Anyone watching the agonizing progress of the Julian Assange case proceeding through the U.K. justice system will be aware that it’s highly unlikely that any judge will simply throw open the gates of Belmarsh prison in assent to calls to ‘Free Assange’.
Sadly for those sympathetic to him, extradition has inched ever closer over the last three years thanks to High Court decisions: first overturning a lower court ruling that blocked extradition on the basis of suicide risk in 2021; next blocking an initial attempt to appeal in 2022; then blocking another appeal attempt in 2023.
Assange has survived more than a decade of a bizarrely public seclusion and alleged U.S. security targeting that ranged from standard kidnapping and rendition to assassination, details of which were forbidden to be submitted this time round. Yet figures fighting or speaking up for him are not lightweight: more support from Australia where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed a parliamentary motion calling for his release in 2023, while his wife Stella has raged for the life of her besieged man like someone out of a Greek drama. Might there be a true reprieve?
On March 26 the High Court played the ball back to the Americans in a ruling that confirmed three out of nine questions of his imperilled rights: ‘that the applicant [Assange] is permitted to rely on the first amendment, that the applicant is not prejudiced at trial, including sentence, by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same first amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed.’
A response is due in three weeks. Had this ruling gone differently, Assange could have been on a plane within days.
It is worth mentioning here where – even were the death penalty threat to be muzzled – he may end up: the ‘supermax’ prison class where the US boxed up the likes of Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui and Ramzi Yousef.
An earlier legal concept that was applied to the question of blocking U.S. extradition demands the ‘Death row phenomenon,’ actually starts to look more humane when one itemizes the torture regime of prisons where inmates are slowly aged in isolation under observation without even the chance to kill themselves.
According to a former warden of the most secure such place, ADX in Colorado, it constitutes a ‘life after death… it’s much worse than death.’
For Stella Assange, speaking on the steps of the court, this ruling was at least a partial hint of genuinely positive momentum, a support for the notion that Assange might have rights after all. For others responding from around the world, the rejections of the six of the nine grounds formed part of the ominous, serpentine locomotion of the UK justice machine to eventually doom the Australian to that fate.
For Irish barrister and human rights specialist David Langwallner, who previously spoke to the Cassandra Voices podcast, the ruling gives a hint of a real path to appeal, and can be taken as a serious gesture from the judges. Speaking again informally to CV, he condemns the ongoing absurdity of a persecution that “should have ended long ago,” and lays out precedents like Soering Vs. United Kingdom.
An earlier version of this article was recently published in the Irish World newspaper, we commend the courage of the editor Bernard Purcell for doing so, but a week is a long time in politics and we felt it required updating and a short addendum on the possibility of a legal challenge.
Indirectly, the failure to deal with the issue of housing and homelessness has led to the rise of far-right protests, targeting immigrants in temporary accommodation. This is the slippery slope to fascism.
Housing is the defining issue of this Irish generation. By extension, it is the defining issue of Ireland’s next general election.
One slender thread of hope to ensure matters did not decline further was Ireland’s temporary ban on evictions. But that has been rescinded.
In contrast, Scotland had the good sense to extend its own evictions ban until September. But in the midst of the worst housing shortage in the country’s history, the Irish government is prioritising the financial interests of landlords.
Ireland’s recently appointed Attorney General Rossa Fanning SC had advised the Irish government that landlords’ groups could mount a constitutional challenge to the extension of the ban. But the Irish government subsequently insisted its decision to revoke the evictions ban was a political one, rather than one based on the AG’s advice.
Nevertheless, the Irish governments have frequently hidden behind the issue of constitutionality. It’s the first line of defence whenever the question of genuine rent control is proposed, and the last line of defence when the calls for the introduction of the eviction ban were first made.
We believe there is a constitutional solution to a supposedly intractable constitutional problem. The origin of the problem is that in Blake v Madigan (1982) The Rent Restrictions Act 1960, (1981) limited the amount of rent which could be charged on certain controlled dwellings.
It also made it difficult for a landlord to recover possession of a dwelling affected by the legislation. Landlords argued that the legislation amounted to an unjust attack on their property rights.
The Irish Supreme Court agreed, referring to how the scheme operated in an arbitrary manner, with no means testing of either landlord or tenant, and that no compensation was available for the restriction of the property rights of the landlords affected.
