Yearly Archives: 2014

BtValkuCMAACMez

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RP0_66GTuI

Last night at least two Palestinians were killed and 200 wounded in the West Bank during a ‘Solidarity  March’ against Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Elaine Bradley, an Irish human rights activist working in Palestine, was among the marchers.

Elaine writes:

Last night I acquired the dubious skill of being able to distinguish between live fire and a rubber bullet when being shot at. Thank you Israel for that lesson. Thank you too for teaching me that I should not assume that if I am part of a peaceful protest that includes families, children – that I will be safe.

Together with a friend I joined 20,000 people on the outskirts of Ramallah to take part in the ’48 march in solidarity with the people of Gaza and to protest the actions of Israel there. The aim was to march to Jerusalem – 3 miles from the notorious Qalandia checkpoint.

Everyone was united under the Palestinian flag, an unusual occurrence in a place with many factions that don’t see eye-to-eye. Whole families had turned out – one woman with her baby in a sling walked beside us for a while.

There was an electric atmosphere verging on festive with music blaring from lorries. The crowd sang along and occasionally broke into chants. We walked a couple of miles down the wide street towards the checkpoint in a massive throng. It was immensely powerful and uplifting despite these dark days for Palestine.

Before we got within sight of Qalandia checkpoint clouds of teargas were visible hanging in a vaporous blanket and the loud report of the tear gas cannisters was startling. I had been warned by a friend to bring an onion – apparently it counteracts teargas effects. People in the crowd around me who had been wearing their kuffiyehs (Palestinian scarves) around their necks, started to swaddle their faces with them. I had always thought that was because people didn’t want to be recognized by the IOF, now I know different.

News of what was happening ahead travelled through the crowd like an auditory Mexican wave. The IOF had blocked the checkpoint, had heavy security there and were not going to let us through. No surprise really.

What was a surprise was how quickly things descended into mayhem. As we rounded a corner Qalandia was ablaze before us. Great flames were leaping into the air where some had set fire to tyres. At this point the crowd sorted itself into groups- young men who were no strangers to these confrontations surged forwards, families, elderly people hung back. We were somewhere in between.

Suddenly a noise, hard to describe – a sound between a ping and a whizz, flashed close by. I stood like an eejit for a split second, not comprehending until I saw every one around me had hunkered down. “They are firing on us with live bullets” said my friend as I dropped down. More firing. No one panicked but turned back and ran in a crouched position, as did I. My friend and I moved back 20 yards and stood to the side of the street beside a shop.

The soundtrack to the night had dramatically changed from music and chanting to ambulance sirens, the bang of teargas cannisters and shots. From the Palestinian crowd fireworks were launched, that together with the Israeli flares gave the whole scene a surreal beauty reminiscent of a scene in Apocalypse Now.

I used my iPhone to video what was happening at what I thought was a safe distance until beside, me several feet away there was a loud metallic bang. A rubber tipped bullet had hit the metal shop. At this point my friend took my hand and said “Come- we need to get out of here. It is not safe”.

As we retreated fleets of ambulances were trying to make their way through the crowd to pick up the wounded. The word spread that someone had been shot in the head. One martyr, three martyrs? So many ambulances – was it 20 or 50? Hard to tell.

I made it safely home but didn’t sleep. The ambulance sirens continued well into the morning of this day. I check the Internet – 2 dead, over 200 wounded. The IOF are saying that they were fired on by Palestinians. Really? So how many IOF soldiers were shot?

An Amnesty International Report of earlier this year entitled Trigger-Happy: Israel’s Use of Excessive Force in the West Bank states “Israeli forces have repeatedly violated their obligations under international human rights law by using excessive force to stifle dissent and freedom of expression.” This sums it up.

The international community has abandoned Palestine and the Palestinians – it’s normalisation or nothing! I am deeply ashamed of our own government’s position – both at EU level, and in their abstaining from the vote at the UN for an investigation into war crimes in Gaza.

