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A Debt of Gratitude Owed to Our Great Women

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Florence Nightingale wanted to learn her nursing craft from the best nurses in the world, the nuns at St Vincent’s Hospital Dublin. Dubliners have enjoyed world-class healthcare provided by the Sisters of Charity, a remarkable achievement by a group of women, yet Irish feminists excoriate these great women.

Nightingale’s famous mission to the Crimea was the result of a report about the dirty, dingy, rat-infested hospital conditions suffered by British troops. The Times war correspondent William Howard Russell, an Irishman, reported on the well-organised services of the French Catholic military nurses, Russell asked rhetorically: “Why have we no sisters of charity?”[1]

The British are boastful in falsely claiming that Florence Nightingale invented the craft of modern nursing. She certainly revolutionised nursing in Britain and contributed to advancements in the field, but the British theft of history has obscured the real history and excluded those who might expose the braggarts of stolen history.

A classic of the genre of anti-Irish prejudice.

Florence Nightingale applied to work with the Irish Sisters of Charity twice, first in 1844 and again in 1852 when she visited Dublin only to find the hospital closed for renovations. The hospital was located on St Stephen’s Green at the former home of the Earl of Meath. It was purchased in 1834 on behalf of the Sisters of Charity, and they turned it into St Vincent’s Hospital. Later, adjacent properties were also purchased to expand the hospital.

The nursing mission to Crimea in 1854 was the result of the public outcry. In the aftermath of Russell’s report, the secretary for war, Sidney Herbert, turned to Nightingale for assistance. Florence was dispatched to Scutari with a contingent of nurses, 14 Anglican sisters, 14 lay nurses and 10 catholic nurses who were also nuns. An Irish sister, Mary Clare Moore was the Chief Executive Officer of the mission, she brought a level business head to counterbalance the more excitable Florence.

At the end of Florence’s mission, the British establishment sought to organise a big event to boastfully celebrate her achievements. To her great credit, she avoided the ruckus, and surreptitiously travelled back into England to avoid the self-aggrandising bluster of her country people dismissing it as, fuzz buzz.

Turning failure into triumph or more correctly creating such illusions is an existential imperative for the ongoing recruitment campaigns of a militaristic society, but the bluster did not go unnoticed. One American publication commenting on the hype of the era asked, “what has she done that thousands of Sisters of Charity have not been doing for the last hundred years?”[2]

Why has the massive contribution of the Sisters of Charity been written out of the history of Irish medicine? The Sisters have over near two centuries built a world-class hospital and provided the people of Dublin with free and affordable healthcare. Why are the Irish so ignorant, that instead of celebrating their magnificent altruism and thanking these great women — which would happen in any normal society — we have turned our back on them and pilloried the good sisters using a slew of falsehoods.

Feminists think that women have been written out of history — a false notion reliant on a lack of erudition — as is their failure to celebrate the achievements of women. Women who built a world-class hospital, worked for free and low wages, are to be commended and given an honoured place in history. This honour will likely be conferred upon great women by men, as Irish women are too busy creating delusions of abuse and misogyny to curry public sympathy and notoriety. It is a sad fact of life that Irish men will have to teach the feminists how to commemorate the achievements of women!

Footnotes

[1] Fealy, ‘Florence Nightingale-Lady with the Lamp: Gerard M Fealy Remembers Florence Nightingale: Writer, Scientist, Reformer, and the Key Individual in Founding Modern Nursing’.

[2] ‘Florence Nightingale, the Protestant Sister of Charity.’

References

Fealy, Gerard M. ‘Florence Nightingale-Lady with the Lamp: Gerard M Fealy Remembers Florence Nightingale: Writer, Scientist, Reformer, and the Key Individual in Founding Modern Nursing’. World of Irish Nursing 18, no. 5 (2010): 22–23.

‘Florence Nightingale, the Protestant Sister of Charity.’ Pilot 24, no. 19 (May 1861).

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What the MABH Commission got wrong!

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Dear Taoiseach, when appointing an independent ‘expert’ or new commission of investigation, it is imperative that ‘experts’ and members of the commission possess the ability to use modern scientific methods of investigation, have a strong commitment to the continuation of the intellectual tradition and use of impartial investigation techniques. All investigations must be set up in a way to mitigate, in as far as possible, all our natural cognitive biases but in particular, for researcher bias, hindsight bias and presentism in historical investigations. Science has evolved several techniques to combat bias, including a demand that contradictory evidence and contrarian views be evaluated, in order to limit the effects of confirmation bias, thus enable the production of better-quality reports.

Not one of these imperatives was a prerequisite for any commission of investigation set up by the Irish government. In particular, the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes — despite investigating allegations based on medical evidence — had no relevant knowledge or expertise. The result was a report, while not entirely incorrect, was mostly incompetent in its pronouncements on medical matters.

The commission ignored entirely — despite the evidence jumping out from the pages of its report — the causal relationship between poverty and high infant mortality rates. The scientific literature is currently awash with such studies and has been investigating the causal relationship which has been indicated by correlation for decades.[1]

The commission’s lack of basic mathematical/statistical knowledge also caused them to make one of the most basic errors in statistical interpretation. They proceeded to base many of their conclusions and speculations on the ‘false causes fallacy’. Every data scientist and statistician is taught — in their first week — that correlation cannot be used as evidence for a cause.

A correlation is simply a ‘co-relation’ between measurements that appear to increase or decrease at the same time, when one goes up/down, another goes up/down or when one goes up, the other goes down. For example, in warm countries, there is a strong correlation between the number of ice-cream sales and the number of admissions to hospital due to heatstroke. Heatstroke is not causing the increase in ice-cream sales, and neither is the increased volume of ice-cream sales driving the higher number of heatstroke victims. In the terminology of statistics, correlation does not imply causation. Accordingly, statisticians are taught to look for other variables/measurements which might be causing the correlation. In the case above, the hidden variable is hot weather.

The commission — unaware of procedures to be followed in basic statistical interpretation — imagined that there was a correlation between poor quality healthcare and high infant mortality rates. Despite having little or no figures for the healthcare side of the equation, the commission did — what anyone could do — use their imagination to fabricate assumptions to fill gaps in their knowledge.

Consequently, the commission has presented to the nation one of the most incompetent conclusions ever arrived at by a commission of investigation in the history of the State.

In Paragraph 12 of the executive summary, the commission pronounces and speculates:

In the years before 1960 mother and baby homes did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival.

There is absolutely no mention that these children were in a high-risk category and intuitions — even today — which deal with high-risk individuals, have higher mortality rates.

Higher Infant Mortality Rates — multiples of the national average — continue to exist in Ireland under your own leadership.

Using the same logic of the commission, we could state emphatically that the mere fact of children who were born to Traveller women seems ‘to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival’. Judge Catherine McGuinness of the Children’s Rights Alliance, tells us that the ‘infant mortality rates for Traveller children are 3.6 times that of the general population.’

In the interests of fairness and justice, the government must now appoint a commission of investigation to avoid any charges of bias for singling out the Christian community for castigation by a government suffering from a scurrilous lack of medical/scientific knowledge.

While you are at it Taoiseach, there are many more cases of high infant mortality rates which you might also want to investigate.

Children unfortunate enough to be born to women over 35 years of age seems to have ‘significantly reduced their prospects of survival’.

Would you believe the fact that children who are born to unmarried mothers in this day and age has ‘significantly reduced their prospects of survival’. The CSO has not yet measured child mortality rates for this cohort, but the Office for National Statistics has measured it in England and Wales. It found that children born to unmarried mothers suffer from a mortality rate forty per cent higher than those born to married parents.[2] Studies from Finland show similar results.[3]

Research in Ireland shows that babies born to mothers under 25 years of age suffer from a mortality rate twice for those born to mothers aged 25 to 29. Children born to women aged over forty also suffer from mortality rates twice that of the mid to late twenties cohort.[4] Can we infer, as the commission has done, that these ‘appalling’ rates are due to poor quality care, or should they have looked for other causes?

You cannot — in light of your comments — fail to launch an investigation or act upon these ‘distressing’ statistics, unless you want your inactions to be the subject of a criminal investigation in 35 years’ time and your name besmirched.

