Una Mullally’s misplaced confidence in young political leadership

Nothing will change in this country if the same people run, the same people are elected, the same people make decisions on our behalf.

This is the opinion expressed by Una Mullally in today’s Irish Times. Unfortunately, the ‘our’ Ms. Mullally speaks of is the young people of Ireland.

In other words, she is writing about yet another interest group that is primarily concerned about their own particular needs.

In addition to the traditional complaints about third-level fees and accommodation Ms. Mullally suggests that young people should be given a quota for election candidates along the same lines as that already provided for woman candidates.

She writes of ‘rumblings’ from young people who have emigrated and occasional (revolutionary?) calls for votes from abroad.

She writes of ‘a simmering of sorts’ of political engagement that she hopes will start boiling.

She demands:

Our political system needs to take young politicised people seriously.

No it doesn’t. Our corrupt political system will ignore any group that fails to make a significant challenge to its activities.

And young people as a group, as a force for real change, as a stand alone, independent movement challenging the rotten status quo is, as far as I can see, non-existent.

Yes, there are plenty of young people involved in the Water Tax protests. In other words, involved in a genuine revolutionary challenge against what Mullally correctly describes as the male, white, middle-class, middle-aged, conservative demographic.

But what Ms. Mullally is really writing about is her unbounded admiration for what she believes is an emerging cadre of new, idealistic political leaders.

She quotes chairwoman of the Young Greens Lorna Bogue’s opinion of the political status quo.

I’m just kind of tired of middle-aged men pissing away my future all the time.

I couldn’t agree more but, unfortunately for any hopes of a new standard of political leadership, Ms. Bogue is in the wrong party. The Greens are led by Eamon Ryan, a middle-aged man whose party pissed all over young and old when in Government.

See here for Ryan’s cowardly/bizarre denial that his party supported Bertie Ahern when he was lying to the Tribunal.

See here for my recent open letter to Mr. Ryan regarding his party’s betrayal of Ireland and its people while in government.

So what should young people be doing?

Here’s a suggestion.

The amalgamation of every student union in the country to form a nucleus for the creation of a national young people’s revolutionary movement with the express intention of bringing down the corrupt, middle-class, conservative political system that has been pissing all over Irish citizens for decades.

Failing that I would invite Ms. Bogue to make a direct challenge to Eamon Ryan concerning the disgraceful behaviour of the Green Party while in power and demand that he apologise for the party’s betrayal of the people of Ireland.

Ansbacher: Alan Dukes and Mary Lou McDonald’s naming of names

Who is Alan Dukes referring to in this quote?

That particular intervention, in my view, was unprincipled, it was unscrupulous, it was despicable.

Is it the brutal terror group ISIS?

Is it the US policeman up on a murder charge for shooting a man in the back?

Or maybe he is referring to someone closer to home.

Perhaps Dukes is condemning the current Fine Gael led government for facilitating the bankers in their strategy of extracting every last cent from desperate mortgage holders.

No, none of these. This great pillar of the establishment was directing his outrage at Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald for her courageous attempts to expose the truth surrounding the very disturbing allegations emerging from the Ansbacher files.

And what McDonald is doing is courageous because she’s taking on some of the most powerful forces in this state. If even a fraction of the allegations made by the equally brave civil servant Gerard Ryan are true then we are looking at an appalling vista for some of the most influential and respected people in the land.

McDonald has claimed that her actions are in the public interest, I agree.

Dail privilege is specifically designed to allow politicians expose suspected wrongdoing in the public interest without fear of court action. It is a particularly powerful weapon in exposing attempted cover-ups by powerful political and/or state agencies.

Village Magazine published a redacted copy of Gerard Ryan’s report in its December/January 2014 issue that, in my opinion, clearly supports Mary Lou McDonald’s claim that she was acting in the public interest when she named names under Dail privilege.

This is just one extract from what can only be described as an explosive report. The series of full stops indicates a redacted section. The extract begins with a quote from the editor of Village Magazine.

In the following pages Village publishes the Ansbacher dossier which ‘Authorised Officer’ Gerard Ryan has been attempting to submit to the Public Accounts Committee. We print it because it seems to us there has been a whitewash to prevent investigation of its mostly tightly documented allegations of widespread offshore untaxed bank accounts being held by the political ascendancy.

Authorised Officer Gerard Ryan.

Following the change of government in 2011 I made two unsuccessful requests for a meeting with Minister Richard Bruton TD to discuss these matters. Subsequently I wrote to Minister Bruton, and later to Attorney General Maire Whelan S.C. enclosing a briefing note dealing with the above matters. I have never received a response to either letter.

