Not European, but Atlantean Irish

We are Europeans now, they tell us, ‘they’ being the Irish political class, including the entire national broadcast and print media. No explanation, it seems, is necessary, just that bald statement – ‘we are Europeans’.

Were we Europeans when a genocidal famine was inflicted on our ancestors by the British establishment, without any worthwhile intervention by any of the the states that collectively made up the European continent? Were we Europeans when the same British establishment waged a war of terror against the people of Ireland from 1919-1921, or when this small island was partitioned under threat of terrible war unless the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 were signed off on by the Irish delegation? Were we Europeans when economic war was waged against the quasi-independent Irish state by Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, or when the Irish economy was kept in a state of undevelopment right up to the 1960s and beyond through the malign interventions of British legislators, industrialists and financiers using the tools of tariffs, taxes, quotas, licences, undercutting, restriction of money supply and so on? Were we Europeans when war was waged against Northern nationalists who had the temerity to ask for fair treatment and justice in the British administered Six Counties, and were we Europeans while that war was sustained for almost 30 years, even after we had become members of the European Economic Community, later the European Union?

The answer is, of course, that we were not Europeans. We were not considered to be, nor did we consider ourselves to be. We were Irish. While the political class embarked on their project of achieving membership of the EEC we never described ourselves as ‘European’. Europe was ‘over there’, beyond two seas and an often politically unfriendly British island. Europe was a place rarely visited, other than by members of the political class and by pilgrimages of disabled and unwell Irish citizens to Lourdes and other Roman Catholic centres of pilgrimage. Even when mass tourism started to appear in the 1960s, the Irish were, when visiting Spanish resorts, going abroad, heading for an ‘exotic’ and ‘foreign’ place, travelling without any notion of being European but certain of being Irish. After we joined the EEC in 1973, and right through to the creation of the European Union through the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, nobody other than those europhiles in the political class for whom the EU project represented some sort of Nirvana referred to us as ‘Europeans’.

We are, under the terms of the Maastricht Treaty, ‘European citizens’, although most of us would probably describe ourselves as Irish citizens – citizens of an Irish state that is part of a European Union that is itself neither a nation or a federation of states in a political union like the United States of America. And while the Maastricht Treaty describes us as European citizens, it is how we see ourselves, and describe ourselves, that is indicative of our personal connection or lack of connection with the concept of ‘being’ European.

Now that the Euro is in crisis through the grotesque mishandling of the currency itself and the crisis that has ensued, and an outrageous lack of regulation of private banking and other financial institutions within the European Union which is a substantial part of the cause of that crisis, it is not enough that we just be Europeans. No, to comply with EU diktats on the repayment of private bank debt by Irish citizens regardless of culpability for those debts, we must be ‘good’ Europeans. In other words we should shut up and pay up so as to protect private banks in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, including in the USA. And if our people are beggared in the process, so be it, and let the Irish people take on the moral hazard that properly belongs to the money-lenders of Europe, and do it with good grace – as good Europeans.

Three years in, the crisis has been used to create a wave of ‘austerity’, particularly in the peripheral nations – Ireland, Greece and Portugal – but also in Italy and Spain. Adopting the neo-liberal approach to economics and society, the EU has placed the burden of correcting budget deficits on the shoulders of the most hard-pressed citizens of these countries while the wealthiest have got wealthier. The EU has taken down two democratically elected governments and replaced them with unelected technocrats.

That other mantra of the Irish political class, ‘we are all in this together’ is patently an outright lie. The most recent budget has illustrated how the hands-off-the-wealthy policy of the current right-wing government mirrors the same policy of the previous right-wing government.

The demand for a fast track approach to balanced budgets is destroying the Irish economy, depressing any prospect of growth, and spiralling the nation’s finances towards bankruptcy. It is not that there is no-one shouting ‘Stop!”. Both national and international economists of some repute have berated the policy-makers for their stupidity, but they might as well be shouting into the wind. The virus of ‘austerity’ has entered the minds of the political class whose members it least affects, and they have lost any reason they may have had, although given the handling of the nation’s affairs over many decades any claim for the existence of rational thought among the political class is a precarious one. In truth, right-wing ideological prejudice is a more likely phenomenon among members of that class.

The latest episode in EU mishandling of the Euro crisis, a rush to create a fiscal union by fair means or foul, points to an end-game that was predicted by opponents of Ireland’s accession to membership of the European Economic Community almost four decades ago and warned against consistently through treaty referendum after treaty referendum ever since. That end-game is the creation of a much-expanded federal United States of Europe controlled by the strongest states, all of them imperialist nations. Far from being a union of states weighted so as to strengthen the smaller and weaker states, the dominance of the Franco-German alliance in driving all policy regarding a solution to the crisis, without evidence of a meaningful involvement by the rest of the EU states, demonstrates an arrogant autocratic approach which must be resisted, but won’t be. It is not as if the Franco-German alliance has shown that it is capable of providing a workable solution. Far from it, the Merkozy approach has been bound up in French and German ideological positions and internal national political expediencies, and as a consequence is incapable of creating a coherent and sustainable solution to the crisis.

And still, with all of this obvious to the average citizen, our right-wing government which includes a discredited Labour Party, together with the main opposition party – also right-wing – bends the knee in supplication to their masters in Europe, hoping that some crumbs will fall from the table, without any discernible evidence to support that hope. Words like ‘solidarity’ and ‘cohesion’ and ‘partners’ still flung about by our home-grown europhiles have lost their meaning in neo-liberal Europe. It is to be survival of the fittest and the relegation of the weakest to some yet to be defined second-class status, and still our political class wants in.

It is time to stop fooling ourselves, or to be more precise allowing ourselves to be fooled, with the notion that we are Europeans over and above being Irish. It is our duty, and the duty of those entrusted with power in the government and the administration, to assert ourselves and to reject policies that will destroy our economy and with it our society, to resist any further attempts to undermine our independence, and to insist that private gambling debts owned by European banks and bond-holders be carried by those institutions and individuals. If any bailing out of European banks is to be carried out, let it be by the nations in which those institutions reside, or as part of a package which includes Irish banks, by the European Central Bank. Any attempt to create a fiscal union which takes away the sovereign right of our nation to determine its budgetary policy must be decisively rejected, as must any attempt to arrive at that position without recourse to the people through a referendum.

