Considering the government has announced its intention to proceed with X Case legislation, I contacted the Taoiseach’s office to query if he welcomed Ms Creighton’s intervention. I was told that Ms Creighton’s announcement was a decision for herself but government policy was clear, that it intended introducing legislation with a suicide test, and had been reiterated by Enda Kenny on a number of occasions, most recently on Sunday in an interview with RTE’s This Week programme.

I also contacted Ms Creighton’s office on Monday morning and asked the following questions: what legal basis she felt if it was possible to omit suicide as a grounds for abortion from legislation; if she felt it was helpful to draft this legislation when it’s at odds with government policy and, finally, if she intended to vote against any legislation that includes an abortion test. Regrettably, I haven’t received a response from the Minister, yet anyway.

In any event, it is clear that Ms Creighton’s draft legislation will be both legally and politically unsound. As former supreme court justice Catherine McGuinness said, at the Oireachtas abortion hearings, it is not possible to excise parts of the X Case decision without have a referendum, something that Ms Creighton, to my knowledge, has never suggested.

The debate now must move to the framing of the mooted abortion legislation and there seems to be some consensus that consultant psychiatrists should perform the assessment of suicidal women. I contacted The Psychological Society of Ireland on Monday to query if they objected to this – particularly considering that the assessment in the original X Case was performed by a psychologist – but was told that the organisation needed “a longer time to come up with a position paper on the issue”. Why the organisation has waited until this late stage to form an opinion on the matter is something of a mystery.

Consultant psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane has also expressed concern, on medical grounds, that any legislation will be overly prescriptive when it comes to medical treatment and assessment. There is a danger that political imperatives, to draft something that those uncomfortable with the suicide test will vote for, will mean that the Bill does not give medics the latitude they need when treating women. To that end, she has recommended that any specification as regards the number of assessments be a matter for regulations, not primary legislation, and said the Department of Health should contact the Irish College Psychiatrists and request its assistance in drafting these regulations.

I emailed the Department, querying if it intended contacting the Irish College of Psychiatrists, or any other professional mental health body, to ensure that the ultimate bill, as well as being legally sound, is medically sound and received the following reply:

The Department of Health is now commencing the process of drafting legislation and regulations in this area.  This process will be informed by the Report of the Expert Group on the judgment in A, B and C v Ireland and by the Report of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children arising from the three days of public hearing on the issue held last week. Further consultation with relevant stakeholders might also take place during the drafting process as required.

While the department is leaving the door open to further consultation with professional bodies, it is not ideal that one such body, The Psychological Society of Ireland, appears to have no position, as of yet, on the matter.

In a plot line straight out of Father Ted, a number of councillors in Athlone have reacted with horror to a large installation by artist Shane Cullen, which painstakingly reproduces the messages of hunger-striking Republican prisoners that were smuggled out of the infamous H-Block prison in 1981. 

However, instead of picketing the gallery with signs screaming “down with this sort of thing” or “careful now”, Fine Gael Councillor Mark Cooney opted to put down a motion at Monday’s local authority meeting calling for the art work to be removed. 

The remainder of this piece can be viewed on the Examiner website, where it was published on Jan 9. 

The tweets in question, according to the piece, were primarily from @Jim_Sheridan, a freelance producer and musical director of RTE’s Late Late show. In one, he responded to a rather crass joke, when one user suggested the Senator be crucified with rusty nails, while in others he lampooned the Senator using photoshop to superimpose his face onto a number of religious and pop culture images.

Curious about whether the Minister had actually seen the tweets and, if so, which ones he found objectionable, I contacted the Minister’s office yesterday to discuss his comments. I did not speak to him directly but received this emailed response from a spokesman:

“I personally told the Irish Independent that I would not comment on any tweet I had not seen but that ‘I would deplore the use of offensive material from whatever source’ – which was by way of a reply to questioning about the place of employment of the person who posted the tweet.”

However, before I posted the blog I failed to contact the journalist who wrote the piece, senior features writer at the Independent, Gemma O’Doherty. She has informed me that, unlike me, she spoke personally to the minister before publication. She also states that at no point did he tell her he would not comment on a tweet he had not seen. During a documented interview, he described the tweets as dreadful, offensive and deplorable. She also confirmed that she had sent Mr Sheridan’s tweets to the Minister and, when I called the Minister’s office again this evening, this was confirmed.

