What we Irish should learn from the Scottish independence referendum

Ireland’s colonial history and the genocide repeatedly visited on the country are well-known facts. Less well-known is that Ireland became the donkey on which the  tail was pinned in 2010, the international debtor of last resort;

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/ireland-must-play-hardball-to-get-deal-on-bank-bailouts-29954697.html

Since this indenture was imposed on Ireland, approximately 250k of the brightest and best have left the country. It is  clear that we were never meant to recover from the famine and Cromwellian genocides; it is equally clear that this is the Endlosung, the final solution with a debt that cannot be repaid forever burdening Ireland.

In 1998 the Irish people were conned into giving up their national territory (all of it, not just the NE corner) in the name of “peace”. They were told that there would be a referendum in that corner to determine its status; there is no sign of it. However, in 2004  there WAS a referendum in the rest of the island in which the people decided 80:20 that the 1998 definition of the nation was wrong.

Now we know what will await us if the NI referendum comes to pass. The US president will weigh in for a “No” vote;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-independence/11103256/Barack-Obama-tells-Scotland-stay-united.html

This is particularly the   case as the Obama administration persistently uses Ireland as a whipping-boy be it for his obsession with gender “rights” or tax;

http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/Obama-needs-to-stop-bad-mouthing-Ireland-right-away.html

From the ramparts of  international neoliberal establishment we will experience fire;

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/scottish-independence-blow-to-yes-campaign-as-bp-and-standard-life-claim-breakaway-will-harm-business-9724874.html

So what can be done? Elsewhere in my “Ireland in crisis” book, I proposed a new constitution in which Ireland reinstates its claim on its territory and interprets the NI referendum as the opportunity for electoral areas to secede.

It is my belief that we are undergoing yet another genocide. I do not believe that we are still meant to be producing the level of high culture we are doing, just as the success of the Irish in America was not foreseen. The “Ireland in crisis” book is full of solutions, at the political, administrative, technological and state narrative levels. The way things are deteriorating in Ireland, they may even be implemented

  Seán O Nualláin

PS (28 April 2015) What of sinn fein holding the balance of power in Westminster after holding their noses/crossing their fingers as they swear loyalty a la 1927?

Why active civil disobedience in Ireland is both increasing and morally justifiable

The Irish constitution defines treason narrowly as the attempt to destroy the state by violence. Thus, the criminals who accepted over $100 billion   debt to international banksters are not by this definition traitors; nor are the Irish banksters  who deliberately lied to the Irish authorities to get $10 billion to keep their Anglo scam going for a while; nor are the scum who destroyed our music industry, putting in its place the U2 Muppet show;

http://davemarsh.us/?p=951

In the past week, the Irish deputy prime minister has  been confronted with her espousal of the classic neoliberal tactic of throwing people out of their homes by activists threatening to take the law into their own hands;

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/t%C3%A1naiste-heckled-at-dublin-homelessness-conference-1.1936483

Of course, in opposition  she used to be a vigorous defender of  housing rights;

http://www.labour.ie/press/2008/07/04/home-repossessions-double-in-just-12-months/

Taking the law into one’s own hands is exactly how revolutionary public like Ireland began.

For the first time, we have seen  Irish people going “postal” at higher rates than the USA and – a la the Dolce Vita – killing their children. There is a massive increase in suicide, alcoholism, and every other index. The Irish state is responding by exporting its talented and young people and replacing them with worker drones for corporate interests.

This is not a stable state of affairs

  Seán O Nualláin
 
PS Please note that I am not advocating a return to 1969-1994. The current situation wherein politicians are being confronted in public is fine with me. In that sense I advocate "civil disobedience". And yes, the threat of a centenary rerun on 1916  - very unlikely and probably even more of a military debacle - should be there and I am not willing to condemn groups like Eirigi

And now – independence for Ireland?

