In the wake of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s extraordinary gaffe in Washington the day before Paddy’s Day, I‘ve been thinking about Monica Lewinsky, the intern he so crassly referred to in his ‘off the cuff’ remark.
So who was Monica Lewinsky? What went on between herself and Bill Clinton, then the most powerful man in the world, and twenty-seven years her senior? And what were the outcomes for her. And for him.
Back to when it all kicked off. She was a bright, freshly minted grad who jumped at the chance of an internship at the White House. She developed a ‘crush’ on Bill and soon the ever-opportunistic Mr. President was inviting her into the Oval Office for an increasingly intense sexual affair.
Not only was the affair ‘reckless’ on his side, it took place as the Republican Party were gathering forces under a new, viscously partisan cabal made up of right-wing parliamentarians, partnered with a shadowy group of lawyers and key professionals known as ‘the Elves’, all desperate to bring this Democratic Love God down.
This nasty lot had cosied up to a distraught young woman Bill had exposed himself to, and asked to, eh, kiss the mighty phallus.
At the same time a years long, $70 million trawl conducted by Judge Kevin Starr into Bill and Hilary’s involvement in a land deal in Little Rock, had pretty much come to a dead end, when the circling sharks were handed live meat: forget the girl asked to kiss yer man’s pee pee, currently the President of the United States is shagging a twenty-two-year-old intern. In the White House.
But, Monica Lewinsky was no longer in the White House. Her superiors, worried by this semi-blatant affair, had shunted her off to the Pentagon, where aged twenty-two, miserable, heartbroken and horribly confused – why wasn’t her powerful lover bringing her back to him? – she confided her woes in a tough older woman, named Linda Tripp.
Tripp by name and Tripp by nature, the lovely Linda, surely spotting gold was to be made, began taping her conversations with the distraught young intern and doing the rounds of literary agents, and journos with dynamite tale in hand.
It’s still blood chilling to hear this older woman advice a confused and clearly lovestruck Lewinsky to keep every gift the President has given her, make sure NOT to dry clean the blue dress with the President’s semen still on it, and not to worry, all will be well. All the while taping the conversations, leading the young woman deeper and deeper into a trap.
Next, the judge who’d unsuccessfully spent millions trying to entrap the Clintons via a land deal in Little Rock, was tipped off by a helpful member of ‘The Elves’ as to what was going on. Smelling blood in the water, he pounced. This could actually bring the President down.
The sting took place one day in a shopping mall where Linda and Monica were to meet for coffee. Linda approached, flanked by FBI, and a terrified Monica was escorted to a pre-prepared upstairs hotel room where lawyers for Mr. Starr awaited.
Monica, refused a lawyer, refused even a call to a lawyer, still unaware that all her conversations had been taped, and shared, was told she MUST co-operate fully and agree to wear a wiretap to entrap the President, and unnamed others. The alternative was years in jail. Jail perhaps also for her Mum and Dad?
She was alone, terrified, mortified, suicidal.
God love her, she refused to co-operate. She still loved Bill.
Eventually, after hours of this travesty of justice, she was allowed phone her Mum.
Her Mum, very sensibly, urged co-operation. Her Dad got a lawyer. Eventually she and her Mum were allowed creep off, battered and exhausted, to her Mum’s apartment where they holed up for months, the press camped outside their window.
The big guns now turned their sights on the Pres.
For months the American media, public, and Congress were convulsed with fascinated horror as the details of the affair tumbled out.
In thanks for her co-operation every snog, every orgasm, every breathless gush, pace Linda Tripp’s tapes, was made public. All detailed by Monica herself.
The President eventually slithered free: ‘I did NOT have sex with that woman’. Went on to finish his term, write a bestselling memoir, charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches, and keep his marriage. Hilary her hair coiffed to within an inch of its life as the drama dragged on, standing by her man: ‘He was a hard dog to keep on the porch’. The hard dog grinning away, delighted with himself, doling out settlements for hundreds of thousands of dollars for women he’d sexually harassed to women he’d outright raped.
Monica meantime was universally pilloried.
She became a national joke. ‘A slut’. ‘A Bimbo’. ‘An over sexed blabbermouth who couldn’t keep her mouth shut’.
Even solid gold feminists and lefties like Gloria Steinem and Michael Moore got stuck in.
She was fair game.
For years, in her own words, she ‘floundered’. She tried celebrity schlock. Handbag design. Dieting endorsements. But eventually removed herself from the public eye. She went to the London School of Economics and did a Masters in Social Psychology . She decided to take control of her story. She co-authored a book. She supported MeToo. ¸She did a Ted Talk. She became an ambassador for anti-bullying, helping ‘survivors of the shame game’. She openly criticised the ex-President who to this day likes to cast himself as the helpless boy and she ‘just a buffet and he couldn’t resist the desert’.
It’s a tale Shakespearian in its breadth. And tragedy. But she is the one who has emerged with flying colours. The President, and sadly his wife, once a proud feminist, and the cohort of savage Republican lawyers and parliamentarians, do not come out of this so well. Oh no.
So perhaps next time Leo goes off piste in one of his speeches he might do a little background reading first. Make certain who is the butt of his jokes, made only hours after cosying up to Mrs. Clinton.
Fuck the Patriarchy. Let the Patriarchs starve.
Feature Image: Clinton with Lewinsky in February 1997.
Public anger has erupted over a lack of political accountability in the wake of the tragic train crash near the city of Larissa in Greece.
On Wednesday, March 8, after a general strike had been proclaimed for that day, a massive crowd gathered in the centre of Athens. Avenues connecting Syntagma Square, right outside the Parliament, all the way to Omonoia Square (the second central square of Athens) were packed with people.
It was unquestionably the largest demonstration in over a decade, with an estimated crowd of up to one hundred thousand. Public anger had reached a tipping point, and it took only a spark for an extended, severe riot to break out.
The protest was in response to the tragic train crash, which happened the previous Tuesday night, February 28. The exact number of casualties is yet to be determined. Fifty-seven have been pronounced dead so far, with many more injured. Wednesday’s demonstration wasn’t the first of its kind, but rather the culmination of protests all over Greece since the previous Wednesday, March 1.
At first glance at the news, a foreign reader might be puzzled by why a tragedy of this sort would be politicized to such an extent, but to the majority of the Greek public this wasn’t just a horrific misfortunate. It was, as the graffiti reads in Greece these days, “A Crime of the State”.
The events of February 28, definitely involve human error. A passenger train ended up in the same track as a cargo carrier coming from the opposite direction. For twelve whole minutes the two trains were speeding towards each other at 166km/h, eventually crashing in a nightmarish head on collision, at Tempi, just outside the city of Larissa.
The fifty-nine-year-old station master of Larissa has since been arrested and charged with multiple counts of manslaughter, and disruption to public transport security.
His lawyer made the following statement on Thursday, March 2, hinting clearly at the broad scope of responsibility for the disaster: “The accused is literally devastated (…) He has assumed the share of responsibility that is proportionate to him, within the frame of responsibility that he should have and he does, but beyond that, we should not focus on the tree when there is a whole forest behind it.”
