Another woman was buried just this week, having been found in Merlin Woods after a seven day search. She follows a young woman two weeks ago who was recovered from the docks having met the river the night before. The sound of the RNLI helicopter has become grimly familiar to everyone. Its drone heard all hours of the night and day.

“Tragic circumstances” have become so routine as to soften traditionally austere hearts. We have reached the point when burly pub security men sincerely bid you “safe home” as you pass their door into the night. They are very often the last ones to see people alive. The back of a bouncer’s head now a regular cameo on desperate grainy CCTV footage.

The decent generosity and cooperation of community in these agonising moments is unrecognisable from a world that leaves people feeling so isolated to begin with. It is difficult for me to reconcile the two.

Galway has always been a town of blow-ins and transients but behind the statistics we are familiar with, it is frightening to see how the place has been hollowed out. Publicans tell me how regular faces once lining the bar have vanished. Those who can leave are always making plans. Years have slipped by unnoticed and now many of your friends have become London people or Perth people. How did that happen?

That other great indicator of prosperity, heroin, while nothing new is making alarming in-roads in a way I cannot recall in my life time.  Associated petty crime makes most of the headlines but you get the sense we are approaching a tipping point. We lost one friend this time last year.

Last week, a group of nine families from the Travelling community occupied the grounds of City Hall in protest. They had been moved from pillar to post over the last few months after their halting site, their home, became too much to bear next to a hazardous landfill on the city’s outskirts.

At a march last December, two African women spoke candidly of treatment that would make your skin crawl. They cannot so much walk down the street without being propositioned or abused from passing cars. Gender and race marks them as an easy target for men who I’m sure are explanatory friends, family and husbands.

Since the Paris attacks last year, the South Asian gentleman behind the counter in my corner shop started wearing an IRFU hat. I have no idea what religion he follows if any, but assume the shamrock crest on his head is an effort to make him that little less Other in the eyes of the ignorant.

Earlier in the year I listened to a woman from Nigeria speak about the “parallel life” her family endures in Direct Provision. The company profiting from this quiet barbarism are taking home six figures annually.

All politics is local or at least this is what we are told. Depending on the audience, politicians are busy making promises about the local or national interest. Local is very different things to each of us.  A short walk around town is enough to see nothing but parallel lives and contradictions.

Welcome to the new Oireachtas Retort new site. A gloomy start perhaps but we might find something to cheer about soon. Firstly, I want to thank everyone for their support and encouragement. It has been genuinely overwhelming and a huge boost for me personally.

Posts from myself and others will be coming regularly now and we hope to make a small contribution in peeking under the nation’s bonnet. Keep up to date on twitter and I’ve reopened the dormant facebook page here if that’s your thing. Anyone wishing to contribute to the kitty can follow the link below here. Thank you very much.

Opinions are like arseholes. Everybody has one.  These days every newspaper has a poll and from incomplete records, I count at least 137 published since government came to office in April 2011.

This was not always the case. The first poll conducted by an Irish political party was done by Brendan Halligan and Gallup for the Labour Party in 1969. MBRI began political polling in the 1970s before their now long standing partnership with the Irish Times in 1982.

Available data indicates that there were just 34 commissioned by the media in twenty one years between 1971 and 1992. Most of this occurred in the 80s or, saw EU and divorce votes bookended by abortion referendums. As far as who’s up-who’s down politics was concerned, polling was largely confined in the lead up to general elections themselves.

Today, polls form a central part of both media content and how politics is discussed. All parties conduct them privately. Newspapers rely heavily on the material not only dedicating several articles to the findings but writers reference the poll throughout each page, building a ‘truth’ with repetition in the mind of readers.

Polls are used to make new arguments and reinforce already held positions. Polls are used to dictate news cycles and set boundaries of what may be discussed.

The past few years have felt like saturation. A good portion of this can be explained by the convenience polling offers newsrooms under budgetary pressure. The hard work of news gathering is effectively outsourced. Without leaving the office, journalists are served exclusive information from which they can squeeze a few hundred words.

More concerning to my mind, is that there is no small connection between the tide of support ebbing away from establishment politics and the frequency with which we are now compelled to focus on these choices as the only show in town.

Take the bemusement and sensationalism that greeted water protests in the latter part of 2014. Opinion pages and airwaves were full of amateur anthropologists scratching their heads as if they had stumbled upon a lost Amazonian tribe. ‘What is it these people want?’ the media wondered.

The anger and motivations were incomprehensible and this is the result when “politics” is ring-fenced as a game of swings and arrhythmic. Just think how opinion polls feed a narrative about ‘stable government’ for example. This is bread and butter on which journalists and politicians can expound at length. Polls put them  [and keep us] in safe and comfortable territory.  Now take the other media narratives polls have produced over the last five years.

• Fianna Fáil support static and the pressure this put on that party’s leadership
• Horror and bewilderment that Sinn Féin support, while reaching a ceiling, had not went into decline on foot of continuous real and contrived outrages.
• The slow demise of the Labour Party
• The seemingly unshakable rise of Independents/Other

Acres of coverage was devoted to these stories based on little more than fluctuations within the margin of error. The water protests demonstrated that not only had all this polling left journalists completely unaware of public sentiment, but that the media by and large are unequipped to discuss and contextualise equally valid political activity that occurs outside the gates of Leinster House.

The reliance on polling creates and reinforces blind spots, leaving everyone’s understanding of ‘politics’ all the more bereft.

Somewhat inconveniently for this view, it is polling itself that has been the most regular reminder of this disconnect. Jack Jones, the late founder of MBRI explained the following some years ago,

National polls represent an overall average for all parties, across all 42 constituencies, and when interpreting the figures it is necessary therefore to take account of the number of constituencies in which each party normally nominates candidates.

For Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael (and to some extent Labour), this means all 42, but in 1997 the PDs contested 27, and while the overall party average was 4.7 per cent, in the contested constituencies the figure was 7.3 per cent, which returned four seats.

In other words, the national average for small parties is not particularly relevant, and each should be viewed in a different context from the larger parties which contest all or most constituencies.

While the above is true, this known unknown aspect has provided cover to ignore what is the biggest story in politics since 2008.  The rise of The Others – more better understood as a rejection of established parties and processes – has dominated the last five years of Irish polling.

Greece, Spain, Labour UK and US presidential primaries have each given their own manifestation to this sentiment but mainstream Irish discussion has simply written it off as outside or ‘anti’ politics.  When pushed, it is simply dismissed as “anything from Clare Daly to Shane Ross”, itself a neat way to confine the whole of politics to Dáil seats, and examined no further.

Richard McAleavey over at Cunning Hired Knaves outlines the following

Seeing things this way leads to the highlighting of certain tendencies at the expense of others. For example, many people whose candidate or party of choice falls under the ‘Independents and Others’ grouping might complain, with justification, that their political priorities, the political content of what they are expressing by opting to vote for someone who falls under ‘Independents and Others’, is hidden from view.

As a consequence, when it comes to public discussion of what is going on, our perspective is focused on what developments mean for the established state of things, rather than what different kinds of political thinking are expressed in the different voting pattern.

Clearly ‘Independents and Others’ is a very bad place to end up if you’re going to talk about the different kinds of political thinking that might be expressed by people whose vote winds up in this grouping. But this is often where it both begins and ends, especially in mainstream discourse.

Such votes then appear as a ‘protest vote’ or a vote against the major parties, an act that is purely reactive rather than conscious political expressions of this or that kind.

This demonstrates how reporting of polls can obscure more than they reveal but more than that, polls are more than a reflection of a space in time when used so often, sometimes unconsciously, to undergird established power or agendas.

In this respect, polling, and certainly the way in which it is analysed, has become a means to buttress a system of power facing a crisis of legitimacy.

On the more deliberate side of things we can look a few examples.

Writing in 2010, Denis O’Brien alluded to something he called “phone polls of questionable provenance” at the Sunday Independent. These polls stopped when he won full control of the paper but until then had allegedly been conducted by a mercurial entity called ‘Quantum Research’. No one outside the Harris/Fanning editorial office ever found evidence that this company existed and it is widely regarded to be an in-house fabrication aimed a selling papers while pushing a myriad of editorial agendas.

Stephen Collins, political editor at the Irish Times has a habit of putting dubious spin on poll results to chime with government interests. Last year he led with claim that ‘nearly 80% will pay the controversial water charge’. The result in fact said nearly 60% ‘will never’ pay. Before that, in what rabble reported as “a manipulation of a survey question, a survey answer and finally the misreporting of both”,  Collins waved his magic over results to align them favourably with government intentions on Direct Provision. From that same dataset, he claimed that voters favour tax cuts over over public services. The results said nothing of the sort.

That latter simplistic question is a regular in polling and just as often dismissed when the wrong result comes in. Ahead of budget 2012 a RedC poll found, 88% agreed with higher taxes on earnings over 100k. The Sunday Business Post who commissioned the poll got around this inconvenience by simply not bothering to report their own findings.

Their political editor Pat Leahy tweeted the following last week and repeated the assertion on television after the RTÉ leader’s debate.

We do not know what ‘politicos’ move in Leahy’s circle but the scepticism should be no surprise given that politicians and media alike overwhelmingly push one preference.

A recent Sunday Business Post RedC article contained the following claim

Our pre-campaign polling over several months has identified the battle for floating voters as being between the desire for a stable economy versus a fairer society.

Did it really? A battle that no one would possibly dream up in their own?

The ‘versus’ there is interesting, is it not? Tacit admission that the world is presented to us as a false and straight decision between stability and equality. Class division erased, neatly excluding the inconvenience that ‘stability’ only ever means prosperity for some and that this ‘stable economy’ as defined is in direct conflict with a fair society.

One of our most recent uses of opinion polling has been Clare Bynre Live on RTÉ Television and the addition of a “bespoke smartphone panel”. Here, you dear viewer,  the voice of the public, are reduced to a statistic on screen, answering a loaded question that you were never asked.

Here’s our favourite question again!

RTÉ TV current affairs specialise in framing complex issues as a choice between two simplistic opposing views and this Clare Byrne Live polling is the latest in meaningless divide and conquer. Perhaps the only useful information to be gleaned so far was a poll last year that found more people supported water protesters breaking the law than had actually paid the charge. Not that anyone in studio noticed.

The big story of last year’s British election was the extent to which opinion polls failed to predict the eventual result. Labour, it turns out, didn’t stand a chance. Or so it seemed. Much of the polling beforehand took its cue from now evidentially dubious data and methods developed by Lord Ashcroft, the former Conservative Party deputy chairman who after seeing his loyalty go unrewarded has since taken to publishing details about the Prime Minister humping a dead pig.

This article is a must read for anyone even vaguely interested in politics. In it Shaun Lawson weaves an intriguing and entirely credible story of how error and potentially worse, shaped that Westminster election. Lawson asks how such an obviously self-interested individual like Ashcrost became the most influential figure in British opinion polling, a process he  keeps shrouded in secrecy, and wonders why more people are not asking the same.

Back home, opinion polling will continue to narrow political horizons while providing little enlightenment. Even when they do, what stares us in the face is often ignored. Take the question of abortion. A RedC poll conducted in the immediate days following news of Savita Halappanavar showed Fine Gael dropped six points from 34 to 28%.

This was perhaps one of the few real causal shifts in five years and to this day the party remains in the mid to high twenties. Curiously, many commentators dismiss this issue as a “distraction” and welcomed quote, “return to the real business” when legislation finally passed in 2013. That is, the real serious business that barely effects party support by a percent or two.

Polling on the issue itself shows those, so anti-choice inclined as to decide their vote on the issue are utterly marginal but, even as the election campaign continues,  politicians continue to hide. Evidence perhaps that candidates are keenly aware that opinion polls do little to capture the complexity of hard political reality.

So to conclude, I conducted my own poll of sorts by asking a number of people for their opinion on opinion polls

Dr Adrian Kavanagh, a geographer at NUIM and popular opinion analysist.

Polls effectively can drive news cycles for the period immediately after they are taken and a consistent trend across a number of polls will generally feed into how certain parties get portrayed by the media

 Dotski, who runs the excellent Irish Polling Report website

The simulacra of history in Ireland in 2016

By James Cussen

Cork (where else?), April 2011

(i)

It is a de rigueur claim, one which usually devolves into sniffy auto-exoticism, that Ireland as a polity is the most ‘fixated’, ‘obsessed’, or ‘rapt’ by the figure of the past. No other country, it is argued in all seriousness, has a relationship to its past as brimming with futile energy and such negative connotations tantamount to the parameters of an indulgent, self-inflicted, mental illness. “Impervious to psychoanalysis”, quoth Freud, “I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide” endeth Bertie Ahern, as last night riffed on by Enda Kenny.

Colonialist gas-lighting passes for historical discourse in Ireland: you are instructed to abjure the past, but take from it too this or that false or tendentious fragment, always in isolation from the whole context, to cement the overall confidence trick.

‘Civil war politics’ is the current cliché contorted out of all meaning (as much as ‘Trotskyite’) in the general election campaign; framed as something old, weather-beaten and above all primitive which we must strive to forget, or transcend. So much the better to turn the corner, or whatever metaphor of 80 proof whig historiography you’re having yourself.

It is a boast, delivered with chest-thumping braggadocio, that the very detail of the record, not only doesn’t matter at all, but must be obliterated from sight as an obstacle to ‘political maturity’, and ‘growth’. The latter I am undecided as to whether is psychosexual or psycho-fiscal, or some alloy of both, after the stylings of RTE’s nightly forays into Strength Through Joy, Operation Transformation.

Given that the Irish civil war was as much a bifurcation along left/right axes of political economy (and not partition as avid repeat viewers of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins seem to believe) this should all give us some pause for extreme suspicion.

Ireland’s predicament really would be tragic if it was not so clearly explicable by the agency of her post-independence bourgeoisie (politicians included), as evinced in their eagerness to evade a clear-minded account of rights and wrongs over the last century. As with denazification on the continent, a persistent civic myth held to be true supposes that Ireland was decolonised after 1922.

James Connolly famously feared we would merely run a new flag up the mast and daub the post-boxes green in a continuation of Anglo-American capitalism with native managers. Who could confound him from our vantage point in 2016? It is not as if we want for a century in which to have proved him wrong, and all we have to show his ghost now is Pat Rabbitte.

Perhaps here I am bidden to concede something singular, if still not unique, to Ireland. Is there another (ex-?) colonial context where quite as much cap-doffing, and special-pleading for empire’s constabulary and compradors, carries on so breathlessly, and, furthermore, with dissent from this farce being regularly pathologised as ‘lunatic’ and ‘fringe’?

Moreover, with what unfounded confidence, and entirely unaccomplished reading, does someone draw equivalence between the violence of the colonised and the violence of the coloniser? It is contemptible ignorance to so smugly brandish the Oxford English Dictionary for a definition of violence, so that capitalist control of the means of production can wipe the blood clean from its lapels and shoes. The Great Famine of 1845-49 then becomes an ‘accident’, and the bawdy peasants simply weren’t helping themselves.

Sainted Brian Lenihan Jr. would have

been apt to heckle in the House of Commons, after the winter of 1846, that ‘everyone partied’. Some had lazy beds in Bulgaria. The political science faculty would have wondered what Grattan’s parliament would have done, if it had been reformed.

Newspaper Columnism in Ireland (I have in mind the 1968 diagnosis of Ulrike Meinhof here), if transposed to other contexts of blatant imperial rapine and subjugation, would likewise produce comically perverse r

esults. We might be treated to an Amerindian Eoghan Harris valorising Hernan Cortés because the Aztec religion carried on human sacrifice, for example. And wasn’t there the boon of learning Spanish through prayer and brutalisation? Vote for the encomiendas parties on 26th of February – for stability.

The RIC or DMP constable ekes out a radioactive half-life in the head of every Irishman and Irishwoman who absorbs post-colonial cues and signifiers from a wider aether of prattle about ‘civic engagement’, aforementioned ‘political maturity’ and fucking Seanad Reform. Self-abnegation in Ireland really seems to surpass almost all other places the British have trod their jackboot. It is as if a spectral Helga is still moored out on the Liffey, the anti-Battleship Potemkin if you will; crewed by eldritch Irish sailors so obtuse that they settle for shooting the lad who suggests the mutiny over, and over, and over again.

You just know the loci of this st

uff too: The Marian Finucane Show, or The Week in Politics on RTE; Inside Politics at the Irish Times; screeds in the letters pages bearing addresses south of the river; any of Stephen Collins’, or Noel Whelan’s, or John Bruton’s, or Terry Prone’s incantations of ‘softly, softly, sociopathy’ across a b

asket of broadsheet newspapers; Hugh O’Connell’s Young Fine Gael cumann of one over at Journal.ie; the clown car of the entire writing staff (yes, Kerrigan too) of the Irish/Sunday Independent. I could be worn out from going on, and already am.

On this very point, cop humour is not a sectional interest as even still in the imperial core of Britain, but almost a popular past-time in Ireland, on which disgusting fortunes of social capital have been accrued. Panti

Bliss, The Rubber Bandits, Niall Breslin – all have smacked youthful lipstick on the pig at some stage or other to mutual benefit: inoculating ‘the guard’ from scrutiny, and mediating his presence into that of non-threatening ‘ally’. He’s a sound lad. He has a laugh, while doing a tough job, and yet you call yourself a socialist. The only bent copper an Irish liberal foresees was a member of The Village People.

Nobody’s been reading any Engels, evidently. His early visits to Dublin, in the 1830s, were a warning to him of impending milit

arisation of the public square (‘the plague of blue locusts’) that had yet to been seen even in England itself. Fitting really, that affection persists as strongly as it does for the filth, where the modern police state truly took seed all that time ago.

A recent Journal.ie headline spluttered about RTE’s flagship 1916 drama series, Rebellion, in its house-style of excessive familiarity, as follows: “Was an unarmed policeman REALLY shot dead at Dublin Castle during the Easter rising?” Which supposes this is almost a live moral quandary unlike actual British rule itself. In Ireland. Right now.

Consciousness is really only at its usual nadir amongst the petit bourgeoisie. I am describing nothing whatsoever of novelty. On the occasion of the Luas strike last week, one inconvenienced commuter thus exclaimed to the Irish Times that Jim Larkin (yes, really) wouldn’t support a tram stoppage

. Jim Larkin would have kicked him up the arse in 1913 for saying the exact same thing in a presumably achronic formula of words.

The cause celébre here though might be failed property developer Tom D’Arcy (neé Fianna Fáil) who, on RTE television in 2014, claimed of ‘Constant (sic) Markiewicz’ that ‘he (!) died in that park over there’, which was apparently of some utterly abstruse significance to his property portfolio being auctioned off by liquidators.

(ii)

This general reproduction of colonial ideology in Ireland, abetted by (in fact) an exceptional dearth of historical knowledge, has lately segued into blatant recuperation of the ‘legacy’ of empire (cf. the neutralising use of ‘heritage’ in the United States about the Confederacy, passim) as a neat dichotomy of ‘two tri

bes’, or two sets of equally valid lived/historical experience that are putatively capable of ‘reconciliation’. Mutual exclusivity; right and wrong, where- and why-fore: get thee all behind me, because the skipper of ‘Ireland Inc.’ has this greasy till to ring up for green jerseys.

A colleague of mine, Niamh Puirseil remarked recently that the idiom of this imperialist revisionism cleaves heavily to words such as ‘forget’ and ‘forgotten’ – but which are used, in this case, to signal that the participation of Irishmen in the army of the British empire during the First World War ‘deserves’ memorialisation which is overdue.

Funny what we’re urged not to forget, isn’t it? Irish soldiers of the Indian Mutiny, who went AWOL in Punjab the year after the Amritsar massacre; or conscientious objectors; or those court-martialled and shot for shellshock, will likely not enjoy the uncritical genuflection which other, more willing, pawn sacrifices on the Western Front receive. An RTE camera crew certainly won’t be at any event held for them, when they would be quite unlikely to catch a scion of the British royal family passing wind while officiating, so as to parse that for geopolitical significance.

It is probably too mild to say the rank servility of it all is a betrayal of the wretched of the earth: those who glimpsed the revolution in Ireland (1916-21), the first overseas English colony, as a beacon of hope in the cause of their respective emancipations. The turning point of the course of Irish independence, after all, was not as much the execution of the rising’s leaders by military tribunals, in May 1916, but moreso the rejection of press-ganging and brow-beating into imperialist wars at the general election of November 1918. Home Rule was discerned then, unlike now, as a shabby self-determination which was no brake on the projection of British power with Irish (and other) bodies.

Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi Minh both are reputed to have studied guerrilla warfare as practiced in Ireland. One of the first countries to recognise the Irish Republic when proclaimed (again) in 1919, at all, was the Soviet Union (our government proved tardy in returning that favour). Soviet textbooks in the 1930s over-egged the pudding considerably in characterising the 1916 Easter Rising as a ‘Red Week’ (even if this was being playful with contemporary right-wing reaction to the event) but the esteem in which the Rising was held abroad should be obvious.

Lenin was not going to chastise Pearse for taking a German consignment of munitions, either. Anyone getting a nosebleed from harping on the latter point is guaranteed to be seen elsewhere complaining that socialists (see also: refugees, water protestors, etc.) own smartphones, and you really need to tell your boyfriend to just stop.

Why is this specific aspect, of Ireland’s significance to global anti-imperialism, not the centrepiece of riotous public celebrations this year? The rich historical ironies that could be teased out are either too much strong beer for our establishment or (just as likely) simply elude them altogether; such as how Lord Mountbatten’s assassination in Sligo, in 1979, owed to the partition of a country which had been the blueprint for his own, of India and Pakistan, as the last Viceroy of the British Raj, in 1947.

Irish partition was not any less instructive for British colonial experimentation everywhere else; from South Africa’s Bantustans, to the sundering of the Palestinian Mandate in 1948. Both Afrikaner and Zionist aspired to what ‘the Ulsterman’ had achieved here, about an hour from Dublin by car: a resilient outpost of white supremacy amidst a dense thicket of ‘savagery’ and ‘superstition’. Enoch Powell retreating in political disgrace to Northern Ireland in the 1960s was scarcely a coincidence either.

Consider too by far the most resonant line of the 1916 proclamation to this day; that which pledges ‘cherish(-ing) all the children of the nation equally’. What neuters this passage’s original potency, in nearly all contexts in which it is deployed now, is the telling omission of its crucial subordinate clause ‘, oblivious to the differences carefully fostered by an alien government’, and the reference to Ireland as a motherland, ‘summons her children to her flag’, which preceded it.

This was an encapsulation of anti-sectarian ambition, at least, on the part of the proclamation’s signatories. It was clearly conscious that the dynamic of British rule in Ireland was that of Caesarist ‘divide and conquer’; and is a faint allusion to the ethnic cleansing and plantation of the interior of the island in the 17th century too.

This might chime with us for all kinds of reasons; such as how public and private sector worker are pitted against each other in a zero-sum game foisted on us regularly by parasitic, yellowpack media concerns owned outright by oligarchs. Or we might be minded of dregs of humanity such as Colm Keaveney TD, (Labour, then Fianna Fáil, but what’s the difference) who asked transgender patients awaiting sex reassignment surgery to cancel their planned operations so mooted ‘sick children’ could be seen first.

You get the idea. Hierarchies of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, by merely being mapped out, could function as an adequate social history of Ireland.

The oft misquoted passage could also prompt us to straightforwardly contemplate the partition of Ireland; something which, as I have said already, had tangible implications for the third world afterwards. As lately as 2002, the Bush White House found the legal framework for its Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib torture compounds, and global network of extraordinary rendition ‘black-sites’, in the precedent of Ireland v. United Kingdom (1977) at the European Court of Human Rights.

This is the so-called ‘Hooded Men’ case about the brazen evil of the British security service interrogators and gaolers in Northern Ireland, and which you’ve probably already seen re-enacted in the Abu Gharib photographs. Britain’s expert witnesses lied on the stand during the original trial of the facts, and now the case has just been listed for re-hearing this year; only in light of documents unsealed under the thirty-year rule.

Really, I have never been so charmed by any contention as that Ireland should be seen as an incubator in which imperialist crimes and libels are hatched to check for feasibility of their wider deployment. The evidence frequently conforms to this assessment, from the 1180s onwards.

However, it is sadly indicative of the wider malaise that, instead, ‘cherish all the children’ has been run down into a thought-terminating cliché used incessantly by the charity and NGO sector in Ireland. It is most often seen in the wild in pleas for more resources to stop up gaps in social goods the Irish state is too happy to shirk from providing, per mainline neoliberalism.

The witless usually take the line to be a reference to literal children. Others, by far more insidious, seem to take it to mean ‘foetuses’. The phrase is by now an heuristic with a high confidence interval for when someone is talking absolute shite, which should give it staying power right out to 2116, when Ireland is taken back by the sea.

(iii)

So it really is with eminent predictability, and no surprise, that the outgoing government’s overall approach has been to convene a ‘decade of commemorations’ that notionally runs from 2012 to 2022, the prelude to which had been the first (and hopefully last) state visit of Brenda Windsor to Ireland in 2011. An event about which there was so much gushing, we needed flood defences in Cork.