Any unintended inference that the Irish Independent’s article was inaccurate is withdrawn and I apologise to Gemma O’Doherty in this regard.

One by one they got to their feet and waxed lyrical about their sympathy for women who find themselves forced to travel abroad for an abortion, fulminated about the appalling failure of successive governments to do anything to resolve the legal quagmire that enmeshes this most controversial of issues, declared their unwavering support for legislation to finally give effect to the X Case judgment — and then promptly voted against a Bill that would do just that.

Now, let’s get a few things straight. It may come as a surprise to hear this but women in this country have had a constitutional right to an abortion, if their lives are at risk, for nearly 30 years, since the constitutional amendment was passed in 1983.

A High Court judge, in the X Case in 1992, said the failure of government to enact legislation to give legal effect to that right was “inexcusable”. Six years later another judge, in the C case, said she didn’t want the High Court to become a “licensing authority” for abortion — vulnerable women constantly forced to mount costly legal actions to determine their right to an abortion.

The response of government, in 2002, was to try to pass a constitutional amendment that would have removed the right of suicidal women to an abortion. They would rather have let them die. Thankfully, the Irish people rejected that amendment.

In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said the State’s failure to implement a framework to allow a woman unambiguously determine her right to a lawful abortion was a breach of her human rights.

The judgment is binding and while the court could not tell the State how to comply with its obligations under international law it did pointedly note that Ireland is almost alone in the Western world in not having enacted legislation to clearly define in statute the conditions governing access to abortion.

Remember, this is not abortion on demand. Or even abortion for health reasons — no matter how serious those health issues may be. The ECHR ruled that the State’s preferred practice of exporting desperately ill women for abortions was perfectly fine. The only thing this ruling relates to is access to an abortion when that abortion will save the life of the mother.

Still, the Government felt compelled to create yet another stumbling block before legislation could even be contemplated and long-fingered action by creating an expert group to discuss how best to bring itself into line with the court’s judgment.

The reasons for this are purely political and have nothing to do with women or their best interests. TDs are simply too craven to accept the implications of the ECHR ruling so they have outsourced the decision to a quango that will be cynically used to deflect criticism when it eventually reports back and recommends legislation.

Then , of course, there will be another endless delay before legislation is drafted and, if the Government manages to get around to it before the end of its term, it may be enacted.

Incredibly, last week was the first time in the history of the State that an abortion Bill was debated in the Dáil, but TDs like Michelle Mulherin still insisted that those supporting it were moving too fast — as if a 30-year delay wasn’t long enough.

The faux controversy surrounding the Bill, the only purpose of which was to grant women an abortion if one was required to save their life, was truly horrifying and reveals the naked contempt with which women are treated by the body politic.

Imagine if politicians had been debating a Bill that offered life-saving treatment for diabetics, or asthmatics or cystic fibrosis patients and it had been defeated in favour of waiting an indeterminate length of time for a report and subsequent identikit legislation? There would have been outrage, deservedly so, but because the debate concerned women, and their right to an abortion, politicians were too cowardly to act.

It really was nauseating but the behaviour of Labour TDs, only one of whom, rebel TD Patrick Nulty, supported the Bill, was particularly odious.

At least those TDs implacably opposed to abortion didn’t betray their conscience. They opposed this abortion Bill and they’ll oppose the next one. It was Labour TDs, with their mealy-mouthed words of support and their patronising extensions of thanks to the proposers of the Bill for raising the issue, who abandoned their principles when they casually torpedoed it.

Support for last week’s Bill, a highly restrictive piece of legislation that would have required the opinion of two doctors before an abortion could be performed to save a woman’s life, is a no-brainer. The real debate we need to have in this country is extending that right to women whose physical or mental health is seriously harmed by their pregnancy.

Currently, most Irish women cannot avail of a medical abortion, a pill taken over the course of a number of days, because of the logistics of travelling abroad. They have to opt for a day procedure, a surgical abortion, which, for safety reasons, cannot be performed as early as a medical abortion.