It is by no means certain that the cack-handed approach to resolving the Euro crisis will succeed. Should there be a collapse of the monetary system, then contingency plans need to be in place. It is difficult to have any confidence in the Irish government and administration in this regard, so married are they to the notion of being ‘European’. These are dangerous times for a people whose state has been recklessly weakened by a succession of bad governments whose members preferred to strut the European stage than to take care of domestic politics – their primary duty. But there is no doubt that in changed circumstances, however difficult they would be, that the Irish people are capable, by genuinely being ‘all in this together’, can recover. For an example of success in that regard we should look, not to the European continent, but to another small Atlantic island, Iceland.

We must set our faces against surrendering to yet more domination by imperialists and expansionists. Our freedom and independence were too hard won to be given away. It is time to pit ourselves against a venal political class, and to win. Let any of them who want to be European take their chances. The rest of us should opt to be the Atlantean Irish and to set our gaze on the rest of the world and on a viable future in that world, free and sovereign.

Occupy The Citizens

The primary objective of anyone or any group who want to promote a new way of seeing the world in which they live, of effecting change, must be to galvanise support, to rally citizens to the cause, to bring not just a moral force to bear on an issue but to show that a numerical force of citizens exists in support of the argument advanced for change.

One of the contentious positions occupying the Occupy movement, and particularly, it seems, the Occupy Dame Street pioneers, is that of whether to allow an involvement in the protest by various groups, from political parties to other pressure groups including trade unions. That is not surprising given reasonable fears that attempts may be made to ‘take over’ what has been begun by a collective of  individuals who have roused themselves to make a stand and have shown courage and commitment to do so when others who might have been expected to live up to their own rhetoric failed to recognise the opportunity and step forward themselves.

There are sound reasons for being wary of political party involvement. It would be ridiculous if the three main parties, Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil, were to show up to pretend support for the aims of the occupiers of the Central Bank Plaza, given their support for the very institutions and ideology that the Occupy movement opposes (and Labour is no different on that to the other parties other than possibly on the scale of neo-liberal inspired austerity).

There is a case to be made, however, not to exclude other parties who have a track record in opposing both the power of the same institutions, and capitalist ideology – of which neo-liberalism is a particularly pernicious form, especially those parties that have advanced proposals to restructure politics, the economy and society in favour of the mass of ordinary citizens and who have expressly opposed the various world and regional bodies such as the IMF and ECB and their policies. Ground rules could be laid down for the inclusion of supporters of these various parties, such as on the use of party banners and on the issue of the right of the Occupy Dame Street pioneers to control their protest themselves and the ground they occupy, without any attempt by any third party to take over on either front.

There is another body that represents a massive number of people on the island, the vast majority of whom are ordinary citizen-workers (and by extension their families and dependents). The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has a combined membership across the island of  over 800,000, with in excess of 600,000 in the 26 Counties. A significant percentage of those members, and their dependents, are suffering from the effects of the insane policies of various right-wing governments from the 1990s to today, with many suffering very badly.

There are valid criticisms to be made of the way trade unions operate. But it must be pointed out that there has been a sustained campaign in the right-wing corporate and state media against the trade unions and against trade union leaders, much of it grossly unfair and unreasonable, all of it inspired by an anti-worker agenda fuelled by vile neo-liberalism, a regressive, brutal ideology that seeks to reverse the gains made by workers through trade union activity over the past century or so.

The reasons for that campaign are obvious. After all, without the unions it would be very easy to drive ordinary workers’ pay and conditions down even more than has been the case over the past four years, thus enhancing the wealth of the corporations and the privileges that those who enjoy high salaries and perks – the professional class – enjoy. The freedom to fire those who do not enjoy the protection of a trade union is exemplified in the case of the Talk-Talk workers in Waterford, whereas the Aviva workers, with trade union representation have at least had some concessions to their dignity and their rights as workers. There are many more examples on both sides. Without the backing of a trade union the power relationship between the employer and the worker works entirely in favour of the employer.

On the issue of criticisms of trade union leaders, there is certainly a case to be made that union leaders should receive a salary commensurate with the work they do as leaders of large organisations but in tune with the pay that their members receive – much as should be the case with public representatives in the Dáil and Seanad – the parliament, and with public servants on the higher scales. Contrary to the picture painted of them, most in the leadership of the trade unions, and the Congress, are good and decent men and women, whose ethics and standards compare more than favourably with those of media owners and their hacks, and politicians, business leaders, bankers, bishops, lawyers and other members of the political class.

Another point worth bearing in mind when considering criticism of trade union leaders is that they, in theory at least, are the servants of their membership. Who are their members? Contrary to what one might imagine, their members are not, in general, left-wing by nature, although many are. A significant number of trade union members support, and may even be members of, right-wing parties such as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and of Labour which has consistently enabled right-wing parties to achieve power. It is right to expect trade unions to be radical, and left-wing – since that is consistent with their origins and their expressed ethos – but the leadership is not autonomous, it must have the support of the membership from which it cannot alienate itself.

What the trade union movement can bring to the Occupy Dame Street campaign, and other affiliated campaigns around the country, is a numerical backing that protests and marches need for public impact, and also a valuable and free publicity machine to spread the essential message of the Occupy campaign to a wider audience in the absence of a media that is fair, balanced and interested in real democracy. The unions may also offer practical assistance on-site and with printing and distribution, etc. They should be asked to do so.

For the Occupy Dame Street pioneers to succeed in bringing about change it is necessary to make their movement a mass movement. Nothing will be achieved by avoiding worthwhile publicity and consciousness-raising among the wider population who, as citizens, deserve to be made aware of the arguments being put forward by the campaigners for revolutionary change. If the movement does not expand by gaining the support of a mass of people it will wither on the vine, to the delight of the political class. That is what they are hoping for, far preferable from their PR point of view than sending in state police to clear the site.

There are other organisations who would also be helpful, including community groups, unemployed workers’ groups, various anti-poverty bodies and those who work for the rights of older people (whose capacity to protest successfully is proven), etc. These are well worth encouraging to become involved. They represent citizens, after all, and citizens who might be very sympathetic to the cause.

Decisions on these matters are entirely for the pioneering campaigners down at the Central Bank in Dame Street to resolve. Anyone who believes in what they are trying to achieve will hope that the decisions they make will be wise and will lead to success. Occupy Dame Street owns the Dublin campaign at the moment. The decisions they make will decide if they can sustain that ownership into the future.

