Tag Archives: Mercille on Monday

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From top: Chairperson of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) Ann Marie Gill, CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, Taoiseach, Enda Kenny and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald at a DRCC event last year; Dr Julien Mercille

Is Enda Kenny a feminist?

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Enda Kenny’s speechwriter wrote a piece in yesterday’s Sunday Independent declaring her boss a “feminist intellectual” and that he “went the extra mile to help women and do them justice”.

The article is so poorly written that it offers one more clue as to why Fine Gael did so badly in the election.

The speechwriter, Miriam O’Callaghan (not RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan)  “admire[s] his compassion, his insight, his ordinariness, his warmth, his feminism and huge intellect”.

Is Enda Kenny a feminist? And what is a feminist anyway? I’ll define it for this piece simply as someone who is in favour of improving conditions for women as a matter of principle.

Therefore, a feminist can be a man or a woman (that will be obvious to feminists, but it’s still misunderstood in public debate). Conversely, anti-feminists can also be either men or women.

So is Enda Kenny as feminist? Well, no he’s not. It’s easy to see that he hasn’t done much at all to improve conditions for women in this country. Let’s look at a few examples (there are many more, of course).

First, abortion rights are still a scandal Abortion is criminalised even in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal impairment, as Amnesty International explains . T

he 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act leaves this restrictive legal framework largely intact. As a result, Ireland is still an outlier—an island of conservatism within a European sea of liberalism.

Second, a number of austerity cuts have affected women negatively. Cuts to the lone parents’ payments implemented by Joan Burton’s department hit women disproportionately.

Another cut that I think represents very well the way in which this government has mistreated women is the overall 21% cut to the Rape Crisis Centres between 2008 and 2014. That’s called a direct attack on women.

In Ireland, 87% of victims of rape or sexual violence are women or girls. If you’re not a feminist yet, that statistic alone should make you one. And what about the perpetrators of those crimes? 98% are men.

But few care: try to find a single story in the media documenting in detail the cuts to the Rape Crisis Centres. The only ones I’m aware of are my own, published on Broadsheet and in the Irish Times. To this day, I have not received a single request for a media appearance or interview to talk about those things.

Third, there are fundamental issues, such as the fact that in Ireland, the gender “pay gap” is 14%. This means that on average, for one hour of work, women in Ireland are paid 14% less than men (the data is based on surveys of employees at companies with 10 or more employees—so it doesn’t include women who don’t work).

Those who think that it’s not too bad should consider that this means that women work on average seven weeks per year “for free” compared to men. And according to the available data, the gender pay gap has been widening over the last few years of austerity.

Moreover, if we look at the “earnings gap” faced by women, it is 35% (this compares the annual earnings of men and women, and so considers the fact that women on average work fewer hours and have a lower employment rate, for example because they interrupt their career to take care of children).

There are many causes for this pay gap. According to the European Commission, they include: “Management and supervisory positions are overwhelmingly held by men”; “men are more often promoted than women, and paid better as a consequence”; “less than 4% of CEOs are women”; “women spend more time than men on important unpaid tasks, such as household work and caring for children or relatives”; “pay discrimination, while illegal, continues to contribute to the gender pay gap”.

To my knowledge, the gender pay gap was not exactly a big issue on the government’s agenda.

A real feminist government would focus on issues like those just mentioned, and on a range of others.

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

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Former Socialist Party MEP Catherine O’Neill and Paul Murphy TD at an  Irish Water demonstration in 2014; Dr Julien Mercille

The Irish Water model wants to shift the burden onto ordinary people via water charges. But a better option is to fund water services via progressive general taxation, like any other public service.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Irish Water and water charges have resurfaced as the political parties are attempting to form a government.

Some in Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have even suggested that they would be open to consider scrapping the charges and perhaps even Irish Water itself.

Of course, a lot of that is probably just fluff to pretend they care about what the electorate wants, but nevertheless, it is possible that the next government might have to adopt a more lenient approach towards water charges if it hopes to generate the required popular support to govern with some stability.

This remains to be seen, but the debate of the last few days has been very interesting.

It reveals that people power does work, and it shows once again the hypocrisy of the establishment and the media in covering water issues. The points I would make are as follows:

1. Protest and civil disobedience do work: the reason why the main parties are now reconsidering charging us for water is because they don’t want trouble in the streets.

So we can thank all the community groups and people like Paul Murphy TD and Joan Collins TD who participated in the protests. It’s interesting that some on the Left, even the radical Left, have been reluctant to support civil disobedience.

But guess what: this is how rights are won. Marches and speeches could be organised every day of the year but it wouldn’t change a thing. Those in power can live with that and will even encourage marches and speeches since they’re quite ineffective and they give the impression that the government is open to hear different points of view.

