ICIS - the International Congress of Irish Studies

The International Congress of Irish Studies was established to provide an alternative to state/neoliberal narratives of 21^st century Ireland. As a result, it does not accept direct state or corporate donations and funds itself through personal (ie non-corporate!) donations and conference registrations.

So far it has run two successful conferences, one at UC Berkeley and one in Dublin (ICIS 1 and 2)

ICIS 1

See http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/ihouse.html?event_ID=55681

The proceedings were published as

http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-Crisis-Analyses-Proposed-Solutions/dp/1443849650

Tues 10 July

8-30 to 9am Registration and Coffee/Tea

9 am Welcome and introductory comments by Sean O Nuallain (conference chair), and Peter Glazer for UC Berkeley

9-15 am to 10-45 Am First panel on theater; Peter Glazer (Session chair), Jackie Fulmer, Virginia Morris with response by Melanie O'Reilly

10-45 am Tea/Coffee break

11 am to 1pm Joyce presentations – invited papers by

Diarmuid Curraoin (Sandford Park) "Metaphysics and Myth in Joyce"
Jackie Fulmer (UC Berkeley - session chair) “Dilly Dedalus: Tomorrow's Girl and Next World Feminism “

Lunch

Submitted papers
2pm to 2-45 pm Seamus Brennan (UCC) (session chair) ; Milesians, Surnames and YDNA; Irish Identity in the Internet Age

2-45 pm to 3-30 pm Seamus Cain " A New Wave of INNOVATIVE writers and poets, in
Ireland and within the Irish diaspora"

Tea/Coffee break

3-45 pm to 5-30pm The destruction of academic freedom in Ireland; Stephen Myers Watt (session chair), Ignacio Chapela, Sean  O Nuallain

5-30pm Break

6 pm; Maurice Fitzpatrick introduces and shows  his film "The boys of St Columb's" with Q+A afterward

Wed 11 July

8am to 9-30 am
The technology and economy session (Chair Dr Sean O Nuallain)

8 am to 9am

 Presentations via Skype by those in Europe

This includes Harry McGee (8-9am) introduced by Sean O Nuallain
 9 am  "Unethical behavior and the rise and fall of Ireland’s Economy".
Author: Rick Revoir, EdD, MBA, CPA

Revisionism and Race  (Chair Catherine Eagan)

(9-30 am)Micheal o hAodha on Ireland's travelers (an ethnic minority)

10 am “Ireland, Irish Studies, and Ethnonational Narratives of Race”
Dr. Catherine M. Eagan, Las Positas College

10-30 am to 11-15 Ishmael Reed - "Does Irish America Need an Intervention from Ireland?"- introduction by Jackie Fulmer

11-15 Coffee

11-30 am to 1pm The Connemaras; a Gaelic-speaking Midwest experiment
Seamus Cain (session chair), Bridget Connelly
Performers of the Irish script  include Liodain ni hUallachain,  Sean O Nuallain

1pm Lunch

2pm  Cathal MacSwiney-Brugha (UC Dublin), Melanie O’Reilly (chair),  and others on the legacy of Macswiney and the neoliberal assault on Irish musical culture

315pm Coffee

3-30pm to end Submitted papers

Session chair; Conn Mac Aogáin

3-30 to 4-30 pm

Conn Mac Aogáin Lehman College, City University of New York
'The Irish Language and a “Gaeltacht” Language Community in the 21st Century: Re-Imaging and Re-Imagining in a Post-Modern, Post-Tiger Ireland'

4-30 pm Victor Vargas (Claremount) "Who goes with swami?

 5-30pm Stephen Myers Watt (Indiana University) "Neoliberalism, Tenure, and Academic Freedom in American and Ireland"


6pm Closing discussion

 Break

7pm Gaelic Jazz concert

ICIS 2

Dublin/BAC, Ireland, Nov 2013

Confirmed panels include
"Episodes from an incomplete coup"

In the course of the last two decades, lamented failings in Irish political culture an acknowledged democratic deficit at the broader level of the European Union have been a backdrop to numerous more specific incidents where the responsibility of the state and public institutions to serve Ireland's citizenry with impartial prudence has been flouted. These disquieting patterns and certain particulars will here be discussed.

