Police Ombudsman's Office bugged..

IRISH POLICE IN SPOTLIGHT

AGAIN AS OMBUDSMAN’S OFFICE

DEEMED TO HAVE BEEN BUGGED

BY PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN!

The startling and disturbing revelation yesterday by the Irish police Ombudsman Commission which investigates complaints against the national police force, An Garda Síochána (Guardians of the Peace), that their offices had been bugged by unknown entities has stirred a political storm across the establishment as Government reactions have sought to blame the Commission for failing to report to the Minister for Justice when the event occurred rather than finding out who the criminal culprits are which is the main public interest in this outrageous incident.

Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Enda Kenny, made a completely inaccurate statement to the media that the Commission was legally obliged to report such incidents to the Minister for Justice and tried to use this misleading quote to divert attention from the real issue here, which is: Who bugged the Ombudsman’s Office????

An Taoiseach said: "Section 80 subsection 5 of the Garda Siochana Act requires that GSOC would report unusual matters ..."
Section 80 subsection 5 of the Garda Síochána Act actually says:  "The Ombudsman Commission may make any other reports that it considers appropriate for drawing to the Minister’s attention ..."   which allows the Commission its own discretion in the matter, not a legal requirement as Mr Kenny implies. A Prime Minister should know the facts of legislation he is quoting unless he is deliberately trying to mislead the public. No doubt the parliamentary opposition will have a field day pursuing the issue this week.

The Garda Commissioner, Martin Callinan, fresh from his confrontation last month with the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee which wanted to query the revelations by Garda whistleblowers on “fixing” and quashing  traffic offences fines  for personal favours on a wide scale throughout the country, where he described the Garda whistleblowers as “disgusting people”, went on the defensive once again and accused the Ombudsman of implicating “his force” in the bugging affair. Callinan’s constant use of the term “my force” has rattled the elected representatives on the PAC and the general public no end. 

He ought to remind himself now and then of the Constitution he is sworn to uphold which declares in

 Article 49 (1):

“ All powers, functions, rights and prerogatives whatsoever exercisable in or in respect of Saorstát Éireann immediately before the 11^th day of December, 1936, whether in virtue of the Constitution then in force or otherwise, by the authority in which the executive power of Saorstát Éireann was then vested are hereby declared to belong to the people.

It is the people of Ireland who are in charge of the State, Government and all public institutions in this country, not any individual, fancy uniform notwithstanding. When you are in a hole, Mr Callinan, it is a good idea to stop digging!

In another display of police arrogance, the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors has called on the Director of the Ombudsman Commission to “consider his position”. What brass-necked impudence from supposed public servants!

The Gardaí themselves, from Commissioner Callinan down, are responsible for the public concern which is now rising about the quality of law-enforcement in the force by their manifest failure to cooperate fully with the Ombudsman Commission since it was established and in particular, Commissioner Callinan’s barge-pole relationship with the Office.

The Ombudsman Commission has been criticised for not reporting their suspicions to the Minister for Justice and for engaging a British company to undertake a security sweep of their offices, which is understandable considering this company would be entirely independent of any Irish sources which might have been responsible for the bugging. The waffling statements of the police representatives are unworthy of a constitutionally established force accountable to the public for their conduct particularly since the Ombudsman Director has stated that they had found no evidence of Garda involvement.

Chairman of the Oireachtas (legislature) Public Services Oversight Committee, Padraig MacLochlainn T.D, said last night there were "more questions than answers" as it stood. "We will want to know what did they and the British security company discover? Were they spied upon or not? And we will need to probe their statement that there was no evidence of Garda involvement. Does that mean they are suspected?" he asked.
After a two-hour meeting with Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, yesterday, GSOC chairman, Simon O’Brien, confirmed that there had been three "threats" to the security of its communication systems. He did not say what these threats were and if they constituted bugging or surveillance, as had been claimed since the story broke in the media on Sunday.
Mr O’Brien said an investigation was set up between September and December last year following a security sweep by a specialist British company they had hired. He said: "At the end of the investigation we found no evidence of Garda misconduct and we shut the investigation down."

 

No doubt this story will continue to exercise public concern and more investigations will be required to reveal the full truth of the matter.

Austerity is not inevitable:

Paul Dillon at the recent launch of Campaign for Labour Policies in Dublin

 

 



 

Austerity is neither

inevitable,  or new:

 

By Paul Dillon:

 

Austerity is neither inevitable, accidental nor natural, or new. It is in fact a return to a very old policy, from before the vote was won, before the trade unions made the giant gains we still enjoy today: austerity is the policy of using the state to protect those at the top, limiting the share of the economy going to workers pay and the public purse. It must be understood that austerity did not fall from the sky 6 years ago when Brain Lenihan, then Fianna Fail finance Minister, introduced the first austerity budget and implied it would be all over before we knew it, and the we were told, laughably now, not to talk down the economy. If austerity is about, and it is about, the transfer of resources upwards, then this trend became well entrenched during the "Celtic Tiger" years.  In 1987, workers share of the national income was 52%, capitals 48%. By 1998, workers share was 42% and Capital's share was 58%.

