Posted by Jim on October 27, 2018
Two exit polls have predicted that Michael D Higgins has been
re-elected to the ceremonial post of President of Ireland with well
over half of the vote.
The polls by the Irish Times and RTE were released after voting closed
at 10pm, and matches predictions that the dimunitive academic and poet
would easily win another seven years at Aras an Uachatarain.
The exit polls also suggest that former Dragons Den celebrity Peter
Casey has come from bottom of the polls to second place with about 21%
of the vote, largely as a result of publicity he received after making
bigoted comments against Ireland’s gypsy-like Travelling community.
In third place was Sinn Fein candidate Liadh Ni Riada, whose vote was
roughly half the party achieved with Martin McGuinness seven years ago.
The party’s worst result in a 26 County election in recent decades, and
her failure to hold her election deposit, could place pressure on the
leadership of Mary Lou McDonald who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Fein
leader in February.
Another star of Dragons Den and a previous candidate seven years ago,
Sean Gallagher, is expected to come third, followed by charity
entrepreneur Joan Freeman. A third Dragons Den star, Gavin Duffy, is
set to the first eliminated when counting begins officially tomorrow
morning.
All of the candidates but Higgins and Casey will have lost their
deposits. The full results of the Irish Times exit poll are as follows:
Michael D Higgins – 56%
Peter Casey – 21%
Liadh Ni Riada – 8%
Sean Gallagher – 7%
Joan Freeman – 6%
Gavin Duffy – 2%
The full results of the RTE exit poll are as follows:
Michael D Higgins – 58%
Peter Casey – 21%
Liadh Ni Riada – 7%
Joan Freeman – 6%
Sean Gallagher – 6%
Gavin Duffy – 2%
A referendum to delete a little-known reference to blasphemy in the
Constitution was also passed easily in voting today, with the Irish
Times exit poll predicting that 69 per cent of voters have backed the
proposal.
A full report on the results will be carried in tomorrow’s
regular edition.
Posted by Jim on October 26, 2018
Farcical High Court Decision Backs PSNI Farce
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Chris Bray on the farcical High Court decision, giving cover to the PSNI when caught lying.
I am now convinced that the Police Service of Northern Ireland is an elaborate prank, a kind of brilliantly large-scale Candid Camera — and the courts are totally in on the joke.
Let’s start with some background. Feel free to skip to the heading Woodshop Felony below if you’ve been following the Belfast Project subpoenas closely (you poor bastard) and don’t need to go through the whole farce again.
In 2011, investigating a 1972 murder that they had ignored for thirty-nine years, the Police Service of Northern Ireland went shopping for unearned confessions in a historical archive in the United States. The subpoenas served on Boston College were, the claim went, desperately necessary, investigative tools scratching away the truth behind the most serious of crimes: the kidnapping, murder, and secret burial of a widowed mother of ten children, Jean McConville, killed by the Provisional IRA as a suspected informer in the employ of the British army in Belfast.
Locked away in a university library, the Belfast Project tapes supposedly held the answers; consisting of frank oral history interviews with former members of paramilitary organizations, they would allow the authorities to bring a set of killers to justice. The headlines said so, plainly and uncritically. “Tapes Hold N. Ireland Murder Secrets,” CNN reported. It was all pretty simple: Get the tapes, press the “play” button, make some arrests.
The police got the tapes they sought, but it doesn’t appear that the police got their Northern Ireland murder secrets. More than seven years later, no one has ever been brought to trial over McConville’s murder, or on any other crime supposedly exposed by the tapes. One elderly man, allegedly a former Provisional IRA member of high rank, was charged more than four years ago with crimes related to the killing, but his case has become the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the criminal courts — forever subject to status conferences, forever unresolved.
Following another, later subpoena, another set of charges were brought against another elderly man alleged to have once been a ranking member of a Loyalist paramilitary organization. Those charges have also gone Full Kafka, forever wandering the hallways of the courts of Northern Ireland and rattling their chains. One day the sun will implode, our solar system will vanish into a black hole, and the charges brought on the basis of the Belfast Project tapes will finally meet their resolution.