All revolutions start in the imagination, all begin with a small body of committed revolutionaries. But all successful revolutions depend on the support of a significant mass of citizens who come to the ideas that the revolutionaries originate and develop. For that to happen then dissemination of those ideas and the arguments that support them is vital, using every available medium.

Occupy The Citizens!

Ireland, Palestine and Human Empathy

According to Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, Alvin Goldman, empathy is “The ability to put oneself into the mental shoes of another person to understand her emotions and feelings”. Most of us experience it on a daily basis, often because of news reports. We empathise with other humans who we do not know when they experience the loss of a loved one in a traffic accident, or in a crime of violence, or suicide, and so on.  Natural disasters affecting large numbers of people, and man made disasters such as war and famine, evoke waves of empathy for the victims from other humans, both as individuals and communities, from across the globe. We imagine ourselves in their situation and empathise with them.

The capacity to empathise is a positive attribute in a person. Not all humans appear to have it, they may have grown to be self-absorbed or they may have suppressed it to enable them to behave in a certain way, such as in war.  It is something that can be deliberately manipulated for good effect, for instance in raising aid for victims of natural disasters or for providing support for bereaved individuals, afflicted children and so on. But it can also be manipulated, and often is, to achieve political, economic, social or military objectives.

Empathy for people we do not know depends on our capacity to see them as being as human as ourselves, and that fact is simultaneously the key to expressions and actions of solidarity with people we do not know, and in the absence of empathy to successfully oppressing, enslaving, colonising, and even attempting to eradicate people. Examples of these things abound throughout history, and it is worth looking at two examples, one from recent history and one which is ever-present today.

When the English set out to conquer Ireland, and throughout that centuries-long failed process, a permanent feature was the portrayal of the Irish as less than fully human (the yardstick of full humanity being English ‘civilisation’). Never mind that the Irish had, prior to the attempted conquest by first the Normans and then the English, a fully developed social system including a very advanced and enlightened Brehon Law system, and a highly developed scholarly tradition – good enough to spread  learning throughout Britain and continental Europe. For the conquest to succeed, the Irish had to be thought of as deviant, uncivilised and uncivilisable, child-like, and even simian (ape-like).

When Anglican clergyman, novelist, university professor and ‘christian socialist’ Charles Kingsley visited Sligo in 1860 he wrote “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe … that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours”.

Another ‘civilised’ man, Robert Knox, an Edinburgh surgeon who was deeply implicated in the Burke and Hare body-snatching enterprise, saw the English Anglo-Saxon as superior to all others. As for the Irish – classified by the British as Celts and therefore not Anglo-Saxon – in his book “The Races of Men” Knox has this to say, among other similarly racist assertions, “…the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts … The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England’s safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for the clearing the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts”.

But, some would say, that was then and this is now. Such rendering of the Irish into a sub-human species – so that they could more easily be driven from their lands, starved, flogged, enslaved, bought and sold, imprisoned, raped, hanged by the neck at will and sometimes drawn and quartered to emphasise the dehumanisation of the individual and the deliberate terrorism of the act – that could surely not happen in today’s more civilised world, or could it?

Of the myriad of similar examples available in the world today, let us take a look at the plight of the Palestinian people, with whom the Irish should, if they knew the facts of the total oppression of these indigenous people, be able to empathise.

When Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 he laid the foundations of the State of Israel, eventually imposed without their consent in 1948 on the indigenous people of Palestine. This declaration by the British came about after intense lobbying of various governments in Europe by the Zionist movement whose principal advocate was Austrian journalist Theodore Hertzl, who founded the political movement known as Zionism in 1897. The movement’s principal plank was the right of Jewish people to establish a national homeland in Palestine based on ethnic ties and rights established by religious practice.

There was one not inconsiderable problem to this. Palestine was inhabited land, with a population made up in 1922 of 75% Muslims, 12% Jews and 11% Christians. But Hertzl had a plan, as an extract from his diaries in 1895 shows – “we shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed – the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly”. In other words, the indigenous Muslims should be expelled from the land of their fore-fathers and mothers, and the land thus stolen and made vacant be given to the Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere. This is the genesis of the ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people, facilitated then by the British.

When the facts of the attempt by Hitler and his Nazi Party to exterminate as many European Jews as possible became known, a wave of empathy swept the world. That empathy was turned into the fuel that fired Zionists in a war against the British who were mandated to govern Palestine, and more importantly against the indigenous population.  A catalogue of extreme atrocities against the Palestinian people ensued, with entire villages being slaughtered in a Zionist terror campaign, coupled with forced expulsions into the Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The 14th of May, 1948 marks the beginning of Al-Naqba or The Catastrophe, a catastrophe that has continued ever since.

Over the intervening 63 years, the Palestinians have been denied citizenship in their own land. They have no recourse to effective justice, with the courts being in control of the Israelis and no written constitution to provide safeguards. They have been and still are, on a daily basis, driven off their land which is taken by Israeli ‘settlers’. Their sources of water have been diverted to Israeli use. In the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip occupied since the 1967 war between the Arabs and the Israelis, the Palestinian population is harassed constantly, shot regularly, is the victim of tear gas attacks (and who knows what other gasses?), is denied the right to normal social and economic life, has been walled in, has had to watch major Israeli ‘settlements’ being built on Palestinian land (illegal under international law), has been denied the right to housing, education, medical treatment and to travel internally in Palestinian territories and abroad.

The Gaza Strip, described as the largest prison in the world, has a population of 1.6 million largely destitute civilians locked into an area of just 360 square kilometres, blockaded by the Israeli army, navy and air force, with regular deadly incursions into the Strip by those forces. Not only is normal trade impossible with the West Bank, Israel itself or the wider world, but in December 2008 Israel launched a major ground, sea and air offensive against the Gaza Strip, including using banned weapons such as phosphorous and depleted uranium encased shells. Over 1,300 women, children and men were killed in 22 days, with 13 casualties on the Israeli side, and much of the Gazan infrastructure – hospitals, schools, housing, sewage works and water works, and so on – destroyed.

A common question asked by people who consider what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people is “how could a people who had a grave injustice done to them then replicate that injustice on to other innocent people?”.

The answer is, of course, empathy, or the absence of it. Just as the British – those fine ‘Christian’ folk – thought themselves to be fully human and the Irish to be sub-human,  so too have the Zionists thought themselves to be fully human and the Palestinian people to be sub-human.