“To declare a new republic, or not?”

The frustration experienced by Ireland's public and, indeed, members of the political class, in the face of a calamitous reality-check amidst the broader international economic crisis, is often told; equally, the tentative-to-meek Irish response, almost without protest, in the face of recent calamity. This panel continues a conversation that has so far failed to ignite real political impetus in seeking renovation of the Irish republic.

“Just Once or with improbable frequency: Can the unlikely success of left-field Irish musical theatre be continued?”

In recent years Ireland has produced high caliber musical theatre across genres, from historical science counter-fact of Improbable Frequency through the biting political satire of Anglo! Of a sudden, it has seemed, Ireland has a burgeoning tradition in quality musical theatre. Participants in this panel consider the possibility of its success being sustained and young talents nurtured in the present economy of arts.

"Intellectual life, academe and common knowledge in Ireland"

Higher education in Ireland is under strain, stretched thin by budget cuts and confused agenda. Intellectual life (whether as vocation or formation) should serve not only to educate an economically productive populace, but also the production and circulation of knowledge as a common good. This panel invites discussants to reflect upon their experience of the ideal University in Ireland, however imperfectly embodied, not only in educational institutions, but also in the public sphere, where journalism and the media are integral to the kind of 'information economy' that is indispensable for real democracy.

The deadline for abstracts, which can be up to 300 words, is Oct 5 2013; however, potential participants for the panels and indeed proposals for other panels will be accepted until Oct 15.

There is a suggested fee of 40 Euro per session, 100 Euro for all sessions.
Cheques should be made payable to Nous Research, Dublin 4.

Students are encouraged to attend any single session of especial interest without payment.
No-one will be turned away for want of funds.

For further details about ICIS, proposals for any additional panel and submission of abstracts please contact feargus@gmail.com or seanoig@gmail.com

Provisional schedule;
 Nov 8 10am – 1pm

9 am – noon Episodes from an incomplete coup

Session chair/moderator  Prof Des O’Neill

Des O’Neill  “The failed privatization of the Irish medical system”

Break 10-30 am tea/coffee

11 am Sean O Nuallain "From social partnership to corporatism and beyond; the state and Irish civil society"

Moderated discussion

Noon
(Provisional) Press conference on the state's collusion with criminals in defrauding Irish musicians

Nov 8 2pm- 4pm Intellectual Freedom Session chair/moderator Feargus Denman

2pm Cathal Macswiney Brugha "Terence MacSwiney and Intellectual Freedom"
3pm round-table discussion chaired by Feargus Denman
 4pm Break  am tea/coffee

4-30pm submitted papers


Nov 9 10am – 1 pm
Panel discussion on the perceived necessity for a second republic, to be chaired/moderated by Demond Fennell.

Joe McCarthy (fiasco.ie) “Hanging chads and other garbage: waste, power and voting in the first Irish republic”

Break 11 am tea/coffee

11-15 Sean O Nuallain “The Tim Pat Coogan/Dan Rooney visa affair: does the USA really support the idea of a united 32-county Irish republic?"
11-45Desmond Fennell
12-15 Cathal Macswiney Brugha "The second Dail and the first Irish republic"
12-45 Gabriel Rosenstck; "From Christ to Krishnamurphy; postchristian secular Europe's search for its roots" Discussion

1-30 Lunch

Nov 9 2pm  - 5pm

: "Independent artists and undependable regulators: rights and oversight in
the Irish music industry"
Introduction 2-30pm  “The Irish music scam; how corruption in IMRO and the state regulatory bodies destoyed one of Ireland's flagship industries” (conference chair)
2-40 Melanie O'Reilly: "The Irish music biz: celtic mysteries, hiddenagendas, and why I became a singing detective."
Reply/amlpification by Danny Macarthy

3-45 pm Tea!coffee
4pm “Just once or with improbable frequency; can the success of Irish musical theater be continued?”Panel discussion, chaired by Ronan Smith who will make introductory comments

