I have just finished representing a client in a murder case and have plenty to reflect on about guilt and innocence. This is a two-part excursus for Cassandra Voices dealing first with why certain people are found guilty of crimes they did not commit.
The Innocence Project, with which I was involved over many years, has flagged the issue of cognitive or confirmatory bias, which often plays a crucial part in my closing speeches. The idea that we are liable to jump to conclusions based on pre-existing prejudices or our life experiences is as old as Dante or Francis Bacon.
The idea explains why in natural justice terms the aphorism: justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, cautions against a decision based on the perception of bias, including objective bias. The crucial point is to be self-reflexive and to acknowledge shades of grey. Such is the path of wisdom – esteem nuance and not dogmatism. That is how to judge or be a juror, or even an investigative police officer, and not a persecutor.
In terms of Confirmatory Bias Drs. Dror and Hampikian of The Innocence Project have demonstrated that even when experts review a DNA test, if the police disclose which is the suspect’s DNA profile, a favourable match to the evidence may be found.
In a case study they conducted, two state experts who declined to exclude a suspect had information about his background. Whereas, when that same evidence was sent to seventeen out-of-state experts at another lab – who had no information on the suspect – twelve of the seventeen DNA analysts excluded the suspect from the inquiry, four deemed the matter inconclusive, and only one agreed with the original state police lab scientists that the suspect could not be excluded.
We refer to this as confirmatory bias, and in my view it goes beyond police officers and social workers. It also seems to apply to pathology experts and forensic experts. The best are trained to understand such biases exist, and as one expert I recently cross-examined recently intimated, allow for a spectrum of doubt.
A crucial problem emerges in the trial and investigative processes when repetitive, leading questions are asked.
Elizabeth Loftus and Maggie Bruck specialise and are associated with the Innocence Project in false memory syndrome, which is accepted as persuasive in many courts. So, for example Loftus conducted a survey familiar to lawyers as to how different participants react to how any question is framed.
An example of a leading question is illustrated by the difference between the following questions.
Question 1: At what speed did car one contact car two?
Question 2: At what speed did car one smash into car two?
The question using the verb to smash led to the witnesses seeing broken glass when there was none and to assume guilt. In short, the question was framed to achieve a particular answer. It was suggestive and leading.
A leading question the big no-no of the criminal courts, as it is used to elicit a desired answer, and build a conclusion from a premises. Unfortunately it is often employed by police officers and social workers. A barrister may attempt to lead, but is chastised if it is obvious.
Language matters and those who misuse or traduce it to achieve outcomes whether for personal, political or commercial reasons should be treated with the utmost scepticism. It is increasingly tolerated in a culture of obvious untruth and exploitation, which is now seeping into the criminal justice system.
Brains can be reduced to mush by leading and direct questions. By such mechanisms children can be led to believe that day workers slaughtered rabbits, as Stanley Schiff recently remarked in a book about the Salem Witch Trials.
Examination of a Witch (1853) by T. H. Matteson, inspired by the Salem trials.
An opinion once adopted
Francis Bacon, the great British philosopher and intellectual as well as Lord Chancellor of Britain also remarked in this context:
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside or rejects
In rape and abuse cases such attitudes as this have spiralled out of control, particularly through the overloading of a formal accusation with endless satellite allegations, which create an overwhelmingly prejudicial effect; compounded by the admission of bad character evidence in the U.K.. This represents the over-weighting of morality to determine criminality.
Historic cases are hugely problematical, as is delay. The all too convenient idea that a victim waits donkey’s years because of suppressed memories leaves a defendant, twenty or more years later, relying on the fallibility of memory – often in the absence of documentation – to defeat allegations. When relationships break-up and partners move on and there are children involved it often opens up an unholy vista.
That is not to undermine the victims of serious crimes. But the falsely accused are also victims and their lives are often destroyed.
Conceptual closure, and stereotyping are necessary as a survival plan but not for justice. Black and white thinking leads to tick box, or slot machine justice.
Luke Sheehan explores the latest developments in the Assange Case, and is joined by barrister David Langwallner to discuss the approach of the U.K.'s High Court.https://t.co/gHTNYXJ4fb@Stella_Assange@DanielFooksArt
Life of course is messy, as is the criminal justice system , and we need categories or categorisations to survive, but we must confront the problem of over-categorisation.
The legendary jurist Jerome Frank was much attuned to how the prejudice of participants in the trial process (judges and indeed jurors or witnesses) influenced decisions, and how selective recall or mistakes about facts often affected the outcome of a case.
Thus, the unpredictability of court decisions resides primarily in the elusiveness of facts and deep-seated prejudice. He wrote:
When pivotal testimony at the trial is oral and conflicting, as it is in most lawsuits, the trial. Court’s finding of the fact involves a multitude of elusive factors: First the trial judge in a non- Jury trial or the jury in a jury trial must learn about the facts from the witnesses and Witnesses, being humanely fallible, frequently make mistakes in observation of what they saw and heard, or in their recollections of what they observed, or in their courtroom reports. Of those recollections. Second, the trial judges or juries also human, may have prejudices – often unconscious unknown even to themselves – for or against some of the witnesses, or the Parties to the suit, or the lawyers. Those prejudices when they are racial, religious, political or economic, may sometimes be surmised by others. But there are some hidden, unconscious. Biases of trial judges or jurors – such as for example, plus or minus reactions to women, or unmarried woman, or red-haired woman . . . or men with deep voices or high-pitched voices.
Identification evidence or the fleeting glance is often subject to the Turnbull Warning of the dangers of same, and although safeguarded it remains troublesome.
Juries have always been swayed by advocacy, and it is, as I have hitherto written, about a dark art more akin to magic or sorcery, but even the most ingenious sorcerer cannot normally produce a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Jurors are not entirely naïve and, in my experience, do focus on the evidence, but particularly in America, hysterical prosecutors often confuse morality and criminality. That this is fuelled by excessively religious people warrants condemnation.
There are other causes of false convictions. In Ireland since 2015 when the JC Case jettisoned the exclusionary rule, allowing the police to characterise tainted evidence as inadvertence or a mistake, it created an open door for targeting and framing. The prevalence of police corruption and incompetence in Ireland recommends, in my view, a special layer of checks in addition to the DPP, before any arrest is sanctioned.
Another consideration is where an offence is far too loosely defined such as the proposed Irish criminalisation of so-called hate crimes.
I am very attuned to dealing with vulnerable people with mental health problems and drug addictions. The problem of false confessions arises when a person is interviewed often without an appropriate adult in the room, and starts to sing like a canary. Vulnerable people will confess to almost anything, often based on lack of self-esteem and incredibly short-sighted desires to get out on bail, sometimes just to go to the pub or attend a football match. Solicitors should always be present. Psychiatric reports need to be secured.
The explosive growth of social media has led to a proliferation of new crimes, such as what may be a mistaken decision to engage in a sexual role play conversation and, in that context, there is the rise in demonic entrapment, including the targeting of perceived sex offenders by vigilante groups who prepare the case for the police.
We live in an age of extremes, characterised by witch hunts, increasing executive decrees, secret laws and over-regulation. It is eminently possible to stray into a wrong place at the wrong time and be accused unfairly.
A crucial final point is to appreciates the damage caused by a false allegation. Even if a person is ultimately found not guilty, they may be traumatised for life.
I hope the Innocence Project gains more traction improving processes at the beginning of the system, rather than providing a photo opportunity twenty years later, when someone’s life has already been destroyed.
The question of compensation also arises, as in the recent Andrew Malscherk case who served eighteen years for a rape he did not commit.
But to anticipate my next article not all are innocent, and some who are guilty are assumed to be innocent. Bob Dylan’s song about Rubin Carter ‘Hurricane’ is forceful and brilliant, although it may have given a sanitised account of the accused. Not that he could have been the champion of the world but that he was always an innocent man in a living hell.
Anyone watching the agonizing progress of the Julian Assange case proceeding through the U.K. justice system will be aware that it’s highly unlikely that any judge will simply throw open the gates of Belmarsh prison in assent to calls to ‘Free Assange’.
Sadly for those sympathetic to him, extradition has inched ever closer over the last three years thanks to High Court decisions: first overturning a lower court ruling that blocked extradition on the basis of suicide risk in 2021; next blocking an initial attempt to appeal in 2022; then blocking another appeal attempt in 2023.
Assange has survived more than a decade of a bizarrely public seclusion and alleged U.S. security targeting that ranged from standard kidnapping and rendition to assassination, details of which were forbidden to be submitted this time round. Yet figures fighting or speaking up for him are not lightweight: more support from Australia where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed a parliamentary motion calling for his release in 2023, while his wife Stella has raged for the life of her besieged man like someone out of a Greek drama. Might there be a true reprieve?
On March 26 the High Court played the ball back to the Americans in a ruling that confirmed three out of nine questions of his imperilled rights: ‘that the applicant [Assange] is permitted to rely on the first amendment, that the applicant is not prejudiced at trial, including sentence, by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same first amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed.’
A response is due in three weeks. Had this ruling gone differently, Assange could have been on a plane within days.
It is worth mentioning here where – even were the death penalty threat to be muzzled – he may end up: the ‘supermax’ prison class where the US boxed up the likes of Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui and Ramzi Yousef.
An earlier legal concept that was applied to the question of blocking U.S. extradition demands the ‘Death row phenomenon,’ actually starts to look more humane when one itemizes the torture regime of prisons where inmates are slowly aged in isolation under observation without even the chance to kill themselves.
According to a former warden of the most secure such place, ADX in Colorado, it constitutes a ‘life after death… it’s much worse than death.’
For Stella Assange, speaking on the steps of the court, this ruling was at least a partial hint of genuinely positive momentum, a support for the notion that Assange might have rights after all. For others responding from around the world, the rejections of the six of the nine grounds formed part of the ominous, serpentine locomotion of the UK justice machine to eventually doom the Australian to that fate.
For Irish barrister and human rights specialist David Langwallner, who previously spoke to the Cassandra Voices podcast, the ruling gives a hint of a real path to appeal, and can be taken as a serious gesture from the judges. Speaking again informally to CV, he condemns the ongoing absurdity of a persecution that “should have ended long ago,” and lays out precedents like Soering Vs. United Kingdom.
Jim Sheridan is a significant figure in the international film industry because of his creativity and talent. He has made an influential documentary, ‘Murder at the Cottage’, about the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case.
In the recent Cassandra Voices Podcast, he explained why he believed Ian Bailey is innocent and much maligned.
In a recent blog, I explained why I believe that the thought processes making Jim Sheridan such a gifted filmmaker may be unhelpful when seeking to find Sophie’s murderer. Here are two issues I raised in my blog: Hitchens’s Razor and the Myth of Bailey the Victim.
Christopher Hitchens’s Razor
The brutal murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier is a fact, not a literary exercise nor a dinner party game where people share their theories of the crime. In the Cassandra Voices interview Sheridan spoke about his relationship with Bailey, explaining why Bailey was ‘tortured’ for twenty-seven years, and why he insists Bailey did not murder Sophie. The content was bizarre and told us much about the workings of Sheridan’s thinking, but little about the murder of Sophie.
Topics included a child floating in amniotic fluid, the guilt felt by Jim’s mother over his grandmother’s death, the famine, a landlord during the famine being called Bailey, a tired old concept called tribal memory, scoring 180 in darts, the mis-attribution of a Life of Brian sketch, Michael Collins, and the killing of Irish people in Clonakilty.
I am no legal expert, but am still certain none of this would be evidence introduced by either side in a murder trial for Sophie. It is irrelevant and a complete distraction from the seriousness of the case. One could have as easily brought up astrology, tarot cards, and reading the runes for consideration.
