Wednesday's Irish politics blog

Quick note on Harneygate

2008-11-27T10:18:00.004Z

As much as I dislike Mary Harney - and boy, do I dislike her - I'm finding myself fairly disgusted with the calls for her step down for getting her hair done on the public purse.

It's not that I think the expenditure was justified. But I can't recall anyone saying that Bertie should step down when it was revealed that more than the average industrial wage was being spent on his make-up. People said it was excessive, certainly. But his position wasn't held to be "untenable" because of it.

You can't separate this hullaballoo from gender issues. Women in the public eye are relentlessly judged for their appearance, Harney more than many others. There is a really nasty undertone to some of the comments being made in the blogosphere about this. Women who consider standing for election know full well they'll be subject to the same excruciating level of scrutiny for their hair, their clothes, their weight. Don't think for a moment this isn't a contributing factor to the under-participation of women in politics.

Harney should resign, of course. But I've always said that. She should resign because of the millions of taxpayer euros she's giving away to developers at the expense of the public healthcare system. That's the important issue, not the fact that she - like the Taoiseach and all male office holders - has an excessive personal appearance budget.

2008-11-23T13:34:00.005Z

My head's buried pretty deeply in textbooks these days, but I did think this item was worth drawing attention to:

Alistair Darling will make a high-risk bid to lead Britain out of recession tomorrow, when he is expected to cut VAT and entice the British people to go on a pre-Christmas spending spree.
...
The cut is expected to see the rate drop from its current level of 17.5 per cent

Meanwhile, of course, down here in the Free State, VAT is set to go up from 21 to 21.5% as of Monday week.

Should do wonders for the "don't shop in Newry" campaign, huh?

In other Blueshirt news,

2008-09-24T13:37:00.004+01:00

it seems that little Terence Flanagan managed to fill only about a third of the thirty minutes alloted to him to speak on the Electoral Amendment Bill in the Dáil today.

He was the first opposition speaker to participate in the debate. I guess that's what happens when you have nobody to plagiarise ...

Quick note on "pairing"

2008-09-24T11:59:00.003+01:00

I'd imagine that few people, other than anoraks such as myself, had any idea what Enda Kenny was talking about when he announced that Fine Gael would refuse to "pair" with the Government over their refusal to allow a debate on the economy.

The Times helpfully explains that:

Under the vote-pairing deal, opposition TDs absent themselves from votes if a minister – with whom they have been “paired” cannot be present due to official business.

I'd just like to make it clear that it is not the case that pairing occurs only when a minister is away on official business. In fact, Fine Gael have quite willingly engaged in this practice when backbenchers have been away for personal reasons. They may be valid personal reasons, but so what? The point of pairing is to prevent important state business from grinding to a halt, which is something that all parties (at least theoretically) have an interest in. If the ruling parties can't get enough TDs elected to ensure their bills never fall due to too many non-official absences on their part, it's not the role of the opposition to give them a leg up.

And if you want to know how I know that FG (and others, incidentally, but never Sinn Féin) have engaged in this practice, it's because occasionally the list of "official pairs" inadvertently finds its way into my clutches.

No sex please, we're Irish

2008-09-12T11:38:00.009+01:00

Ah, the irony. Only yesterday over at the Cedar Lounge a contributor drew a rather smug distinction between the US and this country on the basis of the public role of religious extremists – over there, we were told, they are “political movers and shakers” while here they are confined merely to “prayer crusades”. My immediate reaction, as noted on the linked page, was to point out the flaw in that argument from a non-partitionist perspective. And then I went to have a look at today’s papers and found these news items from well below the border: 750 pornographic DVDs seized in Dublin and Labour calls for laws to fight sex shops.

Let’s look at these one at a time. The first article tells us that the DVDs were seized “as a result of an ongoing Community Policing Unit investigation into breaches of the Video Recording Act of 1989”. Yes, you read that correctly. A Community Policing Unit investigation into porn videos. In Dublin 2. Honestly, have the community police there no better use of their time? Maybe going after the tourist-muggers in Temple Bar? The gangs that hang round ATMs on Grafton Street waiting to distract you and grab your cash? The bicycle thieves on George’s Street? If the residential areas in that part of the city are anything like mine, I’d guess there are a few social housing estates whose residents have all but given up phoning the police when there are problems because the response is so thoroughly inadequate it isn’t even worth the effort. Well, now we know why. Maybe instead of reporting break-ins, drug dealing and cars on fire, they should tell the Gardaí there’s a porno outside.

The second article tells us that those champions of progressive, liberal values the Labour Party are shocked – shocked! – to find that not only do such DVDs exist, but the shops that sell them are subject to the same rules as any other shop. Not good enough apparently; they should have to apply for a specific change of use so that the wishes of those residents who would patronise such a shop can be vetoed by those residents who think they shouldn’t.

Labour’s Joe Costello is particularly outraged that two adult shops were able to open across from churches in his constituency. That’s my constituency too, and I know at least one of the shops he’s referring to, and frankly the fact that anyone could get exercised about it suggests to me that they are either stuck in de Valeraland or have far too much time on their hands. The part of the shop that is visible to anyone outside it is very discreetly-designed; there is no merchandise in view or any images whatsoever. If you couldn’t read enough English to know what “adult shop” meant, you wouldn’t even know what it was. Apart from the extraneous apostrophe in “DVD’s”, in fact, I’m hard pressed to find anything offensive about it. And so the fuck what if it’s across from a church? What gives people coming to or going from church the right not to encounter any reminders of how the human race reproduces?

There’s an argument to be made, from a community perspective, against having a whole conglomerate of these shops in one neighbourhood. An area that has come to be known as a red light district can be fairly unpleasant to live in, in some cases even unsafe. But that’s not the argument Labour are making. Effectively, they want local authorities to be able to prevent any sex shop from opening anywhere if enough people (and how many is “enough”?) complain that it’s unsuitable. The Council’s attempt less than ten years ago to close the Ann Summers on O’Connell Street – O’Connell Street, for fuck’s sake – suggests that such a power is likely to be interpreted broadly, making adult shops all but impossible to open in the State. Would it be the end of the world if that happened? Of course not, but it would further undermine any claim of Ireland (south) to be somehow more secularly advanced than the US.

We may not put people like Sarah Palin in high office here, but it doesn't look to me like we need them.

What's wrong with this picture?

2008-08-20T10:07:00.004+01:00

From today's Times:

A 17-YEAR-old girl, whom gardaí believe was trafficked into Ireland to work in the sex industry, has been remanded on continuing bail.
...
The girl, who is from Nigeria and cannot be named for legal reasons, is charged with failing to produce a passport or another form of identification.

Now maybe this is a product of my wild imagination, but I can think of a pretty good reason why a person who had been trafficked into the country might not have a passport or another form of identification. A few pretty good reasons, in fact.

The Government has repeatedly justified its refusal to legislate for the rights of trafficking victims on the basis that the Garda Síochána treat all such persons "sympathetically", "with respect and dignity" and so on. Yes, that's exactly how I would describe bringing criminal charges against someone for not making sure they had their identity papers with them when they were trafficked.

The threat of prosecution, deportation and other such punitive measures is a very effective way to discourage trafficking victims coming forward. This is a no-brainer. It's so obvious that even Michael McDowell as Minister always insisted (not in so many words, admittedly) that it didn't happen. And yet that's precisely what's happening right now in Carlow-Kilkenny.

It's a disgrace and a scandal and I cannot understand why the migrant and women's rights sectors are not all over it.

2008-08-19T12:24:00.004+01:00

As the dwindling numbers of people who read this blog will know, I haven't been excited by much Irish news lately. But this article, pressing as it does a number of my buttons, made me sit up and take notice:

TEACHERS last night gave a guarded backing to calls for immigrant children who cannot speak English properly to be "segregated" in our classrooms.

This followed a Fine Gael call yesterday for the Government to separate immigrant children with poor language skills from the rest of their classmates.

...

His comments attracted qualified support from the ASTI [secondary teachers' union] last night. However, they preferred to describe the teaching of immigrant children apart as putting them in “immersion classes” rather than “segregation”.

The ASTI spokeswoman said an understanding of English was the key to the integration of immigrant children in schools.

Doubtless there will be knee-jerk responses to this from both sides. Not that anybody listens to me, but I would plead for a few points to be kept in mind. The first being that there are several different considerations involved here, such as:

How non-English speaking children can learn the language as quickly as possible
How to prevent them falling behind in their other subjects
How to ensure English-speaking children aren't brought down as a result of all this

The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that there isn't necessarily one solution that effectively addresses all three of these issues (and that's before we even get into the subject of the social and psychological effects of separating students). I remember the bilingual education debate that was raging in California when I lived there in the 1990s - for all I know, it still is. One side presented studies showing that totally immersing the kids in English was the quickest way to teach them the language. The other side presented studies showing that own-language education in addition to intensive English was the most effective way to promote their all-around academic achievement. Sometimes, these were the same studies. Even proponents of one particular viewpoint were at times forced to admit that it wasn't necessarily a question of finding the "right" solution, but of deciding which aim to prioritise.

Language is a funny beast. It arouses almost inexplicable passions in people, often in inverse proportion to the amount they actually know about it. As was once pointed out to me by a friend of mine with an advanced degree in the subject, so much about language is counter-intuitive - and yet there seems to be hardly anyone out there without a very firm, almost visceral, opinion on the right way to deal with the vexing linguistic issues that arise. It's true for a lot of subjects, of course, that people form views from which they can't be swayed no matter how much contrary evidence is put in front of them. But language seems to me to be exceptional in the extent to which people care so much on the basis of so little understanding of how it actually works.

And it hardly needs to be added that people's views on the subject are often influenced to a great degree by their views on immigration and multiculturalism in general. This makes it difficult, at times, to sort out legitimate concerns about educational standards from lumpen xenophobia just looking for a respectable excuse to latch onto. Of course this works in reverse too: those of us who think of diversity as a positive end in itself are sometimes guilty of not thinking through the practical consequences of policies designed to promote it.

The education of children is an area where society simply cannot afford the hazards of such knee-jerk reactions from either side. It's too important to be decided on the basis of who's shouting the loudest, or which policy fits most neatly within a particular overall ideological framework. The government needs to look very closely at the available evidence - of which there is plenty, just ask the Californians - and make the decision that is demonstrated to be genuinely best for the children, regardless of how (un)popular it is. I know what I hope that decision turns out to be, but it's not for me to advocate. I don't really understand how it works either.

Overheard in Leinster House

2008-06-26T12:52:00.002+01:00

A Fine Gael TD making a call on their mobile:

"Hello ... , can I get back that €20 I loaned you yesterday? I'm meeting someone for coffee."

No wonder Enda Kenny has been so critical of the Government this week. You know times are tough when even culchies earning upwards of €95,000 have to go around begging for change for a cuppa.

Lessons unlearned

2008-06-25T12:11:00.002+01:00

Oh dear. It seems the Government is still having trouble getting its head around the reasons for the referendum defeat.

Hurriedly added to today's Dáil schedule is a motion to approve an agreement between the EU and Australia on the exchange of passenger information. The first that most TDs had heard of this agreement, with all its implications for confidentiality and data retention, was when a briefing note was circulated around 6.00 last night. Clearly, that's not enough time to scrutinise the agreement in detail - and the usual procedure of allowing an Oireachtas committee to thrash it out won't apply either. Why not? Where's the urgency?

With an absolutely straight face, Brian Cowen told the Dáil it had to be approved in this way, because ... the Slovenians are concluding their presidency of the EU soon and are anxious to have this on their record. And we're the only member state that hasn't got around to approving it yet.

Can anyone seriously argue these days that the parliament's role is as anything more than a rubber stamp? Even Cowen seemed embarrassed about it.

Overheard at the RDS

2008-06-14T13:37:00.003+01:00

As tallies from the first few boxes started to make it clear the treaty was headed for a defeat, from an apparatchik attached to a certain anonymous Dublin city Fianna Fáil TD: "Looks like we'll be back here in a few months."

From the same anonymous Fianna Fáil TD speaking on his mobile phone a few minutes later: "Oh, it's about two-to-one in favour."

From a certain Irish Times pol-corr (hint: thinks she's a lot funnier than she actually is) as the final tallies came through: "The Irish people are stupid."

More as I remember them...

Sanity prevails

2008-05-20T23:32:00.006+01:00

After all the controversy of the past few months, in the end it wasn't even close. British MPs voted 304 to 233 against lowering the abortion limit to 24 weeks. Immediately prior to that they'd voted not to reduce it to 20 weeks, 16 weeks or 12, the last two of these not even mustering 100 ayes.

There were a number of reasons for this strong pro-choice showing. Because of recent evidence that medicine is making no progress in improving survival rates for babies born before 24 weeks. Because less than 1.5% of all abortions in Britain are carried out after 20 weeks - and when they are, the reason for the delay is nearly always more serious than abortion opponents like to suggest. And, of course, because the absence of an authoritarian religious tradition means that most British people are not brainwashed from an early age into thinking of the foetus as a fully independent little person with all the rights of the woman whose body it is wholly dependent on. Sometimes I think we're not only on a different island over here, but on another planet.

It's a shame that an amendment that would have extended abortion rights to the Six Counties was withdrawn. By the looks of things it might have had a chance of passing, over the disgraceful opposition of all four of the major parties in the Six, including my own. (Chris Gaskin has astutely if ungrammatically pointed out the hypocrisy of the unionist parties in objecting to this aspect of British rule, but the truth is that all of them are simply calling for the problem to be exported.) So last night's vote wasn't the opportunity it could have been to take a step forward, but at least it wasn't a step back - and with all the anti-choice hysteria we've heard lately that in itself feels like a small victory.

Well done to Louise and other women in Britain who put so much effort into this.

I know, I know...

2008-05-17T09:58:00.004+01:00

I've been terrible for updating this year. Apologies. Hopefully the normal order will be restored later in the summer, when life calms down a bit.

A quick thought for the moment. One of this blog's top bugbears, the Offences Against the State Act, is up for renewal next month. Previously the Green Party could always be counted on to oppose it (although they couldn't always be counted on to get all their TDs in for the vote). It was an admirable principled stance on an issue that had nothing to offer them electorally, and I was happy to give them credit for it.

Obviously this year will be different. They've lined up behind FF on every other issue, and there's no way they'll be let off the hook for this one. While I have some sympathy for the argument that compromise is necessary in a coalition - at least I've had to tell myself that every time I look to what's happening (or not) up north - it's notable that the Greens haven't really tended to make that argument, at least not in the Dáil chamber. Instead of acknowledging that they've had to do u-turns for the sake of their Cabinet seats, or even staying out of debates entirely and just showing up to hold their noses and vote on the Government side, they send their TDs in to argue why the Opposition is actually wrong to be taking this or that position at the present time. So I have to assume that when OASA comes up again they'll do the same. The only question is how they'll justify their reversal - gangland activity, I suppose, since it's hardly arguable that republicans or Islamic militants or anyone else with a political agenda poses any real threat at the moment. But we shall see.

If any Greens reading this have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Policing pokes up its ugly head again

2008-01-09T10:27:00.000Z

I see that Hugh Orde met an Assembly committee yesterday on the matter of the devolution of policing and justice powers. Orde said he sees no reason not to meet the May 2008 target date while unionists, predictably, insist that it won't happen until certain other conditions are met (including, shockeroonie, another pre-condition for republicans).

Sinn Féin's response is here, and one line is particularly noteworthy:

The devolution of Policing and Justice was a key element in the negotiations that led to the restoration of the political institutions.

What that translates to, of course, is "We secured our membership's approval on the basis of a reassurance that policing and justice would be devolved by May 2008 and we're going to have serious problems if that doesn't actually happen". There is no other way to read it, given that all and sundry on the unionist side were making it perfectly clear when St Andrews was agreed that they were not signing up to a hard-and-fast deadline.

In a way it reminds me of the old decommissioning debate. The GFA, remember, called for all parties to "use their influence" to achieve decommissioning within two years. SF said at the time that this wasn't a deadline. The IRA at the time said flat-out that they would decommission only when they were good and ready to. Nonetheless, unionists insisted it was a time-locked guarantee and sold it to their people as such. We all know the rest.