. Discussants include Arthur Riordan, Ronan Smith,Melanie O’Reilly

Taking one for the team; the Irish state's attempt to stop Greece getting a debt relief deal

We are witnessing the dying years of the first Irish republic. It has been traversed by various rough beasts, all slouching across the nation in the past generation. Echoes of these ideologies linger in the body politic;

• A very extreme ideological neoliberalism, with the country essentially been put in the hands of international banksters;
• An extended flirtation with neoconservatism, a flirtation that almost undoubtedly would have been consummated had e-voting (ie no elections) been installed;
• 32-county nationalism, based on the principles of the 1916 proclamation on which the state is founded

Given the lack of our education of our administration, it is unlikely that any of them could even understand how their views had changed as each of these ideas took possession of them in their all-too-long careers. For example, Taoiseach Kenny – who inherited his father's seat – has been a parliamentarian for 40 years, and has no accomplishments or qualifications of any sort. Insofar as one can say this, he is too intellectually slow to be a modern PM.

What prompts this post is that it turns out that much of the suffering in Ireland since 2011 has been inflicted at the hands of neoliberal ideologue Michael Noonan;

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/noonan-dismisses-ashoka-mody-comments-on-debt-writedown-1.2105893

For readers not familiar with Ireland, the “odious” debt referred to is “junior” debt ie unsecured bonds issued by private banks and - for the first time in world history – imposed on the sovereign ie the taxpayer. As Mody points out, this imposition ran contrary to this government's election manifesto. In short, Mody – as the IMF lead in Ireland – was waiting for Noonan to ask for a debt writedown. Noonan did not do so; had he done so, it has clearly been IMF policy since 2008 to allow a writedown.

Noonan ran for election as PM in 2002 and achieved his party's worst-ever result. I now work in Reboot Ireland with some of the young talent who put fine Gael back together again; FG's loss is our gain

There are various explanations for Noonan's “we took one for the team” as he put it. One is a sincere belief in this neoliberal world order, a belief no longer shared even by its erstwhile economist cheerleaders like Brad de Long of UC Berkeley. Another is simply that he was bribed to sell out Ireland. A final one may be found in the fact that he has abandoned even his few friends in Limerick, the few people willing to tolerate him of a Saturday night, and wants to mingle with the Davos set.

For any Greeks reading this, we Irish are embarrassed by this buffoon;

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/any-greek-rescue-deal-will-need-d%C3%A1il-sanction-noonan-1.2105801

The astonishing result is that 32-county Irish nationalism, stripped of its Catholicism, is now the prevailing ideology in Ireland and Sinn Fein is the most popular party. Take it that SF will favour a debt deal for everyone, even if we get kicked out of the poisonous embrace of the EU as a result

PS It turns out that Varoufakis  was part of the "troops out" movement   and sings republican ballads. The first Sinn Fein finance minister?

PPS The essential problem with the current neoliberal world order is that democracy has survived the assault from e-voting. The  neoliberal campaign aginst the nation-state is otherwise perfect;

1, Replace authochtonous culture with American garbage ( a la the MTV awards in Dublin, 1999)

2. Create a massive state debt, if necessary by illegally assigning private debt to the sovereign

3. Impose austerity, with rolling privatization, to repay this debt

4. Create fortress parliaments  - currently happening in Ireland - so that the corporate whores masquerading as "politicians" will feel victimized, yet safe. One of syriza's fuist moves in govt was doing away with the barricades.

But the fools, the fools! This new order suits at best 20% of the population, the rest are sick of austerity  and we will get a united Ireland out of it......

PPPS It is a script straight from the British version of “The office”. The Gervais character (accidentally/out of pique as it happens but we don't yet know that) takes a principled stand that turns out to be popular. He is due his moment in the sun, and journos gather – twice.

The first time he makes a non-announcement to “reboot” things. At the next, it is surely going to be carelessness rather than accident if he blows it. A hush descends as the journos await the hitherto unsuspected depths in this bumptious character.