When we apply Christopher Hitchens’s razor to Sheridan’s comments: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” – we see that all those interesting concepts contain no evidence concerning the murder. They can be dismissed. The stream-of-consciousness outpourings of Mr Sheridan are fascinating. We see how different personal and cultural themes may be woven into a beguiling and entertaining narrative. However, finding the murderer of Sophie is about evidence. There can be no room for the evidence-free assertions highlighted by Christopher Hitchens. This will not be the last time Hitchens’s razor will be applied.
Ian Bailey’s many confessions
Sheridan has dismissed each of Bailey’s 10-plus confessions. In the podcast, he focuses on one described by a senior journalist, Helen Callanan. Both she and Bailey have given several statements about a confession to AGS. Mr Sheridan was not present at that meeting. Mr Sheridan’s narrative is that Bailey learned he was being sacked, and he responded by using heavy irony: as he was a master of irony. Sheridan claims that the confession was ironic. He goes on to say when Callanan told her boss, Matt Cooper, about the confession he did not believe her.
First, we are told Mr Bailey had been informed that he was being sacked. The implication is that the sacking was a trigger that provoked Bailey’s comments. This is not supported by evidence. Bailey was a freelancer, working from article to article or project to project. He may not be given further work but he could not be sacked. Furthermore, there is not a single reference to him being sacked in his statements nor those of Helen Callanan. Is the sacking an assertion without evidence or is their evidence that Mr Sheridan could share with us?
Second, Sheridan insisted, “Bailey was English perfection in sarcasm and irony.” That is Jim’s opinion. It is an opinion that fits his Bailey never-confessed narrative. For a teller of tales that will suffice, but we need more than assertions. Is it true? What is noticeable about what Bailey has presented on social media, in written articles, and said in countless interviews, is that he is a man bereft of irony. There is no perfection here. Indeed, with Bailey, there is evidence to the contrary. There is no evidence supporting this assertion. He is dull, crude and infantile. The signed statements by Helen Callanan could not be clearer. She saw no irony in what was said. We know she was present, that Bailey was a liar, and Jim was not there … so who to believe?
Finally, Jim Sheridan tells the podcast listeners that he doubted very much that Matt Cooper, Callanan’s editor, thought that Bailey had admitted his guilt to Callanan. I have never seen a statement from Cooper to that effect. We are not given any information about the alleged discussion between Callanan and Cooper. When Mr Sheridan says he “doubted very much” is that an assertion without evidence, or is there something more substantial?
In The Murder of Sophie: How I Hunted and Haunted the West Cork Killer(2020), Michael Sheridan’s brilliantly detailed book on the case, there is no mention of any sacking nor of Matt Cooper. One can only hope that the source of these later iterations was not the pathological liar, Ian Bailey.
As a story, Jim Sheridan’s narrative is engaging. It is both coherent and plausible. For a consumer of fiction, it works. However, a good story is not grounds to dismiss the observations of a capable journalist. If there is hard evidence to back his narrative, I hope Mr Sheridan will share it; if there is none he ought to declare it.
Elsewhere Sheridan dismisses all the other confessions. The evidence shows there have been more than ten confessions made. From a teenager through to older adults, male and female, people with a range of occupations. The confessions were made with Bailey sometimes drunk, sometimes sober, and in a variety of emotional states. They are made in different ways. They are not all attributable to Bailey’s non-existent irony skills. There is nothing to indicate any of the statements about Bailey confessing were made by dishonest people with a vested interest in Bailey being convicted. However, the tired and emotional Bailey was repeatedly a dishonest man in the statements he made to vindicate himself.
The myth of Bailey the victim
27 years of torture unable to move unable to leave, branded a murderer without charge. Jim Sheridan
We know Bailey was charged and found guilty (in absentia) in France. Jim Sheridan asserts Bailey was tortured for twenty-seven years; that he was an innocent man, badly let down. We are told his life was miserable. All the time it is implied that he was a victim. Poor Ian.
I do not believe for a moment Sheridan would give this foul-mouthed thug a free pass. It is more likely he did not take a close look at the way the man behaved when he was not on ‘best behaviour’ with Jim. I took a look at Bailey in my forthcoming book The Pervert in the Hills. The man was odious. A torturer, not the tortured. He inflicted pain for an exceptionally long time and kvetched when he started to get a little back.
Is anyone feeling Ian’s pain? When you gather evidence on the man the notion of him being a victim is unsustainable. When Bailey is judged on actual long-term actions rather than short-term impressions it is difficult to feel sympathy for him.
Jim Sheridan is in good faith seeking to understand what happened to Sophie. I do not think old historical events, a mix of disparate notions, evidence-free assumptions, or unjustified sympathy for Bailey holds the key to discovering the murderer. Thankfully a well-put-together circumstantial case has already shown us Ian Bailey did it. He was a despicable man. He was a foul, malignant narcissist who, I believe, murdered Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
The Pervert in the Hills: How Ian Bailey, the monster at the heart of the Netflix documentary Murder in West Cork grew to hate me by J P Holzer on sale from April, 2024.
In a seminal scene at the end of the film Joker (2019) the eponymous character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is being interviewed by Robert de Niro’s character, the TV talk show host Murray Franklin. The Joker asks: “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fucking deserve!” before he shoots Murray Franklin in the head.
My question is this: ‘What do you get when you belittle someone’s work ethic, demean their professionalism, turn it into a tick-box exercise, and laugh at their idealism. “You get a whistleblower.”
After it ended, in May 2023, I received one or two messages from former colleagues who referred to me as “brave” or indeed “very brave”. Honestly, I do not consider myself brave. Pig-headed, stubborn and naively idealistic would be a more accurate assessment; and it’s the ideals that sank me.
Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker.
Origins
This story begins back in 2015 when I accepted a challenge from the daa’s (the commercial semi-state airport company that operates Dublin Airport formerly known as Aer Rianta) then CEO. As an employee of the daa I had been very critical of the behaviour of senior managers, especially the lack of value being accorded to employees. It was during one of these conversations that he challenged me to be part of the solution, rather than continuously carping. He asked me to help reform the organisation’s values.
Having accepted the challenge, I worked with the newly formed values team/committee. A lot of engagement was undertaken to identify what staff valued and were looking for as values in the organisation.
I now suspect it was all done for optics. This is because values only seem important for the daa as long as they do not impact on the bottom line. It is an organisation that seems to be run by accountants, who tend to be fixated on the budget statement at the end of each month. If they did consider values important they would surely have published their last substantive staff survey, conducted with Tower Watson in 2021/2022. That has been buried like it never happened.
I felt that values in the workplace would improve with a more joined-up approach, where people understood how each department worked and that each was reliant on the other.
The daa is a large organisation, reflecting the developing and existing culture of the wider Irish society. What the idealist in me failed to understand was that many people appear content this culture.
There were other impact factors, including the Irish Airlines Superannuation Scheme, long monopolised by Aer Lingus retirees, employees, and executives. I ran for election for one of four places on the Superannuation Committee in October 2008, receiving 1211 votes, 370 short of the last candidate elected, an Aer Lingus Representative.
By this stage the issue of not paying enough into a defined Benefit Scheme had come to a head. This meant that we, as daa employees, like Aer Lingus employees, would become deferred members and enter into separate, defined contribution schemes. A pension product, unlike a defined benefit pension scheme, provides no guarantees.
New entrants into this scheme received (or in some cases had not received) a financial contribution made by the company based on age and role. One such role was being a member of the Airport Fire Service. A medical waiver was required for firemen to benefit from the company’s individual contribution into the new defined contribution scheme.
Having to sign this waiver did not sit well with some of the firemen. A handful refused to sign, and were very poorly treated by daa HR over their principled stance.
Coincidentally, it was around this time that the introduction of the company’s new values initiative was to take place. Two of the values ambassadors were asked to present a short snippet to the fire crew, with the CEO and CFO in attendance. One worked in the daa internal communications team, and I was the other person asked to present.
Sadly, to complicate matters, a senior fire officer rang across on the morning of the presentation to say that the crew were deeply hostile to this presentation and advised that the values ambassadors should not attend.
I was then told that the communications team member would not attend due to this hostility, and was asked, would I? By this stage I had been an Airport Police Fire Officer for about sixteen years and had only recently taken up a full-time role in police training. I understood their anger, but to my mind that pension deal was done, and I was looking towards the future of an organisation aiming to become an aviation security and safety leader. That, at least, was the organisation I envisioned.
So, I went ahead and gave my five-minute presentation. Before I spoke, however, one of the firemen muttered to me that “I would get lackery for this.” I never did, at least to my face anyway.
I bumped into that individual recently, a few months before I was dismissed by the daa, in a coffee shop near Dublin Airport. He had just retired, and not in the manner he had wanted. He looked and sounded broken by the way it had ended. Worst of all, after so many years of spending time with his colleagues, he now had so very few people to talk to.
As part of my values’ journey, I had been asked to attend a company seminar in the Radisson Hotel at Dublin Airport. The then head of airport security and I were interviewed on a stage in front of at least eighty staff, many of them management. I spoke about being ill and conducting a review of myself. I described it as like holding a mirror up to my face and being unhappy with what I saw.
I compared this to the introduction of the organisation’s values assessment – holding up a mirror to the face of the organisation. None of us, I said, could be proud of how the daa had previously behaved, and this was an opportunity to move forward more positively.
Sometime after this I was stopped by a HR manager who told me they loved my speech and analogy about the mirror. They said they had acquired a small mirror and placed at the edge of their desk so that people could see their reflections whenever they were in her office: “to make them look at themselves”, when she was dealing with them.
Image: Daniele Idini.
COVID-19
2020 arrived bringing us COVID-19. Mentally, I was very stretched, having been separated for about a year, back living with my parents, and halfway through my first year studying for a Diploma in Legal Studies in the King’s Inns, which required attendance four evenings per week.
As the country and aviation industry effectively closed down for the first lockdown at the end of March, 2020, I had just managed to get myself through a twenty-four-day course with four other police instructors in Tai Jitsu, conflict management, coaching/teaching, control and restraint and handcuffing techniques.
I had had to book a room in the local airport sports complex – as the daa still has no dedicated facility for many of their aviation training requirements – in order to deliver the course and host the instructor from the UK. On another occasion our room had been double booked and we had to conduct this physical course on half of the usual floor space, as the rest had been set up for a wedding!
When the lockdown led, inevitably, to a voluntary severance scheme, the atmosphere at work darkened. Only months before, staff had voted to reject a management proposal called ‘New Ways of Working’. Many of these conditions were now being foisted on us.
It annoys me that people who want to benefit from a severance scheme get to vote on the terms and conditions of those who wish to remain at work. It was not, however, my fight. I was trying to look beyond COVID-19, having assessed it would take longer than six months.
With that in mind, I asked my brother, a budding artist, to offer an artist’s impression based on what I had told him in a rough sketch. I wrote a one-page business idea, or hook as we call it in training, and argued that now was the time to build for the future of aviation.
I sent these watercolours and the idea to the Chief People Officer in May 2020. The daa head office was based in the Old Central Terminal Building. I left the art work and letter with reception and waited. By this stage, many of the office-based staff had begun to work from home. Understandably, it took him two weeks to get back to me.
He got back to me by email regarding my Aviation Training Centre proposal. I recall he said I had put a lot of thought into the idea and said he had asked one of his team to contact me to discuss it further.
Marqette Food Hall and Bar, Terminal 1, Dublin Airport.
“Oh that”
I never heard back from that team member. A couple of months later, however, I bumped into her while she was queuing for a coffee in Marqette Café in Arrivals in Terminal 1. I said hello and she just about managed to say “Hi” in return. I brought up the idea for a training centre and asked whether she had been asked to speak to me regarding the proposal.
