American legal study shows flaws in Labor's Internet filtering plan

Colin Jacobs, vice chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, has alerted attention to a legal study which is sharply critical of many aspects of the federal government’s proposed Internet censorship plan. Writing in today’s issue of Crikey, Jacobs links to a damning Brooklyn Law School research paper called “Filtering in Oz: Australia's Foray into Internet Censorship” written by Brooklyn’s Assistant Professor of Law Derek E. Bambauer (the study can be freely downloaded as a pdf file from this site). The paper is a wide-ranging examination of the legitimacy of proposed filtering legislation. While the study lauds the government’s openness about its filtering goals, it finds the plan wanting in key areas of transparency, the over-blocking of material, and accountability.

Jacobs says the study is important and is a “serious embarrassment” for Minister Stephen Conroy as he attempts to implement his controversial filtering plan. According to Bambauer, the mandatory Internet censorship will put Australia at the forefront of the spread of this practice from authoritarian regimes into Western democratic nations. Not only do the plans raise concerns about the transparency, accountability, and over-blocking, there is likely to be a serious conflict between efforts to block unlawful content and the economic and social desire to expand speedy broadband access.

Bambauer points out key differences between Australia’s plan and internet censorship elsewhere in the west such as in the UK, France, Germany and Canada. Britain has a “voluntary” system whereby ISPs block traffic to and from a list of IP addresses supplied by the local industry watchdog, the Internet Watch Foundation. Court cases in France and Germany have forced search engines to remove content related to “hate speech” from their search results. Canada’s Cleanfeed, meanwhile, blocks “access to Internet addresses specifically containing child pornography images”. However the Rudd Government plan is the first time that a western democracy has introduced a formal statute to require ISPs to block users from accessing certain materials on-line.

Labor take the matter seriously. In its first budget last year, the federal government allocated over $128 million for cyber safety and law enforcement of which $44 million was dedicated to filtering. More importantly, the focus for filtering slowly broadened from their election promise of blocking unlawful material to blocking content perceived as harmful more generally. The problem for Labor is that is dependent on the support of Family First’s Steve Fielding in the Senate to pass its general program of legislation (itself a huge irony as it was Labor preferences directed away from the more ideologically similar Greens that elected Fielding despite him gaining less than 2 percent of the vote). The socially conservative Fielding wanted more comprehensive blocking, and Labor were compliant, offering a two-tiered scheme where the first mandatory level of filtering would include unlawful content, while the second level would block other sensitive material (such as sexually explicit sites) but would allow consenting adults to bypass its restrictions.

Under the current legal framework, Australia regulates content through a classification system that divides material into prohibited, restricted, and generally available zones. The government’s proposal for generating block lists does not gel well with the complaint-based classification scheme used for Internet sites. Currently ACMA (the Australian Communications and Media Authority) operates a federal level "complaint and takedown" system for objectionable Internet content. ACMA relies on the classification board to classify content and the board treats Internet material like films. If the material is prohibited and is hosted in Australia, the ACMA sends a take-down notice to the ISP or Internet Content Host. For foreign based material, ACMA notifies Web blocking software vendors to add the site to their block lists. This list currently comprises of roughly 1300 URLs but is not in the public domain. Nor are censorship decisions by the Classification Board or ACMA on Internet material which remain secret unlike decisions on off-line content.

Under the new proposal, Labor will add to the 1300 URL block/black list with a further list of child pornography sites from other sources, most particularly Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation. Immediately there is an issue with this plan as responsibility for classification will move to offshore bodies that have no accountability within Australia. Secondly there is no universal cultural definition of what constitutes child pornography and elements that might be illegal in some jurisdictions (such as nude images of 16-year-olds in Australia or the USA) may be legal in other jurisdictions (such as Japan). Foreign lists undercut a country’s ability to render its own, sovereign judgments about what material is unlawful.

Bambauer says Australia information restrictions derive primarily from the democratic political process rather than being constrained by law. Because there is no free speech guaranteed under the Australian constitution, the government has greater leeway to censor Internet materials than would be possible in countries with bills of right such as the United States or Canada. There is an obvious downside in terms of performance; a pilot test of filtering found decreases in access speeds of up to 86 percent. But even if this problem is fixed by the time of release, filtering also carries considerable costs in overblocking, transparency, and accountability that may not be evident initially.