You said:

It is deeply distressing to note that the very high mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications. However, there is little or no evidence of State intervention in response to these chilling statistics and deaths. In fact, a number of reports actually identifying the problems were not acted on. [5]

Lazy or incompetent reliance on imagined statistical correlation also forms the basis for your apology or more correctly, your attack on the Irish people. No national leader in history has attacked the entire population in the manner in which you have done. Yet you think that you can label all the people of the past as having ‘a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy’ while holding ‘a perverse religious morality’ and that these labels do not apply to your mother and grandmother.

What is the point in naming Dublin Airport after Seán Lemass when you say that he, along with ‘the agencies of the State showed little or no interest in addressing these crimes’. You say crimes, but did you even bother to read the commission’s report or provide evidence for these alleged crimes.

As can be proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, poverty was the primary cause of high infant mortality rates, and that the issue was completely missed by the commission. Accordingly, all of their conclusions based on such rates are null and void.

While you repeated many of the falsehoods within the commission report, one, in particular, stands out. You went on Taoiseach to repeat another falsehood that illegitimacy was an ‘egregious breach of human rights’. William Duncan, — a human rights lawyer with little or no knowledge of history — went back 1,000 years to tell a lame story, scurrilously declaring a breach of human rights that continued for the duration of a full millennium. Rights that did not exist until very recently. That is not history, it is not even pseudo-history, nor indeed would it qualify as counterfactual history.

History is about what happened not what might have happened but most of all Duncan never once told us about the 2,000-year history of the church saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of unwanted and illegitimate children. He never told us that illegitimacy was designed to protect the inheritance of the children of the queen from potential claims from the children of the king’s concubines. Duncan, however, mentions an Irish bishops’ conference in 1974 which recommended that there should be no distinction between a legitimate and illegitimate child before the civil law, evincing that the discrimination had a mainly secular basis. However, the thrust of his contribution continues to blame the church entirely for its instigation and continuance. It was in fact English ‘common law’ which imposed the ‘abuses of human rights’. Common law strongly supported the primogenitor system and was stringent in order to protect large blocks of property and power, from division and weakness through partible inheritance. Canon law was much more lenient in comparison and even allowed for the subsequent legitimisation of births.

Confirming one’s own biases is common throughout the authorship of the report and is evident in quite a few of the witness statements too.

The commission points out:

A number of witnesses gave evidence that was clearly incorrect. This contamination probably occurred because of meetings with other residents and inaccurate media coverage.[6]

Judge Harding Clarke had the luxury of access to impartial evidence, which when used, showed that one third of the women claimants, who applied for compensation to the symphysiotomy ex-gratia payments scheme, were fraudulent. These women never had the operation and X-Rays were used to prove it.[7]

Many of the witness testimonies supplied to the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes stretches credulity to levels that would not be tolerated by any sensible person or administration. Yet many Irish politicians were forthright in claiming that children were starved to death at the Protestant run Bethany home, before going on to include all catholic run institutions, The politicians — speaking on parliamentary record — included:

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald (Sinn Féin), Deputy Niall Collins (Fianna Fáil), Deputy Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Sinn Féin), Deputy Robert Dowds (Labour Party), Deputy Seamus Healy (independent), Deputy Ciara Conway (Labour Party), Deputy Seán Crowe (Sinn Féin), Senator Marie Moloney (Labour), Deputy Lisa Chambers (Fianna Fáil), Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Sinn Féin), Deputy Mick Barry (Irish Solidarity–People Before Profit), Senator Catherine Noone (Fine Gael), Senator Gerald Nash (Labour Party) Deputy Kate O’Connell (Fine Gael)[8]

All of these politicians, and more, relied on the use of the medical term ‘marasmus’ on death certificates. Yet — this is important — infants and children died of marasmus at every Irish maternity hospital. Why were they not subjected to a commission of investigation? The answer is ignorance and prejudice. The commission has also rubbished such claims but has any one of these politicians come out in public and admitted to making a mistake? I surmise their reluctance is reflective of the era we live in.

There is no doubt that we are living through a time of mass hysteria and that the truth has been its first victim. I have no business defending the Catholic church or even the Anglican church. They can defend themselves. I cannot stand back, and watch lies and injustice flourish in a nation that has no regard for competent investigative methods including the use of the scientific method where appropriate.

Andreas Schleicher of the OECD reported recently, that ‘a key challenge for Irish schools will be getting students to think for themselves, and develop a strong sense of right and wrong’.[9] The corollary is that students are not currently taught to think for themselves, consequently, they have to let others do their thinking for them.

All of Europe knows that our education system is bad and that it has been in steady decline for decades. This entire scandal is based entirely on bad education which in turn allowed our cultural prejudice of self-loathing to run riot.

Ask yourself one question, why is it that the organisation which fought for the rights of unwanted children not to be killed, throughout two millennia, — and in the absence of action by the secular authorities — took practical steps to provide lifesaving care, education and establishment in employment for unwanted children, should now stand accused of operating a baby-killing and disposal service.

There is something very rotten in Irish education, I wonder will you be the leader who begins to stop the rot or will it be left to someone else, further down the line. If you are going to appoint an expert to review witness’ testimony you need someone — like the Garda commissioner — from outside the state. We certainly have no one with the relevant expertise within the Irish university system.

Without the right people in place, with the right expertise, the taxpayers and citizens of the nation will be forced to pay for the Disneyland thrills of highly paid investigators going round and round on their merry-go-round. Without leadership and competent impartial investigators the country will be stuck for decades in the home of Mickey Mouse.

 

Is mise le mas

Eugene Jordan,
Science Historian BA BSc MInfoTech

 

Footnotes

[1] Wickham et al., ‘Poverty and Child Health in the UK: Using Evidence for Action’.

[2] Reid et al., ‘Vulnerability among illegitimate children in nineteenth century Scotland’.

[3] Remes, Martikainen, and Valkonen, ‘The Effects of Family Type on Child Mortality’.

[4] Corcoran et al., ‘Perinatal Mortality in Ireland: Annual Report 2017’.

[5] Dáil Éireann debate – Wednesday, 13 Jan 2021 Vol. 1003 No. 1

[6] Commission of Investigation, ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’. P12 / 2405

[7] Broadsheet, ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’.

[8] Jordan, ‘Irish Political Fantasists – Children Starved to Death’.

[9] O’Brien, ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’.

 

References

Broadsheet. ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’. Broadsheet.ie, 23 November 2016. https://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/11/23/confabulation-false-memories-and-conspiracy-theories/.

Commission of Investigation. ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’. Irish Government, 30 October 2020.

Corcoran, P., E. Manning, I. B. O’Farrell, and R. A. Greene. ‘Perinatal Mortality in Ireland: Annual Report 2017’. National Perinatal Epidemiology Centre, 2019. https://www.ucc.ie/en/media/research/nationalperinatalepidemiologycentre/NPECPerinatalMortalityinIrelandAnnualReport2017.pdf.

Jordan, Eugene. ‘Irish Political Fantasists – Children Starved to Death’. False History. Accessed 13 June 2021. https://falsehistory.ie/political-fantasy-chidren-starved-to-death/.

O’Brien, Carl. ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’. The Irish Times. 22 March 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/irish-schools-need-to-modernise-20th-century-approach-to-learning-warns-oecd-1.4516222.

Reid, Alice, Ros Davies, Eilidh Garrett, and Andrew Blaikie. ‘Vulnerability among illegitimate children in nineteenth century Scotland’. Annales de démographie historique 111, no. 1 (2006): 89–113. https://doi.org/10.3917/adh.111.0089.

Remes, Hanna, Pekka Martikainen, and Tapani Valkonen. ‘The Effects of Family Type on Child Mortality’. European Journal of Public Health 21, no. 6 (1 December 2011): 688–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckq159.

Wickham, Sophie, Elspeth Anwar, Ben Barr, Catherine Law, and David Taylor-Robinson. ‘Poverty and Child Health in the UK: Using Evidence for Action’. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2016, archdischild-2014-306746.

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Bias and Prejudice Unbridled on Children’s Committee

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When welcoming the report, it was obvious that Kathleen Funchion had not read it… Speaking in the Dáil  Éireann debate on the 13th of January, the day following the public release of the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes, Kathleen Funchion (Sinn Féin), Chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on children… etc. stated.

KF: ‘Mother and baby homes were not homes, they were detention centres’.

