Brexit: British/Irish Relations (House of Lords Report)

There can be no question of people in Northern Ireland not retaining the right to Irish citizenship after Brexit so the House of Lords is wrong to even raise the issue. They obviously don’t realize that anyone born anywhere in the world with at least one Irish grandparent is entitled to Irish citizenship. That said, the House of Lords is telling the Department of Foreign Affairs that the Irish Government should not be running around Europe pleading for the right of people in Donegal to travel to Derry without a visa after Brexit. Apart from making fools of themselves, there is a risk of the Europeans (the other 26 Member States) stirring up trouble for both Britain and the Republic in terms of cross-border and east-west relations, trouble that the other 26 would not normally contemplate causing. They might, however, cause trouble in order to put pressure on the British Government in the Brexit talks or indeed on the Irish Government to leave the EU with the British.

It is possible that officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs are doing their best to stop Kenny and Flanagan running around Europe making fools of themselves. I don’t know but the House of Lords report will be seen by the Department (if not by their political masters) and by other foreign ministries, inside and outside the EU, as a telling off for the way Kenny and Flanagan are behaving. I have no doubt that the British Foreign Office will have urged the HoL to publish the report, and quickly (the first of five or six this week from the HoL), before Kenny and Flanagan do more damage. The weakness of both men is being shown up starkly. In the nature of these things, PM May can’t tell Kenny to stop making a fool of himself. It would also be difficult for the Foreign Office to say that to the Ambassador, even informally, but the message is coming through loud and clear in the report.

The House of Lords report will be seen by the other 26 Member States as a typical divide and conquer move by the British. There is truth in that but from our point of view divide and conquer is the right approach on this occasion.

The House of Lords report talks about any bilateral deal being approved by the EU after it has been agreed by Britain and Ireland. That is diplomatic-speak for telling the EU to take it or leave it. 

A very important report.

Housing Policy

With all the talk about mortgage rules, it was left to Colm McCarthy in yesterday's Sunday Independent to make the most important point of all: the failure of our housing policy is not down to the Central Bank but to the Department of the Environment, the planning authorities and their political masters. Although the Central Bank deserves criticism for the runaway chaos of the 00s, the principal failure down through the decades has been by the political system. As McCarthy said, housing policy is the responsibility of the Government, not of the Central Bank, but because of our dysfunctional political system the Central Bank has been asked to do the heavy lifting. It can't.

When was the last time the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance, the Minister for Housing or any Minister told the public that the price of houses should remain stable in real terms? When have Ministers spoken about the need for housing policy to be set in a wider context of economic and social development, including climate change? When have Ministers told the public that urban sprawl and the waste of good farm land has to be brought to an end and that people will have to live in cities (not commute every morning from ever expanding suburbs). The energy cost, the carbon footprint and the damage done to the fabric of cities (not to mention the quality of life of commuters) demands a major change of approach.

The Irish approach to housing is well captured by the ESB advertisement about the young man heading home for Christmas, bring greeted at the bus station by his father and being driven home to his house in the countryside to be greeted by his mother. It is an experience many people can relate to but it is a lifestyle that will have to change. The idea that work and home should be in different places (even if the advertisement is probably about a student) must be challenged. The majority of the population will have to adjust to living in urban areas within walking or cycling distance of their place of work, or, at worst, a short journey by public transport from within the town or city limits. Children should walk to school or at best go by school bus. Parents should be strongly discouraged or, if necessary, forbidden by law to bring children to school by car (especially by SUV!).

Planning permission should be closely linked to issues of density, public transport, schools and other factors. The question of price controls will have to be considered, if only to deal with the problems of development. Whereas in the past a "good" area of a town or city was home to a wide range of middle class professions and activities, nowadays, in effect, only doctors, lawyers, accountants and financial services personnel can afford to live in certain areas and send their children to the perceived top schools. This not only creates resentment among, say, senior public servants and teachers it also discourages people from choosing a career in the public service or teaching. That, in turn, impacts on economic and social development in two ways: we will have too many doctors, lawyers, etc. (not all of them suited to those professions) and not enough good public servants, teachers, etc.

House prices and the belief throughout Irish society that housing is the route to (unearned) wealth is a deeply ingrained cultural trait in what is a very greedy society and it will not be easy to change. Not surprisingly, public representatives are not prepared to address the greed factor but they will have to sooner or later. House prices have had a huge impact on other areas of public policy, including pay demands and the capacity of the State to provide much needed services. The high cost of living is a result of the greedy nature of Irish society, which won't be successfully tackled until we have a functioning housing policy. Changing cultural habits like greed are of course a lot more difficult to effect than changing mortgage rules but because we have 100 TDs too many the political class won't even try. The problems are mounting up, however, right across virtually every area of public policy and the common denominator - the dysfunctional political system, which needs massive pruning - will have to be addressed.

Why Trump?

There is a great deal more to be said about the election and it will be a very long time before the fallout is complete. There are going to be consequences on many levels but the most urgent one has to be the economy. The media on this side of the Atlantic said that HC’s campaign was slick and that Trump’s gallop through some of the “marginal constituencies” like Pennsylvania in the last few days before the election was a sign of desperation. The opposite seems to have been the case. HC’s campaign appears to have been driven by identity politics, by the type of people who believe the main subject for discussion on university campuses should be genderless bathrooms, whereas Trump seems to have had a well organized campaign that listened to what ordinary citizens were saying. If HC had had any sense at all she would have broadly endorsed Trump’s approach to trade and globalization (not that many people would have believed her). If the Democratic Party does not move immediately to do so now (along the lies of Bernie Sanders) it could well be toast. There is room for a genuine left of centre party to replace the Democrats and to focus on the issues of concern to tens of millions of ordinary Americans. 

Politics is all about the haves and the havenots. The haves are always well represented. The havenots don’t usually get much of a look in but when the party that is supposed to represent them goes farther to the right than the candidate of the haves what else are the voters to do? You could argue that the US empire will have to be brought to an end before US politics can be reformed but assuming that reform is possible within the imperial structure the Democrats have to rediscover what a left of centre political party is about: ensuring that ordinary citizens have a decent job, a decent standard of living, decent healthcare, decent unemployment benefit when out of work, decent housing and so on. Trump took that ground, and in my view honestly so. The same thing happened in 1860 when Lincoln stole the progressive ground of the anti-slavery movement admittedly because the Republican Party wanted strong tariffs in the North and the Southern States didn’t so there was a natural alliance between the various wings of the Republican party that brought about the end of slavery. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s abhorrence of slavery was genuine and the honour of destroying slavery and the rotten social and economic system that underpinned it and benefited from it fell to the Republican Party. The same might happen in relation to excessive globalization. If Bernie Sanders had been selected by the Democrats he would have beaten Trump. He might indeed have beaten Trump and Clinton if he had opted to run. 

I’m not too bothered about Trump’s boorish behaviour. My guess is that he calculated that the only way he could channel the anger into votes was by turning up the volume. This was no ordinary election and if the US elite does not take heed of what happened who knows what will happen in the future. Trump also realized that after fifty years of PC (much of it justified certainly but it had gone way off the rails with the gender stuff and the bathrooms and university students wanting safe rooms) it was necessary to challenge it and challenge it aggressively. He was clearly right on both counts although it was ugly. It will now be up to him to turn down the volume.

