Category Archives: Misc

Zoolander Poster

‘sup?

Free Thursday, January 28?

Anna, at The Producers, writes:

In celebration of the up-coming release of Zoolander 2, we’re putting on a screening of Zoolander (2001) that embraces its zany fashion and tongue-in-cheek humour. The audience can pimp an old t-shirt at the make-and-do station, make themselves ridiculous at the blue steel lipstick table or have our makeup artist Katnka transform them.

Host Mugatu will be there to challenge walk-offs, judge the ‘Blue Steels from the Ferraris, ‘Le Tigres’ and ‘Magnums’ and give a prize to the most ridiculously well dressed — all before the screening.

Any excuse

Zoolander at the Sugar Club

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 12.21.18

Sunday World crime correspondant Nicola Tallant, Anti-Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy, Fine Gael TD Fergus O’Dowd and John Devine, of Transparency International Ireland on TV3’s Tonight with Vincent Browne last night

Further to the recent reports that GSOC accessed the telephone records of three journalists without their knowledge or consent – and this morning’s reports that 62,000 applications for access to landline, mobile phone and internet records were made over five years, the majority by Gardaí…

Last night’s panel on the Tonight with Vincent Browne show, presented by Michael Clifford of the Irish Examiner, discussed the matter.

On the panel were Sunday World crime correspondant Nicola Tallant, Anti-Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy, Fine Gael TD Fergus O’Dowd and John Devine, of Transparency International Ireland.

They discussed last year’s RTE reports about how Paul Murphy was to be charged, the relationship between some gardaí and some members of the media and Nicola Tallant’s own complaint to GSOC about gardaí allegedly accessing her phone records.

Grab a tay.

Michael Clifford: “You work in the area of crime, what do you think of this story? How it’s being handled?”

Nicola Tallant: “Yeah, you just mentioned there that obviously the fight against crime, when you see it in the courts, obviously surveillance and phone records and all that are vital. I think before 2011, when the powers came to the gardaí, that they could, anyone over Superintendent level could sign off to get anybody’s phone records. It was actually dealt with…”

Clifford: “Chief superintendent, I think…”

Tallant: “Under the Terrorism Act. So that is how it has transferred now, it has gone from, it had been dealt with under the Terrorism Act when it didn’t exactly have to be an act of terrorism that you were investigating but it had to be pretty high up. It’s now transformed to if, it’s a culmination I think of this data protection plus the 2005 Garda Síochána Act which makes it illegal for a member of the guards to pass on leaked information that causes harm. You know, the information cannot just be, it’s not illegal for them just to…”

Clifford: “But any confidential information, and most of which guards would have, when you says causes harm, I don’t think there’s any provision that passing on information has to cause harm. How do you define harm?”

Tallant: “Well they do define the harm actually, in the act, and they define it, it is actually quite, there’s a list of things that are defined as harm and they include collapsing trials, that kind of…”

Clifford: “Reputation?”

Tallant: “There’s a few, you know, identifying a witness who has given information in confidentiality, they’re quite strict actually…”

Clifford: “Yeah.”

Tallant: “And I think it has probably been misused a little bit by guards as a bit of a fishing exercise to see who’s talking to the media.”

Clifford: “And is there not also a question, to be fair, that an awful lot of the information that flows from Garda sources to the media is tittle tattle, is invasive of people and, basically, in terms of any test in the public interest, it doesn’t pass it?”

Tallant: “Well some of it is and some of it is very relevant…”

Clifford: “Some of it is but a lot of it isn’t.”

Tallant: “Well, I mean, what, it depends on what you consider to be tittle tattle, what you consider to be in the public interest…”

Clifford: “I’ll give you an example – Paul Murphy beside you. Paul you’ve the issue whereby there was a leak to the media about the fact that you were going to face prosecution – and we’re not touching  the substance of the prosecution, but just in terms of how that came about. How did that come about?”

Paul Murphy: “Yes, the first I heard that myself and 20 something other people would be charged with false imprisonment and other charges related to the protests last year was on RTE Radio from Paul Reynolds, the crime correspondent. That was when we heard we were going to be charged, then nothing actually happened for weeks and weeks. And then the day before we actually were charged, as far as I remember, I got a call, again from Paul Reynolds,  at 5.55pm,  to say that he was going on Six One, headline news,  and to tell us that we were going to be charged.”

Clifford: “And it’s also, just to put a bit of context on it from recollection. Two days before that first, news report on RTE, I think there was a newspaper report suggesting that you wouldn’t be charged and one could surmise that somebody somewhere felt it might be necessary to get word out there to the contrary and suddenly, it appears in RTE.”