‘Commemoration’ is, by intention, inoffensive and, in the government’s own words, ‘inclusive’. If you can imagine the patent absurdity of the same Soviet victory parade of 24th June 1945, except that Nazi banners weren’t hurled to the ground and instead respectfully flown at jaunty half-mast before being returned to their cases, then you get some of the picture. Perhaps General von Paulus of the encircled Sixth Army could have doffed his cap to Stalin on Red Square, for TASS to later remark what a classy gesture it was.

Arlene Foster, the new leader of the DUP, Northern Ireland’s obstreperous tribute act to the South African National Party, has already spurned all overtures to attend ‘commemorations’ of the 1916 rising planned by the outgoing government. This, despite the plainly useless minister whose brief it is, Heather Humphreys, pledging fun, Tayto, Club rock-shandy and (presumably orange) face-paint for all the family.

Foster has a point (at least of consistency). She is assured of her convictions. She is after all an Ulster Unionist: half-hearted white nationalists are almost a paradox. She has previously referred to the 1916 rising as a ‘rebellion’, encoding it in language of ‘order and anarchy’ redolent of, say, the French deep state’s description of fighting the Algerian war of independence as its ‘policing action’. And that might tell you nigh-on everything too about how RTE chose to name its flagship drama about the events of 1916.

In southern Ireland, meanwhile, ideological confusion simply reigns. Whatever we need to ‘move beyond’, it is not the past itself, but rather the outlandish images of it that are carelessly crafted to serve the journeyman niedrigpolitik of the southern establishment. They care only for Northern Ireland to raid for cheap rhetorical ploys, and a peanut gallery of balaclavas and Kalashnikovs with which to scare mythical ‘middle Ireland’ (apparently it’s like Ukraine: the kulaks stretch for miles) about those ‘terrorists’ in Sinn Féin staging, um, an electoral insurgency. If Northern Ireland did not exist, it might be necessary for them to invent it.

It’s all too much like the death throes of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918, facing down the Sinn Féin of that time from which all the current political parties (except the eponymous) are now loathe to admit their descent.

The ensuing ‘good’ IRA/ ‘bad’ IRA problematique has previously enjoyed such famous exponents as Dara O’Bríain, playing plummy ‘safe’ Irishman to a British audience; and mad-as-a-box-of-frogs country squire (and erstwhile Fianna Fáil brains-trust) Martin Mansergh. As this shibboleth is told, the ‘old’, a.k.a. ‘good’, IRA achieved (nominal) freedom from the British empire by force of arms. Sometime afterwards, between 1969 and 1970, petrine succession was ruptured in unspecified circumstances when the ‘bad’, i.e. Provisional, IRA took up arms instead to, eh … get out from under the cosh of the British empire.

One threatens to miss the point asking after the finer subtleties (the ‘minutiae’ to others) if so much as basic narrative coherence has already been jettisoned: such as whom were members of a certain proscribed organisation the Irish state interned throughout the Second World War; or what portent exactly to attach to that kaleidoscope of splinter IRA factions after the first split in 1970. Don’t accept less than a Daily Edge quizicle telling you that you’re Samantha from Sex and The City and a member of the INLA.

Meanwhile, the government has dispatched the Irish army (huist, ‘Defence Forces’) to every primary school in the country with a copy of the 1916 proclamation and a folded tricolour. This, John A Murphy informed us in December, is to act as a demonstration of ‘the legitimacy of the state’. Quite.

History can never be value-free, yet even most Irish historians themselves have failed in this duty and fallen into cognitive dead-zones about the centenary’s obvious political content. It fell to President Higgins to wonder aloud, just before the election was called (30th January) who was writing the story of the oppressed, and not that of the oppressor, or the oppressor’s lackeys:

Certainly it hasn’t been self-appointed conscience of liberal Ireland, and primus inter pares of the advisory panel to the state’s commemorations, historian Diarmaid Ferriter. He can only find time to wish British-style internment on people who wear tracksuits and others he vaguely charges with ‘abuse (of) the past’.

That he is far from the worst offender either gives some hint of the grim prevailing conditions. Really sophomoric historical analysis, being either barely disguised Redmondite propaganda clinging to impossible counter-factuals, or unreconstructed platitudes riffing off of Seamus Heaney poetry, has predominated. It isn’t so much tumbling out of the woodwork as stripping the paint off it, with fumes from ordure.

There are however, promising signs of a popular reclamation of history from the gatekeepers that have failed us in academia no less than in politics. Witness recent protests to save Moore Street from becoming a shopping centre across the road from another shopping centre.

Still though, my favourite remains Enda Kenny being called a ‘cunt’ by a member of the public inside the GPO (while water protesters banged on the windows outside), when the commemorations programme was officially launched there back in 2014. There’s hope for the republic yet.

Image – Fiona Hanley

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In the dying days of the Fianna Fáil/Green executive, John Gormley received the following text from Mary Harney. “Your worst day in government is better than your best day in opposition”, were the words of comfort from his ministerial colleague.

This attitude is reminiscent of a recent interview with Alan “power is a drug” Kelly but also underlines a wider perception that warps Irish politics.

A familiar refrain throughout the last five years and indeed every other election cycle is the emphasis on stable government. All sorts doom is promised should voters neglect to return the right sort of people in sufficient numbers.

Think responsibly. Vote with your head not your with heart.

Accept the reality.

Ministers like Brendan Howlin for example are brimming with dire and largely false warnings about the turmoil and chaos that has befallen our neighbours in the Mediterranean. Germany, that paradigm of responsibility and prudence is currently ruled by a grand coalition. Stability is found one way or another.

It is sort of laughable, really. That the fabric of order and civilisation hangs in the balance if we do not elect dozens and dozens of silent, powerless backbenchers.

Following the last election in 2011, Fianna Fáil were shell shocked. For at least two years and speaking from experience, they took every opportunity to remind us that the new government had a near unprecedented majority and could act however they wished. How the coalition used and abused that power should impress on you the reality of “stable government”.

It is a reflection of just how much contempt parliament and real democracy is held that so little importance and attention is attached to opposition. Party politics treats the opposite benches as waiting room or punishment. There can be no pride or dedication in a job you can’t wait to get out of.

The claim that opposition is powerless should ring alarm bells though. No half-truth is repeated this often without serving existing power, in this case inculcating an all too convenient sense of helplessness. You are much quicker to resign yourself when told there is not much you can do.

As it turned out, we were fortunate that the 31st Dáil was something of a golden term for opposition politics. A dozen or so deputies excelled in holding not just government but the state itself to account. It is no coincidence that much of the established norms were flouted by new and independent TDs.

For most of the previous five years, Clare Daly, an independent socialist, succeeded in keeping abortion on the mainstream Irish political agenda. That was remarkable given the dread this issue strikes into the grey and male hearts of Leinster House.

Catherine Murphy, another independent woman, plunged parliament, High Court, media and one of the world’s richest men into crisis. She deserves credit alone for exposing Finance Minister Michael Noonan, who until then had been treated as some sort of infallible buddha-like figure.

Like Muprhy, Mick Wallace has excavated the shallow grave of our toxic banking legacy exposing as yet unresolved mysteries in NAMA. Wallace, Ming Flanagan, Joan Collins and Daly took on perhaps the country’s most well protected institution, An Garda Siochana, and won no small victories. Months banging on the door before the penalty points and all manner of garda malfeasance began to pour out.

These are just a few examples but these are events that dominated the 31st Dáil and news cycle. A handful of opposition TDs with no party support and even fewer friends in high places succeeded in holding a mirror to how this society really operates. None of this could have been accomplished without their election in 2011. At key moments, it was their standing and powers as members of Dáil Éireann that allowed them to accomplish the work.

Fianna Fáil were adrift with little interest in rocking a boat they themselves have built. They provided absolutely no challenge apart from occasional postures intent on benefiting only themselves.

Sinn Féin have so far proved not quite the threat newspapers would you believe and were largely ineffective, given the potential. Several deputies preformed well and on a fairly consistent basis but in truth, there are few victories to show for five years.

They are considerably hamstrung by widespread hostility and their own past but when you think about that past, it is curious that the initiative required for bank robberies, jail breaks, arms smuggling and general ingenuity of 30 year guerilla warfare has not translated to the mundane requirements of parliamentary politics. The same appetite and creativity is lacking. While they may be gobbling up votes, their impact in holding government to account has been minimal and you get the sense they have yet to really apply themselves in that regard.

Perhaps the biggest opposition flop has been Shane Ross. Can anyone name a single contribution of worth in five years? Mattie McGrath put in a strong performance as a constant thorn in the side of Phil Hogan. Stephen Donnelly established a national profile but Ross? A few blustery speech is all, from the man who threatened to shake up Irish politics and now aims to prop up the next government.

Politicians and journalists are always quick to belittle the opposition as having little to contribute. This graph from Catherine Murphy shows 62% of all Private Members Bills from 1960-2016 were initiated in 31st Dáil. To my memory only two motions were accepted by government.

Part of this is accounted by changes in procedure introduced in the last Dáil but it is no small fact that this burst of non-executive parliamentary activity occurred when the oppositions was not dominated by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Labour.

Politicians and journalists are also quick to belittle the opposition as being against everything. This is a caricature but even if it was not, their much to be against. We should attach more importance to opposition, dissent and accountability. The accusation directed at Fianna Fáil in opposition is that they caused the problems while it power. The accusation directed at government is that they did little to stop it while in opposition.

The depths used by Fine Gael and Labour to deflect opposition criticism have been mind bindingly cynical however, an effective and principled oppositions will make these transparent evasions more difficult in future.

Very often the most thoughtful and righteous speeches of the 31st Dáil were delivered by an opposition politician. Very often it was the opposition who spoke for Irish society at large or those denied a voice. Very often it was an opposition politician speaking for us while the government scattered into hiding.

So think carefully on Friday. Despite parliament being denigrated by those within and outside, all seats on both sides of Dáil Éireann matter and the next term will look very different with parties breaking out of the Technical Group, hitting that magic number seven to gain parliamentary rights for themselves.

The next government will do little to change the rot that permeates. They know their job is to uphold it.  A committed and vibrant opposition, buttressed by the work each of us can do outside, is far more valuable if we are to build our own brand of stability.

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Most of the population (91.4%) has a direct income of under €70,000 per year, and more than half (60%) under €30,000 (NERI). It is for these people that any notion of a recovery is a fabrication.

Ireland has become more unequal after the crash of 2008, and most of the population was sacrificed to neoliberalism. None more so than young and educated Irish people who left the country in droves.

For those left behind, it is sink or swim.

1.3 million people in Ireland are experiencing deprivation, an increase of 215,000 since this Government came to office in 2011. This is a staggering 30% of the population.

Three quarters of a million are in poverty. 230,000 of them Children. The homeless crisis is getting uncontrollable as more and more families are finding themselves without a roof:

While these numbers are for Dublin, the scenario is the same all over the country. The number of Homeless people in Cork has tripled since 2011.

The government has abdicated its responsibilities and removed itself from protecting the most at risk in society. Enda Kenny blamed most of the current lack of Social Housing on Fianna Fail but they were able to provide funding to local authorities to build thousands of units. The sharp decline in provision becomes apparent from when the coalition took office in 2011, to a near complete halt in 2015, at a time it has never been so needed.

Safety nets were removed in the name of austerity, and laissez-faire economics were left unsupervised in the name of free-market ideology. A double sentence with catastrophic consequences.

For example repossession orders are up 80pc:

And we hear that “vulture funds are preparing to pull the trigger on hundreds of business foreclosures and property receiverships in the aftermath of the election”

This is certainly consistent with news in late 2015 that the Government had ordered county registrars to lay off on evictions until after the election, for fear of a voter backlash.

Funds could have been made available but were not. And this was set as policy. The coalition sees more urgency in implementing the Troika’s demands for a water utility than servicing an ailing health system, even as the trolley crisis heightened.

It sees more urgency in letting NAMA sell hundreds of apartments half-price to equity funds than funding Social Housing, even in the worst housing crisis the country has seen.

It recently sold 13,000 Irish families mortgages in arrears to vultures at knocked-down prices and even blocked them from bidding on their own mortgages, what TD Stephen Donnelly qualified as “an outrageous act of vandalism”

The symptoms of these actions are visible all over housing, health, education and infrastructure, where the level of public investment in 2013 was the lowest in 50 years.

For the period 2016–2020, we’re still spending only half of what we should be doing, and once again this is set as policy.

Rory Hearne highlighted the following: “The government appears intent to pursue a neo-liberal model that is reliant on and encourages private commercial investment in public services and infrastructure through Public Private Partnerships”

Most commentators also failed to challenge the opportunist assertion that Fine Gael had spearheaded the economic recovery. For the former head of IMF’s mission to Ireland, it had nothing to do with the Government. And Joseph Stieglitz, Nobel Prize-winning Economist, observed that “in the years since the financial crisis hit in 2008 Ireland had, overall, low or no growth”

Cutting the USC will only make matters worse. Much worse. But given everything we’ve seen so far, hardly surprising. Especially as it is set to benefit high earners the most:

Over 46 percent of USC revenue comes from those earning €70,000 or above, or the 8.6 per cent of the population highlighted in the first table, those who felt the recovery. Even conservative IBEC is bewildered by the move:

But as auction politics go, it was one of the last items that could be offered to voters, even if 90% of them won’t benefit a lot from it. But someone on 200,000+ would get a €16,000 annual tax cut.

Another illustration of how well this group is doing comes in the the number of millionaires. It increased from 16,000 in 2008 to 90,000 in 2015. That’s a staggering 462 per cent increase.

Perhaps one of the biggest failures of this campaign was to clarify all of this for the electorate. The media was too busy scaring the shit out of everyone and warning us all of impeding doom with Sinn Fein.

Fine Gael wants another term for all the wrong reasons. To finish dismantling Irish Society bit by bit and avoid any scrutiny on how it came about doing it. (Banking inquiry, the run on the Pension Fund, NAMA, IBRC & Siteserv inquiries etc etc)

Fianna Fail has no vision. It simply wants the power back for power’s sake.
Put the two together and there will be nothing left.

You have a choice. Be with the 10pc and dismantle public services.
Or be with the rest of society.

Header image by Jim Sheridan

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Today I had planned to publish two posts on Fine Gael and the Labour Party.

A comprehensive account of their time in government. Both articles had been at least a year in the making, extensive notes and several drafts written but for some reason I couldn’t quite find the words to fully reflect what has occurred since 2011.

A wall kept coming down. What can you say, really? How do you quantify a legacy like that. In truth, there is not much more I can tell you. We have all seen enough without me recounting the nightmare here.

Instead, I want to focus on two issues that throughout everything have been by far the lowest points for me since 2011. You can take your own pick, in the full spectrum from distant bank billions to water meters outside your front door but for me, nothing compares to the treatment of the women who fight for justice on symphysiotomy and Magdalene Laundries.

You will find no clearer example of how brute uncaring force, casually demeaning people over decades is hardwired into the DNA of this state. The cold indignity visited upon these women is multi layered.

The complicity and indifference that fuelled these crimes is not confined to the past but persists in the decisions we make in the ballot box today.

I asked Claire McGettrick of Justice For Magdalenes and Marie O’Connor from Survivors of Symphysiotomy for their story today in 2016. You have read enough rubbish throughout this election so please take one minute to read something important.

Whatever rationalisation and reasons you may have today. Just remember that this is the Ireland Fine Gael, the Labour Party and maybe even you are prepared to stand over.

Justice For Magdalenes

On 19th February, we marked the third anniversary of Enda Kenny’s emotional apology to Magdalene survivors. When video clips are played, it is the footage from 19th February that is usually shown. On 5th February however, when the McAleese Report was published, the Taoiseach was not nearly as tearful. Refusing to apologise, he alleged that because of the McAleese Report, ‘the truth and reality’ had been ‘uncovered and laid out for everyone to read and to understand’.

After 5th February 2013, Enda Kenny met with a number of Magdalene survivors. At the same time, he came under immense public criticism for his performance on the day the report was released. Eventually on 19th February the historic apology followed and thereafter, there was little interest – from media or otherwise (Conall O’Fátharta is a notable exception) – in anything other than the ‘good news story’ that was the apology.

Are we to believe that the Taoiseach’s tearful apology was as a result of a ‘road to Damascus’ moment, or was it a political decision, designed to make the Magdalene problem go away? The experiences of survivors in contact with our organisation since the apology would suggest that unfortunately, it was the latter.

In June 2013, Mr Justice Quirke published The Magdalen Commission Report and while the financial element of the ex gratia scheme fell far short of what survivors deserve, we nonetheless welcomed it, in recognition of the other recommended benefits and services, particularly the establishment of a Dedicated Unit and the provision of an enhanced medical card which would provide access to ‘the full range of services currently enjoyed’ by HAA Card holders.  We were pleased when the government announced that it would accept all of Judge Quirke’s recommendations.

A month previous to the publication of the Quirke Report, on 22nd May 2013, Felice Gaer, Rapporteur for Follow-up on Concluding Observations at the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) wrote to the Irish State as part of the follow-up process on UNCAT’s recommendations in 2011. In this letter, the Rapporteur noted that the McAleese inquiry ‘lacked many elements of a prompt, independent and thorough investigation, as recommended by the Committee [Against Torture] in its Concluding Observations’.  The letter went on to ask the Irish State whether it ‘intends to set up an inquiry body that is independent, with definite terms of reference, and statutory powers to compel evidence, and retain evidence obtained from relevant religious bodies’.

On 8th August 2013, just months after the apology, the Irish State responded to UNCAT, asserting that ‘[n]o factual evidence to support allegations of systematic torture or ill treatment of a criminal nature in these institutions was found’ by the McAleese Committee and ‘in light of facts uncovered by the McAleese Committee and in the absence of any credible evidence of systematic torture or criminal abuse being committed in the Magdalene Laundries, the Irish Government does not propose to set up a specific Magdalen inquiry body’.

It is now three years since the apology, and the trust of Magdalene survivors has been seriously undermined, as the government has tried to cut corner after corner on its implementation of the ex gratia scheme. Survivors are still awaiting the establishment of a Dedicated Unit, a measure that should have been put in place immediately and not after the women have had to navigate the Ex Gratia Scheme alone. Some survivors have difficulty in proving lengths of stay because of the religious orders’ poor record keeping, yet incredibly, the government affords greater weight to the religious orders’ contentions than survivor testimony.

The healthcare provisions as outlined in the RWRCI Guide do not provide Magdalene survivors with the same range of drugs and services made available to HAA cardholders. The 512 women who have signed up to the Magdalene scheme thus far have waived their right to take legal action against the State in the expectation that they will receive the full range of benefits and services recommended by Mr Justice Quirke and accepted in full by the government.

In July 2015, six months after JFMR called on the HSE to provide survivors with a comprehensive guide to their entitlements under the scheme, the HSE sent survivors a five-page document. The Guide to Health Services under the Redress for Women Resident in Certain Institutions Act 2015, is an insult when compared to the comprehensive 48-page guide provided to HAA cardholders.

Magdalene survivors living overseas remain low on the list of government priorities.  In this regard the government has repeatedly said it is ‘examining the practical arrangements’ for the provision of health services to women living abroad, however no timeframe has been given as to when this ‘administrative process’ will be in place. The needs of elderly survivors who are part of our Diaspora appear to have dropped off the State’s agenda.  This is particularly the case for survivors based outside of Ireland and the UK.

Earlier this week a vulnerable Magdalene survivor phoned to say she had spent 17 hours on a drip in a chair in a crowded A&E.  This same woman shed tears of happiness in the Dáil on the night of the apology. She phoned me the next day, concerned about the Taoiseach – ‘the poor man was very upset’ she said. Three years later however, she feels completely hoodwinked.

She read Appendix G of Judge Quirke’s report and signed away her right to sue the State based on the legitimate expectation that she would receive a comprehensive healthcare suite.  She certainly expected better than 17 hours in A&E.  This woman has lived a hard life and the pain she has endured seems like it’s almost too much for one person to bear. Her lump sum payment is gone – she had debts to clear and had family to look after. But this woman is a fighter; again and again she picks herself up and keeps going.

And yet she keeps asking me when it will be over. Her life has been a constant struggle, but the State apology represented hope. She thought the fight would be over on 19th February 2013 – I haven’t the heart to tell her that the fight is nowhere near over, and that the State itself will likely resist her every step of the way.

And Survivors of Symphysiotomy

This Government has done everything in its power to deny this abuse and protect the perpetrators. In 2013, invoking unspecified constitutional difficulties, the Government withdrew its support for a Private Members’ Bill designed to facilitate survivors’ access to the courts, thereby shielding doctors, hospitals––and the State itself––from civil actions for personal injuries.

Two years previously, the Government commissioned a whitewash report, publishing it in 2014 on the eve of SoS’s appearance before the UN Human Rights Committee. The UN found that the practice of symphysiotomy constituted torture and involuntary medical experimentation. Flouting the recommendations of that Committee, viz., an independent and thorough inquiry, prosecution and punishment of the perpetrators, and fair and adequate compensation, the Government commissioned a whitewash report, protected the perpetrators, and offered compensation via its no blame scheme.

The Government has always maintained the lie, both at home and abroad, including at the UN, that the practice of symphysiotomy was acceptable.

‘Redress’ was a tactic, a scheme that could be fashioned into a shield for wrongdoers, and a strategy designed to avert the litigation that so many survivors had embarked upon. The Government’s no blame payment scheme offered derisory levels of compensation while forcing victims to sign a waiver indemnifying their abusers, a waiver that, unlike the Magdalenes’, protected private entities, such as religious congregations.

However, the European Court of Human Rights confirmed that ex gratia redress without an admission of State liability could not be considered an effective remedy for victims of human rights abuses.

The final strand in the Government’s strategy emerged early in 2015, when it became apparent in the High Court that the State was now set on fighting survivors tooth and nail, using its vast resources to try to defeat any woman who had the temerity to refuse the Government’s minimalistic compensation and pursue legal actions against her abusers.

The same people today are making decisions. Dr Philip Crowley, today head of quality and safety in the HSE, is a former assistant Chief Medical Officer at the DoH. In 2010, responding to a request for an independent inquiry from SoS, he effectively directed members to the IOG (Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists), the body whose members or some of them had carried out these abuses. The IOG has effectively been charged by successive governments to deal with with symphysiotomy since 2001 (when Fianna Fail was in power).

Had the Catholic Church been entrusted with investigations into clerical abuse, there would have been an outcry. The outgoing Government has never been charged with this human rights scandal, except by the UN.

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For the first podcast I am joined by Richard McAleavey, one of the country’s best political writers and author of the Cunning Hired Knaves blog.

Music from Limerick HipHop trio Rusangano Family. The track ‘Heathrow’ is a characteristically raucous ride through migration. Check them out live as soon as you get the chance.

And award winning poet and activist Sarah Clancy reads ‘Cherishing’.

This was recorded by modest means but I hope to have everything sounding a bit more professional in the coming weeks. Stream or download below

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Climate change and its solutions have long been the preserve of scientists, more recently economists and always – the generation in power. Politicians pore over documents in negotiations, inner cogs working to explore how close they can swing to disaster without harming their reputation or the concerns of vested interests.

These politicians must act ‘for our children, our grandchildren’. Obama states that our elected representatives are of “the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it”. Nelson Mandela’s quote is widely shared ‘sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great; you can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom’. Young people will be protected, coddled, bowed to the concerns and priorities of an older generation. Understand that in being told that the future is ours there is also a warning that the present is not.

There are many conflicting portrayals of mysterious ‘millennials’, all of them patronising. Merely by virtue of the fact that a person may be between 0 to 35 years old they can be selfish, entitled or idealistic dreamers that refuse to work for the world’s worst corporations. As a young woman I am everywhere and nowhere at the same time, in every magazine, on every billboard – and yet never in the Dáil or a public representative. Young people are emblems of dynamism and entrepreneurship, or wasters and binge-drinkers – embodying a threat all the larger for the underlying sense of post-boom guilt. Small towns and villages grow empty and elderly, our cities exhausted.

Not only have we inherited a rotten economic system with an austerity that will undermine our security and healthy as a society for decades to come, we have inherited a market view that has undermined our very means of subsistence.  Climate justice not only insists on just contributions to action on climate between nations, but within them. In the last 25 years, inequality and carbon emissions have dramatically increased in tandem. The challenge is not only to decouple emissions from economic growth, but to question why we allow growth to be decoupled from wider prosperity.

In 2050, 95% of Ireland current carbon emissions will have to be cut.

All things going well, this means homes and business will be insulated to reduce energy use and fuel poverty, any excess will be 100% renewable energy developed in tandem with communities and co-ops. Town and country planning will allow quick, safe and clean transport to and from work. Work will include clean-tech, renewable energy, Climate Smart agriculture/agroecology and co-operatives. Natural resources will be owned in common, disease and carbon intensive farming practices will become local, clean and devolved to the expertise and control of farmers working in partnership with their environment. 2050 then will be the culmination of a whole-scale transition to a post-carbon economy.

At a mere 61 years of age I will have lived through the Great Industrial Revolution – or indeed, its reversal. All things going wrong, I will live in a securitised state where EU navy boats patrol the shores to cut off refugees fleeing scorched or sinking states; privatised water resources poisoned as the land is bored and bled for natural gas.

