(Version by Nina Simone)

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the popular trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter cry

Having written almost 40 diaries on US politics in and around the time of the last US Presidential Elections, I decided to leave it to the experts to comment on US political developments since then. However despite trying to keep up to date by reading Booman and a few other US media sources, I have become increasingly puzzled by the direction of the US politics since then, and particularly by the Republican Presidential candidate nomination process. Perhaps people with more expertise than I on US politics can help me out.

Mitt Romney seems to be the candidate all conservatives Republicans love to hate, partly because of his perceived flip flopping on conservative wedge issues like abortion and public health care, but also perhaps because of his Mormonism and alleged "robotic" personality. Thus, although he is the most experienced, best funded, and best organised candidate, he has failed to achieve more than c. 25%  support from the Republican faithful. The Republican establishment have overwhelmingly backed him as the only Republican candidate to regularly defeat President Obama in opinion poll match-ups.  But the Republican base just can't get to like, never mind love him

And so we have had a plethora of NOT-MITT-ROMNEY (NMR) candidates seeking to achieve a plurality of support from the remaining 75% of Republican primary voters. So long as that 75% of the vote is shared amongst a number of candidates, Mitt Romney can stay in the lead.  However if any one of the rest can become the Conservative standard bearer, it seems that Romney is doomed for all his money and establishment support. But what has been extraordinary is the poor quality of the alternative candidates, so much so that each has collapsed within weeks of having soared into the lead once they become subject to increased public scrutiny.

I have a letter published in the main Irish daily, the Irish Independent, today (below the fold) where it is preceded by a letter making the argument that those holding my views are "liberals" and anti-catholic bigots.

You decide.

[Update] Further follow on letters also published and added below the fold...

Michael D. Higgins celebrates victory with his family

Michael D. Higgins, Labour candidate and long time civil rights advocate has won the Irish Presidential election by a wide margin.  Opinion polls, up to last Sunday, were showing Sean Gallagher, former Fianna Failer, reality TV star and dodgy businessman with a strong lead. Public perceptions changed dramatically following a Presidential debate on Monday where Gallagher was exposed as a "bagman" or senior fundraiser for Fianna Fail and also raised questions about his business ethics which were never satisfactorally answered.  The worry is he came within a week of being elected - the power of positive re-branding and the desperation of the electorate for a new face almost led to the election of someone with a very shallow CV.

The table below shows the dramatic swing in public voting intentions in the last few days of the campaign by comparing opinion poll results with the actual outcome:

David Adams, in a misguided but perhaps tongue-in-cheek piece in the Irish Times, seeks to cast the lambasting of Dana and Martin McGuinness in the Irish presidential election campaign as a reflection of the "fact" that southerners hate northerners and are just as comfortable with the partition of Ireland as his own northern Unionist and Loyalist community.

Reality is us northerners are not liked down here

It has become crystal clear during this campaign that people "down here" don't like us northerners very much. Not in any individual sense - I'm sure lots of southerners could think of a likeable person from the North, if they tried hard enough - but in an abstract way. To the southern mind, we're too abrasive, overly aggressive and, when it suits us, pigheadedly literal (the grating accent doesn't help much, either). And that's not the half of it. Ultimately, we're seen as outsiders - if not quite foreigners - poking our noses into a polity that's none of our business.

The shock on the faces of Dana and Martin as the harsh reality of southern partitionism sank in has been something to behold. Dana's previous outings coincided with the tide of goodwill that swept Mary II into the Áras and, a couple of years later, herself briefly into the European parliament. Dana must feel like she's landed on a different planet from 2004 Ireland. As for Martin (who can only be cursing himself for not being more suspicious of Gerry opting to stand in a Border county, rather than run for president), his taken-aback demeanour has, to me at least, often suggested the previously unimaginable: "Good God, these people make even the unionists seem friendly."

So along with everything else, and contrary to some gloomy predictions, the presidential election has, in its own fashion, even helped with mutual understanding in Northern Ireland. Pity there couldn't be one every year.

One can understand his joy, as a northern Loyalist, at northern nationalists being savaged by the "southern" media in a manner which would never have happened in Northern Ireland - in a still divided community sensitive to the risks of reopening a sectarian divide. However he provides no evidence for his assertion that 'southerners hate northerners'. The reality is that all of the presidential candidates have been criticised almost equally, and what we are seeing is "politics-as-normal" in a maturing, functioning, democratic polity. This is a case of Dana and McGuinness being slated for being old style catholic nationalists, not northerners.

