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izzykamikaze · 8 years ago

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Catherine Kelly, The #ReginaCops And The Rot At The Heart Of The #PotatoRepublic

US Academic claiming false imprisonment.

Catherine Kelly, the tweeter and occasional blogger at the centre of the #ReginaCops scandal has written to Charlie Flanagan, Minister for Justice and Equality, alleging false imprisonment in relation to her recent detention at Dublin Airport. Catherine, a Professor of Political Science at a US university, was in transit through Dublin Airport on June 27th when she was stopped by two men who identified themselves as Gardai and questioned her about her use of social media. They enquired whether she used the name @sanepolitico on Twitter and whether she was the author of a blog post about Minister for Social Welfare, Regina Doherty, both of which she confirmed.

She was advised that she was being "cautioned" and that she was to make no further reference to Minister Doherty on social media. "A page of handwritten notes" was produced and she was told she'd have to sign this before proceeding to her gate. She signed it, as she had very urgent business to attend to in New York. Her letter to Minister Flanagan advises him that her legal advice is that this constitutes a false detention and may amount to false imprisonment under Section 15 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against The Person Act of 1997. This section refers to taking or detaining a person or otherwise restricting their personal liberty, without their consent and Section 15 (2) goes on to state that "a person acts without the consent of another if the person obtains the other's consent by force or threat of force, or by deception causing the other to believe that he or she is under legal compulsion to consent."

Catherine is quite clear that she was told that she was being cautioned, but there are requirements to be met before a caution can be administered under the Adult Cautioning Scheme. These are: there must be prima facie evidence of the offender’s guilt; the offender must admit the offence; the offender must understand the significance of a caution and the offender must give an informed consent to being cautioned. None of these appear to have been met in Catherine's case. No particular offence was specified. She was asked to confirm her Twitter name, @sanepolitico, but no issue was raised with her tweets and no indication given of what offence she was alleged to have committed. The only evidence cited was a blog post regarding Minister Doherty's financial affairs, based on information already in the public domain. Catherine did not admit any offence, did not understand the significance of a caution and certainly didn't give informed consent or have any opportunity to seek advice on the matter.

If there were grounds for a caution and if the Gardai had sufficient intelligence on her movements to intercept her at the airport, surely they could have done so when she was entering the country, when she would have had the chance to get legal advice and consider giving the required "informed consent"? The decision to delay someone under time pressure to catch a flight seems almost calculated to undermine the giving of meaningful consent. When "the offender" has admitted the offence and agreed to be cautioned (remember neither of those happened in this case) they are asked to sign "Section E" of a form that's supposed to have been filled out in advance by the Garda. Catherine was not asked to sign any form, but the fact that she was pushed, under threat of missing her flight, to provide a copy of her signature on what seems to have been a page in an ordinary Garda notebook seems frankly sinister.

It's worth taking a look also at the procedure around the issuing of a caution. A caution is administered by "the District Officer or an Inspector acting on behalf of the District Officer." A caution is normally ("other than in an exceptional situation") administered in a Garda Station, having been explained to the offender by "the member in charge" of the station. Most importantly an Adult Caution is only an available option for a short list of offences under specified Acts. These are:

Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act, 1994 (public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, etc)

Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act, 2001 (theft under the value of €1000, making off without paying, handling stolen goods)

Intoxicating Liquor Act (offences by a drunken person)

Non-Fatal Offences Against The Person Act 1997 (Section 2 assaults)

Criminal Damage Act, 1991 (damage to property under €1000 or threat to damage property)

Dublin Police Act, 1842 (nuisances in public thoroughfares, in Dublin only)

Intoxicating Liquor Act, 1927 (on licensed premises after hours)

Licensing Act, 1872 (public drunkenness again)

Summary Jurisdiction (Ireland) Amendment Act, 1871 (offensive or riotous conduct in a theatre or place of public amusement.)

That's it. That's the entire list. I'm no lawyer, but I can't for the life of me see how any of those could be broken on Twitter or in a blog post. Whatever occurred at Dublin Airport, it was not a properly administered Adult Caution. It smacks rather of an attempt to deceive a person under duress (as everybody travelling through airports in these high-security days is under duress) that something legally momentous is happening to her when really it is not. She's supposed to believe that if she doesn't do as she's told, she will suffer consequences - miss her flight, forfeit the cost of her flight, have to reschedule her engagements in New York, perhaps even be arrested and face protracted questioning in relation to an unknown offence. She is supposed to be frightened. She is supposed to, in the parlance of social media, STFU.

It looks a lot like an act of coercion and intimidation. The intention seems to be to persuade somebody that if she continues to comment on the public affairs of her country, she will face criminal charges when something - a family illness perhaps - forces her to return. It seems intended to silence her, to deprive her of her constitutional right to free expression - and no reason is offered for this action, other than a Minister's displeasure at her words. It really does look a lot like false imprisonment, like detaining a person by deception and without their consent.

It's the action of a corrupt #PotatoRepublic, where the police force misappropriate public money, fabricate roadside breath tests and use the journalists who should be keeping them accountable to smear a whistleblowing Garda colleague as a paedophile. Tribunals and enquiries are ordered by the dozen, but nothing really changes People retire "in their own time" on their full pensions and the show goes on...And now our police force (that should be a police service, for the protection of all) is to be co-opted as private muscle to prevent, without legal authority, a citizen going about her business, in order to tell her that a Minister "doesn't like" her opinions and she should keep them to herself in future? We have to draw the line somewhere folks, and I suggest it is here! (In truth I think we passed it long ago, but better late than never...)

One of the most positive moments in this story up to now has been the intervention of Seamus Dooley of the National Union of Journalists, who has called on the Garda Commissioner to explain why Catherine Kelly's freedom was interfered with in this way. A country that interrogates people at airports for holding inconvenient opinions will never be a good country for journalism. This is already not a good country for journalism - a near monopoly ownership of the media and excessive cosiness with the parties of government has seen to that and, day after day, good journalists who ask all the right questions of all the right people have their stories spiked or mangled out of all recognition. "MSM" (mainstream media) has become almost a dirty word on social media, seen as a corrupt purveyor of Establishment lies - and all too often this is true. The journalists who do not ask the tough questions are the ones that rise to the top of the pile and the ones who risk it all for a tough story struggle throughout their careers or give up the fight. But they are out there. And by challenging this horrible act, Seamus Dooley is defending them.

We need decent journalists more than ever and they are out there, resisting political interference, resisting the push to create clickbait, attempting over and over again over long careers to get attention for the stories that need to be told, the stories that set them on fire - and getting knocked back over and over again. They do not hate social media, most of them use it. It's where their stories come from these days, where they meet their sources, hear what's going on. The good ones try to get these stories more traction, apply the fact-checking that social media lacks and bring those stories to a wider audience. Where do they go when their stories fail to get through the gatekeepers of their vested interest proprietors? Often they drip them back out to social media again. Often it's all they can do.

Good journalists do not hate social media. Journalism can't and won't survive without people who ask questions and people who try to alert the public to abuses of power. Seamus Dooley does us all a great service when he speaks out for enquiring minds, whether those minds are paid for enquiring or not. Good journalists will be grateful to him for doing this, but the ones who have the Garda Commissioner on speed dial for conversations about which whistleblowers should be smeared next will be out for his blood. It's a brave move and one he should be thanked and supported for.

Catherine's interrogation at the airport did not come out of nowhere. A smear campaign has been rolling against Catherine and a number of others (including myself, as it happens) for several years now. This smear campaign is about to step up a gear. More than one false story was planted in mainstream media last year to be spread around now - an insurance policy against the day when the bigger story might threaten to be heard. One of these is being circulated right now to discredit Catherine. It's based on a single tweet, a long time ago, taken out of context and twisted to mean something that it just did not mean. Another story, a fortnight later in the same outlet, suggested obliquely that I had been involved in the harassment of a person I had never even heard of. This is what we are up against - what a lot of people are up against - and it's important to see through the smokescreen. What is the truth they are trying to distract you from now?

The truth is there was no legal authority to stop Catherine at the airport. The truth is that the only matter raised with her was her posts on social media about a government minister. The truth is that the only evidence cited was a blog post containing matters already in the public domain which the minister "doesn't like" people talking about. The truth is free speech is a right guaranteed in the constitution. It is not a commodity to be parceled out only to people whose views you agree with or support. To attempt to deprive somebody of free speech on the basis that they (or their partner, or their family members or their friends) are members of a particular political party is McCarthyism. Everybody should be able to comment on public affairs without fear. Free speech is far too important a thing to deprive people of because you don't like their politics, or even because they may have said one or two things in conversation with friends that you might consider inappropriate or tasteless. They are still entitled to comment on the people elected to govern us and if that right falls, you might as well lock yourself up right now and throw away the key.

(Disclosure: I know Catherine Kelly a little. I have met her once in real life and I liked her. I have interacted with her often on Twitter and frequently disagreed with her, often quite vigorously - but I've never wanted her, or any of the many people I've disagreed with on Twitter, silenced in the name of the State.) Catherine Kelly was falsely imprisoned, albeit briefly, at Dublin Airport, charged with no crime other than the invented one of saying things a government minister didn't like. I swear I will stand beside anybody that this ever happens to and I'm calling on all freedom lovers to do the same. Catherine has written to the Minister for Justice to raise the matter. He's your Minister for the Justice and Equality that's supposed to belong equally to us all. Maybe you should let him know what you think? The Minister charged with "making Ireland a fair, safe and inclusive place to live and work" is Charlie Flanagan. His email address is [email protected]

PS As I was writing this piece, Ruth Coppinger raised Catherine's detention in the Dail. She deserves great credit for doing so.

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izzykamikaze · 9 years ago

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Appeal to members of Galway County Council re public safety at site of former Mother & Baby Home, Tuam.

I’ve sent the following letter by email today to all members of Galway County Council and have asked them to act to ensure the safety of members of the public on the site of the former Mother & Baby Home at Tuam. I attached a copy of my letter to the Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, that can be found in my earlier blog post “We need to talk about nuns, Katherine” posted on 17th October 2016. I’d be very happy if Galway people reading this would contact their public representatives and encourage them to take action to ensure the safety of all users of the playground and surrounding area.

Dear Councillor,

I wrote a few days ago to the Minister for Children to raise some of my concerns about the excavation currently taking place at the Mother & Baby Home site in Tuam. To be honest, I’m expecting a response along the lines of being unable to act as the matter is in the hands of the Commission. However, several matters raised in my letter are outside the scope of the Commission. One area in particular is very clearly the responsibility of Galway County Council – that is public safety in that part of the site not currently under investigation by the Commission.

I believe that many of the burials at Tuam are not in the area currently tended as a gravesite, but under other areas of the Home site, which now includes back gardens of houses as well as a large public area with a playground and access laneways to back gardens. I assume this area to be under the management of Galway County Council. It’s possible that some of these burials are in underground sewage tanks associated with the site’s former use as a workhouse.