All I am about to say has been published by us in 2 CSP books (2012, 2013). Here I am just trying to spark a real debate (ie one that will end with action, perhaps in conjunction with our Scots cousins)

First of all, unlucky indeed is the land that needs  heroes; but  non-existent is the nation that doesn’t have them. Scotland’s shame will last a generation; it has been 35 years since the 1979 referendum and by 2049 North Sea oil will be gone. In 1960 JFK won less than 50% of the vote; by 1962 surveys showed 64% claimed they voted for him. We will have a lot of yes voters in 2015's Scotland

 What this campaign showed was the limits of the purely civic nationalism the SNP espouses. The Scots could be scared by rebuttal of Salmond’s economic arguments; what was needed was a narrative tying them to their land.  Yet his central thesis, that a low population density, resource-rich country can thrive in the 21st century is one we Irish need to pay attention to.

In my 2013 book, I argued that we should be willing to risk losing foreign investment as we refuse to pay the “debt” imposed on us in 2010 to buttress the  neoliberal world order. We always had the ability to do without Google, Facebook and other US garbage. Then again, so has Scotland. Instead we created garbage like Deri in SFI and imported criminals who continue to assert (in publications written with Botox’s manufacturer) against attested lab work that Botox cannot reach the brain;

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/whistleblowers-lab-probe-scientist-to-take-up-irish-post/188052.article

There has recently been controversy about censorship of poets in the Maldives. Are  we in Ireland really in a position to throw stones here? W  do not allow musicians to make a living – it is documented that the chair of IMRO, FF’s Shay Hennessy, was stealing copyrights in the 1990’s at an industrial scale. The state then colluded with him via Enterprise Ireland to sell off the songs at a cut rate via Walmart. So we celebrate Dolores Keane’s return, we should be aware of the factors that caused her depression and drug abuse. Specifically, not getting paid for her work

Secondly, our “legal system has nothing to do with justice.  The Gardai rarely investigate white-collar crime; when they do, as with the Hennessy music scam, the prosecution in interfered with at the DPP level and the musicians had to go to Federal court in the USA, where they won. The alternative is grinding through a system whose legal costs  that has spawned three of the top 20 biggest legal firms in the EU from a population of 1% or so of the total

Thirdly, we do not have academic freedom in Ireland. The 1990 act prohibits strikes for “single” dismissals of everybody, including uni profs. Only Paul Cahill’s willingness to declare bankruptcy in the event of his losing prevented mass sackings at DCU.

The Irish State has a classic corporatist structure, with evisceration of civil society. By all means invite poets from anywhere to speak here; but it should not turn into another excuse for not investigating the institutionalized criminality  and brutalization of artists and thinkers rampant in Ireland

Our  country did not fail for lack of talent and hard work

 Seán O Nualláin

PS Now for the good news; in 1979 only 32% of the Scottish electorate voted in favour of devolution. In 2014 38%  of the Scottish electorate voted in favour of outright independence. The trajectory seems clear, and Westminster will have to "think again" as "Flower of Scotland" puts it.

Looked at through this filter, Salmond looks like the last hope for an independent Scotland that remained loyalist and in NATO. The response from Westminster may be devolution on their terms, with the Scottish Labour MP's hamstrung by the "West Lothian question" and so irrelevant that the Scots begin to replace them with the SNP. Then comes an ethnic national independence drive, possibly after a UK EU withdrawal, one that has a hard man like Jimmy Reid in charge, one that will rightly ignore the BS we heard from international banksters

Next time we Irish should explicitly support outright independence for Scotland

PPS  It is as well to mention, given this scandalous incident of vandalism by Irish students in the SF area;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrJyXL4h3iY

that in 2013 Mel and I formally wrote to the Irish consul-general there complaining about how the behaviour of these students might create anti-Irish sentiment

Announcing an online course in Irish music and song taught at UC Berkeley

We are currently offering an online course on “Irish Music and Song ” precisely as 
taught as an advanced seminar in UC Berkeley .