But now the farce of the Belfast Project tapes has become something else altogether, the word for which probably hasn’t been coined, yet. We’ll need a neologism that combines the ideas of raw sewage, things of microscopic importance, and pure farce. (This would be easier if we all spoke German.)
In 2014, circling back to a source that had brought them no form of success in court at all, law enforcement authorities in Northern Ireland asked the U.S. Department of Justice to promulgate a new Belfast Project subpoena. This time, the PSNI was seeking the recorded interviews archived at Boston College in which a Belfast Project researcher, Anthony McIntyre (a former Long Kesh prisoner who has a PhD in history), is said to have discussed his own role in the Provisional IRA.
Federal authorities in Boston got McIntyre’s interview materials, and the DOJ sent them off to Belfast. But McIntyre went to court to stop the police from reading the transcripts or listening to the tapes. This week, the High Court in Belfast issued a decision in McIntyre’s legal challenge, which they heard almost a year ago.
The decision is, God help us all, comic opera. It makes the farcical nature of the whole production abundantly clear, while attempting to manage the discussion within the boundaries of language that declares that this is terribly serious judicial business. I have a draft copy, not yet signed by the court, and the court has posted a summary of the decision here (link opens to PDF file). I’ll stick to discussing the publicly available summary until the whole decision becomes public.
Now, remember that this all began, seven years ago, with a great deal of somber tut-tutting about the seriousness of the Belfast Project subpoenas, and the urgent work of the PSNI as it raced down the trail after some murderers. So take a look at the summary posted by the court, which describes the matters now being investigated by the PSNI with regard to Anthony McIntyre:
On 3 September 2014 the PSNI requested that the Public Prosecution Service (“PPS”) issue an International Letter of Request (“ILOR”) in respect of a criminal investigation it was carrying out into the following matters:
The detection in 1978 in the applicant’s possession of an imitation firearm while in custody in circumstances suggesting that he may be planning an escape from custody. The applicant states that this is a reference to an incomplete wooden gun in two parts which was found in a search cubicle in prison reception. He was questioned at the time of its discovery but not charged with any offence. Note that this sentence about events in the 1970s begins with “the detection,” at the time, of the thing being discussed. So in 1978, prison officials caught Anthony McIntyre with some pieces of wood, which they suspected, probably for good reason, that he was planning to turn into a fake gun so he could bluff his way out of prison. They questioned him about it but decided not to charge him with a crime. Thirty-six years later, the PSNI decided to conduct an investigation to determine if Anthony McIntyre had possessed some pieces of wood that could be turned into a fake gun for use in an attempt at a prison escape, and they went through the complex and difficult process of obtaining international legal assistance to subpoena interview materials archived in another country.
The reason the PSNI suspected that Anthony McIntyre had once possessed wooden materials that could be used to make a fake gun was that, nearly four decades ago, prison officials in Northern Ireland caught Anthony McIntyre in possession of wooden materials that could be used to make a fake gun.
We suspect this man of Crime X because forty years ago he was caught committing it, so now we need to find out if he committed the crime that we know about because we know he was caught committing it.
Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, ladies and gentlemen.
The PSNI used the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the United Kingdom and the United States in an attempt to find out if Anthony McIntyre hid some wood in his socks forty years ago, a thing they already knew he did.
But let’s keep going, and take a look at the other things the PSNI supposedly set out to investigate by digging into McIntyre’s Belfast Project tapes. Like this:
“Membership of an illegal organisation.”
Goodness yes: Let’s use international legal assistance to conduct an investigation to find out if Anthony McIntyre was ever a member of the Provisional IRA, more than forty years after the time he was actually convicted on that charge. McIntyre’s own website, by the way, has a review of his book on Irish republicanism, which describes McIntyre as “a historian, a former member of the IRA and a onetime party activist with extensive contacts in the organisation.” It took me five seconds on Google to come up with that one — but I don’t have the option of asking the Department of Justice to issue subpoenas on my behalf, so I was forced to fall back on other means.
