Draw Breath

Well, nobody can say that the Taliban don't indulge in highly symbolic behaviour. When I saw the footage from the latest attempt on Hamid Karzai's life yesterday (not his first narrow escape, although it was, as Channel 4 points out, the first in Kabul), I ws struck by the parallels with the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, down to the use of explosions to disorient the bodyguard.

Obviously, I wasn't the only person with such thoughts. Indeed, as Channel 4 news had it last night, the soldiers in the stadium weren't armed, so it may be that the government doesn't even trust its own army (trained by us of course) to refrain from taking pot-shots at the President.

Still, at least Bush has refrained from declaring victory in Afghanistan for the last few years. Amazingly, he actually hasn't declared victory there since 2004, avoiding the problems associated with his annual declaration of victory in Iraq.

What a mess.

There's an interesting spot of research on Libertas over on Indymedia. I haven't chased down the sources myself yet but if what Checkov Feeney says is even a bit accurate he's revealed some pretty fascinating stuff.

Hat tip to John Carroll who I suspect is even more unlikely than I am to be lurking around the Indymedia site…!

Update: Having read the piece more closely, Feeney could do with distinguishing between someone owning a company and being it's CEO (though he's not the only one to get confused on that matter) (see comments below). I've updated this post because while, on the whole, there does seem to be an interesting allegation here (some of the people behind Libertas have made a mint from the shadier activities of the Bush administration and that their campaign coheres with the neocon perspective on Europe) I'm not sure I want to draw conclusions from it.

Alison Millar’s documentary on Father Michael Cleary aired last night on BBC 1 and is a useful bookend to the history of Ireland over the past two decades. Filmed as a student project over the course of several months in 1991, Millar was privy to the banalities of a priest’s domestic life. She was also witness to arguably the greatest single accelerant in the destruction of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Yet, due to her age or her naivity, Millar did not sense that anything was amiss in her portrayal of Father Michael Cleary’s life with his house-keeper and her son. In the documentary she recalls this time and reflects on how she could have missed the fact that the boy Ross was, in fact, Father Cleary’s son. Denying paternity to the end, Fr. Cleary’s star was dulled in the early nineteen nineties.

Millar’s film is fascinating on a number of levels. Firstly, its depiction of the esteem in which Fr. Cleary was held in Ireland is absolutely
authentic. This was a giant of a man, who was revered by old and young alike, who travelled across the country giving forthright talks, whose evening radio programme was a source of great interest to many. He was a celebrity in his own right but one who inevitably became the conscience of the nation. Secondly, the depiction of the Cleary family life is so intimate, so easy, that it begs the question how could people not have known the truth? A striking presence in the earlier and later footage is his older sister. To coin a Dublin phrase, this lady, and indeed none of the relations depicted, could be accused of coming down the Liffey in a bubble. Was it the case that most people in close proximity to Fr. Cleary had a a very clear idea of the truth but felt unable or unwilling to say anything?

In the hands of an older person the camera in Millar’s documentary would have painted a far more provocative picture. In her early footage, she is both childlike in her treatment of the subject and in her role as the storyteller. She is pupil, beneficiary, empty vessel to Fr. Cleary. She shows what she sees but her own overt involvement in the filming process precludes any objective analysis. Contrast Millar’s film with the footage of Father Cleary shot nearly fifteen years earlier in the film the Rocky Road to Dublin and one is immediately struck by how much the deft cinematographer can say with very little. Raul Coutard’s camera almost caresses its subjects. The closeness is not matched by engagement between film-maker and subject. The camera is all-seeing and says all. The viewer is unsettled by the shots of Father Cleary. Not surprisingly, the film was banned in Ireland.

However, Alison Millar’s footage retains its power precisely because it is a void rather than an accurate presentation. That the film-maker has no clue of this makes the footage almost endearing.

The return of Millar and Ross to Father Cleary’s old place of residence reveals many good feelings and memories from his former congregation. His son is articulate and forgiving. The Dublin of the early nineteen nineties might well have been on a different planet. Ironically, we have Father Cleary in part to thank for that.

Good to see an interview with Mark Shuttleworth on BBC Online, who is touting the next release of Ubuntu Linux. We've been running Ubuntu for quite a few years now and have upgraded to the beta of the new version in the last couple of weeks. It's lovely – I'm obviously entirely taken with open-source software (including running this site on Drupal).Ubuntu's strength, to a degree appeals to my impatience. It takes my relatively new Windows machine in the office six or so minutes to boot up whereas I can be running a linux machine within a couple of minutes. It's not that I have a hectic day. I'm just a git who hates waiting.  That said, I also really enjoy taking peeks at the various bits of software out there and – though I have no technical nous – seeing how they are put together as best I can. And of course, nothing beats the price…

Isabel, from what I can tell, also seems to enjoy using Linux. She is the perfect example of the sort of people Shuttleworth is interested in, although she's pretty proficient, she does not want to spend her time messing with machines. If it's secure, stable and flexible, she's happy. And with Ubuntu, that I know of anyway, there's no complaints! 

We're just back from seeing The Orphanage in the QFT. Jesus. I don't know why we do that sort of thing.

How bizarre is it that a good Saturday night would include getting totally spooked by this sort of thing. This did not exactly feel like fun. My pants were not just scaredy by the end of it.