A sample lecture and outline of the course can be found at

http://universityofireland.com/irisherig2011.html

You can simply become a member of the following blog to enroll;
http://irishmusicandsong.blogspot.com/

Queries can be sent to universityofireland@gmail.com

The course costs $25, and will run with lectures posted on the blog every week from Sept 19 for 5 weeks Passwords will be issued to members.

  Please pay at

http://foundationsofmind.org/donate/



It does NOT use video, as we believe that slides + voiceover is a more economical means of learning. The method of assessment is essay submission at the end of the course. As with all the other courses in Stanford's recent offerings (which includes a Berkeley course on software as a service), it is NOT accredited by UC Berkeley , but taught exactly as in UC Berkeley

Students who submit an essay will be given a signature of completion and an indication of where they would have finished vis a vis the Berkeley class

An independent Scotland may make Ireland irrelevant - so vote "yes"

Readers, please note you can find free  excerpts from my 2 books on Ireland here;

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/59226

and here;


http://www.cambridgescholars.com/ireland-in-crisis-16


The books are also for sale;


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

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

 (A further letter to the Taoiseach)

I have made serious allegations of criminal activity and believe that
documentary evidence is readily available. It is not just at DCU the
crimes were committed, but – as I indicated – the music industry.
Indeed, it could be argued that what was being planned at Ireland was
a massive sell-off of the universities, the music, everything.

Ironically, Irish corruption  may allow an independent Scotland get a
great start. Scotland already has universities much higher ranked than
ours and its artists and engineers have not had to put up with Fianna
Fail so are better placed than ours.

Maybe this exchange is simply the government collecting information
with no intention to act; but as an Irishman I must show that I did
care sufficiently to predict how we should re-assert our sovereignty;

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

I am sympathetic to the constraints you experience from the ECB/IMF
but a “yes” vote from Scotland with its implicit rejection of
neoliberalism will provide an opening for you to cast off the ECB/IMF
shackles and  indeed become a nation once again, perhaps with
overwhelmingly protestant Scotland  guaranteeing the rights of
Ireland’s Protestant co-religionists of Alex Salmond  in a loose
confederation.

PS Those wondering about the wisdom of an ex-pat advising the Taoiseach may do well to consider that the current Ostrich strategy is unlikely to work;

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/polititcs/dublin-silence-will-no-longer-be-an-option-if-scotland-votes-for-independence-1.1919450

This is particularly the case as it emerges from "mandarins" who believed that Lenin visited Ireland during the Russian civil war;

 http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/enda-kenny-redfaced-over-wrong-claim-that-lenin-visited-ireland-26889968.html

Maybe they thought it was Lennon?

PPS The content above has now been acknowledged by the Taoiseach.

As companies like BP come out for "no" in Scotland we are getting a sense of what the years 1916-1924 must have been like in Ireland. The added complication of having to defeat the British militarily after repeatedly voting “yes” in Ireland  will not have to be faced by the Scots. Anything other than “yes” is a national disgrace from which they will not recover, particularly after we showed then the way and took the brunt of British violence.

A “No” vote will make it even more urgent that we cure the pathological state of Irish society so that our shared culture can persist in the world

PPPS (14/9) Remarkable  party politics this past week.

1. Gordon Brown and others announce that the status quo is untenable and that the original option Salmond requested of increased  devolution will follow a "no" vote

2. Al Darling seems to amplify this, then goes on the Scotsman to speecify - nothing

3 Hague confirms this by saying Westminster has planned  no additional powers for holyrood

4. Cameron announces  he loves his country more than his party

The biggest party political winners from a "yes" would be the Tories as Labour will lose 40 + seats at Westminster.. So the Tories seem to have a wing that would prefer Scotland leave...........

