Tag Archives: irish self-hate

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Cultural Prejudice Claims Paddy as its Victim

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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.

 

Delusional Paddy

 

EJ

 

Latest -Press Watch, Self-Loathing

Jennifer Zamparelli – Irish Self-Loathing

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Jennifer Zamparelli has made it her mission to broadcast the flatulence of Irish self-loathing from the basement of the RTÉ radio centre on each weekday morning. 2FM is a popular music station with a previous reputation for good music combined with frivolity. Currently such frivolity is provided by Doireann, Donncha and Carl in the early morning and the two Johnnies in the late afternoon. In between is the Jennifer Zamparelli Show, which runs from 9am to midday. During that time Zamparelli never misses an opportunity to claim that her parents were backwards. In fact, not only were her parents backwards but her entire family along with everyone else in Ireland was backwards until very recently.

Such self-loathing is a very common prejudice among the Gaelic Irish and as the name Zamparelli, is not Gaelic, I was a bit surprised to find the prejudice with the same force of strength as the native Irish. I confess to not knowing much about her background and I have never listened one of her shows in its entirety. Occasionally however, while channel hopping on a break from work, I land on 2FM only to find Zamparelli banging on about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Queer issues, and using them to sneer at the Irish nation. It’s her favourite subject and hardly a show goes by without herself or a guest falsely rewriting history to claim to be a victim.

A one trick pony, talking about sex is her main strategy to attract an audience and so on one of recent shows, she ventured into the world of pornography. Andy, who is an Irish porn star. revealed that he is a bisexual actor with a reputation for being well endowed in the trouser department. Zamparelli, true to form, used it as another opportunity to engage in self-loathing. He told one story about how he was deported from France after attempting to shoot a porn film along with two women, in the open air, using the Eifel Tower as a backdrop. The French police did not take kindly to their actions and the only word Andy said he could make out in French was the word, “disgusting”. He also used the word deported but I have never heard of anyone being deported without a court order. He said he drove with to a channel port to leave France with all due haste. I can only surmise that the Parisian police told them to get out of France quick or he and his lady colleagues would be in big trouble.

Oddly enough Andy revealed that his family still lives in Ireland, and with a lot of encouragement from Zamparelli, he revealed that they were subjected to a bit of slagging thanks to his chosen career. Andy was cajoled into saying that ‘it only happened in Ireland’, and that he got no grief about being a porn star while living in England. Zamparelli then used the story to directly accuse the Irish of backward behaviour because Andy’s family were not abused in England. Despite them not living in England!

Zamparelli has a habit of prefacing her prejudiced utterings with the phrase ‘this country’. I have no problem with people criticising Ireland when such criticism is valid but using the phrase ‘this country’ singles it out from all other countries but never is a valid comparison made with other countries.

Had porn star Andy been English, or of any other nationality, I’m one hundred percent sure that when it became known locally, that his family members were related to a man who is famous only for the public display of his big Mickey and the practical demonstration of its secondary function, they too would get ribbed about it. There is nothing uniquely Irish about such behaviour. All famous people are the subject of comment, ranging from mild to abusive, untrue to plausible and unacceptable to invasive. Most of it carried out by journalists, to feed the insatiable appetite of the broadcast and print media, who in turn feed it to the braying masses.

It turns out that Zamparelli is her married name and that her maiden name is Maguire. A more Gaelic Irish name one could not have, and so the strength of her self-loathing now makes sense and is explained by her family origins.

Born in 1980, Jennifer Maguire is of a generation who were deprived of a complete education in Irish history. The British rule of Ireland is a story of appalling abuse, economic, physical, and governmental. Consequently, our true history has the power to incite resentment and hatred of the British. Therefore, in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Northern Troubles were at their height, the Irish government took the decision to de-emphasise the British crimes, violations, and economic embezzlement within the schools’ Irish history curriculum.

Whether the Irish government intended it or not, the net effect of its education policies has been to instigate an about-face. It took the British from being the villains of history to the white knights, who quixotically set about to rescue the Irish from their backwardness.