Whether they contain burials or not, these tanks (cesspools) existed on the site and there is no evidence of them having been appropriately decommissioned. These are large structures (up to 9 feet deep and 9 feet wide) and not very far below ground. In the absence of maintenance or appropriate decommissioning, these structures can collapse, with a risk of injury or death to people using the site. Vehicular traffic in particular would greatly increase these risks but, as set out in my letter to the Minister, people walking across the ground or even heavy rain has been enough to trigger these collapses in other places.

I’m calling on you, as an elected representative of the people of Galway, to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure the safety of residents of the Dublin Road housing estate in Tuam and other members of the public using the site, in particular the children’s playground and the access routes to it. A geophysical survey of the entire site would be needed to eliminate the possibility of any risk from the eleven known underground structures on the site (nine cesspits, a well and a water cistern.)

I am advised that there are areas of grass on the site where there are slight depressions in the ground and where the grass presents a ‘scorched’ appearance during the summer months. These may indicate subsidence due to the presence of voids below the ground, or areas where voids have been filled with loose rubble.

On a separate matter, I want to draw your attention to the existence of a laneway to access the back gardens of houses adjacent to the currently acknowledged grave site. This laneway occupies most of the space designated as a burial ground on Galway County Council’s planning map of 1971/72. I understand the laneway is regularly used for fuel deliveries to houses. Aside from the revulsion many may feel at this use of an area that may contain children’s graves, there is surely a risk of subsidence there too. I call on you to use your influence to have this risk investigated. I understand that area is being used as a parking facility by people associated with the excavation. I feel it’s within the powers of Galway County Council to curtail this use and I hope you will make representations in the matter.

My letter to the Minister is attached and contains supporting evidence, but I’m happy to provide any further information you may require.

Yours Sincerely,

Izzy Kamikaze

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#Tuam #Tuam Babies #Galway County Council #Mother and Baby Homes

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izzykamikaze · 9 years ago

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We need to talk about nuns, Katherine

A letter to the Minister with responsibility for the Tuam Babies

A few weeks ago, I was happy to hear an excavation was starting at the site of the Mother & Baby Home in Tuam. Then I saw where the hoarding went up. I have information that suggests they’re digging in the wrong place and I know the Commission of Enquiry into Mother & Baby Homes has that information too.

It’s hard to know how to react. I struggled with feelings of powerlessness and despair. Is the hoarding in the wrong place accidentally or on purpose? Whose interests does it serve? In a country that ‘apologises’ to Magdalene women, then tries to swindle them out of the medical care they were promised, the line between conspiracy and cock up is very hard to find. Actually, there’s no line between conspiracy and cock up. They are conjoined twins and corruption is a mixture of the two.

Corruption isn’t just about governments, it’s about us. When corruption at the top gets to people at the bottom of the pile, it tells us we don’t matter. We might see what’s happening, but we can’t change anything, we’re too small and unimportant. Nobody will believe us. Nobody will hear us. There’s nothing we can do. If the people at the top don’t want change and the people at the bottom think they can’t make change, then change doesn’t happen. That’s how the country that once led the world in locking up inconvenient people becomes the world leader in letting sleeping dogs lie.

The time for letting sleeping dogs lie at Tuam is over. We’re meant to feel powerless, but we are not powerless. Catherine Corless, who documented 796 deaths at the Tuam Children’s Home, is not powerless. Adopted people denied information about their origins are not powerless. Women whose children were taken are not powerless. We can expose what’s hidden. We can make change.

One way we can make change is to appeal to those who do have power and to do so publicly. We can make it impossible for people in power to say they didn’t know what was going on and what they needed to do to put it right. So, I’ve written a letter to Katherine Zappone, who’s currently the Minister for Children, but I’ve also written it to you. In it, I tell her (and you) that

· Witness descriptions of burials at Tuam confirm there is more than one burial site.

· One witness description of burials closely matches disused sewage tanks below the site (formerly a 19th century workhouse.) These tanks are outside the area being investigated.

· Witness descriptions of a second burial site may describe either a section of the 19th century sewage system or the 20th century septic tank which replaced it. Only the 20th century tank is within the area being investigated.

· An area which may contain burials is under an access laneway used by cars. This may be destroying evidence and is also potentially dangerous to drivers and pedestrians.

· If underground structures at the site in Tuam were not properly treated when the housing estate was built, there is serious risk of them collapsing, causing injury or death to users of the area which includes a children’s playground.

· Failure to find bodies at Tuam, or to find the number of bodies there should be (which is in excess of 800) may indicate that deaths were falsified in order to facilitate illegal adoptions.

It’s a long letter, but easy to read, so put the kettle on and make some time. Come back to it later, if you need to. But please don’t read this just as an appeal to the power of the Minister. It’s an appeal to your personal power, the power they try to make you believe you don��t have. Use it. Share it, write to politicians or the newspapers, put pressure on Galway County Council to make sure the area is safe. If you have information, submit it to the Commission – but make sure you also submit it to Clann, the archive being put together by and for the victims of our institutional catastrophe. Do anything you can to support Adoption Rights Alliance and Justice for Magdalenes Research, the organisations giving voice to the victims. Do something. Do anything. Use your power. Use your influence. Expose the truth that lies waiting in the ground at Tuam.

Dear Katherine,

I see you were in Tuam lately, at the site of the Mother & Baby Home. You were pictured with Catherine Corless, the woman who told the world there were 800 dead children underneath one of our many institutions dedicated to hiding away allegedly wanton women and their children. Catherine is pointing. Your gaze follows her pointed finger. I know what Catherine is pointing at. I know what you are looking at. She is pointing out the locations of the cesspools, where the bodies of the children may be buried.

Before it was the Mother & Baby Home, it was the workhouse. A 19th Century workhouse was a very efficient machine to conceal from view, at minimum cost, all those unable to support themselves except by begging. 130 workhouses were built around Ireland in the 1840s but grudgingly funded as they were by the local rate-paying class, they skimped on the numbers provided for. Famine came soon after and the workhouses ended up swamped with far more people than they were ever meant for - that’s why we remember them as disease-ridden hellholes, but actually the workhouses were built with a view to containing and preventing infectious disease. There was a terrible cholera pandemic at the time, 55,000 had died in Britain and 100,000 in France. The scientists of the age believed disease was spread by an unhealthy smell from rotting organic matter. They called it “miasma” and they rightly expected a lot of it in institutions for the poor and infirm, so when most of Ireland was still on the ‘bucket and chuck it’ system and dear old Dirty Dublin still notorious for sewage and offal flowing in the streets, every workhouse had a state-of-the-art sewage system.

Unfortunately the state of the art was based on the mistaken belief that the important thing was to contain the smell. The solution was a number of large cesspools. Some people use the words “cesspool” and “septic tank” interchangeably, but they’re not at all the same thing. A septic system carries sewage in water to a tank some distance away, where the liquid is allowed to filter out and the solids decompose somewhat. It does not require frequent emptying. A cesspool or cesspit is basically an underground room, directly below the privy or dry toilet (often just a hole in the ground.) Sewage doesn’t decompose into usable compost in these conditions – it’s far too wet and the tank is far too large. The hazards include sewer gas over the tank, which can cause unconsciousness and death, even combustion and explosions. They have to be emptied regularly (regulations specified several times a year) but in the age before chemical fertilisers, there was a ready market for sewage sludge.

It wasn’t a great system but it might have worked well enough, if the workhouses hadn’t ended up accommodating three and four times the number of people they were built for. In Ballyshannon, the sewage backed up into the water tank in 1847. Unlike ‘miasma’, sewage in the water really does cause disease and death. Incidents of workhouse sewage tanks overflowing were reported in Kinsale, Bawnboy and Enniskillen to name a few. By the early 20th century, most of the surviving workhouses had abandoned their cesspools and installed septic systems or connected to urban sewerage schemes. Tuam workhouse installed a septic system in 1918. The complex inherited by the Bon Secours Sisters seven years later included at least nine ‘underground rooms’ that had once been sewage tanks. They were empty now and ready to find a new use.

We need to talk about nuns, Katherine. Young people these days talk of them as evil caricatures. Worse still, they talk of them as if they were all the same. We know they weren’t all the same. In Ireland, for independent minded young women, the nuns were often more meaningful role models than the only available alternative – mothers and wives. They lived in communities of women. They were more educated than most women were at that time. They did important jobs. The school principals, the matrons, the Reverend Mothers were about the only women in our childhoods, and in our mothers’ and grandmothers’ childhoods, who exercised real power. Each order had its own traditions, its own culture. Most were absolutely independent of all the local structures of control, including the bishops, and answerable only to their “mother houses” – often conveniently far away. The answers to some of the mysteries of the burials at Tuam are within the culture of the Sisters of Bon Secours and I’m saving my thoughts on that for the Commission. There were good nuns, bad nuns, kind nuns, nasty nuns…nuns came in all the varieties that humans came in. In 1925, when the Tuam Mother & Baby Home opened, one Irishwoman in every 20 was a nun.

If there is one generalisation that could safely be made about nuns, it’s that they were resourceful. All of us old enough to have been educated by nuns remember anecdotes of how the foundress of the order wheeled and dealed, schemed as well as prayed, to get the land for a convent or the permission for a school. It’s unimaginable that these resourceful women on this congested site would not have found a use for those nine empty, underground rooms.

Tuam workhouse seems to have been the only one built without an adjoining graveyard. Some burials happened within the walls when the workhouse first opened in 1846, but the Poor Law Commissioners put a stop to it, fearful for the health of the inmates. Within a year, the workhouse was forced to buy a burial plot in Carrowpeter. This plot filled up during the Famine and another was opened on the Ballymote Road. There was no space within the walls of the Tuam Children’s Home for 800 burials, yet during its 36 years of operation no funeral seems ever to have been seen leaving the Home. It’s probable that the resourceful Sisters of Bon Secours used the underground structures already on the site to bury the dead.

In 2014, Philip Boucher-Hayes interviewed a witness called Mary Moriarty about her fall in the mid-1970s part-way into a hole that had opened up on the site. She described “a vault” in which she saw the bodies of a number of babies (possibly 100) wrapped and placed on shelves or steps. This description was reported as proof that the bodies were not, as had been claimed, in a septic tank. What she describes is not, of course, a modern septic tank, but sounds very much like one of the old workhouse cesspools – vaulted underground rooms, up to 9 feet wide and 9 feet high and made of brick or stone. Thrift as well as resourcefulness can safely be associated with all the nuns I remember from my childhood. Why on earth would they go to the trouble and expense of excavating and constructing an underground vault when they already had 9 unused vaults under the premises?

The great advantage in our current situation of knowing these sewage vaults were there and may have been repurposed as tombs is that their locations are known. They are clearly marked on the plans for the workhouse and those plans are still available. In June 2014, while the controversy about burials at Tuam was in full swing, I visited the Irish Architectural Archive, where I saw and photographed the plans of the Tuam workhouses. I verified the existence and planned locations of 9 cesspools underneath the footprint of the old workhouse buildings. I gave them to Catherine Corless and I know she included them in the evidence she gave to the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes. I gave them to The Irish Mail on Sunday too, which published them along with an interview with me on 22nd June 2014. I also posted pictures of the plans on my blog. Almost immediately afterwards, the Commission was announced and the plans, along with a large number of other documents, were withdrawn from publicly accessible archives and given to the Commission.

