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!)

Saints and Scholars; a new, putrid garden of remembrance for Ireland's neoliberal martyrs?

Readers of this blog may not know that the Irish and British/NI states granted formal recognition to each other only through the good Friday agreement of 1998. Up to then both had claimed the NE corner of Ireland as part of the national territory. Let us note that, in the resource-starved century we live, France has held on to its colonial claims which comprise 97% of its national territory.

A dashed convenient deal for the Brits, that 1998 business; Ireland surrendered ALL its national territory, defining the nation instead solely in terms of people born there. About 1,4 million people ratified this recission in a referendum. Then, in a further referendum in 2004, about 1.4 million people decided this was not such a good idea after all, and the 1998 agreement is now surely null and void in its territorial retraction.

In 2011, in earshot of riots nearby, the Queen laid a wreath to the heroes of Irish independence at the garden of remembrance in Dublin's Parnell Square. 100 meters away, the statue of Parnell proudly proclaimed that no-one has the right to set bounds on the march of a nation. Behind the queen, representing the Irish state, were two non-Irish people; “President” Macaleese, who true to her petit-bourgeois Belfast origins learned Spanish, rather than Irish at school; and the truly sinister then Minister for Defence (and Justice!) Alan Shatter.

In the latter's brief and corrupt tenure, Shatter declaimed the Irish for nor participating in WW2; swore in tens of thousands of immigrants as Irish “citizens”; and repeatedly interfered with the legal system until he was caught and forced to resign. Here is the truth; WW2 was not our business as a state; many Irish fought heroically for the allies, and well over 50% of all congressional medals of honour have been won by Irish-Americans with over 10% going to men BORN in Ireland. In particular, both of Shatter's parents were English Jews; as Louise London has documented, the scale of the Shoah was due precisely to English Jews refusing to admit their continental co-religionionists;

http://www.amazon.com/Whitehall-Jews-1933-1948-Immigration-Holocaust/dp/0521534496/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416243428&sr=1-1

Now to the matter at hand; we have no evidence that either Enda Kenny. Joan Burton or Michael Noonan have enriched themselves illegally. (It is possible that all have secretly squiirelled away millions ) All are retirement age; none have anything greater than the most minimal undergraduate education. Currently, their well-being is at risk when they venture out in public. For foreign readers, I must point out that, until the Ahern years, one spoke to the Irish PM as person to person in true republican mode at public events,

Noonan and Kenny boast of Ireland's recovery, evidenced by low bond yields; they neglect to mention that serial defaulter Argentina has had the most successful stock market in the world in 2014. Bad girl Iceland, whose refusal to pay back even deposit holders in Icesave provoked British use of terrorist laws and threats of gunboats ( a la the 19^th century remedy for bond default) recovered superbly. The bank bail-out has cost Ireland fully 60 times more per person than it did Britain

There is something of the ancient Irish monks going on Imram in Kenny and Noonan; indeed, finding Ireland too cosy, these monks went to Iceland. I suggest a new corner of the garden of remembrance for these heroes of the new world order, one in which a la Rupert Brooke and Katherine Mansfiled, they will have Brussels/DC pockmarked on their hearts in a country which does  not have a territory. If, entering government in 2016 at latest, sinn fein have not learned from them, we may need a whole new garden

Seán Ó Nualláin  17u samhain  2014


Again, my books on Ireland are at;

scams unveiled

and

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

PS (18 Samhain) This government  has until the end of this week - 22 Nov 2014 - to announce a complete cancellation of installation of meters for water charges in order to avoid complete collapse of the state's control. Otherwise, it can keep the state going with army help for up to a year before there is complete breakdown. My guess is that they see the danger. In either case, it's the end of Kenny, who does not represent any sector of the society

(3 days later) Right on schedule

 The gun returns to Irish politics

PPS The re-engineering of Ireland to exemplify neoliberalism involved what was in effect a  shadow constitution and a dark "deep"  state. The "shocks" through which many were expropriated were implemented initially by use of law as instrument (a la the water charges); when found illegal, the process still continued, which is why I term it a "shadow constitution". We Irish had always prided ourselves, rightly or wrongly, on the notion that our own ability and the strength of community and civil society in Ireland meant that we could do more with less and compete with other countries. What the new dispensation brought was gargantuan structures (like SFI) which were painstaking imitations of those elsewhere and an evisceration of community and civil society.