However, there is little point in scaremongering without offering a credible, confident alternative to a market economy that has caused unimaginable harm to people and planet.  Climate change has no true clear enemies, though corporations like ExxonMobil and Volkswagen that lobby and lie are more culpable than others. We are all involved in, and part of, a structural construct that has adapted our way of thinking to consumption and exploitation without consequences. A whole-scale reorientation of society to our core values of care and sustainability requires co-operation, inclusion and recognition that everyone’s contribution is valuable in building this new just ideology to suit a new future, no matter their background or political view. The awkward categorisation as a ‘youth’ then must be only a strategic act to advance rights and future concerns.

The transition to a climate-smart economy and society no longer ‘needs’ to happen – it is happening. The only question is whose voices are at the table and whose concerns will be protected. Inaction on climate change is not a question of technicalities, but a political choice – a question of who we share declining resources with, and who we allow to reach prosperity. Whole communities are built around peat and coal plants, those who lose their jobs must be offered alternatives, training and jobs with decent pay and conditions.  The energy revolution must not take from communities, but share, devolve and involve.

Election fallout, Fianna Fáil’s notions, where now for Irish Water, school patronage and posh Aldi shopping.

A bit later than planned, episode two is now available for stream and download.

Two discussions recorded last month with Richard McAleavey of Cunning Hired Knaves.

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Episode three, a prochoice special!

This show begins with Fláiva Simas from Galway Prochoice reading a migrant’s perspective on Savita Halappanavar. A musical interlude from Sissy and then I am joined in conversation with Niamh Puirséil and Máiréad Enright. Topics covered include just about everything  from law, politics, respectability and media ‘balance’.

Closing things out, Linda Kavanagh from the Abortion Rights Campaign and Goretti Horgan from Alliance For Choice give us an activist update from north and south.

Massive thanks to everyone who made time to contribute. Very pleased with how this one turned out and would also point people in the direction of this post from Sinead Redmond over on Feminist Ire.

These podcasts will be going up on itunes and Stitcher in the coming weeks but for now you can stream or download on Soundcloud below.

If you find any of this useful, please donate here.

After months of shrill meltdown that included protests likened to ISIS, Hitler and harbinger of the total collapse of civilisation, all the regime has to show for itself so far is a child in prison. Even then, his crimes amount to unrelated serial delinquency but the judge has decided to recast and punish his actions as politically motivated, after the fact. An “attack on the state” no less, so the state is moved to protect itself from a sixteen year old boy.

During sentencing the court heard comments from the bench suggesting a supposed gendered nature to the protester’s actions. It would be laughable if not so insulting and we don’t need to waste much time here dismissing these insinuations. All government politicians spent the last five years lamenting the terrible welcome they faced from ungrateful public. Phil Hogan spent most of his time as Environment Minister unable to appear in public without being greeted by a protest. Enda Kenny being booed in Cork was a favourite of mine.

The judge’s remarks however do bear remarkable resemblance to a line almost immediately pushed by  Joan Burton and the trite bad faith of some of her more  opportunistic supporters. We shall see how things progress from here.

Code named ‘Operation Mizen’ the gardaí have little to show for months of surveillance given all the subversives loudly and repeatedly alleged to be infiltrating and directing the entire movement. Think of the utter shit talk from the Dáil and media during that time. Months of hysterical and equally calculated accusations. All smears, all lies. Terrorists, anarchists, Bolsheviks with the help of your neighbours were at the point of tearing down the state if you were to believe the vast majority of comment but so far, a single teenager has emerged as the menace needing to be banished from society. You will recall much dark muttering about the protests “being hijacked” and at here last the culprit is revealed. A boy of fifteen who masterminded the whole thing by not even being involved in the protests.

In November 2014, senior gardaí planted an entirely false story that water protesters were assaulting three members each day. This would have involved an enormous amount of serious illegality resulting in dozen of prosecutions of actual water protesters but instead here we are with one kid jailed for refusing to cooperate with probation services.

Remember this? When some enterprising journalist at the Irish Independent  decided to ludicrously place a photo of Joan Burton in the path of a flying brick despite the fact she had left  Tallaght hours before. That was one of the more egregious examples but almost without exception across the entire media, journalists, politicians and commentators were given unfettered opportunity to attack and defame a movement of ordinary people.   Today the headlines say ‘boy jailed over Jobstown protest’ while the Irish Times  in giddy exception informs us that he is ‘the first’.

Despite this though, none of the media seem to discuss what his protest was. He was not there that day or any other in opposition to water charges. Is too much or too inconvenient to ask what motivates a teenager to jump on a garda car?

It would be a pleasing to imagine him cheering slogans about Denis O’Brien’s role in the ever narrowing distribution of wealth and resources from on top a policeman’s bonnet but no paper reports him doing so. It is quite unlikely, as the judge seems to suggest, that the young man got out of bed that morning to “attack the elected Tanaiste of Ireland”. In any case, an un-‘politicised’ kid took the opportunity to challenge authority in a way that could only end badly for himself but few will ask what this means.

Let us play a thought experiment.

If one were to be entirely fair minded and place ourselves in the shoes of the Labour Party.

These are the excuses we expect people to swallow

• We inherited a country on the brink
• We were constrained by the Troika programme
• We were just a junior partner, coalition is compromise
• We still did stuff though and isn’t it wonderful
• Our critics are provos/trots/populists/progress deniers/people who didn’t understand the gravity of the situation yak yak yak.

Now let us cast our minds back to June 2010. It was a whole eight months before the general election. Labour just hit 32% in an Irish Times opinion poll and for the first time in history are the most popular political party in Ireland.

Since 2008 Eamon Gilmore and Joan Burton relentlessly assailed a beleaguered Fianna Fáil front bench leaving Enda Kenny in the shade.  Having taken the scalp of expenses abusing Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue the year before,  the poll came just weeks after the party famously accused Brian Cowen of “economic treason” in the Dáil.

Sliding into second place in that opinion poll was enough to trigger a challenge to Kenny’s leadership at a time when all Fine Gael had to do was sit back and make it to the finish line.

Labour were causing problems for all main rivals. Presenting themselves as example of virtue in public life and certainty in a country overcome in political and economics chaos.  Think further back to the emergency budget in 2009 when Pat Rabbitte has this advice for the junior coalition partner.

A party that does not stand for anything will stand for nothing.  That is the position the Green Party has arrived at.

Fancy that!

They had government on the run and one in three voters in their pocket. Fine Gael in meltdown while Fianna Fáil’s “tough decisions” were starting to take hold. Labour were there to take advantage of both and their opposition strategy was beginning to pay tangible dividends.

Contrary to what has been endlessly repeated since, it was this long period and not three weeks of an election campaign that formed expectations of how the Labour Party were going to behave in government.

No doubt something like Ruairi Quinn signing a four foot pledge on his way to becoming Education minister was hugely damaging but there was a much more important cumulative effect. The entire Labour Party strategy during those years can be understood simply in repeated reminders that they were the only party not to vote for the bank guarantee. Regardless of the particulars of that decision this was the message. Labour they said were not like the other parties. Labour were not part of the rotten club that brought the country down. Labour were different and this was key.

The “broken promises” narrative only later became accepted wisdom because of lemming-like repetition by journalists, who of course have good reason to frame politics in ways that cloud a regime they themselves are part of too. For example, it is worth  returning very briefly to the infamous ‘Frankfurt’s way’ promise. In short, Gilmore was responding, however insincerely, to comments made by ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet about potential debt renegotiation. What is commonly and conveniently forgotten is that Gilmore climbed down on the remark within two days after being savaged by several Irish journalists, including Vincent Browne. Cast your mind back, we were all about ‘restoring confidence’ in those days and Gilmore was mauled for deviating from the official script. The ‘Labour broke their promises’ line was then spun for years by the same newspapers who had the party in retreat before a vote was cast.

So while it did become a no-brainer for detractors to share opportunistic election martial, we must consider that something like the Tesco advert only worked in its original meaning because the party had built up reserves of perception that Labour was different. Not just from Fine Gael but different and opposed to all the villains, bad practice and business-as-usual that haunted the country since 2008.

In public relations terms the Labour Party were capable of putting enough distance between themselves and the Galway tent, property supplements, banker’s bonuses and all signifiers of unfashionable nod and wink venality. Evidentially, these perceptions turned out to be false. Even if Labour were not golfing with Sean Fitzpatrick they soon proved eager to sacrifice you, me and even themselves to protect and strengthen the very same complex of speculation, exploitation and privilege.

Today they are despised, barely avoiding wipe out in the worst result of the party’s history.

This is the story of how the Labour Party squandered all that good will.

Throughout the past five years you have been regularly chastised for not electing enough Labour Party TDs. On one day, some hack will inform us that they just didn’t have the numbers to see their policies through. On the next, that excuse is forgotten and we are told all the wonderful things Labour achieved. Go figure.

The truth is that despite 2011 presenting a historic opportunity the Labour Party did not bother to run enough candidates to win a Dáil majority. Even Fianna Fáil in death spiral went into that election with greater ambition.

How about a coalition majority? Nope, just days ahead of the vote in 2011 Roisin Shortall on The Week In Politics made it quite clear that the party had no notion of a Labour led government in coalition with “rag bag and misfits”.

The intention then as always was propping up Fine Gael. How Labour went on to play their hand in government is entirely their own responsibility. The failures, defeats and climbdowns are nothing whatsoever to do with voters or our alleged failure to appreciate the party’s position. This persisted right until the recent election when Labour began to tie itself in knots by clinging to this excuse while simultaneously promising all sorts next time based on returning in even fewer seats. What a load of bullshit.

This contempt for the public, any sort of outside criticism or counter opinion was probably the dominant feature of Labour’s time in government. On their supposed liberal agenda Labour are very keen not to frighten horses, keen to build consensus and bring people along as they claim. Contrast this with implementation of austerity. Pleasantries quickly go out the window as Labour got down to a deliberate project robbing wealth, resources and future protection from the vast majority of citizens.

Here is departed deputy for Dublin South West, Eamonn Moloney

I do not like using the word “austerity”. It is a very bourgeois word. When I was growing up we just used the word “hardship“. The people in most working class estates do not use the word “austerity”. I am aware it is cool for the career socialists to speak about austerity but it is an awful word. Hardship is much better, and people like Dickens used it. I do not know how the word “austerity” crept in but it did not come from the labour movement.

Contributions like this will surely be missed! Hardship, Eamonn, is a result of austerity. Austerity is a deliberate project. Something imposed. Look, read the Labour Party constitution written by career socialists

“the Labour Party believes in tackling the underlying conditions which generate the systematic and deeply rooted inequality which people experience. The achievement of equality requires that society be reorganised with specific objective of a more equal distribution of wealth and power”

So austerity is recognising that underlying conditions generate systematic and deeply rooted inequality but instead reorganising society to make it worse — forever. That’s how the bourgeoisie you refer to are bourgeoisie and that’s what Labour were doing in government for the last five years.

Labour did not save the country, they saved the people who run the country. To get the customary Connolly reference in these articles out of the way, if governments are “committees of the rich”, can anyone say the Labour Party acted in another interest.

Under the smokescreen of growth and competitiveness policies never meant to work, everything done since 2011 was by design. Actively working to undo gains won by workers across all sections of society. A race to the bottom. Landlords, employers, financiers, speculators have all prospered under Labour at your expense. People’s homes bought up and sold from underneath them at the government’s invite. The return of absentee landlordism. Mainstays of social reproduction in private eduction, for-profit healthcare, intergenerational privilege and so on, remain intact.   They leave office having not challenged a single pillar of exploitation. Intentions and Labour’s view of their purpose in the world then are clear, so on their own terms how did they fare.

After the Troika’s arrival a  vast majority may well have compliantly accepted what was ahead however, even following the Troika demands to the letter, under very different leadership you can imagine the past five years being very different. From a purely self-interested party political point of view it is arguable that the government could have got away with austerity itself if not for the manner in which the parties conducted themselves but there was no, depending on your persuasion, ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ style appeal or Stakhanovite movement.  They entered government under an agreement that contained many grave stipulations, grave circumstances many governments have faced in the past but nowhere did the IMF insist they behave like assholes.  For none more than Labour this disregard ensured terminal decline.

In 2012, Sean Sherlock walked into what became known as ‘Ireland’s SOPA’. Essentially, Sherlock was genuflecting to the whims of gigantic record corporations and planned to sign an order allowing courts to block websites accused of copyright infringement. Despite spending his days bullshitting at tech and start-up photo-ops, Sherlock decided to ignore the ‘Innovation’ part of ministerial brief in a gutless attempt to protect EMI’s redundant business model.

Politicians obsequiousness to business is nothing new but the main issue here was Sherlock slavishly providing courts and corporations with blunt powers that remain open to abuse. All this would have passed unremarked had it not been for Digital Rights Ireland beginning rumblings on twitter before coverage on Boards and growing websites like Broadsheet.ie. It was a very good example of how issues can begin with just a handful of people online before seeping into mainstream media and ultimately parliament itself. This is something we saw become more common over the last government term and in itself underlines what is at stake when politics and business collude to erode remaining online freedoms.

Sherlock however was not prepared to accept any contribution and behaved like a child throughout. This tantrum climaxed when Catherine Murphy and Stephen Donnelly forced the minister of state to account for himself in Dáil Eireann during topical issues. Put briefly Sherlock’s words, actions and demeanour amounted to a massive ‘go fuck yourself’ before he promptly folded his script and walked out of the chamber.

The SOPA furore, being an newfangled internet issue, attracted the attention of a lot of young people. There were teenagers without prompt from anyone else making their first protest on Kildare Street before running home to catch a live stream of proceedings. All they saw that day was petulance and contempt from a minister in a futile parliament.

In my eyes it was an awful waste but an early example of how the Labour Party time and again, even with the option of better policies and new approaches were prepared to prop up existing structures no matter how rotten. All while giving anyone watching two fingers.

Indeed, the ‘watchdog’ element could have been one of Labour’s greatest strengths if not their saving grace in government. It would not have made a jot of difference to Troika arithmetic if Labour had decided to act as a force of accountability, justice and transparency. Expectations are extremely low on this front. It really would not have taken much but while the Troika were eager to remake Irish society in their desired image the Labour Party, when it counted, were not.

Instead there was total silence and even defence of Fine Gael on massive scandals surrounding  James Reilly, Phil Hogan and Alan Shatter. The number of times you can recall Fine Gael supporting their Labour comrades says all you need to know about the mugs in that relationship.

Elsewhere on symphysiotomy, mobility allowance, Magdalene laundries, Moriarty Report, garda scandals,  Siteserv, Tuam babies, Rehab, NAMA in the North, to name a few, were all quietly swept under the rug. The list of sins they were prepared to overlook is repulsive. The 31st Dáil had constant lows, down there with the worst of them and there was none the Labour Party were not prepared to stand over.

“When it comes to jobs, anything goes” were weasel words of Eamon Gilmore on disgraced Maltese billionaire Denis O’Brien’s invite to Farmleigh House just months after the tribunal’s final report.

Later, when the Mahon Tribunal published in March 2012, Labour were quick to take the moral high ground, puffing their chests as the only party directly untainted by local  authority corruption systemic in Irish politics. Smug Howlin applauding himself in the Dáil for other party’s tribunals. Just three months later, Jan O’Sullivan sat passively on the front bench as Phil Hogan announced that there would be no need for an independent inquiry into planning irregularities in seven local authorities.

I will never forgot that afternoon, Phil Hogan looked up to smirk over at opposition benches while announcing the non findings of his “rigorous review”. Right here in this June 2012 debate. Bully Hogan had the arrogance to laugh in our faces from the Dáil chamber and why wouldn’t he while Labour are prepared to look the other way.

As Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Jan O’Sullivan signed off on this white wash. Since then several of her ‘findings’ have been overturned in court leading to a second inquiry and since Alan Kelly became top dog in the department, an as yet unacted upon whistleblower file from Wicklow council has twice went missing having already disappeared once on Phil Hogan’s watch.  Make of that what you will.

So tell us Labour. What good is being squeaky clean when you are prepared to sit by while all manner of crime and injustice goes unchecked. Might there be a connection between appalling homelessness and the planning wild west.  The level of malfeasance that went unchecked is breathtaking, week after week. If Labour in government are too spineless then why all the head scratching about voters deserting.  That the only matters they managed to get worked up about were increasingly contrived outrages about Sinn Féin says all you need to know about the Labour Party’s priorities and road to redundancy.

Indeed, Labour Party priorities are a mercurial thing. In 2015 they published this flyer

Such is Labour’s unflinching dedication to housing that they forgot a photo of Jan O’Sullivan, the member of their own party who had just been housing minister for three years. Perhaps the near absence of housing during her time accounts for the omission but nor does that explain the inclusion of Alan Kelly.

Last year saw fewer social houses built than any other year on record. Over half a decade into this problem and this is what they have to show for themselves.

Joan Burton herself had discussed “the emerging housing crisis” in 2010 just weeks before entering government. That was then. Three years later, during another fruitless Dáil exchange, Catherine Murphy suggested Burton was running the risk of becoming the “minister for homelessness”. As we will shortly shall see below, she was already privately aware.

Labour repeatedly dismissed the housing issue outright until May 2014. Simply refused to acknowledge what they now claim to be one of the party’s dearest held values, only softening their cough after a drubbing in the local elections. What we eventually got was a combination of specious reclassifications and public relations waffle that turns further landlord largess into “social housing units”.

The tale of Alan Kelly here though is worth dwelling on. Up until just a few months ago he had been protected and indeed lionised by the media as the hard man to see down water protest rabble. Kelly was regularly given easy headlines and soft interviews. Gifted cosy one on one interviews to slander a movement of ordinary people. Then in October once he looked like doing something vaguely uncomfortable for landlords, the media turned with a vengeance and by then, Kelly along with his party had pissed away any support they needed to upset some of the country’ most powerful interests. A lesson there about who the party chooses to make allies and enemies of.

Eamon Gilmore has since taken up a job as no less than EU envoy to the Colombian peace process. Given his party’s willingness to shamefully cower behind victims of the troubles to avoid Dáil questions it is unlikely he will do much more for Colombia than he managed for his own party in government. One theory is that Gilmore walked into government and on being shown the books went into some sort of shock. Fight or flight and Gilmore legged it. He all but vanished from the national stage, completely abandoning his own party.  Would they have done better if he was present and visible. Unlikely but his Houdini act was a long way from the man who  for a laughable moment just weeks before eyed the Taoiseach’s office.

The second theory is simply that Eamon Gilmore is full of shit. Shortly after entering office he was exposed as two-faced and a national rat by wikileaks cables from Chelsea Manning. On what we must presume were regular cosy chats with the US Embassy, Gilmore informed diplomats that political consideration meant it necessary to maintain a “public posture” on the prospect of a second Lisbon referendum. So there is leader of Labour Party, a parliamentary opposition leader, having a good private laugh at us and the future direction of the entire European Union. Just so Labour could get into office and achieve fuck all.

In 2010, a few weeks before emerging on top of that opinion poll, the Labour Party tabled a private members motion on cuts to special needs assistants. Gilmore said the following

Listening to the Minister and the Minister of State, one would think there was no problem at all and that no cutbacks were taking place, that somehow, the concerns that are being communicated to us on a daily basis by parents, teachers and SNAs, were made up. They are not. Over the past week or more, my colleagues and I have received many heart-rending stories from parents about what is likely to happen to their child in circumstances where the SNA is removed. These are very real stories that are not made up. The Government needs to respond positively to them this evening rather than in the self-congratulatory way of its response.

Three years later in government

There is no cut. There is no cut in the allocation of money for special educational needs. The Government has ring-fenced the funding available for special educational needs, and for very good reason because it is committed to providing for the needs of children with special needs. Second, the number of teachers dedicated to working with children who have special educational needs has not been cut. The number of special needs assistants dedicated to working with children with special educational needs has not been cut.

This is but one of hundreds of examples of how the Labour Party in government are indistinguishable from what they opposed. Do click here to see Gilmore and Brian Hayes on the same issue. What are you even doing in life if you are no better than Brian Hayes. Isn’t one enough.

Are they liars, careerists, pragmatists, realists? That it came so quickly and effortlessly raises unavoidable questions about the party’s sincerity, wider bona fides and purpose.

At the Labour Party summer school in 2006, Pat Rabbitte himself presented an award to the Rossport Five. In 2013, as minister for energy with the power to act, it was total indifference to allegations that Royal Dutch Shell were engaged in an elaborate scheme of bribing the police force with cases of alcohol.

After his pledge Ruairi Quinn promptly began slashing grants and fees. This was just the start and Quinn has presided over a nightmarish restructuring for students and staff across third level in Ireland.  Casualisation and debt. Money everywhere but everyone is broke with not much but Dublin airport and further precarity to look forward to. All this will be covered in depth in a later post but to pluck one recent example, a group students were recently kicked out of room during a meeting on environmental issues.

Trinity News received the following statement

“[t]he Blackstone LaunchPad space in Trinity is reserved during office hours for entrepreneurial students and events. All students engaging in entrepreneurial activities are welcome to use our LaunchPad space. We define the term entrepreneurship broadly to encompass social enterprises and not-for-profit ventures. However all such ventures must aim to eventually generate capital through their activities in order to survive and progress their idea.”

He went on to outline social entrepreneurship promoted in by the space, saying “we have supported many social enterprises since the space opened in February. For example, “CriServ”, an app to assist refugees as they migrate from war-torn areas, and “Small Farms” a student start-up that will produce protein in a carbon-efficient way through cricket farming. Next week the space will play host to a Skype call we have arranged between the UN Food programme Incubation Centre and the Trinity Enactus Society. The space also hosted and sponsored the “Dev, Meet Tech” hackathon in February. The goal of this hackathon was to use ‘technology to provoke positive social change’. We are inspired by the student entrepreneurs we have been working with so far. They wish to change the world, but they do so by creating viable and sustainable businesses that generate capital and create jobs in order to achieve their aims. Political activism, whatever the stance taken by our students, without entrepreneurship is unfortunately not relevant to our mission, and therefore will not be hosted in the space. Any activities run by or for students that aim to promote a spirit of entrepreneurship around campus are welcome.”

This is Ruairi Quinn’s education system. From an RTÉ documentary and book published by his adviser, my take away of Quinn behind the scenes is a man far more concerned with spin than the harm of his policies.In the end,  Quinn announced his retirement early to ensure a day of homage for himself.

Joan Burton having been the first TD elected nationally in 2011 had to rely on transfers from hideous right wing politicians to take the last seat in this year’s election. Burton’s record in office can now this week be surmised by the fact that newly appointed Social Protection minister Leo Varadkar can hardly be any worse. Yes, that is correct. An ignorant, privileged, monumental dickhead of a proud Thatcherite can hardly do more damage in the dole office than leader of the Irish Labour Party.

Where to begin…. Labour protected core rates as long as you are not under twenty five! Good regime liberals and journalists like Olivia O’Leary will even repeat this bullshit on the party’s behalf.  Labour have led an unprecedented campaign of unemployment vilification while at the same time engaged in breathtaking dishonesty by a series of fraudulent employment figures.  Labour is all about some warped dignity of work even when it’s hugely exploitative internships that have completely fucked the labour market for a generation.

34 countries in the OECD and in an economy only second to the United States in terms of low paid jobs but at least Labour restored the minimum wage whoop whoop.  Labour that fills newspapers with stories of garda checkpoints for the unemployed. That invites proven failed and fraudulent companies to come and make profit from unemployment so long as it fiddles the books. Labour, where unemployment is on a level with criminality and mental illness.

The sight of Joan Burton dismissing people quoting Michael Taft during Dáil debates on Jobbridge was really something. Or when she wiped nearly eighty thousand people from the live register for the sake of a good headline. Pick of the bunch though was ahead of the budget in 2013. Laying the ground for further attack Joan Burton’s people planted a story about supposed ‘welfare traps’ for single mothers in the Irish Independent. Her evidence was a self-selecting sample of just 774 (of 419,200 on live register) who themselves contacted Citizens Information. Of six issues identified in the ‘study’, five were related to cutbacks in Joan Burton’s own department but WELFARE TRAP SCUM screamed the Indo front page so job done.

Also highlighted here you can see that in early 2013 according to her own very important study, Burton’s department was receiving information that processing delays due to her cutbacks were causing potential homelessness. Not that you would have known listening to her in the Dáil or reading the Irish Independent.

Short of mandatory electric shock therapy it is difficult to see how Leo Varadkar can top this and what a legacy that is for Joan Burton. As part of the Social Welfare Bill 2012, she began her long, ill-thought assault on lone parent families. Relying on ever present prejudices and inequalities, the lone parents cuts were purely an accounting exercise. The outcome will cost more money, provide no solutions and fulfil none of its stated aims but Burton did it anyway, causing untold stress and misery, just to meet the bottom line.

Watching that debate on an April night nearly four years ago now. Burton faced a sustained campaign by activists – who can take no small credit for her political demise, NGOs and even the customary press release from Labour Women. In the chamber, Burton faltered for a moment and nearly bottled it, clearly aware of the damage she was doing. The promise that no cuts would occur without the introduction of “Scandinavian style childcare” came at the very eleventh hour as a sort of fudge but after recomposing herself the minister carried on with what was to be the first of a number of attacks on Ireland’s poorest families. Last year she pushed ahead with visiting further poverty on their children to make room for tax cuts promised in the election. Hiding her actions for the umpteenth time behind the death of Jean McConville and then later adding further insult to injury by outright lying about improvements in the last budget.

