Author Archives: Kevin L Higgins

Kevin L Higgins writes:

Taken aback by your news but understand the reasons. Since I’ve been around a lot longer I have always been amused by a namesake [the esteemed Kevin Higgins] publishing poetry..The joke is that as a nipper I dabbled. Here is something well-aged as my send off…

I walked into a Dublin Pub (1969)

I walked into a Dublin pub
To silence a thirst from Dublin streets
Steeped in atmosphere
And literary décor
Plastic bark from plastic trees
And in the corner suppin’
The best from James’ Gate
A genuine jackeen, called Joxer
The bloody tourist’s dream.

Kevin L Higgins

Earlier: Kevin Higgins: Avoid Causing Offence

Pic via Rare Irish Stuff

The lounge in Buswells Hotel, Dublin 2 this morning as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed, via video link, a joint session of the Houses of the Oireachtas

Kevin L Higgins writes:

Irish children of the early 1960s whose homes contained a (generally rented) television were treated each weekday from just after 5pm, to a stream of cheaply made, cheaply acquired and universally awful series of outdated American TV shows.

Between Monday and Friday at least three of these slots were occupied by such as Rin Tin Tin, Annie Oakley and of course, The Cisco Kid . Had these productions been labelled like LEGO kits, they would have been described as suitable for 5+. This form of entertainment even then, had barely moved on from an era of film where, in a bar-room fight all the ‘good guys’ wore white hats and all the ‘bad guys’ black ones.

While the Irish population of 2022 has moved on somewhat over 60 years, certainly in its willingness to pronounce on world events, there remains some doubt as to whether we are better informed; perverse in our determination to propound a contrary view or simply remain infatuated with the sound of our own voices. The majority of our political class are certainly a fit for the two latter options.

In the space of a couple of years. a huge chunk of the chattering classes and indeed that of the population as a whole have become experts on the nature and effect of transmittable viruses and in a blink, informed commentators on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe and the logistics of modern warfare. Not since the introduction of the revolutionary arcade game of Space Invaders more than forty years ago have we been able to exhibit our quick-wits and dexterity to such effect.

If were are forced to paint by numbers it can be said that Putin is a vile creature who rules Russia and its satellites with a grip which no one has had, since the death of Stalin in 1953. Though he is acutely aware of his own mortality as he approaches his 70th birthday this is no consolation, as he is transparently unhinged and clinically paranoid.

He is a captive in a prison of his own construction. As on so many occasions in the past, it may fall to the Praetorian Guard to solve the current problem. Those with any knowledge of the Roman Empire will be aware that the Guard could always be bought. There are undoubtedly offers already on the table, the Devil is clearly in the detail.

If we await the sound of trumpets from the Seventh Cavalry bringing relief to Europe, we should recall that at the last changing of the guard in Washington, a deranged lunatic without any apparent redeeming features attempted to overthrow a duly-elected President by violence and continues on a daily basis to preach sedition.

Putin is a present and dangerous poison in the world, but any suggestion that the United States is on balance, a force for good in the world is absurd. However deluded Putin is about a new Russian Empire, the creation and extension of the American hegemony has been inexorable for at least eighty years; that is where US interest lies.

Those interested in how Putin became the new Red Czar and how Russia evolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union, should read David Satter’s “Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State”, published in 2003. Satter’s professional career in Moscow began as correspondent for the Financial Times in 1976. He filled various posts in the Russian Capital until Putin finally had him expelled in 2013. His books are essential reading for a proper understanding of the Russian State over the last forty years.

The Irish response to the displacement of Ukrainian people has been generous and understandable. The virtual canonisation of Zelensky has been a useful focus and rallying mark for those who still recognise the good guys by their (at least notional) white hats.

When it comes to the tortured history of Central Europe however, nothing is simple. For a century Ukraine has been pulverised both by Nazis who actually called themselves Nazis and by the savagery of Stalinism and it’s successors.