Ireland's Fortinbras; Gerry Adams, two-term Taoiseach and Nobel Laureate?

The truth of Hamlet is that the Prince loves to act decisively; he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildesnstern, and kills Polonious. It is only when it comes to continuing a cycle of regicide as power politics that he baulks. Something was indeed rotten in the state of Denmark and the tragedy of Hamlet is that he has to allow these forces play themselves out in his psyche rather than realize them externally to himself, as he should have been allowed to do. Eventually, Fortinbras junior of Norway (whose Dad had lost to Hamlet senior) steps into the grand guignol and sweeps away the ancien regime without a battle. At no point did the court engage with the pressure he represented, preferring to indulge in regicide, incest and petty viciousness.

The recent Irish water debacle, a debacle that has turned out to be the final straw for our two-party system, exemplifies how Ireland resembles Shakespeare's Denmark. Irish community and civil society structures have been historically strong and its people are very resourceful and resilient. Put a jack hammer and plastic pipes in a pile and Irishmen will self-organize to raise funds (raffles! Dinner dances!)' and take extreme physical risks to get the system going. Put the same men of a committee a la Irish water and they will embezzle everything before jackhammer meets tarmac. The bureaucratization rampant in the neoliberal world order brings out the worst in the Irish; boards overseeing boards, paying themselves extravagantly with nothing ever getting done.

Rather brilliantly put here;

video on the scam

Gerry Adams realized the vacuity of 26-county politics during the 2002 general election campaign. As he put it, it seemed to be about which leader was the better craic (fun) rather than any serious issues. This is one way of curtailing debate, as he later realized Conversely, he was expected to roll over and die when he was tried by media for the deaths of Jean McConville and the rape of Mairia Cahill. The problem for the Free state establishment is that these charges have not managed to stick in a court of law; indeed, Mairia refused to give evidence against Seamas Finucane et al having herself made the complaint against them and the prosecutions failed. The Free state establishment has now played its last card aginst Adams as leader.

The result is that Adams is now a racing certainty to be the next Irish Taoiseach. (For the record, I predicted in a broadcast I did on Dublin's Anna Livia radio in 2001 this would happen.) But who is he? What does he believe? What will he do? Apart from the fact that the NI statelet will not exist a day longer than he wants it to, once he is installed as Taoiseach we do not know. We can be sure of his republican credentials because he has manged to keep a lot of the hardliners around him

Or can we? In march 2012, Mitch Riess – a huge admirer of Adams, whom he regards as a great peacemaker – said that the Brits had kept Adams alive to deliver the current settlement. Conversely, they handed files to loyalist terrorists to kill Adams' rivals. Faced with threats to his intellectual authority – most famously by women like Bernadette Devlin – Adams has behaved viciously.

Adams has almost certainly been involved in attempted coup (the IRA recognized neither government/state/statelet in Ireland), torture (the informer and torturer Scappaticci was a close associate), summary executions (Jean McConville), and extortion. Quite a list; yet after Blair, GW Bush, Putin, and indeed Obama, this list is beginning to look like a sine qua non of qualification for being a 21ste century leadfer.

The most likely scenario is indeed the Fortinbras one – Adams is about to exploit a power vacuum. He has been at times Marxist revolutionary, the father of the modern car-bomb through the Ballymurphy IRA, and man of peace. He is an Irish nationalist who cannot speak Irish, an intellectual whose prolix books betray a serious inability to handle abstract thought, and the author of the compromise that will bring about a United Ireland. Moreover, he is aware that Scotland is ready for more ferment as the UK disintegrates

We can take it that Sinn Fein have learned the dark arts of bureaucracy; they are as likely to see their mission as uniting the “republic” with the northern statelet they have learned to administer with the careful coaching of the Brits. The sad thing is that we southern Hamlets will again have to let it happen

