TheTruthHurts

Ireland's corporate regime; non-enforcement

2012-02-04T14:10:00.001-08:00

On Jan 8, 2008, I played for Berkeley against Oakland in the annual squash league match. My opponent was an amiable, very bright African-American called Preston Dufauchard. He was at the time the California commissioner of corporations;

http://calcorporatelaw.com/tag/commissioner-preston-dufauchard/

We had a great chat, and a very sporting game. He mentioned the difficulties he was having with companies registered in Ireland. I told him that I would put him in touch with Irish director for corporate enforcement, Paul Appleby, with whom I had been in frequent contact;

http://seanonuallain.com/id2.html

Appleby did not reply to Preston; then again Appleby has never, in over a decade, succeeded in successfully prosecuting anyone. Matt Cooper commented thus;

http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/matt-cooper/applebys-successor-will-need-to-be-more-proactive-with-investigations-182413.html

I believe this to be too gentle. As it happened, Appleby eventually gave evidence in federal court in the USA that it was ok to pay a dissolved company - this we found out during the discovery period of the following case, in which Appleby and the Irish state ended up on the losing side as we won a landmark battle for all Irish musicians;

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/4:2009cv03580/228656/68/0.pdf

Everything is consistent with the narrative that Appleby was put in place to ensure that a bunch of criminals could continue their nefarious ways. Indeed, the exasperation Judge Kelly has shown with him indicates that Appleby dragged out the Anglo investigation – the biggest financial scandal in Irish history – as long as he could, and then announced a surprise resignation so that his hapless successor would get the blame. It says a lot for Ireland's current government that the senior minister was inclined to let him away with this.

The dubious political legitimacy of the Irish statelet

2012-01-29T19:53:00.001-08:00

The irredentist IRA narrative always went as follows;

1.The second Dail was not properly dissolved;
2.The TD's who voted “no” to the Churchill/Collins deal handed over sovereignty of the Irish state to the IRA army council;
3.The IRA army council is the legitimate government of Ireland

That therefore allowed the IRA run a justice system in parallel to those by the states that claim sovereignty and jurisdiction over the divided island of Ireland . The IRA claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty, they argue, trump those of the British and Irish states

Of course, absurdities frequently emerge. Two wings of the continuity IRA each claimed to be the real government some years ago; and while the Provos were in the game, they “executed “ (murdered )an ex-member in a Belfast bar – and then in turn offered to murder the murderers. The Provos retired in 2005 to suck Brittania's withered paps.

Nevertheless, there is a weight of evidence in favour of the argument that the Irish statelet is simply a vehicle for the suppression of the Irish people, who have proven by our international success in emigrant communities that we are very able indeed. The companion blog to this documents a situation wherein an illegal disciplinary statute was used for a full decade in a state university, causing loss of livelihood and indeed life itself. There is no enforceable corporation law or indeed copyright law in Ireland; at this point, the statelet makes few bones about the fact that it is a colony, designed to shovel Irish workers' money to mysterious “bondholders” after a self-appointed “elite” in Dublin takes its cut. Soon, of course, it will sell off its forests to keep the scam going

The irredentist IRA narrative always seemed to be too facile. Now, however, the only person I have seem in Irish public life with any integrity is Colin Duffy, who has just undergone a 3-year internment for a “crime” he did not commit. The “crime” - stopping young Brit squaddies from terrorizing Afghanis

The export of money, the destruction of Irish culture and so on, taken in combination make it seem that the inheritors of the mantle of Terrence MacSwiney – the only mantle worth inheriting – oppose the rapacious and deeply evil Irish state.

Soon only Ireland will recognize a Canadian gay marriage

2012-01-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

It is fair to say that the Irish state welcomes every freak with an axe to grind/chip on the shoulder while ruthlessly pursuing the extirpation of all independent native artists. The “discovery”, alluded to in the immediately previous post, that there is no enforceable copyright law in Ireland has in fact been known to many of us for years

So “asylum seekers” get food and lodging; remarkably, there are significantly fewer of these suffering souls since the economic downturn, proving - of course! - that recessions soften the heart of repressive political regimes. In the meantime, at least two musicians in my personal acquaintance have been stricken with cancer in their early 40's, after undergoing the Irish state screw over for daring to play a note without a certificate from the dept of Fun

Gay marriage has been signaled by the current bunch of traitors and there will shortly be a referendum on it. Having attenuated the sacrament, then the state institution of marriage by illegal means, the next step is the imposition on the Irish public of another abomination. This is particularly the case in that the “theologian” Katherine Zappone is a Taoiseach's nominee to the Seanad, having lost a High Court case to have her Canadian “marriage” to another woman recognized in Ireland;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_same-sex_unions_in_Ireland

I could not help noting that, in her written account of her attempt to subvert Irish gender roles, Z advertized her love of driving fast cars, speed, noise and other environmentally-damaging themes. . I do not understand why we should subsidize her wish to be a boy.

Now the punchline; that “marriage” of non-residents is no longer recognized in Canada either;

http://www.theworld.org/2012/01/canada-gay-marriage/

Why doe we put up with this?

The music company lawsuit against Ireland

2012-01-12T17:47:00.000-08:00

Finally the music companies are suing Ireland for failure to have any implementable copyright legislation;

http://entertainment.ie/music/news/EMI-launches-lawsuit-against-Irish-state/97275.htm

Even the most "cynical/daring" comments on this topic really don't get it. Ireland has not been run as a normal state since 1998 or so, and there was every indication from back then that the music industry - in the mid 90's perhaps the biggest in the world pro capita - began to be used for the creation of huge scams

We can start with the admittedly labyrinthine narrative on

http://seanonuallain.com/id2.html

To summarize; musicians start to notice that their song copyright registrations are altered when they attempt to repatriate them from Britain and the USA to the nascent Irish music "rights" organization (IMRO). Companies close to the government suddenly "own" part of the songs. The musicians check further, and notice that they are credited with writing songs that don't exist, often spelled in Gaelic with a letter missing.

