Licensed to Kill – Irish Road Safety Authority

April 9, 2024 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

The Irish Road Safety Authority (RSA) was set up to fail and has proved its impotence through the recent rise in the number of road fatalities. At a fundamental level, the failures of the RSA are due to a single foundational false premise. As an illustration, consider the response of the government to combat the rising trend in road deaths in 2022. The Minister for State at the Department of Transport, Hildegard Naughton doubled speeding fines in October of that year. As a safety strategy it was a total failure because the number of deaths for 2023 on Irish roads increased by nearly a fifth. Moreover, when measured over two years, the increase was a staggering 41%. That should have set alarm bells ringing at government level and prompted an investigation into the operation and effectiveness of the RSA, but nothing happened.

A big clue to finding the single false premise is to look at composition of the board of the RSA and their qualifications. The board is chaired by Liz O’Donnell, a former politician and law graduate. Dr. Derek Cawley, a surgeon and Dr John Cronin is an emergency medicine consultant. Sarah is Johnson, a lawyer with claimed expertise in public contracts and procurement. Ashling Cunningham is an experienced chief information officer at Irish Life Group, Dónall Curtin, described as an experienced accountant, and finally Dave Montgomery is also an accountant. That’s it! A board comprised of doctors, lawyers, and accountants with not one single person with expertise in safety. [i] Is that fact not surprising!

The global safety industry is populated with well-intentioned people who think safety planning and strategy is easy and intuitive. Consequently, incompetence is rife throughout the discipline of safety regulation and governance, but perhaps troublingly, that includes its most competent arena, aviation safety.

Princess Dianna is certainly one of the most famous road fatalities in history, but her death was entirely due to poor quality road safety management. The road crash that led to her death had other causal factors whereupon the public gaze has been directed. It might appear cynical, but it is all too common to witness various authorities apportioning blame for causing accidents to drivers, to avoid accepting any blame landing on their shoulders. When investigators are only concerned with apportioning blame to people, it should trigger warnings that their analysis is likely to be inept. As their sole focus is on punishment, they can play no role in the prevention of future accidents.

Aviators have a motto, “aeroplanes bite fools”, meaning that incompetence is rapidly exposed. However, a second aviators’ motto holds that humans are not well suited to the anticipation of potential dangers, “the lessons of safety are learnt in the graveyard”. As an example, take the two 737 Max crashes, they exposed the many “fools” working not only for Boeing but for the regulatory safety authority, the FAA. The use of the common term “fool” in the aviators’ proverb might lead you to believe that aeroplanes only bite stupid people but that could not be further from the truth. Read the crash investigation reports into the two space shuttle disasters and note that many highly educated and qualified people made some very silly and elementary errors that led to the loss of multiple lives.

For those who are interested in, and study safety, it begs the question, why do humans only start to learn lessons after the graveyards have started to fill up with victims? Victims whose deaths were easily preventable, in hindsight.

The 737 Max crashes are a classic in the genre of “graveyard engineering”, as it is sometimes called. In October 2018, a brand-new aircraft, flown by Lion Air crashed into the sea killing 189 people, but nothing much more than the normal air crash investigation took place. However, within five months, when another new 737 Max airliner, belonging to Ethiopian Airlines, plunged into the ground killing another 157 people, it exposed many weaknesses and failures within aviation safety management. In contrast, in the aftermath of the second crash, the action was swift and decisive. All 737 Max aircraft were grounded by various aviation regulatory authorities across the globe.

The lessons of aviation safety are forced by circumstance to be learnt quickly and acted upon with due haste. It is a process that naturally purges the incompetents and foolish processes out of the system. On the other hand, road safety affords incompetence its most luxurious refuge.

Safety regulation is not intuitive. Aviation safety has learnt that human intuition has no place within the industry, yet it pervades in places and sometimes dominates. Humans will always make mistakes but many of these mistakes can be predicted, enabling measures to be put in place to prevent or lessen their consequences.

That is the fundamental false premise that the RSA is founded upon. The government simply plucked people out of nowhere using the false assumption that safety regulation is intuitive, and that no specialist expertise is required to guide strategy and policy.

Accordingly, the primary road safety strategy of the RSA is nannyism. Evidenced by the high frequency of condescending advertisements, scolding road users, as if they were bold children. When the number of fatalities rises, they simply increase the frequency of output hoping that it might brainwash road users into adopting safer behaviours.

One recent road accident resulting in multiple fatalities was reported to have occurred at a known accident blackspot. The elimination of accident blackspots should have been the first priority of the RSA when it was founded in 2006. These blackspots are places where the road engineering is deficient. Places where, in certain circumstances, even good conscientious drivers can have a crash. That is a major point, deficient road engineering is responsible for many accidents and deaths on Irish roads. It seems to be of little concern to the RSA, or any of the local authorities, or even the government at national level.

I recall one case where a driver shot through a crossroads and was T-boned by a car on the main road. He, along with his girlfriend and their toddler died. Within days, the locals reported that the junction was unrecognisable after the local authority carried out works. Prior to that, the signs warning of the junction ahead were obstructed with overgrown vegetation, while the white lines were worn off the road. The driver thought he was on the main road and had no warning that he was approaching a junction without priority. Galway County Council were entirely responsible for their deaths but was anyone held accountable?

Similar accidents continue to occur and many people have been wiped out at straight through crossroads. Not far from the scene of the aforementioned accident is Carnmore Cross. It was once known locally as “suicide cross”. It was a straight through crossroads on the main road from Galway City to Monivea. The junction layout cost many lives until the council decided to stagger the crossroads. Subsequently, drivers approaching from the non-priority ends had no vision of the road ahead and could not mistake it for a straight through road.

A stone’s throw away is the much newer Oranmore bypass, a dual carriageway where once again poor safety engineering caused the death of a woman. The cause of her death was due to the Armco steel barriers giving way, allowing the car to plunge over an embankment into a field. In Ireland these barriers are mere window-dressing, installed to masquerade as safety devices but will collapse when hit with a child’s pram travelling at 5kph. (See appendix)

Judging by the numerous editorials, especially after a spate of fatal road accidents, it seems that every newspaper editor considers himself/herself to be an expert in road safety. How many of these articles have laid the blame on local authorities for inadequate safety management. Is this the reason that local authorities get away with killing people? The focus is always on the incompetence of road users.

Think of all the commentary surrounding the death of Princes Dianna who died as a result of her car striking a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. Did anyone complain that there were no crash barriers. Had the pillars been protected by a concrete crash barrier there is no doubt that the consequences of the accident would not have been as serious. The car would have bounce off it and may have bounced multiple times between two barriers on opposite sides of the road. Motorsport fans are well used to seeing cars bouncing off barriers in such a manner. Each meter travelled before coming to a halt, even upside-down, is causing the car to slow down and dissipate its energy before it finally stops. The13th pillar in the tunnel had the opposite effect, it concentrated the full energy into one sharp point, stopping the car in just over one metre. It resulted in a force of seventy times that of gravity (70g), being transferred brutally in milliseconds to the occupants of the car. To put that in perspective, a human heart weighs on average about 285g for a female and 290g for a male. That’s at 1g. Simply multiply the weight by the g-force number and a human heart will strike the rib cage with a force of 20 to 21kg.

