A recap, for those of you new to the case: Over two years ago, in June 2024, Loco sent out a tweet from a Twitter account he operated, using a pseudonym.

The tweet alleged that an intoxicated asylum seeker living at Trudder House in Newtownmountkennedy had exposed himself to a 14-year-old girl on the 133 bus travelling between Dublin and Wicklow.

It included a photograph of the man, apparently asleep on the bus, and encouraged readers to share the allegation. It further denounced a list of people that Kirk felt were politically responsible for the situation, and accused them of “cheering on pedophilia”.

Now there is, of course, a difference between legal and wise. And I’d argue, dear reader, that Kirk’s tweet was not wise: Sharing photos of people and linking them to crimes is a risky business, not least because you’ll be in a world of defamation pain if you are wrong about their guilt.

The cops, in this instance, however, don’t seem to have been all that interested in whether Kirk was right or wrong in what he actually said. Instead, according to evidence at his trial, six Gardaí descended on his home at 6.30 in the morning, seized his devices, and proceeded to charge him with a breach of Section 4 of the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020, also known as “Coco’s Law”.

Now, here we should take a detour, because this I think is the most disturbing part of the whole affair.

Coco’s Law was named for Nicole “Coco” Fox, a 21-year-old woman who took her own life in 2018 after a sustained campaign of bullying. Oddly, the legislation bearing her name is now best known for its provisions criminalising the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, something which was not, as far as the public record shows, part of Nicole’s own experience.

It is, in essence, Ireland’s “revenge porn” law, though its scope goes considerably further.

The section that Kirk Loco was charged under, section four, is the most oblique and wide-ranging part of the law. Here’s how that reads:

“4. (1) A person who—

(a) by any means—

(i) distributes or publishes any threatening or grossly offensive communication about another person, or

(ii) sends any threatening or grossly offensive communication to another person,

and

(b) with intent by so distributing, publishing or sending to cause harm,

is guilty of an offence.

(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), a person intends to cause harm where he or she, by his or her acts, intentionally seriously interferes with the other person’s peace and privacy or causes alarm or distress to the other person.

(3) A person who is guilty of an offence under this section is liable—

(a) on summary conviction to a class A fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months, or both, or

(b) on conviction on indictment to a fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or both.”

You will notice a few things, if you read that section carefully.

First, it is very vague. For example, the term “grossly offensive communication” is very much an “eye of the beholder” sort of definition. As is “cause harm”. Does somebody who, for example, refers to me as a “Zionist Pig” on X, meet the threshold of gross offensiveness in an attempt to cause me, at the very least, emotional harm? Or would the prosecution have to prove something more than the mere fact that I was offended?

Second, it strikes me that this is what we might term a “creative prosecution”. Kirk was not charged with hate speech, or inciting violence. Instead, the DPP and the cops appear to me to have scoured the statute book and come up with “interfering with another person’s peace and privacy”, and promptly decided to prosecute Kirk on a charge that could have seen him sent down for two years.

Or as the man once said, show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.

Of course, this all had one basic problem, which is that there was rather more to the original allegation than the prosecution’s case might have suggested.

The 14-year-old girl in question actually appeared at his trial, to confirm that she had seen the man’s belt open and some of his pubic hair exposed. The court also heard that another female passenger had complained to the bus driver after the man sat beside her, and that she had reported him touching her leg. CCTV showed the man moving seats, though Gardaí maintained that it contradicted the allegation of exposure. In other words, while the precise allegation in Kirk’s tweet was disputed, there was plainly a real incident on the bus, and real evidence behind the concerns that prompted it.

Consequently, Kirk is a free man. Acquitted. As he should be.

But there are numerous questions that must now be asked.

First, who gave the order to send six cops to Kirk’s house at dawn to arrest him and seize his devices?

Second, to what extent did the Irish cops investigate the underlying incident? Because while they examined CCTV and interviewed the man accused in the tweet, evidence at the trial indicated that they had not even taken a statement from the 14-year-old girl herself. How does that happen?

Third, is this the kind of thing that Coco’s Law was actually intended to prosecute? It was named for a victim of a sustained and targeted campaign of bullying – not a single drive-by tweet about somebody else’s conduct.

And fourth, why did the Gardaí and the DPP believe they could prove that Kirk had published the tweet with the specific intention of causing harm? It is, after all, perfectly possible to publish something offensive about somebody without having the intention of causing them harm. Journalists do it every day.

The precedent that the authorities apparently sought to establish by this prosecution is obvious – though of course the cops don’t seem to care. Imagine a scenario where some cyclist (I know, saints, right?) hits my wing mirror and I, in a fit of rage, tweet out a picture of the offender cycling away, accusing him of reckless cycling.

Is that a grossly offensive communication? Probably not, but given the interpretation of the law that the cops sought to apply to Kirk, you might be forgiven for wondering where the line is drawn.

Kirk has been acquitted. A word here, by the way, for his legal team – solicitor Pádraig Langsch and barrister (and friend of the podcast) Laoise de Brún, who did him proud.

What should now follow is an enquiry into the circumstances of his prosecution. It seems to me that the state has failed here. And while an acquittal is not, by itself, proof of improper motives, I find it very difficult to escape the suspicion that this prosecution had, somewhere along the line, quite a nasty little political motivation.

For that, somebody should be held accountable.

If you were to average the last four public polls on the issue, as I’ve done below (thanks, ChatGPT, for the nice graph) then you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as clear cut as one might think, observing the online debate:

That’s not a massive gap, despite activist sentiment online, in public, and on the media being, by and large, wholly against any decision to change the policy. In fact, it genuinely makes me wonder why the “keep the triple lock” side are so eager for a referendum, given that they are already disproportionately vocal on the issue but nevertheless manage only a small lead over the opposite position.

As readers may know, I myself am an absolute heretic on the issue, by the standards of the so-called “nationalist right”. My view is that a nationalist country (or any country for that matter) should not be granting other countries’ vetoes over what it does with its army.

But I confess I also get annoyed by the tenor of the debate: I noticed one person, the other day, taking to his social media platforms to essentially link the Triple Lock to Irish participation in a Nuclear Armed conflict. Go online, search for discussion of this issue, and you’ll not take long to find an online warrior of right or left preaching with great confidence that the Government’s plan is to send Irish sons and daughters to the front line in Ukraine to take on the good-guy Russians.

None of those things are reasonably foreseeable. They are, by and large, the products of feverish imagination.

What’s more, there’s this idea out and about that neutrality and the triple lock keeps our soldiers safe. That doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny, to be honest: Consider that Portugal, which was a founding member of NATO, lost precisely two soldiers during its 16-year deployment to support the US mission to Afghanistan. Ireland, meanwhile, has suffered five deaths in the Lebanon during the same period.

Now, there might be an ideological argument that says we don’t want to send our troops to Afghanistan (and no such proposal is on the table) but it’s hard to definitively say that similarly sized countries fare worse, in terms of the safety of their soldiery, for being in NATO.

In fact, there’s a reasonably strong argument that our troops would do better, embedded and enmeshed in an alliance, than they do by themselves at the mercy of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

But most of all, online, you will find the bizarre argument that the Triple Lock should be kept because Irish people should not trust their Government, or their Dáil (the two other “locks” in the Triple lock arrangement).

First of all, this is a silly basis for keeping the Triple Lock, for the simple reason that any Government could abolish it, at any time: Say Micheál Martin really did want to send 5,000 Irish lads to the front lines in the Donbass: He could abolish the Triple Lock in a single day’s parliamentary sitting, given the rigidity of Ireland’s whip system.

Since no referendum is required, the Triple Lock isn’t really a lock at all.