Funchion had not managed to read as far as paragraph eight of the executive summary:

  1. There is no evidence that women were forced to enter mother and baby homes by the church or State authorities.

KF: [Women were] forced to give birth in the most appalling conditions, often without medical support or even basic pain relief

The commission wrote:

  1. There is no evidence that the women who gave birth in mother and baby homes were denied pain relief or other medical interventions that were available to a public patient who gave birth in a Dublin or Cork maternity unit. There is evidence of women in mother and baby homes being given pain relief, and being stitched following birth.

Had she been aware at that time that the commission’s report directly contradicted what she was about to say at the Dáil, there is no doubt that she would have attacked the commission’s findings, there and then. Now however, six months later, when she and others realise that the commission have rubbished many of her claims, she now says that ‘the report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission cannot stand and must be repudiated’.

As it slowly began to dawn on her that her allegations are not supported by evidence, she has followed the only option available — to maintain any semblance of credibility — by calling for the report to be repudiated.

She has been howling from the rafters of Leinster House for the former members of the now disbanded commission to appear before the Oireachtas committee, of which she happens to be the chairperson.

However, given the obvious bias and prejudice which she showed and her motivation to keep her credibility intact, would any sensible person allow themselves to be publicly grilled and abused by political grandstanders.

Clearly many of the witnesses have made false allegations — allegations which stretch credulity to levels where only some sections of Irish society can reach — and the commission have stated, — in an overly polite disposition — that ‘a number of witnesses gave evidence that was clearly incorrect. This contamination probably occurred because of meetings with other residents and inaccurate media coverage’. The amount of inaccurate media coverage has been alarming. It is not really the sheer volume of falsehoods which most alarming, but the ease by which beliefs could be fabricated by the politicians and media, which any normally functioning society would have remained sceptical.

She also said that Irish women operated these institutions as if they were prisons.  We ignored the cries of women and children subjected to ‘torture, deprivation and humiliation on a colossal scale’. She clearly holds the opinion that Irish women are particularly faulty and cruel, all wanting to join an organisation so that they could go about the business of torturing women and children. What was in it for them! Is that not the first question any sensible person would ask not to mind a professional investigator?

There is only one motivation put forward, and the entire scandal rests on this one foundation, women hated unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. That is what motivated them to kill and torture vulnerable people, not money, not prestige, not notoriety, carrying all that risk for nothing! The risk of excommunication, risk of execution for murder, risk of reputational damage, risk of banishment etc. All that risk for no gain whatsoever.

The science of motivation holds that two things drive human actions: necessities — food, sleep, avoidance of pain; and rewards. There is no reward for killing a baby, unless you happen to be its mother. That is the very reason mother and baby homes were set up in the first place.

In most countries politicians can fool some of the people some of the time, but in Ireland they can fool all the people all of the time because we are too nice and trusting.

EJ

References

Dáil Éireann debate – Wednesday, 13 Jan 2021 Vol. 1003 No. 1
Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes: Statements

Link – page search: funchion

Deputy Kathleen Funchion (Sinn Féin)

Mother and baby homes were not homes, they were detention centres. A home is somewhere where one should feel safe, loved and protected, not a place where one is tortured, imprisoned and forced to give birth in the most appalling conditions, often without medical support or even basic pain relief. These walls hid torture, deprivation and humiliation on a colossal scale. Human rights did not exist in these centres. As a mother, daughter, sister and Irish citizen, I cannot countenance this cruelty. The cries of children and tortured mothers were ignored and trivialised by cruel nuns [women] and others who were involved in these institutions, who ran the institutions as if they were prisons.

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Top 5 Falsehoods of Irish History which Everyone Believes are Facts

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The Irish nation is particularly prone to believing in historical myths. Falsehoods appear with such frequency in the country’s media and are never subjected to critical analysis that the stand as evidence of the nation’s cultural biases. Historical fallacies are mainly a product of political interference in the education curriculum, where important evidence has been omitted. Are you curious to see what happens to your opinion when these facts are returned?

 

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Government Snobs Increase the Poverty Penalty

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In the same week when medics expressed concern about the high consumption of cannabis and its negative health effects on Ireland’s young people, the Irish government, lacking in the ability to do joined up thinking, put in place a strategy to encourage more young people to consume illicit drugs. One junior minister explained the rationale behind the new minimum alcohol pricing law, was to put ‘alcohol out of the price range of our children and young people.’ Using the same logic, should our politicians have introduced a minim price per gram of cannabis at the same time. Why not include crack cocaine, heroin, smack, speed, yokes and the whole gamut of substances which young people use to go in search of oblivion?

Worse than poor quality thinking is the elitist prejudice expressed as a sneer at Ireland’s struggling classes. Most of the country’s political elite frequent establishments where the cheapest bottle of plonk sells for €25, which after January 2022, will still cost €25. A zero percent price rise for certain classes in Irish society.

Are the struggling classes so detestable that Ireland’s political elite want to punish them and make their lot even more miserable by increasing the poverty penalty? The children of middle-class problem drinkers do not have to rely on charity, unlike working class children. Taking more money out of a family will only increase their reliance on alcohol subsidisation charities like Barnardos. That’s right, tens of thousands of poor families are able to survive on social welfare payments and do not have to rely on charity. In contrast, the households which continually rely on charity have issues with substance abuse and mental health.

An addict will have to have their fix not matter what the cost to them be it in financial terms, health terms or reputationally. Increasing the cost will not reduce consumption but take away from any funds left over after the addict has serviced their addiction.

Minimum price per unit of alcohol is aimed exclusively at the poor and the struggling classes. Its intention is to ‘modify behaviour’ but its foundation is on elitist snobbery best illustrated by egalitarian pricing. The cornerstone of a republic is equality and if price is to be used to modify behaviour, then equality demands that the behaviour of citizens be modified equally. Accordingly, if a person on a social welfare payment of €201 per week pays €6.00 for a pint of beer, then An Taoiseach, should pay pro rata €121.25and Leo Varadkar, €112.07. That would ensure that Micheál Martin is subject to the same behaviour modification demanded by equality. All others should pay pro rata based on their gross income, for example, Robert Watts would pay 167.82 for the €6 pint of beer, a Garda €22.43, a carpenter €20 and so on.

As things stand, a bottle of wine at a restaurant costing €25 will remain at €25, demonstrating that the middle classes will not be affected nor subjected to ‘behaviour modification’. However, if egalitarian pricing was introduced then Micheál Martin would have to pay €506.46, Leo Varadkar €466.97, a Garda would pay €93.45, a carpenter €83.34 and Robert Watts €698.43.

In time, it would of course bring a measure of esteem to some members of the riff-raff, as I am sure a few of whom would be invited to dine with the élite, perhaps even at the same table, for the sole purpose of purchasing the wine.

The Poverty Penalty is the term used to describe the additional cost paid for goods and services by poorer people relative to the more affluent. Thus, the greater a person’s income the less impact price will make to modifying their behaviour, not least because they already drink products which will not be affected by price increases.

Regressive taxation is a related term which acknowledges the Poverty Penalty, and we now have a government, like our colonial masters of old, which seeks to attack its people for no other reason than to pander to their illusions of superiority expressed through a vacuous snobbery. The exact same elitist behaviour which caused the masses to rise up all over the globe to enshrine the three foundation stones upon which a republic is built: equality, liberty and fraternity. All of which have recently been trampled over by Ireland’s over paid elites. The poor are thirsty, Leo Antoinette, ‘let them drink our dregs’!

Most anti-social behaviour due to alcohol and substance abuse is carried out by young people, a cohort with more disposable income than most others. A price increase in alcohol is very unlikely to reduce alcohol consumption and may in fact incline the young and others to illicit drugs. Increased tobacco prices have already made the smugglers rich beyond their wildest dreams, so why send more money their way.

The struggling classed have already been hit hard and are bearing the brunt of carbon taxes, while at the same time they are put to the pin of their collar trying to pay high mortgages, and high rents.

A price increase will not have the consequences its advocates intend, and will bring about many of the problems which only joined up thinking might foresee. It is based on narrow thinking, prejudice and fundamental ignorance of the nature of addiction, self-medication, and the many benefits which alcohol brings to the majority of the people and society in general.