In 2021, Max Verstappen collided with another car and left the track at 290kph/180mph at Silverstone. The onboard instruments measured the impact at 54g. Verstappen emerged shaken but unhurt, thanks to good safety engineering. All corners of the track have a safety run-off area made of tarmac that helps to decelerate the car, better than grass, even when spinning. When the tarmac runs out, a gravel pit followed to further slow a vehicle before it hit the final barrier. Even then, the barrier was cushioned with six layers of tyres held together by a conveyor belt. These types of incidents prove that even when accidents occur at massive high speeds, they are survivable when safety engineering is deployed. It should be noted that F1learned its safety lessons in the graveyard and it too was a slow learner at the start.

The causes of the Princess Dianna accident are well known, but there is no doubt that she died due the incompetence of the French Road Safety Observatory (ONISR).

The predecessor of the RSA was the National Roads Authority, and despite an outcry from motoring organisations, it continued and installed wire rope crash barriers on the central reservations of many dual carriageways. The wire rope barriers pose a significant threat to the safety of motorcyclists but also to other road users. The system is designed so that the supporting posts give way when struck by a vehicle. The steel ropes stretch to restrain vehicles from going more than a few meters over the barrier centre line. On many Irish carriageways the barriers are not installed in the middle of the central reservation but to one side. I have visions of a truck coming through the hedge, striking the rope barrier, and stretching it so that it reaches into the overtaking lane of the opposite carriageway, thus taking out some poor unfortunate motorist.

Most countries carry out tests on their road safety barriers and conduct research to find better ways to lessen the severity of impacts, but not Ireland. They stick any old yoke in the ground and call it a crash barrier. Most are installed incorrectly and while Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) has a document stipulating what engineering standards should apply and the forces that barriers must withstand when struck, it seems to be completely ignored by road engineers and managers. More insightfully, the document is lazily copied direct from Highways UK. [ii] In any case, TII standards only apply to national routes, thus leaving local authorities free to create much mayhem.

Some local authorities have appointed Road Safety Officers who are equally ineffective as the RSA. Yet nobody questions their failures, nor their qualifications for the job. Councils just seem to pluck a civil servant at random from one desk and sit them at another. One road safety officer commenting after a crash that killed a grandmother, a mother and her child at a notorious accident blackspot said, “many motorists still did not fully understand the danger of speeding”.[iii] His comments were not just disrespectful to all the families who had lost loved ones on that road, but it is beyond infuriating that local authorities can blame their continued failures on other people. If road safety officers were held accountable in court for all accidents at known accident blackspots in their region, there is no doubt there would be far less of them and the few remaining brave souls would work tirelessly to avoid ridicule.

All these abysmal failures like Hildegard Naughton’s recent road safety initiative are due to a single false assumption that we all make. It accounts for the huge number of newspaper articles written by those who think that they know it all, and they always blame speeding. However, the cause of all accidents is due to a single mistake or a series of mistakes (deliberate crashes aside). Not one article that I have read in the Irish media emphasises the situational factors that contribute to drivers making errors, nor does it appear to be on the radar of the RSA.

Finding the true causes of human mistakes is the only effective way to prevent future accidents.

Astonishingly but not surprisingly, given the composition of the RSA board, it is totally unaware of the science of “Human Performance (HP)”, and Human Factors (HF). This lack of knowledge gives rise to faulty investigations, concerned only with the attribution of blame to one party or another. As we will see, attribution error is the primary source of their failure.

It may sound like a fitness regime for professional athletes but Human Performance (HP) is the psychological study of how people perform various tasks. Human Factors (HF) is related to HP but is a separate sphere that emerged from many disciplines including psychology, anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, anthropometry, industrial design and engineering, industrial medicine, industrial hygiene, architecture, illumination engineering, interaction design, visual design, and user interface design. It is concerned with the application of what we know about human beings, their abilities, characteristics and limitations, to the design of equipment they use, environments in which they function and jobs they perform.

In the absence of HF, investigators almost always blame accidents on the persons driving or piloting. Scientific studies have shown that humans are inclined by nature to attribute blame for the failures of other people to an internal personal failing, ignoring all other external factors. For example, if a person had to close down their business, most of their friends would attribute the cause to their lack of business acumen, an internal failing. If you were the person who was forced to close down your business, you would attribute its failure to the economy, competition etc. in other words, external reasons. Given any situation we often judge others harshly while letting ourselves off the hook. It is an entirely natural phenomenon that science considers this to be an error in the way human brains process information.

Consequently, the scientific method has developed strategies to combat the natural errors our brains make when processing information. One example is the issue of researcher bias. Scientific research has been bedevilled by bad reasoning for centuries. Many theories once considered to be incontrovertible facts are now on the scrap heap and long forgotten. However, researcher bias remains as powerful as it has ever been and continues to ruin the credibility of many studies and scientists.

Bad science is far more common than people realise and it is mainly the result of naturally occurring information processing errors made by our brains. Another one of these is called confirmation bias. It is the tendency to see only evidence that confirms our opinion and ignore any evidence that contradicts it. To reduce the harmful effects of this bias, scientific researchers are required to show that they have tested the null hypothesis. I know what you’re thinking, WTF! But it is not as complicated as it first seems.

Practically all scientific research studies set out to answer a question or a hypothesis. An example of a research hypothesis is does this vaccine prevent infections? Accordingly, the null hypothesis is then; this vaccine does not affect the infection rate. In other words, because we know that scientific researchers will ignore contradictory evidence, they are required to look for it, publish it, and explain why it can be rejected. Stated another way, scientists are forced by the system to at least look for evidence that might prove their opinions to be wrong.

OK, so far in this article I have been building up to a simplified introduction to the complex world of cognitive biases. You will find it very hard to believe that your brain can make so many errors in different situations. The first point to make is that they are not all bad. The second point is that the effects of these errors can be drastically reduced by using strategies like the ones mentioned above.

Fleishman and Pons are perhaps the most famous victims of cognitive bias in science. During their infamous experiment, the pair convinced themselves that they had observed a nuclear fusion reaction taking place at room temperature. Cold fusion is a massive game changer for science and with great excitement they published their findings. Many equally excited scientists all over the world replicated the cold fusion experiment but found the claimed results could not be replicated. The consequence was that two well respected scientists were the subject of ridicule thereafter. Like all other researchers, they subconsciously found what they had expected to find, even though it did not exist.

Cognitive biases make little difference to the lives of ordinary people. However, they can have a massive effect on their lives and wellbeing when they are allowed to ride unbridled and roughshod over the people by those in the professions along with those who govern us.

