Category: Irish Left

If Sean Fitzpatrick did not commit a crime then we need new laws. Now.

~ jlpagano

Oh, how this makes my blood boil.

Here are some viewpoints on the role former Anglo-Irish Bank chairman Sean FItzpatrick played in the Irish banking crisis.

According to the judicial system…

But Judge John Aylmer ruled this morning on day 126 of the trial that the investigation carried out by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement fell short of the impartial, unbiased investigation that an accused is entitled to.

According to Solidarity TD Richard Boyd Barrett…

Mr Boyd Barrett claimed Mr FitzPatrick walked free because of a set-up and not a blunder. “This stinks to high heaven,’’ he added.

Leas Cheann Comhairle Pat “The Cope’’ Gallagher intervened to say he was referring to a trial and should “refrain lest there might be consequences’’.

Mr Boyd Barrett said: “There is a direct link between Seánie FitzPatrick’s rotten, corrupt activities and Anglo Irish Bank and the families this week being sent to Garda stations or are sleeping in parks because there are no homes.’’

…and then we have the viewpoint of the Irish Times Legal Affairs correspondent Colm Keena

“Sean Fitzpatrick did not commit a crime.” (paraphrase)

It won’t surprise you to learn that my own views would tend to lean towards those of Deputy Barrett.  And while the Irish mainstream media takes such great pains to point out that he was speaking under “privilege” as if it is some kind of cowardly act, I would put forward the proposal that the opposite is the case.

Maybe it’s true that technically Fitzpatrick did not break any laws.  And I would go further in pointing out that watching him “sent down” will not make me feel any better about what the Irish banking sector did to this country.

But if the way he comported himself in both managing Anglo Irish loans and his own personal ones was “legal”, then surely it must be a priority of our parliament to bring proper laws into existence.  And if we can’t bring down a sentence on him in a court of law, how about one from the court of public opinion, making sure the new laws get known as (at least commonly assuming the Dáil would never approve it) The Sean Fitzpatrick Laws.

On the subject of what actually has been done to improve legislation since the crash, here is but one recommendation of the Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis published in 2016…

A personal remuneration clawback provision linked to medium term performance should be part of the employment contract for senior executive management and board members.

Just to break that down…basically it seems to suggest that if a bank is losing money, the “bigwigs” at the bank should not make money in terms of bonuses.

BUT ISN’T THAT BLOODY WELL OBVIOUS???????  Did it really have to take a group of elected representatives the guts of three years to come up with stuff like that???

Like I said, blood boiling.  At least we have people like Deputy Barrett who are free to speculate as to what is really going on amongst the ranks of the establishment without fear of prosecution under libel laws by our nation’s real cowards.

#IANWAE

80% of Irish people vote for FF or FG according to FF TD?

~ jlpagano

“Historically, over recent decades or even the last election, the vast majority of Irish people vote for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, the figure might vary 60, 70, maybe 80 percent.”

The above statement, made by Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming on the latest Irish Times “inside Politics” podcast, illustrates one of the core reasons we have this very website First Person Plural.  It’s a myth that needs to be destroyed in the public domain once and for all.

In fairness to the podcast host Hugh Linehan, he did offer something of a rebuttal to Fleming’s claim when he pointed out that the figures were down in the most recent election in 2016, but it was nowhere near the kind of response that was truly warranted.

The so-called “Civil War” parties received a combined total of 49.8% of the popular vote in the 2016 general election.  In 2011, the combined total was 53.5%.  So the reality is that the figure has been nowhere near the 60% mark since the 2007 election, the third Bertie victory just before “the crash”, where they combined for over two-thirds of the vote, ie 68.7%.

But even those numbers aren’t enough to crunch in order to get a true picture of the Irish political taste.

Recently in France they had their presidential elections, and among the headlines from those results are how “low” their turnout figures were.  For the first round 77% of the electorate voted, for the second round it was just under 75%.  In other words, it was considered a bad thing that a quarter of the people failed to register their vote.

Not since 1997, Bertie’s first election victory, has an Irish general election cracked the 70% barrier.

And in last year’s ballot, despite all the anger surrounding the way the country was failed by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour both before and since the crash, as many as 1,147,534 registered voters failed to turn up on election day.

For me, those votes are up for grabs, and I would argue a significant proportion of those voters would be perfectly willing to vote for anyone but FG or FF (or even Lab) if a decent unified platform was put before them.

If not, the perception that there are only two “serious” options will endure.  Fleming was almost gleeful in the podcast painting FF as some kind of left wing option simply because they are slightly to the left of Fine Gael.

#IANWAE

Stat sources – Wikipedia & Irish Independent

 

 

Social Democrats call for separation of Church and State after #TuamBabies

~ jlpagano

We’re not sharing this Dáil speech by Catherine Murphy TD from the Social Democrats website because we have a particular preference for the party itself; it’s just we like the fact that something like this is being said in our national parliament.

“if Tuam has shown us anything it is that the State must take responsibility for its citizens and that the Church has no legitimacy in the healthcare, education or politics governing our citizens.”

No doubt there are other TDs who share Murphy’s sentiment, but unfortunately among the total amount of TD they would be very much in the minority.  I wonder if that would be the case if a referendum were held on the matter?

Barry Cowen’s smugness re: #Right2Water campaign does not hold water

~ jlpagano

“Oh look at me!!! I’ve made the #Right2Water campaign look foolish!!!”, to paraphrase Fianna Fáil TD and brother of Bertie’s successor, Barry Cowen during the past week.

At an Oireachteas hearing (aka Joint Committee on Future Funding of Domestic Water Services Debate), Cowen asked representatives of the movement if they were in favour of a charge for excessive use of water, to which he was replied in the positive.

Deputy Barry Cowen: I ask the witnesses to answer the following. If this committee was in a position to agree a process by which people who use excessive amounts, in the opinion of this committee, were charged, is Right2Water happy with that?

Mr. Steve Fitzpatrick: Yes.

This led Cowen to go on twitter as though he had somehow convinced a vegetarian to enter a Big Mac eating competition.

After Paul Murphy TD of AAA-PBP accused Cowen of “selective quoting”, The Journal decided to do one of its “fact-check” articles, which in essence served to back up the very picture Cowan was trying to paint, ie one that only pro-Establishment readers would appreciate.

Let’s back up this particular truck, shall we.

First we need to make a clear distinction between what regulating water is meant to do, and what instead our government actually did.

Of COURSE we should be regulating water usage.  It is an important resources and should not be wasted.  But before we do so, we need to identify who is wasting it the most and target the regulation at them.  This clearly brings the private sector in the firing line way before domestic users, but this State has never been led by a Government that would acknowledge this.

Instead, the Fine Gael-led government (yes, I know, with Labour also in tow) sought to establish a revenue stream (pun fully intended) for a new corporate cash-cow known as Irish Water, and began charging the general public long before there was any opportunity to gauge which houses were using excessive amounts of water.

And on top of the specifics of the #Right2Water movement, the main reason it earned itself such incredible public support wasn’t just because of the water issue itself, but also because it was the straw that broke the Irish camel’s back after successive years of austerity following the banking crisis which happened under Bertie Ahern’s, and ultimately Brian Cowen’s, watch.

Even without the most recent poll numbers, when Fianna Fáil party leader and former Minster under Bertie, Micheal Martin eventually has the balls to bring down this current Government and call an election, seeing how the wider voting Irish public sees only two possible parties for leadership, he will be Taoiseach.

Would it be crazy to assume that his government would quickly seek to establish water charges exactly as Fine Gael had done, using the above selective testimony as some kind of justification?  With Cowan as the Minster responsible, no less?  JLP

#IANWAE

A reason why Sinn Féin hoovers up so many votes on the Irish “Left” – they communicate more?

~ jlpagano

Irish Left parties press release.png

One of the principal functions of this site is to examine the fractured wasteland that is the “Irish Left”.

There are many different parties, most of which explore the same issues and some ironically have the word “alliance” in their very title.  You could say they are collectively similar to the “People’s Front of Judea” gag as portrayed by Monty Python in “The Life of Brian”.

Of course that’s not to say their TDs and activists don’t do great work in their communities.  It is just that while they are focusing on this important work, in the bigger picture of the parliamentary set-up in this country, their representation continues to be minimal.

Here at FPP we do not consider SInn Féin to be a “left-wing” party by any means.  They are a single-issue Nationalist organisation that uses this vacuum in the landscape of the Irish Left to win themselves seats, and they do this very well.  We can only speculate just how progressive their actions would be once actually in power, and we don’t really want to find out any time soon.

Still, we have to accept the reality that a lot of their ballot box support does come from the left.  So as part of setting up FPP, we added the main websites from all of the main political organisations to a heading in the news aggregator “Feedly”.  Represented there are The Labour Party, The Green Party, The Social Democrats, the People Before Profit Alliance, the Anti Austerity Alliance, and as we said, Sinn Féin.

Just in case you’re not sure what an “aggregator” is…it is similar to the old “news-wire” in that it gathers the latest released by various news sources and lists them in chronological order, so the most recent releases will be at the top.

What you see in our lead graphic is a screengrab of how our feed looked this morning.  As you can see, of the 19 most recent releases, 17 are by Sinn Féin.

