Last March, around the St Patrick’s Day celebrations in New York, I published a blog post noting that during a lunch for Hillary Clinton, hosted by Niall O’Dowd, the editor/publisher of The Irish Voice, Goldman Sach’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, sought out Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, one of the honoured guests, for a private chat.

The context was a revolt led by Greece’s Syriza party against the Anglo-German austerity policies in Europe and a presumption on the part of many who knew no better, that a Sinn Fein role in the next Irish government could plunge Europe into an even deeper crisis.

Adding fuel to the fire was an imminent internal Goldman Sachs report predicting that SF would take a radical line opposing austerity in Ireland, hitherto the most amenable EU member vis-a-vis austerity.

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs – was ‘re-assured’ after his chat with Gerry Adams

Hence the interest of a worried Blankfein in what was really in Gerry Adams’ mind. Was he going to follow Syriza or the Spanish party Podemos and plunge Europe into an economic maelstrom with alarming implications for Goldman Sach’s profits and Blankfein’s annual bonus? Or not? This is what I wrote:

I understand that on the periphery of the Hillary Clinton lunch in New York hosted on Monday by Niall O’Dowd, the wannabe Irish ambassador for the next Clinton White House, Gerry Adams had a ten-minute tete-a-tete with Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs.

It would be sensible to presume that Blankfein wanted to get his own take on the leader of the political party which was about to be described as the greatest single threat to Ireland’s economic future by his Chief European economist, Kevin Daly.

The report, which warned that Sinn Fein in government could well take the same stance on Ireland’s debt as Podemos does in Spain and Syriza once promised in Greece, was published a day or so later so presumably Blankfein, whose Goldman Sachs empire was once memorably described by journalist Matt Taibbi as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” did not have the opportunity to influence Daly’s report.

A pity for Sinn Fein because according to reliable sources Blankfein later told friends that he had been “greatly impressed” by the Sinn Fein leader, and “re-assured” (by what he had heard).

It is in that context that I recommend that you read a statement issued yesterday by Eamonn McCann and the ‘People Before Profit’ party, critiquing the latest peace process deal between Sinn Fein and the DUP. I doubt whether Lloyd Blankfein, reading this, would think that Gerry Adams had misled him much back in March.

Read it here:

Eamonn McCann of People Before Profit:

“Sinn Fein has now joined the ranks of the austerity parties.”

Staying in government with the DUP took precedence over standing by the most vulnerable. The worst-off people in deprived places like Derry will be hardest hit. People Before Profit’s Eamonn McCann: “If the Coalition in the South introduced this sort of package, Sinn Fein would be elbowing its way to the front of street protest.”

Eamonn McCann: “This deal underlines the necessity of a radical alternative to the DUP, SF and other parties of the status quo.

Eamonn McCann – for Sinn Fein, ‘Staying in government with the DUP took precedence over standing by the most vulnerable’

People Before Profit will be offering this alternative in the forthcoming Assembly election. We need an election asap – and the election of people with different politics.

“It is typical of the deal that new money has been found for a fresh attack on social welfare “fraud”. Welfare fraud is tiny in the North.

The real scandal lies in the huge tax frauds of the big corporations and the super-rich. The Tories should have been told to sod off and sort that out before coming after people in Derry doing the double.

Under the deal, the Assembly will agree not only to the welfare cuts introduced in 2012 but also to the new cuts currently before Westminster. These will see a benefit cap of just £20,000 per annum for families with children – leaving many unable to meet basic needs. It is overwhelmingly children who will suffer.

The new deal includes cuts to all working age benefits, including Job Seekers Allowance, Housing Benefit and even Employment and Support Allowance – a benefit for people found unfit for work. The already miserly rate for each of these will be frozen for four years, while tenants in social housing will see a one percent year-on-year cut to their Housing Benefit. This is all on top of the cuts to Tax Credits, over which Stormont has no control.

Disabled people will see their incomes slashed, as Disability Living Allowance (DLA) ends and is replaced by the Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

The Department for Social Development has admitted that a full 25 percent of people currently receiving DLA will not receive anything under PIP, while a further 33 percent will receive a reduced award. Public sector staff numbers are already down by 5,210. A further 2,200 employees are to be pushed out before March 2016. By 2018, some 20,000 public sector jobs will have gone. Just like Labour in the South, Sinn Fein defends itself by saying the job losses are “voluntary”.

But when managements start putting on the squeeze, there can be a thin line between compulsory and voluntary. Moreover, the loss of so many jobs will have a devastating effect on hospitals, schools and wider public services.Eamonn McCann: “No genuinely anti-austerity party would have signed up to this.”