On the public announcement of the strategy, Leo Varadkar declared to the nation ‘the truth is that too many of us drink too much and too often’. OK then, use price increases to modify your own behaviour and introduce egalitarian pricing. Make Ireland no country for the same auld snobs who caused many rebellions on this island and others. #BlueShirt #TaePots

EJ

Ref:

Cannabis ‘gravest threat’ to mental health of young people
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/cannabis-gravest-threat-to-mental-health-of-young-people-1.4554489

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‘History cannot be a dehumanised, reductive, simplistic or self-serving narrative’

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The gross hypocrisy of An Taoiseach Micheál Martin might not be immediately discernible from his the quote below, spoken at an event to launch the 2021 element of the Commemoration of the Centenaries, specifically those events which led to Irish independence.

‘History cannot be a dehumanised, reductive, simplistic or self-serving narrative’ – Micheál Martin 2021

Only a few short weeks ago, the Taoiseach used dehumanisation combined with a simplistic and self-serving historical narrative to castigate Irish women who managed institutions dedicated to the care of unmarried mothers and their children.

Micheál Martin is a former minister for health, thus a person who we would reasonably expect to have at least a basic knowledge of medical statistics and perhaps even an elementary understanding of pathology, aetiology and epidemiology, respectively the study of disease, disease causes, and disease spread.

The Irish government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to appoint a commission of investigation who had no knowledge of science or medicine, to enquire into a scandal, which is chiefly based on the issue of historical high mortality statistics.

The investigation stemmed from false charges that Irish women, during the 20th century, had starved babbies to death, first at the Protestant run Bethany Home and later to all catholic run homes.

Many Irish parliamentarians, eager to have their names entered on parliamentary record, for having the wit to able to see what others needed spearfishing goggles to see, brazenly stood up and declared to the world that ‘marasmus’ was a synonym of starvation.

The reductive insinuation was that these dehumanised Irish women were motivated by a hatred of illegitimate children and so took to offering to the nation a baby disposal service. One so called historian stated unequivocally that ‘the state and church colluded to get rid of an embarrassment to Catholic Ireland’, a false claim, used also to promote a self-serving narrative, based on one cherry-picked and misinterpreted political comment.

Micheál Martin stated in January 2021 that it was ‘deeply distressing to note’ that high infant mortality rates were known to the authorities, but they did nothing about it. He takes this information from the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes. This comment and finding are the result of a complete lack of knowledge of vintage medicine, aetiology and epidemiology and is based entirely on false assumptions.

It is particularly interesting as the Taoiseach’s comments were made during a tough national lock-down due to the coronavirus pandemic. The legislation which facilitated the lock-down is the seminal 1947 Health Act. One of the prime architects of this legislation was the government’s Chief Medical Advisor, Dr James Deeney. His book, ‘To Care and To Cure’, is essential reading and an authoritative source for the study of Irish medical history. The act combined with the Local Government (Sanitary Services) Act, 1948, mark a turning point in the history of Irish public health, recognising and tackling the causes of disease, and for the first time, they gave the authorities effective powers of enforcement. It is a reminder that the reduction in mortality rates which followed, would have been mostly ineffective if medial solutions alone were pursued.

Deeney records the extraordinary efforts made by many people and organisations to reduce infant mortality rates, often in very challenging circumstances, across every section of the population. Furthermore, the statistics continually revealed that the people most at risk were poor people and poor families. Many charities raised money to help these people, some were supported by local authorities who in turn worked to support poor people and poor families. Infant aid societies provided mothers with clean milk, clothing and other essentials. Mothers were taught good hygiene practices and encouraged to breastfeed their babies. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into more detail, save to say, that there is a whole genre of Irish history dedicated to the subject but was completely ignored by the commission and others.

The role of poverty in causing high infant mortality rates was well noted during the past, is still under study by science and continues to appear with regularity in today’s medical and scientific literature. The issue jumps out from the commission’s report, yet they manage to ignore it completely. An incompetence which points to the self-serving narrative of cultural bias and an exemplar of the Dunning Kruger effect. A cognitive bias where people are sure that wrong conclusions are correct, due to a lack of knowledge of alternative explanations.

The Irish nation should be deeply disappointed that a former minister of health, and a former history teacher, knows so little about health issues, historic or contemporary, as evinced through parroting, is now the leader of the nation.

Persons who proclaim that ‘history cannot be a dehumanised, reductive, simplistic or self-serving narrative’, should have the wit to understand the meaning of their utterances and demonstrate a capability to act in such a way.

Parroting the words of a scriptwriter will not lend to the utterer any credibility.

You can find out how and why the Irish dehumanised women and what caused politicians to write into the political record a reductive, simplistic and self-serving narrative in my new book.

 

EJ

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The Rubberbandits poke Ignorant Fun.

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Unlike the Rubberbandits, the ancient Greeks has brains and put them to use trying to figure out the world and the universe. One of their big intellectual quests was to attempt to find out what life actually is. Their philosophy has come down to us in the from of transubstantiation and consubstantiation of the communion host. In yet another expression of Irish ignorance, and emblematic of the poor educational standards which now pervade in Irish society, Chambers and McGlynn have involved a professor of biochemistry in their continuing sneer at holy communion.

Religion and religious people have become the latest target of the sneering Irish SPUDs. SPUDing is a time-honoured tradition in Ireland and an inherited character trait of people who have little or no social standing. For centuries, little people in Ireland tried to feel like big people by creating illusions of high social standing through putting other people down. Religion was largely exempt from the machinations of the SPUDs as almost everybody believed at one time that religion was necessary for long term redemption.

Blindboy Boatclub (Dave Chambers) and Mr Chrome (Robert McGlynn) in their latest comedy skit appeared alongside Prof Luke O’Neill who they questioned repeatedly on the possibility of growing little Jesuses from a communion host. The professor replies repeatedly that it was not possible. It was supposed to be a comedy skit, but there was nothing funny except their Limerick accents and they thick way in which the question was repeatedly posed to the erudite professor.

Neither O’Neill nor Chambers and McGlynn understand transubstantiation and have taken it to mean transformation. The form, i.e. bread, never changes which is why it was never named transformation. If you change the form of any object, it becomes something else, cut the back of a chair and it becomes a table or a stool. Change a round wheel into a square, and it is no longer a wheel. However, a chair and all other objects can be made from many different substances. Accordingly, it is possible to transubstantiate most objects without transforming them. However, there is more to the word substance than meets the eye.

Sub comes from the Latin meaning under or below while stance means ‘to stand’, from the Latin ‘stare’ (p. star-eh). So literally it means under a stand. Accordingly, it is close to the word ‘understand’. However, despite various speculative theories, nobody understands the literal meaning of ‘understand’, but note the ‘stand’ element. Thus, I take it to mean that you can see what is supporting the stand or stance.

The ancient Greek philosophers reasoned that every object and being is supported by a stance or in other words, a ‘substance’, is something that stands under or grounds things. The substance of a human being is life..

The word substance in ordinary language derives from the philosophical sense but in a distorted way. Phrases like ‘a person of substance’ or ‘a substantial reason’ are a good example of this distortion. In chemistry, a chemical substance is a form of matter that has constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. It cannot be separated into components without breaking chemical bonds. Today, we tend to believe that a substance is matter but clearly by examining the literal meaning of the word it points to a concept underpinning the fundamental constituent of matter. Science is based in philosophy and its early pioneers were all natural philosophers accordingly the term ‘substance’ is firmly rooted in philosophy.

To the ancient Greeks a substance was imperceptible to the senses and the parts of an object or being which were perceptible the philosophers categorised as accidents but better understood as appearances. Appearances can change leaving the substance intact and the substance leaving appearances intact.

Karl Keating uses a shirt analogy to explain it:

Its colour is not the shirt itself, nor is its shape, its soft feel, or its (freshly laundered) scent. No one thing that your senses can perceive about the shirt is the shirt itself, and no combination of such things is the shirt itself. Your senses, on their own, are not capable of knowing fully what your shirt is. They miss its underlying nature. But your mind perceives the shirt’s underlying nature because it is able to bring together the information your senses gather about the shirt, and it extrapolates from there. It perceives the “shirtness” of your shirt, and “shirtness” is more than just the shirt’s color, shape, feel, or scent. In centuries gone by, philosophers called the underlying nature of a thing its “substance” and called its outward, sensible manifestations its “accidents.” Since that last word conjures up images of colliding automobiles, let’s use “appearances” instead.