Murphy: “Correct, and that whole experience for me raised a significant question mark over the relationship between the gardaí, or some gardaí, and some journalists and the reality that some journalists act, in some way, as an extension of the Garda Press Office. They give a Garda line on certain stories in exchange for which they get information and I think that’s extremely damaging from the point of view of public debate, from the point of view of our reputation because I think there was a purpose for that being leaked which contradicts the previous story and also to soften opinion for what was a shocking event: the idea that people were being charged with false imprisonment…”

Clifford: “Well it’s conjecture whether that was, yeah, fair enough. John [Devine], what do you think of Paul’s assessment of that relationship?”

John Devine: “Yeah, we’ve pointed out in the wake of the Garda whistleblower controversy that there seems to be two cosy relationships between some journalists and the gardaí. And it’s not something that just affects media in Ireland. Elizabeth Filkin and Lord Leveson in the UK reported on the cosy relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the British press which were subject to investigation by Leveson and found that, in many cases, payments were being made to police officers for information, they were being wined and dined, they…”

Clifford: “I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that that goes on in this jurisdiction..”

Devine: “I’m not, it’s not to say that there’s anything of, to that level, happening here but, at the same time, many of our journalists are dependent on the gardaí, for the information that feeds their stories. And Leveson and Filkin pointed out that this is an incentive for journalists to toe the line, to be uncritical, to not question police decisions and to turn a blind eye to abuses and, in some cases, by…”

Clifford: “What do you think of that Nicola?”

Tallant: “There seems to be this kind of myth that is growing all the time, that crime correspondents are just fed a line from gardaí or they go down to headquarters and are given a story. My experience, and I’ve been at it 20 years or more, is that a guard wouldn’t know a story really if it hit them in the face. Now a journalist, a journalist knows a story, a journalist goes after a story and they have various sources of information. A lot of them get information on the ground on stories. People covering a daily beat. We have that body in the suitcase there this week that would be, the daily journalists are following that every day. They’re out on the crime scene.”

Devine: “We do know some crime journalists are favoured and this isn’t an Irish phenomenon, this is in the UK, it’s in the United States, there are some journalists who will have information that their colleagues will not have and that’s by virtue of the fact they’ve nurtured a relationship with their contacts in the police.”

Clifford: “And there is one other dynamic there, Nicola, in terms of GSOC and these phone records. GSOC have been at loggerheads with the gardaí on a number of occasions over the last few years and I think it would be fair to say that, in a number of incidences, reportage of that dispute was skewed very much in favour of the gardaí and against GSOC. And now we’ve a scenario where GSOC have apparently these untrammelled powers and they well be targeting the very journalists they might believe are targeting them, all of course, none of it intentional but I think it would be fair enough to surmise that there will be no love lost there, in those quarters.”

Tallant: “I actually think GSOC have done all of us a favour in journalism by the fact the very fact that they have focused this. They have gone in, they have been given these powers and they’ve gone into it like bulldozers and they have really made it very obvious what they were doing with the phone records. I’ve spoken to some of the journalists who are involved in it and it was just quite astounding how obvious they’ve made it. You see the guards have been doing this for years but they’ve been doing it much sneakier…”

Clifford: “Clare Daly made the point today and it was pretty valid. Us in the media, including myself we didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to it until the focus was turned on journalists.”

Tallant: “Well I paid attention to it because I made a complaint actually about my phone, about gardai accessing the records from my phone way back, from 2010, but I made the complaint to GSOC who were very positive about it in the beginning and came back to me just before Christmas to say there wasn’t anything that they could do, the guards couldn’t answer them…”

Related: No widespread snooping on private citizens (RTE)

Earlier: How Many?

Previously: “Come Back When You’re Sober”

Watch back in full here

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From top: Enda Kenny at the Fine Gael Ard Fheis; Dr Rory Hearne

Economic growth rates of 7%, thousands of new jobs, falling unemployment, traffic jams on the M50, queues at high-end stores on Grafton Street and rising property prices.

All the evidence that Ireland is in strong economic recovery?

Not so fast.

Dr Rory Hearne writes:

All those years of austerity (cuts to public services and new taxes) and wage cuts worked, right?

Yes, austerity ‘worked’ and we are in ‘recovery’ – but only if you ignore the sacrificing of a generation that has paid (and will continue to pay for many decades) the price of ‘recovery’ – particularly the tens of thousands of children pushed into poverty and deprivation and the almost quarter of a million forced to emigrate. It is only a ‘recovery’ if you ignore the multiple crises that are going on now from housing to the health service.