The DUP/SF plan also involves “challenging cost reduction targets for each of the nine new departments’”. That means more austerity. The agreement is full of the sort of coded neo-liberal language found in austerity programmes all over Europe. Take “structural reform” in health education, housing and justice – that’s code for outsourcing and privatisation. Despite the rhetoric about taxing the rich, DUP/SF have signed up to a reduction in Corporation Tax to 12.5 percent from April 2018.

This is a bonanza for big corporations. It means a cut of 7.5 percent in their official tax rate. But even this disguises the reality of enormous tax subsidies to the corporations. In the South, the official rate is 12.5 percent but the actual tax paid by corporations amounts to only 5-6 percent. We can expect similar scams in the North – meaning even less money for public services.

The only issue that SF propagandists can claim a concession on is the bedroom tax, which will not affect current tenants. This measure acted like a lightning rod for anger against the welfare cuts generally. Protecting current (but not future) tenants from the tax helped give DUP/SF political space to endorse the overall welfare cuts package.That might provide cover, but of the fig-leaf variety.Parties should stop talking out of both sides of their mouths.

In the coming weeks, People Before Profit will be challenging Sinn Fein members and supporters to take a different road.

As the post-Paris conversation gets uglier, and anti-Muslim acrimony flourishes, in France itself, in Britain and especially here in the U.S., my mind went back to the anti-Irish hysteria that swept England during the early and mid-1970’s, prompted by an IRA bombing and shooting campaign that for its time, and in its sometimes indiscriminate targeting (no warning pub bombs for instance), was arguably the equivalent of today’s ISIS violence.

So I began a search on the internet for material from that period and to my surprise I could find none, or at least only passing references (perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised as the peace process has made the sensitive areas of British Hibernophobia and Irish Anglophobia off limits).

What I did find however was a fascinating and sharply written article about the unhappy experience of the Liverpool Irish during the IRA’s short-lived but very violent English bombing campaign of 1939, in the months preceding the start of the Second World War.

The work of Liverpool-based academic, Dr Bryce Evans, whose website can be accessed here, ‘Fear and Loathing in Liverpool….’ firstly sheds new light on the extent of the campaign, at least for me. For example, there was an IRA bombing incident in England ‘almost every other day’, according to Dr Evans, during the first nine months of 1939. Although short-lived, the IRA’s England Campaign was clearly a more forceful affair than is usually depicted.

But his work is really important because it chronicles the nightmare visited upon the city’s Irish population as fear and outrage spread in a city already infamous for its sectarian divisions.

In circumstances that Donald Trump might find pleasingly familiar, the Liverpool Irish became targets not just because of their suspected sympathy for the IRA, but because Irish immigrants were ready to work for lower wages than the natives who consequently were losing jobs.

A huge public meeting was held shortly after the first IRA bombings in the city in mid-January, 1939 and angry citizens demanded that an Irish bureau be set up “to monitor the city’s Irish immigrants and expel trouble-makers”.

To a chorus of cheers, a local councillor complained that if the flow of Irish migrants to the city continued, Liverpool would have to be renamed Dublin.

A month later as anti-Irish frenzy spread – encouraged by some racially salacious reporting by the local media – the newly formed Liverpool Irish Immigration Bureau began overseeing the forced expulsion of undesirables back to Dublin. Evans writes of poignant scenes at Liverpool docks as tearful relatives saw off expelled family members.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act notwithstanding, the IRA’s campaign of the 1970’s never produced an excess to match this.

Two potent forces, fear of, and anger at IRA violence combined with resentment at job losses blamed on Irish immigration to make life increasingly uncomfortable for Liverpool’s Irish population during 1939 and some in that community adjusted accordingly.

By the time a 19-year old Brendan Behan was arrested in Liverpool, on the day he arrived in the city, in December 1939 at the fag end of the IRA campaign, he was, Evans writes, jeered by a hostile crowd who shouted: ‘String the bastard up’.

Behan, who went to Liverpool on an unauthorised bombing mission and subsequently served time for IRA activity in Ireland, later wrote of the experience: “….some of them were Liverpool-Irish, trying to prove their solidarity with the loyal stock.”

Another IRA activist wrote of a change in the Irish mood as 1939 wore on: the Liverpool Irish, “…..now met him and his comrades with fear and sometimes outright hostility.”

All this, and possibly much worse, is what faces Europe’s and America’s Muslim people.

Here are the translated lyrics of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise sung with gusto at Wembley stadium tonight. I thought you’d like to see what they look like. This line might get your attention: ‘Let the impure blood, Water our furrows’.

Or this: ‘Theyre coming right into your arms, To cut the throats of your sons and women!’ Hmmmm. Let’s hope not, but I fear that is exactly what we’ll see.

The Song of Marseillase

Something like this? On the shoulder or above the heart? Whaddya tink, Donald?

As members of the lunatic right in the U.S., aka the Republican presidential contenders, ratchet up their war cries in the wake of the disaster in Paris, they would be wise to pause first and read and reflect upon this report, based on a United Nations assessment, dealing with the growth of ISIS influence in Central Libya.