The only real question now is - when May 2008 comes and goes and there is still no devolution, will the governments do as they did with decommissioning, insist there actually was a deadline and turn against the side refusing to meet it? Or will they take a literal interpretation of St Andrews and accept the unionists' demands for further concessions? Precedent only points to one answer.

***

On another matter, the unionists are apparently unhappy at the suggestion that the British Government might admit that there was a war going on in the Six Counties.

Well, Chichester-Clark admitted it 36 years ago, what's the point of denying it now?

How many EU countries does it take to change a lightbulb?

2008-01-04T19:07:00.001Z

Apparently, all of them.

Green Party Minister for the Environment John Gormley discovered this today when he was told that his plans to ban incandescent lightbulbs might not go ahead - because they are not banned in the rest of the EU. According to RTÉ:

...under EU mutual recognition rules that govern the internal market, member states must allow the sale [of] any product that is legally for sale in another member state.

There are clearly some exceptions to this rule (cannabis and mifepristone come to mind), but the EU Commission seems to think that incandescent lightbulbs aren't one of them. So no ban unless Gormley can get every other member state to agree.

Whatever about the merits of the proposal, this rule strikes me as utterly mad and as confirmation of the unhealthy influence that business interests have over Brussels. It's also a warning signal about the loss of sovereignty that goes along with European integration. For all the Europhiles' insistence that we are not turning into a "United States of Europe", it's worth noting that a US state doesn't have to ask the permission of all 49 others before banning a product that it deems harmful.

Still, as I can't be arsed to research the regulation in detail, I'd very much welcome if someone wanted to explain to me exactly why it doesn't apply to mifepristone.

Latest news from abortion-free Ireland

2007-11-23T18:41:00.000Z

RTÉ has just carried the shocking news that women in Ireland are illegally ordering Mifepristone, the abortion pill, from an online site hosted outside the country.

At least, the news is shocking to RTÉ and to a doctor interviewed for the segment. Not shocking at all here in Wednesdayland, where it was predicted almost two years ago.

Apparently the authorities have contacted the site's owners informing them that the sale of mifepristone is illegal here. Which is, of course, precisely why the site exists. The owners have not responded yet, and probably won't. And there is virtually nothing the law can do about it - except, that is, to allow women to obtain the pill safely and legally from their GP. If we're not going to let that happen then we had better get used to the fact that women will find some other way to get it.

Incidentally, the site in question can be easily located with a Google search and one thing I can guarantee you is that plenty of Irish women who saw that RTÉ report will now be Googling desperately.

Why the Offences Against the State Act needs to go. Part 342

2007-11-16T17:57:00.000Z

Breaking news today:

Mark Doran, of Poacher's Lock, Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow, was convicted of membership of [the Real IRA]...the court was told that, during a search of Mr Doran's flat, gardaí had found military manuals, books and DVDs, raffle tickets used during a fundraiser for the families of IRA prisoners, and two bodhrans, one with a picture of a woman with a rifle and the other with signatures from several Port Laoise prisoners.

Delivering the court's judgment, Mr Justice Mc Menamin said that such material was "consistent only with significant paramilitary involvement".

'Innocent until proven republican' is still the law in this country, so it seems.

On another matter...

2007-11-15T18:07:00.000Z

... I don't know what the fuck is going on in the Six County Department of Education, but I would like to disassociate myself from it completely.

Sin é.

An dlí is an teanga

2007-11-15T13:54:00.000Z

An email found its way into my inbox this week, asking for my signature on a petition to oppose the Labour Party’s new Legal Practitioners Qualification Amendment Bill. The purpose of this bill is to remove the Irish language requirement for persons wishing to train as solicitors or barristers. According to the petition, the consequences of its enactment would be as follows:

1. That this bill will damage the status and usage of the Irish language generally, and especially damage the status of Irish in the legal system.
2. That it will be impossible for Irish speakers to obtain their rights in the courts of this country if this bill is passed.
3. That court cases and services in Irish should be offered in all Irish courts, in order to give equal rights to Irish speakers, rather than proposing to take away these rights.
4. That this bill will pose a threat to the Irish language under the Constitution, as our first official language. There will also be implications for the status of the Irish language in Europe, where Irish-speaking lawyers are in demand.
5. That this bill has implications for the coutnry's [sic] independence. If the requirement for an oral Irish exam for lawyers is abolished, our legal system will be able to slide back into the English legal system, as matters stood before 1921.

Let’s look at the background to this. Under the original act, which dates from 1929, and the Solicitors Act 1954, any person wishing to train as a solicitor or barrister in the state must pass Irish language examinations at an early stage of their training. The examinations are both oral and written and there are no exemptions (except for solicitors trained in other countries who wish to have their qualifications recognised here). The standard of Irish required to pass the exams is said to be fairly low for those training as solicitors, higher - although I'm not sure how much higher - for those training as barristers.

So how valid are the objections raised in the petition? I’m going to discount #5 straightaway because it is, frankly, ridiculous. I think #4 is a weak argument too. There are no proposals to remove Irish as the first official language, and it’s not clear what the ‘implications for the status of the Irish language in Europe’ would be. If Irish-speaking lawyers are in demand in Europe, then surely that demand itself would act as an incentive for prospective lawyers to learn Irish, with or without a requirement that they do so. (A similar argument can be made for #2, although I think there’s a more pertinent issue on that one, which I’ll come to later.)

#1 is based on a generalised view that Irish language requirements are an essential component in maintaining the status of Irish. I think it has to be said that the (de facto) status of Irish in this country is poor enough even with these requirements and if they are what we are counting on to save the language, we’re in big trouble. This is not an argument against compulsory Irish per se – I would still strongly support it for primary and secondary students, up to Leaving Cert level, albeit with a vastly reworked curriculum to ensure that they are actually learning the language and not memorising only the amount that they need to pass their exams. If we had that in place then perhaps the language would be used enough to create a real need for Irish speakers in a wide range of professions. But the current half-arsed situation, in which only a small minority of people will ever have to use the language after they finish school, seems to me to do as much harm as good to its status.

So that leaves us with 2 and 3. Leaving aside the former's hyperbole, I think these are the strongest arguments in favour of retaining the requirement. Irish is the first language of the state, and its speakers must have the right to use it to conduct their official business. But there’s a serious question as to whether the current law actually protects that right. As I noted earlier, the solicitors’ exams are, by all accounts, fairly easy – meaning you don’t have to speak Irish particularly well to pass them. Is a Gaeilgeoir who wants to conduct their legal business through the national language really protected by a system that admits persons with only a rudimentary knowledge of that language? Given the intricacies of the law, and the extreme degree of preciseness needed in drafting and responding to legal documents, wouldn’t any such person be sure to seek out a fluent Irish speaker rather than someone who’d just managed to pass a couple perfunctory exams? I have no idea how many fluent speakers there are in the legal profession; this category, unfortunately, was not included in the recent Census breakdown of Irish speakers by occupation. But if there are many, it’s obviously not because of the law - as the law does not require fluency - and so the law is unnecessary for this purpose. And if there are few, then the law is failing this purpose. So either way, the case really isn't made for its retention.

Now having said all this, I don’t like the Labour Party bill either. It would replace the compulsory Irish exam with a 'voluntary system of recognising competence in the Irish language' – so you get a little star by your name in the Golden Pages or something, I guess. This is not the way I would go about reforming the present system. I don’t think there should be no requirement for solicitors and barristers to have Irish – but the requirement should be meaningful, and should be implemented in such a way as to actually encourage and facilitate learning of the language, and of course to not form a barrier to access to the legal profession. The recently-introduced policy of the Garda Síochána seems to me to be a common-sense way to go about this: Irish is now a mandatory part of the training regime for those applicants who don’t already have it.

I’ll conclude by (re-)stating the obvious: this dilemma wouldn’t exist if the government cared enough to ensure that the language was taught properly in the schools in the first place, and to provide adequate Irish education for adults.

Republican revisionism and the GFA

2007-11-10T09:36:00.000Z

I've just been listening to Newstalk 106, where Des Dalton of Republican Sinn Féin was briefly interviewed on the subject of that party's Ard Fheis, to be held this weekend.

In the course of the interview it was put to Dalton that the people of Ireland, north and south, voted in favour of the Good Friday Agreement. Dalton denied that this was true: "The people of the 26 Counties didn't even get a chance to vote on the Stormont Agreement," he said.

This is an allegation the GFA's opponents have been levelling for years, and it baffles me. Did they not bother to read the text of the constitutional amendment they (presumably) voted against in 1998? The very first line of it reads:

The State may consent to be bound by the British-Irish Agreement done at Belfast on the 10th day of April, 1998, hereinafter called the Agreement.

You can't get much clearer than that. Obviously the most emotive part of the referendum, for most people in the 26, was the removal of Articles 2 and 3 but it's pure historical revisionism to claim - as RSF and the others constantly do - that that is all the southern electorate voted on.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of the GFA, but I really don't see any credible argument that its passage wasn't the will of the Irish people as expressed at the time.

2007-10-24T17:29:00.000+01:00

It’s reported today that the Common Travel Area between Britain and Ireland will officially come to an end in 2009.

I say “officially” because the Irish government has been unilaterally ignoring the agreement for some time now. I’ve noted this as a semi-regular traveller to Britain: it’s been years since I’ve encountered any kind of passport check upon arrival at an airport in that country, but there are always checks when I come home. So it seems the Brits are just bringing their policy in line with ours. Which is ironic, given our frequent trotting out of the excuse that we can’t do this or that because it might affect the CTA – an excuse that is usually bullshit, as in this instance, for example. In the Dáil today, the Taoiseach also confirmed my long-held suspicion that the CTA excuse previously offered for us not joining the Schengen open border arrangement was only a pretense:

…should we join Schengen, the answer is "no"

It’s also been confirmed that the new arrangements will not apply to the land border between the two jurisdictions. No surprises there. I don’t believe either government would have had the stomach for that. So what will probably happen instead is that border security will be beefed up at Stranraer and Troon (I gave up that Parkhead season book just in time!). No doubt, there will be more instances of Irish nationals being subjected to racist requirements that they write their names in English, something that would never occur to the British authorities to demand of Polish or Spanish passengers. But it's interesting to contemplate the psychological effect of moving the de facto border back to where it belongs.

The other ironic thing about this is that its announcement takes place the same week that the Irish government finally introduces legislation to outlaw human trafficking. As everyone in the migration field knows, but politicians stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, tightening border controls actually facilitates rather than hindering traffickers. It means that there are more people unable to avail of legal means of migration and having to resort to illegal means; a larger and more lucrative black market in forged documents, which in turn provides a greater incentive to criminals to get involved in the business, and often a greater debt for the victim to have to repay to their trafficker, meaning a longer time they are held in debt bondage. Western countries in recent years have tightened their borders considerably and at the same time, the trafficking rate has increased. This isn’t a coincidence.

Finally, I have to wonder what the effect will be on the immigrant women in this country who find themselves with unwanted pregnancies and now face yet another barrier to obtaining a safe and legal abortion. A recent report in The Lancet (summary available at that link; free registration required for the full article) proved what some of us would call the bleedin’ obvious: laws against abortion don’t prevent them but merely make them more dangerous. In this country, we’ve largely been shielded from the latter effect because of the safety valve of travel to England – but many immigrant women don’t have that option. There is already some evidence of illegal abortions among this population and the only reason there haven’t been more is that the Irish government has quietly granted re-entry visas to women who wish to travel for this purpose (I don’t have a link for that, but it's accepted by activists on both sides of the debate). When Britain starts checking the passports of everyone who goes there from here, these women will need to ensure they also have a British entry visa and I’m not sure how willing the Home Office will be to accommodate them. Some increase in the number of illegal abortions here seems inevitable – and the consequences of that could be dire.

****

I realise I’ve said more in this post than I previously had for the whole month. Apologies for my quietness of late, and thanks to those of you who still check in regularly. I can’t promise to keep up as often as I’d like to, particularly given what looks to be an increasing workload for me, but I will always do what I can.

Note to my northern comrades

2007-10-22T17:01:00.000+01:00

When the Assembly is having a debate on abortion, it would be a good idea to have at least one woman MLA speak.

Quick note on the Paul Quinn case

2007-10-22T06:45:00.000+01:00

As readers in Ireland will know by now, IRA members in South Armagh are being accused for the beating death of a young man near Castleblayney, County Monaghan.

On the killing itself, the comments of our local TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin are worth repeating:

Whatever circumstances are behind the attack there can be no justification for this type of violence. I strongly condemn the attack which took place in my own constituency and urge that anyone with information relating to the murder go to the gardaí immediately.

I would caution against a rush to judgement about the perpetrators. Just because the family believes republicans were involved doesn't mean they were. See my previous post on Joe Rafferty's murder, and remember also the case of Gareth O'Connor, for whose disappearance the IRA was widely blamed until it was revealed that he had been touting to the PSNI on his comrades in the Real IRA.

Whoever was responsible, though, it should be obvious that - after Paul Quinn's family - the last people who would have wanted anything like this to happen are Sinn Féin. Whereas some of our opponents, in the media and on other web forums, seem to be nearly wetting themselves with glee.

For the sake of everyone and everything involved, I hope this is resolved as quickly as it can be, and with a minimum of political point-scoring.

2007-09-28T11:17:00.000+01:00

Today's Times (subs required) reports that black taxi drivers are finding it difficult to pick up fares in Dublin and other areas. They say that passengers at ranks are going past them and getting into cabs with white drivers.

The National Taxi Drivers' Union president, Tommy Gorman, denies that racism is involved and suggests that people may have had previous experience with "coloured" drivers (what century are we in again?) not knowing where they were going.

Of course, this never happens with white Irish drivers. Oh no. I never had to give a white Irish taxi driver directions from Heuston Station to Dundrum. I never had to give a white Irish taxi driver directions from O'Connell Street to Phibsboro, for fuck's sake. Yes, Phibsboro. I never had a white Irish taxi driver get hopelessly lost trying to get me from Cabra to the Coolmine rail station. These incidents must all be figments of my imagination.

Gorman made his comments in the context of suggestions that white drivers should refuse to take these fares. He was defending the white drivers for failing to do so. That's understandable. He's a union leader, and the role of a union leader is to stand up for the union workers. But what he seems to be missing here is that he's the president of all the NTDU workers - including the black ones. He should be standing up for them, too, not suggesting these occurrences are their own fault.

The suggestion that taxi drivers should have to take a local knowledge test is a sensible one. If implemented, it would surely weed out most of those drivers (Irish and non-Irish, black, white or whatever) who don't know where they're going. But will it, as Gorman suggests, weed out those passengers who refuse to get into a cab with a black person driving it? Somehow, I don't think so.

What a difference a year makes … or maybe not

2007-09-27T16:43:00.000+01:00

I’d kind of forgotten all about this post. It was brought back to me when I had a look at my visitor stats and noticed someone with an ISP from Fianna Fáil headquarters doing a trawl for blog posts on ‘Bertiegate’. A little worried up at Mount Street, are we?

In retrospect, of course, I think I was a little easy on de Taoiseach. I’m still of the view that there isn’t – so far – hard evidence of anything beyond general sliminess and misjudgement. The inconsistencies that have arisen since then obviously strengthen the case against him, and darken the cloud over his head, to a degree that would embarrass most western leaders into stepping down. But again, this is Ireland we’re talking about, and Fianna Fáil. Even if Bertie goes – and don’t get me wrong, he should – the state is still going to be run by people to whom the going rate of a terraced house is money to be casually handed out to ‘friends’. And it’s still going to be run for those people, which to my mind is the real scandal.

I’ve been struck by this over the past couple days, with the news about Tuesday's Garda shooting in Dublin. That’s obviously a serious and newsworthy story but for God’s sake does nobody see the link between the greed that leads to that kind of behaviour, and the kind that results in fatcats having enormous sums of cash to distribute in ‘whiparounds’ for politicians, and the kind that results in stories like this one? What, apart from the social class of the participants, is the real difference? Thousands of people die in this country every year as a result of poverty, inequitable access to essential health care or other forms of government malfeasance which occur as a direct result of the privileging of the business class at the expense of everyone else - are their lives worth less than the relative handful of people killed by working class gangsters? I don’t think so.