 Seán Ó Nualláin  9u samhain  2014


Again, my books on Ireland are at;

scams unveiled

and

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

Science foundation Ireland disgraces us internationally - yet again

Many reading this blog may wonder at how Ireland “works”; of course, it doesn’t. However, the process is long-attested; a tight core in Dublin city center creating an alternative reality and finding politicians willing to front. Ideas are NOT discussed; if you attempt to speak truth to power, it just waits until you get upset enough that they can declare victory. That, in short, is why institutional Ireland is the stupidest country in the West

I note there are many readers of this post in Germany. They may think "The Irish are at it again - delusional pumping up of the economy, now science". Disregarding the fact that Ireland bailed out the German banks, that is basically correct. I will spare such readers the rest of this blog by summarizing;

1. The recent Nature ad for SFI is an absurd lie

2. Irish scientific performance was better in 2002, the year before SFI was created, than in 2013. In 2002 it was ranked 38 overall; in 2013 it was ranked 40 overall.SFI  has cost in the region of E 800 million annually, according to Chris Horn of Iona and various state boards;


http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=0&category=0&region=all&year=2002&order=it&min=0&min_type=it

http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=0&category=0&region=all&year=2013&order=it&min=0&min_type=it

 It is also lower in 2013 than 2002 in the 3 categories cherry-picked for the Nature ad as we see below

I append two recent e-mails to Taoiseach  Kenny. He is careful to formally acknowledge everything I send. No, of course I do not expect action; however, many of us Irish are au fait enough now to fill the power vacuum that obtains in Ireland

My 2011 thoughts were re-blogged in Indonesia;

SFI also destroyed collegiality

In the past, SFI famously hired private planes at taxpayer's expense to fly useless academics around;

The disgraceful Deri project 

Its very expensive "link" with Stanford seems dead;

 http://deri.org/

Visit the Deri site and play "spot the Irish researcher" (as distinct from admin);

http://www.deri.ie/people

My recent monograph describes how I think scientific research should be done;

Stuart Kauffman's review of "One magisterium"

My 2012 book has a chapter detailing what went wrong with science in Ireland;

A colony once again

It is now a matter of record that we did better in science internationally in an environment in which there was NO state funding beyond university salaries, and in which tenure was protected. Please see my article on tenure in chapter 9 of

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



  It is noticeable that this mischievous ad in Nature is for FOREIGN researchers to come and do ethically dubious "science" in Ireland with corporate links. The native Irish? - we get summarily dismissed (the Cahill case), locked out of our labs (ditto) and our software stolen (my case)

Here are the letters

"A Thaoisigh, a chara

Still no reply. At this point I am not expecting one. We’ll fight it out in court; I have no fear of your state

However, I grant it is possible that Ministers O’Sullivan and Bruton have been told we have a brilliant R+D programme at universities and that people like me rock the boat. While you may prefer to go along with this fantasy, it is as well yet again to point out how ridiculous Ireland looks when these lies are attempted on a global audience It is not even my job to tell you this; clearly, you have incompetent advisors around you and I am concerned for my country. It may be ok for you to look like a fool (as in the “Lenin in Ireland” scenario) and head into retirement, but the rest of us need respect.

“Nature” is one of the top 2 science journals in the world. This week (16 Oct 2014, vol 514 Issue no 7522) there is an ad for SFI facing P. 286.  It claims Ireland is “in the top 20 countries overall for citations…1^st, 3^rd and 4^th in immunology, nanoscience and computer science”

You can check this claim at;

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2014/computer-science-information-systems#sorting=rank+region=+country=+faculty=+stars=false+search=

It is clearly a lie; there is no Irish uni in the top 200, which means that Ireland will be lucky to be 50^th in computer science let alone 4^th.  Any self-respecting researcher will know the ad to be a lie.  The other two are not even “subjects” as defined in academic best practice but take it we are not in the top 50 for biology – the nearest equivalent -  either

No, I’m not expecting any action. But have a look at the life of P. Bartholomew Ahern as we Irish tire of all these lies and waste. As it happens, this is another problem we can and will solve with an effective and honest government. Your lack of reply to my solutions to the music business – just as we played the Sean O Riordain night in Dublin and achieved a major breakthrough in US radio – indicates to me a closed system

Dr O Nuallain

A Thaoisigh, a chara

Many billions have been spent on Irish universities and research since I was illegally forced to leave DCU  in 2002. DCU in particular benefited from patronage due to its proximity to then Taoiseach Ahern’s constituency. It was also allowed to act outside the law. For the record, I ran international confernces every year that brought in money,  had my  research money stolen, and was so proud to serve my country that I never asked for an increment.