But second, it’s just bad, in my view, to be arguing that other powers should have power over your own country because you do not trust your own government. Is Beijing more trusted with Ireland’s soldier’s lives than Dublin? Is Moscow? London? Paris? Washington?

At least the lads in Dublin are answerable to Ireland’s voters in theory, even if not always as much as we would like in practice.

Finally, I’d note something else: Switzerland is Neutral. Switzerland has maintained Neutrality for over a century, despite being bordered by an at-times Imperialist France, Austria-Hungary, and Germany both in its Kaiser and Nazi eras.

It has managed to be neutral without ever giving its neighbours a veto over where it sends its troops.

If the Swiss don’t need to do that, then Ireland doesn’t need to do it either. I’m always a little baffled, if I’m honest, that this is even an argument. Especially one made by self-described nationalists.

But by all means, tell me why I am wrong!

J.

Mauricio was up before the courts in Longford this week, albeit not for something that necessarily makes the hairs on your neck stand on end. He hasn’t assaulted somebody or kicked a dog or exposed himself to the local women.

What he’s done is to attempt to rip off his insurance company, a crime that doesn’t seem to me to be unique to any race colour or creed.

He was charged with using a false RSA No Claims Bonus Certificate and deceiving Liberty Insurance into giving him an insurance quote reduced by €1,388.04. His solicitor told the court he had pleaded guilty to deception.

So far, so mundane. Yet as you may have guessed, there’s a complication. What follows comes from the good folks over at Longford Live, and it’s the tale of how the Irish Courts are contriving (rather than actively conspiring) to keep Mauricio’s Irish Citizenship application in good order despite his crime.

We join proceedings here as Mauricio’s solicitor is applying for a second adjournment to allow him to complete his Irish Citizenship application:

“You gave him the opportunity, Judge, to seek an adjournment before sentence to allow him to complete his Irish citizenship.”

Solr Gearty added, “He has progressed that very well and I understand that while it is not granted yet, it is imminent.”

“He has requested one final adjournment.”

In response, Court Sergeant Enda Daly said the State had no difficulty with the request.

Solr Gearty said his client, “greatly values the opportunity that has been given to him, Judge.”

In granting the request, Judge Bernadette Owens listed Coutinho Oliveira to appear before the court on February 16.

This is, I think, an exceptionally illustrative case for the old story of how Ireland works™. We’ve got a cast of characters all working on entirely defensible assumptions, and yet all of them in their own small and unobtrusive way contributing to an outcome that is, I think, a disgrace.

We’ll start with that outcome: sentencing has been deferred, twice, to allow Mauricio to complete his citizenship. Mauricio here may well be a nice fellow, but before he’s even become a citizen, he’s pleaded guilty to deceiving an insurance company to obtain a quote reduced by nearly €1,400.

Now should being a convicted fraudster stop you getting citizenship? My guess is that a referendum on that question wouldn’t be close, if the public had their say. But of course, they don’t.

(It’s actually neither here nor there, by the way, whether you think Mauricio should get citizenship or he shouldn’t. But we should surely all agree that the decision to award or not award citizenship should be made with the fullest and most complete information.)

In any case, the outcome here is to ensure that Mauricio’s citizenship application is completed before he gets any black mark on his record that may - or may not - affect him.

So who’s to blame?

We’ll start with the most innocent character in all of this, who is Mauricio’s solicitor. The solicitor’s job is to obtain the best possible outcome for his client. In this case, he has asked that Mauricio’s sentence should be deferred so that he can complete his citizenship.

So the lawyer has asked for adjournments, twice. The lawyer can’t be blamed for that. It’s literally his job.

Next in the tier of innocence comes – this one might surprise you – the Judge. The Judge has been asked twice for adjournments and twice she has granted them, explicitly on the basis of helping Mauricio become a citizen of a country he has just pleaded guilty to committing deception in.

But of course, the Judge has not received any objection from the State to an adjournment being granted. So there’s not a lot she can do, without doing something extraordinary.

Then we’ve probably the closest thing we have to a villain in the piece: the local guard, who has consented to the adjournments rather than objecting. But then consider his job: he is there to prosecute the deception charge, not to intervene one way or the other in a citizenship award. Do we really think he’d get any thanks, or improve his own life, by standing up and objecting to adjournments here?

No: each of these people may be acting rationally and defensibly in their own interests. And yet nobody in the reported proceedings asks why completing citizenship should be a reason to defer sentence.

Mauricio, presumably, hopes to get his award of citizenship. And then, as soon as he gets it, he will return to court for sentencing.

Whether that sequence will affect the citizenship decision, we do not know. What we do know is that the court has been asked to accommodate it, and the State has no difficulty with the request.

Everyone’s interests have been considered, except the public’s.

Welcome, Citizen Mauricio.

John actually broke that story on Wednesday, before it went around the world with millions of people asking themselves a single question: What on earth is wrong with Ireland.

But of course, it’s a matter of priorities, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps, to consider asking a kid if he or she wants a hug before enveloping them with your big huge adult arms - but is this a problem that requires a television ad campaign? It’s a weird country that would answer yes.

But then, it is a weird country. It’s a country in which a 14 year old girl is being - by all accounts - repeatedly raped and the Minister for Children, in whose care the child is, is neither expected nor required by Media or Opposition to so much as comment.

It’s a country too that spent much of the week at war with itself over whether the Dáil or the House of Commons should have the final say on where our own Government sends our soldiers: Sarah and John find themselves on slightly opposite sides of that one.

And it’s a country where Sinn Fein TDs lead charities in their spare time, only to find those charities investigated, apparently, for having piles and piles of money, BMW X5’s, and rolex watches. Then there’s the Fine Gael Party, convulsed in internal rows and bitterness.

There aren’t as many jokes as usual, this week - and there was a weird glitch at 46 minutes when the recording decided to drop, so forgive us that.

But it is, on balance, a good conversation. We hope you enjoy it.

J&S

With that, come warnings of apocalyptic weather. Or as we say here in North Tipperary, an average day.

By itself, there’s nothing objectionable in what the scientists have said. They may be right, or they may be wrong, but telling us what they think is going to happen is their job.

However, the notion that the world was ever going to impoverish itself voluntarily to fend off the spectre of a disaster decades away was always nonsensical, and based on no understanding whatever of human nature.

People don’t care about disasters decades away. The evidence on that is clear and observable in other fields of politics.

Some such disasters are vastly more predictable, and still people don’t care: Tell a Donald Trump supporter that the USA’s $40trillion national debt is unsustainable and that the USA is a decade or two at most away from a historic fiscal crisis, and they’ll shrug and accuse you of Trump Derangement Syndrome. At best they’ll shrug and blame Obama and Biden.

And when that crisis comes, by the way, the people living through it will blame contemporary politicians, despite most of the harm having been done in the period since the George W Bush Tax Cuts of 2001, with each successive President making it worse.

Perhaps more controversially, other disasters can be reasonably foreseen: The UK Government, for example, is running at present a “puberty blocker trial” which – by the Government’s own admission – is an experiment on hundreds of British kids to see what happens to them when their natural puberty is stopped in order to make it easier to transition them to the opposite gender later, complete with surgical mutilations and all the rest.

You and I and the dogs on the street, dear reader, can predict with some certainty that there’ll be a scandal about this in 20 years when the participants – sorry, victims – of this barbarism find themselves middle aged and mutilated, and start suing the state and appearing on chat shows where that generation’s progressive activists will applaud them and stare stonily at their elders who thought they were being kind.

But it’s happening anyway.

Back to Climate. The laughable thing about today’s report is that it is accompanied by the usual blather that the problem – even if it cannot be prevented – can still be reversed if humankind would only listen to the climate people and slash global emissions by some eye-watering percentage over the next 20 years.

