(12)

Shane Greer reports on his attempt to get Westminster City Council to recycle business waste. It turns out that the council, while willing to collect his office's waste, will not recycle any of that waste - and will fine him if he puts his waste in recycling facilities aimed at domestic users. That sounds awfully like punishing businesses that try to be green.

The problem with councils running recycling services is that they are inefficient and fail to innovate. They use outdated methods that are expensive, and end up recycling in the same way as British Leyland used to make Austin Minis (at a loss).

In large parts of Ireland, a recent report by Gordon Hector points out, the state has let the free market deal with refuse collection: individual customers choose from private companies and pay directly, rather than through council tax. Competition has meant that technologies and methods unknown in the UK have been deployed. Greyhound, one of Ireland's larger waste companies, recycles 87% of the rubbish it receives (because recycling is good for its profits). The best-performing council in the UK only recycles 55% of waste; the lowest 11%.

This might not compute with environmental activists, but yet again we see that the free market is greener than state control.

(3)

Anyone worried by Natalie's posting below should be aware that you ain't seen nuttin' yet. Tom Griffin of The Green Ribbon has obtained a full listing of the information it is intended to collect (and distribute among various authorities) concerning those buying tickets to move from any one of Britain, the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland to any of the others.

There has been a common travel area since St Patrick, and this was formalised in the 20th century when the countries of Britain and Ireland came incompletely apart. Now it seems both governments are in effect conspiring to introduce internal passports and replace a common travel area with a common surveillance area.

[hat-tip: spyblog]

(5)

Some fine folks have set up a message board called the Irish Liberty Forum for anybody interested in libertarian ideas, with a focus on Ireland (the name is a dead give away). So... check it out and feel free to report on the quality of conversation.

Now that the Freedom Institute is sadly defunct (it went belly up last year), there is great need for some genuine pro-liberty voices in Ireland to counter the paleo-Marxist Indymedia crap that seems to be in such evidence there.

(29)

There's a new social trend in Belfast whereby women are dropping their children off to school still in their pajamas. This has got the local worthies of Belfast worried, and a little peeved.

In a bulletin to parents, Mr McGuinness wrote: “Over recent months the number of adults leaving children at school and collecting children from school dressed in pyjamas has risen considerably.

“While it is not my position to insist on what people wear, or don’t, I feel that arriving at the school in pyjamas is disrespectful to the school and a bad example is set to children.”

Women walking round Belfast estates in all-day pyjama gear is a phenomenon that has been well documented by Robin Livingstone, a columnist in the Andersonstown News, but until now it has been confined to the west of the city.

Mr Livingstone said that he first identified All Day Pyjama Syndrome (ADPS) in 2003. He knows a student at the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education who is writing a dissertation on the subject.

The women are colloquially known as “pyjama mamas” or “Millies”. Their pyjama ensembles are often complemented by large, gold hoop earrings known as “budgies” – because such cage birds could swing from them. They also sport “scrunchies” to create the “Turf Lodge facelift”, in which the hair is scraped so tightly to the back of the head that it pulls the facial skin taut.

There is even a dress hierarchy among those suffering from APDS: the wearing of silk-effect, baggy pyjamas with fluffy, mule-type slippers contrasts, for example, with the traditional dressing gown and hair rollers.

Bloggers, who of course are famous for working in their pajamas, should rally around the millies, and defend their right to drop off their offspring at school, no matter how unsightly it may appear.

First they came for the millies....

(16)

The Irish government has this week succeeded in their plans to help restore a monopoly in health insurance, as the main private insurer was yesterday forced to withdraw from business, leaving the state behemoth with only one tiny rival left to prevent it from controlling the market. Risk equalisation payments which cost them a million €uro every week left BUPA with no choice but to leave.

