First, from slate.com we have an explanation of the 6 different kinds of white supremacist. I was only familiar with the Aryan Prison gangs from OZ and the Neo Nazis from The Blues Brothers.

Second, a very clever guy I know took the time to work out what the results of the last few Irish general elections would have been under a list system. I am a big fan of list systems. In fact, there will be a thousand words explaining why in a few days.

Third, from the guardian, someone did a survey of attitudes among the Islamic community and general society with unsurprising but still interesting results.

Looking back it’s hard to think of a strike from the past where the public wasn’t onside. Things have changed. I previously wrote about my opposition to granting concessions to striking taxi drivers. I could do the same for bus drivers and teachers but to spare duplication lets look at why it is becoming harder to support almost any of the strikes that are happening at present.

We have gone from a position of (albeit tacit) solidarity in the past to one of outspoken opposition to many of today’s strikes. Why do we feel so differently now? We used to support strikes as a matter of principal and now when we hear of a new strike our first question is “why?”

The first reason for this is really important. The workplace is a very different place to what it was in 1913 or even 1980. We work under the protection of a barrage of legislation. For personal or group grievances we can seek redress through the courts. We are protected from unsafe workplaces, discrimination and unfair dismissal. Three of the Labour movements great legitimating causes are gone.

Any movement that seeks to gain rights for a group should work to make itself irrelevant. To a very large extent the Labour movement, through addressing the three issues above, has achieved this goal. The sad irony is that it is the actions taken to protect and project its status that make the majority tire of its presence.

The areas of the workforce that are most heavily unionised share two things in common. They tend to be in sectors of the economy with no genuine competition and they tend to be very unproductive. Most striking workers are employed by the Government or work in industries highly regulated by the government and that really shouldn’t surprise us.

The majority of the workforce is not unionised. Most of those who are not members have no interest in joining a union. Entire sectors, such as hospitality, are almost completely un-unionised. People in these industries, where the level of competition between companies is obvious and similar jobs in similar companies pay much the same understand that their wage is set by what benefit they can bring to the company.

In a basic hotel, a hall porter is a hall porter. You can really only be so good at being a hall porter. It’s only in some more exclusive hotels that there is any incentive to hire better hall porters. These guys earn slightly more in wages and much more in tips. They are protected by workplace legislation but are still often only guaranteed full-time employment during the tourist season So, the majority of the nations hall porters earn minimum wage and even those that don’t are on temporary contracts. The same is true of cashiers, shop assistants, barstaff etc.

These staff don’t organise and strike because they realise that they are getting fair days pay for their labour. They don’t expect the company to give them a raise every year when they don’t add more value year on year.

This is why unions have lost so much public support. The workers they primarily represent (Teachers, Nurses, Bus Drivers) may have legitimate grievances but generally earn middle class incomes and have fantastic job security. They still expect more, not because of any value they add, but just because. We all accept that our wage rates are set by the market, but in these sectors there is still a persisting belief that they deserve a figure plucked from the air as compensation for their labour and their job guaranteed for life.

Their industrial action tends also to be directed at us in an attempt to pressure the government. It’s much easier to feel sympathy for striking shop workers sticking it to a multinational corporation that it is when workers are directly disrupting our schools, hospitals and transport networks. It becomes especially hard to take when they are trying to win the support of people on lower wages, with less job prestige and security.

The concessions that these unions have won also hurt young people entering the same field. It has become much harder for young teachers or lecturers to attain the job security and status of a permanent contract because of all that a permanent contract entails in these jobs. Even in the private sector many lower level administrative positions within companies have no potential to become permanent contracts because that would entitle the worker to the overly costly benefits enjoyed by “full timers”.

It becomes very difficult to supply solidarity to those who request it when they do not show solidarity with part-time or subcontracted workers who are often sitting beside them doing much the same job. For a full discussion of the disappearance of real jobs read the “No Jobs” chapter of “No Logo” by Naomi Klein. She identifies corporate greed as the cause. I would agree only if we acknowledge that the actions of most unions now also fit that category. Unions care only about their due paying members. They don’t care about the part timers working beside them, the sub contractors who work harder for less in the same company or workers in any other sector.