The Maguire clan the full brunt of the English reconquest of Ireland, they, like many others, ended up losing their land, lives, and titles but more importantly their social status.

Forcibly impoverished and socially immobilised, the Gaelic Irish were left with only one road open for those who wanted to advance their social status. The road still runs through the Valley of Sneers even today. Nowadays, when people want to feel superior to others, the buy an expensive German car (on a PCP or hire-purchase), join a golf club, stay in a five-star hotel, move to an upmarket neighbourhood and so on. If no such routes are open, then one can create illusions of superiority by putting people down, mostly expressed through sneering.

The vanquished Maguires together with many other once noble clans, desperate to reclaim some of their former status, took to siding with their British masters. However, entry to the British club required that the British be lauded, and the Irish sneered at.

To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? I am a Paddy. – Paddy Shylock, Act 3 Scene 1, The Merchant of Ennis.

Jennifer Zamparelli is almost completely unknowledgeable about Irish history and society. The little knowledge she has managed to acquire has come from a barstool bore, and not from the expending of energy on scholarship.

Trying to feel big by sneering at others is the most enduring historical pursuit of Gaelic families even today. However, when sneering at the Irish they also sneer at themselves, hence the term self-loathing.

I would suggest that an ignoble award is appropriate. I will call it “the Zamparelli acronym” — Leave Gaelic Bull-manure To Quarrellers

Even at 42 years of age it is never too late for a little bit of homework…

What could a woman do that could have a man tried and executed?
The answer… have sex with another woman. Yep, lesbianism was never banned in these islands. Why? Queen Victoria refused to believe that women would engage in such acts. However, having no truck with British discrimination, it was proposed that after Irish independence, the Dáil would give equality to women by criminalising female homosexual acts, alongside those of males. It was, however, never enacted.

The English executed dozens of men for allegedly having sex with other men. I can find evidence of only two men who suffered a similar fate in Ireland. John Atherton and his alleged lover John Childe. They were not hung by the Irish, but by the English authorities in Ireland.

Atherton was the Anglican Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, who spotted that the Irish had no law banning male homosexuality. He became one of the prime advocates for such a law. Ironically, when it came into force, he and his servant became its first and only victims. They were both hanged on St Stephens Green on 5 December 1640. It is now thought that Atherton was innocent, the victim of character assassination.

The naive Irish Brehon Laws show an awareness of homosexuality, but it was never outlawed. The first time it became outlawed in Ireland, it was due entirely to the British.

The first of what might be interpreted as anti-gay laws on the continent were brought in to protect boys from pederasts. David Norris, Ireland’s most famous gay rights activists, was forced to withdraw as a candidate from the 2011 Irish presidential election when he declared support for pederasty. Pederasty, in Norris’ mind, was where a man takes a boy to live in his home for sexual relations who, in return, receives free board, lodgings, and an education. Norris, always popular with the Irish public, was the favourite to win the election but has since dropped out of public view.

Gay people were always well tolerated in Irish society. Even in the 1970s, when the British Gay Liberation Front was in full flight, RTÉ carried many British shows with gay themes. Dick Emery was especially popular, and one of his gay catchphrases, “Oh hello honky tonks”, became a common greeting in Ireland during the 70s. Emery was joined on Irish screens by a plethora of camp and gay characters, presenters, and actors in popular TV shows like Have You Been Served and films like, the Carry On series. The Kenny Everett Show was one of my favourites. Kenny was famous for being gay in real life and for his portrayal of outrageous characters, many of them gay.

The reality is that the Irish are one of the most tolerant nations on earth. They continue to victims of racism from their own kind and tolerate it with gay abandon!

EJ

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Leo Varadkar & His Lies

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Leo’s Varadkar’s apology following the publication of the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes proved once and for all that even those who are qualified as a medical doctor can be quite unintelligent. It would appear that Varadkar never bothered reading the final report, choosing instead to repeat the horse manure which appeared with alacrity in the Irish press and elsewhere.