For those unacquainted with the health insurance market, risk equalisation is a device designed to underpin community rating: a regulation of health insurance whereby the level of risk a consumer poses to an insurer must not affect the premium paid; i.e. everyone must be offered the same products at the same price regardless of their age, gender, or personal health characteristics. A sceptical observer might wonder why a healthy young person should have to pay the same as a sick geriatric, or in what sense this is really insurance at all. Well, the justification given is that, without this scheme, and the associated regulations of lifetime cover and open enrolment, no-one would be willing to offer sick or old people a health plan they could afford. Therefore, the argument goes, it is acceptable that young people are overcharged in order to prevent this. Community rating is designed to produce inter-generational subsidies, and is a clear example of cradle-to-grave statism.

However, community rating alone does not fully prevent competition - it is possible for more than one insurance company to offer community-rated products simultaneously, as indeed was the case in Ireland for the last ten years. It's a heavily regulated market (imagine if car insurers were not allowed to discriminate according to the risk profile and vehicles of their customers, or house insurance had to ignore the likelihood of flooding or earthquakes in any particular area), but we proved that it can exist sustainably.

So, to really cut out competition, there are several other things you have to do. The first thing that the Irish government did for the last number of years was to give its dominant state provider preferential treatment with respect to the requirements of its solvency reserves. While that did hurt the private operators, it did not totally force them out of business. So our supposedly pro-market government decided to trigger risk equalisation: a device which is theoretically meant to correct discrepancies between customer bases by forcing insurers with younger customers to subsidise their rivals with older, costlier, riskier members. In our case, what it actually did was threaten the main private insurer with having to subsidise its wealthy state rival with nearly three times its operating profits, for little discernible reason and despite clear, logical protests from professional economists in Ireland's major universities (for example listen to this file).

The result of all of this: BUPA is forced to quit, leaving increased power to the state company. According to leaked documents, this company is preparing to increase its premiums by 15% each year over the next three years, clearly exploiting its position of power to the fullest. The public has been duped, and has absolutely no clue.

What's more, no-one is going to stand up for them. An Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern revealed his lack of understanding of the issues by launching an ignorant attack against BUPA. The powerful trade union controlling the state monopoly then announced that it would fight against any efforts to break up this company into competing units. And the mainly left-wing opposition has, predictably, come up short in its handling of this issue.

My question is this: what would you call a private business that was able to intimidate and then forcefully eliminate anyone who dared to compete with it? That's right, you would call it a highly organised criminal outfit. So why is the government any different?

(12)

Although I have lived in Belfast for a very long time, I have rarely written about it, primarily because of hate-mongering gits who turn any mention of Northern Ireland into an excuse for personal attack and pointless flaming. So... if you are one of them, go away. This article will bore you and any attempt to discuss politics will be deleted on sight.

Few of our readers have the slightest knowledge of Belfast outside of what is written over drinks in the Europa Hotel bar or from live media feeding frenzies where a handful of rioters get photographed, filmed and interviewed by a small army of bleeding-lede starved media mavens. This creates a distorted view of our town and has virtually no relationship to the daily lives of anyone who lives here. The 'exciting' Belfast is long gone. This is not to say we do not have some problems with hooligans, particularly around July 12th...

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Reporters at the Europa missed this one!

What the reporters do not bother to show you is that this is an incredibly beautiful place. When we get a perfect day like today, It is simply stunning. That is what this article is about. Nothing newsworthy. Nothing political. I simply went shopping, about a mile or two of walking on foot, and took a few photos to share with you. Since the small size allowable on the front page does not do the images justice, I have made them clickable for those who really want to get the full impact of the high resolution images.

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
The geography of Belfast is dominated by the Belfast Lough and the hills on either side.

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
There are a fair few churches about.

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Even a wee neighborhood shopping center looks nice in the summer sunlight.

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
There are parks and parklets everywhere.

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
There is a bird sanctuary just the other side of this railway bridge.

Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved

If there is any point to this article other than a hot day diversion, it is that journalists are trained to see and report what is ugly and mean in life while bloggers are free to show what is fun and beautiful and good with nary a worry about getting sacked for it.

Now... where did I put those extra icecube trays?

(8)

Slugger O'Toole has a picture and a round up of links of what the 'bogosphere' is saying if you are interesting in what happened in Dublin.

(4)

I received a web launch reception invite via email a couple days ago and had no particular idea why I was on the list. However, as is the case in the music world and a capital offense in that of journalism, one never, ever, passes up free food and drink.

Much to my surprise, this launch of the Britain and Ireland web site for contemporary conversations is the brain child of the British Council and our good friend Mick Fealty (Slugger O'Toole).

The new site will encourage discussion on historical and current entwinement (or entanglement) of Irish and British affairs with monthly articles as talking points. The site was introduced by Trevor Ringland and keynoted by footballer Niall Quinn. I am sure the 'discussion as a contact sport' I expect on this site will make even a rugby game look tame, let alone league football.

If you are interested in this part of the world, I am sure this will become a 'must read'.

Mick Fealty practices being an amputee and nailed
to a cross in preparation for discussions on Britain and Ireland
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved.

(25)

In the last couple days I have written, and then deleted unpublished, several articles about the IRA's much ballyhooed decommissioning (or 'decommissioning', depending on what you believe to be the truth) of its weapons. In short, I am not sure what I think.

To try and make head or tail of what is going on, I have been hanging out at Slugger O'Toole.

And I still cannot figure out if it is cause to celebrate or just another ploy.

(29)

Forgive me if I am not breaking out the champagne just yet at the announcement that the ethnic collectivists of the IRA have declared their 'armed campaign is over'. Of course the fact their 'decommissioning' of arms will take place in private, in marked contrast to the indecent haste with which the UK government has started very publicly ripping down its fortifications, just conforms my view that Blair is a credulous fool.

Contrary to the woolly impression some of the media's dafter talking heads are giving (I really must stop watching early morning TV, bad for the blood pressure), the IRA is not disbanding and unless I see large piles of semtex being burned in front of Stormont, I very much doubt anything more than a token number of already unserviceable weapons and expired explosives will be put beyond their reach as an organisation.

I may not be a huge fan of the ethnic collectivists of the DUP either, but they are the ones who seem to me to be exhibiting the most appropriate amount of continuing distain for Sinn Fein/IRA and so are offering only highly contingent acknowledgement of this latest 'breakthrough'.

My guess is there is a lot less to this that meets the eye. Like the song says: "Don't believe the hype."

(80)

Whilst Britain remains fixated on the aftermath of Tony Blair's unprecedented third term victory against their intellectually bankrupt and dependably inept opponents, it would behove people in Britain to pay a bit more attention to the electoral earthquake which shook Ulster which has resulted in David Trimble's relatively moderate Ulster Unionist Party has almost completely collapsing in favour of Ian Paisley Democratic Unionist Party.

Now that the only two significant political players locally are the two extremist parties from either side of the sectarian divide, things look like they are about to get dramatically more... interesting. The message from the Northern Ireland's protestant majority seems pretty damn clear to me but is anyone actually listening? I have a feeling I am going to be spending a lot more time keeping tabs on what get said on Slugger O'Toole, that most indispensable source of insights for all things Northern Irish, to see how things develop.

(3)

I usually steer clear of 'local' stories because I will almost certainly be pilloried no matter what I say. But this is just too silly to pass up.

It seems that a sociology professor, one not from a Northern Ireland university, thinks the Red Hand of Ulster is a sectarian symbol. In most cases I would just roll my eyes and mutter about 'outsiders' who can not possibly be expected to understand a place as confusing as Northern Ireland.

This is not the case for the Red Hand. In fact, it is partly a symbol of some of my own ancestors: The O'Neill clan. The 'Kings' of Ireland. My maternal grandpa was an O'Neill and there is a wee red hand in that family coat of arms.

Now, if you please Herr Sociologist, tell me why you believe the Red Hand of Ulster is merely a sectarian Unionist symbol? Could it be you have actually never read any Northern Ireland history?

We return now to our regularly scheduled programming... and yes I do intend to post a number of photo stories from Manhattan.

(42)

Hate crime. What it is exactly? Opinions vary but in essence it means that a given crime, such as assault, murder or defamation, will be treated more seriously if the perpetrator is judged to be motivated by certain politically disfavoured prejudices.

