Thursday, July 5, 2012

The beginnings of real debate in Ireland




Ireland - or rather the Irish state - has almost magically created an elite so financially and existentially comfortable that the rest of us might as well be living in another country, even if we share the physical island. It would behove this elite simply to keep its mouth shut; we don't want the peasants revolting! Instead, they continue hectoring about “monetizing the culture”, 'innovation' and so on while not allowing the rest of us any access to the resources in media and indeed state-supported universities that they so jealously guard.

“Monetizing the culture” is precisely what artists do; given the theft of their property through mechanisms like IMRO, they do so at risks that re far greater than anything in other comparable European cultures. What “monetizing the culture” in fact meant was a request for the state to provide infrastructure, both physical and moral, so that already extremely wealthy individuals could accelerate their stealing from the rest of us, this time through the arts.

There is no “we” of equals in Ireland any more; yet there is a diabolical tendency for the elite to demand further unpaid effort from the serfs. A quintessential example is O'Toole's recent jeremiad against theater from his well-paid sinecure at the mysteriously-owned Irish times/Pravda;


At a guess, this was a “kick the dog' response to his being outed as clueless at the meeting he himself refers to toward the start of the article. In any case, one of the targets of O'Toole's critique replied furiously;



As it happens, we are about to debate the issue at UC Berkeley;


However, that is not the point of this post. Since O'Toole has opened the door by attacking some producers in society in the name of “we”, effectively accusing them of wasting taxpayers' money, is it not time to ask whether we need O'Toole himself? Or the universities, and their spin-offs like SFI, given their reluctance to open themselves to accountability in any sense? Since the web afford the opportunity to dispense with perhaps 15k public “servants” in tertiary education and at least ten times that overall, why don't “we” just do it?

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Introducing the academic tenure blog backup

The following entries are from a blog that I ran on a "permanent guest" basis for 4 years.

It may or may not be available on its original site at the time you are reading this, so I have backed it up here

I am no longer convinced that "academic tenure" is the correct way for the state to get involved in scholarship. Conversely, I am absolutely convinced that the assault on  "academic tenure" in Ireland needed to be fought. Had we not fought, the result would be a debasement of the activities of teaching, learning and research to the point that they were to become subject to the whim of globalized corporatism. Oh, and literally thousands of university staff at all levels were going to be subject to summary dismissal without cause - exactly what happened to me.

It is my view that developments in online education allow sophisticated education, including technical education, to be done at the highest level in an environment which removes the necessity of the type of university administrator we saw gaining huge power in Ireland. The Irish state now has to justify its expenditure of taxpayers' money in an inefficient, corrupt and outmoded system.

At a higher level - one that the Irish state will likely as not never reach -  states as political entities have historically domesticated scholars by offering them security like "academic tenure". Given that the bulk of the pedagogy will now come from elite US institutions, a new relationship between state and scholar must be attempted

tenure iuil 2008 (guest editorial)

Academic Tenure Under Threat in Ireland

Higher Education in Ireland is provided by universities, institutes of technology and colleges of education. There are seven universities in Ireland. The institutions of higher education are publicly funded institutions with some institutional autonomy and receive about 90% of their income from state funds. Although they are autonomous institutions, the universities' duties and responsibilities are laid down by the Universities Act 1997. They are also monitored by a statutory body, the Higher Education Authority (HEA), which allocates the funding coming from the state.

About 80% of the academic staff in Ireland hold permanent tenured positions. All full time academic staff are officers of the state and tenured in the sense that they can not be fired without a serious cause, such as incompetence or outrageous conduct. In this sense, job security can be considered high (for instance, compared to the UK where only about 55% hold permanent contracts and there is no tenure). The academic staff who are not protected by tenure are primarily those who are in fixed term or temporary employment. In recent years, there has been an increase in the numbers of academics who are employed on non permanent conditions.

The first appointment to an academic position at an Irish university usually is at the level of lecturer. Lecturers need a PhD degree and preferably publications of high quality. Permanent positions of lecturer start with a probationary period of 12 months. At the end of this period, the promotion committee (invariably made up of senior officers of the university together with four elected academic staff representatives) decides on whether to award tenure or extend the probation period. A positive evaluation requires satisfactory performance of lecturing and other duties, evidence of interest in the pursuit of research and scholarship, and contribution and interest in the departmental development. Upon completion of satisfactory probation, the lecturer is granted tenure

Nowadays lectureships are often temporary - one, three or five years. Many new temporary jobs of one year have emerged because of government funding of temporary positions through the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS): they award funding which includes money to pay for replacement lecturers.

In February 2007, the HIGH COURT in Dublin, Ireland adjudicated on a case involving the interpretation of academic tenure and in particular, Article 5.1. of a controversial Statute of one of its seven Universities, Dublin City University (DCU). The DCU Statute 3 declared

“The tenure of officers of the university shall be such tenure as is conferred on each such officer in his or her individual contract with the university”.
As all DCU contracts of employment are legally constructed to allow the University to unilaterally terminate any contract by the giving of three months notice without cause or reason, the outgoing President of the University, Ferdinand Von Prondzynski, (an academic and employment lawyer by training) believed he could overcome the legal requirements of Universities Act, 1997 Section 25 (6) to "provide for academic tenure" by crafting this wording to stand up to legal scrutiny.

In the case, the Court addressed the question of the meaning of the word “tenure” as used in s. 25(6) of the University Act, 1997. The judge declared that the term as used must go further than a mere specification of the terms of employment. As pointed out a university already has (under subs. (3)) an entitlement to fix the terms and conditions of all employees (including officers). If the obligation to provide for tenure merely meant, as argued by DCU, an obligation to provide for the terms and conditions of employment so far as the length of that employment was concerned, then it would be a redundant obligation as that obligation is already covered by subs. (3). He concluded that the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) must have used the term “tenure” to mean something more than simply delineating terms and conditions as to the length of employment.

He was also satisfied that the term “tenure” brings with it an obligation to give a greater degree of permanency to the status of officers of a university, than would be the case in circumstances where, as a matter of contract, such officers could have their contract terminated on three months notice. He was also satisfied that the purported specification of tenure by a University Statute by reference to contracts of employment which, on the facts, provide for termination on three months notice, was an invalid exercise of the undoubted entitlement of the university to specify tenure.

The President of DCU appealed the judgement and the Case is now heading to the Supreme Court in Ireland for a further definitive ruling. The outcome of the Supreme Court hearing will have major implications for academic staff and academic tenure in all Irish universities but a hearing and judgment will take some time.

PS 2 marta 2014 - The above was NOT written by me and its well-crafted prose heralded a new ethos in irish affairs.  Forget about all the meetings/posturings of academics and so on - all relevant issues were decided by the courts, which no academic beyond me. Connell Fanning and Paul Cahill (the litigants) attended,  and the state knew that it could replace all Irish academics at 3 months' notice. In particular, DCU in Feb 2003  through the business body IBEC threatened a high court injunction to enforce a little-known provision of the 1990 industrial relations act that prohibits strikes for "Single" dismissals.  Yes, you've read that right - anyone can be sacked for no reason in ireland and, unless they have the funds for a high court action, have zero chance of getting reinstated no matter how good their case. see my piece "The destruction of academic tenure in Ireland" in the "Ireland in crisis" book (2013, CSP)

What the courts decided was ambiguous, the Cahill vs DCU case apparently ended with a split decision in the Geoghegan judgement of Dec 2009; and then  Geoghegan, in the penalty/remedy  phase, basically reversed himself and found 100% for Cahill in mar 2010.In my case, I was prevented from taking a high court case, totally illegally, by Kate O'Mahony head of the EAT; she even invented a supreme court precedent for her decision before admitting in public (Jan 2010) that she had fabricated it. I then accused her of corruption, again in public (and in writing) and her judgement on my case is under appeal.While I am ruled to be unfairly dismissed, and repeatedly offered money by DCU which I have refused, a precedent has been set that the Irish unis can use loopholes in the law to intimidate academics and destroy academic freedom with repeated appeals using taxpayers' money.