The Commission knows about the cesspools, Katherine. You know about the cesspools. Catherine Corless knows about them. I know about them. We know where they are – and we know where they are not as well. You are standing with Catherine Corless and three elderly men who I’m told are survivors of the Tuam Children’s Home. You are standing on a manicured lawn of irregular shape with a low wall around it. There is a grotto, an improvised shrine where a statue of the Virgin Mary stands in an upended bathtub behind glass. We’ve all seen the pictures of this little plot, with a low concrete wall around it and a metal gate with a cross.

You are standing beside Catherine Corless and your eyes are following her pointing finger. She’s pointing to the area outside that little plot tended as a gravesite. She’s pointing to the probable locations of the workhouse cesspits. One is under a shed in somebody’s back garden. Others are dotted around the open space (perhaps a third of the footprint of the former workhouse) that now contains a children’s playground, access laneways to the backs of houses, a public footpath. None of the cesspools are under the little lawn you’re standing on. It wasn’t even part of the workhouse until 1918, when it was purchased as the site for the new septic tank that made the old system redundant. Before that it was a gravel pit, under separate ownership. That septic tank was in use until 1938, so it’s impossible that any of the burials from the 1920s and 30s took place there – and why would they, with 9 empty underground chambers to choose from? It is possible some later burials took place there, but it’s unlikely that the structure described by Mary Moriarty is in there.

A high hoarding has gone up in Tuam around the excavation site. The workhouse had a high wall too. Its purpose was to conceal from view the human misery within. All of the many institutions in Ireland, in the days when we institutionalised a higher proportion of our population than even the Soviet Union, had high walls and nobody outside really knew (or probably cared) much about what went on in there. I don’t know what’s going on behind the hoarding, Katherine, but I do know what’s not behind that hoarding. None of the cesspits of the Tuam workhouse are in the area cordoned off for investigation. The area cordoned off is only the “grotto” area, that little lawn we’ve seen so much of on the news. Cars and vans associated with the dig are parked on the area clearly marked as ‘burial ground’ on a Galway County Council map of 1971/2 (when the housing estate was planned.) This is now an access laneway for the back gardens of the houses. Trailer-loads of turf are regularly hauled over the ‘burial ground’ to the back gates of the houses.

Mary Moriarty, the woman who saw the swaddled babies (“parceleens”, she called them) in 1975 believes the place she fell was behind that hoarding. I’m almost certain she must be mistaken. A third of the area of the old Home was covered in briars and brambles at that time. It must be very hard to pinpoint a location. When we know that there were underground sewage vaults a matter of feet away on the other side of the wall (a wall that wasn’t there when she fell), surely the search area must be extended?

There are two other witnesses from the 1970s and what they saw was quite different, so it’s clear there are multiple burial sites. Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney were 10 year old boys when they lifted a slab and saw a higgledy-piggledy pit of bones, quite different from Mary Moriarty’s orderly rows of “parceleens.” The slab they lifted could be the cover of the 1918 septic tank (disused from 1938, when the Home was connected to the public sewer). If so, it is within the area cordoned off for investigation, but there are also lots of places in the old workhouse’s sewage and drainage systems where traps or ‘pipes’ (which could have been several feet deep) would have been covered with slabs for ease of inspection. If what the boys described is not found in the tiny area cordoned off, it must be looked for feet away, on the other side of that hoarding.

Mary Moriarty saw perhaps 100 bodies. Barry and Frannie saw only 20 or so. 796 deaths were recorded at the Mother and Baby Home during its 36 year lifetime. Even if both of these sites were discovered behind the hoarding, where are the rest of the bodies? It makes sense that there would be multiple burial sites. The 796 deaths registered does not include stillbirths, which were not recorded at that time. Stillborn children could not be baptised and it was not considered proper to bury them with the baptised – hence the proliferation of ‘cillini’ (special burial places for unbaptised children) around the country. Assuming a stillbirth rate of 3%, 60 or more stillborn babies must have been buried somewhere, separately from the rest. It is entirely possible that, in that era of sex-segregation, boys and girls may have been buried separately, or younger and older children. Some mothers must have died in childbirth. If they were buried there, nobody has yet reported where they are buried.

If the whole site was explored, it’s likely there still would not be evidence of 800 burials there. This opens up another can of worms, Katherine, as I’m sure you know. Evidence is mounting that, in various institutions, deaths were falsified to facilitate illegal adoptions. You can hardly be unaware of Connal O’Fatharta’s articles in The Examiner on this subject. Some of the people involved in these adoptions may have been well-intentioned. They may have thought it in the best interests of the child, but the results have been harrowing for many people, deprived even of knowledge of congenital medical problems that might affect their own children and left with practically no prospect of ever making contact with their lost families.

It’s a very great injustice and one day it will be brought into the light. The question is will it happen in time for people like the three elderly survivors you met in Tuam? This is our local branch of a global scandal – mass institutionalisation of pregnant women and forced adoption of their children. In Canada, most of the women and children were First Nations people, the indigenous population of Canada. In Australia too, the native Aboriginal people were the ones who bore the brunt of this practice. Ireland is unusual only insofar as the practice was extraordinarily pervasive and reached into every corner of the population, almost every family. I’m sure you heard Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s recent apology to the mothers whose children were taken from them, often without consent and sometimes by deception. In Australia, up to 60% of so-called ‘illegitimate’ children were taken from their mothers for adoption and this is rightly the cause of much soul-searching and official regret. In Ireland it was 97%. It was virtually impossible for any single woman to keep her child.

I don’t want to be cynical about the Commission, Katherine. I want to believe it will get to the truth and bring some comfort to thousands of people affected by this scandal, but sadly we have a tradition in Ireland of reports compiled to satisfy a demand that ‘something must be done at once’ that then gather dust on a shelf or, like the survivor testimony behind the Ryan Report, are sealed until all concerned are dead. I want to believe the Commission will bring, if not justice, at least a measure of truth to the women whose children were taken and to the adopted people meeting a brick wall in their enquiries about their origins. I want to believe in the Commission, Katherine, but the hoarding in Tuam has gone up in the wrong place, the Sisters of Bon Secours have hired the most powerful public relations firm in Ireland and that picture of you standing beside a pointing Catherine Corless has disappeared, although Catherine has confirmed to me that the conversation occurred.

Three months ago the morning news reported that an excavation was to take place at the Donegal farm where 6 year old Mary Boyle went missing in 1977. The dig was scheduled to take five weeks, we were told. By evening of the same day, the search had been called off and an announcement made that nothing had been found. It was a farce. I’ve spoken to archaeologists who told me they wouldn’t even have their tent set up in the time it took for that “five week excavation” to be called off. Something is very wrong in this country and it must not be allowed to frustrate the enquiry into Mother & Baby Homes the way it has frustrated the search for Mary Boyle and many other historic enquiries.

I didn’t think I needed to give evidence to the Commission. The information I had was given to them by Catherine Corless. I’ve since been told that, as it passed through Catherine rather than coming from me directly, it may have been considered ‘hearsay’ and inadmissible. I will now make a submission to the Commission and to Clann, the shadow enquiry set up by Justice for Magdalenes Research and the Adoption Rights Alliance. Making a submission to Clann is a way of ensuring it will be available to survivors and future researchers, even if the State does what it did with the Ryan Commission survivor testimony, which it sealed for 75 years. Catherine Corless has, of course, already given evidence to the Commission. I’ve asked her to submit to Clann also, to ensure her work is available to others in the future. I’ve been advised throughout my own involvement in this by an architect with an interest in institutional architecture. He is one of the very few people alive to have been inside a workhouse cesspit. He doesn’t want to make any public statement, but I’ve asked him to submit to the Commission, which I understand he can do confidentially, and to Clann. I’ve made the same request of Limerick historian Liam Hogan, who spent a lot of time researching Tuam workhouse and the Children’s Home, as reflected in newspaper reports of the time.

Drip by drip, this story is coming out, Katherine. In my opinion, it is better out sooner than later. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it will reflect quite as badly on the nuns as some people hope and others fear. But the truth is, it won’t reflect terribly well on anyone. It was a terrible era: church and state, national and local politicians, doctors, social workers and people charged with inspecting the institutions all played a part in this scandal and barely a handful raised their heads above the parapet to object. Neighbourhood bullies and gossips and the families of the women banished to the homes will also find much to be uncomfortable about when the truth comes out. This was a collective madness of a whole society, in much the same way as the horrors of wartime Germany were. Nobody will get off scot free when this truth is told – but still it must be told.

Politicians worry about their legacy. This is understandable. We’d all like to be remembered well. But it’s also an obstacle to truth in a story of this kind, especially in Ireland where dynastic politics means the sons and daughters of the main actors of the past are all too often in power when an historic scandal trundles down the tracks. Political parties are families too and like to protect ‘their own’ even 50 or 100 years after the event. You’re in a somewhat unique position – a government minister, independent of party apparatus. I mean no offence, Katherine, when I say you may not be a minister for very long. Our current government could hardly be called stable and doesn’t look like making a spectacular contribution to anybody’s legacy. Yours could be different. As I write, you look likely to be remembered as the Minister who marched through the lobbies to keep the 8th amendment, only weeks after she marched through the streets looking for its repeal. There’s a greater legacy waiting for you to claim it. You can be the Minister who brought justice or truth or even a glimmer of hope to the women and children wronged by Ireland’s history of incarceration and forced adoption. I hope you claim it.

In a 2008 interview, speaking about your relationship with Ann Louise, you said “Imagine feeling really free for the first time, free about who you are. Maybe it's hard to understand, for others who have not been despised by society. I don't give a shit what people think any more. I know who I am, our partnership has given me the greatest happiness of my life and it's created a lot of good in the world, so shag off." I’m speaking to that Katherine in this letter, the woman who said that. The women and children from the Mother and Baby Homes were “despised by society” just as you and I were. Here is another opportunity to create “a lot of good in the world.” You can give them back something that was taken from them. Do it, please. Tell the ones who want to hold the floodgates closed to “shag off.” Tell them you “know who you are” and you are the person whose job it is to represent the interests of Irish children, past and present.

Katherine, I can almost see the reply where you tell me you cannot interfere with the work of the Commission. I’d be the last one to ask you to interfere in what we must hope is a proper investigation (remember what I said about Mary Boyle.) But, if the Commission has decided to confine the archaeological aspect of its investigation to that tiny area behind the hoarding, what is there to stop you looking into what is on the other side of it? The truth is, even if there were no bodies buried in Tuam, even if there had never been a Mother and Baby Home there, you would have a duty as Minister for Children to be concerned about the old workhouse site in Tuam. The reason is this: disused cesspools, regardless of their contents, don’t just lie harmlessly under the ground. Disused cesspools collapse suddenly when people walk over them.

