A government TD should sound or indeed be better informed than the men at the end of the bar. So when one decides to open mouth to the press to I would hope that he had previously taken a minute to research the particulars of the individual situation and consider any broader points that might be at issue.

The Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise suffered the destruction by fire of its Cathedral. As part of the rebuild a new organ would be needed and a tendering process was established. A committee chaired by Prof G Gillen, a world class organ scholar, was set up to steer. The contract was awarded to an Italian company who won the competition across all parameters including cost.

On foot of this announcement a local blue TD decried the decision to send work out of the country at a time of economic hardship and begged the diocese to instead award the contract a company in Bray.

Now any private citizen is perfectly free to dispose of his income as he sees fit. He can buy exclusively Irish or half Brazilian half Thai if he wants. But the Diocese is not a private person. It acts in stewardship of the money given to it by the faithful and it has duties both moral and legal in how it uses this money. If it had subverted its own tendering system its auditors have stated they would have not been able to sign off on  the diocesan accounts.

If the good TD wants to see economic hardship then he should continue to push the logic of his position. We are small highly productive nation. We are so far beyond self sufficient in food that we export 90% of what we produce. We are world leaders in the manufacture of computers chips, erection medication and baby food. We sell everywhere to everyone. As one of the world’s most open economies with a bigger export surplus than anyone in Europe bar Germany free trade is our mothers milk.

It may be possible for some economists to construct situations where protective tariffs or selective subsidy look like being helpful to an economy. I doubt it but for the sake of argument let us so suppose. What we know for an absolute fact is that the most tariff friendly thinker would tell us that Ireland is at the extreme opposite end of the trade spectrum and that last thing we should ever do is get into a trade war. We benefit hugely from free trade and open access to foreign markets.

If there are TDs in the government party that favour protectionism, subsidy and tariffs then let them be made known to us. There is no need for them to be shy. They are doing what politicians with no brains and no ideas do in a moment of crisis. Something. That is after all why they got into politics in the first place. They wanted to do Something. Now as the country is mired in crisis they know that they have a duty to do Something. They are part of a long and honourable tradition of politicians spanning the oceans and the ages. Men who stood up bravely and demanded Something must be done. I like to think of them as having two patron saints. The Castor and Pollux of the noble breed if you like. They were St Smoot and St Hawley. They did Something. And along with Blessed FDR (who did Manythings) they made sure the crisis of 29 would become the depression of the 30s.

So please, if you meet your local TD or councillor, throw your arms around their neck and grasp their knees in supplication. Beg them in these perilous and hungry times, to, for the love of God, do Nothing.

I watched a documentary about Padraic  O Conaire on Tg4 over the weekend. The usual story of a tortured artist, a prophet rejected in his own land, and since he was an Irish writer, an alcoholic who drank to kill the demons. A collection of academics and writers including a nun in a veil talked of the tragedy of a man born out of his time and cursed by the mores and narrowness of the society around him.

At one point the subject turned to his politics. It transpires that O Conaire was a radical who embraced the ideas of international socialism. One of the talking heads referred to the hysterical reaction of Cardinal Logue to growth of socialism and quoted him condemning communism in the usual over the top way. This was reported to us in a tone which was a mixture of condescension and   amused contempt. The viewers were clearly being invited to think how paranoid and prejudiced was the cardinal and by extension the Church. Silly and small minded they saw monsters in the shadows which plainly were not there.

Except the monsters were there. And we know they were and we know how monstrous they were. Only seven years after Logue spoke Lenin seized power in Russia. Seven years after that Stalin ascended the Bolshevik throne and the world would know only too well the wonders of International Socialism. As I watched this perfectly ordinary piece of television it struck me that this is what the left always does. And we let them get away with it. They mock those who prophesied against Marxism, they sneer, they jeer. Most of the time we don’t hear the words but we do hear the tune they confidently play and a part of us accepts it. The truth is Logue was not wrong, he was not over the top or hysterical. If anything the Church did not fully understand the magnitude of the evil that was evolving in the heart of Europe. If anything they underplayed the threat of what was to come.

How often have we heard the story of the Hollywood blacklist referred to? Yet the story we hear is always the same. An America gripped by panic and manipulated by wicked rightwing forces betrays itself and persecutes a harmless bunch of creative types. If we were to believe the narrative commonly sold Russia was no threat and in America there were virtually no communists. However we know the American Communist Party at least up to Hungary had tens of thousands of members. We know that like all orthodox communist parties it took direction from Moscow. We know that Stalin’s Russia was deeply hostile to the US. We know that they invested heavily in spy rings in America to steal military secrets and technology. We know from the Blacklisted themselves that party members not merely tried but succeeded in getting anti communist stories blocked from production in Hollywood. That McCarthy was a nasty type and that he abused his power is given. That there was no threat, that there were no plotters is emphatically not.

Thomas Sowell observed that Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. What the left does in public discourse in order to ignore it is to reconstruct history. They adopt the morality of Raskolnikov. Firstly in private they understand that as the vanguard of the revolution they are not bound by the bourgeois morality of the masses. They assume an almost Nietzschean position; their extraordinary role gives them extraordinary permission. In public they practice retrospective falsification in the knowledge that if a lie is told often enough and with enough authority it will be believed. Or at least the truth will be reduced to a point where the masses think there is no truth merely a number of competing narratives.

They have being doing this from the very first days of Socialist power. They had to since they achieved and maintained power from the first through terror. They had to because it became clear very early on that the theory was bunk. They continue to do falsify and deny to this day. The fact that so discredited an ideology should persist is a condemnation of the right.

We all value civility. We appreciate courtesy, politeness and respectful disagreement. Nobody enjoys a discussion where we spend all the time pointing out errors of fact. It feels arid and pedantic. However we live in a teaching moment. It is teaching us that ignorance of history and economics is too expensive a price to pay for politesse. We can no longer allow ourselves to remain annoyed but mute when the old lies are trundled out. These are interesting times and we must respond to people’s interest. The odd arch comment thrown in from the sidelines is not acceptable. This is a time for evangelising. In the pub, at the dinner table, over coffee, we must say, no, I’m sorry you’re wrong. When the tired platitudes appear often it is enough to ask a simple question. The left are deeply unused to having their basic world view interrogated. The lightest of breezes can bring down the whole edifice. But if a conservative stays silent in the presence of Marxian cant what other can the observers think but that we have no answers, we have no argument, we have no analysis to compete with theirs. It is time to speak, and truth will set us free

One phrase perhaps more than any other survives M Thatcher. There is she said, no such thing as society. Those on the left like to throw it in conservative faces like a soiled glove. They try to embarrass politicians with it and indeed generally succeed as most politicians are horribly embarrassed by the truth.

The central debate in democracies over the last century and more has been how to balance the rights and freedom of the individual against the desire to achieve a measure of redistributive justice. We do not want the poor to die of hunger. We want all the children to read and write. But we don’t want to pay punitive taxes. So each political party and each election is a negotiation where we see just how many  pet schemes and high minded projects politicians can convince a plurality of voters to force wealthy people to pay for. Sometimes the pendulum swings to the left and the rich get a good soaking while one legged Eskimo lesbian poetry is well funded. Other times the pendulum swings towards individual liberty and private property and the middle classes get a tax cut while international transgender drum combos suffer a nasty cut.

What Thatcher did when she said what said was to remind a population which had forgotten that society has no money. When it comes to paying for the Eskimo lesbians’ round in the pub society will always be found in the toilets, or outside having a fag. When it comes to paying for services of any kind, there is no such thing as society. Which is what she said and what she meant. When it comes to paying there are only individual tax payers. There are those who are net takers and those who are net givers but Government, the State or Society contribute nothing to the coffers. The role of the state at this point is wages clerk doling out the cash made from the profitable bit of the company. Or perhaps better, a fence, dealing in the procuring and dispersal of stolen goods.

The left really do not like it when we low types remind the dozing public that all that lovely lolly being redistributed by the Fence General is theirs in the first place. This knowledge makes the taxpayer grumbly and truculent. It brings out their baser nature. It makes them ask nasty questions, like,. Why the hell should I have to pay for that? None of this is helpful when one is trying to run a government. Even run one as badly as ours.

The arc opinion regarding where the State may not go and cannot morally do ranges from the anarcho-capitalist through the Burkean Tory and Social Democrat to the Maoist or Stalinist loons. It is an interesting and important debate, which I have all too often. For the purposes of this short remonstrance I will give two quick rules of thumb against which I measure new State appropriations. The first thing is to remember that certain rights are imprescriptible. Governments can never legitimately suspend these rights except in the most extreme of circumstances and for the barest time needed. And with the widespread and tested will of the people. Anything which infringes on this is to be rejected.

The second test is the laugh test. Most of the problems we have regarding the expansion of the state is where someone has created a new right and the state weighs in to vindicate this right, usually at the expense of another’s rights. The way to deal with these  is simply unpack the right in reverse. All these second order positive rights (alla Berlin) make direct demands on other people and their resources. The trick is to see of the lefty of your choice can keep a straight face when you get them to articulate the rights claim as a positive duty. Recently a theftwing pal of mine, vastly wealthier than me, asserted that everyone had the right to free contraceptive medicine. This meant I pointed out that I had a duty to a pay for his condoms. And I asked him to defend the position. Why I demanded, should I buy Johnny’s johnnies. This propositions failed the laugh test. And yet and yet, I guarantee the next batch of manifestos we see will be full of ribticklers far funnier than this. It’s our own fault if we don’t laugh them out of court.

In Ireland education is funded from general taxation. So, not a penny of state money is involved. The system is based on the principle that money follows the child. Schools are subvented according to the number of children attending. Children attend the school of the choice of their parents, which meets their expectations of quality and whose ethos, religious or secular, they are comfortable with. If no such school exists the parents have the right to educate their children themselves. This is a basic right since the constitution is unequivocal that parents are the primary educators of their children and not the state, the family being the basis of society and anterior and prior to any state.

