The Trib

by David Kenny

  After a decade of commentary on the Ireland we were living in, the ‘real’ Ireland was called for in moments of reflection, the ‘old’ Ireland, which apparently was something to be yearned for.

  We got a glimpse of that ‘real’ and ‘old’ Ireland in a Tralee courtroom last week when about fifty people shook the hand of convicted sex attacker Danny Foley as he awaited his sentencing. They queued in single file before the judge returned to the courtroom, squeezing his hand and embracing him, while his victim sat in the front row of the room accompanied only by gardaí, a rape counsellor and one friend.

  ‘She cut quite a solitary figure,’ a reporter for the Irish Examiner said. The incident is of course outrageous. What kind of person would sympathise with a sex attacker who, on CCTV evidence, carried a woman who was drunk behind a skip, forced her to the ground, pinned her down causing scrapes to her wrists and extensive bruising to her back, and pulled off her trousers? When gardaí spotted him crouching over her, he lied, saying he just found her there, semi-conscious. He referred to his victim as ‘yer wan’.

  On Newstalk’s Breakfast programme on Thursday morning, Fr Sean Sheehy, a priest in Listowel – where the incident happened – who appeared in court as a character witness for the thirty-five-year-old bouncer Foley said: ‘My Christian responsibility was to this person that I knew and to the person who is the object of, what I call, this extremely harsh sentence.’ Sheehy didn’t seem particularly concerned about his ‘Christian responsibility’ to a victim of sexual assault, but hey, she wasn’t his buddy. Sheehy’s shocking behaviour isn’t that shocking in light of what we now know about Irish priests, but it does show their strange and disturbing attitude towards sex abuse isn’t just confined to paedophilia.

  Why dozens of men felt compelled to sympathise with Foley is a complex expression of many attitudes; attitudes to women, attitudes to sex, attitudes to community and solidarity. Perhaps they would have felt differently if Foley was in the dock for attacking their daughter, sister, mother, wife or girlfriend – or perhaps not. But it does show that many people refuse to accept that rapists are very often the supposedly nice upstanding and well-liked family men in our communities. It is rare that the face of sexual assault is an anonymous one in a dark alley; much more often, it’s the Danny Foleys of this world – the blokes who go out on the lash in the hope of getting some young wan hammered enough to sleep with them. Sex attackers are our friends and our family members and our neighbours. The people of Listowel find that very hard to swallow.

  And while Foley might be typical of sex attackers in Ireland, unfortunately, his victim is very much the exception as a sex-crime victim. She is the exception because she reported the attack. She is the exception because she went through with the legal process of bringing her attacker to court. She is the exception because after her case was brought to court, her attacker was convicted. And she is the exception because that conviction involved a jail sentence.

  Despite facing total isolation from her community, she had the almighty bravery to follow through. In her victim-impact statement she said: ‘I feel as if people are judging me the whole time. I’ve been asked by people I know if I am sorry for bringing Dan Foley to court. I am not sorry for it. All I did was tell the truth.’

  It’s commendable also that Judge Donagh McDonagh didn’t listen to the ‘character reference’ from the priest about Foley’s respect for women, but it’s sad that he needs to be commended because his actions should be automatic.

  Is this the Ireland that we want? Where a sexual-assault victim is judged by her community as though it was some delusional nation with an extreme vision of Sharia law? Is this what we have regressed to now? An Ireland of magic tree stumps, and eejits blinding themselves looking for a dancing sun in Knock, of people sympathising with paedophilic priests and colluding bishops, and of men patting the back of a sex criminal?

  Mown down by state and police, the students showed the rest of us what democracy is

  7 November 2010

  Just before 30,000 young people took to the streets in the largest student protest of their generation, my flatmate, also a student, hung a banner out the window. It read ‘We Write The Future’. We all write the future, but none more so than a generation who have largely been ignored, disregarded and are now condemned either to unemployment or emigration. This is the moment we stopped confusing apathy with disaffection.