Finally, the PSNI suspects that McIntyre carried out a bombing, with a few problems:
“A bomb attack on a house at Rugby Avenue on 6 February 1976. The PSNI claimed to have received information on that date the applicant was involved in the bomb attack. The applicant, however, maintains that he was in fact the target of the attack and that in any event if the attack was on the date alleged he was in police custody throughout that day.”
More about the Rugby Avenue bomb later, when the full decision is available, but alleging in an international letter of assistance that McIntyre bombed somebody’s house on a day when he was in police custody is an interesting choice.
Analyzing the international letter of assistance — the letter the PSNI asked Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service to prepare in order to ask American law enforcement officials for help — the High Court acknowledges in its decision that the police and prosecutors made a hash of the whole thing. From the summary released by the court, and take a moment to read this carefully:
“There were a number of errors in the ILOR including reference to the incorrect date of birth of the applicant, the incorrect section of legislation in respect of an offence, an assertion that the applicant had been convicted of armed robbery in 1975 and sentenced to a period of imprisonment of three years when in fact there was no evidence to support that assertion and an incorrect date of Judicial conviction for the offence of membership of a proscribed organisation.”
So the police set out to investigate whether Anthony McIntyre once possessed some wood that they suspect he possessed because they know he possessed it, and also set out to learn if a convicted IRA member had ever been in the IRA, and also set out to determine if he blew up somebody’s house on a date when he was locked up in the police station, and when they wrote the letter outlining their investigation, they got most of the supporting facts totally wrong.
These two conclusions come one after the other in the summary of the decision posted on the court website:
The errors in the ILOR were due to a distinct and surprising lack of care on the part of the PSNI and the PPS;
The errors in the ILOR were not indicative of bad faith. Got that? They fucked up everything they touched, which we’re pretty sure proves that they were trying to be careful and do a good job.
Chris Bray Blogs @ The Shade Of The Cloud Of Arrows. He describes himself as an itinerant historian, former infantry soldier, and the author of Court-Martial: How Military Justice has Shaped America, from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond
– forthcoming from W.W. Norton
Posted by Jim on October 24, 2018
Please join us for our upcoming special event.
100th Annual St. Brigid Celebration
125th Anniversary of the LAOH in the USA
Dear Sister & Brother Hibernians and Friends,
You are cordially invited to join us on Sunday, February 10, 2019, at this joyous occasion. Each year the LAOH in Kings County celebrates our Patron, St. Brigid of Ireland; this year will be our 100th Annual Celebration in Honor of our Patron, St. Brigid of Ireland. At this same event we will also be celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians in the United States. So, you can see why we are so excited and wish to have our friends join us at this wonderful celebration.
Please join us on this special occasion. It is not every day that an organization gets to celebrate their 100th Annual celebration in honor of their Patron Saint and their 125th Anniversary in the same year. We will have displays on St. Brigid and the history of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians.
Lunch will include a full sit-down meal, full top-shelf open bar and desert. Giando’s is known for their fabulous food and awesome view of the New York Harbor. Our celebration will begin with Mass at 12 noon. The restaurant will be open for guest at 11:30am, please arrive early so everyone may be seated for the beginning of Mass. Valet parking is included with your Lunch ticket. Afterwards we will have music and Irish dancers for your enjoyment. Tickets are $95.00 per person – please see attached flyer for details.
LUNCH Ticket DEADLINE is January 20, 2019
We will be printing a Souvenir Journal in conjunction with our combined celebrations on this our 100th Annual St. Brigid Celebration and the 125th Anniversary of the LAOH. Please see attached flyer for details. Journal DEADLINE is January 20, 2019.
St. Brigid is the Patron Saint of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians as well as the Patron Saint of Ireland. St. Brigid’s Feast Day is one of the LAOH national holidays which is celebrated by Hibernians across the country. St. Brigid is known throughout the world for her kindness and charity towards others; it is St. Brigid that we emulate when we practice our Motto: “FRIENDSHIP, UNITY AND CHRISTIAN CHARITY”.
