The launcher of this book in Dublin, translator Pierre Guglielmina, gave a speech in The Little Museum of Dublin, in which he managed to nickname the text with the accurate acronym HIT IT – like a piece of modernist wordplay. Pierre described it as a panorama of French literature from the Commune times of 1870 to the Great War (1914), a study that “hit [him] hard”. “The movement of HITIT, from Mallarmé to Proust through Apollinaire…[he said] is a triumphant one, and I have been trying to understand why.”
As the founder of the now seemingly inactive Irish Innocence Project, and co-founder of The European Innocence Network, I staunchly oppose the death penalty, with exceptions for certain Crimes Against Humanity. I have personally visited and represented individuals on death row in Kenya and the U.S.. This underscores the critical need for our legal system to exercise caution, and precision, to avoid wrongful convictions.
Recently, I have condemned in a Cassandra Voices Podcastthe inhumane prospect of Julian Assange enduring indefinite incarceration. This stance does not, however, imply a belief in universal innocence, or countenance a dismissal of deserved punishment. Rather, I advocate for a measured approach to justice, echoing Shakespeare’s notion of ‘measure for measure’ in determining appropriate consequences for actions.
Following an ethical determination of guilt, the central question revolves around what form of punishment is suitable. But before delving into punishment, we must first address the concept of guilt, and whether the guilty evade accountability.
Unfortunately, instances abound of individuals with power or wealth evading justice through various means. Examples include former President Trump and Clinton’s long list of pardons on leaving office, and instances of state officials abusing their authority, as depicted in literature such as Klima’s 1991 novel Judges on Trial. These cases underscore the danger posed by those entrusted with upholding the law manipulating it for personal gain.
David Langwallner begins a two-part series on why people are found guilty of crimes they did not commit dealing with confirmation bias, leading questions etc.https://t.co/N2k7bKiiUI#HateCrimeAct#HateCrime
A state or judicial criminal is often the worst criminal. They have subverted the Rule of Law and the processes they were appointed to uphold. They are professional hypocrites.
In his 1971 detective novel Equal Danger, Leonardo Sciascia demonstrates how in Italy judges may become, by stages, complicit in murder. Chillingly, the President of the Supreme Court intimates to the investigating detective that in condoning murder the judiciary are incapable of error.
Sciascia also documented the complicity of the mafia and Christian Democrats in the murder of God’s banker Roberto Calvi in 1982, and of course the kidnap and murder of the progressive, or incorruptible, Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in 1978.
In Ireland the incident that primarily gave rise to Conor Cruise O’ Brian’s immortal phrase GUBU (grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented) was the murderer of the nurse Bridie Gargan and the farmer Dónal Dunne in 1982. The murderer Malcolm McArthur was discovered on the private property of then Attorney General Patrick Connolly.
Not uniquely in Ireland, the powerful avoid and do not accept responsibility for their actions and may resort to framing others. Voltaire, the earliest expert in miscarriages of justice coined the phrase per encourager les autres, to deal with the scapegoating of Admiral Pyle by the establishment.
Political criminals also enact laws to protect their interests. The new Hate Crimes Bill in Ireland is finally being opposed by SF as they have recognised the danger it poses.
The legal principle of ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt,’ as established in the case of Woolmington v DPP (1935), serves as a foundational tenet. Yet, challenges arise, particularly regarding the interpretation of evidence and credibility of assessments.
In every case I have recently conducted the same question is asked by jurors: “is sure the same as beyond all reasonable doubt?” Judge rightly say yes, and try to avoid further questioning to avoid being buried in semantics.
Of course, the crucial point is that unless someone tells a defence lawyer he or she is guilty – in which case you either withdraw or can only defend by challenging the prosecution evidence without asserting innocence – you cannot know definitively.
Cognitive bias cuts all sorts of ways. A defence lawyer should be timorous about getting a client to plead guilty if there is any doubt. Not least, many clients are vulnerable and inclined to please authority and, as has happened in my experience, defendants may seek to change their plea.
The intersection of morality and legality further complicates matters. It is essential to caution against conflating moral judgment with legal culpability. Instances of moral condemnation influencing legal proceedings – as seen in the admission of bad character evidence – highlight the need for a nuanced approach.
A feature of my speeches is to caution a jury not to confuse morality with legality. Moral condemnation is often used by the prosecution to smear the accused, and the previous bad character admissions ushered in by Blair in the U.K. opens that gateway.
In Ireland, however, the exclusion of bad character is not a good idea. Evidence of bad character is only inadmissible in certain defined exceptions, such as if one puts one’s good character in evidence. There should be more of a halfway house.
Despite efforts to discern guilt, the process remains fraught with challenges. Guilty individuals often resort to elaborate tactics to obfuscate the truth, necessitating a vigilant approach from their lawyers. Additionally, societal biases and institutional pressures can influence witness testimony and judicial outcomes.
In the pursuit of justice, it is crucial to distinguish between genuine miscarriages of justice and rightful accountability. While liberal objections to wrongful convictions are warranted, there are instances where the punishment must align with the severity of the crime. The case of the Moors Murderers 1963-65, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, serves as a poignant example of criminals rightfully facing lifelong imprisonment.
Reluctantly, it must be conceded many are guilty. And it is sometimes very difficult to get them to accept their guilt. Even my great hero Clarence Darrow ‘Attorney for the Damned’ represented Leopold and Loeb, who in a nihilistic fashion attempted to kill another young man simply to prove they could get away with it. As in the Jamie Bolger case. Darrow knew they were guilty and avoided an insanity plea. Instead, he made the greatest plea in mitigation in the recorded legal annals to avoid the death penalty. But they did do it.
Lucy Letby mugshot.
Nurse Letby Case
The recent case ofNurse Lucy Letby who was found guilty of murdering seven infants in Manchester crown court in 2023 is instructive.