There are no state schools in Ireland. There is a diversity of schools run by various denominations, charitable institutions, community bodies and the VEC. The latter being the closest we have to state control is naturally the pet of the current minister. The system on the whole has worked well for us over the years in providing our young people with a consistently better than average education than our counterparts in the OECD. This is not to say that the system is without inequality. As it stands parents who send their children to fee paying schools are penalised as those schools receive a substantially reduced per capita subvention. Roughly this means that a school in the VEC would be paid for twenty seven teachers while a fee paying school of the same size would be paid for around twenty three posts. It is beyond laughable to hear representatives of the TUI dismiss this difference as marginal when one recalls the howls of outrage in response to a cut of this magnitude being propose to any school in the the VEC sector and the declarations of the dire consequences such a reduction would have on teaching quality.

The inequity of this funding is made even more evident when we consider the shape of school funding. In our radically progressive tax system the top half of one percent of tax payers accounts for twenty percent of all income tax receipts. Top earners pay an effective rate six times that of those at the other end of the tax net, while a great number pay no income tax at all. It is no surprise that many of the families sending children to Blackrock, Clongowes and Alex are in the upper tax bracket and therefore already contributing disproportionately to the funding of schools even though these schools are underfunded by government in the division of posts.

Fee paying schools have been with us since the foundation of the state. Have they represented a two tier system of quality education? No. How do we know? Because somebody checked. While the literacy and numeracy results from PISA make the headlines there are other perhaps more important results that get ignored. We have never hit the top spot in either of those areas but we did in another. We were, along with Finland, the country with the greatest equality of access to education in the world. That meant that where a child happened to live, be it in Donnybrook, Listowel or Trim, it had less impact on their educational outcomes than anywhere else in the world. That is equality. Sadly we have seen a decline our performance in this area. The same period has seen not an expansion in fee paying schools. It has seen an expansion of VEC patron schools and a contraction in the voluntary sector, which are religious schools. I am not saying post hoc propter hoc, but it is curious.

Parents send their children to fee paying schools for many reasons. I could speculate upon them but it is none of my business. It is none of the ministers business. The job of the department in this country is not to run schools or decide who goes to which. Its function is regulatory, it is there to define minimum standards and inspect schools to ensure their achieve them. The composition, ethos, religion, language and management of the schools is the choice of parents not big brothers

Some years ago I was able to observe the machinations of Fine Gael in election mode. There was a huge amount of chat about policy, radical cutting edge, game changing, and paradigm shifting policy. Politics was now a battle of ideas I heard, and the job of the party was to innovate and communicate. Well you get the idea. An orgy of cliché was had by all. However when on a few occasions Mad Blueshirt did approach the mother ship moored on Mount St. with fresh notions they went into fits. Not the traditional Fine Gael cataleptics but full blown apoplexy. Raging frothing phone calls and desperate terrified emails besieged us until reassurance was given.

 On only two topics were we to be given our full rhetorical head. The Dear Leader himself had spoken with absolute clarity. Fine Gael was committed to faith schools both on principle and in the belief that the model was highly successful for children. And secondly Fine Gael held the Prolife position as a core value.

 Well faith schools have long since been thrown to the dogs of political opportunism. If this govt lasts five years and Quinn stays as peoples commissar for public instruction then we can be confident God will have been hunted from our classrooms and the religious from our schools. But last week saw something which I still find hard to credit. As tired and cynical as a person becomes there lingers a hope that our politicos have somewhere in them a sticking point. But then…

Last Thursday Ronan Mullen, jihadist, proposed to the Senate that the practice of killing girls in utero because they were girls was a bad practice.

……………. I was going to go on long sarcastic satirical polemic, against our feminists and others, in the manner of a modest proposal.

But I can’t. I’m too tired. I’m too sad. I’m too disheartened right now. The publically confessed catholic leader of Fine Gael, Ireland’s Christian Democratic Party whipped his senators on an indisputable matter of conscience. He whipped them to support an amendment which eviscerated the motion. An amendment put down by Irelands leading pro abortion advocate. A cowardly amendment which came out against infanticide; a practice which is already illegal everywhere. A vicious amendment; which was careful not to mention the abortion, of girls or any other vulnerable group.

I am heart sick. I am hurt for my friends in FG who are bewildered by the lack of morality or courage shown by the leadership of the largest ever FG group in the Oireachteas. I am ashamed for those young men and women who I know and like in the parliamentary party. Men and women I never dreamt would remain passive and quiescent in the face of such an immoral use of the whip. I am at a loss to know where or to whom I can turn to find support or defence of the principles, ethics and traditions of many if not most Irish people. Is Enda Kenny really telling me already that if I want than kind of thing I must go back to the party which did so much to ruin the country?

Maybe. Maybe a decimated, humiliated and purged FF represents the best hope of old idiots like me. On the face of it that proposition seems absurd. You might very reasonably ask me how I could think of forgiving them so soon. You might correctly say that they must spend many more years in the desert before they might even be considered for power. I have no satisfactory answer to you. Perhaps the young TDs and Senators in whom I had previously reposed my hope will yet find their courage and their voice. Perhaps.

On this the first day of repayments the Taoiseach doesn’t know the names of the bondholders. Yet I do. The Internet told me. What I don’t know is what Fine Gael is for. I wonder does the Taoiseach know.

 So twenty two judges have refused to follow the example of their brethren and accept voluntarily the pay cuts and pension levy imposed on the public sector by the Government in January of this year. So for the sake of twenty two judicial pay-packets the government wants to tamper with separation of powers that defines a healthy democracy.  According to the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, the pay cuts would be between 16.3% and 23.2%. Taking a notional salary of €200,000 and taking a middle figure pay cut of 20% that would mean that we are holding a referendum in order to save maybe €880000. In a couple of weeks the same government will mandate Anglo Irish, a dead bank, to pay out €800 million of taxpayers’ money to unsecured bondholders. For E880, 000 we couldn’t burn a single bond holder, we could not even lightly toast one. This referendum is clearly not about saving money.

 The fact is this referendum is probably unnecessary. The Supreme Court has recognised the application of income tax to judges is legitimate .A change in the taxation of judges as a class rather than of just an individual most authorities think would be legal.

If what they really wanted to achieve was just a cost saving, there is no necessity to change the constitution so radically. It would have been perfectly easy to introduce an amendment which would have applied only to judges currently appointed in a once off measure and leave untouched the basic protection of judges provided in the constitution.

 One of the basic principles of all law, statute and especially constitution; is the wording of a law be clear and intelligible and its application predictable. Nobody is agreed about the meaning, short term or long term of the text of this amendment. It is vague, ambiguous and wide. It is poisonously bad law to put into the constitution a cuckoo’s egg of an amendment whose effects cannot be clearly predicted. If professional and academic lawyers cannot agree on a common understanding on the import of this amendment, how can ordinary citizens be expected to make an informed judgement on their vote.

It is a principle of republican government that the judiciary be protected from the legislature and the executive. The United States constitution adopted in 1787, guarantees that judges receive “compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office”. The same guarantee was written into Bunreacht na hEireann one hundred and seventy years later. Our leaders need to remember the most important function of the constitution is to protect ordinary citizens from the power of the state. And independent judges are central to that protection.

 We are not being asked to place our faith in the good will and democratic principles of the Taoiseach and his government. We might be happy to accept that they are upstanding men and women who would never dream of interfering with the administration of justice. That is not the point. We are being asked to accept, sight unseen, the bona fides of every single future administration for as long as this amendment stays in force. Sadly we have no such faith in politicians; if we did we would have no need of constitutions.

Of course if the other referendum being held on the same day should pass then we will effectively have a constitution which is only purely decorative anyway.

Each House shall have the power to conduct an inquiry, or an

inquiry with the other House, in a manner provided for by law, into

any matter stated by the House or Houses concerned to be of general

public importance.

3° In the course of any such inquiry the conduct of any person

(whether or not a member of either House) may be investigated and

the House or Houses concerned may make findings in respect of the

conduct of that person concerning the matter to which the inquiry 25

relates.

4° It shall be for the House or Houses concerned to determine, with

due regard to the principles of fair procedures, the appropriate

balance between the rights of persons and the public interest for the

purposes of ensuring an effective inquiry into any matter to which 30

subsection 2° applies

The italics and emphasis are mine.

Unlike its brother, this amendment needs no deep study to torture a meaning out of it. Its import is all too clear to see. These few lines of law could effectively short circuit the rights and protections currently guaranteed by the constitution. The houses of the Oireachteas, individually or jointly would become our very own twenty first century star chamber. Our TDs and senators would be the arbiters of justice, deciding the extent of such rights as they see fit to grant to any person they chose to enquire into.

They will be enjoined to pay ‘due regard to the principles of fair procedure’ but who is to decide and on what basis what such principles constitute? Will there be recourse to the courts? What powers will the courts have to review decisions of the house? Since it is granted to the houses the right to decide what they consider worthy of investigation any citizen may find herself the object of inquiry without any clear frame work of protection or requirement that a prima facie case exists to justify such an investigation.

The gravity of the possible abuses of citizens is so great that it genuinely boggles the mind. This amendment is either deliberately madly insensitive to rights or bafflingly badly drafted. Whatever the case, it reflects rather poorly on our leaders.

In the run up to the last general election a prominent Fine Gael TD was being interviewed on the radio re some failure or other of the then administration. The journo quoted the relevant minister who claimed his hands were tied by legal impediments. The thrusting FGer sneeringly dismissed this excuse as an excessive concern ‘with constitutional niceties’. At the time it reminded of the oft repeated mantra of Mad Blue Shirt that his was the party of lots of order and little law. Nothing in these proposed amendments gives me pause to think that Mad was not right on the money.

So the Vatican responded to the speech. And those who believe, believed and those who dont didn’t. Big Whoop.Not that the substantial issue of the role of the Hierarchy and the Holy See in the handling of abuse cases is unimportant, it is hugely important, just nobody is really talking about it.