So, women are forced to wait for up to two months, while their pregnancy progresses, before they can leave the country for a much more invasive procedure. They are also less likely to access vital after-care services, once they return to Ireland, because of the stigma attached to their decision to travel for a procedure that, if performed here, could result in a conviction and a life-sentence.

THEN there are the women who discover, much later in their pregnancy, that the foetus has a genetic condition that means it will not survive the birth. They too are told, tough, to continue with the pregnancy and endure the birth. Why? Because a succession of male-dominated governments have presumed to tell women how they should react to that devastating news and feel perfectly content removing any vestige of personal autonomy from one of the most difficult decisions they will ever have to make.

This isn’t an area in which the State should be meddling at all. It is a personal medical decision that should be taken by women in conjunction with their partners and their doctors. Instead, women are reduced to the status of insentient incubator and instructed to grin and, literally, bear it by the self-dubbed pro-life lobby — whose concern for life doesn’t seem to extend past the moment of birth.

The 4,500 women who are unwilling or unable to comply with this diktat every year are shipped, out of sight and out of mind, beyond our puritanical shores — their silent sacrifice deemed an acceptable price to maintain the State’s illusory veneer of moral rectitude.

The abortion law on the statute books is 151 years old while the constitutional ban was introduced when a prescription was required to buy condoms and homosexuality and divorce were illegal. Ireland has changed. It’s time the law did too.

This article was first published in the Irish Examiner on April 25 2012

You can forget your tribunals, criminal investigations, court cases, and convictions. No, that due process stuff is seriously overrated. What the people of this country really need to do is to get down on their hands and knees, stop complaining and start praying.

That’s according to former taoiseach and EU ambassador to the United States, John Bruton, who, during a reflection delivered in Christ the King Cathedral in Mullingar last Thursday, said the “relentless search for someone to blame” for bankrupting the country has become the eighth deadly sin, having easily leapfrogged gluttony and sloth in the immoral stakes.

“Vengeance does not cure the injury to victims. Sometimes it makes it worse. Retribution is not Christ’s way. No, that hard and unnatural thing, forgiveness, is Christ’s way,” said the chairman of IFSC Ireland — a marketing organisation for Ireland’s international financial services sector.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. We haven’t actually had an opportunity for any retribution or vengeance yet because nobody, not a sinner, has been held to account for banjaxing the country, but whist your self-indulgent bellyaching.

Saint Bruton says that even those impure thoughts — like the ones you get just after checking the balance of your overdraft, in which you imagine a number of high profile bankers starting a life sentence of hard labour in some far-flung gulag — are corroding the country.

According to the Sermon at Mullingar, modern Ireland would be a much more pleasant place if we all simply continued to turn the other cheek and quietly got on with the business of repaying Anglo’s debts for the next 20 years without grumbling so much.

Of course, we’ve all turned so many cheeks at this stage that one assumes the former Fine Gael leader is in fact asking us to drop our collective pants, and have our arses mercilessly whipped for eternity, in order to demonstrate our magnanimous capacity to forgive.

“Our reason is a gift from God and we must use it to examine our own lives, our faith and our failings . . . if we did that more often, we would not need so many regulations and regulators,” he mused.

So, the public face of the financial services sector in Ireland thinks we should replace regulation of the industry that has, thus far, cost us €100bn, in payments to banks and NAMA, with religious reflection? What’s next? Politicians telling us that we should return to the good old days when blank cheques were their preferred method of payment and one had more chance of being hit by lightning than getting a receipt for a political donation?

Bruton’s deep-seated aversion to financial investigations dates back at least 20 years when, at a Fine Gael fundraiser, Frank Dunlop told him a party councillor, Tom Hand, was demanding an extortionate amount of money, reportedly £250,000, in return for his support for the infamous Quarryvale project.

“There are no angels in the world or in Fine Gael,” was the cryptic response of the then Fine Gael leader, who failed to report the matter to gardaí or, indeed, conduct even the most cosmetic of internal inquiries into the allegation because he was “disinclined” to believe Dunlop.

Considering the “endemic and systemic” nature of the corruption that was unmasked by the Mahon Report, one would have thought that a chastened Bruton would now have a little more time for the blame game — namely, finding and prosecuting those fraudsters who used their positions of prestige and influence to fleece the country and feather their own nests.