It means that if someone smashes a bottle in your face because you are black (or catholic or muslim or homosexual), rather than because they want to steal your wallet or because they caught you in flagrante delicto with their girlfriend, then that is more serious. The actual substance of the crime is not what makes it a 'hate' crime, just the motivation to commit it against a member of a designated group of people based on their race (which in reality means 'certain races'), religions (meaning 'certain religions') or sexual orientations (meaning 'homosexuals'), that then becomes a hate crime... crimes against philanderers, drunks, football supporters, loud mouths etc. are not hate crimes.

You may hate supporters of Celtic Football Club but if you bash one of them over the head with a two by four, that is not a 'hate crime', it is just assault and perhaps GBH. Unless of course the Celtic supporter in question happens to be a nominal Catholic but you are a nominal Protestant.

It is a criminal act which attracts extra sanction because of what the perpetrator was thinking at the time. In short, a 'hate crime' is a 'thought crime', albeit one usually only applied to thoughts held by certain politically disfavoured classifications of people.

Do you really trust something as corrupt and fallible as a political process to create laws not on demonstrable facts (who hit who with the two by four) but on what people think? Sure, motivation matters: for example being put in fear of your life can justify violence in self-defence, even (sometimes) in Britain. But to legislate that certain groups are more sacrosanct than others is collectivism at its most intellectually pernicious because it denies the individual basis of rights and assigns value on the basis of group membership. We all know where that can end up.

If you think laws should be based on crimes against individuals regardless of what race/religion or sexual orientation they have, then you might want to go over to the Hansard Society on-line consultation on Hate Crime in Northern Ireland and tell them that group rights are not a form of human rights, they are their antithesis.

(8)

News of large scale arrests of criminals in Baghdad carried out by Iraqi police are welcome, provided there is due process and it is not simply a trawling operation. It does however demonstrate the differing priorities of an army of occupation versus a police force.

The International Herald Tribune article taken from the New York Times also mentions a drop in 'spectacular' terrorist attacks over the past three weeks. Those of us who consider that terrorist groups usually prosper in a climate of lawlessness will ponder the Iraqi situation and reflect on Northern Ireland.

There is little doubt that massive police activity will uncover some terrorist networks and disrupt potential attacks: for example raiding the home of a criminal can turn up equipment intended for terrorist actions.

In Northern Ireland all sorts of crimes, from welfare benefit fraud, fraudulent elections, fire insurance scams, drug dealing, protection rackets, unlicensed gambling and alcohol premises, contract killings and woundings, are tolerated on the grounds that the 'peace process' must be kept going.

For the first time in months, I get the sense that Iraq may be going in the right direction. I wish this were the case of Londonderry and Belfast. I have felt for a long time that the violence in Northern Ireland should be considered a law-enforcement problem, separate from politics.

(13)

Given that Ireland is almost a poster boy for 'before-and-after' for what liberalising an economy can do, it is a pity that the people who argue for continuing that process have to couch their words in defensive language. Nevertheless, the Progressive Democrats seems to be making a far better case in Ireland for freeing markets than the pointless British Tories are.

Progressive Democrats president, Mr McDowell, last night issued a rallying call to fellow Ministers to hold to the Government's liberal economic policy agenda, saying tax-cutting and deregulation have helped transform the State.

[...]

He rejected the accusation that supporters of this way believed in the unleashing of unbridled market forces. "It is the essence of the liberal, republican tradition that the market is the servant and not the master of the people. No one I know argues that Ireland is or should be an economy rather than a society."

"Market is the servant and not the master of the people"... but what does that actually mean? It seems to me that an economy can be social, but only when it is not political... and Ireland can only 'be an economy, rather than a society' if politics (i.e, manipulation of the state) has so much control over what is done as to make the economy simply an adjunct of the state and its political processes, wiping out the economic underpinnings of society and the social underpinnings of markets.

So yes, I am all in favour of people in Ireland living in a society, and the only way to do that is to have a free social market rather than a politically regulated economy.