US journalist Stephen Lendman of the Progressive Radio Network who has written extensively on US imperialism and on the Israel-Palestine issue, quotes a 17-year old Jerusalem high school student, Daniel Banvolegyi: “Our books basically tell us that everything the Jews do is fine and legitimate and Arabs are wrong and violent and are trying to exterminate us. We are accustomed to hearing the same thing, only one side of the story. They teach us that Israel became a state in 1948 and that the Arabs started a war. They don’t mention what happened to the Arabs. They never mention anything about refugees or Arabs having to leave their towns and homes”.

Lendman further describes Tel Aviv University’s Professor Daniel Bar-Tal’s study of Israeli Jewish school texts which revealed a pattern of indoctrination of young minds thus: “The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were delegitimized by the use of such labels as ‘robbers,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ and ‘killers,’ adding that little positive revision occurred through the years with mischaracterizations like tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored, and “they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed”.

Given this de-humanisation of the Palestinian people, it is no surprise that empathy with the Palestinians in their suffering is thin on the ground in Israel and in those societies that support Zionism, particularly Israel’s strongest supporter and supplier of much of the weaponry it uses on the Palestinians, the United States of America.

But Ireland is  not Israel, or Britain, or the USA. Ireland – of all of the European countries – should as a result of our historical experience be a repository of empathy for the Palestinian people and for all oppressed people in the world. Their catastrophe should be our catastrophe, just as we have empathy for the Jewish people in the suffering they endured in Hitler’s extermination camps and elsewhere – their catastrophe is also our catastrophe. As a Palestinian man in the Gaza Strip who had just lost his entire family to the Israeli bombs in 2009 asked - “How can they do this. Are we not all children of God?”. Whether or not we believe in a ‘God’, in our empathy we understand what he meant.

The Palestinian catastrophe is a Jewish catastrophe too, for to be Jewish is not synonymous with being a Zionist – many of the world’s most ardent Zionists are not Jewish, and many of the most vocal anti-Zionists are themselves Jewish. The damage that is being done falsely in the name of Judaism in the historical land of Palestine will likely have very damaging consequences for Jewish people throughout the world.

It is right that the Irish people, particularly those who claim to honour the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the Republic itself, should stand with the Palestinian people by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign against Israeli Apartheid policies, and by supporting the second flotilla as it attempts to break the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip. After all, James Connolly, one of the main architects of the Proclamation wished that the Republic would act as a beacon of hope to oppressed people throughout the world.

We must do the right thing – support the BDS campaign and support the flotilla. Indifference just will not do.

A Conspiracy of Common Interest

Two items that illustrate the primacy that the political class in Ireland enjoys over the mass of other citizens have appeared in the media within days of each other.

A report in the Irish Examiner on May 16th draws on the latest Socio-Economic Review by Social Justice Ireland to present some stark facts about wealth and poverty in the so-called ‘Republic’ of Ireland. According to Social Justice Ireland (SJI), in 2009 the top 10% of Irish households received a staggering 25.83% of the country’s total disposable income, while the bottom 10% were forced to make do with a meagre 2.39%.

Contained within that top 10% of households are, of course, those members of the political class who wield enormous power which allows them to make, or shape, or sell to the public, those government policies that maintain and even widen the economic gap between the few at the top and the many in between and particularly at the bottom. If we had access to the figures for the top 5%, and especially the top 1%, then the disparity would be even more obscene.

What of the other end of the spectrum? According to SJI’s Review, close to 630,000 Irish citizens are below the poverty line, including up to 220,000 children. 90,000 of these citizens are what is known as the ‘working poor’ – they give up their week to a job, the reward for which toil is a wage that is not sufficient to lift them even marginally out of poverty.

As for the definition of what constitutes the ‘poverty line’ – it is pitched as being below 60% of the median income. In plain terms this amounts, in 2011, to the sum of €222.18 a week, a sum that would not cover the cost of a dinner for two in a moderate restaurant, or a visit to a fashionable hairdressing salon for one well-heeled woman, or a round of golf for a well-heeled man. But €222.18 is the amount that the ‘other’ citizens, if they can be deemed to be citizens in the real sense of the word, must live on week after week after week, the entire sum of money available to cover the cost of staying alive for another seven days, hoping that no unexpected emergencies arise.

Living slightly above this ‘poverty line’ are those who must toil for just marginally more, with no expectation that they can do more than get by, with a bit of luck. No luxuries, no small nest-egg for the rainy day, no margin of error in the spend on shopping. Grind a week in, then another, then another, hoping for the best.

But this rotten government, the latest in a long line of rotten governments, has plans to make that daily and weekly grind even more hopeless. It, like its predecessors, does not ‘have to’ destroy any vestigial hope that the poor and the working poor might have of some small respite from grinding poverty, it has chosen to. Remember that figure – the top 10% of households receive 25.83% of national disposable income! Yet this government, a coalition that includes a political party that pretends to be a social democratic ‘labour’ party, has set its face in one direction only – away from the wealth of the few and towards the miserable income of the many. This is a preposterous and indefensible choice for any political party that would claim to be even half-civilised.

Not content with imposing wage and social welfare reductions on the poorest in society, this government has drawn more of them into the tax net, hit them with a new ‘universal social charge’ and raised the cost of public services. On top of that, this rotten government is doing the bidding of that top 10% by again targetting low-paid workers, intending to dismantle Joint Labour Committee rates of remuneration for overtime and weekend work among other things.

In this latest assault, the government is egged on by large sections of the media who provide air-space and page-space to employers’ representative bodies such as the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (ISME) and the Irish Hotels Federation, among others.

This brings us to that second item in the media. The Minister for Communications, Pat Rabbitte, a member of the same Labour Party that has chosen to side with the rich against the poor, has stated that he is against capping the salaries of State broadcaster RTE’s top presenters on the grounds that these people are not staff, but contractors. This tidy little arrangement allows these presenters to negotiate terms and conditions which would seem like Lotto winnings to the poor and the working poor in society.

The last year in which the earnings of the most highly-paid RTE presenters was released was in 2008. Pat Kenny was paid a salary of €950,976, Gerry Ryan received €629,865 with Marian Finucane on €570,000, Ryan Tubridy on €533,333 and Joe Duffy on €408,000. It is likely that each of these presenters is able to call on other earnings to supplement the RTE payments. Those salaries put them into, or very near to, the top 10% of Irish households.

