From top: A room for refugees at a shelter in an abandoned government building in Athens, Greece; Dr Julien Mercille

In Athens, Greece the author visits a shelter for refugees displaced by conflicts in the Middle East.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

There are currently 53,000 refugees stuck in Greece, but you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look for them.

So I decided while in Athens this week to see what the current situation was.

I heard about a volunteer-run project in the city providing accommodation for refugees and made my way there to check it out.

When I get there, two or three Afghan and Syrian families are at the reception desk and want to check in. The place is  a makeshift hotel in a former government building.

The hotel’s receptionist is a middle-aged woman of the authoritarian, don’t-mess-with-me type, who constantly looks at you over her glasses. She communicates with the migrants through a younger female Middle Eastern volunteer who translates whatever goes on in the lobby.

The atmosphere is a bit chaotic but gives a good idea of how difficult it is to deal with a massive influx of refugees.

One Afghan family of eight (or two families of four, I’m not sure) is asking for a room. The receptionist is trying all possible combinations on the large spreadsheet on her desk.

“Room C6? No, there’s too many Syrians in that one. Room D11? No, there’s already three babies in there and only one mattress. Room B9? No, the Afghans there are already taking up all the space.”

The translator asks, “What about C6?”

“No, I told you—it’s full of Syrians in there!” replies the receptionist.

“What about B9 with the Afghans?”

“No, it’s too crowded, I just told you!”

The receptionist loses it easily, but they eventually find a room. Everybody is relieved.

Next is a Syrian couple.

The receptionist lets them know that they’re now full for tonight and that there are no rooms left. But the Syrians are determined and proceed to go down the list of progressively crappier options.

“Can we get a tent then?”

“No, the tents are all occupied for tonight”.

“Can we get the couch so?”

“No, the couch is already full for tonight”. I wonder how many people they can really pile up on that couch anyway.

“Can we get sleeping bags and sleep on the floor?”

The exasperated receptionist calls a volunteer who, a few minutes later, comes back miraculously with two sleeping bags. Sorted.

It’s now my turn. The receptionist is now in a sensitive state, and I’m suddenly reminded that it’s not only Broadsheet commenters who don’t like me.

I say I’m a journalist and I’m here to have a look around. Her reaction is instantaneous: “Journalists, no way! You have to leave! No journalists inside, the mass media is bad!”

I tell her not to worry, I write for Ireland’s least read mainstream publication,

It doesn’t work.

“Journalists are not allowed in, they have hurt what we do.”

I’m asked to leave without knowing what journalists have written about the place. I wonder if they insinuated there were terrorists in the place, or drugs, or something else. It could be any of those things. But if one needed an example of how low people’s trust in the media has sunk, regarding refugees or anything else, this is it.

As I walk back to my hotel I decide to go through the Parliament’s park for a change of scenery.

I see a few people walking their dogs and their weasels. Yes, weasels.

A weasel walker explains that there is a weasel party organised in the park today.

Life goes on in Athens.

Julien Mercille specialises in US foreign policy and terrorism and is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

Top pic: Sorin Furcoi/Al Jazeera

From top: Michaella McCollum; Dr Julien Mercille

In the phoney war on drugs what is the purpose of creating  “monsters” like Michaella McCollum?

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

By now every Irish person should know that Michaella McCollum is a criminal, a liar and a bad hair stylist, right? That’s pretty much the message that the media, in particular the tabloid press, has conveyed for the last week.

Michaella McCollum got caught trying to smuggle cocaine from Latin America to Europe in 2013. She spent two years in a prison in Peru and just got out but must remain there for the time being, before she is eventually allowed to come back here.

Her demonisation in the media is interesting. It is indeed remarkable that all of the island’s investigative journalism resources seem to have been mobilised to find the latest minute detail about Michaella’s past.

Did she really leave Belfast because of sectarian problems? Was she drunk or stone or a bit of both or none when she boarded the plane from Spain to Latin America? Did she go to Spain because she is just a party girl or for some other reason?

All this aggressive questioning by the media is quite ironic. Remember, Ireland is the only country in the world (to my knowledge) that explicitly brands itself with reference to a commercial drug. That’s right, and Ministers are very proud to associate themselves with that drug to promote tourism to Ireland and the country’s overseas image.