Although not remotely religious, rarely invoking angels when told about gross corruption, I tend to come across all Old Testament when it comes to debates on the various financial fiascos that have led the country to its current sorry impasse.

Personally, I think a dash of vengeance, and a good dollop of retribution, would go a long way to restoring some public confidence in this country, its political institutions and its justice system.

Not so our former taoiseach who seems to think that a group hug, a rousing rendition of “Kumbaya” and a tearful promise to try to do better is punishment enough for those white-collar criminals whose greed and avarice cost the country its economic sovereignty.

Perhaps it’s easier to forgive and forget when one is creaming a €138,000 annual pension from an insolvent State while still boasting a high-paid job in the private sector, hobnobbing with bankers who intensively lobby for a return to wing-and-a-prayer financial regulation.

Bruton, who will never know the worry of missing successive mortgage repayments, or endure the pain of seeing a sick family member languish on a public waiting list for years, can afford his piety. What he can’t afford, apparently, is to lead by example and return some of his gargantuan pension to an impecunious State — at least until he, you know, actually retires.

Bruton’s obstinacy in this regard is in stark contrast to the patriotic stance taken by a former taoiseach he served under, Liam Cosgrave, who, without fanfare, has quietly gifted part of his pension back to the state.

Let’s not forget, the former Fine Gael leader is also receiving an EU pension for the time he spent as ambassador to the United States, income from speaking engagements, board appointments, like his position on the board for the Centre for European Policy Studies, and whatever he gets for the honorific positions he holds, like Visiting Fellow of the European Institute at the London School of Economics. That’s before his bumper salary from IFSC Ireland even comes into the equation.

Meanwhile, he feels no compunction about lambasting those, engaged in the so-called blame game, who have the temerity to wonder why nobody has yet been hauled before a court and charged with any criminal offence related to the spectacular implosion of the country’s economy and the saddling of tens of billions of euro of private debt onto the shoulders of just four million citizens.

At least others in positions of authority are finally beginning to publicly ask questions about the snail-like pace of the investigation into the banking collapse.

Speaking at the weekend, Communication Minister Pat Rabbitte said the “interminable delay” of the Garda investigation into the fetid dealings at Anglo Irish Bank was “unconscionable”, and wondered why no one has yet been charged with their part in the “destruction of the country”.

Well, Mr Rabbitte can join the club but it seems obvious that, despite the assurances given to Government, the Director of Corporate Enforcement doesn’t have the requisite resources at his disposal to conduct the investigation in anything remotely resembling a timely fashion — the four-year length of the inquiry is proof positive of that fact.

Religious high flyers like Bruton, fond of moralising from the pulpit, may be happy with the notion of white-collar crooks getting their punishment in the next life. Me? I’d prefer to see them held to account in this one.

This article was first published in the Irish Examiner on April 11 2012

I’m uploading it below in PDF format as there hasn’t been that much written about the case and its legal implications. It’ll likely be too wonkish for most but it basically briefly explains the impact of the incorporation of the ECHR in domestic law, some of the more controversial aspects of the judgment and its likely impact – if the government ever get around to doing anything about it. I hope it’s written in a pretty clear way so may make the ruling, and its ramifications, a bit easier to understand.

ABCEssay

Bloggers, tweeters and those who post on internet fora such as boards.ie and politics.ie are scoffed at, sneered at and, generally, treated with the same sort of disdain that one normally reserves for those drunken idiots who think nothing of dropping their pants and defecating in the middle of the street after a night out. In fact, I’m sure I’ve seen that exact metaphor used to describe much of the material that can be found in internet forums.

The jailing last week of a 21-year-old Welsh student who decided to cap a day spent drinking by logging onto Twitter and posting racist slurs about footballer Fabrice Muamba, who remains in a serious condition after he collapsed at a recent FA Cup game, has only served to copperfasten the keyboard-warrior stereotype of the social networking site.

In reality, Liam Stacey is an aberration and the immediate online reaction to his vile racist comments, universal condemnation which resulted in him posting a grovelling apology for his remarks long before the police knocked on his door, highlights the majority opinion of the online community — a zero-tolerance consensus when it comes to those who mistake freedom of expression for freedom to defame.

