Irish ‘Peace’ Activists and Gaza

The hype and hysteria last week surrounding the final days of the journey of the Rachel Corrie, the "Irish" aid ship for Gaza, was extraordinary.

After what had happened a few days earlier to the Turkish aid ship, a confrontation in which nine of those on board had died, there was alarm at all levels about the possibility of a repeat performance by the Israeli special forces.

Thankfully, the journey of the Rachel Corrie ended without anyone getting hurt, and it's worthwhile now looking back at exactly what went on.

First of all, although the aid it was carrying came from Ireland, the ship is owned by a Malaysian group. So it's not Irish.

Apart from ownership, the continual reference in the international media last week to the "Irish aid ship" gave the impression that the ship had the support of everyone in Ireland, that the aid on board had been paid for by some kind of national collection in Ireland, or even that the ship had the approval of the Irish government.

None of this is correct, although it is true that there is a great deal of sympathy in Ireland for the plight of the Palestinians.

It's also true that there is a counterbalancing dislike here for Hamas, perhaps because we know something about terror campaigns. As one commentator here put it last weekend, Hamas is worse than the IRA, and what they have done to Gaza is a "democratic" nightmare.

So the implication in the repeated media references to "the Irish aid ship" last week (like on CBS News) was seriously misleading.

Equally wrong is any assumption that the people on board "the Irish aid ship" were representative of Ireland or the Irish people. They may have been well meaning, but they don't represent anyone but themselves and the action groups they belong to.

With some exceptions, like Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who won a Nobel Prize in 1976 as one of the Peace People, and Irish American Denis Halliday, former UN assistant secretary general, the 15 to 20 Irish on the Rachel Corrie, the Turkish ship and smaller boats in the flotilla, were the kind of young activists who make a career out of this sort of thing.

The same faces reappear, whether it's on the protest at U.S. troops landing at Shannon, or the Shell to Sea campaign to keep the gas refinery miles offshore, or other anti-U.S. or anti-capitalist causes beloved of the liberal left.

One of the Irish on the flotilla, for example, Fiachra O Luain from Donegal, is a more or less full-time political activist who was involved in the protest over the U.S. military using Shannon Airport. Another of the Irish, Fintan Lane, is a left wing academic who has been active and vocal on a number of issues here.

The names of two of the Irish involved in the flotilla sounded a little different, Isam Bin Ali and Al Mahdi al Harati. In fact both are Libyans who have become naturalized Irish citizens.

Now is it just me, or does anyone else think that people who are given citizenship here should be spending their time working hard to contribute to the Irish state instead of taking it on themselves to go on a lengthy voyage to make a political point supposedly on behalf of the Irish people?

That, of course, was the whole purpose of this flotilla. It wasn't really about delivering aid.

It was about creating a confrontation, grabbing international media attention and putting pressure on the Israelis to end the blockade of Gaza. It was about scoring a political point.

The extremely violent behavior of the "peace activists" on the Turkish ship who attacked the Israeli commandos was mainly to blame for the subsequent fighting which left nine of them dead.

It's quite clear now that the commandos were not expecting violence on this scale (previous ships had been boarded without much trouble) and so they were taken by surprise.

Everyone knew that the Israelis had not allowed any ship to break the blockade, and the presumption by the Israelis was that this crew, like others, would submit to being boarded and would allow their aid to go to Gaza via Israel.

When the Israeli commandos were attacked after the boarding -- and the film and still pictures from the ship clearly show this happening -- they were unprepared for dealing with activists who were swinging metal bars and other weapons.

Outnumbered and under severe pressure, some of the commandos over-reacted and started shooting at close range. When soldiers -- any soldiers -- are attacked with that level of ferocity that is how they react.

The outcry which followed focused all attention on the Rachel Corrie, and the Irish government voiced its concern about what might happen and worked out a compromise deal with the Israeli government.

Under this deal the Rachel Corrie would dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod, close to Gaza, and land its supplies. The aid would be inspected under the supervision of UN and Irish Aid officials.

The entire cargo, including an estimated 550 tons of cement, would then be taken by road into Gaza, with two people from the Rachel Corrie monitoring it all the way.

By any standard this was a fair compromise and probably took the Irish government some time to negotiate. But it was rejected out of hand by those on board the Rachel Corrie.

Halliday was quite open about the reason. "While humanitarian assistance is one of the two targets of our mission, the second is to break the siege, the stranglehold of Israel over Gaza, and by voluntarily avoiding Gaza and going to Israel that would not be done," he said.

So getting the aid in was less important than provoking a confrontation that would attract international media attention. Probably at that point, the Rachel Corrie lost the sympathy of most Irish people. It was boarded, there was no resistance, and it was brought to Ashdod.

Although there was a protest meeting in Dublin last weekend, less than 1,000 people turned up.

And when the five Irish who were on the Rachel Corrie arrived back in Dublin on Monday, only a handful of people were there to meet them, although this did not stop the media referring to their "heroes' welcome".

Overall, the feeling here is that the Israelis are their own worst enemy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should write a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

But as one Israeli supporter here wrote in a letter to a newspaper, everyone else can make mistakes and take chances, but Israel has only to be wrong once and it is in deep trouble. It is surrounded by hostile states, almost at permanent war with Syria and only a short rocket flight from Iran which is completing its nuclear program and wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

It only has to be wrong once. It won't get a second chance.

Hamas is not interested in a negotiated settlement and co-existence. That's why it keeps up its rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza.

It may have been elected, but it has its own ideas about democracy. It has murdered most of the Fatah leaders who were its rivals, it imposes its fundamentalist views on the people and it deals savagely with any opposition. Its only interest is the destruction of Israel.