These presenters, between them, occupy some of the most important slots on national radio and television schedules. Between them they wield extraordinary power to dictate and shape the agenda. They are intermediaries between the major players in Ireland’s social, political and economic worlds, and the people. They choose what items are to be covered on their programmes and in what way. They choose, with their producers and editors, whose voices will be heard, what questions will be asked and in what way, and how interviews and discussions will be conducted and often influenced by the intervention of the presenter. They are, by those means, opinion formers. They set the agenda for the day and the tone in which each issue will be presented to the people. They choose to cover certain items and not to cover others. They invite who they want, or don’t invite others. They endorse or dismiss views and opinions.

In effect, what these presenters do, and many of their colleagues throughout the rest of the broadcasting and print media do too, is to shape the mindset of the most powerful block of voters, the middle class, to make them compliant enough so that the status quo is not threatened, to the advantage of all of the political class, and the wealthiest in society.

The Minister for Communications could exercise his powers to require RTE to change the way in which it employs its presenters, and do it in the interest of transparently ethical broadcasting to the benefit of the audience who live, they are told, in a democracy. He could force RTE to change from the practice of using ‘contractors’ and let these people either work as staff, with capped salaries, or let them take their chance in the commercial world over which the Minister does not have the same remit.

But the Minister, of course, belongs to the same political class as Pat Kenny and the rest of the ‘contractors’ do, along with the top 10% who take that staggering 25.83% of the country’s disposable income, and the comparatively wealthy 10% below that group – business men and women, lawyers, doctors, engineers, executives, senior media workers, higher academics, and so on.  The Minister has chosen to leave things as they are, just as he and his party have chosen to leave the wealthy as they are and target the most vulnerable instead.

Two news items that show up the travesty of describing this place as a republic. It is not a republic, unless it is a banana republic, not quite the same thing. It is a hegemonic state, a plutarchy, effectively a dictatorship under the control of the political class, engineered to their advantage by manipulating the flow of essential information and controlling the conduct of debate and discussion, all inhibiting reasoned and informed democratic decision-making by the citizens.   It exists and persists only through the process of  ‘manufacturing consent’.

This plutarchy, this dictatorship, represents a tacit conspiracy of common interest by the wealthiest and the most well-connected against the impoverished – the wretched of this land. What is needed to overthrow it is a conspiracy of common interest by all who believe in true democracy and the enlightened and progressive republic.

The tyranny of ‘expert’ opinion

Closing his ‘Tonight’ programme on TV3 on the 24th of May, Vincent Browne made an extraordinary statement, almost revolutionary. He announced that he was looking to move  from the practice of having only ‘expert’ people on the ‘Tonight’ panels and, in the interest of having a democratic balance of views and opinions, asked for recommendations from the general public of suitable people who could contribute to his programme, to be drawn from across the social classes and not exclusively from the professional/business class as is the norm. What an idea!

Browne’s statement is extraordinary not only because what seems on the face of it to be a fair and democratic and correct approach has never been the practice in broadcasting in Ireland, but also because TV3 is a commercial TV station with a mandatory but limited public service broadcasting requirement. What Browne is proposing might more readily be expected to originate in RTE, the ‘national’ broadcaster, with its much more extensive public service broadcasting requirement and a significant proportion of its revenues provided by way of licence fee, paid in the main by the ‘great unwashed’ whose voices are excluded other than in shallow radio phone-in programmes, heavily moderated.

Blinded by ‘experts’, we are led up the garden path, lectured on what is ‘common sense’ and what should be dismissed as ‘looney’. These ‘experts’ are presented to us as people who ‘know’, who have the ‘truth’, whose opinions are not just worth hearing but worth internalising so that they become our opinions.

The ‘experts’ are, we are often informed, eminent or distinguished or foremost in their field. Some may be, but what does that mean? It may be that the lawyer knows a fair bit about contract law, or licencing law, or constitutional law, or criminal law, but not usually all of these legal areas and more. It may be that the surgeon is indeed an expert in neuro-surgery, or cardio-vascular conditions, or plastic-surgery, but not usually all of these and more. It may be that the academic has forged a successful career in the area of sociology, or economics, or science, or literature, but not all of these and more. It may be that the entrepreneur has made a fortune selling cups of coffee, or building houses, or making plastic ‘things’, but what does that show other than an ability to spot a chance, get organised and make some money?

‘Experts’ usually have a very limited area of expertise. They are not all-seeing, all-dancing fonts of wisdom. In fact, the very closed world that they usually inhabit within their particular area of expertise may close off ways of seeing and ways of thinking about a wide range of personal, local, national and global issues about which they are supposed to have opinions that we are led to believe are worth paying attention to. On these radio and TV panels, surgeons, lawyers, academics, politicians and ‘personalities’ will insist that their thoughts on economics, or politics, or the media, or war, or US foreign policy, or the EU policy on immigration, or the banking crisis are so well-informed and well-thought-out as to be suitable for serious consideration by the population at large. What arrant  nonsense!

On the other hand there are those who did not gain a reputation or access to membership of the political class by acquiring a degree or a PhD in a limited field, or by ‘networking’ successfully, but who left formal ‘education’ early and then educated themselves by keeping their eyes and ears and intellects open, by reading and discussing, by being aware of the natural, social and political worlds, by dissecting and assimilating ideas.

One such man was my father. Having left school at 13 through economic necessity, like so many others had to, he became a sheet metal worker, then a panel beater and later a garage owner. An inveterate reader, he was also a very fine writer, good enough to be offered a position as a correspondent in the 1960s by the Evening Press newspaper. He had a superb knowledge of history – Irish, European and World, and of current affairs, again spanning the globe. His analyses of various issues and their likely outcomes including Ireland’s membership of the EEC/EU, the conflict in the Six Counties, US foreign policy especially in the Middle East, and the economic rise of the East and of South America have been, or are being, borne out. He had an intimate knowledge of the natural world, from the sky at night to the earth below. Long before it was fashionable he was an environmentalist, and again before it was fashionable went against type by championing the cause of indigenous people from the Native Americans to the Australian Aborigines, and all points between.

So highly regarded were his views and opinions that on Saturdays at his garage in Dublin he would be visited by a stream of regular customers, including many  regarded as eminent in their professions, there not just to get petrol in their cars but to hear his views and to exchange ideas. One of the highest-ranking solicitors in the land would spend up to an hour every Saturday talking with him, and listening. But Pearse Stokes would not qualify for inclusion on any RTE discussion panel – then or now.

