Tell us a little bit more about his income over two years… where does it come from?

Really just from investments.. he gives a couple of speeches a year and from that earns a paltry $500,000… but most just investments… some from overseas… and that’s why he enjoys such a low tax rate… Bush era tax cuts, income derived from investment is taxed at 15% whereas regular income is taxed much higher up to 30%.

Who says Americans don’t do irony?

Also noted on To The Point, when Newt Gingrich took offence during the debate just prior to the North Carolina primary at questions over allegations of open marriage proposals and such like surfacing in the media why wasn’t the point made that it was he who had done precisely the same during the 1990s in relation to Bill Clinton at precisely the time he himself was having an affair – and given that Gingrich’s complaint appears not to be the veracity of these allegations but the fact they’re aired at all the issue of the former is irrelevant.

Here’s something that amazed me. I don’t usually feel my jaw drop reading articles, but this was something else. A range of examples of teachers whose use of social media has shaded into something quite dubious. Actually, strike that, very dubious indeed.

More than one in 10 school teachers accused of misconduct last year had used social networking sites and email to forge inappropriate relationships with their pupils, an analysis of disciplinary cases has found.
Facebook, Twitter, online chatrooms and emails were used to befriend children in 43 of the cases brought to the regulator, the General Teaching Council for England in 2011. Eighteen teachers were given prohibition orders and struck off, while 14 were suspended. In all, the GTC heard 336 cases of “unacceptable professional conduct” last year.

And what of this?

A disciplinary case brought against an English teacher, Lee Butcher, who taught at Garforth community college in Leeds came to light only after a pupil’s mother read parts of a Facebook exchange between the teacher and a former pupil.

And the details?

An investigation found that Butcher had had “inappropriate and sexually explicit” conversations with the 16-year-old over the site for three months. They included comments about the former pupil posing for erotic photos over a webcam.
During the exchanges with the girl, he tried to make sure she was alone and asked her not to tell anyone about them. The parent who discovered the exchanges believed they had also been emailed to other pupils.
There were no criminal proceedings, but Butcher admitted unacceptable professional conduct. A GTC committee reprimanded him, saying: “Teachers must not establish or seek to establish social contact with pupils, children or young people for the purpose of securing a friendship or to pursue or strengthen a relationship. That extends to the use of social networking sites such as Facebook.”
He was given a 12-month suspension order, from May 2011, but not struck off.

Some would think that that was a very generous. But the question that raises its head about the cases quoted is ‘how could any of the teachers have a sense that these were appropriate behaviours?

The curious thing is that as someone lecturing in 3rd level I’ve had discussions with colleagues about these issues. Tutorials take place in rooms with windows, or doors slightly ajar. There’s no communication on matters relating to none work related matters by email or social media and so on [I’m not saying it never happens but of those who were discussing the issue the consensus was that these are, again, inappropriate behaviours]. So the idea as expressed by one headteacher that…

The difficulty is that we didn’t grow up with social media, and therefore we fear it and don’t understand how our children interact with it. It’s easy to see the negatives, hard to understand how to protect the children – and very easy to ignore the positives.

… is a bit hard to take. The internet has been an increasingly pervasive part of life for over a decade and a half now for most people. It didn’t fall from the sky last year. That’s plenty of time for schools and other institutions to set out usage policies and so forth. But even if they hadn’t how could teachers believe that non work relationships were appropriate one way or another – whether conducted largely or not on social media. Duty of care and other phrases spring to mind.

Also in the Guardian John Harris has a good piece on how the rhetoric of self-employment, while find for some, is arguably a cul-de-sac for many others. An expedient one for the Conservatives though given that slipping towards self-employment alters the nature of the relationship with the state.

This week David Cameron will once again make a show of his support for an initiative called StartUp Britain, after paying tribute to its ethos in his “popular capitalism” speech last week: “If you take a risk, quit your job, create the next Google or Facebook and wind up a billionaire, then more power to your elbow.”

This is typically extravagant stuff, but the obvious riposte is how many Google’s or Facebooks are there? One each by my count, so effectively a couple of risk takers can look forward to the ‘rewards’. And the other risk takers? Harris references a CIPD report…

As happened in the Thatcher years, we are awash with such talk, just when going it alone is more difficult than ever – and, moreover, the grim truth about most new self-employment has just been revealed. “The additional self-employed are unlike self-employed people as a whole in terms of gender, hours of work, occupation and sector of employment,” says the CIPD’s report. Tellingly, of those who make up the net rise in self-employment since 2008, 90% are part-time. Moreover, the report’s author, John Philpott, talks about people “without skills, picking up whatever bits and pieces of work are available”, whose emergence “hardly suggests a surge in genuine entrepreneurial zeal.”