Faced with this, the Israelis in return want to destroy Hamas. Their method is the collective punishment of the Palestinian people for electing Hamas, aimed at turning them against the Hamas leaders.

Hence the very restrictive blockade of Gaza, which has now been there for three years. It's harsh, it's cruel and it makes the lives of ordinary Palestinians very primitive.

It even seems ridiculous. Cement and metal pipes, for example, are on the aid banned list.

But as the Israelis point out, cement can be used for making bunkers as well as rebuilding schools, and metal piping is used to make the rockets that still fly into Israel from Gaza.

It's a mess. You can't blame the Israelis for wanting security and a respite from the rockets. And you can't but be sorry for the ordinary Palestinians who suffer so much. Whether "peace activists" like those who attacked the Israeli commandos boarding the Turkish ship have anything to contribute is far from certain. Irish or not.

Obama's Irish Roots: The Story of America

When it was first revealed a couple of years ago, like most people here I took the claim that Barack Obama's ancestors could be traced back to the village of Moneygall in Co. Offaly with a grain of salt. Not another American president with roots in an Irish cottage!


But it soon became clear that this was for real. A detailed family tree could be followed, generation by generation, from Obama's mother all the way back to the Kearneys in Moneygall. The births of the same Kearneys who went to America at the end of the 18th century are there in the local church registry books in Moneygall. The link is real and can be traced all the way down to the present day.


But up to now there has not been that much information about what happened in between. What exactly happened to the Kearneys who went to America at the end of the 18th century? Where did they and their children and grandchildren go, and what did they do?

Those questions are answered in detail in a new book by author Stephen MacDonogh, the founder of the Brandon Press publishing house in Kerry, which was published in Ireland this week. The book is called Barack Obama -- The Road from Moneygall and it tells the extraordinary story of the Kearneys in America in exhaustive detail for the first time. (The book will be published in America in November, although you could order it on line immediately from www.eason.ie.)

I got an advance copy a few weeks ago, and it is a compelling read. 
What MacDonogh, who spent months researching the book, has come up with is endlessly fascinating, a story that begins in the pioneering days when immigrants traveled by horse drawn wagon and river boat into the wild frontier to clear and settle the land and carve out the America we know today. 


The first to go was Thomas Kearney from Moneygall who was born in 1765, emigrated probably in the 1780s and arrived in the port of Baltimore, where he got married in 1791 (the first written record of Obama's Irish ancestral family in America). 

Thomas is listed in the Baltimore Directory for 1800 as a carpenter, and he lived on or beside Granby Street in the Inner Harbor, just around the corner from the now historic Flag House.

Some time later Thomas moved on, traveling a few hundred miles on the so-called Wilderness Road into the frontier. He settled in a wild, densely forested valley in what would eventually become the state of Ohio.


In the following years several of his relatives from Moneygall followed him to this fertile Scioto Valley area in Ohio, and to this day their graves are visible in small local cemeteries. They were among the first settlers in Ohio.

Probably the most evocative pictures in MacDonogh's book are of the Kearney gravestones in Compton Cemetery in a township called Wayne, in Fayette County, Ohio.

One of the best preserved gravestones there, with inscription still legible, is that of another Thomas Kearney, a nephew of the original emigrant.

The inscription on the gravestone tells us that this younger Thomas was born in the King's County (Offaly) in 1800, and died in Ohio in 1845. Another gravestone is that of Thomas's brother Francis who had also followed his uncle to America.

Francis died in Ohio in 1848, and in his will he left some land to another brother, Joseph, who was still back in Moneygall, on condition that he come out to Ohio to work it. It was "a tract of land lying in Ross County, on the waters of North Fork of Paint Creek." 


Joseph did so in 1849 and was followed a year later by his son Fulmouth, who was then 18 or 19, and the rest of Joseph's family from Moneygall.

Fulmouth (the unusual Christian name came from his mother's family) worked as a farm laborer in the Scioto Valley and in 1852 married a girl in Fayette County and built a house on Dogtown Road, not far from Compton Cemetery.

Fulmouth was still working as a laborer 15 years after he had arrived in Ohio and in 1865 he, like many others, pushed further on into the wilderness in search of land, settling in Indiana. By now he had a family, and one of his daughters was Mary Ann Kearney who was born in 1869. 


Mary Ann eventually married a man called Jacob Dunham. Obama's mother's name was Dunham and Mary Ann Kearney, who lived until 1936, was her great grandmother. So Joseph Kearney from Moneygall, Fulmouth's father, was Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather. 


From the time Mary Ann marries Jacob Dunham, the story follows the Dunham name and moves on as the post-pioneer era begins and towns and industries start to spread. 

What makes this book so fascinating is not just the way it brings Obama's Irish ancestors to life.

This is not just the story of one family, it's the story of how America was made, starting before the American Revolution and following the creation of the country by the pioneers who moved out from the narrow tamed areas along the east coast into the vast frontier to the west to settle the land.

It's a story of hardship, courage and great adventure. The Kearneys were a part of that great story.

Not only were they among the first settlers of Ohio, they were pioneers in Indiana and Kansas, even taking part in the great land rush of Oklahoma. 


Almost in passing, the story also brings up many facts about Irish and American history that are often forgotten, especially here in Ireland.

Although the assumption is often made here that nearly all Irish emigrants to America were Catholic, the Kearneys were Protestant. In fact when Thomas Kearney was born a quarter of the population of Ireland (then an undivided island) was Protestant, and in cities and towns this went up to 30-40%.

Up to half a million Irish Protestants emigrated to America in the same decades as the Kearneys and played a pivotal role in the creation of the new nation. More Irishmen (nine) signed the Declaration of Independence than any other ethnic group, and all but one of them were Protestant.

