Tim Pat Coogan's Blog

Sunday Independent

An open letter to Dr Zion Evrony, Israeli ambassador to Ireland, from Tim Pat Coogan

You were kind enough to invite me to the recent reception you gave to celebrate Israel’s 62nd Independence Day, but I did not attend out of a growing sense of outrage at the treatment of the Palestinians which I have hitherto only expressed privately.

The recent acts of piracy on the high seas have, however, prompted me to write you this public letter stating why I did not attend and asking that, unless policies change, that I not be invited again. It’s a small, even you might say, trivial gesture, but, I am buoyed by the fact that boycotting played a useful role in Ireland’s history. More… »

By abstaining from politics we cannot influence the decisions that affect our lives argues Tim Pat in today’s Sunday Independent…

A SAYING of my mother’s has resonated with me in recent times: “Don’t leave it to them” By this she meant don’t emigrate and leave oneself with no say in how the country was run.

Or if one did not emigrate, don’t dumbly acquiesce in what those in high places decide.

I’m afraid many of us have been guilty of not taking my mother’s advice and must admit to committing a sin of omission which led to the Government’s sin of commission.

For how many of us can say that we participate fully in the political process?

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Our Rome-appointed bishops have been playing the Vatican’s game of Pass the Parcel, says Tim Pat Coogan writing in the Sunday Independent

GIVEN the scale of what is happening in the Irish Catholic Church, debating the departure of five auxiliary bishops has all the rich, ripe irrelevance to the gravity of the situation as had Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s axing of five junior ministers.

The only meaningful departure would be that of the Pope himself. As Cardinal Ratzinger he was probably the best informed man in the Vatican, being both Prefect of the powerful Congregation of the Faith and Dean of the College of Cardinals. These offices mean that he was privy to the ever swelling tide of reports on clerical sex abuse which poured into the Vatican during his tenure in office, from every diocese in the world.

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“What should I do with the cow’s teat”, inquired the interviewer from the Newstalk Radio station covering the recent National Ploughing Championships. “Squeeze it gently”, replied the lady agricultural instructor evenly, “as though it were your willy.”

In all sorts of ways that exchange, and the generally amused reaction to it, encapsulates the difference between to-day’s Ireland and that which existed at the time of the pope’s visit 30 years ago.

Firstly of course it would have been unthinkable for such bawdy banter to have occurred on the airwaves. Newstalk, and all the other commercial radio stations which now proliferate in Ireland, was some twenty years into the future and in terms of sexual honesty, and Ireland was still probably twenty years behind the rest of Europe.

The big, unprinted, buzz of the time was the fact that a horde of British tabloid journalists had descended on Dublin hoping to stand up the rumor that the President, Patrick Hillery, was having an affair.

An affair! And the pope on his way to Dublin. Imagine such a thing exploding into public view amid a bevy of bare breasted beauties in a British tabloid! Shock horror! However, acting on a suggestion of mine, that he should pre-empt a mega gossip strike by giving his side of the story first, the President called in four political correspondents (from the three major Irish dailies, and RTE) and officially denied the rumor.

Around the country that night people nearly fell off their chairs as RTE’s Sean Duignan solemnly broke the story on the Nine O’Clock news. There was a certain recourse to holy water the following morning also when the morning papers arrived. But, though tongues wagged, most people accepted the President’s word and felt he was right to get the matter out of the way so as not to discolor the papal visit.

The Pope arrived safely to be greeted by a million people in the Phoenix Park. And the British tabloids were left struggling  vainly for scraps of scandal in the torrent of adulatory coverage that broke over the land.

The country virtually closed down as people either attended, or watched the celebration of the papal mass in the Phoenix Park on television. The streets were still deserted as I drove through the normally busy County Dublin seaside town of Dun Laoghaire, to pick up my mother and the rest of my family, after the ceremony, at a nearby train station.

The only people to be seen as I arrived at the station was a group consisting of three embarrassed young lads trying to quieten a fourth young man who was obviously tipsy.

“Isn’t that disgraceful”, said a porter ,”Drunk, and the pope in the country.”  Then he added disgustedly: ”And they got good educations too…”

Such was the obvious, reverential tone of the country, reflected in press, pulpit and parliament. But there were less obvious currents stirring. The Pope got a rapturous reception from another huge crowd, consisting mainly of young people when he visited Galway.