(5)

Occasionally, one stumbles across actions of the regulatory state that masquerade as market policies. Irish health insurance falls into this category.

Health insurance is always a tricky subject as it falls into the wider issues of how private sector medicine can be established. In Europe, with its wide diversity of state driven medical practices, plus voluntary health insurance and complentary health insurance as a tolerated private sector, it is difficult to envisage how one would wean the populace off these systems, even with impending bankruptcy looming. The 'Big Bang' approach of deregulation would not work as the infrastructure and skillset to develop an entrepreneurial model does not exist and this is one area where the gradual replacement of state structures by the private sector and/or civil society may be more appropriate. Complex and difficult issues to grasp with few answers.

One of the wrong answers has been established by the Irish Health Insurance Authority. Most Irish health insurance was the monopoly of a state mandated organisation, the VHI, until the European Union forced the government to open up the marketplace to competition.

In order to ensure that consumers were protected, the Irish government has enforced certain regulations that were written into EU law. The health insurance marketplace has to observe three rules: community rating, open enrollment and lifetime cover.

Community rating is a system that equalises the premiums of health insurance contracts for all consumers, regardless of the health risk individuals represent to a health insurer. Basically, subject to certain terms and conditions, the cost of private health insurance to consumers is the same irrespective of age, gender and state of health.

Open Enrolment is the practice whereby all applicants for private health insurance cover are accepted by a health insurer, regardless of their risk status (subject to maximum age limits and prescribed waiting periods).

Lifetime cover is a system that guarantees health insurance consumers the right to renew their policies, irrespective of factors such as age, risk status or claims history.

In practice, health insurers in Ireland are not allowed to differentiate risks on an individual basis, refuse candidates for insurance or cancel a policy. Furthermore, if the market structure develops so that the risk profile of some companies, based upon the claims experience and age profile of their insureds, worsens at the expense of others, the Irish Health Insurance Authority has the power to levy cash transfers between companies with favourable risk profiles to those without.

What are the consequences? Removing the individual differentiation of risk from insurers prevents them from incentivising individuals through lower premium payments to follow potentially less unhealthy lifestyles. Through the prevention of risk management, the Irish government has ensured that health insurers will be unwilling to innovate in order to maximise profits from their customers. Even if they do, they will probably be penalised for having a favourable risk profile (since this can be the only explanation for a more profitable health insurer in Ireland). Worst of all, they prevent their own population from understanding the risks and actions that are required to live a long and healthy life. It is now clear that health insurance policies do not provide for all of the health needs of individuals, families or the community. To provide for anticipated health costs, health insurance must be complemented by self insurance with people setting aside certain sums for these particular bills.

The Irish, like the British, will get a poor health service, due to the lack of market forces, and will still have to provide self insurance (or as it is known in the old fashioned sense, their savings), in order to save themselves pain and time.

(43)

It is galling to read endless utilitarian articles for and against banning smoking on commercial (but nevertheless private) property with nary a mention of whether it is actually just to enact authoritarian proscriptions on the acts of others who are, after all, in voluntary close proximity.

At least the erratic Telegraph takes a fairly good stab at doing just that:

Other politicians throughout Europe will be watching the Irish experiment closely. You can be sure that if the Irish surrender to the new law without a strong show of resistance, it will not be long before a similar ban is introduced in Britain.

So Irish smokers have a responsibility to freedom-lovers everywhere to make their displeasure felt. They have already come up with some ingenious suggestions for exploiting loopholes in the new law. We wish them luck in finding more.

We note that prisons are among the very few workplaces exempted from the ban. So anyone incarcerated in the cause of freedom will at least be allowed the consolation of a smoke.

Light up, Ireland. Do not cooperate in your own repression.

(8)

recoup (v.) recouped, recouping, recoups v. tr. To receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss. To return as an equivalent for; reimburse. Law. To deduct or withhold (part of something due) for an equitable reason.

v. intr.
To regain a former favorable position.

So when we are told that a committee of the Irish parliament will tell the Irish government that it should...

�use taxes or development levies to recoup some of the windfall profits made by property speculators when their land is rezoned.