How can these people expect solidarity when they show such blatant disregard for everyone else?

We don’t feel like unions are fighting a just fight anymore and we are right.

I was going to write about swine flu but this article is pretty perfect as far as I can see…

I also like this very short bit about protests…

There is, as everyone knows, a gaping hole in our public finances. Most people are at least somewhat aware of its external and internal causes.

The global financial system collapsed meaning money got tight everywhere. Ireland has one of the most open economies in the world. So we waved goodbye to huge amounts of investment capital, export revenue and jobs. At the same time our housing bubble burst at exactly the wrong time. All of this caused the massive decrease in government income.

People are definitely aware of the scale of the problem. Most people, to their credit, are aware of the need for us all to pay more for government services through taxation. Our public services were being subsidised by income from stamp duty, that income is now gone. That money will now have to come directly from all of us. People were incredibly stoic in their reaction to the rises in taxation in last weeks budget. There was a general realisation that if we had to find 8 billion from somewhere, then that somewhere was going to involve all of our pockets.

The anger that had characterised so much of the discourse since the start of the crisis was absent. That anger, although pointless, was understandable. People had been told everything was fine and were then told that the financial stability they had grown accustomed to was gone. Public discourse was all about blame. In turn it was the governments fault, the banks fault, Dell’s fault and immigrants fault.

Most worryingly, it seemed that there was a belief that the basic system we had successfully used to grow was flawed. There are so many posters on the street from socialists and anarchists telling us that capitalism has failed and that economic collapse is an inevitable consequense of greed. When Dell left these same groups blamed the greed of multinational corporations for job losses (They would rather have never had the jobs at all). The Labour Party, in the run up to the budget, seriously put forward the idea of a third tax band for higher earners.

The public wished that we all bear the brunt of fire-fighting our shortfall and it appears that the public are satisfied. In reality the tax and levy changes are going to have most impact on the middle classes. This is a good thing. It is good not because the middle classes deserve to be punished but because if we are going to take extra from anyone, they are most suitable.

The middle classes don’t face the sort of existential problems that the lower classes do. Extra taxation means less luxuries, no new car, less holidays etc. For those lower down the economic ladder it means less essentials, no car, no house etc. That only explains why we shouldn’t focus on the poor, what about the wealthy.

What we must realise is that an extra 100,000 in the pocket of the one wealthy person is more use to society than an extra 5000 in the hands of twenty middle class families. This is only true if we are careful about how we leave that 100,000 in the wealthy persons pocket. Middle class families, with an extra 5000 will save some and spend the rest in Marks and Spencer’s. There are very few ways that we can really hope to encourage them to use retained income in a more useful way. We can affect how wealthy people use the money they keep.

Throughout the 90’s and over the last few years we have embraced the idea of tax breaks for investment in projects that we felt were socially and economically beneficial. The tax break best known to most was the section 50 tax break for construction of student accommodation. The result was a massive investment in student accommodation that has facilitated the continued growth in student numbers generally, the growth in numbers of income generating international students and a rise in accommodation standards in student areas.

We need to keep tax breaks for the wealthy. We need to shift them away from construction, where we have an oversupply of almost everything and into the areas of the economy we want to see grow. Most people would agree that the private sector did a much better job of providing student accommodation than the public sector ever could have. It delivered more, better and cheaper bed spaces than the Department of Education could have imagined possible.

Tax breaks can do much more than provide beds for students. We are very enthusiastic about the idea of getting out of this reccession by creating jobs. The first step is for us to realise how bad the government is at doing this. In many cases it is more likely to create a benefit for us if we leave money in the hands of wealthy people who will invest it in enterprises that they feel are likely to bring them a return. These enterprises will employ people, saving the exchequer money that would otherwise have to be spent on unemployment benefits. This is how we can harness the self-interest of the wealthy for our benefit.

How popular will this idea be? Are people really comfortable with the idea that we will be better off facilitating the rich getting richer?

What we need to remember is that this is the compromise solution to the problem at hand. Just taking more money through taxation has all sorts of bad affects. It changes the way that people consider the value of their time, effort and how they balance up risk when they decide what to do with what money they have. Just keeping taxes low for the wealthy also doesn’t really work because they are likely to save the money that would have gone in taxation or invest in companies or projects outside the state. The middle ground of targeted tax breaks allows us to present the wealthy with a simple choice.