These were acknowledging the effects of centuries of blood and sacrifice for their faith in the genes of Irish Catholics. What stirred in their jeans was something else. Many of these boys and girls had spent the previous night together in their sleeping bags.  They loved the man but his bleak messages of conservatism on matters such as contraception and divorce were irrelevant to their lives.

Time would show that in truth they were also largely irrelevant to the Pope’s warm up act, Bishop Eamonn Casey and Father Michael Cleary. They pranced about the papal platform before the pope spoke, singing songs like “He’s Got the Whole World in his Hand” and generally showing how loyal to doctrine, but nevertheless “with it” was the Irish Church of 1979.

Later it would be revealed that Casey had fathered one child, and Cleary, who specialized in giving retreats to Catholic school girls, had fathered two. But, at the time Pope John wooed Galway, and Ireland, with his seemingly impromptu: “Young people of Galway, I love you.”

He visited Zaire after Ireland, going directly there from Shannon, and while in the African nation he delivered a notable broadside against divorce. Amongst those who saw him off were the Taoiseach Jack Lynch, and the President, Dr. Patrick Hillery. No one commented on the fact that, amongst those who did not see him off was Hillery’s wife Maeve, who around the same time departed Dublin Airport for a holiday in Spain.

Nor, unless they were listening to the BBC World Service in the small hours of the morning, did anyone comment on the vast outpouring of grateful applause that followed  the pope’s  ringing declaration, in Swahili this time: “Young People of Zaire, I love you!”

All the hypocrisy and barrenness of the church’s teaching on sex that lay in the shadows outside the pomp and ceremony of Pope John’s visit, the last hoorah of the Church Triumphant , is now bursting about the ears of Ireland’s Catholics as this is being written. Reports into clerical abuse are either published or are about to be published, but there is one lasting deposit of good concerning the visit which should be acknowledged.

After he had delivered his speech condemning violence at Drogheda, Gerry Adams began to publicly call for an explanation of a passage in the speech, on the obligations of politicians to seek peaceful solutions to the Troubles. Bishop Cathal Daly, who had written the speech, occasionally replied to Adams, but more often did not. Nevertheless a kind of sputtering dialog of sorts ensued.

Becoming interested in this, Fr. Alex Reid, a priest from the Redemptorist monastery where Adams attended mass, secretly began contacting various people on different sides of the divide to tell them that Adams was serious about peace and could deliver. John Hume and the late Cardinal Tomas O’Fiaich were amongst those who believed him. So was I.

I put Reid in sub rosa touch with Charles Haughey, the Irish Taoiseach, and out of such meetings was the peace-process conceived. It took many years after the pope’s departure and much effort on both sides of the Atlantic, before a birth certificate could be produced in the form of the Good Friday Agreement. But in a very real sense that Agreement stems from the pope’s visit to Ireland.

- First published 2nd October 2009 at IrishCentral.com

The shots fired at Mary Robinson by Jewish groups are probably really aimed at President Obama and his efforts to broker a peace deal with Israel starting with an end to the building of illegal Jewish settlements.

The President is right to work for peace. The blame which America’s apparent willingness to support Israel in whatever it does has occasioned in the Arab street is both harmful to America’s national interest, and a source of support for Al Qaeda.

But the attempt to target one of the greatest living Irish women, internationally recognized as a human rights campaigner, in a smear campaign orchestrated by lobbyists for the State of Israel has implications for Irish policy towards Israel and contains potential repercussions for the lobbyists’ cause that do not appear well thought out.

It comes just after an Irish parliamentary delegation had returned to Ireland from a fact finding mission to Gaza and the other Arab territories. It also comes at a time when the recent fighting and its aftermath has increased the swing in Irish public opinion from an uncomprehending, but generally admiring, attitude towards the foundation of the State of Israel, and the State’s early fight to defend itself, to one of ever growing distaste for its increasingly brutal and ineffective military approach to the Palestinian problem.

A few days before the Robinson controversy blew up, I spoke with a highly respected Irish political figure (incredibly there are still such) who had been on the all-party Irish parliamentary delegation and found him to be horrified as much by the illegal settlement building as by the devastation caused to the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip and the effects of the state of siege which the Israel military are enforcing on the population of Gaza.

