Collection of Articles. Non Comment Thread

[Johnnyb]

See past the deliberately inflammatory language and you'll find he has a point, sadly.


Kevin Myers: Kerry has zoned enough land to supply the building needs of six times its population

THE Norwegian ambassador to Ireland, Oyvind Nordsletten, has called for an end to the poisoning of sea eagles in Kerry. These are, after all, Norwegian eagles, and the Norwegians have strong feelings about this kind of thing. Most of us have -- but clearly, not everyone in Kerry. Seven sea eagles have been poisoned so far in Ireland: all seven in The Kingdom. I am moved by the ambassador's touching innocence when he hopes that Kerry people will stop poisoning his eagles. This is rather like the Pope calling on the North Koreans to accept the Seventh Secret of Fatima.

I don't know how many readers we have in Kerry: after this piece, I dare say, a good deal fewer. But Kerry really is a place apart. A county that not merely elects Martin Ferris, Jackie Healy-Rae and John O'Donoghue, but almost hero worships them, clearly does not live by the rules that the rest of us aspire to.

I'll try to explain this to you, Your Excellency, in terms you understand. You know those funny little creatures you have in your homeland called trolls? Well, they're not Norwegian at all. They're originally from Kerry, and were accidentally transported back to Norway in Viking longboats. But they still thrive in their native county, where they are known today as "county councillors".

Kerry people live in one of the most beautiful parts of Western Europe. However, trolls would prefer to live in a county called Rezone Almost Everything: hence the name of the most popular county councillor, Jackie Healy-Rae.

He spoke for all trolls when he said at a meeting of the county council this week that the more land zoned for development in Kerry the better. Which is why Kerry has already zoned enough land to supply the building needs of six times its population. For in the trolls' view, zoning is the real purpose of land. Their vision of paradise is probably a shopping mall in Los Angeles.

Some years ago I asked some illegal-driftnet salmon-fishermen in Kerry what they would do when the salmon stocks were extinct, as they soon would be if drift-netting continued. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," cried one, with a sweep of his fist, in a kind of "Up The Republic!" braggadocio that one might find at 1am in a Tralee pub. Naturally, our audience then roundly cheered this brainless gallant. Which is merely an example of a phenomenon that I'm afraid I'm unable to explain properly, Your Excellency, namely, "cute hoorism".

Let me try to approach things from the opposite direction. In most orderly societies, change comes through the PHIDO cycle. Firstly, you get the Perception of a need. Next, you get the Hope that you can attend to that need. This is followed by the Intent, in which goals are set relative to the original hope. Next comes the Deed, the application of policy. And finally, there is the Outcome, the logical conclusion to the sequence that began with the Perception.

The differences between each stage are incrementally downward: the perceived problem is usually larger than the hope of settling it, the intent is then smaller than the hope, and so on, so that the final outcome never matches the original perception, but there is a clear intellectual link.

The PHIDO cycle is at its most perfect in Germany, where a perceived need for swift efficient transport has produced the outcome of an autobahn-network, with service-stations, computerised signage-systems, highway police, and so on.

IN Ireland generally, there is little real evidence that people accept PHIDO. Which is why Kerry has zoned enough land to satisfy the needs of Belgium, and why we've built huge 'ghost' housing estates outside every town. And why we've constructed motorways without service stations or information-systems. And why we've spent billions on "preserving" a language almost no one speaks, and why we insist that debates in the European Parliament are translated into it -- but then can't find enough translators for the job. And so on. This is dyslexic PHIDOism, namely DOPHI, with the real Intent only emerging after everything else is finished.

However, in many parts of Kerry (I hasten to add, solely those areas where this newspaper is not read) they do not even have DOPHI, but have the YAHOO phenomenon instead, with huge bungalows covering every beauty spot available. And a Yahoo will proudly declare that if that shagging Norwegian bird comes anywhere near his 10,000 sq ft bungalow, or even dreams of *ting all over his lovely Mexican-style hacienda while he's inside watching MTV on his flat-screen television the size of Laois, he'll put the bloody beast on a gatepost.

The neighbouring bungalow (that looks like Shannon Airport Arrivals) advertises itself as a bird-watchers' B&B, and actually has two stuffed eagles (Håken and Astrid, RIP, the last breeding pair in the county) on pillars outside.

And when the Yahoos have poisoned all the remaining sea eagles, and maybe covered the finest glensides with tarmac, they'll probably be angrily asking three questions. Why are visitor-numbers down? Where are the fecking tourists? And what is the shagging Government going to do about it?

Do you know what actually happened to the Celtic Tiger, Your Excellency? It went on holiday in Kerry.

[kerrygold]

IRFU outlines TV nightmare
By Brendan O’Brien

Wednesday, May 19, 2010



IF there is such a thing as a rugby apocalypse, then Philip Browne painted a pretty convincing picture of it yesterday as opposition to Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan’s free-to-air TV proposals took on an international dimension.




The IRFU chief executive was joined in Dublin by John Feehan, his counterpart with the Six Nations, and Derek McGrath who holds the same post with the Heineken and Amlin Cup organisers, the ERC.

Along with representatives of all four Irish provinces, the three chief executives had convened in the ERC HQ earlier to coordinate their riposte to a proposal which they claim will have a disastrous effect on Irish – and European – rugby.

Ryan’s ambition that Six Nations and Heineken Cup matches can only be watched on free-to-air TV was described by Browne at various stages as "seriously misguided", "absolutely cracked" and "nonsense".

It was, he said, the most serious threat to Irish rugby since the game went professional in 1995.

If implemented, Ryan’s proposal would siphon away 18%, or €12m, of the IRFU’s annual income which would in turn lead to cutbacks in all areas and prompt top players to move abroad in pursuit of higher salaries.

Browne warned that it would take very little, perhaps as little as the loss of Ireland’s top 10 players, for everything to unravel to the extent there would be an almost inevitable reduction in the amount of professional Irish sides.

Visions of mediocre Irish sides playing in a half-empty Aviva Stadium, Thomond Park or RDS were conjured up for a future in which the ramifications of Ryan’s input would reverberate down to all levels of the game in this country.

The union’s annual €10m budget for the club and schools games would have to be slashed, Browne said, while the wider impact would be a sharp drop in what was described as the €375m "rugby economy" in Ireland.

"The Minister has a hunch," Browne went on. "He would say it’s a well-informed hunch, but I call it a hunch, that he is better informed about how the game operates and is grown than the collective here, the people who have been running professional rugby in Ireland for 15 years.

"The Minister’s view is going to lead to a spiral of decline in Irish rugby and has the potential to destabilise European rugby. That is the unintended consequence of his well-meaning, well-intended policy... he’s gambling with the future of Irish rugby."

Ryan responded to fears over a resultant shortfall in income by suggesting the IRFU could make up for any losses with extra sponsorship but, as Browne pointed out, that would be wishful thinking, even in a economy that wasn’t gripped by recession. The feeling that this has dropped on the union’s desk at the worst time is compounded by the fact their debt repayments for Aviva Stadium are predicated on the current business model and income. Not that money is the only concern.

The IRFU is an all-island organisation and any decision made on TV rights in Dublin would affect the ability of the union to run the professional game in Ulster which operates under a different political system.

Feehan and McGrath’s presence at yesterday’s press conference were indicative of the concern felt by the wider European rugby community.

Ireland gets more out of the Six Nations and the Heineken Cup (€16m) than it puts back in (€4m) but Feehan has warned that all that could change.

"We would always prefer to be on terrestrial television but we have a serious issue with being told we have to only be on terrestrial television," said the Six Nations official. "The games are going to be on RTÉ for the next three years anyway. The reality is that if this goes through it will have the effect of upsetting the delicate balance we have with the other unions and they will review what Ireland should get out of this.

"Ultimately it might be ‘you’re on your own guys, get what you can out of your own market’. There would be a net decrease from my organisation of around €9m per year."

Feehan warned that the other five unions – England, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy – would take "an extremely dim view" were Ireland to upset what McGrath called "a partnership of mutual benefits".

Browne, Feehan and McGrath all met with Minister Ryan last week but left the meeting "very concerned that he just doesn’t get it," according to the ERC representative. Written submissions have also fallen on deaf ears.

Ryan has extended the consultation period over his proposal which will come to an end in July. After that, if given the green light by cabinet, it will go to Europe to become law.

Anxious times await.



This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Wednesday, May 19, 2010



Read more: www.irishexaminer.com/sport/irfu-outlines-tv-nightmare-120182.html#ixzz0oMcnNuGa

[glengael]

Inventor of the cash machine dies

The Guardian, Thursday 20 May 2010

John Shepherd-Barron came up with his idea for cash maschines after failing to get to his bank in time to withdraw money.

The man credited with inventing the world's first hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser after a "eureka" moment in the bath has died, aged 84, after a short illness.

John Shepherd-Barron came up with the idea after failing to get to his bank in time to withdraw money. Later, while in the bath, a solution came to him.

"It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash," he said in a 2007 BBC interview.

He sold the idea, over a pink gin, to the chief general manager of Barclays, with On the Buses star Reg Varney being the first to withdraw cash from an ATM at a bank in Enfield, north London, in 1967.

Shepherd-Barron was born in India to Scottish parents and lived in Portmahomack in Ross-shire.

The inventor's idea was the first cash machine to be tested, before other patented devices, though he made no money out of it.

With plastic cards yet to be invented, customers put cheques impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance, into the machine which paid out a maximum of £10. The machine detected the cheque, then matched it against a four-figure pin number.

Shepherd-Barron received an OBE in 2005 for services to banking, and was an international businessman who subsequently became chairman of Security Express.

He came up with the idea of a four-figure pin while talking to his wife, Caroline. "Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the standard," he once said.

After moving to Portmahomack, Shepherd-Barron turned his attention to inventing a device that played the sound of killer whales to ward off seals from his fish farm. However, he would admit, it only succeeded in attracting more of the "scoundrels".

After a long and successful career which saw him become the first chairman of the Ross and Cromarty Enterprise, he and his wife retired to his Easter Ross estate, where he tried his hand at snail farming.

James Goodfellow, of Paisley, Renfrewshire, was credited with being the inventor of the pin number and awarded an OBE in 2006. He devised the mechanism of keying in a number code to cash machines in the 1960s.

[kerrygold]

By Eamonn Sweeney


Sunday May 23 2010

Y ou know that stuff we write about Brian O'Driscoll's incredible devotion to Leinster and Ireland? It's all bull*. Brian O'Driscoll couldn't care less about Leinster and Ireland. He's only in it for the money.

And the idea that there is something magical about Munster rugby, that there is a special spirit among the players born out of tradition and a link with their supporters. More nonsense. The likes of O'Connell, O'Gara and Wallace only stay at Thomond Park because the price is right. If they got a better deal somewhere else, they'd be gone in a shot.

You hear a lot too about how well run rugby is in this country, how the success of the international team is only the ultimate reflection of the structures put in place at school, club and provincial level. That's guff as well. The whole thing is like a house of cards. The slightest change in the financial situation would see Irish rugby falling to bits and the team slide precipitously down the international rankings.

So weak in fact is Irish rugby that any loss of revenue from television rights would spell the end of the game as we know it. The entire future of the sport in this country, in fact, depends on a sum of around €10m which the IRFU might lose if Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan prevents them from trying to flog their Six Nations games to Sky in three years' time.

If all of the above sounds daft, don't blame me. I'm just taking at face value the statements of the IRFU who over the past couple of weeks have indulged in an extraordinary temper tantrum over the minister's proposals to list Six Nations and Heineken Cup games as events which must be free to air. Should Minister Ryan get his way, we have been told at tedious length, top Irish internationals will flee the country en masse to ply their trade elsewhere and we will be lucky to beat Tonga.

Ten million euro is, on one level, a lot of money. But it's only a drop in the ocean compared to the €191m which the government forked out to build the Aviva Stadium. Or the €17.5m which the Irish Sports Council gives to the IRFU. Or the €34m in capital funding Irish rugby clubs have received over the past 12 years.

Or indeed the €40m which the insurance company Aviva lashed out to secure stadium naming rights at Lansdowne Road. Or the €40m which Puma gave to become Irish rugby's official kit supplier. Or the money raised by the sale of 36 corporate boxes at the Aviva for €850,000 a pop, most of which had been sold at last count. Irish rugby is hardly on its uppers.

Then again, given that €10m has the ability to make such a profound difference, had the government given €201m towards the building of the new stadium perhaps we'd be up with the All Blacks by now. In which case the IRFU were remiss in not holding out for €50m from Aviva.

The IRFU has benefited significantly from government largesse. It has certainly been given enough dosh for it to show a small bit of manners and not indulge in childish personalised attacks on a representative of the government which has shown it such generosity.

Some hoary old arguments against government intervention have been utilised by the IRFU. One is our old friend, "the government can never repay the IRFU/GAA/FAI for what they do for this country." Rubbish. The logical conclusion of that statement is that the government should eternally give sporting organisations as much money as they want with no questions asked.

Why? There's nothing special about the IRFU. Unlike the GAA, for example, it doesn't have a presence in every parish in the country. Rugby is still a game disproportionately played by the richest section of society. Compared to soccer and Gaelic games, it is a minority sport. Yet it has done very well out of the public purse. Our kids would survive without rugby.

What they couldn't live without are, for example, schools and hospitals. It's teachers and nurses and doctors we can never pay for what they do for this country. But we're cutting their wages. So my sympathy for wealthy sporting bodies is limited.

We've also heard that the government should get out of the way and let the IRFU run rugby however it wants to. This one has a venerable lineage. It was used, for example, when our rugby brethren wished to show their support for the Apartheid regime in South Africa by sending a team there in 1981. But the bottom line is that if you want someone to stay out of your business, you shouldn't ask them for €191m. Perhaps not surprisingly given the social profile of the sport, the IRFU seem to be taking a leaf from our banking sector, boldly independent when it suits them, but with the paw out when they need money.

Then there's the suggestion that the IRFU deserve special treatment because Ireland's performances lifted national morale at a troubled time. Nonsense again. The boost given by sporting victories is great while it lasts but it's fleeting and largely illusory. If you've lost your job and are in danger of losing your house, what does it matter to you who wins the Six Nations? A man who can't support his family would swap every Triple Crown ever won for the chance to get back on his feet.

Unlike the IRFU, Eamon Ryan has made his case calmly, politely and sensibly. He has pointed out, for example, that the 2006 Heineken Cup quarter-final between Leinster and Toulouse was watched by 255,000 people on television. When the same two teams played at the same stage of the competition the following year, the audience was down to 47,000. The difference? The first match was shown on RTE, the second on Sky Sports. The audience of children under 14 watching the game dropped from 27,000 to 2,000.

If the Six Nations television rights are sold to Sky, we can expect a similar drop. It's hard to see how this could be good for rugby or the sporting public in general.

There is another way. Almost all major sporting events are free to air in Australia, that shining example of a sporting nation. The Six Nations has been designated as free to air in France, and so is the Heineken Cup final. French rugby seemed to be going okay the last time I checked.

I suspect that what irks the IRFU is not so much the money as the principle. The principle is the one which guided the Tiger years, that there is nothing more important than chiselling as much profit out of every business opportunity as possible, and to hell with everything else. Look where that got us.

Eamon Ryan has had to put up with opportunistic opposition from prize amadán Simon Coveney of Fine Gael who accused him of endangering the success of Irish rugby and Labour's Liz McManus, whose main concern seems to be the hurt feelings of the IRFU, an odd position for a supposed left-winger. Sports Minister Mary Hanafin pointedly refuses to back him up. He has been described as "cracked" by the IRFU.

But if you think sport is about more than just money, there's only one side to be on in this scrap. Come on you boy in green.

[e-mail]

- Eamonn Sweeney

Sunday Independent

[Mickmack]

The Irish Times - Saturday, May 22, 2010

Burden of Irish debt could yet eclipse that of Greece


OPINION:

What will sink us, unfortunately but inevitably, are the huge costs of the September 2008 bank bailout,

writes MORGAN KELLY



IT IS no longer a question of whether Ireland will go bust, but when. Unlike Greece, our woes do not stem from government debt, but instead from the government’s open-ended guarantee to cover the losses of the banking system out of its citizens’ wallets.

Even under the most optimistic assumptions about government spending cuts and bank losses, by 2012 Ireland will have a worse ratio of debt to national income than the one that is sinking Greece.

On the face of it, Ireland’s debt position does not appear catastrophic. At the start of the year, Ireland’s government debt was two- thirds of GDP: only half the Greek level. (The State also has financial assets equal to a quarter of GDP, but so do most governments, so we will focus on the total debt.)

Because of the economic collapse here, the Government is adding to this debt quite quickly. However, in contrast to its inept handling of the banking crisis, the Government has taken reasonable steps to bring the deficit under control. If all goes to plan we should be looking at a debt of 85 to 90 per cent of GDP by the end of 2012.

This is quite large for a small economy, but it is manageable. Just about. What will sink us, unfortunately but inevitably, are the huge costs of the bank bailout.

We can gain a sobering perspective on the impossible disproportion between the bailout and our economic resources by looking at the US. The government there set aside $700 billion (€557 billion) to buy troubled bank assets, and the final cost to the American taxpayer is about $150 billion. These sound like, and are, astronomical numbers.

But when you translate from the leviathan that is America to the minnow that is Ireland, it would be equivalent to the Irish Government spending €7 billion on Nama, and eventually losing €1.5 billion in the process. Pocket change by our standards.

Instead, our Government has already committed itself to spend €70 billion (€40 billion on the National Asset Management Agency – Nama – and €30 billion on recapitalising banks), or half of the national income. That is 10 times per head of population the amount the US spent to rescue itself from its worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.

Having received such a staggering transfusion of taxpayer funds, you might expect that the Irish banks would now be as fit as fleas. Instead, they are still in intensive care, and will require even larger transfusions before they can fend for themselves again.

It is hard to think of any institution since the League of Nations that has become so irrelevant so fast as Nama. Instead of the resurrection of the Irish banking system we were promised, we now have one semi-State body (Nama) buying assets from other semi-states (Anglo) and soon-to-be semi-States (AIB and Bank of Ireland), while funnelling €60 million a year in fees to lawyers, valuers and associated parasites.

What ultimately matters for national solvency, however, is not how much the State invests in its banks, but how much it is likely to lose. It is alright to invest €70 billion, or even €100 billion, to rescue your banking system if you can reasonably expect to get back most of what you spent. So how much are the banks and, thanks to the bank guarantee, you the taxpayer, likely to lose?

Let’s start with the €100 billion of property development loans. We’ll be optimistic and say the loss here will be one-third. Remember, Anglo has already owned up to losing about €25 billion of its €75 billion portfolio, so we have almost reached that third without looking at AIB and Bank of Ireland. I think the final loss will be more than half, but we’ll keep with the third to err on the side of optimism.

Next there are €35 billion of business loans. Over €10 billion of these loans are to hotels and pubs and will likely not be seen again this side of Judgment Day. Meanwhile, one-third of loans to small and medium enterprises are reported already to be in arrears. So, a figure of a 20 per cent loss again seems optimistic.

Finally, we have mortgages of €140 billion, and other personal lending of €20 billion. Current mortgage default figures here are meaningless because, once you agree a reduction of mortgage payments to a level you can afford, Irish banks can still pretend that your loan is performing.

Banks in the US typically get back half of what they loaned when they foreclose, but losses here could be greater because banks, fortunately, find it hard to take away your family home. So Irish banks could easily be looking at mortgage losses of 10 per cent but, to be conservative, we will say five.

So between developers, businesses, and personal loans, Irish banks are on track to lose nearly €50 billion if we are optimistic (and more likely closer to €70 billion), which translates into a bill for the taxpayer of over 30 per cent of GDP. The bank guarantee may have looked like “the cheapest bailout in the world, so far” in September 2008, but it is not looking that way now.

Adding these bank losses on to the national debt means we are facing a debt by late 2012 of 115 per cent of GDP. If we are lucky.

There is more. The ability of a government to service its debts depends on its tax base. In Ireland the proper measure of tax base, at least when it comes to increasing taxes, is not GDP (including profits of multinational firms, who will walk if we raise their taxes) but GNP (which is limited to Irish people, who are mostly stuck here). While for most countries the two measures are the same, in Ireland GDP is a quarter larger than GNP. This means our optimistic debt to GDP forecast of 115 per cent translates into a debt to GNP ratio of 140 per cent, worse than where Greece is now.

And even this catastrophic number assumes that our economy does not contract further. For the last two years the Irish economy has not been shrinking, so much as vaporising. Real GNP and private sector employment have already fallen by one-sixth – the deepest and swiftest falls in a western economy since the Great Depression.

The contraction is far from over, to judge from the two economic indicators I pay most attention to. Redundancies have been steady at 6,000 per month for the last nine months. Insolvencies are 25 per cent higher than this time last year, and are rippling outwards from construction into the rest of the economy.

The Irish economy is like a patient bleeding from two gunshot wounds. The Government has moved competently to stanch the smaller, budgetary hole, while continuing to insist that the litres of blood pouring unchecked from the banking hole are “manageable”.

Capital markets are unlikely to agree for much longer, triggering a borrowing crisis for Ireland. The first torpedo, most probably, will be a run on Irish banks in inter-bank markets, of the sort that sank Anglo in 2008. Already, Irish banks are struggling to find lenders to leave money on deposit for more than a week.

Ireland is setting itself up to present an early test of the shaky EU commitment to bail out its more spendthrift members. Probably we will end up with a deal where the European Central Bank buys Irish debt and provides continued emergency funding to Irish banks, in return for our agreeing a schedule of reparations of 5-6 per cent of national income over the next few decades.

To repay these reparations will take swingeing cuts in spending and social welfare, and unprecedented tax rises. A central part of our “rescue” package is certain to be the requirement that we raise our corporate taxes to European levels, sabotaging any prospect of recovery as multinationals are driven out.