Far more interesting is the fact that the election campaign can also be understood as a "protestantisation" of Ireland. Protestant, with a small 'p', to be sure, but nevertheless a seminal movement away from the catholic nationalist certainties of yore. One could also use the less controversial term of 'secularisation' of course, but many Catholics are no less religious in their outlook: They have just lost faith in their church hierarchy and in the conservative nationalist political forms that Catholicism has traditionally been associated with.

Dana Rosemary Scallan is one of 7 candidates for the Presidency of Ireland in an election to be held on the 27th. October. It has now been revealed that she became a citizen of the USA prior to her previous run for President in in 1997 and she has the chutzpah to claim that her US citizenship will help her to better perform her duties as Irish President.

Dana says US citizenship an 'advantage' in Áras race

Ms Scallon became a US citizen prior to putting her name forward for the 1997 presidential election but a decision was taken not to inform the electorate, her sister told a court in Iowa in 2008 during a legal case involving ownership of some of  the singer's recordings.

She disputes the above account and claims not to have become a US citizen until 1999 although she has also claimed that no one asked her about her citizenship during the 1997 campaign and thus it was never an issue. To become a US citizen she was required to swear the following oath of allegiance:

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."

As a devout and militant Catholic, she can hardly claim that an Oath before God is a mere technicality - as she now appears to be trying to argue. She cannot even claim, as some Irish Bishops did when they withheld evidence of child abuse from the civil authorities, to have exercised a "mental reservation" in swearing her Oath of Allegiance to the USA, as this is specifically ruled out in the wording of the oath.

The Irish Presidential campaign finally enters its formal campaign phase with the deadline for valid nominations closing at 12.00 noon yesterday. Polling day is the 27th. October. A record 7 candidates have managed to reach the minimum threshold for nomination - the support of 20 members of either house of parliament or four county councils. The office of President itself is largely a ceremonial one so the campaign focus is on personalities and on social/moral/value issues which tells us much about how Irish voters see themselves and want to see themselves represented in Ireland and beyond.

The three most significant events in the lead up to the campaign were the failure of Fianna Fail - the major party of Government since the founding of the state - to nominate any candidate; the nomination by Sinn Fein of Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland; and the resurrection of the campaign by David Norris who had earlier withdrawn his candidacy in the face of a controversy surrounding letters he had written to the Israeli High Court in support of a clemency plea for his former partner on a charge of statutory rape of a Palestinian minor.

The campaign seems destined to be dominated by controversies surrounding McGuinness' former role as an IRA commander, and Norris' judgement in supporting a former partner on statutory rape charges. However the range of candidates on offer is likely to confer a significance to the campaign out of all proportion to the importance of the Office of President itself. The seven declared candidates (in order of their level of first preference support in a recent opinion poll in brackets) are as follows:

Angela Merkel has several times remarked that a new Treaty is required to prevent a recurrence of financial crises like the current one. Many economic commentators point to Eurobonds as an essential part of any solution. The German Constitutional Court appears to have ruled out the issuance of Eurobonds without specific approval by the Bundestag.  This implies that the issuance of Eurobonds is beyond the scope of current European Treaties as such Treaties are subject to adjudication by the European Court in Luxembourg, not the German Constitutional Court.

Not so long ago we had an attempt to create a new Constitution for the EU.  This eventually boiled down to a much reduced Lisbon Treaty which was ratified, not without some difficulty, by all member states. The Lisbon Treaty was at first rejected by the Irish electorate in a low turnout referendum in 2008.  After much political manoeuvring, it was eventually passed by a second referendum in 2009. Opponents castigated it for representing the thin end of the wedge of a new European Superstate.

In reality, the Lisbon Treaty represented no such thing. It made some minor adjustments to governance rules to reflect the fact that the EU had expanded to 27 Member states. In fact, even before it been ratified, it was rendered almost entirely irrelevant by the global financial crisis which erupted in 2008. What difference have the new powers for the European Parliament made? The power of Petition contained in the Treaty has not even been implemented. Has the European Council become any more effective with the appointment of a full time President of the Council?

Instead we have seen the usual fragmented, uncoordinated, shambolic lurching from one phase of the crisis to the next with European institutions largely sidelined whilst a dysfunctional Merkel/Sarkozy national leadership partnership struggles to achieve any kind of coherent policy analysis, never mind an effective solution.

[Update] First published Thu Mar 31st, 2011.