The main Catholic wave of emigration came later, in the decades just before and then in huge numbers after the famine. Many of the Protestant settlers were almost as poor as the Catholics who followed them. Thousands of them from Ulster who were admirers of King Billy (William of Orange) settled in the Appalachian Mountains and became known as the Billy Boys of the Hills, or Hillbillies. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were from the same Protestant Irish stock. 


As MacDonogh points out, our habit today of referring to John F. Kennedy as the first Irish American president is wrong. He was the first Catholic, but at least eight Presidents before him were Protestant Irish, including the iconic Andrew Jackson (both of whose parents were Irish).

The history of the Kearney family in Ireland is also an instructive window into the past here. As well as the Moneygall Kearneys there was a Dublin branch of the family which was highly successful, including a John Kearney who was provost of Trinity College Dublin and later bishop of Ossory, and a Michael Kearney who was a businessman and prominent in the Dublin city politics of the day. 


The fortunes of the Dublin part of the family were founded on the wig making trade, a huge business at the time because professional people wore wigs instead of washing their hair with water (which was believed to spread disease). Wigs were also worn by the gentry and the aristocracy.

But the Act of Union in 1800 and the transfer of all official business to London killed the trade in Dublin.


So Obama has wigmakers and bishops among his Irish ancestors, as well as pioneers who made America.

When the wig business in Dublin collapsed, the Kearneys took up their other trade, shoe-making, and some went back to Moneygall. But their best years seemed to be over. 

The Kearneys were no longer prospering, and due to this and the worsening situation in the country in the years leading up to the Famine, some of them started to look elsewhere. America, where Thomas had already settled, beckoned.

America, where 160 years after Joseph Kearney arrived as an immigrant in 1849 to join his uncle Thomas, his great great great great grandson became president. What an amazing journey for one family in just 160 years ... the story of America.

If Ronan Keating divorces, will he join broke kids on the block?

It's not a question that keeps me awake at night -- and I'll explain why in a minute -- but how much should a wife get when she divorces her husband? Half of everything? Or only half of what she helped him earn?

The question is prompted by the blanket coverage given in Ireland over the past few days to the separation of Ronan Keating, the lead singer of the original Irish boyband Boyzone, and his wife Yvonne Connolly, a former model.

Keating, who ironically has been striving for years to carve out a hard rocker image for himself but always looked like an altar boy, may have finally got what he wanted. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

Keating had secretly been doing the naughty with one of the dancers in the recent Boyzone reunited tour of Britain. When he was off playing golf last week, his wife discovered a mobile phone in his things that she did not know about.

Of course she could not resist the temptation to have a look through the messages. As partners do. And there it all was, a steamy other life.

Or at least that is what we were told by the pages and pages of coverage in the papers here last weekend. Keating may have got his philandering rocker image at last, although he spoiled it straight away by begging for forgiveness.

She threw him out anyway. And not out of just any old house, but out of the palatial modern mansion they own in a gated community of massive mansions in Malahide, an upmarket seaside town north of Dublin.

It's called Abbington (these naff, neo-classical developments always have slightly British names) and it's a small development of huge houses that cost at least two or three million each. It's mockingly referred to in the Irish media as millionaire's row.

Given that the media here are sick to death of writing about our economic problems (last week it was the threat to the euro and how the economic paranoia across Europe is hitting Ireland), they are only too happy to write about poor Keating for a little light relief.

There's nothing new in that. One of the less edifying aspects of the boom in Ireland was the way the media here created a celebrity circuit, comprising minor TV personalities, musicians, models, property developers and so on.

It was very much a B- or C-list celeb circuit and given the size of the country, the same faces cropped up in the gossip pages all the time. It was always faintly ridiculous because the "stars" were people who had been to the same school as yourself, or used to go to the same pubs as everyone else before they were turned into celebs by the media. It was all part of the boom.

So it was just like the old boom days here at the weekend. The country may be going down the drain, but all the media were interested in was the collapse (so far) of Keating's marriage. That and how much a divorce is likely to cost him.

According to "close friends" of the couple, there is still a chance the marriage can be saved. Keating has cancelled all his Boyzone stuff this week to spend time in Dublin to try to work it out with his wife.
But the cost of a possible divorce is still the subject of fascination here, with one paper saying the end of their 12-year marriage would mean "the biggest divorce payout in Irish showbiz history."

The Sunday Independent estimated Keating’s personal fortune at close to ***12 million, and said he would lose two-thirds of that in a divorce settlement.

As you probably know, divorce is something relatively new in Holy Catholic Ireland, having only come into law here in the mid-1990s. So we're still getting used to it and still getting our heads around things like alimony, the division of assets, who gets the family home, access to children and so on.

Because the court decisions in divorce cases are confidential, there has been very little reportage of what is happening. But the law generally is similar to the situation in the U.S. and the U.K. where the assets are divided equally and alimony or maintenance and child support are part of the deal. The main difference here is that people who want to get divorced have to be living apart for at least four years.

The ban on divorce in Ireland had been in de Valera's 1937 Constitution, so it had been part of our culture for 60 years when it was lifted by a referendum in 1995. I remember that referendum debate well (and the previous failed one in the 1980s) and the fears expressed by so many people.

One of those fears was that a farmer who was divorced by his wife could lose the land that had been in his family for generations. It was emotive stuff and the arguments for and against were fierce. But in the end the referendum was carried, largely due to the vote in urban areas.

Maintenance and who gets what has remained an emotive topic here, however. There have been bitter fathers on phone-in radio shows complaining that they have lost the family home, have very heavy maintenance payments set by the courts which barely leaves them enough to live on in a cheap rented apartment, and are allowed only minimal contact with their kids.

They can't have another permanent relationship because they can't afford it. I heard one man in this situation break down and weep on radio a couple of years ago.