“Oh that” was the response. With that she collected her coffee and walked away. “Oh that”. After all my effort.
By this time I had decided I had had enough, and made a complaint of bullying against the Airport Security Manager. It was based on a number of incidents, which I regarded as an attempt to isolate me as the Police Training Manager.
This complaint was brought to the attention of the daa’s Equality Officer, as my own HR business support felt unable to deal with it. She and the Chief People Officer pushed for an informal meeting to address my complaint after the Chief People Officer had first met with the Airport Security Manager. I agreed. No room was booked, instead a meeting was arranged over a cup of coffee at the AMT Coffee Dock on February 17, 2021. No coffee was bought.
The Airport Security Manager attempted to dissuade me – in what I felt was an intimidating manner – from making the complaint. He stated that he would respond with compliance findings against me. In response, I said I would be continuing to pursue the formal complaint.
I left the table and as I walked away he caught up with me. I felt something pushing into my side, which turned out to be his left elbow. I came to a stop and told him to “get his fucking elbow out of my side”.
I let him pass across to my left and started to walk away. I heard him calling after me “bye Matt, see ya Matt”.
I reported the incident to An Garda Siochana and a file was sent to the DPP. Sadly, I had no witness, and it was not caught on CCTV.
I kept pushing the formal complaint, however, and the company hired an external HR consultant. We agreed terms of reference, one being that the investigator would circulate the completed report back to the Equality Officer, and that a full copy would be circulated to the respondents.
The report confirmed there had been an affront to my dignity at work, although the allegation of bullying was not upheld. It also made three recommendations. However, the first recommendation was redacted by the daa in violation of the terms of reference.
On March 15, 2023, while I was still an employee of the daa, the Chief People Officer sent three daa HR managers into the Workplace Relations Commission to have my referral over the complaint of bullying thrown out on a technicality. The adjudicator did not accept their argument and asked all three what was in the partly redacted report. All three claimed they did not know. The adjudicator requested a two week adjournment, and for the Chief People Officer, the Equality Officer and the Airport Security Manager to appear at the next hearing. That hearing has still not taken place. It has been included in my claim for unfair dismissal and penalisation in the workplace over my Protected Disclosures.
A new date had not been agreed before daa HR seized on my email to the board on April 14 2023, expressing frustration at daa HR’s behaviour, claiming incorrectly that it was a letter of resignation.
My frustration was based on the fact that a potential new employer had sought a reference from the Chief People Officer, which was not forthcoming. What did occur, however, was an attempt to file a disciplinary charge against me.
Protected Disclosure
On June 18, 2022, I wrote a letter which constituted a Protected Disclosure to the Minister for Transport Minister, Eamon Ryan. The primary issue was the security culture fostered by the Airport Security Manager and another senior security manager, which, I contended, was leading to a decline in security training standards.
For twenty years, if a newly hired ASU (Officer with the Airport Search Unit) failed any of the screening exams twice they would not be allowed a third re-sit. Now, however, because of staff shortages, ASU trainees were being put forward – with the Airport Security Manager’s approval – for resits after two fails.
This Protected Disclosure was handed to the Minister in the Dáil Chamber by Deputy Duncan Smith of Labour on the June 29, 2022.
For a long time, I had observed the attitude within the daa deteriorate towards aviation security and safety. In my view, it had become a tick-box exercise, and led to a very toxic workplace.
By this stage, in 2022, I had been with the organisation for twenty-four years, having joined the Airport Police in 1998. To remain working any longer in that environment would have killed me, as I had got nowhere with reforming the values of the organisation.
I was to be left to rot, having been unjustly stripped of the rank of Inspector by another senior security manager. This happened, I was told by someone in the organisation because “I did not manage the people above me”. In other words, I did not tell them what they wanted to hear.
For months I heard nothing from the Minister’s office. Then, on October 6, 2022, I emailed the office directly and received a reply from an official saying that although they did have my name, they had no way of contacting me and had decided the Protected Disclosure did not warrant further investigation.
I challenged this and asked to see the initial review and to be provided with further evidence. I still have not seen that review.
Department of Transport officials informed me on October 19, 2022 that the company secretary of the IAA was the prescribed person under SI 367/2020 who I should be dealing with regarding my Protected Disclosure.
Dublin Airport.
Landside Patrolling Risk
Finally, on January 10, 2023, the Aviation Security Manager with the IAA emailed and we spoke. She and a colleague had been tasked with conducting the initial assessment into my Protected Disclosure. After agreeing terms, I met with them on January 30, 2023, and was interviewed for just over an hour.
At this meeting I also provided and highlighted my concerns regarding the daa’s management of the Airport Security Programme, and how I felt that the failure to risk assess landside areas was a mistake. The landside area of an airport is where non-travelling members of the public have unrestricted access, i.e. before security screening. I provided the IAA with a landside risk assessment that I had provided to police management on November 22, 2022. Although acknowledged, it was ignored by the daa security team.
On Friday, March 24, 2023, the head of policy and compliance for the Airport Police circulated an email to police management and sergeants stating that the IAA had issued an update to the National Risk Assessment for Dublin Airport and Airport Police patrolling, which specifically referred to the landside areas.
I now know, thanks to Senator Tom Clonan, that the IAA commenced their investigation in response to my Protected Disclosure into daa security on March 23, 2023, the day before this email was sent.
Image: Daniele Idini
New Role
As I have said, I planned to move on and had been under consideration for a job in a different organisation since January 2023. This role required an enhanced background security check, which in this State can take over fourteen weeks. And so the wait began.
Senior management seemed to think that COVID-19 would give them the flexibility they were always arguing for when it came to regulation. I recall meeting a senior manager during that period in the Arrival’s Hall of Terminal 1. We were both looking at a very empty Arrivals’ screen, and I brought up the CAR (Commission for Aviation Regulation) thirty-minute queue requirement. I said now would be a good time to look at this – prior to re-opening.
“That’s all gone Matt” was the reply. I asked him did he really think so, and he was adamant that it was gone. It hadn’t gone away, aviation safety and security regulatory requirements remained consistent, but the daa had simply stuck its head in the sand.
I should add that I posted a number of thought-provoking pieces on the daa’s company social network, Yammer. One, on May 1, 2022, about leadership, elicited a query from the then CEO. I posted in exasperation at how I had been asked to step up to the mark on values, but had received no support; and another about how, in my view, the organisation had become so very fake, with employees viewed as the problem by an elitist management team.
My last post was in response to the publication of an official report into the culture of the Irish Army. I posted it on Yammer on March 29: ‘Truly dreadful report published today regarding the degrading behaviour of Irish army officers. Thankfully we don’t have that culture or any of those traits in the daa.’ It included a hand on chin emoji, confused or pensive emoji, depending on how you interpret it.
At around 9:30am, on April 12, I received a phone call from my former chief. He requested that I meet him in his office at 10:15am, and strongly advised I bring a work colleague or union official along with me.
I asked what it was about, and he said my Yammer post of March 29. This was the morning that US President Joe Biden was arriving at Dublin Airport. I thought he would have better things to do and responded that it was very short notice; he replied: “I just need to get this done today.”
As a friend put it: “someone else was blowing up his tyres.” I ended the conversation and emailed back, saying that it was too short notice as I could get no one suitable to attend with me. He rang back at 10:30 and apologised for any confusion, saying that it was not necessary for me to bring someone along, and that he only needed to speak with me for a minute. I asked then whether it was an informal chat. He would not admit that but insisted it would only take a minute.
I felt I had done nothing wrong and called to his office. When I arrived he informed me that he was referring to my Yammer post of March 29 to HR. I asked why. He informed me that “it was offensive.” I asked, “to whom?” He informed me after a pause that he found it offensive. I said “you’re the manager, why don’t you deal with it.’
He refused, saying it was going to HR. I replied, “well that is disappointing,” to which he relied “well people can be disappointed.”
About twenty minutes later my prospective new employer emailed to say I had just cleared the enhanced background security check, and requested permission to contact the daa for a reference. Happy about this, I replied I would do so, giving them the Chief Police Officer’s contact details. I thought I was days away from securing the new position.
The next day, the Head of Security HR, emailed to inform me that I was being brought before an investigative disciplinary meeting regarding my Yammer post. The post about the culture in the Army report must have really hit a nerve with daa senior management. Perhaps it was because the Airport Security Manager was a former Irish Army Officer?
The following day, Friday, April 14, I hit back. I emailed the board of the daa, stating that after twenty-four years I intended to move on, but could not do so without a reference, which HR had not provided.
I also stated that I was the one who had made the Protected Disclosure to the Minister, and that I had also been assaulted in the workplace by the Airport Security Manager. I further stated that in my view the daa HR team were untrustworthy and had acted maliciously. I also offered an exit interview as I wished to offer further insights into the daa.
Before emailing the board, I read the company’s exit policy. It states very clearly that an employee resigns to his or her line manager, or HR business support, and is given a notice period based on their employment contract. I had specifically excluded HR or any local management from my email to the board on April 14.
On Monday morning, April 17, 2023 my line manager arrived at my Office. “I hear you’re leaving,” he said. I asked him where he had heard that. “HR told me,” he replied. I asked him who told them. He replied that he did not know. I then held up a copy of the exit policy that I had printed off and said, “someone has jumped the gun here because I have not resigned, my emails to the board specifically excluded you and HR.”
By then, HR had still not provided a reference. From April 12, until May 12 when I received an email from the Chief People Officer instructing me not to report for duty the following Monday, I, along with the SIPTU Sectorial Organiser, had repeatedly emailed to say I had not formally resigned.
It was the company secretary who had taken my email from the daa board and provided it directly to HR. She informed me herself in an email.
It is important to note that in or around October 2022, the company secretary had been handed a copy of the Protected Disclosure, my anonymity removed, by a worker-director and was directly involved with me on another internal Protected Disclosure which she was overseeing.
Since 2019 I have been a student of law at the Honourable Society of Kings Inns. I am in my final year as a candidate for the barrister-at-law degree. It is both an education and a professional qualification. The majority of tutorials take place in the Philpott-Curran Room located at the top of their building on Henrietta Street. John Philpott Curran (1750-1817) was a lawyer, orator and stateman who defended Irish liberties. He also defended United Irishmen, including Wolf Tone.
As I sit and write, a portrait of Wolf Tone, painted by my mother back in 1991 taken from a secondary school history book hangs on the wall behind me. Life is a long and winding road and if you follow your heart you find steppingstones that put you on the right path. There are many famous sayings attributed to John Philpot Curran, one being: ‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.’
I wonder whether it falls to whistleblowers in modern Irish society to maintain that eternal vigilance – crucial to preserving liberty and democracy.
Fact-checking is also surely part of that role. On July 27, 2023, the Irish Times published an article quoting daa sources to the effect that they had been found innocent of any wrongdoing by the IAA, and its subsequent investigation in response to the Protected Disclosure.
This is inaccurate as the IAA amended the National Risk Assessment, in response to issues I raised in my Protected Disclosure, provided to the IAA on January 30, 2023 the day after they commenced their investigation. That issue is now the subject of another Protected Disclosure, one involving the Dáil Transport Committee and the IAA themselves.
The second, partial at least, inaccuracy in that article is the claim that the whistleblower was unhappy over a pay claim. It does not provide context to this. I made the Protected Disclosure on June 22, 2022, and was in receipt of my first negative pay review in twenty-four years on July 26, 2022.
Sadly, most Irish media outlets seem to have no interest in whistleblowers’ accounts. Perhaps they are the victims of bullying by vested interests themselves?