It is genuinely difficult to convey the cynicism, dishonesty and base opportunism with which she behaved during leaders questions each Thursday. Burton and Kenny by no small feat achieved something of a departure from the level of evasion we saw from Ahern and Cowen. It is entirely fitting that she will end her career to anyone who witnessed it as reviled as the aforementioned.  Labour really are no different.

Pat Rabbitte could have been used to illustrate any number of points. Firstly and perhaps only Pat Rabbitte, more than even Joan Burton and Alan Kelly, in his ubiquitous unrelentingly glib pig ignorance was emblematic of how Labour conducted themselves publicly, alienating almost the entire electorate in a cloud of heedless condescension but more than that, Rabbitte represents a resigned defeatism that permeates the party.

Rabbitte should have retired years ago having shown no interest in his ministerial brief and inflicting enormous damage on the party publicly. His bluster played no small part in ending the careers of new Labour TDs while he hogged jobs at the top table before retiring. Pat Rabbitte as minister was asleep at the wheel and in time it will be recognised that Gilmore made a huge mistake in not leaving him on the back benches.

Rabbitte with the weight of experience and niggling sense of failure cloaked his defeatism in a well rehearsed world weariness. Shaving minutes off RTÉ broadcasts with a large and troubled intake of breath before each reply. For others in the Labour Party though this is yet to sink in. Instead, these low expectations are repackaged in various babbles and sneers.

“Who speaks of Syriza now?” taunted Brendan Howlin across the chamber during the last budget. To put this in its full and ugly context, Howlin was minister in a department of finance that was to the forefront in colluding with a brute and more than likely illegal show of strength on the Greek people. Syriza may have fucked it royally but Howlin was no bystander and in the end, in terms of things that certainly matter to him, it was Syriza who were reelected. The summer of 2015 was a grotesque moment in the history of party that wraps itself in the starry plough.

This was not a once off example of Howlin hubris. After coming to power, the Government promised to restore the FOI Act hobbled by Fianna Fáil. Rather than abolish, Howlin very underhandedly attempted to increase fees via amendment at committee stage. When caught bang to rights, like Sherlock before, he threw a massive strop in hail of of bad faith and outright bogus statements. It was quite a week with Howlin, Rabbitte and Kenny out attacking critics and Labour pissing away more support on the little things.

Next “let’s see Sinn Féin deal with same-sex marriage in the North now” was Howlin’s contribution to celebrations on that day in Dublin castle. A glimpse into the small mind of a man who keeps it partisan when so many worked together but throwing down the gauntlet as Howlin seemed to think he was doing is revealing. Firstly, the rights of those in the north are no less our concern. Second, it is the responsibility of no individual party to ‘deliver’.

It may burst what remaining bubble they cling to but marriage equality was won in spite of the Labour Party in government and they blotted their copy book in a big way when Aodhán Ó Ríordáin had the stupidity to suggest the referendum could fall on water protest sentiment. Coolock 88%, Jobstown 85%, Stoneybatter 86%, Darndale 80% – yes votes rolled in from working class heartlands and not just that, but those driven out of the country returned in numbers to have their say. As has been comprehensively argued this was not “voting in solidarity with the government and the State, but in defiance of the multiple impoverishments and oppressions that the State has enacted on the majority of those who live here”. No thanks to the Labour Party.

During the UK Labour leadership race several Irish Labour members I spoke to either wrote off Corbyn’s leadership chances completely, public condemned Corbyn as Pat Rabbitte did or took the road of saying yes, OK Corbyn, but I worry about his “electability”. What struck me most was not taking lectures about popularity from a party on the road to oblivion  but that Labour members here have so comprehensibly swallowed the all false reality and constraints imposed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. This is it. This the best these clowns can imagine. That there isn’t even a ‘traditional labour’ Corbyn current of significance remaining within the party speaks volumes. Even at this point, having gone kamikaze by wedding themselves to the regime, the idea of an alternative is incomprehensible if not considered outright madness.

Labour is said to always wrestle with its conscience and win, but now it barely has conscience left to fight.

Instead ever more frequent defeats and retreats are painted as victories. Take Aodhán Ó Ríordáin’s self serving duplicity on direct provision. Ireland’s asylum process is a web built entirely from bad mindedness. Ó Ríordáin said as much in various ways but his behaviour since 2014 has been as perplexing as it is nauseating. In the process he has unwittingly become a case study for the most scurrilous actions of government, non governmental organisations and profit seeking in one of Ireland’s darkest scandals. What Ó Ríordáin did was make promises, flop and in order to save face double down on a somehow even more abhorrent regime under the International Protection Act. A Bill, the President whom no one in Labour can question on the issue, went as far as refer to the council of state. Another Yes Equality moment indeed.

Was he hobbled by the department? The minister? What did he and his party even try. Answers to these we will never know because in the absence of anything approaching transparency or explanation all we have is self-congratulation for himself and disdain for anyone watching.

Just a few months ago Ó Ríordáin was lecturing women and activists about the eighth amendment and political reality. “Deluded” he called people on national radio. People who have built a movement in spite of anything his party did in Dáil Éireann. Those people are deluded but Ó Ríordáin having been kicked out of the department in failure, is telling people he is going to fix direct provision from opposition benches of Seanad Éireann, huh.

Those of us outside the Labour Party do not understand political reality because for the Labour Party, political reality does not extend further than extracting concessions while always upholding the overall system they themselves are part of. They sat back on all the scandals and corruption mentioned earlier so as not to upset Fine Gael. Is it worth the price or could there be a better way? You wont hear it from Labour.

On issues like abortion which speaks to so much more, Labour see nothing wrong with their place in the world, always remaining on other side of the house dismissing and demeaning counter efforts. Exposing themselves as very thing they accuse of others. Clare Daly’s constructive prochoice efforts in the last Dáil are beyond question but Labour benches remained almost empty every time, only momentarily filling to engage in excuses and petty turf war.

On a range of issues and with some substance Labour may once have positioned themselves outside a conservative mainstream but in no small part to their own actions, in recent years and to seemingly little alarm, much of the ground has moved beneath their feet.

Sitting in Dáil Éireann today is a clutch of TDs who are a long time kicking around Leinster House and we know what that does to people. Across much of the world parties like Labour are being gobbled up. Pasokification is the imperfect if ever evolving understanding, named in honour of Labour’s Greek counterparts who were even out polled by the communist party last September. Scottish Labour are finished, PSOE dropped 20 seats. The list is long and parties with far more successful histories in shaping their respective societies  are dying in ditches of their own making. Here at home, don’t be surprised if Labour blame it on a ‘communications problem’.

Labour are not just proven politically redundant but also politically inept. Aside from the unpopular business they had to get with in government and the election, look how badly the party are advised. Think how incompetent, detached and tone deaf the whole shambles was almost immediately and throughout these past five years. After the election in 2011, Gilmore told the party they would face a sea of protest placards but he didn’t say half it could be accounted for by an unfathomable string of unforced errors. The David Begg appointment, the Mairia Cahill fiasco, Joan Burton cutting the ribbon at food banks for christ sake.

The Labour Party are about solutions not slogans.  We believe in delivering. We get results.

The Irish people have weighed up those results, being wholly acquainted and made their decision.

The Labour Party could very well disappear now and no one would miss it.

If Labour were to dissolve itself, which is something that must be seriously considered, you can easily imagine the current represented in Joan Burton and Ruairi Quinn making up a liberal wing of Fine Gael. Alan Kelly would be perfectly at home in Fianna Fáil while the more image conscious like Ó Ríordáin always have the Social Democrats.

I say none of this to be facetious. Think about it, if the Labour Party believe the right way of doing things is consensus, concessions,  compromise, targeted interventions and so on. There is no getting away from this. If it is all about working within then why do it from another party at all and not among fully committed managers of Irish capitalism.  This is who the party has spent decades hoping to go in and out of power with anyway.  Everyone else is told this is the only way of doing things so why is Labour codding itself and not following the logical conclusion of its beliefs by trying to “effect change” from the driving seat.

Quinn said “because we don’t believe in capitalism, we know how to f**king manage it”, this is ambitious but on both counts patently untrue. Burton said the Clery’s closure was “capitalism at it worst” but her ambitions only amount to capitalism at its best and she has shown her standards in that regard.

Plenty of people still believe in this stuff. There is space for liberal capitalist party, women in boardrooms and an iron fist. The civil war parties don’t really have their heart in stuff yet but the kind of people who would defend labour’s actions of the past five years could make a contribution there without having to support a labour party. The last thing those who rely on a left wing party need is a ‘respectable’ left wing party and in one too many ways Labour have quite contently gone over to the dark side.  Dick Spring on the board of AIB, Ruairi Quinn on the board of a third level venture capital firm before becoming education minister. How many landlords are in the party these days?    In the coming years we shall see what emerges from the FF/FG convergence. It is happening and there is space for all of you somewhere. Something to think about but for the rest of us, Emer Costello wouldn’t even endorse rent control in Dublin during an RTÉ debate in the European elections. She lost her deposit.  People had other options to vote for because Labour stood for nothing.

The Labour Party are clearly not fit for purpose quite arguably have never been. Already for 100 years consistently lagging behind comparable counterparts. Labour has a proud history but it is also a history of nearlys and not reallys. The Noël Brownes and Mary Robinsons that the modern hopes to emulate were hardly even members. Browne was up on screen during the party’s centenary in 2012 but was not a member in 1951, Labour were among those who tuned their back on him during the mother & child scheme. So the, let’s called it restructuring, would provide the space and impetus to seriously re-equip from the bottom up the intersection of politics and trade unionism not just in 2016 but for the next fifty years. Otherwise, Labour’s continued presence is in all seriousness no different to the dance of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael protecting redundant fiefdoms.

How likely are Labour to engage with any of this or wider questions facing their nominal tradition in Europe is questionable given the bankruptcy of thought and purpose evident in the party and not least considering the way criticism and dissent has traditionally been dealt with. Maybe given reduced numbers and with some of the old leadership cleared out things might open up but as if to underline the point, there are nearly as many former members as Labour deputies in the new Dáil. With flunkies like Dermot Lacey and Lorraine Higgins to the technocratic pinnacle represented in someone like Brendan Halligan, you can see the dead end thinking Labour offers. Internal discussion continues I’m sure but any assessments I have seen online were  out of date before even published. There will be no social democracy in Ireland. Democracy itself is on the way across the continent and the Labour Party itself as recent as 2012 enthusiastically collaborated in the effective outlawing of socialism in the EU.

And look where it has got them. Internal struggles over the coming months will not amount to much more than personality difference. Members may insist that there is no shortage of dissenting views within but we also recognise bluster and to any outside observer the idea that Labour is anything but a near homogeneous and largely ineffective liberal party would be preposterous.

Take a look around Irish politics now and it will be evident should the party turn up at an opposition portests any time soon, those who left, kicked out or never joined have more in common with each other than those who remain. That should be very troubling.

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BY JAMES CUSSEN

Reflections on the Irish same-sex marriage referendum of May last are as charming as the hoary old one about the Holy Roman Empire in that almost none have actually been reflective. Except, of course, as a parody of what a reflective piece might look like.

Barely a wet twelve hours after polls closed we were invited not to look back in anger, or deploy any of our critical faculties. An admittedly umbrella campaign led by assorted Birgitte Nyborgs (such that it was occasionally given pep talks by a puppet from RTE’s 1980s children’s programming), Yes Equality, had already elevated John Lennon lyrics to political praxis with expressions that we enjoin the scum of the far right in a renewed brotherhood of man. But it was scarcely the first time in the campaign that heterosexuals had ventriloquised us either; and more of that anon.

Sooner than interrogate the referendum process occasioned by Ireland’s overwrought constitution, or even admitting that how we inscribe ‘equality’ in the future  (or what even constitutes it) is contested terrain, most hacks were and are concerned with the replicability of its apparent ‘lesson’.

What kind of excruciating culture warrior would want to repeat it?

What incarnation of centrist ennui, for whom it was a bloodsport only needing the politesse of fair play, would want to run it all again like some statistical regression?

To make matters worse, the High Court (s)quashed predictable attempts by fringe lay litigants to nullify the referendum result in such a way as to lead to a week of wild liberal paeans about kritarchy and the righteousness of the state form.  A boat naming competition at that moment by the Irish Naval Service could very well have led to “Judgey McJudgeFace”; a Michael O’Leary owned racehorse christened “Borgen” might have attracted millions in novelty bets; Fukuyama himself might have unuttered his recantation in the courtyard of Dublin Castle, lachrymose at what we now know was the opening salvo of “Senator Zappone goes to Washington” … via a route elongated enough to qualify her for the second tier of travel expenses.

And at last, after 18 months of concealment and shadow-boxing, we glimpsed what this was all really about. At long last, as legitimacy leeches from institutions of the state every day, We, The Queers, can take a seat on the porch of this burning house and they will call it the work of their better angels.

The conventions I detest about both the politics of ‘The Gay Question’, and most of the writing on it, really are an ever-growing list, and not exclusive to the topic either. As with the broader currents of identitarian appeal in liberal democracies, the tendency is to co-opt or cultivate ‘appropriate’ minorities (or, lately, ‘appropriate women’) as adjunct to the state and as demonstrations of its benevolence in the ultimate. We are invited to believe that the state muddles through life trying to do the right thing, in a manner more redolent of Bridget Jones than say, Adolf Eichmann.

Witness Labour’s new leader Brendan Howlin (lol) recently emphasising that these ‘soft’ or ‘social’ issues, disaggregated entirely out from a coherent political economy, will be the path his party beats back into the ‘leafy suburbs’ of Dublin. Those leafy suburbs, indeed, that were matched and often out-voted in ‘Yes’ support by less salubrious counterparts in the referendum’s final result. This was in the face of despicable concern-trolling emanating from the coalition’s gaping, moronic ingénue, Labour’s Aodháin O’Riordáin, that the fundament of our water charges movement lay in the forces of reaction ‘duping’ the working class. These pied-pipers of nebulous ‘populism’, and even ‘poujadisme’ according to another over-excited, middle-aged man, existed nowhere except as the reification of Labour’s venomous contempt for instantiated socialism.

To contemplate the dearth of good writing too which permitted matchless liberal hypocrisy to flourish during the referendum, this consisted mostly in the ‘gay’ modality of what writing there was; mirroring a confessional genre deployed for other crosses borne privately (e.g. mental illness) and which is then served up to the middle classes in weekend newspaper supplements. Notionally it’s to prick readers’ consciences, and facilitate their tourism to a place behind a velvet or hospital curtain amidst consumer testing of coffee machines and notes from wine-tasting. But likely as not it prompts them to cross themselves in thanks that they are not such perpetual victims.

Perish the thought that we might be capable of political agency; or that we might think we are not in fact the ones with the problem.

Better explanations for the embarrassing decision to name one ally organisation ‘Straight Up for Equality’ elude me. A further example is how it might always be ‘poor Ursula Halligan’ (who outed herself like some Iphigeneia at Aulis, better to appease the electorate in the final days) but never any similar expression of pity at the intrinsic disorder of emotionally stunted, wife-beating heteronormativity.

Indecent public emotional exposure has been a remarked-on morbid symptom of journalism more generally, of course.

This is meant as no affront to those who achingly, occasionally even beautifully, reveal their ‘inner self’; but the authenticity of this writing is destabilised constantly by either the commodification or instrumentalisation inherent in most examples of it. It is frequently demeaning. Exploitative. A violation. Almost seeking to be probative of how we bleed too if you prick us. Was it indeducible without seeing the guts? Do you want for an empathetic imagination?

Which is all a roundabout way of appraising the reader of how uncomfortable I feel at resorting to it myself in order to get you to listen to me. Reminiscing on the referendum campaign with my boyfriend at the start of this year, we both were struck by our shared feeling of mortification at being suckered by the process even to the point of genuine enthusiasm for the outcome at the time. Now, that was inauthentic. We resolved that having only met each other a month or so before that, the first flush of being together as a couple in that highly charged political climate could be sooner implicated than any worrisome softening of our cynicism.

Sure enough, a lot of my fear of being singled out for homophobic abuse due to public displays of affection has returned since; while any such fear of his, never being really present in the first place, hasn’t changed either. Our lives haven’t changed. Why would they? Marriage is in origin, and nearly always in practice a propertied institution which one perforce arrives to with property for the purpose of further accumulation and inter-generational transmission of that property. Miscegenation statutes in the United States, commonly invoked as historical precedent during our referendum campaign, tellingly did not need to exist in the antebellum (before 1861). Neither of us will ever attain enough wealth so that marriage assumes its primal significance for us: and certainly how could it change what people shout at us in the street, or why they do so? The country hasn’t changed for the better. The world generally is getting worse even though there are genuinely hopeful sites of resistance organising within it that are yet to be hollowed out by parliamentarianism and its political science. We think this is important to remember.

And the personal is never not political, despite wishing it away. Bunreacht na hÉireann’s Article 41 bespeaks the (bourgeois) family being the basic constituent of a whole rotten edifice which hopes for the family to privatise social goods (yes: cooking, cleaning, child-minding, first aid, garment-mending and washing) which society will not (not cannot) afford to provide:

Personal stories, it is incanted by our psephologists, are what carried the result of a referendum to amend Article 41 in specific (the instanced passage above remaining intact, forebodingly). Little aware how unguarded they are being; they have admitted the transactional basis of these prostrations. The proliferation of coffee-table anthologies of personal stories about the marriage referendum, rather than being a sign of Ireland getting the training wheels off (or some such other infantilising analogy that is utterly characteristic of the post-colonial dumpster fire this country is), instead leaves one cold at best and more often speechless at what is being papered over, dissolved or sunken in the process. Soothing narratives for the establishment, of amorphous good triumphing over evil are all that lie that way; and it would be more proper to be afraid of where uncritical heralding of a ‘liberation’ might lead.

Over the long duration, I predict that we will instead discern the Irish marriage referendum, in as much as it is portended already in just the 12 months since, as merely a new, hollowly emoting idiom for as much raw sewerage of bourgeois ideology as it claimed to sweep away on just one day in May.

It was not a radical reform (that being a contradiction in terms anyway) and was, and will continue to be used to set the limits of acceptable and unacceptable minority expression and civic participation in a dangerous way. It will be a template forced on all those who are othered for the prospect of their assimilation and disappearance into reactionary ur-category of ‘taxpayer’. What kind of taste does the much-fêted #hometovote leave with minorities whose right to travel is constrained by either the price of the ticket; or the colour of their skin; or their gender, or all three?

History simply will not be kind to the ‘Yes Equality moment’; or at the very least it ought not be. Astonishingly, some still speak of a ‘Yes Equality moment’ seriously as if it were either reproducible or not already a self-executing punchline.

The cause celébre here being the tortuous assignation of that term to a never-to-be-implemented reform document published last July about Ireland’s asylum seeker detention system, by a preening junior minister whose bailiwick (then) was ‘integration’ and ‘new communities’. Taste the ideology in that bag of Skittles much? The McMahon (named for its judicial chair) report being precipitated because of direct action by asylum seekers, and which the government was only seeking to neuter; largely freezing asylum seekers out of even the deliberations on that report. O’Riordáin might be right – there are definite echoes of Yes Equality in that.

This is just at the domestic level of analysis: the day is surely not long ahead of us before a President of the United States announces s/he is bombing an orientalist caricature in the vindication of the rights of the Human Beings of RuPaul’s Drag Race. There are, just this week, flypasts by RAF fighter jets at Pride parades in one imperial core. The imperial religion pretending to Catholicism’s throne for the moment, New Atheism, has been sure to remind all us uppity homos of the homage we owe those who protect us from the History (capital ‘h’) miring the rest of the world.

I wish to itemise some of the disconcerting portents in the Irish case in due course. Indeed, the biopolitical aspect, and how ‘gay’ marriage has been a route of stealth for reinforcing and recuperating racist immigration regimes; which now have begun to pivot on the imputed testability of a Platonic form of ‘love’ (the self-same ‘love’ that emblazons Coca-Cola bottles), has been covered with tremendous lucidity by Anne Mulhall. I would only add there: did you ever hear the one about Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Services (INIS) asking for screengrabs of the nudes which a couple exchanged over Grindr at the beginning of their relationship, for verification purposes? It’s an inverse Pastor Niemoller speech where first they gave the gays civil rights; and then I spoke up very loudly that this could only be protected if we remain a White Nation.

My ambitions, as you can gather, are more limited than that magisterial article: proffering a tentative baseline to ground a new discussion that is in any way at all more nourishing than the passive-aggressive ‘advice’ delivered during the referendum campaign about ‘start(-ing) a conversation’. The latter being pregnant with the asinine zealotry of mainline liberalism that there is nothing a cup of tea and a decent debate can’t fix in the (faintly Darwinian) ‘marketplace of ideas.’

Pandering might have been (and was) one outcome of this pollyannaish fervour, but more frequently it devolved onto pompous demonstration of intellectual superiority, and tribalistic chest-beating by liberals. Pleas of mine (I was scarcely alone in it either) that the eristic parlour game being made out of my life and others for reasons of pure vanity was far worse than doing nothing, predictably went unheeded. The casuistry inherent in this stuff, so as to be held above the accusation of giving a platform to the hatred of the far-right, is comically lacking in self-awareness.

It is the thesis, in microcosm, that you could have denuded Adolf Hitler’s power by drawing funny cartoons of him, or maybe scrawling phalluses in the margins of Mein Kampf. It is the hidebound belief that the oxygen of public ridicule is antiseptic rather than publicising and emboldening; or simply making it more likely that hate speech will be read by those it will hurt the most.

Any defence of this white-knighting behaviour invariably comes to rest on the insinuation of mine and others’ ingratitude at this outlay of vigorous argumentation on our behalf. Clown noises might accompany the recitation of that Edmund Burke quotation, and I am happy to announce I remain deeply ungrateful.

In this vein, we might segue to the policing of tone, cadence and word that was endemic to the referendum campaign. Again, it is one of those portents that I discern of the referendum’s longue effect on how we will in future discuss, or even postulate the vindication of minority rights in Ireland.

Rather than being an expression of risible optimism, the statement that the marriage referendum ended homophobia in Ireland might actually be true in only the most perverse way. That is: the word itself was abolished from our discourse, by order and as corollary of the same system of law which held forth the false promise of our emancipation.

Our body politic is already injured from the recombination of this ‘abolition’ of homophobia so as to in turn deny the reality of Islamophobia. Mid-throes as we are of Atheist Ireland’s alignment with the vanguard of pan-European neo-Nazism, we can practically see the hamster wheel turning as they re-import the arguments of the referendum’s ‘No’ campaign as to why homophobia was deniable as an incoherent and ‘merely sociological’ (!) concept.

Yes, they will concede, there is a phenomenon of ‘anti-Muslim violence’; but what lurks beneath this meagre concession is that only physical violence counts, and that it is furthermore only sporadic, and will not admit of a structural explanation or, crucially, even being racialised. ‘Islamophobia’ thus is merely a device for demonising Atheists (capital ‘A’) who are critical of Islam. Substitute the words, and break out the violins, and it is all much the same bogus humanitarianism of ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’ that they excoriated the Iona Institute for 12 months hence.

How did we get here? The answer to that owes more to the discursive turns of the liberal-right than the unreconstructed conservatives of Merrion Square, actually. You don’t need me to recount here the blow-by-blow of events that began on RTÉ’s execrable Saturday Night Show in January 2014; the ‘noble call’ orated by Rory O’Neill’s alter-ego drag queen, Panti Bliss, in The Abbey within a fortnight of it either; or even to probe where the pre-emptive disbursal of blood money to litigation-addicted greasy till Catholics, apparently impugned by the chat-show appearance, ultimately wound up. It’s irrelevant to us in all but one remarkable way:  that was the precise moment, 18 months before the final poll was set, when the marriage referendum was won.

Little could have intervened to alter the outcome, nay, the wider public mood, beyond that point, and nothing, in the event, actually did. This really isn’t controversial: any analysis of say, the delicious götterdämmerung suffered by Labour in the 2016 general election will situate it in 2014 too because the chain of causality from that time is just as ineluctable. By April of 2015 I imagined myself figuratively hoarse from being the safest soothsayer shouting into the void; fulminating with mounting exasperation at the stench of defeatism all around, and insisting that unless political polling was being conducted in an extraordinarily botched way (even by its own shabby standards), that a constant twenty percent spread in a simple run-off proposition, persisting solidly over and beyond 18 months, was unassailable.

My point is this: there was space, or the luxury of a solid lead, with which to mount a genuinely radical campaign.  One that afflicted the comfortable far more than it poured oil on their tresses. We could have properly queered it, at least. The tragedy of the marriage referendum abides as much in what a missed opportunity it was, and how it danced more to the beat of the stolid Marian Finucane Show than to the street activism of say, the vast and variegated Right2Water movement.

And I would credit many agents in the latter for rousing political consciousness in working class communities (both urban and rural), and crucially doing so in an autonomous way which was singularly more responsible for the overall national result than anything Yes Equality did. Peruse the index of the windy yet slight Ireland Says Yes: The Inside Story of How The Vote For Marriage Equality Was Won (phew), and you will get a sense of just that. It is an insider’s history, with no entries for ‘class’, ‘austerity’, ‘financial crisis’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘troika’, ‘Jobstown’, ‘Darndale’, ‘Stoneybatter’, ‘The Liberties’ or anywhere not bounded by even-numbered postcodes. To mention any of these things would disrupt the central conceit that at 7 o’clock on the evening of 23rd May, 2015, Ireland ‘became a nation of equals’.