That’s not to say that there are not loathsome trolls lurking behind a mask of anonymity, who use their poison pen, and poor spelling, to try to provoke a reaction. Of course they exist, but the best policy when it comes to these halfwits is not to get angry, or even get even, but just to ignore them. Without the oxygen of attention, those sad individuals, who use social media to launch vitriolic personal attacks on people they’ve never even met, soon return to obscurity and their deep-seated feelings of inadequacy.

The mistake of many in print and broadcast journalism is to react with wounded feelings when online critics dare to express an opinion that is divergent to their own and arrogantly write off the tens of thousands of ordinary people who regularly use new media to express honestly held opinions as deviant or stupid or both.

This deeply entrenched “them and us” attitude arises, primarily, because of fear and distrust. Media is in a state of flux at the moment that could see, if current trends continue unabated, the demise of print journalism altogether.

All over the world newspapers with proud and long-standing records of breaking stories, and providing an important public service for their respective communities, are going to the wall as readers migrate online. In most cases it is only when those newspapers are gone that people realise what they are missing — quality journalism, comment and analysis from a source they can trust.

Irish people’s traditional affinity for buying a daily newspaper means that the decline in sales is not yet terminal here, but the time for wringing hands and just wishing the internet away is long since passed. Business as usual is not an option anymore — something has to give and it’s not going to be the internet.

Print journalists, and their employers, should not be so insecure about the marketability of their talents and skills. Most bloggers don’t have the time or the resources to spend days, weeks or months investigating stories of public interest.

Most cannot spend time covering courts or Dáil sittings or any number of events that you’ll read about each day in newspapers like the Irish Examiner. They would equally baulk at the thought of getting out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning to visit the scene of a murder, in order to interview witnesses, and few would entertain the notion of knocking on the door of a recently bereaved family, unannounced, in order to try to get their side of the story.

Newspapers retain an edge on much of the myriad information that is swilling around in cyberspace because of the investment of media companies in journalists and photographers who go out and unearth, verify and add context to the news.

In truth, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between old and new media. It is often the work of traditional journalists, who have broken stories or covered important news events, that is discussed online following its publication. True, the debate is not always the prettiest, sometimes becoming unnecessarily bitter, but, equally, one can often find thoughtful, insightful and witty posts online and, increasingly, valuable original content in blogs like thestory.ie and namawinelake.wordpress.com.

However, without the existence of traditional media, many of the most popular stories being debated online right now would not have come to public attention at all.

Regrettably, newspapers can’t survive on the feelgood factor derived from publishing stories in the public interest. Alan Crosbie, the chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings which owns this newspaper, has called for State funding to be extended from RTÉ to broadsheet newspapers but, not least because of EU competition law, this simply won’t happen.

Instead, something much more difficult has to be undertaken — an attempt to convince a readership, used to an all-you-can-eat buffet of free news, that it’s worth spending a couple of quid each week to pay for the news that so many resources have gone into creating.

Without this investment the continued existence of newspapers becomes harder to rationalise. What’s the point of a newspaper, full of press releases and regurgitated information when one could get the exact same news by joining a couple of governmental mailing lists? Newspapers, and indeed broadcasters, need to invest in their content — the thing that sets them apart from all of the competition — so they can continue to scoop their rivals with original material and provide loyal readers with stories, and analysis, that they simply won’t be able to get elsewhere.

Increasingly, the danger is that declines in sales and advertising revenues will lead to a vicious circle of cutbacks and layoffs that will whittle away journalists’ ability to act as society’s bloodhounds, sniffing out news stories, transforming them, instead, into glorified press officers.

The internet is a big place and there is ample room for both old and new media, but unless traditional media groups accept the reality that any future growth is going to be internet-based, and realistically plan to exploit the growing market in mobiles and tablets, then their future cannot be assured.

Niche products with a captive audience, like the Financial Times, have proven that pay walls do not have to sound the death knell for newspapers. The challenge, for those that do not enjoy such a narrowly defined niche, is to engage with their readers and devise a pay wall that will not scare them off when they have the temerity to ask for money in exchange for making their work available online.

This piece was first published in the Irish Examiner on April 4 2012. 