  Last week began with a completely idiotic protest, an Éirígí councillor chucking paint on Mary Harney, which did nothing apart from provide a gift to sub-editors on the tabloids the next day. Éirígí was there again at the student protest, along with the Socialist Workers Party. They are to protests what liggers are to launch parties, turning up, constantly unwanted, hanging around, not getting the message that it’s not their party. Both groups were instrumental in disrupting what was a peaceful protest. There is no doubt that those involved in causing aggravation at the tail end of the protest were completely wrong. But this protest took place in a context different from previous ones, a context of heightened emotions, anger, desperation, solidarity, determination.

  Watching the TV footage, it was impossible to condone many of the gardaí’s actions. They stood in rows, batons drawn, shields at the ready, as mounted gardaí assembled behind them. They bashed heads, bloodied noses. None of the protestors were armed or wearing protective clothing, yet even when they were sitting on the ground, the fully Robocopped gardaí saw fit to beat them with batons, knee them, and drag them across the ground by their hair. Eventually, by the time the protestors had reached Anglo Irish Bank on St Stephen’s Green, gardaí on horses, again without warning, charged the crowd, who were simply making their way back to where they came from. They were backed up by charging gardaí on foot and armoured garda vans.

  It was a totally disproportionate response, an ugly, unfair and unprofessional method of controlling a crowd that the gardaí should be truly ashamed of. These kids have been mown down by the State and when they try to make their voices heard what happens? They are mown down by the police. Eventually, two people were charged with minor offences. That means that only 0.0066 per cent of those involved in the protest were accused of breaking the law.

  The issues behind the protest have been lost in the melee. This was about free education as a practical issue and also as an ideal. The lack of foresight in thinking that these problems will be solved by ramping up registration fees is astounding. There seems to be no interest in assessing the possibilities of means testing, a loans system or examining the corrupt grants system. Just whack up registration fees and hope people pay; act bluntly now, think vaguely later - the philosophy of our government.

  People talk about students having a sense of entitlement. But the sense of entitlement to a job and a disposable income is slightly less intolerable than the sense of entitlement the real trouble makers on Kildare Street have. Students aren’t a demographic that enamour themselves to the rest of the population. Their middle-class accents permeate vox pops on RTÉ radio, with ‘likes’ and ‘bullshits’, ‘totallys’ and ‘whatevers’ greeted with eyerolls by those who apparently know better. Their enthusiasm tends to be squashed by cynicism.

  I had arguments with people last week online and offline about the value of protest. ‘What’s the point? Sure nothing is going to change,’ some said. That attitude seems ridiculous to me. Isn’t the reluctance to be involved in democracy – not expressing your opinions, lapsing on being a watchdog to this government – isn’t it that lax attitude that made many of us (and not all, as we are told over and over again, but many) complicit in some of the economic terrors we are now facing? Plenty of people might slag off students for marching, but at least the students are doing something. What are you doing?

  The failure of our democratic process to be fair and the failure of our politicians to communicate or listen has created a vacuum within which groups like Éirígí grow. Moderate voices need to be heard the loudest, and those are the voices of
the students who didn’t resort to scrappy behaviour. These are the people who will be shaping this country. Listen to them. We can’t afford not to.

  If John Waters feels lost or disconnected from the new reality of Ireland, it’s because this isn’t his country anymore

  12 September 2010

  Last night I attended another emigration ‘party’ for two more friends of mine who are getting the hell out of Dodge and heading for the promised land of Sydney, where a sizeable number of this country’s young people already reside. I’ve lost count of the number of farewells I’ve bid to friends and acquaintances this year, and indeed to my own brother who headed for Hong Kong. In almost all of these departures it seemed to me that those leaving this country were doing so in a fit of optimism, not desperation. But what for the poor eejits who stay?

