Soft Irish Rain

Exactly how powerful IS the media?

Some recent, seemingly unrelated incidents have got me thinking.
For several days last week and the week before, the Liveline airwaves jolted with some truly shocking tales of random violence on the streets of Tipperary Town. While most incidents appear to have occurred on St Patrick’s Day, and some it appears within sight of patrolling gardai, it seems it has been an ongoing problem for months or maybe even longer.
In one incident on our national holiday, a garda approached a man who had just assaulted someone and told him he couldn’t be hitting people like that. But it didn’t end there.
One young American visitor had to cut his holiday short after he was attacked on the street in sight of his girlfriend and sister.
Caller after caller recounted assaults that for the most part went unreported or un-investigated by gardai. One woman even claimed that she and her daughter were advised by a garda not to press charges for fear of negative repercussions.
By last tuesday it seemed clear that the attacks were emanating from one unnamed family group who, if the callers are to be believed have been terrorising the townspeople unhindered.
Then comes the extraordinary news live on air of a major garda operation involving armed and unarmed patrols, special response units- hitherto deployed in the gangland strongholds of Limerick- and wait for it, a garda helicopter, as gardai closed in on suspects.
Coincidence or what?
Good news no doubt for the good people of Tipp Town who want their streets back but, really? Is that what it takes to get action and is that level of force actually required?
The second incident was a little more benign but nonetheless troubling. It began last Sunday with a report in the Sunday Tribune of a so-called guerrilla artist hanging unflattering paintings of Taoiseach Brian Cowen in two Dublin galleries. By Monday, the story was picked up by several tabloid newspapers but when it was reported on the flagship 9pm news bulletin by the national broadcaster, RTE it provoked the ire of the Fianna Fail press officer who complained to RTE. One outraged Dublin TD even called for the RTE Director General to stand down. The artist had made email contact with independent radio station Today FM which was then visited by gardai demanding access to the emails in their bid to track him down. You have to wonder who ordered this. As it turned out the artist voluntarily showed up to make a statement to gardai- before the helicopter and the emergency response unit were deployed…..
And then there is the ongoing high profile asylum case of Nigerian mother Pamela Izevbekhai who claims that her daughters are under threat of female genital mutilation if they are forced to return to Nigeria. They have lived in Ireland for four years and have received a large amount of media attention because Pamela’s oldest daughter Elizabeth bled to death as a result of the brutal procedure when she was a baby.
But this is now being disputed after it emerged that two gardai had travelled to Nigeria to verify Pamela’s story and had interviewed the doctor who had previously verified her story. He is now saying there never was such a baby or such an incident. And he is demanding money from any media outlet that wants to interview him.
Is every asylum case investigated so meticulously by the Garda Siochana?
Pamela is already fighting a deportation order and her case has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights. It would be highly embarrassing for Ireland to be shown to have got it wrong.

Three separate stories with a common thread.
They are all about saving face in the court of public opinion, whatever the financial or in some cases, human cost.

Since when did St Patrick’s Day get abbreviated to Patty’s Day? I keep seeing these references and doing a double take. I mean Paddy’s Day has become common parlance but honestly, Patty’s Day?
I’m thinking back to St Patrick’s Days of yore deep in the rural midlands.
It was the day when my family had two opportunities to shine.
First, my father was dispatched in early morning to forage for the perfect shamrock. Not fake stuff, not clover but freshly plucked three leaved shamrock in abundance and somehow he never returned empty-handed to the delight of my mother.
Then we marched off the short walk to the chapel, proudly wearing huge sprigs of dew dripping shamrock alongside our St Patrick’s Day badges.
Every year on that one day the parish priest conducted the Mass in Irish, so armed with Irish prayer books and thanks to weeks of painstaking rehearsals with our committed parents, we were poised to ring out the responses in triumphant Gaelic unison.
Ours were the only voices in an otherwise mute congregation. Occasionally our mother, a fluent speaker, was even called on to do a reading, another family triumph.
Much of the remainder of the day was spent discussing the poor excuses for shamrock worn by most of our neighbours and their embarrassing lack of Irish as the prayer books were carefully attached together with elastic bands and stored away with the badges until the following year.

The Tory Island home of Neville Presho, marked on either side of building with an x, in 1976 before it was demolished.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Imagine boarding up your holiday home on a remote island off the Irish coast and heading off to New Zealand only to return eight years later to find an empty space.
That’s exactly what happened to engineer-turned documentary maker, Neville Presho, who is currently in the Irish courts fighting for compensation.
The island in question is Tory off Donegal’s north west coast.
Presho first visited it in 1976 and like many before him and since was beguiled by its remote beauty. A few years later he purchased a six bedroomed two storey house on the edge of the Atlantic and used it as a holiday home for his frequent visits over subsequent years.
Presho had big ideas, big ambitions, big aspirations for his new island home and its Gaeltacht people. He wanted to help but he was a man who jumped from one idea to the next and soon New Zealand beckoned.
In his absence, his house was first squatted in by visiting trades-people and later mysteriously burned, finally falling down, and vanishing, stone by stone without a trace. In its place was what looked like a car park and the septic tank for the new hotel directly across the road.
When gardai investigated no one knew anything, not even the island king, Patsy Dan Rodgers, who personally welcomes all visitors to the island.
Hotelier, Pat Doohan maintains the house burned down as a result of dodgy wiring and the weather finished it off.

Presho, suffering from bi-polar disorder, diagnosed for the first time after his house disappeared, believes it was malicious and prays for the wrong doers. His life lies in tatters. Marriage over, he is estranged from his children and his home.
Constrained by the statute of limitation, he may not get the justice he so desperately craves. A High Court judge will deliver his ruling at the end of the month.

Once a year, the sheep dotted hills around Lough Gartan pulsate to the sound of lively discourse, courtesy of the Colmcille Winter School. No surprise that this year’s theme was The Recession and no surprise either that despite the panoramic surroundings on the edges of Glenveagh National Park, the mood was glum. Trinity College economics professor, Frank Barry pulled no punches in his scathing criticism of the Government for irresponsible fiscal policies, which have created the mess we are now in. And no, contrary to the mantra of government ministers, Ireland is not the innocent victim of world recession. Au contraire! We made it happen all by ourselves and the global crisis has just compounded matters. We have plummeted from a six per cent growth rate two years ago to a predicted growth rate of minus four per cent this year. In the words of Prof. Barry, that is a spectacular collapse second only in disastrous performance to Iceland. So how did we do it? We let developers and bankers run amuck. We flitted away the copious proceeds of the boom with no thought for tomorrow, paid ourselves too much and let our tax base collapse so when the downturn hit, there were no reserves. There are no reserves so once again, front line essential services are in the firing line for cutbacks they can’t endure. When I say we did all that, of course most people were mere bystanders but we elected (and even re-elected) those who could, nay should, have managed our country responsibly.
“We had become so dependent on the construction sector in Ireland. The size of the construction sector in Ireland was twice the European average, twice the US average, so it was clearly becoming unsustainable in terms of its share of employment, because of the housing boom. So it was going to burst at some time or another. The only instrument at our government’s disposal to protect us against that was fiscal policy. That means that in the good times we should have been running much much bigger budget surpluses than we were running so that we would have the resources available to protect ourselves in the bad times. That is what countercyclical fiscal policy is about, that it goes against the fiscal cycle…. Fiscal policy should have been used to slow down the housing boom because that was the only way. This is not rocket science. It is pretty simple.”
Barry pointed out that the EC twice warned the Irish Government about its pro cyclical fiscal policies and to our shame, was twice ignored. Both times in 2001 and 2007 were on the eve of General Elections when Irish Finance ministers are wont to getting the economy rip roaring drunk. Instead of reining in spending in 2001, Charlie McCreevy chose populism and to the cheers of the public introduced SSIA saving schemes, reduced income taxes and relaxed measures that had been introduced to control the property boom. The pro cyclical policies pushed wages up too high resulting in a loss of competitiveness and when the house boom ended tax revenue “collapsed catastrophically”. But Barry isn’t letting trade unions off the hook either.
“The fact that income taxes have eroded as a share of tax revenue is really a consequence of social partnership in place since ‘86, ‘87. The social partnership deals are to be understood as the unions saying to government we will offer you moderate wage demands but in return you have to give us income tax reductions. That is the entire history of the first twenty years of social partnership. And it worked. It brought industrial peace. It helped get us out of the original fiscal practices but it means that income taxes kept coming down and down. And income taxes as a share of tax revenue are a very stable source of tax revenue compared to the others.”
And a normally more circumspect Michael O’Regan, political correspondent with the Irish Times was also in no mood to suffer fools in what he described as a thoroughly hopeless situation. He blamed the state we’re in on greed, incompetence and opportunism.
“What we have today is absolutely wretchedly hopeless government. This is simply a fact.”
His prediction of social unrest, even revolution, was echoed enthusiastically by the audience. A lone Fianna Fail councillor gamely attempted to defend the party but seemed to lose his train of thought. Back in Dublin on Saturday evening, Taoiseach Brian Cowen extolled that Ireland would rise again. On the shores of Gartan lake a rising of a different kind was being contemplated.