There was a good article on the election in the NYT The End of Identity Liberalism by Mark Lilla, who is essentially saying that gender stuff and bathroom stuff has its place but front and centre: no. Anyone with any cop-on has been saying this right through the campaign but not HC’s people. Apparently, Bill Clinton tried to get this across to them but was told to button it. Apparently, he also told them not to ignore the Catholic vote but the latent anti-Catholicism of HC, a good WASP, came through. In many ways it was the mirror image of Trump’s attack on PC. Clinton and her people felt that they had a licence for good old fashioned Catholic-bashing dressed up as something else. They forgot that good old-fashioned Catholics have votes. HC’s arrogance and sense of entitlement to the Presidency let her down and her friends in the media, who should have warned her, didn’t.

Trump’s election will have an impact on feminism. There is now a divide between those who argue for women’s rights and those who argued that HC had a right to power because she is a woman. That was quite a leap for the sisterhood to make and it was important that she lose on that ground alone. If the sisterhood splits big time over this I would expect “approved” opinions about abortion among right-on types to start diverging too.

It remains to be seen if the military industrial complex and the secret state prevent Trump from making significant changes to US war policy, which, again, I suspect he genuinely wants to make. I suspect that he is opposed to the elite’s policy of perpetual war for perpetual profits for the arms industry (with the morons in the State Department and the satellite think tanks going along with them). It would be a brave man who would predict success for Trump there.

I sent a tweet to the actor who lectured Pence after a theatre performance asking the actor, Dixon, if he had lectured HC in the same patronizing way about her destabilizing of Libya. No response needless to say but I see some tweets coming through about Dixon urging black guys to have sex with white women on Paddy’s Day. If you are going to lecture the Vice President Elect you would be well to have a clean sheet yourself as, if you don’t, someone will dig up the dirt. That is what has happened to Dixon. I don’t expect the New York Times to lecture Dixon about his attitude to white women or a file to be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (as we say) but Dixon, who is an eejit, might come to regret his fifteen minutes of fame.

The Donald trumps Brexit

The election count was a close replica of Brexit night although it went on longer. The similarities indeed were uncanny. The "Sunderland" of last night was Ohio.Trump's win there suggested that a Trump victory was possible. Had he won Virginia as well, which he almost did, I would have got to bed a lot sooner than 7am! As it was, the US networks waited two hours or more to move Trump's electoral college votes from 244 to the 270s (bar one vote to 245). One doesn't want to get paranoid but 99% of the votes had been counted in Pennsylvania, I think, with Trump in the lead (and therefore over the 270 number) but, even though the New York Times had called it, the networks refused to do so for about two hours. I suspect that if Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had gone to Hilary Clinton the networks would have called the results in short order. Which goes to show that Trump's allegations of chicanery might not necessarily have been completely wide of the mark. There were postal votes to be counted in Pennsylvania (by hand, apparently, as opposed to electronically in some other states) but that doesn't explain the delay. I gather Trump was making his victory speech when Pennsylvania or Wisconsin came through and brought him over the top. He had clearly got fed up waiting for the networks.

Brexit is restated, confirmed, underlined and strengthened by Donald Trump's victory, and the euro is next. TTIP is for the bin and the future of the EU itself and NATO are now up in the air. It's impossible just now to take it all in or to know where the US and the world will go from here. The US Presidency is a far weaker institution than we think because of the separation of powers, and Donald Trump is as despised by almost as many Republican senators and Congressmen as Clinton, but like Brexit it's the vote that counts. For the second time in just over six months the people have misbehaved and refused to do as they were told. I don't say that the people are always right but they are always sovereign. It will take this victory to bring home to the Remainers in the UK that Brexit means Brexit.

It is no coincidence that the "revolution" bringing about the end of the post WW2 world began in the UK and the US (leaving aside the collapse of the USSR and communism). The UK and the US created the Western dimension of the post war world. They also pushed more than anyone else (with our elite following them without giving it a second thought) for a world of excessive globalization, including in the financial services area. The Big Bang in the UK in 1985 and Larry Summers' disastrous legislation in the US in the 1990s set the scene for the loss of any control of capital movements, which underlie a lot of the problems since. The mad euro experiment of course deserves to be up there also, which is why the euro will be next to feel the wind of change. NAFTA contributed significantly to Trump's victory. I was exchanging tweets at around 6am with a well known economist who felt that globalization had its merits but said that "the corporate interests unchecked fest at society's expense is the problem". Exactly. Where to draw the line between free trade and the rights and responsibilities of governments to govern their territories and protect the interests of their people is the issue: the near total stakeholder capture of Western governments (in this case the US) by global interests is the underlying reason for Donald Trump's victory.

The number crunchers of course were at it all night. More women voted for Donald Trump than were expected to and fewer Latinos voted for Hilary Clinton than we were told was the case. (I'm not surprised in either case. Why would women vote for somebody shady just because she is a woman or Latinos not be able to understand that states must have borders and rules about immigration?) There is no doubt that playing the hyphenated game was a bad tactic for Hilary Clinton. Truth to tell, she might have had no choice but some of her rallies gave the impression of a Tree Huggers for Clinton event. The Democratic Party needs to get away from giving the impression that it is the hyphenated Americans party and get back to being a left of centre party, e.g. ditch NAFTA. (Donald Trump should seek to reverse the increasing balkanization of the US. The most interesting Americans I've ever met have been ... Americans. Hyphenated Americans tend to be less interesting.) It will be interesting to see if the Democrats work that out. I enjoyed the piece by Brian Boyd in Tuesday's Irish Times in which he pointed out that seeking support from rock stars and the like doesn't work. (Speaking of celebrities, where has Bono been? How have we been so lucky!) The article refers to one individual, who, in 2004, particularly resented the fact that Bruce Springsteen, whom the individual correctly described as a song and dance man, urged people to vote for Kerry in that year's Presidential election. I love the Boss and he was right on that occasion but perhaps another consequence of the revolution is that the age of celebrity might be coming to an end. Donald Trump was one but the end of celebrity could be one of the unintended consequences of his victory.

The media has been the stand-out performer in this campaign but for all the wrong reasons. With some fine exceptions, they did everything they could to create the impression that Hilary Clinton was the better candidate and was home and hosed. I don't necessarily blame the polling companies. I can understand how people would be reluctant to say how they intended to vote. No doubt many people kept their heads down at work and among their friends and then quietly voted for Donald Trump. The Clintons' checkered history finally caught up with them. The media did everything they could to down play the pay-for-play strategy of the Clintons but they couldn't bury it. I suspect, however, that the debates ultimately turned the table. I saw part of the first one and all of the second and third ones. Donald Trump improved with every debate while Hilary Clinton failed to get her vision across (although she did to the global elite and the media, who understood that she was their woman). I noticed, particularly after the third debate, that good journalists could not run away from their consciences and started, ever so gingerly, to point out that Donald Trump was developing into something but that Hilary Clinton was standing still. I thought Donald Trump had left it too late to begin to display the necessary political skills but he hadn't. He had to trod a fine line between the angry revolutionary and behaving like a civilized human being. I thought he had got the balance wrong but he obviously hadn't.