The issue of national sovereignty has for so long been the monopoly of republican headbangers that it is hard to know whether ordinary, sane Irish people still care about it. Either way, we will not be having it around much longer.

We have long since left the realm of easy alternatives, and will soon face a choice between national bankruptcy and admitting the bank guarantee was a mistake. Either we cut the banks loose, or we sink ourselves.

While most countries facing bankruptcy sit passively in denial until they sink – just as we are doing – there is one shining exception: Uruguay. When markets panicked after Argentina defaulted in 2002, Uruguay knew it could no longer service its large external debt. Instead of waiting for a borrowing crisis, the Uruguayans approached their creditors and pointed out they faced a choice.

Either they could play tough and force Uruguay into bankruptcy, in which case they would get almost nothing back, or they could agree to reduce Uruguay’s debt to a manageable level, and get back most of what they lent. Realising Uruguay’s problems were largely not of its own making, and that it had never stiffed its creditors in the past, the lenders agreed to a debt restructuring, and Uruguay was able to return to debt markets within a few months.

In one way, our position is a lot easier than Uruguay’s, because our problem is bank debt rather than government debt. Our crisis stems entirely from the Government’s gratuitous decision on September 29th, 2008, to transform the IOUs of Seán FitzPatrick, Dermot Gleeson and their peers into quasi-sovereign instruments of the Irish state.

Our borrowing crisis could be solved before it even happens by passing the same sort of Special Resolution legislation that the Bank of England enacted after the Northern Rock crisis. The more than €65 billion in bonds that will be outstanding by the end of September when the guarantee expires could then be turned into shares in the banks: a debt for equity swap.

We need to explain that the Irish State has always honoured its debts in the past, and will continue to do so. However, the State is a distinct entity from its banks and, having learned the extent of the banks’ recklessness, we now have no choice but to allow the bank guarantee to lapse and to share the banks’ losses with their bondholders. It must be remembered that when these bonds were issued they had no government guarantee, and the institutions that bought them did so in full knowledge that they could default, and charged an appropriate rate of interest to compensate themselves for this risk.

Freed of the impossible bank debt, the Irish State could concentrate on the other daunting problems left by its decade-long credit binge: unemployment, lack of competitiveness and indebted households. The banks would be soundly capitalised and able to manage themselves free of political interference.

There are two common objections to sharing the banks’ losses with their bondholders, both of them specious. The first is that nobody would lend to Irish banks afterwards. However, given that soon nobody will be lending to Irish banks anyway, this is not an issue. Either way, the Irish State and banks are facing a period of relying on emergency funding. After a debt-for-equity swap, Irish banks, which were highly profitable before they fell into the clutches of their current “management”, will be carrying little debt, making them attractive credit risks.

The second objection is that Ireland would be sued in every court in Europe. Again wrong. Under the EU’s winding-up directive, the government that issues a bank’s licence has full power to resolve the bank under its own laws.

Of course, expecting politicians to sort out the Irish banks is pure fantasy. Like their British and American counterparts, Irish politicians have spent too long believing that banks were the root of national prosperity to understand that their interests are frequently inimical to those of the rest of the economy.

The architect of Uruguay’s salvation was not one of its politicians, but a technocrat called Carlos Steneri. The one positive development in Ireland in recent months is that control of the banking system has passed from the Government to similar technocrats.

This transfer did not take place without a struggle – one that was entirely missed by the media. When Anglo announced they wanted to take over Quinn Insurance despite the objections of the Financial Regulator, journalists seemed to view this as just another case of Anglo being Anglo. They should have remembered that Anglo cannot now turn on a radiator unless the Department of Finance says so, and what was going on instead was a direct power struggle between the Financial Regulator and the Minister for Finance.

Having been forced to appoint a credible Financial Regulator and Central Bank governor – first-rate ones, in fact – the Government must do what they say. Were either Elderfield or Honohan to resign, Irish bonds would straight away turn to junk.

Now you understand the extraordinary shift in power that lay behind the seeming non-headline in this newspaper last month: “Lenihan expresses confidence in regulator”.

The great macroeconomist Rudiger Dornbusch observed that crises always take a lot longer to happen than you expect but, once started, they move with frightening rapidity. Or, as Hemingway put it, bankruptcy happens “Slowly. Then all at once.” We can only hope that the Central Bank is using whatever time remains to us as an independent State to devise an intelligent Plan B – or is it Plan C?

[Seoirse Ui Duic]

Save Irish Rugby
matchdaymail.irishrugby.ie/lt.php?c=623&m=2141&nl=1&s=d97c2bbfa708430d4e544066c7f6d073&lid=11407&l=-http--www.irishrugby.ie/22_20878.php--Q-utm_source--E-mdm--A-utm_medium--E-email--A-utm_campaign--E-40546

Leinster and Munster supporters were united in one thing at the RDS on Saturday night - they want to save Irish rugby. The proposals by the Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan to make Heineken Cup and RBS 6 Nations matches permanent free-to-air events for television would destroy Irish rugby - the national teams, the four provinces and rugby clubs - as we know it.

At half-time during the Magners League semi-final at the RDS on Saturday, Leinster and Munster fans were united in their protest at the Minister's proposals.

They were joined on the pitch by former Leinster and Ireland prop Reggie Corrigan and former Munster and Ireland hooker Frankie Sheahan who outlined the damage this proposal could do and the loss of revenue it could involve for Irish rugby.

Irish rugby is not normally at odds with the Government, however this is the single most serious threat to Irish rugby since the sport went professional 15 years ago.

We are asking you to consider the following and, if you agree, to lend your support to the campaign to persuade the Minister not to damage the sport irreparably by registering your protest today.

• The Minister's proposals would result in the loss of between €10-€12 million in annual revenue to the IRFU. This represents between 16% and 20% of the annual budget and is the equivalent of the entire annual budget for domestic/club rugby.

• This income would be lost to Irish rugby because it would also result in lost income for the international partnerships that govern both the Six Nations and the Heineken Cup and that the IRFU are part of. This would seriously change Ireland’s negotiating position in these partnerships.

• The loss of this income would mean that, unlike what has driven our success in the last 10 years, the IRFU could not offer competitive remuneration to our best players and they would most likely move overseas.

It would also greatly reduce the money allocated to the professional teams, resulting in a significant loss of competitiveness at national and provincial level in all competitions and would probably damage the very popularity and growth of our sport.

• The IRFU is a non-profit organisation, its revenues (€57m) are ploughed back into the sport each year to support the professional teams (€32m), domestic/club rugby (€10.5m), elite player development (€3m), administration, overheads and marketing (€6.8m), depreciation (€1.2 million), games support (€700k) and grounds (€600k).

• The IRFU is also at the beginning of a long term commitment to repay its share of the new Aviva Stadium

[kerrygold]

By James Lawton


Special One's school of science a lesson in substance over style


Monday May 24 2010

From the man who a few days earlier declared "Il Calcio Sono Io" (I am football), Internazionale's Champions League triumph in Madrid was less than some rhapsodic vindication. It was so clinical it might have been prepared in a laboratory.

But then if Jose Mourinho wishes to claim for himself the moon and the stars as well as the spoils of meticulous planning, it is, as always, his own egocentric business.

For the rest of us it is surely enough to acknowledge that for the moment at least he is the most effective coach of footballers on earth.

The way he confounded the hopes of his former mentor Louis van Gaal as the old Dutch master's Bayern failed to exploit their huge advantage in possession, as he did those of deposed champions Barcelona in the semi-finals, verged on the sadistic.

If it was a form of larceny it was also, in the cold perfection of its execution, worthy of a raid on the Louvre.

achievements

Yet, if we wish to lionise the remarkable achievements of Mourinho we must surely accept too that Bayern, especially without Franck Ribery, were a team whose presence in the final was nothing so much as a rebuke to the overall standard of the tournament -- and, from an English point of view, particularly the failure of Manchester United and Chelsea to make it into the semi-finals.

This is not to diminish Mourinho's tour-de-force with Inter over the last two years, or to endorse Rafa Benitez's frankly risible doubts about the wisdom of Real Madrid's pursuit of his services, but to say that what we saw in Madrid was rather the enforcement of some classically applied defensive and counter-attacking principles than any new benchmark of revolutionary quality.

What Mourinho reminded the football world of most persuasively was his formidable capacity to fit a set of tactics most effectively to a certain set of players.

He also proved that at the age of 47, his instinct in the matter of picking both players and strategy is showing evidence of a deep refining process. It is making an already extraordinary haul of 14 major titles look like a mere deposit payment on his journey into the pantheon of winning coaches.

This surely must be the most overwhelming reaction to the way he ambushed his old club Chelsea and the impressive Carlo Ancelotti at Stamford Bridge and overcame the virtuosity of Barca in the semi-finals.

What we saw on those occasions was a marriage of defensive thinking and an understanding of the need for genuinely potent counter-attack.

In the fulfilment of that planning at the Bernabeu we also saw the most striking evidence of Mourinho's growing prowess in finding players perfectly suited to his needs.

Diego Milito's two goals were superbly delivered. They gave Mourinho every right to claim a masterpiece of practicality when he decided to lift the veteran Argentinian out of years of relative obscurity with Zaragoza and Genoa and into the place of the profoundly over-rated Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Using Samuel Eto'o, who he gained in exchange for the desultory Swede, to simply run at opposing defences seemed idiosyncratic at the time, but again it was something that worked perfectly in the final phases of the treble-winning campaign.

Finally, there was the apotheosis of Mourinho's team-building, the re-deployment of Real Madrid's Wesley Sneijder. While the most expensive batch of Galacticos moved into Madrid, Sneijder moved on and began to play the football of his life.

When we embrace these underpinnings of Mourinho's second Champions League title, we can see clearly the development of his touch since his first breakthrough with Porto in 2004.

That year, like this one, was non-vintage with Monaco providing the opposition, but it did serve to show the remarkable commitment Mourinho could engender among a group of over-achieving players.

At Chelsea that ferocious talent was developed with two straight title wins but even at the peak of his Stamford Bridge pomp no one was about to proclaim the unveiling of tactical genius. Indeed, twice in European action Benitez's Liverpool provided the roadblock -- and without provoking anything more innovative than a resort to the long ball, a desperation that was expressed memorably when Robert Huth was sent on for his potential to cause havoc in the opposing penalty area.

Yet who could now suggest that Mourinho has not marched beyond frustration with such ever-growing authority that Real Madrid's move for him has been as inevitable as the sun rising over the sierra?

No, there is no hardship in giving Mourinho his due including the keys of Real. If it is true that in some respects he meets Napoleon's demand for above all a lucky general, his other qualities of nerve and pragmatism are also self-evident.

He has animated the players and fans of Inter in the most extraordinary way. Yet for some of us it would be false to pretend that the joy of his victories does not bring a certain strain.

Most troubling is the sense that Mourinho's impressive progress to the inner circle of winning football men is unlikely to be marked by the most attractive quality of a great coach. This is the implicit understanding that ultimately the best teams are made by alchemy rather than dictatorship.

Internazionale beat Bayern impressively, undoubtedly they were the team most in charge of what they were attempting to do, but did they create any of the emotion inspired by Barcelona in Rome last spring?

engaged

No, they did not. They engaged the brain rather than the heart and could it really be otherwise with Mourinho's presence on the touchline so pervasive in everything they did. In the end, it will always be a question of priorities.

With their vast spending and unbridled ambition to draw alongside their hated rivals Barcelona, Real Madrid's imperative has never been in doubt. They want the man who has proved most likely to make them winners.

By such calculations, Mourinho wins by the length of the Gran Via. He will make it his mission, his show, and Real suggest they will be more than happy to go along for an eventful ride.

Some of us, though, do have the right to keep a degree of faith in the recuperative powers of Barcelona, the team who in recent years have so brilliantly reminded us that football at its most seductive is about the expression of great players liberated to play the game of everyone's dreams. So far, we have to see, this is not part of Jose Mourinho's prospectus. It doesn't make him any less of a commodity, of course, just someone less perhaps than everyone's football prayer.

- James Lawton

Irish Independent

[Seoirse Ui Duic]

www.ulsterrugby.com/11879.php

Pienaar Joins Ulster
Following a report in South African Newspaper, The Sunday Tribune, in which Springbok Coach Peter de Villiers confirmed Ruan Pienaar's move to Northern Ireland, Ulster are delighted to announce that Ruan will join Ulster Rugby on a two year contract. Negotiations for his release are still ongoing with his Province, The Sharks.

Having made his Super 14 debut with the Sharks in 2005, Ruan then made his first appearance for the Springboks in 2006 against New Zealand and was a member of the victorious 2007 Rugby World Cup squad. To date, Ruan has won 36 Springbok caps and has scored 85 Test points.

Speaking about Ulster Rugby's decision to recruit the World Cup winning Springbok, Ulster Rugby Operations Director David Humphreys remarked: "Bringing Ruan to Ulster is a massive statement of our ambition to be competing with the top teams in the Magners League and ERC. He is one of the most naturally gifted players in world rugby and having had huge experience at international level with the Springboks, we believe Ruan will help Ulster achieve success over the next couple of seasons."

Ruan will be joining former Springbok and Sharks players, BJ Botha and Johann Muller, in the Ulster squad next season.

[kerrygold]

By Suzanne Campbell
Thursday Jun 17 2010

Summer time spells anxiety for many of us, and the prospect of stripping off by the pool can push us towards a quick weight-loss plan.

In Hollywood, a new diet trend is to eat only raw food or even baby food -- yet another weight-loss plan supposedly practised by celebs such as Jennifer Aniston. But as these trends come and go, how many of us ask: "South Beach", "Atkins", "The Zone", did any of them work in the long term?

With a diet industry that's worth over €200bn worldwide, it's not hard to see how peddling the latest solution for weight loss is a financial winner. New diet products and "experts" exist to sell us new ways to do the same old thing: lose weight and become healthier.

American author Michael Pollan has an alternative approach. In his new book Food Rules: An Eater's manual, he offers 64 simple tips on how to eat healthily. They read like advice your granny would have given you, and provide a refreshing antidote to the constant stream of nutritional "trends".

Ditching diet gurus and getting real about food is the only approach that works, according to Pollan. Writing about diets is a new departure for Pollan, whose laser-beam attention is normally focused on supermarkets and food manufacturing. His landmark book In Defense of Food made him one of the world's most trusted writers on the subject.

A professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Pollan turns the focus on to us in Food Rules, advising us to ignore "The Nutritional Industrial Complex".

He uses old-fashioned sense to simplify what we put into our mouths and see how it's affecting our weight and health.

Pollan was nudged towards writing about weight loss by doctors who approached him looking for a pamphlet with some simple rules for eating.

One physician told him about the insides of patients which were wrecked by eating "food products" rather than food. In the past, Pollan has detailed the huge health cost of processed foods and points out that the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.

"The modern supermarket has on average 47,000 products. The industry does not want you to know the truth about what you're eating because if you knew, you might not want to eat it."

Obesity costs Ireland €4bn a year. And as we eat more of the so-called Western diet -- processed foods, meat, added sugar, fats and refined grains -- we're also experiencing more of the diseases associated with this diet: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Yet people who consume more traditional foods experience these diseases at a much lower rate.

After years analysing the problem, Pollan's answer is shockingly simple: "Eat real food, not too much of it, and eat more plants than meat."

Expanding on this central theme, Pollan took the doctors up on their challenge: collecting and formulating straightforward, everyday rules for eating for a book that could be understood by everyone.

For advice he turned to chefs, scientists, doctors and the readers of his books. Then he boiled down the knowledge into 64 essential rules about eating with a paragraph explaining each.

For such a heavy hitter such as Pollan, it's refreshing to read a collection of positive tips on eating that is as relevant at the holiday buffet counter as in the aisle of the supermarket. Here's a selection of his food rules:


Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself

Pollan suggests there's nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried food or pastries now and then. The problem is that food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day. Once the food industry took over the task of washing, peeling, cutting, frying potatoes and cleaning up the mess, it makes things like French fries much more attractive.

"If you made all the French fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice-cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them -- chances are good it won't be every day."


Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored

Pollan says that many of us eat when we are not hungry.

"We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry -- before you eat and then again along the way. (If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.) Food is a costly antidepressant."


Avoid foods you see advertised on television

Food marketers are ingenious at turning criticisms of their products into newer, reformulated versions of the same foods. They re-advertise the product as being low in fat or low in salt and then boast about their implied health properties.

Pollan's tip: "The best way to escape these marketing ploys is to tune out the marketing itself, by refusing to buy heavily promoted foods. More than two-thirds of food advertising is spent promoting processed foods (and alcohol), so if you avoid products with big ad budgets, you'll automatically be avoiding edible food-like substances."


Do all your eating at a table

And no folks, "a desk is not a table". Pollan points out that if we eat while we work, watch TV or drive, "we eat mindlessly -- and as a result eat a lot more than we would if we were eating at a table, paying attention to what we're doing".

Testing this, he offers an interesting solution to the problem of fussy children. "Place a child in front of a television set and place a bowl of vegetables in front of him or her. They will eat everything in the bowl, often even vegetables that he or she doesn't ordinarily touch, without noticing what's going on. Which suggests an exception to the rule: When eating somewhere other than at a table, stick to fruits and vegetables."


Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the colour of the milk

"This should go without saying. Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives."


Cook

"Cooking for yourself," he writes, "is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors." And by cooking at home he doesn't mean something complicated or arduous. It's throwing leftovers from the fridge together for an omelette, opening a tin of tuna with some salad, or even beans on toast.

Pollan's rules distil much of what we know about food into easy, memorable nuggets of information. The book's strength lies in that it's uncomplicated, jargon-free and points out with a large dollop of humour the madness of some of our eating habits.

After all, "it's not food if it arrives in the window of your car" isn't that hard to argue with. Food Rules set out to be the antidote to diet books, but it could just change the way you eat for a very long time.

- Suzanne Campbell

Irish Independent



Read more: www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/health-fitness/the-64-healthyeating-tips-that-will-change-your-diet-forever-2223296.html#ixzz0rBjpW62G

[glengael]

My daughter the terrorist

What made village schoolteacher Mariam Sharipova blow up herself and 26 others on the Moscow metro?

Luke Harding The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010

Rasul Magomedov, Maryam Sharipova's father, recognised his daughter as one of the bombers in a photograph circulated on the internet. 'She wasn’t the kind of person who could do this,' he says. Photograph: Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR On Sunday 28 March 2010, 27-year-old Mariam Sharipova set off from her home in the remote village of Balakhani, high in the mountains of Dagestan. Her family's house sits under steep cliffs. There is a dirt track, mulberry and apricot trees, and a river filled with rubbish. A bit farther up the road is the village mosque. Beyond a tiny bazaar is the white-painted junior school where Mariam taught computer science.

Early that morning, Mariam and her mother took a minivan to Dagestan's regional capital, Makhachkala. The four-hour journey passes through a landscape of sheer peaks and river valleys; eagles float in a hazy sky above spruce trees; there are butterflies, birdsong. The mountains eventually give way to green plains dotted with bungalows, and the shimmering Caspian Sea.

Her mother says she and Mariam parted in Makhachkala's Irchi Kazak street. Mariam said she was dropping into the chemist's to buy some henna. Ten minutes later, she called her mother's mobile phone – she had bumped into a female friend, she said, and would make her own way back home. Her mother rang back half an hour later. The number was unavailable. Concerned, but not alarmed – her daughter was, after all, grown up – Mariam's mother went back to Balakhani alone.

Mariam's movements over the next few hours are unknown but, according to investigators, by next morning she had reached Moscow, 1,800km away. Around 7am, as the rush hour was getting under way, Mariam entered the metro. She travelled to Lubyanka station in central Moscow, a stroll from Red Square. And then, at 7.56am, she blew herself up in the second carriage, just as the doors were opening, killing herself and 26 others.

Forty minutes later, a second bomber, 18-year-old Dzhennet Abdullaeva, detonated her suicide belt at Park Kultury station. Together, the attacks killed 40 and injured more than 100, with dazed, bloodied survivors fleeing up escalators. The bombings plunged the city into panic, appearing to herald a new wave of terror emanating from the northern Caucasus, the scene of two brutal wars. More than this, however, the attacks were a devastating rebuttal of the government's assertion that it had squashed the insurgency raging, largely unnoticed, in Russia's volatile Muslim south.

There hadn't been any bombings in Moscow for six years. Why had they started again now? And what would motivate a young, successful and well-educated woman to kill herself and others?

Two months later, I travel to Balakhani to meet Mariam's father, Rasul Magomedev, a Russian literature teacher, in search of answers. I am also keen to document the insurgency now gripping Dagestan, the largest and most diverse republic in the northern Caucasus. Dagestan was, at first, immune to the violence that erupted in neighbouring Chechnya in 1994. Now it seems to be in the midst of a small-scale civil war. This battle, characterised by daily shoot-outs and bomb attacks, is being fought between Dagestan's police force and militant Islamist rebels. Caught in the middle are Dagestan's civilians.

These deadly skirmishes are part of a bigger conflict being played out across the region – that is, the republics of Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachaevo-Cherkessia. The rebels, led by Doku Umarov, want to establish a pan-Caucasian Islamist caliphate in the northern Caucasus, and to create a sort of Taliban Afghanistan. Soon after the Moscow bombings, Umarov claimed responsibility. The Lubyanka bombing appeared an audacious counter-strike against the FSB, whose grim former KGB offices sit forbiddingly in the square above the metro.