I also spent a significant period of time preparing a witness statement at the request of the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation (the GBFI) in connection with the matters referred to above. I completed that statement and submitted it to Minister Bruton on 3 December 2012. Notwithstanding that this witness statement was requested by the GBFI to assist that agency in possible prosecutions arising from the matters uncovered by my investigations, Minister Bruton has, to the best of my knowledge, failed to forward the witness statement to the GBFI at any time in the period of almost 2 years since I submitted it to him.

As a consequence of the above, and in particular of the termination of incomplete investigations of evidence of significant……….followed by failure of various Ministers and agencies of the State to take any effective action to pursue these matters, the public interest in the collection of tax lawfully due and in the investigation and prosecution of Revenue offences has been ignored. It is also clear that the public interest in the disclosure of the matters referred to above has also been ignored.

Religious discrimination enshrined in Irish law

Letter in today’s Irish Times

School admissions and religion

Sir,

The School Admission Bill 2015 says that a school cannot discriminate against student admission based on their religion or their “having no faith”.

However it then gives an exemption: “a school . . . does not discriminate where it admits a person of a particular religious denomination in preference to others or where it refuses to admit a person who is not of that denomination, where it is proved that refusal is essential to maintain the ethos of the school”.

So discrimination based on the “ethos”, ie controlling religion for 98 per cent of the primary schools, is not discrimination based on religion, according to the Bill.

It seems that words can mean whatever the Government wants them to mean, after all. But ask any parent or child sent to the back of the line because they don’t meet the religious “ethos” of the school and they will tell you that it looks like discrimination, feels like discrimination and smells like discrimination – based on religion.

Yours, etc,
Andrew Doyle
Bandon,
Co Cork.

All I can say is Permanent TSB my arse’

All I can say is Permanent TSB my arse’

This was the comment from shareholder Breeda O’Byrne at the Permanent TSB AGM today.

Another customer/victim of TSB, Sarah Hogan said:

Banking for life, we are with you every step of the way.

That’s what your website proclaims. And you most certainly are, Sir. You are bleeding us dry.

Ms. Hogan demanded immediate action surrounding the manner in which the bank was treating its customers/victims.

She has no hope. This is the reality.

There has been numerous such AGMs since 2008 and the script is always the same. Customers vent their anger, the bank managers waffle back insults, the government abandons the people and gives full, unqualified support to the bankers.

This AGM is no different.

The bankers will only stop robbing their customers when the politicians insists that they do so. The politicians will only act to stop the thievng bankers when enough people forcibly demand action.

Until then, the bankers and their political puppets will sit back and sneer at the ineffective/powerless ranting of desperate people.

Joan Burton’s new watchdog

The chief warden at the State’s watchdog compound was not happy to hear the news, so he rang Tanaiste Joan Burton to vent his anger.

Tanaiste; is it true, is the Government giving birth to yet another watchdog?

Now, now chief, calm down. It’s only a temporary measure; as soon as the election is over we’ll have the new arrival put to sleep.

But Tanaiste, we’re already overrun with watchdogs, they’re everywhere and, as you well know, none of them actually watch anything.

Yes, I’m aware of that chief but they do give the impression that there’s regulation and, as you well know, that’s all that matters to politicians.

What about the biggest, most expensive watchdog of them all, the Financial Regulator? Surely it’s his job to watch the banks, surely you should set him on the banks to make sure they treat those in mortgage difficulties with fairness?

Ah bless your innocence chief. This has nothing to do with fairness for ordinary people in trouble with their mortgages. No, this is about protecting the banks, to give them every opportunity to extract every last penny from the peasants.

But…but…Michael Noonan was here just the other day talking to the watchdog about the mortgage crisis and I heard the Taoiseach call on the banks to be nice to those people desperately looking for help.

Now chief, I’m beginning to lose patience with your naivety. My colleagues Michael and Enda weren’t actually demanding action, perish the thought. No, like myself, they were giving the impression of action, a completely different breed of animal, so to speak.

What about the cost Tanaiste? Every watchdog in this compound costs a fortune to maintain, a board, expenses, bonuses, the lot.

As I’ve already said chief, when the election is over we’ll quietly put this watchdog to sleep and continue with our policy of protecting the interests of the banks.

By the way chief, are you calling me on a smart phone?

Yes.

Tell me, where did you get the money for such an expensive item…?

Marian Finucane and ‘ordinary decent wars’

Marian Finucane was not happy with the comment by Gerry Adams that people are ‘disappeared’ in every war.

Not all wars have disappeared. I remember the outcry across the world over Pinochet and Chile and the disappeared. Somehow or another that’s not kind of standard in your ordinary decent war.