The Canadian immigration website crashed during election night. Shades of UK citizens looking for Irish passports after the Brexit referendum. Silly.

It will obviously take some months to see how Donald Trump seeks to turn his victory into significant new policy directions. My first reaction is to breathe a sigh of relief that the world won't be a heap of ashes four years from now. The risk of nuclear war with Russia had Hilary Clinton won would have been very high. Assuming Donald Trump can get the support of the Congress for his measures (which is a huge assumption), if he reduces US corporation tax to 15% that will have a huge impact on the US and global economy. It will oblige this state to move away from Whitaker Economics. I don't underestimate the challenge involved but we have to face the future as well. I hope Donald Trump will instigate a massive renewal of US infrastructure and he should tackle education as well. Hopefully, he will also restructure the Supreme Court and that important social issues like abortion and surrogacy will be addressed. And I hope, he finds a way of keeping the Second Amendment while tackling the US gun culture that has always been a feature of US society but particularly since the end of the US Civil War. Sales of post Civil War surplus weapons gave that culture a boost from which US society has never recovered.

Donald Trump's Cabinet appointments will tell us a lot about his plans for the Presidency. Will he appoint heavy hitters to the economic ministries (and get rid of Janet Yellen, if he can) and lesser figures to State and Defence? Having a businessman in the White House is a huge plus. Will he challenge the military industrial complex, which is consuming (morality aside) far too many resources, resources that the US could spare in the 1950s-1970s but not today? Will he go for the best Cabinet he can and forget the gender balance/must have some gays nonsense?

Clinton V Trump

Jeremy Paxman said on the Late Late Show on Friday night that if he had a vote he would vote for Clinton but that both candidates were awful. He said that Clinton had failed to communicate her vision for America. She is a bore, certainly, like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale, but it is clear that she is the insider candidate, the candidate of Wall Street, the MI complex and the secret state. The elite know she is their woman – she has very successfully communicated that to them. She is also the candidate of sleaze and her presidency will be immersed in sleaze and scandal from day one, indeed even before she assumes office. What people haven’t realized is that sleaze doesn’t matter to the elite as long as their position is secured by every incoming president. The people don’t like it but they don’t matter unless of course we get another Brexit-type result. The extent to which the elite are drifting away from the people (and couldn’t care less about their obligations as an elite) is one of the emerging features of 21st century politics. The similarities with France in 1789 are there to be seen .... (We of course are an outlier when it comes to elites ignoring democracy with the results of the Nice 1 and Lisbon 1 referenda having been rejected by the State ....)

 

I listened to a very sane, calm, rational Irish-American called Michael Ryan talking to Sean O’Rourke on RTE on Thursday. Ryan is the editorial writer for an Atlanta newspaper, which is plumping for Trump. He started off by saying that Trump’s behaviour had been awful and had made it very difficult for decent people to vote for him, which is true. Then he went on to say that Trump had improved considerably in recent weeks, which is also true. (I watched part of the first presidential debate and all of the second and third debates. The improvement in Trump’s performance in the second debate over the first and in the third over the second was considerable.) He spoke about Trump displaying a measure of self-discipline in recent weeks. Indeed, if Trump had reached the stage of his political development in September that he has now reached he would be home and hosed. He said that Trump had made some important and well crafted speeches in recent weeks and was developing into a person of substance. True. Ryan’s newspaper has met Trump. The private man, it seems, is different from the public Trump. So Ryan said anyway. The general impression (spread by the media) is that only red necks from the Appalachian mountains and members of the Ku Klux Klan will vote for Trump but in point of fact tens of millions of people who can read and write will also vote for him. Most will hold their noises while doing so but America is electing a president not a marriage guidance counsellor.

 

On the other side, Ryan spoke about the sleaze that is the Clinton industry, as you might call it. (Tens of millions of people won’t vote for her because they can read and write.) It is sad that the dying days of the Obama administration are a reminder of the Nixon Presidency but I’m not surprised. Obama (who was described by an ex-CIA guy, who spoke at a public meeting in Dublin on Tuesday, as a man who lost his bxxls on Inauguration Day eight years ago somewhere between the Capitol and the WH except for the stand he took on Iran) threw in the towel on his presidency a long time ago.  You could see that listening to (as opposed to watching) the speech he made in N.Carolina the other day where he told the audience that he didn’t want to put pressure on them but that the future of the world depended on their vote. He was practically laughing and was not being in any way serious. Even RTE, strong supporters of Clinton, thought Obama was taking hyperbole to new heights or lows. The ex-CIA guy indicated (from something he had heard second hand) that Obama feared assassination. Maybe so, maybe not but Obama is smart enough to know that any president who seriously challenges the secret state is taking a risk. Having opted out a long time ago he probably couldn’t care less that HC’s behaviour at the State Department or that the efforts of the Justice Department to prevent the FBI bringing her to justice bear a striking similarity to the Nixon administration. There is a realistic chance of criminal charges being laid against HC unless Obama pardons her after 8th November, which I think he will. Whether he is worried about his reputation or not, he can’t have his successor doing the perp walk from the Oval Office to a court! Ryan said that there is civil war within the FBI over HC’s behaviour. She is still the favourite but Ryan thought that the ground was shifting beneath her feet. It is not that the opinion polls are lying but they are not keeping up with the pace of events. (Opinion polls are becoming less and less reliable anyway for all sorts of reasons mostly to do with the way society is changing.)

 

So, if there is any justice in this world Trump will win. The most important area is war and peace. Friday’s Irish Independent reported that a former chief of the imperial general staff in Britain thinks that the world would be safer under Trump than Clinton. Right again: that one is a no brainer. Trump, if elected, would be the first president in my lifetime who knew anything about business, something the WH needs. Trump’s understanding of the self-destructive nature of globalization for the developed world and the fact that it has gone too far is one of the best features of his campaign, and he has clearly succeeded in getting that view across. (Channel 4’s main evening news one day last week came from an empty factory in Detroit, the biggest empty factory in the world or some such. In spite of themselves, journalists with integrity can’t help picking up the good points in the Trump campaign.) Trump would also, I think, upend Roe V Wade and, as he said in the third debate, ensure that state legislatures did their duty and addressed the abortion issue. Given that there have been something like one billion abortions since, say, 1970 it is time that the slaughter of the innocents was stopped. I think his presidency could be a turning point on that issue, if he were to succeed in forcing the issue back to state legislatures. I’m not convinced that legislatures when confronted with the one billion figure will casually let that continue. Trump supports the Second Amendment but hasn't allowed himself to be trapped into a refusal to interpret it in a rational way.

