department Of Justice no.14045P, came before the Law Society.
Since then the file has disappeared without a trace.
It was only in 2017 that he was able to instruct another lawyer to pursue the case. By the time he served a notice of an intention to proceed, in 2019, twenty-six year had elapsed.
Thus far, efforts made by his new solicitor, Kevin Winters to find the file have been unsuccessful.
In the Court of Appeal Judgement, delivered on 27/01/2022 we read that ‘witnesses for the defence (Minister for Justice) cannot reasonably be expected to give evidence that could be regarded as reliable after such an interval.’
The Minister of Justice again denied many of the claims made by Mr O’Brien, including that he recaptured a prisoner who escaped and that he suffered PTSD after nearly being hit by bullets shot by the Irish Defence Forces, which also continues to deny responsibility.
Over the last few years, the case has gained a certain amount of media coverage, mainly concerning the dismissal and sick days. However, very little attention has been paid to Sean O’Brien submitting a protected disclosure to the same Minister of Justice two months after the shooting incident denouncing grave misconduct.
Nor has anyone considered that although O’Brien’s attendance record was certainly not exemplary – 682 days absent between 1980 and 1989 – some of these were due to an injury on duty which occurred in 1983: a fractured hand, and subsequently from 1988, symptoms of a psychological nature.
It would undoubtedly be difficult for any court of law to establish precisely what happened well over thirty years ago in such a complex and volatile environment, but this story seems to contain another lesson.
For many whistleblowers who feel that they have been wronged one of the most difficult challenges is simply to let go. To move on. The obsessiveness associated with their behaviour is often due to a lack of closure.
That Sean O’Brien is still pursuing a judgment in his favour thirty years on from his dismissal reflects this condition.
Only after an attempt is made by a State agency to delve into the historical context of these events can a sense of closure be achieved. A proximate attempt to do so by the Prison Service is what can be found in the Final Report of the Portlaoise Prison Staff Welfare Programme.
This a project carried out by the Prison Service, which recorded the testimonies of almost two hundred Prison Officers who served between 1973 and 1989.
Here we read that:
Portlaoise gave rise to practices that could only have existed in that particular context and the challenges it presented
…
In that time Knowledge and awareness of the lasting impact of occupational stress, of role ambiguity and role overload and of requirements for healthy, sustainable work practices have been transformed. Such knowledge and awareness were not widely available at the time. It is important to avoid judging the past solely in terms of present-day knowledge.
Thus, from this official source we learn that the working conditions were, indeed, unsuitable and outright damaging to officers.
It is reasonable to say we should not cast moral judgement on past practices during war time, but it still only seems fair that there should be compensation available for breaches of a duty of care that applied at that time.
Some respite from the silence that still engulfs this traumatized country should be available. Such is the long tail of war. You still see it slithering through the streets, long after the last shots have been fired.
Regarding the shooting incident, it is instructive to examine the Irish Army’s Rules of Engagement from this period (below). This differentiates between warning and containment shots. The first, as one would expect, are ordinarily fired into the air, posing no danger to anyone’s life, while the second ‘will be fired near to the person concerned,’ but ‘NOT’ ‘into locations where innocent persons would be endangered.’
Based on Sean O’Brien’s account, corroborated by other witnesses, it would appear that these Rules of Engagement were breached, including a prohibition against firing at a target that is running away.
The Irish Army’s Rules of Engagment/ Use of Force in effect in 1988.
Conclusion: Whistelblowing in Ireland
The title image for this article, was taken towards the end of our first in-person encounter. The names of the dogs are Squirt at the front, Maxine on his right arm and Freddy – who was the most protective of Sean as I recall – Beauty hiding in the background and Mighty Man, named in honour of Noel Tracy TD. Treacy has always been very supportive of Sean. Apparently he always started and ended a sentence with “Mighty Man” when talking to anyone.
Having the company of dogs has been an important coping mechanism for O’Brien, while he deals with the effects of PTSD to this day.
We can say that the context of the Troubles legitimately required a certain level of secrecy. There’s obviously more then meets the eye to the events that ultimately led to the non-extradition of McVeigh, which Margaret Thatcher herself was very keen to achieve.
The Department of Defence, to this day, refuses to release the records in relation to the shooting incident, requested through a Freedom of Information Request in 2016, saying:
The release of this information may potentially compromise the security of the Defence Forces in preparation for peace and security operations at home and overseas.
Meanwhile, the first legal file in relation to O’Brien’s case has disappeared without a trace.
Whistleblowers suffer repercussions all over the globe, but Ireland’s reputation for mistreatment of whistle-blowers has worsened inexorably.
In 2021 Ireland’s Protected Disclosure Act undertook reforms to comply with a European Directive. Even then, according to some stakeholders, the new legislation still falls short of providing adequate protection from the inevitable repercussions of such a radical act.
Beyond the legal frameworks, better outlined in David Langwallner’s article “Whistleblew in the face”, which appeared in Village Magazine in November, 2021, the corrosive effects on a whistleblower’s mental health is often overlooked.
All too often, when an instance of whistleblowing reaches the mainstream media, these negative mental health consequences are used implicitly to discredit the disclosures. One of the first questions the media tends to pose to whistleblowers is “Why did you do it?”; followed by: “Would you do it again, knowing the consequences you would face?”
Both questions, somewhat deviously, shift the focus away from any wrongdoings that have been exposed to the action of whistleblowing itself; subjecting the whistleblower to moral scrutiny. Those kind of questions seem designed to suggest a hidden motive for why an individual has become a whistleblower.
Being subjected to such questions – including from oneself – might lead most of us to assume a defensive posture. Over time one may construct an elaborate justification for one’s action, as if the disclosure was itself a crime, and not, only, a testimony to a crime.
With thanks to Ben Pantreyfor editorial assistance.
The bomb might be dropped any time soon now, apparently.
The end of all ends, a nuclear war, looms among the narratives of where Ukraine and Russia’s war might end. Timothy Snyder warns in this regard that a nuclear bomb ‘would make no decisive military difference’; adding that looking at ‘the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking. Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.’
As much as we can agree with this statement, and as much as it is nothing but a prediction for one of the possible futures, other geopolitical analysts such as the Italian Lucio Caracciolo warn of the ease with which the nuclear option has entered public discourse, the talk shows and political debate.
