Re-imagining Ireland, re-engineering Ireland

Every decade or so, the Irish state puts on a show of what French call “L'Imaginaire”; the myths and cultural ethos of the country. Our Victorian-era predecessors made such a good job of imagining the culture of a sovereign Ireland that their struggles with themselves achieved worldwide resonance. Books like Kiberd's cut-and-pasted book of essays packaged as “re-inventing Ireland” are little more than a report of the impassioned mental gymnastics of Joyce, Wilde, , Yeats and (more interestingly) ascendancy writers like Elizabeth Bowen Even in the 21^st century, Irish studies has essentially focused on re-rehearsing these issues.

The results have included an abhorrent intellectual vacuum as Ireland was comprehensively re-engineered. My two books on the subject frame this rude transition as an incomplete coup; absent a popular government, the state is now too weak to complete it. America was very involved as it sought a Trojan horse in the EU.  see the 61k+ records in

 https://search.wikileaks.org/advanced?q=+ireland&exclude_words=&words_title_only=&words_content_only=&sort=0#results

These  rarely feature  the mysterious Bertie Ahern, whose meetings with the Americans may have taken place in camera-  or at least in Drumcondra. Let us not forget that he had Thursdays off and used to bring a file of reports from the principal secretaries of every govt dept home to Drumcondra  - to whom? About this more anon; there are uncontroversial reforms we can propose.

In the first place, much of what passes for state policy in Ireland is flagrantly criminal. Ethnic and other independent musicians still do not get paid and their royalties go to criminals; the universities reserve their right to seize personal possessions and intimidate students; companies favored by the establishment are allowed to trade post-dissolution and continue to steal; penalty points are vitiated for those on whom the state's favor rests. All this can be halted with a new political party

This is GIFIC (“good” old-fashioned Irish corruption), the result of two Tweedle parties alternating in power using Labor as a shared catamite. Since the 1990's, and probably due to the unhealthy American interest in Ireland, experiments were done concerning how to give private companies the imperviousness to prosecution normally enjoyed by the state (eg IMRO) and how to give state bodies discretion to act outside the law as private companies (DCU). The reductio ad absurdum of this, of course, is Irish Water. True god and true man, both wave and particle, it is represented within Ireland as a state organization, and externally as private when bonds have to be issued. The current government is about to disintegrate because of this absurdity.

The unhealthy American interest in Ireland, resulted – in chronological order – in a 1998 “agreement”, promulgated as a set of unilateral impositions on Ireland, that gave up ALL of Ireland's territory, a 2010  insistence by Tim Geithner in the face of opposition by the IMF that Ireland should repay ALL bondholders, industrial – scale theft of passports and refusal of recognition to Irish diplomats at the US embassy in Dublin and Obama' s periodic rants against his “ancestors”. The country was to be de-recognized and reduced to beggarly status.

The current institutional set-up in Ireland is described elsewhere in this blog; corporatist-style fusion of state, business and unions and yet no binding labor court, nor any protection from summary dismissal; massive mafia law firms training those in power to break the law; an incessant drone that the Irish are to become an ethnic minority in Ireland; and so on.

What then can be done? Well, Scotland showed us the way; a low-population high-resource country will win the 21^st century. Of course the Scots baulked; had they not, they could have invited Snowden and Assange; revealed America's gargantuan  software companies as the garbage they are, ready to be taken down by a single smart country; and used the internet to remove the myriad parasites in modern bureaucracies blocking the progress of humanity. 

Now the Scots have chickened out, it's up to us to lead the way, as we did in the time of Joyce and the other greats. anyone who thinks we have any sovereignty left should take a look at this;

The Brits, stupid!

 Seán Ó Nualláin  28 u Samhain  2014(buy-nothing day!)

Saints and Scholars; a new, putrid garden of remembrance for Ireland's neoliberal martyrs?

Readers of this blog may not know that the Irish and British/NI states granted formal recognition to each other only through the good Friday agreement of 1998. Up to then both had claimed the NE corner of Ireland as part of the national territory. Let us note that, in the resource-starved century we live, France has held on to its colonial claims which comprise 97% of its national territory.