 

I’m not suggesting that Trump would do all or anything that he says he would do, if elected, but if were to win, the vote would be what counts. If he seriously attempted to challenge the elite, the secret state would stop him (until eventually the crowd gathered around the Bastille) but might think twice before removing him as they did JFK. Kennedy was an Irish Catholic despised by millions of Americans (many of whom, or their descendants, will vote for Trump, it is true) plus the manner in which he won the election was questionable. So the secret state felt safe enough in removing him. If Trump, who is a WASP, were to win without having to go the chads route to the Supreme Court the secret state would certainly attempt to stop him but would hopefully think twice before going for the sudden removal option.

Future of the US Republican Party

The Republican Party was founded in 1853 from a number of previous incarnations, including the Whigs, the No-Nothings and the anti-slavery movement. It has always been a pro-business party and a WASP party but was temporarily a progressive party in the 1860s because supporting the retention of tariffs, in the northern and southern states, to the chagrin of the latter, which had less industry than the northern states, also meant opposing secession. The constellation of interests that came together in the 1850s resulted in the Republican Party taking on the evil of slavery in the US and defeating it. Progressive people in the US and outside it supported that struggle. The Republican Party ultimately reverted to type (with President U.S. Grant, for example, ensuring that the Indian tribes were conquered) but with occasional bursts of progressive activity such as Teddy Roosevelt taking on the robber barons of the late 19th century and adopting progressive positions on the environment. Teddy Roosevelt remains, probably, the most interesting president the US has had but, unlike Lincoln, who belongs to the ages, Roosevelt was an imperialist and recognizably a Republican in today’s terms. He was also, however, a very competent chief executive of the state.

 

The business class in the US will always have its own political party. Whether it continues to be the Republican Party or whether a new party emerges from the damage Trump is doing to the Republicans is not important. What is important is that people recognize that Trump is a political freak. He is a wealthy man, who wants to change the economic and trade policies a corrupt-beyond-repair elite is pursuing because Trump understands that current US trade policy will damage the US, including, ultimately, its elite. He is, in fact, showing the elite the way to save their own skins. His policy on trade and globalization is progressive in the same way that the policy of tariffs adopted by the Republicans in the 1850s was co-incidentally progressive because it led to the end of slavery. If Trump were to win and change US economic and trade policy, the people of the US would be its main beneficiaries. If Hilary Clinton wins, the people will not benefit. Hence, Robert de Niro or no Robert de Niro, Trump is the more progressive candidate of the two. When so-called progressives look at Trump they see someone saying things about trade policy and about other issues, such as political correctness, that progressives should be saying but are not. That embarrasses them and explains much of the over-the-top comments about Trump.

The Republican Party, post a Trump presidency, would ultimately return to protecting the interests of business and the Democrats broadly-speaking the rest. Hilary Clinton, however, will probably win the presidency and the US will continue merrily sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

 

Freakish temporary realignments in politics occur from time to time in states. It is important to recognize what is happening and to see it as freakish and temporary. Instead people are getting excited over the admittedly boorish behaviour of one of the candidates and in doing so are missing the overall picture.

34th Amendment: What next? (12th August 2016)

1. Muslims in Italy are calling for polygamy to be legalized following the introduction of same sex marriage there.

2. A mother and son in New Mexico, in a sexual relationship, are involved in a campaign to teach the world about genetic sexual attraction. If you google A mother-son couple [who were separated when the son was growing up] is fighting the law to teach the world about genetic sexual attraction you should get the story.

Visions of Floyd

I don't know much about Visions of Floyd (although I think they are from Dublin) except that they are a group of Pink Floyd fans who reproduced a number of the band's hits at the National Concert Hall last evening (Monday 8th August). As far as I know, it was a one night stand although hopefully they will be back. It was, I gather, their first ever public performance and it was impressive. The show started at 20.00 and ended about 22.45, including an encore. The band got a richly deserved standing ovation.

It wasn't a perfect performance but I've no doubt they will get better. They began by performing songs from Dark Side of the Moon, which they might have kept for the second act (after a fifteen minute or so interval around 21.00). The drums were too loud for a venue of the NCH's size (they would be more suited to The Point or to an outdoor venue) and likewise some of the guitar playing was a little on the loud side. However, neither took away from what was a very, very good show.

It is a testament to the greatness of Pink Floyd that Visions of Floyd (who gave every appearance of having prepared very thoroughly for the concert) didn't fully recreate the original sound. That, however, would be impossible but no doubt Visions of Floyd will keep striving for perfection.

The contrast between the trite, contrived, childish, talentless boy bands that we are inflicted with and the talent and maturity of Visions of Floyd (who said very little on stage and don't appear to be bothered about PR) was stark and striking. The band consists of three guitarists (one of whom is also the main vocalist), a drummer, a keyboard player and a saxophonist as well as three female backing singers, who have very strong voices. One in particular stood out.

If you are a Pink Floyd fan and you get an opportunity to see the show don't miss it.

Ulster Bank shows a rotten political system the way to go

Today’s Irish Times reports (as I suspected) that 88% of the mortgage loans being sold by Ulster Bank are more than three years in arrears and 60% are more than four years in arrears. The banks are not allowing that situation to recur with more recent loans. They are taking action sooner and, to be fair to those who are critical of the banks, they are not handing out 100% mortgages nowadays either. There was a time in the late 90s/00s when you were almost mugged if you went into a bank and didn’t come out with an extravagant loan that you didn’t want or need and couldn’t afford. Nevertheless, the key element (in the part of the Ulster Bank package that I’m interested in) is the lack of engagement by borrowers with the Bank.

 

The way the Ulster Bank decision was reported on the news yesterday by RTE’s business correspondent (who is a good reporter) was significant: his body language betrayed surprise at what was happening because of its significance. It is the sort of robust action that happens elsewhere but not in this State. It a consequence of globalization, I have to admit, and it trumps the nudge, nudge, wink, wink way the Irish State operates. We have rules for everything but very weak enforcement. There are exceptions like drink driving but it took a generation to change cultural habits there, which are still far from perfect. Nevertheless, anyone who fails a breathalyzer test on the side of the road nowadays will be arrested, prince or pauper. We need that sort of robust approach to the enforcement of all rules, civil or criminal. RTE’s business correspondent made it clear that, as a result of Ulster Bank’s move, borrowers who have failed to engage with their lenders for three, four or more years would be well advised to do so now. That is the key lesson that I hope professional advisers of all non-engaging borrowers will communicate to their clients.

 

There is a lot of nonsense going on at the moment about forcing the banks to lower mortgage interest rates. The politicians won’t face up to the real problem, a good part of which is the very large number of people who have refused to engage with their lenders about non-performing mortgages for nearly ten years now. Nor, in general, will economists or commentators or the media generally acknowledge the real problem as they are afraid of being accused of being too tough. (It is called doing your jobs.) The majority of those refusing to engage with their lenders are probably FF or FG supporters and because the number is so large they know that the Government won’t let the banks touch them. So, those of us who never missed a mortgage payment are paying off mortgages, worth millions or even billions, on behalf of people who refuse to pay them because of our rotten political system. We are also paying additional taxes, which makes it a triple whammy: our own mortgages, the mortgages of other people and additional taxes. That is simply not acceptable.