The behaviour of SIPTU and their DCU rep, Marnie Holborow, was particularly egregious. In mar 2003 they deceived their coerced membership at DCU by telling them they couldn't strike about an illegal disciplinary statute. Legally, they could and wanted to do so by a margin of 150-0. In fact, holborow had been promised an office for SIPTU at DCU and the real story is that Jack O'Connor had unilaterally  withdrawn the strike option. Now minister alex white, on being appointed a SIPTU-DCU mediator, did precisely nothing other than taking taxpayers' money to set up a Labor party presence at DCU, refusing to talk even to the academics on SIPTU's section committee here but only to fellow failed labor candidate Chris rowland!

Tenure at that stage was gone, though staff clearly could have saved it; only Cahill's case brought the issues back into focus. Eventually, having ignored the industrial relations aspect and insisting on using the courts, DCU eventually pleaded with SIPTU's remaining members at DCU to vote in a new statute to give it legitimacy. to their credit, they did not so vote. Perhaps the fact that SIPTU allowed illegal  and much weaker staff contracts to be issued in 1995 did not help. DCU has been a criminal institution since its birth and should be shut down, with its degrees tranferred to the national uni.

The lessons? First of all, what happens if we remove the state from education altogether, particularly when it decides to close the national uni? the result is http://universityofireland.com/ and it is based in the USA doing very well minus the criminal retards that the Irish state inflicts on us.

Secondly, the Irish state had no problem with a state body acting outside the law for nearly two decades. that indeed is what those of us in the republican movement always said about the Irish state; it is a criminal conspiracy against the Irish people and is quickening its genocidal campaign against us, using the EU and wall St to do so. 

Seán Ó Nualláin,


tenure mf 2008

Friday, September 5, 2008


Dr. Sean O' Nuallain - In his own Words
















The incident up to May 2003 is described in the second edition (Pp. 8-13)of my "Being human" (Intellect, 2004), launched at Stanford in May 2004. (Apologies for the rough appearance - I look forward to the day I have students to do this kind of thing). DCU's illegal attempt to refuse credit for a course on Science and society, the leitmotif in the book, featured in Irish parliamentary proceedings as featured in the links from this post

As described below, I ended up teaching at Stanford as a result of student petition. My courses there were endorsed (and therefore accredited) by the great Patrick Suppes, whose "Axiomatic set theory" can be checked against the Fregeian work below. Suppes is Irish on his mother's side, and may yet be a great asset to Irish education

SIPTU's Double Binds on Academic Tenure

The “double bind' theory of the genesis of schizophrenia was initially proposed by the anthropologist and polymath Gregory Bateson. He acknowledged his intellectual debt to Bertrand Russell, who in turn produced the “theory of types” in response to an antinomy in Frege's system. Was the class of all classes that were not members of themselves a member of itself? In short, if yes, no; if no, yes. It is like the Kerryman who states that all Kerrymen are liars.

While it is doubtful that SIPTU was familiar with this work – or indeed the 1989 and 1997 universities act and various court proceedings based on the latter - they showed considerable mastery of the principles of double bind in their handling of my case. Double bind is essentially a directive from an authority figure like a parent, teacher or indeed branch secretary that, like the Fregeian system, is antinomial. So if a parent says “Be spontaneous!” or “think for yourself!”one is only obeying orders by complying and one cannot win.

In June 2002, I was unfairly dismissed from DCU. I refused to enter yet another set of double binds – an utterly illegal disciplinary procedure initiated in the middle of a grievance procedure. SIPTU supported me in this, and I was summoned to a long meeting in July 2002 with the then branch secretary. Let us recall that our contracts at DCU require us to remain benefit members of SIPTU (that is, not just be members, but pay them about E250/year). This means, for example, that we must picket if there is an approved strike and we are asked to picket by SIPTU, or else we cease to be employees of DCU. Indeed, it means that we cannot comply with a disciplinary procedure that has not been approved by SIPTU, even if we wish to do so.

So the 1997 act is poorly drafted here, as elsewhere; it requires only that the union be “consulted” about new disciplinary procedures, though this is asking for trouble in a closed shop situation. Unambiguously, however, it requires that permanent academic staff appointed before 16th June (Bloomsday!) 1997 cannot have their tenure status, protected by the 1989 act, changed other than by agreement. I was appointed in the 1980's, and like Conal Fanning in the Gilligan judgement, cannot have this new statute used on me for suspension/dismissal in any case.

The branch secretary offered me SIPTU's support - at a guess, because they felt slighted by managerial high-handedness. In any case, she told me to apply for reinstatement as distinct from compensation, and to appeal to the EAT through a rights commissioner initially. I filled in the forms as told. Once I had done so, she immediately told me that I would not be reinstated. To the best of my recollection, her precise words:

“You're not going to get reinstated, you know”

That came as something as a shock – I had several excellent grad students, 2 new books and a new edition of my first about to come out, and a frankly stellar review of one of my previous books was just about to appear in the American jnl of Psychology. As for my teaching, I have since had the honour of having courses accredited and teaching at both Stanford and Berkeley (Nos. 2 and 3 in the world according to the 2008 Shanghai survey, for whatever that is worth). I will post the encouraging students' ratings of these courses if asked. I also felt strongly that DCU had an obligation to my students who, alas, have scattered all over the world. Several were brilliantly gifted. In any case, the fetters of the first double bind were in place.

In late September, 2002, as the record shows, my colleagues at DCU voted unanimously for my reinstatement and threatened strike action. I am still enormously grateful to them, and they were and are perfectly entitled to go on strike for an illegal statute and demand the reinstatement of me and others. At the time, I was also involved with Donal Lunny, my partner Melanie O'Reilly and others in the creation of the musicians' union of Ireland and Des Geraghty had offered to affiliate it to SIPTU. In a corporatist state like Ireland, this meant at least that musicians could get car insurance. One extremely fortunate outcome, as it happened, was that I had Geraghty's cell number.

Apparently, I was to have a say also; a SIPTU official phoned me and asked whether I appoved a strike, and I inadvertently set the next double bind in motion by saying “yes”. SIPTU decided to eschew the strike option, and took an extremely risky case at the Labour court in front of Finbar Flood. This came about after perhaps 10 aborted or deferred settlement meetings. Flood's judgement that the 1985 agreement must be superceded eventually has in any case itself been superceded by the far stronger and more authoritative Clarke and Gilligan judgements. In short, the 1985 agreement is still in place, and will always be for most purposes.

I mentioned the critical legislation protecting tenure to SIPTU several times and was informed that it was actually only a superannuation clause. As I also informed them, their version of the act had a line missing; the crucial one. Similarly, it is noticeable that there was confusion in the Cahill high court case because the crucial lines in Statute no. 3 on the DCU website destroying academic tenure did not appear in the printed version. Judge Clarke, somewhat generously, described this as a technical “glitch”.