 Seán O Nualláin

Finally  (4/2015) We seem to be close to a situation wherein a coalition of the SNP, SDLP and the Sinn feiners who take the oath with their fingers crossed hold the balance of power in Westminster. Indeed, for the English to maintain their own sovereignty, they may be compelled to slough off the Celtic "fringe" ........

What’s wrong with Irish music and how to fix it

The Irish music industry is in crisis. From where we were in the 1990's, with several acts like Enya selling in the tens of millions, we have descended to the point that Iceland is doing better than us with many bands including Sigur Ros and “Of monsters and Men” getting primetime US TV and selling in the millions. In the meantime. South Korea spends $300 million annually promoting its “K-Pop” which even has its own US TV channel.

The disaster that befell Irish music is not just lack of investment; it is in fact mainly a story of Fianna Fail/Green corruption, which you can read in the "Ireland in crisis" book. In any case, we don't have $300 million. Here I'm going to outline a set of solutions. Some of them are large-scale, but some are simply related to what it will take on the ground to establish an Irish presence in the markets that other countries like South Korea have kicked us out of.

First of all, what happened from the mid 1990’s? We do know that U2 have been allowed to act outside the law with “Record services Ltd” , a  dissolved company, signing independent artists and destroying their careers – and we know this as a result of a successful lawsuit. Another such successful suit allowed us discover that the chairman of IMRO,  a Fianna Fail hack called Shay Hennessy, whose job was to protect copyright, was involved in copyright theft on an industrial scale. We know also from an Arts council report  that he colluded with Comhaltas to privatize all Irish music by assigning copyright to IMRO. The goal was surely a lucrative sale.

You can find a summary here;

Anatomy of the scam

It is covered in detail in this book, including an outline in the introduciotn which is available for no charge;

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/ireland-in-crisis-16

 We only have indirect evidence for deeper trends; the rise and fall  without trace of “musicians” like Mumba and Westlife who were feted as early as the  1990’s by organs of the establishment like the Irish Times and the Scotsman; the fact that even Louis Walsh, apparently not in the loop, went broke. What is being proposed is that a nexus of criminals operated with state protection to turn music into a cover for deeper crime. We will never be able to prove this but here are some  hypotheses;

1. Big criminal money (pimps, drugs, “property”), washed in plain sight, through bands who “sell” millions (Westlife etc.)

2. The “deep state “:  message goes out not to allow independent musical artists.  This is never put in writing , but civil servants do not follow up complaints, about copyright and company law. Eventually cases are successfully  taken in Britain & US by the musicians.

3. Ideological: the state does not want emergence of independent voices in areas like music .  This fits with neoliberal ideology which attempts to suppress ethnicity.

4. US & British record companies benefit from suppression of Irish music.

5. Centralisation through IMRO etc allows Fianna Fail to have minute control.  So venues & festivals hiring artists who are not in favour can be punished  through IMRO with additional fees .  The idea is the ultimate sale of all Irish music to someone like Rupert Murdoch.

First of all, a very simple basic example of how it works here where Irish music needs to sell. Recently we did a gig in the very prestigious Angelica's in Redwood city featuring our songs which include Irish lyrics by Sean O Riordain and Nuala ni Dhomhnaill set to jazz. The owner liked it so much that he asked us back to do a new production show, premiered at the Edinburgh festival in 2010, in tribute to the great jazz singer Anita O'Day.  That is now a regular gig

That’s what it will take; apparently small gigs done by hundreds of Irish acts. The state should also support small venues like the Starry Plough in Berkeley, which has had an Irish dance session every Monday night for 35 years to which the cream of America's youth come, and the “”Lark camp” educational summer project. By support, I mean at least sending a diplomat once to acknowledge the contribution.

