We can’t fix Ireland without working out what went wrong. It seems self-evident that, as of 1999, this was the best-placed country in the west. Economically, it was growing at unprecedented rates; politically, it was entering a period of peace, with stability now being threatened only in the south; and culturally, as Tim pat Coogan puts it;
“Culturally, almost every form of activity one chooses to look at is undergoing a period of growth and development. In poetry, prose, rock music, film , cuisine and sport, the republic is playing a role in the international stage out of all proportion to its size”(P 402“The troubles, 1996, Co: Rinehart). We'll look at many of these.
This post is about how to get back there. We first need to be clear about what went wrong. In “The new rulers of the world” John Pilger paints a picture of the carve-up of Indonesia prior to the 1960’s massacres. The argument here is that Ireland underwent a similar, “peaceful” carve-up.
We have some concrete evidence; wikileaks demonstrates that in 2004 Ireland’s finance minister boasted to the then US ambassador Kenny that management now controlled the universities (historically the role of faculty); we do know that Irish traditional music was claimed by a private company, who issued a license; we do know that IMRO (Ireland’s ASCAP/BMI ) had a chair involved in industrial-scale copyright theft of the musicians he was supposed to protect. Bang went the native tech and music industries respectively. Yet that is just the tip of the iceberg.
The players are the then “permanent” Fianna Fail (FF) government, free to enter coalition with anyone (left, right, green) to make up the numbers. Having retracted the claim on the whole island, they had to find another source of electoral/political capital. One method was simply to abandon elections; a very crude e-voting system was tried, and failed. Another was to actually beneficially own large parts of Ireland and other countries; FF cronies were the main beneficiaries of the banking bonds issue of 2005-2008 that brought down the sovereign.
Culturally, other players entered. Anglo-American music companies wanted to destroy the nascent music superpower, the British in particular have had a recidivist interest in ethnocide of the Irish. FF wanted to dominate this aspect of Irish culture. IMO there were two stages; FF first destroyed any independent artists and substituted their own; then they got (if briefly) wealthy and decided to launch creatures like Mumba on the Americans, beating the yanks at their own game while ignoring Irish roots completely. They indeed beat the yanks for the brief 2 months or so the borrowed money lasted.
Film was the same; all grant money was swallowed up by the dreadful “PS I love you”, “written” by the PM’s daughter. Prose? As luck would have it, Murdoch also made her a successful novelist……….the other daughter attempted a singing career.
Rock music;as TPC wrote we had the Corrs, Cranberries etc peaking. Then, as Dave Marsh and I have documented, U2 got carte blanche from the state to set up bogus “recording” and “distribution” companies to steal from the bands who would have been their competition. Now we have nothing part from U2, who are based in holland.
Sport is interesting. Hype aside, the now professional Irish rugby team has had World cup results identical to what it had in the amateur era in which TPC wrote. Club teams no longer put out 200 players to play competitive matches at weekends, as club resources have been sucked up by professionalism. Our soccer ranking has plummeted. In the 1990's we were a top-ranked women's squash nation; around the same time, under Matt Doyle, the tennis team did heroics. Investment in tennis is so poorly-targeted that Castleknock community put tp money for us to have a competitor in the 2014 US open. Granted, cuisine is improving in Ireland as elsewhere
It is worth noting also that law acquired a new role. Ideally, it redresses injustice in society; close to its worst, it becomes an instrument of repression. That is indeed the case in our (2014) contemporary Ireland, with horrendous legal costs and massive case backlogs. Yet the Irish added an extra twist; ignore the verdict. For example, in DCU vs Cahill, DCU made it clear they would sack Cahill again if the case went against them, So the law is used first as instrument, then as a delaying instrument. At this point, th continuity IRA are of higher moral ground than the Irish state in their claims on sovereignty.
