Cassandra Voices

Tag: irish

  • Irish Prison Service Whistleblower: The Strange Story of Sean O’Brien

    To meet ex-prison officer Sean O’Brien for the first time I drove through a sparse landscape of family homes, outside the town of Clara in County Offaly. Miles of narrow roads ran through cold and wet pasture, bog, and occasional patches of woodland, typical of the Midlands.

    We had been in touch over the phone,after the publication of my interview with barrister David Langwallner, entitled ‘Does Ireland still have a Problem with Whistleblowing?’ from June 2021.

    On June 14, 1988, Sean O’Brien disclosed to the Department of Justice various wrongdoings he claims to have witnessed over his years of service in Portlaoise Prison. During his time as a prison officer, between 1981 and 1989, the Northern Troubles were raging, and what went on in the prisons was generally hidden from public view.

    Behind locked doors, staff and prisoners alike endured a parallel conflict, requiring physical and psychological resilience.

    As is already in the public domain, there was a “Heavy Gang” among members of An Garda Síochána operating at that time. There was also a group of prison officers who went by the same name operating in Portlaoise Prison, and which enjoyed the tacit support of prison management. They were notorious for ‘unconventional’ methods, embedded in the prison system.

    Unsafe and alienating working conditions, widespread bullying from top prison officials, as well as being pressurised, Sean claims, to produce a falsified report about a shooting incident in which he was involved, all left their marks on his mental health. Like many others that served as prison officers, he still suffers from those experiences.

    Portlaoise Prison.

    The Prison

    The Portlaoise high security prison complex is one of the oldest penitentiaries in the State. Built in the 1830s, it is still fully operational. Regarded as one of the toughest prisons in the world, it contains the notorious E-Block: a wing dedicated to dissident Republicans, predominantly ex-members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the INLA.

    Parallel to the prison’s official organization, during the Troubles prison officers had to understand and operate alongside the Republican’s own strict command structure. In the case of the E-Block, the prisoners’ relations with staff were filtered exclusively through the highest-ranking members of the PIRA. In 1988 that was Martin Ferris, who went on to become a T.D. for Kerry North between 2002-2020.

    The history of Portlaoise Prison is chequered with multiple escape attempt, riots and blanket hunger strike campaigns. Allegations of prisoner mistreatment by a Heavy Gang first appeared at the Prison Officers Association convention of 1984.

    On that occasion a delegate from Portlaoise Prison, Larry O’Neill told the Prison Officers’ conference in 1982: “If Hitler wanted generals today, he would find plenty of them in Portlaoise. After the war the Nazis said many of them were doing their duty and that is what the management in Portlaoise are saying today”.

    Away from the public eye, the working conditions of prison staff, especially South of the Border, have rarely been covered. An official inquiry was carried out in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, but for reasons that remain unclear, Sean O’Brien’s testimony was excluded after he had initially been invited to testify. The resulting report falls short of exploring the extent of the human rights abuses that seem to have occurred behind the prison’s walls.

    Irish Press, May 25, 1988.

    PO Sean O’Brien

    From a working-class family, Sean O’Brien began his career as a prison officer on February 16, 1980, aged twenty. The ‘job’ consisted of dealing with the most problematic, and in some cases dangerous, individuals in Irish society. Due to staff shortages, this work was mostly given to young and inexperienced men in their late teens or early twenties.

    The training was basic, lasting just a few weeks, and involved a few meetings, active service in different prisons, physical exercise, and simple inductions on the regulations of the institution. None of this offered much value to someone beginning their work in the State’s prisons.

    Sean clearly recalls spending his twenty-first birthday on duty with colleagues; as well as when he had to wear riot gear for the first time during a protest, despite having received no training for what to do in that event.

    He also recalls working through the so-called ‘dirty protests’, when officers were forced to use power washers to clean inches of prisoners’ faeces off the walls; and when he was involved in, and witnessed, prisoners receiving unwarranted strip searches, punishment beatings and enduring conditions which he describes as contrary to the Geneva Convention.

    After one such strip searches, he recalls the Governor at the time, Bill Reilly – a man with a reputation for being particularly hard on Republicans – telling him and the late Chief Officer Brian Stack, who was working with him at the time, to “bait them again,” after Stack told him they had completed the searches. Sean recalls being reluctant to obey the order as his arm was exhausted from already meting out such beatings.

    As a result of such distressing episodes, Sean claims that many prison staff turned to heavy drinking to cope with the stress that the ‘job’ entailed.

    We cannot ascertain the extent of the human rights abuses in Irish prisons at the time as a veil of secrecy, or outright omertà, still hasn’t been lifted. In all likelihood, many episodes have never been made public, as it would involve the State accepting liability for its shortcomings.

    What prison officers endured as a consequence of this environment ought to become public knowledge to ensure it does not re-occur, and so that the necessary redress process is put in place to assist victims of the State’s past failings.

    Flash

    In 1988, Sean O’Brien was living in a housing complex built by Portlaoise prison for officers and other employees a few yards away from the main gate.

    Every morning on May 18, after the customary substantial bowl of porridge and large mug of coffee, the shift began as usual with a security search between the first two gates. This was followed by a meeting at the ‘Parade’, the canteen room, where all the officers on duty lined up to be assigned their positions and tasks for the day by the Duty Chief Officer.

    That morning a crowd of protesters and foreign media had gathered at the main street entrance in front of the prison on the Dublin Road. Patrick McVeigh, a member of the PIRA – known as Flash – was scheduled to be released that day. However, he was expected to be re-arrested by the Gardaí as soon as he stepped outside the main gate, before being extradited to Northern Ireland.

    Tensions were running high in the prison at the time, and the issue had garnered considerable public attention. McVeigh was a political prisoner, and extradition laws did not cover prisoners with such status. Nonetheless, the extradition machine was in motion, as well as another machine attempting to find a way to save McVeigh from the extradition.

    As Flash left the building, a crowd of his sympathisers greeted him at the gate, along with media reporters and a Garda van, with doors open ready to receive the newly freed prisoner. Why there was no other way to handle the exchange remains unclear.

    Sean had elbowed his way in through the unfriendly crowd a few minutes before McVeigh was escorted to the Gardaí waiting for him outside the gate. From there he would be conveyed to Court to finalize the extradition.

    At this point McVeigh somehow evaded his escort and began running along the inner perimeter of the outer wall in the hope of jumping out on to the Dublin Road.

    Contrary to the Governor’s orders, his Deputy Mick Horan physically pushed Sean and illegaly ordered him into a shoot-to-kill area of the prison operated by the Army, shouting, “after him”. Sean obliged along with prison officer Frank Muldowney.

    McVeigh had earned the nickname Flash from his speed of foot. He ran along the inner perimeter of the outer wall, reaching the place where, from the outside, accomplices were hanging off the wall to lift him out, where a motorbike awaited.

    It was then that Irish Army personnel, stationed on the roof of the prison at all times, shot a sequence of five shots, which can be clearly heard from RTÉ footage of the scene.

    Sean felt the reverberations through his body from the flying bullets which, he says, only narrowly missed him. On the ground a few metres away, shots landed in a puff of smoke. Adrenaline overcame fear, and he managed to stop McVeigh before he could leap out on top of the wall.

    With the help of Muldowney, Sean brought him into the custody of two Gardaí, and he then made his way into the main prison building to resume his shift.

    Apart from O’Brien’s testimony, as of November 2022, we came into possession of two additional eye witness accounts of the events.

    One is from Martin Ferris himself. In a letter he writes:

    From where I was watching in recreational room E3, a number of bullets hit the space between Officer O’Brien and McVeigh. Pat McVeigh attempted to climb the farm wall onto Dublin Road with the help of some supporters from outside and certainly, would have succeeded only for Officer O’Brien grabbing his legs and preventing his escape.

    The second source says he witnessed bullets hitting the ground and bits of tarmac flying up around Sean, and that the distance from Paddy McVeigh was seven feet. However, he wishes to remain anonymous, unless an official inquiry is carried out into why this version of events has been consistently denied by the Department of Justice, the Prison Service, and the Department of Defence.

    Cork Examiner, May 25,1988.

    Half Sheet and the Governor

    Not long after Sean had caught his breath, he received an order from the radio room of E-Block to report to Governor Ned Harkin’s office. As Sean was on his way there he recalls being praised and cheered by some colleagues.

    He had just prevented an escape. That would surely lead to a commendation. Instead what welcomed him as he walked into the Governor’s office was a freshly typed false version of that morning’s events, which Sean was ordered to make a copy of in his own hand-writing, right then and there.

    That version of events – insofar as Sean recalls – would have protected Deputy Governor Mick Horan, the officer in charge that morning of the release (and re-arrest) of McVeigh, and would attribute most of the blame to another prison officer Paddy Dunne, who was by then already being suspended, as a suspected accomplice to the escape.

    Sean refused to comply then, and on dozens of occasions during subsequent days.

    According to O’Brien’s protected disclosure:

    The purpose of the Prison authorities ordering me to collaborate with their account as to ACO Dunne was to have him dismissed as not to shine a light on Deputy Horan who would have whole responsibility for Prisoner McVeigh escort on that day. Deputy Horan did not chase after the escaping prisoner. This is what Governor Harkins was covering up.

    In response to Sean’s refusal to provide a false testimony, threats of dismissal such as “leave your uniform at the gate on the way out” from the Governor Ned Harkin became more and more frequent.

    From then on he was not allowed to work on the landings where the prisoners were held. This meant that he was left doing nothing during shifts; waiting in a backroom for the end of the day to arrive. Day after day.

    In that situation the first indications of deteriorating mental health became evident. This included frequent nightmares and strong paranoia, which started to make his days unbearable.

    Sean knew that he wasn’t meant to catch McVeigh, and besides it would be normal to expect animosity towards him from some Republican prisoners. On top of being bullied for carrying out his job, he sensed a target on his back.

    As Martin Ferris, in the aforementioned account, dated 12 November 2022, writes:

    Tensions were high within the prison in the aftermath of this incident, and I, as the spokesperson for the republican prisoners, suggested to prison Governor Harkins that Officer O’Brien should not return to the prison landings until things calmed down. I personally never saw prison officer Sean O’Brien within the confines of Portlaoise Prison from that day forward.

    It was at that stage that he asked the Prison Officer’s Association Representative Noel Touhy for assistance. He was told that it was not possible for the prison to dismiss him in that fashion. The Association was already pressurising the Department of Justice to reinstate Paddy Dunne, and trying to bring to light the dynamics at play in the attempted escape.

    The Department of Defence consistently denied that the shooting could have endangered an officer on duty, as reported by the Cork Examiner on May 25, 1988.

    Cork Examiner, May 25, 1988.

    As recently as July 2022, Brian Stanley T.D. and Chair of the Public Accounts Committee asked the Minister for Justice “if there are any files being withheld for national security reasons that relate to the attempted escape of a prisoner on May 18 1988 at Portlaoise prison.”

    The Minister responsed: “I am advised that the record in question was previously considered as not suitable for release by the Irish Prison Service.” (05/07/2022, Question number: 539, Question Ref: 36042/22)

    The Office

    On June 14, 1988, Sean O’Brien attended a meeting with Noel O’Beara in the Department of Justice in Dublin in order to: ‘[…] make them aware that the “Prison Administration” in Portlaoise Prison were ordering me to make a false report surrounding Assistance Chief Officer (ACO) Paddy Dunne’s involvement in the escape, to have him dismissed.’

    Prior to the meeting, Sean O’Brien says O’Beara shook his hand and congratulated him, stating words to the effect of “you are going to get a medal, what type we don’t know, as one does not exist yet. The equivalent for the Gards is a Scott medal. You are the first prison officer to capture an escaping PIRA prisoner.”

    But by this stage O’Brien was feeling his options were running out. The office to which he had been invited felt wrong from the moment he entered. He found no sign of personal effects – a family portrait, postcards, a sporting trophy or anything of that sort – such as one would expect in a regular office.

    Despite a suspicion of being recorded without his consent, Sean gave as many details as possible, as well as disclosing the many wrongdoings he had witnessed during his years of service.

    Essentially, he blew the whistle on what his superiors wanted him to do, and the wrongdoing within the prison system, while O’Beara listened and took notes. The meeting ended with a promise the matters would be investigated.

    Sick Record

    After this meeting, Sean O’Brian patiently waited for a change in his circumstances. Then he went on sick leave on September 12, 1988, for a stress-related illness. At that point his previous poor attendance record, in part due to a certified injury he had received while on duty, suddenly became an urgent matter within the Department of Justice and Prison Service.

    Sean had already been referred by the Prisoner Governor and the Department of Justice to a psychiatrist (who also wishes to preserve his anonymity). He visited for the first time on September 8, 1988. This resulted in the first suggestion of a diagnosis of post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD), following the shooting incident.

    Nonetheless, behind the scenes, in a correspondence between the prison welfare office and the Department of Justice, his dismissal was being considered; while the full diagnosis of PTSD, resulting from a consultancy sought by the Prison Management itself, was completely ignored.

    Correspondence which we have obtained includes a letter dated February 13, 1987, one year prior to the shooting, where the prison management tell Sean O’Brien that although the Minister had considered his dismissal, he also ‘noted the improvement in your sick leave record.’ It also states that his ‘late attendance has been unacceptably high since September 1986,’ and that his case will continue to be closely monitored.

    Any management is likely to deal with a poor attendance record, but Sean O’Brien’s prior record seems to have been used to inform a response to his attendance after the shooting incident. It blatantly ignores the diagnosis of PTSD, or any other duty of care mandate that the prison service welfare office would have, or ought to have, had at the time.

    A letter, dated March 29, 1989 directly from the Department of Justice, outlines the reasons why it cannot any longer accept the standard of the previous evaluation of a ‘marked improvement on an already atrocious pattern of sick absence.’

    It continues by saying: ‘The result, if such a standard became the norm, would be to push the cost of absenteeism in the Prison Service from its present £3m. (approx) per annum closer to £4m.’

    Thus, despite referring to sick absence, there is no sign of any attention to his medical condition to be found in this letter, which reads like a preparation for a dismissal.

    In a subseqent letter, dated April 14, 1989, O’Brien’s dismissal was actively being sought. The prison’s Personnel Section writes to the Chief Medical Officer that:

    It would be helpful if a definite medical opinion could be obtained as regards to the absences relating to the officer’s metacarpal injury as the orthopaedic surgeon does not appear to have totally ruled out the possibility that this injury could be a recurring one.