Mainly though, knowing this now makes much more sinister the dire instruction we took from hangers-on of the political establishment; whether seasoned backroom boys (like Noel Whelan); or doyens of the NGO/Consultancy/PR revolving-door nexus (e.g. Tiernan Brady) as to what we should do so as to secure, I repeat, a nearly inevitable referendum outcome.

Noel Whelan has been given too much attention, i.e. any at all, in consequence his vigorous self-promotion; his typically masculine insertion of himself into a national conversation (they love that phrase, don’t they) where his contribution was not sought. His advice to us, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a man frightened into rending his garments, was that to have an honest opinion, or even a word, just a word, with which to classify the oppression we experience was ‘counter-productive’ (“not helping ourselves”) and ipso facto libellous. He has since been celebrated as among the chief architects of the ‘victory’ which Yes Equality wot won.

Nobody has seen fit to take him to task for the price paid not just by LGBTQ for this but also causally, and inevitably, that exacted from Muslims in Ireland. And tomorrow it will be Travellers told that their ethnicity is a sham; And the day after tomorrow it will be women told to their faces that misogyny has been figmentary since the invention of the washing machine, whenever we do finally a get a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment of 1983.

Identically to racism and sexism, homophobia only exists on the conceptual horizon of liberalism as something to be warded off as uncouth; something above all not to be accused of, or to accuse someone else of: and especially not on the internet! Only a physically violent assault; only a Westboro Baptist Church slogan so on the nose it may as well be rhinoplasty, might be admitted to the canons of “homophobia”. Rancière’s perceptive analysis of the contrived disjuncture between racism of ‘popular passion’, which is vigorously policed so as to shield the racism of the state from scrutiny, maps across perfectly here. The liberal and the conservative, to riff on Marx, are merely two brothers at war vying for illusory distinguishability from the other.

That is where I will finish lingering on the odious figure of The Tallyman, about whom we can wonder with reasonable safety as to where he will stand when the time for picking sides comes:

Tiernan Brady, on the other hand, and he stands for so many others as well, is much more interesting by dint of being entirely unsophisticated at concealing how he is a pet of the heteronormative regime as both outworking and supporting truss of finance capital. In September of 2015, four months after the referendum, Brady on behalf of GLEN (Gay and Lesbian Equality Network) landed into the ominous-sounding “Out Leadership Summit”, in the City of London, with newly out and proud Fine Gael Health Minister, Leo Varadkar.

Before this incarnation though he had been a Fianna Fáil apparatchik who dutifully served former minister for numerous portfolios Mary Coughlan, in a dogsbody role; she who felt sufficient urgency at an adverse equality tribunal outcome to alter a law on social benefits in 2004. As then Minister for Social and Family Affairs, she made it so that a same-sex partner of an eligible pensioner could not claim the free travel allowance on public transport in right of that relationship anymore. She later in the same year expressed that although some piecemeal reform in the area might be contemplated, Ireland would ‘never be ready’ for same-sex matrimony, or the raising of children by gay couples. Brady joined her team later on, in 2007, but mentioning self-loathing seems redundant when he was already a member of Fianna Fáil.

Go forth again to September of last year: Brady, together with the aforementioned member of the Irish government, was in London to export the distilled ‘lesson’ of Ireland’s frankenstein civil rights experiment as if it was Kerrygold Butter. The corporate firms in attendance at the event ‘pride’ themselves on leveraging the best value from their employees’ wage labour by creating a workplace environment which is accepting of their sexual orientation. They might all hope to be named a gay-friendly employer in awards schemata presided over by severally sycophantic, tory-fancying magazines that are laughably termed a ‘gay media’ in the United Kingdom.  A similar navel-gazing exercise here, The GALAS, once announced the Irish Prison Service as its ‘employer of the year’. How quaint really, given that the Irish Prison Service ‘has no policies to protect LGBT prisoners’.

We digress. Brady and Varadkar condemned themselves out of their own mouths, and let a veritable café of cats out of the bag without any help from me:

It sort of spoils the effect to parse what Tweedledee and Tweedledum are being careful to only say while ensconced abroad with the neighbours, but indulge me an executive summary. We have the political director of an LGBT advocacy organisation admitting to censorship of LGBT voices who speak out about homophobia, and he has the temerity to be proud of this fact. Into the injury he adds the lightly gendered insult of imagining us ‘screaming’ at people. The Irish government minister, as Judy to Punch in this re-staging of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, applauds the job of self-censorship done by homosexuals to themselves and has the further audacity, as a man who came out only four (4) months before the referendum, to declare that LGBT are their own worst enemy. It succinctly illustrates the exact parameters of what I have poured out thousands of words already trying to convince you is in operation: the engulfing of queer existences by the sham of capitalism with Irish characteristics. Later this year, Brady informed the Irish Times while on home soil of how he is toxifying the ongoing same-sex marriage debate in Australia with his good counsel. I’m sure Aborigines, in turn, might be told they’re not helping themselves either as this new spiritual Irish empire widens its embrace in a way every bit as patronising and suffocating as the old African Missions.

You and I might have hurtful memories of what was said, and done, during the campaign; but what better nail in the coffin than to let Brady tell you what his is (from the latter Irish Times article):

Good to have it cleared up whom encouragement is due to in of all of this: the homophobes.

That was what Yes Equality told us not to say; but what about that which they told us to say instead? I want to close out by considering the startling reproduction of patriarchal, comely heteronormativity contained in a smattering of official ‘Yes’ campaign literature. The consideration of ‘positive role models’ and telephoning grandparents vaunted by the likes of Brady and Vlad the Impaler to overseas observers, already betrays this trajectory: but I would contend that it still doesn’t prepare you for the brusqueness of the ideology. Consider one such leaflet in which rutting heterosexuals from the GAA and IRFU (notorious for its er, steroidal social conscience), and the beatific figure of an Irish mammy too, implore the reader to do the right thing in the polling booth. Another exists with much the same arrangement except for the insertion of national treasure and semi-fossilised cultivator of Elektra complexes, Gay Byrne. Between the folds, apart from his name, it is as if the gays have been put out of the good room while visitors decide whether or not to buy the house; their very existence too risky to admit to the floating voter.

That’s only the start of the trouble though. Turn over the page on either leaflet, and you are greeted with this stunning antonym of a sleight of hand:

The Iona Institute might be apt to spit feathers that the discredited rubric of ‘family values’ is properly their province. They wouldn’t be wrong. The term cannot be emptied of its implied programme of enforcement and propagation of ‘normalcy’, to the end of a putative ‘common good’. In any event, the campaign did not seek to invert or up-end the meaning of the phrase: it was straight-up for it (yes).

The language harks, quite deliberately, word for word, to the unaltered text of Article 41 from 1937, and uncritically adopts all the predicates of a Victorian social order based on contractual relations. The basic goodness of this type of marriage is presumed, and there will be no troubling historiography ventured about where it has come from and whether it ought be ‘strengthened’ at all, rather than subverted, and ultimately swept away. Should it want for the raiment of tradition, I am suggesting nothing that was not in the 1847 edition of The Manifesto.

Let me put it another way: if one were to hear the snatch of “is a secure foundation on which society thrives” might you be sooner put in the mind of the Stonewall rioters, or instead Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove?

If the shoe fits, after all. Be rioters comrades; not lovers.

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Figures released by the UK Department of Health in May show women from the island of Ireland accounted for 82.6% of abortions provided to non-British residents last year.

That’s roughly nine women having to travel every single day and these annual headlines are an understatement. Not every woman arriving at a British clinic will give an Irish address while in other instances, women may have the option to travel somewhere else like the Netherlands. Even in the collection of statistics there are layers of invisibility and silence but nine women forced to leave their own home each day is nine too many and Britain remains the primary destination.

The task involved in arranging this journey has been covered in some detail here.

Do you have travel documents? A passport is €80 and Ryanair will only let you travel with a passport. Can you get a Driver’s Licence? You’ve lost it? Aer Lingus will let you travel on a work ID. Your work ID doesn’t have a photo on it? You’ll need a passport then.

Are you an Asylum Seeker? Ok, then you need to get travel documents that will allow you to re-enter the state. Who is your solicitor? Is he or she pro choice? How much does he or she charge to help you with this?

Words by Subprime
Images by Asylum Archive

The McMahon Report into the Protection System and Direct Provision was published one year ago this week. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the report has taken on an almost mythic status in some quarters as a panacea for the ills of Direct Provision. If only the report’s 173 recommendations were implemented, this tale goes, the horrors of Direct Provision would be a thing of the past. Trumpeted as a “Yes Equality moment” by then Minister for State Aodhán Ó Ríordáin this day last year, the publication of the report would “turn the page on the scandal of Direct Provision”.

Reality and the things Ó Ríordáin says are frequently at odds, however, and the report gathered dust for months before being quietly removed recently from the final Programme for Partnership Government (PfG), having been featured in an earlier draft. The report was in reality a weak, reformist document —  had it been implemented fully, Direct Provision would remain intact  —  and a quiet death like this was a fitting end for it. Unfortunately Ó Ríordáin couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie and decided make an issue of the new government’s failure to include a commitment to implement the report’s recommendations after having failed to do so himself as Minister for State in the Department of Justice.

Ó Ríordáin issued a statement claiming that the decision to remove mention of the report from the final PfG is “a betrayal of the thousands of people who have found themselves languishing in Direct Provision Centres all around the country.” On Twitter he said that the McMahon Report was “ the only chance that DP residents had.” This is ridiculous, even by Ó Ríordáin’s usual standards.

The working group process which led to the report was the real betrayal of Direct Provision residents.

The process and the report itself were so compromised and limited in their scope that, far from being “the only chance” for residents, they were used by civil servants and politicians including Ó Ríordáin to actively hamper efforts by residents and others to improve the system.

The bizarre notion that the McMahon Report would somehow solve Direct Provision is perfectly illustrated by a couple of recent news reports: Michael D. Higgins, reacting to the news that McMahon implementation was dropped from the PfG, told the Irish times that he had “noticed” the McMahon Report had not been featured in discussions on government formation. This statement was then picked up by breakingnews.ie, who twisted his words to claim the President had criticised the lack of a commitment to “end the Direct Provision for asylum seekers.” The site further stated that the “McMahon report into Direct Provision calls for an end to the system.” This is completely untrue and could be dismissed as bad journalism but unfortunately it appears that it is a fairly common view that both Ó Ríordáin and the McMahon working group had set out to end Direct Provision.

This narrative is the exact opposite of the truth. The McMahon working group came about during a time when Direct Provision system was experiencing protests in centres across the country. The process was used by the Department of Justice, with help from Ó Ríordáin, to suppress those protests, co-opt NGOs and block all attempts to change the system for over a year.

An Independent Working Group?

The July 2014 Statement of Government Priorities contained a commitment to set up an “independent working group” to report to government on “improvements” that could be made to Direct Provision and the wider asylum system. The group consisted of two sides: representatives of government Departments on the one hand and on the other, a group of asylum NGOs, some random “non-affiliated” political picks and a single refugee

The “independent” adjective was apparently just thrown on there to lend credibility to the group, or out of habit. It was never clear who exactly the group was meant to be independent of and the language of independence was mostly dropped (there’s no mention of the group being independent in the press release announcing its establishment, for example) except when convenient (when government wanted to avoid questions about the group’s progress.)

Being charitable, one could assume that the group was meant to be independent of government  —  except the majority of participants in the group were civil servants from various government departments. Or perhaps it was to be independent of actual government ministers  —  except for the fact that one of the draft plans was for Aodhán Ó Ríordáin to chair the group (which was apparently abandoned to avoid the perception of political interference in the group); government set the terms of reference and picked the group’s members; and ministers publicly discussed what they “hoped” would be in the final report, as the group was conducting its work.

In the end, the Department of Justice settled on ticking the independence box by installing an “independent” chairperson, former High Court judge Bryan McMahon. Despite the fact that Frances Fitzgerald met with McMahon to discuss the group before it first met and that they appeared in public together during the course of the group’s work, you could say that he meets the criteria for being independent simply by virtue of the fact that he is a former High Court judge, seemingly the only necessary qualification to chair such a group in Ireland. An independent Chairperson does not an “independent working group” make but I suppose the Department is entitled to some leeway in their implementation of government commitments.

In any case, it’s not government ministers or a retired judge who would care enough to engage in some kind of conspiracy to influence the group. Rather, it’s the Department of Justice as an institution who have the most invested in maintaining the status quo of Direct Provision and the asylum system.

It is their job, after all, to manage the state based on government decisions. A government decision 16 years ago mandated them to create Direct Provision and the establishment of the working group did nothing to change that decision.

The group’s terms of reference required that whatever the working group recommended, “the existing border controls and immigration procedures are not compromised.” Direct Provision is border control. It acts to dissuade people from travelling to Ireland to claim asylum by keeping those that already made it here in terrible conditions. If the working group was to truly and critically examine Direct Provision, it would have to look at this fact. To do so independently, it would require independence from the Department of Justice, the government department tasked with upholding government policies on border control. In this sense, the group was anything but independent as Justice was more prevalent on the working group than any other group.

Two actual Department of Justice officials sat on the government side of the plenary working group  —  Michael Kelly of the INIS and Noel Dowling of the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA) which runs Direct Provision. Then there was David Costello of ORAC, (formerly of Justice, soon to be in Justice again when ORAC is subsumed back into the Department.) In addition, three other Justice officials sat on various sub-groups within the working group, according to the final report, but others were involved in various capacities as the subgroups were something of a free-for-all. Four Justice also officials helped out as the group’s secretariat and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal was also represented on the group.

That’s a lot of people working within the Department of Justice and/or its semi-autonomous agencies who got to come to the table and help construct the report.

This doesn’t include Tim Dalton, former Department of Justice Secretary General, who for reasons unknown was included on the “independent”/NGO side of the group. This appointment alone should have been cause for objection and outrage from the NGOs represented on the Group  —  Dalton was Justice Secretary General as his Department set up Direct Provision 16 years ago. He would be contributing to a report that, if it were truly independent, could potentially criticise the very system he was responsible for establishing. There were no public objections by members to his appointment to the group. Perhaps there would have been objections to the fact that Dalton and the Chair of the group, Bryan McMahon, visited a Direct Provision centre together after the membership of the group was announced but before the first working group meeting. However, other members of the working group were not told that this trip happened so they did not have a chance to analyse this relationship.

I’m nitpicking here to an extent  —  I’m not sure anybody ever seriously tried to claim the group was independent. It was stated a lot, but didn’t seem to mean a whole lot. Its supposed independence was, as I said above, a useful way for government to long finger any discussion of changes to Direct Provision at a time when it was, from their cynical perspective, absolutely necessary for them to do so.

Hunger strikes and occupations

The working group was set up, intentionally or not, in order to stifle and displace mounting opposition to Direct Provision in the latter half of 2014. The group first met in November of that year and for the preceding three months, residents of various Direct Provision centres had been engaged in both spontaneous and loosely coordinated direct actions against the system.

Starting in Mount Trenchard, Co. Limerick in August, and spreading to eight centres during September and October, residents of Direct Provision railed against the system despite the best efforts of the Department of Justice and centre management to ignore, co-opt and intimidate them (armed Gardaí even came to Mount Trenchard to forcibly transfer three protesting residents to other centres, after the dispute there had already been ‘resolved’.) Actions included hunger strikes in Athlone, Portlaoise and Mount Trenchard; occupations of centres in Cork and Waterford, including a ten-day occupation of the State-owned Kinsale Road Accommodation Centre in Cork City; and a march on Enda Kenny’s constituency office in Castlebar by residents of the Old Convent centre in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo.

Residents used the protests not just to highlight and change the woeful conditions in the centres but also to call for the closure of the system, residency and a right to work for all asylum seekers and an end to deportations. In an effort to quell protests at various centres, Department of Justice officials told residents that the above demands were “non-local issues” which could not be addressed directly by RIA during protests but that they would be covered by the working group. This was untrue. The terms of reference for the group, drafted by Justice, did not allow the group to recommend the closure of Direct Provision and Frances Fitzgerald made it clear at the first meeting of the group that they had not been assembled to consider such an option.

The group did recommend an extremely conditional right to work in their final report but the government has no intention of implementing this and the Minister had ruled this out before the group even met. Similarly, an amnesty was ruled out before the group met, even though the report did recommended a conditional process whereby people in the system longer than five years would be given a form of residency. And, of course and unfortunately, stopping deportations was never going to be considered by the working group — they did, however, recommend that government legislate for increased powers of deportation, a recommendation implemented as part of the International Protection Act.

Avoiding action

The spectre of the working group allowed government to avoid debate on any Direct Provision reforms raised in the Oireachtas. On September 17th 2014, Ronán Mullen proposed a reformist Seanad motion which called on the government to allow a conditional right to work and to institute a review mechanism to grant those in Direct Provision longer than four years “compassionate” leave to remain in Ireland. (Four years is a ridiculously long cut-off point before we should be compassionate about people’s stays in DP but ironically even this obscene time limit was lower than the similar 5 year condition which made its way into the final McMahon Report.)

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin was on hand to counter this motion with a government amendment which welcomed the establishment of the working group. He said the “working group process… is a sensible one” which allows for “necessary change to be identified and managed effectively without the dangers which would be generated by peremptory actions.” In the same speech, Ó Ríordáin also decided to condemn protesting Direct Provision residents who were engaged in a process of unmanaged and dangerous change. While he said he “fully respect[s] the rights of residents to protest”, he could not “condone the targeting of individuals working in certain direct provision centres or the stopping of people going about their lawful work.” This is an astonishing attack on protesters by a Minister for State who supposedly respects their right to protest.

It’s not clear where Ó Ríordáin got the idea that certain workers were being “targeted” but he is perhaps referring to the demand of protesting residents in the Kinsale Road Accommodation Centre in Cork for the removal of a manager there. The grim conditions in the centre and the protest itself are discussed by one of the residents, Lucky Khambule in a recent rabble interview. In their list of demands, residents of the centre said that the manager in question “does not respect the people who are under his care” and that they were “intimidated by the manager calling Gardaí” and threatening to transfer them when they raised issues with him.

“Stopping people going about their lawful work” could also apply to the protest in the Kinsale Road where, at the time of Aodhán’s speech, residents had seized control of the centre and locked out management and staff. The irony of attacking protesters for impeding workers in the same speech in which he is denying Direct Provision residents the right to work is apparently lost on Ó Ríordáin. This method of protest, unlike the “sensible” working group process, was effective in winning residents immediate reforms. In the end, the residents of the Kinsale Road won many of their demands and the manager was removed.

Later the same month, Ó Ríordáin was in the Dáil to counter another motion on Direct Provision, from Thomas Pringle. This motion would call on the government to “abolish” DP and replace it with six months capped reception centres and a right to work after that time. Pringle, pre-empting the inevitable government response that that working group would solve all ills, laid out clearly the problem with this: “Everyone here who has an interest in the direct provision system can indicate what needs to be done because the experts have been informing us about the matter for quite some time.” There was of course, no need for a working group after years of reports ignored by government and the working group process was, Pringle said, “just another delaying tactic on the part of Fine Gael that will result in a much diluted version of what must to be done.”

Ó Ríordáin’s counter motion was identical to the one used against Mullen. He again took the opportunity to condemn protesting Direct Provision residents and this time also expressed his concerns “about the impact the protests can have on children and other vulnerable persons living in the centres.” Again the irony seems to be lost on him that he is smearing protesters while calling for the retention of a system that has an actual negative impact on children and vulnerable people.

It’s worth also comparing Ó Ríordáin’s comments to those of Direct Provision contractor Alan Hyde, in a submission to the working group, describing a protest the Birchwood centre in Waterford:

While protesting peacefully is a recognised constitutional right, the protesters in many cases took the law into their own hands… my employees were stopped from entering their place of employment… the majority of residents were casualities [sic] of the protest.

The Birchwood protest began after Ó Ríordáin’s two Oireachtas speeches condemning protesters so I’m not suggesting he lifted his comments from this submission but the simple fact that a supposedly anti-Direct Provision Minister would come up with the same talking points as did a Direct Provision centre owner should tell you all you need to know about the sincerity of Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.

NGOs

I’ve written before about how the Department of Justice was concerned that some of the NGOs involved in the working group process might be presented with problems because the official stance of their organisations is that they are for the abolition of Direct Provision while the working group was not set up to end the system at all. They needn’t have worried. Of the five NGOs represented on the group, only two had previously campaigned against Direct Provision  —  the Irish Refugee Council (IRC) and Nasc. The remaining three  —  SPIRASI, the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) and the Children’s Rights Alliance (CRA)  —  had taken much more ambiguous positions on the system, consistently failing to call for its abolition. The UNHCR, also represented on the group, never came out against the system.

The IRC and Nasc got around the problem of their previous opposition to the system by releasing statements saying they were still in favour of ending Direct Provision even though they were joining the working group. Nasc’s CEO Fiona Finn said that although she was “disappointed that the terms of reference for the Working Group seem quite narrow,” she believed it was “better to be at the table and try to effect change than not to take part”. Nasc would “continue to push for an end to the system of direct provision… both within and outside of the Working Group.” The IRC released a statement entitled “The Irish Refugee Council will continue to advocate for an end to Direct Provision”. Then CEO Sue Conlan said that the IRC would be “advocating for an international protection system that Ireland can be proud of” while also “advocating for an end to the current system of reception”.

The problem with both of these statements is that they were made after both NGOs had sight of the working group’s terms of reference which did not allow the possibility that the group recommend the abolition or replacement of Direct Provision. The terms of reference as I’ve mentioned above tasked the group with recommending to government “what improvements should be made to the State’s existing Direct Provision [system]”. While this could be interpreted charitably as allowing the group to recommend an alternative to Direct Provision, there was no confusion from government about what they intended. At a roundtable of NGOs in September 2014, prior to the establishment of the working group, Fitzgerald had made clear that by “improvements” to the system she meant improvements and not “replacing it with something else or abolishing it.” This fact was again highlighted by the Minister and McMahon at the first meeting of the working group.

There was no confusion from other observers. Shortly after the terms of reference were announced, a group of academics described the objectives of the working group as “very clear. Direct provision will remain in place. Any suggestions for improvement will be governed by “cost efficiency”, continued ghettoisation and deterrence.” Highlighting the fact that only one refugee was appointed as member of the group, the academics said that the group as announced “further silences and marginalises asylum seekers who have to live with the damage that this system has inflicted upon them”. They supported the call by Anti-Deportation Ireland for the NGOs to step down and give up their places to people in the system.

The Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI), a group of residents across multiple centres which grew out of the organisation developed during the Kinsale Road blockade and other centres, also called for the resignation of NGO working group members. They sent letters to the NGOs demanding representation and this was discussed at the second plenary working group meeting, as noted in the minutes.

The calls for resignations were ignored by NGOs. Asylum seekers would be represented officially only by the Core Group, an IRC funded group of asylum seekers and refugees. They had one representative on the main working group, Reuben Hambackachere, who from the minutes of the group seemed like the only person speaking truth at working group meetings. For example, he made the following contribution at the first meeting of the group:

In relation to the stated aim of the work of the Group — to show greater respect to the dignity of persons within the system, IRC Core Group representative expressed the view that the system of direct provision, which requires people to live in a controlled environment, is incompatible with the dignity of the person.

Sue Conlan and the IRC would later resign from the working group in March 2015 for reasons unrelated to the above. This kicked off internal discussions within the Core Group who fractured into two camps, those who wanted to also resign from the group in protest, led by Hambackachere, and those who wanted to stay on for the final couple of months and see what reforms could be won. In the end, Hambackachere lost out and he resigned from the working group, saying in his letter of resignation to the Chair of the group that he felt restricted by the group’s terms of reference to “legitimizing the current system with only a few tweaks…. My conscience will not allow me to endorse an exercise that has not truly reflected the voices of asylum seekers.” (He also wrote about his experiences in Village.)

Hambackachere’s resignation was in a personal capacity, the Core Group still remained on the working group. He was replaced by Stephen Ng’ang’a who sat on the group until the end and signed off on the final report. The Core Group had been badly damaged by their internal dispute. They started off as a small group of refugees and asylum seekers, backed by the IRC and unrepresentative of the wider body of asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland. They ended up as an even smaller group, and lost the institutional backing of the IRC. This was predictable and comes back to the demands from other asylum seekers for proper representation on the working group. The “community” of protection applicants in Ireland cannot of course be represented by any one group, especially not one tied to a specific NGO.

Apart from the issue of asylum seeker representation, the McMahon NGOs were compromised by the working group process itself. While the lines between Justice and the NGOs have always been blurry, not least in the eyes of many asylum seekers, the McMahon process was a radical departure from the earlier position where the NGOs at least paid lip service to the idea that they were antagonists of the Department. While individual NGOs had of course worked with government before this on various projects, including the first drafting of the RIA house rules, McMahon saw a group of NGOs come together with government to work together to plan the future of the asylum system and Direct Provision.