To judge from the initial statement the delegation subsequently released, everyone else in the party shared his concerns and the full Report of the delegation , scheduled for next month is expected to be particularly damning. Israeli embassy spokespersons are already mounting a campaign to discredit the delegations findings. Even in the midst of chronic economic problems, this controversy seems certain to grow, not diminish.

The TD I spoke to represents a border constituency and was an informed participant in the behind the scenes diplomacy that led to the Good Friday Agreement. His father was a member of Michael Collins’ elite hit team The Squad and by birth and up-bringing he would have regarded the Unionists with distaste and wished for a United Ireland.

But, as a practicing politician, he recognised that times had changed and it was time to move on. The gun had to be put away, the Six County State recognised, the British presence accepted, and both sides, Republican and Unionists, had to co-operate in the interests of peace, allowing the ultimate solution of deeply embedded problems to be resolved in the future by their grandchildren if necessary.

Translated to Palestine this viewpoint would mean that Hamas would cease rocket attacks, recognise the State of Israel and the Israelis would engage in-all party talks, brokered by the US, which would give the Palestinians their State, end the blockade of Gaza and the building of illegal settlements.

The Irish political class, more than most Europeans, have an empathy with problems left over from the days of the British empire. Arthur Balfour, the British politician probably most responsible for the introduction to Ireland, was also the statesman who set today’s events in train with his Declaration, issued during the same era, (1917) which favored “ the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”.

The Declaration also stated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

However the reality which confronted the Dáil delegation in Gaza, during its recent visit, was, in Irish terms, as though a million and a half Nationalists, unwillingly and without compensation, had been forcibly driven across the Border and penned into an area one-third the size of Louth where they could look across the border at the land they once owned.

The creation of such ghettos would have not just produced murderous and irresponsible reactions such as the creation of Hamas and its criminally irresponsible rocket firings, but IRA atrocity on a scale not even possible to guess at, As it was, the hatred that Unionist discrimination spawned in Ireland did gave rise to a plethora of IRAs.

But the British did not drop white phosphorus on densely populated civilian areas, as was done during the recent destruction of Gaza. Nor did they automatically blow up the homes of known IRA men as standard operating procedure. Nor (in recent centuries at least) did they deliberately use massacre as a counter-insurgency tool as was done in Deir Yassim in 1948 and at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.

The fact that the Israeli propaganda machine dubs such activities “operations” does not sanitise them, lessen their impact, nor make them more morally acceptable. The policy which the Unionists once espoused, that error has no rights, opponent, no justification, or legal protections did not eradicate terrorism. It encouraged it.

Directing the blame for “operations” at those who may have thrown, a bomb, a rock, or fired a rocket neither makes “operations” justifiable nor proportionate.

The analogies between the Irish and the Palestinian situations however do have a contemporary relevance which contains important seeds of hope. The name Clinton shines by its own light where the Irish peace process is concerned. But not alone is Hilary Clinton the American leader most charged with finding a Middle East solution, the man who did most to smooth the Good Friday negotiations, George Mitchell, is on the ground trying to repeat what was done in Belfast.

It is in America’s and the world’s interest that they succeed. But above all it is in the interest of Israel and the Palestinians. Peace is what should be striven for by the Israeli spin doctors, not the demonization of Mary Robinson.

- First published 10th August 2009 at IrishCentral.com

Throughout the summer Ireland explodes with summer school mania. Indeed, these schools or festivals pop up amongst the Irish across the world, and I would like to take this opportunity to wish success and good cheer to the good people who will be staging their annual event at Butte, Montana, in a few days time. But it is on two Irish festivals that I wish to focus.

The two are being held North and South of the border, and accurately sum up both the country’s present preoccupations and the frequently over-looked, but central, identity problem facing contemporary Irish society.

One, to be held in Ballina next month at The Humbert School, asks a stark question: Can Ireland be redeemed? As it normally does, the Humbert lists an imposing cast of participants, ranging from John Hume, to Judge Ryan – who produced the recent Report into clerical child abuse – and European and Irish political and clerical luminaries. Over the weekend of August 23, the School will hold a think-in on the issues of the day – banking and political skulduggery, the Lisbon Treaty, child abuse, and Ireland’s diminishing response to world poverty.

The only major Irish institution to escape scrutiny is the GAA, and given the fact that Mayo are doing particularly well at the football this year, it too may come up for mention. If it does, it will be the only influential force in Irish society which can reasonably expect a kind word.