  John Waters grabbed a slice of youth culture pie last weekend when he hit the Electric Picnic festival. Writing in his column for the Irish Times, he despaired at the poor lost souls wandering around the site in Stradbally, Co Laois. ‘The young Irish at Electric Picnic were in a place where they had been led to believe they might find what they were searching for, but they could not find it. And so they were guzzling soul-poison in the hope of locating it.’

  Before you run to the nearest bar and shout for two pints of soul-poison and a packet of crisps, it’s important to consider Waters’ interpretation of young people, and indeed his own morbid summaries of what is essentially something called ‘having a good time’. It’s rather unfortunate that thousands of people attending a festival over the weekend had to suffer the projections of a man who sounds far more lost than any of them.

  Waters’ polemic seemed to stem from observations that because people younger than him were consuming alcohol and drugs in his midst, they were doing so because they had little else to consume in life. That’s rubbish of course. Just because there isn’t religion at a music bash (save for perhaps, the Dublin Gospel Choir on the main stage on Sunday morning) doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be enjoyed. Waters laments that those who were having fun at the festival, who were using a weekend in a field as an escape from the pessimism that hangs dense in the air, are somehow losing out on the greater meaning in this universe. As if a bunch of kids running from tent to tent to catch decent tunes and have a few beers in the process are some sort of empty vessels starved of meaning in life.

  Personally, I’d rather be a godless hedonist than a god-riddled ascetic. There is generally lots of meaning at festivals: the music itself, dancing, random encounters, meeting up with old friends, sharing a laugh, letting one’s hair down. Perhaps Waters would have been more suited keening outside the inflatable church at the other end of the festival and scorning those comely maidens who chose to dance past his confusing mental crossroads of muddled pious philosophising.

  The commentariat make a living out of cannibalising youth culture and its trimmings and then complain that they are suffering from indigestion. Generation after generation give out about a spiritual deficit in those younger than them. But perhaps this is the first Irish generation who have purposely opted out of tormenting themselves by searching for some unattainable greater meaning and who have chosen instead just to live.

  Religion and spirituality are crutches which many younger people have dispensed with in order to stand on their own two feet. The Archdiocese of Dublin used to deal with a few defections from the Catholic Church a year. Now there are so many, the Church has to come up with inventive administrative ways to make it seem as though it is stemming the tide.

  As for spirituality, what of it? There is not much evidence of spirituality in the generation that makes up the establishment of this country. A generation of dishonest bankers, greedy developers and corrupt politicians. A generation that completely overstretched themselves, who spent recklessly, who applauded consumerism, who told their kids to take out giant mortgages and to study commerce, who bought second properties and pretended to be landlords, and who elected a series of inept governments.

  This younger generation, who according to Waters are in the midst of a spiritual famine, are also attempting to forge a creative boom out of nothingness, and to reinvent community out of disaffection. Those in their teens, twenties and early thirties are bearing the brunt of this economic crisis through a combination of zero employment, emigration and negative equity, yet they are simultaneously the most active in attempting to restructure a country into one whose sole goal isn’t profit-making.

  Thousands have left. Those who stay should be allowed to have a good time without being told that their lives are empty. If John Waters feels lost or disconnected from this new reality, then it’s because this isn’t his country anymore. That Ireland is dead and gone. Thank God, or whoever.

  SHANE COLEMAN

  The opposition is skating on thin ice when it comes to the EU/IMF bailout. It needs to get real

  5 December 2010

  Now, more than ever, is a time for cool heads, but unfortunately there was precious little of that last week. The measured assessment of Ireland’s situation by Ajai Chopra was a mini oasis of calm amidst the hysteria that dominated last week’s debate.

  The danger is that as the general election gets closer, the hysteria is going to get ratcheted up even further. We know Fine Gael and Labour are going to form the next government. But the divvy-up of cabinet seats has yet to be decided. And there are worrying signs both parties are looking to outdo each other in the anger stakes.

