The Rusty Wire Service

It’s not just the merchant bankers up the City that can make a few bob off Ireland’s misery you know. "Irish economy to recover?  So, you like the longshots..." You too can take a flutter on a faltering democracy, either down the bookies or online as most bookmakers will be running Irish specials. Here are just a few. Paddy Power , if you’re interested, is offering odds of 1/6 that the budget will be passed and 7/2 that it won’t..... And what about William Hill ’s tempting little 20/1 flutter on Fianna Fáil disbanding before the end of 2012? They are also offering odds on Sinn Féin forming part of the next government starting at 20/1 in cahoots (excuse me, coalition) with Labour and Fine Gael. But for the same money, Boylesports would give you 50/1. The more attractive bet has to be the Sinn Féin/Greens/Labour coalition at 40/1 with William Hill; these are better odds than Boylesports at 33/1 for the same punt. Ladbrokes is missing a trick; its...

The Rusty Wire Service welcomes Fintan O’Toole’s speech and 10-point plan but surprise, surprise, the hurler in the Deptford ditch has a few thoughts of his own on the subject.... (+++BREAKING NEWS HERE+++) "On one side of this street, in 1913, James Larkin was arrested as he addressed the workers of Dublin who   had stood up to claim their dignity as citizens rather than serfs. On the other side, in 1916, Ireland was declared to be a republic under the control of its own citizens." Dublin 2010 I signed it myself; and sure why wouldn’t I? Not sure however if I would have gone to the extreme lengths of one Major Fred Crawford , who in 1912, famously signed Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant in his own blood. But, health and safety apparently being what it is, I’m guessing there will be few sanguinary signatories. This certainly doesn't have the drama of a pact of blood, and while it’s all a little bit ‘Meh’, people should undoubtedly sign this petit...

The Deptford Croppy is currently making some efforts to learn the law but events ‘ trasna na dtonnta ’ (‘ across the waves’ for my Gaelically-challenged bredrin ) are a definite distraction to my jurisprudential inquiries. From Redlegs to Gombeens and back again... Now, in the case of the law of Contract, that distraction can be very welcome indeed. This afternoon for example, while groping through the maze of occasionally flawed reasoning in the wonderfully named Carlill v Carbolic Smokeball Company , my thoughts turned, as they often do, to that sainted Isle.... But before I am wafted away on zephyrs of Celtic wistfulness: the Carbolic Smokeball is one of those precedent-setting cases that every poor law student must study. It came to court in the 1890s and essentially involved some charlatans making grand claims of efficacy and wild offers of compensation for their product; a smokeball which they said could effectively inoculate its users against influenza. The problem was...

Harsh working conditions and the lack of overtime for weekend work top the list of grievances that has prompted a mass walk-out by members of the Trade Organisation for Undercover Technicians (TOUT). Your State or mine? Police in Britain and Ireland are playing down the likely effects of this industrial dispute, which could see them losing significant numbers in valuable, frontline capacity. TOUT, comprised of the Informers and Operatives Union (IOU) and the Guild of Assisted Disorder (GoAD), which represents agent provocateurs and allied trades, voted by a narrow majority in favour of industrial action at an undisclosed location this weekend. With many IOU representatives either abstaining or voting against the motion, it was a close run thing for GoAD. As the motion was carried, there were the predictable chants of ‘No provocation without representation’; a reference to GoAD’s ongoing campaign to have a more senior decision-making role in issues of Police crowd management....

Employing cutting edge technology and of course the best professional minds that the news-gathering world has to offer, we at The Rusty Wire Service can categorically state that today in Dublin, between 10,000 and 150,000 people marched in protest against the Irish government’s bailout plan. It seems then that none of the media, national or international can get their story straight on just how many people marched in Dublin today. According to the fearless Irish Indo -- which largely ignored the march in the main part of its website and barely gave it a breaking news mention -- an estimated 50,000 had taken part. That Indo figure probably had more to do with Henry Street scuttlebutt than any of the Indo lags actually taking a headcount because it seems to be the number that most of the international press have been touting as gospel straight from some minion at the Garda press office. A couple of North American publications even put the figure as low as 10,000 (maybe they went to the ...

It was a bit like the plot from a sinister absurdist farce: an endless bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork cock-ups, institutionalisation and systemic indifference that has spanned three decades. At the centre of it all, a frail, shy old man with learning difficulties. When the file landed on my desk, I was aghast and I still am. The prisoner, let’s call him ‘Tom’, was convicted of arson and given a life sentence with a recommendation that he serve at least four-years, that was back around 1982/3. 28 years later in 2010, Tom is still serving his sentence with no realistic prospect of release in sight in spite of the repeated advocacy and assistance offered on Tom’s   behalf by concerned Irish organisations. I recently made a social visit to Tom; it was the only way I would get access to him. I had made repeated unsuccessful requests to meet with Tom and other Irish prisoners   as an accredited visitor for one of the aforementioned Irish organisations. On all occasions, ...