That is why Vincent Browne is not only right but intelligent in his new approach to the formation of panels for his ‘Tonight’ programme. At a moment in our history that we would prefer not to have visited – brought here by the ineptitude and stupidity and greed of so many in the political class, including some of the media ‘darlings’ – it is time to open out to a wider range of views and opinions by listening to articulate and intelligent and well-informed contributors from previously excluded social class groups.

By adopting this new approach, Vincent Browne and TV3 will enhance the Public Sphere, that area in social life in which public opinion is formed. It should make for more interesting television too – an escape from the incestuous ‘same old, same old’ discussion panels.

And what will it do to RTE – the broadcasting arm of the State and of the political class? Let’s hope it will give them cause for concern. They have had it their own way for far too long, at our expence. Come on Vincent Browne and TV3, show the Donnybrook set how proper current affairs broadcasting should be done – and  can be done.

Bank Crisis – take to the streets.

It just won’t work, some ‘experts’ say, while other ‘experts’ line up to chorus ‘oh yes, it will’.  €70 billion so far to ‘fix’ the banks, with, we can be quite certain, more to come at great cost to every citizen. Well, not quite every citizen – there are of course those tax exiles and tax avoiders and evaders who never ever pay their share of taxes, facilitated all of the time by politicians, senior civil servants, lawyers, accountants, bankers and the rest.

The current estimate is that every tax compliant man, woman and child in the Republic of Ireland will each have to stump up over €16,000 as their individual contribution to rescuing the banks, with no alternative to this other than to set out for distant shores, and forced exile.

The new government has decided on its ‘solution’ to the banking crisis. The Bank of Ireland will be scaled back, divesting €30 billion of assets by 2013 and will provide the first ‘pillar’, while the Allied Irish Bank will merge with the Educational Building Society, shed €23 billion of assets by 2013 and form the second ‘pillar’. Irish Life and Permanent TSB will be taken into State ownership, also entailing shedding many assets.

What we will end up with is fewer banks competing for customers, the end result of crazy, criminal banking policies pursued without hindrance by the State, without adherence to sound business practices, without compliance with the law, without ethical consideration of their actions by the bankers, cheered on by politicians. The citizen will foot the bill for the losses in the banks and for the ‘solution’, and will be at the mercy of a duopoly – effectively forced to deal with just two competing banks, with little prospect of foreign banks wishing to provide any level of competition.

That is the sort of ‘progress’ that comes about as a result of consolidation, synergies, amalgamations – all, we are sternly warned, necessary to compete in the ‘real’ world. It wasn’t always thus.

Up to the 1960s Irish customers had a choice in banking between the Bank of Ireland, Hibernian Bank, Munster & Leinster Bank, National Bank, Provincial Bank, Ulster Bank and Royal Bank. All of these were run on serious lines, operated to sober  business standards by men (not in those days women) who knew their duty was to protect the assets of the bank and its customers, to deliver a profit to the shareholders, and to hand on a sound business when the time came for them to move on.

There were also the Agricultural Credit Corporation to finance agriculture, set up by the State in 1927 but sold to the Dutch Rabobank in 2002, and the Industrial Credit Corporation, set up in 1933 but sold to Bank of Scotland/Halifax in 2001 and closed down with the Halifax operation in 2010. Two good effective State banks, gone.

In the 1960s Ireland had about 40 building societies providing mortgages for house buyers. These were merged over time into the Irish Nationwide, Educational Building Society, First Active and ICS. Even with the mergers there was choice for consumers.

In 40 years we have gone from seven good general banks and two specialist strategic banks, and four solid building societies, to two ‘pillars’ with another, Permanent TSB, in some sort of half-life. No real choice anymore for customers, and a huge bill to pay for the privilege. That is ‘progress’, that is the ‘real’ world – progress for crooks and gamblers and a world of real misery for the citizens.

The people spoke in the General Election, just five weeks ago, and voted, we were subsequently told, for parties that promised change for the better and rational solutions to our financial crisis. It is patently clear that the new crowd in government is as incapable of bursting out of the bubble in which politicians, economists and other ‘experts’ live and think and talk to one another, as was the old crowd. We cannot rely on them to see the world as we see it, and  to take on the neo-liberal Euro-imperialists who will quite happily do this country down to protect their banks and their half-baked Eurozone.

It is time to take off the gloves and take to the streets. No-one is riding to the rescue. No solution but by ourselves. That is how it has always been. The Greeks know that, and so, by now, should we.

 

Exit From EU Essential

It is long past time when Irish citizens should seriously consider the Irish State exiting the European Union, but the growing evidence of Ireland’s second or third-class status within the Union makes this much more of an imperative now. For far too long Ireland’s political class has engaged in a hard sell to have Irish citizens endorse a series of treaties that have dragged the State and its people further and further into a subservient position in the EU relative to the powerful axis of neo-imperialist countries – Germany, France and Britain.

The banking crisis and the resultant collapse of the Irish economy show that that axis – simultaneously neo-imperialist and neo-liberal – is not just prepared to countenance but insists on the enslavement of the Irish people for the purpose of paying the debts of private gamblers, principally the banks and money markets in those countries. If they are to allow for even marginal easing of the terms of what they describe as a ‘bail-out’ but what is in fact extortion, then we must surrender on the issue of our rate of corporate tax.

Ireland’s geographical position as an island separated by not one but two seas from the continent of Europe requires that the State devise methods of attracting investment into Ireland. While not defending the morality or otherwise of favouring international corporations with low tax rates, the fact that the powerful EU states insist on dismantling the limited advantage that this offers as a prerequisite for making it slightly easier for Irish citizens to refund debts that they do not own and cannot pay demonstrates the absence of fairness and parity of esteem between the powerful centre and the periphery.

But there are other permanent features of the EU’s position in the world, that demand that the Irish State and its citizens examine their collective conscience about our involvement with a project that exploits, dominates, enslaves, manipulates and wages war directly or by proxy on less powerful regions, nations and people of the world.

It is anti-ethical to engage in the international arms trade, but that is what European countries do in a highly aggressive and corrupt way and most often to vicious regimes who pile the cost of the weapons on to  national debt while exploiting the treasuries of their countries for personal profit and depositing the proceeds in secret accounts with European banks.It was illuminating and disgusting to see the British prime minister, David Cameron, arrive in Egypt while the people’s revolution was still active, with a posse of some of the most notorious British weapons manufacturers and dealers to discuss arms deals with the military regime that controls that country.