This Ireland exists. And should one travel there and not find it, then they have not looked closely enough.. Hugo Hamilton: The Island of Talking – In the footsteps of Heinrich Boll
#IrelandisFull: the migration of this phrase from the far-right into the mainstream is an awful feature of our woe-begotten times. It begs the question: what does it mean to be Irish? Ireland is of course full at one level; full of gaslighting and bullshit, not least from people who subscribe to these views, and those who have created the conditions for them to flourish.
One is not more Irish because your grandfather was in the GPO. That your name is Lenehan, Murphy, Barrington, Finlay, Kelly, Doyle, or conversely, Langwallner, Smith, Varadkar, Naidoo, Bacik should make no difference to your claim. It is not where you come from, or your name, it is about who you are, what you do and why you do it.
It should make no difference whether it was an immigrant who assaulted a child, given many Irish thugs are wont to do the same. And recall it was a Brazilian delivery driver that rescued her. Thuggish criminals come from all breeds and nationalities. And those who riot and attack people with baseball bats are simply thugs, as are those who spread hatred against Johnny Foreigner from whatever vector in whatever country.
Consider the words of Kipling, often considered a jingoistic nationalist:
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din
Wealth inequality in the United States increased from 1989 to 2013.
Under Neoliberalism
Under a rampant neoliberalism, we now see overt far-right fascism, but also a structural form underpinning the centre-right, which is overseeing the impoverishment of all but the super-rich, while maintaining a veneer of inclusivity.
Now, with an economic and environmental meltdown on the horizon, it is time to assert universal Enlightenment values, and fairly allocate the resources of the Earth, and of Ireland, while leaving room for diversity and even eccentricity. It is the time for those, such as the legendary mixed race writer Albert Camus, to assert the values of moderation against all forms of extremism.
The phrase keep ‘Ireland for the Irish’ is one I have heard in family law proceedings. Sadly, it speaks of a widespread, generally unacknowledged, intolerance.
In recent times we have become a nation of bean counters. Between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants in the state grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112.[i]
Ireland has always been run by a privileged elite, a comprador class of money men and lawyers that facilitate exploitation. The Four Courts still operates with vestiges of primogeniture. So resentment should be targeted against the elites who perpetuate inequality, not the poor huddled masses from Ukraine seeking refuge, which of course was offered to Irish emigrants in the recent past.
Racism, tribalism, and irredentism are worrying signs of fascism, which seems to be the way things are heading. A fascist corporate authoritarian state is on the horizon. The extreme economic doctrine of neoliberalism is breeding autarkic extremism.
One’s nationality, whether Irish, Russian or American, is not an indication of exceptionalism. That you are Irish does not give you an entitlement to despise outsiders. It cannot justify thuggery. Irish lives matter is an empty phrase. The far-right at its most extreme propounds truly crazy fictions. Thus. anyone daring to disagree is labelled a paedo, destroying family values. Jesus wept.
Of course this is linked to the dark money of the evangelical Christian Right. Perceptively, Noam Chomsky once described the U.S. Republican Party as the most dangerous organisation in human history.
David Langwallner receiving the prize from Miriam O’Callaghan for Pro Bono & Public Interest Team/Lawyer of the Year at the AIB Private Banking Irish Law Awards 2015.
Nein Danke Herr Langwallner
As a speckled person myself, like Hugo Hamilton, half-Irish, half Austrian, I was confronted in my school days with comments like “go back to Austria Adolf”. Moreover, during a debate in that crucible of Irish corporate narrow-mindedness which is UCD, I was greeted with the rebuke on an unanswerable point of information: Nein Danke Herr Langwallner.
Much laughter flowed from the thuggish mobocracy. That body included at least one present judge, along with a managing partner of a leading law firm. Thugs and or criminals thus come in all shapes and hues in fact. Many are to be found among our corporate and legal so-called professional classes.
Now what is pure Irish blood? Garrett Fitzgerald, the reformist Blueshirt, was a contradiction in terms. He once described the intellectually superior Charles J. Haughey as having a flawed pedigree. Haughey had his faults but note the class snobbery, and arguably racism, of the comment.
The blue blood Tories of Fine Gael are sustained by a sense of dynastic entitlement, evident with judicial appointments, where a kind of rabbit disease like myxomatosis seems to have created an overwhelming mediocrity.
The name Fitzgerald of course comes from the Vikings who raped and pillaged Celtic Ireland – plus ca change. The only difference is the violations are now financial, which is spawning far right-wing fascism.
One of the heroes of the Irish Revolution, Countess Markievicz was actually born in England and married a Polish-Ukrainian count. Even the long-shadowed Éamon de Valera had a Cuban father and was born in New York. If only he had stayed. The bloodline of pure Irishness has thus always been corrupted. Garret FitzGerald should have understood that being Irish is not akin to a dog breeding competition.
In more recent times, if we are supposed to hate immigrants based on their skin colour or ethnicity, are we to hate the greatest Irish football player of all time, the Black Pearl of Inchicore, Paul McGrath or Phillip Lynott the lead singer of Thin Lizzy similarly?
Are we to add Irish Protestants and Jews to the hate list? Samuel Beckett was a Protestant and so was Justice Kingsmill Moore. A few more Protestant judges might have been beneficial over the history of the state.
Or consider those to whom we have given welcome: the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – one of the most significant minds of the twentieth century – is honoured by a plaque in the Ashling Hotel. The great German writer Heinreich Boll lived in Ireland and was favourably disposed, while the Rolling Stones have had a shadowy presence among the Guinness family. In short, emigres, non-nationals, or “half-castes” enrich our public discourse and provide diversity.
And if we hate the English, should we hate Shane McGowan or John Lennon, both of Irish extraction or if we hate the Yanks, what about Eugene O Neill or F. Scott Fitzgerald, two of the greatest writers who have ever lived, who were of Irish lineage. It might be said that the former’s posthumously published play A Long Day’s Journey into Night captures perfectly at one level what it is to be Irish: alcoholism, mental illness and abuse are the central characteristics of our national polity and governing classes.
Irish and proud..
Who are these people and why are they terrorising poor immigrants? The Fianna Fáil councillors who seek to condone must understand they are spreading the seeds of fascism. To hate the other because he or she is different is a disgrace, and you have forfeited your legitimacy to remain in public office.
Yes, there is a need for a more nuanced immigration system. But proportionately we do not attract as many as elsewhere. Let us not forget that many of these people have experienced horrific scenes we can only imagine. But I fear that Ukrainian refugees on slender social support have gone from the frying pan into the fire.
To fail to understand how much diversity adds to any society is to demonise and exclude. The shocking truth, however, is that exclusion is to be found at the highest reaches of the Irish establishment, who display classic attributes of colonialism as Fritz Fannon describes this phenomenon. Exclusion from the good life enjoyed by a few extends to many native sons.
And if we are to dislike other nationalities let us avoid making it global or universal. I love the Italian film director Fellini but hate Meloni because she is a proto-fascist. I adore the writer Dostoevsky, but cannot approve of Putin. I love the African writer Achebe but not the African dictator Mugabe. Nor should one hate the Irish.
Sinn Fein have been brave in sticking to a non-racist stance, particularly as many of its constituents misguidedly move elsewhere, and if they are to be a party of government they should ignore the electoral consequences and stick to their principles.
Editor’s Note: Readers of a sensitive disposition may find aspects of this account of drug-taking and sex difficult to stomach, but we believe this is a story worth telling. Our mission is to provide a home for independent voices that inspire new thinking.
*****
I awake, into my usual morning of panic but today might be different. My first non-family Christmas. However festive, starting it is with booze first thing in Ireland, to pang off the alcoholism beyond in the making, it’s amazing in Northern California. I am so fortunate of the micro-climate of the Mission District here in San Francisco, and its extension to my locale of Bernal Heights. The tourist map doesn’t stretch as far as here, somewhat making me more of an authentic character in my adopted city,
It is the ideal temperature for walking off a hangover.
Third fag in the sun, having skulled a coffee, a beer, and sipping another of the latter in the pre-spring morning sunshine – I’m feeling pretty good all in all. It’s amazing how well you learn to ride out the cocaine heart failure in the making. I’m a lot tougher than I give myself credit for.
Even that it gives you a nameable blight for these wretched feelings helps: you can blame it all on something rather than the general suffering of existence.
A quick reboot of last night’s misadventure: the fuck buddy of sorts with odd strings dumped me again last night. She’s no doubt an attractive lady to anyone, but she’s more man than I’ll ever be. She’d mentioned the week or so previous, having a heavy period. I asked, “Are your hangovers not so much worse?” Legs spread, practically scratching her nuts, drinking neat whiskey, she cackled, cartoon-like fag hanging out of her mouth, ‘’Women are pussy’s’’.
Our relationship, in its fast and loose umbrella, has more basis in a Jerry Springer omnibus than anything resembling love or how it’s sold. We’re short on domestic violence, as long as you don’t count hers on me, and I promise you, I bring it on myself. An uncivilized drinking partner that eats cunt like me is probably not without its charm.
But don’t ever sit on my chest, rub one out till I break through the straps to devour the offerings, and expect me not to crack jokes. Assessment of the night before damage concludes with only Evelyn rightfully popping the dive bar lovers’ bubble.
Until this morning, Christmas meant a tense mother slaving in the kitchen far too much, but refusing all help till she’s screaming, “No one helps her!” Similar to any bigger family meal, only exasperated by a dead god on this occasion. For reasons that make no sense to us secular, but we get dragged, come leap in, all the same.
This is not isolated to this home economic task either. In all my youth and my on-and-off living with my parents, an always state of arrested development, I was never ever permitted to use the washing machine, even for my own clothes.
Absorbing all this tension from my mother, about decades of meal times is likely where I have some flecks of an eating disorder to this day, which must be a riot to hear for anyone who can see my midriff.
The walk to the house we were celebrating in was brief. I’d been primed along the quiet streets that Christmas, for the most part, doesn’t really happen here, something I was fairly excited about.
I’d some brain fog to match the city fog that late morning. Or early afternoon for the non-living for the weekend types.
This winter was some of the hottest San Francisco gets, but today I was feeling the icy fog it’s known for, outside of the Mission District. Cooling my perspiration compared to my morning ritual, all the seasons in a day here are much more pleasant than in Ireland.
All folk present had a mostly infectious festivity, likely though, was that none of us had work to go to for at least a day. Before I know it, it’s dinner time with my adopted family of ragtag heroes. Each one of them seems to be plucked out of a collection of good guys, the wild aces that could have gone the other way and sometimes ended up villains.
This food is so far beyond my class. There’s cheese in front of me that retails for fifty dollars, and it’s only the size of the coked-up wank wad I’d be creating right now were not I here.
I finally get the don’t cut the cheese joke but my initial thought is: “This smells like anal and I’m not convinced I want to be a part of it.”
The crackers alone cost more than I’d spend on food in a given day.
I got a great cop-out of what to bring to dinner, myself, and my primary guide-come shaman of the whole adventure, split the cost of the prime rib along with his brother, another home economically challenged come-lazy soul.
With it’s roasting someone else’s responsibility, my sole responsibility to myself or anyone was not to drink so much that I couldn’t eat sufficiently. And I failed.
I ate, sure, I even didn’t start the morning wrenching from alcohol poisoning – that being the common way to spoil this day, but I didn’t sufficiently consume my favourite meal of the year all the same.
Me and Evelyn, the cheesy proprietor, exchange many an awkwardness in the run-up to our first chat of the day. I felt her pity for me made it challenging to tell me to feck off as harshly as I needed to hear, or her say it. I am like a puppy who needs a boot, but we don’t because of compassionate society and all that wank that will lead to China ruling us all.
The booze pours festively and rapidly it becomes a whiter Christmas than I’ve ever known. I had nearly no experience with Peruvian powders two months ago now I’m hitting it with the power and comedy of a staged drunk on reality TV.