This was published in the Laois Nationalist, where I worked briefly, in May of that year. 

DESPITE an enforced absence of five years, Charlie Flanagan decided he didn’t need an Ego Boost before re-entering Leinster House last week. He bypassed the trendy hair-dressers and strode into the aptly named clothes shop while out canvassing in Abbeyleix on Thursday.

“I’m hoping to get back into another Leinster House in a couple of weeks,” he told the proprietor, Julia Bergin. “Ah, you’ll be back alright,” she said confidently before cutting Mr Flanagan’s reverie short by adding: “Can the council do anything about those weeds outside?”

There was widespread political shock, presumably felt most sharply by Mr Flanagan, when he lost his seat in 2002. This time he is leaving no stone unturned and seems to be determined to knock on every door in Laois by May 24. He has done his homework. “We have calculated that 70% of people are out during the day and 50% at night. We are trying to visit towns and villages during the day, and I am visiting rural areas every second night. I am in Portlaoise every second evening and also on Saturdays.”

Mr Flanagan next met Anita Bonham: “My son has told me that everyone in his class is after turning to Fine Gael. They’re sick of Fianna Fáil,” she said. The Fine Gael canvassers beamed in unison until she added an addendum; that her son is 13.

Siblings Michael and Mary Dunne are definitely registered to vote and assured Mr Flanagan that he would get their number one. “Laois has definitely lost out to Offaly since 2002. It’s high time for a change,” Michael commented.

Iris Fyffe was busy serving a customer when the Fine Gael election team stormed her shop, proffering handshakes and party literature. “I lost out the last time and I’m anxious to get back in,” Mr Flanagan told her. “You’re fighting fit this time,” she called after him as he disappeared back onto the street, his loyal team of canvassers hurrying to keep up with his frenetic pace.

Out on the street Denis Rohan told Mr Flanagan that even though he thought his father, Oliver J, was “a great man” he couldn’t possibly vote for him: “That Pat Rabbitte wants to introduce abortion into Ireland. You want to go into government with him.” A baffled Mr Flanagan was momentarily lost for words before reassuring him. “I promise that if Fine Gael are in government abortion will not be introduced.” Mr Rohan did not look convinced and began speaking about the controversial “D Case” as the Fine Gael team cut their losses and moved off up the road.

Coincidentally, the next person to meet Mr Flanagan had a completely different opinion of the Labour leader. Mary White told Mr Flanagan that the only politician who cares about childcare is Pat Rabbitte: “I am involved with Jellytots, a crèche in the town. Our funding is due to run out this December. 44 children use the facility and we can’t put up our prices if our funding dries up. Childcare is a huge issue and the people in the department who are supposed to help us haven’t a bull’s notion about what they’re doing.”

Mr Flanagan told her that the right wing agenda favoured by the PDs was the reason that childcare wasn’t adequately funded. “The PDs want to privatise and deregulate everything. Market forces can divide society. We hope to be in government with Labour and if we are we will address the childcare issue as a matter of urgency.”

The next stop in the whirlwind tour of Abbeyleix was the dry cleaners where Helen Campion told the election hopeful that a good deed done by his father meant that he would be getting her all-important number one: “God, it must be 40 years ago now but I was hitching up to Dublin when your father passed in the car. He pulled over and gave me a lift. I’ve voted for Fine Gael ever since.” Although hitchhikers on the M7 are few and far between in Celtic Tiger Ireland, it seems that canny politicians should keep their eyes peeled when travelling up to the capital.

Jennifer Moran and Emma Kilbain, second-year students, were walking home at 4 o’clock clutching copies of Kiss magazine when they met Mr Flanagan and his entourage. Their date with the celebrity gossip bible was postponed as they were asked if they wanted to see a change in government. The teenagers smiled sheepishly, trying not to say the wrong thing. In the end, they muttered a quick “don’t know”, laughed nervously and looked at the ground. It would appear that election fever hasn’t quite gripped the entire nation.

Pensioner Helen Ryan smiled when she came to the door and told a delighted Mr Flanagan that: “I never voted for Fine Gael before but I will this time. We need a change.” Mr Flanagan promised that his clinic door would always be open if she ever had an issue in the future. “My main concern is equity release. Elderly people are being sucked in and ripped off. Living on a pension is tough so I looked into it but they just want to get your money. It’s a disgrace,” she said.