That drug is Guinness. Those unfamiliar with drugs will start complaining that Guinness is not a drug, because it’s just a stout. But alcohol is a drug, and it’s a much bigger killer than all the cocaine carried globally by mules like Michaella.

And the same goes for tobacco. Together, alcohol and tobacco kill about 8 million people worldwide every year—and all illegal drugs (like cocaine, heroin, etc.) kill 200,000.

There’s therefore no debate as to which are the killer drugs. So when are we going to see journalists attack tobacco and alcohol executives in the way they attack Michaella?

Michaella tried to smuggle cocaine across the Atlantic. Does that make her a criminal? Under the ridiculous regime of drug prohibition under which we live, yes. But if drugs were decriminalised, she’d be cheered as a canny business woman.

It’s worth asking why drugs like tobacco and alcohol are legal but drugs like heroin, marijuana and cocaine are illegal. There’s an important article  that came out only a few days ago which says it pretty bluntly.

It features an interview with John Ehrlichman, who was US President Richard Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser. Nixon is the president who launched the “War on Drugs” in the late 1960s and that has been with us since then under different tactics.

Ehrlichman said that the war on drugs was just a mechanism for social control, used to criminalise minorities or any group that those in power wish to control more easily.

In Nixon’s time it was blacks and the antiwar left:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

What is the effect of creating “criminals” and “monsters” like Michaella? The effect is that the public focuses laser-like on those individuals but doesn’t hear news about other crimes.

For example, it was reported  last week that the shortage of hospital beds in Ireland translates into 300 avoidable deaths per year—that’s 3,000 over the last 10 years.

But that wasn’t covered extensively at all by the media. So who should be blamed for those deaths? The Minister for Health? Some bureaucrats?

Unfortunately, the details are lacking. Why? Because our journalists are so busy researching whether Michaella dyed her hair blond or bleached it? And what is her REAL favorite hairstyle? And does that contradict what she said three years ago when hanging out at her local pub? And actually, what pub was it, EXACTLY?

In short, the media has gone all-out on Michaella McCollum calling her a “criminal”, however that only holds if one believes that the drug prohibition regime is legitimate.

But the fact is that it has been a total failure for decades and just about every example of decriminalisation that we have (for example, in Portugal) has proven to be rather successful. By creating monsters, the media diverts attention from the real problems.

Sure, crimes have a place in reporting, and we could criticise Michaella for making bad decisions etc. But isn’t it interesting how some crimes of ordinary people receive so much more aggressive and negative reporting than other crimes, like letting people die in hospitals?

Julien Mercille specialises in US foreign policy and terrorism and is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

Meanwhile…

Yesterday’s Sunday Times

From top: Zainab Heaney from Ireland during a protest over France’s ban on women wearing the Islamic Niqad, Hijab, Abaya and Burqa; Dr Julien Mercille

Anti-extremism statements and pledges are not the way to go. They are against freedom of speech and implemented in a biased fashion against specific groups but not others.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Brussels, Muslims are often asked the question, “Do you reject the acts of terrorism committed in Europe?”

However, Muslims shouldn’t have to apologise every time a Muslim does something wrong.

To repeat the obvious: an act of terrorism committed by a Muslim has nothing to do with the 1.7 billion Muslims in the world. Terrorism is almost always a political act, not a religious act.

Sure, religion may or may not be used to wrap terrorist acts into some kind of ideological garment, but the roots are political.

In any case, it’s easy to see the double standards at play when we ask Muslims “to apologise for terrorism”.

For example, when it was revealed that the Irish Catholic Church had been involved in the mass abuse of Irish children, did we drag every Irish person in front of the cameras to ask them, “As a Catholic, do you unequivocally reject those actions?”

Or imagine that in Africa or Asia, a news presenter had asked a Christian, “As a Christian, do you dissociate yourself from the abuses committed by the Irish Catholic Church?”

And since terrorism is very often committed by men, why not ask every man on the planet, “As a man, do you reject in all your manliness those acts of terrorism?”

And why not require that customs officials of all countries ask Irish travellers, “As an Irish person, do you reject all acts of violence ever committed by the IRA and all its splinter groups?”

Of course, that would be laughable and demeaning and we would never think about doing this.

Yet, for Muslims, it seems to be different.

Two dangerous developments in Belgium and in Ireland are related to this.