Stephen Conroy has been open about Labor's reason for filtering in order to stamp out child pornography (though there are valid concerns about what additional legal content would be blocked particularly by the opt-out layer of the system). However, Bambauer scores Australia poorly on grounds of transparency, narrowness and accountability. On the issue of transparency, he says the Government has fluctuated on what material it will target for blocking while refusing to reveal the names of the sites blocked. Minister Conroy has also recently expanded the plan to include vaguely defined “other unwanted content”.

Bambauer has also examined the results of the early tests to do an estimate of narrowness. He believes Australia is likely to follow the trend towards overblocking in most filtering countries, both to prevent circumvention and to avoid underblocking. He says the tests show that the more effective methods that prevent access to banned material also tend to catch more unrelated sites in their filters. Also, filtering is not effective against the practice of sharing information. Child pornography, for example, is increasingly shared over peer-to-peer networks rather than the Web and filters can only crudely block P2P completely or let all traffic through unfettered.

Accountability is also an issue. Bambauer says the policy appears to be strongly shaped by Senator Fielding who is a proponent of wide-ranging, mandatory filtering. He also decries the government tendency to suppress dissent on the matter. He cites the example of ISP employee Mark Newton who is an active opponent of the plans. Belinda Dennett, a policy advisor to Conroy, sent an e-mail message to the Internet Industry Association (IIA), stating her “serious concern that an IIA member (Newton) would be sending out this sort of message.” Bambauer also neatly skewered Conroy’s argument that opponents support child pornography by saying attempts “to conflate policy differences with support for unlawful behaviour undermine accountability.”

Bambauer says Australia’s filtering plan is a “natural experiment”. He warns this is a worldwide trend and says the debate over filtering has shifted, from whether it should occur to how it would work. The concern, he says, is as filtering is increasingly adopted in the West, censorship that blocks access to material rather than legal measures that punish access “will become increasingly seen as normal rather than problematic”. Censorship can be an effective tool, but it is a dangerous one, he concludes. “Australia’s example will have much to teach about both aspects”.

The Cold War: Gazprom ups the ante against Ukraine

The Russian gas standoff with Ukraine is now a week old and its impact is being felt across the continent. A quarter of Europe's gas comes from Russia. Of that amount, 80 per cent passes through Ukraine, which has refused to meet demands from OAO Gazprom, Russia's monopoly gas giant, for contract price hikes and $2 billion in debt repayments. Russia stopped gas shipments through Ukraine on New Year's Day after accusing it of stealing gas en route to other European countries. Bulgaria has been hardest hit with thousands of homes without heat and many schools and companies unable to open. Experts warn that Gazprom’s reputation will take a hit if people are affected. "If people start freezing, Gazprom could suffer from the long-term point of view,” said Igor Kurinnyy, the oil and gas analyst in London with the Dutch bank ING Groep. “It could be seen as a highly unreliable company."

But the Russian company is showing little sign of backing down. In a provocative media release yesterday Gazprom accused Ukraine of rejecting international law and said it illegally “began to siphon off Russian gas illicitly and then entirely stopped gas deliveries to Europe through its territory”. This, it said, gave Gazprom no option but to “stop gas deliveries to the entry point of the Ukrainian gas transmission system until the moment when Ukraine has provided guarantees of gas transit in full volume.”

Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller said the company has now filed a law suit against Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state gas company for breaking a long-term gas transit contract agreed in 2002. "Gazprom has taken the decision to file a lawsuit with the Stockholm international arbitration court to force Naftogaz Ukrainy to secure unimpeded transit of Russian gas to Europe across Ukraine," he said.

However, Naftogaz chief executive Oleg Dubyna said Ukraine could counter sue. "I am today confident that Russia is not giving its customers enough gas... in order to say we that Ukrainians are stealing," he said. Dubyna unexpectedly went to Moscow today, (there was talk that the pair would meet in Brussels instead) where he met Miller to seek a resolution to the crisis. Both companies confirmed they met early Thursday but released no details of the meeting.