The social media and the professional press have been performing hermeneutics on the response and the main bones of contention have been the three years ago bit, the Quote and Mandatory reporting. There is them on foot of the response as says the Taoiseach was less than honest. I say that the day after he gave the speech I pointed out those three basic mendacities without benefit of  scholars or civil servants. And that is important, as we shall see. 

Not thirty years ago, but three. I am a speech writer. I have been writing speeches for debates and public speaking comps since  I was very wee. Nowadays the occasional politician of taste, or real person, will cross by palm with silver for a hand in the communicating themselves to their public. Rates very reasonable. I have over the years heard Enda speak many times and have a fair sense of his style; loud. He loves a contrasting phrase and gets into high rhetorical mode rather more quickly that most do. The moment I heard the not thirty phrase I smelled oratory. The response of his office to enquiries has been that he was not referring to any specific case. Yet the power of the line derives from the specificity of the accusation. The phrase was used not because it was true but because it sounded good.

It will have been known from the outset that the apex of the speech would be Enda’s declaration of Independence. The question will have been how to get there. The thirty years phrase is the launch pad for the trajectory, associated as it is in the text with the positive words sovereign democratic and  republic. This is the leit motiv  which reaches full exposition in his republic of laws strophe. The piece then moves to a more reflective pace, more sorrow than anger, adagio non troppo. This move from Furioso to lamentoso sets him up the last up surge on which any good speech must end. Here he returns to the contrast between the lawless and the lawful. A good quote from the enemy is always nice spot to launch the last attack and he has beaut from the then Cardinal Ratzinger. He creates a nice them/us,  now/then dichotomy and finishes with a motto.

When you write a speech there is one thing that you make sure to do. You make as sure as possible that there is no fact used that can be easily shown to be false. Opinion is just opinion but facts are annoying nuggety things. He must have known that the not thirty but three phrase would be interrogated immediately, yet he left it in. He left it in because that lyric suited the music . He left it in because he didn’t care if it was true or not. He was part of the government that rejected mandatory reporting and he must have known this. He wanted a quote to suit his purposes and he got one. He knew that the quote was nothing to do with church and the civil power but he used it all the same. He must have known that this would be quickly uncovered, but he didn’t care. The quote was used untruthfully and to deceive, isn’t that what we would normally call lying?

At the time of speech I rejected as nonsense the notion that it was brave as bravery implies risk and he risked nothing. What is deeply concerning to me is that simply because he was engaged in an attack on the institutional catholic church he has been given a free pass to lie to Parliament. On the information available to the public at this moment I believe that the Taoiseach blithely lied to the Dail.

Now if you wish to engage in a a subtle debate about whether or not not the Quote was a lie in the strict sense then I will refer you to the Taoiseach and Tainiste who seem to be masters of mental reservation and sophistry far beyond mere mortals. But the not thirty but three nails him. If there was no specific case then there was no three years ago. What he said happened did not happen. He knew it did not happen.When he said this he did so intending to deceive. He lied.

The history of clerical sex abuse in this country is horrifying. The response to victims has been dire, slow, grudging and piecemeal. Bishops have been weak and mealy mouthed at best morally complicit at worst. I stood in a room in the late eighties and heard a Bishop and priests discuss the problems facing the American Church with abuse cases. The Bishop outlined all sorts of new pro active positive guidelines being introduced to help get out in front of the problem. he talked about the need for openness, cooperation with the police and transparency. He talked about the need to put the safety of  children above everything else.  he talked about mercy demanding justice. The Ferns report made it clear that all he did was talk. If anyone wants to be enraged, sickened and disillusioned about clerical sex abuse in Ireland just look at the facts. The truth is so awful it needs no embroidery. There was no need to lie but he lied. He lied because he didn’t care. His loyal backbenchers line up to declare their loyalty, and reiterate their pride in his Gettysburg Address. So, he lied,and he lied to the Dail ;they should care?

The Massacre at Chanzeaux

Occasionally I come across a piece in the paper or an article in a journal so full of oddness, non sequiturs, and plain inaccuracy that it confuses. It is like finding an object that looks vaguely like something else but resolutely refuses to give up its function. You turn it over, hold it up, stand back from it and then move in very close just to see if there is an angle from which the whole thing made sense. Such an article can be found in the Indo today, under the by line of James Downey. It is asfine an example of ipse dixitism as you will find outside the collected works of Conor Cruise O Brien

The theme I think is secularism in Ireland, with a sub plot of how lovely France is. The story kicks off with a nostalgia piece on the invalid Lourdes marriages. He wonders at the fact that the Irish government’s response to a problem affecting Irish citizens was not to imagine what the French government would have done in their place. He then recounts the story of a family wedding in Aix en Provence, where officiating was the fat and twinkly communist mayor. This I assume we are told to disarm us. Me I just wondered about the fat and twinkly revolutionaries who chuckled gently while they drowned Catholics in rivers of the Vendee.

First things first. He doesn’t know what he is talking about. France is a secular state no doubt. It was the first; it has been a pattern of anticlerical and anti religion states for the last two hundred years. From its inception it has been ruthless in its secularism. Hundreds of thousands of religious would be murdered in the West in the name of Justice and Progress. The convention decreed

“Not one is to be left alive.” “Women are reproductive furrows who must be ploughed under.” “Only wolves must be left to roam that land.” “Fire, blood, death are needed to preserve liberty.” “Their instruments of fanaticism and superstition must be smashed.

In this they anticipated Gramsci, they understood a despotic regime must control the spiritual, familial and educational life of the citizen. There cannot be private lives. Stalin modelled his social and religious policy on that of the revolution. Indeed where in Ireland we used to find diptychs of JFK and John XXIII, in the USSR Stalin’s picture was flanked by that of Robespierre. French secularism is nothing to do with freedom from religion and everything to do with the State claiming a monopoly on sentimental and moral education.

The French take marriage seriously and we it seems don’t. He opposes the extension of civil recognition to long term unmarried couples. He favours changing the welfare system and tax code in order to bolster marriage and help the family. But no one on the right is asking these questions he laments.

Sigh.

The only people asking for this kind of legislation are on the right. David Quinn, Irish Catholicism’s fox terrier is never stopped talking about this stuff. He even went off and founded a think tank to talk and lobby about this stuff. In England the devout Anglican Frank Field is the acknowledged master in the field of welfare policy and the family, though the devout Catholic Ian Duncan Smith, former Tory leader, is now also leading a broad coalition trying to tackle family and societal breakdown.

He blandly asserts that this is a secular nation. Now maybe he really wants this to be true, but thinking won’t make it so. Or maybe as I adverted before he doesn’t know what a secular state is. Such a state does not begin its constitution with the words

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred,

Ireland is a nation where no one religion is established or endowed.  Where the citizen is protected to practice any religion or none. But it is a nation where the objective value of religious belief is recognised and the practice of that belief in its widest sense is protected. The central and crucial difference between secular France and non secular Ireland is the way the law views the individual and it is also at this point that we understand the position of the author of the article.

Quote “ our outrageous political system, which encourages localism and individualism at the expense of society as a whole”

We encourage localism and individualism over society as a whole? How disgusting are we? Refusing to sacrifice our personal morality for the service of the Volk/Workers/.Patria/Revolution/. Shameful we are. I think a jolly good dose of re-education is called for.

One of the last head scratchers he produces is regarding the fact the fact that in France it is clear that the state runs education but here it is all hazy and uncertain and this bad, very bad. Where is this person from? Honest to God. Where? There is no lack of clarity who is in charge of education in this state. None. Zero.

The State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family and guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children

The family, not the state, the family is the boss in Ireland. The citizens get to choose the education they want for their children unlike in totalitarian secular systems like France’s Ecoles where only the rich have the right of choice. If you don’t like the schooling your children are getting, school them at home, in Ireland you have that right. Or get together other like minded parents and set up a school which reflects your values, unlike France, in Ireland you have that right.

One last thing, not because I couldn’t go on, but because I want to start tomorrows dinner. He blithely assures us that in Ireland there is no aggressive secularism. At this point I genuinely wonder if Mr Downey is in fact living in France. Or is it that again he simply is using words which he doesn’t understand. A few weeks ago E Kenny treated us to a fit of the most savage anti clerical anti church sentiment since Henry didn’t get the divorce. The spiritual descendents of General O Duffy want to imprison priests who won’t break the seal of confession. The minister for Education wants the religious out of the schools (they own). He has demanded they hand over one and a half thousand schools pronto. The head of making up human rights, Mossy Manning, the UN and INTO want religion out the schools cos it might upset somebody, somewhere, sometime. That sounds like a fairly aggressive programme to me. Of course sometimes people don’t see things the same way. For example in the Indo today a certain journalist refers to the past in Ireland where “..authoritarian church.. which exercised thought control...” Now if we can take aggressive to mean hostile or likely to cause offence then I would be happy to characterise such a statement as an example of aggressive secularism.

I would also call it wrong headed. If feeling generous I would call it historically naïve. If feeling otherwise I would call it provocatively stupid. Our tragedy he says lies in the absence of a secular morality that might have saved us from the terrible consequences of catholic mind control. There has only ever one kind of secular morality which has played at the state level and that is revolutionary. France post 1789 had secular morality. Other fine examples are Mexico where the values of Robespierre gave us fifty years of savage repression. Mussolini was a secular anti clerical, as was Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Yes indeed secular morality saved those countries from untold disaster. And we all know they never practiced nasty mind control or ever exhibited tendencies to Authoritarianism.  Aggressive secularism is tautologous. Secularism is actively hostile to religious belief and practice. That is why though not religious I could not be a secularist. It is a philospohy of exclusion, intolerance and it is aggressively opposed to the rights of the individual . It may be morally permissible for a person to be a secularist, but a state which is avowedly secular must perforce do violence to the rights of its citizens.