So, under the Constitution, the right to property is to be protected against “unjust attack and the landlords’ rights unjustly attacked.”
But constitutionally, this idea of an unjust attack is subject to the proviso that the rights of landlords must give way to the common good – where the legislature is informed by Directive Principles of Social Policy set out in Article 45 – and also that the means used to intrude on property rights are proportionate.
The social justice and common good arguments for maintaining an eviction ban are, in our view, overwhelming. But, of course, this would limit and restrict the property rights of landlords in an increasingly neoliberal Ireland.
Compulsory purchase schemes have, however, been upheld in such cases as Dreher [984], with the suggestion that sometimes there is no need to pay any compensation.
In Re Article 26 and Part V of the Planning and Development Bill[2000] 2 IR321, Part V of the Bill aimed to provide affordable housing and social integration, imposing a condition that planning permission for residential developments would either have to cede some of the development for affordable housing, or instead pay compensation.
There was no requirement that the State pay compensation to the developer under the scheme, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in a judgment which focused largely on the reasons for the restriction on property rights.
The Court noted that the restriction on property rights was justified and proportionate to the objectives of the Bill.
Based on this precedent, today the government could acquire properties at less than market rates, paying a measure of compensation to the landlords and thus avoiding the unappealing vista of increased homelessness, leading to further social divisions further social divisions, and creating conditions for the rise of a far-right fascism, which may serve the interests of this neoliberal coalition, and its apologists.
It could also have a welcome deflationary impact on the price of property which now exceed Celtic Tiger levels.
Alas, it appears the Irish government does not want this and has proposed an alternative. They are currently drawing up legislation which in effect will extend their Shared Equity scheme to second hand homes where the landlord wishes to sell but has a tenant in situ.
The drive to introduce this Shared Equity scheme came from the two main property lobby groups – Property Industry Ireland and the Irish Institutional Property.
Neither group came up with the idea itself. It is based on an English scheme which research by the London School of Economics (LSE) found pushed up London house prices by 9per cent.
In effect, it operates as a dual mortgage, whereby the tenant in situ would have a mortgage to a bank and also be required to repay the State who would take an “equity stake” in the property.
This is unlikely to work, or even be ready in time, for the forthcoming wave of Irish evictions. A simpler proposal is to follow the South African model of amending the Constitution to include an enforceable right to housing in an emergency context.
The Irish government’s promise of a housing referendum has foundered on a disagreement about the wording. We suspect that it will not implement what is needed for an immediately enforceable emergency housing right, as is enforceable in other jurisdictions.
We doubt the present government has the political will for meaningful action on housing. But there is an alternative, which is to launch a constitutional challenge so the Supreme Court can recant on such nefarious cases as O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation [1989] in which Mr Justice Declan Costello (1926-2011) held that he lacked jurisdiction to compel the defendant to provide the plaintiffs with adequately serviced halting sites, because this was a question of distributive justice.
Such matters of social justice, he intimated, were for Leinster House, not the Four Courts. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC [1994].
Costello (1926-2011), the son of former Taoiseach John A Costello, was a former Fine Gael TD, Attorney General, barrister and judge, who served as President of the Irish High Court from 1995to 1998.
As a politician he was the author of Towards a Just Society, a policy document which shifted Fine Gael towards the left and social justice, and which made Fine Gael a more attractive coalition partner for the Irish Labour Party.
Costello also created Ireland’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Law Reform Commission, making him the most effective and consequential Irish Attorney General in the history of the State.
He was a thoroughly decent man, and a visionary, but also a product of his background. Fine Gael has long since parted company with Costello’s vision of the Just Society for Ireland. Just like Fianna Fáil, it has been completely captured by business interests, landlords and property developers.
Their politics is little more than the shadow cast upon society by big business, as the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) might have said.
The portents for a constitutional challenge in this period of an unprecedented housing emergency are not, however, all bad. In a fledgling way recent judgments have hinted at a more interventionist approach, in proportionate terms where there is recklessness or bad faith.
Well, if throwing people out on the street, disrupting family units with no affordable place to go, is not reckless, what is?
The current crop of Fine Gael TDs have no interest in reading that document, but are happy to deploy it for public relations purposes when it suits them.
Last week Sinn Féin forced a vote on the government’s lifting of the eviction ban, which led to one Green T.D.’s Nessa Hourigan breaking ranks and voting against the government.