The Russian state owns 50.002 per cent of Gazprom and that crucial .002 gives it the power to set the gas giant’s agenda. Gazprom said that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had personally approved the lawsuit against Naftogaz. Russia holds the world's largest natural gas reserves and is not afraid to flex its muscles. It holds 512 trillion cubic metres, more than twice the next-largest reserves, in Iran, according to the US Energy Information Agency. Gazprom is the sole gas supplier to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia, and provides 89 percent of Hungary's gas, 86 percent of Poland's and nearly three-quarters of the Czech Republic's. In addition Gazprom supplies 36 percent of Germany's gas, 27 percent of Italy's, 25 percent of France's, 67 percent of Turkey's, 65 percent of Austria's and 100 percent of Finland's. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey have already reported shortfalls of up to 40 percent since Russia cut off deliveries to Ukraine.

Serbia and Bosnia are typical of Eastern European countries feeling the pinch. Serbia gets 90 percent of its gas from Russia piped through Ukraine to Southeastern Europe. The manager of state-owned Srbijagas says there are only enough gas reserves in the country for a matter of hours and the country's oil stockpile is enough for one day. With outside temperatures dipping below -7 degrees Celsius that makes for an uncomfortable time ahead for Serbian citizens unless a quick solution is found. Neighbouring Bosnia is equally affected. One woman on the street expressed her anger and frustration at a dispute they can do little about. "Nobody is asking us for our opinion," she said. "The politicians are doing what they want, and we can just wait and freeze."

Today’s Financial Times reports that Gazprom might itself freeze if it waits too long for a solution. The English newspaper said Gazprom has been placed in a difficult position due to the crisis and needs to extract as much revenue as possible from Ukraine in the short term. However its tactics could stand in the way of its longer-term ambition of becoming a leading global energy business. The recent drop in oil prices has seen the company drop from the world’s third largest (with a market capitalisation of $350b) to the world’s 46th (valued at just $86b). Gazprom's profits are being squeezed at a time when it faces a massive demand for investment in Russia's crumbling infrastructure and open up new sources of production. But while it has a valid case to charge Ukraine more for its gas, the impact on Europe is badly damaging its reputation as a regular supplier. The stakes are high for Gazprom and for Russia’s rehabilitation as an international superpower.

Quadrophenia: The Windschuttle hoax

This morning the national and metropolitan newspapers have reported on the Quadrant hoax story which Margaret Simons broke in yesterday’s online edition of Crikey. The hoax was perpetrated on the ideological Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle who published a spurious piece about popular scares on biotechnology issues in the magazine’s January/February issue. The Australian’s Samantha Maiden interviewed Simons who denied that she was the hoaxer but admitted she knew about it in advance. “They approached me about three weeks ago, after Keith Windschuttle had accepted the article,” said Simons. “In other words the hoax had already achieved aim in the sense it had been accepted. It was before Quadrant was published.”

Meanwhile today’s Sydney Morning Herald has a David Marr article which has Windschuttle’s version of events. Entitled “Quadrant falls victim to its own reasoning”, Marr’s article said the hoax was beautifully done. Marr said the hoaxer concocted the scheme “provoked by Quadrant's embrace of global warming sceptics”. The aim, he wrote, was to "employ some of Quadrant's sleight-of-hand reasoning devices to argue something ludicrous". But after Windschuttle was advised, he apparently was relieved to find it was “only 10 to 15 per cent” invented. “When I discovered that my gloom and embarrassment changed completely,” he told Marr.

In her Crikey article yesterday, Simons revealed why Windschuttle was gloomy and embarrassed to begin with. She said the article by a “Sharon Gould” was written in the spirit of Ern Malley, the 1940s literary hoax mocking modernism perpetrated by Australian poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley (who himself was the first editor of Quadrant). The new hoax contained the bogus claim that the Australian scientific body CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) planned to commercialise food crops engineered with human genes, but abandoned the projects because of “perceived moral issues”.

The Gould hoax is designed to be a companion and a counter to another famous hoax, the so-called Sokal affair. In 1996, New York University physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the post-modern cultural studies journal Social Text to show that post modernists would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.” The paper was published, though crucially at the time Social Text had no external peer review process. Simons said the Sokal affair became part of the “science wars” which were a series of intellectual battles between post modernists and realists, which had many similarities to Australia’s “history wars”, in which Windschuttle was a major player.