They get the police involved; one of the police is made a job offer he can't refuse, but parliamentary questions keep the investigation going. It is possible that the government simply wanted to find out what we knew.

Then someone in IMRO's London counterpart panics and - lo and behold! - it is revealed that Shay Hennessy, chair of IMRO, HAD STOLEN HUNDREDS OF COPYRIGHTS AND WAS USING IMRO TO PERPETUATE THE THEFT. Quis cutodies cutodiet? AS it happens, the police investigation was aborted with a leak to the papers

http://www.politics.ie/forum/current-affairs/36672-corruption-dpps-office.html

Hennessy was the main advisor on the copyright act that has caused this snafu;

http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4602230-1.html

It is important to remember that, when referring to Ireland 1997-2011, we are not talking about a modern democracy; it is a third world country, with the prime minister paying a fortune of taxpayers' money to promote the musical and other "artistic" careers of his daughters and their partners, including the horrible "PS I love you".

U2, among many others, took advantage of the artists destroyers' exemption, which allowed them trade with dissolved companies and steal at will from far better musicians than them;

http://davemarsh.us/?p=951

Scream and scream again; the dismemberment of Ireland

2011-12-24T19:13:00.000-08:00

We are finally in the end game in which the Irish people are probably going to get to vote on how they like their colonial status. In the meantime, the scenario is that of “Scream and scream again”; the Irish state is kept on a life-support system as the “creditors” take now a leg, now an arm. It is interesting that the political parties have settled back to their historical levels. Fine Gael 30%; the more “republican” wing on the historical Sinn Fein parties in the 40’s; and labour barely reaching double figures.

So, what’s next? Ducking and diving for a brief period as the government attempts to avoid a referendum on fiscal union. Increasing attempts to push a risible “multiculturalism” within while pushing Irish ethnicity with possible American funders. EU regulations spreading like an inkblot. No let-up on the state’s assault on civil society; no attempt to reverse the inroads made by forces such as IMRO into music; and the numerous laws betokening tyranny.

Is there an alternative? Indeed there is. Unfortunately, it will be enunciated by Sinn Fein, who have little credibility and whose negotiation record is not good. SF have allowed partition supported by a unionist veto, total decommissioning – in fact the entire package that would have ensured a slow and agonizing death in a cowshed in South Armagh, where no-one can hear you scream, back in their salad days. The sequence whereby a bunch of Belfast thugs inherited the mantle of Terrence MacSwiney needs to be made explicit at some point.

Why non-critical immigration to Ireland should be stopped immediately

2011-08-09T17:48:00.001-07:00

Whether we like it or not, the Irish state was established as an ethnic project. It was decidedly not a racial one; deep in the maw and sinew of the nascent state was commitment to a set of principles which transcended race. The 1916 proclamation, which explicitly acknowledged two communities on the island of Ireland, anticipated the objections of critics like Anderson who questioned all post-colonial national movements

The tiny size of the Irish state has allowed takeover by various globalizing movements, with dreadful consequences. The first such, notoriously, was Roman Catholicism; the people's response to this mediaeval arrangement has formed the stuff of thousands of novels. The second was neoliberalism, with a brief foray into neoconservatism. It is in that context that immigration was encouraged

It is important to point out that no-one advocates a return to the situation wherein Irish women were asked to have more children than they could handle, while living a life recognizable to their sisters abroad as worthy of them. Yet the current situation wherein there are tens of thousands (at least) from abroad on welfare and bringing up their children at a time of mass unemployment and economic meltdown similarly is unacceptable

Given that the Irish people indicated overwhelmingly in a 2004 referendum that Irish citizenship should be reserved to those ethically Irish, immigration to Ireland should be stopped for all except critical jobs like software localization.

An Irish MK-Ultra, anyone?

2011-08-02T19:02:00.001-07:00

I believe the whole Norris incident offers vital clues as to how Ireland really works, and the creation ex nihilo of soothsayers from TCD – Gurdjiev, von Prondzynski, Norris, Robinson inter alia (spot the Irish name).

A first question is – how did Norris get a job at TCD with only a BA among his earned degrees? And whence this reputation for brilliance, given that he published nothing of any merit, let alone becoming meritorious of the accolade of “Ireland's leading Joyce scholar”;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/02/scandal-scuppers-gay-president

David is not a scholar of any sort. He is just - fortunately for us – a very incompetent politician who finally chanced his arm just a little too much.

In a metaphorical sense, David was born in 1987; it was then he first ran for a Trinity Seanad seat. He ran alongside Mary Robinson and Ferdinand von Prondzynski, inter alia. In a parallel universe, FvP is still running for the Irish presidency, while Norris is enjoying his third year of retirement from TCD. Instead, FvP decided to lead us to the Elysium of full corporate takeover of the universities and destroyed centuries of goodwill while losing 8 cases. Robinson represented both Norris and Bacik in court – unsuccessfully.

The TCD hustings in 1987 were interesting indeed, with FvP being outshone by his loquacious colleague. Of course, we now have the chance to be led by Robinson's successor Ivana Bacik to the Parnassus of abortion on demand. It is interesting how many of these people are immigrants with rather fragmented psyches and attenuated/mysterious family backgrounds.( An Irish MK-Ultra, anyone? )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

Gurdjiev does not even have a name – it should be Georgiades, if anything.

If he has any integrity, Norris will resign from the Seanad immediately. It is clear that a lot of people like him. It is also clear that he was never qualified to teach, and that a real scholar should have been coming into his own at 52, the age David retired.