On the same day, the rail workers held a strike, blaming all governments and especially the current one of Nea Dimokratia, for criminal neglect that led to the tragic events. Union representatives have been appearing on national television, exclaiming that they have warned about such dangers repeatedly, protesting against poor working conditions, chronic under-staffing and a failure to implement basic infrastructure upgrades.
However, whenever they have attempted to strike over this in the last few years, these were deemed illegal, based on new legislation introduced by Nea Dimokratia Minister Kostas Hatzidakis.
Public debate in Greece has also focused on the damage to the railroad system caused by privatization, which was always championed by the current right-wing government, but was in fact signed into law by the previous left-wing SYRIZA government.
The leader of MERA 25 (another left-wing party in Parliament) and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis tweeted on Wednesday, March 1: “Now is the moment to grieve and to look after the injured and the victims’ families. But soon we shall bring to Greece’s parliament the underlying issue: yet another tragedy caused by a hideous railway privatization. Paddington 1999, Larissa 2023.”
Already on that same day, protests had started, with violent clashes erupting in Athens between riot police and protesters.
The Government followed a tactic of heavily policing every relevant gathering, even in situations where people were grieving peacefully. The sadly predictable Greek standard of police brutality ensued, further fueling the public’s anger.
More demonstrations were held on Thursday and Friday. There was a call out to more than twenty cities across Greece, with heavy clashes erupting again in Athens and Thessaloniki.
The situation kept escalating and on Sunday, March 5, a thirty-thousand-strong-crowd gathered in Syntagma Square and went on to march through the centre of Athens. Once again, violent riots broke out and spread throughout the city centre.
Another aspect of the tragedy, which has stoked public anger, has been the mainstream media coverage, which in many cases has been simply to parrot all the talking points of the Nea Dimokratia government about the crash.
The media situation in Greece is exceptionally dire under the current administration, which has consolidated an unprecedented amount of control over it, which is only broken by social media, as has been explained in a previous article.
In the aftermath of the train crash we have seen one of the most blatant manifestations of such corrupt journalism. But in this case it seems the public is not buying it, to a greater extent than ever before.
A video from a popular YouTube channel, mocking several well-known TV journalists for their coverage of the disaster, has gone viral, trending #1 for several days as it received over six hundred thousand views in less than two days. A huge figure bearing in mind Greece’s population is ten million.
The communication strategy of the government and its client media in terms of damage limitation, has been primarily to scapegoat the Larissa station master and secondarily – when the first approach fails – to make the case that this is a chronic problem, and not the responsibility of the current government. But the information that has been coming to light is damning to this narrative.
According to multiple testimonies of people who are or had been working in the railway in various positions there was a significant drop in security precautions – which were already incomplete and defective – since Nea Dimokratia took office.
Staff numbers have been cut, resulting in there being just one station master working the shift instead of two. Also, there were monitoring systems in operation until the summer of 2019, when Nea Dimokratia came to power.
Finally, even the communication tactic of pushing all the blame onto the station master has backfired, as it was proven he was recently hired and put in his position despite lacking qualifications, in a typical Greek manner of “rousfeti”, which refers to politicians doing favors to win over influential constituents.
The Minister of Transportation, Achileas Karamanlis, a member of one of the three major political “clans” of Greece, was forced to resign. His resignation however, seems blatantly tokenistic, as he is still included in the Nea Dimokratia ballots to be reelected MP in the forthcoming election.
Reflecting particularly badly on him is a video of his speech before Parliament, which surfaced a few days after the tragic events. Just one week before the accident, Karamanlis is heard castigating members of the opposition for even implying that there could be a problem with safety in the railway system.
The Nea Dimokratia government has shifted its communication strategy and primary narrative a few times already, in an effort to adapt it to the public’s negative reception. But this in itself has undermined their credibility, creating an impression that they are solely focusing on a communication strategy, relying on shills within the mainstream media.
The situation is still unfolding as the street protests have not finished. There is another general strike proclaimed for Thursday, March 16 and that will be the point when it can be determined whether we are looking at a seismic popular revolt or a de-escalation.
Whatever the outcome, the Mitsotakis government has suffered a severe blow to their image at the worst possible moment. They are now likely to try and push out the date of the elections as far as May. This is the latest date permitted, but it’s unlikely to leave sufficient time for this affair to blow over.
This recommends a very modest expansion to the Office. Its main recommendations have, however, been ignored. The Office we are left with is an authoritarian, over-sized entity that inhibits the capacity of elected representatives to ask parliamentary questions, at a significant cost to the exchequer and in breach of the separation of powers.
Moreover, there is little evidence, as we will see, that its ostensible purpose of assisting Dáil deputies – unaligned or from minority groupings – to pass private members bills is being fulfilled.
The key recommendations of the Dunning Report are as follows:
That OPLA, which then had eight legal staff, should not be put on a statutory footing.
That OPLA should remain an independent entity.
That OPLA should be expanded incrementally, over a number of years
That this should be reviewed eighteen months after its modest expansion.
That it would go from the eight legal personnel in 2016 to a maximum of eleven, and that two additional administrative staff should also be assigned.
That the cost of this modest expansion should not exceed a quarter of a million euro per annum.
The Dunning report allegedly emerged out of a sub-committee on Dáil Reform, chaired by Cheann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl in 2016. The sub-committee met for the last time in May 2016. Dunning worked on their recommendation. The key recommendation was for a modest expansion to OPLA to assist with Private Members Bills.
However, by 2018 OPLA had already taken on an additional sixteen legal personnel – from eight to twenty-four, thirteen more than Dunning had recommended. The high cost of this was signed off on by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, under Robert Watt as Secretary General and Accounting Officer.
OPLA appears to be the creation of the Dáil Clerk Peter Finnegan and the incumbent Cheann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl, who have completely departed from the Dunning recommendations.
Remarkably, the required legislation received no scrutiny and there were no committee stages. It was signed into law by the President on December 27, 2018. Its effect is that the Oireachtas is now often limited to rubber-stamping bills.
I have written to Seán Ó Fearghaíl several times since last November regarding my own inability to have the Dáil records corrected, where parliamentary questions have been undermined for over two years now. He has not replied.
It is no exaggeration to say we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, and that the Cheann Comhairle, the Leas Cheann Comhairle and the Dáil Clerk are all involved.
In its current configuration OPLA is an unconstitutional, legal hit squad, sabotaging the operation of the Oireachtas. It has no business involving itself in parliamentary questions or committees. Its role ought to be confined to giving legal advice to members drafting Private Members Bills.
Having failed to conform to the Dunning recommendation, it should now be disbanded forthwith. Its chief officer Melissa English should not be working with and reporting to the Dáil Clerk, and nor according to Dunning should she have statutory powers.
It seems that anyone now raising parliamentary questions (PQs) on any matter that senior civil servants wish to hush up are being undermined by the Cheann Comhairle, the Leas Cheann Comhairle and the Dáil Clerk, as well as OPLA.