What now seems evident after Ukraine’s successful counter offensive in the north, and the ongoing systematic bombardments on its energy infrastructure, is that hostilities are continously escalating and we should prepare for a new phase in this war. If the unspeakable does happen, it will coincide with a new era of warfare. Maybe the last.
How we develop historical awareness, and a particular narrative, depends more and more on which side of the Iron Curtain 2.0 we fall. For all our apparent enlightenment, time and again, we show ourselves incapable of building diplomatic bridges without brandishing the Sword of Damocles.
The Bomb might be dropped anytime now. But a cultural bomb, thenormalization of the possibility of nuclear war, has already dropped from the virtual skies that we carry in our pockets; conveying an endless stream of images, produced by and for everyone, but curated and filtered by a few.
No one can say when it started dropping. Maybe with the invasion of February 24, or maybe 2014. Some say even 2001. Regardless of the date, we join other generations of humans that must now worry about the existence of nuclear weapons; of the apocalypse.
The first shockwave comes in the form of war’s inevitability as soon as Russia’s tanks began rolling down towards Kiev; until the last moment many, including me, were unconvinced the troops amassed at the border would ever march. The taboo of a land war directly involving nuclear superpowers was still intact.
We are generally shielded, or not even exposed, to pictures revealing the true horror of warfare. For the most part, what is put in front of us depends on the political agenda of warring superpowers or various forms of commodification of suffering. One wonders whether we are now even capable of autonomously creating our own memories; or freely perceiving the present and past, never mind the future under such conditions of conditioning.
The effect of an endless flow of images, tailored and auto-curated to arouse emotions – residing alongside our most intimate obsessions – requires acknowledgement. Their capacity to induce fear and trigger desire are the preferred tools of contemporary propaganda and such tools are used by both side of the Iron Curtain 2.0.
Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race."https://t.co/gtJMu7XUA3
The political consequences of a lack of cognitive freedom in response to weaponized imagery and information are not new in history but, as with every historical constant, is a question that ought to be explored.
The times we live through are what the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi calls the Global Civil War, where:
‘[…] relations among individuals are wired and subjected to automatic connections: political power, therefore, is replaced by a system of techno-linguistic automatisms inclined towards the automation of every space of life, cognition and production.’
For example, how we react to the pictures of Nord Stream II’s bubbles or the Crimea Bridge strike, depend mostly on which conveyer belt of opinions and positions (“the techno-linguistic automatisms”) we find ourselves exposed to.
The same goes for how we perceive the veracity of the images of the massacre of Bucha, as well as Russia’s depiction of neo-Nazism in the Ukrainian armed forces, which was previously extensively covered in our media as well.
Voraciously consuming images of war – of a particular war – I often consider the extent to which images are being used to perpetuate suffering rather than end it.
Just like in the times of COVID-19 – if your memory stretches back that far – it now takes a great deal of discipline to regulate the right dose of news consumption, as the induced anxiety can be overwhelming. Never mind the moderation necessary to digest and discuss it; or put ourselves in another’s shoes.
With a diabolical enemy in our sights, such as our culture demands, as well as a defined timeline of events, wherein we struggle to look past February 24, 2022, we weary of discussing strategic failures – reckless dependence on Russian gas – and broken promises – NATO’s expansion eastwards despite undertakings – over the last two decades by Western governments.
Are we capable of comprehending and reconciling Russia’s (not just Putin’s) very real phobia around encirclement – something that history teaches us is hundreds of years in the making – alongside Ukraine’s legitimate path to independence, which also goes back centuries? Is there now scope for rational dialogue?
Recently, one of Italy’s most prominent newspaper, Il Corriere Della Sera, published the names and pictures of ‘influencers’ who, allegedly, the Kremlin benefit from. Labelled ‘filo-Putinisti’, among these are independent journalists, academics and politicians, treated as ‘enemies of the people’.
It is not very different to how Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have been treated by the Irish Times.
To call for a strategy that would include negotiation with Putin’s regime would be to go against what Italian journalist Nico Piro calls the ‘Pensiero Unico Bellicista’ (Unique Bellicose thought current). Unequivocaly taking NATO’s side is what counts. Whoever doubts the legitimacy or even the sanity of ‘interventionism’, even in the closet, is accused of aiding and abetting the enemy.
How is it that we have been shielded from what has been happening in the Donbass since 2014?Fourteen thousand died in brutal trench war raging at the edge of Europe. Now, suddenly, we feel the heat of the battle across Europe, and simultaneously wonder whether we will have sufficient energy to heat our homes.
Let’s keep pretending Putin’s invasion came as a surprise. Countries don’t invade each other anymore. Nuclear superpowers don’t engage in land wars anymore. Right?
The mnemonic silence over the war in Donbass, has morphed into a cacophony of coverage in the wake of a fully fledge invasion, filling, for months, the void left behind by the receding pandemic, as ominously Europe faithfully follows the dictates of a declining US Empire.
Actually, it seems that as much as rest of the world is preoccupied and even annoyed with Putin’s invasion, it is now giving the finger to the West, after centuries of exploitation.
It seems incredible how the US, apparently so tired of being an Empire, and on the retreat elsewhere, is still willing to unleash the most pervasive and subtle of propaganda campaigns, suppressing dissenting opinions in countries it sees as vassals, perhaps in order to preserve itself, or what is left of its power.
This is no time for negotiation is the message, or better still, there was never time for any. Negotiation cannot occur with a genocidal dictator, or can they?
The propaganda operates not just to change the narrative of the past; it makes one forget that there was a past; or that the past is always brought to us through competing narratives on the battlefield of time and discourse.
Now, with our sense of time destroyed, and with that an opportunity to discuss, and possibly negotiate, we become more and more ready, and even eager, to kill one other. This is the paradox of a time we had dared to call the “End of History”.
The Dust
To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. Susand Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
As Susan Sontag remind us, representations of war and suffering have a long history and contain codes of production and consumption: From Goya’s print series The Disasters of War; to Fenton’s Crimean war pictures; Picasso’s Guernica; and pictures of the 9/11 terrorist attack exhibited in the exhibition ‘Here is New York’.
Francisco Goya Disasters of War – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Nonetheless, exposure, or really, the immersion in the infosphere, where the weaponization of images and messages is unprecedented, cannot be compared to any of the previous decades of warfare.