 

I suspect that most of the borrowers who stopped paying their mortgages did so because they fell on hard times after 2008. Fortunately, the situation has now improved and statistically many (though no doubt not all) of the borrowers who were unable to pay after 2008 could and should have resumed at least some payment by now. That is the nub of the matter.

It should also be pointed out that the refusal of such a large cohort of borrowers to engage with their lenders has probably forced other people into difficulty, including out of their homes. Today’s Indo says that it is probably not a significant number, and I’m inclined to agree, but there is no doubt that many people are struggling to make monthly payments that are higher than they would be if those who have refused to engage with their lenders for almost a decade now stopped behaving in such a typical and selfish Irish fashion. This is a very, very selfish society, not least because we always have weak governments that do not impose discipline on a state that is not naturally self-disciplined like, say, the Nordic states.

 

I hope AIB and BoI follow Ulster Bank's lead although we can take it as read that the Minister for Finance will not allow them to do so. There will be an election within twelve months. Maybe after that, if a stable Government is formed.

 

 

1916 And All That

The 1916 Rising was legitimate. Whether it was well planned and executed are fair questions but the right of the Irish people to evict the invaders since 1169 has never been in question. Nor could it be. What is very much in question is the wisdom of the IRB in cancelling the cancellation of the Rising. In addition, their knowledge of the importance of the economic dimension to independence (keeping the nine counties of Ulster in an independent state) was poor because, like today’s politicians in most countries, the leading Nationalists of the day were ignorant of economics. They were also partitionist although they did not admit that to themselves (any more than this state does today). So there are many grounds for criticizing the Rising but not the right of the participants to rise.

 

It was only with the Good Friday referenda of 1998 that the right of the Irish people to remove the Normans/English/Scottish/British from Ireland was brought to an end. The Second Dail consisted of TDs elected in 1921 to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland (as a result of the Government of Ireland Act of 1920) plus five TDs elected to the House of Commons of Northern Ireland – Collins, Dev, Griffith, Sean Milroy and Sean O’Mahony, four of whom (all but O’Mahony) were elected to both “parliaments”. It was decided that Collins, Dev, Griffith and Milroy would have one vote each on the Treaty. Had the vote on the Treaty taken place on the basis of the 1918 election and had it been carried (unlikely), the right of the people of Ireland to evict the British forcibly would have ended with the Treaty debate. However, as a partition parliament it did not have that right.

 

Although there was no law here in 1916 there was power, the power of the British state to impose their laws on this country. There was a considerable degree of de facto acceptance of British law, particularly after Catholic Emancipation (Ireland was effectively lawless for centuries before 1829 and that includes before 1169, something that has contribute heavily to the semi-anarchic nature of this state today), which led to the emergence of a Catholic middle class, many of whom were happy with British rule (today’s FG essentially) but who would also have been happy with the joke Home Rule on offer later, not least because (as with the Scottish and Welsh home rule Parliaments today) it would have meant jobs for the boys (FF all the way). It is clear, however, from the Repeal Movement and the Monster meetings under Daniel O’Connell and later the Home Rule movement under Parnell and Redmond that the bulk of the country wanted repeal of the union. How to repeal the union was a question of tactics where the perennial question came into play: politics or violence. Politics had a good run of it after 1800 and only ran out of steam during WW1 (a fairly violent affair itself).

 

It was the Famine, which is never really discussed here, that set Nationalist Ireland on the road to 1916. There was a grim determination on the part of the survivors that the British had to be removed from Ireland. The physical survival of the people was at stake. As stated above, there was a serious failure to address the best way to do this while bringing the Scots in the north east of the country along – the most valid criticism that can be levied at the Nationalist movement from the Act of Union to 1921 - but that, as also stated above, was because most Nationalist leaders were ignorant of economics and in twenty two or twenty three of the twenty six counties wanted partition. The partitionist nature of both parts of Ireland can’t be stressed too often. If it is to be overcome, as it must for all our sakes, North and South, it must be openly acknowledged. The leaders of the Irish Free State didn’t realize in 1922 that independence without the north east was a recipe for failure. Their successors today still don’t realize it. The same is true of Northern Ireland. David McWilliams column ("A nation once again", SBP, 15 May 2016) is a blackboard piece (looks good on a blackboard, which doesn’t argue back) and is of limited value (not least because Whittaker Economics is going to run out of steam here) but accurate insofar as it is clear that N.Ireland has no future without the rest of Ireland, Brexit today or Brexit in ten years time or Brexit never.

 

We made the task of state building even more difficult by refusing to take steps to seriously curb emigration. That decision was taken for class reasons: those who had jobs had better pay than if emigration had been lower and emigration was a safety valve that allowed a rotten political system to survive (until it nearly destroyed the state in 2008). Emigration also deprived the state of the energy and drive that is essential for state building. We tried (as we always do) to find a short cut through Whittaker Economics. Using FDI as a basis for our prosperity is bringing us up a cul de sac. At 61, I hope to make it out of this world before we reach the wall in that particular cul de sac but I wouldn't bet on it.

 

If the legitimacy of the 1916 Rising is rejected, as it has been by some, rejecting the legitimacy of the uprising in the Six Counties from 1968-1998 would be consistent with that. The corollary is also true, however. If, as the powers-that-be have been saying ad nauseam for the past six weeks or so, the 1916 Rising was legitimate then the uprising in the North from 1968-1998 was also legitimate.

 

There are those who, on principle, reject the concept of revolution against “lawful” authority (i.e. whoever is carrying the biggest stick at any given time). They tend, not surprisingly, to be privileged people. I don’t embrace lightly or casually the right of people to engage in violence but the notion that people never have the right to rebel against authority would mean, for example, that Hitler’s regime could not be indicted for the Holocaust. The Nazi Party was the legitimate government of Germany and the lawful authority (using a Burkean analysis) throughout those parts of Europe between 1940-44 where the Holocaust occurred. You would have difficulty sustaining Burke’s argument after the Holocaust and very few people would try. The reason the argument is deployed in an Irish context is to justify the betrayal of this State’s sovereignty since 1972. It is more about the EU than 1916. The link between the betrayal of sovereignty after 1972 and the rejection of the legitimacy of the Rising is that FG and FF (or Fianna Gael as they now finally are since the formation of the new Government) represent a class of people, who, since the 1970s, have become tired of independence and genuinely wish to surrender it. (Having worked in the public service for thirty five years believe me I can see their point and I know many people who share their view.) Fianna Gael, Labour, the media, most of the chattering classes, etc., etc. know they can’t surrender the State to the UK (their preferred choice) so they have settled for the second best option: Germany.

This is how the 1916 Rising should be commemorated

Wolfe Tone first advocated Irish neutrality in 1790. In September 1914, when all the leaders of the 1916 Rising met together they decided to establish the Irish Neutrality League (see www.pana.ie ) to bring together all those opposed to the imperialist war of the British Union & Empire.