She is not the first Mancunium serial killer. Between 1963-65 in Saddleworth Moor near Manchester Mancunians Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered innocent children. It is noticeable that they were also influenced by the film ‘Compulsion‘ documenting the Leopold and Loeb case.
Working on a recent case in Manchester, I resisted the temptation to visit the moors, but did pass by Market Street, Cheshire where another notorious murderer, the serial killer and doctor, erstwhile respectability known as Harold Shipman had his surgery. In this case a later inquiry revealed the police should have acted sooner. So, one should not always attack the police.
And there is some evidence in Nurse Letby’s case that the NHS, in collective group think, buried their heads in the sand as the evidence accumulated. They were protecting the guilty through cognitive bias. A consultant who gave evidence in her case said lives could have been saved if there was not a cover up to preserve institutional reputation. Thus, in fairness, state officials, doctors and police officers are often hit from both sides: damned if they do; damned if they don’t.
I have represented clients in several cases where due to witness reluctance or external pressures, the police have taken the action of NFA (No Further Action), which they have come to regret.
The cheaper the crook…
So, what are the hallmarks of guilt? It is surprisingly difficult to work out. One crucial sign is perhaps, as the American actor Humphrey Bogart said: ‘the cheaper the crook the gaudier the patter.’ Overly complex explanations are often a sign of guilt.
The patter includes: convoluted challenges to police evidence gathering and exercise of due diligence on instruction; excessive casting of doubt on overwhelming expert evidence; elaborate excuses for extreme violence based on self-defence; and inappropriate allegations of police misconduct.
Now the process must be tested and many wish to save their skins. Those who are desperate will often resort to anything, and the defence lawyer on instructions often must facilitate this.
I remember how both myself and Adrian Hardiman were tarred with damnation, overlooking constitutional niceties, in the constitutional challenge to The Proceeds of Crime Act as lawyers for Gilligan by the Sunday Independent.
A trial process weighs up whether evidence is relevant or not, and whether there is a case to be answered. The question of whether a case should have been brought in the first place is a different matter.
Legal representatives may also argue over whether there has been an abuse of process through non-disclosure, non-compliance or a fit up. In this respect the absence of video or phone evidence is crucial. Once confronted, a guilty person may tangle themselves up in lies, which affects their credibility when giving evidence
A witness who is lying must avoid the truth and is often lulled by persistent questioning into the trap of telling the truth by indirection.
Thus, the prosecuting barrister Edward Carson, after listening to days of Oscar Wildes’ ridicule at his trial for gross indecency in 1895, popped the surprise question – a deadly weapon to be sparingly used in the barrister’s art – about the boy Grainger.
Did you Kiss him?
The answer which leads to the Reading Gaol and early death in Paris was:
Oh no he was far too ugly.
It must be stressed that the credibility of a witness must be read in the context of the vulnerable person they may be. Some suffer from addiction and mental health issues, which is not to say they are not telling the truth.
Sadly, in a world of increasing subjectivism and loss of truth those who lie may have been telling the truth as they see it, or as they remember it, but not as a fact. Witnesses for defence and prosecution also have intellectual masking to justify in their own mind what they have done. Everyone, as Voltaire indicated, has their reasons.
Anti-social Media
In our time, text evidence from social media and other digital uploads such as chat lines are often very incriminating. The utilisation of social media can have disastrous consequences as historic texts and chats can come back to haunt you. They might demonstrate a propensity as a prelude or aftermath to an incident, and they often show planning, ostensible grooming or worse still acceptance. But comments of a salacious nature in isolation can be magnified by unscrupulous prosecutors.
Scurrilous tactics are never justified, but tarnished evidence is often admitted. I am no fan of racist vigilante groups or engaging in quasi entrapment, but I recognise that sometimes they catch people who are guilty, or, more ambiguously, exhibit certain traits.
Video evidence often confronts someone with what they really did under the influence and normally leads to a quick acceptance of responsibility.
What happens next has been characterised by Oliver Wendell Holmes as the ‘bad man’ of law:
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, and not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
The legal process is often unforgiving, albeit this is necessary at times.
I do not believe in punishment as denunciation, or retribution where guilt and sin are confused, such as occurred in the sentencing of Roger Casement to death.
With respect to what the British call just and proportionate punishment, I had the privilege of inspecting a Norwegian prison when attending a death penalty conference in Oslo. The tennis courts, swimming pools, private rooms discourage recidivism and potentially rehabilitate criminals.
The Court of Appeal in the UK in R v. Ali (2023) is actively discouraging judges from sending people to prison, not least in congested post-Covid times. Most come out not wiser, but weaker.
But let us also be conscious of the appropriate punishment for the massacre of the innocents. Not all who claim a miscarriage has occurred are victims. There is a time for a liberal objection to a miscarriage of justice, and a time for when the punishment should fit the crime. Even the Norwegian prison system struggled with the serial killer Anders Breivik, who they had to build a special facility for.
I wonder will certain lawyers, businessmen or lawyers ever see justice? Not likely, apart from a few subordinates thrown to the wolves. This was the pattern of our banking prosecutions. The rich can retain the best lawyers and engage in plausible deniability, and a chain of command.
Thus, corporate lawyers, judges and businessmen, as well as puppet politicians, have the justice game rigged, up to the point where they commit murder. Then of course the system must react? This may become a pertinent question for Ireland in the coming months.
Did COVID-19 originate from a pathway connected to China’s trade in wildlife-for-consumption, or did laboratory activity trigger the pandemic? Where do things stand with the so-called Lab Leak Hypothesis? One thing is for sure: in this pressing matter, one of the hardest combined attitudes to take is to be both engaged and polite.
Many combatants, previously capable of professional comportment, have descended into bare knuckle insults of the kind academe has not seen since the world decided one must be on the Left or the Right, or that one should comport oneself responsibly in the face of a Cold War that may become hot. Are you on the right side of history, or involved at all? You are either ready for flak, in this situation, or keep your head down.