The plain fact of the matter is that this state is controlled by people who have no regard for the law, no concern for anyone else’s well-being and no interest more pressing than stuffing their own pockets. It should hardly come as a surprise to them that some of the proles want in on the action, and are equally indifferent to the consequences of the means they have at their disposal.

Quick note on the unmarried fathers case

2007-09-11T17:44:00.000+01:00

Good news in this case. I haven't followed it closely, and I understand it's probably only a limited victory, but it is certainly a good decision - not just for the man in question and his children, but also for common sense.

I have a problem with a lot of the fathers' rights crowd. Too often their complaints about the Irish legal system descend into rants on feminism - as if the legislators and judges who came up with our family law were all mad women's libbers, rather than ultraconservative Catholics trying to discourage extramarital sex and believing that women should mind the kids, preferably while standing barefoot and pregnant [but only by their husband] in the kitchen.

But the underlying argument - that unmarried fathers in particular are grossly discriminated against in Irish law - is virtually undebatable. Today's decision may be only a small step toward reversing this ridiculous injustice, but it's a welcome one.

A little Friday brainteaser

2007-09-07T15:46:00.000+01:00

Which TD, from a government party, was spotted chatting away on his mobile while cycling down a busy city centre street today?

Latest news from the Land of the Welcomes

2007-08-31T16:07:00.000+01:00

Prime Time last night carried a report on EU citizens whose non-EU spouses are being threatened with deportation on the grounds that the couple did not live together in another EU state before moving to Ireland.

This is happening because of the government’s interpretation of a recent EU directive which, ironically, was intended to strengthen the family rights of EU citizens.

I have a friend who recently fell afoul of this law. David has been married to his wife (a citizen of one of the “old” EU states) for about eight years. They have lived in Ireland for most of that time, having previously lived in David’s native country. He entered the state legally, with his wife, and was granted residency as the spouse of an EU citizen. This permission had to be renewed annually, so every year, he and his wife would go to the Gardaí to verify that they were still married, and he would get a stamp for another year. He is now eligible for Irish citizenship and has filed an application, but the waiting list is very long and it could be 2009 before his application is approved.

So a couple months ago, when his stamp was due to expire, he and his wife went for what he had every reason to believe was just a formal appearance before the Gardaí for another year-long stamp. Except this time they wouldn’t give it to him. “The law has changed,” he was told, “and you no longer have any right to reside here.” Within a few short weeks he would become an illegal immigrant; his employer would be required by law to let him go, and a deportation order could issue at any time.

Fortunately, it hasn’t come to that for David. He has a few advantages that many others in his situation don’t have: his employer is fairly well connected, and David is a white, native English-speaking westerner (this isn’t supposed to make a difference, but I guarantee you that it does). In his case the authorities relented – at least for this year.

So why is the government all of a sudden deciding to make legal immigrants illegal? Their explanation is that they are cracking down on “sham marriages”. Right. And the only way a couple can prove that their marriage is not one of convenience is to demonstrate that they lived together in another EU country first? My arse.

What happened is this. The government’s solicitors are under instructions to scrutinise every immigration-related EU law in order to determine the most restrictive way it can be applied. In this case, the solicitors found that this new EU directive could be interpreted to say that family rights only had to be granted to couples that had previously lived in another EU state. That, of course, was never the EU’s intention, but no matter. The government saw a loophole and jumped through it like a circus horse. And then made up this nonsense that it was all about "sham marriages".

What angers me most about this is the utter disregard it shows for the human needs, let alone human rights, of the people affected. Not all of them will be deported, of course. With a little luck (and a cerebrally-functioning Supreme Court) maybe none of them will, apart from that small percentage who genuinely did marry for convenience. But they don’t know that. Try to imagine the fear that someone in this predicament must feel. Someone who has spent years in this country, entirely legally, playing by the rules, building a life here for themselves and their family. And then to have a threat like this dangled over their head.

It is a cruel and disgusting way to treat people who have done absolutely nothing wrong.

...let him wear his turban

2007-08-22T17:00:00.000+01:00

I actually struggled with this one a bit: at first glance, it appears to pit two of my most deeply held principles – pluralism and secularism – against each other. On the one hand I most certainly agree that Ireland should make reasonable accommodation to the cultural traditions of newcomers, and allowing male Sikhs (how many are there here? A thousand or so?) to wear their turban strikes me as eminently reasonable. There is no suggestion that it will interfere with their job performance in any way, or cause anyone else any harm or offence.

On the other hand, I am strongly sympathetic to the argument (as expressed in a couple letters in today's Times, subs required) that religion should be kept out of public life entirely. The state should not be involved in promulgating faith in general, or any faith in particular – and police officers, when on duty, are agents of the state. If a Catholic Garda wanted to wear a big fuck-off crucifix I wouldn’t be complaining if he or she was told to take it off.

But there’s a key difference there - and I’m not talking about the lack of an onus on Catholics to wear crucifixes, in the way that Sikh men feel they have to wear turbans. I think the crucial issue isn’t the beliefs themselves but the socioreligious context in which this dispute is taking place. The south of Ireland is, in most respects, and notwithstanding the undeniable (if far too slow) changes that have taken place over the past couple decades, still a country permeated with Catholicism. Our population is 90% Catholic. Our schools are 95% Catholic. Our elected representatives (on a parliamentary level, anyway) are about 97% Catholic. And this is still, unfortunately, reflected in many of the laws and policies that affect our daily lives – including the lives of those of us who want nothing to do with the Church and its teachings. To have Gardaí going around wearing crucifixes would just reinforce the essentially Catholic-theocratic basis on which this state is still to an unacceptable degree run. You can hardly say the same about a Sikh policeman in a turban.

Now the logical conclusion to this is that Sikhs and Catholics would have to be treated differently: the former given permission to openly display their religion, the latter prohibited. It’s not a position I’m entirely comfortable with, framed in those terms. But in a way, I think it boils down to the same question that has divided the US in recent years with regard to affirmative action, or the Six Counties on the 50-50 PSNI recruitment issue: is differential treatment acceptable to achieve equality of outcome? I have always felt that it is, at least under some circumstances. It’s all well and good for the law to say that everyone is equal and no distinction will be made but, in practice, in societies where the dominance of one category of people has been firmly entrenched, such a policy usually just ends up reinforcing the status quo.

The questions we need to ask here are what kind of Ireland do we want, and what policy will best help us achieve it. As I've stated, I want one that is pluralist and secular. Allowing your man to wear the turban would obviously promote the first of these; as for the second, it probably wouldn’t help, but I’m hard pressed to imagine how it would hurt, either. We aren't a secular state, and we aren't going to become one by limiting the rights of minorities to practice their religion. They are the wrong target for us 'aggressive secularists'. When we have a society where belief is genuinely a matter for the individual, and the state actually is no longer promulgating religion in general or any religion in particular, I'll revisit my views on this issue. But until then...

And what if it was a vaccine against prostate cancer?

2007-08-16T18:10:00.000+01:00

A member of a Government expert panel has criticised the delay in recommending whether a cervical cancer vaccine should be provided under a National Immunisation programme. link

OK, let's look at the facts.

Studies suggest that up to 75% of people may contract the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer, at some point during their reproductive years.

Ireland has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in Western Europe.

180 Irish women are diagnosed with this illness every year.

80 Irish women a year die from it.

In clinical trials, the vaccine was found to be 100% effective against the types of HPV linked to most cervical cancers. Link.

What about this is a tough call?

Aer Lingus: It's the electorate, stupid

2007-08-14T12:20:00.000+01:00

Fintan O’Toole annoys me as much as the next person, but when he gets it right does he ever get it right. His column in today’s Times (subs required) says exactly what I have been wanting to say since this Aer Lingus story first broke. Actually, it says exactly what I’ve been thinking since the election. Undoubtedly, it says what I’ll be thinking after the next election too, because in all likelihood the Irish voters will grumble and whinge for the next five years about what a shower of bastards we have in office and then on polling day they’ll go right back and put that shower in again. And then complain when they do the things that Irish politicians do. And so on, ad nauseum.

But we all know this; the question is what do we do about it. Usually the problem is identified as the peculiarly clientelist nature of (southern) Irish politics, and electoral reform is put forward as the solution: get rid of the dual mandate, for example, and TDs won’t have to focus so much on issues properly in the purview of councillors.

That hasn’t worked.

Increasingly the multi-seat constituency is coming under fire: TDs are competing with their party colleagues, the argument goes, and so there’s a great incentive for them to try to build up support from the voters through parish pump type stuff. I’m not convinced by this. For one thing, it doesn’t happen in the US, although the primary system there also means that candidates compete with party colleagues. Of course the party whip system doesn’t exist in the US so party colleagues can compete with each other on ideological grounds, something they can’t do here. But Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael can’t really be said to be competing on ideological grounds, either, so a system under which their candidates are competing with each other (and other parties) rather than first and foremost amongst themselves is hardly likely to eliminate the incentive for them to boost their support through constituency work.

Some of my own party colleagues are in favour of introducing some sort of list system, in which, for example, half the Dáil is elected in the current manner, while the other half is selected by party officials according to the percentage of vote that each party receives. Presumably, the ‘appointed’ TDs would not be bound to do constituency work, not having any constituency to be bound to. There’s merit in that argument, but I can’t help thinking that there is something fundamentally undemocratic about allowing them to be chosen by appointment rather than directly by the people. We complain about this in the Seanad (not that that stopped us … well I won’t go there for now) so I don’t really see how we can support it in the Dáil. The wild optimists also think that this system would increase the extent to which the electorate votes on ideological grounds, because they know they are not just voting for their candidate but for his or her entire party. Again, unconvincing. At the last election voters knew they were voting not just for their TD but for their government, and what did they do? Voted in the same shower of bastards they keep complaining about … again.

I’m not sure what the answer is, or whether it can be found through electoral reform at all. Clearly a cultural change is needed - Irish voters do need to stop thinking of their TD as their councillor, social worker, all-purpose-fixer-upper – but there’s no guarantee that would stop them electing the same old crooks time after time, anyway. I’m sure I don’t need to point to examples in other countries to demonstrate this. Whether it’s PR-STV, FPTP, party list, whatever, the bottom line is that nothing is going to change until the voters take it upon themselves to decide that they aren’t going to put up with it anymore.

And if you think that’s going to happen any time soon, I have a landing slot in Shannon to sell you.

Normal service resumes!

2007-08-10T10:11:00.000+01:00

I am back from my holidays, rested and ready to get back in the swing of things around here. Slowly, though. For now, just a brief comment on today's Irish Times report that an investigation into serious allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Quinn Direct insurance company, in cahoots with serving members of the Garda Síochána, has concluded that the smoking-gun document was forged.

This investigation was carried out by ... the Garda Síochána. What did anyone expect them to find?

Justice has been done.

2007-07-22T03:01:00.000+01:00

I'm on holiday at the moment but, predictably, I'm still checking the news from Ireland every day and as might be expected from this post I've particularly been following the Joe O'Reilly trial.

The verdict today was exactly what I'd expected, and hoped for.

Apparently there is some disquiet about it because of the nature of the evidence (circumstantial rather than physical/forensic). I think this is a misunderstanding of the law. Circumstantial evidence is every bit as valid in building a case against a defendant; it's easier to explain away, but the crucial thing is that the defence has to actually do so (explain it away, I mean) - and Joe O'Reilly's didn't.

The jury has to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt - not beyond any doubt. They have to find that it is reasonable to believe that somebody other than the defendant could have committed the crime. With the evidence that was presented, and with Joe O'Reilly's lack of any explanation of it, combined with the virtually incontrovertible proof that he lied about his whereabouts at the time of the murder, it would really take a stretch beyond "reasonable" to imagine that it wasn't him. "Theoretically possible", sure, but that's not the standard required. If it was, you'd hardly ever get a conviction for anything.

Anyway, I'm sure that now the trial's over we'll start hearing all the details that weren't allowed to be introduced in court and that should seal it for any remaining doubters.

RIP Rachel.

The Dáil session 2006-2007: and so it ends

2007-07-05T14:15:00.000+01:00

... much as it started, with the sitting suspended on two out of the three days this week because of the Government's failure to schedule enough legislation.

Good thing they didn't agree to the Opposition proposal to come back on September 11 (hmm) instead of the 26th. God knows what they'd find to talk about.

More Leinster House redundancies

2007-07-05T10:22:00.001+01:00

A little bird has told me that a number of TDs on the Government side of the chamber - including at least one newly-appointed Junior Minister - have decided to sack their long-serving support staff and put family members in their place.

Not that this would surprise anyone, of course. But I thought it was worth a mention.

Joined-up thinking, Fianna Fáil style

2007-07-04T14:04:00.001+01:00

Two actual Parliamentary Questions and their replies, published yesterday:

Q: To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment if a non-EU citizen whose work permit has expired and who has since married an Irish citizen needs a further work permit to resume employment here.
A (Minister Martin): A work permit is not required for an employee married to an Irish Citizen. The person can regularise their status by contacting the Department of Justice.

Q: To ask the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform how a non-EU citizen whose work permit has expired and who has since married an Irish citizen can obtain a residency permit.
A (Minister Lenihan): Marriage to an Irish national does not confer an automatic right of residence in the State. Applications of this kind take approximately twelve months to process. Should the person wish to continue employment while the application is being processed, they should renew their work permit.

Narrow nationalism 1, international solidarity 0

2007-07-01T19:25:00.000+01:00

Earlier this year, immigration 'reform' legislation was introduced in the Dáil. The legislation contained some of the most draconian provisions ever announced in this country, including harshly punitive measures for most undocumented immigrants, and limitations on their right to challenge the Government's decision on their status; biometric ID requirements; new restrictions on the right to family reunification; and the creation of an underclass of temporary migrant workers with few labour rights and no prospect ever of permanent residency. The bill was strongly opposed by civil liberties organisations and many of the country's leading trade unions, as well, of course, by left or left-leaning political parties such as Sinn Féin, Labour, and the Greens, who condemned its obvious human rights violations.

If the above paragraph doesn't sound familiar, it's because I've changed a couple details. The bill I'm talking about is real (and so are all those measures, and the bit about the civil liberties and trade union opposition), but it wasn't introduced in the Dáil - it was the US Congress. And far from condemning it, every major political party in this State lobbied heavily for its passage. Including the left or left-leaning ones. Including my own.

The reason, of course, is because of one of the few positive provisions in the Bill - the regularisation process for those undocumented immigrants who can afford it. For the sake of a relative handful of Irish people to whom, let's face it, the worst that could happen is that they'd have to come back and live in Ireland, we have not only accepted but actively supported legislation that we would never in a million years agree to in this country.

I understand the realpolitik involved, and I'm sure that if I had a loved one in the US who I hadn't seen in years because of the current immigration regime (as opposed to just a lot of friends in that situation, which I do have), I'd probably be more concerned about them than about the millions of people - mostly poor, brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking - who are going to suffer greatly when this legislation is finally passed.

But it still makes me a little bit sick.

Interesting note re the Greens' ministries

2007-06-26T11:29:00.000+01:00

I was just looking over the list of Junior Ministers in the new Dáil and something struck me that I hadn't noticed before. See Tony Killeen? Minister of State under Gormley and Ryan with "special responsibility for Environment and Energy". There isn't a Junior Minister with special responsibility for Heritage, for Local Government, for Communications or for Natural Resources; it's only the Environment and Energy that a Fianna Fáiler has been put in charge of.

Is it any coincidence that those happen to be the two portfolios that the Greens would have wanted those Departments for in the first place?

2007-06-25T09:58:00.001+01:00

Following on from my post on Saturday, I thought it would be a useful exercise to list all the Private Members debates initiated by Sinn Féin in the previous Dáil:

* The organ retention scandal
* Enshrining neutrality in the Constitution
* Restoration of the northern Assembly
* Enshrining the right to housing in the Constitution
* No confidence in the Minister for Health (Martin, at the time)
* Rural development
* Childcare (note that this was several months before the Meath by-election, in which the Government was reportedly "surprised" that this was an issue)
* Special Needs education
* Privatisation of Aer Lingus
* Reunification
* Establishment of a Department of Labour Affairs
* Drugs
* Part V of the Planning and Development Act (the developers' "get-out clause" for social and affordable housing)
* Domestic violence

If we hadn't tabled these motions, would another party have taken the initiative? Would there have been any debate on these issues? Maybe, in some cases. Probably not, in some others. Definitely not in a couple. And that's not even to mention the myriad of issues that we (and sometimes we alone) raised at Leader's Questions, Priority Questions and in the course of Second Stage debates.