Therefore, the Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA) is proud to take part in the Reclaim the Vision rally of 1916 rally at 2.00pm on Sunday 24th April starting from Merrion Square. The PANA banner will be at station F in Merrion Square South. We urge all of you to take part not just to remember the Rising against the British Empire, but to continue the struggle against imperialist wars today, especially the use of Shannon Airport by US troops (2.5 million & climbing) and the militarization of an emerging European Empire via its EU Battle Groups and its European Defence Agency. 

There is a strong and deeply rooted imperial tradition in Ireland just as there is an anti-imperial tradition from the United Irishmen to the 1916 Rising and our war of Independence. The conflict between these two traditions has not gone away you know. The Reclaim the Vision rally is to show that the Imperial culture that, as in 1914, now dominates Ireland can and will be challenged. We need to rededicate ourselves to achieving the Republic.

Roger Cole
Chairman
PANA

Churchill, World War 2 and Brexit

First the Maisky Diaries and now Kevin Myers (PM Boris Johnson is too high a price to pay for Ukexit, Sunday Times, 17th April 2016). Churchill’s reputation was always going to come under scrutiny at some point but, typically, the scrutiny is not coming from orthodox British historians. Myers is wrong about the British public not liking Churchill. They had good reason to dislike him but his absolute determination not to make a deal with Hitler in 1940 was the basis of his popularity ever afterwards. Indeed, had it not been for the British public (particularly Labour supporters) he would probably have lost office by 1943 (not least because his penchant for military disasters in WW1 continued in WW2) and replaced by Halifax, Cripps, Eden (an utter weakling as Myers says) or Lloyd George (the only one of the four who wasn’t a weakling), who would have done a deal with Hitler but regretted it afterwards. As his funeral cortege was going down the Thames in 1965, dockers, many of them war veterans, I suspect, lowered their cranes in salute. (Some upper class woman told Maisky that Churchill, whose mother was from the southern states of the US, had negroid features. I think that is worse than saying he was Irish!)

 

Myers’ comments about Churchill’s blood lust against German cities (which are absolutely spot on) raise an interesting issue. There is at least one programme per day (usually many more) about WW2 on at least one of the many British channels I have. Apart from the fact that the programmes are a total bore, they must be getting up the noses of the Germans big time at this stage. If the British vote for Brexit, the nonsense about job losses will be disappear off the papers immediately but what the media forget (both here and in Britain) is that the Germans are going to use Brexit as an opportunity to express their frustration at the wall-to-wall programmes on British TV channels about WW2. They are likely to anyway – you can imagine a state visit to London by the German President where he politely but firmly calls time on these boring programmes – but Brexit will be seen by the Germans as an opportunity to demand an end to WW2ism by the British. And they will be typically Germanic in how they demand it, i.e. not diplomatic. Something to look forward to.

 

Geldof and Willy

I was up Benbulben last week. The locals aren’t friendly so we had to go up a very tough way. Great views from the top. If Yeats (or Willy, as his intimate friend Geldof calls him) had ever got up there his poetry would really have taken off ....

Geldof is a good programme maker but why does he have to be so foulmouthed? It took away considerably from what was otherwise a very fine programme. In the midst of the wall-to-wall crass and embarrassing programmes on all channels and articles in all newspapers it was interesting, entertaining, informative and important but Geldof had to reduce it to the level of a pub discussion with his crude language.

Why does RTE not realize that a television programme is not the same as a discussion in a pub? No wonder this society is in the gutter.

Mortgage Lending Rules

The ESRI says that the Central Bank's mortgage lending rules should be modified to ensure more housing is built. As it happens, they should be modified (but not just yet). The recently retired Governor of the Central Bank probably knew that they would be so possibly opted to make them stiffer than they should be. Changing the rules won't increase supply (certainly not in the short term) but will increase demand. It makes more sense to keep supply and demand as close to equal as possible pending the election of a new government that can get to grips with the housing mess. The current rules are dampening demand at a time when supply is inadequate. That makes sense. (Hopefully, the new Government will opt not to use good land for housing but to go for greater population density, the development of brown sights, etc.)

The debate about mortgage rules should not just be a technical one. Indeed, the technical debate should follow a wider cultural debate about the role of property in society. The technical details are important but the real problem is cultural: how to wean people off thinking about property as a money-making machine. The property industry obviously should be profitable but it is neither necessary nor appropriate for the majority of the population to be players in the industry. Buying a house is the most important asset most people buy but most people buy a house to live in, raise their families in and leave to their descendants. They don't get into the property market for business reasons, except that during the Celtic Tiger many did. The results were predictable.

It is much harder to change cultural practices than laws. Irish society seems to believe that property is a ticket to easy riches. Riches aren't picked up easily anywhere by anyone (other than lottery winners although we should always remember that the famous French PM, Tiger Clemenceau, described lotteries as a tax on idiots). Irish society discovered in 2008 that the property market can be as difficult to negotiate as any other market. I get the impression, however, that the lessons of 2008 are being forgotten and that the love affair with property is on again.

Attempts by the Minister for Finance to put pressure on the Central Bank about mortgage lending rules before the general election were typical of how populist political parties behave. They love to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, talk out of both sides of their mouths at the same time and generally behave like yahoos. That is what has to change. The President (as someone who can talk about cultural issues) and, more pointedly, the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance and all other Ministers should address the cultural problem. They need to start the process of weaning this society off the notion that the property market is a mechanism for easy riches. It took perhaps a generation to get (most) people to understand that drinking and driving wasn't on. We still have problems with drinking and driving but far less than we once had. So, we can expect it to take at least a generation to educate people into treating the purchase of property in the right way, to tackle the problem of greed that is at the heart of the love affair with property and to leave the money-making aspect of the industry to the professionals.

1916 is all about 2016

The 1916 carry-on is all about 2016 really. It is an attempt to disguise things like partition, the refusal to back the Provisional IRA in the North after 1969 (they were exactly the same type of people as Pearse and co) and the surrender of sovereignty to the EU. As the PSNI begins a murder investigation into the death of a prison officer, it is just as well that the Irish State choose to pretend there was a difference between 1916 and 1969 (despite doing a great deal to light the fuse there with the 50th anniversary celebrations in 1966). The continued threat from dissident Republicans reflects the fact that not everyone in the North is prepared to pretend that 1916 and 1969 were different. Most people in the Republic don't realize (not least because the Republic is almost as as partitionist as Northern Ireland) that for Northern Nationalists the Treaty of 1921 meant nothing. Their situation didn't improve. Indeed, it worsened for another fifty years although the creation of the British welfare state after WW2 gave Nationalists some breaks that some took and that enabled a new generation of Nationalist leaders to emerge in the 1960s.

 

The 1916 Rising provided a leadership cadre that prevented conscription being extended to Ireland in 1918, kept the Irish State out of World War 2 and prevented conscription being extended to the North during WW2. The 1916 Rising, therefore, prevented far greater bloodshed in WW1 and the possible destruction of Irish society, North and South, in WW2. Eamon De Valera objected to conscription being extended to the North. Churchill’s generals told Churchill to let it go as they were satisfied they would get more volunteers from the 32 counties than conscripted soldiers from the North only. Dev would have sought to prevent people from here joining the British forces had conscription being extended to the North and he would probably have broadly succeeded. Those are considerable achievements that Home Rule and John Redmond would never have achieved.