Substance be understood as the essence of a being or a thing. For example, the essence of a human is life. What is life? It is one of humanity’s biggest questions, but science has no answer and has not been able to come close to providing an answer.

Life is defined as the absence of death. Take a recently deceased corpse, it contains all the elements to make a human, but it is not human because life is absent. Today with genetic engineering which can change the DNA of cell it can only work on living cells. We can tell the difference between a dead cell and a living cell, but we have no idea what life actually is. If we knew what it was then Victor Frankenstein would have made the greatest discovery ever in human history. The only scientists ever in the history of humanity to return life to where it was absent.

Humanity for millennia has struggled to find out what life actually is. The Greeks called the psyche, the Romans the animus which we now call the soul. This is the essence of the being, our substance, which makes us human is life, it is incorporeal.

All objects have a substance, and this can be changed without changing its accidents/appearances.

When I was going to school, I was taught that the bread did not change form, what happened was that the soul of Jesus went into the communion host. Martin Luther did not like the idea of transubstantiation, so he came up with the idea that the substance of Jesus was painted on the outside of the communion host, which is called consubstantiation.

Science is limited to what the senses can perceive and a substance in the true meaning of the word cannot be perceived by the senses. Accordingly, science has its limitations, and most scientists know that science cannot investigate substance/essence and so don’t ever bother.

The Rubberbandits became corporeal thanks to the Rubberjohnnybandit who was known to haunt Limerick during the 1980s. He is thought to be the size of a leprechaun and is possessed of the amazing ability to whip a Johnny off while in use. One particular set of four victims of the Rubberjohnnybandit chose to be like the Beckhams and name their children after the circumstances of their conception, Boatclub and Chrome.

Limerick philosophers have debated substance and accidents ever since but the Rubberbandits were never allowed to be part of the intelligentsia. Although not considered intelligentsia outside of Limerick the resentment of their non-admission explains how the middle-class boys came to earn a living from sneering at the working class and all Christians.

Irish ignorance too is made from a substance imperceptible to the senses, but its accidents are palpable, injurious, toxic and smelly and as welcome as a fart in a space suit, to use the colloquial parlance of Mr Boatclub.

EJ

P.S. I wrote this in a Limerick accent.

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Letter to United Nations re the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

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Dear Mr Salvioli, When miscarriages of justice occurred in Ireland, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties was strangely silent. Contrast their behaviour to the achievements of the National Council for Civil Liberties, now called ‘Liberty’, in Britain, which has been instrumental in exposing miscarriages of justice and in the release of innocent people from jail. On the other hand, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has little work to do in Ireland and so has taken to fighting with the dead, a behaviour common in Ireland due to the nation’s cultural biases and often expressed as a national self-loathing. The actions of the ICCL border on sectarian prejudice and are nearly always exclusively aimed at the catholic church. However, the most disturbing actions of the ICCL are their arguments calling for the fundamental principle of justice and human rights to be set aside.

Recently the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has found that many of the allegations made by and/or endorsed by the ICCL were not supported by evidence.[1] A major embarrassment one would think, but the ICCL has attempted a counterattack by writing whimperingly to you at the United Nations. Their chief weapon is the anachronistic application of human rights law to the past, a time when no such rights were protected by law. An action akin to banning cars from a city centre, and then accusing drivers who drove on those streets before the ban of breaking the law and seeking to fine them or have them arrested.

The mother and baby homes scandals are primarily founded upon the issue of historical high infant mortality rates, thus bringing into play the investigative tools of science and mathematics, tools not normally available to historians. That is specialist historians with knowledge, or at least a basic understanding of pathology, aetiology and epidemiology.

These are subjects not normally taught to historians and lawyers, yet the Irish government appointed such ill-equipped people to investigate the causes of historical high infant mortality rates. When knowledge is absent, assumptions are imperative to fill in the gaps, thus facilitating the arrival at conclusions that would be otherwise impossible.

The size of the assumption is directly proportional to the size of the knowledge gap. Accordingly, the bigger the assumption the greater the distance it is in essence from reality. Consequently, the commission has made several substantial mistakes which all fall on one side in favour of the abuse hypothesis, the same side as the ICCL. However, these errors are easily exposed using current scientific understandings.

The lawyers and the personnel at the ICCL have demonstrated time and again that they have no such specialist knowledge of vintage medicine or science and are forced to base their arguments and allegations entirely on assumptions. However, in their specialist area of law, they also astonishingly wander away from the principles of good justice.

They argue for a ‘survivor-led approach’ to the evidence, effectively urging the government and observers to dismiss evidence, and accept all allegations as fact without the slightest test for credibility. The fundamental principle of justice is that allegations can only be proven if they are supported by evidence. All allegations must therefore be tested for credibility. Many of the allegations made by the ICCL and others are reliant on historical and logical fallacies, and on ‘hearsay’, a legal term, which is tightly controlled in a court setting using the rules of evidence, because of its potential to cause injustice. Moreover, the ICCL seeks to deny the accused of their rights which are guaranteed by the Irish constitution, namely, ‘equality before the law’ and ‘the right to fair procedures’.

During a previous Irish government enquiry, when scientific tools were available to subject witnesses’ allegations to impartial credibility tests, one-third of applicants were found to have provided false testimony.[2] The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has also encountered false testimony but has failed to publicly quantify its extent. The number of such testimonies is likely to be substantial in number, judging from the many accounts appearing in the Irish media, which rely on pushing credulity to heights never before seen. Given that there are huge sums of money on offer as compensation, it is no surprise to find a lot of people are willing to chance their luck, as there is a lot to be gained and little to be lost. As in other cases, many of the accusers work on the premise that the more exaggerated their allegations, the more they will be paid in compensation. In effect, Ireland’s legal system has a long record of rewarding dishonesty, often at the expense of genuine cases made by honest persons.

Unlike its neighbouring countries, Ireland has a compensation culture that is so pervasive and the awards so high, that the country’s insurance costs are astronomical. It has become so problematic for society, that the government has recently gotten the Irish judiciary to agree to new guidelines to reduce the amount given in financial settlement of personal injury claims.[3]

Nonetheless, the courts are full of compensations claims with a not insubstantial number of cases based on allegations that range from the mistaken to the fraudulent. There is little to mitigate against such claims, as judges are inclined to give the benefit of any doubt to the plaintiff and law firms are more than willing to advertise their services on a ‘no win, no fee basis’. The substantial financial sums on offer produces a level of temptation for people which not only outweighs or blinds them to the potential losses, through the awarding of costs against them, but it encourages a substantially higher number of people to take a chance. After all, if Johnny and Mary down the road could get €150,000 and appear to be perfectly okay after their accident, why can’t we get my hands on easy money.

Despite the allure of vast sums in compensation, many people who are former residents of mother and baby homes have testified to the commission about the many good aspects of the homes and of their good treatment. Their voices have not been heard over the cacophony of the wild and the lurid claims, which are the only type appearing almost daily in the Irish media.

Allegations like those discussed at the Irish houses of parliament where several parliamentarians stated unequivocally that women starved babies to death. First, it was alleged to have occurred at the Protestant run Bethany home and later applied to all Catholic-run homes. All allegations were reliant on an ignorant and inept interpretation of the medical term ‘marasmus’, which appeared on a small number of death certificates.

Death due to this exact cause occurred at all of the nation’s maternity hospitals in the past. Accordingly, it would be an imperative of justice that a commission of investigation be established to bring to bear scrutiny on these hospitals and also on the Irish Medical Council and on An Bord Altranais, respectively, the regulatory bodies for doctors and nurses.

If the same evidence that is used to accuse women of murder and abuse can be found at all maternity hospitals, then the singling out of Christian run institutions would in itself be a cause for concern. One would reasonably expect an organisation like the ICCL would be at the forefront in sounding the alarm about the potential for injustice and the breach of the human rights of the accused.

The ICCL citing the commission’s final report wrote that ‘babies and young children were reported to have died from malnutrition, a form of neglect.’ The Commission state:

33.5. Some commentators have concluded that infant deaths which occurred in mother and baby homes due to marasmus indicates that infants were neglected, not appropriately cared for, and/or wilfully starved to death in these institutions.