Yet, even after all that it DCU still not one of the world’s top 500 universities;

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html

On the same page you will note that Stanford is number 2 and UC Berkeley is number 4. I taught 2 new courses I designed myself at Stanford;

http://web.stanford.edu/class/symbsys129/

https://symsys.stanford.edu/viewing/symsysaffiliate/1463

I had to leave Stanford in 2012 as my visa was delayed by the US embassy in Dublin. You will recall certain difficulties regarding ex-Ambassador Rooney and his visa chief Bradley Wilde. Senior Stanford faculty have apologized that I was collateral damage

I continue to run a seminar at Berkeley in science after teaching Irish music there;

http://foundationsofmind.org/

http://celtic.berkeley.edu/flyer%20Irish%20Song%20&%20Music%20course.pdf

As you now know, I did all this while 15 years of notes and books that I owned, and 15 years of work that I did there (1987-2002 with a break in Canada) were being held illegally at DCU. I politely request you to continue the decency that got me my physical possessions back and help me get back my work. It is a matter of public record that FF were trying to privatize the universities and all they contained.

University education is changing; with online courses being aggressively promoted by Stanford and Berkeley through coursera.org and edx.org, it is possible that Ireland will be left at the starting post.  If I and the other talented people shafted by your predecessors are allowed reactivate their careers in Ireland, we can turn it around. We do not  need money from Ireland , just accreditation; I can get very good staff here in the USA.

 Apart from filling the 1,000 or so job vacancies in software localization in Ireland, we could enroll tens of thousands in online Irish studies and cognitive science internationally. We would be the first in both areas. This would work as a private-public project with the state sharing the costs and profits

I suggest that we resolve the issue with DCU with minimal cost to the taxpayer. They clearly owe me money for withholding my physical property. I suggest they pay whatever it costs to buy a house equivalent to the one I had to sell. It would be appropriate for them to grant this. We could settle the IP issue separately. Given that I was able to work at 2 of the world’s top 4 universities without any resources, it is clear that there has been huge loss to Ireland

Is mise le meas

Dr O Nuallain"

PS Of course Nanotech can claim also to be physics........again, try and find an Irish uni in the top 200 in physics. That ad - which I assume also went out in "Science" and elsewhere - must be withdrawn



Finally, here are some figures from what appears a reputable  source

 A government agency has paid for an ad containing lies about the performance of a very expensive project and done so in an international journal

 Here are the rankings in computer science for the years 1996-2013;

http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=1700&category=0&region=all&year=all&order=it&min=0&min_type=it

Ireland is 35 not 4 as the ad said

 37 for 2013, single year, thus excluding the possibility that SFI needed time to redress the lack of research 1996-2002

30 in 2002, the year before SFI began. In short, massive investment of taxpayers' money has led to a LOWER ranking

Immunology

http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=2700&category=2723&region=all&year=all&order=it&min=0&min_type=it

Again 35 not 1 as the ad said

 36 for 2013, single year, thus excluding the possibility that SFI needed time to redress the lack of research 1996-2002

 32 in 2002, the year before SFI began. In short, massive investment of taxpayers' money has led to a LOWER ranking



Nanotech

http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=2500&category=2509&region=all&year=all&order=it&min=0&min_type=it

Ireland is 30 not 4 as the ad said. 32 for 2013, single year, thus excluding the possibility that SFI needed time to redress the lack of research 1996-2002

 31 in 2002, the year before SFI began. In short, massive investment of taxpayers' money has led to a LOWER ranking


In short, SFI is a colossal waste of money.