 

The 1916 Rising, though necessary, was violent and bloody (as all wars are) and should not be celebrated like a carnival. Commemorated, yes, jumped on by bandwagoning politicians trying to disguise their many failures and betrayals, no. The contrast between the celebrations (they will now look - what they are - uncouth after the murder of the Northern prison officer), on the one hand, and the condition of this state, on the other, is embarrassing. Much of the torrent of print and broadcast media output about 1916 is irrelevant and clearly related to the agendas of today. About those, perhaps the less said the better.

 

Politics as a business

Power (to the extent that Irish Governments still have any) is collapsing. Most TDs don’t want it. They all want office (which includes being a TD/Senator and doesn’t have to involve being a Minister). Being a successful politician today is not about changing things, delivering a new vision or anything of that kind. Eamon de Valera had the best part of a century to deliver the vision he had for Ireland – an extraordinary privilege. A pity Michael Collins didn’t get the same time.

Today’s politicians are entrepreneurs. Politics is a business like any other. It has its risks and its rewards. The rewards are not the salary and pension of a TD or senator (though they are not to be sneezed at) but the doors that are opened to celebrity status, board membership, EU perks, joining the rest of the elite who are richer than politicians, etc., etc.  That has been the pattern in Britain since, probably, the late 19th century. Before that, most politicians were grandees or gentry of one kind or another. Since, give, or take, the early 20th century a great many people who went into politics in Britain as commoners ended up with peerages. They wanted to join the upper class. Today, politics globally is a vehicle for the same kind of advancement, and for little else. [Reading The Maiskey Diaries bears this out. At least 50% of the footnotes refer to British politicians, who, the footnotes state, ended up getting peerages as in “Joe Smth MP, the first Baron this”, or “Undersecretary Jones, the first Viscount that”.]

Many of the smaller parties and independents in the 32nd Dail haven’t the slightest interest in behaving responsibly, which involves taking power and wielding it with discipline, which, in turn, involves a whip system for certain measures that must go through the Dail. It also involves compromises, including moral compromises. The principal planks in a government’s programme, if endorsed by its parliamentary party(ies), should be delivered in a disciplined manner. However, Government programmes should be short. They should be of the order of “we will do the best we can” rather than sixty pages of promises that are then delivered in a box ticking operation without regard to whether they should be delivered or not. Matters of conscience and strictly parliamentary business should of course not be whipped.

It is possible that we are inching towards a greater understanding of the need to separate the rights of TDs as members of parliament from their obligation to support a government programme to which they are committed (Kenny might have lost fewer TDs if he had given his party a free vote on the suicide abortion Bill). So, one step forward. However, it is very much a case of two back as it is obvious that other than FF and FG no one wants to be in government. That might sound contradictory but if you think about it, it isn’t. Many of the smaller parties and independents would have zero credibility if they supported a government or, God forbid, joined one. They are so extreme (in the sense of not being willing to recognize the harsh realities of life) that any derogation from the absolute positions they adopt (100% increase in government spending and the abolition of all taxes except for taxes on the “wealthy” – who dey Gay?) would cause them to lose their seats and be replaced by other headbangers. Their business model is built on adopting positions from which there can be no retreat and no compromise. They created that business model (or rather than fact that the Dail has 100 TDs too many created it) and they know they will live or die by it.

So, we are left with FF and FG to form a government. They clearly can’t, not this side of a May election but possibly after a May election, particularly as FF will win more seats than FG and will claim the Taoiseach’s office. It is critical, therefore, for FF that they are not blamed for causing a May election. All of their jockeying for position is aimed at not being blamed for the next election. I don’t know if FG has realized that.

An interesting final point: what happens to the Senate election if the Dail is dissolved before the new Senate election is completed? No one seems to know.

First Three, Four or Five, Respectively, Past The Post System

We pride ourselves on the fact that we don't have a first-past-the-post electoral system but, in reality, we do or a variation of it. In most three seat constituencies the candidates in the first three positions at the end of the first count in the 2011 general election were elected, with the same thing happening to the first four and five candidates in the four and five seat constituencies, respectively.

The candidates in the first three places at the end of the first count were elected in 15 of the 17 three seat constituencies. They were not all elected on the first count or in in the order in which they appeared at the end of the first count. In Dublin North East, two candidates (SF and FF) were ahead of the third candidate (the second successful Labour candidate) at the end of the first count but failed to be elected. Both candidates presumably failed to attract transfers, which is typical of SF candidates and was to be expected of FF candidates in 2011.

In 9 of the 15 four seat constituencies, the candidates in the first four places at the end of the first count were elected, again not all on the first count or in the order in which they appeared at the end of the first count. In the five of the remaining six constituencies, three of the first four candidates at the end of the first count were elected while two of the first four candidates at the end of the first count were elected in one constituency.

In 8 of the 11 five seat constituencies, the candidates in the first five places at the end of the first count were elected (again not all on the first count, etc.). In the other three constituencies, four of the first five placed candidates at the end of the first count were elected.

In most constituencies, a candidate who was in the first three, four or five positions (as appropriate) at the end of the first count but failed to be elected was beaten by a candidate who was not far behind him/her at the end of the first count (frequently five hundred votes or less). Only in Galway East where four candidates (two FG and two independents) were ahead of the final candidate to be elected (Labour) at the end of the first count was the result unusual.

The results have considerable significance for Labour, which like the Liberal Democrats in Britain last year, don't appear to realize they are going to be annihilated. Paddy Ashdown, a former leader of the Lib Dems, said he would eat his hat if the Lib Dems did badly but David Steel, a former Liberal leader, got it right the next day when he said that the Lib Dems lost 49 (I think) of their 57 seats not because of what they had done in government but because of the promises they broke to get into government. I expected the Lib Dems to be wiped out and I expect Labour to be down to between 0-10 seats after our election for the same reason that the Lib Dems were punished.

Unlike large parties, which have large numbers elected locally and nationally (thereby allowing those parties to remain in touch with the electorate), smaller parties quickly lose touch with their bases and their promises. They lose the run of themselves and become arrogant. Small parties suffer in coalition not because they are small but because (a) they make promises before the election that they should not make (the promises are not credible and the electorate knows that) and (b) they break promises that they should not break to get into office. Not surprisingly, the electorate has contempt for them and punishes them at the subsequent election. FF and FG are identical parties so it is unlikely that either party would have to break a significant promise to go into government with the other. Consequently, the smaller party should not suffer at the subsequent general election.

Three seat constituencies
The highest first preference vote received by a Labour candidate who did not secure election in the 2011 general election was 17.56% in Limerick. The Labour candidate was in fourth place at the end of the first count but was 3% behind the third placed candidate (FF). The lowest first preference vote secured by a successful Labour candidate in 2011 (the sole Labour candidate in the constituency) was 14.31% in Cork South West.