However, marasmus was a frequently cited cause of infant deaths in institutional, hospital and community settings in early twentieth-century Ireland. The Commission considers it unlikely that deaths in hospitals and family homes were due to wilful neglect and so cannot conclude that the term marasmus denotes wilful neglect in mother and baby homes. The more likely explanation is that marasmus as a cause of death was cited when an infant failed to thrive due to malabsorption of essential nutrients due to an underlying, undiagnosed medical condition.

Accordingly, this lack of balance is strong evidence that the ICCL has not the skillset to investigate matters historical not to mind matters medical, but more importantly, it demonstrates that they have no commitment to ensuring justice prevails. What about the justice for those who were falsely accused of murder, they may be dead now, but what kind of ‘rights advocacy’ organisation thrives on, and promotes injustice?

The ICCL’s arguments under the following headings are equally not supported by the evidence and were mostly dismissed by the commission of investigation.

· Arbitrary Detention · Violations of the Right to Life
· Torture and Ill Treatment · Modern slavery or servitude or forced labour
· Enforced Disappearance · Violation of Private and Family Life Discrimination

It might seem obvious to state, but the allegations made by the ICCL have been subjected to a seven-year-long investigation by a government-appointed commission, which after examining one million documents found no evidence to support most of their allegations. Consequently, the ICCL might see it as a survival imperative and to maintain their credibility have to seek to rubbish the commission’s findings. A more competent organisation might admit its mistakes and concentrate on the commission’s findings which may be close to matching their allegations, but such aptitude is hard to find in Ireland.

The Irish nation has a remark for the intellectual failings of the Irish elite which goes ‘only in Ireland’. Only in Ireland could there be a ‘human rights organisation advocating for actions which run contrary to the principles of justice, do so in the name of justice, and get away with it. The ICCL would be better renamed the Irish Council for Civil Loathing because that is their modus operandi. They, like many of their compatriots, are prisoners of cultural artefacts inherited from their impoverished ancestors, who were so deprived of social advancement, took to the denigration of others to create illusions of social superiority.

Denigration combined with the ‘colonial mentality’ has left the Irish nation with a set of self-loathing biases, which the Irish often pass off as self-deprecating humour. However, one has only to look at its malignant influences to see the real-world consequences for the nation.

No politician has to date, apologised for making false allegations of starvation against the women who managed and worked in the mother and baby homes. Not one.

Like the ICCL, many of the scandal propagating politicians have posited further scurrilous claims and continue to do so even after they were dismissed by the commission of investigation. The reason for their actions is simple, self-loathing, it is important to a large portion of the Irish nation, who use it to create illusions of social superiority and are naturally reluctant to have their notions of self-worth destroyed by evidence. Accordingly, they will support anyone who advances their prejudices and ignore those who might challenge them.

The ICCL uses presentism with alacrity to promote its agenda. Presentism is the anachronistic use of present-day perspectives to analyse past events. It usually results in the castigation of the past’s decision-makers who made wrong decisions because of not using information that belonged to their future.

The supreme irony of using presentism is that the former residents who were born or raised in institutions were the result of a crisis pregnancy and in this age, it is likely they would have been killed before their birth. Irish women produced a minimum of 181,434 unwanted children in the thirty-five-year period between 1982 and 2017 inclusive. The figure includes 15,094 children who were given up for adoption.[4]

In a corresponding thirty-five-year period, while the Tuam mother and baby home was open from 1925 to 60, Irish women produced 64,290 illegitimate children and 13,431 of these souls were lost due mainly to rampant levels of dire poverty.[5]

The number of births in both periods was remarkably similar 2,199,777 compared to 2,187,967 for the later period. Compare the sad loss of 13,431 infants to the 166,340 children who were aborted before birth and we can begin to see what period of history the baby holocaust belongs to.[6]

It is a mark of insanity to suggest that all the illegitimate children born in the early period were wanted by their mothers. It is a sad fact of life that many babies were unwanted by their mothers then and now. Witness accounts, within the commission’s report, stand as testimony to the efforts made by several mothers who self-harmed in order to cause the loss of their baby.

Moreover, when these children grew up and went in search of their birth mother, it would be the height of insensitivity to reveal to such a person that they were in reality, an unwanted child. Accordingly, and with compassionate intent, they are told that they were a wanted child, but nefarious forces made the mother give them away. It is a story that saves face for the mother and provides comfort for the abandoned child, but it is not necessarily a true version of events, no matter how much people want to believe it.

The issue of unwanted children remains very much with society today, only the method of dealing with the issue has changed. Throughout recorded history, humanity has created vast numbers of unwanted children and it continues to create such children today. Alas, thanks to an unlucky technicality, human rights lawyers are deprived of much business, due to the now commonly accepted precept that human rights only begin when a child makes it out alive from its mother’s womb. If those who are not that fortunate are counted as unwanted children, then it puts a more rational perspective on history.

All societies where poverty is high have higher mortality rates than more affluent societies. Infant mortality rates have been correlated with poverty for decades but only in the last three decades has the causal relationship been definitively established. The United Nations are very well aware of the influence of poverty on mortality rates and appears in what must be thousands of official publications and through its agencies like the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, which estimates that:

On current trends, that 56 million children under age 5 will die from 2018 to 2030, half of them newborns. […] while children from poorer households in low-and-middle-income countries remain disproportionately vulnerable to early death – under-five mortality rates are, on average, twice as high for the poorest households compared to the richest.[7]

How can the United Nations not be able to join the dots with its own information and think it can have any semblance of credibility? The Irish nation was once a deeply impoverished society with high infant mortality rates which were directly correlated to the levels of poverty. The commission has noted that infant mortality rates at their highest during the 1930s and 1940s.

The 1930s was a time of great social deprivation across the globe. ‘Hunger marches’ took place in the richest country in the world, Britain, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against their living conditions. In the 1940s, Ireland was hit by a supply crisis which caused food shortages and hit the country’s poorest people the hardest. The catholic church in Dublin provided the city’s poor people with 8 million meals per year, saving tens of thousands of lives.[8] Yet, they get no credit thanks to Irish ignorance of their own history.

In anticipation of any argument put forward to the contrary by a devotee of the ‘dismal science’, let me point out that GDP per capita is no measure of individual well-being, just ask Joseph Stiglitz et al, but is often used by the self-loathers to insinuate that things were not that bad in Ireland.

However, when wealth distribution is factored in, the true picture reveals itself. In 1931 a staggering 81% of the population of Ireland had no measurable wealth. 1% of the population controlled 59% of the nation’s wealth. The legacy of colonial rule did not disappear overnight. Post-independence, Britain placed a financial burden on the Irish nation which was greater than those imposed on the Germans due to the war reparations post WWI. These payments were known as the ‘land annuity’ and ‘RIC pensions’. In 1932 the Irish government attempted to halt the British financial drain of the Irish economy by withholding the land annuity payment. At that time, they amounted to a staggering 14% (£4,764,767) of the nation’s total tax income of £35.5million.[9]

Britain retaliated by placing tariffs on Irish goods, a time now known as the ‘Economic War’. It placed great hardship on the Irish population and in particular on the poor and infant mortality rates remained high. In 1938 the trade war ended with the Irish government paying out £10 million in a final settlement. However, only a few years later, the British again carried out an economic attack on Ireland, through the withdrawal of vital supplies, in reprisal for the country refusing Churchill’s invitation to join the war on the side of Britain.[10] As a former colony, the Irish economy was left heavily dependent on exports and imports from its former colonial masters. The British Historian Bryce Evans puts it more dirrectly writing that Britain used ‘hunger as a weapon of war’ against Ireland during the 1940s.[11]

There is absolutely no question that poverty was rampant in Ireland and that government efforts to solve it were hampered by external forces and events. There is equally no doubt that poverty was the main cause of high infant mortality rates. It is however ignored in the commission of investigation’s report due to ignorance, despite the issue jumping out from its pages.