I have now faced the might of DCU management at 5 separate Labour relations meetings. Remarkably, they are free to change their allegations as they wish, or indeed repeat the same ones over and over in different fora (It should be noted that even the Gitmo military tribunals do not allow this). The Fleming judgement, I believe, was swayed hugely in my favour by the fact that DCU's story changed radically from November 2002, the first Fleming sitting, to January 2003, the second. In fact, the first set of allegations were so risible that the Ibec rep, Graham Fagan, refused to submit DCU's written document. Fagan eventually withdrew from the case, citing DCU's refusal to put my main accusers- Morris and Pronz – on the stand. In fact, they had previously sought to roll back jurisprudence a few millennia by presenting their case to Gerry Fleming in the absence of me and my representation.For some reason or other, as the saying goes.

SIPTU now believed that I might be reinstated. DCU had 6 weeks to appeal, and they waited about 38 days. It was a double whammy – we are appealing and, by the way, here is the slightly modified statute, which you will agree in 2 days' time. The shop steward seemed in shock; I phoned Geraghty. The branch secretary intervened, and there still is no agreed statute. Thus, and thanks also to Cahill and Fanning, was tenure and indeed civilised procedures for non-academic staff saved in Ireland.

A massive “head of steam”, according to a reliable report, had built up among DCU staff. SIPTU held a meeting at which no vote was taken. The shop steward phoned me while I was playing a concert tour in France to say that “they” thought DCU should have a right to appeal. Who “they” are is as yet unresolved. My reply is and remains that it was suicide to allow the appeal. Not just mine, but that of the other staff who have had this utterly illegal procedure visited upon them.

The branch sec., a month later, told me that I could have two years' salary if I left quietly. While there was sympathy for me, she said, non-one had offered to organize a collection (in fact someone had done so, and, rightly fearing the long haul, I had refused, electing to sell the house I had lived in since 1974). Senior union officials had apparently vetoed the idea of a strike. A considerably better offer came from pronz through the offices of (now Minister) Gormley; payment until a new job came up. I refused both. This issue has to be cleared up properly, not by backroom deals. And now we know; we do have academic tenure in Ireland. It is not the UK.



By July, 2003, the milk of human kindness was apparently abundant between SIPTU and DCU. A SIPTU official told me that the statute would now, with DCU's consent, have to be voted in by a majority of staff. Yet SIPTU never told the other members this, nor did they keep them informed about the unminuted negotiations they had. This all must be changed, and a legal team used. At a guess, the unexpected access of democracy was an attempt to achieve consent for getting rid of tenure.

Fagan came to talk to me on Oct 4, 2003. He seems to have been deeply ashamed of his role, and said that IBEC had withdrawn from the case. Ironically, the appeal was to have been heard the day before; Arthur cox solicitors had taken over from IBEC, and SIPTU had agreed a deferral without consulting with me. Now we were likely to face a full legal team.

The idea of being able to face one's accusers is at least as old as magna Carta; pronz and Morris had not turned up for any hearings to date. The idea of parity of representation is so deeply entrenched that even Karadzic and Milosevic, who eschew representation, have had a legal team appointed for them fully equal to that of the plaintiff. SIPTU refuse to employ barristers, so I got my own , and informed SIPTU of this well in advance. They still wanted to go ahead as before, and their representative, as she later explained to Roddy Horan SC, was deeply upset by her treatment by Mr Mallon. My legal advice remains that there was no need for the tribunal to collapse the scrum when it did, and we let the summons lapse. DCU have neglected to continue their appeal.

In 2005, I had a series of meetings with then minister of Labour Affairs Killeen. It looked like common sense might prevail, and I phoned the shop steward to say this. She questioned my motives, and reminded me that – horror of horrors – I had recommended a strike. But, dear, you did ask me. And so the final double bind was revealed.

There are at least 3 categories of employee in DCU, with different foundations for their rights, all of whom need and deserve protection:

Academic staff appointed before bloomsday, 1997, who are protected by Fanning, Cahill and the 1989 act.
Academic staff appointed after bloomsday, 1997, who are protected by Fanning, Cahill and the 1989 and 1997 acts.
Non-academic staff

The beauty of the Fleming judgement, featured below, is that it can protect all three. What SIPTU must urgently do is appoint senior counsel to read the acts, statutes, and judgements. If it finds that it cannot function at this level, it should bow out of education with whatever grace it can muster and leave staff free to decide their own negotiation team. A final personal opinion is that all staff at DCU should use the same union, whatever it is. Many non-academic staff courageously came to critical and potentially dangerous hearings to support me and others, and that is humbling.

Sean O'Nuallain
Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley



Other blog;


The truth hurts

1/1/12; Finally, the following are all posted as "comments" rather than the main text because when this entry was written, I was not an administrator of the blog and became one only after its posting.

tenure marta 2009

Wednesday, March 11, 2009


Trinity and UCD team up for Innovation Academy

UCD and Trinity College have announced a research partnership which they say has the potential to develop 300 companies and thousands of jobs. The heads of both universities say the initiative would drive enterprise and innovation in a time of national crisis. They hope to increase the number of PhDs by a thousand a year.

The cost of establishing the joint project is €650m over ten years which the universities say will come from a variety of sources including Government and European funding and from the private sector.

The Innovation Academy was announced at a press conference this afternoon by the Taoiseach, Tánaiste, Minister for Finance and Minister for Education. The Taoiseach said it would attract international interest and establish Ireland as a research base. He said a special innovation task force would help drive the project forward.

The establishment of greater links between TCD and UCD was openly feared by DCU President, Ferdinand Von Prondzynski who had written about his concerns for a 'civil war' at Irish Universities and the potential for dissolution of the Irish Universities Association (IUA).

The establishment of a National Academy for Innovation is viewed as laudable and certainly represents payback for the efforts of both TCD and UCD scientists and academics who have collectively striven to put Ireland on the research map internationally.

In an ironic twist, the announcement of the Academy between TCD and UCD predates a Von Prondzynski initiative when he personally presided over the establishment at his own university of the DCU Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship. Unfortunately for the outgoing President, the Academy closed in 2006 when serious concerns arose about the governance of the Academy under his stewardship.

The two premier universities say innovation will now become a third pillar of the sector alongside teaching and research.

There were also calls for incentives to encourage philanthropists to invest in education.

tenure aibrean 2009

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Visions of the Irish university

Papers on this topic usually nod to JH Newman and then comment on how much we've advanced with our modern research universities. The original idea of a community of scholars and students is, at best, treated in a patronising fashion. I am going to argue here that the best chance of survival of the university sector in Ireland is going back to this model.

The other models include the hybrid system that the examinations board introduced into Ireland in the 1880's after the failure of Newman's initiative. It took the scholar/student model, funded it with taxpayers' money, and gave a sense of professional advancement to the students involved. It worked well -and is in fact the only real accreditation of the Irish universities - until the incoherent 1997 universities act attempted, in self-contradictory fashion, simultaneously to enshrine academic freedom, tenure, and a dictator. A truly creative act would have anticipated John Seely Brown's framework, in which the admin, academic, and accrediting parts of the university are separated, and tenders accepted for use of the physical infrastructure.

Pre-1997, we managed to stay up to international standard by an informal task description that essentially made teaching 80% of our job, research 20%. This worked because, while we had teaching loads that were perhaps twice that of the international average and wages perhaps one half of the same, let us remember that the Irish were educating Europe at a time when its natives were daubing themselves with woad. After 1997, an attempt was made essentially to transform the university sector into taxpayer-funded R+D for industry.