This is not going to happen. It will not happen for the same reason that an Irish Government would get no traction by saying that it was going to cut €50 a week from the pension today and increase the retirement age to 70, to prevent a pensions crisis in twenty years.

The average pensioner would, entirely correctly, note that they’ll be dead in twenty years, and poor today. So, no Government will act on that.

But the thing is that Climate is not an Irish problem. It is a global problem. And therefore our national impulse to be the best boys in the class tends to take over. We’re not that eager to fix our own domestic issues, but by golly and for Jehovah, we’ll take the lead on fixing a global problem we can’t really impact.

So in the end, we’re likely to get the worst of both worlds here. Ireland is on course to suffer all the impacts of climate change, assuming the boffins are right (which remains an assumption, albeit one we should take very seriously) while simultaneously suffering all the disadvantages of trying to prevent it.

We get the higher energy prices and the hurricanes. China just gets the hurricanes.

Of course, a cynic would note that Climate is the only problem that can only be fixed by enacting essentially socialist policies, which makes it a convenient excuse for people who wanted to enact socialist policies anyway. Combine that with best boy in the class syndrome, and you can explain most of Irish environmental policy.

But for all that you’re now paying through the nose for things that used to be cheap, you’re going to get the hurricanes anyway.

Maybe the Trump fans have it right. Live it up while the living is good.

Kitty Holland has what should be an extraordinary story in the Irish Times today. In a functioning country that had normal standards for what it expects from its politicians, it’s a story that would bring down a Government:

“There is no place in secure State care for a teenage girl who gardaí believe is being subjected to “horrifying” sexual exploitation by multiple men, the High Court has heard.

The girl, who is 14 and has a mild learning disability, is in the care of Tusla and believes these men “care for her”, Judge John Jordan was told yesterday.

She had been approached by men who brought her to a house in another county and gave her alcohol, cocaine and other drugs to “relax her”.

Tusla was seeking a special-care order for the girl, but told the court it was currently unable to provide her with a bed in any of its three special-care units.”

It goes on from there and it gets worse, with accounts of two other children – one a teenage girl also being sexually exploited by a group of men, the other a teenage boy under the sway of a drugs gang – who also need special care orders. Special Care Orders are essentially the highest security detention, for their own safety, that the state can put a child under.

But let’s stick with the headline case, for now.

The first thing to note is that this child is 14 years old and somewhat developmentally disabled. She is in the care of Tusla – that is, the state agency for children that gets €1.47bn per year. Despite being 14 years old and in the care of Tusla, she is being sexually exploited by multiple adult men, who are giving her drugs and alcohol. This is an ongoing situation of which the Gardaí are aware.

Tusla – annual budget, remember, €1.47bn – has gone to court for this special care order but actually can’t enforce it because it does not have room in its own facilities. As Kitty goes on to report, there are 26 rooms available for such cases, but only 15 are open due to staffing shortages. That’s what one and a half billion quid of your cash buys.

Now, it’s very rare that a Judge does this:

“Jordan directed that details of the cases be sent to three Government Ministers – Minister for Children Norma Foley, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan and Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers – as a “vivid illustration” of the “consequences” of the State’s ongoing failure to open all special-care beds.”

The Judiciary are independent of the Government, and generally take that very seriously and do not engage in political criticism. For a Judge to essentially say – in public – that Ministers need to read all the details of this case and act is extraordinary.

A week or so ago I wrote here that Norma Foley has no business being in cabinet. I will remind you why: She is the Minister for Children. Will Norma Foley make a statement on this case? Will she even be asked about it? Will anybody demand to know why the agency for which she is politically responsible cannot provide a secure bed for a child being sexually exploited by adult men?

I’ll tell you what these Ministers will talk about though: Tuam. And the horrors of finding babies buried in a graveyard in coffins, which is the entirety of what has been discovered in the taxpayer-funded desecration of their cemetery in the Galway town, all in the name of making Norma Foley and Micheál Martin look more compassionate and caring than 1930’s-era Irish nuns. That’s the fucking bar they’ve set for themselves.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a 14-year-old girl in their own care, being raped on the regular in a systematic way, and the state cannot provide a secure place for her with a billion and a half in your taxes.

Am I going mad? And if I am going mad, why is nobody else going mad?

The thing about modern Ireland that the people who love modern Ireland never stop telling us is that it is a better place than 1930’s Ireland. First, that’s not a high bar: We’re vastly richer and better educated.

Second, despite that not being a high bar, we’re not even meeting it on our own core measurements of – let me check my notes here, oh yes – not letting children be abused.

Third, the person we’ve put in charge of this great project of being better than the nuns is Norma Foley, which is not what a serious country does.

Nor is this a one-off case: If you’ve an Irish Times subscription, for whatever reason, you can read about the other two mentioned in this single court sitting. There’s at least one other teenage girl being sexually exploited by a group of adult men, who has complained of pelvic pain as a result of what she describes as “very rough sex”. Nothing the state can do about that either, despite her being in the state’s care.

Traditionally, the first duty of a Government has been to defend and protect its citizens. Normally, this is further nuanced into the old-fashioned idea of women and children first. Functioning states do everything they can to protect their children. And this isn’t some Maude Flanders “think of the children” situation, either – I think we can all agree that teenage girls in the state’s care getting gang-raped on the regular and the state’s Ministers having to be shamed over it by a Judge passes the threshold where that sentiment is passe.

Remember, if you will, what brought down Albert Reynolds’ Government in 1994: A political controversy over the appointment of Harry Whelehan to the High Court, arising from the handling of the extradition of paedophile priest Brendan Smyth.

But not so long ago in Ireland, something like that could bring down a Government. In 2026, you can have a child in the state’s care get raped on the regular, have the authorities aware of it, have the Ministers say fuck all, and….. make page six of the Irish Times.

I try not to do unhinged anger but…. It would make you want to scream at your fellow citizens. Wake the fuck up.

JMG

In media land, journalists take great care to make sure to be as oblique as possible about the identity of the caller.

Now, full disclosure: I don’t know who it was. I’ve been told the same name by about five different people at this stage – but not directly by anybody involved.

That said, to be rightly described as a “senior government figure” according to the usual media conventions, you would need to hold one of the two or three most important Ministries – Finance, Justice, Foreign Affairs – or be either the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste. We also know that the person on the other end of the phone was a Fine Gaeler, which rules out Micheál Martin and Jim O’Callaghan. There are precisely two people left, then, who fit the bill. Besides, such is the state of Fine Gael that there aren’t many people in it these days who can be described as “senior”.

But what we know is this: Following comments that he made that appeared to be critical of anonymous briefings against him, the Minister was sent off to take an urgent phone call that lasted some time, and after it was over he went back inside the venue and promptly collapsed.

Of course, O’Donovan has epilepsy, and there is no established evidence connecting the contents of the call to his subsequent collapse. The timing may have been entirely coincidental.

Later that evening, Simon Harris – indisputably a “Senior Government Figure” – rushed out a statement defending his Minister.

If I was an opposition leader, I know what I would be asking at the next leader’s questions that the Tánaiste takes: Did Simon Harris make that call? The Tánaiste, like every other Minister, is obliged to answer questions in the house truthfully.

But moving on from that, the bigger problem is that this kind of nonsense is on the coalition agenda at all. Patrick O’Donovan may be a good Minister, or he may be a bad one. Either way, he is a very junior one whose apparent “error” was to accidentally deny €20m in funding for RTE.

If the price of making RTE poorer is having an allegedly incompetent Minister in charge, then my advice is that we should all be voting for the dumbest possible candidate at the next election. If they can’t save money in Montrose competently and for good ideological reasons, then complete inability to do their job will just have to suffice. Ends, not means.