I meet Rasul Magomedev in late May. It is a bright, brilliant morning. Washing hangs on the line in the front yard of the family home; shoes are neatly stacked; there is a satellite dish; sparrows flit past a trailing vine. Mariam lived in the downstairs front bedroom. She decorated the walls a tasteful magenta. Her possessions are still there: L'Oréal moisturisers; a bedside table and mirror. There are books in Arabic. More surprising is the heap of women's fashion magazines – Health And Beauty, Good Advice and Glamour.

Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, Rasul tells me he finds it impossible to believe that his daughter was a suicide bomber. "I don't know what happened," he says. "We, too, are seeking answers. She knows. Allah knows. That's it." He offers his condolences to the families of Muscovites blown up on their way to work. Typically, bombers leave a last testament before going on their final mission. But Mariam left no note of any kind. "We've looked everywhere. We've found nothing."

I examine Mariam's old schoolbooks: they are covered in neat, diligent handwriting. She had been taking classes in Arabic. Rasul shows me the verbs she was busy noting down in her exercise book on 7 February, weeks before her death. "She wasn't the kind of person who could do this," he says. "She was self-confident, someone who defined clear goals, and who wanted to achieve them."

As a child, Mariam was self-disciplined and mature, Rasul says – for example, helping him sell popcorn when, in the early 1990s, Boris Yeltsin failed to pay his wages. A bright girl, she studied mathematics at Dagestan's State Pedagogical University. She became the first person from her district to do a master's, and took a second degree in psychology. In 2006 she began working at the village school. If Mariam was indeed a terrorist, she appears to have little in common with Chechen suicide bombers. These "black widows", who featured in Vladimir Putin's 1999-2005 Chechen war, generally acted from motives of personal revenge. Mariam, by contrast, was educated, web-savvy and from a stable, middle-class family.

Was she, though, representative of a new kind of radicalised terror? Balakhani is known as a religious stronghold of Dagestan's Salafis. This conservative form of Islam has been spreading rapidly across the republic. It is more radical than the traditional form of Sufi Islam that has existed in the region since the 8th century. There are growing sectarian tensions, with many Salafis dubious about the local religious leadership, which they believe is too close to state power. The authorities, meanwhile, dub the Salafis extremists and "Wahhabis", and blame them for every anti-federal attack.

Rasul rejects the official account, and the media's portrayal of his daughter as a terrorist zombie. "It's rubbish. From my point of view this is all part of [Russia's] vile campaign against Muslims." He is convinced Mariam may have been abducted in Makhachkala – either by Russia's intelligence agencies, or by other shadowy forces interested in plunging Dagestan into a bloody, Chechen-style war. He claims he realised something was seriously wrong only on 1 April, when his daughter failed to return home for the new school term.

In the days after the metro attacks, police leaked ghoulish photos showing the heads of the two women bombers. Rasul immediately recognised the first bomber as his daughter. The bruises on her right cheek aren't consistent with suicide explosions, he believes, and indicate that in the hours immediately before her death, someone had tortured her. "The bruises would have had to be inflicted three to four hours before the incident," he says. "Why is this? The investigation can't answer this question."

Certainly, the official account of events is puzzling and incomplete. Last month, investigators said they had discovered an apartment in Moscow where three male accomplices had prepared the women for their mission. They said all three had been shot dead by police after "putting up resistance". As usual, they offered no details. Investigators also say that the two women travelled from Dagestan to Moscow by inter-city bus – a journey of 48 hours. Other witnesses insist, however, that Mariam was still in Dagestan early on 28 March. It is possible, of course, that she could have flown from Makhachkala to Moscow under an assumed name. So far, though, the investigation isn't saying this.

Additionally, in the lead-up to the bombing, the family were under relentless scrutiny from law enforcement agencies. In 2008, Mariam's older brother, Ilya, spent eight months in prison, accused of being a rebel and possessing a grenade, before being freed for lack of evidence. On 4 March, the authorities searched Mariam's home, sending dozens of soldiers, trucks and even helicopters into Balakhani. They left empty-handed.

Then, on 28 March, the day his daughter vanished, Rasul was himself arrested at gunpoint. Soldiers encircled the house where he was staying in Makhachkala as part of a special operation. It turned out they were looking for someone else.

It is impossible to say if the police had foreknowledge of Mariam's plans or – as seems more likely – were merely incompetent. Either way, her friends are not persuaded that she would have willingly blown herself up. Gulnara Rustamova, a human rights activist with the organisation Mothers of Dagestan, who became friends with Mariam after her brother's arrest, visited her on 20 March, nine days before her death. She found her calm and untroubled, obsessed not with paradise but with her split ends. "She really loved herself," Gulnara says. "She was always doing manicures and pedicures. Mariam would never go to that extreme. We talked about women's problems."

In the week before her death, Mariam ordered a new dress, bought an expensive mop to do household chores and told relatives she had plans to cultivate the vegetable patch. She also advised Gulnara to buy an electric blanket to relieve her rheumatic leg. "I think both women were kidnapped – someone with a background in special services took them on a plane to Moscow," Gulnara speculates, adding that when she phoned Mariam's mother early on 28 March, she clearly heard Mariam's voice in the background. "I know Mariam. She wasn't ready for death."

But could someone else have persuaded her to kill herself? Russian investigators claim Mariam was leading a secret double life, and was the bride of a top terrorist leader, Magomedali Vagabov. Vagabov is rumoured to be the rebel emir of Gubden, a couple of hours' drive from Balakhani. When I travel there the next day, I discover that it is one of Dagestan's more prosperous districts, its streets lined with handsome, yellow-brick houses. I had arranged to meet Magomed Shapi, head of one of the town's most prominent families. The previous day, Shapi had given evidence to the human rights group Memorial about the disappearance and subsequent murder of his son, Magamod Ali. Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, took his statement. "Salafis are being treated automatically as insurgents," she said, "This is conducive to the marginalisation and radicalisation of the Salafi community."

The police summoned Ali for an interview on 16 July 2007. When he turned up at the regional station, they assured him he was mistaken. On his way home, however, police ambushed his car and shot him in the leg. According to his father, the officers were about to plant weapons in the boot of his vehicle but abandoned the plan when a crowd gathered. Ali was taken to hospital, with witnesses confirming he was still alive. Officers, however, kicked doctors out of the room where he was being held; minutes later, he was dead. Photos show a stab wound in his neck. "He was picked up for his religious convictions. Not for any other reason," his father says, walking me to where his son is buried in Gubden's grassy cemetery.

According to Shapi, it's hardly surprising Muslims are turning to radical Islam, with sharia law seemingly providing an alternative to the corruption and lawlessness that plagues Dagestan. Nobody knows for sure, but it seems in recent years that the number of rebels fighting the authorities has grown. The struggle also has a distinctive ethnic dimension. Dagestan is home to 14 major ethnic groups and several minor ones. Numerous languages are spoken. There is also a clan struggle over who gets to occupy government positions, with incumbents frequently shot dead. Together, it is a recipe for political instability, criminal feuds and smouldering animosities.

Human rights groups say there are numerous cases of extrajudicial killing, torture and disappearances carried out by Dagestan's police force. They add that police also routinely plant evidence on suspects and stage fake encounters in which "militants" are killed. At the same time, police are also victims: one of the officers allegedly implicated in Ali's death was Magomed Ruslan. In 2008, his mother, sister and aunt were blown up while visiting a relative's grave. (Shapi says his family didn't plant the bomb.) A grief-stricken Ruslan set fire to Ali's family home and shot up the porch. The case illustrates Dagestan's fratricidal war – a sorrowful cycle of killing and revenge.

Over a lunch of plov (rice pilaf), Shapi admits that one of his grandsons, Magomedzagir Vagabov, went "to the woods", a phrase that means joining the militant underground. How many jihadist rebels actually live in the forest is unclear, but his grandson, who was killed in January, was a close associate of Magomedali Vagabov, a powerful figure in the insurgent hierarchy – and Mariam's alleged husband.

In recent months, according to Dr Cerwyn Moore, an expert in political violence in the north Caucasus, the rebels have suffered several significant setbacks. Their military command structure is divided into jamaats, or local insurgent units. Late last year, Umalat Magamedov, the leader of Dagestan's Shariat jamaat, was killed in a shoot-out in Makhachkala. Police opened fire on his car when he failed to stop. He was allegedly married to Dzhennet Abdullaeva, the second Moscow suicide bomber. Photos show them posing together holding handguns, a pair of insouciant revolutionaries.

Mariam's father scorns the idea that she was secretly married to Vagabov. He says she spent her entire life at home or teaching at school. "The only time she went out was either with her mother or to go to work. What the Russian press says about her being married is ridiculous."

Independent observers, however, suggest the investigators may be right. Secret marriages between rebel commanders and Islamically minded women are not unheard of, with couples meeting every four months or so in a safe house for a brief moment of intimacy. Those familiar with the insurgency say it is perfectly possible for a young woman to be interested in her looks and make-up while at the same time holding revolutionary convictions. "These women are very feminine," says one source, familiar over many years with Dagestan's militant underground. "For their husbands they want to be really attractive. Their thinking is that what they have inside is for their husbands. They wear sexy underwear. And, of course, they don't want their husbands to run off with someone younger."

The source, who knows Rasul personally, believes it is most probable that Mariam did indeed decide to volunteer as a suicide bomber. To suggest otherwise, she believes, is "wishful thinking" on the part of the largely law-abiding Salafi community. "There is a very radical ideology in Dagestan. It is flourishing in the currents of human rights abuses and egregious corruption. The ideology is poisoning minds. Unfortunately, it is poisoning some very clever minds, and not just those acting from personal reasons." She adds: "We can see clear radicalisation recently, illustrated by the fact they are hitting soft targets again."

But in a world of shadowy groups, anti-insurgent propaganda, violence and conspiracy theories, it is impossible to establish a definitive version of what happened. The authorities have failed to provide any proof or supporting evidence to explain the Moscow bombings, adding another layer of complexity to an already murky episode. In addition, law enforcement agents frequently do kidnap innocent civilians. Many are never seen again.

In Makhachkala, I hear of one such case. Sitting in her front bedroom, Subegat Gasonava recalls how her husband Rashid was seized by special agents. It was 8 September last year, soon after 9pm, a humid night. Rashid was driving his minivan in the centre of Makhachkala. Suddenly, a car pulled up in front of him. Armed masked men jumped out and dragged him away as another vehicle blocked the road. He broke free and tried to escape, but one of his assailants opened fire and shot at the tarmac next to his legs. They then bundled him into a car without number plates and drove off. Nobody has seen him since. Subegat suspects the kidnappers came from the notorious Sixth Division, the federal department in Dagestan charged with investigating organised crime. They deny all knowledge of the incident.

Six days after Rashid was kidnapped, Subegat had a stroke of good fortune: a security camera in a chemist's shop captured the moment the assailants whisked him from the street and into the night, leaving behind his flip-flops. Armed with this unusual proof, she has turned to Dagestan's procurator and to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. So far, however, despite opening a criminal case, nobody has discovered what happened to Rashid. "I don't think he's been killed," Subegat says. "I think he's being held in some kind of cellar or illegal prison." The hardest thing is hiding his disappearance from their two young sons, Amir, three, and Mukhamed, two. "They keep asking when Daddy is coming back. I tell them he's at work." She is cautiously optimistic that Dagestan's new, apparently reformist president, Magomedsalam Magomedov, may be able to help. He has promised to bring back the rule of law, though it's hard to see what this might mean in a place characterised by rampant police abuses and institutional collapse.


Back in Balakhani, Rasul talks eloquently of the 300-year struggle that has been waged in the mountains of Dagestan against Russian occupants. He mentions Sheikh Mansur, who in 1785 organised the first large-scale rebellion against Russian expansion into the Caucasus highlands. It was Mansur who also issued a call for gazavat, or holy war, against the Russians, a slogan still used by today's guerrillas. (Increasingly, thanks to the internet, they see their campaign not as a local struggle but as part of global jihad.) The most celebrated anti-Russian warlord, Shamil, surrendered in 1859 just down the road after Tsarist forces trapped him in the Dagestani village of Gunib. At the same time, Rasul also expresses his fondness for Russian writers Pushkin, Lermontov, Sholokhov and Tolstoy: "I admire Tolstoy for his stand against violence."

I leave with few answers, but the tragedy of Mariam Sharipova, it strikes me, may ultimately be a generational one, with today's disaffected Muslims far more radicalised than their Soviet-educated parents. These days, the major platform for revivalist Islam is no longer the madrasa but the web, an area in which Mariam was a specialist and through which she may have been pursuing a secret life. Rasul quotes a line from Tolstoy's War And Peace: " 'Good people make up the majority. Evil people are fewer in number, but they are very organised and can control the masses.' This is still the case today."

[glengael]

Friday June 25 2010

A MAJOR operation is under way to finish a section of a busy motorway after part of the road collapsed into a bog.

Road authorities last night confirmed that the final section of the Limerick to Nenagh bypass would be completed by the end of the year.

The €425m road -- which was due to open last year -- will link the Limerick southern ring road with the Nenagh bypass.

The construction of the 38km road from Annacotty to Nenagh, Tipperary, was contracted to Bothar Hibernian almost four years ago and was due for completion in May 2009.

Difficulties

However, the contractors ran into serious difficulties at Anaholty bog, where the almost-completed road collapsed earlier this year.

It is understood that thousands of steel-reinforced concrete piles were driven into the bog to support the sinking road.

But following the collapse of the road surface, a concrete and steel bridge is to be constructed over the entire area in the hope of establishing a stable base for the road.

The National Roads Authority (NRA) says the final section of the Limerick-to-Nenagh road will open by the end of the year.

"We are being reassured by the contractor that the project will be completed by the end of the year, but this is a design-built contract so any of the costs incurred due to difficulties with the Anaholty bog is borne by the contractor," an NRA spokesman said.

"We are obviously disappointed (with the delay) as we would liked to have seen the public benefit sooner, but obviously the contractor is dealing with a difficult situation." Limerick County Council said it was satisfied that the contractor was dealing with the difficulties as best it could.

But a spokesman for the council stressed that the contract company must itself address any difficulties that arise during the construction of the motorway.

"Under the terms of the contract between Limerick council and Bothar Hibernian, any issues arising from the construction of the motorway are to be addressed by the contractor in question," he said.

- Kathryn Hayes

Irish Independent

[glengael]

Italy out of Africa and Lippi out of excuses
PADDY AGNEW in Rome

GET THE rotten tomatoes ready. Italy’s World Cup squad, eliminated from the first round of the finals after a 3-2 defeat by Slovakia in Johannesburg yesterday, may face a less-than-sympathetic welcome when they return home later this week.

Indeed, there are those churlish folks who suggest the squad would do better not to return home at all but rather go looking for work as part-time car park attendants in Soweto.

The point is that the reigning world champions have just registered one of their worst World Cup performances.

Not since Northern Ireland kept them out of the 1958 finals in Sweden has Italy recorded such a poor result. To have finished last in what was widely perceived as the weakest of all the first-round groups represents an even worse performance than in West Germany in 1974 when, again, the Italians went out in the first round.

“The plane of shame is ready to bring them home,” commented national news agency ANSA last night, adding: “Marcello Lippi’s world champions are leaving South Africa to return home covered in sporting disgrace”.

In the park of Villa Borghese in central Rome, where thousands of fans had gathered to watch the game on giant TV screens, the sense of disappointment was palpable: “They managed to play for only about six minutes in the whole course of three games,” commented one disappointed fan.

Most Italians had long ago decided it would be impossible for the Berlin heroes of four years ago to win back-to-back World Cups.

Yet many hoped this side would at least put on a bella figura and go out in a style befitting champions. Not so.

Even Sky Italia’s passionately patriotic commentator, Fabio Caressa, had to conclude his much movimentato commentary with the observation: “Frankly, for the entire first half, Italy were terrible . . .”

The football website goal.com was equally disappointed, headling its analysis of the game with: “From World Cup Triumph to a Disaster Of Epic Proportions, Italy Are On Their Way Home.”

Needless to say, the most wanted man in Italy right now is coach Marcello Lippi, the hero of four years ago. He stands in the dock, accused of having adopted too conservative a selection policy and in particular of having left Italy’s two most talented enfants terribles, Mario Balotelli and Antonio Cassano, at home in favour of a number of safe but uninspired players.

The result, say his critics, was an all-too-predictable disaster.

Perhaps some good will come of this defeat. Namely, Italian football, for long duped by that 2006 triumph and more recently by that of the very un-Italian Inter Milan in the Champions League, will acknowledge that not everything is rosy in the vineyard. Meanwhile, watch out for the tomatoes.

[glengael]

THE ILLEGAL netting and commercial sale of wild salmon in the southwest of the country has amounted to a long-running scandal. Because of that, a decision by Minister of State Conor Lenihan to open a draft net fishery for this endangered species in the Castlemaine area of Co Kerry has all the hallmarks of a badly considered political “stroke”. Mr Lenihan dressed his decision up as scientific management and set a catch limit of 800 salmon for this year.

The shabby nature of the exercise is clear from the fact that this is a mixed-stock fishery and the allocation of the catch between commercial fishermen had not been agreed. Salmon stocks in two of the five rivers flowing into the bay are so low they have been closed to all fishing. The other three have healthy returns. The South Western Regional Fisheries Board, which opposed a ban on drift-netting for salmon in the teeth of scientific advice some years ago, supported the decision.

In recent weeks, Fianna Fáil backbenchers have complained about the “over-regulation” of commercial fishermen and small farmers by Government. There is a danger that, in an attempt to regain political support, Ministers may ignore long-term considerations such as sustainability and conservation. Of particular concern in that regard is a widespread belief that Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries Brendan Smith is preparing to reopen a commercial sea bass fishery.

This valuable inshore species was driven to near-extinction by commercial activity two decades ago and the Government was forced to impose a total ban on trawler catches. Rod and line angling, with strict limits on size and catch numbers, continued. Since then, there has been a gradual recovery of stocks. But because growth rates are so slow – a five kilo fish may be 18 years old and Ireland is at the northern limit of its range – the fishery remains extremely vulnerable.

In the south of the country, commercial interests have lobbied for a reopening of the fishery for some years. As a result, the Marine Institute was asked to provide scientific advice. Two years ago, it concluded that total available stocks were likely to be less than 100 tonnes and that there was “no prospect of a sustainable commercial fishery for bass”. In view of this information, it would be a disgrace if Mr Smith surrendered to political pressure and reopened the fishery to trawlers by permitting bass to be taken as a by-catch. Such action would be equivalent to the “scientific management” of wild salmon introduced by Mr Lenihan in Co Kerry.

Irish Times June 26th 2010

[glengael]

Hand home back to bank if you can't pay loan -experts

Wednesday July 07 2010

HOMEOWNERS who are unable meet their mortgage repayments should be encouraged to voluntarily hand their home back to the bank, an expert group on mortgage arrears has recommended.

The group's interim recommendations do not contain any proposals on forcing banks to write off mortgage debt.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan rejected suggestions the group's recommendations were "too little, too late".

Encouraged

But opposition politicians said there was nothing for homeowners in the interim report of the Mortgage Arrears and Personal Debt Expert Group.

Instead of calling on banks to write off some of the debts of strapped householders, the group said people unable to manage repayments should be encouraged to leave their home and be provided with social housing.

"When it is concluded that the mortgage is unsustainable then forbearance is unlikely to be appropriate and voluntary surrender may be necessary," the government-appointed arrears group said yesterday.

People should be assisted in "applying for social housing or other long-term housing supports appropriate to their needs", the report says.

The group has recommended that there be a radical overhaul of the state mortgage interest supplement scheme, which is funded by the Department of Social Welfare.

But it concluded that mortgage interest supplement should only be provided "if there is a realistic expectation that assisting the borrower will ensure that they can sustain the mortgage in the longer term".

The group put off looking at negative equity -- and whether any consumer debt should be written off by the banks -- until it produces a final report in September.

Instead, it recommended that all lenders must put in place a mortgage arrears resolution process (MARP) which would include allowing home buyers to extend the term of the mortgage, or pay interest only, or take a payment break.

The report, the main recommendations of which have been exclusively revealed in the Irish Independent, said lenders should not penalise borrowers taking part in a mortgage arrears repayment process.

They should not be allowed to encourage homeowners to switch from mortgage products such as trackers, if it would put them at a disadvantage.

Financial Regulator Matthew Elderfield has said he would amend banking rules to put the main recommendations on a statutory footing.

The Cabinet yesterday approved changes in the mortgage interest supplement (MIS) scheme, which were recommended in the report.

These changes will allow an eligible couple, where one person is in full-time employment, to qualify for the state-funded MIS .

The ban on paying MIS to such a couple has been removed and a revised means test is to be introduced.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen said the new measures would ensure an end to penalties or arrears charges for those taking part in the arrears resolution process.

Betrayal

But Fine Gael TD Michael Ring accused the Greens of joining Fianna Fail in "betraying" homeowners. The report confirmed there would be no NAMA for the people, he said.

"As the Taoiseach and his cronies lined up at the announcement, were any of them really thinking about the plight of the 33,000 households who cannot pay their mortgage and the 250,000 people in negative equity?" the Fine Gael spokesman on social welfare asked.

"This watered-down, half-baked and hollow report adds insult to injury for these households who can thank the Taoiseach for their current plight."

- Charlie Weston and Aine Kerr

Irish Independent

[glengael]

Pricwatch
Conor Pope Irish times

SUPERMARKET SHELVES Readers have spotted that some of their favourite brands are disappearing from Tesco – it may be good for the supermarket giant’s bottom line, but it’s bad for consumer choice

OKAY, SO IT’S not the end of the world when the stuff we like inexplicably disappears from our supermarket shelves but it is still pretty infuriating and the apparently random way in which the State’s most powerful retailer has discontinued some products of late has made many people see red.