There is now an overwhelming revival of violence in this all-pervasive info-sphere. The message of its inevitability seems a deliberate imposition to distract us from those past and present voices with a lot more to say than a fleeting frame destined to be rapidly replaced in our compulsive doom-scrolling.
At the same time, it devalues those frames, often taken by the rare photojournalists who are able to go where it really matters – at great risk to their lives – and actually convey what their subjects are unable to. Often because they are dead.
The curated, over-mediatic exposure of one tragedy instead of another is not really a novelty in the way we use and experience imagery of a current context of interest, but, as well explored in a recent podcast by the Economist, we live in a radically more transparent battlefield.
The abundance of what is called Open Source Intelligence data, of which photography is a key component – its democratization as with the latest Iranian protests – is to be welcomed, even if it is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, we can say that we have never had as many tools available to us in the search for truth. On the other, the concept of truth, or what is truthful, has never eluded us to such an extent as in recent times.
In an attempt to clear the view amidst the Fog of War, we create individual, atomized fog, which follows us wherever we go.
Little wonder that in our so-called liberal-democratic hemisphere we have no idea how to bring democratic oversight to social media platforms; even leading some of us to cheer on the idea of Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, taking control of such a decisive device for dialogue and confrontation as Twitter.
No amount of moderation, fact-checking, algorithm-driven-filtering or surveillance, can keep pace with the endemic disinformation present in our feeds; as much as no amount of critical thinking, rational argumentation and corroboration can prevail over a propaganda machine built right inside our minds.
“We have no doubt we will prevail.” As the war in Ukraine enters a critical new phase, the country’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska, has become a key player—a frontline diplomat and the face of her nation’s emotional toll. https://t.co/DCXWYnzAsKpic.twitter.com/wcaY5IFGHf
There’s little doubt that photography carries the popular connotation of bearing truths: ‘the image doesn’t lie.’ But we don’t need not look too hard to work out how easy it is it for a photograph, and its caption, if not to lie, to deceive. If not to manipulate, then to be as alluring as a Vogue feature can be.
Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska before a grounded Antonov plane and surrounded by fierce special forces is, in my modest opinion, a photographic masterpiece.
Having said that, going through Rachel Donadio’s piece, and Leibovitz other pictures I recognise how instrumental this is to the current war struggles. Via the gloss of what many desire – to be a celebrity or to become a hero – the image of a presidential couple of a devasted country becomes something we aspire to.
With each blast we feel more and more impotent at creating the conditions for dialogue to occur. Is it possible that neither Putin’s Russia and his allies, nor the West, composed of thirty NATO members supporting Ukraine is willing to take a step back from the brink?
How are we to create the conditions, if the dominant message is one founded on our utter impotence, because it’s always the other sides fault?
It is often been said that impotence breeds violence, and psychologically this is quite true, at least of persons possessing natural strength, moral or physical. Politically speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power […] and that violence itself results in impotence.
If we are actually talking about the possible, and rational, use of the most powerful weapon available it is exactly because power is slipping away from the Western alliance, as much as from Putin’s regime.
Nothing new in that as the re-allocation of power is one of the preoccupations of history itself, seldom unaccompanied by violence. But what does it mean when the existence of nuclear arsenals capable of causing our premature extinction are carelessly normalized as facts of life? Like any other storm. Like any other crisis. Like something we’ll remember. You see the path? And where it leads?
In 1955, Bertolt Brecht published a book called Kriegsfibel or War Primer. It was a collection of photographs, cut out of newspaper and magazines, which he re-captioned with his own verses.
Such a document now exists not only thanks to Brecht’s artistic sensibility, but also because new generations survived to look at it again.
“What are you doing, brothers?”-“An iron tank”. “And with these slabs here?”-“Bullets that will pierce those Iron armors”. “And why all this brother?”-“To live, nothing else”. From Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel
Mario Draghi’s ‘technocratic’ government has fallen, or so we’ve heard. Now it feels like we are facing into the most important election in generations.
And as we approach two months of political campaigning in the middle of the busy tourist season (I suspect there are plenty of cancellations in 5 star resorts…) this could be the right time to ask: how are elections won nowadays. Is it only the votes that counts? Or does social media superiority, which is nothing less than the understanding of current communication trends and technology – often with outside interference – actually determining most democracies’ fates?
With these questions in mind it is worthwhile reminding ourselves how we’ve got here.
I can’t recall a time when Italians believed a government would last its full term. Italy’s apparently chaotic political life has become a cliché, like how beautiful everywhere is to visit, but try living there…
Despite these bleak figures Italy’s economic recovery after Covid-19 was promising, but after the fall of the 5 Star and Democratic Party-led government thanks to a typical palace coup – compliments to Mohammed bin Salman best friend, the Saudi-funded, Matteo Renzi – again a capable leader is needed.
At that point, the authority of a brilliant surgeon was called for in a code red emergency to save the country from spiralling doom. Someone who it was claimed saved the Eurozone from the apocalypse with three words. Someone whose position as Prime Minister seemed like a personal sacrifice, almost a burden to endure in the name of patriotism. In an atmosphere like a coronation, Mario Draghi came to power after the most prestigious career one can think of at the highest echelons of world finance and international banking.
In order to avoid early elections, President Sergio Mattarella called “Super Mario” to the rescue, with a mandate to form a broad coalition of national unity. I remember when Draghi first addressed the Senate as Prime Minister: “Today unity is not an option, it is a duty”, he said, as he prepared to lead one of the broadest coalition ever attempted in Italian political history.
He indicated that Italy is doing just fine, will survive the operation, but that a long recovery period lay ahead. We just needed to be reasonable and support a government of “National Unity” where almost all the political forces were expected to support it from both chambers: Almost 90% from the chamber of deputies and 85% from the senate.
Encompassing Matteo Salvini’s Far-Right Lega, Enrico Letta’s center-left Democratic Party, among others, along with a dash of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Populist 5 Star Movement.
In case you are wondering, there is no definitive consensus as to whether the 5 Stars is left or right wing. This changes depending on where the criticism is coming from.
Its leader, and deposed Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, had to share the cabinet table with Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva – the main instigator in the downfall of the previous government.
What could possibly go wrong?
The only remaining opposition came from a few small parliamentary groups, mainly independents, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, which is now the strongest far right political party. They are not fascist, or so they say, but it isn’t difficult to find nostalgic sympathy for His Excellency Benito, or even Adolfo, among followers, right up to some of the leadership, as was revealed by last year by FanPage, and is well explained by David Drover in the NYT.