I don’t want a Christian version of sharia law. I would end up stoned fairly quickly. But the more I read this article and reflected on it the clearer it became how horrible an alternative a secular Ireland could be. Me I am as old fashioned as a free market Liberal in sixties Britain. I like pluralism. Everybody in the market place, ideas and values competing and complimenting each other. Respectful disagreement is the order of the day and no one is going to make me sacrifice at the Altar of Reason or in the temple of Revolutionary Justice. Our state is one based on Pluralism and Christianity. It doesn’t have to be so, we can change the constitution. But until it is changed please do not be under any misapprehensions. This is not a secular state; we are not a secular people.

If you don’t want to go the Church, do what I do, sleep in. If you don’t want your children to have a religious education send them to Educate together. Or Blackrock. If you don’t want a church wedding, don’t have one. Freedom does not lie in every one having their liberty reduced by the same amount. It is not in taking away the cribs and silencing the bells. It is in the joyful permission to let the bells ring, let the monks chant, let some feast and let others fast. What doesn’t hurt me is not my concern. If the angelus hurts me, then I need more concerns. 

Easy  Chowder or really a kind of Wexford zuppa di pesce.

Fry cubed bacon (from Lidl) and a large diced onion gently in oil and butter til the onion is soft . Then add 2 large diced potatoes (Queens or Roosters) , and a dice of 3 sticks of celery and 3 carrots, a teaspoon of ground cumin (curry if you don’t have) salt and lots of black pepper. Toss around for a few minutes then add juice of half a lemon. If you dont fancy cumin add a good teaspoon of fennel seeds. Do not use garlic.

Now barely cover in chicken stock and simmer til the potatoes are cooked.

Add as half milk and half double cream to create enough liquor for the fish to cook.

The fish is up to you. But I think in a ‘traditional chowder’ Irish style there should always be some smoked fish, haddock, cod or coley. Salmon is cheap and works well, Pollock ditto, any firm white fish  cut in good size chunks. When the fish is just about done add a cup of frozen petit pois. Then when the peas are cooked finish with mussels and shrimp/prawns.

Check for SALT> seafood always needs salt.

Liquidize some if you like a thicker chowder, or before adding the chicken stock sprinkle in a tablespoon of cornflower or add a roux to the stock. But for the love of God cook it out. Floury tasting soup is the work of Satan. Me, I like it more like a fish stew so I just crush some of the potatoes on the side of the pot and thats all the thickening it gets.

For best results this should be served with my mothers home made brown soda bread. However since Ma is gone to her reward this may present difficulties. I will blog on brown bread on another occasion.

Autumn is here. The Autumn blues are upon me. Most people find Winter tough but I like it, the cold, fires in the grate, the chance of snow. But from the 15th of August to Halloween is a long drear of shortening days and dying trees. However now it is harder than ever it was before. Now we have Autumn television, English soccer and X factor; and all its bastard siblings. Reality TV, where the reality is no actors, writers or directors to pay. They go out, kidnap a dozen a misfortunates and take away their medication. Leave them in a hole for a week and then start to film. If not enough happens, cos maybe they picked up all bi-polars in the down swing, they poke them with humiliation sticks and add acid to the water. Eventually one is left alive. This one is then given some money,Max Clifford’s mobile number and released back into the wild. Then packs of photographers pursue them whilst shouting personal insults which then appear on the front page of the most popular toilet Papers. FAT. UGLY. STUPID.COMMON…dead.

Friends this is not entertainment this is abuse. We pride ourselves on the advances in ethical sensibilities of the last century.But if this had been going on in the Commonwealth the Puritans would have banned it and Macauly would have agreed. The Victorians would have launched a moral crusade. Questions would be asked in the House. A royal society would be established supported by rich Methodists and the Duchess of Westminster. Smart women in black taffeta and sharp bonnets would march with banners. There would be hymns. Folks, there would be Tambourines.

The permission the media and public give themselves to be horrid to the inmates of realityville is frightening. A couple of years ago a perfectly ordinary spinster  lady from Scotland won a X factor. She was it seemed a pleasant person who was intact and not awfully pretty. What the red tops had to say about her personal appearance was shocking. Far beyond the bounds of normal comment it seemed to be a competition in invective where human kindness was a dim memory.Treated worse in ways than a child killer all the poor woman had done was win a talent show and look like the rest of the population. Yet they, and everyone about me, burbled about her not to be missed voice, which my ears was nothing special. But in every other regard the basics of decency were forgot in a deluge of passremarkableisms.

If a child is never given meat will she be happy to eat pap all her life? Or is there something within that drives on to more difficult but more satisfying experiences. What is clear about our moment in history is that anything elite is out. Anything highbrow is scorned. Anything which delivers less than instant and recognisable gratification is passed over. The Bourgeois hate bourgeois values and from their control of the media have told the proles that their lives are more authentic and their culture more truthful than the pretensions of the middle class. The nonsense that is speaking well, reading poetry or enjoying classical music is condemned as Posh. The whole sorry tale is a  ghastly parable of what happens when the sixties go on that bit too long.

My mother used to read Somerset Maugham, Camus and Graham Greene. My Uncle Bill read Italo Calvino, in translation. Auntie Bridie as a hobby wrote detective thrillers as witty as anything Georgette Heyer published. And all of them enjoyed a good pot boiler knocked off by Daphne Du Maurier. None of them went to university or had masters in women’s studies, they were just normal literate Irish people in the nineteen fifties. Other than reading and her work as a nurse she had a small number of pleasures that were woven into her life and were in no way remarkable to her friends in Dublin circa 1954. She did the times cryptic crossword every day, though her principle reason for buying the Times was to read Myles na gCopeleen. She went to every change at the Abbey and the Gate and any Italian opera (and Carmen) that passed through town.

What happened? Well to be strictly fair things are not quite as bad here as across the water. The conservatism of our educational system was protected by the dominance of the religious, the poverty of the state and the reactionary middle class values of our teachers. We avoided the full force of the post modernists, structuralists and deconstructionists. But we are not immune from fashion, at least in our seats of higher learning. The playful scholarship of Eco , the sterile paranoia of Satre and the dark of fog of Deluze have all had their effects on the way our intellectuals conceive of culture and art.The notion of High Art has been thoroughly unpacked and unpicked and not always to evil ends. Those who were the bright young things of the seventies are now the grey beards of faculties across the island and of course they carry with them the romance of the ideas of their youth. The problem is that we have never developed a counter current to critique the contemporary. England and obviously Italy and France has a strong tradition of catholic public intellectuals which is utterly absent in what was for years the most catholic country on earth. When I suggest that there  may be an ideological component to any policy or plan proposed by say the Minister for Education or the NCCA I know most think I am being a right wing conspiracy nut. But it is ridiculous to think that some one like Professor Tom Collins approaches any problem without a foundational philosophical or ideological position. And if we do not recognise that position then it is impossible to critique his proposals.

We may decide that to force a hierarchy of cultural values on children in schools is oppressive and fascistic. We may have come to the conclusion that indeed Mickey Mouse is as aesthetically important as Mozart. We may hold that history is impossible and merely represents the acceptable narrative of the structures of  oppression. We may think that notion of truth is laughable and and morality merely a tool of the powerful without basis in the concrete. We may believe that the text is open,the author dead, sexuality constructed and madness a revolutionary form. If so then all is well and we should keep going where ever it is that we are headed. However if these strike you as odd or indeed bizarre notions then it  falls to me to tell you that they are not at all odd to those who will decide on the future education of your children.

It has come to my attention that my taste in film has been questioned. Indeed my taste in film has been found wanting. Richard Miller of EBI fame has given quite the ticking off to one of my favourite films in the form of A man for all seasons and one of my favourite people in the person of St. Thomas Moore.

Now I don’t want to be mean. Times are tough for the theologically high, liturgically low, no popery here Anglo catholic. As he sits at his Sheraton escritoire, looking out from the Queen Anne rectory at the tidy lines of plantation Beech, he silently laments the passing of the ancient certainties. Of course the certainties are not so ancient, going back at most to the sixteenth century when the Welsh dynasty forced the English to abandon a thousand years of traditional religion for the fancy new ideas coming out of Germany.

Bolt and Zimmerman are accused of failing to understand the dreadful dilemma of Henry. The nation had been riven and traumatised by a century of warfare. It was only now recovering from the depredations of the warring barons. His father had succeeded in building up the treasury and had allowed trade to expand and flourish. But all this was up for grabs as his wife, aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, had failed to give him a male heir. Since the civil wars of Stephen and Maud the idea of a regnant Queen was greeted with horror in England. If the country was to be kept at peace and the dynasty to survive, he needed a wife who could give him a live male heir. Bolt portrays Henry as a deeply unsympathetic character Mr Miller asserts, denying him any real psychological insight.

Of course the real problem is that Bolt is too soft on the Tudor. Fine he didn’t die of syphilis, is that really the best we can say of him? He was a monster, who lived and died a slave to his gross appetites. He burnt protestants with just as much elan as his elder daughter would and only his only connection with convinced Protestantism was the with adulterous harlot and witch he put away his wife to marry.

Henry far from being played as the monster he was is shown as a man of ego and quick temper, full of life and passion, if dangerously unpredictable. The film observes that there are things he will not do. He refuses to allow Moore to be put to the rack. Moore is made to tell Cromwell that If he thinks the King will perjure himself then he does not yet know the King. The King will not swear an oath on the holy Bible which he knows to be untrue. It is clear that Henry recognises goodness and honesty in Moore and that is why he so desperately desires his approval over all others.

Miller accuses Moore of hypocrisy when he is shocked by Wolsey’s suggestion of putting pressure on the Church in order to get the annulment. He points out that all the characters had their lobbyists in Rome trying to spin the Vatican. Fine, but there is a difference between diplomacy and extorting with menaces. The heart of the Moore character in the play and film is not Moore saint, scholar or family man though he is all of these. The play is about Moore the lawyer. Again and again the leit motif of the piece is that only the law can protect us from the caprices of the powerful, sometimes the devil, sometimes the King. This is the conservative heart of the work. Over centuries we build up rules and customs and laws that lean upon each other. Individually they may be weak but woven together they are strong against the storm of state power.