In Suffolk County, on Long Island, New York there are many houses built before the sewer arrived and a warren of forgotten cesspools exists below people’s backyards. Since 1998, six cases have been recorded of cesspools collapsing, sucking in people who were walking over them at the time. Seven people have been injured and three killed. It took eighteen hours to dig one man’s body from the foul sludge at the bottom of the tank. Many other cesspools have collapsed without causing any injuries and it’s purely a matter of luck that casualties have not been far higher. One woman’s cesspool collapsed 5 days before the backyard birthday party she had planned for 65 guests. They would have been dancing on the very spot where the hole appeared overnight, after heavy rain. The hole was ten feet in diameter and twelve feet deep. The disused cesspools now collapsing on Long Island are between 30 and 90 years old. The cesspools at Tuam are 170 years old.

“I absolutely love and adore children. Sometimes when I see a child, I go up to them and say “I’m your Minister,”” you told the Daily Star recently. Katherine, if you can’t be “their Minister” for the children under the ground in Tuam, can you at least be a Minister for the children in the playground? Make sure Galway County Council immediately commissions a geophysical survey to establish the safety of the entire workhouse site at Tuam.

Oh…and while you’re at it, could you ask the archaeologists to stop parking their cars on what may well be the graves of the children they’re supposed to be looking for?

Sincerely,

Izzy Kamikaze

PS One of the privileges we allowed nuns when they joined their orders was to start their new life with a new name. Nobody ever accused them of hiding behind a pseudonym. I started a new life myself, more than three decades ago, when I came out at the age of 19 and I too changed my name. Unlike the nuns, I’m continually accused of cowardice and hiding behind a pseudonym, especially when, in any small way I can, I challenge the status quo. I believe you know who I am, just as I knew who you were, long before most people in Ireland had heard of you, but to avoid any such accusation, let me clarify: when they sprinkled holy water over my infant head and later, when the nuns called out my name from the roll book of a typical National School, they called me Ruth O’Rourke.

#Tuam #Tuam Babies #800 dead babies #Katherine Zappone #Mother and Baby Homes

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izzykamikaze · 9 years ago

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The uses of anonymity - a love letter to Sean Moncrieff

Dear Sean, I'm a big fan of your show and I also follow you on Twitter. I saw your tweets today referring to some people campaigning for Mary Boyle as "a bunch of misinformed mob-ruled fuckwit trolls." Judging by your tweets immediately before this one, it seems you make this assumption based on some of them being anonymous. I felt I had to respond to this and I did send a few tweets, but I think you'd switched off by then, so I doubt you read them. I hope when you've calmed down a little, you might be prepared to hear what I have to say.That's why I'm writing to you now. Even if you don't respond, I'm going to put this on my blog, because this is a conversation I have often and it's time to organise my thoughts on it a bit.

Anonymity is not always a sign of cowardice and is certainly not an indicator of evil intent. Some of the nastiest people on Twitter are tweeting under their own names and some of the nicest ones assume a degree of anonymity for various reasons: these include whistleblowers in various institutions, LGBT people in countries where they are criminalised, people who have been subject to intimidation for their stance on one thing or another and some others who are just careful of their privacy. My own name raises a lot of eyebrows, but I've had it a long time and am totally identifiable - more identifiable sometimes than is wise or safe or comfortable.

34 years ago, when I was only a teenager, I got involved in the struggle for LGBT equality. My family were very decent people, but like most people at that time were embarrassed by a family member talking openly about their sexuality. They didn't want me to use "my own" name and I had a new life and was totally ready for a new name. I really needed to be public and to be part of this important freedom struggle. And so, I became Izzy Kamikaze and decades later, I am still Izzy Kamikaze, even though my family and my country have travelled a million miles since then. Things are not always what they seem. My apparent anonymity was a courtesy to my family, rather than a sign of lack of courage. I had courage. When there was only a handful of people in this country who were openly gay, I was one of them. Everybody has their own story and their own reason. I think people should be judged on what they actually say and do, rather than on what name appears beside it.

Broadcasters, including your own station, often interview people anonymously. They distort voices, pixelate faces, change names. They understand that all kinds of circumstances apply where people need the refuge of anonymity. You may feel that none of those circumstances apply to Irish people tweeting about the case of Mary Boyle. I wish I could feel the same way.

I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I'm a long-distance commuter living in a rural area who spends a lot of time on trains. These days Twitter is a large part of my social life and my activism - I did my time on the frontlines and this is all I have time or energy for now. I "know" most of the people who tweet about Irish politics. I know some of them in person and the rest of them I know through interacting with them regularly on Twitter. Some of these interactions are friendly, some are varying degrees of heated. There are people who are abusive. I know them. There are also people who just get a little over-emotional sometimes. I know them too. I got involved today when I saw you address someone I only know as Renegade Woman this way "You're a troll using the murder of a six year old girl so you can bully others. Too cowardly too use your own name." Now, I've never seen Renegade Woman bully anyone. I think she is a decent person. Perhaps I am wrong and you've made a detailed examination of her timeline before making this horrible accusation, but it looks more like you made an assumption that because she is anonymous, she is necessarily malicious and cowardly. I hope this letter gives you reason to reconsider this.

Twitter is a blessing and a curse. I know well the feeling of suddenly being descended upon by a bunch of people who've misunderstood something you've said. I know that you were angry and confused when you sent those tweets. I hope you feel better about it now. As a regular listener to your show, I know what a lot of the people tweeting you don't know - the Mary Boyle story is not the kind of story your show covers, but please try to understand: people who are trying to get this case raised are getting frustrated by the difficulties of doing so, they seize on anything they see as an expression of interest from someone in the media. They retweet it and comment on it and build up their hopes that this may be a breakthrough, when in fact it's nothing of the sort. I understand it's frustrating - maybe even alarming - to be on the receiving end of this, but it's not malicious, it's well intentioned.

I know nothing about Renegade Woman and what circumstances have formed her decision to tweet anonymously, but I know a little about some of the other anonymous tweeters tweeting about Mary Boyle. One is a man who was publicly threatened on Twitter by an elected politician who said he would come to his place of work and beat him up. Another man was told he would be tracked down and his children would be raped - and this threat was proven to come from a close associate of another elected politician. I know at least two people who were pressured by their employers because of political views expressed on Twitter and another woman who tweets anonymously because her husband is a member of Fianna Fail, who would not share her view on this and many other matters. Really, there are all kinds of reasons, from the trivial to the truly sinister, why people choose to tweet anonymously. I hope you'll take this into account and reconsider your remarks.

Some of this may seem far fetched to you. I wish I could feel the same. I myself experienced weeks of harassment and false allegations from members of one political party who didn't like views I expressed on Twitter. My partner was so frightened by this that she asked me to go through my account and delete references to where I lived as she was afraid of attacks on our home. She would like me to tweet anonymously. It's too late for me to do that, but boy do I understand why some people make that choice!

Sean, you interviewed my partner years ago, when you were on another show (Good Grief Moncrieff) and she warmly remembers your sensitivity and kindness to her. She's not home right now for me to check the details, but you have a good rep in my house! I never met you myself, but a colleague of yours, D knows me since shortly after her arrival in Ireland and has been kind enough to refer to me as "her hero" in her blog. I defended her most vigorously when she was attacked by right wing trolls making demeaning remarks about her pregnancy during the Marriage Referendum. I met another of your colleagues, K, when she was still in school. My partner and I accompanied her to the door of her debs, in loco parentis, when she was a bag of nerves as the first young woman in her school to bring a same sex partner. I mention these as character references only. I have no idea of their views on Mary Boyle or on many other subjects, but I'm pretty sure that if you bother to enquire, these fine women will confirm that I am neither a "misinformed mob-ruled fuckwit troll" nor somebody who would leap to the defence of such people. If anything, I am known as a peacemaker and a fan of respectful engagement with people whose views I certainly don't share.

I don't know if you'll bother to read this, Sean, but I hope you will. I'm a veteran of many Twitter squabbles and am quite sure of my ground when I say anonymity is not a marker of abusive behaviour or malice, it is often an indicator of fear and trauma. I think you owe an apology to Renegade Woman and I'm hopeful that if you've read this, you might give her one. I believe you're a fair-minded man. Whether you do or not, something good came out of it from my point of view, because I finally sat down and wrote something about the many reasons for anonymity online, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. That's the reason why I'll put it on my blog, where I can link to it the next time this conversation comes up for me (which is nearly every day, due to my own unusual name.) The only thing I intend to take out is the names of my friends I offer as character witnesses, as I won't have an opportunity to discuss this with them.

Thanks for doing one of my favourite radio shows. I know it's not a show that can do anything for Mary Boyle's case, but I still hope you reconsider your view of the well-meaning people who asked you to do so. Cheers! Izzy

#MaryBoyle anonymity Twitter

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izzykamikaze · 9 years ago

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Malice in Political Blunderland: The Trolls and Tribulations of the Irish Labour Party

It’s not every Christmas you find yourself dubbed “the most feral troll of all” by defenders of the Irish political establishment. I’m afraid I wasn’t clear about the protocol. Will there be an awards ceremony? Is there a dress code? Will I have to make a speech? Two weeks later, I’m being denounced by TDs and Senators as a vile troll harassing a rape victim, part of a Sinn Fein conspiracy. Those of you who know me are now laughing, but I’m not joking. These tweets are about me and they make me quite afraid of what will happen next.

It’s a long story, and I’m sorry I can’t make it any shorter.

My Christmas celebration with my family was on Stephen’s Day, because I worked on Christmas Day. I was wrapping a present for my grandchild when an anonymous Twitter account called @PopulistWatchIr denounced me as “most feral troll.” This is an interesting account. It seems to be a semi-official account (I’ll tell you why, later) of a government party, Labour – the party that talks the most talk about cyberbullying. Despite this affiliation, the account exists to harass and defame those it brands “populists,” broadly defined as anybody politically to the left of the Labour party. Its technique is curious. You might expect an account dedicated to “watching” populists to follow them, retweet questionable tweets, engage with them to expose their “populist” fallacies. Populist Watch has a different MO. It has blocked pretty much everybody who openly disagrees with the Labour party. Having ensured these people can’t read its tweets, it then makes defamatory statements about them to an audience of the Labour party faithful. One can only assume its purpose is to identify people as “legitimate targets” who may be attacked at will. Sometimes it tags the person it’s discussing and sometimes it doesn’t, but it always has them blocked before it does so. It harangued me about various things most of Stephen’s Day, knowing I couldn’t reply as I was blocked. It called on me to denounce Slab Murphy, for example. It always calls me an SF supporter – that’s the smear de jour for Labour tweeters.