But the Palestinian people show time and again that they will not back down in the face of the monstrous injustices inflicted on them. Having been brought up in the traditions of freedom and democracy, I am proud to have been part of last night’s march, to stand in solidarity with a people who are seeking nothing more than justice and liberation.

Elaine Bradley.

Previously: ‘The Mask Is Off And People Know’

Pic Julia Mcfarlane

Screen Shot 2014-07-25 at 12.32.54James Nolan

On the lash in Dublin’s cultural quarter?

You know how this ends.

“…What I find once I leave that pub isn’t exactly pretty. Despite being in a good mood, not to mention pretty drunk, walking those streets for 45 minutes probably sours me more on Temple Bar than anything I’ve seen in the previous ten hours. As the tourists continue taking pictures, as they attempt to drink with dignity and enjoy late-night horse and cart rides, the Irish and British take over and go berserk.”

“It’s inevitable, I suppose, that in a melting pot of international drinkers, the two nations with the biggest love for getting shitfaced will rise to the top. Hen and stag parties spill out everywhere, wobbly cellulite and aggressive sweat stains running in chaotic formations down the cobbles. People jump out in front of strangers, startling them, whooping. Others fall down and puke.”

“A distaste rises in my stomach – I know, soon, I’ll have to leave. Needing photos, however, I persist – the camera needs only be held up for someone to dive in front of it, sticking out their tongue, their arse, and contorting their face into an expression that says, “I am a dickhead.””

“I find myself wishing that more tourists were here to force these people out, but in the long term, the opposite will surely happen. What right-minded person will come here, see this and return? How long until Temple Bar becomes – instead of a tourist attraction – something repulsive?”

“That said as long as drinking is considered our main means of coping with the frustrations of modern life, huge amounts of our populations will continue flocking to places like Temple Bar because, here, forgetting isn’t just tolerated, it’s encouraged.”

“Now I really need to leave, and the way I’m feeling, I kind of don’t want to come back. On my way to get a cab, however, I realise I need a piss – I’ve been walking for almost an hour with the dregs of eight or nine pints in me. In a 24-hour Starbucks I came to a conclusion. I’d gone out to discover something new and had ended up basically where I started. I didn’t want to admit it and be too cynical like people said, but late at night, Temple Bar up close looked like the same shithole it did from a distance.”

James Nolan, of Vice, on a night out in Dublin’s Temple Bar.

FIGHT!

I got pissed with strangers in Dublin’s biggest tourist trap (Vice)

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A former Anglo Irish Bank clerk has been given a suspend sentence for defrauding his employer of €200,000 while the bank was being nationalised.

…

[Gordon] O’Brien had set the money aside “as a war chest” because he was going to lose his job in the wind-up of the bank.

His counsel said his wife was also going to lose her job with another bank and his son had just been diagnosed with autism and faced having his education grant cut.

…

At Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today Judge Patricia Ryan sentenced O’Brien to four years in prison, but suspended it full for three years.

…

The Limerick man committed the fraud by transferring clients’ money into several bank accounts he controlled. He would then take money from internal Anglo accounts and put it into the clients’ accounts to make them appear in order.

No jail for former Anglo employee who defrauded bank of €200,000 (Breaking News)

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Finance professor at Trinity College Dublin, Brian Lucey

Brian Lucey spoke to Gavin Jennings on Morning Ireland this morning following the release of figures yesterday from estate agents, Douglas Newman Goode (DNG), which claimed that Dublin house prices rose by €20,000 since end March (€220 per day or €6,600 a month).

In response to the figures, Taoiseach Enda Kenny denied the suggestions that there is a property bubble in Dublin and blamed the price rise on supply and demand.

Gavin Jennings: “Is the Taoiseach denying a reality?”