Belgium just announced a plan to make all non-European visitors to sign a pledge to accept “European values” if they stay longer than three months in the country. If they don’t sign the pledge they won’t be allowed in Belgium.

This is because the Belgian government said that many people are coming “from countries with other values”. “If they want to build a life here in Europe [we have] no problem with that but they have to sign this statement that they accept our values”. Among other things, the statement will include a pledge to prevent and report any attempts to commit “acts of terrorism”.

In Ireland, leaders of the Irish Muslim community introduced an “anti-Extremism Declaration”  that should be signed by any foreign Muslim speakers who come here to give speeches. It was even suggested that the Irish government should incorporate the signing of this declaration as part of the visa application process to visit Ireland.

Such policies are very misguided. They are against freedom of speech and will only serve as another tool for excluding immigrants and whoever governments don’t want to see in their countries. They will reinforce the demonization of immigrants and Muslims.

Just consider the Belgian proposal and see how absurd it is.

If the Belgians are worried about expelling violent extremists, the first thing they should do is to expel NATO—the military alliance of Western governments that has its headquarters in Belgium.

NATO has unleashed so much destruction in Afghanistan and Libya, let alone the destruction caused by the military forces of its individual member states, notably the US. If this doesn’t qualify as violent extremism, nothing does. Remember that perhaps one million people died in the Iraq War.

Next in line, they should expel all politicians who have supported those military adventures, and that includes a lot of European politicians. And while at it, why not expel anybody who votes for the political parties of those politicians.

Then, if the worry is to protect values of tolerance, why not expel members of far-right groups, including the National Front in France, UKIP, Pegida, etc.?

And why not expel members of the clergy who oppose gay rights, abortion, etc.?

In short, it is clear that none of this makes any sense whatsoever.

Therefore, anti-extremism statements and pledges are not the way to go. They are against freedom of speech; they are implemented in a biased fashion against specific groups but not others; and even if they were implemented objectively, they would be absurd..

The way to fight extremism is by enabling more freedom of speech and more democracy. Those who are scared of that are usually those who seek to prevent others from speaking.

Julien Mercille specialises in US foreign policy and terrorism and is a lecturer at University College Dublin.  Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

Yesterday: Declare And Present Danger

Rollingnews and IMPIC

From top: Tyrrlestown, Co Dublin; Dr Julien Mercille

Property vulture funds are circling Europe.

Have we any protection?

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Up to 200 Tyrrelstown residents now face eviction from their homes.This is because Goldman Sachs bought from Ulster Bank a loan to property developers Michael and Richard Larkin. The loan is secured on their Cruise Park development.

The key aspect of the deal with Goldman Sachs is the sale of 208 houses, which means that families that have rented these homes for up to ten years must now leave.

In short, when vulture funds like Goldman Sachs buy loans tied to properties, business-friendly regulation leaves occupants vulnerable.

An interesting element in this story that has not received much attention is the fact that it is a pan-European issue. In other words, the situation we face in Ireland is similar to that in a number of other countries.

How did we end up there?

When the financial crisis struck in 2008-2009, banks throughout Europe realised that they had made a bunch of bad loans. We’re familiar with the likes of Anglo Irish and a string of bad loans to developers and builders, but the phenomenon was replicated elsewhere, in places like Spain for example, which also saw a massive housing bubble grow to dizzying heights before collapsing abruptly.

In the wake of the crash, European governments set up ‘bad banks’ (NAMA is ours) to buy the bad loans of the banks.

The ‘bad banks’ are now trying to sell those loans to global private investors. Because a lot of the loans are tied to properties, when a global investor buys a package of loans, some control over the properties comes with it.

In Europe as a whole, ‘bad banks’ like NAMA hold about €264 billion of real estate assets that will be sold to private investors within the next decade. It is estimated that 51% of these assets are residential properties, 31% commercial properties, and 18% development and land. The bulk of the assets are located in Spain, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

There is a very good short report here  describing all this.

It surveys ten of the most important bad banks, which are, in order of value of the real estate assets they hold and will sell to investors: SAREB (Spain, €107bn), UKAR (UK, €107bn), NAMA (Ireland, €73.4bn), IBRC (Ireland, €21.9bn), FMS (Germany, €19.7bn), EEA (Germany, €15.9bn), Propertize (Netherlands, €7.4bn), KA Finanz (Austria, €3.6bn), BES bad bank (Portugal, €2.9bn) and DUTB (Slovenia, €1.3bn).