The richness of its ‘black earth’, it’s scale and the fact that it was soaked in blood during the major conflict of the twentieth century makes it the true Mitteleuropa irrespective of how that term was intended by nineteenth century writers. The term was certainly not benign as interpreted by the Nazis who saw it as indispensable in the acquisition of Lebensraum just as Moscow has always viewed it as part of the Russian Empire. Ukraine, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and expansion of the EU and NATO. is now more than ever the buffer state of Europe.

If Ireland is going to embrace Ukraine on the scale envisaged, then it would be a good idea if we were to inform ourselves as to it’s history. Given how poorly we grapple with our own history of the last hundred years, that may be a bit of an ask. The response of the Ukrainian people to violent attack is understandable, as it has been like Poland, the ground over which contending empires have carried out unspeakable atrocities.

When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 21,1941, he quickly swept through Ukraine. A large part of the Ukrainian population welcomed the Germans as their ‘enemy’s enemy’. By September 1941, the German army was fully in control of Kiev or as we now daily refer to it as Kyiv.

Outside the city is a place called Babi Yar, the site of a large ravine. There, over two days, the September 29 and 30, some 33,771 Jews; men, women and children were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen (the murder squads that followed with the regular army) and by members of the Ukrainian State Police, then allied with their enemy’s enemy.

How do we know that? Because with the efficiency for which our Teutonic friends are celebrated they counted very carefully and transmitted the information to Berlin. The details were picked up on Enigma radio traffic, decoded at Bletchley and confirmed by post-war sources.

Any Ukraine for Dummies booklet being used by those within the Department of Foreign Affairs will not be helpful in assisting in the present horror story. Neither will several hundred pairs of bespoke yellow and blue socks. We should read a little, listen a little, learn a little.

The present writer does not claim any particular expertise, but I have been to Moscow, Lviv, Kyiv and visited Babi Yar. I have read the entirety of the Transcript of the Nuremburg Military Tribunal, and completed (a long time ago at undergraduate level) a course of Soviet Studies.

I have read voraciously the history of Europe for some 40 years. If I am none the wiser, I am perhaps a little better informed than I might otherwise be. If we are to be confronted by daily butchery on European soil (while blithely ignoring it elsewhere) and perhaps even Armageddon: perhaps we should be a little curious as to why? Simultaneously, mountains must be moved to bring this latest tranche of war criminals to the Hague.

Our politicians have to have a capacity to understand what their job is on entering Iveagh House [Department of Foireign Affairs], as should the collection of Third Secretaries whose academic output included essays on the Congress of Vienna and a critical assessment of Bismarck based on a student crib. They too may need to widen their reading.

Now retired from law, Tuam activist Kevin L Higgins has contributed to Broadsheet previously on the issue of Mother and Baby Homes.

Earlier: “I Would Like You To Show More leadership”

Sam Boal/Rollingnews

From top: Tuam Burial ground in 2016; Attorney General Paul Gallagher (left) Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman; Kevin L Higgins

Having been kindly offered a platform by Broadsheet’s Bodger to provide a few words on the foul Burials Bill, aka as the Institutional Burials Bill 2022, it was reasonable to assume that he expected a forensic examination of the text of the Bill. This isn’t it, but the following represents my view of the matter.

The members of the Joint Oireachtas Committee in their consideration of the Bill did on the whole approach their task with a degree of empathy for the memory of the dead children and the feelings of their families. That said, the Minister’s Bill was an invitation to do a substantial job of virtue-signalling, which the text offered them. I do not gainsay the genuine decent feelings of Committee members. I do say they were suckered.

Nothing changes the glaring facts that the Minister did not have the Ministerial or Parliamentary jurisdiction to initiate the Bill and neither did the Committee have the jurisdiction to consider it.

I raised that issue with Mr Sean Sherlock TD, who chaired the Session of the Committee which I addressed. I did so for the simple purpose of putting the issue on the record of the Oireachtas. Mr Sherlock as Chair assured me that he had satisfied himself that the Committee did have the power to deliberate on the Bill. He did not tell me if the Committee had received advice to that effect or from whom they might have done.

Prior to the sitting of the Committee I had written to the Chair of the Committee, Kathleen Funchion TD on this specific issue and despite further correspondence with the Committee, a year later, I still don’t know from whom they took advice as to their capacity to consider the Bill or if they sought any advice at all.