Returning to the ICCL, Michael Feichín Hannon was convicted in 1997 on charges of sexual assault had his conviction was declared a miscarriage of justice on the 27 April 2009. The three-judge court, in granting the certificate, described the case as ‘alarming and disturbing’ and said an entirely innocent man was convicted by a jury. His accuser, a young girl, had found God as an adult and as a result, admitted to making up the whole story.[12]

In 1999, Nora Wall became the first woman to be convicted of rape in the history of the Irish state. She was also the first person (male or female) ever to receive a life sentence for rape. The rape occurred 20 years earlier at a time when she was working as a nun at an orphanage. She held open the legs of a twelve-year-old girl in her care, to facilitate her rape by a male employee of the same orphanage. It turned out to be Ireland’s first case of a conviction based on repressed memories, an entirely concocted story, made by a woman with mental difficulties. Nora Wall was released from prison after serving only four days of her life sentence. It was the fortunate result of evidence emerging into the public domain, which should have been kept hidden from public view, as stipulated by Irish law. Her conviction was certified as a miscarriage of justice in 2005.[13]

In both cases the ICCL, founded in 1976, was silent. It made no comments on what improvements might be made to the rules of evidence and/or to court procedures to protect innocent people from false accusations and propose strategies that would make such miscarriages of justice less likely to happen again in the future.

In the parlance of the UN, there is no evidence that as a result of these miscarriages of justice that the ICCL has advocated or campaigned to:

  • Prevent the recurrence of crises and future violations of human rights.
  • Promote truth and memory about past violations;
  • Reform the national institutional and legal framework and promote the rule of law in accordance with international human rights law, and restore confidence in the institutions of the State;
  • Ensure social cohesion, nation-building, ownership and inclusiveness at the national and local levels; and promote healing and reconciliation;

The ICCL not only does not live up to these ideals but has actively promoted untruths and unlike the women it attacked, or the organisation to which they belonged, it seems that they have never protected a single human right nor prevented the abuse of any person’s rights.

The ICCL press briefing on the report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission dated March 2021, is chiefly remarkable for its reiteration, as fact, all the allegations which have been disproven or found not to be supported by the evidence by the commission of investigation. [14]

Just take one exemplar, the ICCL state emphatically that women were detained against their will, yet in reality, women had to apply to get into a mother and baby home. Taking my earlier point about stretching credulity, think about how many people are currently standing outside Mountjoy Jail in Dublin applying to get it.

Human rights lawyers cannot in reason or logic base their opinions on false allegations nor can false or dubious allegations be used to attack innocent people, dead or alive. Such would be representative of a significant failure in the intellectual tradition of humanity.

Dubious allegations might be easily revealed when they bear all the hallmarks of misogyny, it was women who starved babies to death, women who abused children, women who abused mothers, women who trafficked babies, women who kidnapped women, women covered up abuse, women perpetrated a holocaust against babies, ad inf.

One simple question exposes the falsity of the allegations, what benefit would accrue to these women for their actions and what would outweigh the risks. Risks like their imprisonment, castigation, dismissal and excommunication. When rational investigative questions are asked, the road to the truth begins to thaw out and the myths unravel, but why have these questions not been asked by the Irish media, the ICCL and more importantly, by the United Nations.

Irish universities have been engaged in ‘grade inflation’ for the last number of decades. That is the practice of making exams easier for students to gain higher marks, thus creating the illusion of improving standards of education. It works to fool politicians, but the multinational corporations based in Ireland are not impressed with the Irish educational system and have made their dissatisfaction known directly to the Irish government. The top executives of Google, Hewlett-Packard and Intel met with the Minister of Education, Bat O’Keefe in 2012. He was told that Irish graduates do not have the level of skill their qualifications suggest.[15] Despite promises, no corrective action appears to have been taken to date. In recent weeks the OECD has also castigated the Irish education system. Dr Andreas Schleicher stated:

Just 15 per cent of Irish 15-year-olds can distinguish fact from opinion in a reliable way. So, you know, what value is literacy, if you can’t navigate ambiguity? If we can’t manage complexity? [16]

As the output of ICCL seems to evince the same inability that afflicts young adults, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that problems unique to the Irish education system, could be a contributing factor in the apparent lack of skills and abilities at the ICCL.

Natural justice demands that the United Nations should at least subject allegations to a test for veracity rather than gullibly accepting the word of accusers, including that of self-appointed watchdogs. Notoriety seeking is prevalent among individuals today and it, along with groupthink can occur in any organisation or social group, and each malady has the potential to be one of the progenitors of injustice and human rights abuse. These malignant effects always need to be mitigated through competent evaluation of BOTH sides, especially the contrarian viewpoint which should always be sought out and given a fair hearing. Leave the one-sided arguments to the Irish, and let them engage in their time-honoured pastime of self-loathing, and not drag the United Nations down to their level.

The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes was led by a judge, a barrister and a historian. They were not wrong in all their findings, but their reports contain many errors due to inadequate controls for cultural biases, cognitive biases and a lack of expertise in statistics and medicine. Many of its conclusions will not withstand rational investigation as they are riddled with presentism, statistical fallacies and prejudice.

The Irish nation is badly served by its élite, so we would all welcome a UN investigation, but only if carried out by people with a strong commitment to impartiality, empowered with strategies to control for prejudice, cognitive bias, and has expertise in history, science, historic medicine, statistics and placing historic events in their correct historical context. On request, I can supply comprehensive details of what the commission got wrong and what it got right.

The Christian churches, supported by the Christian community, has been in the business of saving the lives of unwanted children for nearly two millennia. For all of that time, not one institution has been accused of operating a baby-killing facility or a post-natal life abortion service. Such flights of imagination can happen… only in Ireland.

It is time to wake up and smell the manure.

Finally, I provide more detail on all the arguments I used here in my new book and e-book.

The book’s epigraph is a quote by Albert Einstein:

‘Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.’

Einstein did not have the ICCL in mind, but he provides a good explanation of what might underpin their thoughts and actions.

Eugene Jordan, BA BSc MinfoTech,
Science historian.

 

References

[1] Commission of Investigation, ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’.

[2] Broadsheet, ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’.

[3] Correspondent, ‘New Guidelines on Personal Injury Awards to Take Effect “within Weeks”’.

[4] Jordan, The Irish Attack on Christianity.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Hug et al., ‘Levels & Trends in Child Mortality’.

[8] Bryan, ‘Rationing in Emergency Ireland, 1939-48’.

[9] Jordan, The Irish Attack on Christianity.

[10] Evans, ‘What Ireland Ate and Drank during the Second World War’.

[11] Ibid.

[12] ‘Sex Attack Case Ruled a Miscarriage’.

[13] Carolan, ‘Ex-Nun Nora Wall Settles Damages Case for Miscarriage of Justice’.

[14] ‘ICCL Press Briefing on Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission’.

[15] Flynn, ‘How Ireland Dumbed Down’.

[16] O’Brien, ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’.

 

Full References

Broadsheet. ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’. Broadsheet.ie, 23 November 2016. https://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/11/23/confabulation-false-memories-and-conspiracy-theories/.

Bryan, Ciarán. ‘Rationing in Emergency Ireland, 1939-48’. National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2014.

Carolan, Mary. ‘Ex-Nun Nora Wall Settles Damages Case for Miscarriage of Justice’. The Irish Times. Accessed 26 July 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/ex-nun-nora-wall-settles-damages-case-for-miscarriage-of-justice-1.2645707.

Commission of Investigation. ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’. Irish Government, 30 October 2020.

Correspondent, Jennifer. ‘New Guidelines on Personal Injury Awards to Take Effect “within Weeks”’. The Irish Times, 9 March 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/new-guidelines-on-personal-injury-awards-to-take-effect-within-weeks-1.4504682.

Evans, Bryce. ‘What Ireland Ate and Drank during the Second World War’. Brainstorm – RTÉ, 25 May 2020. https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0525/1140447-ireland-emergency-second-world-war-food-drink-black-loaf-tea/.

Flynn, Sean. ‘How Ireland Dumbed Down’. The Irish Times. 6 March 2010. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/how-ireland-dumbed-down-1.633741.

Hug, Lucia, David Sharrow, Kai Zhong, and Danzhen You. ‘Levels & Trends in Child Mortality’. New York: UNICEF, 2018.

‘ICCL Press Briefing on Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission’. Irish Council for Civil Liberties, March 2021. https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Press-briefing-ICCL-analysis-of-MBHC-report.pdf.

Jordan, Eugene. The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence. Tafannóir Press, 2021.

O’Brien, Carl. ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’. The Irish Times. 22 March 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/irish-schools-need-to-modernise-20th-century-approach-to-learning-warns-oecd-1.4516222.