Many scientists with an opinion worth sharing are choosing not to do so.
They might be wise. After all, some of this fighting has gotten dirty. Where some engaged in respectable debate before, rivals are now trying to cancel and professionally immolate one another. Direct exchange rather than article or book writing now makes up the majority of this discourse. Peer-reviewed articles on either side of this exchange have been few. Before you say – ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the lab-leak’, or ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the wet market/ zoonosis’, consider this: the Chinese government most likely had insight, and most likely destroyed evidence related to one or the other.
Viscount Matt Ridley, our interviewee here, has been both interested and engaged with the question of the virus origin since the start. He has been so without lapsing into ad hominem jibes. Though he has lapsed into Twitter exchanges of fire, his manner throughout has been civil. He stands with scientists, skilled researchers and a majority of the public in thinking that COVID-19 resulted most probably in a misadventure connected to a Chinese lab.
This does not mean he is correct.
Why is it important to point this out? In a context where both sides of a highly contentious argument disagree over all but the smallest of premises, the question of decency – and its cousin attributes honesty and responsibility – does come to the fore. Decency is also a cousin of openness by the way, and as we encircle in our conversation, China’s rulers have been anything but open. Therefore, take a listen to this exchange, and a look at Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book, as a start about posing this question for yourself. For all of us who lived through the pandemic, and in memory of those who didn’t, asking questions about its origins remains a primary part of the aftermath.
On the April 13 2024, a man stabbed several people in a shopping centre in Sydney. The morning after, I was walking past the Four Courts in Dublin, when a man approached me making a stabbing motion in the air. I fixed my eyes on him as my heart sped up, but it stopped as quickly as it started. Just a gesture of three or four stabs. I saw there was nothing in his hands, but kept my distance as he passed. He didn’t make eye contact or acknowledge me.
The experience threw me off kilter. For a second I doubted what I’d seen. Why would someone do that? To scare people? But he didn’t even seem to notice me. Was he on the phone, and accompanying his words with thoughtless gestures, inconsiderate of how it might affect passers by? Or was he lost in his thoughts, unaware of the world, and acting out some inner drama? Safe to say, I looked over my shoulder a few times as I walked on.
The problem of violence, such as the Sydney stabbing, or the shocking attack on Dublin’s Parnell Square last year, involves many factors: trauma, mental illness, addiction, social isolation, inequality… We could pull on any thread and find enough material to make a case for its importance in contributing to such acts.
For the mainstream media and politicians, however, explanations are simple. These people are “thugs“, “hoodlums“, “scumbags“. Anyone questioning the role society plays may be accused of giving criminals a free pass, and not holding them accountable for their actions.
After violent attacks like the ones mentioned, the media is normally quick to assure people that the motivation was not “terrorism”. The distinction seems to be this: terrorism is motivated by an ideology, a political position. A terrorist act has meaning. But these other types of attacks, according to the mainstream, have no meaning. The attacker was “schizophrenic”, homeless, jobless. Therefore, the violence has no sense to it. It is merely an outburst of animal savagery into the pure, clean, bright and ordered streets. The blame does not lie in us, but in them – those who cannot raise themselves up high enough to walk among us in our enlightened ways.
Violence is like a volcanic eruption. It comes from the lower, subterranean levels of the social body. And we happily ignore the tectonic pressures that are pressing down on those in the depths.
Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position — licit or illicit — and effects a universal modulation.
Our smartphones would be easily integrated into such a system. We could implement it in an afternoon. Of course, some people will complain of the undemocratic aesthetic of such a system, but then when they read the news reports about stabbings, and think of the children, they will put aside their misgivings and gladly walk through the sliding doors with the rest of us. Most of us conformed to a similar QR code system during the pandemic in the name of the public good.
Instead of radical change, society is on track for a compromise. Instead of asking ourselves why our society causes so much illness, loneliness and violence, we are resolving to create stronger walls between us.
Europe is already a fortress, a walled garden in the memorable words of Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief. Our world is divided into the lucky few within, and the unlucky masses without. This dichotomy reaches its most absurd form in Gaza, where enemies at Israel’s gate are not outside, but themselves walled in, a city under siege, enclosed by blockades and checkpoint borders, barraged by missiles.
Image: Daniele Idini.
Golden Tickets
Western society dangles two tickets into the middle class before the labour force: inheritance and hard work. For many people, however, even the second option is becoming unfeasible. The ladder is being pulled up, and the majority of young people now worry they are going to be left behind.
Let us step past, however, the despair of the downwardly-mobile middle class, of which much has been already written. What are we to do with those who cannot meet the demands of middle class careerism? If you can’t manage your addictive behaviours (after all, we are all addicts, in one way or another), and you can’t navigate the world of work, what happens to you?
Those who cannot work are directed to a world of rules, appointments, documents, waiting rooms, lines, interviews, and regular check-ins.
But what if you don’t have a fixed address? And what if you don’t have a mobile phone? Or what if you can’t keep track of all these requirements?
If you fail to navigate the Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy, then you have the final frontier; a Diogenes-like existence at street corners, hostels, and cardboard windbreaks. Soup outside the GPO. Spare change. Random assaults by drunken louts who take middle-class disdain for you as permission to inflict pain.
Stockbrokers, New York, 1966 from United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.03199.
A Successful Civilisation
Historically speaking, our civilisation has arrived at a point of absurd wealth. Through industry, the machine, the market, automation, and the outsourcing of backbreaking work to countries with conveniently lax labour laws, we have access to luxuries unimaginable to a mediaeval king. According to the British Fashion Council, we have enough clothes to dress the world for the next six generations. According to the UN, we can feed everybody on the planet. Why then, do we insist on bestowing the fruits of collective human achievement only to those who pass the test of ‘functioning’ in an insane society?
