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!)