The thirty two county GAA has historical roots in the subject matter of the other Summer School, The Tom Dunn School, held in Rostrevor, County Down. The school was named in memory of the United Irishman Tom Dunn, who was flogged to death in 1798 without betraying his comrades.

I have just taken part in this remarkable event. It combined magnificent Irish music, a moving tribute to the late Paddy O’Hanlon, a founder of the SDLP and a behind-the-scenes architect of the Good Friday Agreement, by his uncle, Dr. Rory O’Hanlon, the former Fianna Fail Minister whose father was one of Michael Collins’ squad.

The highlight was a banquet, at which 18^th Century costumes were worn. The menu was the same as that for a dinner held in honor of Wolfe Tone in Dunn’s time. The toasts included the President of America, of France and King George. The event attracts both Catholic and Protestant support and, while honoring the memory of the United Irishmen in general (and Dunn in particular),  it also seeks to promulgate the Republican doctrine of uniting Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in a common sense of community.

These admirable objectives should command widespread support in the Republic also but, given the anger, cynicism, pessimism, and sense of betrayal, that now permeates  Ireland, anyone who stood outside the GPO today advocating anything which smacked of idealism and a United Ireland would risk either been beaten over the head by a copy of the An Bord Snip Report, or run over by a shopper heading north attracted by prices far lower than those obtaining in the Rip Off Republic.

For at the moment there is nothing left in Irish public life that one might term a tent-pole philosophy around which a sorely beset people could group.

Back in the eighties, not long after I had left the Irish Press in 1987, I began to get worried about the prospect of such a lacuna arising and became so angry at the direction of Irish life, and the clear indications of corrupt relationships between the rich and the would-be rich, and the political elite, that I broke a vow which I had made to myself to shun newspapers and devote myself solely to book authorship.

I rang my old Irish Press colleague, Damian Kiberd, who had earlier left the Press to found the highly successful Sunday Business Post, and arranged to write a blistering article on the theme that Ireland needed to develop a sense of national outrage. In my best Cassandra mode I pointed out that the Irish lack a sense of outrage.

We put up with both the doings of the faceless mandarin and the political poltroon with equal indifference. The stroke-puller, the corner cutting financial whiz kid, the lengthening dole queue are all either tolerated or lazily over-looked until we suddenly find ourselves joining the dole queue, with a mortgage and kids in fee-paying schools.

As a result, twenty years after I wrote that Sunday Business Post article the sense of outrage is all too obvious. Thatching on a windy day has always been an Irish political tendency. But today the thatching is being attempted in the teeth of a howling gale.

To return to the question posed by the Humbert Summer School: Can Ireland be redeemed? The government is hoping that by setting up something called NAMA (National Asset Management Agency) it will calm the tempest. NAMA is supposed to take over the management of the banks’ property loans at a discount, to preserve the ailing Irish banking system. It is a perilous venture.

Nothing definite is known of the extent of the banks indebtedness but guesstimates range from twenty to forty billion. However, in the course of an action brought against a developer last week for a relatively small sum, it was revealed in court that a so called ‘asset’ in Sandyford Co. Dublin, a development site against which 22 million had been loaned, is worth only a half million in to-day’s conditions. That is to say forty four times less than its supposed value.

Just what is the scale of the debt being assumed by the Irish tax-payer, their children and seemingly, their children’s  children? The short answer is we don’t know. But we do know that there are Sandyford-like situations all over the country, and that  the loans involved in them run not to millions but  billions .

However, the government is persevering with NAMA because it fears that if not, Irish bonds will lose their attraction to international investors and the country will go bust. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Most of these bonds are held by international pension funds that have already made provision for bad debts. There is a serious school of thought which says that Ireland is ultimately going to be forced to default on its commitments, because of the real debt situation, and the banks will collapse anyhow.

Better let them go broke now, and allow healthy banks to emerge over the next few years, runs the anti-NAMA argument. How the argument will ultimately be resolved no man can say, but if ever there was a time when the Irish Republic could do with a return to the idealism, and sense of identity, which inspired the Republicanism of Tom Dunn, George Washington and the French revolutionaries,  it is today.

- First published 27th July 2009 at IrishCentral.com

“This will take an awful lot of hardship.”

“It doesn’t take much.”

Both of the foregoing contradictory statements are true of Ireland’s economy and mood of the moment.

