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The right to data portability – You have the right to request that we transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you. If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us at our email above. - Where we rely on consent to process your data, you've the right to withdraw that consent at any time. - You have a right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (though it would be a timesaver if you let us know the problem first) - There's no automated decision making system in place. It will be a wonder if there is even ever a manual decison making system, to be honest. ### Simon McGarr URL: https://www.thegist.ie/simon/ Last updated: 2024-03-03T16:33:04.000Z Hello, Gist reader. I'm Simon, and I write the Gist. I'm a lawyer with [McGarr Solicitors](https://mcgarrsolicitors.ie/?ref=thegist.ie) in Dublin, and the managing director of [Data Compliance Europe](https://www.datacomplianceeurope.eu/?ref=thegist.ie), a global consultancy on GDPR and data protection matters. I'm a [Senior Advisor for M3AAWG ](https://www.m3aawg.org/blog/m3aawg-5-brexit-and-schrems-ii-with-simon-mcgarr-m3aawg-senior-advisor?ref=thegist.ie)and a guest lecturer with the [European Academy of Law](https://www.era.int/?ref=thegist.ie) in Trier as well as the [External Examiner for the Law Society of Ireland](https://www.lawsociety.ie/productdetails?pid=3061&ref=thegist.ie) on Data Protection. I have represented clients in both the landmark [Digital Rights Ireland](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62012CJ0293&ref=thegist.ie) and [Schrems I](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=5A3809D12A633278632889D41ADBB128?text=&docid=168421&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=5990263&ref=thegist.ie) cases before the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the EU. I recently republished the 1969 book [Sit Down and Be Counted](https://amzn.eu/d/dvYoGle?ref=thegist.ie), by Jack Dowling, Lelia Doolan and Bob Quinn on tensions within RTE, and between the broadcaster and the government, for its 50th anniversary. I promise I did not then stage the largest publicity stunt in history. [Simon's Archive of Gists](https://www.thegist.ie/simon/posts/) ## Posts ### The Gist: Ireland's Biometric Laundromat URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-irelands-biometric-laundromat/ Last updated: 2026-08-16T11:15:34.000Z As readers will know, in the [Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Act 202](https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/act/2026/26/eng/enacted/a2626.pdf?ref=thegist.ie)6 the Irish Department of Justice is trying to drive a coach and four through the EU AI Act's limits on police surveillance. It just seems like yesterday when I wrote about this questionable legislation on using facial recognition technology on camera footage (see [Humpty Dumpty's Wall of Biometric Bamboozlement](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-humpty-dumptys-wall-of-biometric-bamboozlement/)). But, in the dying days of the Dáil term, the Department brought in an astonishing set of amendments to that same piece of legislation after it had already gone through Oireachtas debate and consideration. The effect of those amendments appears to be to turn Ireland into a State-sized loophole for police and security organisations across the EU (and possibly beyond) who might want to avoid their new responsibilities under the AI Act. Let's take a look at the text, however little attention the Department hoped we would pay to it. ### Biometric Laundering on Request A member of An Garda Síochána can only use the Act's powers to run biometric analysis on video images for specified purposes. They're set out in the Act's new text for Section 43C(2) of the original law; "43C. (2) A member of Garda personnel shall not carry out biometric analysis, other than for one or more of the following principal purposes: (a) the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of arrestable offences; (b) the protection of the security of the State; (c) a search for one or more missing persons;" Or at least, that was the language the [Dáil passed on 13th May 2026](https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2025/82/eng/ver%5Fb/b82b25d.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). But, just before the end of the term, with Acts being passed under the guillotine (a system where debate is curtailed so the Government can pass laws in a hurry), we got an amendment to that 'purposes' section. It was introduced through the Seanad, not the Dáil. Jim O'Callaghan didn't introduce it to the Dáil, though he had introduced the previous texts on behalf of the Government. It was left to Catherine Ardagh, the new Junior Minister in the Department of Justice to bring it forward to the House. It added a fourth purpose, in pursuit of which a member of An Garda Síochána can use the Act's powers to run biometric analysis. Let's call it Purpose (d); "43C. (2) A member of Garda personnel shall not carry out biometric analysis, other than for one or more of the following principal purposes: (a) the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of arrestable offences; (b) the protection of the security of the State; (c) a search for one or more missing persons; **(d) without prejudice to section 43B(b), cooperation with one or more** **other law enforcement agencies in relation to the prevention,** **investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences.**" "Arrestable Offences" is a specific term defined in [Section 2(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1997](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1997/act/14/section/2/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie#sec2) as being an offence for which a person may "be punished by imprisonment for a term of five years or by a more severe penalty". While the rest of the Act (and even the same section) was careful to limit its scope to those "Arrestable Offences" ([a point made by Labour TD Conor Sheehan during the debate](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2026-07-08/speech/249/?ref=thegist.ie)) this last-minute addition broadened the scope out to "prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution" of *any* form of criminal offence, no matter how minor. So, with a stroke of a pen, the use of biometric analysis went from being limited to serious crimes to being investigated by the Irish police, to being open to cooperation with any 'other law enforcement agency', with no minimum threshold on the criminal investigation grounds cited. The same sort of expansion was made to Section 6 of the new law, which now read "(6) A member of Garda personnel may only carry out biometric analysis in order to search for— (a) an individual who the member has reasonable grounds to suspect— (i) of the commission of an arrestable offence, or (ii) is a threat to the security of the State, (b) a missing person, (c) an individual who the member reasonably suspects is or has been a victim of an arrestable offence, or **(d) in respect of the principal purpose referred to in subsection (2)(d)** **and without prejudice to the generality of paragraphs (a) to (c)—** **(i) an individual who the member has reasonable grounds to** **suspect—** **(I) of the commission of a criminal offence, or** **(II) is a threat to the security of the State or another state,** **(ii) a missing person, or** **(iii) an individual who the member reasonably suspects is or has** **been a victim of a criminal offence."** So while Garda personnel may run biometric analysis only for serious crimes (Arrestable Offences) when they are investigating a matter on their own, that is expanded to any and all 'criminal offences' if it is done in cooperation with any other 'law enforcement agency'. I [previously](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-humpty-dumptys-wall-of-biometric-bamboozlement/) set out how this Act attempts to evade the requirements of EU law by inventing an entirely spurious distinction between 'biometric identification' (which is what the EU law defines) and 'biometric analysis', which is a wholly Irish invention and, in effect, a distinction without a difference. The AI Act [(EU Regulation 2024/1689)](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L%5F202401689&ref=thegist.ie) sets out the accepted uses and limits on the use of AI in processing data. And it sets out a special category of processes as 'High Risk' in Annex III of the regulation. And the very first of those high-risk processes? > High-risk AI systems pursuant to Article 6(2) are the AI systems listed in any of the following areas: > > 1\. Biometrics, in so far as their use is permitted under relevant Union or national law In particular, Recital 54 says that "Remote biometric identification systems should therefore be classified as high-risk in view of the risks that they pose." Recital 95 sets out the problem with the use of AI on CCTV footage which the Minister's Bill proposes to introduce: "considering the intrusive nature of post-remote biometric identification systems, the use of post-remote biometric identification systems should be subject to safeguards" And in Article 26.10 of the AI Act the general need for *prior judicial oversight* as the key safeguard on this intrusive technology is set down; "the deployer of a high-risk AI system for post-remote biometric identification shall request an authorisation, ex ante, or without undue delay and no later than 48 hours, by a judicial authority or an administrative authority whose decision is binding and subject to judicial review". ### Ireland's SaaS offering: Scofflaw as a Service [During the Seanad debate, the Minister outlined](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2026-06-10/speech/89/?ref=thegist.ie) what his real idea was in all of this. By introducing this baseless carve-out from the protections given to citizens against misuse of AI by the police, he would give courts and police an excuse to avoid the judicial oversight EU law has required. > "The court and the garda will not be going to a definition of “biometric analysis” or “biometric identification” in the AI Act. For the purpose of this legislation, it is the definition of “biometric analysis” set out here. > The part of the legislation we are discussing here is called the carrying out of biometric analysis by members of the Garda Síochána. What is clear from a plain reading of this legislation, if enacted, is that it establishes a distinction between "biometric analysis" and "biometric identification". > Irrespective of what the AI Act says, here we are establishing a distinction between the two and only biometric analysis is permitted in this legislation." With this new expansion into international cooperation, the Department of Justice's text, written as the Minister says "Irrespective of what the AI Act says", has become a hole in the entire EU's regulatory framework for law enforcement. Any law enforcement agency that wants to avoid its domestic and EU requirements for prior judicial oversight of its use of biometrics, such as facial recognition, as a High Risk process, can simply send the footage to An Garda Síochána and have them run the uniquely unregulated 'biometric analysis' for them. The foreign law enforcement agency never ran any analysis that required prior judicial oversight, and the Irish police who did will never have to go before a court to explain their actions. The perfect loophole. ### Not Invented Here This kind of grey evidence collection is known in the US as 'witness-washing' or 'parallel construction'. [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origins-evidence-us-criminal-cases?ref=thegist.ie) and the [Cato Institute](https://www.cato.org/policy-report/march/april-2018/surveilling-secret?ref=thegist.ie) issued separate reports on the dangers of this kind of evasion of judicial oversight and statutory protections. In March 2026, the Denver Law Review published an article by the Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering in New York University School of Law entitled "[Witness Washing facial recognition technology](https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7514&context=dlr&ref=thegist.ie)" examining the specific dangers involved in unacknowledged use of facial recognition by law enforcement agencies. He points out that; > In the twenty-four years since FRT’s first formal deployment, appellate courts have examined it in only three decisions. None of these decisions evaluated the underlying reliability of the technology. Police have used this > technology regularly for almost a quarter of a century, but FRT has fully > evaded the processes by which courts purport to evaluate the use of new > technologies in the criminal law It seems worthwhile to note that, on one dusty day last month, Ireland opened Europe's largest witness-washing laundromat for business. [Subscribe to the Gist for Free](#/portal/signup/free) [Pay for the Gist](#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: Who Will Lead FF Next? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-who-will-lead-ff-next/ Last updated: 2026-07-25T13:01:28.000Z Fadó fadó in Éirinn, becoming the leader of Fianna Fáil was the same thing as becoming the Taoiseach. If you got one job, you were going to get to do the other. Every Fianna Fáil leader has ended up as Taoiseach, no exceptions. But Fionn Mac Cumhaill no longer sprints through the forests of Ireland from Howth Head to Dún Aonghasa without bending a blade of grass, so light is his tread. No more does the wisdom of the salmon of knowledge hide in his thumb, wanting only to be sucked on to solve any problem. Similarly, the Fianna Fáil of the past is gone. Nonetheless, one day (soonish) Micheál Martin will resign and a new leader will rise. Let's have a look at the two frontrunners. ### Jim O'Callaghan Jim O'Callaghan holds Fianna Fáil's most marginal seat in Dublin and one of the most consequential Ministerial roles as Minister for Justice. He has long considered himself as the obvious next choice to become leader of his party and hasn't been shy about letting everyone know just how obvious it is. He has a particular style. He loudly sets out an extreme position well beyond what his predecessors might have taken (on [surveillance](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-humpty-dumptys-wall-of-biometric-bamboozlement/), on immigration etc) and then he blusters unpersuasivly in the face of any counter-argument. At the start, when the people effected were powerless, this could give the impression of working. His Department's motto may as well have been "Bad Legislation and Plenty of It". But, when you start to apply the same impulses to balancing competing interests- the very thing that being a Taoiseach requires the ability to do- the wheels fall off that paddywagon very quickly. His response to the fuel protests- [threatening to call out the army on them](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-denial-of-service-attack/)\- was immediately seen as counter-productive. Firstly, it revealed that he didn't politically recognise that the bulk of the protesters were basically a bit of Fianna Fáil's electoral constituency annoyed they weren't getting the benefits of the patronage they felt they deserved. Secondly, he's not in charge of the army and he hadn't checked this plan with the actual Minister for Defence. And thirdly, it was dumb as a bag of rocks. He took the most extreme position (the army has never been deployed against civil protest in the history of the state) and discovered he hadn't understood where the lines of actual power lay in his party, or how people would react to being threatened with the army. (Badly.) More recently, he has embroiled himself in a row with criminal legal aid solicitors over paying them for their work. Again, his impulse has been to take an extreme position and [bluster on](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2026/07/18/legal-aid-system-did-not-delay-kerry-football-fans-three-year-case-flagged-by-minister/?ref=thegist.ie) as his various justifications for it meet the reality of the consequences of those actions. He's the Minister for Justice who's ground the criminal justice system to a halt. Bluntly, the solicitors he is fighting with have every incentive to hold their breath longer than he can survive just asserting it will all end in a minute.\* Not for the first time, the Minister has mistaken saying things for being able to do things. Of course, his profession as Senior Counsel has no division between the two. But while saying things is an effective way to win cases, it isn't a great political reputation to have if you want to win elections. **Outlook:** Blustery, gathering clouds. ### Jack Chambers Jack Chambers, at 35, has held both halves of the government's financial portfolio, as Minister for Finance and current Minister for Public Expenditure. He opposed the repeal of the 8th Amendment and then, after that turned out to be at odds with the majority of the country, he 'evolved' his position to support it. He came out in a public statement in 2024. I mean, you'd think, with all that, you might be able to summon a mental image of him speaking in your head. But, and this may be what has made him so appealing to Micheál Martin as a cabinet colleague, he has the rare talent of erasing himself from your memory even as he speaks. This auto-amnesia is effective in not creating avoidable problems (see: Jim O'Callaghan above) but does pose the question- Do the people yearn for a Taoiseach blander than creamed rice? However, as your eyes slide off Jack Chambers, as off a block of frictionless lard, it is easy to miss his actively bad policy ideas. For example, he recently made a statement to the Dáil which set out a more extreme version of Government power than anything Jim O'Callaghan has ever come up with. [Here he is](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2026-04-16/speech/61/?ref=thegist.ie), explaining how much he rejects the very idea of citizens using the courts when the state acts illegally; > "I am against all judicial reviews whether it is environmentalists, landowners or anybody in the economy....We have seen the enormous deference to allowing this system and industry of judicial reviews to build up. It is undermining delivery systems right across the board. I am against landowners taking judicial reviews, I am against developers taking judicial reviews, I am against anybody taking judicial reviews" Not great on the Constitutional power of the courts to hold the Government to account then. How about the legal duties to take action to reduce climate change and environmental damage? [Wait, we're getting some news just in...](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2026/07/24/emergency-infrastructure-laws-will-be-at-extremity-of-what-is-constitutionally-permitted/?ref=thegist.ie) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-25-at-10.45.35.png) > "The Minister maintained that by disapplying elements of the Climate Act it would reduce the potential for judicial reviews against particular projects going ahead. > He criticised excessive use of the courts “when we have an elected Government”. **Outlook:** Chilling. ### Circling the talent drain As illustrated above, the problem for the Fianna Fáil party is that, despite its years of grumbling about Micheál Martin as leader, it has never been able to find anyone with a comparable set of skills. He knows the weight of his words, and the role the leader has to play in predicting and balancing competing interests. He knows his party's membership and elected representatives are mostly out of kilter with the general voting public and he makes efforts to hide it. He even knows when to give up on an unwinnable fight. I don't think he makes good choices, but I think he knows how to make choices. The post-crash collapse saw the party lose its status as the default party for people with ambition to power (that became Fine Gael). It also lost its self-image as the voice of the Irish people, as the majority of its Oireachtas representatives chose the wrong side on one social and political issue after another. (see: Jack Chambers above) Neither Chambers or O'Callaghan have displayed any ability to do the job of being Taoiseach. But that's not the job they're trying to be hired for. They're auditioning to be the leader of the Fianna Fáil of today. And maybe complaining that the Constitution is interfering with the triumph of your bloodless technocracy's will or cosplaying as a Temu-delivered inflatable Pete Hegseth is the way to appeal to that electorate. The Conservative Party picked Liz Truss as leader. Who knows what madcap decisions an old, out of touch conservative party membership might make? The thing is, the days when being leader of Fianna Fáil led automatically to becoming Taoiseach are as firmly behind us now as Fionn and the salmon of knowledge. The next leader of Fianna Fáil could make decisions that destroy the party with an electorate already restlessly casting about to dump the [100 years government](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-end-of-the-100-year-government/). Just being offputting could be enough to start a stampede. And, as the fuel protests showed, the party's past power bases aren't willing to put up with even the smallest gap in receiving the benefits of patronage. What does Jim O'Callaghan say about solving housing (nowt)? What does Jack Chambers say about what he'd change about Ireland (nowt)? What does that say about Fianna Fáil's future? Lots. ### \*I'm a solicitor, but my firm doesn't do criminal legal aid work. The people who do are the rocket scientists of the profession, with the widest gap between the skills needed to do the job and the pay provided for that job already. The proposed changes to paying them are indefensible and would require them to be exposed to an unlimited and open-ended obligation to work without being paid. They would also further disincentivise the best solicitors to work to defend accused people. You might not care about that today, but [you really would ](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/poor-rely-public-defenders-too-overworked?ref=thegist.ie)if you ever found yourself being prosecuted for something you didn't do. ### The Gist: The End of the 100 Year Government URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-end-of-the-100-year-government/ Last updated: 2026-07-13T09:50:15.000Z The Irish State has spent most of its 100-plus years as both a startling success and an embarrassing failure. It’s important to acknowledge both of those things because if you ignore one or the other the behaviour of its electorate will always seem inexplicable. In effect, we have been governed by the same political parties for that 100 years. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in formal coalition now. But they always shared a common vision of how the state should behave, effectively acting as a single continuous government across that century. Ireland's 100 year government has delivered those successes and failures alike. Let’s take its success first. Slightly embarrassingly, the Republic of Ireland is the oldest uninterrupted universal suffrage democracy in Europe. There were older ones, but they were interrupted by the 20th century’s various experiments with dictatorships. We just kept chugging away from 1922, granting women equal voting rights six years ahead of the UK. By comparison, Switzerland only finished giving equal voting rights to women in 1991. This, in itself, would be a success story. But we have also managed some startling civic successes. Ireland’s education levels since the 1960s have skyrocketed, to the point where the country vies with Canada for the title of [Most Educated](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-educated-countries?ref=thegist.ie) in the entire world. We even managed to come up with a novel approach to political violence in the shape of the Northern Ireland peace process, a phrase coined by the late John Hume to convey the fact that, even when the arrow of Achilles hadn’t yet hit the Tortoise of Peace, there is value in its continued incremental journey. Democracy, the educational uplift of the entire society, and progress towards solving intractable political violence are not nothing. In fact, any one of those might be enough to declare a state a success story, but all three of them would suggest an unalloyed triumph. Except the triumph was very alloyed. The precious coinage of democracy was debased by problems inherited and self-inflicted alike. Let’s look at the middle band before we get to the embarrassing failures. These are the achievements where the state failed one group in order to bring about success for another. Seán Lemass, the Taoiseach who triggered the biggest social changes in Ireland in the 1960s, said ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. But, in fact, over its century of decisions, the Irish State has chosen to lift some boats at the expense of suppressing or sinking others. The state was run by and for a particular set of interests and where those interests clashed with the interests of others, so much the worse for the others. If there is a golden thread running through the history of the state, it is the primacy of property over everyone else. In the early days, this was reflected in the reinforcement of the social structures where the eldest son would inherit a farm while their siblings would be left to the choices of becoming priests/nuns, emigrating, or, for the daughters, marrying some other eldest son. It also ensured startlingly weak rights for renters, as landlords could effectively do as they pleased, resulting in decades of 19th-century tenement slums continuing well into the 20th century. Protection of the property-owning class has been the water that Irish politics swims through, invisible to its fishy participants but explaining nearly everything. It is why our housing crisis exists and why it cannot, apparently, be solved. Solving it would mean a political evolution on a scale of growing legs and lungs and actually climbing out of that water. Unlike the protection of property owners, emigration was famously acknowledged and discussed as one of the failures of the state. For decades, politicians of all stripes would wail that we were raising our children for export, like cattle. But, in truth, the emigration boat provided a critical safety valve to the pressure cooker of a political state so dramatically tilted against everyone who didn’t own property. Instead of having to mitigate or address the political agonies of renters or younger siblings who didn’t fancy being a priest, the state could just carry on, safe in the knowledge that even if they made their lives intolerable, their greatest social enemies would find it easier to leave than stage a revolution. But, while this was a clear failure if you happened to be outside that property-owning class, it was a shining success if you happened to be inside it. Imagine the level of entitlement and unaccountable power of being a member of the State’s favoured group. Courts, media, politics, and every single institution bending to your aid and presenting your needs as the common-sense default. It was the ability to deliver this patronage to its members that held Fianna Fáil in the dominant political position across most of the decades of the Irish State’s first 100 years, and unlike Fine Gael, it even offered something to those not in the property-owning classes through the mass provision of public housing, but at a level that never challenged the profitability of the private rentier’s holdings. See this slightly rough chart below which I have built out of a number of different datasets online. It shows public housing output per 1,000 population. This adjusts for distortions delivered by absolute housing build numbers as the population grows, letting us see the response to the need of a particular population size, rather than just abstract numbers of bricks piled up. You may notice it shows the dramatic drop in 1989 when FG's class proxy, the PDs, entered government and again when FG itself took over from the 2010s. Public housing output per 1,000 population, 1887–2025 (1922–59 decade bars shown at 10× width; height = decade average rate) Pre-independence 1887–1918 (all 32 counties) 1922–59: decade averages — no annual data survives Annual data 1960–2025 (Republic of Ireland) † Pre-independence data covers all 32 counties; population denominator is also all-island, keeping the per-capita rate comparable. 1919–21 absent from all sources. Population linearly interpolated between census years. Tangled in with this story was a competing Irish State, one which did fall to a revolution around the turn of the century. The Irish Catholic Church was a state within the state, its institutional power controlling property, money and people to a degree impossible to imagine now. Free education was held back decades by its control over schooling. State healthcare was held back by its control over hospitals. And women and children were fed into its machinery as another pressure valve for the State’s property-owning classes. If eldest sons were to inherit the earth, the entire twin state of church and Republic would ensure that having children was the most tightly controlled activity of all. And that meant controlling women and, where the twin states wanted, seizing them and their children, as well and incarcerating them. The women could be worked without pay for as long as the church institution wanted to and the children could be taken, renamed and given or sold on. It's a story we're used to hearing now, but I think it is always worth just setting it out clearly so we don't lose sight of the sheer magnitude of wrongs our society was built on. Finally, we come to the part of the Irish story where everyone agrees there was failure. Unsurprisingly, a society built around protecting the rent-collecting and property-owning class and actively oppressing everyone else does not make for an economic success. That grotesque, misshapen political tree could never bear any fruit. The fight was, decade after decade, generation after generation, for who could collect the most scraps, not how to make the pie bigger for everyone. When there was an accidental boom (born of graduates hitting critical mass meeting a wall of cheap international credit) it was typically mismanaged to benefit the descendents of those eldest sons, the property developers, until the bubble of cheap foreign money popped and the whole country fell back down to earth. We're in a second bubble of economic success at the moment, and again, Ireland's 100 year government of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are still reacting to benefit and reward their patrons. Except that during the bust, property owners stopped being the eldest sons of farms, or even their inheritors, the individual property developers. It became the stuff of international investor companies. At the same time, patronage flows the other way now, from the companies whose money stuffs the state's coffers, to a client state that actively adopts the needs of multinationals over those of any humans in the country. How do you think you end up being cited as the [world's main cautionary tale](https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/06/03/irelands-data-centre-strain-a-cautionary-tale-for-rest-of-world-un-says/?ref=thegist.ie) in a UN report on the dangers of uncontrolled data centre development? How does that [data centre growth consume your entire renewables effort](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/datacentresmeteredelectricityconsumption2025/keyfindings/?ref=thegist.ie) and more? Why [prioritise gas you have to import](https://www.thejournal.ie/lng-terminal-slammed-as-fundamentally-incompatible-with-climate-policy-6969312-Feb2026/?ref=thegist.ie) over renewables you could generate yourself, except because those [data centres want to run on gas](https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0312/1562943-dublin-data-centre/?ref=thegist.ie) and need the state to ensure the supply of it into the future, climate be damned. Democracy, education and experience of addressing the threat of political violence. These are the successes of an independent Ireland. They're also the tools it will need to address the state's failures, including the consequences to come of the failures of today. Climate change isn't going to wait for another 100 years of the same approach. Changes are going to be forced if they aren't chosen. Ireland's 100 year government can't make those changes, or address those failures, because to do so would be to admit it caused them in the first place. In fact, it would have to admit that some of the things it did were bad, at all. It refuses to do that. If there is one thing the last decade has taught us, from electing the wrong guy as President to holding a referendum which leads to massive national self-harm, it is that the refusal to acknowledge a mistake is the surest way to be destroyed by it. [Subscribe to the Gist for free](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist for Money](#/portal/signup) [Just throw money at the Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: Humpty Dumpty's Wall of Biometric Bamboozlement URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-humpty-dumptys-wall-of-biometric-bamboozlement/ Last updated: 2026-06-13T13:04:28.000Z This week Jim O'Callaghan, the Minister for Justice, stood up and explained why his plan to give the Garda Síochána powers to use AI to surveil the public didn't need the safeguards set down in EU law. You see, he said, all of those EU limits were on the use of "biometric identification". But he had invented a unique new Irish activity called "biometric analysis" that didn't have any of those pesky protections. This was all delivered in the style of a fellow sitting on a wall in Wonderland. "‘When I use a word,’ [Humpty Dumpty said](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-humpty-dumpty-said-in-rather?ref=thegist.ie) in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’" ### Illegal laws The AI Act [(EU Regulation 2024/1689)](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L%5F202401689&ref=thegist.ie) defines Biometric Identification in Article 3.35\. > (35) ‘biometric identification’ means the automated recognition of physical, physiological, behavioural, or psychological human features for the purpose of establishing the identity of a natural person by comparing biometric data of that individual to biometric data of individuals stored in a database; You'll notice that the definition does not say that you're only 'identified' if a database has your name. What matters is that you've matched the biometric data from Data Source A to the biometric data from Data Source B. In other words, identification doesn't need the machine to say "This face belongs to Simon McGarr". It just needs to say "This picture of a face matches this other picture of a face." But Section 43A in the Minister's new Bill tries to rewrite the definition of Biometric Identification, so that it is limited to times where you do have a name. "‘biometric identification’ means, in relation to an individual, the automated recognition of physical, physiological or behavioural human features for the purpose of ascertaining, or attempting to ascertain, the identity of an individual by comparing biometric data of the individual to biometric data **stored in a database of one or more named individuals**" (emphasis added) He's just invented that need for the reference database to be of named individuals from whole cloth. Now [let's look at what he says his novel Irish idea of 'Biometric analysis' will do. ](https://www.kildarestreet.com/sendebates/?gid=2026-06-10a.126&ref=thegist.ie) > "To put it in the simplest terms, biometric analysis is trying to identify unidentified individuals and figure out whether that person there is the same as the person on the other screen. That is what analysis is." Buddy. That is the same thing that the AI Act has already defined as biometric identification. This is the Minister's Humpty Dumpty manoeuvre. ### They have Previous We have, of course seen this semantic shell game being played before. When it was pointed out that the Department of Social Protection had no legal basis for their processing of Biometric data in the Public Services Card, the then Minister Regina Doherty was emphatic; "We don't collect biometric data. We collect and store photographs." She went further, just to ram the point home. She said the Department "does not ask for or collect biometric data from its customers such as fingerprints, retinal scans or any other items that could be listed as biometric data". > You can see that strange exchange here: [pic.twitter.com/rhPtRlxc4O](https://t.co/rhPtRlxc4O?ref=thegist.ie) > > — Simon McGarr @Tupp\_ed@mastodon.ie (@Tupp\_Ed) [May 3, 2018](https://x.com/Tupp%5FEd/status/992115922109370368?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) The Minister said she was using facial matching technology on the photographs that sat on the front of every single PSC card. But also she said that the Department didn't collect facial recognition data. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/06/IMG_2725.jpg) This was a difficult position, in the same way that arguing the sky is green is a difficult position, as exactly these actions are what is defined as processing biometric data by [Article 4(14) of the GDPR. ](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/?ref=thegist.ie) But, as I pointed out [a year ago today, ](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-not-mandatory-not-compulsory-not-legal/)after the DPC had hit the Department with the biggest fine ever levied against the State for illegally building a biometric database; > The Minister's position relied on simply denying what words meant. > But at the same time she was saying this, the Department was [changing its own references to processing biometric data in its Privacy notice](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/department-ordered-changes-to-biometric-privacy-on-website-1.3563006??ref=thegist.ie&ref=thegist.ie)\- an action taken on the instruction of its [Secretary General](https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-social-protection/organisation-information/department-of-social-protection-who-does-what/?ref=thegist.ie#secretary-general) when its Data Protection Officer was 'on leave'. > And [it was awarding one of the PSC contracts ](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/augmented-identity-firm-gets-9m-contract-for-public-services-cards-1.3555710?ref=thegist.ie)to manufacture the PSC cards to a company called Biometric Card Services. > It was also tendering for the [transfer of millions of biometric facial images](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/minister-insists-no-biometrics-collected-in-card-technology-upgrade-1.3483378?ref=thegist.ie), while the Minister was asserting it didn't collect biometric data.' It's not that they didn't know what they were doing. They just had to keep refusing to admit it. Of course, by the time of the long-delayed DPC decision, the Minister had left her job and gone to the European Parliament and has never faced any questions about her denial of reality. Similarly, Jim O'Callaghan doesn't intend to be the Minister for Justice when the music stops and the otherwise legitimate prosecutions that relied on this law fall on their arse without a chair beneath them. That will be someone else's problem. ### The Ballad of Biometrics In both cases, the Ministers have tried to hide inside the details of technical and legal language, and the general unfamiliarity of both the general public and other TDs with what the meaning of the difficult sounding word 'biometric' is. So, let us travel together through the relevant bits of these laws so that we may immunise ourselves against the virus of bamboozlement. Consider this like the songs in Tolkien. It's here if you want it, but you can always skip to the next bit if you're not in the mood. We'll start with the Bill the Minister was pushing through the Seanad this week. This is the [Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill 2025](https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2025/82/eng/ver%5Fb/b82b25d.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). It's intended to add a new section to the pre-existing Part 6 of the [Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Act 2023](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2023/act/32/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie). Back in the distant past of 2023, the government recognised there were limits to what law enforcement could do when accessing and analysing live feeds from CCTV. Part 6 of that 2023 sets out the rules, including the need to get [prior authorisations from a court](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2023/act/32/section/39/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie) (Section 39). Our Minister's new bill will insert a fresh Part 6A into that dusty old 2023 law with a brand new activity he has invented, just for Irish law, of "biometric analysis". "43A. In this Part— ‘biometric analysis’ means any or all of the following: (a) in relation to individuals generally, the automated recognition and categorising of instances of physical, physiological or behavioural human features by the use of specific technical processing of documents obtained by An Garda Síochána in the course of an investigation; (b) in relation to a particular, but unidentified, individual, the automated recognition and categorising of physical, physiological or behavioural human features by the use of specific technical processing of documents obtained by An Garda Síochána in the course of an investigation, in respect of instances of the particular unidentified individual; (c) in relation to a particular, identified, individual, the automated recognition and categorising of physical, physiological or behavioural human features by the use of specific technical processing of documents obtained by An Garda Síochána in the course of an investigation, in respect of instances of the particular identified individual for the purpose of localising that particular identified individual; **but does not include biometric identification;"** Emphasis on that last line, as they say, added. During the Seanad debate [the Minister complained](https://www.kildarestreet.com/sendebates/?gid=2026-06-10a.140&ref=thegist.ie) that he was getting criticised for not following EU law when > "Sometimes the criticism is that we just adopt everything that is happening in Europe." This is a strange thing for a Minister for Justice, and a lawyer, to say, given that we are obliged by EU Treaties and our own Constitution to adopt EU law domestically. So let's head over to EU law, a superior and binding class of law to domestic legislation, to see what the Minister is proud not to have adopted. The AI Act [(EU Regulation 2024/1689)](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L%5F202401689&ref=thegist.ie) sets out the accepted uses and limits on the use of AI in processing data. And it sets out a special category of processes as 'High Risk' in Annex III of the regulation. And the very first of those high-risk processes? > High-risk AI systems pursuant to Article 6(2) are the AI systems listed in any of the following areas: > > 1\. Biometrics, in so far as their use is permitted under relevant Union or national law In particular, Recital 54 says that "Remote biometric identification systems should therefore be classified as high-risk in view of the risks that they pose." Recital 95 sets out the problem with the use of AI on CCTV footage which the Minister's Bill proposes to introduce: "considering the intrusive nature of post-remote biometric identification systems, the use of post-remote biometric identification systems should be subject to safeguards" And in Article 26.10 of the AI Act the general need for prior judicial oversight as the key safeguard on this intrusive technology is set down; "the deployer of a high-risk AI system for post-remote biometric identification shall request an authorisation, ex ante, or without undue delay and no later than 48 hours, by a judicial authority or an administrative authority whose decision is binding and subject to judicial review" OK, that's enough Elf Songs. Let's get back to the plot. ### Scofflaw As A Service [During the Seanad debate, the Minister outlined](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2026-06-10/speech/89/?ref=thegist.ie) what his real idea was in all of this. By introducing this baseless carve-out from the protections given to citizens to misuse of AI by the police he would give courts and police an excuse to avoid the judicial oversight EU law has required. > "The court and the garda will not be going to a definition of “biometric analysis” or “biometric identification” in the AI Act. For the purpose of this legislation, it is the definition of “biometric analysis” set out here. > The part of the legislation we are discussing here is called the carrying out of biometric analysis by members of the Garda Síochána. What is clear from a plain reading of this legislation, if enacted, is that it establishes a distinction between "biometric analysis" and "biometric identification". > Irrespective of what the AI Act says, here we are establishing a distinction between the two and only biometric analysis is permitted in this legislation." **Irrespective of what the AI Act says?** That is the wall Humpty Dumpty has decided to balance on. He will pass his law irrespective of the actual terms of the AI Act, and if it falls later he doesn't intend to be there to see it. The mad yoke. [Subscribe to The Gist for Free](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to The Gist for some money](#/portal/signup) ### Guest Gist: Everything Everywhere All at Once: Crime and Justice in the Age of Total Surveillance URL: https://www.thegist.ie/guest-gist-everything-everywhere-all-at-once-crime-and-justice-in-the-age-of-total-surveillance/ Last updated: 2026-05-25T06:06:38.000Z In the classic detective story, a rumpled investigator paces a crime scene, notebook in hand, squinting at a cigarette butt or a smudged fingerprint. [Columbo](https://youtu.be/csmHXqyrYTs?ref=thegist.ie) tugs at his raincoat and asks one more question. Miss Marple notices something out of place in a flower arrangement. The detective's gift is observation, intuition, the patient gathering of clues that coalesce into a narrative of guilt. That world is vanishing. In its place rises something stranger and more powerful: a system where the clues already exist, captured automatically by a million cameras, sensors, and transaction logs, waiting only for the right query to surface them. The detective of the future may never leave her desk. The crime may be solved before the perpetrator even knows they're a suspect—or perhaps even before the crime itself actually occurs. This is not science fiction. The infrastructure is falling into place. The question we face is not whether such a system is possible, but what kind of society it will create. Will the abolition of undetected crime be liberating, freeing us from the constant low-level anxiety of theft, fraud, and violence? Or will it prove suffocating, a world where every misstep is recorded and every minor transgression punished? **The Surveilled Society** Every face is now a registration plate. Modern facial recognition systems have reached a level of accuracy that makes meaningful anonymity in public spaces nearly impossible. A face captured on a single camera can be matched against databases containing millions of images, linking a person to a name, a government identifier, an address, a history. The technology is good enough, and human faces are unique enough, that tracking an individual's movements through an urban area has become a matter of computational power rather than investigative effort. But facial recognition is only one thread in a much denser web. It does not even need to be highly accurate, because it can be cross-referenced against other data streams that are far more reliable. Every journey on public transport leaves a record—an Oyster card tap, a Metro swipe, a ticket purchase. Every car has a registration plate, and those plates are photographed thousands of times per day by traffic cameras, parking systems, and automatic number plate recognition networks. Credit card transactions create timestamped, geo-located records of purchases. Loyalty cards track buying habits. Electronic toll systems log highway journeys to the meter. Then there is the mobile phone, the remarkable device that most of us carry at all times. It is simultaneously a communication tool, a social media portal, a web browser, a payment wallet, and a GPS tracker. It knows where you are, who you're talking to, what you're reading, what you're buying, and increasingly, through fitness trackers and health apps, your heart rate and sleep patterns. The phone doesn't just generate data—it serves as the skeleton key that links all the other data streams together, connecting your face to your credit card to your transport card to your car to your social media accounts. Online interactions add another dimension. Private messages on WhatsApp or iMessage may be encrypted end-to-end, but metadata—who contacted whom, when, for how long—remains visible to service providers and, under the right legal frameworks, to authorities. Public posts on social media are archived and searchable. Email, despite feeling ephemeral, persists on servers indefinitely. The result is that it is now technically possible to construct a detailed timeline of nearly every movement, action, transaction, and communication in a person's life. Not just where they went, but who they met, what they bought, what they said, what they read, what they liked, what made them pause and scroll back up the page. The surveilled society is not a future dystopia. It is the present, waiting only for someone with the technology and the legal authority to run the query. **Detection by Database Query** The classic detective worked forward from evidence. A crime occurred; the detective walked the ground , laid out the timeline and gathered clues; those clues led to suspects; investigation narrowed the field until the guilty party was identified. The process was laborious, uncertain, and dependent on human skill and intuition. Most crimes went unsolved because the evidence was simply not available, or because connecting the dots required more time than investigators could spare. The new model inverts this. The evidence already exists, captured and stored automatically. Detection becomes less about gathering clues and more about querying databases—finding the signal in the noise of billions of recorded data points. Consider a simple example: geofencing. When a crime occurs at a particular location and time, investigators can request data from mobile phone carriers showing every device that was present within a defined radius during a defined window. Instantly, they have a list of potential witnesses and suspects. Cross-reference that list against the victim's own phone records, social media connections, and transaction history, and patterns begin to emerge. Who was nearby? Who knew the victim? Who might have recently been in conflict with them? These techniques are already in routine use. Investigators solving serious crimes regularly request tower dumps (records of all phones connected to a particular cell tower), analyse social network graphs to map relationships, and track suspects' movements through accumulated location data. Financial crimes are detected by analysing patterns in transaction data that would be invisible to any human auditor. The shift is profound. Detection is no longer primarily about finding evidence that might not exist—it's about filtering through evidence that definitely does exist to construct a coherent narrative. The database of the everything and the everywhere is the haystack. The haystack contains the needles of specific evidence about a crime. The challenge is knowing which needles to look for, and how the needles are connected. **The Detective Who Never Sleeps: Artificial Intelligence and Crime** The database-query model of detection has an obvious limitation: scale. There are too many databases, too many records, too many crimes, and far too few investigators. A homicide might justify dozens of detectives spending months analysing data. A bicycle theft will not. The practical result is that most crimes, even those where evidence almost certainly exists somewhere in the data, remain unsolved simply because no one has time to look. This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture. The tasks that consume investigative time—analysing data, finding patterns, correlating events across multiple sources, constructing explanatory narratives—are the tasks that AI systems have become remarkably good at. A modern large language model can read thousands of documents and summarise them coherently. Computer vision systems can scan hundreds of hours of video footage and flag moments of interest. Graph analysis algorithms can map complex networks of relationships and identify suspicious clusters. More significantly, AI systems can operate continuously, processing new data as it arrives, running queries that would take human analysts weeks in a matter of seconds. They do not get tired. They do not get distracted. They do not have a caseload that forces them to prioritise. The logical endpoint is an investigative system that operates with minimal human intervention. Crimes are reported—or detected automatically through anomaly detection in the data—and AI systems immediately begin querying the available databases, identifying suspects, and constructing narratives. It can do this all at once, for one or many crimes, reported or unreported. Human investigators review the AI's conclusions, verify the chain of reasoning, and make decisions about prosecution. The detective who never sleeps. This is not a distant fantasy. Predictive policing systems already attempt to forecast where crimes are likely to occur. Fraud detection algorithms flag suspicious transactions in real time. The extension to full investigative AI is a matter of degree, not kind. **When Evidence and Detection Are No Longer Barriers, Which Crimes Should We Enforce?** Legal systems typically distinguish between "serious" crime and everything else. In practice, this distinction often determines which crimes receive investigative resources and which are effectively ignored. Murder gets a task force. Shoplifting gets a shrug. But calling some crimes "unserious" is a misnomer. There is no such thing as a victimless minor crime in any meaningful sense. People whose cars are vandalised, whose packages are stolen, whose gardens are trampled by trespassers, whose phones are snatched—these people suffer real harm. They lose money, time, peace of mind. They feel violated and vulnerable. They lose trust in their communities and institutions. The cumulative effect of unchecked minor crime is corrosive. A neighbourhood overwhelmed by fly-tipping, graffiti, antisocial behaviour, and petty theft becomes a neighbourhood where people lose confidence. If the authorities can't or won't address these problems, why should residents support them? Why should they take the law seriously at all? The social contract frays. Consider what changes when investigative capacity is no longer the limiting factor. Minor crimes happen in plain sight all the time. The perpetrators walk past CCTV cameras. They use public transport to travel to and from the scene. They pay for materials—spray paint, alcohol, tools—with traceable transactions. They carry mobile phones that log their location. Many are foolish enough to film themselves and post the evidence on social media. Today, this evidence goes largely unexamined. Tomorrow, an AI system could flag the incident, identify the perpetrators, and generate a case file—all automatically. The practical barriers that currently shield petty criminals would dissolve. The question then becomes: should we pursue all these newly solvable crimes? The case for doing so is pretty obvious. Laws exist for some good reason. If behaviour is harmful enough to criminalise, it should be harmful enough to enforce. Selective enforcement is inherently arbitrary and often discriminatory. A system that actually enforces all laws equally would be, in a sense, fairer than our current system of discretionary prosecution. But the implications are troubling. Many laws are over-broad, outdated, or unjust. They remain on the books but selective enforcement leaves them dormant. Total enforcement would reveal the full scope of state power—and the full reach of behaviours that are technically criminal. It would also create a society where basically everyone is guilty of something. What would that mean for decisions on employment, immigration or housing? **Detection Is Not the Same as Enforcement** Suppose we can detect every crime. What then? Our systems for detecting crime are imperfect but improving rapidly. Our systems for responding to detected crime—arrest, prosecution, adjudication, punishment—are imperfect and show no signs of improving at all. Courts have large backlogs, and prisons are overcrowded. Probation services are, generally speaking, overwhelmed. What happens when the caseload multiplies by a factor of ten? Or a hundred? The options are unpalatable. Mass incarceration is expensive, socially destructive, and often counterproductive—people who go to prison tend to emerge more likely to reoffend, not less. Fines fall disproportionately on the poor. Community service programmes require administration and supervision that may not be available. Electronic monitoring extends the surveillance state into the home. More fundamentally, what is the purpose of criminal punishment? Is it supposed to deter others? Rehabilitate the offenders? Lock them up where they can’t do more damage? Retribution for their sins? Each theory implies different responses to different crimes, and none offers clear guidance for a world where detection is near-universal. There is also the question of legitimacy. Punishment is tolerated when it feels proportionate and fairly administered. A system that punishes every infraction, no matter how minor, may generate more resentment than compliance. At some point, enforcement becomes harassment, and law becomes tyranny. **Will Crime Be Futile? Is That a Good Thing?** The dream of the perfect crime has animated fiction and reality alike. From the locked-room mystery to the untraceable cryptocurrency heist, there is something that fascinates about the possibility of wrongdoing that leaves no trail. Total surveillance threatens to make perfect crime impossible. Every action leaves a trace, every trace is recorded and every record is searchable. The criminal who successfully evades all detection would need to operate entirely outside the digital world—no phone, no card, no car, no face recognisable by any camera. Such a person would be conspicuous by their very absence from the data. On one level, this is straightforwardly good. Most crime causes real harm to real people, and a society with less crime is better than a society with more. If the certainty of detection prevents crimes from being committed in the first place, victims are spared suffering and perpetrators are spared the consequences of their choices. Of course the analysis is not so simple. Not all laws are just, and not all enforcement is legitimate. Throughout history, people have broken laws to resist oppression, protect the vulnerable, expose wrongdoing, and challenge unjust systems. Fugitive slaves were criminals. So were those who hid Jews from the Nazis. Whistleblowers, protesters, dissidents—all have relied on some degree of undetectability to do what they believed was right. A world without the possibility of undetected dissent is a world where state power faces no friction. Even in democracies, this is dangerous. The capacity to act outside official channels, to organise without surveillance, to maintain private spaces—these are not merely conveniences. They are preconditions for the meaningful exercise of freedom. The futility of crime may also have subtler costs. A society that eliminates all risk of transgression may lose vitality. The possibility of rule-breaking, even when we choose not to break rules, creates a space for autonomy and self-definition. We are moral agents in part because we could do wrong but choose not to. In a world where the choice is removed, are we still free? **National Security, Intelligence, and Policing: Different Things, or Basically the Same Thing?** Historically, the institutions that protect societies from external threats have been distinct from those that maintain internal order. Intelligence agencies spy on foreign powers. Military forces defend borders. Police enforce domestic law. The separation is not merely administrative—it reflects different legal frameworks, different oversight mechanisms, and different relationships between the pursuer and the suspect. Total surveillance erodes these distinctions. The same cameras that track suspected terrorists also track traffic violations. The same data analytics that identify foreign influence operations also flag tax fraud. The same AI systems that monitor social media for extremist content also detect ordinary criminality. When the tools converge, there is a strong likelihood that the institutions will also converge. Police departments acquire advanced intelligence capabilities. Intelligence agencies expand into domestic surveillance. Data flows between agencies that were once separate, creating comprehensive profiles that no single institution could have built alone. This convergence raises deep questions about power and accountability. Intelligence agencies have traditionally operated with far less oversight than police, justified by the secrecy necessary for national security. If those same agencies are effectively policing domestic populations, should they be subject to the same constraints as ordinary law enforcement? If police are using intelligence-grade surveillance, should they require warrants, be subject to judicial review, and transparent to the public they are supposed to serve? The risk is a system that combines the secrecy of intelligence with the coercive power of policing, answerable to neither the courts nor the public. Such a system might be effective—terrifyingly so—but it could not be called the rule of law as we understood it in the 20th century and previously.. **The Bargain We Have Not Yet Made** We are drifting toward a world of total surveillance without ever having consciously chosen it. No legislature debated and approved the comprehensive monitoring of public life. No referendum asked citizens whether they accepted the abolition of anonymity. The system emerged piecemeal, each component introduced for its own reasonable-seeming purpose—preventing terrorism, reducing fraud, managing traffic, improving customer service—until the whole became something no one intended. It is still possible to make choices. We could decide that some data should not be collected, or should be deleted after defined periods, or should be inaccessible to authorities without judicial approval. We could distinguish between data collected for operational purposes and data retained for investigative purposes. We could insist that AI systems used in law enforcement be transparent, auditable, and subject to meaningful human review. We could also decide, consciously and democratically, to embrace comprehensive surveillance as the price of comprehensive security. Such a choice would be neither irrational nor unprecedented—many societies have traded liberty for safety in times of perceived crisis. The important thing is that the choice be made openly, with full understanding of its implications, rather than by default. What we should not do is avoid the question. The technology exists and will continue to improve. The data is being collected whether we acknowledge it or not. The AI systems are being developed, by governments and corporations alike. The only question is whether we will be their masters or their subjects. **Conclusion: The World We Are Building** The future of crime and justice is being written now, in code and silicon and fibre-optic cable, by engineers and executives and officials who may not fully grasp what they are creating. It is a future where privacy is vestigial, where anonymity is suspicious, where the possibility of undetected wrongdoing approaches zero. This world may well have genuine benefits. People may be safer from many kinds of crime. Fraud may be harder to commit and easier to remedy. Children may be protected from predators who once operated in the shadows. The corrupt and the cruel may find fewer places to hide. But it will also be a world fundamentally different from any that humans have previously inhabited. Throughout history, the practical impossibility of total surveillance created breathing room—space for eccentricity, dissent, experimentation, privacy. That space was not a design flaw to be corrected. It was the condition for human freedom, creativity, and dignity. Now the system sees everything, everywhere, all at once. The question is no longer whether it can. The question is what we will ask it to do—and whether, in answering that question, we will remain the kind of society worth protecting. This is not a technical question, and technologists cannot answer it for us. It is a political question, a philosophical question, ultimately a question about what kind of people we want to be. The machines are waiting for our instructions. It remains to be seen whether we will program them wisely. ### The Gist: Britain, the Ungoverned Country URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-britain-the-ungoverned-country/ Last updated: 2026-06-06T07:07:16.000Z > "Riverrun past > Eve and Adams from > swerve of shore to bend > of bay, brings us by a > commodius vicus of recirculation to > Howth Castle and Environs > \-James Joyce" When I was younger, the [Irish ten pound note](https://www.centralbank.ie/consumer-hub/notes-and-coins/historical-banknotes/1990s---2000s?ref=thegist.ie) had the opening lines of Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce on the back, overlaid on the Ordinance Survey map of Dublin, beside a watermark ghost of the image of Lady Lavery as Erin, taken from the first independent Irish banknotes. Finally, we declare that this is a product of the Central Bank of Ireland. This banknote, the work of Robert Ballagh, was a statement from Ireland that also held out a story of Ireland. This was a state with a history (Lavery), with a sense of place (the map) intertwined with a particular story (Finnegan's Wake) of modernity and art, which produces people who can speak to the world (Joyce). And, because banknotes, in the pre-tap era, were the most widespread works of art in a country, I can still quote those opening lines to this day. All of which is to say that, despite its many many failures and flaws, the Irish state (and sometimes even members of the government which heads it) has understood the need to tell stories. The story of Ireland was what created an Irish state. It preceded it, and then people were so invested in that story that they fought (and died, and killed) to make it real. Which, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, takes us to Keir Starmer and Envrions. ### Highly Graphic Content The British Labour Party went into the recent local elections knowing the outcome was going to be very bad. The outcome was then very bad. For some reason, this has caused the party's leader and elected representatives to stagger around in shock. It seems that losing colonial control of Egypt has not stopped Denial flowing through the British body politic. We're going to take a look at three charts which will explain how and why the Labour party lost so many seats in the local election. At the end of looking at them, you will be, it seems, better informed than the entire Parliamentary Party of the Labour Party and nearly every mainstream media outlet of the UK. We're delivering some value here today. #### Chart 1: Where did the Labour Party Voters Go? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-17-at-10.26.56.png) Credit to Oliver Skånberg-Tippen for this simple visualisation of a complex story The graph is almost so self-explanatory that additional commentary is superfluous. The Labour Party lost the largest part of its voter base to the Greens. The rest just said they weren't going to vote for anyone. (The big grey block in the middle is the "Did Not Vote" section). Meanwhile the surge of votes for Reform came mostly from the ranks of people who had not voted in the previous election, as well as a slice of the Conservative party's previous base. The Greens did manage to activate a slice of those who did not vote as well, but it was a fraction of the bloc of Labour voters it attracted. To read the very detailed background on the creation of the this graph, please go to [the essay by it's creator, Oliver Skånberg-Tippen](https://oskanberg.github.io/2026-voter-flows/?ref=thegist.ie), setting out how he made it. #### Chart 2: Why did the Labour Party voters leave? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-17-at-10.36.38.png) This chart is from PersuasionUK, based on polling done by YouGov between 22 April – 5 May 2026 An [in-depth report by PersuasionUK](https://cdn.persuasionuk.org/May%5F2026%5Felections%5Fpreliminary%5Fanalysis%5F7325311b0f.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), taking England, Wales and Scotland separately, examined why the people who had previously voted for the Labour Party abandoned them. This was the same story from a different angle. Take the pink column in the centre of the chart and we can see that the most common complaints were that "They have become "Tory-lite" and have abandoned traditional Labour values" and "Its not clear what Labour stands for any more". The complaint with literally the lowest response, the reason that nobody switched their votes from Labour, was "They are too left wing / too woke". [Starmer's Government followed a plan by FG transplant Morgan McSweeney,](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-labours-fg-mastermind/) to tack hard to the right to chase Reform on immigration, bigotry towards trans people and, weirdly, flag-shagging. This so upset its voters that they got up and left, going to the Green party or just staying at home. It won them precisely zero votes from people who wanted Reform-style policies, who just voted for Reform. #### Chart 3: Who are the Labour Party Voters that left? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-17-at-11.24.47.png) The Economist's assessment of demographics of voter choices. Be careful, as this one is tainted with Two Party System brain This final chart, from the Economist, is far less straightforward than the first two. On first examination, you'd think that it shows Reform eating about a third of the Labour Party's votes, while the Greens cut in from the left. But actually, that's not what it is showing us. Because the UK press are infected with almost incurable Two Party System brainworms, they are constantly trying to force their current multiparty reality into the broken two party framings they all grew up with. So this graph shows the destination of the electoral *wards* (not the votes) by *leading* party (not by voters). In other words, where the Reform vote eats a formerly Labour or Conservative ward, it could do that without taking a single vote from either of the other two parties if it got to the top of the list by activating non-voters. This means that the bottom right of the quadrant (showing older, poorer wards) can't be won back by persuading people to switch back to Labour, because they didn't lose any of those voters there. Instead they've lost because Reform activated non-voters (see Chart 1) and trying to get them to switch onwards to Labour gains you nothing at all but loses you your election. (See Charts 1 and 2). This matters, because a misunderstanding of the story of Chart 3 has led the Starmer government to destroy itself. It turns out that telling the correct story isn't just a communications job. In politics, making sure your story of your own world around you is grounded in reality is the difference between success and failure. ### Countries are all stories in the end I opened with Finnegan's Wake because it is an example of a government and a state telling its story of a nation. [Britain has been telling itself wildly inaccurate stories of itself for decades](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-brexit-merit-badges/). The further those stories have drifted from reality, the worse their ability to govern has become. This is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect. Politics tells stories, but they don't create the society that hears them. A story either resonates, because it talks to people's idea of themselves and their experiences of their lives, or it comes across as false and insincere. Remember Chart 2 above. The second most common complaint from former Labour party voters was "Its not clear what Labour stands for any more". The story Starmer's Labour Party told was inconsistent. (Main complaint from all non-Labour voters: "They have been incompetent in government- broken promises and U-turns") The Starmer Project was to purge Labour of their left-wing. It ejected the former leader as part of that effort. We now know that was largely a response planned by Peter Mandelson while he also received payments and favours from some of the world's least likeable weirdos. But it seems that somewhere along the way, the party leadership came to consume their own messaging, like an AI being trained on its own output. They came to genuinely think that their voters (and not just the grim inhabitants and owners of the UK's media) wanted them to mistreat immigrants, trans people, old people and so on. They spent two years in power actually doing those things and indicating they meant to do even more of it. And now they have staggered back from the absolutely obvious consequences of all of those choices in shock and dismay. At no point since the election has Keir Starmer or any of his supporters said why they think they lost support. To do so is to admit that you have been wrong in understanding the country as a whole, and the Labour Party you lead in particular. And they just won't do it. This is why none of the existing candidates to replace Starmer are plausible as saviours of the party's fortunes. None acknowledge what has been done, and all of them will carry on doing the same thing and therefore will fail to tell Britain a story of itself that its voters believe. Famously, the last lines of Finnegan's Wake end mid-sentence and are completed by the first, closing the loop of the book. If the Labour Party want to change, they can't do it by a commodius recirculation. They either break the loop, or continue to spiral down. [Subscribe to The Gist for Free](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to The Gist for Money](#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: Sunshine and Lollipops URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-sunshine-and-lollipops/ Last updated: 2026-05-05T13:08:35.000Z Let's start at the very top of this story. We should begin with the best possible piece of good news. When you go out of your house and look at the people you encounter all around Ireland, contrary to what you may have been told or led to believe, the vast majority of them are sounders. \- ****66%** of people agreed "Immigrants contribute to our culture and we're all the better for having them here", up from 64% in 2024. \- ****75%** agreed "Transgender people should have the freedom to be themselves and live their lives", up from 70% in 2024\. \- ****80%** agreed "Black, Asian and minority ethnic people face bigger barriers to success than white people", up from 75% in 2024\. \- ****77%** believe people seeking international protection should be supported to become part of the communities they live in. \- ****69%** said "the best way to address the housing crisis is to fund public housing, compared to 31% who believed restricting immigration is the solution. \- ****70%** agreed that misogyny remains a serious issue in Irish society. These happy facts were brought to light this week in [Mind the Gap, a research-driven report from the Hope & Courage Collective](https://hopeandcourage.ie/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ireland-in-Focus%5F-Mind-the-Gap-April-2026.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) which has shown a statistically significant gulf has opened up between the direction of travel of public attitudes (good and getting better) and regressive political discourse (bad and getting worse). Let's look at the numbers first and then we can see if we can explain why our political and media class is reflecting an increasingly funhouse mirror version of the Irish electorate's attitudes. (I don't know why, but I feel I should say that H&CC is a client of mine). ### Here comes the science bit H&CC commissioned a survey in 2024 and again in 2025, with the same questions. So we don't just get a snapshot, but also the direction of travel for public opinion between the two years. The sample size was 3,000\. (For comparison, the longstanding and respected Ipsos MRBI poll is of about 1,000). So this is a statistically significant sample size. The surveys were conducted by [Dynata](https://www.dynata.com/?ref=thegist.ie) and then the data was independently weighted by [Ireland Thinks](https://www.irelandthinks.ie/?ref=thegist.ie), to control for age, gender, ethnicity and voting behaviour so that the results would be representative of the general public. Basically, when it comes to polling, this is the good stuff. ### Racism's Travelling Salesmen The report is broken into three chapters, reflecting the activities of its commissioning organisation. The first, Far Right in Focus, describes the specific actions and tactics of the far right in Ireland since 2024\. For those of you, like me, for whom time is becoming less a series of events on a line and more like an impressionistic smear of things that may have happened in some order or other, I offer by way of context the fact that the Dublin riot happened in November 2023\. That chapter details the Extremely Online nature of far right organising. One of their main tactics is opening facebook groups on local issues ("[Concered Porlock Parents Against Poets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person%5Fon%5Fbusiness%5Ffrom%5FPorlock?ref=thegist.ie)") and then continuing them as a vector for various poisons long after their proximate cause has gone away. ("If Xanadu is so Stately, why doesn't the Kubla Khan go back there, huh?") It also showed just how hard full-time grifters have to work to try to keep the fake appearance of local animus up, leading to some Richard-Scarry level questions of What Do These People Do All Day? > "A recurring feature of often short-lived local mobilisation groups was the involvement of far-right organisers from outside the area taking on leading roles. For example in Athlone, Bundoran, Castleblaney, Carrickmacross, Letterkenny, Oldcastle and Roscommon, the same person travelled to distribute flags and livestream, while helping organise and promote the same type of events in Kilcock." ![Snippet of Richard Scarry's illustration., A mournful looking cat drives his little blue car over a hillock on an empty country road.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-03-at-09.49.03.png) The loneliness of the long-distance bigot The second chapter puts some numbers and facts around the crappy online experiences that most of us have experienced for ourselves. Basically, if your social media platform of choice is built on showing you things according to an algorithm, then that algorithm is being used (or, in some cases, is actively intended) to deliver you a completely false image of Irish public opinion. Firstly, let's deal with where that 'Irish' political commentary is coming from: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-03-at-10.12.57.png) Foreign Bots, coming over here, stealing local nazi jobs Comments relating to Ireland are mostly being run as part of larger astroturfing (and in some cases, [astro-terfing](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-trans-rights-are-data-rights/)) campaigns from other, bigger, English-speaking jurisdictions. Three quarters of the far-right discussion about or referring to Ireland is being posted from abroad. However, for our purposes, the most interesting section is the sub-chapter headed "Narrative Manipulation and Political Mainstreaming". Because, under this wordy title, is a story that explains much of the behaviour of our political system (and the media courtiers who follow its lead) for the last two and a half years. ### Loser talk Our political and media class are sitting all day every day on X (formerly called Twitter) and they are having their brains cooked in an algorithm deliberately designed to promote fringe right wing opinion. This is not organic chatter from voters but deliberate farmed and framed material, three quarters of it originating from outside the country, which is aimed at amplifying the appearance of far-right narratives in connection with electoral events. In other words, this is foreign interference in our elections. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-04-at-09.51.53.png) This is what being a loser looks like. Moaning, and then whinging. Take a look at this graph showing the contrasting narrative frames adopted in 2024 and 2025 by this battery of bots. The 2024 peak comes just before the Local Elections in June and was based around a story of capacity. > “Ireland is Full” operates through a container metaphor, framing the nation as a finite space under pressure, with migration presented as a strain on housing and services. The emphasis is on scarcity and capacity, allowing actors to position their arguments as pragmatic concerns about limits. Now this has two effects. The first effect aimed for was the election of lots and lots of far right councillors. This absolutely did not happen because these people are such born losers and transparent weirdos that the national electorate just was having none of it. We'll discuss the second effect below. After that there's another effort in 2025, aimed at supporting the choice of a far right presidential candidate, primarily through the county council nomination process. Here, they try a new frame, the first one having failed. This time they go for what the report refers to as an "identity and victimhood" frame. > \[The new language\] including terms such as “IPAS,” “illegal,” “traitors,” and “remigration,” signals a sharper grievance and victim based narrative rooted in perceived betrayal and loss. This sharpening coincides with the failure of far-right electoral strategies and a decline in large-scale mass mobilisation. Basically, as you will recall from the run up to the Presidential election, the far right ran a campaign of whinging that they weren't being treated fairly, because they couldn't get their candidates onto the ballot, due to democracy or some such. But I think one of the things that this account from the report misses is just how electorally focussed this switch of narrative is. One of the reoccurring references from the bot farms in that 2025 grievance-run was to Conor McGregor. McGregor, whose MMA background and fondness for squashing his size M body into a size S suit makes him a sort of avatar for the phrase 'battered sausage', had lost a November 2024 trial where a High Court jury found he had raped Ms. Nikita Hand. Nonetheless, he had appealed that decision and then started a shambolic attempt to seek a nomination for the Presidential campaign on an avowedly far-right anti-immigrant platform. The only available narrative, given the court decision, was a grievance-based one presenting him as the victim of injustice. You can follow this timeline on the chart up above. The bots rolled in behind him, ramping up this grievance narrative between February and June 2025\. Then, in July, the [Court of Appeal rejected his attempt](https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2025/0731/1526261-conor-mcgregor-court/?ref=thegist.ie) to overturn the High Court decision and the bots' interest in Ireland crashes down as their man becomes unviable. ### Nobody wants this but it's all I'm hearing about Time to return to that second effect I mentioned above. Sure, the losers and degenerates of the far-right can't get their unfiltered candidates elected in any meaningful ways because of their abject repulsiveness. But having this foreign interference programme aimed at our political and media classes can still have an impact, as they react to what they falsely perceive as organic public concerns. The report reflects this; > This “bleed” of far-right framing into mainstream politics has been reflected not only in political messaging but also in policy debates and government actions concerning migration management and asylum systems. Now take a look at this interview with Simon Harris on RTE radio 1 this week and pick out the strands of those scarcity and grievance narratives. You don't get more mainstream than this. ### Recognising the Problem is part of the solution Take a look at the report's analysis of how the cycle of influence builds on the platform amplification system. It can be applied to explain otherwise surprising or unexpected events. For example, apply this to the recent [Lorrymen protest](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-denial-of-service-attack/) and how that was both created online through facebook groups, presented to the public by far-right actors introduced by the media as representatives of the protestors, and then responded to by the political system. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-04-at-10.50.50.png) An Unvirtuous Circle This report tells us two things. The first, and most important, is that most people are decent and that the more they are exposed to discussions of controversial things, the more likely they are to decide to support the decent position. The other thing it tells us is that we have political and media institutions which are completely incapable of recognising when they are being targeted by foreign interference campaigns. Their choice to sit inside the X/Facebook algorithmic funhouse mirror version of the country and to make policy decisions based on the distorted images pumped into it from abroad may be one of the most consequential failures of our political system. So far, voters have acted as the bulwark against the worst consequences of that decision. But with Independent Ireland [now emerging](https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2026/0502/1571477-opinion-poll-ireland/?ref=thegist.ie) as a voice for this hybrid of far right messaging and mainstream deniability it will be up to us, in between elections, to have to keep insisting on reality over the right's fever dreams. [Subscribe to The Gist](#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: A Denial Of Service Attack URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-denial-of-service-attack/ Last updated: 2026-04-12T13:16:12.000Z The Lorrymen got lucky. Almost everything that could have gone right for their wildcat blockages of Dublin and oil depots at major ports, went right. The Garda Commissioner was on his holidays. The Minister for Justice multiplied their support by making empty threats that just angered their participants, bringing more of them out. It didn't rain, mostly, so that those participants didn't have the excitement of taking action undermined by being cold and wet. But the fact that these little strokes of luck were enough to threaten Ireland's economic activities- deliveries, transport, commuting, heating- revealed just how fragile that system was. And the political and policing reactions to it also revealed just how unprepared the state bodies were to respond to them. ### Speak loudly and hit yourself with a stick The irony of Jim O’Callaghan [citing calling the army in](https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-justice-home-affairs-and-migration/press-releases/statement-minister-ocallaghan-regarding-ongoing-protests/?ref=thegist.ie) to break up a protest fronted by the people whose racism he has been assiduously courting and pandering to since taking office was only topped by the fact that, in his rush to have his name appear in the media beside the big story of the day, he did it before the army had heard about it. And then to have the [threat backfire](https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/fionnan-sheahan-send-in-the-army-threat-by-justice-minister-blamed-for-hardening-stance-of-fuel-price-protesters/a22516956.html?ref=thegist.ie), and increase the attendance at the oil depots of protestors, so that [a senior Garda was quoted as saying ](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41825363.html?ref=thegist.ie)“This is against the backdrop of political announcements of 'bringing in the Army', which did not help matters at all.” Announcing a plan to the media to sound tough, without doing the needed prep, and then that plan makes everything worse? Perhaps the most Jim O’Callaghan move ever. ### We're No.1, why try harder? The Irish State functions under a number of unstated presumptions. One of those is that everything is basically correct and as it should be. Systemic change is inherently bad, because anything that moves us from the status quo is to be treated as a fall from grace. If something has to happen, the machinery of decision making will always stress it is only a temporary measure, and promise that the status quo ante will be returned to as quickly as possible. When the same parties are in power for decade after decade, they have to justify their previous decisions by constantly asserting that, thanks to their wise and endless governance, all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. So the USC was introduced as a temporary tax in 2011 (despite being part of the need to catch more types of earners in the tax net). Or, every year, the Minister for Social Protection 'decides' to issue a one-off double payment for Christmas, like Scrooge delivering a goose to Tiny Tim. Or the widespread ability to work from home is talked about as just a COVID blip. And so on. But this impulse to deny any need for systemic change means that the state has terrible trouble in delivering even the change it officially recognises it does need. Our climate plans were delivered as a series of impossible promises based on outlandish presumptions. [We wouldn't change how agriculture emits greenhouse gases (GHGs) proportionately to their contribution](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-long-hot-summer/). So , instead, we produced a plan where the maths only work if the number of fully electric vehicles on the road goes from about [100,000 at the end of 2025](https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-transport/press-releases/ireland-reaches-major-milestone-in-the-transition-to-electric-with-196000-evs-now-on-irish-roads/?ref=thegist.ie) ([excluding non-plugin hybrids](https://www.moneyguideireland.com/electric-cars-facts-figures.html?ref=thegist.ie)) to 800,000 by 2030\. The state is happy to assert it can achieve incredible and unprecedented feats of change, later, while always arguing that it can't so much as buy a new pair of shoes right now. It will promise any amount of jam tomorrow to avoid actually implementing structural changes in the real world of today. ### Do nothing, and be quick about it So it was that we spent the years from 2019's publication of the "Climate Action Plan to tackle climate breakdown" to 2022 without ever setting up, for example, the agency[ for approving offshore wind farms](https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2022/09/24/shells-exit-from-irish-windfarm-market-linked-to-delay-in-setting-up-state-agency/?ref=thegist.ie). And, even if they were approved, there still isn't a port in the Republic of Ireland that could be used to install them. [Cork is hoping to have the capacity by 2030](https://www.thejournal.ie/investigates-ireland-offshore-wind-6627898-Feb2025/?ref=thegist.ie)\- which is when the Action Plan says we will be generating 55% of all our power from renewables. There isn't even the regulation to let you buy a €250 DIY-kit of solar panels, stick them on your apartment balcony and then plug them in yourself to a socket, offsetting your electricity usage. [It's huge in Germany](https://www.dw.com/en/boom-small-solar-devices-plugged-into-household-sockets-german-energy-transition/a-75022163?ref=thegist.ie). We just haven't done the admin to let it happen. [The CSO doesn't sugarcoat](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eiieee/environmentalindicatorsireland2025economyemissionsandenergy/energy/?ref=thegist.ie) what all this has meant for the reality of Ireland's exposure to global fossil fuel price shocks. "In 2023, renewable energy made up just 5.8% of Ireland’s total final energy consumption - the third lowest percentage among all EU-27 Member States....Ireland therefore stood out for its heavy reliance on oil (all of which is imported) and low adoption of renewable energy compared to other EU countries." When the Lorrymen rumbled down O'Connell Street this week, it was against this background of a nation still largely addicted to burning oil to travel, to heat homes and for commercial uses like lorrying goods about and powering tractors. The global price of oil went up because Trump bombed Iran and then discovered that Straits weren't just for winning poker games. But Ireland's susceptibility to oil price disruption was because the Goverment has been unserious about taking the uncomfortable steps needed to move the country to powering itself by renewable energy. ### System Errors When a system refuses to take necessecary action in the face of reality because that reality doesn't match the system's narrative, it undermines credibility in that system as a whole. Long term, the revelation that the country can be brought to a standstill with some plant hire and a few hundred disgruntled WhatsApp group members will see this happen again. But perhaps more significantly, it has given the far-right their first ever model for successfully hijacking that popular disgruntlement and placing themselves on a national stage. And, relatively unnoticed, all of this [has just been the Mock Exams](https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-when-oil-deliveries-to-us-could-stop-11762782?ref=thegist.ie). The Government's real test starts after this week, when the last tankers of oil sent before the Straits of Hormuz were closed arrive in Europe and the real shortfalls begin to bite. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/04/JP-Morgan-Global-Oil-deliveries-map.webp) Map produced by JP Morgan bank, estimating last delivery dates for different parts of the world. Europe's final deliveries are from 10th April. --- Hello all! This Gist has come later than I would have liked. I'm afraid I was caught up unexpectedly. But I do have two other drafts started, so we may yet get a bumper crop of April Gists to come! ### The Gist: The Very Hungry Killerpillar URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-very-hungry-killerpillar/ Last updated: 2026-03-08T12:02:24.000Z Once upon a time, there was a country filled with religious extremists, willing to take violent action at home and abroad against anyone they declared their enemy. This week, the United States military just followed orders as the President took the easy and fun decision to drop some bombs. By the end of the first week they killed one Ayatollah, 177 schoolgirls and teachers at a primary school, six Americans, sank 20 ships, killing hundreds more, supported Israel killing 123 people by bombing Lebanon, and killed over 1,300 Iranians, including all of their own perferred people to take over in the case of a regime change. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-06-at-17.27.09.png) This weekend, they may have the start of a stomachache. ### Carnival of Grotesques This Trump administration has always been a cavalcade of the incompetent and the warped. Wherever possible, he tried to appoint people who met both those requirements so that they wouldn't have any independence of mind. He needed real *losers* so that they had nothing to fall back on beyond his patronage. Which takes us to Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, a man who achieves the rare feat of being both eager to show off his hard muscles and yet somehow also personifying erectile dysfunction. Everything objectionable about this failure of a person has been on show this week. His weird [christian extremism](https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/pentagon-confirms-hegseth-joined) (note, not actually Christian) saw his hand-purged officer class deliver simultaneous messages to their troops that "President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Oh, goody. Also on display has been the fact that he is thicker than mince. Faced with pretty basic questions like "Hey, do you know what the plan for this war is?" or "Have you got enough missiles for this?" and "Have you started an illegal war? Because you're meant to get Congress' approval for that sort of thing." he immediately spiralled. Pete Hegseth is just saying things. What things? Well, he doesn't have to know. Why should you? "Our Authorities are Maxed Out" may be the standout quote in this freestyle jazz of artless aggression, plumb dumbness and barbarism. I think this is what is meant by the phrase Crashing Out. This guy is one week into a lifetime of consequences and he is already underwater. Or, if not water, than certainly [some liquids](https://www.npr.org/2025/01/22/nx-s1-5270033/pete-hegseth-faces-new-allegations-of-alcohol-abuse-and-misconduct?ref=thegist.ie). ### A dishonest President won't even stay bought One of the more obvious bits of the many many corruptions simultaneously at play in the US administration has been the eagerness of the Trump family to accept money from Middle Eastern governments. [Two billion from Saudi Arabia ](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68296877?ref=thegist.ie)for Jared Kushner's venture capital firm. (The Son-in-Lawless) [Half a billion for the Trump family](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/06/trump-family-uae-crypto-deal?ref=thegist.ie) crypto business from the United Arab Emirates. (Insert eyeroll emoji here) [A big gold plane for the President ](https://www.npr.org/2025/05/21/nx-s1-5406420/trump-accepts-qatar-plane-air-force-one?ref=thegist.ie)himself from Qatar. And more [billions in 'membership fees' for the Trump (Chairman for life) Board of Peace](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/19/nx-s1-5681395/trumps-board-of-peace-requires-nations-pay-1-billion-for-permanent-membership?ref=thegist.ie) from Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. And that doesn't include the numerous Trump-friendly financial deals inside the US economy that have been backed by petrodollar money, such as [Twitter's purchase by Elon Musk](https://web.archive.org/web/20220505115005/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/business/elon-musk-twitter-investors.html) and gulf-state backed [AI and data centre investments.](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/escalating-tensions-turn-spotlight-big-techs-ai-investments-middle-east-2026-03-02/?ref=thegist.ie) Basically, the petrostates of the Middle East have been paying protection money for a quiet life and a say in US policy. But now there are unwanted Iranian drones and missiles falling out of the sky on them, killing locals, upsetting the influencers and angrying up their powerful Soulless Shopping Mall lobby. This guy won't even stay bought reliably. ### Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig Nipping to Venezuela and kidnapping their president is one thing. Popping into the transport and oil engine of the global economic machine and jamming its works with dead schoolgirls and $100m missiles tends to be quite another. The sheer kinetic energy of the social and emotional forces released by that kind of intervention doesn't wind out in a day. Instead, the colonial boomerang has whizzed back to the US at the speed of a fibre-optic cable carrying a market trade. Let's take some quotes from [The Hill](https://thehill.com/business/5772068-trump-economy-iran-war/?ref=thegist.ie), a newspaper specifically for Washington's political class. This is what the Imperial centre is reading about itself; > “The Fed is soon to meet to determine what to do with rates at a time when oil prices and gasoline prices are up and thus, inflation is probably on its way up,” wrote Eugenio Aleman, chief economist at Raymond James, in an analysis. > “This is probably the worst scenario for monetary policy, and we will probably hear the term ‘stagflation’ repeated once again --- > The Islamic Republic’s naval operation has choked off oil exports from the gulf, severely restricting international supply. A prolonged conflict would also force Persian Gulf nations to halt production as barrels pile up in warehouses, which could lead to longer-term price increases. --- > \[Trump said\] "if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit,” The US voter appears, from the outside, to have a series of complicated and contradictory beliefs and wishes. But one of the few constants is that they really hate paying higher prices for things. Never mind whistling past the graveyard, this last comment, from the President for Cheaper Eggs reads more like marching a brass band past his own political resting place. ### Diplomacy by other means The problem for personalist authoritarian regimes is that the Supreme Leader surrounds himself with stooges and yes men who don't tell him when he's making a mistake. This problem is particularly acute when the Supreme Leader has gaping holes in his intelligence and knowledge base, but is too insecure to listen to anyone who knows more or has better judgement than him. Through both of his terms, Trump has been mesmerised and delighted by the fascist notion of strength, as projected by military force. This machismo pose has similarly pleased his base, who love a good sabre-rattle as much as the next red-cap wearer. His self-retitled Secretary for War has played to his Supreme Leader's love of War talk, hysterically screaming about how much war he's going to do. Having excitedly gone along with an Iranian engagement that, per the Secretary of State's comments, seems to have been initiated by another country entirely, the administration is now slowly discovering that War is not an end in itself. Fighting, killing and dying is not actually the purpose of a military. After the defeat of Napoleon’s continental ambitions, Prussian General Carl Von Clauzwitz wrote a book titled "[On War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On%5FWar?ref=thegist.ie)". Published in 1832, it started from a simple premise. War, as distinct from just slaughter, was the 'continuation of policy by other means'. This is an inversion of the fascist impulse to present military strength and ability to cause suffering as a purpose in itself. The US military can, unquestionably, cause death. But the US political system seems further away than ever from knowing what it is killing for. Into that gap, whole empires have fallen. [Subscribe to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: The Promise of No Change URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-promise-of-no-change/ Last updated: 2026-02-22T21:46:35.000Z The past few months have seen a strange dynamic in public discussion. Wherever the possibility of doing something arises, the government has acted to present an equal amount of pressure in the opposite direction. The result is inaction everywhere, in the middle of a set of crises which ought to be triggering a frenzy of activity. As this pattern repeats itself, the public's frustration with the ability of the political system to deliver change is given space to grow. With the two historical parties of government now reduced to a [single two headed animal](https://theweek.com/articles/889613/tribute-pushmipullyu?ref=thegist.ie), they no longer have access to the pretence of decrying the party in power (while largely doing the same thing if they get in). Now they both have to argue that everything they've done is the best possible thing and nothing that is different can be better. Otherwise, why did they do a sub-optimal thing in the first place? In business this is called the [Innovator's Dilemma](https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46&ref=thegist.ie). If you are the comfortable incumbent, even if you could launch a new and better product, you don't want to disrupt the successful gig you've got going on. The corollary of this is that "a successful company with established products WILL get pushed aside unless managers know *how and when* to abandon traditional business practices." Bring that idea back to politics, and we can see signs of failure in our Civil War parties to abandon any of their traditional practices, even as the world is being disrupted around them. Let's look at the money, to start with. ### The Burlap Sack Economy Ireland's recent economic success is based around a very simple model. We hold a burlap sack open [under a pipe attached to Apple and Microsoft](https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0219/1559232-ifac-corporation-tax/?ref=thegist.ie) and let a torrent of free cash just pour in. [The CSO's 2024 statistics puts this into some context.](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-itxs/irelandstaxstatistics2024/keyfindings/?ref=thegist.ie) Back then we had "income tax amounting to almost €30 billion and corporation tax of more than €28 billion." In 2025 the numbers were €32.9 billion for corporation tax, compared with €36.6 billion for income tax. Since then, the Burlap Sack has continued to swell, and it is [likely that 2026 will see money from corporation tax exceed the entire country's Income Tax](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/06/irelands-tax-take-hits-record-106bn-in-2025-despite-fears-over-trump-tariffs/?ref=thegist.ie) take for the first time, as our corporation tax rate goes from 12.5% to 15%. These are basically ground rents the state collects from these huge companies for using Ireland for tax avoidance and access to the EU. The Government has no way of making those pipes pump out any faster. Short of running state-backed ads extolling the virtues of buying iPhones and Windows licences, it relies on the companies continuing to make money hand over fist and wanting to buy their patches of Ireland as a place to put it. The one thing demanded of the Government by these companies, [as a bloc](https://www.amcham.ie/posts/over-four-in-five-amcham-respondents-say-global-hqs-view-ireland-positively-for-investment/?ref=thegist.ie), is that it leave them alone. They'll pay the tax rent. But, [apart from wanting transport to bring their workers to the office and places for them to live,](https://www.amcham.ie/posts/american-chamber-pre-budget-2026-submission-ireland-is-uniquely-positioned-to-remain-a-destination-of-choice-for-fdi-but-must-act-quickly-to-bridge-the-infrastructure-gaps/?ref=thegist.ie) they don't want to hear from the State after that. (You can play a game, and go through the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland 2023 white paper on [Ireland: Regulating for Europe's Digital Future](https://www.amcham.ie/media/cy4j3oq4/fv-amcham-digital-white-paper-regulating-for-europes-digital-future.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), and see how many ideas and lines you've heard repeated by government Ministers since.) This was a basically good deal while the companies were pedestrian capitalist enterprises, rapaciously selling phones and software licences. The disruption to that comfortable situation has come with technology companies choosing to act as a vector of US fascism and of the [social harms](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-abuse-factory/) unleashed by the vastly expensive race to make the US's AI bubble ever make a single thruppance of profit. And, as we have seen, our twin-headed pushmipullyu of a government is unable to change its habits to address even the most blatant of these new circumstances. Instead of cauterising the [Abuse Factory established by X in Fenian Street in Dublin](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-what-you-can-do-about-the-abuse-factory/), through its Grok AI system creating child sex abuse material and facilitating and encouraging the harassment of women through nudification features, the Taoiseach and the relevant Minister rotated on the spot. They seemed to have trouble stating the problem clearly, let alone respond to it. X is a negligible contributor to the burlap sack. But the institutional habit to shield those FDI companies from attention, let alone criticism, runs so deep that even in the face of gross social harm, the relevant Minister went out of his way to blame users instead of the company that was trying to gain market share off the back of CSAM. > [@tupp\_ed](https://www.tiktok.com/@tupp%5Fed?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "@tupp_ed") > > This is a wrong statement of Law, (sections 1,5 and 9 of the Child Trafficking and Pornograp\*y Act 1998 make a company facilitating the making of these images criminally liable too) and also a morally bankrupt thing to say. > > [♬ original sound - Simon McGarr - Simon McGarr](https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-Simon-McGarr-7593297495401204502?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "♬ original sound - Simon McGarr - Simon McGarr") ### Spare a Sovereign, Guv This week our closest EU neighbour, France, [began to untangle its state functions from US tech companies](https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/01/27/france-to-ditch-us-platforms-microsoft-teams-zoom-for-sovereign-platform-amid-security-con?ref=thegist.ie). France, a nation which adopted a special third kind of TV signal ([SECAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECAM?ref=thegist.ie)) and a special French alternative to email ([MINITEL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel?ref=thegist.ie)), is hardly a stranger to being willing to go it alone technologically. But these steps are different from the impulse towards Gaullist national pride. These are closer to the decision to develop a special French nuclear weapons programme, instead of relying on the US NATO nuclear umbrella. The EU is acting on the realisation that US tech companies are a security risk, because the US is no longer a reliable ally. The realities of acting on that realisation were best described by the [PM of Canada](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/?ref=thegist.ie) at Davos; > In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called *The Power of the Powerless*, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? > And his answer began with a greengrocer. > Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. > Havel called this “living within a lie”. > The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. **Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.** The EU is taking down the signs that indicated trust in the US as an ally. And one of those is that it no longer trusts US technology companies with its national secrets. But what does the Irish Pushmipullyu think we should do? After all, we've been told that Ireland needs to take a stronger view on its place in the world. The Taoiseach has said we should get rid of the triple lock to regain 'Sovereignty' over our security and military decision making. Surely it's a much lighter ask to move off X for official work? Or perhaps explore Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Office in the cloud? Or, like France, move to European video call providers for state business instead of Teams or Zoom? Shifting a tech base is hard. But what are they doing to get ready for it, even if it's going to take a while to get right? The [Irish Independent](https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/adrian-weckler-everyones-talking-about-tech-sovereignty-so-how-does-that-affect-ireland/a1867191773.html?ref=thegist.ie) asked Peter Burke, the Minister for Enterprise, about this last week. > "He said its not on his radar right now. "I haven't see any geopolitical pressure around that, personally,", he said "I'm meeting my EU counterparts next week and it's not something that has been raised for the agenda." This raises inaction to almost a law of physics. Newton's First Law says that an object remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by a net external force. Similarly, for an Irish Government Minister, no movement is imaginable unless the Minister experiences an external pressure. Making decisions because the actions might be a good idea doesn't even enter the discussion. Innovation Minister, James Lawless went further, also talking to the Indo. He said "I'm always a little wary of technology sovereignty arguments, because ultimately we're one planet and ultimately we should embrace the best technology." If there is anything the first year of Trump2 has demonstrated, it is that, despite the chaos, hostility , fascism and threats to national security, the Irish government is determinded to be the last greengrocer to take down their sign in the window. [Subscribe to The Gist For Free](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to The Gist for Money](#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: UK Labour's FG mastermind URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-labours-fg-mastermind/ Last updated: 2026-02-02T20:06:32.000Z After two Gists in quick succession on the [abuse factory](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-abuse-factory/) that is X dot com, I thought I'd leave that subject, to return to it when a number of the various investigations, assertions and ineffections have reached some sort of conclusion. Instead, it occurred to me that it has been quite a while since we took a stroll around our neighbour to the East, Great Britain. Specifically, let's check in on how the Labour party there has been using its [commanding Parliamentary majority](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jul/04/uk-general-election-results-2024-live-in-full?ref=thegist.ie) to ensure a transformed nation begins to recover from the prolonged period of clownish Tory misrule. Ah. Sorry to report, it appears the Labour party leadership has spent its time in office [repeatedly stabbing itself in the eye with a fork](https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2025/07/04/worst-of-any-prime-minister-ten-moments-that-defined-labours-first-year-in-power-in-the-uk/?ref=thegist.ie) while the same [clownish Tory misrulers](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1evq263e49o?ref=thegist.ie) join the Reform party who are currently threatening to return them to office. At the heart of this arc of failure is Kier Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. He designed Labour's [technocratic electoral campaign](https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/02/labour-escape-death-grip-technocracy-keir-starmer?ref=thegist.ie) which centred around bloodless plans and targets, rather than anything that might spark emotion or empathy. He has also responded to the opposition's rightward lurch by chasing them to the right as well, even having Starmer adopt far-right language in his public comment, including a direct paraphrase of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. Where Powell complained that a Britain open to immigration would result in white people who "found themselves made strangers in their own country", [Starmer bleated ](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/12/keir-starmer-defends-plans-to-curb-net-migration?ref=thegist.ie)that immigration would result in an "island of strangers". While the UK commentariat have wrestled to explain the failure of the Starmer political project, and its almost uncanny ability to repulse its own voters while attracting none of those it was chasing, those of us on this side of the water will have been experiencing a stirring of recognition. Morgan McSweeney has been running the UK Labour party on the Fine Gael electoral model. ### The Parties of the Hole Fine Gael, as we have seen in election after election for decades, [becomes less popular](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/11/25/irish-times-poll-fine-gael-support-slumps-as-general-election-campaign-enters-final-stretch/?ref=thegist.ie) the more the public is exposed to it. It attributes electoral failures to its leaders, who are therefore under constant threat of replacement. With little job security, those leaders become defensive, frequently blocking opportunities for potential successors to gain meaningful experience. In the same vein, just this week, the Labour leadership blocked the popular mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, from returning to Parliament. The McSweeney family's Fine Gael background is well known. [The Journal reported on them after the election](https://www.thejournal.ie/morgan-mcsweeney-cork-labour-party-keir-starmer-6428429-Jul2024/?ref=thegist.ie): "His aunt Evelyn McSweeney also spoke to the Opinion Line with PJ Coogan and noted that Morgan comes from a Fine Gael family and that his father is very involved in canvassing for the party. “His grandfather canvassed with (Cork North West TD) Michael Creed’s grandfather out on the bike, so that’s how far back we started getting involved in politics,” said Evelyn. She also noted that her daughter, Clare Mungovan, is an advisor to Taoiseach Simon Harris, while Evelyn herself was a councillor for 20 years in Macroom." And certainly we have seen that, since he became Fine Gael leader, Harris has made many of the same mistakes that Starmer made. They both ran an almost content-free election campaign, where soundbite was put ahead of ideas. What [plans they did put forward](https://www.finegael.ie/our-plan/?ref=thegist.ie) offered an almost identical set of priorities, even down to demanding a "firmer migration and criminal justice system". And Harris, like Starmer, has also responded to far-right noise (and it has been largely noise, with negligible electoral success) by [accepting some of its premises ](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2026/01/16/dog-whistling-or-difficult-truths-harris-draws-fire-for-housing-crisis-migration-link/?ref=thegist.ie)rather than reject is as the bad-faith racism it is. The unasked question in all of this is why the UK Labour Party, gifted with a landslide majority, would adopt the political techniques of one of Europe's most enduring [electoral failure-addicted](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/report-says-fine-gael-s-election-campaign-failed-in-many-areas-1.2788899?ref=thegist.ie) parties. The answer, as far as it can be determined from the outside, is a shared belief that the voting public need to be tricked into voting for them, rather than levelled with. What unites both parties ruling cadre is the belief that *beliefs*, always presented as a contrast to 'common sense', are per-se inherently suspicious. This of course is exactly what you would term a political belief, but it is one which denies itself as such. Its proponents hold that their political beliefs are 'centrist', making any ones you might hold extreme and radical by definition. > [@simon\_harristd](https://www.tiktok.com/@simon%5Fharristd?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "@simon_harristd") > > Speaking this morning on @rteradio1 [#housing](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/housing?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "housing") [#migration](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/migration?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "migration") [#ireland](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/ireland?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "ireland") [#fyp](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fyp?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "fyp") [#government](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/government?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "government") > > [♬ original sound - Simon Harris](https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7600754551025502998?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "♬ original sound - Simon Harris") Now, the problem here is that we are, in actual fact, facing an attack on standard human-rights respecting norms from radical right wing propaganda. But both parties' reflexes are to see all external alternatives to their positions as threats to the status quo they claim to represent. This leaves them in the absurd position of having to argue that attempts to bring in improvements to society are an equal threat to the polity as attempts to destroy it. In the UK, this has seen the proscribing of Palestine Action as a 'terrorist organisation' and the consequential arrest of approximately [2,700 people](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/get-involved/take-action/sign-a-petition/end-the-prosecution-of-peaceful-protestors-in-the-uk/?ref=thegist.ie) for supporting them. It has also seen the [arrest and conviction](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/uk-accused-of-undermining-democratic-rights-with-climate-protest-crackdown?ref=thegist.ie) of individuals for engaging in protests against climate change. The UK Labour Party is, meanwhile, plummeting in the polls against a Reform Party collecting up exactly the same Tory ministers the electorate rejected last time, while its left wing gets up and decamps to a newly vocal UK Green party in the face of their previous home's unvarnished hostility to them. At the last poll, both UK Labour and Fine Gael were on 18% support. It appears that Morgan McSweeney's political project has reached its successful conclusion. UK Labour are now as popular with their electorate as Fine Gael are with theirs. The problem with treating politics as a doughnut, where the centre is consistantly defined as the hole where policy doesn't belong is that it means you can never move the country's discussion to anywhere it needs to go. It leaves the parties of the Hole to just react to wherever the dough is. ### His Lord and master Speaking of dough, the other great influence on Morgan McSweeney's career was Peter Mandelson, who previously had to resign as the Ambassador to the US when he appeared in an earlier release of Epstein files. This week he had to resign from the Labour Party, to 'spare it embarrassment' while he, OJ Simpson-like, promised to investigate himself after it was reported that he and his husband had both been receiving payments from Epstein in the tens of thousands, [and that he had also leaked a memo on government tax plans to him](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2026/feb/02/uk-politics-peter-mandelson-jeffrey-epstein-labour-party-fallout-latest-updates?CMP=share%5Fbtn%5Furl&page=with%3Ablock-6980d7098f0853bfd7be72a4&ref=thegist.ie#block-6980d7098f0853bfd7be72a4). Mandelson remains a peer of the House of Lords and a member of the Privvy Council, so I suppose we can look forward to potentially further resignations in the future once his self-investigating has been completed. Britain is a rich country which has been captured by a small number of it's richest individuals over a number of decades. Its media hunts in packs, creating [salience from irrelevancies](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/small-boat-crossings-have-a-disproportionate-impact-on-immigration-attitudes/?ref=thegist.ie), [generating fears in the population unrelated to their actual problems in life](https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-of-concern/?ref=thegist.ie) and [promoting the scapegoating of minorities](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17577632.2022.2153216?ref=thegist.ie#d1e105) while conducting little to no structural assessments of the real problems that the political and social worlds have inherited and intensified. It is surely of no little significance that it turns out that this model of [public capture of political discourse for private gain](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgm4rkn7x7po?ref=thegist.ie) is one which is revealed by these Epstein documents to have had been a global formula. ### The Gist: What you can do about the Abuse Factory URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-what-you-can-do-about-the-abuse-factory/ Last updated: 2026-01-11T12:44:53.000Z Hello there! Yesterday's Gist, [The Abuse Factory](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-abuse-factory/) about X ,the child abuse material app, has been read quite widely. But people did message me with ideas for what to do next. So I thought I'd do a really quick list of four things you can do that really will make a difference. ### 1) Report the X and Grok apps on the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. This is the one you might forget about, but I'm leading with it because it is quietly the most powerful action you can take. [Apple and Google control these platforms.](https://www.theverge.com/policy/859902/apple-google-run-by-cowards?ref=thegist.ie) And the thing they both stress is that having an App Store comes with protections, moderation and supervision which stops apps going rogue and keeps users safe. If they block an app, it is DEAD. On the app store on an iPhone, you scroll to the bottom of the app's listing and then you click the very last link "Report a Problem". Worth noting, *you'll need to download the apps to see the report a problem* link. You can do that, Report it and then delete them without ever opening them. Follow the drop down menus to tell them you're reporting "Illegal content". Then fill out the form. Here are some screenshots of my report to Apple to get you started. You'll also need to paste in the URL of the App. You get that by clicking the "Share" icon in the top right hand side of its page. It looks like a square with an arrow flying up out of it. Then tap "copy link" (or sometimes "copy URL"). Paste that URL into your complaint when they ask you for it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/01/How-to-share-on-App-store-1.jpg) There's the button you click to get the App URL you'll need later ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8266.PNG) You can make your own complaint, but here's the one I made ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/01/IMG_8267.PNG) The Questions want something else, but this is what we're giving them because we are not going to go looking for CSAM, thank you very much Apple ### 2) Email your children's schools People who have done this in the last few days have seen immediate results. The schools don't want to put child welfare or safety at risk. They just need to be able to know about the problem in a way that lets them describe it to Boards of Management and other parents, and to know what the solution is. You can even email them the two paragraphs below and a link to the original Abuse Factory Gist as a quick way of explaining the problem. "There is a new feature offered by X, (formerly Twitter) that makes child sex abuse material. A user can pay it money, as a subscription, and that's one of the services it offers. This doesn't happen by mistake or because the user has tricked or hacked the system. That's just part of the features its owner has advertised as one of the benefits of being a customer.... Schools use X because it used to be a handy way of communicating with parents about what their children did while they were in school. They'd post wholesome pictures of children from 5 up, doing sweet and fun things at events like Sports Days or Charity collections. All of those images of Irish children from school accounts uploaded to this factory are now available, as a result of this new feature offered by X, for anyone to ask it to generate new pictures, showing all those schoolchildren undressed. While school accounts remain online with this platform, the platform will keep offering them as fodder for their users of this service. Please confirm that my child's school will delete it's account without any delay." ### 3) Email your TDs and say you really need them to close their X Account You can find your TD's [contact details at this link. ](https://www.contactyourtd.ie/?ref=thegist.ie) Again, just let them know how important the issue is to you, that you consider elected representatives using a child sex abuse material platform a red line for you as a voter and ask them to close their accounts. This isn't a party political request. You can point out that both Ministers Patrick O'Donovan and Niamh Smyth from the Government and Gary Gannon from the Opposition have left X. If you're feeling very energetic you could send the same sort of a message to your local councillors. ### 4) Email Irish Rail and ask them to stop using X as their sole service update method If we want people to leave X (and we do) then it should not be used for [essential service notices](https://x.com/IrishRail?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie). Irish Rail is critical for people trying to get to work, or home from visiting friends and families. Updates from it should not be only available on a platform that generates child sex abuse material and illegal sexual harassment imagery. They have their own app they could use. They have a[ webpage](https://www.irishrail.ie/en-ie/news/service-updates?ref=thegist.ie) they could use. Or they could use Bluesky, or Instagram, or literally anywhere else. Time to remind them who those service announcements are meant to serve. [Subscribe to the Gist for Free](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist for Money](#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: The Abuse Factory URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-abuse-factory/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T10:44:33.000Z In Dublin, on Fenian Street, there's a factory that makes child sex abuse material. You can pay it money, as a subscription, and that's one of the services it offers. This doesn't happen by mistake or because you've tricked or hacked the system. That's just part of the features its owner has advertised as one of the benefits of being a customer. It's owned by a foreign industrialist, as they used to be called. But the European offices of this factory are an Irish company called [X Internet Unlimited Company](https://www.solocheck.ie/Irish-Company/X-Internet-Unlimited-Company-503351?ref=thegist.ie#report-2). Back before its current ownership, it had a fair number of Irish employees, but they've mostly been let go. It isn't a commercial behemoth, but it is unquestionably regulated by Irish law. Now, the factory also does the equivalent of printing information leaflets for the Irish Government. And Irish media use it to tell each other, and the Government, that they have published their work on their websites. The media also use it to boil their brains in algorithmic far-right cess, but they're not as keen on talking about that. Schools use it, because it used to be a handy way of communicating with parents about what their children did while they were in school. They'd post wholesome pictures of children from 5 up, doing sweet and fun things at events like Sports Days or Charity collections. All of those images of Irish children from school accounts uploaded to this factory are now available, as a result of this new feature, for anyone to ask it to generate new pictures, showing all those schoolchildren undressed. While school accounts remain online with this factory, the factory will keep offering them as fodder for their users of this service. It doesn't just offer to make images of children in states of undress, as a feature for its customers. It will also offer to take images of anyone and generate a sexualised image of them. The foreign industrialist announced this feature himself with an emoji, and [a product demonstration where he took a preexisting photo and prompted the machine he is promoting to produce one in response where he was just wearing a bikini. ](https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/grok-ki-zwischen-bikini-spass-und-missbrauch,V7PstI6?ref=thegist.ie) A study this week found that approximately [six thousand child sex abuse](https://bsky.app/profile/virginmedianews.bsky.social/post/3mbwuz2lwk52t?ref=thegist.ie) and sexual harassment images are now being generated (and published online) ***every hour*** by the X Internet Unlimited Company. And, per [Ireland's Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, Caoilfhionn Gallagher](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0107/1551973-grok-concerns-minister/?ref=thegist.ie), 99% of those images are of women and girls. The world's most prolific child sexual abuse material and sexual harassment factory is now on [Fenian Street in Dublin](https://maps.app.goo.gl/9RX86NifJRcrZWrc7?ref=thegist.ie). We don't need a dawn raid, or an Interpol investigation to reveal that address. W[e can just look it up in the Irish Companies Registration Office](https://core.cro.ie/e-commerce/company/536189?ref=thegist.ie). ### The Power Law In response, nearly all of Ireland's law enforcement, regulatory and political machinery has spent the week in a state of farcical denial and desperate inaction. It turns out that, because the factory used to be a respectable commercial endeavour, Ireland's systems are culturally incapable of taking action when it goes rogue. The machinery of our state was built to protect and defend institutions of power. Historically, it spent decades specifically ensuring that perpetrators of child sex abuse would not face any consequences for their actions if they were part of the institutions of the Catholic Church. Consequence-free physical and sexual abuse of children was part of the deal the institutional Church offered the Irish state, along with running schools, hospitals and other expensive-looking services. This is a habit of thought that the Taoiseach [demonstrated this week ](https://bsky.app/profile/newschambers.bsky.social/post/3mbvohzvjys24?ref=thegist.ie)is still alive and well in Government. ![Richard Chambers ‪@newschambers.bsky.social‬ My word. The Taoiseach, in China, says "platforms can be misused and abused or they can be used for positive reasons as well..." and says that should be considered carefully "before jumping to conclusions" on whether it's appropriate for the Government to be on X. 9:34 AM · Jan 8, 2026 130 reposts 98 quotes 420 likes 9 saves](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2026/01/Screenshot-2026-01-10-at-10.54.53.png) Sure that factory has been making an industrial quantity of child sex abuse images, but the Government also gets some leaflets printed there. So, you know, let's not jump to any conclusions as to whether the Irish State should keep giving it the content which underpins its business. The Minister for Communications also stepped forward- while, of all places, surrounded by children and teenagers at the Young Scientist's Exhibition- to defend the company who had built a machine for producing child sex abuse material and sexual harassment images. The fact that he did so in possibly the most asinine, technologically ignorant and morally bankrupt way imaginable, while surrounded by children showing off their love of science and technology was just an extra treat for the rest of us. > [@tupp\_ed](https://www.tiktok.com/@tupp%5Fed?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "@tupp_ed") > > This is a wrong statement of Law, (sections 1,5 and 9 of the Child Trafficking and Pornograp\*y Act 1998 make a company facilitating the making of these images criminally liable too) and also a morally bankrupt thing to say. > > [♬ original sound - Simon McGarr - Simon McGarr](https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-Simon-McGarr-7593297495401204502?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "♬ original sound - Simon McGarr - Simon McGarr") The same Minister had announced before Christmas that he considered child protection online more important even than constitutionally protected Human Rights. But, apparently, both are less important to him than Companies making money. Digital Rights Ireland and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties sent a joint letter to the Garda Commissioner, seeking an investigation into X Internet Unlimited Company, citing a criminal offence under Sections 5 and 9 of the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998\. They eventually received a response simply acknowledging receipt of the letter. We know of no action the police have taken. Compare that to the 2009 policing and political response to a man making an oil painting of an undressed Brian Cowen holding a toilet roll. Then, [just reporting on the story resulted in Today FM getting a garda visit and a threat to obtain a warrant to search their emails to hunt down the artist](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20087749.html?ref=thegist.ie). “The powers that be want action taken” the police told the producer. RTE memory-holed its own report on the picture and [ran a public apology the following day](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/rte-apologises-for-news-item-on-cowen-nude-portraits-1.729614?ref=thegist.ie) for having accurately told its audience of the event, after receiving a complaint from the then the government press secretary, Eoghan Ó Neachtain. Clearly, "careful consideration" can happen much faster when the political system objects to the content of an image strongly enough. ### None so blind as those who will not see As part of their efforts to avoid taking any effective action in the face of a glaring mass breach of the law, various political and institutional evasions were attempted. They mostly boiled down to suggesting that Ireland would like to regulate this material, but it had somehow forgotten to make it illegal to deliberately facilitate the production of child sex abuse material. This suggestion doesn't survive contact with a cursory trip to the Irish statute book. As DRI and ICCL highlighted in their letter to the Garda Commissioner, the state didn't forget to make CSAM illegal. [The Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1998/act/22/enacted/en/print.html?ref=thegist.ie) is clear and easy to read. Section 1 defines what it terms as "child pornography" and it specifically deals with images produced by computers. "irrespective of how or through what medium the representation, description or information has been produced, transmitted or conveyed and, without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing, **includes any representation, description or information produced by or from computer-graphics or by any other electronic or mechanical means**" Section 5 sets out the offences surrounding the material defined in Section 1; > **5.**—(1) Subject to [*sections 6*](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1998/en/act/pub/0022/print.html?ref=thegist.ie#sec6) *(2)* and [*6*](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1998/en/act/pub/0022/print.html?ref=thegist.ie#sec6) *(3)*, any person who— > (*a*) knowingly produces, distributes, prints or publishes any child pornography, > (*b*) knowingly imports, exports, sells or shows any child pornography, > (*c*) knowingly publishes or distributes any advertisement likely to be understood as conveying that the advertiser or any other person produces, distributes, prints, publishes, imports, exports, sells or shows any child pornography, > (*d*) encourages or knowingly causes or facilitates any activity mentioned in *paragraph (a), (b)* or *(c)*, or > (*e*) knowingly possesses any child pornography for the purpose of distributing, publishing, exporting, selling or showing it, > shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable— > (i) on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding £1,500 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or both, or > (ii) on conviction on indictment to a fine or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years or both. > > (2) In this section “distributes”, in relation to child pornography, includes parting with possession of it to, or exposing or offering it for acquisition by, another person, and the reference to “distributing” in that context shall be construed accordingly. It is a matter properly left to a Garda investigation to determine how many of the above grounds for prosecution that X Internet Unlimited Company would be captured by. It also matters, as you can see, if they restricted the use of this feature to paid customers as that would raise the question of whether they have been offering the images created for 'acquisition', as referred to in Section 5(2) above. Finally, in case there were any doubt on the matter, the law also deals with holding officers of corporate bodies which breach Section 5 personally liable. Section 9 of the Act says: > **9.**—(1) Where an offence under [*section 3*](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1998/en/act/pub/0022/print.html?ref=thegist.ie#sec3) *,* [*4*](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1998/en/act/pub/0022/print.html?ref=thegist.ie#sec4) *,* [*5*](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1998/en/act/pub/0022/print.html?ref=thegist.ie#sec5)or [*6*](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1998/en/act/pub/0022/print.html?ref=thegist.ie#sec6)is committed by a body corporate and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of, any person, being a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of such body or a person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, that person as well as the body corporate shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished as if he or she were guilty of the first-mentioned offence. (The clarity of this corporate liability clause is one of the reasons it is so mysterious that, for example, as late as yesterday the Irish Times published an explainer headed [Are sexualised images being made by Grok AI illegal in Ireland?](https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/01/10/are-sexualised-images-being-made-by-grok-ai-illegal-in-ireland/?ref=thegist.ie) which baldly asserted "In any case, the legal repercussions would fall on those sharing the images, rather than the owner of the technology that created it.") ### We can be heroes In a week of profound institutional failure, it's important to acknowledge two people who didn't avoid their duties to state facts plainly and accurately. Firstly, Richard Chambers on Virgin Media News stuck with this story day after day, asking questions that forced ministers to address reality. He didn't accept the initial minimising responses and he looked for more than actionless pablum from his interviewees. But most importantly, he held the professional and moral clarity to recognise that a company opening a child sex abuse material factory in the middle of Dublin was a huge story that needed to be covered. Secondly, plaudits are due to the Minister of State for Trade Promotion, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, Niamh Smyth. While her senior cabinet colleagues were prevaricating, she said X needed garda investigation into potential criminal acts. While her [Senior Minister](https://www.thejournal.ie/peter-burke-grok-x-6920210-Jan2026/?ref=thegist.ie) was arguing against leaving the platform, [she deleted her account](https://www.meathchronicle.ie/2026/01/08/niamh-smyth-deletes-x-account/?ref=thegist.ie). It shouldn't be difficult to act swiftly and without hesitation when the question posed is "Is it OK to work with the child sexual abuse material factory?" But the bar is assuredly in that hole. Meanwhile, parents can make their own stand. This week, after a parent enquiry, my daughter's primary school announced they were leaving X, removing all of the years and years of images of children's events, sports days and Christmas choirs from X, the deepfake abuse factory. Perhaps, in the face of the State's political and policing collective shrug, we're all going to have to email our own schools, TDs and businesses and tell them it is time to make their revulsion explicit, and get off X. 💡 If you'd like some simple but powerful actions you can take without even putting your phone down, I've written a follow-up gist "[What you can do about the Abuse Factory?](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-what-you-can-do-about-the-abuse-factory/)" with four simple suggestions. ### Guest Gist: 2026, Our Already Rotting Future URL: https://www.thegist.ie/guest-gist-2026-our-already-rotting-future/ Last updated: 2026-01-02T08:30:41.000Z There are so many reasons to hate AI that [my first piece along these lines from last year](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-3/) barely scratched the surface. To reiterate first principles, my main problem with Artificial Intelligence, as its currently sold, is that it’s a lie. In almost every single instance of AI hype: 1\. Those things that it **can actually do** are either evil, stupid, harmful, environmentally ruinous, or all of the above. 2\. The technology **cannot** **do** almost all of the things it purports to do. 3\. It **will very likely never** **be able to do almost all of** **the things it is predicted to do in future**, and the absurd amount of cash being bet on those predictions is decimating untold numbers of worthwhile human industries while enriching the worst people on the planet. That, as the kids say, is “a lot”. So let’s start somewhere small, shall we? **In The Beginning Was The Word** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/12/image-1.png) All those college reunions, lost in time without itineraries like tears in the rain As of two weeks ago, this asinine dialogue prompt is what greets me every time I open a new document in Microsoft Word. I’m sure I can switch it off but I’ve kept it in place because there’s something so inane and blasphemous about this feature that I find the sight of it almost recreationally unpleasant, like a chemical smell you can’t help huffing because it’s so vile, or an aching tooth you keep probing with your tongue in some masochistic thirst for pain. There are several tiers to my disgust. Firstly, I write for a living so, yes, there is a pompous annoyance that my writing tool now thinks I’ve forgotten how to write. This is not the most important reason why it’s awful, nor the one which reflects best on me personally, but it is the first that sticks in my craw, and it would be dishonest of me to deny it. Secondly, this suite of options, which changes every time, is always so bewilderingly specific that it very clearly elides any form of usefulness for even the most crippled patient on the Writer’s Block ward. Today it’s “a witty blog post about a sailing trip”, “a potential itinerary for a college reunion in London” and “a newsletter on successful camping during rainy seasons”. Obviously – so obviously, in fact, that it assaults my senses to say it out loud – these experiences are unlikely to hold even coincidental relevance to your writing goals, let alone your actual life, so there should be no reason for you to click on them whatsoever. Third, on the off chance that such projects *were* somehow relevant to something you wanted to write about, why would you need your word processor to write some odd, false facsimile of an experience you have actually lived, on your behalf? To what end? For which platform? For what use? ### **Not Adding Up** There are, of course, people who are not writers but still have to generate documents for their work or hobbies and find that process either a lamentable chore or a mortifying ordeal, just as there are those of us who have little affinity for maths, drawing, music or any of the other fiddly tasks AI now offers to do on our behalf. I’m sympathetic to those optimists who view these Word prompts as an attempt in that direction; a vessel that provides, for those who abhor writing, the same relief that, say, a calculator provides for those who have always been intimidated by mental arithmetic. The difference is I’ve not yet encountered a calculator which asks its users, every single time it is switched on: “how about 43 x 756 today?”, or “want to know the square root of 7,568?”. The idea would be preposterous, even if we could guarantee the numbers would be correct. And in the case of a calculator, at least, you would consider that accuracy a guarantee, wouldn’t you? Well, you might have, before August, when Microsoft’s boffins looked up from their job of borking the world’s most famous word processor just long enough to do the same to the world’s most famous spreadsheet suite, a feat redeemed only by the fact it generated one of the greatest headlines of all time: “[It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes](https://defector.com/it-took-many-years-and-billions-of-dollars-but-microsoft-finally-invented-a-calculator-that-is-wrong-sometimes?ref=thegist.ie)”. The kindest function we can ascribe to these prompts is as a demonstration of “what Copilot *can* do”, which is to quickly generate sprightly ad-copy slop, riddled with misinformation garbled from great (stolen) reference works as well as joke posts on 4chan and entirely new hallucinations by a word-guessing algorithm that cannot know it is wrong. All this, peppered with bullet points and breezy exclamation marks that give its every utterance the tone of a Disney kid reading Wikipedia while slightly concussed. If it can do that for a witty sailing blog then, the theory goes, surely it can do the same when you plug in a prompt that does comport to your life experience. ### **Ah, Go On** All of the above is true, but it risks siloing the main critique of AI into what I might term Mrs Doyle Theory; lamentations on the surface-level crapness of AI’s products, and their grotesque removal of human effort, joy, and character from the world. I do passionately believe that AI is evil in all of those ways and, like Mrs Doyle, resent it for many of the same reasons she detested the TeaMaster3000. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/12/image-2.png) Good enough to use twice So, I will reiterate that this is a strong critique, and a noble one, but it shifts the emphasis toward what AI does – or cannot and will not ever be able to, do – and away from the larger problem with AI: what it’s actually for. The real reason these AI tools are now everywhere is not solely, or even majorly, because the people funding, designing and launching them have a different view on the human experience than you or I (although they most probably do). No, they crowd every document and website you open because vast teams of engineers have spent millions of man hours and billions of dollars on this technology and are very, very aware that no one is using it. So, they’re desperate to get those metrics up by engineering the user toward clicking on them, even if we do so by mistake. By, say, making their AI assistant hover as an ever-present cursor asking you to “rewrite”; or sticking it in menus and taskbars where, muscle memory informs you, more useful functions once resided; or jamming it front and centre of articles you’re reading where any press of a key or click of a mouse will register as another use. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/12/image-3.png) Go ahead. Make my day, if I had any concept of days. Ask me anything, it pleads. *Really, anything. Please, for the love of God, I do mean ANYTHING.* ### **Toil And Trouble** AI does not exist due to a good faith attempt to create a boon for the public, which has simply failed in this objective. It exists as an attempt to create… **this**, the exact situation we're describing; the largest bubble of hype for a single unpopular technology ever seen on Earth. Focusing on what AI and its boosters get “wrong” – technically, logically, morally, artistically – misses this larger point. The reward mechanisms of tech CEOs are uncoupled from being right, or even being profitable in any long-term way we might understand, because their job is raising hype and increasing valuation in the short-term. Bubbles of nonsense do this extremely well. AI is not an answer to any coherent question of performance, efficiency, utility or progress. It’s merely an answer to the only question Big Tech really cares about: how do we keep the line going up? As with blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and virtual reality simulacra like the Metaverse, AI is just the next big open wallet beckoning cash for an industry that last innovated a great, saleable product a decade ago. And the money being leveraged is now so mammoth in scale that it has no equivalent in any boom or bubble in human history. The capital expenditure associated with AI is mooted to be around $700bn. We might think of this as the seed investment which the industry will need to claw back before it turns a profit. The entire annual revenue of the worldwide AI industry is $60bn – including, as Cory Doctorow points out, one unit of $10bn that Microsoft and OpenAI pass back and forth to each other each year. Moreover, he continues: [“the seven companies that make up a third of the economy pass the same $100bn IOU around and claim that it’s revenue, one after another. The bubble is going to burst, but in a way that’s going to make the 2008 crash look like the best day of your life”.](https://youtu.be/9LgLg0zlbJQ?t=296&ref=thegist.ie) It’s what Ed Zitron has termed the [enshittifinancial crisis](https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/?ref=thegist.ie) and Rusty Foster has called [“the piss factory”](https://www.todayintabs.com/p/let-s-see-what-s-going-on-down-at-the-piss-factory?ref=thegist.ie). A deadeningly obvious grift designed to hoover up trillions in funding for companies promising a return for investors that seems very, very far from ever happening. All of the shit we see every day, the AI dreck clogging up our browsers and enshittifying our online and real-world experiences, is merely what $700bn worth of seed capital buys you: a dog and pony show intended to fool credulous investors that all of this is going somewhere. The problem with this pantomime is that it has real world consequences, in the form of millions of people being laid off by companies now pivoting to AI to catch up, and the aforementioned desecration of much of the technology and internet services we use every day. Somewhere in this formulation, we can throw in the usual chuffa about individual cases of Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, being weaponised as an absurd [erotic fiction outlet for his own ego](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk-grok-ai-bias-ranks-richest-man-fittest-smartest?ref=thegist.ie), on those occasions when it’s not being retooled as [an outright neo-Nazi periodical](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/france-will-investigate-musks-grok-after-ai-chatbot-posted-holocaust-denial-claims?ref=thegist.ie). Or those times when ChatGPT has caused extraordinary negative effects among its users – a phenomenon so prevalent that even mentioning it prompts one to ask “which time do you mean?”. [The seven families currently suing OpenAI because their loved ones experienced psychosis, self-harm and suicide](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-suicides-lawsuits?ref=thegist.ie)? [The delusion-spirals documented by the New York Times in August](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html?ref=thegist.ie)? [The man in Missouri who disappeared without a trace because ChatGPT told him Armageddon was nigh](https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises?ref=thegist.ie)? [The murder-suicide in Connecticut](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/openai-refuses-to-say-where-chatgpt-logs-go-when-users-die/?ref=thegist.ie)? ### **Come Back Maximum Overdrive, All Is Forgiven** Once upon a time, our dreams of the AI apocalypse were thrilling. You remember, don’t you? A digitised close-up within the mainframe, showing a lone spark somewhere deep inside a maze of circuitry, blazing a luminous trail of infection across an infinite mesh of wired nodes; some unseen crackle of static zipping across a screen on the control desk of a nuclear submarine; a lonely satellite freezing out in deepest space before bringing its eagle-eye to bear on Earth; and somewhere, deep within the desert perhaps, among the sheet-draped computers and empty desks of some forgotten, foreboding government base, a large black console, wreathed in dust, emits a single ominous red light as it flickers into life so it can plot our remote destruction. And then planes fall from the skies and bank machines spit cash. Traffic lights go haywire and phones shut down. Burly men rigged with earpieces burst into the oval office, slap a calculator from the President’s hands before firing two bullets into its screen and shepherding him to a bunker for his own safety. “It’s the machines, Mr President-”, they say, gasping for breath while battering their phones with hammers. “….they...*they’re* *alive!*”. Instead, we get this timeline, where AI is en route to destroying much of the world in the most boring way possible, poisoning the greatest well of information ever conceived by mankind, lowering the average intelligence of an entire species, obliterating the market for art, literature and science while recalibrating our tastes to the most egregious slop imaginable, and downsizing the human workforce by millions of employees, all without ever demonstrating more intelligence than a very proficient autocomplete program. Somehow, despite the fact that every single interaction most people have with AI is either laughable incompetence, or brief moments of stolen mirth involving fake funny cats doing fake funny things, we’re trapped in a doom loop in which it is lauded by governments, tech barons, and a desperately inattentive media, all of whom seem hellbent on telling us that this rotted future is what everything will be like forever. If that’s all left you feeling pretty depressed, well welcome to the future. On our current trajectory, it’s unlikely to get better from here. Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom. My next piece will be a witty blog post about a sailing trip, and I think you’re gonna love it. ### Guest Gist: Monsters, Inc: Frankenstein, Dracula and masculinity URL: https://www.thegist.ie/monsters-inc-frankenstein-dracula-and-masculinity/ Last updated: 2025-12-31T12:56:19.000Z One cool thing about the classics is that their adaptations tell us a great deal about the moment of their creation. Right now we're all kind of worried about men. The pervasive sense that men don't quite know how to behave anymore is getting addressed quite a bit in current cinema. Big releases this year worrying about masculinity included **Roofman**, **Wake Up Dead Man**, **The Running Man**, **One Battle After Another**, **Materialists** and the underrated **Caught Stealing**. But looking specifically at the classics, both Dracula and Frankenstein had major movie adaptions released in the last twelve months, and both had their previous major adaptations around thirty years ago. So let's consider what these separate pairs of movies can tell us about masculinity then and now. ### Once bitten, twice guy The first thing one notices watching **Bram Stoker's Dracula** from 1992 is the sense of heightened reality provided by the stagey sets and Eiko Ishioka's Oscar-winning costumes. The second thing is that Keanu Reeves as Thomas Harker is so out of his depth there's no competition between himself and Dracula (Gary Oldman) for the favours of Mina (Winona Ryder), even when Mina learns about Dracula’s dastardly actions towards her best friend Lucy (Sadie Frost). Fortunately Lucy’s various boyfriends gang together to take Dracula down with the help of Van Helsing, who Anthony Hopkins plays with a directness that was almost certainly not intended to be so comic. ![Keanu Reeves as Thomas Harker and Gary Oldman as an old Count Dracula in his castle.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/12/Dracula-1992-Keanu-Reeves-and-Gary-Oldman.jpg) We can tell it is the 90s from Keanu's fringe By contrast, there’s no laughs at all in 2024’s **Nosferatu**, in which the vampire (Bill Skarsgård) is so physically disgusting that he must hypnotize or incapacitate his victims to get close to them. Director Robert Eggers combined the Dracula story with **The Exorcist**, putting the gentle Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) under Nosferatu’s mind control since childhood that her attempts to fight result in seizures. (The character names are changed thanks to the 1922 movie adaptation also called **Nosferatu**, but it’s the same Dracula.) Ellen's husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is a decent man, who loves his wife and undergoes his trials for her benefit. And yet his best friend (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) sees his own wife (Emma Corrin) as a possession, culminating in a final action so repulsive that even the screenplay has to say it can't take any more of it. The difficult sexual politics of Dracula are evenly matched by those in Frankenstein. **Mary Shelley's Frankenstein**was made in 1994 on the heels of the surprise success of **Bram Stoker's Dracula**, with Francis Ford Coppola involved as a producer instead of director and with the same pretentiousness of adding the novelist’s name to the title. But any Kenneth Branagh joint has the ego of Kenneth Branagh at the centre, and the major focus of his Victor is his romantic relationship with his adopted sister Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter). This gross incest theme is not quite subsumed by Victor building his creature, with the help of several friends, using the body of an anti-vax prisoner (Robert De Niro). Issues of control, bodily autonomy and whether anyone can compel anyone else to love them are all handled with the maximum amount of melodrama. ![Victor Frankenstein, dressed in a dashing corseted Romantic era waistcoat and hairstyle, is giving a lecture in a Royal Society style pit surrounded by scholors in hats with books.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/12/CHANG---FRANKENTSTEIN---008_PF_20240307_02900r.webp) Frankenstein could never find the second battery when he needed it By contrast, in Guillermo del Toro's **Frankenstein** from this year, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is the science-loving fiancée of Victor (Oscar Isaac)'s younger brother. She relates strongly to the Creature (an astonishingly good Jacob Elordi) as someone else mistreated on the macro and micro levels. There's attraction but no sexual creepiness against Elizabeth here, and Victor flatly refuses to build the Creature a bride. Instead the fury from the Creature is because Victor rejected him for needing him too much. The violence is largely between them, only otherwise harming some of the Danish sailors who bravely get in the way of their vendetta. Well, and ruining a wedding. Their obsession with each other leaves women out of it, which is probably for the best. ### Monster Men, not great for women But what do these four movies tell us about men thirtyish years ago (when I was old enough to sneak into **Bram Stoker’s Dracula** at my local multiplex on its opening night, but definitely not mature enough to understand it) and where we are now? Well, the central metaphors of both stories – men wish to use the bodies of others to create life without taking responsibility for their actions or any consequences – are still sadly relevant. In both the male characters also face a double threat: firstly, happy female sexuality is so strong a danger to men that not even death is an escape from it. Secondly, men’s homes are at constant risk from outsiders, who bring plague and disease with them in addition to their capacity for seduction and/or violence. When foreign men corrupt nice local ladies, who have been kept innocent of their powers by design until it is too late, the horror follows. The nineties versions of that horror rely on a stylised melodrama that has gone out of fashion, using overwrought cinematography and huge sweeping spaces to make their points. The modern versions emphasise small details, with plenty of clutter in their spaces since stunt work and CGI handle the melodrama. When it comes to the battle of the sexes, the decades also take opposite approaches. In the nineties versions, women should have been protected from the unfairness of society by a kind husband. In the present day, the husbands are so distracted women must stand alone against evil with only their intelligence and morality as weapons. And what does kindness get the modern man? Hoult’s caring husband is no match for the evil consuming his wife, and Elordi’s thoughtful Creature is left to face the endless cold alone. It's all pretty grim, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s **The Bride!** out in March 2026, which will place Frankenstein in 1930s Chicago, doesn’t look any more relaxing. But at least Frankenstein and Dracula each have a saving grace, though the different decades provide different ones. In the nineties versions the heroes have lots of friends to fight evil with, and the modern versions emphasise everyone can make their own choices. In del Toro’s **Frankenstein** Victor apologises to the Creature so the Creature forgives Victor, and those acts of kindness provides the movie a grace note that all these other adaptations deny themselves. The lack of hope in **Nosferatu** is what makes it so hard to bear, and both of the nineties adaptations end with such brutal murder the whole experience is soured. Even in horror there must be hope, and our concerns about masculinity must include making it easy for men to make both lots of friends and happier choices. Del Toro’s **Frankenstein** shows the way, which I think makes it the superior adaptation. For monsters are not born but made, which means they can be unmade, if people choose to be kind. *Sarah Manvel is a very funny and beautiful genius, who doesn't like pina coladas. Oh you mean professionally? She is the author of You Ruin It When You Talk and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic. Her own blog is* [https://sarahsnewideas.com](https://sarahsnewideas.com/?ref=thegist.ie) *and she'd really love a literary agent. She also enjoys when she gets to write her own bio.* ### Mini-Gist: Power’s Walled City URL: https://www.thegist.ie/mini-gist-powers-walled-city/ Last updated: 2025-12-11T09:56:14.000Z Ireland is a polity where you can go and visit a Minister in a constituency office on a weekend to ask for help filling in a form. The distance to/from officeholders is effectively zero. But the distance for most people from *power* can be (invisible to them) huge. Patrick O’Donovan went out on the national airwaves with a half-baked, bad set of ideas about linking access to online spaces to our PPS numbers. Crucially, he also proposed also embedding the age verification duties (and risk, and cost) on the Phone Monopoly Controllers, Apple and Google. If he had these ideas himself, it would be a Christmas miracle. But in fact, they are Zuckerberg’s Meta’s lobbying aim across the world. And, given the fact that the register of lobbyists features a [record](https://www.lobbying.ie/return/131745/meta-platforms-ireland-ltd?ref=thegist.ie) of the same Minister being lobbied by Facebook on this exact plan a few weeks ago, I think we may safely let the Magi know they will be spared a trek to Limerick this year. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/12/IMG_8080.jpeg) Photograph of the record from lobbying.ie showing the Minister’s name (highlighted by me) in the list of politicians lobbied by Meta on age verification plans. Now, the consequences of the Minister’s ideas would be pretty terrible. Elon Musk would be plugged into the state database built on our PPS numbers, for example. But what it demonstrates is that the power to make a policy and then see a government adopt it largely sits outside of political parties. One of the evident failures of the FF and FG party candidates in the Presidential election was their inability to articulate what either party was for. These are hollow vessels, whose policies are largely set by outside forces. An organised external lobby can simply slot their preferred policy in. But this power isn’t available to just anyone. The two civil war parties recognise that certain interests are inside the walls and some are outside. Being located in the liberties, people and groups outside the FF-FG walled cities can say heterodox things like “I think children are people not property, so their human rights of expression, privacy and data protection matter too.” Meanwhile established lobby groups, long inside the walls, can say “Ireland should use a chunk of its EU political capital [to get a nitrates derogatio](https://www.antaisce.org/news/eu-nitrate-derogation-decision-a-bad-day-for-irish-waterways?ref=thegist.ie)n so dairy farmers don’t have to change how they work right now.” Most Irish people are not dairy farmers, and would prefer clean rivers. And, if you were thinking about governing long term, you would want to use your derogation to prepare dairy farming to stop polluting everyone’s water. Instead this is just the latest in a line of extensions to the derogation without any changes even started. When Patrick O’Donovan unveiled his underbaked pie of an Internet policy giving Meta what it wanted, it was because they are inside the walls, just as powerful (but less visible) than the farm lobby. This is the malaise in Ireland’s democracy. A Democracy where politicians are in constant office, but do not respond to citizens’ wishes (or even just their own voters’ interests) but just advance the policies that suit monied lobbies is a disaffection machine. Because people lose hope. There are ways that people outside those established walls can force change. They can, for example, insist on the Government following the law. And the Govt are trying to stop that from happening by restricting judicial review. Or they can try to organise their own counter-campaign, to raise the possibility of one of those policies that lobbyists made earlier costing FF or FG actual votes But the Government is acting now to restrict, impede and install state controls over the access to the online spaces which reduce friction in that kind of organising. The insulation of living inside walled cities is that those inside them tend to only hear people like them This, as we know, is amplified when their main exposure to “what people are saying” is a social media site owned by an openly far-right billionaire whose algorithm keeps showing them Nazis. The background to all of this, in Ireland, is that this power structure feels like it is nearing an end. The combined vote for FF and FG at the last election fell again to about 43%. They can’t address the crises- infrastructural, administrative and cultural- blocking housing. And they know that they are reaching the limit of society’s tolerance of being told to live into middle age in their parent’s box rooms. In the gap between the financial crash and the eventual much-anticipated defenestration of Cowen’s FF from office Ministers started signing 10-year contracts with service providers. Those inside the walls wanted to know they would stay, no matter what. Expect to start seeing mentions of something similar from the end of next year onwards. Because when empty parties look like they will lose the patronage powers of office, they find that the walls keeping that power away from the electorate can fall very quickly. And be aware that voters organising themselves online to object to the established policies of the civil war parties has been one of the main drivers for today’s efforts to introduce state controls on access to online spaces. If we’re going to escape these social immobilities on housing, on welcoming people, on climate and environment- on a plethora of issues you could reel off like a 1950s catechising Bishop- we will have to speak to each other directly. We will answer half-baked, unworkable lobbyist plans being pushed from within the cracked walls with a clear “No”. ### The Gist: Waving the Ban Hammer URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-waving-the-ban-hammer/ Last updated: 2025-12-09T16:52:37.000Z This week, coinciding with Australia's [new rules](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxRB5qWphJE&ref=thegist.ie) banning under sixteen year-olds from social media, we heard details of a social media regulation plan being trailed by the Minister Patrick O'Donovan, the Irish Minister for Media. And guess what? It's both super illegal and mysteriously leaves Meta (the social media giant everyone complains about) without any of the main risks of implementation. Minister O'Donovan has had a sequence of ideas about limiting and monitoring citizens' access to the Internet, which he outlined to the Dáil in [a written parliamentary answer on the 18th November 2025](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2025-11-18/533/speech/731/?ref=thegist.ie). He is currently [consulting with the Attorney General](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/12/06/new-digital-wallet-to-be-tested-within-months-to-restrict-social-media-access-in-ireland-for-under-16s/?ref=thegist.ie) as to which of these plans are legal and how that might be so. This may not be the traditional sequence when approaching fantastically complex and sensitive issues. Some lesser people might check if their plans were illegal before announcing them. But Minister O'Donovan is not a man with a lot of time for complexity and nuance. ([Recall the time he cited Sinn Féin as having responsibility for the Dublin-Monaghan bombings](https://web.archive.org/web/20170925184923/http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/ff-voters-are-alarmed-by-talk-of-sf-deal-36074757.html)). He prefers to present himself as a politician ready to stick to the delivery of his ideas, whether or not experts and naysayers point out their flaws. He is committed to a model of government where doing something is the goal and the actual wisdom of the things being done is a secondary matter left for the public and the courts to consider. Consider it the Ministerial [Dunning-Kruger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger%5Feffect?ref=thegist.ie) approach to public policy. The specifics of Minister O'Donovan's plans are worth looking at. > I am working across Government and with all stakeholders to ensure children and young people can be safe from harmful or illegal content online, in particular, through a new Government measure to support **age verification**. I am seeking the inclusion of a commitment to this effect in the Government’s updated National Digital Strategy which will be published later this year. > In addressing age verification, we must seek to ensure that there are trustworthy systems in place that are interoperable and respect users’ rights, including data protection rights. To that end, my officials are continuing to work with the Government’s Chief Information Officer and his Office to look at practical technical solutions to **age verification as part of the Government's Digital Wallet being developed using MyGovID.** (emphasis added) So, he wants to bring in a national identity system, which would share details with both the state and the private sector, by confirming the age (and possibily the identity) of everyone accessing online content and/or confirm what websites that citizens were looking at to the State. This is a huge escalation of the [already announced plans by ](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtf-commission/)Coimisiún na Meán[ to build a distributed database of porn preferences](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-coimisiun-na-mean-is-big-mad/). It will now directly interface with the State's central database of citizens, built on top of the Public Service Card database. But then there was more. The Minister, following the examples of Republican State legislators in the US, [suggests this State's ID system would then also be embedded into the tech monopolies of Apple and Google's iPhone and Android operating systems. ](https://extra.ie/2025/11/29/news/irish-news/social-media-ban-children?ref=thegist.ie) In the US this has been [a lobbying aim of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, over the objections of privacy minded Apple](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/20/zuckerbergs-enlisting-the-gop-against-tech-rivals-apple-and-google-00295945?ref=thegist.ie). Who can tell if our Minister independently came up with this same idea that happens to focus all the regulatory effort away from Meta or if it might have been suggested by a Meta policy lobbiest? We do know that [Meta has registered that it met and/or emailed the Minister to lobby him](https://www.lobbying.ie/return/131745/meta-platforms-ireland-ltd?ref=thegist.ie) "to explain Meta's position on app-store age verification". And the Minister's plan was announced after that lobbying took place. One US advocate, who actually favours regulating social media, describes the success of these lobbying efforts by Meta over there; > “They are doing a very good job distracting from any legislation that would hold them accountable,” said Ava Smithing, director of advocacy and operations at the Young People’s Alliance, an advocacy group that favors regulation of social media. (By the way, Apple and Google already have excellent ways of identifying if you are an adult when you are accessing their app stores, based on whether you have a credit card. Banks, you see, are reluctant to offer credit cards to children) ### MyGovID is illegal These are not good policies. But on top of that, they are, as advanced by the Minister, not lawful policies. Let's start with the recent [decision by the Data Protection Commission](https://www.dataprotection.ie/sites/default/files/uploads/2025-09/IN-21-7-3%5FDSP%5FFinal%5FDecision%5F2025.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), who spent years considering whether the PSC database had a lawful basis for processing biometric data (facial recognition photos). They found that the system (called SAFE 2) that both databases are built on was in breach of eight different sections of the GDPR, fined the state body €550,000 and also notified it that it would be issuing an order for them to stop processing that data altogether. And what does the MyGovID system also require? [Oh dear. ](https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-social-protection/publications/mygovid-app/?ref=thegist.ie) > "**Does online SAFE registration involve the processing of biometric data?** > Yes, the service creates and processes biometric data in the app." \- From the Department of Social Protection's own FAQ on MyGovID. ### Plans within plans So, to recap, Minister O'Donovan has announced plans before receiving his Attorney General's advices. Those plans are to integrate an unlawful state identity database with private tech companies, to monitor and identify children and adults in a way that happens to be exactly in line with the stated lobbying preferences of Meta, on the basis of no stated evidence as to the value or effectiveness of such a vast expansion of state interference. Let's leave the last word to [the Minister, during a Dáil debate, ](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2025-11-20/speech/14/?ref=thegist.ie)complaining about the fact that the Government's previous illegal attempts to force people to get Public Services Cards failed and suggesting he would have just carried on. > "it floundered because some interest groups outside of the House were more interested in privacy than other issues and they got their way." This is a strange way for a Minister to describe citizens and the Data Protection Regulator for Ireland taking action to stop the Government from acting illegally. But, I suppose, he may look forward to floundering himself, if continues to try and build Meta's favourite useless regulations on the sand of the MyGovID system. ### The Gist: AI, The Sound and Fury URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ai-the-sound-and-fury/ Last updated: 2026-01-01T10:10:57.000Z This is a much more tentative analysis then you usually see from me. That's because I am wandering around inside a landscape where I am very much a stranger in a strange land- thinking about AI. I wanted to write it mostly because it would help me sort out my own ideas about this technology. And I thought I'd post it to you, most esteemed Gist reader, because my tentative conclusions seem to be different from most of those I've seen discussed. Let's try to start with some context. ### Accidental Empires OpenAI, a fairly obscure company in the global economy, launched a project called ChatGPT in November 2022\. It was a downloadable app that connected back to the central OpenAI servers. I call it a project and not a product because [it was derived from an earlier bit of research work on creating a language model that OpenAI had developed called GPT-3](https://doi.org/10.1080/23311975.2023.2275851?ref=thegist.ie). If you were launching this thing now as a mass market product, you would not stick yourself with calling it ChatGPT. Because that is a terrible name. The thing was, at the time, they weren't expecting ChatGPT to be a mass market product. This was put out in the same spirit of science projects as their earlier research. But then it turned out they had a hit. Five days after the release of ChatGPT, it had 1 million users. In fact, it was so successful that it began to bend the entire technology industry around it. When you become the fastest adopted consumer product in tech history, you attract attention from the money people. ### A Box of Tricks I suppose we should point out here that the AI industry has been developed through hugely extractive and abusive behaviours. Everything written, drawn or pictured on the open internet- all these words here that you're reading, for example- has been scraped, copied and used to train the models so they can guess what is the most statistically likely next word to be produced. Here's [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/25/24254042/mark-zuckerberg-creators-value-ai-meta?ref=thegist.ie) reporting what Mark Zuckerberg said about the commercial worth of the works of Warhol, the writings of Zadie Smith and even these Gists; > “I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” Zuckerberg said [in the interview](https://www.theverge.com/e/24017522?ref=thegist.ie), which coincides with Meta’s annual Connect event. “My guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable.” But if creators are concerned or object, “when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much.” This is a piece of verbal slight of hand, of course, as is almost everything said by the compulsively mendacious husks of humanity granted billionaire status by the quirks of tech history. If the principle is that you cannot train your AI model without taking and using without consent or payment, um, *everything ever made* then it suggests that either any AI model is inherently illegal or any income you make is barely yours. And what Zuckerberg does here is try to atomise that problem, which stands at the root of this industry *as a commercial venture.* He seeks to ignore or minimise collective responses, be they through laws, Treaties or mass action litigation, and isolate an individual creator. What contribution to the entire corpus of human writing have you made with this one article, or artwork, or work of imagination you're complaining about? "In the grand scheme of this", 'this' being Zuckerberg's description of human imaginative endeavour since history began, sure, hardly anyone has made a definitive difference. But every voice added to that chorus is a gift and adds value to the whole. And, crucially, it is that entire chorus which the AI training process needs to function. Is it any wonder that [this industry is so hostile](https://www.nlrb.gov/case/19-CA-312724?ref=thegist.ie) to the concept of unions? Their model of collective action to assert rights is a threat to its very existance, which relies on individual profiling and targeting of content at atomised users. Anything which sees individuals coming together and acting in unison, whether in their workforces or in the wider public through democratic representation, is inimical to its ability to maintain the power imbalance which has made them so much money. Making money in the imagined AI future of the tech oligarchs is inimical to democracy. But is making money even possible? ### Mad Money Here is where we point out that the economics of AI are flatly insane. None of this makes sense as an investment. It is pure casino gambling. [Every person using ChatGPT costs OpenAI more money then they pay them.](https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-is-openais-money-going/?ref=thegist.ie) Every free and paying user asking how to make a fluffy omelette or getting it to draft an email to their kid's teacher drains their resources. Now multiply that by all the money invested in all of the competing and ancillary AI companies- Google's Gemini, Meta's Llama, Anthropic's Claude and all the companies whose name you've never heard of building and filling data centres with Nvidia chips. Everything spent on this entire gold rush has been to mine gold that costs its owner more than they can charge for it. Sure, say the investors, they're losing money every time somebody uses their service. But, as the old dot com bubble joke goes, they'll make it up on volume. The investors' gamble is that everything will settle down later into a few big winners who will eventually control and, in a real sense, own most of the global economy. If AI is everywhere and nothing can work without one of these AI providers then eventually, the thinking goes, they can put up the prices to anything. This is a dream of a rentier economy not seen since French [sans-culottes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-culottes?ref=thegist.ie) systematically guillotined the heads of the last one. Imagine the Apple App store, where they take 30% of every transaction, but apply it to the entire global economy. That's the excuse for the vast investment. Not just the hope of living in the courts of a handful of new Sun Kings. But the fear of missing out on, not the Next Big Thing, but the Last Big Thing. If you are a pile of money, the AI bubble is an event of existential FOMO. The extent of this money bonfire is only barely perceptible from where we are, because unlike the finance boom, it is based on capital expenditure building actual physical assets like data centres. And in the main those are being built in the US. The effect of this centralisation of investment is that [the world's second largest economy is being distorted. ](https://www.wired.com/story/data-center-ai-boom-us-economy-jobs/?ref=thegist.ie) (paywall, but you can read Wired magazines for free through the [Libby app](https://libbyapp.com/?ref=thegist.ie), if you use your local library card) But we should just say again here that none of this makes any sense whatsoever. Firstly, [because of the existence of China](https://www.reuters.com/technology/deepseek-releases-model-it-calls-intermediate-step-towards-next-generation-2025-09-29/?ref=thegist.ie), which releases cutting edge models for free (out of mischief). But secondly, because it is based on a presumption that the AI industry will end up like the modern internet advertising industry, with two or three winners making impossible amounts of money from globally-centralised systems. And, [like Alanis Morrisette before me](https://youtu.be/NPcyTyilmYY?si=k4lk4If4MQc9rWt0&ref=thegist.ie), I'm here to remind you that event was a complete anomaly in the history of how tech has worked for the last 50 years. It happened because social networking and search-based online advertising both entwined at a moment when it wasn't possible to make them occur locally in a compelling way. The Intel Inside chips in people's home computers weren't up to it. The copper wires that connected homes to the internet weren't up to it. And the software to make it a good experience wasn't up to it for anyone normal. (Of these three, it is the last issue which has proved most stubborn). The actual run of technology remains driven by Moore's Law and its variants. Chips get smaller, cheaper and more powerful over time. What used to need a mainframe to process now lives in your pocket, trying to show you videos of [cats on Roombas](https://www.youtube.com/results?search%5Fquery=cat+on+roomba&ref=thegist.ie). ### The Centre Cannot Hold > "The Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party decides that the existence of a unitary centralized Communist Party with a unitary Central Committee directing all the work of the party in all parts of the RSFSR is essential." > \- [Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party](https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/communist-party-building/communist-party-building-texts/centralization-of-the-communist-party/?ref=thegist.ie), On the Organizational Question. March 23, 1919 Moore's law makes decentralisation of purely processing-intensive activities simply a matter of time. All those billions spent on data centres and all that water and power being used to train models are to produce a non-recurring benefit. Training a model needs vast, boggling, amounts of power, only delivered at an advanced speed by the bleeding edge of the relevant type of chips (now made by the world's most valuable company by share price, Nvidia). But once it's done, it's done. The [second stage in using an AI model is called inference](https://youtu.be/lsPucobtdDk?si=Jrk73bLgsORpi-1o&ref=thegist.ie). This is the bit where the model that has already been trained responds to queries or new info you feed it. And this bit is far less demanding. You can use last-generation chips in your data centres. [Or a large firm or organisation could even buy a set of boxes to run it in-office](https://build.nvidia.com/spark?ref=thegist.ie). Or, if you don't need that much complexity in your responses, [you can run a pre-trained model on your own laptop](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct?ref=thegist.ie) and chat away to it. Cory Doctorow, the tech writer and activist, has even pointed to the possibility of tiny chips that know just enough to read complex manuals and documents acting as helpful assistants to trouble-shoot everyday appliances. [He's termed this the Productive Residue of the AI Bubble](https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/?ref=thegist.ie#productive-residue). All that training is done. We can't recover the assets used for it. We may as well see what we can do with the models after their business models collapse, in the same way as we continue to use the fibre optic cables that were laid at lunatic cost during the dotcom bubble of the 2000s. There is no natural moat protecting centralised AI systems, once training models are being commoditised after they are produced. Imagine a world where samurai swords are created by master metal smiths, honing their skills for years, forging them through tears over months of hard spiritual and physical labour, finally holding the folded and hammered steel to the dawn's light to capture the essence of the ineffable in the blade. Now imagine this same world has the cardboard box with Duplicator written on it in crude marker from Calvin and Hobbes. As soon as the completed sword exists, you can just toss it in and make as many identical copies as you like. [That's the AI industry. ](https://theconversation.com/openai-says-deepseek-inappropriately-copied-chatgpt-but-its-facing-copyright-claims-too-248863?ref=thegist.ie) Social Media had network effects to keep the balance in favour of centralisation. Advertising and search had the [Google Flywheel](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/technology/microsoft-ceo-testifies-google-search.html?ref=thegist.ie), where searches informed ads making them much better than anyone else could match. AI has nothing to stop it from becoming just another feature that runs on your computer or phone except whatever the time will be between someone finding lasting value for it and however long it takes for Moore's law to let that use live on your own device. Everyone has been laughing at Apple's complete inability to make Siri better, because they have been nowhere in the AI race. But, in the final shakeout, they will still be in a position to incorporate already trained AI models into their devices as they grow more powerful but won't have spent billions on creating them. ### We who remain The strangest thing about this AI bubble is how it manages to throw such a harsh light on the existing, sometimes hidden, fault lines in society. In its push for more concentration of wealth by rent-extracting, it just reveals how much our economy has already been allowed to run on that model. In its hostility to recognising people's rights to collective action through legislation or banding together to insist on their rights it reveals the hostility to democracy that has been an undercurrent to the tech industry's growth for years. Let's leave the last word to one of Mark Zuckerberg's individual, overvalued content creators. Taken as a whole, the AI bubble is; > "but a walking shadow, a poor player, > That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, > And then is heard no more. It is a tale > Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, > Signifying nothing." > \- [William Shakespeare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William%5FShakespeare?ref=thegist.ie), [*Macbeth*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth%5F%28play%29?ref=thegist.ie), Act V, Scene V ### The Gist: No contest URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-no-contest/ Last updated: 2025-10-25T13:39:21.000Z There are, perhaps, alternative worlds where lots of things are different. Fianna Fáil maybe decide to run an MEP instead of a MIA. Or one where a fleet of no-hopers got nominated and we spent the whole campaign having to listen to the media asking candidates their opinions on the Latin mass and if cocaine bloat is a positive feature in a President. But, writing as the Presidential election results that literally everyone expected come in from the count centres, there is one thing we can be pretty sure of. In all of the possible universes, there was never one where Heather Humphreys was going to win a Presidential contest against Catherine Connolly. And we know that for sure, because we've just tried it out. Catherine Connolly will be declared as the next President of Ireland by the end of the day. So let's take this chance to think about what just happened. ### **Catherine Connolly: What do I know?