Allow us to take a reasonably high proportion of your income or gamble on investment in sectors that we think are socially and economically beneficial. This alters the decision making process for the wealthy when they come to think about when and how to invest.

The tough choice we have to make when it comes to taxation is whether we adopt a tax policy to make us feel that society is fair or a policy to make us all better off. Let’s be better off.

http://www.slate.com/id/2214724/

This is fantastic. Read this and reconsider all the self important opinion pieces about why the newspaper is essential for democracy.

http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/04/03/five-dumbest-tariffs

Pretty interesting article about the walls countries are putting up that will inevitably hurt us all.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/03/stiglitz/index1.html

Joseph Stiglitz explaining just how much trouble we are in.

Part two of the last article will be up this weekend or earlier.

We are obviously in a bleak economic situation.

“Since the last General Election, less than 2 years ago, over 200,000 people have lost their jobs. Every lost job costs at least 20,000 Euro between social welfare payments and lost taxes. That’s four billion every year! The Taoiseach has admitted to me in the Dáil that unemployment could go to over 450,000 by the end of this year. That’s another two billion!” Eamonn Gilmore… March 29th

Those are big numbers and more importantly, big percentages. Unemployment of 400,000 would be around 20% of the workforce and 6 billion is a little under 10% of yearly government expenditure.

But it’s all too easy to get lost in the numbers. Gilmore and the Labour party have one major thing right and to be fair all major parties are singing from the same hymn-sheet. Fixing our society is about jobs. Apart from the obvious compassionate reasons to protect jobs there are hardnosed economic reasons too.

An economy in freefall is a society in freefall. High unemployment leads to higher crime, drug use, ethnic tension and violence. This leads to a vicious downward spiral of underinvestment, under-education and underachievement. Downward spirals are what happen when a downturn really hits every aspect of an economy.

In “Globalisation and it’s Discontents”, Joe Stiglitz elaborates further on the reasons why employment should be the key focus for a government during a recession citing the different approaches taken by countries during the South East Asian Economic Crisis of 1997. These countries experienced a credit crunch 12 years before we did. They experienced the same sort of shock we are now and the countries that fared best are those that prioritised fiscal stability (rather than austerity) and preserving employment.

The big question we have to ask is how we try to protect employment? There is so much talk about job creation at the moment. How do we “create” jobs and continue to provide the sort of social services we want? We have to balance two seemingly contradictory concerns. We have to spend to protect jobs and social stability where possible while at the same time focusing more than ever on competitiveness.

A good example is the continuing political fallout over the loss of jobs at Dell. It’s a good parallel because South Korea ignored the advice of the IMF in 1997 and subsidised their chip industry (against IMF advice). It was a nationally significant employer and returned to profitability after a few lean years. The difference is that the Koreans were making a good investment. Although it came as a shock to many the departure of Dell was inevitable.

Dell was huge not just as an individual employer, but due to all the feeder factories and services that relied upon it. The impact on Limerick and Tipperary has been massive and it is understandable that there was a public outcry to protect the jobs that were lost. The problem is that had we put together a package to keep Dell, we would have needed another and another in time. Wage levels and costs of operating are just too high here for factories like Dell.

Gilmore asked “Does it not make more sense to spend €10million now to save 1000 jobs, than to spend €20m every year to keep people on the dole?”

The answer is… “It depends”. If, like South Korea, we can be confident that a major industry will return to profitability then it makes sense to protect the jobs because the state will save on welfare and recoup their investment through taxation in time. We can’t afford to pay money out of taxation to keep unsustainable jobs in Ireland. It places too high a burden on the rest of the tax paying population especially when it involves supporting such a big chunk of Irelands manufacturing sector. The higher income tax required to pay for these would damage competitiveness too much by requiring a subsequent rise in wages and would suck too much money away from increasingly stretched public services that impact on us all.

The problem with using Government funds to protect jobs is that it only works in our long-term benefit if we focus on protecting and developing our areas of comparative advantage rather than subsidising areas where we are uncompetitive.