Extreme jihadism was not entirely unknown in Libya before the fall of Gaddafi but it was confined to the eastern city of Benghazi and surrounding region, and Gaddafi, who was a fervent opponent of radical Islam, cracked down hard whenever it showed itself. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, was illegal when I lived and worked in the country way back in the early 1970’s.

The crisis that led to NATO’s intervention and the fall and death of Gaddafi was sparked by rioting in Benghazi largely led by jihadi types who had been allowed out, or had escaped from jail, and Gaddafi’s threat to end the violence was conveniently interpreted by the West and liberal interventionists like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, using the opportune cover of the Arab Spring, as a threat by Gaddafi to massacre thousands of civilians.

The threat was a bogus one; Gaddafi really intended to put down the jihadists but NATO’s military intervention, actually on the jihadists’ behalf, opened up another Pandora’s Box, the consequences of which are detailed, sadly, in the U.N. report described below.

The parallel with Syria, where American and Arab Sunni military aid to ostensibly moderate anti-Assad elements, ‘fell’ into ISIS hands, is unfortunately uncanny.

It is what happens when the lunatics are allowed to run the asylum:

This, from WashingtonsBlog, is an interesting, if controversial, take on the origins and development of ISIS.

Some may not like the idea proclaimed by the blog that the West, and the U.S. in particular, were, along with allied Sunni states in the MidEast and Gulf, largely responsible for creating the monster. But that’s not exactly breaking news. Even President Obama now concedes this, as you can see in an interview featured in the article.

What Obama doesn’t say, but I suspect knows full well, is that the blame falls most heavily on the shoulders of those neoconservatives in Washington and elsewhere who inspired and plotted the invasion of Iraq and by so doing set in motion the events that led to Friday night in Paris.

Always remember this simple truth: the neocons opened this Pandora’s Box.

The same forces were at work in Britain when the decision was taken by the Cameron government to topple the Libyan leader, Col. Gaddafi, with similar disastrous consequences. The attempt to more recently do to the Syrian leader, Assad what was done to Gaddafi, set the stage for ISIS’ bloody emergence.

I remember arguing with American friends when Obama began his assault on the Syrian regime that the only people who would benefit would be the hardline jihadists and that America would soon rue the day it turned down this road. But with the U.S. media beating the war drums in the background, my words fell on deaf ears.

The parallels are very far from exact, not least in terms of scale, but reading this history of ISIS and the impact U.S. policy has had on its development, I couldn’t help but reflect on how the stupid policies of the British military and government, urged along by their Unionist and Loyalist ‘allies’, were in the early years of the Troubles similarly the single most persuasive factor determining the growth of the Provisional IRA.

It took the best part of thirty years to come near settling our little difficulty – and it’s still far from solved – in a place that is a fraction of the size of the Middle East, with a much simpler history and demographic make up, with a common language, much less violence and access to heavy weaponry, and many cultural similarities. How long then is it going to take to sort out the mess made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their buddies?

As Clarence Darrow once said: ‘History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.’

Context for Paris Terror Attack: U.S. and Its Allies C-R-E-A-T-E-D ISIS

UPDATED BELOW

As regular followers of this blog are likely to know, controversy last week raged around the issue of Mairia Cahill’s membership of RNU, the Republican Network for Unity, widely believed to be associated with the paramilitary dissident group, Oglaigh na hEireann.

The immediate motivation for the furore, which at one stage saw Senator David Norris and Catherine McCartney take up cudgels against Cahill, was Mairia Cahill’s attempt to get elected to Seanad Eireann on the Labour party ticket. Despite the attacks, on Friday she was elected and is now a full time Irish politician.

Mairia Cahill – elected to the irish Senate but under pressure over her links to dissidents

Mairia Cahill has, of course, also been a burr under the saddle of Sinn Fein – and a swingeing critic of SF president Gerry Adams – for some time, largely because of her persuasive and damaging allegations of a Sinn Fein/Provisional IRA cover up of her rape by a leading West Belfast Provo.

Not surprisingly the internet was last week humming with anonymous and sometimes not so anonymous allegations detailing Mairia Cahill’s alleged links with RNU and other dissident groups, many of which seemed focussed on trying to undermine her narrative concerning the IRA/Sinn Fein role in concealing her rape.

The Norris/McCartney charge against Cahill was, in contrast, based only on her one-time membership of RNU, a dissident republican group with roots in the McKevitt-led Real IRA that is opposed, inter alia, to the Good Friday Agreement, the Stormont power-sharing government, the PSNI and most of the institutions established as a consequence of the peace process.

After resisting efforts by the media to interview her, Mairia Cahill finally issued a statement saying that she had indeed been a member of RNU in 2010, had served as national secretary but resigned after ‘a few hours’, and offered an apology saying her membership had been ‘the wrong thing to do’.