These same European countries systematically exploit, with the client governments complicity, the resources of the client states, importing their raw materials to Europe where great value is added through manufacturing and sales. The impoverished people of the third World who attempt to follow the jobs into Europe are harassed, exploited, criminalised and very often expelled. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment is reaching fever pitch in many of the so-called ‘enlightened democracies’ in Europe, and is facilitated if not encouraged by the governments of those democracies through thinly veiled incitement and the enacting of very repressive laws aimed at those immigrant communities.

EU countries are heavily involved in the illegal and brutal wars being waged against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which would not have begun and could not be sustained had those countries not joined the ‘coalition of the willing’. The EU is also actively complicit in the slow genocide of the Palestinian people in not only failing to exert strong pressure on Israel and the US to end their criminal oppression of an innocent indigenous people, but also in exploiting all trade possibilities with Israel in both directions. Not content with that, the EU is currently absorbing Israel into the European Union (well documented by David Cronin in his book “Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation”).

The leaders of the neo-imperialist states which control the European Union are not people that any reasonably moral person would want to associate with. The scale of destruction that these leaders wreak on the world and its people is massive, and criminal. It is in effect no different from the havoc their ancestors created in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle and Far East. Their record is the direct opposite of the record of the Irish people who, throughout history, have never sought to dominate or oppress other nations, but who have been the subject of colonisation and genocidal policies inflicted by one part of the axis of European neo-imperialism, Britain.

Given the current banking and fiscal crisis that Ireland is going through which will cause massive hardship on the Irish people, the prospect of disengaging with the EU and engaging with the 118 countries of the non-aligned movement is just a different challenge, but a far more rewarding one if planned for and handled correctly.

Not only is there a bright future for the Irish economy in a wider world, there is the opportunity for the Irish State to re-establish itself as a neutral peace-loving defender of human rights in the world. That is a prize worth working for. The debate on our future is urgent and must begin.

For more on this read a previous post – http://theirishrepublic.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/atlantean-irish-in-the-wider-world/

Democracy’s Child, Dictatorship

Contrary to what the German ‘elite’ think of the Greeks at the moment, we can generally expect to find the pearls of wisdom we need there, even if they have to be excavated from 2,500 years ago.

Plato had something to say that might sound warning signals about the Fine Gael-Labour coalition: “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty”.

With a combined strength for the Coalition of 113 Dail seats, just 52 TDs will occupy the opposition benches, and several of those are likely to be sympathetic to Fine Gael on a range of issues and policies, with Fianna Fail already indicating that it will be supportive where government policy is in accord with the previous administration’s. That leaves fewer than 30 Dail Deputies between Sinn Fein, the United Left Alliance, and left-leaning independents, who are ideologically opposed to the stated programme for government.

In these conditions, there can be no expectation of close-run votes in the Dail, even on the most contentious of issues. When it comes to the matter of standing orders in the Dail where these affect issues like speaking time and order of business it will largely be in the gift of the governing parties to make concessions and not because it is right, or equitable, or fair, or indicative of parity of respect for the voters who put those Deputies there to give voice to their concerns.

Between the parties that make up the Coalition there will undoubtedly be tensions, and within the parties too. But given the likelihood that the opinion poll ratings for both parties will drop substantially there will be little appetite for publicly expressed discord within or between the parties. Despite Eamon Gilmore’s closing oration at the Labour Delegate Conference when he presented a rosier outcome for Labour at the next election than history would indicate, many of the newly elected Labour TDs will have a serious fight on their hands to hold their seats. It is likely that Fine Gael’s position will be little different. The need for survival is a great gagging device.

It is quite likely that we will see legislation or regulation proposed that under normal conditions would either not be proposed or would be modified because of tight voting conditions that normally prevail in the Dail. With the majority it will command this government need not be so restrained, and those who think that Labour would guard against the introduction of repressive legislation don’t know their recent history. Section 31 of the Boradcasting Act is one example, introduced by a Labour Minister, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and there are others.

It is likely that Sinn Fein will shine in opposition. The party has seen returned as Dail Deputies not just a cohort of intelligent and highly articulate TDs but also a leader who has demonstrated exceptional political skills, is a good communicator, and is a person with considerable international stature. There is no doubt that Sinn Fein is ready in the starting blocks, rarin’ to go.

The United Left Alliance too will shine. Again, they have a group of intelligent and highly articulate TDs, with street ‘cred’. They will relish the thought of getting stuck into Labour from the word ‘go’.

It may well be that the most effective opposition will have to be fought on the streets outside Leinster House, and the United Left Alliance and Sinn Fein will be primed for that too. That may well be the place that dictatorship will be denied, and democracy enhanced. The republic is after all, according to another Greek, Cicero, “the property of the people”.

So it must remain.

The Gobbledeegook of Ireland Inc.

Ireland Inc. – whatever that is – is bankrupt, we are told. Insolvent, broke, bust, beggared. Our spending is way beyond our means, out of control, disconnected from the ‘real’ world. With deeply worried looks they ask if we can not see that our GDP doesn’t match our public spending, or is it GNP, whatever that or the other one is. We need, they say, to get to grips with the macro numbers, or maybe it is the micro numbers.

We’d need to be economists to understand the gobbledeegook. But we have enough of them already, too many, and most of them played their part in getting us into the trouble we are in. The good ones were dismissed as cranks, or traitors, advised to go and commit suicide by our then Taoiseach, Bertie ‘Cornerboy’ Ahern. While many ordinary citizens knew we were in some sort of bubble, the favoured economists and the cheer-leading media commentators protested otherwise. “It’ll be fine”, they said, “sure we’ll have a soft landing”. Turns out that soft landing was more like a plane plummeting down, out of control, onto concrete.

What is a country worth? Measured in a way that is different from the IMF’s way, what might Ireland be worth? If a qualified valuer created an inventory of assets, what value might those amount to? How many multiples of our deficit, or GNP/GDP, or total international debts would that be?

We have 70,000 sq. kilometres of land, and 27,847 sq. kilometres of territorial fishery waters. We have proven gas and oil reserves of at least €500 billion in value, with much more to discover. We have agriculture and food manufacturing, tourism, high-end manufacturing and service industries and a valuable arts ‘industry’. We have many thousands of kilometres of road, and thousands of kilometres of railways and all that goes with that. We have over 4,000 schools and 134 hospitals, and two million houses and apartments. We have electricity generation and a grid, and a natural gas grid too. We have towns and cities, airports and ports, bridges and tunnels. This list could go on and on. We can get the drift. We paid for all of that, with blood and money. It has value, and much of it is owned by the state – in other words owned ultimately by the citizens.