Near the end he reproves Cromwell for threatening like a dock yard bully, rather than Chancellor of England.

Sir Thomas More: You threaten like a dockside bully.
Cromwell: How should I threaten?
Sir Thomas More: Like a minister of state. With justice.
Cromwell: Oh, justice is what you’re threatened with.
Sir Thomas More: Then I am not threatened.

Then I am not threatened. Moore persists in his belief or hope that the law can save him. It is only when it is plain that all hope is lost and the verdict and sentence have been procured that he finally unburdens himself regarding the marriage. The warning is clear, when the state for any reason or pretence puts itself above or beyond the law then the state is no longer legitimate. And of course no longer safe. In a state where the law is the tool of the party, as it was in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Mao’s China then there can be no freedom. In this state we survive or die at the whim of the petty official. Merely doing right is no longer enough to protect us and keep us safe.

Sir Thomas More: I do none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.

What shocks Moore is not the notion of robust diplomacy but that the laws of England, Magna Carta and the Kings coronation oath would be trampled or ignored. Also remember that Moore like all the Characters is a man of the Middle Ages. This stuff  about the renaissance is merely a creation of French Deists and I would be disappointed to discover that Mr Miller swallowed it. The renaissance is the middle ages with better painting, worse theology and no philosophy. For Thomas the role of the church in the life f the nation and in society is beyond question. He may satirise nuns and priests but the institution of the Church is like oxygen in a water molecule. Also the idea of the papacy being something foreign is a wholly novel and rather odd idea to Medieval Man. The Pope is in Rome. Where the heck should he be??? Not Avignon anyway. The Pope is Pope by virtue of being Bishop of Rome, his nationality is a matter of indifference to an inhabitant of Christendom.

Then we come to the most predictable of the slings and arrows our latter day Lattimer would lose off. That the author of Utopia was a proto commie and all round weirdo. Now, one of the characteristics that separate us moderns from the likes of Moore and Fisher is our capacity to live with cognitive dissonance. Modern man has at any one time a host of conflicting and contradictory idea and propositions swirling around in his head. This can cause inaction or a head ache but mostly we don’t even notice. However the notion that a man as famously orthodox as Thomas could have simultaneously believed in the superior morals of his No Place is not credible. Anyway, who has ever read Utopia and come away thinking, whoa nice place, love to holiday there. It is plainly a nasty anthill of a country. To me the most obvious way to understand the book is a critique of pure rationality. This horror is the very best outcome we can expect in a world without Revelation and tradition. This is what Moore imagines a world with Christ, the Church and Scripture would be like. Moore was no commie; he was good London lad from a family of lawyers with a house in Chelsea. Tell me if that sounds like a Labour voter.

The movie may have its faults but the universally wonderful acting from a terrific cast cover them up to my eyes. I have watched it so many times and still I am so moved by the last meeting with his family in the tower, especially the fight with the Lady Alice. The scenes of the trial cannot fail to thrill even the most jaded Lutheran.

As for the man himself? Well his life was not perfect, certainly to the modern eye. He persecuted and prosecuted those who were afflicted with the German enthusiasm. Some he even brought to the public hangman. But martyrs are so not for the life they lived but the death they endured. And maybe it is here that Bolt is at his weakest. For in the play Moore dies for his personal conscience, for his sense of himself. As he says to his daughter in the tower

‘ When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands) And if he opens his fingers then-he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.’

I have always been a little skepical of this motivation, it strikes me as the courage of a modern man. But maybe that’s no harm, Bolt is an artist not a historian and whatever he may have done with the history the character he has created for us is warm, wise and tragically enchanting.

My Milanese friends could never get the fact that I had no Irish identity card. What happened they would ask if a policeman stopped me? Why would a policeman stop me I would reply? To check your identity….and so forth. You see in Italy by law you must carry an identity card or other proof of identity. The police have the right to stop any person to check that they are carrying their card. The card was made for the law and the law made for the card but all of it is just an excuse to give the police the power to stop anyone they want without a reason. We are fighting a drugs war on much the same basis

That is to say, why are drugs illegal? It is only in the last century that we have thought to regulate the sale of narcotics. During the Great War it was possible to buy a gift box in Harrods for the boys at the front which contained amongst other things, syringes, cocaine solution and heroin. The first attempt to restrict marijuana in the United States at a federal level was through taxation. Many cultures used naturally occurring mind altering substances in their rituals. As Prof Eileen Kane observed in all cultures at all times in human history only three things are constant; marriage, alcohol and hallucinogenic drugs.  Yet today we ban the sale of a wide array of drugs natural and artificial. Opiates, cannabinoids, MDME, psychedelics fungal and mass produced are the most popular of our forbidden fruits.

Why do we make the sale of these substances illegal? Why do we wage war? Why has this subject become a touchstone of conservative values across the world? It is one of the great shibboleths of modern political life; one can never be soft on drugs. I am stringing this out and repeating myself for a reason. I really want you to think, why do we ban drugs? Until we have cleared up the reasons for our behaviour we cannot advance the discussion. We must first understand what it is we wish to achieve by making the sale of some drugs illegal. Process is fine but only by measuring outcomes can we see if a policy is a success. So why do we ban heroin or hash? What is the desired outcome                                                                                                 We control these substances because they are bad for us. Yet we do not ban cigarettes or beer. And we know for a certain fact that many many more die from fags than opium. We know that every year more people die from prescription medications than all the illicit substances put together. Heroin is bad for one, but not that bad. Cocaine is worse, and crack is worse again. But ironically crack came about as a market response to the higher cost of cocaine in the mid eighties, in Miami and New York for sale in the poorer parts of the city. Ecstasy is not dangerous, nor is cannabis or peyote or magic mushrooms; at least not dangerous when compared to legal recreational drugs.

So it is clear that we do not control these drugs simply because they are bad for our health. Rather we ban them because they are not the drugs that we use and feel safe with, the drugs we understand. And then we are deeply suspicious of those who try to evangelise for liberalisation or legalisation. Whether the advocate is Howard Marks, Ming Flanagan or some hippy musician we suspect the reason they seek change is personal not principled. They just want to be allowed to spark up a doobie without fear of arrest. They have an agenda.

Then there is the aesthetic of addiction which surely informs the visceral rejection most have to the idea of liberalisation. Most of us have grown up far from intravenous drug use. My education about the subject started and ended with Starsky and Hutch, and Kojak. From these sources I learned that Junkies would get hooked from one hit of Horse and it would eventually kill them. Addiction to heroin was essentially a death sentence and kicking the drug was virtually impossible. Junkies would steal, prostitute themselves and kill in order to feed the need. Almost all of this was untrue. However the aesthetics of heroin addiction are horrible. When I used to regularly pass through Central Station in Milan in the 1990s it was a haven for heroin addicts. Those who had been using longest were frankly repulsive, their clothes rank their hair filthy, their bodies emaciated they would walk with the weaving uncertainty of a toddler. It was horrid. It was also heartbreaking. No sane person would want this to happen to their child, so we ban it.

Of course there is the nub of it. Addiction is a moral and physical disaster for the addict, their family and wider society. Addiction to anything is terribly destructive. Heroin, coke, crack or speedballs of course are the most visibly destructive and consequently we treat them most seriously. But all these drugs carry consequences that can be catastrophic in individual cases, be it long term hash use, amphetamines or ecstasy. Parents are terrified for the well being of their children and they demand that the state play its role in protection too.

But. But its not working. In fact it is much more than not working. Prohibition is causing precisely those effects that make us want to ban drugs. And that folks is our problem. We need to untangle the consequences of drug use from the consequences of drug policy. Prohibition is killing our children. It is killing ten of thousands every year and it is making thousands of criminals enormously rich.

In our quiet little country we have seen a frightening growth in murderous violence over the last twenty years. In Dublin and Limerick gangs of coked up young men engage in pitched battles or carry out assassinations in Pubs and betting offices. The violence spirals ever upwards as different gangs try to get control of the drugs business across their town or city. This business is worth hundreds of millions every year. For youngsters who may have poor prospects working as dealers, couriers or enforcers they can earn vastly more than any of their straight pals can dream of.  In Britain the value of the illegal drugs trade was estimated at £6.4 billion six years ago. Globally the international trade is guesstimated at over half a trillion dollars. Drugs are one of the most widely traded and valuable commodities on earth. BEAUSE THEY ARE ILLEGAL.

It is a simple fact. Governments around the world in conjunction with bodies like the UN or WHO have made many many bad men very rich indeed. And we always knew it would. When the USA brought in Alcohol prohibition it transformed the Mafia from a local import doing business in the Italian ghettoes to an international power. It gave the mob the resources to buy influence at local and national level. Without prohibition organised crime in America might never have got off the ground. Drugs cause crime because the traffic in drugs is a crime.

All over the world in the less attractive streets and parks of our big cities you can see women sell their bodies to men. These women tend to fall into two camps. Those who have been kidnapped by criminals or in some way fallen into their power and are forced to sell themselves by these Mafiosi. The others are the crack hos, famed of song and story. They prostitute themselves to pay for a drug habit which consumes them. They do this because the price of drugs is held at massively inflated rates by the dealers. The cost of illegal drugs bears no relation to their production costs and very often in cities local gangs will engage in price fixing cartels. And the competition authorities refuse to act! Making drugs illegal pushes women to prostitute themselves. It is a direct consequence of policy.

Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Dundalk. Just a few of the places in the world where the activities of terrorists are funded by the government control of drugs. In Mexico the war on drugs has caused the tens of thousands of deaths. In Ciudad Juarez alone there were in one year three thousand drug murders. Not only is the West’s conflicting desires of consumption and prohibition destroying the fabric of many producer nations it is pouring money into the hands of terrorists like the Shining path Maoists in Peru, or the Islamicist radicals across Asia. If it has not already happened, drugs money will soon topple a government and install its own friendly power.

