The Tort of False Imprisonment

Tánaiste Joan Burton changes cars before being evacuated
from the protests in Dublin.

Several activists are reportedly about to be charged with false imprisonment for the protest in which Tánaiste Joan Burton was trapped in her car for over two hours, including TD Paul Murphy. Mr Murphy's objections are substantially that there was an element of 'political policing' in the process - particularly in the arrests, and 'dawn raids' on the activists who had been involved. He claims that charges would have not be brought were it not for a sense that they had offended the establishment, and in the exercise of discretion, it had been decided that the application of the law would come down firmly on the accused.

Nationalism in Ireland in 2015

A debate has begun in Ireland on how the country should celebrate Easter 2016, one hundred years after the Easter Rising.  Thus far it has taken the shape of an external-relativist debate, particularly in relation to the UK; and a peace-violence debate, and whether violent uprising should be celebrated, especially given the question about what it actually achieved.  The official launch video in November was almost universally panned for seeking to look to the future (with the British Queen's visit seemingly the starting point) and almost completely ignoring the Rising itself, and the proclamation of independence.  I have some sympathy with the designers of the video; if we look deep enough into the dark past of history, there is some danger that the country may fall back into it.

Post-2016: A Dáil in Chaos?

Was it for this etc.?

Much recent commentary on the rise of independents has begun to extrapolate current trends into and beyond the next general election.  Pat Rabbitte said he feared for the very future of politics.  It does indeed seem as if we are in for a period of political turbulence.

Stephen Donnelly: Ireland's Ralph Nader

Nader was vilified and heavily criticised
at first, but his book transformed the car
industry in America.

The first Chevy Corvair launched in 1960 was a roaring success. Jack Kennedy was President, Elvis Presley was on the radio, and America was fighting the Communists in the dark corners of Eastern European cities. It was a sleek designed power grunt of a machine, with swing-axle suspension. That meant that it needed a significant tyre-pressure differential between rear and front tyres, which resulted in a dangerous amount of over-steer. In lay mans terms, that means that when you turn the car left, the wheels turn much more left than you had intended. There was a significant danger of 'tuck-under', where the left front wheel in a left turn could essentially flip under the car, causing an accident.  Many people died as a result, though the car industry was unperturbed - driver error, was the response. If you drive at a safe speed, you're fine.

The Next Anglo-Scale Crisis Will be in Data Protection

Billy Hawkes has his work cut out for him

I've argued for some time that the problem in Ireland is not one of light-touch regulation, but of culture. The failure that led to such catastrophic circumstances was not down to Lehman Brothers, or the Global Meltdown, or Anglo, or the Financial Regulator, but culture. A culture that said 'go on sure you'll be grand,' a culture that basically said take what you can get away with, so long as you don't get caught, a culture that told politicians - jovially - that the only thing, the *only* thing they had to protect was their seat.  That caused an abdication of leadership and responsibility, an absence of ownership, and a complete abandonment of the principles of the nation. So we are - as they in Leinster House so wearily put it - where we are. The implication of that phrase, of course, is that we do not learn from our mistakes, we forget about the past, and we fix the problem we are faced with rather than contemplating the uncontemplable - that we are fundamentally wrong about all sorts of important stuff that's really hard to fix.

Why Ireland Needs Drones

Drones come in all shapes and sizes, not just Predators
with sidewinders attached.

Drones have got something of a bad press recently, what with all of the extra-judicial killings and what not, and Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, and all sort of other folks getting concerned about the automation of lethal force.  Much of the focus is on the US, but it should be noted that there are dozens of countries deploying their own drones now, and not just for pre-emptive strikes on irksome alleged terrorists outside state borders.

NAMA: Rebadging Failure as Success

Photo Credit: Google Images

Fintan O'Toole calls out the economic failure in Ireland in today's Irish Times (and, incidentally, in The New York Times also) and in particular those politicians who hold the country up as an example to others. The debt has soared, public services have been slashed, and quality of life has deteriorated for all but those who have emigrated in the last five years. Things are admittedly pretty awful, and made worse by rich men in expensive suits praising the country for its prudence and fortitude.