I previously (unsuccessfully) attempted to ascertain via PQs how many bogus doctors have been used across state agencies over the past three decades. This caused the legal heavy gang to fire off threats in an area over which they have no jurisdiction.
Standing Orders were infringed in the replies to my PQs. I tried to have that infringement rectified by the Committee for Parliamentary Oversights and Privileges (CPPO). However, members of the Committee informed me that my submission was never circulated or heard.
I even wrote to Micheál Martin as Taoiseach to make him aware of this. His response was to say that the Cheann Comhairle is a constitutionally independent office.
Melissa English, the head of OPLA in an article for Eolas Magazine in March 2019 said the OPLA had been extended and put on a statutory footing following the Dunning report of December 2016. The Dunning report allegedly followed on from recommendation of a “final report of the Sub-Committee on Dail Reform in May 2016.”
The case for OPLA’s expansion was, according to Dunning, based on a huge increase in the number of Private Members Bills (PMBs) tabled by opposition TDs, especially independents. OPLA was conceived of as an entity that would assist all non-Government TDs and Senators in Leinster House to perform their jobs.
The overall argument for the expansion of OPLA was to speed-up the through-put of such bills to legislative completeness, so that the legislative process would operate more smoothly. It was felt to be unfair that legislation brought in by Government had the resources of the office of the Attorney General and expert parliamentary drafters, while opposition TDs from small parties and groupings had no such legal expertise at their disposal.
The focus of the Dunning report is on the role of OPLA in private members’ bills. He noted that there may be issues with opposition groupings and independents taking up the services of OPLA. For that reason Dunning recommended that it was vital that that OPLA remain independent. He also explicitly recommended that it should not be put on a statutory footing as previously stated.
Even more to the point, he recommended that the operation of a modestly expanded OPLA be “implemented incrementally”, when referring to an OPLA with only three additional legal personnel – that is eleven in all.
It begs the question: how did it go from eight to twenty-four personnel in two years, and why was it put on a statutory footing in defiance of Dunning’s recommendations? Its growth is certainly not commensurate with an increase in the number of private members bills. Instead, it has become a sinister entity designed to muzzle democracy.
Dunning also recommended that it should be reviewed eighteen months after implementation, rather than being guillotined onto the statute books just before Christmas 2018, after virtually no Dáil debate, and certainly no pre-legislative scrutiny.
Furthermore, Dunning recommended that the head of OPLA should be upgraded to Assistant Secretary rank and for the appointment of three legal experts in the rank of Principal Officer (PO) and a third in the rank of PO, who would be an expert legal drafter. Dunning also recommended two additional administrative staff at middle ranking civil service grades.
At the time of Dunning report there were already eight lawyers, two legal researchers and two further administrative staff. Thus, the report recommended a total of eleven lawyers and four administrative staff. Yet by 2018 OPLA had expanded, according to Melissa English in the Eolas article of March 2019, to twenty-four legal personnel creating a total staff of thirty-five, along with a further eleven administrative staff.
Dunning also recommended that the head of an expanded OPLA (upgraded to Assistant Secretary rank and pay scale) should be filled through an open competition. This also didn’t happen. The murky legislation in the 2018 Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Amendment Act provided for the appointment to be made by the Dáil Clerk himself.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of all this is the manner in which legislation putting OPLA on a statutory footing was passed into law: the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Amendment Act 2018 does not seem to have gone through a committee stage, or pre-legislative scrutiny.
A member of the sub-committee I spoke to claims it didn’t go through the Dáil or any pre-legislative scrutiny and suggested that this was done by the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission. However, the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission is not vested with the authority to pass legislation.
The Houses of the Oireachtas Commission was established in 2004 following the passing of the Houses by the Oireachtas Commission Act 2003. It made provision for a committee of eight members of the Dáil and Seanad, along with the Cheann Comhairle, and Cathaoirleach of the Seanad.
Crucially, Dáil Clerk Peter Finnegan is also an ex-officio member of this Commission and, even more importantly, he heads the management board of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission – a civil service entity, comprising the Clerk of the Dáil, the Clerk of the Seanad, Martin Groves, and four more Assistant Secretaries, one of whom is, since 2018, Melissa English as head of OPLA, one external member and one Principal Officer.
To add to the confusion, the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission also has an audit committee, comprising three different TDs and four more senior civil servants. Prior to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission being established in 2004 the Houses of the Oireachtas was run and staffed in accordance with the Houses of the Oireachtas Act 1959 and the Civil Service Commissioners Act 1954.
Cheann ComhairleSean Ó Fearghaíl
Stages of the Bill
Having by-passed the committee stage the bill was deemed to have passed a series of almost phantom stages in the Dáil and Seanad in late December 2018 at a point when the Dáil was rising for the Christmas recess, although the then Fine Gael junior minister in the Department of Expenditure and Public Reform did announce the Bill in the Dáil and Senator Gerard Craughwell backed it in the Seanad.
It was deemed to have passed the first stage in the Dáil and Seanad on Monday 10 December 2018 yet, bizarrely, the Dáil record shows neither House sat that day!
Nonetheless, all five stages of the bill were deemed to have been passed on Tuesday December 18, and the Dáil website supports this, despite the Dáil sittings record showing the bill was not even considered.
The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins signed the Act into law on 27th December 2018. The entire process was a violation of the Constitution, as legislation appears to have been slipped in via the channel of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, a body entirely dominated by a supporting management committee of civil servants under the auspices of the Dáil Clerk, Peter Finnegan. To be clear, the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission has no constitutional authority to pass legislation.
Two personalities are a constant in this constitutional travesty: Seán Ó Fearghaíl as Cheann Comhairle and chair of the sub-committee leading to Dunning’s review, and Peter Finnegan, Dáil Clerk. Ó Fearghaíl chaired the sub-committee on Dail reform, which allegedly provided the justification for OPLA’s vast expansion on a statutory basis under the Dail Clerk, in defiance of the recommendations of the Dunning report.
Ó Fearghaíl and Peter Finnegan are also members of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, of which Finnegan is the Manager, as well as being head of the management team of the Houses of the Oireachtas supporting the Commission, comprising five top civil servants.
It would appear that the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission has un-constitutionally created an Oireachtas within the Oireachtas.
Violation of Separation of Powers?
Very grave questions arise from the use of OPLA as a legal heavy gang punching down unlawfully. It has regularly exceeded its remit since the passing of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Amendment Act 2018.
Arguably, this amounts to a constitutional crisis. Mr Finnegan has been reported to SIPO and to the TLAC civil service Commissioners who have not acted. But then he’s on the SIPO Commission, which is another conflict of interest.
Apart from the unscrupulous expansion of OPLA, well in excess of Dunning’s recommendations, the take-up of the OPLA services in Private Members Bills (PMBs), anticipated by Dunning, has not happened. Nor has there been any discernible increase in the passing of PMBs.
A glance at the Houses of the Oireachtas annual reports reveals no expansion into service by OPLA in PMBs. In 2021 there were a total of 113 PMB, but OPLA only gave advice on 56 of these, and only provided drafting service to 36. None of the bills successfully passed.
The statistics for OPLA’s work show that most of its “advices” are to the Houses of the Oireachtas service itself and of the 639 “advices” it provided in 2021, 493 were to the service itself and 143 were advice to committees.
In addition, they are heavily involved in Protected Disclosures, FOI requests and Employment Law. None of this was envisaged by Dunning.
So, how did a vastly bloated, OPLA pass into law in a manner contrary to the recommendations of the Dunning report? How and why was it put on a statutory footing under the Clerk of the Dáil in 2018, when Dunning recommended that it shouldn’t be put on a statutory footing?
It seems as if OPLA has become an unconstitutional, authoritarian entity designed to snuff out an essential feature of Irish democracy. Under the pretence of a pressing need for legal assistance in PMBs, a legal monstrosity has been installed in the Houses of the Oireachtas.
OPLA violates not just the Dunning report, but the Separation of Powers under the Constitution, as it has been integrated into the executive wing of Government under the Dáil Clerk, all at vast cost to the taxpayer.
When writing about JobPath in 2016 I attempted to articulate something disturbing I had seen when the DSP appeared to collude with private companies to deceive welfare recipients into entering into contracts with the private companies, contracted by the DSP to deliver the JobPath “service”.
I never quite articulated the more general problem of privatisation, and ended up ghettoised really in arguments about welfare and “willingness to work”, exactly as the propaganda of the time was designed to frame the problem. Interestingly, Ken Loach’s film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, which is concerned with the same anomalies in the employment activation system, also ended up similarly ghettoised in the welfare question.
Corner-Cutting for Profit
But during my research I noticed something even more sinister than state collusion with private entities duping the citizenry: for instance, certain private prisons in the United States – which were run by the same companies who ran JobPath – were shut down by the Obama administration when it was discovered that prisoners were suffering malnutrition and dying: due primarily to severe cost-cutting for profit on the part of the private companies.
Similar scandals have emerged here with regard to the Direct Provision service, where services to the “clients” are cost-cut to boost company profits. As I write, a similar scandal is emerging with reports from Ukrainian refugees of inedible food in a migrant centre somewhere in the south of the country.
Similarly, the cervical smear scandal is essentially also a result of cost-cutting as a result of privatisation, cost-cutting that has cost some people their lives, most recently Vicky Phelan, whose final message to us was to always ask questions, the very thing our mainstream media often fail to do.
🇺🇦 Nasc CEO, Fiona Hurley discussing lack of standardised accommodation for Ukrainian people who are in Ireland under Temporary Protection: 💬 "[T]he vast majority are afraid to make official complaints, citing their fear of retaliation or being moved."https://t.co/8ccbGrrZp4
— Nasc, the Migrant & Refugee Rights Centre (@NascIreland) February 17, 2023
Privatised Armies
Meanwhile, it has come to light that the Russian state is using private military companies to conduct the war in Ukraine. The arrangement is similar to all other privatisation deals, where a private company inserts itself between public money and the people in return for providing a “service”, depleting the quality of the original service to siphon off as much as it can for its share-holders.
The difference in Russia is that the “clients” – in this case conscripts – are being used as cannon fodder. The US of course has labelled one of these companies, Wagner, a transnational criminal entity. But in a world of transnational corporate bodies that’s just the pot calling the kettle black.
In the YouTube video by Johnny Harris, ‘Who got rich off the war in Afghanistan’, Harris reveals a system of military privatisation in the US that becomes a free-for-all of public-money-siphoning, under the pretext of war, for a plethora of private government contractors, with members of Congress even holding shares in some of the companies receiving the contracts.
And as is often the case with such things, all the shady dealing is hidden and obscured behind innocent-seeming terminology. Like the old song, you say tomayto and I say tomato, it’s a case of you say security and I say mercenary.
Harris’s video shows most clearly the manner in which corporate privatisation of state services is often little more than a system by which private entities, in collusion with rogue government representatives, conspire to basically ransack tax-payer generated public funds for the benefit of private investors.
Put simply, why should millions of poor people have education, health and welfare benefits when a small gang of wealthy people could just as easily have all that money for their yachts, private planes and nose jobs? Hm? Makes sense to me.
Pardoned to Death
In Russia, to find recruits for the war in Ukraine the Russian government offered pardons to prisoners in the prison system who were then contracted as soldiers to the private military company Wagner, becoming the very essence of cannon fodder.
For instance, it is a routine tactic on the front, according to captured Russian soldiers, for commanders to deploy troops of conscripted convicts into conflict areas in order to identify gun emplacements and other targets for their artillery. They achieve this by the simple expedient of allowing the conscripts to be gunned down, giving the commanders the opportunity to see where the gun emplacements are and relaying this information to their artillery.
The point is, like the prisoners in the US private prison system, or the migrants wasting away in Direct Provision, or the people on trolleys in hospital corridors, or the sincere young men pedalling furiously through traffic as delivery “companies” to make a buck that won’t even pay a rent, while the parent company grows fat and rich; the Russian prisoners on the Ukraine front, having made a pact with the devil in the hope of amnesty, are nothing and no one in the greater game of profit and loss. A great game being conducted by governments and those private interests, often the buddies of government officials, insinuating themselves between public expenditure and the people this expenditure was intended for.
As for the platforms extended by the Irish Times to commentators like Fintan O'Toole and Una Mullally, @frankarmstrong2 explains the illusive function their presence on the paper's commentary line-up serves here: https://t.co/1ufczB11d9pic.twitter.com/qthP0IwkeP
Politics has moved far beyond the old simplicities of left and right, and is now firmly established as corporation versus the individual. This is perhaps why mainstream media in general seems so oblivious to the insidious creeping nature of privatisation into all corners of the culture, since big media is itself corporate.
This is why privatisation is the enemy, because the traditional protector of democratic freedoms, the so-called serious mainstream media, is itself already corporate and privatised. Even when it emerged that the private companies contracted to deliver JobPath were slyly attempting to blur the lines between welfare and criminality, it was reported only by one rag tabloid, while the serious media looked away.
Like that old movie ‘The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers’, privatisation invites you to surrender and conform, softly crooning that it’s the end of all anxiety and worry to simply give up on yourself and just get in line with the company’s needs.
As Barbara Ehrenreich showed in her book Smile or Die, How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World corporate propaganda designed to disarm workers is knowingly implanted by the use of positive thinking and the concept of team-work. In work situations where precarity is the reality the worker is advised to be upbeat at all times.
This insanity-inducing expectation has the effect of controlling potential worker dissatisfaction at source, saving the company the problem of individual grumbling that might lead to unionisation. This allows companies to lay-off workers by the thousand for profit, depending on market fluctuations, without any blowback. Such a culture sends workers the message that they are worthless.
The only way out of this is to find a company to surrender to and hope that you get lucky enough to be kept, a situation that ultimately devours the human qualities of independence that make a culture healthy and productive and generous, the workers under the privatisation cosh of corporations becoming resentful of those dependent on welfare.