The point here is that the loss of speaking rights for our TDs isn't just our loss. It means that fewer of these issues will be discussed in Leinster House. With us and Gregory silenced, Higgins and Healy gone, and Finian and the Greens bought, Labour will be the sole voice of the left(ish) in the Dáil - and their own poor showing relative to Fine Gael's means it will primarily be the latter who benefits from the demise of the Technical Group. Partisan Labour supporters and SF opponents may celebrate our exclusion, but it can hardly be seen as a good thing for progressive politics in this state.

An interesting rumour from across the pond ...

2007-06-24T16:38:00.001+01:00

... has former Georgia Democratic Congressperson Cynthia McKinney going forward as the Green Party candidate for president, with Cindy Sheehan as her running mate. I hope it happens. It'll be amusing to watch Gormless & Co's attempt to claim ideological congruity with this ticket, as they sit in a government that the would-be USVP has accused of being "complicit in war crimes".

Actually, quite apart from that, I'd love to see this happen. I'm still allowed to vote in US federal elections, and it would be a nice change from having to hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil, or for some Peace and Freedom Party no-hoper you've never heard of (come to think of it, I've never heard of most of them either - even when I lived in California), or to just not be arsed because they're all crap. This would be one American presidential campaign I could really get behind.

Three pictures

2007-06-23T07:07:00.001+01:00

Meg Walsh

Rachel O'Reilly

In February of this year, Sinn Féin introduced the following Private Members motion:

"That the Dáil,
recognising that:
— the grave threat to life and limb and to the mental health and quality of life of women, children and men posed by domestic violence is undermining the fabric of our society and our belief in equality;
— an estimated 1 in 5 Irish women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives;
— of 126 women violently killed since 1996, 81 were killed in their home and just under 50% of victims whose cases have concluded were killed by their partner or ex partner;
— in 2003 on average more than 23 incidents of domestic violence were recorded by Gardaí each day compared with an average of 11 other assaults recorded;— more than a third of all calls to the Women’s Aid national phone help-line went unanswered due to inadequate funding in 2005;
— women are 70% more likely to be raped, severely assaulted or murdered after they access the legal system and attempt to leave their abuser and therefore victim safety and offender accountability must be at the centre of every intervention; and
— there is an unjustifiable shortage of refuges and other front line provisions;
believes that:
— an effective sanctioning system is essential if the incidence of domestic violence is to be reduced and therefore law enforcement bodies and agencies involved in the administration of justice must prioritise the prosecution of domestic violence crimes on indictment where possible rather than simply as breaches of orders;
— the variation in Garda practice across the state and within stations is a serious problem and can impede women from making complaints or even undermine the cases that are brought forward, and therefore the existing Garda policy on domestic violence and practice must become subject to monitoring, support and supervision to ensure it at least achieves the level of response expected and set down by that policy;
— consideration should be given to the appointment of a Commissioner within An Garda Síochána tasked with ensuring domestic violence is treated as a serious criminal matter, and domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse crimes should be named as crime priorities in the Garda Annual Policing Plans;
— greater investment should be made in specialised training and ongoing in service training for Gardaí given the distinct nature of crimes of domestic and sexual violence;
— guidelines should be introduced detailing criteria for the granting of safety, protection and barring orders, as should regular information seminars for the judiciary on the dynamics and impact of domestic violence, the latest international research into effectively stopping domestic violence, and responding to the needs of victims, children and offenders;
— all key agencies, including the HSE, Probation Service, Courts Service and Housing Authorities, should be obliged to develop and implement, in conjunction with the expert agencies, a domestic violence policy and training to govern their work;
calls on the government to:
— make the necessary provisions for the introduction of an effective and consistent sanctioning system;
— publish and schedule time for legislation amending the Domestic Violence Act 1996 as a matter of urgency, including amendments to:
— remove the restrictions caused by residency requirements;
— list the name of the agency/practitioner responsible for taking sworn information, for serving orders and/or summons and providing evidence to the court regarding the response of the respondent;
— provide for the immediate communication to the local Garda station of the granting/extension of an order for priority entry onto the Pulse system;
— provide for applicants for orders to automatically be given a copy of their sworn information;
— provide for the immediate seizure of any firearm legally held by a person against whom an order has been granted; and
— clearly specify the data protection provisions governing the sharing of information by agencies;
— re introduce and resource a role for the Probation Service in family courts producing safety reports and risk assessments to inform judges’ decisions;
— ensure the supervision of child access where necessary to protect against further abuse;
— make provisions for the extension across the state of the inter agency work model developed by the NDVIA and the systemic changes achieved by them in the pilot areas of Dun Laoghaire and Bray District Courts;— prioritise and guarantee core funding to frontline services including refuges, outreach, counselling, court accompaniment and transitional housing on a multi annual basis to allow for the strategic development and delivery of services; and
— introduce measures to overcome language difficulties and other barriers, including the prospect of deportation, experienced by immigrants, ethnic minorities and others attempting to access services and protections."

Believe it or not, this was the only debate on domestic violence in the life of the 29th Dáil, despite our justice and equality spokesperson Aengus Ó Snodaigh regularly calling for one.

The Government, unsurprisingly, defeated our motion, replacing it with their usual self-congratulatory muck about how much they had already done and promising to do more - just not as much more as we were calling for.

One wonders whether those promises would have been made at all if not for our motion. With SF effectively gagged in the 30th Dáil, we won't have the opportunity to initiate another such debate, and little opportunity to "remind" them to stick to their promises.

In the meantime, we can only hope that justice will be done for Rachel, Meg, Siobhán, and all the other women killed or maimed while the Government is busy patting itself on the back for its meager achievements.

They're definitely taking the piss.

2007-06-21T10:21:00.000+01:00

Conor "Kebabs" Lenihan as Minister of State at the Department of Justice with special responsibility for integration.

I'm going to wake up tomorrow and this is all going to turn out to be one long, surreal dream, right?

Are they taking the piss?

2007-06-15T16:20:00.000+01:00

The Green Party has indicated that it will not be seeking to re-route the M3 motorway away from the Hill of Tara during the next five years... [Eamon] Ryan said the decision to construct the motorway alongside the Hill of Tara was a decision of the last Government and "this is a new Government".

From here.

Sometimes, I don't even feel the need to add my own comments... some things just speak for themselves.

The Greens' first sellout

2007-06-14T18:44:00.001+01:00

In 2002 the Green Party repeatedly protested and called for a change to Standing Order 114, which denies speaking rights to parties of fewer than seven members.

A motion has just gone through the Dáil which would grant speaking rights only to parties with at least seven members. Anyone care to guess what position the Greens took?

Many more similar instances to follow, no doubt.

News from Kildare Street

2007-06-14T09:39:00.000+01:00

Joe Higgins's office, in the corridor with the Shinners, Greens and Tony Gregory, has been vacated. It is now being occupied by ... Jackie-Healy Rae.

My God, what a depressing five years we have ahead of us.

A short note on the Greens' deal

2007-06-13T18:07:00.001+01:00

It will probably go through, but it doesn't seem to me like they've got much out of it. No scrapping of co-location. No end to US troops at Shannon. No M3 re-routing. So what are they getting? Carbon tax - a fairly minor concession, in the grand scheme of things. More spending on education - won't begin to address the problems endemic in the Irish system. Local government reform - desperately needed, but the kind of changes that would make a real difference would do so at Fianna Fáil's expense and does anybody think for a moment they would let that happen?

I hope those within my own party who had hoped for us to be in the Greens' position now are learning a lesson from this. The kind of radical changes we propose are never going to be agreed by an FF or FG-led government - it would be turkeys voting for Christmas. The prospects for an alliance of the left may seem bleaker than ever after this last election, but ultimately I can't see any other road to real change in this country.

Paisley Jnr in sensible comment shock

2007-06-01T06:20:00.000+01:00

I've finally got around to reading that interview with Ian Paisley Jnr and, while his comments about gays and lesbians are every bit as vile as reported, I was surprised to find a bit of sense rarely seen in Irish politicians - north or south, republican, nationalist, unionist or other. Asked about segregation in schools, Baby Doc said:

Believe it or not, I went to an integrated school. I believe parents should have the choice, but I believe that if you want to have the choice of a religious, exclusive school then you should pay for that choice - it should not be paid for by the State... I understand that the churches have a huge input into all this, but I think the churches need to stand back and the sooner the better.

I continue my long wait for Sinn Féin to adopt such a sensible, progressive position.

Incidentally, toward the end of the interview Paisley Jnr also refers to the problems that could arise in the event of abortion law liberalisation in the South. Is he bothered by the potential deaths of Irish "babies"? Does he worry that it could encourage similar moves north of the border? No, his specific issue is solely to do with the existence of different laws in different parts of the island. Er, isn't that part of what unionism is all about?

Election 07: What went wrong

2007-05-26T08:11:00.000+01:00

The big spin, of course, is going to be that "all the small parties were squeezed". And there is something to that. But it's notable that in most of the constituencies where we expected to make gains, there was at least one left candidate whose votes could have seen us through - but we didn't get them. Why didn't we? You'd have to suspect that left voters were turned off by what seemed to be an already-made decision to prop up a Fianna Fáil government, and the fact that we'd already shown ourselves willing to discard certain left-wing policies (such as the increases in corporation tax and PAYE for high earners) in order to do so.

As for those voters who wouldn't necessarily be described as "left" but who we'd nonetheless hoped to get the support of, well, it seems pretty simple. The anti-FF ones didn't want to vote for us because we all but said we'd support the government. And the pro-FF ones just voted for FF. Some of them transfered to us, but nowhere near enough.

I'm gutted for people like Larry O'Toole and Dessie Ellis, who've done absolutely stellar work in their constituencies for years and deserved to be rewarded for it. And for Seán Crowe, a truly dedicated public rep. And I can't even bear the thought of Aengus Ó Snodaigh losing his seat.

If there's any silver lining, there were a few constituencies where we performed better than most of us were expecting, such as Cork East, Limerick East and Kerry South. A lot of those who missed out are young enough to have a good go at it again in five years. And of course, there's the PD/Michael McDowell wipeout. But it's really not much consolation. We had a terrible election, and we need to learn from it. I'm not at all confident that we will, though.

As for the other parties, it's interesting the way that the media are spinning some of their results. Have a look at the end of this article, where Labour is described as having "recovered well" - by holding even or losing a seat. The Greens' poor results are glossed over although they look like doing the same. We could end up losing no more seats than either of those parties - yet we get the "big losers" tag and they don't.

*****

I'm aware that this will seem like sour grapes, but it has to be said that the results don't show the electorate in a particularly good light. Look at some of the baffling decisions they have made:

In Monaghan, a constituency where the biggest issue is the pending loss of the local hospital, the voters turfed out the hospital candidate (who was admittedly a bit useless) and voted in a member of the party whose government is responsible for the loss of the hospital.
In Galway West, where the water's been undrinkable for months, a member of the Government tops the polls.
With a similar situation unfolding in Wicklow, the Environment Minister gets nearly a quota on the first count.
And I'm not even going to get into some of the things I heard on the doors during this campaign. Let's just say that this was a big victory for clientelism over any sort of ideology.

Finally, while I generally support PR-STV because of the unique ability it gives to small parties and independents to get elected, questions do have to be asked about the fairness of a system under which a candidate who gets 939 votes can get in ahead of candidates who poll over 3000 (see the Dublin Central results). But of course, since Fianna Fáil have benefitted from this system, it will never change.

It's a depressing five years we have ahead of us.

Harney to nurses: vote Sinn Féin

2007-05-09T18:14:00.000+01:00

On the 1.oo news today, Minister for Health Mary Harney noted that Sinn Féin are the only party who fully supports the nurses and therefore, if they want their demands met, they and their families should vote for us. Cheers for that Mary, the cheque's in the post.

On another matter, I was relieved to hear that the judge in the Miss D case has shown humanity and compassion - and pulled this country back from the brink of international ridicule - by deciding that the State has no power to prevent a 17-year-old travelling to Britain for an abortion. I'm sure the politicians are relieved too, thinking the issue will die down now. It's important that the growing pro-choice movement doesn't let that happen.

Now for the hard part

2007-05-08T22:33:00.000+01:00

Believe it or not, I'm not disappointed that my scepticism about Paisley's intentions currently looks as though it was misplaced. I like being able to say "I told you so" as much as anyone - but the prospect of yet another delay, yet another extension of the Single Transferable Deadline, and above all yet another concession was just too grim to gloat over. So I'm happy if I've been proven wrong ... on this count. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the DUP are going to genuinely share power, or are merely going to use theirs to hold us back.

The media are all agog with reports of this "historic day". Some of you will probably say I'm just being cynical again, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. After all, haven't we already been here? Granted it's Paisley and McGuinness, rather than Trimble and Mallon/Durkan, at the helm and I accept all the blah-blah about Dr No finally saying "yes" but at the end of the day how much further along are we, really? I mean if you see the peace process as a vehicle to achieve a united Ireland - as the leadership and party faithful have always insisted it was - rather than merely as a conflict resolution device.

I remain of the view that we made a serious tactical error when the Assembly collapsed. Instead of telling the UUP "fair enough boys, it was your idea to begin with" we allowed ourselves to be sucked into the notion that the peace process depended on its restoration. In doing so, we handed rejectionist unionism the leverage to extract whatever it wanted from us. Now, after concession upon concession, the SF leadership has done well to convince most of the grassroots that getting the process back to where it was several years ago is "progress". We've really just come full circle, and it's still very much an open question whether the revived institutions will provide us the means to actually move forward.

Rally in Response to the ‘Miss D’ Case

2007-05-02T20:24:00.000+01:00

Just a quick note to ask that anyone who's willing and able to do so, please make it down to the GPO on Saturday at noon for a rally in response to the Miss D case. Full details on the rally (and the case, for those not familiar with it) are on the Choice Ireland blog (see link to the right of this post).

I, unfortunately, had already chosen this weekend to go visit a friend of mine in Bulgaria, but I fervently hope for a large turnout. It is really time that all parties - including my own - get the message that this subject cannot be ignored for much longer.

Interesting election item

2007-04-30T00:25:00.000+01:00

Given Bertie's recent (and revealingly partitionist) comments about Sinn Féin "imports" from the Six Counties helping out with Mary Lou's campaign, I was amused to note, on my way down the Cabra Road this evening, that the car driving people around to put up Fianna Fáil posters had northern-registered plates.

The posters themselves are worthy of comment, too. A picture of Bertie, beneath which are the words:

Ahern

Brady

Fitzpatrick

So not only are FF not attempting any vote management, again, but even here in what should be Mary F's strong patch, she's relegated to their third choice candidate. Given that almost nobody puts Brady in with even the slightest hope it's looking like a fairly straight contest between us and the Greens for that fourth seat.

PDs play the race card

2007-04-27T17:08:00.000+01:00

The Minister for Justice has this morning published his long-awaited Immigration Bill.

It's a huge piece of legislation which doesn't so much overhaul the current unfair, inefficient, non-rights-based regime as put it on a statutory footing (in such a way as to nonetheless leave him an unacceptable amount of discretion in many crucial matters). There is absolutely no chance of it clearing the Oireachtas before the election - unless the Minister intends rushing it through with little or no debate, something I don't think even he would have the neck to do.

So why publish it now? Clearly there is one reason, and one reason only: to use it as part of his election manifesto. To tell voters that if they return him and his party colleagues to office, this xenophobe's charter will become law. It is campaigning on the issue of immigration and thus effectively, unavoidably, playing the race card - something that violates at least the spirit of the anti-racism protocol that all 26 County parties signed up to before the last elections.

Shameful. But not in the least surprising.

Another election, another Martin Ferris arrest

2007-04-22T17:30:00.000+01:00

I've just heard the news that Martin Ferris has been arrested on suspicion of drink driving.

My first thought is that the timing of this is awfully curious. Remember this? When did that happen? Oh yes, just before the last general election. The circumstances of the latest arrest would certainly lend themselves to a stitch-up: a random check, at a roadblock near his home. And the Kerry Gardaí do have something of a track record here; see also this case.