You know you’ve a problem when the most degenerate drug user you’ve known the Christian name of says: “Jesus, O’Dowd! Go easy on the sneachta!”
All my co-workers, and even suppliers, were Mexican so maybe I was Jeh-sus O Dowd
***BLACK***
Around 18 hours later my investigative skills found me suddenly in a bad, bad dive bar. A menacing, not affectionately labelled dive. My resurface into consciousness is like coming up on psychedelics. But I’m by no means psychotic.
I’ve an odd if valuable ability to for the most part know what’s real and isn’t, even when experiencing lots of unreal. Things here have a melted quality. Fortunate of my previous jaunts to this bar, I knew already it had a Lynchian, “between dream and nightmare” feeling to it mostly caused by how fucked up you have to be called to the district’s only 6 am opening bar.
Cheese trader Evelyn is back and forth at the bar with a dealer trying to work herself up to the purchase. Women like foreplay. Men like a job done.
I smack my glass hard on the bar, spilling it down to my hands about the base making a mess: “Mr barman sir, who sells sneachta in here?”, stressing a H sound like my Sligonian heritage demands of me.
He smiles, like one does at a moron, and nods to some gentlemen playing pool. Remember those red and blue gangs who were all the rage in the 90s? Well, these were the reds, or at least pretending to be.
The meaner looking of the two with the facial artwork brought me into the toilets, then the cubicle for the exchange. This was commonplace. I believe there must be a legality in no one actually witnessing the exchange.
Even if everyone knows exactly what’s happening behind 35mm of chipboard, flashed with hospital baby blue laminate, certainly bought for a bargain. I request, with a combination of question, statement, and just general Celtic mangling of Germanic sentence structure: “Does he do 50 bags?”
He appears amused by the utter shambles before him. He has the sorely required zip lock, out in a moment, while I’m pulling fistfuls of every denomination of US dollar out of every crevice I am aware of having on my person. I must flash 300 plus dollars in front of him.
You’d be wrong to assume I was flush. This had to last me almost another month till my flight home. Why the hell didn’t he rob me? What sort of opportunist, outside the law, is he?
He’s the reason China is our future dominant global power but bless his tear-drop tattoo heart all the same. Or maybe he cherishes this date more traditionally than I do. As I step out my dear friend Fionn steps right in. Evelyn looks rather peeved at this.
***BLACK***
It’s suddenly many hours later, I’m in an Irish bar I know, but not this messed up. Certainly when I’m pretty sure there’s daylight out those windows. In all the years of it, I’ve never felt as scummy as being really impaired during daylight.
There’s possibly latent Catholic guilt that I shouldn’t enjoy myself till all childer are in bed. Everyone present is new excluding Evelyn.Everyone including Evelyn is knee-slapping at whatever I am uttering.
I can surmise she is her variant of back into me again, a token nod of hand deep in my inner thigh. It, however, would be a Christmas miracle for me to make any use of that scenario with the Colombian blizzard I have been battling through.
***BLACK***
Some incalculable time later. We’re as naked as the bed, with no sheets, pillows, duvet, or comforter (when in Rome), about us. Illuminated by street lights coming in the window like a synthetic moon, all of our phones are dead, including my burner brick which I thought was immortal till now.
Even the clock is dead. Is this a nightmare? She is freaked. You ought to be in your own gaff in this confusion, let alone next to me again. Why is the hair dryer broken in this room rather than working in the bathroom? Why does the house smell of piss? Why are our clothes all over the flat? Why is the shower broken?
All I can do is offer to look at the shower and realise. I am not a man. I masquerade as a man, but I am no man. The last thing I fixed was a VCR which must have been in the 90s.
She’s overdone now. This is too much for anyone without a lashing of “Mother’s Little Helper” to counter whatever chemicals we’re out of. She takes charge.
“My folks are away,” she states, “we’ll go there and watch cable till we can handle the situation.”
Pack up and go down the stairs to realise, she doesn’t have her keys, and she doesn’t know whose she has instead. We’re too distraught to deal with any of this. She’s going to have to replace both hers and her folk’s locks. For the second time. This winter.
But these others obtained along the way are really getting her briefs in a braid. We decided to order a Chinese and survive one more day. This was the first, truly, deeply, menacing come-down I had experienced here. The first that mirrored true depression to the point I feared I might actually be depressed.
Many friends, come-corrupted acquaintances, have asked me how I can hit, and hard, the class A narcotics when I suffer from a “medication for the rest of my days”, mood disorder. It’s nothing on real depression.
You still have enough introspection, even after the unholiest binge, to know that this too shall pass. You don’t get that luxury with the real thing.
With the genuine darkness reigning down on you, the best bargaining you can do with yourself is “this too shall pass.” With a firmer, maybe, “you fight”, entering your head. But even with manageable bouts of the garden varieties of utter despair, it will come back again. And again. Like Terminator sequels.
It never truly goes away, it just leaves you for a holiday. This experience was that traumatic, we should have been soul mates after this. Alas, we’re not even friends who share memes
I meet Fionn, the big spender, soon after for drinks. He seemed plenty chirpy till we began to converse in our cubby. I tell him how little I remember in a jovial way. His gate takes a shift downward. Around his eyes grows black, and baggy, skin turning jaundiced in pigmentation, losing elasticity.
His voice cackles with a poor handle on his life. “You don’t remember, do you? Fuck you don’t!”
Once we purchased our narcotics in the twisted dive bar, sometime the morning after Xmas dinner, we’re not so sure, we went out on the somewhat busy street to consume them with pinches and keys. Away in our world together we are shot back into the real world where the war on drugs is very, scarily, real.
And suddenly, I too recall at least this brief window of time. Siren’s tear through the, I wish, night. Blue and red bounce about the nearer buildings Fionn pelts back into the bar in fits of internal shrieking. Chucks his big spender 100 bag under a stool, and hops on a chair in the farthest corner, knees to chest rocking and now audibly panicking.
“Oh fuck I’m going to prison, I’ll never meet my daughter!”
“Oh fuck, Brian is definitely going to prison, they’ll never stop raping him!”
And I return to the busy bar to loudly proclaim,
“FUCK ME THAT’S GOOD SNEACHTA!”
Later that very night I got home and Evelyn called to fill me in on her recovered memories since we parted ways after the Chinese.
Kenneth had rung her to apologise and tell her he was paying for a new mattress and whatever else, and it had all flooded back to her. More of a trickle for me.
Deep in the darkness, engulfed in the memory bank, a mini party kicked off at hers at some stage, and Kenneth was put to bed as we went off gallivanting into whatever time of day it was. When we returned sometime later, Kenneth had pissed her bed and was trying to dry his jeans with the hair dryer. He burnt it out, trying to hurry through our giggles.
When he left we had a deep meaningful conversation, which she thought would be better not to bring up, stated with a tone that meant never. I performed an act of great kindness on her there in the living area before bed, like the gentleman I am, and off to bed we go. But she can’t relax in the piss-soaked sheets, so we strip the bed and proceed to have sex in the shower
Naturally, we break the shower, in what could only be awful, uncoordinated, glamourless, aqua-bonking. And the mystery of the keys is solved. Kenneth’s wife and Evelyn were powdering their noses in the deviant little girl’s room, and each of their keys wound up in the others’ bags. No need to change security systems after all!
Nollaig bán shona dhaoibh
Feature Image: Swing near the top of Bernal Heights Park, looking east.
In the first part of his essay concerning his enduring lifelong fandom of Manchester City FC, and the club’s current owners’ wealth vis-á-vis his left-wing politics, Desmond Traynor recounts his origin story as a supporter of the club, and offers a critique of the Irish soccer commentariat’s biased attitude to City’s success.
After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football. Albert Camus, article in Racing Universitaire Algerios club’s alumni magazine (1957)
Looking back, I can see that my attraction in starting to support Manchester City F.C. in 1968, at the age of seven, was perhaps the first indication of a budding contrarianism. Not that I had enough self-consciousness at the time to recognise it as such. What is interesting about certain decisions one makes as a child, adolescent, and even as a young adult, is that they are usually made prior to one having the full story, about oneself or others, or in general about this thing we call Life – if, indeed we ever get the full story. They tend to be instinctual, or even pre-cognitive, and so revealing of particular bedrock character traits in a still-forming personality. However, lest we kick off on the wrong foot, please note that I have not bestowed this questionable epithet on myself; rather, it has been attached to me by others. I do not necessarily think of myself as a contrarian, or even contrary. I just like different things than other people do, or have different reasons for liking the same things that other people also like. Which, obviously, could be said of anyone else’s idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. It’s called Taste, and there is no accounting for it – good or bad.
The origin story runs like this: 1968 was the year Manchester United won the European Cup, and almost everyone in Ireland who was not already a fan of that club became one. They captured the floating voters. I thought to myself: ‘Screw this for a game of soldiers, I’ll be a Manchester City fan’. This was not merely, or only, evidence of a latent, wilful desire to be atypical or antagonistic, or the product of a childish caprice: we had a good side then, and won the League that same year, the F.A. Cup the following season, and the European Cup Winners’ Cup and the League Cup in the 1969/70 campaign. The team was full of gifted players, heroes whose magical names rolled off the tongue, which still resonate today (among City fans, at any rate): Francis Lee, Mike Summerbee, Neil Young (no, not that one!), Tony Book, Joe Corrigan. Best of all was Colin Bell, one of the greatest midfield playmakers England has ever produced. Shrewd, languid, possessed of incredible stamina (his nickname was Nijinsky – after the racehorse, although ballet dancers require considerable stamina too), he could run box to box, but he didn’t always need to, as he could pick out a defence-shredding pass from forty yards. He was the definition of ‘silky skills’. Such was my infatuation that, as a fledgling player, I modelled myself on his example. I even persuaded my mother to sew a number 8 onto the back of my boyhood City jersey, in his honour. (Speaking of jerseys, another reason for my plumping for City was that I preferred the sky blue they wore to the red sported by the Red Devils.) Bell’s career was cut short in November 1975 when, at the age of 29, his right knee was severely injured in a challenge by Manchester United’s captain Martin Buchan, during a League Cup derby at Maine Road.
But then, apart from winning the League Cup in 1976 with a victory over Newcastle United at Wembley, we had a bad forty years or so at the office, with mid-table mediocrity gradually giving way to spells in the old Second Division (1983–1985, 1987–1989, 1996–1998, 1999–2000 and 2001–2002), yo-yoing between the top flight and what is now the Championship. We even endured the ignominy of being relegated to Division 3 for a year in 1998–1999 – as chronicled by Mark Hodkinson in a weekly column for The Times, later collected together in his book Blue Moon: Down Among The Dead Men With Manchester City (2011). Thus did the phrase ‘long-suffering’ come to be applied whenever City fans were spoken of by those of other allegiances. Hell, we even bestowed it on ourselves, often adding the equally derisive ‘typical Citeh’. In some unfathomably fatalistic way, it seemed I had been destined to support this club: its ethos suited the wry resignation of my ‘What can you do about it?’ temperament, with early promise curdling in to the predictable compromises of average adult living.