In this way the systems of privatisation consume all the good in society and in people. All the virtues that created the society becoming little more than the raw materials the corporations feed off.
Feature Image: Direct Provision centre at Lissywollen, Athlone, in 2013.
Latour argues the intervening period, associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ‘was initially marked by what is called “deregulation”, alongside ‘the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities.’
This coincided, he says, with another phenomenon less often stressed: ‘the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change’. He defines “climate change” in broad terms as ‘the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives,’ rather than simply the climatic consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, as the contemporary environmental challenge is commonly reduced to.
This broader definition of “climate change” therefore encompasses ecological constraints – the material conditions of our lives – which even the most vociferous denier cannot gainsay, as well as other readily ascertainable phenomena such as pollution and nature loss.
Latour continues, ‘It is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone.’
He contends: ‘they [“the elites”] decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally.’
Thus, ‘From the 1980s on the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others.’
He offers the stark conclusion that any observer of social media can attest to: ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.’
Dominant players in the fossil fuel industry were undoubtedly aware of climate change by the late 1970s, and developed communication strategies designed to confound the public. Through their risk analyses, leading investment banks – representing the real elites – would surely have been privy to such information that had been circulating since the 1960s.
Thus, investment portfolios were diversified, and bets hedged. It hardly mattered that technologies branded “clean and green” could still have devastating environmental impacts, or lead to new relationships of dependency in developing countries. In this re-alignment, companies create halo effects around products through greenwashing strategies. This explains the unprecedented attention to climate change we now see across mainstream media.
The belated embrace of environmentalism – once the preserve of hippies – by elites also distracts from the urgent need for structural adjustments.
Lacking “a common world”, where resources and opportunities are shared equitably within countries and internationally, populists may point to the hypocrisy of a system that permits “vertiginous” inequalities. Under private ownership, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables yields profits for the elites, but may impoverish many who are already living on the edge.
Since Latour’s book, much abides, but much has changed too. The apparent “symbol” of our collective madness, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 Presidential election, while other populist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have also exited stage right, for the time being at least. But inequalities only increased during the pandemic, when trust in science was undermined by profiteering.
The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, alongside simmering US-Chinese tensions over Taiwan, indicate the era of globalisation has come to an end. In this new edition of the Cold War, conservative, authoritarian leaders are pitted against Western governments dominated by elites that appear to be profiting from another crisis.
Environmentalists ought to recognise that we are facing a nuclear winter, worse even than the impact of climate change, if the Ukrainian-Russian conflict escalates, and support attempts to broker a negotiated settlement. Moving forward, a new global compact is urgently required to address environmental challenges and rampant inequality.
The environmental movement should develop a more nuanced understanding of the social and political forces ranged against meaningful reforms in the West. To develop, as Latour puts it a “common horizon” – and overcome collective madness – in the face of climate change and inequality, democratic governments must act to reverse the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s, and in particular assert control over a highly profitable renewable energy sector.
Feature Image: “Rebellion Day” on Blackfriars Bridge, 2018.
Did you a struggle to understand and navigate your way through events surrounding our response to Covid-19 in Ireland? Did what at first appear to make sense, as a reasonable and decisive reaction to a dangerous virus, seem, over time, to become increasingly absurd?
Even cursory examination of the data shows large inconsistencies in our response, which at the very least warrants further investigation. The facts and primary data kept pointing to a counter-narrative, very much at odds with the official line relentlessly and consistently being pushed on us from the media and official sources.
From mask mandates, lockdowns, the media campaign against Ivermectin, mass vaccination and finally and most chillingly, the vaccination of children and pregnant women. Policies did not appear to stand up to even the most basic medical or scientific scrutiny. Yet few appeared to be questioning them. Apart from a few dissenters who were cast away as heretics, there was a complete absence in traditional Irish media, or the medical and scientific communities, of scrutiny or challenge.
So we now find ourselves, almost three years from the start of this unprecedented event, in a world that seems to want to move on, and forget what happened as fast as possible. There is little appetite for reflection, or any possiblity of individuals acknowledging mistakes and suggesting we will respond differently in future.
Indeed, in a recent interview on RTE’s Brendan O’Connor Show, when gently prodded by the presenter as to whether we might have been a bit stringent, Professor Luke O’Neill claimed ‘the only option we had at that time was to lockdown’ in March, 20202, otherwise ‘a lot of people could have died’. As this was on radio it was impossible to know whether he was saying it with a straight face, but he is surely aware that Sweden, despite refusing to lockdown, had one of the lowest death rates in Europe over the course of the pandemic.
Across the political spectrum, there is almost complete denial of errors and even less appetite to take responsibility for the long-term consequences of policies. Yet, as more and more facts emerge showing the fundamental flaws in our response to Covid 19, the larger questions that remains are: why did policies that were clearly not in the public’s best interest become government policy, and how did this come about?
Unless we understand why this happened the questions on how it was handled will be candles in the wind. Untethered to a motive it makes no sense. This requires an understanding of context and motive.
Mattias Desmet’s theory of Mass Formation offers an extraordinarily insight into both why and how this kind of event can happen. Desmet, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, draws on his clinical experience of the behaviour of crowds and group think, as well as the work of others in the field, in particular Hannah Arendt.
Unsurprisingly, Mass Formation and its role in our response, did not occur as a result of Covid nor is it the first time in human history it has happened. The roots and causes have been emerging for many years with the growth in what Desmet describes as the mechanistic society.
Since the Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century, the Western world has seen continuous improvements in wealth, living standards and health. No matter what the problem, there seems to have been a scientific solution or medicine to solve it.
However, we have become increasingly averse to risk and uncertainty as technology has solved problems and cured illnesses.
In parallel, the steady decline in organised religion and a spiritual dimension to our lives has left us increasingly adrift and rudderless. We have been left without a north star of substance, dependent on a mechanistic world to deliver food, entertainment and pleasure in never-ending supply.
In that mechanistic world there are no grey areas. There is either a solution or no solution. The application of the mechanistic model to social and philosophical questions has left no space for ambiguity. The nuances and complexity of life that our poets express is lost in a world where you are either right or wrong.
It is within this social milieu that Mass Formation can occur, but for it to take hold requires a number of specific conditions. Desmet outlines the first condition as generalised loneliness, social isolation and lack of social bonds in society.
The digitalised society we live in has given us immense connectedness with our fellow humans, from next door or the other side of the world, but the quality and texture of that connectedness does not compare to direct human-to-human contact, which we have been drawn away from.
That lack of connection to a religious or spiritual grounding has left people in a constant state of underlying anxiety. Desmet talks about the vibrations of a people and how this anxiety is a constant in their lives, as evidenced in the relentless increase in the use of antidepressants and anxiety medication.
The global market for antidepressants in 2020 grew from $11.7bn to $14.9bn representing a 28% increase in a single year. At a time when we have never had such abundance, we have never been more unhappy. The more we own and can do, seemingly, the more unhappy we have become. The connectedness, sense of purpose and spirituality we enjoyed, has been replaced with an ‘always on’ digitised anxiety.