There is an arc of crime which reaches across the globe. From the Golden triangle to Turkey, onto Sicily, North Africa and onto Colombia and Bolivia in South America. The huge profits made in the drugs trade are then used to fund a mass of other criminal activity and the chief perpatrators remain untouchable with protection bought from the proceeds of drugs. We give them this money. Their market, their business could disappear overnight if we chose to act. We have the capability to transform the face of our inner cities and the population of our prisons.

Last year in the USA alone fifteen billion dollars were spent on the drugs war. Think in Ireland of the amount of time our police force spends dealing with drug crime and drug related crime. Think of all the people in prison today because of drug crime. Think of all the dead men, dead because the trade is so very lucrative. Think what we could do with all the resources we now plough into policing and treating drug problems. Even the great bulk of illness related to heroin use is connected with the addictives used to cut the drug not the heroin itself. The cankers, the ulcerations, the needle sharing, the over doses, all could be a thing of the past if the users were buying pure calibrated pharmaceutical heroin from their local chemist.

In 1969 Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. In the last forty two years virtually every country on the planet has followed suit. Yet in the face of such seemingly impossible odds, the drugs are winning. More to the point the drug dealers are winning, big. No one wants their child to become an addict. But prohibition is not limiting or controlling consumption. Rather it makes consumption much more hazardous than it need be. I could appeal to liberal principle and point out that the state has no right to tell me what I can or cannot put into my body. I could point out the inconsistency of celebrating Alcohol which does more damage than any other substance, while coming down heavy on a harmless spliff. I could say that legalisation would be a panacea for all our problems but that would be a lie.

No matter what laws we pass or repeal some people will get high. Some of those people will become dependent. Some people will die. If hard drugs were made legal tomorrow maybe there would be an explosion of opiate addiction. I don’t think so, but I can’t know. What I can ask is this. What would the outcome of legalisation have to be, for it to be worse that the outcome we already have from prohibition. That’s got to be some scary result!

The senator has quit the race but the story goes on. What started as a political rise and fall has become something rather more quirky and interesting. The reaction to the fall has been more enlightening than anything that had gone before. Where Norris was the story, now the story is the story. I trust I make myself obscure.

First things first. I want to establish the facts as I understand them and as far as they are known. In 2002 Helen Lucy Burke interviewed David for Magill. In the interview he expressed sympathy for the Greek idea of intergenerational love between adolescent males and older men. This came to public attention and caused a kerfuffle. His explanations were poor and poorly presented. While damaged he was not fatally wounded and the campaign rolled on. However his team did seek reassurances that there were no other similar skeletons rattling about and such reassurances were given.

Next in the mix came a young pro Israeli blogger based in London. Antipathetical to Norris because of the senator’s stance on Palestine he decided to do some digging. After a few hours up popped a conviction against Norris former lover, Ezra Nawi. A conviction for statutory rape of an adolescent Palestinian boy. It then transpired that a letter existed where Norris had sought to persuade the court in Jerusalem to be lenient in sentencing Nawi. This letter came into the public domain. Others did not. The senator did make their content available to his team and it was ultimately these letters which would lead a number of his team leaders to resign from the campaign. And it was this flight of supporters that created the sense of a campaign in terminal difficulty.

Like the sainted Margaret he decided to fight on. However as circus continued he began to lose the support of Oireachteas members and it became clear that the nomination was beyond him. Standing outside his house before a scrum of media he announced his decision to resile from the race. As he did this the skies darkened and in D’Olier Street the blinds were torn from top to bottom and all across Kiliney and Dalkey and even unto Enniskerry a great sigh went up and weeping and gnashing of teeth was heard.

I was sympathetic to his run. I was willing and indeed eager to help out in the campaign. However it transpired that they did not want political hacks and dear friends I cannot deny I am an old fashioned dark side hack. The Magill story annoyed me only in so far as the campaign handled it so very very badly. But but but. The Magill story assumed a very different quality when the later story broke. And here I stand amazed by the reaction of the print media and RTE.

When he quit the race the vocabulary of reportage changed radically. In his going he was dignified, courageous, honourable, distinguished and noble. His going was not of his choice but he had been hounded out. He had been hunted, persecuted, goaded and harassed. Mostly he had been hounded. Well I want to know who the f%#* was doing the hounding? The only journalists who weighed in against him were David Quinn, John Waters and Kevin Myers. It’s an unlikely posse. And while I’m sure the Irish catholic has a loyal fan base I’m dubious about its ability to hound a ferret of a henhouse. RTE maintained the studied silence of a man whose boss had farted in the lift. Yet overnight the senator was martyr brought down by the Pope, the Israelis, Labour, Fine Gael, homophobia, hypocrisy and those sneaky Paraguayans. We had lost a great president and the people had been denied the right to chose by a cabal of insiders and plotters.

The smallest but most irritating point I will take first. He was not denied by a quirk of the system. He was denied by the system. It is not a constitutional nicety, it is a law. It has been a law for a very long time. It was the law when he decided to run. The reason he did not have a nomination when two other less well known, less well funded, less media beloved independents did was because he ran a dire campaign. He ran for president when he should have been running for a nomination. That is his fault or the fault of his advisers.

Far from being hounded a quiescent press would never have properly interrogated him. It was only when the internet was so full of the story that the mainstream media were forced to take it up. And the story was uncomplicated. The man who had assured us that in Magill he had been having an academic chat about the practices of ancient Greece while he of course deplored and despised child abuse in all its forms was found to be defending a child abuser. The letter is quite clear in its attempt to minimise the seriousness of the offence and full of mealy mouth excuse/justification.

Such a letter appearing only days after the Cloyne Report and Kennys hissy fit could only have one outcome. Such a letter was not a political misfortune but a simple demonstration that the man was not suitable to be president. That does not make him a bad man, merely not presidential material.

Ah but he did it for love. As the drama critic made the point it seems to be ok to write letters if you might get a vote out of it, but if you do it for love its wrong. YES!! That is precisely correct. It is part of the job to represent constituents; they are indeed the politician’s clients. However when a public figure uses their position to seek to advance the cause of a person with whom they are connected in private life, and does not declare that fact, that is the very definition of a corrupt act. It is giving special treatment, it is the old golden circle so beloved of our honesty loving press.

The act of writing the letter was corrupt. But the end of the letter of Letter was despicable. To downplay, to minimise the gravity of the offence, was wrong and especially wrong for a leading campaigner for gay rights. He handed the homophobes a wonderful opportunity to conflate gays with pederasts and paedophiles yet again. Yet the more I read his final speech the more I wonder was really is his position on underage sex anyway. Though the epithet most commonly used to describe his speech was dignified I heard it rather differently. I smelled self pity and justification, a touch of the martyrs. Also I heard him be sorry not that he had lacked empathy for the victim, but that people had garnered the impression he lacked empathy. So, is that I am sorry for what I did or I am sorry you caught me doing it ?

The cognitive dissonance in the press was clamorous. The double standards applied to clergy, popish types and our Dave was laugh out loud funny. Except of course it’s not really funny at all. The levels of denial are Himalayan. The man brought himself down and I am sad for it. I believe him to be a good man.He has certainly done far more good than I.Good men may do evil and remain good, I must believe this or we are all damned. He has suffered for what he did and didn’t do. And now I see Eoghan Harris is writing in his defence. Whatever David may be guilty of, does he really deserve that?

Things are bad. So bad that we need to tell the truth. In all politics certain words become shorthand for whole philosophies. For years in Ireland if the left could succeed in attaching the epithet Thatcherite to a person or policy then they were more than half way to sinking them. When we unpack the idea Thatcherite one of the central themes is a combative, sceptical or indeed down right hostile attitude to the EU. Depending on where one stands this attitude was coloured by an old fashioned nationalism or a little Englander xenophobia. While the Iron lady swung her hand bag and banged on the table, we were the rational anglophones of the community. Everyone liked us. We never made trouble. And our national parties never for a moment allowed the high Idea of Europe to be questioned. For FF it was a simple question of CAP and infrastructure funding. For FG it was something more, something almost spiritual. They were the party of Europe par excellence, out of power at home but hob nobbing with Christian Demo leaders of Germany, Italy and Spain when abroad.

The heated, emotional and polarised debate about Britain in Europe has critically coloured the way we conduct discourse about the union. But the the real positions of our political leaders are no more than shibboleths. We must be for Europe.  Euro sceptics are mad right-wingers and crazy communists.We must be in Europe. Well at this rather interesting moment we need to roll back on our collective prejudices and emotionally loaded positions. First we must understand what the Union is for. I cannot escape the belief that for years now twenty seven different nations have been individually sold a different vision of the union to match the aspirations of that particular nation. Well twenty seven competing and conflicting visions into ONE does not go. If the separate countries of Europe want basically different things from the union how can we pretend that the union will cohere. We can pretend only if we have already decided that the wishes of the various citizens in the various states are not going to be allowed to impede the progress of the project.

Why did Greece join the Euro ? More particularly why did they join the Euro when to do so involved them massively doctoring their nations accounts and telling whopping lies that surely they knew must be uncovered ? What outcome did they expect from the combination of fraudulent accounting, unabated borrowing and an unreformed economy ? The decision to join the single currency was not simply or principally an economic one. It was desire to be in. To be part of the club. To be modern. To be European like the Germans, Dutch and French. When Ireland joined she had a dramatically different economy to Greece. Open, productive, flexible and fast growing why did Ireland join the Euro ? To a degree for the same reasons the Greeks did, and the Spanish and the Portuguese and…..Even with years of double digit growth the memory of poverty was very fresh. Yes, there were economic arguments in favour of our joining the currency but the passion that drove our entry was the proof it gave us that we really were successful and modern just like the germans. And not at all like the English, who of course stayed outside. Why did the British stay out? While the economics were certainly hotly debated ultimately the choice to keep sterling was political and emotional, though not necessarily the worse for that.

The south and the Irish were for years on the right end of the fiscal transfer so maybe we can see their attachment as a misplaced pragmatism but what do the paymasters get out of the set up ? The Dutch, Germans et al must get some psychological benefit.  Is it as simple as the knowledge that as long as the EU is going the Germans will not invade ? For the Germans is it a payment they willingly make to be allowed out and about in polite society?