This hyper complex informational administrative “service” economy is historically unprecedented. And yet we expect everybody to pick up the skills necessary to thrive in it, or we punish them brutally and unsympathetically. We see it as a bare minimum achievement to survive in this strange environment and punish those who can’t live like us with alienation, hunger, and hardship.
In 2013, eight million 5-centime coins (one per inhabitant) were dumped on the Bundesplatz in Bern to support the 2016 Swiss referendum for a basic income (which was rejected 77%–23%).
The Case for Universal Basic Income
I am a proponent of Universal Basic Income (UBI). The idea is simple: give everybody enough money for clothes, food and shelter. The income is different from the dole. Everybody gets it, even if they don’t need it. There’s no need to endure intrusive bureaucratic nosing into how you spend your time in order to qualify for it.
Most of us dismiss UBI out of hand. But why? Do we fear that a life of safety, satiety and comfort will make us lazy, debased, selfish creatures? It appears to me our current system does a fine enough job at that. If anything, UBI would do the opposite. It would improve morality, because it’s easy to be generous and patient when you are well-fed and comfortable.
But for all you cynics, to whom I sympathise, let’s put aside the appeal to morality and ask this: Do you really think a basic lifestyle of security and comfort would be enough for most people? I think many people would work simply so they can show off their wealth to others, without needing to be incentivised by fear of ruin. As social animals, our need for status is deeply felt. People will work to signal their vigour, or simply as a way to pass the time and give their life a sense of purpose and meaning.
And what about jobs that nobody would do for free? At the moment, these are the lowest paying jobs in our economy. We expect the people with the fewest opportunities to resort to them – essentially a kind of slavery. In a better society, the most unpleasant jobs, like cleaning the toilets, would be the best paid. Or maybe we can just build some robots to do that, rather than building robots to make music and art – you know, the stuff that humans actually like doing.
Anyway, what’s the big deal if people become idle? Let them go for it. Idleness is certainly less harmful than most of the activity that goes on in our civilisation, and earns applause, billions of euros, and occasionally Nobel Peace Prizes.
Fin Divilly – Songwriter and Performer by Daniele Idini.
Not just for Artists
UBI was trialed in Ireland, in a flawed manner, via the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, which closed in 2022. As the name suggests, a basic income was extended to artists alone. To me, this runs contrary to the most important part of Universal Basic Income: its universality. You shouldn’t need to prove that you are already providing a service to society in order to qualify for it. That’s putting the cart before the horse. UBI is meant to free up people so they can begin to do more valuable things with their time, which should be valuable to society too.
By granting it only to a certain category of people, it implied that the income was a conditional grant, rather than an unconditional gift. It came across as a transparent deal: we’ll give you money, but we want you to create commodities in return. Rather than challenge the logic of capitalism, opening the way for a new kind of society, it reinforced the existing system.
I understand that artists were impacted badly by the pandemic, but so were homemakers and carers – are they contributing less to society than professional artists? UBI should be a no-strings-attached gift given in good faith to everybody, not a conditional grant for a cohort of well-respected creatives.
The flawed thinking behind the BIA scheme was so effective at poisoning the well, and confusing people about the potential of UBI, that it almost feels intentional. A better trial would involve a completely fair lottery, with the name of everyone in the country in the pot. That way, we could see the impact of receiving a UBI on the lives of people from a cross section of Irish society, and all types of socioeconomic backgrounds.
A lot of people today are stuck doing work they know is meaningless, simply because it pays the bills. The technical term for such an employment, as coined by the late David Graeber, is a “bullshit job”. Far from being a ticket to freedom, bullshit jobs induce a feeling of guilt, low self-worth, and absurdity. Most of us have ideas of what we would like to do if we had more time, if we weren’t constrained by the necessities of earning money for rent, food, and utilities. Ultimately, we are kept in place by a sensation of insecurity. Imagine what we could do if our lives weren’t based on fear.
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.
For the Irish, living as we do on a divided island, the question doesn’t have to be facetious. As a negative example, to try to land on a positive answer, Northern Ireland comes to mind. Wherever that congenitally deformed statelet ends up, its passage through the twentieth century will form a storyline we will never stop arguing about. God bless us.
Lebanon, where I lived briefly from January 2011, is a mystifying and compelling organism.
Were it on the seafloor, it would be brightly coloured, shape-shifting and perhaps equipped with a defensive poison. A territory carved out of the Ottoman Empire via the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, it formed with Syria the ‘French mandate’. It has held together against expectations, and enjoyed tangible golden ages through the same century-long lifespan as our post-colonial Ireland.
At the Beittedine Palace, 2011.
The local cultures, which still roughly map onto the religious arrangements of the confessional political system, have incredibly deep roots. I say ‘cultures’ and ‘roughly’ because this is a land where people will seriously make the case that they are the direct descendants of the Phoenicians, if not the Canaanites. Some of the ingredients here are antiquated enough to make monotheism look like a recent fad.
Other claims include references to identifiable cities and mythologized landscapes in ancient history that remain traceable today: the cedar tree that appears on the flag is of the stock used to build the Jewish Temple, and the forests are referred to in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In cities like Batroun, Saida and Sur, the phantoms and visible stubs of Phoenician harbours can still be observed. Compressed between the plains and deserts leading to Mesopotamia, and the coastal route to the Nile and Egypt, it has produced merchants and travellers over the millennia. The Lebanese diaspora may number seventy million.
Beirut’s Green Line after the Civil War.
To live in Beirut at the time I did, was, I now realize, a taste of a brief golden age all on its own. One of the clichés that had to be learned was the fable of the glorious 1950s and 1960s: the period after the Second World War and before the domestic civil war, when the traditional merchant classes were joined by elite émigres from other parts of the defunct empire to create prosperity. They became ‘bankers to the Middle East,’ a role now occupied by Dubai.
Wealthy post-Ottoman families that retreated there included the Sursocks, who would form a link to Ireland, and Jewish families from Iraq and beyond. Nadim Shehadi, the guest speaker on our latest podcast, is a product of the cosmopolitan confidence of that time.