Leo Varadkar is a gaff prone politician, a former and future Prime Minister (Taoiseach) of Ireland.[1] He currently holds the position of Táinste or Deputy Prime Minister. He is a former medical doctor and many people— including me — regarded Leo Varadkar as intelligent, even though on many occasions in the past, it appeared he could not be bothered using it. I was wrong, dead wrong.

In his apology Leo declared ‘this report shames Irish society entirely,’ claiming that ‘a conspiracy of shame and silence and cruelty’ helped to create a ‘stifling, oppressive and deeply misogynistic culture’.[2] All these statements are untrue and not contained within the report. Leo incorporated so many gaffs that it would take many pages to list and explain them. Accordingly, I will cite a few examples which will suffice to illustrate the point.

Leo: ‘It must not be forgotten that illegitimacy was not a social prejudice but the law of the land, a law passed in the House in 1931 by our forebears.’[3] Dead wrong again. The Legitimacy Act, 1931 allowed the status of illegitimate children to be legitimised.[4] Common Law or British law —  for centuries —discriminated against illegitimate children to protect the inheritance rights of the children of an official marriage. It is a biological fact that knicker elastic loses its properties around rich and powerful men. Kings, Counts, Viscounts, Lords and most of the full gamut of the male elite, had mistresses or conducted extra martial affairs with members of the opposite sex and the same sex. Those of the heterosexual variety resulted in the birth of many children and these children were denied the right to inherit from their father.

Sometimes however, the father recognised or acknowledged his parentage thus giving his child some inheritance rights and on occasion that could amount to full inheritance. In the case of royalty, full rights were seldom granted but many recognised children got titles, elevating their social status, but seldom were they elevated to the full status of royalty. William I of England was officially known as William the Bastard, the surname was not an insult then like it is today.

The surname Fitzroy literally translates as ‘son of the king’ and one of the illegitimate sons of Henry VIII was acknowledged by him and named Henry FitzRoy. He was given the title of Duke of Richmond and Somerset.[5] He was the older half-brother of Queen Elizabeth I and had his birth status been legitimate, he would have been King of England.

The laws on illegitimacy are deeply engrained in British law and have existed for centuries. It is extraordinary that a seemingly educated man like Varadkar is steadfastly unaware of the basic facts of history.

The concept of illegitimacy did not start in 1931 and the Irish law was written — as many are today, with intellectual laziness — copied from a British law of 1926. Had Leo bothered to look up the Irish statute book, he might have noticed that the 1931 Act set out to modify the ‘Legitimacy Declaration Act of 1868’, introduced when Ireland was ruled directly from Britain. That reveals yet another buffoonish gaff when Leo went on to state that the 1931 law was ‘very much guided by the Catholic social teaching of the day’. Really! Using Leo’s brand of logic, responsibility must lie with protestant social teaching, as the British establishment have a centuries old culture which is hostile and anti-Catholic. There is no chance in hell that the British would introduce laws based on Catholic social teaching.

It is a lie to suggest that illegitimacy was enshrined in law by the Irish in 1931. It is a lie to suggest that the Act was based on Catholic social teaching. Stirring up hatred of Catholics using lies would be a hate crime in most functioning democracies.

Leo also declared us that the report shows that Ireland had a ‘deeply misogynistic culture’. However, that again is a lie misrepresenting the report and ignoring totally the stories of former residents who were complimentary of their treatment. The commission’s final report contains only one mention of the word ‘misogyny’ and this is a repeat of a lie fabricated by feminist historian, Lindsay Earner-Byrne. She claimed that the Minister of Justice James Fitzgerald Kenney ‘presented a disturbingly misogynistic approach to welfare’, presenting the unmarried mother as ‘temptress and blackmailer’.[6][7] In actual fact the parliamentary debate from 1930 was a philogynistic attempt to give unmarried mothers the right to claim financial maintenance from the putative father. The comments relating to ‘temptress and blackmailer’ were addressing issues surrounding how the law could be abused by such persons, and what safeguards could be built into the law.  There was absolutely no hint in his comments that he was applying a pejorative label to all unmarried mothers. Earner-Byrne’s lie was never checked for veracity by the commission and others and is indicative of poor-quality analysis and poor university educational standards which currently pervades through Irish society.