** Back at the start of these Gists I said that Catherine Connolly was having a [mare of a campaign](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-presidential-selection/). This, of course, was because I am an idiot. And, in this case, I was a particularly shameful kind of idiot. Like the most flabby-minded middle aged golf bore at the end of the club bar, I mistook my media diet for reality. Shame on me. In actual fact, what was happening was that she was gradually building a grassroots campaign, recognised and supported in turn by each of the parties who joined the initial Social Democrats nucleus. She was doing this by actually going and talking to human beings, either directly through an endless national tour that would put Bob Dylan to shame or by speaking through social media directly into people's ears and from their pockets through videos, podcasts and groupchats. > [@catherineconnollytd](https://www.tiktok.com/@catherineconnollytd?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "@catherineconnollytd") > > She might pinch your ball or hop on your bike, but she’ll also speak out when required. There has never been a more important time to elect a President who will be independent of Government. Vótáil Catherine Connolly 1 [#CatherineConnolly](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/catherineconnolly?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "catherineconnolly") [#guthnandaoine](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/guthnandaoine?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "guthnandaoine") [#raiseyourvoice](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/raiseyourvoice?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "raiseyourvoice") [#ConnollyForPresident](https://www.tiktok.com/tag/connollyforpresident?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "connollyforpresident") > > [♬ original sound - Connolly for President](https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7559131867469171478?refer=embed&ref=thegist.ie "♬ original sound - Connolly for President") She did this in the face of an absurdly hostile institutional print media running a series of narratives completely unrelated to anything happening on the ground. We'll come back to that later on. In each of those conversations she was herself and nobody else. What was clear to everyone watching was that she was probably incapable of being a political mouthpiece for anyone else. And, as they met her, listened to her, saw her keepy-uppy skills and thought about her ability to remain herself while staying within the roles she took on (Leas Ceann Comhairle, barrister, TD) they decided that she was a person who matched the role of President, as they wanted it to be. I don't think that 65-70% of the Irish electorate now agree with her every position. I do think they decided she was the right person for this job. ### **Fine Gael: What was all of that about?** In a way, it seems misleading to talk about a single Fine Gael campaign, because they ran a number of conflicting campaigns at the same time. There was one where ["Heather" offered to serve tray bakes](https://img2.thejournal.ie/inline/6828173/original/?width=1300&version=6828173&ref=thegist.ie) to the nation in a feel good, Aga-warmed, retirement Presidency. We had a different one where the Humphreys campaign consistently let the losing candidate self-soothe by making visits within [a drive of her house in the North-West ](https://www.roscommonherald.ie/humphreys-and-connolly-take-campaigns-to-cavan-and-meath%5Farid-74322.html?ref=thegist.ie)and make FG Chamber of Commerce-style speeches about small businesses and exports. In Fine Gael, this is the equivilent of chanting a Buddhist mantra to calm the mind. This is also how to appeal to the voters she knew and understood, in Cavan-Monaghan. Unfortunately, nobody in her camp seemed to have noticed that she wasn't running for President of Cavan-Monaghan. Both these campaigns, while incompatible and incoherent, could plausibly be represented as an expression of different parts of who Humphreys presented herself as, as a candidate. But, once the IPSOS Irish Times poll came out and Jim Gavin performed his rare landlord self-Maoing, a third Fine Gael campaign appeared. This one was the 'smear the bejasus' effort of a losing team and had every appearance of being run from Fine Gael HQ, without reference to the candidate at all. At one point, it put out an actual attack video and sent links to the media to try to get them to embarrass themselves by asking stupid questions about whether barristers are the same as their clients really. When Humphreys was asked about it on air, she didn't even know what video they were talking about. The institutional media, of course, were happy to be fed something to say, spending two days talking amongst themselves about the cab-rank rule. This, from what we might term The Harris Campaign must have felt like a huge win. And it was worth precisely Nothing in getting votes for their candidate. What we learned from the General Election was that Simon Harris had no idea what a successful campaign actually is, because he thinks success is a series of images or headlines obtained that add up to a win. So he stages handshakes or ice cream cone lickings or says empty attack lines that get repeated ad nauseum but never stops to tell voters what any of it is actually all for. The important message in an election isn't 'Vote For Me' but ' Vote For Me so I can change \[Insert Campaign Theme Here\]'. This is particularly baffling to Fine Gael, because their perennial political offering is to make sure that nothing actually changes, ever. The Heather Humphreys campaign was doomed from the start because she was a candidate who offered to be a spokesperson for a minority (Fine Gaelers) while running for the one office in the state where being seen as a party partisan representative is poison. The President isn't meant to do what they're told. They have to know their own minds, so as to act independently in the small but critical areas where they have direct powers. They also need to use that mind to reflect wider society's values. The Humphrey's campaign demonstrated time and again that it didn't recognise the legitimacy of any non-FG values. It also had trouble showing us that Heather Humphreys had thought about any of these things. None of the attack lines floated by the various Humphreys' campaigns landed because they weren't about anything voters cared about. We've [spoken before ](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-reading-the-bay-leaves/)about the Fine Gael approach to political messaging as a squash game, where their prepackaged lines are smashed repeatedly against the uncaring wall of the electorate. They tried some old nonsense about the Cab rank rules, about hiring a policy assistant who had been in prison and even tried to terrorise us with a good time by resurrecting the old Cumann na nGaedheal Red Scare lines from the 1930s. ![A poster from 1932 reads : We want no 'reds' here! Keep their colour off your flag! vote for Cumann na nGaedheal](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/10/Screenshot-2025-10-25-at-13.02.40.png) The Fine Gael Campaign went for some Deep Cuts None of it was about how people live, or want to see the country they live in reflected by the office of President, granted the huge moral authority of being elected with the single largest political mandate of any official in the state. ### **Spoiled Brats** The final story of the election, and one that has come into focus as the count goes on, has been the elevated level of spoiled votes. This is an invitation for Ireland's Greatest Losers to claim that, actually, every spoiled vote is a vote for whatever voter-repellent position they want to push. It is undeniable that a two candidate race is anathema to the modern Irish political desires. Voters are used to having a range of choices and being able to make nuanced sub-choices between them with transfers. This election became a de facto experiment with a First Past The Post election and a major bloc of the electorate didn't like either of their real choices (or the human Rich Tea biscuit in the middle of the ballot). But trying to read votes covered in overt racism and ones that wrote-in Elvis Presley as making the same political point is simply not a credible narrative. And it shouldn't be given any credibility just because the people who want to make it do so standing on top of their very large handbags. ### Everyone loves a winner The price of this election may come due for some of the losing parties sooner than they imagine. But for today, we can look forward to the declaration of the nation's 10th President in Dublin Castle being a positive, joyous and popular one. ### The Gist: Jim Bows Out URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-jim-bows-out/ Last updated: 2025-10-06T06:40:04.000Z Of all Jim Gavin’s gaffes, it turns out it was his spare one that took him down. He had spent a miserable day being asked about pocketing a tenant‘s money and not giving it back for 16 years, while knowing this whole thing was likely for nothing after that [morning’s poll](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-presidential-numberwang/). He had given [an interview](https://bsky.app/profile/newschambers.bsky.social/post/3m2i6bxmcak2t?ref=thegist.ie) to Virgin Media’s Richard Chambers earlier that day, where he had referred to “boots on the ground”, and said “we’re not even halftime yesterday on this journey and half times are just breaks in play and there’s a lot of long way to go.“ and that he’d “a brilliant team around me and I’m so much up for this” and “I’m passionate about being President... I’ve got full energy to get through the campaign.” Later that day he quit, presumably having depleted Ireland’s entire resources of cliche. ### The Long Game Imagine you are a tenant, in the worst financial crash in living memory, and you discover that over three thousand of your very precious and irreplaceable euros have been sent by your idiot bank to your previous landlord. And then he won’t give them back. Not then, but also, not later either. He just keeps the money, because that is how Irish private landlords behave. You pay a deposit to a landlord and then they try anything on to refuse to give it back. Now imagine you spend the next 16 years seething every time that landlord appears on the TV, being fêted for his sporting triumphs, receiving state appointments and still never giving you your money. And now, and I invite you to imagine this in full 8k Hi-Def Surround Sound, imagine seeing that guy announce he was running to be President and realising you were going to tell your story and End It. For anyone who has ever had to deal with a landlord who took their cash this is the stuff of legend. You would let the monkey paw get you for it. “Who needs a soul?“, Faust would have said as he traded for this outcome. ### FF’s Zombie Campaign Jim’s premature withdrawal might have met with the approval of the country’s small faction of Steen supporters but it leaves Micheál Martin in almost the worst of all worlds. Because, you see, Jim managed to not pull out early enough and FF now find themselves required to carry his presence on the ballot to full term. Section 30(1) of the Presidential Elections Act, 1993 says that a candidate may only withdraw up to the closure of nominations “But not thereafter”. ![A person in respect of whom a nomination paper has been delivered to the presidential returning officer pursuing a section 14 May with withdraw his candidate at any time before the completion of the ruling on nominations but not thereafter](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/10/IMG_7794.jpeg) Meaning that Gavin’s name will remain on the ballot paper. His withdrawal will just mean that he won’t do anything to try to persuade people to back him. Which, to be fair, describes how his campaign worked from the start. ### The Gist: Presidential Numberwang URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-presidential-numberwang/ Last updated: 2025-10-05T10:53:23.000Z Today's [Sunday Independent has an Ireland Thinks ](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/poll-catherine-connolly-leads-in-race-for-presidency-as-support-for-jim-gavin-drops/a1283426616.html?ref=thegist.ie)poll on the presidential campaign. Unless instantly contradicted by a poll of equal weight, it is likely to be one of those polls that arrives at a moment to set the tone for the rest of the election. Firstly, let's look at the headline numbers: **Catherine Connolly 32 (+12 in four weeks)** **Heather Humphreys 23 (+3)** **Jim Gavin 15 (-5)** **Undecided 31 (-8)** As you can see, we're in a four horse race with Catherine Connolly and Undecided in a statistical dead heat at the front, Heather Humphreys cantering behind and Jim Gavin teetering on the edge of a visit to the glue factory. The poll goes on to ask people who their second choices would be and calculates that, as matters stand, once Gavin's eliminated, Connolly would win out over Humphreys on a **53% to 47%** split. The sample size was 1,430\. The margin of error is +/-2.6pc. We'll discuss some of the consequences of Fianna Fáil's man becoming the [Copydex](https://corkartsupplies.com/Copydex-125ml-C00304?ref=thegist.ie) candidate in a minute. Here's the eternally reliable [Gav Reilly](https://bsky.app/profile/gavreilly.com/post/3m2gjzlxpos2x?ref=thegist.ie) to illustrate just how fragile a lead that would mean Connolly currently holds. ![Gav Reilly on Blusky: Illustration of how much a knife-edge this is: if Humphreys were to do something to win over just a tenth of the undecideds, then a crude/over-rounded calculation makes it 50.3 to 49.7 for Connolly. Absorb another 1 point off Gavin’s vote and it’s a dead heat.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/10/Screenshot-2025-10-05-at-09.23.47.png) In effect, a poll with 31% Undecideds is of next to no value in predicting the final result of the election. What it does give is a clear indication of the relative appeal of the three candidates and the direction of travel of their campaigns to date. On that basis, let's draw some barely-sustainable conclusions! ### We live in TV Times Firstly, a rise of 12 points in the face of some pretty sustained questions and issues across the last four weeks confirms that Catherine Connolly is having the best campaign, by far. But that vast undecided bloc means she still doesn't have a comfortable lead. Nonetheless, one thing suggests that she may reach those happy fields as the Undecideds start to pick a side. In an election where nearly a third of voters are undecided, the tendency is for them to disproportionately plump for one candidate after a TV event. And Connolly has already proven to be the strongest TV debater of the three, by far. That means Heather Humphreys would have to deliver a commanding debate performance just before polling day if she wanted to move the needle on her headline support figures and not just hope Jim Gavin's transfers carried her over the line. So far, the concept of a commanding Heather Humphreys debate performance remains in the realm of speculative fiction. ### Martin's Folly The Sindo polling sees about 60% of Gavin's support transferring to Heather Humphreys and 35% to Catherine Connolly. But Humphreys can only rely on that to boost her above the frontrunner if Gavin has enough votes left to give by campaign's end to make a difference. Jim Gavin going backwards by 5 points is likely to provoke a series of knock-on effects inside FF. When FG's Austin Currie ended up with 17% in the 1990 presidential election, it provoked Alan Duke's resignation as party leader. (Though it is worth remembering that nobody liked Alan Dukes as party leader anyway.) If those Gavin numbers keep trickling lower, expect to hear increasingly strident and attention-grabbing policies from Jim O'Callaghan, looking to position himself as the Micheál Martin replacement plan. I expect him to announce his plans for a chain of Garda stations on the Moon by polling day if Jim Gavin stays south of 15%. ### Campaign Chivers Like jelly, it sometimes seems as though the shape of an election campaign will never set. Unlike jelly, even when it does seem to be settling down, it can all be reshaped by last minute events, TV moments or just undecided voters not being enthused enough to turn out. Actually, none of that is like jelly at all. Forget I mentioned jelly. Today's poll has two significant political messages. This election is Catherine Connolly's to lose and is Micheál Martin's to survive. Both can happen, but on today's numbers, neither is a sure thing. ### The Gist: A Presidental Trio URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-presidental-trio/ Last updated: 2025-09-27T10:13:01.000Z An election campaign has its own momentum, outside of the power or influence of any individual candidate. So, if you are Gareth Sheridan, a splashy launch across the Sunday supplements may prove insufficient to persuade county councils to give you a go. Or, if you are Maria Steen, Lex Luthor's army of screaming monkeys at keyboards may prove counter-productive as you command Oireachtas members to let you throw your Hermès handbag into the ring. In the end, despite all the noise, the three candidates who are starting their campaign proper this weekend are (in order of nomination) Catherine Connolly, Heather Humphreys and Jim Gavin. In other words, FF, FG and Ors. Not for 35 years has a Presidential Election seemed so stable (and, whisper it, rather uninspiring). But under the surface, this stability hides a political system in a febrile state. ### "I like Soap" The posters have gone up on lamposts. Micheál Martin's candidate Jim Gavin (or Don Uachtaránacht as he's also known to the less observant poster reader) beams, shiny-faced down on the public with all the political charisma of a middle manager in a soap factory. He can't wait to visit some community groups, he explains in his interviews with the zeal of a man eating a slice of waterlogged bread. The most likely outcome we could expect if he won would be a return to a Presidency in the Patrick Hillery mold. Jim Gavin persuasively assures voters that he could do the time. Fourteen years of working on your golf swing in the Phoenix Park, never troubling the public's mind, or the Government of the day, with anything much of anything? Don Uachtaránacht, human snooze button, is ready to deliver. ### Pearls before swine Heather Humphreys has been rather more successful so far in conveying a sense of herself as a person. That person is admittedly a sort of avatar of Fine Gael- enough pearl necklaces to endanger the viability of oysters as a species, tasteful coloured silk scarves and any other class indicator you'd like to add. But it rings true because it is true. That's a power in a race which is about picking a person as the face of a country. Where Jim Gavin offers a sort of living absence, Heather Humphreys is the Government made present. The details of her campaign are strategically non-specific. She wants unity, which seems defined as everyone voting for her. This is a policy which any politician could similarly endorse. She'd also prefer to talk about foreign affairs through the lens of Russia's attacks on Ukraine than on Israel and Gaza, the latter being a signature strength of Catherine Connolly's campaign. We're only two days into the official run, but Humphrys hasn't had any obvious mis-steps yet. What she mostly has to worry about is that Fine Gael doesn't have enough votes to land her a win on its own. So she has to pitch to be the number two choice of both the other candidates. One will be eliminated and likely elect one of the remaining two with their transfers. Expect more talk about how she thinks there ought to be a United Ireland (but, like Saint Augustine pleading to be made chaste, with the caveat "but not yet, oh Lord!") ### I Yam What I Yam The person who has had the roughest time in making the transition from her prior role to putting herself forward as the President of Ireland has been Catherine Connolly. Connolly has no problem presenting herself as a real person with real beliefs, nor is she a representative of a particular political faction, being an Independent backed by an arc of left parties and Sinn Féin. But she has consistently and voluntarily set out positions which could have been almost designed to alienate blocs of voters from her. She sometimes complains about facing challenging interviews about her views. But nobody asked her to compare modern Germany to the 1930s version under the Nazis. And you just can't expect to pop off a few zingers like that when you're offering to represent the views of the entire population of Ireland and not get some follow up questions. Being an Independent opposition TD means never having to account to a leader or party for what you say. Being a Presidential candidate means having to account to everybody, all the time. We did learn that she has two cats, which are named Cat 1 and Cat 2, demonstrating a practical approach to cat owning. And she still has the makings of a winning campaign struggling to find its way out. She is touring the country and meeting people. She has the best online presence. Her election would represent a continuity of sorts in Ireland's presentation of its self-image on the world stage with Michael D Higgins. She is the sole candidate not representing a government party and at last count, in 2024, the support for FF and FG put together couldn't quite reach 43% of the votes. Meaning, if she appealed to everyone else, she would represent the majority of the population. Her challenge will be to find a way to remain true to herself while recognising [which parts of her political](https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/1nqk10r/catherine%5Fconnolly%5Fon%5Fthe%5Fblindboy%5Fpodcast/?ref=thegist.ie) worldview are shared by voters, and focussing on them. ### Unknown unknowns Like most Presidential campaigns, this one will likely be determined by something unforeseen, unplanned and unavoidable. Whether its Sean Gallagher being asked about collecting money for FF in a TV debate or Brian Lenihan suffering from mature recollection on a radio interview, these elections tend to crystallise suddenly around a defining moment. It's up to the candidates to try to prepare themselves for the unknown. And it's up to the rest of us to have to pick one of them. Look, it's a difficult time all around. ### The Gist: The Presidential Selection URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-presidential-selection/ Last updated: 2025-08-31T18:01:47.000Z Irish Presidential elections are strange things. The role is largely ceremonial, but does come with sufficient constitutional powers and duties that you would feel better with a safe pair of hands in the job. For example, every time you see people saying the President should send a piece of legislation they don't agree with to the Supreme Court to be tested before they sign it, remember that is the surest way of rendering it judicially bulletproof. And be glad that we have yet had an incumbent who didn't understand that fact. And yet, the job is more than just an accumulation of Constitutional tidying-up tasks. Since it stopped being a retirement home (or sometimes, exile) for Fianna Fáil politicians with the defeat of Brian Lenihan by Mary Robinson in 1990, the role of President has taken on an era-defining task. In part, this is just a function of the fact that each term is seven years long, and the incumbent can nominate themselves for a second term if they feel like it. It's hard to be the head of state for 14 years and not, in some way, end up being the face of a particular era. What has been impressive in the last few decades is how well each of the incumbents has personified the aspirations of those eras. They have each, in a very different way, brought themselves to the role while giving voice to wider social (as opposed to party-political) undercurrents forcing themselves to the surface. So, as Michael D. Higgins prepares to step down from a 14 year run as Ireland's most voted-for and popular politician, shoulders are jostling to replace him. This weekend, with Fianna Fáil finally admitting they were going to run a candidate, we seem to have reached the start of the real competition. We don't have all of the runners and riders settled, but it seems like a moment to do an early overview of some of the hopefuls. Problem: To take the job, you need to run for election. (Pictured below, the typical Irish Presidential election candidate experience) [via GIPHY](https://giphy.com/clips/jason-clarke-ritual-worf-klingon-OfSkkiqjK7h4mUVlEE?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Presidential Hopefuls **1) Catherine Connolly** **Supported by:** Social Democrats, Labour Party, People Before Profit Catherine Connolly is first on this list because she is, to date, the only person to ensure she will be an actual name you'll see on the ballot. She did a widely admired job as the Leas-Cheann Comhairle in the last Dáil and proved she was capable of separating her own political position from the needs of a constitutional role. Her politics are, as her list of support would suggest, left wing. She has also run a really bad campaign so far. I mean, it's been a mare. At heart, the repeating problem is an unwillingness to say "I thought that then, but I know better now". In 2018, for example, she was one of 11 Oireachtas members who nominated Gemma O'Doherty as a Presidential Candidate. Asked about it in July of this year she said her 'judgement call' was right at the time. Now, the thing here is that Catherine Connolly would lose precisely no votes if she said "Janey, that turned out to be a mistake and we all dodged a bullet there. You live and learn." But she wasn't willing to admit a mistake. It is the same with her trip to Syria under the Assad regime. She went, the decision has aged like milk, but she has let it come back up, time and again, because she won't say it was an error, even in hindsight. It's early days yet, and the ship may right itself. There is talk of bringing in Michael D's former campaign manager. But the terrible crucible of a Presidential election is like Greek drama, always working to reveal the tragic flaws in even the most admirable of characters. **2) Billy Kelleher MEP** **Supported by:** One Fianna Fáil TD so far. Billy Kelleher MEP is the next on the list, because he is the person who, while not having a nomination locked in, has received the most actual votes of any of the other runners. Kelleher is what you would receive if you ordered the delivery of approximately two meters of extruded Fianna Fáil. He is a career politician, and was a Junior Minister under first Bertie and then Brian Cowen. He later went on to call on Micheál Martin to commission an inquiry into the reasons for the decline in Fianna Fáil support. This suggests either a neck made of a [fine alloy of copper and zinc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass?ref=thegist.ie) or a chronic lack of attention. Kelleher faces an uphill battle for the party nomination because, just after he declared his intention to run, his party leader endorsed someone else. **3) Jim Gavin** **Supported by:** Micheál Martin and various other senior FFers Jim Gavin was the manager of Dublin's GAA football team when it won seven All-Irelands. He has a background as a military pilot and has been the second-in-command in the Irish Aviation Authority as their Chief Operations Officer. In other words, he has been an impressive public figure who has been appointed, not elected, to every role. This makes him almost an archetype of the surprisingly brittle Presidential candidate. Amusingly, his [wikipaedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim%5FGavin%5F%28Gaelic%5Ffootballer%29?ref=thegist.ie) has received more edits and expansion since 23rd August 2025 than it had in all the preceding years of its existence. My favourite is the one by "Irish Spook" tagged "*possible AI-generated citations*". Given his CV we may expect he will be asked particularly about his opinion on Ireland's military neutrality. Maybe I'll be wrong, but I feel there are submerged rocks ahead. **4) Heather Humphreys** **Supported by:** Fine Gael After Mairead McGuinness withdrew for health reasons, Fine Gael turned to former TD and former Deputy Leader Heather Humphreys. This required them to shoulder their Munster MEP, Sean Kelly, out of the way. This choice was a slightly strange one. The campaign proper hasn't started, but it was only in October of last year that [she announced that she wouldn't stand again](https://fb.watch/BPYSL%5FSOSP/?ref=thegist.ie) for election for FG in the General Election because her health and energy levels weren't what they were. She [said then](https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2024/1020/1476390-heather-humphreys/?ref=thegist.ie) that "the bottom line is I'm getting older and like everyone else... you don't have the same energy you have when you were younger". She then went on to say that, for the same reason, running for the Presidential election "wasn't on the cards for me". But, Good News! Just as FG's first candidate stepped out, things were looking up: > "I’m well. I feel like I’m back to my old self...I’ve had a good rest. The tank is full again." Of course, Fine Gael have never managed to have a single candidate elected to the Presidency in the history of the state. So the bar for success here is pretty low. **5) Mary Hanafin- Non Runner.** **Supported by**: Herself. Mary Hanafin had as much chance of winning the Presidential election as any given banana. In fact, even though she would have had the advantage of (a) being called Mary and (b) not being a perishable soft fruit, she had less of a chance than the banana because any given banana wouldn't have been Mary Hanafin. She [announced today](https://www.thejournal.ie/mary-hanafin-not-running-fianna-fail-presidency-6803924-Aug2025/?ref=thegist.ie) she was withdrawing from consideration to become Fianna Fáil's candidate. Similarly, I am announcing I am no longer expecting to win this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. **6) Gareth Sheridan** **Supported by:** Senator Sharon Keogan One of Sen. Sharon Keogan's [slate of mutually exclusive](https://meathlive.net/2025/08/18/brace-yourselves-keogan-aims-to-get-five-onto-the-park-election-ticket/?ref=thegist.ie) would-be independent candidates, Pharma millionaire Gareth Sheridan burst like a weakly -thrown water balloon onto the public consciousness through a [Sunday Independent interview](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/multi-millionaire-pharma-tycoon-gareth-sheridan-35-launches-bid-for-irish-presidency/a1172656881.html?ref=thegist.ie). He immediately followed this up with a [public spat ](https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/gareth-sheridan-accuses-people-in-sean-gallagher-circle-of-co-ordinated-attack-1792355.html?ref=thegist.ie)with former Presidential-loser Sean Gallagher and capped off his introduction to the voters by being unable to say which of Senator Keogan's policies ([micro-chipping](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/election-candidate-defends-call-for-discussion-on-whether-children-with-special-needs-should-be-microchipped/38907890.html?ref=thegist.ie) special needs children, saying LGBTQ people are involved in a hostile take-over around the world, using the Ireland Is Full hashtag) he supported. He first complained that "you can't have opinions these days without being called left or right". Which is true, particularly when those are political positions which are, you know, Very Right. Apparently, although he [said that immigration](https://www.thejournal.ie/gareth-sheridan-presidential-campaign-launch-6790234-Aug2025/?ref=thegist.ie) was a "tricky subject", the best he could do in response was saying he wasn't "completely pushing Sharon Keogan's message". So, only partially pushing it? A small reminder that, to get elected, Michael D. Higgins received **822,566** votes in [2018](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%5FIrish%5Fpresidential%5Felection?ref=thegist.ie). In order to be elected Senator in [2025](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/elections/seanad-general-election/?ref=thegist.ie), Sharon Keogan received **115** votes and was elected on the last count. I'm sure this will all run swimmingly for him. **7) Person Unknown** **Supported by:** Sinn Féin An empty seat at the table has been left by SF's inability to settle on whether they want to run a candidate and who, if they did, that person would be. Sinn Féin, by now, knows that running heavy-weight politicians from Northern Ireland (Martin McGuinness, Michelle Gildernew) in the Republic has not been a winning formula. They could try to retire their leader to the Arás (call this the Dev Manoeuver), but Mary Lou McDonald doesn't seem too keen on being parked in the Park. Or they could back Catherine Connolly (who has been [touring West Belfast](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/08/28/catherine-connolly-sells-herself-as-uniting-candidate-on-visit-to-sinn-fein-heartland/?ref=thegist.ie) this week expressing her support for a United Ireland, in the first savvy campaign move we've seen from her camp). But until they pick a direction, Sinn Féin have made themselves irrelevant to this election. **8) Bertie Ahern - Undeclared** **Suported by:** Definitely not Micheál Martin Bertie has been circling around a Presidential bid for a few years. He refuses to rule it out whenever he's asked. He positioned himself for one by rejoining Fianna Fáil. He knew Micheál Martin wasn't pleased with the idea, but he may have thought he could square that inside the party. Then [CMAT released her bombshell single Euro-Country](https://youtu.be/%5FSVNTv44C4g?si=cX6074kkT220pwn0&ref=thegist.ie), namechecking Bertie in her broadside on growing up with Da's killing themselves around her. And that, believe it or not, was the end of Bertie's chances. By making the financial crash a culturally live issue again, she channelled 1.21Gws of raw artistic power directly into Bertie's campaign and sent it like a DeLorean, back into all those futures lost. [Subscribe to The Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to The Gist for some small monies](#/portal/signup) [Send a One-Off tip to The Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: A Balancing Act URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-balancing-act/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T09:13:59.000Z Imagine, if you will, becoming the Minister for Justice. It’s one of the big policy Departments and is recognised to be a place for talent. It also involves a big risk of Ministers being damaged by their time there- historically due to getting too close to An Garda Síochana and then having that blow up in the Minister’s face. We don’t have to go back as far as Sean Doherty and the 1980s phone tapping scandal he presided over (which eventually took down CJ Haughey). Frances Fitzgerald resigned as a Minister and Deputy FG leader as she [got caught up in the Garda institutional response](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/frances-fitzgerald-failed-to-meet-high-standards-she-set-for-herself-1.3308922?ref=thegist.ie) to the whistleblowing of Sgt McCabe. Then Alan Shatter resigned after a [report into his actions](https://www.rte.ie/news/2014/0507/615859-shatter-timeline/?ref=thegist.ie) during the same controversy. (He later [successfully challenged](https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/alan-shatter-successful-in-court-of-appeal-case-on-critical-guerin-report?ref=thegist.ie) that report but has never held Ministerial office since) In fact, although it was the Department of Health which Brian Cowan famously described as Angola, because it had so many political landmines buried in it, no posting has been so likely to blow up under a Minister as the Department of Justice in the last decade. ### Security through insecurity Which leads us to the latest plan by the current Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan. He has taken a clear line since his appointment of announcing that he will grant any and all of wishes of An Garda Síochana when it comes to new surveillance powers. He has even promised to give them powers that his immediate predecessors, Helen McEnteee and Simon Harris had specifically rejected as excessive. So, for example, Simon Harris had denounced [the Deskerati](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-people-behind-desks/) as a shadowy force of people with terrifying horizontal wooden surfaces at their disposal, preventing him from bringing in facial recognition via CCTV. But even he had said that power should not allow for a live facial recognition system monitoring the public sphere. His proposal was to allow facial recognition, but limited to archive footage. Our new Minister wants no such limits, seeking not just a live biometric facial recognition system but also [a live biometric recognition system to recognise people](https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/irish-justice-minister-wants-real-time-frt-gait-biometrics-in-police-investigative-toolkit?ref=thegist.ie) in CCTV by other attributes like their gait. This is specifically a use case which the European Data Protection Board, the collective body of every single Data Protection Regulator in the EU, [has already determined to be illegal:](https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/documents/public-consultations/2022/guidelines-052022-use-facial-recognition%5Fen?ref=thegist.ie) > “remote processing of biometric data in public spaces for identification purposes fail to strike a fair balance between the competing private and public interests, thus constituting a disproportionate interference with the data subject’s rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter.” ### The War on Maths So we come to the Minister’s other illegal plan- breaking encryption for everyone to force platforms to give the police backdoor access to secure messaging systems, such as Apple’s iMessage or Meta’s WhatsApp. He is, at least, quite clear that this plan involves a breach of everyone’s rights to privacy and data protection. But he argues, correctly, that there are other competing rights such as security. And, he again rightly says, when rights are clashing a balance has to be struck between them. He gave a speech addressing this exact point, saying “We need to recall that the countervailing balance to the right to the individual right to privacy is frequently the collective right to security. [Collective rights need to be acknowledged and on occasion should supersede individual rights](https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-justice-home-affairs-and-migration/publications/speech-by-minister-for-justice-home-affairs-and-migration-jim-ocallaghan-a-contested-arena-balancing-competing-human-rights-in-the-area-of-justice-home-affairs-and-migration/?ref=thegist.ie).” The Minister’s problem is that both of the European Courts to which Ireland is answerable have already assessed his proposed balance and found that his outcome would be illegal. Let’s start with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In 2022, they decided on the legality of requiring a backdoor to encrypted messages in the case of [Podchasov v Russia](https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre?ref=thegist.ie#%7B%2522itemid%2522:%5B%2522001-230854%2522%5D%7D). The Minister’s argument about the balancing of collective security and individual liberty had been at the heart of the case (Though here it was being advanced by Putin’s Russia, an unfortunate intellectual bedfellow). Paragraphs 75 to 77 of the judgement contain probably the pithiest statement of the Court’s findings on the necessity and proportionality of Minister O’Callaghan’s proposed balancing of rights. The Court found that, while crimebusting and security were legitimate policy aims, it wasn’t proportionate to weaken encryption for everyone as the price of pursuing them. > it appears that in order to enable decryption of communications protected by end-to-end encryption, such as communications through Telegram’s “secret chats”, it would be necessary to weaken encryption for all users. These measures allegedly cannot be limited to specific individuals and would affect everyone indiscriminately, including individuals who pose no threat to a legitimate government interest. Weakening encryption by creating backdoors would apparently make it technically possible to perform routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal electronic communications. > Backdoors may also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously compromise the security of all users’ electronic communications. The Court takes note of the dangers of restricting encryption described by many experts in the field (see, in particular, paragraphs 28 and 34 above). > …the ICO’s statutory obligation to decrypt end-to-end encrypted communications risks amounting to a requirement that providers of such services **weaken the encryption mechanism for all users**; it is accordingly **not proportionate** to the legitimate aims pursued.” (Emphasis added) In other words, there *is* a balance to be struck between Garda surveillance powers and individual rights. But the Minister is proposing a tipping of the scales that has already been found to be illegal. In coming to that decision, the ECHR quoted the [UN's expert report on privacy in the digital age](https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5117-right-privacy-digital-age?ref=thegist.ie) which was even clearer; > *"*the impact of most encryption restrictions on the right to privacy and associated rights are disproportionate*, often affecting not only the targeted individuals but the general population. *Outright bans by Governments, or the criminalization of encryption in particular, cannot be justified* as they would prevent all users within their jurisdictions from having a secure way to communicate. Key escrow systems have significant vulnerabilities, since they depend on the integrity of the storage facility and expose stored keys to cyberattacks.* > *Moreover, mandated back doors in encryption tools create liabilities that go far beyond their usefulness with regard to specific users identified as crime suspects or security threats. They jeopardize the privacy and security of all users and expose them to unlawful interference, not only by States, but also by non-State actors, including criminal networks.* > *Licensing and registration requirements have similar disproportionate effects as they require that encryption software contain exploitable weaknesses. Such adverse effects are not necessarily limited to the iurisdiction imposing the restriction" (Again, emphasis added)* But that's not all! The Irish Government has already argued and lost repeatedly in front of the EU's top court, the CJEU in Luxembourg, when arguing that security or policing issues which *may arise in the future* should rank ahead of the *certain and concrete* personal data and privacy freedoms of everyone in the state. In both the [Digital Rights Ireland](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=7271FF6AA2F574015489594ACC1E486E?text=&docid=153045&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=7222328&ref=thegist.ie) case and the [GD case](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=257242&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=7222825&ref=thegist.ie) the court found that the Irish government's assessment of what was a proportionate interference in the general population's data and privacy rights in order to permit data retention (for potential future policing purposes) was incorrect. In GD, they set out the long history of case law on the question > it follows from the Court’s case-law that the question whether the Member States may justify a limitation on the rights and obligations laid down, inter alia, in Articles 5, 6 and 9 of Directive 2002/58 must be assessed by measuring the seriousness of the interference entailed by such a limitation and by verifying that the importance of the public interest objective pursued by that limitation is proportionate to that seriousness (judgment of 6 October 2020, *La Quadrature du Net and Others*, C‑511/18, C‑512/18 and C‑520/18, EU:C:2020:791, paragraph 131 and the case-law cited). And then it (again) ruled that interfering with the data protection and privacy rights of all of a population, on a general and indiscriminate basis, was preclueded by the Charter of Fundamental Rights. > **\[EU law\] read in the light of Articles 7, 8 and 11 and Article 52(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, must be interpreted as precluding legislative measures which, as a preventive measure for the purposes of combating serious crime and preventing serious threats to public security, provide for the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data.** The Minister knows all of the above. His Department has taken the lead in representing the losing side in each of those outings to the CJEU. His current proposal represents a continuation of the Department of Justice's long-held, Trumpian, approach to unwelcome judicial findings that their plans are illegal. It is also the same Departmental culture that planted so many of those landmines under his predecessors' political careers. When something the department wants isn't available to it, simply assert the contrary, in the face of all the existing facts, and plough on. There’s always another Minister. [Subscribe to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, but pay a bit for it](#/portal/signup) [Tip the Gist, just this once](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: Age Verification is an Epic fail URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-age-verification-is-an-epic-fail/ Last updated: 2025-07-13T20:16:39.000Z It will be no surprise to long-time Gist readers to hear that Ireland's clueless regulator of the Internet, [Coimisiún na Meán](https://www.cnam.ie/?ref=thegist.ie), has some bad ideas. This is, after all, the body who suggested that an ideal policy outcome was for children to send live selfies of themselves to porn sites. In fact, as it is relevant to the plan intended to roll into action in a fortnight, let's review the CnaM's stated plans to bring in an age verification gate for all video sharing platforms. (which is to say, almost1 all social media in a video-first media world): “Uploading documents and or a live selfie is one example” (source: [CnaM website](https://www.cnam.ie/statement-regarding-age-verification/?ref=thegist.ie)) “A requirement for a person to show their passport and then a selfie to verify they are the person on the passport” (source: [Irish Examiner](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41300860.html?ref=thegist.ie)) “A live selfie each time you want to access it and they use biometrics to check”. (source: [Irish Examiner](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41300860.html?ref=thegist.ie)) And, as always, I return to Dr. Karlin Lillington of the Irish Times [description of these proposals](https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/2024/01/25/new-broadcasting-and-online-regulator-has-not-got-off-to-an-auspicious-start/?ref=thegist.ie) to aid us in assessing them; “all absolutely mega-scale bonkers” ### Britain: The Gift That Keeps Giving It is one of the consequences of Brexit that if your country is considering some manifestly insane policy- I mean, something really really "mega-scale bonkers"- there is a greater than even chance that Britain will have done it already, with extra administrative zeal. And so it is with the idea of Age Verification for social media. The UK's equivalent of CnaM, Ofcom, is [proud to report that its Age Verification enforcement system](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/age-checks-for-online-safety--what-you-need-to-know-as-a-user?ref=thegist.ie) is coming online at the same time as ours. But, unlike the CnaM, it has built a load of tools and documentation to promote its mad idea. Whereas our regulatory body simply shouted out the window to the street below that it wants to see some square circles delivered in a fortnight, Ofcom set [deadlines](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/roadmap-to-regulation?ref=thegist.ie), built [questionnaires](https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-sites.com/formentry/RegulationChecker?ref=thegist.ie), launched a[ full enforcement programme](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/enforcement-programme-to-monitor-if-services-are-meeting-their-childrens-risk-assessment-duties-under-the-online-safety-act-2023?ref=thegist.ie) and has overseen the roll-out of those age verification systems. As an aside, one of my favourite parts of the UK's laws is that there are exemptions if you are a UK education or childcare provider (who also permits porn on your website.) Surely an invitation for the creation of a chain of PornHub x Creche and Childcare Services collabs. ![6. Do any exemptions apply to your online service? Some online services are exempt from the Act because they are internal business services or because they are provided by a public body, or by an education or childcare provider. Do any exemptions apply to your online service? Select all that apply Yes, it is an internal business service, including services such as business intranet, content management systems, or customer relationship management systems Yes, it is provided by a public body, such as Parliament, a UK public authority, or foreign government Yes, it is provided by an UK education or childcare provider No, none of the above applies](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-13-at-11.33.56.png) ### Bluesky's Epic Fail This week saw the introduction of [Bluesky's Age Verification requirements](https://bsky.social/about/blog/07-10-2025-age-assurance?ref=thegist.ie) in the UK, in response to these Ofcom requirements. These will presumably mirror how they deal with these demands in the EU when Ireland's rules lackadaisically come into force too. So we get a peep into our near future. **Spoiler: Not Good.** Instead of building their own Age Verification scheme, Bluesky decided to use one called Kids Web Services. This is a system bought by Epic Games (you know, the people who do [Fortnite](https://www.fortnite.com/?ref=thegist.ie)) and then made [available for free](https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/30/22702117/epic-games-children-privacy-safety-kids-web-services-free?ref=thegist.ie) to any developer to integrate with their service. Who doesn't love a free compliance tool? Now, I live in a house with three children, so while I have never managed to learn how to do the Floss myself, I was, at least, familiar with Epic Games in their Fortnite aspect. But I hadn't encountered their Age Verification entity before. Possibly because they launched it with talk about the Metaverse and I may therefore have just zoned out while it happened. But reading the Bluesky statement, I found myself suddenly interested in the [Kids Web Services Privacy Policy](https://www.kidswebservices.com/en-US/privacy-policy?ref=thegist.ie#Location). Especially when I found out that Kids Web Services has its EU representation office in Haddington Road, Dublin. Yep, we've been left minding the shop again. ![](https://media.tenor.com/Ls8GCuCX6dUAAAAC/bingo-bingo-bluey.gif) This is what I look like as I read Privacy Policies To access Bluesky (and whatever other entities take this free route to ticking the age verification compliance box) we will have to agree to Epic Games's system getting the following data: - Your email address - a unique ID number some, "but never all", of the following information: - your name, date of birth, mailing address, credit or debit card information, a personal identity number (such as a CPF number in Brazil, a CURP number in Mexico, certain digits of a RRN number or i-PIN in the Republic of Korea, and certain digits of a US social security number in the US), a cell phone number, an **identity document** or **face scan**." (uh...emphasis added) - "we automatically collect information about your devices (computers, phones, tablets etc.) and your use of and interactions with KWS, including in order to identify your country and language" - Device information, which includes "data about the operating systems and hardware and software versions, device identifiers, internet protocol (IP) address, login data, browser type and version, time zone setting, country and language, browser plug-in types and versions" - Usage information, which includes **site navigation... the actions you take**, the time, frequency and duration of your activities (UH....emphasis absolutely added) - your child’s age or date of birth. - your child’s country (and in the US, State) and language. Ok, so, you know, wow. That is a lot of personal data, including face scans, postal addresses, mobile phone numbers and so on. But at least we can be sure, can't we, that it's not going to be used for anything other than Age Verification? I mean, we haven't accidentally issued a legal mandate for a huge commercially invaluable data honeypot on everyone's browsing and web activity history linked to their government ID, have we? Epic Games, the people who brought us the most profitable microtransactions site aimed at children in the world, would never try to use this huge pool of data for their own commercial purposes, right? Oh no. ![Purpose: To improve and develop new products and services We may sometimes use your information to help us improve and develop products and services, including to develop updates and add new functionality, product and features based on your comments and feedback and an understanding of how you and others use them. Adult data Verification information Device and usage information Customer support information](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-13-at-13.03.23.png) Bluesky don't even have control over Epic. The Kids Web Services company isn't a Data Processor for Bluesky as Data Controller (which would let Bluesky dictate how its users' data can be used). The Privacy Policy is quite clear that "The legal entity responsible for the information that we collect through KWS is Kids Web Services Ltd (**we** / **us**). Kids Web Services Ltd belongs to the [Epic Games family](https://www.epicgames.com/site/about?ref=thegist.ie) of companies" In legal GDPR terms, they are Joint Controllers. Look, I even found the [Joint Controller Agreement](https://www.kidswebservices.com/en-US/joint-processing-arrangement?ref=thegist.ie) that sets it out. Epic even explicitly set out how all of the data they collect will be treated as an asset of the business; > "If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we may share your personal information with the acquiring or receiving entity. The categories of information we disclose and our legal basis for doing so depends on the circumstances, but would include our legitimate interest in operating, selling and expanding our business" So, yeah, we've legislated for an exciting new kind of surveillance capitalism. As always, if a service on the web is being offered for free, it just means that you (in this case the adult wishing to participate in social media) are not the customer. You are the product. ### Square Circles are hard to draw Both the CnaM in Ireland and Ofcom in the UK were tasked with performing an impossible task. They had to introduce mass surveillance of adults' interpersonal conversations with other adults by means of social media, while also, at the same time, protecting their Data Protection and Privacy rights. As you can see above, if it can be done, it hasn't been done yet. When [Karlin Lillington](https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/2024/01/25/new-broadcasting-and-online-regulator-has-not-got-off-to-an-auspicious-start/?ref=thegist.ie) wrote about this plan, she pointed out that the Age Verification bar would be at platform level, not at the level of individual pieces of content. So a person who just wanted to watch cat videos but not lose access to the full platform they were on would still have to surrender their browsing anonymity. In response, the CnaM issued a[ furious statement](https://www.cnam.ie/statement-regarding-age-verification/?ref=thegist.ie); > "She accuses us of proposing to create a porn user register and repeats baseless online claims that people would have to upload their identity documents and facial scans, ... She even suggests that this could be required when people only want to view cat videos. > She rightly says that such a proposal would be bonkers. We agree. Which is why we have neither considered it nor proposed it." This 'bonkers' outcome is, as we can see above, [exactly what has now happened](https://bsky.social/about/blog/07-10-2025-age-assurance?ref=thegist.ie). I believe CnaM when they say they never considered the consequences of their actions. But it is a pity that they were so wrapped in institutional arrogance that they didn't consider that other people, with more experience of how the internet actually worked, might know better. --- 1 You see, in all of this co-ordinated push to introduce age-verification, the unspoken winner is Meta. That's because they are the shopping centre to other platform's city streets. While they recently announced they were [specifically permitting hate speech](https://news.sky.com/story/metas-new-guidelines-allow-users-to-say-lgbt-people-are-mentally-ill-13285449?ref=thegist.ie) against certain vulnerable groups, they won't allow anything sexual on their platforms. Scream trans people shouldn't exist all you like on Facebook, Instagram or Threads. They're fine with it, just as long as you keep fully covered while doing it. These laws therefore create costs for their competitors, while leaving them with nothing extra to do. It is a classic regulatory moat. [Subscribe to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, but for some money](#/portal/signup) [Tip the Gist, for general awesomeness](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: The Price of Ugliness URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-price-of-ugliness/ Last updated: 2025-06-29T08:47:16.000Z The week started like any other. The Government was struggling to explain how it had bet its entire success on a signature housing plan that immediately fell apart when it exposed to air. In the US, the representative of the calcified sex pest wing of the Democratic Party was expected to return to be NY mayor. And in the UK, the Labour Government was discovering its plans for performative cruelty to people unable to feed or clothe themselves were a step too far for even its own MPs. But then, near the end of the week, we had a break in the usual cloud cover of events, allowing a single piercing ray of additional darkness to shine through to stab at our minds. The Minister for Public Expenditure, Jack Chambers spoke about what he had learned from the ballooning costs and systems failures in the National Children's Hospital project. Now, this isn't just idle chat. He is the Minister who will oversee what could be described as a bazooka of €165 billion in planned infrastructure expenditure over the next few years. He is also the Minister responsible for the spending up until now on that same hospital. Understanding what went wrong in that project and then making sure it doesn't happen again is going to be the difference between getting the value out of those €165 billon and just squirting it directly down a drain. Harken now, gentle reader. For the Minister speaks, and it behooves us to listen to his considered thoughts. The pearls drop. Let us [catch them](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/06/27/cost-to-take-priority-over-aesthetics-in-future-state-infrastructure-projects/??ref=thegist.ie). “**There needs to be much better discipline in cost effectiveness in projects**,” Mr Chambers said in London. “**That means making choices around cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics in some instances. There are important lessons out of the children’s hospital**,” Oh no. The Minister for Spending Vast Sums of Money on Huge Complicated Projects doesn't understand what design is. He equates it with 'aesthetics', as though the National Children’s hospital had spent an extra €100bn on getting just the desired shade of Farrow and Ball paint for the corridors. Design is a process, not a colour chart. And it was the lack of a proper design process, due to a sequence of asinine decisions taken for a mix of political and administrative short-term convenience, which triggered the National Children's Hospital's elevation to the status of the 6th most expensive hospital in the world. Don't take my word for it. At the start of 2025, the [Parliamentary Budget Office in the Houses of the Oireachtas](https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/parliamentaryBudgetOffice/2025/2025-01-30%5Fhospital-construction-costs%5Fen.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) produced a 60 page analysis on the relative costs of building the National Children's Hospital, with an eye to identifying how to minimise similar future cost overruns with the upcoming National Maternity Hospital we'll be paying for and then [giving to the nuns' designated successor](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-whose-national-maternity/). Here's what that report said about design in the Executive Summary; > Developing a high-quality, peer-reviewed, and mature design before commencing a major construction project reduces the risk of a cost overrun. It goes on (at Section 10.3 of the report) to discuss the "Design Maturity Risk". Failure to settle on a design at the start of a process, and then stick to it, means that changes and mistakes get more and more expensive to fix or implement as the project goes on. Look, there's even a chart! ![I mean it's a pretty basic chart. It just demonstrates the idea that things are more expensive and harder to fix after you pour out a load of concrete](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/06/Screenshot-2025-06-28-at-08.07.55.png) Let's cover just a tiny example of how a **lack** of planning and design in the National Children's Hospital resulted in a x10 cost increase. In the grand scheme of the project's costs, it was nothing. But in what it revealed about how the management of that project it may as well have been just pasted right into that graph above. In December 2019, a puff piece from a Chinese CCTV vendor, Hikvision, [revealed](https://ipvm.com/reports/ireland-hikvision?code=cr&ref=thegist.ie) that the National Children's Hospital had "chosen an all-Hikvision surveillance system including specialized facial recognition cameras". IPVM, [an international news site reporting on security technology](https://www.broadsheet.ie/tag/national-childrens-hospital/?ref=thegist.ie), covered the story via FOI which was, by January 2020, being picked up by Irish papers. While the international media focused on the fact that Hikvision was [under sanction](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/10/09/2019-22210/addition-of-certain-entities-to-the-entity-list?ref=thegist.ie) for involvement in human rights abuses arising out of its involvement in 'China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high technology surveillance', the local media had a more local question. Why had the National Children's Hospital bought specialised and very expensive facial recognition CCTV cameras at ten times the cost of the usual ones? What did it plan to use them for, and how could it legally implement facial recognition in a hospital full of children? Basically, the questions were- What on earth are you doing here? And their defence- the explanation they gave to everyone to make things sound better for them- was that they didn't know 'how or whether they would use them'. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/06/Facial-Recognition-CCTV-in-Children-s-hospital-headline.jpeg) Well that makes me feel much better. They expanded on this to the international press. **"It has not yet been decided which aspect of this technology’s many capabilities will be used in the new children’s hospital.** This decision will be taken nearer the opening of the hospital by Children’s Health Ireland" Remember the chart up above? The one that showed that the later you left making design decisions, the more expensive it was? Well, here the project's managers were so loathe to make a decision that they just bought the most expensive thing in the shop so that someone, later, would have the responsibility of deciding what they'd do with it. This isn’t an excess of aesthetics. This isn’t even a design-led cost. This is a cost which happened due to a lack of a design process. They were buying stuff without a set purpose in mind. The opposite of design is not efficiency, but waste. What our Minister thinks is that making things pretty, making the public realm beautiful, is a waste of money. He wants to choose to lower the aesthethic value of our entire public realm, as a matter of policy, because he thinks that will make it look like he is controlling costs. But we could end up with windowless buildings made of unpainted breeze blocks and they’ll still have 10x overruns if the political and administrative system keeps doing the same thing from a refusal to ever acknowledge its actual shortfalls. Good design isn't about cost. It is about choices. It needs someone to take responsibility to make decisions on those choices. And that, not aesthetics, is where our current system keeps falling down. ### The Gist: Not Mandatory, Not Compulsory, Not Legal URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-not-mandatory-not-compulsory-not-legal/ Last updated: 2025-07-13T21:35:09.000Z In 2015, while at home looking after our new baby, my wife received a letter from the Department of Social Protection telling her that she needed to attend a social welfare office to be photographed for a Public Services Card or have her child benefit payment cut off. As she did not want to drag an infant out to a government office she solved this problem the sensible way. She handed me the letter and said "Deal with that." I [then](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2017/08/23/public-services-card-id-database-id-card/?ref=thegist.ie) [set about](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2017/11/27/data-sharing-agreement-re-public-services-card/?ref=thegist.ie) [obliging her](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2018/07/13/the-facial-images-on-the-psc-are-biometric-data/?ref=thegist.ie) [in her](https://www.kildarestreet.com/committees/?id=2018-02-08a.1039&s=simon+mcgarr+public+service+card+risk+major%3A9&ref=thegist.ie#g1046) [request](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/government-backs-down-on-public-services-card-1.4752047?ref=thegist.ie). Today the Data Protection Commissioner found that the Department of Social Protection - Infringed Articles 5(1)(a), 6(1), and 9(1) GDPR by failing to identify a valid lawful basis for the collection of biometric data in connection with SAFE 2 registration at the time of the inquiry; - Having regard to the preceding finding, infringed Article 5(1)(e) GDPR by retaining biometric data collected as part of SAFE 2 registration; - Infringed Articles 13(1)(c) and 13(2)(a) GDPR by failing to put in place suitably transparent information to data subjects as regards SAFE 2 registration; and - Infringed Articles 35(7)(b) and (c) GDPR by failing to include certain details in the Data Protection Impact Assessment that it carried out in relation to SAFE 2 registration. This is on top of the DPC's earlier findings that public bodies outside the Department of Social Protection couldn't insist that people accessing services had to have a PSC card. Today's decision unravels the last patch of sand for the government's claims that the PSC card project, and its processing of all of the cardholder's biometric facial data, had a lawful basis. ### Deny, Delay... become an MEP? This is a project which has cost over €117 million euro (as of 2021). At every turn the state and Ministers have engaged in Trumpian denials of facts that were as plain as day. Perhaps to solve the problem that there was no lawful basis for biometric processing of people's faces, the then Minister Regina Doherty (now an MEP) stood up and told the Dáil "We don't collect biometric data. We collect and store photographs." Sure. But they were photographs of people's faces. We know that's what they were because *every card had the biometric photograph on the front of it*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/06/PSC-Standard.jpeg) Hey, isn't that a face over there? She went further and said her Department "does not ask for or collect biometric data from its customers such as fingerprints, retinal scans or any other items that could be listed as biometric data". > You can see that strange exchange here: [pic.twitter.com/rhPtRlxc4O](https://t.co/rhPtRlxc4O?ref=thegist.ie) > > — Simon McGarr @Tupp\_ed@mastodon.ie (@Tupp\_Ed) [May 3, 2018](https://twitter.com/Tupp%5FEd/status/992115922109370368?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) But at the same time she was saying this the Department was [changing its own references to processing biometric data in its Privacy notice](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/department-ordered-changes-to-biometric-privacy-on-website-1.3563006??ref=thegist.ie)\- an action taken on the instruction of its [Secretary General](https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-social-protection/organisation-information/department-of-social-protection-who-does-what/?ref=thegist.ie#secretary-general) when its Data Protection Officer was 'on leave'. And [it was awarding one of the PSC contracts ](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/augmented-identity-firm-gets-9m-contract-for-public-services-cards-1.3555710?ref=thegist.ie)to manufacture the PSC cards to a company called Biometric Card Services. It was also tendering for the [transfer of millions of biometric facial images](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/minister-insists-no-biometrics-collected-in-card-technology-upgrade-1.3483378?ref=thegist.ie), while the Minister was asserting it didn't collect biometric data. The combination of the blunt denial of objective reality and the gross threat to the wellbeing of the people the Department is meant to serve has become the hallmark of the state's response to screwing up on data projects. This is as though the [Department of Education threatened to defund the education of 30% of primary school children because schools wouldn't hand over their data](https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2015/06/18/data-protection-commissioner-finds-pod-was-and-still-is-unlawful/?ref=thegist.ie), while also asserting children's special-needs health data wasn't sensitive and wouldn't be treated as such. [Mad idea](http://circulars.gov.ie/pdf/circular/education/2014/17.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). Who could imagine such a thing? ### Regulator in a bottle The DPC's decision today has a [good headline position](https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/press-releases/dpc-announces-conclusion-investigation-use-facial-matching-technology-connection-public-services?ref=thegist.ie). They issued the biggest ever fine against a state body and confirmed it was illegal to process the biometric data under multiple sections of the GDPR. But let's look at their list of actions they took on foot of that mass, population-scale illegal gathering and processing of biometric data. > (1) reprimanded the DSP, > (2) issued administrative fines totalling €550,000, and > (3) issued an order to the DSP requiring it to cease processing of biometric data in connection with SAFE 2 registration within 9 months of this decision if the DSP cannot identify a valid lawful basis. So, you see number (3) there? That there is absolutely nuts. They have found the processing is illegal, after nearly a decade of the Department trying to explain why it isn't illegal. But then they say the Department can keep illegally processing the illegally held data for another 9 months. Sorry. On what basis can the DPC make a finding of illegal processing but also say it can keep happening? This is turtles all the way down, where the turtles are made of comically bad decisions by state actors to keep doing or facilitating illegal things. The worst kind of turtles. In effect, the DPC has announced 9 months of [The Purge](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the%5Fpurge?ref=thegist.ie), but for your biometric data. Here's what Digital Rights Ireland [said in response](https://www.digitalrights.ie/digital-rights-ireland-welcomes-e550000-fine-for-illegal-psc-biometric-data-gathering/?ref=thegist.ie); > **Faced with the largest unlawful collection of sensitive biometric data Ireland has ever seen, the regulator has bottled it.** The DPC knows this biometric data processing has no lawful basis. It had to say it- at last and long after it ought to have done so. But it just doesn't have the guts to tell the state to delete its illegal database. And a regulator that won't regulate the state is no regulator at all. [Subscribe to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, for some money](#/portal/signup) [Tip the Gist gratuitously](#/portal/support) ### Guest Gist: Empires of Certainty URL: https://www.thegist.ie/guest-gist-empires-of-certainty/ Last updated: 2025-06-01T10:00:00.000Z ### **On the Comfort of being wrong about other people** For a few weeks it was hard to [turn on the radio](https://freakonomics.com/podcast/were-not-getting-sicker-were-overdiagnosed/?ref=thegist.ie), [listen to a podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/are-we-too-quick-to-diagnose-with-neurologist-dr/id1370990314?i=1000710360364&ref=thegist.ie) or [open a paper ](https://www.irishtimes.com/health/your-family/2025/04/05/adhd-children-are-now-in-a-queue-with-50-year-old-adults-for-a-drug-that-is-in-short-supply/?ref=thegist.ie)without seeing Suzanne O’Sullivan’s book ‘The Age of Diagnosis’. The commentariat, it seems had found their white knight, someone with deep compassion for patients speaking “common sense” and raising the alarm about the epidemic of overdiagnosis in society. Like Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling who strayed into quackery when writing on vitamin C, O’Sullivan, while an expert, has no expertise in anything she writes about in her book. She is more condescending than compassionate and little of what she writes makes sense, common or otherwise once you scratch beneath the surface. Clever people being sincerely, badly and damagingly wrong is a tale as old as time. The great physicians of classical Greece,—Hippocrates, Plato, Galen—conjured up one of medicine’s more bizarre blunders: the idea of “wandering womb” while debating the mysteries of the female body. They believed that the uterus, dissatisfied or underused, might decide to go traveling inside the female body, pressing against the lungs, climbing toward the throat, causing breathlessness, fainting, and what would centuries later be codified as “hysteria”. This was dogma, not a metaphor, a belief that stood mostly unchallenged for over a thousand years. The treatment? Fragrant compresses to entice the womb back to its proper home. Or, preferably, marriage. It’s funny really what happens when you can’t really see what’s happening inside another person and you don’t check in or believe their actual experiences. Much like our intrepid Greeks, O’Sullivan cries hysteria when there are deeper and more challenging issues at work. The tl;dr of the book starts with a chapter on Huntington’s Disease and uses the idea of diagnosis without useful treatment as the rough material on which to build its house of straw. She then walks us through a number of chapters including on Lyme’s Disease and Long Covid, Austim, The Cancer Gene, and ADHD, Depression and Neurodiversity. Wittigenstein, in the original notion of “you don’t have to comment on everything”, once said “*Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent*”. A former manager of mine put it more prosaically saying “opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one”. To try and avoid this arsehole trap I’ll stay focus on two of the topics here rather than speaking about things I’ve no experience of in ways that are meaningless and misleading. ### It's Binaries again It’s important to say that O’Sullivan goes wrong from the start The idea of the wandering womb seems absurd. And what is amusing now was once settled orthodoxy. The lesson is sobering: confident pronouncements by experts—especially about human behaviour—often age badly. It’s not that long ago that psychiatrists were confident that “refrigerator mothers” caused Autism. What begins as cautious insight hardens into rigid dogma, sustained more by culture and ideology than evidence. And when medical certainty insists on defining people without listening to them, it moves from error to harm. And this is my primary concern about this book. Not that it is wrong. It is very badly wrong, of course, but it is also very actively harmful. O’Sullivan, argues for the existence of an “over-diagnosis” of both ADHD and Autism, particularly among adults. In doing so, she adopts a tone that pulses back and forth between concern and condescension, underpinned by a worldview that too often undermines people’s agency. The effect isn’t rhetorical—it echoes more broadly through how society treats diagnosis, support, and the validity of lived experience more generally. O’Sullivan’s ADHD chapter rests on an all-too-familiar binary: the assumption that the world is divided into the truly disordered and the merely distracted. She dismisses the surge in adult diagnoses as the product of lowered diagnostic thresholds and cultural trends, rather than the outcome of growing awareness and better access to care. In doing so, she ignores an extensive body of research: neuroimaging studies identifying structural and functional differences in the ADHD brain (Hoogman et al., 2017), and genetic analyses confirming its heritability (Faraone & Larsson, 2019). O’Sullivan’s argument comes across less as a critique of diagnostic inflation and more as a refusal to accept that complex traits may manifest differently across lifespans and different social settings. O’Sullivan frequently undermines her own arguments. She at least recognises that ADHD is real—“a person with a first-degree relative with ADHD has a five- to ten-fold higher chance of having ADHD than other people.” She notes that ADHD rates can correlate with childhood adversity and then suggests that “stimulant drugs would never be recommended to counteract childhood adversity but they can be given if ADHD is viewed as a neurotransmitter imbalance in the brain.” The fact that “a person with a first-degree relative with ADHD has a five- to ten-fold higher chance of having ADHD” indicates a genetic risk factor. At the same time, childhood adversity could exacerbate or unmask these underlying vulnerabilities, making ADHD symptoms more pronounced or harder to manage. Recognising adversity as a contributing factor does not negate the reality of ADHD any more than acknowledging that stress can exacerbate high blood pressure negates the physiological basis of hypertension. No one would suggest that an adult with hypertension shouldn’t take blood pressure medication because stress might have contributed to it in the first place. She also notes in relation to drugs that “where drugs may work is to help people focus on repetitive, mundane tasks. But that does not necessarily translate to an improvement in creativity or in the sort of complex mental abilities that matter more to relationships, work, or success.” At this point, one wonders if O’Sullivan has actually met and spoken to people with ADHD. People with ADHD are some of the most wildly creative individuals imaginable, with extremely complex mental acuity. It’s the mundane tasks that frequently derail them. The lived experience of people whose lives have improved with support and treatment, both pharmacological and psychological, is quite important. ### Counting things does not increase their number There is a certain irony to her claim that people are rushing toward an ADHD diagnosis as if it were a new wellness trend. Anyone who has ever faced the skepticism of a GP, the maze of assessment processes, or the social stigma that still clings to psychiatric labels, knows this isn’t an impulsive Amazon purchase. It’s a hard-fought and hard-won recognition of the truth and reality. Her autism chapter follows a similar arc, paternalism in polite prose. Here, O’Sullivan again argues that diagnostic expansion has led to overreach. She suggests that the inclusion of less visibly impaired individuals—especially those diagnosed in adulthood—somehow dilutes the meaning of autism. Her argument relies on conflating diagnostic expansion with diagnostic laxity. O'Sullivan suggests autism is increasingly diagnosed without robust clinical justification. However, empirical data reveals autism has historically been under-recognised, particularly in females, ethnic minorities, and adults, whose traits were masked or misunderstood for decades. Recent increases in diagnosis correlate more closely with improved awareness, refined diagnostic criteria, and enhanced accessibility to healthcare rather than diagnostic laxity (Lai et al., 2015; Brugha et al., 2011). The greater than three-fold increase in autism diagnoses among students in special education programs in the United States between 2000 and 2010 may be due in large part to the reclassification of individuals who previously would have been diagnosed with other intellectual disability disorders, according to new research. [https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/increasing-prevalence-autism-due-part-changing-diagnoses](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/increasing-prevalence-autism-due-part-changing-diagnoses?ref=thegist.ie) Her tone is one of genteel skepticism—a well-mannered doubt that cloaks a deeply troubling assumption: that those who claim an autistic identity later in life are, perhaps, mistaken. The implication is that people can’t be trusted to narrate their own experience. In doing so, she revives a medical paternalism reminiscent of the Victorian physician prescribing fresh air and cold baths for hysteria. She conflates genuine diagnostic expansion—correcting historic under-diagnosis—with over-diagnosis. Current research clearly distinguishes between recognising previously overlooked autistic presentations and inappropriate diagnosis, with evidence predominantly supporting the former (Happé & Frith, 2020). ### People should be the authors of their own lives I’m going to take both autism and ADHD together under the broad umbrella of ‘neurodiversty’ but it’s a term I’m not particularly fond of because it suggests there is an neurotypical and normal objective standard. O’Sullivan decries diagnostic expansion as irresponsible. Her argument relies heavily on the assumption that there exists a clear, definable line between “normal” and “abnormal” human experience, a line that she suggests contemporary medicine has irresponsibly blurred. Yet decades of neurobiological research complicate this neat binary. ADHD and Autism are profoundly complex neurodevelopmental conditions, validated by substantial scientific evidence demonstrating consistent structural and functional brain differences. Studies robustly indicate alterations in dopamine regulation and executive functioning pathways in those with ADHD. Genetic research underscores the hereditary nature of both Autism and ADHD studies indicating heritability rates upwards of 70-80%. This is reflected in a common experience among parents of those with ADHD and Autism. One of the most common tropes these days is parents of those with Autism and ADHD being diagnosed on the back of their children being diagnosed. Children struggling are brought to specialists by concerned parents whose own struggles were never recognised and whose lives were circumscribed by a society that neither understood them or enabled them to flourish. This leading to diagnosis by adults much later in their lives. Moreover, the lived experience of individuals with ADHD presents a narrative fundamentally different from O’Sullivan’s portrayal. Adult diagnoses often bring profound relief, validation, and empowerment. Individuals report transformative moments upon diagnosis, expressing sentiments like finally having the “missing piece” that clarifies lifelong struggles. Women in particular, whose symptoms frequently express as anxiety or depression, find immense validation in recognising their experiences through an ADHD lens. Popular narratives showcase how diagnosis often catalyses profound positive changes in self-understanding, interpersonal relationships, and overall life trajectory. In response, O’Sullivan argues that these positive outcomes mask deeper harms—chief among them, a dependency on medication and accommodations that could undermine resilience. She dismisses stimulant medications, casting doubt on their long-term efficacy and suggesting that perceived benefits might be placebo-driven. Yet her critique starkly contrasts empirical findings published in authoritative journals like *Pediatrics* and corroborated by systematic reviews, which unequivocally demonstrate that stimulant medication significantly improves not only core ADHD symptoms but also academic, social, and occupational functioning. O’Sullivan’s argument is an ideological one. Much like those who decry the moral failure of those whose obesity is fixed by Ozempic rather than willpower. ### Suffering as virtue went out with anesthetics O’Sullivan’s skepticism mirrors a broader societal suspicion toward neurodiversity and chronic illness—an insistence that true suffering must always visibly differentiate itself from everyday difficulty. There is similar paternalism in how society approaches autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, and even Long Covid. Individuals suffering from chronic fatigue or Long Covid frequently encounter disbelief and minimisation, their subjective experiences brushed aside by a medical establishment more invested in neat explanations than in the messy reality of lived experience. Transgender individuals face comparable paternalistic narratives. Their self-understanding and expressed identities are frequently subject to gatekeeping from medical and psychological authorities who presume to define what is and isn't valid about their inner realities. This insistence that external observers know best—the paternalistic folk belief that medical and psychological professionals understand a person’s internal landscape better than the individuals themselves—mirrors precisely the stance O’Sullivan implicitly adopts in her discussion of ADHD. O’Sullivan’s broad assertion that the label of ADHD or Autism can lead to bullying or a lack of striving for normality in a person's life ignores what actually happens to children with Autism and ADHD. These children are frequently bullied and isolated in school and society. The complex adverse life events that O’Sullivan suggests are part of a polygenic nature of ADHD are so co-mingled with the presence of ADHD that they are likely impossible to disentangle. The profound relief that people get from a diagnosis of ADHD and autism in later life, a lifting, sometimes, of shame and understanding of their self, is often tied to the grief of what was lost by not knowing earlier—opportunities forgone, relationships lost, time and energy wasted. O’Sullivan’s arguments against diagnosis are Victorian in nature, suggesting people won’t struggle enough with a diagnosis. There is a very dangerous and toxic notion at work here. People with ADHD and Autism are not merrily going about their lives striving. They are already labelled: flighty, fidgety, restless, forgetful, thoughtless, rude, weird, clumsy, shy, trouble. These labels become part of people's identity as they internalise societal expectations, seeing themselves as lazy, damaged, and leading to the types of anxiety and depression that are so often found with autism and ADHD The notion that struggling is inherently virtuous stems from a cultural narrative that equates effort with moral worth. But this framing fails to consider that not all struggles are chosen, nor are they all equal nor are the all valuable. Struggling, in and of itself, is not a virtue. The circumstances of a person’s struggle—social, economic, neurological—matter greatly. A person born into privilege might “struggle” to meet deadlines; a person with ADHD may experience cognitive paralysis doing the same. The glorification of ‘grit’ can encourage burnout, masking deeper dysfunctions. People are celebrated for “pushing through” rather than being supported in sustainable, compassionate ways. This distorts both individual well-being and collective understanding of health. The effort expended can be incomparable. When we valorise struggle, we risk making suffering a performance of character. People who are constantly pushing through adversity may be applauded, while those who seek help, accommodations, or alternative paths may be unfairly judged as weak or lazy. This creates a toxic cycle where pain is seen as noble, and easing it is seen as failure. The notion is that what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger embedded deeply in our toxic culture. Frequently what doesn’t kill you leaves you anxious or depressed, broken or humiliated and limits your potential flourishing as a human. ### Bad science has worse results The potential impacts of O’Sullivan’s assertions are substantial and troubling. By portraying ADHD diagnosis as predominantly unjustified, her arguments risk discouraging individuals from seeking necessary medical care and support, potentially exacerbating their difficulties and isolation. Families might become hesitant to pursue or accept diagnosis and intervention, depriving their children of critical early support. Healthcare providers may become reluctant to diagnose ADHD, undermining their ability to offer evidence-based treatments and supportive accommodations. Policymakers influenced by such scepticism might restrict funding, resources, and accommodations necessary for ADHD individuals to thrive educationally, occupationally, and socially. Support for neurodiversity is chronically underfunded, particularly in Ireland. And this is where the mask slips with O’Sullivan. She claims a number of times that this isn’t a question of money but effectively vilifies people better able to mask autism or ADHD from those who are really worthy of care including profoundly autistic individuals who can’t live unaided. This cuts through much of her discussions. Robert Chapman, in *Empire of Normality*, shows how capitalism, and the demands of neatly packaged predictable people profoundly impacts neurodiverse people. O’Sullivans’ repeated paternalistic stances serves to entrench stigma. It serves to reinforce a narrative that individuals seeking diagnosis and support are incapable of accurately understanding their own experiences and needs. Such narratives further marginalise neurodiverse individuals, disempowering them and diminishing their autonomy in critical decisions about their healthcare and life trajectories. To move beyond these deeply problematic framings, a more scientifically accurate, philosophically sound, and ethically respectful approach to neurodiverse conversation is required. Such an approach must begin by unequivocally recognising neurodiversity as a legitimate developmental difference, validated by extensive empirical research, rather than dismissing it as mere medicalisation. It should embrace intersectionality, explicitly recognising that neurodiversity intersects with other dimensions of identity, necessitating tailored, inclusive support frameworks sensitive to diverse lived experiences. In both chapters, O’Sullivan’s scepticism is couched in the language of caution and scientific integrity, but it rests on a flawed philosophical foundation. She consistently positions neurotypicality as the gold standard, against which all deviation must be measured—and usually found wanting. There’s little room in her framework for neurodiversity as a natural variation in human cognition. This is a misstep not only scientifically, but ethically. ### Difference is not disordered Philosopher Robert Chapman, in *Empire of Normality*, critiques precisely this tendency: to view neurological difference as disorder rather than diversity. Chapman argues that our understanding of conditions like autism and ADHD has been shaped more by capitalism’s demand for conformity than by genuine science. After all, what makes ADHD problematic? A brain wired for stimulation and spontaneity—or a school and work culture designed for quiet compliance? Who defines dysfunction: the individual, or the system they’re trying to survive in? The distortion of science to serve cultural narratives is not new. Naomi Oreskes, in her work on climate denialism and the misuse of scientific authority, has shown how doubt can be manufactured by selectively quoting data, dismissing consensus, or privileging anecdote over evidence. O’Sullivan’s chapters fall into a similar trap. She cherry-picks studies, ignores volumes of contradictory evidence, and appeals to an outdated ideal of scientific gatekeeping—where knowledge flows from expert to layperson, not collaboratively or democratically. In this framing, ADHD and autism are not real unless an expert deems them so. This not only misrepresents the scientific literature but fundamentally denies the epistemic authority (who you trust as a reliable source of knowledge and expertise) of neurodivergent individuals to speak for themselves. Two of the best books on the mind I’ve ever read are Robert Chapman’s critique of the “Empire of Normality” and Richard Bentall’s “Doctoring the Mind”. Both are person-centered approaches to mental health, that begin by challenging the very notion of normality that so often governs society’s understanding of neurodiversity. Chapman contends that the “empire” is upheld by institutions and cultural narratives that pathologise cognitive differences and marginalise those who diverge from a narrowly defined norm. Bentall, meanwhile, critiques the rigidity of traditional psychiatric diagnoses, advocating a more holistic view that takes into account individual experiences, social factors, and psychological well-being alongside biological elements. Joining these perspectives acknowledges the complexity of ADHD and autism by highlighting the interplay between biology, personal narratives, and societal structures. Rather than casting these conditions solely in terms of deficits measured against normative standards, both Chapman and Bentall encourage us to consider the unique ways in which neurodivergent individuals process, perceive, and engage with the world. By reframing such differences as variations along a continuum—rather than strictly disordered functioning—this approach validates a range of strengths, abilities, and sensitivities that deserve recognition and accommodation. Crucially, Chapman’s emphasis on dismantling “normality” dovetails with Bentall’s argument that environmental and social factors must be addressed if we are to truly support neurodivergent people. Schools, workplaces, and public spaces often fail to meet their needs, intensifying challenges that could otherwise be mitigated through structural changes and inclusive policies. Equally important is the recognition of individual agency: both theorists champion the voices of those with ADHD or autism in defining what support looks like, rather than imposing top-down clinical or educational interventions that may ignore people’s subjective realities. ### Improving society helps everyone Finally, this synthesis invites a deeper cultural shift. Instead of focusing on “fixing” individuals to fit a narrow mould, we can and we should look to transform the broader social environment. Policy reforms, flexible educational approaches, and community-based resources can collectively create space for neurodiverse ways of thinking and learning. When such inclusive frameworks become the norm, ADHD and Autism cease to be viewed primarily as medical pathologies and are instead understood as natural cognitive variations within the human family—ones that can bring distinctive strengths and perspectives when valued and supported. So what would a more inclusive, scientifically true, philosophically robust and morally just alternative look like? First, it would start by centering lived experience alongside empirical evidence. This is about science and truth. As Richard Bentall and others in the critical psychiatry tradition remind us, no diagnosis is meaningful unless it helps someone make sense of their life. The purpose of psychiatry is not to impose labels but to foster understanding and growth. Second, it would adopt a strengths-based, intersectional approach—recognising that ADHD and Autism do not manifest in a vacuum, but interact with gender, race, class, and culture in complex ways. Third, it would embrace participatory research, where neurodivergent people are not just subjects but co-creators of knowledge. The different between what is said here and what is known to be true is an abyss. O’Sullivan is decrying objective reality in the guise of concern. Finally, it would tell better stories. Stories that do not dismiss paternalistically but locate it ethically. Stories that use science not as a gate but as a bridge. Stories that illuminate difference without pathologising it. Stephen J Gould once wrote, “The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinise.” It’s time we scrutinised the stories we tell about neurodivergence. And it’s time we wrote new ones—truer, kinder, and more complete ones. ### Fighting monsters before they grow Central to reforming discussions around ADHD and Autism is adopting a humanistic, strengths-based model. This model should emphasise dignity, agency, autonomy, and respect for individuals. Rather than viewing people as passive recipients of medical interventions, we must see them as active participants capable of defining and directing their own care and support strategies. Historical and ongoing challenges faced by individuals within healthcare and social systems should inform a compassionate and inclusive approach to policy and practice. Practical strategies must involve promoting participatory research methodologies, ensuring that individuals play central roles in shaping research agendas, designing interventions, and interpreting outcomes. Such participatory frameworks enrich our understanding and increase the likelihood of creating genuinely supportive and effective strategies that respect the autonomy and lived realities of people. The was a speech in Andor Episode 9 where Mon Mothma say’s *“The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest*”. It’s a speech squarely aimed a certain political actors. And it reflects what we’re seeing more broadly in society. Particularly in the US and the UK and laundered not infrequently into Irish media. On Autism, ADHD on Long Covid, and with Transgender people. I don’t think O’Sullivan is a monster, though she monstering people. She has rejected the objective reality and the science and opened the door to monsters. Policy and practice should reflect a commitment to restructuring societal systems—educational, occupational, and social—that are inherently intolerant of cognitive diversity. We need to get to reality, not what’s comfortable for O’Sullivan and her fans. Flexible educational approaches, inclusive workplace accommodations, and societal recognition of diverse cognitive styles can mitigate the inherent biases perpetuated by rigid capitalist expectations. Ultimately, the critique of O’Sullivan’s position underscores that the core issue is not an epidemic of diagnosis but an epidemic of societal intolerance towards cognitive diversity. Her paternalistic framing, inadvertently or deliberately, strengthens the oppressive norms she ostensibly challenges. True progress demands moving beyond paternalism towards genuine inclusivity, empowering individuals with respect for their diverse experiences and autonomy. Only then can our conversations align with scientific accuracy, philosophical integrity, and the fundamental dignity of lived experience that a turn towards the truth brings. Let me end, with a story. In the early 2000s, a young woman named Lydia Brown began blogging about their experience as an autistic person—challenging stereotypes, pushing back against deficit narratives, and coining phrases that would go on to reshape the discourse around autism. A nonbinary autistic disability rights advocate, writer, and scholar whose work foregrounds intersectionality and self-advocacy, Brown didn’t wait for institutional permission to be heard. They wrote, organised, and helped build a thriving self-advocacy movement that continues to influence policy, language, and practice to this day. They weren’t the subject of a clinical study—they authored their own. Brown’s blog *Autistic Hoya* and their co-edited anthology *All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living with Racialised Autism*, highlights the voices of autistic people of color and redefines what inclusion can look like. And in an Irish context read “Wired our Own Way” for stories of the voices of Autistic people in their own words. In this, they exemplify what happens when agency is returned to those too often spoken about and too rarely listened to. The consequences aren’t disruptive—they were transformative. Not only for them, but for an entire generation of people who, in hearing someone else speak truthfully, were empowered to speak their own. *Dermot Casey is CEO of IRDG (Industry Research and Development Group). He was COO of Storyful and has been an adjunct lecturer at the UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School and is a Board Member of the NSAI (National Standards Authority of Ireland).* ### Things mentioned · Bentall, Richard. Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. Penguin Books, 2004. · Benthall, Richard. Doctoring the Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail Penguin Books, 2010 · Brown, Lydia X. Z., et al., editors. All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living with Racialized Autism. DragonBee Press, 2017\. The publication was suspended in 2021 because We currently plan to take a break before announcing a formal plan to continue with publication of a second, revised edition of the anthology that will both address the harm caused in the original edition and provide an important, necessary resource for autistic people of color. [https://autismandrace.com/all-the-weight-of-our-dreams-anthology/](https://autismandrace.com/all-the-weight-of-our-dreams-anthology/?ref=thegist.ie) · Brugha, T. S., et al. “Epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adults in the Community in England.” Archives of General Psychiatry, vol. 68, no. 5, 2011, pp. 459–465\. DOI: [10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.38](https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.38?ref=thegist.ie) · Chapman, Robert. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Penguin, 2023\. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451379/empire-of-normality · Faraone, Stephen V., and Henrik Larsson. “Genetics of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Molecular Psychiatry, vol. 24, no. 4, 2019, pp. 562–575\. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29892054/ · Gould, Stephen Jay. The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. W. W. Norton & Company, 1985\. Stephen Jay Gould: [“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize.”](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/107266-the-most-erroneous-stories-are-those-we-think-we-know?ref=thegist.ie) · Happé, Francesca, and Uta Frith. “Looking Back to Look Forward: Changes in the Concept of Autism and Implications for Future Research.” [Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 61, no. 3, 2020, pp. 218–222](https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcpp.13176?ref=thegist.ie). · Hoogman, Martine, et al. “Subcortical Brain Volume Differences in Participants with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Children and Adults: A Cross-Sectional Mega-Analysis.” [The Lancet Psychiatry, vol. 4, no. 4, 2017, pp. 310–319\. ](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28219628/?ref=thegist.ie) · Lai, Meng-Chuan, et al. “Sex/Gender Differences and Autism: Setting the Scene for Future Research.” [Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 54, no. 1, 2015, pp. 11–24](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4284309/?ref=thegist.ie). · Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. [Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, 2010](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/merchants-of-doubt-9781608193943/?ref=thegist.ie). --- Hello all, Simon here. My thanks to Dermot for his guest essay on a topic that agitated me when I saw it appear as a flavour of the month yap-talker topic. He's addressed it fifty times better than I would have. I thought it was particularly suitable as a Gist as it touches on many of the themes of our last few months. The dangers of [allowing imperial binaries which insist on people being one thing or another](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-trans-rights-are-data-rights/), instead of accepting that humanity exists on a spectrum. The fact that seeking an ADHD diagnosis involves a person becoming the primary author of their own lives is also the key insight in data proteciton law. It is also one of the stongest assurances of having people treated with dignity. And, of course the fact it ends in a bunch of further reading. ### The Gist: Guns, Shannon and VAT URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-guns-shannon-and-vat/ Last updated: 2025-05-26T09:01:35.000Z Brazenly, Donald Trump accepted a personal gift of a $500m golden “palace in the sky” without paying for it. But, while we wait for the formal renaming of Air Force One to the Gilt-y As Charged, this week it was another airplane that topped the news. We had the experience of watching, live, as a group of people were illegally renditioned by the Trump regime from the US to an intended destination of South Sudan, in direct [breach of a US Court order](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/south-sudan-deportation.html?ref=thegist.ie). And, to add some local interest, [the plane stopped off in Shannon along the way](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22515224/?ref=thegist.ie), making Ireland ([once again](https://www.ihrec.ie/download/pdf/ihrc%5Frendition%5Freport%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=thegist.ie)) a part of the US extraordinary rendition infrastructure. ![Map of the world, with the classic red line showing flight from Texas to Shannon, and then on to Djibouti](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-25-at-13.00.35.png) As an extra quirk, [Gillian Brockell](https://hardghistory.ghost.io/a-private-jet-to-hell/?ref=thegist.ie), a journalist who identified the private-sector Gulfstream plane being used while it was in the air across the Atlantic, realised that it was heading towards Shannon, though it had not filed an official destination. So she called the local Garda station and told them that there was an aircraft on the ground in Shannon, and that the people in charge of it were possibly keeping people detained in that civillian aircraft without any legal basis. She spent 13 minutes talking to the police and gave them all the info she could. (There's a really [good interview with her from Morning Ireland here](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22515224/?ref=thegist.ie)). After about three hours, the plane took off again from Shannon, with the detainees still on board. Its next stop was Djibouti, where there is a US military base. And it hasn't got from there to South Sudan yet. ![A labelled political map of the horn of Africa](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-25-at-12.18.05.png) Look, I'm not pretending I didn't have to look up where everything was. We can talk about the details of this particular flight with considerable certainty because Trump [posted one of his blustering screeds on his grifty website](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-deportations-south-sudan.html?ref=thegist.ie). Amongst the all-caps and exclamation marks, he confirmed that the renditioned men *had* been on the plane identified by Gillian Brockell (and later identified again by the NY Times, who rather churlishly didn't cite her earlier work) *and* that the plane also carried "a huge number" of ICE agents *and* that the intended rendition onwards to South Sudan was blocked because of the US Court order undermining the legality of the plan. In other words, it appears that whoever is in charge in Djibouti was more effective in respecting human rights law than Ireland managed to be. ### **That time we facilitated torture** We have been here before, of course. Here's the [2007 Irish Human Rights Commission's report ](https://www.ihrec.ie/download/pdf/ihrc%5Frendition%5Freport%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=thegist.ie)on Ireland's role in the George W Bush era of extraordinary renditions of individuals for the purposes of torture abroad. This was expanded upon by the Open Society's Justice Initiative's 2013 report ["GLOBALIZING TORTURE: CIA SECRET DETENTION AND EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION",](http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/globalizing-torture-20120205.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) which determined that [Ireland had "facilitated" the CIA rendition and torture project](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland-facilitated-cia-renditions-1.1254760?ref=thegist.ie). Furthermore, the question of planes landing in Shannon and flying on to Israel has also triggered questions as to whether Ireland is being used as a refuelling stop in the delivery of arms to Israel's government while it prosecutes its military action against the people of Gaza. The reason that these are still only questions- as yet unanswered- is that the government declines to have officials inspect the planes which land. Indeed, [An Garda Síochana seem as determined as they were in the Bush era](http://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/cia/documents/complaint-Tim-Hourigan-US-aircraft-Shannon.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) to place the level of evidence required to trigger an examination of what might be on one of these planes so high that it would be impossible for any member of the public to meet it. The view taken then was that police would only inspect US planes if a member of the public could already prove that there were prisoners (or arms shipments or even undeclared restricted items such as guns) on board. Here's how the Irish Human Rights Commission described the Irish State position. > The Government also appears to have put the onus of producing evidence regarding suspect aircraft on to the private citizen. It has requested that if any private citizen has evidence that aircraft have been used for ‘extraordinary rendition’, such information should be given to An Garda Síochána for investigation. ### The Capone Gambit A few months ago [Lelia Doolan](https://www.irishtimes.com/photography/2024/05/12/in-pictures-woman-celebrates-90th-birthday-with-nice-and-easy-charity-skydive/?ref=thegist.ie) assessed the legal situation regarding the treatment of planes used by the US government stopping at Shannon. She wrote to the Attorney General to put him on notice that she had concerns that Ireland was not complying with its duties of systemic inspection of planes for cargo under EU VAT law. Article 2.1 of [Directive 2006/112](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32006L0112&ref=thegist.ie) on VAT confirms that the “importation of goods” shall be subject to VAT. Article 85 specifies that the taxable amount should be based on the value for customs purposes. Interestingly, Article 143 allows for a VAT exemption for goods transiting through a member state to another member state, but only if goods details are detailed and declared. So, if you were importing purchased arms into Shannon airport for onward delivery to Israel, Ireland would be the only point where VAT could be charged on that cargo, as Israel is not a second EU member state. ### Customs and Exiles The EU is very hot on the common application of Union Customs controls, (VAT is one of the Union's sources of funding). It has a Code to ensure that everyone holds to the same standard. And it sues member states it thinks haven’t been adequately vigorous in applying the rules. In the case of [C-213/19 (Commission vs. UK)](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=76B241BF11EFF5B8D3B0F937C8966C30?text=&docid=255244&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=5346967&ref=thegist.ie), it was emphasized that member states must adhere to that common Union Customs Code. In particular, the CJEU addressed the financial consequence of failing to run a proper inspection regime to determine the value of goods being imported into a EU member state. Paragraph 82: > fraudulent imports into the United Kingdom increased significantly on account of the inadequate nature of the checks made by the United Kingdom customs authorities. And the court found, in Paragraph 549: > Therefore, the inadequate nature of the customs controls conducted by the United Kingdom customs authorities led to both the customs value of the goods concerned and the taxable amount of the relevant imports for the purposes of VAT being determined incorrectly, for which the United Kingdom must be held liable. That is to say, if an EU country runs an inadequate customs checks regime, then that country would be liable for the value of the VAT lost due to its inadequacy. ### Feeling Adequate? [Article 46.2 of the Union Customs Code](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02013R0952-20221212&ref=thegist.ie) states that customs controls, including inspections, must be applied based, not on absolute knowledge, but on objective "risk analysis using electronic data processing techniques to identify and evaluate risks…” Meanwhile, Article 46.4 outlines that risk management should include activities such as “collecting data, analyzing and assessing risk, prescribing actions, and regularly monitoring and reviewing processes and outcomes…” In other words, the onus of producing evidence regarding suspect aircraft is not on the private citizen. ### Arms and the Man There is an exemption on the general EU requirement to charge customs duties on arms. If they’re being imported into an EU member state and are on the way to *another EU member* state, *for the use of that state's military*. [Regulation 150/2003 ](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2003/150/oj/eng?ref=thegist.ie)exempts those shipments from import duties. But, leaving aside that none of the controversial flights are said to be delivering arms to another member state's military, that exemption can't apply unless the weapons are declared and the exemption claimed. If no weapons declarations are made, by planes which an objective risk assessment would indicate may be carrying them, it is Ireland's duty to inspect them itself or to pay the lost VAT monies itself. Finally, we come to a relevant piece of Irish law. Passed by Taoiseach Micheál Martin when he was Minister for Enterprise, SI 884/2005 proudly outlaws all exports of weapons from Ireland. The aim was to ensure that Ireland couldn’t become part of the international arms industry. And top of the list of the Scheduled items which can't be exported from Ireland; 1. Small arms, automatic weapons and accessories, as follows, and specially designed components therefor: > (a) Rifles, carbines, revolvers, shotguns, stunguns, crossbows, pistols, machine pistols and machine guns So what of the "huge number" of ICE agents declared by the US President to have transited through Shannon (on a plane the state was given advance notice of)? Did they travel unarmed with, as Trump described those being unlawfully renditioned, "EIGHT of the most violent criminals on Earth"? Or were some “rifles, carbines, revolvers, shotguns, stunguns, crossbows, pistols, machine pistols and machine guns” involved? And how can the Irish government say they are running an adequate inspection regime under EU law if they can't answer that question? [Subscribe to The Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Paid Gist Subscription](#/portal/signup) [Throw money at The Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: News of the World URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-news-of-the-world/ Last updated: 2025-05-11T07:11:37.000Z After our very [Extra explanatory exegesis](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-trans-rights-are-data-rights/) last time, let's try something different. Instead of thousands of words covering hundreds of years we'll just run around quickly looking at things that happened this fortnight. ### Canadian Elections It is a painful truth that as the generations turn, Irish people abroad just get worse and worse. Our national charms and empathy fade leaving only our worst instincts for malice and cunning. This is why Irish-Americans surround Trump while he is as popular as aging mackerel sewn into curtains back in their ancestral home. So it is is with some relief that we discovered the Irish-monikered winner of the Canadian election, Mark Carney, is sufficiently close to our actual country that he'd held an Irish passport since the 1980s and could still be called up to play in any future soccer internationals. But while his win was notable and impressive, it was mostly a result of other people's actions. Specifically, Donald Trump's rhetorical denials of Canada's independence and the fact that his opponent, Tory party leader Pierre Poilievre was a personally repellent Trumpist. Trump has claimed to have a [Midas touch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas%5FTouch%5F%28book%29?ref=thegist.ie), an uncharacteristically accurate self-assessment, in that [everything he touches dies](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/3-king-midas-all-that-glitters/id1798575126?i=1000701537216&ref=thegist.ie). So it was with the polling numbers for Canada's Tump tribute act as soon as the US president returned to office. *Cue the chart!* ![A line graph showing party polling averages for a number of Candadian political parties. The main focus is that the blue line for the Conservative party is well above the red line for the Liberal party (approx 20 points above) until Jan 2025 when the Liberal soar up past the Conservatives, as they fall. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-05-at-08.35.13.png) I wonder what happened half way through January 2025? There's barely any time to tell you about Poilievre's ostentatious [embrace of crypto](https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/poilievre-personally-holds-investment-in-bitcoin-as-he-promotes-crypto-to-canadians/?ref=thegist.ie), his minimal reskinning of Trump's America First slogan as Canada First or his backing for a [Freedom Convoy of anti-vaccine truckers](https://www.policymagazine.ca/pierre-poilievres-moment-of-truth/?ref=thegist.ie) that blocked the streets of his own constituency’s voters in Ottawa. We can just note that, on top of losing the national election, he managed to so annoy the sleep-deprived residents of his own electoral district with his honking horn for truck-fuelled anti-science that they turfed him out of his own seat. ### Australian Elections It was déjá vu all over again at the Australian elections, as the previously leading conservative Coalition faced the consequences of giving off enthusiastic Trumpy vibes after the start of the Tariff Times. *Chart!* ![Sophisticated line chart with confidence intervals marked, but basically the Labor line goes up and over the Conservative Coalition line just before April and never changes after that. ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-05-at-09.01.55.png) Reinforcing the messaging of the Canadian elections, we even had a personally objectionable right wing Liberal party leader, Peter Dutton, whose frontbench senators explicitly made speeches declaring a [Make Australia Great Again](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-12/jacinta-nampijinpa-price-trump-make-australia-great-again/105169348?ref=thegist.ie) policy. Australians were unconvinced, re-electing the incumbent government that had been trailing the opposition group's promises to [introduce DOGE-aping massive job cuts in public servants](https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/dutton-and-the-coalition-did-not-do-the-work-and-misread-the-australian-mood?ref=thegist.ie), until Musk and Trump demonstrated what chaotic vibe-coded government would actually mean. Oh, and then the Dutton led his party to it's [lowest modern seat](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-04/liberal-leadership-four-contenders-federal-election-2025/105250010?ref=thegist.ie) result and lost his own seat. Listen, it's almost like there's some sort of lesson to be learned here. ### UK Local & By-Elections There were three stories happening at once in England's elections this week. The main one was that Nigel Farage's latest personal political vehicle, Reform UK, surged to startling success, taking both a By-election seat directly from Labour and a wall of Local Council seats. *Bring on the Chart!* ![Heading for two bar charts: "Reform and Lib Dems' seat sahre exceeded vote share" subhead: Share of votes and share of council seats won in the local elections. Two bar charts below. the headline number is that Reform UK got 31% of the vote and 41% of the seats](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-05-at-09.37.11.png) While it may seem strange that Nigel Farage, the answer to the question 'what if nicotine-stained fingers became a whole person?', would buck the international trend against Trumpist rightwing populism we should remember that all these votes were cast in England, not the UK as a whole. More to the point, only some of the constituencies were voting. And the ones that were up for grabs were overwhelmingly Tory-blue. Which takes us to the second story of this election. The UK Tory party is imploding and has no plan to change its trajectory. The Financial Times, a pretty sober outlet, summed up the results starkly: "The world’s most successful party is currently losing a fight to the death." Of the 21 [Councils changing control](https://news.sky.com/story/local-election-in-maps-and-charts-reform-deliver-massive-blow-to-traditional-parties-13360032?ref=thegist.ie) fully 18 of them were the Conservatives losing to either Reform outright or slipping out of their control. Only one council switched from Labour control. In a first-past-the-post system, electorates are forced into binary choices to allocate power. And chunks of the former Tory party electorate simply won't vote for them any more. Hence, Reform. The third, and perhaps biggest, story from this election is the continuing inability of the Labour Party to understand its own electorate. Labour has spent its time since election studiously signalling to all those Reform voters that it, too, can be cruel and racist. It has cut fuel allowances for old people, attacked trans people, demonised immigrants and generally gone out of its way to sound like the least popular member of your pub quiz team. In fact, it was even [outflanked to the left by Wetherspoons](https://bsky.app/profile/soozuk.bsky.social/post/3lnq2zfpedc2p?ref=thegist.ie) after the UK SC decision on trans people. In short, the Labour party has expended considerable political capital driving away its own base to the left, sending support to the Greens in national polls and lifting the Liberal Democrats into second place by seats won in this election, while winning exactly zero support from people who were never going to vote for it anyway. Unlike our other two stories, which are basically the same narrative of the Tory party's collapse from different ends of the telescope, this one is a purely self-inflicted wound by the Labour Party leadership. The explanation is a question of the UK's political culture, rather than any electoral strategy by the Labour Party. Firstly, the current Labour leadership was defined and took power in opposition to the left. [Jeremy Corbyn's leadership was its main antagonist](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/07/25/uk-s-keir-starmer-carries-on-purge-of-labour-party-s-left-wing%5F6697678%5F4.html?ref=thegist.ie), even while Brexit consumed the Tories. Secondly, the UK media has been on a long collective march to the right for decades. The creation of the [Murdoch Press](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/rupert-lachlan-murdoch-australia-empire-rudd-turnbull-fox-dominion/?ref=thegist.ie) as a bloc has driven and shaped the UK political classes more than almost any other factor. During the time all of the people around Kier Starmer grew up, the [more right-wing position](https://theconversation.com/the-election-wot-the-sun-and-the-rest-of-the-uk-tabloids-never-won-79208?ref=thegist.ie) has always been presented as the reasonable and popular one. This has a long-term effect, constraining political conceptions of what might be imagined, let alone delivered. But, now that they have achieved stunning majority power, the Labour Party continues to chase the marsh gases of right wing support, leaving behind the actual voters who put it in. The number of Labour voters who even consider they might be curious about voting for Reform was just 11% of their base. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/05/Screenshot-2025-05-05-at-10.41.08.png) The British electorate voted for change. (And if you had to live inside of Britain's funhouse mirror political system for the last decade, who would blame you?). In response Starmer promised that he would give them more of the things that they had voted against. > "the message I take out of these elections is that we need to go further and we need to go faster on the change people want to see. And that’s what I’m determined to do.” This is bad politics, as well as bad thinking. If Opposition party leaders losing their own seats is commonplace, will the UK try to go one better? [Subscribe to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, for some money](#/portal/signup) [Just throw money at the Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: Trans rights are Data rights URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-trans-rights-are-data-rights/ Last updated: 2025-04-21T15:04:55.000Z In the main I try not to intrude on issues that fall outside my personal well of experience or knowledge. The issue of legal recognition of the dignity due to trans people is one of those areas. But the last few weeks has seen that discussion veer directly into my patch. We have had two decisions from courts delivering two incompatible approaches to addressing trans people's lives. One, from the UK, takes the classic Imperial approach of setting out rigid boundaries and then placing people on one side or the other of the borders they've drawn up. The other, from the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) starts, not with abstract rules, but from the individual's life and derives the way forward through existing rights and freedoms to what will do most good and least harm. Of the two, I obviously prefer one over the other. Unfortunately, as we live in an Anglophone media space, the decision from the CJEU (originally issued in French and Hungarian) didn't get even a fraction of the decision from the UK Supreme Court. The approaches differ and, as a result, so do the decisions. But both cases acknowledge one thing. The rights of trans people to live their lives (a modest expectation) are rooted in decisions on privacy and, more recently, in data protection laws and caselaw. That's right, eventually every issue bursts into our Data Kitchen. Let's see if we can clean up some judges' mess for them. ![](https://media.tenor.com/jGpMTh09IFEAAAAC/kool-aid-man-oh-yeah.gif) The Kool Aid guy, a fitting gif in more ways than one. ### Gender Borders, Policed Once upon a time there was a thing called the British Empire. It was big, and it controlled the lives of millions of people and it was bad. That last element is not a truth universally acknowledged, particularly amongst those who wish they could control other people's lives. Obviously the famines and looting of the colonised countries (starting with Ireland) were no fun for those living there. But a more pernicious and less noticed effect of Imperial power is that it changes and imprisons the minds of those in power at the centre, not just out at the edges. Drawing borders on a map might make a fellow feel powerful and important. But to become a big important Empire fellow, you have to accept borders drawn all around inside your head too. The key issue is that running an Empire requires strict binary definitions of things. At base, this means there are the colonisers and the colonised. It is critcal, if the Empire is going to justify its actions to itself, that the line between the two is constantly policed. If colonised people are actually just like the colonisers then the things done to them would be just like doing those, intolerable, things to the real people you know and love. That can never be thought. So that's the first border of an Empire. Who are the rulers? Who are the ruled? Oh dear. Because now things get more complicated. We have to start creating definitions of behaviours and characteristics of the rulers and the ruled so that we can both justify their oppression and our power over them. If we say we have to rule them -because they are feckless and childlike and require guidance like a parent- that means that we have to become constantly serious and grown-up. Joy is sucked out of our lives as the price of taking it away from other people. Also, we've now defined our family lives as a mirror of colonial rule- parents now rule over children, as colonisers over the colonised. Sending infants to [British boarding schools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%5FBrown%27s%5FSchool%5FDays?ref=thegist.ie) is intentionally designed like a miniature colonial posting, teaching subjegation of difference as much as conjugation of verbs. Or [conjuration of potions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogwarts?ref=thegist.ie). Now the Empire is drawing borders inside families. Inside homes. What if we define those colonised as being weak, of needing protection, even from themselves? If they are too emotional to govern themselves, while we are defined as rational? We go to work. They would lie about all day if left to their own devices. What if they are womanly and we are therefore manly? It looks like we've constructed models of oppression based on strict versions of gender behaviour between men and women. The Empire is drawing borders inside our heads now. Real men and women must behave in a particular way, because we have said that if either gender is not behaving in that way it becomes like the colonised- the lesser races. Most importantly, men (because they rule) must not be womanly (it undermines that rule). To step outside of those borders is to reject Empire's natural order. Being a gay man was always a threat to Imperial power- punishable by violence and possibly death- because it was a breach of those borders. A man from the centre of Empire could not behave like some native from the colonies (or like a woman, which was analogous). Oscar Wilde was not really imprisoned for being gay (he was Irish, and therefore Other already). He was destroyed for having sex with a Lord of the British Empire and the son of a Marquess. The border had been transgressed. Asking why British institutions are Like That when it comes to their responses to trans people is to forget the Imperial soil those institutions' roots have grown from. ### Let's talk about sex, baby > “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ > > ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ > > ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” > ― Lewis Carroll, [Through the Looking Glass](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/45962572?ref=thegist.ie) The judgment in [For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers](https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc%5F2024%5F0042%5Fjudgment%5Faea6c48cee.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) was a unanimous decision of all the judges of the UK Supreme Court. One of the reasons for this is that the question they were asked to determine was carefully circumscribed. They were not asked to determine 'what is the definition of a woman', as some careless reporting might have you believe. They were asked to draw borders around the edges of the use of the word 'woman' in a single Act, the Equality Act 2010\. Paragraph 2 of their judgment is at pains to stress just how limited their decision is; *"It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the EA 2010."* But the court does need to set out its boundaries at the start. If the question is whether a trans woman is a women *in this Act*, we'd better draw a border around what is or isn't a trans person. *"A person who is a biological man, ie who was at birth of the male sex, but who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment is described as a “trans woman”. Similarly, a person who is a biological woman, ie who was at birth of the female sex, but who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment is described as a “trans man”*. - Paragraph 6 of the Judgment. For the UK justices, there is always a bright boundary- reassignment or 'biological'- around a gender definition. No personal fluidity or uncertainty is acceptable in a court of calcified Empire. Ambiguity is literally outside the law. The Court spends paragraphs 36-53 of its decision describing a repealed law, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, as part of its mission to decide what legislators mean by 'man' and 'women'. You might wonder what relevance the contents of legislators' heads as they were drafting laws half a century ago has, given that law has been repealed. That is not the sort of comment that gets you made a UK supreme court judge, laddie. To no great surprise, the Court decides that the legislators of 1975 had not been thinking about trans people when they wrote their, now defunct, law. Then it implicitly acknowledges that the UK has not had a stellar history of legislating for the rights of trans people. It was only after the [European Court of Human Rights found that its refusal to recognise the gender as-lived of one of the UK's citizens ](https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre?ref=thegist.ie#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-60596%22]}) (in the Godwin case) was a breach of their right to privacy that it passed a law to allow for trans identities to be recognised. It is worth pausing there to note both of these facts. Firstly, that the UK state system, including the UK judiciary, completely refused to uphold the rights of the trans plaintiff. It took a trip to a European Court to get justice. And secondly, that the right the court found had been breached by the UK was the right to privacy. The plaintiff was not being permitted to live a private life, because the British state was constantly demanding that life was invalid. It was outside the permitted bounds. Even after Godwin had been decided, the UK courts remained unwilling to see their strict borders crossed. Paragraph 66 describes a precedent decision post-dating the ECHR's judgment, on trans people marrying; *\[The Judge\] said that recognition of Mrs Bellinger as female for the purposes of section 11(c) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 “would necessitate giving the expressions ‘male’ and ‘female’ in that Act a novel, extended meaning: that a person may be born with one sex but later become, or become regarded as, a person of the opposite sex”* The trans experience was denied. Novel, extended, meanings on being human were not to be allowed. Further, as noted in paragraph 74, the UK state will not recognise anything other than a male or a female gender identity. Even if a foreign state issues a certificate recognising a non-binary identity, the UK will not accept it. Everyone is to be on one side or the other of this defined line, which must not be crossed or blurred. The Scottish Government pointed out to the court that the legislators were specifically thinking about trans people when they brought in the regime for gender recognition certificates. There was even an explanatory note in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 pointing out that the legislator's specific intent was to make it so the earlier 1975 Act would have its meaning changed. I think the court's response to this unhappy counter-example, after harping on about legislative intent in the 1975 Act, is one of the most breathtaking pieces of judicial handwaving I've encountered. *"the Scottish Ministers drew the court’s attention to para 27 of the Explanatory Notes. The notes give as an example of the effect of section 9(1), that a trans man with a GRC would be entitled to protection from discrimination as a woman under the SDA 1975\. *In our view, this is a good illustration of why the use to which the courts should put explanatory notes is limited to the context of the legislation and the mischief to which its provisions are aimed*: see Lord Steyn in R (Westminster City Council) v National Asylum Support Service \[2002\] UKHL 38, \[2002\] 1 WLR 2956, para 5 and the passages from R (O) cited earlier. There is nothing in the notes to suggest that the department had undertaken the kind of detailed analysis of the effect of such a change on the operation of provisions of the SDA 1975, as amended by the 1999 Regulations, that we have undertaken in the following sections of this judgment before giving that as an example of the effect of section 9(1)."* \- Paragraph 81 (emphasis added) When the legislators of a repealed law from 50 years ago were not considering trans people in their drafting and definitions of a man and a women, then we spent paragraph after paragraph on it. When a specific piece of legislation explicitly acknowledged an intent to define a gender marker inclusively, the court dismisses the legislators’ clearly stated intent, on the basis that they hadn't thought enough about the consequences of their actions. Later the court returns to this push back against the intentions of elected legislators in Paragraph 101, saying they "See the force in Mr Cooper's \[KC for a group called Sex Matters\] argument" that there should be exceptions allowed for from the protections in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 which are not anywhere in legislation. *"... the carve out in section 9(3) is not limited to express statutory provision excluding the application of section 9(1) or to circumstances where that is a necessary implication"* They go on to define exactly when such an unwritten exemption from legislation might arise, in the Court's opinion. The Scottish Ministers had argued that it had to be given the most narrow definition, as one of strict necessity. The Court disagreed. It declines to be bound to a standard that would have prevented it from imputing *"what it would have been sensible or reasonable for Parliament to have included or what Parliament would, if it had thought about it, probably have included" -* Paragraph 101 The context for this assertion that the court can know better than the legislature what's good for it is a sequence of paragraphs considering the UK legislative idea of 'living as a woman'. Paragraphs 87-93 go on an extended riff on the concept of 'passing', of living and dressing a certain way as evidence that you are living as a woman. This, of course, means that women could also be assessed against their adherence to this model of gender-approved behaviour. If there is a legal standard to live as a woman (which the court implicitly suggests ought to exist beyond having official documents showing you are a woman) it follows that all women are now subject to having their lives assessed against this standard. Addressing an earlier judgment which had determined in favour of a trans person the court waspishly points out that; *"The Court issued a GRC. The Court did not therefore address the question whether, if AB’s evidence showed that she complied with the guidance because her official documents used female names and pronouns but that she did not “present” as female or occupy a stable female social role, she would have satisfied the criteria that she was living as a woman and that she intended to continue to do so."* \- Paragraph 93 If this judgment of the UK Supreme Court did nothing else, the complaint that there should be a set of criteria to measure women's behaviour against, to assess if they are sufficiently womanly, would make it an historically bad example of British Imperial thought. Empire requires that women be womenly and men be manly. So too, still, does the Supreme Court of the erstwhile British Empire. In Paragraph 154 it asserts *"clarity and consistency about how to identify the relevant groups that share protected characteristics are essential to the practical operation of the EA 2010."* In the end, at Paragraph 172, the Court tips its hand. Following the explanatory notes of legislators or limiting itself to only legislative interpretations of the text as written or even limiting carve-outs to the actual stated intentions of the Gender Recognition Act? It had to reject them all. Any one of these limits would get in the way of the Court's key cri de coeur. In Paragraph 172, it describes a series of gender-affirming situations and groupings, a listing of open-minded acceptance and then responds in horror; *"We can identify no good reason why the legislature should have intended that sex-based rights and protections under the EA 2010 should apply to these complex, heterogenous groupings, rather than to the distinct group of (biological) women and girls (or men and boys) with their shared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group."* They can’t identify any good reason why the legislature *should* have intended this, you see. This is not a decision of statutory interpretation. It is an ideological declaration by the heads of the Judiciary. ### Data Protection: a right to be the main author of your own life Let us leave the Imperial Court. We have tarried too long in its obsessions, which grow adhesively unpleasant the more one is exposed to them. Reading the UK Supreme Court's learnéd judgment, delivered unanimously, comes awkwardly close to the experience of being trapped listening to a bar room reactionary, demanding men cut their hair with a short back and sides or that women should only wear dresses. In fact, we will probably return to that scene later, when we address the Cyclops and Bloom in the context of Sinn Féin's embrace of partition, so don't put it down too far away. For now, we're leaving these western isles and heading into the heart of Europe. Specifically, to a big building off a motorway near Luxembourg airport, where the Court of Justice of the European Union lives. On 13th March 2025 the CJEU, the top court in Europe for interpreting the effect on EU law, made a ruling on a case which had been referred up out of Hungary's courts- [**VP** v **Országos Idegenrendészeti Főigazgatóság**](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=296550&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=8804444&ref=thegist.ie). The case related to Hungary's predictably hostile treatment of trans people who were also seeking asylum. As part of its system, Hungary required that these applicants for international protection would have to have their gender recorded. Here, from paragraph 15 of the CJEU's judgment, is the description of the facts of this case in a nutshell; *VP is an Iranian national who obtained refugee status in Hungary in 2014\. In support of their application for that status, VP relied on their transgender identity and produced medical certificates drawn up by specialists in psychiatry and gynaecology. According to those certificates, although VP was born female, their gender identity was male. Following recognition of VP’s refugee status on that basis, VP was nevertheless registered as female in the asylum register which, in accordance with the provisions of the Law on the right to asylum, is kept by the asylum authority and contains identification data, including gender, of the natural persons who have obtained that status.* So far, so [Orban's Hungary](https://apnews.com/article/hungary-pride-ban-amendment-orban-gay-rights-lgbtq-155ec12cbbde7cc6be0f96adb323de77?ref=thegist.ie). However, although the case came out of Hungary, the decision of the CJEU applies everywhere, to all EU member states. And that application is immediate and direct, meaning that any national provision which existed or was passed in the future would be automatically nullified if it was in conflict with the EU law. This is the decision that states what Ireland, for example, can and can't do when it comes to gender identity. So, quite a significant case on a hot-button issue. Let us just check on the multitude of Irish press comment about it; ![An empty desert scene. Tubleweed passes in slow motion. Caption [crickets chirping]](https://media.tenor.com/WH5FLl0gOicAAAAC/when-i-ask-a-question-and-all-i-get-are-tumble-weeds-and-crickets.gif) Yes, I see. OK, well, let's see what we can do to make up for that oversight. ### The CJEU knows where "Papers, please" ends > “No permanence is ours; we are a wave > That flows to fit whatever form it finds” > > ― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game Unlike the UK judgment, the EU court is pretty succinct in its reasoning. There are three key passages to this judgment. Paragraph 32 sets out the test for any Member State to apply when obtaining and then recording the gender of a person. That test is derived from longstanding and current data protection principles. The key focus is on the *purpose* for which the data relating to gender is collected. If the purpose is to identify the person, then it should "refer to that person's lived gender identity" not that assigned at birth. *it is for the referring court to verify the accuracy of the data at issue in the main proceedings in the light of the purpose for which they were collected and to assess, in particular, in the light of Article 81(c) of the Law on the right to asylum, whether the purpose of collecting those data is to identify the data subject*.* If that were the case, *those data would therefore appear to refer to that person’s lived gender identity, and not to the identity assigned to them at birth.* In such a context, contrary to what the Hungarian Government maintains, it is for the controller, in the present case the asylum authority, to take into consideration that person’s gender identity at the time of their registration in the asylum register, and not the gender identity assigned to them at birth. (emphasis added)* Paragraph 37 explains the logical consequences of this simple application of existing principles. If accurately recording gender (as lived) for the purposes of identity is either not addressed or specifically legislated against by a national law, that law is incompatible with EU law on Fundamental Rights (and therefore is to be set aside). *Thus, national legislation which prevents a transgender person, in the absence of recognition of their gender identity, from fulfilling a requirement which must be met in order to be entitled to a right protected by EU law such as, in the present case, the right enshrined in Article 8(2) of the Charter and given specific expression in Article 16 of the GDPR, must be regarded as being, in principle, incompatible with EU law (see, by analogy, judgment of 4 October 2024, Mirin, C‑4/23, EU:C:2024:845, paragraphs 53 and 60 and the case-law cited).* I said CJEU judgments were succinct. But one of the ways they manage this is to be very information dense. To expand on that paragraph a little- where a person has a right covered by the Charter of Fundamental Rights or any other provision of EU law and access to those legal entitlements is being blocked by a failure to correctly record their gender (in line with the definition at paragraph 32 above as being defined by "***lived gender identity, and not to the identity assigned to them at birth***") then whatever national law that is causing that impediment is to just be set aside. It is a dead letter. [Every court, every state body, every individual official has to behave as it it didn't exist.](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/primacy-of-eu-law-precedence-supremacy.html?ref=thegist.ie) That's the consequence of incompatibility with EU law. Article 8(2) of the Charter is > data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. And the relevant part of Article 16 of the GDPR is; > The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. In other words, the CJEU, building on the earlier findings of the European Court of Human Rights' privacy law decision in the Godwin case against the UK, recognises that the issue of recognising, recording and otherwise processing a person's gender identity is an issue of data protection. This is not a novel application of data protection law. It is exactly what the law has always been intended to achieve- it is a recognition that, all other things being equal, a person should be empowered to be the primary author of their own life. Finally, for good measure, the CJEU creates an absolute ban on any attempt to limit a trans identity only to those who have undergone surgical reassignment. The last paragraph of the Decision is; > a Member State may not, **under any circumstances,** by way of an administrative practice, make the exercise of that right conditional upon the production of evidence of gender reassignment surgery. (emphasis added) And with that the EU's top court bound every Member State of the Union to a minimum standard they are to apply when processing data relating to a person's gender recognition. This is an EU-wide gender recognition law, based on people's lived experience. And, unlike the UK Supreme Court, they didn't need to travel back half a century to justify their reasoning. ### Sinn Féin demands Ireland follow Britain's example The reaction to the UK's Supreme Court decision in Ireland was swift. Mostly this was because it was in large-print headlines throughout the UK media, which is the primary yardstick our media uses for the newsworthiness of any judicial event. The most striking response was from Sinn Féin, whose health spokesperson, David Cullinane was at pains to hail its arrival, on X of all lamentable places; ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-21-at-09.10.03.png) Firstly, the ruling was not on the 'legal meaning of woman' outside of a single Act. See Paragraph 2 of the judgment quoted above, if you can remember that far back in your life. What is more striking is that the SF TD for Waterford thought he should welcome a decision of Britain's Supreme Court, hailing it as 'common sense judgment' and saying 'The ruling needs to be fully examined in this state'. That last sentence is particularly baffling, as the only act the judgment applied to doesn't exist here. And even in the UK, the judgment didn't apply to the whole country- Northern Ireland is specifically excluded from this decision. The next day, we had the form (but not the content) of an apology for this tweet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-21-at-09.08.55.png) This is a 'sorry you were offended' apology, which doesn't take back any of the substance of the policy position of the earlier tweet. But then Páidraig Mac Lochlainn, SF TD for Donegal and the party's chief whip in the Dáil, felt the urge well up inside him to address the same question in an interview with Highland Radio; > Following this week's UK supreme court ruling, Sinn Fein Chief Whip Pádraig Mac Lochlainn says the conversation now needs to be had in Ireland. [pic.twitter.com/e4dKyn4HOu](https://t.co/e4dKyn4HOu?ref=thegist.ie) > > — Greg Hughes (@GregHughes2) [April 18, 2025](https://twitter.com/GregHughes2/status/1913154742932348929?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) You can see the full clip linked to for as long as notorious transphobe Elon Musk leaves it on X, the platform he owns. Mac Lochlainn could hardly be clearer on his desire for the Imperial borders to be erected here. For the Donegal TD, matters must be defined by the clear binary between a man and a women and he expresses his demand that 'we're going to have to deal with the legislation in Ireland". *"this ruling does bring clarity...it defines in terms of equality legislation what a women is, and also what a man is because as you know it works in different directions... we need to deal with it and we're going to have to deal with the legislation in Ireland because unfortunately it isn't clear"* We have already discussed why British Imperial institutions are Like That. But why are Sinn Féin, alone amongst the major parties of Ireland, so eager to declare they share Empire's need for gender binaries? ### An Invented Ireland > "The androgynous vision of a world whose gender boundaries were endlessly open turned out to have a wider political, as distinct from a merely personal, meaning: the manly women and womenly men of the Irish renaissance had positioned themselves on the cusp between worlds between the coloniser and the colonised, between west and east, between having (a phallus) and being (a woman). Now such a confusion of gender boundaries could stand only for "the fragile status of nationality", and so it was ruthlessly disallowed. The ideologues of independent Ireland reverted to the old, neurotic philosophy which saw the male as in all things the opposite of the female." > \- Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd, 1995 Ireland, Britain's first overseas colonised people, is now the EU's richest post-colonial state. The place where all those Imperial boundaries and partitions were first tried out- the laboratory where Britain invented its Imperial self- spent decades working through and out the corrosive effect of the coloniser's binary definitions. For Sinn Féin, the work clearly isn't complete. Some Joyce? Let's have some Joyce. > —The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and glaring at Bloom. > —Ay, ay, says Joe. > —You don’t grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is … > —Sinn Fein! says the citizen. Sinn fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us. > \-Joyce, James. Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics) Bloom encounters the one-eyed citizen in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. He is a rote-reciting nationalist of the most conventional sort. During the encounter, where the citizen has denied the possibility of being both Jewish and Irish, Bloom is challenged to define a nation as a binary, and refuses. > —But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse. > —Yes, says Bloom. > —What is it? says John Wyse. > —A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. > —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years. So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it: > —Or also living in different places. > —That covers my case, says Joe. > —What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen. > —Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland. > > The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner. > Joyce, James. Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics) Empire is internalised and mirrored by its nationalist foe. Joyce shows that the British Empire's demand for binary selves has colonised the mind of the self-defined Irish nationalist and points to a radical and freeing alternative in Bloom, a man who defines himself and his nation in terms of *and* not *or*. It was that escape, that leap out of the prison of binaries, which allowed the Good Friday Agreement to eventually cut the Gordian knot of Ireland's uncivil war. Its signatories agreed that people could be both Irish and British, not forced to decide between the two. The public overwhelmingly endorsed it. Even Ian Paisley Junior now holds an Irish passport and advises his constituents on how to apply for one themselves. Sinn Féin's present chorus of binary enthusiasts are as trapped as the UK Supreme Court in an Imperial, pre-Good Friday Agreement, world. ### Synthesis and rest, at last What does the UK Supreme Court decision mean for Ireland? Outside of the rhetorical opportunities for people eager to reverse the country's existing provisions for the legal recognition of trans people, nothing at all. Furthermore, the CJEU's decision ensures that the UK decision could never be given an effective local implementation. You can't circumscribe the rights of trans people to their own identity if it is not permitted to process data regarding their gender to identify them when that data rejects their lived experience in favour of their gender status at birth. I doubt the SF spokespeople even knew that the 'clarity' and 'dealing with the legislation' they hoped for would be incompatible with EU law and therefore not possible in Ireland. But it would. What does the CJEU decision mean for the UK? A more interesting question this. The UK's position on gender recognition is now nominally at odds with the EU's Data Protection regime. But the UK mustn't let their data protection regime come unmoored from the EU's, or they will lose their status of 'adequacy', threatening the free exchange of personal data that their economy relies upon. So it seems likely that this is the high water mark for the Imperial gender binary. The UK Supreme Court decision applies to one word in one act. But, without coming undone from the principles of data protection, the UK state can't lawfully take actions to process people's gender data in a way that ignores their lived experience in favour of their gender status at birth. If the government tries to operationalise the judgment more generally, the UK GDPR sits waiting for it like the troll under the bridge. For the rest of Europe, Ireland included, this particular issue now remains a very British dis-ease. [Subscribe to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, for some money](#/portal/signup) [Throw money at the Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: Tariffifing Behaviour URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-tariffifing-behaviour/ Last updated: 2025-04-06T12:13:39.000Z OK. OK. Imagine now that you are a idiot. You are someone who is profoundly stupid and has been all their life. By choice, you are also profoundly ignorant. People have offered you opportunities to learn about the world for decades. In recent years, literally thousands of people have been publicly offering you information about almost anything you choose to speak about. You reject all that education, expertise and knowledge. Because you are an idiot, you only value the thoughts you came up with yourself. Because (and I'm sorry to harp on about this but it seems key to everything else) you are an idiot, you believe you are smarter than all these other people. Why would the smartest man in the room need to listen to so-called experts, you think to yourself as you stab yourself in the eyeball with your own pastry fork. You're not even eating pastry. You were using it to try to pry open the back of the plug, currently inserted into the mains, to see if it really is filled with cheez whiz like you just saw on TikTok, in that [briefing on TikTok](https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/trump-tiktok-delays-ban-us-deal-1236355158/?ref=thegist.ie). Now, for lamentable and unvirtuous reasons, you were recently elected as President of the United States of America. This is your second go at this. It was either that or likely bankruptcy and possible imprisonment. But this time, you, an idiot, are going to show everyone. You're going to show all the people who beat you last time, obviously, but you also want to show all the people who were working with you last time who kept telling you not to do things. They kept telling you that you were wrong about things?! Well, not this time. This time, you've only hired people who tell you that you're right. You've got the support of the richest (and therefore also smartest) man in the world and you let him do some computer things. He showed you his car. Everything's computer. Very impressive, far less on fire than expected. And now you're going to do it. You're going to bring in the obvious policy everyone told you not to do last time. But this is actually your single big idea. This is the idea you have had for decades. This and wanting brown and black people to die are your top political concepts. You would recognise them as your *idée fixe*, if you had ever heard of the term. You're going to make all the foreign countries have to pay money to be able to sell you things. It's a tax, just on foreigners! Literally, the best idea ever. The perfect policy. I mean, it's a proven model. You can't trade around here unless you pay the Don first. For some reason, last time, all of the stuffed shirts and that blonde lady, who your House of Wax son-in-law said were actually five different ladies, said you could only do tiny ones. A bit on China, but not on all of China. Just steel or General Tso sauce or something. This time you asked the interns to work out the biggest numbers, the biggest and the best numbers, for you to announce. The bigger the number, the more money the foreigners would have to pay. So they came back with a few ideas on how to sell it. Most of them were really long and had footnotes, which are for losers and don't work on TV anyway. But one of them, from the sweaty intern, was just divide one thing by another thing and get a number. And they were all such big numbers. It was perfect. You explained the idea with a big chart. People need something to look at while listening, you know from personal experience. You can't just say stuff, they lose interest and you start to reach for the TV remote. Except the people who do money things on Wall Street didn't like it. All their numbers got smaller, not bigger. And the foreigners said they'd make you pay too- as though you were just another country, instead of the only real country. And then millions of losers came out on the streets against you. For some reason there were also a lot of [penguins](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands?ref=thegist.ie). And the worst thing- the intolerable thing- was that everyone you saw on TV said you might actually be an idiot. They weren't allowed say that. You had made it that they weren't allowed say things like that by [putting a guy in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2Ap5Ii2u1Y&ref=thegist.ie). But now they were saying it. And somewhere, inside your very stupid, very calcified mind you knew something. You knew something new. You don't like knowing new things. But you were starting to know it now. They all thought you were wrong. And it looked like– even though it wasn't true because it couldn't be true– it looked like you were wrong. You fish out your phone and start [thumbing at it](https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114279756371714617?ref=thegist.ie). All caps, so they know you mean it. Like an idiot would do. "MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE" ### The Stooge Problem Now, let us return you to your own mind. Not that of an idiot. What a relief. A political movement or party which reaches a point of unrestrained power gets there by having ranks of stooges they can stuff in at all levels to just do what they're told. But they do a second job. Stuffing institutions with stooges also neuters them. This is great if you want to make sure that you just get what you want without any resistance from checks and balances. This is bad if you encounter a problem that can't be solved by a stooge. Because you've drained your system of all of its effectiveness, you are left just asserting things in the face of reality. This has been the Republican mode for decades. And it has worked for them, because they are surrounded by media and institutional stooges who are willing to tell the general public that they are right and reality is wrong. The US has never been more institutionally stooged than it is today. Obviously, for any Irish person who remembers the bank crash of 2007, this is very familiar. A politically dominant body, Fianna Fáil, had recently won its third consecutive electoral victory. It had decades to fill all the institutions of the state with its supporters. But when the markets crashed they took down the banks. And nothing FF could say could make that reality go away. Remember [Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19KotloFVxA&ref=thegist.ie) denying an IMF bailout was coming to take over Ireland's finances. A few weeks later the deal was done. On Monday, the US markets are going to open again. Nothing they've heard over the weekend gives them a reason to think that this idiot is going to reverse himself. Worse still, even if he does reverse himself the spell of the US as a reliable and predicable investment location is broken. Who knows what the mad king might do next week? ### The Money Lake The EU is letting matters settle for a while before deciding how they will react to theses tariffs. Ireland really doesn't want to see an escalating trade war, given it makes a shedload of US bits, bytes and pills that underpin the tax base. But there is a step the EU could take that would be a far more devastating response, without impacting trade at all. The US government funds itself by issuing bonds. Treasury Bonds are a kind of IOU. They promise to pay the bearer of the bond a certain amount of money after a set amount of time. They are the ultimate safe haven. Currently, $13 trillion is sitting in US Treasury bonds. Now, imagine there was an equivalent EU bond. Which system looks like the safer bet? Would you like to leave your money under the care of the European Central Bank? Or under Donald Trump's Fed? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-06-at-11.27.50.png) Europe could certainly use a few extra trillions of euros right now. But the Mad King might not survive without it. [Subscribe for Free to The Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, but pay a bit](#/portal/signup) [Throw Money at The Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: A Bad State of Affairs URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-bad-state-of-affairs/ Last updated: 2025-03-24T09:24:54.000Z By the end of the 20th Century it was very clear that there had been an unchecked proliferation of the most dangerous and compelling weapon that had ever been invented- The Modern State. A modern state is equipped with organs for completing various tasks. Some are crucial to the wellbeing of everyone in the state (welfare, tax collection, security). Some are chosen to reflect the values of its citizens (art grants, culture promotion, libraries, traffic planning) and some just pop up to solve a particular problem and never go away (Media regulators, dog breed testers etc). A key to ranking high on any of the [global lists of happy citizens](https://edition.cnn.com/travel/worlds-happiest-countries-2025-wellness/index.html?ref=thegist.ie) is living in a state where the right balance has been struck between these various strands of power and where no one aim dominates the others. A state, an entity capable of liquidating its citizens or neighbours, can also be used to deliver nice schools to children and lend large print cowboy books to senior citizens. Living in a failed state is usually accompanied by trucks full of people with guns deciding what you will do with your Wednesday as opposed to experiencing perfect freedom, despite the [utopian alternatives ](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jim-shamlin-the-anarchist-utopia?v=1685255566&ref=thegist.ie)presented by the advocates of anarchism or [libertarianism](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling?ref=thegist.ie). In other words, despite its dangers, the modern state is unlikely to go away any time soon and we would certainly miss it if it did. ### Bad eggs stink But sometimes a state goes bad. This can happen because it is captured by bad people intent on subverting it. Or it can happen because one of its competing strands becomes overpowered, swallowing or erasing all the other priorities we may want the state to consider. Post-independence Ireland had a state fused with the interests and obsessions of the institutional Catholic Church, resulting in decades of quasi-official child abuse, arbitrary mass incarceration of women and the promotion of mass emigration as an alternative to allowing pressure for social change to build. A flavour of those decades, from [the speech made](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1951-04-12/43/?ref=thegist.ie) by the FG Taoiseach of the day, John A Costello, after the church had objected to mothers and children receiving state-funded healthcare, describing his Cabinet; > I have no doubt that they do not desire in the slightest to go one fraction of an inch outside the sphere of faith and morals—our complete obedience and allegiance." Whenever a state demands or offers "complete obedience and allegiance" to anything, you know it's gone bad. ### ChatControl, emphasis on control But before there is a demand for complete obedience, there is always an effort to build up the powers of monitoring and surveillance which will let the state check it really has got that sort of obedience. For the people in institutions building that capability, the idea that their machinery could be hijacked by people who might use it for ill is always alien. For institutional reasons, they frequently can't think of that happening. They can see the drug dealers, abusers and terrorists that they have been charged with tracking and catching. That's their imperative and it obscures everything else. The state is filled with [Paperclip Maximising](https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/paperclip-maximizer?ref=thegist.ie) institutions, charged with just one job and not given any duty to see how that job should be limited in favour of the overall health of a society. Surveillance is a particularly stark example of that tension. If only the state authorities could introduce a perfect [panopticon](https://www.britannica.com/technology/panopticon?ref=thegist.ie), they could eliminate all crime. Sadly, they would also have eliminated all freedom at the same time. This is the [Minority Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FMinority%5FReport?ref=thegist.ie) problem. Or, if you prefer your references a bit more recent, A [Three-Body Problem.](https://www.polygon.com/24105807/3-body-problem-sophons-protons-explainer?ref=thegist.ie) Which takes us to the EU's ChatControl plan. In 2023 the EU Commission proposed a regulation to force evey form of messaging in the EU to be intercepted and scanned automatically. In effect, faced by the implacable force of maths the Commission decided to try to legislate it away. This was received about as well as you might expect. The European Data Protection Supervisor convened a seminar of experts and published their collective thoughts on the proposal under the not-at-all ominous title ["The Point of No Return". ](https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications/events/2023-10-23-edps-seminar-csam-point-no-return%5Fen?ref=thegist.ie) They warned that the plan was for "General, indiscriminate and automated analysis of all … communication." Encryption was to be 'backdoored' to allow for mass scanning by the states. The head of the EDPS warned that, given the very shaky technology proposed to actually do this scanning, "Scanning of messages is not only a threat to the privacy, but also a means that produces extremely questionable results." In February 2024 the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling \[[Podchasov v Russia](https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre?ref=thegist.ie#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854%22]})\] which ruled that laws requiring weakening of encryption for all users were "not proportionate". Nonetheless, when Viktor Obán's Hungary took the Presidency of the European Council for the back half of 2024, it announced that passing the ChatControl proposal and breaking encryption for eveyone in the EU was one of its main priorities. We're all used to Hungary acting as an illiberal spoiler inside the EU, but in this case, it nearly got a majority of votes from the other member state governments to pass the plan. It was only when the Dutch spy agency actually came out and [warned their own government that the plan would threaten the country's own cybersecurity](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dutch-intel-service-csam-update/?ref=thegist.ie) that they flipped from support to abstain and the Hungarian plan lost its majority. Oh, and of course, we found out Ireland was one of the countries [supporting](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40903706.html?ref=thegist.ie) Hungary's plan. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/03/Chatcontrol-map.jpeg) This map from the anti-chatcontrol MEP, Patrick Breyer shows just how close things were By October 2024, it looked as though the plan was dead again. In November 2024 we got further evidence of the insecurity of backdoors for good guys, when it turned out that in the US mobile phone companies had allowed back doors into their systems for law enforcement surveillance purposes. But, shocker, didn't it turn out that [China had sneaked in the same doors and used them to track potentially millions of American mobile phones including ones owned by JD Vance and Trump](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/02/china-spying-telecom-trump-harris-fbi-cell-phone/?ref=thegist.ie). They must not have known those backdoors were only meant for American spies. But then on the 12th December 2024 the plan came back, like a B-Movie monster, for one last desperate push while Hungary held the Presidency. Matters teetered on the brink, by all accounts, but they didn't have the votes. It was agreed that all the countries would continue to work to pass a law. But they didn't pass this one. Poland took the Presidency on the 1st Jan 2025 and the proposal to bring in enforced mass surveillance and to mandate the end to encrypted messaging was [changed to a voluntary scheme](https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/half-good-new-polish-chat-control-proposal-to-be-discussed-on-wednesday/?ref=thegist.ie). But they hand over to Denmark (who supported the Hungarian plan) in July 2025, who will be followed by Cyprus (another Yes on mass surveillance). So these trees around us suggest privacy isn't out of the woods yet. ### The UK, Europe's Mine Canary of surveillance But we don't have to wait that long to see what might happen if a state started to demand that internet platforms break encryption for its users so they could peep into their private communications and data. Yes, Brexit Britain is here. And it has passed the [Investigatory Powers Act](https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/investigatory-powers-act?ref=thegist.ie) On the 7th of February 2025, the BBC reported ["UK demands access to Apple users' encrypted data"](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g288yldko?ref=thegist.ie). As there is no way to only let the UK government break end to end encryption for its advanced security cloud offering, this would have meant Apple creating a backdoor for their entire platform. On the 22nd February 2025, the [BBC followed up on their earlier report](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo?ref=thegist.ie). "Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data." So it is that Britain doesn't have the data it wanted and, also, its people don't have the option to encrypt their data on Apple's platform. Other nations worry about the power of the Deep State. But only Brexit Britain continues its world-leading innovation in the novel field of the Shallow State. Just capriciously doing self-harm for the headlines. ### Who's in the pipes? A Europe which is existentially threatened from the East and under verbal assault from the West, to the point where it has announced a mass rearmament platform may find this ChatControl plan a test of its states' ability to ensure that it balances one part of its state's demands (surveillance) with the larger needs of security. When the Dutch have their own spies in chorus with privacy, security and data protection researchers and experts, maybe we should be asking the Irish Government why they still think this is a good idea? Can our state move past the impulse to look for obedience and allegiance from its citizens and start to listen as well as speak? [Recent history doesn't inspire much hope on that front](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/maternity-hospital-deal-may-require-clarification-of-clinically-appropriate-1.4879110?ref=thegist.ie). But these are changing times. We may yet hope that we are not all fed into a machine for converting all matter into the surveillance equivilent of paperclips, just to let our enemies to our East and our West into everyone's conversations. [Subscribe for free to the Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist, but pay a bit](#/portal/signup) [Throw Money At The Gist](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: A Confederacy of Dunces URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-confederacy-of-dunces/ Last updated: 2025-03-10T09:24:23.000Z What is most galling about it all is the level of cliche and hackwork. There's a genuinely evil dictator running Russia and he's invaded a European country. There's a high-stakes election in the US for president. There is a cartoonishly terrible candidate, who wins against a black woman hobbled by association with a disastrous Middle East policy. And there's also a tech villain who owns a media outlet. This is exactly the kind of regurgitative cinematic universe slop everyone expects now that Amazon has bought the Bond franchise. It is more upsetting to discover we're stuck inside it as reality. The last fortnight has seen the upending of the post-WW2 order. We haven't seen more than just the first beginnings of the consequences, but they will probably play out for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this. Some decades nothing happens, and some weeks decades happen. This has been a month of those weeks. ### Axis to Grind The US has switched sides from Europe to Russia. That was the plan. And that is what has happened. The Trump regime did not do this because [it didn't have a good meeting](https://www.ft.com/content/2108807d-2f06-4cc4-9c83-c6485c941939?ref=thegist.ie) with the president of Ukraine. Nor did it start [crippling Ukraine's defence systems against Russian missile attacks](https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-lawmaker-tells-bi-trump-153212868.html?guce%5Freferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce%5Freferrer%5Fsig=AQAAACXyPPPKSHt5boZjCx54wl91QwZbuU4%5FwhC0b-E7U2UQ%5FfZEyZB97G8hGuAsigCnvGIMHrAjH2mFscmYHnSnTbnM35RdqDxGpV0Ng4OJ4MhxwG09dLeuGe8lVXeYJQ-MeJUX76ErgkqiqRC3axj0RqBzq-OvdxarsLx73rXOERdR&ref=thegist.ie) because of a personality clash. The consequences of this are so large it is difficult to absorb them all. The key reasons do seem clear, however. The US Republican party led by Trump is now an anti-democratic movement. It is committed to the promotion of authoritarianism at home and abroad, in a simliar way that US administrations of previous decades were committed to "anti-communism" as the guiding force of their whole foreign policy. And, just as in the "anti-communist" age, this new authoritarian US is happy to align itself with other powers who share its primary goal. It's taken a few decades, but we finally have an actual Axis of Evil in the world. The fact that it is also insultingly *stupid* just makes it worse. Europe, the continent, not just the EU, is trying to come to terms with this reversal of 80 year old currents. It is as though you walked out of your house and found your concrete driveway was now made of quicksand. Lethally unwanted, yes, but also just disorientating. [Airplanes will have to be redesigned](https://ukrainetoday.org/us-ends-support-for-ukrainian-f-16s-but-french-mirages-will-be-salvation-forbes/?ref=thegist.ie). Satellites will need to be launched to replace the inevitable [Starlink betrayal](https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-trump-zelenskyy-putin-russia-moscow-live-sky-news-latest-12541713?postid=9248851&ref=thegist.ie#liveblog-body). Horrible sums of money will be diverted from productive or humane uses into building, not just arms, but an entire European heavy industry of re-armament. All while the world is already awaiting delivery of the geopolitical instability it ordered back in the 1970s when it decided dealing with climate change seemed like kinda a pain. Those problems are now "Out with Courier" and will be arriving tomorrow and every day thereafter. ### Is there anything to be said for another bowl of Shamrock? Ireland's place in this maelstrom has barely been discussed. The longstanding hardware enthusiast's position of advocating to join NATO is a dead letter. Joining NATO after a US heel turn would be like trying to rejoin the UK, after Brexit. A bad idea to start with, rendered absurd. But we don't know what the next week might bring, let alone the next four years. So we send the Taoiseach to the Oval Office to deliver our annual shamrock, basking in the toxic glow of Trump's declaration of Irish-American Heritage month. "Signing the proclamation, [the president](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2017rvxpwpo?ref=thegist.ie) said the Irish were "great people", adding: "They voted for me in heavy numbers so I like them even more." Talk about taking shots from a drive-by. But go the Taoiseach must, or he breaks the annual chain of invitations, attention and favours for Europe's most glic gaels. A cancellation would see future invites collapse into depending on which faction held the White House. But trips to the White House now carry risks where once there were only rewards. The dragon's voice may sound civilised enough as it invites you in, but it sits coiled on a bed of gold and will burn the world to grow its hoard. ### Struck, Dumb But despair is not the right response. The future is not written, let alone set in stone. Remember, none of these people are particularly intelligent. Low cunning only gets you so far, when you find yourself wandering out of your own weird petri-dish environment and start trying to guage your abilities in the real world. We should remember that in 2019, [one in eight US men](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/2019/07/12/ce84b/1?ref=thegist.ie) believed they could get a point in a tennis game against Serena Williams. And in 2021 nearly 10% of them believed they could [defeat an elephant in a fist fight.](https://www.statista.com/chart/25590/which-animals-could-you-beat-in-a-fight/?ref=thegist.ie) In a similar vein, [evident enthusiastic elephant pummeller JD Vance](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/jd-vance-volodymyr-zelenskyy?ref=thegist.ie) thought he could out-alpha Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the world would be persuaded through the force of his manliness. Instead, the Very Online VP earned himself the ultimate online disgrace- [a dismantling from the Menswear Guy](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/08/zelenskyy-suit-ukraine-fashion-style-00219275?ref=thegist.ie). The main weakness in this House of Weaknesses is Elon Musk. This is because the man himself is the anthropomorphic personification of the word 'liability', of course. But also because, in his rush to wield unaccountable political power, he forgot what that power was built on. Musk has power because of his money. But he is the richest man in the world only for so long as his Tesla stockholding remains bubble-inflated. And Tesla, despite his frantic recent claims otherwise, is a car company whose CEO has been successfully persuading people not to buy their cars. Outside the US, Tesla sales are [a busted flush. ](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/uk-new-car-sales-drop-1-february-industry-data-shows-2025-03-05/?ref=thegist.ie) And inside the US, a grassroots, distributed protest has formed around the idea of [picketing, shaming and damaging Tesla's brand value](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/tesla-dealership-attacks-elon-musk-protests-escalate?ref=thegist.ie). This week Musk tried to insinuate the Takedown Tesla protests weren't spontaneous expressions of political speech but were. something something *something* funded by a group of people (he named them). He cited an Investigation as his source. It is possible these Investigators were distracted. For example, one of the masterminds they identified behind Tesla pickets turned out to have been dead for six years. Tesla may yet join him, unravelling its largest shareholder's life and power along the way. See. There's always something to look forward to. [Subscribe to The Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to The Gist, but for some money](#/portal/signup) [Shut up and take my money](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: The Landlord's Game URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-landlords-game/ Last updated: 2025-02-23T15:25:00.000Z After months of flopping about, the Irish Government decided it was time to stop messing about on the edges, rowing about Schrodinger's Independents and saying the opposition were telling lies, but as Gaeilge. The moment had arrived for this government-in-no-great-hurry to finally get down to the heart of the main problem of the nation- Housing. Starting from the top, the Taoiseach took the lead. Firstly, there was the little problem that [all the housing numbers the Government had chanted before the election had turned out to be baloney](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/we-got-it-wrong-taoiseach-says-inflated-pre-election-housing-figures-were-a-genuine-belief-at-the-time/a831749808.html?ref=thegist.ie). Just absolute duff figures, used to rebut arguments that we had a housing crisis and that the Government had failed to address it. The Taoiseach explained that everyone had relied on Darragh O'Brien, the Housing Minister, telling them how many houses he'd get built (40,000). Then, after the election, it turned out those numbers were absurdly inflated when the CSO came out with some actual figures on completions (30,330). This explanation does require us to imagine that the Taoiseach and other coalition party leaders haplessly considered Darragh O'Brien a more oracular source of statistics and prediction than, say, the Central Bank who were projecting final housing completion numbers of around 32k as early as September 2024. One [Fianna Fáil TD told the Daily Mail](https://extra.ie/2025/02/04/news/irish-news/damning-letter-on-housing?ref=thegist.ie): ‘We’re left wondering what was actually achieved by his housing plan that wouldn’t have happened without him being there.’ Darragh O'Brien is no longer housing minister, so he didn't address any questions about why he had given his Taoiseach and all the other members of the Government their regrettably false sense of personal success. Instead he has moved on to tackle public transport, making (and I swear I did not invent this) his first signature policy the delivery of infrastructure that just doesn't turn up when the numbers say it ought to be there. Yes, the Minister for Ghost Houses is now the Minister for Ghost Buses. Has any single politician ever had such a record of haunting failure? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-15-at-14.28.30.png) Source: [https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFvF4J5saWE/?igsh=Y2ljeThtbHF2NXpo](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFvF4J5saWE/?igsh=Y2ljeThtbHF2NXpo&ref=thegist.ie) ### Rent Lobbyist Pressure Zones Then, almost in the same breath, the Taoiseach laid out his plan to turn things around. We had to be realistic, he told us. The Government wouldn't build houses for everyone, so we needed to make building more profitable for private developers. As these developers are now (unlike the last FF housing boom) largely build-to-let investment firms, [the key profit lever is to do away with rent pressure zones. ](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/02/09/taoiseach-signals-possible-end-to-rent-pressure-zones-by-end-of-year/?ref=thegist.ie) We should be clear what this kite actually means. It is the direct continuation, now the election is over, of the previous government's housing policy. [From March 2023: ](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-eviction-politicians/) > "The result, just to look at it again, was that the Government decided that they would see thousands of people made homeless, as a deliberate result of their public policy, so that landlords (institutional or individual) could see higher returns from their property investments." The alternative to mass homelessness is that someone has to pay for housing all the people who need houses, but who cannot afford to buy one. As the government has promised its property-owning voters that it will never reduce the price of housing (see April 2023, [The Gist: Where did the houses go?](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-where-did-the-houses-go/)), the possibility of making housing more affordable to buy is off the table. This leaves two sources to provide new housing. Either the state builds it, spreading the cost of providing this housing across all of the tax base (humans and unfathomably wealthy companies alike) or investment firms pay for it and then recoup the costs with extra profits directly from renters through rent, forever. Obviously, the result of the former would be cheaper accommodation for the people who live in the housing than the latter. You can spread the costs to the state through the whole economy, likely recouping more in additional economic productivity and social mobility than it would cost in actual euros spent. If nothing else, consider the boost to population alone arising from all those 20somethings suddenly released from their parents' back bedrooms. Talk about a Big Bang. But doing so is now ideologically rejected. Meaningful quantities of State-provided housing has become the river Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael refuse to cross. On the far shore is the possibility of housing in general becoming more affordable. And this is the one thing they will never do. So the governement has again made the conscious decision to see masses of people made homeless- families, single people, old people- in order to allow institutional investment firms to make higher profits through raising the rent on people who are not voters they care about. Forget Ghost Houses. This is a Zombie Policy, which still shambles on long after it has been shown to have no life or hope left. --- If you'd like to listen to me talk about some of the above, as well as the other things which came up during the Campaign Gists, I was on the [EchoChamber Podcast](https://tortoiseshack.ie/1415-the-gist-with-simon-mcgarr/?ref=thegist.ie) doing exactly that. Health issues, including a broken arm from an unnecessarily dramatic ice/road/bike interface, appear to be clearing up and I hope to be able to type more readily this week. ### The Gist: The Group Think Government URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-group-think-government/ Last updated: 2025-01-23T14:32:58.000Z Yesterday's disruption of the election of a Taoiseach by the Dáil may set the tone for this Government's years in office (however many they may be). Behind the spectacle was something deeper. It has been a demonstration of the limits of the powers of office and a reminder that the Dáil functions and the Executive exercises power with the consent of the Opposition. That fact is why the 1921-1927 Free State parliament needed the Labour Party to sit opposite while the main opposition in the country was self-exiled from the Dáil. The Govt is only legitimate with an opposition. The Labour Party played that role- bedding down Ireland’s Parliamentary system and culture. Ironically, FG spent something like eight decades not learning that lesson after spending most of that time as the main Opposition party. Having tasted Executive power as the Civil War's winners, they sullenly waited to reclaim what they saw as their rightful place inGovt in sulky impotence. Since having power fall into their lap, the party has resolutely set its face against any introspection on what might have caused its long exiles from Cabinet. Meanwhile, over the same period, FF effectively lost their position as the party in or about to be in Govt only once- after the Cowen Govt’s collapse. Why would they ever consider the role of Opposition as anything more than a tiresome waiting room they had to briefly endure before being called back into office? This Govt was negotiated without a thought for the potential reactions by the Opposition parties to the deal allowing backbench Govt TDs cosplay as Opposition. Neither party has a culture that values parliamentary opposition- that sees it as having a role of its own, beyond The Losers. Why stop at Independent TDs? Why not form every non-Ministerial backbench FF and FG TD into technical groups of 7 and give them each a slice of the Opposition’s speaking rights? That’s what the Ceann Comhairle has said would be legal. But everyone would recognise it wasn’t legitimate. Take a look at this headline. ![RTE Website screenshot: Incoming Govt caught off guard amid day of high emotion in Dáil chamber](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-23-at-09.19.13.png) The Govt was “Caught off Guard”. The deal done to let the Independents run with the hares while pretending to also hunt with the hounds was clearly absurd. But they all were surprised it didn’t fly. This is the [Groupthink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink?ref=thegist.ie) problem again. I wrote about groupthink in the Gist at the end of the [National Maternity Hospital](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-exit-voice-and-loyalty/) row. > “precisely because they have worked so long towards a common goal, people who are engaging in group-think find challenges to their shared beliefs intolerable.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-23-at-09.22.51.png) Irish Examiner Headline: Martin: Dáil chaos a 'subversion of the Irish Constitution' > “We forget it sometimes, but the Government doesn’t pass laws- the Oireachtas does that. And that’s because hearing the opinion of “the loyal opposition”, who are outside the group consensus of government, produces stronger, more robust legislation.” > “An institutionalised process that challenges groupthink is why democracies tend to last longer than autocracy.” Our [last Campaign Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-and-in-the-end/) was focussed on the idea that the Opposition has an unusual level of coherence in its professed worldview. And we saw some of that play out yesterday in the line of leaders standing together to deny the validity of speaking time for Schrödinger's Independents. But the opening of the Dáil has thrown the corollary into sharp relief. With no ideologically or politically diverse voices in Government the incoming administration is going to find itself wrongfooted repeatedly as it trips over the gap between what all the parties in Government will agree seems reasonable and how those ideas will fly when exposed to the public gaze. Wednesday's outing provides a lesson in the value of hearing from voices from outside your own worldview before deciding your lead balloon is going to soar from the rooftops. The Taoiseach will be elected today, I’m quite sure. But the new Government - and their Ceann Cormhairle- have had a marker set down by the Dáil to remind them of the limits of executive power. ### Campaign Gist: And in the end... URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-and-in-the-end/ Last updated: 2025-01-16T23:56:29.000Z What seems like the most conventional of all outcomes to an Irish election (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael back in power) actually holds the seeds of radical change. Unfortunately, not all change is good. This is the last Campaign Gist. It seems strange to write a Campaign Gist at this distance from the actual campaign, but then this has been a very protracted election. The knowledge that it was coming shaped behaviours and actions throughout the year. Fine Gael got a new leader becuase their sitting Taoiseach just didn't want to go through it. Sinn Féin's poll-ercoaster ride saw them gyrating through a series of desperation-tinged [lamentable decisions](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-sfs-duality-galways-volatility/) as they saw the cliff-edge of the public vote approach. By the time the actual election was called and the campaign officially started in the dead of November, the political and horserace commentariat had been driven insane. For them, all of 2024 was an ashen-faced electoral Narnia– always the Winter of campaigning but never the Christmas of an actual vote. Well, the vote has come and gone and we have a new Government ready to start the business of making decisions for the country now they've decided how to divide the spoils of success between them. But despite the familiarity of the cast of characters, this government actually represents a departure from anything else we've seen before. This is an undiluted right wing government facing a leftish opposition. This is the moment decades of political science academics and frustrated [Labour Party theorists](http://brendanhalligan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/5-Days-Labour-History-final-NC.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) have waited and pined for. ### A Contriwise Equilibrium For much of the history of the state, we've had one of two models of government. We had the era up to the 1980s where Fianna Fáil governed as a hegemon, interrupted by short periods of Fine Gael/Labour (and Misc) coalitions. Then we had the era of coalitions, where each election was followed by a mathematically-defined effort to jigsaw a majority together. If Fine Gael were in office, they governed with Labour and faced Fianna Fáil as the lead opposition. If Fianna Fáil were in power, they also had a Labour or Green partner and faced Fine Gael as the main alternative voice. Even when Fianna Fáil relied on the PDs, Fine Gael provided the main other option for voters to turn to. Is it any wonder that Sinn Féin's leader re-used a Tweedledum and Tweedledee reference for the second campaign in a row. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2025/01/Tennieldumdee.jpg) Irish voters face their polling choice, 1927-2025 In each version, the government had a nominally leftish component and/or faced a right wing voice as the main alternative. This new government will have neither. ### FF, the Socialist Party It would be silly to suggest that Ireland has never had a right wing government. I mean, look at Ireland. But it has never had such a clear division between a right wing government and a nominally left wing opposition. There is no minor mudguard in this coalition. The alternative is something different, not the usual “same but a different coloured tie”. Micheál Martin, who the election has reminded us is a pretty canny politician, has seen the danger here. Like [socialist Bertie Ahern](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/dail-row-over-socialist-ahern-1.995233?ref=thegist.ie) before him, he has started to position Fianna Fáil as the left wing voice in the government. Given the government voices are going to include a Healy-Rae, this doesn’t require that much movement. The Overton window of what may be said by people in power is about to make the Taoiseach look like Micheál The Red in comparison. The danger of this arrangement is that the flavour of a political coalition tends to be set by its loudest, most provocative members. Every time Danny Healy-Rae opines on climate science now, it won't just be [the BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36213938?ref=thegist.ie) and his voters in Kerry his message will reach. It will colour opinion of all the government's TDs with their voters. When Barry Heneghan, a FF-style Independent TD in the guise of a [manic children's TV presenter](https://www.tiktok.com/@barcare/video/7440541847275031840?is%5Ffrom%5Fwebapp=1&sender%5Fdevice=pc&web%5Fid=7460657203961759255&ref=thegist.ie), appears [giving a thumbs up in a photo](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/new-government-td-poses-with-veteran-criminal-days-before-entering-coalition/a173945280.html?ref=thegist.ie) with a man who had to give his house up to CAB, that's the Government Deputy Chief Whip doing it. Now look at that through the prism of [today's absurd row](https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0116/1491111-ireland-politics/?ref=thegist.ie), where Michael Lowry proposed that the government coalition regional members who didn't actually land a ministerial job should get to keep the perks of being in an opposition Technical group. Lowry, best imagined as a collection of faults roughly pressed into human shape, is no idiot. He knows the danger of leaving all of the reactionary voices inside the Government tent. ### The Red King's Dream For the very first time, almost by accident, Ireland's government will offer voters single political worldview and the Opposition, from their various angles, will offer a different and opposing one. Whether the Opposition is up to the challenge of this moment is still an open question. The largest opposing party, after all, will be Sinn Féin, a party which has never had to take responsibility for anything that hadn't exploded. After its unseemly gyrations around immigration, it will have only a bare few months to reassert itself as having any leftish credibility before people tune out again. We have no idea if the party is even capable of learning from the experience of its second short fall election. It may not be able to imagine anything beyond "One more heave". A party with only two leaders in 42 years is hardly one that has shown a capacity for fleet-footed responsiveness to change. For Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, the keyword for the programme for government is 'continue'. Their plan is to just keep doing what they were doing anyway, but stop doing the Green Party things that irked them. But this isn't a continuance of the last government. It is something new and rougher. When Tweedledum and Tweedledee refuse to ever battle the fight will move on without them. After all, how else will we all shake Ireland up? It needs a nice hard rattle. [Subscribe to The Gist](#/portal/signup/free) [Subcribe to the same Gist, but for some money](#/portal/signup) [Never mind subscribing, I just want to give money](#/portal/support) ### The Gist: "My Daughter's Path" URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-my-daughters-path/ Last updated: 2025-01-04T12:44:47.000Z My daughter left me, but I followed her into the brown pine-needle forest. By the time I got there she was already with the women, and I couldn't enter that place. So I waited outside for her to come back to me again. . I waited in my car, which I had used to cover the great mossy distances in the forest. It had taken her a long time, and she was on her own for most of it. It must have seemed like forever to her, although to me everything just flashed by. I never noticed anything until it was too late. A few times I even had to go back, having lost her path entirely. But I always found her track again. Sometimes, as I passed, I would see a place where she fell or had stopped and cried, and I would cry as well, for her. The crying stopped the further, the deeper in, I traced her. Here she had been hurt, but had kept going on regardless. I admired her courage, to travel such a road alone. I wished I could have helped her when she had to scramble over the mound of broken branches or jump a ditch. But then, I was who she was traveling away from. When I reached the end of her trail she had gone behind the high walls and the thick brown gates. No news of her came to me from inside. Nothing could come to a man like me from inside such a place. So I settled myself by my car to wait for her to come out. I was her father and that, I knew, would always make her mine. While I waited I would remember her face as she turned in our kitchen. I could never remember what I'd said to her, because I thought she'd always be there to hear it. She had been my happiness for so long. And at the same time I saw now how short it was- just a drive across a mossy forest. I knew I would have to keep her alive, all of her alive, by my thoughts. I had been alone for some months when I found her first, on the doorstep. She was dressed in green knitted wool and a yellow knitted cap. I remembered that as a baby, my daughter had worn the same clothes. I had delighted in seeing the amazement on her face as her cap was pulled off and then on again. Her blue eyes would open wide and her shiny nose would move up, as her mouth formed a small round hole of surprise. I knew she was the only perfect thing I had seen. Nothing was more important than her. Her hand would grip my proffered thumb and her eyes would try to focus on what she had caught. I don't think she ever saw the size of her prisoner, or how firm a grip she had on him. She would lie on her back and watch, all day. Even when there was nothing to see. She would watch the distance if that was all there was. But her power came because she never just saw how something looked. She always took it in fully, as it really was. No illusion could get past her clear blue filters. I sometimes felt I should fear her, if I did not love her so much. Most movingly she would try to watch herself, as she caught sight of her outstretched hands or her lifted feet. But that was beyond even her cool gaze, as she would feed back on her own reactions. Her hand would flex and she would react, moving her arm even more. I never knew if she made the connection between her inner world and that world she saw around her. I read once that babies make no distinction between themselves and others, that they see the world as just another mysterious part of the whole. It was true with me. I had become an extension of my daughter, and like her hands I reacted to her emotions. I felt as she felt, and through her I felt it totally. I was shocked when I found I had lost that daughter. I lifted the body of the baby I had found and carried it to my car. It felt just as I remember her feeling in my arms, but its closed eyelids and it's stillness weren't those of sleep. My granddaughter? My daughter. I held her for a long time. I still don't know how I didn't notice her going, or how I let her leave. But she was gone and I could only think about her with the past. I wasn't ready to bury her, so I wrapped her up in a shroud (a small envelope she made) and laid her in the boot of my car. I still yearn for the pressure on my thumb of her grip. I failed to keep her with me, and so am lost myself. I was some years waiting after that. It often rained in the forest, which was a darker place now than I remembered it. I would collect this water to drink and wash. I had brought sandwiches and boiled sweets in my glove compartment, so I never went hungry. It wasn't a luxurious life but I didn't care. Nothing was more important than what I was doing, and what I had to do. One of those mornings I woke to find a child waiting for me at the foot of the door. Her clothes were those she had worn on summer when we had gone on holiday. Dressed in her lizard t-shirt and faded blue shorts, my six year old daughter insisted on introducing herself as six and three quarters to everyone we met. I have an image of her still in my mind walking ahead of me, the grass on either side of the path taller than her head. Her hair was short that year, all those years, with what was called a pageboy style. She carried an adult tennis racquet, which looked outsized as she swung it with both hands. She would sometimes wave it unsteadily at the head of passing grasses, but mostly she let it drag in the sand behind her, leaving tracks of animals she sometimes called out to me. Kangaroo was her favourite, as she held the racquet between her legs and hopped in her canvas shoes, great arm swinging leaps taking her a few inches forward at a time. Often she would stop, and turn to reassure herself that she hadn't lost me. She would always smile with relief at my closeness and would walk on again. A child's voice murmuring to itself, its voice rising and falling as it tells its tale. She was far enough that I couldn't hear the songs and stories she told, but that I longed to be part of. And close enough that she could hear my crunching steps and the poke-rutch of my umbrella in the sand, carried against the wind as much as the rain. We would play the video game in the local pub together. I would steer my spaceship, aiming it at the threatening asteroids and she would press the red cigarette-burned fire button. We often lost lives because I would have my attention fixed on her face as she watched the screen with the same concentration that my first, lost daughter had brought to her hands. When we did die, she would look up at me for reassurance and I would feed the machine another 10p. It was a small price to pay to remain her protector. I remember showing her the stars, freed from their city-dimness. She looked up and watched them all. I had never known any of their names, but she wouldn't have been interested anyway. For her, any names given to such things would be meaningless. As we stood beside a roll of hay, another exotic touch, I saw again an echo of the amazement of my first daughter. For her the sky was mysterious. But it wasn't the sky filling me with awe that night, those nights. I knew I mustn't lose this daughter, and I didn't seem to be in danger of doing so for years. Watching her wade into a particularly heavy snow so wrapped up that her arms stuck out from her body, blends into a picture of her silhouette as she bent on a beach, looking at a rock or a crab or a rock that looked like a crab. Her shadow stretched away on the wet sand, distorted by the sinking light. It was the figure of a much taller, more slender person which streamed away from my daughter. I feared it. My daughter asked me questions and I told her many things. But I cannot now remember telling her anything as an answer to her questions. She would listen to me as I talked about the rock forms on the cliffs we passed or the erosion which made the beach. But when I was finally finished she would ask why the sea was better than the ground, sometimes? I never knew the answer to any of her questions, so I would tell her about something else. At first, she would repeat her question, but she later learned that it did no good. When she stopped asking questions and I stopped not answering them, my fear grew. I was always too late. My second daughter was gone. I laid her body, wrapped in a larger piece of cloth, beside my baby in my car. And as I did so I feared what was to come. I had only one child left to me. Two lay unburied, mourned, behind me. But the third was the last. There would be nothing but waiting when she was gone. My third child will be tall and she will be quick. While I wait here for her to appear at the door, the forest has grown black and my hands have grown old. After she is laid down there will only be waiting left. I know my daughter will come back to me in the end. The last child on the doorstep will be taken in, not left out, and it will belong to her and it will be me. ### The Gist: Paul Duane's "My Christmas Memories" URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-paul-duanes-my-christmas-memories/ Last updated: 2025-01-01T12:02:59.000Z ### My Christmas Memories by [Paul Duane](https://www.patreon.com/weirdandconfusing?ref=thegist.ie) So here we are again! Smack-dab in the middle of “the most wonderful time of the year”, when sleighbells glisten and children listen, and my thoughts drift again to Christmases long-gone and as with most people of my age those memories often revolve around television, the Late Late Toy Show of course, as well as evergreen Christmas fare like the Muppets and of course the spectacle of Mass broadcast from Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral into our own homes where we watched kneeling beside the three-piece suite. People these days mired as they are in the swamp of social media and the rest of it don’t care about such things. Their loss. In my memories those times glow softly with a peace that the chilly yellow antiseptic-smelling present day can’t help to match. My own most cherished memory of seasonal television is one that no matter how many times I repeat the memory when describing it to concerned loved ones, doctors or the police, nobody seems to remember except me. This is difficult to believe because it happened on live television in broad daylight in the middle of December 1988 and I know because I saw it. But it never turns up in Reeling In The Years even though I never missed an episode and the people in the RTE Television Archive stopped replying to my polite emails long ago. Statistically someone else must have seen it! But so far I have found no-one. This is why I am writing and with a bit of luck publishing this piece perhaps in Ireland’s Own magazine or possibly in Our Boys which is the magazine of the Christian Brothers Schools worldwide. These publications have a huge readership and surely someone out there will read my words wrinkle their brow pull out a dusty old VHS tape and send it to me so that I can have the last word on the subject and turn those doctors green from disappointment with my irrefutable proof positive on videotape. They would have to unlock those doors and I could walk out into the festive December air to find the doors long closed to me would open up again and all the ones I thought long lost would smile and take me in. Proof. It’s what I’ve searched for all these long years. Here's what happened as best I can tell it. I was a student at the time in Dublin though for all the studying I was doing I might as well have called myself a dosser because to be frank the lure of easy living had caught me and I was at the time quite likely to remain in my bed until lunch hour was past and once out of bed my breakfast often came rolled up in a jumbo Rizla cigarette paper to be consumed while I watched afternoon children’s TV programmes along with a can of beer if there was any left in the fridge. Not just any old TV programmes though. I was a super-fan as were all my friends of the puppet duo Zig and Zag who came to Ireland from a planet called Zog. They were a secret we kept from the outside world. They gave us a break every weekday afternoon from being young adults trying to survive the bleak Irish 1980s. We loved them. Mr Comedy and Captain Joke were our friends. Throughout Halloween of that year one of the puppets – I no longer remember which one, so let’s just say it was Zag – had created a post-modern masterstroke which is to say he made a puppet of his own and tried to learn ventriloquism. This puppet Frankenstein’s monster was a lumpy-headed ugly bug-eyed creature to which Zag if it was Zag gave the name Podge. Zag’s clumsy attempts at ventriloquism were funny enough – a puppet operating a puppet! Had anything like this happened before in history? I doubted it! - but what happened after that was even funnier, so funny it made me howl even in my darkest dreams. Podge sat ignored most of the time on a box at the back of the tiny studio from which Zig and Zag would broadcast. His ugly lumpy papier-mache head lolled stupidly staring with blank eyes as the puppets went through their routines. But one day something very strange happened when both Zig and Zag were for some reason momentarily off-screen leaving the studio empty. This is a phenomenon called ‘dead air’ and it is something television generally avoids and after what happened that day I understand why. Podge, the puppet made by a puppet, moved its head and spoke. “They don’t know I’m listening,” it said. “They don’t know I’m alive. They have a lot to learn about me.” I sat there riddled with strong weed watching in nervous fascination as this thing - this Golem – revealed its true nature to me and the rest of the television audience. We had been told a secret that Zig and Zag themselves were ignorant of. It gave me an excited scared bubbling feeling in my guts. But this isn’t the thing I’m talking about, this is only the beginning of the thing. The Podge saga as we now called it continued through the month of October and we watched avidly as Zig began to slowly suspect something was up. Giggling with joy we talked about it in the dingy college canteen over polystyrene cups of Nescafé. We adopted weird ugly Podge as our mascot. He was in on the joke. Or so I thought anyway. He was the one who knew the world’s secret inner workings. I began to draw him in the margins of my college essays and I will admit perhaps I thought about him more than my friends and maybe I did it a little bit too much but it was only a joke really or so I thought at the time. Eventually the Podge ‘story arc’ concluded and the evil puppet was found out and banished but I continued to turn the events of October over and over in my mind and examine them with fascination and some slight puzzling internal excitement. On the day this happened Christmas was fast looming with its forced return to the family home where the parental norms I hid away from in Dublin would return and once again I would be with people who would not understand the secret language I had adopted in Dublin. I tamped down the fear by increasing my intake of substances which I managed to do by selling additional substances to my immediate friends and by ignoring my college work even more than usual. The day this happened I breakfasted at lunchtime on stale bread toasted so as to intensify its palatability and topped with honey I found at the back of the fridge. The honey had fibrous growths in it that I finally recognised as the remains of the October mushroom crop which had been left there to macerate for weeks into a sweet sticky mulch. No stranger to fungi, I shrugged and ate it though it tasted strange. Though some have tried to argue it might have had some bearing on my later actions that day I maintain that things would have transpired in the same way even if I had been as sober as a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Society like my father. A Christmas-themed week was in progress on the Zig and Zag show. It was built around a big ‘reveal’ which had been hyped for weeks. Surprisingly I was the only one at home on the day of this reveal as the rest of my housemates were busy doing their exam prep in the college library. All the better for me! I had the cluttered living-room entirely to myself. I made myself a cup of tea to go with my bread and honey. I waited in great excitement to see what Zig and Zag had in store for us. What was to come was something I could never have imagined. A curtain hung across the middle of the studio set. It was hiding something mysterious and I smiled to myself as I imagined what it might be. Possibly the show’s host - the perennially confused-looking Ian – might have been made to dress as a hapless Santa trying to deliver gifts only to be mocked and made the butt of jokes by his puppet masters. Nobody knew because as I said before it was a carefully guarded secret. Then the curtains parted to reveal Podge sitting upright on a tinsel-decorated throne. It was the last thing I expected. He had not been part of the show for weeks now. He had almost been forgotten except sometimes in my dreams. Here he was, back. Now all the sounds the music the banter of the puppet hosts faded into an echoing distant roar as Podge’s bug-eyes bored deep into mine as I sat on the floor inches in front of the television in the livingroom filled with discarded pizza boxes and paperback books which gradually fell away from my view until all that was left in the universe was those terrible, unblinking eyes with their crudely painted black pupils that reflected back no light, nothing at all. Then he said my name. And he turned to look at me. And he moved towards the tv camera that separated him from me and towards the curved smooth screen of the television and through it and into the room with me. The things that happened after that they wrote up in the newspapers so you might have seen it and you probably have strong opinions about me like most people do but I don’t like to think about too much especially during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. The way they all say it was me who did all those things to all those people and say nothing at all about Podge the puppet even though I told them exactly what happened but now if I think about it too long it just makes me angry so I try not to. Just because I forgot to press ‘record’ on the VCR sitting under the TV. If I had just recorded the time when the puppet came out of the TV at me they couldn’t be upset with me anymore and maybe they might allow me out for Christmas sometime instead of lying here in this yellow room with the smell of Dettol with my face turned to the wall on my small bunk looking into the cracks in the paint and turning them into pictures in my head as I sing the old songs to myself like have yourself a merry little Christmas or It was Christmas Eve baby in the drunk tank. So please check your old video recordings for me! In between the ads for Bachelors beans and Xtra-Vision video rentals somewhere in the static on some tape somewhere is proof of my innocence which if you think about it would be the very best thing you could ever give anyone for Christmas. You boy what day is it. There’s one for everyone in the audience. I turned my face away and dreamed about two blank black eyes and the fuzzy reception on the tv set like snow falling generally all over Ireland. Nollaig shona daoibh go léir. ### The Gist: Sarah Manvel's 2024 Cinema Year URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-sarah-manvels-2024-cinema-year/ Last updated: 2024-12-30T11:14:17.000Z I asked author[ Sarah Manvel](https://sarahsnewideas.com/?ref=thegist.ie) to contribute a piece of her film writing to our Christmas Cracker round up because I have spent the year enjoying reading a person who seems interested in criticism of film. It is very hard to find someone who writes criticism on movies, as opposed to recaps of what happened or bean-counting descriptions of box-office returns. But it's not quite impossible yet. --- by Sarah Manvel ### No Sex Please, We're Watching There’s been a recent cultural shift in the Hollywood blockbuster. Where once the big finale would always involve a kiss, this is no longer the case. This shift (or lack of) began in 2016, when Hollywood said ‘global’ audiences wanted Matt Damon to kiss nobody, not even Pedro Pascal, in **The Great Wall**, and that a hug was sufficient at the end of **Rogue One**. Now the responsibility for our smooch-free movies seems to belong with a younger generation. So uncomfortable are the youths with sex stuff onscreen that Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell had to content themselves with smiling at the end of this year’s [**Twisters**](https://movieswetextedabout.com/theres-something-missing-at-the-heart-of-twisters-review/?ref=thegist.ie#more-2068). Considering both Miss Edgar-Jones and Mr Powell have a smoking-hot reputation thanks to their respective bold work in **Normal People** and [**Hit Man**](https://www.criticsnotebook.com/2023/11/hit-man-movie-review-richard-linklater-glen-powell-netflix.html?ref=thegist.ie) (which had film festival crowds literally bursting into applause), you’d think audiences would like to see what they could do together. But right now at the cineplex it’s clear the all-powerful young-adult market is generally uncomfortable with snogging, much less anything else. Part of this is a hangover from the lonely isolation of lockdowns. Following that we’re seeing some long-overdue social change about power dynamics and unwanted physical contact, but this protectionism is sometimes extended into seeing physical contact between other people. Concern for safety and consent is adorable and appreciated. But when this extends to good-looking actors briefly locking lips, it can morph into puritanism. There’s a great case to be made for the importance of all kinds of hot stuff onscreen. When my sister was at uni in France, her host family covered the kids’ eyes at even the mildest violence on television. Yet whenever there was nudity and sex scenes, the children were encouraged to watch and ask questions. My shocked sister was told it was important to learn first that all bodies are normal and then how to give and receive pleasure with them. Whereas violence – taking pleasure in hurting others – was the worst thing of all, never to be tolerated in life or in art. I never met this family but they changed my thinking. After all, how are people disturbed by seeing someone kiss going to get the courage to kiss someone themselves, much less be any good at it? And when all depictions of physical affection are driven out of the mainstream and into pornography, doesn’t that cause more problems than it solves? ### Queering Bond Daniel Craig’s recent courage has been obvious. Back in October 2005, the announcement that he would play James Bond set off a furore (A blond? Playing Bond? My stars!) despite his pre-Bond work demonstrating a radioactive attractiveness perfect for an idealised spy. Unfortunately the straightjacket of the part, which largely is to embody a specific idea of masculinity in the service of sophomoric romantic ambitions wrapped in a cartoonish Union Jack, curdled his interest in acting. This is a tragedy most apparent when watching **Casino Royale**, which has aged like fine wine. An extraordinarily vicious and visceral performance was there right out of the gate for audiences unprepared for how he took the character back to basics. Decades of Roger Moore’s winks to the camera and Pierce Brosnan’s politely stylised action meant audiences had forgotten that an assassin, state-sponsored or not, is [tragic, not comic](https://www.criticsnotebook.com/2008/10/quantum-of-solace.html?ref=thegist.ie#more). Since **No Time to Die**’s release in 2021 Craig has been acting like a man reborn, or at least one determined to smash stereotypes of what makes a ‘real man,’ starting by exclusively playing homosexuals. In Rian Johnson’s gentleman detective movies, 2019’s **Knives Out** and its 2022 sequel, [**Glass Onion**,](https://www.criticsnotebook.com/2022/10/glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery-movie-review-daniel-craig-rian-johnson.html?ref=thegist.ie) Craig is the preening ‘confirmed bachelor’ Benoit Blanc, unravelling ludicrously complicated crimes with his mind and a respected female assistant instead of his body. A third instalment is in the works, too. Now, in the recently released [**Queer**](https://movieswetextedabout.com/queer-movie-review-venice/?ref=thegist.ie#more-2252), Craig plays a version of real-life writer-slash-junkie-slash-manslaughterer William S. Burroughs looking for love and enlightenment in all the grossest places. The scene where he waits for the heroin to take hold is the single best thing Craig has ever done, a complete lesson in pain and heartbreak. The rest of **Queer** is a hallucinatory mess, but there’s no such missteps in Craig’s performance as a needy, demanding, damaged man desperately trying to escape the prison of his self. It’s a gruesome triumph. Let’s hope that Craig continues to find a way back to parts which allow him to demonstrate all the nuances of his enormous talent as he pleases. ### But is it a Better York? How women’s horizons have expanded in movies is also pleasing, even when imagination about women’s lives has its limits, such as the overused trope of a New York City setting. But it’s always been a hell of a town. 2015’s **Brooklyn** focused on an Irish woman (played by Saoirse Ronan) in the 1950s building a new life for herself guess where because there was no work for her at home. But when suddenly life in Enniscorthy, complete with a fella, becomes an option, she has to decide if she wants to choose the place that made her choose in the first place. 2023’s [**Past Lives**](https://intheirownleague.com/2023/03/05/past-lives-berlinale-2023-review/?ref=thegist.ie) told a similar female-immigrant story but one more strongly rooted in New York. There a Korean woman, Nora (Greta Lee), has a happy career and a happier marriage with an American before her childhood sweetheart comes from Seoul for a visit. It becomes clear the two kids in love remain in love despite their vast differences as adults. Nora has already made her choices, but naturally wonders what if. And of course her husband from her chosen culture will never understand her the way someone from her home culture does. Which understanding is better? And is this a question that can be answered? Two movies from this year similarly explored the life choices of daughters of immigrants in Brooklyn, one to huge success and the other not so much. Palme d’Or-winning [**Anora**](https://movieswetextedabout.com/anora-review-the-best-american-movie-so-far-this-decade-cannes/?ref=thegist.ie#more-1694) brought a class-based twist to its tale of heedless marriage between a Russian-American stripper (Ani, played by Mikey Madison) and an immature but unimaginably wealthy young Russian man. As things go sour there’s the unignorable awareness of everything money can buy, and Russian superstar Yura Borisov has made an international name for himself as the man who understands Ani’s value when no one else does. But this year’s [**Tendaberry**](https://intheirownleague.com/2024/02/02/sundance-2024-review-tendaberry/?ref=thegist.ie), written and directed by Haley Elizabeth Anderson and which has not been picked up for distribution despite playing at Sundance, does a more emotional job of showing one young working-class woman in Brooklyn navigating her own way. A broke Dominican-American woman (Kota Johan) cannot join her Ukrainian boyfriend when he must return to Kyiv. She spends her time alone watching the video diaries of Nelson Sullivan, a real person who documented his life in 80s New York with a camcorder, new tech at the time, before he died of AIDS. Studying how he lived and moved is how she realises she must also build her own unique city, leading to an end of life-affirming power to rival **Anora**’s. In a time when audiences are hungry for emotional guidance, it’s shocking no one has taken a chance on **Tendaberry**. Watch it somehow, and you’ll also feel your own personal culture shift around you. ### The Gist: Cartoon Year In Review URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-cartoon-24-2/ Last updated: 2024-12-28T13:37:48.000Z [Allan Cavanagh](https://www.caricatures-ireland.com/?ref=thegist.ie)'s cartoon round up on some of the Gist's biggest stories from the year, (together with some words from Simon). ### Ireland's Internet Age Rating Few stories will ever match the sheer number of memorable phrases provided by the Coimisiún na Meán's plan to age-gate the internet. From the "[Porn User Register](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-coimisiun-na-mean-is-big-mad/)" of [Coimisiún na Meán go off the rails](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtf-commission/) and [Coimisiún na Mean is Big Mad](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-coimisiun-na-mean-is-big-mad/) to "[absolutely mega-scale bonkers](https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/2024/01/25/new-broadcasting-and-online-regulator-has-not-got-off-to-an-auspicious-start/?ref=thegist.ie)" while covering the eventual not-quite implementation of the planned code in [A Free Speech](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-free-speech/) The Gist was your number one source of soundbite-inflected info on obscure regulatory action. ### Playing House ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/12/Playing-House.jpeg) Housing is a difficult, society-wide problem. Which was why it was so surprising that [Paschal Donoghoe so easily alienated voters](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist/) when responding to a homeless woman on live TV during the election: "I know it's a very complex argument to make regarding why I'm saying there should not be a complete ban on evictions. The reason for that is that I want more landlords. I want more private landlords". ### Regrettable Neighbour Events ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/12/Trump-sitting-on-No-10.jpeg) While trying not to look was sometimes the best way to deal with our neighbours to the left and to the right, it was difficult to completely fail to cover the UK and US elections. But the arc of history was not the fun kind. We went from enjoying [sequential Tory self humiliations](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-death-march/) or flickers of hope in the [Brat Summer](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-new-us-election/) to facing up the Winter reality of the Labour party being led by "[an underbaked batch loaf in a pair of glasses](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-theatre-of-the-absurd/)" and the US electing just The Worst, provoking [Mourning in America](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-mourning-in-america/). ### A Minority Retort ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/12/Facial-recognition-Garda-video.jpeg) This year, [Fine Gael pushed hard to bring in live facial recognition](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-saving-face/) through CCTV and bodycams attached to Gardaí. This provoked one of the rare examples of your Gisting author having to go out in public and [appear before the Oireachatas Justice Committee](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-facial-recognition-technology-doesnt-work/) as a part of a chorus of counterpoint to Drew Harris' lobbying efforts. ### The Mudguard Meltdown ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/12/Green-Responsibility.jpeg) The year ended with an [election](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-2/) where the Green Party was consumed by voter ire, after becoming the larger Government parties' answer to many of their own voters complaints. No facial recognition done? The Greens made them stop. [Climate action](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-greenhouse-grass/)? The Greens made them do it. New number on your Dublin Bus? The Greens. [Humiliatingly bad referendum results](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-zugzwang-referendum/)? The Greens. (actually, on that one...). ### The Gist: AI, a talking dog for the 21st Century. URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-3/ Last updated: 2025-01-10T15:57:49.000Z **An invited essay by** [**Séamas O'Reilly**](https://bsky.app/profile/seamas.bsky.social?ref=thegist.ie) Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil is something of a legend. The self-proclaimed “master swindler” was the paragon of the early twentieth century con man. In his time, he posed as the immaculately tailored owner of a talking dog, a medicine show huckster, an oil-field prospector and an infinite number of prestigious businessmen reluctantly cajoled into sharing a surefire stock tip - for a price. He plied his trade on street corners, boardrooms, race-tracks and betting shops, separating his marks from their money via means so ingenious many of them have lived on a century later. If you’ve seen the ruse which serves as the centre point of 1973 crime caper *The Sting*, you’ll know one of his greatest hits; the fake bookie’s shop, staffed with dozens of stooges, all working in concert to con one rich mark out of his money. He’s said to have scammed Benito Mussolini out of $2 million and, in 1899, was widely reported to have sold a perfectly unremarkable chicken to an oil baron for the measly price of a thumb sized piece of pure gold. That last wheeze was, in fact, so widely reported that it lives on in the foodstuff which was subsequently named in his honour; the chicken nugget. In Weil’s marvellous memoir, *Con Man*, there is scarcely a paragraph that doesn’t induce lip-smacking glee at his audacity, or the bottomless reserve of credulity he encounters from sober, serious people who, surely you think, should know better. His true genius, conveyed in great detail, was in diagnosing the psychology of the mark, which is to say the psychology of the human soul. In the business of offering “something for nothing”, the person you’re conning is almost always your co-conspirator. "Each of my victims” he writes, “had larceny in his heart.". I return to Weil’s scams, and his judgments of human nature, often. I see them each time, say, a billionaire runs for the American presidency on a platform of helping the downtrodden by cutting taxes for his wealthy friends, or a cohort of British elites succeed in selling ‘sovereignty and independence’ for the measly price of a place within the world’s largest trading bloc. Increasingly, however, I see it most prominently in the vaunted halls of tech, and nowhere more regularly than in the field of AI. ### The Hated Helper To be clear at the outset, there are obviously elements of AI which show promise. The elimination of many rote and tedious tasks in our daily labours should be greeted as a boon, and AI’s work in highly specialised and technical tasks could prove more exciting still. Early developments in linguistics and pattern recognition already suggest that AI could, and hopefully will, lead to terrific advances in everything from [ancient translation](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/books/booksupdate/ai-ancient-tablets-gilgamesh.html?ref=thegist.ie) to [early diagnosis of disease](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/30/artificial-intelligence-tool-identify-cancer-ai?ref=thegist.ie). In such use-cases, however, there is very little guff about this technology’s sentience, nor mention of that dreaded unicorn “artificial general intelligence”. They are simply ingenious and exciting tools which have solid and encouraging applications but do not, crucially, gesture toward an omniscience that does not exist, and which be undesirable if it did. As an ordinary internet user, I despise almost every in-road into my life that AI has made in the past few years, from incompetent chat services to bafflingly inchoate Google search functions, and the deadening churn of bots on every social media platform left alive. There are dozens of terrible AI versions of my own book being freely sold on Amazon, one of which [I even bought in a futile attempt to scry its contents for some form of meaning](https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41039723.html?ref=thegist.ie). As someone in the creative field, I am sympathetic to the most common critique of AI within that sphere – namely, that its ‘artistic’ output amounts to lazy, error-riddled garbage which is morally and stylistically repulsive, while plagiarising and undercutting actual human artists – but this only nibbles at the edges of how I feel about the topic. Because my main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too). ### Would Sir care for a Poisoned Baloney Sandwich? No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffused with so much unsubstantiated bullshit, that I cannot banish from my thoughts the sight of a well-dressed man peddling a miraculous talking dog. The claims made by AI evangelists are so broad and plentiful that compiling a pleasingly long paragraph of purported use-cases is as simple as Googling “AI + \[noun\]”. Having now done just that, I am happy to report that AI will apparently [make you rich](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelwells/2024/04/15/5-ways-to-make-money-online-with-ai-in-2024/?ref=thegist.ie), [find you a date](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/technology/ai-dating-apps.html?ref=thegist.ie), [make you a better lover](https://deepai.org/chat/relationships?ref=thegist.ie), [a better parent](https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/exhausted-mental-load-parenting-ai-app-3010068?srsltid=AfmBOooBeRpgvQSvqcp0r5lp9EMTMKDsozkB21OFkh9zKCeXAPSW5Ovq&ref=thegist.ie), [a better writer](https://onezero.medium.com/how-artificial-intelligence-made-me-a-better-writer-85c57856189d?ref=thegist.ie), [a better worker](https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcperna/2024/10/01/aiis-ai-making-work-better-or-worse/?ref=thegist.ie), [a better boss](https://www.leadershipchoice.com/how-ai-can-help-you-become-a-better-leader-and-where-it-falls-short/?ref=thegist.ie), [a better person](https://charlesandsystems.medium.com/ai-makes-you-a-better-person-ea82aac69408?ref=thegist.ie), [a better soldier](https://www.army.mil/article/236301/researchers%5Fstrive%5Fto%5Fmake%5Fai%5Fa%5Fsoldiers%5Ftrusted%5Fally?ref=thegist.ie), [will fight all wars,](https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2024/07/12/war-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-conflict/?ref=thegist.ie) [end all wars](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/war-and-peace-age-artificial-intelligence?ref=thegist.ie#:~:text=AI%20could%20in%20fact%20remove,critical%20digital%20infrastructure%20certainly%20could.), [hobble terrorists](https://unicri.it/News/-Countering-Terrorism-Online-with-Artificial-Intelligence?ref=thegist.ie), [empower terrorists](https://icct.nl/publication/exploitation-generative-ai-terrorist-groups?ref=thegist.ie), [make you immortal](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/02/21/ai-can-now-make-you-immortal--but-should-it/?ref=thegist.ie), [end crime](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68067081?ref=thegist.ie), [cause crime](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/24%5F0927%5Fia%5Faep-impact-ai-on-criminal-and-illicit-activities.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), [solve the housing crisis](https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/the-ai-revolution-in-12-months-no-one-is-writing-bids-or-tenders-without-using-software-like-this-84238?ref=thegist.ie), [revolutionise architecture](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/07/ai-architects-revolutionising-corbusier-architecture?ref=thegist.ie), [cure cancer](https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/cambridge-cancer-research-ai?ref=thegist.ie), and [make you a perfect creamy fettuccine with pineapple and cashew sauce](https://oneingredientchef.com/introducing-dishgen/?ref=thegist.ie). Some of the above links are more nuanced in their prescriptions, but all advance the same basic claim: AI has world-changing implications for just about every concept or phenomenon you can name, and several you can’t. The problem is, AI is not only unfit to do many of those tasks better (or even more cheaply) than humans, but if it was, in several cases, I’d set fire to every server farm I could find and urge you to do the same. Let’s take Large Language Models as an example, since they’re the most well-known piece of broadly usable AI tech on the market. Much of their notoriety stems from the fact that its hallucinations are so infamous as to be cliché. We all, I’m sure, have our favourites, like meal planners that recommend [putting glue on pizza and eating three rocks a day](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o?ref=thegist.ie); mushroom foraging bots which suggest [users cook and prepare entirely fatal fungi](https://gizmodo.com/ai-chatbot-joins-mushroom-hunters-group-immediately-encourages-them-to-cook-dangerous-mushroom-2000523863?ref=thegist.ie); or supermarket apps that cheerfully prescribe recipes for “aromatic water” [AKA chlorine gas](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/10/pak-n-save-savey-meal-bot-ai-app-malfunction-recipes?ref=thegist.ie). It should be observed that such examples are not merely failures because they advocate things that kill their users (although this is not ideal) but because they take the place of existing repositories of information which had little-to-no use case for replacement. In so doing, they’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now? ### Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble Some quibble and say that these are just teething problems, the inevitable – even amusing – first steps of a technology finding its feet. But that next step, itself, seems illusory. The scaling of AI to something more workable will require geometrically more investment and computing power than the squillions it has already swallowed up on its path to being the current shit product that nobody trusts. Even enthusiastic reporting on the success of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, can’t avoid mentioning that [the company is on track to lose $5 billion this year](https://fortune.com/2024/09/28/openai-5-billion-loss-2024-revenue-forecasts-fundraising-chapgpt-fee-hikes/?ref=thegist.ie). Up to now, their financing has been driven by massive cash injections from the same cheery ranks of hedge funds, soft banks, and petrostates which have propped up every loss-making company you can name for the last decade, from Uber to WeWork to FTX. As recently as July, we saw signs that [the market might not be quite as enthusiastic about doing so anymore](https://futurism.com/investors-concerned-ai-making-money?ref=thegist.ie). It may not be a bubble, but it certainly looks reasonably bubble-shaped, leading tech writer Ed Zitron to convincingly argue we should be referring to the sector as [“Subprime AI”.](https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/?ref=thegist.ie) Cory Doctorow goes further in arguing our only task going forward should be [working out what kind of bubble it is](https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/?ref=thegist.ie), the kind that leaves something behind, or the kind that does not. The cost, both financially and in terms of energy resources, of making good on the promises of Artificial General Intelligence are so vast as to approach Death Star numbers, before we even contend with logistical problems of training AI in the first place. The pool of real-world information on which AI has yet to be trained is not merely dwindling but is, itself, now so polluted by AI-generated content that [this task is rendered more difficult still](https://x.com/jathansadowski/status/1817690404675879242?ref=thegist.ie). Chlorine gas air defusers and superglue pizzas are all well and good when they’re merely poisoning amateur cooks, but they have also poisoned the very well from which AI must now train itself, and separating out the hallucinations from real information grows more difficult with every line of robot doggerel these same companies ceaselessly barf into the digital ether. ### Automating the Evil Henchman Industry All of which is to elide the real harms of this technology we currently see in the world around us. In his recent, and spectacular, takedown of current AI orthodoxy, [The Phony Comforts Of Useful Idiots](https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-phony-comforts-of-useful-idiots), Edward Ongweso Jr lists some harrowing examples, such as [the incompetent crime detection software currently putting American criminal justice in the hands of the machine](https://www.wired.com/story/plainfield-geolitica-crime-predictions/?ref=thegist.ie), the [discriminatory welfare algorithm which wrongly accused 26,000 Dutch families of fraud](https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-a-discriminatory-algorithm-wrongly-accused-thousands-of-families-of-fraud/?ref=thegist.ie), and [the ongoing use of AI to enable the ‘mass assassination factory’ of Gaza](https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?ref=thegist.ie). In all such cases, AI’s “errors” are both devastating, and hard to even label as errors at all, so much as a bleakly useful abrogation of responsibility for the bad actors intent on protecting the dystopian interests of those in power. It is not the thought of eight fingered portraits or garbled auto-generated novels which prompt me to indulge in cheery reveries of burning server farms to the ground. It is the spectre of yet more dehumanised populations, preyed upon by dehumanised systems of state violence. I hate AI because it does not work at most of the things its promoters claim it does, and many of the things it does do are explicitly evil. Its missteps not only kill but dissolve the fragile fabric of trust in information we have left. The jargon of AI boosterism, like NFTs and cryptocurrency before them, has seized the imaginations of punters and investors who believe they’re being led to a world of ease and profit that will change the world and make them filthy rich in the process. It’s the last true “something for nothing” we have left, delivered via mechanisms so abstruse to the lay person that its powers can be described with the folkloric hyperbole of a magic chicken. As a teen, I first encountered Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and marvelled at its concision. I was too slow, however, to realise the transitive property hidden within his neat equation: if all technology is just magic we don’t yet understand, then any old bollocks can be marketed as technology, so long as it’s conveyed to us via a mage class of tech wizards with a passion for turtlenecks, eugenics, and the removal of vowels from proper nouns. It’s a boom time for our new medicine men. Joseph Weil has nothing on them. ### The Gist: A week of Christmas Crackers URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-week-of-christmas-crackers/ Last updated: 2024-12-27T13:14:28.000Z To keep us all afloat in the great void of leftovers between Christmas and New Year, I've asked some people whose work I enjoy to contribute a piece to the Gist. These are the Christmas Crackers you found on Stephens' Day and keep opening on the drifting mush of time afterwards. Like a cracker, you're never sure what you might get. We have essays, film criticism, short stories and a review of some of the Gist's 2024 in cartoon form. Please enjoy, while unconsciously filling your mouth with chocolate from an [open box of Merch for a 19th Century play](https://www.leedsplayhouse.org.uk/unwrapping-the-sweet-story-of-quality-street/?ref=thegist.ie) nobody remembers. ### Campaign Gist: FG finds the voters revolting URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-2/ Last updated: 2024-11-24T12:10:37.000Z Fine Gael entered this election campaign holding all the best cards. It had the most popular leader, the luxury of choosing the date to suit itself and it was the most popular party. It was convinced the people were behind it. Five days from the election and the electorate is behind FG, but only in the way that a pursuing mob waving pitchforks and flaming torches is behind a fleeing Frankenstein monster. Fine Gael have had a nightmarish electoral campaign. But there is nothing unusual about this. FG are always terrible at election campaigns. It is not for nothing that I launched the first Campaign Gist with the subheading ["Fine Gael release traditional voter repellant campaign"](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-early-warnings/). What's more interesting is to understand *why* FG are terrible at election campaigns. It is the same reason they keep being terrible at them. During an election campaign the party reveals its inner self to the electorate, who then recoil. FG's core position is that they are right and the electorate should be grateful to have them. This was their position when they lost to FF in 1932\. It sulkily remained their position all the way through the next eight decades in the wilderness until their sudden catapult into the role of biggest party when FF collapsed to third place in 2011\. And, oh boy, has it been their position since then. ### Fine Gael: I am holding a gun and my feet are full of holes Let's start with the video. > [ View this post on Instagram ](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCsFEE9haMe/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fembed&utm%5Fcampaign=loading) > > [A post shared by RTÉ News (@rtenews)](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCsFEE9haMe/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fembed&utm%5Fcampaign=loading) The sleeping giant in this campaign has been the government's failure to help people in need of disability services. In particular, parents of children with special needs- a bloc which spans geography and class- have been left carrying the pain and guilt of knowing their children need help and not being able to make the system that is meant to deliver it actually work. The HSE acknowledged that by the end of 2024, there would be a [20,000 child backlog of Assessments of Needs](https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/personalpq/pq/2024-pq-responses/july-2024/pq-28813-24-richard-boyd-barrett.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) (the very first step on accessing assistance). Two different sets of canvassers, from two very different parts of the city told me that the assessment of needs crisis was coming up spontaneously on the door, second only to housing. Immigration was nowhere as an issue by comparison. When the Irish Times [followed a candidate around](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/11/20/i-have-two-kids-who-are-working-in-the-civil-service-and-they-cant-afford-to-buy-a-house-candidate-told-on-doorstep/?ref=thegist.ie) on the canvass they concluded "housing has been the dominant issue while out canvassing followed by health, services for children with additional needs and public transport." But, until the Taoiseach walked away from a care worker whose voice was almost breaking, there was no real focus available for voters for this angst. A poll out today from the Indo, taken before that video, shows FG's support falling and Simon Harris' huge lead in popularity ratings has evaporated. I think we can presume that his snubbing of a care worker hasn't turned that around. It is worth understanding that a viral moment catches fire because it reveals something the viewer feels already. It turns unspoken, ambient impressions into a crystal clear, concrete event. This one clocked up 1.8 million views in less than a day. For comparison, in the 2020 general election, the total number of voters was 2,202,192\. That is a lot of people making their minds up. ### How Dare You, says FG to public opinion FG sent proxies out as the numbers climbed. They explained that was just a single moment and the Taoiseach was actually a sound sort who for some reason just this one time happened to be a thin-skinned arrogant pup when confronted with a woman overcome with emotion on behalf of those she cared for. Except, those voters see something about Harris in that video. He walks away from the woman when she questions his personal sense of his own virtue. You can't talk to him unless you first acknowledge he is a good man. It is a low-key Trumpian trait in its self-centering. He later released his own long, rambling video. It was reported as an apology, but I invite you (if you are prepared for [excruciating second-hand](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCtYlQ-Mzkr/?ref=thegist.ie) embarrassment on his behalf) to watch it all. He doesn't open with an apology. In fact, he manages to never say the word sorry at any point in the video. Instead we get a self-comforting stream of consciousness, all about Simon Harris and how, actually, he *is* a good man. From Simon Harris. And Simon Harris may well be a good man, who isn't right about some of his politics. Life is complicated. But campaigns don't do nuance. A TikTok Taoiseach who lives by the viral video, can die by the viral video. What is seen cannot be unseen. These are the rules of the medium. ### ### Campaign Gist: Building a Wall URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-building-a-wall/ Last updated: 2024-11-20T13:36:13.000Z This is a Gist I would prefer not to write, in part because I suffered watching the leaders' debate and was left with no additional content beyond questions about the fashion status of chest hair and, for some reason, a tendancy to mutter 'mentally stabbed' to myself all day. But if our shapeless and narrative-free dark winter election has been pointing towards anything, it has suggested a lot of people have thrown their hats at parties altogether and are settling on supporting Independent candidates. In the last Irish Times/IPSOS poll, the highest named party support was for Fine Gael at 25%. But the group marked Independents sat above that again at 29%. Now, if that represented a party, you'd be looking at at the biggest party in the country. But it doesn't represent a party. Independents run the spectrum from local heroes, like Catherine Connolly and Thomas Pringle, to Fianna Fáilers or Fine Gaelers who didn't get the party nod to run (the Healy-Rae Origin Story, for example) to absolute Headbangers. But, if you crunch some numbers and take account of some results from the Local Elections as well, you end up with six constituencies where there is a fair risk that one of that Headbanger class might get elected- usually on the last seat. If, like me, this seems like something you'd like to avoid, you might want to throw a bit of financial support, or a vote or even campaign for whoever is best placed to avoid that from happening. And the magic of PR means you can still vote for others you like down the ballot. So, with the minimum amount of having to show all my very boring spreadsheety homework, here are the main troublesome constituencies, and the candidates to back or vote for in each to minimise the most unhappy outcome's odds. ### Dublin Bay North What's Up: Actual riots earlier this year. Who's the best person to vote for if you live there?: John Lyons, Independent Left. Why them: Do not make me wave a spreadsheet at you. Look, his vote base is exactly the same areas as where the headbangers are looking to get their votes. He has a solid local record as a Councillor and he just missed out on the last seat to Sean Haughey last time. [John Lyons Campaign Donation Button](https://www.gofundme.com/f/my-general-election-2024-campaign?ref=thegist.ie) ### Cavan Monaghan What's Up: Heather Humphries' big vote is up for grabs. Best person to vote for if you live there: Probably the weaker of the two SF incumbents, Pauline Tully TD. Why them: This is a headscratcher of a setup. But on the presumption that SF's polltopper is returned, that FG will get someone or other of their plethora of candidates elected and that FF's two TDs will return, that leaves the last seat between the second SF sitting TD and one of many available Headbangers. No donation method offered, but TD page here: [https://paulinetully.ie/](https://paulinetully.ie/?ref=thegist.ie) ### Dublin Central What's Up: I mean, where do you start? Let's say this constituency has the worst sort of celebrity candidates. Best person to vote for if you live there: Gary Gannon TD and Neasa Hourigan TD, one and two in whatever order of preference you like. Why them: There is a real chance of a Headbanger candidate getting in here and the best block to that would be to just fill all the seats with the current incumbents. On the pretty safe assumption that neither the Leader of SF nor Paschal Donoghue will be fighting it out for the last two seats, the best thing would be to vote for the other two, at 1 and 2 respectively, in whatever order you prefer. [Gary Gannon Donation Button](https://www.idonate.ie/crowdfunder/GaryGannon?ref=thegist.ie) [Neasa Hourigan Donation Button](https://neasahourigan.com/action/?ref=thegist.ie) ### Dublin North West What's Up: Three seats, one without an incumbent with Róisín Shorthall stepping down. Best person to vote for if you live there: Rory Hearne, looking to hold the seat for the Social Democrats Why them: Because if you shake all the numbers up in a big tumbler that is the best use of a Number 1 for a voter who wants to make sure the last seat doesn't go anywhere less savoury. [Rory Hearne Donation Button](https://www.idonate.ie/crowdfunder/roryhearne?ref=thegist.ie) ### Galway West What's Up: Another empty seat as Dev tribute act, O'Cuiv finally goes away. Best person to vote for if you live there: I mean, the best person to vote for here is Catherine Connolly. But if you are firmly anti-headbanger, you might put her 2 behind a candidate that could hold the last seat. Social Democrats' Niall Ó Tuathail was the underticket candidate below the fight between the two FG candidates last time. This time I'd rank Labour's Helen Ogbu, SD's Cllr Eibhlin Seoighthe and Green Party Senator Pauline O'Reilly in whatever order you preferred. Why them: If the transfers between them are strong, the last seat should go to one of them. [Eibhlin Seoighthe Donation Button](https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-elect-eibh-to-the-dail?ref=thegist.ie) [Helen Ogbu Donation Button](https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-helen-ogbu-win-a-seat-in-dail-eireann-for-galway-west?ref=thegist.ie) [Pauline O'Reilly Donation Button](https://donorbox.org/pauline-oreilly?ref=thegist.ie) ### Cork North Central What's Up?: This is a mad constituency with a history of lunatic choices abounding. We have two Labour candidates, two Social Democrats, FF gene pool independents, headbangers and all sorts. I mean, what am I meant to do with this? Best Person to vote for if you live there: Mick Barry TD from People Before Profit. Why them: He's an incumbent, so lots of name recognition, but he lost a chunk of his base in a boundary redraw. He's vulnerable to a strong showing from one particular challenger from the right. [Mick Barry Donation Button](https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-get-mick-barry-back-into-the-dail-donate-today?ref=thegist.ie) That's it. That's my best effort. I hope it was of some assistance. \*Correction: I originally said Labour, the Greens and the Social Democrats were all running two candidates in Cork North Central. The Greens only have one. I regret the bleary eyed error. ### Campaign Gist: Buffalo Stance URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-buffalo-stance/ Last updated: 2024-11-16T00:23:10.000Z Look, yesterday’s Gist was a long one and I thought we should all take Friday evening off. Maybe have a drink, or enjoy the love of a good lemon drizzle cake. But then this happened, and I realised I couldn’t not remark on it. Here, in what I promise is going to be one of the iconic images of this campaign, is Micheál Martin climbing onto the back of a buffalo. This. This is how you win an election. Get on the telly, on every phone, with no questions. Just you and a very placid piece of livestock, memeing it up nationwide. Every election is about solving problems. Specifically, for every candidate, the problem is “How do I get elected?” If the solution to that problem involves jiving with Monaghan gift shop owners, or sitting on the back of a piece of livestock like a 19th C Punch cartoon- then you DO it. If you get elected, you can implement policies or exercise power in circumstances where sitting on top of a buffalo would be counterproductive. Cabinet meetings, for example, or at EU summits. Think of the carpet cleaning bills alone. But first, you need the votes. And to get the votes you need people to remember you, and hopefully associate you with a neutral to amusing image. Mark my words, once this plays widely, expect to see Simon Harris sitting astride a donkey, or a particularly burly house cat. For those of us with long memories for electoral imagery, today’s awkward mastery of cattle by a FF leader was payback long coming. ![Cartoon: DeValera stands in a field With a bill charging at him labelled Irish Agriculture.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/11/IMG_6090.jpeg) ### Campaign Gist: SF's Duality, Galway's volatility URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-sfs-duality-galways-volatility/ Last updated: 2024-11-15T00:14:48.000Z Two thoughts arise from today's events and occurrences and both are on the situation Sinn Féin find themselves in. Let's take a look. ### Black Boxes passing in the night It is very difficult for me to write about Sinn Féin as an institution or a party. Unlike every other party, I have almost no insight into how it works or why it does what it does at a leadership and elected member level. But one thing that has become clear over the last year is that SF's leadership is similarly mystified by what motivates its supporters. Voters and party have simply stared at each other for the last 12 months, in mutual incomprehension. The key event in this simultaneous bafflement was the [riot in Dublin](https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2023/1207/1420746-how-dublins-riots-developed/?ref=thegist.ie). It was one of the most effective political violence events staged in the city since the 1916 rising, triggering a sudden and wrenching lurch by mainstream parties to mollify anti-immigrant sentiment by becoming instantly more anti-immigrant. This wasn't solely the response from Sinn Féin. Fine Gael [immediately reacted](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/11/08/need-for-mature-debate-on-immigration-levels-amid-public-anger-fine-gael-meeting-hears/?ref=thegist.ie) by swinging their political rhetoric so far right, so fast, it ended up in a ditch, wheels spinning. The State's policing response was so flabby as to be an invitation for further, conveniently local neighbourhood[ riots such as happened in Coolock](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41480065.html?ref=thegist.ie). The scale of its impact didn't go unnoticed in the UK where the far-right instigators of the riots in August clearly modelled them on the Irish one, down to [adopting disinformation on children being stabbed by an immigrant](https://apnews.com/article/uk-southport-stabbing-online-misinformation-1dcd23b803401416ac94ae458e5c9c06?ref=thegist.ie). The effect fell flat when the UK police, courts and newly-elected-by-a-landside government just came down on the rioters like an [anvil chorus](https://youtu.be/MdX3T%5FKjcos?si=%5FDmW4EW8nkL1x32Q&t=63&ref=thegist.ie). The UK police, more used to dealing with hooliganism and riots, were positively eager to hit people with sticks while the newly elected government felt no need to pander. But, relevant to today's campaign launch of their immigration policy, the riot -and their subsequent reaction to it- marked the moment that Sinn Féin's polling went from slow drift down to sudden and sustained plummet from the top. On the 21st November 2023, SF were topping the opinion polls with an average of 30.6% support. By the 13th November 2024 (yesterday) that sat at 18.9%. In between those two dates, the ostensibly left-wing party has frantically been signalling they could be hostile to foreigners too. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/11/Irish-Polling-Indicator.jpg) Today, they even suggested they might look at making EU/EEA and Swiss citizens put their name in a register in order to keep a file on their movements. > "I think it makes sense if you’re establishing an immigration management agency, data drives policy, it’s important from that, that the information is there that you understand the flows of people in and out of the country. > “But it is relatively common across Europe and it is worth exploring, particularly in the context particularly of, we have adequate data to properly manage migration." > \- [Sinn Féin vows to ‘explore’ new registration requirements for EU citizens](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/elections-2024/sinn-fein-vows-to-explore-new-registration-requirements-for-eu-citizens/a1841625038.html?ref=thegist.ie) This ignores that the countries across Europe who require registration do this because they require their own citizens to also register their addresses. In addition, it is specifically forbidden to require registration of 'flows of people in and out of the country' if those people are EU citizens who are in the country for up to three months. ([You can stay in another EU country **for up to 3 months without registering**](https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-rights/index%5Fen.htm?ref=thegist.ie#eu-citizen)) Any attempt to bring in automatic registration of 'flows of people in and out of the country', but only for non-Irish EU citizens, would [instantly breach EU law](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM:l33152&frontOfficeSuffix=%2F&ref=thegist.ie), and for reasons so incomprehensible even the spokesman couldn't do more than suggest it might be nice to have some files and we could see what we'd do with it afterwards. All of which is to say that Sinn Féin have spent a year studiously broadcasting to their community and left-wing voters that they are simply not trustworthy when it comes to sticking to their principles. ### Misunderstanding your Voters For decades, Sinn Féin's voters in the Republic of Ireland were made of two factions. One was attracted to the party by its association with physical violence and death. It was exciting to be able to break taboos and have a justification to advocate for atrocity. This was a minority, but held disproportionate power and voice before the Good Friday Agreement. Their other, larger, bloc and the source of the party's slow rise to lead the opposition was built on their diligent support work in communities that felt, frequently correctly, ignored or abandoned by the other main parties. We could term these the 'Up the Ra' and the 'How's yer Ma?' factions. With the days of physical force left behind by the SF leadership, the impulses that created the Up the Ra support have moved on to radical right groups, who offer the same thrills of violence and taboo breaking without all the annoying helping the needy. But instead of letting that minority go, SF's leadership has panicked and, in trying to win them back, has cost themselves the trust loaned by voters who really did care How their Ma was and wanted a left-wing party who would look after her. In the end, barring a major upset, the party's year misunderstanding voters will likely cost them their chance of entering government. ### That's Numberwang! TG4 released a poll on the Galway West constituency. It revealed that running [two](https://www.fiannafail.ie/general-election/grainne-seoige?ref=thegist.ie) [FF candidates](https://www.fiannafail.ie/councillors/john-connolly?ref=thegist.ie) against a recently quit FF candidate ([now Independent](https://www.noelthomas.ie/about?ref=thegist.ie) Ireland) was not the best method of converting any of those candidates into a FF TD. But behind that headline, it showed that the only sitting candidate to lose more support than the margin of error was SF's. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/11/Galway-West-poll-1.jpg) Look, they're just numbers, they won't kill you to look at them. [Subscribe to the Gist for Money](#/portal/signup) [Drop a One-off Tip](#/portal/support) ### Campaign Gist: Greenhouse Grass URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-greenhouse-grass/ Last updated: 2024-11-13T01:23:27.000Z With the climate crisis literally killing people on every continent, and the [COP26 conference being told today](https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2024/11/13/cop29-hears-carbon-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-set-to-reach-record-high-in-2024/?ref=thegist.ie) that 2024 would see the highest ever set of carbon emissions, the main parties were out today coddling farmers. ### IFA invited to Make-A-Wish FF, FG and SF all trouped in to the IFA to promise them, in turn, that Farmers were their Bestest Boys and Girls and that it was the Mean Green Party who had forced climate mitigation targets on them at all. "Mary Lou McDonald [said her party](https://www.rte.ie/news/election-24/2024/1112/1480409-general-election-2024/?ref=thegist.ie) would push for more payments for farmers and criticised the Carbon Tax, calling it "thoughtless and lazy". The Agriculture sector was responsible for 34% of all [greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland this year](https://www.climatecouncil.ie/councilpublications/annualreviewandreport/CCAC-AR-2024-SfA-final.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). This made it the largest source of Ireland's emissions. [Simon Harris said ](https://www.thejournal.ie/simon-harris-says-politicians-have-to-press-reset-on-relationship-with-farmers-ifa-6540662-Nov2024/?ref=thegist.ie)"When parties, including my own, publish our manifestos, a lot of the projects in those manifestos are funding off the back of tax receipts paid by the agri-food sector in Ireland.” In [Q1 of 2024, the CSO says](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-na/quarterlynationalaccountsquarter12024final/gdpbysector/?ref=thegist.ie) that Agriculture was only the 10th largest source of GDP, contributing a total of 1.28% of the top 10 sources of domestic product. Revenue's figures show Agriculture contributed 0.75% (three quarters of one percent) of all [tax revenue in 2023](https://www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/receipts/net-receipts-by-sector.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). "[Fianna Fáil committed](https://www.rte.ie/news/election-24/2024/1112/1480409-general-election-2024/?ref=thegist.ie) to retaining the derogation on the Nitrates Directive, if it is returned to government." The EPA [reported in August 2024](https://www.epa.ie/publications/monitoring--assessment/freshwater--marine/Nitrates-Article-10-Report-for-Ireland-2020-2023.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) that nitrogen concentrations in Irish waters had not improved between 2020-2023\. It said "Agriculture has been identified by the EPA as the most prevalent significant pressure on water quality, impacting over 1,000 waterbodies or approximately 60% of all waterbodies that are ‘At Risk’". The head of the IFA, in response, [complained that farming didn't get enough supports](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/11/12/next-government-will-need-new-deal-to-support-farmers-as-sector-faces-huge-challenge-says-ifa/?ref=thegist.ie) from the State. ### **Enumerating** Unhatched Chickens We're still in the early phase of this election, where parties are trotting out their rehearsed lines and planned events. Having all the campaign plans written down in a neat grid can fool a large party into thinking they can control the outcome with good prep. This is, as even the most cursory glance at the last 30 years of Irish elections demonstrates, a complete fantasy. Just ask Fine Gael how well [rugby club whooping and banter ](https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist/)looks when taken out of the party context and put in front of the general public. And that's if you generously consider "Michael O'Leary says something provocative to get attention" is an unforeseeable event when you invite him to your party shindig. Holly Cairns of the Social Democrats voiced this feeling that the big parties thought the deal was sealed before a vote was cast. History suggests the only constant in a General Election campaign is surprise. ### Campaign Gist: The Rentier Class URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist/ Last updated: 2024-11-12T11:38:24.000Z The day is long and the night is dark and our dreams are full of landlords. So, let's go. ### Fianna Fáil: The Manifesto's Yoke This is the Besto Manifesto. This was Micheál Martin's message as he launched the party's big pile of pointless paper and then tried to tell everyone what the main ideas of his party were for the future of Ireland. It was going to be good times brought about by [very marginal wonkish tinkering](https://www.rte.ie/news/election-24/2024/1111/1480307-fianna-fail-manifesto-key-points/?ref=thegist.ie) around the edges of the current near-utopian society. The very model of institutional behaviour. Some hours later, the party [qualified their manifesto ](https://www.thejournal.ie/fianna-fail-manifesto-launch-drugs-6539268-Nov2024/?ref=thegist.ie)commitments by explaining that when they said they'd decriminalise possession of personal drug use, they didn't mean coke or heroin. Also, they clarified they didn't actually know what they'd decriminalise or which drugs or how often. "We will look at the amount of drugs that should be decriminalised for personal use and the number of times that a person can be diverted to health interventions, among other issues. “Fianna Fáil believes that it is time for a change in how drug use is treated in Ireland,' I guess they'll let us know what that change will be later, when they've worked it out themselves. ### Fine Gael: I appear to be on fire It was a day of two halves for Fine Gael. They were both bad halves. They continued to take hits from all sides for their on-screen guffaws at Michael O'Leary's digs at teachers (numbered at **121,405** voters at last count, not to mention parents). Just how difficult it is to distance yourself from a video of your own party members (dressed in branded Fine Gael jackets) cheering and whooping may be suggested by[ this video](https://www.tiktok.com/@virginmedianews/video/7435727950000950560?ref=thegist.ie) of Simon Harris saying random sentences in the hope that everything will just go away. Then he was questioned so hard by a small boy that it made the evening news. Eager to turn the page on this, Paschal Donoghue appeared on RTE's Housing Debate to assure the public that, unlike all the other years where housing has been in crisis due to FG policies, if his party was re-elected things would be ace, *this time*. Then, after being faced with a searing question from a homeless person, he explained why he had voted to end the ban on evictions which resulted in her family being made homeless. ([see 1:16:00 onwards](https://www.rte.ie/player/series/upfront-with-katie-hannon/10001371-00-0000?epguid=IH10003116-24-0023&ref=thegist.ie)) "I know it's a very complex argument to make regarding why I'm saying there should not be a complete ban on evictions. The reason for that is that I want more landlords. I want more private landlords" The Fine Gael Campaign magic continues to sparkle. ### Social Democrats: Good Governance Wizards Meanwhile, the SDs [relaunched their longstanding idea](https://www.socialdemocrats.ie/our-policies/honest-politics/?ref=thegist.ie) of a standing anti-corruption body and a number of other [good governance](https://www.ohchr.org/en/good-governance/about-good-governance?ref=thegist.ie) proposals. While I'd be generally in favour of these at the best of times, it is possible that they may have unexpected currency over the next few days. ### WhatsApp Whispers Anecdotally, it appears that WhatsApp is being used to spread stories (true or not) under the radar about candidates. Even I, with my studious avoidance of WhatsApp groups have heard two so far. It is possible this might be just a coincidence. Or it might be the tip of an invisible mountain of unofficial samizdat rumourmongering that a standard media diet wouldn't even hint at. We'll see as the campaign goes on. ### The Gist: Mourning in America URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-mourning-in-america/ Last updated: 2024-11-11T00:42:50.000Z Thanks to scheduled surgery to remove a non-vital organ, I spent much of the week under the influence of heavy opiates. In a way, this was the ideal state to learn of Donald Trump's re-election to the post of president. However, as I continued to experience a period of medically mandated sub-par intelligence and judgment, I confess I did start to wonder if I wasn't the only one so afflicted. This is an attempt to help us understand what happened and also to understand what is going to happen next. It comes from a person sitting propped up in bed in a country on the far western edge of Europe. As such, it is the result of specific circumstances. The outcome of my thoughts since my dum-dum pills ran out may not chime with much of what you may have read or been told since the election. All I can say is that these are my guesses. You may have yours. ### What just happened? Lots of people voted for Donald Trump to be president. But more significantly, lots of people didn't vote at all. In 2020, when he lost the election to Biden, he collected up 74,223,975 votes. This year, when he won, he received 74,708,855 votes. In effect he received only a marginal absolute increase in his support. In the first election he was trounced. In the second, the same number of supporters resulted in a blowout victory. The deciding factor in the outcome was not Trump. It was the level of support his opponent could muster. In 2020, Biden received 81,283,501 votes. And in 2024, Harris received 70,980,347\. ### Mind the Gap. That 10,303,103 is the hole US democracy fell into. It's too early to say which of the many available reasons for Biden's voters declining to turn up for Harris proved decisive. It may well be, because the world is really annoying like this, that it turns out that it was a little bit of a lot of different reasons. A few million examples of misogyny. Some millions of racists. A few million people unhappy about inflation and the price of dinner ingredients. A few million people angry about all the dead Palestinian children they had spent the year scrolling past on their social feeds. A million here, a million there. Pretty soon, you're talking real money. What I am comfortable saying is that if you're reading someone who's telling you *this week* that they know the One Weird Trick that Harris could have done differently to change the outcome, that is a person willing to just say things irrespective of how true they might be. Which, in the years to come, is going to be something everyone is going to have their fill of. ### What happens next? Dark days, I am afraid. Also, dark days. I am afraid. US power is now consolidated around the worst people, and there are no checks on them. The Supreme Court is morally and legally bankrupt. It can't be relied upon to uphold any Constitutional principle as it has shown itself to be without any principles at all. It is the judicial branch, not the legislative one, which is the real check on executive power in the US system. And that check is now simply gone. The US is about to experience just how hollow the promise of laws are without any institutional power behind them. The US Senate and, it appears, the House of Representatives, will compete for this Trump electorate in a way they only did on the fringes before. This will be the [Imperial Presidency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial%5Fpresidency?ref=thegist.ie) that Nixon could only dream of. And sitting atop of this pyramid of putrefaction will be a moral homunculus. A sort of a perversion of the idea of the golem- an empty man, animated, not to protect the weak as the legend would have it, but by the need to harm them. He will be cheered on from every power and money-seeking corner. Billionaires to abusers (and all points overlapping) will loudly tell everyone (including you) that he is right and just even as he acts out his hollow, soulless cruelties to harm anyone and everyone he can. He is a man who will die, like all men. But the harms he leaves behind will be scars carried by us all for the rest of our lives. A burning world. Dictators given succour. Fascism triumphant and emboldened everywhere. I am starting to regret running all those [Butterfly-Stamping Time Travel Tours](https://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/ASoundofThunder.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). ### What can we do? All, though it may seem strange to say now and stranger in the next few months, is not lost. The thing to remember is that we have seen these guys before. There aren't any surprises here. They are going to unleash a tidal wave of baloney and bullshit and hope to just wear down everyone until they go numb. So far this week they said they'd cancel birthright citizenship, Constitution be damned and that they might just pull out of NATO if the EU regulates Elon Musk's partisan lie machine. Will they do either of these very stupid things? Maybe. Is it worth paying attention to them right now? Absolutely not. Owning the machinery and institutions of Imperial government and media means there is no end of Really Stupid Stuff that will be cycled in front of the US and global public's eyeballs. But you don't have to react. You don't have to participate in whatever the drama of the day or hour is. Choose trustworthy people and institutions to get your information. Get used to the wearing habit of assessing sources and working out whose interests they act in. It's so tiresome. For those of you in the US, please accept my condolences and a suggestion that you protect yourself by picking something you can directly effect and just minding that little patch. Maybe you can help a library or school or particularly endangered group. I bet you could. I bet you would. And, if I know you, I bet you will. For the rest of us, here in the bits of the world who don't vote for the US imperium, but live within its penumbra, we should immediately get off Xwitter. Then we need to look around and see what we can shore up now. The polluted tide will rise, but it can be held back. We need to choose our local battles too. When the waters fall back (not automatically in four years, this isn't that kind of presidency, I fear) we will have to take stock. We will lose a lot of value. That is the nature of a deluge. But we can still try to build our barriers to carry us through. But, for now, grieve. Mourn. A particular set of futures are gone now. Millions of our potential selves have winked out. It's painful. But I really want to meet you on the other side of the times that are coming instead. We'll need you there. [Subscribe to the Gist for Free](#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist with Money](#/portal/signup) ### Campaign Gist: Early Warnings URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-early-warnings/ Last updated: 2024-11-10T19:08:32.000Z For newer subscribers, our Campaign Gists are shorter, and a bit sharper than usual. Also, they happen more often. We're two days in and already we're seeing some of the shape of things to come. ### Fine Gael release traditional voter repellant campaign Fine Gael has historically had a quite straightforward relationship with election campaigns. The campaigns begin, the public is exposed to the Fine Gael messages and policies and then their support slides every day until the voting day. So, to start them off on the good foot this time, the new leadership came out of the gates talking about the subject that makes voter's hearts swell and taps their dreams of a better tomorrow- VAT. Better[ still, their proposal was to raise the base rate of VAT from 9% to 11%](https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2024/1109/1480003-election-canvassing-vat/?ref=thegist.ie). Gav Reilly [explained the result](https://bsky.app/profile/gavreilly.com/post/3lajqdcg2272w?ref=thegist.ie): "Abolishing the 9% rate would also mean marginal increases in the cost of leisure services like gym memberships, swimming pool visits, and even the likes of bouncing castles and indoor playgrounds." It is good to see that the old Fine Gael Touch remains, as they reintroduced themselves to the electorate by offering to increase the price of children's birthday parties. The following day, they had to explain that when they invited Michael O'Leary to a campaign launch, they didn't know he was going to [insult voters' children's teachers](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/11/10/fine-gael-td-distances-himself-from-ryanair-boss-derisory-remarks-about-teachers-at-campaign-event/?ref=thegist.ie). I promise we will get to return to this theme more than once before voting. ### Sinn Féin propose extradition without legal representation “I think we should be looking at deportation more rather than free legal aid and prison, which some actually find quite comfortable” I see. Thank you for illuminating your views, SF Integration Spokesperson. [Deportation without legal representation. Got it](https://www.thejournal.ie/sinn-fein-immigration-2-6537275-Nov2024/?ref=thegist.ie). The next day [Mary Lou McDonald clarified](https://www.sundayworld.com/news/irish-news/mary-lou-mcdonald-says-its-common-sense-to-deport-immigrants-for-serious-crimes/a829997630.html?ref=thegist.ie) where she stood on this idea: “What Claire said is just a matter of plain common sense.” ![Dril Tweet Screenshot: turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/11/Screenshot-2024-11-10-at-18.50.57.png) ### Some old pablum Fianna Fáil, Labour and the Social Democrats all launched policies on how they would make cities safer and regenerate them. Contrary to all sense, journalists then spend time trying to get people to care. In the end, policies unveiled during an election campaign are hardly worth paying any attention to at all. After all, Fianna Fáil has been in government for five years and with government for a decade. If they had a bright idea to make cities lovely and livable, why wouldn't them have mentioned it before now? For opposition parties, the point of an election campaign is to remind people that they exist and that you could have their flavour of impulses instead of the current flavour. Launching plans during an election is an invitation to voters who might be tired of Coke to try some Pepsi. Changing parties in government makes a big difference to how a country is governed. Changing particular policy papers, less so. **Winning the Day:** Michael O'Leary, who was mentioned all day. **Losing the Day:** Everyone wearing a big Fine Gael jacket standing next to Michael O'Leary. ### The Gist: A dirty little Act URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-dirty-little-act/ Last updated: 2024-10-31T14:57:19.000Z We are going to do an election overview once the whistle is officially blown, but in the meantime I was prompted to look at a niche question after speaking to a councillor who told me that they were getting multiple emails on it. Local Councillors in Westmeath were unhappy with a Ministerial order to establish temporary accommodation in a place improbably called Lissywollen. Some of the elected reps on Athlone Moate Municipal District council got it into their heads to try to use a piece of legislation from 1948 (with a shameful history of being weaponised against travellers) to block this plan. The legislation was [Section 31 of the Local Government (Sanitary Services) Act 1948](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1948/act/3/section/31/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie). To save me having to type all that out loads more times, we'll just call it The Act from now on in portentous capital letters. Section 31 of the Act allows "a sanitary authority" to issue an order prohibiting "temporary dwellings" on a number of grounds including if it is of the opinion that erection of the temporary dwellings would be prejudicial to 1) public health 2) the amenities of the locality or 3) would interfere to unreasonable extent with traffic So, let's look at this idea. To see if elected officials have the power, first of all, to do this we need to break down two phrases. We need to see if elected representatives are actually "a sanitary authority" and we need to see if the proposed temporary accommodation facility falls inside the definition of "a temporary dwelling". ### Are elected councillors "a sanitary authority"? I urge readers to resist the temptation to make a joke to themselves on the personal hygiene habits of Moate's elected representatives and to try to answer the question seriously. A "Sanitary Authority" is defined in [Section 82 of the Local Government Act 2001](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2001/act/37/section/82/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie) as an "urban district council or a borough (other than a county borough) corporation" The same section defines the power set out above under the 1948 Act as part of the "water functions" of a Sanitary Authority. That's going to be an important point later on. It then transfers those powers to County Councils in Section 83\. (1) . The Chief Executive in Westmeath had been preventing an order being issued by the elected members by telling them they're trying to bring it before the wrong meeting "In the 2014 Local Government Act, the government specified that any orders that might issue under this legislation must be considered and approved at Municipal District level." he [told the burghers of Moate. ](https://www.westmeathindependent.ie/2024/10/23/minister-seeks-resolution-on-athlone-asylum-seeker-centre/?ref=thegist.ie) But there is a more fundamental reason they can't issue this order. They don't have any power to do so. They lost that power over a decade ago. In [Section 7(4) of the Water Services (No. 2) Act 2013](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2013/act/50/section/7/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie) all references to a "sanitary authority" in any enactment which related to water functions were transferred to mean Irish Water. And, as we know, this particular dirty little clause is defined as a water function by the 2001 Act. Leaving these councillors holding an empty bag. Who knew Irish Water would finally be good for something? ### Tents or Huts? Oh, and one more thing. Even if Irish Water went insane and wanted to issue the order while wearing a Napoleon hat, the original 1948 Act would prevent it from effecting anything other than a "temporary dwelling". But there is a special legislative meaning given to that phrase for the purposes of The Act. Leaving aside watergoing vessels, a "temporary dwelling" is defined as (a) Tent (b) Van or other conveyance c) Shed, hut or similar structure Building an accommodation centre for *housing people temporarily* doesn't meet the definition of a *temporary dwelling* (at least, we hope not). So, in short, the elected councillors have no power to issue any orders under Section 31 of the 1948 Act, and even if they did still have that power, they wouldn't have the power to issue them in respect of an accommodation centre which went beyond tents, vans or sheds. Which is probably why they didn't actually issue a Section 31 Order under the 1948 Act in the end yesterday, and instead [bloviated about getting an injunction](https://www.midlands103.com/news/midlands-news/tanaiste-defends-plans-for-accommodation-centre-in-lissywollen/?ref=thegist.ie). An unsanitary business, this. Do let any elected councillors you know that just because they receive an assertion that they have a power that they ought to exercise, it doesn't mean it's actually true. Maybe forward them this little essay, just so they'll have an explanation to hand when voters who have been misinformed raise it. ### Reeling in the Disinfo Given the merry purchase this sort of misinformation and disinformation can have as we approach an election, this might be a good moment to suggest one long-term remedy. I recently made a short submission on a Bill to allow non-commercial access and re-use of the RTE Archive. This was to fight what has been described as the asymmetry of bullshit's economics. "Chaotic information was free: good information was expensive.", as the Guardian's former Editor Alan Rusbridger described the problem. RTE's Archive represents decades of professionally made and edited video, ready to be reused to fight barefaced lies and false assertions, all owned by the state and through it the public. It's a rare trove that the Bill would let us all make better use of. ### The Gist: Theatre of the Absurd URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-theatre-of-the-absurd/ Last updated: 2024-10-12T11:59:39.000Z Obviously, let's start with the Tories. ### Too Cleverly By Half OK, so imagine, right, that you're running for leadership of a really, really badly defeated political party. The voters so despised you they elected an underbaked batch loaf in a pair of glasses just to get rid of you. Now imagine you have an insane two-stage electoral system, where the Elected MPs (who have a stake in choosing someone who might actually function) keep voting until they whittle down the candidates to two. At which point the electorate is completely swapped for approximately 100,000 old, rich thickos who previously looked at Liz Truss and thought her glass-eyed gaze and mince-brained ideas were PM material, if the alternative was a man with brown skin. Obviously, in these circumstances, what you want to win is a) be in the final two and b) have the other candidate be your weakest possible opponent. Maybe, to achieve b), you'd get some of your *surplus* supporters to switch to your weakest opponent. Of course, you'd need to make sure you knew just how many you could afford to switch. James Cleverly, a former Home Secretary and the closest thing the party had to a sane candidate, was leading the field in the penultimate vote and his weakest opponent Robert Jenrick looked likely about to drop out. But when the last MP vote was announced to gasps, Cleverly was in third place, behind both Kemi Badenoch and Jenrick. It appears that we may add 'counting' to the list of things Tory MPs are manifestly incompetent at. The result is that the final choice presented to an electorate of people who actually pay money to be called Tories will be what sort of swivel-eyed loon would they like. Given their previously expressed preference for swivel-eyed loons, (see Liz Truss) they may find this appealing. Jenrick's weakness is that he is both a loon and yet, also, profoundly dull. If you were required to describe him for a photo-fit you would just get a vaguely rectangular shape on a page. He once resigned as a Minister because Sunak's illegal Rwanda deportation plan wasn't [illegal Rwanda-deporting](https://news.sky.com/story/rwanda-bill-wont-end-merry-go-round-of-legal-challenges-jenrick-insists-13026140?ref=thegist.ie) enough. People who have heard him speak struggle to recall anything beyond a sort of undulating drone, as if the school experience of a Thursday afternoon double class of Geography had started trying to communicate directly. On the other side, Kemi Badenoch has much to attract Tory party members. For example, she has both 'Bad' and 'Enoch' in her name. She has literally promoted her policy to [fight with Doctor Who](https://deadline.com/2024/09/kemi-badenoch-david-tenannt-doctor-who-spat-campaign-video-1236076135/?ref=thegist.ie), reflecting her electorate's natural affinity for racist authoritarians seeking to Exterminate all life. And, although she is Black, [she assures her electorate](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/03/20/kemi-badenoch-clumsy-diversity-drives-no-substitute/?ref=thegist.ie) that she will act to support that most oppressed of groups, white men. Both options for leadership of the Tory party are bad options, which are the only sort of options its electorate really want, or deserve. ### Tesla's Imaginary Robots Elon Musk, a man who will die like all men, has been facing a growing threat to his personal fortune. Tesla, the car company he didn't found, has been comically over-valued based on [rubes believing his loudly-spoken baloney](https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/9/24265781/tesla-robotaxi-elon-musk-claims-safety-driverless-level-5?ref=thegist.ie) that it is just two years away from introducing autonomous driving vehicles. He has been making this and similar claims for nearly ten years now. In recent years, the market for electric cars made by Tesla sagged after its owner accidentally bought a social media network to promote how much of a far-right wierdo he was. Its [Q1 2024 deliveries were 9% lower](https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-vehicle-deliveries/?ref=thegist.ie) than the previous year's same quarter, while the [overall electric car market grew 25%](https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars?ref=thegist.ie) in the same quarter. This gave pause to some of the rubes who had bought its shares in anticipation of owning, not a stake in a company that made bad cars, but one that owned an entire robot economy. Musk's fortune is basically built on the back of this rube gas balloon of Tesla shares. If the gas goes out, it will plummet to merely obnoxious wealth. To avoid this, he announced he was going to show all the haters out there Tesla was getting real with its robots. It was going to unveil its new Cybercab, a driverless car that could be used as a taxi while you weren't using it yourself. A sort of physical side-hustle. This is a big ask, given no such thing exists anywhere. There are [driverless taxis](https://waymo.com/?ref=thegist.ie), but they are limited to specific intensively scanned and mapped locations, so that they don't get lost or mistake a queasy child for a green light and plough into a birthday party. But announcing you'll be doing the same thing as other companies, only later and with less preparation isn't going to cut it down the rube mines. You've got to give them some showbiz, some sizzle. So this week, Tesla put on an actual show in a Hollywood back lot in Burbank, and unveiled a car that didn't exist and a bus that didn't exist. Although there were models of what they might look like, they were not the promised vehicles, which Musk claimed would be able to drive themselves anywhere. Both of the things that didn't exist were promised to be about [two years away](https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/the-tesla-robotaxi-reveal?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=1180475&post%5Fid=150090845&utm%5Fcampaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=gvid&triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fmedium=email). I don't know how long the rubes will keep buying this, but for some at least, it was the end of the line. ![A share price chart from 10th to 11th October 2024 for Tesla. There is a big drop.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-12-at-11.12.56.png) ### The Hardest-Working Honeypot In Russia This week I happened to be in Leinster House to make submissions supporting [Patrick Costello TD's Bill ](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2023/14/?ref=thegist.ie)to make RTE's Archives more available for non-commercial use. But, fortunately for you, dear readers, that is for another day. Instead, what I discovered while there was that everyone was talking about the [Sunday Times story of a sitting Irish parliamentarian who had offered his influencing services to Russia](https://www.thetimes.com/world/ireland-world/article/how-a-russian-operative-snared-an-irish-politician-2bh3zkt5x?ref=thegist.ie). Although not named in the piece, there was only one name on everyone's lips. If true, then the described means of persuasion (luring the mark in with sex before using it to pressure them to turn) demonstrates that at least one Russian agent has gone far beyond what ought to be expected of her in service of the mother country. Also, I have a LeCarré pun all ready to go, once defamation laws permit. [Subscribe to the Gist for Free](#/portal/signup/free) [If you'd like to pay, for some reason, this button does that](#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: A Free Speech URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-free-speech/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T20:12:57.000Z A few days ago I agreed to deliver a keynote to an online conference on the "Next steps for online safety and regulation in Ireland". I was one of four keynote speakers. The other three were **Niamh Hodnett**, Online Safety Commissioner, Coimisiún na Meán; **Rita Wezenbeek**, Director, Platforms and Enforcement, DG Connect, European Commission and **Julie Inman Grant**, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. ![](https://media.tenor.com/JCW-4lIvKhUAAAAC/bigbird-one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others.gif) The conference itself was intended to have real-world impacts. The organisers charge for attendance, and then charge for access to the after-the-fact records. They also make them [available to policy-makers.](https://westminsterforumprojects.co.uk/publication/PFFI-Online-Reg-24?ref=thegist.ie) > *the output of the conference, which will be shared with parliamentary, ministerial, departmental and regulatory offices. This includes the full proceedings and additional articles submitted by delegates. Those that attended include officials from DCEDIY, ROI; DTCAGSM, ROI; DfC, NI; DfE; DSIT; Ofcom; ICO; Education Scotland; Home Office; Government of Jersey; and the Welsh Government.* But you, happy Gist reader don't need to pay your €315+VAT for, at least, my contribution. Here it comes now, largely as I delivered it. **Main point for busy readers:** The Online Safety Code has, by accident or design, created two seperate legal requirements to introduce age verification by designated platforms, and they don't both meet the tests set down by the CJEU for being compliant with EU law. --- Hello, and thanks for the invitation to speak today. I’m going to be addressing the [Online Safety Code](https://www.cnam.ie/statement-on-the-online-safety-code/?ref=thegist.ie) which is looming for implementation from October. I should say that I represent [Digital Rights Ireland ](https://www.digitalrights.ie/?ref=thegist.ie)in my professional capacity, but that my submission today is a personal one, not on their behalf. We were gifted a [primary overview of the legislative history](https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/ireland-online-safety-code-expected-within-months?ref=thegist.ie) and basis of the Online Safety Code earlier and so you’ll be spared listening to that from me again. I should say that I’m aware I probably represent the Counter-Programming element of the morning. My interest in this topic arises from my wish to see regulation of platforms, and particularly the regulation of platforms to protect children, to be effective. My comments are not related to material which is illegal- there is no question that illegal content should be removed or prevented. I’m addressing material which is explicitly legal, but defined as harmful. And there are some classes of data which can be easily placed in that definition. The canonical example is material promoting self-harm or disordered eating in young people. But the devil is in the detail when it comes to drafting regulations and restriction of legal public speech. A code which disproportionately interferes with the rights of privacy and free expression set out in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is not an effective code. And, its safe to say, an **effective regulation** is something that everyone here wants to see. The Online Safety Code grows out of the EU [Audio-Visual Directive](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2018/1808/oj?ref=thegist.ie), but it is very much an Irish interpretation of what that law intended, going beyond the quite basic requirements to build a very wide-ranging framework for the regulation and restriction of internet content. That Directive was originally intended to bring in a harmonisation of laws regarding video content. That background, where the platforms were imagined as merely a new kind of broadcaster, is reflected in the final text, which speaks in Article 6a, of restricting access to material unsuitable to minors by “selecting the time of the broadcast, age verification tools or other measures”. The EU Commission suggested that the form of age verification methods they anticipated was by means of allowing parents to set a pin code (as is used by [Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/guide-to-netflix-parental-controls?ref=thegist.ie)). These are uncontroversial extensions of the existing and familiar Watershed norms from television broadcasting. The difficulties arise from how the Irish State, and then Coimisiún na Meán, decided they would react to these ideas. The online safety code text we have now has been submitted to the EU Commission through the TRIS procedure and the standstill period has ended. So, this is the text. And I’m sorry to say, this is not a good text. The proposal is to bring in mandatory age verification for both children and adults on two separate bases. The first is set out in Part A, Section 10.6(f) of the Online Safety Code. > A video-sharing platform service shall establish and operate age verification systems for users of video sharing content with respect to content which may impair the physical mental or moral development of minors. As [Elizabeth Farries](https://digitalpolicy.ie/people/elizabeth-farries/?ref=thegist.ie) pointed out earlier, this is almost a textbook example of a law which fails the CJEU’s test of being ‘clear and precise’ and ‘specific’. My idea about what content may impair the moral development of minors and Enoch Burke’s may be quite different. We are verging close to revisiting Ireland’s history with the[ Censorship Board](https://www.nationalarchives.ie/article/habitually-rankly-immoral-state-censorship-in-ireland-after-1930-a-lecture-by-dr-aoife-bhreatnach/?ref=thegist.ie), where everything from Ulysses to Women’s Magazines could be declared immoral. And separate and distinct from that requirement in Part A of the Code is a different, specific, requirement in Section 12.11 (in Part B of the Code) for video sharing platforms to introduce an age assurance scheme in the event that their terms and conditions allow for the uploading of "adult-only video content”. This is a specifically defined term being video content consisting of pornography and/or violence or cruelty. As Section 12.1 says that its Part B provisions are without prejudice to the requirements set out in Part A Section 10, we have two, parallel, age verification requirements set out by the regulator, only one of which could even arguably meet the CJEU’s test for clarity in law. But let’s take a look at what the Commission’s Executive Chairman has set out as the Regulator’s expectation of what an Age Verification scheme would look like in practice. “Uploading documents and or a live selfie is one example” (source: [CnaM website](https://www.cnam.ie/statement-regarding-age-verification/?ref=thegist.ie)) “A requirement for a person to show their passport and then a selfie to verify they are the person on the passport” (source: [Irish Examiner](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41300860.html?ref=thegist.ie)) “A live selfie each time you want to access it and they use biometrics to check”. (souce: [Irish Examiner](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41300860.html?ref=thegist.ie)) Dr. Karlin Lillington of the Irish Times [described these original proposals](https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/2024/01/25/new-broadcasting-and-online-regulator-has-not-got-off-to-an-auspicious-start/?ref=thegist.ie) as “all absolutely mega-scale bonkers” But this still seems to be the Commission’s plan. It was telling that the [Australian Safety Commissioner](https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us?ref=thegist.ie) speaking earlier had no answer to squaring privacy and age verification beyond saying ‘hopefully we come up with some workable scheme’ and, like the Brexiteers in the past trying to argue about the possibility of a frictionless Border, fell back on a hope that some technology, as yet undefined, would solve this issue. But while it is one thing to say that a plan is bonkers, a more critical question is the question of whether this plan can be legal. To be able to defend against claims of failure to properly implement a state mandated age verification system, the platforms will have to retain the age verification data. Our statute of limitations for claims of breach of contract (by parents against platforms, let us say) is six years. We have had years of very clear decisions from the CJEU as to what is and is not proportionate in laws requiring data retention which would impact the privacy and data protection rights of EU citizens. Looking at the text of the proposed Online Safety Code in that light, we can ask some straightforward questions. Does it, as is required in paragraph 65 of the [Digital Rights Ireland Case judgment](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:62012CJ0293&ref=thegist.ie), lay down “clear and precise rules governing the extent of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter”? I think we’ve seen it does not. Does it, as required by paragraph 68 of that judgement require that the senstive biometric or identity data is required to be kept inside the EU? It does not. Does it, as required by paragraph 67 of the same judgment, in its text ‘specifically ensure the irreversible destruction of the data at the end of the data retention period?” Again, it does not. Amongst other things, the lack of these clauses in respect of EU Directive 2006/24 led to the CJEU to strike down that directive as having breached the legal requirement to comply with > “The principle of proportionality in the light of Article 7,8 and 52(1) of the Charter”. If those shortfalls were enough to strike down a Directive for the entire EU, the question remains why Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán would think that their Online Safety Code will avoid the same fate. Good regulation is critical and literally everyone would like to see it. Unfortunately, if the current Online Safety Code is implemented, we will have neither good regulation nor certainty, while also significantly impacting the privacy of adults and children alike just before an election. ### The Gist: Here come Ireland's speech police URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-here-come-irelands-speech-police/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:53:45.000Z Ireland's new regulator of Internet content [took another step](https://www.cnam.ie/coimisiun-na-mean-to-notify-online-safety-code-to-european-commission/?ref=thegist.ie) towards making large social media platforms scan our faces for biometrics or demand our government papers before allowing us to access them this week. But that's not the only piece of Irish Government regulation of Internet content in the works. If we do a search in the [EU Commission's TRIS website](https://technical-regulation-information-system.ec.europa.eu/en/search?ref=thegist.ie) (regular readers will remember how TRIS works from [Too Urgent to Get Right](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-trss/)) we can see there are two far-reaching planned codes-Bills and proposed regulations- on internet speech notified from Ireland. Taken together, they may upturn many of the assumptions we have learned about using the Internet, not just in Ireland but also- as the Irish Regulations have effect on the huge tech platforms based here- across the EU. Let's whizz through them in turn. ## Part 5 of the Electoral Reform Act 2022 Oh, hey, did you know we already passed a Part 5 of the Electoral Reform Act two years ago that would have given the new Electoral Commission the power to decide they didn't like what people had said on a political matter and order it taken down? Have you also noticed you've never heard of that happening? That's because it was never switched on (commenced). Probably because it was a sloppy piece of political showboating passed for rhetorical purposes without the rigour to actually make it work. But now Part 5 is back, Back, BACK! Here's what the [Irish Times quoted from](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/08/14/social-media-regulation-government-wants-to-get-tough-on-digital-platforms-but-what-can-be-done/?ref=thegist.ie) me on this bit of legislation: > The new draft, McGarr says, is better. “It’s more realistic, more defensible and less open to challenge in respect of breaching EU law – and it looks to create an actual operational system.” > He warns that much will rely on codes of conduct that have not yet been finalised: “They’ve punted all the really hard parts of this process down to codes of conduct that are not visible to us. It’s a framework, the actual rules are still unknown.” Not quoted was my third thought on this: > This Act is a significant step up in operationalising what was previously little more than a legislative dead letter passed for rhetorical purposes. > Passing the new law will mean the state begins deliberately deciding what political speech- *when such political speech is explicitly not illegal*\- is and is not allowed. This is a very major decision and therefore this is a significant Bill. I'm not saying it is automatically bad. There is plenty of scope to decide certain deliberate misinformation is so undesirable that it could interfere with democracy. But what is notable is that even the framers of this legislation couldn't actually draft a set of rules to let us see what they had in mind. With a vote on a new government expected before Christmas and this bill coming out of the TRIS standstill mechanism on the 4th October 2024, this one might get hot, fast. If the Electoral Commission decides it would like to use its new powers and issues a Code of Conduct before the General Election, we're not going to have much time to debate whatever ideas it cooks up in the meantime. 💡 [Link to TRIS Page and Proposed Text](https://technical-regulation-information-system.ec.europa.eu/en/notification/26037?ref=thegist.ie) Notification Number:2024/0374/IE (Ireland) Date received:03/07/2024 End of Standstill:04/10/2024 Sponsoring Body: Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage Still open for public submission?: YES, [here](https://technical-regulation-information-system.ec.europa.eu/en/notification/26037?ref=thegist.ie) ## Draft Online Safety Code Background Gists to this particular doozie at [Coimisiún na Meán go off the rails ](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtf-commission/) and [Coimisiún na Meán is Big Mad](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-coimisiun-na-mean-is-big-mad/). After those Gists were published, the Commission received 1400 submissions on their plans, [overwhelmingly negative](https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/202405%5FSummary%5FConsultation%5FvFinal.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). Having defended their hatstand proposal to age gate access to platforms entirely in press responses, they eventually stuck their actual response in a single sentence on page 17 in their [report on the consultation](https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Response-to-Consultation%5FvFinal-3.pdf?ref=thegist.ie): > **"The Commission has removed the obligation in the Code to restrict the access of children to services through age verification."** But the draft Online Safety Code remains riddled with terrible ideas and evidence of just careless drafting. It still reads like a first pass at a document, but it's now come free of the EU standstill period (as of the 28th August 2024). That means this is The Text. That text still includes the plan to require their regulated entities to collect ID data on children and adults seeking access to adult content and store it, creating a distributed "porn-user register" as the [Coimisiún phrased it](https://www.cnam.ie/statement-regarding-age-verification/?ref=thegist.ie) while denying it. It also provides, at clause 10.9, an effort to address concerns about misusing these records (which will be stored by such stalwarts of probity and trustworthiness as Elon Musk's X) > a video-sharing platform service provider shall not process for commercial purposes (such as direct marketing, profiling and behaviourally targeted advertising) the personal data of minors collected or otherwise generated by providers \[to comply with the requirements of the Code\] But in doing so, it opens up more questions than it answers. Are only the minors' records now sheltered from commercial use and advertising profiling? Will adults have a new little field distributed to behaviourally targeted advertisers letting them know what sort of adult content preferences they've accessed? Will both children's and adults' ID data be permitted to be processed for additional non-commercial purposes such as academic research (a means of laundering data processing in the field of AI model creation in the past). If neither party's data can be used in any of these ways, why create a special clause only covering children's data? Will the day come where platform users look back in fondness to a time when the ads that followed them around the internet were just for slippers? Despite this textual and conceptual shambles, the Coimisiún na Mean (Media Commission) can now go ahead and bring these restrictions in. They'll apply at first to their [designated services](https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/20240115%5FRegister-of-designated-relevant-online-services.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, Udemy, X, and YouTube) though they say other services may be added to that list. What's interesting is that the commercial properties with the largest headcount of actual workers in Ireland on that list are also the least likely to be effected at first. There's a get-out for platforms who just make it a part of their terms and conditions that designated adult-only videos can't be uploaded or shared on their platform. > A video-sharing platform service provider whose terms and conditions do not preclude the uploading or sharing of adult-only video content as defined in this Code shall implement effective age assurance measures as defined in this Code to ensure that adult-only video content cannot normally be seen by children. An age assurance measure based solely on self-declaration of age by users of the service shall not be an effective measure for the purposes of this section. Guess which large designated platform doesn't has rules about sharing nudity, even to the point of acknowledging that it does not apply these rules with nuance? > "the execution of our policies can sometimes be less nuanced than we would like and restricts content shared for legitimate purposes.", [Meta helpfully explains](https://www.facebook.com/business/help/725672454452774?id=208060977200861). Who doesn't like avowedly 'less nuanced' regulation by the State and huge companies of the things they can and cannot say to their friends online? Coda: This one looks like another candidate for the pre-election rush to regulate the internet. 💡 [Link to TRIS page and Proposed Text](https://technical-regulation-information-system.ec.europa.eu/en/notification/25925?ref=thegist.ie) Notification Number:2024/0283/IE (Ireland) Date received:27/05/2024 End of Standstill:28/08/2024 Sponsoring body: Coimisiún na Meán Still open for public submission?: No. ### Clouds on the horizon Legislation and state systems to control what people say and what may be shared are frequently commenced with good intentions and then instantly degrade into abuse by power. These proposals will require expensive and lengthy court challenges, over and over again, if they start to illegitimately restrict speech. It is easy to point to the things which are obviously harmful online. There is such a class of content (material promoting eating disorders to children, for example). The difficulty comes where the lines are to be drawn on the edges of those definitions. But when it comes to statute, what we've seen is the government leaving the drawing of those difficult lines to regulatory bodies and, so far, the regulatory bodies not being up to the job. ### The Gist: The New US Election URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-new-us-election/ Last updated: 2024-07-30T21:58:48.000Z A few weeks ago the contours of the US election seemed set- Donald Trump would challenge Joe Biden and one or other old white guy would win. It mattered which old white guy it was, but the old white guy outcome was still the only option on the table. Between Biden visibly being an old guy on TV and Trump not being killed while being shot at, you could hear the soft hissing of air going out of the punctured Democratic Party campaign. ### But His Letter! Suddenly the entire presidential campaign has changed. After years of preparing to stand against the old white guy- building up attack lines in the media, picking a human appendix as a running mate to please billionaire donors- Donald Trump is suddenly the Old Guy candidate facing a multi-racial, Gen X woman opponent. And behind her, he now faces something we probably haven’t seen since Obama’s first election campaign. The Trump Republican Party unexpectedly faces not just a new candidate but an activated electorate- an electorate that represents the majority of voters, and suddenly feels as if it can have an impact on who gets elected. And they are absolutely losing it. ![Three charts showing the age breakdown Of voters ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/07/IMG_5282.jpeg) 71% of registered voters are under 65 Obviously, faced with a black woman, Trump and his followers have a whole set of insults they are just desperate to reach for. But someone somewhere has told them that dog whistles are only meant to be audible to your dog. Just blowing a whistle isn’t the same thing, even if it brings the curs running. Behind the wall of Democrat donor money and the surge in enthusiasm the most striking change has been one in tone. The Kamala Harris for President campaign voice speaks like a normal human. This is critical, because if you sound normal, it suddenly allows you to point out that the other lot, well, don’t. Here is the campaign response to some usual mad, rambling Trump rant; > "Tonight, Donald Trump couldn't pronounce words, insulted the faith of Jewish and Catholic Americans, lied about the election (again), lied about other stuff, bragged about repealing Roe, proposed cutting billions in education funding, announced he would appoint more extremist judges, revealed he planned to fill a second Trump term with more criminals like himself, attacked lawful voting, went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn't want to sit near at a restaurant - let alone be President of the United States. In the original, each claim is linked to the video of him saying it. But it is the last line that is the killer. He “generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant”. ### 1 weird trick to madden your opponents The idea of grown adults being compelled to listen to older bloviating men rant tiresomely has increasingly become a cultural trope in the US. Think of all the not-quite-joking references to having to listen to racist Uncles at Thanksgiving. That last Harris campaign line doesn’t play like a single note. It is a thrumming, resonating chord played in the secret hearts of every voter who has ever thought “OK, Boomer.” At last count, per Pew Research, that’s 71% of them. And those voters have heard that chord and started to play variations on it. ### ”I’m a creep…” Enter, please, terminally online beardy-weirdy, and Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. A man who absolutely did not write about the time he had sex with a couch, but whose personal brand will now always be just one furniture-intimacy gag away from collapse. The Republican Party has spent decades evolving electoral representatives in a particular environment. Their electorates at local and state levels have been rigorously gerrymandered, so their only challenges are from party colleagues willing to be more extreme in their positions. And, at the same time, their donor class has got more and more peculiar as wealth was concentrated up into fewer, richer, odder hands. Trump, being the embodiment of both tendencies, has accelerated this trend. As a result, the entire party’s elected and pundit class is a gang of absolute fruitcakes. They are madder than a box of frogs, if cybertrucks came boxed, and made of frogs. They gibber in public about Jewish space lasers, and literally stand screaming outside children’s libraries. This is a party that [Louis Theroux](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006w7gn/episodes/guide?ref=thegist.ie) would make excuses not to spend a weekend with. [Ripley](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripley%27s%5FBelieve%5FIt%5For%5FNot!?ref=thegist.ie) himself wouldn’t believe it. [Bizarre magazine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarre%5F%28magazine%29?ref=thegist.ie) would shun them as Too Much. They are a bunch of creepy weirdos. And, suddenly, the Democratic party’s found a new voice to just say it out loud. And, deliciously, the slithy toves and borogoves of the Republican Party, bred in isolation in the only possible petri dish of cruelty and stupidity which could have sustained them, are raging mad about it. ![A tweet from JD Vance saying “JD Vance is weird.”](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/07/IMG_5285.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/07/IMG_5284.jpeg) I don’t know if this is a sufficient tactic to win an election. But it is a jolt of fresh energy to fill a listless, despairing party’s supporters with fizzing enthusiasm. This is a new election, with a dramatic new trajectory. It’s suddenly a bad week to be offering the electorate some weird old creeps. That’s bad news for the Republican Party, who have only had weirdos and creeps on hand for years. Whatever else it may turn out to be, this is not their Grandfather’s Election any more. ### The Gist: LPT, the Chew Toy Tax URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-lpt-the-chew-toy-tax/ Last updated: 2024-07-13T11:17:02.000Z Newly elected local councillors have been taking their seats for the first time in recent weeks, cutting deals with other parties to share power and goldy-looking chains. The nature of these fights is less bald men fighting over a comb and more starving men fighting over an imaginary biscuit. One of the most notable facts about Irish local politicians is just how little power they are allowed to wield. Ireland comes nearly bottom of the European table for the effectiveness of our local democracy. On Page 7 of [this assessment](http://ailg.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Monitoring-of-the-application-of-the-European-Charter-of-local-Self-Government-in-Ireland.docx.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) from the Council of Europe, they found "Irish local government turns out as being among those with the lowest scores, with a rank only just above Hungary and the Republic of Moldova." This is mainly because Ireland's local government system effectively remains colonial in its setup. We have a collection of satraps appointed from central government who actually run things and we have hundreds of elected representatives who are, in effect, voted in as lobbyists for the electorate. Even the Council of Europe's visitors saw this historical model persisting in central government's mind and commented on it; > When the monitoring delegation visited the Custom House in Dublin, where the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage resides, it was informed that “local government has been administrated and supported from this house for 200 years”. The house was used by the British as the location where local government in Ireland was controlled, but after independence also by the Irish central authorities. This was a telling way of expressing how central government views local government – something that is administrated and not primarily regarded as self-governing units. A few years back (under [pressure](https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/troika-wont-let-us-out-of-a-property-tax/29121382.html?ref=thegist.ie) from the [Troika](https://www.independent.ie/life/the-week-ireland-gave-up-its-sovereignty/29796376.html?ref=thegist.ie), who were sort of national sponsors sent in to manage us back to administrative sobriety after the financial crash saw FF take us to rock bottom) the Government came up with the wheeze of the Local Property Tax. This scheme was designed to give the illusion of financial autonomy to Ireland’s elected local authorities while ensuring they never actually got to change anything with their decisions. Imagine it as the taxation equivalent of one of those bunches of colourful plastic keys you give to babies to chew on. The Local Property Tax was unpopular with an electorate who were being squeezed on all fronts while also experiencing the mental anguish of being forced to learn how international bond markets worked. But in reality it was carefully designed to be [hooey](http://www.publicpolicyarchive.ie/distribution-of-the-local-property-tax-how-the-equalisation-fund-works/?ref=thegist.ie) from the start. Each local authority was allowed to set a discretionary extra bit of the tax. This could be up to as much as an extra 15% on the baseline. Given that the entirety of the LPT only pulled in 7% of local authority funding, the totality of the democratic fund raising powers granted to the elected councillors consisted of arguing over the fate of just 1% of their local authority’s total budget. > the taxation equivalent of one of those bunches of colourful plastic keys you give to babies to chew on. But even that amount of power was too radical for central government’s liking. So they built a second mechanism in the back of the tax. If you were in a local authority which could actually raise some extra money (mostly, because you had a city or environs to act as a valuable taxable property base) then that extra money was taken away and put in an “equalisation fund” before being given away to all the other local authorities. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/06/IMG_4963.jpeg) In effect, the councils who could expect to raise extra money from a LPT raise were taxing their voters to subsidise services those voters would never see. The amount that the lucky recipients of the LPT money got from their town mouse cousins was set by central government based on a set exceedingly opaque criteria. Indeed, even today, the basis for deciding who gets funded and by how much has still not been published. That formula, recently reviewed, has been vaguely [described](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/ddb82-government-announces-754m-increase-in-funding-to-local-authorities-in-2024/?ref=thegist.ie) as being an undefined mix of - population - area - deprivation levels - local authority income raising capacity - national policy priorities And that mystery continues, even in the face of efforts by politicians to try to find out exactly how this mystery meat is made. When the Assistant Secretary General of the Department of Local Government was before the Public Accounts Committee, [Catherine Murphy TD tried to get details of the secret formula out of her witness. ](https://www.kildarestreet.com/committees/?id=2023-10-26a.9&ref=thegist.ie#g96) > **Ms. Fiona Quinn:** It is very transparent. On the Deputy's point around population, 10% is dedicated based on population, but deprivation, to which 20% is allocated, also takes in population, so that balances the city areas out. Obviously, geographic area is the largest percentage weighting applied to it in the new model. The reason for that is the cost of delivering services over a much more geographically dispersed region. This is the closest we have to finding out what **is** the "very transparent" formula for funding local services in Ireland. We know 10% of the decision is based on how many people there are, while geographic area is the largest percentage weighting applied to it. In other words, when it comes to funding local services, it is mostly not paid for the people who live in an area, but for the square footage of land. Talk about a lingering colonial mindset. The basis for this division is blithely asserted as being due to "the cost of delivering services over a much more geographically dispersed region". But that is patently absurd. A mostly empty tract of land, with scattered one-off houses, doesn't need the same level of services as a densely populated city. You don't need the same number of libraries for 10 people as you do for 10,000 people, no matter how far you spread the 10 out. > it is mostly not paid for the people who live in an area, but for the square footage of land. However, as the Assistant Secretary-General of the Department refers to, there has been an update to the previous scheme. Instead of the previous 'equalisation' scheme (where the money making Local Authorities had their extra tax taken from them and given to the others) Local Authorities are now keeping 100% of the Local Property Tax. This is presented as giving them a exciting new opportunity to raise and spend taxes in their local areas, for their own locality's benefit. But, as we've seen, central government abhors the idea of giving any real tax-and-spend powers to local politicians. So, to make sure that nobody actually saw the benefit of their local taxes, they introduced a matching reduction in central government funding for designated spending. Let's go back to that exchange between Catherine Murphy TD and the Department's Assistant Sec-Gen. > Ms. Catherine Murphy: What occurs now is local authorities will have a baseline and once they go above it, they then have to self-fund things like roads. Motor tax is collected, but local authorities must use what is collected via the LPT on road repairs. > Ms. Fiona Quinn: Self funding, yes. > Ms. Catherine Murphy: It is daft. This is made to be complicated for that reason. If the vast majority of people had an overview of this, there would be a bloody riot. You can tax your population any sum you want, but they can never see the good of it. Chew away on these plastic keys, central governement says to our toothless local representatives, jingling them in front of councillors. All of which makes [statements about the centrality of Local Property Tax](https://www.thejournal.ie/aodhan-o-riordain-progressive-alliance-6417427-Jun2024/?ref=thegist.ie) under this regime as the closest we have seen to politicians literally throwing their toys out of the pram. ### The Gist: A safe pair of hands URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-safe-pair-of-hands/ Last updated: 2024-06-13T22:36:41.000Z Every election is an adventure and every count a revelation. Nobody knows what's going to happen when people are presented with two foot of ballot paper and a series of unflattering portraits of both the candidates and, by extension, their own neighborhood. Anyone who tells you they do know what will happen in advance is either selling you their polling services or will also claim to be getting messages from beyond the veil as to where your late Great Aunt Mabel hid the family silver. We've had a superabundence of narratives generated since the boxes of both the Local Authority and European Parliament elections were opened. Meaning has been imposed and superimposed, to the extent that it can be a bit hard to see what actually happened behind all the stories already building up around the events. Let's run through the library of Just So tales, and see what we might make of them if we, too, peep behind the veil. ### Sinn Féin Flop This is the main story coming out of the election. But Sinn Féin actually increased their number of seats held, compared the last election in 2019\. In 2019, Sinn Féin won 81 seats out of 9.5% of the first preference votes. This time they got 11.8% of the first preference vote and won 102 seats. The problem for the party is that 2019 was widely seen as a disaster of a result for them. They weren't even thinking of that being the bar to get over this time. The party has been floating in the 20s in polls for years, sometimes bumping up into the 30s in terms of party support. Everyone agreed they left seats on the table at the last general election because they didn't run enough candidates. This time, determined not to repeat the mistake, Sinn Féin ran more candidates. More than they could ever get elected. A lot more. Not since the heyday of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has one party put so many candidates up in one election. This is an excellent way to split your vote, missing out on seats that might have been won, if you just don't have the first preference juice to start with. And, on 11.8%, this was a shrivelled, dry and juiceless election for Sinn Féin. We'll look at why in a minute. ### Fianna Gael: one party, two heads We've grown used to the idea of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael working together in government. Whether in [formal coalition](https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/130911/fe93e24e-dfe0-40ff-9934-def2b44b7b52.pdf&ref=thegist.ie#page=null) or with [a confidence and supply agreement](https://www.lawsociety.ie/globalassets/documents/policy-and-law-reform/public-affairs/ff-fg-agreement-may-3-3pm.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), the two parties have been shoring each other up since 2016\. Over that time, the voters for each of the parties seem to have become happy with this arrangement. In this election, transfers between the old enemies flowed as though they were, in fact, the same party. ![An election poster for Cumann na nGaedheal, showing Dev as the prisoner at gunpoint of the IRA](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/06/1225222651343405058-EQDdgLOXYAAwnOi.jpg) Relations between the parties was not always so friendly, historically In 2019 the parties got | Party | Seats | FPv% | | ----------- | ----- | ----- | | Fianna Fáil | 279 | 26.92 | | Fine Gael | 255 | 25.26 | This year they got | Party | Seats | FPv% | | ----------- | ----- | ----- | | Fianna Fáil | 246 | 22.95 | | Fine Gael | 245 | 22.99 | Stripped of expectations from the polls, this looks more like gentle and managed decline than a barnstorming result. ### “Nazis! I hate Nazis!” The press worked themselves into an unseemly lather in the weeks leading up to the election about the novel prospect of Ireland electing a banc of far-right candidates on an explicitly anti-immigrant platform. Some of the political parties panicked at this prospect and were at pains to signal to voters that they, too, could be relied upon to be racist and callous also. Sinn Féin, in particular, seeing their poll numbers sagging, responded by sweatily reacting to the volume of online mouth-breathers as though they indicated a nascent mass movement. In reality, the assembled ranks of Twitter’s Musk-scented sock puppets struggled to elect a bare handful of local councillors. Each one a shame to their electorates, of course, but nothing close to any kind of political force. ### STV, The Joy Division Perhaps one of the sweetest moments of democratic Karma was when Dublin Euro candidate Niall Boylan- who spent many of the empty years of his life griping about people who cycle bikes- found his political career was ended before it started by transfers from Green party voters pushing his Labour Party rival ahead of him into the last seat. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/06/4576a94d-f20e-4b23-bf32-889fd68a2df5.png) ### What have we learned? The essence of a Just So story is that it works backwards from what can be seen (elephants have long trunks, Fine Gael only lost 10 seats) and creates some tall tale to explain it (A crocodile stretched it out and Simon Harris’ personal charisma has thrilled the public). And, like a Just So story, a political narrative’s main purpose is not to be true but to be a tale to amuse and amaze. But, as should be clear to all readers by now, the Gist is staunchly indifferent to amusement. So here is a plain, rather dull, account of these election results; The people who turned out to vote took the threat of the radical right seriously, and decided to plump for candidates who seemed like a safe pair of hands. Sinn Féin’s massive slate of candidates meant a massive slate of unknowns being presented to the electorate. The talent bench for any political party always has a maximum depth. After that, you risk voters meeting your C or D candidate as the party’s representative. If, like me, you are told on your doorstep that the Plan is to vastly increase services delivered by the local authority while also abolishing the tax that funds 35% of the current services most people will spot a lack of seriousness. Similarly, any party willing to pivot so easily to dog whistles on immigration is a party whose claim to champion the left-wing will be looked at askance. In the end, it may be more basic than even that. Over the last five years the tide came in for Sinn Féin and then it went out again, and they never got the good of it. The next election may see more of the same as we got here, or it may see some other party catch the wave. But I can’t see the moon pulling the votes in SF’s favour again this year. Parties can make good and bad decisions about what to do, and those decisions matter. But, despite the efforts of the latter-day Kiplings whose jobs rely on explaining how one thing led to another, sometimes all they can do is hope. Which, as a voter, is all you can ask of an election. ### The Gist: The Death March URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-death-march/ Last updated: 2024-05-27T01:42:54.000Z Rishi Sunak is not an admirable man. It is worth pointing that out as we watch his extended humiliation over the last week and the next five (five!) more weeks to come. Because if he was even a slightly sympathetic person, it might be painful to watch what is happening to him. But he not an admirable man. He is an [unprincipled technocrat](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-man-for-all-seasons/) without the basic competence that tag would suggest. He is the management consultant brought in by failing management, because they know he won't make them look bad in comparison. In terms of annoyances, he's not even the man at the party with a guitar who plays Wonderwall when nobody asked him. He's the guy who stands next to that guy, nodding his head. It's not painful to watch this guy and his party fail. This is going to be *great.* We are in the unusual position of being gifted the spectacle of an election campaign where the people who chose to call it do so in a state of despair. In my lifetime, we've only been gifted two such moments- the Blair landside of 1997 and the 2011 election after Cowen's Fianna Fáil sank the economy. The first was at a time of rising economic possibilities in the UK. The second was characterised by a rage for revenge that not even the Government TDs fully understood. Clearly, it is the FF collapse which we can use as our template for this election. The Tories haven't merely got tired and corrupt during their long stint in power, like John Major's Tory regime. Over the last fourteen years, the UK's most electorally successful political movement went insane and dragged everyone else through its various political psychoses. And now Britain's voters are ready to *get them* for it. Unlike the 2011 FF implosion, the Tories don't have the protection of the PR-STV system to scrape in on the fourth and fifth seats. First Past The Post presents election options as a binary choice to the unfortunate voters forced to function inside its limitations. Immediately after the election was called a spate of reports came out on the emotional state of the ruling party. ![](https://media.tenor.com/bYN1Jld5OgwAAAAC/friends-rain.gif) Tory MPs, pictured today [“It’s so crazy”, "A gamble of huge proportions. I don’t understand it.”, "Yeah, we're fucked, pardon my French", "I am sad" and, most movingly, “emotionally this is a lot to digest”. ](https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/madness-tory-mps-despair-at-rishi-sunak-s-early-election-mistake/ar-BB1mTwnU?ref=thegist.ie) It could hardly happen to a more deserving set of people. The UK Tory party, in its membership and its elected representatives, has landed a series of utterly avoidable disasters upon those it has ruled over for fourteen years. The Tory MPs who have rushed to tell us how hard the possibility of impending political oblivion has been on their feelings literally killed people with their shenanigans over the past 14 years. From the fecklessness of Cameron's Brexit referendum to the humourless authoritarian self-delusion of May's assertion she could deliver the square circle, to the dead that Boris Johnson imagined piling up during COVID as a consequence of his promise that he already had a square circle and it was all so easy. Each turn of the screw-ups was worse than the one that went before, in exactly the ways a party filled with reactionary and *very stupid* people who were used to getting their own way would go. Until at last, the party's members decided to vote to [make Liz Truss their Prime Minister](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-an-toryocht/). Truss, a person with the permanently glassy thousand-yard stare of a castaway who wasn't rescued quite soon enough, promptly killed the Queen. (It is possible she merely induced such despair at her first encounter with the monarch that death seemed like the better option.) What all of this rogues' gallery have in common is that they were each willing to deny reality to pander to the prejudices of their voters and the press, even as it pressed in and crushed their predecessor. May insisted on Britain's negotiating strength while being squeezed into a box by the actual power of the EU. Then Johnson asserted that he could Get Brexit Done without having to accept any of the downsides of the deal that May had struggled not to make, before events suddenly threw him into the role of his nation's most reluctant social distancer. Finally, Liz Truss simply denied how money worked only to see everyone else's money disagree with her. And now, in the final five weeks of this long walk off the shortest of piers, their caretaker leader continues to respond to the evolutionary demands that made him and deny what is clear to everyone. He has called an election, in the face of likely wipe-out, while refusing to accept that things are bad for the voters who are to pass judgement on him and his predecessors. His MPs are forced to face the possibility of consequences flowing from their actions. No wonder they're feeling overwhelmed. This weekend, Sunak suddenly remembered he had a signature policy he'd forgotten to mention, to [bring back National Service](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c988jdxl02vo?ref=thegist.ie). Next week- who knows? Hanging? Flogging? Warm beer at school dinners? I suppose we'll have to see what his crack team of policy experts, The Daily Mail Below The Line Comment-leavers, come up with next. They won't get better after they lose this vote. In fact, they'll probably get worse. But if the UK's voters do their job properly, they will stop mattering. And, no matter what comes next, that will be a relief for everyone. ### The Gist: Banning TikTok (for starters) URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-banning-tiktok/ Last updated: 2024-04-28T21:06:22.000Z This week, there was a surprising turn of events. Specifically, the US political system managed to do something and [actually passed a law](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/technology/bytedance-tiktok-ban-bill.html?ref=thegist.ie) which included a dramatic TikTok 'ban'. Neither you nor I own TikTok, so we may leave the question of the financial effect of that decision aside. Regarding the money side of this ban, who (outside of some fuzzily-defined entities in China) cares? But when it comes to the political and social- and maybe even cultural- impact of this move, there will be aftershocks from this earthquake felt around the world, as well as in the US. To look at what happened, let's get our terminology right. The law Joe Biden signed on Wednesday doesn't make the TikTok app illegal, or make it illegal to use it. It is aimed at forcing a change in the ownership of that app. After 9 months (extendable to 12 months at the discretion of whoever happens to be President then), if the app's current owners ByteDance have sold it then it can keep operating as before. This is likely designed to makes it appear more like an intervention into corporate control rather than the personal-expression area. The lawmakers had to take that sort of approach, because just banning a particular speech platform ([including the TikTok app itself)](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/business/tiktok-injunction-ban.html?ref=thegist.ie) has not met with huge success when the courts have examined whether those bans were Constitutional. ### Here comes the Law Bit It is worth taking a look at some of the actual wording of the legislation. [You can read it here](https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/text?ref=thegist.ie#toc-H49326F77434C4336B3BA44830FF4A94A). It is a very short section, stuck in like an old bus ticket used as a bookmark to a very long unrelated Bill. We start off with the framing of the Heading naming it the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". We may take a moment of gratitude that nobody appears to be trying to refer to it as the PAFFACAA. ![Mean Girls Meme, with "stop trying to make paffaca happen" as the caption](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/04/stop-trying-to-make-paffaca-happen.jpg) The act creates a special ban on providing or hosting (by way of the Apple App store or Google Play store, primarily) apps under the control of 'Foreign Adversaries'. That's a special legal term, defined in [this other government decision here](https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subpart-A/section-7.4?ref=thegist.ie), which says that there are five Foreign Adversary states (plus one Venezuelan politician). (1) The People's Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (China); (2) Republic of Cuba (Cuba); (3) Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran); (4) Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea); (5) Russian Federation (Russia); and (6) Venezuelan politician Nicolás Maduro (Maduro Regime). ![Six lightning bolts hit the sea at the same time.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2024/04/These-six-fish-in-particular.jpg) The State Dept hates these six fish in particular ### Taking an Adversarial Approach Now, this raises a lot of questions that are just taken as read by the text of the Bill. Firstly, are all commercial bodies controlled from each of the five nations named presumed to simply be extensions of those States? In other words, the law appears to assume, as a matter of course, that there is no difference between a company controlled from a 'Foreign Adversary' state and an institution of that state. Now, you might argue that *must* be the case, given the particular circumstances of each of those listed nations. And it is hard to deny that if ever a North Korean App became a smash hit across the US (presumably an update of [missile command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile%5FCommand?ref=thegist.ie)) that it would be unreasonable to presume that the data being quietly collected wasn't available to the Stalinist state. But what is strange here is that the law skips right past the bit of this chain of thought where evidence of such access is produced to substantiate the plausible assertion and we move directly to responding to it as though it had been settled. This also establishes a model for foreign states to adopt regarding US and other countries' commercial actors. Apparently, the US legislature and executive have now committed themselves to a surprisingly Bolshevik view of economic action, with those economic actors treated as simply arms of the state. To put it mildly, the unforeen consequences of that precedent seem likely to echo years after the most viral TikTok dance has faded from the memory. ### Less a TikTok Ban, more a way of life What makes this law something that will have long-term consequences is found in H.R.815, Division H, Section 2, paragraph (g), sub-paragraph (3)(B). Because sub-paragraph A, directly before it, is where the TikTok/ByteDance specific language sits. But then it goes on in part B to add a general, permanent, power for the US President to similarly proscribe any other app from a Foreign Adversary State. Here's the process for prescription of the next app as a Foreign Adversary Controlled App; > a covered company that— > (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and > (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of— > (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and > (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture. Let us be clear. Of the five Foreign Adversary states, it is the relationship with China which faces the greatest practical impact from this new clause. In the future Iran may launch a SHEIN-for-hijabs or Cuba a Temu-for-cigars. But we're not there yet. Bu as of last Wednesday, any successful Chinese app faces effective nationalisation by the US government (albeit of a uniquly US privitised kind) at 30 days notice. **Coda:** The Telegram app, much used by far-right propagandists and conspiracy lovers, was founded by two Russians, is the largest social network in Russia and, [it is reported](https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/03/24/telegram-raises-1bln-with-russian-direct-investment-fund-buying-bonds-a73346?ref=thegist.ie), has received investment from the Russian State Direct Investment Fund. If I were running Telegram, I would be feeling a bit sweaty as I read H.R.815, Division H, Section 2, paragraph (g), sub-paragraph (3)(B). 30 days can go by so quickly. ### The Gist: Office Politics and Pink Slime URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-short-cuts/ Last updated: 2024-04-12T08:32:23.000Z Leadership upheavals generally signal a change in direction for a country or a political party. A new leader topples an old one because they are doing things badly or have just come to the end of the line. But this month, we've seen Leo Varadkar step down as Taoiseach and be replaced by Simon Harris as the leader of Fine Gael with barely a ripple bestirring the surface of our political waters. And, in Northern Ireland, the DUP saw the abrupt departure of Jeffrey Donaldson for reasons it is prudent not to discuss in the light of potential future court cases. Neither change was brought about by action from rivals. Northern Ireland's departure is potentially profoundly significant, but it is too early to examine. The departure of Leo Varadkar just seems to have been the decision of someone tired of the whole political circus. He just didn't fancy doing the job any more (a position we should welcome, given how often politicians fail to recognise when they have passed the point where they offer a net positive). In effect, the Taoiseach chose resignation, in every sense of the word. His replacement by Simon Harris, although it had the superficial form of a significant political event, in that the country had a new Taoiseach, really amounts to no more than a bit of office politics within the Fine Gael party. Only if the new incumbent does something fresh will we have anything to assess. The one thing he has indicated to date is his wish to be seen as a 'Law and Order' politician. Fine Gael's history suggests what is meant by this is less about addressing society's problems in order to remove the root causes of crime and disorder and more about giving the institution of An Garda Síoichana uncritical support. This impulse previously resulted in the premature end to the careers of two Fine Gael Ministers for Justice and successive Garda Commissioners. If Simon Harris' campaign speeches turn out to be reflected in his actions, we may yet look back on his election as the return of a uniquely blueshirted version of Mutually Assured Destruction. ### Stony grey soil, banks of youth burgled Whatever about office politics, electoral politics still looms large. The resounding referendum defeats by the government (spectacularly misread as a lurch to the right as opposed to a continuation of the electorate's determination not to be taken for granted) are hardly in the rearview mirror. And yet, up loom the local and European elections. We have had an [unhappy recent example](https://www.euractiv.com/section/biodiversity/news/eu-council-position-hardens-against-nature-restoration-law/?ref=thegist.ie) of just how destablising impending elections are to policymakers who fear the opprobium of their voters. The Nature Restoration Law, a critical piece of the EU's climate and environmental response was scuppered by the refusal of enough governements of the EU, represented in the EU Council, to sign off on the law they had already previously approved and which had been tortuously passed by the elected EU parliament. In the EU, farmers may be the most organised and longstanding lobby group, with a voice at every government table as well as deep roots lobbying at an EU level. But it was the eruption in the Netherlands of a newly-minted Farmer's party ([the BBB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer%E2%80%93Citizen%5FMovement?ref=thegist.ie), founded by those famously horny-handed children of the soil, a journalist and two marketing executives) which really unsettled those facing election. Whether the pieces align after this years' elections to allow them to come back and drag efforts to preserve the ecology of the entire continent across the line is apparently in the hands of an electorate who may or may not even be thinking about it at the time of voting. ### Pink Slime and other information infestations Democracies are in the midst of a disinformation crisis. Disinformation is better understood as a means of attack, and not a single purpose or action. There are multiple actors at work- from states hostile to democracy itself to commercial entities seeking to profit from socially harmful action, to fringe domestic political actors trying to puff themselves up to appear larger than they are. These disparate groups sometimes co-operate or echo each other's positions, as their goals frequently align along nilhilistic spectrums. Unscrupulous, unsophisticated or just opportunistic actual elected officials can take up their positions and advance them too- either to tap into the power of the disinformation networks for personal gain or because they mistake the noise for genuine voters voices or because they given them cover for expressing pre-existing opinions they otherwise would have kept hidden. Welcome to the world of Pink Slime. Pink slime, named after the goop added to cheap US burgers to bulk them out instead of meat, is propaganda which takes the superficial form of journalism. In the US, the collapse of local journalism has seen networks of these ‘smear and jeer‘ sites pretending to be news outlets spring up in their place. Here in Ireland, we saw disinformation networks assiduously cultivated during the Covid-dislocation. AI text generation will allow even the most unsophisticated jackboot jackeen to generate vast swathes of websites peddling anything from general despair (everything and everyone has been corrupted by a conspiracy) to hyper-specific untruths about people’s own communities. No bylines, no authors even. Just a website template and a few minutes at a textbox describing what odour of bullshit is desired. This is the sort of thing that, in another world, we might have expected the Online Safety Commissioner of the Coimisiún na Meán to be able to address. Sadly, it seems that body is overwhelmed already. Readers will recall they said they were too busy with other, bigger media outlets to give an interview to the Gist. An FOI confirmed that tidal wave of interview requests, the tsunami of talking that buried them in the first 19 days of the year, was, in fact, 12 interviews. And now they’ve also confirmed they’ve received *1,300* pieces of feedback on their public consultation on getting minors to send selfies to porn sites. The previous record was 55. I think we may have reached the limits of that infrastructure pretty quickly. So, instead, we should try to strengthen and attend to trustworthy journalism. If, as Gresham’s law has it, Bad Money drives out the Good then similarly untrustworthy journalism will undermine the reliable. We should expect city managers eager to give interviews to local newspapers, or Ministers to agree to firm-but-fair interviews by good faith actors. The far right has realised that its primary rival for votes is not the Government parties but Sinn Féin. in response, they have been running an unrelenting smear campaign against SF. It is darkly ironic that, after years of openly hostile coverage from Dublin’s media, the Sinn Féin party desperately needs a strong and reliable journalism ecosystem as a counterbalance to noisy assertions equating racism with patriotism. We’ll have to see if SF can wrestle themselves to the ground and hold them selves steady in the face of unending abuse by Conor McGregor Cosplayers. (Why else do they all have such terrible beards?) A media that asks hard-but-fair questions is still liable to be unpopular with parties approaching power. The questions are still hard. Similarly, exchequer funding for RTÉ (as a fixed percentage of tax-take) is not necessarily a crowd-pleasing policy. We may need to wait until after the votes are counted before we see that sort of thing. But if we’re to avoid Pink Slime becoming a major part of our media diet, both readers and those they are reading about will have to consciously choose more nutritious options, however unpalatable they may find them in the short term. --- An exciting first for the Gist as it was cited in a report for the[ Irish Law Times.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-mckeown-bl-04a033115%5Filt-4-editorial-activity-7175828963791896576-YPcK?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=member%5Fios) ### The Gist: The Zugzwang Referendum URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-zugzwang-referendum/ Last updated: 2024-03-08T12:10:56.000Z It is voting day in Ireland, and International Women's Day around the world. And the citizens of this fair polity have been asked to change the Constitution. Bunreacht na hÉireann is no stranger to amendments, and so we are being asked to vote on the 39th and the 40th changes to the basic law of the land. In respect of the 39th Amendment (the Family referendum on the white Ballot Paper) it's pretty easy to know if you're on the Yes or No side. You just ask if you're happy if Families (with a capital F) should be defined more broadly than just Families based on marriage. There has been some noise about what the new phrase "durable relationships" means but it basically isn't worth engaging with. The phrase is already used in EU law and in [Irish law when applying that law here](https://www.irishimmigration.ie/my-situation-has-changed-since-i-arrived-in-ireland/de-facto-partner-of-an-irish-or-non-eea-national/?ref=thegist.ie#eligibility), and the courts will simply interpret it in a way which is compatible with those preexisting interpretations. For me, this is a simple Yes. The 40th Amendment is, in contrast, just a headwrecker. It will, in one vote, ask if we want to take out the gendered reference of working at home as women's duties (obvs, yes) and then also put in a new thingy about care work in general (which is very much not obvious in its impact). So it was with great interest that I saw that [The Ditch](https://www.ontheditch.com/attorney-general-advice-in-full/?ref=thegist.ie) had got hold of a piece of unobtanium in the form of the [Attorney General's legal advices](https://www.ontheditch.com/content/files/2024/03/Attorney-general-advice-in-full.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) to Minister Roderic O'Gorman. These advices had been withheld, but now, here they are for everyone to read. And what an interesting read they make. On the question of whether the proposed wording intended to increase or decrease the level of supports the state would be required to provide to people giving care (and this is not to brush over the fact that centering the provision and not the receipt of care and support is a problematic framing in the first place), the AG is clear where he stands. He thinks that there will be plenty of litigation claiming that it does, but then he goes on to say > "there can be little doubt that the obligation on the State to 'strive' to support the provision of care will have real effects which will be enforced by the courts and it will be relied upon in a very wide range of contexts.... and could result in declaratory orders against the State with significant financial implications." He also raises an interesting point on the use of a new word in the Irish language version of the proposal in the place of 'strive'. This translation is different to the translation of 'strive' already used in the Irish language version of the text. The existing one ("Déanfaidh an Stát a dhícheall" in Article 45.1) is explicitly used for a clause which can't be relied upon in court (sometimes called a non-judiciable clause). So this new one Irish translation of "dréim" is to be distinguished from an explicitly weaker ambition. This is important because the Irish version of the constitution is the superior text and in any effort to distinguish meaning, it can be relied upon to determine the correct interpretation. With dark irony, this was demonstrated to be more than just a pious statement of support for the language [when the Supreme Court](https://www.courts.ie/view/Judgments/3a70d153-1b79-4b80-818d-ccb627a8ba24/b61f5b19-fd3a-43d0-abb9-75e6e2502a5a/2001%5FIESC%5F63%5F5.pdf/pdf?ref=thegist.ie) relied upon the difference between a 'child' in the English text and a 'leanbh' (more like an infant) to reject efforts by Kathy Sinnott to assert her son's right to an education. It appears that people with disabilities shall always be forced to discover the limits of the State's responsibilities. The AG also stresses that the [Heneghan judgment](https://www.courts.ie/view/Judgments/a3284379-a644-41b8-ad16-ef162e629bd7/a0b8bd8f-b946-4a7c-96de-fc3479d51ec9/2023%5FIESC%5F18.pdf/pdf?ref=thegist.ie) from the Supreme Court left it open to the court to take account of things said in a referendum campaign when interpreting the purpose and scope of a constitutional amendment. This makes the [Taoiseach's statement](https://www.thejournal.ie/taoiseach-care-referendum-6319144-Mar2024/?ref=thegist.ie) that he felt that it was not the duty of the state but foremost the duty of families to provide care ("I don’t actually think that’s the State’s responsibility, to be honest. I do think that is very much a family responsibility") appear more strategic than previously. Such a statement in a campaign by a Taoiseach on national TV could be a strong piece of evidence for the state in any future litigation try to avoid those 'significant financial implications' the AG refers to. For what it is worth, I go now to the polls still unsure how I will cast my vote on the green ballot. But do try to get out to vote, however conflicted you might be. Families, defined in a way that matches our society now, at least, deserve the support through the 39th Amendment. ### The Gist: Facing Facial Recognition Down URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-facial-recognition-technology-doesnt-work/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:53:06.000Z The Department of Justice looked to push forward its par-baked legislation on introducing facial recognition technology to An Garda Síochána. Contrary to their [initial plan](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/justice-minister-helen-mcentee-looking-for-compromise-with-green-party-over-garda-use-of-facial-recognition-technology/a924425716.html?ref=thegist.ie), the Department had been pushed into letting the Justice Committee hold hearings on the quality of their proposed legislation. This stage is called pre-legislative scrutiny. Consider it a sort of institutional effort by the legislature to avoid laws coasting onto the books in a state of unchallenged group-think. So, on Tuesday the Committee heard from the [Deputy Commissioner of the DPC](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/2/?ref=thegist.ie), [from me](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/4/?ref=thegist.ie) and [Olga Cronin](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/90/?ref=thegist.ie) (for DRI and ICCL), from the [Rape Crisis Network of Ireland ](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/5/?ref=thegist.ie)and from the [Law Society of Ireland](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/6/?ref=thegist.ie). Then they heard from [Drew Harris, the Garda Commissioner](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/7/?ref=thegist.ie) and a sentence or two from the [Department officials](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/146/?ref=thegist.ie) who were promoting the Heads of Bill before the Committee. Then it heard from a bevvy of academic experts, including [Dr. Abeba Birhane](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/181/?ref=thegist.ie), a senior adviser in AI accountability at the Mozilla Foundation and adjunct assistant professor in TCD, [Dr. Daragh Murray](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/182/?ref=thegist.ie), senior lecturer and IHSS fellow at the school of law at Queen Mary University of London, [Dr. Nessa Lynch](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/183/?ref=thegist.ie), law lecturer University College Cork and research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, [Professor David Kaye](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/189/?ref=thegist.ie) from UC Irvine school of law and [Ms Hinako Sugiyama](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/203/?ref=thegist.ie), digital rights fellow and lecturer in UC Irvine school of law and [Dr. Ciara Bracken-Roche](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/193/?ref=thegist.ie) assistant professor at the school of law and criminology at Maynooth University. One way to gauge if a piece of legislation has been successfully drafted is whether the state's data regulator, civil society, a wealth of leading international academic experts and the representative for an entire legal profession comes in and points out that it would be illegal. And that's what happened [that chilly Tuesday](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/publications/?committee%5B0%5D=%2Fen%2Fcommittees%2F33%2Fjustice%2F&topic%5B0%5D=correspondence&topic%5B1%5D=opening-statements-submissions&ref=thegist.ie). Amongst the many peculiar elements of that hearing was the Garda assertion that they intended to never use their Facial Recognition powers, in this Facial Recognition Bill, to recognise faces. > It does not make definitive identifications. We do not have a reference database, as is sometimes misunderstood, that we can compare against. We are not attempting to make identifications. > [\- Andrew O'Sullivan, chief information officer with An Garda Síochána](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/64/?ref=thegist.ie) This may seem strange, as at first glance, it paints the Government and Garda thirst for facial recognition legalisation akin to a bald man demanding legislation for free combs. However, the key part of this statement was easy to miss. It comes earlier in the paragraph. Let's look at that quote again, with the extra context. > I will make the case again that **what we are primarily talking about in use cases Nos. 1 to 8 in our submission** is the use of the technology to filter, cluster or sift evidence and to boil it down to a series of suggested cases at which the examiner would look. It does not make definitive identifications. We do not have a reference database, as is sometimes misunderstood, that we can compare against. We are not attempting to make identifications. (emphasis added) The Garda submission did not have 8 use cases. It had 9\. And the ninth one was, indeed, recognising faces by reference to a database of biometric images. 1. "Retrospective person remote biometric identification – Search a database of facial images (with associated identity) for a match with an image" So all the denials of such usage were specifically worded to deliberately exclude the use case that positively says they will do it. ### A Face in the Crowd If you are going to run facial recognition on crowds of people, you need something to match them against- so you can recognise them. Here's Dr. Daragh Murray explaining this, and also indicating where the UK police get their reference database. > With regard to the existence of a reference database, for facial recognition to be effective there has to be a reference database. If a person in a crowd is identified, the benefit of facial recognition is being able to match that face against a database to know who you are looking for. To say this is not present seems difficult to believe. In the UK the reference database is the police national database, which is a database of custody images. There are approximately 19 million images. > [\- Dr. Daragh Murray, Queen Mary University of London](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/201/?ref=thegist.ie) Now, Ireland doesn't have a custody image database of anything like that scale. But what it does have is a national biometric database of the majority of the entire population's facial images, in the form of the PSC card database. You know, the one with the headline "[‘No legal basis’ for photo database created using Public Services Card](https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2023/06/09/no-legal-basis-for-photo-database-created-using-public-services-card/?ref=thegist.ie)". And, wouldn't you know it, the text of the Heads of Bill is drawn so broadly as to try to allow access to exactly that set of images. [Section 3](https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.gov.ie%2F279007%2Ffb799964-4186-4e4c-a3f7-46eb55a3ca0d.pdf&ref=thegist.ie) of the General Scheme of the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) (Amendment) Bill; > (i) nothing in this Part shall prevent An Garda Síochána from processing and storing images which have been legally provided by other national or international organisations And Section 7 confirms; > a member of Garda personnel may utilise biometric identification to search the following in order to locate, follow the movements or identify a person: > > (a) any images or footage that An Garda Síochána legally retains; > (b) any images or footage that An Garda Síochána can legally access. This is not what was promised in June 2023, as reported by [the Law Society Gazette. Then, the Government said that](https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2023/june/high-court-judge-to-report-on-garda-use-of-frt?ref=thegist.ie); > The scraping of open-source images from social media will not be permitted, nor will the purchase of commercial databases against which FRT could be run. > The use of other public-service databases, such as the Public Services Card and passport images, by the Gardaí for FRT will not be permitted. It is hard, having attended the Committee meeting and listened to the evasive responses from the Gardaí to the wall of warnings raised against this legislation, to think that the Committee will not look for significant amendments to the proposed legislation. In the meantime, we may enjoy the small insight into [Senator McDowell's interior life ](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/joint%5Fcommittee%5Fon%5Fjustice/2024-02-13/speech/152/?ref=thegist.ie)offered by this debate. "I have often wondered whether I am entitled to go around my neighbourhood using a dashcam as a local vigilante." Please refer back to this, should a cowled figure broodingly emerge from the darkness to fight crime in Dublin 6, growling "I'm Dashman". ### The Gist: Coimisiún na Meán is Big Mad URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-coimisiun-na-mean-is-big-mad/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:54:17.000Z Once upon a time, state bodies did not issue rambling statements radiating J Jonah Jameson-shout-dictating-while-pacing energy, describing their own plans as a 'porn user register'. That time was before last Friday, when Coimisiún na Meán decided to write a letter to the Editor of the Irish Times, and then (when it wasn't actually published on the Letters page) to [publish it on its own site](https://www.cnam.ie/statement-regarding-age-verification/?ref=thegist.ie). An action which, now it has happened, we can take as being Perfectly Normal for an Internet Regulator. Which marks a change from before Friday, when it was typically the action of Internet Cranks. So much has changed since Friday, you guys. The prompt for this desk thumping and cigar chomping was that [Dr. Karlin Lillington, technology columnist for the Irish Times, had picked up on some of the criticism from our last Gist and built them out into concern about the capacity of the new Irish regulator of internet content for much of the EU. ](https://www.irishtimes.com/technology/2024/01/25/new-broadcasting-and-online-regulator-has-not-got-off-to-an-auspicious-start/?ref=thegist.ie) She echoed some of [my concerns](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtf-commission/), arising from the Executive Chairman Mr. Jeremy Godfrey's interview with the Irish Examiner. Here's what Mr. Godfrey originally told the Examiner: (emphasis added) > "Mr Godfrey said his office will not be “absolutely prescriptive” on how the age verification should work, **a requirement for a person to show their passport and then a selfie to verify they are the person on the passport** could be described as a “gold standard” of verifying a person’s age. > “We care much more about the effectiveness than how it’s achieved,” he said. “There are other ways people could consider like you **just have a live selfie each time you want to access it and they use biometrics to check.** " Dr. Lillington was not impressed by the inevitable consequences of these ideas; > "On the bad side – oh, so woefully bad – is the [suggestion](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41300860.html?ref=thegist.ie) from the commission’s executive chairman, Jeremy Godfrey, that the State build a porn user register, based on people submitting passport details and uploading facial scans. The idea is to verify ages and identity to protect children from the harm of accessing such sites. But this utter nonsense would create greater harm and risk." And, to aid in reader understanding she helpfully summarised the plan "It’s all absolutely, mega-scale bonkers." The Commission was stung by a respected expert columnist suggesting that its half-baked proposals might indicated that CnaM was not a body ready for prime time, let alone to make incredibly complex decisions on behalf of most of Europe about what may or may not be done on the internet. So they came out swinging. > "She accuses us of proposing to create a porn user register and repeats baseless online claims[\[1\]](#fn1) that people would have to upload their identity documents and facial scans, with porn sites retaining this information for six years. She even suggests that this could be required when people only want to view cat videos. > She rightly says that such a proposal would be bonkers. We agree." --- 1. Hi, it's me. [I'm the problem, you see.](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtf-commission/) [↩︎](#fnref1) ![](https://media.tenor.com/DXZVgqq3ORsAAAAC/bold-strategy-dodgeball.gif) ### Just make the circles square Friday's statement goes on to clarify what is being proposed instead of the uploading of IDs by adults and children alike, together with live selfies. No, no, no they said "we have neither considered it nor proposed it." Leave aside the fact that it clearly is what their executive chair told the Irish Examiner. Now is the time for them to set the record straight. They want tech companies to implement ID systems, yes and > Uploading documents and/or a live selfie is one such technique Their objection seems to boil down to the (accurate) description of the *consequences* of this proposal as a distributed "porn user register". What matters to Ireland's internet regulator for the EU is not the material outcomes of their proposals, but the good intentions they have in proposing those outcomes. They finish by once again attempting to assert that their previous experience in regulating broadcasting is, in some way, relevant when it comes to regulating the completely different many-to-many medium of the internet. > "While regulating licensed broadcasters is different to regulating online platforms, the end-goal of ensuring that audiences can access pluralistic, culturally, linguistically and socially relevant content, while being protected from harm, remains the same." Instead the defence betrays just how inappropriate a broadcast-focussed regulator is in addressing the online world. On the Internet, we are not merely *audiences*, passively receiving broadcast material down a different wire. Here, we are also the creators of the content, the makers of the words and the ascribers of meaning. The internet reflects social norms, but it also creates them because it is made up of the people who are society. A body that presumes to regulate those norms but that cannot understand how that is different to the broadcast world of the past should not have the job. ### You built it, you own it Finally, as an aside, Friday's statement contains a number of freshly minted references to data protection laws. The Commission sagely puffs its pipe and demands that technology firms deliver a square circle to its desk by Monday. It wants them to find a way to both create an ID database of users (including biometrics, somehow?) and then also to do it "accompanied by appropriate privacy protections". How? The regulator doesn't say. Possibly because the regulator hasn't thought about it for more than the time it takes to type the pablum phrase. But also possibly because it is literally impossible. But let us imagine this crackpot scheme were to be put into effect and the laws of Euclidian Geometry were to be rewritten so that circles could also be squares. In that universe, the Coimisiún na Meán would have decided the purpose of the ID and biometrics data being processed. They would also have determined the means by which that processing would have occurred. Here's Article 4 of the GDPR, defining a data controller; > ‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; And here's Article 82 of the GDPR setting out the consequences of becoming a data controller; > Any controller involved in processing shall be liable for the damage caused by processing which infringes this Regulation. Is the Coimisiún na Meán ready to make itself liable for how Elon Musk's X, or any effected pornography site, uses these selfies of adults and children? Has it thought about how it will defend against claims if databases of state IDs with accompanying sexual preferences leak? If the Coimisiún na Meán is issuing defensive statements now, wait until it finds itself an actual defendant. --- I did write to the Coimisiún na Meán via its PR representatives and asked if I could interview someone there about their plans. I thought you might be interested in their position. About a fortnight later, I got this reply "Unfortunately, Coimisiún na Meán is unable to accommodate your interview request for a piece for your newsletter. Coimisiún na Meán receives a large number of interview requests on an ongoing basis. Because of this it must prioritise requests from journalists, which are accommodated whenever possible, in line with the Commissioners' other work commitments. " Sorry internet newsletter readers. The regulator who is working on rules about how and what you can see on the internet only wants to speak to real journalists. No newsletter slop. Except, as Friday's statement shows, when a journalist starts doing actual journalism they're not too happy either. ### The Gist: Coimisiún na Meán go off the rails URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtf-commission/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:54:01.000Z Let's start with where things stand right now and then go from there. The first thing I should say: **this is not a joke.** I say that now, because later on, as you're reading the rest of this piece, you're going to keep asking yourself "Is this some kind of a joke?" Hence, this helpful reference statement for you to return to repeatedly throughout. This week the Executive Chairman of the new Irish regulator for internet content, Jeremy Godfrey, made himself available for comment to the press to discuss the [Coimisiún na Meán](https://www.cnam.ie/?ref=thegist.ie) (Media Commission) [plan](https://www.cnam.ie/coimisiun-na-mean-opens-public-consultation-on-irelands-first-online-safety-code/?ref=thegist.ie) to introduce a code of conduct to control how adults would access websites. He outlined [the plan set out in page 17 of their Consultation and proposal document to the Irish Examiner.](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41300860.html?ref=thegist.ie) This body regulates content (and in particular video content) for the largest internet companies in the world due to the fact so many of them are based in Ireland. Mr Godfrey suggested that his Commission would require adults and minors (children under 18) to send a copy of their passport to websites- including porn sites- and then, also, send them a live selfie so the porn sites could see what they looked like right now. And then the porn sites would run biometric data processing on those images (details unspecified) to confirm they were over 18\. Call this the Nightclub Bouncer plan. This is the national internet regulator proposing that it would require that everyone, adult and children alike, would upload their state ID and live selfies, to porn sites to have biometric processing of their facial images performed. Resulting, amongst other things, in an effective register of porn preferences for adults and a collection of selfies of children kept by the porn sites for six years (required to prove they have complied with the regulation, you see). I refer you now to the top of the newsletter. I am still not joking. 💡 Hey! Good news! This crackpot scheme isn't law yet. And you can do something to stop it. The Commission has extended its time for feedback on this plan to the 31st January 2024\. You can just email what you think of it, giving as many reasons why you think it is a bad idea to [VSPSregulation@cnam.ie](mailto:VSPSregulation@cnam.ie) Please do drop them a line, and tell your friends too. But wait! That's not all! The CnaM Executive Chairman wanted to talk about porn sites because that's the least popular class of entities covered by this regulation. But the age-verification requirement actually can cover any [video-sharing platform](https://www.cnam.ie/designation-notices/?ref=thegist.ie) under the jurisdiction of the Irish State (link to the designation notice under section 139E and section 139G of the Broadcasting 2009 Act). That's a list that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, XTwitter and YouTube, just to pick four household names (because of [Section 5 of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2022/act/41/section/5/enacted/en/html?q=video-sharing+platform&search%5Ftype=all&ref=thegist.ie)). It might also mean homegrown platforms such as [Mastodon.ie](https://mastodon.ie/?ref=thegist.ie), the most prominent Irish part of the [Fediverse,](https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub?ref=thegist.ie) who also allow videos to be shared. In fact, Section 2 of the Broadcasting Act 2009 (as amended) casts the net wide enough to cover almost anywhere that lets you post a video. > In this Act, ‘video-sharing platform service’ means, subject to subsection (3), a service, within the meaning of Articles 56 and 57 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, where— > (a) the principal purpose of the service is devoted to, > (b) the principal purpose of a dissociable section of the service is devoted to, or > (c) an essential functionality of the service is devoted to, > providing audiovisual programmes or user-generated videos, or both, by electronic communications networks, to the general public, in order to inform, entertain or educate. Also, these restrictions won't just limit and record access to porn sites. They can be applied to any sites which contains material the Commission decides may be legal, but on the other hand, oughtn't be seen by children. In other countries, this has been the kind of legal provision which has seen libraries restricting access to [books involving LGBTQ+ themes](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/books/book-ban-rise-libraries.html?ref=thegist.ie), racial justice themes and anything else you could imagine the [Burke family](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-checking-the-weather/) objecting to. The exact description of what is to be restricted behind the Commission's Nightclub Bouncer plan is simply 'age-inappropriate content', defined broadly in [Section 45 of the Online Safety Act 2023](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2022/act/41/section/45/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie#sec45) as "online content that is likely to be unsuitable for children (either generally or below a particular age), having regard to their capabilities, their development, and their rights and interests". It goes on to give examples of pornography and acts of violence, but the controls aren't limited to them. This plan goes far beyond the requirement of the EU Audio-visual directive, which the EU Commission suggests "could be done by the use of PIN codes". The Commission also [points out](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/avmsd-protection-minors?ref=thegist.ie) that the Audio-Visual Directive has no "restrictions for programmes which might simply be "harmful"". The proposal therefore must be measured against the twin EU law requirements of "necessity and proportionality" under the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the GDPR. It fails both tests, of course. If there is an alternative method of meeting the requirement of age restriction (as the European Commission's suggestion of the use of PIN numbers demonstrates) then it fails the test of necessity and cannot be in compliance with EU law. And even if there were no other method, it has to be considered whether creating a distributed database of internet use, including porn preferences, for all EU adults is proportionate to the aim being pursued. Then consider it also requires the additional security risk of sending copies of sensitive personal documents such as passports to platforms such as Elon Musk's X AND also requiring they perform biometric processing of [article 9 GDPR](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/?ref=thegist.ie) facial data of both adults and minors. I think the question of proportionality answers itself by the time you reach the end of that sentence. It is at this point that I feel justified in pointing to my [interview on Morning Ireland](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/21574302/?ref=thegist.ie) from 2019, where I warned that the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland was the [wrong body](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2019/0624/1057148-online-safety/?ref=thegist.ie) to put in charge regulating the internet, because it had neither the experience nor understanding of the medium necessary. In creating Coimisiún na Meán the Government did just that. The fresh new regulator is now demonstrating exactly how unfit for this role it is. I take it back. In a way, this is a joke. It just isn't funny. --- Hello, dear reader. Many thanks for your interest in our first Gist of 2024\. A reminder that you can [subscribe for free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) or, if you would like to support the production of more Gists into the future on a self-hosted [non-nazi ](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/business/substack-nazis-content-moderation.html?ref=thegist.ie) system you can opt to contribute (from €2 a month) at [this link](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup). But please know, I will always love you equally, regardless of which subscription option is right for you. ### The Gist: Saving Face URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-saving-face/ Last updated: 2023-12-18T02:57:32.000Z In 1956, Isaac Azimov published a short story called "The Dead Past". It centres on the efforts of an historian to gain access to a strangely-restricted machine for viewing events in the past. He wants to see Carthage, his area of academic interest. The government has the only 'chronoscope' in the world, and it refuses his request. In response, he secretly teams up with two other programmatic characters and builds one himself. He finds it can't see Carthage at all. But it is able to show anything that's happened less than a second ago. The chronoscope is a universal privacy-destroying machine. The Government agent who catches up with the secret research team too late explains what they have really done; > When people think of the past, they think of it as dead, far away and gone, long ago. . . . \[But\] when did \[the past\] begin? A year ago? Five minutes ago? One second ago? Isn’t it obvious that the past begins an instant ago? The dead past is just another name for the living present. This week, the Irish Department of Justice announced, again, [plans to allow for the police to use facial recognition technology](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/797e2-minister-mcentee-receives-cabinet-approval-for-draft-facial-recognition-technology-bill/?ref=thegist.ie). And this time, they assured us, they would limit their attentions to the dead past. The nature of the original plans were made clear by the Minister for Justice in 2021 in [a speech to the Garda Representative Association](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2022/06/02/gardai-will-be-able-to-use-real-time-facial-recognition-under-planned-legislation/?ref=thegist.ie); > “As well as helping to identify suspects in a crowd, it will also be able to exonerate innocent people by showing they were elsewhere at the time of a crime” Simon Coveney [later wrote to the UN](https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=37218&ref=thegist.ie), after its representatives expressed their concerns that Ireland was advancing dangerous batshit notions, and went further, confirming; > “It is proposed to introduce both retrospective and live facial recognition facilities into An Garda Síochána.” This earlier plan- [to run this system on live video feeds](https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=37218&ref=thegist.ie)\- was stymied in July by a combination of political resistance by the Green party in Government and the fact that it was so blatantly illegal. Only the former of these objections was determinative of its abandonment. But then the Minister for Justice and the Gardaí were left flat-footed by the riot in Dublin in November. As explained in Yes, Minister, at times of crisis politicians are inclined to logical fallacy- "Something must be done, this is Something, therefore I must do it." So, hence the return of Facial Recognition technology. It may have had absolutely no function in preventing the riot ([or investigating it)](https://www.thejournal.ie/cabinet-approves-draft-legislation-facial-recognition-technology-6248686-Dec2023/?ref=thegist.ie), but it does have the benefit of being the Something (a piece of recently drafted and reluctantly abandoned legislation increasing police powers) which happens to be on the shelf and to hand. The riots were caused by difficult social, political and policing errors and problems which will require complex and lengthy responses if they are to be addressed. That is no kind of fun to announce, if you're a Minister under pressure. Much better to reach for the Argos catalog of surveillance and declare the problem addressed. Technical solutionism applied to public policy. The argument now is that this plan is *different* to the previous, strangled, one. The key difference is that the Government is now saying it will only use the facial surveillance systems 'retrospectively'. However, so far, we haven't had any definition of how 'retrospective' use of video footage would be defined. Is it, as in Azimov's story, "A year ago? Five minutes ago? One second ago?". Without that question being addressed, none of the Government's current plans will survive contact with EU law. This is kabuki legislation, stylised gestures towards Fine Gael's tattered self-image as a party of order as authoritarian power. They know this themselves, as the announcement press release from the Minister concedes in its last paragraph; > The Minister also noted the progress being made at European level in relation to the AI Act and said that new legislation would be drafted fully in line with the requirements of EU law. When the agreed final text is available, any necessary amendments required, will be made during the drafting process. In the meantime, I suppose it might be worthwhile remembering just how dire was the sci-fi world which failed to realise that watching the dead past on video was always, also, going to irrevocably destroy the living present. Azimov’s story ends with a bleak curse aimed at the characters who bring it about. > Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. ### The Gist: A foreseeable surprise URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-foreseeable-surprise/ Last updated: 2023-12-03T14:32:53.000Z A riot in Dublin. What a strange, unpleasant, idea. On the 23rd November, there was an unforeseeable and terrible event resulting in children and adults being hospitalised, [some still in grave condition](https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/second-child-6-injured-in-dublin-stabbings-released-from-hospital-1556760.html?ref=thegist.ie). We should hold those people in our minds, just as we do all the victims of shocking crimes. That crime was an unpredictable event. The consequences of that unforeseeable event, in contrast, were so foreseeable as to have been the topic of public speculation even in the hours before they happened. The well-known machinery of disinformation and incitement sprang into action. Telegram groups and X-Twitter networks popped off. The people running them told followers that children had been killed. They told them they should go out on the streets. They incited indiscriminate violence against anyone who looked like they weren't pasty white enough for their liking. And then, once disorder had broken out, it acted as a magnet to people who were excited to find they could use it as a cover to get a five fingered discount on a new pair of runners. That was all foreseeable, because they had done it all before. There is now a well-established small network of racist far right agitators in Ireland who have spent the last few years jumping from hot topic to hot topic, looking to recruit people into radicalisation by chasing that heat. This has happened in full view with no effective action taken to disrupt it. In February of this year, Niamh McDonald of the Hope and Courage Collective (who track and research responses to this sort of agitation) made a submission to the Oireachtas Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. She [warned then](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxkJybIQw1cFUyt4H2iDE11sFMk4MRWqwH?si=pAQgKyBYb5I4U0j-&ref=thegist.ie); > The digital platforms are the key mechanisms driving hate, disinformation and manipulation. Meta, Twitter, Tik Tok and YouTube are systematically failing to enforce their own Community standards including ignoring reported harmful content. YouTube in particular is assisting in the monetization of protests. In September of this year, she gave [an interview to Patrick Freyne of the Irish Times](https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/2023/09/09/combating-the-far-right-they-shopping-for-anything-that-whips-up-fear-and-division/??ref=thegist.ie) where she expanded on the approach her organisation had evolved to assist communities targeted for angrying-up by the far right. It relies on locally-led community de-escalation. They aim to cool feelings, where the far right aim to heat things up. > “There’s an innate reaction to get out and counter protest. But then you’re shouting at your neighbour across the road who you’ll have to meet in the post office. So what do we want to achieve? We want the far right to leave our communities and to separate people from the ideas of the hatred and the extremism. If we go out and chant ‘racist’ it’s going to deepen divisions and it’s going to polarise. And we’re not going to have any discussions we need, to understand why some people feel the need to go on to these protests ... Who do we know in there that can talk to that person? ... Because when the far right leave, which they will do when they don’t get what they want, the communities are left with that.” All of which is to say, both the causes, methods and responses to far-right radicalisation have been known- and people have been talking about them - for years. People can come to hold strongly *expressed* harmful views about things they held no views on previously. In fact, most people are persuadable to one position or another on lots of questions, if they are framed in a way that triggers emotion. If I've never thought about whether clarified butter is a nice ingredient option or a profound insult to my national mashed potato traditions, but it suddenly becomes a test of my tribal identification or my worth as a parent, I am likely to suddenly hold strong opinions about it and argue for one side or the other. This is despite the fact that I may have never encountered any clarified butter in my life. Make the issue heated enough and neighbours will start calling each other Ghee-bags on community Facebook pages. That doesn't mean we need "a conversation" on the merits of clarified butter. Accepting that framing is just an amplification mechanism for the bad faith fights on the declared topic. Instead it means we need to recognise that driving wedges into society on emotional issues is *the purpose* of all this agitation. Upgrading the location of those arguments from social media to mass media is the opposite of what is needed. The primary political and policing response to the risk of the far right has been to dismiss them as irrelevant. As Mick Clifford [said mockingly](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40947116.html?ref=thegist.ie), > Right-wing extremism certainly exists, but it is confined largely to online echo chambers and a limited number of headbangers. Given the far right organisations had memberships in the low two digits, he joked that maybe they should "hire a minibus to go on a recruitment drive around the country." Unfortunately, that is exactly what they have been doing, online and off. This is a policing and a political problem. Neither function had recognised the nature of the problem they face, because they were using the wrong metrics. Politicians were reassured by the perpetual failure of explicitly far-right political candidates. And the police considered their risk in terms of [containment and balance](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-far-left-riots-and-other/). And nobody has made the cash-cows of the social network platforms carry their share of responsibility. But this is also a social problem. And here, I think, we can all do something constructive. Shocking events that stir fear or anger may happen at any time. But if we have spoken about the risks of disinformation in advance with our friends and communities, we have done the work of social inoculation against the viruses these networks try to spread. We can do our part and still expect those with institutional influence to do theirs. 💡 The Friday night Gist/Mastodon/Bluesky get together went over very well, with badges handed out to all and at least one request for the secret Gist handshake. Thanks to all who came, and also to those who couldn't make it but sent good wishes. They were read out to all attending, like telegrams at a wedding, by the night's designated Best Man, Kevin Teljeur. ### The Gist: An Invitation URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-an-invitation/ Last updated: 2023-11-30T20:52:18.000Z Hello there, valued Gist reader. Did you know there will be a meeting of good hearted souls tomorrow, Friday 1st December in the Market Bar in Fade Street, Dublin 2? If you did not, know it now and please consider coming along and saying hello to your fellow readers, along with people from Mastodon and Bluesky. All are putting their personal deep animosities aside for the official start of the season of good cheer. You could do the same! I'll be there, handing out badges to members of those two groups. But if you're just a Gist reader, and you let me know, I'll show you the secret reader handshake. Better than a badge any day. I hope to see you there. ### The Gist: A Man For All Seasons URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-man-for-all-seasons/ Last updated: 2023-11-14T08:17:27.000Z Consider the many lives of Rishi Sunak. It seems like just last week when the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was setting out his fourth or fifth stall to voters. Having been previously a radical [Brexit supporter](https://www.rishisunak.com/news/why-i-will-vote-britain-leave-eu-0?ref=thegist.ie) he had become the avatar of [Treasury orthodoxy](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunak-liz-truss-treasury-nadhim-zahawi-margaret-thatcher-b1020474.html?ref=thegist.ie). He then aimed to be a [competent but passionless](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/25/world/uk-prime-minister-rishi-sunak?ref=thegist.ie) technocrat after his elevation to the job of Prime Minister was caused by the woman who had beaten him blowing her economy up in less time than it takes a sofa to be delivered. Then we had a burst of trying out being a culture warrior when his only by-election win prompted him to add “[killing the planet](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/19/rishi-sunak-planning-drop-net-zero-policies-pre-election-challenge-labour?ref=thegist.ie)” to his central political offering. This was on top of previous failed efforts to find a wedge topic to try to scare back some of the 20+ poll deficit of voters. [Immigrants](https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-pm-sunak-says-small-boat-crossings-are-down-20-last-year-2023-06-05/?ref=thegist.ie)? [Trans people](https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/06/rishi-sunak-transphobic-comments-conservative-conference/?ref=thegist.ie)? [Thomas the Tank Engine](https://www.politico.eu/article/rishi-sunak-hs2-rail-london-north-england/?ref=thegist.ie)? Each effort was launched with some show-case of cruelty and stupidity, in the hopes of attracting the cruel and the stupid, before being discarded in favour of the next division bell being rung. None of them worked in the face of a public who appear to have decided that, actually, now that they think of it, maybe the Tories aren’t actually that ace at running things after all. For his next effort, then he announced that he thought the same way. His conference speech was another relaunch as the anti-Tory Tory. Nobody, he suggested, more desperately wanted change than he, the Tory Prime Minister, after 13 years of Tory government. For some reason, possibly due to the fact that it is 23 years since U.K. voters were being exposed to lead in petrol fumes, this particular argument didn’t do any better than the previous ones. So this week we see the latest revamp. Like a block of flats constantly being relaunched as “new to the market” when they can’t find any suckers to buy them, Rishi Sunak is reborn. Eight years after the chaos unleashed by the 2016 Brexit referendum, he has brought back the man who delivered that resounding catastrophe. David Cameron, the rare human whose head conveys the unease of a large, sweating, hard boiled egg in both texture *and* character. Not elected, not even an MP, since he ran away from 10 Downing Street to spend more time with other people’s money, Cameron is nevertheless back as Foreign Secretary. Meanwhile James Cleverly, the man whose every waking moment is a refutation of nominative determinism, was bumped over to be Home Secretary. Sunak had to do that, having been forced to fire his Minister for Law and Order on the grounds that Home Office Ministers aren’t traditionally meant to call for fascists to take to the street and attack the Metropolitan police for being too left wing. So now we can see the shape of this week’s Sunak voter offer. He is the Brexit PM who promises change and also a return to the Tories of before Brexit, who will fight for pollution and against public transport while meeting all climate goals. He is change and continuity. He’s the unifying culture war vet. Containing multitudes while remaining basically empty is a complex political persona. Perhaps we should look on this as being a tribute to Doctor Who, in its 60th year. Sunak has already reached his Peter Davidson era and seems certain to burn through his remaining regenerations before cancellation looms. Until then, we will have to suffer through his stunt casting for The Two PMs. I suppose we should have expected as much after the Labour Party chose a Cyberman to lead the Opposition. ### The Gist: Off Their Trolley URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-off-their-trolley/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:17:38.000Z > “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero! > No, Andrea....unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” > \-Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo The UK has been reliving the darkest days of COVID this week. A prade of curiously candid participants gave evidence to the inquiry set up to examine what happened. To nobody's great surprise, it turns out that electing terrible people leads to terrible decision making, resulting in terrible outcomes. More unexpectedly, it also turns out that the people who run the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland do have one redeeming feature. They are baroquely talented at swearing. Regrettably the inquiry has demonstrated the limits of this genuine talent in dealing with an infectious disease. When faced with a crisis, all they knew how to do was Fuck about. At the heart of the problem was Boris Johnson, a Prime Minister described by his chief scientific advisor as "weak and indecisive". As the week's evidence piled up from civil servants and advisors of all shades, this seemed to be too generous. It became clear that, at a moment of national peril, the Tory party had left the entire nation in the hands of Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. In March 2020, Johnson's attention bounced about from his alimony-funding book on Shakespeare to getting away on a mid-term break. He couldn't make a decision, and when he did make one, he couldn't stick to it. At the inqury his chief of communications, Lee Cain, complained that Johnson thought too much about what the papers would say if he made life-saving decisions based on fact. There's a problem when your PR guy complains you're worrying too much about the press. When it came to making decisions based on scientific fact, Johnson had a similar love of bullshit as in the rest of his life. At one stage the Prime Minister forwarded a YouTube video of a [man claiming to cure covid by blowing a hair dryer up his nose](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67287003?ref=thegist.ie) to the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Advisor and asked them what they thought. In messages amongst his advisors, his directionless careening from one position to another resulted in Johnson being referred to simply by an [emoji of a shopping trolley](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/nov/01/dominic-cummings-has-every-right-to-badmouth-boris-johnson-but-please-stop-picking-on-shopping-trolleys?ref=thegist.ie). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/11/DALL-E-2023-11-05-10.20.29---a-pen-and-ink-drawing-done-in-the-style-of-Tenniel-and-other-19th-century-cartoonists-of-Mr.-Toad-of-Toad-Hall-from-the-Wind-in-the-Willows.-He-is-sta.png) "💩💩" Johnson's political purpose was Brexit. He surrounded himself with people- as advisors and cabinet ministers alike- who were willing to support that project. But using Brexit, a deeply stupid aim, as a litmus test for employment was sure to result in an historic collection of "useless fuckpigs, morons \[and\] cunts", as Dominic Cummings described them. Giving evidence at the committee this week, Cummings said that the events of 2020 now persuaded him that he had "understated the position". What he didn't do was reflect on his part in creating that situation. If the British Cabinet was staffed by "fuckwits", it was because he, Cummings, had insisted that only people who supported Brexit's fuckwittery would be appointed. Unsurprising then that the same bunch of people were unfit to deal with a national crisis, resulting in the avoidable deaths of thousands of people. They were unfit to deal with anything. This was a group of people who would have burnt a swimming pool down if left in charge. Johnson is an empty shell of a person. Somewhere in the internal void of his being he seems to have understood that. In response, he surrounded himself with people who were even less competent, intelligent or moral than he. This is the group that still runs Britain today. This week, for example, one of his [Peter Principle ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter%5Fprinciple?ref=thegist.ie)policymakers announced they would criminalise giving shelter to homeless people. Meanwhile the same [Government announced plans ](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/04/plans-to-redefine-extremism-would-include-undermining-uk-values?ref=thegist.ie)to redefine the term Extremism to cover any ideology which "aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values.” From the evidence we've seen so far, this may be the first case of a government party outlawing itself. 💡 Hello! You may be one of the happy people who read The Gist in your email. But did you know that [TheGist.ie ](https://thegist.ie/?ref=thegist.ie)has had a redesign? It now includes a Featured section, where I can bring together pieces from the archive on a theme. Last week was a set of Gists on Housing. This week, I'm going with the Fianna Fáil saga. Let me know if you have any favourites you'd like to get a moment back in the sun again. ### The Gist: Parliament of Fools URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-parliament-of-fools/ Last updated: 2023-10-23T22:52:08.000Z The United States of America has a bicameral legislature. This lofty description is usually followed by a brief nod to the differences between the two Houses. The Senate- small, with long terms in office. Stately. And below, Congress. Regular elections, a multitude endlessly teeming, seething, screaming and scheming. And that, as the comedians of the Catskills would once have put it, is just the Republicans. The framers of the US constitution deeply distrusted representative democracy. That’s why they dropped both an elected aristocracy and an elected monarch on top of the system, just to keep them down. I guess if you’re at the top of a slave society, you’re always going to worried about what the people below you might do, given a chance. This week, and every week, the Republican Party has been working hard to ensure that those founding fathers were proved right. The Republicans’ third nominee for Speaker of the house since they narrowly won in 2022, Jim Jordan, failed repeatedly to win enough votes from his own party to get elected. In this he followed the loser path of the previous guy, named Steve, from last week. They both followed Kevin McCarthy, who managed to hold the job for 10 whole months, making him now the Elder Statesman of Failboys. To explain what is happening, I would first ask you to imagine you are an idiot. You win election to Congress because you promise the idiots in your party who live near you that you will be a mouthpiece for their stupidest and worst thoughts in Washington DC. You don’t have to worry about even thinking about anyone who isn’t in your party, let alone persuading them to vote for you, because your electorate is grotesquely Gerrymandered. Once you get the party nomination, for the majority of all congressional seats, you don’t have to ever worry about not getting elected. As a result, these Congressional representatives arrive without ever learning how elections work. They are politicians who are outraged at the practice of politics. As an example, [here’s Matt Gaetz](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/20/us/house-speaker-vote-jim-jordan/578c5dfe-c626-5471-ac92-c31c059f7b93?smid=url-share&ref=thegist.ie), Republican supporter of Jim Jordan and the answer to the question “what if I overinflated this Rob Lowe balloon I got from Wish?” > “\[Jim Jordan was\] knifed by secret ballot, anonymously, in a closed-door meeting in the bowels of the Capitol. This was truly swamp tactics on display.” Voting for officeholders by secret ballot and electorates expressing their preferences! What is this system even called? The most recent failure followed the model of the hopeless candidate coming closest to being elected on his first go, and then seeing his fellow weasels realise he’s a loser and increasingly scramble to abandon him for the next Aunt Sally to be propped up at the coconut shy. ![A 1911 drawing of Edwardians throwing sticks at a dummy, trying to knock its head off. The Dummy is called an Aunt Sally.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/10/IMG_3766.jpeg) Voting underway for Republican Speaker Candidates Next week, they’ll do it all again with a series of personifications of the phrase “Diminishing Returns”. My money is on them all just eventually giving up and voting for the Elder Failboy to be restored and never speaking of it again. ### By-election Blues The Tories lost two more by-elections, in absurdly safe seats. Both flipped directly to Labour. This brings a total of five by-election results since Rishi Sunak became PM. They’ve suffered crushing losses in four and held the fifth by the skin of their teeth because of a local annoyance at having to pay to drive into London as part of an effort not to see children die of bad air. Of course, the lessons he took from this 4-1 score was to announce that he was now the candidate who would promise bad air to everyone across the U.K. He cancelled train projects and promised to see the U.K. resile from all the things it had promised it would do to meet its carbon emission pledges. If chosen to lead the British people he would deliver blackened lungs throughout the nation, he pledged. This week’s fresh failures suggest that presenting himself as the candidate who will work to end civilisation on planet Earth if it makes for cheaper parking has not been the vote-getting voter proposition he may have expected. *Corrections: This article originally got Matt Gaetz’s first name wrong, after checking his surname repeatedly. The author regrets both the error and having to know of the* existence *of Matt Gaetz.* ### The Gist: In Want of a Miracle URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-in-want-of-a-miracle/ Last updated: 2023-10-16T07:37:28.000Z This week sees one news story dwarf almost everything else. The attacks on people in Israel by Hamas and the subsequent declaration of a “war” by Israel’s government are a human disaster and hugely politically consequential. They are also events I feel almost completely unqualified to discuss. Ireland, almost as an accident of history, has a longstanding state sympathy for the people living in the occupied territories. This official policy is largely reflective of public opinion. This has generally not been welcomed by successive governments of Israel. The strength of expression of that unhappiness waxes and wanes according to the willingness of any particular government to accept a foreign nation may be both friendly and critical. Ireland is also the only Western European country to have been the birthplace of a President of Israel. This is not the irrelevant relationship Ireland’s size suggests. Similarly, Ireland has the painful lived experience of an intractable violent conflict in a confined physical geography between mutually antagonistic groups. The rituals of condemnations and binaries of identity demanding that neighbours be considered enemies, loom large still. The power of grief and graves and hate to warp and destroy society and humanity are painfully familiar. Grotesque violence begetting and amplifying the same cycle again, the gyre encircling wider and wider. Oh we know it. The political power those emotions can generate can galvanise failing careers and build local empires. The live wire of trauma has to be stripped bare regularly to really make that current flow. There is no extra power generated in a settled system. The slow, flawed, dull work of trying to build something that can one day be considered peace can never deliver the same jolt as revenge, retaliation, lashing out against a dehumanised other. ### The darkness below Last week, I cycled up to the World Trade Center Memorial, and looked down into a hole marking the footprint of an absent tower. The United States suffered that unprecedented terrorist attack and reacted by declaring a War on Terror. An Iraq and Afghanistan later, would it react the same way? In the middle of the rectangular absence of the memorial is a second pit, the water falling from the names of the dead around the edges just leading to deeper darknesses below. The United States has a talent for national monuments. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate representation of the dynamics of terrorism than an absence leading to darkness, surrounded by the living memory of the dead. Peace doesn’t happen when those lists of names get long enough. Justice isn’t retaliation, or revenge against people who look or sound like the people who have harmed you. But how long were those bromides said here before they took root? How many times did John Hume deliver his Single Transferable Speech before it was heard by enough people enough times? Ireland- it is said- is a post conflict society. We are still carrying the traumas of that conflict with us. I think there is more weight to the meaning of that than we give it credit. We haven’t really put our recent past behind us. But it also means that we have come through a conflict. It’s not gone, and we know it is possible to slip back again. But we know the drives and rituals of the cycle of violence and hate, like a recovered addict can look back at their own behaviours and experiences and then see them repeating for others. Here’s Patrick Kielty, who lost his father as a child to that cycle: ### The Gist: Let's do the Twist! URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-lets-do-the-twist/ Last updated: 2023-10-23T22:47:11.000Z Imagine, if you will, that you have been in power for many years. Maybe you've had over a decade of uninterrupted occupation of the commanding heights of the great offices of state and the influence they grant. Now imagine that you have screwed things up. I mean, it is royally fucked. You can't just let things roll on to the voting booth with everyone grimly planning to take their revenge. You've got to do something, anything, to try to stave off the apparently inevitable. You have to do the Twist. The Twist is an uncomfortable sort of a move, but it isn't at all complicated. You just need to try to find something that will make people talk about some new topic that isn't your own abject failures. If you're low on morals as well as imagination, you will start trying to pick on a minority. Or perhaps you will invent a foreign enemy to attack, if you're in a Imperial sort of a country. If nothing else is working you may have to just make up mad stuff about an imaginary version of your own electorate and then loudly point and shout about the mannikin you've dressed up. Take the UK Tory party. It is so far behind in the polls, against the architype of the inanimate carbon rod model of political opponent, that even its own MPs are feeling doomed. And this is no mere temporary blip in public opinion. The UK Tory party has, since entering government in 2010, made so many choice choices, all of them bad, that it actually is difficult to even remember them all. Obviously, Brexit, yes. But did you remember they had a PM who only lasted a little over a month and managed to kill the Queen while in her first week in office? She then moved on to increasing everyone in Britain's mortgage rates with sheer incompetence. But wait, they also had the PM who was a compulsive liar and killed a load of people during covid, including nearly himself, before hosting a load of Covid parties in 10 Downing Street. But those were the good old days, so now the Tories, led by their own inanimate carbon rod, are desperately trying to do the Twist. Whether its sending migrants to Rwanda, or making the lives of trans people harder, or even not even trying to meet climate change targets they just want something that will bring them enough heat to distract everyone from the fact that they have made everyone's lives worse and their country is crumbling. ### Let's Twist again Now imagine you are either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. You are becalmed in the polls, sitting at the lowest level of support you have ever received in [some cases](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/09/28/poll-september-2023-full-results-charts/?ref=thegist.ie). What do you need to do? You need to stop people from continuing from thinking about whatever it is they're thinking about (it's housing, by the way) and think of something- *anything*\- else. You need to do the Twist! For Fianna Fáil, the patronage machine, that means you need to start demanding [road spending](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/09/29/tensions-rise-over-roads-spending-as-fine-gael-and-fianna-fail-press-eamon-ryan/?ref=thegist.ie) over and above the National Development Plan's budget. For Fine Gael, that means you retreat to the basest of your base's base instincts- back to the days of "Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All". [Here's the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar,](https://www.kildarestreet.com/debate/?id=2023-09-27a.184&ref=thegist.ie) expressing himself on the question of the honesty of people who are in receipt of social welfare payments. > Deputy Paul Murphy asked if I have seen "I, Daniel Blake"; I have. I saw it when I was Minister for Social Protection. It is a very good film, by the way, and I would recommend it to anyone. It is, of course, one-sided. All of the characters in the film, or at least all of the people in receipt of benefits in the film, are very genuine and honest people who need help and have done as much as they can for themselves. There are other programmes, like "Benefits Street" and so on which show a very different picture. Of course, as is always the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. Why does the truth lie somewhere in between? Because, of course, everyone knows that is how you get to claim to stand in the centre. As a statement, it contains more multitudes than a Walt Whitman impersonator convention. But as a desperate effort to justify talking about (statistically negligible) dishonesty of people receving 'benefits', it is a Twist that Rishi Sunak would be proud of. ### Take me by your little hand, and go like this Of course, the biggest Twisters of the week were the US Republicans who responded to Donald Trump being found guilty of fraud by launching an impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden while simultaneously searching for a grounds to justify an impeachment. At one stage they were left pleading with their own witness as to whether their rags, bones and hanks of hair which they'd thrown in front of him could be assembled into evidence of impeachable crimes. Mr. Johnathan Turley, their star witness, [said that](https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4228663-gop-witness-says-current-evidence-doesnt-support-biden-impeachment/?ref=thegist.ie), actually he thought the details they'd assembled “really do gravitate in favour of the president.” He helpfully followed this up; > “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment" Sometimes, the problem with doing the Twist is that you can end up back where you started. ### The Gist: Do not pass Go... URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-checking-the-weather/ Last updated: 2023-10-23T22:52:28.000Z The calendar tells us that we are now safely into Autumn, *season of mists and mellow fruitfullness* [(as Keats would have it). ](https://poets.org/poem/autumn?ref=thegist.ie) But since the schools went back, the weather has been more likely to prompt comment on its unseasonable heat. Hardly a conversation has occured that doesn't echo the lines from later in the same poem, with people gasping under the sun *Until they think warm days will never cease/ For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.* First to return to his clammy cell this week was Enoch Burke. Mr. Burke, a man raised to both be wrong about everything and to believe he was always correct, demonstrated another of his social failings by turning up at the school he used to work and roaming around on its grounds. This was both disruptive to the school's running and displayed a lack of imagination on Mr. Burke's part. This was his second academic year playing the part of the school's Uncle Jim who just doesn't know when to leave. Having ceased employment as a teacher after shouting at his boss in public he has proved unable to move on from that argument. This week he ended up in the High Court to answer an application by the school to have him jailed for breaching a previous court order to stay off their grounds. He had previously been let out of an earlier imprisonment, without purging that contempt, so the chances of the defendant seeing sense were slim. The effort to switch the pressure from a carceral to a financial one in the interim appeared to have had no effect. He simply allowed the daily fines to accrue while he continued to show up. The school explained that having a rando hanging about a school like a haunted hurley was foreseeably disruptive. Mr. Burke delivered one of the great own goals of litigation [in response](https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2023/0908/1404290-enoch-burke/?ref=thegist.ie); > Mr Burke said the students "en masse" had been "enthusiastically" in support of his presence at the school, at one point "begging" him to sign their shirts and blouses and annuals as well as shaking his hand and taking photos at the end of the last school year. > He described it as a "flash mob" and said students were "desperate" for him to sign scraps of paper and even a flag. Not disruptive at all, then. Enoch ended up in his clammy cell, of course. But his case poses a challenge to the Court and its ability to enforce its rulings. Incarceration for contempt of court is typically a very short-lived thing. Most people don't want to spend a second night in prison when they could just step out whenever they want by complying with a court's orders. But the Burke case is the third I know of where this presumption has been challenged. In the first, in Shell v The Rossport Five, the company encountered a group of people who were willing to remain in jail, in defence of their homes and community, as they saw it. The effect of that was to raise sympathy for the jailed men in their dispute with Shell E&P Ireland Ltd. Eventually, the company applied to the court to [withdraw the injunction ](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/rossport-5-set-free-after-spending-94-days-in-jail-1.1182980?ref=thegist.ie)they had earlier obtained so the men could be released. They also paid the men's legal costs. The message of that sequence wasn't lost on would-be protestors, but it also taught the courts about the difficulties an open-ended contempt jailing could create in politically charged circumstances. While incarcertion until the accused purges their contempt might be an easy way to let out the regretful the next day, it risks making the wilful a permanent prisoner without a full trial. Ten years later, during the water meters protests, the High Court found that a number of protesters had breached an earlier order not to harass or interfer with water meter installations. But on that occasion, perhaps mindful of the lessons of Rossport, the judge delivered a defined sentence for the breach [of 28 days](https://www.newstalk.com/news/group-of-water-protesters-may-be-jailed-or-fined-if-high-court-finds-theyve-obstructed-water-meter-installation-669627?ref=thegist.ie). Although Enoch Burke is surely one of the planet's most annoying people and his justification for his actions is rooted in bigotry and a profound lack of social skills, it's important to keep one eye on the how the precedent of his treatment sets the model for future responses to contempt of court. Hanging around a school you've been fired from, signing autographs when the court has told you not to isn't an appropriate activity but it also doesn't warrent an indefinite jail sentence in excess of that served by people guilty of more serious crimes. This is particularly true in a modern age where noisy self-selective martyrdom can become a means of tapping into a dark river of funds looking to promote fringe political positions globally. If Mr. Burke has decided to make sitting in jail and feeling righteous his full-time career, we can expect that the court will eventually move to a rolling fixed term, like the 28 days issued to the 2015 water protesters. In an age of flexible working it seems likely that, as he is released whenever the school is closed, Enoch Burke may yet become Ireland's first prisoner on Term Time. 👋🏻 Hello there! Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of the piece. As a reward, [here is a link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEH2fk0ONag&ref=thegist.ie) showing what going viral looked like when the web started. On the same topic, here's the [story of a world](https://screenrant.com/elf-bowling-play-online-free-christmas-weirdest-game/?ref=thegist.ie) when you could just email .exe files around your office and play insane games. Why yes, it was my birthday recently and I was reminded I am very old, thank you for asking. ### The Gist: Capital Crimes URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-capital-crimes/ Last updated: 2023-11-14T13:50:48.000Z This week Bank of Ireland, Ireland’s largest and only privately owned bank, decided to do some IT. We don’t know the nature of the IT they were up to. Maybe it was an update to a piece of software. Given the known state of Bank of Ireland’s technical infrastructure, it is possible that at the turn of the century they solved Y2K by just resetting their computer clocks back 23 years and forgot to make a note in the diary. Whatever the root cause, the consequences were apparent to all their customers- their electronic banking system just stopped working. You couldn’t even buy anything online, because the app wouldn’t approve the transaction. For BoI customers, Ireland was suddenly a cash-only economy. So all around the country queues formed at ATMs because nobody can remember the last time they actually touched cash. ([Did you know they’re going to redesign all the euros?](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/future%5Fbanknotes/html/index.en.html?ref=thegist.ie) Will we even notice when they do?) And this was when things started to get strange. It turned out, the ATMs didn’t know how much money your bank account had. So if you asked them for €1,000, you got €1,000\. This turned out to be particularly popular amongst people who would like €1,000, which is one of the larger demographic slices in the country. Faced with the world’s least consequential bank run (the worst case scenario being that the ATMs would run out of money for a night) Bank of Ireland warned everyone getting a €1,000 that it would get them in the end. If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if you glanced back over your shoulder to see an entire banking institution standing at the side of the road, shaking its fist in the air impotently, having just missed catching you before you drove away, well that was a good day for you. All of which might have been just good clean fun. Except, into the middle of this situation, stepped An Garda Síochána. The police force of the state decided it was going to guard the ATMs of Ireland, to protect the money against citizens accessing their own bank accounts. The police initially claimed they weren’t guarding the interests of capital at all. They were just standing in front of the machines containing the foldable assets of a private bank that had sequestered its clients assets to prevent *public order* issues. One could argue that this subtle policing task, of preventing jostling at the bank run, was somewhat lost on the ground, where video showed the forces of the state standing guard over ATMs in empty streets as though they were honouring the Tombs of the Unknown Euros. [https://twitter.com/stelyons1978/status/1691563908350255200?s=42&t=a9PpjfJKqt6UQE\_nXQlsDQ](https://x.com/stelyons1978/status/1691563908350255200?s=42&t=a9PpjfJKqt6UQE%5FnXQlsDQ&ref=thegist.ie) A later statement issued by An Garda Síochana to [press](https://x.com/newschambers/status/1691585753501831493?s=46&t=a9PpjfJKqt6UQE%5FnXQlsDQ&ref=thegist.ie) punctured even this tissue-thin excuse, tearing its gossamer threads to demonstrate that, no, there really was no institutional understanding of the role and limits of the police in society. > “An Garda Síochána are aware of an unusual volume of activity at some ATM machines across the country... > “An Garda Síochána remind people of their personal responsibility in carrying out their personal banking.” To be very clear- until running an overdraft becomes a crime, An Garda Síochána has Absolutely Nothing to do with how people carry out their personal banking. No crimes were being committed. Unsanctioned overdrafts of a maximum €1,000 might have been the consequence of the night’s frolics, but this is not a policing matter. It’s not even a civil matter. Now, we should realise the context for this police intervention in the protection of private banking’s convenience. Dublin has been the scene of a recent [attack](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/07/28/us-tourist-attacked-in-dublin-last-week-is-out-of-coma-his-sons-say/?ref=thegist.ie) on a tourist. Every single person in the city you may care to speak to, or read reports of being spoken to, will tell you that police visibility is close to non-existent on the city’s streets. The pandemic has done real harm to the experience of being in Dublin's city centre, as a visitor or a resident. The Minister for Justice recently went for a photo-op [walkthrough of the inner city, stepping](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/08/07/far-more-people-find-dublin-unsafe-now-than-in-2016-surveys-show/?ref=thegist.ie) through the streets with a Garda escort, imagery so ill-judged that it has likely ended her chances of becoming FG leader. Meanwhile, domestic violence calls were just not responded to on a [mass scale](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/more-than-3-000-domestic-violence-999-calls-marked-cancelled-by-garda-1.4601760?ref=thegist.ie). And most pertinently, over and over and over again, in contrast to their abscence in other circumstances police [turn up en mass](https://www.thejournal.ie/overreaction-to-a-peaceful-occupation-actions-of-gardai-and-security-firm-condemned-4231211-Sep2018/?ref=thegist.ie) to the aid of [landlords](https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/watchdog-raises-concerns-over-garda-conduct-at-eviction?ref=thegist.ie) engaging in [evictions](https://www.thejournal.ie/dublin-eviction-investigation-darragh-obrien-5178478-Aug2020/?ref=thegist.ie). Government ministers had theatrical fits of the vapours at a [piece of art depicting the police](https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2023/04/02/artist-behind-garda-eviction-image-believes-people-are-missing-the-point/?ref=thegist.ie) attending an historical eviction. They needn’t have worried. The image was clearly too subtle. No artist would be so crude as to simply show the police force of the state standing guard at Bank Machines, protecting money against the people who own it. And now, no one needs to. ### The Gist: Mapping the Election URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-2/ Last updated: 2023-08-08T18:42:14.000Z The institutions of the state have closed to allow the gentleman landowners of the professions of law and politics to [return to their fields to oversee the harvest](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2008/09/08/the-long-vacation/?ref=thegist.ie). This gives the citizens of the state a chance to blearily blink their eyes and ask themselves "What just happened?" ### The Peri-Election Pause The last General Election was in 2020\. The next one has to be before February 2025\. There will be a Local and EU election in June of 2024\. All of which suggests that we're now in the pre-election period when parties and candidates start trying to pick the issues to define themselves in the minds of the voters. They are also going to be hoping for candidates to put in front of those voters who won't make them recoil. But the starting whistle hasn't been blown on this race just yet. Everyone is waiting for the outcome of the newly-created Electoral Commission's first ever [redraw of Dáil Constituency boundaries](https://www.electoralcommission.ie/constituency-reviews/?ref=thegist.ie). We know there will be more seats at the end of the project, because there are more people in the country and one goes up with the other. But nobody knows who their exact set of voters will be. Sitting TDs may find the mix of people, and therefore the mix of life experiences their voters want them to give voice to, suddenly altered. Imagine having been Terence Flanagan, a Fine Gael TD for the leafy, yacht-riddled constituency of Dublin North-East. In 2011 you would have topped the poll, with nearly 30% of all first preference votes cast. Then, in 2013, your constituency was merged with some of the adjoining neighbourhoods, filled with people who lived in houses that had been built by the council, instead of by their Daddies. Suddenly you also had another TD from the same party, Richard Bruton, running alongside of you. You decided to split from FG, to take a stand on the question of denying access to abortion services and also, maybe, so as not to be flattened by your more well-established running mate. Maybe that would have been a politically wise issue to advance in the old constituency. But the new combined voters of the fresh new Dublin Bay North constituency ended up having the [nation's highest Yes vote in the 2018 Repeal referendum](https://www.electionsireland.org/results/referendum/refresult.cfm?ref=201836R&sort=yes). **The TD didn't understand his new electorate.** Which is likely partly why, standing for election as a TD for Renua in 2016, the former poll-topper simply lost his seat. There will be more TDs, but the ones we have now carry no promise that they'll be included in that future cohort. The moment the Electoral Commission publishes its maps, sometime in August/September of this year, we are going to see an explosion of positioning statements and posturing from every politician in the country. Forget Local Elections. This is about to be the long Local Campaign. Expect opposition to everything nearby and demands for everything else, also nearby, as TDs try to belly themselves up to the front of any local issue that seems to have resonance. From [Bike Lane Bashers](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/02/09/coalition-colleagues-clash-over-new-limerick-cycling-route/?ref=thegist.ie) to [Turf-Warriors](https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2022/09/30/turf-cutters-warn-of-confrontational-scenes-after-eu-warning/?ref=thegist.ie), [Refugee Nimbys](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2022/11/25/sinn-fein-td-raised-concern-over-site-for-refugee-homes-and-warned-of-possible-serious-divisions-in-our-community/?ref=thegist.ie) to [Tarmac Enthusiasts](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/fine-gael-backbenchers-launch-fresh-attacks-on-eamon-ryan-over-road-projects/a1126160460.html?ref=thegist.ie), every local campaign with any whiff of heat about it will attract TDs and would-be TDs, seeking to appear to be the voice of a local area in their redrawn constituency they've just discovered they care passionately and knowledgeably about. Of course there is a fallacy embedded in these moves. Local noise isn't a measure of genuine local opinion- it measures how loud some voices can shout, not how many of them there are. Like Terence Flanagan, TDs might discover that becoming the face of the losing side of a hot-button issue provides that new local electorate with a great reason not to vote for them at all. 👋🏻 Because it's August, you might get a chance to read some books. So, despite the fact that nothing I say may apply to your interests, please know that, in the history area, I enjoyed [Rubicon](https://librariesireland.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=2015931&ref=thegist.ie), [Age of Wonder](https://librariesireland.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=2304070&ref=thegist.ie) and [Team of Rivals](https://librariesireland.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=206536&ref=thegist.ie). But the history book I have reread the most is [The Very Short Introduction to the French Revolution](https://librariesireland.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=231949&ref=thegist.ie). It packs a lot into its slim little covers. Or you could just read [Ulysses]( librariesireland.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SETLVL=&BRN=668217). It's good, actually. That linked edition will help you through any challenges in the footnotes. And all those links will let anyone in Ireland get the books for free. ### The Gist: The Road from Perdition URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-road-from-perdition/ Last updated: 2023-07-02T17:47:25.000Z This week has seen some memorable moments. The unravelling of RTE’s management like a ball of twine being played with by particularly attention-seeking kittens will stand out in the mind long after mundanities such as your offspring’s birthday party or a failed Russian coup. The reason that RTE’s travails have so gripped the political and public imagination (and no conversation throughout the land this week has been complete without some disbelieving reference to it) is that it suddenly reveals a thing which has been in public view all along, but never acknowledged. RTE is a Public Service Broadcaster, except when it is behaving like a commercial broadcaster. And those two roles, and ways of behaving, and broadcasting outputs and styles are mutually exclusive. 🗣️ If you’d like to read a piece by me on some of the historical echos from the 1960s in today’s story, including a starring role for Ryan Tubridy’s grandfather, [TheJournal.ie were good enough to post it](https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/rte-tubridy-payments-6106555-Jun2023/?ref=thegist.ie). Pop over and read it after this. It’s good, I promise. And then go and buy the book I pulled all the anecdotes from- [Sit Down and Be Counted](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sit-Down-Counted-Evolution-Television/dp/191631371X/?ref=thegist.ie). Early in the week, everyone was saying the same thing- that no matter what happens next, RTE can forget any reform of the licence fee for years. But as the week wore on, and the news and current affairs part of RTE made significant efforts to meet the public service part of the station’s promise, something new appeared. Politicians and academics began saying the unsayable- it was time to take steps to separate the commercial and public service strands from the station’s culture and funding. So, as a bit of a change, let’s look at how they could do it. ### One Weird Trick RTE has three main structural problems. 1. It is starved of cash. 2. As we learned this week, its commercial arm has been operating directly contrary to its public service remit. 3. It hasn’t created any sort of a digital future for itself, so its audience is aging into the grave. You can fix all three things with, as they say on the internet, one weird trick. You simply stop taking ads. All commercial pressure vanishes. Advertising ‘clients’ are not being entertained to public scandal at a cost of 100s of thousands of euro, because there are no advertisers. All the money goes to the business of programming. As everyone who has ever tried to use it will tell you, the RTE Player, the supposed digital platform for the future of public service broadcasting, is a pile of steaming dung unfit for any purpose. And, having spent a number of years looking for (and even sometimes getting) FOIs on RTE’s digital strategy I think I can simply explain why with a little quote from now-resigned DG of RTE, Dee Forbes. In 2019, Ms. Forbes went to the Oireachtas and faced a number of questions about the generally hopeless state of the RTE Player. She responded by illuminating the RTE management position around people using the internet to access its programming. > “11% of households, and the figure is growing, do not pay the television licence and yet can consume public service programming on their online devices…This lag in legislation is resulting in a further loss of €20 million in public funding annually.” [https://www.kildarestreet.com/committees/?id=2019-12-10a.175#g176](https://www.kildarestreet.com/committees/?id=2019-12-10a.175&ref=thegist.ie#g176) In addition, the player can only generate pennies to the TV and radio Euros in advertising monies. In 2020, RTE’s total commercial earnings were €134.5 million. But out of that, [only 4.9 million was made selling those infuriating Player ads](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40892030.html?ref=thegist.ie). When you see every person using your internet system as costing you both public and ad money, of course you don’t spend any cash on making it work. You’d drown it in a sack if you could. Change that, and you create an actual incentive to solve RTE’s platform and audience problem. But, you may say, ads contribute nearly 50% of RTE’s revenue. Wouldn’t scrapping them be instant disaster? Well, before we answer that, the next thing I propose is to abolish the license fee too. The [future of media commission](https://assets.gov.ie/245148/546b8b19-c8f8-45ee-ae46-69620c434aab.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) proposed this as a half measure last year. But they still wanted to keep the ads. However, we’re not worried about limiting ourselves only what’s going to be politically popular. We’re actually trying to fix problems here. We’re also not going to replace the licence fee with the moronic [Broadcasting Charge ](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/what-is-the-public-service-broadcasting-charge-1.1507400?ref=thegist.ie)either. The licence fee is an absurd and indefensible means of raising funds. It is regressive, inefficient and coercive. Its only excuse on introduction was that TVs were a luxury good only possessed by the very rich, who ought to pay for the programmes they got to watch using their fancy black and white sets. Now TVs are ubiquitous, and public service broadcasting is acknowledged, and has been acknowledged all week, as being of critical importance for society as a whole. Having now wiped the slate clean, we’re ready to propose something new. ### Here comes the science bit RTE should be funded from central exchequer funds, at a sum fixed as a proportion of the tax revenue generated each year. This would allow it to save for the lean times, and to also invest when the economy allowed for it. If tax take went down, the money going to public service broadcasting, (which is mainly RTE) would go down too, automatically. We would do it this way, because timing funding to a formula to exchequer funds, as opposed to allowing a minster to decide the funding on a year to year basis will reduce the risk of political interference. It ought to come with a review of the appropriate percentage at a set time period- say once a decade. This would offer editorial independence akin to the 10 year BBC Charters, but be more responsive to the wealth of the nation in the interim. The chart below shows the effect this would have had on RTE’s finances since 2016\. While the actual income has remained stagnant under the dual licence fee and advertising model (green bars), funding of, by way of example, less than three quarters of one percent of net tax revenue (0.7% in the blue bars) would have seen RTE’s funding woes abolished. ![ Tax Take (billions) 00.7% RTE Funding (€m) Actual RTE Funding Difference 2016 47.9 335.3 337.3 -2.0 2017 50.7 354.9 337.5 17.4 2018 54.6 382.2 339.1 43.1 2019 58.4 408.8 342.1 66.7 2020 56.0 392.0 331.1 60.9 2021 67.5 472.5 344.4 128.1 2022 83.1 581.7 tbc tbc](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/07/Screenshot-2023-07-02-at-15.18.15.png) This is actually a good idea, you know At the same time, the commercial sector would have seen its main competitor for advertising simply leave the market. The money available for other commercial media could also be expected to rise. And all without a single IRFU season ticket bought for advertisers. A true public service broadcaster, incentivised to invest for the digital future is what everyone says they want to see. It has been the yoking of advertising and commercial interests to that public service broadcaster from the start that was the original sin of Irish broadcasting policy. It was the source of the Tubridy top-up payments, as the terror of losing the money brought in by the star presenter in advertsing and sponsors drove the "intention to decieve". We shouldn’t waste a good omni-crises. It’s time we set up the only structure that will ensure that RTE’s management stop seeing advertisers as its clients, and be willing and able to deliver the public service Ireland needs. 👋🏻 Hello there! I promise a Gist on non-RTÉ news is in the works, but I just couldn't let this one pass me by. Thanks for sticking with it all the way down to the end here. ### The Gist: All the news URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-the-news/ Last updated: 2023-06-24T14:59:25.000Z Some weeks you might be casting about for anything interesting to read about in the news. Then, other times, it feels like you're a golden retriever in front of a tennis ball shooting machine. The kind Columbo's adversaries used to show how rich and inhuman they were while he asked them crumpled questions. So, let's take a quick glance at a few of this week's bouncing newsballs together. ### RTE's Fortycoats Finances I've [written before](https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2019/09/14/rte-after-netflix-recasting-broadcast/?ref=thegist.ie) that the question of the salaries of RTE's main presenters is a distraction from the real issues around how to fund public service broadcasting in Ireland. And, I suppose, that's still true after we discovered that RTÉ has been quietly paying its top presenter, Ryan Tubridy, scads more than it had publicly admitted. Only now, instead of the distraction being something to try to ignore, we can safely say there is no chance of having the substantive discussion for the foreseeable future. It seems that, like [Fortycoats,](https://www.rte.ie/archives/2018/1115/1011077-fortycoats-co/?ref=thegist.ie) the corporate governance of RTÉ has a lot of layers. As the original denizen of the Flying Trick-Shop used to exclaim, "by me Forty Coats and my Fifty Pockets", the national broadcaster seems to have kept substantial chunks of change in some of its many pockets without the other layers knowing about them. So, for example, while RTÉ was cutting the pay of its lower-paid workers, Tubridy's top-ups were paid from a pocket in [the Commercial section called "The Barter Account", which was not within the purview of the "Financial Function"](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/read-in-full-rtes-statement-on-hidden-payments-to-ryan-tubridy/a1462860565.html?ref=thegist.ie). The Director General of RTÉ was then announced to have been suspended and the previous Chairwomen issued a curious statement on the payments. Now, we've no way of knowing if the Chairwomen did or didn't know about the payments to Tubridy that RTÉ's new board publicised this week. But what we can say is that the statement she issued didn't deny that she was aware the station's top star was receiving this money, a fact that seemed to be missed by most reports on it. What her statement repeatedly said was that she didn't know there was *an issue* with them. > "At no time during my tenure as chair of the RTÉ Board did I, or other members of the board, have knowledge of **any issue** relating to certain payments and the profoundly serious lack of transparency involved.... Up until I concluded my term as chair in November, 2022, I was not made aware of **the issue** relating to these payments...**The issue** did not emerge until after an audit of the 2022 accounts." (emphasis added) Anyone who has had a disagreement with a housemate over some disputed domestic habit, be it leaving the toilet seat up or storing unwashed plates in the oven, will recognise that being told there was never an issue about it before is not the same as a denial of the existence of the plates. ### The Cook, The Thief... Russia's Ukrainian war turned domestic this week. The Russian mercenary army, the Wagner Group, led by a man who looks like a bullet, Yevgeny Prigozhin, seized control of the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and declared his mercenary army was at war with the Russian Ministry of Defence. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-24-at-09.43.04.png) Starting to remember why Mercenary Armies fell out of favour, historically. We were treated to the sight of Russian tanks invading Russia, not one of the manoeuvres traditionally considered to come prior to a major Russian military victory. Putin then [went on TV](https://news.sky.com/story/vladimir-putin-accuses-russian-mercenary-boss-yevgeny-prigozhin-of-treason-12908739?ref=thegist.ie) to declare that his former favourite restaurateur (one of Prigozhin's early Putin-connected businesses) had committed an act of treason. It has been said that the golden age of the Celebrity Chef was past, but we may be seeing the greatest impact made by one one since Nigella Lawson told people to cook their hams in Coke. More than the failure of the Russian army to capture Kyiv in the planned three days, or of the grinding death and destruction the subsequent war has created, this challenge hits at the heart of the Putin state. Prigozhin's empire has been a privatised espionage and military force, carefully grown as the Russian President's extra-state arm. His heavily edited Wikipedia page says that, after spending 9 years in prison for running gangs of teenage thieves he started a new business selling what are presumably highly euphemistic 'hot dogs' on the streets of Saint Petersberg. Soon, according to a quote from the [New York Times profile of him ](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/world/europe/prigozhin-russia-indictment-mueller.html?ref=thegist.ie)"the rubles were piling up faster than his mother could count them in the kitchen of their modest apartment." This being the usual fate of hot-dog cart owners. First you get the hot-dogs, then you get the money, then you get the power, as the old saying goes. He then went into casinos and restaurants, famously the kind of cash businesses that 'hot dog tycoons' who have more cash than they can count like to get involved with. It was while working on the former that he encountered Putin, who was then the state official in charge of casinos and gambling. Fast forward to the last decade and past an FBI indictment for interfering with the 2016 election which saw Trump take the White House. His Wagner Group has been recruiting criminals from Russian jails to hurl at Ukrainian fighters for months. Now, it seems, a decades-long partnership has broken down between the Russian President and his own [Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler](https://wiki.lspace.org/Cut-Me-Own-Throat%5FDibbler?ref=thegist.ie). While it does appear that an open conflict between the two can only end in another Dibbler business failure, [the brittleness of an authoritarian system](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-dry-ice-of-war/) means that the consequences of this open conflict are simply impossible to predict. 🗣️ Today's [Page 1 of the Irish Times](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/06/23/mcentee-to-seek-private-hearing-of-court-application-under-law-dealing-with-dwyer-data-challenge-digital-rights-group-claims/?ref=thegist.ie), Mary Carolan reports on TJ McIntyre of Digital Rights Ireland's speech yesterday, revealing the Department of Justice's intent to secretly apply to the High Court "on the basis of a serious and genuine, present or foreseeable threat to national security, for an order requiring the general and indiscriminate retention of caller, traffic and location metadata for 12 months." TRIS? What's TRIS? ### The Gist: Faced Down URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-faced-down/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:53:16.000Z Regular Gist readers will remember the sequential Minister for Justices' plan to bring in facial recognition technology for the Gardaí by jamming in an amendment to an existing bit of law as it was passing by. This plan ran into a number of problems. Firstly, as [originally articulated](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-face-off/), it was illegal. Also, as the [Green party's TDs pointed out](https://twitter.com/Costellop/status/1664239043117285376?s=20&ref=thegist.ie), it also was bad technology. Finally, it turned out that the serried ranks of the forces of the state's coercive powers were being menaced by that most eldrich and arcane of creatures- [People Behind Desks](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-people-behind-desks/). Whether it was the occult powers of horizontal wood, internal Government dealmaking or just the being-illegal problem, on Sunday, [the Independent website conceeded that Fine Gael's dream was over](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/crime/fine-gael-climbdown-in-row-over-garda-facial-recognition-technology/a2049733133.html?ref=thegist.ie). After a year asserting they were going to force this through, they gave up and acknowledged they couldn't. The announcement still claimed that they'd bring in future legislation, going through the scrutiny the previous plan would avoid. But, you know, I think we may class this law in the same category as the Tory Government's perennial plan to introduce porn passes in corner shops for the internet. They say it because they like how it feels to make the sounds out loud, as opposed to reflecting any genuine legislative intent. ### Throwing neutral shades The President of Ireland, and head of its armed forces, decided to express himself on the question of Ireland's participation in military alliances. We've addressed the issue of the [Neutrality Bemoaner](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-war-talkers/) previously. There was a [significant uptick](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/pat-leahy-whatever-we-do-on-neutrality-will-come-at-a-price-1.4824529?ref=thegist.ie) in assertions of the inevitabliity of Ireland joining a military alliance back in 2022\. This talk came to a sudden and juddering end [as polls emerged](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/overwhelming-support-for-retention-of-ireland-s-military-neutrality-1.4853176?ref=thegist.ie) demonstrating that what appeared to be solidifying conventional wisdom of the end of Nuetrality was not shared by the public. But now we're back, the forces of Neutrality Bemoaning returning from their distant orbits like a Halley's Comet made up of rapidly defrosting red-faced Yer Das, crammed tight with barely a golf club or pint of Heineken between them. The appeance of this omen in the sky, its long tail of men in comfort-fit salmon pink shirts with one too many buttons opened trailing across the heavens, heralds the introduction of Micheál Martin's plan to, as Leo Varadkar put it, develop "proposals as to how we could consult stakeholders and the public in a meaningful way on how our defence and security policy should evolve." There is something familiar in the tenor of this project to tour the country telling the public they're wrong. It feels like a repeat of the impulse that saw the last FG government announce plans to commemorate the Black and Tans, and then continue to argue they were right even after giving up on the actual plan. Whether the security forum delivers as profound a bounce to the opposition as that last wheeze, it certainly has been entertaining to see the media seriously pose the question as to whether the elected official with the most votes of anyone alive or Yer Da might better reflect public opinion. ### Double Down The troubled Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022 has been struggling to emerge from its difficult post-enactment life. The law was passed in barely a week from start to finish, on the basis that it was too urgent to let legislators examine it. It then sat on the books, an uncommenced Act, after the Department of Justice discovered that it was meant to alert the EU Commission of changes of this sort, through what is known as the TRIS mechanism. This was, as an FOI confirms, news to the Department. As one Dept of Justice official emailed two others on the 2nd December "The context here of course is that the TRIS issue was not flagged to the Department as a legal issue at any stage before the Bill was enacted." They eventually announced that, even though they didn't have to, they were going to put it into TRIS anyway. The EU Commission responded pretty sharply > We would like to remind the Irish authorities that the Directive (EU) 2015/1535 (hereinafter 'the SMTD) requires that Member States notify their technical regulations in a draft stage, which shall remain in that stage until the end of the standstill period. In this regard, the Court of Justice ruled that a technical regulation cannot be applied if, though notified, it has been adopted, entered into force and implemented before the end of the three month standstill period required under the SMTD (judgement of 26 September 2000, Unilever, Case C-443/98, EU:C:2000:496). The failure to respect that standstill period is a material procedural defect rendering the technical regulation at issue inapplicable and unenforceable against individuals (judgment of 16 July 2015, UNIC and Uni.co.pel, Case C-95/14, EU:C: 2015:492). Or, for short, How Is This Not Too Late? Despite this, on the 6th June last, as one of her very first actions since resuming office, Minister McEntee signed the Commencement Order for the Act (SI [287/2023](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2023/si/287/made/en/print?ref=thegist.ie)), without apparently worrying too much that the state may be building its data retention regime, once again, on an 'inapplicable and unenforceable' law. 🗣️ One of the advantages of advanced age is having direct memory of the last time the state's executive and media debated whether the President had overstepped their Constitutional duties. For a balanced write up on the issues from the Robinson Presidency, see this article by David Gwynn Morgan, co-author of Kelly's Constitution, from 1999\. MARY ROBINSON’S PRESIDENCY: RELATIONS WITH THE GOVERNMENT. **Irish Jurist (1966-)*, **34*, 256–275\. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/44026473](http://www.jstor.org/stable/44026473?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Rise of the Deskarati URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-people-behind-desks/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:53:22.000Z This week Simon Harris relinquished his role as Minister for Justice, as Helen McEntee returned from her maternity leave. He had been an unusually vocal Ministerial stand-in, enjoying the opportunity beloved of all FG politicians to say things that warm the cockles of hearts wrapped in blue shirts, worn as either part of their uniform or just as a political choice. (Ministers for Justice should not be dismissed as a mere appendix to their Department. Historically, the office holders have acted more like the gall bladder, alternating between a place for the storage of bile and just having rocks rattling around inside them, depending on the occupant of the office.) One of his declared priorities was to push through legislation to allow for... well, it wasn't exactly clear what he wanted, but it seemed as though he was looking to legislate for Gardaí to wear body cams linked to a real-time facial recognition system and database. This idea has proved attractive in other jurisdictions up to the moment it is actually deployed in real life and starts accusing [random](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/detroit-facial-recognition-surveillance-camera-racial-bias-crime/?ref=thegist.ie) people of [being criminals.](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/29/tech/nijeer-parks-facial-recognition-police-arrest/index.html?ref=thegist.ie) Well, I say random, but in fact there is a very strong correlation between misidentification by these systems and being black. Racial bias is part of the whole deal. The actual crime-fighting usefulness of this technology can be gauged by the comment by the [Chief of Police in Detroit who remarked](https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyzykz/detroit-police-chief-facial-recognition-software-misidentifies-96-of-the-time?ref=thegist.ie) that "If we were just to use the technology by itself, to identify someone...I would say 96% of the time it would misidentify." Nonetheless, Ireland's police are convinced that [Shelbyville](https://youtu.be/KGg5rfBfWT4?ref=thegist.ie) have got the drop on them with their new-fangled crime-cameras and they're only [desperate for the chance](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/body-cams-must-be-able-to-recognise-faces-insists-garda-chief-drew-harris/42434530.html?ref=thegist.ie) to see if they can buy the surveillance equivilent of a monorail as well. Harris found himself facing two forms of resistance to his project. His plan [was illegal ](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-face-off/)and it also proved politically impossible to implement. Finding himself lashed to a basically failed project as it went under, he took a page out of the Brexiteer handbook. He declared he had been stopped by a shadowy group of people. The enemies of the forces of law and order? People Behind Desks. ![Tweet from Richard Chambers "Justice Minister Simon Harris tells GRA conference he’s at the “end of my tether” because of objections to body cams for Gardaí voiced by people “behind desks” complaining about the right to privacy…"](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-03-at-10.55.47.png) Throughout his months in office, Minister Harris continued to fail to bring in a law to allow a surveillance form so illegal the European Data Protection Board has already assessed it and found; > “remote processing of biometric data in public spaces for identification purposes fail to strike a fair balance between the competing private and public interests, thus constituting a disproportionate interference with the data subject’s rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter.” The Minister (as the avatar for his Department) reacted in two ways. He started to vary the description of what he was trying to propose. [We went from his predecessor's statement ](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2022/06/02/gardai-will-be-able-to-use-real-time-facial-recognition-under-planned-legislation/?ref=thegist.ie)that the systems would be used to 'identify suspects in crowds' to a desperate effort to try to conflate just recording video on body cams (an activity nobody is objecting to) with the facial recognition element. At one stage he [nonsensically complained that the Gardaí were, somehow, prevented from recording video with cameras, unlike everyone one else. ](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/05/31/gardai-being-only-people-at-protests-without-cameras-is-absolutely-ridiculous-harris-says/?ref=thegist.ie) Politically, the Green Party were the primary block to the law proceeding. They're a coalition party, so their position can't be just ignored. But similarly, it would be a bad look for the Minister to start attacking his Government colleagues. Hence: The People Behind Desks. ![Richard Chambers Tweet from May 22nd 2023, "Simon Harris again says it’s very easy for people “behind desks” or on microphones to criticise or second guess the Gardaí. Says body cams remain on his agenda."](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-03-at-11.09.43.png) Taking a leaf from the Michael Gove Brexit line that people were sick of listening to Experts, the Minister's reuse of the same strange formulation of words to describe his opponents invites us to try to work out who are these political powerhouses, with their menacing horizontal wooden surfaces? If we think they must be the people who *aren't* the Green Party, but *have* objected to the introduction of live Facial Recognition Technology as part of an amendment to an existing bill, we can presume he means lawyers, academics, technologists. Basically, people who might have some expertise in the subject he's attempting to legislate for. As someone who owns a horizontal piece of wood, behind which I sometimes sit, I can confirm that being located behind a desk is not a method of assuring infallibility. Nor, however, is it a location which ensures that I am wrong until I stand up and step away. People Behind Desks are not arguing [desk cathedra](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ex%20cathedra?ref=thegist.ie). They don't assert their deskyness as the source of their expertise. Instead they make arguments based on citing [laws, and facts and surveys and so on](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/04/18/facial-recognition-technology-will-turn-gardai-into-roaming-surveillance-units/?ref=thegist.ie). It's those arguments which the Minister spent his brief time in office avoiding, because he had no answer to them. On her arrival back into her job this week, Minister McEntee [acknowledged that she was abandoning the plans for live Facial Recognition](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/06/01/helen-mcentee-resumes-role-as-minister-for-justice-after-maternity-leave/?ref=thegist.ie). It would be worthwhile if she could persuade her Department that proceeding with a law that could actually pass and stand up to legal scrutiny would be a better use of her remaining time in office than continuing her predecessor's futile furniture-based line of argument. 🗣️ The European Data Protection Board has already issued a [comprehensive analysis of the legality, necessity and proportionality of facial recognition technology in law enforcement](https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/documents/public-consultations/2022/guidelines-052022-use-facial-recognition%5Fen?ref=thegist.ie). Might be worth looking at? ### The Gist: The AIrish Times URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-airish-times/ Last updated: 2023-11-14T13:51:53.000Z This week saw something new in the Irish Times. As the paper’s editor later [acknowledged](https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/05/14/a-message-from-the-editor/?ref=thegist.ie), the newspaper unwittingly published an [opinion](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/05/11/irish-womens-obsession-with-fake-tan-is-problematic/?ref=thegist.ie) article at least partially written by an AI chatbot, along with an AI generated photo of a non-existent blue-haired Ecuadorean author. The involvement of this technological novelty was the focus of much of the subsequent debate, with the newspaper identifying it as an issue to be addressed in future commissioning. (Presumably, henceforth all opinion columnists will be treated as potential fae changelings, with Fintan O’Toole asked to show his teeth and hands and touch a piece of cold iron before his column is accepted). Not addressed by the Editor’s note, because it was a far more difficult issue, were the habits of thought which saw an article of the sort capable of just being generated by a chatbot being published in the first place. This seems to have been the hoaxer’s low ambition- to prove that the Irish Times was so eager to give voice to under-represented opinions that it would publish absolute by-the-numbers culture war nonsense. ### White Musk Certainly it was the gleeful squeal from the White Musk right, and, in a self-exculpatory way was also the paper’s after the fact position. The Editor’s note defiantly ended with a pledge to keep publishing under-represented voices, (such as the previously silenced non-existent person population). What it actually revealed was something deeper, and in the long term more concerning for all of Irish media. The article was published for the clicks. It got the clicks, because its contents were provokingly stupid. When it was published, it was the second most popular piece on the site. The most revealing part of the Editor’s note was the blithe assertion that this is what opinion pieces are for- “The aim each day is to come up with a blend of thought-provoking columns that inform, stimulate and lend a fresh perspective on a current issue.” Why was wearing fake tan a “current issue”? Well, it wasn’t. Literally nobody in the country was thinking the things generated by the AI chatbot. We live in a country where seeing the sun becomes a topic of surprised conversation amongst strangers. But that sort of thing had been a successful culture war topic elsewhere, and this was a chance to tap a fresh new vein of rageclicks. “It made an argument that has been aired in other countries but related it to the Irish context.” as the Editor’s note put it. ### ClicksGPT It was the content, not the hoax, which was the real breach in trust with readers. Whether the author made their argument in good or bad faith, it could only be published for indefensible reasons- not to give voice to the voiceless but to angry up the blood of the readers. The hoax/AI elements simply stripped the paper of its usual defence for publishing this sort of thing. They couldn’t argue it was a legitimate point of view they just happened to be harvesting clicks on, because suddenly the blue haired immigrant they were shielded by winked out of existence. Now there was nothing standing between the text and its promoters. Newspapers everywhere publish opinion columns to give a platform to chosen arguments (and the people who make them). There is frequently an internal understanding that these columns are quite unlike the content produced as news, where being accurate and factual are, in the Irish Times as elsewhere, critically valued. Facts, as the old Guardian Editor’s comment goes, are sacred. But though the world is full of facts, people aren’t filing cabinets. We make sense of the information presented to us by placing it within broader narratives about what’s going on in our world. This is the real purpose of an opinion section and the real risk posed by one which wrongly thinks it is there to “provoke” as a primary purpose. It provides narratives and stories that help readers make sense of all those facts so carefully assembled in the front of the paper. There is huge power in narrative building. A false narrative can become so accepted through repetition that it can lead to profound errors of public policy and worse. Understanding is built on facts, but it doesn’t grow by them alone. Stories are stronger than mere facts, which makes it so important not to reproduce harmful and divisive ones just because you saw it get clicks elsewhere. From Brexit to Covid denial, from the invasion of Ukraine to the climate crisis vehemently denied by voices given space in newspapers and other media for decades, the platforming of bad ideas and opinions and the reproduction of harmful and wrong narratives has threatened lives, jobs and polities. ### Wavin Pipers I trust the Irish Times to always attempt to get its facts right (nobody’s perfect, but I believe that’s the aim of every news report). But ever since its previous [opinion editor defended](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/why-we-published-nicholas-pell-s-article-on-the-alt-right-1.2926420?ref=thegist.ie) publishing a far-right glossary of abusive terms, written by a proponent of right-wing provocation, it has been clear that the paper has gone wrong when it comes to understanding its own role in helping readers make sense of the world. Whether written directly by an existing human or generated by an AI bot at the prompting of a hoaxer, the threat from platforming bad faith arguments is the same. As in economics a debased currency will overwhelm any remaining pure coins in circulation, so in the realm of platforming opinions, bad takes drive out the good. Not recognising the difference between the two is what loses a media outlet its readers’ trust. We haven’t needed AI to produce debased opinions in the past- we’ve always been able to find humans ready, willing and able to generate them on demand in exchange for money and/or influence. The only difference the intervention of an AI chatbot makes is to lower the barriers of entry so as to ensure those open sewers may gush unceasing. We need to be able to tell our stories to each other. But the role of an editor is not to act as a journalistic Wavin pipe, dumping undifferentiated contents on the reader. Not all stories deserve to be heard, either because they take no account of the facts of the world or because they seek to harm others through bad faith argument. Finding and promoting the stories that help improve our lives, rooted in fact and tinged with human insight is the promise of an opinion section. Trust builds the more often that promise is kept. 💡 Some interesting things I've read on AI recently: [Wired on finding out ChatGPT](https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-generative-artificial-intelligence-regulation/?ref=thegist.ie) has been stealing your work. Interesting new angle on the [cultural impact of a post AI world](https://pca.st/episode/0a98b2ab-e882-4d4e-8b1f-13bc8f0d15aa?ref=thegist.ie) in a podcast discussion. And, just to confirm, ChatGPT will generate an essay in the style if the Gist if you ask it to, so at least we know we have one famous reader. Even if it is a non-sentient chatbot. ### The Gist: The Late Late Low URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-late-late-low/ Last updated: 2023-11-14T13:52:18.000Z Ever since Ryan Tubridy announced he was going to quit the Late Late Show to spend more time with his radio mic, RTÉ has been trying to replace him. The show is regularly the highest rated entertainment slot in Ireland, the pay is better than most RTÉ jobs and it literally couldn't be a more high profile gig. So far, the job has been as attractive as a Gorgonzola sewed into bedroom curtains. The Late Late Show, as a programme, was built for decades around (and largely by) one man to match his interests, strengths and weaknesses. When he retired, his replacement spent years being visibly unhappy at being forced into the same shaped container. Gay Byrne’s ghost still owns this show. And the decades RTÉ spent trying to deny this, most of them to try to deny Byrne better working conditions, have now come home to roost. RTÉ was so unhappy at letting him recognise his own power that, for 25 years, they would only employ him on rolling 13 week contracts. Even as he came to define the station, they constantly told him he was never more than 13 weeks from being replaced. As writer Julian Gough said "It's all part of RTÉ's refusal to believe in the idea of talent. Gay Byrne was an employee, and we will just put another employee in the slot." The slot has proved tricky to fill with this model of interchangable employees, like grinning lego minifigures. The current host of the programme presents a sort of shadows-on-the-cave-wall version of Gay Byrne’s Late Late, (with the exception of the Toy Show, which is superlative). History behaves as though the Late Late show was about political bits and showbiz stars and so on. And, you know that was sort of true. But the programme had a secret move which was abandoned as soon as Gay Byrne left, due to the ineffable skill needed to pull it off. It kept the guests on stage and let them interact. Showbiz people would weigh in on political bits. Politicians would be asked to sing a song. And then, to pile an additional layer on top, we’d sometimes just see what the audience in the studio thought about things. This was the famous national conversation, where the nation talked to itself about things never spoken about before in public. This is also chaos. A formatless, impossible to prepare-for bloc of live TV, sitting like a formless void at the end of the broadcasting week, surrounded by the most valuable advertising slots the station has to offer. Gay Byrne was a bit of a curmudgeon. But, also, never mind 'talent', he was an actual TV genius. Asking people to stand in his shoes and play the part of ringmaster to a circus of his creation is like asking them to restore an Old Master painting. ![Before and after, Ecco homo restoration](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/05/IMG_2772.jpeg) None of this is hard to see, and the closer you stand to the Late Late (and particularly have had experience of live telly) the more horrific the job looks. In part, this is because it doesn’t come with Gay Byrne’s power to just throw everything out and do something weird. But really, what makes it impossible is that it doesn't come with being Gay Byrne. Instead of just racing to announcing a new Late Late host to pour into the existing jelly mould RTÉ should do ostentatiously strange things with the slot over the Summer to try to find a way forward. Give it to two people to present and let them roam around the country. Hire outsiders for one week to make the show of their dreams- with all the assistance of the station to help make it happen. Try out the idea of a Guest Editor or presenter from Magazines. RTE literally needs to try everything to break the format, so it can find a way forward. The problem is not about finding a presenter for the show. The problem is finding a show. The only way out is through. 🗣️ If you're interested, you can read more about the early days of RTÉ (and the creation of the Late Late Show as a social and political force, to the rage of the people running RTÉ) in this book I published [Sit Down And Be Counted: The Cultural Evolution of a Television Station](https://amzn.eu/d/afBOgaO?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: "My superpower is not knowing" URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-my-superpower-is-not-knowing/ Last updated: 2023-04-25T11:53:55.000Z This weekend saw the sort of clash usually reserved for the climax of Godzilla films, as Elon Musk's Twitter (and, at this stage it is hard to seperate the dancer from the dance) implemented its long threatened Blue Tick Apocalypse. In removing the sign of authenticity from everyone from the Pope to Stephen King, Musk thought he could make them all buy it back for a monthly fee. Instead, it was shunned by celebrities and found its audiences amongst scammers and nazis. In response, Twitter's apex account, @dril, who has evolved to understand the platform in a way its owner never could, urged everyone to just block everyone who paid Twitter the $8 tick-tax. The BlockTheBlue hashtag ran riot. ### Romulans in the Neutral zone This all seems like a report on a space battle between warring Star Trek aliens if you're not plugged into the ins and outs of Twitter. And yet, because of the outsized impact social media, and the internet in general, has had on societies and individual lives, what happens there does matter to us all, when it goes to the heart of how it will work. Twitter's owner is a billionaire. He's in the top three richest people on the planet. He lost [$12 billion in net worth](https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23692915/elon-musk-net-worth-plummet-tesla-twitter-spacex-420?ref=thegist.ie) this week (his big rocket exploded, his car firm is saggy and his social media network is, well, it's Twitter). But he's still got more money than could be spent in a lifetime of bad decisions. @dril is an account written by[ a guy who sometimes has a show on a small tv network](https://www.theringer.com/tech/2023/4/12/23673003/dril-twitter-interview-profile-identity?ref=thegist.ie) and who hopes to make a modest living from writing. This shouldn't even be a clash. And yet, the two sides are really a proxy battle between whether social media's users (team @dril) own their own spaces or whether those platforms own them. In miniature, this is a version of the fight to decide the future of social media. In all liklihood, it ends with a sort of mutually assured destruction. The platform falls as it collapses into the sewer of hitler-fan accounts and the communities who formed on it dissolve or decamp elsewhere, lessened. But in the meantime we should not underestimate the free entertainment of seeing a billionaire, a person with literally no worries that aren't self-created, going into meltdown in the face of teasing from the man who once warned his followers that "if your grave doesn't say 'rest in peace' on it you are automatically drafted into the skeleton war". ### This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife Things took a new turn by Saturday, when it was clear that the the threat of removing Blue Ticks from celebrities had not, as intended, provoked them all to start paying, but had instead turned the Blue Tick into a plague mark, a sort of badge of social stigma. The Scarlet Letter, but with a monthly payment. Seeing its one commercial idea fail, Twitter's shrivelled animating spirit thought to itself "If @dril argues that everyone with a blue tick should be blocked on sight, how would he like it if he had a blue tick?" ![screenshot of Dril tweet showing his account with a blue tick "Ah they got me. Im fucked" he says](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-23-at-18.53.53.png) ### Free Advertising? Now, this is a bit interesting, because Twitter's offices for EU data protection purposes are in Dublin. And so Twitter International Unlimited Company, with its office at One Cumberland Place, Fenian Street, Dublin 2 is processing @dril's data in the EU, with the Irish Data Protection Commission as its regulator and the Irish courts as jusicial oversight. The DPC, for example, [fined the company €450,000](https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/press-releases/confirmation-fine-twitter-international-company?ref=thegist.ie) in 2021, mostly for reporting a data breach a few days late. But @dril never looked to have his data processed for the purposes of showing a new blue tick. He didn't want one (and over the course of the next few hours he would repeatedly shake it off by changing his name, only to have some poor soul in Twitter manually stick it back on him. Like the old Loony Tunes ["Duck Season, Rabbit Season](https://youtu.be/17ocaZb-bGg?ref=thegist.ie)" sketch, except one party is both Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd and so keeps shooting itself in the face). As the hours passed, it turned out that he wasn't the only one receving a blue tick unasked and unwanted. [Celebrities](https://twitter.com/LilNasX/status/1649915691242524672?s=20&ref=thegist.ie), Nobel Prize-winning [journalists](https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1649926598479544321?s=20&ref=thegist.ie) and even the [Auschwitz Museum](https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/1650176623948201984?s=20&ref=thegist.ie) all rushed to confirm that they hadn't paid the tick-tax. Processing personal data requires a legal basis under Article 6\. According to the Blue Tick info box which is now appended to each account, Twitter Blue account owners have had their telephone numbers verified (and have paid Twitter). ![Verified account This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number Learn more](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-23-at-19.19.40.png) Processing data by a body inside the EU, means that data must be processed in line with the GDPR. So, although @dril, Stephen King, Paul Krugman, Lil Nas X and so on live outside the EU, they can all complain to the Irish regulator for the price of an email. ( info@dataprotection.ie ). Or, if they felt like it, they could take court cases citing the precedent of Tolley v Fry \[1931\]. The Defendants, owners of a chocolate company, advertised their products with a caricature of the Plaintiff, a prominent amateur golfer, without his agreement. It was held by the House of Lords that the implication of an endorsement was defamatory (with thanks to [Fergal Crehan](https://twitter.com/fergal/status/1650096553326002178?s=46&t=a9PpjfJKqt6UQE%5FnXQlsDQ&ref=thegist.ie) for the reminder) Or they could complain that claiming they had signed up for a socially stigmatised software product was an attempt to save it by rubbing some of their glamour onto its saggy, malodorous carcass. This is the common-law concept of passing-off, or false endorsement. The leading case on this is the UK Court of Appeal's Eddie Irvine v Talksport. This awarded the F1 driver £25,000 for an advertising leaflet with a photo doctored to make it appear that he was endorsing a particular radio station. Multiplied by the thousands of celebrities who had a Blue Tick pinned back on them without asking, claiming they had subscribed, and you're looking at something rather more than $8. In the end, the tragedy of the fight over Twitter's soul is that it was lost at the outset when it was created as a privately-held centralised platform. Musk's antics have just revealed how unsuitable that model is for a public forum. The future, however clunky or slow we are getting there, is to build communities on open protocols not platforms. That way, nobody owns them so nobody can buy or sell them. Mastodon and its fellow Fediverse of apps are built on the open protocol ActivityPub. Regardless of the outcome of the Blue Tick Battle, in the end Twitter is in a war with the future it has already lost. [Subscribe to The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: The Aul Sod URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-aul-sod/ Last updated: 2023-04-19T20:36:45.000Z The President of the United States is a more complex person than his caricature allows for. Amongst his positive traits is an embrace of emotion. He feels, and wants people to know he feels. He feels Irish, and so, by the alchemy of identity, he is Irish. It is his affinity with the family story of emigration from a blighted land that carried him around our small island last week. Tá me abhaile, he told the Dáil in his address. Being Irish is a distinct sort of a claim in the US context. It carries stereotypes with it (which, over in actual Ireland, frequently cause wincing). But it is recognised as a story of having succeeded despite hardship- of having come from desperation. Biden’s homecoming was also an old-fashioned reintroduction for his voters back home- a chance to see him fêted in a personal, rather than political context. As he promised the cheering crowds of Mayo, he’d let them know soon when he announced his plan to run again. But every well-worn story has a villain, to give it drama. And the story of fleeing from a famine-stricken 19th C Ireland has one top-hatted, moustache-twirling baddie above all else- The English. Now, of course, the actual people of England are a varied sort, many of them having Irish ancestry themselves. But, despite this, the English media committed to the bit throughout Biden’s good-natured tour of bricks and barney. They were wracked with the sort of prickly touchiness so familiar from Ireland’s past. We were once the nation so conscious of our failures that we saw insult and slights everywhere. Now that role has flipped to those responsible for England’s self-hobbling. They couldn’t decide which attack line made them feel better- that he was too Irish or that he wasn’t Irish enough. In the end they went with both. Newspapers ran infographics to calculate what fraction of his ancestry was Irish but also portrayed him dressed as a jigging leprechaun. Above all, they openly seethed at the smaller neighbour getting all the attention. It would be hard to improve on Andrew Maxwell’s comment on the naked envy on show: ![Andrew Maxwell @andrewismaxwell Biden: I’ve had the best time of my life Ireland: Ahh it’s nothing Joe,knock in any time..safe home now,here’s a packet of Tayto for your pocket *Hugs all round *The most powerful man on earth,adjusts his Mayo 4 Sam hat and away British Media: [image of Ferris Bueller's sister]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-21.26.30.png) [https://twitter.com/andrewismaxwell/status/1647161360969781248?s=46&t=a9PpjfJKqt6UQE\_nXQlsDQ](https://twitter.com/andrewismaxwell/status/1647161360969781248?s=46&t=a9PpjfJKqt6UQE%5FnXQlsDQ&ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: No homes to go to URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-no-homes-to-go-to/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:23:57.000Z It is Easter Sunday and everyone should be enjoying themselves with their chocolate eggs. But, for Fine Gael, the theme was more chickens coming home to roost as the first big poll of the Post-Eviction policy came out. Fine Gael registered their lowest ever result in the [B&A poll published in the Sunday Times](https://www.thejournal.ie/opinion-poll-fine-gael-sinn-fein-2-6040285-Apr2023/?ref=thegist.ie), dropping eight points in one month. This plummet, though well outside the 3% margin of error, was just one poll, on one month. But it does seem to have been the predictable outcome of the mysterious Fine Gael impulse to put themselves forward as the political face of the pro-homelessness movement. Fine Gael made choice after choice over the course of the last month. Each decision was so politically perverse, it might have been the result of the party racing through a fistful of [monkey-paw wishes](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The%5FLady%5Fof%5Fthe%5FBarge/The%5FMonkey%27s%5FPaw?ref=thegist.ie). Every single action they took, on the most important topic in the country, was almost assured to repel voters. From having a row over an artwork having the temerity to interpose modern images of evictions into a Famine-era painting they immediately turned around and [decided ](https://twitter.com/AlanFarrell/status/1643187342537048067?s=20&ref=thegist.ie)that [attacking the bona fides](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41109391.html?ref=thegist.ie) of Fr. Peter McVerry looked like the thing to do. By the end of the month, the only surprise was that Fine Gael's ministers didn't call a photoshoot where they demolished a thatched cottage themselves, leaving some actors dressed as Famine-era peasants to die in a ditch to really ram the message home. And all of this damage was done before the first actual eviction happens as a result of the government's choice to increase homelessness in order to deliver benefits to landlords. For reasons which seem more psychological than political, more pathological than strategic, Fine Gael has pushed itself forward to be the party owning evictions and homelessness. Fianna Fáil mustn't believe their luck. ### Losing Face Back in June 2022, the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee announced she'd be slipping in an amendment to the already commenced Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill 2022\. Avoiding the tiresome stage of pre-legislative scrutiny, the Minister told the GRA (as opposed to the Dáil) that she would create a legal basis for the Garda Síochána to use facial recognition technology. She [told t](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2022/06/02/gardai-will-be-able-to-use-real-time-facial-recognition-under-planned-legislation/?ref=thegist.ie)he police that the technology would soon be "helping to identify suspects in a crowd". Later, when a bevvy of UN experts objected to this idea, Simon Coveney told them that the proposal was "to introduce both retrospective and live facial recognition facilities into An Garda Síochána." And yet, [despite the then Minister for Foreign Affairs insistance that Ireland could bring in madcap local laws if it wanted to](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-face-off/) ahead of a wider EU legislative framework, we have heard almost nothing more about the matter. This week there was [a report that suggested](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/coalition-showdown-over-plan-for-gardai-to-get-facial-recognition-technology-amid-green-party-pressure-on-harris-42425111.html?ref=thegist.ie) one of the reasons for this sudden silence on the matter. The Green party had decided they didn't want this backdoor introduction, and that it ought to go before the Oireachtas as stand-alone legislation. What was interesting, for the sharp eared amongst us, was the statement issued by Simon Harris' Department of Justice in defence of their plan. > The ability to automate searches on legally held images and footage would allow the organisation to operate more efficiently and effectively. Gone, from the subsequent long list of things the police would do with these powers, is any mention of using 'live facial recognition facilities'. Whether that element of the plan still exists or not, the recent CJEU and Supreme Court death of the Department's long fight to deny the ban on mass surveillance applied to them or the police means that they have given up trying to argue for it. [Subscribe for Free to The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, I insist on Paying](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: Episode 2 A New Chart URL: https://www.thegist.ie/bonus-gist-a-new-chart/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:30:22.000Z Hello all! The chart from the Weekend's Gist ([Where did the houses go?](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-where-did-the-houses-go/)) prompted some questions about other numbers to show. I think some of the points were valid. Though I was working from the Goverment's own datasets, the spreadsheet for Local Authority New Builds starts to break out Part V new builds (ie, those built by developers but then given to the Local Authority) after 2016\. I've now added those in too. I have also, for illustration, added in the figures for the numbers of new households being supported by HAP payments to private landlords each year since 2016\. I think it's an eyecatching multiple of the state's new housing output. ![A chart showing New Builds by Local Authority Housing 1999-2022, Part V new builds and New HAP Households](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-03-at-18.08.44.png) Source: [Government Report 1,](https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/6060e-overall-social-housing-provision/?ref=thegist.ie#social-housing-delivery-progress-against-targets) [Government Report 2](https://assets.gov.ie/243730/a30cdcc2-2094-4c08-98e5-c74e6956a2ab.xlsx?ref=thegist.ie) ### Hapless Records Just a point on the HAP numbers. The state's own statistics sources disagree when it comes to figures for new HAP households. One report (which I have used above as they are from the same set of stats as the Part V data) delivers one set of numbers. But the [HAP quarterly stats ](https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/6060e-overall-social-housing-provision/?ref=thegist.ie#housing-assistance-payment)deliver similar but not identical figures. As Social Justice Ireland [have said](https://www.socialjustice.ie/content/policy-issues/more-1-4-hap-tenancies-not-sustainable-while-real-social-housing-need-33?ref=thegist.ie) "If Government is to address policy failures on housing, it must do so on the basis of real data". ### The Gist: Where did the houses go? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-where-did-the-houses-go/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:23:41.000Z In 2017, I spotted a strange number in a very dull looking spreadsheet-style chart on a Government website. And it took me aback. So, as was my wont, I tweeted; "No snark, this is me asking an actual question. Ireland built fewer public housing last year than at any point in the state’s entire history. Has someone announced this as a policy? What is the policy? What is the declared reason for this inactivity?" Grammatical infelicities aside, it was a reasonable question. When the state breaks with the habit of its entire existence, it is usually the result of some major contested policy decision. But the Government of the day, and its predecessors, hadn't declared any animus towards local authorities. On the contrary, the [Minister for Housing in 2017 seemed to be entirely in favour of local authorities building houses](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2017/0904/902210-murphy-housing-crisis/?ref=thegist.ie) directly, denying any ideological basis to the state's failure to build. > "Mr Murphy said he wants to provide homes for homeless families and that means building new social housing homes. > Speaking to RTÉ News, he said that the State has to do more in this area. > He said unfortunately for quite a number of years the State was not building social houses and the private sector was not building houses either." Why had the state unfortunately stopped building houses, an onlooker might ask. Apparently, it had just... not, for no particular reason. At the same time, his party leader was [complaining in the Dáil](https://www.kildarestreet.com/debates/?id=2017-12-05a.5&ref=thegist.ie#g29) that looking to increase public housing delivered by the state was, itself, a "very hardline ideological position". In 2017, the Minister for Housing said that, when it came to seeing Local Authorities delivering houses "it will not be a question of money, ideology or resources standing in their way." > The Government has nationalised evictions. Every eviction, usually a private crisis between a tenant and a landlord, is now framed as the result of the Government's policy. If it wasn't money, ideology or resources, it must have been something else. Whatever Gelatinous Cube or Uncrossable Chasm Local Authorities found blocking their way, the trends of the previous decade continued. They basically failed to build houses. It seems, despite the Minister's words, that the [policy set out by the Department of Housing in September 2012](https://www.thejournal.ie/snapshot-of-one-county-how-irelands-housing-crisis-grew-out-of-control-2825668-Jun2016/?ref=thegist.ie) remained > The current financial constraints have led to a significant reduction in the capital budget for housing. > To respond to this reality and to ensure that social housing need is met the Government has radically reformed housing policy, with a shift in focus towards leasing options This chart shows the delivery of Local Authority house-building from 1999 to Q3 of 2022, the most recent figures available. They basically just stopped building at anything like the historical numbers as soon as Fine Gael became the largest party in the state. They have never recovered. They have actually been trending down since 2019\. (Green Bars, years mostly led by FF Taoiseach. Blue Bars mostly led by FG Taoiseach) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-02-at-12.11.06.png) Sources: [Government Report 1](https://assets.gov.ie/229932/9db97274-11f7-4e08-8b85-f134b10ab947.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) , [Government Report 2](https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/6060e-overall-social-housing-provision/?ref=thegist.ie) [Government Report 3](https://data.gov.ie/dataset?tags=social+housing&ref=thegist.ie) \*2022 figures do not include Q4 For a chart which includes the delivery of new houses by third parties, you can take a look at this excellent piece by [Christina Finn of The Journal,](https://www.thejournal.ie/snapshot-of-one-county-how-irelands-housing-crisis-grew-out-of-control-2825668-Jun2016/?ref=thegist.ie) which confirms that nadir was not offset by other forms of building for public housing. ### Nationalising Misery This week the government parties experienced a series of tactical successes. They won their various parliamentary votes. But in doing so, they suffered a massive strategic loss. The Government has nationalised evictions in the popular imagination. Every eviction, usually a private crisis between a tenant and a landlord, is now framed as the result of the Government's policy. The State now owns evictions in a way not seen since the Land League. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2023/04/eviction_scene.webp) Eviction Scene, Daniel MacDonald from the Crawford Collection Politically, this is an almost unfathomable disaster. It will never go away as a story. The Government can never tough it out or move on. There will always be another unbearable story of eviction into homelessness to come- another infant or pensioner or carer or family- to be put to every government TD who steps in front of a mic. ### Why no building? The two main government parties, but in particular Fine Gael as the largest party since 2011, looked to play pass the parcel with the future on housing. Instead of Local Authorities, they would pay private landlords (via HAP or long term leases) to house people. As the Taoiseach [told the Dáil in 2017;](https://www.kildarestreet.com/debates/?id=2017-12-05a.5&ref=thegist.ie#g29) > "Just because social housing or public housing is not built directly by a local authority does not mean that it should not count." The problem was that, generally, private landlords don't build their houses afresh. So, as private housing stock became occupied by people who would have once been housed in newly built Local Authority houses, it stopped being available for other private tenants, or for people trying to buy a home. By turning off the tap of Local Authority construction, the State was starting the clock running on a timebomb, to go off the day the numbers seeking housing exceeded in absolute terms the numbers of houses available. Pre 2011, they were adding thousands of new homes a year. After FG took over, that dwindled down to 75\. But all those thousands of new households still needed to go somewhere. While the music played this had multiple attractive advantages to the civil war parties and their supporters. As the scholarly work on the last election [How Ireland Voted](https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030664046?ref=thegist.ie) confirmed, there is power in Sinn Féin's contention that “If Fianna Fáil were party of the developers, Fine Gael are the party of the landlords.” ### The Music Stops Both parties have support bases who demand that property prices and rents continue to rise. By turning off the State supply, and diverting the state monies into subsidising private rent, they were ensuring that both blocs of supporters needs were met. But now the music has stopped and the parcel can't be passed to the future any longer. Both parties responsible for this collapse of delivery of Local Authority building are in power at the same time. Neither can blame the other. There's some evidence that they are starting to realise the serverity of their crisis. Fine Gael, over the weekend, launched a war on pictures in response to the SF housing spokesman posting a piece of political art on their policy. Nothing, of course, confirms the continuing power of political art as when the target of its critique reacts to it with hysteria. This month the Government parties decided, as a matter of choice, to allow people to be evicted knowing that there aren't enough places for them to go. The current Minister for Housing conceded it could increase homelessness. And that was what they decided they wanted to have happen. The effect of that decision will stay with the TDs and Ministers who voted for it every day the government remains in power. It will stay with the people evicted and made homeless for the rest of their lives. [Subscribe](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: Eviction Politicians URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-eviction-politicians/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:23:32.000Z A few years back there was a vogue for describing certain elected officials as "Conviction Politicians". Tony Blair was hailed by the UN Secretary-General as a [conviction politican in 2005](https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2005/sgsm10251.html?ref=thegist.ie), which we might mark as peak conviction. Subsequently, the phrase fell out of favour as it turned out that one could also be filled with a conviction that invading Mesopotamian countries on dodgy grounds and a bag of fantasies of how occupations are experienced by the occupied was a good idea. There was a small window when it might have been revived, albeit in a different context, while Boris Johnson faced multiple police investigations in office. But this week saw Ireland witness the birth of a new class of public official- the Eviction Politician. After a hard week labouring down in the Landlord Mines, the government surfaced to confirm it had decided to make thousands of people of homeless. This, to put it mildly, is not typical of the sort of public policy that is admitted to by politicians who still face the possibility of seeking re-election. Nonetheless, there was a certain brazen energy to the government's bold new policy of deciding, as a matter of choice, to see men, women and children put out of their homes to sleep on streets, in tents and police stations or shivering in cars. > Ending the evictions ban could "very possibly" lead to an increase in homelessness, the Housing Minister has admitted. > However, speaking at Government Buildings as he confirmed the Government decision to end the emergency ban, Darragh O'Brien said that the move was a 'responsible' one. - [Irish Examiner](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-41087398.html?ref=thegist.ie) The eviction ban was a blunt instrument intended to give a breathing space for the government to staunch the flow of people into homelessness, largely as a result of a rental market consisting of unavailable and unaffordable properties. Here's the same Minister in January of this year: > "We brought in very significant new protections around the winter eviction ban to give us space to deliver more properties. > “I'm hopeful for this year. I'm hopeful in relation to new housing delivery.” - Irish Mirror While Fianna Fáil (and before them, Fine Gael's) ministers' hope springs eternal on this question of delivery of houses, it turns out that, rather than using the six months of the eviction ban to feverishly try to staunch the crises, the Government had decided that was something for Future Them to worry about. Consequently, we were treated to the simultaneous announcement of some mitigation plans so unbaked that even the government spokespersons citing them couldn't agree what they might be. The Minister repeatedly cited a plan to have local authorities buy houses with tenants in situ. This policy has been in place for some months, [and has been an abject failure throughout](https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/03/10/low-uptake-of-tenant-in-situ-scheme-as-house-purchases-set-to-miss-1500-target/?ref=thegist.ie), with no steps taken in the eviction ban pause to fix it. The flagship mitigation proposal was to give 'first refusal' to tenants to buy the home they were renting if it was being put up for sale. Much good this would do you if you couldn't actually afford the thing, which is typically what prevents people from buying houses. But then it turned out that [the Government had been doing their homework on their laps at the back of the bus](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/03/08/eviction-mitigation-measures-what-are-they-and-will-they-work/?ref=thegist.ie) on the way into the Cabinet and didn't have any actual legislation drafted, or any idea what its details would be, or when it might be passed. The result, just to look at it again, was that the Government decided that they would see thousands of people made homeless, as a deliberate result of their public policy, so that landlords (institutional or individual) could see higher returns from their property investments. Some turds can't take a shine, no matter how much polish is applied. Eviction politics, like conviction politics before it, seems likely to define its adherents. ### The Offside Rule The BBC is currently headed by two men. The [Director General is a former Conservative Party election candidate](https://www.thenational.scot/news/18499342.tim-davie-tory-now-charge-bbc/?ref=thegist.ie). The [Chairman facilitated an £800,000 loan to Boris Johnson](https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnson-bbc-chair-richard-sharp-made-significant-errors-of-judgement-over-800-000-loan-12808390?ref=thegist.ie). The UK Government, determined in the face of hot competition to cede to nobody the title of being Just The Worst, announced during the week they would stop protecting people against actual slavery as part of their anti-immigration rhetoric and policy platform. > "If you come here illegally...…you can’t benefit from our modern slavery protections…" - [UK PM](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-on-the-stop-the-boats-bill-7-march-2023?ref=thegist.ie) After he suggested that this sort of dehumanisation rhetoric was akin to 1930s Germany, Gary Lineker found himself the focus of a frenzy of faux-outrage by people who were determined that any comparisons with fascism would be stamped out, hard, and people who said bad things about the nation's leader would be stripped of their rights of free expression. That this might prompt the onlooker to suspect those comparisons might have had some validity didn't seem to occur to them. Anyway, the two men who deffo are not Tory Stooges at the head of the BBC decided they would keep Lineker off the screen until he recanted his criticism of the Leader. At which point, quite appropriately, It Kicked Off. In a sort of aikido move, Lineker had managed to shift the argument over the government's treatment of powerless, nameless and vilified asylum seekers into a proxy fight where the government's proxies took him on in the refugees' stead. When two placemen of an already laughably unpopular government decide to take on Gary Lineker in the court of public opinion, it only ends one way. Linekar is off the air, but so is the bulk of the BBC's football output as the rest of the talent simply refused to play along with their shows without him. Perhaps more importantly, Linekar's criticisms of government's policies are implicitly endorsed every time the BBC's cabbage-brained response is criticised. We can see just how complete a rout he instigated when even the Labour opposition quietly said that maybe he ought to be allowed express an obvious historical comparison, now that they think of it. As one BBC presenter [noted](https://twitter.com/mrdanwalker/status/1634349426125725699?s=20&ref=thegist.ie), "It appears the dressing room may have been lost" [Subscribe to The Gist for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Against all sense, subscribe to the Gist for some money](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: Letter from America URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-letter-from-america/ Last updated: 2025-08-14T06:38:29.000Z Last week, I found myself on the Streets of San Francisco. At no point did my nose explode into a florid strawberry. Nor did I have a single shootout or car chase. In those respects at least, not all of my TV expectations were met. Nonetheless, having been cut off from the usual flotsam of events, this week’s Gist includes some on the spot reuse of personal experience. ### The Infernal Combustion Engine The cars are absurdly large, yes of course. I am a middling sized adult and I was barely visible over some of the bonnets of vehicles. But what really struck me was that the city was built around cars. European cities are old. They were built for people and horses. Of course there are some wide streets (The Dublin of the 18th Century even had a Wide Streets Commission). But San Francisco was largely built around the car as the connective tissue of the city. Streets are chasms, empty deserts given over to the camels of the city. In a city where space is so clearly at a premium, it is astonishing to see just how much land is devoted to running huge roads between buildings. And once you travel outside the centre of the city, the task of moving workers in and out of town to do their jobs has resulted in amazing ugliness. Concrete rivers of cars, sometimes stacked one on top of the other flow through car dependant commercial spaces. A double decker of commuting misery and aesthetic assault. Electric cars may reduce emissions, but the US’ primary 21st Century urban challenge will be to rework cities built as storage vats for traffic jams. ### Whataboutery Holly Cairns took over as leader of the Social Democrats and did a tour of studios and interviews to set out her stall. A bit of attention and airtime is no harm for a small party. Though it seemed that most of the media she encountered were consumed by one overriding question- When was she going to extinguish her party by merging into the Labour Party? And if not, why not? At first glance, this is an odd sort of a go-to question for members of a political party. Rarely does the leader of Fianna Fáil have it put to them that they’ve been basically the same collection of right-wing impulses as Fine Gael for much of their history and when are they going to just merge? However, this question has the advantage of requiring no engagement or awareness of any party policy or recent activity while appearing ‘savvy’. It also has the disadvantage of being air-time filling guff, but you can’t have everything. Meanwhile, Fine Gael (previously Cumann na nGaedheal, and the National Centre Party and also previously the Army Comrades Association, previously the Blueshirts, previously the League of Youth, previously the National Guard) [made a statement](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/oireachtas/2023/03/01/varadkar-marks-holly-cairnss-big-day-by-talking-about-varadkar/?ref=thegist.ie) warning how hard it was for a party to survive past its second leader, presumably from experience. ### The Windsor Not The UK and the EU announced they’d come to an agreement on Northern Ireland. They called it the Windsor Framework, to make it seem more palatable to Unionists. Presumably the idea of branding it with a sash and bowler hat was only abandoned late in the day. The London press then adopted their serious voices and intoned that the DUP would take their time before deciding whether to say Yes or No. The DUP leader’s efforts to keep a straight face while he said he would be making a real effort to come to a difficult decision was undermined somewhat by [some of his MPs](https://www.irishnews.com/news/brexit/2023/03/02/news/paisley-3102119/?ref=thegist.ie). In a sort of DUP equivalent of the marshmallow test for toddlers, they proved unable to postpone saying No, even with the reward of making a bigger impression if they could wait to say No later. [Subscribe to the Gist for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist with Money](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) 🗣️ Thanks for reading all the way down here to the bottom, where we keep the party. Please feel free to send on this email or link to anyone you think might like to subscribe too. (The next Gist will be a doozy, by the way) ### The Gist: Exercising their Prerogative URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-exercising-their-perogative/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:30:35.000Z This week we were given a rare gift from the Government’s new attorney general. The [AG was asked to produce a paper](https://www.gov.ie/pdf/?file=https://assets.gov.ie/246651/5ec1c0b9-5347-4f74-9e20-fc0ddc246762.pdf&ref=thegist.ie#page=null) examining (for which we may read ‘defending’) the government’s longstanding habit of dragging wronged people through the courts and settling before they lose a test case, so as to enable the same delaying tactics to continue to be applied to other similarly wronged people. This was a matter of systemic importance to the State. In its 100 years it has done a lot of harm to its citizens and, as the AG pointed out, the potential liability for all those harms has reached hundreds of millions. > “It is understood that the Department of Health calculated (in 2010 figures) that, if the State Defendants did not succeed in defeating claims in the private cases, there would be a very substantial potential maximum exposure on the part of the State, in excess of €7 billion.”- AG report, Paragraph 118 It’s notable that the report never considered the consequential corollary of that sum- that the State, if it lost the cases, would have been proved to have inflicted billions of euros of losses on elderly citizens who qualified for medical cards, in the last days of their lives, and have removed that same sum from the finances of their families. Lifetimes of savings, of assets paid for and built up, lost. It is that blindness, or disinterest, to the harms done to individuals which characterises the AG's report and which makes it an unlikely piece of political dynamite as the [Government has started to realise](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22211910/?ref=thegist.ie). Every Minister, of every party, who had held the offices of Minister for Health had endorsed (for which again read ‘acquiesced’. This is an area where euphemism abounds) the State’s approach. The Attorney General takes a special little detour in his report to explain that it doesn’t matter who the Ministers might be, or even if they are aware of a policy, their Department’s actions are their responsibility (and not, say, their Department's). The report represents a rare statement of the true multi-generational policy of the Government of Ireland when it comes to addressing harms done to its citizens by it. From the point of view of the State, as articulately set out by the AG, the interest of the executive is the same thing as the public interest. In a zero sum game where losses are either those of individual citizens or the States, the state’s rights to more money should always come first. The logic of presenting “the public interest” as being identical to whatever is the Government’s interest is to simply forbid anyone suing the State. ## The Attorney General’s argument is an effort to reinvent the Royal Prerogative to restore legal immunity to the Irish State. This was actually the law for the first 50 years of the Irish State, as inherited from the UK doctrine of the Royal Prerogative. ### It's my Prerogative The idea of the [Royal Prerogative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal%5Fprerogative%5Fin%5Fthe%5FUnited%5FKingdom?ref=thegist.ie) was that the Crown, as the sovereign and personification of the Executive, could not be liable to civil claims. Therefore the sovereign’s Government could not be sued by citizens. From 1922 the Irish State enjoyed this comfortable insulation too. It was not until 1972-incredibly- that the Irish State was made fully answerable to its citizens before the courts. In [Byrne v Ireland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byrne%5Fv.%5FIreland?ref=thegist.ie) the Supreme Court dismantled the Royal Prerogative by finding the Free State and subsequent 1937 Constitutions has split the Crown from the executive The Supreme Court took the argument back to the 1922 split, despite the ambiguities of that Free State Status > “Although the Crown had not ceased to participate in governmental acts, and the state was not a republic, executive authority ceased to be identified with the Crown.”[\[1\]](#footnote-1) The Attorney General’s argument is, effectively, an effort to recast the legal theory of the Royal Prerogative which would assign the government immunity from suit on the basis of it being the Executive acting on behalf of the Sovereign People as opposed to a monarch. This argument- as the Supreme Court’s 1972 judgment recognised- has no place in a republic and is repugnant to our Constitution. An Executive which can reject its duty to answer for its wrongs, on the basis that its decisions are automatically “in the public interest” is a dangerous expression of autocratic power. However there remains a very strong constituency for restoring exactly that insulation which was stripped from the Irish State by Byrne v Ireland (see the[ journal article](jstor.org/stable/44026434) cited above as an example). The most enduring source of that backwards impulse remains the State itself. ### The Royal We While it is completely understandable how reporting on events as they happen is the definition of news in the eyes of most of its practitioners, it is a pity we do not also have an equal tradition or outlet aiming to put events in a longer historical context. I think knowing the monarchical, autocratic root of a Prerogative argument adds understanding as to the vision of the State and citizen being advanced. The AG’s report closes with a statement which crystallises this demand for an unfettered state, unbound by the petty rights of the individual. > In truth, it is to be welcomed that public expenditure decisions were determined by Government, having regard to the totality of the situation, rather than being dictated to by fact-specific judicial decisions on individual cases in a manner that is divorced from the state of the public finances.”- Paragraph 191 It is common to say something like “that’s not the state I would like to live in" in response to this sort of thing, but it is more important to recognise that this is an accurate description of the state we do live in. This is the permanent tank and water that every generation of politicians swim in and through, until they don’t even see it surrounding them any more. The AG has given plain voice to the administrative state’s hostility to the citizens they think it exists to serve. By holding it up to the light, and inviting us to admire its cruel sharp edges, he has made the invisible State visible. 1. Citation: COSTELLO, KEVIN. “THE EXPULSION OF PREROGATIVE DOCTRINE FROM IRISH LAW: QUANTIFYING AND REMEDYING THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVES.” Irish Jurist (1966-), vol. 32, 1997, pp. 145–94\. JSTOR, [jstor.org/stable/44026434](https://jstor.org/stable/44026434?ref=thegist.ie). Accessed 11 Feb. 2023\. [Subscribe to the Gist for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Subscribe to the Gist with Cash Money](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: It’s Been a Week URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-its-been-a-week/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:30:47.000Z ### Mis-Poster Paschal Donohoe made an error and then he explained how it happened and paid the few hundred of extra funds he shouldn’t have got back. Last week’s Gist didn’t think it worth mentioning and left the door open for this week’s Gist to tell you how correct that was. In the main, the entire thing had the air of a roomful of drunk uncles at a wedding roaring at each other that one of their number had forgotten to do up their fly, only to find they had a similar difficulty, ending in a quiet mass rezippering amongst the crowd. Except typical weddings don’t have a gaggle of people outside the window shouting about the Great Zipper Scandal that may be about to break. This was one affair where nobody wanted to stay for the afters. \*\*\* ### The country is just resting in their account In the U.K., a minister and Chairman of the eternally ruling Tory party was sacked after threatening to sue reporters for accurately reporting an ongoing tax probe into avoiding approx £30m in tax. He wasn’t sacked straight away, just after days of Prime Ministerial dithering had holed the new PM’s pledge for probity in Government below the waterline. This all happened because the Tories are at the stage of political calamity where even when they are forced to do the right thing, they will only do it after reaping all the damage of preferring the wrong thing first. \*\*\* ### Slow Tracks Germany agreed to send its tanks to Ukraine, after its own Tory-worthy stretch of dithering. We have yet to see if the tanks will be delivered in time to be used before next Winter. \*\*\* ### Delay, deny and wait for them to die The Daily Mail reported on the latest revelation from the Dept of Health whistleblower that the Government, across many different Ministers, had agreed an aggressive litigation strategy aimed at people in nursing homes and their families. Facing the possibility of having to repay billions wrongly taken from people in nursing homes, the Government agreed to a series of policy positions which effectively established “delay, deny and wait for them to die” as a cost saving measure. Now, there is a theoretical basis for this sort of approach when companies do it- they are meant to be sociopathically devoted to increasing profits for shareholders at the cost of everyone else. In contrast, the Government of Ireland exists to act in the interests of the citizens but was here deciding to take steps to minimise those citizens’ recovery of their own money. This suggests one of two explanations. Either the State is not run for the benefit of its citizens, or the people who manage the State prefer institutions to humans. The events of Ireland’s first 100 years of independence suggest these are not mutually exclusive explanations. \*\*\* ### A post by any other name There were further calls to somehow (the details are always elusive) make it illegal to write words on the internet without accompanying them with your real name. For people who are not whistleblowers, vulnerable people, victims of domestic abuse who have fled abusers or a member of a historically ignored or oppressed social or ethnic group, this doubtless sounds like plain common sense. And, because for some reason (see above) the political and commentary classes tend not to be any of the above, this idea comes around over and over again. And, every time it does, it falls to people who have spent more than twenty minutes cumulatively across their lifetimes thinking about the consequences of such a policy to explain why it is a terrible idea. Here’s a researcher from the MIT Media Lab Centre for Civic Media: “According to a US nationally-representative report by the Data & Society Institute, 43% of online harassment victims have changed their contact information and 26% disconnected from online networks or devices to protect themselves \[see Amanda Lenhart, Michelle Ybarra, Kathryn Zickuhr, and Myeshia Prive-Feeney. [Online Harassment, Digital Abuse, and Cyberstalking in America.](https://datasociety.net/output/online-harassment-digital-abuse-cyberstalking/?ref=thegist.ie) Report, Data & Society Institute, November 2016\. \]. When people do withdraw, they are often disconnected from the networks of support they need to survive harassment. [Pseudonymity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonymity?ref=thegist.ie) is a common protective measure. One study on the reddit platform found that women, who are more likely to receive harassment, also use multiple pseudonymous identities at greater rates than men \[see Alex Leavitt. [This is a Throwaway Account: Temporary Technical Identities and Perceptions of Anonymity in a Massive Online Community.](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2675175&ref=thegist.ie) In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, pages 317-327\. ACM, 2015 \]." In contrast, while the harms of a real name requirement are measurable and confirmed, there is no comparably conclusive evidence that bringing one in solves online misbehaviour. Not everyone wants a byline, or their photo and name hung on lampposts. It is a test of empathy for those who do want those things to understand why what works for them might not work for others. Removing anonymity is not a magic bullet for ending online abuse, but is a surefire way of silencing voices who have historically had no safe way to be heard. [Subscribe to The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: Ersatz Thoughts URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-erstaz-thoughts/ Last updated: 2023-01-22T14:13:35.000Z It is a truth universally acknowledged that the requirement to produce an opinion column of similar length at a set timetable will eventually result in the columnist going mad. This is because, generally, people simply don't have that many opinions. Either the topics of columns become [increasingly trivial](https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2014/02/21/david-quinn-shirley-temple-and-the-milkmans-cheery-whistle/?ref=thegist.ie) or repetition sets in, requiring the familiar themes to be rehashed in an escalatingly strident and hysterical fashion. So it is no surprise that the launch of [a machine for making up written things](https://chat.openai.com/?ref=thegist.ie) has been met with dread fascination by the opinion-columnist classes. It is rather as though librarians found themselves receiving brochures for a service offering to just supply [books by the yard](https://booksbythefoot.com/?ref=thegist.ie). Some have reacted with barely concealed relief, taking the opportunity of the discussion of machine learning-generated text to use it to write [chunks of this week's word-mill burden](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/01/21/breda-obrien-chatgpt-is-the-ultimate-plagiarism-tool-how-can-teachers-respond/?ref=thegist.ie). Others have complained that the critical institution of homework is threatened. Homework is largely bunk, and so threatening it is akin to threatening an institutional habit of making parents feed their children large bowls of dry shredded wheat five afternoons a week. Any opportunity to get away from a widespread but worthless action should be embraced. What is the value of continuing with the form of a means of assessing education, even if technology has rendered it potentially worthless? The purpose of education is to enrich, inform and engage the student. Our university system was not established as a means to increase the national production of pedestrian student essays. The best argument against Machine Learning-generated text or images is that the algorithm literally doesn't know what it is saying. It confidently cites sources that don't exist, written by scholars who never lived. It is not a database of knowledge or a creative force- just the product of a corpus of other people's original (and unoriginal) expression. It is to writing or image creation what those tik-tok videos of existing [processed foodstuffs being recombined](https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYdgb6Sk/?ref=thegist.ie) by Stepford Mid-Westerners is to cooking. While serving up the written equivilent of hot-dogs mixed with jellybeans and mayo may resemble the basic shape of human expression, it only persuades those who mistake the form of a piece for the measure of its value. A familiar error to anyone who has witnessed an argument that harmful or hateful speech should be given a platform provided it is couched in a civil tone. There has been one way in which having the OpenAI chatbot available as a benchmark was of value this week. Some of [public](https://www.thenational.scot/news/23254213.jeremy-clarkson-made-christmas-day-apology-meghan-markle/?ref=thegist.ie) [men](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2023/01/21/free-now-pulls-sponsorship-of-tommy-tiernan-show-following-joke-about-taxi-drivers-and-dublin-zoo/?ref=thegist.ie) ran into [monetary](https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/television/tv-news/taxi-firm-free-now-pulls-six-figure-rte-sponsorship-deal-after-tommy-tiernans-racist-joke-42304335.html?ref=thegist.ie) [difficulties](https://www.autoblog.com/2023/01/19/amazon-the-grand-tour-jeremy-clarkson-prince-harry-meghan-markle/?guccounter=1&ref=thegist.ie) with things they had said and found themselves struggling with the rote rituals of self-justification and apology. Just as the technologically derived word-salads produced by AI algorithms have learned to present superficial and vauge phases to avoid revealing their gulfs of unknowing, so a [Clarkson](https://deadline.com/2023/01/amazon-jeremy-clarkson-part-ways-meghan-markle-apology-1235223477/?ref=thegist.ie) or a [Tiernan](https://www.buzz.ie/news/irish-news/tommy-tiernan-public-statement-joke-29008689?ref=thegist.ie) will attempt iterative mixtures of responses until one seems to 'do'. Of course, we only need chatbots producing predictable rote responses made up of recycled words and ideas if there's any risk of running out of the naturally occurring stuff. Fortunately, Ireland shows no sign of any shortage of this valuable guffery. As demonstrated by this piece arguing that a university should just [keep things named after racists](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/01/21/erasing-berkeleys-name-from-trinity-would-do-nothing-to-combat-racial-prejudice-in-ireland/?ref=thegist.ie) because the signs are there now, so you know, why change anything. The main threat to the valuable expression of original ideas is that they would be buried under vastly more numerous pieces of regurgitated works produced in response to repetitive and unimaginative prompts. As any quick look at our current culture suggests, technology may contribute to the mass production of these ersatz thoughts but it certainly isn't the source of the problem. [Subscribe to the Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Gratuitously pay for the Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: 2022, Tragedy and Farce URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-2022-but-quick/ Last updated: 2023-11-14T13:53:09.000Z ### Everything, everywhere, all at once The biggest story, rumbling behind everything else that happened in 2022 was [Russia invading Ukraine at the end of February](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-dry-ice-of-war/). Initially billed by Russia as less a war and more a mass visit to a reluctant cousin's house, the reality bit hard within days. But beyond the military failures (which were legion) was the strategic failure to understand the nature of Ukraine itself. From "[The Dry Ice of War](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-dry-ice-of-war/)", written three days after the invasion started. > The success of the Russian invasion has been taken as a given. Their numbers and arms are overwhelming. But ask the United States whether superiority of numbers and arms ensured victory in Iraq. Victory is a politically defined state, not a military one and invading a stable democracy doesn’t have many of those endpoints available for the aggressors. More than losing on the battlefield of Ukraine, Putin's Russia also lost its place in the global economy. Sanctions saw the EU cut itself off from Russian gas. Fuel prices soared across Europe, [but were subsidised or capped by state interventions](https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/markets-and-consumers/action-and-measures-energy-prices%5Fen?ref=thegist.ie). Refugees poured across the borders into the EU and were taken in with visa waivers (except for in the UK, who spent the year making questionable choices. We'll get to them below). Ukraine held the line and then pushed it back. The EU and the US held their lines. The Russian people continued to be fed their government lines. 2023 will see which of these lines breaks first, with consequences for almost everything. ### The Incredible Imploding Prime Ministers While the war in Ukraine was deathly serious, the UK continued to offer the world the comic relief of their political dysfunction. Starting the year with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister is, admittedly, already akin to waking with a hangover and finding yourself sharing a bed with a haystack made of willies. But nobody could have foreseen that (after his MPs discovered by way of a series of by-election losses that the voters would punish the Tories if Johnson remained) he would be [brought down by *somebody else's* sex scandal](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-week-of-reckoning/). There then followed a lengthy leadership campaign, commencing with Rishi Sunak as favourite and ending with Liz Truss being elected leader. While Sunak warned his electorate of difficult days ahead, Truss succeeded by promising them everything was awesome. ![](https://media.tenor.com/m01eD_cUIZQAAAAC/everything-is-awesome-good-mood.gif) How to win a Tory Party Leadership Election On meeting her new Prime Minister, the [Queen died](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-gilded-age/), triggering a week of national reflection which quickly devolved into a row about [who was ](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/27/itv-chief-defends-holly-willoughby-and-philip-schofield-over-alleged-queue-jumping?ref=thegist.ie)and [wasn't](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/16/david-beckham-joins-queue-to-pay-tribute-to-queen?ref=thegist.ie) skipping the queue. While ending the longest reign of any monarch in British history with a row about queuing may seem to be the most British of all public discourse choices, that is only true if you realise that row took the place of actually reflecting on the fall of the British Empire. Having seen off Queen Elizabeth, Liz Truss swiftly saw off the [UK's economy](https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2022/oct/19/uk-inflation-cost-of-living-food-petrol-pensions-stock-market-bonds-business-live?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with:block-63500d2b8f08eb546778a76b&ref=thegist.ie#block-63500d2b8f08eb546778a76b), her [chancellor](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2022/oct/14/kwasi-kwarteng-chancellor-tory-discontent-mini-budget-liz-truss-corporation-tax-uk-politics-live?page=with:block-6349476c8f085fc6682b3057&ref=thegist.ie#block-6349476c8f085fc6682b3057) and then the branch she was sitting on by way of a ['mini-budget' with macro effects](https://www.ft.com/content/7bad4783-e6d1-4776-8fa7-4188bbb9d86f?ref=thegist.ie). The new PM announced that she was unleashing Britain only to find out the cords she was cutting were attached to [the parachute that had been holding it aloft](https://www.ft.com/content/736a695d-61f6-4e84-a567-fb92ed2a3dca?ref=thegist.ie). Having [given the Tory hardliners everything they'd demanded for years,](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11244431/ALEX-BRUMMER-Kwasi-Kwarteng-delivers-genuine-Tory-Budget-spells-end-Treasury-doomsters.html?ref=thegist.ie) it turned out they were to choke on their [unlimited rice pudding.](https://youtu.be/dSUuyUR%5FpPE?ref=thegist.ie) Mortgage rates jumped, government borrowing costs jumped and after 45 days in office, she [jumped too.](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/liz-truss-to-quit-as-prime-minister?ref=thegist.ie) Rishi Sunak became the third Prime Minister of 2022, and, barring unforeseen complications between now and midnight, the last one. His MPs are effectively at [war with ](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/united-kingdom/article/2022/12/04/united-kingdom-rishi-sunak-leads-an-ungovernable-conservative-party%5F6006526%5F135.html?ref=thegist.ie) themselves, the voters are just waiting to make their feelings known at the ballot box and his party is, on average, [one single percentage point higher in the polls than it was the day Liz Truss left](https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/?ref=thegist.ie). ### Ireland, going in circles Making notes for this year in review, it struck me how short on narrative Ireland was. The biggest stories and changes were all abroad. As long as you weren't [really looking forward to a white-water rafting centre](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/government-refuses-to-fund-25m-dublin-whitewater-rafting-project-1.4516220?ref=thegist.ie) or a [place to live](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41019860.html?ref=thegist.ie), life mostly struggled to try to rebalance to normality after the chaos and tragedy of the lockdown years. The business of politics, as opposed to the content of any individual political choice, took precedence. Whether [declaring](https://www.rte.ie/news/2022/0514/1297971-national-maternity-hospital/?ref=thegist.ie) he [wanted the National Maternity Hospital to go ahead](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-exit-voice-and-loyalty/) with [St Vincents Healthcare Group as landlords](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-maternity-hospital-in-brief/) or splitting the [baby of climate science](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-long-hot-summer/) to pacify the [cattle and dairy lobby](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-40924079.html?ref=thegist.ie), or trying to [restrict citizen's rights to challenge the decisions of the Planning Authority](https://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/2022/december/streamline-judicial-review-call-by-business-lobby?ref=thegist.ie) after the [courts found those decisions to be frequently unlawful](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40905887.html?ref=thegist.ie), the Taoiseach made a virtue of being decisive, as opposed to necessarily making the correct decisions. This was praised by the political press. As the EU started to ask questions about laws passed without[ following the required processes](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-trss/) at the end of the year, the shortcomings of [passing laws and worrying about the details later](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-too-wrong-to-fix/) started to [make themselves known to the government](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-internet-irregulator/). He remains, despite this, to have handled multiple crises with humane and open impulses, running contrary to the wishes of significant chunks of his party. So when December rolled around he remained effectively unchallenged as FF's leader, even as he was replaced as Taoiseach by Leo Varadkar. The effect on each of their parties of this switch will become apparent as 2023 winds on, but it is likely to be centrifugal. ### This here, and you there Thank you all for reading the Gists across 2022\. There are now just over 1000 of you signed up to have them land in your inbox. You should each hope to identify each other, possibly by a special handshake or a lapel pin of a one and a zero. However, I couldn't write these pieces unless I knew you liked reading them, so for me, please let me wish you all a happy and peaceful 2023\. [Subscribe for Free to The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, surely you must take my money!](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: The Internet IrRegulator URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-internet-irregulator/ Last updated: 2022-12-28T17:06:15.000Z You may know that Ireland has, for reasons left obscure, taken it upon itself to pre-empt the [EU-wide regulatory framework for the internet](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act-package?ref=thegist.ie) and just go ahead and roll its own. Back in 2020, the [Government sent their draft law to the EU Commission](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/search/?trisaction=search.detail&year=2020&num=782&ref=thegist.ie) to see if it was OK under EU law. This is the famous TRIS procedure that the Dept of Justice skipped for their Data Retention law. (see previous Gists [Too Urgent to Get Right](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-trss/) and [Too Wrong to Fix)](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-too-wrong-to-fix/) The EU Commission at the time passed it as OK, so the law came back and spent the next two years wandering like a particularly mad ghost up and down the corridors of power, before being signed into law on the [9th December 2022](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2022/6/?ref=thegist.ie). Problem: Papers sent to me under a completely flukey FOI request have revealed that the EU Commission wrote and suggested the government should resubmit the amended text, to avoid the risk of having the entire law found void. > I have been contacted by the Commission to ensure you are aware of your notification obligations. > They have requested I pass on the following communication. > "The Commission services understood that the Irish authorities have been progressively amending this law, and will continue to do it in order to adapt the newly created Media Commission to the requirements of the DSCs under the DSA. In order to ensure compliance with the notification obligation, I would like to ask whether you could provide us more information on whether the Irish authorities intend to notify these amendments to the Commission, or if not, whether the Irish authorities could explain the reasons why they do not consider that a new notification is necessary in this regard. > > As you know, the consequences of failure to comply with the notification obligation in accordance with the case law of the CJEU are the inapplicability of the non-notified provisions under the CIA Security case." The Dept told the Commission and the Minister everything was Fine. Just Fine. Then Technology Ireland- the [industry group for Big Tech](https://www.ibec.ie/technologyireland/about-us/member-directory?ref=thegist.ie)\- wrote to the Minister on the 1st December and warned that the Act was no longer covered by the EU's 2020 pass, and needed to be resubmitted. The same argument the Commission had suggested they consider. They had also pointed out that the whole proposed law was a relic of an earlier age, when the EU wasn't about to regulate this whole area with the [Digital Services Act](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act-package?ref=thegist.ie). They weren't subtle about it. In an email to the Minister of the 7th October, they warned; > The rationale for the OSMR Bill now faces a changed landscape since its initial proposal three years ago. Specifically, the parallel implementation of the DSA within the same general time frame as the OSMR Bill makes it imperative that the Government considers the risk of legal conflict, misalighment of scope and duplication arising between the two. Instead of addressing these concerns, the Department just got the President to sign the Bill into law and then wrote back on the 19th December to tell them the deed was done now anyway. > "I would like to thank you and your members for your engagement on the development of the Bill. As of 6 December 2022, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill was passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas and, on 10 December, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act was signed into law by the President." The Department's argument was that the new parts of the Act- primarily the bits of that had been introduced after the EU's approval had been obtained didn't constitute a legislative action that needed fresh approval because they just kicked the can down the road to a future Online Safety Commission decision. But that still left the Department having to reply to the European Commission. First, they discussed it amongst themselves. > "the query relates to how the DSC is to be implemented. As we know, it will require legislation, which will, at least in part, amend our OSMR Bill (Act)." > \-(16th Nov 2022) Then a briefing note was prepared for the Minister. > The DSA has not yet been published in the Official Journal of the European Union and Ireland will have 15 months from when it comes into force (likely end-November) in order to do so. This will require separate legislation, which is likely to require some additions to the Bill (which will then be an Act). But, despite acknowledging internally that the Digital Services Act EU provision was going to require amendments to the Irish OSMR Act 2022, they settled on a different message to be sent back to the EU Commission. > A reply should be sent along the following lines- > > The Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2022 is not being amended to implement the Digital Services Act in Ireland. > \-17th November 2022 What's the upshot of all of this? Well, it is likely that the BAI's new incarnation as the Media Commission will be launched with a potentially fatal flaw in its foundations. If the EU Commission and Big Tech's lawyers were right and the OSMR Act ought to have been resubmitted to TRIS before it was passed as a law, then the new Irish Regulator for the Internet is at risk of being challenged the first time it takes strong action, and the whole law on which it stands being declared non-applicable. Which, given the stakes and resources of the companies it will be attempting to police, feels like a question that will haunt the Media Commission long into the future. [Subscribe for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, I insist on paying. Step aside.](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: Too Wrong To Fix URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-too-wrong-to-fix/ Last updated: 2022-12-23T10:14:30.000Z This is a continuation of our last exciting instalment ["Too Urgent to Get Right"](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-trss/) on the way the Irish Government rushed through a new mass surveillance law in the last week of the July Oireachtas term, skipping the bit where they needed to alert the EU Commission. Now, four days before Christmas, [they've tried to submit the same law they refused to send](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/search/?trisaction=search.detail&year=2022&num=872&ref=thegist.ie) into a process the EU Commission has already said they can't use any more. ### The Story So Far Back in the days of Saturday morning kids clubs serials in cinemas, this would be the follower-upper. So, a short recap is in order. You will have to imagine the booming voice for yourself. [When last our isolated heroes, the Department of Justice, were seen,](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-trss/) they were dangling over a pit of their own construction. Below them- (legislative) Oblivion! Can the great office of state escape this trap of their own devising?!! Now find out! ![](https://media.tenor.com/VkqT9cIZOZEAAAAC/flash-gordon.gif) "I'll tell them. They will respect my hat" ### With one leap our hero was... oh no. You will recall that, having been asked about their failure to submit the new Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022 to EU Commission for the TRIS procedure, the Department of Justice [didn't appear to know what they were going to do next or what arguments they might make](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41021237.html?utm%5Fsource=dlvr.it&utm%5Fmedium=twitter) to justify doing it. > The department can confirm that, to date, a notification under the TRIS regime has not been made in respect of the Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022.” They said the department is considering whether or not certain exclusions to TRIS may apply, and “whether any further steps are necessary”. In subsequent media and industry briefings, I understand that they had settled on a particular line. They were telling anyone who asked about TRIS that they had the benefit of an exemption to the requirement to submit. This was an implicit acceptance that TRIS would apply but for the working of this mighty exemption. Given the consequences for the law (being non-applicable from the start because that's how seriously the EU takes the TRIS and the Single Market it protects) all interested parties wanted to know what special exemption they were citing. Problem: it’s not a specially exempted law. But in an effort to try to fit the Ugly Stepsister’s legislation-foot into a glass slipper of exemption, the Department were briefing from mid-December that the Data Retention law is exempt because it is 'giving effect to a CJEU decision.' This argument lasts exactly as long as it takes to say “Which CJEU decision requires EU member states to bring in a Data Retention regime?” ### The Communication Corncobs (Not Owned) Act Now, on the day the Irish Courts closed, the Department has tried a last, desperate move to save their fatally-flawed legislation. They've submitted it to the EU Commission- the thing they said they were certain didn't need to be done- through the TRIS procedure. [Here, take a look at it.](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/search/?trisaction=search.detail&year=2022&num=872&ref=thegist.ie) It comes with a Big Notice at the front. The Notice says > Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022 ("the 2022 Act") The 2022 Act has been approved by the Irish parliament (Oireachtas) but has not been legally implemented via Ministerial order. Therefore the legislation is not, as of yet, in operation in Ireland. Further details are provided below. This is the Department trying to come up with a way to argue it isn't too late to do this. Gordon's Alive!, they want Brian Blessed to bellow. ![](https://media.tenor.com/CgAh9DUMsuwAAAAC/hawkmen.gif) Except the EU Commission has already confirmed, in a letter to Digital Rights Ireland's Chairman Dr. TJ McIntyre, that they'll be having none of that. > we would like to inform you that the procedure laid down by Article 5(1) of the Directive (EU) 2015/1535 (the ‘SMT Directive’) requires the notification of **draft measures** containing technical regulations within the meaning of that Directive and provides that the Commission and Member States may issue a reaction on the notified measures **that are in a draft stage.