This is the kind of ignorance that’s going to escalate as we approach the climax of the 1916/100 commemorations.

It seems that Ms. Finucane happily operates under the delusion that there is such a thing as an ‘ordinary decent war’ and that the participants in these ‘decent’ wars would be outraged at the idea that anybody would be ‘disappeared’.

Stuffed into ovens in millions, yes. Wiped out in mass bombings of cities, yes. Cut down in swathes by machine gun fire and artillery, yes. Systematically cut to pieces for practicing the wrong religion, yes.

But abducted and ‘disappeared’, no, nobody could be that evil – except Sinn Fein/IRA.

Ms Finucane, apparently, can think of only two conflicts, Chile and Northern Ireland, where people were disappeared.

She’s seems to be blissfully unaware the people are disappeared in every war. I would be genuinely astonished to learn of a war in which people were not abducted, murdered and ‘disappeared’.

RTE management really should insist that if a presenter is going to comment on current affairs/history they should possess at least a smidgeon of knowledge on the subject.

Or could it be that Ms. Finucane has so bought into the establishment’s anti Sinn Fein propaganda campaign that she now believes, without question, that acts of war committed by the IRA are, somehow, more gruesome, more reprehensible than any other act of war ever committed throughout history?

Yes, I think that’s nearer the truth.

Copy to:
Marian Finucane

Gerry Adams: Speaking the truth about war

How do you orphan ten children, what kind of depravity is that?

This was the question put to Gerry Adams by 60 Minutes presenter Scott Pelley while questioning Adams about the murder of Jean McConville by the Provisional IRA in 1972.

Adams truthfully and accurately replied:

That is what happens in wars.

We only have to take a brief look at Mr. Pelley’s own country to see the truth of that. Thousands of civilians killed (murdered?) by ‘depraved’ drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Countless thousands ‘murdered’ by ‘depraved’ American citizens in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and most other places of American military involvement.

Here’s just one example of the aftermath of a (depraved?) drone strike.

As later reports revealed, the strike was far from a success. At least nine civilians died, most of them from one family. There was one survivor, 14-year-old Fahim Qureshi, but with horrific injuries including shrapnel wounds in his stomach, a fractured skull and a lost eye, he was as much a victim as his dead relatives.

At the moment Mr. Pelley was asking Mr. Adams about depravity in conflict his country had numerous armed drones on mission to kill selected targets, in his name, with the likely consequences for innocent civilians.

And in case I’m sounding anti American let me stress that every war is the same, the citizens of every country behave in the same manner in time of war. War is a depraved human activity. No human, no country has a high moral ground from which they can look down in purity and judge others.

What humans should do is acknowledge the reality of their brutal nature and work towards bringing it under control.

Irish cowboy town and fake regulatory agencies

It’s not often a minister for justice makes me laugh but the latest comment on police reform from Frances Fitzgerald had me in stitches.

Making excuses for her complete failure to establish a police authority the minister said that, in the meantime;

A kind of shadow board would be set up.

Ok, let me first state an absolute fact. This government will not set up a police authority. The next government; if it is spawned from the same corrupt political/administrative culture, will not set up a police authority.

The reason is simple; the establishment of a genuinely independent police authority would end the corrupt nexus between the body politic and the police force. That corrupt nexus has served the interests of politicians, their friends in the Golden Circle and senior police officers since the foundation of the state; it will remain firmly in place for so long as that culture exists.

What we will see is the establishment of a fake police authority, an authority that from the outside looks and acts as if it’s the real thing but, in reality, is a fraud.

The setting up of fake regulatory agencies is the single greatest achievement of our corrupt political system. These fake authorities are so successful that they have not only fooled ordinary citizens, they have fooled the media, the international community and even many of the politicians who established them in the first place.

The system can best be understood by comparing it to those fake Hollywood wild west towns built to make cowboy movies.

Walking down the main street everything looks real so long as nobody actually believes there’s anything of substance behind the facades.

So, for example, when a citizen opens the door marked ‘Financial Regulator’ they find themselves in a wilderness populated by drifting tumbleweeds, each one with a tag reading – secrecy laws forbids the answering of any questions.

When the door marked ‘Standards in Public Office’ is opened citizens are met by an official endlessly chanting – Political accountability? No, never heard of it. We just dig holes in the sand and fill them in again.

When the Troika arrived they already knew there was something odd about the way things were done in this town so they opened more doors than usual.

Inside the austere and impressive door to the legal system, for example, they found mountains of stolen loot surrounded by hundreds of partying solicitors and barristers. Clear out this den of iniquity they instructed the government, we’ll be back to check on it.