On the one hand there is the demoralizing game of pass-the-parcel being played by the politicians with the report of the popularly-termed An Bord Snip Nua which contains the horrific list of cuts which the economists say are needed to get the economy back on track.

On the other is the clearly observable mood of national cheerfulness brought on by a combination of welcome ephemera which have nothing to do with the economy.

The fine weather, the success of the rugby players and U2’s Barcelona opening are helping to offset the gloomy impact of the incessant flow of news bulletins about job losses and yawning trade deficits.

It is many years since Thomas Davis wrote that there was no nation on earth over whom music had such power over as the Irish. He was writing in an era of famine, but he had hit on an essential truth of the Irish character which has carried them through many a fearsome trial and may do so again in today’s circumstances.

Priceless gift

The race does have a priceless gift of being able to seize the moment if an instant of distraction or of uplift beckons. The sun appears briefly and, from God knows where, people flock to the beaches. A famous horse runs at a race meeting, and the punters forget the dole queues to spend money no-one knew existed.

The gift of laughter and an ability to make music out of spoons and bones helped the Irish to survive the horrors of mining or ditch-digging in disease-ridden swamps. The obverse side of the medal is of course depression and alcohol and substance abuse.

But here, in the now, where I am on the Aran Islands the sunshine is causing the Irish to revert to tradition attitudes. Instead of going abroad for the sun they are flocking to the Aran Islands to enjoy its spectacular beaches and incredible cliffs. In place of Germans and Scandinavians I now meet clouds of cyclists who pay me the compliment of taking me for an Islander and addressing me in half-forgotten, school book Irish.

But for how long will the sun shine? The sportsmen enthral? The day of reckoning can not be postponed indefinitely. And the passing of the parcel will have to stop sometime.

No soft words

The government somehow managed to get the IMF to tone down its recent report on the Irish economy so that while stigmatizing Ireland for creating the most overheated economy in the developed world, at the same time it still managed to sound vaguely complimentary about how it was dealing with the consequential crisis.

However An Bord Snip contains no soft words. It is the day of reckoning. It contains the precise recommendations for slashing welfare and public service budgets which the government hopes will induce the international financial community to keep Ireland afloat.

Various drafts of its real or imagined contents have been well leaked. They range from cutting children’s allowances, reducing the number of Gardai, dropping some 10,000 superfluous civil servants off the State pay roll to removing certain appendages from members of the Cabinet (a particularly well-received rumor this last).

For some weeks now the publication of the Report’s contents has been expected almost daily. But what has been received instead have been circumlocutory official statements to the effect that: “It is expected that the Report will be presented to the Minister for Finance tomorrow.”

‘Riot Police’

So far tomorrow has not come and the statements about ministerial, presentations are being (correctly) interpreted as code for “Jaysus lads. If we publish that any savings we might make will go on paying riot police.”

This is not an entirely unreal forecast. Already the elderly have taken to the streets over the withdrawal of medical cards and at least one section of the trade union movement, the electricians union, has shown its willingness to disregard government urgings for restraint by serving strike notice, not over the now universal pay cuts, but for a wage increase.

The gardai and civil servants unions might well be expected to respond with demands for thousands of job cuts by exercising the nuclear option. Realistically speaking, a government which has already been ravaged in last month’s local government and European elections could be looking at near total extinction in any forthcoming general election.

And, fears for a general election apart, there is the looming question of the re-run of the Lisbon Treaty. It is generally accepted that a central factor in the electorate’s rejection of the last Lisbon Treaty referendum, which made Ireland the sore thumb of Europe, was anger at the government’s performance.

Sinn Fein

But there were other considerations such as fears about abortion being introduced to the Republic, the ending of the traditional policy of neutrality and the unlikely, and un-lovely, shared attack on the Treaty from the left-wing Sinn Fein and the right-wing Libertas party.

Since that referendum the Irish government has managed to secure remarkable concessions on the neutrality and other issues from the European Parliament. Moreover both Libertas and Sinn Fein suffered reverses in the recent European elections so there were strong grounds for supposing that in the Lisbon Treaty’s Second Coming, next autumn, the measure would succeed.

Ordinary common sense would appear to dictate that it would pass, if for no other reason than that there is a general realisation that the Republic of Ireland’s continuation as a sovereign State depends on the support of the European bank, but if An Bord Snip were to trigger a bloody-minded reaction on the lines of the electricians action then anything could happen.