The Republic stands at a crossroads. No comely maidens at this lonely junction; much more likely is the offer of sovereign souls for sale...... On BBC’s Newsnight earlier this week, market libertarian economist Irwin Stelzer characterised the current situation in Ireland as nothing more exceptional than another shift in the seemingly random migrations of global debt.  Well, random to most of us at least who don’t work in markets like the Catastrophe Exchange or any of the other esoterica and exotica that banking has discovered in its alchemical quest to turn mathematics into gold. Money will be found (as it always is) to service this debt; whether it's from the ECB and the Germans or the IMF which ultimately means the US. It actually doesn't matter from where; in a system where financial flows are so globalised and trades so instantaneous it's origin becomes a bit of a moot point, macroeconomically speaking. But the one certainty in all of it is that the Irish people will...

Low carbon solution to Ireland's economic woes?   People travelling over to ‘the mainland’ and ‘the rest of the colonies’ in search of work (and maybe a bit of land with a pub or a building firm on it) are blaming their plight on their own country-people in Ireland. Standing on Liverpool docks yesterday, a traveller recently arrived from Dublin had this to say: “Those are the ones that drove me off anyway; sure I was just as settled as them, and then their banks came and took the house back and we had to go after the work finished. So now we’re headin’ down to London, I’ve an auntie in Willesden who's over here since the last big push in the’80s.” “It’s grand for them lot, settled in their nice houses on the Golf Club road, but even after my house was sold out from under me, they told me I still owed them money. Oh, you turn around an’ they’d rob ya that crowd....”

Europe...my arse   News that the UK will be ponying up £7bn (€8.2bn) as part of the Irish bailout was greeted with hissy-fits from the Euro-sceptic rumps of all the big three parties in Parliament today. But then Britain never could get its story straight when it comes to either Ireland or Europe. Since joining the then EEC with Ireland and Denmark in 1973, the Great British Public has wavered between ambivalent scepticism and xenophobic hostility on the question of its involvement with its European neighbours. The British (English) press has never tired of whipping up Europhobia. From the heady days of ‘Up yours Delors’ to ‘Metric Martyrs’ and ‘non-bendy bananas’. Indeed, the man on the Clapham Omnibus could be forgiven for thinking that Europe was solely devised to erode the British way of life. Chancellor Osborne (himself apparently an heir to an Irish Baronetcy) has played the bailout as a helping hand to a friend in need. Very noble. But let’s take a cl...

With the government in Ireland so far refusing to give in to nationwide calls for a general election and the trade unions openly calling for a campaign of civil disobedience, The Rusty Wire Service thought that, before its readers start off en masse to the barricades, they might appreciate a crib sheet on the subject. More than a slogan or a dinner party conversation The Rusty Wire Service however proposes to leave analysis of the peculiarly Irish experience of Civil Disobedience for another day: boycotts and parallel jurisdictions are after all more a matter of execution and logistics than political philosophy. The definitive treatise on the matter is of course Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ written in 1849, largely in response to continued slavery and the Mexican-American War. In this slim volume, Thoreau argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that, furthermore, people have a duty to avo...

Because prison is such a bleak place, those surprising little moments of beauty and tenderness can really catch you off-guard. Recently, I was facilitating a visit for an Irish prisoner who's halfway through a twenty stretch. I took his 22-year old daughter and her 2-year old son down to see his granda, because he hadn’t seen them in over a year. I got up to go to the coffee bar to get some hot drinks and biscuits in but it was really to give them a bit of space on their own while I queued. I took a look around me, first glancing back at my happy prisoner with his daughter and her son and then, my gaze wandered to the other prisoners getting their visit. Pretty, brassy girls I'd seen dolling themselves up in the toilets before the visit; now sitting with their handsome, banged-up bad boys, doubtless promising to stay true. Slow, lithium-heavy VPs (Vulnerable prisoners; usually sex-offenders) being visited by wee middle-aged mothers with tight lips and even tighter ...

Work was murder....   A recent piece in The Economist asked the question whether or not psychopathy is an evolutionary aberration. The article suggests that “prisons are packed with them. So, according to some, are boardrooms.” To anyone who has experience of either or both places, neither is a shocking proposition. The Deptford Croppy is neither a stranger to the penal system, nor to the Square Mile and can therefore assert with some authority that while the prison system is a place that reeks obviously of mental illness; the sociopaths that do the most damage to society work in the City and it’s easy to see why they flourish there. “The combination of a propensity for impulsive risk-taking with a lack of guilt and shame (the two main characteristics of psychopathy) may lead, according to circumstances, to a criminal career or a business one,” suggests The Economist. It’s the blank and dead-eyed lack of empathy, the acceptable view that decency is a vulne...

In an uncharacteristic outbreak of sanity, the British Government has accepted in principle that the 1701 Act of Settlement which enshrines primogeniture and bans Roman Catholics from sitting on the English throne “may be discriminatory”. 21st century PC: Westminster to repeal Succession  A Cabinet office statement warned however that amending the Act of Settlement “is a complex and difficult matter that requires careful and thoughtful consideration”. The subtext being, don’t expect any changes any time too soon. Primogeniture is effectively an old feudal tool to ensure that estates remained under a family name. Under this system, a woman in the line of succession is automatically superseded by a younger male sibling.  To be perfectly blunt, it is a nakedly sectarian and clearly sexist piece of legislation. Its historic roots are in the period after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (part of a catalogue of laws often referred to in Ireland as the Penal times ). The ongoing attempts...