Finally, there is the search for meaning in life. As our worldly needs and desires are met, we are confronted with a more fundamental question as to the meaning of our lives. The connectedness we had in the past, where we interacted with the people who manufactured a product or povided a service has almost completely disappeared. Most of us are now small cogs in the global supply chain. We are part of a mechanistic world, which seeks efficiency and productivity, but which leaves the human cogs feeling soulless and lost.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Suggestive Story
So how does Mass Formation emerge from this world? Desmet describes how the catalyst for Mass Formation can be a suggestion or story in the public sphere. With society so conditioned, any suggestive story causing anxiety and fear can be the ignition point. The process leads to psychological gain. The anxiety that roamed through society like a fog can attach itself to a specific cause. It is no longer free-flowing but has a cause to attach to and draw energy from.
As the level of fear increases, the cause developing it draws in the masses with a call to solidarity and collectivism. Those refusing to participate are accused of lacking solidarity and civic duty. “You don’t want to kill granny” was levelled against offenders as an unarguable fact that only the most callous would ignore. As the Formation deepens it no longer relies on facts or data. The masses believe the story, not because it is accurate, but because it creates a new social bond.
The strategy of dealing with the perceived object of anxiety creates ritualistic behaviours. The function of ritualistic behaviours is always to create group cohesion. They are symbolic and aimed at subjugating the individual to the group. The more absurd the ritual, the more power it has in forming group cohesion. We think of space markers in public parks, fences around concert goers and Ireland’s most renowned scientist appearing on prime time TV in a plastic bubble, as only some of the ridiculous ritualistic behaviours we were sucked into performing. Few questioned them: the more outrageous they were the more we adhered.
The psychology of crowds is well researched and to those that ask well ‘surely all the doctors and scientists can’t be wrong’ one can point to the well-known conformity experiment by Solomon Asch. Participants are asked which line from A B or C is the same length as Exhibit 1. The experiment is set up with a single participant in a group of 8 where the other 7 members are Asch’s employees. The 7 employees declare that line B is that same length as 1. Faced with the pressure of the crowd 75% agree to what a blind man could see to be untrue. Group formation is more important than the accuracy of the story.
Enemies of the People
Finally, the masses need an enemy. The dominant group needs to contrast the virtues of good citizens with the demonic followers of a counter-narrative. Pent-up frustration and aggression are released. Those that do not go along with the Mass Formation feel the brunt of this behaviour. There evolves a rapidly reduced empathy and intolerance towards those not in the group.
Statements from public figures that those who choose not to take vaccines should be denied hospital care were greeted by the mob with relish. Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president stated in Dec 2021 that the “EU must consider mandatory vaccination”.
The Nuremberg Code of 1947 and codified into law by the UN in 1966 was built on the principle of informed consent, yet this fundamental human right was jettisoned without debate or question.
Statements from ‘liberal’ Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada and Ahern in NZ intimating they would make the life difficult for the unvaccinated difficult contained an explicit menace and threat that is not normal in our society. It betrays a shocking abuse of power.
Frank Armstrong reviews a new book on the Irish government's response Covid-19 and wonders whether it will be said once again: “We didn’t know, no one told us”https://t.co/vikPQsuFMa@broadsheet_ie@danieleidiniph1
So, the remaining question is whether those in power knowingly planned and executed the greatest breakdown and dismantling of some of the most cherished values in Western society? Was there a master plan with covert meetings and messages shared among the key players? The answer is probably no, or at least that’s not necessary for it to happen in what appears to be a cohesive manner.
The world was ripe for a Mass Formation and the leaders of the Western world, one by one, consciously or unconsciously, seized on the fear and anxiety that Covid generated to exercise extraordinary power.
They stood by and allowed power to move from elected officials to technocrats who previously held no authority. Their technocratic authority, Holohan in Ireland, Fauci in the US, Whitty in the UK, made them unchallengeable. The most benign questioning was met with a cry of being anti-science and idiotic.
Hannah Arendt used the term the ‘banality of evil’ to describe the dull bureaucrats who participated in the Holocaust, and who wielded extraordinary power without a moral or ethical compass. They were just following orders. There may not be a conscious awareness of the harm being done, as most of these technocrats, and leaders, will have bought into and have been victims of the Formation themselves. What they were conscious of, however, were the levers they could exercise to deepen and extend it.
As soon as it started it became very obvious, they could exercise almost unlimited power over the public without challenge. Almost no force was necessary. The number of occasion where police were needed to enforce lockdown rules were very rare. Mass Formation ensures self-governance. Those who disagree are forced by the crowd to comply or face being banished as outcasts.
So where to now? Covid has subsided for now, but the costs and damage have yet to be fully accounted. It will take many years to tally that human suffering and the financial bill. It may require the current actors to leave the stage to allow the facts to become readily available, and for the public to see the full tragedy of our self-inflicted wounds.
The possibility arises that this will reoccur in the event of another pandemic. Are those who tasted almost complete power really satiated?. Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine the crack-cocaine-appeal of that kind of power will not draw them in again. The question is what event will they weaponise, what fear will they jump on as the catalyst for the next Mass Formation and the return to a totalitarian regime?
Amy Gallagher, nurse and psychotherapist, has initiated legal proceedings against Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust for religious discrimination; racial discrimination; discrimination on the basis of philosophical belief, harassment and victimization.
While the story has appeared in British newspapers, mainly the right-wing press, it has not been covered in Ireland. I came across it when Gallagher was interviewed on the right-wing podcast The New Culture Forum. Her story was, however, unhelpfully flagged in a partisan manner that might have the effect of alienating people in the centre.
Amy Gallagher’s troubles came about when she was on a final two-year training course in a Tavistock Trust training centre to complete her psychotherapy credentials. She was struck by the emphasis on so-called Woke ideology in the lectures and seminars, often to the exclusion of psychotherapeutic instruction, involving handouts guiding students towards ideological harmony.
She found this curious and irritating at first, since these diversions had little to do with the discipline she was there to study. Two lectures in particular caused her to more seriously question what she was hearing. One was based on the assumption that Christianity was a racist religion, while the other was titled “Whiteness-A Problem For Our Time,” which was summarized in the online description thus: “The presentation is rooted in the assumption that the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness.”
Ideas and Perspectives
Gallagher had studied Arts and was aware of the ideas being promulgated: a strange amalgam of French intellectualism married with Freudianism and Marxism to form “perspectives” that will be familiar to anyone who has studied English, Sociology or the now compulsory Gender Studies in university.
During an interview, in response to the interviewer saying, we all know that there is “Inherent racism in all white people,” this stated as a fact, without any backup, Gallagher objected and said she didn’t believe that. The interviewer gave her a look of impatience and said it’s like the way “sexism is inherent in all men”. Gallagher said she didn’t believe that either. Gallagher was immediately seen as “difficult” and a “problem”.
During a later interview, called to assess her as a “problematic” individual, when she continued to hold her ground, simply asserting her right to disagree with the various tenets of the ideology, she was directly ordered to “stop speaking”.