Lest we forget, the patents emerging from the government's $50 million+ sponsorship of Medialab were sold for 28 Euro; multiply both sums by perhaps 100 for what SFI and PRTLI will cost and bring us. Alternatively, to repeat; anyone bright and commercially hip enough to invent a real product will have been bright and commercially hip enough to remove it from the university's IP claims. Stanford's main achievement in this respect has been to back off HP, Yahoo, and Google as their lawyers taught the founders of these companies to say “Stanford Who?”. All 3 companies have since been generous to Stanford.

Elsewhere on this blog, this writer has worked out what the scholar/student model would look like, with knowledge regarded primarily as edification. Any lacunae in the teaching part of this system can be worked out with reference to the web; this is precisely what Paul Rabinow and his group, fearing the commercialisation of UC Berkeley, are doing. The corruption involved in the grip that “Big publishing”has on science is being confronted by the academic community in the whole of Harvard, MIT, and the education dept of Stanford, who have voted for an open access model of publishing for their papers with copyright ceded to the university in the first instance, who can then negotiate with the publisher to make the work available for the whole of humanity. So, in the early 21st century, 3 of the best universities in the world have moved to a new model exactly as the unaccredited Irish universities obsess about IP.

There is, of course, yet another model for those who want to stress the vocational aspect, one that can emerge organically from the original model, and this will feature later on in this blog.


Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Aibreán 26 2009

tenure bealtaine 2009

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Danny O'Hare, international man of mystery

Irish politics are very hard to explain to outsiders. One of the reasons is that 2009 was the first year that Ireland actually realized that running a country involved prosecuting white-collar crime, as otherwise the international community would lose confidence in its governance; and so we just jailed someone (Frank Dunlop) for corruption, having publicly let the far more corrupt go free for generations. It is also fair to say that both of our leading parties, Fianna Fail (FF) and Fine Gael, subscribe to an odd synthesis of catholic nationalism and globalized corporatism. The sole difference in the past decade has been FF's more active promotion of property development as the main locomotive of the economy; this is ending in tears, to put it mildly. By the time this is being read, FF will visibly be on the road to the incinerator of history.

Originally formed from those who rejected the treaty creating an Irish statelet, FF morphed gradually into a celebration of the financialization of the world economy and there is no going back from there to the old shibboleths of a united Ireland and Gaelicism. While some of its original members did take part in a civil war, it eventually degenerated into a bunch whose sole core belief was that the rest of us owed them a (luxurious) living. They put their apparatchiks in everywhere from the boards of the semi-state bodies to the foremen on building sites. In the 1970's, they decided to create a university in northside Dublin.

The initial plan was to combine the tech colleges that eventually became DIT. Then Danny O'Hare had the idea of using the old agricultural college in Glasnevin as a new campus. After a few years of stand-off, the institution that has wrecked the lives of many began to take shape. Ironically, it started well, and would have continued that trajectory, absent its founding father's foibles.


A historical interlude may be necessary here. Danny was a godsend to FF. When his own governing authority threw him kicking and screaming from DCU in 1999, he went on to many appointments to lucrative and absolutely disastrous state boards like the famed Medialab, which single-handedly destroyed the cutting-edge of Irish software for the past decade:

Danny's board

Sunday Tribune and WSJ comment

After this trail of destruction was complete, he embarked on a little-known Bonoesque venture to save the world, and this may not be known to Irish readers. First was a sojourn at the Hoover institute at Stanford, home of the torture cheerleader Condi Rice. There he announced that he was working on a book describing how the original private US universities topped the rest. Perhaps fortunately for him, this book has yet to see the light of day. Then came “angel of mercy” trips to Vietnam with Chuck Feeney , the only philanthropist to have kept all his money after giving it away – ach sin sceal eile, involving Chuck's promotion of private Irish hospitals and a hot line to De Taoiseach (our Prime Minister, for the unininitated).

Danny's animus against tenure is what has destroyed DCU to the point that it needs to be started all over again. Northside Dublin deserves better than DCU; its cankered accreditation is described elsewhere on this blog. Prondzynski has done nothing other than implement the agenda outlined in Danny's halcyon days; the weakening of the contracts that the union had imposed on him began in the mid-1990s.

And so to the punchline. The rape-camps in Christian brothers' Canada were described in a book called “Unholy orders” and a famed drama documentary called “The Boys of St Vincent”. Fearing financial ruin, the order there transferred its monies to Ireland. In 2008, E400 million was transferred to a board involving Danny

Ireland's Boys of St Vincent


There is much else I could write; his innovation in linguistics, imitated by his successor, whereby the verb “resign” morphed from intransitive “(I resigned from”) and reflexive forms(“I resigned myself”) to a transitive such (“I resigned X from Y”, whether 3 months' notice was given or not - one assumes). Or the fact that, by his own admission, he became an administrator after realizing he was, at best, a mediocre scientist. His dictatorial control of DCU, reflected in the role of the "chief officer' in the deranged 1997 Irish universities act, extended to his sitting on interview boards conducted in Irish, a language he does not speak.

Perhaps, however, I might best refer the reader to the preceding entry on industrial schools. In the meantime, is it too much to ask that we might have a president whose family comes from elsewhere than the building industry?

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 28u Bealtaine 2009

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Industrial schools, industry's university

It came as something of a surprise to see that DCU still styles itself “industry's university” in its strategic plans:

Sell-out


Lifting the hem that high is close to mooning from the front. This is surely something worth commenting on in the media; are the other Irish unis less industry's? Or does it betoken a disinterest in the fuddy-duddy sort of academic endeavour that has given us every single technological breakthrough in these complicated modern times?

Of course, following the commission on child abuse, the term “industrial” applied to education now has a rather fearsome resonance in Irish society:

Child abuse

Approximately three generations too late, the Irish media is excoriating in the strongest terms behaviour that it showed no interest in whatsoever while it was actually ongoing. Then, of course, the state dogma was Roman Catholicism and the department of education inspectors appointed to assess these cesspools of abuse gave them a clean bill of health time after time.

Before moving on to the obvious current parallel, that of the current neoliberal/neocon dogma and its consequences for care of the vulnerable, let us quickly look at some recent heroic posturing by Madame Editor of the Irish times. That paper's move to the asinine right has been perhaps the single most damaging media event in 21st century Ireland. Madame has shown no sympathy whatsoever for the Rossport 5, sent to jail in a move she actively encouraged while Shell broke the law so flagrantly that legal documents had to be served on them by the government literally on the building site.

While we can only guess why Minister Sean Doherty bothered to tap her phone in the incident that secured her fame and fortune, she has received massive plaudits for refusing to reveal sources to the Mahon tribunal, and indeed destroying documents;

Support from Guardian

All of this is perhaps as it should be. However, let us consider a hypothetical situation. Let us imagine that, instead of supporting her in this way as the Supreme Court beckoned, the Guardian allowed Judge Mahon, Kennedy's accuser, prime placement for his blog on the home page of its website. Would in not be fair to assume that the Guardian had a particular view on the issue, just as we can assume that that the Irish Times has a certain view on academic tenure? Is it perhaps to corner the market in Ireland, so that the IT hacks would never have to face serious analysis on their pontifications on everything under the sun? The IT has not broken a story in eons; instead there is endless uninformed commentary, the great majority from the right.