... we are being told the Irish government should receive an equivalent for; make up for: recoup a loss.

Now how exactly does a property owner profiting from a change in the manner in which the Irish state abridges their property rights (i.e. land use zoning), thereby cause the Irish state a loss that needs to be recouped?

It should be clear that what we have here is an example of our old friend 'meta-context' at work again. Underpinning the suggested tax increase is the unspoken axiom that the economy exists for the purpose of allowing the state to acquire resources and any profits derived from the economy which benefit someone else other than the state are in fact a 'loss' for the state. That is to say, this is just a slight variation on the bizarre economic fallacy that someone else getting richer perforce makes someone else poorer. The self-evident concept of wealth creation simply does not register.

I wonder how many people sitting in that Oireachtas committee set to tell the Irish leader to increase those taxes would find the notion that the only reason the state 'allows' people to engage in economic activity for their own benefit at all is so that the state can tax them? My guess is that it would not be a commonly held overt belief but if you were to actually strap a number of mainstream Irish journalists and TDs to chairs and question them, teasing out the unspoken underlying assumptions within which they see the world, that is indeed what you would discover to be the case.

(6)

In what is a splendid testament to the sense and wisdom of Irish youth, when the EU held a conference for young people in Ireland (free registration required)... how many young Irish people turned up?

None.

Clearly they had better things to do. How very, very, very, splendid.

(15)

I hope that nobody in Ireland was naive enough to imagine that the recent public smoking prohibition was the zenith of their government's ambitions.

Not even close. In fact, they are just getting warmed up:

After piloting through radical laws that will ban smoking in Irish pubs at the end of the month, Irish Health Minister Micheal Martin pledged to bring in new controls on alcohol.

Martin's smoking prohibition will mean that anyone found lighting up in bars and restaurants after March 29 will face a fine of up to 3,000 euros.

Addressing his Fianna Fail party's annual conference, Martin said he now planned to target the country's alcohol problem and to encourage "responsible" drinking, in particular targeting under-age offenders.

Lord only knows what else is on his 'hit-list' but his blood his up and his nostrils are flared with the scent of victory so its onwards and upwards to new frontiers of micro-management. His is an addiction for which is there is no 'cold turkey'. It is a thirst that can never be quenched and neither reason nor persuasion can divert such people from their mission.

How apposite is the wisdom of C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

I have posted this quotation here on Samizdata before but the age in which we live demands that it be repeated again and again.

(1)

Our good friends at Slugger O'Toole were featured on the Northern Ireland TV show "Hearts and Minds" tonight. Politicians from across the spectrum heaped praise on what the blog has accomplished for local politics.

We had Mick Fealty's smiling face in multiple cuts. The previous time I saw it was after about six pints (or so) in the local, well... locals some months ago. He didn't look quite the same on TV as when I last saw him that night, searching for his coat under the legs at the bar...

(16)

David is too easily impressed. Over here in Ireland, we were doing public sector cannibalism when public sector cannibalism wasn't cool.

In 1992, the Irish Labour party broke with tradition by entering into a coalition government with Fianna Fail. The Labour party had increased its share of the vote after a campaign of vigorous opposition to Fianna Fail. To placate its voters, most of whom had expected that they were kicking FF out of government, and because they were feeling cocky, Labour demanded a whole raft of rhetorical leftiness in the government program. One of these was to rename the crusty old "right wing" Department of Justice as the brand new, "compassionate" Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. A consequence of this was the establishment of Citizen Traveller, charged with:

implementing an integrated communications initiative to promote the visibility and participation of Travellers within Irish society, to nurture the development of Traveller pride and self confidence, and to give Travellers a sense of community identity that could be expressed internally and externally.

This translates as: a Traveller-advocacy group working out of a government department, their motto: "Promoting travellers as an ethnic minority". So when one government department - the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform - enacted legislation to enable the police to evict caravans which were trespassing on private property, a branch of the same government department - Citizen Traveller - took out expensive billboard and newspaper advertisements to protest this "racist and unworkable law".