Ireland could be turned around in a year

2011-08-01T09:11:00.001-07:00

There are several pathological tendencies within the Irish state and society which are being ignored in the frenzy about rate cuts and gay presidents

The first is the role of the state itself in eviscerating civil society. This tendency has not lessened in the slightest since the fall of the 1997-2011 juntas and their replacement by – well, by everyone not part of the juntas. Indeed, the shamelessness with which the state continues to fix its citizenry for the speculation, megalomania, and sybaritic lifestyles of a very few for a very short period is remarkable

Yet that is less surprising, put in the context of a state that has lurched from a disastrous Roman Catholic fixation to a no less disastrous neoliberal one, all at the expense of its people. Indeed, encouraging immigration allowed Brecht's parodic notion of the leadership choosing a new citizenry, as the old one had failed it

The results have been catastrophic, at every level – material, cultural, and existential. At the last level, there were many refuges for hold-outs against galloping statism until recently – pub, music session/concert, freedom of assembly and speech. The state has used proxies like IMRO to control Irish music, whose 1990's torrent has now turned into a trickle. In the meantime, attested criminality in the music business goes unpunished in Ireland, with Irish musos forced to get their rights through legal action in Britain and the USA.

A second mechanism used by the state is the differential application of European law and recommendation to control its people. So a farmer who went down to the pub and had 3 pints every Saturday night for 35 years before driving back slowly on deserted roads suddenly finds himself subject to the same legislation as a joyrider going 200 km/h on a crowded autobahn. Competition law was actually used (via Siptu) to stop musicians agreeing what fee to ask for in a gig.

It is true, at the time of writing in August 2011, that Irish people in general like their new PM. That is easily explicable by the fact that the government he replaced made no secret of its criminality and lack of basic self-control. The best that Enda Kenny can do, given the parameters he has set his administration (or he has allowed others to set) will be to restore the confidence of some in a MO that was intended to be totalizing and criminal in the first place

The irony, of course, is that Ireland could be turned around in a year

1.Default on all debt. Indeed, the “loan” from the “UK” should immediately be written off as reparations
2.Re-emphasise the sense of genetic and cultural belonging that will motivate us to give of our best
3.Scrap every parasitical entity within the Irish state, from think-tanks to NGOs, that drag us down financially
4.Claim all natural resources for the people as the constitution requires

The battle of the Gays

2011-06-17T07:27:00.000-07:00

David Norris has brilliantly maneuvered himself into a near-certainty candidacy for the Presidency in Ireland. Moreover, he will be doing so under a very popular anti-"bailout" banner

His opponent will almost certainly be Gay Mitchell, and journalists are already licking their lips at the possibility for headlines. A Labour party candidate will unfortunately (for them) also be pro-bailout and will lose traction

This is going to be fun!

Of “paiderastia” and paedophilia

2011-06-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

So when we were growing up in Ireland of the 70's, we were told to long for a united Ireland - one that would be quite Catholic and Gaelic

In recent years, we were told to rescind all that. Some of us are still deeply confused

There was also the 70's notion that the 26 county state was somehow involved in weakening the moral fiber inculcated by Catholicism. We got over that when we heard what the Catholic Church was really up to between the sheets, and partly as a result of David Norris' brave action against the Irish state, brought in the most liberal age of consent laws possible.

Homosexual sex between an "attractive" adult and 17-years old farmboy is legal in Ireland. They can even proceed to civil union. Unfortunately, as it happens, gays still often end up alone, indeed taking their own lives.

Now, however, we as a nation are asked to distinguish “paiderastia” and paedophilia. Of such cognitive dissonance do backlashes begin

Indeed, those of us confused by the notion of "multiculturalism" and the non-working Nigerian majority in Ireland now have another issue;

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110601/wl_africa_afp/nigeriacrimechildtrafficking_20110601143218

This does not apply solely to Nigerians;

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/wikileaks/kids-in-hse-care-ended-up-working-in-brothels-2665248.html

We now have two very dark scenarios;

1. Nigerian women are forced to become pregnant, and put on a plane to Ireland just before delivery, at which point they give birth to what was a new citizen (up to 2004)

2. Chinese children are trafficked into Ireland, put into HSE care, escape with the aid of their traffickers, and work as sex slaves

Wait until we get some "vivres-avec" from Haiti...

Good Friday, a week early

2011-04-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

Ireland got another kick from the admittedly inept Moody's today - but that's not the main story

After all the attempts to prop up the Irish property market, today's Allsop/space auction revealed;

1. Farm land even in relatively central (vis a vis Dublin) Wicklow is less than 8k an acre

2. Attractive 4-beds in Ballsbridge are a max of 550k (and that probably included some estate agents' trickery)

The total loss to the value of Irish real estate from today's auction, including farm land, is well over E100 billion, and perhaps closer to E500 billion

Only the revenue commissioners were party to this information before today - only they have the real price at which property changes hands

End of the Fianna Fail Music scam

2011-02-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

After 13 years, we finally got a judgement in US federal court;

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/4:2009cv03580/228656/68/0.pdf

It is unambiguously in our favour, upholding an earlier default judgmental recommendation

Now to get the scum who perpetrated the crimes in Ireland

A significant debate, at last

2011-02-17T12:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was possibly the first time in a millennium wherein potentates who could claim future jurisdiction over a sizeable part of the island, including Dublin, debated their plans as Gaeilge. In the history of the Irish "republic", the brief Dukes/Haughey interval 1987-1990 was the only one I can recall with the 2 principal party leaders having any real command of Irish (De Valera/Gubbins/Coll had very little)

We also had 3 dialects; Munster, Galway and Mayo. Had they allowed Pearse Doherty - as they should - that would have comprised Donegal. An opportunity missed; it is noticeable that sinn fein are now free to enunciate the republican narrative to which FF escaped to regroup in the 1980's. That option is therefore now closed off for FF.

As for what they had to say, it is clear that the recent cuts are a done deal, as are NAMA and the ECB/IMF bailout. When pressed, neither Gilmore nor Kenny denied the former. So let's look ahead to 18 months' time, when the "new"government is just as unpopular as the current Cowen-led one

The idea of Ireland as an expression of deep existential urges was most recently expressed in the life and work of the great and tragic Terrence MacSwiney. The 100 million or so people worldwide who identify themselves ethnically as Irish need a place of origin. It is the duty of the Irish state to provide a place that is genuinely culturally Irish; when the crime of paying off debts we never incurred again begins to grate, the national urge will again have to be carefully modulated as it gains in power.

Biffo Cowen; the Mannion's cross roads candidate?