Brian Lucey: “Well, no, I think he’s more realistic now than other Government spokespeople have been over the last while. Technically, this might not be a bubble because there are huge supply issues as the Taoiseach has identified now. That is when you have very low supply and demand is rising you’d expect to see prices rising. The thing is though that when you see a 25% year-on-year rise in house prices that should absolutely terrify people. High house prices are not good for the economy. If we have learnt nothing, and, apparently we have learnt nothing…Then, you know, there’s really no hope.

Jennings: If you say a 25% year on year rise should terrify people, what should it do to an administration, to a government?

Lucey: Well I presume it should terrify them as well, it should spur them into immediate action to try an advance the things that can be advanced quickly. Look, we’ve known since 1970, 1970, 44 years, that there is problems with land-bank hoarding. We’ve done nothing about it, why would we expect that simply because we’re into another bubble would Government and administration would stir themselves. We’ve known that there are problems with SME’s [small and medium enterprises] getting finance for the past five or six years and most of the developers are not the big billion dollar people, they are people building 20/30/50 houses, SME’s by any definition. We’ve known that there are problems for 18 months with zoned land not being serviced because local authorities don’t have the money to engage in putting in sewerage lines, etc. Nothing has been done on that.

Jennings: Do you get the sense though, now that that could be changing?

Lucey: I think that this is beginning to change but these things take a very long time. You know there’s ideas of building five, 10, 15,000 houses, that’s great, that’s next year, that will help. We’ve a very thin market and the market could very easily collapse out under it as the cash buyers disappear which will result in a double dip. Let’s remember, if you go back to the pretty seminal work of Morgan Kelly, who is the man that we really ought to take very seriously, the man who took the scales from all of our eyes. His original 2007 ESRI data analysis, which nobody has been able to disclaim, suggested we should be looking at 65% fall in house prices. We’re recovering and we’re now at about a 40% fall. House prices are not affordable in Ireland. They might be affordable in the south west, they might be affordable in the upper Shannon basin. They are not affordable in Dublin. And there’s a big problem here.

Jennings: In a word Brian Lucey, for people who are looking at the property market and aren’t in it as yet, in a word, there is a headline on the front of the Daily Mail “House Prices Back To Boom Levels By 2019” Are we going there?

Lucey: [inaudible]…Ah jesus…I think we run a danger, you know, but that kind of, those kind of headlines, I don’t know if the Mail are being their usual pop self or not but we don’t want to go back there, we want to get house prices down to a sustainable level. At a €35,000 average income, which is what it is in the country, if you do the math’s of three times one salary and once the next salary, and at 80% or 85% loan-to-value ratio we should be looking at average house prices at around the €200,000 area. That would be up and down according to different regions. But, when you’ve got it well above that, which we have, when you have international property valuers saying we are overpriced, when you see vulture funds and value funds and bottom feeding funds, that we’ve seen come in and pick up the good stuff and are now leaving, they are saying the markets is not toppy, on the rise. This is about as big a flare-lit tip-off that we have a major problem as you could get. The danger is, in the middle of July, it will be October before anything gets done.

Jennings: Just very briefly Brian Lucey, speculation yesterday in commentary from a German MEP, a senior advisor to Angela Merkel, that there is no hope of a deal on the €64billion banking bailout, should we be surprised?

Lucey: No! I mean every single commentator has been saying that there was never a hope of this, the Government have been peddling the argument that this is a game changer, it was never going to work, you cannot on one hand say to people “we are doing great” and on the other hand say “give us a hand out” we were never going to get this money, and it was fallacious to believe so and disingenuous to claim so.”

Listen back in full here

Kenny denies there is a property bubble in Dublin (Irish Times)

Previously: €220 A Day

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Maura Fay, of the Irish Farmers Journal, writes:

Google and car companies across the world are spending millions developing self-drive vehicles.

However, one inventor, Michael Shannon has already done it with a Massey Ferguson MF250. If a field is digitally mapped, you can let this tractor off by itself and it’ll spread fertiliser, roll fields, etc. using GPS co-ordinates.

It can also be controlled by remote control and driven manually.

Making a Massey remote control (Irish Farmers Journal)