A dashed convenient deal for the Brits, that 1998 business; Ireland surrendered ALL its national territory, defining the nation instead solely in terms of people born there. About 1,4 million people ratified this recission in a referendum. Then, in a further referendum in 2004, about 1.4 million people decided this was not such a good idea after all, and the 1998 agreement is now surely null and void in its territorial retraction.

In 2011, in earshot of riots nearby, the Queen laid a wreath to the heroes of Irish independence at the garden of remembrance in Dublin's Parnell Square. 100 meters away, the statue of Parnell proudly proclaimed that no-one has the right to set bounds on the march of a nation. Behind the queen, representing the Irish state, were two non-Irish people; “President” Macaleese, who true to her petit-bourgeois Belfast origins learned Spanish, rather than Irish at school; and the truly sinister then Minister for Defence (and Justice!) Alan Shatter.

In the latter's brief and corrupt tenure, Shatter declaimed the Irish for nor participating in WW2; swore in tens of thousands of immigrants as Irish “citizens”; and repeatedly interfered with the legal system until he was caught and forced to resign. Here is the truth; WW2 was not our business as a state; many Irish fought heroically for the allies, and well over 50% of all congressional medals of honour have been won by Irish-Americans with over 10% going to men BORN in Ireland. In particular, both of Shatter's parents were English Jews; as Louise London has documented, the scale of the Shoah was due precisely to English Jews refusing to admit their continental co-religionionists;

http://www.amazon.com/Whitehall-Jews-1933-1948-Immigration-Holocaust/dp/0521534496/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416243428&sr=1-1

Now to the matter at hand; we have no evidence that either Enda Kenny. Joan Burton or Michael Noonan have enriched themselves illegally. (It is possible that all have secretly squiirelled away millions ) All are retirement age; none have anything greater than the most minimal undergraduate education. Currently, their well-being is at risk when they venture out in public. For foreign readers, I must point out that, until the Ahern years, one spoke to the Irish PM as person to person in true republican mode at public events,

Noonan and Kenny boast of Ireland's recovery, evidenced by low bond yields; they neglect to mention that serial defaulter Argentina has had the most successful stock market in the world in 2014. Bad girl Iceland, whose refusal to pay back even deposit holders in Icesave provoked British use of terrorist laws and threats of gunboats ( a la the 19^th century remedy for bond default) recovered superbly. The bank bail-out has cost Ireland fully 60 times more per person than it did Britain

There is something of the ancient Irish monks going on Imram in Kenny and Noonan; indeed, finding Ireland too cosy, these monks went to Iceland. I suggest a new corner of the garden of remembrance for these heroes of the new world order, one in which a la Rupert Brooke and Katherine Mansfiled, they will have Brussels/DC pockmarked on their hearts in a country which does  not have a territory. If, entering government in 2016 at latest, sinn fein have not learned from them, we may need a whole new garden

Seán Ó Nualláin  17u samhain  2014


Again, my books on Ireland are at;

scams unveiled

and

http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-A-Colony-Once-Again/dp/1443840858

PS (18 Samhain) This government  has until the end of this week - 22 Nov 2014 - to announce a complete cancellation of installation of meters for water charges in order to avoid complete collapse of the state's control. Otherwise, it can keep the state going with army help for up to a year before there is complete breakdown. My guess is that they see the danger. In either case, it's the end of Kenny, who does not represent any sector of the society

(3 days later) Right on schedule

 The gun returns to Irish politics

PPS The re-engineering of Ireland to exemplify neoliberalism involved what was in effect a  shadow constitution and a dark "deep"  state. The "shocks" through which many were expropriated were implemented initially by use of law as instrument (a la the water charges); when found illegal, the process still continued, which is why I term it a "shadow constitution". We Irish had always prided ourselves, rightly or wrongly, on the notion that our own ability and the strength of community and civil society in Ireland meant that we could do more with less and compete with other countries. What the new dispensation brought was gargantuan structures (like SFI) which were painstaking imitations of those elsewhere and an evisceration of community and civil society.