One reader is so annoyed by Tesco dropping certain products that he has started a gentle campaign of civil disobedience. He messes up shelves and pushes the stock he doesn’t like behind the ones he likes. It is, in truth, a faintly ridiculous campaign and one which has gone presumably unnoticed by anyone except the poor unfortunates who have to tidy up after him.

While we don’t endorse his defiance we understand his frustration, as do many readers. Last month we posted a short piece on our blog about the absence of some products from Tesco’s shelves and the response from readers was huge – close to 80 people got in touch to moan.

The two best mainstream pastas in Ireland are De Cecco and Barilla – they’re also the best-selling brands in Italy, an endorsement which is good enough for Pricewatch. But can you get them in Tesco? Not any more. The only pasta Tesco sells are own-brand options, and pastas made by Roma and Napolina.

“I used to love the jelly beans from the Jelly Bean Factory, an Irish Company, but they vanished about a month or so ago,” wrote one reader. “I noticed recently that all the Discovery Mexican range is gone. The only choice now is Tesco own-brand or Old El Paso. Discovery’s sauces were way better,” said another.

Several readers bemoaned the disappearance of Linda McCartney’s vegetarian products. “Before the big ‘change’ in 2009 which involved dropping dozens of ‘popular brands’ and moving to a lot of low-priced products, you could get any of the four varieties of Barrys’ tea,” another reader said. “Now you can maybe find one variety, or two if you’re lucky, often on the lowest or highest shelf.”

“Sno yogurts have also disappeared,” wrote someone else. “A lot of the milk that went into these yogurts came from local farms, so I used to buy them. I am very curious to know why this has happened?” Ace bleach, Ecover, Inversoft toilet paper, Royal baking powder, Roses Lime cordial, Robinson’s Hi-Juice, Buitoni pasta sauces – the list of products readers complained about being dropped was long.

So, what’s the story? How much of it is down to shifting demand and how much of it is down to the change in its supply system? Much of Tesco’s stock is now sourced in the UK and then shipped over to a warehouse in north county Dublin before being distributed across the country. Do these distribution changes mean Irish shoppers are now more likely to be offered what is popular in the UK? Industry sources have also suggested that Tesco may be taking certain brands off its shelves to send a message to suppliers and producers about its power in order to drive down prices – smaller suppliers who are too stretched to lower their prices sufficiently get dropped.

Tesco is known to drive hard bargains with its suppliers. Earlier this year this newspaper revealed it had been demanding millions of euro from suppliers in return for the continued stocking of their products on the supermarket’s shelves. It told individual suppliers they must pay up to €500,000 in order to have a presence in its 119 stores around the country. Suppliers have also complained about the demands made by other large retailers but says Tesco’s were bigger in scale and breadth.

A number of producers who do business with Tesco were willing to talk to Pricewatch but all declined to be identified. One described Tesco as “a law unto themselves. We have people calling us to say they can’t find our products on the shelves but we have not been told what is going on by the store,” he says.

“It is very frustrating. I honestly don’t know if they are being cute hoors, trying to put us under pressure and drive prices down or if it is down to incompetence. Things have gotten so much tougher for us all since the Change for Good campaign was introduced and there have certainly been casualties.”

Last year, Tesco rolled out a massive price-cutting campaign which, it claimed, would see prices across its stores fall by an average of 22 per cent. The Change for Good campaign was forced upon the store because the flow of shoppers crossing the Border in search of better value had seen its business drop in some Border counties. It was able to drop prices by centralising its distribution system, buying for the Irish market from its international suppliers and putting pressure on local suppliers to lower their prices.

We contacted Tesco to see if it could shed light on the disappearing products. In a statement it said it offered customers “a wide choice and like all retailers the range of products offered are determined by demand from customers. Tesco is one of the biggest supporters of the Irish food industry, buying over €2 billion worth of Irish food products each year.”

Other supermarket chains have noticed changes in Tesco’s stocking system and have taken advantage. Superquinn has started stocking many of the products delisted by Tesco. “We can’t really win the price war against a company the size of Tesco but we can win on range and offer products that they have delisted. The pressure Tesco is putting on some suppliers means they are decamping to the UK and we are trying to bring them back,” says James Wilson, Superquinn’s trading director.

He cites the example of De Cecco. It is the “biggest selling pasta in Italy so we want it on our shelves.” He points out that if Tesco is reluctant to deal with a certain supplier, it makes it easier for Superquinn to do so. “We do support Irish businesses but we also negotiate hard because we have to. If we don’t our prices will climb too high.”

A producer of a well-known Irish brand tells Pricewatch that Tesco was “not so brazen as to say straight out ‘do this or you’re off our shelves’ but you are given little reminders along the way about the power they have and they can shift the goalpost in the middle of the year, irrespective of what is agreed at the start of a year.”

Another producer agrees. “We do business with the biggest supermarkets in the world, and while Tesco doesn’t play hardball more than anyone else, there is a difference. When you reach an agreement with a German or a US retailer, that agreement is final. With Tesco there are always surprises.”

Another fact of life, however, is that retailers big and small have no choice but to respond to consumers’ demands, eventually. According to retail sources, Tesco, more than most retailers its size, is responsive to complaints. “If the consumer complains loudly enough and often enough about the disappearance of a certain product then Tesco will listen,” one source told Pricewatch. So if the products you like have disappeared make sure your voice is heard. After all, every little helps.

Irish Times July 12th.

[hamish]

ISLAND LIFE ......

A bustling waterfront village, scenic beaches, deep-sea fishing and fossilised tetrapod tracks – Valentia island has it all, and more, writes Miriam Mulcahy


ALTHOUGH I’VE been lucky enough to holiday in Kerry for many years, I discovered Valentia only recently. My partner has a thing for islands – the sense of isolation they induce, and the first chance he got, he packed us into the car and we were island-bound.

Incredible as it may seem to me now, I was reluctant – unwilling to forgo a rare summer’s day on the perfect sands of Derrynane. For all of us, it was love at first landing as the ferry pulled into Knightstown and we caught our first glimpse of the village clustered on the harbour, its Victorian buildings and wide streets quite unlike anywhere else so close to the water.

Kerry is like that – you can find a part that is so perfect, so complete, that has everything you could ever possibly want or need, that the rest of the world, and of Kerry, too, fades and recedes until there are only this village and these beaches.

A small island off the Ring of Kerry, joined to the mainland by a bridge at Portmagee, Valentiat has an unparalleled wealth of beauty and heritage. There are walks on windswept cliffs, tiny coves and beaches, a shiny new marina in front of Knightstown for yachts and boats, views that get better around every corner and, more than anything, a laid back, unhurried charm that permeates everywhere.

Any visitor will be spoiled for choice for what to do and where to stay. There’s a good mix of self-catering and BB, with a choice of older cottages scattered around the island in scenic locations, or modern developments in the heart of Knightstown, the bustling waterfront village. If you stay in Knightstown it’s a short stroll to any pub and restaurants, from where you can soak up the atmosphere.

For those in search of peace, there are also BBs on the western side of the island, looking down on the lighthouse and the sea. A visit to the Valentia Heritage centre in Knightstown is the key to unlocking much of the island’s history. It showcases the work of noted naturalist Maude Delap, whose collected specimens developed marine research.

Here you can learn about the transatlantic cable, which islanders claim to be a feat of engineering no less astounding than that of putting man on the moon. In the 1850s, the first attempts were made to lay the cable, between Valentia and Newfoundland in Canada, before eventual success in 1866. A cable station operated on the island for a hundred years, and brought much prosperity and life to the island.

The architects of all this industry – the cable, the Slate quarry, the Nimmo-planned village of Knightstown, were the knights of Kerry, the FitzGeralds, who were live-in landlords in Glanleam. Slate from the quarry roofed some of the most important buildings in London, including Westminster, St Pauls and Buckingham palace.

Some of the slate even found its way to South America in the form of railway sleepers, and the enterprising Knights brought back South American plants to create a tropical garden in Glanleam. The gardens can still be visited today and are a real pleasure to walk around. The Knights were tireless in their promotion of the island and had many eminent visitors to stay at the house. Queen Victoria’s son came for a visit and, in his honour, the harbour-front hotel was renamed the Royal.

A visit to the tetrapod tracks is an absolute must-see for children: 350 million years ago, an ancient creature crawled along the rocks here, in what was then mud, and left a clear series of tracks that will delight any mini-marine biologists.

Above the tracks is the Lighthouse Café, where salads and vegetables are grown in the organic garden, the menu is full of seafood, the wine list and coffee, both excellent – but what really pulls people back, year after year, is the breathtaking view from a series of terraces outside. If you get a good day, it’s heaven.

WHEN YOU CAN drink no more coffee or wine, or whatever is giving you an excuse to linger here, above the cafe is the Slate Quarry, with fine views. The best view of the island, however can be seen from one of the two mountains on the island. You can do this the easy way, or the hard way.

The easy way is to drive to the summit of Geokaun, on the northern side of the island, and enjoy spectacular, panoramic views of the island, the Ring of Kerry, Dingle and the Blaskets. The hard way is to accept an invitation from Mick O’Connell, legendary footballer and Valentia’s most famous resident, to go for “a hop up the hill”. It’s not easy seeing a man in his seventies leave you for dust as he tears up the mountain, but to hear him speak about his home was worth every sore muscle.

Of course, it’s an island and the sea will constantly beckon. There’s a tiny beach at Glanleam that is utterly charming and quite different to the vast expanses of golden sands that are so much a feature of the Ring of Kerry.

IF YOU WANT A wild beach day, Diarmuid Ring, an octogenarian boatman, will ferry you to the adjoining island of Beginis, which is unpopulated. The harbour in Knightstown is a focus for kids and teenagers alike – and that most beloved of Irish summer sports, jumping from the pier, the most simple of joys now prolonged by the wearing of wetsuits. As well as the fine new marina in the harbour, Valentia Sea Sports offers summer camps, kayaking and sailing.

Fishing is another big attraction for visitors and there are several boats that will take groups out for deep sea fishing.

Everything is there for the taking – ling, wrasse, and cod – and there is nowhere better to finish a successful day out on the water than in the bar of the Royal hotel, which does excellent bar food.

Another feature of south Kerry is the summer Seine boat regatta; Valentia’s regatta is on the August weekend and, whatever the weather, the atmosphere positively sizzles.

If you get the weather, make sure to visit Skellig. This world heritage site, 12 miles out to sea, is a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Visiting this rock, where monks, lighthouse keepers and their families eked out Spartan lives, is an uplifting experience. It’s astonishing, but be warned – those in poor health should not travel, and be wary of taking young children. Trips are available from the pier at Portmagee: mornings are better as, sea conditions permitting, you can land on Skellig.

Rainy days must be mentioned because, unless you’re incredibly lucky, Kerry will shower you with a few. Take the kids to the candle-making factory at the back of the island, stop for an ice-cream at Daly’s Farmhouse Dairy, where the ice-cream is made on the farm, have lunch at the Knights’ Inn in Knightstown, which has a great secondhand bookshop. If the rain has thwarted a trip to Skellig, the Skellig Experience Centre paints a comprehensive picture of the lives of the monks and the lighthousekeepers who lived there.

For the golfer, the world-class links at Waterville are 20 minutes by car. For those disinclined to pay world-class green fees, Skellig Bay, also in Waterville, is wonderful course.

It’s a tiny island with a disproportionate amount of attractions, but the beauty of Valentia is the possibility of doing it all or doing nothing: each pursuit is equally rewarding on this jewel of an island which, once visited, will forever haunt you.

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/travel/2010/0710/1224274394063.html

[Mickmack]

Tuesday, July 13, 2010Perhaps a new confidence may be the greatest legacy

TOM HUMPHRIES

JOHANNESBURG LETTER: Part of the growing-up stage of any country is that it has to be let make its own mistakes

HOME TONIGHT on a late flight which comes through Amsterdam and is likely to be stuffed with morose Dutch people keen to get back to their Amsterdam coffeehouses.

Before the toil of the airport and journey, however, Phineas, who has been driving me around Johannesburg – or Jozi, as he calls it – has half-offered, half-insisted on taking me on an informal freedom tour of Soweto. He is going to show me the sights.

Where the young Mandela lived and hung his shingle, the spot where young Hector Pieterson was shot at the start of the 1976 riots, and so on. If I’m lucky and if Phineas can stop laughing for long enough (Phineas, it’s not Funnyus), we will also see the house in which Leeds United legend Lucas Radebe grew up.

It’s a funny thing and sad thing, but Phineas knows as much about the hardships of Leeds United as he knows about what goes on at the Orlando Pirates or Kaizer Chiefs, the dominant Sowetan clubs. A large part of soccer’s progress in some African countries has been a further colonisation of the imagination by the English Premiership. In Johannesburg and beyond you see many, many more Premiership jerseys being worn than you do favours of local clubs.

Phineas lives in Soweto with his three kids, the oldest of whom he is struggling to put through college. He talks almost sentimentally about the struggle for South Africa’s independence and wonders wistfully if the Bikos and the Mandelas really had in mind the sort of administration which Jacob Zuma presides over these days.

It’s a good question. But part of the growing-up stage of any country is that it has to be let make its own mistakes and endure its own Zumas as well as enjoy its Madibas.

Today and yesterday Phineas has been busy ferrying people to the airport and he is more than a little disappointed in the amount of business which the World Cup brought to his country and in the speed at which it has dissipated. I imagine that sense of disillusion will fester and grow in some people, but the hope for South Africa will be that they will eventually take the white elephant stadiums in their stride, enjoy the improved infrastructure and move on with the galvanised and confident feeling which South Africa has had these past few weeks.

Perhaps the pretty stadium in Green Point will hardly be filled again, and for some it will be hard not to look at it and imagine the hospitals or schools which it might have bought. But the compensation lies in South Africa’s seamless staging of the event and the longing which many of us have to go back and to learn more about this recondite place.

What is as interesting as the economic or political impact the tournament will prove to have is what it will do for football here. Spain’s win in the 19th staging of the World Cup was the 10th for a European side. South America have won the other nine.

I am indebted to a thoughtful article by Samuel Amiteye, a Ghanaian academic working in Germany, for pointing out some of the following details which are pertinent to African soccer. All 19 of those World Cups have been won by sides with native coaches.

Part of the deficit of confidence in African countries and the surfeit of arrogance among the rest of us has meant it is almost traditional now for African countries to set sail under the guidance of foreign managers. The cliche is that you need a foreign manager to impose the discipline and the stifling systems which native managers would struggle with. Long term, it is a poor investment.

Twenty teams in the recently deceased tournament had native coaches. Of the six African nations who qualified, Algeria were the only team to travel with a native coach. Twelve native and four foreign coaches advanced to the last 16, from which six native and two foreign coaches qualified to the quarter-finals. Eight foreign coaches failed to bring their sides to the last 16. Four of those were managing African sides. The four teams that made the semi-finals had native coaches.

Amiteye points out, however, that Ghana have won the African Cup of Nations four times (1963, 1965, 1978 and 1982) and were coached each time by a Ghanaian. On top of that, they have two under-17 world titles and have been twice under-17 runners-up. Ghana are one of the favourites in this age group at the Fifa World Championship. Only the first of these achievements, the Under-17 World Championship in Italy in 1991, came under a foreign coach (Otto Pfister). Ghana won bronze at the Barcelona Olympics under a home-bred coach. Their Under-20 World Championship (another first for Africa) last year was achieved under Sellas Tetteh, another home product.

So why the heavy investment in foreign coaches for the national team, men who add the trip to the World Cup to their CVs and immediately sell themselves to the highest bidder when the World Cup is over? When they go, they take with them the nation’s entire store of knowledge on how to manage and handle a team at a World Cup.

It is a pity and a tragedy. Soccer is a great unifying river which runs through the African continent. A lot of times we glibly say that sport or soccer is a metaphor for life, but in Africa they tend to find that those countries which have sorted themselves out well economically and politically in terms of corruption tend to do best at football.

Ghana again is a good example, though I enjoyed the story of the climax to the 2007 season when Nania FC and Great Mariners were involved in a tight race for promotion and both absolutely needed to win on the last day of the season. Nania beat Okwaku 31-0 and Mariners beat Mighty Jets 28-0. All four clubs and anybody even sitting on the bench were banned!

Nania FC and the Mariners not withstanding, Ghana’s success here has been a tribute to patient under-age work at home and a league which is generally well run. They are ahead of the posse at the moment and can learn lessons from countries like Nigeria, whose burgeoning promise in the 1990s has been squandered by corrupt administrators.

South Africa was great. The legacy will be mixed, but perhaps confidence will be the most tangible asset the continent brings forward. Their day will come.

[kerrygold]

By David McWilliams

David McWilliams: This is no mere slump, it's the bankruptcy of a nation

Wednesday July 14 2010

IF Seanie Fitz is bust, well then so too is much of Ireland's professional class. Because they were all at the same game -- buying into syndicates, borrowing against their incomes and hoping to make fortunes.

But now that history is being rewritten, FitzPatrick suddenly is painted as a man who acted alone. This is ludicrous. But when you are white washing you need a "baddie", and Seanie fits that bill for many of his erstwhile associates who this time four years ago were all "Seanie this and Seanie that". He has, in classic Irish fashion, become a "moral skip" into which many can throw all the sins of the boom.

Meanwhile, unlike Seanie, these guys are busy lining up to throw their own commercial sins into that financial skip that we term NAMA. This is (as predicted) turning out to be a horrible mess where no one who runs it seems to have the faintest idea what they are at, how much the thing will cost, and what effect it is going to have on the property market. In fact, no honest man can put a finger on any of this because, honestly, we can't know. So what we get is dishonesty dressed up as certainty.

But a few things are clear: NAMA is full of fees for the professionals who get on this peculiar gravy train; the cost will be borne by you; and the underlying land will eventually have to be sold off cheaper than NAMA (ie the taxpayer) is paying for it because that's what happens when the only buyer in town eventually begins to sell.

The bankruptcy of Seanie and yet the saving of Anglo with your money reveals a pattern in Irish public life -- where the institution is saved no matter how rotten, but the individual is sacrificed no matter that he is simply a small version of the corrupted institution. So Seanie is declared bankrupt and his assets are sold but Anglo is not and its assets are subsidised!

We are shifting the losses of the banks onto the people and, in so doing, shackling the prospects of the next generation to the mistakes of the last one.

What this means is, at best, a "jobless recovery". In plain English, this means that unemployment and emigration remain high, take-home wages fall relative to profits in the economy and "after-tax" wages fall even further. The "growth rate" is driven mainly by multinational exporters who don't employ many people.

We are entering into a period of many years that will be precisely the opposite of what we experienced in the boom.

One of the most striking things about the boom in Ireland -- which made it different to, let's say, the boom in the US -- was that wages rose dramatically as well as employment rising dramatically. Now this process will go into reverse.

Equally, the bill for bailing out the banks -- which should follow the Seanie example and be declared bankrupt -- will be paid largely out of income tax and all sorts of other stealth -- and not so stealth -- taxes.

In a classic example of "gombeenism", where the feudal land economy is still paramount even as the rest of the world has shown that trade and human ingenuity are what makes you rich, the Government has decided not to raise a property tax. So taxes will come from other income, despite the fact that the main lesson of the boom must surely be that property is a useless form of wealth creation -- otherwise we'd still be rich!

Given that corporation tax is unlikely to be touched, you should expect that your savings will be taxed in a superannuated DIRT-style levy in the months ahead. After all, your savings are just lying there, they are simple to trace and easy to get at.

Contrast the ease of taxing savings with the obvious difficulty of tracking down tax evaders who have money under the mattress. One of the central tenets of tax-raising is that it should be easy -- and taxing savings is easy. For the State, finding cash which is hidden is difficult and expensive.

And speaking of under the mattress, with tax going up and credit non-existent, many cash businesses (such as pubs and shops) will simply start going into the black economy by under-reporting turnover and keeping precious cash in safes. This is what always happens when taxation starts to rise and a public expectation of further tax hikes take hold.

Unfortunately, this cycle is what happened in the 1980s when we had economic growth in all but one year of the decade and yet the whole period felt like a depression.

Don't forget, the 1980s was a period when Ireland stagnated while the rest of the world boomed. So too was the 1950s for that matter, so there is no reason to believe that a global recovery now will be enough to drag us out.

In fact, a global recovery, by putting up pressure on interest rates, might have the opposite result because the effect of interest rate rises on our heavily indebted punters greatly outweighs the positive effect of trade because most people don't work in the exporting sector.

With a few tweaks here and there, this is what we face into. Ultimately, the huge debts will be defaulted on, leaving people to ask why we didn't just declare ourselves bankrupt at the start of all this and move on. But "conventional wisdom" tells us that the nation has to soldier on pretending not to be bankrupt. So the banks pretend to be solvent, the Government pretends to have a strategy and the cheerleaders pretend that we have "turned the corner", when in fact, on the ground, things are getting worse.

It is quite painful to see the broad consensus across the political landscape on this economic prognosis. There seems to be no party offering an alternative. If there is no alternative, then this is the way things will pan out and yet again Ireland splits between the "insiders" who hunker down and survive the recession and the "outsiders" who emigrate or go on the dole.

Seanie Fitz's bankruptcy represents not just his personal bankruptcy, but the bankruptcy of an entire generation of Irish go-getters and their imitators. If we are not to lumber the next generation with the bill of the last, we must call time on the likes of NAMA and say "enough, move on".

www.davidmcwilliams.ie

- David McWilliams

Irish Independent

[kerrygold]

Cup of Sorrows
Duller than ever, soccer needs a few ELVs to save its bacon, writes Neil Francis

Possessed: once football was about passion and attacking guile, but now teams are more likely to cheat their way to victory, a trait we saw all too regularly in South Africa
Big players like Wayne Rooney flopped
12Emo Philips, who I have to see at the Carlsberg Comedy Carnival next week, had an amusing anecdote about starting up a lemonade stand as a new business. The first drinks were free – the second drink cost €20. The antidote was in the refill.