However, this should be complemented by the following;

1. IMRO is a hopelessly corrupt Fianna Fail gazebo. It should be closed down, with its functions transferred to a well-regulated state institution. IMRO's revenue is around $50 million per year. Much of that is profit. Venues and radio/TV playing quality music could have their “licensing” paid to IMRO reduced by 75% as this money never makes it to the musicians, but rather goes on administration. Even if the income is cut to $25 million, it will still be plenty for the following steps;
2. In particular, IMRO's claim that it OWNS all of Irish traditional music, as the  arts council report exposed, should be refuted and the property should be held in trust.
3. All the theft done by IMRO and its companion MCPS should be reimbursed to the musicians. Between 1999 and 2003, the Gardai collected much evidence on IMRO and only a blatant interference with the DPP prevented their being prosecuted. The case was resolved in 2010 in US federal court instead but the musicians cannot enforce the verdict for lack of funds and it is in Ireland's interest that the state should help them do so perhaps through the WTO;
4. The state should emulate the French and introduce an “intermittent” system. This would mean that, instead of going on the dole and trying to hide their gigs, full-time artist/musicians who do over 50 concerts a year at state-recognized venues should get a grant;
5. The state should reimburse all the musicians who had their CD's illegally licensed through an enterprise Ireland trade stand in midem in France at 1998. That will pay many outstanding bills, as we found through our successful federal court action that the sales through Walmart in particular were in the millions;
6. The state should return the copyrights taken by IMRO to the musicians
7. The state should return the money due to musicians from U2's use of dissolved “distribution” companies like Record services Ltd to destroy independent labels. This was done with FF connivance, and while we won a lawsuit against U2 on this, Paul Appleby refused to act even after we met him one-on-one at his request in 2006;
8. The state should investigate the use of fake tune titles in Irish by IMRO – the Gardai believed this indicated massive fraud as these could launder money;
9. The state should use existing media like the “Today's Ireland” program in the USA to introduce the American public to quality Irish music, not bad country music as now;
10. The state should stop the FF dominance of the festivals that Ireland will get every year like Celtic connections and Lorient and ensure new bands get a break there
11. If there is any grant money for tours in the USA, it would best be used by ensuring safe transport and accommodation.

After that, leave it up to the market; many Irish musicians are in my experience very hard-working and able. Under FF, they experienced nothing but state collusion with criminals.

Seán Ó Nualláin  Lunasa 2014

(please note part of this was mailed to the Taoiseach and posted elsewhere)

PS A similar analysis might work on the destruction of native Irish initiative in academia, with the people behind SFI/PRTLI destroying many good initiatives

After all, why have good science and other scholarship be produced free by native Irish if you can have expensive and inferior material done by foreigners living off the Irish taxpayer?

It buttresses one's opinion to consider that DCU's head was a director of  the British-American Business Counci, currently governed by such luminaries as James Murdoch;

http://www.babc.org/about/boards.php

http://universitywatchdog.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/affiars-of-the-nation-dcus-president/

We do not need any of these parasites.

PPS Remarkably, this infamous comment made at commencement/conferring in 2005 is now hard to find;

'"Ireland's native population could be in a minority by the middle of this century, the president of Dublin City University (DCU) will claim today. But large-scale immigration is still essential if we are to remain prosperous, Prof Ferdinand von Prondzynski will say.

Unpublished UK-based research, which he does not identify, has indicated that by 2050, Ireland's population will consist of a multicultural and multiethnic mix in which the indigenous Irish will form a minority.

He says this is based on some demographic projections which also suggest that people of Chinese origin may form the largest of the new ethnic groups.

"Whether this turns out to be an accurate prediction or not, we have to prepare for a very different kind of society," he says.

"It needs to be a planned process to ensure our skills needs are being met . . . a very substantial increase in population will be needed over a long period of time.

"And I don't think people have quite realised this yet."

In a speech to be delivered at a conferring ceremony in DCU later today, Prof von Prondzynski will also argue that any attempt to stop migration here will lead to a significant decline in the Irish economy, and a return to Ireland's peripheral status in Europe.

This is because a major population expansion is needed for the next wave of economic growth.

Universities have a particular obligation to prepare the country for the increasingly multicultural nature of Irish society, he believes.