** > > Considering that **the measure was not notified to the Commission and is in fact not in a draft stage anymore**, the Commission and the Member States are not in the position to issue any reaction in the framework of the aforementioned Directive. (emphasis added) You can't claim your law is only a draft if the President has already signed it and it's become an Act. Imagine the chaos across the EU if the Commission let that stand as the criteria. And how does Ireland explain why it is sending in a law that's already passed its TRIS-by date? > Accordingly, the position of Ireland is that the 2022 Act is exempt from the notification requirements under the Technical Records Information System (TRIS) under Article 7(1)(e) of Directive 2015/1535\. This states that the notification requirements of the Directive do not apply to technical regulations which "restrict themselves to implementing a judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union". > > Notwithstanding Ireland's clear legal position in this regard, Ireland is making a TRIS notification in respect of the 2022 Act on a strictly precautionary and without prejudice basis. Ouch. I guess the first argument hasn't been as persuasive as they might have hoped. Submitting the TRIS application revealed one more home truth. The Department didn't claim there was any particular urgency in its consideration. They've accepted a three month standstill on implementing the law. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-23-at-09.28.04.png) Which rather undermines the rationale for pushing it through the Oireachtas in the teeth of warnings from experts, opposition and civil society in one week last July. Maybe our heroes should look before they leap. [Subscribe to The Gist for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [I insist on paying for The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) Hi there! Thanks for sticking with me through this year's Gisting. I'll be doing some festive ones over the interregnum between Christmas and New Year. But I want to say thanks to you all for your interest in the sometimes-niche thoughts that fill my head and for the nice emails and comments during the year. I've a new daily home as @Tupp\_ed@mastodon.ie if you'd like to join me there. Have a great break everyone and mind yourselves. ### The Gist: Too Urgent To Get Right URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-all-trss/ Last updated: 2022-12-05T10:00:27.000Z You probably remember the push to jam an entire national survellance act through the Oireachtas in the last two weeks before Summer recess. (See previous Gist, [National Surveillance, the Rush Job](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-national-surveillance-the-rush-job/)). What you probabaly haven't heard since then is that the Government, who claimed that this law was so urgent it couldn't allow time for debates or amendments to be completed, haven't actually turned that Act on yet. [It hasn't been 'commenced'](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/ResultsTitle.html?q=Communications+%28Retention+of+Data%29+%28Amendment%29&ref=thegist.ie), which requires a further Ministerial Order. Meaning we're still all living under the terms of [the predecessor act](https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2011/act/3/enacted/en/html?q=Communications+Retention+of+Data+Act+2011&ref=thegist.ie), which the Government (and everyone else) acknowledges created an illegal mass surveillance database of the population. The replacement was too urgent to be scrutinised, and yet apprently not urgent enough to be actually used. One of the issues the Government faces is that, in their rush to force the law through the legislature, they seem to have skipped the step at draft stage that would require it to be assessed by the EU Commission. This is the TRIS procedure. If you thought [ESB smart meters](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-how-smart-is-your-meter/) were wonky as a topic, wait until you get a load of this one. ### A TRIS-kit, Here's how it works. If a member state (a country that is part of the EU) is going to bring in some new law or rules or technical regulations that *might* create a lumpiness in the smooth and seamless European Single Market then a draft of those rules should be sent to the EU Commission for their thoughts through the [Technical Regulation Information System (TRIS) procedure](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/?ref=thegist.ie). [\[1\]](#footnote-1) The Commission can make suggestions for changes, or can decide no changes are required. However, the EU really, really values the Single Market. It does not want, for example, France inventing new regulations that would give an advantage to French internet services ahead of Spanish internet services and slipping them through. To prevent that sort of shenannigans, it has a nuclear button if a country just fails to send the legislation through to them at all. If you pass a regulation that ought to have been submitted to the TRIS, but wasn't, then your law is forefit. This has been settled case law following a series of decisions by the CJEU[\[2\]](#ftn2), confirming the dire consequences of non-notification of a draft technical regulation, which failure, the court has found, “constitutes a substantial procedural defect, \[and\] **renders a technical regulation adopted in breach of either of those articles inapplicable**”[\[3\]](#ftn3). (emphasis added) ![Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) says "You get nothing. You lose. Good day sir)](https://media.tenor.com/pq-mX4vNzvMAAAAC/willy-wonka-and-the-chocolate-factory-gene-wilder.gif) The EU, if you skip your TRIS Ireland does know about the need for these kinds of notifications, obviously. You can search for what has been notified to the [EU Commission here](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/search/?ref=thegist.ie). And, if you think you, as an interested party, have things to tell the Commission as a comment on the government's submission, you can send in thoughts. For example, [here's the State's submission](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/search/?trisaction=search.detail&year=2020&num=782&ref=thegist.ie) on the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill, submitted in 2020. But, if you take a look, you won't find any sign of any submission by Ireland through the TRIS process regarding this year's Data Retention law. ### A Task-it In July of this year, [Dr. TJ McIntyre](https://people.ucd.ie/tjmcintyre?ref=thegist.ie) of Digital Rights Ireland [\[4\]](#ftn4) wrote to the EU Commission and told them that a 'technical provision', as per Article 1(f) of the 2015/1535 Directive that defined the TRIS process, had been passed as the Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022\. The EU Commission wrote back saying that the Government had missed their chance to enter the TRIS process. > we would like to inform you that the procedure laid down by Article 5(1) of the Directive (EU) 2015/1535 (the ‘SMT Directive’) requires the notification of draft measures containing technical regulations within the meaning of that Directive and provides that the Commission and Member States may issue a reaction on the notified measures that are in a draft stage. > > Considering that the measure was not notified to the Commission and is in fact not in a draft stage anymore, the Commission and the Member States are not in the position to issue any reaction in the framework of the aforementioned Directive. The current national law is still the 2011 Data Retention act, which the Government accepts (and which the CJEU found) was in breach of EU law, every state entity, including the police, have a legal duty to apply the EU law directly. The Department has known for years the 2011 Act didn't comply with EU law Where a state body encounters a disagreement between a national law and an EU law, it is the duty of the state body to directly disapply the national law.[\[5\]](#ftnt5) ### We've lost our yellow basket. Rumour has it that the Government is currently attempting to gesture towards an argument that they are OK because, maybe, if you squint at it and tilt your head to the side, it looks like the law might be exempt from TRIS. This is what Sir Humphry Appleby would have described as a 'couragous' argument. And indeed, it is telling that even the Department of Justice doesn't feel like it can actually assert that TRIS doesn't apply. It's left [limply saying](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41021237.html?ref=thegist.ie) they're still considering 'whether any further steps are necessary'. Except, as the EU Commission has confirmed, if they missed their chance to board the TRIS-train, then that's it. The station is now boarded up. One point the Department does want to stress is that it just *had* to hurry and pass the Act quickly. But the problem with this half-voiced excuse is that the TRIS procedure actually has a method for dealing with [urgent cases](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/tris/en/faq/?ref=thegist.ie), where the ususal 3 month delay can be skipped. At heart, we have a continuation of the same line of administrative failure we have seen from the Department of Justice since the Digital Rights Ireland case made it clear that the EU Directive on data retention was invalid. The Department has allowed critical laws, dealing with some of the most intrusive and sensitive surveillance powers, to [float unsupported](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2014/04/08/digital-rights-ireland-ecj-judgement-on-data-retention/?ref=thegist.ie). This lets uncertainty grow as to whether they can or can't be relied upon in investigation and prosecution of serious crimes as well as continuing an unlawful mass surveillance system of nearly the whole adult population of the country. Now, by its own admission, even the Department [doesn't know what it's going to do next.](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41021237.html?utm%5Fsource=dlvr.it&utm%5Fmedium=twitter) > The department can confirm that, to date, a notification under the TRIS regime has not been made in respect of the Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022.” They said the department is considering whether or not certain exclusions to TRIS may apply, and “whether any further steps are necessary”. [Subscribe for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, I insist on paying!](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) 1\. Article 5 of EU Directive 2015/1535 requires that "Member States shall immediately communicate to the Commission any draft technical regulation" 2\. C-144/16 Municipio de Palmela, C-303/15 Naczelnik Urzędu Celnego I w Łodzi, C-98/14 Berlington, C-336/14 Sebat Ince, C-613/14 James Elliott Construction, Joined cases C-213/11, C-214/11, C-217/11 Fortuna Grand Forta, C-194/94 CIA Security, C-443/98 Unilever 3\. Paragraph 50, Unilever C-443/98 4\. My client. 5\. The CJEU has most recently addressed this longstanding duty of all organs of the State in Case C-378/17 Minister for Justice and Equality, Commissioner of An Garda Síochána v Workplace Relations Commission. Yes, that's right, Ireland was trying to deny that too. ### The Gist: Why so many 50:50 results? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-why-so-many-50-50-results/ Last updated: 2022-11-24T15:17:42.000Z The US elections have [safely passed](https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/2022-midterm-elections?ref=thegist.ie), with a less-pronounced shift in the direction of authoritarianism than expected. This has been hailed as a victory of sorts for the proponents of the current very very poor US democratic system. How effective Democrats in the US Senate can be may come down to a single seat repeated race in Georgia (again) after the candidates received 49.4% to 48.55% of the vote. (A libertarian candidate got 2.1%, because there’s always one.) In Brazil, the non-fascist candidate squeaked in ahead of his repugnant opponent 50.9% to 49.1%. And, of course we can look back a few years at the Brexit referendum with its chaos-unleashing 52% to 48% outcome. What all these places and elections have in common is a political system that presents choices as a binary- Yes/No, Leave/Remain, Moral Homunculus Fascist/ A.N. Other. Ireland doesn’t have that sort of binary choice for its electoral system. In 1920 Britain faced a huge surge of support for Sinn Féin- created when the British wrongly asserted the party had been behind the 1916 rising. They [switched Ireland’s electoral system from the First Past The Post](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/pr-and-making-every-vote-count-an-irishman-s-diary-on-an-election-in-1920-that-set-the-template-1.4138477?ref=thegist.ie) system to Proportional Representation, Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) so that SF wouldn’t win every seat contested. Doing so, they probably accidentally ensured the long term viability of post-independence Ireland. That PR-STV voting system has endured, through two constitutions and two more referendum efforts to change the constitution to go back to First Past The Post. Ireland loves the plurality of PR (it also loves the greatest game in the world, The Count). Media in FPTP nations regularly present coalition governments, or multi-party systems in general, as inherently weak or unstable. Look at the weird emphasis there on rapidly declaring a winner too. I think this is probably because people unconsciously absorb the norms they grew up and live in as universal, and so see differences as deviations from that norm, not as potentially better alternatives. There is an excellent and enjoyable [US audio documentary from Radiolab](https://radiolab.org/episodes/tweak-vote?ref=thegist.ie) which tries to explain the workings of an Irish election (as an example of PR at work) for a US audience. It is striking for an Irish listener just how exotic the idea of not just installing the candidate who does best on the first count is treated. Ireland is a post-colonial nation, and its electoral system was originally a decision of the Imperial power imposed on its colony. But Imperialism is built on hard binaries. UK, France, US, Russia. None of the 19th/ 20th C Imperial powers use PR.\* Binaries are the water empires swim through, invisible to them, because they are everywhere. (\*Well, Germany has a form of PR, but it was imposed after Nazi Germany was destroyed and occupied by the other empires) It is an exercise left to the reader to recognise their own best example of the susceptibility of Imperial nations to appeals to, and insistences on, either/or binaries throughout society. But why are so many binary states hovering around 50:50? This is a real question- and not one that I think we have a clear answer for. Binary choices deliver Yes/No results. But they don’t ensure that the Yes/No would be evenly split. > Imperial, binary, thinking is alien to the long term stability of a polity. Empires fall, not evolve, because they are hard but brittle. One answer might be voter mobilisation. Faced with truly terrible consequences if the other side wins, you can mobilise more people to vote. But then, why so evenly mobilised? Individual binary systems will have particular institutional tilts towards one side or the other (via gerrymandering, media environment etc). The division of voters may not be 50:50 at all, but the system might be rigged to favour one side or the other. But I tentitively suggest that binary political systems all tend towards an equilibrium of near 50:50 in the division of power over time, to allow for periodic changes of government. Once people have self-sorted, a binary identity becomes internalised as one of their personal traits. Think about the long tail of voters identifying as Leavers/Remainers in post-Brexit Britain, despite it being a one-off referendum split. But this creates significant social and political tensions- if almost everyone has chosen a side in a binary society, and each side is calcified at nearly 50% (to allow for some amount of change of government) then you have, in effect, two standing armies running like a fault line through the country, fighting on ever decreasing ground for those who can be persuaded to switch, or to care enough to vote. Imperial, binary, thinking is alien to the long term stability of a polity. Empires fall, not evolve, because they are hard but brittle. Allowing for a range of views defuses societal tension and improves (though on it own, can’t assure) long-term political stability. The weaknesses that Imperial states see in proportional representation, or multiparty coalition parliamentary models are actually their strengths. And, as we struggle to make global and difficult decisions in the face of a climate emergency, it is becoming clearer just how weak clinging to that Imperial binary model is. 🗣️ If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. [Subscribe for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, I insist on paying](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: The Twits URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-twits/ Last updated: 2022-11-18T11:24:40.000Z > “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” > \-Ronald Dahl, The Twits Elon Musk has been CEO and Chief Twit of Twitter since the 27th October. In that time he has done everything he can to make Twitter a home for, and the product of, ugly thoughts. And, sure enough, the three groups of people he relies upon to keep Twitter a going concern have each decided that they can hardly bear to look at the face of their love/hate app. Things unquestionably got uglier. The new owner's arrival was greeted by an eye-watering [tripling spike](https://www.axios.com/2022/11/12/elon-musk-twitter-racist-tweets-data?ref=thegist.ie) in the use of racial slurs and wealthy advisors ([as revealed in court documents](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/05/twitter-elon-musk-future-trump/?ref=thegist.ie)) suggested playing “a delicate game of letting the right wingers back on Twitter (including the boss man himself, if you’re up for that)”. Certainly, it is clear who considers they have the support of the Chief Twit. Meanwhile, having skipped on due diligence so comprehensively that he ended up buying a whole social media network against his will, Musk continues to demonstrate a misplaced confidence in the contents of his own skull. Musk sits astride his new toy like a velveteen-clad little tech Fauntleroy straddling a newly obtained rocking horse. His tweets are each heralded by a popping sound as he pulls his oversized lollipop from his mouth to confidently announce incorrect technical details about how Twitter works or, amazingly, admit believing he has bought a business whose main asset is software and servers (as opposed to the implausibly significant network of people it attracted). Musk, the self-made heir to an emerald mine, has been sprinting through the full menu of terrible management and business decisions as though he felt the cold, crisp breath of Liz Truss’ lettuce on his neck. ### Staff The new owner has fired so many people that he prompted some of the senior people left to resign. Having fired them, he immediately tried to hire them back. Presumably, this followed an evening spent walking bent over an empty Twitter HQ, trying to find out what one switch was connected to. His latest management gambit was announcing there would be no more remote working and that anyone who stayed would face extremely [Hardcore](https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674?ref=thegist.ie) working conditions, which he clarified would just be endless overwork in an abusive working environment. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-18-at-00.43.21.png) [https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1593345748086788098](https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1593345748086788098?s=46&t=b646qq3gK-D23iS%5FMqndMw&ref=thegist.ie) ### Tweeters This is at the same time that users continue to pack up and leave, making the dark, baffling and upsetting trip that is setting up an account on Mastodon to find a new world lacking both Twitter’s despot and his surrounding tin-pots. An [internal Twitter report](https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/?ref=thegist.ie) confirmed that a tiny fraction of twitter’s users produced 90% of its tweets and half of all the revenue. The report was followed -a bare few weeks since the new management moved in- by [the news](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/03/1062752/twitter-may-have-lost-more-than-a-million-users-since-elon-musk-took-over/?ref=thegist.ie) that 1 million accounts had been deactivated (and an uncounted number more just abandoned). That only felt like a bleak prophesy of the wilderness to come. ### Advertisers In response to the deafening rush of their audience towards the doors, Musk moved to reassure the people who actually pay the bills- the advertisers. This was unexpectedly successful- in that nobody expected it to be so dramatically the [opposite of success](https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459254/twitter-high-risk-ads-groupm-advertisers-content-moderation?ref=thegist.ie). Ad buyers for global brands actually cancelled their advertising with Twitter while he spoke to them. He also announced a wilfully dumb idea to verify anyone who paid €8 for a blue tick. Then he cancelled the plan after every Problematic Brand was immediately impersonated by a blue tick wielding account. From drug companies seemingly announcing an end to insulin price gouging to weapons manufacturers pledging to become ethical, the blue ticks drove conversations and moved billions in stock prices. In fairness, it turns out that this could be €8 well spent. ### Just a Tool In a sense Musk embodies one of Twitter’s most unintentional and powerful social effects- that of the rich and powerful person, left alone with their phone and a blue tick account swiftly destroying the mystique and admiration that a century of PR has worked to build up around the rich and famous. As a platform, it has allowed and encouraged a whole generation of the monied classes to speak directly to the public, in the same way a toddler will proudly announce they have filled their nappy and then look around for the applause that is their due. ### What’s lost This breakneck campaign of heedless destruction brings harm to a place where networks of genuine social change have coalesced and grown, from #BlackLivesMatter to #ArabSpring, building on the unexpected restoration of the # symbol from typographic obscurity to become the coral core of great reefs of people working together. ### What’s next Mastodon, the primary beneficiary of Twitter’s most valuable users looking for a lifeboat, has seen its [user-base swell](https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2022/11/13/mapping-the-mastodon-migration-is-it-a-one-way-trip-or-an-each-way-bet-for-science-twitter/?ref=thegist.ie), tripling in weeks after years of quiet, unnoticed development. Irish Twitter, for example, moved, in the space of a week, to a single [Mastodon.ie](https://www.mastodon.ie/?ref=thegist.ie) server en masse. 16,000 arrivals to a server that had previously been home to 600 souls. The greatest irony will be if Musk’s exercise of sheer infantile wealth and ego triggers a mass break from the dominant model of internet use- from a surveillance, advertising and algorithm panopticon to an entirely uncommercial, volunteer-run community-based archipelago of conversation. Though many will mourn the loss of what made Twitter unique, in the end it was brought down by what made it just like the other titans of big tech- its users were never the clients. They were the product. When that was suddenly made clear, by a single billionaire trying to buy them all, the product simply shoplifted itself out the door. It remains to be seen whether Twitter's fall will come from the Tweeter, staff or advertiser walk-outs first. But it doesn't seem like the fall itself is in doubt. 🗣️ If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. [Subscribe for free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, I insist on paying](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: How Smart Is Your Meter? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-how-smart-is-your-meter/ Last updated: 2022-11-07T13:06:50.000Z Autumn has settled upon us, and the Government knows Winter is coming. By and large, people in Ireland like having heating, cooking facilities and hot water in their homes. And, ever since hanging large pots over open hearths burning dried cowpats fell from fashion, they have turned to electricity to meet those needs. As rumblings of astonishing double-digit increases in electricity prices grow, with their real-world impact likely to be seen when the first new bills start to arrive, attention has fallen on a hitherto obscure tool of the administrative state, the smart meter. ### Save money by counting how much you've spent Let’s look at just one thing the Government has latched onto- urging people to save money by getting a smart meter and switching to a “Smart Meter Tariff”. We’re going to look at this commonly repeated bit of advice, seen in official statements and lists of energy-saving tips alike, because it is absolute nonsense. It is completely divorced from reality- a piece of techno-solutionism that dissolves like a disprin on contact with actuality. Firstly, let’s take the claim at its height. The Irish energy industry regulator, the CRU, ran a trial in 2011, where they installed smart meters on a block of houses and businesses and encouraged the inhabitants to use them in various ways. [This consumer behaviour trial](https://www.cru.ie/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/cer11080ai.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) is described by the regulator as "one of the largest and most statistically robust smart metering behavioural trials conducted internationally to date". All of the participants were made a promise, as part of the trial, that if it turned out that their new tariffs based on when they used electrity ended up being more expensive than the normal tarrif they used to have, that the CRU would pay them the difference. > Throughout the Trial all participants testing time-of-use tariffs were guaranteed that they would not pay more for their electricity than if they had been on the normal Electric Ireland tariff (14.1c per unit ex VAT). Accordingly, all participants received a balancing credit at the end of the benchmark period and in January 2011\. The small number of individuals who incurred costs above this average were recompensed on a case by case basis. Having made this a no-lose offer, the trial then proceeded. And what they found will surprise nobody who has lived in a house or worked in a job- the effects of these incentives were marginal when it came to usage. All the pricing incentives, reminders and data only reduced overall electricity usage by 2.5% for houses, and 0.3% for SMEs. In respect of SMEs, the report found "there is no tariff, DSM stimulus or tariff/DSM stimulus group which reduced overall electricity usage or peak usage by a statistically significant amount" This is unsurprising, because we basically use electricity when we need to use electricity. The reason there are peak demand times when people come home from work is that's the time we turn on the lights and make the dinner. Children will not sit hungry in the dark because you want to wait for the off-peak tariff to kick in. Similarly, SMEs use the electricity they use when they use it, because that is when they are open for business. And if you struggle through the opaque pricing forests which have been planted around the various tariff options you'll find that a typical estimated annual price difference between using a standard meter and a smart meter, taking account of a time-use tariff for the average user, is just €138 in a year. (€1928 compared to €2064 with Airtricity [per bonkers.ie](https://www.bonkers.ie/compare-gas-electricity-prices/electricity/?ref=thegist.ie)). That's not a lot of savings for pushing Ireland's toddler bedtime to 10pm. And, contrary to the habitual pablum from ministers and cost-saving experts, it isn't going to make a dent in a cost of living crisis that has seen electricity costs increase by around 45% this year. ### The silent data grab bit The smart meter project has been going on for years and there are over a million of them in the ground already. There's nothing inherently wrong with a smart meter. We already have metering on electricity, after all. But the difference here is that they can make their own meter readings and send them back to ESB Networks whenever *ESB Networks* wants them to. And you'd be surprised how often ESB Networks wants to read your meter. Like, every few minutes, it turns out. These smart meters were originally set up to store detailed half-hour usage data but only transfer that stuff from the meter to ESB Networks if there was a request from the customer, or some other compelling reason why the data was required. Otherwise, the plan, as set out on the [CRU's website](https://www.cru.ie/home/smart-meters/?ref=thegist.ie), was for ESB Networks to default to getting a report once a day on how much power had been used in that 24 hours. > "Every day, ESB Networks will collect data from your smart meter. This will state the amount of electricity used over the last 24-hours." But ESB Networks is currently (from beginning of October 2022) rejiggling smart meters so that all the granular half hour data from its customers smart meters is being brought into a centralised database, whether customers consent or not and whether their billing tariff needs it or not (and this is suggested to increase to every fifteen minutes after 2025). This is new. When the smart meter project was being rolled out, as the [Internet Archive ](https://web.archive.org/web/20220524154204/https://www.esbnetworks.ie/existing-connections/meters-and-readings/smart-meter-upgrade/more-information-on-smart-meters-and-data)snapshot of the ESB Networks webpage shows, they were assuring the public that they would only take info from smart meters more regularly than once a day if the customer had signed up for that as part of their tariff deal. > "It is important to note that your meter will only send the minimum amount of data to ESB Networks’ MDMS that is necessary to provide to your supplier for the purposes of billing you in accordance with the tariff or plan that you have selected." But now, despite that promise remaining, the [ESB Networks page](https://www.esbnetworks.ie/existing-connections/meters-and-readings/smart-meter-upgrade/more-information-on-smart-meters-and-data?ref=thegist.ie) says that all smart meters will send them "details, broken down by each half-hour, of the electricity consumed (and exported to the grid, if applicable)" The result of this huge, but quietly implemented change, is that the ESB networks database will contain a profile of activity in every home in Ireland, broken down into half-hour increments . The state body will know whether the home is occupied and when we enter our homes, and the level of their activity in the home when we do. Every home, whether they agree to a smart meter tariff or not, will be captured. This represents an unprecedented live surveillance database of all homes in the country. The public don't know (except for you, clever Gist reader). There was no big announcement. They've just flipped a switch and committed to putting our homes under surveillance. ESB Networks haven't even carried out a proper data protection impact . The DPIA that [ESB Networks refers to](https://www.esbnetworks.ie/docs/default-source/publications/smart-metering-september-2022-dpia-final-.pdf??ref=thegist.ie) on their site is an unsigned draft, with no approval recorded on Page 2, and is therefore incomplete. It is also, quite clearly, completely wrong in assessing the impact of their plan. Page 17 reveals just how blind the company is to the consequences of its monitoring. > The process does not include systematic monitoring of data subjects Sorry, but once you've made this mistake about keeping track of the occupancy and activity level in every single house in the country, you've gone awry. This draft DPIA has a long way to go to even properly assess the impact of this project. Meanwhile, they've already started it. ### Why are you telling me this? Do you know, I don't even know why I told you all of this. Electricity meters are surely the least sexy bit of technology in the universe, up there with electric can openers and Volvos. I suppose I just thought that you might want to know that the things people were telling you about them were just a bit wrong. They won't save you money and, since October, they aren't privacy respecting either. I promise I'll do a funny one about Elon Musk next Gist. [Subscribe to The Gist for free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Sir, I insist on paying](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist Extra: An Tóryocht Audio URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-extra-an-toryacht-audio/ Last updated: 2022-10-27T16:46:34.000Z Hello there! I've recorded an audio version of our most recent Gist, which, contrary to what the fellas over in Shelbyville might say, is not at all out of date. It's just a little bonus for paid supporters, be they €2 or €7 a month. [I insist on paying something](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Gist: An Tóryocht URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-an-toryocht/ Last updated: 2022-10-24T12:14:24.000Z As is obligatory, we start by pointing out that Liz Truss will be, by a considerable margin, the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history. It is rare to see a person of such limited talents encounter their limitations so swiftly and comprehensively. In a way, that is just another way of reflecting how rarely mediocre women reach the top job. The Tory party has been long committed to the promotion and protection of [deeply mediocre men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader%5Fof%5Fthe%5FConservative%5FParty%5F%28UK%29?ref=thegist.ie#Leaders%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fparty%5F%281922%E2%80%93present%29). Mostly this is an impulse of self-preservation, given how regularly that description applies to its elected members. One look at any of the recent UK Cabinets of None of the Talents will confirm this as one of the party’s ongoing core principles. This is a bench that runs so shallow that Jeremy Hunt, a man with the air of a small boy suddenly asked to manage a nuclear power plant while on a school trip, is considered an indispensable Chancellor. But, as we see this week, the party’s longing for a jolly good fellow who will tell them what they want to hear runs deeper than ever before. The response to Liz Truss’s [Government By Pamphlet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia%5FUnchained?ref=thegist.ie) has been to turn to the one man they can be sure will never have any pamphlets or plans at all. Forget Tóraíocht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne. This is the Tóryocht. The Tory party members are, once again, in pursuit of their great love, Boris Johnson. To understand why, we need to understand just how important lying has become to Tory members. ### The hedgehog and the fox The dumb fox is wrong about many small things but the stupid hedgehog is wrong about one big thing. Historically, the Tory party has always been a dumb fox, wrong about almost everything, but not much caring which thing was brought to the fore by any given leader. But since 2016 it has chosen its leaders according to a simple metric- were they the stupidest hedgehog? Brexit has been the giant stupid thing every hedgehog Tory leader had to say the wrongest thing about. Whoever would deny reality most brazenly won each leadership competition. So the party bred fantasists, by evolutionary pressure. After being elected leader, each of them encountered an external force that couldn’t be denied, were damaged or destroyed by it, and were replaced by someone even more willing to say black was white. Theresa May's assertion of Britain's power was sunk by the EU’s negotiating strength. Boris Johnson, by Covid (a serious problem which he, fatally, couldn’t take seriously). And, in a trice, Liz Truss was finished by financial markets and, to be clear, her own insufficiency. But the Tory party never reflected on why their leaders kept ending up as hedgehog roadkill. It was simply taken for granted that the next one just had to be wronger, harder. Now the party itself, even if carefully averting its eyes from the polls, can see its own electoral oblivion in its peripheral vision. Some MPs whose jobs are on the line are belatedly hearing the alarms sounding. But the members have the luxury of one last bang of the snooze button- all they need is Johnson, their human duvet, to come back and tell them what they want to hear. The [Financial Times had a clear video](https://youtu.be/wO2lWmgEK1Y?ref=thegist.ie), full of numbers and facts, about the ongoing and permanent costs of Brexit. It is the great error that can’t be acknowledged by the UK’s political system. And, as evidence of that error piles up on all sides, the Tory members have to work harder and harder not to acknowledge it. Nobody ever wants to admit they made a mistake, let alone a mistake that has damaged your entire country’s future, slashing their wealth and the opportunities for their children. The unique promise of a Boris Johnson leadership is that the members will never be asked to face up to the truth, because that’s just not what Johnson is about. This is the Tory party’s choice- elect a technocrat who will make them acknowledge the consequences of their actions- or to spend the last few years before the next election with a man jovially assuring them it’s all just grand. Without a cataclysm, the UK's dumbest hedgehogs will continue to plod on towards the motorway of the next election That's why, if Johnson can persuade about a third of his MPs to put him on the ballot, he is the most likely winner. ### The Gist: The Sandcastle Files URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-intelligence/ Last updated: 2022-10-22T08:27:33.000Z This week, I was on [RTÉ's Morning Ireland](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22161088/?ref=thegist.ie), beaming in from the end of my couch through my outsized Elvis microphone. I was willing to approximate expertise at 7.20am in order to explain why the Gardaí have no legal basis for opening files on people unconnected with any crime, and keeping family photos of their children playing on the beach. (For some, cornflakes. For me, this.) If you are like me, you will have not previously been aware that the Irish police considered it part of their job to build "reference and intelligence" files made up of personal details and copies of 100% non-suspicious and everyday family photos of kids on beaches building sandcastles, or at ballet recitals. But, earlier this week, RTÉ broke the story that was exactly what had been happening for years. An algorithm in the US had sent these pictures to the Irish police, to check if they were images of child sex abuse, having intercepted them from messages sent through big tech platforms like gmail and Facebook. About 400-500 people a year were checked in this manner and the Gardaí confirmed their images were completely innocent- what's known in the business as a False Positive. All of which is fine. What was problematic (and unlawful) was what the Irish police did with those images then. They don't just bin them. They carefully open a file on the people who sent and received them, and keep the copies of the children doing their everyday tree-climbing or paddling etc. Asked to explain this Extreme Scrapbooking, the police themselves couldn’t cite any applicable legal basis. Having recited a series of legal powers which applied to the investigation of crime (which these pictures were not part of), they could only say they had a ‘rationale’ for keeping these permanent files. ![In cases where no criminal offences identified following a review of material referred to An Garda Síochana for investigation, no crime incident records are created. This means that there is no impact on any person referenced in the data- and no references to them as suspects or victims. However, there is a rationale for the continued segregated retention of the original referral data, including: * quality assurance and accountability for the actions taken and decisions made in respect of the referral; * Reference and intelligence material in respect of future investigations in the event that additional information concerning the data subjects (potential witnesses, suspects and victims) included in the referral; and, * Compliance with the provisions of other legislation to which An Garda Síochána is subject, including but not limited to the provisions of the National Archives Act 1986. Section 71(5) of the Data Protection Act 2018, provides for further processing of data, received for law enforcement purposes, for a separate law enforcement purpose by the receiving controller or a separate data controller provided that data controller is a competent, authority for law enforcement, and the processing is necessary and proportionate for the purpose of the further processing](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/10/E310D085-450C-4F4C-A77A-ADEFA08BB1B4.jpeg) The Garda statement suggests they might have three uses for keeping a file of the these snapshots of ordinary life- building sandcastles on the beach, and so on. They also mention Section 71(5) of the Data Protection Act. We’ll get to just how misconceived that is in a moment. Firstly, we have the suggestion that our police force are holding these holiday pics, forever, for “quality assurance and accountability…of investigating members”. I’m afraid that is a question of internal management and discipline. Checking police work ought to happen before the investigation ends. If An Garda Síochána aren't confident in their process to decide between child sex abuse imagery and holiday snaps, they have a more serious operational problem than just data protection on their hands. Next, and most seriously, we have the explicit proposal that the police should keep files on members of the public and their families, who are unconnected with any criminal investigation as “intelligence material”. We have actually seen this impulse before, in other jurisdictions. The EU, having seen where this impulse led in former Soviet Eastern member states, enshrined data protection as a fundamental right in the EU Charter. For the full intelligence material files experience, you can visit the [Stasi Records Archive](https://www.stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de/en/?ref=thegist.ie) online, or in person in Berlin. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/10/CEF57134-B899-42AA-8B70-192606A70D1D.jpeg) Finally, in their third bullet point they close their eyes, say a Hail Mary and cite some unspecified law that neither they nor we know at the moment, and also The National Archives Act. Let’s leave the Tomb of The Unknown Legislation undisturbed and take a moment of silence, out of respect. As for the National Archives Act, the Gardaí seem to suggest that (a) a national law could compel indefinite retention of everything, over-ruling EU law *so that* (b) some time in the future people’s holiday snaps of their children would be deposited with the National Archives. Uh... really? ![Iron man saying “I got Nothing”](https://media.tenor.com/iabuskF05QAAAAAC/ironman-i-got-nothing.gif) (Section 2(2) of the National Archives Act defines what are "Departmental Records", to which the act applies. It says that they have to be records "made or received, and held in the course of its business". Once the police know there is no crime connected to these wholesome family memories, there is no reason to hold them in the course of its business and the National Archives Act doesn't apply.) Now, let’s come back to that final confident assertion of the powers to hold data granted by S71(5)of the Data Protection Act 2018 This is part of Ireland's transposition of the Law Enforcement Directive (LED), which is the separate, data protection regime covering law enforcement *actions.* It makes sense that Law Enforcement actions would need a different set of rules from the GDPR. You couldn’t have suspects able to write in and ask for their files, for example. The police statement also helpfully quotes when the LED applies. ![Law-enforcement purposes is defined under section 70 1A of the data protection act 2018, as processing for the purposes of the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of criminal offences, including the safeguarding against, and the prevention of, threats, to public safety, or the execution of criminal penalties.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/10/3BB7F56B-EEA0-4D73-8CD4-43D2E409D4D0.jpeg) Once it’s confirmed photographs are harmless and no crime occurred, the LED doesn’t apply. So citing it here is a misleading nonsequiter. The Law Enforcement Directive applies to law enforcement *actions* tied to actual crimes. It does not apply generally to any action taken by a law enforcement *body*. Once these images and the data around them are confirmed to be false positives, they are covered by the plain old GDPR, not the LED, because there isn't a crime to investigate, prevent or detect. And so the special LED-only powers granted under Section 71(5), which the Garda statement ends with, simply don’t apply at all. Now, if data is being stored or otherwise processed without a legal basis, then that is a breach of the GDPR rights of all the people whose data is being processed be they children, parents or proud Grannies who wanted to show off the pictures of their kids doing ballet. Amongst other remedies, An Garda Síochana are obliged to assess whether the infringement meets the threshold of seriousness that require them to notify all the people whose data rights were breached. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties have written to the Data Protection Commission, seeking an investigation of these thousands of police files of family photos. It remains to be seen if our regulator feels like doing its job, this time at least. Radio interview: [https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22161088/](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22161088/?ref=thegist.ie) First RTE story: [https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/1020/1330252-garda-data/](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/1020/1330252-garda-data/?ref=thegist.ie) Follow up RTÉ story: [https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/1019/1330023-garda-data/](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/1019/1330023-garda-data/?ref=thegist.ie) [Subscribe For Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [Shut Up And Take My Money](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: The Meta reVRse URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-meta-revrse/ Last updated: 2022-10-17T21:58:38.000Z I have been having a lot of thoughts about the staggering amount of money being spent to try to make VR homes, offices and Third Places happen. This money is primarily being spent by Mark Zuckerberg’s vastly profitable chaos-machine company, whose name he switched from Facebook to Meta. Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. None of the arguments or proposed uses for Zuckerberg’s vast project-within-a-company make a lick of sense. While I am very open to the possibility of pure Folly explaining monumental mistakes, I also feel that billionaires tend not to habitually explain their motivations honestly. This week there was a very long infomercial released by Meta, starring the SunKing himself, trying to hint to the stock market what on earth they were doing backing this bonfire of capital at the same time as cutting hiring in the face of their first-ever fall in advertising income. [Having watched this exceedingly strange artefact](https://youtu.be/hvfV-iGwYX8?ref=thegist.ie) (you can do so too, but believe me, you won’t), I thought I’d tell you what I think is going on. The key to helping me towards some understanding here, I am embarrassed to say, is Mark Zuckerberg’s haircut. ![Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Hair Crimes Tribunal](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/10/927236EB-EE6A-4D97-8B5E-785F13C430E8.jpeg) He's more of a Senate guy Mark Zuckerberg has chosen, against all tenets of style or taste, to fashion his head-topping after the Emperor Augustus, first emperor of Rome and founder of the Roman Empire, which was quite a big deal of an Empire before Facebook came along. Now, this is quite a fashion statement for a person with, effectively, unlimited funds to hire people to make him look good. We know that Augustus was the likely model for this style-as opposed to, say, [Ebeneezer Goode](https://youtu.be/txKWzW1rdy4?ref=thegist.ie)\- because Mark Zuckerberg has waxed fannishly about the founding Emperor in a 2018 [New](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy?ref=thegist.ie) Yorker profile. ![The Shamen video for Ebeneezer Good](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/10/86C3467D-719B-40F5-B46D-27F3F7903EA7.png) Ebeneezer Goode (probably not Zuck's hair shamen) > “My wife was making fun of me, saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon: me, her, and Augustus. All the photos were different sculptures of Augustus.” So the richest man of his generation, with a fascination with the founder of the Roman Empire, has an idea. He will replace the world as it is with a world which can be controlled absolutely, within his own empire. The metaverse project is nothing less than an attempt to establish a global Pax Meta. Imagine you controlled and monitored everything that everyone saw for significant parts of their day. Not just looking at a screen, but everything outside it too. Decor, weather, fashion, architecture… and ads. As though people were living inside one of those video game franchises with the product placements, except the products are on their virtual desks or floating outside on animated zeppelins. No competitors exist inside a corporate reality. No other giants can intrude or compete. Imagine Facebook, but for your real life. This would be an Empire any would-be man of history would think worth burning a fortune for. So while the huge push for the Metaverse is marketed as a way to talk to playmobil versions of your co-workers’ torsos, we should always remember Mark Zuckerberg’s haircut. Talking about Augustus imposing the Pax Romana- a military backed imperial control of Europe- he reflected obliquly on the price of Empires. > “What are the trade-offs in that?” Zuckerberg said, growing animated. “On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today. Two hundred years feels unattainable.” > On the other hand, he said, “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.” VR is actually fun if it doesn’t make you nauseous. But I’m not sure I'm willing to find out what “certain things” Zuckerberg would be willing to do to make his Metaverse dream come true. And, judging from the ongoing mass apathy to what is being offered, [nobody much else](https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-metaverse-horizon-worlds-zuckerberg-facebook-internal-documents-11665778961?ref=thegist.ie) is tempted to find out either. [Subscribe for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [I insist on paying something](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: Face/Off URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-face-off/ Last updated: 2024-09-19T19:53:29.000Z Yesterday we learned that the Irish Government had been contacted by four (4) [United Nations Special Rapporteurs.](https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=27594&ref=thegist.ie) These are people appointed for their expertise, to speak for rights, freedoms and people under threat around the world. The Irish Government’s plans to pass a law to allow Gardaí to run facial recognition on the public through CCTV cameras had managed to upset four of them at once. ### So UNhappy The [UN's experts especially didn’t like](https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=27594&ref=thegist.ie) the “proposed use of FRT \[Facial Recognition Technology\] by law enforcement for ‘real time’ analysis of footage of large numbers of persons to identify them, then possibly track and apprehend them, raises significant human rights concerns, particularly with regards to the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.” because > “these forms of identification and data collection violate the individual’s anonymity in public spaces and exert significant “chilling effects” on decisions to participate in public gatherings...FRT represents a clear interference with individuals’ rights to privacy.” And, finally; > “we recommend that your Excellency’s Government not pursue the proposal to authorize the use of FRT in law enforcement via amendments to the Bill at the committee stage.” The Government, in a letter signed by Simon Coveney, sniffly replied. He pointed out that, although the EU are, right now, debating a piece of superior legislation which will supersede any national notions Ireland has about the proper use of AI, that UN Special Rapporteurs weren’t the Boss of them. The Governement could pass completely off-the-wall bonkers legislation about things the Civil Service only dimly understood if they wanted to. Why should they wait for a thought-out, international norm that is already in front of the EU Parliament? > “as a sovereign Member State of the European Union, Ireland is fully entitled to introduce its own legislation that regulates an area of the activities of citizens …Ireland, in common with any Member State, cannot be obligated to withhold legislation that it views as necessary and domestically required pending the development and negotiation of a law at European Union level” But take a step back from the intervention of the UN and let’s try to work out how and why the Government ended up announcing it wanted to pass a Facial Recognition law in the first place. Because, the thing is, [the law they put through the Oireachtas Pre-Legislative scrutiny system](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2022/79/?tab=documents&ref=thegist.ie) in 2021 didn’t have any such proposals in it. We learned of the plan, not in the Dáil, but in [a speech by the Minister for Justice in June 2022 to the police’s representative body, the GRA](https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2022/06/02/gardai-will-be-able-to-use-real-time-facial-recognition-under-planned-legislation/?ref=thegist.ie). And, at that stage, the details were so sketchy that all we could make out was that the Govt wanted a law, even if it wasn’t quite sure where the limits of that law could be. There was even a suggestion of a new role for the Gardaí of proving people innocent- something hitherto left up to Jessica Fletcher. > “As well as helping to identify suspects in a crowd, it will also be able to exonerate innocent people by showing they were elsewhere at the time of a crime” Simon Coveney’s reply to the UN goes further, confirming; > “It is proposed to introduce both retrospective and live facial recognition facilities into An Garda Síochána.” But, in a return of the mental gymnastics that gave us a PSC card that was “mandatory but not compulsory”, although the plan is to use live facial recognition, the Minister assures the UN bods “there are no proposals for the use of FRT for ‘real time’ analysis in any such manner”. “Any such manner” doing quite a lot of lifting there. So. to recap, that’s a plan to legislate for Live facial recognition, “identifying suspects in crowds” but not ““real time’ analysis of footage of large numbers of persons, to identify them”. A blueprint that includes a need for a square circle usually suggests the plan isn't ready to leave the drawing board. ### The Data Protection Bit But now we come to the mystery- why did the minister for Justice suddenly announce in June 2022 she was going to so significantly amend a piece of legislation which had already gone through pre-legislative scrutiny back in December? Why was Ireland asserting its sovereign right to urgently pass dumb local laws on matters of the most intense international debate, even as the EU was in the middle of the same debate on a law that would supersede ours? What happened between Dec 2021 and June 2022 to make this a legislative emergency? Well, come with me to look at the missing piece of this puzzle. In May 2022, just a few weeks before the Minister’s GRA speech, the collective group of Data Protection Authorities in the EU, called the European Data Protection Board, issued their [“Guidelines” on when it would and would not be lawful for the police to use facial recognition technology for law enforcement.](https://edpb.europa.eu/our-work-tools/documents/public-consultations/2022/guidelines-052022-use-facial-recognition%5Fen?ref=thegist.ie) The most crucial statement they made was to say that just transposing the current EU law governing use of data by law enforcement absolutely did not give a legal basis for FRT. In Ireland’s case, this transposition was done by the Data Protection Act 2018. > “the national provision transposing Article 10 LED into national law - with a similarly general and abstract wording - cannot be invoked as a legal basis for the processing of biometric data involving facial recognition“ This meant that any police force which had read the law as giving them that power- and so did not believe they needed any additional legislation to let them run FRT- suddenly would urgently need a law passed to justify that usage. But the EDPB go on to explain all the strict limitations that would apply to that law. The first- and most significant- is that it must be only used when “strictly necessary”. > “It restricts the margin of appreciation permitted to the law enforcement authority in the necessity test to an absolute minimum. In accordance with the settled case-law of the CJEU, the condition of “strict necessity” is also closely linked to the requirement of objective criteria in order to define the circumstances and conditions under which processing can be undertaken, thus excluding any processing of a general or systematic nature”. So, saving manpower by automating a laborious task wouldn’t be a sufficient legal justification- the law could only allow for uses which could not- in any way- be done without FRT. But they have some specific thoughts on the legality of the Minister for Justice’s suggestion to use FRT to “identify suspects in crowds” > “with regard to data subjects for whom there is no evidence capable of suggesting that their conduct might have a link, even an indirect or remote one, with the legitimate aim according to the LED, there is most likely no justification of an interference” with their privacy and data protection rights. And, just to ram the point home, they do an analysis of a sample use of live FRT to identify suspects in a crowd. They conclude > “remote processing of biometric data in public spaces for identification purposes fail to strike a fair balance between the competing private and public interests, thus constituting a disproportionate interference with the data subject’s rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter.” Two questions remain with me at the end of this sequence of statements and laws. 1. Before the May 2022 EDPB guidelines, had the police here engaged in any use of Facial Recognition Technology, basing its legality on a misinterpretation of the Law Enforcement Directive and the Data Protection Act 2018? 2. Why does the Department of Justice think it is a good idea to legislate in haste, on a matter of critical international debate, in the face of an impending law agreed by the EU as a whole, on exactly this point? What does Ireland know that the best brains in the world have missed to assure the Government that they are the ones to have got this balance right? Or, from the citizens’ point of view, perhaps the question is blunter. Why should we trust that the government which illegally used Public Services Cards across the state, that is under investigation for the use of biometric data, that asserted for years that its unlawful mass surveillance Data Retention laws were fine, has got this one right? [Subscribe for Free](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) [I insist on paying something](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup) ### The Gist: A Lack Of Truss URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-lack-of-truss/ Last updated: 2022-09-30T07:56:12.000Z We are a week since the UK Government announced a mini-budget, wrenched the wheel hard to the right and crashed the country into a ditch. We can now see that the queen did her state one final service by dying just as Liz Truss took office, thereby preventing her final PM from making any major policy changes for a full two weeks. In months to come, Britain will look back fondly on those times when their main concern was whether Phil and Holly had skipped the queue to gaze upon the departed monarch's flag-draped coffin. The reason those days will evoke nostalgia is what Prime Minister Liz Truss and her Cabinet of Curiosities did next. As we know by now, it appears both the new PM and her Chancellor suffer from the same debilitating ailment- convictions. Very very stupid convictions. They are convinced that if only rich people didn’t have to pay tax that everyone would end up as a rich person. This idea has no evidence- or indeed any widely accepted theory- to support it. Nonetheless both the holders of the UK’s great offices of state appear to have imprinted upon it at an impressionable age, like newly hatched ducklings following around an Alsatian, if Alsatians also weren’t real and didn’t exist. The reaction to this proudly declaimed shared delusion from the uptight sorts in charge of Money, and the keeping thereof, was not as Ms Truss expected. They took their Money and started putting it safely somewhere else. Sterling was sold off, then the Government’s own gilt bonds (their loans) had to offer higher and higher interest rates to persuade anyone to buy them. Then, eventually, (ie, Wednesday) the entire UK pension system nearly went bust. The problem was temporarily avoided by the Bank of England printing £65 Billion so they could use it to buy those bonds and keep them floating. Never let it be said that Britain doesn’t have a magic money tree. It just takes the form of a printing press. So, catastrophic systemic financial collapse has been dodged, at least until the weekend. Cue the Prime Minister touring a series of local radio interviews. This was, from a horserace view of politics, a bad idea. The Prime Minister has demonstrated by the application of any microphone or lens, that she is not a first rank communicator. Indeed, her rank would be so low she may have warranted a dishonourable discharge from ever having to make conversation at all. This was exemplified by the quick-fire round of local radio interviews this morning, where the Prime Minister materialised for five minutes on each station, humiliated herself and then teleported directly to the next, to deliver the same points again. It was like Groundhog Day, if, instead of starting the day to I’ve Got You Babe, Bill Murray had been woken in his pyjamas in the town square and everyone took turns at hitting him in the face with a plank. For Irish listeners it was telling to see the return of an old friend in the Tory speaking points- “I don’t accept that.” After Fianna Fáil had flattened our economy, they spent the next 18 months shaking their head to each undeniable recitation of miserable facts and responding “I don’t accept that.” Meanwhile, UK Labour’s poll lead triggered a breakdown in standard electoral prediction models, which suggested a return of 2 (yes, just two) Tory party seats after the next UK election. By all accounts, Liz Truss does not accept the events of last week. It remains to be seen how long she can hold that position before her hysterical party comes to the conclusion they can’t accept her. ### The Gist: Video Q&A URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-video-q-a/ Last updated: 2022-09-19T16:18:36.000Z Something a bit different today. I've made a video with Taryn DeVere, where she puts the questions sent in by subscribers to me. This is the (video) Gist. 00:00 - Intro 00:37 - What do you get out of writing the Gist? 02:07 - The ePrivacy Directive; what is it and is it robust? 05:39 - How does sharing location on your phone with Google connect with people visiting abortion clinics? 08:16 - Are there other under-reported corners of GDPR (discusses [Chat Control 2.0](https://edri.org/our-work/a-beginners-guide-to-eu-rules-on-scanning-private-communications-part-2/?ref=thegist.ie) ) 10:27 - Would you describe yourself as a campaigner or activist? 13:00 - Don't forget the pancakes on Gist Lemon Day. 13:31 - Does Ireland have a healthy media ecosystem that holds power to account? 21:05 - To what extent does the Gist fulfil a function that other outlets should be providing? 22:59 - Wrap up ### The Gist: The Gilded Age URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-gilded-age/ Last updated: 2022-09-11T11:37:44.000Z This week the United Kingdom underwent the greatest change in its domestic affairs in living memory. At the start of the week, it changed its political leader. And at the end of the week, it changed its head of state, and the head of its established state church. Queen Elizabeth II has, since her death, been compared to many things and people. But the more I thought about the complexity of talking about her life, the more I thought about the Incredible Hulk. Queen Elizabeth II was a person- a very old and frail lady who died at the end of a long life surrounded by disappointing, to one degree or another, family members. People met that old lady throughout her life and found they liked her. Queen Elizabeth II was also the head of state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the head of the Church of England, the Commander-In-Chief of the British army, the inheritor of the British Empire’s global colonial project and the head of the Commonwealth, as well as being the head of state of 15 remaining former colonies. Bruce Banner and the Hulk have the decency to clearly indicate which is acting by turning green and bursting out of their plaid shirts. And when we talk about one, we can use different names to indicate if we mean the big guy, or the other fella. The Queen of England looked like the same person, and used the same name whether she was chatting to a butcher in Cork or presiding over the democratic institutions of England while wearing a crown topped by a diamond taken from the earth of Africa. This overlap has complicated discussion of her legacy. For the last few years the UK has been, to put it mildly, Going Through Some Things. A time of enormous change is always seen as dangerous to a power structure committed to maintaining the status quo. So the official view of the next week in the UK we see from the outside should be recognised for what it is- a shell, potentially brittle and cracking. Liz Truss stepped out onto Downing Street to deliver the official response to the news of the Queen’s death. One part of the artlessly intoned speech she ploddingly read struck me; > “Queen Elizabeth II was the rock on which modern Britain was built. Our country has grown and flourished under her reign. Britain is the great country it is today because of her.” We don’t know how long ago those words were written. But they simply rang absurd after the last few years of chaos, reputation collapse and untrustworthiness that have characterised the UK’s recent political persona. But step back and notice the scope of the claim- ‘our country has grown and flourished under her reign.’ It is monarchs and heads of state, those smashing, roaring forces, who reign. Frail human beings, the Bruce Banner-puny human element of the duality, don’t come into the business of reigning. And, though not at all as the Prime Minister meant when she gratingly read her script with all the conviction of a tea-towelled tot in a school nativity play, Britain did change definitively for the better across the seven decades of the Queen’s reign. That change was the disintegration of the British Empire, and of Britain's idea of itself as an Imperial power. Empires are strange things. They exist because they are unimaginably profitable (and the British Empire was that before it was anything else). But those profits tend to pool around individuals, instead of dropping into the coffers of the general public. This grotesquely distorts the society at the centre of Empire. Meanwhile, the societies whose wealth is being extracted, out at Empire’s periphery, also suffer social warping or collapse from the violence, oppression and death that status delivers. Empires poison their centre and dehumanise and kill at their edge. The Queen of England ascended to the throne five years after the partition of India ended the British Raj, at the cost of approximately 1 million Indian lives. Three years after she took the throne, Britain attempted to maintain Imperial control over the Suez Canal when it was nationalised by the Egyptian government. She received [daily briefings](https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/what-the-queen-knew-1388234.html?ref=thegist.ie) on that debacle from MI6 (Her Majesty’s Secret Service wasn’t an idle title). By the time the Suez crisis was over, England’s 800 year imperial project was finished along with it . It took the many decades of her reign for the power structure she was the figurehead for to accept that. As Brexit showed, some never did. If Queen Elizabeth II’s reign had a single theme, then, it was the end of empire. Paradoxically, this remains Britain’s greatest social and political opportunity. It would never be possible for an Imperial Britain to “grow and flourish” . No Imperial power can ever grow. Change represents a threat. An Imperial power structure will tell a story to the populous that they are living in a Golden Age, while reproducing the same model of exploitation at home that proved so effective abroad. Queen Victoria’s reign may have featured a famine killing a million Irish people, children sent down mines and up chimneys to die and been the literal source of the phrase 'Dickensian poverty' but she was calculatedly presented as the Empress upon whose realm the sun never set. It was a gilded age, but the golden shine of gilt only covers the thin layer on top of a base metal. Next week will see a country-wide theatrical performance. It will be the [Festival of Brexit](https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/907681/Jacob-Rees-Mogg-Brexit-Day-Theresa-May-festival-Olympics-party-celebration?ref=thegist.ie) the dreamers of Empire never got. It will tell a story of national greatness, policy consistency and of global love for a head of state (as opposed to affection for an old lady). It will be a national anxiety dream acted out on a scale never seen before. Morrisons will [silence their beeps](https://twitter.com/holly/status/1568675155563651075?s=20&t=iHZ62yMq3NSlnJsa0u1jBQ&ref=thegist.ie). Cars will [flow through Hammersmith](https://twitter.com/LBHF/status/1568887068024918016?s=20&t=iHZ62yMq3NSlnJsa0u1jBQ&ref=thegist.ie). Someone, somewhere, will play the poetry bit from Four Weddings and a Funeral. Buried by the performance, there will also be a funeral for a very old lady. And then, afterwards, there will be the start of a new story of Britain, with new characters playing the lead. And change will come. In an empire, everything new starts at the edge before it comes, at last, to the centre. The centre has changed. I’m interested to see what happens next. ### The Gist: The Siege of Troy URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-siege-of-troy/ Last updated: 2022-08-28T09:20:43.000Z It’s hard to get a handle on the story of Robert Troy. That isn’t because the story is too complex. It is almost the easiest political story you could come up with. No, what makes it difficult to talk about is that it is so damn straightforward. At first glance, there seems almost nothing to add to a [simple recitation of the facts](https://www.thejournal.ie/robert-troy-resignation-5849533-Aug2022/?ref=thegist.ie). But let us leave the specifics of Mr Troy’s property portfolio behind and consider the effect on the general public of hearing a TD announce he owns 11 homes and he makes no apologies for it, because he isn’t a person of privilege. Many of them will own zero homes. Others will have friends or family in rented accommodation who move every year or so as the landlord turns his portfolio over by upping the rent or evicting, as Mr Troy argued in the Dáil should be allowed happen during the pandemic lockdowns. Or maybe they own their house (via the bank) but remember paying rent to landlords who wanted it in cash. In general, the general public doesn’t own 11 properties that other people pay to live in. That’s what makes us the general public, as opposed to the incredibly specific public. But for TDs, being someone’s landlord is one of the [most common things you or your peers can do](https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2022/08/24/almost-80-tds-and-senators-are-landlords-property-owners-or-both/?ref=thegist.ie). And into that fracture between the governed and their governors fell Robert Troy. He eventually produced his comedy list of errors and omissions, an errata slip published in response to a continuing series of critical reviews of The Minister for Regulation’s self-regulation, [to get ahead of the story](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40947203.html?ref=thegist.ie). But the list of missed registrations and misunderstandings of plain rules was almost beside the point. He just didn’t seem to recognise that the glowing nuclear rod he had thrown into the still waters of the story was the news of his 11 part property empire. And once it landed, the waters just boiled. By the time he issued his resignation statement, he knew it. We can only imagine that’s why he wrapped up his ministerial career with a paragraph which has buzzed ever since in the head of anyone who read it, like a wasp banging against the inside of our skulls > “I personally will not apologise for being a landlord. I bought my first house at the age of 20 as I went straight into a job after school, so I was in a position to purchase my first property then. I am not a person of privilege and I have not been brought up with a silver spoon in my mouth, I have worked for all I have" Like a sort of [Mandelbrot set](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Self-Similarity-Zoom.gif/402px-Self-Similarity-Zoom.gif?ref=thegist.ie) of entitlement, any and every element of this paragraph we might zoom in on contains sufficient voter-maddening power to instantly end Ireland’s energy crisis. Forget wind farms. Just tour the country and read this paragraph wherever people are gathered and you could capture enough rage to let us fuel an unbroken carpet of data centres from sea to shining sea. Owning 11 places to live, a TD flipping properties bought from the state by selling them at a profit to the state, getting cash payments from tenants, arguing that you and other landlords should be able to evict tenants during the pandemic without mentioning you are a landlord, arguing that the state should pay landlords like you more rent without mentioning that you’d benefit- none of these are illegal. Robert Troy was not brought down by his regulatory errors and omissions. He was sunk by the behaviour that his peers in the political class found perfectly normal and the elctorate unfathomable. That self-penned paragraph will be Robert Troy’s lasting political legacy. After years of Fianna Fáil worrying that the voters didn’t have a clear picture in their minds of the party’s identity, Mr Troy has laser etched one onto a sharp-edged steel plate and inserted it forcibly into voters' brains. Fianna Fáil is that paragraph now. His leader backed him, praised him, embraced him. Now, they own him. And in a feat of extraordinary literary synthesis, he may well have written their electoral obituary even as he left office. ### The Gist: Who makes money from inflation? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-who-makes-money-from-inflation/ Last updated: 2022-08-15T10:22:51.000Z For the second month running, the CSO reported that Ireland's prices rose at the highest rate for over thirty years. The annual rate of inflation so far in 2022 has reached 9.1%. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-11-at-13.24.17.png) CPI is the Consumer Price Index, HICP is a standardised Eurostat equivalent, with slightly different methodology. So all of the prices went up and nobody can afford to do things or exist. Except, that isn't true for everyone. First, let’s acknowledge that inflation is causing serious hardship. That is what the phrase “cost of living crisis” is intended to cover. Literally being just alive is becoming increasingly unaffordable, with housing the biggest and worst crisis amongst all the others. Inflation particularly hurts people on fixed incomes —social welfare recipients, like pensioners. It's why talk of addressing [increasing living costs by lowering taxes](https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/budget-2023-tanaiste-leo-varadkar-27712102?ref=thegist.ie) is particularly ugly. It pays some of the state's finite resources to the people who have money already (through taxed earnings) and pays nothing to those inflation most sharply harms. ### Stretched like elastic If your income is fixed but the prices of the things you have to buy to live keeps going up you soon stop being able to buy anything but staples, and eventually, not even staples. ![Richard Chambers Tweets: What does that rate of inflation mean? 🍞 Avg sliced pan costs 18c more than it did last year. 🍺 Avg pint of stout in a pub is €5.13 - up 22c compared to last year - with lager up 22c. 🍝 500g of spaghetti up by 21c in the year. 📽️ 15% increase in the cost of going to the cinema (June 2021 vs June 2022) 🥛 27c increase in 2 litres of milk - a 16% increase. 🥚 10c increase in six large eggs.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/08/Chambers-Tweet.jpg) However, because no economic event effects everyone the same (because there are lots of different ways of being, financially speaking) there *are* people who benefit from high inflation. They’re not representative of the population, but it is worth knowing about them. Firstly there are those commercial entities who have what is known as high price setting power, which is tied to price inelasticity. That’s a bunch of economics jargon, so let’s stomp on it so the meaning squirts out like the contents of a school milk carton. Imagine you could just put up your prices for things and people would still buy them. Or you could put up prices by 40% but there would only be a 10% drop in consumption. If prices are unhitched from demand like that, there’s said to be lots of price inelasticity. They're inelastic, because people will stretch instead, in the same way medieval peasants used to stretch to fit the rack in their King's dungeons. The glaring example of this in Ireland in the last few months is energy costs. They've increased by 21.6% since January. Increasing cost by 21.6% didn’t reduce consumption by 21.6%. Instead it increased energy profits. In fact, those profits went up, a lot. For example, Bord Gais Energy's UK owner reported that their [profits in the Irish company had gone up 74%](https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0728/1312725-bord-gais-energy/?ref=thegist.ie). Profits are what a company has after its supply expenses are paid. War or no war, it looks like opportunistically increasing energy costs in a time of high inflation has been a profit maximising, not cost-covering, choice. ### Inflate the debt away. Another way in which an entity might benefit from a period of high inflation is if they have a great deal of pre-existing borrowings which they had used to purchase a lot of non-depreciating assets. For example, developers who have borrowed very large sums to build up land banks of development land. None of this is hard to understand- literally schoolchildren learn it (that’s where [I learned it](https://www.curriculumonline.ie/Senior-cycle/Senior-Cycle-Subjects/Economics/?ref=thegist.ie)) but it is weirdly occluded or obscured in media or public discussion. Inflation helps entities who borrowed cash in the past and used it to buy appreciating assets. Let’s shrink this down. Imagine it is 2017 and I am a delveloper company. I go to a bank and I borrow, say, €100m and then I buy a bunch of land zoned to build houses on. I have to pay interest on that- pretty modest single digits, given prevailing interest at that time. Then I do literally nothing. Grass grows. Meanwhile the value of my asset is increasing far more than my interest costs. But on the other hand, if I build during an inflation spike, my costs will be higher. But my assets can sit there accumulating value if I just... don't build anything yet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/08/KPMG-COnstruction-Cost-chart.jpg) Source: [Savills](http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/ireland-research/market-in-minutes/ireland-development-land-market---market-review-and-outlook-2022-compressed.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) Irish Development Land Market Review and Outlook 2022 Problem: What about that debt from buying the land? Answer: Inflation! During a period of high inflation, the value of the cash I borrowed shrinks, relative to the value of the land I used it to buy. I am making an unrealised profit every single day on my whole bank of land I refuse to build houses on. I have become a farmer of unearned money- literally a new rentier classs, but without the bother of having actual tenants to make pay me rent. The only thing that could go wrong for me in this novel new profit farm arrangement is if my land value falls. So the one thing that I—the debt holding, land bank hoarding developer company do not want is for housing (and therefore land) prices to fall. Now, coincidentally, about this time last year The Gist had a relevant observation to make on the one thing the Government would not do, or even say they wanted to do, in response to the housing crisis. > “It is anathema to the government parties to ever try to cause a drop in house prices- or rent. And that is why our current policy machinery had failed to solve this social crisis for over a decade.” - [The Gist, 5th Sept 2021](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-roof-over-our-head/) When we recognise that a particular outcome is simply out of bounds for political discussion– and particularly when it is an outcome that seems like it would have general popular support– we should not look to expressed intent to identify for whom public policy is crafted. We should look at the effect of that policy and who it benefits most. ![Headline: Windfall tax would undermine Irish engergy independence, says Paschal Donohoe](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/08/Windfall-tax-headline-from-newstalk.jpg) Source: [Newstalk](https://www.newstalk.com/news/windfall-tax-would-undermine-irish-energy-independence-says-paschal-donohoe-1371570?ref=thegist.ie) [Subscribe to The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: Lords of Misrule URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-lords-of-misrule/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:31:27.000Z The Government has reached a moment of truth, and it doesn't like it. The climate targets it merrily agreed to put into law turn out to have actually meant something. And the Green Party's leader and Minister responsible for making them happen doesn't seem willing to sell the pass. He seems to actually want to reduce Ireland's emissions by 51% by 2030, so that it can meet the committment to hit net zero emissions by 2050\. To do that, Ireland needs to [revolutionise most of society all at once](https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/6223e-climate-action-plan-2021/?ref=thegist.ie) (as the government agreed to do). [Transport going away from internal combustion, the entire energy network shifting hugely to renewables, hundreds of thousands of refits on homes up and down the country](https://assets.gov.ie/207876/ab5e4b34-e381-4ee7-acf3-1e59e1a1b57d.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). The scale of this project is staggering. The challenge of the change it will bring about, in every part of life, dwarfs anything since [Ireland was electrified](https://esbarchives.ie/rural-electrification/?ref=thegist.ie). Except, it turns out, for Agriculture. Fine Gael (and more quietly, Fianna Fáil) are demanding that The Sacred Cow should not be interfered with. Or at least, not to the extent that is required. A range of 22% - 30% reduction of emissions was agreed between the government parties for the Agriculture sector. Now it is time to set the specific figure within that range which is needed in order for Ireland to meet that overall 51% target. ## Inconvenient Truths The [EPA has already said that](https://www.epa.ie/our-services/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/ghg/key-messages/?ref=thegist.ie), given the amount of the carbon budget which Agriculture has used up since 1990, a 22% cut in Agriculture emissions won't do the job. Even if every one of the massive changes in the rest of society were completed (house retrofitting, mass electric vehicle takeup, wholescale conversion to renewable electricity generation etc) a 22% level of Agriculture emissions cuts would only deliver about half of Ireland's overall required emissions reduction. > An emissions reduction of 28% in 2030 vs 2018 is projected in the With Additional Measures scenario, this is compared to the 51% target, despite an assumption that the lower end of the agriculture target (22% reduction compared to 2018) is met." - [EPA](https://www.epa.ie/our-services/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/ghg/key-messages/?ref=thegist.ie) Fine Gael faces one of the worst things that can happen to a political party. Something they do not want something to happen has become something which must happen. There is no room for fudging or debate. The facts are clear, even if they are unwanted. Unless, that is, you're willing to abandon relying on facts and true statements to make your case. Which is what some of the FG proponants of keeping emission cuts at the lower end of the range have resorted to. The Agriculture lobby has been [adopting the tactics of harmful but profitable industries (oil, tobacco and so on](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/vested-interests-public-against-climate-science-fossil-fuel-lobby?ref=thegist.ie)). It has created talking points intended to counter the scientific consensus, or sometimes just to deny reality. Those talking points are then relayed down to individual farmers as well as spokepeople and political proxies. This has a duel purpose. The farmers, like Trump supporters, are given a grounds for feeling aggrieved at their opponants, instead of seeing their own actions as harmful. And the media, because of a widespread glitch, typically presents disputes on matters of fact as though they were debates on matters of opinion. ## Facts? We don't agree with them A [head to head debate](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22124731/?ref=thegist.ie) between someone with a fringe view on climate science and someone representing the consensus view of qualified experts will appear to the audience as a matter of disagreement between equally valid positions. As FF TD Jackie Cahill said to UCC Professor Hannah Daly at the end of their appearance on RTE Radio "I disagree with your facts." ([At 23:40 in this file](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22124731/?ref=thegist.ie)) Other facts have been disagreed with too. On Monday FG TDs John Paul Phelan, David Stanton, Charlie Flanagan, Paul Kehoe and Senators John Cummins and Garret Ahearn issued a joint statement, including this false claim; [“Other sectors of our economy are producing higher emissions”](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/group-of-fine-gael-tds-and-senators-claim-farmers-and-rural-ireland-being-scapegoated-41862354.html?ref=thegist.ie) In fact, Agriculture is, by far and away, the largest source of Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions. I mean it’s 37% of all Irish emissions. The 2nd placed sector (Transport) is at 17%. It's not even close. Source: [EPA](https://www.epa.ie/publications/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/air-emissions/irelands-provisional-greenhouse-gas-emissions-1990-2021.php?ref=thegist.ie) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/Screenshot-2022-07-27-at-11.01.43.png) EPA chart showing sectoral contributions to Ireland's Greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 While both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have led governments since 1990 which saw rises in Agriculture emissions, it is Fine Gael who have been in power when the steepest and least forgivable year-on-year rises have happened, since 2011\. To make 22% reductions from now a viable option, Fine Gael would have had to ensure that lost decade had been spent delivering incremental cuts in emissions. They chose not to do that. And, faced with the consequences of that political choice, they are now left only with [denial](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/group-of-fine-gael-tds-and-senators-claim-farmers-and-rural-ireland-being-scapegoated-41862354.html?ref=thegist.ie) and [delaying the inevitable](https://www.independent.ie/news/environment/climate-must-wait-as-ministers-squabble-over-deal-for-farmers-41870416.html?ref=thegist.ie). As stewards of Ireland's climate policy, Fine Gael have proved themselves Lords of Misrule. It is time for Ireland to stop arguing about what the science says must be done (a cut in Agriculture emissions at the upper end of the agreed range, as a minimum) and to start **planning how to achieve it.** The longer we wait, the harder that project gets. Time to start. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/Screenshot-2022-07-27-at-00.05.28.png) Emissions figures source, EPA. Years mostly led by a FF Taoiseach in green, FG in blue. ### The Gist: A long, hot Summer URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-long-hot-summer/ Last updated: 2022-07-24T23:25:02.000Z This week was meant to be a bit of end of term fun for the Government parties. With the Dáil in recess until the 14th September, the Executive gets to play without the formal requirement to face an opposition. This is a time for announcements, where Government TDs, who, lest we forget, have a monopoly on good news on what the state is going to do next, get to announce to their constituents all the goodies they've procured them. The fact that this sort of an announcement is generally just heralding the automatic decisions of the civil service is neither here nor there as far as the happy herald is concerned. But this week had something different about it. Specifically, it was hot. Very hot. And that was just in Ireland. Across Europe, it was thermometer-busting, record-setting, life-ending, firestarting hot. Climate change is pretty undeniable when the roads start to melt. And it was against that sweltering backdrop that the public became aware of the farm lobby's resistance to the Minister for Environment's plans to set where, in the already agreed range of 22-30% reductions, the requirement for the Agriculture sector's emissions reduction would end up. [![Chart from the EPA showing greenhouse gas emissions by sector](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/agriculture-sector-emiss-1-.svg)](https://www.epa.ie/our-services/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/ghg/agriculture/?ref=thegist.ie) EPA chart The Minister had made it clear that he wanted the reduction level to be set at the higher end of the range. He had to do that, because as the EPA reported during the same week, Ireland simply wasn't making the overall reductions in emissions it needed. In fact, for the past two years, emissions had actually risen overall, mostly driven by rises in Agriculture. If you have 10 years to meet a reduction target and spend the first few years of that increasing your emissions, you're going to have to go faster and harder at the back end of the plan to hit the targets. Ireland is going backwards. The gap between the orange line and the straight grey line is the projected shortfall if we don't get our act together. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/Total-GHG-including-LULUCF_WEM-and-WAM.PNG) The EPA was clear. Even if Ireland implemented [every single planned mitigation](https://assets.gov.ie/10206/d042e174c1654c6ca14f39242fb07d22.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) (this includes such fanciful dreams as 800,000 vehicles on the road in eight years), but left Agriculture to deliver its minimum 22% cut, the country as a whole would only manage to reduce emissions by 28% instead of the required 51% reduction. 🚨 Ireland has an objective of climate neutrality by 2050 with an interim target of a 51% reduction in GHG emissions, including LULUCF, by 2030 relative to a baseline of 2018\. The latest Projections indicate that the sectoral and overall targets set out in the Climate Action Plan will not be met with the measures currently modelled. An emissions reduction of 28% in 2030 vs 2018 is projected in the With Additional Measures scenario, this is compared to the 51% target, despite an assumption that the lower end of the agriculture target (22% reduction compared to 2018) is met." - [EPA](https://www.epa.ie/our-services/monitoring--assessment/climate-change/ghg/key-messages/?ref=thegist.ie) But the Agriculture lobby don't want anything above the 22% minimum. In fact, they sent their spokesmen and political proxies out to describe even that level of climatesaving action as 'challenging'. Which, to be fair, if you're in the middle of a multi year increase in argriculture emissions, any reduction figure probably does look like a challenge. If you would like to be equal parts depressed and annoyed you can [listen to the Fine Gael junior minister for Agriculture](https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/22123203-carbon-emissions-targets/?ref=thegist.ie) here alternate between groundless bluster and transparent dissembling, as he argues against his own Government's overall emissions reduction policy. Apparently, the Department of Agriculture doesn't see itself as the means by which the state's overall policies can be applied to agriculture, but as an institution for applying the farming lobby's policies to government. Regulatory capture, but we're all the hostages. Meanwhile, while junior ministers will happily act as sectoral mouthpieces without any pretence of taking account of the needs of the rest of the country or even the world, Government's leaders have to say something to at least pretend that they aren't just willing to see their voters' children come to view summer tarmac like B-movie quicksand. And so the week was filled with talk of 'New Technologies'. You will remember how we all sniggered at the absurd Brexiteers who kept insisting their impossible plans for the Border could be made real with [new (but not specified or invented) technologies](https://www.france24.com/en/20190208-brexit-technology-ireland-may-barnier-northern-border-uk-may-dup?ref=thegist.ie). Remember how everyone knew this was a denial of reality, a refusal to admit truth they just couldn't acknowledge? Well, it turns out the Taoiseach and Táiniste remember it too- and they want a bit of that magic technology themselves. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/Screenshot-2022-07-24-at-11.32.09.png) Instead of doing things to lose weight, I will wait for new technologies to look after it. It isn't clear if these are new New Technologies, or the same [New Technologies that Fianna Fáil politicians were putting their hopes on in 2011 when the last Climate Change Response Bill landed](https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2011-01-19/speech/157/?ref=thegist.ie), with a thud, in the final dying days of the Cowan regime. As I write, the government is still wrangling with itself, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs and Ministers claiming that the Green Party (whose Minister is implementing the policies needed to bring about the 51% emissions reduction they all agreed to) is forcing their shared policy on rural Ireland. And, meanwhile, the public register tells us that the [IFA lobbied 649 times in the 727 days since this government formed](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-40924079.html?ref=thegist.ie). [Fine Gael](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/agribusiness-and-food/simon-coveney-hails-exciting-end-to-milk-quotas-1.2007850?ref=thegist.ie) and [Fianna Fáil ](https://www.fiannafail.ie/news/as-national-dairy-herd-grows-by-33-in-7-years-farmers-ask-is-there-enough-fodder-moynihan?ref=thegist.ie)have advocated and incentivised increasing dairy farming, in particular, for years. The consequent private investment in additional methane-burping cows may turn out to be Ireland's first example of a stranded asset. The blame for that failed investment falls, not on the Green Party implementing the universally acknowledged required policy, but the two larger parties who led farming, like the Pied Piper, dancing to the tune of short-sighted lobby campaigns. In the meantime, we continue to be a grim outlier in a Europe set aflame. ![Chart showing the change in total greenhouse gas emissions from 27 EU countries and the UK between 1990 and 2020. Data source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/SDG_13_10/bookmark/table?lang=en&bookmarkId=844c1fa2-d7c4-4454-9720-c87128f218f7 Data: Estonia -71.1 Latvia -59.3 Lithuania -57.8 Romania -56.1 Bulgaria -49.9 Slovakia -49.5 United Kingdom -48.5 Czechia -43.0 Denmark -41.4 Germany -40.8 Sweden -35.1 Hungary -33.8 Finland -32.6 European Union 27 -31.6 Greece -28.1 France -27.5 Italy -26.5 Belgium -26.0 Croatia -25.0 Netherlands -24.0 Poland -20.8 Luxembourg -18.4 Malta -17.0 Slovenia -14.9 Austria -5.9 Spain -4.6 Portugal -1.4 Ireland 6.2 Cyprus 46.0](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/Screenshot-2022-07-24-at-12.05.54.png) Oh, come on! ### The Gist: A week of reckoning URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-week-of-reckoning/ Last updated: 2022-07-11T00:13:34.000Z ### Executive Dysfunction Having lost 50 members of his government to resignations, the UK's Prime Minister finally conceeded he would leave his job some time in the future, probably. His end had been triggered by a sex scandal, but not one of his own making, making it a surprise to friends and foes alike. In a speech which owed more to Fr. Ted's Golden Cleric oration than Cicero, he whinged at the nation that an eccentric mob (his political party) had unseated a man of historical greatness (him). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/07/Screenshot-2022-07-11-at-00.26.30-1.png) Having had so many ministers and appointees vigiously defenestrate themselves from the halls of government, Johnson, who is still the Prime Minister, set about filling the empty spaces. This resulted in the boggling sight of a national Executive largely consisting of people who had not, up until now, been considered fit to serve in a Johnson government. Kier Starmer, in an unusual moment of functional phrasemaking, referred to it as 'the charge of the lightweight brigade'. From a Chancellor who is under [investigation into his tax affairs](https://www.ft.com/content/a57b6f7d-003f-4651-a6b8-3e880293efc1https://www.ft.com/content/a57b6f7d-003f-4651-a6b8-3e880293efc1?ref=thegist.ie) to the Education Minister who screamed at a booing public to ['wait and see' ](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/EJFqtiEB?ref=thegist.ie)and then [gave them the finger](https://twitter.com/i/status/1546199132221710337?ref=thegist.ie), Johnson's Cabinet of Curiosities seems likely to vie with the man himself in producing sensation in the coming months. ### Bad Planning This week the Government decided to take some action over the festering crisis in An Bord Pleanála. The planning authority has not had a good record of making lawful decisions recently, having lost [32 of the 35 judicial reviews of their SHD decisions since 2017](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40901819.html?ref=thegist.ie). In addition, the [deputy chair of An Bord Pleanála resigned](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40914164.html?ref=thegist.ie), while inquiries into his decisions in office continue. And the sober sorts at the Irish Planning Institute warned the government [changes to the planning system in the past four years have created “a developer-led process that is inimical to the common good”](https://www.businesspost.ie/news/planning-rules-are-inimical-to-the-common-good-ipi-warns/?ref=thegist.ie). So, hot on the heels of their [attempt to pass a law on national surveillance in one week](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-national-surveillance-the-rush-job/), the Government unveiled their response. Instead of dealing with the causes of losing so many court cases- that the planning authority was making so many indefensible decisions- they decided they would change the law to make it harder to take a judicial review of those decisions. Take a read of solicitor [Fred Logue's guide](https://twitter.com/FredPLogue/status/1545837500219916288?s=20&t=rwIHx5QIfqCgfKPnHp8buw&ref=thegist.ie) to all the ways in which these amendments, introduced at the last minute amidst handwaving by the government about them being 48 pages of minor matters, fall short. > Reading some of the last minute amendments to the pending planning bill, there has been plenty of commentary from [@NoonanJoe](https://twitter.com/NoonanJoe?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) and [@attractaub](https://twitter.com/attractaub?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) who have done heroic work trying to decipher almost 50 pages of cryptic amendments lobbed in at the last minute - fwiw here's my take 1/ > > — Fred Logue PhD MIEMA CEnv (@FredPLogue) [July 9, 2022](https://twitter.com/FredPLogue/status/1545837500219916288?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) Perhaps the crispest response came from [Mr. Peter Sweetman](https://twitter.com/SweetmanPeter/status/1546037515907649538?ref=thegist.ie), who has frequently been the litigant in many of those successful Judicial Reviews, at his own financial risk. > To make good law, first you must understand what you are trying to change, I suggest that not one member of this government has any idea of the problems with planning and compliance with Irish and EU law. When so many cases are being lost, would it not be better to find out why. [Subscribe to the Gist ](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: National Surveillance, the Rush Job URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-national-surveillance-the-rush-job/ Last updated: 2022-07-06T06:33:43.000Z In 2014, the top court in Europe, the CJEU, delivered its judgement in the [Digital Rights Ireland challenge](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:62012CJ0293&from=EN&ref=thegist.ie) on the system of surveillance that had been put in place covering 500 million EU citizens. They struck down the EU law it was based on and they found the model of general 'data retention' to be incompatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Half a billion people's rights were protected. I am the solicitor for Digital Rights Ireland and count that as one of the days I did good work. To this day, the Irish Government continues to base their legal defence of the Irish Data Retention regime on the Data Retention Directive the CJEU nullified eight years ago. While even Wile E. Coyote eventually stops spinning his legs in mid-air and looks down, the Irish state has steadfastly continued with denial as its first and last response to a binding decision that they had built a national surveillance database, accessed between[ 10,000 and 12,000 times a year](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/garda-granted-access-to-11-500-phone-records-over-two-years-1.2504559?ref=thegist.ie) by Gardaí with no prior warrant or judicial oversight, based on an EU law that no longer existed. Case after case was taken to the CJEU, ( [Tele2/Watson](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:62015CJ0203&from=EN&ref=thegist.ie) from Sweden and the UK, [La Quadature du Net](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:62018CJ0511&from=en&ref=thegist.ie) from France), on the Data Retention topic. Each one took a similar approach. The state party asked the CJEU maybe it didn't really mean what it had said in the Digital Rights Ireland case and the CJEU affirmed it did and gave greater and greater detail of what that meant in practice. Eventually, the Irish state [faced their own reference to the CJEU](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=257242&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=10371458&ref=thegist.ie), and responded by asking it to again reconsider the DRI/Tele2 rulings. The law was, by now, so clear that the Court even asked the Irish state if it seriously wanted it to answer the referred questions again. As the Attorney General recently [described it in a recent TCD seminar](https://www.icel.ie/event/data-protection-conference-may-2022/?ref=thegist.ie), Ireland was in a "dialog" with the CJEU and it wanted its answer. To literally nobody's surprise (except maybe the Irish State) the CJEU came back with a response which confirmed all its previous reponses. It also clarified again exactly what a lawful data retention regime would look like, something the Irish Government had ignored when it brought forward a 2017 Bill to amend the 2011 Act. In 2017, the Department of Justice's official admitted the Irish Data Retention regime was illegal Then, after all these years of inaction, the Department of Justice suddenly produced an emergency piece of legislation last week. It was such an emergency that they hadn't even published the Bill while the Oireachtas Committee was doing a truncated pre-legislative scrutiny. As Thomas Pringle TD pointed out, the proposed timelines were so absurd that they had, quite literally, two minutes remaining to introduce amendments to a Bill they hadn't seen, while they were still in Committee meeting. This timeline was so ridiculous that the Committee suspended proceedings and when they came back, it had been slightly improved. The current plan is for the law to be on the books by the end of this week. There do seem to be some practical problems, however. The phone companies, who will have to actually take those laws and make them true, flagged during their submission to the Committee that there were some very significant technical issues. As the Department admitted, despite all these years since the DRI judgment in 2014, they hadn't actually effectively consulted with the telcos about the new law. That's now also due to happen this week. Meaning the Department are finding out if the law they've written is impossible to implement at the same time as they are passing it. On top of all that, there is the additional problem that the new law doesn't actually solve the problem of the old one. There are a series of legal requirements, identified by former [Chief Justice Murray in a report on this exact subject](https://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Review%5Fof%5Fthe%5FLaw%5Fon%5FRetention%5Fof%5Fand%5FAccess%5Fto%5FCommunications%5FData.pdf/Files/Review%5Fof%5Fthe%5FLaw%5Fon%5FRetention%5Fof%5Fand%5FAccess%5Fto%5FCommunications%5FData.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) which are still not being implemented. **The most obvious problem is that the new Bill creates a new basis for continuing to retain data on the whole population for 'national security' but then **fails to provide any definition of national security.** By relying on an undefined threshold, it fails to meet the [requirements of the CJEU](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=232084&doclang=en&ref=thegist.ie) that: > ‘In order to satisfy the requirement of proportionality, the legislation must lay down **clear and precise rules governing the scope and application of the measure in question** and imposing minimum safeguards, so that the persons whose personal data is affected have sufficient guarantees that data will be effectively protected against the risk of abuse. That legislation must be legally binding under domestic law and, in particular, **must indicate in what circumstances and under which conditions a measure providing for the processing of such data may be adopted**, thereby ensuring that the interference is limited to what is strictly necessary.’ In *[Zakharov v. Russia](https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-159324&ref=thegist.ie)* the European Court of Human Rights held that a Russian law which failed to define state security purposes was in breach of Article 8 ECHR: > ‘It is significant that \[Russian law\] does not give any indication of the circumstances under which an individual’s communications may be intercepted on account of events or activities endangering Russia’s national, military, economic or ecological security**. It leaves the authorities an almost unlimited degree of discretion in determining which events or acts constitute such a threat and whether that threat is serious enough to justify secret surveillance, thereby creating possibilities for abuse**.’ In addition, a 'transitionary' provision in Section 9 of the Bill attempts to create a legal basis for all of the existing, illegally retained, data to be kept. Thomas Pringle TD inquired of the Department of Justice how this wouldn't fall foul of the long established principle that it is unconstitutional for the Oireachtas to try to pass a law that would determine a matter already before the courts. He even helpfully cited the caselaw (the [Sinn Féin Funds case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn%5FF%C3%A9in%5FFunds%5Fcase?ref=thegist.ie)) and referred to the still ongoing DRI case. The official from the Department said he was unfamiliar with the case. We were left to wonder which case he was referring to. The Justice Committee members were so unimpressed with the answers they were given, including a promise that the law was going to be replaced later, at a time unspecified, that both Government and Opposition members put down amendments to the law automatically killing it after a set number of months. In her unpersausive speech tonight, the Minister for Justice argued that any such 'sunset clause' would introduce uncertainty. Presumably, having a vague promise to repeal and replace the law at some unknown point of time with unspecified terms is the Department of Justice's preferred means of delivering certainty. And, in a microcosm of the Department's response to this issue for nearly a decade, she was still complaining about the CJEU's decisions; "It is actually the European Court rulings that are having the impact here, but also how the EU Charter of Human Rights is being interpreted." Pesky courts, and their law interpreting. So we are faced with the sight of a Department of Justice which is, again, refusing to actually follow the law because it doesn't like how the courts found against the Department's wishes time after time. In doing so, it is supplying fuel for appeals by every single person convicted by this evidence in the future, instead of admitting it Got It Wrong and following the CJEU's checklist on how to collect and store phone data legally. We only need to look to our East to see that a scofflaw state is a danger to its citizens, and in the longer term, to its own legitimacy. ![](https://media.tenor.com/images/5b3de699ebd09bd01431e68208e041d2/tenor.gif) [Subscribe to The Gist](https://www.thegist.ie/#/portal/signup/free) ### The Gist: Roe v Wade, assayed URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-roe-v-wade-assayed/ Last updated: 2022-06-25T15:12:03.000Z This week, the US Supreme Court, an institution debased across decades of unmeritorious appointments, finally reached the end point of its majority’s long goal- the overturn of national rights to privacy for women’s health by way of rejection of the 50-year Roe v Wade decision on access to abortion. It is hard to express how significant this decision will be for literally millions of women across the US, as individual states compete to produce the most grotesque laws restricting, punishing, stigmatising and surveilling women. All the nightmares of Ireland’s recently repealed 8th Amendment will be revisited, fused to a policing and surveillance infrastructure unlike anything seen here. From this distance, we can only acknowledge the scale of the disaster which will fall on so many at the personal level. But we can also see the shape of the institutional consequences of this decision. A majority of the US population do not want abortion bans. Even within states with solid Republican majorities, such as Texas, the voters say that is not what they want. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/06/Screenshot-2022-06-25-at-16.02.13.png) And yet restriction has been the unceasing policy and aim of the Republican Party for decades- because the US is not a functioning republic. Its majority simply can’t vote themselves into power, due to [gerrymandering](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/?ref=thegist.ie), [gerontocracy](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/opinion/beware-the-ruinous-optimism-of-democratic-leaders.html?ref=thegist.ie) and a legislature built to [value property (States) over people (voters)](https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution.htm?ref=thegist.ie). The Democratic Party’s establishment response to this latest assault (vote for us) simply refuses to countenance addressing these structural problems and so fades into irrelevant [wishes that things could be better](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/dobbs-decision-nancy-pelosi-poem-response.html?ref=thegist.ie). This [judiciary](https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/05/07/a-heedless-majority/?ref=thegist.ie) will not reinstate the rights it has taken this week. The executive cannot get the legislature to do so. In this, as in so many other social and political issues, [the majority](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/minority-rule-cannot-last-america/617272/?ref=thegist.ie) have no means of seeing their will given political force. This is unsustainable. It is hardly controversial to observe that something which is unsustainable will not be forever sustained. History suggests that women and their allies are not willing to see their rights take a back seat for electoral concerns. And, perhaps heedlessly, the removal of the Roe v Wade judicial protection for abortion suddenly makes politicians responsible for the topic. And [being held responsible for your speech and actions can be an uncomfortable position for a politician](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/23/jan-6-panel-to-hone-in-on-trumps-efforts-to-meddle-at-doj-00041708?ref=thegist.ie) used to competing on rhetorical extremism. Removing the protection of Roe v Wade has removed public positions on abortion access from the realm of the rhetorical and brought it back to the sharply practical and political. It is easy to announce you want to see pregnant voters have their rights curtailed when everyone knows you are unable to give the empty promise force. It pleases your radical wing while just being complacently treated as so much noise by other potential voters. But it is quite another for a politician to credibly tell their electorate that if they get elected they will see to it that the voters and their own sisters, daughters and partners are treated as incubators or allowed die of political expediency. We can expect a long, hot Summer of inchoate protest, before the shape of an alternative set of norms start to coalesce. While this judicial revolution is ongoing, the US public is mesmerised by the account of the [attempted coup of Jan 6th 2021](https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/jan-6-committee?ref=thegist.ie). Both share the same source- a devotion to minority rule. Each of these shocks is a reminder that revolutions destroy as well as create and their ends become unpredictible even to those who worked the longest to create them. The most common victim of a revolutionary act is its instigator. The Supreme Court, as an institution, doesn't seem to have recognised that risk. One thing we can be sure of is that no US institution will make it through the next 10 years untouched by transformation. How quickly the institutions recognise that will determine whether the transformation takes the form of revolution or destruction. ### The Gist: A Crisis of Confidence URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-crisis-of-confidence/ Last updated: 2022-06-11T17:19:29.000Z > Let’s all move on. > \-Every Tory Minister Determined to contribute their share of gaiety to their nation’s jubilee celebrations, Tory MPs triggered a vote of no confidence in their Prime Minister, the Bacchus of the Break Room, Boris Johnson. Apparently, seeing a public hopped up on jingo and bunting still moved to boo the man set to lead them into a general election where they, themselves, might lose their job caused these MPs to reflect deeply on the needs of the nation. Even as the trifles and tiaras festival continued, it was announced that some 54 of the Conservative MPs had now written in looking for a vote of no confidence. This being the magic number to trigger one, there followed a day of low farce and high drama respectively from the Johnson and anti-Johnson sides. For everyone looking on, it was hard to know who to back. Since his election Johnson has been exactly what he always has been, but now as Prime Minister. Whereas his opponents are driven by a range of conflicting impulses, interests and IQs. Some are upset at the parties he had while the rest of the country was locked down, unable to say goodbye to their loved ones. Some want to try to get Britain back into the Single European Market, having found Brexit increasingly indigestible. And some are upset he hasn’t cut taxes, this being the alpha and omega of their entire political universe. As all sides are made up entirely of Tory MPs none prompts any natural sympathy. Which makes the end result all the more amusing for everyone not a sitting Tory MP. Having spent the day predicting that they would break into three figures the rebel alliance discovered they had far more support than even they suspected. 148 votes were cast against the Prime Minister retaining his job. Removing everyone actually paid to support him (the “payroll vote”) this meant that 75% of all his backbenchers had voted to heave him overboard. ### After the Deluge He responded by trying to win over as many of these disparate and conflicting factions as possible. He hurried forward promised legislation to break international law on the Northern Ireland protocol, and then had it be known that his Foreign Secretary was trying to break the law **too much** with her latest draft. He promised tax cuts as imminent, while also assuring his Labour-nervous Red Wall MPs that he was also going to spend more on the services their voters depended on. In other words he stuck resolutely to the model that got him elected - promising everyone what they want to hear while treating the actual delivery of those promises as an irrelevance. As there is no way that a man like this just resigns from a job that gives him power and money, and the Tory MPs have blown a hole in his authority below the waterline, we are faced with perhaps the most entertaining of all worlds. Those Tory MPs now realise they are also aboard the Johnson ship of state but having failed to sink it at this attempt they can’t try another escape for a further twelve months, even as it keeps taking on water. As the UK Labour Party continues to look as effective and incisive as a stiletto made of cottage cheese, it may take all that extra time for it to persuade voters that they represent a liferaft worth the try. For the rest of us onlookers, we can consider this leadership challenge result to be the effective end of the Johnson Government. Nothing it announces can be reliably enacted from now on, and nothing it does can survive internal factional challenge. Vapourware policy announcements, minority-blaming and petty cruelty are all that is left to them. A fitting, if unpleasant, end for the Brexit Tory project. 💡 You can always subscribe (for free or otherwise) to the Gist using that pink button over there, if you'd like to get it delivered safely to your own email inbox. ### The Gist: Sickened URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-sickened/ Last updated: 2022-05-28T19:59:15.000Z Not before time, let’s turn our attention to the world outside Ireland’s borders. ### Party On, Boris In the darkest days of the first of the UK’s Covid surges, people were dying at a rate of about 1,000 a day. They frequently died without the comfort of their families near them, and were then buried or cremated in similar isolation, leaving wells of traumatic grief in families who were denied a natural goodbye. Meanwhile, in Number 10, people were partying hard. Booze fridges were installed, staff drank until they puked in the office and the Prime Minister was photographed toasting one party with a drink of his own, the Dionysius of Waitrose wine in a box. The report into it all by civil servant Sue Gray was published this week and the UK Govt urged everyone to move on. In fact, if possible, they wanted the moving on to happen so quickly that nobody actually had time to read the long-awaited report. It went from being talked about as the necessary precondition for action to being a historical coda- a full stop on a long-gone time. But even while the menagerie of the maliciously incompetent and the incompetently malicious that Johnson calls his Cabinet urged the public to stop dwelling on the distant past, like 2 years ago, their Tory backbench colleagues were fretting about the future. The window for replacing Johnson as leader opened after the UK local elections were finished and will close approximately 9 months before the next general election. This gives them only a few months to move against him before he is locked in as the face of their hopes of keeping their jobs. And that, more than any finding of police or officials, is the real threat to the remainder of his profitable and ignominious political career. Those Tory MPs know all those families of the dead may relish a chance to see them depart too, unmourned. ### Guns kill children The United States experienced another of its reoccurring nightmares when a school was attacked by a single armed man, leaving infants and teachers dead. The proximate cause of this is a broken electoral system, weighting all states’ representation alike, regardless of population, creating rotten borough-style senators. This has seen one party, representing minority views, block legal protections the majority want- financially incentivised by a gun lobby which has previously been shown to act as an agent of Russian influence. That local, armed, police waited around in a corridor for over an hour, letting the shooter continue to murder children rather than intervene is just a bleak rebuke to the concept of solving gun violence with more guns (or police, for that matter). The bigger problem is that, under the current system, the US can’t find a way to solve this horror show with votes, either. ### The Gist: Exit, Voice and Loyalty URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-exit-voice-and-loyalty/ Last updated: 2022-05-22T17:32:40.000Z *(Normal service on The Gist will be resumed after this last piece on the National Maternity Hospital)* ### The privilege of office By Monday, the Taoiseach had had enough. The National Maternity Hospital decision had been postponed for two weeks to explain its virtues to the public before the Government confirmed its go-ahead. But over that fortnight the Government had found itself losing the room. A poll over the weekend saw FG losing 5% of their support and 60% of the public had declared themselves against it. As usual when governments lose public support, this was presented as a communications problem. The public just didn’t understand why this plan was such a good deal. They had misinformed themselves. They were just opposing it for political purposes. The merits were being debated when they should just be accepted and welcomed. So the Taoiseach decided to use the power of his office. He refused to engage with any of the questions or issues raised, declared them nonsense and said that the [decision was going to happen the next day, with no changes](https://www.rte.ie/news/2022/0514/1297971-national-maternity-hospital/?ref=thegist.ie). And that was that, really. The Government did what the Taoiseach told them the following day. Two Green TDs declined to do what they were told the next day and were stripped of the party whip for six months. I was opposed to the proposed deal. I think the wording is ambivalent, and that a 299 year lease and licence deal can’t afford to be anything but crystal-clear. But you can read about [why and how](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-maternity-hospital-in-brief/) I thought the deal could be [improved](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-not-all-there/) in [earlier Gists](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-maternity-hospital-difficult-birth/). I wanted to reflect with you about the experience of those two weeks and what came after. ### An Expert Eye I wasn’t representing a client or getting paid by anyone as I did this public engagement. As they describe, down at the Bar, working unpaid to try to make things better for everyone, I was acting Pro Bono Publico- for the public good. I am a litigator. That’s both my primary professional experience and my temperament. I read documents with an eye to the weak points. I look for inconsistencies, escape clauses and unlawful elements. And so, when they were released, I stress tested these agreement papers. And, just as a citizen of the republic, I found some howlers in the NMH deal paperwork. Most crucially, the phrase “clinically appropriate” had been inserted at its root without a definition, creating a risk of unexpected or perverse interpretation across the next three centuries. The drafters hadn’t seen that risk because they had been working towards finding a form of words that they could all agree on. The words had been put in at the HSE's request because it was trying to address one of the risks inherent in the absorption of the National Maternity Hospital into the St Vincent's Healthcare Group. And when a group of people are all looking to reach a common outcome, that’s all they come to see over time. Group-think sets in. ### Group-think and its costs The tendency to group-think over time is why adversarial testing is part of cyber-security. People get paid by companies and organisations to attack their security setup, to test it. It’s why [armies run war games](https://podbay.fm/p/pop-up-ideas/e/1359579600?ref=thegist.ie), and why they pay outside think tanks to run more of them for them. It’s why, after the Vietnam war, the US army built a “stovepipe system” where officers outside the usual chain of command could by-pass the layers of officialdom who had been involved in making a decision to deliver the bad news of its real world consequences to the top brass. And, of course, in the world of political decisions, it is why there is a system of legislative scrutiny and review. We forget it sometimes, but the Government doesn’t pass laws- the Oireachtas does that. And that’s because hearing the opinion of “the loyal opposition”, who are outside the group consensus of government, produces stronger, more robust legislation. An institutionalised process that challenges groupthink is why democracies tend to last longer than autocracy. Everyone is fallible, and failure becomes more certain the more closed a decision-making process becomes. But precisely because they have worked so long towards a common goal, people who are engaging in group-think find challenges to their shared beliefs intolerable. When citizens’ arguments fall outside the permitted range of group-think on a topic, but are difficult to deny on their own merits, their legitimacy is attacked based on who’s making them (too old, the wrong sort of expert etc). ### Shooting the Messenger This isn’t a new feature of Irish politics. When, in 2007, UCD Economics Professor Morgan Kelly [warned about an impending property](https://youtu.be/Gd6ZwqLePC0?ref=thegist.ie) crash the then Taoiseach said he didn’t know why citizens like him didn’t [just](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/strong-criticisism-over-suicide-comment-1.948348?ref=thegist.ie) kill themselves. > “*Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don't know how people who engage in that don't commit suicide”* The executives of Anglo-Irish Bank joked with fellow in-group stockbrokers that Professor Kelly should be ‘incinerated’. [‘Incinerate Morgan Kelly’ - the most shocking Anglo tape yetThe UCD economist Morgan Kelly, who alone predicted the sheer scale of Ireland’s economic crash, was the subject of a shocking and searing verbal onslaught by a senior Anglo banker and a leading Dublin stockbroker after he suggested the then government would be better off incinerating the billions…![](https://m.independent.ie/theme/_base/images/07d2193fd511344aa861e734cf912ad7.ico)Independent.ie![](https://www.independent.ie/incoming/77199/30079905.ece/AUTOCROP/w1240h700/app14mor.jpg)](https://m.independent.ie/business/irish/anglo/incinerate-morgan-kelly-the-most-shocking-anglo-tape-yet-30444629.html?ref=thegist.ie) After the crash that Prof Kelly predicted had come, taking Ireland's banks, economy and many citizens with it, a Finnish academic was hired to identify its causes. [He reported](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/nyberg-found-group-think-and-herding-behind-crash-30835704.html?ref=thegist.ie) that "group-think and herding" had gripped Ireland's banks, Government and the Central Bank alike. All the experts had agreed. And because of that, they had all ended up disastrously wrong. Power can be wielded without concern for voters’ views. But, in Ireland, doing it has a price to be paid at the next visit to the ballot box. But, more importantly, when group-think distorts policy making we all pay a price for the blunders that follow. It is because we live in a republic that we have both a duty and a right to speak up when we see those mistakes being made. ### The Three Fates In his book [Exit, Voice and Loyalty ](https://books.google.ie/books?hl=en&lr=&id=vYO6sDvjvcgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=Exit+Voice+loyalty&ots=Y9fPohA8ke&sig=w043m0mkEvd2ctrOHLun6Zf8%5Fgg&redir%5Fesc=y&ref=thegist.ie#v=onepage&q=Exit%20Voice%20loyalty&f=false)the political economist Albert O. Hirschman set out how organisations and states failed. When people see policy mistakes being made they have three choices- they can simply Exit (quit or migrate), give Voice to their concerns to try to fix the problem, or put Loyalty to the existing powers ahead of the good of the whole and defend it, no matter what. "No matter how well a society's basic institutions are devised, failures of some actors to live up to the behavior which is expected of them are bound to ocur, if only for all kinds of accidental reasons... lest the misbehaviour feed on itself and lead to general decay, society must be able to marshal from within itself forces which will make as many of the faltering actors as possible revert to the behavior required." \- Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty Of the three responses Hirschman identified, only valuing people giving Voice to their concerns can ever make things better for the whole. Rewarding Loyalty over speaking hard truths is the surest way to destroy a country or organisation, as its denial of the existence of problems means they can never be addressed. Ireland has a sorry history of trying to stifle challenging voices and rewarding loyalty. ### Hoping for Error For the rest of my days I will ardently hope to be proved wrong about my concerns with the National Maternity Hospital. Over and over again, day after day, everyone who warned about this plan will wish to be shown up to be wrong. Anything else would be monstrous, given what it would mean to be proven right. But, avoidably, I will also fear that one day this plan's critics might turn out to be right. And what a bitter legacy that will be for those who spent these weeks demanding Loyalty to the conventional wisdom. ### The Gist: The Maternity Hospital, in brief URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-maternity-hospital-in-brief/ Last updated: 2022-05-18T18:35:46.000Z Seeing as we've been reading through these documents for a few days now, and the Minister for Health is before the Oireachtas Committee, readers may find useful a handy summary of what we've found so far. ### Ownership of the new Maternity Hospital Building The Lease between HSE and St Vincent’s Healthcare Group (SVHG) provides for SVHG to own the Hospital and the Buildings. The First Schedule defines the SVHG premises, which includes > “any buildings erected or to be erected thereon and together with all additions alterations and improvements from time to time thereto or thereon.” The HSE will have a Leasehold interest, but they will never own it outright. The lease includes covenants controlling the use of the property and the NMH company's constitution also provides for the landlord to nominate 3 of its directors. Having briefed the Taoiseach, Minister, journalists and officials that it was untrue and misinformation to say the state wouldn't own the building, the Government has since been on a mission to revolutionise Irish Land Law by asserting that Tenants "[essentially](https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1522207563030274048?s=20&t=LsklMWGRMjXPnqxVSBOLsA&ref=thegist.ie)" own the properties they occupy on a lease. ### The Black Box: 'Clinically appropriate" The Permitted Use the HSE can put the new hospital to is defined in the Lease as > “In relation to the National Maternity Hospital Area as a public hospital primarily for the provision of all **clinically appropriate and legally permissible** healthcare services, including research, by a maternity, gynaecology, obstetrics and neonatal hospital, and a range of related health services in the community and any other public healthcare service or services” That creates a two step test for any use of the hospital. 1) clinically appropriate 2) legally permissible. Number 1 there is undefined and unnecessary. (Also, if I have to type it or say it one more time I may come unmoored.) On [Prime Time](https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2022/0510/1297277-key-questions-about-the-new-national-maternity-hospital/?ref=thegist.ie), Holles Street's legal advisor said that she was originally very pleased at the insertion of the phrase "clinically appropriate" into the agreement document and then that; > We did not foresee that this would be taken and flipped. Ambiguity results in unexpected, unwanted or sometimes perverse-seeming interpretations being placed on the disputed phrases. The Minister has said this phrase was introduced at HSE request. It can therefore be removed without damaging the deal otherwise. It should. If it is not removed, it should be defined by way of a list of controversial procedures which are presented as “including but not limited to” which will answer the complaint that a list might limit further medical developments over time. ### Constitution of New NMH company: The Man with the Golden Share The new company which is going to run the fresh new National Maternity Hospital sets out its Principal Object at Section 3.1 > The principal object for which the Company is established is the promotion of health, in particular by the provision of all clinically appropriate and legally permissible healthcare services, including research, by a maternity, gynaecology, obstetrics and neonatal hospital, and a range of related health services in the community. This means that the company’s officers are bound to only perform activities that meet the 2 step test (sing it with me); 1) clinically appropriate 2) legally permissible. The Minister has a golden share where he can oblige the directors to take actions if they don’t provide any and all ‘legally permissible’ healthcare services. His powers are reassuringly strong sounding when you read them in isolation (as he is wont to do)... ### Except... The Health Minister’s golden share powers are only able to be exercised if they are in compliance with that two step test too. That is because they are part of the Reserved Powers (Section 5 of the NMH Constitution) And all the reserved powers are “exclusively subsidiary and ancillary to the principal object”. > 5.1 “The Company shall, in addition to the powers conferred on it by law, have the following powers (the “Reserved Powers”) which are (i) exclusively subsidiary and ancillary to the principal object and which are to be carried out in furtherance of the principal object” In short, the Minister's Golden Share has been placed too far down in the stacked hierarchy of rights and obligations to be able to overrule a challenge to action based on any future interpretation of the phrase "clinically appropriate" in the Principle Object clause of the new NMH company. ### Costs The rent due to the Landlord (St Vincent's Healthcare Group) is set at €850,000 per year in the lease with a rent review every 10 years for 299 years. That Rent is abated to €10 if the Tenant follows conditions in its use of the Premises. Those Conditions include a requirement that they do not use it for any purpose that doesn’t meet the ‘clinical appropriateness’ test. The rent goes up to the €850,000 if they do. > Lease Section 4 (c) “yearly rent shall be abated to €10 per annum for so long as each of the following conditions are complied with; there is no change to the Permitted Use without the consent of the Landlord;” ### Religious ethos A body can have a religious ethos even if not owned by a religious order. Last night two of the members of the Board of the HSE issued a statement saying > "Boards also influence the culture, values and ethics of the entity they govern and this gives rise to legitimate concerns for us about the potential influence of ethos." St Vincent’s Hospital Group's Board of Directors are bound to follow the company’s constitution. St Vincent's Hospital Group are the Landlords of the new hospital premises and they are the 99% owners of the New NMH company and they nominate 3 of the 9 directors of that company. The St Vincent's Healthcare Group's brand new constitution says that they were "founded by Mary Aikenhead as part of her mission to provide Service to the Poor". They go on to say the company is engaged in a "continuation of the fulfilment of this mission" and goes on to describe its core values as; > Human Dignity: Respect the dignity and uniqueness of each person > Compassion: Accept people as they are, bring empathy and care to all > Justice: Act with integrity which respects the rights of all > Quality: Strive for excellence in all aspects of care > Advocacy: Speak for the voiceless, act with and for them to achieve the appropriate quality of care. ### Basically We can accept the absolute bona fides of everyone involved in this project while also acknowledging that the text of the agreement documents as they currently stand leaves the provision of services open to challenge on the basis that the challengers believe they are not in line with the undefined test of ‘clinically appropriate’. Whoever those challengers may be in future, either outsiders ([a SPUC-style situation](https://www.pila.ie/resources/case-summary-the-society-for-the-protection-of-unb/?ref=thegist.ie)) or future SVHG or New NHM board members, we cannot predict the behaviour of officeholders charged with interpreting ambiguous legal texts for the next 299 years. Nor can we predict what every possible court would decide was the correct interpretation of that phrase over the same timescale. ### A way forward The State should 1) Ask the brand new owners of SVHG to gift or sell us the land. The new owners are not bound by the Vatican rules on disposing of assets which tied the nuns' hands. According to Stephen Donnelly, the request to purchase hasn't been put since Simon Harris was Minister for Health. Well, with independent new owners of St Vincent's Healthcare Group comes a chance for a fresh start. 2) Delete the phrase ‘clinically appropriate’ from the governing clauses in each of the documents. This, by itself, is the most effective, fastest and easiest step which could be taken to ensure the provision of all the healthcare services we expect to see in a modern National Maternity Hospital. It doesn't effect the state's curious suggestion that they need to specify it will be a maternity hospital- that's already dealt with in the text confirming it will provide "healthcare services, including research, by a maternity, gynaecology, obstetrics and neonatal hospital". The whole agreement balances on the interpretation of the phrase "clinically appropriate" by every court and set of St Vincents directors for the next 300 years. Moving forward without removing this ambiguity is a recipe for unending and unpredictable legal traumas, as we saw with the alphabet of pain (X case, C case) following the insertion of the 8th Amendment. 3) If, for reasons unknown and as yet unexplained, the State refuses to remove the 'clinically appropriate' phrase, they should define it with a list of healthcare services people are worried might not continue after the move from Holles Street and preface it by saying that the definition 'includes but is not limited to' that list. This allows for future expansion of services as healthcare evolves without any need to amend the Constitution of the company. If they don't change the plan at all from what they have presented today (and that is currently what they are briefing will be their intention) they may expect that absolute majority of the public who oppose it to make their feelings known, immediately but also at the next election. It won't have passed Government TDs that the failure of Fine Gael's most recent candidate in the Dublin South by-election was in part attributed to his association with the anti-choice Renua party. Appearing to stand against the tide of Repeal - a defining political moment for a great number of people- is not a path to electoral success. Voting through an avoidable legal quagmire is similarly unlikely to prove popular as the consequences unwind between now and the next election. ### The Gist: The Maternity Hospital’s Difficult Birth URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-maternity-hospital-difficult-birth/ Last updated: 2022-05-04T21:30:56.000Z After a busy day urging [active citizens](https://twitter.com/tupp%5Fed/status/1521452291735404544?s=21&t=mwoJpchN%5FrOnH0fn%5FEDp2w&ref=thegist.ie) to call their TDs to register their unhappiness with the plan to transfer ownership and control of a €1bn new National Maternity Hospital, the whole thing ended with the Cabinet getting spooked and telling the Minister for Health to publish his plan and come back in a fortnight. So, instead of holding a victory announcement the Minister presided over a sort of zombie press conference after the Cabinet meeting broke up. All the same guests, but now, instead of praising him for his achievement in getting the deal over the line, they were left trying to argue that everyone should just sit still and do nothing for two weeks. This is unlikely to occur. However the meaningless press conference, carrying on like the afters at a cancelled wedding, was overshadowed by something real. The HSE released the up-until-then secret terms of the deal between the HSE, Holles Street Hospital and St Vincents Hospital Group. Let's take a look at some highlights. ### What they say in the papers We should say, to start, what the [Minister said](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/0503/1295690-national-maternity-hospital/?ref=thegist.ie) we would find in his bushel of paperwork. > "People will be able to see within the Memorandum of Understanding the clinical protections in the NMH and indeed the obligations on the new National Maternity Hospital to provide all services." Will we though? Because a careful reading of the full set of documents reveals something else- A set of powerful hooks left hidden inside the relationships between the parties undermining the controls the Minister so ardently wanted to point to. What follows are notes from an initial reading of the documents the HSE made available last night. They aren't a legal opinion and, as you might imagine from a publication called the Gist, they don't represent the last word on these papers. Nonetheless, it is hopefully helpful. ### Still missing pieces The first thing to say is that the papers released last night represent only part of the documents constituting this deal. They are missing the documents which govern and control the company which the nuns have set up and transferred their shareholding to. Under canon law, this transfer [required the approval of the Vatican](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/vatican-approves-transfer-of-lands-at-st-vincent-s-hospital-site-1.4248390?ref=thegist.ie) and is subject to whatever conditions were set by the Vatican to proceed. The Minister does not appear to know what those rules are, telling the Irish Times > “I guess you’d have to talk to the Vatican about that. We don’t have any such documents." In fact, the state has been kept so in the dark on the matter that Mason, Hayes and Curran, the solicitors working for Holles Street Hospital, have a footnote at page 3 of the Co-Ordination Agreement meekly asking "MHC Note: Can you clarify whether any third party consents/approvals or additional steps are required in advance of the ability of SVHG to grant the Lease." This seems like something of a loose end to leave unresolved when you're bringing a supposedly oven-ready deal to cabinet. The papers released also lack basic elements on their own account- the Operating Licence is missing the Facility Operations Agreement, which is meant to be attached as a Schedule and the Lease is missing the maps and Annexes which would show the parts of the St Vincent's campus the current hospital management would control and which parts would actually be under the control of the new hospital's management. Those maps are also missing from the various option agreements. This last point is particularly interesting in the light of the eye-opening clause of the Lease which commits that a portion of the land and/or the building being leased is still going to be left in control of the nuns' new vehicle. > "“Landlord Area” means that part of the Premises to be constructed by the Tenant for the exclusive use of the Landlord comprising an area of approximately \[ • \] and shown coloured \[ • \] on the plan numbers \[ • \] annexed hereto which area is also defined in the Operating Licence as “SVHG Areas”" We don't know the area of this constant ongoing presence in the Leased property, we don't know what the nature of the buildings that the State (the Tenant here) is promising to build their new landlord and we don't know what it is intended to be used for. These seem like the sort of things one ought to know about before agreeing to a lease with someone. Especially a lease that promises to make this space and its publicly-funded buildings available to their new landlord for the next 299 years. > "The Tenant has agreed to give certain assurances in this Lease to ensure that the Landlord’s use of these areas will always be available to the Landlord." (Section 3.5, Lease) Until we get the full set of papers dealing with this relationship released into the public domain- which includes the Vatican's requirements for the new company which will eventually own the €1bn hospital the state is building for it- we can't assess it in any really complete way. ### What is Appropriate? The Operating Licence, the Co-Ordination Agreement and the 299 year lease are all agreed what services are permitted to be offered at the new hospital; > the provision of all **clinically appropriate** and legally permissible healthcare services. You will remember that the current St Vincent's Hospital says that > "There is no prohibition on any medical procedure, whether elective or emergency, that is **clinically indicated**, including vasectomy or tubal ligation.” However, its own doctors [acknowledge](https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-not-all-there/) that the effect of the restriction to procedures which are clinically indicated is that > tubal ligations are not performed in St Vincents Hospital Why is there an undefined test of 'clinical appropriateness' for legally permissible healthcare services added to every one of these documents? The Minister has responded to that question by deflecting, saying > the Government can therefore give a “rock solid guarantee” that all services will be provided. I certainly don't know what that guarantee is based on. And, without any definition of what the test for clinical appropriateness will look like in any of the documents between the parties, it is certainly more than I could say. ### The Rent is Too Damn High There is a real financial threat to the state if it turns out that it doesn't like how the management of the new NMH (and the holders of 99% of its shares, St Vincents Hospital Group) intepret the meaning of that double test for the provision of services at any point in the next 299 years. The Taoiseach has been highlighting the great value rent of €10 per year offered by the Lease agreement. Except that isn't actually the rent defined in the lease. The Lease defines the Rent as > €850,000 per annum or such revised rent as may be payable in accordance with the provisions of this Lease from time to time. There's a rent review clause that triggers every ten years. Presumably, the rent will go up at some point over the 299 year term of the Lease across 29 rent reivews. The €10 payment the Taoiseach is discussing is actually another mechanism of control by St Vincents over the new NMH. If they ever feel that the State-funded hospital is offering medical procedures that are outside the test of 'clinical appropriateness' they can threaten to revert to the standard rent- from €10 to €850,000 a year in one jump. > "the yearly rent shall be abated to €10 per annum for so long as each of the following conditions are complied with;... (c) there is no change to the Permitted Use without the consent of the Landlord" This is a far cry from "ownership… by any objective analysis" as the [Taoiseach told the Dáil.](https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1521839321388666880?s=20&t=2we8VhtSdICPUBPY%5FR56NQ&ref=thegist.ie) ### Conclusion (and a solution?) Basically, there are two agreements. There is the one the State is willing to make. And there is the one the nuns were willing to make. These two agreements do not overlap. The effort made to date has been to find a combination of words which would conceal this incompatibilty. This might get you through the one-way door of signing documents and getting Cabinet approval. But it just means that the first crisis will shatter the appearance of comity. By the time we know what form that crisis is- whether it comes from the Vatican, from a disagreement on what is clinical appropriate or from a breakdown in the relationship between the various Directors of the new NMH- it will be too late to walk away from this deal. The solution is, surprisingly, contained in an option agreement released along with all the other papers. In it, the nuns' new corporate vehicle agrees, under certain circumstances, to just sell the NMH site at market value to the HSE "free from any encumbrances, mortgages and/or charges." Its exactly what should have happened at the start, and should be taken as the simple answer to all the fumbling explanations why it can't happen now. Its time to cut the Gordian Knot this project has snared itself in. The State and St Vincents have agreed it can be done. Now it just needs the political will to grasp the opportunity to do it. ### The Gist: Meet the New Gist! URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-meet-the-new-gist/ Last updated: 2022-05-01T10:02:45.000Z Things have changed for the Gist this week. Seeing as it only exists because you like to read it, I thought this might be a good moment to do my first ever post on writing a newsletter. This is the Gist’s gist! ### First The Gist exists as two sorts of things. It is an email that arrives in your inbox about once a fortnight about something you have absolutely no advance warning of by a person who plays a potato on the internet. And it is a website, where all those emails live on as sort of archive, building up a history of things the potato has said where you can refer other people to them. This is a model of writing that really appealed to me- it seemed to be built around the idea of writing for a relatively stable audience, instead of trying to come up with combinations of words that the Matrix-like robotic spiders of Google might find appealing to their inhuman SEO brains. So, because I am susceptible to trying new things, I set up the Gist on Mailchimp’s TinyLetter service and sent the first email to approximately 15 people in May 2016\. [Here is it now](https://www.thegist.ie/guards-some-sort-of-eu-water-thing/). A pretty bare-bones sort of an email, with no web address you could share. In fairness, I think claiming it gave even the Gist of its stories pretty generous. I was sending one out every single day too- right before going to bed. My idea was that it might sit every morning in the inbox of the recipients and let them know what the two or three things people would be talking about were. The problem with this is that I actually need sleep. And staying up into the small hours of the morning to identify and then compress the main news points of the day wasn’t really sustainable for me. ### Then So, when Substack appeared, offering to both send out newsletters and also give them a web presence, I thought that was a great idea. I had been doing a daily round-up of the 2020 election campaign (a topic which had the benefit of being both amusing and easily summarised) in the Campaign Gist series. Substack let people forward on the addresses of pieces through social media and the newsletter started to get some more subscribers. Around this time a small event occurred which was surpassingly strange- as I walked from Jervis Street shopping centre to the Millennium Bridge a man stopped me, asking was I Simon McGarr. After the traditional moment of darting my eyes about his person for any legal documents he might have been dispatched to serve, I admitted I was. He then shook me by my hand and said he loved the Gist. I have been writing words for the internet since 2002 - since the days of [Radio Userland blogs](http://radio.userland.com/?ref=thegist.ie). But in twenty years of saying things in pixels, nobody had ever formed an affinity with a site I’d written. People felt like The Gist was for them. I’ve come to feel the same way. Again out of curiosity, I had turned on Substack’s ability to for people to pay for Gist over the Christmas holidays in 2020\. It has 32 paying subscribers now and I am constantly worried for them. Generally, each post is read by between 1000-2000 people and the emails are opened by about 50% of the 849 recipients (or thereabouts, as some may open them without being tracked). So now we come to the next, and I suspect last, big change to the Gist’s home. I have grown less and less happy contributing to a VC-backed content platform as a place to keep The Gist. Substack has very slowly been trying to rebuild the open model of blogging from 2002 as a closed garden (its latest innovation is the equivalent of a webroll, where bloggers used to show a list of the blogs they liked on every page. Now you can do that with Substack, but only with other substacks. Thanks, but no thanks). The [twisting fate of Medium](https://ev.medium.com/medium-editorial-team-update-8679bcb9fe81?ref=thegist.ie), another privately-owned platform for publishing people’s words, shows how insecure contributing your work to a company that then farms it can be. I also was unhappy about some of Substack’s privacy and data protection setup, something I care about as you might imagine. ### Now So this week sees the launch of [TheGist.ie](https://www.thegist.ie/). Like most projects which involve me trying to learn technical things, it is slightly rough around the edges still. But the heart of it is there. I now pay for the hosting and domain name. The archive will last as long as I keep paying and the URLs will stay unrotted. No Management pivot in Silicon Valley can kill the Gist. I’ve used Ghost, a system which has support for newsletters built into its core. It's a welcome relief from the world of plugins and incompatibilities that Wordpress has become. The fees charged by Substack to handle paid subscriptions are now going towards the hosting costs. That seems a more elegant use. So that’s the New Gist- same as the Old Gist, as much as possible. But I wanted to send this out to you all to say thanks for reading these emails and posts for the last few years (and for your feedback here and on twitter when you liked or disagreed with a particular turn of phrase). Traditionally I’d end by promising great new things in the future, but really, if we all just get through our days as things are I think that’s a success at the moment. But today I want to thank you all for your support. Thank you for reading and sharing the Gists over the years. It really is lovely not to write for unknown, anonymous website visitors, but for an audience that, over time, feels a bit like a community. Albeit a community with an interest in the exceeding niche things known as whatever might be in my head on a given day. Thank you. ### The Gist: Healthcare, Not All There URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-not-all-there/ Last updated: 2022-05-01T10:06:37.000Z The nuns have [moved ownership](https://www.rte.ie/news/2022/0428/1294943-st-vincents-shares/?ref=thegist.ie) to their chosen vehicle to control St Vincent's Hospital and the new National Maternity Hospital. This is the first in a series of steps attempting to address a massive problem which the previous government simply denied existed. Had the previous Govt had its way, the nuns would now own and control the National Maternity Hospital, while the state gifted it to them. It was only public, civic minded rejection of that plan that has improved it. But it's still got a key problem left. The problem is, in a way, the most wicked problem of Irish healthcare. It is certainly the root problem of Irish healthcare's relationship with women and infants. I'll let Dr. Boylan, formerly Master of the NMH at Holles Street describe it; > Dr Boylan said "if legally permissible services at the new hospital are subject to a test of clinical appropriateness, women will lose both their autonomy and their unfettered right to access all legally permissible reproductive healthcare, including as I have noted, abortion" The problem is that, as the price of getting something they needed for optics from the nuns, the Government has agreed to subjecting the provision of healthcare in the new National Maternity Hospital to a two step test. 1) Is it legally permissible 2) Does a Doctor agree it is clinically appropriate. Women's rights to legally permissible treatments are now fettered. The quid pro quo for this new limitation on access to medical services was that St Vincent’s Healthcare Group had “undertaken to amend their constitution to remove any reference to a religious ethos or purpose”, as a “priority”. The Government couldn't try to move this scheme without addressing the obvious religiosity problem. They needed plausible deniability. The Board of the HSE approved this new deal and asked the Cabinet to back it. But two board members, Prof Deirdre Madden and Dr Sarah McLoughlin, said they did not feel their outstanding concerns were adequately addressed and they dissented from the decision. They “continued to have concerns regarding legal ownership of the site and building, and the governance and control” of the hospital. [(Source)](https://irishtimes.com/news/politics/proposals-to-ensure-independence-of-national-maternity-hospital-approved-1.4860785?ref=thegist.ie) St Vincent's Hospital, right now, have exactly the same policy the Government says that the new National Maternity Hospital will labour under. [They say ](https://www.thesun.ie/news/934342/st-vincents-hospitals-refusal-to-carry-out-sterilisation-procedures-on-women-sparks-outrage/?ref=thegist.ie) > "There is no prohibition on any medical procedure, whether elective or emergency, that is clinically indicated, including vasectomy or tubal ligation.” There's that phrase again. It has to be 'clinically indicated'. And yet, the effect of this policy is that consultant gynaecologists have to write out to people seeking tubal ligation and ask them not to look for the service in St Vincents as they are 'not performed' there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/2022/04/Screenshot-2022-04-28-at-17.40.58.png) Letter from the Gynaecology Clinic confirming "tubal ligations are not performed" The nuns may be gone, but it appears that the controls they placed on women's access to state funded healthcare are intended to outlast their involvement. The Dept of Health and the then owners of St Vincents healthcare group and the management of the NMH in Holles Street all assured the public there was no risk of religious influence when the original plan become public. That assertion was wrong then. We could see it was wrong. We can see this too. ### The Gist: The In-Between times URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-in-between-times/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:18:05.000Z ### France Typing this, voters are going to the polls in France to choose the direction they want their country to face. The choice is pretty clear, even if a lot of them don’t like either option that much. Either the country re-elects their personally unsympathetic Third-Way centerist avatar as President or the republic is besmirched by choosing an ally of Putin’s Russia to undermine its place in the world. Before we take the outcome of that sort of a choice for granted, we should remember the Brexit referendum. ### Russia In the East of Europe, war continues its bloody, criminal horseride through Ukrainian cities. At the same time, there are the beginnings of whispers that Russia’s army has actually lost this war already. All that remains is to inflict enough carnage and destruction to make a claim of victory in withdrawal plausible. Whether that comes to pass, there’s no question that what happens next will not look like what has gone before in relations between Russia and the rest of Europe, let alone between Russia and its own neighbours. The former superpower is now a client state of China, reliant on access to its markets for natural resources to replace all the commercial doors closed in its face elsewhere around the globe. ### The EU and the Internet Back in the legislative chambers of the EU, we’ve seen a new response this week to some of the destabilising of the public realm triggered by the growth of commercial social media as a dominent communications and information source. The Digital Services Act is getting ready to join the GDPR as the EU law you hear about the most. It hasn’t reached the end of its journey onto the books, but even the text as it stands represents a complete failure of big tech to defend their positions and will challenge some of their main means of turning eyeballs into profit. Big Tech never took EU principles of data protection and privacy seriously. It represented them as thin justifications for protectionism. As a result, it underestimated the energy underpinning the push to bring in legislative provisions giving them voice. It also meant that it never found a lobbying argument which could persuade the majority of parliamentarians or governments. By assuming bad faith and arguing against the relevance of rights at all, the industry ensured that EU officials and elected representatives stopped listening to its positions. ### Ireland and the Internet This new EU law will also open up the prospect of additional regulation of the internet’s contents by government bodies. As we know, Ireland decided not to wait for the EU-wide framework, but to simply strike out on regulating internet content on its own. To do this it cast about for the nearest thing to hand that looked like a regulator and it changed its name. But turning the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland into the Media Commission (incorporating the Online Safety Commissioner) doesn’t actually give it any additional expertise and the terms of the Irish Bill weren’t even drafted to be compatible with the brand new Digital Services Act. Despite the electoral pressures the government parties face to claim to be doing something, we may find that the final form of this ill-considered Bill is cut down to just implementing the sensible bit of EU law (the Audio-Visual Directive) that the rest of the house of dreams was built on. Meanwhile the idea of an Irish-specific legal framework for regulating Europe’s internet content (including regulating private messages between citizens) may end up taking its example from another proud tradition of the technology industry- Vapourware. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/93b370f4-05bd-4d34-89f1-6bf86986c720_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Stories remaking our world URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-stories-remaking-our-world/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:19:35.000Z Newspapers bring you news (and crosswords). TV brings you cross words. Books bring you ideas, and other people’s lives (or, if it’s a book of crosswords, many crosswords). So, as the maelstrom of terrible events churns I tried to think what the Gist could bring you. As my contribution to your diet of words, it might be helpful to try to reflect on stories. ### Tales to make the world turn The world is filled with facts, of course, but people aren’t filing cabinets. People find the accumulation of facts oppressive, not uplifting. They need stories, first, to make sense of the facts they’re told and to create a context for the rest of the facts they encounter to make sense of them in their turn. At the moment we have a bunch of competing stories jostling for attention, each rich with subtext. Some of them are local, some are of global significance. But, to the extent that people believe them, they all matter. ### The Short Tomorrow The overarching story is of the truncated future. Climate change can be minimised. The end is not certain. But the end is certain if we don’t do the familiar list of things needed to avoid it. And, the story goes, we’d sooner die than act. But that isn’t true. People make wrenching, extraordinary changes for their children. Despair is a story told to us by people with the most to lose in an environmental revolution, and it has a real effect. It suppresses hope, without which a new story can’t form. Imagine a world where tobacco companies had convinced the public that it was so hard to give up smoking that everyone might as well just accept cancer. That story has been jolted off its rails by the sudden superimposition of Russia invading Ukraine. Because while power systems were not built to galvanise at the possibility of completely deconstructing the carbonised economy, they are absolutely clear that you act when threatened by war. Russia has invaded Ukraine. And the richest collection of countries in the entire world is right next door and are rapidly rewriting the story of their relationship with the big, unstable autocracy to their immediate east. Russia makes its money from selling climate-damage to the EU. In particular, it sells gas to Germany. And Germany now has the strongest motivation in history to stop using gas. Fast. Fixing climate change has inbuilt commercial opponents. But nations have deeper impulses and power structures then even oil companies can reach. Eliminating Russian gas is now a matter of National security across the EU. And for large, powerful states, no story is as compelling as self preservation in the face of war. ### Rise and fall of giants China has absorbed a story that predicts it will rise to eclipse the United States as the greatest power in the world. The United States has, surprisingly, come to agree with this narrative. China’s story is easy to understand. It had been a victim state (of threats external and internal) for over 100 years before finding a formula which triggered a gush of wealth probably unprecedented in world history for the sheer number of lives lifted up. When this sort of thing happens, whoever is at the wheel at the moment the tide rises is always eager to point to their wisdom as the cause of the improvements. In China’s case, that was the Communist Party. Actual wisdom means not believing in that story too much, for fear of losing sight of what is real. Luck (the Roman’s fortuna, if we want to be classical about it) is still the main cause of spectacular successes on huge canvasses. China is racing to adopt and adapt renewable energy even as it has become the world’s largest carbon emitting nation. Of the world’s top 10 solar manufacturers, 8 are Chinese, one is South Korean and one is American. This is a country which doesn’t intend to succumb to a Short Tomorrow. And then there’s the United States. Absurdly rich, militarily powerful and dominant for a century, it has become mesmerised by a story of decline. What is the Q-Anon, Trump madness if not succumbing to a sense of panic at a perceived loss of position? But even outside the realm of the fever-dream, what does the US see for itself as a future? As the 8-ball says “Outlook not so good”. And yet, nothing is inevitable. The society is brittle, because it is trying to alter its nature while not changing any of the institutions or power systems that were built for the old US. A multi-cultural US, with anything approaching even a commitment to equality of treatment for all its residents, simply can’t be willed into being inside the framework constructed to ensure the eclipsed power structures were never threatened. The birth of the new is being hidden behind the loud and dangerous death of the old. Without a change in the story, both could take each other down. The US is a country built out of shared stories, at risk of being destroyed by them. ### We’re going to need a bigger campfire Stories travel by people communicating with one another. It’s only a voice in your head until you can say it to someone else. It’s in the telling that an idea becomes contagious. But the means of communication is poisoned in many places. The problem is either through control by people so rich their wishes are directly contrary to the wellbeing of the vast majority of their audience or by capture by state propaganda. Sometimes, it isn’t [even propaganda for the state](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/2/germany-bans-german-language-russian-state-broadcaster-rt?ref=thegist.ie) they’re broadcasting in. Is it any surprise that the two major western powers with the most distorted media landscape (US and UK) are the ones with the most grotesque stories distorting their views of themselves and the world? Similarly, state control of media in Russia has millions of that country’s population seeing their army and their government through a glass darkly. The internet, a story all by itself, offers a chance to be consumed by feral stories. Lives have been torn apart by mad and evil narratives that prey on internet users, hiding in the algorithms of giant companies that don’t even imagine they are publishers at all. But it also offers a place to meet more people than most of us see in person a lifetime- people who are mostly trying to make sense of their world. And in doing so, it gives a chance for new, better, stories to emerge. Stories were born by people talking to each other around a fire, facing the light and trying to make sense of the world in the dark at their back. That’s still what they are, though the campfire circle has grown beyond imagining. And the world those words can change is more in need of good stories than ever. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/aa4a08fa-851a-4b45-b6f5-bc1ff05b8ec7_1800x1200.jpeg) ### The Gist: Labour Pains URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-labour-pains/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:20:02.000Z Alan Kelly was not well liked by his fellow TDs. He was not well liked by a significant bloc of voters. We’ve learned this week he wasn’t well liked by many of his back room staff. But he was something different from what had gone before. And when Brendan Howlin quit as Labour Party leader, the party members knew they wanted to try something different. So, they put him in charge. But party members don’t have to work with their choice of leader, unlike the TDs or staff. So, this week, their choice for the face of the party turned up at a hastily announced press announcement to resign. He confessed that he was as shocked as the press to find himself in this position. Almost immediately, the TDs started briefing that the next leader- by acclamation, so as to avoid another vote by the members- would be the party’s newest TD, Ivana Bacik. While there will be a change in tone at the top, this will be Labour’s third leader since the electorate passed judgement on the relish with which they had advanced and defended the cuts of the troika government with FG. It is hard to remember now, but that was a cataclysm for the ‘half’ part of Ireland’s Two and a Half Party system. In one day it went from 37 seats to 7\. To try to get a sense of the impact that had, Alan Kelly had just sold the Party’s HQ building and started renting space instead to make room for growth to come; > “A spokesman for Labour said they had outgrown Ely Place to such an extent that even the largest rooms were not large enough to accommodate meetings.” [Source](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/labour-party-in-move-to-penthouse-in-capital-s-docks-1.2184004?ref=thegist.ie) As it turned out Labour’s Georgian HQ would have had to become a kind of reverse-Tardis, being so much smaller on the inside that it simply couldn’t accommodate seven people in a room. In a way, the comedy statement from the unknown spokesman is telling. It’s a comment from a party which refuses to accept what is happening to it. And that, in the end, is why Labour keeps cycling through leaders without really rebuilding any relationship with all those voters it lost. The party will acknowledge that people are unhappy with it after its last stint in government. But what it has never said- and still won’t- is that the voters are justified in some of their criticisms of how the party behaved in office. The Labour Party’s TDs and Senators still say they did the right thing the last time they had power over people’s lives. And, by extension, when they acknowledge the public’s anger at them, there is always a silent clause- “but the public are wrong”. And the public never fails to hear it. Ironically, more than the actual decisions, it is this stubborn position of both defending their historical actions and also the siege mentality they developed- that those who opposed them were stupid, or sometimes just bad- which holds them back now. Labour’s Ministers enjoyed having power. They identified themselves as powerful people who were making important decisions. And they came to identify the people who were unhappy with those decisions as their enemies. They promoted [policies intended to drive down people’s incomes](https://www.nerinstitute.net/research/internal-devaluation-and-labour-market-trends-during-irelands-economic-crisis?ref=thegist.ie), ran [campaigns against social welfare recipients](https://www.thejournal.ie/social-welfare-fraud-ireland-2179301-Jun2015/?ref=thegist.ie) and they enthusiastically [defended the Irish Water debacle](https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-water-abolition-alan-kelly-2799156-Jun2016/?ref=thegist.ie). After Brendan Howlin took over as leader of a party that could fit in a Citroen C4, he knew that they had to make some sort of contrition statement. This is how he framed it; > “We are rightly proud of the many things we did in office. But we’re also honest enough to recognise that we didn’t get everything right.” When asked to pinpoint what those mistakes were, however, he [didn’t actually admit anything the party](https://www.newstalk.com/news/howlin-labour-promises-ge2020-960041?ref=thegist.ie) had done in Government was wrong. Instead, he said the lesson he’d learned was not to promise anything better. Politics is complicated, but one of the simplest parts of it is how closely the story each party tells about itself matches the story the wider public carries around. The Labour Party is a party that believes it has been wronged by an ungrateful public and that its votes have been taken away unjustly by other parties - some by Sinn Féin, some by the Social Democrats. They’ve turned the weans against us, it wails. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4c1f0b79-66f9-4490-9960-8d455e7a65d3_1029x513.jpeg) Power, said Minister Alan Kelly, was a drug that suited him. The party has never taken the first step on the road to recovery from that destructive high. It has never admitted that it wronged its voters. Until it does, it doesn’t really matter who leads the party. All those people who used to give it their number 1, like me, will just hear the same message. The Labour Party needs voters more than they need it. But who would support a party that still tells you how wrong you were not to love it for working against you at the hardest time of your life? ### The Gist: The Dry Ice of War URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-dry-ice-of-war/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:20:26.000Z The phrase “the Fog of War” is often used to explain the uncertainty around both the events of individual battles and the wider decisions made around those battles. But, in the modern age, that fog has been weaponised. A deliberate effort is made to sway opinion or establish stories of what is happening. This is a deliberate flood of obstruction- The Dry Ice of War. What follows are fragments- observations and statements which it is too early to attempt to string into a coherent argument. Consider them each single beams of light, trying to piece the fog, but recognising it can’t be cleared yet. \*\*\* Russia is an autocracy. So to say Russia, or the Russian government, has invaded a neighbouring country is to say that Putin has decided he will make that happen. \*\*\* There is a war on, and we are being bombarded by propaganda. \*\*\* Russia’s invasion is the most consequential decision that Putin has taken since he took power. It wasn’t done in response to anything happening. It is a war of choice on his part. This makes it a crime, for what that statement is worth, but also suggests that the relevant change has to have come about inside Putin. A number of experts, including some voices from Russia, have expressed surprise at the sharp break with his previous appetite for risk. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/560d062d-2cb3-4da5-8e12-867226cf3414_1024x768.jpeg) \*\*\* Putin has not defined his military aim in public. His indicated end point is a regime change. But unlike an autocracy, toppling a democratic government, or driving it into exile, isn’t the same as changing the power structure of a state. A puppet government imposed by a foreign state without popular legitimacy can only stay in power as long as it can control its population though force. Then it falls. \*\*\* The EU now has the most profound reason to accelerate its move away from fossil fuels. No political force can turn off the wind at sea or stop the sun from shining. That sort of reliability is suddenly going to be worth money. But, because those investments aren’t going to happen overnight, there will be a spike in the demand- and cost- of all the other, currently available energy sources. \*\*\* The success of the Russian invasion has been taken as a given. Their numbers and arms are overwhelming. But ask the United States whether superiority of numbers and arms ensured victory in Iraq. Victory is a politically defined state, not a military one and invading a stable democracy doesn’t have many of those endpoints available for the aggressors. \*\*\* Putin has just lived through the same pandemic as everyone else. Lots of people suffered significant mental stresses during the enforced isolation and restriction of movement. \*\*\* Meeting no support, strongly expressed opposition externally, and signs of domestic rejection of his narrative, Russia’s autocrat has immediately gone to the last item on the escalation menu and started talking about nuclear weapons. This is bad for everyone in the world, but also reveals a lack of contingency plans in Putin’s mind. \*\*\* There have been Putin apologist or client politicians in most EU states for the last 10 years or so. Some may have been bought and paid for, others may be really have considered the enemy of their enemy to be a friend. At this point, it doesn’t matter. A period of de-Kremlinisation is likely. Familiar names will find themselves meeting chill winds. \*\*\* Tanks are frequently a self-defeating political tool. I hope we see that defeat pan out as swiftly as possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/479097be-ff85-4e71-bb6b-92dab1087121_1125x1011.jpeg) ### The Gist: War Talkers URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-war-talkers/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:20:54.000Z #### War Talkers; a spotter’s guide I have no idea what is happening on the eastern border of Ukraine. If I started telling you what I thought was going to happen, you should rightly consider me a spoofer. However, we have all now lived through a few times when military action was taken, and those of us who live in the english speaking world have experienced some of the rhetoric and propaganda which precedes that action, regardless of who the military participants are. Some of the War Talkers to expect; **The Armchair Generals:** Suddenly, men (almost always men) who have previously evidenced only a scant awareness of places outside of their own postcode become overnight experts on the military history and tactics of the potential participants in faraway conflicts. They might opine on the cultural oddities of some of those who will be involved in military action, merrily applying national stereotypes they just read in a tweet as strategic gold. Some of these people are also the sort to become actual generals, and so may be the most dangerous type of War Talkers. **The Whatabouterists:** There are two classes of whatabouterists. There are those who are deliberately engaged in propaganda to promote or excuse the actions of one side and there are those who just love Whataboutery. As they are functionally impossible to distinguish from each other, it’s best just to consider them all as filler material with the effect (and sometimes the intent) of blocking other more constructive discussion from occupying airtime. **The Toy-Boys:** Some people just love military hardware. Probably the greatest military outing for this class of war talker was the first Gulf war, with its videos taken from missiles as they flew into buildings. Suffering from [Janes](https://www.janes.com/?ref=thegist.ie) addiction, the sight of trucks with anti-aircraft guns or jets screaming across the sky is a thrill to them in itself. The matter of the soft, non-mechanical people who tend to get chewed up by those machines seems never to intrude into their enjoyment. And, of course, there is the special Irish class of war talkers, the **Neutrality Bemoaners.** #### In defence of Neutrality For the Irish Neutrality Bemoaner, Ireland’s failure to join in with international military alliances is a stain on the nation’s soul. We are happy to take the benefits of regional peace, they say, but we are not willing to play our part in making it happen. This argument, despite its widespread articulation, seems to fall apart with a simple tug of its connecting strings. To be clear, nobody for a moment thinks- not even the Neutrality Bemoaners- that any offensive capability that Ireland added to a military alliance would make the slightest difference to the outcome of any given clash or deterrent. For them, it is the principle of the thing. If you want to enjoy peace you should spend, fight and have your young men die for it. On the other hand, it is also the case that the existence of non-aligned western democracies (Ireland, Austria, Finland\* etc) allows those small, militarily unthreatening states to play a part in brokering, hosting and sometimes even carefully enforcing peacebuilding and peacebuilding talks and actions. Without honest brokers, how could deals get done? [Oslo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo%5FAccords?ref=thegist.ie) peace accords\*. Nuclear disarmament deals done in [Reykjavík.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk%5FSummit?ref=thegist.ie) Peacekeeping in the Lebanon. Ireland’s Neutrality is not an abdication of the duty to promote security. It is an opportunity that gives certain countries, by dint of historical experience or geographical location, a chance to act for peace far more effectively than any military action their armies could contribute. Bemoaning Neutrality is to conflate militarism with effectiveness and presents peace as something only won through constant threat of overwhelming war. The lasting regional peace that Ireland enjoys is thanks to a western Europe which abandoned that thinking after it devastated its people and nations twice in a century and choose a more lasting model of co-operation with old enemies. If you were designing an Irish foreign policy from scratch now, with the aim of coming up with the most effective way in which a very small stable democracy in a strategic backwater location could contribute to promoting peace, military non-alignment would be a persuasive frontrunner by some distance. Even if it did disappoint the hardware enthusiast community. *Corrections and Howlers: The original text of this piece referred to Norway and Iceland as militarily non-aligned. While Norway acted in an “honest broker” role in the Middle East talks leading to the Oslo Accords, it was a founding member of NATO. And, while Iceland has literally no standing army, it also was a founding NATO member.