I won't be defending Martin if it turns out that he was over the limit. There's never an excuse for drink driving, and SF have been critical enough of the Fianna Fáil politicians who've managed to get away with it, like Jim McDaid driving the wrong way down the N4, and GV Wright mowing down a nurse.

But frankly, I wouldn't put anything past the Garda Síochána. Especially at election time.

Looks like an election is imminent

2007-04-18T14:27:00.000+01:00

The Government has today tabled a motion to extend the Offences Against the State Act for another year. The OASA doesn't expire until the end of June so there's absolutely no need for them to table this motion now ... unless they aren't planning for the Dáil to be around much longer to put it through. (Edit: they've now scheduled it to go through next week.)

I've nothing new to say about the OASA that I haven't already said before. It needs to go.

2007-04-03T13:29:00.000+01:00

In the latest episode of the long-running saga of Ireland's slow progress toward modernity, it seems that parents are being asked to produce baptismal certificates [free registration required] to get their children enrolled in their local school, where said school is run by the Catholic church (as over 90% in this State still are) and is oversubscribed (no figures, but that number seems to be increasing too, thanks to the widespread and ludicrous policy of building housing estates first with schools to follow later - often years and years later).

Anecdotally, some non-believing parents are even having their children baptised, for the sole reason that doing so is the only way to secure a place in the local school.

Readers from other countries should understand that this is not a case of social climbing parents just trying to get their kids into the best school. In large areas of this State, the local Catholic school is the only school. If there is no place for your child in it, there is nowhere else in the vicinity for the little munchkin to go.

This is ridiculous.

Church officials are defending the policy on the grounds that these are, after all, Catholic schools, and since the Church is running the schools, it has the right to decide who can attend. But that's just not good enough. The extent of the Church's control over education in this State means that Catholic schools are, de facto, State schools. They are even called "national" schools. Their teacher salaries are paid for by general taxation. They are not just some minor private enterprise operating on an optional basis with the right to minimal government interference.

The Minister's response to this crisis (no link, sorry; I heard it on the radio) has essentially been to wash her hands of it. The affected families have little recourse under State law, as both the 1937 Constitution and the relevant legislation were effectively drafted in such a way as to protect the Church's right to decide how the majority of our children will be educated.

But when the reality is that children are being discriminated against because of their (or more accurately their parents') religion - and that some parents are even being forced to "convert" their children in order to secure an education for them in their home communities - it is plain that a serious human rights violation is taking place. If the State won't do anything about it, the parents should go to the ECHR. My general misgivings about the European Union notwithstanding, as long as we're going to be a part of it we may as well take what benefits we can get from it - and anything that helps drag this country kicking and screaming into the 21st century is definitely a benefit worth taking.

2007-03-21T06:16:00.000Z

I see that Gerry Adams has announced that Sinn Féin now "fully support the police".

Were the last two paragraphs of the Ard Fheis motion struck off when I wasn't looking?

That the ard chomhairle is mandated to implement this motion only when the power-sharing institutions are established and when the ard chomhairle is satisfied that the policing and justice powers will be transferred.

Or if this does not happen within the St Andrews timeframe, only when acceptable new partnership arrangements to implement the Good Friday Agreement are in place.

Classism, sexism and the Irish justice system

2007-03-13T18:22:00.000Z

I was utterly disgusted today to hear the news that yet another* rapist has walked free thanks to a judge's decision to impose a suspended sentence.

The details are as follows: a young man named Adam Keane from Co. Clare broke into a woman's house and raped her as she slept. He denied it, blaming drink and drugs for a memory loss, but DNA proved his guilt. He was found guilty by a jury, but he will serve no time, because the judge gave him a three-year suspended sentence.

This is the same judge who, on the same day, imposed a 15-year sentence on another rapist, Joseph Cummins of Tipperary.

Why such a glaring discrepancy?

The judge, Paul Carney, is reported to have said that he felt "uncomfortable" handing Adam Keane a custodial sentence because he believed Keane's testimony that the action was "out of character" for him. Excuse me? He's supposed to be punished for a crime, not for a character. Is a rape somehow acceptable when committed by someone who thinks of himself as a decent fella? That's the message this decision is sending out. The fact that Adam Keane has a regular job, and is reportedly from a "good family", as compared with Joseph Cummins's "disadvantaged background", was another obvious factor in the discrepancy. Anyone who tells you that there is no class bias in the justice system is talking out their arse.

But I think there's another big difference here: the difference between the victims. Joseph Cummins's is 75. Adam Keane's is 33, and looks younger. Nearly all rape victims who come forward will tell you that they encounter a certain amount of disbelief, a suspicion that they somehow "asked for it". But nobody is going to suspect a 75-year-old of "asking for it". Did the judge find Adam Keane less guilty than Joseph Cummins because he subconsciously thought that Adam's victim just might possibly not have been the innocent party that Joseph's victim "obviously" was? (It's interesting to note here that two of Adam's jurors voted to acquit - despite the DNA evidence against him.) Is there a hierarchy of victims at work here, based upon stereotypes of the sexuality of women of different ages? There might well be.

Adam Keane's victim has courageously waived her right to anonymity and has asked the DPP to appeal the sentence. I certainly hope she succeeds.
________________

* I was thinking of one Irish case in particular from maybe four or five years back. I can't find the details of it now, but as I recall, the judge declined to impose a custodial sentence on the grounds that the defendent "didn't hurt" the victim - apart from raping and threatening to kill her. Adding insult to injury, as the case concluded, the judge said to the rapist, "I wish you well."

2007-03-09T18:43:00.000Z

For anyone who wants more information about the rogue agency I mentioned in yesterday's post, there's an excellent summary up at Indymedia.

Happy International Women's Day

2007-03-08T22:26:00.000Z

I "celebrated" the day by taking part in a demonstration against a rogue agency operating on Dorset Street, about 15 minutes away from my home.

This agency advertises itself under the names "A Choice for Women" and "British Alternatives". Names that are obviously designed to attract women considering abortion, under the guise that they will provide the information and referrals these women seek.

Instead, however, they try to terrorise the women out of their decision. They do this by lying about the future that awaits women who choose not to continue their pregnancy. They tell women that abortion leads to breast cancer (lie), to child abuse (lie), to congenital depression (lie), to whatever they can come up with to scare the woman out of terminating the pregnancy. They use delaying tactics such as telling the women that it is not possible to have an abortion before two months (lie) or that they have to have an ultrasound first (lie). Apparently, in the anti-choice mind, any woman who decides to go ahead with an abortion ought to at least be forced to have it as late as possible, to make it as unpleasant as possible. If they can't prevent an abortion, they can at least punish the woman who has one. And they wonder why we say they are anti-woman.

The agency that we demonstrated in front of made it very clear that they do not have a position they can defend. They tried to stave off the demonstration by covering up the front of the building with a canvas and scaffolding. I'd like to post the photos I took, but I keep getting error messages on this stupid blog hosting site, so you'll have to take my word for it (although there are pictures up on Indymedia if you're really curious).

The bottom line in any case is that this agency and others like it are now on notice that they cannot continue to LIE to women who find themselves pregnant about the choices available to them. We are watching you, and we will continue to watch - and we will take action against any of those who are found to be trying to force vulnerable women to live by their own moral code.

Oh, and apparently there was an election in the North today, too. I'll post about that later.

One more note on Croker

2007-02-25T08:41:00.000Z

Watching the news reports on the protest, I spotted one fella holding up a sign that read "No to Foreign Games". I thought at the time that that was a poor choice of slogan, suggesting that the issue was one of the narrowest of nationalisms, rather than the history of England's presence in Croke Park.

I didn't notice what the sign-holder was wearing at the time. Here's a picture.

And RSF wonder why nobody in this country takes them seriously!

On the Croker controversy

2007-02-24T11:20:00.000Z

Most of the media coverage I've seen of this has been fairly predictable, so I confess I stopped reading it after a few articles. But I doubt that any of them could have been just so wildly inaccurate as this piece by - surprise surprise - a Sunday Independent columnist, Eamonn Sweeney.

Mr Sweeney writes that

when the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) voted to allow foreign games at the ground, England was hardly mentioned... That God Save The Queen would be played in the stadium was not uppermost in anyone’s mind.

Now, I don't know which debates he was listening to at the time, but I can tell you that that was certainly one of the key issues raised by republican opponents of the change to Rule 42. In fact, I can remember a few people having to deny that it was the only issue, because it was starting to get to the point where some were suggesting that there would be no problem if an agreement could be reached whereby the anthem would not be played. So the idea that this is a newly-thought up controversy is simply untrue.

Sinn Féin's position on the matter was reached at an Ard Fheis a couple years ago, just before the change to Rule 42, when we passed a motion stating that we would accept whatever decision the GAA took. It wasn't a unanimous decision on our part, and there remain large numbers of people within the party who disagree with it - and even those of us who voted in favour would have had serious reservations, among them the spectre of GSTQ and the union flag. But that it was the GAA's decision to make and not ours is, I think, not really debatable.

Which is why today's protest doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, if you think about it. Not that people who oppose England's presence at Croke Park don't have a right to protest - of course they do. But we all knew this was coming as soon as Rule 42 was scrapped, two years ago, and I don't recall any organised effort to prevent it in the intervening period, say by announcing a boycott of the GAA until the change was reversed. Indeed, a couple of the people I know who were most vocal against it have continued to give their money to the very organisation whose decision they'll be protesting today.

It isn't the England team, or the IRFU, who are ultimately responsible for GSTQ being played at Croke Park today. It just seems a little bit silly to me that they and not the GAA will be the protestors' target.

***

On another note, I've been asked to post up another letter on the policing issue which didn't make it into An Phoblacht. I'm happy to oblige, although I do want to point out (especially for any muckraking journos reading this) that the paper has published other letters dissenting from the party line on this issue.

A Chara,

I wish to reply to issues raised by Seán McGabhann's letter in the February 8th edition of your paper. In it, Mr McGabhann claims to have recently realised that joining the policing boards was the right way to go and that those 'misguided' individuals who opposed it, needed to be persuaded that the struggle continues.

The problem I have with Mr McGabhann's remarks are twofold. Firstly, he argues as if it is the existence of a politics-based route itself that is the most problematic aspect for those who opposed joining the policing boards. If this were the case, why would people have stayed for so long? I would argue that people who opposed this just simply did not see the same advantage in it as they did with say, the GFA. Essentially, the present policing arrangements are a solution imposed by the two governments, with some minor tweaking by republicans. If the policing boards were such a site of struggle, why did we have to wait until now?

Secondly, he fails to adequately explain how he came to this sudden conversion? What became so radically different in the past few weeks? Perhaps it is those who voted yes who need to be persuaded that the road to a unified Democratic Socialist Republic will be an extremely long one which involves much thinking outside the box, rather than jumping into bed with homophobic fascists (the DUP) and accepting Brit- influenced policing solutions, just because we worry that people won't like us. (What else is new?)

Is mise le meas
Donal O' Driscoll
Co Cork

Labour's lukewarm support for gay rights

2007-02-16T07:06:00.000Z

It seems the Labour Party will use their Private Members' Time in the Dáil next week to introduce their Civil Unions Bill.

This is a positive step, and I hope the Government will accept the Bill (and I suspect they might just do so, although if they do, they will leave it parked until after the election).

However, I can't resist the opportunity to highlight Labour's record on this issue.

In February 2004, the Government's Civil Registrations Bill went through the Dáil. That bill provided for the registration of births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Included amongst its text was a small line which would exclude same sex partners from the right to register a marriage. The Government inserted this line based upon legal advice it had received that without it, same sex marriage would effectively be legal.

Sinn Féin tabled an amendment to delete the line, and thus to give same sex partners the right to marry.

When our amendment was voted on, Labour (as well as Fine Gael) were mysteriously absent from the chamber.

In November 2005, the party's Deputy Leader Liz McManus
confirmed that the Labour Party are not in favour of gay marriage:

I do appreciate by the way that there are sections in the gay and lesbian community who ... would wish for full equivalence, both as regards rights and obligations and as regards terminology, between marriages as presently understood and gay unions.

That does not seem to me, however, to be a feasible proposition and it is not one that the Labour party advocates.

In the furious backtracking that ensued, Labour acolytes tried to suggest (with no real evidence that I'm aware of) that their party supported gay marriage in theory, but didn't think it was constitutionally feasible, and so supported civil union as a compromise.

I can't offhand think of any other situation in which the Labour Party, or anyone else, would say "Well, the Constitution as it stands won't allow that, so we won't support it." Generally speaking, if you think the Constitution prevents a basic human right, the answer to that is that you try to change the Constitution. At the very least such a view is no basis for refusing to register a vote in favour of that right when it comes up in the Dáil. It's not as though our amendment would have triggered a referendum, for heaven's sake - even if all opposition parties supported it, the Government still had enough votes to defeat it. It was simply a means to put support for gay marriage on record and Labour's failure to do so can only mean one thing: they don't support gay marriage. Full stop.

So credit to them for pressing ahead with this Bill. But don't misread it as real support for gay and lesbian equality.

2007-02-01T21:44:00.000Z

I see that in this week's Metro Éireann, Labour's Dublin City Councillor Aodhán Ó Riordáin refers to the late PUP leader David Ervine as "a hero of mine". And "someone that I hope will become regarded as a founding father of a peaceful Ireland". He describes Ervine as "so special", his words so "uplifting and inspiring".

No, I'm not making this up.

WorldByStorm did a good piece about Ervine's death, and how he was eulogised by the same people (especially down south) who regularly dismiss republicans as barely reconstructed terrorists. Including the Labour Party. I don't need to repeat anything said there.

But one thing I would like to know is this: will Aodhán be mentioning this view while he's out on the canvass in his North Inner City constituency? Or will he be relying on the fact that working class Dubs don't read Metro Éireann, and are unlikely ever to hear of his hero-worship of a former loyalist paramilitary who headed up a party devoted to maintaining British rule in this country?

More Irish than the Irish themselves?

2007-01-31T07:50:00.000Z

On another matter entirely, the Indo are leading with a story today about immigrants and social welfare fraud.

While I'm not denying that this exists, the Indo's coverage of crimes committed by foreign nationals has become disgracefully tabloidesque. For some reason, the nationality of the (alleged) criminal always merits a place in the headline when the person is not Irish. But you hardly ever see headlines like "Corkonians caught in PPS scam", "Clondalkin native jailed for drug smuggling", "Hunt for Kerryman on fatal assault indictment". When a suspect is Irish, as most of them are, that fact isn't seen to be worth mentioning, and the result is that a person reading the paper is subtly fed the idea that foreigners are responsible for all the crime in this country.

The funny thing about this article is of course that Irish people have been taking liberties with the social welfare system for decades. (I'm not necessarily condemning them for this, because the levels of social welfare in this state are quite low - far lower than they are in most European countries, and frequently not enough to live on - especially in the case of families.) There are parts of this city, not terribly far from where I live, where it's probably the rule rather than the exception. But I don't recall the Indo running any huge headline stories on that lately.

Indeed, shouldn't this be viewed in the context of the recent brouhaha sparked by Enda Kenny's call for immigrants to adapt to Irish society? Enda said that immigrants need to "integrate into our communities" and "respect our cultural traditions".

If the Indo's story is true, perhaps they're actually doing a better job of that than we know.

Should I stay or should I go?

2007-01-29T15:34:00.000Z

Media reports on the Ard Fheis have made much of the lack of a walkout or a visible split in the ranks. And it's true that in that regard, the fallout has been less than it probably could have been. But it's also true that a lot of people had already left in the months immediately preceding - and I suspect a sizeable number of others are considering their options now, and may still vote with their feet.

I've thought about it too but, as deeply unhappy as I am with the decision taken yesterday, I don't think that leaving is the answer. For starters, where would I go? None of the alternative organisations seems to have a notion of how their idealised vision of a 32-county republic could actually be brought into existence. Without exception, their strategies all rest on the presumption that if only their voices could be heard, they could persuade the Irish people to rise up and demand the republic.

That's just not going to happen.