The concept of “troll” has drifted somewhat from when it was first used to describe the kind of teenage boy who, from the safety of their bedroom, tramples over people’s boundaries in search of any extreme reaction. The stock-in-trade of this species is death threats, rape threats, comment about personal appearance, sexual slurs and so forth. “Troll” is now used with abandon to describe anybody you disagree with, or find annoying online. I’ve used it in this sense myself, so I can hardly object to being called a troll. I say things online that some people don’t like, therefore I am a troll. Guilty as charged.

“Feral trolls,” on the other hand, is usually still reserved for the real nasties; the ones who abuse people, call them names, wish harm on them or threaten harm, tell lies, set up multiple accounts in order to continue to abuse and evade detection. I think the two most “feral trolls” I’ve personally encountered, were two (supposedly pro-life) guys whose response to my tweets regarding a raped woman being denied an abortion was to start a conversation about whether or not I was too ugly to get raped. That’s classic feral troll. Like those who descend on someone tweeting suicidal ideation to tell them to “get on with it,” or who daily subject feminists in particular to death and rape threats. There is at least one person who’s behaved like that in this story and it’s not me.

I’ve never done any of these things. I’m a feminist whose legitimate, political speech has been inconvenient to authorities. I’ve abused nobody. I challenge anybody to produce evidence of this alleged “abuse” which is supposed to have taken place on my Twitter account, in full public view. You won’t find it. It doesn’t exist. Important people are calling me a harasser and abuser and implying I’m mentally unstable.

This is happening because I asked inconvenient questions, which exclusively concerned the political history and fitness for office of a political representative, Senator Mairia Cahill. Despite what‘s being said about me, I’ve never questioned her allegations of rape and I don’t intend to. I’m a feminist. I know one in four women has been sexually abused. Ms Cahill’s account of sexual abuse is entirely credible and representative of the experiences of thousands of abused women. I strongly supported Ms Cahill on Twitter and condemned Sinn Fein when I first became aware of her story. Like the rest of my interaction with Ms Cahill, that’s all on the public record and anybody interested in the truth can see for themselves.

It is confidently being stated on Twitter that I’ve “abused” Ms Cahill. It’s even implied that I’ve used sexual slurs against her. I’m a feminist. I never used these words against any woman in my life. It’s all a lie. My side of it is still on the public record (Ms Cahill has protected her account, so her tweets are only visible to her followers. I think her account is being cleaned up. She has said some nasty things) Check my side out for yourself (if they don’t get my account taken down.) I haven’t done any of the things I’m being accused of. The people accusing me are trying to keep secrets from the public. I hope there are still people who care about an injustice of this kind.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of Sinn Fein. I am not now, nor have I ever been part of a conspiracy to harass a rape victim. It’s not even true that I’ve tweeted thousands of times about Ms Cahill. Look for yourself and you’ll see. What I’ve tweeted about thousands of times is the extraordinary degree of harassment I’ve experienced since asking Ms Cahill three simple, polite and politically vital questions. From the time I posted these questions I came under pressure from a bewildering variety of sources. I’m a feminist and I’m followed by lots of feminists. If I was “harassing a rape victim,” they’d see that and challenge me -and I would listen to them.

The only group that has consistently supported women and children, whether their abusers were church, state or paramilitaries has been feminists. You don’t have to live very long in the Ireland that makes proper medical care for Magdalene Laundries survivors dependent on them signing up to an inadequate compensation deal, to understand our political parties aren’t concerned about victims unless it suits them. If you were abused by their political rivals, they might well parachute you into a Seanad seat. If it was the State, they just wait for you to die – or take your case all the way to the European Court like Louise O'Keeffe. All victims are not created equal.

Feminists didn’t challenge me, because they didn’t see me “harassing a rape victim.” They saw me fighting for my right to ask political questions. Only 3 people outside of what I now call #LabouRNU raised any reservations about my questions. Two of these agreed Ms Cahill was unfit for public office, but thought she would be in office for such a short time, it wasn’t worth objecting to. The third just found it boring and told me she was unfollowing me.

The pressure came from Labour accounts, some named, some anonymous, supplemented by a variety of accounts whose profiles declare their opposition to the peace process including socialist republicans; a gentleman whose proudest boast is that he served eight and a half years for attempted murder; and the current National Secretary of RNU, who advised me I’d “gone too far.”

There were also a number of “egg” accounts – anonymous tweeters with no profile pic and no followers. Their names are just a jumble of letters and numbers and there seems to be quite a few of these accounts exclusively devoted to attacking anybody who questions Ms Cahill. Some of them are abusive, some just time wasters. The thing about these accounts is they are almost invisible. They have no followers, so obviously you don’t have followers in common. Your conversations with them don’t show up on anybody’s timeline. You can’t follow these accounts. If you try, they disappear and another one springs up in their place. Some of these accounts appear to abuse Ms Cahill, but their MO is odd. They may in fact be false flag accounts.

In my most recent conversation with Ms Cahill (started by her, as usual, with smears on my mental health, her regular MO) one of these pops in to say “Mairia Cahill is a c**t.” I immediately object to any woman being described that way. Something odd then happens. Somebody breaks the thread, perhaps by deleting and reposting. The effect of this is that when Ms Cahill retweets this abuse - mere seconds later, it displays without my response condemning it. It makes it look like I’m part of an abusive conversation with Ms Cahill, which I am not. Clearly a skilled troll is at work here and its agenda is, not to abuse Ms Cahill, but to discredit me. Now who would do a thing like that? My response, now standing separate from the tweet that it objects to, is still in its proper place in my timeline.

The named Labour tweeters mainly stay within the law. They tried to grind me down and waste as much of my time as possible, but they didn’t openly abuse me. They were happy to defend the activities of the abusive accounts, though. Given their pioneering attitude to stamping out cyberbullying, I found their unanimity with the anonymous abusers amusing. I took to calling them #LabouRNU and they didn’t like this. I didn’t invent this hashtag, by the way. It was already out there.

Legitimate Labour tweeters did not actively abuse me, but one in particular devoted many hours to tying me up in knots defending myself from allegations of insufficiently condemning other people’s tweets about Ms Cahill or of abusing her myself, though he could never supply an example of an abusive tweet. I managed to document some of this, using the hashtags #KangarooCourt and #BringOnTheDuckingStool. This man and I had followed each other for a while and had followers in common, so other people drifted in and out of these conversations. If my account disappears, these conversations may end up being the best way to see the pressure I was under. He tweets as @Hippoclides – I emphasise that his behaviour, unlike some of the other accounts, was legal, if very unpleasant and unfair. I would never try to curtail his speech, but I only engaged with it so that other people would see exactly what was going on.

It’s a point of pride for me that I never blocked him or anybody else. I never did anything wrong and had nothing to hide. Anybody is welcome to jump into my mentions and correct some point of fact or challenge an abusive tweet - if they ever manage to find one. I did stop following him, though and I soft blocked him. This means I blocked him and immediately unblocked him, so that he was dropped from my followers. He could still read my tweets if he wanted to, but they wouldn’t just appear in his timeline. He did want to read them and immediately refollowed me. I asked him many times not to do so and not to tweet me unless he needed to correct me on some fact, but every time my account got busy and I might not notice another notification, he followed me again. This happened maybe 15 times. By contrast, Ms Cahill asked me once not to tweet her. This happened on an occasion when she had dropped by to insult me, not the other way around (which I emphasise has never happened.) I never tagged her in another tweet until her public denunciations of two days ago.

I supported Ms Cahill in the beginning and I still support her, insofar as she is seeking justice regarding her rape. Anybody who tries to cover up the rape of a young person under the age of consent covers up a serious crime. I condemn any such activity absolutely, as I have done all my life. I still had some misgivings about the way Ms Cahill conducted her campaign. I disapproved of the BBC Spotlight programme naming people who allegedly committed offences – not because I want to protect these people, but because, if they did do these things, I’d like them held accountable by the only appropriate mechanism we have for that, the courts system. People who have been tried in “the court of public opinion” can never receive a fair trial, so there will never be any trial. However terrible their crime, they’ll escape the consequences. I didn’t express this disapproval at the time, I’m afraid. I fully supported Ms Cahill’s own choices as a woman who’d been raped. I made allowances for her, but I felt it was a grave error on the part of the BBC. If you look at my tweets for that period, you’ll find I tweeted extensively on the subject in support of Ms Cahill, but avoided naming the accused people, even though their names were in the public domain.

I defended Ms Cahill, even after her dissident republican affiliations were produced with a flourish by some Sinn Fein tweeters. Who cared what her politics were? (She was not seeking any office at that time). She was a raped woman seeking justice. I didn’t care if she was in the KKK! - I supported Mairia Cahill. It’s all on the record.

Over time, I realised Ms Cahill was doing some stuff I couldn’t support. People who had no part in any abuse were being denounced on the basis that they were in Sinn Fein, or could somehow be associated with Sinn Fein. One woman was told that her husband may have been an informer, which struck me as particularly irresponsible. Her grandchild was named and she was told she should be thinking about his welfare. A photo of a child sex abuse survivor was posted against her will on a Unionist account with which Ms Cahill is friendly. This seemed to happen because the woman had offended Ms Cahill online and Ms Cahill drew attention to the published photograph from her own account. People with no association whatsoever with Sinn Fein got this treatment too, if they dared to disagree with any aspect of Ms Cahill’s behaviour.

Catherine McCartney, a feminist, law student (then – graduate now) and human rights activist whose brother Robert was murdered by IRA members has been a powerful – and independent – advocate for victims of the Troubles. Her family’s campaign for justice led directly to SF entering the policing process and she is proud of that. Catherine opened her home to Ms Cahill when she first went public about the abuse and allowed her to stay there for a period of several months. She was unaware Ms Cahill was a member of one of the groups that had split with SF in protest against the policing decision that was Catherine’s great victory, her family’s lasting memorial to Robert’s memory. Catherine was later denounced by Ms Cahill and accused of “standing with” the people who murdered her brother because she reposted on her Facebook page a statement from solicitors criticising the Spotlight programme for “trial by media” of people accused by Ms Cahill. Catherine believes that everyone, including the people who killed her brother, is entitled to a fair trial. I agree with her and I hope everybody who studies the law shares this belief.

“Human rights” are those rights that we agree everybody should have, even our worst enemies. The right to a fair trial is one of those rights. I’m writing this in the hope that free speech, the right to question authority, is one of those rights too. I don’t think a person who supports the right to a fair trial should be accused of siding with her brother’s killers. I think it’s reprehensible to aim such a smear at a person who has supported you when you most needed it. I became aware of other stories too. Other women, other feminists, unaligned to any party, who have supported Ms Cahill, have then been denounced and falsely accused of various things. I became aware that I could not support this person and I stopped supporting her – but still, I did not abuse her. In the fullness of time, after she had become a political candidate (which gives the public a legitimate interest in her activities) I publicly asked her some questions regarding her political acts.

Here are the questions I asked Ms Cahill, phrased exactly as I phrased them:

-Did you run an email account [email protected] while a member of dissident group RNU? I understand the account solicited evidence regarding sexual abuse by members of Republican organisations. http://sluggerotoole.com/2010/01/30/an-open-appeal-to-all-republicans-from-ms-cahill/

-Were you at the time you ran that account, affiliated with the anti- peace process, anti-policing RNU?