There is a story of abuse of due process, and bullying of both staff and students, fully as disgusting in its general outline (if not scatological detail) as the abuse in the industrial schools. The Green party were aware of this before going into government, and asked a set of parliamentary questions based on students and staff that they had interviewed. Once in government, their tune changed completely;

Egregious violation of law



Despite what I frankly interpret as an assault by the IT, whose ownership is of course somewhat irregular in company law terms, we are not totally powerless. For a start, at least this blog is on the record. Secondly, we are in a position to summons Deputy Gogarty (now chair of the Dail committee on education, having resigned as his party's spokesman on the issue)to explain his change of heart. The author of the industrial school-type ruling that the unis could do “day to day” whatever they liked is a Mr Paraic Mellett of the HEA. It will be interesting to hear from him also. As a confirmed technocrat, he will do doubt have an ideological bent that we can unpack, in public, and on the record, for his employer, the Irish taxpayers who send their children to environments made abusive by irresponsibility like his.

It would have been great to have a chance to run a dogma-free Ireland within the rule of law for a while, just to see what happens. Maybe it's not too late?



Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 27u Bealtaine 2009


PS I am somewhat in shock. It turns out that Tom Boland, head of the HEA was the civil servant most involved in cutting the deal that transferred the costs of the rape-camps in the industrial schools over to the taxpayer;

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/how-the-orders-got-more-than-they-bargained-for-1756645.html

We shall summons Mr Boland to the EAT to explain his John Yoo-type interpretation of the 1997 universities act, so similar to the dept of education's historical views on treatment of abuse claims.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 31u Bealtaine 2009

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Silly fukus; neocon attacks on tenure

Francis Fukuyama is the type of public intellectual who disgraces the academic profession. A mediocre scholar, he has been involved in promotion of the genocidal US campaign in Iraq. Later, of course, he admitted that he and his neocon colleagues may have been a little de trop in their promotion of torture and imperialism. It will be the task of the next generation to try and undo the damage he and his ilk have done.

Silly Fuku

is a summary of the man's life and “work”. Who has funded this idiot in his facile pronouncements of the “end of history” - later of course repudiated - and now the “end of tenure” in the Washington post? Even the facts are wrong - Britain reinstated many of tenure's protections after the Tories were defeated in 1997:

Fuku two

Similarly for Hawaii's own Rudy Rummel and others. Theirs is a pathetic attempt to take the ladder up with them. Both “scholars “ start with the disclaimer that they themselves have been protected by tenure – including through periods where their views would have ensured their dismissal, had a left-wing administration with an intolerance level similar to theirs been in power. That is indeed the critical point; tenure affords a mechanism through which often controversial and apparently extreme views can be tested in the academy before being inflicted on society as a whole. Among the first victims of an incoming totalitarian regime are always scholars.

Yet the defense of tenure can go deeper still. Let us forget for a moment the doomed, illegal and infantile efforts to get rid of tenure at DCU; for example, all issues surrounding my case have been decided at the Supreme court, and God knows what management are trying to do by continuing the agony at a lower court. Academic tenure offers the state an opportunity to domesticate scholars; and scholars, historically, have taken their domestication with gratitude. The alternative is immensely powerful ideas careening around improvised structures within civil society with enormous implicit danger to the state. The inevitable expression often is armed revolution led by a cadre with views as ill-informed as the Utopian socialism that begat the 1917 Russian revolution.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 23u Bealtaine 2009

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Academic corporatism marches east..California, Arizona, Ireland....

The recent sycophantic coverage in the Irish times (IT) of our beloved leader's "Diry of a nortsoide uni Prezident" indicates, yet again, to what depths that paper has sunk under Geraldine Kennedy. The IT, represented by a supposed liberal, was aware of the violation of union-management agreements as far as December 2002 and, unsolicited by us, asked questions about it. In 2003, she then interviewed the students who were abused, insisting that one come to meet her on a Sunday as it suited her, and has copies of his correspondence with Pron. She has written nothing and the IT is a threat to academic tenure and the welfare of students. This is exactly how the institutional abuse they report on so copiously today - 50 years after the fact - occurred in the first place

There are many of us who believe that the presence of a journalism department at a university is corrosive of the real pursuit of knowledge that the rest of us are engaged in. Not a word has been written in Ireland's so-called “paper of record” about the attempt to destroy academic tenure, and basic human rights for students and staff. Even the corporatist Sunday Independent has covered these stories,

Interestingly, this follows hot on the heels of public denunciations of Irish musicians (in Princeton, USA) by the likes of Fintan O'Toole. On Monday, Peter Murtagh launched a savage attack on the Mayo hunger-striker Maura Harrington. As for suing them; after a particularly intemperate set of rants by Siobhan Long (music “critic”) and Karlin Lillington, the IT responded to our complaints grudgingly and indirectly, and only after refusing normal “right of reply” channels.

There is a real story at play here about the demise of academic freedom in Ireland. Thus the regrettable necessity of this blog; I would much prefer not to write it. However, we find that the agenda to put universities under the direct control of businesses was tried before in 1990's California. That it failed is partly due to citizen Glynn Custred;


Californian corporatism




Of perhaps much greater interest in that the chancellor who attempted to bring this in , Barry Munitz, was exposed as dubious in the extreme by a set of articles in the LA Times, culminating in a summary by Vanity fair.




Faculty response to Munitz

Let us make it clear; we are aware that what DCU is trying to put in place is a university subject to the whim of corporations. Any faculty member is subject to summary dismissal in the new dispensation. Since this could not legally be introduced, in conjunction with SIPTU, management are attempting to do so by abusing due process.

What are our journalists doing? What kind of training are they getting?

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 20u Bealtaine 2009

Thursday, May 14, 2009

"College view" backs down; DCU management chickens out of EAT

"The College view" has withdrawn the highly libelous and defamatory article earlier published because it contained grossly inaccurate and damaging statements about me made by Prondzynski:

Tissue of lies is now withdrawn and cannot be accessed on the internet.

I have also been offered the chance to write an equally prominent article with my reply in their next issue in October - in the meantime, watch this space!

In a related move, DCU has chickened out of the EAT hearing on June 9 and now want to reschedule in the hope that they can starve us into submission.

SIPTU allowed them to do this, in the same way as they have conceded every time that DCU management expressed a preference on anything. The 2004 hearing was originally adjourned at the request of Mallon, the DCU management barrister (SIPTU did not supply us with one) over my strenuous objections - I had come from the USA, and my legal advice was that there was no reason to adjourn. Btw, Mallon's knowledge of the case was such that he ran out of questions and sought an adjournment after 90 minutes.

A chairde, my dear friends - if you want to keep your jobs, home, and families together, call a strike NOW, and make sure that Paul Cahill's heroic stance is not wasted

This is the current scenario;

1. You are working, minding your own business, that of the nation and your students

2. A moment later, you are told you are sacked without any procedures whatsoever.

3. Prondzynski announces to the media and anyone who'll listen that you "are no longer a member of staff"

4. In the meantime, you are barred from campus, from your friends, from your work, and will not be able to make your mortgage payments

You now have two options;

A. Go the EAT route. Take a civil suit for defamation. I did both. My house and 20 years' work at DCU are gone. I have now had 7 years without salary and SIPTU still allow them to defer hearings for utterly spurious reasons (Question; why did IBEC back out of the case in the first instance?)