And the consequence of this was widening inequality. At the height of the boom, Ireland ranked second to bottom in the OECD league table for poverty and inequality. Contrary to all lies, myths, Ireland's spending on social protection was half the EU average at the height of the apparent boom. Alongside this, trade union density and power fell rapidly during the Celtic years, meaning that by the time the crisis arrived, the labour movement was severely weakened. Trade union membership was 55% of the workforce in 1980, 38% by 1988 and 30% by 2010. And all this occurred in an international context where the share of the economy going to employers, over workers or the public purse has increased hugely. The high amounts of debt which so many of us carry, is a consequence of this decline in ordinary peoples share, and of course the debt which so many people have, is a huge contributory factor in holding back resistance to the effects of the crisis.

Alternatives

 There is a vast gap between what austerity provides, and what citizens desire and that is where an enormous space emerges for an alternative policy. By 2015, the unemployment rate in Ireland will stand at 13%, according to the Government's own figures. This is why when you hear them say that they are working to provide jobs, that employment is the way out of the crisis, they are being somewhat economical with the truth, when they know by their own figures, that their policies sustain unemployment. Unemployment keeps wages down, it disciplines the Labour market. The purpose of slashing the public sector pay bill is to allow for similar readjustment in the private sector. Austerity cannot provide jobs, nor is it intended to. Jobs are not created by tax breaks, jobs are created by demand and investment.

A massive job creation programme needs to run in tandem with an attempt provide for the social needs of our people -we need to stop slashing the public sector -we need to take leash off public enterprises -and we need to start talking about co-operatives and worker controlled industry. There are endless bailouts for banks and those who speculated with them, but none for workers or communities. Why couldn’t the state, in the case of Waterford Crystal, have bailed out the workers, buying the patent for Waterford crystal, handing it over to the workers in Waterford who could run the place with blindfolds on, as an alternative? An investment strategy is the alternative to the cuts:24 billion steep since the crisis began. But, we ought to be very clear; when we demand investment and jobs, we must distance ourselves from those employments, in private and public sector, which downgrade terms, conditions, for young workers, and displace long term better paid jobs. The nurses unions boycott of 2,000 nursing positions, on much poorer pay terms and conditions than these workers deserves, has resulted in just a handful of applications. This has been a tremendous show of solidarity, driven from the grassroots up by young nurse, making the scheme unworkable. The Health Minister has said he wants to extend a cut price programme for other health workers, and that is why it is essential that the nurses maintain this boycott and win. They deserve our full support.

 

Privatisation

In the name of austerity, huge chunks of our public services are being outsourced and privatised. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of healthcare. The programme for Government between Fine Gael and Labour, allows for the full privatisation of care for the elderly. Other areas will be up for grabs, like administration in the HSE. Coupled to this, we are to move to full on private health insurance, where a handful of global multinationals will compete to make profit, subsidised massively by the public purse.The home help workers know what this is about, when they experienced the cut in wages, of 25% when care services were outsourced. The most disadvantaged communities in the state know what this is about, as they await the provision of primary care, while the state enters into partnerships with developers who can no longer profit from housing, but who are now being subsidised to build primary care centres where they can profit most.

This health system -private, for profit, outsourced- will be more expensive. That’s the experience in the United States, where more public money is spent per head than anywhere else in the world, the experience also in this Dutch model Ireland is to follow, where health spending has gone up, when private insurance came to dominate. State subsidies for drugs and private insurers who profit from illness, should be replaced with a system that invests in prevention and treating everybody equally. We may be bottom of the league at so many things, but we are top of the tables when it comes to which state pays out most for drugs and medicines. In almost every other sphere, pubic services invested in by us for decades, are up for grabs. Look at CIE: where, if the Minister for Transport gets his way, private companies are to be offered routes on our public network, and where more public bus routes will be privatised.

The pattern is always the same: starve services of investment, thrash the public sector trough the mass media, weaken the unions internally, privatise the services, followed by huge paycheque for CEOs and investors, and inevitably, as we have seen in Britain with the privatisation of their trains, a poorer service, a more dangerous service. The privatisation of Telecom Éireann reveals what privatisation means. Eircom was worth, in today’s money, €8.4 billion at the time of its privatisation and was debt free. By early 2012, it was on its way into examinership, with net debts of almost €4 billion. It had shed all but 5,500 of its 13,000 jobs, and we have one of the worst  broadband systems in Europe.The alternative voices on this and on other public services have hardly been heard. But austerity inevitably means privatised public services-there is obvious huge public support for decent health and education services, which austerity can no provide, and that’s a further opening for the space for the alternative argument.

