Ireland's incomplete coup?

Ireland's incomplete coup? - the “Ireland in crisis” conference, UC Berkeley July 10 and 11

(as printed in "The Irish Herald" May/Bealtaine 2012 P 15)

While the economic crash in 2008 Ireland was both foreseeable and not untypical for that historical year, there are many indications that recovery this time will be both more difficult and more multi-faceted than its 1990's equivalent. A related issue is the dearth of real analysis that characterizes Irish studies, which allowed the absurdities of the so-called “Celtic tiger” period to reach vertiginous heights. This conference can perhaps begin to address at least the latter issue.

Unlike the case in the 1980's, this economic crash has occurred at a time of fracture in the major national narratives. It may be the case that Irish people have had difficulty adjusting themselves to living in a state that is the result of imposed borders, versus an island that is unequivocally their home. Simultaneously, it is perhaps true that the Irish state has perfected a totalizing corporatism that has replaced Roman Catholicism with neoliberalism as its dogma. What is certainly arguable is that the cultural output of the Irish, exemplified in popular music, has never been of worse quality in the history of the state, and perhaps indeed before the state came into being.

A second major difference from the 1980's crash is the vastly different economic context, both at the macro and micro levels. At the former level, the country has signed on to a set of EU agreements that restrict its ability to govern, both in fiscal and monetary terms. At the latter level, the transaction cost of simple commercial activity in Ireland has grown enormously, due both to vastly higher costs for infrastructure and labour and the incursions by the state into civil society that have made Ireland the most regulated country in the world. Paradoxically, these incursions have been accompanied by a dearth of real corporate enforcement, resulting in the rest of the world losing faith in the now surely doomed Irish stock market.

Finally, the fact that EMI was compelled to sue the Irish state to get it to conform to EU copyright law did not surprise many of those working in area that need to protect intellectual property. The dearth of corporate enforcement is attested by the assignment of a laughably small team of investigators to the Anglo-Irish bank investigation, a tiny investment in cleaning up one of the greatest financial scandals in recent world history, and one that the head of the commercial court in Ireland has frequently criticized. In fact, may one ask whether we are living through the aftermath of a fortunately incomplete coup, one devised to destroy ancient and well-functioning aspects of civil society while placing power and money irrevocably in a very few hands?

It is surely self-evident that a state should exist for the welfare of its citizens. The U.S. A. uncontroversially identifies this welfare with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The Irish state now exists apparently to serve neoliberal ideals, even if this service can be performed only at the cost of its citizens. As this service continues, EU policy dictates that an economic depression will in turn continue to tighten its grip on Ireland as all liquidity in the state is to be used to pay down debt that has for the most part been imposed in the country in a way that stretches conventional financial practice beyond breaking point.

These neoliberal ideals have been extended to justify an attack on many ancient and well-functioning aspects of Irish civil society. For example, EU competition law was used, with the collusion of the head of Ireland's largest union, to prevent musicians from negotiating a living wage for their services through their own union. Ireland is by some accounts the most regulated country in the world, making it a nightmare for anyone outside the elite (who continue to enjoy impunity) to set up a profitable business. In fact, this state's policies are simultaneously causing Irish citizens to emigrate to find work and increasing the number of non-Irish at work in Ireland.

The “Ireland in crisis” conference, at ihouse UC Berkeley July 10 and 11, 2012, 9am to 5pm each day will discuss these matters as well as looking at current trends in the arts (including theater), and the attempt to destroy academic freedom in Ireland. It is sponsored by the department of Theater and Performing arts at UC Berkeley, whose chair, Peter Glazer, will be the first speaker. Other world-renowned speakers include Ishmael Reed, the great African-American writer and winner of a Macarthur”genius” grant, Ignacio Chapela, Micheal o hAodha of UL, and Melanie O'Reilly. We are still accepting abstracts ; these and other inquiries can be sent to contuirt2012@gmail.com

Revolutionary times in Ireland?

My recollection is that Lenin's dictum is that revolutionary times have arrived when neither power nor the populace want to continue as before. So, as it is clear that there is inertia in the administration of power, Ireland is not in a revolutionary mode. This is just as well as armed rebellion is uncontrollable, by definition.

What is happening is IMO far more interesting - effectively a clear debunking of the narratives by which a self-appointed elite have maintained positions of great privilege. Anyone in Ireland who bought a house and established themselves in a a profession before 1995 ( absent state-orchestrated disasters such as befell this writer) is now sufficiently wealthy that he will be able to set up the kids as well.

However, the dominant narrative is neoliberalism; more specifically, the exit from clerical miasma into the most globalized country in the world. So anything culturally Irish is denigrated in favour of "multiculturalism", "tolerance" and various other covers for theft by an elite from the producers in the society

The problem is that the eschaton is now a point at which the Irish people, yes, CAN pay back money they didn't borrow in the first place, the better to sustain an economic, cultural and sociopolitical order that not only has visibly failed, but is without any roots in the country.

So the refusal to pay the householder's charge is perhaps very significant indeed as the treaty referendum approaches.

Pacta sunt servanda; the end of the first Irish republic

With that Latin tag – a gerundive construction no less – Commissioner Rehn rolled the death knell for a whole generation of Irish politicians. Only Sinn Fein are free to make a few simple and cogent arguments

The first is that voting “no” on this treaty, we are warned, expels us from the safety net of the EFSF. But we've already been told we'll be back in the bond markets in two shakes. So that argument is won by SF

Upping the stakes a little, we are warned about the Argentina scenario. Yet the carrying capacity of Ireland suffices for as population a multiple of what we have now. Would we be able to pay the myriad “public servants” and other parasites who draw up schemes? Thankfully, not any more. The teachers, nurses, etc? Yes – and it would weed out those who are uncommitted if they were paid for a short time in a non-convertible currency

As for losing Google, Facebook, Paypal, don't make me laugh. The “technology” in the latter two is a joke; and Google might even have sufficient cultural roots at this stage to want to stay. The alternative would be to prohibit its crawling state-funded websites until our own computer scientists demonstrate that they have caught up. That would take 2 months or so

We can also start to demolish the congeries that Irish official society has become, with scams held in place by gigantic and vicious legal firms; Enterprise Ireland acting as a front for bootleggers at international trade fairs; and so on. We could do a deal with our European friends - and we have no enemies in the Eurozone – that involves giving up our corporate rate and its associated scams and replace it with normal corporate formation (the original “universitas”) and enforcement.

The alternative? From the Wiki entry on Locke;


“The concept of the right of revolution was also taken up by John Locke in Two Treatises of Government as part of his social contract theory. Locke declared that under natural law, all people have the right to life, liberty, and estate; under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens. In some cases, Locke deemed revolution an obligation. The right of revolution thus essentially acted as a safeguard against tyranny. “

Ireland's corporate regime; non-enforcement

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/

Direct link

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;


The apparently eternal Irish music scam

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

Appleby has NO successful prosecutions after a decade on the job

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;

A victory for musicians, loss for the Irish state

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

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

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

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.blogspot.com/2013/05/content-from-my-previous-website-on.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