One in five or six marriages here now ends in divorce, so we're catching up on other countries. With the end of the boom here and many people in financial trouble, the pressure on divorcing couples is greater than ever now. Some divorcing couples end up sharing the family home because the property collapse means it can't be sold.

In most divorces here between ordinary people, especially in cases where there are young children and a wife who either stays at home to look after the kids or works only part-time outside the home, the husband ends up carrying a very heavy burden. And that's how it must be, since the kids have to come first in these situations.

But the situation gets more complicated the more money there is involved. Why should Yvonne Keating get more than half the wealth that her husband has accumulated?

She didn't write the songs, manage the band, sing backing vocals on tour (maybe she should have!) or do anything else that built up the Boyzone fortune that I can see. Should she be allowed to keep the Abbington mansion just because she and the three kids are used to living there?
Why would a comfortable but slightly less expensive home outside millionaire's row not do? How much is a reasonable settlement in such cases?

One accepts the need to provide generously for the children's welfare and for support for the wife if she is looking after the kids full-time, but why must it go beyond that, and for how long?

A more extreme case which raises similar issues is that of Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal who is divorcing his wife Justine, a novelist. They live in California, which means that she is entitled to half his billions, even though as a writer she probably knows as little as I do about computers and the intricacies of secure Internet payments. It's all over the Internet at the moment if you want to look them up.

Does she really need that much to bring up their kids? And why does she deserve to get it? What is the logic of this legal presumption? I'm just asking!

In my own case, I happen to be married to a woman who now earns twice what I do (she's in the fashion business), which just makes up for all the years I earned twice as much as she did when she was a young designer. If we divorced we would, I hope, divide what we have on a fair basis. And both look after the kids.

But if I had earned a few hundred million writing thrillers I'm not sure I would be happy to share it 50/50. I don't cut cloth. She doesn't pound the keyboard. So I just don't see the logic.

One of the few glimpses of the wronged wife that the press pack outside the Keating mansion got at the weekend happened when a van pulled up outside and Yvonne emerged from the house. The van doors were opened and Yvonne's two newly-groomed Bernese mountain dogs leapt out into her arms. They were just back from the dog groomer.

And you know how much that costs. Need I say more?

Irish take to the streets in angry protests

There was a protest outside the Dail (Parliament) last week against the cuts in government spending.

There's nothing unusual in that because protest marches to the Dail are a time honored part of Irish democracy. When people here are upset with the government of the day about something they march on the Dail, make angry speeches and then go off to the pub for a pint or go home to watch their protest on the nightly news.

Last week's protest march through the center of Dublin ending outside the Dail seemed to be the same, with the protesters shouting angry slogans and waving banners comparing the way the state is spending billions propping up our bust banks with the severe cuts it is making in the services given to ordinary people, many of whom are out of work and struggling.

As I said, protests like this are not unusual, and certainly many people here are extremely angry about the current situation. But this protest was not the same.

In fact it was very different, because it ended in violent clashes between the protestors and the Gardai (police) lined up outside the gates of the Dail. The protestors attempted to storm the gates and fight their way inside the Dail. The Gardai drew their batons and fought back.

It wasn't that serious and it didn't last very long, but it wasn't pretty. Suddenly it seemed like the kind of anti-cutback street fighting we have seen in Athens over the past few weeks had arrived in Dublin.

There was an element of militancy and viciousness in the protest here last week that was new. The fighting, especially since it was right outside the Dail, looked really bad in the newspaper pictures the next morning.

The faces of the protestors in the pictures were contorted in hatred as they attacked the Gardai, something that most Irish people find deeply offensive because there is huge respect here for our police.

It was vicious. But it would not be accurate to say that it was the start of our Big Fat Greek Revolution.

While parts of Athens were in flames last week, there were only a few hundred on the protest march in Dublin, and only a few dozen of those were involved in the violence. And it soon became clear that this was a calculated tactic by the usual suspects.

Up front doing the kicking and punching were Republican hardmen and members of the miniscule Socialist Workers Party (some of whom have never worked a day in their lives!). Pushing and shouting at the back were some of the People Before Profit Alliance and other looney left groups, including a new one called Eirigi (which is Irish for Rise Up).

These groups are a sort of throwback to the sixties when a lot of us believed in revolution, and that undermining the capitalist system would lead to a socialist workers paradise. Most of us have grown up since then and realized that things are a bit more complicated than that -- and also that communism could be even more corrupt than capitalism. But all that seems to have passed these people by.

Somehow they think that attacking innocent Gardai will cure the current crisis (which is ironic since the Gardai are unhappy about the cuts in the pay they and other state workers are suffering).

The protestors last week were demanding an end to cuts in government spending and jobs for everyone. And they called for a mass campaign of civil disobedience and mass protests to force the government to change its policy of cutting back to balance the budget.

Wouldn't it be great if it was that simple? We could all protest for a few days, and then get jobs, housing, the best government services and so on ... and not have to pay any more tax to achieve this nirvana.

Back in the real world, most people here now realize that governments can't do things for free. Governments are not very good at creating jobs or providing free housing.

They can only do these things at enormous cost, and in the end someone always has to pay, either taxpayers or the foreign money markets that give us loans.

And that's our problem. We're spending ****50 billion a year and getting ****30 billion in tax revenue. The rest has to be borrowed, and the money markets don't want to lend us any more.

As I've said here before, the Irish government has not run out of compassion. It has run out of money.

We are currently running a budget deficit of 14.3% of national income which is almost five times the European Union's limit -- we're worse than Greece!
But we have promised to bring it below the 3% limit of national income by 2014. To do this we have agreed to cut spending and push up taxes so that our deficit will be reduced by ****16 billion by 2014.

Last year in the budget for 2010, the government pushed through ***4 billion worth of savings. In the budget this December another ***3 billion euro in savings has to be found.