Also, over the last few days, there has been a flurry of hypocritical arguments from the government and media about the dangers of abolishing Irish Water and scrapping water charges, such as:

2. “If we abolish Irish Water we’ll go back to the inefficient system of running water services by the 40 or so Local Authorities, which is an uncoordinated and costly system”:

This is so ridiculous that you can be pretty sure that whoever says that is being disingenuous. The truth is that abolishing Irish Water has nothing to do with going back to the Local Authorities. It means keeping a centralised, national system, which does provide better coordination and efficiency.

But that national body should be a public body, not a semi-state commercial body like Irish Water. The difference is that Irish Water is commercial and charges for water, whereas a simple public body, which could be called the National Water Authority, is not commercial in nature and remains in public hands, and can’t be privatised down the line, as Irish Water could be.

3. “If we abolish Irish Water, its workers will have to be fired and we won’t be able to invest enough in our crappy water infrastructure”.

Oh wow. Since when does the government actually care about people losing their jobs and the lack of investment in our infrastructure?

Since 2008, under austerity, the main parties have raised the unemployment rate and cut public spending. Now that their beloved Irish Water is under threat, they suddenly pretend to care about those things…

In any case, if Irish Water became a public body, its staff with expertise in running a water system would stay. It is the useless marketing bureaucrats, legal advisors and overpaid executives who would have to find a job elsewhere.

The issue of investment is important, however. It is true that our water infrastructure needs investment. The reason is because under austerity, the government has refused to fund it adequately.

This is the standard tactic to privatise public assets: first, underfund a public body; second, when it is collapsing because it is underfunded, cry out loud that it’s a scandal that our infrastructure is so bad and that we need the private “efficient” sector to fix it; third, privatise it, even if there’s usually not much difference at all in efficiency between the public and private sectors—in fact, the private sector is in important cases less efficient (e.g., health care).

The central issue is: How should water services be funded? The Irish Water model wants to shift the burden onto ordinary people via water charges. But a better option is to fund water services via progressive general taxation, like any other public service. The reason why the government never mentions that is because it means taxing the rich to fund services for everybody.

If the provision of water services remains in public hands, the government could also borrow cheaply on the markets to invest in infrastructure via a National Water Authority. However, the proponents of Irish Water say it would be better to set up Irish Water as a commercial semi-state and have it borrow on the markets and keep all that off the government’s balance sheet.

The problem with this is that it would mean charging us all for water instead of using general taxation. It is therefore better to make general taxation more progressive, to implement a wealth tax, and to tax businesses a little more (to bring them on a par with the norm in Europe, so we’re not talking about being unfair to businesses here) and to use that money to fund water services.

The Right2Water movement has a detailed explanation of how this could be done here and the economist Michael Taft has a similar explanation here.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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 From top: German coverage of the Cologne New’s Year’s Eve incident; Dr Julien Mercille

The reported sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, over the new year provided far right groups the perfect opportunity to demonise refugees.

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

Many migrants and refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East have recently reached Europe. Sadly, they have been used by some in political circles and the media to stir up racist feelings across the continent.

There’s nothing better than a Muslim to act as a scapegoat for the failure of European governments to provide jobs and essential services, or simply to rally citizens behind the flag irrationally so that they follow their leaders blindly.

And when refugees or migrants commit crimes against women as in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve, far-right groups were handed a Christmas gift, the perfect opportunity to whip up fear and xenophobia.

To be clear, the reported sexual attacks in Cologne and elsewhere in Europe need to be dealt with firmly. The correct response is to pursue the perpetrators, whatever their migration status or ethnic origin.

But the wrong response is to blame and punish and expel all Muslims or refugees. Germany has by now received over a million refugees and migrants. Some will commit crimes, but most won’t. Stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs shouldn’t be the basis of policy.

As Amnesty International stated, “The German government must not allow the crimes committed by a number of men to dictate the fate of over 1.1 million refugees in Germany”.

It’s easy to see the racist double standards at play in the media and among certain political groups. For example, in 2014 there was a big report on abuse of women in Europe published by the European Union’s fundamental rights watchdog, which interviewed 42,000 women across the 28 EU member states.

The report found an astonishing fact: 1 in 3 European women have been the victim of physical or sexual violence since the age of 15, with the majority of perpetrators being men (and we’re not talking about inappropriate emails or phone calls here, but about real violence, things like to be beaten, burned, slapped, or forced into sexual intercourse).

On top of that, about 50% of women in the EU have experienced sexual harassment—that’s 90 million women.

This is the real scandal about the abuse of women in Europe. Yet, you won’t find too much coverage of that in the media, and certainly not the hysterical coverage found in some outlets about the Cologne events.

Moreover, a few days ago, at almost the same moment as the Cologne attacks happened, a similar tale of abuse surfaced in Germany: an investigator found that 231 boys had been physically and sexually abused, including raped, in a Catholic choir between the 1960s and 1990s.