The most concerning thing is that the Fine Gael party seems to think this matters. Whatever about the wider electorate, it would have won much greater support from its traditional supporters had its response to RTE complaints about the budget been a simple “go and jump in a lake, RTE”. Instead, “Senior Government Figures” seem so annoyed about a relatively fractional cut in RTE’s budget that they are prepared – allegedly – to bollock their own ministers over it.

This, more than many other stories, sums up Simon Harris’s leadership of Fine Gael. He is preternaturally obsessed with the daily back-and-forth of stories, and squashing the bad headline in a newspaper over a story that doesn’t matter – to the complete neglect of any long-term sense of who his party’s voters are, or what they wish to see accomplished.

What he has never understood is the concept of the good row: The fight that you might lose tactically, but win strategically. He has never understood the concept that being on the wrong end of the media sometimes puts you on the right side of the public. Bertie Ahern, for all his flaws, was never that worried when Fintan O’Toole condemned him. Nor should he have been.

Right now, across the country, families are looking at winter with fear and trepidation. Filling the oil tank. Fueling the car. Spending on Christmas. Sick relatives, and so on. And what have they had from the party that – more than any other – is supposedly on the side of taxpayers? An internal row over money for RTE.

And all this at a time when one of their own Ministers is recovering in hospital, having collapsed in the middle of the controversy.

These are not serious people, and they have no business running a serious country.

Contrary to what you might think, this writer has no animus towards Fine Gael. I would very much like to see a serious Fine Gael party at the heart of Government – one with the identity it used to have, as being a defender of taxpayer interest, strong on law and order, moderate on international affairs, and ruthlessly competent in administering the state.

But that’s not the Fine Gael party we have. What we have is a soap opera led by a man who can’t stop making statements and interventions in the media – but who does not have any sense at all of what his party is supposed to do, beyond getting nice pictures in the papers.

Tell RTE to get stuffed, Simon. Your approval rating will go up.

Wednesday saw a massive public sector strike - ostensibly in response to the Government breaching a promise to raise pay for workers. In this episode, we look behind that claim: Is it better to pay teachers, or better to do what the Government has done, and give everyone free books and free meals? Is it better to pay nurses, or give every woman free contraception and hormones during menopause? Does all this spending make us better off, or does it make things worse?

While the Government were losing control over their own workers, things were worse in Waterford, where an innocent family was burnt to death, apparently over drug debts that none of the deceased had ever incurred. Will that tragedy “spark action”, as people like to imagine?

No, says John: In fact it will make families even more terrified of the terrorist drug gangs who are running amok. And over whom the state has no control.

While all this was happening, a Government Minister was hospitalised in circumstances that at least suggest the pressure of his role has played a part. None of this inspires confidence….. but wait.

The Dáil was in fact busy this week. It was debating a very important piece of legislation from Ruth Coppinger. We talk about that, as well.

As ever, we hope you enjoy. This was one of those weeks where we could have done two episodes, so we’d better get around to that fast.

Thanks for listening.

J&S

But for the record: Grand. The rooms are smaller than you’d expect for a prestige Dublin Hotel, the breakfast is distinctly “meh”, and the lifts are small and slow. The price of course is absurd, but that’s basically every Irish hotel since half of them have been turned into migrant residences.

On the upside, the underground car-park is very handy and there’s a lot you’d put up with to be staying smack bang in the middle of Ballsbridge if you are attending an event, as I was.

Tell you who won’t be attending an event at the Herbert Park Hotel, of course: Jews.

My good friend David Quinn got the scoop:

Note here that “Jews” is the correct formulation. The event was not hosting the hated Israelis, but instead a bunch of (predominantly) Jews from around Europe, who wanted to hold some sort of a forum on discussing anti-semitism. Reportedly – and the Hotel certainly hasn’t denied it – somebody from the hotel asked the organisers if there was any connection to the IDF, which is absurd but sort of standard these days in Ireland.

The line of thinking here is not hard to follow. It almost certainly went from “conference on anti-semitism” to “that’s about Jews” to “Jews live in Israel” to “Israel is bad we cannot host this”.

A great many more people think this way than you would think. And almost all of them would be horrified to be called antisemitic for it.

They make little mental shortcuts that they don’t even notice themselves making. And because they don’t notice them being made, they are outraged that somebody could ever think that they – very good people, after all – might be engaged in a form of racialism.

One of the things the Irish Government does, and certainly cannot be blamed for, is to regularly assert that the country does not have an antisemitism problem. Since five minutes on social media would disabuse them of that notion, and since they are all on social media, we can call this what it is: A patriotic lie in the national interest.

Ireland most certainly does have an antisemitism problem. But there are levels to these things: I think it highly unlikely that Jewish people would ever be rounded up and deported, not least since the Irish State seems barely capable of deporting anybody. But also because that would require a conscious, active antisemitism. Which is not what infects the majority of the country.

What infects Ireland instead is a kind of provincial, passive antisemitism. The kind that associates the word “Jew” with “Israel” and then on to “Palestine” and then on to “very bad”. The kind that doesn’t hate Jews for their religion, in most cases (a few old-style Catholics and immigrant Muslims excepted) but hates them for their perceived opinions. This is why the most prized asset of the Palestinianist is the anti-Zionist Jew. See, they cry: This one’s alright.

What happened in the Herbert Park Hotel – in my opinion, at least – was just an extension of what happened with the blessed football matches which sent our poor Sports Journos absolutely crackers. Palestinianism is an identity, more than it is anything else. And identities need to be expressed.

Everybody with a functioning brain knows full well that the policy of the Netanyahu Government will not be shifted over who and where the Israeli soccer team plays. Or over who gets to stay in a hotel. So the actions at issue are not about affecting policy, or even about helping the poor blighted Gazans. They’re about self-expression. They’re about “we’re on the right side of history”.

That’s the funny thing about evil: The people doing it are almost always convinced they are doing righteous things. And right now the righteous thing is to “stand with Palestine”.

If that means that a hotel must, as in 1930’s Germany, become Judenfrei, then so be it. Other Palestinianists will know that you are on the right side – after all, what is antisemitism, compared to literal genocide™?

You’d like to think, I suppose, that we’ll snap out of this as a country at some stage and wake up feeling a bit hungover and embarrassed. And, just like we did with the Covid Lockdowns, we probably will.

But there’ll never be a reckoning for it. It will just not be mentioned again, like the lockdowns. Because our identity, more than anything else, is that Ireland is a good country and we are good people.

And that, as the Government well knows, cannot be challenged by facts. People would rather be sustained by the lie.

JMG

But collective action is collective action. And nobody can deny that the public sector unions, for all their villainy, have a point when they say that their members have been hit very hard by the cost of living. Just like the rest of us.

There will, of course, be a pay deal. This Government, which has never yet found a problem it would not attempt to solve by throwing more money in its general direction. But in doing so, it will create more problems for itself.

So the public sector will get a pay rise. The alternative – strikes – is not something that Government can live with. But handing them a pay rise will set a bad precedent.

Ireland’s public sector is – as most of us who don’t work in it know – very inefficient. One reason for that is that it suits politicians perfectly for the system to be inefficient. Hear me out.

The best and most successful politicians are the ones who can make it work for their constituents – the idea being that you get so frustrated dealing with the system that you eventually call up the local TD or Councillor who makes a phone call and suddenly the system delivers what people need.

In fact, if you know who to talk to and what to ask for, the public service in Ireland can magically transform from “frustrating” into “boy I’m glad I pay my taxes” very quickly. And who knows who to talk to? The local TD or Councillor.

A system that actually worked effectively would not be good for politicians, especially in an Irish context where “he got me the medical card” is the most effective way to win votes. Whether TDs understand this themselves, or whether it is subconscious, is hard to say. But if the system was less frustrating, we would need our TDs less. And that would shut off an invaluable supply of votes.