Mario Draghi was, and still is, the leader of a party that does not exist yet he retains extensive sway over how Italy is governed. One can almost recognize a cultist aspect projected by his persona, and now by his ‘agenda’, which has filled the void of political vision formerly filled by both left and right factions.
Now a strange mix of old faces ranging from Enrico Letta, to the former leader of the 5 Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio – and even some ex members of Forza Italia – are his disciples available to spread the word.
In very simplistic terms the unified message that triumphed with Draghi’s government is that the country would not survive without a broad, caretaker government, led by who knows, and that the vast majority of civil society has a moral duty to support him, “Whatever it takes”. Says who? Is that NATO on the line?
The current crisis can be traced to what was the largest party in parliament – until its recent split – the 5 Star Movement, simply attempting to present certain amendments to the bill “Aiuti” or “Help”, to the government, that they deemed necessary in areas such as welfare, tax, ecology; as well as attempts to reconsider Italy’s role in the context of the war in Ukraine.
A range of polls since Russia’s invasion reveal that about half of the Italian population does not support weapons being sent to Ukraine. It’s only natural that political factions seek to capitalize on popular opinions, as much as it would be naïve to believe foreign powers, be they Russia, China or NATO, wouldn’t be attempting to exert influence, especially at a point such as this.
This approach by the 5 Star Movement was apparently ignored, leading to the government’s fall, and to the Lega and Forza Italia seized the opportunity to call for an early election.
It begs the question: why shouldn’t the largest party in government demand reforms for which it has a mandate?
This current crisis could actually be a long delayed awakening of a political system which has remained comatose, at least since Berlusconi’s time.
It’s just a shame that an unholy trinity of Berlusconi’s FI, Meloni’s FDL and Salvini’s Lega may have the numbers to become Italy’s next government coalition. This is the equivalent of Le Pen winning in France, and will surely destabilise all of Europe.
He’s Back! Berlusconi alonside Giulio Andreotti in 1984.
By the way, I did say Berlusconi. Guess what? He’s back! With a pledge to plant one million trees, because his party has always been environmentally conscious after all. It’s a bad case of United States of Amnesia that Italian would consider Burlesconi suitable for the presidency of the republic.
Then again, while he was Prime Minister Conte secured an EU Recovery Package worth about €220 billion, which is expected to flood Italy’s economy with money in the coming years. Who else should we trust to manage this if not the same people, or their disciples, over and over again?
At all times, we may safely assume, with the approval, or background manoeuvring, of a foreign actor.
Is that NATO (or the US government) on the line again there?
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Feature Image is a work by Office of U.S. House Speaker from https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1446579056720416773.
A month on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European states, including Ireland, are faced with some of the most significant challenges in decades. How should the West react? With humanitarian aid? With issuing a welcome to refugees? With weapons? With direct military interventions such as imposing a ‘no fly zone’ and therefore potentially extending the conflict beyond Ukraine’s borders?
It’s a pity that the European Union has in effect forfeited a potential diplomatic role, due to the decision of some member states to supply arms to one of the belligerents (albeit the victim of aggression), to the extent that diplomatic efforts at securing a settlement are being hosted by Turkey under Erdogan, which is not exactly a country renowned for protecting civil liberties or democratic values.
It’s also a pity that the popular uproar greeting Putin’s invasion has not been seen in the past few years in response to other conflicts, including the war in Yemen which has raged, without an end in sight, since 2014.
The pictures shown here are of a protest organized by theIrish Anti-War Movementin an effort to raise awareness of the tragedy Yemenis are still experiencing, as well as a call for Ireland’s neutrality or non-alignment to be maintained. They hope instead that the State can play a major role in leading necessary diplomatic efforts to resolve conflicts around the world, including the war in Ukraine.
There now seems to be a concerted efforts on the part of the political establishment to push to formally abandon the country’s neutral status, already strained by past and current use of Shannon Airport by NATO forces.
The Irish Anti War Movement @IrishAntiWarMvt are holding a protest at 6PM at the Dáil in solidarity with Ukraine for peaceful solutions to the war and to defend Ireland's neutrality.
Patricia McKenna addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO, Dublin.Crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO, Dublin.Ibrahim Hashem addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO, Dublin.Crowd marching at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in towards the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.
Crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 marching towards the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Dáil Éireann, Dublin.
crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Richard Boyd Barrett TD addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Abdulaziz Almoayyad addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Ivana Bacik TD addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.
The HSE, and health care access more generally in Ireland, has never been under such scrutiny as has been the case in recent times. From the handling of the pandemic to the chaos witnessed during last year’s cyber attack, we now face recent revelations about utter confusion in the handling of funds and a recruitment crisis, exposed in leaked tapes published by the Business Post.
HSE CEO Paul Reid also admitted in a recent News Talk interview how, particularly recruitment issues, were “not going to be solved in one year.”
It is reasonable to assume that addressing structural dysfunctions in health services will take time, but we often forget the real impacts, and often irreversible damages on our most vulnerable members of society, caused merely by the passage of time. This applies especially to the treatment of complex conditions requiring a multi-disciplinary approach.
A most striking example is the effects on those children awaiting treatment for Spina Bifida/Hydrocephalus, and their parents.
We recently spoke to Amanda Coughlan Santry, the co-founder of the parent-led advocacy group Spina Bifida & Hydrocephalus Paediatric Advocacy Group, which has been active since 2017. It raises awareness around the lack of access to care for children affected by the condition, and actively engages with the institutions to address what seems one of the worst failings by the State in contemporary Ireland.
Amanda, along with other parents Una Keightley, Stefania Opinto, and Orlaith Maher Lalor, joined us for an in-depth interview which we hope can draw further attention to the current situation.
The group have recently launched a website www.sbhpag.comin which sixty-nine children’s stories are presented. Here one can discover the scale of the challenges surrounding their access to treatment.
We heard of children being left on waiting lists for surgeries for over a year for treatments, which in other European countries are urgently attended to. There have been years of complaints, which went for the most the most part unanswered and, most distressingly, in the last few months, parents of children in pain, have felt compelled to refuse to leave A&Es for days on end until their children were treated.
Daniele: Can you tell us more about this condition?