Simons would not reveal who “Sharon Gould” was, other that to say it wasn’t her. She linked to the website Diary of a Hoax (protected but viewable via Crikey) which was Gould’s blow-by-blow account of how the ruse was put together. The hoaxer claimed he/she didn’t do this to be unkind to Windschuttle personally. “I almost feel like apologising, because, as hokey as it sounds, as much as I love a good piece of culture-jamming,” he/she wrote, “I also hold Lauren Slater’s position on ‘the critical role of kindness in writing and in life’”.

Windschuttle was unimpressed by the hoaxer’s “almost apology”. Late yesterday he published an online response in Quadrant. Windschuttle denied it was a genuine hoax similar to the Sokal and Ern Malley affairs because it relied upon real issues, real people and real publications for most of its content. He wrote: “None of the principal subjects, personnel or publications discussed by 'Gould' in Quadrant are bogus. The biotechnology controversies she discusses genuinely occurred. The authors she quotes do hold the positions she says and they did write the works she cites. The institutions she says were involved in the biotechnology products she discusses are real institutions and are well known for funding projects of this kind.”

The writer and lawyer Helen Dale has advised Sharon Gould to reveal herself/himself. Dale was the author of the 1993 award-winning novel “The Hand That Signed the Paper” which purported to tell her fictitious Ukrainian family's bleak wartime history under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko. Now Dale is urging Gould not to repeat her mistakes. On her shared blog Scepticlawyer yesterday, she wrote “If one is going to hoax, one should hoax in good spirit. This is something I failed to do, at least as time went on. Instead of following the Ern Malley hoaxers, or Leon Carmen (the Wanda Koolmatrie hoaxer) and outing myself, I waited for the press to find me. This was a bad idea, and led to a great deal of bitterness, some of it ongoing.”

However, Margaret Simons is unimpressed by Dale’s intervention saying “you couldn’t make it up”. However Simons does not address any of the issues raised by Dale. And the ease by which a publication could be duped is noted by science writer Tim Lambert at Deltoid who notes “the hoax article seems almost reasonable, though the proposal to use genetically modified mosquitoes to deliver drugs seems a bit of a give away.” Meanwhile, the discussion about the hoax on Larvatus Prodeo (LP) also raised a mixed bag of responses varying from glee about the embarrassment of one of “the greatest puffed-shirts of them all” (Windschuttle) to accusing the hoaxer of cowardice. In the end analysis, the affair will do Windschuttle and his magazine no harm at all. In fact, as one commenter on LP notes, “Quadrant will probably see a lift in sales because of this hoax.”

John Atta Mills wins Ghana election

The Electoral Commission of Ghana has announced John Evans Atta Mills as the winner of the 2008 presidential election. Atta Mills represents the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) and he narrowly won, polling 4,521,032 representing 50.23 per cent of the total votes cast. He defeated the ruling party’s Nana Akufo-Addo who took 4,480,446 votes representing 49.77 per cent of the electorate. It is Atta Mills’s third tilt at the presidency and he had to withstand two rounds of voting and a special election in a single constituency to defeat his National Patriotic Party (NPP) rival by 40,000 votes out of more than nine million ballots.

Atta Mills will replace long-term president John Kufuor who steps down tomorrow after defeating Atta Mills in the last two elections. Kufuor was one of Africa’s elder statesmen during his eight year reign. Kufuor served two terms as president and the constitution did not allow a third term. In his final state of the nation address, Kufuor said parliament should consider extending the term of Ghana's president to five years to give "reasonable room" for a newly elected leader to settle into the job. “For the president of a struggling, developing nation with weak institutions, perhaps in the case of Ghana a five-year term, renewable once, will create the needed space for making a better impact,” he said.

Atta Mills narrowly lost the first round vote in December against Akufo-Addo but the latter did not pass the 50 per cent threshold needed for outright victory. In the run-off election later that month Atta Mills came out ahead of his rival by a wafer-thin margin. The narrowness of the margin meant that there were claims of foul play from both sides. It took a ballot re-run in the remote rural constituency of Tain before the opposition candidate was finally declared the winner. In one hit, the NPP had lost the presidency as well as control of the parliament.

The 64 year old John Atta Mills was the protégé of former president Jerry Rawlings and served as vice-president to Rawlings between 1997 and January 2001. Rawlings anointed Atta Mills as his successor in 2001 but he lost that election to Kufuor. Atta Mills courted controversy by saying he would consult Rawlings (who initially came to power in a coup) if elected but he has recently distanced himself from his mentor. He described himself as a social democrat borrowing from Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah's social welfare program. But he pitched a more inclusive and less polarising political platform than both Nkrumah and Rawlings.