It’s the basic problem. Whatever about enthusiasm only a small fraction of those moving into the category – by the stats available – will make much a decent living in it. Only a tiny fraction will do much better.

Not that the Conservatives will worry overmuch.

The Tories are on 40%, up three percentage points from December, while Labour has drifted down one to 35%. The Liberal Democrats are on 16%, up one.

I tend to see Milliband as a weak enough leader, so on one level 35 per cent is good enough. But it’s not great, and against this particular Tory led government it’s nowhere near great enough. The next election is still some years away but one wonders what thinking is going on inside the LP currently as to how to change those numbers. Mind you, even the polling picture is fairly mixed still…

A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times recorded a five-point Conservative lead, whereas ComRes for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror now have the two main parties level-pegging, after the same company recorded a four-point Labour lead in December.

Though it seems that one Boris Johnson is set to enter the Commons in the next couple of years. Can this be true and if so what of his bid to retain the Mayor of London role? He himself rules it out…

“I really don’t see how I can run for Parliament in 2015. Let’s kill this. I’m ruling myself out.”
But Reigate may appear a more attractive prospect if Johnson finds himself with a bit more time on his hands in May. Two successive polls in recent days have given Livingstone a narrow lead.

Nice to have a parachute prepacked and ready, no?

Returning briefly to the US Republican primary contest I’d found a lot of comments on articles online from Ron Paul supporters saying that he was arguing the Golden Rule. Intrigued I have to be honest, I had to look up the Golden Rule. It may be familiar to many of us, albeit formulated in various different ways… [from wiki]:

The “Golden Rule” has been attributed to Jesus of Nazareth: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12, see also Luke 6:31). The common English phrasing is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

But here’s a thing. When Ron Paul tried out a variation on this in explaining his stance on foreign policy to an audience consisting in no small part of Christian evangelicals at the South Carolina primary debate the response was…well, here’s the ABC report…

Paul’s willingness to stand up for what he believes in when it comes to U.S. involvement in foreign countries hurt him repeatedly in Monday’s debate.
The conservative Republican electorate in South Carolina booed Paul’s answers on foreign policy and Texas Gov. Rick Perry even suggested that a gong should have been used to cut Paul off.

Christian evangelicals and an avowedly Christian oriented party booing the Golden Rule.
A bit of consistency lads would go a long way.

Then his 2009 Newsletter which might be of use to him now as it includes a section on ‘HOW TO COPE THROUGH DIFFICULTIES‘

Away from Ivor to a leaflet from the Repudiate the Debt campaign

Then this one might be of interest to city dwellers
An “Information leaflet on proposed Septic Tanks and Associated Charges” from Mattie McGrath

Then from Cumann na nGaedhael 1932 “De Valera’s Policy All Along has been Un-Irish and Un-Catholic” , “Remember Spain and Mexico”

And finally a 1979 Flyer and notepaper for Bert Bennett, Jim Maher, Dave Neligan ,Máirín Breheny of the Socialist Labour Party

Having suffered through Peig at school these gave me a great laugh when they came out in the mid 1990s.

“Let’s be fair about this – we all partied”

Viewable here

Then we had this today from Enda Kenny

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has blamed Ireland’s “spectacular” economic crash on a “mad borrowing” frenzy.

“What happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing,” Mr Kenny told a meeting at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

“The extent of personal credit, personal wealth created on credit was done between people and banks – a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash.”

He gives the impression that the whole country went mad borrowing for the sake of it.
But like many of you I had to borrow to buy an overpriced home. It may have been ‘mad’ but we had to have somewhere to live.
Like the vast majority I didn’t buy an investment property either. I didn’t drive a new car (Indeed we’re a one car family) , go on mad holidays , have flat screen televisions in every room and so on.

At least I’m in Dublin (close to family) , unlike some of my friends and relatives stuck down the country with a big mortgage and a property worth less than half what they paid for it.

Needless to say its those that got little or nothing from the boom that are amongst those now suffering the most from the “austerity”.