How do you win elections in Ireland? It is not, dear reader, by fixing a broken system. It is by helping voters navigate the broken system with your help.

If they did try to fix it, they would be screwing themselves: Imagine what would happen to the politician who said “we’re going to cut 100,000 public sector jobs and get rid of a lot of paperwork”.

It sounds good on paper, but in reality most of you likely know somebody who does one of those jobs.

Consider the efforts they’ve made, over the years, to “fix” the public sector:

During the last recession, major efforts were made to make the public sector work harder. Readers of the correct age may remember the Croke Park and Haddington Road Deals, which essentially asked public sector workers to do more hours for the same pay. The basic idea was that if you added more hours, then the “pay divided by hours worked” sum would look better, and the Government could say it was getting bang for its buck.

But of course, those hours are quite often a sham: Meetings. Training Days. Doing paperwork. The extra hours worked do not equate to more time with patients for nurses, or more time with students for teachers, or more hours chasing crooks for the Gardai.

Their net effect, arguably, was to lower morale, create a shortage of applicants, and leave the public with broadly the same public service as before. It was an accounting trick, not a drive for efficiency.

Meanwhile, the size of the state has dramatically expanded. The best figures I can find suggest that from 2010 to the present day, the total number of state employees has gone from about 300,000 to nearly 420,000: A near 40% increase in the number of people employed.

So Ireland now has a bigger, bloated, less efficient public sector. And all of the people in it need – like the rest of us – to heat their homes and fuel their cars, so they need more money.

That money will come from everyone else. It will come from the private sector. Where businesses have just been told in the budget that they must also pay their own minimum wage workers more. And where workers, in general, work longer hours and have lesser benefits.

It’s no individual worker’s fault, and the public versus private debate doesn’t really help. It’s the fault of politicians, maintaining a system that suits them but doesn’t really suit anybody else.

JMG

My father was fortunate: His final illness was relatively brief, and his death was at home, in his sleep, in his own bed, surrounded by people who loved him. He lived a long life relatively unspoiled by unforeseen tragedy or loss, and almost made it to eighty. I’d take that deal myself, were it on offer.

Of course, the grief is very real. I had a very good man for a father and, though we were very different people and not prone to talking for hours on the phone – “wait and I’ll get ma”, he would say, when I rang and we would run out of things to say about the weather – he was never not there when any of us needed him. His passions were his wife, his children, and his work, in that order. Though latterly his grandchildren bumped us all down a rank, which is right and proper.

For my part, I just wanted to say thank you. Far too many of you reached out to me and my family personally over the past few days for me to be able to ever thank you all individually, though I shall try. Some of you even came to our home to pay respects, despite never having met me. That was incredible. One of the things about this little community of podcast listeners is that many of you know Sarah and I very well, despite maybe never having met us. That some of you would make the effort to show up absolutely blew me away.

Many others simply sent messages, or left comments, all of which were deeply appreciated.

We get many things wrong in this country, but one thing that – I think – we do well are funerals and grief. I’ve not lived in Monaghan, or in the family home, for close to 24 years, and I met people this past weekend I hadn’t seen in over two decades.

The turnout of people to offer help – from making tea to parking cars to bringing food – is one of the most humbling things I have ever experienced. We do funerals in a way that says “this person mattered, we cared about them, and we care about you”. Until you experience it yourself, you don’t truly appreciate how comforting that is. I hope we never lose it, or fully embrace the funeral home culture that is slowly creeping in.

This is a pic of my dad and myself, when he and mum joined Orla and me on holiday in Madeira two years ago. I’ll always have the memories of that trip, and of the 42 years in which he was the best dad I could ever have hoped to have.

Thank you all so much.

J.

In his absence, Sarah was looking around for a replacement and landed on one close to home: Infamous libertarian, former FG councillor, Dental genius/torturer, and - putting all those titles held by Keith Redmond in the shade - Mr Sarah Ryan.

The obvious topic was the budget, and they dissect it in detail: The minimum wage hike, and its effects on business. The lack of imagination. The excess spending. And the political culture underpinning it all.

That out of the way, Keith decides to take his life in his hands by discussing, on a podcast with his wife, the things that make certain women attractive. Say something for the man: He’s got courage, as well as brains.

John will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy.

J&S

Whatever. Who cares?

Some of you do, I suppose. Better to get a tenner than have to fork one over.

But ultimately this whole system is built on a single rotten edifice, which is Pay as You Earn. This turns your employer into the state’s tax collector, meaning that Simon and Jack never have to put their hands directly into your pocket. They’ve already lifted the cash from you before you ever get your share.

This diabolical, genius, near perfect system is one of the biggest blights on a democratic society. It can never be abolished. The problem is that it was created in the first place.

Consider what it does.

First, it takes all the pain out of paying taxes. You don’t miss what you never really got in the first place. Imagine how different the politics of this country would be if, for example, every PAYE worker had the system abolished, got to keep all of their own money, and then had to write a big cheque at the end of the year. Thirty grand in some cases. Fifty or sixty in others. Even a cheque for ten grand isn’t fun to sign, when you’re getting nothing for it other than the privilege of seeing ads on the telly telling you to not drink and drive (a subsidy to RTE, if you’re wondering).

Second, it divorces the citizen from the state almost perfectly. It means that you have no feel for how much is being taken from you. Psychologically, I suspect it means you are much more blasé about the waste and the mis-spending because you don’t feel it, as such, as being “your” money that’s wasted.

Third, it pre-empts and prevents protest. It’s not viable, in Ireland, to have a mass disobedience campaign where people respond to some scandal by saying “we’re not paying any more”. Your leverage – collective leverage – over the levers of power is drastically reduced. There’s no mass movement that can starve or weaken the state by denying it funding.

Now you might say – and indeed have a very good point – that this is all better than the alternative. That it makes the state’s income predictable. That it takes away the pain and misery of employing accountants. That it gets fewer people in legal trouble for tax evasion.

You’d be right. As I say, it can’t be abolished. Much like leaving the EU, the immediate costs of doing so would simply be too high for the system to bear.

But we should talk about the costs. One of the reasons we have so much waste in this country, both literal in the sense of wasteful spending and figuratively in the sense of spending on useless things (Are you Emergency Ready?) is that it is so easy for the Government to acquire the public’s money, using a system designed – allegedly – for taxpayer convenience.

It’s not really for your convenience, it’s for theirs.

Now, circling back to the stupid budget: It’s the usual, really. The Politicians have done what the politicians always do, which is to divide us all into little interest groups and throw us all a bone. There was something for your sports club. There was something for the childcare moms. There was something for the disabled. I don’t know if, in the end, the hundred quid for the teenagers to go to a concert was in there.

I hope it was, because that’s the Irish budget in sum: Pocket money day. The politicians give you your few quid if you’ve been good.

What there wasn’t, and what there never is, was a plan to use the resources of the state to solve any particular problem: Five grand for first time buyers won’t make a hair of difference to the housing market on a macro level – the only purpose is to buy some votes. Same with the dole tenner or the home-heating oil freeze. There’s no strategy here, just a voter appeasement scheme.

There is so much that could be done in Ireland, if politicians had imagination. Instead, I write this having just received news that a relative who went to a public hospital last week emerged from it with a potentially fatal infection. The HSE budget last year? €26.9billion. Or €3.07million, every single hour.

If we don’t feel ourselves paying it, we’ll never be as angry about it as we should be.

Consent is a magic word. Almost anything goes, so long as all parties are in agreement with it and happy to participate at the time the act or acts are taking place.

