Fixing Ireland

Fixing Ireland

This document starts with a set of solutions relevant to Ireland in the 2020’s. It is important to remember that many of us who fixed Ireland a generation ago are still active, know what’s wrong, and know how to fix it. Here are some solutions;

-          In keeping with standard practice, renounce the odious part of our 230 billion Euro debt. Much of this was imposed in a process denounced by the ECJ as unfair and unjust, and to solve short term issues raised by Timothy Geithner;

-          The quid pro quo for the European Union will be subjecting GAFAM and other silicon Valley “Irish” companies to normal tax regimes. If they leave as a result, so be it as we are great software engineers and our talents have been suppressed;

-          Bringing the universities under statutory control, which they have avoided since 2002;

-          Restructuring Irish science away from the SFI model, which was the result of interference by CIA/In-q-tel operative Anita Jones, a former SFI board member, and has resulted in Ireland – at great expense to the taxpayer- slipping in the international rankings;

-          Asserting classic common law ownership, preventing privatized profit and socialized risk as exemplified by NAMA;

-          Reinstating the  copyright wing of the Gardai, scrapped after a peculiar decision by the DPP in 2003;

-          Making a realistic territorial claim, reflecting the preponderance outside the extreme north-East corner of citizens wishing to remain in the EU;

-          Energetically promoting Irish tech and art, with our creators buttressed by an aggressive copyright regime;

-          The cliché of “joined up government” is appropriate to rectify the current situation whereby often junior bureaucrats make unilateral decisions without consultation. The HEA official who placed the universities outside statutory control in 2002 is an example; the RTE bureaucrat who later apologized for an insane decision that prevented Irish radio breaking through in the US is another’

-          What is ultimately a poll tax should be discontinued, and the money can be regained by discontinuing the Apple appeal, inter alia;

-          While our teachers, nurses and others in the front line should be rewarded, much of the bureaucracy is wasteful and early retirement should be encouraged for those wasting their lives in these jobs;

-          Market mechanisms should consistently be applied. For example, many young people would have been able to afford to buy houses and start families had the state not illegally intervened in the housing market in 2013, often in a manner that benefitted Wall St at the expense of the Irish;

-          With respect to the environment, there is a strong case for asserting our rights on all offshore oil, the better to keep it in the ocean;

-          Ireland is full of civil rights black holes; all of which need to be filled in. Abandon hope ye who enter mental hospitals, or indeed the preclearance area in Dublin airport

-          A return to normal representative democracy; no supply and confidence,  a return to normal unions independent of the state, no citizens’ assembly etc

What went wrong?

For a decade following the mid-90’s, Ireland was culturally and  economically the most promising country in the world. It is important to remember that the current imbroglio is due to incompetent and often criminal behaviour by those in political power.  Moreover, much of this story simply has not been told.

It comes as a shock to many to find that the Good Friday agreement rescinds all land claims by the Irish state, including that on the 26 counties. Yet that was known at the time, and featured in Dáil debates and op ed IT pieces. Shocking too is the fact that Irish traditional music was privatized in 1998 and  is owned by a Murdoch-related organization. SFI is a classic CIA operation, and when the chief science officer complained about its foci being identical to In-q-tel, the government suddenly remembered he did not have a real Ph.D. and forced him out.

The independent music scene was destroyed by an illegal deal made at the Enterprise Ireland trade stand in 1998. The proceeds from that deal could have seen the dozens of musicians involved safe through life. Instead, the state asserted criminals’ freedom to trade with dissolved companies and claim ownership at random, a process that ended with a federal court case in the USA in 2010  after the Irish system failed. By then, of course, the world had changed, and the role of the Irish state in trivializing art by colluding in its being objectified as “content” to be purveyed by GAFAM with little benefit to is creators needs scrutiny.

Everything about the financial crash suggests that the government at the time had agreed beforehand with the holders of junior bonds that they would be made whole, a first in world history as private junior debt was transferred to the sovereign, The founders of Stripe, the Collison brothers, were turned down by enterprise Ireland. The IDA first accepted and then rejected for no reason, a Stanford/Intel/HEA proposal for Ennis approved also by Clare Co, council.

The project to privatize the state universities, another first in world history, resulted in the taxpayer losing millions, then billions, as academics were illegally dismissed by the colleges, and won a series of court cases that are the definition of Pyrrhic victories. E-voting was an attempted coup; rendition planes landed in Shannon. And so on.

We did not meet a wall; we progressed into disaster, with the additional suicides caused by the crash close to equaling the death toll of the Troubles. The scale of the engineering for failure precipitating the social, financial and artistic collapse suggests an underlying  malign dynamic resembling a colonial process. All that is another day and another debate; for the moment let us focus on implementing solutions.