And so the Awful and the Cheerful reign over Ireland at the moment. I’m afraid that as the summer fades into winter that rugby alone, or even the exploits of the great Kilkenny hurling team, will not sustain the national mood. But Davis’s words still hold true and after all the Irish spirit did survive the famine and the awful effects of building the canals through the dreadful, fever-infested swamps of New Orleans.

- First published 6th July 2009 at IrishCentral.com

The new celebrity politician of Ireland, George Lee, accurately summed up the implications of the rip tide that has run through the electoral triathlon, of which two legs have  been effectively decided.

In his victory speech, he said that the Government does not have a mandate to continue. The local government wipeout which seems to be in progress and the way the two by-elections to the Dail are going would certainly bear this out.

Nor are the early forecasts for the European Elections any more hopeful for the government. It’s too early to call these with certainty, but Fianna Fail could end up with no representative in the East (effectively with no one in Dublin), and Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou MacDonald could also struggle to retain her seat.

Both sides of the Irish Sea are swept these days with the prospect of electoral change, as England’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown could no doubt ruefully tell Ireland’s Brian Cowen.

But more soberly, what each leader could equally truly tell the other, is that electoral change could, very likely will, come without bringing major policy changes.

For the elephant in the Irish room the fact is, that to all intents and purposes, Dublin has ceded control of her economic affairs, no matter what new coalition of forces comes to power in the Dail, to the European Central Bank.  Whatever unpalatable medicine that institution chooses to dish out will have to be swallowed by us all.

Love affairs have to be paid for and Ireland’s fatal romance with the property developers has indeed proved a Liason Dangereuse.

The money for the dole and for bank bailouts has one thing in common – it has to be borrowed – and Brussels is the only place it can be borrowed from, that is if it can be borrowed at all.

A mini International Monetary Fund (IMF) regime of spending cuts and credit restrictions is already in place, and a much more stringent one, more closely resembling the full blooded IMF variety, is scheduled for the autumn budget no matter what government is in power.

However, despite the restrictions of the Brussels straight jacket, the Irish electorate have managed to make one important, independent statement.

It has said loudly and clearly that it is sick of greed, corruption, inefficiency and waste. In caning Fianna Fail as it has done, and may yet do further, it has issued a warning to the political class that some kinds of behavior can no longer be gotten away with.

The powerful Irish institutions of the Churches, the Banks and the body Politic are learning a new and threatening word, accountability.

There is a seeking of justice abroad; people want to see bankers in handcuffs for fraud, and clergy in jail for the horrors they inflicted on children in their care.

The electorate wishes to see decent people taken off dole queues to which they should never have been consigned by bankers and by developers’ greed and by political corruption.

All these goals may not seem important in Brussels, but they are also important to the people of Ireland, whose votes are being counted this weekend.

- First published 6th June 2009 at IrishCentral.com

Ireland is bracing itself for the Charge of The Right Brigade.

Right in the moral sense, as in wanting to severely chastise those who have done wrong, in this case the Fianna Fail government, at the polls next Friday.

But right also in the sense of the term Right Wing. Unquestionably the electorate are justified in feeling as they do under the first definition of right.

The tragedy lies in the fact that though it appears inevitable that the public will record a triple vote of no Confidence in the government in next Friday’s European, Local Government and parliamentary by-elections, thus leading to an equally inevitable General Election fairly shortly there after.

However, whatever combination of parties form the next government (presumably Fine Gael and Labour), it will have to continue with Fianna Fail’s present policies of Tax and Cut.

For the brutal reality of our present situation would appear to be that daily, the country currently spends some €50 million more on social services and the public service than it gets in revenue.

Unemployed

Daily also, the numbers of unemployed rise so that instead of being contributors to the exchequer these unfortunates become a drain on the public purse. So some belt tightening is obviously necessary.

But, at the same time, as dazedly, the long suffering Irish public gazes at the consequences of horrific job losses. People are forced to grapple with the nearly incomphrensible parallel reality that Fianna Fail is simultaneously spending billions on efforts to shore up banks whose directors’ reckless behaviour would appear in some cases to have been in breach of their legal fiduciary responsibilities.

Today’s electorate, their children and grandchildren are being committed to shouldering stratospheric debts in what is probably a vain attempt to shore up these irresponsible banks .

But these grim facts alone do not explain the depth of the public’s anger with Fianna Fail.