In preparation for this, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan last week told his fellow ministers to start making lists in their departments of where new cuts can be made. They have two weeks from today to make their proposals for more cuts, otherwise he will do it for them.

So it's going to get a lot worse for all of us before it gets any better. And we can expect a lot more protests from the looney tunes outside the Dail.

Because of the huge damage done to the stability of the euro by the overspending and borrowing by some member countries (like Greece and Ireland), the European Commission has now said that in future the annual budgets in countries in the euro zone will have to be approved by the commission before they are presented to national parliaments.

This led to an outcry here last week, with some people complaining we were losing our sovereignty to Brussels. But the fact is that it may be the only way to get some countries to behave sensibly.

And given that it is largely the taxpayers of Germany who are carrying the can for the new ****750 billion euro emergency fund to help European economies that get into trouble, one can't blame them for wanting some reassurance.

The reason all this is necessary goes back to the euro, which ambitiously stitched together in a single currency a range of countries whose economies were at very different stages of development. Political and economic convergence were supposed to make it all work, and massive transfers of money in structural funds were used to help the slow nations catch up.

But it's only been partly successful. Germany makes Mercedes cars.
What does Greece make? The answer is very little. And Ireland is not much better.

The answer to the problem Ireland -- and the other countries in Europe with weak economies and big deficits -- faces is being able to answer that question. What do you make?

Being able to answer that question in the future will mean developing a new entrepreneurial spirit among young people here. We have the brains and the education, but too many of our young people want to be marketing assistants or stylists or lawyers or (God forbid) journalists, and not enough of them want to start their own businesses and create products that will sell globally.

Instead of protesting and shouting Give Us a Freakin Job (like in America last week) or Give Us a Freakin Home, our young people need to be innovating and creating their own futures themselves.

There's no mystery involved. You don't have to be part of a giant corporation.

You have to identify products that are needed and then work cheaper and faster than the competition. That's how China does it, with millions of small businesses that make the products we all buy. That's what we -- and young people in America -- need to do.

Because it's not just Ireland, or the U.K., or some weak European countries, that have to stop running enormous budget deficits and living on borrowed money. America is facing the biggest problem of all.

The Irish teenage screwdriver killer

One of the most disturbing cases ever to be heard by an Irish court came to a conclusion last week when a Dublin teenager called David Curran was given a life sentence for the brutal murder of two Polish men.

The two Poles, Pawel Kalite, 30, and Marius Szwajkos, 29, were both stabbed in the head with a screwdriver by Curran two years ago when he was 17. Despite the fact that Curran (pictured above, right) was just a kid, he was so hyped up on drink and drugs at the time that he was able to kill both men in a few seconds.

The ferocity of the attack was truly shocking and has led many people here to wonder how Irish society can produce a twisted, vicious youngster capable of such barbarism.

It happened in February 2008, in the Drimnagh area of Dublin, one of the old blue collar parts of the city where there are some trouble spots, but nothing like the real problem areas in the desolate new suburbs to the north and west of the city.

The two Polish men, both mechanics, were living in a rented house in the area and working in a small local garage. Their employer said that they were quiet, decent men who were good workers.

It was while on the way back to the house after a hard day's work (even though it was a Saturday) that Kalite called into a takeaway to get a bag of chips. He was coming out of the chip shop when a young teenage boy from a group of teenagers bumped into him, probably deliberately.

Kalite was angry, began to chase the boy around and there was a scuffle with the teenagers. A man who was passing by became involved. Kalite was knocked to the ground in the scuffle, during which time he was punched and slapped by the teenagers, two of whom were teenage girls.

He picked himself and his bag of chips up and made it back to the house, which he shared with several other Polish people who were also working in Dublin. One of his housemates said she could see how upset and humiliated he was at being beaten up by a gang of teenagers, some of whom had now arrived on the street outside the house. She and another Polish man begged Kalite not to go outside again.

But he did, and within seconds he and his friend Szwajkos, who had gone out to help him, had both been stabbed through the temple with a screwdriver wielded by Curran. As both men lay dying on the ground with blood pumping out of their heads they were kicked repeatedly in the face.

Looking at Curran last week, it was hard to believe that he could be capable of such deadly viciousness. He has what used to be called a typically Irish face, pale skin with freckles under a head of red hair. He looks like an average, skinny Irish teenager, and the pale complexion and freckles give him a look of childish innocence.

But behind this facade is something which the judge in the case last week called "profoundly sinister." Passing two life sentences on Curran, the judge said that with "lethal accuracy" he had aimed at the most vulnerable part of the human body -- the temple.

He added that Curran's actions left "a chilling and disturbing feeling as to what kind of a person would do this." The killings, he said, were "brutal, savage and could be described as sadistic."

It was this aspect of the murders that was so disturbing to people here. To be able to swing a fist holding a screwdriver with enough precision and force to penetrate through someone's temple and deep into the brain requires a combination of aggression, sadistic intent and accuracy.

It's not something that would be easy to do, or possible to do by accident. Yet this 17-year-old teenager was able to do it with deadly accuracy and effectiveness not once, but twice, in the space of a few seconds.

What can be the mentality of a teenager like that be? What can the family background in Dublin be that produces such a teenager?

What emerged in court was a picture not just of Curran as an individual but of the group of teenagers he was part of, an out of control, almost feral bunch of kids. These aimless, feckless, moronic youngsters were illogical and highly aggressive, with no sense of restraint.

With nothing meaningful in their lives, minor events (like bumping into someone) assumed massive proportions for them and were transformed into imaginary major insults.

When stoked up on drink and drugs they were capable of appalling violence, almost on a whim. And there were girls involved as well as boys.