But most of all, we have the people of Ireland, the greatest resource, much of it untapped. In 2004, while he was Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Michael McDowell said that ‘a dynamic liberal economy like ours demands flexibility and inequality in some respects to function’! Note the use of the word ‘demands’, particularly as used in conjunction with the word ‘inequality’,  a foretaste of the line taken by the EU, ECB, IMF and Goldman Sachs.

Since independence we have maintained, and still do to an ever-increasing extent, a significant cohort of our people including children in poverty and deprivation. Their use is as a negative force to depress pay demands, thereby increasing ‘competitiveness’ and inflating profits. Urged on by brutish neoliberals like Michael McDowell we turned and still turn our own fellow citizens into unwilling recipients of social ‘welfare’ by depriving them of the educational and training resources necessary to lift them out of poverty and to allow them forge a productive life for their own benefit, and society’s. Not content with forcing a life of dependency on them, our leaders accede with alacrity to the diktats of the EU/IMF/ECB Troika that social welfare rates be slashed and the low-paid be brought into an ever-widening tax net. While that is done, we allow a self-appointed ‘elite’ to maintain and enhance, on the backs of the poor and the low-paid, a life of power, privilege and wealth.

The formula for determining the liquidity or insolvency of any country is, on the face of it, a smoke and mirrors formula created by the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, the OECD and the United Nations. It pays no attention, it seems, to the value of long-term durable assets including natural resources, the built environment and communications infrastructure, or the value of people and what they can do. It appears to be nothing other than a contrived tyranny inflicted on non-’elite’ countries by those who control ‘elite’ international bodies with the end result of maintaining empires and money markets.

We need to cut through the gobbledeegook and find an exit strategy that we can live with. It is time to turf out the amateur ‘smoke and mirrors’ men we put in charge of the ship of state or, to use their gobbledeegook, ‘Ireland Inc.’.

Atlantean Irish in the Wider World

Ireland is virtually alone in the EU, with the exception of the Baltic States and Luxembourg, in not having an imperialist past, but rather, like the Baltic States, having experienced centuries of domination by an imperialist neighbour.

Since the first moves in the 1960s to apply for membership of what was then the European Economic Community, there has always been principled opposition in Ireland to immersing the nation in what was seen as a pan-European imperialist project and aligning itself with those countries which have wreaked a trail of destruction on nations and peoples around the world. It was believed by many opponents of the proposed Irish membership of the EEC that our proper place in the world was as part of that global collective of those victims of European imperialism known as the non-aligned movement.

The non-aligned movement is an organisation of 118 member states, and 18 states with ‘observer’ status. It was created as a ‘third way’, an alternative to alignment with either the West or the Soviet Union in that power-play that was the ‘Cold War’. It is largely made up of nations and peoples that are former colonies of European imperialist nations.

There is a set of requirements for membership of the organisation, which are:

• Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
• Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
• Recognition of the movements for national independence.
• Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations, large and small.
• Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
• Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
• Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
• Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
• Promotion of mutual interests and co-operation.
• Respect for justice and international obligations.

‘The purpose of the organisation as stated in the Havana Declaration of 1979 is to ensure “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics.” (Source – Wikipedia)

Contained in that Declaration are many of the issues that now confront Ireland, and which were identified by opponents to EEC membership from the 1960s on, but rubbished by the proponents of membership. Joining the non-aligned movement would see Ireland reclaim its independence and sovereignty, including its fiscal sovereignty with the reintroduction of its own currency and the consequent power to revalue that currency when conditions demanded that should be done in the interest of the nation – the nation being all of the people and not a wealthy minority.

What of the other members of the non-aligned movement and how would Ireland sit among them? It is a simple task to identify regimes with which we would have serious issues, but the same is the case with some member states of the EU. On the other side, there are very many members of the NAM that share significant elements of history with us (domination and colonialism by European states, and the difficulties of working through the post-colonial period). Many of the member states have had their borders artificially constructed or manipulated by the imperialists, and we share that experience. Like them, we have experienced the deliberate colonialist policies of destruction of our language and culture and the fostering of sectarian divisions with all of the long-term problems that have arisen as a result.

And what of the argument that by leaving the EU we would materially damage Ireland’s economy and therefore its capacity to maintain its independence? The quick answer to that is evidenced by the assault on our fiscal independence, and therefore our sovereignty, by the larger member states of the EU to protect their own banks, bond holders, etc. But the positive answer is to look at the trading opportunities – both material and intellectual – that would be available in a body of nations that not only includes super-economies such as India, China, Brazil, but also includes over half of the world’s population, about 80% of the world’s oil resources, and the vast bulk and variety of other precious metals and minerals – on which the EU is almost totally dependent.

Other beneficial considerations of our re-alignment would include the proper control and management of our very valuable fisheries, and of our (to be nationalised) oil and gas resources through a fair partnership with other non-aligned nations who have the technical expertise and equipment available. The opening up of global markets for value-added agricultural produce in a world which is experiencing food shortages is another enormous potential benefit.

Despite the damage done to Ireland which has come to a climax with the EU-IMF intervention in Black November 2010, there is little doubt that we are capable of successfully taking a different fork in the road that is the nation’s journey. There is much to gain from this new approach – not just in terms of independence and sovereignty and pride, or in terms of our economy and society, but more crucially there is a moral component to it in terms of our attitude to war and injustice and exploitation – all hallmarks of European and US policy towards the rest of the non-NATO world.

We are not Europeans as we have allowed  ourselves to be misled into thinking. As Bob Quinn suggests, we are the Atlantean Irish, with our gaze directed not just at Europe, but at the world at large. We have the twenty-twenty vision of a people at the periphery, once we remove the EU blindfold. Why would we limit the scope of our ambitions by aligning ourselves with imperialists with so much blood on their hands, and an ambition to expand their activities, when we can take our place among the non-aligned nations of the world as equals – nations who, unlike Europe and the US, and even ourselves, hold the Irish in some considerable regard.

It is time to open a real debate on our future, to stop limiting ourselves by surrendering to the demands of a union of unequal states, but instead to open our minds to the possibility that we can change ourselves and the world for the better. Time, as James Connolly wished, to build a sovereign republic that will act as a beacon of hope to the oppressed people of the world. We are most certainly capable of doing that.