Ireland's Fortinbras; Gerry Adams, two-term Taoiseach and Nobel Laureate?

The truth of Hamlet is that the Prince loves to act decisively; he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildesnstern, and kills Polonious. It is only when it comes to continuing a cycle of regicide as power politics that he baulks. Something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark and the tragedy of Hamlet is that he has to allow these forces play themselves out in his psyche rather than realize them externally to himself, as he should have been allowed to do. Eventually, Fortinbras junior of Norway (whose Dad had lost to Hamlet senior) steps into the grand guignol and sweeps away the ancien regime without a battle. At no point did the court engage with the pressure he represented, preferring to indulge in regicide, incest and petty viciousness.

The recent Irish water debacle, a debacle that has turned out to be the final straw for our two-party system, exemplifies how Ireland resembles Shakespeare's Denmark. Irish community and civil society structures have been historically strong and its people are very resourceful and resilient. Put a jack hammer and plastic pipes in a pile and Irishmen will self-organize to raise funds (raffles! Dinner dances!)' and take extreme physical risks to get the system going. Put the same men of a committee a la Irish water and they will embezzle everything before jackhammer meets tarmac. The bureaucratization rampant in the neoliberal world order brings out the worst in the Irish; boards overseeing boards, paying themselves extravagantly with nothing ever getting done.

Rather brilliantly put here;

video on the scam

Gerry Adams realized the vacuity of 26-county politics during the 2002 general election campaign. As he put it, it seemed to be about which leader was the better craic (fun) rather than any serious issues. This is one way of curtailing debate, as he later realized Conversely, he was expected to roll over and die when he was tried by media for the deaths of Jean McConville and the rape of Mairia Cahill. The problem for the Free state establishment is that these charges have not managed to stick in a court of law; indeed, Mairia refused to give evidence against Seamas Finucane et al having herself made the complaint against them and the prosecutions failed. The Free state establishment has now played its last card aginst Adams as leader.

The result is that Adams is now a racing certainty to be the next Irish Taoiseach. (For the record, I predicted in a broadcast I did on Dublin's Anna Livia radio in 2001 this would happen.) But who is he? What does he believe? What will he do? Apart from the fact that the NI statelet will not exist a day longer than he wants it to, once he is installed as Taoiseach we do not know. We can be sure of his republican credentials because he has manged to keep a lot of the hardliners around him

Or can we? In march 2012, Mitch Riess – a huge admirer of Adams, whom he regards as a great peacemaker – said that the Brits had kept Adams alive to deliver the current settlement. Conversely, they handed files to loyalist terrorists to kill Adams' rivals. Faced with threats to his intellectual authority – most famously by women like Bernadette Devlin – Adams has behaved viciously.

Adams has almost certainly been involved in attempted coup (the IRA recognized neither government/state/statelet in Ireland), torture (the informer and torturer Scappaticci was a close associate), summary executions (Jean McConville), and extortion. Quite a list; yet after Blair, GW Bush, Putin, and indeed Obama, this list is beginning to look like a sine qua non of qualification for being a 21ste century leadfer.

The most likely scenario is indeed the Fortinbras one – Adams is about to exploit a power vacuum. He has been at times Marxist revolutionary, the father of the modern car-bomb through the Ballymurphy IRA, and man of peace. He is an Irish nationalist who cannot speak Irish, an intellectual whose prolix books betray a serious inability to handle abstract thought, and the author of the compromise that will bring about a United Ireland. Moreover, he is aware that Scotland is ready for more ferment as the UK disintegrates

We can take it that Sinn Fein have learned the dark arts of bureaucracy; they are as likely to see their mission as uniting the “republic” with the northern statelet they have learned to administer with the careful coaching of the Brits. The sad thing is that we southern Hamlets will again have to let it happen

 Seán Ó Nualláin  9u samhain  2014


Again, my books on Ireland are at;

scams unveiled

and

http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-A-Colony-Once-Again/dp/1443840858