Inter-cultural studies and research should be prioritised, while care needs to be taken to ensure the "new Irish" gain equal access to higher education.

Universities should also be "active contributors" to anti-racism policies, and should offer support to industry and to Government agencies in this regard.

However, Prof von Prondzynski will stress that they should maintain an interest in, and support for, Irish traditional culture as part of this development.

"Ireland as a multicultural society will be able to make a particularly valuable contribution to the new Europe, and will be able to continue to lead as a country in which high-value innovation takes place and strong community values are espoused."

Although the immigration issue is a difficult one for the Government, recently introduced measures - such as increased restrictions on citizenship - are frequently counterproductive, the professor said yesterday.

"People are nervous about immigration. But immigration is almost always a good thing. People think immigrants come here and take jobs, but the opposite is true. They will come and create jobs."


http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/topstories/5233563?view=Eircomnet'

If anyone thinks i am being paranoid about the disappearance of this from most of the web, try this on any search engine (it i about P's attempt to destroy academic freedom and tenure in Ireland)

Cahill -v- DCU, [2009] IESC 80 (2009)

Now try

Cahill -v- DCU, [2009]  80 (2009)

This is expensive hacking.......the supreme court story embarrasses them

So here are a few sites that still preserve the other story;

http://www.thephora.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-1904.html

http://thumped.com/bbs/threads/2050-chinese-outnumber-irish-in-ireland.22177/

http://www.politics.ie/forum/health-social-affairs/211684-forces-lined-up-make-irish-minority-their-homeland-33.html

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-24775395.html

PPS Yes, it is moderate rant mode

 As Scotland prepares to leave the UK within 17 years of Ireland recognizing it, we can look at indepndemce for ourselves

First, we can pay for ourselves by getting tid of corruption paid for by taxpayers as above, We can then look at the 800+ boards that cost us so much. Surely we can start by having our 2 competition bodies compete to produce a winner or MAD (mutual assured destruction)?

http://www.competitiveness.ie/newsevents/news/title,10698,en.php

http://www.tca.ie/

PPPS (20150
 The following means that the ONLY Irish roots musician seeming to make a living was actually, as Mel and I suspected, a front

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/sharon-shannon-and-manager-ordered-to-pay-bank-520-000-1.2081461

SS was still getting all the prestige gigs like Lorient through Dunford.


 AR's in brief

1. nationalize IMRO;

2. Cut IMRO tariffs 50% and eliminate them for folk music;

3. Expand aos dana to include all quality musicians doing 50 or more gigs a year

Ireland 2014; or when the deep state meets a power vacuum

The term “ the deep state “ has gained a lot of traction through Mike Lofgren's magisterial essay. I will use it here to refer to a nexus of intelligence agencies, financial monoliths, government agencies and politicians to which enough power has accrued that they can act outside the law

The deep state as the end of liberal democracy

For example, many of the repossessions of homes in the USA from 2008 were illegal because the banks, the foreclosing entities, had sold on the mortgages. Lloyfd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs let the cat out of the bag on TV when he baldly stated that the Obama administration ignored citizens' welfare in order to buttress the “economy”.

The USA has entered a pathological political space in which the most libertarian Republicans are now the voices avowing classical values of free speech, getting the state out of our business, and the benefits that have accrued from the Snowden revelations. The response from Obama has been to create “rights” like “marriage equality” and to use everyone's discomfort with gender-as-politics to hide his true agenda.

The situation is very different in Ireland because, particularly since the Shatter incident, the state has lost power. Indeed. there is a consensus that there is a lack of enforcement of many laws;

http://www.corruptioninireland.com/apps/blog/

 It is indeed conceivable that neither of the two parties that have dominated Irish politics since 1921 will be in government after 2016. So what does the deep state do when it meets a power vacuum?