So when should we spend to protect jobs? One example is in tourism. Our tourism industry should recover as the global economy recovers. It makes sense to try to keep hotels and attractions ticking over even if at a loss because tourist numbers will recover more quickly if the infrastructure is up and running. It makes sense to invest in some construction projects now because it will lessen the shock to the industry and importantly it is the best price the government will get for these projects this half century.

We should protect jobs when we can see society benefiting. In both of these cases we do more than help individual workers, we make smart long term investments that will benefit everybody.

This approach does mean more jobs being lost but hopefully we will be able to create new jobs by staying competitive. Protecting jobs doesn’t mean protecting specific jobs, it means ensuring that the total number of jobs stays high. To do that we will have to make very tough choices that will hurt people but help our society recover over the medium to long term.

Competitiveness will be part 2.

As more people that we know and consider honest sign on for welfare we change our opinion and see it as silly to force these good honest people we know into work for welfare programmes. At the same time we are seeing a rise in social problems such as drug use, vandalism, littering etc. The point of this article is to make a case for the introduction of a smart, targeted work for welfare programme.

There are different ways of drawing up work for welfare programmes but most share two aspects in common. They tend to favour social programmes not motivated by profit and they tend to involve various degrees of compulsion.

From California to Australia the unemployed are told to do some useful work or get cut off. This makes sense in societies that are very individualist in outlook and see a person’s welfare primarily as their own responsibility. This take it or leave it approach jars with us, especially now, and rightly so.

So why would we still want to push people into similar programmes and how would we do it?

Unemployment is a very different experience to what it was last year. It is the strongest employers market in a very long time. Young people fresh out of college not only have to compete with their contemporaries for fewer jobs than before but also with scores of similarly qualified and more experienced workers re-entering the employment race through no fault of their own. People who have excellent experience, who performed perfectly in their jobs are competing against people with almost zero experience. Apart from those who can find work in shrinking graduate employment programmes the reality is under/unemployment.

The situation is even bleaker for non-graduates. They have even less to mark them out from the pack. The lower level admin jobs, which were previously stepping-stones to long-term stable employment, are now flooded with graduates and again the goalposts have shifted. The qualifications and experience that got you a particular job one year ago no longer get you an interview.

The biggest common factor uniting these two groups is a shared lack of the experience that employers desire. The biggest fear that both groups should have is stagnating in unemployment. Whatever their hobbies/interests/voluntary work what an employer wants to know is that employees, who are expected to work harder and longer for less, are going to get up, come in on time and work hard.
The one thing that makes an unemployed person more employable now is an employment history. We need to enable people who cannot get work at any level to prove that they are workers in waiting rather than a risk to be taken. There is such a danger of talented people stagnating on the doll unable to get that first step into the work place.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that unemployment is by its nature demotivating. Many people start their period of unemployment with good intentions of keeping routine, exercising and trying to up-skill. The drudge of job applications and rejections can wear people down and long periods in unemployment actually do lead to people forgetting the routine of work and then having to re-learn it on return to the workplace.

So, lets start thinking about what a smart scheme could look like. Lets say that we try to keep a focus on social projects, some aspect of incentive, if not compulsion, and a focus on work routine and up-skilling.

We still want people to be able to get off Welfare by finding a job so the time commitment should be small. One full day of work per week isn’t unreasonable. The day kept flexible to allow for attendance at job interviews and training courses. The projects can be from something as simple as cleaning up the local area to an expansion of the sort of youth and community work focused on in the community employment scheme at the moment.

As much as possible, the administration of the scheme should be done by people on the scheme. This is possible through the use of workflow systems and training and experience in those systems makes people far more employable. By moving people around and being flexible we can over the course of weeks or months give people the type of hands on experience they need with a fairly low level of oversight.

We all benefit from cleaner parks and local areas, repairs to dilapidated facilities and beefed up social programmes. With social problems highest in areas of high unemployment, the workers would be giving back directly to their communities and in some cases repairing the very playgrounds that their children use and working with the teenagers who set the example their kids will follow.

The workers benefit from keeping active, having a day of work every week to stay in the routine of a working day and importantly being able to prove to employers that they are interested in working because the system can be set up to act as a reference generator.