Every four years the world waits and then watches the Fifa World Cup, a poisonous festival of cynicism and commercialism. I don't mind the commercialism. Even before we had realised it long ago it was part of the tournament. It completely subsumed nationalistic pride. Very few of the players actually give a toss about the tournament and play accordingly. The quality of the product and the entertainment quotient stink. The recent tournament was crap and the final was crap. Everything that was worth watching in the previous World Cups is now gone.




The German tournament in 2006 was awful beyond words and the final a travesty, even worse than the final last week. The Japan/Korea event was *-house too, sparsely illuminated by Ronaldo's goals in an average final game. Don't ever be fooled by a soft-focus dreamy highlights package of the best bits of skill. It doesn't compensate for weeks of dreary kick ball devoid of spark, drama, even of a sense of occasion. When was the last decent final? You really do have to think hard about it. Come to think of it, when was the last decent Rugby World Cup, tournament or final?




The genesis of the decline lay in the corruption of the game. Antediluvian players cared about winning the World Cup. Italia '90 to USA '94 was the time period where the true corruptive force of too much money came to the fore. The time the players cared more about their 50-100k per week than they did about winning a World Cup. Some of the big names who disgraced themselves at the finals through lack of interest you'll find it won't have cost them a thought. Their agenda is to be fresh for the domestic club game and €120k per week. As I chastise, I would for the purpose of balance put myself in their shoes. Why should I put 10 seasons of €120k a week at risk by getting injured or getting stale after a long season and losing form and your place on your club side. Hmmm!




As usual the perversion of the game and the corruption of every standard comes from the top down. If you had a spare tenner to spend you could do an awful lot worse for a summer read than spend it on Andrew Jennings' master class Foul!, a wonderfully researched and cutting chronology of the activities of Fifa. Bribes, collusion, fraud, vote rigging, ticket scandals, hedonism, embezzlement, kick backs, it's a fantastic read. In terms of corruption the IOC is in the ha'penny place.




If its governing body is as decadent and corrupt as Mr Jennings says it is, and I have no cause to doubt any of his assertions, then how can anyone at any level below them hope to garner any direction from it? The body is rotten right through and self-empowerment and self- enrichment seems to be the cornerstone of most of the powerful officials. When it behoves them to act, particularly when their game is in crisis, they are singularly unable to do so.




Their problems are manifest. Whether their insularity prevents them from realising that they exist is a problem in itself! Popular appeal is dwindling rapidly. The gulf between the common man and these tossers is at its zenith. There are now more wankers per national squad than ever before. Irish or English supporter, would there be anyone out of the England squad of 23 that you would like to sit down for a pint with? Do you think you could control your contempt for anything less than the 20 minutes that it would take to drink it? Most players at the elite level even before €120k per week came to pass were wankers. It's an unsolvable conundrum. There is no antidote. In 10 years' time these boorish empty vessels will have multiplied to such an extent that for every Paul Scholes you will have 20 vacuous degenerates. Darwin's waiting room gets ever fuller and it is only a matter of time before the connectivity dies and the fan base dies off.




The other major problem is the game sucks, it's really boring to watch. I much prefer to play it than watch it. You have to be very good to be able to play a possession/passing game. Stroking the ball backwards and forwards all the way down the length of the pitch does very little for me. They are all quite happy to stroke it around because, despite the fact that they are doing nothing with the ball, they feel they can control the game through domination of possession.




The prime reason teams at this level feel they can do this is because they have the Federal Reserve behind them. As long as they can still play the ball back to the keeper, as long as they have this safe haven, teams will continue to stroke the ball around inanely. If your opposition knows that you can't pass the ball back they will push forward, hey presto, a bit of space. Compromise on law changes is worse than no change at all. Just because a keeper can't handle a back pass is barely taken into consideration, the ball is still sent back to him in most cases. Preventing this would revolutionise the game. And the keeper is punished if he does receive a back pass and subsequently plays it, which brings us onto the next topic: the foul.




Professional, accidental or cynical, I observe with stoic admiration the cheery way soccer players scythe down any player on the ball, particularly if they actually look like they might do something with it or when the play is close to the box. This persistent cheating is so entrenched that there could be uproar if they tried to do something about it. A yellow card is so inconsequential you couldn't disguise the level of disdain it's greeted with by the offender. They couldn't give a damn. What is the point in showing a player a yellow card? It offers zero as a deterrent and that is of course if a bad foul is ever ruled a yellow card offence. If they were serious about stopping constructive play being halted by foul play I have a simple solution.




Fifteen minutes in the bin first foul, 15 minutes in the bin second foul, third foul see ya! You would be amazed how quickly the game cleans up and how much of an incentive it would be for a skilful player to try and beat an opponent without resorting to the lowest common denominator. Managers are quite happy to destroy the game and actually instruct their players to take somebody down if they pose a threat to goal. They would have to think twice now about instructing their players to do that if they spend 15 minutes on the sideline every time they do it.




I wouldn't bother tinkering with the offside rule, if those two laws were brought in, space would free up and the game would flow. First Fifa would have to recognise that there was a problem. At least the IRB recognise there is a problem, they realised that the game had become very boring and introduced the ELVs which were hopelessly inadequate. It makes them a bit like the current Green Party in government, the economy is in meltdown and they are formulating legislation on dog breeding. I'm never going to watch a World Cup final again. I'm glad it's all over and I'll never slag the IRB again.




The Jabulani ball which Adidas produced (Andrew Jennings' book profiles Sepp Blatter's special relationship with Adidas in the book) was just a crock of *e. Adidas should have borrowed an O'Neill's GAA ball from 20 years ago and used it. Heaviest ball in the world, no chance of it being sent 30 metres into the stands. Not good for the Parkinson's though, you wouldn't want to head it more than twice.




PS I do not envy Sky's marketing department when they try to hype up this year's Premier League due to start shortly. The evidence was very clear to the watching world that the players who populate the Premier League failed abjectly, let their countries down very badly and did not give a toss. That's the calibre of player that is being promoted here. Best of luck, lads.




[e-mail]

July 18, 2010

[bilythewalsh]

The blackest hearts: War crimes in Iraq

In March 2006, four US soldiers, strung out after months in the deadly battleground south of Baghdad, hatched a plan: to carry out one of the worst war crimes ever committed in Iraq


Jim Frederick
The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010



On 12 March 2006, Abu Muhammad heard a knock on his door. He lived in a village just outside Yusufiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, and warily he headed towards the window – since the invasion, you never knew who it might be. It was a neighbour of his cousin and her husband, who lived in a nearby hamlet. "You must come," the man said. "Something has happened at your cousin's house, something terrible."

Pulling into the driveway, Abu Muhammad saw his cousin's 11- and nine-year-old boys wailing. They had just returned home from school. Smoke was billowing from one of the windows.

Abu Muhammad circled the house, looking in the windows. His cousin Fakhriah, her husband Qassim and their six-year-old daughter Hadeel had all been shot. Their daughter Abeer, 14, was naked from the waist down. Her body was still smoking; her entire upper torso had been scorched, much of it burnt down to ash. Her chest and face were gone.

"Come," Abu Muhammad said to the boys. "Come with me." He dropped them with his wife and drove to a nearby traffic control point, TCP1.

Staff Sergeant Chaz Allen was in charge of TCP1 that day. He sent Sergeant Tony Yribe to check it out. At just 22, Yribe looked like an action hero and was on his second tour in Iraq. As usual, he noted, there were not enough men to mount a proper patrol. Ideally, they shouldn't be manoeuvring with less than a squad, nine or 10 men. But that almost never happened. Here in the so-called Triangle of Death, three-, four- and five-man patrols were standard. Allen told him to pick up two men on his way, from TCP2. "And be sure to bring a camera. Battalion is going to want pictures."

It was late afternoon. 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, and all of 1st Battalion of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, had been in theatre for nearly six months. The same to go. It felt like an eternity – with an eternity yet to come.

Yribe arrived at TCP2. Specialist Paul Cortez and Private First Class Jesse Spielman were ready to go. At 23, Cortez was acting squad leader, a job many thought beyond him. He had a reputation as an immature loudmouth with a nasty streak, and he was in charge of a motley group of six soldiers down at TCP2, some of whom had been on their own at this spartan, unfortified outpost for 12 days straight. They were pretty ragged and strung out.

Specialist James Barker, 23, was next in seniority, a soldier renowned for being a smart aleck and mischief-maker. Spielman, 21, was quiet and unassuming; Private First Class Steven Green, also 21, never stopped talking.

Some Iraqi army soldiers were already at the house. It was grisly. Yribe started taking pictures and directed the other soldiers to look for evidence, but Cortez started dry heaving. He looked green and pale, and was drenched with sweat.

"Jesus, just go outside," Yribe told Cortez. Spielman was cool and efficient, but the burnt girl's remains were so disgusting they just left her where she was. As the men moved a mattress, something small and green skittered across the ground. It was a spent shotgun shell. That's odd, Yribe thought, Iraqis don't really use shotguns.

In mid-2006, three years after the toppling of Saddam's regime, the 330 square mile region south of Baghdad that encompassed the Triangle of Death had become one of the deadliest locales in the country. It was a battleground of the incipient civil war between Sunnis and Shias, and a way station for terrorists of every allegiance, ferrying men, weapons and money into the capital.

Just two years later, the region had been effectively pacified, patrolled by 30,000 men (including Iraqi forces) who experienced about two attacks a week. Back then, however, it was occupied by just 1,000 US soldiers, who coped with more than 100 attacks each week against them and Iraqi civilians. With far fewer troops and resources than they needed, the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment – a light battalion of around 700 men – was flung out there with orders, essentially, to save the day. During their year-long deployment, 21 men were killed, with scores more wounded badly enough to be evacuated home. Seven of those who died came from the same group of around 35 men: 1st Platoon.

In December 2005, Staff Sergeant Travis Nelson and Sergeant Kenith Casica of 1st Platoon were shot dead at TCP2 by a lone Iraqi who had given them information in the past. "That's when things started to turn," says Staff Sergeant Chris Payne, leader of 1st Platoon's 2nd Squad. A few days later, two more men of 1st Platoon were killed by an IED (improvised explosive device).

The feeling that death was certain was becoming pervasive in 1st Platoon, and spreading like a panic. More and more men started to believe they simply weren't going home. Some say drinking was becoming fairly common. There were plenty of interpreters who were happy to procure bottles of whiskey or gin, or even pills or hash, for any soldier who wanted them.

Green was reacting particularly badly. He had always been a loudmouth, racist and misogynist. An evaluation form filled out by the Combat Stress team around that time is a horror show of ailments and dysfunctions. Green told them he was a victim of mental and physical childhood abuse by his mother and brother, he was an adolescent drug and alcohol abuser, and had been arrested several times. Now, he said, he was having suicidal and homicidal thoughts. One entry states, "Interests: None other than killing Iraqis."

By this point, extreme hatred of Iraqis had become common in the platoon and was openly discussed. They became more aggressive: suspects were beaten, house searches got more violent, drinking became more open and was not limited to the ranks. The men were at a far lower ebb than even those meant to monitor them realised.

During patrols, Green often volunteered to kill. "I was always saying, 'Any time you all are ready, you all are the ones in charge of me. Any time you all say the word, 'Go', it's on," he recalled.

Just after 4pm on 5 March, 21-year-old Specialist Ethan Biggers was shot in the head. He had been the entire company's little brother; he and his fiancee were expecting their first child.

On 12 March, Green was pulling pre-dawn guard in the gun truck at TCP2. He'd been up for 18 hours. "When I'm on guard next time," he told Cortez and Barker, "I'm going to waste a bunch of dudes in a car. And we'll just say they were running the TCP."

"Don't do that!" Cortez said. "Don't do it while I'm here. I'm supposed to be running this *."

Barker agreed. "I've got a better idea," he said. "We've all killed Hadjis, but I've been here twice and I still never *ed one of these *es."

Cortez's interest was piqued. They talked about it semi-seriously, as they did other things throughout the rest of the morning.

Barker had already picked the target. There was a house, not far away, where there was only one male and three females during the day – a husband, wife and two daughters. One was young, but the other was pretty hot, at least for a Hadji chick. Witnesses were a problem, though; they knew they couldn't leave anyone alive. Barker asked Green if he was willing to take care of that, even if women and kids were involved. "Absolutely," Green said. "It don't make any difference to me."

They refined their plan and, over several hours, went back and forth on whether or not to do it. Barker was pushing hard, and Green was game, but finally Cortez said, "No, * it, this is crazy. * this. There is no way we are doing this *."

At around noon, with a new wave of boredom taking hold, the three of them, with Spielman, sat down outside to play Uno and drink whiskey. The men got drunker and drunker, and eventually Cortez declared, "* it, we are going to do this." He outlined the mission and divvied up the duty assignments just like a legitimate patrol. He and Barker would take the girl, Green would kill the rest of the family, Spielman would pull guard and 18-year-old Private First Class Bryan Howard, a recent arrival, would stay back and man the radio.

Spielman, who had not heard of the plan until then, did not bat an eye. "I'd be down with that."

Cortez went out to the truck to check on Private Seth Scheller, who was the only one on guard. Scheller was also new.

Cortez briefed Howard. He said they knew of an Iraqi girl who lived nearby, and they were going to go and * her. To Howard, it was the most insane thing he'd ever heard. He didn't believe it, nor that they were leaving him and Scheller alone. Cortez gave him the radio and told him to call if any patrols or Humvees came through. The men, armed and disguised, headed out the back of the TCP.

Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi was not from the Yusufiyah area. After the 1991 Gulf war, when UN sanctions made life even tougher, he and his wife Fakhriah had moved to be closer to her family and to look for work. A daughter, Abeer, was born in August 1991; soon after came two sons, Muhammad and Ahmed, and another daughter, Hadeel.

When the US invaded, local people were hopeful, but soon the area began to fall apart from neglect and violence. The locals felt persecuted. The US patrols were brutish. Qassim's brother-in-law was gunned down in cold blood by the Americans in Iskandariyah in early 2005, said his sister. Other family members got hauled off to jail for no reason, with no indication of when they'd come home.

Fakhriah was particularly worried about Abeer. Now 14, her fragile beauty was attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Soldiers would give her the thumbs up and say, "Very good, very nice." By early March, the harassment was getting so bad that Abu Muhammad told the family to leave Abeer with him; there were more people at his house and it was less secluded. But Abeer stayed there only one night, on 9 or 10 March. With his protection, Qassim assured Abu Muhammad, they'd be fine.

Sneaking up on the house, the soldiers corralled the whole family into the bedroom. After they had recovered the family's AK-47 and Green had confirmed it was locked and loaded, Barker and Cortez left, yanking Abeer behind them. Spielman set up guard in the doorway between the foyer and living room, while Cortez shoved Abeer into the living room, pushed her down, and Barker pinned her outstretched arms down with his knees.

In the bedroom, Green was losing control of his prisoners. The woman made a run for the door. Green shot her once in the back and she fell to the floor. The man became unhinged. Green turned his own AK on him and pulled the trigger. It jammed. Panicking, as the man advanced on him, Green switched to his shotgun. The first shot blasted the top of the man's head off. Then Green turned to the little girl, who was running for a corner. This time the AK worked. He raised the rifle and shot Hadeel in the back of the head. She fell to the ground.

Spielman came in, saw the carnage and was furious. Green explained the AK had jammed and Spielman began searching for shotgun casings.

As Green was executing the family, Cortez finished raping Abeer and switched positions with Barker. Green came out of the bedroom and announced to Barker and Cortez, "They're all dead. I killed them all." Cortez held Abeer down and Green raped her. Then Cortez pushed a pillow over her face, still pinning her arms with his knees. Green grabbed the AK, pointed the gun at the pillow, and fired one shot, killing Abeer.

The men were becoming extremely frenzied and agitated now. Barker brought a kerosene lamp he had found in the kitchen and dumped the contents on Abeer. Spielman handed a lighter to either Barker or Cortez, who lit the flame. Spielman went to the bedroom and found some blankets to throw on the body to stoke the fire.

The four men ran back the way they had come. When they arrived at the TCP, they were out of breath, manic, animated. They began talking rapid-fire about how great that was, how well done. They all agreed that was awesome, that was cool.

Several hours later, Yribe was still mulling over what he had seen. You don't see a lot of girls that little murdered in Iraq, he thought to himself. And the burning of the other girl's body – that was strange, too: burning was a huge desecration. Then there was the shotgun shell. The shotgun is almost exclusively an American weapon.

As Yribe approached TCP2 to drop off Spielman and Cortez, Green was waiting in the street. He pulled Yribe aside. "I did that *," he said.

"What?" Yribe said.

"I killed them," Green repeated. Barker was standing next to Green, but didn't say a word.

Caught off guard, Yribe dismissed it as more of Green's crazy talk. It was insane. How could a scrawny guy slip away from a TCP by himself in the middle of the day and rape and murder a family? But Green kept insisting. Yribe told him to shut up, he didn't have time for his bull* right now.

The next day, Cortez went to Yribe in tears. He said he was so shaken up by what he had seen in the house, he needed to go to Combat Stress.

While Yribe covered for Cortez, he found Green. He'd been thinking over what Green had told him the day before and it was bothering him. "Now," he demanded, "tell me everything, every detail."

Green started to talk. Again, Barker was there and, again, he did not say a word. The thing that really convinced Yribe was not what Green was saying but how he was saying it. Ordinarily, Green was manic and boastful. Right now, however, Green was serious, sober, matter-of-fact.

When Green was finished, Yribe told him, "I am done with you. You are dead to me. You get yourself out of this army, or I will get you out myself."

Yribe decided not to say anything and, as there were no witnesses, the bodies had been removed so quickly and so many soldiers had tramped over the house, there was no usable physical evidence beyond a few AK-47 shell casings. Without conclusive evidence, it was instantly a cold case, like tens of thousands of murders in Iraq that year.

On 20 March, Green went to Combat Stress and, over a few days, was diagnosed with a pre-existing antisocial personality disorder, a condition marked by indifference to the suffering of others, habitual lying and disregard for the safety of self or others. The diagnosis carried immediate expulsion from the army. Back in the US, on 16 May, he was honourably discharged and returned to society.

On 16 June, three more of 1st Platoon's men – Private First Class Thomas Tucker, Specialist David Babineau and Private First Class Kristian Menchaca were attacked on guard. Babineau was killed, the others captured. Three days later they were found, murdered, burnt and mutilated. When Yribe heard, he lost it. "It drives me crazy," he said to Private First Class Justin Watt, "that all the good men die and the *bag murderers like Green are home eating hamburgers."

"Murderers?" Watt asked.

Yribe told Watt about the day at the checkpoint and how Green had confessed to him. Watt couldn't believe what he was hearing, and didn't believe Green could have acted alone. "Just forget I said anything," Yribe said. But Watt couldn't forget. He began obsessively mulling it over.

Around lunchtime on 19 June, Watt ran into Howard and Private First Class Justin Cross. As they were talking, Watt remembered both guys had been a part of the group at TCP2 that day back in March. They discussed all the messed-up stuff they had seen, and Watt brought up the girl who got burnt. Convinced Watt knew the whole story, Howard filled in many of the missing pieces.

That night, Watt recounted it all to Yribe, but again he said he didn't see what good was going to come from digging it up. For a while, Watt did try to forget. But he kept coming back to the father. He imagined the powerlessness, the impotence, of having armed men break into your house and there being nothing you could do to protect your family. Watt ran it over in his mind again and again. He resolved that he couldn't just let this pass.

On 23 June, Watt spoke to his immediate superiors. Over the next two days, the matter reached the highest levels. The soldiers involved were interviewed and, with varying degrees of vehemence and evasiveness, each claimed to have no knowledge of the crime. But over the next five days, and over multiple interrogation sessions, Barker, Cortez and Spielman all broke down and confessed, corroborating Howard's narrative, though each resisted fully implicating himself.

The US army paid the Janabi family $30,000 for the murders of Qassim, Fakhriah, Abeer and Hadeel. Nine months into a year-long deployment, 1st Platoon's war was effectively over.

Back in the US, Green was arrested by the FBI. The crime was making news, and al-Qaida was exploiting the outrage for maximum propaganda. On 10 July, the Mujahideen Shura Council issued a five-minute video showing the mutilated corpses of Tucker and Menchaca. Its audio includes clips of Osama bin Laden's and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's speeches, as well as the message that the video was being presented as "revenge for our sister who was dishonoured by a soldier of the same brigade".

Although there was virtually no usable forensic evidence, the army's cases against Barker and Cortez were particularly strong, based on their confessions, and both offered to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit rape and murder and other charges if the army agreed not to pursue the death penalty. The army accepted, and sentenced Barker and Cortez to 90 years and 100 years at the military's maximum security prison. They will be eligible for parole in 20 and 10 years respectively.

In March 2007, Howard pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice and being an accessory after the fact. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison, and was released on parole after 17.

Spielman's lawyers claimed he did not know where the rogue patrol was going on 12 March and, once at the house, was too surprised and scared to do anything about it. A military panel did not believe these claims of innocence, found him guilty of all charges and sentenced him to life in prison. His sentence was later reduced to 90 years; he, too, will be eligible for parole after 10 years.

Because Green had been discharged, his case proved to be much more complicated. The Justice Department announced it was pursuing the death penalty, making him the first former service member ever to face the possibility of execution in a civilian court for his conduct during war. His defence team twice offered to have him plead guilty if the government would take the death penalty off the table; twice the Justice Department declined. To this day, his defence attorney maintains that this was a politically motivated appeasement to the Iraqi government and public opinion. His attorneys also tried several times to have Green reinducted into the army and tried by court martial. The army declined the offers.