    This injury occurred in 1983 and since then he had required recurring treatment and suffered constant pain. Thus, some of the absences being used to prove his poor record seem to have been a direct consequence of this injury.

    The letter ends with a pointed request:

    Perhaps you would confirm that Officer O’Brien does not have an on-going health problem. It would be appreciated if you would also say if you agreed that absenteeism is the problem in this case.”

    Apart from the recurring physical injury, the year between the shooting incident and his dismissal is constellated with absences, arguably caused by his deteriorating mental health.

    Debilitating insomnia, extreme paranoia, crippling anxiety, flashbacks; all these symptoms have led to a diagnosis of PTSD, but again there’s no sign of a duty of care wherein the psychological damage received while on duty is recognised.

    Instead, on May 23, 1989, at approximately 3pm, a knock arrived on the door of O’Brien’s parental home. It was Senior Prison Officer Mick Horan and Garda Sergeant Kevin Ford. They are looking for Sean and Hugh O’Brien (Sean’s brother, also employed at Portlaoise Prison) to tell them that they were both being dismissed. They are asked not to turn up at work the following day. His parents are instructed “to tell Sean to leave his uniform at the gate”.

    So Sean O’Brien and his brother were dismissed from the Irish Prison Service with a verbal notice delivered to their bewildered parents, without any official document being issued by the Cabinet of the Irish government.

    Following this we discover from the letters obtained from St. Patrick’s Hospital that the prison’s chief medical officer John Geoghegan did not even see Sean O’Brian before his dismissal had been finalized. And we find more indications that his mental health injuries suffered while on duty had been completely ignored by the Prison Service in considering such a dismissal.

    The Void 

    At the beginning of my interaction with Sean O’Brien, I timidly inquired about the long period running from his dismissal in 1989 to 2017, when he was approached by the former President of the Prison Officers’ Association P. J. McEvoy, who instructed a solicitor to pursue his requests for a Duty of Care under the 1956 Regulations, and recognition for his actions on duty, at a point when Sean’s mental health inhibited him from pursuing the case.

    During that period, Sean O’Brien claims he was not in the right mental state to follow up on his case. It seems he let it slide. What he had endured by then in terms of psychological distress he is reluctant to recollect, apart from to liken it to hell.

    After his dismissal, an alter ego emerged in his personality. All we know is that this alter ego opened a security firm with his brother and that at some point in 2007, he landed a helicopter onto the roof of a shopping centre, in his own words, to “collect a set of keys”.

    The Missing File

    The proceedings against the DOJ that began in 1991 were interrupted in 2008 when O’Brien’s solicitor, David O’Shey was placed under arrest.

    Then, O’Shey’s documents, including those in relation to the case of Sean O Brien vs The Department Of Justice no.14045P, came before the Law Society.

    Since then the file has disappeared without a trace.

    It was only in 2017 that he was able to instruct another lawyer to pursue the case. By the time he served a notice of an intention to proceed, in 2019, twenty-six year had elapsed.

    Thus far, efforts made by his new solicitor, Kevin Winters to find the file have been unsuccessful.

    In the Court of Appeal Judgement, delivered on 27/01/2022 we read that ‘witnesses for the defence (Minister for Justice) cannot reasonably be expected to give evidence that could be regarded as reliable after such an interval.’

    The Minister of Justice again denied many of the claims made by Mr O’Brien, including that he recaptured a prisoner who escaped and that he suffered PTSD after nearly being hit by bullets shot by the Irish Defence Forces, which also continues to deny responsibility.

    Over the last few years, the case has gained a certain amount of media coverage, mainly concerning the dismissal and sick days. However, very little attention has been paid to Sean O’Brien submitting a protected disclosure to the same Minister of Justice two months after the shooting incident denouncing grave misconduct.

    Nor has anyone considered that although O’Brien’s attendance record was certainly not exemplary – 682 days absent between 1980 and 1989 – some of these were due to an injury on duty which occurred in 1983: a fractured hand, and subsequently from 1988, symptoms of a psychological nature.

    It would undoubtedly be difficult for any court of law to establish precisely what happened well over thirty years ago in such a complex and volatile environment, but this story seems to contain another lesson.

    For many whistleblowers who feel that they have been wronged one of the most difficult challenges is simply to let go. To move on. The obsessiveness associated with their behaviour is often due to a lack of closure.

    That Sean O’Brien is still pursuing a judgment in his favour thirty years on from his dismissal reflects this condition.

    Only after an attempt is made by a State agency to delve into the historical context of these events can a sense of closure be achieved. A proximate attempt to do so by the Prison Service is what can be found in the Final Report of the Portlaoise Prison Staff Welfare Programme.

    This a project carried out by the Prison Service, which recorded the testimonies of almost two hundred Prison Officers who served between 1973 and 1989.

    Here we read that:

    Portlaoise gave rise to practices that could only have existed in that particular context and the challenges it presented

    …

    In that time Knowledge and awareness of the lasting impact of occupational stress, of role ambiguity and role overload and of requirements for healthy, sustainable work practices have been transformed. Such knowledge and awareness were not widely available at the time. It is important to avoid judging the past solely in terms of present-day knowledge.

    Thus, from this official source we learn that the working conditions were, indeed, unsuitable and outright damaging to officers.

    It is reasonable to say we should not cast moral judgement on past practices during war time, but it still only seems fair that there should be compensation available for breaches of a duty of care that applied at that time.

    Some respite from the silence that still engulfs this traumatized country should be available. Such is the long tail of war. You still see it slithering through the streets, long after the last shots have been fired.

    Regarding the shooting incident, it is instructive to examine the Irish Army’s Rules of Engagement from this period (below). This differentiates between warning and containment shots. The first, as one would expect, are ordinarily fired into the air, posing no danger to anyone’s life, while the second ‘will be fired near to the person concerned,’ but ‘NOT’ ‘into locations where innocent persons would be endangered.’

    Based on Sean O’Brien’s account, corroborated by other witnesses, it would appear that these Rules of Engagement were breached, including a prohibition against firing at a target that is running away.

    The Irish Army’s Rules of Engagment/ Use of Force in effect in 1988.

    Conclusion: Whistelblowing in Ireland

    The title image for this article, was taken towards the end of our first in-person encounter. The names of the dogs are Squirt at the front, Maxine on his right arm and Freddy – who was the most protective of Sean as I recall – Beauty hiding in the background and Mighty Man, named in honour of Noel Tracy TD. Treacy has always been very supportive of Sean. Apparently he always started and ended a sentence with “Mighty Man” when talking to anyone.

    Having the company of dogs has been an important coping mechanism for O’Brien, while he deals with the effects of PTSD to this day.

    We can say that the context of the Troubles legitimately required a certain level of secrecy. There’s obviously more then meets the eye to the events that ultimately led to the non-extradition of McVeigh, which Margaret Thatcher herself was very keen to achieve.

    The Department of Defence, to this day, refuses to release the records in relation to the shooting incident, requested through a Freedom of Information Request in 2016, saying:

    The release of this information may potentially compromise the security of the Defence Forces in preparation for peace and security operations at home and overseas.

    Meanwhile, the first legal file in relation to O’Brien’s case has disappeared without a trace.

    Whistleblowers suffer repercussions all over the globe, but Ireland’s reputation for mistreatment of whistle-blowers has worsened inexorably.

    In 2021 Ireland’s Protected Disclosure Act undertook reforms to comply with a European Directive. Even then, according to some stakeholders, the new legislation still falls short of providing adequate protection from the inevitable repercussions of such a radical act.

    Beyond the legal frameworks, better outlined in David Langwallner’s article “Whistleblew in the face”, which appeared in Village Magazine in November, 2021, the corrosive effects on a whistleblower’s mental health is often overlooked.

    All too often, when an instance of whistleblowing reaches the mainstream media, these negative mental health consequences are used implicitly to discredit the disclosures. One of the first questions the media tends to pose to whistleblowers is “Why did you do it?”; followed by: “Would you do it again, knowing the consequences you would face?”

    Both questions, somewhat deviously, shift the focus away from any wrongdoings that have been exposed to the action of whistleblowing itself; subjecting the whistleblower to moral scrutiny. Those kind of questions seem designed to suggest a hidden motive for why an individual has become a whistleblower.

    Being subjected to such questions – including from oneself – might lead most of us to assume a defensive posture. Over time one may construct an elaborate justification for one’s action, as if the disclosure was itself a crime, and not, only, a testimony to a crime.

    With thanks to Ben Pantrey for editorial assistance.

  • OPLA Erodes Irish Democracy

    The Office on the Parliamentary Legal Advisor (OPLA) was placed on a statutory footing in 2018, by amendment to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Act 2003, without so much as a press release, let alone media coverage of an important development. This entity is delivering a hammer blow to Irish democracy.

    In the midst of the pandemic in 2021, Marc McSharry TD – an ardent supporter of whistleblowers – tabled a number of parliamentary questions (PQs) on my behalf. These mostly concerned the apparent widespread use of bogus medical doctors across state agencies.

    All of these questions were shot down, however, under Standing Order (SO) 45, which inaccurately claimed they weren’t questions of ‘fact of policy’.

    The final PQ was euphemistically ‘amended’, but was in reality an entirely new PQ, drafted so as effectively to give legislative approval to the practice of using bogus doctors, fraudently claiming to hold medical council registrations.

    These doctors are used, in particular, in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection (DEASP) and are paid a sum for each client they cut off disability payments. All doctors reviewing cases in the DEASP are obliged to be registered with the medical council.

    Signing Off

    The PQs raised on my behalf were signed off on by Leas-Cheann Comhairle, Catherine Connolly whom I implored not to put the replies on the Dáil record, as I explained it would be a violation of Standing Order 45 to alter a PQ without consent.

    However, Catherine Connolly doubled down, claiming PQs can be ‘amended’ under SO 45.

    Yet the provision of SO 45 states that PQs can only be amended in ‘consultation’ with the Deputy raising them, which did not occur.

    Despite being furnished with a copy of standing order 45, Catherine Connolly bizarrely wrote to me and Deputy McSharry that the replies were going on the Dáil record, and she was ‘not re-visiting’ the matter. This effectively gave Dáil blessing to serious malpractice.

    I was entitled to an appeal before the Committee for Parliamentary Oversight and Privileges (CPPO) but, before I could make a submission, I received an unsolicited letter from the Cheann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl erroneously claiming I had no right to an appeal to the CPPO.

    I then engaged the service of a solicitor (at my expense), and only after two solicitors’ letters was my right to a CPPO hearing established with the Cheann Comhairle, who wrote to say he had given my submission to the clerk of the CPPO.

    Matters did not end there. After this I encountered the sinister entity that is OPLA.

    Seán Ó Fearghaíl TD

    Case Closed

    I had requested that another committee member chair the CPPO for this case, as the usual chair Seán Ó Fearghaíl, and his deputy, Catherine Connolly, had questions to answer. My request was refused, however, by the Office on the Parliamentary Legal Advisor (OPLA).

    Then I sought to appear as a witness. This too was denied. Finally, I received a brief email from the Committee clerk, a middle-ranking civil servant, saying the case had been heard on April 6, 2022, and had found against me, and that the Cheann Comhairle had chaired it.

    I received no reply from the Committee clerk to further enquiries such as whether the requisite quorum of eight committee members were in attendance. I did, however, receive a high-handed reply from a ‘legal counsel’ in OPLA, conveying what I now know to be an inaccurate account of the hearing.

    Having checked with members of the Committee, it appears my case was never heard and, my submission was not circulated to the Committee members. This is a breach of Standing Order 118.

    OPLA circulated a number of further authoritarian letters defending the Cean Comhairle’s right to chair the meeting, while maintaining that there had been a hearing by the CPPO in the first place.

    On June 10, 2022, the deputy head of OPLA, Ramona Quinn wrote a letter to me citing ‘laws and conventions going back to 1923.’

    In response, I challenged Ms Quinn and OPLA as to what Dáil Standing Order allowed the unit to intrude on – and indeed unconstitutionally usurp – the work of any Committee of elected representatives of Dáil Eireann? To this I received no reply.

    I did, however, receive a number of further, intimidating, letter from OPLA, thereafter unsigned.

    In response, I put them on notice to the effect that this constituted harassment and pointed out that they were trespassing into the constitutionally sacrosanct domain of the Ceann Comhairle, and the Oireachtas. I asked the head of OPLA for the Dáil Standing Order allowing for it. To this I again received no reply.

    OPLA

    Further enquires reveal that the OPLA quango evolved from containing just one legal advisor, Melissa English, in 2007, to twenty-four legal experts in 2018!

    English had been a sole independent legal advisor in the Houses of the Oireachtas but, according to a March 2019 article in Eolas magazine, ‘under her stewardship it is now a statutory office comprising a multi-disciplinary team of barristers, solicitors, legislation drafters and specialist researchers.’

    The article goes on to quote English saying, ‘the OPLA unit had to be structured and resourced over the last 12 years.’

    Eolas magazine reveals further that OPLA emerged from ‘a report of a retired civil servant Dunning in December 2016’, and it led to a Dáil sub-Committee headed by the Cheann Comhairle for the establishment and vast expansion of OPLA, including the provision for the head of OPLA to be appointed a deputy Secretary General in the Houses of the Oireachtas.

    The function of OPLA is supposed to be tripartite: to give legal advice to Oireachtas members; to help draft legislation in Private Members Bills; and to defend the Houses of the Oireachtas in court challenges.

    However, given English and her unit are part of the Oireachtas, and as she is a civil servant reporting directly to the civil servant and Top-Level Appointments Committee (TLAC) appointee, Dáil Clerk, Peter Finnegan, how can she defend herself and her unit in court, as it is now an integral part of the Oireachtas?

    Furthermore, English flagged the ‘colliding rights of parliamentarians to absolute privilege in respect of their speeches in the Dail and the, sometimes competing rights of outside persons whose personal constitutional rights can be adversely affected by this speech’ as part of the justification for her bloated unit.

    I maintain that English and her legal heavy gang have copper-fastened gross medical malpractice implicit to the use of unqualified medical practitioners by State departments and agencies.

    So much for the constitutional rights of citizens, English appears to have seen no problem giving parliamentary blessing to a seriously problematic practice.

    Furthermore, English appears to have seen nothing irregular about government Departments and Oireachtas civil servants distorting PQs, or the Cheann Comhairle apparently misleading me in correspondence.

    The Leas Cheann Comhairle Catherine Connolly who signed the PQ responses ought to be aware that OPLA has exceeded its remit, violated the Oireachtas and conveyed falsehoods about a phantom hearing at the CPPO in April this year. I argue that she is deepening her original violation of SO 45, and failing to correct the records of the Dáil arising from the distortion of the PQ. She is also failing to correct the erroneous assertions of OPLA.