We shouldn’t force people into this programme because they won’t like it, won’t work hard and will devalue it in the eyes of employers. Why not just adopt a system of incentives? Standard unemployment runs at around 200 euro per week. Why not give a slight cut to those who refuse to participate on the programme and a slight rise to those who do. So have two rates, 180 euro and 220 euro. It might not sound like a massive difference but it means that those who work feel they are being paid a little at least. Those willing to take a 40 euro hit should be allowed to do so.

This will also send a very strong message to employers, that people on the scheme are actively looking to get out of unemployment. They are not just listlessly sending off CV’s in the hope of getting something. They can have a reference to attest to their attendance and punctuality. They can have hands on experience of different types of work. We should work with employers to design projects that emphasise workplace friendly skills and behaviours to make sure that people are getting some real benefit from the programme.

So the programme should benefit communities and the unemployed if implemented correctly.

What do you think? I’m very interested in people’s comments on this.

There was, until deregulation, a massive problem of under-supply. On Saturday nights it wasn’t uncommon to queue for two hours for a taxi. The tightly regulation created this problem. If almost all Taxis were in operation the number was still too low to satisfy demand these times and in many cases drivers chose to avoid the busiest times. Drivers invested very large sums of money in plates because a taxi was a money factory. It was a guaranteed earner, a job for life.

The terms of this job for life have changed massively. Full time taxi drivers have to work longer hours to make the same money. Estimates for Dublin drivers are at 50 to 70 hours a week. They feel their customer base has been usurped by part timers who do not rely on taxiing as their main source of income. Most drivers are working close to double the hours they were working before to bring home the same money. It is understandable that people feel sympathy and express solidarity.

But stop and question this, we are in an economic downturn where most private sector workers are either undergoing significant pay cuts, changing work practices or working extra hours for the same wage. Taxi driving is a low intensity profession. It has plenty of rest time during non-peak hours. Drivers, while waiting at the rank, can get out and stretch their legs, have a chat and a coffee. As a job to work long hours in it really isn’t the worst.

Architects, Solicitors, Barristers, Bankers, Secretaries etc aren’t looking for controls or specific job protection even though many are under threat or becoming redundant. As an entire workforce we are facing longer hours, lower wages and more competition for jobs. We are also guaranteed to keep seeing strong competition for as long as we keep trade moving freely between countries.

We see Taxis differently only because they were treated differently for so long. What we are forgetting are the problems that we had and how deregulation has brought the changes we wanted all along. The stated issue with part time drivers is that they only come out to work at peak times. This means that the strike centers on a grievance over supply rising to meet demand. The drivers are upset that we aren’t waiting over an hour for taxis on Saturday nights anymore. Surely the main aim of regulating taxis isn’t to provide jobs but to ensure a good service is provided. The system we have now is delivering in a way that the old system never did.

The drivers are also asserting that people don’t have a right to a second job. The part time drivers working an extra 15 to 20 hours a week are working the same number of hours per week in total that full time taxi drivers are complaining about. They are pushing themselves so hard because they face the same economic pressures that the full time drivers face. Why should it matter how they spend the other 40 hours per week? Surely they should be equally annoyed with the other full time divers working an extra 15-20 hours reducing the supply and demand imbalance that leads them to high profits.

Surely all that we should worry about is whether or not people have a chance to earn a living. Part time taxi driving is keeping many families afloat in these difficult times and it is also improving the service. Striking drivers definitely won’t tell you that there have always been part time drivers. In the days of plate control they worked for full time drivers (some still do). They often worked the peak hours when the work was at its hardest and most dangerous. The difference is that they received a flat hourly rate with the plate owner accumulating profit in his sleep.

This isn’t to say that the plate owners were fat-cat pigs or anything like that (Although some, especially those who bought up multiple plates, often were). The reason that they adopted this practice was to help pay off the high price they had paid for their plate. The point is that, although the prosperity of individual full time drivers is under threat, the open market is actually a much fairer system. By lowering the financial barrier to entry it allows part timers to gain more appropriate renumeration for their time and effort.