-If you were, why did you not disclose that affiliation in your appeal?

In case the reasons for these questions are not obvious, Ms Cahill has built a career on opposition to “kangaroo courts” (freelance investigations of matters more properly left to the police and the courts) yet, only 13 days before the publication of this appeal, an interview with Ms Cahill was published in which she stated:

“I never wanted M killed. I wanted him tied to railings in Ballymurphy with a placard around his neck saying he was a rapist."

I think most of us would consider this a forgivable rhetorical flourish from a woman who had been raped, but we might see it differently if we thought that, at the time of speaking these words, she was a leader of an organisation that broke away from Sinn Fein because it didn’t want cooperation with policing. I think many people would be worried about a person with those affiliations setting up an account that invited allegations of abuse. They’d be concerned about what action might be taken against people who were identified in that way.

A Youtube video exists that gives the date of that year’s AGM, where one would normally expect officers to be elected, as 31st of January 2010, the day after publication of the Slugger O’Toole appeal. I don’t know if this is the meeting at which Ms Cahill was elected National Secretary, but I would like to know. I think that’s a piece of information that should be in the public domain, when a person is seeking public office.

I don’t know what you picture when you hear about “the most feral troll” but to me it sounds like someone who was raised by wolves. I wasn’t raised by wolves, I was raised by journalists. Both my parents were journalists, so I grew up understanding that journalism is about asking questions that somebody, somewhere, doesn’t want to answer. Everything else is advertising or public relations. [A version of this truism is doing the rounds online at the moment, attributed to George Orwell. An interesting investigation into its real origins and the various sources to which it is sometimes attributed can be found at that link].

I was raised to believe it was not only permissible to ask questions, it was actually vital that questions should be asked… although it wouldn’t necessarily make you popular.

Ms Cahill says she was National Secretary of the dissident group, Republican Network for Unity, for only “a few hours.” If a local county councillor had resigned from the committee of the golf club after “a few hours,” the kind of journalists I grew up around would have been trying to get the story, but nobody asked Ms Cahill what had happened until after she was safely in the Seanad. Her latest political party, Labour, presented any attempt to do so as abuse.

Professional journalists, competing with each other to be first with “the news” – this stuff that somebody didn’t want you to know - used to be the best people to ask questions and dig for the truth. Sadly, this may no longer be the case. Ownership of mass media is now concentrated in very few hands. The biggest proprietors and their favoured political parties are unlikely to be subject to the same degree of scrutiny as the parties and individuals who threaten their interests.

Mass media are now rarely the first with the news – that distinction goes to the first person on the scene with a smartphone to upload a picture to Twitter or Facebook. Some of the functions of mass media are now transferring to social media and to the "networked Fourth Estate". There are both positives and negatives to this, the main negative being the bewildering number and variety of voices. It is not as easy to filter what you are exposed to as it used to be, when you simply selected the newspaper whose bias was closest to your own, and reliable sources of information and comment are not always easily distinguishable from unreliable ones.

I’d love to live in a country and time where we could rely on professional journalists to ask questions for us. Sadly, we don’t. Catherine Murphy TD did us all a great favour last year, when she uncovered favourable banking terms offered to the Maltese tax exile who now controls most of our media. Even after she raised this under parliamentary privilege, the media were too afraid to report it and we had several days of “constitutional crisis” while they awaited clarification of their right to cover what had been said in the Dail and was being barked by the dogs in the street, courtesy of social media. So these are times when citizens sometimes have to ask their own questions, in the hope that somebody – a journalist, a dedicated public representative – will pick up on the question and take it from there.

There’s enough journalism in my DNA that I do this from time to time. I have dabbled in journalism my entire life. For example, in 2014 I did a piece of independent research on the controversial Mother & Baby Home in Tuam, and passed what I had on to a journalist (Alison O’Reilly of the Mail, still doing sterling work on this story). I posted my own take in this blog and then I moved on (though I do hope to return to this story in the future). The story that fell into my lap this year concerned the behaviour of politicians on social media. This is a subject that has become rather topical in the meantime.

In the UK, Conservative MP Lucy Allan was recently revealed to have faked a death threat she claimed to have received after voting in favour of air strikes on Syria. But back in October, when I decided to write something about this, it had received negligible coverage. The behaviour of Irish politicians on social media has still not had any coverage, and is no more admirable than that of Lucy Allan. I have witnessed, for example, a candidate posting a screenshot of a tweet, out of context, to present it as some kind of threat sent to her, when it was actually part of a (rather juvenile) conversation, which was certainly about her (and presented her in an unflattering light) but was neither threatening nor sent to her. I think this is irresponsible behaviour, which could have grave consequences for the person identified in this way.

I’m very active on Twitter and I was witnessing behaviour every day from public representatives that I thought was unbecoming. In particular, I was shocked to see a Labour Dublin City Councillor attack a female academic as a “waste of taxpayer’s money” because she had posted a tweet criticising government policy on homelessness to the Vincent Brown People’s Debate. This councillor is a political appointee to the board of UCD and he admitted when I asked him that, when he said the academic (@DrSusanLoughlin) was a waste of money, he actually had no idea what she did.

I thought this was an abuse of his position. I was also witnessing politicians daily flinging mental health slurs of the “tinfoil hat” variety at members of the public who made unfavourable comments about government policy and practice. I don’t believe being unhappy with your government means you’re crazy, so I thought this was pretty unfair too. My resources are limited. I set up a gmail account, [email protected], and issued an invitation through my Twitter account for anybody who had been abused online by a public representative or candidate for public office to send me their story (and preferably screenshots).

Governments are understandably eager to control social media and, in Ireland, the Labour Party is the one leading the charge. If there’s one thing the pesky public likes to bitch about, and feels entitled to bitch about, it’s de gubbermint - for as long as we’ve had governments, we’ve had conversations about exactly how shockin’ de gubbermint is. Some givin’ out is obviously ill-informed, but the right to give out about de gubbermint without harassment is still one of the things that separates civilised societies from dictatorships. I cherish it. I often exercise my right to “give out stink” about the people who rule us. You might think I do it too often, but hey, you can always ignore me. Do you want to live in a country where I’m not allowed to do it?

The challenging thing about social media for politicians is that, unlike the givin’ out about de gubbermint that you do at the school gates or down the pub, it leaves behind written evidence that the politician can see and may not enjoy reading. But a comment that a public representative doesn’t enjoy reading is not necessarily harassment or “abuse”. I must pause at this point to rent my clothing and mourn the arrival of middle age, because I never thought I’d hear myself say the words… “this recent Telegraph article puts it rather well,” but actually it does. MPs should stop whining about abuse from online trolls and celebrate free speech.

Nobody should be sending death threats or rape threats and that kind of behaviour is already very illegal. We have a legal right not to be defamed also; nobody should be using the internet to tell malicious lies about another person. I can put my hand on my heart and say that, whilst I’ve engaged in extremely robust debate on Twitter, I have never done any of those things. Scrutinise my tweets. Look for the kind of abuse you might expect from “the most feral troll” declaimed by the great and the good. It’s not there. You’ll find a good deal of political anger, you will find questions that certain powerful people would rather were not asked, you’ll also find a good deal of inconsequential banter among friends, because Twitter is a very social network. You will find no threats, no abuse, no harassment, no unsubstantiated allegations and no defamation. You will find absolutely nothing beyond the bounds of normal (sometimes political) discourse. I’m sure you’ll find lots you disagree with – the question is whether you’ll find anything I should not be allowed to say.

I’d seen public representatives using Twitter to speak about members of the public in a way that is already against the law. I’d set up an account to collect evidence of this. I thought some journalist or politician might be interested at a later time, when these same politicians might try to restrict free speech on the internet in order to gag critics of the government. Although I repeatedly asked people to email me these stories in private, many contacted me publicly on Twitter and some of the stories were shocking – like the mother of a disabled child being accused of “living off the state” when she criticised cutbacks affecting her child. Labour people with whom I regularly lock horns on Twitter didn’t like me talking about this stuff. When some of the stories were about Mairia Cahill, they liked it even less.

For four days after I posted my questions, I was continually attacked by the variety of accounts I mentioned earlier. It went on day and night. I interacted rationally and politely with all of it. None of it provoked me to abuse. I kept count of the days by composing a pinned tweet each day which linked to my original tweeted questions. If you search my account for the numbers between 1 & 29, you’ll find these status reports. It ebbed and flowed, but for 24 out of the first 25 days, there was some kind of pressure being applied every day. #LabouRNU didn’t like me drawing attention to this, but I’ve dealt with a lot of bullies in my time. I know the most effective thing you can do is to make it public. I did everything I could to keep it public and it worked. The really aggressive stuff petered out within a week. After that it was mostly smears about not having condemned somebody else’s tweets or demands that I again produce examples of the abuse I had received and had already tweeted screenshots of. Some days, every waking minute that I wasn’t working was spent defending my right to ask these questions. At no time was anybody able to produce an offensive tweet I’d posted.

Every tweeter who is asking questions about Ms Cahill was now tagging me in all their tweets about her and believe me, that’s a lot of people and a lot of tweets! Some of them are Sinn Fein people for sure, but only a handful are abusive and I couldn’t swear to their affiliations. There are a lot of “false flag” accounts operating around Ms Cahill. I did challenge abusive tweets when I had the energy, but the number of tweets I was receiving was overwhelming. I didn’t read a lot of them and often asked to be untagged from conversations. Far from obsessively tweeting about Ms Cahill all day every day, by this stage I was using Twitter less than I ever had. I certainly wasn’t having fun there.

I was often afraid. Depending on where the attacks were coming from, I didn’t know whether to be frightened for my safety or my job. I wouldn’t tag my partner in tweets, for fear she’d get harassed and I deleted tweets that might identify my home or where I would be that weekend. I didn’t anticipate public denunciation. I was too confident that the record showed I’d not done anything wrong. Now that it’s happened, I’m afraid they’ll get my account deleted so they can tell more lies about what I’ve said.

after 25 days it settled down a bit. After 29 days, December 19th, it got so quiet I stopped counting. I felt I’d made my point and I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging all this unpleasantness through Christmas, which is also the busiest time of year in my job. I tweeted very little in the next few days and hardly at all about Ms Cahill – but then Populist Watch did its search and destroy job on my Christmas on the 26th.

The Populist Watch account opened on 1st December and immediately set about blocking anybody left wing on Twitter. Its MO was so unusual that it became the subject of much Twitter chatter and a competition developed to see who could get blocked the fastest. I managed it in one tweet, but I didn’t win, because lots of other people got blocked without saying a word. I reproduce my one tweet here, so you can see how very offensive and vile it is.