2010-11-23T20:56:00.001-08:00

Barack Obama has been a disappointment to many – apart of course from Goldman Sachs, his main campaign contributor. It was a dastardly plot; get hosts of idealistic young people excited about vacuous slogans - “hope”, “change”, “yes, we can” - and then reveal the protagonist as being a conservative of extreme dullness. It has worked brilliantly; feeling left out of the fun, the young people 's parents formed a “Tea party” and will guarantee Republican control of all 3 branches of government from 2012. Barack had the power to disillusion a whole generation and inspire another – to fight against him.

It was perhaps de trop of Barack to put the system in place that saved Goldman and their fellow banksters; they were allowed borrow treasuries at 0% and then invest them at 2% or so – with the treasury department. After a few months, Goldman and their peers did not even obey B's summons to come to DC; it was apparently too cold, and nobody could tell them where the train station was. B. had a New Deal scale chance to introduce a more equitable system, but instead used the resources of the state to destroy working and middle class families and buttress the banksters.

B's true greatness, however, is manifest in his support of BP. Lest we forget, the disaster happened mainly because B had suggested 3 weeks earlier that this kind of drilling was safe! Remarkably, no-one has pointed out that Steve Chu, his energy secretary, was the shill who brought BP to UC Berkeley. Indeed, Chu's scenario was DCU-like; whole labs, funded with public money, assigned to BP with no public access. Tenure in the UC system is a great deal more tenuous than is realized; it is held for each academic in the smallest dept in which one teaches. If that dept is abolished, so is one's tenure.

Not so with Brian Cowen, not so. Those who believe that he was constructed from various parts of farm animals only have part of the truth. That happened only after the soviets ran out of money after constructing his mind; the use of a horse's posterior as the hox genes for the face is too well known to rehearse here (I eschewed the glaring pun). . Their funds already had been well spent on a brilliant plan to take down globalized corporatism, now unfolding.

First of all, allow Anglo-Irish bank to perpetrate a scam that would make Bernie Madoff blush; surely the greatest financial fraud in European history. It is rather piquant that the criminal investigation has stalled due to encrypted files in a country that taught decryption of British SIGINT as part of a DCU undergrad course. Then get the other Irish banks to imitate it (as if they could! - but they did try) with Biffo as finance minister overseeing it with a leer.

The true brilliance of the plot has become clear only in late November, 2010. Surely the sensible thing would be to open the books to Fine Gael, FF's good twin – and equally dependent on an overpaid middle class – and “Labour” whose funds mainly derive from union “dues” paid by civil servants? Posing as an incoherent alcoholic, Cowen knew that he could keep the international financial markets in turmoil by appealing to the atavistic instincts of his party. Remember the 77, boys! And Labour can wait!

So there is NO possibility of a budget passing on December 7, 2010, as the IMF has demanded. Whenever “good sense” (read – world government) is proposed, Biffo can simply wrap the green flag around himself. The fact that very few in FF have any family connections to the “War of independence” or the “Civil War” does not matter - it is their narrative.

I salute the brilliance of the soviets in 1959 as they implanted this specimen in an unsuspecting female somewhere in the Irish midlands

Ps Mannion's cross roads is in Co. Offaly

PPS The prediction about the budget was of course wromg but let's see how the finance bill goes 26 eanair 2011

PPPS I was wrong again - the finance Bill passed, with many FF TDS guaranteeing their own political demise. Immediately, the Irish political landscape fractured into right and left, with FF's new leader "burying the hatchet" with Fine Gael, and Sinn Fein leading the agenda with an anti-IMF line with which Labour will have to keep up. IMO, at least

Ireland; a colony once again

2010-04-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

From 2004-7, I had a set of papers accepted at Irish studies conferences, some of which financial considerations stopped me from attending. I also spoke at some of the better American universities during this period on the same subject; what I predicted was the imminent financial, moral, and cultural collapse of the ethnic project we call the “republic of Ireland”. On foot of this, I wrote a book called “Ireland; a colony once again” whose publication has been delayed mainly because of having to deal in my professional life with the fetid, yet gargantuan corruption at the core of the Irish state. En route, I have come to see this state as not just a colonial force directed against the Irish people in the name of various ideas like neoliberalism, but as effectively genocidal.

Both seem radical contentions, unless of course the latter seems simply ridiculous and downright barmy. For a first line of defence, I could perhaps point to the fact that Dublin has been a colonial centre for much of its recent history; first, undoubtedly, for the British and now – with well over 70% of our “native” legislation actually comprised by EU directives – for the neoliberal dispensation authored by the EU, WTO, and other such bodies. One could also point to the theocratic experiment from c. 1935-1970 that we are still recovering from, and the brief flirtation with neoconservatism from 2002to 2004. Yet it is the genocidal idea that attracts me more.

“Genocide” was coined by Lemkin as a term to describe, not necessarily the physical extinction of a people, but wiping away by any means necessary all trace of them from the earth. According to its adoption in international law in 1948, no-one need be killed; the core notion in the term “genocide” is wiping the footprint of a people from the earth. Up to this point in 1948, international law allowed a state treat its people like a farmer treats his chickens. Now there is a really high mountain to climb; I am going to argue that a state whose highest levels consist almost entirely of Irish indigenes are nevertheless actively conniving in the genocide of the Irish.

However, consider the following recent developments;

1.Since 2008, the government's policies have been carefully calibrated to ensure massive emigration (due to unemployment) of the native Irish, while maintaining the failed neoliberal experiment incarnated above all in a disastrously corrupt banking sector.
2.At the same time, massive immigration has been encouraged, with the immigrants receiving many benefits denied to the native Irish.
3.An assault has been performed on sites of enormous archaeological significance like Tara, with the govt showing a willingness to destroy any protectors, both legally and physically.
4.Natural resources are being privatized , as exemplified by shell in Mayo, with the state's armed forces acting as Shell's private army
5.The Irish establishment profit enormously from all these developments; indeed the current minister for transport allowed the the private firm behind the most controversial road development (beside Tara) to share office space with his dept.
6.Historically, revisionism has become de rigeur. Indeed, our foreign-born current President (who learned Spanish at the expense of Gaelic at school) spends a great deal of her time debauching the military projects of the Irish like the anti-Tudor uprising
7.An assault on the musical culture of Ireland culminated in a suspended privatization attempt in the 1990's In the meantime, the government and national broadcaster has adduced boy bands and chick lit as official national culture. Also in the meantime, scam artists are preferred over genuine musical artists, and - exemplified by a recent US federal court case – the Irish state is the only state that allows dissolved companies to continue to steal copyrights, as well as trade openly with the approval of the state's export bodies
8.The major media disproportionately put foreign-born models on their covers to exemplify a changing of the guard

Am I over-reacting? I really hope so. In the meantime, there are indigenous rights declarations (like that of 1993) lodged that the UN to which we are surely entitled to have recourse

The new Irish cultural campaign/offensive

2010-03-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Many of we Irish living involuntarily in exile in the USA laughed long and hard at the latest scam – the appointment of the other gay Byrne as cultural ambassador (since the original one is after all doing the roads);

Byrne's appointment

This Irish government has for over a decade sustained an offensive targeting any creative artists who queered the pitch of their beloved westlife, cecilia ahern etc. Clearly, the money has run out – from having one of ahern's garbage productions on primetime network TV, they are now realistically looking at whether they can stream video from 300-seater venues in the USA

When they were still virtuous and pure, mar dhea, the “Greens” asked many questions about nefarious activities in the music biz from which FF were benefitting mightily. It involved also Enterprise Ireland; briefly, what was happening was that artists would be “signed” by Ffers, their copyrights stolen with collusion from Ffers at IMRO, and trade fairs like Midem (where the Irish stand was controlled by FF's Shay Hennessy) would be used to export millions of units The artits never got paid

We got the cops involved, and IMRO is now a much cleaner body. A federal court case is in the offing for recovery of royalties

That case, again

and the judge ordered a mediation meeting after an unsuccessful attempt to dismiss by Valley, who responded with another motion to dismiss which is to be heard, appropriately, on April Fools' Day, 2010

Details are on bottom of http://seanonuallain.com/id2.html

in what is admittedly a long narrative, appended. The “greens” need to go before they allow and indeed assist FF in destroying this part of our heritage as well

Valley entertainment has recently in 2009 been sued by an independent Irish singer-songwriter Melanie O'Reilly for copyright violation. To date Valley has paid all royalties due to Ms O'Reilly to an individual with no legitimate claim on Ms O'Reilly's material, and having agreed through its lawyers in 2000 not to do so. Furthermore, it has continued to do so having been furnished with documentation that the "company" it got the license from in 1998 is not a valid business entity in Ireland or anywhere

Valley continues to steal from Irish musicians, and its bravado in "standing up" to ex-President Bush has to be seen for the fraud that it is. Its own website (checked 3/9/10) confirms that "Seven labels collaborated for the original release of Celtic Woman by Ireland's Excellent Music"

In that, it shares a dubious distinction with Quebec's St Clair (now owned by the private investment firm Pouschine Cook Capital Management, LLC) However, Excellent music was struck off the Irish register of companies in 2000 - and again, in the case of Valley, Ms O'Reilly's putative license came from another source. Both Valley and St Clair can look forward to many years of lawsuits from Irish musicians, having their misdeeds exposed, and boycotts of their products - the boycott is after all an Irish invention.

What is stunning about this is the gall of this Irish government in attempting to domesticate artists, having victimized them for so long. The truth of the matter is that the colonial effort which involved also traducing the universities and the native science enterprise itself in the manner described in the companion blog has now run aground due to lack of funds. Now, having funded garbage like “Celtic thunder “ in the USA (omnipresent on public TV at one stage; the screams of protest still reverberate), they are trying to move up the value chain.

PS 5u aibrean 2010; We won both parts of the case, with St Clair having a default judgement lodged against them, and Valley agreeing a financial settlement, with our tracks taken off their album

The “greens” and climate change

2010-03-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

It may be hard to believe, but less than a decade ago the “greens” were an avowedly leftwing party (and described as such by Gormley himself at national convention). Every effort was made by the volunteer
(and elected) national council to reflect as much of Irish society as possible in a wide range of policies; most of us who served thereon have very warm memories of our colleagues there. A warning signal was that the current bunch of elected reps showed up perhaps once each over a five-year period; Gormley's contempt for policy is best attested by the fact he lived less than a mile away from the hotel where meetings took place, and only showed up once – ironically for an incinerator discussion

There is much controversy about climate change, largely because the “hockey stick” model – let's be patriotic(!) and call it the “hurley” - is a palpable fake to anyone who knows even the most minor aspects of time series prediction. Any attempt to come to conclusions as broad of Al Gore does would need massively more evidence, and the hurley was done without any reference to the wide community of statisticians. That is not to say that climate change is not occurring, and indeed it may be partly anthropogenic. However, it is its political and financial uses which are more significant

Wrt gore, it could be argued that Gore got the Nobel and his currently lucrative career for staying quiet like a good little boy while Bush stole the 2000 election. Gormley had similar problems. He wanted to be a minister, but hated the idea of an independent set of policies acting as constraints, particularly as he is by no means a real green of any sort. So farewell integrity, truth, respect for the law – let alone the policies we used pass on national council about the Arts, waste, GMOS, and so on. Gormley first tried a policy coup – all policies could be summarily changed by the elected reps, utterly in defiance of the will of the members. When this was turned down, he looked into the void – and liked what he saw

FF were never going to allow him interfere with their sacred scams, many of which he had exposed in the Dail – the music biz/IMRO, DCU, banking and so on – let alone shell, Tara, etc. Why not just tear up all the policies and find a new utterly controversial and apparently urgent issue for stupid kids to get excited about? Therein lies the true genius of climate change as a political tool; it is rather like transubstantiation and life after death in that non-one can possibly disprove it, no-one really need do anything except shout down all who oppose it, and it gives a free pass to finished narcissists like Gormley and his colleagues as they destroy 25 years' hard work by activists committed to the sanctity not just of the physical environment, but forms of human life that inform our time on earth with purpose and meaning.

Property and U2; the old rock'n'roll

2010-02-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I started a music company with my partner Melanie O'Reilly

Free downloads!

It has been successful beyond our expectations, with sales in the hundreds of thousands, and many award nominations. The only problem is this; we have been paid royalties for only about 2% of our earnings, and this is the subject of an ongoing federal case in the USA;

Anatomy of the music scam

We cut our litigation teeth on U2's dissolved “Record services” which the Irish corporate enforcement authorities allowed to continue to trade for years after its dissolution. U2's links with property development in Ireland continued to the point that they thanked the “builders” McKillen, Mulryan and Qunilan on their 2009 album. Imagine our lack of surprise when all 3 names ended up on the list of the miscreants whose reckless trading has sunk the Irish economy;

The taxpayer gets the bill for Deborah Harry etc

To safeguard their privileges for the next world after this one, all three contributed, Borgia style, to a Vatican refurbishment;

Sicut fuit in saecula saeculorum

Is it not about time that someone thoroughly investigated U2?

27u nollag 2011 - The good news; Dave Marsh has now taken up the story

http://davemarsh.us/?p=951

The bad; Looks like bono has successfully angled to replace Gabriel Byrne as cultural ambassador for Ireland

Ireland's narrow escape; the failure of e-voting

2010-01-07T14:08:00.001-08:00

In early 2004, as until 2008, Ireland had many of the ingredients for that type of corporate governance we call fascism; a largely unaccountable police force (as the 2006 Morris report has attested), union of labor unions and employers under the auspices of the state in “ social partnership” agreements, a charismatic power-hungry prime minister (P. “Bertie” Ahern), and continual encroachment by a powerful state into aspects of civil society that started with the domestication of the trade unions. Massive privatizations were being contemplated, starting with the universities; of those actually achieved, that of the telecommunications sector has left Ireland in the third world with respect to broadband. The universities' privatizations were presaged by attempted manipulation of the quasi-Orwellian “social partnership” agreements to destroy academic tenure, with the death of at least one young academic as a result, and the destruction of academic freedom.

From January to June 2004, Ireland through Ahern held both the presidency of the EU (which rotates) and that of the European Parliament, through a rightwing elected parliamentarian. Having violated the practice of Irish neutrality in allowing both rendition flights and US troops through Shannon airport, one of the themes of the Irish dual presidency was to debauch the status of interlocutor of France/Germany and the Anglo-Saxon military alliance by unambiguous support by Ireland of the Iraq adventure. Dutch Nedap e-voting machines were chosen to implement the final stage of the takeover by globalized corporatism; a report was commissioned with political hacks and appointees forming a majority in the committee.

However, problems began immediately. The initial reaction of the committee to the proposed e-voting process was so severe that the Dutch threatened libel action. The report, as released a month before the machines were meant to be used in European and local elections, is at www.cev.ie/htm/report/V02.pdf. It made clear that there was no debugged version of the software available even at that late stage, so voting proceeded in time-honored Irish fashion. This includes informal checking by “tallymen” from each party, and formal public counting by civil servants. The government was trounced, with Ahern's party suffering their worst result since entering the democratic realm from their wilderness years as the proto-IRA.

An intriguing aspect of the proposed software is the use of Microsoft access as the database program, which few responsible consultants would have urged. Blackbox voting, among others, have shown how access can be exploited to set up a double accounting system, with election officials acting in good faith likely to be duped. After controversies about the storage of the machines on the property of his political supporters, Ahern ordered a second report which came out in 2006. It can be found at evoting.cs.may.ie/. Despite frantic attempts by Ahern to spin it as a resounding endorsement, on the extraordinary basis that it said that only the software was at fault, it is now clear that e-voting would not be used in our general election in 2007. When his popularity blipped upward, as in October 2006, Ahern attempted to reintroduce the topic, with the plan being use of e-voting in 2009 local and European elections, with storage by the army. This was abandoned, and the machines are now being junked.

The Irish case strongly suggests that e-voting is critical to the neocon agenda; it is vitally important to keep the pressure up so that this proposal never again sees the light of day.

The Irish state and revisionism

2009-12-29T19:34:00.000-08:00

The ennobling of Sir P. Bartholomew Ahern approacheth; he will soon follow Sir Peter Sutherland, Sir Tony etc down the aisle. While the teaching of revisionism in Irish unis strikes some as problematic – how can you presume the moral force to levy taxes from people in order to pay lecturers to question your historical right to levy them? - here, in the US, Irish government policy reached fantastical heights of absurdity.

In 2005, the Irish consul-general in the western US decided to ignore the existence of a program in Irish studies in San Francisco and celtic studies at UC Berkeley, as well as the pleas of the Irish community here, and gave money to British studies to put on lectures in Irish studies. The sole historical lecturer was an arch-revisionist; check out

Tugging the forelock

After the “Workshop with Professor Jane Ohlmeyer” Revisionism: Debates on Irish History I guess we can expect “Pro-choice; debates in reproductive rights” and “No zyclon; debates on the holocaust.”

We got these lectures stopped only after sending a delegation to Aengus O Snodaigh in the Dail; to his credit, Aengus asked a written question. In the meantime, the Irish state has not attended any of the main regular non-political cultural events here, including a whole Irish day put on by International House at UC Berkeley;

“Question No 341

Parliamentary Question - Dept Details

To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs if his attention has been drawn to
the fact that the Irish consul in California donated funding to a course on
revisionist history run by the British Studies Department in the University
of California, Berkeley and has refused funding to a course on traditional
Irish music proposed to be run under celtic studies at the same university;
and if he will make a statement on the matter.
- Aengus Ó Snodaigh.

For WRITTEN answer on Tuesday, 12th December, 2006.”

FF are Clemenceau's “radical republicans” in Irish drag; they got away with pretending to believe in a UI until it suited them not to. One of the Ohlmeyer lectures is on the web; we were indeed there, did object, and our objections were edited out. This lecture was described by Prof. Dan Melia, secretary of academic senate at UC Berkeley, as “boring and stupid”. La Ohlmeyer and her like are just academic mercenaries paid by the “Free” state to keep the coolies in line; once out of their Irish hothouse, they come across as the morons they are.

The Irish electorate did not know that, as events have proven, any provision of the GFA can unilaterally be rescinded by the British. Had they done so, it is highly likely arts 2+3 from the 1937 constitution would not be in play, and there would have been no uproar about the Mandelson action in unilaterally suspending the NI assembly. Incidentally, this uproar went as far as the Taoiseach's office; Blair was personally attacked from within that body.

It is perfectly legitimate to ask for another referendum on the issue, which is currently legally ambiguous. In the meantime, the spectacle of McGuinness and Robinson having to run something together will be good for a laugh.

So many of us do in fact feel that we have a territorial claim, and that there is a border dispute.

Putting things extremely simply;

1.The Irish govt. funded lectures given under the aegis of British studies on revisionism at UC Berkeley. Brit Studies, in turn, is a dept. within European studies. They had promised in writing not to do this.
2.The Irish govt. refused to fund fully accredited academic courses both at New College and UC Berkeley on Irish culture. In fact, they have repeatedly denied the existence of these courses.
3.After a question by Aengus, they finally deigned to engage with the matter by sending a delegation to UC Berkeley and actually talking to the New college people.
4.However, they did nothing, contributed nothing, and courses have had to be cancelled again
5.Clint Eastwood's recognition by the Irish state for perhaps the most significant global contributions to Irish culture of the past 5 years would have been a useful publicity coup, but this govt. is unable to see this. We spoke to Clint in 2007, and he would have loved a formal invite to Ireland
6.The Irish govt. again has been conspicuous by its absence at an annual international festival at cultures here, and we now routinely apologise for their chronic non-participation in cultural events.
7.The revisionism project is essentially a retrospective justification of British rule in Ireland. It is therefore logically inconsistent for the Irish state to levy tax for revisionist lectures, whether in Ireland or the US.

What is galling in this case is the attacks on Irish culture itself by the state (see the music scam thread on seanonuallain.com), along with the abysmal intellectual level of defenders of revisionism.

We always win this one, and will do so again.

PS
Does anyone have similar tales from the assimilation of the Irish to the British state? In case anyone doesn't believe the above;

From the UC Berkeley Institute of European studies report 2005-2006 , P. 13;

'Thanks to the generous support of the Irish government, Jane Ohlmeyer hosted a workshop on “Revisionism; Debates on Irish history”'

Heritage-community-rights; a new political movement

2009-12-18T10:40:00.000-08:00

For 5 years I was sci + tech convenor for the GP and a member of national council. About 2002, there was an internal coup in the party with policy and executive power centralised in Leinster house. Indeed, Gormley asked me about then to allow policy to be decided in Leinster House. Several of us resigned over the Ciaran Cuffe affair, which began the party's lurch to the right.

My partner Melanie O'Reilly (of RTE 1) and I live for now in Berkeley, California, but my visa restrictions have lessened, and I can return more often.

We see the following major issues that should be addressed by an Irish
ecology party

1. National ownership of resources, as the 1916 proclamation envisages; Shell in mayo is the reductio ad absurdum there.
2. Protection of heritage; while Tara is extremely prominent, equally destructive attacks have been launched at the native music industry and – hard though it may be to believe- native scientists, who are being replaced by grotesquely subsidized foreign imports (a la Medialab and SFI)
3. An ethical foreign policy, which the current use of Shannon is not, putting it mildly
4. Sustainable development of the west (I am from Clare, and have seen my hometown of Kilkee -or Kilkutta because of its sewerage problems– being destroyed by development that has been illegal in California since a century ago and John Muir)

However, those of us from the original greens remember a time when being “green” meant also community, equality, and health. To this I would add “rights” as the state in Ireland becomes more and more oppressive. . Similarly, I think it is necessary that any new heritage party should have “green” in its title, as we should not concede that. So “Eire ghlas/Green Ireland” (the alternative for “green' in Ireland, uaithne, is hard to pronounce for English speakers)and underneath Heritage-community--rights strikes me as good marketing. It is tragic – but also a fantastic opportunity – that the current “greens' have embraced neoliberalism, as incarnated in the Lisbon treaty, just as this exploitative and inefficient way of running the world's economy has proven without merit.

Indeed, there is a massive opportunity now with NAMA going through, horrible though it is in concept. It is my opinion that the GE 2007 was turned around for FF in the last week with developer money; it has been known for some time that FF pay canvassers. The quid pro quo was that Bertie would make calls to the banks whenever a developer needed the banks to go easy on them. NAMA means that this unaccountable source of power within Irish society will be subject to FoI requests; and, sure enough, developers are already having court orders against them. In this vein, I should add that I believe FF to be finished; their very success in enriching their supporters, and the vacuousness of their agenda (they can hardly start on about the north again a la Haughey in opposition) ensures this.

___________________________________________________________________________

Executive summary

“Eire ghlas/Green Ireland”

Heritage-community-rights

This party proposal combines the well-accepted green emphasis on sustainability with an emphasis on individual rights. It argues that the state in Ireland has become too big, and needs to withdraw from many areas in which it has proven incompetence. Any resources it acquires through taxation should be used for health and community, not neoliberal experiments. Conversely, it should actually apply its laws on corporate enforcement, rather than allowing rampant corruption. Finally, the provisions of the original GP constitution that separated policy, elected reps, and the executive should be honoured this time around.
___________________________________________________________________________

Eire ghlas/ Green Ireland founding principles

Prologue

Eire ghlas attempts to realise the aspiration that the rights of the
planet are the rights of the person. Green parties to date have run
the risk of forgetting about issues like social justice in their
righteous enthusiasm to save the biosphere. While this enthusiasm is
not misplaced, there is a fatal flaw in conventional “intrinsic value”
Green thought; the person is the culmination of nature, and political
parties should never value the rest of nature over the person. The
resulting political project, our political project, is a far more
interesting one that that of conventional Green thought.