Colin Bell b. 1946,
City of Lost Souls
All that has changed now, of course. ‘When City are great again…’ wrote Mancunian music critic and lifelong City fan Paul Morley, in a short article titled ‘City of Lost Souls’ (Arena, November 1998), and lo it has come to pass. In August 2008, City were purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, and massive investment ensued – not only in transfer spend on players, but on infrastructure, the youth academy, and the regeneration of east Manchester with facilities for the local community. Gradually, results began to match the upturn in player and managerial quality. 2011 saw City secure their first trophy in thirty-five years, with a 1-0 win over Stoke City in the FA Cup final. 2012 brought our first League (by then Premiership) title in forty-four years, with the famous two goals in injury time against relegation threatened Queens Park Rangers to turn a 1-2 deficit into a 3-2 victory in the last minute, thus beating United into second place on goal difference (having already thrown down a marker by thrashing them 6-1 at Old Trafford earlier in the season). Every City fan remembers where they were at 93:20 on that sunny Sunday afternoon in May, otherwise known as the ‘Agüeroooo!’ moment. Me, I kept watching replays of Sergio’s winning goal for a week afterwards, in an effort to make sure that I hadn’t developed mild psychosis and entered an alternative reality. It confirmed for me that football provided the last vestiges of Greek drama in contemporary society, except that this was aleatoric theatre – a pop-up, if you will – for if you wrote it as fiction no one would suspend disbelief at this patently manufactured deus ex machina finale. Just when we thought it was going to be another case of ‘Typical City’, we emerged into a bright new sky blue dawn. The second Golden Era, it seemed, was well underway.
City won the Premiership again in 2013–14 under Manuel Pellegrini, who had replaced Roberto Mancini, the man who had presided over the beginnings of our historic resurgence. The arrival of tactician extraordinaire Pep Guardiola as coach in 2016 signalled the start of a period of sustained success for the club. City have won five out of a possible six Premiership titles between the 2017–18 and 2022–23 seasons, only finishing second behind Liverpool in 2019–20. 2018–19 saw City complete an unprecedented domestic treble of English men’s titles – the Premiership, F.A. Cup and League Cup. Add in a rake of League Cups over the same period, and the rosy picture is almost complete. But 2022–23 turned out to be the greatest season in our club’s history, as we not only won our third consecutive Premier League title, but also the F.A. Cup final against old foes Manchester United, and the long-awaited supposed Holy Grail, our first European Champions League Cup, in a final versus Inter Milan (incidentally, my favourite Italian team – almost a win-win situation, if there is such a thing), thereby achieving a rare feat – the continental treble.
Which just goes to show: if you wait long enough, everything comes around.
Envy and Ire
Unsurprisingly, the influx of such vast resources, and the on-field dominance it has brought, has aroused the envy and ire of supporters of other clubs. (I hesitate to use the term ‘rivals’, as it suggests that there are teams capable of challenging us on a consistent basis; in this case, can we settle on ‘competitors’ as the designation least offensive to all parties?) This discontent at City’s serial successes is exacerbated by a sense of injustice, as accusations of City’s breaching of both UEFA’s and the English Football Association’s Financial Fair Play rules fuel feelings that the club has bought its way to the top, due to the deep pockets of its owners and their skulduggery in the dark arts of creative accounting. Furthermore, there is the implication that because said proprietors are one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates, and the U.A.E.’s human rights record is less than pristine, then City’s wealth is tainted and its fans are hypocrites. Friends and acquaintances have asked me, often goadingly: how I can profess to be any kind of socialist and yet continue to support a team which represents the triumph of monied elitism? What kind of cognitive dissonance is involved in advocating for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against apartheid Israel, when migrant workers are routinely treated appallingly in Abu Dhabi, and reports circulate of government critics of the U.A.E.’s repressive regime being imprisoned and tortured? Am I ultra-selective in the causes I choose to espouse? One of the things this essay is, is an attempt to address, and hopefully explain – if not quite reconcile – some of these apparent contradictions.
This air of grievance is felt especially acutely in Ireland. There is a sketch by comedy trio Foil, Arms and Hog, where an applicant for Irish citizenship is asked a catalogue of questions as a test of knowledge for eligibility. One of the queries goes: ‘What are the two main religions in Ireland?’ Our candidate doesn’t miss a beat, responding with the quip, ‘Manchester United and Liverpool’.
While there are devout members of other denominations – for example, Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs, Leeds, Everton, Aston Villa and West Ham all enjoy healthy fanbases on these shores, and I have even met the odd adherent of exquisitely eccentric sects like Ipswich Town and Stoke City – the overwhelming majority of Irish soccer fandom of English clubs is comprised of faithful followers of either United or Liverpool. To be sure, there are often sound reasons for such gargantuan support, such as family tradition or connections with one or other of the clubs, or the presence of many Irish players or players of Irish extraction in current or previous squads. Yet, just as often, Irish people attach themselves to an English club for motives which are almost entirely arbitrary – the colour of a jersey or the first game they ever saw or a favourite player. (This is true of sporting loyalties, including football, everywhere. Although a Mancunian born and bred, qualified lawyer and professional investigative sports journalist David Conn, while hailing from a predominantly United family, became a City fan almost by accident, rather than orneriness: when he was six years old, and asked to choose between the two local clubs, he looked at their respective badges – United’s a red devil with horns, City’s a rose beneath a ship – and opted for light blue. Incidentally, Conn’s Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up (2012) remains one of the best books about football ever written – and not just for City fans – combining as it does a forensic trawl through City’s financial dealings with the changing attitudes and mixed emotions of a lifelong fan witnessing the monetisation of the modern game. In many ways, my own effort here is just a pale imitation of Conn’s achievement, albeit from an Irish fan’s perspective.)
But the most common explanation for the popularity of Liverpool and Manchester United in Ireland is, I submit, because both clubs were, in the past, serial winners, just as City have become today. Many of these could be termed ‘legacy fans’ (the same is true of Arsenal, Chelsea and Leeds) – relics of when their clubs were much more successful, which was when they started supporting them. It’s easy to back a winner, and there is safety – and solidarity – in numbers. The herd instinct kicks in. This is why one notices a more than average quota of fair-weather fans among their number. When their team of choice hit a bad run of form, or their trophy haul is depleted, you will hear all kinds of excuses for slackening of interest, and the declaration ‘The game is gone for me’ because of the deleterious influence of floods of cash, or the introduction of VAR, or the corruption of governing bodies, or whatever.
Yet, if I had a penny for every ardent United or Liverpool fan I’ve ever met, and inquired of ‘Have you ever been to Old Trafford / Anfield?’, and drawn a blank – well, I would have a lot more pennies than I do today. For, as Paul Morley put it in his piece mentioned above: ‘To support United is too easy. It’s convenience supporting. It makes life too easy. There is no challenge. It is a cowardly form of escapism, a sell-out to the forces of evil…to support them is heroism in a can.’ Since the wheel of fortune has spun kindly in the direction of what legendary former United manager Sir Alex Fergusson once called their ‘noisy neighbours’, doubtless many United fans now feel exactly the same way about City. In United’s glory days, there used to be a loose coalition of fans of many other clubs congealed around the banner of ‘ABU’: Anyone But United. Nowadays, it has been supplanted by the amended acronym, ‘ABC’: Anyone But City. Fans of every club are inclined to partisan paranoia when they feel things are not going their way. But here’s the twist: there are far more Liverpool and Manchester United fans in Ireland than City fans. Is it any wonder that we City fans sometimes feel like a persecuted minority? And all for the crime of playing exciting, entertaining football – at a level rarely, if ever, seen before.
Etihad Stadium, Manchester.
Anti-City Bias
This anti-City bias is not confined to the foot soldiers of the red hordes (as I tend to think of the innumerable fans of these two clubs found in evidence hereabouts – rather than envisioning groups of radical revolutionaries huddled under beds around the country), but is also noticeably visible and voluble among the many high priests of their persuasion present in the Irish soccer media – hardly surprising when one realises that the majority of sports reporters and analysts here are drawn from the ranks of one or the other red menace. Clearly, fans of other clubs, and their public representatives, frequently hate on us too. But the gross preponderance of Reds’ affiliates in the make-up of the national football commentariat is not difficult to account for: if Ireland as a nation has large contingents of Liverpool and United fans, then print and broadcast media – dependent as they are on advertising revenue – will broadly pander to and reflect the views of that massive target audience which, in a classic case of vicious circle marketing, comprises a large section of its readership and viewership.
It is difficult to delineate this prejudice without mentioning some names. Certainly, the old guard were dead against us, with Eamon Dunphy publicly venting his dislike of ‘the City project’ when he was a freelance contributor on RTE television. Presenters such as Joanne Cantwell regularly goaded him on. But then, he used to play for Manchester United.
Of the current crop, Ken Early’s latent loyalties are easily identifiable from his Irish Times article headlined ‘Manchester City’s dominance a reminder the rich always get their way’ (20/01/22). Among many contentious statements contained therein, a pair of standouts were, ‘Most of us don’t watch football for technical quality or tactical intrigue. We’re watching because we want to feel something – and the risk of defeat adds savour to the joy of victory’, which he then linked to the ludicrous claim, ‘Look at the joy Manchester United have given the world these last several years. Lurching from crisis to crisis, they continue to be more watchable than City’s vastly superior team.’ The first is an appalling admission from a paid pundit, whose job it is to keep abreast of the strategic evolution of the game. Besides which, Manchester City still and always will be beatable – just like any other team – and watching them gives rise to a great variety of emotions in me, and other City fans. Plus, discerning neutrals can and do admire the precision of a well-executed game plan which City provide. As for the second, even diehard but cleareyed United fans know it is not true. They would acknowledge that United have for some time – since the retirement of Sir Alex – been a mismanaged laughing stock, which is why many of them have flocked to green-and-gold wearing protest club, Newton Heath. While there may be considerable schadenfreude to be derived by fans of other clubs in watching United’s steady decline into a comedic soap opera, they are surely no longer heading to Old Trafford to witness object lessons in how the Beautiful Game should be played. At the time of Early’s salvo, I wrote a fulsome rebuttal to the Letters page of the IT which was not, as was only to be expected, selected for publication. I subsequently penned a one sentence rejoinder, quoting his ‘more watchable’ assertion, which did see the light of day. It simply read: ‘Would it be impertinent to inquire as to what (red) planet he is living on?’
Meanwhile, the Sunday Independent is a virtual Liverpool FC fanzine, platforming as it does the Scouse-loving triumvirate of Dion Fanning, Eamonn Sweeney, and Declan Lynch.
Of the three, Fanning is the most measured and fact-based (evidently qualities not much valued at the Sindo, as his work is now more often to be found in the pages of the Irish Examiner, and he has been involved with podcasts for Joe.ie and The Currency.ie) in his criticisms. But his allegiances are easily discerned from a piece like the one headlined ‘A different Liverpool story in a parallel universe’, with standfirst ‘Liverpool’s golden age is ending but is it any consolation if one day they discover they were cheated?’ (The Irish Examiner, April Fool’s Day, 2023). Ineluctably, he highlights that City have been ‘charged by the Premier League with 115 breaches of financial regulations’, and refers to claims that City have ‘used shadow contracts to pay players’. However, he fails to address the argument that such ‘artificial rules’ are designed to protect the existing elite, other than to counter that ‘most rules in sport are absurd and all clubs in the Premier League agreed to these ones.’ Nor does he mention that City had since won their appeal against UEFA at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, for the alleged use of such shadow contracts, and for the alleged hiding of owner investment as sponsorship money – even if the Premier League charges have still to be answered. In fairness, Fanning could not have known at that point that Rui Pinto, the hacker who made public his ‘Football Leaks’ revelations, which were subsequently covered by German news magazine Der Spiegel, and led to the initial UEFA two-year ban on European competition for City, would be sentenced to a four-year suspended prison term for his crimes, including extortion, in September 2023.
Sweeney is a different case entirely, as he is the source of the most vicious and sustained attacks on Manchester City in this Mediahaus organ. A brief selection of sample headlines from recent years will suffice to illustrate his naked animosity: ‘Looks like Guardiola’s best days are in the past’ (10/11/2019) (that one wore well); ‘Man City’s manager is the figurehead for an organisation which represents all that stinks about modern sport’, the intro of which reads ‘Manchester City are football’s most despicable club and Pep Guardiola its most despicable manager’ (18/07/2020); ‘Soulless City will win title, but Liverpool have hearts and minds of fans’ (19/12/2021); ‘A classless man in charge of a classless club run by classless people’ (22/05/2022); ‘Ugly truth behind the success of City’ (29/04/2023). Without parsing each article word for word, take my word for it that, in any other context – and undoubtedly if it were directed against his preferred Liverpool or many others’ preferred Manchester United – his bile would be widely regarded as libellous incitement to hatred.