Sursock Palace before the explosion of 2020.
In 2011, the Arab Spring was triggered by events in Tunisia the week I arrived. Through connections, I had the opportunity to meet the renowned journalist Robert Fisk for coffee, and as we sat in a place on Sadat Street, the TV in the corner was flashing images of Mohamed Bouazizi burning. I had been reading about the story, and Fisk hadn’t, so for a few minutes I was the one explaining events to him.
My journalistic Larp brought me up and down the country. No-one ever called me out on it. I wrote one story for the Daily Star, the Saad Hariri-sponsored newspaper, about a scheme to write essays and theses for brattish students at the American University of Beirut. My real job was writing multiple choice questions for a rich private school and educational company.
I had a blast. Young and hopeful journalists were everywhere, and the dismal course of that profession, with Facebook annihilating the business side and ISIS looming into view with plans to cast them in their snuff movies, was not yet obvious.
One young English writer I knew noted that “the next few years are looking pretty good for work.” She might have been right, but that sort of attitude, shared by the foot soldiers of the international NGOs, was already watering seeds of uncommon bitterness among the Lebanese. Their rivers of trouble were sources of fresh water for well-paid and often decadent hordes of expats. One wonders how high the shoots might have grown by now.
At the moment of the horrific Port explosion of 2020, I was living in Paris. A Lebanese woman I knew there, a filmmaker[1] and activist, called me briefly, with her voice inflamed from sobbing. “Really Luke, what have we done to deserve all this?”
Sursock Palace after the explosion of 2020.
Add to this the financial collapse which wiped out savings and plummeted the domestic currency, the Syrian refugee influx which increased the population by at least 30%, the pandemic pains and now a very possible Hezbollah-Israel war, and you might have a country that even her most ardent lovers will leave. Who will stay, and who will join the seventy million-strong diaspora? What cause for hope might persist?
One of the characters I met during my time there was Nadim, during a dinner at the palace of the Sursocks in Gemmayzeh. With characteristic Lebanese curiosity and openness, he simply stayed in touch with me, a random person who had breezed through then strayed very far from Beirut, like most of our overconfident cohort running around at the time.
One also wonders, incidentally, whatever happened to all those little girls and boys?
[1]Of course she was, and is. Her first films were beautiful, artful, personal things shot through with a heatwave of avant garde, mostly concerned with her much-traumatized locality of the Shia south. Some recent work is here.
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 mid-January, St. Petersburg’s governor, Alexander Beglov, stated in his blog that Russian soldiers returning from the frontlines “know what they are fighting for” after witnessing gender-neutral toilets in Ukraine.
“These guys who saw toilets in schools where instead of two rooms, for girls and boys, there are three rooms – for girls, boys and gender-neutral ones, they don’t need to be explained what values we stand for,” Beglov said, referring to the values associated with gender-neutral facilities.
The governor’s statement caused a stir on social media and confused even supporters of the war. The attempt to awaken patriotic feelings was met with ridicule. Many thought it was inappropriate to justify modern Russia’s bloodiest war with toilets.
“What kind of talent does one have to have to explain the war with Ukraine by the fact that there supposedly are transgender toilets in schools (most likely, confusing them with toilets for teachers),” exiled Russian opposition politician Leonid Gozman sneered in his column.
However, soon Putin himself adopted the toilet rhetoric, claiming at a public event that ‘common toilets’ were a reason for many Russians returning from abroad en masse.
“It is difficult to raise children in the conditions that are created in some Western countries today. Sorry, having shared toilets for boys and girls, things like that. This has already become commonplace,” Putin explained. It is not entirely clear what exactly surprised the president so much. If Governor Beglov was upset about the ‘third toilets,’ Putin was surprised by the shared bathrooms, common in many Russian homes and apartments.
The topic of toilets has concerned Russian authorities in the past as well. In December 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed indignation about the shared toilet at the OSCE summit in Sweden, concluding that it was ‘not humane.’ However, toilets have never before been used as a justification for war.
Not only politicians but also the clergy are discussing the supposed “true” motivations behind the Russian invasion in Ukraine. In early 2022, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, asserted that the war in Ukraine stemmed from the West’s attempt to impose foreign values, notably “gay parades.”
“Today, there is a loyalty test to this (Western) government, a kind of ticket to that ‘happy’ world, the world of excessive consumption, the world of apparent ‘freedom.’ Do you know what this test entails? The test is very simple yet terrible – it’s a gay pride parade,” the patriarch said in his sermon.
“To join the club of those countries, one must hold a gay pride parade. Not to make a political statement of ‘we are with you,’ not to sign agreements, but to hold a gay pride parade,” he added. Vladimir Putin also addressed the West’s attempt to forcibly introduce what he described as “newfangled” gay trends in Ukraine.
The gender and LGBT agenda suddenly became one of the main topics in Russia. In 2023, authorities officially banned gender transition surgeries and ordered the annulment of marriages where one partner requested a change of gender marker in official documents. Additionally, “propaganda of same-sex relationships” was outlawed, and the acronym LGBT was labeled as “an extremist movement organized in the United States” and deemed a threat to constitutional order.
However, the ongoing war encompasses more than just discussions about toilets and gay pride. Russian officials at various levels cite other reasons, including the prevention of a third world war, as justification for their actions.
“Colleagues, the commencement of a special military operation prevented the onset of a third world war. Consider what could have ensued? A humanitarian catastrophe, millions of casualties. This scenario was averted for one reason—our soldiers and officers are combating Nazism, safeguarding the peace and tranquility not only of Russian citizens but also of citizens in other states, particularly those in European nations,” stated Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the Russian Parliament, in January.
Of course, the credit for averting global carnage is personally attributed to Putin.