As the buoyed up election team walked to the next house Mr Flanagan gave some insight into the public mood at the moment: “It’s amazing. I’ve never met so many people who don’t know how they are going to vote. People are really thinking about it. In 2002 I got 12,000 second preference votes and being everyone’s second favourite is not a good place to be. People think they are doing you a favour when in actual fact it’s a vote of very little consequence.”

He then went on to list the phrases that he dreads hearing when canvassing: “You know that you’ve no hope when you hear people saying; I’ll look after you; I’ll give you a scratch; I’ll give you the nearest thing to a number one that you can get; or, I won’t do you any harm.” It may not do any physical harm, but hearing words like that from the electorate can inflict serious mental anguish.

Thankfully Trisha McKenna did not mention any of these phrases when she opened her door. She is a biker and said that VAT being applied to safety gear like helmets and leather gloves was a serious issue: “Some shops treat helmets as if they are leisure equipment and add VAT to the price. Tax should not be added to safety gear. Road safety is a huge issue at the moment and something should be done about this. If young men spend nine or ten grand on a bike, they are not going to want to pay any extra for good safety gear. It could save their lives.”

Mr Flanagan admitted he had never heard of this and said that he would look into it. It must have been a slip of the tongue when he said that he would raise the issue with the party’s finance spokesman – Brian Cowen.

I have uploaded a link to her lecture which is about 30 minutes long followed by some questions and answers, here – 20120329 150934 - and have also transcribed some of the lecture below.

I would recommend listening to the entire lecture – she crams a lot of horrifying, and infuriating, information into 30 minutes.

On the 2002 deal religious orders – “Among Bertie Ahern’s most egregious acts.”

The child abuse scandal dwarfs all others as a shocking chronicle of rape and cover ups are contained in both the Ryan and Murphy reports…in 2002, among his most egregious acts, Bertie Ahern made a deal with the religious congregations to limit their exposure to compensation thus leaving the taxpayer to meet over €1bn in costs. Now, you hear a lot about taxpayers having to pay off bondholders in banks but remember that the same taxpayers had to carry this great burden to pay the major share of compensation to the victims of clerical sex abuse. Those responsible for the abuse, and cover-ups, have only had to meet a small share of the costs and that, to me, remains a shocking and continuous scandal.  On a much larger, vaster, scale that became the model for how banking collapse was dealt with…the bank guarantee, as with the clerical abuse scandal, transferred the burden onto the shoulders of the taxpayer.

The Flavin Case – “That precedent haunts every other [financial] inquiry.”

This concerned allegations of insider trading on the Irish stock exchange…the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that Mr Jim Flavin, as chief executive of DCC and a director of Fyffes, had acted illegally by selling DCC’s shares in Fyffes while in possession of confidential information which was highly pertinent to the inflated Fyffe’s share price.  The Director of Corporate Enforcement had a High Court inspector appointed to examine the matter and, I have to say I was amazed when, the highly regarded inspector produced his report in 2010 exonerating DCC from the consequences of an established breach of law on the basis that Mr Flavin didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t mean to act illegally, and taken legal advice and was given the go ahead. He found the actions were inadvertent breaches of the law and decided he acted in good faith on the basis of what he had been told by highly paid advisors…the Director of Corporate Enforcement decided to drop the matter and took no further action in relation to the biggest insider dealing scandal ever disclosed in this country and for which DCC had to pay €40m in damages to Fyffes. Now, that precedent haunts every other inquiry…most notably, the inquiry into Anglo Irish. The Flavin’s case shows very well the barriers any prosecution has to face in pursuing business malpractice in Ireland.

The Ansbacher Inquiry – “We have been down the road of financial scandals, with close political connections, before and the reaction is always the same.”

The political reaction then was identical to what we heard last week after Mahon. The 10,000-page report was sent to the Revenue Commissioner, the DPP, the Garda Commissioner etc. Revenue and the tax authorities did use it to enforce a new, quite successful compliance regime but there were no criminal prosecutions. So, we have been down the road of financial scandals, with close political connections before, and the reaction is always the same. Revenue does pursue back taxes with interest and penalties…but it’s rare for criminal sanctions to be applied. Ray Burke, the former Minister, was prosecuted for tax evasion and he went to jail for 6 months but he never faced prosecution for the adverse corruption finding made against him by Judge Flood.