I thought it might be useful to republish this diary now that the Libyan intervention appears to be entering the end game phase of regime change. As expected "protecting civilians" morphed into regime change, but a major deployment of "boots on the ground" was avoided. We still don't know what the new Libya will look like or precisely how the transition will be accomplished. Have the interventionists like Samantha Power been vindicated by the outcome to date?[End update]

Samantha Power is Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the Staff of the National Security Council. Born in Ireland in 1970, she emigrated to America with her mother aged 9, and went on to study at Yale and then Harvard. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide and then wrote a second book called Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World about the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Nations Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad.

Update] First published Thu Mar 31st, 2011.

I thought it might be useful to republish this diary now that the Libyan intervention appears to be entering the end game phase of regime change. As expected "protecting civilians" morphed into regime change, but a major deployment of "boots on the ground" was avoided. We still don't know what the new Libya will look like or precisely how the transition will be accomplished. Have the interventionists like Smantha Power been vindicated by the outcome to date?[End update]

Samantha Power is Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the Staff of the National Security Council. Born in Ireland in 1970, she emigrated to America with her mother aged 9, and went on to study at Yale and then Harvard. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide and then wrote a second book called Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World about the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Nations Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad.

front-paged by afew

Three independent members of parliament have now withdrawn their support for the nomination of David Norris to run for President.  He needed 20 nominators and now is down from 15 to at best 12. Other supporters have gone to ground, and most of his campaign staff have resigned. Besides giving one interview to the Sunday Independent, the normally voluble David Norris is nowhere to be seen.  Joe Jackson, author of an otherwise sympathetic book David Norris, Trial by Media says he knows of other scandals waiting in the wings. It is not looking good for him.

I have very mixed feelings about my letter to the Editor (below the fold) being published. As usual, the Irish Independent have edited out the argument and printed only the conclusion. I actually surprised myself with my own conclusion in this case. Normally I am pig stubborn and will hold my position to the end.  David Norris would be a good President for many and a divisive figure for others. That's not always a bad thing, even in a largely ceremonial Presidency.

But I know David Norris slightly and have always been amazed that he should have considered himself a viable candidate for the Presidency.  Nothing to do with his sexuality, and everything to do with the narrow cultural niche he occupies in Irish society as a representative of what is still perceived to be a rather elitist university. Trinity College Dublin graduates still elect three senators to the Senate - a legacy of the time when it was an almost wholly protestant institution and there was a desire to include protestants in the newly independent Irish state.

An election for the Presidency of Ireland will be held on 27th. October, and the field of candidates is beginning to take shape. It is difficult to make the case that European Tribune readers should be interested in this election because the office is largely a ceremonial one, and one of limited significance in a larger European context. It used to be viewed as something of a retirement home for retired Prime or Cabinet ministers (the President lives in a magnificent mansion in Dublin's Phoenix Park) but the popular significance of the office was transformed by our last two Presidents.

However the current campaign has also raised broader issues around the appropriate limits of public sexual morality and the representations that public office holders can legitimately make on behalf of their partners, friends and constituents.

Mary Robinson was elected President in the wake of a long struggle against conservative forces in the areas of women's equality, contraception, divorce, and the interference of the state (acting as a proxy for the Catholic Church) in what should be private matters.  The election of Mary McAleese, who hails from Belfast, gave some recognition to the Catholic nationalist minority in Northern Ireland who felt they had been abandoned and forgotten when the Irish state was set up to their exclusion.

Both were elected amid considerable controversy - Mary Robinson, because her feminist views were not yet embraced by the establishment, and Mary McAleese, because she was seen in some quarters as dangerously close to Northern Irish Republican paramilitaries. Both succeeded in becoming almost universally popular and redefining, to some extent, what Ireland was all about. Mary Robinson's term can be seen as bringing the gross marginalisation of women to an end (although full equality is still some way off).  The Queen's visit last May, the highlight of Mary McAleese's term,  can be seen as bringing centuries of Anglo-Irish antagonism to a formal end.

The current campaign is being riven by controversy concerning the candidate currently leading in the polls - prominent Gay rights campaigner David Norris - over letters he wrote in support of a former partner convicted of a statutory rape of a 15 year old Palestinian boy in Israel in 1997 and an interview he gave to a restaurant critic, in 2002, in which he appeared to extol the virtues of classical Greek society in which older men sometimes initiated adolescent boys in the practice of sex. However he is running for election in modern Ireland, not ancient Greece, and given the trauma surrounding child sexual abuse that is currently convulsing Ireland, both controversies could be very damaging to his campaign.