“In essence, the third world war was averted due to his (Putin’s) competent decisions and actions,” stated the representative of the Ukrainian separatists in the “DPR,” Artem Zhoga. Towards the end of 2022, he publicly appealed to Putin to run for his fifth presidential term. Аfter sighing and throwing up his hands the Russian president agreed…
Although Putin refrains from portraying himself as the world’s savior, he certainly views his decisions on a grand scale. For instance, in the fall of 2023, he asserted that the Russian military was combating colonialism in Ukraine.
“The West, fundamentally, does not desire such a vast and diverse country like Russia. The multitude of cultures, traditions, languages, and ethnic groups simply does not align with the mindset of racists and colonialists,” explained the Russian leader.
“It is this genuine freedom that the fighters in the special operation zone are defending today,” he added.
By the end of 2023, polls indicated a declining level of support for the war among Russians.The country faces sanctions, ongoing casualties, and a stalemate in the invasion. Neither side appears capable of achieving significant progress on the front lines.
So, what is the path forward? The Kremlin lacks a clear vision for the future. The only strategy offered by the authorities is to escalate hate speech — enemies in Kyiv, enemies in the West, and enemies within the country. Following crackdowns on journalists and opposition figures, persecution has extended to writers, artists, and, more recently, celebrities (traditionally loyal to the regime).
Putin has wagered on perpetual war, as political scientist Tatyana Stanovaya asserted in one of her columns. She believes that aggressive militarism is increasingly defining Russian daily life.
“This choice will exacerbate conservative trends, accelerate repression and make Russian politics more intolerant and ruthless,” Stanovaya wrote.
This is evident in Russia’s campaign against LGBT. Officials, from mayors to the president, have suddenly focused on topics like gay pride and gender-neutral toilets, using similar language as if following a script.
Is this topic truly a major concern for Russians? Analysis of the “anxiety index” for 2023 reveals that people’s primary fears revolve around various factors, including declining living standards, rising prices, and the threat of new mobilization.
In March, Russia will hold presidential elections, where Putin is expected to secure the desired outcome. However, he will have to deal with mounting problems.
Despite the repression and purging of opposition figures in Russia, protests continue to erupt sporadically. In Moscow, the wives of mobilized men are demanding the return of their husbands, residents in Bashkortostan (A Muslim-majority republic located between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains) are outraged over the conviction of an environmental activist, and recent protests erupted in Yakutsk (east Siberia) following a domestic murder. Moreover, the situation is exacerbated by increasing instances of drones attacks and shelling occurring in different country regions.
But the most unsettling development for the Kremlin was the emergence of widespread support for Boris Nadezhdin’s campaign. As a representative of the systemic opposition, Nadezhdin aims to enter the elections with a straightforward message: stop the war and initiate negotiations. Surprisingly, these objectives resonated with a vast number of Russians.
Thousands of people across the country (and even beyond its borders) queued for hours to provide their signatures in support of Nadezhdin. In fact, this marked the largest anti-war action in the last two years. Nadezhdin’s supporters don’t expect his victory but are glad to express their stance in the only legally possible manner. Ultimately, Nadezhdin succeeded in gathering over 150 thousand signatures required for nomination. However, this doesn’t guarantee his eligibility to compete.
Will Putin find new arguments to justify the need to continue the war? It is quite possible, but it is already clear that for this he will have to come up with something better than the threat of gay pride and gender-neutral toilets.
It’s hard for those of us who work in the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy to put into words how much of a visionary Dr. Ivor Browne was. He was a pioneer of LSD psychedelic-assisted therapy in San Francisco and London in the 1950s. He also pioneered the therapeutic use of LSD, ketamine and holotropic breathwork in the 1980s in Dublin, when he was the Chief Psychiatrist at the Eastern Health Board, and Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin.
He worked with LSD and ketamine group therapy in St Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Dr. Ivor Browne was a maverick and, I would say, a truly great man, in many ways a man before his time.
I had the privilege of getting to know him personally when he was running a regular meditation group every Tuesday in the Lantern Centre Dublin City near where I lived. Even though he was in his late eighties or early nineties at the time, his wisdom, compassion and wicked sense of humour radiated when in his presence. Despite showing up every week, I recall that he could never remember my name, due to his great age, failing hearing, and the staggering amount of people he had met over his lifetime; yet he greeted me and all the other participants each week with a beaming smile, like we were long lost friends.
Browne’s work on trauma
In his book Ivor Browne, the Psychiatrist: Music and Madness, based on work he had originally published in 1985, he speaks of the concept of trauma stored in the body as ‘the frozen present,’ which involves unprocessed emotions. To help process the unprocessed he referred to the use of altered states of consciousness, cathartic states, music and group therapy.
This concept received very little attention from the psychiatric profession at the time, and a paper he published in the Irish Journal of Psychiatry, entitled ‘Psychological Trauma, or Unexperienced Experience’ in 1985, received zero citations at the time. This work, nonetheless, paved the way for the subsequent work of Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk on trauma, somatic trauma therapy and psychedelic assisted therapy. In the 1980s – in recognition of the importance of his pioneering work – Dr. Stan Grof came to Dublin to collaborate with Dr. Ivor Browne, as did R.D. Laing.
Thus, decades before later-day pioneers on somatic trauma therapy like Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, Browne was speaking of trauma as the ‘frozen present’, using altered states of consciousness to help people process trauma frozen in their bodies, and using group psychotherapy, breath-work, bodywork and music as a means to do this.
In a 2017 article published in Network Ireland magazine, Browne explains his attitude to trauma :
Once that shut down (through a traumatic experience) happens, then that experience is frozen. So it is not a case of a threatening memory being repressed, it is that it has never gotten in properly. Once it is frozen it is outside of time, so twenty years later this can activate – some everyday event can trigger it – and you then experience it as if it is happening now. You don’t think about it and remember it – you feel it and experience it. And, of course, at that point you think you are going nuts because you look around and nothing traumatic is happening, yet you experience this traumatic feeling. That is why I called it “the frozen present”, because when it comes, it comes through as the present, not as the past. Eventually when it works its way through and you experience it a few times then it moves into the past.