While Sinn Fein surrogates are suspected of involvement in last week’s internet campaign against Mairia Cahill, the party itself remained largely silent.

Gerry Adams – his niece heads RNU in Belfast

It now seems there may have been a reason for that silence and it lies in the fact that six weeks ago, or so,  Gerry Adams’ niece, Sinead Adams was elected Belfast chairperson of RNU.

Sinead is another daughter of Liam Adams, Gerry’s brother who was convicted and jailed for sexually assaulting his other daughter, Aine Dahlstrom. Sinead apparently gave evidence supporting her sister during Liam Adams’ trial. That means that animosity to Gerry for turning against his brother does not seem to have motivated her political journey into RNU.

The news that the party president’s niece was elected to a position of leadership in a dissident group that the party was attempting to link to and smear Mairia Cahill with, was not, one presumes, something that Sinn Fein was all that keen to circulate, or even risk emerging in the media.

The RNU announcement can be found on its West Belfast Facebook page, which is here:

RNU Béal Feirste elects a new Comhairle Ceantair

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Charlie

Last week, Republican Network for Unity in Béal Feirste elected a new Comhairle Ceantair to steer the movement in the City into the 100th anniversary year of the 1916 Easter Rising.

The four members elected have been key personnel in driving forward the party’s strategy in Belfast over the last 12 months and have vowed to step it up a gear to ensure RNU continue to build upon firm ground and strengthen the Republican position.

Belfast Public Relations Officer and Student activist Nathan Stuart commented:

“The newly elected Comhairle Ceantair is a clear indication of RNU’s progressive outlook, its membership reflects the party’s desire for both its youth and female membership to be represented throughout all leadership levels.”

“We seek to further develop working relationships with other progressive groups as we believe that only through a united approach can the major obstacles facing Belfast such as cuts to healthcare and education, racism and sectarianism be tackled in an effective way.”

“Our Belfast activists have elected us to do a job, to spread the Republican message throughout working class communities in the city, firmly making our position relevant. We are determined to converting the young, vibrant and radical energy into fostering Republicanism throughout Belfast.”

Left to right is Nathan Stuart (Belfast Public Relations Officer), Cáit Nic Shomhairle (Belfast Secretary), Sinead Adams (Belfast Chairperson), Freddy Clarke (Belfast Treasurer)

This, MSF’s swingeing criticism of the medical implications of the Trans Pacific Partnership, from Executive Intelligence Review

PRESS RELEASE

Doctors Without Borders Warns: With the TPP, Affordable Medicines for Millions Will Disappear

Nov. 8, 2015 (EIRNS)—In a strongly worded statement released Nov. 5, Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), warned that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose text was just made public, “is a bad deal for medicine; it’s bad for humanitarian medical treatment providers such as MSF, and it’s bad for people who need access to affordable medicines around the world, including in the United States.” The statement was issued in the name of Judit Rius Sanjuan, U.S. manager and legal policy adviser for MSF’s Access Campaign.

Pointedly referencing the Obama Administration, the statement warns that “the provisions in the TPP will not only raise the price of medicines and cause unnecessary suffering, but they also represent a complete departure from the U.S. government’s previous commitments to global health, including safeguards included in the U.S.’s 2007 ‘New Trade Policy.’”

“MSF remains gravely concerned about the effects that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will have on access to affordable medicines for millions of people, if it is enacted,” MSF states.

The TPP text, “confirms that the deal will further delay price-lowering generic competition by extending and strengthening monopoly market protections for pharmaceutical companies…. It is very concerning to see that the U.S. government and pharmecutical companies have succeeded in locking in rules that will keep medicine prices high for longer and limit the tools that governments and civil society have to try to increase generic competition…”

If enacted, MSF warns, “the TPP will not allow national regulatory authorities to use existing data that demonstrates a biological product’s safety and efficacy to authorize the sale of competitor products, even in the absence of patents. The TPP would also force governments to extend existing patent monopolies beyond current 20-year terms at the request of pharmaceutical companies…”

MSF urges all legislatures or parliaments of those nations that signed the TPP, “to carefully consider whether the agreed TPP text reflects the direction they want to take on access to affordable medicines and promotion of biomedical innovation; if it does not, the TPP should be modified or rejected.”

You couldn’t make it up.

I thought the Guardian actually missed the real story, which was a) that Corbyn was there at all, b) acknowledged with a wreath of poppies a war (1914-1918) most historians agree was fought in the interests of British imperialism, and c) was wearing a smart suit complete with a neat shirt and tie. Michael Foot how are ye?

Michael Foot at the cenotaph

In which case perhaps the headline should really have read: “Left-wing Labour Leader’s House Training Going Well”.

Here’s the bow: