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By KEVIN MYERS
Independent.ie
March 27 2012
**Thought this might stir people up on a Wednesday… ;)
Today’s is my final column as a salaried employee of this newspaper. The remorseless flow of the decades has brought me to retirement-age, and to the very last tribunal of my staff-career: Mahon.
What a revelation that was! After €300m and 15 years, it found there was corruption in Ireland. Good God! I cried, hurling the radio out of the window in disbelief. Can this be true? Irish people not honouring their word?
No, no, no: next you’ll be telling me that priests have been sexually abusing children, and nuns brutalising unmarried mothers, and why, government ministers arming and funding a militant breakaway wing of the IRA! But thank God: such things are impossible, are they not?
They certainly are not impossible if you remain in steadfast denial about what kind of people we are.
Tammany Hall — the organised nexus between political favours and the ballot-box — was Ireland’s great contribution to the US body politic.
Only one American president in history had absolutely no ancestors listed in the first US census of 1790. That was John F Kennedy, for whom the political machine of Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago obligingly “disappeared” the vital ballot-boxes that would have made Richard M Nixon president. Hence, the first and only Irish Catholic tenant of the White House, courtesy of a rigged-election.
You probably know my opinions on 1916, and find them outrageous and tiresome. Good. So stop reading now.
But if you think a trade unionist — Connolly — giving his 14-year-old son a revolver to shoot down his fellow-countrymen a moral act: if you think a landed Countess — Markievicz — murdering an unarmed policeman — Lahiffe –in St Stephen’s Green a moral act; if you think that a gunman — Holohan — chasing a helpless 14-year-old boy — the pathetically named Playfair — from his home in Phoenix Park, cornering him and blowing his brains out, a moral act, why, you’ll probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
This is the kernel, the key: you cannot have a political culture that publicly cherry-picks through the Ten Commandments; once you tolerate that, then others will do likewise, but making different choices according to their mood.
Thus Charlie Dalton, one of Michael Collins’s Murder Squad (the subject of much heathen and depraved nationalist veneration), later became a founder of the Irish Hospital Sweepstake, which made fortunes for ex-gunmen like him, and naturally, gave very little to Irish hospitals.
Exiles in the US gave comparable sums to de Valera’s Fund for Ireland. And guess what? He kept most of it, issuing worthless shares to the poor idiots who subscribed, but keeping the valuable ones for himself, so creating a ruling Fianna Fail kleptocracy to rival that of the Free State Sweepers.
Corruption is made possible by low standards: what is unpunctuality, but a disdain for rules?
The plumbers or electricians who don’t show up on time are the building-blocks that make possible the Ziggurat of large-scale corruption.
Moreover, the culture of the Catholic confessional, and the absolution it conferred on non-sexual misdemeanours, served as a profound contaminant in Irish life: no non-pelvic sin, from patriotic-swindling to patriotic-murder — a mere spectrum, not a quantum-leap — was taboo in the perverse form of Catholicism that took root here.
The Mahon Tribunal lasted 15 years, five years longer than it took to build the Large Hadron Collider under the Alps. Whereas the latter’s task is to seek the origins of existence, Mahon’s brief was somewhat more modest. So discovering that creatures like Flynn, Lawlor and Burke were corrupt is rather like hiring Holmes to find a Lambeg drummer banging away in a Vatican phone-box: it certainly shouldn’t take €300m.
And as for Bertie Ahern’s improper €215,000, why, that sum is €80,000 less than the legal costs at Mahon of just his namesake alone, Dermot.
Meanwhile, 17 lawyers earned over €1m during the tribunal’s decade-and-a-half of leisurely lucubrations, with each SC earning up to €2,500 a day. And you know what? If you unleashed the Mahon Hadron Collider on any one of us, you’d find something juicy and untoward. On me, certainly.
The Moriarty report found that billionaire Denis O’Brien’s Esat deal — from which he later made €300m — was facilitated by the corrupt Michael Lowry. Precisely one year on from the finding, the Taoiseach Enda Kenny was sharing a platform in New York with Mr O’Brien.
Which probably means that Bertie Ahern might take heart: we really don’t take the tribunals’ findings any more seriously than we do the basic rules of an orderly, law-abiding society, the violations of which brought about the tribunals in the first place.
No wonder that Galway City Council is now planning to erect a statue to the terrorist mass-murderer Che Guevara. They simply haven’t got a clue about anything, have they?