Amanda: Spina Bifida is described as one of the most complex conditions compatible with life; a baby’s spine and spinal cord does not develop properly in the womb, causing a gap in the spine. Spina bifida is a type of neural tube defect. The neural tube is the structure that eventually develops into the baby’s brain and spinal cord.
Most people with spina bifida can have surgery to close the opening in the spine. But the nervous system will usually already have been damaged, which can lead to problems such as weakness or total paralysis of the legs, Urological, Bowel and Renal issues.
Many babies will be born with or develop hydrocephalus which is a build-up of fluid on the brain. This requires a V.P or a shunt to drain the excess fluid from the brain into the abdomen or the heart.
There are about approximately 550 children under 18 living with Sb/Hydro in Ireland. Ireland has one of the highest rates of neural tube/SB birth rates in the developed world.
Daniele: Can I ask you for a little bit of context to give an idea of the extent of the services needed?. What are the types of care that your children need?
Amanda: Our children need proactive care and what they are receiving is often reactive care via emergency intervention. This is often too late and results in long term damage and loss of function. These children need timely access to care particularly in relation to Orthopaedics, Urology, Ophthalmology, Neuropsychology and Neurosurgery.
Daniele: How are these types of care being delivered in Ireland and is the capacity in the health service enough to address the scale of the problem in Ireland?
Amanda: Currently the care in Ireland is sporadic, chaotic, under-funded & under-resourced. Some children have access to a Multidisciplinary Spina Bifida Clinic, others do not. There is no clear pathway of care for children living with Hydrocephalus alone. An annual MDT SB clinic is international best practice. We estimate 85% of SB children are not receiving this and the percentage is higher in children born prior to 2009.
Daniele: I gather that the waiting times are causing actual daily pain and suffering. If someone breaks a bone or a dislocation, he gets treated in a fairly short time. How’s that different from the pain that your children suffer? And what happens if you go to the A&E?
Amanda: I know of a child that received her surgery last month because the mother took the drastic measure of taking her daughter to accident and emergency and refusing to leave. She dug her heels in the A&E in Temple Street, until she was admitted. And once she was admitted sat for two and a half weeks before the child had her surgery.
In that process, the CEO of the National Children’s Hospital Group, Joe Gannon, subsequently wrote to one of the politicians in government who had been trying to fight for this child’s case, and told the politician that she was currently an inpatient and that she was going to have her surgery on the 17th of January.
He made it sound that it was a planned admission and that she had been given a date and they had come in.
Actually what happened is that the mother refused to leave until her daughter’s medical needs were met and also the child did not have her surgery until a week later. The mother is very grateful to all the doctors involved as they all told her that she was doing the right thing not to leave and were very supportive. She was supported in that sense by us as well but she should have never had to take such a drastic step.
We’ve had another number of families that have had to do this since last September.
Another mother went in on a Saturday with her son, who had dislocated hips for four years, the child is six, and she refused to leave until they were admitted. And once they were admitted, they couldn’t see the surgeon because he wasn’t there. They refused to leave and sat there for 10 days until their child had the surgery.
Daniele: How did your organisation come into being?
Amanda:We’re all parents of children with spina bifida or hydrocephalus that came together to advocate for better services for children, under the age of 18, living with Spina Bifida/Hydrocephalus in Ireland.
Our group was formed in 2017 and have been trying to work in a proactive and collaborative manner with all relevant stakeholders since then.
My own son was one of the children failed, he sat on a waiting list from 2014 to 2016, and by the time he’d seen a spinal surgeon in 2016, we were told it’s too late.
So my son lives with inoperable scoliosis and he cannot be helped by this campaign or anything else but I wanted to do something to stop this from happening to other children. Una Keightley was one of the very first to come on board when we formally launched the paediatric advocacy group.
Daniele: Una Keightley, what pushed you to take a more proactive role in dealing with the issue?
Una: I suppose it did become quite apparent that no matter how many letters you wrote, like what Amanda had said, the situation didn’t improved. She wrote to everyone, she had highlighted it. And it just really concerned me. And I’m a health care professional. I’m a radiation therapist and it was just unbelievable to me that this was going on. And I suppose at that stage my child was younger when we came together. Once we talked to more and more parents we realized that people were actually lodging complains but they were going nowhere.
So we started to proactively inform the powers that be and Children Health Ireland asking them to do something about it.
Amanda: There is a cohort of children born prior to 2009 who had no access at all to this to the Spina Bifida team in Temple Street Hospital because there was no urologist on that team. So it was decided it was safer to leave the children in Crumlin Hospital and move them at a later stage. A urologist didn’t come onto the team at Temple Street until 2014, and the children were never moved. So a lot of our children were receiving inadequate services are no service at all.
We highlighted this problem in 2018 with the CHI board. In that meeting, they asked us, our advocacy group, to go back to the families and identify whether they felt that they weren’t receiving a timely access to services or any services at all. So we did, which was a big job being undertaken because we’re volunteers.
There was also a cohort of families who thought that their children were being treated but many other that did not.
Una: In the beginning of 2019, we gave Children’s Health Ireland a list of 133 families and children who felt that they weren’t receiving a proper service. There was then so many e-mails back and forth between Amanda and CHI. We asked them: When can we meet? What are we going to do about this? And the answers were like: “We’re verifying the list.” “We are analysing the list.”
We have screen shots of these emails.
That one way communication continued for probably 18 months until, after March 2020 they just ignored us.
Entering 2021 we felt we had to do something but, on top of that, I need to say that I suppose a lot of parents were fearful. If they talk out, maybe the care standard that would be provided to their child would be diminished. Now, I wouldn’t have that fear, and I don’t think any of us would.
It was then when we decided to publish online our children stories. Which is something that distressed us greatly but we felt we were left with no choice.
We had requested to meet the Minister ever since he took up office. He wouldn’t meet us. The Minister for Children wouldn’t meet us. The Minister for Disability wouldn’t meet us. Nobody would take up and highlight what was happening to these children. So the parents as a group decided that we were going to have to do something fairly drastic to get their attention. So that’s what we did.
Daniele: I have noticed an increase in media attention to the issue in 2021, also thanks to your campaigning. Are you hopeful that increased scrutiny could move things in the right direction?
Amanda: Yes, people now view our children as the vibrant individuals they are as opposed to a number on a list or a medically complex child that is unrelatable. The support received initially from media, County Councils, and local representatives across all 26 counties has been immense. This has stemmed from the proactive and
drastic measures taken by the Paediatric Advocacy Group and the families to highlight the failures in care for their beloved children.
People have been shocked by the current state of medical neglect that has
been inflicted by the Irish state on our children. They are not willing to allow a further generation of children to be failed and to turn a blind eye to the historical neglect that has been allowed to happen.
Daniele: After years of campaigning, countless letters to TDs and local councillors, you have finally met with Minister Donnelly along with Spina Bifida Hydrocephalus Irelandand other stake holders last February in relation to the abnormal waiting times that are now in place for paediatric orthopaedic treatments. Plans have been presented and funding – as much €19 million that the HSE made available to CHI –, albeit with little information on the specific break down. The Minister also set some clear goals, including to limit the waiting time to four months at first with the aim for this to be reduced to zero, and to provide a number of additional treatments. What’s the reaction from you and your organization to these pledges?
Amanda: There aren’t many details released yet, and there is still a draft in formation. What they told us is that they have ring fenced €19 million for children with spina bifida, but also to children with scoliosis.
They have also said that clinically no child should wait for more than four months for surgery. So that is very ambitious and while we’re glad about these pledges, we’re not blindly trusting. There’ve been promises made before not only to us, but to the scoliosis advocacy groups as well. So yes, the funding is great, but we need to see that the funding is going to make a real difference in these children’s lives.
One of the government target is to “treat an additional 107 Spina Bifida cases” but we don’t know how they come up with that particular number. There is no database within CHI of how many children are living with the condition. So how do you come up with a number if you don’t know how many children you’re treating, do you know? So we’re a little bit dubious about it and we don’t want to be tied to that number. What we want is to fund and to reach as many children as possible.
Daniele: Did the Minister agree to regularly update your organisation while they endeavour to deliver these pledges?
Amanda: We do have a commitment from Stephen Donnelly and Children Health Ireland, to regularly engage with us and we do now have a contact with one of the Minister’s special advisers. So if an issue comes up or we want to speak to Donnelly, all I have to do is give the special adviser a ring and he will relay any information and if need be we speak to the Minister directly. So that’s the promise we have. So we are we’re optimistic and he seemed very genuine when we spoke to him. But don’t intend to take the pressure off until this gets sorted. We intend to stay very, very focused.
Daniele: Are there any kind of league tables or other international comparisons that can be drawn on?
Una: It would be difficult because we have such a high rate compared to a lot of the world. What we do know is that in Ireland it is not the expertise that is missing but proper funding and organization. Cases are picked up in pregnancy here more than they are in other countries, probably because the stenographers are looking for them due to the high incidence.
Daniele: What kind of challenges are you dealing with as mothers and what are the support needed for families at large?
Stefania: My daughter’s name is Aurora and she’s just turned three. From her birth in February 2019 until August 2019 she was in hospital as she was born with Hydrocephalus.
I found out about that on my 26 week scan here in Ireland and to be honest with you I didn’t know what it meant so I had to do my own research. They didn’t explain to me exactly what it was. So I had to go back to Italy, and I went to the hospital in Genoa to try to get different opinions.
Once she was born, here in Ireland, she needed to go straight for surgery because there was too much pressure on the brain because of these fluids. And so we got transferred first to Temple Street, and after two weeks to Crumlin.
I just want to clarify that doctors and nurses were fantastic to me, to my husband and to Aurora. She wouldn’t be here if the surgery hadn’t been successful.
Having said that there definitely gaps in the communication between the two hospitals. They were relying on the parents to get the information, which is not ideal because I’m not a doctor and that created frustrations and fears.
When our daughter was released from hospital we were pretty much left to our own devices. She had just one appointment in Temple Street during her first year. And after that, I’ve been told that I needed to wait another year. Initially I thought that such a long time between visits was just because she’s doing well but It’s not the case. There was lots of information that I had to get elsewhere, and not from the professionals. In terms of psychological support for parents, we were very much left on our own. So you either cope and become resilient or probably you’re not going to make it mentally. I’m grateful I found this group and that these ladies became my source of knowledge.
Una: In terms of the financial support as well, like. Many of us received no financial support because our husbands or partners were too high earning So although your child has very high medical care needs – you could have a child who’s on oxygen 24 hours a day – you won’t get one penny from the government.
Orlaith: In my case, my daughter is 20. We were under a multi-disciplinary team but with only three consultants in it. And after 2008, Crumlin finished up its spina bifida clinic. We then ended up being spread over four hospitals which don’t share files. So as Silvana said earlier, it is up to the parent to bridge the gap.
When she was born she was very ill for the first four and a half months. We lived in the hospital paying for parental accommodation.
I had my dream job. I worked in the Irish Times and I was part of the first team to ever bring in supplements into a broadsheet newspaper. I went on carer’s leave and eventually ended up leaving my job.
There was no support for children with hydrocephalus. It’s not considered an intellectual disability. So, you know, you’re very much left on your own. My husband had a good job. I’ve never received Carer’s allowance after the first four or five months that we spent in hospital with her.
When my daughter was seven they took away her medical card. In this country, when the medical card is taken away, your medical hardship scheme is directly attached. So a lot of the equipment you need you have to pay for it yourself.
At nine she had three failed shunts, and two brain bleeds ending up spending nearly four months in Beaumont Hospital. I had to pay for my parking every day, for my accommodation and my food. Thousands of euros. I can’t claim back anything on that. And we still had to pay our bills and our mortgage.
There’s a lot of stress around dealing with the child that’s sick and sure, you’re not failing your special child as you’re doing the best you can. On top of that, you’re fighting for everything. You’re fighting for therapy, you’re fighting for access to care, you’re fighting for basic things like my daughter’s incontinence and the allocation of nappies. It compounds into a heavy psychological weight. It’s not the disability alone, it’s the lack of support; the lack of access to timely care and that constant heavy worry all the time. They need help. I can’t get them help. I can’t force my appointments. I can’t force the consultant to do this or that. My daughter has now aged out of paediatrics and there’s no transition pathway. So now my job is going to my GP all the time. She had her first orthopaedic appointment in five years two weeks ago, and that took 16 adult consultants to refuse her before we got that orthopaedic consultant. So there’s lots of stress on you all the time.
Here in Ireland, we have great nurses, we have great doctors, and I wouldn’t made it without them, but they’re not resourced and there doesn’t seem to be a willingness to accept we have such a high rate of these cases and that it needs to be invested in.