When they returned a year later they failed to notice that the apparent reform activity was an act performed by actors hired for the day from a nearby spaghetti western movie set. The drunken party was (and still is) continuing just over the hill.

Down at the end of the town there’s a brand new, freshly painted building with the title, Charity Regulator. Inside there’s a large office with an impressive array of filing cabinets, desks and stern looking officials.

On closer inspection however, the files are just blank paper, the desks are made of balsa wood and the officials are shop mannequins.

So what, at first glance, looks like a real regulator turns out to be nothing more than the usual cynical exercise in deception.

Because it’s new, no citizen has yet been damaged by this latest fake regulator but, in time, thousands will suffer just as countless thousands have suffered when, in desperation and trust, they opened the doors of other so-called regulators only to find themselves slowly strangled to death in an arid desert of ruthless, self-serving bureaucracy and political corruption.

Copy to:
Frances Fitzgerald

An open letter to the leader of the Green Party Eamon Ryan

We must get people re-engaged in politics.

These are the words of Green Party leader Eamon Ryan.

Here’s my reply:

Dear Mr. Ryan,

It is highly unlikely that you will understand never mind actually act on what I’m about to say. This is because, in common with most of your political colleagues, you live in a political bubble of delusion.

Created over many decades of corruption, arrogance and incompetence this bubble of delusion causes a complete blindness to what citizens are desperately looking for from the body politic/State.

What they are looking for is very simple – a political/administrative system they can trust.

But they never get what they want because the political/administrative system is corrupt beyond reform.

This is not to say that every politician/political party is corrupt. It is to say, however, that every politician/political party operates within a corrupt system particularly when wielding political power.

Every politician who enters the gates of Leinster House must make a decision, consciously or subconsciously – to challenge corruption or go along with the rotten system that has blighted the body politic for decades.

To date, most politicians have gone along with the system and by so doing have betrayed the people’s trust. The very few who challenge the system, like Roisin Shortall, are immediately and ruthlessly ejected from the club.

The system will not tolerate a threat from its most dangerous enemy – a politician with principles.

A brief look at recent political history over the last three decades proves the point.

The people trusted the Progressive Democrats because they promised accountability and reform in response to corruption within Fianna Fail.
Ultimately, the PDs betrayed the people when they abandoned their integrity and principles in exchange for power and influence.

The people rejected the PDs for their betrayal.

Dick Spring gained the trust of the people in the run up to the 1992 election on the basis that he would deal with what he called the cancer of political corruption that was doing so much damage to Ireland and its people. He immediately betrayed that trust when he went into coalition with the very cancer he had just condemned.

The people rejected Dick Spring for his betrayal.

In opposition, the Green Party gained the trust of the people by promising to reform politics, to challenge corruption. Once in power however, the party abandoned the responsibilities of power/government and instead focused entirely on getting its own green agenda enacted. The party looked the other way as political corruption continued to wreak havoc on the lives of Irish citizens.

Here’s John Gormley in response to political corruption:

We’re not the moral watchdog of any political party…we look after our probity and our standards…we cannot be responsible for events that took place before our entry into government.

The people rejected the Green Party for its betrayal.

The Labour Party (again) and Fine Gael gained the trust, of a by now desperate people, in the run up to the 2011 election by promising to take immediate action to counter political corruption, by promising to urgently introduce the political reform the people have been desperately seeking for more than thirty years. But once again the body politic betrayed the people.

The people will reject this government for its betrayal.

But, on this occasion, there is a difference in the people’s response. They have finally rejected the system itself that has betrayed them. Our country is now in a transition period that will ultimately see the end of the old regime and the beginning of a new type of politics.

Recent polls have clearly demonstrated that the people have lost all faith in the political system as currently constituted. This fact is most clearly seen in the form of hundreds of thousands of citizens on the streets in protest against oppressive taxes. These people are not on the streets primarily to protest against taxes, they are, effectively, in rebellion against the political/administrative system that has betrayed them for decades.

Your comment that the people must re-engage with politics is symptomatic of a political mindset that is in the process of passing into history. I would invite you to wake up and look around you.

A significant percentage of the people are in open rebellion against the political system that you represent, they have taken to the streets in rebellion, they have begun voting in their droves for Sinn Fein and independents for just one principal reason – they no longer trust you, your party or the political system that you represent.

Not since 1916 have the Irish people been so politically energised, not since 1916 have the people been so radically politicised, not since 1916 has the ruling power been so blind to what’s been happening on the streets and in the minds of the people.

Not since 1916 has the governing power been so disengaged from politics and the people.

Yours sincerely
Anthony Sheridan

Copy to:
Eamon Ryan