Still, I always come out wondering at the way that film has spoiled our capacity for fantasy. Maybe its just me, but I find it relatively easy even in films like this to distance myself from the story by thinking about the whole confection as a manufacturing process. If you get to engrossed just have reassuring thoughts about the cameraman, the bloke with the boom, the people in makeup, the director. Works a charm for the likes of me.

What we miss is I suppose no longer even available from literature. The veracity of the spoken word is probably the only place where someone can become truly immersed. The folklorists may have been doing us a huge favour in allowing us at least to be tourists in story-telling (I personally recommend David Thompson's Creatures of the Sea – don't let the whimsical title put you off). But reading the stories is not the same as actually being told by the very people you relied on for information about the world – neighbours, family and passers-by. We belong to only the third generation in Ireland who were likely to travel more than a few miles from home. Where, for all those who came before, can the boundaries of this world have ended, if anywhere?

The firmer lines between the recognisable world and fantasy are undoubtedly a modern development. By this, modernity is a function as much of medium as anything else. No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, it always distances us from the voices of those we trust. In truth, if you really want to cast doubt on the way things are just whisper in somebody's ear.

Companies may be legal fictions but who's to say that they're not capable of love?

Well. Not quite. But sometimes they just don't want to be made look bad in front of the laydees.

I recall being in South Africa a few years ago and seeing the minister for justice rejecting a national High Court ruling on the SA government's bonkers HIV policy on the grounds that, because the court was in Pretoria, it had no jurisdiction beyond the Guateng province. It was a depressing moment, combining a disgraceful political stance with a sneering dismissal of the role of courts in maintaining the principle that society ought to be ruled by laws not people.

Beverly Cooper-Flynn's re-admission into Fíanna Fáil last week, based on a unanimous decision of the Parliamentary Party, was just as dispiriting. Beverly Cooper-Flynn had of course unsuccessfully sued RTÉ over their allegations that she had facilitated tax evasion when working as a bank official. Having lost her suit in the High Court she appealed (on a number of technicalities really) to the Supreme Court and lost again. In the High Court judgement following the jury's verdict, Justice Morris agreed with RTÉ's council in deeming Cooper-Flynn's character to be 'flawed' (and thus not amenable to being libelled).

So we have it established by a jury in the High Court (and through the appeal, by the Supreme Court) that Beverly Cooper-Flynn facilitated tax evasion. While, as the Dáil's Public Accounts Committee (of which , weirdly, Cooper-Flynn was a member) uncovered , she wasn't the only one,the number of bogus non-resident accounts, the major vehicles for tax evasion, in the Castlebar branch of the National Irish Bank where Cooper-Flynn worked went up from 44 in 1992 to 3,302 in 1993. 1993 was the year that James Howard, at the centre of RTÉ's report, claimed that Cooper-Flynn sold him a bogus offshore account (not that I'm suggesting Cooper-Flynn could have been solely responsible for that increase). Moreover, it seems that Cooper-Flynn arranged her father's tax affairs, including moving the proceeds of various investments, themselves made with 'personal political donations,' into an NIB account in Co. Monaghan, using Pee Flynn's Brussels address. Presumably as a not-quite-so bogus offshore account, since Flynn at least did have a house in Brussels (as was discussed on the Late Late Show in this spectacular clip).

What's so thoroughly depressing about all this, never mind Ahern's and then Flynn's evidence to the Mahon Tribunal, is the idea that someone can be deemed by the highest courts in the land to have facilitiated or even encouraged people to evade taxes and yet be accepted back into the bosum of the government party, happily chirruping about how they'd love to be a minister. It just emphasises the fact that these people obviously not only think that they are above the law, but think that they are synonymous with the law. It seems that the rulings of the Supreme and High Courts are merely a matter of political inconvenience. You just hang around until the smell fades away.

Not that this approach to the courts is a purely political issue in Ireland. Last year was remarkable for the ruling of the Supreme Court (covered here) that Jim Flavin, executive chairman of DCC had engaged in insider trading of shares in Fyffes. Insider trading is, you know, very much illegal. Hence the Director for Corporate Enforcement's seeking to have Flavin and others disqualified from acting as company directors. Paul Appleby, the DCE, has expressed concern that people who "actively participated" in insider trading can still carry on with their corporate lives. Not only is there "no doubt about fraud on the market," but there doesn't seem to be much of a feeling that Supreme Court judgements are in any sense definitively damning.

Hence the fact that DCC's board decided to express their continuing support for Flavin within minutes of the Supreme Court's ruling. Whatever you think of Flavin's pride in "the high ethical standards which we've always fostered within DCC," doesn't that suggest something, whatever the motivations of the board's members, about the status of the rule of law in Irish public life?

While it was good to see that the government might just respond to the scandalous behaviour in DCC I see this and Cooper-Flynn's readmission as a piece. This is not just about people's actions in themselves, it's about how they and their supporters regard the status of public life. It seems that the Irish public sphere is not a shared space, regulated by common consent, but a series of private realms, where the important thing is to get on. While we don't do anything so glamourous as incarceration-as-therapy, we do illegality-as-inconvenience.

Undoubtedly none of this is uniquely Irish. I suspect the slighly bored despair is.