Instead he announces that they've been awaiting his “brand” and party title. He then presses “Play” on a DVD player and they are confronted with an ethics officer – a finance adviser. The new party is called “renua”. (For the record, I never joined it and never will)

A hush descends as you laugh uncontrollably at the TV. As the closing credits roll, one of the pols who has hitched his wagon to the Gervais character in interviewed on live radio – but blanks out, as the Gervais character has given his party no policies along with a double-bind; don't let the party down.

Reboot/renua could have a wide range of policies by now. I know that for a fact as I wrote an extensive policy document on IP and presented it to acclaim at UC Berkeley of Feb 13 2015. Reboot/renua knew this and Ross McCarthy, director of policy admonished me beforehand not to let the “movement” down. So what happened?

Pols do not want to be constrained by policies and prefer to make them up on the fly; that is what went wrong with the Greens in Ireland. The most generous interpretation is that they came from FG, where policies are written by consultants, and saw the new political party as a marketing firm that naturally did not have any particular product/policy, the better to be able to sell ANYTHING However, the existence on an “ethics” officer, however ludicrous, suggests a darker story and I will end this PS on that note.

Many of the Reboot/renua have not really left FG socially. It makes sense that what Creighton is attempting is to rope a few thousand people in on a truly Kafkaesque (“The castle”) mission wherein they are permanently unsure of being on the right track. They then can be prosecuted by an “ethics” officer. Little Ross McCarthy, director of policy, ensures that no policies are ever finished to ensure FG-friendliness

So Lucy can rejoin FG with her new, browbeaten members at a price of her choosing. As it happens, she could have succeeded by doing it straight and honestly. She and the others will now lose their seats

Academic Tenure revisited

In 2002, I was illegally dismissed from my tenured job at DCU. The “university” (which has never been accredited) used a little-known provision in the 1990 industrial relations act that allows single dismissals, putting every public service job in Ireland at risk. It has never returned even the clothes i left there, let alone my software. Several generous settlement offers were made; I chose instead to expose the issue through the industrial relations process, and have refused the monies awarded to me.

Paul Cahill, the object of another pogrom by DCU, asked me in 2008 to take over academictenure.blogspot.com in order to expose what was going on. In 2009, before my case, I received legal advice it would damage my chances for reinstatement. I left it up.

In 2012, Cahill destroyed the blog. I still have maintained most of it on another blog and in my book “Ireland in crisis”. Cahill should reinstate the blog in its original form

However, having fought so hard for academic tenure, it is clear to me that many - if not most – of the academics hired since the Celtic tiger years are not fit for purpose. A pro-active hiring on non-Irish people commenced in the 1990's leading to the likes of this;

http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=85634&date=2015-02-11&tab=all_events

We cannot ask Irish people to pay 100k+ for nonsense such as this event. I propose the following revision of tenure, with staff being offered early retirement if the new scenario, wherein they have a “hunting license” and office rather than a guaranteed huge salary, is not appealing. MOOCS allow academics attract huge audiences;

●No-one should lose tenure; conversely, academics should give more value for money

●Tenure’s elements should be distinguished; freedom from redundancy, the right to offer courses  and a place of work until 65 upheld for “legacy” academics but pay, the right to supervise students at graduate level and so on should be made subject to performance.

●Indeed, there is a case for granting tenure to well-performing private college academics

●We are trying to free the academic process from the state and simultaneously to ease taxpayers’ burden

Time to review Ireland's over-liberal homosexuality laws

The past few weeks have made it clear; the Irish people does not want to allow sex with minors, be it Church-originated or an emanation of Dublin's muesli belt. This is particularly the case for – ahem - “man/boy love”

Until the mid-1990's, the status quo ante was that there were draconian laws on the books, dating from the Victorian era, which were never enforced. While that is unacceptable, it is doubtful that the present dispensation is any better.

Currently, an “attractive, older man” can wine and dine a boy from the wilds of western Ireland for his 17th birthday before initiating him into a lifestyle that nature most certainly did not intend. The older man can also propose civil union and - if Katherine Zappone gets her way - marriage, regardless of what the boy's bewildered parents want.

