Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

On the topic of vindictiveness you only have to look at the fate of the Combat Poverty Agency. It was trying to highlight the systematic penury which due to structural inequalities persisted in Ireland even at the height of the so-called Celtic Tiger period. However, it was gradually starved of funds and has now been swallowed up by the Department of Social and Family Affairs where it will have no other identity except that of a bauble in the midst of a ministry headed by the Lady Bountiful who doesn’t believe anyone is entitled to any welfare payments, a stance in which she is supported by her senior well-paid officials.

I may have mentioned that the story about the ombudsman was nobbled. It was pushed off the top of the news – in fact the news altogether – by reports about how some government agency has identified 5 billion euro worth of public spending cuts. These will include a savaging of welfare payments. It won’t effect the members of the oligarchy and elite, who can be comfortable that their taxes aren’t going to the “work shy”. It will of course lead to an increase in mendicancy and probably an increase of those women and girls who will be forced to sell their bodies in order to make ends meet. Such an increase in supply will be music to the ears of the many senior civil servants, judges and members of the judiciary who frequently use such services – I could name names here. They’ll be delighted to have prossies who speak English instead of all of the foreign women they’ve had to deal with. But then some of these gentlemen’s tastes extend beyond women and girls.

On the subject of Emily O’Reilly’s comments about the Ryan report, one of the reasons why nobody said anything about institutional abuse even though everyone knew it was going on was for self-preservation. If you were a member of the Knights of St Columbanus or some other ultra Catholic lay group your passage to the higher pastures of employment was guaranteed. If you weren’t a member your outlook was less assured, but were you to offend the Knights in any way you could kiss goodbye to any effective advancement in vast areas of the Civil Service and Judiciary, and the Knights were (indeed honesty compels me to switch tenses here) are very vindictive, unforgetting and unforgiving. Their members conceal their intrinstic reactionary views on everything behind a cloak of religious clap-trap. I remember being in the company of a knight – one of the best of them now dead alas – when the television reported the demonstrations in Belgrade which brought down the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. He stated: “They’re getting’ as bad as us.” As to their attitude to those complaining of abuse, I remember one of them denouncing a victim as a “whinger” who “deserved everything he should have got”.

In a personal response to the revelations of the Ryan report on abuse in Catholic institutions, Ireland’s ombudsman gave a very forthright response to the release of the Ryan report on institutionalised abuse. Extracts from her speech can be found at The Irish Times site.

She said that the report had shown Irish people as exposed “not as chatty, avuncular scholars but as a repressed, cold hearted, fearful, smugly pious, sexually ignorant and vengeful race of self styled Christians.” She added: “”If things were hidden, they were hidden in clear sight … Judges knew, lawyers knew, teachers knew, civil servants knew, childcare workers knew, Gardaí knew. Not to know was not an option.”

RTE news carried a fairly extensive report on Ms O’Reilly’s speech on its One O’Clock broadcast, but by the time of the evening news it had been nobbled. There was nothing about it on the Eirtel teletext service either, thanks to the rats and the members of Ireland’s home-brewed “Klan”.

Last Sunday’s meeting between President McAleese and a group of abuse survivors was a very nice and pleasant photo opportunity – and that’s all it was.

I can imagine the folksy Mary McAleese accompanied by her husband doling out solicitude.

What about ya ya were abused were ya? Ah Gawd that’s awful so it is – Gawd luvv ya – wud ya fancy a Chinese?”

But victims of abuse deserve more than pious platitudes. They want action.

The president’s words that perpetrators of abuse should face criminal charges remind me of Macbeth’s reminiscences of the tale full of strength of fury but signifying nothing. Many of the abusers are dead, others in conditions of advanced senility. As a former professor Law Mary McAleese should know how difficult it would be to launch criminal actions against such people, with an onus probandi based on proof beyond all reasonable doubt. But the president is no fool. She knows this, but it sounded like the right thing to say.

Hardly have they put their fat arses back on their seats than Cavan County Councillors are planning to screw their electorate one more time. I read in the latest edition of the Cavan Echo that some of that brave band of trail-blazers are planning a trip to visit a land-fill facility in Germany. Now there is no need for any councillor to go; at the end of the day decisions will be taken by members of the unelected and unaccountable county council executive and the councillors can just sign off on them. Indeed the whole thing is a really cynical sop by the county council executive towards the elected members (who they view as merely troublesome but impotent irritants). “Want a foreign holiday – (minus the missus)? Jump aboard ladsw, but don’t give us any grief in the future.