If they did as a Committee seek legal advice and acted on it, then I am content to say it was very bad advice and I don’t ultimately expect anyone to readily put up their hand to claim any such Advices as their own. Despite for the most part, but apparently not unanimous empathy or understanding of Committee Members, they did not seem to realise they had been been sold a pup.

The Minister’s subsequent agreement that any ‘obstruction’ to the relevant coroner exercising his jurisdiction be ‘removed’ would in other circumstances be almost funny. It does not appear to have occurred to the Committee that apart from the issue of the Minister having no right to meddle in the matter, that ‘obstruction’ would probably have seen the Bill in it’s entirety torn to shreds under judicial examination.

The third Attorney General to have a finger in this pie (Paul Gallagher) seems to have taken the view that leaving within the Bill, something so legally absurd and pursued by a Minister lacking in Parliamentary Jurisdiction (and apparently commonsense); that when an ‘outraged’ Committee removed it, the chorus of welcome would drown out any questions as to why the Coroner did not perform his duty when the remains of the Tuam Children were in part, unearthed in September 2016.

Not to mention why three Attorneys General [Marie Whelan, Seamus Woulfe and Paul Gallagher] have failed in their the clear obligation to invoke s24 of the Coroner’s Act 1962 to remove the Coroner for North Galway,who has sat on his hands for more than five years and appoint another Coroner to act.

The net result is that something which made the Bill an indisputable legislative excrescence and may have pulled it down in it’s entirety, has been removed. This does however leave in the body of the Bill, the mechanics to construct a clunking layer of administrative asbestos, with which to smother and hide the truth of Tuam and other mass graves. As a child I saw better three card tricks executed on half-day school holidays at Punchestown.

The bet, this Minister,, Government and Attorney General have placed on the current text with it’s unnecessary baggage, is that it will survive legal challenge and perform its intended role in burying for all time the grotesque truth of Tuam; but more importantly stifle the clear obligation rooted in law, to both investigate the deaths of so many children and avoid a finding in law as where responsibility for their deaths lies.

In short, this piece of legislation has never been necessary to complete the exhumation of Tuam and determine as far as possible by the use of advanced forensic techniques the causes of death of those children and to record verdicts of a Coroner’s Court as to the likely causes of death.

The existing law is not only adequate to perform this task, it is a legal imperative that it be used. The obfuscation and obstruction which has been the modus operandi of Government for the last number of years is beneath contempt. It amounts to something which libel lawyers may tell you, dare not speak it’s name and certainly not outside of legal proceedings.

In acknowledging that this piece may not correspond to what was suggested to me, I will indulge myself in referring to the words of Captain Gustave M. Gilbert the Army psychologist assigned to confer with the defendants at the Nuremberg trials. His access to individuals such as Herman Goering was quite unique. He would later write:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel (for and) with their fellow men (empathy). Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

I need to pause here and say that in my direct contacts with Minister O’Gorman I have found him a courteous and urbane individual, genuinely personally pleasant and when let off the leash by civil servants, generous in his readiness to engage.

But Irish ‘Greens’ it seems are not actual politicians in the usual sense. They are ethereal creatures amongst us, whose good intentions cannot be challenged. Of course, anything contained herein should not be characterised as amounting to any degree of particular animus. Rather in the style of Monty Python it should be regarded as applying to any purveyor of bullshit.

Pursuing this theme I am drawn to the dialogue scripted by the late Robert Bolt for David Lean’s majestic ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The issue therein was one which impacts on all our lives to this day: the appropriation and/or acquisition by the ‘West’ of the natural resources that drive the capitalist economy.

The exchange in question is between politician/diplomat Mr Dryden (Claude Rains) and Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) ;

“A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. Whereas a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it”

Kevin Higgins has contributed to Broadsheet previously on the issue of Mother and Baby Homes. He is a member of the Tuam Home Survivors Network and acted as Solicitor for Mr Peter Mulryan In the first High Court case, in respect of records for the ‘Home. Though retired he continues to be part of the campaign to achieve Justice for the dead children of all such Homes and contributed to the Joint Oireachtas Committee dealing with the issue.

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