The fact remains that what takes place in that scenario is state-sponsored rape., and the older man should be locked up for a sentence approaching that of murder. As for the 17-year-old, there is much propaganda out there telling him he is just tuning into his natural impulses. In the past, he might have become a priest or brother and continued the cycle of hate and dominance/submission on younger men. Now he is told he is something called “gay” and commits to a Stockholm syndrome existence

The facts remain, that even in “liberal” societies, older gay men suffer disproportionately from depression;

New data on lesbian, gay and bisexual mental health

The “gay lifestyle” is a promiscuous one, with sites like grindr.com ensuring the rest of us will be paying an aids bill for generations. When youth has fled, the lack of the civilizing influence of women becomes a terrible burden.

What this is fundamentally about is the attempt to create a political force from the “gay” population – which is in the natural state restricted to people with a chromosomal/hormonal problem for which they are decidedly not to blame. Alternatively put, look how far the Irish Green party on foot of its civil unions bill – and I am willing to grant that the 1.8% who voted for them included every “gay” person in the country.

For the record, the true prevalence of homosexuality is perhaps 1% with - according to Nate Silver - perhaps 4% engaging in recreational same-sex coupling; genes determine the neural basis of sex, so "intersex" minus a genetic component should be treated as mental illness.

 Finally, it would be great if gay men stopped approaching straight men in normal bars.Given S, Fry's "marriage" to  man 30 years his junior it is not a stretch to imagine a gay seduction  of a 17-year-old, a rushed marriage after elopement, and the Free state granting inheritance rights. As for Sinn Fein, it will be compulsory singing of "god save our glorious Queens" ar scoil gach maidin

PS (21 u Bealtaine 2015)  Referendum tomorrow - the "yes" side has EVERY political party, many semi-states like the IDA, and unions on their side. Yet it is likely to be close, with a "No" vote so hard core in areas like Clare that it is physically  unsafe even for seasoned pols like Pat Breen to canvasss there - so he now sticks to the Malls

What went wrong? First of all, it will still probably pass. Yet it is interesting to note what are effectively soft gay porn posters of attractive same sex young people making love on Ireland's streets, thus promoting homosexuality as an attractive lifestyle choice. Likewise, using an ugly transvestite modeled on the early Eddy Izzard as far back as early 2014 to launch the campaign showed a degree of confidence in the final result that has been complemented by both Senator Norris and President McAleese breaking the law this week.

In short, flushed with confidence, the "yes" side may have overplayed its hand.In either case, the critical issue of surrogacy has been kicked down the road. This leads to the consideration that conception may be initiated by a gay man masturbating with gay porn in a sperm bank. That sperm is then applied to eggs paid for by a donor, who will often suffer cancer as a result. John Edwards' wife died because of such fertility treatment. Then another woman must be paid to carry the child

While humanity has used many styles of child-begetting, spraying sperm over eggs is pre-mammalian, and is to this day used by fish. It is fascinating that  a system of reproduction discarded by mammals, the cutting-edge of evolution, is being hailed as "progressive"

PPS 25u Bealtaine Remarkably, the poll precisely reflected a canvass on p.ie a few weeks ago; what we learned is that p.ie is more representative than we thought

The more interesting thing is the split with FF. Avril Power's resignation allowed Mattie M finally to break rank and follow McGuinness et al. So there is now an anti-liberal faction within FF. What might save Martin is the fact that Renua gifted him the bye-election

PPPS It gets better - it turns out that they got the wording wrong. The wording people voted on emphasised that "beirt" can enter into marriage. An assumption was made that "beirt" refers only to two people. Many of us knew from conversations with native speakers that was wrong;


http://www.rte.ie/news/nuacht/2015/0507/699390-reifreann/

So linguistics will be the acid test. That discipline accepted the practise of spoken language as critical some time ago for its definition. so, even apart from foclóir Uí Dhónaill (the dictionary) correctly insisting that "beirt" can refer to things, we have a corpus from Donegal saying that two female or male sheep can now get married;

- beirt chaorach (Teileann, Co Dhún na nGall)

The state response has been that they redefined an official version of the Irish language in 1958 in which this is not possible. In that case, there was a coup in 1958 and we need to reverse its effects

Legal and regulatory reform

Ireland suffers from a justice system with the following legal components;