The co-option of the NGOs was noted in a recent article by working group member Ciara Smyth entitled “Chronicles of a Reform Process”. Smyth notes that one might take “jaundiced view” that the working group formulation, ie. NGOs and civil servants working more or less together towards a common goal, “might impede NGOs from adopting stance [sic] critical of government; the co-opting of NGOs onto the Working Group will certainly do so as far as the report is concerned.” Smyth’s article was written just before the publication of the report in June 2015. She was certainly correct that the remaining NGOs were indeed co-opted to the extent that they could not be critical of the government’s immediately obvious intention not to implement the report.

Another #YesEquality moment

The day after the report was finally delivered to government on June 23rd 2015, the Irish Times carried a story by Fiach Kelly quoting anonymous sources including a cabinet member. The story claimed that “700 migrants” had entered the state in just one month. An anonymous source then said that “those who are the focus of concern” are “in essence illegal immigrants and they are using the asylum process to gain entry to the country”. Fitzgerald was later asked about the 700 figure and it’s clear from her answer that nowhere near 700 people claimed asylum in any one month period in early 2015.

Apart from the outright lie that 700 people had abused the asylum system, the story also features anonymous concerns within “the Coalition” that “improvements in direct provision system, as well as a recovering economy, could make Ireland a destination country for immigrants.” The Irish Times had access to some of the report’s recommendations that same day as detailed in a separate article by Carl O’Brien — but they chose to run Fiach Kelly’s anonymously sourced article on their front page. In other words, they could have taken the opportunity to highlight the report’s recommendations but instead they chose to undermine it.

It isn’t that surprising that reactionaries in Cabinet and/or the Department of Justice would try to undermine the report’s release by planting ridiculous Daily Express style “migrant” scare stories in the press. It’s certainly not surprising that the newspaper of record would facilitate them. However, despite this clear evidence that the report was being and would continue to be undermined, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin’s optimism was not dampened.

A week after being delivered to government, the McMahon Report was published on June 30th 2015. Ó Ríordáin lost the run of himself on Twitter that day, producing this classic tweet where he characterised the publication of the report as a “another #YesEquality moment”. He said that the publication of the report was an “important moment” and that “implementation must be a priority.” You have to admire his enthusiasm but the report was never going to be implemented. Fitzgerald’s rather less enthusiastic reaction to the report was to say that the report “will receives [sic] serious study and consideration.” There was a press conference to launch the report at 4.30pm that day at which Fitzgerald said she thought the “roadmap set out in the publication is practical in its ambition.” Before 6pm she had already refused to commit to implementing the report’s recommendations.

Time to Act

Though the government was clearly never going to implement McMahon, the NGOs who remained on the working group until the end never lost hope. Their dedication to the report was total. They came out with coordinated statements on the day of the report’s release. When government avoided discussing the report in the Dáil, the NGOs formed a group called Time to Act to call on the government to implement the report’s recommendations. But implementation never came. Government implemented a couple of previous announced recommendations – a waiver on prescription charges for Direct Provision residents and a scheme of third level supports for asylum seekers which was so limited that only two people qualified for it. But for months these were the only announced changes to Direct Provision on foot of the McMahon Report.

Fans of Ireland’s asylum system will notice I’ve thus far glossed over the fact that the working group actually dealt not just with Direct Provision but with the wider protection process. This is an intentional choice, for brevity and because the group was presented as and referred to by government as a “Direct Provision working group”. The group actually focused equally on or even gave more time to “improvements” to the protection process rather than on “improvements” to Direct Provision. These two issues although related could be separate but McMahon blurs the line between them.

Whether Ireland maintains open or closed border in theory has no bearing on whether or not it operates Direct Provision, a separate system or no reception system at all. However, the report proposes a single application procedure as a method of reducing time spent in the asylum system. And although the introduction of a single application procedure was already planned by the Department of Justice, government has seized upon the single application procedure as a “solution” to Direct Provision.

The single application was legislated for as part of the International Protection Bill last year. According to government, this Bill “responded to” 26 of the McMahon recommendations, primarily the recommendation to introduce a single procedure. Non-McMahon NGOs objected to how the Bill was constructed and to how the government rammed it through the Oireachtas just before the Winter recess in December 2015. Even McMahon NGO Nasc objected to it, saying that while the “Minister claims that the Bill implements the key recommendations of the Working Group, this is simply not true.” Despite these objections, the Bill became an Act, signed in to law by the President after being referred to the Council of State.

The Department of Justice recently released a document which which lists the status of the 173 McMahon Report recommendations. In a press release accompanying the release, Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald stated that she is “determined to implement this report in full as soon as possible.” This is impossible as things stand. Justice has decided that 5 recommendations will not be implemented. These relate to the right to work for asylum seekers after 9 months in the system and the establishment of an independent advisory board to oversee the system. These recommendations are marked “no longer applicable.” A brief information note at the top of the document explains that these recommendations have been superseded by “the passing of the International Protection Act 2015.” This is clearly at odds with the Minister’s statement that the report will be implemented in full and this was the the first and only time that the Department has stated officially that some McMahon recommendations will not be implemented.

Of the “implemented” recommendations, it appears that less than the amount stated have been implemented. In some cases, a recommendation listed as being implemented clearly has not been implemented. In many other cases, the ‘implemented’ recommendations are vague, subjective, or a continuation of standard practice. For example, one recommendation requires that “the good practice established through the [McMahon] Working Group of sharing and discussing information in a safe setting among key stakeholders be continued.” This is listed as an implemented recommendation but it’s not clear who the key stakeholders are or what constitutes a safe setting.

If the McMahon NGOs were honest they would admit that Justice’s claimed implementation of a number of the recommendations is completely false. Instead, they have over the past year consistently “welcomed” “progress” on implementation. Following on from their criticism of the International Protection Act, Nasc also mildly took issue with government’s announcement of a €6 increase in the weekly Direct Provision Allowance for children. Nasc’s Fiona Finn said that they “welcome any improvement” to Direct Provision but that the increase wasn’t enough and called on the government to implement McMahon properly. Tanya Ward of the Children’s Rights Alliance, another working group member, said that the increase “will barely cover the cost of a bottle of Calpol” but in the same statement, along with two other children’s charities, she acknowledged “the leadership of” Joan Burton “in securing this increase” and recognised “the support and commitment of Fitzgerald and Ó Ríordáin but said that the government must implement McMahon fully.

Why would government fully implement the report when NGOs are welcoming insulting “implementations” of the report that go nowhere near meeting its recommendations?

Despite a year of non-implementation, it emerged recently that the McMahon NGOs have been meeting with the Department of Justice over the past year, and will continue to do so. The Time to Act NGOs released a joint statement “welcoming” government’s “renewed commitments” for full implementation. They did not mention that government, presumably with their blessing, had ruled out a right to work for asylum seekers.

It seems that the NGOs who were involved in the group are happy to be drip-fed half-implemented recommendations, reassurances and lies from government. This would be fine if they didn’t claim to advocate on behalf of the people most affected by inaction. When they renewed their commitment to implement McMahon, government claimed that they had granted status to 1,500 people who had been in Direct Provision longer than 5 years. That is great for those people, but as of April there are still almost 1,000 people in direct provision over 5 years. There are 3,047 in the system for longer than 9 months, one of the government’s vague targets for a maximum stay once the single procedure is implemented. Rather than advocating for an end to Direct Provision, these NGOs have been praising government for removing some of the people in the system for the longest and implicitly condemning everybody in the system for a year or two to continued limbo.

Aside from Ó Ríordáin’s and the NGOs’ hypocrisy in calling for the report to be implemented, other people and groups who should know better are also making serious calls for implementation. For example, the Irish Association of Social Workers issued a statement recently which called on government to implement McMahon “without further delay.” I disagree. The current “delay” is one full year since the report was presented to government. In August, it will be two years since the Direct Provision protests of Summer ’14. Residents suspended some of their protests partly on the understanding (explicitly stated by the Department of Justice) that their concerns would be addressed by the working group. They were not.

The working group was ill-conceived from the outset, partially a response to protest by residents and to longstanding objections from all quarters against the horrors of Direct Provision. The work of the group was shaped and directed by a Justice Department resistant to even the most minor reform. The recommendations in the McMahon Report are impossible to fully implement.

It would be nice to believe that the government will suddenly decide to implement McMahon, but they will not. If the report was a true template for positive change then people should indeed campaign for its implementation, but it is not. It deserves to be forgotten about. The real crime is that people still push it as a “solution” to the detriment of real change. For the McMahon NGOs to continue to push it when it’s going nowhere compounds their betrayal of asylum seekers during the process.

Over fifty thousand people have been forced to live through Direct Provision over the past 16 years. Residents’ stories of horrific conditions and abuse from staff are no longer hard to find. There were plenty of reports before McMahon laying out the damage caused by the system. Government and the NGOs ignored all of this during McMahon and they continue to ignore it by slowly and incompletely implementing the report’s recommendations.

Direct Provision is in theory reformable, but only if you leave aside your morality and compassion. To anybody who sees its residents as human beings, the Direct Provision system is unacceptable. Men, women and children have been left at the mercy of private operators for years because of their immigration and financial status and because of the colour of their skin.

Government ministers, a retired judge and some well paid ‘humanitarians’ had the privilege of wasting almost a year of their lives compiling a white-wash report. Another year has now passed while they have sat on that report.

During that time, an average of about eight people will have died in Direct Provision. Hundreds of applicants for asylum here will have been introduced to roommates they don’t want and bad food they shouldn’t be expected to eat.

None of these horrors would be fixed by implementing McMahon  —  the only way to right the wrong of Direct Provision is to end it.

Oireachtas Retort is a space for original and occasionally incisive commentary on the relentless torment of Irish politics. If you find any of this useful, please click the brown envelope to donate!

The fifth annual March for Choice is just over two weeks away on Saturday, September 24th.

This year’s theme is “Rise & Repeal – a comment on the failure of our Republic to fulfil the promise of 1916″. March coordinator Linda Kavanagh says “the Easter Rising sought Sovereignty and self determination for Ireland. Today, we seek the same control over our own bodies. No longer will the Irish State force us to self-administer health care by taking abortion pills, risking a fourteen year jail term, or spend thousands of euro travelling secretly to England. This year we, the women of Ireland, with the support of all those who care about equality and human rights, are self administering our independence”.

Organisers at the Abortion Rights Campaign are extremely busy  ahead of what is likely to be a record turn out for Ireland’s largest prochoice event. I would encourage everyone to spend some time volunteering between now and the day itself. There are plenty of small ways to contribute so please click here to find out how you can get involved.

Aside from this, the best thing people can do is talk to friends, enemies, family, strangers, co-workers, team mates, book clubbers, drinking buddies and pets about attending the march itself.

On the day cheap buses will be leaving from Belfast, Galway, Cork, Sligo, Mayo, Meath and elsewhere so get in touch. Dublin people remember to factor in a potential bus strike on the day.  Saturday, September 24th – save the date now and plan ahead.

More than  833 woman from Northern Ireland and 3400 from republic were forced to leave their home country and travel to Britain in 2015. In the coming years, women living in Ireland face having to leave the European Union itself, however, awareness and disgust at these facts continues to grow. It has been an eventful year with the 8th Amendment never far from the political agenda.  After the explosion of activity in 2012, the issue of reproductive choices in this country has slowly become mainstream.

Since Clare Daly’s bill on the X Case anniversary and particularly the death of Savita Halappanavar, reproductive rights is a question legislators increasingly expect to be asked. Many politicians remain scarred from 1980s so while their glacial progress and evasion remains completely unacceptable, the breakthrough after decades is testament to work being done.

Outside of Leinster House, conversations are happening around kitchen tables, people are attending meetings, work is happening at all levels in big and small ways. Personal and public displays of support are becoming commonplace rather than transgressive and perhaps most ubiquitous is the REPEAL jumper.

Anna Cosgrave the woman behind the idea says the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive and having sold out several times says demand is “telling of how pressing this issue is and how heavy it’s weighing on those that are effected”.  The project has certainly been a huge success in terms of visibility and giving people the sense of being part of something bigger. Those interested in more t-shirts, badges and bags can visit the ARC shop.

The activist landscape has been transformed. The depth and  plurality of support that exists now is the prochoice movement’s best asset but as our numbers grow, the first and most important action is listening to the women involved in both the campaign and in your own life.

We only need look at how a small number of anti-choice activists have redoubled their efforts to shut down discussion wherever it arises. This site will be publishing a more in depth focus on this in the coming days but we should note that nothing they have done so far prevented spontaneous applause in the Rose of Tralee dome of all places.

In the North, abortion became an election issue for the first time this May after two high profile court cases dominated headlines and talk radio. In April, a 21 year old woman without means to travel received a three month suspended sentence for using the abortion pill in 2014. Showing their true colours, anti-choice groups were quick to condemn the judge’s ruling for being “unduly lenient”. Just weeks later it emerged that a second woman is facing trial for buying pills online  for her daughter.

The activist response has been swift with three women in protest handing themselves in to the PSNI for procuring pills. Kitty O’Kane, Colette Devlin and Diana King in Derry say “we feel very angry that it’s illegal. We’re angry that women are placed in this situation. That women who can afford to travel to England can have a legal abortion but women who can’t afford to travel can only access nine week abortion pills for £60. We’re very angry about that. We’re very angry that women are being criminalised”. Police inquiries remain “ongoing”.

In July, record numbers turned out for a rally for choice in Belfast. Organiser Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird believes “the increase is indicative of a growing hunger for change completely in keeping with this latest wave of feminism, not to mention the added drama of going head to head with Precious Life. Reports have stated that we outnumbered their march and that their usual upbeat character (the likes of the “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Amnesty has got to go” chanting) was nowhere to be found. I feel like we marched as the winning force and they marched as the losing force”.

She says “the situation is so close to achieving change, so much so that I don’t believe it would be foolish at all for some of the more mainstream, liberal organisations to drop their line of pushing for incremental change. The recent action of the Derry 3 handing themselves in is what we need more of. We need to brazenly and unashamedly break the law and let them know we are doing so”.

Recent years have finally started to see increasing acknowledgement of the Northern Irish situation in Britain and it vitally important that we too in the republic continue to build links and support with women in the north.

Awareness and information about the pill continues to spread. WomenonWeb can be contacted here while Bpas have just launched further aftercare services. For separate matters and information on that neglected area of sexual and women’s health, not least in light of further exposure of rogue counselling centres,  you can contact the IFPA in confidence here.

The issue of fatal foetal abnormality diagnosis has probably been the most prominent aspect this past year with families and even several TDs continuing to talk about their experience, making it likely to be the first dealt with under any post-repeal legislation.

The work of activists from Terminations For Medical Reasons has been so crucial in highlighting the treatment of thousands of women and families under the eighth amendment.

Speaking to Gaye Edwards of TFMR about the previous twelve months she says “unfortunately people continue to receive diagnoses of Fatal Foetal Anomalies, so one of our top priorities continues to be providing emotional support for those families, by telephone, text, messaging and in group meetings. We have also been on a drive to educate people about Fatal Foetal Anomalies, destigmatise the choice to terminate such pregnancies and move closer to repeal of the eighth amendment so that practical and compassionate legislation can be put in place to allow women to be cared for in Ireland”.

Undoubtedly the biggest breakthrough for TFMR this year was founding member Amanda Mellet successfully taking a complaint against Ireland to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. “In a landmark ruling, all 18 members found that her human rights had been violated and that she had been subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a result of Ireland’s draconian abortion laws (Mellet -v- Ireland)”.

This ruling forced an apology in the Dáil from the health minister and a typically bumbling reply from An Taoiseach who insists the ruling is “not binding”. Máiréad Enright and others say otherwise  but in any case, this will add further pressure on the same politicians that so easily excluded the D Case from legislation just four years ago.

In the short term we get Irish solutions to Irish problems. Government have promised to “make arrangements” so that “services surrounding these events and instances should be improved”, but this ham fisted at best piecemeal offering comes after women have been facing this journey for decades and not least after members of Enda Kenny’s own governments have been aware of this issues for several years.

The general election this year returned perhaps the greatest number of prochoice politicians to Dáil Éireann. At least forty or fifty openly prochoice TDs in all, perhaps more when you include pro-referendum or pro-repeal which is a very strong foundation in a parliament that lags far behind the public.

Just before the summer recess, Mick Wallace’s Bill caused plenty of trouble both within Fine Gael and at cabinet. Building on Clare Daly’s work during the previous term, we are fortunate that this stuff is occurring in parliament with some frequency because otherwise it would be very easy for politicians and by extension large parts of the media and public services to ignore.

Enda Kenny’s coalition have established a citizens assembly that is, of course, more to do with the needs of politicians than anyone else. Government are seeking to outsource an issue they  view at best a distraction at worst nuisance. Little do they realise abortion only forms one part of campaign against the treatment of women should they become pregnant in this country.

The convention should be treated with utmost scepticism, however, it also important that anti-choice elements are not given inch in any battle. Official processes must be engaged with but as will become more and more important as we edge closer to a referendum, we should resist falling into the trap of fighting on someone else’s terms.

Contestation within the broader prochoice movement itself is likely to intensify over matters like campaigning, strategy, demands and so on. Leadership of the Yes Equality campaign have begun to acknowledge the mistakes of that referendum and it is important for people to realise that out of both necessity and practicality, many of the marriage campaign tactics should not be repeated. Be wary of anyone suggesting otherwise.

The issue of ‘balance’ as presently interpreted by the media needs to be tackled as a priority. This is not a 50/50 fight and we should not be expected to face disproportionate and scurrilous opposition on a regular bases. Broadcasters too need re-examine the format and framing  of debates and information provision in light of their own ongoing failures but especially the 2015 referendum and British media mistakes during the Brexit campaign.

When not combating outright lies and scaremongering,  the abortion debate in Ireland is already susceptible to becoming mired in legal and medical discussion where women making these decisions are often patronised if they are visible at all.

It is crucial that women’s rights are placed front and centre of every discussion and the wider campaign.  This seems bleedin obvious but just watch how quick women’s experience is sidelined.  This is what the march for choice is all about.

This is first in a number of posts between now and the march on the 24th. In the mean time you can check out a prochoice special of the Oireachtas Retort podcast available for stream and download below.

pics – Paul Reynolds

Oireachtas Retort is a space for original and occasionally incisive commentary on the relentless torment of Irish politics. If you find any of this useful, please click the brown envelope to donate!

On the launch of Telefís Éireann just over fifty years ago, President Eamon De Valera addressed the audience in one of station’s most remarkable broadcasts. Likening the power of television to atomic energy, this giant of Irish history expressed personal apprehension that “never before was there in the hands of men an instrument so powerful to influence the thoughts and actions of the multitude”.

Later that evening the station was blessed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.

While the role of RTÉ alone in driving social change has been over mythologised by John Bowman and others in recent years, there can be little doubting the effect mass media plays in shaping, advancing and limiting public attitudes. Denis O’Brien spent millions in his effort to take over Independent Newspapers, in compliment to his radio empire, while the malign  influence of Rupert Murdoch has warped expectation for millions of people.

In the political realm the use of mass marketing has come to be known as the ‘air war’. Political parties and government policy are sold just the same as cars, mortgages and dishwasher tablets. There is debate about whether this or the ‘ground war’ [canvassing, getting the vote out, etc] is a more effective use of resources but nonetheless, each year the amount spent by Irish politicians on spin doctors and media training continues to grow.

In 2012 for instance we learned that James Reilly and Frances Fitzgerald had used over €30, 000 in ministerial allowances on the services of the Communications Clinic. Each week, Irish politicians of all stripes and level spend thousands advertising in local newspapers. We pay for it. In the US,  media campaign budgets dwarf the total spend in elections elsewhere. Deep pockets of Obama, Romney, their supporters and opponents ensured over one million adverts were broadcast during the 2012 cycle. In more recent times the success of people like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage is rooted in their ability to stay in the headlines.

So then, having survived and later thrived during some of the most pivotal decades in Ireland’s history,  De Valera was correct anticipating a new front in the battle for hearts and minds. How well did he know that much of this battle would involve rewriting his own constitution.

Away from stage managed TV debates and the bright lights of modern public relations there is another aspect. Some years after De Valera’s warning, Oliver J Flanagan TD made the observation that “there was no sex in Ireland until Teilifis Éireann went on the air”. This was nonsense of course, but what Flanagan meant is that the medium provided a new space where uncomfortable and unmentionable topics where acknowledged.

Perhaps one of the best examples came later in 1984 when letters flooded into the Gay Byrne radio show following the death of Ann Lovett. At the time Byrne remarked that there were “too many letters. They couldn’t be ignored”. This is crucial.  Like Flanagan’s anxieties about sex, the media in this instance was really only communicating something that already existed but for various reasons remained forbidden. In the shadows and margins of respectable society  something is always waiting for its moment before bursting out to leave the world unrecognisable. The weeks following the death of Savita Halanpanavar saw similar outpouring where that awful tragedy encouraged thousands to share their experience, no two the same, both on the airwaves and among friends and family.

I sat up one night that week listening to replay of some phone-in show on 4FM. Dozens of people spoke about Savita, about their own experience of maternity care and of abortion. There was no agitation or ‘debate’, just regular people with all sorts of stories spanning decades. Women who were speaking about events for the first time in their lives after hearing someone do the same fifteen minutes earlier.

Issues of secrecy, silence, stigma and shame loom large over both the social and legal framework of Ireland’s reproductive health regime. A significant amount of this has been enforced through absence.  Away from Article 40.3.3 alone,  when the constitution states that a women’s place is in the home it is not just buttressing the ideal of patriarchal family or primacy of motherhood.

While ‘the home’ is not necessarily the opposite of the outside world, a women’s place in the home for a very long time and even today meant surrendering financial and a large degree of personal independence. This is not to say mothers were chained to the sink but issues of participation in the public sphere are written into the constitution as a baseline into which all other tributaries are supposed to flow.

Until the 1970s young Irish women were forced out of heavily gendered public employment in teaching, nursing, administration, etc, on becoming married. The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996 while countless other expectant women were given a one ticket out of the country. Enforced absence came in many forms and I needn’t tell you how lack of ability to control one’s own body  was a factor.

In February this year, Maria Bailey became the 100th women to enter Dáil Éireann since Constance Markievicz in 1918. Over one hundred men were elected the same weekend just as they have been in every election previous.

When news of the Miss X broke in 1992, An Taoiseach Albert Reynolds stood in the chamber to make a statement on Ireland’s injunction of a fourteen year old girl. There were just eight women TDs at the time and the two who tried to speak were ruled out of order by the Cheann Comhairle.

After over 21 years, a government passed legislation in line with that Supreme Court judgement which had been upheld by the people not once but twice. From  that January through May, no law in our lifetime was ever given so much time in parliament but it was not until the final stage of the final night in 2013, after months of supposed debate, that someone read onto the Dáil record part of evidence given by a then teenage girl during the X Case. She had been absent throughout. She was not alone, government also excluded the D Case from consideration. Deirdre Conroy was absent until waving her anonymity in 2013 stating that what happened to Savita Halappanavar “was the final straw”. Ahead of the 2002 referendum she had previously published an pseudonymous open letter the Taoiseach asking to be listened to. Here she was again three Taoiseachs later. There is no reason why anyone in her circumstances or any other should have to forfeit so much to be heard in Leinster House.

In public houses where there is considerably less drinking and antisocial behaviour, places long considered and marketed as the heart of Irish social life, women were routinely banished to a snug if they were served at all.

One way or another, women were absent. Through the law and much more, women’s views, experience and decision making was kept out of sight where it was less likely to intrude or contribute.

Returning to our national airwaves, the 1947 Radio Éireann annual report states that a programme called ‘Housewives Half-hour’ was among the most popular,

The circle of regular listeners now embraces every county in Ireland and a big number from England and Wales. Constant appeals are made for an extension of the time or a bi-weekly programme.

Nearly thirty years later in 1975, the first issue of Banshee magazine from Irish Women United declared

You’ve just read the daily papers. You’ve been listening to the radio. You are are probably about to watch television. Would you know from the attention devoted by the media to women that females make up fifty one percent of the population?

Did you notice any howls of justifiable outrage that Irishwomen are denied contraception, divorce and abortion? That we work for half the wages men get? That we rear families, a difficult job indeed, under conditions no trade unionist would tolerate in a factory – mothers get no pay, no paid holidays, no training for child rearing and often no home in which to rear children? They don’t even have the legal right to decide the religion, education or domicile of their children.

You’ve just spent the whole day learning nothing about women and no one cares what you think.

It was into this Ireland that the Eighth Amendment soon arrived.

Throughout the decade proceeding 1983, elements of the conservative catholic right had fought nationwide running battle against what would become the Irish Family Planning Association. In 1973 a man named John O’Reilly presented Dublin gardaí with contraception he had received by post. Accompanying the contraband were copies of two letters to the IFPA, one signed by an Eilish and another by Deirdre. John O’Reilly was then chairman of a little operation called the ‘Irish Family League’, his daughters were aged nine and ten . He had directed them to sign the letters which he posted in an effort to bring the forces of the law against the IFPA. Charges were brought by then Fine Gael Attorney General Declan Costello who some years later was the High Court judge who ordered the injunction in the X Case.