Having blocked me, it made a few remarks about me. I didn’t pay it much attention, to be honest. It was light relief from the other stuff going on for me at the time. A few days later, it unblocked me for long enough to have a conversation, then immediately blocked me again. The behaviour of this account was a common Twitter joke at the time and I did join in some of the jokes, mea culpa. I never speculated about who was running the account, other than to say that it was obviously a Labour account. Yet, on 7th December a man called @liamhayeslabour demanded I retract a claim I’d never made, that he was @PopulistWatchIr. I understand Mr Hayes is a member of the Central Council of Labour and that somebody had made this claim about him on Twitter the previous night. It wasn’t me, gov! I never heard of him. Mr Hayes knows it wasn’t me because he retweeted the original tweet that made this claim. He knows who said it, but I’d clearly been marked as somebody you could make any nonsense claim about, without evidence.

The basis for attributing the account to Mr Hayes was that he was the account’s first follower. That’s rubbish. Nobody who wanted to disguise their identity would make such an elementary mistake. But I still think you can tell something about an account from its first few followers – especially when the account is as choosy about its followers as this one. After the Christmas Denunciation, I developed a stronger interest in the account and decided to check out its follower list. The content of the account makes it obvious that Populist Watch is a Labour account, but I was still surprised by what I found. Of the first 60 followers of Populist Watch, no fewer than 38 are sufficiently strongly identified with Labour for the party’s name to appear in their brief bio and this includes a lot of public representatives and party office holders, including government ministers, the two Senators most closely identified with anti-bullying campaigns and Joan Burton’s Chief of Staff. These are the people for whose amusement this bullying account was set up. This is the appreciative audience for whom a target was painted on my back while I tried to eat my Christmas dinner.

The attacks have escalated. So far, I’ve been called obsessive, sick, dysfunctional, paranoid and a PIRA loving bully, amongst other things – and this is just what elected representatives have said; their hangers on have happily gone further. Most of them have blocked me, so God knows what else they’re saying. None of these things are true and all of them are damaging. I work with vulnerable people and preventing bullying is a big part of my job. I take it very seriously. These false claims could have very serious consequences for me.

After all of this, I still support free speech – theirs as well as mine. I don’t want to get these people kicked off the internet. But I don’t want them running the country either. I don’t want them to have parliamentary privilege to make their baseless claims against me and others.

Joseph McCarthy had a list of 205 State Department employees he said were communists and six years of terror were unleashed on the American left, with thousands of lives ruined. Mairia Cahill says she has a list of 1000 Sinn Fein trolls. I don’t doubt I feature on this list and this is an injustice both to me (I value my independence) and to Sinn Fein (which should not be held responsible for me and many other independents raising questions about Ms Cahill’s suitability for office). Senators Cahill and Higgins are pushing for a debate on “online abuse” and, if they get it, I fear parliamentary privilege will be used to name and shame people who’ve done nothing wrong. This could destroy many lives and there is no way to appeal. Catherine Murphy showed what parliamentary privilege is for when she used it to bring to account a wealthy man, with the power to keep his dealings with our money out of the public eye. That’s what it’s there for – not to take down inconvenient but powerless questioners, like the kid who says “the Emperor has no clothes” when everybody else is feeding his delusion.

Mairia Cahill has another list, compiled from the email account I’ve been interested in. The people on that list may be named in connection with very serious offences and given no opportunity to defend themselves or test the credibility of the claims against them. Are we going to decide these people, on account of their political beliefs, are the kind of people who are probably guilty of something, so it’s OK to accuse them of anything? This “round up all the usual suspects” attitude locked up the Birmingham 6 and the Guildford 4 for years and defended it, because they were “the kind of people who’d probably done something.” In the South too, Nicky Kelly (now a Labour party councillor in Co. Wicklow) spent more than four years of his life locked up for being the type of person who might possibly have been involved in the Sallins Train Robbery.

One of our last decent journalists, Gene Kerrigan, played a huge part in exposing the miscarriage of justice and now he’s talking about the delegitimisation of the politics of a third of the electorate. We need to listen to him this time. I spent a lot of my youth marching for the release of people unjustly imprisoned because they fell between the cracks of the split between the Provos and the Officials/Stickies (now respectably ensconced within the Labour party). I don’t want to spend my old age protesting my innocence of “charges” too insubstantial to ever make it to a court.

Why is this happening? Moves are afoot to undermine the Good Friday Agreement, overwhelmingly supported by the people of this island, and to return Northern Ireland to direct rule from Westminster. It’s now openly being stated that we "need" to do this, because the silly electorate has not voted the way they were expected to. If that’s not an “attack on democracy”, I don’t know what is. The witch trials of former dissident Mairia Cahill will be used to bring the peace process down, using claims that would never stand up in a court and will never have to meet any standard of evidence. If a thousand little nonaligned people like me have to be destroyed in the process, I guess it’s no skin off anybody’s nose – unless people like you decide it is. I have hopes.

These people have made our public life into an am-dram production of The Crucible. The Salem Witch Trials have rolled in to town. Get them out and keep them out – I hope it’s not too late for me.

[Postscript: I’m sometimes asked why I “give out” more about Labour than FG. The answer’s simple. Nobody who would pay the slightest bit of attention to me would ever vote for Fine Gael or Fianna Fail. I have never given either of them even the lowest preference. I don’t think any feminist my age could vote for either party, certainly not anybody who lived through their campaign to reduce the value of women’s lives with their grotesque Eighth Amendment, or who got on a bus down to Kerry, as I did, to support Joanne Hayes, victim of the most bizarre miscarriage of justice ever seen in Ireland.

None of us could ever vote for FF or FG. When those two controlled 80% of the vote, our options were not voting, or voting for Labour or Sinn Fein, both of which have behaved disgracefully when it suited them, notably on reproductive rights. “Fellow travellers” like me, as in, people who were broadly on the left, but not signed up to any party, would give our number 1 to whichever one of them we were least disgusted with at that moment and our number 2 to the other. It was a blessed relief when there was another left wing candidate to mix it up a bit. I’m very happy that the forthcoming election will offer a little more choice. Both parties stand to be demoted on my paper. I’ll let you guess which one I’m most disgusted with this time].

#Irish Labour #LabourRNU #RNU #Mairia Cahill

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izzykamikaze · 10 years ago

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Actually, we ARE family

There is a lot of focus in Ireland right now on "the family" and the family life of LGBT people is under the microscope. I'd like to say what family means to one person, the only one I can speak for. I want to say what family means to me.

In some countries, the individual citizen is regarded as the stuff that society is made of. Not in Ireland. Article 41 of our Constitution says the family is "the fundamental unit group of society" and this family,” THE family" is based on marriage. Clearly Irish society was intended to be something with a moat and a drawbridge. If you're not part of a family, or if your family isn't THE family, you are NOT PART OF SOCIETY. "Society" can get along just fine, without the likes of YOU!

A hundred thousand kids were taken from their mothers and adopted because their families were not THE family. A right to a mother and father? They don't even have a right to a goddamn birth cert!

LGBT people have been "outside society" since forever, but here we are still knocking at the door. How did we survive? Well, if the families we came from rejected us (as they often did and still do) we found people who could love us and, in time, approved or not, those people became our families. Because our constitution actually does have a point when it comes to families being the building blocks of society. No man or woman is an island. Nobody does very well all on their own.

We made friends and those friends became family. Some of them were straight people who hadn't got the memo that we weren't even part of society. We became part of their families, they became part of ours. Sometimes we were lucky. We found someone who loved us, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Sometimes death parted us. Often we just had the same lousy luck that a lot of our straight friends had. We had lives, we had loves, sometimes we had children. Sometimes we also had the great good fortune of caring for children who had also been cast out by the society with the moat and the drawbridge. We made, friends, we made families, we made communities. We made hay when the sun shone. We made tea and sympathy when times were tough - and when life gave us lemons, we made goddamn lemonade.

We made do.

I was 19 years old when I first marched for Gay Pride in an Ireland which could not have been more hostile, where it was just "natural" that we were outside of society, where that was how it was "supposed" to be. Now, every year, myself and my family, my beautiful, created, extended family, parade with our friends through the streets of Sligo. Sligo is a town of maybe 20,000 people, with no gay bar, no LGBT community centre, no pink pound or rainbow euro. Some people say it's the smallest city in the WORLD to have an LGBT Pride Parade. Our straight friends have been with us from the start, marching under a banner that says "Straight But Not Narrow." (I love you guyz!)

Our kids are there, THEIR kids are there, our mums, brothers, aunties are there. Weary gay activists come from other parts of the country to join us for "the craic," the sense of community and togetherness, the solidarity, the buzz of each other's company!

Even in the Celtic Tiger era, we never had the money to put together a programme. Now we have less than nothing, but somehow people always offered us what we needed. The late Christopher Robson, a hero of the LGBT rights struggle in Ireland, came at his own expense to show his slides of 30 years of our struggles and our joy. Another hero, Tonie Walsh of the Irish Queer Archives made time for us too.

Musicians, drag queens, dancers, DJs, travelled the length of the country to entertain us for free. The then Mayor of Sligo, Declan Bree, rolled up his sleeves, still in his Mayoral chain and carried boxes for us. Students and kids on the dole made breakfasts for volunteers and knelt on the floor making banners at two in the morning. Acts of love were everywhere to be seen. Remember the happy, smiling, LOVING faces you saw recently on #FamilyMatters (the Twitter riposte to the contemptible Mothers and Fathers Matter)? - They're the kind of faces you'll see at Northwest Pride. That's the love we surround ourselves with every August, no matter what the rest of the year has done to us.

Right now, those happy, smiling, loving people are knocking on doors all over the country, pleading for our right to have what others take for granted. They are getting lots of support, but they are also looking into the cold, dead eyes of those who have always hated us and it is making them tired and sad and angry. The haters are riding higher on the hog now than they have for decades. Their smoother, glibber allies are soft-selling their smears all over 50% of the airwaves - and this new "respectability" for their views is giving great comfort to the people who still spit in our faces and break our noses, whenever they can get away with it.

They mock our families and our lives from every second lamppost - and the families of EVERYONE whose life deviates in any way from their so-called "ideal." They want the "right" to shun us in their businesses and in the schools we support with our taxes. They debate whether we are fit to do the jobs we had to fight damn hard to get. Our elderly parents, who travelled a hard road to learn to accept us, are sitting in the same churches that protected rapists of children and they are being told that WE are a danger to our kids and all kids and "THE family" and the society with the moat and the drawbridge. And - surprise, surprise, they are succeeding in poisoning some minds.

It has ALWAYS been easy to tell lies about gay people and have them believed.

And the smiling, decent people with the Yes Equality badges? They keep on knocking on doors and fighting this shit. They are my extended family and the extended families of all the out LGBT people in the country (which is still, when all is said and done, a tiny minority.) They are full of the thing that family is supposed to be all about. They are full of love.

That's the vision of family I want my country to care about. They are the people I want us to honour. And next Friday you get to decide if we, and they, are "part of society." Our struggle has NEVER been easy and our enemies have always been unscrupulous. They will tell ANY lie, cheat in any way possible. Confused elderly people will be taken from nursing homes to vote against our love and our families. Shock stories will be dredged up or invented to discredit us. The next few days are going to be a nightmare for isolated LGBT people - kids in schools, rural dwellers, fragile people - as the haters crow from every rock.