1. Common law;
2. Consequences from a written constitution, which initially at least was partially a sectarian catholic document. Much of what passes for "legal reform" as of 2015 consists of attempts, often hamfisted like the 2013 abortion legislation, to reverse this ethos; ;
3. Unconstrained use of resources by the state in civil proceedings, leading to enormous law firms and an elision of individual legal rights that is in violation of the 2005 ECHR Morris and Steee ruling

It also suffers from a smorgasboard of regulatory agencies, some private, some public. A list is appended. The civil service increases 15.5% in size from 2001 to 2008. Many of these staff not dealing with the public have no discernible function, and will be hard to dismiss even if negligent, with enormous pensions calculated historically from the moment of their retirement

Finally, despite all this, the country collapsed between 2008 and 2010 largely to a LACK of enforcement of regulations. The Financial_Regulator Neary famously handed out 7 billion euro to Anglo Irish bank, who knew that it was merely going to buy some time ahead of their inevitable collapse. Legal proceedings in the USA indicate that the CEO used this time to pocket several million for himself. Neary, who still has a very generous pension, was judged in court in Ireland to have directed officials of Anglo Irish bank to behave in a criminal manner.

The Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement has taken no successful proceedings since its formation in 2001, with the High court rescinding what initially looked like a success. The DPP has failed to prosecute in the Anglo Irish and music copyright cases, with American litigation proving necessary, leading to questions about the necessity for the Irish state itself

It is not controversial to suggest, in the year following the “penalty points” revelations, that regulation has historically been abused politically to favour the friends of those in power.So what can be done? The answer lies in this writer's opinion in the fact that the game theory notion of “perfect information” is being approximated as smart phones colonize the citizenry; few indeed are those without some access to the internet, if only at the local library.

THE SOLUTION

Many Irish citizens have hard copies of documents they submitted to the relevant regulatory body, documents that were treated dismissively. A first step is to scan these and post them in a central site on the internet. Clearly, if the correspondence was done electronically, this posting is easier.

The second step is to allow entrepreneurial lawyers take cases - if necessary against the state and/or private regulators – based on these documents This will involve waiving the statute of limitations as has been proposed in Massachusetts for child sex abuse.

A third step is to dismiss civil servants who have been proved negligent and/or corrupt with a guilty verdict at trial seen as tantamount to a verdict in a disciplinary procedure. Such civil “servants” would lose their pensions if retired. Funds used for this initiative will be recoupable from this process.

At the end of a five-year period, it should become clear which of the agencies below are necessary It should also be clear whether private regulators like the law society can be trusted to continue and whether the state should intervene.

One example of how this might work out in practise may suffice The peculiar phrase “autonomous statutory responsibilities “ keeps coming up in reply to questions about the Irish universities both in the Dail (including questions from Joe Higgins) and as we've seen from civil servants. So they are responsibilities, but autonomous, so effectively not responsibilities; moreover this paradoxical state has been enshrined in statute.

The phrase does not occur at all in the 1997 act, and “independent” itself is NEVER used in this context but usually correctly refers to concerns about academic freedom. The section 25 referred to time and again by the “mandarins” bears no relation to autonomy, Far from being statutory, it is clear that a civil servant (originally Padraic Mellett of the HEA) invented this phrase to allow universities' management do whatever they wanted to staff, students and the taxpayer.

Ironically, the HEA is the body tasked with preventing precisely the grotesquely expensive legal processes on the 200's that cost the state 10's of millions. Clearly, either Mr Mellett should lose his job, pension and pay compensation if he was wrong. If he was right, he should lose his job as the HEA now has no role.