We are unfortunate in that, despite his classical liberal background, our current Justice minister Michael McDowell has developed a Blunkett-like authoritarianism but he is to be congratulated for phasing "Equality" out of his department and ultimately shutting down Citizen Traveller.

(2)

I mentioned before that Ireland has an oxymoronically titled Competition Authority. If that level of government intrusion was all we had to worry about, I wouldn't mind too much. Unfortunately we are also saddled with the similarly Orwellian-sounding Equality Authority. Their motto is "Diversity for an Equal Ireland" or "Equality for a Diverse Ireland" or something else equally bland but diversely platitudinous like "Be Reasonable, It Pays!". This bunch of state-stipended, humourless entitlement-enforcers is headed by - some achievement this - probably the most pompous man in Ireland: Niall Crowley. He is an insistent hectoring presence on our radio waves. Through the the op-ed and letters pages of our newspapers he regularly reminds us of our "reponsibilities" in prose laden with jargon, tautologies and sundry infelicities. So it was with delight today that I read Blog Irish's eloquent skewering of this self-serving organisation and supremo.

(44)

One of the most appealing aspects of a libertarian outlook is simplicity. It is often the case that when one examines, in greater depth, what initially appears to be a libertarian conundrum, it proves not to be. One such faux-dilemma, suggested to me by Alan K. Henderson's comments to Andy's post below, is the extent to which liberty can be threatened by non-state interests.

This can be the basis for populist political crusades against "Big Oil", "Big Pharma", even "Big Food". The faux libertarian conundrum is the notion that we need a strong state as a guarantor of "real competition": to break up monopolies in the interests of consumers. Yet surely such interference in the market is un-libertarian? In reality the conundrum evaporates when one examines how such monopolies arise. Put simply, monopolies wither in the free market and thrive under state regulation. Such monopolies, rightfully abhorrent to any free market capitalist or libertarian, are sustained by the very political system which seeks to regulate them. Just as the enforced "tolerance" of multiculturalism is a form of intolerance, so enforced competition is inimical to true free-market competition.

A similar dilemma is suggested by considering the plight of those in Northern Ireland who have fallen foul of paramilitaries. It matters little to a person tortured or exiled on threat of death whether his tormentors are acting for the state or a paramilitary group, Yet so-called human rights bodies such as Amnesty International, pay little attention to the human rights of such individuals, reserving their comments for infringements by state forces. Glenn Reynolds struck a chord when he cheered David Trimble for pointing this out. Needless to say this did not go down too well with some of the socialists and nationalists who comment at Slugger O'Toole. The conundrum is that surely a libertarian can agree with Amnesty's justification: It is proper to be more concerned by state abuses than actions by private agents.

In examining this "conundrum" it also evaporates but leads to a surprising, counter-intuitive insight. In the segregated, working class urban 'bantustans' of Northern Ireland, paramilitaries are in a position to exert punishment and enforce exiles because they have been ceded a monopoly of violence. By the state. Local hostility to police forces means they are reluctant to carry out normal policing and individuals are prevented from defending themselves. This gives the paramilitaries a free run. Though they are nominal antagonists, the IRA effectively operates a monopoly of violence backed by the British state. The plight of its victims should be the proper concern of any agency which professes to uphold human rights.

(6)

French anti-terror police have arrested five people suspected of links with the Real IRA. This is the splinter group of the IRA that is opposed to the peace process (such as it may be) and has been blamed for a series of attacks since breaking away from the IRA. The most serious was the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people and was the worst single atrocity in 30 years of violence.

The suspects were all French nationals and they are suspected of involvement in a support network for the Irish group. They were held after police discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition outside the ferry port of Dieppe.

(17)

This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening...

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope's anti-gay document for hate crimes.

I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the 'boiling frog' syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late.

Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever... that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state.

You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as 'hate speech' by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships... and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter.

And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight.

I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that...The state is not your friend.

More and faster please.

(37)

As a libertarian I shall boycott Ryanair on political grounds while that state- backed parasite Michael O'Leary is in charge.