B. Take out a High court injunction. If tenured before 1997, use the Fanning Supreme court judgement. They will appeal and remove you from teaching, and take your lab from you - if you have one, a la Paul Cahill. 5 years and a million Euro gone. After 1997; the have been kind to Paul Cahill, nicht wahr? In fact, they openly defied Judge Clarke's recommendation that he should be allowed return to his duties, and to return to him (Clarke) if there was a problem. They then prohibited Cahill from returning to Clarke, and continued to delay the referral to the Supreme Court.

In other words, SIPTU has ceded arbitrary power to management, and everyone is now at risk. To delay a hearing and withhold payment (or force the risk of punitive legal fees) is effectively the same as a dismissal in any case. From 2002, DCU management has delayed hearings and/or not implemented the recommendations when the hearing eventually took place at least 7 times.

Specifically; Summer 2002: Numerous cancellations of scheduled meetings.

Then it went into the Labour relations commission (LRC)

1. 27 Aug 2002 DCU management refuse to attend a meeting scheduled at the LRC

2. Sept 16 2002 DCU management leave the LRC for reasons later declared spurious by Finbarr Flood of the labour court

After a credible threat of strike action, they begin to attend the LRC.

3 Dec 6 2002 Labour court recommendation, issued by Flood, ignored by DCU

4. 30 Jan 2003 Rights' commissioner recommendation issued; appealed by DCU 4 days before the deadline.

IBEC leave case, citing refusal of DCU management to provide witnesses

5. 3 October 2003 Appeal of rights' commissioner recommendation scheduled. DCU management seek and are granted a deferral by SIPTU

6. DCU management then seek adjournment of the hearing within 90 minutes of its starting in Nov 2003. It is refused, and hearing is to continue in Feb 2004. It is clear that the barrister they have brought in knows nothing about the case; a legal team on the other side would have mopped it up there and then in our favour.

7. Feb 2004; DCU management again seek adjournment of hearing. It is granted, for reasons that expert legal opinion considers invalid, and the case heads into limbo for more than five years.


8. May 13 2009: DCU management seek and are granted deferral of EAT hearing due to begin June 9, 2009, and after the supreme court has ruled against them on the central issue. They are granted this deferral 8 days after the deadline for such deferrals has elapsed, as specified in the EAT's own documentation, and for reasons that do not seem pressing, as the EAT's rules recommend (see below; notice received 30/4, deferral granted 13/5). The worker involved and his family, who live in the USA, have to change a very complicated schedule that had been established after the deadline had passed. No specific alternative dates have been communicated to him or his family. No expenses or reimbursement is available from the EAT for the plane ticket already bought to travel for the June hearing, or work lost in the USA for the week in question






SIPTU has allowed them to do this. Go figure. The original idea of the EAT - set up in its present form by Labour's ex-leader Michael O'Leary while in government - was to ensure speedy rectification of these cases ie about 4 months. The fact is that employers have now found a way, crude as it is, to render this legislation powerless and not just perform summary dismissal, but subject the worker to a time-wasting and humiliating process afterward.

7 years and counting................what a way to destroy academic tenure, and indeed any job security in Ireland! This situation always needed a strike. Of course, it is ultimately self-destructive by SIPTU; the truly terrifying latitude of behaviour that they have allowed DCU management effectively de-unionizes not just the academic workplace in Ireland, but the whole country.




Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 14/15u Bealtaine 2009

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

DCU: after Newsweek, the Daily show? Saturday Night Live?

My distinguished colleagues on “the Watchdog” have commented that DCU has done well over the past decade. I can't comment on this, to a large extent; I have been illegally banned from campus during most of that period. However, there are certain objective criteria that can be reported on. It can also be reported that its main strategic partner in the USA, Arizona state University, is an international laughing-stock, the Sarah Palin of universities.

First of all, despite the massive amounts of taxpayers' money with which the place has been flooded, it has failed to crack the top 200 in any ranking system (In fact, it seems to hover around the 300-550 mark). Quite how massive these monies are we will find out when accounts are finally published; DCU has never published full accounts this millennium, and even partial ones have not emerged for 5+ years. Secondly, I can report on conditions in my home department, computer applications, which was during the 1990's the flagship of the university

I am tenured there since 1988. It was understood that one taught 3 courses, 6-9 hours a week, and then also did the tutorials, an extra 6-9. (Several of us also did Ph.D.'s part-time). Moreover, unlike TCD, the faculty teaching a day course also taught that to the excellent night degree students. Yet we managed to create new programs, like the night degree and ACL degree.

It is fair to say that there was a degree of jealousy on the part of management of the (largely unsought) media profile of the dept. We found, for example, that our rooms were not being cleaned. After a brief lull in which we did not have to do tutorials, the rules changed again; we were asked to do tutorials, even as tutors for the classes lectured by our own grad students. Our head of dept was constructively dismissed, and then failure rates, already high, went through the roof from 1999.

I mention all this because I understand that things are right back to square one; the ACL and night degree were abolished by this administration at enormous cost to the taxpayer. Both initially ran at practically no extra cost. There is no funding for tutors, so 1987 conditions again prevail


However, darling, we'll always have Newsweek and Arizona State University (ASU). The problem with that is ASU, “the Harvard of date rape”, is now even more than before a comic byword after its announcing that President Barack Obama did not merit one of its honorary PhDs - unlike, to take one example, the disastrous Kim Campbell. It has pursued the path of academic corporatism with the same vigour as DCU, including the abolition of departments. Click on the links below, and weep. After "the daily Show" ran one of the intrepid Jason Jones' investigative forays, "Saturday night live" - who destroyed Palin - also got in the act through Amy Poehler and Seth Myers. One hopes for DCU's sake that they are now tired of the story.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Arizona State Snubs Obama
thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes
Economic CrisisPolitical Humor


ASU gets Palin treatment

Herald


Grid


Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 13u Bealtaine 2009

Friday, May 1, 2009

Mayday, Mayday!! Or: How to save Ireland

One is struck by the parallels between Prondzynski and Pamela Izevbekhai. The lies; the use of taxpayers' money to take a doomed case all the way to the Supreme court; the certainty that sliocht a sliocht, their seed and breed, will feel that the Irish people owe them a living. 62% of Nigerians in Ireland, like Prondzynski , are not working. This is worse in prospect than the affirmative action that California got rid of by referendum

Before this goes further, it is worth noting that, in contrast to the mad campaign against tenure and academic freedom, Pamela is fighting what would have been the good fight, had she not lied. There is no question; Ireland should comply with international refugee law, and so should the applicant refugees. On a personal note, we are the only Irish group ever to do live African-american jazz radio, and the only non-black band of any ethnicity to attend the Oakland meetings to lend support to the campaign against white jazz hegemony.

It is interesting to hear the arguments of apologists for high immigration, called the Doheny and Nesbitt school in Ireland in honour of the pub in which they draw up their plans to reshape the country after suitable refreshment has ensured that their already modest intellectual capacities are irrevocably impaired. So I just lost 40 minutes of my life hearing Sara de la Rica at UC Berkeley economics dept explain, given the theoretical work of Borjas, Peri, and Sperber, inter alia, why immigration is still such a great idea. She first of all denied the well-attested Spanish programs to send unemployed immigrants back to the their place of origin, then produced a baroque mathematical argument (note the beautiful reference in line 3 to "supplies offered by natives", at least until they get restless).