Guess who led the choir? Rev. Georg Ratzinger, the brother of former Pope Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger). You’d think you’d have a scandal here about the Catholic Church that the media might want to expose. But all we heard about are the crimes of the Muslim refugees.

Right-wing political groups have used the Cologne events to demonise refugees, who they called “Rapefugees”. For example, Lutz Bachmann, the leader of the far-right anti-Islam Pegida movement, can be seen here smiling and wearing his t-shirt that says “Rapefugees not Welcome”.

The German media also poured oil on the fire. For example, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, a leading liberal newspaper, used a picture of a black arm reaching right in between the legs of a white woman (top).

This image was used to illustrate an article in which a psychologist said that every time young Muslim men meet with women they take it as a highly sexualised encounter. The editor-in-chief of the paper later had to apologise and wrote: “We regret the fact that these illustrations could have hurt the feelings of our readers and apologize for that”.

Also, the conservative magazine Focus ran a front-page cover showing a naked white woman covered with black hand marks (centre). One editor described it as “disgustingly racist and sexist.”

But the magazine didn’t apologise, it even defended its image, saying that it was used “to symbolically present what happened in Cologne. Therefore we’re showing as representative for the many female victims a woman who has been made a sex object and been degraded—but who is determined to fight back”.

It’s easy to see how fast xenophobic fears can spread. Migrant men have already been banned from a swimming pool [] in Germany, in addition to protests against refugees in general.

In short, we need to keep a cool head and treat sexual crimes for what they are without indicting refugees as a group—explicitly or implicitly.

Julien Mercille is a lecturer at University College Dublin. His column appears here every Monday. Follow Julien on Twitter: @JulienMercille

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From top: Michael Taft; Dr Julien Mercille

The state of progressive media in Ireland is gloomy.

But that all may be about to change (a little).

Dr Julien Mercille writes:

I am informed by ‘sheet editors that a “beefed up” Broadsheet will evolve over the next few weeks boasting a slightly modified design, new columnists/writers and more cats other “exciting stuff”.  This will help fill an immense gap, especially as election 2016 approaches.

The state of Irish progressive media reflects the state of progressive independents in politics. There are projects here and there, individuals trying to do good things, but with a lack of unity resulting in scattered and dispersed endeavours that often go nowhere, or at least never reach their full potential.

The consequence is cynicism, frustration and apathy. It all looks so disjointed that people don’t know where to go, what to do and who to talk to in order to get organised to change things. Projects are started but often don’t move beyond a Facebook page.

Indeed, because of the weakness of progressive media, people too often end up on Facebook and social media. There you can read scattered commentary and see pictures of this and that and read people vent and argue and complain.

It’s clear that some feel very satisfied and excited at debating others and insulting politicians on Facebook. If you’ve spent five hours building graphics and pictures saying Joan Burton is an idiot, that must have been useful, no?

The truth is that this stuff leads nowhere. The only effect is to make the complainers feel good about themselves and actually spread cynicism further and more deeply.

Sure social media is effective to circulate ideas and organise meetings. But in terms of providing a regular source of analysis and opinion on current affairs, we’ve seen better.

One thing that never fails to amaze me is the quality and effectiveness of the progressive media in the United States compared to the appalling state of affairs here.

Broadsheet tries and will try harder to combine two things that are very difficult to achieve in any setting: 1) provide quality content that is 2) actually read and popular. Many other platforms do well on one of those, but not the other. A good quality blog that’s read by 14 people is a failure. And a website that has a million readers but contains only jokes is a failure as well. I think that combining Broadsheet’s reach with quality content might nail it.

It will be a necessary counter-weight to the mainstream media. Some of the latter is good, but much of it is either too uncritical of government or vacuous. The result is that progressive viewpoints have had a hard time making it through.

One thing that strikes me on a daily basis is how much commentary and reporting in the Irish press is simply empty. The problem is not even that I disagree with a viewpoint, it is that there simply is no viewpoint presented, or no point made, with articles completely lacking direction, or angle, or content. The result is that readers are just staring at the television or newspaper but getting nothing out of it.

Broadsheet may even be useful to journalists and producers working in the mainstream media. As a one-stop shop for progressive views, it will be an important resource to find quotes or interviewees or individuals who can appear on radio and television from among the cast of ‘sheet contributors.

For example, Michael Taft will have a weekly column on Tuesdays, starting tomorrow and focusing on the economy in plain and accessible language. I will stay on for Mondays, and look forward to reading all the congratulatory comments from my detractors.

And there will be other writers joining. The goal is to provide a broad range of progressive viewpoints.

Hopefully, the project will snowball and get people interested and talking together. So watch this space.

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

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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.

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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