We argue that environmental destruction, which is indeed accelerating
at frightening rates, is ultimately the result of centuries'-long
attacks at the dignity of the human being, both by forces on the left
and on the right. To realise our full humanity in all its physical,
biological, social, intellectual and spiritual dimensions, which is
the real project of every human life, includes within itself the
project of caring for the biosphere of which we are part.
Specifically, this project, stated as a political program, is radical
enough to dismiss as capitalist propaganda current neoliberal thought,
and as socialist propaganda attacks on the post-enlightenment concept
of the individual in the name of any kind of forced collectivism
including so-called “social partnership”. Social justice, thought of
as economic fairness, can be achieved neither by capitalism or its
communist mirror-image; it requires the altogether more sophisticated
resources of economic game theory, among much else. It also requires
changing the Irish legal system to give individuals legal resources when
the state attempts to expand itself further into civil society
by engaging in litigation with a citizen, often taking the citizen to the supreme court a la Cahill versus DCU, 29 June, 2009.

Environmental
costs need to be factored in as concretely as real human effort, as
distinct from manipulation of economic indices, in considering any
plan of action.

Ireland, 2009

The dozen years up to 2008 have been glory years for economic neoliberals in
Ireland; by the same token, the next 15 will be the opposite. The
surrender of control of interest rates, and self-imposition of
draconian interpretations of relatively broad EU guidelines like those
on competition, effectively created a property bubble, and deprived
the state of the economic autonomy that Arthur Griffith so stressed.
Emboldened by their empowerment due to these circumstances,
neoliberals undertook a project of running down and privatising many
state services that had taken generations of dedicated work to build
up. The resulting mess has produced the most privately indebted
country in the world per head of real income, and a thoroughly
disempowered younger generation. At the height of this period, with
extraordinary rendition/torture flights being allowed in Shannon, the
FF/PD government attempted to impose the same kind of e-voting system
that has been discredited and abandoned in the US. That was Ireland's
moral nadir, and fortunately we stopped them

In the meantime, the official “Green” party negotiated for a place
in government with this thoroughly criminal government. For this
reason alone, it would be imperative to form an alternative green
party; however, there are many more positive reasons that we will now
see.

Policy principles

Constitutional

EG believes that the sterling work of the Irish people in achieving an
agreed-upon written constitution needs to be responded to in our
generation with equal vision and courage. It believes that the
following changes need to be made;
1.Deletion of the theocratic prologue in favour of a secular statement
like that with which the Indian constitution opens
2 Addition of an amendment like the first amendment in the US
which, by protecting religions from
the state, has also protected the state from religion. If
necessary, the existence of individual conscience as the moral
unit of the state needs to be stated explicitly.
3 Deletion of all other sectarian and sexist implications of
the 1937 constitution

The People and its Territory

It is a historical fact that a terrorist campaign in the name of a
united Ireland paradoxically led to the Irish state's dropping its
claim on the north-eastern part of the island. The history of British
colonisation and indeed genocide in Ireland, and the inspiration
Ireland's revolts gave to other colonies, are similarly historical
facts. While a united Ireland should remain an aspiration, the GFA
has provided peace, and an altogether more interesting project is
possible. One of our nobel laureates, John Hume, suggested that the
100 million or so people worldwide of Irish ancestry should be offered
nationality, if not citizenship.

State and civil society

The incursions by the state into civil society culminated in deepening
of employer/union “partnerships” which resulted in a de facto loss of
the right to withhold labour, to get reinstated once fired, and indeed
to form trade unions in the public service (since the state insisted
that you join one of its choice as a condition of employment).
Simultaneously, membership of unions in the private sector is
vanishing. This is one area that the state should withdraw from.

The experience of Ireland as an independent state indicates that the
state can run a rudimentary health service, schools up to but not
including third level (where its institutions need private
competition), an airline, and a telecommunications network, inter
alia. Its incursions into the music business and indeed the arts in
general, software and most of science, and much else have had the sole
effect of providing subsidised competition for altogether more
talented individuals. All this needs to be rectified.

It looks rather as though the crisis in the irish banking system resulted in a de facto
nationalisation of the banks by issuing Irish (banking) bonds which are bought mainly by the Irish banks, and mainly with money supplied by the ECB. This effective nationalisation will have must
be adjusted in favour of the people and against the incompetent and immoral bank management, perhaps by turning the bank bonds into shares and shifting the burden from the taxpayer to the mega-institutions that own the bonds..

The economy

Ireland must be prepared to regain control of its destiny, even if
this means renegotiating the terms of its membership in the EU, WTO,
and so on. For example, an average house should cost at most double
one's income, and the mortgage should last at most 20 years. In a
state that has borrowed $100 billion or so from foreign banks since
2003, this state of affairs will not be achieved without pain.

Environmental costs must be factored into every activity monitored by
the state. Corporate enforcement must rise to the level of the US;
this in itself will release massive energy from individual
entrepreneurs who have been struggling under the crony capitalism that
weighed on recent Irish public life, and destroyed countless businesses

Finally, it is taken as self-evident that the state should aspire to
social justice, indeed equality of opportunity, for all its citizens.

Green Ireland

We still have a relatively pristine environment, be this due to penury
and genocide rather than ethics. The mindset that would damage the
Tara surroundings needs to be expunged. Rigorous claims should be enforced
on all our assets from predators, both from without and within. With
this, an emphasis on Irish culture and its unbroken history for
thousands of years needs to complement our experience of our beautiful
country.

Bare bones structure of the party

If nothing else, the 2002 coup demonstrated the urgent necessity of maintaining democratic and representational structures in the party. The unit should be the constituency, not the ward. There has to be an executive, elected each year at national convention,but it is one whose brief should be tactics rather than strategy, let alone the capacity to compromise core principles. There has to be national council, a policy making body, which electoral candidates should attend, along with policy co-ordinators and an elected member from each constituency. The contempt shown for policy by electoral candidates last time around is, in retrospect, what doomed the party as principles and strategy became subservient to sound-bites.