As a psychotherapist Gallagher realized that she couldn’t simply take such blanket group judgements as fact. You just couldn’t say that all people in a certain identifiable group are this or that, based entirely on their skin colour or appearance. Her job as a psychotherapist is to treat individuals, who tend to be quite unique, regardless of group identity. To accept the prejudices being pressed on her by management would mean that she would be claiming to know her patients just by looking at them, judging them entirely by appearances and group identity, which, in her view, undermines the core idea of psychotherapy.
Ideological Crimes
Gallagher researched the material being promulgated by management and found that the ideas were essentially ideas taken from critical race theory populist Robin DeAngelo, ideas which Gallagher describes as academically irrelevant, backed up by nothing, and little more than racist propaganda.
She claims that the Tavistock Trust, in seminars, refers only to this material and not to any other relevant academic material. When she queried this approach, she was told she was not up to speed on anti-racism, that she had “problematic views”, the implication being that she was racist for having queried some of the odd assertions quoted above.
It was assumed by management that in questioning the ideology, she had committed some kind of “crime” against it. Attempts were made to strike her off the nurse’s register. But the nurses and midwifery council defended her, saying simply that nurses are entitled to disagree with ideas.
She was then accused by a member of management of racial harassment, of making that person feel “unsafe”, and of having a twitter account that made that person feel “unsafe”. Gallagher had started a stand-up-to-Woke twitter account which was then described as putting out “hate speech”, apparently just by sheer dint of its existence.
She was then prohibited by the faculty head from entering the main reception area any longer, based on the idea that the sight of her might re-traumatize certain people offended by her views.
The Psychotherapist
Then it gets really odd, and even a bit comical. Having studied psychotherapy, her training kicked in and she began assessing the various individuals in management she was dealing with.
So, after being reprimanded for speaking her mind, and after being warned off bringing “personal opinion” to bear on what the management regarded as self-evident truths about racism and white privilege and so on, she realized that the ethos of the antiracism ideology she was facing bore all the hallmarks of neuroticism, the very conditions that she was trained to treat, to move people away from. For instance, she says:
The ideology itself…goes against all the things that I’ve been taught as a mental health professional. It’s hysterical, it catastrophises, it jumps to conclusions about certain things, it assumes what is going on in the other person’s mind, it’s very all or nothing black or white thinking, excuse the pun, it’s kind of, you know, there’s baddies and there’s goodies. These are all psychological mechanisms that I’m generally trying to help people move away from…It’s like they’ve embraced neuroticism and they’re advocating for it…Critical race theory and woke ideology is negative thinking, essentially.
Legal Challenge
She says she wants her legal challenge to be as impactful as possible. That she isn’t just taking the Tavistock Clinic to court for the what they did to her, but that she is taking critical race theory itself to court.
She describes the people who essentially bullied her as being out of control, believing themselves to be above the law and above institutional procedure. For instance, they would verbally threaten her with certain procedures of reprimand, but then wouldn’t follow up, since to do so would have required putting this in writing and on the record.
One of the bizarre assertions made to her by a member of management was that “Christianity is responsible for racism because of its use of the words light and dark.” This is the type of observation that might be acceptable in an undergraduate essay, but it is hardly a foundation for serious philosophical progress on any front.
The forthcoming court case should make for an interesting spectacle, assuming it is even reported on in mainstream media. In many ways, Gallagher’s action, will for some, mirror the case taken by writer Deborah Lipstadt against the holocaust denier David Irving. On the other hand, it might also mirror the case taken by Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry.
In the midst of the pandemic in 2021, Marc McSharry TD – an ardent supporter of whistleblowers – tabled a number of parliamentary questions (PQs) on my behalf. These mostly concerned the apparent widespread use of bogus medical doctors across state agencies.
All of these questions were shot down, however, under Standing Order(SO) 45, which inaccurately claimed they weren’t questions of ‘fact of policy’.
The final PQ was euphemistically ‘amended’, but was in reality an entirely new PQ, drafted so as effectively to give legislative approval to the practice of using bogus doctors, fraudently claiming to hold medical council registrations.
These doctors are used, in particular, in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection (DEASP) and are paid a sum for each client they cut off disability payments. All doctors reviewing cases in the DEASP are obliged to be registered with the medical council.
The PQs raised on my behalf were signed off on by Leas-Cheann Comhairle, Catherine Connolly whom I implored not to put the replies on the Dáil record, as I explained it would be a violation of Standing Order 45 to alter a PQ without consent.
However, Catherine Connolly doubled down, claiming PQs can be ‘amended’ under SO 45.
Yet the provision of SO 45 states that PQs can only be amended in ‘consultation’ with the Deputy raising them, which did not occur.
Despite being furnished with a copy of standing order 45, Catherine Connolly bizarrely wrote to me and Deputy McSharry that the replies were going on the Dáil record, and she was ‘not re-visiting’ the matter. This effectively gave Dáil blessing to serious malpractice.
I was entitled to an appeal before the Committee for Parliamentary Oversight and Privileges (CPPO) but, before I could make a submission, I received an unsolicited letter from the Cheann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl erroneously claiming I had no right to an appeal to the CPPO.
I then engaged the service of a solicitor (at my expense), and only after two solicitors’ letters was my right to a CPPO hearing established with the Cheann Comhairle, who wrote to say he had given my submission to the clerk of the CPPO.
Matters did not end there. After this I encountered the sinister entity that is OPLA.
Seán Ó Fearghaíl TD
Case Closed
I had requested that another committee member chair the CPPO for this case, as the usual chair Seán Ó Fearghaíl, and his deputy, Catherine Connolly, had questions to answer. My request was refused, however, by the Office on the Parliamentary Legal Advisor (OPLA).
Then I sought to appear as a witness. This too was denied. Finally, I received a brief email from the Committee clerk, a middle-ranking civil servant, saying the case had been heard on April 6, 2022, and had found against me, and that the Cheann Comhairle had chaired it.
I received no reply from the Committee clerk to further enquiries such as whether the requisite quorum of eight committee members were in attendance. I did, however, receive a high-handed reply from a ‘legal counsel’ in OPLA, conveying what I now know to be an inaccurate account of the hearing.
Having checked with members of the Committee, it appears my case was never heard and, my submission was not circulated to the Committee members. This is a breach of Standing Order 118.
OPLA circulated a number of further authoritarian letters defending the Cean Comhairle’s right to chair the meeting, while maintaining that there had been a hearing by the CPPO in the first place.
On June 10, 2022, the deputy head of OPLA, Ramona Quinn wrote a letter to me citing ‘laws and conventions going back to 1923.’
In response, I challenged Ms Quinn and OPLA as to what Dáil Standing Order allowed the unit to intrude on – and indeed unconstitutionally usurp – the work of any Committee of elected representatives of Dáil Eireann? To this I received no reply.
I did, however, receive a number of further, intimidating, letter from OPLA, thereafter unsigned.