Imagine a situation where a shop assistant was doing all of her boss’s hardest work and dealing with the most awkward customers. Imagine that she was confident she could compete with the boss by opening her own shop. Now imagine that she wasn’t allowed because the government had decided that there were already enough shops in the area and that if she provided a similar service she might damage her boss’s livelihood. People would be outraged and rightly so. We would be outraged because we have always expected shops to make an effort to gain our custom. Because retailing started as a marketplace they are pretty much always treated as marketplaces.

We would see little or nothing wrong with that shop owner losing their livelihood because of a better product being offered. We think about restaurants the same way. In truth, think of any business that has never been strictly controlled by government licence and we see it the same way. Some taxi drivers are working hard to differentiate themselves from the herd by cultivating a loyal customer base and/or joining an efficiently run cooperative or company. This is how a full timer can work to protect his position within the open market. What we shouldn’t allow is an exception to be made in this case and put up barriers to entry for new drivers.

If we start to wall in specific industries to try and protect jobs we will ensure that they will not develop to their potential. They will not be as cheap or efficient as they can be. The more things that are expensive and inefficient in a country the more wealth that could be used well is wasted. The more industries we do this with the more we waste.

The reason that caving to Taxi drivers would be dangerous is because we would be accepting the principle of protectionism within our economy. If we protect the livelihood of these workers why shouldn’t we protect the livelihood of every other worker? Should we do away with part time work altogether and rob business of a flexible workforce and create inefficiencies and more expensive goods and services? Should we ban people from taking on a second job to protect the interests of pre-existing workers unwilling to compete?

Of course we shouldn’t. We need to get used to the idea that in today’s flatter and more open world we have to compete for jobs all our lives. We can’t expect to just get a job or enter a profession and see money roll in if we do nothing to make ourselves better and more valuable than the others in our field. If we start to wall in specific industries to try and protect jobs we will ensure that they will not develop to their potential. They will not be as cheap or efficient as they can be. The more things that are expensive and inefficient in a country the more wealth that could be used well is wasted. This should apply to all professions and if we don’t remember that now, we can say goodbye to future prosperity.

There was a feeling then that the situation of northern Catholics, especially lower class Catholics, was untenable. There was structural violence in the way that society was organised and it certainly was an unjust society. It is a pity that the civil rights movement was hi-jacked by escalating violence before it had a chance to bear fruit but the point is that there was a legitimate concern on the part of republicans however inhumanely they pursued their aims. The idea was that the misery and chaos caused by a tit for tat paramilitary war was worth it to protect the longer-term interests of Catholics who suffered immediate and extreme discrimination. The assumption was that only government from Dublin could protect the rights of Northern Catholics.

The last 12 years or so have shown something quite different to be true. Although the North still has some festering social problems it has moved on an immense distance as a society. Bigots still exist but do not have power or control any longer. If the traditionally more extreme parties are now in power it demonstrates a move to the center on their part rather than a move to the extremes by the general population. The question on Sunday was how, not if, Sinn Fein would condemn the killings. The only quibble they raised at Stormont was an old issue regarding the involvement of British Army experts in PSNI investigations that was hardly incendiary.

Sinn Fein appears to have realised that the most likely path to a 32 county republic is through gradual integration and cross community trust building. This recognises the reality that, for a United Ireland to be viable, unionists and loyalists will have to be brought along as a willing minority rather than outgunned or out bred. This is why Gerry Adams referred to the attack as not merely wrong but counter productive. Trying to push soldiers out of Northern Ireland perpetuates the fear that exists among unionists and loyalists of the fate that awaits them in a united Ireland. This fear is informed by the flight of southern Protestants since partition and actions such as Saturdays. A fearful Unionist population will never willingly give up the protection of the British Government in exchange for guarantees from the south. This is why Sinn Fein participates in politics with at least more than half a heart now. This is why they support policing and condemn violence. It is an attempt to show unionists that they have nothing to fear.

So if this approach is so obvious to so many who seek to unite Ireland why is it so offensive to the Real IRA? There have been so many comments over the past few days stating that the murderers were inhuman. This is untrue and unhelpful. To understand the killers it is of primary importance to understand that they are as human as you or I. What then has pushed them to commit such a brutal and pointless act? There are two reasons.