Amanda: In the space of 18 months, my son went from needing care to becoming completely inoperable. For the first couple of years. He had a lot of appointments. Then it that stopped.
My relationship with my partner deteriorated and broke down, very early on due to the stress and the strain of trying to care for a very medically vulnerable child. I suddenly became a single working mother with two children, one with massive medical need and not financially supported by the state. I worked full time, paid a huge amount of rent. I’ve subsequently remarried and have gone on to have other children. Thankfully, my husband came into this with an open eyes.
We wouldn’t change our children, what we would do and what we want to do is to change the services for them. They can become independent within their capabilities, and live their lives to the fullest without the need to be in pain or to have their parents struggling and fighting for services.
Daniele: Over the last two years of pandemic, and with the HSE coming under cyberattack, your stress levels must have been almost unbearable. Having said that it is quite evident that these dysfunctions were there prior to these. How have you coped?
Amanda: I’ve spoken to numerous families about this and we acknowledge that the pandemic and the cyber-attack happened, It was very scary and nobody had to protect our children more than we did.
But what happened in the pandemic? The small amount of services and extra curriculum activities that our children were receiving stopped.
Physiotherapists, occupational therapists were all redirected to COVID services and we understand the need for that. But there was also a huge recruitment drive by the HSE up thousands of health care professionals, like myself were ready to help but weren’t called up.
We know now that during the pandemic, orthopaedics accident where less frequent so why weren’t our children’s needs met within this timeframe when obviously there was the space to meet them given the cessation of extracurricular activities?
As parents, we would call the pandemic and the cyberattack, the new great excuse for not giving us an appointment.
Our children didn’t just freeze their conditions for two years or three years. You know, they continue to deteriorate.
Stefania: My daughter Aurora, she has malformation of her ribs and she has never seen an orthopaedic surgeon in the last 3 years.
It’s not that the doctors aren’t aware. Her Cardiologist took her case to his heart and did his best to advocate within Crumlin Children Hospital and he really fought for me but it’s not his job to organize a better multidisciplinary care structure.
Daniele: That would be the job of the administration I presume. To conclude, how do you think Irish society perceives disability and how can awareness be promoted?
Amanda: Irish people generally would be viewed as very laid back and positive.
Therefore, there is an element that “disability cannot happen to me!”. It is only with an ageing population, inaccessible public transport, inaccessible housing, and educational facilities that the message is relayed to the ordinary person about how vast the inequality is between the non-disabled & disabled communities in Ireland.
Over the last few decades Ireland has become a more diverse nation. Our children are exposed to more languages, ethnicity and religions than has ever been present on this island.
These are the children of a new and inclusive Éire and as such, they do not have the same prejudices and intolerances as those who have gone before them. Our children living with disabilities are accepted by their peers and integrated more within society.
It is deeply distressing for us that the relevant stakeholders within government and the Irish health care system, have not adopted the same attitude and continue to treat our children like second class citizens.
You enter here a taut quintet Where theorists can shift or shape How we make sense of market flow; How men and how it’s mostly men, Explain the ways our commerce works. No Flash of insight, more a slow Encroachment that in turn creates Our understanding how by stealth New certainties of common sense Construe the weave of life and wealth. Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Dealing, Canto 1, Mechanisms, p.67.
‘Is what is written on a piece of paper worth the paper it’s written on?’ was the simple question posed by the Master of the High Court, Edmund Honohan, at the beginning of a recent Decision, delivered on the 9th of February, 2022 in the case AIB PLC vs Gary Lennon.
Curiously, unlike other Decisions, this is still unavailable on the court’s website, and certainly didn’t make many headlines; although an article in the Irish Times provides a simplified account.
Could this be because of its seemingly complex legal arguments; or perhaps because it reveals too much about how banks and Vulture funds are taking advantage of Ireland’s permissive legal environment?
The Decision relates to a case in which AIB were claiming payment of an outstanding debt, from Mr Lennon. However, Mr Lennon counterclaimed that AIB had not furnished the necessary evidence to the Court entitling them to substantiate or prove the claim.
The first thing that a bank or vulture fund needs to do when claiming payment of an outstanding debt or repossess a house, is to prove, with supporting hard (’probatory’) evidence, that it owns the rights to that property or debt.
Unsurprisingly, this often proves a difficult exercise after the individual debts are bundled up (securitised) and sold on the international market via ever more and more complex financial structures; Section 110 companies, SPVs, Subsidiaries of subsidiaries. These structures allow our banking system to handle non-performing loans, but also to facilitate a lot more capital outflow, often in the form of un-taxed profits.
AIB PLC vs Gary Lennon
In this Decision (which to be clear is not a judgment) by the Master of the High Court we find, apart from the case in question, some serious warnings in relation to the use in courts of the Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020, which now allows business documents, previously considered mere hearsay – out of court statements that are generally inadmissible in proceedings – as evidence in financial cases.
Simply put, when it now comes to such cases, it has become acceptable for a bank to adduce hearsay evidence, laying claim to a property or debt, and for this to be accepted in good faith.
Thus, according to Honohan’s Decision, creating a situation where:
In banking cases, the plaintiff has deep pockets and a reputable firm of lawyers to present the case. Is there any risk of an overarching judicial prejudice in the plaintiff’s favour? The lay litigant thinks there might be.
We cannot overlook, either, the alarming phenomenon of banks telling the courts to not even think of requiring their witnesses to come to court and submit to cross examination. A belief that summary judgment is there for the asking?
Confusion around what actually constitutes acceptable evidence and the institution of legal procedures that overwhelmingly favour big financial institutions over ordinary citizens, could be yet another channel for regulatory capture.
There is currently €16 billion worth of loans on this roulette table in Ireland, all of which are in some way securitised and being traded as we speak.
With politicians and the media are now furiously engaging with more accessible aspects of the housing crisis, like simplistic explanations of supply and demand, and the necessity for foreign investment, it is also important to look into how the law has been altered to give more leeway to banks and Vulture funds.
Citizens, as much as the financial institutions, should demand a justice system that satisfies basic criteria of fairness and impartiality. This should make it realistic for any citizen to challenge a bank or Vulture fund.
This ought to be regardless of how deep, shallow, or broken, your pockets are.