On which note, I end my career as a salaried-columnist, bidding you all a fond and final farewell.
Yet stay! Cease your ecstatic ululations! Quell those indecent carols of good riddance! For next week, I shall return as a twice-weekly columnist, no longer on staff, but now on contract. Yes, gentle readers, weep and despair!
By Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
Tuesday January 24 2012
THE black rat, courtesy of bubonic plague, proved this was one world. The great Asian flu in 1918-19 did something similar. And the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s did likewise, this time proving that a rectum in New York could within hours be infecting one in Berlin. This one world is now united by the internet, the great sewer in cyberspace. One world: one colony; one colon.
If you haven’t been libelled by Wikipedia, you probably love it. I have been libelled by it, and I regard it as a potential source of very great evil. The Wikipedia entry on me a couple of years ago said I was a child-rapist who sodomised boys in Belfast, my crimes being covered up by my masters in British intelligence. It is impossible to imagine a more wicked and lethal libel, an incitement to murder in a land replete with murderers. That’s Wikipedia for you, the intellectual bathhouse of our times, in which you can swap personal fluids and fatal viruses with complete strangers.
Do this. Find out the name of a really big banker on Wall Street, and just see how little information Wikipedia has on him. Then check anyone in Irish life who is well-known but not rich. Contrast the entries. The really rich powerful man probably has a skeletal entry, not too many scandals, and no information about where he lives. But the entry of the less powerful will not merely list his home address but also much private material, plus — if he has any enemies — possibly many falsehoods, as I discovered.
Newspapers came into existence to counter the baleful influence of pamphleteers, the first bloggers in history, who — with the invention of the printing press — found they could say almost anything about anyone, without consequence. It’s no coincidence that the terrible events of the reformation of the 16th century and the abominable religious wars of the 17th century owed much of their venom to the printing press and the lies that it made possible. The massacres of Protestant settlers in Ireland in 1641, dreadful as they were, were not so much bloodier than any of the massacres that had accompanied the wars of the Roses, or the aftermath of any of the risings in England. It was the printing press which embedded 1641 in the English mind, with consequences that live with us still. By the end of the 17th century, there were so many pamphlets saying so many untrue things that governments across Europe decided — and the people largely agreed — that society needed responsible sources for its news. Hence the emergence of licensed newspapers.
In the past decade, Wikipedia has produced the greatest “information” revolution in history. But what actually is a “fact” in an internet-world that consists of a cyber-rabble bawling malevolent gibberish along with scientific truth? Who knows which is which? And who are the thousands of people who write the Wikipedia entries? Do you know any of their names? Thanks to the internet, we have travelled back to the intellectual anarchy of the 17th century pamphleteers.
The day-long closure of Wikipedia last week was said to have blacked out the world. Not my world, it didn’t. Moreover, I don’t blog and I don’t tweet, or read blogs or twitters, because I don’t know how to. I treat Wikipedia with the same intellectual respect I would a football chant. I am in a minority. Wikipedia, the most powerful tool for informing people in world history, has transformed how most people acquire information.
Plagiarised Wikipedia quotes, copied and pasted, are now universal media-fare. The word viral takes on a new meaning: the sewers are no longer underground, but are pumping their bilge into the food-fair. And as we wade knee-deep in all this mixture of nourishment and effluent, who knows what is good and what is toxic rubbish?
Jimmy Wales, the inventor of Wikipedia, having turned it into a charity, is clearly not a greedy man. But the concept of “charity” actually means that in essence, it is personally unaccountable. Moreover, he is an ideological supporter of a free internet. But even the slightest idea in public always exacts a price: on the internet, there’s no such thing as a free hunch. For where there is untrammelled “freedom”, you soon get untrammelled barons with untrammelled powers.
THE real beauty of the free market is that it is not really free. It has rules about where and when it takes place, about what you can call a potato and what you can call a pear, about not selling whiskey to a child, and not selling rotgut to anyone.
In other words, freedom needs consensual rules — otherwise the outcome is the freedom to tyrannise, to bully, to marginalise, to cheat, to oppress. This is what we are already seeing in the sordid universe of the free internet, with its depraved galaxies of hysteria, its solar systems of malice and its malevolently circling comets of vindictive dementia. What happens when a really powerful force is able to mobilise such cosmic hatreds? History — 1789, 1917 — supplies the answer.
– Kevin Myers
SAOIRSE32 
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