Four seat constituencies
The highest first preference vote won by a Labour candidate in a four seat constituency who failed to be elected in 2011 was 11.75% in Cork North Central. The candidate was in sixth place at the end of the first count, less than 1% behind the fourth candidate elected. The lowest first preference vote secured by a successful Labour candidate in 2011 was 7.18% in Galway East. He was one of two Labour candidates in that constituency.

Five seat constituencies
The highest first preference vote secured by an unsuccessful Labour candidate in 2011 was 8.21% in Dublin South Central. In Wicklow, two of the three Labour candidates failed to be elected (the two candidates had a combined first preference vote of 9.43%). Had Labour run just two candidates they might have won two seats. The lowest first preference vote secured by a successful Labour candidate in 2011 was 7.71% in Wicklow, where, as stated above, there were three Labour candidates.

The Arms Industry

The head of the GMB union in Britain, Sir Paul Kenny, is opposed to Jeremy Corbyn's attempts to change Labour Party policy on Trident because it would affect the jobs of members of his union. He has threatened to mobilize workers at 50 defence industry sites across the UK to oppose any attempt by Labour to scrap Trident.

The ghastly position adopted by Kenny tells us a lot about the role of the arms industry in Western economies. (Kenny's knighthood tells us something about it too.) I don't know what percentage of the prosperity of developed economies (some anyway but they are all connected) is dependent on the arms industry but I think I once saw a figure of 25%. Whatever it is, it is significant.

The arms industry is now a key part (not far off being the only part) of what is left of Britain's manufacturing industry. Its influence on British foreign policy is enormous and deadly. In his article about the GMB union's opposition to scrapping Trident, in the Irish Times on 12th January, Denis Staunton failed to refer to the baleful influence of jobs in the arms industry on Britain's foreign policy. It is no coincidence that Britain has been to the forefront of every murderous policy being pursued by the West in recent years, including in Libya. They need the wars to preserve Britain's prosperity but the wars are getting closer to home.

In general, the media says little or nothing about the link between the arms industry and foreign policy, not always through wanting to bury the link but sometimes due to a simple failure to see the connection. It would help a great deal if economic history was a core subject at secondary level. It would teach everyone to make the necessary connection between economics and politics. It would also teach those who become senior journalists to probe issues that need probing and to bring to the surface the shocking link between the arms industry and the relentless wars that the arms industry demands. (Their editors and proprietors might not let them of course.) During the Cold War the arms industry (on both sides) was on to a good thing. They had a guaranteed market without (for the most part) the need for actual warfare although the Vietnam War was driven by the arms industry.

The end of the Cold War changed the situation and the the arms industry now needs (and is getting) hot wars all over the place. The fact that the wars are getting closer to home doesn't matter to the industry. Indeed, it helps their bottom line. The industry has no loyalty to any state or society (other than the need for societies to be sufficiently stable to allow them to pursue their murderous activities), only to profits. They are likely to welcome anything that boosts their profits. (58,000 dead US troops in Vietnam meant nothing to the arms industry as the figure was low enough not to generate a revolution and many of the dead were no doubt poor or black or probably both.) The next step is to ensure that their own societies are attacked (in a small way but big enough to generate an appropriate policy response from governments) as that will generate even more profits.

Joseph Heller's character, Milo Minderbinder, in Catch-22, captures the reality of the arms dealer perfectly. Heller deliberately and cleverly paints Milo as an attractive character but with something fundamental missing from his moral make-up. It is difficult for most of us to understand the mindset of the arms manufacturer and the arms dealer. We can't understand Milo Minderbinder's character in Catch-22 and we can't understand the amorality of the industry in real life either. We are not like them. Most people would recoil in horror at the thought that they were contributing to terrible suffering in the Middle East and elsewhere through the jobs held by their friends, neighbours and fellow citizens. It gets more difficult, however, when they have to be told that they will have to make a choice between generating wars in the Middle East or seeing their standard of living drop by 25%. So their governments and their media don't tell them. If, however, citizens were taught at school to think about the relationship between economics and politics it would make it more difficult to hide the horrors of the military industrial complex before it is too late.

Problems in the Health Service

Yet again today on the News at One, the Minister for Health was subjected to the usual questions about times on trollies, wards not open and so forth. It is easy for journalists to ask about the problem of SUPPY when they should be talking about the excess DEMAND for health services. I can't understand why politicians, who are on the receiving end of all this, never fight back. Is it because they haven't done their homework on the different levels of demand for health services in, say, Dublin and Manchester or, say, Dublin and Copenhagen? Why is the first fortnight of the year very demanding for the health service here? Is it in Manchester and Copenhagen also? Is it because people here have been consuming too much over Christmas and getting no exercise? If that is the case, why are the Government and the media not focusing on that problem? Is it all a game? The media play the role of the great crusaders. The politicians allow themselves to be humiliated in return for the media not asking the questions that are really relevant and that would oblige the Minister for Health, his Department and the HSE to address the real issues?

Has the Department of Health or the HSE (or the universities or the media) done any research on the nature of the demand for health services in this jurisdiction as opposed to other jurisdictions? How much of the bottlenecks that we constantly hear about has to do with our lifestyle, in particular the use and abuse of alcohol and other drugs, legal and illegal? Does the average citizen of Manchester or Copenhagen consume less alcohol than the average Dubliner? Are demands for A&E services in Manchester or Copenhagen less severe than in Dublin and is that a reflection of a healthier lifestyle among Mancunians and Danes? It shouldn't be too difficult to find that out and draw the necessary policy conclusions.

Do general practitioners in Manchester and Copenhagen look after their patients the way GPs once did here or are they just a referral service as seems to be the case here now? Do GPs do house calls in Manchester and Copenhagen unlike here as far as I can tell? A well functioning health service starts with citizens not living unhealthy and undisciplined lives (something their GPs should constantly remind them of as opposed to many GPs merely extracting large amounts of money from their patients every time their patients cross a surgery threshold). Why is the unhealthy lifestyle of so many people, frequently documented, not linked back to the problems with the provision of health care?

Why is their not more emphasis in the need to keep people away from hospitals and attending their GPs instead? There is no point in the Minister for Health making lame appeals on RTE. Action needs to be taken. Many GPs need to up their game, substantially. People need to be turned away from hospitals and referred back to their GPs, all of whom should have a facility for their patients to be seen 24 x 7. Why do hospitals permit GPs to refer patients for hospital attention when it is not always necessary? Why is the HSE not analysing the statistics to identify those GPs who are referring patients unnecessarily to hospital?

The main problem in the health service - which neither the media nor the politicians ever allude to - is that vested interests are more powerful than Government or the health service. Vested interests put their own interests first. That is not the case with the NHS in Britain. There are of course powerful health sector interests there but there is a sense (and I know this from my own experience) that the health service is more important than, and takes precedence over, the interests of the professions, trade unions and others who make up the service. The British Government has always seen itself as being above the vested interests and not as a referee managing the competing demands of the various interests, as is the case here. The weakness of the Government here in the face of strong vested interests is not just confined to the health service but (as with other sectors) politicians seem afraid to address the real issues and the media won't either. Using politicians as the national punchbag is easier for the media and politicians seem to be happy to play along.

Only in Ireland would this situation arise.