Notwithstanding the previous dispute of fact, we were duly impressed until Figure 3 of her paper showed a per hourly wage rate of E1.15 for immigrants. This she defended tooth and nail until it was pointed out that the top rate was E2.27, and she didn't know what she was talking about, like our local heroes. The economization of life due to neoliberalism is often misspelled as it takes flesh a la the CDOs, default swaps und so weiter that ensured this mess will continue for a decade.

It is time for a reality check. The IMF is imminent; even if it wasn't, what has happened in Ireland is less nationalizing the banks than bankalizing the whole state. This follows the attempt to create a pure (Milton) Friedmanite experiment in Europe I described on California Progress report in 2007. There are many savings that can be made and, fully aware of the barrage of PC BS I am about to face, here goes;

1.Cap civil servants' salaries at 100k. Savings in the 100's of millions pa. This includes the Doheny and Nesbitt financial wunderkinden, as indeed does the next section.
2.Do a review of all civil servants that do not deal directly with the public. For example, start at the HSE employees (3 in many small hospitals) who allocate beds, a task that used be done by the matron with some help. Good teachers, doctors nurses etc are safe. Get rid of 90% of the appalling HR staff in state institutions like DCU. Scrap the HEA, root and branch; they have allowed financial corruption, and – far worse – a situation where neither staff nor students at universities have any rights against management. Savings – perhaps 15 billion per year.
3.Get rid of SFI, PRTLI, SIPTU's closed shops, and (a state or rather FF institution)IMRO. Billions pa saved
4.Fire the director of corporate "enforcement" Appleby, the DPP Hamilton, and everyone associated with the banking debacle. Introduce proper adherence to the law, and watch the economy blossom again
5.We have about 100,000 immigrants each costing the state at least 10k a year on unemployment assistance. Do what Spain is doing and offer anyone not an Irish citizen wrt the 2004 referendum a way out. Billions pa
6.Ditto for any immigrant doing a job that can be done by an unemployed Irish citizen
7. Forget this Nama nonsense. Ask the ECB if our banks can borrow 100 billion which they are to pay back. If not, leave the Euro and make a single "take it or leave it" offer for our debt a la Argentina, nationalize all resources, and watch a competent set of politicians take over as the EU recedes. .

Yes, I'm serious. Time to decide if we want a country or not

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. Lá Bealtaine 2009

tenure meitheamh 2009

Saturday, June 20, 2009

The students speak (III)

There has been no further communication from DCU to this ex-student since 2003, who obviously needs closure for the sake of his well-being and to get on with his life. He has been promised a reply, and it has been delayed nearly 7 years.

I shall comment further on this anon; in the meantime, anyone who believes my judgement of P. was harsh might take a look at the behaviour below





























































Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 20u Meitheamh 2000

The students speak (II)

So far there is an account of a meeting, at which unspeakable breaches of "duty of care" are implemented by management in order to secure a case against a staff member. Today let's look at

1. The class rep's view of events. As it happened, he was at the meeting.

2. The further pressure put on two students, as described in yesterday's post. Had they done what was asked, and agreed to incriminate me, no doubt DCU management would have done them a few favours. No-one should send their kids to DCU until the rule of law is established there.

If anyone from outside Ireland who reads this wonders why no criminal charges have been filed, it is because that this behavior reflects a powerful criminal interest group within Irish society. We did get the case brought up, repeatedly, in parliament. The answer was that this sort of behavior is no-one's business except management's, and they can do whatever they want. Many of these proceedings are quoted elsewhere on the blog. This is of course BS; however criminal investigations are routinely stopped by political pressure in Ireland. A previous such - that of theft of research money at DCU, again brought up in Parliament - was also thwarted.

Surely, then, the thing to do is contact the President? He has kids of his own, nicht wahr? He surely would see the potential for destruction of lives of the students by the behavior of the likes of Grey, Smeaton, Morris and Verbruggen??


























Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 20u Meitheamh 2000

Friday, June 19, 2009

Letting the students speak

The following three entries here will be the voices of students as they saw what happened in 2001-2002. Their anonymity is being respected, and their names will be redacted as necessary from their correspondence with senior members of DCU management.

I feel no similar obligation to DCU management, so will frame the above by noting that

1. Registrar Jim Murray had, months before this incident, advised Smeaton that the subject in question was examinable. More specifically, he said DCU's legal position would be weak if it refused credit

2. The "senior member of the school" referred to at the meeting was Mr Renaat Verbruggen

No attempt has been made by management to compensate the students for the sadistic and criminal treatment meted out to them and I did not solicit any of this material from them.








































Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 19u Meitheamh 2009

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The state, civil society, and academic tenure

I am about to break up a very busy schedule, in which I work daily with the most talented and most generous-spirited people I have ever met in the world's attested crucible of symbolic creativity in order to attend Paul Cahill's Supreme court case, at my own expense. One of the reasons for this is that Paul is a truly great human being ; he has taken on forces beyond the ken of 99.9% of humanity and won. Not just the congeries of globalized corporatism and catholic nationalism which defines DCU, the Irish Times and its acolytes at DCU; what is at stake is a totalizing view of the state and society, which must be resisted. Another reason is, of course, the sheer consequentiality of this issue. Let us explore these in turn.

Civil society is a paradoxical concept. It refers to a rule-based set of functions which (as yet) do not have the legislative imprimatur of state. Due to its colonial heritage, Ireland is full of benign civil society structures; the Irish music session; the GAA; traditional Irish music, until IMRO privatized it in the 1998 deal; the intensity of the democratic process which, unlike that in the USA, survived electronic “voting”. Italy is full of benign such, as well as malignant such like the Mafia and Camorra (see the movie and read the book “Gomorrah”; this is what FF would have become, had they not been domesticated; the 1990's saw them revitalize this antinomial dream). The work we Irish people, and our allies from other countries (many of whom were married to Irish people, surely the ultimate vote of confidence in a country) did in setting up DCU, while paid by the state, was largely civil society; we went every day beyond the call of duty, which Danny O'Hare nevertheless attributed to his own Roman Catholic genius. (He never taught there)

FF's impetus has always been to bend the state toward its scams, and then extend the state so that no competition is possible. And now, of course, the Irish state under FF has bankrupted itself, and the IMF calls the shots, as already predicted on this blog:

IMF and NAMA


DCU takes lawsuits against its staff rivalling anything from the Munster circuit at its most extreme;

As frivolous and vexatious as Tom Mallon

A thought experiment; the DCU president shoves mail into your door at home, repeatedly, asking you to do something illegal. Do you agree to do it? Are you in violation of your contract if you don't? No and no, surely? More to the point, we can, I assume, take a criminal case against him and his "legal' advisers after the dust settles - which will be sooner than they think, because even the state is sick of this unsuccessful incursion into civil society.

So what will happen next? Well, IMHO the Supreme Court will throw out DCU's appeal, and comment that it should never have gotten this far. Wrt the EAT; an offer has been made to DCU to obey the law, and deal with all the issues internally. The central issue – of education, and the organic formation of young women and men – was historically made in Ireland through the hedge schools, an a fortiori civil society construct. It is my opinion that we are heading back there from this miasma of criminality, incompetence, and ripping-off taxpayers to pay for perhaps the most laughable self-elected elite since the Hapsburgs . We even have a Prussian – one not married to an Irishwoman - involved.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 18u Meitheamh 2009

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Countdown to the Supreme Court

Despite SIPTU's depredations in this area, the union at DCU - considered as the voluntary association of faculty and other staff – is still strong. It is increasingly reasonable to argue that we have been lulled into giving up all employment rights over the past 15 years since SIPTU allowed management unilaterally to change our contracts to weaken tenure. In the meantime, management has been allowed by SIPTU to get away with egregious – and indeed often criminal – acts of bullying and denial of basic rights both to staff and students.