As the doomsday scenario for terrified tenants looms large, and the Irish government looks on with complete indifference to such pain, we are reminded of the word of a Christy Moore song- “the spirit that dwelt within, now sleeps out in the rain”.
"The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45…" Recalling an important article from 2018 by Eoin Tierneyhttps://t.co/NZ5U8ODAYo@paddycosgrave@cilliandoyle87
With the government’s rejection of last week’s motion from Sinn Féin to extend the eviction ban, and with the help of certain “independent” TDs, the same result is now likely to be reached today. The Labour Party’s no confidence motion has also fallen short.
This government and its drive to break all homelessness records is bruised and battered, but not unbroken. In our view the last remaining hope for the thousands facing eviction rests upon the kind of last-minute legal challenge our initial article set out.
Papers could potentially be lodged on Thursday seeking an interim injunction for violations by the government of Article 43, Article 40.3 and Article 45 of the constitution. This will require state-sponsored lawyers to show cause, and seek a return date for a fully-fledged interlocutory hearing with skeleton arguments and detailed consideration.
The logic is that the implementation of the lifting of the eviction moratorium on Friday would not happen as mandatory relief and an injunction would be sought against the lifting. This would require careful judicial consideration, and thus time for cool judicial heads to resolve whether it could be secured.
If a lawyer cannot be enabled to seek an interim injunction on such short notice any member of the public can do so.
However, a powerful symbol would be the representatives of the opposition in Dáil Eireann coming together, in conjunction with some of those currently facing eviction, to try and avert the inevitable prospect of a humanitarian catastrophe on our streets in the months to come.
A new Socialist Lawyers’ Association of Ireland announced its establishment in January of this year, so perhaps they might even want to lend a hand. There are also organisation likes CATU and other campaigning groups. But time is of the essence.
Our conservative political classes seem to have either sleep-walked or deliberately created this unprecedented housing crisis and its dysfunctional property market. Sterile and detached cost benefit analysis where households are units and people products lead to the increasing dehumanisation of those impacted by policy decisions.
Even the most basic rights we can think of like housing and a safe and secure upbringing seem to wither on the vine. To quote someone who Fine Gael should know well:
“We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood, and complacency must be dispelled, and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.”
Those are the words of the late Declan Costello former Fine Gael TD, Attorney General and author of the “Just Society”. They seem to ring truer than ever.
The time has come for a Housing challenge, for we the people.
David Langwallner is an Irish Barrister based in London. Cillian Doyle is a political economist and policy advisor. The views expressed are their own.
Unaware of the roaring cataract ahead, a small boy splashes in the dark river named Dodder, cheap buoyancy aids on his arms, flailing them in the manner called the dog’s paddle, eyes and mouth squeezed shut, neck stretched to keep his head above the surface. I shout a warning, which he must hear because he squints one eye open, manages an uncertain glance at me before he drops in slow motion towards the froth and blackness below, not screaming. An unseen piano makes clichéd sounds in the background and this musack is the main element that irritates me awake. I already know that all the children are safe in their beds, and this can only be a cheap movie scenario in which I am the small boy.
Even my nightmares are cinematic clichés, retribution for spending most of my life trying to avoid them. It’s a bit late for me to invent a new scenario in which life itself might be a dream, the music not potently cheap, the mise-en-scène not too close to the bone; too late to wake up and start all over again. Best to count my blessings and face the end of my ninth decade with equanimity.
Not much older than me, my island home has survived the past hundred, vaguely independent years before falling over the economic cliff. Despite having lived the greater part of my life in a contented region called Conamara in the waste of Ireland, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that my personal and cultural identity are also falling to bits.
My fellow-citizens and I have shape-shifted from being the credulous members of an imperial Roman Church, then being shanghaied as reluctant subjects of the British Empire, finally citizens of an embryonic European Empire, which looks like ending up as the Fourth Reich. But unconsciously we are, and have been for many years, carriers of the most recent imperial virus, this time North American. Now, as Hubert Butler predicted many years ago, ‘…there is nothing but Anglo-American culture to unite us.’
In this chameleon state we exist, of course, less in the literal sense than imaginatively which, in the Irish psyche, certainly in mine, tends to be more real. Our new masters’ films – pardon me, movies – and TV shows have filled our waking hours and daydreams.