After ruling out an insanity defence, Green's attorneys decided their best hope was to focus on the horrible conditions under which Bravo worked, Green's abysmal upbringing, the leadership failures that plagued every level of the 1-502nd and the warning signs of his murderous obsessions that his superiors routinely ignored. During several dramatic weeks of testimony, the defence ran a trial within a trial against the army's negligence in allowing the atrocity to happen, while prosecutors emphasised the heinousness of Green's behaviour.

The jury of nine women and three men found Green guilty of all counts of conspiracy, rape and murder, but hung, six against six, on the issue of whether to sentence him to death, triggering an automatic sentence of life in prison without parole.

Relatives of the murdered family, including Abu Muhammad, had testified during the trial, and afterwards were allowed to address the court. Abu Muhammad spoke last, praising his slain family members and criticising the jury's reluctance to execute Green. He concluded by turning to Green and saying, "Abeer will follow you and chase you in your nightmares. May God damn you."

Then Green was given the opportunity to make his first public statement. He addressed the family, saying, "I am truly sorry for what I did in Iraq and for the pain my actions, and the actions of my co-defendants, have caused you and your family… I helped to destroy a family and end the lives of four fellow human beings, and I wish that I could take that back, but I cannot… I know if I live one more year or 50 more years that they will be years that Fakhriah, Qassim, Abeer and Hadeel won't have. And even though I did not learn their names until long after their deaths, they are never far from my mind… I know I have done evil, and I fear the wrath of the Lord will come upon me. But I hope you and your family at least can find some comfort in God's justice."

Green is currently serving five consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.

• This is an edited extract from Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness In Iraq's Triangle Of Death, by Jim Frederick, published on 6 August by Macmillan

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/24/war-crimes-us-soldiers-iraq

[kerrygold]

Bog warriors: turf war hots up
Turf-cutting belongs to a different era, but there are some for whom work on the bogs is more than just a job; it's a way of life, writes Michael Freeman

Patrick Connolly: 'We cut our own turf, just for the house. You'd do it in the evenings when you've finished work. Out around six or half six, and you'd be home around ten or half ten'
Seamus Gallagher: 'This year the weather was good and we went early because the bogs were dry... If the bogs are wet you cannot touch them'
Luke Flanagan has cut his bank for eight years; before that, it was his father's, and before that it belonged to his uncle, who worked on it for 67 years
123One year in the late 1930s, the All-Ireland Turf Cutting Competition was held on a bog near Walsh Island, Co Offaly. Spectators came by the thousands to cheer on sleán-wielding champions from around the country. The competition was opened by the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, leader of a struggling post-independence Ireland not totally unlike today's: unemployment had rocketed, and the economy was crippled.




But some people thought they had a solution. After the cutting was done – or so the story goes – the local curate, a Fr Breen, and Patrick Gorman, an official from the recently-founded Turf Development Board, took De Valera to the town's handball alley. The alley stood on a hill, looking out over the bog that stretched for miles around, and the crowds of people. Look at this, they told Dev. This is Ireland's wealth. Peat; and the men who can cut it.




Turf has been used as a fuel in this country for hundreds of years; by the seventh century AD, its use was already regulated by Irish law. The seasonal rhythms of cutting and saving – the men cutting in April or May, and the women and children saving in July – have been part of life for dozens of generations. If you ever needed to, you could tell where you were in the country by how the sods were footed to dry: in Kildare, they are piled in pairs crossways; in Mayo, they are leant four upright against each other, with another on top.




But today, there is a battle for the future of the bog. In the 70 or so years since De Valera's trip to Walsh Island, Ireland's peatlands have been exploited as never before. A present-day visitor to the town's disused handball alley would see ugly black scars sprawling over the landscape all around: areas razed by the men and machines of Bord na Móna. According to the Irish Peatlands Conservation Council, nearly half of the bogs that once covered an enormous 1.1m hectares – almost one-sixth of the area of the Republic – have now been cut away. With others consumed by agriculture, forestry or overgrazing, only 20% or so remain intact as habitats for wildlife. And the quality of that 20%, says IPCC director Dr Catherine O'Connell, "is declining rapidly". "We need to conserve the peat, the water, and the plants and animals that are in them," she says.




This June, an EU derogation allowing continued peat extraction on 131 Irish bogs marked as Special Areas for Conservation expired. Facing heavy fines if it did not act, the government – in the person of environment minister John Gormley – introduced a law banning turf cutting on 32 of those bogs, with the others to follow over the next three years. The reception in some quarters has been venomous. Turf cutters have promised to go to prison rather than stop working on their turbaries. "We will be fighting it the whole way," says Turf Cutters and Contractors Association spokesman Luke 'Ming' Flanagan. "We'll be cutting turf anyways. Just the same as people continued to use condoms even though they were illegal. And continued to be a Jew in Nazi Germany."




Winning turf by hand is skillful work, and hard. It takes place at the very edge of the bog, on the face bank – just next to the strip cut the year before. First, the swarth – about six inches of grassy, fibrous topsoil and roots – is cut off. In the old days the sleán, a spade with a right-angled wing, was used to slice out the wet, light-brown sods; now, they are usually cut by machine. Then they are spread on the bog, where they gradually take on the familiar black-brown colour of turf in the hearth. After a few days, when the sods can be picked up without breaking, they are footed in small stacks to dry, and later piled into a rake for transport to the home. By one reckoning, each household consumes a strip of bog 150 yards long, two feet wide and three feet deep each year.




Many turbaries are handed down through families for generations. Luke Flanagan has cut his bank for eight years; before that, it was his father's, and before that it belonged to his uncle, who worked on it for 67 years. This year, Flanagan took his own children out for the first time. "They're only five and seven, and I brought them out to the bog. For the craic, to see would they do a bit of turning. And they absolutely loved it." It's a part of family culture, he says. "I would have a great connection to the bog. My father, for 10 or 11 weeks during the summer, for 14 hours a day – he would have brought home virtually everyone's turf from around this area."




The time of our fathers and grandfathers was the age of the bog in Ireland. In the 20th century, turf was not only the staple fuel for anybody in the countryside, it powered much of the cities too: at one stage, fully 40% of the country's electricity was generated from peat. Millions of tonnes a year were sliced from the bogs. "Many people thought it was a crime to leave these bogs there and not use them," says Donal Clarke, who has just published a history of Bord na Móna called Brown Gold. "It was a crime. That's what they said. This is a national resource, and it is a crime not to use it."




For millions, the cutting of turf is powerfully embedded in the image of rural Ireland. "It is lovely when you go round the countryside in July and you see the tractors hauling the big rakes, the big piles of turf," says Clarke. "There is something very traditional about it. And the smell of it is lovely."




The Turf Cutters and Contractors Association does not want this to change. And it asserts that if they are cut responsibly, bogs are not seriously damaged. "For domestic use, it is sustainable," says Flanagan. "While we're cutting, it is regenerating again. Even going by the government's – the National Parks and Wildlife Service's – own report, my bog, Cloonchambers bog, has actually grown by 12%." (This is seen as a distortion by the NPWS, which says while one particular area may have increased slightly in size between 1995 and 2000, the overall ecological quality of the bog decreased – due to turf cutting.)




TCCA members are also angry that private citizens are being prevented from taking relatively small amounts of turf, while Bord na Móna – which currently extracts around four million tonnes a year – is allowed to continue destroying whole bogs apparently unhindered. The reason the government now wants to turn the turf-cutters off their bogs, says Flanagan, is that they have managed them so well. "It's a bit like firing Alex Ferguson for winning the Premiership," he says.




But for conservationists, the picture of hand-cut bogs is not so rosy. The IPCC believes that, to date, 47% of Ireland's bogs have been cut away for turf. And though the scars left by Bord na Móna in the last 80 years may be painfully visible, they account for only 7%. A full 40% has been lost to centuries of hand cutting. "If you cut turf by hand for 400 years, you essentially cut the bog away," says Catherine O'Connell. "With the way people are talking at the moment, you'd think they weren't doing anything. But just looking at the air photographs of peat bogs, you can see it's all been diced up. Like somebody cutting a block of cheese." They simply cannot regenerate fast enough, she adds. "A bog only grows 1mm per year, so each 30cm sod of turf that's cut vertically – that's 300 years of bog growth."




The argument is complicated further by that old chestnut, the 'urban-rural divide'. One commenter on the TCCA's Facebook page put it bluntly. "Der's people for bog and people for tar!" he wrote. "And the ones for tar should stay the f**k outta the bog!"




"John Gormley thought that the best way to put this through was to hold our nose and shove it down our throats," says Flanagan. "Well, it isn't working. Next March and April when they go out to cut turf again – because I'd imagine that's when they'll start to enforce it – they will have mayhem in the countryside. If they think what's happening with Shell To Sea is a difficult situation, this will make that look like a complete and utter picnic. That's not a threat on my part, that is from having called in the local elections to the doors of 11,000 people personally. And at every second door they have told me straight: there won't be enough places in Castlerea prison for us."




The truth, however, is that the turf-burning era is coming to an end with or without John Gormley. Nationwide, the total weight of turf harvested by hand each year has dropped to just one-fifteenth of what it was even in the late 1980s, and is showing no signs of anything but decline.




The All-Ireland Turf Cutting Competition that once brought those thousands of people to Walsh Island is now a charity event in the village of Ticknevin, Co Kildare, whose results are reported only in the local newspaper. As a wealthier Ireland sees more and more people move to the cities, and ever fewer live in the old houses with solid-fuel ranges, turf is gradually ceasing to register as a part of life for most of the population.




"I was the main organiser of an International Peat Congress in 2008," says Donal Clarke. And people kept saying to me, 'But why are you organising a peat congress?' The consciousness of turf has pretty well gone, I think."




Clarke believes that Ireland has just another 10 to 15 years of peat left, almost all of which will go towards electricity production. The future of the bogs, he says, lies not in exploitation but in eco-tourism: if they can be restored, the plants and animals will come back, and the people will follow.




"Now that people are so much better educated in all these things, they will have an interest in going there," he says.




Attitudes have changed: when de Valera went to the turf cutting championships, an uncut bog was a wasteland. Now, it is an attraction. "You've got areas which they've reflooded, where wildlife has come back again," Clarke says.




"You've got wonderful biodiversity of plants and animals. And it is very beautiful – when you go down there in the spring, and the bog cotton is all in bloom, and the ducks and all the different birds are everywhere – it's marvellous. I think that's the future."




And as for the turf cutters? "There will always be, I suppose, a small number of people who are interested in cutting turf because it's part of their heritage," he suggests.




"But very few people are going to go out and do that back-breaking work. The countryside is covered with bogs that are half cut away – where people have plots, but nobody ever goes there anymore. I know families that have turbaries, but they don't even know where they are. Nobody in the family has cut it for two generations. It's much easier to put in an oil tank, put in central heating and press a button. For another generation or so, people will have memories of cutting turf. After that, you just have to move on."




Patrick Connolly is a car mechanic in Ticknevin, Co Kildare, and the organiser of the Ticknevin All-Ireland Turf Cutting Competition



"We cut our own turf, just for the house. You'd do it in the evenings when you've finished work. Out around six or half six, and you'd be home around 10 or half 10. Last five weeks, we would have been up there now, I would have said there was definitely something in the region of probably 40 to 50 tractors drawing turf off the bog in the one day. I've never seen as many in one day before, ever. Everybody just hit on the one day. You might have to pull over for six or seven tractors, coming up the road in convoy.




"When you're going through life down where we are here, and we've seen nothing else only turf, we've known no other way. That's kind of the way it is. And it'd be cheap as well. You'd go out there and you'd bring out your year's firing for roughly about maybe €400. And that's your year's firing for your house. You go and get €400 of oil and it wouldn't get you too far. Oil is too expensive and you don't get the same heat off oil. I've always maintained it's unhealthy. I just think it is, there's not the same heat off it.




"I'd be one of the main organisers of the turf cutting competition. We call it the Ticknevin All-Ireland turf cutting competition. That started in 1984 and we've never missed a year. We postponed it one year for a week because it was raining. But that's all. We'd get from around 400 to 1,000 people at that, this year we had 23 teams. And the money we raise goes to charity. I competed every year bar last year and this year. The problem I had was, I won it a good few times and I said I'd step back. Because you just can't keep winning it, you ruin it. It's like Kerry winning the football.




"You could get a lad there and he'd go terrible fast, he'd throw a load of turf up, but it wouldn't be worth a *e. Because you're breaking up the turf and everything. So the way we do it is neatness of the bank, straightness of the bank. Your turf size should be the same every time. And that every turf you're throwing up is on the barrow, that there's not a complete mess made of the place. You could put out 40 barrowloads and I could put out 35 and I could beat you. Because mine would be nice and neat.




"I think they're wrong in ways that they're stopping people cutting, and maybe right in other ways. There's no harm in where there's bogs that were never touched – leave them that way. But I've seen Bord na Móna; there was a bog round here that I would say was probably about 1,000 acres and they went in, they levelled the whole lot, and there wasn't a word about it. Why didn't they keep that bog? You've a bog over in Clongorey here beside us where people are doing their cutting every year. And they're trying to stop all that. And a friend of mine, his family is cutting for nearly 200 years on it, and they're trying to put him out of it. It's his way of living, it's his way of life."




Seamus Gallagher is an 80-year-old farmer in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo



"We've had a good summer and the turf is got now. This year the weather was good and we went early because the bogs were dry – it would be the middle of April. Other years then it all depends on the weather. If the bogs are wet you cannot touch them.




"When I was younger I was away from home, in England. And then when I came home work wasn't great so I started to cut turf. Cut it by hand. And I used to sell trailer loads, 12 or 14 trailer loads a year. I'd be 30ish at that time and I done it for a good few years. I often went out to work in the morning on the buildings, and then come home in the evening, have a dinner and have a couple of hours on the bog. Trying to survive, let's put it that way.




"Nowadays it's all done with machine. Once it was the sleán; that's going back some years ago now. But the men got weaker, and not as fond of work. I cut by hopper now. I did cut it by hand years ago.




"There's a lot less people cutting turf. One time when you'd go to the bog, there could be 10 or 15 men in different sections, you know. And when it'd come about 11 o'clock and they were getting knackered, they'd all meet up together and have a sandwich and whatever was going. They all talked, that's all they had. At that time there wasn't much television. They'd look forward to it and they'd all have their chat and tell how much turf they had cut. One would always be trying to outdo the other.




"You could go to the bog now and you wouldn't see anybody. You'd be all on your own. Going back years ago too you'd see hares, you had grouse, all those things. In the mornings you'd hear the corncrake. It was lovely to hear them. But that's gone, you see. Burning bog, I blame it on that. They see the fires and it's the time of year they would be nesting and all that. It vanished them.




"We had a range at one time, and we used that because it was handy for cooking, and you were heating the house. Then the oil took over, but we still use the open fire. To sit at a turf fire now, it's company. If you were sitting on your own, you watch it, and no matter what you're doing, it's company. We still have it and we wouldn't be without it. We still light the fire now, in the summer."


August 15, 2010

[bilythewalsh]

North Korea: secrets and lies
A tale of illicit romance, cruel famine and dramatic escape from North Korea, the country that fell out of the developed world.


By Barbara Demick
Published: 1:12PM GMT 16 Feb 2010


If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Next to this mysterious black hole, South Korea, Japan and China fairly gleam with prosperity. Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and streetlights, the neon of the fast food chains appear as tiny white dots signifying people going about their business as 21st-century energy consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.


North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.

North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major road – the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.

North Koreans beyond middle age remember well when they had more electricity (and for that matter food) than their pro-American cousins in South Korea, and that compounds the indignity of spending their nights sitting in the dark. In the 1990s the United States offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons programme. But the deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of reneging on their promises. North Koreans complain bitterly about the darkness, which they still blame on the US sanctions.

But the dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can't be seen with. When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7pm in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity.

I met many North Koreans who told me how much they learnt to love the darkness, but it was the story of one teenage girl and her boyfriend that impressed me most. She was 12 years old when she met a young man three years older from a neighbouring town. Her family was low-ranking in the byzantine system of social controls in place in North Korea. To be seen in public together would damage the boy's career prospects as well as her reputation as a virtuous young woman. So their dates consisted entirely of long walks in the dark. There was nothing else to do anyway; by the time they started dating in earnest in the early 1990s, none of the restaurants or cinemas was operating because of the lack of power.

They would meet after dinner. The girl had instructed her boyfriend not to knock on the front door and risk questions from her family. The boy found a spot behind a wall where nobody would notice him as the light seeped out of the day. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.

The girl would emerge just as soon as she could extricate herself. At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices would gradually rise to whispers and then to normal conversational levels as they left the village and relaxed into the night. They maintained an arm's-length distance from each other until they were sure they wouldn't be spotted, talking about their families, their classmates, books they had read – whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.

By the time I met her, in 2004, she was a woman of 31. Mi-ran (not her real name) had defected six years earlier and was living in South Korea. I was writing an article about defectors and had asked Mi-ran to lunch in order to learn more about North Korea's school system. In the years before her defection, she had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and-six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.

There was something about her self-possession and candour that allowed me to ask more personal questions. Did she have a boyfriend there?

'It's funny you ask,' she said. 'I had a dream about him the other night.' Mi-ran laughed. 'It took us three years to hold hands. Another six to kiss. I would never have dreamt of doing anything more. At the time I left North Korea, I was 26 years old and a schoolteacher, but I didn't know how babies were conceived.'

Mi-ran admitted that she frequently thought about her first love and felt some pangs of remorse over the way she left. Jun-sang had been her best friend, the person in whom she confided her dreams and the secrets of her family. But she had none the less withheld from him the biggest secret of her life. She never told him how disgusted she was with North Korea, how she didn't believe the propaganda she passed on to her pupils. Above all, she never told him that her family was hatching a plan to defect. Not that she didn't trust him, but you could never be too careful.

Neighbours denounced neighbours, friends denounced friends. If anybody in the secret police had learnt of their plans, her entire family would have been carted away to a labour camp in the mountains.

'I couldn't risk it,' she told me. 'I couldn't even say goodbye.'

Mi-ran and Jun-sang lived on the outskirts of Chongjin, one of the industrial cities in the northeast of the peninsula, not far from the border with Russia. The North Korean landscape is strikingly beautiful in places, but somehow devoid of colour. The houses are simple, utilitarian and monochromatic. Most of the housing stock was built in the 1960s and 1970s from cement block and limestone, doled out to people based on their job and rank. In the countryside, people typically live in single-storey buildings called 'harmonicas', rows of one-room homes, stuck together like the little boxes that make up the chambers of a harmonica.

In 1984 George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun. The red letters leap out of the grey landscape with urgency: long live kim il-sung. we will do as the party tells us. we have nothing to envy in the world.

Until her early teens, Mi-ran had no reason not to believe the signs. Her father was a mine worker. Her family was poor, but so was everyone they knew. Since all outside publications, films and broadcasts were banned, Mi-ran assumed that nowhere else in the world were people better off, and that most probably fared far worse. She heard many, many times on the radio and television that South Koreans were miserable, that China's diluted brand of Communism was less successful than that brought by Kim Il-sung and that millions of Chinese were going hungry. All in all, Mi-ran felt she was quite lucky to have been born in North Korea under the loving care of the fatherly leader.

In fact, the village where Mi-ran grew up was not such a bad place in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a typical North Korean village of about 1,000 people, but its location was fortuitous. The East Sea (the Sea of Japan) was only six miles away, so locals could occasionally eat fresh fish and crab. The village lay just beyond the smokestacks of Chongjin and so had the advantages of proximity to the city as well as open space on which to grow vegetables.

Mi-Ran's father, Tae-woo, had grown up in South Chungchong province in South Korea. He was 18 when the Communists invaded in 1950, and he had no choice but to enlist. The South Koreans were ill-prepared and needed all the able-bodied men they could get. He was captured as a prisoner of war, and his life as a South Korean was effectively over.

After the armistice, there was a prisoner exchange, but thousands more were never sent home, among them Tae-woo, who was sent to an iron-ore mine in Musan, a gritty town on the North Korean side of the Chinese border. Here he met and married Mi-ran's mother, and Tae-woo quickly assimilated into North Korean life. It was easy enough for him to blend in. Soon after his marriage, Tae-woo and his new bride were transferred to another mine near Chongjin where he knew nobody. There was no reason for anyone to suspect anything unusual in his background, but it was in the peculiar nature of North Korea that somebody always did know.

After the war, Kim Il-sung made it his first order of business to weed out foe from friend. He disposed of many of his comrades in arms. They had been invaluable during the war; now that they had served their purpose they could be discarded. Kim Il-sung then turned his attention to ordinary people. In 1958 he ordered up an elaborate project to classify all North Koreans by their political reliability. Each person was put through eight background checks. Your songbun, as the rating was called, took into account the backgrounds of your parents, grandparents and even second cousins. As a former South Korean soldier, Tae-woo's ranking was towards the bottom of the heap. North Koreans of the lower ranks were banned from living in Pyongyang or the nicer patches of countryside towards the south where the soil was more fertile and the weather warmer. Tae-woo couldn't dream of joining the Workers' Party, which, like the Communist Party in China and the Soviet Union, controlled the plum jobs.

People of his rank would be closely watched by their neighbours. It was almost impossible for a North Korean of low rank to improve his status. Whatever your original stain, it was permanent and immutable. And family status was hereditary. The sins of the father were the sins of the children and the grandchildren. The North Koreans called these people beulsun – 'tainted blood', or impure.

Mi-ran and her four siblings would carry that taint in their blood. Her parents thought it best if they said nothing at all to the children about their father's roots. What was the point in burdening them with the knowledge that they would be barred from the best schools and the best jobs, that their lives would soon reach a dead end? Why would they bother to study, to practise their musical instruments or compete in sports?