NAMA was actually designed to do this.  Its model works thus: you have a property worth $50m, for which a developer has a loan of $100m, you pay the bank $20 for the loan, re-capitalise the bank for the $80m shortfall (i.e. repay the German inter-bank lender) through off-books sovereign debt, then sell the property for $30m, making (ahem) a $10m 'profit'. So NAMA then is a success, because it drove a profit from its loan book. The State, meanwhile, is crippled.

Anyone can be successful if they are allowed to define the rules for success themselves.  Small minds are destroying this place.

A No-Vision Rest Home for No-Vision Politicians: The Conservative Reform Alliance

Didn't get the memo then?

In Susan Neiman's 2008 Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, there is at least some part of the answer to why we are all so cynical these days.  Neiman talks of things like reason and hope - not incompatible, it seems - and says of aspiration that so long as it is limited by the actual, no other idea has a chance.  Good bedtime reading for Lucinda Creighton, one suspects.

Her fall from high office has been well documented, losing the whip on the abortion bill, and subsequently forming the Reform Alliance, an entity not quite a political party, but registered for fundraising and populated by politicians.  Today, it emerged that several high profile independent TDs would not be supporting the breakaway movement, dealing a significant blow to the Alliance, and seriously undermining any ambitions it may have had to real power. Which is a shame.

Retaining the Seanad: Vote No!

I was unsure about this referendum.  The Seanad has long been a bit of a wasted opportunity.  A landing spot for failed Dáil candidates; Bertie's appointment of Eoghan Harris; the famous 'weekend Senators' who get appointed for a couple of days at the end of a term in order to get past-members' parking rights and all that other bullshit.  Generally speaking it is a failed institution, and in truth we won't miss much if and when it's gone.

I'm voting to retain the Seanad.  Why?  Because of the cynical, populist, and arrogant way in which the Government has decided to execute its campaign.  This isn't reform, it changes nothing.  The problem is with the concentration of power, and this does nothing to address that.  This is nothing to do with saving money - no permanent jobs will go, and no buildings will go.  Yet the Government has said that this is why they are doing it, and, according to the Irish Times poll on Monday, that is why most people are in favour of abolition. Kenny and Fine Gael may have trumpeted the abolition of the Seanad loudly as a policy platform in the run up to the election, but they never once mentioned cost.

The abject lack of reform in the Dáil is what is being swept under the carpet here.  Once this has been put to bed, electoral and Dáil reform will be off the agenda for the remainder of the Dáil term.  The whip system will remain.  The electoral system will remain the same.  The excoriation of the Dáil as a relevant chamber will persist.  The concentration of power in the executive, in the top of the executive, will endure.  The government has succeeded in creating an effective dictatorship, without checks and balances, without accountability, and doomed to repeat the same mistakes that we made the night of the Bank Guarantee.  The government is too close to see it, and the rest of us are either blind or disinterested.  Sure, we have elections, and we can change who the dictator is.  But the song remains the same.  

Fine Gael and The Will To Power

Abolishing the Seanad is an intellectually lazy and
populist move that will compound our system's failure

I shared a plane journey to New York yesterday with a man working with NGOs, in the area of global co-ordination.  We talked about how difficult it was to control egos where righteousness levels seem to know no limit.  "People get into this," he said, "with the best of intentions - then they forget about why they're there, they forget about the children, and the starving, and the organisation becomes an end in itself.  You can get a lot done when you remind them about why they're there."

Shatter's Folly

The Minister has some work to do in making himself popular

The Minister for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter is being accused of an abuse of office for digging up some Garda dirt on a political opponent in order to undermine him during a television debate.  Government Ministers Joan Burton, Richard Bruton and Brian Hayes have been out defending the Justice Minister, but whatever the outcome, they are going to be privately acknowledging that this incident has begun to damage an already poor public view of the administration. But more on the politics later. This is not the first time Minister Shatter has brought the dignity of the office into question.

How to Butcher a Metaphor: The Cypriot Bail-In

So, let's get one thing straight. Cyprus is neither a bail-out, nor is it a bail-in. Either metaphor fails, and the tortured extension of the metaphor to 'bail-in' illustrates the poor grasp of language by a) the people who came up with it and b) the people (mostly journalists) who gaily leapt on it.