In reality Irish society was philogynous — it loved and respected women — it gave them rights and protected them; rights men did not enjoy. Unlike in the United Kingdom, women got the vote on the same basis as men, were constitutionally protected from being forced by poverty to do work harmful to their health, which they were forced to do under British rule. It gave women the right to opt out of jury service and much more.

In another part, Varadkar broadcasts to the nation that children who were in mother and baby homes and those who were fostered out that ‘their education [was] unimportant’. Leo obviously has no memory of the ‘truancy Garda’, a policeman or policewoman tasked with finding children who were frequently absent from school.[8] Hundreds if not thousands of parents and guardians found themselves before the courts to explain such absences. Many received fines or were imprisoned. Leo of course never looked up the law to find the School Attendance Act, 1926,[9] nor did he read the part of the commission report which stated that only the Tuam Children’s Home kept children of school going age and all those who were fit to attend school, did so.

Leo’s laziness is abundantly evident in his apology, it suggests that he never read the final report of the commission — three thousand pages is hard enough to get through, even harder when it is full of complex history. He may have read parts, but he managed to miss entirely, all the evidence which would have contradicted his prejudices. His expectation to get away with lies and misrepresentation suggests that he likes to rev the engine to make noise, but he doesn’t bother to press the clutch pedal to put his brain into first gear.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying that; ‘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.’ The Irish parliamentary system is not currently blessed with even a few people with such basic capabilities and Leo stands as the very exemplar.

People from Dublin, like Leo are called Jackeens, short for Union Jackeen. The slang term is taken from the British flag and is indicative of a culture within sections of Irish society which has a sneering contempt for all things Irish. The attitude is still today pervasive in Dublin society and elsewhere in the country. West Brits and Shoneens are among the other terms, our ancestors used for Irish people who are overly enamoured by the British, who they see as their superiors. It is a mechanism of illusory social climbing achieved by creating a psychological and snobbish affinity with their colonial masters — adopting their racial prejudices — to denigrate their fellow Irish citizens. Putting people down elevates the denigrator and creates a false sense of superiority. Superior beings assume themselves to have the right to sneer at their fellow Irish people — ‘self-loathing’ is the term often used by social researchers today. It is so deeply engrained in society that it often goes unrecognised, which is perhaps just a well for those on the receiving end.

When Leo sneered at the entire Irish nation, his opinion was nothing more than a mindless expression of the prejudices of his social environment. However, using lies which are easily disprovable to back up his sneer, shows that if he has innate intelligence, he is fearful of expending energy by using it. Moreover, he is completely ignorant of Irish history and so empowers the barstool leprechauns to install their false history in the vast empty space between his ears.

There is no shame on Irish society other than to have elected a parliament of dolts, who have not got the wit nor the inclination to acquire a half decent standard education. A parliament full of liars like Leo Varadkar who have no interest in the truth, nor have they the interests of the people at heart.

The international financial crash of 2008 caused Ireland to suffer from a political inversion — a phenomenon where the dumbest in society rise to the top.

EJ

Footnotes

[1] As part of the coalition deal, Micheál Martin steps down and Leo Varadkar takes over as Taoiseach on 15 December 2022

[2] Oireachtas, ‘Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes’.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Government of Ireland, Legitimacy Act, 1931.

[5] Beauclerk-Dewar and Powell, Royal Bastards.

[6] Commission of Investigation, ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’ § 9.96.

[7] Oireachtas, ‘Affiliation Orders Bill, 1929’.

[8] O’Connor, ‘Truancy Officer System Is “Not Properly Funded”’.

[9] Government of Ireland, School Attendance Act, 1926.

References

Beauclerk-Dewar, Peter, and Roger Powell. Royal Bastards: Illegitimate Children of the British Royal Family. The History Press, 2011.

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

Government of Ireland. Legitimacy Act, 1931, Pub. L. No. Number 13 of 1931 (1931). https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1931/act/13/enacted/en/print.html.