It is our tradition in Brooklyn that when we come together with our family and friends to celebrate St. Brigid, we also bestow the prestigious LAOH Kings County St. Brigid Award; this award honors a sister who exemplifies our Motto of Friendship, Unity, and Christian Charity. So please bring your family and friends and join us on this special day!
THANK YOU for your continued support of our annual St. Brigid Celebration for these past 100 years. We look forward to sharing this day with our friends.
If you wish to be included in our journal or attend our celebration please fill out the attached form. If you have any questions please contact Chairperson, Ms. Mary Hogan at 917 699-9290. You may also email Mary at LAOHBKLYN@AOL.COM.
Thank you for your continued support of this special event.
May the blessings of St. Brigid be with you and your family always.
Yours in Friendship, Unity and Christian Charity
Chairperson 100th Annual St. Brigid Celebration/125th Anniversary LAOH
Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians Inc, Kings County
Posted by Jim on
Thursday, October 25, 2018
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Riverdale-on-Hudson Funeral Home
St. Margaret of Cortona Church
All Off-Duty Members should attend in Class A Uniform.
Posted by Jim on October 22, 2018
Susan Collins, Brett Kavanaugh and Irish-Americans On the Right
In the aftermath of the appointment of the decadent Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS, Michael Shaw Mahoney discusses ultra conservative Irish America.
Susan Collins has difficulty speaking. The Republican senator from Maine suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that dams her flow and gives her oratory a broken, halting quality. Susan Collins does not have the gift of the gab, but the senator cannot help it.
The senator does have control over the content of her comments, however, and earlier this month, on the day before the US Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she was quite clear about her allegiances. There’s no mistaking her loyalty to white men who want to control women’s reproductive rights. Collins is also a dedicated apologist for powerful men accused of sexually assaulting women. There’s little doubt that some of these men are guilty as charged. How did the tag Republican get affixed to these Americans, and how did Susan Collins, the descendent of an Irish immigrant to New England in the early 19th century, become their defender? She and the Grand Old Party (GOP) have certainly drifted many, many miles from the cabin door of Abraham Lincoln.
We Americans are taught at an early age that Honest Abe grew up in a little cabin and read the family Bible by candlelight. It’s an old yarn, and it’s true. The Lincoln family lived on two hardscrabble farms in LaRue County, Kentucky, right smack in the middle of the state, and the family Bible still exists. A massive thing with butternut pages, it rests in a glass case a stone’s throw from where baby Abraham was likely born. The Great Emancipator’s humble origins, his rise from rural poverty to the leadership of the fight against bondage and oppression, made him a likely candidate for adulation among the thousands of Irish who survived the coffin ships crammed with the refugees of the potato blight. Lincoln’s ascendency to the White House coincided with the rough assimilation of Ireland’s cottier class to the dog-eat-dog world of America’s teeming eastern cities, to Boston and New York in particular. Battered by hunger and indifference, those bereft of the lumper landed in a ring of competition and carnality. For some Lincoln must have been a sympathetic figure. But not for all.
In 1863 after Lincoln introduced a draft to augment the Union armies during the American Civil War, many recent Irish arrivals to New York City protested. They were none too keen on getting shot for the rights of the black man. Not long off the coffin ships, these incorrigible Irish rowdies, many of whom spoke English as a second language, burned and looted a good chunk of Manhattan. They also turned on the city’s blacks, hanging some of their victims from lampposts, setting fire to others. In the mayhem, the indigent survivors of an agricultural disaster gave the lynch mob its muscle, and in their powerlessness to combat being used as cannon fodder by a nation they hardly knew, the crazed Irish had to find someone lesser, someone to serve as a scapegoat. Lincoln be damned, they must have thought, emancipation be damned.