Anyhow, they all joined for different reasons and they stay for others and all the while when asked give the choral response, Europe, amen. Matteradamn. What is clear is that there is no simple unifying principle of utility which joins the member states. There is no one over arching economic reason, at least now. We are gone well beyond a free trade bloc, well beyond. And what is your bleddy point man, I can feel you cry. Ok, if once the notion of Europe represented an idea of peaceful cooperation and free trade leading to better living standards across the continent it does not any more. If once the idea of Europe was truly used at the service of the citizens of the various states it is not any more. if once basic if debatable ideas like food security and free trade the drivers of European integration they are no longer. Listen to your politicians and hear them waffle. hear them hedge and hum and sing a song. hear them plainly not have a bulls notion why this bit or that bit of ever deeper union is beneficial to Marco, Monty or Miguel. Where the EEC once served the people (ish) now the people are required to service the Platonic form that is Europe. What ever that word means, it has become not a material cause of better living but an end if not the end in itself.

There is one group which has consistently told the truth. Lord how they have pissed off the dear Leaders. But resolute like all zealots they have told us like it is for years. And better they have told us how it was going to be and how it shall be. It is telling that the metaphor most often used for the EU project is a train. It travels A to Z along a predetermined track. It can slow down, occasionally stop but what it cannot do is leave the track. A change in direction on a moving train is what is known as a crash. The enthusiast never tried to hide this. For years the hard core Euro fans had told us that the only direction we could go was deeper integration with a federal state as the goal. That has been constantly pooh-poohed by our leaders. They would never go that far, cos of course they know we would never vote to go that far. Yet here we are and the hard core lads were right. We tried the Euro as a group of nation states and it has not worked.

Mon. Sarkosy, never a man to let a crisis go to waste has mad it clear that the present debt problem will have long term and structurally permanent results. It will lead to much deeper fiscal and financial integration across the Euro zone. It will require more power for the ECB and more central regulation of taxation and national budgets. Well as we know here once your parliament loses the right to make the budgetary choices it wants you are no longer in a separate independent state. But he is right. The Euro zone must coordinate. There must be trans national financial regulation. Borrowing by individual members must be controlled to protect the currency from debasement.And in the short to medium term all the economies within the zone must synchronise. Where there are economies in a different phase of the business cycle to the those economies which dictate interest rates, then we will have credit and asset bubbles just like the ones we are now unwinding.

Noonan and Hayes recently told us in dramatic language of the perils of default and that there was no place to go save the Euro. Any other thinking than pay it all and stay in the euro would lead to old Argentinians dying on the streets of Moscow. Or Russians searching for food in the dustbins of Athlone. And the middle classes would be reduced to going to Iceland for their holidays.That may not be right. I’m not really sure it was hard to follow the argument. Listen, I dont mind our leaders telling me the odd porky. Or indeed heightening the drama of a situation for rhetorical effect. But if you must lie, please tell me an intelligent lie. One I can in good conscience choose to believe.

Default is a word much like dioxin. Everybody thinks it will kill you horribly with the merest brush. But there are thousand of dioxins and most wont do you any harm at all.If I owe you a fiver and am supposed to pay you on Monday but instead pay on Tuesday I have defaulted. There is the world of difference between paying all the money a day late and never paying any but both are defaults. So instead lets talk about negotiated deferred maturity. Much less scary isn’t it ? The markets do not think we can pay our debts. If they are right then we should start to default as soon as possible, or negotiate different maturities, while we still funded for eighteen months. A proper restructuring of the debt and continued reforms in the economy are more likely to create a willingness to lend than a blanket refusal to recognise we have a problem until it is all too late. All the lenders in the future want to know is how capable will be be to repay debt. If we continue to pretend nothing can or should be done then their judgement is not likely to make our return to the bond markets a happy one.

The Euro is a political currency facing into a political crisis. Without at least a quasi federal structure it cannot continue, save for maybe half a dozen countries, and I’m not even sure long term that that works without the political integration. This a big old truth moment. Amongst the helots who vote in Europe there is no no no no desire for ever deeper union. None. Socially. Culturally. Economically. Politically. DEMOCRATICALLY . None. So we have a choice. Either we can soldier on with a currency which will wreak havoc on the lives of ordinary people but keeps the European Idea alive. Or, we can work out how to peacefully, in an orderly way disassemble the currency and accept that we do not all need the same money in order to stop the Germans invading.

In the summer of 1978 my pal The Mad Blueshirt was packed off to the gaeltacht. He was fourteen. He and the other boys in the house were required to say the rosary every night. Bluey said No!. And went on to organise the resistance. In the face of dire threats he refused to back down and in the end was victorious, the rosary would be optional. That took courage.

My first contact with the Dark side was at the age of twelve. I attended my first Ogra meeting in 1981 and was handed a letter to sign. It was a statement of support and sympathy for the hunger strikers.I was morto but I refused to sign.That took a bit of courage.

When my Grandfather got his rifle and took the tram on  Easter Monday in 1916 that took a heap of courage.

When a young lawyer at the begining of her career in the 70s decided to work with a young academic in Trinity to change the laws against homosexuality that took courage. And signs on it she is a wonderful President.

I admire courage in people, it is the virtue on which all other virtues rest. I admire those sportsmen who possess great physical courage, who will put their bodies in places that most men wouldn’t. I admire courage in business, the willingness to risk wealth and reputation to follow a dream, to create something unique. Most of all I admire moral courage. Those men and women who live out their convictions, disregarding the mockery and derision of their contemporaries. They speak truth to power and dont care about the outcomes.

The leit motiv  of the press reaction to E Kenny s speech on the Cloyne report has been his courage. I am baffled. I am not affecting bafflement. I am not being sarcastic. I am simply baffled. Courage of any kind carries with it risk or danger. Where is the risk in bad mouthing the clergy and the Vatican ? What is the downside?  Morally, politically, electorally, what was the danger to E Kenny? What did he risk materially? What could he lose? Where in subsists his courage? The reports were written as if John Charles were still in Drumcondra and Pius XII was on the throne. But he isn’t.

The truly courageous thing to do would have been to tell the truth. To say that along with the  Church the State failed its children. To challenge everyone to strive for higher standards of respect  for all the vulnerable in care. To recognise that the Church which failed so badly in the past has made great strides forward and finally seems to get it. To admit that successive governments have failed to bring in the legislation required to bring child safety up to scratch in public care homes. The instinct to avoid personal responsibility but rather seek out blame is rarely the mark of a courageous man. It its of course the hallmark of the liar.

Yesterday

Richard Rich

we were treated to a nauseating sight. The Taoiseach in full rhetorical flight, fulminating over the wickedness, perfidy and black corruption of the Pope in Rome and all his legions. As usual it was never a mono when a poly syllable would do. The tone started out high and quickly rose to impassioned shriek. Across Leinster house, across Dublin , across Ireland the Thunder was heard. The Thunder of stable doors being nailed shut many years after the horses had bolted.

This was a performance of intensity. A performance rich in moral hauteur. A performance worthy of Robespierre or Molotov. It has received excellent notices in all the best places and is expected to help the company to do good business with less popular, more demanding material later in the season.  Why should I be so contrary as to be unimpressed. (as if he gave a rattling @~) . Well It seemed to bovis to be a sickening display of hysterical, hypocritical mendacity.It was a a shockingly cynical exploitation of the feelings of revulsion and anger we all feel towards the clerical rapists and their protectors .Worse it exploited the pain and suffering of those raped and tortured children for base politics.

He points to Rome. Of course as long as we look away we can’t look here. The underlying fictive superstructure of the piece was that the Cloyne report revealed previously unimagined wickedness. Rot. Since before the Ferns report we have known about the rapes, the cover ups, the delays, the obfuscations and denials. The issue of the primacy of civil over canon law was being declaimed a decade ago. The failures of direction, comprehension and communication across the Vatican are proverbial. There was so much wrong done it needed no high rhetoric or embellishment but he cannot help himself. He deliberately and dishonestly misrepresented then Dr Ratzinger’s  views on truth as being proof of his disdain for the civil power.

Does no body else find it bizarre that we should look to a State a thousand miles away to blame for the rape, torture and murder of Irish children. Did we have no police? Did we have no law? Had we no government? Did these children all have no parents or families? The Taoiseach has been in parliament for thirty six years. He took the seat his father had occupied for twenty one years. He was a member of the governing party under Cosgrave, Fitzgerald and Bruton.He was a cabinet minister. In all that time how many attacks did this TD for Mayo launch against the power of the Catholic Church? How much time did he expend pursuing justice for the children in the industrial schools? Letterfrack, all of forty miles from Castlebar I’m sure was still a closed book to he and his dad when it closed in 1974.

If we have one weakness over any other as people it is our capacity to find scapegoats for our own moral failings. How often do I turn on the radio or TV to hear earnest voices discuss the dreadful hold the Church on our poor parents and grandparents. How its influence was a miasma that permeated every corner of society. Well folks it was not done at gun point. Rather the reverse, generations of Irish stubbornly held on to Rome even at the point of a reforming gun. if the Church had the power it had it was because we gave it to them. If our children ended up in Industrial Schools or Laundries it is because we sent them there. If little children were beaten and abused with impunity by men they called brother and women they called sister it is because we did not care. For the State to blame a foreign power for the treatment of its own citizens within the national territory is ,well a little rich.

So why now? Why this frenzied attack? Well he is a man who never saw a bandwagon he did not wish to be on. And in this year of grace 2011 it is a safe bandwagon to climb up on. Croziers no longer deliver the sting they once did. No, these days one must fear the Keep our Hospital Campaign. One must fear the promises scattered with abandon before a general election that was unloseable . He is a hollow a man. A couple of years ago I had the great good luck to be at the FG bash in Kilarney where the Big Idea of Reform was presented.(and rejected by the hoi poloi) As I studied the proposals I remarked to Mad Blue Shirt that the author of these ideas must have a very base, very low, notion of politics. As he goes about creating the most faith hostile government in our history, aided by Mao Tze Quinn, i wonder if there is in him any sticking point? Is there any thing within himself that is him alone? Or is he in the end simply the amalgam of his desires?