Under questioning in court, O’Reilly’s daughters acknowledged that they did not understand what their father had asked them to do. The case was later struck out on the distinction that the IFPA had accepted a donation rather than sold the contraception. The ‘Irish Family League’ took their defeat and moved onto their next scheme. O’Reilly, a member of the Knights of Columbanus, would go on to become chairman of the Prolife Amendment Campaign and to this day remains at the top table of the Prolife Campaign. They have recently removed the page listing personnel from their website for some reason. Must be some mistake.

The history of these groups has been well documented so what I want to focus on is the operation and how, like the case above, these people use law, regulation, bureaucracy and plain old influence  to stifle and  censor.

Obviously, insertion of the Eighth Amendment itself is probably their biggest victory but we have seen a lot of activity in recent years and months that I think warrants proper context.

The first thing to take into account is that today just as in the 1980s, we are talking about a group of people who are insignificant in number but considerable in commitment. Take Senator Ronan Mullen, former press officer to the Archbishop of Dublin during events that led to the Murphy Report. Mullen looks for votes on the basis that “I will be the one to stand up x, I am the only one who will speak for x”, “without me there will be no..” and so on. The first sentence on his literature for this year’s Seanad election claimed “Ronan Mullen stands out in Irish politics”. I wonder why that could be? Mullen stood in his first proper election in 2014 only narrowly out polling a catastrophe like Lorraine Higgins while Luke Flanagan got four times as many votes. The mythical prolife vote was unmoved from its slumber, it seems.

The Iona ‘Institute’ was established on the same basis. Without us no one else would be putting this view across. Just like the original Prolife Amendment Campaign, they all double bluff on one hand purporting to represent a large section of society while on the claim to be the lone voice speaking out.

The antichoice side do not just oppose abortion, but contraception and sex education too along with dozens of other issues under the umbrella of sexual permissiveness as one but very important  part of a much broader worldview. It is derisory to suggest that religious belief is not the foundation of their campaigning. For tactical reasons this will be dressed up in language of dignity and human rights. There may be others motivated by misogyny or anti-feminism alone but you cannot talk about  Irish anti-choice activity without putting the church front and centre.

This is not to say that this religious view is simplistic or unthinking, far from it. Much of the world is ordered by lines long set down in part by the church and the anti-choice standpoint forms part of a material and ideological structure as insidious and complex as its cousins in private property and capitalist social relations – which themselves are not at all  incompatible with a desire to see Irish society conform to a particular Roman Catholic ideal.

However while Irish capitalism is doing ok, its ally in cloth is sort of in an odd place today. The tide they hoped to turn in the eighties has crashed down around them, slowly at first but then with ferocious speed. The world and country has changed rapidly and they have the siege mentality of panic and motivation characteristic of people who feel under attack on several fronts. A recent Irish commenter on a popular American conservative website described the impending referendum as “the Stalingrad of Irish Catholicism” hoping that “if the religious segment win and enter the political process more assertively thereafter there is a real chance Ireland will not go the way of the rest of Europe”.

It wouldn’t be Irish Catholicism without nationalism of course. As has so often been the case around the world at different times, women are bound up with ideas of nationhood and identity so Irish women find themselves caught in someone else’s longing for a place that never really existed.

Many of the main players see themselves as guardians of a particularly kind of Ireland. Much of it nostalgic but some is more current. Status is a big thing. The Prolife Campaign claims that the amendment is “regarded internationally as one of the key pro-life victories of the past 40 years”.  Prestige for Ireland in the Catholic world and themselves in the antichoice bubble is seen as important.  After the 2013 ‘Rally for Life’ Sean O’Domhnaill of Youth Defence proclaimed that Dublin “looked like the pro-life capital of the world”. The marriage referendum will have been a serious blow to whatever pomp that remains and the impending visit of his holiness will weigh on their minds.

Internationally, the Irish antichoicers have had some interesting associations from extremely wealthy Americans to straight up neofascists in Britian and Italy. At home, rivalry between Youth Defence and PLC has lead to no shortage calamity, most famously a split in 2002 causing Youth Defence to go against the PLC and church in advocating a no vote on the Twenty-fifth Amendment. For a brief moment in 2013 they held united protests but within weeks were back to ploughing their own furrow.  They can regularly be heard encouraging people not to attend the other’s events.

I have often quoted this from a 1994 Nuala O‘Faolain column but it captures much of the thinking and is something that could be applied in many other cases. Looking back she observed that

“often at meetings, I would see that a certain kind of educated, middle-aged man in particular was enraged at being forced to listen to plurality of voices when no one was listening to him. I’m not saying that their anti-abortion feelings weren’t absolutely sincere but the rage was even bigger then the issue. They would still have been angry, even if travel and information and the whole lot had gone as they had wanted. It is Ireland they are disappointed in and their own place in it. It is the erosion of certainty that is threatening them. A lot of people in this country want to go back to the simplicities of an authoritarian era”.

Repeated opinion poll since 2012 show that those opposed to abortion in all circumstances is at best one and ten people. They have lost every referendum on the issue since winning 1983. How then can such a minority hold the rest of us back?

Essentially everything since the amendment plan was hatched has involved antichoicers being a  nuisance. We got a referendum no one wanted in 1983. That amendment caused the country revulsions in 1992, Youth Defence came along to wreck everyone’s head before the very same people from PLAC pestered Bertie Ahern into committing to yet another referendum ahead of the 1997 election. Whether harassing women on the street or the elderly for money, the real story of Irish anti-choice activism has been one long pain in the arse.

Today, Dáil Éireann is still populated by many politicians spooked because of bitter campaigns in the eighties and they are deeply reluctant to go within a mile of something believed to be contentious.  Throughout passage of the PLDP Bill in 2013, each one would rise to his feet in the chamber at atone that “this is a very divisive issue”. Most politicians, not least those preaching the gospel of laissez faire in all other aspects of life,  are completely indifferent but believe there are more votes to be lost than won on the matter. Anti-choice activists have exploited this by being loud and persistent enough to make most politicians believe we are still living in 1985.

Below is a list of organisations that made submissions on abortion to the Committee on the Constitution ahead of 2002

Much of these would be one man bands but many are still with us.

Letter writing and lobbying is constant enough and during 2013 everything was thrown at politicians to prevent passing of the legislation. We should take lessons that after a campaign that included Enda Kenny receiving letters written in blood,  they only managed to syphon off six dissenting blueshirt TD who went onto to lose their seats this year.

This summer a mural on the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar received worldwide attention after anti-abortion activists succeed in pressuring its removal. Echoes of 1977 when following complaints, Dublin Corporation withdrew a grant from the Project Arts Centre after the staging of two plays by the Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company. This summer it was planning permission rather than affront to national morality that got the Project Arts in trouble. What was most curious about the complaints is that a wall in Temple Bar had people writing letters from, er, Donegal. As the letters all arrived in succession, each touching on the same points of planning permission and public funds, it is patently obvious that the complaints were organised rather individuals acting independently.

Which brings us back to the media and one the greatest targets of anti-choice ink.

Writing in the Irish Times ahead of the referendum last year, Breda O’Brien informed us that

In 2009, GLEN had 348 media appearances – 179 broadcasts and the rest ranged from national newspapers to the Law Society Gazette. Almost one per day.

That is quite the statistic to compile. Media monitoring like this is serious dedication for people who claimed they were only concerned for the childer.

On the morning of June 24th this year after the votes were counted, thousands in Britain woke up and googled “what is the EU?” This came after a months long campaign and decades of coverage not to mention living in the bloody thing. Since the referendum there has been much recrimination about broadcasters’ insistence on false equivalence in place of anything resembling balance let alone the kind of useful information a public should expect. The BBC would wheel out fringe commentators as an equal and credible view despite the fact their claims were far outside any consensus let alone based on evidence. Any old dubious rubbish was fit for broadcast as counterpoint.

Here at home we are regularly confronted by the same seven or eight people, each one simultaneously an expert on law, medicine, finance, global politics and most especially, everyone else’s decision making. The have no obligation nor inclination to tell the truth. They have no respect for other people’s circumstances. They have no interest in what you think.

Listen carefully, you will hear them exclaim about one study or another than despite no one else ever encountering has turned the medical consensus on its head! You can get a copy easy on http://www.totallyrealscience/americanmoolah.org. Up next in studio, Cora Sherlock tells us how she is going to build a wall to keep the abortions out!

During 2013, anti-choicers polluted the airwaves with fear that three years on has never come to pass. Floodgates, arrrrrrgh. Fringe conservatives in Ireland then succeeded in having all sorts of scurrilous claims broadcast during the marriage referendum last year. RTÉ took an ultra cautious approach in who was allowed speak about their own real lives while hypothetical children were inescapable.  In this we the public were denied the full spectrum of human experience, shade and contrast was lost, so much more of that important issue went unsaid and as a consequence of what was permitted many people suffered. Though they lost comprehensively, the right succeeded in narrowing the debate to the extent that people found themselves exposed to and having to argue against absurd and damaging nonsense.

Since then, the Broadcasting Authority has been inundated with vexatious complaints any time a woman so much as breathes near a microphone. Reading through BAI judgements it is clear, just like Projects Arts, that complaints originate from a small group of people and often the same person under different names. There is a certain correct format in making a successful complaint and it is obvious that a small group of people have been instructed or coached. These complaints are not representative of public sentiment but again, causing nuisance is just enough.

Could you imagine our side writing letters to the BAI every time women are portrayed as untrustworthy, stupid or one dimensional? We would scarcely have time for little else.

To make matters worse, even though no referendum rules apply broadcasters have taken on cautious interpretations on these rulings in acts of  self-censorship that resemble the days of Section31. One effect of that occasionally still lamented piece of legislation is that women either part or perceived to be part of the republican or nationalist movement were absent from the airwaves. As a result, the particular perspective and experience of women during the Northern Ireland conflict often went unspoken. If you were a member of something like a housing, health or education campaign for example, Section 31 often had the effect of keeping these aspects out of sight. A version of this persists in Northern Ireland today where  women who must be silent for war, today  must be silent for peace. More absence.

The Iona ‘Institute’ was established in 2007 as a media pressure group and are far more mundane than most of us like to think. Essentially they exist to be on the end of a phone should a producer need someone to make up ‘media balance’. They contribute nothing.  During the 1980s, the ‘institute’ model was very successful for the United States in selling neoliberalism and wars. Our own little ghouls on Merrion Square adopted the same model. Professional bullshitters. No expertise no mandate armed only with well rehearsed bad faith arguments and ability to succeed as long as radio and TV producers keep picking up the phone.

Key to their activism is securing airtime completely out of proportion with the view they represent. They have a vested interested in creating false panic around bias, censorship and ‘silencing’ as it is one way to ensure media stay lazy in how programmes are formatted and issue are framed.

The one thing you will never hear the Iona Institute discuss though is religion. They will hold forth on issue of marriage, schools, abortion and whatever else they were never asked but it is clear that a decision has been made to leave Jesus at the door. In 2012, Ronan Mullen established another operation called Catholic Voices which is modelled on the Opus Dei front in Britain of the same name. They deal with the God stuff and “equip speakers with the knowledge and skills to communicate clearly and competently in the media”. So you have the false balance already present in the Irish media and then train people like you would a politician or scandal hit celebrity. Like Breda O’Brien and others, they will always just be introduced simply as a ‘school teacher’ or some such while the audience is none the wiser.

This is not the only coordinated attempts of media manipulation. At a poorly attended ‘Convention for Life’ in Dublin back in 2014, Niamh Ui Bhriain of Youth Defence promised “massive campaign” targeting advertisers at the Irish Times due to the paper’s roll in breaking the Savita story and subsequent support for the 2013 legislation. My inquiries suggest the campaign either didn’t materialise or had no discernible impact.

This tactic is regularly encouraged by Alive! magazine who recently enough suggested that readers(?) write to Avonmore Dairies in protest. Avonmore was then sponsor of the Late Late Show and one commercial break, we are told, included and avert for Durex. Thinking went that Avonmore could be spooked into making trouble for RTÉ because their brand was now somehow associated with contraception. Readers will have to make their own mind up about that one  but I suspect Alive! editor Fr Brian McKevitt was the only one at home getting bothered about condom adverts on a Friday night.

McKevitt plays an interesting part in this story. Anti-choicers are always keen to tell us about “the women who regret their abortions” but rarely does anyone admit that the group ‘Women Hurt’, whose trauma these people are so eager to exploit, was set up by none other than Fr McKevitt himself, a Dominican priest. Appearing on Liveline earlier this year after publishing an article which claimed beating children (one of his paper’s regular obsessions) “made them more successful in life”, on air he went to compare masturbation to drink driving.

Indeed, at times it seems “balance” doesn’t work in their favour. David Quinn was recently forced to publicly concede that the owner of a rogue crisis pregnancy agency farcically defending himself on Liveline was “… not doing a very good job”. More important was a segment on RTÉ Primetime in 2013, Dr Berry Kiely of Opus Dei and medical adviser to the Prolife Campaign appeared as ‘balance’ to Sarah McGuinness of Terminations For Medical Reasons.

I don’t want to patronise Sarah McGuinness with any of the usual words or comments but re-watching that clip after some time you can only admire the work she and others from TFMR have found themselves doing.

The Prolife Campaign on the other hand later complained that the discussion was unfair because Kiely couldn’t possibly be expected to come out of it in a good light. That in itself says more about their position and ironically enough too, the antichocie mantra of people being being responsible for their  own actions. But more than that again, it shows that in the face of life in its unpredictable variation and difficult complexity, when women are no longer absent, the antichoice message is exposed. They can only succeed when debate is underpinned by fictions like Irish abortion is not already a reality or one size fits all circumstances. Once they have to account for for real life, the whole thing quickly falls apart.

These days women are tweeting Enda Kenny about their period and throwing knickers on his dinner table. Women are coming with much more than personal trauma and their own souls to bare. They come now from every angle in full colour.

The other crowd no longer have a monopoly on nuisance.

They who once swaggered with confidence, hectoring government ministers who made sure to listen, cannot abide a mural on a Dublin side street. They have wrapped themselves in a comfort blanket that says there is a vast conspiracy. Even the Rose of Tralee is out to get them!  In their echo chamber, still assured of their own self-evident  truth they cry that if only we can get the message out. Once people hear the truth, they say.

It’s easier than accepting that no one is listing.

These people have always presumed to know best and they could maintain that conceit only as long as they kept the women away.

For a long time leading to the centenary of 1916 a running battle had taken place between those who claim to support “constitutional nationalism” as represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party and those with loyalty the armed campaign on which this state was founded. The vast majority of commentary was a nonsense.

While there were many aspects, a central argument was the insistence that independence could have been achieved by the work of gentlemen legislators alone. The entire revolutionary period is considered something of an embarrassment but aside from a few million needless WWI deaths, the IPP was no stranger to regular violent protest outside parliament and were indeed responsible for a number of innovations in the Westminster chamber that were and would today be decried as a “stunt”.

It is fairly obvious that the counter revolution has won out so what struck me was just how anxious its proponents were over the last two years. Debate was started by a small group of people to defend a position that no one was really arguing about and yet they ensured it was thrust into the spotlight for months. Probably unwisely at this juncture.

It would be nice to think they are kept awake by questions of legitimacy but I suspect it is more to do with some underlying awareness of just how fragile their version of the world is.

How else do we explain the persistence of all this if not for fears about the precarity of their own position? Why was there such regime consensus and vigilance about the centenary being “hijacked”?

They have the run of the place unhindered for nearly one hundred years so what is it that spooked them so much.   You could argue they did succeed in taking space from more important considerations of 1916 but that is probably giving them too much credit.

Descendants of both nationalist camps however are united in their disdain for dissent. The Labour Party meanwhile are busy preparing proposals for a return to social partnership at a time when striking workers are winning.

Protest, if it is tolerated at all , must be ‘peaceful’ and political engagement must end at the ballot box. This week however many were outraged by people wearing a jumper in parliament.

Laissez faire died with the PDs it seems and Ciaran Cannon has demanded that TDs be sanctioned. For a jumper. When asked his own view on a referendum in February he didn’t  have the guts to answer the question. On Tuesday Houses of the Oireachtas broadcasting service resorted to bizarre camera angles in effort not to show the offending garments.

Elected politicians and a few jumpers. Deary me. There was no marching “mob”, no bad language, no water balloons or “missiles”, no alleged death threats, abuse or “false imprisonment”. All the rules regularly demanded were adhered to and yet people were fuming. It was reminiscent of last summer when many so called democrats were scandalised by Greek people having an opportunity to vote on the demands of international finance.

The opposition are routinely chastised for pushing the limit of constraint set down by government while many of the most outraged have no issue with the executive dictating to a parliament mandated to hold it to account.

Within this the media are trained to present pantomime contention in place of genuine conflict.  Many, many, of those who preach the gospel of parliamentary supremacy were very late in waking up to scandals in the gardaí, NAMA and IBRC. In 2014 newspapers were convulsed by revelations of gardaí collecting ‘intelligence’ on infants from the Travelling community despite Clare Daly disclosing the information over six months earlier. Finance Minister Michael Noonan was for months free to evade  questions from Catherine Murphy on IBRC and Mick Wallace on NAMA because the vast majority of political reporting took no interest. All these matters have since led to inquiries.

During a 2012 Dáil exchange it became quite apparent that the Dept of Taoiseach had breached the McKenna judgement during the Fiscal Treaty referendum. When asked to outline his departmental expenditure for the house and public, as he is required to do, Enda Kenny attempted to conceal nearly twenty thousand euro he had spent on  PR consultancy during the  campaign. When asked why the numbers he provided didn’t add up, the Taoiseach claimed the pages of his script got stuck together before getting extremely flustered and defensive.

It was farcical stuff, the kind Miriam Lord and others would normally feast on and yet for some reason not a single newspaper reported what happened.  The prime minister had seemingly spent thousands unconstitutionally during a referendum, made a complete shambles of trying to hide it, the press gallery was full and yet the public were never informed. Make of that what you will.

You cannot with any credibility centre Dáil Éireann as the only legitimate place to do politics, devote coverage to meaningless debates and then precede to ignore the uncomfortable business. If people can get away with something of that magnitude on the chamber floor, imagine what goes on in private. What happened that day held parliament in far greater contempt than any jumper, walk out, sit in or stunt.

Which brings us to the fact that throughout this past year many politicians and journalists have muttered darkly about the emergence of something called the “post-truth era”. At its heart this is a sort of self-defence mechanism.  Coping with no longer having a monopoly of influence. Spare a thought for those so used to being heard. Trust in all sort of people and institutions has collapsed but instead of self-reflection, the spectre of inflamed popular passions is conjured up as some sort of inexplicable outside phenomenon.  The saying goes that truth is the first casualty of war but the aggressors remain reluctant to admit it.

Across much of the world political organising is decried as “anti-politics”, “populism”, “anarchy” and whatever else. This has always been the case as the enlightened and the anointed cower before the mob. What goes unspoken of course is that the opposite of populism is surely elitism but it is implicit in the growing list of things labelled as such.

According to figures released in September, 90 families have become homeless every month so far this year, anything else you see would be populism.

At the Irish Times, habitual no hoper Stephen Collins is particularly weary of this siren call. It is not unusual among jilted Progressive Democrats to hold the intelligence of the electorate in contempt but more-so Collins resembles the Japanese soldier hiding up trees unaware the world has changed and his  own role it. Journalists talk about ‘new politics’ being current Dáil arithmetic rather than the result of it.

Outside the mainstream knockabout, reactionary forces also have quite successfully rebranded  feminist, anti-racist, LGBT activists as “social justice warriors” as a means of carrying out the same poison we have seen for decades. Whatever you have heard, make no mistake this is a campaign to undermine dissent. Egregious cases are used to seduce people into ridiculing ideas like content warnings, safe spaces, no platforming, etc, seemingly unaware that they are gleefully belittling political organising. The conservative press have been remarkably successful in exporting their slander of political correctness and it never occurs to people why or in whose interest so much energy is spent attacking student politics at the very time when  higher education  as a public good is being dismantled.

The world today is a grim place but the disparities in wealth or democratic deficit at root were certainly not caused by an absence of manners or deference to authority.  The ruling class in Europe succeeded in creating a new normal after 2008 which has decimated old certainties and safety nets. Those who like to think of themselves as the sensible moderate centre are directly responsible for creating conditions of current upheaval but just like the banking crisis itself, they have washed their hands of the results. This week Deutsche Bank teeters again. On the eight year anniversary of our own guarantee, we see all the same echoes of systemic risk in Frankfurt.

The past year of internal Labour Party politics in Britain is met with alarm and hysteria. Enormous effort was made to prevent people from voting in leadership elections which they are free and entitled to do. A glance at the rapid  rot of political parties around Europe only underlines the enormity of what is occurring in Britian but this peaceful democratic engagement, following all the explicit rules; getting involved, trying change the system from the inside, etc, is treated as end times.

In the United States, White America continues its latest terrifying round of paranoia and ignorance. The largest and most important civil rights movement in generations has arrived because thousands of people who follow the rules still end up dead on a policeman’s bullet.  In recent weeks a prominent football player started a peaceful, dignified and soon powerful protest. By now, thousands have joined him on one knee during the national anthem but this, this too is deemed unacceptable by enemies and supposed allies alike.

As seen during the marriage referendum and increasingly during the repeal the eighth campaign, those demanding respectability not only provide room to the opposition but probably aren’t all that interested the struggle to begin with. In the wake of 2008, many engaged in mass pseudo psychology about why the Irish were not protesting. Judging by most of the shrill commentary today, that was just how they wanted it to remain. Rules only matter to those who make them.

As RTÉ abdicates responsibility for production of children’s programming, Mark Cullinane takes us through a deeper cultural, institutional and potentially terminal malaise at the national broadcaster.

Once the initial frisson of hazy nostalgia for Wanderly Wagon, Bosco or The Den (choose your generation) subsided, one could be forgiven for reacting with a shrug to the news last November that, owing to a worsening internal financial situation, the public service broadcaster RTÉ would soon shutter its children’s television department and outsource all future production.

Although the decision to put out to tender all programming for a whole chunk of its audience came as a bolt from the blue even to staff at the coalface of kids’ TV in Montrose, for a public increasingly accustomed to the reality that ‘economic recovery’ is in fact perfectly compatible with wholesale cuts to public services, this may have appeared as a mere surface wound- especially for an organisation whose generous remuneration of those at the top of its star system is common knowledge.

For some of us, the indifference was surely tinged with more than a hint of schadenfreude. After all, here was the public broadcaster, desperate to make efficiencies, hoisted upon its own petard; its act of self-privatisation serving as both example and consequence of its thorough internalisation of neoliberal common-sense.

And given what an impediment the broadcaster’s special editorial brew of national boosterism, middle-class liberalism and instinctive deference to political and economic elites has been to a bewildered and disillusioned general public trying to make technical and ethical sense of the political, economic, social and cultural dislocations of recent years, it’s hard to be roused to speak up in defence of the 21^st century Morbegs that never will be. In any case, they’ve already said that it doesn’t mean they’ll be spending any less on children’s programming and that it won’t affect their commitment to Irish-made children’s content – so really, why care?

So it was perhaps to a less than receptive audience that Bosco, the face of Irish children’s television in the 80s and 90s, emerged from their box to deliver a stinging video riposte to the suits in Montrose for selling out the children of Ireland.

But you don’t need to succumb to rose-tinted (or rosy-cheeked) romanticism about the quality of the broadcaster’s children’s output- past or present- to see something troubling in new Director-General Dee Forbe’s readiness to cut loose the only non-profit kids’ TV unit in the country and gift-wrap its funding for what are euphemistically known as the ‘indies’.

The short-term casualties are, of course, the already precariously-employed freelancers who look likely to lose their jobs early in the coming weeks. If murmurings in Montrose reported in The Irish Times are anything to go by, these are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg as the broadcaster scrambles to respond to growing losses induced in part by weaker than expected advertising income in 2016.

But the existential questions begged by sacrificing a key plank of the broadcaster’s institutional legitimacy may well come to be deeply regretted. For the prize of scraping a pass on the statutory minimum annual spend on independent productions, never again can RTÉ assert its public service status and ethos as a reason why any class of programming simply must be made by it alone. Waving the white flag over internal provision for that part of the population seen as most urgently requiring shielding from an exclusively commercial media environment signals loud and clear that RTÉ feels that its public service obligations can be fulfilled just as well from the substantial distance as mere publisher of other people’s work.

Indeed, saving money on pesky staff and equipment and bestowing commissions on eager ‘indies’, thus currying favour with what Forbes describes as public service broadcasting’s commercial ‘frenemies’, fits closely with RTÉ’s now well-established organisational strategies for survival in a post-broadcast world. This ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach appears, as I’ve previously argued, less as a tactical rapprochement with large and powerful private media industries and is more an index of its utter absence of ideas about what could and should be distinctive about a modern public media enterprise. While seeing no essential differences between public and private provision warrants at least full marks for consistency with the broadcaster’s default editorial line in its political reportage, the ongoing efforts of many of these ‘frenemies’ in intensive legal and lobbying efforts at home and in Europe to arrest the development of public media suggests that such a strategy of self-abnegation is unlikely to serve it well.