Firstly, they see the flipside of the moderate approach to achieving a United Ireland. All of this peaceful co-existence and realisation of social and human rights may help to soften Unionists to the idea of a United Ireland but it also has another affect. For so many their principal motivation for taking part in the Nationalist movement was to secure an end to the discrimination that they suffered. As that discrimination is removed so is the impetus to organise and actively seek an end to partition for many people. What makes the members of the Real IRA different is that they conceive sovereignty as coming from land and history rather than from people. It doesn’t matter to them that the Catholics of Northern Ireland are as happy and free as their counterparts in the south. It doesn’t matter to them that almost nobody supports their actions as they are certain that the only righteous end is a United Ireland and that all compromises along the way are aberrations against their cause. This fervour is their justification for attempting to derail the peace process and sounds very familiar.

It is very like the sort of religious fundamentalism that motivates much of the Islamic terror we see in the world today. It is difficult to fight this as a war of ideas as anyone who espouses a view contrary to theirs is necessarily an enemy, a traitor, an intellectual or any of the other words they use to describe those who refuse to see the world as they do. For those at the most extreme end of the Republican belief system Sinn Fein are becoming the enemy for collaborating and giving in to Unionist demands on policing and other issues. For not answering all policy questions with dogmatic replies regarding the occupation of Northern Ireland Sinn Fein has lost control of this fundamentalist element.

The second reason for the outrage at Massareene is equally obvious and frustrating. The spectre of recession hanging over the world at present is blamed for a lot of things and it has a role to play here too. It explains why the attack happened now. There is a strong correlation between economic downturns and upswings in ethnic violence. Economic downturns bring with them unemployment, fear and bitterness. Just as the National Front gained strength amongst the youth in British council estates in the late 70’s and early 80’s organisations like the Real IRA are harnessing the undirected anger of the frustrated and hopeless lower class catholic youths of Northern Ireland and directing it against a traditional foe. In their recruitment, they are harnessing a very natural and human way of thinking during times of scarcity. It is “in-group” thinking, one naturally wishes that members of their community or tribe get the best of a bad lot. They feel they are more entitled to possess wealth and security than “others”. The rationale that spurs this hatred and resentment of Protestants mirrors the hatred and resentment that was felt by British Youths in a similar economic and social situation towards Indian and Pakistani immigrants during the Thatcher years. Note that the explanations for the attack emphasise a frustration with Sinn Fein and the peace process. It is expressed as too much (concessions) being given to protestants and the Catholics being left with nothing (dignity, pride, nation etc.). If you exchanged what is in the brackets for jobs and benefits you would have a national front pamphlet from 1981.

This article doesn’t suggest a solution to the re-emergence of dissident violence. Its only aim was to try to think out why this outrage occurred and why we must remain vigilant to further attacks. To paraphrase Gerry Adams from his less sensible day… these causes haven’t gone away you know.

I like to see myself as someone with ideas. I think about things. I know that doesn’t make me unique or special but it is a very big part of my identity. I understand that my thoughts and opinions aren’t always right. It would be hard for someone with such changeable opinions to assume he is all knowing. I don’t see a change in my viewpoint as a move from one state of certainty to another but simply as another stage of uncertainty.

I do, however, think that I look at things in interesting ways due to never feeling entirely certain and not having a consistent overarching ideology. I have recently become frustrated at my lack of an outlet. Ideas are no use if they stay locked inside my head. In the past I debated and wrote for the college paper. This blog is a structured way for me to continue working through ideas and issues. I plan to use it to keep sharp thought processes upon which I place high value and hope to profit from in the future.

I intend to post at least once a week. Posts will hopefully be on a variety of topics. I intend to post on politics, social issues, literature, pop culture, sport etc. The one condition that I am imposing upon myself is a measure of self-discipline. I will not be putting up short posts or rambles. I intend for what I write to be at least as much of a finished article as I used to submit to the college paper. I want what I post to be read by people other than me and for people to be interested enough to leave comments and pass articles onto their friends. I think the only way to do this is to try to achieve something like printable quality in my posting.

So that is the plan. I hope you read and enjoy the articles that will follow this declaration of intent and swallowing of pride.

Best wishes,

Derek Doyle