Perhaps, you might wonder, they do a “news-dump” every Sunday morning, ie posting a ton of stories all at once and doing nothing for the rest of the week?  Yeah, we wondered that too, so we scrolled down.  They post articles at that rate throughout the week, at least ten articles per day.

Communication via social media, particularly in times when an election is NOT imminent, is a key way of keeping in touch with the wider public.  If Sinn Fein are flooding cyberspace with policies and information during that time, is it any wonder that they have so much success when the elections do come around?

Obviously Twitter, Facebook & websites aren’t the be-all and end-all, but surely it has to be seen as fertile ground for organisations which focus on issues left of centre.  Here at FPP we will be looking to highlight not just the issues themselves, but how they are covered by the various parties AND the mainstream media.

#IANWAE

 

 

 

 

 

 

A simple flowchart for the Irish “ProLife” movement as the Citizens Assembly convenes #RepealThe8th

~ jlpagano

Yesterday we featured an article in Journal.ie about refugees that seemed to be geared towards those with more right-wing views.

Today, as the Citizens Assembly meets to consider many different issues including the contentious 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, the online publication have posted a piece about the public submissions to the Assembly, and in its headline it has an extract from a Pro-Life viewpoint.

We’re not necessarily suggesting that the article in question is biased, but what we are saying is that these articles are clearly designed to provoke a host of comments, the vast majority of which re-hash the same old Pro Life v Pro Choice talking points ad nauseum.

The only important issue right now is that of a referendum.  Do we have one, or not.  Obviously here at FPP we believe that we should.  The government should establish a timeframe for the vote now including a “no later than” date, then it should work on formulating the wording for the question to be put before the people, then we should have our date.

Only after that is sorted should we start the debate.  In our opinion, the #RepealThe8th movement should be putting all its energy into getting the vote date organised and ignore the polarization for now.

We also believe the Pro-Life movement should be equally interested in a referendum, assuming they believe their views represent the will of a majority of the Irish people.  To that end we have produced the flow-chart below…

repealthe8th-flowchart

#IANWAE

Article in Journal.ie clearly written to provoke comments from “I’m not racist but…” brigade

~ jlpagano

Here’s the story…as part of Ireland’s agreements as part of the international community, 80 refugees, mostly of Syrian extraction, are to be accommodated in a refurbished hotel in County Roscommon.

For the most part, we here at FPP see that as a good thing.  It’s not perfect, there are negative connotations, but given all that has been happening in the world, that a place is being found for these people where hunks of metal are not being dropped from the sky on a daily basis has to be seen as a net blessing all round.

So when you report on that, we think the “80 lives made better” thing is the best starting point.

Now…to get a clear picture of what is going on, of COURSE you look into how the locals feel about it.  Of COURSE you interview local people and representatives.   And of COURSE you seek out the response from the Department of Justice and the Roscommon County Council.

However, assuming there are language and logistical barriers preventing you from speaking to the refugees themselves, we believe you should ALSO interview the Irish Refugee Council, or Amnesty International, or some other such organisation who generally act as the first responders from Irish society towards such people when they arrive on our shores.  Maybe get a little perspective on what it must be like for them?

According to this article in the Journal, the 80 refugees are not the story.

“Council meets to discuss housing of refugees in refurbished hotel“

The important narrative, apparently, is that the locals don’t like the way THEY have been treated.

Fine Gael Senator Maura Hopkins, a Ballaghaderreen native, says that “a number of questions need to be answered” with regard to the move.

They go on to interview a Fine Gael councillor, as well as two Fianna Fáil councillors (FF have 8 of 18 on the council by the way – FG 3, SF 1, IND 6) .

Like we point out, those viewpoints are all fine, but they are not the full story.  To be fair, the article does end like this…

TheJournal.ie has contacted both the Department of Justice and Roscommon County Council on the matter.

…yet they still posted an article that purely focuses on the reaction of a handful of right-leaning councillors.

You can imagine the kind of comments that will appear below an article like this.  Posted at 10:30am Friday, by 3pm there were 182 comments, like these…

The plan is to get in as many Muslims as possible until Ireland becomes as unstable and divided as Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, basically any country with a high Islamic fundamentalist presence. God help any of you with female kids.

Screw our own people, leave them on the streets, but look after the foreigners, that’s the humane thing to do. What the hell is wrong with this Country?

There is a cruel irony here, where sending refugees to a hotel in Rosscommon somehow makes it okay. There are absolutely no prospects of them ever finding employment, so they might be better off back in Syria where they came from and at least can fend for themselves and regain their dignity. They certainly won’t have much dignity around here.

This makes my f**king blood boil

Let’s house 80 ” refugees ” in a newly refurbished hotel …..

Meanwhile the government issue a court order to remove irish homesless people from an abandoned building …

How does this make sense ???????