“Wolf of Golfgate” Country
Readers may be familiar with a movie about the 2008 subprime market collapse called ‘The Big Short.‘ It is constellated with explainers like Margot Robby in a bubble bath illustrating subprime mortgage backed securities, and chef Anthony Bourdain making a fish soup with left over mortgages with low values to explain securitisation.
The financial collapse, as described in the movie, actually happened, after some twenty years of head spinning financial innovations. In that period, investment banking went from being a relatively boring and stale career into what may be referred to as the “Wolf of Wall Street” life.
Fast forward about a decade, banks get bailed out, while austerity cripples the most vulnerable. 2013 is the year that Reits and Cuckoo Funds came to Ireland and begin to dictate the kind of supply of housing the Irish should have. This has led to the artificial inflation of prices in the housing market.
In the Land of the Wolf of Golfgate there are thousands upon thousands of loans being bundled together, as we speak, and traded around the world like you would soya beans or any other asset. The reality on the ground is that these are mostly homes that many of us are living in, or should be.
Securitisation and other complex financial structures to recover outstanding debts, are not always a bad practice and are actually an essential tool to limit banks’ exposure to risk; thereby ensuring a country’s financial stability.
But if financial predators go unchecked, especially when it comes to housing, and the courts are not up to speed with the financial innovations involved in the cases that it encounters, the country offers fertile ground for those financial entities, and their money, to become overwhelmingly more powerful than the ordinary citizen.
As Edmund Honohan warns in his recent Decision:
Courts are not yet up to speed with the byzantine multiple-player transactions in the capital markets. Even the Financial Times, in a full page ad in the edition of 27/28 November 2021 warned “Fakery is now everywhere, Regulation has failed.” Our courts are still exploring the mechanics of securitisation. Wait till we start getting “synthetic” securitisation! And as for encryption and blockchain software, who will interpret the “hash”? (77)
Moreover, in this often unbalanced relationship between the judiciary and high finance, the use value of a house is deemed to be superseded by its exchange value.
Another explanation is that unequal access to quality legal representation creates a great disparity between individual citizens and these institutions when it comes to access to housing stock and credit.
This is an issue for which a petition has recently been launched to address a problem that could affect over 200,000 people. It is called ‘Legal Support for possession proceedings on homes.‘
“There are currently thousands of citizens battling to save their family home in Irish Courts, not represented by any legal team.” Legal Support for possession proceedings on homes | Uplift https://t.co/Hz99SW6K8Y
For the above to happen as smoothly and quietly as possible, you need lubricant in the machinery, which normally comes in the form of extra virgin political oil. This speed up things and make sure the machinery of claims and repossessions works like clockwork, and without any unnecessary impediments.
As we previously mentioned, one of the widespread practices for banks, Vulture funds and Cuckoo funds, to lubricate the passage of cases, is to present hearsay evidence, something somebody says out of court, and for it be accepted in good faith: This practice now seems even easier despite ad hoc clarifications in the Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020.
The Act was passed shortly after the case, Promontoria (Aran) vs Burns, wherein Promontoria, a notorious investment fund, often referred to as a Vulture, (I didn’t say it, it’s hearsay) was barred from presenting business records in evidence, and therefore lost the case.
At that point most people in the country were absorbed with dealing with a pandemic, and shortly afterwards there was the Golfgate Scandal, which included Brian Hayes, CEO, Banking & Payments Federation of Ireland; a prime examples of Ireland’s revolving door between politics and the private banking sector.
With an urgency rarely seen for other problems, such as the homeless and healthcare crises, the Act was fast-tracked through the Oireachtas.
Here is how Minister of Justice and Equality, Deputy Helen McEnteeintroduced the Act in the Dáil debate on the July 30 2020:
The commission’s report recommends that records compiled in the course of business, because they are generally reliable, should be admissible in civil proceedings as an inclusionary exception to the hearsay rule, subject to the safeguards that have been set out in the Bill. Separately, the Court of Appeal was called in a recent case, Promontoria (Aran) Ltd. v. Burns, to interpret and apply the law as it currently stands regarding the admissibility of business records in civil cases. Both judgments delivered by the court last April were clearly of the view that the law in this area needs to be updated by legislative reform. More recently, the Judiciary has specifically identified legislative reform of the civil law rules on business records to my Department as among the most urgent priorities for it to be able to advance cases fairly and without unnecessary delays and costs to all parties concerned.
It introduced the possibility, or rather encourages the use of business documents as evidence, even if they are mere hearsay, although it does allow the other party to challenge the validity of such evidence.
But best of luck if you are a lay litigant, without legal aid and in a precarious financial situation, attempting to challenge a skilled team of lawyers pitted against you, by the bank or Vulture fund in question, full of good faith.
The inherent risk to private citizens posed by the the misinterpretation of this new law in front of the disarming power of the law firms which the banks rely on, was articulated in an earlier decision by Ed Honohan, AIB PLC vs McGrane, on the 9th June 2021, under the heading EU Charter of Fundamental Rights:
Given that at least some of these issues – contract terms, debt restructure etc. – are now the subject of EU Directives, the courts will have to satisfy themselves, under Article 47 of the Charter, that the defendants are given “effective access to justice” and, for cases of complexity of the sort above described, that “Legal Aid shall be made available to those who lack sufficient resources insofar as such aid is necessary.
Most litigants in person just show up in court on the day the case is listed and it may then be too late to make up for lost ground. The chances of framing and corroborating a second bite at the cherry, on Appeal, may be vanishingly small, even if they manage not to miss the ten-day deadline for an Appeal (which many do).
Writing in Prospect Magazine in 2018, David Neuberger, former President of the UK Supreme Court, said:“Without the rule of law society becomes unjust, violent and poor. It is of fundamental importance that courts are open and accessible.
“Accessibility means that people with grievances and those being sued must get access to legal advice and to courts. It is an affront to justice if people cannot understand or enforce their rights.
It’s always a difficult task to communicate to a wider audience how the intricacies of the law, full of carefully crafted language, are at play in underpinning how our society, and economy operates.
Especially when true complexity arises, actual trials are needed and the public needs to know it can trust their judicial public servants “the adults in the room”, in the making of these key decisions.
The thicker the blanket of legal fog, the more political “good intentions” and “good faith” are but a faded image of what people’s actual needs are.
This leads to a society dominated by cynicism, unable to envisage any change, and politically impotent.