All those are at various stages of selling their assets, a process which is expected to continue strongly in the coming years.

The map (above) shows all the sales of such loans for the year 2014. The UK, Spain and Ireland account for 83% of the sales.

The main buyers of the assets are private equity firms, mostly from the United States, but also from Europe.

Examples include Lone Star, Cerberus, CarVal, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. The assets are also purchased by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which are real estate companies in which global investors can take shares and receive dividends from the rental income generated by the properties owned by the REIT.

REITs are attractive because they pay little or no corporate taxes. Spanish and Irish REITs have been particularly active recently to channel investors’ global funds into European property.

But this is not all. In fact, the total value of real estate assets available in Europe for investors to grab is about €531 billion.

This includes the €264 billion above but it also adds the assets held by banks not formally part of bad banks. There’s a very good short report on this here.

When global investors capture properties anywhere in Europe, there is a risk for the occupants. Some countries offer more protection to them than others, however.

For example, the Sunday Business Post mentioned that what is happening in Ireland, with tenants facing eviction in Tyrrelstown and elsewhere, would never happen in Germany, where they are better protected.

Once again, it all boils down to the balance of power between people and corporations: Ireland caters to the needs and interests of global investors; but it should look after the needs of the people instead.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

From top: The RDS count centre on Saturday; Dr Julien Mercille

Elections are exciting but real democracy happens between them.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Election talk has dominated the airwaves over the last few weeks. Left parties like Sinn Féin and the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit have made important gains. Progressive Independents like Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have kept their seats.

So there is cause to celebrate…but not so fast.

Many commentators have declared that this is “democracy in action” and how beautiful it all was. The people have spoken and, allegedly, this is what democracy is all about, holding our politicians to account.

Yet, it is important to remember that electoral democracy is so shallow as to be somewhat irrelevant.

Voting once every four or five years and doing nothing in between is actually a way to protect the establishment from being really challenged. It is a way to keep the population out of all sorts of important decisions for the country and that will affect each one of us.

In other words, we need to deepen democracy.

I take “democracy” here to mean simply the condition in which people are able to decide over what matters in their lives, as opposed to having decisions imposed on them by those in power.

Significantly, deep democracy means cooperation among ordinary people, because that’s essential to becoming more free. We can’t increase our opportunities and expand our horizons without the assistance of others and without collaboration at the community and national levels, and beyond.

If we become atomised and individualistic, our opportunities will shrink and we will have to satisfy ourselves with a very limited existence.

This means that whatever the election results are, we must continue to extend democracy to the many areas where it is either non-existent or too shallow—and there isn’t a shortage of those in Ireland.

The objective is to give as much control as possible to people over their lives and to organise the economic, political and social spheres in a way that we can benefit as much as possible.

Deep democracy therefore includes:

Economic democracy: This involves a redistribution of resources so as to reduce inequalities and so that the products of work do not go disproportionately to a small corporate elite. It also involves giving those who work the right to decide about what goes on in the workplace, instead of being told what to do by their bosses and managers. We’re not cogs in a machine, we’re creative beings.

Social democracy: This means the right of everybody to decent housing and a decent education without discrimination based on religion or ethnicity or socio-economic class. It’s also about the right to quality health care whenever needed. So far, those services are organised to cater to the needs of the well off more than anybody else.

Gender democracy: This means giving women the possibility of making decisions over their own bodies. In Ireland, this means giving them the possibility to make their own choices about abortion. It also means doing away with all sorts of gender discrimination in the economic, cultural and political spheres which are too many to enumerate here.

But the fact is that very few of those will be won in the Dáil.

Parliaments mostly rubber-stamp legislation once people have organised and campaigned for it. Politicians need to be pressurised until it becomes too costly politically for them to ignore people’s wishes. As the saying goes, rights are not granted, they are won.

Therefore, when looking at the election, it will be easy to identify a number of progressive candidates who should have been elected but didn’t make it. Either they never came close to making it, or they lost in the very last rounds by a few dozen votes.

It’s disappointing, but one way to look at it positively is that those who didn’t achieve their electoral goals have not really lost.