The public are well aware that there is an international crisis and that bank bail-outs are not confined. It was not better for either the country or the party that Fianna Fail endeavoured to make political supporters of builders and developers by inviting them into the infamous fund raising tent at Galway Races each year at so many thousand euro per scrotum.

The symbolism of the tent for the Irish public is that the unholy alliance of politicians, builders and developers pissed out on the rest of us by creating and maintaining an unsustainable property bubble which catastrophically worsened Ireland’s position in the face of the international financial tsunami.

The warnings of the few economists who spoke out were derided. Significantly, one of these commentators, RTE’s former Economics Editor, is now odds-on to defeat his Fianna Fail rival in one of the by-elections.

Corruption

Bertie Ahern, however, wondered out loud why people like Lee did not commit suicide. When the whiff of corruption forced Ahern himself him out of office, his departure took the form of a long goodbye of speeches and functions that went on for months, obscuring the growing threat of collapse in the building boom.

Brian Cowen, the Minister for Finance, whose ministry is supposed to prevent such collapses took office in a splurge of  congratulatory, down home celebrations in his native Offaly and throughout the rural GAA world he is most at home in.

This too went on for more months, contributing to the impression that all was well with the economy, unemployment was a thing of the past, Fianna Fail was in its heaven and all was right with the world. Who cared about talk of corruption, stroke-pulling, over-charging in pub, restaurant and supermarket? Everyone was making money.

Well, as the world knows, all was not well. The cranes fell lifeless across the country. The brutal, yellow earth-moving, landscape-defiling, building machinery, the tough-looking unshaven men in the day glow jackets, disappeared from the building sites. Half-completed apartments, boarded-up sites, bought at hugely inflated prices, be-spattered the land.

In the Dail, the bullying, hectoring style which Cowen had begun with in his opening jousts with the principal Opposition leader, Enda Kenny, gave way to a furtive, sweaty demeanor, which had all the inspirational leadership qualities of a rabbit caught in the glare of a head light.

Ineffective cost-cutting

His ineffectiveness and that of his colleagues was encapsulated for me one night last year, after the government ushered in its cost-cutting program by proposing to take back medical cards from the over-70s.

I suggested to my TD, Mary Hanafin, the Minister for Social Welfare, that this was not the best way to go about winning friends and influencing people. She rounded on me: “We’ve taken a 10 percent pay cut. What more can we do?”

A few days later a grey tide rolled through Dublin, culminating in mass meetings outside the Dail. The Government promptly restored most of the cards, but the crisis deepened and suddenly there were solicitors and architects in the dole queues. Parents with a negative equity mortgage lay awake at night wondering how they could keep their children in fee paying schools.

Hanafin is the archetypical example of what ineffectual Fianna Fail has become. Her father was the Fianna Fail Treasurer, a post not associated with penury, her late husband a very prominent earner at the Irish Bar. She has no children, a ministerial salary of some €200,000, a State car and driver.

But, and it is a very big but, middle class Dublin to whom she once appealed has suddenly entered the world of the dole queue. The chattering classes are still there. But it is their teeth which are chattering.

People are worrying about the situation erupting on to the streets. I would assess that danger as being remote—as yet. A great deal of anger will be defused if  the polls are borne out and Fianna Fail does get a monumental kick up the backside next Friday.

But that €50 million a day still has to be found .

All sorts of new taxes and and savage welfare cuts are forecast for the Government’s coming budget in October, the third in a year. But even if the government falls before then the Charge of the Right  Brigade will go ahead anyway, fuelled in part by a Reagan-Thatcherite anti-Union, anti-Welfare vein in Fine Gael.

‘Cut social welfare’

Licking his lips one former Fine Gael Minister commented to me recently: ”This can be got right if we have the balls. Make it worth while for them to work. Cut out this minimum wage nonsense and cut  the social welfare payments.”

What work? Where will the money come from to pay the new taxes?

And oh! What about those billions for the banks? Who’ll pay them?

These are the questions and others like them which are likely to be drowned out initially by the thunder of the Charge of the Right Brigade.

But if they are not answered with discernment and sensitivity, Ireland has a history of taking its politics on to the streets and behind  barricades not easily breached, even by a charge of the Right Brigade.