Consent does not preclude regret: You can consent to something today and regret it tomorrow. All that consent does – which is why it is a terrible standard, in my view – is set a legal rule about whether something is allowed, or has crossed the line into sexual assault or rape.

Consent is now at issue in what is set to be one of those American cases. You know the ones: You’re going to hear about them whether you like it or not. In a week or so there’ll be columns in the Irish Papers about the case, and everyone will be on the radio giving their opinion. The case in question is the Cornell/Fraternity Rape case. Or the Cornell Seven, for short.

Here’s what happened:

On the Night of October 19^th 2024, a young woman who, in American fashion, is now called “Jane Doe”, met a guy on a night out and went back to his fraternity house. While there, the young man asked her if she would like to have a threesome with him (man 1) and his friend (man 2). Jane Doe agreed and gave consent. Upstairs they went, and, well, cue the crappy music.

After exerting himself, Man 1 fell asleep. At this point or shortly thereafter, Man 3 – a friend of Man 2 – entered the room and after some conversation, Jane Doe had a second consensual threesome with 2 and 3 while Man 1 slept. Following that, Man 3 apparently sent a text to other male residents in the house which referred to events in the room using the words “free p*ssy”.

At this point, men 4, 5, 6 and 7 entered the room. In her sworn statement, Jane Doe says that she was reluctant, scared, and felt “completely numb to the whole situation”. She also says that she considered taking Ketamine – more Ketamine to be precise – in the hope that she might pass out and avoid having further sex with the men in question. Further, at least one of the men said to the others that they should stop. And when Jane Doe directly asked for the sex to stop, stop it did.

Three weeks later, she gave a statement to the University Police, who passed it on to the prosecutors. The prosecutors declined to charge, saying that the six-page sworn statement supplied to them did not identify sexual activity continuing after Jane Doe had clearly withdrawn consent, and did not establish the kind of incapacity required for a criminal prosecution.

Now, this has transformed into political scandal: Jane Doe is taking a civil case. The Governor of New York has given multiple press conferences. There are calls for the University Authorities to resign. There is – to use the vernacular – absolute war and carnage on TikTok, with young women essentially declaring war on behalf of Jane Doe. The Patriarchy, in short, has struck again.

What to make of this?

The first thing to say is that the behaviour of the six men in question was by any objective or traditional moral standard, abominable. At the very least, they took advantage of an intoxicated – the degree of intoxication being in dispute – young woman.

But objective and traditional moral standards are not the same as the law. The law, and western culture for years, has defined rape and sexual assault by a very simple metric: Consent.

And there’s a further double standard here: On the one hand, society declares that women are entirely equal people with their own agency who are competent and confident in making their own decisions. On the other hand, it places immense responsibility on men, in precisely these kinds of situations, to make decisions for women. Jane Doe’s police statement says that she was feeling completely numb; It says she was “disassociating from the situation”. It mentions that she felt coerced. It does not say that she said “no”.

Society tries to get around situations like this by going back to the intoxication point: She wasn’t in any fit state to give consent. Now reader, I don’t know: I was not there and had I been there I certainly would not have been in that room. But the bigger point is that this is a cop-out: Certainly there are situations where people are unable to give consent, but the bigger problem is that consent is the standard taught to young people about how to conduct themselves.

Consent is what creates these grey area cases that drive people bonkers.

I’ll say here what George Hook got sacked for saying: If you are a young woman and go to a frat house full of men and consent to not one but two threesomes while high on Ketamine, you’ve made a bad choice. One that makes you objectively less safe.

Equally: if you are a young man and find a group of your friends engaging in group sex with a woman you do not know and have never spoken to, and decide “I’ll join in here”, then you’ve made a bad choice that has made both you, and the woman, and your friends objectively less safe.

The fallout here – all the battle over did she or did she not consent – is about something much more fundamental. It’s a proxy battle over who behaved worse, or more stupidly. And who should get punished.

One of the biggest problems here is that Jane Doe undoubtedly and understandably feels as if a crime has been committed against her because she feels as if her life was harmed by the events of that evening. And of course, feeling as if you have been harmed creates a reciprocal demand for justice – Men 1-7 should, in Jane Doe’s eyes and those of many of her supporters – receive harm to their lives in kind, in the form of judicial punishment and shaming and perhaps jail time.

But, and here’s the problem: when she talked to Cornell University Police she at no point stated that she denied consent for anything that happened. And under the narrow reading of her signed statement adopted by the prosecutors, the law offered her no obvious route from ‘I bitterly regret and feel violated by what happened’ to ‘these men committed rape’. Those are not the same thing.

Everyone can look at that room and think: Something has gone horribly wrong here. But the only legal framework we’ve all been taught then insists upon answering the question almost exclusively by asking: at precisely which moment did consent cease to exist? Or did it?

I’ll say this and this only for the seven men: I have no idea how they were supposed to know the answer to that question.

These debates about the relationship between men and women are fundamentally based on the nonsensical notion that men and women are the same. That they play by the same rules. That what works for one works for another. Over and over again, young people are becoming victims of that notion.

In this case, seven lives are in the process of being ruined. And yet, it seems to me that nobody in this case can be definitively shown to have broken the very golden rule – consent – that we’re told prevents these things from happening.

Perhaps that rule needs some re-thinking.

However, if the march of the arachnids into Sarah’s home has one thing going for it, then it’s this: It has come just after she received her “be emergency ready” booklet. So she’s well set.

We discuss that booklet this week, of course, and the Minister responsible for it: Helen McEntee. As we get into it, we get into a more fundamental question: What does it say for the health of our democracy when people like McEntee and Norma Foley are in Cabinet, but apparently hardly in office? Who actually makes decisions like “send everyone a booklet reminding them to dial 999” or “Totally ignore the latest Tusla scandal”. Are we governed by politicians, or figureheads?

As John says: One thing we’d like to ask Micheál Martin above all is: “Why is Norma Foley in Cabinet?”

Away from that, there’s a good - but civilised - barney in here about the Orange Order, Garvaghy Road, and all that in there, with Sarah representing the views of good patriotic fenians everywhere and John earning himself a position up against the wall when the revolution comes.

John might be on safer ground re: the epidemic of madness in Sports Journalism, however, given the reaction of the crowd at the Aviva last night. And finally, amidst some chat about the case of Krista Pike, who survived two attempts to kill, her, we get two things: A truly terrible Candace Owens joke, and an important question: When Ruth Coppinger takes power and sentences us all to death, what will be your last meal?

Emergency Ready, Indeed.

As ever, thanks for listening.

J&S

Which leaves, once you go through the list, only one set of winners: The Sports Journos.

We’ll get to the Irish Football Team in a moment, but that story is not, actually, exhibit A for the prosecution. This piece in today’s Irish Times is.

If you’re not familiar with the story, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently purchased a home in Waterford, decided to give €50,000 each to his three neighbouring hurling clubs. It is fair to say this is not a massive chunk of Zuckerberg’s wealth. It is also fair to say that €50,000 is a massive chunk of change for most clubs. And those clubs are grateful. Which Ciarán Murphy in the Irish Times just can’t get past:

“The three clubs came out and said their piece this week, and they are thankful. The sum of €50,000 is still a lot of money on the mean streets of Knockanore. They are delighted and didn’t really abase themselves too grievously while they were thanking their new neighbours for their largesse (although talk of commemorative jerseys made me dry-heave a little). But let’s not the rest of us get fooled here. This is not even back-of-the-sofa money to Zuckerberg.

He has been a malign influence on the world. He has eroded democracies and poisoned the minds of young people around the globe. Like the rest of the tech barons milling around Donald Trump’s White House, he presents an existential threat to the future of the planet”

You read that right: 1,000 or so words to say that Zuckerberg is cheap and evil, in a column officially about sports but really, as so often with the sports journos, about the writer’s own political obsessions.