    Four Courts Quay.

    Violation of Separation of Powers

    I wrote to Melissa English on October 15, 2022 regarding the intrusions of OPLA into the workings of a Dáil Committee.

    English defines herself as ‘being central to the defence on behalf of parliament of the cornerstone of the constitutional separation of powers’, but she seems unaware that OPLA violates the constitutional separation of powers. As a civil servant under the Dáil Clerk, English is obliged to respond in ten working days to queries from the public.

    Yet, to date, I have received no response from her to these questions I raised.

    1. What is your defence of the violation by OPLA of Dail SOs and the Constitutional Separations of Powers in taking over the CPPO committee from its clerk designate and its elected members?
    2. Sinead Fitzpatrick, legal counsel, conveyed un-retracted inaccuracies in two formal letters to me and my solicitor on 20 April 2022 to the effect that the case was heard by the CPPO on 6 April 2021. It was not heard and, the submission was not even circulated in further violation of SO 118.
    3. Why am I still being harassed by unsolicited and unsigned communications from OPLA whom I have requested to remain outside of my dealings with elected members of a Dáil Committee – a constitutional process in which OPLA has no role or jurisdiction?
    4. Are the Cean Comhairle and the Leas Cean Comhairle being consulted and informed about these communications, and do they approve of the ongoing communications I am receiving from OPLA at your direction?

    I have separately put these questions to the Cheann Comhairle and the Leas Cheann Comhairle, similarly without reply.

    Constitutional Crisis

    I notified Taoiseach Micheál Martin in late 2021 to the effect that there is a constitutional crisis in the Oireachtas because of the ongoing conduct of the Cheann Comhairle and Leas Cean Comhairle. I also informed him that OPLA and the Dáil Clerk are violating the constitutionally sacrosanct realms of the Cheann Comhairle and the Oireachtas.

    Micheál Martin responded that the Cheann Comhairle’s office was independent. It begs the question: who exactly will deal with the constitutional impasse that has emerged in this case?

    It appears that OPLA is ensuring that in certain circumstances a PQ cannot be asked on behalf of a citizen. Nor can a citizen access a Dáil Committee to redress the injustice of a wrongful PQ.

    How, one wonders, did the Oireachtas ever function before the recent creation of OPLA and its band of twenty-four legal heavy hitters?

    The answer seems obvious. OPLA is designed to muzzle the Oireachtas. That is perhaps why no press release attended its creation on a statutory footing and its wide expansion in 2018.

    It is an authoritarian quango which has mushroomed from one legal advisor to twenty-four in the space of twelve years. Masquerading as a helpful entity, its real purpose is to snuff out a crucial function of our parliamentary democracy.

    A Legal Monster

    So how did the legislation creating OPLA slip through parliament in 2018 and, how much does it cost the taxpayer? Having spoken to a number of TDs, none seem to recall the 2018 legislation creating OPLA in its current guise passing through the Houses of the Oireachtas.

    Given OPLA’s total staff, including clerical and twenty-four legal officers amount to thirty-six, we may assume it costs at least €5 million per annum.

    The spend was signed off on by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform under Robert Watt as Secretary General and Accounting Officer. Perhaps this explains Robert Watt apparent contempt for Dáil Committees.

    Democratic accountability compels a total dismantling of OPLA in its present guise. One does not need to be a constitutional lawyer to see that it is glaringly unconstitutional.

  • Guglielmo Marconi’s Irish Connections

    The life of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, has been celebrated on two primary occasions in Ireland. First, in 1997 at the centenary of his first wireless transmissions, and also in 2007 at the centenary of his first commercial TransAtlantic wireless transmissions between Ireland and Canada.

    Both anniversaries were celebrated in Clifden, Connemara, where, in a rural site at Derrigimlagh, Marconi had built his most powerful radio station fit for the purpose.

    For the 2007 celebrations, I produced a twenty minute documentary on the life and achievements of Marconi. This was presented at the Italian Institute of Culture in the presence of a select audience, which included Marconi’s daughter Princess Elettra, and her son Gugliemo.

    The documentary entitled “Marcon’s Legacy in Ireland” is a comprehensive, somewhat emotional profile of Marconi that engages with him as a man and father, as well as his profound scientific achievements.

    Tracing the path of his life from birth in 1874 to death in 1937, it shows how, as a young boy, he showed a passion for constructing rudimentary gadgets that drew on the filed of electromagnetism, for which he and developed a deep fascination.

    This culminated in him developing the capacity to transmit wireless messages to his brother in the perimeter of his garden in Villa Griffone, his family home near Bologna.

    That was only the beginning of a distinguished career as an inventor which led to the invention of radio, as we know it today.

    Marconi’s many links with Ireland are highlighted in the documentary, including a connection with the RTÉ grounds where Montrose House stands, which was inhabited for some time by Marconi’s mother, Annie Jameson who was a member of the famous family of distillers.

    Indeed, his first wife Beatrice O’Brien, was the daughter of Lord Inchiquin of Dromoland Castle, Co Clare; although he eventually, amicably divorced her to marry an Italian countess Cristina Bezzi Scali.

    His surviving daughter Princess Elettra, was the guest of honour at the presentation of the documentary at the Italian Institute of Culture in Dublin in 2007.

    She said: “I love Ireland and I know Ireland was very important to my father, I’m very grateful because Annie Jameson was the only one who believed in my father when he was very young.”

    In 1909, Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their “contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy” (radio communications).

    Feature Image: Marconi demonstrating apparatus he used in his first long-distance radio transmissions in the 1890s. The transmitter is at right, the receiver with paper tape recorder at left.

  • Varadkar Leak: Broaden the Investigation

    The ongoing criminal investigation into an alleged breach by Tánaiste Leo Varadkar – while Taoiseach in 2019 – of corruption legislation and the Official Secrets Act (OSA) should be broadened to include members of the permanent Government; especially the Secretary General to the Department of the Taoiseach, Martin Fraser. Instead, he is set to be become Ireland’s next ambassador to the U.K., despite having no diplomatic experience.

    Serious charges of corruption were first levelled against Varadkar in Village Magazine in October, 2020, but this article primarily focuses on the importance of the OSA investigation pertaining to the responsibilities of top civil servants. The OSA requires the relevant civil servants to perform a formal authorisation process before the release of a confidential official document.

    The weight of responsibility for upholding the State, its assets, institutions, and statutes in perpetuity falls to civil servant members of the permanent government. The formidable powers vested in senior civil servants are commensurate with their responsibilities.

    Chain of Movement

    We know that a confidential draft G.P. contract was acquired by Leo Varadkar through his own Department of the Taoiseach, which received it from the Department of Health, and that, bizarrely, this was couriered from the Taoiseach’s Department to Baldonnel Aerodrome to the then Taoiseach.

    It is safe to assume that that this unorthodox chain of movement involved the State’s most senior civil servant, Martin Fraser, and perhaps then Secretary General of the Department of Health Jim Breslin.

    Notably, an official in the Department of Health warned that ‘Unilateral publication of the Agreement, in the absence of confirmation from the IMO that it is satisfied with the final text, would represent a serious breach of trust.’ The leaking by Varadkar of the document to his friend Dr Maitiu O Tuathail, the President of the rival National Association of General Practitioner (NAGP) surely “represented a serious breach of trust.”

    Moreover, according to the FOI received by Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty even ‘the line Minister responsible for the negotiations [then Minister for Health Simon Harris] was unable to obtain the contract from his officials.’

    If the draft contract had been acquired by Leo Varadkar from a more junior official it would not be the subject of a criminal probe, as there would have surely first been an internal inquiry under the Secretary to the Government, Martin Fraser.

    We can therefore take it for granted that the release of the document to Leo Varadkar was authorised by the State’s most senior civil servant: Martin Fraser. If so, it begs the question why Fraser would have permitted this to happen.

    Legal Obligations

    What then were Martin Fraser’s legal and constitutional obligations?

    First, as the State’s most senior civil servant he should have satisfied himself and informed the Cabinett under 2018 anti-corruption legislation and the OSA, that Varadkar was not acquiring a highly sensitive document for corrupt and unlawful purposes. An apparent failure by Fraser– who originally joined the Department of the Taoiseach as finance officer in 1999 under Bertie Ahern – to interrogate why Varadkar sought a hard copy to be delivered to him at Baldonnel displayed an unacceptably permissive approach, at the very least.

    Secondly, Fraser had an obligation as Cabinet Secretary to inform the Cabinet that Varadkar had acquired the confidential G.P. contract under the OSA. Any decision to release such a sensitive document should have followed normal Cabinet procedures, or at least the advice of the Attorney General should have been sought.

    That the roles of Fraser, and, to a lesser extent, Breslin do not form part of the Garda investigation sets a dangerous precedent, with the potential to destabilise the legislative basis of the State itself. The powers of the civil service operate in perpetuity via a constellation of interacting legislation, of which the Ministers and Secretaries Act, the OSA and civil servants’ contracts are integral parts.

    Many now consider the leaking of the G.P. contract to have been relatively harmless, and question whether Leo Varadkar had anything to gain from it. But that the Gardai have given it the status of a criminal investigation demonstrates the gravity of the matter. Any breach of the OSA casts doubt over the integrity of senior officials – especially Martin Fraser – and by extension state institutions.

    These processes are not now being interrogated in what appears an alarmingly narrowly focused investigation.

    Despite repeated attempts to bring this matter to the attention of senior members of the Gardaí, I have received no response to date.

    Ambassador Role

    If he was under investigation, Fraser would surely not be departing for the role of Ambassador to the U.K..

    That he was proposed in July 2021 for the London posting, while the investigation was underway – and where it had been raised to criminal status encompassing the OSA since April 2021 – gives rise to serious concern.

    That appointment process calls into question the judgement of the current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin the Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney. Formal democratic decision making is being sidestepped, amidst the horse-trading of a tripartite coalition that devolves to the permanent, unelected government. The botched secondment of Tony Holohan – in which Martin Fraser is also implicated – confirms this impression.

    As in Holohan’s case, with Fraser’s appointment to London, executive decisions appear to have been made in violation of normal procedures. Indeed, Fraser has no prior experience as a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs.

    But the plum London job still awaits a figure described by former cabinet minister Shane Ross as ‘an immensely powerful civil servant.’

    Zappone Appointment

    From what we know of what is in the public domain, Fraser was among a suite of names proposed for various overseas positions, which were brought to the Cabinet for consideration on July 27, 2021, just as the controversial proposal to appoint Katherine Zappone as UN special envoy was unravelling.

    The Irish Times carried a story that afternoon stating that Fraser had been “proposed” that day for the London Embassy job, but it remains unclear when the Cabinet actually signed off on this appointment.

    The Irish public now have a right to know whether Fraser knew the purpose for which Varadkar was obtaining the sensitive contract in an unorthodox fashion; and if not, why didn’t he attempt to ascertain this.

    The role of Martin Fraser – along with the then Secretary General of the Department of Health Jim Breslin who should have received any such instructions in writing – should form part of this criminal investigation.

  • Walking at Night

    Night Walking Deserves a Quiet Night

    I’ve always walked alone in the city after dark. Recently, it’s with my dog, along the banks of the Royal Canal. Of a winter evening, the path is quieter than during the day, when bikes and scooters fly by, and the dog’s senses are lit up by the city wildlife revealed in the still of night.

    Last week, as we strolled along a quiet stretch, a man entered the canal path from the road and began walking towards us. Something wasn’t right about him.

    For so many women, there is an understanding, so quietly absorbed that we don’t even give it much thought, that there are risks attached to walking alone at night: of physical violence, of sexual violence, of harassment. It’s the water in which women swim. It’s the reason why our male loved ones show concern for us over their male counterparts when out walking alone – because we all know there are greater risks to it by virtue of being a woman.

    I saw a post on social media, in the aftermath of the recent shocking murder of Ashling Murphy. It was by a male journalist who decried the blaming by women of men ‘en masse’ for individual atrocities by men against women.

    The ‘not all men’ mantra seems to me as dull-minded as it is deflective, for whoever made the claim that it was?

    The perpetrator is the person to blame. What is being called to account in women decrying male violence against women is a culture that means all women, including female children, swim in the waters of often unconscious fear when facing the public world of men, from a young age.

    In this world, we know what it is to go from feeling safe to on edge in the blink of an eye, from puberty on, if not before – when we flinch in the face of that first catcall, or unsolicited approach on the street. Ani DiFranco sings of it in her resonant song ‘The Story’:

    I would’ve returned your greeting

    if it weren’t for the way you were looking at me.

    Only men can change that.

    It doesn’t make all men to blame; but it does make them potential agents of change for the better.

    The man who began walking towards me last week was young and, as I said, something wasn’t right about him. His behaviour was heightened, edgy. Maybe he was high. He shouted greetings at the dog, but it didn’t sound friendly. My adrenaline kicked in. I furtively glanced behind to see if I was alone. I was.

    I braced myself for his approach. It wasn’t that I thought the worst, it was that I knew that whatever came to pass on this canal path with nowhere to escape to, I was to a fair degree at his mercy. I gripped my key between my fingers – that reflexive move women make even if only to feel safer.

    The whole thing probably unfolded in less than thirty seconds but it felt longer. He knew that I was the vulnerable one and I sensed his knowledge as he approached. He came closer than he needed to. ‘How are you, love?’ Spoken loudly, into my face. We both knew it wasn’t a genuine question.

    I answered as friendly-casual as I could. Not too nice, not too nonchalant. Definitely no hint of aggression. In my voice I was trying to impart lots of things. I’m relaxed. I don’t see you as a threat. I’m friendly (whatever the nature of your problem is, I don’t judge you). That wasn’t true. I did judge him – for getting his kicks from being able to be scary towards a lone woman just by virtue of being a man. Any soothing note my tone might have imparted was tactical.

    After he passed, I slow-counted to twenty. I was afraid to turn around too soon in case it gave him cause to return. I glanced over my shoulder, then exhaled slowly, relieved to see he had continued on this path – and I was nearing the road.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that I don’t think I’d even have committed the incident to memory, let alone mentioned it to anyone, if I hadn’t returned home to the devastating news that a young woman had been murdered while out jogging on a Tullamore canal path. Ashling Murphy was a beautiful, talented, generous spirit, with her life in front of her. But this is the water in which women swim, the air in which we walk, or run – where risks, conscious and unconscious, sometimes, brutally, come to pass.