Almost as disturbing as the violence was the behavior of this group in the hours before the murders. They had spent that Saturday on waste ground near the canal in Drimnagh, drinking heavily, smoking cannabis and taking pills.

It was a cold February day but some of them went swimming, so high they were insulated from the chilling canal water. There was nothing unusual in this. It was just another day down at the canal, Curran told the court.

He had been thrown out of school at 15 and had behavioral and drug problems which a counselor had been trying to deal with. Although he lived at home, he spent most of his time robbing to fund his drinking and drug taking.

With Curran that day was Sean Keogh, a friend of his who was two years older, and some younger teenagers including two girls. They were drinking vodka and alcopops, and taking drugs. The session went on all day, moving from the canal bank to a nearby field.

At some point the group split up, with Curran and Keogh heading off to find somewhere to rob and the younger ones heading for the local chip shop.

This is when the incident with Kalite happened. The man who had jumped out of a passing car and intervened in the scuffle was David Curran's father, and the boy Kalite was chasing around was his nephew.

The man grabbed Kalite by the throat and pushed him up against the shutters of the butcher's shop beside the takeaway. Kalite was punched, collapsed on the ground and was kicked.

The butcher came out to try to calm the situation, and Kalite got up and headed for his house further up the road. On the way, one of the teenage girls who had attacked him threw a bottle at him and screamed racist remarks.

In the meantime, Curran and Keogh had stolen a motorbike and found a pointed Phillips screwdriver when Curran got a call on his cell from one of the girls who was upset and wanted him to come and help deal with the Poles.

He claimed later in court that he had been told that his father had been stabbed but the court did not believe this. Arriving at the chip shop he was in a highly aggressive state, and went with the group of teenagers up the road looking for Kalite.

All the time he was being egged on by the girls. When they got to the house, there were teenagers outside and the two Polish men and a woman were standing in the small front yard.

Curran went for them, the woman ducked out of the way and seconds later the screwdriver had been driven into the brains of the two Polish men. Keogh kicked them in the head when they were on the ground.

Curran realized they were dead and ran away. He told the court he went home, had a curry for dinner and then threw up.

And all that night and the next day he and one of the girls who had been involved sent text messages to each other about what had happened.

One of the messages the girl sent said: "Ha ha, like I can't believe it. Mad nite xxxx."

For the jury in the case and people generally, these messages were shocking, revealing how callous and alienated these kids were.

The victim impact statement from the relatives of the murdered Polish men was heartbreaking, showing what decent, quiet, non-violent people they were, working hard to make a life for themselves. The contrast with the vicious, mindless young Irish teenagers who had attacked them was striking.

The case has left an aftershock of concern here. People know only too well that in post-boom Ireland there are a lot of violent, feckless youngsters whose only aim seems to be to get the maximum amount of drink and drugs into themselves.

They have no vision, no ambition. Instead of hope they are filled with resentment and are ready to turn to extreme violence if someone even looks at them the wrong way. Especially an immigrant.

The cause of this situation includes dysfunctional families where the parents are almost as bad, and inadequate schools which spend hours teaching Irish but fail completely to instill a sense of responsibility and citizenship in the kids, or even an ability to read and write.

There's always been a problem of this kind here, of course, and it's not unique to Ireland. But what's new now is the immediate resort to extreme violence, even murder, as a first response.

That is what is illustrated by this case and it's very scary.

The Irish side of the Greek economic tragedy

In the old days when times were tough, Ireland was sometimes referred to as the place where people kept pigs in the kitchen. Any reference to our pigs in the kitchen tendency was a serious insult, of course.

But these days, it's worse. Never mind pigs in the kitchen. Now we ourselves are being called pigs!

The only consolation is that we are not alone. The PIGS is the way the international money men now refer to the basket case economies of Europe --- Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Sometimes they spell it PIIGS, with the extra I being for Italy. But we are definitely in there, thanks to the severity of the crash that followed the boom in Ireland, the collapse of our tax revenues and the yawning budget deficit that opened up here.

Basically, like the other PIGS, we have been going bankrupt and fast. In Ireland the state spends €50 billion euro a year but gets in only €30 billion in tax.

That's give or take a few billion. The €20 billion gap has to be borrowed, and obviously you can't keep doing that for more than a few years without burying the country under a mountain of debt.

In fact, what would happen is that as a country we would go bankrupt. Or to put it more precisely, the money markets would no longer buy our government bonds and so we would be unable to raise enough money to pay the salaries of state workers like teachers, nurses, police etc.

We would be unable to go on paying welfare to all those out of work. And we would be unable to pay for all the state services that people these days take for granted.
If that were to happen, the country would go deep into recession and as state services collapsed civil unrest would follow, a doomsday scenario.

The only way to avoid such a national implosion is to cut back state spending so that at some point in a few years time our spending is likely to be back in balance with our tax income. Or at least the gap won't be so alarming.

As long as the markets see we are heading in that direction they will be happy to lend to us, because they will feel confident of getting their money back at some point in the future.

That is why the Irish government is now nearly two years into a program of cutbacks. A few billion was cut from spending last year, with some of the savings coming from trimming back the very generous pay and pensions that Irish state workers get.

Another few billion has to be cut this year and next year and even the year after that. And obviously it's going to get harder each time to find ways to cut.

But the Irish government is doing it because there really is no alternative. The cost to Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen and his government has been huge.

The cutbacks have made this administration so unpopular that the latest national opinion poll last weekend shows Fianna Fail now in third place, behind Labor, with the lowest approval rating in its history.

No government would do this willingly, because it's political suicide, but as I said there's no other way out. The situation is so serious that Cowen has to put the country before his party.