‘Sex Attack Case Ruled a Miscarriage’. The Irish Times. 27 April 2009. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/sex-attack-case-ruled-a-miscarriage-1.839613.

 

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The Rubberbandits and Blind Wet Fartage!

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Isn’t it amazing how Blindboy, who celebrates or at least draws attention to Limerick’s reputation for criminality, gets miffed when Forbes believes the Rubberbandits! Blind indeed.

The Rubberbandits made their name through lampooning Limerick’s criminal classes using a plastic shopping bag for facial disguise instead of the customary lady’s nylon tights. The net effect is to reinforce the public view of the prominence of criminality within the city. It has become a celebrated part of the city’s culture, so much so, that Limerick city in its bid to become the European City of Culture 2020, enlisted the services of city’s fake and comedic criminals. The bid ultimately failed bid but quite what the European judges thought of what constituted Limerick’s culture is unknown, but it would appear that no other city celebrates is criminal classes with such alacrity as Limerick.

The Rubberbandits might counter with arguments that they are really lampooning the lower classes of Limerick. However, only a tiny proportion of these people might have a need to wear a disguise on occasion. It is also unfair to associate swathes of the population with criminality. Moreover, it should come as no surprise to anyone to see that Limerick has become, unfairly, associated with criminality, a view reinforced by Blindboy Boatclub et al.

Mr Boatclub angrily dismissed an article published by the American Forbes magazine describing it as a ‘wet fart’.  The article concentrated on the negative aspects of Limerick and had the audacity to use the city’s nickname, ‘Stab City’ and went it on to claim that the billionaire Collision bothers were lucky to escape the warzone. The Collision brothers, natives of Limerick city, founded the Stripe Internet payments company which required them to move to Silicon Valley in California and they became billionaires in a very short period of time. Hence, the notion of escaping Stab City.

It was they who were the subject of the article written by an Irishman, Stephen McBride who was born in Dublin but now works in America. Using his local knowledge and filtering it through many Irish cultural biases, he produced yet another expression of national self-loathing. McBride took all the negative commentary about the city and embellished further to a point where the Collision brothers described it is daft and bizarre.

The reality is that Limerick is a lovely city and I visit it regularly, and I recommend visiting to all my friends and acquaintances. California has a murder rate three times higher than Ireland, so one is much safer in Limerick than California.

The debacle is emblematic of a problem in Irish society which largely remains unaware of its malignant effects. In the book I name this set of behaviours,  ‘Clurichaun Syndrome’, which you can see expressed daily through the media where Irish people, of normal intelligence, can think that they can make loathful comments about the Irish nation, and it magically does not apply to them, nor their family and friends.

Blindboy is also blind to clurichaunism and most of his audience think that he is just expressing Irish self-deprecating humour. But there is a lot to suggest that the Rubberbandits, like many of their fellow country people, are unable to rise above the prejudices of their ancestors. William Hazlitt once wrote that ‘prejudice is the child of ignorance’ and I add that her most precious child is Irish ignorance due in no small part to its ability cause real world harm.

Irish children are not allowed to be proud of their country and the achievements of their fellow country men and women. Almost every Irish child is taught that that Irish people, outside of their social circle, are faulty human beings. Of course, it is set of views which are also held by people outside of one’s social circle so that they think you too are nothing more than an ignorant gobhite. Accordingly, people are blind to the fact that their negative prejudices apply to them, so it is like a blind self-loathing. It has many practical implications which have the net effect of taking children out into the back year and shooting them in the foot. Their future prospects are damaged by the fact that they had the misfortune to be born Irish. Many cannot wait to emigrate to get away from the fault human beings in the forlorn hope that the superiority of people from other nations with rub off on them.

Irish people will support English soccer teams in their hundreds of thousands, leaving a few hardcore people to support their own. The result is that Irish children’s prospect of becoming a professional footballer are greatly diminished. It is emblematic of a centuries old problem where Irish investors have a preference for not investing in Ireland.

Many Irish employers have a preference for hiring non-Irish people. Irish universities cannot produce enough talent, with result that all the giant multinational companies with operations in Ireland are staffed by a huge majority of talented individuals from abroad. At the same time, Irish third level graduates have to go abroad to find work. Irish universities are engaged in grade inflation, effectively pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible politicians but not the employers.

The Irish society of the early 21st century is a society in chaos, its identity smashed with false notions of women misogynists and a deeply misogynistic society. A set of historical falsities which the Rubberbandits have keenly promoted and done so using pure Irish ignorance.

You probably would not believe it, but I do like the Rubberbandits, they showed great talent with their song ‘Horse Outside’ and great poetic talent in the Irish language version of ‘I Want to Fight your Father.’

However, as Albert Einstein astutely observed, ‘few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment’, the talent of the Rubberbandits is wasted through promoting myths with no basis in fact. They have deposited many ‘wet farts’ about the Catholic Church and no doubt stored the resultant soiled underwear in a plastic shopping bag. Sometimes it looks like the forgot witch plastic bag was used  to store the said underwear. 😀

EJ

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Irish Self Loathing

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More bloat has been added to the already distended corpus of Irish literature dedicated to Irish self-loathing. It is a genre of racist literature mostly written by Irish people and the latest expression to come to international attention was written by an Irishman, Stephen McBride. The American Forbes business magazine has pulled the article after an outcry from the public, politicians and the billionaire Collison brothers who hail from Limerick city.

McBride wrote that ‘Many folks think Ireland is all rolling green hills and five-star golf courses. But in the middle of the Irish countryside is a city called Limerick — known as the “murder capital” of Europe.’ Written under the headline ‘How Two Brother Escaped ‘Stab City’ And Made $11 Billion’.

The article was about John and Patrick Collison who are the founders of ‘Stripe’ an online payment processing company for internet businesses. Their success has ranked the two young men amongst the youngest self-made billionaires in history. McBride asserted that they left a ‘warzone’, Limerick City, for Silicon Valley saying they beat the odds to get out.

Patrick Collison responded: ‘Not only [is it] mistaken about Limerick but the idea of ‘overcoming’ anything is crazy. […] We are who we are because we grew up where we did.’ John, responding on Twitter, described the article and its claims as ‘daft’.

McBride from Dublin, a city which was the centre of British power in Ireland for centuries has a long history of anti-Irish prejudice entwined in its culture. Accordingly, Dubliners are nicknamed ‘Jackeens’, a short for ‘Union Jackeen’, from the British flag which was traditionally flown from the male part of a ship, its jackstaff. Thus, ‘Jackeen’ literally means little penis. However, sneering at other people is not only deeply engrained in the psyche of the whole Irish nation, but also is the main national pastime. Every day the newspapers and broadcast media have at least one article which can be classified as Irish self-loathing. As daft a pursuit it may appear to be, there are enormous psychological benefits to be gained from sneering at other people.

Humans are hierarchical animals and the height of the position we see ourselves as holding on that hierarchy is vital to our feelings of self-esteem and self-worth. Self-esteem is a personal perception of how much value they have for themselves. Self-worth is a person’s perception of the value they think they bring to society.

When upward social mobility is difficult or impossible the human mind will naturally create illusions of higher social standing than can be justified or displayed publicly through adulation or prestige possessions. The easiest and instant way to achieve a feeling of upward social mobility is to denigrate other people and or social groups. Wherever the denigrated are ranked on the social scale, the denigrators will view themselves as having a position just above. In other words, they put people down so that they can feel themselves to be their social superiors. That is the genesis of the prejudices and perhaps the genesis of all prejudices and can be found in affluent circles as well but expressed through different behaviours.

The denigration of others is deeply embedded in the culture of some sections of Irish society, and is transmitted from generation to generation through their family history of impoverished ancestors, who were at one time firmly rooted at the bottom of the Irish social strata.

Irish people who sneer at the Irish seem blind to the fact that they are sneering at themselves, family, friends, and they too sneer back at the sneerers, which is why it is a self-loathing. The sneers revel in their illusions of superiority, but the reality reveals a psychological overcompensation for social deficits.

You can take the man our of the bog, but you cannot take the bog out of the man.

FYI Paddy: California has a murder rate over four and a half times that of Ireland!

Irish self loathing is a serious issue for Irish society and is not a victimless pursuit. The causes and the resultant malignancy are explored in detail in the book The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence

 

EJ

DEBUNKED


Except where otherwise noted, the content by Eugene Jordan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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