For any of us who had any direct dealings with Ivor Callely Harry McGee’s profile in the Irish Times certainly brought it all back. It wasn’t just the somewhat mischievous line:

Callely (53), politically, was a relatively minor figure (he was a junior minister for a short stint).

But also as McGee said that the man was ‘hard working and ambitious’. Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Others might well reflect on the following:

In his first junior ministry, he accounted for twice as much of the photographic budget as the senior minister Micheál Martin. In transport, he included prominent images of himself on Operation Freeflow billboards. He had a poor record for retaining staff, with some leaving after claiming he was unreasonably demanding.

If there was an ideology there it was hard to discern. As McGee notes:

He had a general pro-business outlook and took strong stands on diverse issues in the 1990s – backing taxi drivers in opposing deregulation and making indefensible statements about asylum seekers, some of whom he said had a culture of “bleeding of lambs in the back garden”.

That’s pretty loathsome, but is it worse or better because one has the impression that it wasn’t based on anything so much as the sort of chatter that informs parts of the public discourse.

One could perhaps argue, and McGee does so, that he was typical of a strata of ambitious individuals attracted to Fianna Fáil when it was the predominant political entity, individuals who had no interest in ideology. And I think it is a perfect reflection on how that party had had whatever residual ideological core hollowed out that it saw absolutely no problem in this. But there was a problem, that when it came to tougher times the organisation was much much more brittle, and almost as a corollary of that, had no clear fixed guiding principles. I’m not suggesting that FF would have done considerably better last year if it had a more clear cut ideological profile, but such a glue would have bound it up to a greater degree. And ironically that ideological glue could be left of centre, right of centre, whatever. But when there was none, none at all, then small wonder that an electorate whose support had been more in the nature of votes of confidence during good times fled for pastures new when it began to go wrong.

When their cross class coalition fractured it wasn’t the Callely’s of the world who were well positioned to take up the slack and save the org. Indeed Fianna Fáil’s current plight is almost directly attributable to this complete illusion that it somehow transcended class politics. Fine Gael has never made that error, albeit it has had tactical tilts towards a broader populism. But this was a paradoxical approach by FF.

Callely was an anomalous figure in Fianna Fáil. His spivvish pin-striped appearance and his trappings of wealth including a showy Range Rover, a power boat and a west Cork holiday home sat uneasily with some colleagues.

Note though that he managed to join and remain within the party. That although he never scaled the real heights of Irish politics he was a junior minister twice! If those colleagues were ‘uneasy’ they did little enough about it, and nor did it prevent Ahern nominating him for the Seanad in the wake of losing his seat in 2007. As with the appointment of Harris one has the sense that Ahern was either playing a strange in-joke or had completely lost the run of himself. But then again, Callely was a powerful vote getter in Dublin North Central.

One other thing that struck me was that many of those in a similar predicament to Callely found themselves at a loss when the tide went out. They’d never really known a situation where FF and by extension themselves were in charge. Sure, there had been times of opposition, but these were mercifully brief and always with the solid expectation that once given the opportunity a grateful populace would vote them back into power. To say that they were bereft as the writing solidified on the wall in the run up to the last election would not be overstating things.

If that sounds that I’m sympathetic to the man, don’t get me wrong. I’m not. But it’s another telling indication of just how cosseted their lives had become. These people weren’t built for opposition, or small party status.

One last thought on this matter. There’s a jibe about Independents which goes along the lines that they’re not able represent the national interest. Perhaps so in the case of some of them, though many of the current crop seem to talk of little else. But it seems to me that charge could much more easily be put about the likes of Callely and his peers whose interests truly appeared to be constrained by the boundaries of their constituencies and the perpetuation of individual political careers. That too would seem to me to part of the problem with Fianna Fáil in the contemporary era.

Meanwhile, one detail of a follow up report is worth noting:

Mr Callely’s home and office were searched yesterday by gardaí as part of a planned operation.
In many Garda investigations into alleged white-collar crime, suspects often arrange to meet gardaí at a designated Garda station to be taken into detention for questioning. However, the desire on the part of the investigating detectives to search Mr Callely’s home and office meant the element of surprise was used.

Those alleged white-collar criminals. They turn up for appointments. Never shove documentation into shredders. No need for surprise searches there – eh?

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It’s difficult to not feel some human sympathy for those who deserted for whatever reason. But the problem is what principle other than sympathy is at work here?