Which brings me to the single biggest obsession of the Irish Sports Journo: The Irish Football Team, and its damnable refusal to obey the commands of Sports Journo Inc.

Nobody who has read an Irish newspaper in 2026 could be left in much doubt about what Sports Journo Inc wants. Deciding to abide by the FAI’s own internal vote on whether to play a game against the You-Know-Who’s (credit: La Perrins) has been variously described by sports reporters as “a black day”, “a stain”, “extraordinary”, and, of course, because Irish reporters are rarely original, “GUBU”.

For disobeying the Sports Journos and playing football with the You-Know-Whos, the FAI have been subject to an extraordinary campaign which now includes coverage that bears little resemblance to the hearing I watched. The Irish Examiner, for example, claims today that the FAI were “battered and bruised and unable to counterpunch” against politicians at the Oireachtas yesterday.

There are two explanations for that headline: Either the Sports Journo who wrote the piece wrote it before the hearing; or he is living in a fantasy cocoon where he saw an entirely different hearing than I did.

The Irish Times branch of Sports Journo Inc, meanwhile, is essentially encouraging protesters to believe that a sufficiently hostile reception for the Irish Team tonight might “make players think again” about Sunday’s match against the You-Know-Who’s.

I was talking, earlier this week, to a seasoned hack in one of the major papers, who wouldn’t always be the biggest fan of what I have to say. But even he was taken aback by the ferocity of it, the only explanation he could offer being that “it’s the first time any of these guys ever had a bit of influence and it’s gone to their heads”.

I’m not sure that’s right. I think most of it has to do with incentives, and cowardice.

Simply put: This time next year Sports Journo Inc will be writing about something other than the You-Know-Who’s and the rest of us will probably still read their takes on the next Man Utd Manager, or what Mayo lads will talk about now the curse is over. Once they’ve done their time as hysterics, the annoyance will fade, because lads still want to read about sports. You and I, dear reader, are not going to boycott them and make their lives a misery.

But the other lads will.

The best way to stay onside with the likes of the Bohemians fans and People Before Profit, simply put, is to bow to them on this one. Because unlike the rest of us, those people hold a grudge obsessively.

On one level, that’s sort of understandable. But on another, the implications are enormous. Because it’s the You-Know-Who’s this time. God only knows who or what it will be next time.

The sports journos, I submit, provide us with a useful preview of what happens when political conformity becomes the price of being left alone: people are hectored, abused, shouted at and bullied into compliance. Protested if they do not obey. Endlessly denounced in the media.

A press corps willing to go to the lengths that the Sports Journos have here is showing you something about itself.

What we’ve seen this week from the Sports Journos has a name: McCarthyism. Not, obviously, in the precise historical sense of congressional investigations and Communist blacklists, but in the broader sense that survived the man himself: the endless hounding, investigation and denunciation of people for supposed ideological heresy.

It may have begun with the footballers and the You-Know-Who’s, but it won’t end with them.

The details of the case, which are predictably horrific, can be read here. I’m linking RTE only because, whatever else its many flaws, it does not have a paywall.

If you don’t want to click, the basic gist is as follows: A husband abused his family and children for years by locking them up in a house in conditions that were so awful that, when Gardai finally entered the property, they had to pull out because of the smell.

Matters were brought to the attention of the Gardai after one of the children, a teenaged girl, tried to take her own life in school. Absent that act of attempted self-destruction, it is unlikely that the cops would have known to go and check the home.

You know who did know, though? Tusla.

The Child and Family agency had been aware of the family for – get this – twelve years. The family had been referred to Tusla in 2012, 2013, 2015, and most recently in 2019 by various concerned actors in the public sector who had encountered the family. When the mother – who was being abused by the husband – showed up to a meeting with Tusla, she was accompanied by the husband and told Tusla everything was fine.

And Tusla, naturally, said “grand so”. Between the first engagement and the present day, twelve years of abuse went on, and it went on despite four separate referrals to the state’s agency responsible for stopping this sort of thing.

And this is hardly an isolated historical failure: literally the day before this judgment was reported, HIQA published an inspection of Tusla’s North Dublin child protection service. Of the four national standards it examined, three were found to be non-compliant.

Now, of course, there’s a wonderful thing about Tusla. It’s the same wonderful thing that is true of the HSE. What is that?

It is the basic fact that Tusla does not really exist to protect children, so much as it exists to protect politicians from the consequences of failing children. If you’re reading the above and thinking “Tusla is a disgrace” then you are both correct, and also doing exactly what the architecture of Irish Child Protection is designed to make you do.

The Minister for Children, the person who sits atop this mess, is Norma Foley. Her name has not appeared in any coverage of this case that I can find.

Tusla’s budget - €1.47 billion – serves that purpose as well. Foley, as Minister, forks over the cash, appoints an “independent head” of Tusla, and then when the shit hits the fan, she can hide. When the agency screws up – as it does relentlessly – it is summoned to an Oireachtas com-mih-hee, where it gets the most ferocious dressing down.

Politicians call it a disgrace. Say things are shocking. Demand reform. And do fuck all.

That is how the system is designed to work.

Now, in its defence, the sheer repeated incompetence of Tusla given the money and resources it has remains astonishing. But when an organisation fails as often as it does, with the budget it has, an obvious explanation presents itself: That there is no incentive to be better.

If we want a working child and family agency, then put simply, the person in charge of it should be somebody likely to face real consequences for failure: It should be the Minister for Children herself.

Here’s what a google news alert for Minister Foley looks like, right now:

You’ll observe what’s not there: Nothing about Tusla or its failures. In Ireland, it is as if those who run the country are entirely disconnected from the things that happen in the country.

That is by careful design. And it is a design that needs to be unwound, before anything in Ireland can possibly get better than it is.

Number 3 advises us that we should store all important documents in a waterproof, resealable bag. What this anticipates, of course, are not our own needs in the aftermath of the apocalypse, but the need for bureaucracy.

Imagine the scene: You’re there with your husband and kids (because obviously, the wife will have the documents) stranded on the roof of your house amidst the rising waters. Finally you see the Irish Navy on the horizon, come to rescue you. And you’ll be allowed on – because your passport will be right there, in a waterproof, resealable bag. They’ll have Sorcha from UCD there to scan the documents for you.

Number 5 might just pip it at the post, however: “Remember”, it counsels us, “Save a photo of your important contact details to your phone”. I’m not joking. That’s seriously what it says.

The others really pale in comparison. Top tip number four is that the number to call if things go wrong is 999. Or 112. Top tip two reminds us to have a supply of food. I’m fine on that score, since I store mine as fat reserves around my gut. Six months or so, right there.

But what, might you ask, is “top survival tip number one”? Dear reader, I am surprised you would have to ask: It is to “keep this booklet somewhere safe in case you need it”. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m putting mine in the safe, so I have a record of what number to call when the Zombies surround the house.

I joke, but there’s a serious point here: Whoever wrote this book, and whoever signed off on its publication, thinks that you are an idiot. A fool. A child.

2.2 million copies of this have been printed, plus another 26,000 which will be handed out to local authorities. I cannot, as yet, determine the full cost – but I can tell you that if they used An Post’s Publicity Post service, which facilitates delivery nationwide, then the cost of that alone will have been at least €400,000, conservatively.

The existence of such a publication should be a scandal on a number of grounds, but a lot of people understandably won’t think of all the reasons, or have time to do much more than roll their eyes. So let me list just a few of them, in the spirit of taking the ludicrous Irish state seriously.

First, this booklet contemplates circumstances in which the normal functions of the state are, at the very least, severely impaired. There are certainly emergencies in which shops might be closed, electricity might be out, and roads might be impassable while the phones and emergency services continue to function. But the more serious the emergency envisaged, the less useful much of the advice becomes.