As for the people, no population would accept the cutbacks we face, if there was an alternative. The Irish government has been able to make the cuts, so far anyway, because deep down most people here understand that it is necessary. They don't like it and they argue about the detail and about how the burden is being shared, but they accept it as inevitable.

So we have a real chance of coming through this without tearing ourselves apart. And if we need a real life reminder of what the alternative is, all we have to do these days is turn on our TVs and watch the news coming from another one of the pigs, Greece.

Now it's a long time since I was over there, not since my long-haired student days when the favorite way to spend summer was hopping from one Greek island to another.
Apart from the sunshine, I remember the ouzo, the slow pace of life, the men sitting outside the coffee shops all day twirling their worry beads (although what they had to be worried about was beyond me). Even Athens was laid back.

It turns out, in fact, that the whole of Greece was far too laid back, and it doesn't seem to have changed much over the decades since. They've been spending much more than their taxes warranted and the result is that they are now in financial crisis, with Greece having built up a debt mountain of an incredible €300 billion euro.

They have also been running a big budget deficit recently, which means the debt mountain has been getting bigger at an alarming rate.

Over the past few weeks, the money markets decided that enough was enough. Last week a leading ratings agency classified Greek bonds as "junk.”

So they had reached the end of the line. Unable to borrow more, they faced a very real crisis.

In the old days when a country got into difficulty it would devalue its currency. But Greece is now part of the European Union and its currency is the euro, so devaluation is no longer an option.

Its collapse would threaten the future of Europe as a single currency area. So the big boys from the EU and the IMF piled into Greece a week or two back to sort out the mess.

What they came up with was an arrangement for Greece to borrow another €110 billion over the next few years, on condition that it starts cutting spending, raising taxes and generally getting the state finances under control again. Ireland's share of this rescue package for Greece is over one billion, all of which will have to be borrowed.

And yes, it's hilarious that poor old Ireland should be rescuing anyone given our problems, but it makes sense. If Greece were to go under, Portugal and Ireland would be next in the firing line of the money markets.

There has been a lot of superior talk here last week about how we're not like Greece. Such comparisons are not only inaccurate but dangerous, the government says.
But what we should really be saying is, there but for the Grace of God and the good sense of most of the Irish people goes Ireland. The similarity is too close for comfort.

Our national debt is only around €100 billion, in comparison with Greece's €300 billion, but then we have only half the population. Also our debt has been climbing fast and our budget deficits in percentage terms are not that different to the Greek deficits.

The big difference is the apparent public willingness of the Irish people to face up to the situation. Instead of facing reality the Greeks, as you will have seen from the TV news in the last few days, have been tearing the country apart with street battles, strikes, the shutdown of schools and services, even occupying the Acropolis!

They've been acting like spoiled students from the 1960s who want to have a revolution while Daddy pays the bills. Mind you what they're faced with is tough.

It is estimated that many state workers in Greece have lost 30 percent of their income since cutbacks started a month ago, and now there is more on the way. Part of the problem is the huge number of people on the state payroll, so big even the government has lost count.

A huge problem is the inefficiency and corruption, so even though state spending has vastly increased, services are not much better. State workers in Greece get long holidays, have short working days, and get all kinds of bonuses and perks.

Some get special payments for using computers! Forestry workers get a bonus for working outdoors!

To get state services (like seeing a doctor without a delay of months) you pay a small bribe. There is so much petty corruption that an estimated €800 million of bribes was paid to state workers last year.

Many civil servants have been allowed to retire on a guaranteed pension at 50 (under the new deal they will have to work until they are 67). All of this has been a huge drag on the real economy in Greece where, apart from tourism, there has been little development and where jobs are scarce.

Those who do have jobs or small businesses have been dodging their taxes (one estimate is that 30 percent of earnings in Greece are in the black economy) which has meant that tax revenues are much lower than they should be. And to keep all this mess going, the Greek government borrowed heavily in recent years and spent like there was no tomorrow.

Well, tomorrow has come now. The modern day Greek tragedy of running battles on the streets of Athens at the weekend sends shivers up the spines of the authorities here.

It's already causing us problems because the cost of borrowing for us has gone up thanks to nervousness about Greece. Last week the cost of new funds for us was pushing 6 percent, whereas Germany pays just over 3 percent (Greece was paying 9 percent).

There's a message in all of this for Ireland. To avoid a similar crisis, we have to take the pain and keep to the program to get our state finances back in balance again. The alternative is an Irish version of the Greek tragedy.

The good, the bad and the greedy of the Irish pension scandal

In this column last week I was discussing the way some people at the top of Irish business and official life have been trying to ignore the harsh cutbacks in pay and services that everyone else here has to take on board.

Cutbacks are for the little people, the members of the Greedy Bunch seem to think, like Leona Helmsley used to say years ago about taxes before she was locked up.

The Irish Greedy Bunch think they are too important and too busy to be bothered with cutbacks themselves. They're above all that.

Their job is to tell the rest of us how much we need to tighten our belts, and how the country will go bankrupt if we don't. The idea that maybe they should share the burden, or lead by example, never occurs to them.

I was saying here last week that this selfish behavior by some of those at the top in Irish life was generating a scary level of anger among ordinary people across the country. It was destroying social cohesion, the sense that we're in this mess together and must work together to get out of it. If it did not stop, there would be open rebellion and marches on the streets, I warned.

Oh my prophetic soul. There haven't been any protests yet, but the outcry over the past week has been so great that the Greedy Bunch is starting to wake up to reality.

One of the worst examples of greed at the top was the ***1.5 million pension top-up being given this year to the chief executive of the Bank of Ireland, who earns half a million a year. This was necessary so that he could, as agreed, retire at 55 on a pension for life of over a quarter of a million a year.

This bank, like the rest of the Irish banks, has been rescued by the Irish taxpayers, most of who earn a fraction of that salary and have little or no pension. So the outcry when this became public was deafening.