Having failed so far to bring about sudden institutional death by persuading European legislators and courts to reclassify publicly funded broadcasters as- get this- illegal state aid, private interests are likely to settle for second prize- the hollowing out of public media institutions by transforming them into glorified funding bodies for private production houses with the commercial nous, financial muscle and contacts to push to the front of the queue. A glance across the water at the BBC suggests what lies just a little further down this particular slippery slope, yet the reportedly rapturous reaction to Ryanair chief Michael O’Leary’s anti-public service and anti-RTÉ tirade at a recent Fine Gael fundraiser serves as a reminder that Ireland’s political class will almost certainly not rush to the defence of RTÉ’s organisation integrity in anything like the manner with which it continues to defend its egregious sweetheart tax arrangements with Apple.

The current outsourcing issue is likely to be a canary in the coalmine for what seems likely to be a slow-motion transformation into a Channel 4-style publisher-broadcaster, albeit one with a large public subvention. In the abstract, such a transformation doesn’t sound so bad. Diverting ever more programme funding away from its Montrose studios could mean less of the stuffiness, insularity and perhaps even the political caution that permeates so much of its programming (even if it’s undoubtedly the case that the worst offender, the news and current affairs department, would be the last to face the chop).

There’s even a case to be made that a publisher-broadcaster model is perfectly compatible with radical visions for a democratised and democratising public media that softens or even mutes its editorial voice and focuses instead on becoming an authentic and accessible platform for public expression.

But the cold economic logics that explain why it has embarked on this particular path- cost savings and the placation of domestic commercial media producers- tells us quite enough about the eventual destination to surmise that this is no royal road to becoming a ‘people’s publisher’.

In raising the question of whether the new Director General Dee Forbes, recently poached from Discovery International, had anything to do with the recent outsourcing decision, Bosco was onto something important: the alignment of interests between commercial media players and the strategic direction taken by senior RTÉ figures with close industry links. For example, amid the selection of grandees on the RTÉ Board (the word ‘entrepreneur’ features in the online profiles of no less than four of the ten current members), the new Chairperson Moya Doherty was founder of Tyrone Productions, only resigning upon taking up her new role in Montrose, while Stuart Switzer, Managing Director at Coco Television, retained his position even while serving on the RTÉ Board up to 2015. The current Channel Controller of both RTÉ 1 and 2 is Adrian Lynch, who founded and managed Animo Television until his appointment to RTÉ in 2014.

All three companies are major beneficiaries of RTÉ commissions and feature prominently in the broadcaster’s most recent annual report of its spending on independent productions. No need to allege any legal impropriety here; just look at the revolving door.

Commissioning briefs for interested independent producers that emphasise the attractiveness of programme proposals that entail low-costs per programme hour, which come with external funding already secured or which are amenable to commercial sponsorships amply demonstrates the commercial as well as legal imperatives underpinning its expanding commissioning activities. They also offer a reminder that it is the big production houses with economies of scale, institutional contacts and administrative know-how who are best placed to benefit from the opening up of RTÉ’s schedules to tender.

It’s also worth asking why there’s such an air of inevitability around RTÉ’s increasing commercial alignments. The broadcaster’s current balance-sheet travails are just the most recent example of what have been regular internal financial crises whose roots lie in political-economic forces that go well beyond the more immediate and oft-cited threats of Sky, Netflix, Facebook, Brexit, or whatever you’re having yourself.

Much of this may be attributed to the original sin of the dual-funding mandate which has since RTÉ’s inception left it deeply vulnerable to the ebb and flow of the advertising market, to say nothing of the pervasive cultural impacts on programme commissioning and production engendered by commercial imperatives. This has been sustained and exacerbated by long-term governmental policy, which when not actively undermining its revenue generation capacity á la Ray Burke in the early 90s, has obstinately refused to ease the broadcaster’s dependence on commercial income to the point that the imbalance is more than double the average amongst European public service broadcasters and almost four times that of other Western European PSBs that also benefit from funding through a license fee. RTÉ executives continue to extol the virtues and necessity of the dual-funded regime even as the wreckage mounts and in the face of clear evidence that, as once articulated by the liberal columnist Fintan O’Toole that it is a worst of both worlds scenario that confers ‘all the susceptibility to political caution of a state organisation with none of the protection from market pressures’.

The myriad impacts of commercial imperatives in Irish broadcasting were memorably excoriated as far back as 1968 by three rebellious programme producers who had resigned from RTÉ in protest. But they had seen nothing yet: their critique came from a time before New Public Management and before the state (and later RTÉ itself) dispatched regular waves of management consultants- Stokes Crowley Kennedy, Logical, KPMG, NewERA- to help ensure that the broadcaster evolved in lockstep with the neoliberal turn. Current developments regarding children’s television in RTÉ should be seen in this context of a longer term project of managed privatisation at Montrose, and indeed serving as a mark of its successful internalisation.

A rough 2017 beckons for a public broadcaster out of money, out of ideas and with few friends it can call on for support, whether inside the Dáil or in civil society. Don’t forget that (mostly) benign neglect was the best that successive Labour party ministers for communications in the last administration could offer- illustrating the void of vision for its future beyond managed decline even by those parties seen as having ideological affinities with public service broadcasting’s welfarist roots.

Neoliberal incorporation thus links the generalised crisis of public service broadcasting and the ongoing collapse of the social-democratic project in countries in their shared Western European heartland. But the fact that present circumstances at home have rendered politically impossible just about any changes to RTÉ’s funding settlement illustrates the consequences of public service broadcasting’s entanglement with the broader and escalating crisis of legitimacy of national political systems.

The long-mooted broadcasting charge, a direct replacement for the existing license fee, hardly heralds fundamental changes to the funding of public media. Designed to break the link between television ownership and license fee liability in the age of the internet, the new universal charge would bring into its net many current evaders (of which there are no shortage in Ireland), delivering a net increase to RTÉ’s coffers through reduced evasion and collection efficiencies even in the absence of an increase in the annual fee itself.

But this relatively modest measure to help shore up the public half of RTE’s funding mix has for years been long-fingered time and again for the simple reason that in the wake of the successful mass public resistance to the Irish Water project, no party of government has or likely will dare anytime soon to gift the opportunity of another mass charges boycott to a disaffected public who’ve just had a taste of people power and found they liked it. For all its crowing about resilient viewerships and a successful digital transition, RTÉ must know on some level that it is unloved. And despite the apparent challenges it faced in judging the size of the Right2Water rallies it reluctantly covered in its bulletins, they could hardly have failed to spot the many placards that indicated that Montrose was next in line for a dose of popular resistance.

That fear has been enough to quiet talk of new legislation to introduce the charge- it’s a wonder that the likes of Paul Murphy and Brendan Ogle haven’t been personally blamed for RTÉ’s latest funding crisis- but present events show that the status quo isn’t exactly a victory, either.

This is partly because to allow RTÉ to take its Faustian pact with the state and the commercial media sector toward its logical conclusion is in many ways precisely what the ruling class wants, and fits their vision for the future of public services. A public broadcaster without studios is quite consistent with public policy that is giving us libraries without librarians, rail tracks without trains, and houses without people.

Moreover, while RTÉ’s vision of public service is creatively moribund- notwithstanding occasional glimpses of life- this doesn’t render its political functions benign. With its news and current affairs department having spent the best part of the last decade narrating economic and political crisis in ways consistently sympathetic to the masters of the universe of capital, recent trainwrecks of editorial judgement involving far-right guests on the flagship Late Late and Claire Byrne Live programmes suggest that for its next trick public service broadcasting will follow its brethren elsewhere in the Irish media in sleepwalking into the banalisation of racist discourses; a regression mirroring the death throes of its political cousins in the European centre-left.

This enthusiasm appears to be driven by a combination of the imperatives of bums-on-seats audience maximisation, the idiosyncrasies of prevailing editorial conceptions of programming balance and free speech as well as representing some sort of effort to reflect purportedly changing public opinion (never mind that this latter imperative has proved far less effective in shaping editorial lines on the causes, consequences and long aftermath of the 2008 crash).

Regularly displaying a tin ear to public criticism, these moves are routinely defended in the end by recourse to journalistic authority. But flatlining levels of trust in journalism suggests that a great many of us have serious doubts about the basis of that authority, and by extension the whole public service enterprise as it exists today.

Fortunately for those on the inside- at least for now- RTÉ is ably protected from being forced to seriously respond to public demands by an alliance of institutional technocratic managerialism, professional journalism, and the state. Each has the means and motivation to wall off public access to venues where critical questions can be asked about the fitness of the media which acts in our name and extracts a due for the privilege. Sure, a basic infrastructure of accountability and participation appears present and correct, taking the forms of internal and statutory complaints processes, consultations, freedom of information requests, parliamentary questions and even an audience council. But these mechanisms are in practice subject to the evasion and co-option of political and media elites, or are simply toothless, seriously diminishing their capacity to crystallise and translate public will into institutional change. If RTÉ’s managed privatisation is to be halted and its remit revolutionised, alternative means will have to be pursued; their intransigence must be met with resistance of our own.

Fortunately, the present disruptions to normal service provided by the return of the political in both parliamentary and street forms have hinted at the power of concerted collective action against the apparatus and will of the state and its agencies. The democratic and democratising possibilities of public media are there to be reclaimed from the staid, statist and increasingly commercial hand of actually existing public service broadcasting- if we dare to want them.

And in its own, more modest way, Bosco’s acerbic response to RTÉ, in foregrounding the basic expectation license-fee payers have that their annual contributions should surely be enough to make a few programmes for children, invites us to take the battle for the heart and soul of publicly-funded media more seriously. Who’d have thought it’d take a puppet to take on the marionettes?

Following recent events in Ireland, Rosa Gilbert finds British journalism struggling with ‘legacy issues’ of its own.

Martin McGuinness’ death on 21st March gave a number of commentators in the British press the opportunity to drop the niceties and decorum that some of us had expected of them since the peace process led him to the office of Deputy First Minister.

Noman Tebbit enjoyed describing how he should burn in hell while article after article described him (without scarequotes) as a terrorist and murderer. Just a week later a British soldier called Alexander Blackman had his sentence reduced from murder to manslaughter after a huge public campaign backed publicly by the Daily Mail who raised almost a million pounds for his legal case. Despite being caught on video shooting an injured, unarmed combatant in Afghanistan, knowingly breaking the Geneva Convention, the British press never referred to Blackman as a war criminal or murderer – even though he had originally been convicted of murder.

By way of expanding on this theme, this article is a brief and preliminary attempt to expose how and why the British press works hand in hand with promoting the British war machine and its colonial nostalgia.

Where other institutions have attempted to deal with the past in Northern Ireland, the attitudes of British journalists remain stubbornly placed in the past. Despite insufficiencies and fragility that have emerged most visibly in the last few years, the Belfast Agreement of 1998, marking the end of the conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, included all the constitutional elements in Britain and Ireland necessary to bring a cessation to hostilities. It also attempted to provide for an impressively large number of eventualities relating to security and policing, justice, democratic institutions. However, the institutions established to deal with the ‘legacy’ of the conflict in Northern Ireland have been on the whole inadequate. The Historical Enquiries Team which was set up in 2005 to review the cases of unsolved murder committed during the Troubles faced criticism from the independent police inspectorate in 2013 for not investigating deaths caused by the police or military with sufficient rigour. Unsurprisingly this was largely down to the fact that members of the investigations team were drawn from RUC personnel, many of whom retired after its reorganisation as the Police Service of Northern Ireland under the 2000 Police Act. The Legacy Support Unit which was tasked with providing documents to the coroner’s office – who, in lieu of judicial reviews and inquiries, were carrying out inquests into murders committed decades ago – was similarly staffed by ex-RUC Special Branch members.

Thanks largely to cuts to the policing budget of 7% in 2014, the HET which, despite its partiality and inadequacies, had revealed crucial information about a number of incidents that had initially been hidden by the RUC, was dissolved and responsibility for its caseload transferred to the much smaller Legacy Investigations Branch of the PSNI. And so the one imperfect but functional method of providing families with information about what happened to their loved ones, a vital element of the reconciliation plank of the Belfast Agreement, ground to a halt. Amongst other issues such as the DUP’s refusal to allow an Irish Language Act, the provision of which was agreed upon in the Belfast Agreement, the lack of progress with legacy investigations has been one of the major stalling points of the current negotiations between the political parties in Northern Ireland. Undoubtedly it will prove to be a sticking point between the new and completely unprecedented Catholic/nationalist majority in Stormont and Theresa May’s Brexit plans – the Historical Enquiry Team, along with the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland, had been established following a series of landmark judgments by the European Court of Human Rights (McKerr group v UK). These judgments showed that the UK government had violated its obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to life) by a) not investigating adequately the lethal use of force by State agents in a number of cases, b) not implementing certain judgments in Northern Ireland that were implemented in the rest of the UK.

But if you were absorbing the British print and broadcast media in recent weeks, you might be forgiven for not appreciating this startling problem for the devolved assembly and executive in Northern Ireland in their attempt to continue power-sharing rule under the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and British crown. When British politicians and the press bother to alert themselves to the continued existence of Northern Ireland, they concern themselves with two themes: the issue of the border, and the now decades-long moral panic that the second largest party in the province has been run by erstwhile senior paramilitaries. The death of Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, who served as their Deputy First Minister for the last ten years and was instrumental in bringing the Provisional IRA towards ceasefire and decommissioning, has provided a new generation with an insight into the absolute poverty of the British media in its reporting on Irish matters.

To prove how little the demographics of Fleet Street journalists has changed over the decades, the same, sensationalised language of the 1970s and particularly the 1980s has resurfaced, the perpetuation of which is vital for the perversion of the historical record that keeps the cogs in the media outrage machine turning – if the Provisional IRA can be written off as terrorists, godfathers and murderers, there is no need to understand how and why thousands of young Irish men and women joined an armed insurrectionary movement in a period of otherwise relative peace in Britain and Ireland. Whilst the Belfast Agreement demanded the reconciliation between the main political actors in Northern Ireland, and former IRA volunteers rather remarkably made peace with ex-loyalists, police officers, soldiers and prison guards, there has been no similar reconciliation between the British media and ex-combatants. Republicans especially feel aggrieved over the reporting of the conflict, and from reading the reaction to McGuinness’ death it’s easy to see how.

It wasn’t simply that print and broadcast media was partisan or treated republicans unfairly, it was an instrumental figure in the interpretation and trajectory of the conflict. From early in the 1970s, the RUC and British Army had a co-ordinated media policy overseen by the Information Policy Co-ordinating Committee based in Stormont Castle, and the British media consumed and regurgitated their output uncritically. One example of how this operated is the tragic incidence of the McGurk’s bar bomb in Belfast in December 1971, Belfast’s deadliest attack during the Troubles. The day after the attack, the BBC was quoting senior RUC sources who stated that forensic scientists believed the bomb had exploded inside the building; the Times repeated it the following day and called it an IRA bomb, and the day after that the Defence Secretary repeated it in the House of Commons. The narrative was set – those inside the pub had died, but as they were handling or protecting explosives, were they really innocent? In fact the police were lying, and the army media unit knew this. The forensic evidence and an eyewitness account proved that the bomb was left outside the pub – indeed, the car that dropped off the bomb was allowed to drive around the most securitised part of Belfast with no trouble. A loyalist sectarian attack was passed off as an IRA “own goal” by the RUC with help from the press, validating the security policy of pursuing and interning republicans instead of loyalists. By uncritically echoing the propaganda pushed by the RUC and British Army, the British media was culpable in smearing innocent victims as terrorists, and allowing their loyalist murderers and the police who colluded in the cover-up – and probably the deed itself – to get away with it. At the same time, they participated in the minimisation of Irish Catholic grievances as well as the vilification of the republican struggle.

There are some notable exceptions to this; the Times Insight team did significant work in lending their audience to the claims of “ill-treatment” in detention centres which we now know amounted to torture (although in the 1980s they misreported on the 1988 Gibraltar killings and helped to smear the key eyewitness). However, exposure of these claims, whilst meritable, can only go so far within the framework of British media reporting on the Troubles. As long as Irish Catholics were seen as a suspect community, and any republican as fair game, it was unlikely that British popular opinion would be adverse to them being subject to what was euphemistically called “slap and tickle”.

Whilst Bloody Sunday has rightly received attention in Britain, largely thanks to the Saville Inquiry’s vindication of the innocence of the victims, the Ballymurphy Massacre just five months earlier is not so well known. As Operation Demetrius – the arrest of the first round of internees – got underway on 9 August 1971, an enclave of West Belfast, besieged by the 1 Para British Army unit conducting arrest swoops, was the site of local protests against the siege, followed by the execution by paratroopers of ten unarmed civilians over the course of 36 hours (another died later after suffering a heart attack). The Daily Mirror’s report of this event from August 12 described the massacre as “IRA ‘suicide attacks’”; two days later it repeated the security forces claim that they have “virtually defeated the hard core of IRA terrorist gunmen” since the start of Operation Demetrius. Most of those arrested in that first swoop weren’t IRA members, let alone “gunmen”; one of those murdered in Ballymurphy was a priest who had been shot twice whilst administering the last rites, one man was shot 14 times in the back.

The passing of Martin McGuinness has seen adult journalists and commentators screeching all manner of hyperbolic claims and holding him solely responsible for IRA attacks on mainland Britain. Of course these are chosen for the maximum impact on the British public rather than an accurate insight into the functioning of the Provisional IRA, beyond the fact that McGuinness never denied his IRA membership nor condemned its acts. And yet, the epithet of “ex-terrorist” has helped to define the more wearying trope of the reportage. The more liberal-minded, particularly those like Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair, who have a vested interest in buffing up their role in the peace negotiations,  emphasised this aspect of McGuinness’ personality as a former baddie turned good through his engagement with British politicians – all that was needed was a bit of compromise and reason, and the gunmen would down their weapons. McGuinness went on a “journey”; he “turned” towards politics; Theresa May separated the “earlier part of his life” to his recent years; journalists contrasted the Provisional IRA lethal attack on Lord Mountbatten in 1979 (whilst McGuinness is said to have been IRA Chief of Staff) against McGuinness’ 2012 handshake with the Queen.

The problem with this narrative is that it allows selective grief – we can mourn for the peacemaker whilst still despising the IRA man – without accounting for the subtleties and inherent contradictions that can be garnered from engaging with the historical record of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

This approach towards the republican movement does two crucial things. Firstly, it ignores the very early adoption of political strategies and participation in negotiations. During the 1972 IRA negotiations with the British Northern Ireland Secretary Willie Whitelaw, McGuinness participated as a senior figure. According to the Daily Telegraph in September 1972, attempts to ‘end the campaign of terror have been supported by the Provisionals’ Londonderry Brigade. The Londonderry Provisional leader [McGuinness], in hiding in Buncrana is strongly opposed to Mac Stiofain’s fanatical commitment to uniting the 32 counties by “victory through violence”.’ Secondly, it presents the earlier McGuinness – the violent murderer, the terrorist – in a way which distorts the chronology of the causes and outbreak of violence. To paraphrase Gerry Adams, unlike ‘Marine A’ Alexander Blackman, Martin McGuinness didn’t go to war, the war came to him. But focusing on Irish Catholics’ experience of the police and British Army in Belfast and Derry in the late 1960s would run the risk of assuaging the public of the notion that the British state was more than a neutral arbiter intent on making peace.

In 1982 when McGuinness & Adams had assumed the leadership roles of the republican movement and were pursuing the so-called “armalite and ballot box” approach, the pair, along with Danny Morrison, were banned from Britain under the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, having been invited to London by GLC leader Ken Livingstone who to his credit defied his party leader Michael Foot to do so. As Home Secretary, it was Willie Whitelaw, one of the negotiators during McGuinness’ trip to London in 1972, who had the responsibility of signing the exclusion orders. This was done upon the advice of Kenneth Newman, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former RUC Chief Constable. Three years later the government intervened to halt the screening of a BBC film ‘At the Edge of the Union’ because of its part focus on Martin McGuinness. The Daily Mail was not at all alarmed about censorship of the press. In an article titled ‘How the IRA must love this BBC hypocrisy!’, the tabloid asked “what, one wonders, would the last war have been like if the sort of people who run British broadcasting had been manning the airwaves then? Would Hitler and Himmler have been interviewed on the grounds that it was important to ‘understand the issues’? The parallel is not so absurd. The IRA is at war as surely as Hitler was.” The Soviet news network was slightly more alarmed by this state intervention, recognising that the row over this censorship showed that the BBC was under the government’s [editorial] control.

Whitelaw’s hypocrisy was repeated by Douglas Hurd a few years later in 1988 when, after succeeding Whitelaw as Home Secretary, he announced the broadcast ban which stopped television and radio companies carrying interviews or direct statements from proscribed paramilitary groups, but also from representatives of Sinn Féin, Republican Sinn Féin (who had recently split from Sinn Féin) or the UDA, and anyone who supported or promoted these organisations. Ten years earlier, in February 1978, Hurd had met Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison in West Belfast for a BBC programme called Spotlight. A week later, Adams was arrested and charged with IRA membership. A few months earlier, in December 1977, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Airey Neave had stated in the House of Commons whilst it moved to renew the Emergency Provisions legislation that the “terrorists” were “not glorious Republicans but bloody murderers”. Neave wanted something done about the “godfathers” who were still at large, in particular Martin McGuinness who he complained was “still around”.

The Thatcher government’s broadcast ban was not unprecedented. The 1922 Emergency Provisions (Special Powers) Act allowed the Minister of Home Affairs in Northern Ireland to ban papers, films, books. But as studies of the BBC and Northern Irish media have illustrated, there were soft forms of self-censorship within media organisations which reduced the need for external, state censorship. Some of the programmes censored by the BBC Director General included those on topics such as the Stalker/Sampson ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents and following cover-up, and the Birmingham Six judgment. For consecutive ministers, relying on internal checks wasn’t enough in the clamour for more firm control of the press output. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Roy Mason wanted a three-month blackout on reporting of terrorist activity, even – remarkably – if he were to be assassinated by the IRA. However, once Sinn Féin became an increasingly popular electoral force during and after the 1981 hunger strikes, there was a clear need to deal with the political respectability with which Sinn Féin were able to promote themselves. During the 1980s the reliance on self-censorship became insufficient and Douglas Hurd turned from making BBC programmes about Sinn Féin to legislating them.

Before he passed away, McGuinness resigned his position as Deputy First Minister, clearly in ill-health. This prompted a great number of tributes and praise of his career from Sinn Féin supporters, an image circulated of him wearing a wide-brimmed hat and three-piece suit imposed on top of the famous depictions of the leaders of the 1916 rising. Photos circulated of McGuinness with Nelson Mandela.  The parallels with the icon of the South African anti-apartheid resistance and its post-Apartheid peace and reconciliation is a recurring theme of Irish republicanism, based on similarities in state repression (emergency laws, curfew, police massacres), the resistance (civil rights, armed struggle and international solidarity) and in the attempts to transition to post-conflict society. This comparison between McGuinness and Mandela has infuriated the Daily Mail who published an article after his death with the title “The Irish Mandela? You must be mad! The day his mask slipped and I saw McGuinness the monster” – the mask slipping turned out to reveal that McGuinness had sworn to some British soldiers trying to search his car.

The tabloid press’ collective amnesia over figures like Mandela serves a purpose and we would do well to remind ourselves of Lenin’s description of this tendency in the opening paragraph to State and Revolution, but it wasn’t long ago that British aristocratic lawmakers were condemning McGuinness and Mandela as of the same ilk. After detailing his despair at the apparent travesty of independent, post-colonial African states during a debate in the House of Lords in November 1985, Lord Burton went on to extol the virtues of apartheid South Africa, in particular defending the regime’s press censorship: “Is there anything wrong in gagging the voices of a lot of terrorists? Her husband [Mandela] could have been out of jail now had he renounced violence. Our own Government was quite rightly unhappy about the BBC film on that violent man Martin McGuinness, who was portrayed as a nice comfortable family man playing with his children on the sands of the seashore. Why should the BBC be the voice of the IRA or the ANC?”

Indeed, the commenters on the Daily Mail website at least were consistent in their criticism of the headline which they were furious with for sanctifying Mandela. In 1961 Mandela formed the armed wing of the ANC – Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation) also known as MK – later recalling that he had come to the conclusion that “it would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our demands with force”. According to testimony and historical research, Mandela was a senior member of the SACP and part of a small group that prepared the ground for the move from a policy of non-violence to armed struggle on behalf of the SACP, whilst the MK remained formally separate from the ANC despite the crossover in membership of the armed and nonviolent wings. Without being overly simplistic, there is a striking resemblance in the roles played by Mandela and McGuinness in arguing for a competent guerrilla warfare strategy against the violent repression of the hitherto peaceful civil rights campaigns.

But there is a more urgent consequence to this depiction of McGuinness et al that goes beyond mere infidelity to the historical record. As long as both these portrayals – reformed terrorist or unrepentant murderer – of characters like McGuinness or Adams remain, both the Westminster government and the unionists in Stormont are repeatedly forgiven for not taking the legacy commitments outlined in the Belfast Agreement seriously enough to be implemented. Both portrayals position the republican armed struggle as needlessly violent and without cause, rhyme or reason. It helps to perpetuate the justification of British military and loyalist violence in Northern Ireland, and continues to condemn the victims of state violence. Whilst Sinn Féin have been rightly criticised for their political judgment in recent years, the reaction in the press to McGuinness’ death has shown the ignorance of Northern Ireland’s past, present and future.