The SF strategy has its faults, obviously. But at the very least it's more plausible given that it rests on the persuasion of a far smaller number of people: enough in the North to tip the nationalist ratio over 50%, and/or enough in the South to put us in government.

And if all the other organisations are out, that leaves only the option of becoming a non-aligned republican, which seems entirely pointless to me. Most of the people I know who've gone down that route end up doing little more than posting bitter rants about their former comrades on internet message boards. And often ultimately emigrating.

There's also damage limitation to consider. The enemies of republicanism are obviously delighted that we've signed up to colonial policing; they'd be even more delighted to see us decimate ourselves in the process. I don't want them to have that satisfaction.

And finally, leaving SF would mean not only turning my back on their policing policy, but on everything else that they're doing. I think most of the rest of what they're doing is good, and I still want to be part of it.

Now I know that some people who have recently left, or are considering leaving, read this blog, and I know they're probably thinking: yes, yes, yes, BUT. It's a matter of principle. How can I remain in this party after it's turned its back on such a key principle? And I understand that view, I really do. But at the same time - and at the risk of causing great offence, for which I do apologise and offer the usual disclaimers - I can't help thinking that there's something a little bit egotistical about it. It seems to me to be overly concerned with the thought that MY image, MY republican credentials are at stake if I stay here. Yes, I'd like to be able to look in the mirror and say without hesitation that I had remained true to all my principles, and no, I can't quite do that at the moment - but I don't see what practical benefit would derive from leaving the party on that basis. I don't see how it would help end partition and achieve the republic that we all want.

The party has made its decision and we're stuck with it, so we can only make the best of it that we can. I'm going to do this by continuing in my specific role within the party, where I do think we're achieving something, and by using whatever limited influence I have to try to prevent further bad decisions being made.

But who knows. I could still change my mind later.

My thoughts on tomorrow's Ard Fheis

2007-01-27T17:03:00.000Z

Now that the internal debate is all but over, I think it's an appropriate time for me to go into the precise reasons why I oppose going on the policing boards.

The first and most obvious reason is ideological. Republicanism's primary raison d'etre at this time is (supposed to be) to oppose the Six County statelet. Signing up to an armed force which exists to defend that statelet is simply incompatible with that purpose. This is not a case of infiltrating to destroy; we are endorsing that armed force. I cannot get my head around this.

Now even having said that, I am a pragmatist and if it could be demonstrated to me that in doing this we would actually be hastening the demise of the statelet, I could accept it, nose held and all. But that hasn't been demonstrated to me. I do not see any way that this will actually advance the process of reunification. It may advance the restoration of the Executive but, as I've said previously, I think that's essentially irrelevant anyway. Bluntly, I just don't see the Executive as a prize worth sacrificing any more of our integrity for. And I have serious doubts as to whether that "prize" will be forthcoming as a result of this decision anyway; I think it's far more likely that the DUP will continue to move the goalposts... and that the governments will continue to let them get away with it. I just hope that at some point we find the sense to refuse to do so.

Policing supporters ask what the alternative is. Well, I don't know. But I don't think we've really explored the question. The choice has always been put to us as if it was either black or white and I just don't think that's the case. It seems to me that a lot of the 'yes' arguments are the same ones that the SDLP have been making for years. And I'm not convinced that there have been enough changes in the PSNI to justify the contention that we aren't making the same mistake they did and jumping too soon.

I also find that the attempts to portray this move as a "strategic initiative" fall flat. An initiative, by definition, cannot be a move that you make when you're under pressure to make that move - as we clearly are. I do not for one moment believe that we would be doing this if the governments had not made it clear to us that we have to, if we want "progress".

So far all those reasons, I voted for my cumann to oppose the motion. This position was adopted unanimously and as a delegate to the Ard Fheis tomorrow I will be voting No.

Now, having said all that, I want to say something else.

The debate that has gone on within the party has been described (mainly by our opponents within the broader republican movement, but also by some party members or new ex-members) as a sham debate. It has been said that tomorrow's result is a foregone conclusion and that no real dissent within the party has taken place.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but that's a load of bollox as far as Dublin is concerned.

I've attended about half a dozen meetings (apart from my cumann meetings) on the subject. At all occasions, debate has been robust and thorough. The leadership figures present have listened attentively and responded thoroughly and respectfully to all concerns raised. Obviously, their responses weren't sufficient to allay my objections, but at no time did I feel that those objections were just ignored or dismissed.

The leadership will win the motion tomorrow for the simple reason that they have managed to convince the majority of the membership that this is the right move. Now people can decide for themselves whether that's because the members are "sheep", or because their arguments were framed more persuasively than the opposition's were, or whatever. But the fact is that people have been given the opportunity to make up their minds and they have done so freely. The leadership have won the debate fair and square - I don't have to agree with them to acknowledge that.

I think this is a bad move for the party. I think it will come back to bite us on the arse. I hope I'm proven wrong. But I can't say that I have any real complaints about the way it's been handled.

I doubt that there is any other party in this country that would have dealt with such a crucial internal matter in such a creditable way.

The collusion report

2007-01-22T11:45:00.000Z

If you don't have time to read all 162 pages of the report into police collusion with the UVF in the North, the following extract (reproduced verbatim) should give you the flavour.

The report finds evidence of collusion in the following areas:

• The failure to arrest informants for crimes to which those informants had allegedly confessed, or to treat such informants as suspects for crime;
• By creating interview notes which were deliberately misleading; by failing to record and maintain original interview notes and by failing to record notes of meetings with informants;
• The failure to deal properly with information received from informants, so that informants were able to avoid investigation and detection for crime;
• By arresting informants suspected of murder then subjecting them to lengthy sham interviews by their own handlers at which they were not challenged and then releasing them on the authorisation of the handler;
• By not recording in investigation papers the fact that an informant was suspected of a crime despite the fact that he had been arrested and interviewed for that crime;
• By failing to take steps to hinder an attempted bombing by the establishment of an operation either to disrupt or arrest the alleged perpetrators whose names were known to Special Branch;
• By giving instructions to junior officers that records should not be completed, and that there should be no record of the incident concerned;
• By ensuring the absence of any official record linking a Special Branch informant to the possession of explosives which may, and were thought, according to private police records, to have been used in a particular crime;
• By withholding information from CID that the UVF had sanctioned an attack;
• By concealing from CID intelligence that named persons, including an informant or informants, had been involved in particular crimes;
• By withholding information about the location to which a group of murder suspects had allegedly fled after a murder;
• By the concealment on a number of occasions of intelligence indicating that up to three informants had been engaged together in murders and a particular crime or crimes;
• By routinely destroying all Tasking and Co-ordinating Group original documentary records so as to conceal an informant’s involvement in crime;
• By destroying or losing forensic exhibits such as metal bars and tape lifts;
• By not requiring appropriate forensic analysis to be carried out on items submitted to the Forensic Science Service Laboratory;
• by blocking the searches of a police informant’s home and of another location, including an alleged UVF arms dump;
• By not questioning informants about their activities and continuing to employ informants without risk assessing their continued use as informants;
• By finding munitions at an informant’s home and releasing him without charge;
• By not informing local police of an anticipated attack, and not taking any action to prevent the attack;
• By not using the available evidence and intelligence to detect a crime and to link the investigation of crimes in which an informant was a suspect;
• By some Special Branch officers deliberately disregarding a very significant amount of intelligence about informant involvement in drug dealing in Larne, and North Belfast and in punishment attacks linked to drug dealing from 1994 onwards;
• By continuing to employ as informants people suspected of involvement in the most serious crime without assessing the attendant risks or their suitability as informants;
• By not acting on witness and other evidence received in particular crimes when the suspect was an informant;
• By not considering or attempting to conduct identification processes when there was particular evidence from witnesses about a criminal’s appearance;
• By providing at least four misleading and inaccurate confidential documents for possible consideration by the court in relation to four separate incidents and the cases resulting from them, where those documents had the effect of protecting an informant;
• By not informing the Director of Public Prosecutions that an informant was a suspect in a crime in respect of which an investigation file was submitted to the Director;
• By their failure to maintain the record of intelligence which was the basis for applications for extensions of time in detention to the Secretary of State;
• By withholding intelligence from police colleagues including the names of alleged suspects which could have been used to attempt to prevent and to detect crime;
• By the practice of Special Branch not using and following the practice of authorisation of participating informants;
• By completing false and misleading authorisations and reviews of informants for the purposes of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act;
• By cancelling the wanted status of murder suspects “because of lack of resources” and doing nothing further about these suspects;
• This investigation has examined the activities of police officers responsible for informants over a period of twelve years. On only one occasion have PSNI provided any document indicative of consideration of the termination of the relationship which Special Branch had with any of these informants, despite the extent of the alleged involvement of these informants in the most serious of crimes.

For years and years republicans have said this was going on and have been told we were at best paranoid, at worst outright lying; that there might (might!) be the odd "bad apple" in the RUC; that there was no more than the occasional bended rule and that even that was probably excusable given what the police were up against. There's all that out the window now. And this report only covers collusion with the Belfast UVF; imagine how much more it could have found with a wider remit.

I wonder if the report will get the widespread coverage within Britain that it merits, and that the Cory and Barron reports never did. Somehow I doubt it.

More on policing

2007-01-12T10:40:00.000Z

My good friend and comrade Justin Moran submitted a letter to An Phoblacht which did not appear in this week's edition (although another letter, expressing more or less the same sentiments, was printed). I think it makes some important points so, with Justin's permission, I'm posting it here.

A chara,

The claim, in last week’s editorial, that supporting the Ard Chomhairle’s motion on policing will bring about ‘…further change, maximise our political impact and ensure that the policing model we have seen in the Six Counties for decades is consigned to the past’ indicates that the party’s paper has decided what the ‘right’ decision
should be before the party has.

Contrary to the editorial, many republicans see Sinn Féin taking seats on the Policing Boards as a co-option of republicans to the protection of the Six County state. The role of any police service is to protect the state and its interests. In this context, to maintain partition.

Sinn Féin members on Policing Boards would be partly responsible for, but not in charge of, an armed paramilitary police force led by British officers and enforcing British law in Ireland. The carrot of a Sinn Féin Justice Minister ‘some day’ has been replaced with the notion suggested over Christmas that the Justice ministries would be split between the SDLP and the UUP.

Also replaced was the party’s agreed Ard Fheis position, ironically the product of an Ard Chomhairle motion, that an Ard Fheis would only be called when a date for devolution of powers had been set and agreed to by the DUP, the structures of the administration of those powers agreed, and the enactment of British legislation.

In the absence of any of this, the Ard Chomhairle has overturned the Ard Fheis position and called an Extraordinary Ard Fheis that, at time of writing, the leadership no longer seems sure on because the DUP hasn’t reacted positively enough.

Is mise le meas,

Justin Moran
Inchicore
Dublin 8

On a related note, I see that our Mulhuddart councillor Felix Gallagher has once again been prevented from properly engaging with his local policing committee thanks to the shameless partisanship of his fellow councillors in Labour and Fine Gael. The hypocrisy is astounding: on the one hand, these muppets will fall all over themselves to insist that Sinn Féin must engage with the police system in the Six Counties and, on the other, they're doing everything they can to keep us out of the system here.

The failures of affordable housing - part 2

2007-01-08T06:42:00.000Z

The Indo has recently run two articles (free registration required) which should strike fear in the heart of anyone on the Dublin City Council affordable housing list. They're certainly striking fear in me.

According to these articles, workers on the average industrial wage or thereabouts are finding themselves unable to avail of affordable housing because ... they can't afford it.

I wrote about this previously. According to the head of the Council's housing section, quoted in that post, the fault in this matter lies with us (the applicants) for reaching beyond our means. But the Council's own website states that affordable housing

"is aimed at first time purchasers who have low to middle income and who would otherwise find it difficult to compete in the current private property market"

Now obviously there's going to have to be a minimum cut-off point somewhere. But the phrase "low to middle income" clearly indicates that that cut-off point is supposed to be somewhere below the middle. And what on earth could "the middle" be, if not the average industrial wage?

If workers on an average wage cannot afford "affordable housing" then it is not affordable. By definition. By the Council's own definition.

How much clearer could it be?

On the policing stuff

2007-01-05T23:04:00.000Z

If anyone's wondering why I haven't commented on recent events, it's because I feel that I have already made my views clear, and anything further I might have to say should be reserved for the internal debate.

Once that debate is over (and, I expect, from my perspective lost), rest assured I will have plenty more to say.

America, Palestine and Israel: is there hope?

2006-12-21T17:04:00.000Z

This is nothing to do with Irish politics, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

I'm in America at the moment, and I spent a couple days this week in NYC. I lived there for a year and a half in the early 90s, and in upstate New York for a couple years after that, so my reflections in the following paragraph are based entirely upon experience.

As most people will be aware, there is a huge Jewish population in New York - such that Rosh Hashanah is a state holiday. This population is, by and large, fiercely Zionist, and its political influence is strong enough to have effectively cut off any debate on the subject - at least that was the case when I was living there. Outside of the (extremely marginalised) far left, and the unfortunately slightly less marginalised Nation of Islam, there was simply nobody arguing the Palestinian cause; to do so was to be labelled an 'anti-Semite' and, most likely, a sympathiser of those towelheads that had bombed the World Trade Centre shortly after my move to the city (merely a coincidence, I assure you).

So I was pleasantly stunned at a couple things I saw there this week. Things like Palestinian scarves on display for sale by the city's ubiquitous street vendors, and young, distinctively non-Arab people wearing them; and at every bookstore I visited, former President Jimmy Carter's extraordinary new book about the conflict, Peace not Apartheid (extraordinary in the fact that it exists, I mean; I haven't read it yet), was in the 'best sellers' section. These may seem fairly minor, and maybe they are, but they would have been absolutely unheard of a decade or so ago. Let's hope they're an indication of a loosening of the stranglehold the Israel lobby has had on American politics for decades - because as long as it persists, there can never be hope for peace in the Middle East and, increasingly, the world.

On the Nally verdict

2006-12-15T14:15:00.000Z

I remember waking up one morning in 1992 to the news that an all-white jury in suburban Los Angeles had acquitted four white police officers who were caught on videotape beating the living daylights out of a black man. I remember feeling completely disgusted, sickened and appalled that such a clearly racist verdict could have been handed down. I remember sympathising completely with the anger and outrage expressed by the black community and, finally, I remember profound depression sinking in that things like this could still happen in today's world.

And Rodney King had only been beaten, not killed.

There's no justification for this decision. None. Shooting a retreating, already-wounded man in the back and then beating him with a stick as he lies dying does not fall under any conceivable definition of "defending one's property", nor is it reasonable to believe that such a completely OTT reaction was motivated entirely by fear. It was an act of revenge, it was criminal and it should have been held as such.

And I see once again that Fine Gael, the "law and order" party, have come out in support of Padraig Nally. This of course is the same bunch of hypocrites who never miss an opportunity to accuse republicans of carrying out "vigilante justice". Only this week Enda Kenny was parroting some fantasy, no doubt fed to him by Paul Williams, about "IRA involvement" in the recent shooting of a Finglas drug dealer (who, you'd have to admit, was almost certainly responsible for bringing much more misery into this world than John Ward ever did).

My condolences to the Ward family and the Travelling community as a whole.

Budget 2007 - What's wrong with this picture?

2006-12-07T15:17:00.000Z

The image below is taken from the new budget document. Have a close look at the figures.

The average industrial wage is just over €30,000. Why is a worker on that wage benefitting least from the budget measures?

And no, I'm not just annoyed about this because I'm on the AIW myself - I genuinely don't understand the reasoning.

By the way, I noticed that during the budget debate today, the full compliment of Fine Gael TDs was in the Dáil chamber to listen to Enda Kenny's speech. Within 90 seconds of Pat Rabbitte standing up, however, all but two or three of them were gone. I don't think even they are taking this 'coalition' seriously anymore.

On the collusion report

2006-11-30T09:51:00.000Z

I see in today's Examiner that Enda Kenny thinks the Taoiseach "should demand of Mr Blair that he give the necessary co-operation" into the investigations of crown force collusion in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

Absolutely.

Equally, Enda Kenny should demand of his former party leader, Liam Cosgrave, that he give the necessary co-operation into what the Brits were up to in the 26 Counties under his watch. Cosgrave has consistently refused to do so.