    The particular attributes of her murder – that it took place in broad daylight, that it looks to have been an attack by a stranger– make it ripe for description as a tipping-point event, and the outpouring of grief and anger in its wake suggest this may be so. Time will tell.

    For while the cold threat of such an attack may strike the greatest fear into most women, the reality remains that for victims of male violence, the perpetrator is rarely a stranger.

    Per the Women’s Aid Annual Impact Report 2020, since 1996, 236 women have died violently in the Republic of Ireland. 61% were killed in their own homes; 55% were killed by a partner or ex (of the resolved cases) and almost nine in ten knew their killer.

    And while domestic and gender-based violence prevails across social class, often its victims face higher rates of social inequity, including homelessness – in a European study some 92% of homeless women had experienced violence or abuse throughout their lives.

    For society at large, the issue of gender-based violence is one that remains behind closed doors, dealt with within the confines of the private rather than public domain. Charities that support victims of gender-based violence consistently struggle from underfunding, and consecutive governments have treated the issue as one of low priority.

    Lockdowns have been shown to create the most serious impacts for the socially disadvantaged, so it is no surprise that the 2020 Women’s Aid report reveals a startling 43% increase in contacts with their services, compared to 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic and its measures have had an ‘unprecedented and exhausting impact’ on victims of abuse. Surely this and other social inequities of lockdowns must be given consideration as Covid-19 policy shapes itself towards the future.

    As the government quickens pace to steer through its new strategy on domestic and gender-based violence, due to be published in March – its stated goal being a zero-tolerance approach – time will tell what it delivers on a structural level, and we can only hope that it signals meaningful change.

    Whatever comes to pass, it remains the case that on a societal level, all men do have a role in changing the waters within which women swim, along with the air within which we walk, run, and carry out our lives – private and public. And owning that fact may be what separates the men from the boys.

  • One Irish Son’s Journey

    It was one of those frequent blustery evenings, Wednesday May 18th, 2011. I was driving back to Rosses Point from Sligo town. In five minutes one could get soaked, as I had earlier and would after. The wind would blow like hell and clouds give the sky over to shades of light blue and grey as dusk approached. That morning, the water in the tidal channel connecting Sligo Bay to the town was choppy, wind- churned, a kind of deep green. By evening’s light it was calmer, a fuller cerulean than the sky itself.

    I had been having a bout of sinus headaches. A great man for the self-diagnosis, here’s how I assessed the possible causes: 1) indoor dampness from the more or less daily Irish rain; 2) drinking too much, not stout or John Power whiskey, rather strong black tea by the gallon; 3) consuming lashings of white flour in the form of croissants and sausage rolls from the bakery run by the French family off Rockwood Parade; 4) a non-fatal overdose of the scones dished up warm with butter by Jill Barber and her crew at the Drumcliffe Tea Shop by the Churchyard where W.B. Yeats is buried. I felt like I was coming down with something.

    My friend Martin had waxed lyrical about a Leitrim-born homeopath in Sligo town, Maura. He characterized her as a good listener, a healer. He said she might have something for what ailed me. My batch of Euros was dwindling. That year everything in Ireland was twenty-five percent more expensive when compared to American prices, yet I was curious enough to see could she help the sinus ache or maybe persuade a high-pitched constant companion – screeching in my ears – to abate. More than that, I thought I’d get an appointment because frequently my default mode could be characterized as uptight, on alert – shoulders up, jaw clenched, muscles clamped down, my head mimicking a fist. The resultant drag on my energy wore me down.

    I had a 6 p.m. appointment with Maura. Inevitably, I got caught again in a blast of horizontal Northwest rain during the short walk from the Tesco’s parking lot in the centre of town around the corner to the faded elegance of the office buildings at the West end of Wine Street. A British legacy, eight three-story grey Georgian houses were built in a terrace in the 1830’s with large square windows, decorative semi- circular glass above thick wooden front doors and terra cotta pots atop concrete chimneys. They still look decent despite pipes running down the front of several to drain rainwater off the slate roofs.

    Imbibing Sligo Life

    Born a stones-throw away in Garden Hill Nursing Home, I had imbibed life in Sligo as a toddler. Gripping my father’s trouser leg, I observed the goings on around him. I would scamper after him into Blackwood’s General Store on Grattan Street, a place of creaky wooden floorboards sprinkled with sawdust, populated by white-coated shop assistants. After forking out for a pound of rashers, my father would point to the cylinders flying about the ceiling on wires. The shop assistant wrote up a slip and put it along with cash into a cylinder, pulling a handle to send it flying up to a mezzanine office that appeared to be suspended from the ceiling. From that vantage point a bespectacled old dear made up the change and zipped the cylinder back down. Once or twice every summer, my father bundled me into the front seat of his black Ford Consul and drove me down Cartron Hill into Wine Street to the Café Cairo, its floor tiled in black and white squares, for a whipped ice cream cone.

    The world of my early boyhood was circumscribed by the wider landscapes of Sligo – limestone encrusted Ben Bulben, the fresh waters of Lough Gill and the Garravogue river running through town past Foley’s Brewery to the weir at Hyde bridge where we tossed lumps of sliced pan to the swans. Along the coastline, I ran after my father to keep up on his walks in the salted air off the Atlantic coast: Raghley, Strandhill, Rosses Point, Mullaghmore. Running in place against the wind, knees reddened by the chill, brown long socks pulled up tight in wellie-boots I watched my father, his shoulders thrown back, stride away from me into the ghostly distance of the mist enshrouded second strand at Rosses Point.

    I stepped through the glass front door of number two Wine Street through the vestibule into an office to the right. In the old days, doctors had offices along this part of Wine Street. Maura’s place was a new twist – a gang of alternative practitioners sharing space, naming it the Wine Street Wellness Center. Maura arrived in and walked me up the U-shaped staircase to the first landing. To the left, her high-ceilinged office looked shared – no visible personal items or files – and the furniture was second-hand. I sat in a low uncomfortable chair with my back to the door while my soaking raincoat dripped across the only spare chair. I viewed Maura in profile at her bare desk facing the wall.

    She asked me all kinds of questions, about my aching back, ringing ears and all of the things happening in my body certainly but also in my emotional world. She had a series of gently probing questions. As I blabbed replies, she seemed to let my story wash over her, writing the odd clue she extracted down on a notepad. She asked how did I feel about this or that time in my life, all with a view to “restoring the body’s natural balance,” said she.

    Balance, as far as I was concerned, was something others might attain not me. I had been keeping my eye out for balance of some sort for years – balance between my tired body and racing mind; between work and play; between pushing myself to forge forward and sitting back to rest. I wasn’t sure what balance felt like.

    Massive Turning

    Prompted by her expansive questions, my mind’s eye drifted to a massive turning in my life – February 1989. My mother, Mella, took ill suddenly, fatally. I talked to her on the phone the day of the hastily scheduled surgery – open heart – and she said, “Don’t come now; bring the kids in a couple of months, it will be just the tonic I need.” She called my toddler sons her little darlings. Barely twelve hours later, a loud phone bolted me awake in the early hours – the call every emigrant dreads. My elder brother Vivian killed me softly, “She’s in a bad way; come home as quick as you can.”

    Sitting there in the thrift store low chair, I told Maura I was remembering the agonizing wintertime plane trek home to Ireland. Every minute of the journey from Pittsburgh to JFK in New York to London Gatwick and on to Dublin was drawn out, excruciating. “Six hundred miles an hour, bollox,” I remember thinking somewhere over the Atlantic as the steward poured another weak tea into my flimsy plastic cup. At Gatwick, extra security checks delayed me further. With the IRA active, all Irish travelers were suspect.

    Years before, just passed my twenty-sixth birthday, when my eldest brother Ian phoned to tell me my father had died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-two, I knew by the tone of his, “Hello,” what was coming. When he said, “I’m afraid I have bad news,” that sealed it. His news was not entirely unexpected. My father had drifted downhill after retiring at the age of sixty-seven. This call, though, this one struck like the once in a lifetime tornado that had ripped up parts of Pittsburgh, my adopted hometown, in 1980. Out of the blue, Mella, ten days before her 70th birthday, was lying in a hospital bed in Dublin close to death; nothing I could do would speed me to her side. Stuck in mid-air over mid Atlantic, I resorted to talking silently to her.

    “I’m coming. Hold on, dear one, hold on.”

    Vivian awaited at Dublin airport. He shepherded me to his green Mercedes with the tan leather seats. In silence, my brother the motor racing champion sped me through the early morning fog like a VIP, across the semicircle of Dublin Bay anchored by the chimneys of the Bull Wall, past the strand at Sandymount where people braved the early morning wind and drizzle to walk dogs. Ignoring speed limits, he revved the purring engine as we waited at the railway crossing for a DART commuter train to rumble and clatter past. The back end of the Merc fish- tailed as he turned left with a screech onto busy Merrion Road – bobbing and weaving in and out of clogged traffic lanes – straight to the Blackrock Clinic.

    A Preternatural Tristesse

    “What are you feeling now?” Maura asked. “Sad,” I told her.

    Sad wasn’t the half of it. A preternatural tristesse had descended on me, as if I was touching an opening, a small portal atop an immense reservoir of sadness, a deep subterranean lake of tears like an underground aquifer. I was surprised, nonplussed, to discover it. The grey twilight threw shadows scything at an angle across the top of the wall and along the corner of the high-ceilinged room.

    “Right,” she replied with an inflection that combined, “I hear you,” with “I accept your story.”

    Slumped slightly in the non-ergonomic chair, I felt my shoulders relax a little, involuntarily let go of a layer of tightness clamping them down. There’s not enough time in one lifespan, I thought, to cry all of those tears. I sat there wondering if I had somehow not dealt with buried grief around the loss of my mother, whether words unspoken – words of love and affection, respect and gratitude – were still stuck in my gullet after all these years, or whether part of that lake of tears might even belong to her and my father or ancestors, not be mine at all.

    As Maura consulted a large reference book, I remembered that my father and the gregarious Denis Boland regularly sipped John Powers in the second floor living room of the Boland’s Wine Street house a couple of doors along, the one with the plaque outside that stated simply Surgeon Boland.

    They drank pints in the Yeats Country Hotel in Rosses Point with the town’s elite, Tommy Mulligan of Western Wholesale Company, Jimmy Doherty the Accountant, Toher the Chemist who drove a Volkswagen Beetle, Armstrong the Solicitor, the businessman Soden and cigar smoking wit Doctor Charles McCarthy.

    My mother too enjoyed friendships in these houses along Wine Street with May Quinn, the dentist’s wife, and big-hearted Moya Boland who held court from her kitchen, always at the ready to entertain visitors who wandered in off the street. May Quinn’s early death from cancer rattled my mother. They were like sisters the two of them – good looking, blond and wispy with tan makeup. Golf buddies at the links in Rosses Point, after playing a round they giggled together over gins and tonics in the member’s lounge.

    “What we are looking for,” Maura said, “is a constitutional remedy; one that gets underneath surface symptoms to draw out the body’s own capacity to heal – physically and emotionally.”

    First Train Trip

    Memories were overtaking me. I didn’t tell her that earlier that day a walk to the train station at the West end of town had caused me to re-live my first trip in a train – from Sligo to Dublin with my father and younger sister Adrienne. I was six or seven. Oblivious to what packing up must have been going on, I thought we were on some sort of adventure to see Dublin, a dream-place I could not conceive of.

    I quizzed my father at each stop. “Where are we now?” Longford, Edgworthstown, Mullingar, Kinegad. The train stopped along the way while in the hushed carriage people shuffled on and off puncturing the quiet by banging the thick green doors shut then dragging bags along the light brown linoleum floor before heaving them onto overhead racks.

    On the outskirts of Dublin approaching the city centre the train slid by small brick-walled back gardens. The train tracks were high. I could see over the back walls into tiny yards where between light rain showers daily washing blew on lines. In some places there were narrow laneways between the back walls and the railway. Elsewhere, smashed up bicycles, beat up chairs and prams, Walkers brand with metal springs sticking out, lay rusting beside the tracks. Approaching Westland Row station, small windows with white lace curtains hid tiny darkened bedrooms from the train.

    Somehow, we landed up in 72 Cowper Road, a tall elegant Victorian with stained glass on the front door, a half block down from busy Rathmines Road. Welcomed in by my maternal grandparents, I followed the adults like a duckling to the kitchen at the back of the house, down a couple of narrow steps behind a door with curtained glass. My mother and two elder brothers had arrived by car; suitcases had been unpacked. How did these ancient, quiet people – gentle souls – Joseph and Margaret Hynes, cope with six of us landing in on top of them, sharing beds, sleepily whizzing into piss-pots in the middle of the night? Even then I wondered.

    We Weren’t Going Home

    As one day rolled into another it dawned on me gradually, we weren’t going home to Sligo. We were enrolled in schools. We had moved to Dublin for good. I walked to Miss Carr’s elementary prep school on Highfield Road, my brothers to the bottom of Cowper Road and over the railway footbridge to the Jesuits at Gonzaga College in Ranelagh.

    After a couple of months of this routine, we moved to a new house nearby in the quiet leafy confines of Merton Road, number 42. I recall no explanation at the time, or at least none that I could comprehend. As an adult I inferred there was sacrifice involved for my parents. They moved us from Sligo, where years on my mother would confide they had enjoyed their happiest times, for a fresh start – to be closer to aging parents, enroll us in top schools and expand the family to five children with the Dublin birth of my brother Colman.

    I was an hour in the chair answering questions, pausing for Maura to make notes or look something up, when she declared she had an idea for a remedy for me but wished to think about it further – I could stop by for it in a couple of days. A gust of wind shook the windows just as she opened the office door to graciously escort me downstairs to the front door.

    Steering left out of the Tesco’s lot, I drove West along Wine Street, then turned right on the Inner Relief Road, the new bypass that cuts off the West End of Sligo from its center. Past Hughes bridge where the Garravogue joins the tide, I veered left off Markievicz Road up Cartron Hill past my boyhood home, called Inniscara this longtime, down the other side, across the causeway and out the Rosses Point Road.

    I found myself teary-eyed approaching the village at the neo-Gothic limestone Protestant Church on the left marking the widening onto the “new” promenade road built in the 1970’s, the one that “desthroyed” the village, according to two locals, semi-permanent fixtures on the bar stools of Austie’s Pub. Uachterán na hÉireann, President of Ireland Mary McAleese was coming over the car radio on RTÉ addressing a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth 2nd – Head of State, Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, top mega-wealthy Royal personage reigning over millions of subjects – Eílis a Dó as they were calling her on the News in Irish.