None of this could have been done without a criminalization of the the Irish state bureaucracy. So overstaffed was this that many justifiably came to believe that their sole role was to commit crimes for their political masters; as they still do; but the people are rising. Others simply obstructed projects; here are a few examples
To repeat; Ireland is lumbered with bureaucrats, many of whom were put in place during the Ahern years to ensure compliance with ahern's desires. They had no skills relevant to their area. What they could do is destroy proposals coming from competent people; this bottom-up approach had been used successfully for building Ireland's native software industry and is described in Sean O Riain's book
The Irish state is losing its grip because established political parties are fronting for an order that no-one ever articulated as a political program. While claiming to get Ireland back on is feet, they perpetuate scams that cause mass emigration of the Irish; that destroy native talent in tech and music; and much else. The scams - and here I speak from experience - are often implemented through bureaucrats placed in key positions. the only qualification for their jobs these miscreants have is their willingness to commit crimes.
In a country with a brutally attenuated cultural history, these scum caused havoc. I name names; Paul Appleby, head of corporate "enforcement ", who, while delaying an inquiry into the banksters also attempted (and failed) to plead in US federal court that it has perfectly ok for Irish companies to trade after being dissolved. Ronnie Ryan, principal secretary of the department of education. The DPP's office is so clearly corrupt that all of them need to be thrown out.
So instead of our own google we have a bureaucrat in place at the IDA (Pat Howlin) who destroyed our link as equals with Stanford in 2006; we have, instead of the greatest music industry in the world, an ex- bureaucrat (P Lyons) who corruptly gave IMRO a monopoly and then joined the private sector; instead of being a dominant force in US radio, we have an ex-bureaucrat (Clare Duignan) who turned down an offer to franchise Irish programmes in the USA. In all cases, these proposals cost the taxpayers nothing and would have brought in $ millions; in all cases, the bureaucrats kept their jobs and pensions. There has to be a massive involuntary redundancy programme here and loss of pensions, starting with Neary, the “financial controller”
I want to outline how I see the way
things should develop in Ireland .For the record, I have spent as
much time in the “real world” (music and media) as universities
and have considerable skepticism about academic ideas. If what one
says cannot be understood by an intelligent layperson, forget it. My
two recent books on Ireland are of that nature; much of what I'm
about to write is in them
The first main point I would propose
is that the role of the state in Ireland needs to be cut back to
essential activities which it does well and thoroughly. This would in
practise result in many front-line civil servants (Gardai on the
beat, nurses, teachers) getting a pay increase and many quangoes
being abolished (SFI, and much else).
To reduce the role of the state also
allows a way out of the abortion/gay marriage dilemmas. Briefly,
simply to declare that the state does NOT have the right to take
life is very powerful; similarly, insisting that the state must in
its institutions and practices reflect centuries of community and
civil society practise puts the onus on those who would scramble to
find a single gay marriage community ritual in history (Nero comes
to mind; sin sceal eile). The same argument works for private
property; what was bizarre about NAMA was the clear infringement on
the constitutional protection of private property.
The state has no business in adult
people's bedrooms, as Pierre Trudeau famously said; it has proven
also incompetent in its “picking of winners” in sophisticated
areas like software. What we have instead is the grotesque SFI, which
followed the failed Medialab. Likewise, the unwitting Irish taxpayer
pays for weird projects in California like Deri (NUIG/Stanford), the
San Jose innovation center, and god knows what else.
What the state can do is very firm
corporate and criminal law enforcement. The Irish music business -
huge in the 1990's – was effectively ruined by Enterprise Ireland
hosting criminals at its international trade fairs who sold off the
work of the many independent artists then in Ireland for
bargain-basement sale at Walmart. Nobody got a penny apart from the
criminals, and the Gardai investigation was treated so
inappropriately at the DPP level that the Gardai chose to give us
many of the documents they had collected. We were then able to take
cases successfully in the UK and US. It turns out that B Ahern's
boyo, the chair of IMRO from 1998 (Shay Hennessy) was stealing
copyrights at an industrial scale.
We can confidently say that the Irish
music biz can be put back together; similarly, the software we did at
DCU before I was unfairly dismissed in 2002 is still ahead of
anything here (DCU has refused to give me access to it). The central
idea; return the state to an appropriate role and allow the energy
and initiative of the Irish do the rest. This transcends left/right
issues I hope you find what I have to say sympathetic
Seán Ó Nualláin Ph.D.8 u Nollag