It is clear that we should try and get rid of the school of journalism, hard though this may be. I have argued before that it has no business at a university; moreover, the disgraceful line taken by the (often PhD less) “faculty” who scribble for the Irish Times is anti-tenure and anti-scholarship. (Of course, we should also ban the IT from anywhere union members congregate for its blatant attack on tenure)

I confess that I have felt the burden of trying to keep tenure alive for those tenured before Bloomsday, 1997, a weighty one, particularly as it is clear that SIPTU were prepared to throw the case. The situation as it stands is that NOTHING can be done to prevent individual dismissals of anyone, pre or post 1997. However, what I and Fanning have succeeded in doing is making sure that the application of the statute to anyone pre 1997 is illegal. Believe me - I have refused two settlement offers, and given up much to uphold this principle, which holds regardless of how the EAT turns out.

Paul Cahill more than kept this flame alive in my absence. Now Paul faces the might of the Irish state in the Supreme Court on 29 June. It is incumbent on us to turn up in numbers to show our support; I am coming back from the USA to attend. There have been many who supported Paul and myself, and of course we cannot name them for fear of reprisals in their direction from management, disgraceful though this reality (at a university!) is in fact. I will, however, list a bunch of people who have been less helpful

It divides between the criminal, the treacherous, and useful idiots. There are some who fall on the intersection. In some cases, I will give an explanation.

Criminals

Prondzynski, Conry, Walsh, Smeaton, Morris, Burns, Pratt

No explanation necessary, and I caution P. VERY strongly never to stuff illegal material through the door of my home, nor to defame me in public again. Regular readers will note that I won the libel suit against him; everything here is valid, and nothing he has said about Paul and myself is valid, nor truthful, nor legal .

Traitors

Ian Marison, Niall Moyna, Morris, Smeaton

All have turned up on management's side to give evidence, often perjured such evidence

Traitors/Useful idiots

Eddie Holt and Colm Kenny have taken management's side in their weekly drivel

Heather Ruskin and Marnie Holborow refused to give evidence at the EAT; that latter also at the High Court, even after being summonsed

Renaat Verbruggen and Brian Stone joined Morris, Smeaton and Prondzynski in the bullying of students.

More will be named as events unfold. Strange the paucity of Irish names in the above list. Apart from Kenny and his buddy Conry's , the only one is Moyna's. That name in turn brings up memories of the special Branch uprooting floorboards in the EE department,a counterfeit $$ trail in the US leading to deportation, and DCU faculty explaining in court that "bomb timers" were for one-armed bandits. Ah, the years, the years . Funny what recognizing the Irish state did to these people; did Niall have to show that much enthusiasm for it?


Again, sorry to state the obvious; however, the often ethical expert testimony given by DCU-based expert witnesses at, for example, the Gibraltar shootings inquiry derived partly from their protection by tenure. Moyna and Marison gave evidence at the High Court to help management destroy tenure.

A thuilleadh nios deanai




Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 14u Meitheamh 2009

Sunday, June 7, 2009

The politics of tenure in Ireland

Non-Irish readers of this blog may be astonished at many of the industrial relations (IR) goings-on. Why did the faculty not strike, after several ballots approving such action? Why is a case that may result in summary dismissal for everyone being allowed by SIPTU (the “union”) to go to the supreme Court on June 29, 2009, since a loss there would result in all IR negotiation becoming null and void? (If they can legally dismiss summarily, all negotiation is irrelevant). Why did SIPTU not make any attempt to enforce the numerous verdicts obtained by staff against management? Why did they not attempt to pursue the criminal and other sadistic behaviour by management of which their own correspondence evinces knowledge? In short, will tenure in Ireland be revoked de iure by daylight robbery, with only god knows what consequences internationally?

Tenure in Ireland has de facto been revoked some time ago, and it was a political decision made by SIPTU. As soon as they allowed the principle of individual dismissal, no-one's job was ever safe; there is no way of keeping together a research lab while one goes through the Kafkaesque IR processes of the Irish state. Yet this IR process allows SIPTU to continue to exert pressure on the government, and claim that the dismissal is illegal for as long as it suits them, while interfering in our lives. So there is much to be gained for them; however, a loss by Cahill in June would make SIPTU, as well as many staff, redundant. In this entry, I will try and summarize the situation, and speculate about the motives of the players.

First of all, DCU is a closed shop; all staff are forced to join the ruins of the old James Connolly/Jim Larkin behemoth, SIPTU, contorted into its present shape on the say-so of Bertie Ahern as a way of preventing real unions from emerging in the public service. Faculty in other Irish universities join IFUT, which did a goodish job in negotiating provisions for tenure in the 1997 act. SIPTU had no part in this, and wrongly declared the 2001 DCU statute to be legal. For that alone, they should be kicked out of DCU. Since DCU was the only university with a SIPTU closed shop for faculty, it was the wedge for faculty summary dismissal; IFUT would have won this case way back.

However, that is just the start. The most maddening thing about this is that staff voted to strike in 2002, and none of the disasters visited upon the lives of talented and sensitive people since then should have happened. The Labour court verdict of 2002 was another point at which everything should have ended, as also the EAT verdict of 2003. Finally, the Cahill (2006, 2007) and Fanning (2005, 2008) verdicts afforded the opportunity for closure, as did the no-confidence vote of Nov 2008 and the further formal strike ballot of 2009. At any point, a real strike threat would have forced management to rescind the "summary dismissal" statute, and get back to the negotiating table for real. That is not what SIPTU wanted apparently; a phony war can be kept going for longer than a real one; indefinitely, in fact, with many opportunities for them to get jobs for their boys and girls, and posture politically.

SIPTU's history was recently analysed in one of our yellowish papers;

The Colombian connection

Note the reference to the grandiose lifestyles of the "union" top brass, who have taken about $5 million since the 1997 act was conceived from their “members” at DCU to fund their extravagant sybaritism . Many of them and the associated “Labour” party (I have yet to see any of these do a real job) are ex-members of the paramilitary-connected “Workers' Party” (see previous parenthesised comment). It seems rather that, for whatever reason, like Fianna Fail (FF)they believe that the rest of us owe them a living. Their central political aim is political power, in government with FF.

So let's look at the tactics here. Every time a victory has been won at DCU (usually by an act of individual brilliance a la Cahill), they attempt to gain control of the process, and string it out as much as possible with their rising stars like Alex White and Chris Rowland being parachuted into our lives. They have perfected the “Duke of York” strategy; call a strike ballot, and then rescind the strike action, thus wearing out their members' will. At all these points, they are nodding and winking to their handlers in FF, who after all inflicted them on us.

Yet, given the weekends' political results, with the Ahern mafia gone,this repellingly immoral strategy may prove to be too clever by at least three-eights (SIPTU will call their boys in to negotiate the final 1/8). At the end of this process, they will be either ejected by their "members' from DCU (if both Cahill and I win) or by management (if either of us lose). Even the win/win scenario still allows an occasional "individual" dismissal; this is a loophole we must close, at least by insisting on procedural correctness, as well as a temporal definition of "individual"(Dismissals two minutes apart? two years? etc)



Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 4u Meitheamh 2009