    The last British monarch to visit Ireland had been Elizabeth’s grandfather George the Fifth, who landed in 1911 in Kingstown Harbor, we know today as Dún Laoghaire, to receive the muted admiration of his Irish subjects. At that time Ireland was a colony agitating for home rule, a modest form of self-governance within the Union with Britain.

    “What do you think of Eílis a Dó?” a woman juggling a quart of milk, car keys and an Irish Independent newspaper in the village shop in Rosses Point had asked me that morning, pointing to a front page picture of her nibs dripping with royal jewels? “Isn’t she great all the same, for a woman of 85, and yer man is gone 90?”- yer man being His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, longtime sidekick to Eilís a Dó.

    Mary McAleese acknowledged centuries of conflict between Britain and Ireland while asserting those days were well behind us. The whole island, besotted with English football, Downton Abbey and royal weddings, had achieved normal relations with England untainted by mutual threats of violence.

    “The past,” said she, “No longer threatens to overwhelm our present or our future.”

    A few drops of tears were making thin tracks along my face. Eílis a Dó got up and brought the house down with her opening words in Irish: “A Uachtaráin,” she intoned inserting a barely perceptible pause for dramatic effect, “Agas a cháirde,” President and friends.

    “Fair play to her,” our friend Myra Curley, a genial elder in Rosses Point village would declare the following day. Myra followed the royal goings on closely.

    Oyster Island

    The better to listen, I pulled the car over on the promenade road a stone’s throw from where Oyster Island lies across a narrow tidal channel. Evening wind blew low hanging grey-stained clouds across the sky. Gazing over the undulating tidal waters, it occurred to me it was my lot to be removed at an early age, exposed the way maybe gannets or terns off the coastal headland at Mullaghmore, twenty-eight kilometers North of where I was parked, are battered by the elements.

    Migrating birds return again and again to their origins, over and back, over and back, tracing and retracing infinite invisible patterns on the air. For four decades, I have mimicked their returns.

    Since leaving Ireland at the age of twenty-three I came back every chance I got, always returning to Sligo, never feeling fully American yet I was cut off from the day-to-day routines and interactions that would render me an Irish local once again. Toward the end of every trip before returning to Pennsylvania I pined, the way a long-distance lover’s heart cracks a little at the prospect of further separation from a beloved.

    Here I was again, rummaging around the landscapes and buildings of my early boyhood, a familiar desiderium setting in. My mind drifted like a cloud to the year of my father’s death, 1979. In quiet Mullaghmore on the morning of August 27th, the IRA blew Earl Mountbatten of Burma to bits in his small fishing boat, Shadow V. Three others were killed too when the creaky boat exploded beyond the long sandy beach where the harbor opens to Donegal Bay. Among the dead were Mountbatten’s fourteen-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, whose twin brother Timothy survived, and Paul Maxwell a fifteen-year- old summer helper from Northern Ireland. Prince Philip, Mountbatten’s nephew, stood silently and stoically with the Prince of Wales as the coffin draped in the Union Jack arrived back in England. Surgeon Boland of Wine Street had treated survivors at Sligo General Hospital.

    Years later Paul Maxwell’s courageous father, John, somehow found it in his heart to publicly support the release under the Good Friday agreement of one of the perpetrators, Thomas McMahon of Carickmacross, after nineteen years in prison. McMahon would refuse requests to meet with John Maxwell, who wanted to see as he put it, “Would he be capable of putting himself in my shoes?”

    The Good Friday agreement having settled more or less the Troubles in Northern Ireland, rendered possible the Royal visit and the elegant speeches coming over the car radio. It occurred to me that seeds of sadness in me, the trickle of tears on my face, may have their origins in grief and loss engendered by leaving Sligo as a small boy, Ireland itself as a young man.

    In the late seventies, there was nothing much in the way of opportunity for young people. For most of the eighties Ireland exported a hundred thousand young people annually – a diaspora largely forgotten and wholly ignored in the country’s public discourse. Idealism and romance were calling my name and I chose to flee to the States with my American beloved.

    It took several years to break upon me what had happened. I had removed myself from places, landscapes, language, people, culture and the very air I took for granted breathing. The poet Eavan Boland put it this way, “An ordinary displacement, had made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.”

    To be sure, my migrant’s longing was no match for loss and grief suffered by Paul Maxwell’s family and the families of those killed and maimed by the troubles in the North. Sitting there in the car, I felt grateful for the magnitude of John Maxwell’s compassion, inspired to follow his example – to deploy further measures of compassion toward my uprooted younger self.

    A few days later I would take a small sugary pellet, the remedy Maura doled out, and feel a further calm descend. The sinus problem would abate a bit.

    Beyond the chilly tidal channel, clouds cast a shadow across Knocknarea. Evening light played hide and seek with the burial cairn of Maeve, ancient Queen of Connacht, atop the mountain. As teardrops dried on my cheekbones, Elizabeth Regina declared, “We should bow to the past, but not be bound by it.” I felt my neck muscles relax further as a soft rain peppered the windshield.

    All Images (c) Daniele Idini

  • Irish Housing: Historic Roots of a Crisis

    As a UCD undergraduate I recall Professor Tom Bartlett likening Irish history to a pint of Guinness, ‘with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth everything else, including all the political movements.’

    Old habits die hard. The issue of property remains a paramount concern. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at approximately 82%, a proportion that only declined, to 69% in 2014, after the Crash from 2008, precipitated by reckless lending, often to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers. This reflects the ongoing effect of a global financialisation of property as a speculative asset from the 1980s, leading to the exclusion of a substantial proportion of a younger generation from home ownership across most of Europe, North America and beyond.

    Ireland’s housing crisis is a special case however. In order to understand its long term causes – Dublin is now the most expensive city in the euro area primarily due to staggeringly high rents – it is necessary to explore an historic relationship with land, arising out of a colonial experience. This has brought an economy where the land grabber reigns ascendant.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Urbanisation

    A nation derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits. Over recent centuries, in Ireland, as elsewhere, mass urbanisation, disproportionately directed at Dublin, has occurred, but we have built our cities on historical patterns of land ownership.

    There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish relationship to property that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation, in particular the Plantations, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation through the Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    The second is the dominance of pastoral, livestock agriculture, particularly since the late nineteenth century under a system of individual land ownership – as opposed to treating property as a collective patrimony under Brehon Law in Gaelic Ireland.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    It is incorrect to assume cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlements emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture; and in earlier centuries cattle were kept for domestic milk production rather than to produce a (beef) commodity for export.

    Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato from the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, bringing marginal land into cultivation for the first time. Although, ominously, according to John Reader in The Untold Story of the Potato (2008), ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated.’ It acted like cheap credit in generating a ready source of subsistence on small parcels of land, but the potato cannot be preserved for a long period like grain so cannot easily be traded, thereby impeding development.

    Over time, the impact of Irish agriculture, especially extensive grazing, on Ireland’s nature has been profound. According to Frank Mitchell in Reading the Irish Landscape (1997): ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape.’ This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, before the most intense period of colonisation at the end of the eighteenth century when a poet lamented:

    Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? / Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár;
    Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that further degrade the land, while offering little scope for biodiversity.

    The sixteenth and seventeenth century Plantations trapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society, in a Malthusian grip that culminated in the Famine.

    Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s

    Describing the acquisition of annual leases by small farmers, who had previously held land in common under the Brehon Law system, Seán O’Faoláin wrote in The Irish (1947): ‘The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession.’ Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory, as land became an asset to be bought and sold, rather than a collective patrimony.

    Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century. The raising of cattle, often exported ‘on the hoof’ to England for eventual slaughter, began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage as the British discovered cheaper sources of grain after Napoleon’s blockade ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Henceforth, the cheap labour of the Irish peasantry – a substantial proportion unconnected to the market economy – were an anachronism to the British administration in Ireland.

    The Famine (1845-1851) was, according to Charles Trevelyan the architect of Britain’s response ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil.’ Anticipating the Shock Doctrine, the Famine, he declared, was:

    the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…

    Wood engraving, 1886. cc Library of Congress

    Strong Farmers

    The Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture, increasingly under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this mode of production was (and is) that profitability depends on a low labour input. It made no sense for numerous sons and daughters to remain on the land, and so the tsunami of emigration that formed during the Famine gave way to steady migratory waves. Over the long term this brought precipitous population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

    As Joseph Connolly put it in his Labour in Irish History (1910): ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places.’

    This process should not, however, be attributed solely to remote authorities in Westminster working on behalf of absentee landlords, as is commonly assumed. Significant gains were made by Catholic Irish farmers holding farms above twenty acres. As Kerby A. Miller wrote in The Atlas of the Great Famine (2012): ‘an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties.’

    As Ireland did not witness an Industrial Revolution, except in the North-East corner, this shift from tillage to pasture led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world with a lower population now than in the 1840s, when the population stood at almost nine million. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold.

    National Independence

    The struggle for Irish independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, a comprador class selling their primary products on the Imperial market, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures, culminating in Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903, the British administration sought, but failed, to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country.

    This allowed their sons to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. This cohort entered the professions, established a National University in 1908 (Maynooth University had also been established in 1796) and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to an individualist and competitive approach to land, in contrast to collaborative arrangements typically associated with tillage, including the Clachan settlements of pre-Famine Ireland. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was a cattle farmer, and duly aligned the national interest with the economic fortunes of his ‘grazier’ class.

    After independence in 1922, pastoral Strong Farmers continued to sell mostly cattle onto the Imperial market, notwithstanding the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to more labour-intensive tillage for domestic consumption; except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing subsistence crops.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Individualist Outlook

    The outlook of the peasant-pastoralist has informed our laws and values since the inception of the State, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it:

    we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like a beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch.

    The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, high levels of precipitation and humidity make Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited to mechanised harvesting. The traditional method of ‘bindering’ – drying the harvest over months in stacks – became uncompetitive due to high labour inputs, and so the population drain form rural Ireland continued.

    Moreover, since the 1970s price supports from the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy have reduced flexibility and dynamism in land use, by inflating values as farmers were guaranteed payments, even on poor land, without adequately addressing the associated population drain.

    Legal Protections

    As the sons and daughters of peasant-proprietors migrated to cities, especially Dublin, Ireland’s politics of clientelism embodied in the two main political parties took hold. An urban population with roots in raising livestock prizes land as an asset from which profit is derived, as opposed to a situation where crops are cultivated for the family table and traded within the community.

    An inherited skill in deal-making was readily applied to urban development, which is also reflected in strict judicial interpretations of private property, allowing enterprising developers to make a killing. Thus, State institutions have favoured the landed interest over the property-less, in a troubling reminder of a bygone era.

    In 1973 the Kenny Report recommended that land around the hinterland of Dublin should be compulsorily purchased by local authorities for 25% more than its agricultural value. According to Frank McDonald, the former Environment Correspondent of the Irish Times, Dr Garret FitzGerald, a member of the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government that received the report could not remember why it wasn’t acted upon. ‘It just slid off the agenda’ he said, and no subsequent government acted upon it. McDonald said that ‘Ostensibly, the reason for this was that Kenny – a constitutional lawyer himself – had proposed something that would be unconstitutional. But no attempt was made to test this in the courts.’

    That was until Part V of the Planning Act 2000. This was referred to the Supreme Court which held that the acquisition of land for social and affordable housing did not offend against the Constitution. Unfortunately, however, that provision did little to ameliorate the housing crisis during the Celtic Tiger as developers evaded responsibility by paying over sums to local authorities, and successive Ministers watered down the provisions.

    The reluctance of politicians to implement the Kenny Report reflected a genuine fear that any such provision would fall foul of the Court, which has tended to vindicate a constitutional right to property under Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1.2 over competing interests of renters to security of tenure or a controlled rent.

    Thus, in 1981 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional attempts to introduce rent controls under The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, while the wide scope of Article 45 has been given little attention.

    This reflects a sectional bias as the common good (to which all constitutional rights are subject) should allocate a reasonable prospect of basic accommodation to all permanent residents.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Unenumerated Rights

    The idea of an ‘unenumerated’ Constitutional right – in that instance a right to bodily Integrity – was first identified by the same Justice Kenny in his landmark High Court judgment of Ryan v Attorney General (1965). A right to adequate shelter may also be unenumerated. For instance, Kenny’s seminal Ryan judgment cited the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) which states that: ‘every man has the right to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care and finally the necessary services.’ Yet the Court has avoided vindicating a basic human right to adequate shelter.

    Now, underpinned by legal and political deference to the property interest, we see huge swathes of land and buildings that have been left fallow in urban areas: a 2016 report in The Dublin Inquirer identified at least 389 derelict sites. We are unaccustomed to urban density, or community developments, except as a sign of poverty – with the 1930s schemes of Herbert Simms a rare and inspiring exception. Strict demarcation between properties, and a lack of community spaces, may be interpreted as a legacy of extensive cattle-rearing for the imperial market.

    Furthermore, the sons and daughters of nineteenth century pastoralists, accustomed to low-density living with few neighbours on the horizon, sought distance from their neighbours, and the assurance of owning a motor car. This accounts for the sprawl, and prevalence of needless boundary walls, in Irish suburbia; as well as a preference for one-off housing.

    The commercial culture can also be linked to the pastoral outlook. It is revealing that few successful Irish businesspeople have been technological innovators. Rather, success has been built on buying low and selling high, just as a cattle farmer buys a calf and seeks to sell him at a higher price – the entrepreneur Tony Ryan was quoted as saying ‘you make your profit the day you buy.’ Thus developers often purchase land at a low price and sit on this until financial conditions improve. The Irish dream is built on living off the fat of the land, creating conditions to the liking of the vulture and cuckoo funds our government now accommodates.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Historic Failings

    No Western economy experienced growth, at least in the period 1995-2007, comparable to that of the Celtic Tiger, but this was achieved, at least in part, through the availability of cheap, and ultimately ruinous, loans, by unscrupulous bankers. But like the wonder crop of the potato, these loans generated ultimately ruinous growth.

    Failure of both property and potatoes emanated from America. In the case of the Famine it was the dreaded blight, phytophthora infestans, which first blackened the leaves and then reduced the crop to inedible mush. The pin that burst the Irish property bubble, a large boil on a global wart, was marked with another American sign, that of the ruinous Lehman Brothers. Both the potato blight and subprime mortgages afflicted other countries, but perhaps nowhere as severely as Ireland.