If Fine Gael want to be in Government it is essential that they give their full backing to investigations of this nature, including calling on all their members and supporters to come forward with any information they have that may be of use in solving these heinous crimes.

Isn't it?

Unionism gets cold feet ... again

2006-11-24T18:33:00.000Z

Is anyone surprised? It's only the third time in as many years that we've been on the brink of an agreement, only to have the unionist leader announce at the last minute that republicans haven't done enough. It's beginning to look like a bit of a pattern!

I have increasingly little doubt that when SF finally endorses policing there will be some other excuse. It really doesn't bear thinking about what we might be required to do next - the one thing you can say for certain is that the Governments and the so-called 'nationalist' parties on this island will fall into step behind the unionists to insist that progress depends upon our doing it. Anyone who thinks otherwise should consider that back when I made this prediction, Peter Hain was still saying that policing wasn't a prerequisite.

I wonder if we mightn't be better off if the Governments just pulled the plug on this charade now.

The failures of 'Affordable Housing'

2006-11-23T11:13:00.000Z

Readers in Ireland may have seen yesterday's Irish Times story (paid registration required) in which the head of Dublin City Council's housing unit branded the Affordable Housing strategy a failure.

Having been on the Council's affordable housing waiting list for a couple years now, I'm inclined to agree, although for rather different reasons than those Mr Kenny gives. I'll take the article's points individually:

Affordable housing was developed by the Government to allow families and workers such as teachers, gardaí and nurses who had been priced out of the housing market to buy their own homes at a reduced price with the assistance of local authorities.

However Mr Kenny, the council manager with responsibility for housing, said that these "key workers" are not applying for affordable housing and up to 85 per cent of people on the waiting list were single.

I can't speculate on the "key workers" issue. But in the latest list of affordable properties available from the Council, roughly 85% are one- or two-bedrooms. Hello? Any wonder families aren't applying?

Applicants were frequently "too fussy" about the locations of the housing schemes.

I wonder what exactly Mr Kenny means by this. If it's postcode snobbery that's one thing. But it's not for nothing that the real estate agency's mantra is "location, location, location". You really cannot overestimate the importance of this factor in the suitability of a property.

Take my own situation. I work in the city centre; I don't drive; I come and go quite a bit outside normal Dublin Bus hours. Thus it would obviously not be suitable for me to live way out in the suburbs. I resent the implication that that's me being "fussy" - I think it's me being realistic about the impact that location would have on my life. I'm willing to make the sacrifice of paying a bit more for a smaller place in town, which would not be appropriate for all other applicants. It's horses for courses really, and what is Mr Kenny's problem with that?

Of course it also goes without saying that if we had anything approaching an adequate public transport system here, this wouldn't matter so much. And there are also serious issues with infrastructure around a lot of the new developments going up - is it "fussy" to not want to move to an area where there are virtually no essential resources or local amenities? Why doesn't the Council make more of an effort to deal with those issues?

It's also worth pointing out that this so-called fussiness isn't preventing people applying for all these properties. According to the Council, in the last draw there were roughly ten times as many applicants as there were properties available. The least popular location attracted 141 times more applicants than it could accommodate. Obviously we're not really that fussy after all.

The homes on offer were also generally apartments and "key workers tend to want to live in houses", Mr Kenny said.

Personally I'm grand with apartments but whose fault is it if they're the only properties being built within city limits? Not ours surely!

People were backing out when they realised that there was a "claw-back" in place to allow the council to recover money if the house was sold within a 20-year period, he said.

"This raises the question of why some people are getting into this: is it because they need a home or they want to get into the business of property development?"

Or a third reason: because most single people don't expect to be single forever and have genuine concerns that they may have a need to "trade up" within 20 years - and there is no provision to trade up to a larger affordable unit (as affordable housing is only available for first-time home-buyers).

"They apply for the affordable housing, then they don't have the money for the mortgage"

Not really "affordable" then is it?

"a lot of them might be better fared concentrating on the private rental sector."

Translation: "It's your problem, not ours".

The council previously had a weighted system that allocated a priority to people according to their circumstances. For example, those with children were placed high on the waiting list. However, this was discontinued last year in favour of a lottery system.Mr Kenny said it may be time to reintroduce a system that would give greater priority to couples, households or older applicants.

I cannot fathom the logic of de-prioritising the group that makes up 85% of those on the list. Maybe one of my readers can explain this to me.

The problem with the Affordable Housing Scheme is simple: there aren't enough affordable properties available. Everything else flows from this one fundamental issue. Now it's not entirely the Council's fault. The Government bears a large share of the responsibility - for giving into its developer friends and gutting Part V of the Planning and Development Act, which required that 20% of all units in new developments be set aside for social and affordable housing; and for grossly underfunding local authorities such that they cannot afford to build anywhere near the number of units needed. But there is clearly also a lack of real commitment at local authority level to fixing this problem. You can't hide this fact by trying to shift the blame onto those thousands of us competing for the relative handful of properties on offer, Mr Kenny.

2006-11-14T10:39:00.000Z

The first thing that has to be acknowledged is that the Baby Ann case is a terrible one whichever way you look at it. All participants in it deserve sympathy and recognition of the difficulties they have faced, and will continue to face, because of it.

That said, I am going to break the consensus that’s emerged and say that I think the Supreme Court made the correct decision.

From a legal perspective it was really the only choice the Court could have made. The previous High Court decision, however logical it may have appeared, was clearly in contradiction of the 1937 constitution. But that’s not my argument. I don’t believe that those who sided with the adoptive parents proved the case that it was in Ann’s best interest to remain with them, and particularly not to the extent where it should have overridden their rights as her parents.

The argument for her staying where she was was that it would be disruptive to her life to remove her from the only parents she’s ever known. Undoubtedly this is true, in the short term. But two-year-old children are remarkably adaptable and it seems unlikely to me that she will suffer ill effects from the change in the long run. It’s just as possible that she would have suffered from knowing that her birth parents wanted her back and were not allowed to have her back.

I’m also not convinced that those who supported the adoptive parents were entirely motivated by the “best interests of the child” argument. Let’s consider a scenario in which the birth parents hadn’t willingly given her up at birth, but lost her through, say, a kidnapping. Assume that the adoptive parents knew nothing of the kidnapping and believed they were adopting through proper legal means. Would there still be a consensus that the child should remain with them? I very much doubt it. Many would agree that the birth parents should regain custody on the basis that they hadn’t chosen to give the child up – although this would hardly make removing the child from her adoptive home any less disruptive. Now admittedly I’m only making an assumption here on how people would react to this scenario but it’s an assumption I strongly believe is correct and if it is, it demonstrates that there is more than the mere “best interests” argument at work here (in much the same way that many people who claim to oppose abortion on the basis that they believe it is murder are nonetheless willing to make exceptions when women don’t choose to have sex).

And what that points to is an issue I raised earlier in this blog at the time of the Jehovah’s Witness transfusion case – the risk of the “best interests of the child” being used as a convenient cover to pursue a different, sometimes more sinister agenda. Such cases have already emerged in the US, where right-wing judges have used that excuse to deny custody to lesbian mothers or practitioners of minority religions, or where women have been jailed for not adhering to prescribed standards of behaviour during pregnancy. If you recall the Elián Gonzáles case, his uncles were only prevented using that argument in their custody battle by a Florida law which states that the “best interests of the child” are relevant only in a battle between two fit parents, not between a fit parent and a non-parent. You can bet that if it wasn’t for that law, the anti-Castro mafia which controls the state of Florida would have ruled that the boy’s best interests lay outside of Cuba.

Which is why I’m also hesitant to join in the consensus over the upcoming referendum to enshrine the rights of children in the Constitution. I support it in theory, because I have no basic disagreement with the notion that children should be given more constitutional protection - not least from this Government giving its appalling record on many children's issues (poverty, education etc). But I do think we need to recognise that there is negative potential in this constitutional amendment as well – potential for children to be turned into political footballs and for “children’s rights” to become just another vehicle by which reactionary forces can exert control over adults’, and in particular over women’s, lives. The wording of the proposed amendment will be extremely important and needs to be given due attention by the progressive parties in this State. We should not simply be falling over ourselves to welcome the referendum without any reference to this very real concern.

St Andrews, again

2006-11-07T07:55:00.000Z

I know it's almost too easy to attack the Indo for its sloppy reporting but even by its own standards, its report yesterday that SF "fully" support the St Andrews agreement is appalling. So appalling that one must suspect a deliberate attempt to unsettle our base. Wouldn't be the first time.

My reading of the actual SF position on the matter is fairly simple: we've agreed to the good parts and will continue to negotiate on the rest.

My position hasn't changed, but I think this is a fairly accurate reflection of what the grassroots have been saying. Most of the membership want "progress" as it's come to be defined - i.e. restoration of the institutions - but aren't happy with a lot of the details in the proposals. So it is important that work continues on ironing out those issues.

In the meantime, attention needs to be drawn to the findings by a panel of international investigators of widespread collusion in loyalist murders, including the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

It is really past time for the Dublin Government to take action against London for its continuing refusal to co-operate in the investigations.

On Bulgaria and Romania

2006-10-29T09:20:00.000Z

First of all, let's make something clear. The Irish Government's decision to deny Bulgarians and Romanians the right to work here was not necessary to preserve our common travel area with Britain. From 1 January, Romanians and Bulgarians will have the right to travel freely throughout the EU, a consequence of their status as EU citizens. Their labour market status has nothing to do with this. Sweden, as a signatory to the Schengen Agreement, shares a common travel area with nearly every other country in the EEA and that didn't prevent them granting employment rights to the accession states in 2004, nor will it keep Finland and Slovakia from opening their labour markets to the 2007 states. It's a complete red herring and I suspect deliberate disingenuity on the part of some of those propagating it.

Now then. It's reported today in the Sindo (free registration required) that the decision was in fact motivated by fears of a "growing black market" in Ireland. If true, and given the source the odds are only about even, it demonstrates a Government thinking that borders on the moronic. Denying employment rights to people that you cannot deny entrance to - yes, that's the way to put a stop to the black market all right. Jesus. How much do we pay these people to decide public policy for us?

While first year logic ought to tell you that such a move will most likely encourage rather than discourage the underground economy, there's evidence for this as well. The European Commission released two reports this year which examined the effects of the transitional arrangements imposed by most EU countries in 2004. Sure enough, the black economy increased in those countries as did the number of low-skilled migrants, while Ireland, Britain and Sweden got most of the migrants at the higher end of the skills spectrum. Ireland and Britain more so than Sweden, which suggests that our increase was influenced by factors other than the lack of labour restrictions here, language and the availability of jobs in key sectors being identified as the two most important. The implication of all this is that Ireland and Britain will continue to be disproportionately attractive compared to other countries with similar labour laws - only now the migrants we'll be competing for will be those who aren't skilled enough to get legitimate work.

It's a recipe for trouble.

The issue that underlies all of this is one that migration analysts have long known but that xenophobes and governments continue against all reason to try to deny: immigration happens. It happens whether the receiving countries want it or not and it happens in spite of all their attempts to limit it. The Irish of all people ought to know this. Legal barriers do have some deterrent effect, but they also have the inevitable consequence of encouraging irregular migration. Indeed, the recent NESC reports on migration theorised that the relative lack of an underground economy in Ireland, compared to Britain and the US, is due in significant part to the relatively open work permit system that existed in this country up until a few years ago. And see where that Sindo article comments on the "growing black market" in Ireland? Is it any coincidence that that growth has occurred since the work permit requirements were tightened? Of course it isn't (and nor is it coincidental that human trafficking to Ireland has increased over the same period, but that's a subject for another day).

Now I'm not saying that there isn't a need for restrictions of some kind. Although I'm ideologically in favour of open borders, based upon my strong belief in the fundamental right of workers to control their own labour, as a practical matter I recognise the impossibility of Ireland or any other country making such a move unilaterally. But the point here is that the borders will be open anyway to migrants from Bulgaria and Romania. The reason that border controls are so strict for nationals of third world and Eastern European countries is precisely because governments know that the only way to keep those people from working here is by preventing them coming here in the first place and once they've achieved the right to unrestricted entry, as is guaranteed to all EU citizens, that's most of the battle lost. If the European nations are genuinely committed to the right to free movement of persons, they must acknowledge that the movement of labour goes hand in hand with it, and it's of no benefit to anyone to pretend the two can be separated by silly transitional arrangements.

St Andrews (2)

2006-10-20T23:01:00.000+01:00

I've been noticing that a lot of people, including a lot of panicked Shinners (and a lot of gleeful dissidents), seem to think that the St Andrews proposals were agreed amongst all the participants at the St Andrews negotiations.

They weren't.

As I understand it, this is what happened. The negotiations were about to collapse and everyone was going home. The governments then pulled out this document and offered it to the parties. The parties said Very well, we'll bring this back and think about it.

Personally my preference would have been to tell the governments where they could stick their document but then, I'm not on the negotiating team and there's probably a reason for that!!

Having read the thing thoroughly, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Quite apart from my concerns about signing up to policing under any circumstances, and particularly under circumstances where it is clear to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex that we are under the cosh, the details of this particular proposal should rule it out. Party policy, as agreed at our last Ard Fheis, includes a prerequisite for devolution of criminal justice and policing. This document says only that if everything goes according to plan there should be enough cross-community confidence for the Assembly to "request" devolution by May 2008.

That's a DUP wrecker's charter if I've ever seen one.

There's simply no way we can sign up to an agreement which would have us take seats on the policing board well in advance of this devolution and with only the vague promise that we ought to be able to "request" it in 18 months' time.

I also believe that if we're going to take a step of this magnitude we need to get more out of it than the measly morsels on offer. OASA, the remaining POWs, the OTRs ... none of these matters are dealt with in the proposals. The civil rights advances on offer don't seem to me to be much more than what the GFA already calls for. Why should we make more concessions just to get what we're already supposed to be entitled to?

So for all these reasons, I'll be strongly opposing our signing up to these proposals. And I'll stick my neck out and say that we won't. Depth of feeling on this issue is too strong and these proposals are too far from fulfilling the criteria previously agreed upon. Much, much, much too far.

St Andrews

2006-10-14T17:42:00.000+01:00

I haven't had a chance yet to look in detail at the "agreement" reached at St Andrews, so I'll reserve comment on it for the time being.

For now I'll just note that I stand 100% by my previous posts on the PSNI, and on the Assembly.

More later.

On Bertiegate (2)

2006-10-06T16:15:00.000+01:00

The PDs are in a right mess, aren't they? Pull out of government, and they won't be back in it for years - if not decades. Stay, as they're ostensibly planning to do, and they'll lose all credibility in their role as "Fianna Fáil watchdog" because it will be patently obvious to everyone that they're only doing it for the sake of their own Cabinet seats. Either way they've been seriously damaged - and given the damage they've done to this country over the past nine years, it couldn't happen to a nicer party.

I have to admit, though, I'd really rather see them go.

The IMC report

2006-10-04T18:38:00.000+01:00

I had a read through it today and most of it's the usual load of predictable, unsubstantiated, factually sloppy rubbish. But if the Dublin Government is going to treat its assessments as definitive, it must be consistent in the actions it takes on foot of them. Specifically I'm talking about the continued imprisonment of republicans on the charge of "membership of an illegal organisation".

The 1937 Constitution and the ECHR both guarantee the right to form associations, subject only to "necessary" restrictions in the interests of public safety or national security. The new IMC report can only be interpreted as stating that there is no such basis for outlawing the IRA. The report describes the IRA as

firmly set on a political strategy, eschewing terrorism and other forms of crime

Hence there can be no justification for the continued proscription of the IRA nor for the continued imprisonment of these men. They should be released immediately.

On Bertiegate

2006-09-30T18:28:00.000+01:00

(Note: For some reason, irishblogs.ie is linking to this post, which is a year old and not entirely representative of my current view on the subject. Please see my rethink here.)

It's funny what passes for a scandal in this country. I'm no fan of Bertie, and would shed not a tear if he were to walk over all this. But as Fianna Fáil sleaze goes, this episode strikes me as a storm in a teacup. Poor judgement, certainly, but I wouldn't think that was necessarily a resigning matter in and of itself. I also get the sense that this is primarily a media- and FG/Labour-driven controversy; the average punter just doesn't seem to be all that outraged about it.