If we are genuinely at the point where households need to survive for an extended period without normal supplies or services, being reminded of the number for 999, or to photograph your contact details, is not much of a survival strategy. Why someone would need their important documents in such a scenario is beyond me.

In such a world, the survival skills listed in this booklet are hopeless. The state would be much better advised to put together a booklet on how to hunt and cook rabbits, or how to start a fire using twigs.

In this sense, it’s the iodine tablets, mark II: By the time the nuke has gone off, the iodine is not going to save you.

Second, the state is providing mostly obvious advice on what citizens should do in an emergency, while rather less attention appears to be paid to what the state itself would be capable of doing in one. In an emergency on the scale contemplated, large-scale rescue operations would be required. I joked above about the Navy coming to save your family: The state has only a tiny number of naval vessels available for operations at any given time.

There is something slightly rich about a state with serious deficiencies in its own emergency and defence capacity sending everybody else a leaflet telling them to keep a few tins in the cupboard.

Only third is the sheer waste involved. The state has an emergency text alert system. Should an emergency come, much of this information could be delivered to every functional phone in the country – and if it cannot be, then the 999 advice and the storing contact numbers advice is itself of limited use.

I cannot yet put a firm figure on the total cost, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. But once design, printing and nationwide delivery are included, this is plainly not a trivial exercise. Would a website not have sufficed? They could even have tested the emergency text system to give people the web address, and tell them to print their numbers off from there, or whatever.

Fourth and finally, there’s the insult to our collective intelligence. We are governed by people who think that we do not know to call 999, and that we do not customarily store the phone numbers of our loved ones on our phones.

Remember that when they show up asking for your votes. The Minister responsible for this leaflet should be made to answer for it.

And you won’t be surprised to learn which Minister it is: Helen McEntee.

JMG

The soldiers there must have felt some tension too, given that the IRA tried to kill them all on at least three occasions when I was a kid – a heavy machine gun attack in 1991, a mortar attack in 1994, and another machine gun attack in the same year, when I was ten years old.

To travel from our home, near Castleblayney, to Dundalk, took us through Cullaville.

Then, as now, Cullaville was a hotbed of Republicanism. Then, as no longer, one would pass the infamous “sniper at work” signs, designed to intimidate the British Army or anybody else who didn’t want to be shot. Once – but only once – there was a checkpoint there not run by the British, but by men in balaclavas who presumably answered to the Army Council. That was probably more disquieting than the Brits, to anyone driving through.

Thankfully those days have gone and that road is now littered, not with sniper at work signs, but with enormously large homes built in the post-peace process years when business, it seems, was good.

Visit Latlurcan cemetery in Monaghan Town, where my grandparents and uncle lie at rest, and thirty yards from their graves lie the remains of Jim Lynagh, killed by the SAS at the Loughgall Ambush in 1987 as he tried to blow up a police station in that small town. His grave, like most IRA graves, is adorned with a headstone much more elaborate than what the common family can afford.

Meanwhile, on Bragan Bog, a few miles to the north where I used to spend miserable days with those same grandparents in life, cutting turf, there are other graves. Unmarked ones. For Northern Catholics the IRA didn’t like. They don’t get the big headstones. They didn’t even get a funeral.

Now, I write these things not to present myself as some traumatised veteran of the troubles™. I had a happy childhood. I’m just saying: I remember this shit. I remember what it was like. And the moral certainty that brought it all about. There are a lot of people in this country, from a lot of places much further removed from Northern Ireland, who never had to be as close to it.

Drumcree is the worst of it. Drumcree is it at its purest.

What possessed the PSNI to tell the Parades Commission that they thought that a parade down that road could be peacefully accommodated should, in my view, be the subject of scientific research. The people who made that determination should have their brains donated to science, that they might be studied.

But nevertheless, the recommendation was made. The courts and the system have told the Portadown Orange Lodge – not an institution that has always covered itself in glory – that thirty-five of them may walk down a public road to complete their restricted 1998 parade.

The law, the system, and the independent methods of arbitration that have kept the peace (mostly) for thirty years have, finally, just once, come down on the Orange side in that particular existential fight.

The loyalists had been losing that one for so long that they’d forgotten what it felt to win one, I think. Meanwhile the nationalists had been winning the fight for so long that they, in turn, had forgotten it even was one.

What I’ll say is this: All of this matters a great deal.

You cannot expect people to live in a country that remains tribally divided, and then tell them that the laws designed to keep the peace between them only apply to one side.

For thirty years, Nationalists have told the Portadown Orangemen that they must abide by the law and the decisions of the courts and commissions and the rest of it. For thirty years, albeit without much good grace, the Orangemen have complied.

Now, Nationalists are saying that they will not do the same. And for now, they are getting their way. What’s more, I think they will probably triumph, ultimately.

They will triumph because they operate from a position of strategic strength on the escalation ladder. For the parade to go down the road, the police would have to escalate and remove them, and therefore be seen to be the ones starting the violence. No UK politician – especially a Welsh Labour Party man of the left, like Chris Bryant – will ever order that.

But nationalism’s local position of strategic strength is not replicated elsewhere across the province. And setting a precedent whereby people power and politicians combining to give the law two fingers is an example that others will, surely, follow. There will be no tit without, somewhere else, a tat. There never is, in Northern Ireland.

That’s what gave us the bloodshed, remember? Some self-appointed person in the IRA would decide to give the order to shoot a policeman. Some drugged up maniac in the UVF would kill a catholic or two in response, which got a response, which got a response. That cycle kept the entire nonsense going for decades, long after anyone with a brain could see that the “armed struggle” was going nowhere.

This is the kind of cycle that made household names out of animals like Michael Stone and Dessie O’Hare, who in other lives would have merely terrorised their wives and children and left the rest of us alone.

So spare me the crying about the Garvaghy Road. The residents there have gotten their way for three decades – their way, remember, being that they have a veto over who walks on a public, taxpayer road.

The sight of Brendan McCionnath back in the news – someone Tony Blair once described as the most unreasonable man he had ever met – and Mary Lou McDonald nodding along as her supporters call people “bastards”… that’s not what anybody needed.

Peace would have been better served by letting the thirty-five lads walk down the road, and then stopping them by means of the law next year, and the year after. If you can’t tolerate people walking on a road, then what can you tolerate?

Nothing but total victory, is the answer it seems for many. But here’s a last question: If nationalism cannot respect the law on a parade, and seeks to overturn it with force – why, oh why, in gods name, should any unionist ever respect the law on a democratic vote for unity?

JMG

So instead, we said we’d talk about something that’s perhaps more relevant: The enormous number of Irish young people who say that this country is - in the vernacular - shite, and that they’d leave if they could. 68% of them say as much; and even bigger majorities say they cannot get houses. Or jobs.

Frankly, lots of them can’t even get dates. We talk about all of that: The pressures caused by migration; the public money wasted on “free stuff” that doesn’t improve their lives; the closure of pubs; the degradation of shared public spaces like the City Centres.

Then there’s Nick Delehanty: Technically, he’s our rival over on the Irish Question, but he’s also an Irish Person who lost his business this week, and got sneered at by the state-funded media. We talk about that: The pressure and hardship of running a small business, mad proposals from the Labour Party to make it even more difficult, and how all of this ties into the nonsense around Holly Cairns and Maternity leave.

We also discuss Ebun Joseph and the Convention on Education, which John wrote about yesterday. And finally, for fun: Did y’all hear about the mad Lesbians in America? Because it’s a great story, even if it does tend to confirm your suspicions that the western world is presently in a mental health crisis.

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Have a great weekend,

J&S