Sean O Nuallain PhD

Here is a list of regulatory bodies;

13

Database of Regulatory Bodies – List of Bodies

1. Department of Agriculture and Food

1.1 Department of Agriculture and Food

1.2

National Milk Agency

1.3

Veterinary Council

2. Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism

2.1 Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism

2.2

Fáilte Ireland

2.3

Horse Racing Ireland

2.4

Irish Greyhound Board/Bord na gCon

Private Bodies

2.5

The Turf Club - Office of the Governing Bodies

3. Department of Communications, Marine and Natura

l

Resources

3.1 Department of Communications, Marine and Natura

l Resources

3.2 Broadcasting Commission of Ireland

3.3 Commission for Communications Regulation

3.4 Commission for Energy Regulation

3.5 Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority

3.6

Fisheries Boards and Commissioners

3.6.1 Central Fisheries Board

3.6.2 Eastern Regional Fisheries Board

3.6.3 Northern Regional Fisheries Board

3.6.4 North-Western Regional Fisheries Board

3.6.5 River Moy Commissioners

3.6.6 Shannon Regional Fisheries Board

3.6.7 Southern Regional Fisheries Board

3.6.8 South-Western Regional Fisheries Board

3.6.9 Western Regional Fisheries Board

4. Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Af

fairs

4.1 Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Af

fairs

4.2

An Coimisinéir Teanga

4.3

The Commissioners of Charitable Donations and Beque

sts for Ireland

4.4

Waterways Ireland

5. Department of Defence

5.1 Department of Defence

6. Department of Education and Science

6.1

Department of Education and Science

6.2

FETAC: Further Education and Training Awards Counci

l

6.3

HEA – Higher Education Authority

6.4

HETAC: Higher Education and Training Awards Council

6.5

National Educational Welfare Board

6.6

National Qualifications Authority of Ireland

6.7

State Examinations Commission

6.8

The Teaching Council

14

7. Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment

7.1 Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment

7.2

Companies Registration Office

7.3

Competition Authority

7.4

Health and Safety Authority

7.5

Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority

7.6

Irish National Accreditation Board

7.7

Irish Takeover Panel

7.8

Labour Court

7.9

National Consumer Agency

7.10

Office of the Director of Consumer Affairs

7.11

National Standards Authority of Ireland

7.12

Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement

7.13

Office of the Registrar of Friendly Societies

7.14

Patents Office

8. Department of the Environment, Heritage and Loc

al

Government

8.1

Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local G

overnment

8.2

An Bord Pleanála

8.3

EPA – Environmental Protection Agency

8.4

Private Residential Tenancies Board

8.5

Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland

(

Local Government Authorities are listed separately

)

9. Department of Finance

9.1 Department of Finance

9.2

Central Bank and Financial Services Authority of Ir

eland

9.3

Commission for Public Service Appointments

9.4

Institute of Incorporated Public Accountants

9.5

Irish Stock Exchange

9.6

Irish Taxation Institute

9.7

Office of the Appeals Commissioners

9.8

Office of the Revenue Commissioners

9.9

Standards in Public Office Commission

9.10

The Financial Regulator

10 Department of Foreign Affairs

10.1 Department of Foreign Affairs

11. Department of Health and Children

11.1 Department of Health and Children

11.2 Adoption Authority of Ireland

11.3 Food Safety Authority of Ireland

11.4 Health Insurance Authority

11.5 Irish Medicines Board

11.6 Mental Health Commission

11.7 Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council

rivate Bodies

11.8 An Bord Altranais/Irish Nursing Board

11.9 Dental Council

11.10 Medical Council

11.11 Opticians Board

11.12 Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland

15

12. Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform

12.1

Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform

12.2

Censorship of Publications Board

12.3

Dublin Carriage Office

12.4

Film Censor’s Office

12.5

Office of the Data Protection Commissioner

12.6

Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner

12.7

Private Security Authority

Private Bodies

12.8

Bar Council

12.9

Law Society of Ireland

13. Department of Social and Family Affairs

13.1 Department of Social and Family Affairs

13.2 Pensions Board

14. Department of the Taoiseach

14.1 Department of the Taoiseach / Central Statisti

cs Office

15. Department of Transport

15.1

Department of Transport

15.2

Commission for Aviation Regulation

15.3

Commission for Taxi Regulation

15.4

Commissioners of Irish Lights

15.5

Córas Iompair Éireann

15.6

Irish Aviation Authority

15.7

National Roads Authority

15.8

Railway Procurement Agency

15.9

Railway Safety Commission

15.10

Road Safety Authority

16. Local Government Authorities

Reasserting the right of the Irish people to own their country

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

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!)