The first deployment of the metaphor was in relation to the 'bail-out' of Greece, then Ireland and others. The metaphor was OK - like a boat in trouble, taking on water, the troika were providing assistance in relieving the problem. In cash terms however it was a reversal - the cash was coming in to the country, while the water would have been hurled out of the boat. Nevertheless, the assistance (in terms of muscle for the bailing, so to speak) was inbound, so the metaphor was sustainable.

Neo-Feminist Nonsense

OMFG can you believe he said
that! Well, no, he didn't.

The manufactured outrage over Leo Varadkar's off the cuff comments in relation to personal insolvency legislation is another example of over the top, reactionary nonsense coming from the Women's lobby in Ireland.  It's about time that we all got a grip of ourselves and started being a little more sensible about things. Varadkar said that working for less money than the cost of childcare in order to keep a career going "a legitimate thing to do but if you can’t pay your mortgage as a result or you can’t buy your groceries as a result well then that’s something that needs to be taken into account in any insolvency arrangement.”  Cue public anguish and a complete distortion of a headline in the Irish Examiner screaming "VARADKAR: WOMEN TO CHOOSE CAREER OR MORTGAGE"

Ivana Bacik on Morning Ireland cried foul as it was not in the interests of the country to push women back out of the workforce.  Orla O'Connor from the National Women's Council said Varadkar's comments were anti-women, and anti-children.  Twitter, erm, melted.  It's entirely nonsense.

RTE and The Future of TV

Last night's love-in with RTE was a classic wolf in sheep's clothing.  RTE decided to make a programme about television and its future, as part of the fiftieth anniversary programme, that was in effect an egregious, dishonest use of the license fee to defend the license fee itself.  There was no real analysis of other markets and how they operate, because almost all of them operate differently to Ireland; some operate on a license fee without ads (Germany, France), while others operate on ads with no license fee (USA - though PBS is a specifically and exclusively federally funded organisation).  RTE takes both, and screws up at both.  For ad based content, you need to compete against other commercial channels - RTE's viewing figures have been steadily falling over the years.  For license fee driven content, you need to advance the cultural and political objectives of the state: within the last twelve months, the monstrous treatment of Fr Kevin Reynolds, TweetGate and Sean Gallagher, were swiftly followed by the shutting of the London office of RTE.

The Culture of NAMA Stinks

Today, Brendan McDonagh announced with great glee that the National Asset Management Agency had made a profit of €247m for 2011.  In his interview on RTE Radio at One O'Clock, the smug McDonagh, who commands an austerity adjusted salary of €370,000 (having taken a voluntary 15% pay cut earlier this year) propounded that the organisation had breezed passed the cynicism of two years ago, and circumnavigated low expectation to deliver what were astonishingly good results, notwithstanding a write-down of €1.27bn in the value of its assets.  It was as if NAMA was just another Irish success story, and the Celtic Tiger was back again, and McDonagh was the new breed of entrepreneur, leading the charge out of depression!

Eurocrisis: Sovereignty, Federalism, and Choices

Funny, nein?

The current travails of Europe are not new.  A group of countries bound by proximity yet separated by terrain, for thousands of years the continent has been dominated by war, conquest and turmoil.  Today, we see her once more tearing herself apart as the unequal distribution of resources sets itself against capitalist economics and nominative socialist leadership.  While the things that bind us together – the Monnet and Schuman version of a shared heritage, the fledgling institutions of the European Union, and an increasingly pervasive English language – remain, the smaller things that separate us become exacerbated.  Even the recently held European Football Championships, or before that the Eurovision Song Contest, tend to reinforce the more serious political and economic rivalries within the Union.  Greece versus Germany was billed everywhere as David versus Goliath, Coloniser versus colonized, Merkel versus whoever the current Prime Minister of Greece was.  Some Irish fans hoisted an Irish tricolour with the words “Angela Merkel Thinks We’re At Work” emblazoned across it, an image that made the front cover of Bild and other news media around the world – the distinction was clear, Merkel and Germany was “them”, and Ireland was “us”, there was no such thing as a European.