We have not even mentioned the fact that FEWER Irish companies now get Nasdaq listings after more than a decade of SFI than did before. By SFI's own account, even their patent and spinoff activity is dismal;

http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1024619.shtml
 
The respected finfacts site also labels SFI's goals as delusional;

http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1026400.shtml

It also echoes research by Brian O'Neill over 10 years ago showing many researchers double and treble-dipping into funds from PRTLI,, SFI, etc. Brian also claimed much of the funds went into BUILDING, not research. We can assume that these were the buildings sold at a discount to foreign firms





PPS The "Lenin in Ireland" incident was described as follows in the Brit tabloid Sun , with all the insult to Irish intelligence that is its stock-in-trade;

The Sun wot won it

Yes; when Ireland  agreed to shoulder over E100 billion debt its people had not incurred, this is the level of advice our PM had

I felt inspired to write this ditty; think a Ronnie Drew growl, a melody like the verse of  "are  you right there Michael" or "st Kevin" or similar come-all-ye. There is a reference to Lenin's menage a trois.....

Lenin in Dublin

We've all heard oul Solzhenitsyn

Say in Zurich Vlad did reside

But auld Alex did never start bitchin'
About when Lenin went Liffeyside.

The Whites and the Reds they were fightin'

His two wives started to moan
Says Vlad I'll sail over to Ireland
and check out their National Loan.

He sauntered out ever so vain

Promenaded on Dun Laoghaire pier

when the wives complained of the rain

He stopped in to Neary's for a beer.

Mick Collins was helpful and martyred

The country it was  stony broke

That's always the case and departin'
Lenin saw Dublin sink under the smoke.

PPPS Finally, elsewhere I have written about the coincidence of the  foci of SFI and the CIA's In-Q-tel

http://seanonuallain.blogspot.com/2013/07/science-foundation-ireland-and-cia.html

This of course makes it look as if i have spent too much time in Berkeley, home of the conspiracy theory. and then - thank you Jesus - a US spook comes out and confirms my suspicions that the USA has been trying to subvert the culture, including the science of other countries.

In Greenwald (2014, P 167) an NSA/SIGINT officer for "science and technology" announces that the main goals of the spooks are "Money, national interest and Ego". The destruction of  the Irish music industry that I document earlier on this blog can be viewed in terms of the spooks' goal of "pervasive exportation of American culture as well as technology". On another blog I have documenetd their attempts effectively to de-recognize Ireland as a country, probably at the behest of their British catamites;

http://seanonuallain.blogspot.com/2014/03/irelands-missing-ambassador-strange.html


 Greenwald, G. (2014) No place to hide NY: Henry Holt



 Seán Ó Nualláin 2014

Specific policies for a new Irish political party.

(AS Elsewhere (CSP, 2013) I have written about what a constitution for a new Irish republic might look like.

You can find this book, the proceedings of the first ICIS conference at UC Berkeley, with a free excerpt at

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

The monograph can be found at

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

A free excerpt from my monograph is at;

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

I include this parenthesized antescript  as the readership of this blog is indeed international)

Here the objectives are less abstract; simply to outline current absurdities and  to propose a course of action to resolve them

I. The nation and its territory

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That there is a national territory

-         That there be no ambiguity about sovereignty

-         That there be a clear ownership of the island’s  natural resources by the Irish people for their own benefit

-         That we Irish be accorded the status of a sovereign nation by the USA rather than have a charge d’affaires

-         That the US embassy in Dublin properly safeguard the Irish passports entrusted to it for visa approval

Neither of the above is true as of the early 21^st century; after the 1998 referendum there is no territory and none of the island is ours. After the  2004 referendum , the alternative pre-1998  definition is also gone. Therefore these are the policies;

1 The territory of the Irish state is the island of Ireland

2. A referendum is to take place in “northern Ireland” allowing areas to secede. Those that do secede will lose immediate access to Irish passports

3. If the USA continues to treat us abusively , we should recall our ambassador

II Macroeconomic policy

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That we should have control over a currency

-         That we should not set a world first in having junior private bank debt transferred to the sovereign

-         That we should get a deal at least as good as Iceland, post 2008, whose private banks defaulted on British account holders