Appointing people who have no specialist skills or knowledge to positions within the domain of safety regulation might seem astonishing but it is an everyday occurrence. It happens because the ministers and government have no idea of the complexities involved. In the case of Ireland, the government simply took a celebrity broadcaster, Gay Byrne and made him the first chairman of the RSA. Byrne’s job was simply to act as a mudguard for the government. Every time road fatalities numbers surged, the mud thrown up landed on poor auld Gaybo, and not on the minister or the government. That has been the primary role of the authority ever since.

Gay had an element of luck on his side. Like a sales manager who appears to have star qualities in a rising market, his/her true abilities will only show in a declining market. Gay took over the helm of the RSA at a time of rising affluence, overflowing government coffers, and unprecedented investment into the upgrading of Ireland’s network of bad roads. Many new and safer roads were built, including motorways and dual carriageways that when combined with big improvements in car safety thanks to Euro NCAP, it led to a gradual decline in the fatality statistics. Other factors in the decline were a big decrease in the number of road journeys due to the financial crash and emigration to name just two. The number of people suffering injuries due to road accidents has remained stubbornly between eight and nine thousand per year. The stability of this statistic would suggest that vehicular safety improvements have yielded more survivable accidents. Therefore, if the number of accidents has remained the same, it is more likely that vehicular safety improvements account for the decline in the number of fatalities than the RSA strategy.

Like many state organisations the RSA operates in secret. Sure, they publish accident statistics but they are too general to allow for any scrutiny. Their intention is to hide from public view any information that has the power to reveal defects within policies, procedures, and operations. The net result is that incompetence has a revered and protected status in all Irish government bodies.

In marked contrast, all aviation accident reports are made public. The policy is based on one of the oldest and most natural principles of humanity, learning from the mistakes of others. It is not just pilots who make mistakes, it is everyone from aircraft designers, air traffic control, ground crew, maintenance crew to cabin crew, security personnel and all others.

The totality and the detail contained within aviation accident reports makes for heavy reading and is not for everyone. However, accident investigators make mistakes too and by forcing their reports into the public domain, it affords the public, along with industry experts, a chance to assess the quality of their work. More importantly, it forces investigators to wok to a high standard for fear of public ridicule and consequent reduction in attribution bias. That is the tendency for investigators to blame the pilots with little regard for the situation.

A safety organisation can only be effective if it is prepared to open its operations to public scrutiny and embrace criticism.

The aviation model is bar far the best accident prevention method currently available and every road safety organisation should follow its example.

Finally, we know, to err is human. It is not possible to change human nature. However, it is possible to change conditions that cause people to make errors and make error-recovery easier and with accidents, survivable.

Aloof nannyism is nothing more than a licence to kill.

EJ, is a former licenced motorsport safety officer, former licenced aircraft pilot, certified advanced driver and has spent his career working in safety critical environments.

Appendix & Refs

[i] The board of the Irish Road Safety Authority

[ii] Transport infrastructure Ireland specification document for crash barriers.

[iii] The N17, one of Ireland’s major roads is a total disgrace. This newspaper article from 2017 lists the deaths of 11 people in the previous two years. Many more have died since and yet no one has called on Mayo’s road safety officer to resign.

Ireland worst in Europe for Road Safety – European Commission

A bit of cop-on has come to NI

Victory in Northern Ireland: wire rope barriers will disappear

An animated reconstruction of Diana’s accident in Paris.

Verstappen Crash at Copse Corner 2021 View from the grandstand.

Lessons from the American space shuttle disasters

New York Times – “smart people working collectively can be dumber than the sum of their brains” Space Shuttle disaster. Article

Compared – Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia Accidents

A partially collapsed crash barrier at Mincloon Cross in the Galway City after a low speed impact.

Self-Loathing

Michael O’Reagan – The Man for False History

February 5, 2024 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

Retired journalist Michael O’Regan has appointed himself the departmental secretary at the ministry for propaganda and false history. Of late, he has been very keen to ensure that his Twitter followers vote Yes in the forthcoming referenda on March 8th. Perhaps unremarkably, O’Regan’s Twitter, sorry X posts, on the subject embodies every one of the Gaelic stereotypes including self-loathing. It is also a good example of the type of false confidence that embeds itself when prejudice occupies the parts of the mind usually reserved for knowledge-based education and reason.

Thankfully, the top two people in the world who are the subject of O’Regan’s hate, and name-calling, are dead. They are of course Eamonn de Valera and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Both men had an input into the drafting of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland.

Twitter/X is a place full of hate. If humans really are sentient and rational beings, then why are hatred and nonsense so appealing. Why do we want to read/watch/listen to people expressing hatred for other people and groups? Hateful comments are always a manifestation of small mindedness but prejudice keeps us from that realisation. People are keen to make fools of ourselves while others egg them on! It’s a mad, mad world.

McQuaid has, in recent times, been dishonestly made out to be a villain, mainly using the falsehood that he regally ruled over the Irish government. Anyone who knows anything about Irish history is aware that the claim is not true. He was certainly a diligent and hard-working lobbyist and like all lobbyists, sometimes his proposals were accepted and not accepted. However, he was entitled to lobby the government the same as any other lobbyist. The government were equally entitled to ignore his lobbying and did so on many occasions. In just one example, the government were particularly annoyed with McQuaid, de Valera included, when he sided with the teachers during their national strike in 1946. McQuaid was politically out manoeuvred on many occasions. There is no doubt that he was an influential figure. However, the extent of his influence has not only been greatly overstated but has entered the hallowed halls of bunkum.

*Nothing like a bit of puerile name-calling to excite prejudice.*

I contend that the chief architect of the vilification of Archbishop McQuaid was the infamous Dr. Noel Browne. Browne is falsely lauded these days as “the man who did most to rid the country of the scourge of tuberculosis”. The truth is that Browne glorified himself at the expense of others, including his close friends and allies. He was the greatest plagiarist in Irish history. That is, a person who claims the achievements of others as his own. Those who continue to laud Browne, despite the historical evidence, are so lazy, they let others give them their opinion. Worst of all, they have not got the disposition towards truth seeking. Therefore, they are nothing more than a conduit of nonsense. (see link to Browne article below)

Those who demonise McQuaid are unaware, or perhaps more correctly, do not want to admit to his great achievements. The poor of Dublin were provided with eight million meals a year at the height of WWII when food prices soared. He gave financial help to the victims of air raids in Dublin, was instrumental in setting up clinics to treat venereal disease, and actively promoted better care for tuberculosis patients, the elderly, the physically and intellectually disabled, and sick children.

Perhaps the biggest lie O’Regan wants his followers to believe is that there is misogyny in the Irish constitution. He, and others, attempt to mislead people by leaving out key information to imply that the constitution states that a woman’s place is in the home.

The constitution does not imply, nor is it stated anywhere in the document that a woman’s place is in the home. In fact, it singles out certain women and gives them a right to stay at home and mind their children, should they choose to do so. Moreover, it explicitly guarantees the rights of such women by stipulating that they cannot be forced out of their home to work because of economic necessity. These two words are left out of every argument in favour of the abolition of this clause.

If you agree with Michael O’Regan’s interpretation of the constitution, it is because you believe the same lies and do not have the ability to use your own mind. Look things up for yourself, otherwise other numpties will give you your opinion.

Finally, O’Regan has also posted about his concern for the King of England’s prostate health. Now, it might turn out to be that brownnosing the king is one of his favourite pastimes, but Anglophilia in combination with Hibernophobia is one of the diagnostic indicators for the presence of Gaelic self-loathing.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” ― Daniel J. Boorstin

Fake Climate News from State Broadcaster

January 21, 2024 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

Recent flood events at Salthill in Galway were reported under the headline “Storm Debi: Further sign of climate change in Ireland”. However, the floods have nothing to do with climate in Ireland or elsewhere. Caught out by history, RTÉ failed to report that all the areas of Galway hit by floods were reclaimed from the sea.

The article was written by George Lee, RTÉ’s Environment Correspondent, who was famously lampooned by satirists playing on his tendency towards excitability. However, his reputation as a prophet of doom dates from a decade earlier when working as the station’s economics correspondence. Then in 2018, perhaps in recognition of these qualities, the RTÉ authorities moved him from agriculture to environment as he would naturally take to climate alarmism, like a duck to water.

Reclaimed land is prone to subsidence (downward movement or sinking) over time as the ground dries out, leading to system compaction due to water withdrawal and natural compaction.

Here is a photo showing the foundations of a lamp post that were once level with the surrounding tarmac. Built on marshland that was once part of the river Corrib, the buildings of the Galway Retail Park all stand on piles. Those are tall pillars of reinforced concrete driven into the marsh until they reach solid ground underneath. A concrete foundation is then poured flat on top of the piles to ensure that the building does not sink.

The car park is not supported by piles, as it would be too expensive for such a large area and unnecessary. The engineers, in anticipation of land subsidence, designed the footpaths using cobble lock bricks, so that they could be easily taken up and re-laid as the ground settles. The second photo shows bricks pointing upward at a strange angle.

The whole article shows a lack of care diligence for accurate reporting. Glaring errors are visible all through. One caption, “Flooding in Salthill in Co. Galway after Storm Debie”, is placed beneath a photograph of floods on Flood Street in Galway City centre, 1.5km from Salthill. One has only to look at the ESB mini pillars to observe they are double the height of normal installations. Why? Because Flood Street floods regularly and has flooded many times before ‘climate change’ became a popular phrase. The street stands on reclaimed land beside the old city port, which was also filled in to make the space for the town’s fish market.

RTÉ and many other news publishers are guilty of lying through omission. Not one of them mentioned the name Flood St., which we can surmise was due to the fear that readers might twig that its flooding has nothing got to do with climate change.

The carpark at Toft Park in Salthill features prominently when it floods in in publications eager to use it as evidence of something new in our climate. There are always cars left in the carpark, even when floods are expected. Accordingly, it delivers great photos and sends the subliminal message that the expected flooding was unexpected. However, either the car owners are clever people who have left their clapped-out bangers there in the expectation of receiving compensation from Galway City Council or they are total numpties.

The carpark sits on a mound of rubble dumped onto the seabed to create extra land. In the late 1960s and early 70s a dyke was constructed with a road sitting on top of it, taking a triangle of land from the sea. Over the course of a few years, rubble was dumped on this triangle to create land, which was later named Toft Park, to commemorate Claude Toft, a prominent Salthill businessman.

The land was used to construct a Tourist Office building and the National Aquarium beside it. In my memory, none of these buildings have ever flooded. The latter building is engineered to avoid flooding, as it is raised about a meter above its own car park.

Right next to it is the infamous carpark that floods every time when high winds combine with high tides to send waves crashing over the dyke. I suspect a secondary cause arises from the rainwater drains within the carpark. They may have no one-way valves and therefore permit water to backflow directly from the sea.The old saying that ‘there is money in muck’ can be repurposed for present day use as ‘there is money in muckraking’. Many academics, keen to secure finance for their various projects have also used the floods in Galway for self-promotion.

Tom McDermott of University of Galway has an article on RTE’s website advocating for his flood alarm system. According to him, it is a complex task to study all interactions between the various drivers of flood risk. There is no doubt that the academics will be kept in clover mulling over the complications of complicated systems. However, seldom do academics see or propose practical solutions.

The solution for Toft Park is simple and very cost effective. Raise the level of the carpark. No more flooding, no more using it to create climate alarmism or fake news. The same solution is the only practical option for Flood Street. Raise the level of the dyke wall at the old Fishmarket/Spanish Arch. The solution is again simple, but simple solutions continue to evade Galway City Council. Rather than find a permanent solution, they continue to deploy a temporary dam in the form of a water filled tube along the same dyke or quay wall, in response to weather forecasts. Storm Debi caught them napping, and Flood St lived up to its name, with no flood defence in position.

The current bunch of officials at Galway City Council have no memory of the city’s reclaimed lands, therefore have a complete lack of knowledge about how to manage or use such lands. Infamously, their lack of knowledge has bitten them on several occasions, but perhaps the most embarrassing incident occurred in February 2020. The opening ceremony for Galway, as the European City of Culture 2020 had to be cancelled due to flooding and high winds at the park.

The council scheduled the event to take place at South Park, a peninsula of land surrounded by the waters of the Corrib estuary and Galway Bay. The park is known locally as ‘The Swamp’ and is entirely made from reclaimed land. Parts of it were originally the seabed, but it was mostly a sea marsh that flooded at the time of spring tides. The land was first filled with the waste from the city, making it the city dump. It was later covered with topsoil and used as football pitches.

The old maps show a lake in the middle of the present park, fed by streams that in turn emptied into the Corrib estuary. These seem to have been covered up and blocked up, but sporadically the lake makes an appearance. It was there in February 2020 and has appeared several times since, most recently during storm Debi.

The June 2023 meeting of Galway City Councillors was reported under the headline, ‘Meeting hears no easy fix to serious flooding at South Park pitches’. However, the comments made indicated that the while the council are aware that the park is built on a dump, it thinks that the way to fix the problem is to dig it up and put in drainage pipes. A solution bound to fail because of false assumptions. Yes, it might keep the lake from reappearing or disappearing more quickly than it would do normally, but it does nothing to address the real issue, subsidence. The most practical solution is to raise the level of the ground. There is no need to break the current surface. Just lay drainage pipes on a membrane, cover over with gravel and layer over with topsoil.

The big argument of the climate change debate is its anthropogenic causes. Anthropogenic means human made, and the primary cause of flooding is Galway is most defiantly anthropogenic. It has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with poor memory, poor planning, duff engineering, non-existent complexity, along with the complete absence of critical thinking and common sense.

The most troubling aspect of this fake news and poor-quality reportage is its use to scaremonger people, especially the young, into believing that the world is coming to an end.

The prophets of doom seek to profit from spreading doom, racing to outdo one another in the popularity stakes with no care for truth or quality. All our institutions have become corrupted by confirmation bias.