As for Hot Press alumnus Lynch, one is never quite sure as to what extent his tongue is firmly in his cheek or how much he actually means it (probably some weird admixture of the two), due to his unremitting deployment of ironic overstatement. In ‘Big Money meets Big Football meets Big Law’ (26/05/2019), having bemoaned the evils of leveraged buy-outs of clubs by ‘rich-guys-with-no-money’, he continues: ‘Now we’ve got rich-guys-with-money, indeed the problem with the rich guys who own City is not just that they are considerably richer than the rich guys who own Liverpool or Spurs, they are limitlessly rich as only oil-rich countries can be, they are ludicrously, crushingly rich. And still… still they’re in trouble with UEFA, accused of breaking rules in relation to Financial Fair Play.’ As though rich-guys-with-no-money are somehow preferrable to rich-guys-with-money. He endeavours to bolster his case by arguing, ‘One is reminded of the fact that football of the American kind is considered so important, it is rigged like some socialist experiment’, when it could just as easily be framed as being so important that it is rigged like a capitalist experiment – like the rest of U.S. society. By-the-by, he concludes that week’s column with analysis which lays the blame for Brexit firmly at Jeremy Corbyn’s door, a good indication of where his ideological sympathies lie. This is what passes for informed, astute political commentary in the reputed highest-circulation Irish Sunday newspaper. In ‘Don’t mention the war: filthy rich Manchester City were once hilarious losers just like Basil Fawlty’ (11/02/2023) he states: ‘There are complexities within this story of the Premier League charging Manchester City with breaking 115 financial fair play rules…But there are great simplicities to the case too, the most obvious of which is this: I don’t know any fans of Manchester City. I know fans of Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Aston Villa, Everton, Leeds United and West Ham. I even know a Nottingham Forest fan. But I don’t know any fans of Manchester City.’ Maybe Lynch should get out more. He is welcome to attend one of the triweekly meetings of the City Supporters Club – Dublin Branch (of which more anon) to check out how many City fans there really are hiding in plain sight in his midst. But it is in the terseness of his tweets that Lynch gives himself revealing free reign: ‘City are not a good side’ is a gnomically reiterated mantra of his; while ‘Would love to see the Arsenal winning the league obvs, yet I fear City* have aimed for a narrow win this season to maintain the illusion that the competitive structure hasn’t been wrecked by their incessant, hydra-headed cheating’ (8/05/2023); ‘Interesting to see comments about the Arsenal ‘bottling’ it from football writers who “bottle” the mention of those 115 charges against Man City* every day of the week’ (18/04/2023); and ‘No, the biggest bottle in history is the abject failure of so many English journalists and broadcasters to even mention that City* are facing 115 charges of cheating’ (15/05/2023) enter the realms of conspiracy theory nonsense. (It took a while for me to figure out why Lynch habitually places an asterisk after every obsessive mention of City, but eventually Merriam-Webster furnished what I presume is the answer: ‘the character * thought of as being appended to something (such as an athletic accomplishment included in a record book) typically in order to indicate that there is a limiting fact or consideration which makes that thing less important or impressive than it would otherwise be.’
John Aldridge
John Aldridge
The Sunday World features a ghost-written column by ex-Liverpool and Republic of Ireland stalwart John Aldridge. Week in week out, in plain man’s language, he trumpets Liverpool’s cause: the reason they are not able to compete is City’s perfidy. He is quoted in an interview with Kevin Palmer headlined, ‘It’s time to hammer Man City if they are found guilty’ (9/02/2023): ‘Everyone knows this has gone on from day one. They have done well to get away with it for so long. We will have to see what comes out in the wash and give themselves a chance to prove their innocence.’ Was no subeditor at the SW alive to the patent contradiction covered in the space of those three short sentences? In his own ventriloquised voice, in ‘Surprise guys can claim a Champions League spot’, he tells his red readership, ‘As I’ve mentioned in my Sunday World column, Manchester City’s dominance at the top of the Premier League table is a big problem for the English game, as interest will wane if they win the title by a mile every year’ (24/9/2023). Even if City have succeeded by nefarious means, is that even true? The Bundesliga attracts more than fans of serial winners Bayern Munich (eleven consecutive titles, and counting).
But perhaps the most egregious example of anti-City vilification comes courtesy of Miguel Delaney, who works for the London Independent but is of part-Irish extraction, and a known Liverpool aficionado. (He claims to support one Irish club and one Spanish club, but no Premiership club) Delaney tends to adopt the moral high ground, focusing more on the U.A.E.’s campaign of ‘sportswashing’ – an attempt to render their human rights abuses more palatable to the world – rather than on the resources the owners’ wealth places at City’s disposal. I will tackle these problems in due course, but for now, here is a smattering of Delaney’s critique. In his consideration of City’s 2023 title win, headlined, ‘Five titles in six years: Are Manchester City destroying the Premier League?’ over a standfirst of ‘Pep Guardiola has been given limitless funds to create the perfect team in laboratory conditions, and the result has been an almost total eradication of competition at the top of the Premier League’ (22/05/2023), he declares, ‘City have brutalised the very idea of sporting competition. There’s been no tension. There’s been no drama’, going on to assert, ludicrously, ‘That has meant there haven’t been any real memorable moments, beyond some great goals and the repeated image of Haaland and De Bruyne tearing at goal.’ Those images were, precisely, memorable moments. He concludes with, ‘The reality is all of City’s success is ultimately explained by the fact they are a state project.’ Prior to that, writing in his newsletter (17/05/2023) in the wake of City’s 4-0 win over European giants Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final, second-leg at The Ethiad (a game I was lucky enough to attend), Delaney revealed that ‘sources within the game (and with Delaney, it is always unnamed ‘sources within the game’) are growing concerned with how City are brushing all before them aside.’ It is little wonder that Declan Lynch has commended Delaney on X (formerly Twitter), praising him for ‘doing God’s own work’. However, while other top clubs may be aggravated by City’s dominance, it is fair to say that City fans are rejoicing in it.
It might be a good idea if all those engaged in public discourse around football in Ireland were required to declare their interests before being allowed to comment. On second thoughts, perhaps there is no need for this measure as, as has been demonstrated, many of them already do this freely, yet their outpourings are not met with the requisite scepticism – because they are preaching to the converted, and their favouritism is plain for all to see.
Both as a lawyer and Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis was an inveterate opponent of big business interests. Less well known than his other contributions, is that he a co-authored a text in the 1890 Harvard Law Review that invented a privacy right, which has steadily been eroded in criminal justice.
Indeed, as a judge in Olmstead v US Brandeis extended the privacy right to what he termed ‘the dirty business of the state’. In that case, without judicial approval, federal agents had installed wiretaps in the basement of Olmstead’s office and in the streets near his home.
Culminating in the recent Quirke case, in Ireland, a right to privacy in criminal proceedings has now reached a juncture of virtual nonexistence.
In my last article I referred to Irish Supreme Court Justice Gerard Hogan’s opinion that for thirty years the Irish Courts have failed to enforce due process under Article 38 of the Irish Constitution. The Quirke case delivers us to the terminus, facilitating the dirty business of the state.
In that case, evidence gleaned from a computer unlawfully seized from Patrick Quirke’s home was deemed admissible. Jurors in Quirke’s original trial were informed that Quirke’s computer was used for internet searches on the decomposition of human remains and limitations of forensic DNA. Quirke was found guilty of murder based on circumstantial evidence.
No Statutory Safeguards
In Ireland we now enjoy no statutory safeguards, other than Judges’ Rules, whereas in the U.K. Section 76 and Section 78 of PACE (The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) are actively enforced to exclude coercive and inappropriate tricks or force, and that which impacts on the fairness of the proceedings. I know from experience that judges in the U.K. are vigilant at throwing out a case in the event of an abuse of process.
The murmurings by the Irish government about the implementation of the Special Criminal Court recommendations is a space which should be carefully watched. Most likely, in my view, is that an institutional preference for non-jury courts will be given ever-wider jurisdiction.
It is a sign of how we are entering an inquisitorial rather than adversarial age worldwide, not just in Ireland, which suits the interests of many of our elites. Our own, and other states, are sidestepping the Rule of Law in the interests of big business, often at the expense of the sometimes-innocent lives of others.
Furthermore, it is noticeable that the seven judges of the Supreme Court selected to adjudicate on the Quirke case did not include the state’s leading constitutional lawyer. Gerard Hogan’s absence was his presence.
One can only wonder why Hogan was, deliberately or otherwise, excluded. Perhaps to preserve a show of strength through unanimity? Or maybe Hogan would rather colleagues were unanimously wrong, and wanted no hand nor part in it.
While on the High Court Peter Charleton was the architect of the nefarious JC case. His judgment in Quirke expressly reinforces that case, and fails to over-rule it as doctrinally unsound. He also sidesteps accepted breaches of EU and ECHR data protection under the privacy right. The judgment effectively subsumes a right to privacy at the expense of public order considerations, and legitimates the dirty business of the state.
Hardiman’s absence is also his presence. The shade of a forgotten ancestor. His dissent is not even addressed in any satisfactory detail in Quirke. This failure to address Hardiman’s reasoning is not dissimilar to the way the State treats whistleblowers, who are demonised, ignored, trivialised or excluded. If all else fails, as in the McCabe inquiry which Charlton presided over, the State endeavours to deflect, invoking the shabby excuse of inadvertence – at least until confronted by the stark truth.
Then, only after being caught with your legal pants down, do you cobble together a shabby deal involving a multimillion pound pay out. With a confidentiality agreement of course.
Image: Daniele Idini
Factual Matrix
The factual matrix of Quirke may go some way towards suggesting that it was an inadvertent mistake, but that is not a typical pattern, as various sources, including the Morris Tribunal, and Hardiman’s eviscerating judgment in JC, demonstrate that discipline – and it might be said ethics – are barely apparent in the Irish police force: An Garda Síochana.
It is not a case of – as I can testify – simply of incompetence, though this is undoubtedly part of the problem. It is a combination of tunnel vision, or cognitive bias, coupled with active attempts to frame those deemed to be threats, or perceived threats.
Whistleblowers, including and especially internal ones, are a particular target, but human rights lawyers or defence counsels may also be in their line of fire.
There is no point having the symmetrical precision contained in Charleton’s detailed judgment and in some of the majority judgments in the JC case. This is not a case about shipping or guarantees where rules can be implemented precisely with clear consequences; and where high commercial stakes demand clarity and precision, which can then be cross-checked against best practice in industry.
The rules in criminal proceedings must be matched up with, and adapted to, social realities. A member of An Garda Síochana may describe something as inadvertence when it was a reckless or deliberate violation of constitutional rights. There is a consistent tendency to lie or cover up. That is what the Morris Tribunal and other reports demonstrate. Things have got worse not better. This was not dealt with adequately in the Report of the Fennelly Commission.
Image: Daniele Idini.
The Path of The Law
In one of his most celebrated contributions to legal discourse Brandeis created the so-called Brandeis Brief, which is often used in cases involving the death penalty, and others. This involves the marshalling of economic and sociological data, historical experience, and expert opinions to support legal propositions, i.e. judgments must be cross-checked against social realities.
Therefore, in Ireland the behaviour of the police does not warrant a watering down of the strict exclusionary rule. In Ireland we require a high standard. Discretionary rules will not be applied.
If the police are afforded the excuse of inadvertence, they will happily paper over illegality.
Rules must be informed by social realities. It was recently alleged in the High Court that a number of officers supervised the importation of drugs, and controlled the flow of shipments to dealers. Woe betide anyone who has the temerity to stand in their way.
Charleton by implication, and expressly, suggests that a factual inquiry into the bona fides or honesty of a police action and decision can be made in a specific context. But given the present Special Criminal Court dispensation, accepting uncorroborated police evidence, that inquiry must be very limited and conditioned by the judgement of subjective officialdom.
The acceptance of a Garda evidence in even securing a warrant without adversarial scrutiny is unacceptable. Safeguards need to be built into the system.
The Quirke judgment is a travesty: a neatly-ordered, precise and tidy travesty – as is Charleton’s want. We should not be facilitating the dirty business of the state but enforcing the privacy right.
In the insular, it felt like it at times, enforced statelet of Northern Ireland, sexual repression was a thing. (And probably still is.)
Faggot. Queer. Bent. Gayboy. Bender. Fruit. OOOOooooooooo like an effeminate caricature: going around, mincing, limp-wristed, and nothing but a bum-watching, bumboy. These were some of the names I heard levied at me when I was eighteen and on into my twenties.
At the time, my mental health was on skid row. I had depression, was low on self-confidence; suffered terrible social anxiety, and an alcoholic experimenting with harmful drugs . I did not realise at the time that I was in pain due to my background. Yes, family and subsequent cognitive development. Impaired. Yes. Immaturity. And I was unwell. Really. I did not stand up for myself. I had no response to these verbal demarcations.
They used to say, ‘Burnsy, why haven’t you got a girlfriend then?’ And I would take – as the colloquialism goes – a reddener. Pure scarlet. Flustered and embarrassed and already a wreck. I started to think maybe I was. One of them, and I was struggling with my sexual identity. My gayness was trying to come up to the surface and out. But I was suppressing it.
Image: Daniele Idini.
I can recall some twenty years later, sitting in a working-class bar, one Saturday afternoon two decades ago, in Belfast, alone at a table with a drink, and coming to the end of the line on the subject – asking myself: ‘Am I gay? Do I really want to be in a relationship with a man?’
I knew that this situation had become a neurosis in my mind. And I had to venture out there to find out. I went online and looked at Transexual escorts in Belfast. I picked one. Of an Asian background. I went to a hotel the next week and found out that I was not gay after all. The physicality of what is a man’s frame/body and the presentation gender of a man, was, is, something that I was not attracted to. At all. And that’s fine.
My sexual identity had very little bearing on my mind’s stunted growth. It was all familial.
Image: Marina Azzaro
There was the time whilst I was living in Dublin that I went along to a reading group after being asked by a guy who is gay. I knew he was gay and did not have an issue with it. I did not have a secret fantasy or agenda to get better acquainted. During the reading, he tried to play footsie, or, leggsy, rather, under the table with me and I did not reciprocate. From then on, he has given me the old round around and does not converse or communicate and I thought that was rather selfish, but there you are.
Indoctrinated media draws very clear lines on the subject of sexuality: binary codes, definitions and stereotypes.
I do wonder about the repression back home, though, the religious doctrines and institutions which repressed people and silenced others. The subsequent abuses.
I did wonder for a long time about homophobia and innate homosexuality and violence meted out in manifest self-anger as one reads and hears so often about attacks on gay men. Gay women. Gay people.
People are people they have their preferences and proclivities.
I went on a trip to Berlin a couple of years ago to visit the museums and check out the city. Cut to a Friday evening; there was slight drizzle and when I was walking down through Rosa Luxemburg-Platz, I saw a man in full-make-up, a pink latex jacket, leather biker’s hat, a black mesh over his face, black leather trousers, and black boots, and to me, he looked happy.Free. I was happy for his freedom and thought to myself, ‘You wouldn’t see that in certain areas of Belfast on a Friday night. Sadly.’
You just don’t know the great struggles people have in their lives.
All persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by, and entitled to, the benefit of laws publicly and prospectively promulgated and publicly administered in the courts. Lord Bingham, ‘The Rule of Law‘, Sir David Williams Lecture, Cambridge, 2006.
I have written extensively about the whittling away of due process in Ireland. This is derived from Article 38 of the Constitution, which states: No person shall be tried on any criminal charge save in due course of law.
In 2017 Supreme Court Justice Gerard Hogan at least had the courage to argue that the Irish Courts have, in effect, failed to enforce due process, constitutional rights in Ireland for the past thirty years. ‘Moves’, he said, to reduce the scope of ‘the most fundamental constitutional safeguard of all‘ — the habeas corpus guarantee in Article 40.4.2 – ‘speaks volumes regarding the prevailing constitutional zeitgeist.’ That zeitgeist has only become more illiberal, especially with the advent of emergency powers in response to Covid-19.
The particular violations of due process have been exposed in the J.C. Case (2015) where the Supreme Court – notwithstanding what was probably Adrian Hardiman’s most brilliant dissenting judgment – effectively allowed the police to characterise as an accident, what seems to have been a purposeful and deliberate breach of constitutional rights.
We have also witnessed the subordination of privacy rights to considerations of public order in the Dwyer Case on appeal to the Supreme Court. There, the Court simply sidestepped the State’s breaches of directly applicable EU data protection legislation, rendering privacy rights a dead duck.
But if these developments aren’t sinister enough, consider what is happening now for the liberty of the subject.
Adrian Hardiman.
In Camera Proceedings
The term in camera in legal and juridical terms is about a hearing being held in private. It is a pragmatic feature of civil or industrial processes, such as patent violations or family law proceedings. It has various implications, including that the names and identities of the parties to the suit are kept out of the public gaze, and reporting restrictions are in place, including press coverage and conventional law reporting. A judgment could be published, and context made clear, but details may be kept out, redacted or anonymised.
The intra-jurisdictional consensus – a fundamental principle of international law – is that when a process or a piece of legislation or an executive decree is adjudicated without there being independent representation or scrutiny it is of dubious authority, as it has not been adequately challenged.
So-called emergency powers have a nasty habit of becoming permanent, everywhere. In the face of opposition, however, the UK government repealed its controversial law, giving police the right to apprehend people suspected (hence ‘sus’) of ‘intent to commit an arrestable offence.’
Within Lord Bingham’s summary of the Rule of Law is the idea that the law ‘should be publicly administered in the courts.’ It is crucial for any democracy that all judgments become a matter of public record or, failing that, only partial elements are excluded, and then only by implication, after independent representations of counsel.
This is violated when in camera proceedings occur. Justice, as Bingham said, cannot be achieved behind closed doors.
The current Minister for Justice Helen McEntee TD has, nonetheless, obtained a High Court order from Justice Owens requiring telecommunications service providers to retain certain data – including user, traffic and location data – for a period of twelve months, for the purpose of safeguarding the security of the State.
The Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022 came into operation on June 26, 2023. Under the terms of the Act, the Minister for Justice must have been satisfied that there exists a serious and genuine, present or foreseeable, threat to the security of the State.
She also, presumably, had regard to the necessity and proportionality of the retention of Schedule 2 data, and how this could potentially impact on the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. Justice Owens was obviously persuaded by her arguments, which are not in the public domain, for reasons of state security; do you see where this is going?
It should also be noted that the Minister consulted with the Garda Commissioner prior to making the application. The Act was, in effect, a transposition of an EU Directive, but no scrutiny has been permitted. No independent counsel. No counterweight.
So what could this threat to the security of the state amount to? Minister McEntee also recently stated that Sinn Féin presents a threat to the criminal justice systembecause they timorously suggested adopting suggestions of the review group on the Special Criminal Court.
The Yam Case of 2020, which Geoffrey Robertson QC litigated before the ECHR under Article 6, clearly identified that even partial exclusion under the in camera rule and partial reportage invites scrutiny.
Thus, T.J. McIntyre from the Sutherland School of Law in UCD argued that Ireland’s new mass surveillance regime is ‘certain’ to be challenged in the European courts. He said the government’s decision to seek a High Court order was made ‘behind closed doors, without any consultation with the data protection commissioner, with civil society, or with the industry’ and, importantly with no detail provided on the supposed national security threat.
In a damning assessment he stated:
The 2022 Act has to be treated as of no legal value … You can’t have a measure that’s supposed to authorise mass surveillance of the entire population, and be the basis for criminal investigations and prosecutions for years to come, where its foundation is so uncertain. It’s grossly irresponsible to do that.
Thomas Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill 1933-2010.
Special Justice
The Special Criminal Court is a three-judge criminal court, convened without a jury to avoid any potential intimidation of its members. It is enabled by the Offences Against the State Act, the first of which was published in 1939 to prosecute members of the IRA and declare any similar organisations unlawful. More recently, the Court has been used to deal with the deadly rise in gangland crime and organised criminal syndicates.
The legislation, and its Court, have been criticised by Amnesty International, the United Nations and the Irish Council of Civil Liberties over the last number of decades and at its inception by Mary Robinson.
Most of the recent review group concluded that the use of a non-jury court is ‘justified’ and that the court is needed to counter ‘a real risk to juror intimidations.’ However, the review added, contradictorily, that there is ‘an absence of concrete evidence’ on the nature and extent of the risk posed to jurors today. The review added that a non-jury court should only be used in ‘an exceptional case.’
One way that the review recommended this should be done is through abolishing ‘scheduled offences’ – where certain offences are automatically tried by a non-jury court – and placing the decision in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), which, it should be noted, is a political appointment.
As an additional safeguard, the majority review recommended the appointment of a judge to review whether the correct procedure has been followed by the DPP, and whether the decision had been made based on of the evidence heard in that case alone. This would mean, under the new Court, that the DPP would decide whether it is suitable that a citizen, who stands accused of a crime, be tried in a non-jury court based on the evidence in the case, regardless of the case’s threat to national security.
Accompanying the majority review, there is also a minority review which argues that the establishment of a permanent non-jury court is ‘constitutionally inappropriate’. The minority review said: ‘Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done, we are in danger in all sorts of way as Iseult O’Malley of the Irish Supreme Court said of becoming ‘overly habituated to the abnormal.’
Commenting on the recommendation to replace the SCC with a new Special Criminal Court Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said that the Special Criminal Court eliminates the very real risk to jurors and potential jurors posed by subversives and organised criminal groups. She said that the recommendation from the review group ‘requires serious consideration’ due to the importance of the Special Criminal Court and its place in the Irish judicial system.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee.
‘Belief Evidence’
As well as non-jury trials, the SCC has special powers to accept ‘belief-evidence’. This allows the belief of a Garda Chief Superintendent that a person is a member of an illegal organisation to be used and accepted as evidence of that person’s membership. While the majority’s report recommends that new legislation be created to provide more regulation around the use of non-jury courts, they have deemed the continuation of belief-evidence ‘appropriate’.
While the report says that belief-evidence can continue to be used, it adds that someone must not be prosecuted ‘solely on the basis of that evidence.’ There needs to be corroboration. The minority simply notes that the UK police did not need belief evidence to prosecute and recommends its abolition.
Last month, Minister Simon Harris, who took over as Justice Minister while McEntee was on maternity leave, received approval to propose the resolutions to extend the legislation. A Government spokesperson said Harris considered that there remained ‘a real and persistent threat from terrorist activity, primarily from so-called ‘dissident’ republican paramilitary groups.’
The criminal court of justice, Dublin. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices
Conclusion
We appear to be witnessing a serious regression in the Rule of Law in Ireland, where unspecified threats to the state are decided in camera, and an extension to the use of judges without jury with police belief evidence continuing to be accepted. All of this twenty-five years after the signature of the Good Friday Agreement which effectively ended the Troubles.