They will continue to create very significant change outside Parliament, and that may sometimes actually turn out to be more useful than parliamentary work. Combining that to agenda-setting speeches in the Dáil by those who got in should make us hopeful.

So let’s get to work.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

From top: A checkpoint in Dublin manned by the ERU (Garda Emergency Response Unit); Dr Julien Mercille

The response to the recent gangland killings reveals a complete lack of understanding of drugs and related crime.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

The recent killings in Dublin involving drug gangs have received much media coverage. Yet, the reporting is so misleading that a few clarifications are in order.

The main reaction on the part of politicians and the media has been to blame Sinn Féin almost immediately, using the killings as a useful diversion from the issues that should dominate the electoral campaign.

Then, many calls were made to adopt a tough approach to drugs and gangs and to boost Garda resources, giving them more and better guns.

This reveals a complete lack of understanding of how to deal with the problem of drugs and related crime.

In particular, two effective solutions have received virtually no attention: (1) legalisation of drugs, and (2) reducing drug money laundering by American and European banks.

Making drugs illegal does not work and it increases violence. When drugs are illegal, drug dealers who disagree over unpaid debts or about how to divide neighbourhoods to sell their drugs will not ask the Garda or a judge to arbitrate, because they’ll be put in jail. So, they fight it out on their own with guns.

Neither is police enforcement very effective to deal with drugs, as research has shown again and again. This is because even if, say, police officers are able to arrest drug dealers, others will simply emerge to replace them, as long as there is a demand for drugs. If the police seize drug shipments, the drug lords will simply produce more and send more, as long as there is demand.

Therefore, the best way to reduce drug problems is to offer treatment services for addicts to reduce consumption. If there is no consumption, there is no market, and no gangs will ever emerge to sell drugs, and we can all say goodbye to the violence.

There is a well-known RAND study (a US-based think tank) that ranked four solutions to the drug problem in terms of their cost effectiveness. Treatment was the most effective, and the others came in as follows:

2nd: Police enforcement domestically: 7 times more costly than treatment

3rd: Interdiction at borders: 11 times more costly

4th: Overseas intervention: 23 times more costly

But under austerity, drugs programmes have been cut by 37%. Also, unemployment zoomed, leaving drug dealing as an attractive option for those living in communities where there are no good jobs.

Thus, giving more powerful guns to the Garda is not a good solution. Do we want to become like the US, where cops have become hyper-violent?

The Health Research Board did a study of the drug market in Ireland recently. The report confirmed the above. It examined Customs officials’ drug seizures, which numbered 1378 for the first half of 2009.

But 90% of those were either weed or hashish, and 90% were of less than 28 grams. Weed and hashish for personal use are not dangerous.

The report concludes with an indictment of police and customs enforcement, stating that:

“Our research showed no evidence that drug availability was affected for any significant period because of successful law enforcement.”

For those who worry that legalisation would lead to a massive growth of drug use, the experience from places that have liberalised their drug laws (for example, Portugal) shows that there may be small increases of consumption of some drugs (e.g., marijuana), but overall it’s absolutely not true that there is a massive rise in consumption. There’s an excellent report on Portugal’s experience here .

Also, big traffickers and producers would still remain illegal, and there wouldn’t be any advertising, and you could only buy drugs in specific stores. So there wouldn’t be packs of weed or heroin on sale on the shelves at Tesco or Spar.

As I wrote here a few weeks ago The benefits of legalising drugs can be summarised as follows:

1. It saves the State a lot of money because the police don’t have to run around the country arresting students smoking pot or heroin addicts who are homeless and simply have an addiction problem.

2. It generates taxes for the State because drugs is now a legal business, just like tobacco and alcohol. It doesn’t mean we think that drugs are healthy products, it just means that the industry becomes tightly regulated. It thereby generates tax revenues for the exchequer, which can be invested in treatment for addicts.

3. Violent crime decreases. When drugs are illegal, they generate violence.

4. Quality is much better: under a regulated system, the State can regulate the quality of the drugs, as it does for all foods and alcohol. Therefore, drugs become less dangerous.

5. Drug problems become public health issues, not criminal issues. This means that addicts are treated for their addiction instead of getting harassed by the police and arrested.

In addition to legalising drugs, governments should better regulate banks. According to the best estimates available, worldwide, about $220 billion of drug money is laundered annually through the financial system, which is dominated by Western banks.