Because it’s difficult to discern any other than the view that Britain’s needs, or actually the inclinations of those individual soldiers, were greater than those of this state. And that seems to me to be very very shaky ground upon which to construct a defence of their actions.

Joseph Quinn had a piece recently in the IT that argued:

The story can count itself as another sad chapter in the history of the State, but an important question remains unanswered. How does one define desertion if it takes place in a country whose government’s stated position is a policy of strict neutrality, while almost every nation in the same hemisphere is at war?

This seems to me to be an ahistorical reading of the situation. The immediate answer is we define it as desertion, because the context, short of war crimes – and this by the way is legislated for in international law, is irrelevant.

If, for example, the campaign, was arguing for the pardon of any Irish soldiers who had deserted the British army to defend their homeland, those hypothetical soldiers would have each faced imprisonment of six months to three years as the customary punishment. And in other armies the sanctions were considerably worse.

But of course there’s more.

5,000 is quite tiny in relation to the mobilised British armed forces during World War II. The figure of 3.5 million is generally accepted to be the number who served at one time or another between 1939 and 1945 in the British Army. Whatever about individual motivation and individual heroism and sacrifice in various circumstances their general contribution could only have been minimal. So to paint this in existential terms from the point of view of the British state is a mistake.

But to some degree that is what is being done. And in doing so it neatly sidesteps the question that this was an existential issue for this state.

Éire was a small impoverished state with limited resources. The main resource that it had in military terms was numbers of men able to serve in the army. Obviously they would have been a thin defence in terms of any effort by the major protagonists to land on these shores, but their nuisance value should not be entirely underestimated, at least in blunting an invasion or forestalling one. So from an Irish perspective the ability to put the largest possible number of personnel into uniform was central. This was the defence, much more so than invocations of neutrality.

But in all this it seems to be forgotten that British national interest saw no issue at all in detailing comprehensive plans to invade the South in order to forestall a German invasion [as noted by Dr. X they invaded Iceland in May 1940] – and it hardly needs mentioning that had the opportunity/necessity arisen the Germans would have invaded.

And that leads to a linked point. Neutrality, whatever some of the rhetoric now emanating from various quarters, was inextricably positioned in relation to Britain. For all the public complaints from Churchill (and more hypocritically – given the late and forced entry of the US to the war – David Gray, the US ambassador to Dublin who seems to have developed a near-pathological aversion to Éire and belief that of some sort of collusion with the Nazi’s was extant) the reality was of incredibly, and I use the word advisedly, strong links at military and military intelligence levels between the UK and Éire, the extent of which have taken decades to emerge in full, much less to be acknowledged in general debate on this topic. Given the history between the two states in the preceding two decades this was a remarkable turnaround. Note too the extremely strong economic links – one telling anecdote is that the regular Collinstown/Liverpool Aer Lingus service was often filled by business men involved in the lucrative cattle trade, an anecdote that is probably not that far from the truth.

But neutrality was a deliberately chosen course which, in retrospect, seems to have been the best possible way for the state to survive. Had it thrown in its lot with the British this state would have been unable to defend itself, and this would have placed a corresponding pressure upon the British to take up that burden. Given how stretched that state was in the early years of the war it is hard to see the military justification. But politically that was absolutely impossible. It is not a case of an Irish population that was pro-German, though that undercurrent did, without question, exist and waxed and waned depending on the progress of the war, as much as an Irish population that saw an overtly pro-British stance as anathema – given the historical legacy and the reality of partition. And while it is easy to paint this in atavistic colours at this remove, the grand narrative of a war against fascism was simply not extant then as it is now, and how could it be with a US that was neutral until 1941, a Soviet Union that signed a pact with Nazi Germany and a Britain whose political classes largely were acquiescent or appeased German expansionism during the mid to late 1930s and who were palpably unwilling to go to war. To allow many of the inhabitants of Éire a degree of scepticism during this period is far from unreasonable.

Ironically, partition offered both Éire and the United Kingdom a way through with a means of projecting British power further into the Atlantic to protect vital convoys. So better by far to allow the status quo to persist, an Irish neutrality which was effectively pro-British in intent and effect [one of the most fascinating aspects of this is the way in which De Valera is painted as anti-British, when the historical record would suggest that the issue of Irish independence aside he was in fact mildly Anglophile throughout his life].