Still one thought does occur. I am told the good people of Mayo still go to mass. They may yet have both the moral core and memory to bite the gentleman where it hurts, right in the ballots.

My oppressor

Principled conservatives do not reject the dogma of equality for economic reasons. This fact seems to continue to confound and confuse the left. Incapable of comprehending this fact they insist on characterizing the right-wing rejection as a concern for an erosion of incentive within the market.No. There are many good economic reasons not to accept equalatarianism but they are not our concern here.

Firstly the concept as used in the media and by political professionals is an a priori dangerous principle on which to base legislation or policy.It is so vague as to be almost without content.When we make laws with empty concepts we rely on our politicians and judges to to create that content and that is a very bad idea. Do we mean equality in something, to something  or to do something? Is it a starting point or an end? Is it means or an end?

The first thing i want to draw your attention to is this, Equality is simply a word. It is not an argument. It is a word masquerading as an argument. We have been passive in allowing the left to establish the notion of equality as something obviously and uncontroversially good. Only a crank or real bastard would not support equality. But the next time you hear some one talk about equality get them to define what they mean and what outcomes they wish to achieve. Then ask them to justify why this is a Good Thing.The fact is that equality is a bizarre notion with no basis in morality. It has very limited uses. For the religious there is equality before God and for the citizen there is equality before the law, and that is where it stops. Since outside of redistributionist theory economic/physical/intellectual equality  does not exist the burden of demonstration falls to those who propose this odd notion.Yet it is always the conservative that is required to provide both the critique and alternative.

Echoing the Ethics of Aristotle, Aquinas observes that by nature all men are equal in liberty but not in other endowments. Humans enter the world in diversity. Some are tall. short. fat, thin, slow, fast, clever, dull, Irish and unattractive. We begin life in difference yet at the moment of birth we are probably at the point of greatest similarity across humanity. After this everything pushes difference. The status, wealth and aspirations of our parents. The number of our siblings and the size of our family. Our place in that family. The love of our mothers or their antipathy. Where and when we are born.The schools we attend, the friends we make and the food we eat. All of this and much more make us incrementally more different each day.

So, we are born unequal, and inequality is the norm throughout nature. What then does advocacy for equality mean?  Well clearly it is more than a minimal claim to equal treatment in law. Nor is it simply a moral affirmation of the equal value of all persons. Rather it is an economic aspiration based on a moral claim. It is the desire to create a society where the the gap in wealth and or income between the least and most successful is minimised. What precisely constitutes a morally acceptable level of inequality is unclear, if indeed any level is acceptable. Moreover equality is not just about income but also goods and services.

A first and fundamental step is to deconstruct those institutions where money can bestow advantage. Education is nationalised and homogenised. Wealthy parents should not be able to privilege their child’s future over that of less well off parents through private schooling. Otherwise we will be complicit in permitting the existence of a self perpetuating oligarchy. This is equality of opportunity. Similarly the quality of medical care individuals receive should not be contingent on economic success. Health is the most basic building block  for an person seeking to compete in the marketplace. The choices facing the advocate of equality are limited. He can pursue the abolition of private provision of education and medicine. He can create a parallel public provider which is the equal of the private sector. Or, while waiting to achieve one of these punish those using private providers through the tax system.Naturally those using the private sector will be disproportionately subsidising the state providers in any case since with progressive taxation the top ten per cent earners pay fifty per cent of all direct taxes.

In Ireland constitutional and cultural obstacles make state control of schools problematic. Also the domination of of the religious orders until recently insulated the system from extravagant social or educational experiments.  Schools here remained mostly places to teach children. If we look at our English cousins we can observe a grand eqaulitarian project in action. Fifty odd years ago the comprehensive system was introduced to destroy the class system. Schools were explicitly to be tools of social engineering, sweeping away the old order in the white heat of the technological revolution. The grammars were closed, but not the Public schools like Eton, Harrow or Stowe. So brilliantly successful was this experiment that in todays Britain run by old etonian Dave Cameron the proportion of Oxbridge students coming from the state sector is lower than it was in 1960. This is a very important point to remember. The liberal left again and again values process over outcome. Rather than identifying the desired outcome and then deciding what is the best way to reach it, with set ideas of what would constitute success or failure, they become invested in processes that feel like they should work. When they dont in fact work then it is because of external factors frustrating the plan or a the fact that the plan needs more time more money more everything. The lefts world view is based on class conflict. Therefore their analysis assumes an active enemy. Which is very useful when looking for a scapegoat.

Equality of access or opportunity has three fundamental flaws at its heart. Firstly it is in strict technical sense, nonsense. Until the old leftist eugenic dream can be realized human beings rejoice in diversity. The benign planner can try to generate a society where we all have identical access to every tool but it cannot overcome the problem of talent, and its lack. The capacities, desires, aspirations and energies that individuals possess will always frustrate the eqaulitarian. Providing me with all the time, training and tools that Roger Federer received will not in fact give me equality of opportunity in professional tennis since he has been unfairly gifted with natural ability which I almost completely lack.

At this point it is useful to distinguish between negative and positive claims. What drives policy making today are rights claims that are positive in nature. These kinds of rights, despite the name, are considered to be lower order rights and more difficult to establish as being rights at all. They are called positive because they make positive demands on other persons. If I am charged with  crime in Ireland I have a right to legal counsel. If I have no money then the people of Ireland have to pay for one to defend me. Thus it requires a positive action to fulfill this obligation. Negative rights are the basic, first order rights on which our legal and moral systems are based. They are called negative because rather than demanding action from others they ask simply that other refrain from doing certain things to me. The right to life demands you do not kill me. The right to property demands you do not steal from me.

If the by equality of opportunity we were to mean simply my access to any public good or service should not be denied perversely, then I would have no objection. This is merely treating all citizens equally in law. Any publicly funded, supported or licensed service should be open to all who can pay. Whether or not private enterprises should be compelled by law to take the business of all is another question. I find the notion of a racist business morally repugnant, irrational and bad business. But whether I should be able to force that business to behave as I think they should is a point for debate.

But that is not the point here. The debate here is about a secondary and positive right. This brings us to the second flaw. TO BE CONTINUED

No where in the world are markets unregulated. Nowhere comes any where close to being laissez faire. In the US in the last twenty five years for every one finance related regulation abolished two have been made law. The single most important market is in food, its production and distribution.Though very far from unregulated it is also probably the only market that had become significantly freer and more transparent in the last three decades. As a result, even in the face of global production failures and structural increases in production costs of corn,milk ,soya and meat, we have the lowest food prices ever and the smallest per centage of a family budget being spent on food. Which is especially good news for the those with the lowest incomes, but of course free markets always help the poorest most.Just as it is a simple fact the wealthy can afford socialism but us ordinary joes cant. Nobody would for a moment consider entrusting the supply of food to the state, yet we hand over the supply of health care, education and security without a thought.

But if we were to pay heed to the noise around the crisis you might believe that for twenty years financial services in Ireland were a wild west of unregulated cowboys and gunslinging financiers. The Finnish gents report makes clear that there were a series of systemic failings which lead up to the bursting bubble. What is not clear is that more regulation  is required. Certainly we may need different regs but the failure of the last ten years were human not legal. Human beings failed to pursue allegations. Human beings chose to believe the unbelievable. Human beings refused to countenance the idea that their buddies might be lying to them. Even auditors are for the most part human beings.  If regulation is left solely in the hands of government, no matter how thick the forest of law, it will fail.

The situation which pertained in the Ireland now was the worst of all possible worlds. The role of bank watch dog was assumed by the state in place of the share holders and directors. The shareholders lulled into a sleep by promise of state oversight do not bother to question the books but just accept the dividends. All the time the state is failing spectacularly to police the banks. Yet we seem to have a most touching faith in the capacity of the self same state to do this job in the future.

While I certainly do not wish to detract from the fun blame game that we can all play with quotes and reference to text it seems to this simple bear that the Finnish gent has missed two small but important points. He tells us that the bubble was home grown. Bad decision making in the banking and state sectors mirrored bad choices made by private citizens. We were seized by animal spirits and buoyed by irrational exuberance which drove us to make make poor judgements about risk and long term value. And thats grand.

We can blame no one but ourselves for the state we are in he sternly admonishes us. And he is quite right. We made the choices, lent the dosh, borrowed the dosh and failed to notice a loan book which was 80% composed of loans to property developers and where said loans to buy property were secured against property.We borrowed and spent like drunks.And a drunken man who shoots with his wife with a machine gun is wholly responsible for that homicide. But, and here is the fun bit, if we also discover that this man went to local 24 hour gun store while inebriated as a newt and at midnight succeeded in buying a heavy machine gun, no questions asked, then would we not also wish to ask the gunstore owner a question or two. Our lads failed but lads in in banks in Germany and France failed too. There is plenty of blame to go round.

However to be a bore I must return to the fact that all of the conditions outlined by the gent do not constitute sufficient conditions for the bang. There is one more condition which must pertain before a credit bubble can inflate. Cheap money. All of the mad schemes of the Irish banks were done using virtually free money borrowed from European banks at a time of near zero interest rates set by the ECB. If the markets had been setting the price of money in Ireland the cost of borrowing would have been much higher, as productivity fell, production costs soared and exports declined. However we were part of a currency where the cost of money ws being set to meet the needs of the then sluggish and poorly performing Franco/German bloc.

So we were flooded by our banks with mispriced money. What happened next. Malinvestment, irrational behaviour and total failure to understand the nature of risk. Mmm.It seems to me Ive heard that song before, it has an old familiar ring.

Whats the point you ask Bovis? Well as long as the price of our money is set not by the market but by the needs of economies out of sync with ours we will have booms, busts and everything in between