The Mahon Report – “Corruption has been endemic and systemic.”

Business and politics got intertwined in a wholly corrupt manner… It was possible for a group of sleazy politicians to break through all the safeguards in the system and create planning decision that have neither rhyme or reason but which impose huge costs on communities and families.

The Media – “Everybody knew what was going on.” 

The maddening this about [planning corruption] is that it happened in the full glare of the media. Everybody knew what was going in. it was so blatant it was the subject of jokes and anecdotes … I remember the day in 1996 when an ad appeared in the Irish Times from a Newry firm of solicitors offering a substantial reward for information leading to a conviction for planning corruption. I was Minister of State at the time, and had my own experience of receiving 42 formal legal letters threatening defamation action unless I withdrew suggestions of misconduct … so I was personally rather pleased someone was trying again to lift the lid on this corruption. I was rather shocked, I have to say, to observe the furious reaction in the of Leinster House corridors to the ad from Newry. TDs from all parties were horrified that such an ad could have appeared and there was widespread annoyance that anyone should cut across the established means, which then was a Garda inquiry, all of which had been utterly futile in the past.

Fianna Fáil and its “toxic triangle” of networks and connections 

A rezoning frenzy allied to tax breaks led to a construction boom and the mountains of debt accumulated by banks in a mad rush to offer loans to developers … Anglo lent to developers, the developers funded Fianna Fáil and Fianna Fáil then brought in tax breaks which, in turn, encouraged banks to lend more. So, that was the toxic triangle, or the golden triangle, of networks and connections.

Bertie’s Nigeria gig.

I was amused to see, on the front page of the Irish Times, Bertie Ahern giving a lecture in, of all places, Nigeria – a country which has probably been more damaged by corruption, over the decades, than other country, certainly in Africa and perhaps on the planet. Perhaps he was talking about political ethics.

I mean, it’s not as if he’s being asked to embark on a mission to find the lost city of Atlantis. Or, indeed, solve an even bigger mystery — the source of the monies that were discovered in Ahern’s convoluted bank accounts.

The list of people who could be implicated is by no means infinite and runs to just 15 members of cabinet and 20 junior ministers, after Ahern magnanimously opted to swell their ranks by three, from 17, when the party romped home in the 2007 election.

Martin should know this better than anyone seeing as he was reappointed to the cabinet that year, having first joined the front bench in 1997. But no, he has no recollection of any concerted attempt to undermine the tribunal’s work.

Odd then that the Mahon Report was so adamant that members of that government had launched “unseemly and partisan attacks” on its work, concluding: “There appears little doubt but that the objective of these extraordinary and unprecedented attacks on the tribunal was to undermine the efficient conduct of the tribunal’s inquiries, erode its independence and collapse its inquiry into [Ahern].”

Having had 24 hours to digest the report, before he faced reporters at a press conference on Friday morning, Martin appeared to brush off this damning indictment by suggesting that because no one was specifically named it was impossible for him to delve any further into the matter.

He also pointedly said that while he unequivocally accepted the findings of the tribunal, the critique of the government did not appear in the report’s findings and was instead mentioned more generally in the summary — the implication being it somehow carried less weight.

Of course, this is an entirely disingenuous statement as it seems obvious that the reason the tribunal judges did not include their scathing criticism of the government in their findings was because that particular determination was not derived from evidence that was painstakingly adduced at the tribunal over 15 years but, rather, from the venom that was spewed in print and broadcast media during a relatively short period of time, while Ahern was spinning his financial fairy tales in Dublin Castle.

Instead of treating the tribunal’s unprecedented criticism of ministers with the seriousness it deserves, the message from a glib Martin, eager to use the proposed expulsion of Ahern from the party as cosmetic proof it has finally mended its ways, was “move on, nothing to see here…”

Read more: http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/colette-browne/martin-cannot-brush-off-criticism-for-his-silence-on-tribunal-bashing-188563.html#ixzz1qUKdxalD