But I believe those smiling people with the inclusive vision of family will win. It will not be as easy as some of them thought, but WE will win. And when we're done with that, I hope you book some time off in August to come and party with us at what will most likely be the LAST EVER North West Pride this August.

This is our tenth North West Pride. Ten years of this tiny miracle is, in itself, something to celebrate. Poverty, emigration and austerity are quietly ripping us apart here in the rural fringe. And sadly, the young LGBT people are still usually the first to be driven out. The people who kept on making it happen anyway just can't do it any more.

Maybe after next week, a new, more equal Ireland will supply the energy to reboot it. Maybe it won't. But me and my extended family and all our lovely extended families who are wearing themselves out knocking on doors? We will ALWAYS be bursting with Pride!

Vote Yes, folks. Because THESE families matter. xxx

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izzykamikaze · 10 years ago

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We’re so Northwest Pride

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izzykamikaze · 11 years ago

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VAULTS UNDER #TUAMBABIES SITE ARE PART OF SEWAGE SYSTEM

New evidence has come to light in the #TuamBabies case, which took the world by storm in recent weeks. This evidence tends to support the view of local researcher Catherine Corless - that the bodies of almost 800 children who perished at the site may be inside the disused sewage system of the Workhouse which occupied the siteprior to the opening of the Mother and Baby Home (a Catholic institution for unmarried mothers and their children.)

For the past 10 days or so, various vested interests have tried to discredit the story as a hoax. They’ve been able to do so due to faults in how the story was treated by mainstream media. The story broke in the Irish Mail on Sunday of 23rd May. (Please note: the original story was published only in the print edition and the words “septic tank” were not used. This later version was first posted online on 2nd June and has since been updated.) http://dailym.ai/1kFSG3f

The slightly more restrained tone of the original article is glimpsed in this clipping on Donal O’Keeffe’s blog: http://bit.ly/RqHHUb

Apart from the Mail and coverage on “Liveline” (a popular phone-in programme) during which Catherine Corless mentioned her belief that the burial site was a sewage tank, the story was more-or-less ignored by Irish mainstream media, but rumbled away sensationally on social media. This led to it being picked up by international media outlets which, with few local news stories to check against, chose to cover social media speculation as if it were proven fact. In particular, most stated that “the bodies of 800 babies had been found,” which was not the case. Obviously, various international media players were left with egg on their faces and had to recant aspects of their original stories. There were at least some established facts, but sadly, these got rather lost in the scramble to recant.

The established facts were that 796 deaths had been registered during the 36 years that the home was open; that this represented a mortality rate several times the national average, that no place of burial was known for most of these and that eyewitnesses reported that there were burials at the site, although the number could not be established.

At this point, only two eyewitnesses were reported. Two young boys, Barry Sweeney and Frannie Hopkins, had lifted a slab on the site when playing there in the 1970’s. This exposed a pit “filled to the top with bones.” It was apparently assumed that the bones were those of “famine victims.” A priest was sent for, some prayers said and the grave was closed again. Sometime after that, a local couple began to tend the site as a memorial and it became the manicured site now familiar from media coverage http://bit.ly/1lQzroF But when these boys were playing there, it was an untended wilderness – the kind of place where only kids go.

At around the same time as international media started to backpedal away from their initial sensational reports, another eyewitness account emerged, also from the 70’s, which appeared to contradict the first. An adult, Mary Moriarty, had seen a child playing with a skull and ventured into the brambly wilderness to try to return it to its resting place. She glimpsed a tomb and describes it here.

The tomb she describes sounds much more organised than the boys’ description of a heap of bones. The bodies were stacked neatly on steps or shelves and resembled “parcels.” Asked whether it was “a septic tank,” Mary seems unsure. But the interviewer, Philip Boucher-Hayes (who has incidentally done very good work on this story) clearly decides it’s not a tank and the story is presented in that light. His blog that day also dismisses the idea that this is a sewage tank. http://philipboucher-hayes.com/

This dismissal seems to be based on nothing more than a vague idea that we know what a septic tank looks like (and that there would be no “tunnel” to a septic tank.) But what if we don’t know what a septic tank (or, more correctly a sewage tank) looks like? What if it looks like this?

This is a “section” from the architectural plans of Tuam Workhouse, later the Mother and Baby Home. A section is a drawing showing a two-dimensional slice of a building or structure. Being two-dimensional, it doesn’t show the depth of the structure, just the height and width. This “cesspool” is 9’ 9” tall (just under 3 metres) and appears more than 3 metres wide. It has a high arched ceiling and looks much more how we might expect a vault or tomb to look than what it actually is – a sewage tank.

The section comes from a document that, after a modest amount of research, I found in a public archive, where it seems nobody else had thought to look for it. I only had a mobile phone camera, so I couldn’t photograph the whole page, but here’s the corner that explains what the document is.

So, all the drawings on this page show structures that are part of the sewage system of Tuam Workhouse (“privies” are toilets – probably dry toilets, usually just a hole with a tank below.) They are extraordinarily varied in appearance and none of them would be immediately identified as a sewage tank by an inexperienced person.

The sewage system is much more extensive than previously thought. So far as I’m aware, all previous accounts have relied on the idea that there was only one tank.

In the same archive, I also found a ground-floor plan. A “plan” gives a birds-eye view, like a map showing the shape of the buildings on the ground. This plan was in terrible condition. It is very large, very faded and hard to photograph. This photo gives an idea of its general condition.

The positions of cesspools beneath the complex are shown on the plan. I counted nine, but there could be more -given its condition, the plan is hard to read. Structures are marked in the draftsman’s handwriting and much of the writing is tiny.

The next picture shows the one cesspool I expected to find. I had been told there would be one below the “Dead House” (mortuary) in the centre of the back wall. The Dead House is marked “D.H” on the plan and vertical writing identifies “cesspool underneath.”

Pictures below show some of the others:

(Cesspool projects beyond the complex’s wall on left of pic. The complex is incredibly symmetrical – there is a matching one on the opposite side.)

The next one is in the Women’s Yard. (Again, this is mirrored in the Men’s Yard on the other side of the building.)

So, that’s five, so far…

The Kitchen and Scullery are on the Women’s side of the complex, with the Laundry and Wash House occupying similar (but not identical) positions on the Men’s side.

So that makes 7, right?

Two more are marked in the Boys’ and Girls’ Yards. They look like this:

That makes nine. As I said, there may be more – I almost lost my eyesight finding some of them! They are concentrated into the rear half of the complex, as the fancier buildings (Board Room, offices and the like) are up the front.

So what does this prove?

There was a range of underground structures under the Tuam Workhouse, which became St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home and these were associated with the containment and disposal of sewage.

Shallow structures, covered with flagstones (like the slab lifted by the two boys) and higher, crypt-like structures (suggested by Mary Moriarty’s account) wereboth part of this sewage system.

Tunnels (as described by Mary Moriarty’s informant, Julie Devaney, who had been a child in the Home and stayed on as an adult to work for the nuns) are certainly suggested by the drawings, but more expert people than me are hopefully reading this and can clarify. Certainly, some means of emptying the tanks was needed. We have a 21st century attitude to sewage. In the 19th century, before chemical fertilisers were available, the contents of these tanks were very valuable. I found an amusing insight into the 19th century attitude to what we cheerfully flush away in a 1971 book called “Coprophilia” by Terence McLaughlin (a fairly eclectic history of attitudes to dirt.)

A central part of the argument that the sewage system could not have been for burial has been the notion that this system was in use until 1937 (when the Home was connected to the town’s sewerage scheme.) This may not be true. A newspaper article from 1912, posted on Twitter by @BrendanSol told me that a new sewage system was under consideration as early as 1912 (13 years before the nuns took over the premises.)

It doesn’t seem that this went ahead. In 1918, a much more amateur-sounding scheme happened, using the labour of workhouse inmates under the supervision of the Master.

Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914 on Twitter, who has done amazing work, tweeting a lot of press cuttings from the period) sent me this article from that year.

So these works could have made all or part of the Workhouse sewage system redundant, 7 years before the nuns moved in. On such a cramped site, it would be astonishing if a series of underground rooms had not found a use. As space to bury the dead appears to have been an issue, the sewage tanks may have become tombs.

In relation to shortage of space for burial, a 2012 excavation of a different part of the Workhouse site found (Workhouse-era) burials. These burials were oriented north-south (instead of the usual east-west) and shortage of space may be a factor in this, as they seem to have followed the direction of the Workhouse wall. This link also relates how, within two years of opening, the Workhouse authorities were forced to acquire a burial site elsewhere – no evidence has emerged yet that the Irish State demanded the same of the Mother and Baby Home during its 36 year history. http://bit.ly/VgEc5o

One final picture makes another point. It has been reported that the Workhouse site has disappeared under a housing estate, leaving only the tiny scrap of land identified by Catherine Corless as a sewage tank (actually, this may be the 1918 tank, as it does not appear on the workhouse plans.) This is not true. As this animated gif shows, a large portion of the footprint of the site was not built on and a rather odd “blank space” was left in the middle of the housing estate. This space is now, of all things, a children’s playground and appears to occupy much of the area at the rear of the workhouse where, as I said, the sewage system was concentrated.

(Source: Ordinance Survey Ireland website, www.osi.ie , Orthos 2005 map and 25" Historic map utilised for the image)

It’s hard to look at this image and not speculate that somebody at Galway County Council in the 70’s didn’t want to dig up whatever they felt lay beneath the Mother and Baby Home. And this is a good place to end this story, for now. Church, State, communities and families all played their part in the massive tragedy of Ireland’s institutional past. When all the secrets are told, nobody is going to come out of it smelling of roses. It is very sad that we seem to be more interested in how these children were buried than in their miserable lives, or the pain still being experienced by the bereaved mothers and the adopted children severed from their histories. But as we are, I might as well come out and say it – it seems quite probable the #800deadbabies are buried in the sewage tanks.

This piece is dedicated to my partner of many years, to the daughter she had “out of wedlock” and to the child that daughter is now carrying – no blood of mine, but in every imaginable way my longed-for grandchild.

The documents mentioned were given to the Irish Mail on Sunday, which published them on 22nd June. Unfortunately this article has not yet appeared online. However, the Mail’s surveyors did confirm that these underground structures are consistent with anomalies found during their survey of a small part of the site.

The following people have been helpful in ways large and small. Any mistakes, assumptions or shark-jumping is mine, not theirs! Liam Hogan, John Murphy, Ariel Silvera, Cillian Rogers and Imelda Peppard, Dr Jack Elliot, Dr Pauline Conroy, Donal O’Keeffe, Alison O’Reilly, Lyser, Ciaran Ferrie, @AuntieDote, @BrendanSol and (surprisingly) @BattlementClare

#tuambabies

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