He continued:
The best example is grief. If you have lost someone you have to do a lot of work over time in order to integrate that to allow it to become a memory. Then it becomes less threatening. When my wife died five years ago, the first year was absolute hell, and I couldn’t imagine feeling any joy. The second year was bad, but not quite as bad as the first. Now after five years I am quite contented. I have a different life. By processing the trauma, it has shifted into memory, but this approach is not possible in the current psychiatric model.
Billy Ralph argues that moves by the HSE to measure health metrics in G.P. practice serves the interest of Pharma, and could foreshadow a dystopian future.https://t.co/vMddr37zH7@indepdubnrth
Browne was a vocal critic of the reductionist, purely bio-medical model of psychiatry. An outspoken critic of the mental health discourse, he said: ‘we are living in a society that is driving people mad’, emphasising that
Psychiatry is a reductionist system that explains everything by the parts……The tragedy of psychiatry is that this is the only way you can think. Because in the psychiatric model you cannot ask how the behaviour or upbringing of a person is affecting their biochemistry – you can only ask how is the biochemistry effecting the person. Psychiatrists don’t take a history, so they don’t understand the problem in the context of the individual’s life.
What is even more extraordinary is that he did this at a time when Irish society was incredibly conservative and the Catholic Church still held tremendous power. Professor Ivor Browne was censured by the Medical Council over his role in the Father Michael Cleary affair in 1996 after he had spoke out in support of one of his patients, Phyllis Hamilton, who revealed her affair with Fr. Cleary.
He also proposed the heart, rather than the head, as being of central importance in mental health, and wellbeing, and that love was essential in the processing of trauma:
Key to processing trauma is cultivating a relationship that allows it to be processed, and that ultimately involves love, and the deepest traumas we can experience involve a separation from love.. the truth of all this is that the heart is the centre, and if our heart is closed we cannot experience love.. if your heart opens, then you can connect.
A deeply spiritual man, who became a devotee of an Indian spiritual guru, Browne believed, ‘These are the kind of things that we can talk about through poetry, or through the therapeutic model, but we can’t deal with these concepts through the psychiatric model. At the deepest level, a lot of our problems are spiritual.’
In Ireland, we sometimes do not celebrate our own. Today we celebrate Dr. Ivor Browne as a truly great man. He was offered a professorship at Harvard University, and I have no doubt if he had taken it he would be much more well known outside of Ireland.
Instead, he choose a life of service, helping his patients, and reforming the psychiatric services in Ireland, and Greece. Browne also played an important role in the closure of the infamous Leros island psychiatric hospital in Greece, infamous as one of the most brutal psychiatric hospitals in Europe.
Here is a link to a paper he co-wrote in 1960 with Dr. Joshua Bierer, the pioneer of social psychiatry in the UK, on the therapeutic use of LSD and group psychotherapy.
Browne also recognised the healing power of psilocybin, and the ancestral Irish use of magic mushrooms, mentioning in a podcast in 2017 that: ‘Magic mushrooms were probably available to the druids, back at that time, so several thousand years later, similar, to the sort of relationship you have (with ayahuasca) in Peru or Brazil.’
Freud reputedly said that the Irish were the only people impervious to psychoanalysis, and that may be true, certainly in previous generations due to the ancestral trauma that was so prevalent. But Ivor Browne is the closest thing we have to an Irish Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung.
Thank you Dr. Ivor Browne, from all the people you helped and for your visionary qualities.
The ten principlesof the U.N. Global Compact, formed in 2000, sought to realign business as a force for good. They include compliance and support for human rights; upholding good labour practices and eliminating discriminatory and forced labour; taking up proactive environmental stewardship; and fighting corruption.
Several institutions across the planet joined the Compact, including large corporations, SMEs, universities and think-tanks. These principles are now starting to inform corporate, business, and operational level actions and strategies. In some cases, these principles are considered at every stage and improved responsible practices have been introduced.
Broadly, ‘responsible businesses’ that embed sustainable practices take a number of different initiatives. These can firstly be classified under actions that do not harm people or the planet while making profit; secondly, those that focus on their ESG (environmental, social, governance) investments.
In order to make a larger impact on society and the environment, businesses can work on improving the lives of the people they impact. e.g. by creating green services, and making value chains more sustainable and inclusive.
This could also come about through investments that promote and support social sustainability. Also, firms in any given sector may consider choosing to work with ‘responsible businesses’ who are their partners, investors, and suppliers. So, in the end, it is not only about the firm in question, but also its partners and wider associates, who share similar values and goals.
Businesses caring about their wider stakeholder groups and not simply shareholder wealth, has led to increasing recognition and action around people-planet-profit, or The Triple Bottom Line. Some of the largest corporations, including Amazon, IBM, and TESLA have all set net-zero targets and micro-level reduction of carbon footprints. In addition to this, business goals such as using only ethically sourced materials, becoming more energy efficient, streamlining logistics practices, and applying the components of industry 4.0, offer the prospect of ‘win-win’ situations.
Environmentalism on United States stamps.
People-Planet-Profit
Empirically, high shareholder value is considered an indicator of success. Today, however, more than ever, it’s about scoring highly on indices such as sustainability, managing employees responsibly, supporting (instead of exploiting) other stakeholders in the supply chain, and looking after the well-being of community members.
Values-driven business tends to have better public perception and P.R. images than traditional ones with a narrow focus on profit. These are important variables that feed into success today.
In 2017, a sustainability survey by Cox Conserves, revealed that 88% of small and midsize businesses, across various sectors have already implemented sustainable activities. It can be argued that the triple bottom line needs to be a part of every company’s culture and values to be successful in the long run, and to manifest responsible practices in various forms.
Broadly, ‘The triple bottom line’ can be defined as a sustainability framework that examines a company’s social, environmental, and economic impact. The following definitions in this context might prove useful.
People: the positive and negative impact an organisation has on its most important stakeholders.
Planet: the positive and negative impact an organisation has on its natural environment (reducing its carbon footprint, responsible usage of natural resources, etc).
Profit:the positive and negative impact an organisation has on the local, national and international economy (includes creating employment, generating innovation, and paying taxes, amongst others). It is important to remember that organisations need to remain solvent in order to do good! Hence ‘profit’ remains integral to success.
Managing the paradox…
The question, therefore remains: how can the Triple Bottom Line [“3BL”] be a lucrative and long-term strategy?
Well, for starters, having 3BL raises transparency that mitigates shareholders’ concerns about concealed information. In fact, it helps fulfil one of the pillars of corporate governance too – transparency. Moreover, it involves accountability around organisations’ actions, while delivering growth and improved economic situations/opportunities for a business
It also lines up a business to be a part of ‘world betterment’. At a local level this should translate into boosting community developmentthrough better practice. Finally, 3BL improves a company’s competitive advantage vis-à-vis its peers.
For most businesses implementing reforms come at a cost, thereby creating a paradoxical scenario. There are paradox theories that identify such conflicting situations and which argue that organisational tensions remain latent until environmental factors ofscarcity, plurality, and change demonstrate the contradictory nature of the tensions, making them salient to organisational actors.
Conditions of scarcity refer to limitations on the resources available to the organisation, such as factors of production and finances. Plurality represents conditions of uncertainty as to organisational goals and the strategies necessary to achieve them. For example, as mentioned earlier in the article – the 3BL need to become part of the values, culture, and strategy of an organisation to function effectively in most markets. Finally, change signifies shifts in contextual conditions, which leads organisations to adapt and adopt new practices.
A paradoxical approach understands that long-term success requires continuous efforts to meet multiple demands, not by trading off or prioritising one goal over others, but by a dynamic process of splitting and synthesis, as explored in a study by Smith and Lewisin 2011. However, synthesis means that this short-term splitting process is repeated cyclically, with new priorities emerging in each cycle, and in the long run, a dynamic equilibrium emerges.
This involves “purposeful iterations between alternatives in order to ensure simultaneous attention to them over time”. In essence, this means that organisations can attend to the competing demands of the triple bottom line to varying degrees over time, thereby reaching a dynamic equilibrium to effectively manage all three objectives.
Doing so promotes “…a virtuous cycle of tension and resolution as the firm responds dynamically to the changing and competing demands of sustainability management”. This is one way to overcome the paradox, which is applicable in many circumstances.
Former tennis player Anna Kournikova in 2009.
Become a role model…
It pays to be good! A study surveying thirty thousand people in sixty countries conducted by Neilson explores the factors shaping consumer perception towards brands. One of the key findings of this work was that about two-thirds of the respondents would be willing to pay for sustainable products.
Particularly, the millennial groups are willing to pay between ten and twenty-five per cent more for sustainable products, and be grouped under ‘responsible consumers’. However, the results were not consistent in certain advanced economies, where some of the major social ills are less evident, such as income inequality, limited job opportunities, and a lack of safety at the workplace.
Good business practice builds a competitive advantage for firms. Selected large corporations address inter-connected global goals and improve their operations, some being more innovative and cost-efficient than others.
This is generally reflected in an improving share price over time. The competitive advantage arrives not only from how businesses are conducting their operations more responsibly but also from increased stakeholder engagement. Sustainable businesses, who tend to normally fall within the ‘responsible business’ category anyway, create value for all stakeholders, including employees, supply chain partners and wider associates, civil society, and the environment.
Michael Porter and Mark Kramer proposed the ‘shared value creation’ theory proposing exactly the above, i.e. that a business can be a force for good and simultaneously generate economic value by identifying and addressing social problems which intersect with their business.
The struggle is often to balance the trade-off which makes a few stakeholders better off at the cost of others. There is rarely a pure ‘win-win’ scenario. However, regular dialogue with stakeholders should lead to reduced conflicts and increased cooperation. Revising business practices and running new iterations gradually helps a company to be better positioned and maintain its niche competitive advantage, aligned with a core sustainability agenda.
Finally, another critical advantage to working closely with wider stakeholders on ESG issues helps build critical support mass over the long term. This also allows businesses to deal with external forces that assists with risk management strategies.
Besides a focus on planet welfare, alongside keeping shareholders content, consumer interest in sustainable products is another significant dimension. Consumers value transparency, fairness, and explore the global impact of brands they associate themselves with. This has become a matter of perception, in the sense that there is no real scorecard that is used to measure these impacts quantitatively.
However, the footprints of large corporations in particular is far easier to identify today than a generation ago. Several studies by Deloitte and Global Economic Forum demonstrate that consumers are more loyal to brands that have a positive ESG image. Another study shows that about two-thirds of consumers studied in six countries believe they “have a responsibility to purchase products that are good for the environment and society” — 82% in emerging markets and 42% in developed markets.
We await a reliable scorecard…
Moving forward with such sustainability and social strategies is a requirement for almost all businesses nowadays. Thus, organisations are creating newer forms of partnerships, and alliances with other actors such as governments, local agencies, and community groups to work together and contribute towards larger objectives.
It is advisable that companies do not over-promise on these wider societal goals, and instead focus on delivering on a small number of actionable ones that leave an obvious impact. This is largely, also, because the resources of any organisation are limited. Therefore, investing selected key resources aimed at a few high-impact goals will also maintain shareholder confidence.
Companies should consider re-framing their sustainability strategies in the current global economic environment, where the complexity of change is increasingly overwhelming. What is still missing, however, are more reliable scorecards that convince stakeholders and consumers. The challenge remains to quantify evidence of ‘where is the impact’.
Feature Image: The California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California, is a sustainable building designed by Renzo Piano.