However, only about 0.2% of all laundered criminal money is seized and frozen, as governments have other priorities than regulating the banking industry, which benefits from this extra liquidity.

A few years ago, the chief of the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime even lashed out at bankers’ habit of laundering drug money, declaring that “At a time of major bank failures, money doesn’t smell, bankers seem to believe”

So we need to force banks to adopt better safeguards. By now we should all know that “light-touch” regulation of banks only leads to big problems, so why not regulate them forcefully for drugs as well as borrowing and lending?

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. His book on drugs can be found here. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

From top: Minister for Health Leo Varadkar; Dr Julien Mercille

Leo Varadkar’s views on hospital overcrowding and abortion shows he is not fit to be Minister for Health.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

This weekend, Niamh Horan in the Sunday Independent had a great interview with Minister for Health Leo Varadkar (see also the related article here).

Ms Horan seems to have a knack for extracting nuggets of information from politicians, having done the same last week with macho-man Alan Kelly from Labour, who boasted that “Power is a drug… it suits me”.

Leo made a number of astonishing claims that cast serious doubts about his understanding of health and health care. In other words, the interview proved that it’s not because you’re Minister for Health that you know anything about health.

First, he stated bluntly that cutting resources to hospitals was a good thing.

You would have expected that a pro-austerity Minister well-trained by public relations advisers would have said something like “Listen, I know cutting funding to hospitals is not good, but we don’t have a choice”.

But no, he said he does like the policy of cutting funding to hospitals because he thinks it makes nurses and doctors work more efficiently when they’re under pressure. Leo said:

“What can happen in some hospitals is sometimes, when they have more beds and more resources, that’s what kind of slows it down.”

Really? And why is that?

“Because they [hospital staff] don’t feel as much under pressure. So when a hospital is very crowded, there will be a real push to make sure people get their X-rays, get their tests and, you know, “let’s get them out in four days”.”

Nevermind if they need more than four days, they get out in four, and we push the problems down the line as usual, when those people will come back to the hospital because they were discharged too quickly and they haven’t healed properly, and their condition may even have worsened.

What Leo said is simply not true, as anybody working in a hospital will tell you. When you’re under pressure, you speed up, and you make mistakes and you cut corners. Medical staff work with people’s lives and they need to take the time needed to do what needs to be done.

I can hardly imagine Leo himself on the operation table telling the surgeon and his assistants: “hurry up you don’t have time to do it 100% because you need to go meet other patients”.

Nevertheless, Leo made the incredible and wrong claim that “more beds and more resources do not relieve overcrowding” in hospitals.

Well, yes: more beds do relieve overcrowding, by definition.

It is true, however, that more funding is not the only solution to the health care system. The main problem is the type of system we have.

Anybody working on health care needs to know something: a tax-funded public health system like the NHS in the UK is the best system that exists and it is what we should aspire to. It is both cheaper and it is better for health.

The reason is that in privatised systems, there is a lot of bureaucracy involved and that’s very expensive. Armies of clerks and office workers need to compute the price of every treatment, process claim forms, reject claim forms to try to save money for the insurance company, send glossy letters to insurance policy holders, etc. All that costs a lot of money and this is why private for-profit systems are more expensive than public ones. It’s very well-established through health policy research.

There is therefore no reason for Leo not to know that. Why is he privatising our system then? It’s not because people want that.

Indeed, the one issue that is the most important to Irish people, poll after poll, is health care. Therefore, the government is completely at odds with the population in that it acts to worsen the trolley crisis, cut funding to our hospitals, increase crowding in our hospitals, and privatise the system even if this is amounts to a waste of money.

The second point Leo made in the interview is about abortion. Niamh Horan pushed him but he simply refused to give any answer that would mean that he wants to liberalise abortion laws significantly.

Leo has stated that he is “pro-life”—that means, cutting through the spin, “anti-choice” or “pro-the government deciding for women and their partners what’s best for them”.

This means that the Minister of Health does not want health care in this country to provide an important service for women’s health.

In fact, it appears that Leo doesn’t even understand the issue of abortion. Here is the exchange with Niamh Horan:

Niamh Horan: “Do you believe abortion in Ireland is a class issue?”

Leo Varadkar: “No [laughs]. I don’t know what that question means.”