As the children approached adolescence, the obstacles presented by their father's background began to loom larger. Those not admitted to further education are assigned to a work unit, a factory, a coalmine, or the like. But Mi-ran's siblings were confident they would be among those chosen to further their education. They were smart, good-looking, athletic, well-liked by teachers and peers. Had they been less talented, rejection might have gone down more easily.

It was Mi-ran's brother who finally forced the truth to the surface. Sok-ju had spent months cramming for an exam to win admission to the teachers' college. He knew every answer perfectly. When he was told he had failed, he angrily confronted the judges to demand an explanation.

The truth was devastating. The children had been thoroughly inculcated in the North Korean version of history. The Americans were the incarnation of evil and the South Koreans their pathetic lackeys. To learn that their own father was a South Korean who had fought with the Yankees was too much to bear. Sok-ju got drunk for the first time in his life. He ran away from home. He stayed at a friend's house for two weeks until the friend convinced him to return. Sok-Ju knew, like any other Korean boy, that he had to revere his father. He went home and fell to his knees, begging for forgiveness. It was the first time he saw his father cry.

Mi-ran was in high school when she first noticed that city people were taking trips to the countryside to scavenge for food. When she bicycled into Chongjin, she would see them, looking like beggars with their burlap sacks, heading toward the orchards that lined both sides of the road. Some would even come as far as the cornfields that stretched for miles south from her village towards the sea.

Where Mi-ran lived, the narrow strips between the harmonica houses were painstakingly cultivated with red peppers, radishes, cabbages and even tobacco, because it was cheaper to roll your own than to buy cigarettes, and virtually all the men smoked. People whose roofs were flat would put pots up there to grow more vegetables. These private agricultural efforts were small enough that they didn't raise the ire of the Communist authorities. At least in the beginning, before the food shortage grew into a famine, they staved off hunger.

Initially, the relationship between Mi-Ran and Jun-sang took on a 19th-century epistolatory quality. They stayed in touch by letter. In 1991 few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing-paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily. And the distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered.

In Pyongyang, ­Jun-sang could buy proper paper. He owned a ballpoint pen. His letters ran on for pages, long and eloquent. Their correspondence gradually evolved from stilted formalities to full-blown romance. He quoted to her from the novels he read. He wrote love poems.

Jun-sang's experiences in Pyongyang gave Mi-ran a glimpse into a remote world of privilege. At the same time, it was hard to listen without a trace of jealousy. She was in her final year of high school and she feared it would be the end of her education. Jun-sang sensed her depression and probed more deeply until at last she told him how she felt. 'Things can change,' Jun-sang wrote to her. 'If you want more in life, you must believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams.'

Mi-ran would later credit Jun-sang's words of encouragement with changing her life. Once a good student, she had let her grades drop. She hit the books. If she didn't make it to college, she wouldn't have herself to blame.

To Mi-ran's great surprise, she was accepted into a teachers' college. In autumn 1991 she moved out of her parents' house and into the college dormitory. But as winter temperatures plunged Chongjin into a deep freeze, she realised why it was that the school had been able to give her a place. The dormitories had no heating. Mi-ran went to sleep each night in her coat, heavy socks and mittens with a towel draped over her head. When she woke up, the towel would be crusted with frost from the moisture of her breath. In the bathroom, where the girls washed their menstrual rags (nobody had sanitary napkins), it was so cold that the rags would freeze solid within minutes of being hung up to dry. ­

By the time Mi-ran graduated, in 1994, she was eager to move back home with her parents, as food distribution in Chongjin had stopped entirely. She requested a teaching assignment close to home and was fortunate to be sent to a kindergarten near the mines where her father had worked. The kindergarten was housed in a single-storey concrete building surrounded by an iron fence with colourfully painted sunflowers that formed an archway over the entrance with the slogan we are happy. The classrooms were standard issue with matching father-and-son portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il presiding above the blackboard. There was a large bookcase with only a few books, barely legible because they had been photocopied long ago from the originals.

The village children were visibly poorer than their city counterparts, and came to school in a motley assortment of hand-me-downs, often swathed in many layers since there was little heating in the school. As Mi-ran helped them off with their outerwear, she peeled layer after layer until the tiny body inside was revealed. When she held their hands in her own, their baby fingers squeezed into fists as tiny as walnuts. These children, five and six-year-olds, looked to her no bigger than three and four-year-olds. Mi-ran wondered if some of the children were coming to school mainly for the free lunch the cafeteria served, a thin soup made of salt and dry leaves.

Still, she approached her new job with enthusiasm. To be a teacher, a member of the educated and respectable class, was a big step up for the daughter of a miner. She couldn't wait to get up in the morning and put on the crisp white blouse that she kept pressed under her bed mat at night.

The school day started at 8am. Mi-ran put on her perkiest smile to greet the children as they filed into the classroom. As soon as she got them into their assigned seats, she brought out her accordion. All teachers were required to play the accordion – it was often called the 'people's instrument' since it was portable enough to carry along on a day of voluntary hard labour in the fields. In the classroom teachers sang, 'We Have Nothing to Envy in the World,' which had a singsongy tune as familiar to North Korean children as 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.'

Mi-ran soon noticed that things were getting worse. Each child was supposed to bring from home a bundle of firewood for the furnace in the school basement but many had trouble carrying it. Their big heads lolled on top of scrawny necks; their delicate ribcages protruded over waists so small that she could encircle them with her hands. Some of them were starting to swell in the stomach. Mi-ran also noticed that the children's black hair was getting lighter, more copper-toned.

The school cafeteria had closed for lack of food. The students were instructed to bring a lunchbox from home, but many came empty-handed. When it was only one or two who didn't have lunch, Mi-ran would take one spoon each from those with to give to those without. But soon the parents who sent lunch came in to complain. Mi-ran heard a rumour that the school might get some biscuits and powdered milk from a foreign humanitarian aid agency. A delegation was visiting another school in the area and the children with the best clothing were brought out, the road leading to the school repaired, the building and courtyards swept clean. But no foreign aid arrived. Instead, the teachers were given a small plot of land nearby on which they were ordered to grow corn. The corn was later scraped off the cob and boiled until it puffed up like popcorn. It was a snack to ease the children's hunger pangs, but it didn't provide enough calories to make a difference.

The teachers weren't supposed to play favourites, but Mi-ran definitely had one. The girl was named Hye-ryung (Shining Benevolence), and even at the age of six she was the class beauty. She had the longest eyelashes Mi-ran had ever seen on a child and bright round eyes. In the beginning, she was a lively, attentive student. Now she was lethargic and sometimes fell asleep in class.

'Wake up. Wake up,' Mi-ran called out to her one day when she saw the girl slumped over her desk, her cheek pressed against the wooden desk. Mi-ran cupped her hands under the girl's chin and held up her face. Her eyes had narrowed to slits sunken beneath swollen lids. She was unfocused. The hair spilling out around Mi-ran's hands was brittle and unpleasant to the touch.

A few days later, the girl stopped coming to school. Since Mi-ran knew her family from the neighbourhood, she thought she should stop by the home to ask after her. But somehow she held back. She knew exactly what was wrong with Hye-ryung. She had no way of fixing it.

Too many others in her class were in the same situation. Always the same progression: first, the family wouldn't be able to send the quota of firewood; then the lunch bag would disappear; then the child would stop participating in class and would sleep through recess; then, without explanation, the child would stop coming to school. Over three years, enrolment in the kindergarten dropped from 50 students to 15. What happened to those children? Mi-ran ­didn't pry too deeply for fear of the answer she didn't want to hear.

A decade later, when Mi-ran was a mother herself, this period of her life weighed like a stone on her conscience. She often felt sick over what she did and didn't do to help her young students. How could she have eaten so well herself when they were starving? It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realise is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without taking much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn't going to share her food with her favourite pupil, she certainly wasn't going to help a perfect stranger.

It has been said that people reared in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. People did not go passively to their deaths. When the public distribution system was cut off, they were forced to tap their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in the field, draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour. They pounded acorns into a gelatinous paste that could be moulded into cubes that practically melted in your mouth.

North Koreans learnt to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the ­foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles. On the beaches, people dug out shellfish from the sand and filled buckets with seaweed. When the authorities in 1995 erected fences along the beach (ostensibly to keep out spies, but more likely to prevent people from catching fish the state companies wanted to control), people went out to the unguarded cliffs over the sea and with long rakes tied together hoisted up seaweed.

Nobody told people what to do – the government didn't want to admit to the extent of the food shortage – so they fended for themselves. All ingenuity was devoted to the gathering and production of food. Ultimately it was not enough.

Mi-ran's father died in 1997 at the age of 68. In the months before his death, Tae-woo had spoken more lucidly than before about his family. He insisted that his only son memorise the names of their ancestors on the family register, a ledger in which Korean families record their heritage. He had been the only boy himself in the family and so his own son would carry on the family line.

There was another last wish that would be harder to fulfil. Tae-woo wanted his family in South Korea to be notified of his death. There was no postal service between North and South Korea and no telephone service. To contact relatives in South Korea seemed utterly impossible.

The following year Mi-ran's sister So-hee came rushing into the house. She had just spoken with a friend who had admitted to travelling back and forth to China. He knew people there who could help them get in touch with their father's family. Once you were inside China, he assured So-hee, you merely had to pick up a telephone to dial South Korea. Maybe they wanted to try?

Mi-ran and So-hee were suspicious at first. You could never trust anybody who wasn't family. This was exactly the way that the secret police entrapped people. After a few days of deliberation, they decided the friend was sincere. He had relatives in China; he knew somebody with a truck who would drive them to the border, and a border policeman who could bribe the appropriate people to look the other way. It was decided that Mi-ran, So-hee, their brother and their mother would go to China to contact her father's relatives in South Korea. They had no idea whether they could locate them, and they didn't dare think about actually going to South Korea.

All the elements of the plan fell into place within a few weeks. Mi-ran had one urgent task in preparation for leaving. The night before their departure she took out a carefully wrapped bundle from her clothing cupboard. It contained every letter she had ever received from Jun-sang. The letters had to be destroyed. She ripped each one into tiny pieces before throwing them out. She didn't want anybody to learn of the decade she and Jun-sang had spent obsessed with each other. After they were gone, they would be denounced as traitors. She didn't want her guilt to rub off on Jun-sang. His life could go on as it had before. He could find himself a suitable wife, join the Workers' Party, and spend the rest of his life in Pyongyang as a scientist. He'll forgive me, she told herself. It's in his best interest.

Mi-ran left the next morning on her bicycle, a small backpack slung over her shoulder. She casually waved good­bye to her mother and brother. The plan was for everyone to leave the house separately to avoid attracting attention. Later in the day, her mother would pop her head into a neighbour's front door to mention she was off to help one of her married daughters with a baby for a week or two. That would buy them a little time before the police were notified that they were missing.

Mi-ran met up with the truck driver who took her to Musan, where Mi-ran's father had been sent as a prison labourer after the Korean War. It was a ghost town now, its mines and factories closed. But beneath the lifeless exterior, the place was teeming with smugglers. The town is situated near one of the narrower stretches of the Tumen River and was developing into one of the hubs for illegal border crossings into China. It was a growth industry, perhaps the only one in North Korea. The truck driver specialised in bringing people without passports or travel permits to the border.

If anybody spotted the family, they wouldn't have suspected that they were fleeing their home. They wore their best clothing underneath their every­day clothes, hoping not to look like pathetic North Koreans once they got to China. Their attire also supported their cover story – they were attending a family wedding in Musan. They carried only enough luggage for a weekend excursion. Stuffed inside were a few family photographs and dried seafood, fish, squid and crab, Chongjin's gastronomic specialities. The food was intended not for their own consumption, but for bribes. There were two checkpoints along the 50-mile route to Musan. A few years earlier, they wouldn't have dared drive to Musan without permits; but this was 1998 and you could buy almost anything with food.

Mi-ran was travelling alone. Her mother, brother and sister had gone earlier, per the arrangement. A guide escorted her out of Musan, down a dirt road that ran parallel to the river. When the road ended at a cornfield, he left her. He gestured to her to cross the field and keep walking in the direction of the river. 'Just keep walking straight,' he said.

By now Mi-ran's body was trembling from fear and cold. Without light to guide her, it was difficult to just go straight. Where was the river anyway? Then she almost collided with a wall. It loomed high above her head and stretched as far in either direction as she could see. It was white concrete, like the wall around a jail or a military compound. As she edged her way along it with her hands, the wall got lower and lower until it was easy enough to climb over. She understood now. It was a retaining wall for the river embankment. She scrambled down to the water.

Autumn is the dry season in Korea so the river was especially low, reaching only her knees, but it was so cold that her legs turned numb. They felt like they were made of lead as her trainers filled with water. She was sinking into the silt. She lifted one leg, then the other. Step by step she inched forward, trying hard not to slip and topple into the water. Suddenly Mi-ran felt the water receding to her ankles. She pulled herself up to the riverbank and, sopping wet, looked around. She was in China, but she couldn't see anything. There was nobody there. She was completely alone in the dark. Now she was truly panicked. She looked back behind her at North Korea. If she could find that road, she could walk back to Musan. From there she could catch a train to Chongjin and the next day she would be home. She would go back to her teaching job. Jun-sang would never know she had nearly run away. It would be as though none of this had ever happened.

As she contemplated her options, she heard a rustling in the trees. Then a man's voice. 'Nuna, nuna.'

Her brother was calling her, using the Korean word for 'older sister'.

She reached out for his hand and was gone from North Korea for ever.

This is an edited extract from 'Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea' by Barbara Demick (Granta).

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/7249849/North-Korea-secrets-and-lies.html

[glengael]

Dara O'Cinneide (Kerry 2004)

“Every face directly in front of me was a Gaeltacht person – all family, friends, neighbours and team-mates.

“You’d start to get emotional then. I’d consider myself cool enough, but I was thinking ‘I’ll be struggling here’.

“It’s impossible not to be affected. I remember seeing the Kerry Golden Years video and you’d have seen Ogie Moran lifting Sam and Ogie was crying, or close to it.

“Tyrone had beaten us in ’03 and Armagh had beaten us by a point in ’02. When the talk turned to Kerry, it was that we were damaged goods; that we’d never get a hold of this new style of football. We were very hurt at that.

“The message I wanted to get across was we’d had a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Kerry the last two years, but it was over now.”


Extract from Irish Timesa article on captain's speeches , Sat Sept 11th

[kerrygold]

How not to go green: Slick publicity is no longer enough to convince us of a brand's eco credentials

Adman David Jones reveals why campaigns have to keep it real

Interview by Ian Burrell


Thursday, 23 September 2010

When BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, killing 11 workers, the company's pretty green and yellow floral logo was about as much use in stemming the resultant 2,000 square mile-plus oil slick that contaminated the Gulf of Mexico as it was in convincing us of BP's corporate commitment to the environment.


We're all wiser these days to the subtleties of greenwashing, the practice of companies using advertising and marketing messages to persuade us that they care that bit more about their ecological responsibilities. So David Jones, one of the world's foremost admen and the global chief executive of the advertising and communications group Havas, will have his work cut out addressing the Sustainable Planet forum, which takes place in Lyon over the next three days.

He will have harsh messages for business, he promises. The days when the corporate world could pull the wool over the eyes of consumers with slick but hollow slogans are long over and, thanks to the growth of social media, it is the public that now has the whip hand in evaluating a company's green credentials.

Jones, 42, is something of an expert in this area, a long-standing advocate of the need and value of putting corporate responsibility at the core of a business. He is the global chief executive of the Havas-owned advertising agency Euro RSCG, which ran the TckTckTck climate change awareness campaign with the former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan last year and is an adviser on sustainability to Nicolas Sarkozy's French government.

According to Jones, companies have had drastically to alter their stance on green issues over the past 20 years. BP, he says, was the poster child for what he describes as the "decade of image", the final 10 years of the last century. "In the decade of image, the majority of people did not genuinely change their business but decided that if they had a couple of nice marketing messages, they could convince the world that they were a great company and do better because of it," he says. "I think BP were the poster child for that, the rebranding into a flower and the Beyond Petroleum campaign and all of that."

In its Beyond Petroleum campaign, BP boasted of its work in producing solar energy and natural gas and, alongside beautiful imagery of partially submerged trees, opined that "Beyond... means starting a journey that will take the world's expectations of energy beyond what anyone can see today." Jones derides the campaign, from 2000, saying: "Quite frankly, it was probably the biggest over-claim we have ever seen in the world of marketing."

With the coming of the new millennium, business started to become more sophisticated, he argues. In the "decade of advantage", the smartest companies "genuinely put socially responsible business at their core and actually gained significant competitive advantages because of it". Jones, an Englishman based in New York, praises Walmart for having transformed its image in the United States, through a green approach. "It completely re-engineered its reputation in North America and became one of the most respected and admired companies in terms of what it was doing. A decade earlier, it had real [image] problems," he says. "The critical point was that it was genuine and it probably did more to change its supply chain and logistics in terms of sustainability than any major company has ever done." He cites Marks & Spencer as a British company that achieved a similar effect with its Plan A campaign (so called because there was no Plan B) setting out 100 commitments to "do the right thing". Jones says: "Plan A repositioned the company in a completely different way in people's minds. It was incredibly overt and everywhere across print and websites. I think it was genuine and had a very positive impact on their image."

Which brings us to 2010 and the start of the "decade of damage", as Jones calls it. "We are now moving into a decade where consumers can vote against you with their wallets and your business will be damaged. Consumers now have the power through social media to really 'punish' those companies who don't live up to their standards."

Once again, BP is the prime example. Jones points to the Twitter account @bpglobalpr, set up by a man calling himself "Leroy Stick (aka a guy in his boxer shorts)". Stick started his Twitter account "because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bull* PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing". So he began making jokes at the company's expense.

The account quickly attracted 180,000 followers, vastly more than the official BP Twitter account. Stick also restyled the logo in a splattered black. "It was a very interesting lesson for the world we live in today," Jones says, "that one individual can have over 10 times the followers that one of the world's biggest companies has." The name Leroy Stick was itself a pseudonym, inspired by the piece of wood the Twitter author and his father used to curb a dangerous dog called Leroy that terrorised their neighbourhood in his childhood. BP was being treated as a corporate Leroy.

Before the economic downturn, Euro RSCG conducted a global survey of consumer attitudes to ethical business and found that 80 per cent of respondents believed they had a responsibility to censure unethical companies by boycotting their products, while 83 per cent believed ethical business should be the norm and they should not be made to pay a premium price for ethical goods and services.

Chief executives have a key role to play in emphasising the sincerity of a company's approach. Jones argues that Apple's recent problems over faults with the iPhone 4 were largely due to the company's reluctance to communicate more with consumers. "The culture of Apple is not open and transparent," he says. "It closed off and denied it and only after $9-10bn of share price erosion did it start getting its act together. It's all about transparency, authenticity and speed. Those three things are critical in the social media world."

Jones, who is fluent in French and German, has long been one of advertising's leading global thinkers. He was the youngest board member of the giant Abbott Mead Vickers/BBDO at the age of 28 and was running Australia's leading agency at 32. When he was overseeing Euro RSCG's global accounts in London, he commuted to the office from Paris via Eurostar. He is advising Nicolas Sarkozy's government on the issue of sustainability during France's presidency of the G20. Tomorrow, he will be in Zurich to launch the next instalment of One Young World, an annual Euro RSCG initiative to gather inspirational young people from around the planet under the same roof.

The TckTckTck campaign ahead of the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen drew the support of more than 10 million "climate allies" without a penny being spent on traditional media campaigning. "The whole idea was to create an open-source idea, something people would pass on," Jones says. "We would advise clients that it's much more important today to create content that people can share than to create content that you control and own."

In pursuing that strategy, he warns, companies should be careful not to promise something that they know they can't deliver. "If you start trying to make a small initiative into claiming you are the most green and ecologically friendly company in the world, it will come back to bite you, and one of the reasons that BP fell so hard was because of the huge over-claim," he says. "I'm not saying the oil business is easy and if tomorrow we all had to live without oil we would be in serious trouble. But you don't have to change your logo to a flower and give everyone the impression that you press wild daisies for a living. That's one of the reasons why the backlash against them was so harsh."

[kerrygold]

Valentia: Treasure island
Willie Dillon left the coachloads of tourists behind on the Ring of Kerry and ventured to Valentia where he stumbled upon great walks, friendly wildlife and a head for heights Valentia island.


By Willie Dillon


Saturday September 25 2010

They say it's Kerry's best-kept secret. Valentia Island is tucked away just off the country's most popular tourist route, its famous ring.

They say it's Kerry's best-kept secret. Valentia Island is tucked away just off the country's most popular tourist route, its famous ring.


Yet it escapes the conveyor-belt trundle of the big tour coaches ferrying package tourists to the next souvenir outlet and loo stop.


This gem of an island -- measuring a little over six miles long by nearly two miles wide -- is for those who prefer to fill their lungs with pure Kerry air and jaw-dropping views of mountains, sea and sky.


Its setting on the edge of the broad Atlantic would suggest a rugged climate with lots of wind and rain. Not so, say locals, who claim the island has its very own microclimate which means the rain clouds don't begin offloading until they are further inland. You'll often hear disparaging references to "the Dublin weather forecast" whose writ apparently doesn't run in Valentia.


The best thing about this island of 600 inhabitants is that it is totally accessible. From April to September, a small car-ferry runs a continuous shuttle service across the narrow water from Reenard Point, just south of Cahersiveen, to busy Knightstown, the biggest village on Valentia. Alternatively, there's a more roundabout route over the bridge at Portmagee on the opposite end of the island. Once there, you're on to a maze of winding roads and rugged landscape with riotously coloured hedgerows aflame with golden Crocosmia and deep-red fuchsia.