The Irish immigrant ancestor of Susan Collins did not come over during the Famine. Arriving in the 1820s, he set up shop in Maine, well away from urban squalor, and began a sawmill, the prototype for a company still run by members of the Collins family. We don’t know what that ancestor thought about the race question in America. However, a conservative, entrepreneurial streak soon began to take hold in the Collins family. Its patriarchs bought into the American Dream, the Horatio Alger rags to riches trope that, one must admit, the Collins clan brought to fruition. They stocked away enough acorns to keep them from the chill and vulnerability of an Irish life lived in America’s ghettoes where Paddy, Mick, and Mary struggled to be white and stay one broken rung above blacks, where they watched the arrival of other tribes, the Italians and eastern Europeans who came from lands that Donald Trump, if he lived then, would dismiss as “shithole countries”. The family of Susan Collins had a buffer and built a tidy fortress.
Which brings us to the curious case of one Brett Kavanaugh, America’s little darling. Through some twist of fate, the newest member of the United States Supreme Court shares a surname with one of Ireland’s most celebrated poets. They have little in common. Poets do not generally weep nostalgically about their high school workouts with their kegger buds, in Brett’s case the charming Tobin and Squee who, after four years of towel snapping and Delaware beach bacchanalia, became alums of the Jesuit institution Georgetown Prep and a school girl named Renate, the earth girl they claim was easy.
Brett Kavanaugh failed his job interview in front of an entire nation, but thanks in large part to the vote of Susan Collins, he now holds down one of nine seats on the Supreme Court. Collins was not swayed by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault, nor was she nudged to a NO vote by the implorations of numerous law professors and the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Brett Kavanaugh belongs to a special species of Irish-America. He’s a member of an acquisitive breed of bourgeois Roman Catholics expert in the art of shape shifting to become, at least on the surface, super WASPs: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (i.e. untouchable white dudes with lots of power).
Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Georgetown Prep, is not an elite American prep school, like say Andover, Groton, or even Woodberry Forest in Virginia, where Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) learned some of his chops before returning to El Paso and the border along the Rio Grande. No, Georgetown Prep is a Jesuit school. It’s a Roman Catholic high school dedicated to athletics; unlike Belvedere in Dublin, which can claim James Joyce, Georgetown Prep is second division. For Americans who tuned it, the school now has a reputation for producing fit beer drinkers and professional date rapers. Bret Kavanaugh also went to Yale – he’s quite proud of that apparently – but he could never have become a member of Skull & Bones, the secret society at Yale that looks like the tomb of Roman patricians and can claim Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger as members. Skull & Bones is a WASP nest.
The desire for power and respectability has shaped many so-called Irish-Americans, a group with many subsets and a group more accurately dubbed Americans with Irish surnames. There’s Irish by DNA, Irish by passport, and Irish by imagination or fantasy. Choose your definition. Depicted as violent simians in Victorian cartoons, Irish immigrants to America in the 19th century, as noted previously, had to stomp on blacks and other immigrants to become more fully white and American. While the Roman Catholic Church certainly shoved conservative family values down the throats of Irish immigrants and still exerts a disproportionate influence given the Roe vs. Wade debate, social class in a supposedly classless society became the greasy plane upon which some Irish slid to the right. An old friend Danielle Pelfrey Duryea, a graduate of Yale University and Georgetown Law School, recently wrote:
The transformation from Irish to Irish-American fascinates me too, especially because I have so much feeling for the former and so little for the latter. I’m far less inclined to lay the blame (for right wing conservatism) at the steps of the American Roman Catholic Church – not least because it’s hard to best the 20th century Irish Church for conservative strictures. The example of Italian-Americans overlaps with that of Irish-Americans to an extent that suggests an alternate, and to me more likely, pair of explanations: the logic of American racism combined with that of American anti-Catholicism, creating an endless desire in both groups to differentiate themselves from an abjected black American underclass and to strive for complete access to and acceptance by wealthy WASP power – see the WASP-emulation of places like Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep. Where that Roman Catholic Irish-American insecurity is most acute, the striving for white power is most conspicuous and craven. Fox News, with its cast of swollen talking heads, has made the reputations of several now prominent Irish-Americans. Bill O’Reilly, forced to leave the network under a cloud of sexual harassment charges, became the trusted talisman of millions on the right wing. O’Reilly has always promoted the idea of American exceptionalism, reaping the profits from quickly cobbled biographies of white men leading the way in America’s manifest destiny. Bill O’Reilly is the descendent of a potato farmer from County Cavan who fled Ireland early in the lumper blight.