Let's look first at the Irish deep state. The preceding entry talks about its actions; destruction of many of the signal achievements of Irish culture. What these actions have in common is first of all their criminality; it is clear that they were able to hire/create politicians willing to interfere with prosecutions. Secondly, there is a nuancing of the private and public; DCU, a state university, was able to have an illegal disciplinary procedure on its books for over a decade. IMRO, a “private” “music rights” organization, benefited from a state-created monopoly (one corruptly given). Both committed many crimes, with impunity., Lacking recourse to the criminal law, those injured by the crimes can take their chances in the ruinously expensive Irish civil courts, a system that has spawned 3 of the biggest 20 law firms in the EU.

Why does this writer think some of this came out of an American think tank? There is the fact that Ahern repeatedly brought David Putnam over to talk about how community and civil society can be destroyed; it is likely that Ahern saw this as a “how to” manual. The goal was a state largely owned by Ahern and his cronies, democracy crushed by e-voting, and massive immigration making the native Irish a minority. Since 2009, this last has been happening through emigration of the Irish.

The two Tweedle parties alternated in government and protected each others' scams. Who knows what would happen to FG's scam of Rehab if they attacked the CRC? What might happen to the Motorola lawsuit against Denis O'Brien if FF were not allowed keep their music scam, even if it destroyed the greatest music industry in the planet as of 1995? The Irish “deep state” was unfortunately riven with tribal allegiances

So what can be done? In fact, very much can be done. The state has extremely little power now, particularly relative to pre-2008. We can insist that Irish public institutions reflect our sensibility as Irish people. We can insist on the now radical notion that the rule of law applies equally to all citizens, and that civil servants who perpetrated the crime since 1997 should lose their pensions. And so on

The current state of affairs is not sustainable and it is really only a matter of calibrating how aggressively nationalist the incipient party that may hold power from 2016 will be. Ireland has turned from its initial goal of exemplifying an ethnic nationalism by allowing its citizens take over control of a hitherto colonial system to a neo-colony in which a self-appointed elite judge their citizens in accordance to how they conform with neoliberalism. The goal, to make the Irish an ethnic minority in their own country, was actually explicitly stated by DCU's president during the  Ahern era as both inevitable and desirable. It is unlikely that speech could be given in the current climate after 5 years in which the Irish have carried the burden of the 2008 Wall St crash, as Tim Geithner explicitly proposed that they should.

 Seán Ó Nualláin 22 Iuil 2014

 PS 26 u nollag 2014; The political party system in Ireland has since self-destructed with sinn fein now the most popular party. It is unlikely that they will be quite as compliant as the tweedle parties so what happened? How did an experienced (if not very bright) politician like Kenny preside over this?

The explanation possible lies in a set of deals comprising the deep state takeover in the 1990's; law to be used as a subversion of citizenship, not as a means to justice; the destruction of native culture (artistic, intellectual, archaeological) and an inexorable progression to privatizations like water, health,  and the universities, a rerun of 1970's Chile. In return people around  Ahern became (if briefly) billionaires and foreign investment (FDI) grew.

The problem is that the deep state imperatives required either e-voting with power to nominate a PM or eternal Tweedle alternation with "Labour" enabling the scams of each. Of the items not mentioned in the 2011 manifesto by which  fine Gael achieved government, if not power, Kenny almost certainly believed he could get away with continuation of the scams (eg penalty points, music), abortion, gay marriage, and full payment of the bondholders as the economy recovered, It is well within the bounds of possibility that he failed to see the new dispensation agreed by Cowen and Ahern wherein destruction of the institutions of the  first Irish republic would be compensated for by a massive, undemocratic  transfer of money and thus power to their cronies. For example, why bother that the state has no territory (after the 1998 Belfast "agreement") if you and your cronies hold title, through coillte, to massive tracts of land?

Now it is too late for Kenny and a new terrible beauty is possible. in this, my last post of the year, I ask the reader to look at the posts on Scotland and hold out the hope that we will learn from their hopes