Of course, that alone says plenty about Fianna Fáil. Can you imagine if, say, Joe Higgins or Trevor Sargent or Gerry A. had taken that money? They'd be ruined politically. But FF? Sure, we're used to much worse than that from them.

Meanwhile a far greater (albeit not entirely unrelated) scandal is going virtually unnoticed: a new Revenue Commissioners report showing that a number of people earning over €1 million per year are not paying one cent in income tax. Now this is truly outrageous - and how much did Six-One news have to say about it? Not one word.

2006-09-22T12:03:00.000+01:00

In regards to yesterday's blood transfusion case, I have two questions.

1 - If this woman had been a Catholic, and had refused a medical procedure on the grounds that it violated her religious views, would it have been forced upon her?

2 - If she had been a man, would the Court have decided that his status as "parent" was the overriding factor?

I suspect in both cases the answer would be "no".

The second for me demonstrates the need for a certain amount of caution in the recent trend towards prioritisting "the best interests of the child" in every legal dispute. People do not cease to be individuals with their own needs and rights simply because they have children. It's often women who suffer when we forget that, as Article 41.2 of the 1937 Constitution demonstrates. A balance needs to be struck which respects, to the greatest degree possible, everybody's human rights - and I don't think it has been struck in this case. The patient's decision is not the one I would have made, but it's her body and she should have had the right to make it.

Religious ethos exemption: a licence to discriminate

2006-09-16T08:25:00.000+01:00

I'll call her Lily. She's a qualified language support teacher - a skill that is desperately needed in Ireland's schools today, given the large numbers of immigrant children from non-Anglophone countries. Lily loves her work and she's good at it. But she can't get a job. Why not? Well, because she lives in a small village in rural Ireland, where some of the locals just aren't used to people like Lily - dark-skinned and with a foreign (albeit native-English) accent.

The last time that Lily applied for a job, she was turned down without even being interviewed. She later discovered that the successful applicant was far less qualified than she. But he was a native. She filed a FOI request to find out why she wasn't considered. The response made reference to the need to protect the school's "religious ethos". In other words, the school looked at her details, deduced from her ethnic background that she is not a Catholic, and decided not to shortlist her.

And this is perfectly legal, because Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act 1998 allows denominational schools to discriminate against potential employees who are not of the school's religion.

Once again, Lily is a language support teacher. She wouldn't even be teaching religion. How could her mere presence undermine the school's religious ethos? And without having given her an interview, how could they be certain that she wasn't a Catholic in any case?

It seems quite clear to me that in this case the religious ethos exemption was merely an excuse for the school to discriminate against a person of a foreign/minority ethnic background. With increasing numbers of immigrants in the workforce, the likelihood of this being an isolated incident seems slim.

The need for language support teachers in our schools is pressing - far too pressing to allow the exclusion of qualified people on spurious religious grounds. The law needs to be changed urgently. Not only for the sake of Lily and others like her, but for the children, who need teachers who know what they're doing far more than they need people who happen to fit an idealised cultural stereotype.

If you see only one film this year...

2006-09-13T07:09:00.000+01:00

... after The Wind That Shakes The Barley, of course, it should be Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I saw it last night and it was astonishing.

That's all for now.

Labour's coalition partners: "Arrest the strikers"

2006-09-12T07:57:00.000+01:00

According to Fine Gael Transport Spokesperson on Newstalk 106 just now, the Gardaí should have arrested the taxi drivers who lined O'Connell Street yesterday to draw attention to their grievances.

I was one of those inconvenienced by the taxi protest yesterday, and I certainly agree that it wasn't the best tactic if they wanted to gain the public's sympathy (although I'm not sure that they did) - but, come on. By "inconvenienced" I mean it added about 15-20 minutes onto my travel time. Hardly something worth arresting people over.

But of course, this is the same Fine Gael Transport Spokesperson who, a few years ago, said that the bus drivers taking part in the "no fares day" protest should have the fares deducted from their wages.

Labour people - for God's sake, what are you thinking???

2006-09-07T16:18:00.000+01:00

I've had a glance through the newly-published heads of McDowell's Immigration Bill and, unsurprisingly, it's a depressing read. There can be little doubt that the minister has an eye on the general election and, having been so successful at creating foreign bogeymen via the citizenship referendum, subsequent comments about "cock and bull stories", etc., is now trying to show how tough he is on them.

One unfortunate thing that jumped out at me immediately is the requirement that all foreign nationals carry ID cards. What a recipe for racial profiling and harassment that is. Non-whites are obviously going to be the primary targets - and what happens when a bored Garda looking for something to do challenges a naturalised Irish citizen for their ID? Of course, as a citizen, they won't have one, but how will they prove it? Effectively, if they want to avoid the (inevitable) hassle, they will be forced to carry proof of their citizenship! This will constitute discrimination against Irish citizens on the basis of their race or ethnic origin - which is not only inherently obnoxious but probably also illegal, under the Equal Status Acts.

I didn't notice anything in the heads of the bill about family reunification, which is frankly unbelievable. As everyone who works in the immigration sector knows, this is a massive issue. At present, only refugees and non-Irish EU nationals have a statutory right to have their spouses and minor children live here with them - even Irish citizens don't have that right! McDowell has consistently fobbed off Parliamentary Questions on the subject, saying that he would deal with all of this in the upcoming legislation - so where is it?

**

On another note, I was sorry but not altogether surprised to hear the news that Daily Ireland is to cease publication. The truth is that it never lived up to its potential - too parochial, and with frequently baffling editorial decisions. I thought its columnists, its foreign news and its Celtic coverage were good and, of course, it was always refreshing to get through a whole Irish newspaper without the SF bashing that all the others are so fond of. Shame it didn't work out but I have to say that its creators really only have themselves to blame.

No Irish, no blacks, no dogs

2006-08-30T14:32:00.000+01:00

Newstalk 106 this morning did a story about immigrant and ethnic minority kids and the troubles some of them are having finding places in their local schools. I got a sort of sick feeling in my stomach as soon as they announced the topic, because I knew that every neanderthal in Dublin would be listening and texting in their views on the matter.

Sure enough. Judging by the comments read out on the air, Dublin is in the company of Jim Crow-era Mississippi and apartheid-era South Africa in terms of its average citizen's enlightenment on racial issues. And listeners were told that those were the milder responses.

One texter said that they spent €7,000 so that their children could attend fee-paying schools with no "minorities". I'm reminded of the expression "a fool and his money are soon parted". What exactly is going to happen to those children when they turn 16 and have to face the real world?

Does anybody seriously think that we can turn the clock back to when Ireland was a monoracial, monoreligious country? (Not that it was ever really either, of course!) Migration and multiculturalism are a fact of life now, all over the world and we cannot possibly be an exception here. People need to learn to deal with this.

I spent my holidays in Africa this year and it really gave me a new perspective on the migration experience. I found it incredibly difficult to be in a place where everyone could tell just by looking at you that you didn't belong, and where you were often the centre of attention just by being there. And this was in a place where my skin colour actually gave me some privileges and where the reaction from people on the street was motivated by curiosity rather than hostility. I really can't imagine how uncomfortable it must be to be on the receiving end of racial attitudes here ... and especially to try to raise children in that sort of environment, to have to try to shield them from the hatred people like the 106 texters were spewing.

When I just wrote that last line, about parents trying to shield their children, my mind flashed back to images from the Holy Cross siege in Ardoyne a few years ago. Most of the 106 texters probably had the same reactions to that as I did - anger, disgust, disbelief. But while they may not be throwing urine-filled condoms at the children - at least, not yet - it is fundamentally the same attitude.

PSNI GAA game – a step too far

2006-08-29T16:38:00.000+01:00

Today’s Daily Ireland cover story features Joe Brolly (son of Francie and Anne) explaining why he has no problem with his GAA club playing the PSNI and, furthermore, why Sinn Féin should have no problem with it either.

I won’t attempt to speak for Sinn Féin on the matter, but I personally cannot accept Joe Brolly’s arguments. It’s too much, and too soon. Far too soon.

Of course, my own experience with the northern police has been limited. But it hasn’t been good. A few years ago I was on a bus travelling back from a Celtic game which (rather foolishly in retrospect) made a stop near the Park Centre Roundabout to let a passenger off. A few scumbags in Rangers tops set upon us and hurled a brick through one of our windows, fortunately not hitting anyone until it had bounced off an opposite wall, thus slowing down its trajectory. The brick landed at my feet and I picked it up – had anyone’s head been in its way, they would have been very lucky indeed to escape without serious brain damage.

At that point the bus driver did the sensible thing and drove off as quickly as possible, stopping in Newry to report the incident. Well, to try to report the incident, because as it happened the peelers only wanted to know one thing: Had we been drinking?

Now granted this is only one incident but frankly, when you walk into a police station holding a brick in your hand which has just been thrown through your window, and which very clearly could have caused you very serious injury or death, and the police show not even the slightest bit of concern, it really doesn’t do much for your opinion of them!

And there are plenty of recent events which lead me to suspect that this attitude persists. Take the arrest of Máire Nic an Bháird for speaking Irish, the collusion of the PSNI in the erection of loyalist flags in Lurgan, the Ballymena PSNI chief's disgraceful attempt to portray the Michael McIlveen murder as a tit-for-tat incident - I could go on. On the evidence available to me, the PSNI does not appear to be anywhere near sufficiently reformed for republicans to accept the kind of normalisation of relations that would allow this game to go ahead. It is, of course, the GAA's decision and not ours - but it's a decision I find disappointing.

I also question the wisdom of Daily Ireland highlighting, on its cover, a quote from Joe Brolly in which he used the term "black bastards". Of course most of us reading that would know what he meant, but in a multicultural country I think we need to pay a little more attention to how our words might be misinterpreted by newcomers here. I'm actually a bit surprised that this didn't occur to anyone at Daily Ireland.

2006-08-28T10:58:00.000+01:00

I wasn't surprised to read this morning that the CORI report due out tomorrow will show that the gap between rich and poor in this state continues to widen. I see this with my own eyes, walking around the North Inner City.

What I do find absolutely shocking in that report is the statistic that 22.6% of the adult population are functionally illiterate. 22.6%!

Very serious questions have to be asked as to how nearly one out of every four people in this state can go through twelve years of schooling and emerge lacking such a basic skill. There is clearly something very wrong with an education system that allows this to happen. And I have to conclude that primary responsibility for this disaster must rest with those who have primary responsibility for education.

I am not trying to engage in gratuitous Church-bashing. I acknowledge that, in many countries, Catholic schools have superior performance records in comparison with other schools (although that is often due to factors such as self-selection rather than anything inherent to Catholic education itself). But the fact is that the Church has been given a job to do in this state and with an almost one-in-four failure rate, it is clearly not being done. This needs to be recognised.

**

In other news, I see that Republican Sinn Féin invited POW-turned-right wing ethnonationalist Gerry McGeough to speak at their annual hunger strike commemoration. I find this a bit perplexing. I know that many RSF members share McGeough's reactionary views on reproductive freedom (as, sadly, do too many members of my own party), but I am surprised RSF would want to associate themselves with someone now in the news mostly for his ties to fascist sympathiser Justin Barrett and for his slurs on gays and immigrants.

RSF are already viewed by a lot of people, including those who tend to share their analysis of the national question, as fundamentalist political dinosaurs. From the discussions I have had with republicans of the dissident variety, I know that this reputation is impeding RSF's growth and they are not going to shake it by offering a platform to the likes of Gerry McGeough.

On the Morris Tribunal

2006-08-18T10:45:00.000+01:00

We've said this before, but with the most recent revelations about Garda misconduct - a word which scarcely seems adequate to convey the utterly appalling actions of some members of the force - it needs to be said again:

Giving a corrupt police force the powers which the Offences Against The State Act gives them is like giving a blowtorch to a pyromaniac.

The Act needs to go. Now.

A perfect example of border idiocy

2006-08-11T11:17:00.000+01:00

Have you ever tried to book a ticket online for the bus from Dublin to Belfast? You can't do it. This is because, as a Bus Éireann person explained to me, their system and Ulsterbus's system are not compatible.

You can book a Eurolines ticket online for anywhere in Britain. You can book a Eurolines ticket online for Poland, even. But you cannot book a Bus Éireann/Ulsterbus ticket online for Belfast... or Newry, or Derry. Want to go to Enniskillen? The bus to Donegal Town stops there. But you'll have to book your seat all the way through.

Somebody needs to sort this stupidity out. It's 2006 for heaven's sake.

2006-07-30T20:01:00.000+01:00

I've been back from holidays for most of the past week, but I've really been struggling to find things to write about. What's going in Lebanon just seems to overshadow everything happening here. It's horrifying and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

There's been enough posted elsewhere about the situation, and I don't feel I have anything particularly new to offer to the discussion, so I'm just going to register my utter revulsion at Israel's brutality and arrogance, and leave it at that. Hezbollah's tactics are wrong, but the Israeli response has been so exorbitantly out of proportion that one can only conclude they're enjoying themselves.

Death toll as of right now:
Israel - 51 deaths, 18 civilians
Lebanon - 523 deaths, mostly civilians

It's a sick joke for the Israelis to describe what they're doing as "self defence". It's gratuitous slaughter, nothing less.

2006-07-25T20:38:00.000+01:00

I've been on holiday, in case you hadn't guessed.

Liar

2006-07-07T18:34:00.000+01:00

Enda Kenny today: "We support the implementation in full of the Good Friday Agreement."

Except for the release of a few of the prisoners covered by its terms, you mean.

Coalition still confused

2006-07-05T10:22:00.000+01:00

For the second week running, Labour have abstained on a bill supported by their intended coalition partners.

Bertie is absolutely right when he says that if he did call an early election the "Rainbow" would have a heart attack. Who do they think they are fooling? They have no joint policy programme; they can't even agree on their own legislation, much less Government policies such as the privatisation of Aer Lingus, the erosion of neutrality, etc.

Furthermore, all indications are that if FG and Labour did manage to cobble together a Government, FG would be by far the senior partner. Have Labour ever indicated what their redline issues would be in such a coalition? Does anybody know, even Labour themselves?

I know I go on about this a lot but I'm genuinely baffled that any Labour supporter would be in favour of this agreement.

2006-07-04T10:53:00.000+01:00

I've been following with interest the battle between an estranged couple over their frozen embryos.

This is one of those cases that creates strange bedfellows, as I realised this morning when I heard John Waters talking on the radio about it and found myself nodding in agreement. As a feminist and a vocal advocate of women's reproductive freedom, I might be expected to side with the female half of this (former) couple. But while I sympathise with her, I cannot agree that she has the right to have these embryos implanted against the wishes of the father.

For me the fundamental issue of reproductive freedom has always been the right of a woman to control her own body. An embryo inside her is a part of her body, and she has the right to decide whether to carry it to term or not. But in this case, obviously, the embryos are completely and totally separate. A decision not to implant them will not affect her bodily integrity and therefore this decision is not hers and hers alone.

Besides all that, if the court rules in favour of the woman the likely justification will be along the lines of "these embryos are human lives and destroying them is murder". That's obviously not a ruling which supporters of reproductive freedom would welcome.

But I wonder what those who make that argument would do if the partners' wishes were reversed and it was the woman, rather than the man, who wanted the embryos destroyed. Would they argue that she should be forced against her will to have them implanted in her uterus? The thought of that is horrifying, but it seems to me to be the logical conclusion of that line of thinking.

Repatriate Aiden Hulme

2006-06-17T17:09:00.000+01:00

Aiden Hulme is a 27-year-old Irishman serving 22 years in an English prison. Since his incarceration he has suffered extreme medical neglect and now faces having his leg amputated. Aiden, who is on 23-hour lockdown, is being denied suitable painkilling medication.

We are calling for Aiden to be returned to serve his sentence in Ireland where he can receive the medical attention he urgently requires close to his family. The decision on whether to repatriate Aiden Hulme rests with the Irish Department of Justice.

***

The above is taken from a leaflet distributed at a demonstration I attended today. This campaign is supported by all republican organisations as well as by the SDLP. If he were an illegal immigrant in a New York jail no doubt the entire Irish political establishment would be pleading for his repatriation.

For more information and to sign the petition, click here.