  Describing Ireland as ‘banjaxed’ may make for good headlines, but it’s hardly what the country needs to hear from the government-in-waiting. Nor does it help public confidence when both main opposition parties try to claim that the interest rate being charged to Ireland is higher than that paid by Greece when they know full well that three-year money as accessed by the Greeks is far cheaper than the longer term funding secured by Ireland.

  Eamon Gilmore’s angry insistence that he will not be bound by the terms of the agreement with the EU/IMF will certainly be a crowd-pleaser. But it is the most pointless piece of political posturing since Fianna Fáil’s opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the mid-1980s. The government in which he will soon be Tánaiste will have to be bound by it.

  In the current climate, there are obvious short-term political benefits to the opposition’s approach. But Fine Gael and Labour are in serious danger of creating unrealistic expectations that they have no hope of satisfying when they come to power. The reality is that the deal reached with the EU/IMF was as good as could have been achieved. We were all out of options – the whole world knew it. The idea, which has been put forward in recent days, that we should have told the IMF and, more particularly, our European allies, to get stuffed is astonishingly naïve.

  The European Central Bank has been propping up the Irish banks for some time now with emergency liquidity to the tune of tens of billions of euro. The merest hint from the ECB that Ireland’s intransigence might cause this to change means our goose was cooked. So let’s get real.

  It is understandable that people wanted bondholders – particularly the €4 billion worth of unguaranteed senior debt holders in Anglo Irish – to share the pain. But once the ECB vetoed that move, for fear of contagion across the entire euro-region, that was a clear non-runner. But that hasn’t stopped the calls for the government to revoke the full guarantee of the banking system, convert bondholders into equity holders and – even more dramatically – restructure the national debt and default.

  Nobody can say for definite that matters won’t reach a stage where Ireland – along with a number of other peripheral Euro countries – won’t be forced to default. But to do so now unilaterally would be an extraordinary gamble with limitless potential downsides.

  The highly respected Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau made the sovereign default argument in an article in the Irish Times last week. But his forecast as to what would happen once we did that was less than reassuring. ‘A default would cause havoc, no d
oubt, and would cut Ireland off from the capital markets for a while. But I would suspect that the shock would only be temporary,’ he wrote.

  That’s great, so. Just as the real economy looks like it has finally stabilised – with exports and manufacturing increasing, unemployment edging down, the exchequer returns stabilised and even consumer confidence no longer dropping – we adopt a policy measure that will create ‘havoc’. But don’t worry, the suspicion is that being locked out of the capital markets will only be temporary. Munchau went on to argue that ‘even Argentina was able to gain funding from investors a few years after its default’.

  The reality is that Argentina defaulted in 2001 – setting the terms of its restructuring in 2005 – and nearly a decade on, the only international loan it has received is from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela at 11 per cent interest. It has relied largely on domestic savings to fund government spending, which is not an option in Ireland.

  That hardly sounds like the model we want to follow. If you think the current credit crunch is bad, just imagine what it would be like if the Irish sovereign and our banks are shut out of international finance. Bank loan books would have to be reduced to the size of domestic deposits and that’s making the very optimistic assumption that there would be no fleeing of depositors in the event of a default and a revoking of our bank guarantee.

  In the piece, Munchau argued the government should assess its solvency on the basis of an estimate of nominal economic growth ‘of no more than 1 per cent per year for the rest of the decade’.

  If we do end up with nominal growth of just 1 per cent a year then we definitely will be screwed. But, given how the Irish economy’s fate is so tied to global growth, presumably all the other peripheral Eurozone nations will be screwed too.

  If we are to end up defaulting, surely it would be preferable to do so collectively with a number of our euro allies than for little Ireland to be the only guinea pig in what would be a hugely risky economic experiment where nobody has a clue what will happen apart from utter ‘havoc’ being created? For now at least, there is little choice but to go with the EU/IMF plan. If Patrick Honohan is right – and there are no more black holes in the banks – and if the economy can grow close to the rates set out in the plan, then our interest payments (which will account for between 25 and 28 per cent of total tax revenue) should be just about manageable.