In response, I put them on notice to the effect that this constituted harassment and pointed out that they were trespassing into the constitutionally sacrosanct domain of the Ceann Comhairle, and the Oireachtas. I asked the head of OPLA for the Dáil Standing Order allowing for it. To this I again received no reply.
Further enquires reveal that the OPLA quango evolved from containing just one legal advisor, Melissa English, in 2007, to twenty-four legal experts in 2018!
English had been a sole independent legal advisor in the Houses of the Oireachtas but, according to a March 2019 article in Eolas magazine, ‘under her stewardship it is now a statutory office comprising a multi-disciplinary team of barristers, solicitors, legislation drafters and specialist researchers.’
The article goes on to quote English saying, ‘the OPLA unit had to be structured and resourced over the last 12 years.’
Eolas magazine reveals further that OPLA emerged from ‘a report of a retired civil servant Dunning in December 2016’, and it led to a Dáil sub-Committee headed by the Cheann Comhairle for the establishment and vast expansion of OPLA, including the provision for the head of OPLA to be appointed a deputy Secretary General in the Houses of the Oireachtas.
The function of OPLA is supposed to be tripartite: to give legal advice to Oireachtas members; to help draft legislation in Private Members Bills; and to defend the Houses of the Oireachtas in court challenges.
However, given English and her unit are part of the Oireachtas, and as she is a civil servant reporting directly to the civil servant and Top-Level Appointments Committee (TLAC) appointee, Dáil Clerk, Peter Finnegan, how can she defend herself and her unit in court, as it is now an integral part of the Oireachtas?
Furthermore, English flagged the ‘colliding rights of parliamentarians to absolute privilege in respect of their speeches in the Dail and the, sometimes competing rights of outside persons whose personal constitutional rights can be adversely affected by this speech’ as part of the justification for her bloated unit.
I maintain that English and her legal heavy gang have copper-fastened gross medical malpractice implicit to the use of unqualified medical practitioners by State departments and agencies.
So much for the constitutional rights of citizens, English appears to have seen no problem giving parliamentary blessing to a seriously problematic practice.
Furthermore, English appears to have seen nothing irregular about government Departments and Oireachtas civil servants distorting PQs, or the Cheann Comhairle apparently misleading me in correspondence.
The Leas Cheann Comhairle Catherine Connolly who signed the PQ responses ought to be aware that OPLA has exceeded its remit, violated the Oireachtas and conveyed falsehoods about a phantom hearing at the CPPO in April this year. I argue that she is deepening her original violation of SO 45, and failing to correct the records of the Dáil arising from the distortion of the PQ. She is also failing to correct the erroneous assertions of OPLA.
Four Courts Quay.
Violation of Separation of Powers
I wrote to Melissa English on October 15, 2022 regarding the intrusions of OPLA into the workings of a Dáil Committee.
English defines herself as ‘being central to the defence on behalf of parliament of the cornerstone of the constitutional separation of powers’, but she seems unaware that OPLA violates the constitutional separation of powers. As a civil servant under the Dáil Clerk, English is obliged to respond in ten working days to queries from the public.
Yet, to date, I have received no response from her to these questions I raised.
What is your defence of the violation by OPLA of Dail SOs and the Constitutional Separations of Powers in taking over the CPPO committee from its clerk designate and its elected members?
Sinead Fitzpatrick, legal counsel, conveyed un-retracted inaccuracies in two formal letters to me and my solicitor on 20 April 2022 to the effect that the case was heard by the CPPO on 6 April 2021. It was not heard and, the submission was not even circulated in further violation of SO 118.
Why am I still being harassed by unsolicited and unsigned communications from OPLA whom I have requested to remain outside of my dealings with elected members of a Dáil Committee – a constitutional process in which OPLA has no role or jurisdiction?
Are the Cean Comhairle and the Leas Cean Comhairle being consulted and informed about these communications, and do they approve of the ongoing communications I am receiving from OPLA at your direction?
I have separately put these questions to the Cheann Comhairle and the Leas Cheann Comhairle, similarly without reply.
I notified Taoiseach Micheál Martin in late 2021 to the effect that there is a constitutional crisis in the Oireachtas because of the ongoing conduct of the Cheann Comhairle and Leas Cean Comhairle. I also informed him that OPLA and the Dáil Clerk are violating the constitutionally sacrosanct realms of the Cheann Comhairle and the Oireachtas.
Micheál Martin responded that the Cheann Comhairle’s office was independent. It begs the question: who exactly will deal with the constitutional impasse that has emerged in this case?
It appears that OPLA is ensuring that in certain circumstances a PQ cannot be asked on behalf of a citizen. Nor can a citizen access a Dáil Committee to redress the injustice of a wrongful PQ.
How, one wonders, did the Oireachtas ever function before the recent creation of OPLA and its band of twenty-four legal heavy hitters?
The answer seems obvious. OPLA is designed to muzzle the Oireachtas. That is perhaps why no press release attended its creation on a statutory footing and its wide expansion in 2018.
It is an authoritarian quango which has mushroomed from one legal advisor to twenty-four in the space of twelve years. Masquerading as a helpful entity, its real purpose is to snuff out a crucial function of our parliamentary democracy.
So how did the legislation creating OPLA slip through parliament in 2018 and, how much does it cost the taxpayer? Having spoken to a number of TDs, none seem to recall the 2018 legislation creating OPLA in its current guise passing through the Houses of the Oireachtas.
Given OPLA’s total staff, including clerical and twenty-four legal officers amount to thirty-six, we may assume it costs at least €5 million per annum.
The spend was signed off on by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform under Robert Watt as Secretary General and Accounting Officer. Perhaps this explains Robert Watt apparent contempt for Dáil Committees.
Democratic accountability compels a total dismantling of OPLA in its present guise. One does not need to be a constitutional lawyer to see that it is glaringly unconstitutional.
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
Fellipe Lopes joins Frank Armstrong to discuss the results of the first round of the Brazilian Presidential elections in which former President Lula failed to secure the required 50% to avoid a second round run-off against the incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Nonetheless, Lula remains favourite to win in the second round.
However, Fellipe argues that Bolsonaro “has already won the election”, given that ultraconservative candidates have emerged victorious in state legislatures and the Congress. It will be difficult for Lula to do very much, he says, even if, as assumed, Lula wins the second round.
The importance of Brazil in the world cannot be overstated. It contains most of Amazonia, the lungs of the world, and a huge, and growing, population of over two hundred million. Many Brazilians are living in Ireland now too.
Fellipes points to the historic difficulties of Lula’s P.T. (Workers’ Party), arising particularly after the impeachment of President Dilma, and a number of corruption scandals.
He also looks back at Bolsonaro’s background. For a long time he was an unremarkable representative for Rio de Janeiro, but he was able to connect with the public through cheap jokes and an emphasis on family values and law and order.
They also discuss the importance of Evangelical Christianity in Brazil, which has been around for a long time in an historically Catholic country. Many pastors are now powerful political figures.
Fellipe argues that the Brazilian left failed to connect adequately with vulnerable communities, unlike their opponents, who have also been adept at harnessing the power of social media.