The island is a haven for those who like moderate levels of exercise, and there's no better place to get started than Geokaun, the island's highest mountain at 600 feet.


We were surprised to find a booth at the start of the climb, where we paid an €8 admission charge for four people on foot. We pointed out that the tariff for a car and passengers was a fiver. The climb is reasonably vigorous, but you can take it one bit at a time. There are four separate viewing areas at different heights -- all with spectacular panoramas of sea, cliffs and mountains.


At the top, the 360-degree view is straight out of John Hinde's top drawer, all lustrous blues and greens with a skyline which includes four of Ireland's six highest mountains. To your left are the Blaskets, while the Skelligs sit like two vast cathedrals of solid rock on the horizon behind you. I should point out that you can also drive all the way to the summit, but where's the sense of achievement in that?


Back at ground level, we were pleasantly surprised when the young lady at the booth refunded us the €3 admission price discrepancy.


Some eight miles away to the south, the sharp-edged Skellig Islands can be seen from many parts of Valentia. The bigger of the two, Skellig Michael, rises an abrupt 700 feet out of the Atlantic and is a UNESCO World Heritage site, owing to the presence there of one of Europe's least accessible monastic ruins. From the sixth to the 13th century, Christian monks lived and worshipped here from their distinctive beehive stone huts.


Boats travel from Valentia every day in high season, weather permitting, at a cost of €45 per person and advance booking is essential. The fare is worth every cent. The one-hour boat ride first takes you around Little Skellig, which has the second-biggest gannet colony in the world. An estimated 30,000 nesting pairs make this massive lump of uninhabited rock their home during the summer months.


Gannets, unlike many humans, mate for life and their presence in such vast numbers literally turns parts of the rock face white. The resident seals recline lazily on the lower rocks eyeing the boatloads of humans with a laid-back, 'seen it all before' look.


Skellig Michael (in Irish, Sceilig Mhichil) is not recommended for people with health issues or a fear of heights. After you disembark, the climb to the monastic settlement is steep and hazardous. There is a rough, irregular stone pathway of 618 steps, sections of which pass within feet of sheer cliff drops without any protective railing. The danger is emphasised by the fact that last year's two fatalities on the island occurred very close to the bottom where people might be inclined to start relaxing.


It's fair to say that most of us were a little apprehensive beforehand. But the rewards were immense: dramatic views at every turn and the ultimate reward of getting to the walled-off monastic compound where one of the resident OPW guides gave an engrossing account of the settlement's history. For one member of our group, however, coming back down the steep steps was vastly scarier than going up. Opting for caution rather than dignity, she negotiated much of the journey on her bum.


There are no facilities of any kind on Skellig Michael, including toilets. But an added bonus is the presence of numerous puffins who behave as if totally tame and are happy to stand and be photographed at close range.


Back on Valentia, one of the most curious attractions are the so-called dinosaur footprints on rocks at Dohilla.


These mysterious fossilised tracks were left by a tetrapod, a large amphibious creature, which walked on soft sediment some 350 million years ago when Kerry was apparently situated somewhere south of the equator.


They are the oldest-known footprints in Europe , discovered only in 1993 by a Swiss geology student. It requires considerable imaginative powers to conjure a prehistoric creature out of what are, in fact, very slight indentations on the shoreline rock. Just don't go there expecting to see Jurassic Park.


Need to know


GETTING THERE


Access to Valentia couldn’t be easier - if you have a car. From April to September, a small car ferry runs a continuous shuttle service across the narrow water from Reenard Point, just south of Cahersiveen, to busy Knightstown, the biggest village on Valentia. There’s no need to book; just show up at the pier. The crossing takes about five minutes. Alternatively, you can drive over the bridge at Portmagee on the opposite end of the island.


STAYING THERE


The property website daft.ie gave us a range of great self-catering options on Valentia. We chose a fully-equipped cottage for four on the more remote southern end of the island for €400 a week in high season. We had a marvellous view of the Blaskets from the front window, while from a side window we looked directly out over the Skelligs.


WHERE TO EAT


As restaurant locations go, it’s hard to imagine a more delightful, out-of-the-way setting than the Lighthouse Café. Soak up the fabulous views while dining outdoors amid profusions of wild flowers and a reclaimed organic vegetable garden. Tel: [phone] begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 066 947 6304 end_of_the_skype_highlighting to check off-season opening times. The Knightstown Coffee Shop is a lovely little haven serving delicious food and homemade desserts in a friendly, relaxed setting, with a very interesting second- hand bookshop attached. Tel: [phone] begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 066 947 6373 end_of_the_skype_highlighting. Across on the ferry from Knightstown, the familyowned O’Neills at The Point specialises in fresh fish — no meat, no desserts, just fish. Tel: [phone] begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 066 947 2068 end_of_the_skype_highlighting.


GREAT THINGS TO DO


Explore Valentia’s once prominent role in global communications. The first commercially viable transatlantic telegraph cable came ashore here in 1866, connecting Europe and the US for the first time.


Take a stroll on the broad beaches of Ballinskelligs.


Visit the Skelligs Chocolate Company and sample raspberry and Champagne truffles.

Join the Ring of Kerry route near Waterville, where tourists flock around the statue of Charlie Chaplin, who was a regular visitor. On your way back, stop off at the nearest ATM machine, for there are none on Valentia. The nearest is in Cahersiveen, a short hop on the ferry. Also, most businesses on Valentia don’t accept credit cards.

Take a boat trip to the Skelligs (066 947 6214). Sea fishing trips are available for families and groups. Talk to the tourist office on Knightstown Pier. Tel: [phone].

Visit the exotic Glenleam Gardens, a 40-acre site described as like wandering into a benign jungle. Open from April to October. Tel: [phone].

- Willie Dillon

Irish Independent

[kerrygold]

By Maurice Hayes

Biblical tirade on hedonistic greed is a tale for our times


Monday October 04 2010

IN an unwitting by-product of protest, those concerned Christians who boycotted Mass yesterday week missed out on a highly relevant tract for the times (or for a tribunal). The first lesson, a reading from the Book of Amos, could usefully be printed as a leader by any contemporary Irish newspaper.

This is not to beat a drum for the bishops who seem more concerned about scoring points against a pious and elderly lady than to address the substance of her complaint -- the lack of recognition of the existence of women by the Roman Catholic Church. There can be few half-decent arguments left which would justify the exclusion of half the human race from the ministry and declare the priesthood a male reserve forever, according to the order of Melchisedech (or Benedict or John Paul for that matter).

Leaving doctrinal and theological quibbles aside, it is hard to see how they propose to staff the organisation in the future when men are retiring and dying at a faster rate than they are being recruited, where seminaries are virtually empty and where there is no evidence of even the most rudimentary form of succession planning. As parishes are being amalgamated for lack of priests, it seems perverse in the extreme to argue that the only way to preserve the faith is to deny the right of preaching to women who might carry the gospel to those who otherwise would not hear it.

But back to Amos and his thought for the day. This is the Old Testament prophet, angrily, majestically, denouncing the moral decay which imperils the existence of the nation and excoriating those who are its agents and servants. In ringing tones he cries "woe" to those ensconced snugly in Zion and Samaria, lying on ivory beds and sprawled on their divans, dining on lambs from the flock and stall-fed veal, howling to the sound of the harp, drinking wine by the bowl, using the finest oil for anointing themselves, who do not care at all about the ruin they have caused, and calling for them to be exiled from Zion.

As anathema to a materialistic and hedonistic generation where greed triumphed over judgment and caution went out the window, as risk was eliminated in a dystopian vision, it could hardly have been more relevant to contemporary Irish society.

If the country is to weather the storm of the next few years, while we extricate the economy from the mess created by piratical bankers, delusional developers, lax regulators and financial adventurism, it can only be by belt-tightening on a punitive scale. Success will depend on political leadership of which, at first sight, there is not much about, social cohesion and solidarity. People can cope with temporary or even short-term sacrifice if there is promise of better times ahead but, more importantly, if the pain is seen to be equally shared and fairly distributed.

However, it is not immediately obvious that this is indeed the case. People have an innate sense of justice, and in contemporary Ireland that sense is outraged by the apparent immunity of those who caused the mess from paying the price that is being exacted from those on the lower rungs of the social and financial ladder who were not part of the financial fantasy world in which straw was spun into gold -- fool's gold as it transpired. They also find it hard to reconcile the light-handed regulation of financial institutions which allowed bankers and developers to dissipate billions of euro into thin air with the zeal with which the State pursues those who fiddle a few euro on welfare or fall behind with their TV licence.

Dearbhail McDonald in her compelling retelling of the serial dramas in the commercial court makes the distinction between law and justice. There is something distasteful, to say the least, about excessively rich men suing each other in civil actions in an attempt to shift blame or save money, if not reputation, while at the same time avoiding the criminal prosecution that to most of the populus would seem more appropriate.

There is a strange irony in the fact that a man -- deranged by the complication of his financial situation -- who drove a truck which took a flake of paint off the gates of Leinster House causing damage amounting, at most, to €100 can be brought to court and charged with criminal damage within 24 hours while financial wizards who may or may not have engaged in conspiracy to delude the markets seem immune to prosecution two years after their questionable activities brought the economy to crisis.

It is hard to talk about justice to those at the bottom or in the middle of the pile while those high flyers who brought the economy and the banking system to their knees are still swanning around, living lives of highly conspicuous consumption, and while concepts of human rights which we all thought had been developed to protect the poor and the disadvantaged from exploitation and oppression are deployed to protect the corporate rich from prosecution.

Some of these have already called Amos's bluff by exiling themselves from Zion to sunnier climes or entirely outside the jurisdiction of the Irish courts. Nevertheless, the common man and woman will hope that he is nearer the mark when he declares that "the sprawlers' revelry is over".

[e-mail]

- Maurice Hayes

Irish Independent

[glengael]

DAD'S LIFE: Parent’s verbal attack on principal is out of order, writes ADAM BROPHY

I’M DROPPING the kids to school and the principal, as is her habit, is by the entrance, greeting us all. I’m dragging my two behind, not paying attention to much beyond getting them in the door until I become aware of a brief altercation.

A parent has emerged from the building, coughed a line of abuse in the principal’s direction, waved an arm dismissively at her and stormed off. As it happens, we’re next to go past and she is visibly shaken, and this is a woman who doesn’t get shook.

I don’t want to pry, but I’m both shocked and intrigued. I send the kids off and ask if she’s okay. She informs me that, occasionally, part of the job involves taking flak from parents. It’s not enjoyable, it’s not pretty, but it’s par for the course.

Really? How many other people have jobs that involve standing in the rain at 8.50 on a Monday morning with the possibility that someone on the outer edges of the organisation that you head will bark in your face that you’re a buffoon?

This shocks me on a number of levels. I know that a teacher shouldn’t make a child suffer for his or her parent’s misdemeanours, but I would not allow any parent back on school property who believed they had the right to spit vitriol in my face. If that means the child has to change school, so be it. Obviously I would be a less tolerant principal than the one in the job.
But on a human level, where does someone learn that it’s okay to behave aggressively towards another person, particularly someone who has direct responsibility for the safekeeping of their child? In confronting a teacher in public you undermine their position, you cause your own child anxiety, and you make yourself look a prat.

Where you send your kids to school is a leap of faith. The decision may be based on reports from existing parents or an impression made on visiting the establishment, but most of the time it is borne of convenience – this is a place you may have to get to, twice a day, for a number of years. But whatever the reason, when you pack your kids through that door you have no idea how they will react to their teacher, to the kids around them and to the ethos of the school which, of course, is dictated by the principal.

Most kids respond just fine, but there will be issues in every class. Kids will bully and be bullied. Kids will have difficulties at home and will act out in the classroom. Kids will have problems learning. For some, school is a joy, for others a sentence. But accepting school policy is the parents’ responsibility, not the teacher’s. If issues arise that can’t be resolved, it is up to the parent to decide whether their child’s best interests are served by staying in the school or not.

As a parent, if you disagree with the practices being adopted in any school, you are perfectly within your rights to voice your complaints. The best-run schools are the ones that listen to suggestions and have a fluid, open policy. The school my kids attend is one of those schools. If it was not and my concerns were not being heard, I would place them elsewhere and complain officially. That may inconvenience me, but I don’t manage the school, I only manage my kids.

There are many educational dilemmas facing parents. The fact that the vast majority of primary schools are Catholic is ridiculous considering the religious leanings of the vast majority of parents. Schools are underfunded and overcrowded. For the most part, their IT infrastructure is at a Third World level. The Department of Education pays exorbitant rent on land and buildings when it should have had premises custom-built when money was sloshing around its coffers.

But most important for schoolgoing kids is the relationship they develop with their teacher and, by extension, their principal. I would have them schooled in a crumbling, Victorian workhouse if it meant they were exposed to good teaching. By extension, I would remove them from the shiniest seat of learning if I felt it was instilling values I disagreed with.

I can do that because I am an adult and seek alternatives to stamping my foot and pouting when things do not go my way.

[kerrygold]

By David McWilliams


Wednesday October 06 2010

The last time I checked there was a harp on the front of my passport, not a picture of Michael Fingleton

The other day I met a German radio presenter from ARD, the German public radio station. I've known her for quite a while -- since a brief spell working on the German economy in the 1990s for an investment bank. She, like many other foreign correspondents, has been sent to Ireland to see what is going on here.

After a while, I wondered why she hadn't asked me anything about the Government, or the prospect of an election or what new political constellation might emerge here. She joked and in an exaggerated German accent laughed: "David, it doesn't matter who your next prime minister is, he will have no power -- we own you now, and he will do what we tell him."

The problem is that the joke is on us. She touched on the nub of the issue: the Irish elite is prepared to sell the sovereignty of this country to protect the likes of Roman Abramovich and other vulture investors who bought up third-rate Irish banking debt at a discount and are hoping to get paid in full.

In the world of debt, these people are referred to as 'rogue creditors'. Typically, they are treated as rogues. They are nothing to us and should be treated as nothing. As the clever economist Karl Whelan observed, if we are happy that our tax is used to pay Frank Lampard's wages, then that's more of a reflection on us.

People such as Abramovich, like the other creditors, can be told to line up in an orderly queue and wait for the liquidator to give them the morsels that might remain from the broken Irish banking system. The crud Abramovich owns -- an IOU from Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS) -- is not the same thing as Irish government debt.

The last time I checked there was a harp on the front of my passport, not a picture of Michael Fingleton.

Any political party that fights the election on that premise of protecting the Irish taxpayer from vulture investors will get my vote. Not only will that party be doing the right thing, but it will begin the process of giving back to the people the country that we built. This country and our future income needs to be ripped from the grip of the 'political elite' (a group the governor of the Central Bank identified the other day) who are selling us to the lowest, not highest, bidder.

My German friend was amazed when she saw Abramovich's caper and she observed that the Irish parliament kept genuflecting to some crowd called bondholders. She asked me one of the most insightful questions I have heard throughout this long saga: "Do you Irish need to be loved so much that you will stand up for nothing?"

With Germanic precision and with the benefit of distance, she touched a nerve. The Irish weakness for not causing any trouble (bar a few theatrically drunken songs for the audience late at night) has led us to a situation where we are embarrassed to admit that we messed up. We don't want to stand out. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves for serious reasons. Is it because we want to impress the foreigner and above all make life easy for him?

Is it fair to say that over the years the language of resistance has been replaced by the language of compliance?

What is clear is that some countries fight, some make nuisances of themselves, but the default position of Ireland, or at least the Irish elite, is to comply -- no matter what the cost.

So take the example of euro membership. Denmark and Sweden -- two great European countries whose bona fides as EU members was never in doubt -- decided to keep their own currencies because they were perfectly happy with them and the euro's case wasn't compelling enough.

Meanwhile, what did our elite do? They went along for the ride -- one which the evidence would suggest was an extremely ill-advised ride. Ireland had much greater cause for concern about joining the euro, but we hardly made a noise. Why?

Could it be -- to follow my German friend's line of enquiry -- that we didn't have the self-confidence to stand on our own two feet and do some hard analysis about the consequences of this currency or any other decision?

Did we just want to be a mute member of the club -- unlike the pesky Danes, Swedes or, God forbid, Brits?

It is difficult to answer these questions. They are fraught and can lead to lots of heat and sometimes not too much light, but you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see a pattern.

Take, for example, Abramovich owning a huge amount of INBS debt. How did he get his hands on it? Who sold it to him? Would it be too much to conclude that whoever -- whichever broker -- sold the debt to him, also sold it to some other mega-rich clients elsewhere?

That would stand to reason. If so, could it be that the mega-rich who are closer to home find themselves in the same position as Abramovich?

Could it be that the only people benefiting from the Government's blind rush to impale the small guy with the debts of Fingleton et al are our own "high net worth" individuals? Could they be pulling the strings?

In all this haze, allegation and counter-allegation, can the "cui bono" question help us at all?

A clear domestic banking resolution law would clear all this up. But we have no such law. So the people are left in the lurch wondering who to believe.

We do know that, for example, the EU Commission gave its opinion on Friday at the wind-up of a Danish bank where it enthusiastically supported the principle of burden sharing.

Here's the quotation from the EU Commission regarding bust Danish banks: "Moreover, burden sharing is ensured by excluding shareholders and subordinated debt holders of the failed bank from any benefit from the aid."

There you have it in black and white. This is what the EU has advised Denmark to do. It clearly states that they won't give any state money to the troubled bank until the subordinated debt holders are burnt.

So let's get back to my German friend's observation: is it because we need to be loved or are we protecting someone big?

The EU says burn them and move on. Logic says don't sacrifice your sovereignty to bail out the hyper-rich, democracy says it is unfair to penalise the poor for the mistakes of the rich. What do you think?

David McWilliams will teach an economics diploma called 'Economics without boundaries', enrolling now; see www.independentcolleges.ie

- David McWilliams

Irish Independent

[glengael]

19/10/2010 - 14:23:43

Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson has confirmed striker Wayne Rooney wants to leave the club.

Rooney’s future has been the subject of intense speculation over the last few days following reports that the England striker was unprepared to sign a new contract.

Meanwhile the club also confirmed Rooney was carried off on a stretcher during training this morning with an ankle injury and will not feature in tomorrow night's Champions League clash with Turkish side Bursaspor.

In an interview with MUTV today, Ferguson said: “David (Gill, chief executive) in the early part of the summer had opened talks with his agent and that was to be continued after the World Cup.

“I was in the office on August 14 and David phoned me to say he wasn’t signing a contract. I was dumbfounded. Only months before he was saying he was at the greatest club in the world.

“I asked to have a meeting with the boy. He reiterated what his agent said, that he wanted to go.”

Ferguson denied reports that he and the player had fallen out, and revealed his irritation that Rooney had denied having an ankle injury.We’ve not had any argument,” he told MUTV.

“You have to understand the mechanics of these situations when someone wants to leave the club. It’s an easy one to say you’ve fallen out with the manager.”

Asked whether or not he was genuinely injured, something Rooney denied following England’s game against Montenegro, Ferguson said: “Yes, he was injured. I said that in a TV interview some weeks ago.

“We sent him for a scan but there was no doubt that although he’s able to train he’s still carrying traces of that injury.

“Why he came out and said that you can only guess yourself.

“It was disappointing he said that.”

He continued: “When it came to the Sunderland game, I gave him a complete break hoping he would get his form back.

“Why he’s come out and said that I have no idea.”

Having learned of Rooney's desire to go, Ferguson requested to speak to the player.

He said: “Dealing with the next step was always going to be decisive for us, how we dealt with the situation.

“I asked to have a meeting with the boy and he reiterated what his agent said, that he wanted to go.

“The one thing I said to him was ’respect this club’, I don’t want any nonsense from you.

“I don’t know if he has done that. I have doubts on that, we are reading all these things about falling out with me and all that nonsense.

“It’s disappointing because we have done everything we possibly can to help Wayne Rooney ever since he came to the club.

“We have always been here as a harbour for him any time he has been in trouble, the advice we have given him, I was even prepared to give him financial advice.

“But it’s not just Wayne Rooney, we have done that for all the players.

“Wayne has been the beneficiary of that, just as Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes has...so there has been no falling out.

“So there we are, we have got into a situation where we had to clarify this for our fans because what we saw on Saturday was unacceptable.

“When we got to 2-2 (against West Brom) and they were chanting Wayne Rooney, it’s a pressure on the players and didn’t do the team any good so we had to clarify the situation and put it right.”

[glengael]

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

• Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse
• 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war
• Full coverage of the Iraq war logs


A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him."

The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".

A Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times this week that under its procedure, when reports of Iraqi abuse were received the US military "notifies the responsible government of Iraq agency or ministry for investigation and follow-up".

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.

The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

Iraq Body Count, the London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, says it has identified around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths from the data contained in the leaked war logs.

Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.

No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.

However, the US figures appear to be unreliable in respect of civilian deaths caused by their own military activities. For example, in Falluja, the site of two major urban battles in 2004, no civilian deaths are recorded. Yet Iraq Body Count monitors identified more than 1,200 civilians who died during the fighting.

Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers, plans to use material from the logs in court to try to force the UK to hold a public inquiry into the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians.

He also plans to sue the British government over its failure to stop the abuse and torture of detainees by Iraqi forces. The coalition's formal policy of not investigating such allegations is "simply not permissible", he says.

Shiner is already pursuing a series of legal actions for former detainees allegedly killed or tortured by British forces in Iraq.

WikiLeaks says it is posting online the entire set of 400,000 Iraq field reports – in defiance of the Pentagon.

The whistleblowing activists say they have deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals. They were accused by the US military of possibly having "blood on their hands" over the previous Afghan release by redacting too few names. But the military recently conceded that no harm had been identified.

Condemning this fresh leak, however, the Pentagon said: "This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment."


The Guardian Saturday 23rd October 2010