———. School Attendance Act, 1926, Pub. L. No. Number 17 of 1926 (1926). https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1926/act/17/enacted/en/.

O’Connor, Alison. ‘Truancy Officer System Is “Not Properly Funded”’. Irish Independent. 26 August 2003. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/truancy-officer-system-is-not-properly-funded-25936219.html.

Oireachtas, Houses of the. ‘Dáil Éireann Debate – Vol. 35 No. 7 Illegitimate Children (Affiliation Orders) Bill, 1929—From the Seanad. – Seanad Amendments’. Tithe an Oireachtais, 11 June 1930. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1930-06-11/30/.

———. ‘Dáil Éireann Debate – Vol. 1003 No. 1’. Tithe an Oireachtais, 13 January 2021. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/2021-01-13/10.

 

Latest -Press Watch, MABH

Cost of mother and baby homes compensation scheme will exceed €1bn

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Irish taxpayers are being forced to pay massive a compensation bill — costing each worker an average of €355 — for supposed historic abuse that never happened. Government officials estimate that the compensation scheme will have a final cost €800 million. However, these are probably the same people who estimated that the Ryan Commission would cost €2.5 million, but it ended up costing the taxpayer c. €82 million. A massive under estimation, but it was dwarfed by the final bill.

The Ryan commission investigated abuse at industrial schools, awarded €970 million in compensation, spent a further €176 million on health, housing, educational and counselling services, incurred a legal bill of €192.9 million, while the running of the commission itself cost €82 million, giving a grand total of near one and a half billion Euro (€1.43 billion). Consequently, the cost to every single worker in Ireland was €700 each on average.

The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes stated in its final report that ‘there is no evidence of the sort of gross abuse that occurred in industrial schools’. The Irish, being Irish, chose to ignore the evidence, commission reports and plain old common-sense. The scandal promoters have had the luck of the devil to pursue their agenda for compo at a time, when we have in situ, probably the most inept government in the history of the nation. It seeks to punish the citizens of the country for historical events that never happened. Imagine working hard, paying tax and the government spending it foolishly. Perish such thoughts.

 

 

EJ

Latest -Press Watch, MABH

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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‘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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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.

 

Latest -Press Watch

Book Launch – Online – Friday 2nd April 2021 8pm

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The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence

The mother and baby homes scandal is but one example of the Irish abuse of history with many of its falsities guarded from public view. All historical debates have historians on at least two sides, but Irish historical scandals are remarkable for the lack of dissenting historians, who have been silenced or are totally disinterested in the subject. The other side of the story has not been told until now.

The book takes an empirical look at the mother and baby homes scandal and others in what the author claims to be Ireland’s greatest history scandal. A scandal founded upon false allegations, bad history and incompetent statistical interpretation. It drew its oxygen from populism, cultural biases and the prospect of compensation, and it grew into a triumph for ignorance. Babies were not starved to death by religious women, women were not banned from sitting on juries, nor were they banned from doing work ‘unsuited to their sex’ nor did the state create a ‘brutal carceral’ system to confine wayward women. The underlying causes of the mother and baby homes scandal have been allowed to fester for decades due to a breakdown in the quality control systems in academic history. The aim of the book is to apply the quality control methods which should have been in use and seek to discover the reasons for their failure.

Published in March 2021, it is the first book to be released critiquing the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes released two months earlier. The commission have done a good job in places but have made significant blunders through a lack of knowledge of statistical interpretation, they had no more than an amateur knowledge of vintage medicine, relied on non-fact checked academic historical writing and of course, presentism. That is interpreting the past through the eyes of today.

Written for a general audience, the book goes in search of the causes and finds the evidence to present to readers in order to restore some balance and common sense to Irish history.