Before I explain, my apologies to Andy Duncan, for I intend to exercise the privilege of a Samizdatista and make my comment on his posting below a posting in itself. I want lots of people to read it and think as I do.

Why am I so against O'Leary? No, it is not his cheap flights (in themselves cheap flights are a good thing), nor his not paying dividends (I neither know nor care about dividends), nor his safety record (take the risk or don't: up to you), nor his comments about wishing to be a dictator (unimportant bombast), nor the environment (a side issue: to protect it, privatise it), nor his intention to move his business elsewhere if the bureacrats mess him about (I actively like that bit).

It's because he intends to make his airline strong by massive compulsory purchase of people's homes, homes they love and desperately want to keep, so that airports can be expanded. Stansted Airport is the one I know about personally, but I stress that state compulsory purchase for any airport anywhere is as clear a violation of liberty as you will ever see. Like force-advocates everywhere O'Leary has a pep-talk about how it's all necessary for the greater good, adding a positively Stakhanovite spiel about how Britain must compete with France and Germany. I stress that he doesn't merely go along with this because he can't imagine any other way; he is an enthusiast.

Also my neighbour saw him speak and said he was an arrogant git.

(42)

I don't know if AynRand.org runs an annual awards ceremony, but if they do, I'd like to nominate Michael O'Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, for the Hank Rearden Award for Top Quality Businessman of the Year. Check out this piece, in today's Telegraph.

Just to tempt you, here's some quotes:

We are never paying a dividend as long as I live and breathe and as long as I'm the largest individual shareholder.

It gets better:

Go to Waterside [BA headquarters] and tell Rod [BA's chief executive] he's going to grow profits by 12pc this year and he'd have an orgasm... God speed [Rod]. You're doing an outstanding job. Keep it up.

Our friends, the EU, are also thinking of prosecuting Ryanair on some spurious grounds of whether Ryanair received state aid at Charleroi airport, its Brussels' base. O'Leary describes this as:

Regulatory bullsh*t.

Excellent! Michael O'Leary has also said that if the EU rule against him, he will shut Charleroi down, and sack its 3,000 workforce. He rounded off this promise, in typically uncompromising fashion, with the following statement:

I've no intention of making life easy for bureaucrats.

Bravo, sir! Unfortunately for Dagny Taggart-style ladies everywhere, multi-millionaire Michael O'Leary is getting hitched soon, though he's not letting it put him off his financial stride:

The reception is going to be cheap. The honeymoon is going to kill me.

Though recently, his thoughts have also strayed to politics and sport:

I think a right-wing dictatorship led by me would not only improve the Irish economy but the Irish football team too.

What a dude. I've got some Irish blood in me. If Michael O'Leary ever becomes Prime Minister of Ireland, I wonder if they'll let me swap passports? I quite fancy Dundalk, which remarkably, is also the home town of The Corrs.

(3)

Brendan O'Neill has been lamenting the postponement of elections in Northern Ireland, pointing out this is profoundly anti-democratic. He is of course entirely correct.

However as long as the state is allowed to have more or less unlimited potential power over civil society, it cannot be unexpected that in a tribal place like Ulster, folks in a given community are going to be terrified of The Others having their hands on the levers of power. I suspect trying to share so much power is at worst a futile hope leading to more violence and at best, a Mexican stand-off.

Surely at least part of the solution is to simply bind ALL political power in Northern Ireland hand and foot with a written constitution that places pretty much every aspect of life that really matters off-limits to the vagaries of democratic politics. Worried about those 'dirty Fenian Tagues poisoning our schools'? So abolish state educational conscription completely and leave it to churches, community groups, socialist-group-hug-collectives, business guilds, whoever, that way the 'Tagues' do not have to worry about the 'stinking Orangemen' doing the same to their children. Just apply this to all the centralised power functions (such as planning and land use) for full juicy goodness. Once you have done that, it would seem to me that much of the reason to try and bomb people into/out of power becomes... well... pointless.

Democracy is fine, just as long as the people being voted for cannot actually do anything. Think outside the (ballot) box. Be a radical.