Horan: [I explain that a woman who is wealthy and can afford to travel to the UK has greater access to a safe abortion and medical care than a woman who has no access to similar funds]

Varadkar: “No, I don’t think it’s a class issue.”

In sum, what the above reveals is not so much ideological differences as a failure to know and understand the basic facts about health and health care. If we agreed on the basic facts but had an ideological argument, at least, we’d all be living in the real world. But here we have a more fundamental problem with getting the facts straight.

It reveals incompetence of the highest order.

A Minister for Health who believes that overcrowding is a good thing and that refuses to provide abortion services like everywhere else in the Western world is not a Minister of Health.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

From top: Dan O’Brien Dr Julien Mercille

Looking for missed bubbles?

You’ve come to the right place.

A Saturday morning radio appearance with two well known economic pundits throws up for the author a horrifying vision of Irish media deference.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

This weekend, I was on Newstalk’s Talking Point, the radio show hosted by Sarah Carey on Saturday mornings. I was on a panel with Dan O’Brien from the Independent newspaper and Eamon Delaney, who often writes in the same newspaper and is the founder of the right-wing think-tank Hibernia. The ‘sheet transcribed some of the best parts here  and the podcast is here.

We were there to talk about the role of the media in light of the Banking Inquiry, before which I appeared as a witness.

The radio show was one of the most interesting of my media appearances. Sarah Carey was good at keeping the ball rolling during the interview, and that led to a number of declarations on the part of the two other panellists, as follows:

1. Eamon Delaney is a former diplomat for the Irish government. He revealed how docile and obedient his mindset is and it’s actually scary to think there are others like him in the government and media. To challenge and interrogate received wisdom is out of the question for him.

Indeed, he declared that journalists should never question or challenge the owners of their news organisation and should remain loyal. He said journalists should be like diplomats, they should simply obey their government, and never challenge it. Even if, seemingly, their government does really bad things like supporting a war on Iraq based on lies, etc.

People ask me all the time, “you say journalists don’t challenge the establishment enough, but have you actually talked to a journalist who told you that was true?”: I will now use the above example every time I’m asked that question.

2. Dan O’Brien tried once again to blame economists for missing the housing bubble. He said that journalists can’t be blamed because they just rely on economists and other experts to report on events.

That’s another astonishing comment, for several reasons.

First, an important point to remember, and that I made on the show, is that Dan O’Brien has no credibility. He doesn’t understand economics. And I’m not saying this as an opinion or due to ideological differences, I’m stating it as a matter of fact.

He has a record of failure for the last 15 years. From 2001 to 2007, he missed the housing bubble entirely. Then, since 2008, he’s been saying that austerity was the way to go to revive economies in recession. But history shows exactly the opposite, and any competent economic observer knows that.

Dan seemingly can’t even read articles. For example, it is well known that the Economist magazine warned about the housing bubble in Ireland and in other countries as early as 2003. It wrote about it clearly and repeatedly. Those were not vague warnings, as the magazine even gave percentages of overvaluation in the real estate market.

But Dan didn’t bother reporting on that, even if—wait for it—at that time, he worked for the Economist! The fact that he couldn’t even read his own magazine is mind-boggling.

And anyway, why did Dan not bother reporting on David McWilliams’ warnings about the housing bubble? Maybe McWilliams is too much of an independent thinker for Dan?

Second, although I’m always pictured as the guy who despises journalists, as opposed to the likes of Dan O’Brien, who supposedly defends journalists, we can see here that the reverse is actually true: I have more respect for journalism and the work of journalists than Dan. He thinks that journalism is just about reporting what others say, whether it is “experts” or the government. Think about this for a second, it is extremely demeaning to journalists. It means that they’re not supposed to think very much, simply to report the sayings of others.

I know that a number of journalists don’t agree with Dan, but still, that’s what he says every time I debate him.

On the contrary, my view is that the ethos of journalism should be to report the truth. And for that, you need to question things, determine whether “experts” are really experts, etc. That requires independent thinking and I expect journalists to do that, myself included, not to simply report whatever politicians or others say.

Third, Dan always complains about the methodology I used for reaching my conclusion that the media missed the housing bubble. He never explains what exactly he doesn’t like about my methodology, which is revealing in itself, but let me ask him about his own methodology: Dan, can you explain to us what your methodology was to miss the massive housing bubble for 6 years? And also, can you explain to us what your methodology is for believing that austerity apparently works to revive economies in a downturn, contrary to all historical and contemporary evidence?