Democracy

What austerity does to democracy is that it hollows it out. The list of social rights that have been lost during this austerity period is long: The right to dental care funded by PRSI payments, the right to state funded masters for students on grants, then there are labour rights that have been reduced. In each of the areas where social rights have been lost, citizens are forced to rely on the market, where we become consumers with rights depending only on how much we spend, rather than citizens. This transfer of provision has been accompanied by a transfer of democratic responsibility into group and bodies which we cannot elect and cannot remove. The national roads authority, NAMA, the HSE all operate beyond any accountability, despite the fact that they control vast public resources.

Austerity clashes with these seeking tom advance democratic demands. The demand for more democracy not less as a response to privatisation, mass consumerism will invariable bring clashes with those who seek to restrict democratic rights. As we fight austerity we must nail a few lies and mistruths, which have been peddled constantly as this crisis has developed. Yes, there are the resources in Ireland to introduce a wealth tax. The top 1% of adults own over 125 billion. A French style wealth tax would bring in 500 million a year, according to the Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, himself.

Economy

Yes, there are enough resources off our coast to provide an enormous economic dividend; 750 billion worth, according to SIPTU. Is there a better example of the neo-liberal mess we are in than the situation regarding our natural resources? In 1975, licensing terms which allowed for a 50% State holding,royalties and a 50% tax on profits accruing from an oil or gas find and development. In 1987 royalties and state participation were abolished by Fianna Fail and in 1992 the corporate tax rate was reduced from 50% to 25%.

Yes, the debt that we all carry, must be thrown off our backs, and there are mechanisms to do that, which will, of course, clash with the interests of our own banks and wealthy individuals, and the Government's move last week, put belt and braces on their liabilities. Mobilising for these demands for jobs, public services and democratic rights will invariably cause clashes with power and established interests that exist. The previous Government and this Government, including the Labour Party, are committed to austerity. The space for an alternative to the policy of this government and the last is vast, when you consider that the aspirations of people can’t be satisfied by austerity.

But, we ought to be fully honest. The phrase "austerity isn’t working" isn't the whole truth-  it is working for those for whom it is designed to work. Every cent of the bogus bank debt will be repayed. The top 10% of citizens in Ireland have enjoyed an increase in their income during the crisis. The major corporations, aided by our tax haven status boom, like TESCO's, returns profits like never before, while tagging the workers who make this possible.

None of the things which people desire -full employment, decent health and education- can be provided by austerity or those who support austerity. That is where the space lies. But, this will require an upsurge in organisation, politicisation and solidarity. And if the establishment has returned to an old policy of austerity, it is worth saying, maybe we should return to an old policy which could be made very modern again. When Connolly wrote letters overseas to unions seeking support during 1913, the letters were headed with the slogan "each for all, all for each". There cannot be meaningful social action without an increase in solidarity between people, and it is up to us to make Connolly’s message resonate now, as an alternative way of dealing with one another, more strongly than ever.

 

 

 



New Book on Irish Folklore

NEW BOOK ON IRISH 

FOLKLORE WELCOMED:

This book, a welcome addition to publications on Irish Folklore is well illustrated and has two music CD's included with a fine collection of music and songs related to the theme of the Irish "Otherworld" or supernatural beliefs and superstitions of the Irish culture from many generations. Belief in the existence of a parallel world and in otherworldly phenomena is a long established Irish tradition and elements of this belief continue to be found in contemporary Irish society. The "Sluagh Sídhe", the Host of the Sídhe is the principal element of this tradition, often misnamed "fairies" by writers in English, they were the inhabitants of a parallel world associated with ancient grave sites and mounds of the pre-Celtic period and later incorporated in the local aspects of the Celtic Christianity which became established in Ireland in the 5th Century.

 A pre-historic tomb site in Co Clare, Ireland, which sites were often connected with the "Sluagh Sídhe" of

Irish folklore.

The book, "The Otherworld" has been compiled and edited by Rionach uí Ógáin and Tom Sherlock. Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann is the publisher.

The material contained in the book is from the National Folklore Collection/Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann in University College Dublin. The National Folklore Collection UCD is the largest in the world and has been developed from the founding of the Folklore of Ireland Society in 1926 which led to the establishment of the Irish Folklore Institute (1930-1935) and, subsequently, the  successful Irish Folklore Commission (1935-1971). The work begun then continues today under the auspices of the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin.

 The "Beansídhe" as envisioned by Disney Studio's animators in "Darby O'Gill and the Little People"(1959).

Prof. Ríonach uí Ógáin is Director of the National Folklore Collection/Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann, University College Dublin. She has published numerous articles on traditional song and music and has lectured widely on the subject.

Tom Sherlock is a music business manager and consultant with wide experience in the promotion of traditional music. He has worked as a production manager with Claddagh Records, an artist manager and agent, a promoter and producer, a festival programmer and as a writer and commentator on Irish music and culture.

Paperback 220pp; ills. November 2012 | ISBN: 978-0-9565628-3-8
Catalogue Price: €25.00 | Web Price: €22.50

"The Otherworld" is available for purchase from Four Courts Press