Not many years ago I counted ninety cinema screens in Dublin in which not a single Irish film was to be seen. The bulk were American. Although I now require subtitles for the more recent manifestations of their staccato, one-phrase dialogue I have not quite mastered the Tarantino fashion of peppering my scripts with four letter expletives. Must try harder.
The empire’s audio-visual avalanche has forged mine, my childrens’ and my grandchildrens’ dialects and tastes. We of an older generation cannot be excused; Jack Nicholson was for long my ideal actor and Humphrey Bogart taught me to smoke fifty years ago.
It should not upset me that my grandchildren prefer Rap to O’Riada. The truths of the three Williams – Faulkner, Saroyan and Goulding – were once gospel to me. American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee were in my mind long before Brian Friel became my favourite.
We are now fortunate to speak the American dialect of English because we need go no more with our bundles on our shoulders to Philadelphia in the morning. Philadelphia has come to us in the form of Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard and the rest of the multinationals, which are now the core of our island’s economic wellbeing as well as a reminder of our anxious dependency.
The fact that up to seventy five percent of the resident I.T. multinational employees are non-Irish, while four hundred thousand of our youngest and brightest have in the last five years slipped quietly away only confuses the matter, but must not be brooded over. At least the multinational surveillance company (SGS) from which I must beg renewal of my driving license is harmlessly Swiss.
Apart from the last exception, our cultural credentials are impeccable. If forty million United Statesians are deluded enough to call themselves Irish we must be entitled to return the compliment and claim documentation as Yankee Doodle Dandies. Unfortunately the US immigration authorities now screen us potential emigrants at source, literally on our native soil in Shannon airport. As Peter Fallon urged – and I know very well I am retooling his context – in a recent poem:
Say never again to The Wild Irish Rover,
No more to The Minstrel Boy.
Give us back our sons and daughters,
Say that Ireland is over.
How fragile our illusions of sovereignity have been, how transformed has been this trading post in the last century, since a teenager named James Toner – along with 200,000 other Irishmen who needed a job – ran away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army. As a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps young James’ task was to collect the body parts of his fellow youths killed among the bloomin’ roses in Picardy. He survived the horror and grew up to be my uncle Jim.
I just looked him up in the British Military Archives.
Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation:
Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner. During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them.
This means that Jim did something foolhardy, at least under cover of night, in the midst of a carnage that was never revealed to us, his nieces and nephews.
Back in Dublin with a small war pension, Jim married, begat no children and endured Irish patriotic resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy. Even his brother-in law disapproved of him. When my father made the drawing of four-year-old me, Jim was not impressed. He acidly pronounced: “The boy may be alright, but he has the head of a bloody rogue.”
I overheard that remark and worried about it. Surely he was joking? Or was he envious because he had no children himself? I now surmise that it was general bitterness because nobody, especially not my father, wanted to hear about the horrors Jim had witnessed in France. He had been informally decreed an Irish traitor in the British army.
Sometime in the 1950s he decided to abandon his golf, at which he was local champion, and his buoyancy aid, whiskey, and put an end to the pain that was identified too late. It is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is applied to the euphemism ‘veteran’. Uncle Jim put an end to his pain with the aid of a gas oven.
There are other associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, Uncle Jim’s sister Kathleen ran away with her boyfriend, a Tommy named George Thomas.
A possible fatal attraction was the fact that both of their fathers kept pigs; science now says that personal odour is a most powerful sexual signal. I met the ageing lovers in their home at Abingdon, Berkshire in 1964 when Uncle George unexpectedly said to me: “I glory in you, Bob.”
I think he meant that I appeared not to have inherited my father’s prejudices against the English. He was wrong; our parents’ prejudices are lodged in our DNA but, as a form of energy, can happily be redirected at more fitting targets, such as the English Public School system and all their imitators closer to home. Oh, the bitther word!
When World War II (like War Number 1, a civil war between blood brothers, the Germans and the English) came along, one of Uncle George’s sons, Sidney, enlisted as a teenage frogman and acted, at nineteen, as one of those cockleshell heroes who attached limpet mines to enemy ships. He became a hero of mine and survived to produce a pretty daughter named Cathy whom I subsequently persuaded to elope with me briefly to Ireland where we had midnight swims at Killiney beach and were referred to as kissing cousins. Cathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF people who put on daring aerial displays.