Looking only for evidence which confirms one’s opinion is a natural tendency and the biggest obstacle to rational thinking. Consequently, critical thinking and the scientific method both demand the that procedures are followed to combat confirmation bias. The first step is to seek out contrarian views to examine, analyse, count, or discount their veracity.

It is a supreme irony; that much of what is claimed to be based on science is not science or is just plain old bad science.

The climate change debate is riddled with bad science and bad actors.

The car park in the sea at Salthill Toft Park

Aerial Photo of Salthill in the 1950s before land reclamation took place

Refs

Storm Debi: Further sign of climate change in Ireland – By George Lee Environment Correspondent, in Dubai

Experts explore flooding South Park to combat rising sea levels (Photo of the swamp lake)

What’s required for local areas in Ireland to predict and anticipate floods?

Storm Debi: Galway playground and pitches among damaged facilities as financial help announced

Uncategorized

Patrick Christys – Half Irish, half educated, full union jackass

December 21, 2023 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

Bias and jingoistic bias is to be expected from the GB News channel, but racism is never acceptable. Patrick Christys’ anti-Irish comments calling the country a disgrace, singling out Ireland’s neutrality during WWII as a prime example, but it is also typical of British ignorance. Only a week or two before, another GB News presenter, also with Irish heritage, Mark Dolan, once again blew hard on Britania’s flute, ranting out the usual falsehoods about how great the British Empire once was, ignoring the death and the destruction it caused to millions of lives. He would never mention the brutality and oppression that ultimately caused many countries to fight wars of independence to get rid of British rule. Even the United Kingdom itself was broken apart after centuries of misrule, racism, and incompetence.

Patrick Christys’ Irish mother never explained to her son how the United Kingdom government attacked Ireland and its people during WWII, using hunger as its primary weapon. If the Irish government, in response, returned the favour and adopted a similar obstinate, coercive, and obstructive approach to Britain’s war effort, it would have been the most British thing it could have ever done. In stark contrast, the Irish government supported Britain’s war effort or, it was neutral but on the side of Britain. Unlike Spain, which was neutral on the side of Germany. Moreover, Spain is never attacked by British jingoes for its stance in WWII.

Christys made the comment while discussing the decision of the Irish government to bring a case against the British government to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over its recently introduced amnesty law. The law deals with the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles, with the primary purpose to protect serving and former British soldiers, accused of crimes, from investigation, together with both criminal and civil legal actions. To achieve this end, they also had to give the same amnesty to all former combatants. Many families of the victims are distressed to learn that the murderers will never be held to account for the loss inflicted upon them. Consequently, and at the request of many of these families, the Irish government decided to act.

It comes at the same time as the British government is considering withdrawing or revoking the authority of the European Court of Human Rights over its failed migration policies.

The reality is that the British state stumbles for failure to fiasco but uses Grotesque Bullshit (GB) to hide the reality from its people. Brexit has been a disaster, but no one is allowed to mention the word in that context. Remember the Brexit Bus? It screamed, “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”. Just, minutes before the start of Christys’ programme, the newsreader announced that the Welsh devolved government was to cut back on services and increasing taxes to fund its part of the National Health Service. Scotland is also to increase taxes for the same reason.

The £350 million slogan was a lie, typical Grotesque Bullshit (GB) designed to hoodwink people. It worked alongside blaming Europe and the Germans for decades of continuing British governmental failures.

In 2019, BBC news reported that the top five poorest regions in Europe were all in Britain. There is no other developed country that has so many people reliant on food banks to survive. The reality is that the country has become impoverished, and it is getting worse.

Britain is a wealthy country, but all the wealth is in the hands of the well off. Ten percent of the population of Britain (not the UK) own nearly half of all the country’s wealth, while one percent owns a quarter of the wealth. Consequently, the big picture statistics are skewed when all this wealth is divided up into overall per capita wealth. One has to look a bit harder to find that Britain has an astonishing 14.4 million people living in poverty. By any measure, that is failure.

Blaming the Irish, the Germans, the Jews, the French and the migrants for British failure is typical GB. Ultimately, however, it is the ordinary people in Britain who bear the brunt of governmental failure.

It would appear that the main aim of GB News is to keep people happy in their poverty. They create a false sense of superiority that in turn gives them the right to sneer at other nations.

Before Dan Wooton got the bullet from the Tonight show, he chose two people for awards each night. One for The Greatest Briton, the other its opposite, The Union Jackass. Christys has continued this tradition, but I assume that he cannot nominate himself.

The award for Union Jackass of the year goes to….

GB News was never intended to be an impartial news delivery outfit. It has a nationalist agenda and never misses an opportunity to pursue that agenda using the full toolbox of lies, lying by omission, half-truths, sensationalism, demagoguery and more. However, it has found an important niche, as it is not afraid to level much warranted criticism at other news outfits like the BBC. Its news service is truthful at times but also biased and tainted with Ghastly Bullshit and has become woke. GB News is more honest as it wears its bullshit on its sleeve.

Childish Climate Change Behaviour

November 12, 2023 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

Climate change activism often involves individuals with a simplistic view of the world and a limited grasp of scientific principles. John Gibbons, an environmental journalist and commentator, serves as a notable illustration of this phenomenon through his behaviour on social media.

Recently, Mr. Gibbons penned an article for the Irish Examiner in response to the flooding events in Cork. The piece was accompanied by a photo capturing residents of Glanmire discarding flood-damaged furniture into a skip. This incident highlights not only the challenges faced by the community, but also the need for a more informed and nuanced discussion surrounding climate change.

Gibbons wasn’t the sole advocate leveraging the floods in Cork to advance a particular agenda. Social media saw a surge of individuals, spanning from Green politicians to climate alarmists, eager to portray the floods as conclusive evidence of climate change.

It’s worth noting that the name “Cork” is a deviation from the Irish term “Corcaigh,” meaning a marsh or swamp. This etymology underscores that the ancient city of Cork is situated in a swamp, standing at the river Lee’s lowest crossing point in the tidal region. Historical records reveal that Cork has faced recurrent flooding throughout the centuries, primarily due to its geographical placement. Consequently, the floods in Cork city cannot be attributed to climate change. Similarly, floods in other parts of Cork County stem from the positioning of towns and structures on floodplains. Take Middleton, for instance, where floods are entirely artificial, resulting from poor location choices, inadequate planning, subpar engineering, and impractical expectations.

Globally, substandard engineering ranks amongst the leading causes of urban flooding. Instances like the floods at the Dundrum Shopping Centre and Letterkenny Hospital underscore this point. In Dundrum, a seemingly inconspicuous stream was redirected into pipes, disregarding the fact that it had originally traversed a deep valley. When the stream swelled, it went unnoticed.

Engineers are tasked with sizing pipes based on the “once in one hundred years event” principle, or 0.1%. Simply put, the pipes should accommodate the most significant flow of water without obstruction. However, in practice, these calculations often rely on assumptions. In the case of the Dundrum Shopping Centre, shortly after its opening, heavy rain hit the Dublin mountains. The stream, following its natural course, swelled as usual. Unfortunately, the pipes, sized based on a mere guess, proved too small, leading to flooding.

A similar miscalculation occurred in Letterkenny, where the underestimated size of a culvert beneath a main road resulted in flooding at the hospital. Situated on the site of an ancient dam and corn mills, prone to flooding for centuries, the Letterkenny hospital experienced substantial damage in a 2013 flood, followed by a minor one a year later. The hospital’s bowl-like location at the bottom of a steep hill exacerbates its vulnerability to heavy rain.

Middleton in County Cork, located on a sea inlet with rivers to the west and south, has a history of flooding, especially after heavy rain. The name Owenacurra river is a transliteration of Abhain na Curragh meaning the river of the marsh. More ancient evidence that the town is situated in a swamp. Yet, amidst these events, no climate commentator highlighted the historical susceptibility of these areas to flooding, attributing the incidents solely to climate change. Meanwhile, some journalists resorted to sensationalism, prioritising emotional impact over factual reporting.

Nature, it seems, defies engineers. The belief that engineering can outsmart nature often clashes with reality. Examples include the overtopped tsunami wall in Ryoishi, Japan, and the 2012 flooding in St Asaph, Wales, due to breached flood defences, underscore the limitations of engineering based on false assumptions.

The most practical solutions, such as relocating settlements from floodplains or restoring floodplains to reduce flood severity, are often overlooked. These sensible approaches contrast with the antics of climate activists, as highlighted by the New York Post’s characterisation of them as “, ‘Climate activists? Ha! More like full-grown children seeking attention’.” Even in online interactions, like John Gibbons’ response to a tweet, a lack of professional decorum undermines constructive discourse.

The consequence of widespread fear often leads to regressive behaviour, ill-thought protests, and the perpetuation of baseless scare stories. The public, hungry for sensational narratives, becomes unwittingly misled by media seeking clicks. In the realm of science, the prevalence of researcher bias, where contradictory evidence is ignored, remains a significant challenge, hindering the objective evaluation of theories.

Climate change alarmism often stems from individuals lacking a comprehensive understanding of science, leading them to rely on others for their opinions. This reliance fosters a cycle where these individuals, unable to substantiate their views with evidence, resort to immature name-calling—labelling dissenters as climate deniers or morons.

In a realisation of his own imprudence, Gibbons eventually deleted his responses and pre-emptively blocked any further comments from me, all captured in incriminating screenshots.

Despite adopting the username @think_or_swim, his actions suggest a deficiency in critical thinking and a penchant for scaremongering. It appears inevitable that he will soon find himself swimming in the submerged streets of Cork. The same streets that were once canals, now filled-in by human intervention, but reclaimed by nature at her discretion. This serves as a poignant reminder of human folly that nature persistently exposes.

Featured image montage. Photo of a climate protestor who glued her breasts to the street. John Gibbons. Flooding in Cork City in 1959. A quote from Richard Lindzen, a Harvard-educated American atmospheric physicist who has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.

Some References…

Gibbon’s article in Irish Examiner

Flood-hit hospital was built on site of ancient dam

Anger as floods hit hospital a year after €40m catastrophe

Welsh river spills over flood defences

Shocking footage of extreme flooding across Cork as experts warn ‘it will get worse’

Climate activists? Ha! More like full-grown children seeking attention

Latest -Press Watch, Self-Loathing

Cultural Prejudice Claims Paddy as its Victim

October 22, 2023 Eugene Jordan 1 Comment

The fall of the Web Summit’s CEO Paddy Cosgrave was entirely his own fault. For some time, previous, Paddy had taken to social media, particularly Twitter, to promote his political views by sneering at his opposition. Sneering at others is a common or garden pastime in Ireland, with the barstool Zorgons at the vanguard.

In the aftermath of the evil Hamas attacks on civilians on October ninth, Cosgrave sent out a few tweets which he thought were promoting his pro Sinn Féin stance, while at the same time pursuing his anti-Fianna Fáil and anti-Fine Gael agenda (FFG). The main problem for Paddy is that Sinn Féin is a pro-Palestinian party and was, until recently, the political wing of the IRA. Sinn Féin’s political enemies were quick to intimate that they were supporters of Hamas and therefore bore some responsibility for their atrocities. Paddy initially set out to defend Sinn Féin, tweeting…

The following day, with the world’s media depicting the gruesome details of the savagery used by Hamas and with public revulsion rising, Paddy, blissfully unaware, continued to sneer at his foe…

That might not seem like much of a sneer, but his true attitude is revealed in many of his previous tweets, with this one standing as a good example. Sent only a few days before the Hamas atrocity…

Like many Irish people before and now, Paddy is obviously uncomfortable with his low birth status. He thinks that by putting other people down, he is superior to them, outranking them in the social order. Paddy’s attitude reveals one of Irish society’s most powerful cultural biases, that once installed, remains in-situ despite personal success. It causes immense harm to the holder, to other people and is the main cause of Paddy’s resignation as CEO of the Web summit company.

This cultural bias has many names from self-loathing and begrudgery, to Seoneenism and Jackeenism. Many people who hold and express these biases remain unaware that their opinions are based on nothing more than prejudices, which in turn, are reinforced through a highly selective view of the evidence.

Self-loathing is responsible for many of what ails Irish society, including its love affair with false history, emigration of young people, public service incompetence etc.

Indeed, Paddy, like the rest of us, sick of poor performance and corruption in the Irish political system set up The Ditch website, employing three journalists, to expose political corruption. Unfortunately for Paddy they only managed to rake over old coals, dragging up old much publicised cases from the past, cases that were dealt with long before. Again, Paddy’s plan appears more to be about embarrassing the political establishment to favour Sinn Féin.

Corruption exists in all political systems in all countries. It is a fact of life. However, Ireland has a particular problem with public service incompetence, it far outranks the problem with political corruption. Recently released statistics show that in a five-year period, the public health services managed to kill 3,000 people, accidentally, and injured 140,000 others. The cost overruns and the tomfoolery over the building of the National Children’s Hospital is a disgrace. The list is endless and grows with each passing day.

Corruption is much more rife within the public services than in the political system, but it goes almost unnoticed. It is in this area that The Ditch should have concentrated its efforts, thereby making it more likely to be an effective agent for change. However, the agenda of The Ditch, as dictated by its owner, is to grow support for Sinn Féin and the far left.

Ireland is crying out for an organisation like The Ditch to expose and challenge the country’s incompetent officials. Such officials continue to operate freely, without any fear of being exposed, due to the diversionary nature of our cultural prejudices. Press the right button and people like Paddy will take aim at the wrong target, time and time again because sneering at others makes them feel smart and imperious. Moreover, it can alleviate the stress of the inevitable failure and maintain its delusions, holding that it was due to the stupid plebs who were unable to appreciate the greatness of the sneerer.

Regretfully, as it happens all too infrequently, reality can hit like a wet fish across the gob. Poor auld Paddy got hit with a sardine. An impact with a small fish, but it was just big enough to knock him off his pedestal.

Uncategorized

Halfwit’s Misadventures: The Chronicles of Comical Cluelessness

October 14, 2023 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

Some people make a rock look like a genius but wear the armour of anonymity to avoid exceeding their quota of real-world ridicule. I see one such numpty on an online forum calling me a crackpot and a looney! He/she has decided to critique one of my articles to give to the online world the benefit of their massive intellect. They point out that the claims made by me are of a crackpot variety. Yes, indeed they are, in that article, and deliberately so.

“Satire often reveals the absurdity of the world, but when people miss the joke, they become part of the comedy.” – G.K. Chesterton

Writing that article, I used a rhetorical technique where an argument or a proposition is intentionally taken to an extreme and absurd conclusion to highlight the flaws, contradictions, or absurdities within the argument or proposition. It’s often used to demonstrate the illogical or undesirable consequences of a particular line of reasoning, making a point by showing how impractical or absurd the argument becomes when taken to its logical extreme.

Our intrepid forum poster, called Jank, took aim at my various absurdities and presented them as quotes to impress his audience with his vast intellectual abilities, blowing all my flapdoodles out of the water.

In the real-world, statistics are notoriously hard to interpret, and bad statistical interpretation dominates our world, particularly in the media, causing people to be misled. That is the purpose of the article, to put a crackpot analysis on such information to highlight the problem.

Accordingly, the mortality statistics for Rahoon Parish in Galway were much higher than the national average for over a century. Why? Because there is a major hospital in the parish. It is an acute hospital, a place where lots of people die! The mortality statistics for the parish are therefore biased/skewed, but if we interpret high mortality rates in the manner of most journalists, we get crackpot conclusions.

Knock, knock… who’s there? ’Tis a crackpot who mistakes a satirical crackpot interpretation for a genuine factual reportage!

Jank, in his genius, quotes the article’s conclusion…

The moral of the story! It is easy to draw excitable conclusions from statistics, but the scurrilous misinformation emitted by bluffers and fluffers dominates due to poor educational standards in Ireland. Evident throughout the system, from its universities right down to its kindergarten schools.

His/her comments on my final paragraph demonstrate beyond all doubt that the real person behind the Jank was born during low tide in the gene pool.

In an act of spectacular stupidity, Jank writes, “whatever that report was about. (I am still not sure)”. Yet the name of the report by the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes is clearly stated in black and white!

All the signs of reductio ad absurdum are there, and it is clearly stated the article is about the “hospital effect” in statistics. All the simple clues were missed by poor auld Jank!

Yep, the online world is full of halfwits like Jank.

“The moment you take satire at face value, you’re in danger of losing your own.” – Jon Oliver

You can read Jank’s deranged critique here…

Latest -Press Watch, Self-Loathing

The Useless Graduate – The cause of Ireland’s problems!

September 17, 2023 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

John McGuirk, speaking at the recent Ireland Uncensored event, blamed Ireland’s growing governmental nannyism and numptyism on the ‘useless graduate’. He explained that these are people with arts degrees, with no hard skills, but they got a degree in sociology. He almost added more academic subjects to the list but stopped himself dead in his tracks, punctuating the end of the sentence with the phrase ‘a degree in whatever’. McGuirk’s comments echo a growing realisation, across these Islands, that the universities are producing graduates of little skill and ability. The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, only a month previous, promised a ‘crack-down’ on worthless university degrees. Will such a crack-down happen here in Ireland?

McGuirk again hints at the answer, explaining that since the introduction of free third level education in 1994, the Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) sector has grown into an €8 billion industry. He likens it to a ‘Common Agricultural Policy for Dublin 4’, an allusion to the fact that practically all the organisations in the sector are in receipt of substantial government funding. He says that they are designed to fail, that they can never solve the problems they were set up to solve.

Almost everyone who has been through the university system knows that the department of sociology is contained within one big padded cell, located in the middle of every campus. Sociology students are driven mad by being plunged back into the 19^th century, forced to decipher the bamboozling and contradictory writings of Karl Marks, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Sometimes it is claimed to be a science, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sociology studies human societies, but its resultant theories cannot be validated by science. It is officially classified as a rational discourse, and not a science. However, the absence of impartial validation tools means that any auld guff can be passed off as an academic theory. Consequently, the output from the padded cells can be the product of hysteria that would be an endless source of entertainment were it not also dangerous.

Countless individuals and families have been damaged by sociology, and its malevolence continues unabated today. Perhaps for the maddest of reasons, to give a ‘useless graduate’ a chance of a job, one must have a master’s degree in sociology to qualify and work as a social worker. The term is a misnomer, social workers do not work on a society, they work with individuals and families in crisis. Accordingly, the theories of Marks, Durkheim and Weber do not apply to individuals or family groups, nor does the ability to write academic essays confer practical skills that can benefit anyone outside of sociology. The long list of children abused and murdered while under the care of social workers stands as evidence of the dangers of employing ‘useless graduates’. In Britain, twenty years ago, after the murder of a toddler under the care of social workers, the investigation report laid the blame firmly on their training, describing it as being ‘too academic’.

It is not just NGOs who are afflicted. Tusla the government’s own child and family agency is stuffed full of ‘useless graduates’, who endanger the lives and wellbeing of children and their families daily. The plethora of failures at government agencies like the HSE (health), CAMHS (child mental health) have been described as ‘catastrophic’ by one investigative report after another. The list is endless, but none is more emblematic of the incompetence than the blunders within HSE. It was recently revealed that it had accidentally killed more than 3,000 people in the last five years, while a further 480,000 incidents had occurred that had the potential to cause harm to patients.

The excuse is always the same, failures are blamed on ‘a lack of resources’. In other words, give them more money and that will solve all their problems. Tusla gets more and more money every year and it hasn’t solved its incompetence crisis. The same goes for the HSE and the full gamut of state institutions.

The excuse works because it preys on a psychological weakness of the political classes. They are eager to claim credit for obtaining funding. First, it proves to themselves that they are not useless, second, they think that it oils the wheels of their gravy train, speeding it towards re-election. Part of the solution is to watch out for numpty politicians, who claim the credit for funding, and vote for someone else.

The useless graduate is far more dangerous to the health and wellbeing of many people than we realise. However, as McGuirk also pointed out, there is the issue of hatred. It appears that the political classes hate the people they govern. ‘You eat too much, you drink too much, you drive too fast, you use the wrong kind of heating in your homes. You say the wrong things, you think the wrong things. You don’t say the right things or think the correct things.’

The poor and the working poor have been more greatly impacted by plethora of simpleton policies. For example, the families of alcoholics have been left penniless by the minimum price per unit of alcohol decree. It does not take much effort to learn that addicts have to have their fix, no mater what the cost. Much of the crime in Dublin is associated with drugs. It has created a human wasteland full of addicts committing crimes to fund their habit.

However, rather than come up with a strategy and policies that might be effective in reducing various problems, the Irish government will always find a way to make the problem worse. They will then fund an NGO to partially alleviate the misery they caused in the first place. The NGO will of course have many employees on fat cat salaries, most of them will be ‘useless graduates’, no doubt.

Finally, McGuirk further defined a ‘useless graduate’ as ‘not a doctor, not an engineer, and not a scientist’. The implication is that these degrees are less useless or produce more intelligent people. However, while the professions contain many brilliant minds, they are equally counterbalanced by dimwits! The Americans call these boneheads, book-smarts. That is people who are seemingly academically competent but are positively inept in the real world.

John McGuirk is the Editor of Gript.

References

Video: Ireland Uncensored
Over 3,000 fatalities caused by accidents within the HSE since 2018 – Published Aug 21, 2023
The reliance on State funding poses challenging questions for all charities
Ireland’s greatest economic failing: poor public services
Rishi Sunak is right about worthless university degrees
Numpty
Tusla failed to refer 365 cases of suspected child abuse to Garda

Latest -Press Watch

Lucy Letby – Why? And the Fake News.

August 22, 2023 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

BBC news bulletins of the 18^th of August 2023 named nurse Lucy Letby as “the UK’s most prolific child serial killer in modern times.” That is simply not true, or is it? The answer depends on the definitions of the terms used. A serial killer, as defined by the encyclopaedia Britannica, is a person who murders two or more people. Accordingly, Ian Huntly’s murder of two girls in Soham in 2002 is classified as a serial killing. ‌Myra Hindley and Ian Brady killed five children in the 1960s, Robert Black murdered four children in the 1980s, Beverley Allitt, also a nurse murdered four babies in the 1990s. Rosemary and Fred West murdered many teenagers over two decades. However, the serial murder of babies and children carried out by women is not a new phenomenon and not confined to ancient history.

The second issue is the meaning of the phrase “modern times”. History is divided into three broad eras: antiquity, medieval and modern, meaning old, middle, and present. The old period ends with the fall of the western Roman Empire, while the middle period is generally agreed, by historians, to have ended around AD1500. Accordingly, the phrase “modern times” refers to the period starting about AD1500 to the present day.

The BBC’s use of the phrase “in modern times” is misleading, leaving viewers and readers with the impression that the number of children killed by Lucy Letby was one of the highest since AD1500. That is simply not true. Britain has a long sordid history of female serial killers. Many were executed for the crime, including Mary Ann Cotton (hung in 1873) who murdered twelve children, and three adults. Ada Chard-Williams, hung on 6^th March 1900, was convicted of one child murder but suspected of killing many more. However, Amelia Dyer, hung four years previous in 1896, was probably the most prolific serial killer, male or female in history. She was convicted of a handful of child murders, but it is certain that she murdered at least 400 infants.

You might have the phrase applied to women, even today, of “nursing a baby”. At that time, most of these women were called nurses. The word nurse is derived from the same source as nourishment and continues to mean a woman who provides nourishment for an infant. A “wet nurse” is the term for a woman who breastfeeds infants who are not biologically related to her. However, the word nurse today is most understood to be the title of a person providing medical care, mostly in a hospital setting.

Nurse women, who offered to care for other women’s infants for a fee, were known as baby farmers. Despite being outlawed, the practice continued right up to the 1940s in the UK. It was outlawed because many women baby farmers, took the clients’ money but neglected the child, often causing its death. Others such as Amelia Dyer took the money and maximised their profit by swiftly and deliberately killing the child, then secretly dumping its body, mostly in rivers.

Their clients were mostly women who bore children they did not want to keep. Sometimes these were children born out of wedlock, others were born to women too impoverished to raise them, while others were an embarrassment to the mother and/or her family. Many chose to pay a baby farmer to raise the child, either in a lump sum or by making regular payments, to take a problem off their hands. Most women never wanted to see their child again, while a small few held out hope of reclaiming their child, should their situation improve in the future. On rare occasions, a mother would ask to visit her child, so the baby farmers often took the precaution of keeping one or two healthy babies for show. Mothers would be shown an infant and be told that it was theirs. Occasionally a mother would not be convinced and that led to the prosecution of a few baby farmers.

Again, terminology can be misleading, as these women advertised themselves and were known as nurse women. Not all nurse women murdered or abused children in their care, but as always, every profession has its rogues. Their motivation to murder was mostly financial gain. However, the press can find no explanation for what motivated Lucy Letby’s to kill and attempt to kill so many infants.

It would appear to me that Lucy Letby has a mental disorder that used to be named Munchausen syndrome by proxy but is now known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (FDIA), or Fabricated or Induced Illness by Carers (FII). According to the American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) The behaviour occurs without a specific benefit to the caregiver.

Hall of Shame, Latest -Press Watch, MABH, Self-Loathing

Irish Times Desperate to Keep Tuam Facts Hidden

June 4, 2023 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

Sportswriter repeats the same old claptrap and innuendo about Tuam.

The Irish Times claims to be the best and most accurate source of news in Ireland, a paper of record. However, in a desperate attempt to boost declining sales, it has, in recent times, adopted the tactics of the gutter press. It appears that reporting truthfully, using skilful and informed journalists, is now considered by newspaper owners to be the quickest route to oblivion.

Forcing journalists to write false stories or to sex-up mundane content with excitable or smutty innuendo would appear to be the preferred methods used by the main body of the gutter press. However, other, more subtle methods can be used to similar effect. One tactic is to use journalists who have little or no expertise in a specific area of interest. It’s a brilliant tactic that takes advantage of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It holds that people, with no competence regarding a particular subject, feel themselves to be experts in that subject. I know, it’s gas! When applied to journalism, reporters don’t know what the most pertinent questions are to ask. Consequently, they have little or no skill in getting to the truth of the matter. So how does an editor manage to achieve that?

Imagine if you took a sports journalist, a person whose entire career involves describing the behaviour of grown adults chasing a bag full of wind around a field, and then send them to cover a story that requires an elementary knowledge of science and medicine. The result would be a story written from the perspective of a sportswriter. Moreover, the lack of pertinent knowledge would leave the reporter in a position of gullibility. To be taken advantage of, without knowing or even suspecting it.

Poor auld Keith Duggan, taken advantage of by the Gutter Times, with no clue what just happened!

There are not 796 children buried at the children’s graveyard. The number arises from the work of an official at the registrar’s office in Galway. It’s a mistake, as the official missed out on some of the records.
Catherine Corless is not a historian!
She omitted the fact that out of the 796 death certificates she obtained, nearly 100 were of children born to married parents.
The burial ground indicated on a map of the Tuam Children’s Home is much larger than the current boundaries of the burial ground.
Astonishingly, the Irish branch of the Red Cross is not impartial! Yep, it gave an award to Catherine Corless, without checking the veracity of her claims.
Children were not abused nor starved to death at Tuam or any other so-called mother and baby home.

You can read the claptrap and innuendo here

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2023/06/04/every-little-bone-the-difficult-exhumation-ahead-at-tuams-former-mother-and-baby-home/

References

DEBUNKED