None of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose;

1. We should refuse to repay all debt imposed by the IMF/ECB
2. As a quid pro quo, we should offer to bring our corporation tax regime in line with the rest of the EU;
3. If this offer is not accepted, we should reboot our “punt” currency and exploit the carrying capacity of a land currently exporting over $13 billion worth of food every year

III Civil and corporate law enforcement

It would seem reasonable to assume;

- That our corporate law enforcement body has taken at least one successful prosecution since its formation in 2001;

- That there be no ambiguity about whether civil or common law exists in Ireland, and whether its basis is natural law or not;

- That judges should be properly trained, and refrain from gratuitous comments;

- That 100% of the new law should come from Ireland, not 25%

None of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose , in a land whose revolution was exemplified by the creation of a new court system;

1. The civil and corporate law systems be stripped down to basics about property;
2. That criminal law rely on the common law;
3. that properly trained judges interpret the law vis a vis justice and civil society precedent and in so doing create the basis for new fundamentals

IV Culture and ethnicity

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That Ireland is the land of the Irish, as France is of the French, and that the public statements of university presidents should not demand that the Irish be a minority ethnicity in Ireland;

-         That the highest cultural resources of the state be reserved for the ethnically Irish;

-         That the state behave to its citizens with decency and with a sense of the benefits to the world of a fully-realized Irish state;

-         That the goal be the Irish fully alive, rather than neoliberalism exemplified

None of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose that;

-         A definition of Irish ethnicity, one that recognizes our vast Diaspora, be included in the constitution;

-         That any immigrants should be assimilated;

-         That we cease projects like those in science that replace native enterprise with extravagantly-funded and foreign-staffed nonsense

V Right to life

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That life in all its manifestations be honoured, including  through a well-provisioned health service

-         That, given scientific  ignorance of the relation between impulse and action, suicide not be grounds for full-term abortion with its Gothic mechanism

Neither  of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose that;

-         The state refrain from having power over life and death

VI Property

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That those losing their homes to foreclosure would not have to pay the debt for which their inability to pay is the reason for their eviction;

-         That those who make massive property investments and lose them through incompetence should not be able to hold onto them at the taxpayers’ expense;

Neither  of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose that;;

1. NAMA be scrapped and the property be sold at market price, or alternatively used to woo the recent Diaspora back with cheap home deals;
2. That, given that homelessness is more expensive to the state than building cheap housing for the indigent, we should do the latter;
3. That the current scams involving NAMA to promote scarcity in various prestige areas of Dublin to pump up the property values of the Irish establishment be scrapped

VII Industrial relations

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That since unions are legal, so are strikes for illegal dismissal

-         That the state should ensure equality of representation at illegal dismissal tribunals

Neither  of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose that;

1. The current “social partnership” model be abandoned and real unions be allowed to emerge
2. Equality of representation should be enshrined in law as the ECHR required in Morris and Steele vs UK (2005)

VIII State media

It would seem reasonable to assume;

-         That the national broadcaster should stress quality material, from all over the world;

-         That it should either pay for itself through ads or attenuate to a bare-bones quality service

Neither  of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose that;

   1. RTE should cast off its “pop” wing and be subsidized as a quality service, as distinct from consuming hundreds of millions annually in the production of trash

  2.   Producers and presenters currently with RTE  and having to leave should be subsidized to create independent media companies

IX Culture

It would seem reasonable to assume, particularly in a country with as ancient and attractive an attested and living culture as Ireland;

-         That state export boards would not collude with criminals in selling the quality expression of its greatest artists for Walmart to market at cut-price;

-         That the national “music rights body” should not be involved in copyright theft at an industrial scale;

-         That the entire corpus of traditional should not be privatized, but be in the public domain;

-         That criminals in this area should be brought to justice once caught in Ireland by the Gardai, and exposed both in British litigation and US federal court proceedings

None of the above is true as of the early 21^st century. We therefore propose that;

1. The statute of limitations be lifted for these crimes as for others;
2. Civil “servants” involved should be prosecuted, and lose their pensions if convicted

Seán O Nualláin