Why can’t members of council staff go on their own? Are they afraid? It’s supposed to be a research trip, so why don’t they send one of their research officers? – one in particular is “solche suesse knabe” but how could he stay away from daddy? We all know that Cavan County Council’s employees include so many fluent German speakers. I’m not necessarily being facetious here, for if they were going to France they could bring with them the staff member who has a degree in French yet who for many years worked in the Motor Tax department – but who of course was partially sighted and didn’t have a parent serving on a council.

I see Bernie Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years in the jug. Poor man. had he been in Ireland he wouldn’t have got 150 points on his driving licence. I mean, for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if he were committing a REAL crime, like welfare fraud.

(this post also appears on my African Violets blog)

The reaction of the international community and many commentators to last December’s coup in Guinea shows woeful lack of understanding for African developments. Looking at the event through a really narrow and legalistic framework it has been characterised as an example of a step backward from “democratic” development to a world dominated by men with guns. But where was democracy in Guinea? It was a country whose many resources were being freely pillaged by a corrupt coterie close to the increasingly incapacitated President Conteh. While there were voices raised in opposition to his regime they were too feeble and badly organised to mount any effective resistance, and you got the feeling that, given half the chance, these civilian voices would be just as adept at the grand larceny of the state’s resources.

  Captain Dadis Camara’s coup has the potential of wrenching the country out of this quagmire and offering Guinea and its people an alternative.

 Elections are to be held later this year; indeed Camara wanted to hold them next year when the basic infrastructure for holding a poll might have been put in place, but the solicitous international community insisted that they be held sooner rather than better – as if going through the motions of holding a ballot can introduce democracy in a country with high levels of illiteracy and with no experience of casting ballots or counting them.

 Captain Camara is not standing in the elections. This is a pity, because he has shown himself to have vision beyond what passes for vision among many of Guinea’s politicians – getting rich quickly. He joined the army after his university education, so he must be set apart from semi-literate thugs of the past like Samuel Doe or Idi Amin who used the army as a means of gaining power quite literally through the barrel of a gun.

 He has pledged to hand over power to civilian politicians. Because such people wear business suits the international community feels more comfortable with them than uniformed soldiers. That such besuited figures are often thieves doesn’t seem to worry them – indeed it may be a further common feature.

Gardai in Dublin are appealing for help in locating a missing snake which they fear may have left the country and travelled to Brussels.

It belongs to the very rare Biffo Cobra species. It’s green with white and orange banding, as well as some black spots forming the letter F on both its back and front.

The snake, though venomous, is not usually dangerous unless it’s cornered when it has a tendency to lash out, opening its mouth very wide and allowing its pendulous lower lip to flap menacingly.

A garda spokesman said that their main concern is that the snake may be getting hungry. Its preferred food is steak.

I’m sure I’m not alone in believing that eircom’s webmail service is rubbish. When you log on (if you can that is) your box is inundated with spam. You send a message with no idea whether it will get there and when your correspondent replies there is absolutely no guarantee you’ll get it. I could paper the walls with the instances of people, mainly public representatives and other “important” people who claim they have responded to my messages, (and have quite testily rebutted my enquiries as to why they haven’t answered), but of whose responses I can find no trace in my inbox.

I’d love to hear from others who have experienced similar problems. They should write to me at ciaran1965@hotmail.com. But apart from sounding off on the web what can they do? They might send a message to their local TD – but not via eircom webmail!

For a number of years Cavan town has prided itself on being relatively litter free. This was because it came high in an annual survey carried out by a shadowy organisation called IBAL. In their most recent survey Cavan has fallen back – to 22nd place I hear.

If Cavan is starting to revert to its dirtier nature some of the blame must be laid at the hands of the local County Council. For a start morale amongst council workers is at an all time low. This isn’t helped by the spectre of a three-day week hanging over them, and it certainly hasn’t been helped by being summoned to meetings with the lazy County Manager who, in the first meeting, exhorted them to work harder, and then at a subsequent meeting a week or so later exhorted them to work really harder.

A scheme whereby young people were paid to pick up litter has been scrapped by the council: they need the money to pay councillors who lost their seats. This was quite degrading but it did put money into young people’s pockets, but because working on it was viewed as well not exactly the done thing there were no sons or daughters of sitting councillors being paid to pick up trash – oh no, they had to get far nicer jobs than that – and so the scheme was axed. (Personally I can’t see why a certain councillor’s son who works in Ballyjamesduff couldn’t be given a bag, a shovel maybe, and a bag and told to clean the streets. It’s hard but honest work, but he’s such a delicate little flower.)