One of the labor leaders said that the case was making the national agreement on pay reductions impossible. That agreement is already in trouble with several unions saying no, which has the government very worried.

So last week, at the 11th hour, the bank boss bowed to pressure and said he would not take the pension top-up. Nobody in the government admitted to calling him, but I'd say the lines were burning up last week and he caved in.

But by then the media and the public had scented blood. Suddenly everyone was asking why the elite at the top of Irish society was still being paid so much.

How come the bankers who had got the country into the mess were still getting huge salaries? How come the politicians and the senior civil servants who had been asleep while the country went down the tubes were still being paid very high salaries, or were retiring on huge pensions for life?

Over the past week, the hunt has been on. And nobody in the elite is safe from scrutiny.

Suddenly everyone's pay is being looked at, particularly those who were part of the property boom, or the politicians and the regulators who failed to stop the boom turning into a disastrous bubble.

There is public outrage at the amount of money that the guys who ran the two financial institutions who were most out of control still seem to have. The two guys are Sean Fitzpatrick, who ran the relatively small Anglo Irish Bank, and Michael Fingleton, who ran Irish Nationwide, a small savings and loans.

Between them, these two started the madness that was copied by the other banks. They are the main culprits who blew up the property bubble and floated it away on a sea of borrowed money. They are now costing the Irish taxpayers billions.

Yet Fitzpatrick still lives in a luxury home and has a luxury lifestyle. Since the crisis blew up he seems to be spending a lot of his time playing golf in Spain.

Fingleton grabbed a million euro bonus in his last year in office, on top of a huge salary, before he retired on a pension pot of well over ****20 million.

Fingleton turned what used to be a small savings and loans for ordinary people buying homes into a major speculator in the commercial property market, borrowing billions to do it. Almost all that money has now gone, and the Irish taxpayer is left with the consequences. Yet Fingleton is still living like a millionaire, presumably because he has millions stashed away, apart from his vast pension.

And the financial regulator who was supposed to be overseeing all this? The guy who should have been reining in Anglo Irish and telling Fitzpatrick that he was borrowing far too much for the size of his bank and lending to too few people in just one sector (property)?

The guy who should have been telling Fingleton that a small savings and loans like Irish Nationwide had no business getting in so deep in commercial property? Where is the financial regulator now?

Well, he's retired as well, on a yearly pension that is four of five times what I get in pay even though I'm still working.

So being asleep on the job has paid off very nicely for him. How come? Because like a lot of these guys he was a state employee, so his pension is guaranteed, thanks to the taxpayer.

All of these guys at the top, both the incompetent state employees like the last financial regulator and the top executives in the private sector banks, had salaries in telephone numbers and pensions either paid by the taxpayer or backed by huge personal pension funds, paid for by their banks.

Since all these banks are bust, surely their pension arrangements no longer apply?
Wrong! The taxpayer -- through the government bailout of the banks -- looks after all that.

And it's not just guys who are at it. The gals are just as bad.
This week's big controversy is about Ireland's current European commissioner, a former member of the Dail (Parliament) and former minister called Maire Geoghegan Quinn. She used to be a primary (junior) schoolteacher before she got her father's seat in the Dail (like so many others).

She's the European commissioner who looks after science and innovation and things like that, for which she has no qualifications whatsoever, but that's another story.

What we're interested in here is the money she's getting, a cool ****350,000 a year as well as lavish perks for accommodation, travel and so on that come with being a commissioner (the commissioners are like ministers in the European Union's cabinet).

Geoghegan Quinn’s salary as commissioner is ****243,000 and is paid by Europe, but she also has two Irish pensions (one for being a former member of the Dail and one for being a former minister) which add up to ***108,000. And she is being paid these pensions by the Irish taxpayer even though she is working full time as a commissioner.

The daft system we have in Ireland entitles former ministers to start getting their pensions even when they remain as ordinary deputies in the Dail and therefore are not really retired. The same goes with Geoghegan Quinn; she's retired from the Dail but gets her ministerial and Dail pensions even though she has a full time job as EU commissioner.

Up to a few days ago she was refusing to answer media questions about this. But so great was the public anger that on Monday she suddenly caved in. She has decided not to continue taking her Irish pensions while she is being paid by Europe, she said.

A number of other former ministers and junior ministers also responded to the public outrage by announcing on Monday that they would no longer be taking their pensions while they are still on Dail deputy salaries.
Given the problem the country faces, this is the least they can do. Funding all these pensions for former ministers, most of whom are still earning salaries, costs the Irish taxpayer tens of millions.

But changes are on the way. The government reduced the ministerial pensions for sitting members of the Dail by 25% last year, and after the next general election a sitting deputy will not be allowed to also pick up a ministerial pension.

But for legal reasons that change cannot be backdated. Among the current deputies picking up the pensions in addition to their Dail salaries are former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, who gets ***98,901, and former Labor leader Ruairi Quinn, who gets ***41,656. Ruairi is giving up his; Bertie is thinking about his.

The politicians should be leading by example, of course, which is why this situation with ministerial pensions is such a scandal. But there is a similar problem in the so-called state sector, the civil service and all the semi-state organizations where pay and pensions are funded by the taxpayer.

People retire early, get golden handshakes and big pensions, and then head off and get jobs in the private sector and continue to get their big pensions even though they are not retired at all.

And in the banks and financial institutions that have been bailed out by the taxpayer, huge pay-offs and pensions are still happening. Even the last financial regulator got a retirement deal to die for!

Why does this happen? Because the Irish taxpayers are mugs who have always put up with it.

But not anymore. Now everything is under the public microscope, and the country is in revolt over what it is finding crawling around there. The Greedy Bunch is on the run.