Is your methodology to always and only talk to the same incompetent economists? Why is that? On what criteria does your methodology exclude competent economists like David McWilliams, Michael Taft, those at the Nevin Institute, or TASC?

We’d really like to know about this fascinating methodology.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. Follow him on Twitter: @JulienMercille

Saturday: No Touching of The Hair or Face

Top pic: Rollingnews

Update: Rights of reply welcome.

From top: US Army plane refueling at Shannon in July; Mick Wallace and Clare Daly; Dr Julien Mercille

Since 2002, 2.5 million US troops have transited through Shannon. But highlight the government’s complicity in the “war on terror” and you could find find yourself jailed..

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

We can plausibly imagine the following question on the exam Gardaí pass to join the police forces:

“Question: One Minister authorises the passage of 450,000 US military troops through Shannon airport on their way to criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other hand, two TDs try to close Shannon airport to the US military to prevent Irish State complicity in war crimes. Who should you arrest?”

“Correct answer: the two TDs.”

This is what happened last week. Our police forces arrested TDs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace and drove them separately all the way from Dublin to Limerick prison. The two politicians remained there only a couple of hours and were then driven back to Dublin the same day.

They were arrested for refusing to pay a €2,000 fine for attempting to inspect US military aircraft at Shannon airport. They were attempting to highlight the issue of Irish government complicity in the “war on terror”.

Since 2002, about 2.5 million US troops have transited through Shannon. Military and civilian aircraft have carried soldiers, weapons and “rendition” suspects flown from one country to another where they have been interrogated and tortured.

It’s all part of operations related to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. It is summarised in a new booklet produced by the group Shannonwatch.

The wars are criminal. A recent report estimates that between 1 million and 2 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during the “war on terror”.

The website of An Garda Síochána says that it works “to achieve a reduction in crime”. One would therefore think that our police forces would act to prevent Irish government participation in crimes committed in the Middle East. But it is instead those that try to prevent such crimes who are being arrested.

On the politicians’ side, Minister for Health Leo Varadkar lambasted Daly and Wallace, saying that it was “unacceptable” for a TD to break the law.

One might think that Varadkar would be focused on Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Labour TDs who have allowed the Irish State to participate in crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But no, it’s only about Wallace and Daly.

Varadkar has more responsibility than regular TDs in this regard because he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport in 2011-2014.

What does this have to do with Shannon? A lot. It is this Minister who is in charge of approving civilian aircraft carrying weapons into Irish airspace. Because most US troops fly into Shannon onboard civilian aircraft, this means that Varadkar is responsible for having approved most US troops that transited through Shannon under his tenure, a total of about 450,000.

Also, now, as Minister for Health, one would think that he would be concerned about, well, health. But the deaths of Iraqis and Afghans, children included, seemingly don’t count for much.

Meanwhile, as usual, Joan Burton complained about protests, in particular, that Wallace and Daly had cost the State a lot of money which could be better reinvested elsewhere. It never occurred to her that if her own government stopped military flights through Shannon the money would be saved instantaneously.

It is often said that politicians just do and say whatever people want to hear to get elected. But that’s not true.

The Peace and Neutrality Alliance commissioned an opinion poll to find out whether the Irish population supports the use of Shannon airport by the US military: 58% are opposed and only 19% in favour (23% don’t know).

This shows that politicians do not always seek to get votes by doing what the electorate wants. Politicians answer to power interests, in this case, that of maintaining close links with the United States military and government.

It is therefore important to fight off protestors and prevent opposition movements from reaching large proportions. This was actually confirmed by US General John W. Handy in 2007. He said that the Irish government told him that the reason it did not want to stop the flights was that this “would send out a signal that the protestors had won and the Irish State did not want that”.

So the government needs to show it will be tough with protestors. Hence the decision to send Daly and Wallace to jail, for symbolic reasons.

But the government still has to manage this rationally. My guess is that if it had sent the two TDs to jail for a month over Christmas, they could have become symbols around which more protests could have emerged. So it sent them for two hours only, to make a point, at a cost of €8,000 to the taxpayer.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. He is the author of Cruel Harvest: US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade. Follow Julien on Twitter: @JulienMercille