Another Fox star, Sean Hannity, grew up on Long Island and likes to point out that his Irish grandparents from counties Cork and Down were humble, hardworking folk who earned everything they had. Hannity is now the minister of propaganda for Donald Trump. Joseph Goebbels never did the job so well. The vast majority of GOP voters, the ones Hillary Clinton infamously dubbed “deplorables” in the 2016 presidential election, see O’Reilly and Hannity as the great white hope. They have no awareness that these right wing chest thumpers with Irish surnames descended from Irish men and women who suffered endless abuse, who in some cases were even murdered. In 1855, a Know-Nothing mob in Louisville, Kentucky set fire to tenements occupied by Irish and German immigrants, killing 26 people on a tragic day now known as Bloody Monday. That stain on the Nativist movement of the 19th century was a precursor to Charlottesville, though on Bloody Monday the hate was primarily directed at Irish canal diggers in particular and Roman Catholics in general.
The painful history of Irish second-class citizenship has faded. The vilified immigrant has become the demagogue who now scapegoats more recent arrivals. O’Reilly, Hannity, Steve Bannon of Breitbart, and yes Brett Kavanaugh too, have joined the motorcade of shiny golf carts. They have entered the inner sanctums of cigar smoke: fully white, fully protected, fully committed to holding the fort against the brown barbarian hordes.
The American political parties, it must be stressed, made an ideological flip in the 20th century. The Republican Party of Lincoln slowly morphed into a reactionary party of social conservatives friendly to the interests of the wealthy while the Democratic Party, formerly so entrenched in the South, moved away from its support of segregation and Jim Crow. The parties would be unrecognizable to their supporters of a century ago. The GOP of Susan Collins, a political party now kidnapped by Donald Trump, has little in common with the republicanism of those who fought against Franco and fascism in Spain. Nor does it resemble the “good old IRA” that confronted the British Empire in the era of Ireland’s War of Independence. Trump supporters of the ‘Merican variety would undoubtedly brand James Connolly a commie libtard. Michael Collins feared the wealth gap that Republicans in the United States ignore or openly work to widen. Collins wrote in 1922, “What we must aim at is the building of a sound economic life in which discrepancies cannot occur. We must not have destitution or poverty at one end, and at the other an excess of riches.” Michael Collins was opposed to hacienda economics. Admittedly, the American GOP does share – at least until recently – the social conservatism of Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil, an Irishman and party also known to wear the republican scarf in all kinds of intricate knots. The historian R. L. Foster writes in his seminal book Modern Ireland: 1600-1972:
But ‘Republican’ could stand for anything from merely anti-British to agrarian-syndicalist-revolutionary, not to mention exclusivist-Gaelic-Catholic; it was a moral stance as much as a political affiliation. The dust from the Kavanaugh hearings has settled. The boy-man who loves his calendars and beer is a Supreme Court justice. He works with Ruth Bader Ginsburg now. Some decisions have an impact the sages, prophets, and lesser prognosticators, like the dogs in the street, can foresee at the time. When Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith returned from London, having given away a sizeable chunk of their island, many Irish instinctively knew there would be hell to pay and more war to wage. They were right of course. Susan Collins (no relation to the Big Fella except maybe in the distant mists) also made a momentous decision; in the end, nobody was really surprised by her Yes vote for Kavanaugh. She nailed her colors to the mast for all to see. She let the boys bust out the rum and flog the blackguard who decries the captain suffering from sunstroke. Collins has let the boys flog the women too. Especially the women. We will have to wait and see how her party loyalty, her alliance with forces deaf to the cries of the Irish departed, affects the United States and the generations of Americans to come. In the meantime, the ropes are pulled tight around the wrists and the lash is raised on high.
➽ Michael Shaw Mahoney, (MA Queen’s University Belfast) is a teacher and father of two from Louisville, Kentucky.