And only if you ignore the very shaky foundation of our economic growth with half of it based on dodgy profit shifting by multinationals.

What I’m saying here – unpopular and all as it may be – or as much as you may not want to hear it – is that there is a dark truth to our so-called ‘recovery’.

Much of the commentary about the recovery is hype and spin, which at times descends into plain lies and ignorance. Ireland is no ‘success’ story for austerity or economic growth.

What we are is a country that sacrificed the welfare of its younger generations in order to pay for a crash caused by neoliberal (free market) economic policies, corrupt and crony politics and the decisions of the generation in power and the wealthy to prioritise protecting themselves

If you don’t believe me – just look at the facts. Take children for example. The number of children aged 0-6 (the most vulnerable age) suffering from deprivation in Ireland doubled from 55,000 in 2007 to 105,000 children suffering deprivation in 2014. Ireland now has the third highest deprivation rate for children aged 0-6 in the EU15 – at 25%. This is over 8 times Norway’s level.

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Levels of Deprivation for Children Age 0-6 in EU15, 2014

While one of the most shameful scandals affecting this country is the rise in number of homeless families with children. The numbers below show that by September last year there were almost 1,500 children living in emergency homeless accommodation.

 

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Rise in numbers of homeless children nationally

Then there is that issue no one in the corridors of power wants to talk about – emigration. Despite the ‘recovery’ 35,000 young Irish people emigrated from Ireland last year. Just under a quarter of a million – 250,000 left between 2010 and 2015. If they had stayed then our unemployment rate would be double what it is now.

Our ‘recovery’ wouldn’t look as rosy with 16% unemployment – would it? The graph below shows that the emigrants are all in the under 40s generations.

They left and continue to leave not just because of the lack of jobs but because the lack of quality jobs and quality of life in Ireland. Because as, Blindboy put it, we can’t afford houses or children.

 

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Our disadvantaged communities also paid a heavy price as community development organisations had their funding slashed and housing regeneration projects were abandoned.

I saw first-hand as a community worker the impacts of harsh austerity in a Dublin inner city social housing estate of Dolphin House where residents were left living in horrendous conditions with mould, damp and sewage in their flats.

Of course all of this was not accidental, or unfortunate ‘collateral damage’.

It resulted from a political decision by those in power to prioritise the already privileged and powerful over the younger generations. So they ensured the German and French banks and the billionaire bondholders were repaid while community and child services were cut, a recruitment embargo was put on the public sector thus cutting out a major area of employment for young people and graduates.

And for anyone who did get a job they cut the pay of new entrants.

Public spending was cut in social housing, public transport, flood defences, hospitals, schools– leaving us with a housing crisis and one of the lowest stocks of public infrastructure in Europe that will take decades to make up for.

New charges were introduced into water, property, health care (a visit to A & E is now a €100 charge if you don’t have a medical care or private health insurance. I found this out when I had to pay it when I brought my six month old baby to hospital recently). While Bus Fares have also risen.

In addressing the housing crash they created NAMA which took the developer’s toxic loans off the banks (to allow them return to profit), gave the developers and big business write-down’s on their debt and are selling that housing and land to international property speculators and vulture funds. There was no debt-write down for us ordinary joes.

Some of us were left with our massive mortgages (many of whom went into arrears –with over 30,000 facing repossession of their home) while others face rising rents and no possibility of ever owning a home.

Those in power knew the impact their policies would have. They showed who they are prepared to stand up and be courageous for. While they thumped the table at European meetings to defend multinational corporations paying a 12% (and lower) tax rate they were silent about the doubling of the numbers of children in poverty.

They would rather allow children be made homeless than to disturb the privileged and powerful by introducing a wealth tax on Ireland’s richest who grew their wealth by €34bn since 2010. The top 20% of households now have 70% of the wealth in Ireland.

I am one of the generation under the age of 40 who is straddled with a massive mortgage, paying huge childcare costs, and experiencing precarious work for years due to the public sector embargo and cuts.

My friends and family have emigrated because they can’t get a decent job. I know families struggling to get by each week, children sleeping with their parents in cars because their parents can’t afford the rent. Is this the Ireland we want?

Is this the Republic we are proud to commemorate in 2016? Ireland is no austerity success story. The recovery has been built on sacrificing younger generations.

It’s time to tell the truth about the Phoney Celtic Phoenix.

Dr Rory Hearne is a Senior Policy Analyst with TASC, the Think-Tank for Action on Social Change. He is also an independent candidate for the Seanad NUI Colleges Panel. His column appears here every Wednesday. He writes here in a personal capacity. Follow Rory on Twitter: @roryhearne