So perhaps what we see here is a reification of British national interests over Irish national interests. But what we also see is an effort to diminish Irish agency. For all its myriad failings the government of the day was a democratically elected one and more broadly this in the context of societies where desertion was regarded in a particularly negative light [and conscientious objection as well, it’s quite enlightening to look at the situation of those who sought that status in Britain during the same period, and the attitude of the military and the broader society to them].

Quinn argues that:

Soldiers such as Shannon and Kehoe, who, for whatever motive, contrary to the precise definition of desertion, abandoned a post of safety for a post of extreme danger, suffered consequences that were not only harsh, but entirely unnecessary – the danger to Ireland, and the wider world had long receded.

There is nothing imprecise about the definition of what those soldiers did. It’s only by modifying the term desertion – in frankly an unconvincing way – that that case is sustainable.

Tom McGurk in the Sunday Business Post puts it quite well. He notes the evasiveness over the concept of ‘desertion’ and also some of the unusual political agenda’s that appear to have entered the campaign. He continues:

We should, of course, pardon the deserters – but it should be done in a way that also recognises and distinguishes the service given by the 40,000 full-time and the almost 200,000 part-time soldiers who didn’t leave the country in war-time.

Furthermore it would help if the campaigners were to accept that what the 5,000 deserters did was wrong. Then we could all happily consign this episode to the footnotes of our history.

I’m probably slightly less generous than he. I wonder is there a concept of a conditional pardon, but granted some gesture is probably the right way to engage with this at this point. But his central point remains. Whatever the rhetoric what happened was wrong and that should be faced up to before this goes forward.

In a significant speech on Monday night at the opening of The Shoah in Europe exhibition at the Department of Justice Mr Shatter said it was of vital importance that this and future generations remembered and learned from the horrors of the past.
He added that in the 1930s practically all visa requests from German Jews were refused by the Irish authorities.
“This position was maintained from 1939 to 1945 and we should no longer be in denial that, in the context of the Holocaust, Irish neutrality was a principle of moral bankruptcy.

The problem with this statement is that it elides a number of distinctly different issues. There’s little question that the state was hugely remiss in its human and other obligations to Jewish refugees from continental Europe both before, during and after the war – Dermot Keogh’s Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland is a fine text on the area and is extremely sobering.

But the link with ‘neutrality’ is hard to make – for precisely that reason, the lack of any significant efforts to relieve the situation of Jewish refugees was characteristic of the state well before war was declared – Keogh quotes Robert Briscoe in communications with the Dept. of Justice in 1937/38, then an FF TD, making the extremely valid point that the states attitude to refugees from Germany was in stark contrast to the fact that the Instructor of Music in the Army, the Director of the National Museum and various other worthies [many/most who had Nazi links, though he did not state this] were admitted to the state and allowed to stay here. There’s no doubt at all that this was a national disgrace.
But to then try to contextualise it or neutrality with the Holocaust is ahistorical.

As easily argue that US neutrality between 1939 and 1941, or the Soviet pact with Nazi Germany were moral bankruptcy. And neither state entered the war due to the Holocaust. Precisely the same can be said about the United Kingdom whose entry to the war bore no relation to it at all, and proceeded with little or no relation to it either.

The Atlantic Charter which was agreed between the UK and the US in 1942 is probably the clearest expression of war aims, and it makes no direct reference to issues pertaining to the Holocaust. Moreover information about the Holocaust was broadly speaking suppressed by both the UK and the US during much of the course of the war for fear of it being seen as a “Jewish war”.

The first significant change in this was the publication of the Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, both Jewish inmates of Auschwitz who managed to escape, in June/July 1944. This revealed the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz but what’s telling is how that was downplayed by those who appealed on behalf of those being sent there [for more see the response from Vatican]. There is more, the prosecution of the war subsequently in respect to efforts to save those in the concentration and death camps indicates how they were of a secondary or even tertiary concern in military terms.

In other words no state emerges from the Second World War with an untarnished record, and to ask the Éire, impoverished, with few resources and isolated by dint of geography, should assume a greater degree of responsibility than others who were in a better position to deal with these matters, and evidence no lesser culpability in the broader historical sweep, is unreasonable.

That this neutrality was oriented entirely towards British interests is of course unspoken by Shatter, though more on that tomorrow. But in general terms I’d argue that Irish neutrality was, given the context the only rational course to pursue. It wasn’t heroic, and perhaps more importantly in the global scheme of things it had little impact [although I’d suggest that it was actually hugely beneficial to the UK and UK interests], but it was a matter of cementing the prospects of national survival.