The debate around clerical child sex abuse continues to reverberate around the Irish polity with the Vatican calling for a more "objective" debate and withdrawing its ambassador to Ireland for "consultations" in response to the Taoiseach's stinging criticism of the Vatican's role in the crisis:

Taoiseach's speech on Cloyne motion

Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic...as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism....the narcissism .......that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.

The rape and torture of children were downplayed or `managed' to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and `reputation'.

Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict's "ear of the heart"......the Vatican's reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.

I had a letter to the editor published in the following Sunday Business post (below the fold) which dealt with one aspect of the controversy: The proposal, by the Government, to introduce legislation which would require mandatory reporting of reasonable suspicions of child abuse regardless of how those suspicions came to the attention of the person in question. The most controversial element of this proposal is that it would require a priest to break the "seal of the confessional" if someone confessed to child abuse.

There is a danger that the political response to the public anger over the revelations in the Cloyne report will be tinged more with revenge and attempts to eliminate the influence of the Vatican over Irish affairs than it is with concerns over child welfare per se. Leaving aside that private confessions are rarely heard any more, and that where a traditional confessional box is used the priest may not know the identity of the person making the confession, are there larger issues of principle surrounding civil liberties at play here? Under what circumstances should a private conversation between (say) a bishop and a priest, a doctor or therapist and his patient, a lawyer and his client or a husband and wife, be regarded as privileged?

My letter argued that the issue of child protection is paramount:

As the news from Somalia worsens and the shock from the Norway attacks sinks in, its easy to become a bit of a bad news junky. However in recent times there have been a few signs that there may be light at the end of the tunnel in Ireland's quest for salvation and (if I may mix my metaphors) that some green shoots may be appearing.  Given that I have contributed some apocalyptic diaries on Ireland's economic and political prospects, it seems only right that I should also report on what could be interpreted as hopeful developments.

A short list of such positive developments in recent months could include the following:

1. A new Government has been elected in a sharply contested election without violence
   
2. The Queen's visit helped to put to bed historic enmities between Ireland and Britain
   
3. Barack Obama's visit was a success for other reasons
   
4. Irish tourism has shown signs of recovery
   
5. The success of four Irish Golfers in winning Major Golf Championships in the USA and Britain will help revitalise the Golf tourism business
   
6. The Irish Government has forcefully declared an end to Rome rule.
   
7. Exports remain vibrant and are still double imports
   
8. Economic growth may reach 2.5% next year and the interest burden of Ireland sovereign debt may peak at 20% of Government revenue - below the peak during the 1980's recession.
   
9. The terms of the ECB/IMF/EU "bail-out" have been improved by up to 1 Billion per annum (0.7% of GDP).
   
10. Foreign direct investment rose 20% in the first half of this year
    
11. Ireland is on track to produce 40% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and perhaps to become the lead electricity exporting country in Europe.

OK, it's much easier to be cynical and dismiss much of the above, some of which will only have the most tenuous of links with economic recovery.  Taken together, though I think we may have "bottomed out" both politically and economically. Follow me below the fold to see if the case for a positive outlook stacks up:

Poulaphouca reservoir

In Driving a dual carriageway through my home I documented the extraordinary process by which planning officials proposed to build a motorway standard road from the outskirts of Dublin to Hollywood - a village with a few hundred dispersed inhabitants, two pubs and no shop. At a personal level, I was obviously not happy that one of the proposed alternative routes was to go right through my home, and two others were due to cut my brother-in-law's dairy farm in half. But the bigger problem was that I could see no logic in building the road in the first place.

The planning team have now produced their Public Consultation Stage 2 Route Corridor Options Drawings and have invited public comment on them. The good news is that none of the new proposed alternative routes now impact as much on the scenic Poulaphouca reservoir Special Protection Area (and also effect my own home and my brother-in-Law's farm much less drastically). Perhaps the arguments in my submission to the Council (based on my diary) had an impact after all - despite my misgivings about the process.

However the bad news is that the planners have still not produced any cost benefit or environmental impact study for the project as a whole - on the grounds that these will vary depending on the final route chosen. This is of course true at the marginal cost level.  My big problem is that a lot of public resources are being expended on designing a route when I can see no sustainable cost benefit for the project regardless of the final route chosen. Some will doubtless be marginally less expensive or deleterious for the environment than others, but where are the benefits?