Eugene Jordan is an expert in the field of historical medicine and science. He holds degrees in science, psychology, history and a master’s degree in information technology. His Facebook blog on Irish Medieval History has over 230,000 followers and is still growing. Over the years, he has published many articles, including lessons for historians in the Tuam Mother and Baby Homes Scandal, published by the Federation of Local History Societies in 2018. He is the Vice Chair of Moycullen Heritage, past president of one of Ireland’s oldest academic heritage societies, Galway Archaeological and Historical Society and former chair of the city’s Civic Trust. He continues to give public lectures on diverse topics, from the science behind Formula One Racing to the meaning of Irish place names.

The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence is published by Tafannóir Press. tafannoirpress@gmail.com The book will be available for purchase online, at a special launch price of €20 including postage, at falsehistory.ie and as an eBook from Google Play Books.

The book launch will be held online using Zoom and will consist of a short presentation by the author, followed by a question and answers session. Questions can be asked in person or by using Zoom text messaging. The presentation video will be available shortly after on the Irish History Facebook Page, @trueirishhistory, and also on falsehistory.ie

The book launch event takes place online using Zoom at 8pm Friday 2nd April. Places can be booked using Eventbrite. A link will be sent to all who have registered which can be clicked on to access the event.

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/book-launch-the-irish-attack-on-christianity-the-case-for-the-defence-tickets-148169953319

 

The printed version of the book is available from.

https://falsehistory.ie/product/the-irish-attack-on-christianity/

Use this discount code and get the book including postage for €20.00 or €22.00 shipped internationally€8.00 off the recommended retail price. Code: launch2021

 

Available also as in eBook format from Google Play Books

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Eugene_Jordan_The_Irish_Attack_on_Christianity_The?id=lHcjEAAAQBAJ

Now available with 60% off as a special book launch price. Now €9.99 Hurry this is limited time offer.

Cluirchaun Syndrome

Plastered and legless – Her friends have no sympathy!

‘I woke up the next day in a guy’s house covered in bruises’
Ireland’s culture of putting men first is particularly odious in the context of sexual violence

A classic of the genre – At first glance, this appears to be a troubling story of a woman, Paula Gahan, now a comedian living in London, who was, or thinks she was sexually assaulted after going on a major alcohol bender. However, what it chiefly noticeable about the article is the Irish anti-Irish prejudice of which the author is unaware of. First, she attacks her own mother for putting men first at the dinner table and extrapolates from this woman’s behaviour to that all Irish women who are in the habit of putting men first. The article is a typical sneer at all things Irish and the Irish themselves and by an emigrant who now lives in London among ‘superior’ beings. She ends her article by saying she never wants to go back to Ireland and never even wants to think of it. This quite a common practice among the Irish both at home and abroad. The Irish abroad can think that they belong to a new nation and that the sneers do not apply to them but the Irish at home are always sneering at the Irish and think that their sneers do not apply to them, but they do. That is why begrudgery and Cluirchaun Syndrome are self-hate prejudices. the Irish Times has been running a series of articles about the Irish diaspora abroad and in quite a few of these articles, it is common to find them sneering at or denigrating their homeland and their own people.

Back to Gahan’s night in question, she tells us she got so comatose from the drink that she woke up in a guy’s house covered in bruises. Obviously, she was legless and fell quite a few times but had no memory of how it happened. She does not clearly state what happened, because she has no memory of that night but assumes that she had sex with the guy. She also intimated that it was without her consent but we have no way of knowing what the circumstances were. Sometime afterward she confided in a friend and found no sympathy, dismissed with the phrase “you knew what you were doing”. The friend is saying directly that she knew she was going back to the guy’s place.

There are a number of threads in this story that have been wound into one, and the second is the #metoo movement which started post the Harvey Weinstein scandal and has inspired some women to see themselves as victims and court publicity. The sexual activity may have not been consensual or the other party could have believed that it was consensual but we will never know nor will a court of law be able to decide. Moreover, the whole case has been ruined by the friend who said: “you knew what you were doing”, yet she expects us all to take the blame for her behaviour.

The reality is very different from Gahan’s perceptions, Ireland was always and remains largely a philogynous society. it has only been in recent times, through the malevolence of certain feminists, that genuine history has been turned on its head. btw if you have to look up the meaning of philogynous, it proves my point.

EJ

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