* *The author regrets the errors and the use of the third person.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f24dc47d-a4bd-4b91-bbcd-c7681603490f_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Gas times URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-gas-times/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:22:59.000Z **Party like it’s 2019** The Irish Government announced it would lift nearly all Covid 19 restrictions at 12 hours notice and the nation \*went bananas\*. It is possible the the entire cost of the pandemic to date to the public coffers may have been made up by the tax collected on slabs of cans hastily purchased on Saturday afternoon. As 50% of all dwellings hosted parties, and 100% of all party people joined in, it was difficult to hear the Taoiseach-over the thunderous playing of WAP-adding that this did not mean the pandemic was over. This was rather akin to a teacher announcing there would be no homework for the week but then trying to shout over the resulting clamour that they want the class to do extra study in their own time. While we will have to wait a few weeks to see what effect these changes will make to already high infection numbers, one thing is certain. If the pent-up excitement of Saturday night continues unabated into the Spring, the new minimum unit pricing on drink may yet see Big Supermarket rival Big Tech for profits. **Trouble, Piped in** Russia has had a hard Covid 19 experience. In addition to the direct impact of the illness on its population’s health (difficult to measure reliably) the collapse in economic activity across the EU caused a collapse in demand and prices for Russian Natural Gas in its main market. As natural gas makes [up 60% of Russia’s exports and about 30% of the country’s GDP](https://warsawinstitute.org/russias-economy-becoming-heavily-dependent-hydrocarbons/?ref=thegist.ie), this was a matter of considerable concern to their government. Authoritarian Governments are rather limited in their toolbox of available responses to unhappy turns of events. As the system doesn’t allow for any acknowledgement of blame or error in the ruling faction, lest it be read as an admission of weakness, all undeniable problems have to be assigned to enemies- internal or external. An already simmering conflict with the country to the East, full of talk of military risk from NATO etc might meet that requirement. But there is an under-reported issue in the background of the troop buildup on the Russian-Ukrainian border. As EU economies have reopened, demand for Russian natural gas has surged, with a consequent rise in income and prices. But that supply has been delivered increasingly through new direct pipelines via Turkey and Germany. As the [Oxford Institute for Energy Studies points out](https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Russian-gas-amid-market-tightness.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), the Russian Gas company’s deal with its Ukrainian equivalent means shipping through the Ukraine has become less attractive. > [“According to the transit deal between Gazprom and Naftogaz of Ukraine signed at the end of 2019, Gazprom agreed that it would pay Naftogaz for transit of 65 Bcm in 2020 and for 40 Bcm each year during 2021-2024.](https://warsawinstitute.org/russias-economy-becoming-heavily-dependent-hydrocarbons/?ref=thegist.ie) > > [These payments do not depend on the actual gas flows via Ukraine, as the deal is essentially ship-or-pay. At the same time, Gazprom launched its new 31.5 Bcm Turk Stream pipeline in January 2020.”](https://warsawinstitute.org/russias-economy-becoming-heavily-dependent-hydrocarbons/?ref=thegist.ie) Note the sudden and sustained drop in Ukrainian transit since Jan 2020. ![IMG_9907.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/5cceec13-074d-4588-8050-e3f4a94c93cb_907x538.jpeg "IMG_9907.jpeg") In short, we may be looking at the consequences of Russia taking steps against its neighbour which it was forced to postpone until it had both an alternative way to keep its gas income flowing, and the EU money returned to pay for the whole adventure. It highlights again that the most effective security measure Europe can take is to radically increase its own solar and renewable power generation. ### The Gist: A light extinguished URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-light-extinguished/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:23:21.000Z Schoolteacher and musician, Ashling Murphy went for a run and was murdered. Nothing else that happened this week matters. The shock of the news coming out gave way to the paroxysm of anguish, of anger, of horror and of loss. Vigils were spontaneously held around the country, and abroad. Ms Murphy’s family, her friends and her community appealed for privacy. She had taught seven year olds. Their parents had to tell those children that their teacher wouldn’t come back. Girls and boys. Every woman in the country felt the weight of her murder- a woman just being herself, present in the world, and then attacked and killed for that. Every man worth their salt was again aware that they didn’t carry the scars of the lifetimes of experiences of past blows to their humanity, their safety and their freedom that every woman does. Ireland has been a misogynistic society for so long that it is as universal as water in the ocean. Both men and women live their whole lives immersed in it. It poisons both, but it kills women. Men kill women. For generations, Ireland has killed women. Ireland can do better. Mostly, women have made it better in my lifetime. Men can do better. Too frequently, they don’t. This week, Ashling Murphy was killed. And no change- not to ourselves, to our country, to our culture- can alter that fact. We grieve for her lost life. Like all mourners, before we can turn to its wider meaning, we have to express we are sorry for her loss, knowing our feelings are only a shadow of others’. We remember Ashling Murphy. \*\*\*\* If you can, please donate to Women’ Aid [womensaid.ie/donate/](http://womensaid.ie/donate?ref=thegist.ie) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/1afea7e2-32c0-4bc3-a44f-6adb520e0971_821x1094.jpeg) ### The Gist: 2021, only moreso? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-2021-only-moreso/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:25:33.000Z We might as well get this out of the way first. #### Covid 19 Look, who knows? What we do know is that the government have taken great pains to learn nothing across two years from either their mistakes or other people’s successes. Regrettably, we also now have the additional problem that the people we’re relying on to make decisions have two years of their own past decisions to justify to themselves and others. So, whether it is antigen tests being called snakeoil, or the inexplicable refusal to accept that an airborne virus requires schools to be fitted with air filters so they can stay open, the errors of the past are now haunting the present. It is possible that someone might try taking actions to make schools safe (because they really must stay open), as opposed to asserting they are safe as an alternative to making them so. But that really would be a new approach. #### Housing A secure place to live is critical for a person’s wellbeing. Without it they won’t have a moment’s peace. Secondarily, they will burn with a deep intention to ensure that the people who have done this to them will pay. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael simply refuse to take any steps which would reduce the value of houses or the rate of rent. As a result, they are converting their estwhile voters into their diehard, rabid opponents. Micheál Martin was quoted in an [interview this week](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/taoiseach-says-sinn-f%C3%A9in-is-in-destructive-opposition-mode-1.4767366?ref=thegist.ie) attempting to make a political issue of Sinn Féin’s silence on the topic of Ukrainian border integrity. This suggests that this may be literally amongst the last topics where FF’s approach comes out in polls ahead of an imagined Sinn Féin government’s. On that basis, it cannot surely be long before the Government starts asserting that SF aren’t sound on the One China question, or that they’re avoiding admitting their position on Neutron Stars. All of which might make the Government parties feel better, but none of which will address the chasm waiting under them on the issue that voters care about- houses, houses, houses. At this stage, it doesn’t really matter what Sinn Féin’s housing strategy is like. What matters is that it isn’t FF’s or FG’s. #### Mother and Baby Homes The Irish State has spent the last few years insisting on the importance of EU law in its dealings with the UK. At the same time, it has been acting as a scofflaw when it comes to respecting its own citizens’ rights under GDPR to their own data. The [collapse of the Department of Social Protection’s PSC card](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/government-backs-down-on-public-services-card-1.4752047?ref=thegist.ie) defence at the end of 2021 suggests that the Attorney General has been delivering some home truths to his clients as to how sustainable that will be. The [subsequent collapse of the defence of the Mother and Baby homes judicial reviews ](https://www.thejournal.ie/mother-and-baby-home-commission-high-court-settlement-5633597-Dec2021/?ref=thegist.ie)taken by survivors against the Commission’s report- an 11th hour surrender by the state after putting up a full defence- suggests that it will take action to be started and followed through before the State can be brought to admit it was wrong. In the meantime, the Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman appears determined to continue to self-conflagrate in the service of his department. Why he does it is a political mystery. #### Big Tech (and Ireland) The Data Protection Commission was being kicked about internationally by the end of 2021\. It has never been properly resourced, but this has become a crisis since the 2018 One-Stop-Shop provisions made it the lead regulator for all the big tech companies you care to mention. This year, we’ll see if the Government are happy with things to continue as they are, or may overhaul the system to add additional, international, Commissioners and allow the DPC to offer something approaching competitive salaries for their staff and legal experts. But there was a second tech story building throughout 2021- the growing [consumption of power by data centres](https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/data-centres-could-use-up-to-31pc-of-power-by2030-study-reveals-40958440.html?ref=thegist.ie), attracted to Ireland by the IDA but providing few enough jobs once they’re built. The Indo summarised a report produced by the Data Centre industry itself; > Irish data centres will account for about 15pc of the country’s total electricity consumption in 2021, according to the report. > > It revealed that on a medium-range projection, data centres will be consuming 24pc of all Ireland’s power availability by 2030. One of the reasons given by Intel for not locating their new €80bn, 10,000 employee factory in Ireland was that they were worried about the reliablity of the power supply. That is a bad trade off for Ireland. #### RTÉ and other animals The Government wanted an expert report on RTÉ. They got it, but it [reportedly included a recommendation to scrap the licence fee and pay RTÉ directly from central government cash.](https://www.independent.ie/business/media/funding-rte-looks-likely-to-remain-a-big-challenge-41046603.html?ref=thegist.ie) This is the glaringly obvious solution and is also political poison. Expect to see this can being kicked further down the road, while RTÉ withers. Of course, there are problems with direct political control of RTÉ’s finances. [I’ve proposed one solution myself.](https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2019/11/12/rte-a-proposal-for-the-funding-issue/?ref=thegist.ie) #### Rotating the Taoiseach Marking the end of Micheál Martin’s term as Taoiseach, and likely his time leading Fianna Fáil too, there is a scheduled swap of the top job due at the end of the year. Expect this to gradually consume all political reporting as the time draws near, and as Martin’s aspirant successors set out the rag and bone shops of their hearts to try to replace him. As the new FF leader will have to try to run from all of the existing Government’s decisions in order to save their party from oblivion, expect Leo Varadkar’s second term to be a brief one. The Gist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and cheer me up no end, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks! ### The Gist: 2021, A look back URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-2021-a-look-back/ Last updated: 2022-01-01T12:47:12.000Z #### Jan 2nd: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: The Worst Lock-In EverThe new year has dawned and never was there greater consensus that everyone was glad to see the back of an old one. And, as its a new year, let’s do a little run around to see what we can expect for early 2021\. Firstly, let’s acknowledge, it gets better. Secondly, there will still be fuck-ups…Read morea year ago · 1 like · Simon McGarr > What’s most galling is that ‘saving money’ by reopening early always ends up costing the state more money because of the severe economic effect of the subsequent lockdown. We get the worst of all worlds, simply because the State’s impulses are to treat economics as if it was book-keeping. #### Jan 5th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Can't spell Pandemic without Panic“We’ve always wanted schools to remain open.” That was Josepha Madigan’s final, weak, response to a series of questions she chose not to answer, at length. The questions, from Philip Boucher-Hayes on RTE Radio’s Today programme, were straightforward- should the schools remain open when the evidence for the safety of schools was based on a tracing system…Read morea year ago · 1 like · Simon McGarr the Government ran a PR campaign attacking its scientific advisors for not seeing the bigger picture when it comes to pandemic containment. > Sometimes the reason why politicians make these decisions, is because we're the ones who can see the bigger picture. It's not just about a virus and statistics around a virus. - [Leo Varadkaar, 6th October 2020](https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/1005/1169652-covid-19/?ref=thegist.ie) The bigger picture now is simply that there is nothing more critical than the virus and statistics around a virus. You might wish that not to be the case. You might really want to go for some drinks, a meal out, or to not have to pay another few months of PUP payments to furloughed staff. But none of those *wants* will change the facts. #### Jan 7th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Any news?There was too much news today so we’re just going to try to sprint past a bunch of it really fast, gathering whatever we can from our peripheral vision. US and them Two major political events happened in the United States today. One will strip major political figures of their power and will hugely empower others. The other was a spectacle, made for TV…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > Trumpism is now a political dead-end, snuffing out every political career it touched. It ended its eponymous proponent’s career. It ended the Georgia Republican candidates’ careers. It has ended Mitch McConnell’s power over the US legislature. > > [Expect](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/national-security-adviser-resigns-trump-protest/index.html?ref=thegist.ie) [lots](https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/georgia-senate-election-results/?ref=thegist.ie#300942) [of](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/stephanie-grisham-white-house-resign/index.html?ref=thegist.ie) [Republicans](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533033-gop-senators-hopeful-theyve-quashed-additional-election-challenges?ref=thegist.ie) to start sprinting away from its rotting corpse and keep going as far as they can, to try to shake the smell off. #### Jan 13th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: A bad confession on Mother & Baby HomesMother and Baby home survivors. That was the topic the State wanted to discuss this week, even as the questions mounted about the fatal consequences of the Government’s decision to depart from medical and scientific advice in suppressing Covid. The Well-Trodden Road…Read morea year ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Simon McGarr > On the Mother and Baby Homes report “The State, if cornered, will sometimes Admit something seems awry. But it doesn’t like the radical transparency and truth-telling of Confessing. Its reports become evasions, like a three thousand page ellipse, marking where the absent truths should be. Then it plans for sealing and deleting records that might let people find the truth for themselves. > > This is all with the aim of avoiding Penance- to compensate those the State wronged, at the full value of the harms done to them.” #### Jan 17th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Drop the Dead DonkeyThe Mother and Baby Home Commission of Inquiry spent six years and €11 million or so euro compiling a report which, like Dracula when the blinds are pulled back, has crumbled to ash the moment it was exposed to sunlight. The report did ensure that a stack of documents were dug up and it will be valuable midden for future researchers to mine. But as to i…Read morea year ago · 3 likes · Simon McGarr > Senator Regina Doherty kicked off the new position, [calling it ‘cold’ and ‘callous’](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40208657.html?ref=thegist.ie) and backpeddaling on the now-failed Plan A of accepting the report. > > “we accepted the report and I think that's wrong” > > … Nobody who doesn’t hold the title of Bishop is going to stand behind this Commission report now, and its members can look forward to an unfamiliar experience of being asked to account for their choices as the last leg of their participation in this public issue. #### Jan 24th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Seeing DoubleAmerica, in stereo The birds, now keenly watched by a housebound and event-starved populous, seemed to sing a little sweeter this week with the departure of human migraine Donald Trump from the US Presidency and his timely replacement by the personification of two aspirin and a short nap, Joe Biden…Read morea year ago · 3 likes · Simon McGarr > The US is often described as a divided nation. But it might be more useful to think of it as simply two different countries which happen to share the same location. They are superimposed on each other, each imperceptible to the other on a day to day basis. The two populations have different broadcasters, entertainments, authors, leisure activities, school curricula, religious expression and career paths. > > …One country is more populous, richer, has a much better educated citizenry and is preferred by foreign allies. The other country is increasingly authoritarian, riddled with disinformation, has a standing army of ill-controlled militia and cannot win in a fair head to head electoral contest. > > If we were to hear about a developing conflict between two nations described so we might expect trouble ahead. #### Jan 28th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Musings for AirportsIn May 2020, expert group NPHET sent its advice to the Government; “a mandatory regime of self-isolation for 14 days at a designated facility for all persons arriving into Ireland from overseas (with limited exemptions to include supply chain workers and those in transit to other jurisdictions, such as Northern Ireland…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > We’re looking at the impact of system exhaustion. Border controls and hotel quarantine are a genuinely difficult administrative system to introduce. And the existing system has been operating at full stretch for nearly a year now. The actual people who would have to turn a policy into reality just have not been able to countenance that they will have to bike up another mountain when they’re still halfway up the first one, their thighs screaming. #### Feb 5th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Picking Up The PiecesTales of Two Congresswomen A violent mob storms the Capitol building at the losing President’s instigation and roams the halls looking to kill senior members of the incoming government party. It’s a pretty big story. This week saw two women dealing with the fallout from that event in public…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > The following day, the Minister for Health came back and explained what he’d said was right, but also this other thing that was different to it was right too. This had the reassuring quality that you would expect on the electorate. #### Feb 16th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Public Service Broadcasting, the red herring editionThe world is continuing on much as before, but moreso, so it might be worth paying a small moment’s attention to a thing that is never quite topical but is still significant all the same- What on earth is Public Service Broadcasting and why should we care about it…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > If you’ve ever wondered why the RTÉ Player was an unwatchable train crash, while every other channel, from TG4 to Channel 4, could deliver a streaming platform without the angst, consider [this observation by RTÉ’s Director General](https://www.thejournal.ie/tv-licence-fee-evasion-rates-4883009-Nov2019/?ref=thegist.ie) > > RTÉ says that “11% (and growing) of households” don’t pay the TV licence because they don’t have a television, but can still watch RTÉ programmes on the RTÉ Player. > > “This means a further loss of €20 million in public funding annually,” it said. > > The better the RTÉ Player is, the fewer TV Licence fees RTÉ fears it will get. #### Feb 22nd ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Demanding AttentionThe Irish Government continued to start new Covid communications conflagrations into which to throw a tired nation’s goodwill, while questions piled up, unanswered on the doorstep of the Mother & Baby Homes commission, not least from the Minister for Children…Read morea year ago · Simon McGarr > the Australian Government proposed a binding arbitration panel that would assign values that ‘should’ be paid to the old media by the new platforms and then enforce those values as debts, under pain of millions of dollars of fines. > > The problem with this is that G&F don’t rely on ‘news’ to make their money. As Facebook swiftly demonstrated by blithely cutting Australian news sources (and a lot of other things too) out of its platform as a response. Old media sold its stories to readers (or viewers), so that readers could be sold to advertisers. But Facebook is full of little economic units who are making their own stories- pictures of their grandkids, walks in the wood, tales of their day. News is less than 4% of Facebook’s feed content. > > Which leaves the same problem the Aussies tried to solve still in play- the output of trustworthy media has never been so socially valuable. But if they don’t understand the way Internet platforms work, they can mistake that *social* value for a commercial value it just doesn’t have to those platforms. #### Feb 28th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Far-left Riots And Other Tall TalesGrafton Barbarism Fascism loves violence. It draws its power from involving and implicating increasing numbers of people in the transgression of violence, which they then struggle to justify to themselves and each other rather than reverse course. To that end, it chases the heat of public disquiet- emphasising division, amplifying distress and then goadin…Read morea year ago · 4 likes · Simon McGarr On fascism’s tactics for gathering support: > once fascism has gathered enough adherents it will use them to commit acts of violence. Remember, very many of those adherents would recoil at the thought they were fascists. ‘I am solely motivated in ensuring a high-quality reliable train network’, they would explain, ‘and have never been as interested in the genocide side of our party platform.’ > > The problem for society at large is that, once people are adhered to a fascist platform- whatever the reason that was originally used to draw them in- they will continue to justify that past decision by rejecting any evidence that they were wrong as false. On Drew Harris’ quickly withdrawn claim that police had been attacked by ‘far left and far right’: > the Irish Garda Commissioner’s career background in Northern Ireland leaves him seeing political divisions as zero-sum games. In policing them he instinctively balances everything between two extreme poles. Any blame for one is reflexively accompanied by blame for the other, for balance, in case he be accused of supporting one side over the other. > > But this is a reflex born of Northern Ireland’s particular political circumstances. It doesn’t map onto the difficulties of policing a radicalised right. #### Mar 13th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: FF, the Coalition's Biggest Small PartyIt’s the single most consistent factor in Irish coalition politics. If you join a coalition as the small party, you risk anything from brand damage to full-scale electoral wipeout. Even the PDs, in the end, couldn’t save themselves from the fate of the littlest co-bo…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > Without a clear sense of social aims beyond an aspiration at technocratic competence, FF can’t loom large in the national imagination. But if they plump for that one clear reactionary path their TD’s find so attractive, they’ll shrink even further. > > Which means Fianna Fáil may have to get used to a future of coalitions as the smaller party in more ways than one. #### Mar 27th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Autistic children and other enemies of the StateThe notification chimed at 9am on Friday morning. “Department of Health built secret dossiers on children with autism” And with that began the latest, worstest sorry tale yet of our scofflaw state’s abuse of citizens’ data. The children’s families had sued in their name to get the state to follow its statutory duty to give them an education. The Departmen…Read morea year ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · Simon McGarr Re Autistic Children and other enemies of the State > The department said that, under data protection legislation, it was entitled to share and store information for the purposes of getting legal advice or to defend court proceedings. > > This is a reference to Section 8(f) of the 1988 Data Protection Act. > > Except, 1. That’s not what the section allows and; 2. That Act was repealed when the GDPR replaced it and'; 3. It doesn’t matter what’s in our national laws if it breaks the EU law above it. #### Apr 10th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: FF hits rock bottom“There needs to be a conversation”. As anyone whose boss has popped their head around the door and said this to them will tell you, this is never a happy statement to have delivered to your face. But, for the Taoiseach to hear it from one of his previously loyal supportive TDs, it must have sounded like a tolling bell…Read morea year ago · 3 likes · Simon McGarr > No Fianna Fáil grandee or would-be leader has advanced a compelling explanation of what the party is meant to be for now. The [closest we’ve heard](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-40258550.html?ref=thegist.ie) is that it is The Centre Party- the party for people who don’t like their porridge too hot in Sinn Féin or too cold in Fine Gael. > > The appeal of the Tepid Porridge Party has not yet triggered the frenzy of public excitement its proposers seem to have expected. #### May 8th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: A Cold House for VotersIt was a busy week for the Government. As the Covid situation rattles forward on the rails laid down earlier in the month it was time to talk about all the other things that are annoying the voters. Specifically, it was Housing Week! And, like everything to do with its housing policy, the experience did not leave the public (or Government parties) feelin…Read morea year ago · 6 likes · Simon McGarr > Like the legendary Roc, the Minister has sat upon his nest, labouring mightily for a year to lay this week’s egg of a housing Bill. But instead of hatching into a plume of praise, the news that an international investment company had bought up a whole estate of homes in Kildare saw the government’s policy immediately tumble from its nest and be dashed on its own TDs terror. #### May 18th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Attack of the Cyber-MenLife in a pandemic is a funny old bit of business. Vaccines become household names, with their own national fandoms. The act of looking at things you don’t need in shops becomes an obscure object of desire. Academics and doctors assume the role of national figures…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > the post of [Director of the National Cyber Security Centre](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/cyber-security-role-is-vacant-because-of-low-salary-td-says-1.4566803?ref=thegist.ie) was so modestly funded that the position had lain vacant for months due to the uncompetitive salary. > > Given that Ireland might have expected to attract unwelcome levels of attention from state actors thanks to its election to [membership of the UN Security Council](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/simon-coveney-the-un-security-council-is-being-tested-1.4566646?ref=thegist.ie), coupled with the general criminal honeypot of increasingly centralised systems running on well-advertised old software it might seem that cheeseparing the salary of the person intended to keep us secure might not have been the best idea. > > But, regrettably, it is all of a piece with the funding priorities of a government which spends more on subsidising Greyhound Racing than on the most significant data protection regulator in Europe. #### May 29th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: How Did I Get HereThere is a moment, late in the evening when the Sun has gone down but the world hasn’t quite gone dark. The deeds of the day are done, but we don’t yet need to start on the next. That’s the time to take a breath and reflect. The Jabs keep going into people’s arms, racing the threatened vaccine-busting mutations that need unvaccinated hosts to develop…Read morea year ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > Ireland’s institutional thinking resulted in a fatal blind spot. But the UK’s administrative culture examined the range of options and decided in advance on the mass death of its citizens. > > A survey of Irish people released last week reported that only 12% of Irish people would trust the current UK Government. Given what we’ve learned, the only wonder was how high that figure remains. #### Jun 12th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Survivors refuse to stay on MuteThe Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman started off looking like he might have a quiet fortnight. By the end of the first week, he found himself on air arguing that he might have to withhold redress from Mother & Baby Home survivors…Read more10 months ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > At the same time that Prof. Daly was giving her talk to Oxford University’s blessed few, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth was issuing its first, belated responses to survivors’ data access requests for their records. > > It did not go well. Redactions continued to bedivill the releases of survivors’ access to the records of their own lives. However, there was one astonishingly obtuse bloc of refusals. Health records- particularly critical for survivors who may have been used as test subjects as infants as part of vaccine trials- were simply not released. The Department sent a letter citing an unspecified regulation in a statutory instrument from 1989 which, they said, obliged them to give the records to a doctor and not directly to the survivor. > > This was both mind-bogglingly patronising and paternalistic, but also ([as I set out in this sample letter available to anyone who got this reply)](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2021/06/11/sample-letter-in-response-to-dept-of-children-refusal-to-provide-health-data-in-response-to-mother-and-baby-home-survivor-data-subject-access-request/?ref=thegist.ie) completely at odds with the Minister and the Department’s obligations under EU law to give survivors access to their records. #### Jun 21st ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Whose National Maternity Hospital?A shudder ran through the week, like the return of a familiar bad dream. The Government want to build a new National Maternity Hospital, the current one being too small and too old. They have a problem, however. The last Government (which, Greens excepted, the same parties either supported or led) allowed a mad deal to be done with the nuns who own St Vi…Read more10 months ago · 4 likes · Simon McGarr > Things took a turn for the institutional after the [Department of Health told politicians they’d tried to buy the land](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/state-tried-but-failed-to-buy-site-of-new-national-maternity-hospital-1.4596648?ref=thegist.ie) but [then the nuns said nobody had ever asked them about purchase](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/government-to-renew-effort-to-purchase-national-maternity-hospital-site-1.4598760?ref=thegist.ie). > > The Dept then couldn’t put their hands on any evidence of this effort, beyond- apparently- reading a declaration from St Vincent’s that they wouldn’t sell. > > This approach to making wishes come true will be familiar to anyone who has tried to lose weight by just thinking about losing weight but then not done anything about it. And, predictably, both approaches have demonstrated an equal degree of success in achieving their aim. #### Jul 10th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Reading the Bay LeavesThe Result: Ivana Bacik (Lab) enters the Dáil. But let’s take a moment to look at what the campaign can tell us about some of Ireland’s political parties. Fine Gael The most striking thing about Fine Gael is that, despite the electoral success the party inherited from Enda Kenny, they have absolutely no idea what a political campaign is. They just don’t g…Read more10 months ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr > Fine Gael wants to make every election about the thing FG wants it to be about. Last time, they wanted an election about Brexit. Nobody cared about Brexit- the voters cared about housing. But for FG that didn’t matter. Brexit was what they wanted the election to be about and they didn’t see why everyone else didn’t just get with the programme. Anyone who has found themselves being talked at by a 7 year old boy with an enthusiasm for dinosaurs or Pokémon will recognise this conversational gambit. > > This time, they wanted to run a campaign about the menace of Sinn Féin. It didn’t matter that the chance of Sinn Féin winning a single seat election in Dublin Bay South was so slim FG might as well have built their campaign around repelling a Dalek invasion. > > For FG, a campaign is like a game of squash where they continuously smash their chosen messages against the uncaring wall of the electorate. #### Jul 24th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Grabbing a Quick Byte / The Once and Future PDsPints Policy The question of getting people into pubs again has taken on totemic importance as the pandemic has ground on. Hospitality, as an industry, has never been shy about making its political voice heard. So, when, at the end of June, the Government postponed reopening, it was the…Read more9 months ago · 1 like · Simon McGarr > The PDs were the model for the ending of the Civil War split by identifying a set of policies- economically right wing, but uninterested in the restrictions of the Catholic Church on personal freedom- that a large bloc of the supporters of FF and FG felt good about. > > For much of his time as party leader, the PDs were in power. Indeed, that power lasted long after the initial surge of electoral support had ebbed, as they remained in Government as ideologically influential coalition party members. > > But their power also came from speaking for the interests of a class (rich people) who themselves wield power in society and could amplify their ideas, turning them into assertions of political common sense. #### Aug 5th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Fifty 1 Hour Party PeopleIt would probably all have just blown over. Katherine Zappone had been nominated for a freshly minted position as a part time Irish representative for Human Rights and that hadn’t been exactly adroitly handled. FG forgot to mention it to the Taoiseach or the other party leader fella they’re in government with before Cabinet. But the Cabinet, in their co…Read more9 months ago · 2 likes · Simon McGarr On Katherine Zappone’s Fifty 1-hour party people: > There was never a 5k limit for travel, it was just advice. There was never a legal requirement for older people to cocoon. It was just advice. And, as we can see, right now, Organised events are not forbidden. The problem is that for the past year, the Government has consistently relied on health advice to the public and to businesses to shape what the social norms should be- not on the legislation. > > It may be that after this week’s events, the government’s ability to advance public health advice which goes beyond what it can legislate for has ended. #### Aug 19th On the IPCC report on Climate Change > This is a problem for those of us planning to stay living on Earth for the next few decades and hoping not to have to hand it to the current generation of children like a box marked Fragile that rattles distressingly when you move it. > > As with the Cold War, the institutional requirements of the society we live within mean we continue to hesitate to take the steps needed to mitigate (there is no longer a reverse option) the worse consequences of climate change to come. We can change them collectively, as the Cold War stand-off was suddenly changed by the collapse of the USSR. But we can’t do it fast enough without a radical alteration of the underlying assumptions of the society we’ve inherited. On regime change in Afghanistan; > Certainly Ireland knows all about the long-lasting troubles of fusing an armed overthrow of a foreign-backed government with an oppressive theocratic ideology that represents itself as the only natural expression of the nation’s true soul. #### Sep 5th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: The Roof Over Our HeadThe beginning of September is a liminal time of the year. School terms restart. Political and court terms likewise start to think about what will happen next. But this year, this anticipatory element has an extra sharpness. The world has been on an extended sabbatical from business as usual thanks to Covid lockdowns and close downs. The political system…Read more8 months ago · 5 likes · Simon McGarr > The Government’s problem with dealing with unattainable housing and even more unaffordable rents is that the institutions of the state have been stymied by the requirement to meet two aims- to protect the asset value of property owners and to allow people to find somewhere they can afford to live. > > It is anathema to the government parties to ever try to cause a drop in house prices- or rent. And that is why our current policy machinery had failed to solve this social crisis for over a decade. It is also why we can expect to have no more to show from Housing for All than we got from Rebuilding Ireland. > > There is a clash of short to medium term interests between those with property and those who need places to live securely. Helping one is contrary to the (short to medium term) interests of the other. Our state (more than most) has been designed and been run by the former since its creation. #### Oct 10th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Made of MoneyThis week, the Budget has been the talk of… well, not of the town, because that would suggest that the general public is discussing a financial planning exercise of deliberate opacity. Like every year, however, it’s been the talk of every vested interest and their lobbying group. Which, given that paid lobby groups are a substantial source of press rele…Read more7 months ago · 4 likes · Simon McGarr > Fianna Fáil just wanted to get back into Government. In years gone by, they never needed to worry about what they’d do when they got there. The Civil Service ensured a continuity of political policy and the patronage powers of the state delivered for the party. Now that it no longer functions as a patronage machine, its elected members are becoming ghosts at their own Cabinet table, looked through instead of at. > > For example, ask yourself What will the Department of Education do because Norma Foley is their Minister that they wouldn’t do if left entirely without any Minister at all? If the only answer is ‘do up more primary schools in the Minister’s constituency’, you’ve already recognised FF’s problem. #### Oct 23rd ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Political EntropyThe 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says “spontaneous change in a closed system always proceeds in a direction that increases randomness or disorder.” Or, as Yeats put it, “Things fall apart.” And yet in political circles there is a powerful presumption that politics works in the opposite direction- that, over time, the arc of history bends towards justice (o…Read more6 months ago · 3 likes · Simon McGarr > Today’s Sunday Business Post [publishes a Red C poll that sees each of the three](https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1452004911407902726?s=21&ref=thegist.ie) being lapped by their main rivals. FF by FG. FG by SF and even the Labour Party slipping behind the recently-constructed-in-flight Social Democrats. > > The Irish state is going through its decade of centenaries, with the final 100 year markings of the state’s foundations yet to come. 100 years is a long time for any organisation to endure, and for good reason- it’s just hard to attract talent for multiple generations when you’ve become the status quo. #### Nov 7th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Facebook goes MetaRumours of a rebrand of the entire Facebook enterprise appeared only a week earlier. Then the announcement came. Facebook, the company, was no longer going to refer to itself as Facebook. It was now Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, the Sun King of the Palace of Menlo Park, appeared in a series of hallucinatory video segments to explain that this was part of the c…Read more6 months ago · 1 like · Simon McGarr > But as long as people continue to get their information about the world outside their home from Facebook’s properties, Facebook cannot escape the political consequences of its actions. And those problems are not restricted to the US. Let us not forget that Facebook’s European headquarters sits on Misery Hill (no, really). > > So we come back to their change of name this week. If Facebook can’t escape what it is, it will try to do something else. It will try and escape being Facebook. #### Nov 21st ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: A Round UpSave the Children, unless it is inconvenient The Data Protection Commission of Ireland is an unusual beast. A government entity of a small country, whose funding only just exceeds the state subsidy to the Irish Greyhound Board, which has the job of regulating the largest and most powerful companies in tech…Read more5 months ago · Simon McGarr The Government’s 2021 plans were not complicated. > 1\. Get adults vaccinated. > > 2\. Keep children going to school > > 3\. Reopen the economy and stop [paying the PUP](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/another-25-000-people-came-off-pup-or-live-register-in-october-1.4720437?ref=thegist.ie) The problem has come now that they have actually achieved each of these stages and the result is widespread infection. They didn’t have another plan, and the first plan was simply too simple. It wasn’t going to work without the mitigations that would have cost money and stretched the imaginations of the authorities. They were unwilling to do either. #### Dec 6th ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88d4ee47-ceae-4e38-8af0-c635407c1f19_256x256.png) The GistThe Gist: Ireland under InvestigationA bit of a Gist exclusive story this week; the European Commission opened an investigation into the Government’s refusal to give Mother and Baby Home survivors GDPR rights of access to their health records. It wrote to the Government, raising the issue on foot of a complaint by one survivor. The complaint and investigation were triggered when the Minist…Read more5 months ago · 1 like · Simon McGarr > The European Commission opened an investigation into the Government’s refusal to give Mother and Baby Home survivors GDPR rights of access to their health records. It wrote to the Government, raising the issue on foot of a complaint by one survivor. The complaint and investigation were triggered when the Minister for Children refused to set aside a piece of 1989 domestic law in order to give effect to the GDPR, as he is obliged to do. > > Furthermore, the new Heads of Bill for the Government’s much heralded Birth Information and Tracing Bill have also been submitted for investigation, as they provide for a fresh statement of the same restriction as the 1989 law. > > … > > For survivors, a right that everyone seems to acknowledge they have—to access their medical data under the GDPR—continues to be blocked. ### The Gist: Ireland under Investigation URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ireland-under-investigation/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:27:12.000Z A bit of a Gist exclusive story this week; the European Commission opened an investigation into the Government’s refusal to give Mother and Baby Home survivors GDPR rights of access to their health records. It wrote to the Government, raising the issue on foot of a complaint by one survivor. The complaint and investigation were triggered when the Minister for Children refused to set aside a piece of 1989 domestic law in order to give effect to the GDPR, as he is obliged to do. Furthermore, the new Heads of Bill for the Government’s much heralded Birth Information and Tracing Bill have also been submitted for investigation, as they provide for a fresh statement of the same restriction as the 1989 law. That’s the headline. Now let’s explain how we got here. When the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation (Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters) was published the Government was mindful of the firestorm it had met in November 2020\. Back then, the Minister for Children et al, had whipped the three government parties TDs to support his proposal to seal the Commission’s records for thirty years, in the teeth of public outrage. Then, the following week the [AG told Cabinet](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/roderic-o-gorman-s-first-direct-contact-with-ag-was-in-october-1.4399352?ref=thegist.ie) that he hadn’t given the advice the Minister had relied on in his arguments against the application of the GDPR, and the whole effort fell apart to the great unhappiness to those same TDs who found they’d been sent out defending the indefensible. So, on the report’s publication in January 2021, access to records was a hot topic. As part of their statement greeting the report, the Government [promised](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/4f64f-government-statement-on-the-final-report-of-the-commission-of-investigation-mother-and-baby-homes-and-certain-related-matters/?ref=thegist.ie); > “We will ensure that people can access personal information contained within the Commission’s records in line with GDPR.” You will be unsurprised to hear that [this has not, to date, happened](https://www.thejournal.ie/mother-and-baby-home-survivors-health-records-5549391-Sep2021/?ref=thegist.ie). In fact, the Government completely refused to provide survivors with direct access to their medical records, in particular, citing a Statutory Instrument from 1989. Wearing my solicitor hat I wrote in June 2021, representing a Mother and Baby Home survivor, to the Minister to explain why the GDPR, a later and superior law, meant that he had a legal obligation to simply ignore, or disapply, that blocking legislation and provide survivors with their records. You can read the [detail of that argument here](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2021/06/11/sample-letter-in-response-to-dept-of-children-refusal-to-provide-health-data-in-response-to-mother-and-baby-home-survivor-data-subject-access-request/?ref=thegist.ie). It was pretty comprehensive (for this you may read; long) and the Department didn’t try to engage with it, other than simply repeating its previous position. Here’s the Court of Justice of the EU setting out the principles that apply when domestic law contradicts EU law in a recent decision of [WRC v The Minister for Justice;](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=954376A136978D657C3DFE22C03404B6?text=&docid=208381&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=5548258&ref=thegist.ie) > “bodies called upon, within the exercise of their respective powers, to apply EU law are obliged to adopt all the measures necessary to ensure that EU law is fully effective, disapplying if need be any national provisions or national case-law that are contrary to EU law. This means that those bodies, in order to ensure that EU law is fully effective, must neither request nor await the prior setting aside of such a provision or such case-law by legislative or other constitutional means.” In June 2021, the Minister for Children wrote to the Minister for Justice. He acknowledged “the broad reach of the Regulations imposes a significant restriction on the fundamental right of access of data subjects to personal information about themselves”. He then continued, seeking to do the very thing the CJEU has said a data controller must not do. He made a request and awaited ‘the prior setting aside of such a provision… by legislative or other constitutional means’. > I would be most grateful for an urgent review of the Regulations and Section 68 of the 2018 \[Data Protection\] Act When the Minister for Justice wrote back to him, she declined to solve his problem, pointing out that all Ministers of Government have the power to pass Regulations. It then became clear that, unlike the Little Red Hen, the Minister for Children is not a man given to deciding to ‘do it all myself’. In response, he again decided that Somebody Else should do this, and contacted the Minister for Health about drafting new laws. Because, just now, what else might the Department of Health have to do with itself? Meanwhile, also in June 2021, the Data Protection Commission wrote to the Minister’s officials, joining the chorus pointing out that his Department wasn’t following the GDPR. > “Concerning SI 82/1989, I have had reason to re‐examine the Department’s approach to dealing with SARs pertaining to health data and I am of the view that **the manner in which the Department is handling such requests is not appropriate to the circumstances.** While section 68 of the Data Protection Act saved SI 82/89, it did so in the expectation that new regulations would be made under section 60 of the Act which would take account of the requirements of Article 23 GDPR. Furthermore, it cannot be the case that the considerations in play in 1989 would have foreseen the specifics of the current situation or that the SI was intended to apply to a scenario such as the Department is now dealing with” (emphasis added) But, by September, there had still been no action by the Minister for Children or his Department to actually apply the GDPR and give survivors direct access to their medical records. So, on behalf of a client, on the 17th September my office reported Ireland for this ongoing breach of EU law to the European Commission. On the 10th November 2021 the Commission wrote back, confirming it had opened an investigation on foot of that complaint and that it had written to the Department; > “We wrote to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth as part of the investigation of this complaint. They informed us that the Minister for Health is progressing new Regulations concerning access to health data as a matter of priority and that officials from the Department of Children are also liaising with the Department of Health on this issue. The Department have informed us that the new Regulations intend to take into account of the requirements of the GDPR, and the issue of mandatory consultation with a health practitioner will be given further consideration. They stated that it is anticipated that the new Regulations will be in place by the end of the year.” In response, I pointed out that the Minister had not accepted that the requirement for a mandatory consultation with a health practitioner would be changed, but merely that it would be given ‘further consideration’. I then supplied the Commission with a copy of the new Legislative Heads for the same Minister’s proposed Birth Information and Tracing Bill, drawing their attention to Section 10(2), which repeats and continues the same block on direct access, and maintains the same requirement from the 1989 SI, that survivors’ medical records would be sent to doctors, not to them directly. We’re awaiting their reply, but it appears as though Ireland remains under investigation. And, for survivors, a right that everyone seems to acknowledge they have—to access their medical data under the GDPR—continues to be blocked. The Gist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and cheer me up no end, consider becoming subscriber. ![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/2fb75e35-22e6-484a-95c5-6660f4a88860_588x662.png) ![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/2d624fcc-9721-4157-9797-5de8f6be8d7f.jpeg) ### The Gist: A Round Up URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-round-up/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:28:13.000Z ### Save the Children, unless it is inconvenient The Data Protection Commission of Ireland is an unusual beast. A government entity of a small country, whose funding only just exceeds the state subsidy to the Irish Greyhound Board, which has the job of regulating the largest and most powerful companies in tech. A few months ago, it issued a draft document for comment on ensuring the rights of children were protected in the online world. It set out fourteen uncontroversial principles for the F[undamentals for a Child-Oriented Approach to Data Processing](https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/dpc-guidance/blogs/the-children-fundamentals?ref=thegist.ie). This week, [it issued the paper giving the results of that consultation process](https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/consultations/children-front-and-centre-fundamentals-child-oriented-approach-data-processing-report-public?ref=thegist.ie). The results were sufficiently eye opening that the DPC was compelled to point out the incongruity of some of the bright ideas they had received; > “the DPC was rather surprised by the general tenor of some submissions, particularly from the technology sector or trade associations representing organisations from this sector.” Apparently, despite the fact that companies such as [Facebook have been loudly talking about their focus on child safety and privacy](https://on.ft.com/2Z74RIg?ref=thegist.ie) while also [pushing to launch products directly aimed at capturing the eyeballs of children](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/technology/facebook-instagram-for-kids.html?ref=thegist.ie), they were not too hot on proposals that would remove ambiguity about what the law in this area actually means. Here’s the DPC again; > “It is notable in this regard that organisations, which purport to already have effective and proportionate safeguards in place for protecting children’s personal data within their service, objected to core aspects of the principles set out in the draft Fundamentals” The DPC pointed out that their document was only giving specific guidence on legal obligations which already exist in the GDPR. But, despite this already pre-existing set of obligations; > many submissions from industry appeared to want wholesale sections of the document removed without suggesting alternative approaches which would still afford the same high level of protection to child users of services. Nothing says you’ve got [A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking](https://www.facebook.com/notes/2420600258234172/) like trying to persuade regulators delete references to the privacy obligations you already have. ### When The Levee Breaks Ireland has been enjoying the fruits of the Government’s evolving Covid 19 policy. Or to put it another way, the infection numbers have ballooned, the PCR test slots are booking up nationwide and the country is at the upper end of per-capita global new infections, despite a vaccination rate in the mid-90%. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/dc4b2b72-88fa-47b4-8400-4fff32c70a59_3400x2400.png) In other words, we have “[disgraced ourselves again](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/storm-in-a-tassie-the-playwright-the-poet-and-the-abbey-theatre-1.639659?ref=thegist.ie)”, as Yeats once yelled at the Abbey audience. The Government’s 2021 plans were not complicated. 1. Get adults vaccinated. 2. Keep children going to school 3. Reopen the economy and stop [paying the PUP](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/another-25-000-people-came-off-pup-or-live-register-in-october-1.4720437?ref=thegist.ie) The problem has come now that they have actually achieved each of these stages and the result is widespread infection. They didn’t have another plan, and the first plan was simply too simple. It wasn’t going to work without the mitigations that would have cost money and stretched the imaginations of the authorities. They were unwilling to do either. Now they’re trying to invent a new plan on the hoof, in the face of reversing both the school and economic reopenings. We have been here before, [at the same time last year](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/11/reckless-christmas-rule-relaxation-blamed-for-irelands-dire-covid-surge?ref=thegist.ie), for [the same reasons](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55099731?ref=thegist.ie). Apparently, like the Bourbons of post-Revolution France, our rulers are determined to have [learned nothing, and forgotten nothing](https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00010627?ref=thegist.ie). They will have to hope that the public’s memories are less enduring. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6292ee4e-012e-413f-8382-c968af673555.tiff) November Dusk ### The Gist: Facebook goes Meta URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-facebook-goes-meta/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:28:50.000Z Rumours of a rebrand of the entire Facebook enterprise appeared only a week earlier. Then the announcement came. Facebook, the company, was no longer going to refer to itself as Facebook. It was now Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, the Sun King of the Palace of Menlo Park, appeared in a series of hallucinatory video segments to explain that this was part of the company’s great refocussing towards the coming Metaverse. To illustrate this future, the planet’s least convincing human interactions were shown in sequence, taking both video and virtual form, as Mark exchanged wordUnits with employees and the protagonists of Wii Fit with equal naturalism. One of the unsimulated recipients of these terror bytes of data was a bright-faced subordinate whose eyes carried the burden of the unheimlich experience throughout. But from our point of view, we may probably dismiss the goggle-eyed vision of the future that was painted. Just as 3D TVs were universally [accepted as the coming thing](https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2008/01/ces-2008-life-in-the-third-dimension/index.htm?ref=thegist.ie), and billion-dollar companies swung into [making 3D content](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/124965-titanic-how-do-you-convert-a-movie-to-3d-anyway?ref=thegist.ie) to feed the predicted 3D-glasses wearing family of the future and [absolutely none of that actually happened](https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/does-ces-2014-mark-the-death-of-3d-television-29895083.html?ref=thegist.ie), so the proposed metaverse is likely to remain a marketing fantasy until participation doesn’t invove strapping two televisions to the front of your head. Rather we should see this rebrand as a reaction to Facebook’s real problems here in the present. They’re sufficiently bad that the company has good reason to run away from its own name. We might, if we were of a historical minded bent, term this the [Windscale ](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/apr/18/energy.nuclearindustry?ref=thegist.ie)gambit. As a company, it has one great advantage. It just can’t stop making money. Money oozes out of the walls and bursts up through the floorboards of every room and cupboard in its buildings. [It is rich and profitable and is getting richer and more profitable every passing month.](https://investor.fb.com/financials/default.aspx?ref=thegist.ie) But riches aren’t enough to protect a company from the consequences of its [terrible](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook/u-n-investigators-cite-facebook-role-in-myanmar-crisis-idUSKCN1GO2PN?ref=thegist.ie), [careless](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58805965?ref=thegist.ie) or [care less,](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/22/jan-6-capitol-riot-facebook/?ref=thegist.ie) actions. Even an absurdly rich company can face a reckoning unless it also becomes powerful politically. And here Facebook faces the problem which has faced media conduits since news of Gilgamesh’s exploits was etched on stone tablets- being the source of news makes you unpopular with the objects of that news. It has responded to this problem by adopting a sequence of actions. It [denied it was a media company](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-is-a-technology-company-not-media-company.html?ref=thegist.ie). It tried to [cozy up to powerful ](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/20/facebook-republican-shift/?ref=thegist.ie)factions, and favoured the faction that was in power by [algorithmic decree](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservatives-2020-421146?ref=thegist.ie). As the US political winds changed at the end of the Trump regime, it even tried to [circle back to suppressing the political radicalisation it has prompted again](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/09/23/facebook-reveals-what-content-it-will-suppress-but-not-remove---though-crucial-details-remain-hidden/?ref=thegist.ie). But as long as people continue to get their information about the world outside their home from Facebook’s properties, Facebook cannot escape the political consequences of its actions. And those problems are not restricted to the US. Let us not forget that Facebook’s European headquarters sits on Misery Hill (no, really). So we come back to their change of name this week. If Facebook can’t escape what it is, it will try to do something else. It will try and escape being Facebook. In that circumstance, its choice of new name speaks to exactly the impulses that have driven it. For a name change that is entirely about itself, what else could the rebrand, and the action, be than Meta? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f1c43475-4586-4bb7-82c5-170101d2c072_656x470.png) ### The Gist: Political Entropy URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-political-entropy/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:31:36.000Z The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says “spontaneous change in a closed system always proceeds in a direction that increases randomness or disorder.” Or, as Yeats put it, “Things fall apart.” And yet in political circles there is a powerful presumption that politics works in the opposite direction- that, over time, the arc of history bends towards justice (or at least improvement). I mean, that might happen, sure, but not without an awful lot of energy being pushed into that arc. History is so full of terrible people doing terrible things that not since Noah has an arc required such a excessive effort to move it. It’s worth recognising that, if we are moving into a period of shocking events and sudden realisations (From “Why has my oven stopped in the middle of heating my dinner and my light bulbs have left me standing in a pitch black kitchen?” to “Why has my beachfront house filled up with water?”) then a state run energetically can make people’s lives significantly better. There are things we need urgently done that can’t and shouldn’t be left to personal responsibility. There are things that need a collective response. That’s why it’s worth having political power in the hands of people who are both competent and know what they want to do with that competence. Typically, you would hope to have some fresh faces bubbling with new ideas at the Cabinet table. A growing problem is that the faces around the cabinet table are looking as fresh as last week’s mackerel. But more profoundly, our longest established political parties- the institutions built as lenses to capture and focus political impulses- seem to have lost their puff. Let’s take a spin around the mulburry bush- About a month after [the Taoiseach said his office didn’t have ‘bandwidth’ to manage Slaintecare](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40694777.html?ref=thegist.ie) and saying it was a matter for Health officials, Health officials responded by [disbanding the Advisory council of experts](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/sl%C3%A1intecare-advisers-seek-meeting-with-government-before-disbanding-1.4691110?ref=thegist.ie) that was so unhelpfully pointing out their failures. The Taoiseach,[ on returning home from delivering a thundering speech to the UN General Assembly on the need to take urgent and radical steps to combat climate change](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-40706228.html?ref=thegist.ie), was asked if he’d support removing the Car Park that was built on Leinster House’s formal gardens in 1948 and reinstating it as a green space. What about the vested interests?, he effectively spluttered. Former TDs get free town parking for life! [You can’t disturb a person who is already enjoying advantages!](https://www.thejournal.ie/free-parking-former-politicians-micheal-martin-5561245-Sep2021/?ref=thegist.ie) “Climate change is the single greatest challenge facing our generation.”, the Taoiseach told the assembled leaders of the world in the UN. What he failed to mention was defeating the problem of Parking in Town was, apparently, the greatest challenge facing the last generation and that took precedence. A man who cannot imagine improving anything if it will discommode anyone with a vested insteret, no matter how minor, seems unlikely to have the temperament to prepare a nation for a climate emergency. But the Taoiseach’s embrace of not doing pales in the face of Fine Gael’s Entropy Problem. It has positioned itself so successfully as the party that won’t play well with others that it is the last choice of every other party across the spectrum to partner with. In a political system where coalition building is the key to government, this is the surest route to isolation from power. But step back from the day to day and you see the two and a half parties of Ireland’s two and a half party system (FF, FG and Labour) all limping along at a fraction of their once presumed position. Today’s Sunday Business Post [publishes a Red C poll that sees each of the three](https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1452004911407902726?s=21&ref=thegist.ie) being lapped by their main rivals. FF by FG. FG by SF and even the Labour Party slipping behind the recently-constructed-in-flight Social Democrats. The Irish state is going through its decade of centenaries, with the final 100 year markings of the state’s foundations yet to come. 100 years is a long time for any organisation to endure, and for good reason- it’s just hard to attract talent for multiple generations when you’ve become the status quo. Fortunately for society, change comes as old people (and their institutions) are replaced by the next generation. Unfortunately for society, not all change is for the better. But what can be assured is that as sure as day follows night, the possibility of causing social change will only grow more attractive than working to keep things as they’ve always been. And parties who have allowed themselves to stand for the past aren’t likely to have much of a future. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/cb3d8156-7962-49a3-b731-171270e43fd1_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Made of Money URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-made-of-money/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T10:32:22.000Z This week, the Budget has been the talk of… well, not of the town, because that would suggest that the general public is discussing a financial planning exercise of deliberate opacity. Like every year, however, it’s been the talk of every vested interest and their lobbying group. Which, given that paid lobby groups are a substantial source of press releases and PR, means there’s been [a lot of reporting about it](https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2011/12/06/why-budget-coverage-is-bad-news/?ref=thegist.ie). This year is something of a showcase budget- the first plan the government has made for an economy not under Covid restrictions. This, they tell us, is what they meant to do all along. But it turns out that the three parties in government have all intended to do different things. Fine Gael have intended to make sure things carry on as much as before as they can contrive (this has always been FG’s policy in respect of everything social and economic. Indeed, so deep is this commitment to the status quo that the policy manages the extraordinary feat of predating the existence of the party by approximately twenty years, when it it took the form of a promise to deliver Home Rule). They even managed to launch a National Development Plan with the reassuring statement that it was the same as the last one, with all the previously unbuilt infrastructure still just as promised. The Green party, on the other hand, have found that their leader holds the crossroads for almost all of that capital spending and have been fighting to bend it towards climate change remediation, rather than carbon intensification (ie, fewer big roads for big cars). The result has been the first big win for the Greens in government. Despite tussles, there are no firm commitments to actually build any new roads. Instead, every road anyone has ever asked for has been placed in the Laminated Magic Book of Dreams (that’s the National Development Plan’s new official name, a title previously monopolised by the Argos Catalog) so that FF and FG TDs can show the pictures to their voters. Fianna Fáil just wanted to get back into Government. In years gone by, they never needed to worry about what they’d do when they got there. The Civil Service ensured a continuity of political policy and the patronage powers of the state delivered for the party. Now that it no longer functions as a patronage machine, its elected members are becoming ghosts at their own Cabinet table, looked through instead of at. For example, ask yourself What will the Department of Education do because Norma Foley is their Minister that they wouldn’t do if left entirely without any Minister at all? If the only answer is ‘do up more primary schools in the Minister’s constituency’, you’ve already recognised FF’s problem. Meanwhile, the outside world presses in. Covid supports are unwinding unpredictably, Brexit continues to mess with the supply and cost of goods, inflation is being implausibly raised as a concern, people are walking around Dublin in short sleeves in October, while [cattle burps are emerging as a global focus for fighting climate change](https://www.ft.com/content/73e5f1fc-76ac-48b0-871a-7fa4e8bda69b?ref=thegist.ie) and [135 other countries squeezed Ireland hard enough to abandon the tax rate that the country built its foreign direct investment policy on.](https://www.dw.com/en/ireland-agrees-to-increase-corporate-tax-rate-to-15/a-59443853?ref=thegist.ie) Ships left to drift don’t reach any harbour, they just eventually run aground. That’s as true for the ship of state as any other sea-going vessel. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/44736bf7-fb2e-4057-90a0-07036f41c2f7_1125x1374.jpeg) ### The Gist: Hot Stuff URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-hot-stuff/ Last updated: 2021-09-12T13:25:14.000Z ### Rowan and Martin’s Think-In The news felt like reheated leftovers this week- Fianna Fáil’s think-in produced zero changes in their behaviour or plans. Having spent hours pouring over a report on their failures at the last election that blamed a lack of distance from Fine Gael and failure to support a motion of no confidence in Eoghan Murphy, the [party leader announced they’d all be backing Simon Coveney in the Dáil](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn-f%C3%A9in-using-coveney-no-confidence-motion-to-divide-and-conquer-says-taoiseach-1.4670310?ref=thegist.ie). Meanwhile, FG’s Paschal Donoghue continued to [stymie FF’s plans](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/oireachtas/minister-will-propose-vacant-property-tax-if-there-is-solid-basis-in-data-1.4622702?ref=thegist.ie) to tax vacant properties and [Leo Varadkar announced he would try to block the tax rise](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/varadkar-to-oppose-massive-rise-in-prsi-for-self-employed-1.4671745?ref=thegist.ie) intended to pay for FF’s already announced scheme to delay raising the pension age. It remains to be seen if Fianna Fáil will ever decide that enough is enough. Given the Sunday Business Post poll over the weekend saw them at 13%, while Sinn Féin floated improbably at 29%, it seems more likely they’ll just carry on the way things are, but a little less happy each day. ### Risk of Nun Elsewhere, it emerged that [the HSE’s Risk and Audit committee](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nmh-work-halted-in-control-row-pcv6pk7tf?ref=thegist.ie) have been refusing to sign off on the governance plan for the new National Maternity Hospital as, contrary to the endlessly repeated pablum from the nuns, they think it will hand control of the hospital over to Saint Vincent’s Hospital Group. As an argument, this has the benefit of being both 100% correct and trivially easy to demonstrate, neither of which has stopped the Government from denying it since the deal was announced. ### The Gist: Hot Stuff As promised last time, I’ve made you a completely off-topic video, wherein I tell you about hot sauces of increasing spicyness, while eating them, until I finally meet my match in Alice Cooper’s Poison. For a week of leftovers, you can never have too much hot sauce. ### The Gist: The Roof Over Our Head URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-roof-over-our-head/ Last updated: 2023-11-05T12:23:22.000Z The beginning of September is a liminal time of the year. School terms restart. Political and court terms likewise start to think about what will happen next. But this year, this anticipatory element has an extra sharpness. The world has been on an extended sabbatical from business as usual thanks to Covid lockdowns and close downs. The political system across the world has been consumed by the immediate crisis of a pandemic. Now we’re tipping towards a new dynamic- largely driven by the vaccine rollouts triggering an improvement in circumstances. But it’s being driven by something else too- vested commercial and political interests are screaming for a return to the business of income generation as usual. But let’s leave behind the [assertions of city centre office building owners](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/central-bank-warns-of-covid-19-risks-to-property-market-1.4280680?ref=thegist.ie) that we will all want to get back to work in their assets and the [demands by tech companies that we don’t let our climate emission reductions](https://www.businesspost.ie/energy/tech-giants-demand-government-support-for-expansion-of-data-centres-db50e803?ref=thegist.ie) get in the way of unending data centre expansions. Instead, let’s look at the document the government announced this week to deal with the problem of Housing. [Housing for All](https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/ef5ec-housing-for-all-a-new-housing-plan-for-ireland/?ref=thegist.ie#view-the-plan) follows [Rebuilding Ireland](https://www.ipav.ie/sites/default/files/rebuilding%5Fireland%5Faction%5Fplan%5Ffor%5Fhousing%5Fhomelessness.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), a plan that started in 2016, failed signally for six years,[ ended the career](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/eoghan-murphy-resigns-as-td-for-career-in-international-affairs-1.4548873?ref=thegist.ie) of the housing minister who regularly announced how [successful](https://www.kildarestreet.com/committees/?gid=2019-03-06a.415&ref=thegist.ie) it was being and has now been dropped down the State’s memory hole. (take a look at [rebuildingireland.ie](https://rebuildingireland.ie/?ref=thegist.ie)) At least nobody can say the new plan has big shoes to fill. Unless those shoes are the proverbial concrete boots its predecessor now wears. The Government’s problem with dealing with unattainable housing and even more unaffordable rents is that the institutions of the state have been stymied by the requirement to meet two aims- to protect the asset value of property owners and to allow people to find somewhere they can afford to live. Trying to ride both these mismatching steeds has seen the reversal of normal presumptions of economics. In Ireland, high prices have become the cause- not the effect- of a shortage of supply. As the state constantly intervenes in the market to stimulate price rises (See [Rebuilding Ireland Home Loans](https://rebuildingirelandhomeloan.ie/?ref=thegist.ie), or [Help to Buy](https://www.revenue.ie/en/property/help-to-buy-incentive/index.aspx?ref=thegist.ie) etc) the logical thing is to sit on development land and even empty apartments in the anticipation of selling them for more, later. It is the same calculation that sees people cut back on their spending in a deflationary spiral, but applied to supply, not prices. And, like a deflationary spiral, the only way out is to have the state to intervene on a huge scale to break out of the universal beggering of market logic. It needs to do something which acts contrary to the delivery of profit- provide large amounts of housing that could be worth more later, now. And, sure enough, that idea is certainly talked up in the new Housing for All plan. It promises local authority housing- [“9,500 of these will be new-builds, each year between 2022 and 2030”](https://assets.gov.ie/197127/964a866d-285d-4f8e-b7c5-a57b5c4b9325.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). But, put beside the same plan’s estimate of needs -[“Ireland will need an average of 33,000 new homes to be provided each year from 2021 to 2030.”](https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/ef5ec-housing-for-all-a-new-housing-plan-for-ireland/?ref=thegist.ie)\- it would seem a little optimistic to suggest that adding 24% of the housing supply from the state would fundamentally move the market. The recently published [How Ireland Voted](https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030664046?ref=thegist.ie) has a chapter which reflects on messaging in the most recent election and highlights the potential impact of the statement from Sinn Féin’s leader during the RTE debate that “If Fianna Fáil were party of the developers, Fine Gael are the party of the landlords.” The truth is, the last time Fianna Fáil oversaw a sudden and dramatic drop in house prices, it nearly broke them. And Fine Gael’s voting base is the primary beneficiary of housing asset price inflation. It is anathema to the government parties to ever try to cause a drop in house prices- or rent. And that is why our current policy machinery had failed to solve this social crisis for over a decade. It is also why we can expect to have no more to show from Housing for All than we got from Rebuilding Ireland. There is a clash of short to medium term interests between those with property and those who need places to live securely. Helping one is contrary to the (short to medium term) interests of the other. Our state (more than most) has been designed and been run by the former since its creation. Long term, of course, a state built on a deepening social divide over something as basic as the need for shelter is in nobody’s interest. The time is approaching where the choices will have to be made that break us out of the price-rise protection cycle. But this week, the government declined to make that time now. Fianna Fáil may have found the one policy they genuinely would sooner see their party die rather than implement. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/537f9c11-28cf-49ef-8e13-f4b51ebf1fca_1024x826.jpeg) Postscript: There may be a bonus Gist video for subscribers this week, so keep your eyes peeled for that. It will be very different to the newsletter, because, sure, why not? ### The Gist: A Change In The Weather URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-change-in-the-weather/ Last updated: 2022-05-03T02:21:19.000Z ### You don’t need a Weatherman/To know which way the wind blows When I was growing up, it was acknowledged that there was a significant chance, shading over time to a certainty, that something or other would provoke a nuclear war that would wipe out life on earth. Every Cold War spy thriller was actually [a horror novel](https://nationalpost.com/news/world/the-cold-war-proposal-to-have-the-president-hack-an-aide-to-death-to-start-nuclear-war?ref=thegist.ie), where all the characters shuffled their pieces on a board that was already doomed. No matter which side ended up ahead, playing the game at all drove everyone closer to the atomic conclusion. The difference between a horror story and a thriller is that, in a thriller, the protagonists still have hope. The latest report from the UN’s global expert group on Climate Change, the IPCC, was released with the unambivalent message [“Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying”](https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/?ref=thegist.ie). It arrived accompanied by a myriad of illustrations from across the world, as news reports of massive fires engulfing regions were layered over pictures of floods and the future seemed to send its echos back towards us as [people took to boats to escape the conflagrations](https://twitter.com/meteogr/status/1423771527577800717?s=20&ref=thegist.ie) that had consumed their homes or holidays. This is a problem for those of us planning to stay living on Earth for the next few decades and hoping not to have to hand it to the current generation of children like a box marked Fragile that rattles distressingly when you move it. As with the Cold War, the institutional requirements of the society we live within mean we continue to hesitate to take the steps needed to mitigate (there is no longer a reverse option) the worse consequences of climate change to come. We can change them collectively, as the Cold War stand-off was suddenly changed by the collapse of the USSR. But we can’t do it fast enough without a radical alteration of the underlying assumptions of the society we’ve inherited. I’m not saying that can’t happen. The Cold War framework of [Mutually Assured Destruction](https://www.britannica.com/topic/mutual-assured-destruction?ref=thegist.ie) was disrupted by the implosion of an entire political and economic model for a global Superpower. This crisis isn’t going to be fixed by [small changes on the domestic level](https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2021/0817/1241229-individuals-family-climate-change-action/?ref=thegist.ie). Climate change [isn’t a matter of ‘personal responsibility’.](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/10/individuals-climate-crisis-government-planet-priority?ref=thegist.ie) It is only addressable at the level of national and international politics. There is still hope for our future. All is not lost. But the IPCC reports are telling us, loud and clear, we don’t have any more time to wait and see before our race-against-time thriller simply shades into horror. ### A Bright and Shining Lie The Taliban entered Kabul, as the [US-backed government](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/asia/cia-delivers-cash-to-afghan-leaders-office.html?ref=thegist.ie) fled to spend more time with their money. This is a disaster for the people of Afghanistan, turning the country into an open prison for its women and setting all its citizens on a grim path for the foreseeable future. Certainly Ireland knows all about the long-lasting troubles of fusing an armed overthrow of a foreign-backed government with an oppressive theocratic ideology that represents itself as the only natural expression of the nation’s true soul. As to how the US so miscalculated the strength of the Afghanistan army they’d spent decades and billions on training, well, all the answers have been sitting for decades in David Halberstam’s book on the political mistakes that prolonged the Vietnam War, [The Best and the Brightest.](https://librariesireland.iii.com/iii/encore/record/C%5F%5FRb2901375%5F%5FSthe%20best%20and%20the%20brightest%5F%5FFf%3Afacetcollections%3A1%3A1%3ADublin%20City%3A%3A%5F%5FOrightresult%5F%5FX6?lang=eng&suite=def&ref=thegist.ie) Just like the rest of us, the institutional impulses of a mixed military and political project mean that the same errors keep being rewarded- until the day they aren’t. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/fa52eccf-dc47-481d-a928-a66dd9bf5067_6057x2340.jpeg) ### The Gist: Fifty 1 Hour Party People URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-fifty-1-hour-party-people/ Last updated: 2022-05-03T02:21:51.000Z It would probably all have just blown over. Katherine Zappone had been nominated for a freshly minted position as a part time Irish representative for Human Rights and that hadn’t been [exactly adroitly handled](https://www.independent.ie/breaking-news/irish-news/mistakes-were-made-in-zappone-appointment-says-coveney-40720312.html?ref=thegist.ie). FG forgot to mention it to the Taoiseach or the other party leader fella they’re in government with before Cabinet. But the Cabinet, in their constitutional mutuality, had approved the appointment. The Taoiseach had grumbled a bit afterwards but indicated it was all in the past now. Then the Irish Independent ran a [barely connected story](https://www.independent.ie/news/news-headlines/irish-news-headlines-zappone-hosted-varadkar-and-50-guests-at-party-before-controversial-appointment-and-emotional-tributes-as-garda-loses-cancer-fight-40716906.html?ref=thegist.ie), but featuring many of the same actors. Like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, this quickly eclipsed the first episode, becoming the story’s locus, leaving the candidate’s withdrawal from the UN position as almost a second order tale. Because, as it turned out, powerful people had all gathered in a fancy place and listened politely while being talked at. And, after the [great Golfgate paroxym](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-golf-fallout-back-to-school) consumed an EU Commissioner and required the Chief Justice and a past Chief Justice to invent a non-statutory process, the political world knew what that could mean. Without hesitation, Fine Gael triggered its Prime Directive- *Protect Leo Varadkar At All Costs.* UN appointment? *Nope.* A year’s worth of constructive ambiguity between industry guidelines and advice and legal requirements? *Nope.* Apropros of nothing the AG issued a quick assessment of people who happened to go to hotel garden parties that weren’t weddings, which happened on the 21st July 2021, and were outdoors. You, like me, will be glad to hear that those people were all confirmed to be A-OK, in terms of the Covid Restrictions. But as the ripples of the Merrion drinks spread outside the confines of the political (we [even had an Archbishop](https://www.joe.ie/news/archbishop-says-prevention-communions-confirmations-irrational-discriminatory-727860?ref=thegist.ie) wanting to know why outdoor first communion parties were out, while politicians drinks were in) it wasn’t clear that the political actors were going to be able to climb out of the gap between what people have been told to do and what the law said they could do, into which they had fallen. (You can follow me down the rabbit holes of the relevant SIs [in this twitter thread](https://twitter.com/Tupp%5FEd/status/1422993972520267787?s=20&ref=thegist.ie). Note that the limit is not 200 attendees, but 200 people ‘proposed to attend’, which suggests a limit on invites rather than people who turn up). Because, even as the AG was issuing his blessing for up to 200 person social events in hotel gardens, [the non-statutory guidelines from Fáilte Ireland](https://failtecdn.azureedge.net/failteireland/Guidelines-for-Re-opening-Hotels-and-Guesthouses.pdf?ref=thegist.ie), which hotels and other hospitality businesses have followed dutifully were unambiguous: > “Meetings/ Events: Organised events are not permitted.” There was never a 5k limit for travel, it was just advice. There was never a legal requirement for older people to cocoon. It was just advice. And, as we can see, right now, Organised events are not forbidden. The problem is that for the past year, the Government has consistantly relied on health advice to the public and to businesses to shape what the social norms should be- not on the legislation. Invoking the Prime Directive, as Captain Picard [would readily tell you](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime%5FDirective?ref=thegist.ie), can have some unintended and unwelcome consequences. It may be that after this week’s events, the government’s ability to advance public health advice which goes beyond what it can legislate for has ended. Given the pressures on all sides, between industry and religious figures on one hand and the threat of the Delta varient on the other, this particular evening out may yet have a national hangover. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/e1edca6f-30e3-4693-9f75-255db8802bf0_800x532.jpeg) Photo: cc By [JD Hancock](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Grabbing a Quick Byte / The Once and Future PDs URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-grabbing-a-quick-byte-the/ Last updated: 2022-05-03T02:24:25.000Z ### Pints Policy The question of getting people into pubs again has taken on totemic importance as the pandemic has ground on. Hospitality, as an industry, has never been shy about making its political voice heard. So, when, at the end of June, the Government postponed reopening, it was the [main headline](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40324700.html?ref=thegist.ie) consequence of the changing infection patterns triggered by the Delta varient of Covid19. The Government later announced it would allow the opening to proceed from next Monday, the 26th July. Unfortunately, this decision seems to have been arrived at first and only then did the preperation to allow it to happen begin. As a result, as the deadline loomed, all week we’ve had a daily adjustment of the announced rules governing people’s entry to the hallowed ground of ‘inside’, each decree adding another layer of complexity and administration to stepping over the threshold. By lunchtime Friday, with the app to allow the scanning of QR Covid Certificate codes still not released, this was what was being promulgated; ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/64c0e006-a855-4b56-80e6-07ee2c8b3806_1200x640.png) The problem for the government (as data controllers in this instance) is that they’re mandating a form of data processing which Article 35.3 of the GDPR says can only happen lawfully if there is a [Data Protection Impact Assessment](https://www.dataprotection.ie/sites/default/files/uploads/2018-11/Data-Protection-Impact-Assessment.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) completed before the first bit of data is collected or otherwise processed. Maybe there’s a lovingly crafted DPIA completed in a government drawer somewhere. If so, it might be a good idea to follow the HSE’s example with the Covid tracing app and publish it. On the other hand, the evolution of this plan, buffeted by industry negotiations and institutional impulses from the state is giving off very strong ‘Didn’t do a DPIA’ vibes. Certainly elements (every adult member of a household having their contacts individually taken, for example) look like they wouldn’t have survived a systematic assessment for necessity and proportionality. None of which is to say that rules distinguishing between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, proportionate to an ongoing health crisis, are illegitimate per se. But intervening in the lives of citizens should be done lawfully, both because to do otherwise is to invite mayhem but also because the DPIA system is designed to produce a better policy outcome. That’s why it was made compulsory. It gives structure to the difficult and sometimes chaotic world of policy formation- whether that’s inside a company or at the level of a national government. Dull though it may seem to the more buccaneering impulses of politicians, a good and lawful process is one of the best ways to end up with a lasting, solidly defensible effective outcome. Skipping it because you want to move faster to get to your pre-determined end seems like the classic ‘More Haste, Less Speed’ error. ### Dessie Did It During the week, Des O’Malley, a politician who had a three-act impact on Irish society over decades, died. The [obituaries](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/des-o-malley-obituary-key-political-player-thought-by-some-as-best-taoiseach-ireland-never-had-1.4626632?ref=thegist.ie) tended to acknowledge his Act I role as Minister for Justice during the Troubles in the 1960s, before dwelling on his Act II role as Charlie Haughey’s antagonist. This is understandable, as both supply personal drama and revealed O’Malley’s character- a critical part of an obituary. But it left his most lasting impact on Irish politics playing as afterthought. Des O’Malley was the founder of the Progressive Democrats, the most influential defunct party in the history of Irish politics. The PDs were the model for the ending of the Civil War split by identifying a set of policies- economically right wing, but uninterested in the restrictions of the Catholic Church on personal freedom- that a large bloc of the supporters of FF and FG felt good about. For much of his time as party leader, the PDs were in power. Indeed, that power lasted long after the initial surge of electoral support had ebbed, as they remained in Government as ideologically influential coalition party members. But their power also came from speaking for the interests of a class (rich people) who themselves wield power in society and could amplify their ideas, turning them into assertions of political common sense. Whether it is the Táiniste’s constant talk about [cutting taxes](https://www.businesspost.ie/tax/varadkar-to-push-for-income-tax-cuts-despite-fianna-fail-concerns-49e5392c?ref=thegist.ie) on highly paid people, or media demands to [hurry up and reintroduce austerity](https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/cabinet-faces-defining-battle-over-how-to-handle-the-public-finances-1.4603649?ref=thegist.ie) to shrink the supports for those left out of work by the pandemic, or the growing unelectablility of mainstream party candidates who reject a secular state, the Progressive Democrat voice is still echoing past its official lifespan. And, as the founder of a party built on FF politicians being elected by FG supporters, the current FF/FG coalition government shows that Des O’Malley’s political third act was the one with the most profound long term results. Ejected from Fianna Fáil for ‘conduct unbecoming’ he ended up becoming the model for modern Irish right-wing politics. ### Coda: Many thanks to all of your for subscribing. Feel free to forward this email on to friends or enemies you think might also enjoy it. And, if you’re a paying subscriber, I’ve introduced a very small change- you can now leave comments under the web versions of these pieces. If you do, be sure to be excellent to each other. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/642ad94a-df16-45c9-b9b8-7636808e6091_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Reading the Bay Leaves URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-reading-the-bay-leaves/ Last updated: 2022-05-03T02:25:06.000Z The Result: Ivana Bacik (Lab) enters the Dáil. But let’s take a moment to look at what the campaign can tell us about some of Ireland’s political parties. ### Fine Gael The most striking thing about Fine Gael is that, despite the electoral success the party inherited from Enda Kenny, they have absolutely no idea what a political campaign is. They just don’t get it. From the FG point of view, a campaign is when you pick something you’re comfortable with talking about and then ride that out in front of voters. If they like it, great! But if they don’t, well, they’re wrong and it’s their fault. Here, they managed to play this relationship out with the electorate on multiple levels. The Tánaiste didn’t like the obvious local choice as candidate. The candidate the party got was one who just felt good for the Fine Gael party. His manifest weaknesses as a candidate were there for all to see. But even if they were clearly visible to the electorate, they didn’t matter to the party. And, from FG’s point of view, that’s what matters. James Geoghegan, quite apart from his inherent qualities, was simply the worst possible choice to win over the voters of Dublin Bay South. He decided to make his name as a member of an anti-Repeal splinter party. Dublin Bay South voted Yes by 78.5%, the highest repeal vote anywhere. In an unusually high profile field of candidates the constituancy’s largest party ran the candidate with the thinnest of political CVs. Approximately 50% of the electorate were women. 100% of the sitting TDs are men. He was a candidate Fine Gael were comfortable with. Whether he was a candidate who could ever persuade the rest of the electorate to want to vote for him appeared to simply not occur to FG as a question. But let’s leave aside the candidate, who will, after all, not be the candidate standing in every constituancy at the next election. Instead, let’s look at the FG campaign. It was unmoored from anything resembling reality. Fine Gael wants to make every election about the thing FG wants it to be about. Last time, they wanted an election about Brexit. Nobody cared about Brexit- the voters cared about housing. But for FG that didn’t matter. Brexit was what they wanted the election to be about and they didn’t see why everyone else didn’t just get with the programme. Anyone who has found themselves being talked at by a 7 year old boy with an enthusiasm for dinosaurs or Pokémon will recognise this conversational gambit. This time, they wanted to run a campaign about the menace of Sinn Féin. It didn’t matter that the chance of Sinn Féin winning a single seat election in Dublin Bay South was so slim FG might as well have built their campaign around repelling a Dalek invasion. More significantly, nobody seemed to have noticed that in a single seat election, you couldn’t win on FG’s 27% vote share. You had to attract transfers. So running a campaign based on attacking any other major party was a strategy certain to sabotage even a paragon of a candidate. Even as the mid-campaign poll confirmed their main rival for the seat was Ivana Bacik, they stuck with their SF-focussed talk. For FG, a campaign is like a game of squash where they continuously smash their chosen messages against the uncaring wall of the electorate. It’s as though the party came in late for a lecture on political campaigns and went away filled with certainty that elections are won on message discipline, having missed the bit about picking a message that people care about. Fine Gael’s leadership is solid. They’re still riding high in the polls. This loss isn’t a game-changer for them. But it does show they’ve learned nothing from their failures in the General Election last year and, by god, they intend to keep not learning things because that’s the Fine Gael way. ## Labour Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner! No party is so in need of a win as the Labour Party. A party with deep roots and grey beards is struggling towards some sort of recovery under Alan Kelly. But the Labour Party is a long way from being a votegetting brand in itself. This election victory was Ivana Bacik’s reward from a comfortable electorate for her years taking unpopular positions that eventually won the day, while also being a reassuringly establishment law professor. Now she’s elected, it is hard to imagine the Dublin Bay South electorate turning their back on her. Which is going to have consequences for… ### Fianna Fáil The single FF seat occupied by Fianna Fáil was held by the skin of his teeth by Jim O’Callaghan last year. He was also the director of elections in this by-election, nominally committed to getting a rival party colleague elected to split his vote with. If that looks like a conflict of political interests, it just means your eyes are working. In that context, a 5% vote share- the lowest ever share by a FF by-election candidate- might be more of a success (for Jim) than a failure. But for everyone in FF not named Jim O’Callaghan, it just hammers home their irrelevance to large chunks of the country. 5% would be universal extinction for the FF machine. And now they know that’s all they get, if they don’t really try. Once, you could have run a three-legged donkey with a FF rosette and be sure of something north of 40%. Without power, Fianna Fáil has become hollowed out. It is a patronage machine which can’t really deliver the benefits of membership it used to promise in its hegemony. Distracted by the administrative busy-work of government, it’s leadership hasn’t come up with anything this diminished party might stand for, other than being less than everyone else. Less right than FG. Less left than SF. Less liberal than the Social Democrats or Labour. The party of the less. As the scale of the collapse emerged from the tallies, opportunists flocked about FF, urging it to follow the siren song of doctrinaire Catholic conservatism. Quite what element of the Ivana Bacik electorate would switch when presented with a man in a rubber Archbishop McQuaid suit went unspecified. Michéal Martin has kept his party from enthusiastically dashing itself on those rocks, and they resent him for it. Meanwhile Jim O’Callahan’s leadership ambitions are now in the hands of FG’s Dublin Bay South Pharmacist-Across-The-Water, Kate O’Connell. If we say Bacik will keep her seat, and O’Connell will readily take a seat for FG now if she runs again, that leaves O’Callaghan standing up when the music stops. You can’t be party leader if you can’t get yourself elected. ### Sinn Féin A solid seat’s worth of a vote share confirmed and a free look at FG’s comedy campaign playbook. There are worse ways for SF to end an unsuccessful election. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b331be55-8a3f-44e6-becb-a4b4d6a825e0_2436x1125.jpeg) ### The Gist: Whose National Maternity Hospital? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-whose-national-maternity/ Last updated: 2022-05-03T02:26:39.000Z A shudder ran through the week, like the return of a familiar bad dream. The Government want to build a new National Maternity Hospital, the current one being too small and too old. They have a problem, however. The last Government (which, Greens excepted, the same parties either supported or led) allowed a mad deal to be done with the nuns who own St Vincent’s hospital, gifting them the state funded asset of a national maternity hospital. The deal took the form of a Nov 2016 agreement between the current private National Maternity Hospital in Holles St (permanent chairman of the board: The Archbishop of Dublin) and the private corporate body, St Vincent’s Healthcare Group ( then wholly owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity). The Department of Health, [long accustomed to fund the delivery of health services by private religious-ethos entities](https://assets.gov.ie/9386/6d02f4a9fb554e30adbebb3eec5091d9.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) apparently hadn’t thought to get involved in those negotiations. [The Agreement was eventually published in April 2017](https://www.stvincents.ie/app/uploads/2020/05/NMH-SVHG-Agreement-21.11.-2016-Mulvey.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) after [the opposition to it by Dr. Peter Boylan (former Master of Holles St Hospital)](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/board-of-maternity-hospital-rejects-call-for-resignation-of-deputy-chair-1.4277734?ref=thegist.ie) became public. Its [mediator argued unpersuasivly for the benefits of the deal](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/health/mulvey-its-not-possible-for-nuns-to-hand-over-maternity-hospital-land-as-it-is-tied-up-with-loans-35665144.html?ref=thegist.ie). The problem for the Government was that, on publication, it was now clear to anyone who read it that Dr. Boylan’s concerns around institutional and clinical independence were well-founded. The Minister of Health at the time, [Simon Harris, predicted that he’d have the legal issues on those topics solved by May 2017](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2017/0425/870295-national-maternity-hospital-agreement/?ref=thegist.ie). We have yet to glimpse the glittering form of this square circle. The board of Holles Street Hospital forced Dr. Boylan out, and started an extraordinary PR campaign, [demanding that the Government break ground on the hospital on the terms of that agreement before the end of 2018,](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/plan-to-move-national-maternity-hospital-to-st-vincent-s-stalemated-1.3717800?ref=thegist.ie) citing [inapplicable EU laws to support them](https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2018-12-06a.406&ref=thegist.ie). This week, with the issue becoming live as an election approaches, FF and FG’s leader tortured words to express how much they **wished** the state owned and controlled the hospitals they paid for. Conspicuous by their absence were any words suggesting how this might be achieved. Things took a turn for the institutional after the [Department of Health told politicians they’d tried to buy the land](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/state-tried-but-failed-to-buy-site-of-new-national-maternity-hospital-1.4596648?ref=thegist.ie) but [then the nuns said nobody had ever asked them about purchase](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/government-to-renew-effort-to-purchase-national-maternity-hospital-site-1.4598760?ref=thegist.ie). The Dept then couldn’t put their hands on any evidence of this effort, beyond- apparently- reading a declaration from St Vincent’s that they wouldn’t sell. This approach to making wishes come true will be familiar to anyone who has tried to lose weight by just thinking about losing weight but then not done anything about it. And, predictably, both approaches have demonstrated an equal degree of success in achieving their aim. Apparently, having tried both wishing *and* hoping for half a decade, the Department of Health has decided to strike off in the fresh new direction of doing. > “I am going to be engaging with the Sisters of Charity, with St Vincent’s, and my strong view is the State should own the site, and if anything can be done to that end, we will do it,”, [said the Minister for Health](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/government-to-renew-effort-to-purchase-national-maternity-hospital-site-1.4598760?ref=thegist.ie), apparently the idea of actually engaging in talks to buy the site having just occurred to those within the Government’s walls. Not included in that statement is what the Government will do about this project if nothing ‘can be done to that end’. Will the State then shrug sadly and pay €800 million for a hospital it will neither control or own? For years, the State has promised everyone they will be happy with the outcome of this misconceived project. It may need to finally face up to abandoning the possibility of pleasing everyone if it wants to do its duty by citizens. Governance is not a mediation. And women and children’s healthcare should not be up for negotiation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/593caa91-27f5-48b5-a4a6-2e985c14272d_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Survivors refuse to stay on Mute URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-survivors-refuse-to-stay/ Last updated: 2022-05-03T02:28:00.000Z The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman started off looking like he might have a quiet fortnight. By the end of the first week, he found himself on air arguing that he might have to [withhold redress from Mother & Baby Home survivors](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/rejecting-mother-and-baby-homes-report-risks-survivors-redress-minister-says-1.4583688?ref=thegist.ie) if they insisted on their experiences being officially recognised. By the end of the second week, his Government was saying it planned to [appoint another expert to do a new report](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/mother-and-baby-homes-testimony-may-be-examined-by-independent-expert-1.4591157?ref=thegist.ie) into those testimonies to address the Commission report’s failures. Apart from the continuing marvel of a Minister apparently eager to continue to put the torch to his own credibility in order to act as a spokesman for his Department’s unsustainable policy positions, the past two weeks have provided a kaleidoscope of views into how power in Ireland works now. This is the Gist. ## 1) Survivors make change through being right The old style system of dealing with an uncomfortable circumstance was to shunt it out of the political realm into a report. This drained away the momentum of media attention and the issue could be squared away at some later point with a report of greater or lesser utility, assuring everyone the matter was now sorted. This model broke down when the McAleese report was met with sufficiently detailed and persuasive resistance. But the Mother and Baby Home Commission report took things further. Survivors had empowered themselves immediately before the report’s release in the fight over the sealing of their records. They had mobilised mass support through measures such as the fastest-growing petition in modern Irish history and through voters expressing their disgust to their own TDs at the treatment of their friends and neighbors. At the same time, advocates took to the air to deliver a series of analyses of the Minister and his Department’s legal position which saw its credibility collapse to the point where his own Attorney General disowned it, at cabinet. This demonstrated to politicians there was real political risk to them in blindly accepting appeals to authority, and copperfastened to the media that survivors and their advocates had expertise which potentially exceeded the state’s. When the Commission’s report issued in January, its shortcomings were immediately evident and those setting them out had already proved themselves reliable analysts to the public and to the media and political class. Analysis and argument from fact, not institutional authority, was now the primary yardstick for whether the report would be presented as a success or failure. And it was survivors and their advocates who had both the credibility and the moral authority to determine that. ## 2) Institutions still have power, even without legitimacy The Irish state is a very old thing. It is older than the 100 years of Irish independence, being still the system of command and control [inherited from the colonial state of pre-1921](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ireland-19121985/D0837BA45DEC51913532B141F102A820?ref=thegist.ie). It operates on a presumption of a monopoly of authority- once the state has pronounced on a matter it expects that pronouncement to be taken as the last word. The roiling over the rejection by the voting public of the State’s institutional response to an inquiry into its own part in a system of mass incarceration, unpaid labour and the forced separation of babies from their mothers has, strange as it may seem, taken it quite by surprise. The Commission of Inquiry refused to answer questions about its work to the Oireachtas Committee on Children by way of a letter. This was the third such refusal, but was made all the more indefensible in the light of one of its members having already given a talk and answered questions as part of an academic online seminar for Oxford University grads. But, though that talk and its admissions about how the ‘confidential committee’ testimony of survivors was addressed (ie, not) pushed heat into the issue it is likely that the more long term, and unanswerable damage to the reputation of the Commission’s report was done by the almost simultaneous publication of [a forensic analysis of its accuracy and academic rigor by archivist Catriona Crowe in the Dublin Review](https://thedublinreview.com/article/the-commission-and-the-survivors/?ref=thegist.ie). The Commission could argue all it liked with the judgements on its findings. There is no answer to a specific academic analysis demonstrating quotations being made up. > How, in a passage consisting mostly of paraphrase and summary of elements from Caroline’s testimony, did the Confidential Committee manage to invent one quotation and botch another? > > \-[ The Commission and the Survivors, by Catriona Crowe](https://thedublinreview.com/article/the-commission-and-the-survivors/?ref=thegist.ie) Nonetheless, unless repudiated by the Government, this report will stand as the official historical account of this shameful system of abuse. The McAleese report is still being cited by Irish Government officials at the UN to defend the state’s role in the Magdalen laundries element of Ireland’s coercive confinement gulag. Institutional power continues as the default, whether or not it has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. ## 3) The Department of Children is failing At the same time that Prof. Daly was giving her talk to Oxford University’s blessed few, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth was issuing its first, belated responses to survivors’ data access requests for their records. It did not go well. Redactions continued to bedivill the releases of survivors’ access to the records of their own lives. However, there was one astonishingly obtuse bloc of refusals. Health records- particularly critical for survivors who may have been used as test subjects as infants as part of vaccine trials- were simply not released. The Department sent a letter citing an unspecified regulation in a statutory instrument from 1989 which, they said, obliged them to give the records to a doctor and not directly to the survivor. This was both mind-bogglingly patronising and paternalistic, but also ([as I set out in this sample letter available to anyone who got this reply)](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2021/06/11/sample-letter-in-response-to-dept-of-children-refusal-to-provide-health-data-in-response-to-mother-and-baby-home-survivor-data-subject-access-request/?ref=thegist.ie) completely at odds with the Minister and the Department’s obligations under EU law to give survivors access to their records. These three statements seem to be at odds with one another. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they won’t all continue to be true until one finally overcomes the others. photo credit: Auguste Blanqui - Hello! Thanks for reading down to the bottom of this email. If you like the Gist, why not forward it to your friends that you suspect might like it as well. They might subscribe and then you’d both be ace! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/accea468-551f-495a-89e8-9614f91a5126_2112x1497.jpeg) ### The Gist: How Did I Get Here URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-how-did-i-get-here-bbd/ Last updated: 2021-05-29T21:19:49.000Z There is a moment, late in the evening when the Sun has gone down but the world hasn’t quite gone dark. The deeds of the day are done, but we don’t yet need to start on the next. That’s the time to take a breath and reflect. The Jabs keep going into people’s arms, racing the threatened vaccine-busting mutations that need unvaccinated hosts to develop. Until that programme is over, the primary state responses are set on rails. Of course, as any Irish person can attest, a vehicle running on rails will still frequently arrive late, broken or just vanish entirely. But we are starting to see a look back beginning- debates about what states did right and what they got wrong. In Ireland, the medical system has recognised a few 2020 errors publicly- primarily the lack of focus on residential care homes as requiring PPE. It’s [pretty generally acknowledged this was the result of institutional short-sightedness on the part of the HSE and its managers](https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2020/0716/1153797-nursing-homes-the-forgotten-front-line-of-the-pandemic/?ref=thegist.ie). The care homes are mostly private, so the HSE hasn’t had direct management responsibility for them. So, when it hurriedly scooped the pot of PPE for Ireland’s health system, it never saw those those elderly people as being within its direct care. Similarly, rules on private staff working in multiple sites were slow to come and only snapped into focus after the damage was done. The result was the lead anti-pandemic Irish state healthcare institution was instrumental in exacerbating, not preventing, large numbers of deaths of elderly and otherwise vulnerable people. Institutional thinking always makes outcomes worse, but in a plague, those costs are not abstract. They are counted in lonely funerals of loved parents and grandparents, attended by families who will always carry the trauma of the nature and mourning of their loved-one’s death. Still, at least we can say that the Irish institutions made an (acknowledged) error. As Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to the UK Prime Minister, testified to a parliamentary committee, death on a vast scale was literally part of the UK’s plan. Most of the reporting on his evidence focussed on his accounts of spectacular personal dishonesty, stupidity and incompetence by the men elected to lead the UK. (He included himself in that, but, you know, not too much) Certainly, it’s not ideal to have a PM who was so disruptively incompetent and uninformed that his emergency response committee preferred he write a Wiki-quicky book about Shakespeare for cash instead of attending their meetings. And maybe that was for the best as having a pandemic meeting chaired by someone who reportedly proposes a policy of “Let the bodies pile high” isn’t necessarily what we might term “best practice”. On top of that, having a health secretary in a time of pandemic who planners come to realise realise they can’t believe even when he assures them he has not sent infected old people out of hospitals as carriers to their own care homes is a stroke of bad luck. This is like selling black rats as lovely clean family pets for children during the bubonic plague. But away from the (completely plausible) tales of personal cupidity and blunders, there were the bones of a deeper bleakness. The UK’s 2010/11 [national plan for dealing with a pandemic](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment%5Fdata/file/61968/flu%5Fpandemic%5Fscience%5Fpaper1.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) recommended aiming for a level of deaths peaking at around 450,000 a week, with non-pharma steps (social distancing, travel restrictions, advising against mass gatherings and advising hand washing) explicitly rejected on grounds of cost and ‘lack of evidence’. (See page 54, paragraphs 9.1 and 9.2 of that link if you really want the chills). The blue line on this chart was the plan, not a warning. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/810d1845-96bf-4883-ab76-c05bd1e13a0e_895x475.jpeg) Graphic violence Ireland’s institutional thinking resulted in a fatal blind spot. But the UK’s administrative culture examined the range of options and decided in advance on the mass death of its citizens. A survey of Irish people released last week reported that only 12% of Irish people would trust the current UK Government. Given what we’ve learned, the only wonder was how high that figure remains. But not as remarkable as the simultaneous news that the Tories had increased their lead over the Labour Party with the UK electorate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/07028592-de24-4b5f-9a69-eef5a1d13237_1125x1613.jpeg) Consider the two trust figures a natural experiment on the effect of two different media ecosystems in covering the same events. If open Bond-villain style plans to actively choose the killing of hundreds of thousands of people can’t overcome media boosterism and propaganda, the UK may become the first Western locus of a very bleak version of 21st Century politics. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f7d11ab2-e09e-4e7f-8994-ef88093b7782_2224x1668.jpeg) ### The Gist: How Did I Get Here URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-how-did-i-get-here/ Last updated: 2021-05-29T12:02:25.000Z There is a moment, late in the evening when the Sun has gone down but the world hasn’t quite gone dark. The deeds of the day are done, but we don’t yet need to start on the next. That’s the time to take a breath and reflect. The Jabs keep going into people’s arms, racing the threatened vaccine-busting mutations that need unvaccinated hosts to develop. Until that programme is over, the primary state responses are set on rails. Of course, as any Irish person can attest, a vehicle running on rails will still frequently arrive late, broken or just vanish entirely. But we are starting to see a look back beginning- debates about what states did right and what they got wrong. In Ireland, the medical system has recognised a few 2020 errors publicly- primarily the lack of focus on residential care homes as requiring PPE. It’s [pretty generally acknowledged this was the result of institutional short-sightedness on the part of the HSE and its managers](https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2020/0716/1153797-nursing-homes-the-forgotten-front-line-of-the-pandemic/?ref=thegist.ie). The care homes are mostly private, so the HSE hasn’t had direct management responsibility for them. So, when it hurriedly scooped the pot of PPE for Ireland’s health system, it never saw those those elderly people as being within its direct care. Similarly, rules on private staff working in multiple sites were slow to come and only snapped into focus after the damage was done. The result was the lead anti-pandemic Irish state healthcare institution was instrumental in exacerbating, not preventing, large numbers of deaths of elderly and otherwise vulnerable people. Institutional thinking always makes outcomes worse, but in a plague, those costs are not abstract. They are counted in lonely funerals of loved parents and grandparents, attended by families who will always carry the trauma of the nature and mourning of their loved-one’s death. Still, at least we can say that the Irish institutions made an (acknowledged) error. As Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to the UK Prime Minister, testified to a parliamentary committee, death on a vast scale was literally part of the UK’s plan. Most of the reporting on his evidence focussed on his accounts of spectacular personal dishonesty, stupidity and incompetence by the men elected to lead the UK. (He included himself in that, but, you know, not too much) Certainly, it’s not ideal to have a PM who was so disruptively incompetent and uninformed that his emergency response committee preferred he write a Wiki-quicky book about Shakespeare for cash instead of attending their meetings. And maybe that was for the best as having a pandemic meeting chaired by someone who reportedly proposes a policy of “Let the bodies pile high” isn’t necessarily what we might term “best practice”. On top of that, having a health secretary in a time of pandemic who planners come to realise realise they can’t believe even when he assures them he has not sent infected old people out of hospitals as carriers to their own care homes is a stroke of bad luck. This is like selling black rats as lovely clean family pets to children during the bubonic plague. But away from the (completely plausible) tales of personal cupidity and blunders, there were the bones of a deeper bleakness. The UK’s 2010/11 [national plan for dealing with a pandemic](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment%5Fdata/file/61968/flu%5Fpandemic%5Fscience%5Fpaper1.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) recommended aiming for a level of deaths peaking at around 450,000 a week, with non-pharma steps (social distancing, travel restrictions, advising against mass gatherings and advising hand washing) explicitly rejected on grounds of cost and ‘lack of evidence’. (See page 54, paragraphs 9.1 and 9.2 of that link if you really want the chills). The blue line on this chart was the plan, not a warning. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/810d1845-96bf-4883-ab76-c05bd1e13a0e_895x475.jpeg) Ireland’s institutional thinking resulted in a fatal blind spot. But the UK’s administrative culture examined the range of options and decided in advance on the mass death of its citizens. A survey of Irish people released last week reported that only 12% of Irish people would trust the current UK Government. Given what we’ve learned, the only wonder was how high that figure remains. But not as remarkable as the simultaneous news that the Tories had increased their lead over the Labour Party with the UK electorate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0565c061-4dbf-4aa3-a49b-8108a42524c4_1125x1613.jpeg) Consider the two trust figures a natural experiment on the effect of two different media ecosystems in covering the same events. If open Bond-villain style plans to actively choose the killing of hundreds of thousands of people can’t overcome media boosterism and propaganda, the UK may become the first Western locus of a very bleak version of 21st Century politics. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b22b91a1-7de9-4172-9978-12d04c07a0e4_1029x772.jpeg) ### The Gist: Attack of the Cyber-Men URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-attack-of-the-cyber-men/ Last updated: 2021-05-17T23:34:04.000Z Life in a pandemic is a funny old bit of business. Vaccines become household names, with their own national fandoms. The act of looking at things you don’t need in shops becomes an obscure object of desire. Academics and doctors assume the role of national figures. Ticking away in the background is the effort to keep the regular functions of the health system still working. Lives depend on it. Which was why this week’s attack on the core computer systems of the HSE and the Department of Health seems so shocking. In hindsight this shock is a strange idea. Just as unions don’t plan strikes on bank holiday Mondays, so attackers don’t confine their targets to non-vital systems that you can completely do without. The disruption is the point. The consequences of the attack still hadn’t unwound into the following week. Maybe patient data had been spectacularly compromised, or you know, not, who can say, mused newly appointed [Minister for Just Saying Words to Fill The Void](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/hackers-could-publish-hse-patient-data-online-says-minister-1.4566862?ref=thegist.ie), Ossian Smith. While we waited to see if x-rays of famous people with intimately misplaced items would make their way to Facebook and add to the gaiety of the nation, people noticed [reports that 38,000 HSE PCs were running on outdated versions Windows 7](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2020/1209/1183265-hse-technology/?ref=thegist.ie) and that the post of [Director of the National Cyber Security Centre](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/cyber-security-role-is-vacant-because-of-low-salary-td-says-1.4566803?ref=thegist.ie) was so modestly funded that the position had lain vacant for months due to the uncompetitive salary. Given that Ireland might have expected to attract unwelcome levels of attention from state actors thanks to its election to [membership of the UN Security Council](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/simon-coveney-the-un-security-council-is-being-tested-1.4566646?ref=thegist.ie), coupled with the general criminal honeypot of increasingly centralised systems running on well-advertised old software it might seem that cheeseparing the salary of the person intended to keep us secure might not have been the best idea. But, regrettably, it is all of a piece with the funding priorities of a government which spends more on subsidising Greyhound Racing than on the most significant data protection regulator in Europe. Some of this may be a question of the age and tech literacy of those making the decisions. Some may be a reflexive assessment of spending money to avoid bad things is just money wasted. After all, if those responsible are successful, it doesn’t look like anything bad happened. Consider this the [Y2K fallacy](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45083650?ref=thegist.ie). But, at base, deciding not to make securing critical infrastructure a priority is the result of a lack of imagination. The Government has multiple plans for national, all-population scale databases. The Public Services Card. The Single Customer View. The Individual Health Identifier. But in each case, the most severe risk- of a whole system compromise, risking the data protection rights of everyone in the country- is discounted as simply unlikely to happen. This week, we encountered, once again, the hard reality of building a national scale data system. In the long run, all data leaks. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/72e68ff9-3bfd-4e54-868a-81ef9ef2754c_1024x807.jpeg) ### The Gist: A Cold House for Voters URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-cold-house-for-voters/ Last updated: 2021-05-08T12:21:32.000Z It was a busy week for the Government. As the Covid situation rattles forward on the rails laid down earlier in the month it was time to talk about all the other things that are annoying the voters. Specifically, it was Housing Week! And, like everything to do with its housing policy, the experience did not leave the public (or Government parties) feeling good. The week was intended to be built around the (very) long awaited Housing Bill from Fianna Fáil’s Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien. Minister O’Brien is a significant figure in FF, as the party has decided they might need a Dublin leader to rally the mysterious Jackeens to their faded flag. So it was that he was entrusted with the most critical political project of this Government- fixing the housing crisis. (Covid being less a political project and more a chip pan fire needing dousing) Like the legendary Roc, the Minister has sat upon his nest, labouring mightily for a year to lay this week’s egg of a housing Bill. But instead of hatching into a plume of praise, the news that an international investment company had bought up a whole estate of homes in Kildare saw the government’s policy immediately tumble from its nest and be dashed on its own TDs terror. It is Government policy to give tax breaks, ie subsidise with public money, to investment companies to buy up residential units in the state. Michael Noonan set this up, and it has become a major factor in the total market for housing- [topping 40% of the total residential spend last year.](https://www.knightfrank.ie/research/ireland-residential-investment-snapshot-2020?ref=thegist.ie) ![IMG_8740.jpeg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/59d720af-e62e-438a-b8ef-9077e71592ea_1043x1011.jpeg "IMG_8740.jpeg") But the [sweat broke out upon the brows of FF and FG TDs](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/response-to-housing-bill-leaves-government-tds-jittery-and-frustrated-1.4558760?mode=amp&ref=thegist.ie) when they were simultaneously presented with the consequences of their own parties’ policies (voters locked out of buying homes by tax-break fuelled institutional investors) and the tepid incrementalism of what their Housing Minister was proposing to do about it. “Is this the best we’ve got?” The wails went up from parliamentary party meetings. Ministers, feeling the chill of voters rehearsing a dance upon their political graves, suddenly started announcing incoherent policy positions on the hoof. Buying up apartments was OK, but not houses. Buying up homes in town centres was OK but not suburbs. Leaving other people’s voters locked out of homeowning was OK, but surely not theirs. The irony is that the Minister had the social space to produce almost any radical position and would have been lauded for it. Housing is a crisis that is omnipresent for those experiencing it, and the numbers of those experiencing it are only going one way. TDs of all parties now know the Government has set out its stall with the Housing Bill and can all see it is offering nothing beyond the tattered rags and broken twigs of the current policies with some tinkering around the edges. Departmental capture is so complete that the Minister faced the humiliation of voting against his own opposition housing amendment bill, reintroduced by Labour without changing a word. If you’re a government TD, this was the week you realised you weren’t going to be given anything meaningful to say to voters to suggest you were part of the solution to their problems. And if you were an Opposition TD you realised you could just change your name to “Build Houses”, stick it under your picture on your election posters and top any poll in the country. The Housing Bill is politically dead on arrival. The Housing Minister may find he has suffered a politically fatal wound. But from now on, Housing policy is the live wire of Irish politics. ### The Gist: FF hits rock bottom URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ff-hits-rock-bottom/ Last updated: 2023-11-26T11:56:29.000Z “There needs to be a conversation”. As anyone whose boss has popped their head around the door and said this to them will tell you, this is never a happy statement to have delivered to your face. But, for the Taoiseach to hear it from one of his previously loyal supportive TDs, it must have sounded like a tolling bell. It was prompted by [a poll showing Fianna Fáil’s support hitting 11%.](https://www.redcresearch.ie/lockdown-takes-its-toll-as-happiness-falls-impacting-ff-vote/?ref=thegist.ie) For comparison, in December 2010, as the economy imploded and Brian Cowan’s government sparked public rage at every bumbling stumble, the party [still polled at 17%](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/fianna-f%C3%A1il-plunges-to-record-low-level-of-support-in-latest-poll-1.687479?ref=thegist.ie)\- considered a crisis at the time. But, if only the party could recognise it, the week suggested there was a path for Fianna Fáil back from irrelevance. Fianna Fáil’s problem has not been its leader- Micheál Martin is a tetchy technocrat with the charisma of weetabix, but he has managed to save his party from the consequences of [its own errors](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/war-to-follow-in-fianna-f%C3%A1il-over-martin-s-abortion-stance-1.3360763?ref=thegist.ie) more often than not and still has a personal approval [rating a multiple of his party](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/poll?ref=thegist.ie) support. Their problem, as their TDs have fuzzily recognised in recent months, is that their party has [no identity](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-40258550.html?ref=thegist.ie) in the modern world- Fianna Fáil has always stood for putting Fianna Fáil back into power and delivering patronage. This offer works great when you’ve got 40-50% of the votes but is sort of non-functional when your voters need binoculars to catch sight of the next nearest supporter. No Fianna Fáil grandee or would-be leader has advanced a compelling explanation of what the party is meant to be for now. The [closest we’ve heard](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/politics/arid-40258550.html?ref=thegist.ie) is that it is The Centre Party- the party for people who don’t like their porridge too hot in Sinn Féin or too cold in Fine Gael. The appeal of the Tepid Porridge Party has not yet triggered the frenzy of public excitement its proposers seem to have expected. But, almost by accident, standing on her feet in the Dáil, Junior Minister in the Department of Health Anne Rabbitte hit on a potentially attractive new role. Fianna Fáil as the party that will fight for voters with the faceless machines of the state. This is alien to Fianna Fáil’s culture, which was grown in a world where they were the faceless machines of the state. But it makes sense now. The Junior Minister had been left to answer questions in the Dáil over the revelation in the RTE Investigates programme that had revealed her department had been amassing dossiers on autistic children. That same day, the Data Protection Commission had used its powers to [designate Authorised Officers to enter the Department as part of its investigation](https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/department-of-health-inspected-by-data-watchdog-as-part-of-autism-dossiers-probe-40266551.html?ref=thegist.ie)\- a dramatic escalation of risk for the state body. She read the speech that she’d been told to, which left almost everything important unanswered. So far, standard issue fare. But then she broke out. It turns out that the Minister had questions of her own Department’s behaviour that she was still waiting on asking. And she read them out- putting her questions to herself. She then ended with a confirmation that she had looked for a briefing with her own officials before coming into the house but it hadn’t happened. > “**I asked if other concerns about this file management had been raised over the years. I am awaiting a response to that. I also asked if there are other similar file or case management protocols in place elsewhere in the Department. That was my last question up to the meeting with the Secretary General last Friday**. > > “**Before I came into the House today, I was expecting a briefing, but proceedings ran ahead. Some of the script that I read out is from the Department but a lot of the information I presented this afternoon is my own.”** Later in the week, the FF Minister for Health, went to war with Simon Coveney- the personification of FG establishment in the Cabinet- over extending the mandatory hotel quarantine to the US and new EU countries. Coveney was backed by the Ministries headed by FG in blocking the extension of travel restrictions to these Important Countries. The FG arguments won the day at the first Cabinet meeting. But when [the public heard them, they were unconvinced. ](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/hotel-quarantine-should-not-apply-to-countries-where-many-irish-live-coveney-says-1.4526178?ref=thegist.ie) This tends to happen when you can’t decide which argument you want to advance so just make them all, regardless of whether they make a blind bit of sense. By the end of the week, the list was extended, with the USA and four EU countries added. In both Minister Rabbitte’s statement and the Hotel Quarantine row Fianna Fáil managed to do something it hasn’t even noticed it needed up until now- it staked out a position more in line with the public mood and then it tried to advance that position against internal and institutional resistance. Fine Gael voices the views of state officials, because it has always seen itself as the rightful heirs of the state. The Green Party are consistently [bamboozled and helpless](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/roderic-o-gorman-s-first-direct-contact-with-ag-was-in-october-1.4399352?ref=thegist.ie) in the face of their own Departments. Even as it hits new polling lows, Fianna Fáil may have stumbled on a strange route back from irrelevance- to become the internal opposition in the Government it nominally leads. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/86766170-6454-4648-bb47-ebfa8219a006_1125x1348.jpeg) ### The Gist: Autistic children and other enemies of the State URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-autistic-children-and-other/ Last updated: 2021-03-27T01:37:19.000Z The notification chimed at 9am on Friday morning. [“Department of Health built secret dossiers on children with autism”](https://www.rte.ie/news/investigations-unit/2021/0324/1205962-department-of-health-dossiers-children-autism/?ref=thegist.ie) And with that began the latest, worstest sorry tale yet of our scofflaw state’s abuse of citizens’ data. The children’s families had sued in their name to get the state to follow its statutory duty to give them an education. The Department has since spent the last ten years looking for something- going on ‘fishing expedition’ after ‘fishing expedition’- to use against them. The problem was, it didn’t follow the normal, lawful means of accessing medical records under a court order for discovery. It just exerted the raw power of a government department to take what it wanted. It reached into the Department of Education, to get copies of the children’s school reports. Then it went further. It wrote to medical professionals, clinical caregivers who were attended by the children and their families seeking treatment and help, and it told them to hand over their infant enemy’s medical details. It told them to keep this data raid secret from the families. And, it seems, the medicos complied. The Department has been screaming that this is all totally normal since the story broke. Whenever it issues one of these [borderline hysterical statements](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/96bc8-open-letter-from-secretary-general-of-the-department-of-health-robert-watt/?ref=thegist.ie), it focusses on the nature of the data stored. It never addresses the means by which it has obtained that data. That’s because it may be normal for me to hold your bank records if I receive them on foot of a court-ordered discovery process. But if I break into your house in the night and steal them from your desk then it is generally considered very Not Normal when I am found with them. And this is the problem with the Department’s legal defence to the obvious charge that it (amongst others) has breached the Data Protection rights of these children and their families. Here’s what it told RTÉ; > The department said that, under data protection legislation, it was entitled to share and store information for the purposes of getting legal advice or to defend court proceedings. This is a reference to Section 8(f) of the 1988 Data Protection Act. Except, 1. That’s not what the section allows and; 2. That Act was repealed when the GDPR replaced it and'; 3. It doesn’t matter what’s in our national laws if it breaks the EU law above it. Let’s look at those three in order. 1. Section 8, 1998 Act allowed for sharing data when > (*f*) required for the purposes of obtaining legal advice or for the purposes of, or in the course of, legal proceedings **in which the person making the disclosure is a party or a witness** And these doctors, and School Boards of Managment who made the disclosures weren’t parties or witnesses. 1. The GDPR came into force in May 2018\. The RTÉ report said this dossier processing continued after that, and [today’s statements from the Minister for Health confirmed it.](https://www.rte.ie/news/2021/0326/1206256-autism-rte-investigates/?ref=thegist.ie) By then, a new Data Protection Act has been passed. It had to abandon the subjective wording that allowed sharing when someone thought it was ‘required’ and replace it with [Section 47 DPA 2018](http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2018/act/7/section/47/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie#sec47) where sharing was only permitted if ‘necessary’. > 47- The processing of special categories of personal data shall be lawful where the processing— > > (a) is **necessary** for the purposes of providing or obtaining legal advice or for the purposes of, or in connection with, legal claims, prospective legal claims, legal proceedings or prospective legal proceedings That’s an important change, because the High Court of Ireland has already confirmed that accessing a litigant’s entire medical history generally, going back years and years will not generally be considered necessary, and so will not be allowed, even in court Discovery applications. (See Paragraphs 11 and 12 of [Power v Tesco Ireland, 2016](https://www.bailii.org/ie/cases/IEHC/2016/H390.html)) > “It offers the proposition that general discovery of a plaintiff's entire pre-medical history ought to be allowable. However, this is but a starting-point: discovery, were it always or even widely to be ordered on this basis, would almost invariably be disproportionate (oppressive).” 1. And finally, even if there was a provision in Irish law allowing for the sharing of data about citizens between state bodies in secret, that provision would be a nullity, since the CJEU has already determined, [in the Bara case](https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=088B16B7963E5875FB5F49E00294B040?text=&docid=168943&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=195745&ref=thegist.ie), that EU data protection principles overrule and outlaw any > “national measures, such as those at issue in the main proceedings, which allow a public administrative body of a Member State to transfer personal data to another public administrative body and their subsequent processing, without the data subjects having been informed of that transfer or processing.” The Data Protection Commissioner has [announced they’d like some questions answered](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/data-protection-commission-to-contact-department-of-health-over-dossiers-on-children-with-autism-1.4520302?ref=thegist.ie). That body will need to go further than just asking questions, if it is to ensure that these children’s rights have been upheld and this sort of snooping isn’t repeated. [Photo by Tahir mq - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, ](https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71575428&ref=thegist.ie) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/46e63a5c-b4dc-4a17-af75-51397b2f42ec_4160x2340.jpeg) ### The Gist: FF, the Coalition's Biggest Small Party URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ff-the-coalitions-small/ Last updated: 2023-11-26T11:57:02.000Z It’s the single most consistent factor in Irish coalition politics. If you join a coalition as the small party, you risk anything from brand damage to full-scale electoral wipeout. Even the PDs, in the end, couldn’t save themselves from the fate of the littlest co-bo. Even the [Journal of Nordic Irish Studies could see the dynamic clearly in 2018](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26657347?ref=thegist.ie); > The strongest party in the coalition reaps the benefits of coalescing with a minor party and wins over the latter’s supporters. So, when FF and Fine Gael went shopping in April 2020 for a small party to make up the numbers in their Grand Bargain, everyone knew what the party foolish enough to bite the poisoned apple would face. RTE’s political reporter Sandra Hurley [described the familiar bargain](https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0417/1132236-smaller-parties-govt/?ref=thegist.ie); > They have to weigh up the opportunity to realise policies, versus the risk of shouldering blame and being railroaded by the larger partner. But, since then, something unforseen has happened. The familiar dramatic draining away of support has gurgled down the plughole, not of the Green Party, but of Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil, which never imagined itself as taking any ‘minor party’ risk in entering a coalition because it has always been the overwhelming larger party. But take a look at the Irish Times/IPSOS MRBI poll. This has long been considered the gold standard of Irish polling (in part just because it has been running for so long). The Green Party received 6% support, basically the same as their election result of 7%. But Fianna Fáil have fared as every minor party coalition member before them. The public have decided they are the face of failure, whatever failure they might imagine that to be. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/9c7e35cb-62cd-4e15-8d55-4f9d8de956cd_1915x1349.jpeg) Leave aside the details of what the public might consider those failures to be (mostly Covid related, unsurprisingly). The real question is why the curse of the small party has fallen on, what is after all, the party with the most TDs. And, again, this comes down to the existential crisis Fianna Fáil has been facing for some years. It has declared itself to be a Centre Party, in an age of polarisation. But, when you examine it, it doesn’t have centrist policies so much as a lack of any particular viewpoint. That’s not new- the Fianna Fáil of the past stood for Fianna Fáil, and in a country where that meant patronage unlimited, everyone knew where they stood on that policy. FG have soared since the election and the Greens have carried on mostly the same. Both are the thing they are. But, even nominally leading the government, nobody knows what FF are. We only know that if most of their TDs and members got what they want it would see them diminish and go into the West. The area the party is still strongest (conservative catholic voters) is a fast-shrinking cohort in the electorate. Committing to that identity is to abandon any plans for a significant future. Without a clear sense of social aims beyond an aspiration at technocratic competence, FF can’t loom large in the national imagination. But if they plump for that one clear reactionary path their TD’s find so attractive, they’ll shrink even further. Which means Fianna Fáil may have to get used to a future of coalitions as as the smaller party in more ways than one. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6619dbcc-d22f-48d2-a2c8-52a5a3514c3e_1125x1109.jpeg) ### The Gist: Far-left Riots And Other Tall Tales URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-far-left-riots-and-other/ Last updated: 2021-02-28T12:14:30.000Z ### **Grafton Barbarism** Fascism loves violence. It draws its power from involving and implicating increasing numbers of people in the transgression of violence, which they then struggle to justify to themselves and each other rather than reverse course. To that end, it chases the heat of public disquiet- emphasising division, amplifying distress and then goading people to blame rather than understanding. In this way it acts as a sort of physical manifestation of a late night radio call in show, only one that would like to kill the guests too. If people are upset about something- being stuck in their house for the longest economic shutdown in the EU, say - fascists will act to funnel that heat towards their goal of violence as a means to power. As most people have busy lives which tends them towards assessing the most recent things they’ve heard in the context in which they hear them (as opposed to a decades-long context of all the previous things a person has said to indicate they are a fascist) this is a model which works as long as our heat-chasing fascist is provided with platforms to transmit their words to enough people. However, once fascism has gathered enough adherents it will use them to commit acts of violence. Remember, very many of those adherents would recoil at the thought they were fascists. ‘I am solely motivated in ensuring a high-quality reliable train network’, they would explain, ‘and have never been as interested in the genocide side of our party platform.’ The problem for society at large is that, once people are adhered to a fascist platform- whatever the reason that was originally used to draw them in- they will continue to justify that past decision by rejecting any evidence that they were wrong as false. In doing so they will cast about for evidence that they were right all along. And, by the nature of evidence that suggests that joining a fascist movement was a good idea, it too will be wrong. This impulse is not unique to fascism, but is just how people who make any and all errors of judgement in their opinions are wont to behave, as 10-15 minutes on any social media platform of your choosing will demonstrate. But every step is a step down, a step deeper. Because once you’re arguing that protesting outside the Dáil with nooses is OK, you’ve to then justify that mistake by arguing that assaulting political opponents with beams of wood to the head was right too. And then you find yourself arguing that firing explosive rockets at policemen’s faces in a premeditated attack should be looked at in a *sympathetic* context. And, just like that, you’re a fascist. All because you couldn’t accept the alternative of admitting you were wrong once. ### **Things True and False, for Balance** The Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris, spoke after his force was attacked by the aforementioned fascists. He wanted to acknowledge the danger his policewomen and men had faced and try to convey his awareness of the nature of this network of heat-chasing groupings. Here’s how RTÉ reported his statement; > Mr Harris said there was a conglomeration of groups involved in demonstrations including anti-maskers, anti-vaccination groups, anti-lockdown groups, and elements of the far-left and far-right. > > "No one group that we saw today was one set of individuals. This was groups working in concert with each other, as a group, as a mob," he said. It was self-evidently wrong to suggest that ‘far-left and far-right’ groups were working in concert with each other and (despite an incoherent attempt by the Minister for Justice to invent a justification for what the Commissioner had said in the meantime) by the following day [he had withdrawn it](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2021/0228/1199831-dublin-protests/?ref=thegist.ie). Before passing over the incident it is worth thinking about what it said about the changes to what Irish institutions have always taken for granted that the shared events of the last few years have wrought. Four years of Trumpism culminating in an insurrectionary attack on the US legislature has undermined the reflexive institutional impulse to assert that all critics of the status-quo are equally dangerous. The public, rightly, just don’t think they are. The Garda Commissioners of old would never have issued a correction. They would have followed the Department of Justice’s path of justifying the error with more wrong statements. This is evidence of institutional learning. We also glimpsed something else- the Irish Garda Commissioner’s career background in Northern Ireland leaves him seeing political divisions as zero-sum games. In policing them he instinctively balances everything between two extreme poles. Any blame for one is reflexively accompanied by blame for the other, for balance, in case he be accused of supporting one side over the other. But this is a reflex born of Northern Ireland’s particular political circumstances. It doesn’t map onto the difficulties of policing a radicalised right. **We have to be able to accurately describe the political roots of violence before we will be able, as a society, to successfully tackle it.** Here’s a better use for Grafton Street. I look forward to seeing more of this again in the future. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4459e2d8-f163-4085-9686-bff634594203_1180x1206.png) ### The Gist: Demanding Attention URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-demanding-attention/ Last updated: 2021-02-22T04:51:53.000Z The Irish Government continued to start new Covid communications conflagrations into which to throw a tired nation’s goodwill, while questions piled up, unanswered on the doorstep of the Mother & Baby Homes commission, not least from the Minister for Children. But, as none of these plotlines are due for immediate conclusion, I hope you’ll allow me to continue my diversion into the question of regulating broadcast in a post-internet world. This is The Gist. This week, the Australian Government triggered a show-down with the two behemoths of social media Google and Facebook. Both present themselves as companies that offer services to consumers for free. Neither make their money doing so. Both are actually exceedingly large advertising companies- the largest the world has ever seen and the most profitable. They are not the Washington Post of Watergate. They are the Mad Men of Madison Avenue and every TV network and newspaper rolled into one. They sell people- their users- to businesses. And it was that business the Australian Government (egged on by Rupert Murdoch’s creaky old media) has honed in on. Advertising is the business that actually makes the money that bubbles up through the walls and floors of Facebook and Google, uncontrollably showering each in riches, like Beverly Hillbillies who went out shootin’ for some food and ended up owning Saudi Arabia. Previous efforts to claw back that lost advertising income had relied on asserting copyright on links to their material. The problem with this, even for a sympathetic government, was that it would create a wider problem with everyone- large or small- falling foul of potential copyright claims for every link. ([Ireland had some experience of how badly this could go awry in 2012](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/12/30/2012-the-year-irish-newspapers-tried-to-destroy-the-web/?ref=thegist.ie)). So, instead, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was tasked with an inquiry into Facebook and Google specifically, and produced [a report](https://www.accc.gov.au/publications/digital-platforms-inquiry-final-report?ref=thegist.ie) proposing legislative changes to claw back some of the value of those missing ad dollars. You’re 206 pages in before you get to the nub of the argument they created; > ƒThere is a fundamental bargaining power imbalance between media businesses and Google and Facebook that results in media businesses accepting terms of service that are less favourable. Using the language of competition, the Aussie Commission set out an argument that newspaper and other media deserved payments for the value of their work but that they weren’t getting them because of Google and Facebook’s dominent market power. In response, the Australian Government proposed a binding arbitration panel that would assign values that ‘should’ be paid to the old media by the new platforms and then enforce those values as debts, under pain of millions of dollars of fines. The problem with this is that G&F don’t rely on ‘news’ to make their money. As Facebook swiftly demonstrated by blithely cutting Australian news sources (and a lot of other things too) out of its platform as a response. Old media sold its stories to readers (or viewers), so that readers could be sold to advertisers. But Facebook is full of little economic units who are making their own stories- pictures of their grandkids, walks in the wood, tales of their day. News is less than 4% of Facebook’s feed content. Which leaves the same problem the Aussies tried to solve still in play- the output of trustworthy media has never been so socially valuable. But if they don’t understand the way Internet platforms work, they can mistake that *social* value for a commercial value it just doesn’t have to those platforms. Whatever the outcome of Australia’s experiment, rent-seeking just doesn’t seem to be a business model with any future for those trusted news sources. Not when the tenants can move away from your plot at will. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/71f074d1-64af-44cb-b0d2-ba5f5f90dc08_1813x1072.jpeg) ### The Gist: Public Service Broadcasting, the red herring edition URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-public-service-broadcasting/ Last updated: 2021-02-16T01:46:57.000Z The world is continuing on much as before, but moreso, so it might be worth paying a small moment’s attention to a thing that is never quite topical but is still significant all the same- What on earth is Public Service Broadcasting and why should we care about it? In Ireland, the idea of public service broadcasting was, for decades, simply another way of discussing RTÉ. It was the only TV station broadcasting, it was the dominant Radio broadcaster, it was the only real speech (as opposed to pop music) broadcaster with national reach. This has led politicians and broadcasters alike to fall into a habitual rut of immediately transforming any discussion of Public Service Broadcasting into a discussion of the thing RTE wants to talk about, which is the TV Licence Fee. This is traditionally countered with the Presenter Salary Gambit. The problem with that particuar topic pairing is that it perennially misses the point. RTÉ’s funding model is structually misconcieved for producing either commercial profits or public service broadcasting and in chasing both it frequently succeeds at neither. Bluntly, you can have a public funded model or an advertising model, but you can’t have Irish public service broadcasting (with its inherent lack of commerciality and high costs) reliant on advertising money in a world where TV advertising is structually dying. (If you want to know how long this has been clear as day to anyone with eyes in their head to see, [I happen to have recently republished a 50 year old book demonstrating this exact point](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/191631371X/ref=cm%5Fsw%5Fem%5Fr%5Fmt%5Fdp%5F0F5Z7E3ES2WVA53AR07X?ref=thegist.ie).) RTÉ is lobbying to widen the net for the TV Licence- to capture households where, currently, you can watch its output, but on a device that isn’t a TV and so you aren’t required to pay a Licence fee. The Government actually flirted with this in 2009, in the Broadcasting Act (see the wide definition of television set in [Section 140](http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2009/act/18/section/140/enacted/en/html?ref=thegist.ie#sec140)) before the Minister hastily issued a follow up [Statutory Instrument](http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2009/si/319/made/en/print?ref=thegist.ie) exempting anything that wasn’t an old style TV on a stand or the wall from the Act. The reality of introducing and enforcing an annual tax on smartphones came crashing in hard and fast. If you’ve ever wondered why the RTÉ Player was an unwatchable train crash, while every other channel, from TG4 to Channel 4, could deliver a streaming platform without the angst, consider [this observation by RTÉ’s Director General](https://www.thejournal.ie/tv-licence-fee-evasion-rates-4883009-Nov2019/?ref=thegist.ie) > RTÉ says that “11% (and growing) of households” don’t pay the TV licence because they don’t have a television, but can still watch RTÉ programmes on the RTÉ Player. > > “This means a further loss of €20 million in public funding annually,” it said. The better the RTÉ Player is, the fewer TV Licence fees RTÉ fears it will get. ### It is a perverse commercial incentive to sabotage the station’s future to hoard a dwindling income stream. In the end, the argument won’t be won on cheeseparing lower collection fees from An Post or on trying to force people used to watching their iPads to buy a TV. A TV Licence is a relic from a time when owning a TV was a mark of high income. If we extend it to be, in effect, a household or poll tax we have introduced a new regressive tax, lacking either intellectual credibility or political acceptance. If it is to be universal taxation, it should be progressive, cheap or free to collect and have next to no evasion. ([you can read one short suggestion of a model for that here](https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2019/11/12/rte-a-proposal-for-the-funding-issue/?ref=thegist.ie)). But if it is to deliver something radically *better,* it will need to be more than just replacing the money lost through dwindling advertising. It will need to be underpinned by a fresh discussion of what public service broadcasting means in a world of Netflix and all the other empty calories of fun streaming into our homes. That’s going to mean we look up from the dreary steeples of Montrose and Marconi House and find out what’s going on in the world that will remake or destroy the media ruts we’ve all been far to deep inside for too long. And, guess what, that’s what’s coming in the next Gist. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/87eb55cd-9e87-4fd3-8748-a77b00a08716_1125x653.jpeg) Hey there! Thanks for sticking around to the end here. It’s just you and me here now, I’m pretty sure. I just wanted to thank you again for reading, and to specially thank you if you had paid for the pleasure. But I love you all equally, and have no favourites. Send me your thoughts on what a public service broadcaster would look and feel like to you. Just hit reply, and there I am. ### The Gist: Picking Up The Pieces URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-picking-up-the-pieces/ Last updated: 2021-02-05T10:53:55.000Z ### Tales of Two Congresswomen A violent mob storms the Capitol building at the losing President’s instigation and roams the halls looking to kill senior members of the incoming government party. It’s a pretty big story. This week saw two women dealing with the fallout from that event in public. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [released a video](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2021/feb/02/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-reveals-she-is-a-sexual-assault-survivor-video?ref=thegist.ie) giving greater detail of how near to harm she came as the mob searched for her, specifically. She addressed it, in a characteristically thoughtful way, in the context of her past experience of sexual assaunt. Meanwhile Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of committee seats by the Democrats after the publising of her conspiracy theory-filled past statements. Greene, a sort of human avatar of your dumbest cousin’s Facebook feed, explained that she’d read a lot of stuff on the Internet and been ‘allowed to believe’ them. This stuff included advocating for the execution of her current work colleages, claiming bereved parents of schoolchildren killed in mass shootings were only codding and that *(deep breath)* the California wildfires were started by a space laser beam which was controlled by Jewish bankers. The Republican members of congress reportedly gave her a [standing ovation](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opinion/marjorie-taylor-greene-republicans.html?ref=thegist.ie) at their party meeting. ### Yeah, But No, But Yeah The Government continuted to suffer for their inability to explain resistance to hotel quarentine, despite every effort being made by the various arms of the state to come up with one. One of the problems with not having a clear reason for doing something is that everyone starts making up their own reasons- in part to deal with questions, but also to tell themselves a story of their own actions that makes sense to them. So it was that Ministers took to the airwaves, and for the second week running, just couldn’t say the same thing twice. > [](https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1357040275164659714?ref=thegist.ie) The following day, the Minister for Health came back and explained what he’d said was right, but also this other thing that was different to it was right too. This had the reassuring quality that you would expect on the electorate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/1e8d1985-9157-4b78-a7cf-742718f9e4b2_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Feedback Friday URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-feedback-friday/ Last updated: 2021-01-30T22:46:28.000Z Hello! Something a bit different this time. Some feedback from the last few weeks on some of the Gists that you’ve received, and what you liked, didn’t like, and would like to see more of. Over to you; Responding to [Musings for Airports](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-musings-for-airports): > Hi Simon, > > Love your work, and your ability to capture how I feel in a concise, yet better-phrased sentence in particular. > > Regarding the current stumbling shambles of an approach: > > The kite flying from the cabinet’s green contingent regarding a possible 2km restriction zone made the demands for mandatory quarantine all but inevitable > > (presumably the rest of cabinet were unwilling to associate themselves with that particular notion) > > Don’t overlook the optics of gift card aisles and children’s toys being behind barriers in supermarkets also, with birthday and communion season on the horizon and a fresh batch of home schooled children to keep occupied > > A recurring theme with this government is going back to the same well over and over when dreaming up new restrictions, regardless of their inherent logic or even contradictions with already established ones > > Keep up the good work, above all on the mother and baby home report as I’m sure the powers that be are looking for another rug to sweep the latest one under. > > Jamie And; > Hi Simon, > > I'm really enjoying The Gist, it's a great summary of current affairs and a keen insight into why our political structures continue to fail, and sometimes succeed. > > I like this episode particularly as it peels away the layers of spin to give a truthful commentary on life under the tyranny of Covid in Ireland today. Thank you and keep up the good work. > > Regards, > > Brian Responding to [A Bad Confession on Mother & Baby homes](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-a-bad-confession-on-mother) > Simon, > > As requested I'm replying to say that this one is, well I can't call it my favourite, but this one made me stop in my tracks. I forwarded it on to my kids (adults really) for a read. Honestly, I avoided most of the newspaper articles - I will read them, but not this month. Thanks for this. > > *"* Irish Society was, unquestionably, warped and wronged by the power structures [which saw mass coercive confinement](https://email.mg1.substack.com/c/eJxVksmSokAARL-muWFUFfuBA6IiPY2yqu2FKHZkp0oWv37sPs1E5O1l5OVljGmad-OqPkk6smPa1yuTqEBCsRQxpYoAggAiGQIkA3kDN5ouKMqeU7QthGgPwQcPmhxuyDMiFMfVJu4aplBBnAoZiGWOFyHGsgIUKCAsJ6IiKTLmOaZWC0p78sFpH-jwTtrgst40Ofpv6Q3iH%5Fg519XeOBe65riB%5FPBmyxw0cq3ASzRyr7h89fR02FqLQmyaN0VJdi3MwrNZLtJ5ui731b%5FdJ0129hkvaMAx74Zn3tucuqNB3LOe6kA2WFdzHveX1j4iYtTWNi7cvgR8iQy75nXbkUNzoDdybqbk8%5FZHCQRv4Trj--6zS-A%5FMu5SRJm56xzLyvrj2XZ2WDELURBvPA6H%5FMtm93g43iT2NVz41y7HQuZ-kwYajufbl5M1DMbD18u-eQquErFxhTVBwOv6hENV63BkM7uHkkPHcBm2RzBNFqyHnhUgH-SeJ9eRfWKjfrvbnqexY4OVlRC9VYhKi7lrc1y2fjQn88IXYXVaytkxk6szRUYnoiUI2uNyiCCFwiwu7ZR6oBu4p3I5-NcnMT0rlCyrrAKm7wgNy0TlIJKQJABmVEkT53gc3y%5FIfw3-6P-t0bVP1TadSZ1Smo4M%5Ffdgb8dJ9-63Ki3SvCT0L6oD1b4) hit 1% of the whole population in 1951\. For comparison, Stalin’s Gulag system was 1.5% of the USSR in 1953." \*\*\* I really appreciate hearing that stat his as hard as it hit me when I found it. In some way, I think the history of 20th Century Ireland has been missing the context of this mass incarceration system to explain it. We couldn’t understand Stalin without knowing about the Gulags. We can’t understand Ireland without seeing the forced incarceration it was built on. Thanks again Simon ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/8bc90263-ce55-4ba6-9b2d-6420048750b8_1408x509.jpeg) If you’d like to nominate a favourite Gist, or give a different perspective on something I’ve written about, hit reply on any of the Gist emails, or just find me on Twitter @Tupp\_ed and tell me about it. ### The Gist: Musings for Airports URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-musings-for-airports/ Last updated: 2021-01-28T01:35:40.000Z In May 2020, expert group NPHET [sent its advice](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40212500.html?ref=thegist.ie) to the Government; > “a mandatory regime of self-isolation for 14 days at a designated facility for all persons arriving into Ireland from overseas (with limited exemptions to include supply chain workers and those in transit to other jurisdictions, such as Northern Ireland)" For reasons (specifics ever-changing) known only to the Government, they decided to just ignore this ninnying talk of putting people in a ‘designated’ facility, known as hotel quarantine to you and I. Instead, people arriving to Ireland were asked to promise to be sound, before being released into the population. Last week Tony Holohan, presumably with a facial expression of unparalleled told-you-so-ness, announced that after our Christmas visit season the more infectious, possibly more deadly, British Covid variant [now accounted for 60% of all Irish infections.](https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/0122/1191502-variant-covid-19/?ref=thegist.ie) Ministers fanned out across the airwaves, their Spidey-sense tingling at a change in the air. The public was having one of its moments when it crystalises around an opinion. Fed up trudging through the longest January in recorded history they wanted actual rules with actual enforcement (not, traditionally, one of the Irish State’s strengths). The Opposition sensed it too. Suddenly, like a Tik-Tok going viral, the voices of the Social Democrats and People Before Profit went from a lonely duo shantying about ZeroCovid to a chorus, as Sinn Féin and Labour joined in. After a week spent trying out and abandoning increasingly baffling excuses for a year of inactivity on international travel (The Border, The Constitution, If You Make Us We’ll Cancel Next Christmas Too, The DUP, Your Aunt In England, Your Nephew Who Might Need To Fly To London For A Big Job Interview) the Cabinet met in a sweat. They emerged with a plan; they *would* announce extra restrictions on international travel and then just… not. > [The detailed legislative work to implement this will get under way immediately.](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/e2374-extension-of-level-5-restrictions-and-introduction-of-measures-for-international-travel/?ref=thegist.ie) I mean, why not leave to tomorrow what you could have done last May? What’s the rush anyway? For what it is worth, here’s what I think this all feels like. We’re looking at the impact of system exhaustion. Border controls and hotel quarantine are a genuinely difficult administrative system to introduce. And the existing system has been operating at full stretch for nearly a year now. The actual people who would have to turn a policy into reality just have not been able to countenance that they will have to bike up another mountain when they’re still halfway up the first one, their thighs screaming. It’s not about money, or the border or Nephews With Good Jobs In London. We’re sick and tired. The general public, yes, but also the bits of the public who happen to have been left minding the shop of state when a pandemic blew the doors off. But both bits of the public still have to keep making good decisions together because, as we’ve seen this month, we pay a price in blood if we don’t. We’re going to have to get faster at this. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6919b646-171c-4939-9d6d-31b5317a67e2_4032x3024.jpeg) **Feedback Loop** Oh, hey, you’re still here. Great. I’ve got a couple of really good bits of feedback on recent Gists. I was thinking of doing a roundup- a sort of Feedback Friday. If you’d like to nominate a favourite Gist, or give a different perspective on something I’ve written about, hit reply on this email, or just find me on Twitter @Tupp\_ed and tell me about it. ### The Gist: Seeing Double URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-seeing-double/ Last updated: 2021-01-24T02:31:32.000Z ## America, in stereo The birds, now keenly watched by a housebound and event-starved populous, seemed to sing a little sweeter this week with the departure of human migraine Donald Trump from the US Presidency and his timely replacement by the personification of two aspirin and a short nap, Joe Biden. The unwinding of Trump’s power, equally nullified by his supporters attempting to overthrow the country’s elected government and by a Twitter ban, reached a new peak as even a few Republicans voted to see him impeached. The fact that he would also be banned from running for office again, leaving the field open for other Republicans to take power, was simply a happy happenstance. The longer story of the last four years will take more time to emerge from the obfuscation and denial it has been wrapped in. The US is often described as a divided nation. But it might be more useful to think of it as simply two different countries which happen to share the same location. They are superimposed on each other, each imperceptible to the other on a day to day basis. The two populations have different broadcasters, entertainments, authors, leisure activities, school curricula, religious expression and career paths. The UK and Ireland are closer to being a single nation than the two USAs, and as an Irishman, I do not say that lightly. One country is more populous, richer, has a much better educated citizenry and is preferred by foreign allies. The other country is increasingly authoritarian, riddled with disinformation, has a standing army of ill-controlled militia and cannot win in a fair head to head electoral contest. If we were to hear about a developing conflict between two nations described so we might expect trouble ahead. ### Schrödinger’s Brexit Brexit promised us it would be yesterday’s story, but it was the foolish person who believed it. The UK’s break with the EU is more a historical trend than a news story and it’s only just started to play out. Everything up until now has been about competing narratives describing possible futures after Brexit. You could pick between them, to match you personal preferences. The problem with potential futures, as any Austrian physics professor’s purring pet will tell you, is that eventually they all collapse into a single true present. You can have infinite possible things to come, but there’s still only one reality while you’re in it. If the last 20 years has taught us anything it is that there will always be people and institutions eager to defend and protect power. But, if people wake up to find their [fishing business destroyed](https://www.ft.com/content/82371fcb-3814-4ac1-8332-c59daaa49c8b?ref=thegist.ie), or their shop shelves bare or [international use of their global financial services sector diminished by €6bn in a day](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/markets/eu-share-trading-flees-london-on-first-day-after-full-brexit-1.4450561?ref=thegist.ie), it’s hard to spin the utopian story out for long. Everyone focuses on the bit of Schrodinger’s thought experiment where the cat can be both alive and dead in the box. It’s an exciting time and everyone can argue their favourite option. But it’s important to remember the end of the experiment, when the box is opened and everyone may find it always held a dead cat. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/c62d5e1e-bcf1-4869-9316-6f0445f3cc32_1226x660.png) Illustration: Av Dhatfield [CC BY SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/?ref=thegist.ie) ## Later this week Let’s try to have a special edition of the Gist later this week, catching up with what we know now about the Mother and Baby Home Commission’s report and what the next steps are for survivors of this branch of Ireland’s 20th Century Gulag Archipelago. ### The Gist: Drop the Dead Donkey URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-drop-the-dead-donkey/ Last updated: 2021-01-17T14:28:31.000Z The Mother and Baby Home Commission of Inquiry spent six years and €11 million or so euro compiling a report which, like Dracula when the blinds are pulled back, has crumbled to ash the moment it was exposed to sunlight. The report did ensure that a stack of documents were dug up and it will be valuable midden for future researchers to mine. But as to its conclusions, and any suggestion that it might stand as the final word on the issue, the Government went out on the airwaves today to declare a Great Reverse. The signal was for all parties to toss the report it launched with great fanfare and a welcoming webinar last week under a passing bus. Senator Regina Doherty kicked off the new position, [calling it ‘cold’ and ‘callous’](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40208657.html?ref=thegist.ie) and backpeddaling on the now-failed Plan A of accepting the report. > “we accepted the report and I think that's wrong” On Gavan Reilly’s radio show, the Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman sharply departed from the Commission report’s attempts to claim there was no evidence that adoptions were every anything but voluntary. [He said they’d taken a ‘legalistic approach’](https://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/on-the-record-with-gavan-reilly/roderic-ogorman-minister-for-children?ref=thegist.ie) in finding these women weren’t compelled and cited the descriptions in the report, and in particular the personal accounts from the women who gave evidence to the Confidential committee . He said it was clear the women were left with no choice. He also rejected the Report’s recommendation that redress should be blocked for anyone who was coercively confined and/or whose child was taken after 1973 on the basis that there was a little known social welfare payment available and so they should get nothing after that. That.. just isn’t going to fly. He declined to endorse how the Commission conducted its inquiry. This break was made easier by the [discovery by Noelle Brown that the Commission hadn’t actually taken a transcript of her evidence](https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5/?ref=thegist.ie#/radio1/21892875), but had just slotted in facts to a pre-defined questionnaire, and as she discovered that it wasn’t even accurate. Those details would have been the key ones for anyone trying to trace their mother or their own story- the date of entering the home and the date in which her birth mother died. How unfortunate. Finally, the Minister promised to take a GDPR approach to his proposed next legislation to allow for access to people’s records. Why he doesn’t just apply GDPR directly right now, given it’s already the superior law, remained unanswered. The Commission Report should be subjected to further academic and historical analysis. But as a political document its life has now ended. Nobody who doesn’t hold the title of Bishop is going to stand behind this Commission report now, and its members can look forward to an unfamiliar experience of being asked to account for their choices as the last leg of their participation in this public issue. For the survivors and the public whose sympathy has driven this volte face by the Government the question can move on to pressing the Government to break from another of its past habits and not cause survivors any further trauma as a price of compensation. \[[You can read my piece on GDPR and the Mother and Baby Homes in the Irish Examiner here](https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40208042.html?ref=thegist.ie)\] ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/09238687-66e9-41bf-a2ec-4991256e1a60_1376x586.png) ### The Gist: A bad confession on Mother & Baby Homes URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-bad-confession-on-mother/ Last updated: 2021-01-13T02:15:49.000Z Mother and Baby home survivors. That was the topic the State wanted to discuss this week, even as the questions mounted about the fatal consequences of the Government’s decision to depart from medical and scientific advice in suppressing Covid. ### The Well-Trodden Road The Government has had since the 30th October, when the Commission of Inquiry delivered its report to the Minister, to read, digest and respond to its contents. This week has seen the well rehearsed media management of these reports swing into action. Draw some poison with the worst headline with a soft Sunday placement before anyone else can answer with the real report. Drop the report and then swing into narrative-setting before people have a chance to read it. Sorrowfully declare the thousands of dead and missing babies to be something we all were responsible for, the grim relics of a inexplicable past society. Society, unlike all the still-existing state and church institutions who actually administered these policies, can’t be sued, you see. Finally try to rush to the Apology as quickly as possible, as an end to the thing. A state apology, but on behalf of that scoundrel society again. Strangely, no particular part of the State is acknowledged to have committed any wrongs. The Church has a procedure for the Sacrament of Penance. The sequence goes Admission-> Confession-> Penance -> Absolution. The State, if cornered, will sometimes Admit something seems awry. But it doesn’t like the radical transparency and truth-telling of Confessing. Its reports become evasions, like a three thousand page ellipse, marking where the absent truths should be. Then it plans for sealing and deleting records that might let people find the truth for themselves. This is all with the aim of avoiding Penance- to compensate those the State wronged, at the full value of the harms done to them. As Judge Quirke [described his intention](https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2013/07/07/the-quirke-report-a-critical-analysis/?ref=thegist.ie) in designing a compensation scheme for Magdalen Laundry survivors: > the payments which I am recommending are expressly required by my Terms of Reference to be “ex gratia” in nature. They are not and do not purport to comprise full and complete damages to compensate the Magdalen women for injury and loss caused by the wrongdoing of the State. Irish Society was, unquestionably, warped and wronged by the power structures [which saw mass coercive confinement](https://twitter.com/tupp%5Fed/status/841571615683014656?s=21&ref=thegist.ie) hit 1% of the whole population in 1951\. For comparison, Stalin’s Gulag system was 1.5% of the USSR in 1953. But that does not mean ‘we’ or the generality of Irish society are responsible for these abuses. When power is concentrated and misused, it is not equally the fault of the person with power and those they abuse. Society was arranged for the benefit of specific people and institutions. The society Ireland had was the one *they* chose, not the one that the citizens without power wanted. The inheritors of those powerful institutions may discover, as survivors and their advocates read the report and absorb it, that the society we have now has indeed changed, in ways that they have always feared. As any good Catholic knows, you can’t get Absolution from a bad confession. If the Minister or the Taoiseach really wants to reach that state of grace, they will have to do better, or eventually face judgement. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d749d2d5-8c7c-4414-a739-32b0223d8035_1668x1043.jpeg) [photo credit](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fmass%5Fgrave%5Fat%5Fthe%5FBon%5FSecours%5FMother%5Fand%5FBaby%5FHome,%5FTuam,%5FGalway.jpg?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Any news? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-any-news/ Last updated: 2021-01-07T02:42:27.000Z There was too much news today so we’re just going to try to sprint past a bunch of it really fast, gathering whatever we can from our peripheral vision. ### US and them Two major political events happened in the United States today. One will strip major political figures of their power and will hugely empower others. The other was a spectacle, made for TV. The election of the two candidates in Georgia for the Democratic party changes the course of the next two years. It will put the entire machinery of the US federal state out of the hands of the Republican party and represents a triumph of democracy- of the determined wish of Georgia’s voters (and particularly Georgia’s Black voters) to have their will reflected in their elected officials. But it also triggered something else- the defeated Republican party candidates had tied themselves to Trump. Now all the others could see what the electoral consequences of that were. Trump isn’t a kingmaker. He can’t make anything. He’s a wrecker. And he handed the Georgia elections to the Democrats. His attention-seeking and suggestions of overturning the election resulted in a Democratic turnout even more extreme than that in November. Both Republicans were [leading their races](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-for-republicans-in-georgia-vs-the-case-for-democrats/?ref=thegist.ie) the day of the Presidential election. They swore allegiance to him in ad after ad, groundless challenges to his loss and all. They did it to prevent him from turning on them and driving his base away. He did it anyway. The storming of the Capitol (in the same sense that I stormed my front door when I came home from school aged 10, by having my Mammy open it for me) was dramatic, undemocratic, violent, malignant and stupid. In that sense, it was an ideal expression of the spirit of the outgoing presidency which had inspired it. It interrupted a ceremony confirming the election result that a clique of elected Republicans had planned to disrupt with their own undemocratic, malignant and stupid objections. By the time the police had gently shooed the white supremacists, conspiracy nuts and Facebook-loons out of the building, [like armed ducklings who’d wandered in from the local pond](https://twitter.com/emmaholland%5F/status/1346940411273760773?s=20&ref=thegist.ie), standing with Trump didn’t look as hot a ticket to political success as it had yesterday. Granted, associating yourself with a violent occupation of your legislature which has ended bare minutes earlier isn’t usually a great look. But more importantly, *there was nothing in it for them any more.* Trumpism is now a political dead-end, snuffing out every political career it touched. It ended its eponymous proponent’s career. It ended the Georgia Republican candidates’ careers. It has ended Mitch McConnell’s power over the US legislature. [Expect](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/national-security-adviser-resigns-trump-protest/index.html?ref=thegist.ie) [lots](https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/georgia-senate-election-results/?ref=thegist.ie#300942) [of](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/stephanie-grisham-white-house-resign/index.html?ref=thegist.ie) [Republicans](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533033-gop-senators-hopeful-theyve-quashed-additional-election-challenges?ref=thegist.ie) to start sprinting away from its rotting corpse and keep going as far as they can, to try to shake the smell off. Power in the US is still transferred by the silent drifts of citizens’ votes. Occupying a building, however violently, was never a threat to that. Only someone who couldn’t tell the difference between the trappings of power and its democratic reality could have expected otherwise. Of the two big political events of the day, one was democracy. The other was just a (bad) show. ### Testing times The much-leaked new Covid restrictions were confirmed for Ireland, but with a twist. Where the UK announced they were scrapping their end of year exams, the Irish Minister for Education came up with a wheeze of her own. Leaving Cert students would keep coming to school, even through the heavy Level 5 lockdown for three days a week. This came a surprise to those students’ teachers (whose unions hadn’t been told about this) and to the Government’s scientific advisors, who quickly pointed out [nobody asked them about this plan.](https://www.rte.ie/news/2021/0106/1188012-schools-leaving-cert-education/?ref=thegist.ie) Expect this notion, like last year’s [Ministerial assurances of the Leaving Certificate’s certainty](https://www.rte.ie/news/education/2020/0402/1128166-state-exams/?ref=thegist.ie) up to the moment of cancellation, to melt away like the driven slush over the next few weeks. ### Thank you Thank you all so much for your subscriptions, paid and unpaid alike. You’re all very good for sticking around. An unusual number of Gists this week. I hope you’ll stick with me for more. Tomorrow, snow. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/ba73b32c-6aa8-4a1b-8a53-087380a2b3cc_2047x1364.jpeg) photo by Ronnie Macdonald under cc licence ### The Gist: Can't spell Pandemic without Panic URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-cant-spell-pandemic-without/ Last updated: 2021-01-05T02:31:52.000Z “We’ve always wanted schools to remain open.” That was Josepha Madigan’s final, weak, response to a series of questions she chose not to answer, at length. The questions, from Philip Boucher-Hayes on RTE Radio’s Today programme, were straightforward- should the schools remain open when the evidence for the safety of schools was based on a tracing system that the head of the HSE said was now unreliable. The stream of non-answers were blackly comical in their disconnect from reality but that final statement had the ring of truth. It reminded me of the repeated bleats from Fianna Fáil TDs as the banks fell apart and they were presented with the latest financial horror-facts “Well, I don’t accept that.” Both statements were true- they expressed wants and beliefs as a response to hard numbers and facts. But they both had the same effect on the audience listening to them- sparking incandescent rage at being misled, to their face, when the facts were clear. The schools can’t be safe because, bluntly, nowhere where people meet is safe right now. The explosive rate of increase in Covid infections has changed the risk profile of everywhere we might go. The schools may have been safe, but things that were safe before Christmas can’t be presumed to still be safe now. In October the Government ran a PR campaign attacking its scientific advisors for not seeing the bigger picture when it comes to pandemic containment. > Sometimes the reason why politicians make these decisions, is because we're the ones who can see the bigger picture. It's not just about a virus and statistics around a virus. - [Leo Varadkaar, 6th October 2020](https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/1005/1169652-covid-19/?ref=thegist.ie) The bigger picture now is simply that there is nothing more critical than the virus and statistics around a virus. You might wish that not to be the case. You might really want to go for some drinks, a meal out, or to not have to pay another few months of PUP payments to furloughed staff. But none of those *wants* will change the facts. The numbers are bad. We say that to each other. But we should remember they are bad because every number is a person, every person has a family. They will all remember this week. They are less likely to forgive it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/e1725593-be96-4369-94be-320a5f45d3a6_1091x640.jpeg) ### Special Thanks: A special thanks to those of you who have chosen to pay for your Gists. You prompted me to do a second one this week! ### The Gist: The Worst Lock-In Ever URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-worst-lock-in-ever/ Last updated: 2021-01-02T14:54:07.000Z The new year has dawned and never was there greater consensus that everyone was glad to see the back of an old one. And, as its a new year, let’s do a little run around to see what we can expect for early 2021\. Firstly, let’s acknowledge, it gets better. Secondly, there will still be fuck-ups. ### Covid explosion The Government starts the year with the worst holiday hangover ever, with January’s projected infection rates so high, they [will literally be off the chart](https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1345301447135678464?s=20&ref=thegist.ie). One-man news engine, Gav Reilly of Virgin Media News revealed that the software to compile the daily infection rates has a built-in maximum of 2000 per day. As of today, there’s a backlog of 9,000 stuck in the system with NPHET saying that’ll swell hugely by the end of the month, with thousands per day. The [Taoiseach](https://www.gov.ie/en/speech/8753b-statement-by-an-taoiseach-micheal-martin-on-the-reintroduction-of-level-5-restrictions-of-the-plan-for-living-with-covid/?ref=thegist.ie) tried to suggest this was not because the Cabinet substituted their own epidemiological expertise for NPHET’s, but due to a mutated virus. [NPHET said different](https://www.thejournal.ie/uk-strain-coronavirus-b117-ireland-third-wave-5314440-Jan2021/?ref=thegist.ie). You can guess which story the public has chosen to believe. A small aside on this: This is almost a non-party political problem for the government- Even their own supporters will turn on them if it turns out they screwed this up by choosing to fund retail and restaurants with the lifebreath of people’s parents and grannies instead of through state supports. And their problems will be compounded if they keep making baloney excuses in the face of questions- the anger that burned down Fianna Fáil and Labour’s house was, in part, an anger they they kept justifying themselves long after it was politically helpful to do so. What’s most galling is that ‘saving money’ by reopening early always ends up costing the state more money because of the severe economic effect of the subsequent lockdown. We get the worst of all worlds, simply because the State’s impulses are to treat economics as if it was book-keeping. Remember that TDs aren’t holding normal clinics, aren’t circulating in their communities, aren’t chatting after mass, funerals, in shopping centres. They’re cut off from their normal feedback systems which would alert them to an oncoming storm. This one could be a hurricane. ### Mother and Baby data, still Meanwhile, the Mother and Baby Homes issue is looming again, with the Commission report sitting on the Minister’s desk and some very questionable (from a GDPR perspective) letters about redaction of records going out to women over Christmas. Expect this entirely avoidable fire to burn hot again just as the public is at its most distressed in early February. The Minister’s department has not had a good time with understanding the GDPR that actually exists, as opposed to the one they wished existed. Lest we forget, this resulted in the [magnificent moment where the Minister](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/roderic-o-gorman-s-first-direct-contact-with-ag-was-in-october-1.4399352?ref=thegist.ie), reading the notes prepared by his Department, explained at Cabinet he was following Attorney General’s advice only to have the Attorney General, sitting at the Cabinet table, disagree with him. The controversial legislation was passed while the Department were still denying that the GDPR applied to the data held by the Commission. As a result, some of the provisions in the act aren’t in compliance with the superior EU law. It remains to be seen if the Minister and his Department are thirsty to repeat the experiences of October 2020. ### Thank you! A special thanks to those of you who have chosen to pay for your Gists, and also a thanks to those to haven’t, because I love you all equally. But for those who have subscribed, check your inboxes for a little gift from me. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/67bedf4b-fa62-4dce-a386-c1203a32924b_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: A small thank you URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-small-thank-you/ Last updated: 2020-12-30T23:51:52.000Z You, brave few, paying subscribers may claim a little bespoke prize _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Gist: 2020? Burn it down URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-2020-burn-it-down/ Last updated: 2020-12-23T18:06:35.000Z It is traditional to do an end of year review in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year, when we lose all track of time, everything is closed and we spend our time mooching around the house with our families. However, for obvious reasons, in 2020 we don’t need to wait before we get into this state, so let’s just do it now. ### FF, remembrance of a party past Look, it can hardly be said too often but it’s frequently been passed over as a story- Fianna Fáil is lost and dying. It may recover, because you don’t dominate a country’s social, cultural and political system for most of its existence without having deep roots. But exactly that history of dominance has been working against Fianna Fáil. Its remaining representatives’ impulses are to appeal to the FF voter. This idea makes sense when that consists of up to 60% of the electorate. It makes less sense when your addressable audience is so numerically reduced that a significant portion are at risk from actuarial life-expectancy tables. Fianna Fáil’s leader is a walking hourglass, the sand draining from the future to the past through a constantly tetchy present. There doesn’t seem to be any effort being made to regain relevance beyond the idea of one more heave. We’ve discussed Fianna Fáil’s main high-level problem many times- once they were who you voted for when you didn’t want to look at Fine Gael any more. This was a winning electoral offering, due to Fine Gael. Now that role has been gifted to Sinn Féin, by mutual agreement between Sinn Féin and Fine Gael. But if you *do* want Fine Gael in government, well, you know, there’s Fine Gael. The Taoiseach has attempted to claim that this makes Fianna Fáil The Centre Party! Ireland actually had a [Centre Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National%5FCentre%5FParty%5F%28Ireland%29?ref=thegist.ie) once. It only lasted a year, before being absorbed into Fine Gael. ### COVID and its aftermath Vaccinations notwithstanding, Covid will remain the primary shaper of Irish society and life deep, deep into 2021\. And, as the 20th Century Chinese diplomat once reportedly said of the French Revolution, it is too soon to say what its impact will be. Businesses, economic orthodoxy, transport choices, childcare, the role of the state- every one of these have been turned inside out. All the things you were told were impossible are now commonplace. The question is whether we will flee from these changes, as reminders of the grimness of the pandemic as we leave it behind. Or will we find that what’s seen cannot be unseen and face up to grappling with the meaning of ghost office blocks and a State able to invest effectively limitless cheaper-than-free money? The ripples of consequences to us as individuals are hardly knowable yet- from the demand for larger houses if they’re also to contain a workspace to the lasting emotional wounds of grief and loneliness. But there will also be weird positives to come out of this. You can’t wrench people’s lives into different shapes without it coming as an unexpected escape for some of them. We can expect a generation of art and culture to begin to come to terms with what’s happened. It will be strange, and some of it will be beautiful. ### What’s Past is Prologue Imagine if the bottom of a Tetris game was a city. You could look up and see the enormous shapes looming over you, not here yet. Who knows where they’ll land, what they’ll crush, what they’ll alter. That’s what this year has felt like. Glance up and there’s a huge cube of Brexit plummeting down towards us- nearly here now. Beyond that, we can see regime change in the US, a jagged S-bend in the sky. We can see the long red rectangle of China beyond that and then, above everything but almost blocking the light, the vast shadow of Climate change. All we can do is try to understand what’s happening to us and do a bit of thinking about it in order to understand what we’ll do next. ### And finally… Thank you so much for subscribing and reading the Gist this year. I’ve really enjoyed writing all 84 Gists since 2020 started, some 35 years ago. On a whim I’ve turned on paid subscriptions, but please be assured you’ll still get the usual emails whether you take up the offer or not. Have a safe and happy Christmas and I’m sure we’ll have a chance to meet up here again next year. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/5835e9f8-b07b-4dd1-8c80-7d6eeb049c44_1800x1200.jpeg) ### The Gist: Storms in a Tweetcup URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-storms-in-a-tweetcup/ Last updated: 2022-05-02T02:16:41.000Z Tweets. Sinn Féin haven’t been having a great time of it with the tweets for a few weeks. One of the most valuable bits of real estate for the leading party of the opposition is the Chair of the powerful Public Accounts Committee. Sinn Féin’s occupier of that chair, Brian Stanley TD, decided to [opine on matters historical on the 28th Nov](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/sinn-f%C3%A9in-td-brian-stanley-apologises-for-inappropriate-tweet-1.4422982?ref=thegist.ie) before deleting his tweet and apologising for it as “an inappropriate and insensitive tweet”. By the 3rd Dec, he’d decided it was safest to just delete his whole account, and his Facebook one too for good measure. This was after an eight year old tweet referring to the election of the new Fine Gael leader was found: > “Yippee 4 d tory. it's Leo. U can do what u like in bed but don't look 4 a pay rise the next morning.” Before we move on, let us spare a moment for the spent husk of a Government staffer who was tasked to read eight years of tweets to find the basis of a follow up story. But what is telling is Mr. Stanley’s [wounded statement](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40139432.html?ref=thegist.ie) which followed; > Tweets are shorthand, and we're not as good at it Who’s the ‘we’ there? Sinn Féin? They’re recognised to have the most active and engaged social media presence of all the parties, albeit one which is [probably actively ](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/social-media-pile-on-against-sinn-f%C3%A9in-critics-does-not-aid-party-%C3%B3-broin-says-1.4428994?ref=thegist.ie)[counter-productive](https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40030697.html?ref=thegist.ie) to their image. Maybe he just meant people like him? You know, TDs. Some people who are also TDs are the Fianna Fáil backbenchers. Every week they have a parliamentary meeting [whose minutes are livetweeted](https://twitter.com/search?q=%40mcconnelldaniel%20pp%20meeting&src=typeahead%5Fclick&f=live&ref=thegist.ie), to the apparent frustration of the party leadership. The fact that the party leadership showing this frustration is what fuels the leaks doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Anyway, as Fianna Fáil bobs dangerously close to single digits in poll numbers, the TDs have settled on what’s wrong- “Our [social media presence](https://twitter.com/McConnellDaniel/status/1336396481042018305?s=20&ref=thegist.ie) is appalling”. “The party needs to be [better at social media](https://twitter.com/McConnellDaniel/status/1336400730949906433?s=20&ref=thegist.ie)” But just as Mr. Stanley’s problems with tweets are unlikely to see Sinn Féin’s position dented in future polls, so a social media overhaul of Fianna Fáil will similarly do nothing to lift its fortunes. Saying that isn’t to endorse the much touted (and deeply dumb) assertion ‘Twitter isn’t real life’. Twitter is a reflection of real life- just as a golf clubhouse, a GAA clubhouse and a nightclub are each different reflections of real life. They give expression to an aspect of public opinion. But Twitter has also become a broadcast system for official actors (hence the livetweets of the FF meetings). Politicians are used to broadcast media- that’s what most of them have trained to use for decades. But a broadcast medium that is also an archive of all the dumb things we’ve ever said in passing and a two-way communications system? As Mr. Stanley realised as he deleted his account, “we’re not as good at it.” Meanwhile, the Government moves forward on laws to [regulate citizen’s use of the internet](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-should-irelands-broadcasting) and creating a crime of making an internet post that “[causes alarm or distress to the other person](https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/2017/63/eng/ver%5Fa/b63a17d.pdf?ref=thegist.ie)”. This points to a crunch happening from the middle of next year, when people who are self-confessedly bad at understanding and using the communication elements of social media will try to draw up rules that will restrict a good chunk of the world’s usage of it. Ireland’s biggest Twitter-storm is yet to land. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f24a5e8d-e0ea-4e23-b56b-41f13a3f0be5_1102x796.png) ### The Gist: Changed, but not utterly URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-changed-but-not-utterly/ Last updated: 2025-08-23T08:55:52.000Z The pounding headache in human form which is Donald Trump will cease to be the President of the United States next January. The mild sedative who will replace him, Joe Biden, will bring blessed relief, to start. This isn’t where to go for [numbers](https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/2020-election-results-coverage/?ref=thegist.ie), but let’s take it as only a matter of time. It’s worth a rundown of some consequences of that change. Let’s take a spin through the future. ### The World Good news! We might still have a future to spin through- Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement took effect the day after the election. Biden has already said that rejoining it will be one of his first actions in office. This was probably the most consequential matter which was in the balance in this election, being a question of whether or not *any effort* would be made to avoid the extinction of humanity. ### Sowing Done. Time to Reap Consequences. It’s not a very popular idea amongst the very old people who run the Democratic Party. Biden has run on the slogan that he will be a uniter of all Americans, a worthy idea akin to offering to emulsify oil and water. When Obama took power, one of his [most consequential decisions](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/what-to-do-about-the-torturers/?ref=thegist.ie) was to cancel the investigation and prosecution of those who promoted an illegal policy of torture in the Bush Administration, on the basis that it would be divisive. That sent the signal that no behaviour by people in power would ever face consequences in the event that you lost power. That policy gave the Trump campaign free rein, in the belief they would never face the consequences of their actions. Biden will have to decide whether to let the defeated taste the consequences of their actions when they had the whip hand. Personally, I hope that those responsible for the policy of child separations and encagement have it follow them to their graves, but everyone will have their favourites. ### Game rigged, new rules needed The US system’s democratic flaws have been starkly laid bare throughout these years. There are two parties, and only one of them can muster a majority of support from citizens. Democrats have now won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, something no party has done before in U.S. history. As a result, the Republican party must constantly act to suppress votes, voting and whole classes of voters, [gerrymander to reduce the impact of votes](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/?ref=thegist.ie) which are cast, and cling to the electoral college system which gives the same power to New York as to the state of Nevada. Biden is a four year President. With a Senate and a House in his control, he could have simply burned that system to the ground, resetting the entire political basis of his country, and forcing both parties to value all of the votes, not just the ones in ‘swing states’. There is a wafer thin chance it could happen in January, as the last two seats are filled. If it does, it will be due to the Black women and men of Georgia voting to save their country and perhaps, for some of them, their lives. ### Democracy, still magic There will be lots of time for to look at the new problems that Trump’s legacy of cruelty and lies has left us. But let’s take just a second to enjoy the votes falling softly all over the United States, burying an administration which never recognised that they could be ended. Deep drifts of ordinary voters’ expressions of opinion, smothering a voice that thought it was always entitled to be heard, demanding they stop counting because he never really believed they counted for anything. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/46ad48f9-5a75-41d7-886e-d425d535f54a_1083x720.jpeg) ### Mothers, Babies, Homes and their Data URL: https://www.thegist.ie/mothers-babies-homes-and-their-data/ Last updated: 2020-10-23T01:20:47.000Z The Minister has made a statement on the Government’s legal position on the application of the GDPR to ... well, to what exactly? Let’s look at it together; This is the Gist. > My Department has engaged extensively with the Attorney General's office on this issue and the advice we have received, to which the Department is bound, is that the GDPR right of access to personal data set out in Article 15 of the GDPR is expressly prohibited by section 39 of the Commissions of Investigation Act. Then he explains further; > Section 39 of the Act prohibits that in accordance with Article 23 of the GDPR, which allows for exceptions to the GDPR in a range of circumstances including those relating to the administration of justice. It is on that basis that the Attorney General has advised my Department that the potential solution to the issue of access to information, which a number of Deputies have suggested, is not available. Really? Firstly, oh dear. A national law can’t overrule an EU right, especially not one directly derived from the Charter. It certainly can’t prohibit it. Let’s all go look at Section 39, the impressively muscular piece of the Commissions of Inquiry Act 2004 which the Minister says can prohibit bits of EU law. Let’s have a peep at the words. It’s not long, don’t worry. It’s quite straightforward. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/5aac7256-10a3-4fc0-bcdb-26f22d64d917_1125x1433.jpeg) Now, firstly, as [Minister for Justice and The Commissioner of An Garda Síochana v WRC (Case C-378/17)](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&td=ALL&num=C-378/17&ref=thegist.ie) confirms, sometimes there are national laws that just aren’t legal. Laws that conflict with EU law are, strange as it sounds, illegal laws. And the state must just ignore them. The Court said; > It follows from the principle of primacy of EU law, as interpreted by the Court in the case-law referred to in paragraphs 35 to 38 of the present judgment, that bodies called upon, within the exercise of their respective powers, to apply EU law are obliged to adopt all the measures necessary to ensure that EU law is fully effective, disapplying if need be any national provisions or national case-law that are contrary to EU law. This means that those bodies, in order to ensure that EU law is fully effective, must neither request nor await the prior setting aside of such a provision or such case-law by legislative or other constitutional means. So Section 39, says the AG, the Minister tells us, exempts the records from Article 15 Data Access Requests. Except, as you can see above, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even mention Article 15 and the GDPR. It couldn’t, because it was passed in 2004 and the GDPR was passed in 2016. Instead it attempts negation of Section 4 of the Data Protection Act 1988\. And that Act isn’t the GDPR. It isn’t even still alive. The 2018 Data Protection Act deals with the status of the old 1988 Act which this Section 39 addresses. It was almost all repealed. Two acts were specified as able to rely on it still. Neither was the Commissions of Inquiry Act 2004. Here, don’t rely on my word for it. Read it yourself; ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/a263a857-6608-4972-8211-c36a74162fd9_1125x1603.jpeg) To recap, the Ministers says the AG told him that a section of a national Act, which refers to a repealed law, prohibits the functioning of an EU Fundamental Right under the Charter. This is deep into what might be termed “novelty”. But if we’re down in this Governmental rabbit hole we might as well go on and meet the Queen and play the croquet match to the end. Let’s go check how this time travelling 2004 law can rely on a 2018 Regulation provision to cancel that same EU law. Time to look at Article 23\. “Restrictions” Before we go in, let’s remind ourselves of the Minister’s claimed basis, on which his entire position rests, for asserting Section 39 of the 2004 Commissions of Inquiry Act can oust people’s GDPR data access rights. An exception “relating to the administration of justice.” OK. > [](https://twitter.com/i/status/1319430803487662081?ref=thegist.ie) But even if Section 39 of the Commissions of Inquiry Act 2004 *was* relying on an exemption that was actually one of the existing grounds for restricting GDPR rights, It still wouldn’t make it legal. You see, Article 23 has a second section, setting out requirements for national restriction laws. No requirements, then the law (and its restriction of rights) is invalid. > **23.2** In particular, any legislative measure referred to in paragraph 1 shall contain specific provisions at least, where relevant, as to: > > (a) the purposes of the processing or categories of processing; > > (b) the categories of personal data; > > (c) the scope of the restrictions introduced; > > (d) the safeguards to prevent abuse or unlawful access or transfer; > > (e) the specification of the controller or categories of controllers; > > (f) the storage periods and the applicable safeguards taking into account the nature, scope and purposes of the processing or categories of processing; > > (g) the risks to the rights and freedoms of data subjects; and > > (h) the right of data subjects to be informed about the restriction, unless that may be prejudicial to the purpose of the restriction. And Section 39... ain’t it. To recap: The Minister described advice given by an unspecified AG on an unknown year (which may or may not be from before the coming into force of the GDPR) which said that an Irish law can prohibit an EU right, despite it limiting a different repealed law, based on a non existent restriction clause, which would anyway require a series of protections which it doesn’t have to be valid. ### The Gist: Level 5, mar dhea URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-level-5-mar-dhea/ Last updated: 2020-10-05T00:32:16.000Z Every Political Correspondent spoke with one voice moments after the news of the NEPHET recommendation leaked- the Government was shocked. It was angry. It had been caught off guard. They never saw it comin’. They complained to the PolCorrs- how could these experts do this to them? ‘Why me?’, we could hear echoing through every line, ‘Why do I have to deal with this now? I don’t want it to be true’. This is, bluntly, an unworthy and immature response for the Government to have and it is a dangerously self-indulgent thing to do to attack their own scientific experts. I don’t know if time will prove NEPHET right or wrong. I do know that the counter arguments suddenly mustered into the public domain (hospitals aren’t full, fewer people die now from Covid, why do doctors keep harping on about saving lives instead of money?) appeared from people less qualified in public health. And I know none of them addressed the acceleration in the rate of transmission (the famous r number) which has been the anxiety NEPHET have been voicing for nearly a month. What we know is that if you are the leadership of the country, in a crisis you need to lead. This is a crisis. The Government has been given unhappy news. It has been engaged in a whole-state project of returning to the status quo ante. It was ready to speed that up or slow it down. It was not ready to reverse it. It is possible the Government believes that it can’t turn the ship of state swiftly. But this is a pandemic- it’s not the Budget, with friendly chats with familiar pressure groups and lobbyists (sometimes very familiar as with the D’Arcy jump). A virus cannot be appealed to for fair play. It won’t temper its spread because the political cost of stopping it is too high. If the right choice is Level 5, that’s the Government’s job to explain. Setting up an expert body and then complaining in public about what they tell you isn’t leading. It’s whinging. Meanwhile, just a moment from me to you; if we do need to bring in further temporary restrictions to our lives and work, we’ll get through it. It’ll be zero-craic and we’ll do it anyway. And at the end we will see people again and groan at all the pickling, or whatever new craze grips us. And some of those people will laugh with us, instead of having died, because we made that sacrifice. We won’t know who we saved, but I don’t think that will make it less heroic. We did masks, eventually. We can do this, with or without the Government’s help. But for all our sakes we can only hope they can suppress their complaining about leading, and just do it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/c3441ed4-fc5b-4fc9-beab-3a7bc3778df5_2048x2048.jpeg) ### The Gist: Not Enough Hours In The Day URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-not-enough-hours-in-the/ Last updated: 2020-10-04T13:05:39.000Z This week saw US politics succumb to the remorseless power of the gods of narrative, and the first ever example of the Department of Education failing the Leaving Cert because it didn’t show its workings. This is the Gist. ### **Ill behaviour** The US President has spent months denying the reality and risk of becoming infected by COVID 19\. During his debate with Joe Biden, he mocked his opponent for following scientific advice and wearing a mask. If this was a Hollywood movie, we would consider this to be the crudest form of foreshadowing. Instead, it is 2020 and reality is apparently under the control of narrative forces with the subtly of hack screenwriters. So it was that the US President got Covid and flew away in a helicopter to hospital. He may or may not come back. He put out a video saying the next few days will be “the real test”, which had the duel distinction of being the clearest statement on his health of the four the White House issued in the one day, and possibly his only accurate statement on Covid ever. In the meantime, the Republican plan to jam a radical right judge onto the Supreme Court seat may have been imperilled by enough Republican Senators to make up the balance of power having gone to a maskless White House celebration of their impending success, and being infected. It appears that the one thing we can know at the end of the week is that the gods of narrative have consumed the rest of the US pantheon. ### Leaving Cert Dusts A few months ago I said that the Leaving Cert was a key test of the government’s competence and that botching it had the capacity to build permanent ire in the hearts of parents and students. The safe thing to do would have been follow the example of the HSE when it was introducing the Covid App. They realised they needed to build trust in the app and so they chose to rely on transparency, putting all the code on GitHub to be examined by anyone who wanted. But the Department of Education felt this was not for them. Despite calls in the weeks before the results to release the code and algorithm they were using so it could be looked at in advance, they went for secrecy. Sadly, it then turned out there had been error (cue rattling keyboard sound from the gods of narrative). The Taoiseach flatly told the Dáil, when asked, that the Department of Education had not totted up the right numbers and thousands of students were due higher results and maybe thousands of new college places. The colleges responded by pointing out there was no room for new college places as they had already filled them up. Next week, they’ll tell the students which of them are due an upgrade and, you know, burst into fire. ### Gene Genies You’ll have heard about the issues with GMI and the use of patient DNA data. Today saw a huge joint investigation published by [Noteworthy.ie](https://www.noteworthy.ie/proposal/private-genetics-database-76-Jan2020?ref=thegist.ie) and by the [Sunday Business Post](https://www.businesspost.ie/health/genes-for-sale-the-harvesting-of-irish-genetic-data-7c72aabe?ref=thegist.ie). They’re well worth a read. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/789e6bbd-5f29-4bea-bfeb-829a267bcdb9_433x718.png) Image: A god of narrative, pictured any day in the last 3 years. ### The Gist: On we go URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-on-we-go/ Last updated: 2020-09-19T00:26:55.000Z ### US: A mighty chair, now vacant After an exhausting four years of a funhouse mirror as President, reflecting distortions and grotesquery back at the American public, a tiny, but sufficient, number of voters seem to have decided not to buy a ticket to see the show again. This would be a relief for the rest of us, certainly. But, unfortunately, the death of the Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg means we can expect at least one final objectionable act before the curtain falls. A US Supreme Court judge, no matter how significant their life’s work, is also defined by the moment of their departure. Judge Ginsberg held her own tenaciously against a lifetime of adversaries- sexism, above all. Her death from cancer- her fifth such health crisis-could hardly have come at a worse time for the Court she sat on. With nothing to lose, and an apparently bottomless supply of morally absent cyphers available to choose from, we can expect to hear about nothing else from the US president for the next six weeks. If we are unlucky, the consequences may stretch into decades. ### Ireland: Ill will Dublin’s virus numbers go up, and bad things start to go down. Eager racists attack a bystander with a decades-old history of non-violent activism, while the police have a good hard think about it as they watch. The question is raised as to whether requiring a book full of racial slurs to be studied multiracial schools is really on. The embarrassing thing is how long it took for that question to occur. Ireland may need some strong medicine to reverse the upward trend in both these viruses. This week may be the start of that course of treatment, uncomfortable though it will be. ### UK: Not even a serious enough state to joke about Oh, please. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0794d8ef-4fd2-4a2b-9f47-4d208806220b_2048x1536.jpeg) photo used under [cc licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/?ref=thegist.ie): [Geoff Livingston](https://www.flickr.com/photos/geoliv/?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: BOGOF(F) URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-bogoff/ Last updated: 2020-09-07T23:33:53.000Z The week started with a surprise for businesses serving food. Failte Ireland told them that, starting immediately, they had to keep a note of what each of their patrons ate and store that record for 28 days, so the Gardaí could come and look up our dinners. Apparently, in August the Government had approved this “Who ate all the pies?” law but forgotten to mention it. Who knows, maybe at this stage they didn’t know they’d done it themselves. We’re told Cabinet meetings are frequently virtual now anyway. Perhaps it was inevitable they would produce virtual decisions. As the week wore on and it became clear that this law was unpopular, possibly illegal, and probably unnecessary Ministers attempted to offer solutions. Unfortunately, they each offered a different solution, culminating in three Ministers (Health, Taoiseach and Other Taoiseach) each offering a different legal intepretation of a law they’d all agreed to a fortnight earlier, in the same news report. This was quickly followed by Eamon Ryan announcing the new plan to tackle waste, which also proposed…well, let’s do just two quotes; > Over the medium to long-term, examine the potential role of economic instruments (e.g. levies) on ‘fast fashion’ which could also support higher value indigenous producers by reducing the cost differential. And > We will work with retailers to end the sale of multi-buy packs to prevent over-buying by consumers. or, as the Irish Times reported, a proposal to reduce buy one get one free offers (BOGOF, in the retail parlance) on food, and to increase the baseline price of clothes. Not unreasonably, people responded by wondering had the Greens ever met a poor person, or even seen one on TV and why did they hate them so? (Also, from lawyers, a groan at the thought that 5 decades into EU membership, there are still Government Departments who don’t know they’re not allowed to assist ‘indigenous’ products with levies) The Green response was instructive. As these government thoughts appeared in public and the public didn’t like them, multiple Green representatives expressed shock that everyone was reacting to things that weren’t in the plan. When the above bits of the plan were produced, this switched to general statements about how unreasonable people are to harp on about the bad bits of a plan without also praising the good bits. A response which appears to confuse the role of a politically engaged voting public with a Montessori teacher. Under normal circumstances, a Government unable to stitch two sentences together without stabbing a fork in its thigh would be a source of national gaiety. But the pandemic tinges these failures with a dark edge. We need these people to make good choices and express themselves clearly. Any day now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7590619b-53b7-463c-876a-9bede57732ee_1062x1317.jpeg) ### The Gist: Golf fallout, Back to School URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-golf-fallout-back-to-school/ Last updated: 2020-08-25T00:12:32.000Z ### Fallout 2 The Oireachtas Golf Society Gala Dinner is starting to look like the worst idea for a party since Julius Caesar’s Ides of March Karaoke Night. Phil Hogan, once used to bestriding the land like an unlikable colossos, has been reduced to producing a ‘detailed’ description of his movements on the orders of Ursula Van Der Layden, the EU Commission President. [Reportedly](https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1297947433683607552?s=20&ref=thegist.ie), this includes an explanation that The Man said it was all OK. This was after Friday, when the Commission’s spokeperson put out an- as it turned out questionable- assertion that, being the EU Trade Commissioner, "it is important for him to act responsibly in matters regarding Covid-19". I don’t know how continentals feel about saying things that are, um, accurate, but I guess Big Phil will be finding out, the same as the rest of us, tomorrow. The rest of the details are coming thick and fast, with, admittedly, the balance mostly tilted towards thick. Hogan won a George Foreman Grill. Sean O’Rourke’s retirement plan after leaving RTE, of working for RTE, is on hold. The Chief Justice and the previous Chief Justice have had to invent a non-statutory process. And Dara Calleary had to [resign a second time](https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2020/0824/1160924-dara-calleary/?ref=thegist.ie) (this time as FF deputy leader) because once wasn’t enough. Meanwhile, and taking the antic feel off the whole sorry mess, Liveline continued to give voice to the trauma and pain of its listeners’ experiences under covid restrictions. ### School Daze The Taoiseach gave another live interview today to show that at least someone was still in charge round here. Amongst the topics he touched on was an admission that the Department of Education had designed their Leaving Cert grading algorithm with the same socio-economic elements (grades up for rich kid schools, down for poor ones) which had imploded the UK’s A-Levels. He assured us that they had removed it [after he’d intervened](https://www.rte.ie/news/education/2020/0824/1160936-schools-reopening-martin/?ref=thegist.ie), but that, as a result, they were still working on the final system. He then went on to assure listeners that his Minister for Education, was on top of her brief. This was the same Minister who he had just admitted hadn’t been able to spot a land mine the size of a Tesco Extra in front of her even after watching her UK equivalent blow himself up, like a unctuous Tory Wile E. Coyote. The first children start going back to school this week. The Leaving Cert results will be due on the 7th September. Everyone will know what grades they started with from their teacher a week later. It may be that the Golf Gala has lit a fire of hot anger. But if the Department of Education doesn’t get the next month’s milestones right, the ensuing conflagration will reduce this Government to ash. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/c039a008-deb4-42e4-913c-cc58c2bdba2e_2048x2048.png) ### The Gist: Around the world URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-around-the-world/ Last updated: 2020-08-23T00:17:50.000Z ### Parts East Belarus had an election recently and the incumbent dictator announced he’d got 80% of the vote. This proved unpersuasive to the voters of Belarus, who were minded to see the alternative candidate take office. There then followed a series of state officials quitting- including a swath of the state TV on-air talent- and chants of Resign! at him while he tried to rally his imagined base of factory workers. As is traditional at times such as these, [torture and brutality ](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53776461?ref=thegist.ie)was meted out to people protesting on the streets. As is also traditional, this backfired, rallying more support to the protesters. Truly, a commitment to the old ways. Anyway, the whole thing is currently on a knife-edge. It [seems ](https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/18/strike-delayed-at-major-belarus-tractor-factory-after-workers-threatened-with-dismissal?ref=thegist.ie)that a lot hangs on whether people believe change can come sufficiently quickly to risk losing their jobs by going out on strike. And perhaps, behind that, there’s a lot of private calculations to be made by those workers about whether ending an authoritarian system built on huge state enterprises is, on balance, good or bad for the people who rely on those huge state enterprises. Because whither the jobs of the 15,000 workers of the Minsk Tractor Works after the deluge? Meanwhile, the President of neighbouring Russia seems to have decided now is the time to see one of his more [prominent opponents](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/poisoning-russian-dissidents-200822163134775.html?ref=thegist.ie) loudly poisoned. Which may suggest his calculations on the likely final decision of the Tractor Workers of Minsk. ### Parts West Joe Biden finished up a four day Zoom conference to become the Democratic Party candidate for President, proving that there is always someone trapped in a more horrific work meeting than you. ### Parts South Australia has been [jailing children](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53858663?ref=thegist.ie) from the age of 10 up. Unsurprisingly, over 65% of those children came from the 3% of the population who are from Australia’s indigenous people. The people in charge of this policy didn’t really desire a change to this activity, presumably because that’s exactly what they wanted, but had indicated they’d think about it. They’ve now said they still didn’t want to change it, but that ‘"if people want to convince us they can". This suggests that Australia's Council of Attorneys-General is both revolting and also run by 15 year old boys who think they’re the smartest YouTuber in school. In Mali, there has been a [coup of Colonels](https://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00074482.html?ref=thegist.ie), removing an unpopular president who was already being edged out under negotiations. History suggests that even the most popular coups by Colonels do not end in unalloyed success. Very bad rank for disgruntlement, the Colonel. ### Parts North The ice is melting and we need to get very serious about that. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/bb709134-dce6-4752-9827-de86d1327c55_750x665.jpeg) ### The Gist: Jaysus. URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-jaysus/ Last updated: 2020-08-22T00:59:31.000Z It hadn’t been a great week. The Ministers in charge of public health matters had been issuing multiple clarifications of various bits of their plan to increase restrictions since Tuesday. The public had been monumentally fed-up with them, and their lot in life. By the time the Minister for Health had found himself, unbidden, comparing a pandemic to bouncing on a trampoline the Taoiseach must have felt things couldn’t get worse. He was wrong. He was so wrong. ### A good walk spoiled The flubs and fumbles of the start of the week may not have been impressive, but they were, as the Taoiseach would later admit, a function of rushing best-effort decisions forward in the face of a virus that didn’t keep to office hours. But then the Irish Examiner broke the story of the Oireachtas Golf Society and their 80 person shindig. And the public realised they hadn’t been angry before, because now, now they knew what angry was. As is traditional, Liveline on RTE radio one provided the outlet. But it wasn’t the expected shouting and railing of outrage. It was something more devastating than that. People told stories of losing loved ones, of a mother dying alone and being buried under the covid restrictions. Of sisters visiting their brother behind glass, not recognised with their masks on. Of deep, harrowing tragedy and open wounds left with people who sacrificed more than it was decent to ask for the greater good. And behind every story, the contrast to the lads in the plus-fours, whooping it up at a ‘gala dinner’, the sort of event where gammon appears on the menu and also pays the bill. The Agriculture Minster’s evening efforts to apology the problem away were done by morning. He was gone. But the tide of fury kept rising. The excuses started to become more baroque as public servants explained they’d only accidentally attended the gala dinner, as it had been sprung on them unexpectedly. Presumably they had made their way to a hotel function room expecting to find an indoor crazy golf course, and been so disorientated by the lack of novelty windmills they’d fallen back onto a chair set for a meal. The Taoiseach hit the communications nuclear button and went on the Six One News to do a live interview, just to signal he was still somewhere in the vicinity of his job. ### The man with the touch of crud Sometimes something strange happens in politics. A government can suddenly lose the people. A sort of inverted Midas effect is triggered. And from that moment on, everything that government touches turns to crud. Their arguments aren’t even listened to. Humiliations pile up. It happened to John Major’s government after the run on sterling. It happened to the Cowan government as the banks imploded. And that government can carry on. It can still hold its majority. But it’s a zombie, marching undead towards an electoral decapitation. Ireland can’t afford a zombie government in a public health and economic and social legitimacy crisis. It needs better. And, as Livelines’ stories showed, it deserves better. Micheál Martin bought his truncated term in office with his party’s future. But it would be better if he didn’t haggle the price up to include our futures too. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/ec226e8d-1a21-44f0-8dd3-30d4887948ba_1600x1600.png) ### The Gist: Losing at Solitare URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-losing-at-solitare/ Last updated: 2020-08-19T01:00:44.000Z The late Sean Hughes spoke about living in Ireland in the 1980s, and just being depressed at what was presented as normal. “Is this the best we can do?” was the constant refrain. Like Sean Hughes, everyone in Ireland wants the answer to be no. We want to see people in power to rise to the occasion. Simon Harris and Leo Varadkar were an effective pair of voices in the early, onrushing outbreak phase. Clear, rational and reassuring. Along with the Chief Medical Officer, they explained what was happening, what had to be done and how and why it would be done. And everyone, regardless of political opinion, was glad of it. Today’s communications were… not that. The Taoiseach indulged his scolding instincts, blaming groups of people who didn’t run meat plants or were warehoused in cramped settings by the state for not doing what they were told. The Minister for Health went on RTE’s Prime Time and treated the questions posed to him by Mark Coughlan as if he was in a political debate. Dodge here. Deflect there. Keep talking to block follow up. If ever there was an approach more perfect for provoking in the viewer feelings of rage and fear in sequence, this is it. Covid 19 is not a political animal. As the expert who came on immediately afterwards responded, “The virus doesn’t care about spin.” Everyone wants the Government to succeed, because everyone wants the benefits of that success. The Minister wibbled about looking into this, ramping up that. What would be better would be a set of internally consistent public health guidelines and just that little touch of humility that builds trust, not breaks it. There is no opposition to success in reversing Covid. The Government’s only enemy has been itself. Today that foe cut deep. ### Dead Cert Meanwhile, the Minister for Education came out and gave an interview. In it, she demonstrated she had no idea how the plan to calculate Leaving Certs wouldn’t fall foul of the same implosion that hit the UK’s A levels, given it had all the same intellectual underpinnings. Her assurance that it would be better because we use numbers and they use letters for grades simply left the viewer with the strong impression she might not be familiar with either. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b9f864a4-cc56-4656-8c54-2c6bc1204347_2048x1365.jpeg) Photo CC: [Alan Levine](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/7266250916/in/photolist-c56rfd-8fjhQb-GrjVfa-5Zvq69-5Zrdq2-5Zrd2c-6vHjAN-5Vx672-4rf4km-4raYAi-4raYWB-4rf57u-4raYpT-4rf4JG-4rf51J-4rf4h5-2cT8F3T-ruuv3-WzskPF-KPJcy5-9EsLNc-2NxjTf-2NsVyv-2NsVQe-2NxjPm-2NsVMF-2NxjWb-et4kPQ-5eNs7f-5eNsaw-5eJ3NT-nmhWq-Vodhi-awAkW-am9ffM-GrkL5e-5GxfiN-8d28Sb-PVyxHN-7u5GNk-kvqgR-KNJMx-e9am4i-55bLCp-6Dpc4-apBcyq-arERTM-Kc3fs-2iXKX4h-qJ3Rq?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Midlands lockdown, Dublin ghostown URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-midlands-lockdown-dublin/ Last updated: 2020-08-08T09:01:44.000Z ### Meaty Matters An August weekend starts with the inhabitants of Counties Kildare, Laois and Offaly placed back into restricted movements and business activity. This is thanks to outbreaks- ‘clusters’ in the strange, instantly adopted jargon of the pandemic- arising from direct provision and meat plants. Both involve almost voiceless people. In Direct Provision, overcrowding was raised as a problem immediately by the people living in those conditions That was dismissed. Access to the PUP payment for people in Direct Provision was refused. This week, the Taoiseach had to say > Following reports that there was an issue with people in Direct Provision settings being reluctant to come forward for tests because of fear of losing income, we have decided that, lest there be any doubt, Direct Provision residents will be treated the same as any other citizen in terms of social protection supports when it comes to Covid-1.' There was no doubt, because the Social Protection Minister and her Department had reflexively refused to apply the rules to people in Direct Provision. This was just those chickens coming to roost. In meat plants, the fact that 90% of staff are reported as not being paid sick leave, and work and live in very close quarters was a receipe for disaster. When the matter was raised in the Dáil in May, the Minister dismissed even discussion of the problem as ‘smear tactics’. And then he set out a statement of the then FG government’s view of who was to be listened to about safety concerns; > “The import of your question seems to be that management in these companies would in some way jeopardise the ongoing production of their own plant operations. The primary concern in all these issues is the safety of people… I have staff in my department working in conjunction with management in those plants." Covid-19 is a virus. It doesn’t care who it infects. It can’t be dismissed or PR’d away. When people- any people- are left unprotected, it will take advantage. And then that effects the people who are used to being listened to as well. The virus is systematically revealing that the habits of the Irish state in their treatment of different classes of people are one of the major challenges to truly addressing its spread. ### Dublin Ghostown Dublin has long been imagined in relation to its pubs. With the ones without kitchens closed and the ones with food struggling to attract locals in the same numbers as tourists, perhaps that will change. But, at the moment, a trip into town is a tale of two cities. By day, it is becoming a pedestrian and bike friendly destination- with increasing numbers of car-free streets making it a viable place to take children as a pleasure not a chore. And then, at around 6pm, the shops shut and everyone just goes home. Drink isn’t the only reason to stay in a city. But its nearly the only one left when there are no shows, no music venues, no cinemas and no theatres. While publicans clamour for things to return to the way it was, without that network of nightlife options they may find that, even in Dublin, nightlife does not live on pints alone. Whatever comes next, it won’t be the same thing that was there before. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f56889ff-dd57-4d77-a044-ee22bd526301_1150x772.jpeg) ### The Gist: John Hume's funeral URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-john-humes-funeral/ Last updated: 2020-08-06T00:22:38.000Z ### A small ceremony for a huge figure There’s not much to add to people’s tributes to moral and political giant, John Hume, whose funeral was today. But I do remember him giving his single transferable speech year after year to us as viewers, an infinitely patient teacher faced with a slow class. Shed sweat not blood. You can’t eat a flag. A united Ireland can only happen if there is a unity of people, not land. Delivered looking straight into the camera and into the viewers’ homes. It is awe-inspiring, the sheer brainpower to create that clear a description of fantastically contested and complicated issues and then the imagination to see through the communication of those ideas, endlessly repeated to reach the desired level of changes of mind. Ireland has produced only a handful of these political giants. What luck for the rest of us that he was there to stand above the maelstrom. By understanding people’s kitchen table conversations and seeing what they had to become, and then moving them there across decades. That single transferable speech, delivered again and again down the lens to us, to help us see. There are O’Connell Streets up and down the country. John Hume probably would have enjoyed a bit of street renaming. But, surely more than anything, he knew there were children alive because of what he did. By now, those children will have had children of their own. Think of the scene at the end of Schindler’s List, as the Holocaust survivors return with their children and grandchildren, each placing a rock on Schindler’s grave, every year the pile getting bigger. John Hume gifted us a cairn, not to inter the dead but to celebrate the living. Each stone a life saved, the pile rising higher every year. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6d3b05a8-0106-4439-b373-be2a4176cf62_2048x1536.jpeg) Photo by Nogwater, under cc licence. ### The Gist: Should Ireland's Broadcasting Regulators rule the Internet? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-should-irelands-broadcasting/ Last updated: 2020-08-04T00:21:58.000Z The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland has had a chequered past. Created by the 2009 Broadcasting Act, it is empowered to control the output of Ireland’s TV and Radio stations. Its decisions have been regularly odd (eg in 2014, they found [gay people talking about the hope of getting married wasn’t acceptable](https://www.thejournal.ie/bai-complaint-same-sex-marriage-mooney-show-1620082-Aug2014/?ref=thegist.ie)). Just this week, the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland, on whose complaints board the BAI’s CEO sits, decided that an [educational TV ad for tampons was generally offensive](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/tampax-s-tv-ad-has-been-banned-get-a-grip-ireland-1.4317651?ref=thegist.ie) and shouldn’t be run again. Like I say, odd. But perhaps the oddest thing they did recently was [their 2019 pitch](https://www.bai.ie/en/bai-publishes-submission-on-regulation-of-harmful-online-content-implementation-of-new-audiovisual-media-services-directive/?ref=thegist.ie) to a receptive Government to become a Regulator for the Internet. Not just the internet in Ireland, but- because Ireland is home to most of the tech giants in the EU- the regulator for billions of people’s internet around the world. The EU has a Directive on Audio-Video Services (Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV and so on) which has to be brought in by September 2020\. The [FG Government came up with the idea](https://merrionstreet.ie/en/news-room/releases/minister%5Fbruton%5Fpublishes%5Fdraft%5Fscheme%5Fof%5Fnew%5Fonline%5Fsafety%5Flaw.html?ref=thegist.ie) of yoking this perfectly anodyne piece of housekeeping legislation to another, home-grown idea, to regulate ‘harmful content’. That has become the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2019. Without getting into the weeds too much, this proposed law is not great. Here’s Trinity College Dublin’s Law Department’s Dr. Eoin O’Dell in January 2020 [on the state of the legal drafting work;](http://www.cearta.ie/2020/01/the-governments-proposed-online-safety-and-media-regulation-bill-has-a-surprising-omission/?ref=thegist.ie) > “In its current form, important elements are dangerously vague, and there is an unpardonable oversight in the drafting… Despite [the amount of time](http://www.cearta.ie/2019/10/the-demise-of-the-uks-current-age-verification-plans-for-online-porn-and-what-that-might-mean-for-irelands-proposed-online-safety-commissioner/?ref=thegist.ie) that this process has taken, these Heads seem rushed, vague, and incomplete.” He cites, as one example, the fact that the Bill has forgotten to legislate for the creation of the Online Safety Commissioner it’s meant to empower. > “Given that the Online Safety Commissioner is the whole *raison d’être* of the Bill, the failure to establish it properly is a shocking omission.” Obviously, this doesn’t instill a lot of confidence. But if we take a look at the Government’s [current](https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d8e4c-online-safety-and-media-regulation-bill/?ref=thegist.ie#general-scheme-of-the-online-safety-media-regulation-bill) documentation around this Bill, the heart sinks further. Here’s the government’s [own image](https://assets.gov.ie/76725/61834cef-c977-4a66-9b97-95cf03216c2c.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) from June 2020, describing what will be regulated by this new BAI+ body. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/69e90f5b-cfc3-4028-b543-3c6dd294f404_2146x1318.png) If your eyes opened wider and wider as they panned across this galaxy of activities until they started to water as they reached “Private Communications Services” and “Private Online Storage Services” then you have probably spent more than 10 minutes online in your life. Then you discover that Section 49A of the published [Heads of Bill](https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d8e4c-online-safety-and-media-regulation-bill/?ref=thegist.ie#general-scheme-of-the-online-safety-media-regulation-bill) lists some content that the BAI-replacing Commissioner feels might be harmful, but, as the explanatory note states “It is not proposed to define harmful online content.” Oh, and that Section 49B provides for new kinds of content to be designated by the Minister as harmful online content in the future. This is… I mean, [Sir Humphry Appleby](https://youtu.be/cIYfiRyPi3o?ref=thegist.ie) of Yes, Minister fame would probably have termed it ambitious. The rest of us might just say it is impossible. But go beyond the nuts and bolts of whether the proposed act is legislatively fit for purpose, or whether its intended field of activities could be addressed by officials with mere mortal lifespans. This is a law that seeks to create a body, built on the BAI, which can decide what can and cannot be published online- over and above what is rightly criminal to disseminate. It declines to define what is and is not covered and new things may be added. In doing so, it wishes to take in private communications services and private storage services and regulate them as it has regulated broadcast in the past. This is a basic category error. It treats communications between private citizens as if they were just another form of licenced broadcast. In its pitch for these powers to the Government, the BAI described the sort of power it wanted; > “The OSR \[online safety regulator\] should be able to issue HOC \[harmful online content\] Notices to both “open” online services (e.g. social media platforms) and “encrypted” online services (e.g. private messaging services).” Leave aside the question of how the BAI thinks it will find out about the content of encrypted private messages. Any body who thinks it ought to treat online communications in the same way as it regulates broadcast media has demonstrated why it is unfit to do both, if not either. My conversations with my friends are no business of a broadcasting regulator. This Bill has now fallen under the responsibility of the Minister for Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht, [Catherine Martin](http://catherinemartin.ie/?ref=thegist.ie). As her title might suggest, she will have a lots of disparate things looking for her attention. But she ought to perform one of the most vital of ministerial functions with this Bill. She should shout stop. The Government should pass the bits needed to give effect to the unobjectionable Audio-Visual Services Directive and drop the rest. Regulating the internet isn’t something to be rushed. It is something to be done right, where it should be done at all. And, where it is to be done, it should be done by institutions with the right experiences and instincts for the job. That’s not the BAI and it never will be, no matter what their new name. ### The Gist: Making it PUP as they go URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-making-it-pup-as-they-go/ Last updated: 2020-07-30T02:24:00.000Z Why are they doing this? That was the main question I asked and was asked in turn this week. Why are the government staking out terrible policy positions, burning scarce political capital on them and then collapsing with bad grace to a compromise endpoint leaving nobody happy? A quick run down on what we’ve seen so far. The shortest Ministerial career in Irish history. Pay rises and pay cuts, both of which resulted in more pay for the government. And, even before the last issue was settled, the next hove into view. On the 10th July, without bothering to let anyone know, the Minister for Social Protection had signed a [Ministerial Order](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ed3FRDRXYAALmFm?format=jpg&name=large&ref=thegist.ie) that amended legislation dating back to 2007\. That was a law, which said that you could take a 2 week holiday and still get your jobseekers allowance. Everything was now exactly the same except the word holiday was replaced by the phrase “holiday, in accordance with the Covid-19 General Travel Advisory in operation by the Department of Foreign Affairs.” You could still get paid your jobseekers allowance and go on holiday. You just had to do it in accordance with a regularly amended and unpredictable press release which explicitly said it was only advice and it was up to your to use your judgement. ### **The Phantom Menace** Then on Sunday, the Other Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, was asked about this obvious inequity- where advice was given the force of law, but only for those unfortunate enough to be unable to work. As a former Minister for Social Protection, the question of taking money away from recipients is one of the few issues Leo has shown a personal passion for. He built his leadership platform on a publicly-funded deligitimisation campaign (Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All). So, with this reddest of meats dangling, this lion of Fine Gael pounced. He delighted in saying a series of things that were not. By the next morning, the machinery of government was struggling to remake the world in the image of the Other Taoiseach’s words. Now, because he had said people had to be available for work, that was added to an online list of requirements for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment. This made no sense, as there was no work and the whole macroeconomic point of the payment was to simply pause people while the virus raged and let them step back into their old jobs. Redundancy had even been suspended. But then, once it was on the website, they had to keep defending it and so they put it in some legislation defining the PUP as well. And they announced that the legislation allowing people to continue to get paid was just off now. Like a kitchen running out of soup, the rule of law was no longer available. Laws were described by the Minister as ‘flexibility’ and the Department no longer felt like following them. FLAC pointed out this was illegal. Then people began to Talk to Joe. ### **Livelined** Day 1\. Then Day 2. It is a truth universally acknowledged that three days of Liveline coverage can end a Minister. A week can topple a government. On the third day, the Minister announced all the things she’d been saying before now were still right but that she wouldn’t be doing them anymore and would bring in some laws to fix it up and, you know, maybe people could go on holiday to the places that the Government’s own Green list said were fine to visit but now you had to check in your with your Parole, sorry, social welfare officer first. Which will presumably mean that women travelling for abortions will now be legally obliged to notify their social welfare office first. That’ll make them feel warm fuzzies towards the Government. ### **But why?** Why did they do it? No matter what way I turn this multifaceted gem, it seems to be the same answer. They did it because The Department wanted them to do it. And the Department wanted to do it because it is, institutionally, insane. They do what they want and they think that is what being in office means. But, as Michéal Martin knows, if people decide you’re their enemy as they try to make the best of their life, they will consider themselves your enemy, frequently for your political life. The Pandemic Unemployment Payment covers a range of society which the Department is unused to exerting its power over. It includes many people who have access to social power of their own. As the payments that have kept society cohesive in the face of a social and economic cataclysm start to ‘taper’ as the nights draw in, Ministers will look back on this week as the good old days. But they may not even get that far if they don’t quickly realise that the officials in their departments see them as expendable. As the previous Minister for Social Protection can attest, no matter how willing a politician is to do what they’re told, their officials can’t save their seats. All those new enemies, freshly minted this week, can wait. And every new rake to the face will swell their numbers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/791f59f1-ab50-4c07-8107-75d9900f88c2_5472x3648.jpeg) ### What is this Schrems judgement about? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/what-is-this-schrems-judgement-about/ Last updated: 2020-07-16T23:01:27.000Z Some background: I represented Digital Rights Ireland in the Schrems I case and would have represented the EFF in the Schrems II case if the court had accepted them as an amicus to the court. So I’ve been thinking about the context of these consequential decisions by the Court of Justice (CJEU) for quite a number of years. ### The nuts and bolts The case resulted in a decision on two different legal mechanisms for sending personal data from the EU to the US – the EU-US Privacy Shield and the general-usage Standard Contractual Clauses. Privacy Shield was always basically farcical and it’s an embarrassment that it was allowed to linger as long as it did. But the Standard Contractual Clauses element of the case is where the long-term consequences are going to come into play. Basically, now you can’t just sign a contract and have both sides promise to be good. Now, you have to look at the legal systems the parties live under to see if that contract can really be held to. This is particularly significant for transfers of personal data to the US, which hasn’t followed the EU and a good chunk of the world in accepting that data protection is a human right, and whose hunger for mass-surveillance data from its tech companies was revealed by the Snowden revelations. As the Irish DPC said after the ruling, utilising much of the nation’s store of understatement as they spoke, “it is clear that, in practice, the application of the SCCs transfer mechanism to transfers of personal data to the United States is now questionable.” All of the bromides and reassurance statements coming from the US and the EU Commission during the day was the sound of losers, who had lost, not wanting to admit just how bad their loss was. ### Institutional matters OK, so does the EU’s top court just really hate Facebook and other Silicon Valley behemoths? That’s not what this is about – though that’s the fixed opinion of a lot of those Valley company executives. But, like so much else, this isn’t actually about them. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, has now twice tried to make a politically attractive compromise with the US to keep the EU-US data pipes flowing. And, twice, the court has simply said that they were flat out wrong to do it and that the agreement was illegal. There isn’t going to be a third Potemkin data deal. Institutionally, that’s an important line for the CJEU to hold the commission to. No matter how convenient they might find it to do so, the commission isn’t going to be allowed ignore the Treaties and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. ### The clash of philosophies In the unipolar world after the USSR expired, the US developed a digital culture with unimaginable profits pumping through it, all dependant on the idea of people being economic units whose data can be sold on, mostly to advertisers. The EU, though the Charter of Fundamental Rights, has codified a human right of data protection, complementary but distinct from privacy, which runs entirely contrary to that Matrix-style model of humans as economic batteries for huge data machines. The EU has been using its market power (it is the richest market in the world) to encourage and cajole other countries to come along with it. Nearly 100 countries now have some sort of data protection laws on their books, making trade with the EU much easier. And the court, as we’ve said, is holding the line on this newest human right as something non-negotiable for the future of the internet. This change is going to come to the US as well – probably from the state level up, with the most prominent example being California. And this matters because there is a third model for the treatment of individuals and their personal data, and it is the Chinese one. The US model can make huge profits, but so can the Chinese model. But the EU’s data protection principles aren’t compatible with that Chinese model as it stands today. The unipolar moment has ended. The CJEU have their eyes on a horizon, because that’s their job. But they’re not worried about which venture-capital hoodie is up or down. They’re holding the line that matters. They’re making sure that by the time we realise that the online world and offline society are one and the same thing, we still have a chance to keep the offline rights we’re used to in both. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/cada7b0d-1eb5-4edc-a6e6-89f404d52f5b_1612x1449.jpeg) ### The Gist: Nothing To Lose URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-nothing-to-lose/ Last updated: 2020-07-15T16:55:55.000Z It’s been a big week for aficionados of stories at the intersection of Fianna Fáil, policing and data protection. And at the end of it we have a hint of what approach Michéal Martin plans to take to his span of days as Taoiseach. This is the Gist. Barry Cowen didn’t want to answer any more questions. He didn’t want to talk about the circumstances around his conviction any more. He just wanted everyone to Move On. This is a tactic from the old hegemonic Fianna Fáil. When a party answers to nobody but the leader, as long as the leader’s been squared, the conversation can just be shut down. The problem for Ireland’s shortest serving Minister in history was that leader of Fianna Fáil isn’t the unassailable peak it once was. The FF leader answers to everyone else now, and he didn’t like it. This gap between Martin’s recognition of the reality of FF’s position and the reflexive presumption by his TDs that they have returned to the status quo ante of the pre-crash age explains much of the party’s internal divisions. So, Cowen is out and Dara Calleary, the Chief Whip from the West, is elevated to the Cabinet returning Connacht to the top table. The defenestrated was so shocked he issued a whole twitter thread as a statement expressing how unexpected it all was. But now we know that Martin has realised that, if his TDs have less to fear from him long term than other, less time-limited, leaders, he has no reason to worry about making enemies. The question is whether he will have realised this can be a permanent way of proceeding, or he will continue leaving off taking these painful decisions until after he’s already expended political capital defending the indefensible. And, of more long term significance for the rest of us, can he can persuade his party to recognise that the FF of 2020 is unrecognisable from the FF of 2006? There are a few short months for the once National Movement to realise that t he past is a different country, and they voted differently there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b4b1756a-4a26-49b2-aaef-7dfcfdce5901_644x848.png) ### The Party That Forgot How To Win URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-party-that-forgot-how-to-win/ Last updated: 2023-11-26T11:57:35.000Z Fine Gael have approached their third sequential period in government as a seamless transition. Buy the Varadkar FG, get the Varadkar FG. Green TDs have spent the fortnight calling on the Gov to do things to improve transport etc while holding the Ministry of Transport . Both in content and effectiveness, so far, so expected. But this is the long awaited return of FF to government. Their leader is the Taoiseach and the man who was almost a one-man campaign during the election. The one thing he hasn’t looked, over the last few weeks, is in charge. Having picked his ministers, he faced open revolt from his jilted party spokesmen. FF TDs started briefing against their more Ministerially-successful rivals. His Minister for Agriculture had to apologise to the Dáil for a years-old drink driving court appearance which suddenly surfaced. Senior party reps loudly spurned job offers they felt were beneath them. Then the new Cabinet started saying things- apparently without central vetting or control. The Phoenix Park was reopened as a “thoroughfare” by a Junior Minister representing Adare and a FF TD from Park-adjacent Castleknock let it be known he’d delivered this rat run. Apparently the closure of the city’s green lung to through traffic had been impeding access to a parish pump. Then the new Minister for Education started to equivocate loudly on sex education for children, on gender recognition and, outside her brief, on legislating to give full effect to the provision of abortion services. Let’s leave aside the merits or otherwise of these particular decisions and opinions. Michéal Martin has given himself two years as Taoiseach. In those two years, he has to demonstrate that Fianna Fáil is a party with a vision of the future that it can rally voters to. At the moment, his party is behaving like a group of TDs with no faith their party has any future to speak of. Minister or not, it’s every public representative for themselves. And Michéal Martin, a heartbeat into the job, has discovered that a time-limited Taoiseach simply lacks the power to impose a central discipline on his own party, let alone its coalition partners. If you’re going to be gone soon anyway, who cares about offending you or your leadership? Enda Kenny met this problem at the end of his time as Taoiseach as soon as he announced he wouldn’t be looking to lead FG after the next election. The election turned out to be years later, but his leadership ended long before that. Michéal Martin needs to show the whole electorate that FF has a vision for Ireland. His party’s chances of re-election depend on it. That’s going to be hard if his TDs keep openly trying to use the National levers of power to please their personal constituencies. There is a centrifuge pulling FF TDs away from him, each spinning away from any central control. What plays well in Kerry on sex education in schools isn’t going to help increase the imperilled FF vote in Dublin and surrounds. A party of half-Independents has no story to tell about itself. And a party without a story is a party without a future. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6960312b-76f2-4376-9203-6de358ebf83d_2224x1668.jpeg) ### The Gist: We’re doing masks now URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-were-doing-masks-now/ Last updated: 2020-07-08T01:39:31.000Z Even before the press conference marking its launch, Ireland’s Covid Tracing App was a smash hit. By tea-time of its first full day, it had hit half a million downloads. Time will show if all of those who downloaded go on to activate the Bluetooth-based tracing element of the app when they’re out and about. There were concerns raised about some of the elements and choices made in designing the app (the self-reporting symtom tracker becoming the Snuffle-o-meter almost immediately). The app wasn’t meant to handle any location data at all. But it does. It was meant to solely do Contact Tracing, but now it does three or four things. The legal basis for processing is consent, which is iffy for a State app. The App transfers scads of data to the CSO who have [behaved insanely](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/cso-continues-to-explore-plan-to-use-phone-data-for-tourism-statistics-1.3704065?mode=amp&ref=thegist.ie) in Data Protection matters previously. (They once wrote to the EU looking to have the Charter of Fundamental Rights changed so they could track tourists using their mobile phones) But, for all that, the (excellent) DPIA is published and the app’s source code is on github. They scrapped their earlier, erroneous, plans to create a state database of who meets who. Its a good faith effort to do a good thing in the bad circumstances of a pandemic. But it for all that, it will probably fail. Bluetooth tech was never designed to measure distance or duration of proximity. The Bluetooth radio waves are defiantly analog in their functions, [being echoed and retransmitted on a Luas or Bus](https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/bluetooth%5Frssi%5Fstudy.pdf?ref=thegist.ie). In the end, there is a governance committee which is intended to exercise overnight over the app and see it self destructs after 90 days of it running if it’s not really of help. If the laws of physics, [as explored by TCD Computer Science academics](https://www.tcd.ie/news%5Fevents/articles/trinity-study-confirms-accuracy-concerns-on-contact-tracing-apps/?ref=thegist.ie), manage to defeat the Covid Tracking App it won’t be anyone’s fault. The state should make lots of bets when faced with a dramatic problem. Some will work, some won’t. We can take the rapid takeup of the app as a signal that the public is thirsting to contribute to pushing down the infection rate. Maybe, now, the state will put similar effort, talent and resources in promoting the cheap, unsexy and non-tech solution that all the science agrees can dramatically cut transmission and let us get back to our normal lives that much sooner. We’re doing facemasks now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/444287de-1281-4995-bc17-4340ffd6f1d5_2436x1125.jpeg) ### The Gist: Earwax and Spinning Tops URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-earwax-and-spinning-tops/ Last updated: 2020-06-13T16:43:25.000Z The Department of Education continued to assure parents that they have no particular idea how to open schools, the UK media struggled to escape a conversation about the UK’s race history by fleeing into trivia and Ireland had strong feelings about the opening of Pennys. Instead of dealing with that, I’m going to talk about what we can discern from the sudden upsurge in ads for earwax on the internet. This is the Gist. ### The Year of Earwax Since lockdown, the number of hours spent online has soared amongst the population. Phone companies removed caps on internet use, streaming videos became a staple part of the public conversation and webcams simply sold out worldwide. If you’re in the business of delivering physical items to people, it must have seemed like all your Christmases come at once (albeit with the terrible logistical problem of trying to keep up with all your Christmases unexpectedly coming at once). But the greatest money machines in the world- the Google and Facebook duopoly on advertising- suffered a very strange reversal. People started noticing they were encountering more and more junk ads for fringe products. The most viscerally objected-to ads were for earwax removal items, illustrated with unstinting amounts of wax. Also making their return were those totems of meaninglessness, the executive toy spinning top. If you were middle aged and male, the spinning tops were coming for you. But why did this advertising monoculture coincide with global lockdown? Well, basically, these are the bottom-feeder ads. Google runs an auction every time you load a web page. It’s fast, because it has to finish by the time the page has loaded. Google grabs their profile of you and race around a load of ad-brokers, asking “Who wants this guy? How much will you pay to show ads to him?” Normally, this is a crowded market, with a lot of different advertisers looking to pay money to plop their ads in front of your eyeballs. But if the market collapses, you’re left with the bottom feeders. The firms who bid indiscriminately to show ads to everyone, but only at fire-sale prices. If the only ads you see are earwax and spinning tops, it’s a sign something weird has happened down at the Google Money Mines. And, at this stage, that means that something weird has happened in the economy. ### Waxing and waning In April, Wordstream (a sort of adwords analysis site) said that, even as [the whole US population became Extremely Online, they saw a 21% drop in conversion rates](https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/03/18/covid-19-google-ads-data?ref=thegist.ie). Those are the vital moments where someone who clicks on an ad goes on to buy something. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7f2acbe9-bbd7-4ae5-b99c-20e054ee1af6_786x490.jpeg) There was also a (less dramatic) 7% reduction in the numbers of people clicking on ads in the first place. However, it seems that the usual advertisers must have seen something similar. A drop in click-through rate means that you are still paying Google for clicks but not getting any good out of them. So it seems that the inventory of Google ad space suddenly collapsed in value as the lockdown bit, leaving the likes of earwax and spinning tops to fill the void. Or, in the case of those accursed spinning tops, to embody the void. All of which is a bit of fun, except for what it suggests about the post-lockdown economy. A collapse in click through rates and advertising inventory suggests that both business and consumers are prioritising cash preservation. From the view of the individual, this makes sense. But at an economy-level this is the recipe for 1930s style deflation. If we’re all still looking at earwax by October we can take it that even greater levels of economic stimulus and government borrowings are going to be needed to avoid the most economically and socially dangerous of all events, the deflationary spiral. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f0dc8cda-0df1-45df-99aa-61068d9e8a43_2048x1536.jpeg) ### The Gist: A Burning Injustice URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-burning-injustice/ Last updated: 2020-06-01T00:06:06.000Z OK. Let’s do this. My tone is wrong, the format is wrong and the medium isn’t able to do justice to the profound depth of the story. But silence isn’t good enough. This is the Gist. ### Police Riots The US policing system, faced with a few days of being criticised, responded over the past few days by erupting into violence, encouraged by a President of the United States who needed division and a new group to Other having failed to contain a pandemic. He finished his weekend by suggesting he would make being against fascism a terrorist offence. The citizens of the US who had watched people who looked like them- black men and women- be killed in a series of filmed events (and who have been taught about all the unfilmed events by their parents) continue to live in an oppressive power system. The media found themselves targeted by police forces with impunity as they attempted to cover these events. The rest of the the US citizenry also have to live with civic upholders of the law who manifestly fail at that role. It appears to be a problem unsolvable without a revolutionary break. No such break is currently apparent, so despair would seem the only appropriate response to this circumstance. Meanwhile, in Ireland, white people told black Irish people they didn’t live in a racist country. Travellers begged to differ. I will try to do better on another day, when we can all have some fun about the snakes and ladders of party politics again. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/c9c14701-0840-4515-8c69-d7c39ac1455d_1125x835.jpeg) ### The Gist: The Nearest Neighbour URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-nearest-neighbour/ Last updated: 2020-05-30T10:01:08.000Z Looking to the East before looking to the West. It has been a hard few years for Ireland’s view of our neighbours, home to families and friends. What happened? This is the Gist. ### Nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown The UK’s Brexit vote in 2016 seemed to mark a break from the rational, if unattractive, politics of Ireland’s nearest neighbour. What happened to them?, people asked when I went abroad. But that was the mistake we made- viewing the UK through the lens of their own media and the stories they told about themselves. Looking with these fresh, post-Brexit eyes, the UK has been suffering the model post-colonial meltdown for nearly 60 years now. Their public is volatile (see poll tax riots) their politics is debased (see the first-past-the-post electoral system), their society is riven with divisions and simmering resentments (see 1970-2019). It’s all been there to see, all our lives. What happened in 2016 is that the break in the UK’s domestic arena came in an area where Ireland was the world’s foremost expert- having a referendum on the EU. And so, suddenly, we could see just how threadbare and shallow the UK’s political and media fused machine was- because we literally knew better. We’d already made all the mistakes, and we knew them when we saw them. Ever since, we’ve taken off the lenses of the UK’s self-told story. It has been a sorry time, but we have, at least, been able to recognise it for what it was. The parts of the UK that the central media narrative wasn’t really speaking to anyway have done the same. Scotland, Northern Ireland, and latterly even Wales are now looking at England as the difficult relative. Too important to them all to ignore but impossible to live with. The Covid crisis has now seen more parts of England alienated from that story. The audience for the English history of itself shrinks further by the month. Its political leaders are diminished by their own story’s weaknesses, spinning fairy tales of visiting castles to test their eyes. The narrative of England’s exceptional place in the world is charging towards the immovable white cliffs of reality while the price paid for those stories ticks higher each day in the statistics of the dead. A pandemic does not care what story you tell. The Coronavirus will continue to spread regardless of media narrative, public opinion or political affiliation. Only unwanted, difficult action can stop it. And England’s dreaming has stopped its systems from waking up to that- or any other- hard truth. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4cc20673-1de8-4ec8-89ed-63aee727b2b5_2448x2032.jpeg) ### The Gist: Schools Out Forever? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-schools-out-forever/ Last updated: 2020-05-29T00:31:56.000Z As the second-level schools peter out, and the parents of primary school children start to dream of a July without any online assignments to oversee, the Minister for Education has taken to the airwaves. This is the Gist. ### Leaving Cert, Departed The Minister for Education was very clear. The Leaving Cert wasn’t going to be cancelled. The Taoiseach was equally clear. The exams would go ahead ‘by hook or by crook.’ It would happen. Then it would happen, but later. Then it would happen, but later still. Maybe in August. And, um, the practical subjects would happen too. Students would come into schools, but nobody knew when. They’d tell the students later. Then it was cancelled. Then they decided that they’d give everyone a very questionable grade, because it was better than nothing. But then you had to register to get the grade by today. Then they said this plan was so successful that they’d be abandoning it and extending the time to register. Look, it’s hard. We understand. But really, this isn’t a Department that has been wowing the parents of Ireland with its clarity of planning so far. But the Leaving Cert only impacts one year’s student cohort. Now its the turn of all the primary school parents of Ireland to enjoy this decision making process. ### The Primary Concern This morning, the Minister for Education was back on the airwaves. He told Sarah McInerny (who is an excellent addition to the RTE lineup) that schools weren’t going to reopen properly come September. We’d still be doing the online learning a few days a week, with a few other days with the children in school. This was… bonkers. For decades the Education has steadfastly insisted on behaving as though every home still had a stay at home mother to look after children at any given time. But proposing to put that presumption into action, by forcing parents trying to return to work to give that work up for some, unspecified number of days a week, yet to be determined did not go down well. By Prime Time at 9.30pm, The Minister for Education was back out on the airwaves, to come out swinging against the Minister for Education from that morning and his daft talk. > The Minister for Education has said he would not accept a "half return" to school which would be required if the current two-metre social distancing guidelines remain in place in September. At the start of the covid discussions, a lifetime ago in March 2020, there was talk of the idea of ‘lockdown fatigue’ where the public just would refuse to comply. Homeschooling a 9 year old, while also trying to educate a 6 year old, while trying to work a full time job all at the same table seems like a circumstance designed to test the limits of that fatigue to the maximum. We may yet see the Department of Education’s certainty on what can and cannot go ahead in September is as unreal as the Leaving Cert that never was. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b9ddc8b2-f76d-458c-971d-b6fc7c5ee61b_1578x682.png) ### The Gist: A power vacuum URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-power-vacuum/ Last updated: 2020-05-11T21:25:48.000Z What’s going on? Aside from the daily statistical count of infections and deaths, it’s hard to know. With the Dáil attenuated, the Government is answerable to no one. Some Ministers don’t even have constituents to worry about, because they’re not TDs any more. The one thing that is still visible above the icy black waters is the process to form a new Government. So let’s squint at what we can see and work out what it can tell us. This is the Gist. ### Smoke signals ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4b0f305b-812e-4572-aab9-5e80a8ab3623_1125x891.jpeg) Lookit, here’s what this means in aggregate. FG are briefing against the very talks they’re in and are at the very least hopeful that they might lead to a new election. Meanwhile, FF are facing down the tube of the cannon that their current leader voluntarily wheeled in and pointed at his own party, for reasons that remain mysterious. FF have options. But to make those options return from whence they were banished, Michael Martin would have to stop being their leader. That’s not his plan, but it seems to be quietly forming in the minds of a growing group of FF TDs. Play it all out and you see that FG just need to act as wreckers for the talks with the Greens and they can stay in office, no division of the spoils of office, unless and until it’s possible to hold a new election. From that perspective we can make sense of Simon Covney’s recent defence of the sacred place the farts of cows have for FG (cow farts being a massive proportion of the greenhouse gas output of the nation). Today’s story is on the true love FG feels for the Green bugbear of a Liquid Natural Gas pipeline up the Shannon. The effect is to present Fine Gael as the alternative to green policies- The Sludge Party. But if the talks fail, and an election is triggered, Michael Martin will never become Taoiseach. And that’s the one thing neither he nor the FF party can accept. But unlike the party leader, the FF TDs are able to thwart the FG manouver. Which is why Jim O’Callaghan’s recent softening on the question of Sinn Féin in government is an interesting new development. Only candidates who offer what Martin refuses to countenance- the return of FF to Government without FG- have a place in any future tussle. All of which is to simply say that these talks are unlikely to be the last word on the shape of the post-COVID Irish Government. And that matters, because, for all the talk of the hardships of office, whoever is in power for the next few years will have an unprecedented opportunity to remake society and the State. ### The Gist: A Lost Summer URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-lost-summer/ Last updated: 2020-05-02T10:15:55.000Z The magical May Bank Holiday arrived, the sun shone, Lidl and Aldi risked public order incidents by offering garden furniture and barbeques in their middle aisles. And the government announced the national plan for the great escape from a lockdown. Fianna Fáil still aren’t that government, a problem for them that’s only going to get worse as events unfold. This is the Gist. ### Paths to Freedom The public is, let me be clear, a bit frayed at the edges. But, at our core we’re still committed to sticking with the common effort to flatten the curve of infections and save the lives of strangers and loved ones alike. But, you know, we’d like to stop. So it is that still-the-Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar took to the airwaves with a cheat sheet to tell Ryan Tubridy when we might be able to do that. And the answer is… sort of never. But that wasn’t the answer we wanted to hear, so instead we got a [23 page set of Excel spreadsheets](https://assets.gov.ie/73722/ffd17d70fbb64b498fd809dde548f411.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) promising jam tomorrow, with tomorrow to be a date yet to be fixed. The headlines were; no return to school (already clear to every homeschooling parent, but no less painful for that), allowing some restaurants and pubs to reopen (but only in a commercially unviable way), and letting us go 5k from our homes for a change of scene. Not yet addressed- understandably- how do we manage society and its function after the end of Phase 5 to avoid ending up back in Phase 0? The money problem, here and everywhere else, will eventually become acute. The only means of addressing it so far identified are decades of Austerity to make Herbert Hoover wince or just magicking the problem away with Central Banks’ stroke of the pen. That there is still an argument about this choice suggests that widespread brain worm infections may be a greater threat to social wellbeing than even this pandemic. ### Fianna Fáil and the mystery of the vanishing options Fine Gael lost the BeforeTimes election held in Feb, coming third. The [Examiner ](https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/commit-to-the-7-and-then-well-talk-catherine-martin-reacts-to-tanaistes-shocking-comments-997153.html?ref=thegist.ie) quotes a FG TD arguing they couldn’t have done worse. FF shaded it to be the party with the most seats. But FF have let FG set the agenda for both potential government policies and coalition talks. This is, at first glance, a real mystery. FG did terribly in the election. Even they say so. But they have a social and class base. This means they think they have a chance to do better and they can’t do much worse in a new election FF have no such certainty. (See [“The Gist: Poll Positions and FF’s peril”](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-poll-positions-and-ffs-peril?r=43vhb&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=web&utm%5Fsource=copy)) Fianna Fáil’s political offering since its creation has been to be the party you vote for if you don’t want Fine Gael in government. And FG, for decades, were so objectionable to the electorate that this was a winning offer much more often than not. But the agreement between FF and FG to go into government with each other in order to keep Sinn Féin out of office has fundamentally changed what a vote for Fianna Fáil means. Now, a vote for FF is a vote to keep FG in power. This makes the next election perilously uncertain for the Fianna Fáil. It has changed its core offer to the public- from the main alternative to Fine Gael to being the secondary alternative to Sinn Féin. And that leaves Fine Gael with the power in this relationship, even with fewer seats. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/03449375-668b-4fac-950b-5e4a39a36ef0_2150x1106.jpeg) ### The Gist: Bleaching and Creeping URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-bleaching-and-creeping/ Last updated: 2020-04-25T10:56:36.000Z I try not to introduce too much personal elements into these things- but what I wouldn’t give for a proper desk. Anyway, today is really about how the strains of quarantine are starting to show all over, even with the best will in the world. Or, in the case of the President of the United States, even without any good will to start with. ### Trump suggests injecting bleach into your veins That’s it. That’s the story. Then there was the afterstory. After a day of various proxies trying to justify this homocidal intervention from Theodore Roosevelt’s bully-pulpit, and increasingly desperate pleading statements from the makers of bleach, Trump sulkily said he didn’t mean it. That same day the US death toll from the pandemic passed 50,000. ### Ireland creeping out when nobody’s looking Not hugely, but it does look like families and workers are sneaking out more than they’re meant to. The CMO warned he wasn’t going to recommend ending the lockdown as a result. Which, on the one hand, he probably wasn’t going to anyway. But, on the other hand, we really do need to stay home. But, on the third hand, is it a good idea to blame lockdowns on ‘other people misbehaving’ rather than ‘unhappy facts’? A leaked Government memo warned of a [coming ‘divisive’ phase](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/jaw-dropping-confidential-memo-warns-of-divisive-phase-1.4235481?ref=thegist.ie) where social welfare supports would be reduced. Applying pre-pandemic austerity reponses to government expenditure seems like just the sort of thinking that saw Fine Gael come third in the BeforeTimes election. Meanwhile we seem to have another creeping problem. Political machinary wants to give people what they want. People want the shutdown to end. But if it gives them that, a bunch of important people will die needlessly. So it keeps trying to tell them it will give them what they want, shortly. As time ticks on, those future dates keep coming around and new reasons for pushing them off have to be found. There’s a [tension building](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/hse-takes-issue-with-coronavirus-testing-expansion-plans-1.4237593?ref=thegist.ie) between the political and medical sides of this project. [Meanwhile, in Germany,](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/german-states-lifting-lockdowns-too-quickly-warns-merkel-coronavirus?ref=thegist.ie) Chancellor Merkel has been preparing people for restrictions to carry on, warning we’re still only at the beginning. ### App update: Still botched And that, for the moment, is all we’re able to say, as the state continues its self-defeating insistance on secrecy in the one project that needs mass trust. You can read a good overview on the state of this project in Ireland from [NUI Maynooth’s Prof. Rob Kitchen](http://progcity.maynoothuniversity.ie/2020/04/will-covidtracker-ireland-work/?ref=thegist.ie). And a good view from the US from [Violet Blue in Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/contact-tracing-apps-are-coming-whether-we-like-it-or-not-190035504.html?guccounter=1&guce%5Freferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90LmNvL3BaMlR0ZmYwdFo%5FYW1wPTE&guce%5Freferrer%5Fsig=AQAAADvuH27N2%5Fr-EswTglPXM%5FI2oGNO4SzAEDrHMP0dkaBAAyzRycwoq1qws40SPhqJNddZ%5FvdniyDw4-RW2Px6TrpPV6UpRfwR%5FvWixBbzeskfZSUDOMrEwTiSFKkqma%5FuzDPDEhUsLhnM-0n%5FycXkFb-KmlD8lNL1jopmOJAiyx9M&ref=thegist.ie). And a [deep report](https://github.com/DP-3T/documents/blob/master/Security%20analysis/Privacy%20and%20Security%20Attacks%20on%20Digital%20Proximity%20Tracing%20Systems.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) on what a trustworthy and reliable app would do from the DP-3T consortium of researchers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f10763e6-0c1c-4bc1-9d94-2245e1ac8554_634x942.png) ### The Gist: Leaders Questions, few answers URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-leaders-questions-few-answers/ Last updated: 2020-04-24T01:23:11.000Z Oh hey, there you are. I was worried you might have succumbed to ennui and be listlessly pawing at the side of your bedside table in the hope it might just turn into a day at the beach. Just as well nobody connected with this newsletter ever had that dream. Meanwhile, Tony Holahan produced seismic charts to show Ireland was quietly restarting when we should still be in our houses. In fact, the earthquakes are still happening in Leinster House. This is the Gist. ### The Boring Uncle of All Parliaments Westminster likes to style itself The Mother of All Parliaments, a title well-suited to the institution in that it both ignores the fact that Iceland has the oldest parliament (literally, the Althing) and manages to lay a claim to every other national deliberation chamber in the world, in particular all those formed by breaking away from its control. Ireland’s Dáil, however, knows its place. It is a place for words. Words of varying quality- some pedestrian, some sublime, some Danny Healy-Rae’s. But the quality always matters less than the quantity. So it was that, after weeks of being starved of the speaking, the opposition leaders got a chance to Say Some Words. And Say them they did. The Leaders’ Questions format basically broke down, under the weight of the speeches delivered. After the words were poured out, the Taoiseach eventually glanced down at his notes, promised to write to them all with the answers and said time was up. But there was one golden thread through the speeches- the Dáil wanted more transparency. Massive decisions were being taken and they didn’t even know who was taking them any more. This is going to be trouble, later. (see [What’s with the Covid Apps?](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-whats-with-the-covid-apps)) ### Revenge of the Nerds Regular readers [will remember](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-love-in-a-warming-climate) when the Greens launched their post- election negotiation process. Multi-stranded talks, lasting seven hours at a sitting. You will also remember [FF quickly tiring](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-government-snaps-into-focus) of this sort of detailed policy engagement. As their joint paper with FG demonstrated, they’re more Big Picture guys. Actually planning the details of government is what the Civil Service is for, after all. But today, Eamonn Ryan struck back with a snappy [17 point response paper](https://www.thejournal.ie/green-party-ff-fg-5082135-Apr2020/?ref=thegist.ie), looking for all sorts of detail. This will presumably have been met with mixed feelings in FF (and, to a lesser extent FG). On the one hand, if the Greens bite, as their leader says he wants to, Michael Martin can start shopping for Mr. Taoiseach mugs now. On the other hand, they have been given a pile of homework and power may depend on it getting good marks. And I’m not 100% convinced that doing homework is why FF TDs sign up for election. ### Covid Apps- Still botched, still critical The Netherlands [scrapped all their proposed Covid App options](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/netherlands-abandons-initial-plan-to-develop-covid-19-tracing-app-1.4236355?ref=thegist.ie) because none of them were properly designed to meet the privacy concerns from either experts or the public. We haven’t scrapped ours, in part because unlike the Dutch, we didn’t put in place an expert advisory team that might warn the public the software wasn’t good enough. The window of opportunity for us to fix the core trust problem at the heart of this likely critical project is closing rapidly. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/334fdf0c-fc78-4e64-9ff2-e6a3d4a12079_4032x3024.jpeg) ### The Gist: What's with the Covid Apps? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-whats-with-the-covid-apps/ Last updated: 2020-04-18T11:59:32.000Z ## To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As the coronavirus swept through Asia, there were reports of the deployment of the Chinese mass surveillence regime to track and control the poplulation through their phones. Singapore, careful to always present itself as an alternative Asian model, rolled out an app trying to preserve privacy while still helping with contact tracing. Now, as the US and EU grapple with their own lockdowns, technologists, doctors and governments alike are sure that Covid Apps represent a potential silver bullet solution to reopening economies. But not all app approaches are equal. This- insofar as it can be given the speed the situation is moving- is the Gist. ### Ireland: The Wrong Reflex Having a medically useful Covid 19 tracking app is not a software project. It is a social project. That is because the app will only work to help identify who has been near an infected person if it [has widespread adoption](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936?ref=thegist.ie). Basically, if people don’t want an app on their phone because they don’t trust it then whole project is dead on arrival. The Singapore model recognises this. There, the source code of the app was published for everyone to examine. The best way to kill rumours or misinformation about what an app can do is just to let everyone see for themselves. The app itself aims to ensure that there is no centralised database of the populations’s movements. Instead, a bluetooth token is passed from phone to phone, if they both have the app installed. The Irish Health officals have, to date, stated that they will not publish their app’s source code before launch. Add to this the suggestion that the project isn’t being developed in-house, but has been contracted out to an external management consultancy, and the refusal to publish the (legally required) Data Protection Impact Assessment in advance to allow all stakeholders to assist with the planning and development of the project. That document would also allow us to see if the model is one with a centralised database of population movements or a decentralised Singapore-style model. They haven’t said why they want to keep the app details hidden. And, to be clear, *it doesn’t matter why*. What matters is that the launch of the app will inevitably be marred by immediately being the subject of questions and misinformation that could have been avoided by simply overcoming the State’s institutional impulse for secrecy. The development of this app seems to have drifted within the purview of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform- the same ministry responsibile for the PSC project. Given that what is at stake can be described as literally life or death, we can only hope that the same institutional mistakes of that ‘mandatory but not complsory’ project are not going to be repeated. ### EU Commission: A False Start There’s no point pretending otherwise- The EU has not had a great Pandemic so far. Member states have gone it alone, instead of acting in concert. There have been instances of hoarding of PPE by countries and one member state decided to bring in an autocracy in the kerfuffle. Healthcare is not an EU competency. The Treaties that govern the EU leave that to the individual countries. So, in an effort to exert some relevance and influcence, the EU Commissioner in charge of telecoms decided they would try to co-ordinate data-informed responses. We saw an initial flurry of effort around mobile phone tracking (mostly not actually useful, as this data tracks location within such large cell sizes as to tell us nothing about who was within 2m or 20m of anyone else). Then we saw the emergence of a slightly mysterious body- The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing group (PEPP-PT). Basically built around one fellow, Hans-Christian Boos, this has been tapped by the relevant EU Commissioner as being a framwork the EU might endorse for Covid Tracking apps. The problem is that it has, so far, refused to provide documentation of what that framework might be. Members of the consortium were growing concerned at the lack of info before that concern burst into alarm at the removal of references to the decntralised model of tracking (DP3T) from the PEPP-PT website. Here’s Kenneth Patterson, the Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich , who then announced that ETH Zurich was withdrawing from the PEPP-PT consortium. > “Their system is closed and not open to review by external experts. We can’t look at a specification. We can’t look at code. So the system could be full of bugs. It could have a backdoor for the security services. No one outside their closed project can tell. > > This opens the gates to privacy hell” And this was followed by a pretty punchy letter yesterday from a group of MEPs, putting basic questions to the PEPP-PT contact, Mr. Boos, about the group’s plans and structure. You can read that [letter here](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EV31tCzWkAI84bP?format=jpg&name=medium&ref=thegist.ie). But here’s the key paragraph; > Can you explain why PEPP-PT has so far not been transparent on the functioning of the contact-tracing apps it is developing? Why has it not published its full protocol for security and privacy, and not devided to make its code available through open source, so that people can verify whether the application functions as stated by the authorities, such as the DP3T approach? These questions seem sort of familiar to anyone who’s just read the paragraph above on the Irish Government’s approach. It would be nice to know if the Irish Gov is one of those [seven countries](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/17/europes-pepp-pt-covid-19-contacts-tracing-standard-push-could-be-squaring-up-for-a-fight-with-apple-and-google/?ref=thegist.ie) that PEPP-PT’s Boos says have committed to adopt this centralised, cloud-based ‘privacy hell’ model. ### The US: It’s Google and Apple’s world, we just live in it While the rest of the world works on apps, the two companies that effectively control the entire smartphone ecosystem decided to get out ahead of the game. Remember, these companies do not want people to come to resent their smartphones as tools of oppressive governments tracking their populations silently, a tiny trench-coated agent in every pocket. So they’ve moved to [introduce a framework for tracing apps ](https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/16/21221458/apple-google-contact-tracing-app-coronavirus-covid-privacy?ref=thegist.ie)that would force the use of decentralisation as the model if you wanted them to run in the background. In the end, this is the move with the greatest significance made so far in the contact tracing app ballet. It will probabaly be the deciding factor for which model is adopted, regardless of whatever dreams individual governments had. And, while their move has been in favour of privacy today, it is a reminder that when it comes to the smartphone world, there are two voices that matter and [everyone else is just playing in their sandpit](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/16/nhs-in-standoff-with-apple-and-google-over-coronavirus-tracing?ref=thegist.ie). Note: This was sort of long, for a Gist and a bit niche. But I hope it’s been at least of interest. Thanks are due to my loyal subscriber who suggested this special topic edition. All errors are my own, as usual. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b46665ee-c42a-43c1-8168-2b92e8c2d133_760x855.jpeg) ### The Gist: A Most Expensive Bargain URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-most-expensive-bargain/ Last updated: 2020-04-15T11:15:09.000Z Imagine I have a crisp €500 note in my pocket. And I am out in the market looking to buy a kettle. Two tents, beside each other, have kettles. I stand in earshot of them both and declare three things: that I will never buy a kettle from the first tent, that I absolutely must buy a kettle no matter what and that I have €500 on me. This is the Gist, and today we learned from Fianna Fáil how to pay €500 for a kettle. ### A Party where everyone’s invited. Except them. Fianna Fáil came first in terms of seats in the election which some of you may remember from the BeforeTimes. Fine Gael came third because they had driven the country stone mad from their quinteessential FG carry-on. Now Fianna Fáil have agreed to go into a coalition government (or agreed to agree it later) wit FG. Here’s how the chair of [Fine Gael described it to members;](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/fine-gael-and-fianna-f%C3%A1il-reach-agreement-on-historic-framework-for-government-1.4228580?ref=thegist.ie) > They reaffirmed their commitment to forming a majority government of three or more parties/groups that will last five years with full and equal partnership between FG and FF at its centre. Presumably this was followed by another message saying “I know! I can’t believe it either!” On the [1st March](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-poll-positions-and-ffs-peril), your friendly neighborhood Gister explained the dynamics of Micheal Martin’s inexplicable sabotaging of his own negotiating strength. > FF+SF might have saved FF, but not Martin. And, as I have tried to explain, the one thing which Martin *must* do is become Taoiseach. He will make any choice that leads there- and avoid any choice that doesn’t guarantee him that top job. The key to this deal is this sentence; > There is also an understanding that Fianna Fáil will hold the Taoiseach’s role in the first period of Government. And thus the kettle was bought. Except… the two Civil War parties were so diminished at that last election that the two of them together still don’t meet the bar for a majority. They need a third party or a bunch of Independents. And, thanks to Parnell’s invention of enforcing voting with the party, one of those would be a lot easier to hold together. And so, we have a return of the world’s weirdest effort to find a third coalition party member. The large parties have already agreed their programme. So the offer is to have no impact, but to carry the blame. Media proxy voices for both those civil war parties will be mustered to demand, I dunno, that Greens/Labour/Social Democrats must do what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael want. An offer of being an explicitly designated scapegoat is a novel approach to building a coalition. You could only expect it from parties who fell short of their electoral expectations because voters rejected their presumption that power was their by right. The real mystery would be the psychology of the party leadership that would find it attractive. ### Otherwise The leader of SF revealed that she was recovering from a bout of Coronavirus. The President of the US said he’d cut off funding for the World Health Organisation during the worst pandemic since its foundations. (He probably doesn’t have a power to do that without Congress. Even his lies are lies.) Tomorrow: barring something eyecatching, I’m going to be taking up a suggestion from a Gist subscriber and do a special roundup on the status of Coronavirus surveillance around the world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4410d7dc-57b5-4d05-baec-6d642e2fa34f_640x480.jpeg) ### The Gist: How we live now URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-how-we-live-now/ Last updated: 2020-04-14T00:31:42.000Z Time marches on, even if we have no idea what it’s destination is going to look like. The contours of the future we can just about start to make out are strange, and strangely familiar. Meanwhile our East and Western neighbours both find themselves facing the consequences of misdeeds in the recent past. This is the Gist. ## How long, oh Lord, how long? > “social distancing is going to remain a "very big part of life", until an effective treatment or vaccine can be found.” [RTE’s reported on this](https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0413/1130257-harris-irish-strategy/?ref=thegist.ie) Minister for Health’s assessment of how this virus will continue to change how we live our lives. The rolling three week extensions to the restrictions were probably the right way to help people find a way into this social wrench. But there comes a point- which we’re pretty much at now- when we approach the end of another designated lockdown period and it’s time to start acknowledging that this isn’t going away any particular time soon. The consequences and impact of that fact are going to reshape and determine society and politics for years to come. As things stand, we’re still only a few weeks in. And a vaccine is likely a year to 18 months away. How we get from here to there with the minimum amount of deaths is the primary moral question right now. But we’ve hardly had a chance to consider the political ramifications of it- let alone form answers beyond carrying on with our emergency measures. South Korea reported high numbers of reinfections in their ‘second wave’. This means healthy people can get the virus, get better, but end up getting it again. So much for the UK’s herd immunity plan, designed originally for a new flu. ### Absolute Melt has Meltdown The US President railed at facts, true statements, the press, the US Constitution, Governors of states and women for a bloc of time on live TV. No doubt he will be pleased with the ratings, as people from around the world tuned in to see a moral homunculus scream into his own internal void. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden, basically on the grounds othat Trump was so bad that anything displaying sentience was preferable for the continuance of life and civilisation. ### Can’t get the staff these days In the UK a dossier containing transcripts of WhatsApp messages leaked. It showed that Labour Party staff had done what they could to both undermine the Labour leader, and the Labour Party in the run up to the 2017 election. This included not addressing complaints of anti-semitism and tipping off named members of the press when a shadow minister was hiding in a cupboard and crying at the ferocity of racism she was faced with, so that she could be humiliated further. > “45 minutes after the exit poll revealed that Labour had overturned the Conservative majority, one senior official said the result was the “opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years”, describing themselves and their allies as “silent and grey-faced” and in need of counselling.“ [Anti-Corbyn Labour officials worked to lose general election to oust leader, leaked dossier finds](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html?ref=thegist.ie) One of the staffers involved has been tipped for a leadership role under the new party leader. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0b98f03e-0d66-4cca-8ae3-76935fc2bcbb_1024x767.jpeg) ### The Gist: Purgatorial consistency URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-purgatorial-consistency/ Last updated: 2020-04-12T19:51:11.000Z What day is it? Is this my still my first egg, or my third? Can my children hear me breathing in the wardrobe? There are some questions I can’t help you with, no matter how important they’ve become. But I can do my best on one question at least- what’s going on? This is the Gist. ## Parties and other irrelevances Good news everyone! The two civil war parties have agreed to agree to go into government together if only they can persuade some others to loan them some votes to do it. Bad news; nobody cares. We’re stuck in our houses, 15% of the population is on some financial support since the beginning of March and everything has an ongoing veneer of unreality. Fine Gael have been presenting themselves as the safe pair of hands who should be left in charge. Poor Leo Varadkar’s copy of Soundings is worn thin from being ransacked for uplifting speeches. Fianna Fáil, the party with narrowly the most seats in the Dáil have been left in such a weak negotiating position by their leader’s preemptive rejection of the only alternative government that they’ve apparently conceded the ole ‘rotating Taoiseach’ ask. Meanwhile, they’re still short of a majority, even combined, and so are screaming at other parties to Give Them Their Votes Dammit, an approach in keeping with both leaders’ displayed social skills and about as effective. There will be Independents, Government and then a series of policy errors and personal animosities to look forward to. Meanwhile, the clock to the voters’ next reckoning will continue to tick. ## Boris Johnson, the body politic The UK’s Prime Minister leaves ICU, and the UK press switch from assuring their readers that their leader is only slightly inconvenienced to telling them he was at death’s door days ago. In more significant news, the UK’s herd immunity policy disaster continues to exact its toll in lives and lost love. But the focus of the UK press, who have never seemed as alien as now from outside the country, continues to be their PM and his health. Some have gone so far as to revive the Medieval idea that the health of the nation is a reflection of the health of its leader. We can presumably look forward to a spate of further approving headlines if Boris Johnson steps out into Downing Street to announce “L'état, c'est moi” on his return. ## Money, it matters some Every nation is spending money it doesn’t have to fight the Coronavirus emergency. The Bank of England is funding UK govt debt directly. The US Fed is printing dollars. The ECB knows what it needs to do but is having trouble getting its board made of each Euro nations to agree to do it. This isn’t sustainable. So, working on the basis that things that can’t go on the way they are have to change, we can expect some fireworks in a short few weeks. In the meantime, Europeans are trying to get stimulus where they can. Thanks for sticking with me. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/799cd074-63b2-4138-87fd-4d742e4704c9_4032x3024.jpeg) ### The Gist: Checking on the Neighbours URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-checking-on-the-neighbours/ Last updated: 2020-03-27T00:51:54.000Z Let’s take a quick sprint around how the covid-19 crisis is being dealt with (and reported) outside Ireland. My sources for each will be english language, but wherever possible produced in the country. Let’s go. **UK:** Our nearest neighbour and perhaps the most shockingly mismanaged outbreak location in Europe, the[ BBC yesterday confirmed](https://twitter.com/i/status/1243095246797516801?ref=thegist.ie) that the Governement wasn’t releasing up-to-date figures for deaths. Also yesterday, they said they were going it alone in looking for ventilators as they’d had Brexit. Today, they said that actually, they really wanted to join in, but they’d accidently missed the email with the deadline to put their procurement request for ventilators through the EU-wide purchase. Apparently putting [‘Brexit before breathing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/26/no-10-boris-johnson-accused-of-putting-brexit-over-breathing-in-covid-19-ventilator-row?ref=thegist.ie)’ wasn’t the winning headline they’d hoped for. **Spain:** [El País](https://english.elpais.com/politics/2020-03-26/spanish-pm-secures-congressional-support-to-extend-state-of-alarm.html?ref=thegist.ie) outlines what’s happening in Europe’s fastest moving outbreak country. > Under the state of alarm, Spaniards are only permitted to leave their homes under certain conditions, such as to purchase food and medication, and to get to their jobs if they cannot work from home. Despite that, Spain is seeing shocking deaths and rates of infection. The minority left gov’s PM sought and received more emergency powers, though not without calls for even more stringent restriction from the opposition. **Italy:** The epicentre of the outbreak in Europe and still the worst-hit. [With 80,000 cases confirmed and over 8000 deaths](https://www.thelocal.it/20200310/the-form-you-need-to-travel-in-italy-under-new-coronavirus-rules?ref=thegist.ie), the mortality rate there has been an eye-watering 10%. This is a social disaster and 8000 family tragedies. > Italy's coronavirus infection rate had [slowed for four successive days](https://www.thelocal.it/20200325/italy-reports-a-slight-drop-in-coronavirus-deaths-and-cases?ref=thegist.ie) from Sunday to Wednesday, fuelling hopes that the epidemic was slowing in Italy. > > But things looked less certain on Thursday after the infection rate rose again, in the worst-hit region of Lombardy and elsewhere in Italy. Anecdotally, there’s worry about a wave appearing shortly, if people who moved from the impacted North of the country to their holiday homes in the South just before travel restrictions start to become symptomatic. **Sweden:** Sweden, so often cited as being the [‘perfect cousin’](https://open.spotify.com/track/7EOKTINti6v7Hw66lrEjJd?ref=thegist.ie) of the rest of the EU, appears to be screwing up in a UK-style laissez faire approach. [Euronews:](https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/24/swedish-populist-quits-party-amid-controversy-over-coronavirus-masks?ref=thegist.ie) > in Sweden, prime minister Stefan Löfven and the Public Health Agency of Sweden have kept aggressive legislation at bay. His government still allows up to 500 people together, while restaurants and bars remain open under stricter hygiene rules. University students have been sent home, but schools are open for the kids. The main Covid-19 related story in the eerily unconcerned Swedish press was a right wing populist party leader having to quit when it turned out he was running a side business selling facemasks at huge mark-ups. Wtf, Sweden? **United States:** Now the global epicentre of the Covid-19 outbreak and they haven’t even properly started testing nationally yet. Laws passed to help with some economic pump-priming met the [highest ever recorded one-week figures](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html?ref=thegist.ie) for people being made unemployed (3 million) and more to come. It’s a slow-mo disaster. The only entity who has seen a lift from this was a little Chinese company called Zoom Technologies, whose shares skyrocketed by a factor of ten this week. The rise was so sudden that the SEC suspended trading. The regulators pointed out that investors might want to think about putting their money in the completely different company, Zoom Video Communication instead. [Photo](https://www.flickr.com/photos/184673311@N04/49099017821/in/photolist-2hNHiq2-zXFWpa-2iiLvR6-cKfVPL-uic5Wk-24nHRm3-24uc1Uv-2f8sQyz-2f8sQBa-2iCsaXE-T1e19b-24uc1W4-4Bp6By-xH4ATH-2gGu9Y3-4JLjJE-a6ETaJ-2iogqpn-29XAwVg-71Cdys-fDrMoR-bzatCB-S7URj2-Q5KnxN-MW8Zx-C3Noft-GQXTkW-Hy78bV-Eoybhs-dFUk7m-2cYEL3a-22UYiws-TTbbxf-SRbqdQ-G5i5ce-U21xKJ-5kxFn3-U3hDix-TumjG3-8DidA5-SWiTe6-5EZk2r-22fQ4Gw-gNSrv-7moB5Z-G1KAwr-5ET875-4K92Bt-6q4sZt-2dWL2aZ?ref=thegist.ie): ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/c930ae29-91a2-40fc-9196-2258a522443e_1280x853.jpeg) ### The Gist: FG goes Socialist URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-fg-goes-socialist/ Last updated: 2020-03-25T08:41:59.000Z In politics, people like to talk about new governments having a honeymoon, where the glow of victory allows them to introduce radicle changes in their first 100 days. But the coronavirus crisis has seen the Irish Government, still in place after losing the election, radically reconfiguring the state and society in its final 100 days. ### “The 20s will (perforce) be Socialist” Fine Gael is a very conservative party. In fact, that is almost its defining characteristic. It wants things to stay the same, almost without any caring what the definition of ‘things’ is. In internet terms, it proposes to everyone that the [This is Fine](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GVCeaYb9zYq-w0%5FK2sxQasdT82I=/0x0:900x500/1820x1213/filters:focal%28378x178:522x322%29:format%28webp%29/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus%5Fimage/image/49493993/this-is-fine.0.jpg?ref=thegist.ie) cartoon is the right approach to life. So there is a grim irony that the paroxysm of the Coronavirus crisis has happened in the dying days of its stewardship of the nation. Becuase it may be a conservative party, but it is still an Irish conservative party. And that means there was no echo of the UK’s dreams of herd immunity and letting pensioners dying. They have just gone with the science and gradually ratched up the restrictions to supress the transmission of the virus. But, in order to deal with the consequences of turning off the economy and preparing for a lot of critically ill people needing care, Fine Gael have, so far, announced 1. A near basic income payment system (the Pandemic unemployment payment) 2. One week later, an increase in that basic income by nearly 30% above the previous dole payment which is suddenly accepted as unsustainably low. 3. Free Childcare facilities (though full subsidy of staff wages and costs of private operators) 4. Nationalisation of private hospitals. (All staff now HSE staff. All facilities now state controlled) 5. A national rent freeze (previously unconstitutional, according to the same Govt now bringing it in) 6. A huge increase in state spending to pay for all of the above. There are still gaps- why are people who where previously getting the dole still expected to live on the €203 while newly unemployed people get €350\. Surely a rent and mortgage holiday, rather than a rent freeze is also needed?- but take a look at that list. And now imagine what Fine Gael would have said about any party that proposed to do any, let alone all, of the above during the recent election. In a Revolution all the things that were previously impossible become compulsory. And all the rules we presumed were immutable melt like dew. This isn’t a just a crisis. This is a Revolution. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7edf5577-8867-402c-ada3-1cad8baf656b_321x474.jpeg) ### The Gist: The Story That Ate The World URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-story-that-ate-the-world/ Last updated: 2020-03-24T01:46:47.000Z Climate change. Very “not now!” as a topic. But it taught a lesson. If things unfold slowly enough, the world can doom itself by just not reacting. Now Covid-19 has proved the opposite- if a threat moves fast enough, anything will be done to stop it. ### The Wheedle and the Damage Done Boris Johnson took to the TV, looking like a pillowcase filled with porridge. The cause of this outing? As he spoke it seemed to be either that someone had finally shown him a chart showing the already assured death-toll consequences of his policy for the past three weeks, or it was a poll. Either way, the UK’s PM was shook by what he’d learned. He’d spent the weekend having his proxies blame his advisor Dominic Cummings (a sort of Davros figure if, instead of Daleks, Davros had created a range of demotivating office posters). He announced a series of strict restrictions on movement- including restricting everyone in the UK to one exercise outing a day. How the police would know, from the look of you, that this was your second jog of the afternoon (or, indeed, under what statute such a query was appropriate) was left to the imagination. The BBC later explained the police powers would flow from the power of persuasion. ### Getting Welfare to work The Irish Government challenged the DPC’s findings on their marquee electronic services project, the public services card. 4m cards have been issued already at a cost of approx €65m Mo and they were made a requirement to access services and payments. As of yesterday, Welfare scrapped the whole requirement for that online ID system for their Jobseekers and Pandemic payments because it was getting in the way of the need for people to register for Pandemic payment assistance. It’s hard to see it ever coming back when the scrappage seems like a vindication of the DPC’s position that the requirements for the card were neither necessary or proportionate. As a final defiance of anything resembling institutional sanity, the Minister retweeted a reminder that hundreds of thousands of people would have to come to Post Office to pick up actual physical cash payments during a pandemic. This was presented as not being bonkers in the nut. ### The Last Trump > *We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump*. [KJV](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/KJV?ref=thegist.ie)[1 Corinthians 15:52](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible%5F%28World%5FEnglish%29/1%5FCorinthians?ref=thegist.ie#Chapter%5F15) The US hasn’t been completely changed yet, but the infection levels in New York as testing is rolled out suggest that the twinkling of an eye is approaching in a matter of days and, then at the last, approaching Trump. In anticipation, the proxies of power have been advancing the argument that “if a few pensioners die, too bad.” This is presumably to have a rhetorical answer prepared for when those inevitable deaths start to rise. And here we reach what climate change has taught us. You can sacrifice the young and their future for a profit now. But the death-squad here are proposing sacrificing the old, in the space of a few months, for profit. And that just isn’t as easy to sell. If you want to put your Wolf in sheep’s clothing, you have to make the disguise fit the predator beneath, or not enough people will be taken in. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f10d9a6e-efdb-4761-b9a9-fa2c5d86aaf9_767x1024.jpeg) ### The Gist: Nothing for the weekend URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-nothing-for-the-weekend/ Last updated: 2020-03-23T01:12:57.000Z Mothering Sunday spent without meeting any elderly mothers. Restless movement, urges to escape to Western isles. The weekend has been a disjointed one. ### Infection, Control Facebook announced they would be donating 720,000 facemasks they had to medical staff. This news prompted the universal response “What on earth do Facebook have 720,000 facemasks for?”, the answer to which doesn’t seem possible to both know and feel better about. In the UK, all the government media proxies suddenly had one message- Dominic Cummings made the Prime Minister make a terrible policy error that might yet kill a quarter of a million people. All those things that are happening aren’t the PM’s fault, it was his soon-to-be-found-under-a-bus advisor. Much good that will do anyone when the numbers start to climb. In the US, new estimates from Morgan Stanley Bank suggested that the past three months had suffered a quarter where economic activity had contracted by 30%. For context, the previous largest contraction was 25%, for the Great Depression in the 1930s. On the Internet, lots of lads made charts out of numbers to try to exert some control over the sudden chaos of their lives and who am I to say they were wrong. (But similarly, they were of use primarily as a sort of occupational therapy, like basket weaving with spreadsheets) The US senate started to row about the terms of their bailout, to try to keep a ghost of their economy running. And, back in Ireland, we saw a heavy emphasis on ramping up capacity (building test centres, taking samples, testing, results) even as the public discourse ramped up on the consequences of the public wandering around. The logic of increasing levels of restriction seem inexorable- one of the most dangerous sentences imaginable. Stay well. Keep clear of each other. Wash your hands. It’s all ahead of us. There’s always another trip to the fridge in the meantime. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/af1e4e71-0a05-4b03-96ea-662a3cdfd25d_1280x958.jpeg) ### The Gist: WTaF URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-wtaf/ Last updated: 2020-03-22T08:50:02.000Z So… busy week? Everything went into overdrive last week- every hour delivering a tilt to the entire world that would normally be discussed for months. Newsfeeds were horror-scrolled compulsively. But, maybe it’s still worth picking out the main threads from the one giant story. This is the Gist. ### Ireland: A Too Social Distance Children sent home. Gradually closing businesses sending workers to non existent home desks with freshly-bought laptops. Everyone finding out how Zoom works. Grandparents’ nostrils looming large as they peer down at their grandkids on little mobile screens. Everyone not at Cheltenham raging at people gone to Cheltenham. Fianna Fáil winking into silent irrelevance to the point where Varadkar seeks to stay as Taoiseach, despite having fewer seats. Overall, a competent showing from medicos, civil servants, media and political actors makes the best of a bad starting position of an under resourced health system. Still too much gallivanting. Ratchets quietly preparing for the next closures and restrictions. ### UK: The Living Dead Almost impossible to overstate the public policy disaster of the UK Govt in London. Despite years of Brexit jokes, Ireland has family and friends there. It has a border with part of the UK on its island. We are *invested*. London Times reports; > In Feb “Cummings outlined the Government’s strategy. Those present say it was “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad” When Imperial College made public that the figures for the projected deaths under this scenario would reach 250,000 the Tories started denying herd immunity was ever their plan. This presumably for the benefit of any future judicial inquiry. While their Gov is still resisting testing unhospitalised sick people, the GB public remain broadly unconcerned, unlike every poor sod who has to come in contact with them. ### USA: Who knows? This looks very bad. ### All The Money In The World Across Europe impossible things are suddenly becoming compulsory as entire economies are basically closed and the nation’s citizens and some businesses are just paid directly by the State. The US is preparing to do the same to their system, with free money being just given to citizens. The ECB starts buying bonds to fund the boggling costs. Stock markets plummet. Deflation, mass unemployment and global contraction have arrived in the space of a fortnight. Economics is the least important thing to focus on in a health crisis, but the political consequences of the next two months will reverberate through the rest of our lives. All the rules have melted like dew at noon. We’re just extemporising from here on. Look after yourselves, and your loved ones. Keep washing your hands- I can recommend Lidl’s Cien hand cream for any cracked skin you’re getting. But the Gist of all of the above is that things will be worse before they are better and its up to us, staying at home, to make that better day come as soon as possible. Stay safe. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0ad756c6-ba32-48f0-be38-1767654a9eb8_4032x3024.jpeg) ### The Gist: Everything happens URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-everything-happens/ Last updated: 2020-03-13T01:04:10.000Z Pity the poor Gister. Most days, it’s a struggle to find enough that happened to fill even the smallest of emails. Today was, by common consent, not like most days. ### Pulling the levers The Taoiseach, who is still Leo Varadkar, went to the US with a simple task. His job was to pick up a crystal bowl filled with shamrock, pass it to a man who would casually insult him and then leave to tour some FDI opportunities. By mid-morning Irish time, that was not the main job of the day. The main job of the day was making the closest to a wartime speech we ever want to see a Taoiseach get, in reaction to the latest coronavirus numbers. Restrictions on public meetings, closed libraries and museums, so far so incremental. But then the biggest social disrupter lever got pulled. All childcare and education was closed too, until the 29th March 2020. The mobile phone networks promptly failed, as every parent in the country rang each other to panic. The next thing to fail was everyone’s common sense, as panic buying hit the shops like college students buying cans on Holy Thursday. Retail Ireland had to issue a statement reminding everyone the shops were there tomorrow, and so would the food and loo roll. The extra wise gazed at a week indoors with children and snuck off to stockpile 1000 piece jigsaws. But, at last, everyone felt that our response had caught up with the potential risk posed by the situation. ### Nothing Happens The UK’s PM decided to [make a speech](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/mar/12/trumps-travel-ban-wont-have-much-impact-on-spread-of-coronavirus-says-rishi-sunak-live-news?ref=thegist.ie) too. His warned of all the beloved family members who would soon be dead, but ended with a sort of shrug, rather than any specific social isolation rules. Whatcha gonna do?, his body language said, Granny’s gotta go. The immediate interface between the UK’s **[laissez](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=ALeKk02RbREyUCHQfn%5FQ7KzuvY4PREknfw:1584060807515&q=laissez-faire&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB3u-tnpboAhWHZxUIHSFlB1gQkeECKAB6BAgQECc&ref=thegist.ie)**[\-faire](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=ALeKk02RbREyUCHQfn%5FQ7KzuvY4PREknfw:1584060807515&q=laissez-faire&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB3u-tnpboAhWHZxUIHSFlB1gQkeECKAB6BAgQECc&ref=thegist.ie) response and Ireland’s was the Northern Ireland border. So then a bunch of NI politicians came out to complain about everyone else’s plan. Which was, to be fair, a novel reversal of the usual pattern. BBC’s Newsnight helpfully produced a chart comparing the UK response (both thoughts *and* prayers) and the rest of Europe. Luckily for the Government, it turns out the UK has a cohort of people delighted to relax and be assured that Johnny Foreigner has got it wrong again. For once, I hope they’re right. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/41930501-3518-480b-a06d-bb36b52761fd_1024x733.jpeg) Photo: [André Spicer](https://twitter.com/andre%5Fspicer/status/1238241224697565185/photo/1?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Quick Bits URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-quick-bits/ Last updated: 2020-03-12T02:27:18.000Z A very very quick roundup for today. ### Sick Beats Everyone knows the Coronavirus is coming. The Chief Medical Officer has repeated the Minister for Health’s explanation for not bringing in strong social restrictions yet- we’ll get fatigued of staying in and take our chances later on deserted streets. In the UK, the Editor of the Lancet has said their similar delay is based, not on advice from medical professionals, but from behavioural economists. That’s unlikely in Ireland, the government having never so much as seen a picture of a behavioural economist in a catalog. Meanwhile, in an effort to find someone Other to blame for the US’ impending runaway crisis, Trump announced he was blocking all Europeans from the US except Britain. When the detail was published, it turned out when he said Britain, he had meant Ireland as well. This just before getting his crystal bowl of Shamrock. Come out, ye Orange Tans! And, from Australia comes news (via Tom Hanks’ Twitter that he and his wife both have Coronavirus. Not Tom Hanks! ### Green machine The Greens declined to fall automatically into the FF/FG government and instead repeated what FFer Eamon O Cuiv suggested earlier- a grand national government of all the talents (and parties). A more appealing idea then being the 3rd wheel on a very unpopular FF/FG pairing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/ac0bca17-abd5-4340-892f-98bd9c5a94da_1050x816.jpeg) Photo by [Mark](https://www.flickr.com/photos/seamark/?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Government snaps into focus URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-government-snaps-into-focus/ Last updated: 2020-03-11T01:20:27.000Z On Monday the Irish Times was reporting Fine Gael “is not at this stage willing to talk about the formation of a government.” Today there was a joint statement from the two civil war parties that they were “the two parties should now commence in depth detailed talks”. The change? Covid-19. ### The calm before the storm The Government decided to flip a bunch of switches at its meeting on Monday. It announced plans to spend the €3bn Brexit stash on combating the virus consequences. It cancelled the Patrick’s Day parade. But it left another swathe of switches unflipped. Pubs still open for Patrick’s Day. Flights still going to and from Italy. Some manner of Horse Eejitry letting people come back if they decide to go to Cheltenham. The Ministers must have heard the rising murmur of worry (and sometimes just panic) as the situation in Italy gets profoundly bad, profoundly quickly. They swept out onto the airwaves asking the public to trust their medical advice and that they were only going to take steps when they were needed, and not before. And I, being not a doctor, grimace but have to accept it’s the right thing to do. But I would dearly love someone to show me all the things that are weighed up before these decisions are issued. I really want to know how those difficult decision-sausages are made. It seems to me the most reassuring way of getting public buy-in for choices to do or not do certain things in a crisis is to explain how the choices are made, wherever possible. And that public support will be vital if we’re on the upward slope towards the Italian experience in a matter of weeks. ### FF to Greens: Jesus, stop talking at us The Green party set out to really take the business of agreeing a government programme seriously. A large negotiation team opened “a multi-stranded talks process” with FF and SF separately. Turns out, [as expected,](https://thegist.substack.com/p/the-gist-love-in-a-warming-climate) that FF found this got very old, very fast. Not nature’s natural academics, they haven’t enjoyed listening to lectures on policy. We can expect a truncating of that whole process to a single question by the end of the week- In? Or Out? Before the virus hit, that would have been a very shaky proposition to get through the Green Party delegate conference. Now? Expect to see the three-party government in place in time for the cabinet meeting two weeks from now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/20197eb6-4e61-4181-a79c-a29c2f332625_800x800.jpeg) Photo cc [confuzzyus](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mihaistn/?ref=thegist.ie) ### The Gist: Mega TCD Seanad Roundup URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-mega-tcd-seanad-roundup/ Last updated: 2020-03-10T01:59:16.000Z The Trinity College Dublin panel for the Seanad has three seats. Presumably the original intention was to ensure that there would always be some Protestant voices in the Oireachtas, but not *too* many. If you’re one of the TCD graduate voters, why not use your exalted voice, protestant or not? ### In order of preference… Here, in a very rough order of my preferences, come the candidates. **RUANE, Lynn** public representative If I had a vote on this panel I would give Lynn Ruane my Number 1 preference. This was her first term as a Senator and she managed to be a public representative that you’d actually l[ook forward to hearing from](https://youtu.be/7nRg6Q7oww8?ref=thegist.ie). She spoke out about class- the unmentionable subject in Irish politics- as well as weightlifting, her daughter, her time using drugs and what she learned during her longer time helping other people using drugs. She’s also been an excellent coalition builder as a legislator, with Alice Mary Higgins, Francis Black and other members of the Civil Society grouping in the Seanad. **CLONAN, Tom** academic / journalist I really like Tom Clonan, so you should read this in that light. His advocacy for proper care for his son, who uses a wheelchair, broadened into advocacy for disabled people’s services in general. But, and this was the bit I liked, he didn’t centre himself in that. His son’s voice remained the primary experience. Earlier in his career, he was a Captain in the Army, and did a PhD which [revealed a culture of bullying and worse of women in the institution](https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/tom-clonan-whistleblowing-4909558-Nov2019/?ref=thegist.ie). He was attacked and threatened when it went public. But he produced the receipts to defeat those attackers. Also, he’s always very courteous and I really like that. **BACIK, Ivana** senator Ivana Bacik, incumbent senator, is a Professor of Law, advocate for women’s rights, and senior member of the Labour Party. I only once encountered her, when we were going on RTE radio and she defended the McAleese report into the Magdalen Laundries for the government. She hadn’t read it, but she did have a selection of extracts to refer to. I don’t think that was either her finest hour, or representative of a lifetime of dedicated work for social improvement. **PRIESTLEY, William** Green Party county councillor The rare honest declaration of a party affiliation, [Cllr Priestly’s special interest](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56b2691de32140ec41344495/t/5e4fbcca0a77d85c6c5e8267/1582283985331/Priestley+2020+Election+leaflet+TCD+Seanad.pdf?ref=thegist.ie) is promoting the collection of rainwater to flush toilets, more generally, climate activism. Also not ‘building houses on top of houses’, which, to be fair, does sound like a recipe for trouble. Particularly if you’re in the house balanced on top. **BYRNE, Derek** academic and media professional Derek seems to have lived an exemplary life of advocacy, for gay rights, for people addicted to drugs. So it feels very churlish to point out that his [self](https://www.tcd.ie/seanad/candidates/meetcandidates/?ref=thegist.ie#derek-byrne) [descriptions](https://derekbyrne.ie/manifesto/?ref=thegist.ie) include “my provocative and sometimes controversial contributions to the Opinion page of the Irish Times” and “Some of you already know me from the Irish Times and Newstalk.” and I can’t get Troy McClure out of my head. **NORRIS, David** senator Look, it’s David Norris. Do you want to vote for him again, or do you want to vote for someone else? You don’t need me to tell you any more than that. **O’GORMAN, Joseph** company director / administrator, Central Societies Committee, Trinity College Dublin I mean, it says here he’s been a Trinity student since the 1980s and then part of the staff of the college societies admin since. I only know about the college admins of other, non-TCD colleges from the many years ago when I was in college, but I would not have picked the people left babysitting student societies as the most likely to become national figures, or, in the alternative, to be able to open a tin of USA biscuits unaided. But sure, that just goes to show how different TCD must be. **ALI O’SHEA, Abbas** director, AFA Consultancy Compelling personal story (arrived in Ireland as a refugee from Iraq 14 years ago, has been an Irish citizen since 2016, runs a business promoting Irish 3rd level to Gulf students). The only person of colour running for both the NUI and TCD panels, looks to represent the minority experience, and 3rd level concerns. **SCANLON, Keith** electrical and electronic engineer Wicklow resident, climate change is his signature policy. Surprisingly, like Ali Abbas O’Shea, he also appears to also be running in the NUI Seanad election. Which is, you know, a bit Eyes Emoji. **MACNEILL, Hugo** consultant / non-profit Welcome, friends, to my favourite WTAF moment of discovery, as I watched [this campaign video](https://twitter.com/i/status/1237085100443082753?ref=thegist.ie), featuring in excess of 50% of its runtime talking about rugby. Former head of a little firm called Goldman Sachs in Dublin (I presume that’s the non-profit outfit referred to in his official ballot description). Formerly of Blackrock College, a fact I know only because its mentioned in the first paragraph of [this interview ](http://trinitynews.ie/2020/03/seanad-elections-hugo-macneill-on-investment-banking-rugby-and-higher-education/?ref=thegist.ie)with him, and currently married to a Fine Gael TD, he has recently backed the plan to increase student rents in TCD. It appears someone has designed a candidate to troll me. You’ll need to get your ballots back by the end of March. Best fill them in now, and then you’ll have a whole week and a bit to find a stamp and get to a post box. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6c8d64f0-436b-483f-884f-737bbe73e5a2_2925x2631.jpeg) ### The Gist: Mega NUI Seanad Rundown URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-mega-nui-seanad-rundown/ Last updated: 2020-03-09T01:02:20.000Z The Seanad is a profoundly weird legislative body. The three seats bagsied for NUI graduates should be available to all graduates to vote for. But this is the electorate- 100,000 on the register. Multiples of that could register but don’t. And of the 100k who can vote, only 36k do it. So here, one vote really does make a difference. ### Tower of Preferences Here’s my order of preference, No 1 vote going to Alice Mary Higgins, and last preference going to Ronan Mullen. You can leave him off if you like- it’s basically the same thing if you’ve voted all the way down the rest of the field. But your might want a different order. So, using my Tower of Policy, let’s do a quick rundown on the NUI candidates. **Alice Mary Higgins:** objectively the best Senator the NUI has elected for, literally, decades. An astonishingly hard-working legislator, with significant contributions improving the Government’s Data Protection Act, Data Sharing and Governance Bill, the Heritage Bill (protecting hedgerows and other environmental issues) as well as drafting her own legislation on Seanad Reform. **Rory Hearne:** Rory’s an academic, an expert on social policy and the host of the [Reboot Republic](https://tortoiseshack.ie/reboot-republic-podcast/?ref=thegist.ie) Podcast, strong on housing and the practical changes to support it. **Keith Scanlon:** Wicklow resident, climate change is his signature policy. Surprisingly, he also appears to also be running in the TCD Seanad election. Which is, you know, a bit Eyes Emoji. **Laura Harmon:** Former USI president, Labour party policy drafter, running as an independent. LGBTQ rights her signature policy, but broadly Labour-congruent policies. **Ruth Coppinger:** Was a Solidarity-People Before Profit TD until the recent election. Just a hint of the scold as a TD. **Michelle Healy:** UCC admin, background in international human rights with the UN. Heavy Cork and college funding flavour to the campaign statements. **Abbas Ali O’Shea:** Compelling personal story (arrived in Ireland as a refugee from Iraq 14 years ago, has been an Irish citizen since 2016, runs a business promoting Irish 3rd level to Gulf students). The only person of colour running for the NUI panel, looks to represent the minority experience, and 3rd level concerns. **Michael Finn:** Former Lord Mayor of Cork. Signature issue: Cork things. **Marcus Matthews:** OK. So, look, I think it’s best if you [go here and look](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ABTzYCStg9RkM1GK%5FCsG-RfLByl%5F2IX1/view?ref=thegist.ie) at this 20 page manifesto and let its existence inform your opinion. Does ISP things for a living. **Peter Finnegan:** I’m a bit stumped here. Is in favour of a shopping list of everything and anything you might want. Advocates for working within the system. **Garbhán Downey:** He’s got a signature issue- A university for Derry. If that’s your issue, he’s your candidate. **Michael McDowell:** Former Minister for Justice, Former Attorney General, Former leader of the Progressive Democrats. Michael McDowell led the efforts to block Shane Ross’ pet project changing how judges are appointed. That was a good effort, because it was a super dumb Bill. But, if you ever see any of those petitions to [stop Irish children being deported](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/brazilian-father-to-be-deported-days-after-daughter-s-birthday-1.4182514?ref=thegist.ie), they happen because of the change in the constitution he promoted. **Ronan Mullen:** Just the worst. Historically, he has a poll-topping bloc of first preference votes and is very transfer unfriendly after that. ### Not leafleted **Brendan Mary Price:** Enthusiastic electoral candidate, bushel-obscured light as yet recognised. Seal Sanctuary. [Warns that this](http://www.nui.ie/elections/seanadelection2020/Profiles/Price%5FBrendan%5FMary.asp?ref=thegist.ie), his sixth candidacy is his “Last, LAST, offer to you”. Signature issue: Cliamate change. **Jennifer Butler:** Folklore academic, [seems a decent sort](http://votejennyb.ie/?ref=thegist.ie). Signature policy… maybe, Education and generally being sound? Seems worth a preference, if you ask me. **Eoin Delahunty:** “I will not be posting out a Litir Um Thoghchán as [I believe it is a waste of paper and money](https://medium.com/@eoindelahunty/why-im-running-for-seanad-%C3%A9ireann-60f4492f20ab?ref=thegist.ie)”. A test case in the power of Medium posts to introduce yourself to the Irish electorate. Signature policies: Climate, self regard. **Karen Devine:** Self described left wing feminist academic candidate who spoke at [“Irexit Freedom to Prosper”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPrQZxjAPj8&ref=thegist.ie), and declined to answer questions about whether she supported Ireland following Brexit out of the EU on Twitter. **Eva Dowling:** Official Green Party candidate. Is, [in some way I haven’t been able to specify yet](https://evaelizabethdowling.com/?ref=thegist.ie), science. **Anne Staunton Barrett:** Castlebar Chamber of Commerce notable and gift shop retailer. “[I will campaign for the removal of the anonymity of the internet,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THJm2bUB7Rg&ref=thegist.ie)” **Please do vote.** This is an election where almost anyone can find a candidate they’d be happy to support, even if, like Ronan Mullen, they are the worst. The franchise is painfully restricted. If you’re lucky enough to have a vote, please use it to do some good. And please give Alice Mary Higgins your Number One, if you’d be good enough, thanks. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/2329558f-1650-45c1-9683-4dbee8412135_1702x4025.jpeg) ### The Gist: We reach the Michael D fantasy stage URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-we-reach-the-michael-d-fantasy/ Last updated: 2020-03-06T00:54:54.000Z Against a background of a doubling of confirmed Coronavirus cases (6 to 13) in one day, and a nation swearing off skiing holidays in Northern Italy for all time, the political system is settling into gridlocked trenches. ### Michael D isn’t a non-player character In gaming, a non-player character is typically encountered when the game just needs something to move the plot on. A trader to sell things, or a crime boss to give out a job to the player. They work to a script, they are predictable and they are just there to help the real people in the game- the players- to do what they want to do. Today [we discovered](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/fianna-f%C3%A1il-s-tough-stance-on-coalition-talks-belies-its-weak-position-1.4193149?ref=thegist.ie) that ‘at the highest levels in Fine Gael’ people who see themselves as players have started to think that the President of Ireland is a NPC in their political game. Their wheeze? Hold out for more from FF than its ready to offer yet, then pantomime going over the waterfall by looking to dissolve the Dáil but then- aha!- our NPC President will refuse to grant the request, forcing the deal to be done. As the Irish Times correctly points out, this is High Fantasy to leave Tolkien in the dust. Fine Gael presuming that Michael D Higgins will act to help Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil by blocking the public from voting… look, help me out here, my eyes are watering trying to hold this idea in my head. ### Panic in the Party Meanwhile, in Fianna Fáil the metallic taste of panic in the mouth is keeping their TDs rather more grounded. The day started with the [party leader explicitly saying](https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0305/1120318-dail-second-meeting/?ref=thegist.ie) on RTE radio that he wanted FG to help him form a government (and therefore admitting the weakness of his position, having already eliminated even the threat of any alternative talks). It ended with Martin reacting angrily to criticism from his own TDs for the position he’d boxed them into. Micháel Martin’s ‘reacting angrily to criticism’ is starting to sound like the leitmotif of his political career. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d0733462-c91e-4ec0-8633-22a35849deb4_720x583.png) ### The Gist: Royal Special Edition URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-royal-special-edition/ Last updated: 2020-03-05T02:16:37.000Z Sparing us all more talk about the slow-motion unfolding of the Coronavirus situation, let’s a have a bit of a chat about the Windsors. ### Brexit and the Damage done Prince William and Kate Middleton (as was) continued their haunt around bits of Ireland. It’s all Vision, no Sound in these kinds of trips. The appearance of the royals popping in for a pint, or taking a hike up Howth or scratching Bród’s ears in the Áras. The look of the thing is what matters, not whether they say anything beyond safe platitudes. These visits are deployed as joint strategic interventions by the UK and our Dept of Foreign Affairs. Basically, after years of Brexit-yodelling reaching our unwelcome ears, the people of Ireland have found their patience with the English a bit… tested. The UK knows it, at least in some desperate, still-functioning Foreign Office room, barricaded with desks against the door in case a Minister tries to visit So, with another round of critical talks looming, where Ireland will again wield disproportionate power over the shape of the outcome, the UK are trying something new. Following years where starvation of the Irish people has been openly discussed as public policy, they’ve decided that perhaps some goodwill wouldn’t go amiss. Ireland- from England- seems sexy and young so we’ve been sent the A-List Young Royals. (The bit that didn’t quit and move to Canada). Meanwhile Michael D makes a speech about the warmth between the two countries and the Taoiseach does similar. Ireland, despite everything (oh, so much everything) is still economically and socially entwined with the UK. The UK’s elected gov, of course, seeks to make up in stupidity what it lacks in charm. It’s hard to tell what long term consequence there might be from this trip after the next genius outburst from a Minister. But, after the threats to Ireland of the last round failed so dramatically, they will expect the Windsor’s to play their part.dows They won’t, but the Irish Gov will release papers as part of the new low-information approamemt. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/ef8be59a-3fdf-496c-abf0-4f1e47cea99d_1125x650.jpeg) ### The Gist: Ill behaviour, Leo left on read URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ill-behaviour-leo-left-on/ Last updated: 2020-03-04T02:00:11.000Z There’s a bunch of problems arising out of our Coronavirus issue. Mostly, that I have to spend hours in rooms full of barristers- famous for their fondness for ski trips to the Italian Alps. ### Technocracy With the political system effectively AWOL, it has fallen to the officials of the State to meet the challenge of minimising a pandemic. The Chief Medical Officer made some reassurance statements yesterday and today before the 2nd case was confirmed the Dept of Health arranged for some good info to be delivered through the low-Fi medium of whiteboard stickmen. Basically- you’ve got to be within 2 metres of a sick person for 15 minutes to be at high risk of infection. Most people who do get it, will get a mild dose. Washing hands 5-10 times a day is the best step to stop the spread. Stocks continued weakly (hand cream manufacturers presumably excepted) and the US Fed cut interest rates, just on general principles. ### Call me, Call me on my mobile FG are emerging from their tent, like Achilles stomping out after a massive sulk and blinking in the daylight. More meetings with FF that they are pretending aren’t about coalition. More intriguing is the fact that Leo Vardakar texted Mary Lou McDonald of SF looking to open a line of communication. She acknowledged she got it, but not that she’d replied. We can only imagine Leo’s feelings as his blue tick turned to Read, but reply came there none. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6161c994-3dea-4cc9-ac4c-ec5f5f68c9da_1112x946.jpeg) ### The Gist: Labour Leadership, Martin's past URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-labour-leadership-martins/ Last updated: 2020-03-03T01:14:56.000Z It was a day when a virus started to riddle the public domain, with bottles of hand sanitiser running out in pharmacies, to be replaced by ‘make your own’ kits of medical alcohol, aloe vera and eucolyptus oil. But elsewhere, there were still some political events. Here’s the gist. ### The Past is always with us, eh, Michéal? A Prime Time special on the State’s retraumatising and institutional abuse of victims of instititutional abuse, under cover of providing redress is both timely and timeless. Timely, because it was a reminder that self-described Change-bringer, Michéal Martin was Minister for Health when the plans were set in train (2002, change-lovers). This prompted the now FF leader to suddenly mull on the events of 18 years ago he’d supported in Cabinet and decide that, on reflection, they might have been a bit of a error, now he thought about it. And, as for indemnifying the religious orders and thereby creating a financial incentive for the state to undermine victims “in retrospect in my view, that was, that was, that was a mistake at the time”, But that wasn’t his view at the time, as the Minister for Health and Children, when he voted for a system generally acknowledged to produce atrocious treatment of vulnerable people, by design. Who says Michéal can’t do Change? ### Labour Leaders Alan Kelly wants to be leader of the Labour Party. Aodhan Ó Riordáin wants to be leader of the Labour Party. They both promise they will do everything they can, if elected, to ensure that somebody will have a chance to replace them. So they’re out saying strange things. Things like > We are not viewed right now as a competent agent of change, a party ready to solve society’s problems and not culturally relevant. (Kelly) > > I want people to look at the Labour Party and say: ‘They are on my side’ (Ó Riordáin) > > We haven’t been relevant to the national conversation, we haven’t connected with people outside of our own circle (Kelly) > > If people feel we have let them down, then we have. (Ó Riordáin) > > Let’s make Labour sexy again (Kelly, disturbingly) All of which suggests that the years of drift by Labour have not been because the members (at whom all this straight talk is aimed) didn’t understand the party’s problems, but because of the reluctance of now-departed elder Lemon TDs to accept they, personally, ever made any mistakes. Some sort of theme there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d8f0ef03-61d1-46ab-80ac-a3293a1524bf_1520x1140.jpeg) ### The Gist: Poll positions, and FF’s peril URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-poll-positions-and-ffs-peril/ Last updated: 2023-11-26T11:57:18.000Z The Amarach poll last week could have been dismissed as an outlier. But this weekend brings confirmation from the long-standing B&A poll. SF support has soared since the election- up 10% to 35%. The headline figures for the three largest parties are - Sinn Féin 35% (+10) - Fianna Fáil 20% (-2) - Fine Gael 18% (-3) ### An existential crisis for FF The last election was a disaster for Michéal Martin, despite his party shading it to take the most seats. The next one will be much much worse. All his choices will make it worse. FF+FG is two fingers to the electorate (see, SF +10). They’ll be as kind to FF as they were to the Greens who put Fianna Fáil back into power. FF+SF might have saved FF, but not Martin. And, as I have tried to explain, the one thing which Martin *must* do is become Taoiseach. He will make any choice that leads there- and avoid any choice that doesn’t guarantee him that top job. The B&A poll shows the consequences of that invisible decision engine driving Martin’s choices. A FF/FG coalition made him the clear leader of the largest party as well as the one less tainted by the outgoing government’s choices. So the Taoiseach job is assured. All the same reasoning would have pointed to him having to accept a Mary Lou McDonald Taoiseach if he had countenanced a SF/FF deal. This would be the end of post 1933 Fianna Fáil (though arguably, Fianna Fáil as it was for most of the lifetime of the state, a hegemonic patronage machine, was ended by the Cowen govt). Weirdly, despite coming third in the election, and this poll, FG are in a less dangerous position. FG are a niche party. Their base is 16-21% of the vote. They won’t fall below that because there are class and social reasons to prop up that floor. They can’t command a majority, but they won’t melt away. In contrast, Fianna Fáil once described itself as a National Movement, not a political party. The problem is, when you’re not a National movement any more and you never consolidated a political party base, what are you? What, in class or social terms, are FF? The lack of a clear, distinct answer to that question means FF support lacks a floor to its fall. And, while FF allow it to avoid the compromises of government, Sinn Féin can continue to be the repository of the electorates hopes and dreams of something better. The question is not whether Michéal Martin will be the next Taoiseach (he will) but whether, by making that choice, he will be also be the last Fianna Fáil Taoiseach. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4aba678d-1dc1-47b0-ba1e-d08d0a1138da_1074x1298.jpeg) ### The Gist: Incubation period and Baby Names URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-incubation-period-and-baby/ Last updated: 2020-02-29T00:16:30.000Z The Coronavirus situation is waiting to snap into focus, but is already looming large internationally. Meanwhile the annual stats of Baby names from the CSO are released. ### US Markets Go Viral Prompted perhaps by moral homunculus President Trump’s repeated assertions that the Coronavirus was no big deal, the US stock market took its third biggest one week dive since 1933\. Given the President stands at the opposite end of US history from George Washington, it seems appropriate that the markets would presume an inversion of the first president’s famous announcement “I cannot tell a lie.” The World Health Organisation upped the risk level posed by the virus to the top of its scale. Any outbreak in the US will likely be exacerbated by the firing of the US Gov’s pandemic preparedness team, by the lack of healthcare for people working in face-to-face service industries and by the fact that the population’s awareness of the infection is such that they’ve responded by forcing an 8% drop in the value of Corona Beer’s brewer. We’re still in the incubation period for the virus in the EU and US. But it isn’t looking like this one’s going to just be a flash fever. ### Baby Name Stats Every year, the Central statistics office in Ireland releases a list of the top twenty names for boys and girls born the previous year. I have no idea if this is done everywhere else but, by God, we love it. Everyone has an opinion on the leaders and laggers, mourns the absence of their favourite candidate and, of course, comments on the continued purgatory Mary has been exiled to. Hail Mary, fallen from grace. There are stacks of things to say about the list- about what it says about class, about the perceived social value in particular names, in the number of names with a fada. And the great thing is, everyone can weave their own story from the list. Of course I have it for you. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/5fdc722e-79c4-4bda-8289-1d8a74b9a844_744x778.png) ### The Gist: Love in a warming climate URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-love-in-a-warming-climate/ Last updated: 2020-02-28T02:01:41.000Z Everyone loves you until they don’t. That’s what the Green Party have been feeling today, as the attention from other parties suddenly wavered, and left them as second best. Meanwhile everyone’s attention is focussed on the coronavirus story, as Ireland’s first case lands in Dublin Airport, and then makes their way up to Belfast. ### A bit Green The Green party has been around for a long time now. And yet, and yet, it’s focus on questions of urgent, critical ecological issues has always resulted in a bit of an earnest air. So, Eamonn Ryan’s plan to establish a multi-stranded talks process, involving- to start- a seven hour meeting with Sinn Féin may not have been the best start. Basically, people can get really tired of that kind of thing, really fast. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are still circling each other, with FG playing the part of a child who would prefer to take its ball back home anyway. FF may not have the bandwidth for seven hour multi-strand meetings with a third-wheel party at the same time. And Mary Lou McDonald, at one of her public meetings (which are still being very well attended) took up a comment describing the Greens as Fine Gael on bicycles. > [](https://twitter.com/younggreens/status/1232789150321070081?ref=thegist.ie) (What did she mean? Shh, [nobody mention class](https://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/columnists/victoria-white/state-is-responsible-for-us-having-fee-paying-schools-its-their-plan-211234.html?ref=thegist.ie). Nobody ever refers to the obvious references to class in public discourse and it’s always been a bit mysterious.) Basically, the Greens are a nice-to-have for a FF/FG coalition, but can be replaced by FF/FG indos. They’re a must-have for Sinn Féin, who might want to play along with the strands a bit less transparently if they actually mean to get any agreement. ### M-m-m-my Corona It’s not good, but it’s not a surprise either. Ireland joins the list of countries with the Coronavirus confirmed. The patient is in Northern Ireland, having flown in from Italy through Dublin Airport. Hopefully they’ll be OK. Unfortunately its probably too late to say the same about the Irish public, which has spent the last few days circulating fever dreams on WhatsApp and explaining their plans to Joe Duffy to fight off a virus with an axe. Meanwhile, we’ve learned that Italy has Europe’s lowest rate of washing hands after going to the loo, at 57% and we have all been giving it the side eye. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4c95b858-3725-4769-9bc1-c1beaf41d850_1200x1200.jpeg) chart cc by Niall McCarthy ### The Gist: Conventional Wizards URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-conventional-wizards/ Last updated: 2020-02-27T01:59:29.000Z “Well, its been quite a few weeks now since the election and really the important part of politics, the doing deals, the meetings in secret, the briefing of trusted press outlets are all well underway. This is where the real action happens, where important people do things which can always be explained as rational and clever, after the fact. ### Symposium of respectability The two big parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in the driving seat throughout the history of the state and will want to show that they can carry on in the driving seat for the next 100 years. Some people find that comforting- that’s one of the reasons they got nearly 73 seats at the last election between them. Other people would like to see someone else go into government. It’s not for a journalist to say what might happen in the future, but just to report what’s already gone on in the past. Though, that said, there will be something it’s safe to report happening in the near future. The two parties will be having a symposium, a sort of policy exchange as its been described to me by some very knowledgable sources, where they will tell each other things. No deal is done, not by any means yet, but it is certainly a thing that might happen in the future that may, or may not, lead to a deal being done. No polls have come out this week since the one showing the two big parties on 17 and 18 percent respectively. That’s going to be a critical thing to watch out for in the next few weeks, as depending on the polls is a key part of modern politics and reporting. It’s vital to have hard facts to work from. Opinions, if you express them, can be wrong later, while reading poll numbers from a sheet is always an unchallengeable position. ### Votes Quandary There was a Fine Gael meeting where strong opinions were expressed- some TDs going so far as to say what would be best would be if there was another election and Sinn Féin won even more seats so they could go into government, just to show how bad they’d be. This isn’t a universally held opinion in FG, not even, perhaps, a common one. But you do hear it voiced often enough to make it certainly one strand of anonymously quoted opinion. The problem with this plan, in the minds of *some people,* and I stress I don’t have any particular point of view on this, in the minds of those people might be the thought that another election could let loose uncontrolled elements into the political system. Specifically, voters. ### The problem of democracy Voters in the last election proved to be very unpredictable and to want things completely at odds with the issues most to the fore in political circles- Brexit, tax cuts and social order. Instead they were quite insistent that they wanted something- and right now, it’s hard to know just what that something was- done about housing and health. That’s what the exit polls tell us, so we know it’s safe to say. It’s clear at this stage that one of the most unstable parts of the Irish political system is the election process. It's thrown up an almost impossible collection of parties, some more conventional than others. It is possible that, unlike the professional political class, the electorate simply isn’t qualified to make these decisions for itself. Certainly, we can’t know that for sure yet, but time will tell.” photo: David Catchpole ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/688d5c08-515f-45f3-a37a-6fed22be8eb6_1127x391.jpeg) ### The Gist: Events, dear boy URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-events-dear-boy/ Last updated: 2020-02-26T00:20:27.000Z Talks. A seven hour meeting between the Greens and SF. Early exploratory meetings between Michéal Martin and Leo Varadkar. More meetings planned, after further careful delays and internal talks. Except it’s looking like time may be up sooner than was expected. ### Coronavirus Something significant is happening here. After practise runs on SARS, Swine Flu and Bird Flu (Remember them?) we look like we’re all about to see what an infectious disease looks like in an age of mass travel and urbanisation. One of the surprising reoccurring elements of this story has been important people acting as though they can’t catch an illness, by dint of only meeting other important people. So the Dept Minister of Health in Iran gets ill. While he was in the incubation period, [the Dutch Foreign Minister travelled to Iran](https://twitter.com/dannyctkemp/status/1232305804906237952?s=20&ref=thegist.ie) and met his Iranian counterpart, who had a driver who seems to have turned out to be infected also. > [](https://twitter.com/NaomiOhReally/status/1232311352108048384?ref=thegist.ie) They, in turn, will all go back and meet with their national governments over the next few days. Traditionally this opening credits montage is followed by Tom Cruise trying to save his family. Meanwhile, Ireland is waiting to see how things go. The Minister for Health has said the Ireland v Italy rugby match should be cancelled. The HSE, which is annually overwhelmed by ‘Winter’, has assured the public it is prepared. ### Brexit The EU yesterday gave the necessary instructions to [M. Barnier to start negotiations with the UK](https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/25/brussels-and-london-flex-muscles-as-eu-prepares-to-finalise-post-brexit-trade-stance?ref=thegist.ie). He says he’s ready to start on Monday. On past experience, the UK will arrive to the first meeting wearing a sock on one hand and will have forgotten their notes on the train. In a sort of greatest hits move, David Davis MP has announced the deal will be excellent for the UK because of the wishes of German car manufacturers. But Ireland is back in the middle of the negotiation, as the strangely absent PM promotes the idea that the previous agreement on checks in the Irish Sea might still be up for reversal or revision. The gradual uptick of external pressure may see a FF/FG government (+FG-like indos) snap into place faster than they might have liked. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/08d0be3a-7fbc-46e3-b02e-b0d8ac970fb1_800x800.jpeg) photo: N.Lange.de ### The Gist: Lovesongs and Negotiations URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-lovesongs-and-negotiations/ Last updated: 2020-02-25T00:55:22.000Z There are public meetings and private meetings and both have been happening today. The first of Sinn Féin’s public rallies/meetings and the FF/FG talks quietly continued in private. ### Nuremburg by the Lee? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/71ca1d5d-dc55-44e8-83fb-7008692e55a3_1184x468.png) There are plenty of things to remember about SF’s past and plenty of things to highlight from the present too (climate policy is not at the races, certain successful candidates may be woodentops). But having the Taoiseach warning that parties holding public meetings is equal to [“intimidation and bullying”](https://twitter.com/harrymcgee/status/1231884678946283529?s=20&ref=thegist.ie) is risible. There’s surely a price to be paid for this sort of hand flapping over Sinn Féin by the civil war parties. The party received its largest ever vote based on 1. An overwhelming wish to change the government from the FG and FF led one 2. A series of policies about the things people cared most about, most of all housing. The civil war parties refusing to engage on either ground leaves voters with only the choice of acknowledging they should not have cared about the things they did or intensifying their ardour. ### What’s in the box? So why do these self-evidently counter productive things? Well, FF and FG have a problem, which Michéal Martin knows about. Most of the population didn’t want either of them in government. And, given rumbles from his own TDs, it’s possible that most of his own party don’t want to see FG back in government by FF’s hand either. The flapping (see above) this week has been to try to frame a world (for their own supporters) where they have to go into government with each other to keep the Terror of the Shinners out. Basically, it’s a bad bit of comms, but all the others are worse. Because, by making the price of a SF/FF government his own head, FF’s leader (who, lest we forget *must* get into government) has nowhere else to go but Leo Varadkar. Fianna Fáil won the most seats in the election. So far, it’s left them with only bad choices. ### The Weekend Gist: News from Elsewhere URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-weekend-gist-news-from-elsewhere/ Last updated: 2020-02-23T22:21:22.000Z As the behind the scenes overthinking continues, a bit of a break from the norm. A quick Gist on news from elsewhere. ### The UK: Government by walking away Storms caused floods throughout the soggy bits of England. Succesive Tory govt planning regimes allowing[ building on floodplains](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/19/one-in-ten-new-homes-in-england-built-on-land-with-high-flood-risk?ref=thegist.ie) mean there are more of those with people living in them than there used to be. The UK PM is on his jolly holliers and has left his weird advisor man Dominic Cummings minding the shop. *He’s* hired and then, um, accepted the resignation of a fellow advocating eugenics and then announced a plan to destroy the BBC’s funding system. This weekend’s papers have been gifted stories that the UK Gov won’t abide by its EU legal obligations on Northern Ireland. The Home Office announced new blue passports from next year, with a significant social media spend. We should consider the details of the various stories to be noise, with the signal to be derived from them simply that the UK gov intends to do profoundly serious things in a profoundly unserious manner. ### US: Bernie up, Trump purges After gyrations following his positive showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the media finally swallowed the bitter pill of his heavy Nevada win, and started reporting that Bernie Sanders is the frontrunner to be Democratic candidate for president. There’s about a fortnight more during which that could change, depending on the outcome of a vote in South Carolina (determative of Biden’s bid, in effect) and Super Tuesday (California, Texas etc). Meanwhile, having escaped his impeachment, Trump is purging his administration. Given his previous difficulties of filling and retaining talent, this result in a leafblower being given a cabinet position. ### China: Epidemic problems One of the problems of authoritarian government is that you don’t get a lot of incentives for sending bad news up the chain of command. In a crisis, this is a big problem, as bad information makes for bad decisions. So the official statement by the Chinese President that the current outbreak poses the [most significant health crisis since the creation of the modern Chinese state](https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2020/0223/1117135-coronavirus-world/?ref=thegist.ie) may be an honest reflection on the resiliance of an authoritarian system in the face of a problem that can’t be dealt with solely through tools of political and social control. ### The shared problem of reality As all of the above have seen in recent years, facts *can* be denied but the consequences of those denials tend to be irrepressible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b835dd96-f5cd-4c99-9f82-7a35e9acee6c_4032x3024.jpeg) ### The Gist: A bonfire of vanities URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-a-bonfire-of-vanities/ Last updated: 2020-02-23T01:02:45.000Z Its been two weeks since the election. I was away for the last week. Now I’m back, it’s probably time for a bit of a round up. And, it turns out, some strange things have happened. ## Three go in, None come out After nearly two weeks of shadow boxing, the time finally arrived for the first votes for Taoiseach. Briefly, the results were 1. Mary Lou McDonald, SF: 45 2. Micheál Martin, FF: 41 3. Leo Varadkar, FG: 36 4. Eamon Ryan, Green: 12 Then we got to see the party leaders reflect on these, entirely inconclusive but nonetheless significant numbers. (You need 80+ to get elected to the job). Leo Varadkar adopted the party line, which remains ‘Ye’ll see we’re right, and until ye do, ye can stew in it’. This could be described as a novel way of winning public support if it hasn’t been FG’s baseline position for about 90ish years. Micheál Martin made a speech built like a patchwork quilt, if each patch was a separate piece of whataboutery roughly stitched to the next, explaining why the party which had received the most votes was anathema to democracy. The question of what impact on Fianna Fáil’s future that Micheál Martin’s strangely prickly personality will have deserves more attention. And Mary Lou McDonald made a speech which pretty much knocked it out of the park. (Bear in mind, I say this as a person from a quite different political point of view). Hovering behind it all [was an Amarach poll](https://extra.ie/2020/02/19/news/politics/sinn-fein-second-election?ref=thegist.ie) (not the gold standard in political polling, it should be remembered) showing SF’s support since the election had risen to 35% while the two civil war parties were at 17% and 18%, with FF in third place. Unless further polling contradicts, we can expect that to be the end of all talk from FF about another election. **Meanwhile:** Social Democrats said they wouldn’t play 3rd wheel to enable a FF/FG gov. This shouldn’t have been too tricky to decide, much as it is straightforward to avoid ordering the Eddie Rockets Arsenic Burger, no matter how big the picture on the menu. The Green party leadership continue to hum and hah about the idea of playing this sacrificial role. Presumably this will continue until they ask their membership (per their constitution) or the civil war parties rope up enough independents to end the conversation. Labour continue their internal exile of leaderlessness and decline to play with the other parties while armpit deep in quicksand, and who could blame them? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/126a919d-d73e-4c5c-a242-dc1572e50f7a_385x582.jpeg) ### The Gist: Party political shorts URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-party-political-shorts/ Last updated: 2020-02-16T01:11:32.000Z It’s seven days since the election and we’re drifting through the weekend. Little enough has been settled this week and of the positions that have been adopted, it’s hard to know how many of them will remain unaltered after TDs start showing their hands at the first vote for Taoiseach next Thursday. ## Maybe a very gisty roundup. **FF** Won the most seats, may lose most from the result. **FG** Lost the election, but knows it was right and the voters will soon see. Oh, they’ll see. **Labour** Lost seats, lost leader, currently just lost. **Greens** Everyone’s favourite party to make up the numbers. Leaders may face restive members. **Social Democrats** A party that’s become more than the sum of its parts. Plays well with others. **SP-PBP** Look, I’m not a Kremlinologist, but it was a good outing for them, as the second most popular choice for SF voters. **Sinn Féin** Won most votes, won stacks of seats but now has to win over other parties. It’s proving hard. Next: Looking like FF/FG but nothing’s finished yet. Surprising how much of a part Micheál Martin’s rather prickly personality is playing in discussions. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b0d1524f-ea0e-4d1c-b4b5-f59eba861cae_2048x741.jpeg) Photo: cc by Red Mum ### The Gist: The Next Election URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the-next-election/ Last updated: 2020-02-15T01:46:54.000Z It’s day five since the election and we’re so over that. Because a whole new set of campaigns started up today, as nominations closed for the Seanad elections. Before we do a panel roundup, a quick explanation of how the Seanad works. ## It makes no sense. Various numbers of seats in the Seanad are assigned to various panels. People are elected or appointed to these panels by constituencies intended to represent the interests these panels are hoped to give a voice to. This was a fashionable political idea in the 1930s, called corporatism, which became unfashionable shortly after the 1930s due to it being promoted by OG Facist, Benito Mussolini. But, we still have it now. For more on this eccentric method of having a legislature, see the [Citizen’s Information explanation](https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/government%5Fin%5Fireland/elections%5Fand%5Freferenda/national%5Felections/seanad%5Fpanel%5Felections.html?ref=thegist.ie). Basically, the parties can elect their own candidates to the Seanad according to their strengths in the preceeding Dáil and county council elections. What matters to us here at The Gist is that this suggests the Green party could place 4 candidates in the Senate. The Saoirse McHugh for Senate campaign starts here. ## NUI Panel This is the panel with the largest potential electorate, and can fill three seats. It currently has Ronan Mullen, Michael McDowell and Alice-Mary Higgins. This effectively represents the entire spectrum of human value. Anyone in the entire world who graduated from any NUI college in the country can vote by postal vote- from abroad, if necessary. If you’ve any sense you’d give your Number 1 to Alice-Mary Higgins who has been Stakhanovite in her work drafting, amending, improving and critiquing legislation. Then, as all the cool kids say, whether you’re trying Vote Left and Transfer Left as far down the ballot that you can get. Take a look at Rory Hearn, host of the Reboot Republic podcast there too. And former PBP TD Ruth Comppinger will have plenty of name recognition. Just… one more thing. Historically, NUI Seanad panel is particularly attractive to people who turn out to be a spoon short of a full drawer. It’s worth a 15 minute google of candidates you don’t know. ## TCD Panel While the NUI panel was created to ensure there was always a representation for college educated representatives in the Seanad, the TCD panel was intended to make sure we’d have Protestants too. Three of them, anyway. Lynn Ruane, protestant or not, is holding one of these seats admirably. Ivana Bacik sits beside her and Senator-For-As-Long as he feels it David Norris. Take a look at Tom Clonan too on this panel for a good preference. Here’s a good roundup on that election: [Trinity’s University Times has the full list.](https://www.universitytimes.ie/2020/02/10-candidates-to-run-for-trinity-seanad-panel/?ref=thegist.ie) We’ll come back to these two mini elections later in the week. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/5fbedf07-3a96-494d-9300-a08800898f4e_1837x875.jpeg) Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about it. *Thanks!* ### The Gist: Mutually Assured Destruction URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-mutually-assured-destruction/ Last updated: 2020-02-14T00:44:14.000Z It’s five days since the election and something has gone very wrong. These were going to be a few days where everyone took it easy, showed off their shiny new TDs and made gnomic comments about talking to everyone. Instead, some imp of the perverse has provoked them to start a multi-party high stakes game of Chicken. Nobody needed it, but that’s what we’ve got. ## To Be Or Not To Be Fianna Fáil suddenly face an existential crisis. This is a sentence that should never make any sense. They came out of the election with the most seats, they’re the pivot party between SF and FG, and are most likely to see their leader as Taoiseach. What’s not to like? Apparently, the answer is ‘Continued Existence’. Because that’s what FF TD’s decided to work towards shedding at their meeting of newly-elected members. They have set their hearts on putting Fine Gael back into office in a Grand Coalition of the two parties formerly known as ‘big’. Fianna Fáil are a patronage machine. They must get back into government if they are to deliver the patronage that their supporters expect. They’ve already been out of power longer than any time since Dev took the Oath of Allegiance in 1932\. Micheál Martin must become Taoiseach. Lots of FF TDs see Sinn Féin as a threat to their remaining voting base. But in response they are leaping into their Studebakers, combing their pompadours with their flick-combs and roaring straight towards the oncoming lights of letting Sinn Féin lead the opposition to a government the electorate has just comprehensively rejected. Fine Gael will bite their hand off for it. That’s already clear. Both are presuming the Greens will join if asked. This is, um, a problematic presumption, particularly as Section 5.8.4 of the Green Party Constitution requires any deal done by Green TDs to be ratified by the Green party members. ## Anything to be said for another election? No, there is not. The public would be both exhausted and enraged by it. The Sinn Féin surge might rise further- but it also might ebb away as dramatically as it emerged. Fianna Fáil would likely be the loser of those last seats that put it ahead. Fine Gael may already be on their floor, but there’s not much upside to showing their violently rejected and unrepentant faces again. And all the small parties are at risk of seeing their fresh new seats being hoovered up by new second and third SF candidates. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/1520e9eb-8ff8-4998-97a3-5efc467bd230_938x642.jpeg) Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about it. *Thanks!* ### Count Gist URL: https://www.thegist.ie/count-gist/ Last updated: 2020-02-13T01:43:25.000Z It’s Four Days since the election and it already seems like an eternity ago. Taoiseach-fever is burning through the body politic, as all the parties are throwing shapes and waffling hapes before tomorrow’s first set of votes for the big job. But a few things happened today, so let’s get to ‘em. **Howlin Bows Out** Labour leader called a press conference and, surrounded by TDs and Senators, announced he was stepping down. It’s hard to imagine the world where Brendan Howlin was the quick young man of the Labour Party, but that world did exist. His leadership wasn’t the catastrophe of some of his immediate predecessors. He seemed to be aware of the problem of having the parliamentary party with the highest average age in the Dáil. But the problem was that, by the time he inherited the ruins of the party, he was too fond of precedent, decorum and process to drive radical change in his own party. He resigned, striking a note of pride in the long and very honourable history of the Labour Party (it has one, as the oldest party in the state). A great pity it hasn’t been willing to break more from that past’s weight under his leadership. Ged Nash and Aodhan O’Riordan may expect to shuffle forward as the week progresses, if they can get up after being trampled by a rampaging Alan Kelly. **FG Fits** FG having accepted their failure wholeheartedly, they flew straight through acceptance to try to get right around to denial again. Never has being electorally juiced, in the face of widespread calls of “Not Them!”, been so embraced as a lovely treat. Meanwhile, FF are filling the airwaves with anything but straight answers on their objections- darkly muttered- to getting back into power with SF. Thursday can’t come fast enough. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4c304ed0-8adf-4d20-b994-87b10f2bcd2d_798x600.jpeg) ### Count Gist: The sound of silence URL: https://www.thegist.ie/count-gist-the-sound-of-silence/ Last updated: 2020-02-12T00:00:00.000Z It's three days since the vote and everything has gone very quiet. In coffee shops all around Leinster House people are huddled in clumps, speaking in hushed tones, eyes darting at the door in case an enemy or journalist comes in. But, for the rest of us, everything has gone quiet. We'll see what the outcome of all these meeting are on Thursday, when the parties all turn up in the Dáil and reveal who they all want to vote for as Taoiseach. In the meantime, unlike a newspaper which has to fill its pages with news even when nothing happens, I don't intend to intrude on your time when there's nothing to say. So today, the very Gist of a Gist. **Clearing the decks** [The Examiner had a good spot,](https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/psc-data-protection-policy-updated-after-doherty-loses-seat-981078.html?ref=thegist.ie) noticing that the day that Regina Doherty lost her seat, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection whipped down their disingenuous Privacy Statement and replaced it with one that admitted the Department was processing citizens' biometric data. As the Minister had spent years issuing flat denials of that plain fact, it looked a lot like the Sec-Gen moving to prepare for the next Minister to not have to burn public money defending the indefensible. > You can see that strange exchange here: [pic.twitter.com/rhPtRlxc4O](https://t.co/rhPtRlxc4O?ref=thegist.ie) > > — Simon McGarr (@Tupp\_Ed) [May 3, 2018](https://twitter.com/Tupp%5FEd/status/992115922109370368?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) ### Count Gist: And in the End, the transfers you give.... URL: https://www.thegist.ie/count-gist-and-in-the-end-the-transfers/ Last updated: 2020-02-11T00:00:00.000Z It's Day 2 of the Count and we are into the realm of hilarity as the losing parties- who have never both lost the same election- struggle to come to terms with what's happened. The numbers have settled down and we know what the Dáil looks like. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/13c3efd6-7820-44c1-9709-b53ba1e4e1ae_640x640.png) The trick now is to work out what the Government might look like. **Fine Gael** are in their tent, sulking like mighty Achilles, if Achilles was a third-placed ancient Greek, who'd just been booed off the battlefield. Their position, as expressed to a number of journalists anonymously, can be summed up as 'Scum voters. Let's see your SF save you now.' **Fianna Fáil** is having a public internal breakdown at, effectively, losing again. One faction wants to do a deal with SF to get back into power but knows it would risk destroying the party. The other faction knows it would destroy the party and thinks it might do better in another election. Only one of these factions involves Micheál Martin becoming Taoiseach so, hint, that's the one that's going to win. **Sinn Féin** owns this town. One seat off FF's result, but with the largest vote, its main effort will be to demonstrating it can bring the change it was put in to deliver. Oh, and addressing eruptions of coverage for witnessed explosions of 'Up the Ra' out of candidates. There will be a few problems as it struggles to fill all the new PA jobs, everyone having basically been elected. One candidate went on holiday for two weeks *during the campaign* and still came back to electoral success. It may well be that some of those taking their seats are piles of inanimate objects in trenchcoats, but for the time being, as long as they can roll through the voting lobby for a Mary Lou Taoiseach they'll be left alone. Expect eejitry over the next few weeks as they encounter microphones for the first time. **Oh, the numbers**. The numbers. They dance like sugar plum fairies in everyone's mind, digits constantly pairing and dividing, always trying to reach the magic majority of 81. With FG sulking in its tent, SF have decided to take the lead. Phoning around all the parties of the left to have a chat. Leaving messages for Brendan Howlin. But the numbers mean even the broadest left coalition would need to govern as a minority Government supported by one of the other big parties. And the reality is FF must get back into power, while FG must get SF out of power. So, nope. Next, FF+SF+AnyLeft party. This works on the numbers. Hell, chuck in an extra left party for the fun of it. This would be the long-held dream of Labour party members past, the Left Led coalition. They just always imagined they'd be leading it. With FF a minority in that lineup, there's no reason to think it has any automatic claim on the Taoiseach's job. Except FF would sooner eat a bowl of rat's anus' rather than see that happen. But, like Dick Spring before them, SF may extract a high price to leave the bauble of leadership with Micheál. **Also:** Danny Healy-Rae issued an apology for any offence it might have taken to his statement the previous day that The Planet can go to Hell. You know you've had a good count day when you wake up the next morning and have to issue an apology to The Planet. ![Go on then, scuzzball electorate, get out.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/a7975e42-3384-43fd-a1d7-b011096ca5cc_639x548.png "Go on then, scuzzball electorate, get out.") ### Count Gist: Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life, At last I've found thee! URL: https://www.thegist.ie/count-gist-oh-sweet-mystery-of-life/ Last updated: 2020-02-10T00:00:00.000Z It's Day 1 of the count. The boxes are open. True things were said yesterday, and today we got to literally enumerate them. I love a count, me. ![Bundles of Votes](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d3d3b19e-f176-498b-927e-8469c12f916c_450x205.jpeg "Bundles of Votes") There are thousands of stories across the country in a count. But here isn't the place for all those. Instead, here's the Gist; **Sinn Féin's day comes** Sinn Féin are at the head of the big table now, getting more votes than any party. But they've pulled up to it in a short chair of their own design, thanks to a conservative candidate strategy. As SF candidates swept in across the day on first counts, with entire spare quotas being distributed, we got to find out how real the slogan of vote left, transfer left was. And, as it turned out, it pretty much stuck. For example, Mary Lou McDonald's constituency voters may yet be instrumental in delivering both ancient local Christy Burke and flash young Gary Gannon in her wake. **FG in their rut** After a campaign so bad its awfulness became an actual campaign talking point, Fine Gael limped home in third place on first preferences. UCD's number crunchers are projecting they will end up with effectively the same number of seats as SF, or a bit less. Their seat strategy was the mirror of SF's mistake, running multiple candidates, expecting to emerge the overwhelming winners. Instead, Ministers have flamed out completely while others scraped home in late counts. They've ruled out coalition with SF, giving them only two futures- opposition or a formal coalition with FF. Their reaction of flat denial of the reality of what had happened, as well as a refusal to accept they had done anything- at all- wrong doesn't look like a party ready to make peace with voters. Richard Burton, Eoghan Murphy and Damian English all echoed the same party view that the electorate just hadn't been smart enough to understand that FG was good for them. **FF, lost and found** Fianna Fáil are adrift and look to be rewarded for it. Having lost half its historical vote and becoming the large party least in tune with modern Ireland (its primary indicator of support is weekly mass-going), its leader is the most likely to end up as Taoiseach after this election. Having ruled out any deal with SF during the campaign, Micheal Martin was suddenly happy to think about talking to them as the numbers came in. And, as that's the only way to get to a majority, then that's what's going to happen. (In a bit. We need to spend weeks pretending first.) But long term, Fianna Fáil is a party being hollowed out. Taking power will keep the facade of functionality and recovery in place but only a massive culture change in the party will stop that rot. **Any Transfers left?** Sinn Féin hoovered up so much of the non-FF/FG first preference that it was only when their surpluses were being distributed that we got a sense of how the rest of the others did. Briefly the answer was: PBP/Solidarity did OK Social Democrats did actively well (including appearing to take the seat in Wicklow occupied by Stephen Donnelly, who left the party to join FF), Labour had a shocker (4%!) The Greens did pretty well, with some walloping successes (Dublin Central), though, as I suggested, their decision to run an anti-choice candidate in Dublin Bay North has likely cost them that seat. Oh, and fascists, racists and assorted head-bangers got nowhere. Tomorrow, the real drama happens. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/238435c6-8daa-40ee-b03a-613f7e76ec75_640x334.png) ### Count Gist: Poll postions, Adopt a constituency URL: https://www.thegist.ie/count-gist-poll-postions-adopt-a/ Last updated: 2020-02-09T00:00:00.000Z It's day 0 of the count. The country went out and voted on a Saturday, for the first time since 1918\. And, like 1918, Sinn Féin seem to have had a pretty good outing. So now we have to COUNT THE VOTES! And so, contrary to any common sense, I will be doing a Count Gist over the next few days as the boxes open. Let's start with the exit poll. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7acb464a-4f20-4fe0-bd9a-421af6a2ae82_640x360.jpeg) With a margin of error of plus or minus 1.3%, there is no meaningful difference between the top three parties in first preference share. But there is a meaningful difference in the amount of seats they can win. FF and FG fielded candidates with the hope to pick up two seats in most constituencies- three in some places. SF were pulling candidates off the ticket after their weak Local Election showing. They only have 42 candidates. Mary Lou McDonald isn't in the same game as the other two parties. Not in this election anyway. And the terror of the two old enemies, FF and FG of what might happen with a second election, where SF could actually field enough candidates to scoop the proportion of the pot that 22% would give will loom large. There are still only a few valves that lead out of this boiler room of electoral pressure. FF/SF, FG/SF, or, depending on how the magic of the count fell, SF/Everyone not FF&FG. But the only one that could be put in place in a matter of weeks is basically a return of the FF/FG coalition (however described). Anyway, tomorrow, here's what I'll be watching for: Has the two candidate strategy FG used split their vote, losing them both seats where they had enough votes to take one safely? Watch: **Dublin Central** and Paschal's terror, **Dublin Bay South** and Kate O'Connell/Eoghan Murphy and finally **Meath East** and Regina Doherty/Helen McEntee. Can the Greens get people elected outside Dublin? Watch: **Mayo**, **Clare, Galway West** and whether Saoirse McHugh's and the other candidates Eamon Ryan described as 'Wild Atlantic Women' can snatch traditional FG second seats from them. A less homogenous Green Party is one with a much higher ceiling on it's future growth. Repeal and its impact Watch: **Dublin Bay North**, with lots of No candidates in a hugely Yes voting constituency. Social Democrats and Labour They're within the margin of error of each other in the exit poll. One is both a new party and has a very young membership. The other is the oldest party in the state in both a personal and institutional sense. If Labour hasn't got new, fresh faces elected may it be the first Irish party to just retire? Watch: Rebecca Moynihan in **Dublin South Central** and Ciaran Aherne in **Dublin South West** for Labour and Cian O'Callaghan in **Dublin Bay North**, Gary Gannon in **Dublin Central** and Niall O'Tuathail, **Galway West** for the Social Democrats Finally: Where will the SF surplus go? They'll mostly get elected on the first count on these numbers. But they'll have hapes of spare votes. If their voters followed the urgings to Vote Left, the rest of the small parties could see dramatic improvements. But if they followed past experience, they are most likely to go to Fianna Fáil. That's the question that'll likely decide the shape of the next government. Watch: **Everywhere.** ### Campaign Gist: How were things with you? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-how-were-things-with/ Last updated: 2020-02-08T00:00:00.000Z Day 25 and last and I thought I'd ask people what their experience of the campaign was. I asked what did you think at the start, did anything happen to change your mind during it, what you’d hope for after the count and why? Here are some of the responses I got; > Saw only two or three canvassers in Galway city centre last weekend and only one called to door. I saw SF doing well from the start and the scale of obvious disaffection with the main parties is reassuring- shows we are proud not stupid electorate . Overall lacklustre campaign > > — Mary Frances Rogan (@DrMaryRogan) [February 7, 2020](https://twitter.com/DrMaryRogan/status/1225818740706742272?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) > DunLaogh 4 seat. One canvasser. Lots leaflets delivered by An Post. Identified my vote early on, changed one due to party's poor attitude to womens health. Result: probably FF coalition, hoping enough leftwing in coalition to put manners on them. Depressed > > — Mary Buckley (@marybuckley549) [February 7, 2020](https://twitter.com/marybuckley549/status/1225846430927028225?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) > From a distance - expected a Green wave & a lot of anger on housing & health, and that’s what happened. > Am surprised to find myself feeling sorry for a lot of (but not all) FF/FG people - I’m sure they mean well, but they’ve got everything so wrong for so long. In terms of … > > — Philip O'Connor (@philipoconnor) [February 7, 2020](https://twitter.com/philipoconnor/status/1225784427000799232?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) > … hope for the count, as many sensible, progressive voices as possible, but what we’ll get is the another FF/FG govt in some shape or form - hopefully the last we ever see of them. > > — Philip O'Connor (@philipoconnor) [February 7, 2020](https://twitter.com/philipoconnor/status/1225784586514391045?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) > One person has contacted me, on behalf of a candidate. Otherwise I haven't been canvassed. Not in person at all. I live in my parents house, I'm at home a lot. I mean, how am I supposed to see how well people lie to me if they don't talk to me? > > — UNAbomber (@blush\_01) [February 7, 2020](#) > 1) I had assumed it'd be a standard forced two horse race but Sinn Fein's showing in the polls surprised me. > 2) But not as much as the media's complete failure to shape the narrative as they've done in elections past though. > 3) And I know better than to hope for things. > > [— Wokeback Mountain (@MajorThrill) ](#)[February 7, 2020](https://twitter.com/MajorThrill/status/1225796044539256832?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) Please go out and vote for your preferred candidates in order of preference as far down as you feel you can go, and thank you to all 268 of you. I have really loved doing this newsletter and I hope you enjoyed reading them. *Oh, and finally, Campaign Gist should really end now, its work complete. Instead, we'll bring you Count Gist for a little while longer.* ### Campaign Gist: A forest of talk URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-a-forest-of-talk/ Last updated: 2020-02-07T00:00:00.000Z Day 24 of the Campaign. Journalists and candidates alike are ashen-faced on the TV. Newsletter writers are mourning all the lost sleep of a daily email commitment. But somewhere else, under the rock and soil, the political landscape is rearranging. **A forest of talk** The time is running out. The sand grains are draining. And every candidate has, gnawing at their soul, the fear that if only they had had one more chance to explain it would have made all the difference. So we have leader debates, deputy leader debates, small party leader debates and so on. And, you know, it's a lot. I mean, I'm writing a newsletter about the election campaign and even I am getting exhausted by it all. But, behind all the talk, voters are slowly landing on their decisions. Polls, week in, week out, are taken and they give snapshots of people's feelings. But now there's an election coming. And decisions are being discussed in kitchens, and mulled over privately. The candidates' free leaflets arrived in through the letterboxes around the state yesterday and today. They were closely examined for signs of lunacy. The talk will fill the airwaves until 2pm tomorrow. But really, it's become just background noise. It's 24 days since the election was called. And, reading this, you're about 24 hours away from the vote. The face of everyone in the business of politics is carrying the quiet horror of knowing that there's nothing much to be done about it now. Power has left all its usual haunts. It's in the kitchens and living rooms now and it'll stay there until the count is finished. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/444d6e30-fbeb-433f-87f6-11751ec2af8b_640x374.jpeg) Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at [https://tinyletter.com/Tupped](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped?ref=thegist.ie) Thanks a million! ### Campaign Gist: FG Party, SF breath-holding, FF? URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-fg-party-sf-breath/ Last updated: 2020-02-06T00:00:00.000Z Day 23 of the Campaign and nobody knows anything. So, let's take a tour through the strangeness together. **Fine Gael Party (like it's 1932)** The Taoiseach decided to give his media interview in front of a 1932 Cumann na nGaedheal poster which (apparently) hangs in Fine Gael HQ. Here it is: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/97c9c563-91a5-4f16-9d19-567d80cdfa53_600x906.jpeg) The message was presumably intended to suggest that Fine Gael are the party you could rely on to always spot when there were secret, hidden groups behind their rivals- this time Sinn Féin. Except, as everyone knows, Dev listened to precisely nobody his entire hermetically sealed life- let alone the IRA- and he spent the next 30 years occupying the corridors of power, while Cumann na nGaedheal went into permanent meltdown and merged with some fascists to form Fine Geal. FG also warned that Sinn Féin were communist: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f63c24ec-26c5-4a0a-bd90-0a92c8addc59_321x474.jpeg) and that they were involved with shadowy gunmen: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d886e70d-5b29-4840-8ae2-1556f802a9d6_640x965.jpeg) (Yes, that is a poster warning that Fianna Fáil are communists.) Paschal Donoghue was at pains to warn that a vote for Fianna Fáil was a vote for Sinn Féin in government and vice versa. The Taoiseach said only a vote for Fine Gael would avoid these terrible coalitions: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7cab47c7-9294-42d9-a8c2-12579d75c7f4_385x582.jpeg) Re-running 1932's election campaign isn't exactly the future any of us expected Fine Gael to be looking forward to when they unveiled their election slogan. **Sinn Féin hold breath** Everything is raining down on them- the past, the present and criticism of their future. And there's no way of knowing if any of it is going to have any effect whatsoever. What's clear is that the party had no expectation of taking the lead and doesn't really know what to say or do, in case it makes the magic run away. **Fianna Fáil, Who Dat?** Micheal Martin must have hoped he would collect the votes of the Change hungry electorate. Badly served by the talent puddle on his front bench (he can only dream of a whole pool), he's been the FF face on every lampost. But, whether it's Jack Chambers trying to rut in studio like a Great Irish Whelk or Michael McGrath's auto-amnesiac TV appearances, erasing themselves from the viewer's memory evan as they're happening, we've seen why the FF leader has put himself at the front of their campaign. The moratorium approachs, not that we'll pay it any attention. ### Campaign Gist: Head to Head (to Head) Debate, CrossOver Event URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-head-to-head-to-head/ Last updated: 2020-02-05T00:00:00.000Z Day 22 of the Campaign and we're having a mysterious old time about it. Nobody knows what's going to happen and everyone is holding their breath. **Head to Head (to Head)** It's a debate, FOR LEADERS! Prime Time was the venue for the latest election set piece, Nau! Jetz mit Mary Lou, as it doubtless was reported in the German press after RTE examined their rigorous, unshakable objective criteria they'd used to exlcude her from the first debate and suddenly realised it was bunk. For 90 Minutes they went back and forth and then forth again (three headed debates being a new, untested format) rattling out stats and facts like rote-learning Renaissance men and woman. The two big party leaders threw digs at Sinn Féin. Then, near the end, shades of the past loomed up at Mary Lou McDonald on a question of a slur, by a Northern Ireland SF minister, on the name of a Northern Ireland man, murdered in 2007\. She'd denied it had been said when it was raised before. Presented with the exact quote, she said the only thing to be said- it shouldn't have happened. Thin gruel. Special stubbornness points to Leo Varadkar for making the effort to haul his dead Brexit horse into the studio and try to flog it (still) to the electorate. Striking also was the Fine Gael pitch to warn that Change was Bad. Making the offer from FG now explicitly More Of The Same. **CrossOver Event!** I got to go on the EchoChambers podcast today to talk about some of the themes I've seen bubbling out of the Campaign Gist. And you can experience this epic independent commentary crossover event (like the Avengers, but without the fancy facial hair) [over here.](https://tortoiseshack.ie/ge2020-pressing-the-big-red-button-ep-231/?ref=thegist.ie) [ ](https://tortoiseshack.ie/ge2020-pressing-the-big-red-button-ep-231/?ref=thegist.ie) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/8427bb49-48b1-40ec-b63d-64ea15d045ae_640x550.jpeg) ### Campaign Gist: MRBAye-Aye-Aye!, Tragedy in Tipp, FG's living Post-Mortum URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-mrbaye-aye-aye-tragedy/ Last updated: 2020-02-04T00:00:00.000Z Day 21 of the Campaign and all is changed utterly. **MRBAye-Carumba!** The third poll in a row, showing Sinn Féin rising, comes from the Irish Times MRBI house. This is the poll it used to be said of, that if MRBI tell you you're dead, phone the undertaker. And tonight it came back with a result unlike any before. Sinn Féin came in at the top of the poll, ahead of FF and with FG trailing in third place. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/48215f55-ccdb-4a4c-8437-e75b9f7cf60f_640x358.png) Sinn Féin just don't have enough candidates to capitalise on this result. You need 80 for a Government majority. They only have 42 candidates. Either their voters are nudged to keep voting down the ballot for non FF/FG candidates or a 5 year role as the largest opposition party to a Grand FF/FG Coalition looms. **Tragedy in Tipp** A candidate has died in Tipperary. Campaigning has been suspended. As there are still days to go to the vote, the nominations will now be reopened and that constituancy will vote about two weeksafter the rest of the country. Given the numbers in the poll, can we expect a second SF candidate to be added to the ticket? **FG's Living Post Mortum** What happened, we might expect FG to be asking itself. Falling to third place, with a hazardous excess of candidates threatening potential disaster, and yet... and yet... there's no sign Fine Gael is capable of asking that question. This is a party which has spent 87 years waiting for the electorate to admit it was wrong and FG was right. And now, as the electoral mud slides unpredictably around it, reshaping the landscape, burying certainty it apparently plans... to spend the last few days stressing Brexit. This is some next-level anti-politics. Let's pause a moment to think. Not about FG's failures of action and message, which are too many to fit into this small newsletter, but about how this Sinn Féin surge is being presented. SF are the same party they were a few short months ago when they lost a bunch of Euro and Local seats. What's happened? Well, the answer lies across with FF and FG. FG have managed, through force of personality, to repel the voters who had plumped for them as the means by which FF had to be unseated. Fianna Fáil have taken up residence in the low 20s of support. It's not going away, but the other 20-25% it used to have isn't coming back. Sinn Féin are inheriting the Kick the Bums out bloc. Its hard to hold on to as the past suggests that, when it's with you, you better not do anything but BumKick your way forward. But, with the shortfall in cadidates from its own party, it might be time for them to call for some BumKick Transfers. ### Campaign Gist: FG splinters, SF URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-fg-splinters-sf/ Last updated: 2020-02-03T00:00:00.000Z Day 20 of the Campaign. The last week looms, with suddenly a lot of novelty on the horizon. **FG Splinters** Richard Bruton and Catherine Noone. Paschal Donohoe on his soapbox. Soft focus videos of Simon Coveney. Suddenly, as the poll results came home and the reality of approaching opposition sank in for FG, it is every man for himself. Gone is lofty talk of international affairs. Suddenly, individual ministers are putting out messaging of themselves, in their constituencies, their politics suddenly more retail than Henry Street and Grafton Street combined. Not every minister is going to get out of an election where the vote drops to 24% with their seat. Expect a local focus from the FG cabinet for the next week, and positioning for any leadership battle to come. **Left Splinters** FF and FG, it now seems, are polling at significantly less than half the electorate’s first preferences combined. For the first time ever, there is talk of government being formed without either of them. It’s possible, though very difficult to imagine. But it isn’t possible if the various parties stick to their current positions. PBP don’t want to go into coalition, but might support a non FF/FG gov from outside. Labour, having said no, then yes, now says no again to coalition with SF- leaving their voters to just disbelieve them, or vote for a choice between opposition again or coalition with FF or FG. At the same time, the real issue is trying to get elected- and as none of them have multi-candidate constituencies, that will mean some very clear requests to supporters to transfer all the way down to other potential left coalition parties. **Voters' autonomy** Political analysis often seems to see politics as a brach of fluid dynamics. If a party goes up (or down) it must be because voters have been sluiced and blocked by the party to end up in it. But, in fact, though they hold no press conferences, call no photo opportunities and launch no manifestos, the electorate actually gets to decide what it wants. At the moment, it has decided it wants change and is, for the first time, trying out using Sinn Fein to do it. This is going to result in lots of novelties, good and bad, in the weeks ahead. But let’s not imagine that this is as a result of anything SF have done since their bad Local and Euro elections. This is just what the voters have plumped for, and when the electorate decides it wants something, it has the last word. ![Dropping the Pilot](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/a0f7eb8f-1874-4105-b9d0-de2d7ed695d1_500x728.jpeg "Dropping the Pilot") ### Campaign Gist: FG says No, Voters do too URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-fg-says-no-voters-do/ Last updated: 2020-02-02T00:00:00.000Z Day 19 of the Campaign and, lookit, its not looking great for Fine Gael. It's sort of looking the opposite. **FG say No** So, you know, the internet has been around for a while now. But, for reasons not currently to hand, Fine Gael appear not to have noticed before this election. And so they made a video where the cabinet emphatically said no to something (see yesterday's Gist, [Sinn Féin: Are they made of evil bees?](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped/letters/campaign-gist-departmental-ventriloquism-fg-novelties-sf-hysteria?ref=thegist.ie) for more details) and posted it themselves, even though nobody was making them. Whereupon, everyone just took the video and put their own question at the front. From whether FG would ever do anything about climate change ("No! No way! No never, no way! etc) to whether they will be in the next government ("No! No way! No never, no way!" etc). FG then gave the story an extra day of legs by complaining about it, because they had turned up in the street wearing a suit made of slices of ham and, most unfairly, the local dogs had shown them unwanted interest. **Voters say No, too** Yesterday, I was sniffy about a poll for the Times that isn't the Irish Times. But today, we have another set of numbers telling the same story. FF and Sinn Féin neck and neck at 24% and FG in third at 21%. Shows what I know. This sees Fine Gael facing a reversal of the seat bonus that comes to parties with large votes and multiple candidates in each constituency, so that their seat result will be less than their proportion of first preferances. After which, Paschal Donoghue made another video, of himself, on his own, in Dublin Central on a box. Message: Forget national campaigns. It's every man for himself now. ![Plumbing Provos?](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/9a137183-21d5-4dba-8afe-96494c30478b_640x853.jpeg "Plumbing Provos?") ### Campaign Gist: Brexfast Rolls, Iffy Poll URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-brexfast-rolls-iffy/ Last updated: 2020-02-01T00:00:00.000Z respondentsDay 18 of the Campaign trail and there was only one thing to be done all day. We just had to look at Brexit happening. Janey mac. **Brexfast Roll** Long before the sun rose over Dublin, a bus was wending its way through the cold dark streets towards Dublin Port. Inside the bus were journalists and Fine Gael candidates. The journalists were there because the Fine Gael candidates wanted them to see something. My four year old daughter has a fondness for this move also. Come and see! she says, and I do, and then I find I have one less drinking vessel or there is a cat where my mantlepiece ornaments used to be. Come and see, the FGs told the journalists. Then the journalists discovered they had to get on the bus at 4am. Come and see! came the response. They came and saw. And what they saw was Paschal Donoghue and Simon Coveney don a high-vis vest, pull the bus in to a petrol station and order a breakfast roll. > "Could I get a sausage roll," says the Tánaiste... "With butter and ketchup... Just sausages yeh" [pic.twitter.com/r4JRbp2SHR](https://t.co/r4JRbp2SHR?ref=thegist.ie) > > > — Richard Chambers (@newschambers) [January 31, 2020](https://twitter.com/newschambers/status/1223131525350293504?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=thegist.ie) So it is that Brexit dawned, journalists yawned and nobody, but nobody, knows what FG thought that was all about. **Iffy Polls** At midnight, the Times that isn't the Irish Times released a poll, showing FG fallen to third place behind Sinn Féin. Quality polling in Ireland is a spectacularly complicated business, requiring in-depth knowledge of a constituency's oddities in order to be able to weight the respondants properly. Contrary to what you might have seen people with football club avatars on twitter doing, there's little point comparing different polls to each other. What's key is to compare a poll with it own predecessors, as they will all have the same methodology. This poll was done by a UK firm, which has never polled in Ireland before. I mean, it's all good fun, but can the return of the Sindo's Quantum Research (a polling company which always had eyecatching results but didn't appear to have any corporate form) be far behind? ### Campaign Gist: Departmental ventriloquism, FG novelties, SF hysteria URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-departmental-ventriloquism/ Last updated: 2020-01-30T00:00:00.000Z Day 17 of the Campaign and the Gist will be zigging while everyone is zagging at the Cooper/ Yeats debate tonight. Instead, here are some bits and pieces you may have missed. **Departmental ventriloquism** Minister Katherine Zappone came out strong, with plans to force childcare workers to give a day in lieu for their strike day or see the children’s grant cut. Then she reversed this position after it was exposed to air and burst into flames, a sort of political phosphorus. This is the danger for Ministers used to having their department tell them what their policy should be. When departmental priorities depart from what is acceptable to voters, the department relies on its captured minister to take the flak. And the Minister almost always obliges. Though it takes a particularly dedicated spokes-Minister to burn their goodwill with the parents of small children days before an election. Perhaps the example may act as a warning to some of the incoming batch of Ministers on the danger of becoming the one moving their mouth while their Department drinks a glass of water. **Fine Gael’s New Tune** Fine Gael have been having a mare of an election. For the second time running they managed to misjudge the electorate by talking about the things that Fine Gael cares about, not what voters felt. The people who last time brought you the Sindo Xmas Party of Election slogans, Keep the recovery going, were back this time with talk about Brexit that nobody wanted to know about. They’re still flogging that horse, presumably because all the fliers are printed now so they have to do something about it. But it has somehow been noticed the response to “half time” metaphors on Brexit haven’t provoked political rapture. Hence the new tune to whistle- Only FG can be trusted with an economy. On the one hand, it’s at least a snappy message with no sport metaphors. On the downside it faces into what is increasingly clear is a change-hungry electorate and offers More Of The Same. This seems a tune destined for very low royalties for all the play it’ll get. **Sinn Féin: Are They Made of Evil Bees?** The two main parties, along with much of the media have been surprised and alarmed by the success of Sinn Féin in the polls. The result has been a blizzard of assertions and questions on the party which run from the reasonable (All The Things In The Past) to the incoherent (These Plans For Building Houses Are Cursed by Ghost Pirates! Shun Them!) If the polls are reflected in the results, all of this will go out the window- and some of those reasonable questions could do with not being drowned out by demented wails before then. **OK, the Debate** ![That debate in full](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0d15f525-cffd-4816-8706-9d70f925a3e1_640x277.jpeg "That debate in full") ### Campaign Gist: Bridge, Tunnel, Billions and Billions URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-bridge-tunnel-billions/ Last updated: 2020-01-30T00:00:00.000Z Day 16 of the campaign and we have 11 days left before polling day. Yes, only a little past half way. I know. **Bridge** There was a new bridge opened in Wexford. The Taoiseach cut the ribbon, accompanied by various all-party local worthies and mayors. The bridge, named after JFK's mother Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, formed a sort of Platonic ideal of Leo Varadkar campaign events. Its impact was entirely visual, there weren't too many unexpected questions ("You say it's a bridge, Taoiseach. What does it do?") and it was commenced by a earlier government altogether, who won't ever get any credit for it. **Tunnel** Fine Gael decided to re-up their Catherine Noone problems, by first 'pausing' the vote management messages in Dublin North Bay asking people to vote for her. Then they claimed that story was fabricated (it clearly wasn't) and that instead they were going ahead asking people to give Sen. Noone their number 1s. Then Leo suddenly realised that the apology he got earlier in the week should be less about him and more about apologising to people with autism. This only took a day to realise, presumably accompanied with a sudden start, sitting up in bed and then some sipping of flat Lucozade. We all know that apologies delayed and then produced at the instruction of your boss are the most heartfelt ones. Similarly, **Billions and Billions** Sinn Féin set out their manifesto stall and quite the groaning board it was too. To pay for it all, Sinn Féin sent the papers to the footnotes, where they discovered a plan to tax the sort of intangible intellectual property assets that the tech boom has in spades. Madness, said Paschel Donoghue, paymaster for the most expensive hospital in the world. It promised to build tons of extra houses, cut taxes, increase spending and, I presume, deliver fresh ice creams from vans accompanied by symphony orchestras. In the end, like Fine Gael's latest day trying to make Brexit a campaign issue in the face of everyone's steadfast disinterest, the manifesto represented a repeat of SF's pitch to the electorate that they represent the real change option. So far, that's the main thrust of the campaign. It would be interesting to see if FF and FG start openingly competing for votes against SF by moving towards their policies. Given their inability to react to external stimulii today, I wouldn't hold out much hope, but then again, still 11 days to go. ![Wrong Wexford Bridge, Simon](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/9a5e3ee3-99b2-445d-9f18-fddf3e3be156_640x480.jpeg "Wrong Wexford Bridge, Simon") Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at [https://tinyletter.com/Tupped](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped?ref=thegist.ie) Thanks a million! (Photo cc Brian King) ### Campaign Gist: NoOne home, Labour tome, Galway Thunderdome URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-noone-home-labour-tome/ Last updated: 2020-01-29T00:00:00.000Z Day 15 of the Campaign and it was all from dawn to dusk. **NoOne home** [Back again](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped/letters/campaign-gist-debatable-value-relatable-saoirse-and-the-seething-cauldron-of-dublin-bay-north-1?ref=thegist.ie) in Dublin Bay North, where FG candidate Catherine Noone spontaneously combusted, leaving the rest of the country trying to put their jaws back on. Probably best to just go to the clip as the candidate starts talking about her party leader. Roll it there, Collette. > He’s autistic like, he’s on the spectrum, there’s no doubt about it. He’s uncomfortable socially and he doesn’t always get the in-between bits...If I do say so, I am much more natural than he would be...I didn’t mean it in the sense of the actual illness or anything. I just mean he can be a bit wooden and lacking in empathy... She said this when talking to a journalist from The Times. They went on to say "the Senator also attempted to say the word was a potentially offensive word that could be used out of context such as "special" or "n\*\*\*er". She quickly clarified that she would never use the N word and said it was a bad example." Closing this conflagration she explained > Sometimes I say, ‘Oh God, I’m a bit special’ but I don’t mean it to be derogatory. The Senator, previously famous for demanding a [ban on ice-cream van music](https://www.thejournal.ie/catherine-noone-on-ice-cream-vans-1512396-Jun2014/?ref=thegist.ie), is now famous for this. **Labour Tome** It's a manifesto! Labour have been mostly absent from this campaign (as a national voice), but after Brendant Howlin's outing in yesterday's debate they've decided to join the national fray today with their manifesto launch. And they've got a big idea- freeze rents. Is it constitutional? Fuckit, says Brendan, let them sue. This is a surprisingly clear message from Labour and, if they can find a way to wheel it around in front of eyeballs so it gets noticed, they might see some benefits from it. **Galway Thunderdome** Small sample (525 people) and large margin of error (4%) aside, TG4's poll showing sitting TD and [vocal critic of remittances to people with melanin](https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2019/1112/1090381-noel-grealish-dail/?ref=thegist.ie) Noel Grealish sunk down the table, with a seat each for FF and FG, and Social Democrat Niall Ó'Tuathail, the Green's Pauline O’Reilly neck and neck behind them. With decent prospects for Gary Gannon in Dublin Central and Cian O'Callaghan in the cockpit of the election, Dublin Bay North, with a fair wind the Social Democrats might find themselves returning to the Dáil in rude health yet. Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at [https://tinyletter.com/Tupped](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped?ref=thegist.ie) Thanks a million! ### Campaign Gist: Take Us To Your Leaders URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-take-us-to-your-leaders/ Last updated: 2020-01-28T00:00:00.000Z Day 13 of the Campaign and we finally got a debate with all the party leaders on the telly and, you know, it wasn't terrible. **Na, na, na, na, nah-na, Leader!** The Irish political system is shaped by our voting system. And today's debate did something that the previous two-hander failed to do- it showed the range of political choices available to voters through Proportional Representation. The moderator, Claire Byrne, kept the cross-talk to a minimum (ie, still loads, but it stayed functioning) and the line up of leaders and their mini-podia embraced actual differences on policies. Nobody self-destructed, so a bit disappointing on that front. Strangely, in a way, everyone managed to turn up and be a sort of concentrated version of themselves. Leo Varadkar was smooth and pleased with himself, like a pebble eroded by an ocean of double cream. Eamon Ryan, like his tie, appeared to have been knitted for the occasion. Brendan Howlin yelped for some balance from his distant endpoint, appealing to The Rules. Róisín Shorthall was the Aunt with good advice you didn't want to hear and Richard Boyd Barrett swept the board at a student debate only he could see. Micheál Martin scolded like a cranky chaplain, focussing most on Sinn Féin. And Mary-Lou McDonald, thanks in part to the efforts of FF and FG throughout the debate, ended up looking like as the leader of an opposition in the midst of a change election. **Policies** Cows and climate, Tax whinging, (no brexit), cops and drugs- were all raked through. FG pitched right for the rich, dumb person vote, the Taoiseach outright complaining that tax wasn't fair because the state was taking your money. Labour shuffled slightly around, love-bombing the Greens and Social Democrats extending a (quickly rebuffed) hand to People Before Profit before going for broke after the debate and opening the door to talking about government with Sinn Féin too. There was also no mention of health, a really weird Cow-centric version of a Climate change discussion and so many promises of more police that we will have drifts of them collecting on street corners if they come to pass. TV is basically the worst available medium for discussing ideas. And yet, it is the best medium for looking at people and taking stock of what you see. Politics is much more about making assessments of which person you want to trust to make the right decision than it is about fantasy manifeso promises. There was plenty here for a voter to think about and decide on. And really, we can't ask for much more than that on even a good day. ![Leaders' Debate](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b795d99b-2c7e-4b81-9d0b-2837fe3cd7a1_640x411.jpeg "Leaders' Debate") Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at [https://tinyletter.com/Tupped](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped?ref=thegist.ie) Thanks a million! ### Campaign Gist: Dismal science, SF quarantine URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-dismal-science-sf-quarantine/ Last updated: 2020-01-27T00:00:00.000Z Day 12 of the Campaign and everything seems to be in a state of uncertainty. **Dismal Science** As previously remarked, party manifestos are bunk. However, responses to questions about those manifestos can be helpful in assessing how parties go about dealing with the non-bunk bits of life. So, for example, your FG response is to make bold, unsupported assertions and appeal to authority- "We have the plans", they said. It's a tricky position to take nine years into power as it prompts the obvious response- why have you only thought of them now, then? Fianna Fáil addresses claims it's promising something for everyone; "if you look at this manifesto it is a prudent enough approach." A sly acceptance of the premise of the question. The problem for voters is that the promises become a fluttering whirlwind of numbers, spinning around them. Reporting on them blurs into a drone with arguments for and against figures that lack any solidity to begin with. Economics was once called the dismal science, but surely addressing these irrational numbers must be even more dispiriting. **SF Quarantine** Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have said they absolutely will not go into coalition with Sinn Féin. Equally, Fianna Fáil have said they won't go into coalition with Fine Gael. Then again, they've been in not-coalition with them for five years now. And at the same time, Fine Gael worked hard to re-establish the Northerm Ireland Execuitve, returning Sinn Féin to government. Its a riddle how any of this is even meant to fit together. What's so strange is how these long-held contradictions are just accepted as normal. **Drift** We're deep into the campaign and, after the first week sent all the plans into a tailspin, nobody has seen any momentum build behind any of their positive proposals. Mostly it's been a sequence of reactive announcments trying to address eruptions like the pension-age disaster. This is regrettable, given the ten year projects we need to be urgently starting- from rebuilding health to demographic shifts (those pensions again) and, most of all, climate. ![Drift](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/acb39c8b-d6cf-4dc2-b1ca-e829aa09abd0_640x650.jpeg "Drift") ### Campaign Gist: Manifest-o Destiny URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-manifest-o-destiny/ Last updated: 2020-01-25T00:00:00.000Z Day 11 of the Campaign Trail and the early excitement has faded to be replaced by the hard slog of actually constantly talking to the general public. **Manifestly useless** Christmas Day comes, long planned for and anticipated. Eyes snap open early, mattresses are jumped up and down on, and there's a lot of shouting for attention. But then time peels by, visiting the houses of relations and friends takes its toll and before you know it, it's December 29th and you've forgotten what day of the week it is. So it goes for elections and the political class. At the end of the second week, they need something new. So it is that every pol corr brushed down their Sultans of Ping puns today, aiming to put the FF and FG manifestos to the testos. This was a waste of everyone's time, as Manifestos are Bunk. Regina Doherty said nobody reads manifestos during elections, and- in a sentence you are unlikely to see repeated in these newsletters- she was right. They are nothing more than a press release. When we elect people to the Dáil, we are picking which people we want to be around to make the decisions on the completely unpredictable things which will constantly happen for the next five years. There's no point demanding you'll hand out jelly beans on every street corner (or jail everyone in possession of jelly beans). Either you're just that kind of person, or you're not. It's much better, as a voter to vote according to the person whose instincts seem to be good. They might not be able to do what their manifestos promised, but at least there's a chance they'll do the right thing when they have to. ![Communist Manifesto](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/e10f6ec5-57c1-46f3-8a02-50d4a1c1f854_640x302.jpeg "Communist Manifesto") ### Campaign Gist: A short hiatus URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-a-short-hiatus/ Last updated: 2020-01-25T00:00:00.000Z Day 12 of the Campaign and your author has taken himself to a Burns Dinner. As a result, today’s gist shall be shorter than usual- a mark in. It’s favour, I hope you will agree. Exile, though not always cunning Party leaders marched briefly in Drogheda against drug gangs, a choice with no chance of alienating potential coalition partners given the lack of prominent Drug Gang Candidates. The Greens launched their manifesto, which was v interested in talking about Green policies, as you might imagine. Meanwhile, FG head office displayed evidence of stress when they summarily expelled the young man who has founded a Northern Ireland branch if Fine Gael. His crime in their eyes was to take out €100 of Facebook ads in favour of his father, who was not (now) running for FG. In the middle of an unhappy campaign, Head Office isn’t one to accept that blood is thicker than posters. ![Burns Night](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/8609b82e-ce63-4d96-b6a6-ed437bac8aff_640x360.jpeg "Burns Night") ### Campaign Gist: Jesus H. Christ, so much trivia URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-jesus-h-christ-so-much/ Last updated: 2020-01-24T00:00:00.000Z Day 10 of the Campaign and there are signs that cabin fever is setting in the central campaigns and the press pack alike. **Are you all on Drugs?** Yesterday's debate was such a non-event that the only thing that could be found to latch onto was the (repeated) admission that the Taoiseach had some drugs about 20 years ago. It was embarrassing to watch and we can only hope it goes away. Sadly, this being FG's campaign, they decided to pour lava on the fire by announcing he'd be going to an anti-drugs rally in Drogheda. A reminder that the Taoiseach is the head of the Executive of the State, which comes with its own police force. **Coalition Fantasy Football** When there's nothing happening, I guess you've got to write some stuff about something. So the other non-event from the debate was the suggestion that FF and FG could go into government together. As this completely won't happen ever because FF is not actually insane (as evidenced by the fact that they didn't fall for this sucker move after the last election) we may as well play ourselves out for the day with that old voter favourite while experiencing an election campaign, with One Hour of Fart Sounds- Over 1000 farts . **Oh, Just one more thing....** Some children's lives will take a radically different path depending on the outcome of this election. Some of us- and we don't know which yet- will have something happen where their life will hang in the balance depending on who is in power. Decades ago, Noel Browne's TB programme altered the course of vast numbers of people's lives. There are people alive now because their parents didn't die of TB. A day of trivia in a campaign does not mean that our democracy is trivial. We are going to do things (sometimes terrible things) with our votes that will change our lives and the lives of the people we know. It would be nice if a decision that size wasn't squeezed through the narrow tubes of pantomime horse-race yap. ![Pantomime Horses](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/fe3a8dcd-26f5-4676-a74a-468405d5efa2_640x386.jpeg "Pantomime Horses") Photo CC TaylorHerring Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at [https://tinyletter.com/Tupped](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped?ref=thegist.ie) Thanks a million! ### Campaign Gist: Debatable Value, Relatable Saoirse and the seething cauldron of Dublin Bay North URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-debatable-value-relatable/ Last updated: 2022-08-15T10:25:06.000Z Day 9 of the Campaign and we had a few significant occurrences. Also, an opportunity to cheer on Saoirse McHugh, Green Party candidate in Mayo. **Debatable Value** There was a strange genre mash up on TV3, where a Sky Sports format (Pre and post-game analysis programmes) bracketed a strange fashion show, solely for blue suits. The suits were placed left, right and centre in a studio, like a sparsely decorated provincial haberdashers' window. Each suit contained a person, but to no great effect. As a debate to learn about the humans who were seeking to become Taoiseach, the format told us that they could read from cue cards, make (small) hand gestures and point out the beam in the other's eye, while denying the mote in their own. None of which really seems to advance the sum of human knowledge, or give anyone any reason to change their previous voting plans. In effect, the debate was staged to demonstrate the charisma and personal charm of two men, worn by their suits. A nil-all draw then, always the hardest result for Sky Sports to hype. **Stanning Saoirse** Saoirse McHugh is a Green Party candidate based on flippin' Achill Island. It's miles of driving from there just to reach the middle of nowhere. But she's running in the vast, empty tundra of the Mayo constituency after coming close to taking a seat in the EuroElections after flattening Peter Casey (you remember him? Big vibes of the uncle walking around with a sloppy Guinness at the wedding with his shirt untucked). But her interview with Joe.ie packs in so much charisma, smarts and amusement that we can only be sorry she wasn't at the TV3 debate, as she might have walked away as the lead for Taoiseach. How many other Green Party candidates have cheered for the tumbrils and blithely pointed out that a State is a 2nd best way of organising society (at best) after a preferred system of self-organising communities. None. That's how many. One less than one. As many monkeys as are in a barrel of monkeys with no monkeys in it. Zero. [Watch it here, if you haven't yet. ](https://twitter.com/ellenmcoyne/status/1219998998406291456?ref=thegist.ie) And here's an earlier interview from the [Disturbing The Peace podcast](https://tortoiseshack.ie/saoirse-mchugh-achillsgottalent-live-at-the-wiley-fox/?ref=thegist.ie), where you will learn of the candidate's secret hand-based shame. **Dublin Bay North and the Magic Repeal Seats** Imagine a land where there were empty seats. Not one, but two empty seats, where their occupants have just wandered off. Welcome to the feverish world of Dublin Bay North. With Tommy Broughan announcing he's joining Finian McGrath in the retirement zone, there are a bunch of possible seat takers clustered about, hoping to be the bums nearest the seats when the music stops. One thing which may play an under-reported role is the mass mobilisation built during the Repeal. Dublin Bay North had the highest Yes vote in the country. Voters will remember which candidates' put in the work (and a number of them, Labour, SocDems, and John Lyons, Independent were absolute trojan in pounding the pavement). All of which may tip the balance one way or the other in a tight Dáil result, a continuing echo of Ireland's deepest grassroots triumph. ![Dublin Bay North](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/342f580c-dfd1-428e-b7a1-ef0ce2a7dbc9_500x355.jpeg "Dublin Bay North") Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at [https://tinyletter.com/Tupped](https://tinyletter.com/Tupped?ref=thegist.ie) Thanks a million! ### Campaign Gist: Wolves, real and metaphorical URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-wolves-real-and-metaphorical/ Last updated: 2020-01-22T00:00:00.000Z Day 8 of the Campaign and nothing much of note happened. **Taoiseach wears brown, leaves town** Completely unrelated to the MRBI polls showing FG support crumbling in Munster, the Taoiseach took his FG roadshow to Mallow in Co. Cork, to be seen meeting “country people” and perhaps, to learn of their ways. He wore brown, to show his respect for their mud-based culture and bought sausages to prove he wasn’t vegan (regretfully, he didn’t attempt to hammer the point home by snacking on the raw sausages as he walked around. Maybe by next week’s poll.) **Wolves, Wolves, WOLVES!** The Social Democrats had a bit of a moment, with co-leader Róisín Shortall setting out their health plan, backed by all the parties in a committee she chaired. Meanwhile, the party’s Wicklow candidate, Jennifer Whitmore launched their biodiversity policy and it was *good*. Proper thoughts on land use and paying to use land as a carbon sink through rewilding. However, from my very selfish point of view, the most important point was the part of the plan to reintroduce native species made extinct by humans. That’s right, #WolvesNow is back, Back BACK after Eamon Ryan backed away for being laughed at. As the only suitable national park (in terms of size and nature) is Killarney National Park, there is a non-negligible chance of witnessing a Wolf v Healy-Ray face off in the future. Who wouldn’t want to see that? ![Wolf](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0b2ad3d3-5127-4af8-8d66-841a77e72c50_640x599.jpeg "Wolf") Oh hey, thanks for subscribing- it’s really good of you. Would you do me a favour? If you know someone else who might like to subscribe, can you forward this to them and tell them about the signup page at https://tinyletter.com/Tupped thanks a million! ### Campaign Gist: The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-the-falcon-cannot-hear/ Last updated: 2020-01-21T00:00:00.000Z Day 7's Campaign Gist and we suddenly wake, blinking, into a new world. **Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre** The Doldrums are behind us, the next polls are out and the metallic tastes of panic and power are co-existing in almost everyone's mouth. The efforts at command and control, frayed from a first week full of unpredictable and unignorable events, are shredding under the pressure of feedback. Suddenly, we have a whole line up of extra TV debates coming up, and the spending promises are falling upon us like dandruff on a school vice-principal's jacket. In line for a €10m sports grant for rugby in Galway, home to multiple imperilled FG TDs? The Taoiseach makes it €20m, just to be on the safe side. Sinn Féin demand equal time for their leader in the RTE debate, and, as they're in a statistical dead heat in the polls with the Taoiseach's party, lots of people start to say- 'seems sort of fair'. Liveline surfaces the problem that people leave their jobs at 65, but the Government has moved pension payments to 67 and plan to force the retired people to pretend to look for work for the intervening two years for thousands less than their pension. And pensioners vote. All the parties promise to fix this, but only the Government is going to get the blame. Then there was this: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/67ed4132-c282-4c92-aacc-c7b4276c5be5_640x213.png) Gold. ### Campaing Gist: The Poll and afterwards URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaing-gist-the-poll-and-afterwards/ Last updated: 2020-01-20T00:00:00.000Z Day 6 of the Campaign and there was no way I wasn't going to do one on that poll. **The Poll** It takes a special sort of genius to launch your election campaign by telling the public that they're juvenile for not supporting your Black and Tans commeroration before canceling it with bad grace. Then follow that up by banging on about Brexit, which literally not one person gives a hoot about as an election issue, while the rest of the news is full of deaths and maimings. You might as well run for election, demanding credit for not extinguishing the sun. > "We have left the vast radioactive hydrogen sphere burning throughout our time in office. Do you really want to to take the risk that the opposition might not do the same?" Of course it will. This is the floor you're pointing to. So it is that the vauge sense that maybe Fine Gael's relationship with the voters wasn't as mutually admiring as may have been presumed received an actual data point in the shape of the Sunday Times' B&A poll showing them one point ahead of Sinn Fein and 12 points behind Fianna Fáil. **Afterwards** This is the start of an actual campaign to test the parties. They've all been blocking their movements out on stage, with no sign of the audience to give a sense of how the play is going down. Now we'll see how they react to information. Traditionally, Fianna Fáil will tell voters what they think they want to hear to keep a lead. Fine Gael will tell the voters they are wrong. Labour will... I don't know what Labour will do any more. They're like Michael J. Fox's siblings in Back to the Future, fading gradually from image and memory. But really the question now is what Sinn Féin might do. Between Councillor Podcast's thoughts on statutory rape and the focus on the big two by the media otherwise, they haven't had much of a chance to demonstrate what they could do. The Greens and the Social Democrates will have mixed feelings about the poll. Both are still localised parties, with support in patches around particular candidates. Like the PDs of old, this can result in a significant seat bonus when things go right and a trip home in a taxi for the whole party when it doesn't. ### Weekend Campaign Gist: Doldrums and the end of the world URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-campaign-gist-doldrums-and/ Last updated: 2020-01-18T00:00:00.000Z As it’s a weekend, Campaign Gist takes a slightly different format. **Doldrums** The election campaign seems to be running in some distant, sealed part of the country. This isn’t necessarily from any lack of local effort by candidates. Doubtless, doors are being knocked on, hands shaken at shopping centres and poster-related ire has reached record levels in the political classes. Though difficulties mustering volunteer efforts in the dark and bitter gloom of January may explain some of the lack of boots on the ground. Perhaps it’s a sense of disengagement from the whole process. The Irish voting system lets voters express their wildest electoral desires at No. 1, while still letting them fall back to 2nd and 3rd etc choices. It should result in a fantastically plural campaign, with every preference potentially the one that will get the last TD elected. And yet we’ve been treated to a campaign- and this is hardly the fault of the parties- which has been presented as FG v FG, with everyone else an afterthought. This is a a return to a model of viewing public discussion from the 1980s. Except the two big parties used to capture nearly 80% of the first preference votes and now account for hardly half. That a state of affairs that hasn’t been in place for 30 years is still considered a return to normalcy is a reflection of the mental ages of those thinking about it. The result is a campaign where half the voters (the half not represented by the Old Firm) are ignored while the parties themselves seem to talk past them, at each other’s supporters. **Climate** FG, a party whose identity is bound up with beef farming, has proved ineffective in acting on the many flashing red lights about Ireland’s need to cut carbon output. At last count it was going to pay €150m in fines, to compensate for its indifference to saving the world from mass extinction and social breakdown by missing Ireland’s quite mild EU target reductions. Today, it set out its stall for more of the same, with the Taoiseach making his lead policy an attack on the Green Party for actually proposing to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by the amount recommended to meet our targets before 2030. Here, as elsewhere, FG may be misreading the nation, by mistaking their own priorities for everyone else’s. Earlier in the week it was banging on about Brexit, a slice of eaten and forgotten bread if ever there was one. Now it is offering itself as the party to refuse to act on climate change. Agriculture is Ireland’s largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, making up more than 30% of the total, while representing less than 10% of GNI or employment. Farmers are being squeezed for their beef by the processors, but the rest of us are paying a very heavy price too. We pay some now, to change how we generate and use power and how agriculture manages its environmental costs, or we pay later, when we’ve no choice, and the bill is Everything. ![Agriculture stats](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/a5b1f7a1-fad8-4777-a40b-d8724be0e6e3_640x1602.jpeg "Agriculture stats") ### Campaign Gist: Death, Taxes, SF’s woes URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-death-taxes-sf-s-woes/ Last updated: 2020-01-17T00:00:00.000Z Day 4\. Your Campaign Gister has come down with a fever. Some of the below may, therefore, be be the product of an overheated mind. **Death** It is proving an unfortunate theme of this campaign that each day is accompanied with news of a terrible crime. First a 17 year old was dismembered, then a car was shot at. Electorally, this seems like an awkward issue to address. None of the main parties is going to the electorate offering more violent crime. But, again, none of the parties consider themselves “the party of law and order” like the incumbents, on whose watch all these things have happened. The Taoiseach therefore went to Drogheda and released a video where he promised that he was ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. Unlike Blair, whose slogan this originally was, this appeared not to refer to poverty, despair and education, but on increasing the after-the-fact responses of the police. It is possible that FG’s perception of the causes of crime may be somewhat singular. **Taxes** Every FG budget has been quietly agreed with FF over the last 5 years. Unsurprisingly, both parties are claiming they will carry on as before, but better. Specifically, FG are offering to cut taxes and FF are offering to levy less tax. Other parties- the Social Democrats, Labour, Sinn Fein etc, are suggesting that we pool all the suggested extra givers and spend that money on making our society better. However, due to a systemic failure in our media system this option is being treated as a fringe proposal. This is strange in an age where the FF-FG vote share barely accounts for half, but not strange in an age of collapsing traditional media audiences. SF’s woes While two largest parties bounced harmlessly off each other like students wearing inflatable zorb-style sumo outfits, SF suffered a second day of their councillor’s podcasts being listened to, with unflattering effect. Having accepted yesterday’s non-apology for racism and anti-gay jabber, they found he had also expressed his thoughts on the question of statutory rape, to no great credit to anyone. Local election poll-topper or not, SF realised this was going to be their daily lot as journalists just kept listening to his back-catalog and pulled the plug, suspending him from the party. No apology needed, this time.m ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d98811ed-a19f-4a0c-b4b8-2f51b29b78e6_640x1092.jpeg) ### Campaign Gist: Brexit Merit Badges, Not-Sorry Racism, Spiral Paper Hats URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-brexit-merit-badges/ Last updated: 2020-01-16T00:00:00.000Z Day 3 of the campaign, which by some quirk has also always been happening. **Brexit Merit Badges** Today presented more evidence that, contrary to all that is sane and rational, Fine Gael are genuinely invested in talking about Brexit to win votes. A voter may say to themselves “Why should I care about how busy FG ministers have been on that multi-vehicle clown car pile-up? That is literally their job. If it wasn’t them, someone else would have done what their civil servants told them to do.” One Fine Gael Senator went so far as to claim 600 people canvassed around Dundrum had raised it with him. ”Foreign policy getting a great reception on the doors” is apparently to be the FG mantra for however long it takes them to realise this idea is as in-touch with the National mood as Keep The Recovery Going. **Not-Sorry Racism** A MMA fighter turned SF councillor was instructed by his party HQ to apologise for opining that, by dint of not having ancient Irish blood\*, and not being a “family man” the Taoiseach wasn’t a proper leader of Ireland. He singularly failed to apologise, which failure was hailed by his party leader as calling a halt to the story. \*Blood, a kind of watery protein shake full of captured gases. **Spiral Paper Hats** Election campaigns generate time-specific ephemera like nothing short of royal weddings. We have already had the celebrated branded glasses cases resembling sanitary towels this year, but surely it is time for the return of spiral paper hats. A category of Headwear second only to the Christmas cracker paper crown for inducing a devil-may-care attitude in the wearer, rife in the 1980s, and apt to provoke whoops and unprovoked shoulder hoisting. ![Spiral paper hats](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/3c3447c8-5bb2-4e9d-ad7f-d9587a85b677_640x552.jpeg "Spiral paper hats") ### Campaign Gist: A Series of Unfortunate Events URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-a-series-of-unfortunate/ Last updated: 2020-01-15T00:00:00.000Z Campaign Gist is in an unusually somber mood today. A homeless man was critically injured while industrial machinary was used to remove his tent while he was in it. A photograph of the Minister for Housing's poster hanging above the scene of the incident went viral. The Taoiseach responded by suggesting the matter be addressed by the Dublin Lord Mayor, an opposition election candidate who occupies an office whose main executive decision is when to ride in a gilt carraige and who to invite to the Mansion House to help with the free Guinness. Then the Minister for Housing tweeted to say he'd taken his poster down. All of which is to say that almost anything other than the deep causes of this catastrophe was addressed. Homelessness is a national blight. Ugly treatment of and speech about poor people has been a feature of recent years. The Taoiseach's capacity for empathy and compassion became part of the day's conversation. Later, to help voters make their minds up on those points, he did a photo call where he climbed into the cab of some industrial machinary. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/91c7c632-f72d-4fdc-b7fb-f0bd0f39c715_595x344.png) ### Campaign Gist: Posters, Posers, Mass Disenfranchisement URL: https://www.thegist.ie/campaign-gist-posters-posers-mass/ Last updated: 2020-01-14T00:00:00.000Z It’s the Gist! In an election! So it’s the Campaign Gist! Shorter and more ruthlessly selective than ever. ​ **Posters** Fizzogs on lampposts mean only one thing- post-revolutionary terror and hangings from the street furniture. Unless it’s an election, in which case we are treated to lovely photos of our increasingly incongruously smooth candidates. As usual, the appearance of these posters provoked calls to ban posters, an issue which can be advanced at any time in the electoral cycle but is only proposed at the exact time it can be classed as Too Late. **Posers** No not the candidates. Election campaigns bring out the soft, mushroomy layer of society’s man-mulch who want to tell you about their insights into the deep games being played in elections. Everything is a distraction from the real thing, everyone is signalling, or referring or appealing to some bloc or other. And our man can see through it all. Never explained is how the people the man derides as clueless wildebeest during the Dáil term become amalgams of Machiavelli and Moriarty the moment the President hears a the dogs barking at the figure on the doorstep. Pay no heed. **Mass Disenfranchisement** Most parties make plans to Get Out The Vote. But, whether by accident or design, Fine Gael have gone one further and Got Out The Voters- an entire year of new voter registrations will only take effect 7 days after the election. Just so we all know where we stand. More tomorrow! ![Polling station sign](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/121488b4-f652-4e47-b02f-8281d805ae3f_640x263.jpeg "Polling station sign") ### The Gist: Euro-Drama, Hounded Out, Boris-In-Arsery URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-euro-drama-hounded-out-boris/ Last updated: 2019-07-03T00:00:00.000Z **Euro-Drama** A day and a night and then another day without sleep. Only hotel banquet food and take-out for sustenance. The leaders of the 27 member states of the EU unhappily discovered themselves in a sort of Irish Hotel Wedding Experience as the price for trying to decide who would get the jobs of running the body for the next five years. After public debates between the lead candidates, literally tens of hours of discussions, and a brief moment when the Taoiseach had to deny he was about to leave us for foreign shores, the leaders chose a series of minor national politicians from Western Europe that nobody had previously mentioned to run the show. The names now go on to the EU parliament, who will muster a chorus of raspberries in response to having their preferences ignored. All of which might seem the most embarrassing story out of the EU, were it not for the plucky efforts of the Brexit Party's MEPs. Demonstrating their commitment to democracy, they arrived into their jobs complaining the Strasbourg parliament was far away, that there were lots of other people there (many of them from out foreign) and then proceeded to turn their backs on the Ode to Joy. Whatever about the EU, the Brexit Party want no part of Joy. **Hounded Out** Repercussions continue from the Prime Time Investigates exposure of the treatment of greyhounds. Both Barry's Tea and FBD Insurance have dropped their sponsorship of the sport. BoyleSports haven't. And neither has the government, who pump millions into a sport whose own governing body was described in a 1955 Dáil debate as having "corrupted the greyhound industry". Meanwhile, did you know greyhounds are the only form of dog classifed by the Government as livestock? **Boris-In-Arsery** The most likely (and yet, also most unlikely) person to become Prime Minister of the UK was assiduously avoiding any contact with the dangerously corrosive material known as reality again. This time, he was promoting a bridge between Scotland and Ireland. While the risk of this occurring remain undetectable by electron microscope, it is understood that Northern Ireland is taking no chances and is already commissioning some Giant sized baby-gros as a precautionary measure. ![Bridge on a Boat](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d052f949-8d42-4f29-9e9c-590a56131e85_640x480.jpeg "Bridge on a Boat") ### Weekend Gist: G20, Pride(s), Shockin' Hot URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-gist-g20-pride-s-shockin/ Last updated: 2019-06-30T00:00:00.000Z Back now , for the moment. On we go. **G20: Occidental Winners** After discovering that putting tariffs on Chinese goods led to China putting tarrifs on US goods, the US president demonstrated his mastery of dealmaking by reversing himself, and declaring himself the winner of the whole thing at the G20 summit. **Pride(s)** Dublin saw two Pride parades today- with the main march becoming a sort of festival of mainstream acceptance/co-opting and an alternative demo which worked hard to remind that Pride was created to protest, not pander. Undoubtedly, the biggest winner was Pennys, who became the unofficial supplier of reinbow themed wearables to the entire city. **Shockin' Hot** So hot. Just, you know, sweaty and hot. And that was Ireland. On the continent, it was insanely hot. The hottest day on record in France. Newspapers report that in Champagne, they're worried that the consistant change in climate is making the grapes too sweet and the wine too syrupy. This feels like sitting inside a melting nuclear reactor plant and complaining about the sound of the alarm. ![Hot day](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/bd040f86-7097-484c-8305-0bc8b69fd68d_640x363.jpeg "Hot day") ### The Gist: Courting reporters, Martian robots URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-courting-reporters-martian/ Last updated: 2018-11-27T00:00:00.000Z **Reportedly** Here at The Gist, we like to squeeze things down for you. So, imagine how helpful it is to find that a whole set of unrelated but proximate stories suddenly crammed themselves together. On the day that saw a new set of reporting restrictions to limit reporting/tweeting of court proceedings to 'bona fide' journalists (triggering an existential question of what such a thing might be, and how to assess it) the High Court saw a five day rape trial collapse following publication of a newspaper report on it- while the jury was deliberating- which the court felt was so prejudicial as to require the jury to be discharged. Here's a thing- Court reporting is a difficult skill. Even legal practitioners, familiar with the details of a case in advance, have to concentrate to work out which statements, amongst the many words spoken, are the key points. A Court reporter will come to a case cold, and has to work things out as they go. While everyone in a court has experienced the dislocation of a news report that bears no resemblance to the event they participated in, Irish court reporting remains a valued and valuable skill. And, significantly, the piece in the Indo which triggered the trial collapse wasn't by a court reporter. But, as the seriously bad consequences of that condemned piece shows, the value of journalism on court proceedings should be defined by what is done- not by who is doing it. **Intellects vast and cool and stop-motion** NASA is demonstrably good at landing robots on planets. Mars, our nearest neighbour, is currently inhabited by a 100% robot population. They're mostly tooling around, poking rocks and testing sand for wetness. I mean some of them are also probably stuck on their side like paniced tortoises, but you can't win 'em all. Today saw the addition of a new robot. The InSight intends to examine how Mars' innards work. Most pleasingly, for those like me with only an abstract interest in Martian lava, is that it appears to have been designed by the 1970s Doctor Who props department, complete with classic BBC spacefaring features, the 'upturned colander of science', a 'paint can in tin foil' and, most radically, the actual box Camberwick Green lives in. ![Nasa Mars Robot](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/1b997fc1-b0e2-472a-9523-74eb3b5cd7a9_640x390.jpeg "Nasa Mars Robot") ### The Weekend Gist: Gibralter Story, then a pictured item URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-weekend-gist-gibralter-story/ Last updated: 2018-11-24T00:00:00.000Z **UK just can't** Spain complained. If the withdrawal deal applied to Gibraltar, then they would veto it. It took the UK four days to respond- "Grand, whatever, no applying the deal to Gibraltar. We just can't any more." No point fighting to the ends in Westminster for a deal that vaporises over a rock. Mrs May, a sort of Duracell Bunny for Bad Ideas, is now free to carry on making arguments for the plan which is patently worse than not leaving the EU at all, but better than leaving without any deal. **Coffee in a flask, but good** If you like coffee, the Waco Nanopresso sort of looks like it might be one to stick on the Santa list. It's a sort of double thermos flask. The top bit is filled with hot water. The bottom bit you fill with ground coffee and then you pump the middle, so that the pressure on the water actually makes a proper espresso with crema and all. RRP is $64.95. ![Waco Minipresso](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/940a99f5-72c1-4b69-9a38-8c1c88e56551_518x708.png "Waco Minipresso") ### The Gist: Art meets Paint, Brexit Update, Black Friday URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-art-meets-paint-brexit-update/ Last updated: 2018-11-23T00:00:00.000Z **Trenchant criticism of defaced installation** Somebody didn't like the 18 foot sculpture of a WW1 soldier installed at the enterance of St Stephen's Green. They sprayed red paint over its bottom half. Though this isn't the most constructive form of social criticism, it is certainly the most direct- neither destroying the piece, nor allowing it to stand unchallenged. We've just finished four years of WW1 centenary commemorations. The War was a global event, but a European abyss. And over those four years, covering the run up and then aftermath of Britain's brexit paroxysm, we've seen subtle shifts in tone from our neighbour- from remembrance, to commemoration, to the beginnings of a suggestion of heroism being celebrated. Ireland's WW1 experience was fraught. The Irish people fed to the slaughter machine were othered even as they were in the trenches. WW1 was an insanity that destroyed life, empires, social norms, security, health. There was bravery by soldiers, but in the face of meaninglessness, the only available heroism was in spite of the War, not in pursuit of it. They did not, as one pat politician comment had it today, make a sacrifice. They were the sacrifice. **Brexit** FUBAR. **Black Friday- still not happening** Shops all over the country bought ads to announce they would be cutting prices on some lines tomorrow, turning the whole nation into one of those 1970s promotions where Next would put a 50p sofa in a window to provoke queues. People, vaguely aware that goods are available for sale on other days, were faced with an onslaught of inbox mono-messaging not seen since the height of the Great Privacy Policy Updating of GDPR. ![Tiny Jervis](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/cc929d1c-d35f-41fd-9e9c-42bb8da39283_640x511.jpeg "Tiny Jervis") ### The Gist: Scouting Ireland rot, Charity Regulator regulated URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-scouting-ireland-rot-charity/ Last updated: 2018-11-22T00:00:00.000Z **Scouting in the past** Unsurprisingly, like lots of Irish organisations put in locus parentis over children, it turns out that volunteering with Scouting Ireland was used as a chance by a bunch of child abusers to attack children. According to the fella hired to do a review, this abuse was likely to have effected hundreds of children and it happened between 1960s and 1980s. Of course, the reason its coming to light now is that just this year the organisation had its funding suspended, and the entire board of directors resign after the org mishandled current rape allegations and then tried to put the Chief Scout who had done the mishandling in charge of a meeting on good governance. In some parts of Ireland, the 1980s never ended. **Charity Regulator smacked** The Information Commissioner ordered the Charity Regulator to explain why it decided to Twitter block a complainant (my sister, Róisín). The decision is a significant precedent for the use of Twitter as a communications channel by state bodies. But the real story is still the behaviour of the Regulator in the run up to referendum to Repeal the ban on abortion. They took no action against No-vote promoting Facebook pages holding themselves out as charities, even though my sister supplied an entire spreadsheet full of bogus pages claiming to represent charities that didn’t exist on the Charities Register. At the same time, the regulator wrote to at least one long-standing artistic venue and threatened to destroy its financial grounding by withdrawing its charitable status unless it destroyed a Repeal-supporting piece of art. It represented a stunning interference in the public realm at a time of a very significant Constitutional vote. It also reveals a regulator of Artistic charities actively hostile to the most basic tenets of free artistic expression. So today's ruling from the Information Commissioner on their petulant response when Róisín raised questions about this behaviour with the regulator, and the childish refusal to accept that the rule of law required it to answer for its actions, aren't the amusing side issue they seem. They're evidence of a rotten institutional culture in a body set up to deal with rotten institutional cultures. See, sometimes, you get to have thematic unity in a newsletter. ![Obscured Maser image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/f009acae-bbd0-476b-a9f4-810a5fafe6bf_640x480.jpeg "Obscured Maser image") ### The Gist: Asia News Edition URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-asia-news-edition/ Last updated: 2018-11-20T00:00:00.000Z Sometimes, there is nothing interesting happening nearby in news. Trump is still awful, Brexit is still occurring, FG like rugby. So, today we have a special round up of news from Asia. **#MeToo in Bollywood** Bollywood star Preity Zinta was asked about the #MeToo movement (an interesting phrase used to designate a political or social campaign with neither leaders nor a centre). She told the reporter "people treat you the way you want to be treated", which didn't go down so well. Interestingly, the PR response was a double header of both 'out of context' and 'disappointment' with the journalist for making the star look bad. These are things you say when you can't actually deny you said the thing you wish you hadn't said. **Democracy on Trial in Hong Kong** Hong Kong is feeling that it's promise of autonomy, democracy and freedoms, while still being part of China may not be lasting as long as the 50 years specified. So, lots of people took to the streets, in 2014 and- like the Occupy movement- held long protests, controlling public spaces. This week, the Gov is starting trials of leaders of the movement for causing a nuisance. Which, in Hong Kong, is apparently a criminal offence with up to 7 years in prison. **The Building Blocks of Australia** Plato asserted that there were perfect versions of everything, like geometric forms and that, in this world, we only ever encountered debased echos of those ideals. So it is that we learn that, at the very far end of the spectrum from the Platonic ideal of a cube is Wombat poo. Wombats, unlike every other creature in the world, poo cubes- about 100 cubes a night. They do this using unique intestinal squeezing. Then, having produced this little faecal minecraft hoard, they proceed to spend their night using the tiny pooblocks to build structures to mark their territory. Really, if you take nothing away from our Asia special but this fact, I think you will agree it has been a valuable adventure. ![CC Patrizio Cuscito](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b650dcd8-40c8-4529-8a2b-4576d6ae5181_640x399.jpeg "CC Patrizio Cuscito") ### The Gist: Rent Bandits, Rugby win, Brit fit URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-rent-bandits-rugby-win-brit/ Last updated: 2018-11-19T00:00:00.000Z **Landlord law lacuna** The head of the Residential Tenancies Board had a clear message to deliver. There were landlords out there just blatently raising rent above the maximum 4% a year in "Rent Pressure Zones" (aka, where the people are). And, by golly, there is absolutely nothing the RTB can do about it. Nothing at all. Because, by an amazing turn of events, the Dáil where one in five of the TDs are landlords just forgot to insert any of the required enforcement powers in the law when it was first passed. The Director promises that (a) they'll soon have new powers to act and (b) they never lacked powers to act and urged people to come forward with complaints. Which is a bit of a headscratcher. **Ball win** Minority sport rugby had a day in the sun when the Irish team of the little-played game beat the storied New Zealand squad. This proved, the Taoiseach said, that small countries really could sometimes be the best in the world. Arguably, New Zealand, population 4.7 million, had been proving this for some time. **Looking politely away** The UK's avant-garde Brexit exploration of the themes of the Hammer movie studio, through the medium of constitutional law continues to unfold. We're in the stage where the balloon of absurd puffed up self-aggrandisement and bluster has been released. We have seen where the deflating polity is eventually going to land (barring astonishing events, they'll just take this deal). But first we need to go through the frantic period where the balloon zig-zags around without any aim or purpose, consistently emitting a loud farting noise. Really, it's probably politest not to watch this bit. ![CC Alex Steffler](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/ff329c87-0371-4c89-b964-820bb523199f_640x427.jpeg "CC Alex Steffler") ### The Gist: "Or Chaos with Ed Milliband" URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-or-chaos-with-ed-milliband/ Last updated: 2018-11-16T00:00:00.000Z **Reality Bites** OK, so this is the Gist. Let's do the Brexit bit. So, basically, Ms. May's Wednesday claim the Cabinet backed her was missing the \*until they start to quit. Mr. Raab, the man who had negotiated the Brexit deal quit, reputedly in horror at what he had wrought. He later explained that there was a better deal (nature unspecified) available if only Ms. May would ask one more time for it. And that it was that better deal (details not supplied) that he really wanted to support. Then some other Tories quit from their makey-up jobs, alerting the populous very briefly of their previously unsuspected existence. Lord Snooty MP went looking for a new party leader (presumably in the nearest looking-glass). Ms. May, displaying the incapacity to react to external stimuli which has become her hallmark, shrugged it off. She remains undeterred from a seemingly doomed effort to win a Commons Vote for the EU's offer. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the population struggled with conflicting wishes- both wanting to see the UK do a sensible deal and the, less noble, desire to find out what our nearest neighbour looked like while being consumed by eldritch demons of historical irony. **Facebook Fuckup** Lost in the din of Brexit, the NY Times ran a [scoop](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html?ref=thegist.ie) on Facebook's internal reaction to the platform's part in disinformation and democratic subversion. It was eye-popping. I mean, I have to quote this: > "Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic." In response, Facebook said they did nothing wrong and also that they'd just that day fired those lads. Then, later, Zuckerberg went on the phone to some journalists to explain that, as Facebook's benign king, nobody told him about the bad things his servants had done in his name. And also, that he was thinking of setting up a fully independent board (chosen, appointed and paid for by Facebook, which is an interesting new definition of independent) people could appeal their algorithmic banning. No US reporter noticed that this human involvement was, in fact, a requirement of Article 22 of the GDPR. ![Holy Moly.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/2c60b397-a8c4-429d-bc64-23438243b6d5_594x241.png "Holy Moly.") ### The Gist: Brexit or bust URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-brexit-or-bust/ Last updated: 2018-11-14T00:00:00.000Z **May-Day! May-Day** Brexit has been 18 months of watching someone trying to haggle on prices with the automatic scanning machine at a Tesco checkout. Now, having finally reached the point where the 'store is closing' announcements have got serious, the UK gov has decided to just pay for the thing they wanted at the price it always cost. Unfortunately, it is possible that there isn't a unitary thing called the UK Government any more. So, instead, the nominally-in-control Prime Minister faction will be trying to win over her Cabinet and then win over her party, in order to finally win over the UK Parliament. If she can manage that, the EU will agree to sell her the thing she wanted at the price it has always been. Success means leaving the UK subject to the rules of the EU Customs Union and- for the Irish parts of the UK, the single market- dashing their (always fantasy) hopes of swashbuckling trade deals with distant climes. But, at the same time they lose a say in the construction of those rules and regulations. It remains to be seen if the UK public (who, you'll notice, do not appear in that list of groupings to be won over above) eventually feel they got good value for the price they pay. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/13e689e1-6a85-41db-9366-b30824788120_640x280.jpeg) ### The Gist: Lee RIP, Welfare Cheats redux URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-lee-rip-welfare-cheats-redux/ Last updated: 2018-11-13T00:00:00.000Z **Comics, cruelty and cameos** Stan Lee lived to be 95 years old. Today, he died. 95 years is a long time- long enough for him to be a complicated person to write an obituary for. Fortunately this can be solved by ignoring the first 60 or so years of his life and discussing him as the man who created the Marvel universe and then wrote all its stories. This would be easier if that were true, however. Lee's comics career was one of nepotism and cruel credit-stealing from his co-creators, Ditko and Kirby. But the three shared progressive, New York values of tolerance and their characters' stories reflected that. The experience of the Jewish WW2 GI who was assigned the rank of Playwright became embedded in Marvel's heroes' narrative DNA. He may not have had much to do with his characters as they developed and grew into global icons but the power of that original creative bite has lingered long. Those stories have turned out to be culturally important, as the Marvel universe has become one of the major forces reshaping movie-making. Marvel studio's use of all those characters over the last 10 years (and the staggering money they made) is comparable perhaps only to Star Wars as a transformative shift in the Hollywood ecosystem. And, at a time when much of the culture has flirted with facist notions, those stories stand as a pop culture bulwark of explicitly anti-fascist tales. **Welfare Cheats Itself** The Taoiseach set out his stand to become leader of Fine Gael by running a publicly-funded, deeply misleading campaign against the practically non-existent rounding error of social welfare fraud. After he had moved on, the Department's officials said that they wouldn't repeat it. "In retrospect I believe it was a mistake.", said the top official (who hadn't been there at the time). And yet... and yet. It turns out that there may be an actual problem of cheating the Dept- but that the problem was not with recipients but with employers. RTE's reporter, Philip Boucher-Hayes reported on a Committee appearance by the Department's Assistant Secretary who confirmed that employers who have been discovered to have avoided paying PRSI are, as a matter of policy, not prosecuted. In addition, the Department refused to answer a question put to it by Senator Higgins asking what proportion of findings of bogus self-employment are quashed by their internal appeals office. Martin McMahon, a campaigner on the issue, asserted there was a policy to allow bogus self-employment to continue. What the Department officials did say was that they didn't want any new laws requiring them to take action that would 'disrupt the labour market'. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7520e1f0-6a80-4364-b3b2-cbc7fe775927_640x496.png) ### Weekend Gist: Dry Trump, Fly Bike, Wry Bit URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-gist-dry-trump-fly-bike-wry/ Last updated: 2018-11-11T00:00:00.000Z **US President's enthusiasm for history dampened** The person who was elected two years ago to do the job of being President of the US cancelled the plan to attend a memorial in a French cemetery for Americans who were killed in WW1 because it was raining. That's why he cancelled, not why they died. I clarify that, in case the President is reading this. **Good Consumer Good** As it's the Weekend Gist, this section is devoted to the pleasure of looking at very expensive things. This time, it's the Ella Cruise Hybrid electric bicycle from German bike boffins, Cube. This snazzy affair has a battery powered electric engine that bundles you along at about 15km an hour, as you gently pedal yourself. Having tried one of these a fortnight ago, I can confirm it's basically like cycling with some invisible hand whooshing you along. Also, when you buy one (for something akin to €2,500) they do put a set of pedals on. ![Snazzy ebike](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/17e6070e-f59e-4c6f-a050-b01629116a48_640x388.png "Snazzy ebike") **Wry Eye for the Rich Guy** Oh, hey, you know those guys. We all know them- they are millionaires but have amusing personal failings and foibles. I mean, maybe they like to build follies in their landscaped gardens with onion-domed roofs. Or they have inappropriate girlfriends that their social circle don't approve of. Or they collect art but they don't know much about it and our little funny sketch will reveal they're boors or something. In fact, our wry little column is a stultifyingly conservative demand for social conformity, which manages to also solely define society in terms of the sort of people who can build onion-domed follies. ### The Gist: Electagram, Hospital Scrooge URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-electagram-hospital-scrooge/ Last updated: 2018-11-07T00:00:00.000Z **Repubs Get Outta Town** Democrats in the US, having received most of the votes cast, lost in the Senate, but won control of the House of Congress. The meaning of this is whatever you want it to be for the purposes of public discussion. But, just here, between us, it means that gerrymandering effectively contained voter's will but couldn't stop it completely. One striking result is that the Republicans now hold no urban districts anywhere in the US. Expect a lot of talk about guns, god and gays for the next two years from them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/078268f3-47f5-4965-a186-b18a6cea368a_640x361.jpeg) **Hospital Scrooge** The Taoiseach said something noteworthy- he specifically said that "previous standard winter plans including additional home help, home care and transitional care had not worked." His diagnosis for this failure? Christmas holidays- by nurses and doctors. His solution: "nurses and other medical professionals should not be on extended holidays over Christmas and the first two weeks of January to ensure that every hospital bed is open" Missing context: Set aside the lack of evidence that hospital overcrowding is caused by seasonal leave. The impact of this policy will fall disproportionately on workers from abroad- in particular from distant climes. To make the long haul flights to families makes sense, extended leave is the only leave they take. One Nurse on twitter also pointed out the meaning of precluding Jan leave (@NursePollyRGN) "many of our non Christian colleagues work all through the Xmas & new year and take leave from the 7th for their own celebrations, so if we deny them leave in January, who will work Xmas in their place ?" The Irish medical system ceases to function if it stops being an attractive place to work for foreign nurses and doctors. The HSE may discover that medical staff aren't just for Christmas, they're for life. ### The Gist: Election Endgame, Brexit Panto, Irish Data circus URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-election-endgame-brexit/ Last updated: 2018-11-06T00:00:00.000Z **Edgy Election** Democrats hope to take control of Congress in an US. The local commentary casually acknowledges that the constituancies are gerrymandered, there is widespread vote suppression of minorities and that the voting machines are suseptible to tampering. Basically, it takes an overwhelming Democrat vote turnout to hit even representation. This appears to be passively accepted as just how things have to be. However, this time, their opponants may just have managed to motivate that sort of strong response by running an openly racist campaign. If not, we can expect Republicans to conclude racism is a winning proposition and to order a larger supply for use over the next two years. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/a847f440-de57-4fbf-aaee-86d76f52f668_640x853.jpeg) **Brexit \*sigh\*** Concerns this week that the UK's negotations with itself appear on the verge of collapse. Random members of the UK government have advanced mutually incompatile propositions this week to each other, none of which have any possibility of being accepted by the EU- who they seem to continually forget are their negotiating partners. The latest trip around this ever-narrowing gyre culminated in David Davis' successor, Minister for Brexit Dominc Raab, asserting that the Irish backstop the UK promised would stand forever, no-matter what, was only good for 12 weeks. This notion then conflagrated on contact with reality. **Irish Gov Wants to Overshare** This week the Irish Gov bill to share private and personal data around between public bodies without prior notice, contrary to EU law, was back in front of the Oireachtas. I mean, I know it's not headline news but I feel I should tell you. You could tell your TDs its bad and they should stop it. They won't care, one way or the other, but the consequences of this passing will unfold over expensive, litigation filled decades. ### Weekend Gist: Flabby News bit, Glossy Bit, Slice of Life URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-gist-flabby-news-bit-glossy/ Last updated: 2018-11-03T00:00:00.000Z **News bit** The media's love of fellas who'll leave their natural habitat of the golf club bar and tell you what they really think of travellers and women continued this week on TV golf club bar, the Late Late Show. Ignoring the specific spoutings (which is what every normal person learns to do when encountering this sort of boor) this capped a very bad month for the media. More concerning for those of us who have to live in the society that media reports on, there is precious little sign of any reflection or introspection. As so frequently is the case, the exception has been [this article](https://dublininquirer.com/2018/10/31/niamh-did-the-media-give-peter-casey-too-much-coverage?ref=thegist.ie) from the Dublin Inquirer, which did the work of quantifying just how much his statements about travellers turned Casey into the darling of the press. He's the purple bar below. Remember it the next time you hear a journalist tell you they're just neutrally giving equal time to all candidates. ![Niamh Kirk's analysis of candidate coverage](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/d2896dcc-65c9-4f21-904d-ebd849e3c206_640x395.png "Niamh Kirk's analysis of candidate coverage") **So expensive** Here at the Weekend Gist, we're committed to giving you the opportunity to enjoy a full colour photo of a consumer good you can't afford, but which is pleasurable to look at. This week, a piece of jewelry from Stonechat. They make their own in their shop in the Westbury Mall in Dublin and you can watch the talented lady silver smithing away at shiny metal. For me, seeing someone skilled making something is a pleasure in itself. Anyway, I like this silver necklace, because I really love the National Museum's torc collection which it's a nod to. There's a bigger one as well, for ladies who go to the theatre, wearing scarves. But this one is 17mm wide, and, designed by Ann Chapman, it's €150. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/bf30840b-6859-4c4f-bbb6-3eb2db01b55d_640x640.jpeg) **Closing column of whimsy** Every weekend publication closes out with a slice of life. Due to an unexpected interaction with a reversing car, I visited an A&E dept this week. In and out in 8 hours, the main thing that occurred to me was that the worst of the three waiting rooms I visited was the one that had a big TV showing Sky news with the sound on. In a way, cable news is the spiritual enemy of The Gist, being news delivered at great length without ever trying to learn anything from it. Adding a TV to a public space is a sort of mild violence. Adding one showing a 24 hour news channel is a full blown assaut- something no A&E needs. Anyway, I'm just going up to the club bar, does anyone want another G&T? ### The Gist: Google's man problem, US' man problem, UK's not knowing things problem URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-google-s-man-problem-us/ Last updated: 2018-11-02T00:00:00.000Z **Google staff Feeling less Lucky** Thousands of people got up from their desks in Google at 11.10am all around the world and walked out to protest the spectacular failures of the company's management to properly deal with the sex harassment. This is a not great look for any company, particularly one so profitable that competition for talented staff is one of the few things that can restrict growth. The problem is that men were misbehaving and the company, run by men didn't act effectively to dissuade them. The consequence has been a growing gap in the self perception of Google's employees and the management of Google about the kind of place Google is. Good people have resigned over ethical concerns about military use of Google's work. Others have decided to leave employment in Google because they no longer felt it was a safe or welcoming place to work. US Alphabet employees make political donations to Democrats over Republicans at a rate of approx 15:1. Management are going to have to do better than a set of non-apology apologies, or get used to seeing talent walk out the door. Who knows, if things really get tough, staff might even decide unions have a place in the 21st century after all. ![Alphabet political donations](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/1b5b8192-7cc7-4df1-834e-30e63bc9acd2_640x499.png "Alphabet political donations") **US Pres reveals some new depths that we always knew he had** The House of Congress looks about 85% likely to fall into Democrat control. It might even be a thumping Democrat victory, driven by disgust at the US president's first two years in office. That president has responded with a twin track strategy- being super-extra disgusting and finding excuses for why nothing is his fault. Given what we know of him and his life history, it seems likely this is a return to the patterns of a lifetime of responding to his own failures. If US voters decide they couldn't be arsed to vote and Dems fall short, we're likely to see matters degenerate further. **Hooey, the Brexit years** Clocks running down, sand running out, planes reaching ends of runways, cars driving towards cliff edges. People writing about Brexit have been running out of metaphors recently to describe the state of affairs. Nonetheless, even without a fresh comparator the project stumbles on. The most recent twist is the commencement of a criminal inquiry into the Leave.EU campaign over where the cash came from. This has some on the remain side calling for Brexit steps taken on foot of that vote to be 'put on hold'. This really only in demonstrates that the UK remains woefully incapable of understanding the dynamics of a referendum. The solution to a doubtful referendum result is another referendum, with new arguments. Everything else is hooey. ### The Gist: News dearth, US Pres goes Full Irish, Irish passports in demand URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-news-dearth-us-pres-goes/ Last updated: 2018-10-31T00:00:00.000Z **Bank Holiday Hangover** Schools are closed this week, and the bits of the country that didn't go back to work yesterday (newspapers and the like) found that their heart wasn't really in it. Similarly, journalists scraped around the sides of walls and even reported on wills in the probate office to bring you bits of things that could be passed off as news. From a big bequest to the Irish Cancer society by a dead lady with lots of money to how to wake up in the morning now the clocks have gone back- we got it at its inconsequential best. **US President goes Full Irish** One week from the Election in the US. To follow yesterday's announcement that US troops are to be marched up to the top of a hill on the US Mexico border before being marched down again- because that's where brown foreigners are- the man in charge of the largest collection of bombs in the world was at it again. Today, he announced he intended to revoke the right to citizenship for people born in the US. This policy posed a slight moral quandry in Ireland, where it was roundly condembed for being both racist and also illegal under the US constitution. On the other had, if successful, the President would have proved himself so extreme that he would have matched what Irish voters voted for in a 2004 referendum by a 79% majority. Of course, he can't do this, and he has no intention of actually doing it. He just needs something to snatch critical column inches and mouthbreathing panel discussion away from his supporters actually trying to kill the people his government designated their enemies. Like I say, it's one week from the election. **You. Shall. Not. Passport.** Speaking of the exciting world of becoming an Irish citizen, there were reports today that 15,000 applications from the UK had been turned down (an increase from 1 the previous year). The Dept of Foreign Affairs disagreed with the numbers but declined to provide their own. Everyone agreed there were tens of thousands of extra applications from the UK. The chair of the Seanad's brexit committee pointed out that 10% of the UK was eligible to apply for an Irish passport- a total figure in excess of the current population of Ireland. It is possible Dublinrents may keep going up for a while. An aside: When the BBC reported on this story, they went to the trouble of choosing for their accompanying illustration a set of Blue Passports, not the wine coloured ones of the EU. Rather undermining the veracity of this image was the fact the Irish Passport was also blue, a state of affairs which has not pertained for approximately 100 years. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46030552 ![Ireland is familiar with the standard of debate in an EU Referendum](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/46869899-ef05-4c97-93d3-521425bde9f1_480x640.jpeg "Ireland is familiar with the standard of debate in an EU Referendum") ### Merkel's last lap, US Army Playacting, Loser wants a prize URL: https://www.thegist.ie/merkel-s-last-lap-us-army-playacting/ Last updated: 2018-10-30T00:00:00.000Z **Europe's Anchors' away** The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, has seen her once unquestioned power ebbing away across a number of lackluster regional elections. The Government parties have not been doing well- which is bad news for the political centre as both the main German parties are currently in government together. She announced over the weekend that she'll be stepping down in 2021, effectively opening the race to replace her. The EU (and the rest of the world) has grown to rely on Germany as a solid, unflappable counterweight to hysteria elsewhere in the world. When Bismark was dismissed by Kaiser Willhelm II, Punch published Tenniel's famous Dropping The Pilot cartoon. Depending on Germany's next choice, we may look back to this as the moment Europe lost its anchor. ![Dropping the Pilot](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/4ee14578-1452-4981-b4ba-1db75f44af39_500x728.jpeg "Dropping the Pilot") **The Grand old Duke of York?** Trump, the moral homoculus who currently has control of the resources of the largest military power in the world, was complaining this week that people kept talking about his supporters trying to kill the individuals he attacked by name. As there's an election coming up, he wanted the press to talk about things like foreigners and whatever might angry up the blood amongst the people he wanted to vote. So, as if by magic, he's ordered thousands of troops to the US-Mexico border, to guard against literally no real threat at all. It's in the news. So, mission accomplished. **Peter Casey and the noisy minority** Peter Casey was trounced in the Presidential election. He recieved approximately 19% of the cast vote. Now he wants someone to hand him some power as a participation trophy. He suggested he'd take a seat for Fianna Fáil in Donegal. The TDs who hold the FF seats in Donegal were unenthusiastic about that plan. Now, comedy rump party Renua- who still recieve state funding- have offered to make him their leader. The party lost all of its political representation in the Oireachtas and received only 2.2% of the vote in the 2016 election. Which, neatly, was where Casey was polling before being anointed the primary opponent to Michael D Higgins by media exposure. ### Weekend Gist: President returned News, Luxury Good Photo, Wry Comment on Everyday Life URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-gist-president-returned-news/ Last updated: 2018-10-27T00:00:00.000Z **Higgins triumphs unnoticed** The President of Ireland having been reelected with the largest personal mandate in the country's electoral history, the media have immediately rushed to give more attention and oxygen to the reactionary comments of the shambling mound who came a very distant second. It is possible this may represent a systemic problem in how the Irish media reacts to stimulai. But, if it does, be reassured you will never find the Irish media troubling you with reflections on that. **Look! So Shiny and Expensive** Like all weekend editions, the Saturday Gist offers you a glimpse of stuff you can't afford, with the insouciance of people who presume we all have €10K to spend on a pair of shoes. We can assure you, this is not because the advertising budget for luxury goods is spectacular. So, please meet the NOMOS Glashutte Zurich WeltTimer Watch. It can tell the time in two places at once, like a €10 casio can, but this one is made of cogs and is slightly less accurate and costs €4500\. But it does look cool. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/fa033202-01c0-4dc5-a9be-d91f928065d2_640x640.jpeg) **It's a funny old game, life** As a weekend edition, we end with some light hearted reflections on how things are these days. Probably with some reference to making kids' Halloween costumes. Of course, the Weekend Gist loves everyday life, and warmly commends it to you, our valued readers. The Autumn is drawing in, with leaves blowing all around the place. Perhaps we should finish by quoting Yeats or Heaney or one of those lads about Peter Casey. But nothing too unfamiliar, because we haven't actually read any poetry in decades. Probably something from Soundings. "An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered cloak upon a stick" ### The Gist: Pres/Ref Vote, Data Air Raid, Cable Fable URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-pres-ref-vote-data-air-raid/ Last updated: 2018-10-26T00:00:00.000Z **Nation, just glad its all over, votes** Its only been a few short weeks of national embaressment, appeals to the lowest impulses in the world, motivational business word-guff, holy eczema cures and explanations of how money you give away can end up back with you again. But today, the bit of the nation that gets up and votes will decide if they want it to go on like this for another seven years, or to return to the relative relief of just having Michael D Higgins be a super good President. Polls suggest the latter is the favoured choice. As a bonus vote, government has arranged for a special referendum on whether you want to annoy Senator Ronan Mullen. Always vote Yes when presented with that opportunity. **Flying Blind** British Airways (which is owned by the same company as Aer Lingus) has not had the best of track records minding its customer's data since the GDPR came into effect. First it demanded that customers post all their personal details in public messages "to comply with the GDPR" if they wanted their customer service through Twitter. Then they announced they'd been hacked and about 380,000 people (by definition, pretty well-off people) now had their credit card details in the hands of the culprits. And this week, they announced that, now they thought about it, perhaps another 180,000 on top of that had also been hit. The real interest here- for anyone not actually using British Airways to fly about the place- is to see what sort of enforcement or court compensation consequences flow from these mass breaches. **Wired to the Moon** The problem with the National Broadband Plan has always been that it took a plan that was essentially political in nature- ("Screw it, we're going to wire up every home, regardless")- and then tried to apply a profit-driven, market approach. Since wiring up every home is, basically, commercially insane but socially valuable this posed a difficulty. When the ESB went around bringing electricity to the whole of Ireland, they didn't try to find a cheap and profit-generating way to do it. There wasn't one. But they just did it anyway. Now the effort to apply the logic of tendering to making sure that Luke Skywalker can get wifi on Skellig Michael seems to be tottering. Gov sources are talking about working on a Plan B. Apparently, six years in, they're thinking of asking the ESB to do it. Pic Credit: By Jerzy Strzelecki - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15821956 ![Poor wifi, lashings of blue milk](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/88e38d0c-8adf-46ee-b136-2cbec695b510_640x416.jpeg "Poor wifi, lashings of blue milk") ### CSI:Tuam, TV Debate, God-Bothering URL: https://www.thegist.ie/csi-tuam-tv-debate-god-bothering/ Last updated: 2018-10-24T00:00:00.000Z ### **The Past Is a Foreign Country, With No Extradition Treaty** In Tuam, Co. Galway there's a small patch of grass with a wall around it in the middle of a housing estate. Under the grass is a sewage works, which was used as a mass grave for hundreds of babies and children. They died after being taken from their mothers, who were then themselves frequently coercively confined and made to work for no pay. This system was state policy at the time. The police have shown curious disinterest in investigating this state of affairs. The local coroner has declined to convene an inquest. The HSE and then Tusla knew of the unusually high mortality rate in the attached Mother and Baby Home since 2012 but took no action. Now it's been announced there will be a forensic excavation of the site. Let's see how that turns out. ### **Don't Bore Us, Just Get To The Áras** There was a telly debate in the Presidential election. None of the participants had live tweets put to them, and so had nobody to blame but themselves for their performance. Contrary to any possible logic, there will be another one before polling day. The polls say most of the candidates will then lose their deposits and the President, Michael D. Higgins will be returned to office to sighs of relief from the nation that it's all over. At this stage, I'm mostly still in it to see if there's a TV moment where Sean Gallagher realises on camera he lost because people just didn't want him to win. ### **God-Bothering** There's a 2009 defamation law that made Blasphemy in Ireland a very serious crime with a fixed fine of €25,0000 in all cases. This being Ireland, it was made so very serious in order to try to dissuade investigators and prosecutors from ever trying to use it. And nobody ever has tried, so far. Now there's a vote coming up on removing the Constitutional ban on blasphemy. If it goes, so does the law and the fine. This is a bit like digging up one of those unexploded WW2 bombs. It hasn't gone off up to now. You could just leave it where it is. But, in the Constitution as in life, leaving unexploded bombs in place is usually the wrong choice. ### The Gist: UK's 800 minutes of Irish Oppression, Royal Excuses, Wallfallen Schools URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-s-800-minutes-of-irish/ Last updated: 2018-10-23T00:00:00.000Z ![Odeon Kids Club 1950s Lyrics](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/e74475cd-d273-4c7b-a0b2-175f42c4c68f_640x352.png "Odeon Kids Club 1950s Lyrics") **UK, longing to be a nation once again** The UK Prime Minister, who is still Theresa May at time of writing, announced a new plan to deal with the fact that, apparently, nobody in charge of the Brexit project noticed that Ireland was a different country. And that now that they know, they are none to happy about the consequences. This plan is, basically, that the EU join the UK in pretending that all the previous plans and agreements (backstops, sequencing of negotiations etc) just didn't happen. Time, as always, will tell whether this plan is successful or joins all of the UK government's previous plans in a sort of hot compost heap of shredded dreams of Empire. **Saudi crown prince explains it all** Ah, you see, this was all just here when I got here. And I've only just noticed it now. Before you pointed it out, I thought it was a work of conceptual art. And I also hadn't noticed it. And, now that I think of it, I think it was done by my friend who just died. **Wallfallen Schools** Builders the Dept of Education is suing for not building four schools properly also built tens of other schools. Turns out they're not super either. "Ties that fix the exterior walls to interior walls were inadequate" as RTE helpfully described one of the problems That seems not great for buildings full of children. **Extra:** you likely follow my @Tupp\_ed account on Twitter. Sadly, the giant inscrutable brain that runs their security system has decided I look shifty and has locked my account in case all of my tweets have been automatically generated by sub-par software with a weakness for children's TV of the 1970s. While this is sorted out, please subscribe to my backup account @Tupped ### The Gist: UK rails at last 800 minutes of Irish Opression, Royal excuses, Education breaks down walls URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-rails-at-last-800-minutes/ Last updated: 2018-10-22T00:00:00.000Z ![Odeon Kids Club 1950s Lyrics](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/39556736-baaa-42ae-bb0f-18f6521c73b6_640x352.png "Odeon Kids Club 1950s Lyrics") **UK longs to be a nation once again** The UK Prime Minister, who is still Theresa May at time of writing, announced a new plan to deal with the fact that, apparently, nobody in charge of the Brexit project noticed that Ireland was a different country. And that now that they know, they are none to happy about the consequences. This plan is, basically, that the EU join the UK in pretending that all the previous plans and agreements (backstops, sequencing of negotiations etc) just didn't happen. Time, as always, will tell whether this plan is successful or joins all of the UK government's previous plans in a sort of hot compost heap of shredded dreams of Empire. **Saudi crown prince explains it all** Ah, you see, this was all just here when I got here. And I've only just noticed it now. Before you pointed it out, I thought it was a work of conceptual art. And I also hadn't noticed it. And, now that I think of it, I think it was done by my friend who just died. **Wallfallen Schools** Buliders that the Dept of Education is suing for not building four schools properly also built tens of other schools. Turns out they're not super either. "Ties that fix the exterior walls to interior walls were inadequate" as RTE helpfully described one of the problems That seems not great for buildings full of children. **Extra:** you likely follow my @Tupp\_ed account on Twitter. Sadly, the giant inscrutable brain that runs their security system has decided I look shifty and has locked my account in case all of my tweets have been automatically generated by sub-par software with a weakness for children's TV of the 1970s. While this is sorted out, please subscribe to my backup account @Tupped ### The Gist: Pres election, Boy deportation, Difficult conurbation URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-pres-election-boy-deportation/ Last updated: 2018-10-19T00:00:00.000Z **Small man towers over opponants** Michael D. Higgins, after seven years of doing exactly the job he is applying for to universal acclaim, remains most people's first choice for President. To reassure those people they're right, the other candidates have been existing. The one within the margin of error decided to spice things up by attacking Travellers- in both the general and the specific case- presumably on the basis that being known for being a terrible person was preferable to not being known at all. **Boy Deportation** In 2004 the people of Ireland turned out strongly to change the Constitution. 79% of those voters approved a change that meant that children born in Ireland would no longer automatically Irish citizens. Don't even talk to me. And yet, now that actual small children who have lived their whole lives in Ireland, kids who were born in Ireland, are now threatened with deportation to their parent's countries of origin, there's resistance. In two days over 30,000 people signed a school's petition to keep a 9 year old boy from Bray from being deported to China. This shows (1) people are terrible when asked questions in the abstract (2) people can be excellent when presented with concrete consequences and (3) the 27th Amendment has to be repealed. **Urbanity** Dublin is a small city smooshed across a large space. To allievate this non-ideal combination we sometimes come up with plans to make it easier to live and travel in it. So far this year we've had a tunnel that will disrupt a playing field, which was told to change the plan and find a way to not go under anything. We've had a redraft of the Bus network proposed with the communication nous of a turnip and a plan for a (possibly completely sterile and useless) city plaza fall foul of the same space having been colonised by transport links. It might be time to revisit that idea of having someone in charge of all these things. ### The Gist: Terrible People Are Doing Terrible Things URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-terrible-people-are-doing/ Last updated: 2017-02-01T00:00:00.000Z **Oireachtas Free Speech Zone** Irish High Court finds TDs &Senators can't have restrictions on their speech in the Oireachtas by a court**.** **Courting Attention** US Supreme Court Judge told "You're hired" in prime time TV spectacular **Getting Gisty With IT** Very brief email newslette**r returns.** ![Dalek punch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/7980f1df-adf4-4c7c-87fe-68d09e9a00d4_640x334.jpeg "Dalek punch") ### The Gist: UK lunacy, VP Debate, Tech's listening ears URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-lunacy-vp-debate-tech/ Last updated: 2016-10-04T00:00:00.000Z **UK Lunacy** Tory party conferences are rarely pretty. But this year, the UK's Government appears to have taken note of the defeat of the Blackshirts 80 years ago today in the battle of Cable Street and decided it was time to do something about that. Specifically, they decided to dedicate themselves to destroying Britain by shunning EU trade in favour of 'innovative jam exports', to trying to make employers draw up lists of foreigners, and generally partying like it was 1939\. I genuinely have no idea what on earth all this is about. **VP Debate** Tonight the Vice-Presidential candidates will debate each other. Nobody can tell which is which and fewer people care. **Tech's Listening Ears** Google launched their Google Home speaker and mic today, going head to head with Amazon's Echo speakers to the be actual surveillance microphone that you pay money to put in your house and listen to you all the time and relay what it hears back to a secret site. Perhaps unhelpfully, today it also turns out Yahoo was reading everyone's email for the NSA, even though they said they weren't. ### The Gist: Police and numbers, Tax talk, Debate echos URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-police-and-numbers-tax-talk/ Last updated: 2016-09-28T00:00:00.000Z Hello again! The Dáil is back in session and so are we. **Police and Numbers** Irish police are considering going on strike for more pay. However, it is illegal to go on strike. So they instead all call in sick at the same time. However, the CSO released figures suggesting it might not make as much difference as it ought, as 16-17% of all crimes aren't even recorded in the system for recording crimes. And when they were recorded, they seemed to suffer a sort of grade deflation with up to a third of certain serious crimes given a lower seriousness grade than appropriate. And then, finally, 37% of all the crimes marked detected didn't appear to have been... well, detected. This report into the problems with the official figures was released at the same time as the official figures, which showed that the police were being very successful and there was much less crime. Hard to know what more there is to be said on all that. Oh, the head of the Garda Inspectorate went to the Dáil and agreed she was disappointed that lots of police promotions and senior appointments had been made without their involvement, as their founding law suggested should happen. Nothing was done about it. **Tax Talk** The budget is coming up. It is the talk of the Dáil. Unfortunately, that means we have to listen to suggestions like giving returning emigrants a tax cut. This suggestion, which would have managed to break EU law, be spectacularly racist and be comically unfair can only have been intended to lock up the Mammy vote who want their Johnny to come back with his little kids. Anyway, Enda sank it today, leaving the next daft notion ready to take its place in the noise machine. **Debate Echos** Bloated moral homunculus Donald Trump continued to demonstrate his temperament by sulking loudly about being flattened by Clinton in their debate, days later. This is all to the good and long may it continue. That's your news in Gist. Simon ### The Gist: Banks Stressed, Trump vs Bereaved, Chuteless URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-banks-stressed-trump-vs/ Last updated: 2016-08-01T00:00:00.000Z **Banks Stressed** The two main Irish banks hovered in the bottom of the EU's league table after the continent-wide stress tests that see what would happen in the event of a financial crisis. Basically, this means they were some of the most likely banks to go bust in the event of a problem. Still. The banks issued statements pointing out that there was no problem, and therefore no need to worry. Which rather misses the point of the exercise. **Trump vs Bereaved** Trump's mind-parp arising from the Democratic Convention was to draw attention to the strongest element of that convention (a speech by the muslim parents of a deceased US army captain). He drew attention to the parents by repeatedly smearing them- first suggesting that the dead solider's mother was silenced because of her religion. In response, she wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, calling him ignorant. Then Trump complained that the dead man's father had no right to stand up and criticise him. Then he justified all of this attack on the parents of a dead war hero by complaining that the other guy started it, demonstrating again by falling back on the 'he started it' argument that he was basically an overgrown spoiled child. **Chuteless** So this guy jumped out of an aeroplane and he didn't have a parachute and he managed (just about) to land in a net instead. If you haven't seen this video, go and get it and watch it, from behind your fingers if needs be. ### The Gist: An Appealing Judge, Life Goals, Bon Gabon URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-an-appealing-judge-life/ Last updated: 2016-07-29T00:00:00.000Z As neither of Ireland's news agenda setters (RTE and the Irish Times) can muster any news worth the name, tonight it's an Africa News In Gist Special. **Doubtful prosecution** A judge who convicted (in his absence) a notable rival to the sitting President in the Democratic Republic of the Congo says now she did it under pressure from local spies. I'm sure it will be fine, just like always happens since the King of Belgium used to chop off the locals' hands for the purposes of civilisation and also cash. **Life goals** In Zimbabwe, the 92 year old President has announced his plan to continue in office until he dies. Responding to a statement from his usual power base of veterans of the country's War of Independence that they were withdrawing their support, he threatened to get them. Not totally sure a plan to rule until death announced by a 92 year old is anything more than a medium term problem, mind you. **Gabon Bon** A young fella, who sits on a stairs and sings was filmed and uploaded doing a Celine Dion cover. Avoiding the opprobrium you might expect, the video was shared by a Gabon blogger and then by Celine Dion herself to millions of . Our singing hero points out he likes singing on steps. And that's your news in gist, Africa edition. ### Woman wins, Man parps, Insurance exchange URL: https://www.thegist.ie/woman-wins-man-parps-insurance-exchange/ Last updated: 2016-07-28T00:00:00.000Z **Woman wins** Hilary Clinton won the Democratic Party nomination to be President. This would be ho-hum if it had been some fella. But it was the first time that anyone from the female half of the population of the earth had got such a nod. And that was a big deal. **Man parps** Meanwhile the man running for the Republican party started feeling antsy. It hadn't been about him for, like, three days. So he gave a press conference where he just said a bunch of mad stuff- amongst it an invitation to Putin's Russia to spy on his opponent, to help out. Next week he starts getting told state secrets! **Insurance exchange** ![Information on the Insurance industry is best sought from outside the insurance industry](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/763816ed-b0d8-476e-a0d5-34fe9070d692_640x336.png "Information on the Insurance industry is best sought from outside the insurance industry") ### The Gist: Glossing over speech, Shrinking ad-bags, Terrible things URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-glossing-over-speech-shrinking/ Last updated: 2016-07-25T00:00:00.000Z **Glossing over repeal** The Project Arts centre saw their political speech stifled by an instruction by Dublin City Council to paint over Maser’s “Repeal the 8th” mural, on planning permission grounds. No, I don’t know either. An empty sort of victory for those who would literally want to gloss over this campaign. **Shrinking ad-bags** Yahoo sold itself to some US phone company. The Guardian lost £170million in the last year. RTE dropped a mere €2.8million in comparison. UTVIreland lost itself, being sold to the people who pipe the internet intermittently into your house. The seven radio stations UTV used to own were also sold, to Rupert Murdoch, after the owner said it was suffering “as the recovery in Irish radio fails to take hold”. The problem, locally and everywhere else, is that ads are moving onto the internet (basically 75% to Google and 25% to Facebook so far) and not coming back. And these are all ad reliant businesses (RTE by govt policy). It looks like only the sturdy email newsletter can be relied upon to survive the coming ad drought. **Terrible things** Now, here’s the thing- terrible things are happening all over the world, all the time and they always have been. But (see above) media really want your attention. So, if you’re reading about the terrible things now, that does not mean there is more of them. It just means somebody’s gone to the trouble of playing the part of the sucky-faced old church lady and hurried to tell you the bad news they’ve just heard. If you don’t want to know about something that doesn’t directly effect you, it is OK for you not to seek that info out. ![This one wasn't subject to an enforcement letter.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b3c5edf4-d7cf-4c88-b449-fe9e4838e9dc_640x427.jpeg "This one wasn't subject to an enforcement letter.") (A Maser mural near the Project that nobody seems in a hurry to paint over on planning grounds) ### The Gist: Trump horrorshow, A Suitable Bob, Shots in Munich, Isles of Insurance URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-trump-horrorshow-a-suitable/ Last updated: 2016-07-22T00:00:00.000Z **Trump horrorshow** The Republican convention peaked at 3am Irish time yesterday as plus-sized moral homoculous Donald Trump gave his acceptance speech. Earlier he gave an interview to the NY Times where he made protective NATO action dependent on the receipt of sufficient cash money from the ally states. This being perhaps the first time a US presidential candidate has suggested they intend to follow the example of the creation of the Athenian Empire. Look, what can you say, he's clearly a terrible person? (The Athenians' conversion of allies into imperial subjects through military threat ended in the destruction of their polity. But who reads books anyway?) **A Suitable Bob** Bob was in a snakeskin suit and wanted to people to rock and the audience had come dressed in flip-flops. So he fucked them out of it, accidentally providing Pennys with a free ad in the process. **Shots in Munich** A shopping centre. Shots. Men with guns. People have died. We don't know anything beyond that and so nothing beyond that should be said yet. **Isles of Insurance** A company selling insurance to 14k people in Ireland- from out of Gibraltar- has stopped trading. After Sentana, selling insurance in Ireland from out of Malta, went the same way. I am starting to think rocky islands are just not the natural habitats of insurance companies. ![Bone Fides](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/678af881-ea2b-46f3-9e27-6e4356778471_640x851.png "Bone Fides") ### The Gist: UK Doomwatch, UnWarranted Hotmail, Eircod URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-uk-doomwatch-unwarranted/ Last updated: 2016-07-14T00:00:00.000Z **UK Doomwatch** The new cabinet has been appointed in the UK and, proving that reality may be buckling, it is even more gruesome than the last one. Boris Johnson’s appointment as Foreign Secretary is basically just having a laugh. **UnWarranted Hotmail** In 2013, a fellow’s Hotmail was sitting in Dublin and a US judge issued a warrant for it. Today the 2nd highest court in the US said that was not OK as warrants couldn’t function outside the US. This is a very important case, both for non-US internet users and for all the other countries who would feel unhappy about US court orders and warrants being applicable inside their borders. **Eircod** It almost tripled its costs, it's not being used, nobody bothered to remember theirs. Eircode turns 1 today, amidst a blizzard of "yeah, but" statements from the people in charge of spending the cash and planning the project. ### The Gist: We're Rich!, YouTube pressure URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-we-re-rich-youtube-pressure/ Last updated: 2016-07-12T00:00:00.000Z **We’re Rich!** Hey, the CSO say that last year Gross Domestic Product grew by, not 7% but 26.3%. This doesn’t mean that we all get bars of gold in the post as it turns out that much of those ‘Domestic’ monies are really measuring multi-national companies cash. **YouTube Pressure** Something of an interesting moment today. A documentary was uploaded a week ago to YouTube on missing child Mary Boyle. It was made by Gemma Doherty, a journalist with the Daily Mail (and formerly with the Indo group). I think it’s fair to say that it was lightly covered by Irish mass media- not ignored, but not exactly trumpeted either. It didn’t matter- in that one week, the documentary reached over 78k views. After which, today, the Gardaí announced they would set up a review of the case. Which does raise the question of what, exactly, an Irish mass media is any more. ### The Dead, Cow Correction, Self-Suing Schools, 'Ready, Fire, Aim' URL: https://www.thegist.ie/the-dead-cow-correction-self-suing/ Last updated: 2016-07-08T00:00:00.000Z **The Dead** Movies would have us cheer for the good guys, the downtrodden, when they fight back. But there was a demonstration in Dallas last night over the routine shooting of black american citizens by their police forces. And someone or some people started shooting at the police, killing four of them. These may have been lovely people, or nasty people who were shot. It didn’t matter to the people who were killing them. These dead people shouldn’t be treated as a kind of equivalent to the hundreds of dead black men, mostly, who met their ends when they met the police. We’ve been shown them killed as video, and then live streams, bring us right into the US black experience. Gist: Longstanding US social poison faces longer, hotter Summer. **Cow Correction** Yesterday, I claimed the UK army had shot and killed cows. Despite being only 5 words long, I managed thereby to suggest Monaghan had been invaded by foreign troops intent on some modern cattle raid. This was wrong, and while I do feel free to squeeze facts down, I try not to just get things flatly wrong. Sorry! **Self-Suing Schools** Waiting lists for schools are being abolished. Schools are saying they’ll be sued by parents. Clearly, the kind of parents who can afford to sue for laffs. **‘Ready, Fire, Aim’** The current surveillance legal regime will be examined by the Law Reform Commission. But the Dept of Justice wants to extend its surveillance laws in the meantime. Because, why wait? ### Morning Gist: Cow Dead, FF reanimate, Blair whatever URL: https://www.thegist.ie/morning-gist-cow-dead-ff-reanimate/ Last updated: 2016-07-07T00:00:00.000Z **Cow Dead** UK army shot some cows. That’s it. **FF reanimate** Poll shows rise in support for FF. FG TDs seem to misdiagnosed the problem as not controlling cabinet sufficiently. In fact the problem for FG is insufficient votes at the last election, something they haven't come to terms with yet. **Blair whatever** As the Chilcot report was kind of long, it was much easier to report on it through the lens of the prepared reactions of the main party. So Tony Blair said he was sad about all the dead people but he was still totally right and that is the story done and dusted. ### Morning Edition: Iraq Hindsight, Pistorius, ePrivate No More URL: https://www.thegist.ie/morning-edition-iraq-hindsight-pistorius/ Last updated: 2016-07-06T00:00:00.000Z **Iraq Hindsight,** Oh hey, look at all those words! That will be mostly how the Chilcot report, published today, will be reported on today. Running to 12 volumes, and millions of words it is report on how the UK went to war in Iraq. (Spoiler: Doesn’t end well). The people mentioned in it have had months to familiarise themselves with it while journalists will have three hours to skim it before dropping in front of cameras and keyboards to describe what it says and means. So, expect a rather, eh, skewed tale to begin. Key thing to remember about this is that its author is a retired English Civil Servant who served in the NI Office, the Home Office, the Civil Service Department and then the Cabinet Office. Basically, they appointed Sir Humphrey Appleby. So, leave aside fevered ideas of accusations of illegal warmongering. This is a tidy-up mission. **Pistorius** South African man got six years for killing his girlfriend. **ePrivate No More** The Irish Government has been lobbying for the EU Commission to actually repeal the ePrivacy Directive, removing one of the main protectors of EU citizens online. This follows a number of lobbying meetings by Google with officials, recorded on the new register of lobbying. And today, a bunch of the tech giants issued their own call for ePrivacy to be withdrawn. I leave you to think about whose interests the Irish Ministers have been advancing in these circumstances. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/3663f9af-07fa-41b3-9609-28bace94dade_640x239.jpeg) ### Weekend News In Gist URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-news-in-gist/ Last updated: 2016-07-03T00:00:00.000Z Broken Britain, Sky-Hole **Broken Britain,** After so many years of talking about it, UK newspapers have finally Broken Britain. But, as Boris was knifed by human-guppie hybrid Michael Gove we can't even look forward to the sight of the heir-apparent squandering his unearned chance. Gove, who once denounced the Good Friday Agreement, has achieved something nobody thought possible by finding a level of personal objectionability that repulses Conservative Party MPs. Theresa May, who as Home Secretary paid for a billboard to drive around London telling immigrants to go home, is now seen as the more palatable alternative. Labour has gone insane just when we needed them not to. From the looks of it, this will be the gist of every Labour-related report for the foreseeable future. **Sky-Hole** Good news everyone! Remember the hole in the Ozone layer we all heard about in the 1990s? Well, it looks like the world actually did something positive for a change with an international treaty banning use of CFCs. This year, as the CFC intensity reduced, the Ozone hole has started to shrink. Downside is, we invented things called HFCs to replace the CFCs, which were fine for the Ozone layer but also turn out to have been the fastest rising source of greenhouse gases in the EU. That's your News in Gist @Tupp\_ed ### *Morning Edition* UK check-in, Fans with fans, Troublesome Priests URL: https://www.thegist.ie/morning-edition-uk-check-in-fans/ Last updated: 2016-06-30T00:00:00.000Z **UK Check-In** Britain is still stuffed. New ways things have gone wrong since yesterday: Headbanging brexiteers declaring for Tory leadership. Labour MPs demanding their leader go, but with no alternative in mind while leader insists on staying with no plan to heal the split. Countdown to property crash stats becoming known still clicking away in the background, with consequences for UK banks who have lent to build huge buy-to-let landlordism. **Fans with fans** Current status of Irish fans: About to be awarded the Medal of the City of Paris for being gas. **Troublesome Priests** Universities, it turns out, have been spending money on chaplins, but the posts kept being filled mostly by priests. New plan: everyone can apply to be a chaplin. (Likely outcome: just different priests) ### Brit-Fit, Bankflop, Iceland cometh URL: https://www.thegist.ie/brit-fit-bankflop-iceland-cometh/ Last updated: 2016-06-28T00:00:00.000Z **Brit-Fit** The UK keeps up the high standards of the last few days. Boris announced his plan was to just keep things as they are now, but without having to follow any EU rules. Also, rainbow flavoured ice cream, unicorn-based transport network, fat-burning doughnuts. The Labour Party continued to rage against itself. George Osborne held an early morning press to reassure London markets before they opened. Markets were suitably settled and spent another day dropping off a cliff. Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland continued to be the only adult in charge in the UK. **Bankflop** As Bank of Ireland’s shares was enjoying a sympathetic cliff fall experience, its customers got to find out what it was like when its ATMs stopped working. (It was rubbish, from personal experience). They came back later. **Iceland Cometh** England, of course, were still very much looking forward to winning in the Euro 2016 championship. They just had to get past beating Iceland, a land of foreigners and therefore intrinsically not as good. So, they put down their Boris columns in the Telegraph, jogged out and were promptly knocked out of the competition, adding to the gaiety of all (not England) nations. ### Turkey murders, UK flailing, Bin sneaks URL: https://www.thegist.ie/turkey-murders-uk-flailing-bin-sneaks/ Last updated: 2016-06-28T00:00:00.000Z **Turkey murders** People shot travellers and then blew themselves up in Turkey’s main international airport killing 28 people who just wanted to get somewhere or do their job. This is just one of those rote stories now, because you can’t really stop people from doing this every time they try it and the pattern is the same. We all just have to play the odds that we won’t be the people caught on the day it happens. Everything else is security theatre. **UK flailing** Nope, they still have no idea what they’re going to do now. The Labour MPs overwhelmingly voted no confidence in Corbyn , who basically said ‘so what. I’m just going to sit here.’ Farage made a show of himself in the EuroParliament, prompting the head of the EU commission Juncker to also make a different kind of a show of himself. Rupert Murdoch came out for Boris for PM. Osborne said he thought he’d have to raise taxes and cut spending in aftermath of the mad vote. I mean, look there’s hardly a bright spot anywhere. There was a big march in London, but someone’s still going to have to get Labour back functioning and make it run on ‘Back In’ ticket to fix this. **Bin sneaks,** Greyhound, the unlovely firm Dublin City Council sold all its bin customers to suddenly, are attempting to evade the spirit of the Gov’s plan to freeze the pay by weight plan for a year by just switching everyone to pay by weight unless they opt out by 1st August. (their site has no opt out mentioned on it). This will be a big problem for the Government who will get it in the neck from the lots and lots of Dubliners who will find out about this in their first August bill. **Endpapers:** Here, a reminder that there's more than one Britain: https://youtu.be/EfuKjVBkL3U That's your News In Gist @Tupp\_ed ### Fixit URL: https://www.thegist.ie/fixit/ Last updated: 2016-06-25T00:00:00.000Z **Fixit** > “If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.” \-The Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett Well, they only went and did it. England and Wales rose up against London, with all its horrid Others and voted to pull the End of the World switch. The Act of Union may unravel, Scotland and N. Ireland dashing for the safety of keeping their maroon passports. David Cameron’s place in the history books is assured. He resigned, certain to be remembered as one of the most significant of Prime Ministers- the man who made the worst political miscalculation in modern British history and blew up the future. Oh, the vortex of wrongheadedness that created this self-inflicted, unforced disaster for the UK! Its political discourse around the EU has been basically dysfunctional for decades. Its popular print media are clinically insane on the subject. The voters have, quite literally, never heard anything about the EU that actually exists. They have also been trained by the horrible 1st past the post voting system the UK uses to think that their vote probably doesn’t matter. We saw videos of “Leave” voters expressing regret at their choices today on the TV. They only wanted to have a pop at all those people who are always telling them what to do. This is how referenda work- unlike parliamentary elections, lining up all the powerful, connected and knowledgeable voices on one side is almost the most certain way to boost the other camp. Power, office or expertise is not an advantage in a referendum- it is starting handicapped. Cornwall (who voted strongly to leave) issued a call to preserve all its EU funding. They mean it. This can be fixed. Not with another referendum (the UK is still not sufficiently used to these votes to be able to face a second one) but with an election where reversing the decision is offered by one side. That can only happen as long as nobody in the dissolving UK executive presses the Article 50 Big Red Button out of some sort of cliff-edge mania. The moment that happens, the way back takes years and years. So, first chaos (the UK property bubble popped today, btw. It’ll just take a few weeks for it to be undeniable). Then lots and lots of buyer’s remorse, in polls and everyday life. If you want to help, always share those videos of regretful Leave voters. Then, an election on climbing back into the lifeboat from the freezing water. This can be fixed. Not that it will, necessarily. After all, there is no such thing as progress. But even when it looks like all is lost, a country can find itself again. We will all gain if Britain decides it wants to start on the way home. ### Counting to Two, Free Money, Bins URL: https://www.thegist.ie/counting-to-two-free-money-bins/ Last updated: 2016-06-24T00:00:00.000Z **Counting to Two** Britain has voted and they're counting all the bits of paper. If you're reading this in the morning, sure, you'll know better than me what happened. If not, go off to bed. The whole thing was still mad. **Free Money** There was a great story about a fella at an ATM that started giving out free money. He gave it back when the police were called, but was prosecuted anyway. The court directed that he not be convicted as the prosecution had charged him with taking the money from a thing that, it turned out, they didn't prove existed. **Bins** Suffering from post-Water trauma, the Gov suddenly realised that Phil Hogan had left them another gift- a bin charge mess. Solution: Let's just not do that for a year and then, you know, maybe it will all be better then. ![Ireland is familiar with the standard of debate in an EU Referendum](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/1de97a13-154d-476f-8e90-9386f71abc74_480x640.jpeg "Ireland is familiar with the standard of debate in an EU Referendum") That's your News in Gist @Tupp\_ed ### *Morning Edition* Football, England's Nervous Breakdown, US Sit-In URL: https://www.thegist.ie/morning-edition-football-england/ Last updated: 2016-06-23T00:00:00.000Z **Football** Ireland won against Italy. We get to play again! Irish Fan Status: Still gas. Also, checking on their phones how you apply for a loan from the credit union. **England’s Nervous Breakdown** The people of the increasingly-misnamed United Kingdom go to the polls to experience a pleasure well familiar to the Irish. They get to vote in a referendum. This referendum, being an example of Folly that a connoisseur of the inexplicable misjudgments of people in power could savour for years, has proceeded in a civilised and respectful way in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Meanwhile, England has been suffering a nervous breakdown. Fascism has been stoked and voiced in the mainstream. There has been murder on the streets. Decades of irrational hostility to the EU has bloomed into an outburst of formless, meaningless screams of rage by people who feel they ought to be be able to do as they please, unhampered by rules of civilised behaviour or other people’s rights. What I’m saying here is, if you’re reading this and have a say, quickly go out and vote Remain. While we wait for the unknowable outcome, remember that the UK polling companies have no corpus of nationwide referenda data to identify and correct statistical artefacts in their raw data and so, in all likelihood, where results look close, your guess is as good as theirs. **US Sit-In** Democrats in Congress decided to stage a Sit-In on the floor of the House of Representatives to demand a vote on a law to stop people on terrorist watch lists from buying guns. The Republicans turned off the TV cameras, and the telly stations reporting switched to broadcasting live video streams from Democrats' phones, thereby suddenly handing control of the images to the protest. As I say, it has been a big week for Folly. ### Fascists, Football, Failure URL: https://www.thegist.ie/fascists-football-failure/ Last updated: 2016-06-18T00:00:00.000Z **Fascists** Turns out a man who's accused of murdering an MP while shouting "Britain First" may turn out to be a subscriber to fascist magazines, to behave like a fascist and assert his name is "“Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”" when asked it in court. These facts suggest there are reasonable grounds to think Jo Cox MP may have been killed by a fascist. What's surprising is that there was quite an effort being made to deny the killing any political meaning in bits of the UK press. Until the "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" bit. That sort of puts the kibosh on that. **Football** Ireland lost 3-0 to Belgium. Irish fan status: still gas. **Failure** Rio is hosting the 2016 Olympic Games. By way of an FYI to the world, it's declared a state of "total collapse of public security, health, education, transport and environmental management". Now, not being familiar with the social affairs of Rio, this sort of statement might be just business as usual, but it does hint that the Olympics may have a few hiccups to come. Meanwhile, Belgium's police arrested a bunch of people they said wanted to kill people at the Euros and there were a bunch of, um, *issues* around Azerbaijan's hosting of a F1 race thing. Hopefully, international sport will have a better time of it next week. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/bae7180d-5952-4c5d-9402-e6fb5320d004_480x640.jpeg) That's your News in Gist @Tupp\_ed ### GSOC'd, Irish Fans, Popping Pill Prices URL: https://www.thegist.ie/gsoc-d-irish-fans-popping-pill-prices/ Last updated: 2016-06-17T00:00:00.000Z **GSOC’d** If it’s a Friday afternoon, then it must be a difficult report being released from the Department of Justice. This one was the first inquiry of its sort into whether GSOC did things correctly after a lady died in a road traffic accident and before a Garda they had been investigating died in station. Chunks of the report have been held back, but from what we can see the answer to the question posed above is, ‘not really but also the law wasn’t what it should have been anyway’. **Irish Fans** Still gas. **Popping Pill Prices** The HSE can just decide to pay less for drugs, apparently. It says it will unless the drug companies lower their prices. The companies don’t want to lower them all that much. Hardly surprising. It does make one wonder why the HSE didn’t just do this since it got the power in 2013. That’s your News in Gist. @Tupp\_ed ### Murder URL: https://www.thegist.ie/murder/ Last updated: 2016-06-16T00:00:00.000Z Murder MP Jo Cox, was small, well liked, pleasant and welcoming to immigrants to the UK. She had two small children. A man with a gun shot her dead today after attacking her in public. He shouted out 'put Britain first' as he killed her. Even reduced to bare facts, that's an awful thing to have happened. The political media system agreed to suspend the referendum campaigning, largely revolving around xenophobia and rejection of The Other, as a mark of respect. That's it. Sometimes, there's only one story that matters. So, that's the News in Gist. @Tupp\_ed ### Terrible people, Football, A friend of Ireland URL: https://www.thegist.ie/terrible-people-football-a-friend/ Last updated: 2016-06-13T00:00:00.000Z **Terrible people** "Let's see if we can turn these freshly killed murder victims to our own personal rhetorical advantage." - Terrible people. A day after mass murder of revellers in a gay nightclub in Orlando by a homophobic abusive man with a violent fantasy life that had him investigated by the FBI who could just buy some guns when he felt like it, and terrible people were trying to turn the event to their advantage. It's all exactly the cesspit of homophobe distortion, NRA denial and Trump you'd imagine so feel free to fill in the details yourself. Decent sorts showed solidarity around the world too, because the species isn't irredeemable or anything. **Football** THERE IS FOOTBALL. I like international tournaments and the Euros in particular, but we all know I am not going to be the go-to source on this. **A friend of Ireland** Something quite unusual happened today- it probably won't make headlines anywhere, but could shape the development of society. The US federal government turned up in the High Court and asked to be permitted to join a case as a 'friend of the court' (amicus). If accepted (and it would be quite the court who would decline such a friendship, when offered) the United States could end up directly pleading for the adequacy of EU citizens data protections in its surveillance legislation in front of the EU's top court in Luxembourg. Its reception will be one of the most significant moments in EU/US relations, and the development of what will be normal in the digital world- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/0e1026b0-4e07-4221-b96f-7da95d18f36d_640x1212.png) Panopticon, or privacy? ### Mass murder, Mass media, URL: https://www.thegist.ie/mass-murder-mass-media/ Last updated: 2016-06-12T00:00:00.000Z **Mass murder** A gay club in Florida during Pride, running a Latino night. A man whose father said he got angry when he saw two men kissing. He had already come to the attention of the FBI as potentially violent but could still buy multiple weapons of mass murder. Dozens of people who were planning on having some fun on a night out now won't come home because being gay is still enough to provoke haters to violence. That's what we do know. The worst mass murder shooting yet in the US, attacking a traditionally oppressed minority. Gays during Pride joining black congregations in church and children at school as preferred targets of people who like the idea of killing lots of people. **Mass Media** There's also a wall of things we're being told, but which fluctuate and shift as the hours pass. This is where the Internet- and particularly social media- is at its weakest and traditional news sources who keep to journalistic traditions of checking facts before reporting on them and choosing to only report on what is relevant about an event. Basically, having an editor is a critical part of reporting on fast breaking news stories. Some editors are better than others of course so it's perfectly OK to simply wait for clarity on an event to crystallise, instead of trying to catch each twist and turn. Aside: If your public response to mass murder starts "Appreciate the congrats..." you probably aren't ready to have a public response yet. That's your News in Gist @Tupp\_ed ### Not tonight URL: https://www.thegist.ie/not-tonight/ Last updated: 2016-06-10T00:00:00.000Z I will not do a News in Gist tonight. Philip Cairns was 13 when he went missing from my neighbourhood. I was 10\. By the time I was 13, I used to cycle down a nearby road to go to my local library. The smiling face from his photo was with me in the back of my mind whenever I passed by. Later, I worked with his sister. I remember the shock of seeing her in the newspaper as her family made a fresh appeal for information about their missing brother, missing son. I hadn't known. Tonight, there's a report that the police believe he was killed by a man who is now dead. I can't think about anything else right now. @Tupp\_ed ### Juries, UN, Car Insurance URL: https://www.thegist.ie/juries-un-car-insurance/ Last updated: 2016-06-09T00:00:00.000Z **Juries, juries, juries** Serious crime cases have juries, who put in the hours needed to come to decisions. Sometimes, lots and lots of hours. They hear fantastic amounts of evidence and wrestle with legal niceties that baffle experienced lawyers. Today, the reportedly longest jury deliberation in the state's history ended with a guilty decision against a former CEO Irish Life and Permanent Denis Casey, who'd been accused of conspiracy to defraud. This is part of the answer to the rhetorical question "and what did Ireland do about its bankers, eh?" (Juries used to hear cases in civil law too, but were removed in all but defamation. The Governments of the day weren't happy to let them do their work in the realm of money). **UN: Abortion law abhorrent** The UN Human Rights Committee found Ireland's 8th Amendment to have created an inhuman response for a woman carrying a foetus with a fatal abnormality. It said she ought to be compensated and the Irish law changed. The Minister who took Dáil questions on the finding said he hadn't read it. He also stressed that the Government's slow-bicycle race to not address the state's cruelty to citizens in immensely traumatic circumstances might even start in six months time. **Car Insurance** Fianna Fáil pass a motion urging the Govt to Do Something. Govt explains it will do something after it gets a report in a few months that suggests what it might do. This is all a load of hooey as the reason the Insurance is going up is that the Insurance Companies want to take in more money. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/69cd6d5e-2ece-4d00-be1d-01509c9f02ab_500x383.jpeg) ### NAMA, Hillary v Trump, Fog URL: https://www.thegist.ie/nama-hillary-v-trump-fog/ Last updated: 2016-06-09T00:00:00.000Z NAMA The NAMA Annual Report has been released and, good news!, everything is awesome. NAMA is something something 20,000 new houses as well as in some way going to make a giant profit to make us all rich again at the end. All the jam will arrive every other day. Oddly, not addressed in the Annual Report is that ongoing rumble from Northern Ireland. But then, as we know, by appearing in a corporate document the good news is official news while that stuff is just a background hum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/b228f917-6b7c-4aa4-ba54-cc155eeadec9_640x478.jpeg) Hillary vs Trump Trump, as is his wont, was complaining recently that the judge hearing the class action case against Trump University was Mexican. When it was pointed out he was American, Trump dug in. He was of Mexican decent, the oversized homunculus guffed, and this was a conflict which should prevent him hearing Trump related litigation, as Trump wanted to wall off Mexico. Trump later expanded this line of non-thought to say no Muslim judge could hear a case involving him either. By extrapolation, any judge possessed of an interest in anything other than Trump should be disqualified. I mention Hillary because she's pretty much sealed the deal on the nomination and she's probably going to have to wade through miles of this stuff. Fog What's with all the water droplets, huh? Delaying Gist deliveries and airplanes alike. ### Lightning, Court Reports, Abroad URL: https://www.thegist.ie/lightning-court-reports-abroad/ Last updated: 2016-06-07T00:00:00.000Z **Lightning** Basically, the main thing you need to know from the news to speak to you fellow humans is that a fella was hit by lightning and that he's alive and hopefully going to recover fully. This is everyone's chance to dust off their personal favourite struck by lightning stories, whether over-determined golfers or unscathed- but vaguely specified- stories of unscathed relatives. **Court reports** The doings of the CCJ continue to serve the same purposes for the newspaper trader they have had since the 19tg Century. **Abroad** England staggers forward toward a Referendum on staying in or leaving the EU, without a clear mental image of what either means. (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all crystal clear on it, by contrast). Polls suggest it's tight, but there's good reason to think UK poll companies have no idea how to make their sample data representative, given the lack of a good sized corpus of previous UK-wide referenda to work from. Little Englanders appear not to have noticed their dreams all involve basically repudiating human rights and other checks on the Exwcutive's power just at the moment the Executive has proved itself so incompetent it declaered a plan to hold an avoidable referendum that posed an existential threat to Britian's place in the world. Some Little Englanders: ![Little Englanders, pictured today](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/768afbed-8634-49d9-8b5e-1771bb987dd7_640x480.jpeg "Little Englanders, pictured today") ### (Sunday) Crime, Sun, Full Colour Supplements! URL: https://www.thegist.ie/sunday-crime-sun-full-colour-supplements/ Last updated: 2016-06-05T00:00:00.000Z **Crime** With the courts closed and nothing else moving on a sunny Summer Bank Holiday Sunday, we're left with reporting on police activity as the final available form of official news. So, today we have shootings, assault on children and so on as the main breaking news. While gangs attacking each other does have some wider significance the rest are just mosaic tiles that don't form a picture. Personal tragedy, individual malice, chaotic lives- they're all significicant to the people's whose lives they effect but tell the rest of us little about anything. But, if you like that sort of thing, Sunday's your big news day. **Sun** Its a lovely day. Just enjoy your life today and don't be worrying what everyone else is up to. **Full Colour Supplements** Since Mr. Pulitzer launched the idea of the Sunday papers as we know then in the 19th Century, Full Colour Supplements have been a key part of any Sunday news publication. Here then are ours. Enjoy! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/e5097fd7-d764-4283-98b4-d63ef7c2498b_640x640.jpeg) ### (Weekend) The Greatest, A whimsical column on Brunch, Show of Weakness URL: https://www.thegist.ie/weekend-the-greatest-a-whimsical/ Last updated: 2016-06-04T00:00:00.000Z **The Greatest** Muhammad Ali's life story was too big for one life, so it overflowed and poured into everyone else's life story too. He fought for himself and, because he was an irresistibly attractive other, he fought for them too. The sport he played didn't deserve him and its cultural significance burst when it harmed him, and it's other fighters. He's dead now. He was the heavyweight champion of the world and he, still, always punched above his weight. **A whimsical column on Brunch** Nope. **Show of Weakness** A bunch of malice-laced fanatics gathered together and tried to fill a short street. They failed. This ship is sailing. That's your (Weekend) News in Gist ### Court Reports, Trump Trip, Luas back suas URL: https://www.thegist.ie/court-reports-trump-trip-luas-back/ Last updated: 2016-06-03T00:00:00.000Z **Court Reports** It's a very sunny Friday of a Bank Holiday. Which means all our usual news sources are in beergardens- except for the courts! So, we've got guilty verdicts and innocent verdicts. It's all very official and newsy. Guy who worked for Irish Life and Permanent is not guilty. Man who committed terrible crimes is guilty. Lady did something to make your granny grab your wrist and exclaim with glee, Isn't that Awful? **Trump Trip** Human ruminant and unpresidential candidate, Donald Trump announced his plan to drop into his golf course in Ireland at the same time as Joe Biden is visiting the country, just to be a dick about it. **Luas Suas** The Luas drivers, who had been striking, agreed to take a last available offer. Maybe they decided that a union that ends up holding transport strikes over the summer (instead of the Winter, when they actually generate some pressure from passengers) might not be able to do any better for them. That's your News in Gist. @Tupp\_ ### Health stuff, Sort of big Meaningless Numbers, O'Leary talk, Unscheduled prayers URL: https://www.thegist.ie/health-stuff-sort-of-big-meaningless/ Last updated: 2016-06-02T00:00:00.000Z **Health stuff** Northern Ireland says gay men can give blood after all. But not marry. We're keeping it contiwise. The Minister for Health, who's a youngfella with a grand head of hair on him, says he wants everyone to agree with a policy that will take 10 years to do, which does sound a good idea but also like a recipie for a pretty quiet life as Minister for Health. And the HSE says it doesn't want to spend cash on a drug to help cystic fibrosis patients and the Youngfella Minister says the CF people shouldn't worry because it'll probably be grand. **Big Meaningless Numbers** Some sort of sleepy Thursday press release that says we've loads of extra money from Tax. (But not for CF drugs. That's not how news works.) Also a lady in her eighties pretended to be her partner's dead wife and collected pensions for years. Added up that was a big number too, though not really in the context of a Social Welfare overall budget. **O'Leary talk** Exactly as you'd expect it. ![Bong!](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/95a10382-6d19-4f68-b429-9f1a731411d7_637x601.jpeg "Bong!") **Unscheduled Prayers** RTE refused to broadcast a call to prayer at the end of the day during Ramadan because... Um. So, it's not that having a call to prayer broadcast was a bad idea. It was totally fine. Seems the reason why it was a no was that the sun sets at different times and so *this* call to prayer couldn't be fit into the TV schedule. They'll run some Ramadan diaries instead. Just before the daily, always fixed, easily scheduled Angelus broadcast. Not much else, really. Sometimes there isn't even enough news to Gist for you. @Tupp\_ed ### Birmingham bombs, Gorillas, Clery's, URL: https://www.thegist.ie/birmingham-bombs-gorillas-clery-s/ Last updated: 2022-10-24T13:47:51.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/09/2e/092e59c2-d4b3-46c9-8790-ebfcb2a9bda5/content/images/public/images/6a26f48d-5875-40e6-b64c-0e2308504ca0_640x308.jpeg) **Birmingham Bombs** The Birmingham pub bombings from the 1970s are going to be looked at again, as they are now an official error so the UK State can acknowledge that. Who knows, maybe it will turn out a dead person was to blame. **Gorillas (deceased)** A faraway zoo shot a gorilla the other day because a child fell into its pen and they didn't want the child to die. And in our own Dublin zoo, the big sad eye'd male gorilla, Henry, died of gorilla sickness. So, like Cecil lions before them, zoo gorillas are a thing for the next little bit. There's even a photo of a cloud that looks like a gorilla on Facebook. So, don't go on facebook. **Labour... Reopen Clerys?** There was a vote in the Dáil and now Brendan Howlin has finally passed the law he always wanted but never could when in Government. And the 2nd most powerful Minister at Cabinet. It's something about employment law and Clerys. **Foreign While Pregnant** Another foreign lady died during a problem pregnancy in one of our maternity hospitals, which would make you feel a bit off. Maybe go looking at that gorilla cloud pic on Facebook after all. And that's your News in Gist. @Tupp\_ed ### Guards, Some sort of EU Water thing, Babies URL: https://www.thegist.ie/guards-some-sort-of-eu-water-thing/ Last updated: 2016-05-31T00:00:00.000Z **Garda Numbers** The Minister for Justice says she'll give more stuff to the police in a bit over gangs and maybe even more police, but not for years. She also wishes we'd stop asking her hard questions about them. **Europe Water Thing** Some sort of thing where the EU Commission guys say we have to pay water charges but maybe they're wrong. **Babies** Nice news story- Jack and Emily are the top Irish names. Jack's a good one, though no idea where all the Emilies are coming from. Maybe something on TV. Anyway this is all over the place and you can trot it out at the water cooler without upsetting anyone. Unlike the the other story, which is about babies dying in Cavan hospital. This is getting less play and is probably more important. That's your news in Gist. @Tupp\_ed