These connections make me wonder if I am not still a bloody rogue and worse, a fellow-traveller of that suspect class, a West Brit rather than a putative citizen of America.
For a start, I was born in the Pale: Dublin and its environs. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years away from the BBC accent, whose Home Service provided most of my childhood listening pleasure; Radio Éireann broadcast only a few hours per day.
My early reading was what we called the comicuts, The Rover, The Hotspur, The Eagle, all published in England. My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo, who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.
But as I grew up I betrayed them all for the likes of Irwin Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Hemingway, and now I know I’m a virtual Yank. I assure you that this is less a form of ingratiation with the American Chamber of Commerce than one of realisation and resignation. No problemo.
There are more ingredients in this cultural Irish stew.
Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse’s father was from Birmingham; James Connolly came from Edinburgh and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, Irish, English and American and still cling to that long-lost cause: socialism.
The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall disturbs me, with its sea of Union Jacks and Hooray Henrys rendering Land of Hope and Glory – because I am moved by Elgar’s music (although he did not write the lyrics, which are as Kiplingesque and vainglorious as Deutschland Ueber Alles).
When filming American schoolchildren with their hands on heart, reciting the daily oath of allegiance to their flag, I am also uneasy. Indoctrination of the unruly young starts early on that continent but, by contrast, nationalism has in recent years become a vulgar word in Ireland.
How do the British and the Yanks get away with their jingoism? And where, apart from everywhere and nowhere, do we Irish really fit in? To those who, like myself, find all of this disconcerting I say, cop on, get a life, get the message, get over it, get with it, and other such novel and useful imperial edicts. No worries.
Staying for a moment with the phenomenon of British and American nationalism, I wonder if the answer may not be that they were both empires whereas Ireland’s only imperial conquest was spiritual – mainly among the black babies of Africa – and that appears to have been erased by our national amnesia. As very soon must happen to me as, dragging my feet like a reluctant schoolboy, I approach four score and ten, intending that looming watershed to be more an act of defiance than any petty celebration.
On my ninetieth birthday I shall beware of those who say: “You’re looking great, haven’t changed a bit.”
My exact contemporary, the late Ben Barenholtz, a survivor of Naziism and a New Yorker, who produced Coen brothers’ films and gave me a present of a book of all of Cole Porter’s lyrics, told me that he has an ex-friend, a liar who has said exactly the same thing to him every year for the past twenty years.
The astonishing thing about this compliment is that we ancients believe it. We skip and dance down the road until we are forced to pause, whereupon we resemble the silent nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. We oldies, by contrast, have merely run out of breath, full stop, or period, as I should really learn to say.
The truth of the above platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: we are decommissioned. Joseph MacAnthony has described our aged generation as tourists in the departure lounge. We exist, persist, only in our anecdotage.
Who would have thought that little Riobárd, the boy in the drawing, would survive so long? Certainly not himself, whose life expectancy as a film and TV maker was long ago estimated by an insurance Actuary to be no more than forty five years.
What matter that this little Jackeen has spent more than half his life in the least colonised part of Ireland – the Gaeltacht of Conamara which, paradoxically, he has long known to be spiritually and economically closer to Boston than to Dublin.
Who gives a tinker’s curse that the Jackeen in question, having read so many comments, references, articles, essays, even PhD theses about his minor oeuvres, now dares to give his version of the story? But age confers a protective veneer of immunity, anonymity, even a kind of invisibility on the elderly so one is free to say what one likes.
As Kurt Vonnegut – who in one of his modest communications to me referred to himself as an old fart who smokes Pall Mall – put it: “Old men are obscene and accurate.” We can experience a kind of lightheaded bliss when we notice our fuel gauge moving towards empty and we can offload petty concerns.
The present words are thus an act of memory, which is equally an act of imagination and may be approached academically as sub-Proustian because although my life sentence has been long these sentences are, with a few exceptions, not.
I also possess unlimited memorabilia – photos, letters, diaries, the usual bric-a-brac of a life – which may save me from downright lying. Besides, there are those modest films which constitute aides-memoire and, not least, may be treated as having been personal buoyancy aids, otherwise described as vain aspirations.
I occasionally wonder, as I float towards the brink of the cataract, if I do not exist in some other, gentler person’s nightmare?