Now to be fair, there are some comments going the other way…

Lots on here on about homelessness. No humanity at all

If ye feel that strong on irish homelessness open yer own door welcome in the homeless. Id say 0% of ye would. So shut up on about innocent people who didnt choose to be bombed beheaded shot HOMELESS imprisoned for nothing risking lifes spending all there money drowning trying to save there familys

Do you think 5 years ago they would choose to be in this situation and end up thousands of miles from home in ballaghaderreen.

Ps the mayo border is nearly 13 km away

…but the way the article has been presented views like this are guaranteed to be in the minority.

#IANWAE

MLK quote gets perfectly applied to #blacklivesmatter but also can be used for other struggles against injustice

~ jlpagano

In the latest Best of the Left podcast there is a segment taken from Dave Zirin’s “The Edge of Sports” where he deals with the reaction to American football player Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the US national anthem in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Zirin uses a quote from Martin Luther King to describe the reaction of several influential people from the sport’s community to the protest, whereby they essentially say “I support the ends but not the means”.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen’s Councillor or Ku Klux Klan-er, but the “white moderate”, who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”.

Who paternalistically believes they can set the timetable for another man’s freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time. And who constantly advises the negro to wait for a more convenient season.

Personally I have more respect for someone who bravely stands up for what he believes in than I do for someone who blindly stands up for a song and a waving piece of cloth.

But I also believe the quote is significant for wider issues around the world.  Take what we have here in Ireland, like #RepealThe8th #Right2Water and #StopTTIP.  Please understand that I appreciate the many differences between those struggles and those of the African American community in the US.

What I do mean is that such struggles should not be fought against the extremists at the far end of any ideological argument.  It should instead be directed at those in between who stand with their backs to the resistance because while they do appreciate the injustice, they don’t see the point in resisting…at least not right now.  “Maybe that day will come, but it is not today”, is essentially their argument.

They should be shown that not only can it be today, but it can also be done peacefully.  If enough people believe, it can be so.

 

 

A must-read perspective on #AppleTax

~ jlpagano

An article by an Irish Economics expert that fully lays out the #AppleTax situation without towing the government line or simply spelling out what public services can be bought with a sum like €13billion is our kind of article.

Terrence McDonough is a retired professor of economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway and co-editor of Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the Twenty-First Century.

His article appears in the American left-wing quarterly Jacobin and is titled “Ireland’s Bad Apples” and puts a very interesting spin on the reaction of our government to the European Commission’s ruling, particularly that of the “Churchillian” Michael Noonan.

It often seemed like Irish politicians believed they should represent Europe to the Irish people rather than represent the Irish people in Europe. But it turns out their cozy relationship with Europe was weaker than their romance with a major American multinational corporation.

Well worth a read.  Many thanks to Joan Collins TD for sharing.

Any hope for unity in the Irish Left takes another serious blow

~ jlpagano

We don’t like the terms “left” and “right” here at FPP but often we have no choice but to use them – especially in anything to do with Irish politics, where there has never been a Taoiseach who could remotely describe themselves as “left” (as hard as Bertie tried).

Basically, the “Irish Left” may be an entity, but it has absolutely no unity.  The Labour Party would consider themselves to the forefront, but in recent times they have drawn so close to the “establishment” ranks that they can at best be known as “centrist” now.

Which leaves The Socialist Party.  And People Before Profit.  And the Anti Austerity Alliance.  And the Greens.  And Sinn Féin, apparently.  And a smattering of independents.

Then there’s the Social Democrats.  For the purposes of this post we don’t want to concern ourselves with the circumstances behind Stephen Donnelly leaving the party (though if you are interested you can click here for the Indo’s take).  The fact remains that they have been in existence for just over a year and had three quality TDs with a hope of gaining even more down the line.  Now already one is gone.

Statement by the Social Democrats regarding the departure of Stephen Donnelly T.D.

Stephen Donnelly T.D. has informed us that he is leaving the Social Democrats.

We are disappointed that he has decided to walk away from the project, we undertook, to establish and build the Party.

The Executive Committee of the Party has reaffirmed its commitment to the vision of a strong economy, fair society and honest politics.

What an absolute shambles.  These politicians should be working together not apart.  In the Monty Python movie “The Life Of Brian” they made a joke about all the splinter movements like “The People’s Front of Judea” and the “Judean People’s Front”.  The left wing of Irish politics is making that joke into a reality, and has done for years.

Until they find a way to come together with the common goal of breaking the Civil War Duopoly, making those two identical parties finally merge and offering a realistic  alternative for the Irish people that prioritises things like health, education and housing over the continued widening of the income inequality gap, it will be “Politics As Usual” on this small island.