- First published 2nd June 2009 at IrishCentral.com

Modern scandals repeat mistakes of famine

This year’s National Famine Commemoration ceremony at Skibbereen was dignified, efficient, moving.

We stood under the Irish flag, beside a detachment from our own army as ambassadors from all over the world, accredited to a sovereign Irish Republic laid wreaths on the site of a mass grave wherein lie the remains of some 12,500 victims of An Gorta Mor, The Great Hunger.

The wreath-layers came from the US, the UK, Kenya, Latvia, China, Korea, Hungary, Iran, Canada, Australia, Russia and many other places. Both the cemetery itself and the high ring road above it were thronged . A healthy, well dressed crowd had come to pay its respects to the dead, to the wellsprings of our diaspora.

Around us May blossom, lush green grasses and the strong flowing River Ilen sparkled their approval at our reverence. It was a mood and a moment in which optimism soared free from sadness.

History whispered a comforting word in my ear: If we could travel through the famine to this moment of universal recognition we can pass through the far lesser trauma of the present economic crisis. But, as I listened to the speeches, admirably brief and felicitous as these were, another voice began to whisper uneasily at the back of my head:

“This is all too sanitised. The trauma is being filtered out.”

No word of how and why the famine happened. Not even a moral drawn. For example how might the lessons of Irish starvation in the midst of plenty be applied to the Third World to-day? There was of course no word of blame.

The political reason for this reticence was understandable. It is hoped that following next year’s National Commemoration ceremony in Mayo, that in 2011 there will be a Commemoration across the Border in the Six Counties. Many Unionists still see the Famine as simply another excuse for Fenians to hold yet another flag-waving parade, forgetting that death did not discriminate amongst Catholics and Protestants when starvation and fever descended on Ulster during An Gorta Mor..

Dublin decision-takers hope that the mere fact of holding even the most low-keyed ceremony north of the border will somehow advance reconciliation. Perhaps it will.

But I grow increasingly weary of denial. It was denial by the decision-takers that we were in an unsustainable property bubble that so horrifically compounded the effect on Ireland of the world credit crisis. It was denial by both Christ and Caesar that led to the Ryan Report on the sadism and sexual aberration which has made a sick joke of the term, “The Island of Saints and Scholars.”

And, as everyone now knows, it was denial of responsibility that led to the much-criticized deal whereby the Church sought to close the books on the scandal by forced the State to accept a mere 127 million euro for its share of liability whereas that of the State has since grown to 1.3 billion and climbing.

Commenting on the deal a well-known Dubliner, given to gallows humour commented: “They didn’t pay their whack.” Heartless, but, if ever there was a true word spoken in jest that was it. For what people do not generally realise is the fact that that the Church did not in fact hand over 127 million Euro.

The deal was in in three parts. In one, cash was apparently handed over, but how much one can not say with certainty. The second part of the deal consisted of a transfer of Church property to the State. But some of this property turned out to have legal complexities attached, consisting for example of lands left to the Church for specific purposes, the building of a school, perhaps a church or a hospital.

But the third part was the really malodorous component: Having beaten and buggered children entrusted to its care the Church now charged for the counseling services it provided for the rehabilitation of its victims. These services were solemnly included in the settlement as a payment.

We have not heard the end of this sorry saga. A little late in the day, public opinion, with the politicians trailing in its wake, is calling for a revisiting of this despicable settlement, concluded on its last day in power, on the eve of a general election, by an out-going Fianna Fail government.

However, whatever the outcome of the public’s outburst of indignation over Ryan, I’m afraid that I have to say there is probably worse to come. Of my knowledge, as they say, I am aware that a report into deviance amongst the clergy of the Dublin Archdiocese is nearing publication.

As an indication of its contents it may be told that when he received it, the reforming Archbishop Dermot Martin was so shocked by its contents, some of which had led to his being appointed in place of Cardinal Desmond Connell, that he called the priests of the Archdiocese together and told them that after reading it he felt like climbing into a bottle of whiskey. He warned his clergy that there must be no attempt at cover-ups, no defences, just sincere expressions of apology and of sorrow.

Archbishop Dermot is a man of Dublin, not of denial. Would that there were more like him in Ireland in the ranks of both Christ and Caesar. In subsequent columns I hope to show how the famine affected Irish psychology and how the power of the church, which the famine did so much to buttress, over reached itself to arrive at its present situation in Ireland.

- First published 24th May 2009 at IrishCentral.com