   
   

Bishop John McGee is the only man ever to have served as private secretary to three Popes - Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, and Pope John Paul II. He was thus at the heart of the Vatican establishment for almost two decades before being made Bishop of Cloyne in 1987. Now a judicial report into child sexual abuse in his diocese has found that the Vatican was 'entirely unhelpful' in applying child safety in the Diocese and that Bishop McGee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008, 12 years after the framework document on child safety guidelines was adopted by the Irish hierarchy despite Vatican opposition.

Britain offers to subsidise Irish wind farm industry

THE BRITISH government could massively subsidise the Irish wind energy industry under proposals to be considered in London today.

Britain believes the west coast and the seas around Ireland can provide it with a large amount of its renewable energy and could be willing to subsidise offshore wind farms there.

Industry groups here say such a move could be worth up to €1.6 billion a year to the Irish economy.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Minister for Energy Pat Rabbitte will be attending the British-Irish Council, where the issue of electricity interconnectivity will be high on the agenda.

Mr Rabbitte will have separate meetings with his British counterpart, Charles Hendry, who said at the weekend that the proposals could bring "significant wealth [to Ireland] with very little downside".

Mr Hendry said the west coast of Ireland was an ideal location for wind farms, but the small Irish market meant there was no demand for the potential power generation. "We want to put that right," he said.

...

Irish Wind Energy Association chief executive Dr Michael Walsh welcomed the wind farm proposal.

He said Ireland needed to generate 4,500 to 5,000 megawatts a year by 2020 to meet renewable targets. He believed there was capacity to generate 6,000 megawatts from onshore and a further 4,000 from offshore, meaning half of all Irish wind-generated energy could be exported to Britain.

He estimated that 5,000 megawatts of exported electricity would be worth €1.6 billion annually at current electricity prices.

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Kader Asmal and former president Mary Robinson at a meeting of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties in September 1976. The address given in the poster opposite was that of his Dublin home at the time.

Kader Asmal, founder of both the British and Irish Anti-Apartheid movements, Cabinet Minister in Mandela's and Mbeki's Governments, and lately, critic of Zuma's Government in South Africa has died aged 76 after a heart attack.

He lectured me in International Law in Trinity College Dublin but was always more noted for his activism than his academicism. He was among a number of South African émigrés who later inspired me to do my Masters thesis on the options for ending Apartheid and predicting its immanent demise (for largely economic reasons).

Asmal: an activist to the end - Cape Argus

Last week, Asmal publicly slammed the government's proposed Protection of Information Bill, calling for it to be scrapped.

Communications Minister Roy Padayachie, referring to that call, said Asmal's recent comments on the bill would be "seriously considered", while other ministers agreed that Asmal's views had given the ANC food for thought.

Michael Noonan

The ECB has set its face against any "credit event" being allowed to happen as part of the Greek or any other bail-out.  Ireland has even been prevented from buying out its own debt at discounted rates on secondary markets. Ireland's EU partners have also been spectacularly unhelpful in insisting that Ireland pay a higher rate of interest on its loans than that payable by Portugal.  Sarkozy persists in believing that Ireland can be bullied on the corporate tax issue despite France's effective rate of corporation tax being lower than Ireland's.

However today, Michael Noonan, Ireland's Finance Minister, has announced that Ireland will impose loses on unsecured senior bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide despite such a move being explicitly ruled out by the ECB.  Interestingly, Noonan went to the USA to clear the deal with the IMF and Timothy Geithner first - such has been the Irish Government's loss of faith in the ECB and its European "partners".

The Irish Times - Letters

Madam, - The article by John O'Hagan condemns "celebrity economists" such as Morgan Kelly for their octopus-like forecasting abilities and lack of calm, rational, factual, analysis, while making no verifiable statements of fact, or falsifiable predictions for the future. His thinking seems to be reducible to your headline that "Confidence and hope can trump counsel of despair", while ignoring the fact that the positive spin about "soft landings" and "the cheapest bank guarantee in the world" got us into this mess in the first place.

As the numerous comments on the online version of your paper can testify, his pious hope that we can muddle through ignores the fact that the economic meltdown he thinks can be avoided by thinking positive is already a reality for those outside the comfortable academic groves and intellectual bubble world he seems to inhabit.

"Please don't rock the boat because I'm all right Jack" seems to be the mantra being repeated by the Irish elite at the present time. Bad things happen if you allow reality to intrude.

Unfortunately, the consequences of such complacency are all too real for most people and moralising econobabble from highly paid academics can no longer cover the cracks their lack of leadership has exposed and created in Irish life. - Yours, etc,

FRANK SCHNITTGER,