    The austerity that followed may be likened to the extreme Shock Doctrine practised by Charles Trevelyan, while the feeding frenzy that occurred through NAMA recalls the land-grabbing in the wake of the Famine.

    In order to address Ireland’s Housing Crisis we must face up to the sins of our fathers, including an enduring bias in favour of strict individual ownership preached by the two main political parties in government, as well as the judiciary.

    A version of this article appeared in Village Magazine.

    Title Image: House in proximity to Dog’s Bay, Connemara. ©Daniele Idini

  • Interview: Belfast on the Twelfth

    In interview with Daniele Idini, photographer Graham Martin reveals he was drawn to cover the Twelfth in Northern Ireland after developing an interest in geopolitical events while living in Brazil. Before his trip North he expected trouble, but encountered a surprisingly welcoming atmosphere, even in hardcore Loyalist areas, although much of the iconography remains disconcerting to any visitor from the South.

    Daniele Idini: Are you a regular visitor to Northern Ireland?

    Graham Martin: No not really, and that’s part of why I wanted to go with a camera. As you know, photography is a great tool for attempting to explain things to others, but also to yourself. It’s a great way of coming to terms with things, understanding things and I, like many in the South am aware of all the stigmas attached to the North. Having been born in the 1980s I do remember going up with my parents as a kid and although already relatively peaceful, there was still a physical border and I can remember passing through the checkpoints, seeing the walls and turrets without fully understanding what it all meant. Since then, any visit I made up there and over the border was for a shopping trip or for touring the Giants Causeway and Antrim coastline. My initial impression crossing the border was how good the quality of the roads were compared to the South, the red letterboxes, or the Union Jack painted on the curbs. Later, when I had a cell phone, there was the network switching over; it always felt slightly surreal. It was only in later years, when I started to orientate my photography more towards photojournalism that I started taking an interest in geopolitical events. Mostly abroad at first (I really began to take photography seriously when I emigrated to live In São Paulo, Brazil from 2012 to 2016), but then, you start to become curious about your own backyard; which you mainly ignore at first, because it always seems like it’s something that you want to get away from. So, for me, this recent trip was the first time I went up looking at it in a new light, and that was because of photography.

    A child adds to the pyre before the Eleventh Night bonfire at Mountview Street estate off the Crumlin Road

    Daniele Idini: In a previous article, which included interviews with a number of influential actors, we reported on rising tensions. We encountered a delicate situation, with a multitude of factors are at play. A combination of a Covid-19-related crisis; the effect of Brexit negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement, which was implemented in the context of the UK being a part of the European Union. What did you expect to happen on the Twelfth this year, and did it transpire?

    Graham Martin: I genuinely thought it could go either way. There was all this talk of it potentially being heated, and I did reach out to some contacts who are originally from the North, and from the Protestant community, to ask advice on where would be interesting for me to go to see the parades and what bonfires would be accessible to outsiders. They gave their advice and warned that it looks like it’s going to be quite a heated Twelfth this year, because of everything that is going on at the moment. The advice I received was generally like “So, you know, keep your distance, keep your accent down, be sharp, keep your wits about you”, that kind of thing. When you get that kind of advice from people who are from there and who know the place, that colours your perspective and perception of things. I still went with an open mind, but like with everything, whenever there’s a lot of discussion, build-up and anticipation, quite often it doesn’t quite end up amounting to much at all, which ended up kind of being the case. There were some contentious bonfires built close to peace walls and talk of the PSNI forcibly removing some, which ultimately they didn’t.

    Smoke rising in the Sandy Row area on July 10th indicates a pyre has been set alight a night early perhaps by Nationalists saboteurs…

    Some of the bonfires were set alight the night before and I think there was one youngster, of maybe fourteen years-of-age, who got badly burned, which is a separate issue, but that was kind of the extent of any major incidents or outbursts and I actually felt warmly welcomed there. Any kind of feeling of apprehension was ultimately my own based on preconceptions. I arrived there with my guard up and found that there was no real need for that. I could walk around freely, could photograph in any neighborhood, could approach and talk to people on the streets. Even on the Shankill, which is notoriously Loyalist, I was taking pictures of people openly and they would want me to send them to them by email.

    Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.

    There was a little bit of bemusement and surprise when they realised that I was from the South, but perhaps they respected that. So I got comments like “fair play to you” . You could say that that general calm I experienced was very much a planned thing, in light of everything in the news and I think there was a marked intention to keep things civil and peaceful.

    Spectators at the Sandy Row bonfire on July 12th night.

    On seeing my camera one guy at the bonfire on Sandy Row came up to me  and said, “don’t go making this look like something it’s not. Nobody’s fighting here. Everybody’s happy. You know, everybody’s peaceful. There’s going to be no violence here. Don’t go back reporting something that it isn’t, like the papers tend to do.” They notice that this big night of the year for them is always marked with negative press, with criticism, and I think there was an intention overall to show people that the Twelfth could pass off peacefully, and there was going to be no tension.

    Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.

    Daniele Idini: We can say then that there was an effort to keep the tension to a minimum. Yet, as I see from your pictures, there were some controversial messages and flag burning. What do these provocations, if we can call them this, really mean in this context?

    Graham Martin: Every year the same flags and slogans are burnt on the fires. The Irish tricolour is burnt. You have effigies of Bobby Sands burnt, the gay flag, the Palestinian flag. You have pro-Israel graffiti around on the walls, which is just as provocative. It seems paradoxical that they identify themselves with Israel as a kind of a small nation that has the right to be in that particular territory. It’s just very confusing to see the Tricolor and the Palestine flag up in flames, and yet the people are warmly welcoming. They’re quite civil in person, but at the same time you see graffiti around stating K.A.T. (“Kill All Taigs”). Taigs is what they call Catholic nationalists, the Irish. You’re walking around meeting people, photographing people, and to your left, there’s K.A.T. graffiti, to your right, there’s a big, multi-storey bonfire with your nation’s flag on!

    Bonfire Pyres on July 10th ready for The Eleventh Night celebrations at Sandy Row, Shore Road, Tigers Bay and Donegal Pass.

    They’re demonstrating that they hate you and at the same time, they’re willing to open up and talk to you and shake your hands, so what’s the true feeling there? It’s very jarring. On the other side, when you walk through Catholic neighbourhoods like Ardoyne, not too far from the Shankill, in peace time, although IRA murals still exist, most of the more aggressive ones have been decommissioned. Many now are promoting sports and social community activities, environmental issues, and there are little or no flags. The odd tricolor maybe, but when you cross over onto the Shankill the murals feel more aggressive, more provocative. You’ve got those kind (such as the U.V.F murals and graffiti) up around the Shore Road, that would make you weary to enter into such areas. I walked up to one pyre as it was being built, the one that commenting on the Irish News (see image in grid “Fuck the Irish News”)* and there were a few guys hanging around finalising it’s construction. They basically told me to get the fuck out of there, so not such an open vibe. That’s the thing though; they put up these things, huge pyres with large signs and slogans that are clearly intended to seek attention, but then if you go and try and document it, you’re quickly warned to get the fuck out, so it’s quite challenging .

    A line of PSNI Land Rover Tangis approach passing a conflagration in the Sandy Row area.

    Daniele Idini: I guess it would depend on who is the intended audience for these displays. Some might include the press, but some, might be predominately intended for the community itself, and the aversion toward media is actually part of the message.

    Graham Martin: Essentially, you know, you’re seeing slogans that are saying ‘Kill Catholics’. It’s beyond provocation. They can say it’s their culture and “let us let us have our night”, but there has also been homophobic and other racist graffiti on the Protestant side, denouncing the Black Lives Matter campaign for example. There a lot of topical issues that they are intentionally taking a side on. So this seems to me like a statement and not just aimed at their own community. There are paralells with the global push to a more Populist, right-wing ideology, you’ve seen pre-Brexit with Nigel Farage, and with ethnic nationalism in the U.K.

    Spectator at the Sandy Row bonfire on the Twelfth.

    Daniele Idini: The discontent in Loyalist communities, still focused on the Partition question, now seems to be directed equally towards Westminster. There’s a feeling of betrayal aimed at the likes of Boris Johnson, a Conservative. It has created an identity crisis, wherein there’s a feeling of abandonment from the rest of the United Kingdom; which brings a sense of fragility.

    Graham Martin: It’s been building for years, I suppose. You’re talking about communities there that are really marginalised, under-developed and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see why they would be jumping on that kind of thing, and out of frustration picking on the Black Lives Matter campaign, Climate Change, or adopting the anti-masks / anti-vax campaigning. It’s really masquerading as something else. It’s a kind of rhetoric that it’s normalised that it doesn’t even get questioned anymore. The burning of flags, for example, could be seen as a form of hate crime, yet it’s completely normalised and permitted. Also, the bonfires aren’t regulated at all. There’s nobody in an official capacity to make sure they’re safe. If one falls over, which happens from time to time, it’s the size of a building falling, and on fire, It’s kind of surreal that it’s allowed to proceed as it does.

    Rex Bar, a well-known UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group) meeting place on on the Shankill Road, July 12th.

    Daniele Idini: I guess there is a level of negotiation going on with the authorities to try to keep the tensions to a minimum. To go back to the wider issues, Northern Ireland finds itself for the first time facing the possibility of a United Ireland that is being seen as not too remote of an option, and the result of Brexit’s negotiations is perceived by some as incompatible with the Good Friday agreement. It could be a treacherous path to save a peace treaty.

    Graham Martin: There needs to be good faith and efforts from both sides, and a period where controversies aren’t dug up from the past. The difficult thing for sure is that the Troubles are within living memory for many people still; it’s not ancient history. And it’s going to take a long time for people to forgive and forget. Now it’s the Sea Border that’s causing fresh tension, and the announcement of the Statute of Limitations on investigation into the Bloody Sunday Massacre. Who knows what it will be next. It seems like it’s such a consistently fractious and volatile situation.

    ‘Summer of ’69’ mural on Hopewell Avenue in the Loyalist Shankill Road area, referencing the August 1969 violence which helped spark the Troubles.

    And it’s not about religion, of course, but the symbolism of the churches, and the ephemera surrounding the divided beliefs remains ever present in the murals, tattoos, and the wearing of either the Catholic Celtic or Protestant Rangers football shirts. I think it’s harmful to be carrying that around as a constant reminder of superficial dividing lines between communities. But I don’t think young people are really identifying with their own faith any more, or their religion they’re born into quite as much as they used to. I think there’s a move away from labelling people based on their beliefs. That might sound naively optimistic, but I think that’s going to help things there. People can inform themselves better with the Internet and the global exchange of information, and question ingrained fears or hatred of their neighbours. You’ve seen how such a turnaround can happen in Southern Ireland over the last twenty years, where the power of the Church has waned, and all positives that have come out of that with marriage equality and Repeal the 8th. That is happening in the North also: an easing of hardline traditions which are loaded with sectarianism. And I think it’s going to hopefully have positive knock-on effects in time.

    Graham Martin’s work is available below:

    www.grahammartinphotography.com

    https://www.instagram.com/graham.martin.photo/?hl=en

  • Covid-19: A New Irish Social Contract?

    Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of three indicators: Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens.

    These features of a healthy republic, he wrote, diverge from a narrow form of republicanism associated with Rousseau ‘which argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will: ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy.’ Up to that point in Ireland, O’Toole argued, this latter, narrow version had predominated, which he associated ‘in vulgar terms’ with appeals being made to ‘pull on the green jersey’’; and where ‘an idea of accountability implicit in mixed government is ditched.’

    ‘For most of the history of the state’, O’Toole concluded that the state ‘failed miserably in the basic task of ensuring citizens were free from subjection to the arbitrary will of others.’[i]

    Now, as Ireland slowly unwinds from an interminable lockdown that tendency of Irish governments to pull on the green jersey, avoid accountability, reject obstreperousness and a conspicuous failure to ensure that citizens are free from the subjection to the arbitrary will of others, is evident once again. This regression has arrived especially through what O’Toole himself described on April 28th, 2020 as the ‘top-down, command-and-control approach’ of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), which the elected government has deferred to throughout most of the pandemic.

    Times of War

    The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to reshape the Irish political landscape, eroding foundational certainties of left and right. When the dust settles new formations may crawl from the debris, with democracy itself in peril, as the coalition government chooses to extend emergency powers until November, while other countries such as Denmark aim for a swift return to normality.

    In terms of the pandemic’s wide-ranging impact, there are parallels with the outbreak of a global war. As Hannah Arendt put it: ‘The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of the an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.’[ii]

    Placing billions under lockdown around the world had a shuddering effect on daily routines, altering intimate exchanges and gestures, besides radically reducing the ambit of daily peregrinations. It’s a very modern form of trench warfare that confined most of us to within 5km of barracks – spilling out invective on (anti-)social media.

    In Ireland, with the advent of bigger government, there is a confidence among some on the left that their time has arrived, and that a relatively youthful population will vanquish age-old privileges of wealth and caste through a permanently enlarged state.

    However, as Eric Hobsbawm records, one reason Engels (and even the late Marx) ‘began to turn away from calculations that the international war might be an instrument of revolution was the discovery that it would lead to ‘the recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries’ which would serve the ruling classes.’[iii]

    Similarly, nationalism chauvinism – ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex’ – has been witnessed throughout the pandemic in Ireland. This is perhaps unsurprising as, historically, infectious diseases have given rise to, and fed, plagues of prejudice and outright racism; the diseased ‘other’ at the gates of the city is a recurring theme. Ruling classes have often put forward strongman rulers to harness this xenophobic sentiment.

    Since March 2020 we have poured over spreadsheets of daily deaths, infections, testing rates and vaccine roll outs to determine how ‘we’ are doing relative to ‘them.’ In Ireland we tend to measure achievements and failures against the noisy neighbour next door, whose boorish leader has somehow managed to transform one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from Covid-19 into a great British victory pageant, through a rapid vaccine rollout. Boris now looks unassailable, notwithstanding Brexit storm clouds, Dominic’s revenge, Indian variants; and just the suspicion that the vaccine may not prove quite the panacea it seems now in winter 2022. Time will tell.

    Indeed, the narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic should serve as a warning to the Irish left that ruling classes can easily steal their best clothes. In this respect, Johnson operated with far greater flexibility than Donald Trump, shifting from a ‘take on the chin’ herd immunity approach in March, 2020 to championing what he would have previously decried as a ‘nanny state’ lockdown. He and his chumocracy used the pandemic as a pretext for introducing draconian legislation against protest and civil disobedience, apparently aimed at movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

    Recovery Position

    Similarly, though less dramatically, Leo Varadkar resuscitated his political career after Fine Gael’s disastrous performance in General Election 2020, donning proverbial scrubs for the initial phase of the pandemic. Having identified himself with “early-rising” middle class voters Varadkar was smart enough to realise that his preferred Thatcherite policy of reliance on an Invisible Hand of market forces could lead to a public health disaster during a pandemic.

    Since entering the coalition, Fine Gael Ministers have emphasised a law and order approach – Simon ‘TikTok’ Harris was quick off the blocks denouncing as ‘disgusting, grotesque and obscene’ a comparatively unobstreperous anti-lockdown protest in Dublin by European standards. Fine Gael have also allowed Fianna Fail to act as a mudguard for a failing system of public health: Ireland’s health expenditure is the third highest in the EU, yet we have only 5 ICU beds per 100,000, compared to 35 in Germany and 28 in Austria.

    Fine Gael represents itself as a centrist party, placing emphasis on its belated support for marriage equality and abortion referendums, which obscures from a failure in government to address structural inequalities and ongoing environmental damage. Replacing James Reilly as Minister for Health in 2015 Leo Varadkar promptly abandoned universal health insurance (UHI).

    After becoming leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar claimed he would represent thrusting early risers – tantamount to saying he would not alter structural inequalities that are most apparent in access to housing. In combination with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael has represented the dominant interest of large property owners, indifferent to whether their wealth is maintained via independent corporate entities, the state, or as in Ireland’s case increasingly, a corporate-state nexus.

    Simple distinctions of left and right are often misleading. Thus, when considering the virtues, or otherwise, of big government it should be clear that administrative levers and patronage may drive inequality; most obviously through mind-boggling salaries, such as the €420k paid to the Director General of a dysfunctional HSE, Paul Reid – ironically a former Workers’ Party activist. Reid has no medical or scientific qualifications, and previously acted as chief executive of Fingal County Council.

    Moreover, left-wing politicians and their supporters are often drawn from higher income groups; a tendency that within Fine Gael circles used to be referred to as noblesse oblige – accompanied by the obligatory glass of fine Cognac – of which the Just Society was the apotheosis. But a left-wing identity may be superficial, as the distribution of state largesse, or patronage, apart from being expressed in high public sector salaries, often benefits established professional elites of lawyers, academics and indeed doctors.

    Leprechaun Economics

    Big government patronage motors along fine in Ireland for all concerned as long as the tech and pharma sectors do the heavy economic lifting. This is the ‘Leprechaun Economics’ that Paul Krugman referred to dismissively. But now the Biden administration’s taxation proposed changes to the global tax system may make the current Irish model unworkable. The ECB is also likely to desist eventually from quantitative easing, with inflation looming.

    Renewed fiscal rectitude and the prospect of multinationals leaving a perpetually unaffordable capital city for workers, will place increasing reliance on those indigenous SMEs that have endured the Crash of 2008, and the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. Yet whole sectors have been furloughed for over a year, with some such as events and tourism wondering whether they have a future at all. The Central Bank has warned that one in four firms could fail when pandemic payments cease.

    It should be unsurprising, therefore, for a small businessperson living from transaction to transaction to be wary of parties promising higher taxation on the left, and instead be attracted to politicians on the right, or even far-right, that are acquainted with the language of commerce, however superficial this may be, in the case of Leo Varadkar at least, whose concern for SMEs has disappeared after his supportive comments proved unpopular last October.

    An objective for a progressive left should be to attract support from an increasingly marginalised mercantile class, emphasising that a favourable environment for entrepreneurship, as in Scandinavia, is enabled by efficient public service, including a one-tier, functioning health system. The left can argue that leaving healthcare to market forces – as in the U.S. – is not only deeply unfair, but also, crucially, leads to greater costs than a functioning one tier public system which also – as in most European countries – delivers better outcomes overall.

    The inherent danger of Ireland’s two-tier model, where health care provision is subject to market forces is epitomised by a question recently posed by a Goldman Sachs executive: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” In an age of profound health insecurities – which are amplified through subtle advertising cues – market forces will continue to distort public health priorities.

    It was the father of economics Adam Smith who warned: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ However, while resisting a buccaneering tendency in the delivery of a vital government service such as healthcare, the left cannot afford to dismiss the dynamism of entrepreneurship in society at large. Just imagine the food you would be served if the government was running all the restaurants.

    Following Public Health Guidance

    While there are a range of financial supports available to SMEs, the world-beating length of Ireland’s lockdown has made trade impossible for many businesses, some of which may never recover. The failure of the two centre-right parties in government to represent their concerns arguably, lies at the heart of Ireland’s deeply flawed response to the pandemic.

    From March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years. Yet, despite having the youngest population in the Union, according to a Reuters by February Ireland had endured 163 days of workday closures. This was the highest, by some measure, of all the European countries surveyed at that point. By contrast, Denmark had lost just fifteen days, having experienced a death toll almost half that of Ireland’s per capita.

    The uncritical attitude of mainstream Irish left wing parties towards public health officials should also be reconsidered. Recall the major mistakes in particular by Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan, who saw nothing wrong with fans going to Cheltenham in early March, 2020, ordered care homes to re-open to visitors that same month, and then transferred 4,500 untested patients back into care homes – surely contributing to the second highest level of care home mortality in the world during the first wave. Yet Irish left wing politicians have consistently complained about the government failing ‘to follow public health advice,’ despite Holohan’s long history of cock-ups and cover-ups.

    Even before Christmas NPHET – a body composed primarily of career civil servants and notably short on scientific expertise – seemed to have been all on board for the ’meaningful Christmas’ of Micheal Martin’s imagination. The only significant deviation between the government’s approach and NPHET’s advice was that the latter preferred to permit household gatherings rather than opening the hospitality sector. Cue raucous Christmas house parties, as opposed to what were mainly orderly affairs in pubs and restaurants.

    In fact, Ireland’s ‘third’ wave, which coincided with the more transmissible B.119 variant (although apparently not more lethal as was widely reported) actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.

    Sadly, public health obscurantism has also brought denial of their own data, which said outdoor transmission of Covid-19 is about as frequent as curlew sightings.

    The latest embarrassment over NPHET refusing to acknowledge the benefits of antigen testing, underlines that if left-wing politicians are slavishly going ‘to follow the public health advice,’ and whatever Yes Minister civil servant advises then we won’t see radical reforms in Ireland any time soon.

    Frank O’Connor

    Guests of the Nation

    Over the course of the pandemic Irish attitudes have hardened against the free movement of people in and out of the country, culminating in the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantines for some foreign, including EU, arrivals at the end of February.

    Contemporary Irish attitudes to hardworking foreigners resident in Ireland recall Frank O’Connor’s classic 1931 short story ‘Guests of the Nation.’ Set during the War of Independence 1919-21 it portrays a bond of friendship that grows up between two IRA men, Bonaparte (the narrator), and Noble, who are detailed to guard two captured English soldiers Belcher and ‘Awkins who have a natural affinity with the country:

    I couldn’t at the time see the point of me and Noble being with Belcher and ‘Awkins at all, for it was  and is my fixed belief you could have planted that pair in any untended spot from this to Claregalway and they’d have stayed put and flourished like a native weed.

    Ultimately ‘Awkins and Belcher are sacrificed at the altar of of a narrow nationalism, just as a today the Populist appeal to ‘protect our own people’ has ordained that the rights of immigrants in Ireland, and abroad, to see their families was disregarded.

    This appears to stem from a widespread notion that ‘we,’ like faraway New Zealand and Australia, can eliminate the disease from ‘our’ shores altogether – devolving into the juvenile #wecanbezeros hashtag adopted by some politicians on the left. The problem is that ‘we’ are a society with lots of ‘them’ immigrants living here, and an enormous diaspora of ‘us’ beyond the shores of an island divided into two jurisdictions, highly dependent on international trade in goods arriving on trucks (with drivers).

    Moreover, apart from the extreme geographic isolation and sparse populations of Australia and New Zealand, ‘we’ in Ireland have legal obligations to preserve freedom of movement under European treaties and the Good Friday Agreement, enshrining a porous open land border. Apart from committing economic hari-kari, pursuit of ZeroCovid appears legally impossible, unless of course we want to pursue an Irexit and build a wall along the Northern border.

    Nonetheless, egged on by febrile – ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – coverage in a national media increasingly reliant on government advertising, a prevailing view is that all deaths from Covid are essentially preventable; emanating from the failing of the state, or the reviled Covidiot, rather than being the tragic consequence of a pandemic, the death toll from which has been systematically exaggerated.

    Moreover, intercepted correspondence within the ZeroCovid ISAG group of independent scientists – who have taken on the Opus Dei role to the Catholic hierarchy of NPHET – reveals, among other disturbing insights, that they were looking ‘for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.’ As these revelations first appeared in right-wing Gript, however, the left-wing echo chamber refuses to acknowledge it is being played.

    Are you right there Michael?

    Nonetheless, a number of politicians have come forward representing an anti-authoritarian left, concerned by the harms of lockdown and favouring a targeted approach – protecting the elderly – and building up ICU capacity. In a recent blistering Twitter attack the independent (and former Labour) TD for Clare, barrister Michael McNamara – who as chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Covid-19 Response became as well acquainted as any Irish politician with diverging epidemiological assessments of the pandemic – identified a recurring Irish deference to vested authority.

    In response to a Fintan O’Toole article critiquing the DUP McNamara wrote: ‘Instead of criticising unionism, let’s look at the complete mess we’ve made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We’re ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same.’

    He continued: ‘If it wasn’t for Unionism, we’d be like Hoxha’s Albania now. There’d be no way off this island. But there is a beacon. Belfast Airport and Larne are beyond the reach of NPHET, just as surely as the rule of the Archbishop’s palace in Drumcondra didn’t pass the bridge in Portadown.’

    He added more controversially:

    ‘We can’t blame the medics for their experimental therapy, any more than we could blame the clergy for their zeal.  Successive governments have abdicated their democratic responsibility throughout this State’s short history. So why would Unionists want to be “governed” by Dublin?’

    It was a fair question, when one considers the North is reopening far sooner than the Republic. Although this has arrived after a rapid vaccine rollout, the experimental nature of which McNamara raises problems with.

    Facing Up to Errors

    Here we come to the crux of an unhelpful cultural division between left and right that the ruling parties will use to divide and conquer. This is the new identity politics arising out of the pandemic, epitomised by attitudes towards face masks.

    For too many on the left the science on this issue is proven as opposed to followed. Wearing a face mask now appears to have become an article of faith. Yet a recent report by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention entitled ‘Using face masks in the community: first update – Effectiveness in reducing transmission of COVID-19’ stated:

    The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect, but there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect. Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty.

    Additional high-quality studies are needed to assess the relevance of the use of medical face masks in the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Moreover, the Irish left should consider our dependence on pharmaceutical behemoths that jealously guard intellectual properties, notwithstanding huge state aid grants, and indemnification against adverse reactions. It is akin to the dependence of small farmers in developing countries on genetically modified seed, under a model of Philanthrocapitalism overseen by Bill Gates, who according to a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik has shown “a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies,” and devotes hundreds of millions of dollars each year to whitewashing his reputation through “charitable” media grants.

    Moreover, all too often, media debates around Covid-19 fail to acknowledge the link between pre-existing morbidities – ‘underlying conditions’ – and morbidity and mortality from Covid-19. Thus, US Studies have shown that having a BMI over 30—the threshold that defines obesity—increases the risk of being admitted to hospital with covid-19 by 113%, of being admitted to intensive care by 74%, and of dying by 48%, making it almost as relevant a consideration as having been vaccinated.

    In Ireland, moreover, Mayo coroner Patrick O’Connor recently questioned the attribution of deaths to Covid-19, saying: ‘In reality, a lot of people have terminal cancer or multiple other serious co-morbidities. People can die from Covid and or with Covid. I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis.’

    https://twitter.com/SunTimesIreland/status/1383791062846562307

    Furthermore, by embracing ZeroCovid Utopianism many on the Irish left failed to focus on the failings of a decrepit Irish health system. This epitomises a tendency among politicians to dance to the tune of a corporate media that has placed relentless focus on the disease itself, regularly interviewing mendacious ISAG figures, while generally ignoring underlying social and environmental factors that drive morbidity and mortality.

    The canard that Ireland could simply shut its borders and reach ZeroCovid perhaps points to the need for reform of an Irish secondary educational system, which according to the a rather unkind assessment from the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher is designed to produce ‘second-class robots.’ Perhaps too many of us are lacking the requisite critical faculties to look beyond news headlines.

    In fact a radically different, defiantly left-wing approach to the pandemic been put forward by, among others, Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kuldorff in The Jacobin. They pointed out:

    Elites have seen their stock portfolios balloon in value, and many professionals have been able to keep their jobs by working from home. It is the country’s poor and working-class households, particularly those with children, who have borne a disproportionate share of the burden. Lower-income Americans were much more likely to be forced to work in unsafe conditions, to have lost their livelihoods due to business and school shutdowns, or to be unable to learn remotely.

    Beyond ZeroCovid, the Irish left should emphasis the harms of Ireland’s reliance on lockdowns, and harness the malcontents of the poorest, including small business owners. Otherwise they court irrelevance as the traditional ruling parties have already taken on the role of ‘caring’ for the people, while retaining the power to ease restrictions in the face of opposition from the left.

    Science and Technology are not Neutral

    Also, as opposed to running in fear from being labelled anti-vaxxers by a cheerleading corporate media, the left might at least consider the wisdom of foisting vaccines that have been granted under emergency use conditions on all age groups. Indeed, many on the left in Ireland seem unwilling to question dominant institutional narratives, a tendency recently criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris in The Jacobin, who said: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    It remains unclear whether universal immunization will bring about long-term ‘herd’ immunity; while in the absence of long-term safety data the benefits to young, healthy subjects of vaccination may not outweigh the cost in terms of adverse events from treatments granted under emergency use licences. Sober assessment seems to have given way to an ideological and, at times, a coercive approach.

    In terms of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, writing in the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, pointed to how in the media ‘a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%’ for severe disease.’ Ollario et al in The Lancet referred to absolute risk reductions of ‘1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.’ The authors also pointed to how ‘considerations on efficacy and effectiveness are based on studies measuring prevention of mild to moderate COVID-19 infection; they were not designed to conclude on prevention of hospitalisation, severe disease, or death, or on prevention of infection and transmission potential.’

    Doshi has also objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’  This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer those who received a placebo the opportunity to receive its vaccine.

    Doshi argued that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    An alternative policy would be to reserve vaccines for those most susceptible to severe symptoms – the old and the obese – along with healthcare workers and others unavoidably working around the world in congested environments. Devoting scarce resources to increasing ICU provision to bring us into line with European averages might be a better approach than relying exclusively on the quick fix of the vaccine.

    The Irish left should now desist from identity politics around vaccine uptake that the centre-right is relishing. ‘Tiktok’ Harris previously stoked tensions with talk of mandatory vaccines and promoting vaccine passports. The left should resist vaccine apartheid, nationally and globally, while demanding the release of patents earned through state supports.

    On the Horizon

    Ireland can expect significant social problems to emerge out of our world-beating lockdown strategy that recalls a prior devotion to austerity; a mental health pandemic and mass youth unemployment are upon us already. Moreover, the young are currently denied the safety valve of an easy hop to another English-speaking country for work. This may be a recipe for radicalism, but unfortunately genuinely dark forces on the far-right are ready to pounce on malcontents.

    It is surely vital that we maintain our European connections, thereby scrapping Mandatory Health Quarantine that is an insult to immigrant groups in Ireland, as well as the diaspora. 90% of scientists believe that Covid-19 will be with us forever, so it seems there will always be ‘variants of concern’ to contend with, just as there are with influenza.

    As a country Ireland has serious work to get on with in terms of addressing a housing crisis and improving our environment. A narrow focus on the pandemic should not be allowed to derail these efforts. This may be like a war but it is not a war. Even prior to vaccines, this is a virus with an infection fatality rate of less than 0.2% in most locations. Moreover, up to 86% of those infected may not have symptoms, such as cough, fever, or loss of taste or smell, according to a UK study from October. We require better provision of public health and an adequate plan to address the ongoing obesity pandemic.

    We also need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about Long Covid, considering ‘at least some people who identify themselves as having Long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.’

    We need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about long Covid

    A New Social Contract?

    The pandemic calls for a new social contract to be negotiated in Ireland that acknowledges republican values of Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens. The French COVID-19 Scientific Council led the way in a paper for The Lancet:

    it is time to abandon fear-based approaches based on seemingly haphazard stop-start generalised confinement as the main response to the pandemic; approaches which expect citizens to wait patiently until intensive care units are re-enforced, full vaccination is achieved, and herd immunity is reached.

    They continue:

    Crucially, the new approach should be based on a social contract that is clear and transparent, rooted in available data, and applied with precision to its range of generational targets. Under this social contract, younger generations could accept the constraint of prevention measures (eg, masks, physical distancing) on the condition that the older and more vulnerable groups adopt not only these measures, but also more specific steps (eg, voluntary self-isolation according to vulnerability criteria) to reduce their risk of infection. Measures to encourage adherence of vulnerable groups to specific measures must be promoted consistently and enforced fairly. Implementation of such an approach must be done sensitively and in conjunction with the deployment of vaccination across the various population targets, including all generations of society.

    They argue against reliance on lockdowns:

    Using stop-start general confinement as the main response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer feasible. Though attractive to many scientists, and a default measure for political leaders fearing legal liability for slow or indecisive national responses, its use must be revisited, only to be used as a last resort.

    To date, many on the Irish left appear to have had their heads in the sand promoting a Utopian ZeroCovid solution. This should give way to a more balanced appraisal that considers the interests of all of Irish society. With the youngest population in Europe, and as one of the richest countries, the Irish government could have preserved a far higher standard of living for the population during the pandemic. We now need to draw up a social contract that takes a more balanced approach.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] O’Toole, Fintan (editor), Up The Republic: Towards a New Ireland. Faber and Faber, London, 2012, p.1-52.

    [ii] Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.22

    [iii] Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, Tales of Marx and Marxism, Little, Brown, London, 2011, p.79

  • Unenumerated Constitutional Rights Erode Irish Democracy

    John Philpot Curran

    When the Federal Convention of 1878 had completed its work on the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin described its result as, “A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it”.

    Not much later, John Philpot Curran gave a similar warning, now usually summarised as “Vigilance is the price of liberty”.

    Each was saying that a written Constitution describes how a country should be governed, but does not promise that it will be. If we want to keep the system we have chosen, we must be vigilant. A single departure may not seem very significant, but if we ignore it we may realise too late that it was a step in undermining our system of government. It is not enough for political leaders to be alert. In a democracy we are all political leaders, our system of government and the freedoms it promises belong to us, and if we want to keep them we must be vigilant to protect them.

    This country has a democratic Constitution. Article 5 declares that it is to be a democratic state, and other Articles, read together, deliver on that promise. The Dáil is to be the dominant power in the Oireachtas.  Elections for it must be held at regular intervals, so that we can dismiss political leaders who do not serve us as we wish.  Elections must be by single transferable vote.  The “sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State” is vested in the Oireachtas, the only limit being that its laws may not be “repugnant to the Constitution”.  Laws are made in public, at sittings the public can attend and the media can report.

    That our only lawmakers are those the People choose is the foundation of our democracy, as of every representative democracy. By adopting a Constitution that said that the only people who could shape the country by making law were those we had elected, we gave ourselves a democracy in 1937 – if we could keep it.

    Leinster House the meeting place of Dáil Eireann.

    Have we? Partly seems to be the best answer. The Oireachtas is no longer our sole and exclusive lawmaker. In the 1960s Irish judges began to adopt what is called “judicial activism”, the view that judges should play an active role in shaping the law.  In 1965 the High Court advanced that view in the Gladys Ryan case. The Oireachtas had decided that it would be good for our dental health if piped drinking water contained a tiny proportion of fluoride, and enacted the Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act, 1960, under which piped drinking water was and is fluoridated. Mrs Ryan complained that this meant she and her children had to drink contaminated water, and took High Court proceedings to have the Act annulled. After a hearing lasting many months Judge John Kenny decided she had not proved that fluoridated water was injurious to health and dismissed her claim.  But he made it clear that if he had formed a different view he would have annulled the Act.

    That the case went to hearing is surprising. As we noted above, our Constitution vests in the Oireachtas the “sole and exclusive power of making law for the State”. Those words seem to mean that if a citizen thought an Act was defective her only resource would be to campaign to have the Oireachtas repeal or amend it. If another authority within the State could examine the reasons that led the Oireachtas to pass the law, disagree with them and annul the legislation, the power of the Oireachtas to make law would not be “sole and exclusive”. Those words seem to mean that the judge should not have heard the claim, because he had no authority to interfere with legislation that was consistent with the text of the Constitution. The Attorney General seems not to have made that argument. If so, he effectively abandoned the Constitutional authority of the Oireachtas as our sole and exclusive lawmaker.  It seems never since to have been asserted in any Court.

    The Judgment was a blow to the authority of the Oireachtas in another way. The effect of Judge Kenny’s decision was: “The Constitution includes a list of rights it guarantees to citizens, and the list is clearly not intended to be complete. Other rights may be added. The Oireachtas can add them. So can judges. A judge of the High Court or Supreme Court may decide to recognise a right that a citizen claims but the Constitution does not mention and deem that right to be part of the Constitution, as though it had been included in the document the People adopted in 1937. An Act of the Oireachtas or a Section of an Act that is incompatible with a right a judge has decided to recognise will be annulled as if it were repugnant to the Constitution, even though it is not”. (Rights so identified later came to be called “unenumerated rights, and we will use that term, for simplicity.)

    The Ryan decision changed how we are governed, in three ways. First, judges could examine why the Oireachtas had passed legislation and interfere if they disagreed with its reasons.  Secondly, the Oireachtas’ authority to make laws was no longer sole and exclusive, because judges might decide to recognise and enforce an “unenumerated right”. Thirdly, such a decision by a judge would override legislation enacted by the Oireachtas. That may seem to be a transfer of power from one organ of State to another, but it was an erosion of our democracy, because representative democracy depends on laws being made by those we have elected and by nobody else. Authorising people we had not elected and could not get rid of to override decisions of those we had elected was and is inconsistent with our claim to be a democratic state.

    The Ryan decision also undermined our authority in a less obvious way. Our Constitution provides that only we, the People, may amend it, but when judges import “unenumerated rights” into it they in effect amend it. Our authority to do so is no longer sole and exclusive.

    Separation of Powers.

    Finally, it effectively changes the meaning of “separation of powers” and “separation of functions”. These used to mean that each of the three organs of government, the legislative, executive and judicial, had its separate function in which neither of the others should interfere. It now seems to mean only that the legislature and executive may not interfere in the judicial function.

    There was no protest. We did not show vigilance in defence of our freedom.

    Judges have invoked the “doctrine of unenumerated rights” (a “doctrine” is more impressive than a “theory”) many times since 1965. Unlike legislators, judges deal only with issues others bring before them, so they produce new “doctrines” or “rights” only if litigation gives them the opportunity. However, a substantial number of unenumerated rights have been established and a substantial amount of legislation annulled in the last thirty-six years. For example:

    • Although all of the rights the Constitution lists except Habeas Corpus are promised only to citizens, that is only to people who, as it says, owe loyalty to the Nation and fidelity to the State, the Supreme Court decided to grant an “unenumerated right” to a non-citizen. (V.H. v. Minister for Justice Supreme Court No 31 & 56/2016)
    • It forbade the Government to participate in a referendum campaign. (McKenna An Taoiseach & ors IESC 11; [1995] 2 IR 10.)
    • It forbade the Dáil to conduct an inquiry into matters of public concern that might call for legislative intervention. (Maguire and others Seán Ardagh and others [2001] No. 329 JR; S.C. Nos. 324, 326, 333 and 334 of 2001] – the “Abbeylara case”.)
    • On dubious grounds it invalidated legislation designed to protect young girls from sexual exploitation. C. v. Ireland & ors [2006] IESC 33
    • It refused to hear a Habeas Corpus claim by a citizen who claimed to be unlawfully imprisoned, although the Constitution promises that right to anyone to making such a claim. (Edward Ryan v. Governor of Midland Prison [2014] IEHC 338)
    • In a puzzling decision, it held that a police officer who is asked to approve a search warrant must act “judicially”, and that an officer involved in the relevant investigation cannot do so. The essence of us acting judicially is hearing both sides before reaching a conclusion.  That does not seem to be what the Court meant, but it did not explain what it did mean. (Damache V. DPP {2012] IESC 11
    • Although tradition and the Constitution both say that elected legislators in the Dáil or Seanad are to be free to perform their duties without judicial oversight, the Supreme Court decided that someone who claimed to have been injured by what had been said to her in a Dáil committee could pursue a claim. Kerins v. McGuinness & Ors.  [2019]  IESC 110
    • One Supreme Court judge, Judge O’Donnell, complained in a written Judgment of the quality of legislation, in language reminiscent of an irritated employer complaining about incompetent subordinates. (Clarke  O’Gorman [2014] IESC 72)

    Each of these decisions further undermined the Oireachtas, and, through the Oireachtas, the Irish People’s power to shape the country we live in. Two of them, N.V.H.  and Edward Ryan, are incompatible with the text of the Constitution. The list shows how much of our lives, which we agreed in 1937 should be governed by our elected legislators are now subject to the Court’s intervention – or interference. Again we have not shown vigilance.

    Nor did those we elected to represent us. On the contrary, they have recently enacted the Judicial Council Act, which, after bringing the Council into existence, invited it to prepare “Guidelines” for compensation to be paid to successful plaintiffs in personal injury claims.

    Superficially, that may have seemed rational. Individual judges decide what money should be paid as compensation for injury, so why should not judges as a group agree Guidelines to be applied, or at least consulted, in all cases? The answer is simple. Deciding what compensation should be paid to an injured plaintiff is administering justice, which is the role of judges.  Guidelines to be consulted in all cases have the effect of law, even if they are given another name. Judges have no role in making law. Only the Oireachtas has. So in passing the Act the Oireachtas declined to perform a function that the Constitution imposes on it, and delegated it to a body that has no authority to perform it. This also meant that questions that elected parliamentarians should have teased out will not get the attention they need.  Here are some examples. Readers may think of others.

    • Personal injuries actions operate on an assumption that pain, past present and prospective, can be compensated for by money, and only by money. Is that assumption valid?
    • If it is, is it right to assume that the extent of the pain, not the circumstances of the sufferer, determines the amount of compensation? €10,000 might seem a life-saver for a young couple struggling with high rent or mortgage and household bills, but be next to useless to a retired person living on an adequate pension.
    • Our system protects a wrong-doer from having to address and acknowledge the consequences of his or her wrong-doing, because insurance companies forbid any contact between their insured and his or her victim. Does that serve us well?  Would we drive more carefully if we knew we would have to confront personally the consequences of any carelessness? 

      The criminal court of justice, Dublin. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices

    Most Superior Court judges nowadays are “Judicial activists” as described above. The concept is obviously attractive to judges and perhaps to others who believe trained intellects shape a society better than “ordinary people” could. But it is incompatible with democracy. That the Oireachtas invited a Council of judges to make law and the judges agreed tells us how far this country has travelled from the democratic ideals set out in our Constitution. Incidentally, the Guidelines emerged only after judges had circulated among themselves documents that they discussed in private, and that we did not get to see. With limited exceptions, our Constitution requires the Oireachtas and the judges to do their work in public, but, understandably, it did not consider how judges should do the work of the Oireachtas.

    This article is critical of judicial decisions, and might seem to be hostile to our judiciary. Not so. Most of our judges are admirable men and women, with a deep understanding of the law and a strong commitment to justice. The purpose of each decision mentioned above (except the refusal of Habeas Corpus, which still seems incomprehensible) was to do justice. For a dedicated judge to deny someone justice, because our legal structure does not permit it must be disagreeable, almost like a physician refusing treatment to someone who needs it. Most judicial decisions were well motivated and most were beneficial to the community.

    So, the argument that our precious democracy has been and is being eroded by decisions of judges does not mean we should denounce them. It would be wiser to suggest to them, politely, that our country would be better served if they respected the authority of our legislature more than they do at present, recognising that even a little judicial activism risks putting the judiciary in competition with the legislature and that carried to extremes it is inconsistent with democracy. If judges came to accept that, we can be sure they would act to address the problem. They are used to examining and evaluating evidence and arguments, and if the arguments stand up and are supported by the evidence, we should expect our judges to accept them, consider what they need to do to remedy the situation, and do it.  If they accept that an imbalance has grown up between our organs of government that threatens our democracy, we can be confident that change will follow.

    But if they do not, we should remember what Franklin and Curran taught us.