Atta Mills will have little time to celebrate his election victory as he faces mounting government debts and wage demands. He will also need to heal the political divisions born of a bruising and suspicious campaign with its allegations of voter fraud. The losing NPP significantly raised public spending in the election run-up to fund expansionary measures to help the country cope with high oil import prices. The legacy to Atta Mills is an increased national debt and it is likely he will have to quickly introduce an austerity budget. But in reality there was very little difference between the two major parties’ policies and a consensus may be possible. And while the world economic downturn has hit Ghana hard, the country is considered a well-administered country by regional standards and a model for political and economic reform. The task ahead for Atta Mills is difficult but far from impossible, by African standards.

Helen Suzman: Cricket in a Thorn Tree

Helen Suzman was buried yesterday in a private Jewish ceremony in Johannesburg. Suzman, who died on New Year’s Day aged 91, was one of South Africa’s greatest anti-apartheid campaigners and a true independent spirit. She was a courageous parliamentarian for 36 years, a third of which she was the sole independent voice. "I used to put 200 questions a session," she told CNN last year. "They were all of course designed to expose the atrocities. I made good use of my parliamentary position."

Helen Suzman was born in the mining town of Germiston, east of Johannesburg, on 7 November 1917. Her parents were both Jewish Lithuanians who had fled anti-Semitism in Europe. In 1937 she married a doctor named Moses Meyer Suzman with whom she had two daughters. She became interested in politics after the disastrous 1948 election which brought the National Party to power and entrenched the apartheid system.

She successfully ran for the South African parliament in 1953 as the United Party Member for Houghton, a prosperous and largely-Jewish suburb near Johannesburg. Suzman quickly established herself as a thorn in the side of the new regime and former President PW Botha called her a "vicious little cat". The feeling was mutual; she called him “an obnoxious bully”. In 1959 she joined eleven other liberal MPs who formed the liberal Progressive party, which supported the rights of all citizens, regardless of race and creed, and a dismantling of the apartheid system. The party was annihilated at the ballot box in 1961 and Suzman was the only one of the dozen to retain her seat.

She remained the lone parliamentarian voice of anti-discrimination throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1963 she railed against the law which gave police powers to detain suspects for 90 days without trial, which, she said, brought South Africa "further into the morass of a totalitarian state". In 1967 she visited Nelson Mandela in prison cell on Robben Island and the admiration was mutual. Suzman said she knew immediately “that this was a man of considerable courage”. In return, Nelson Mandela was equally glowing, “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard, he wrote. “She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells."

In the 1980s, her greatest success was to see the abolition of the pass laws as part of the slow and uneven unravelling of apartheid legislation. She finally retired from parliament in 1989 and served on a variety of top public institutions. These included the Independent Electoral Commission that oversaw the country's first multiracial elections in 1994. She stood by Mandela's side when he signed the new constitution in 1996 as South Africa's first black president. But she never stopped being controversial. In 2001 she was declared an "Enemy of the State" of Zimbabwe after openly criticising the Robert Mugabe regime. It was a perverse honour she took great pride in.

Today, the director of the Helen Suzman Foundation Raenette Taljaard paid tribute to Suzman in the South African newspaper The Times. Taljaard had known Suzman for the last 15 years and said she (Suzman) had a strong sense of what she liked and disliked and had “no ambiguities or shades of grey for her between right and wrong”. Equally, said Taljaard, when Suzman’s academic research led her deeper into the injustices of labour migration in South Africa, she quickly realised that she had a role to play. She was society’s “cricket in a thorn tree who would speak truth to power with a clear moral purpose in a country that had lost its moral compass.”

Suzman continued to campaign for better conditions for blacks to the end of her life. On her 90th birthday, she expressed disillusionment with the lack of progress in addressing crime, unemployment and poverty in South Africa. "Masses of black people are very disappointed with lack of delivery of housing, water and sanitation," she told AP. But no one could be disappointed with Suzman. She delivered to the end.

Defiant Hamas continue rocket attacks under Israeli assault

Gaza militants have defied the Israeli ground invasion and have fired dozens of rockets across the border in the last 24 hours. Five Qassam rockets struck the town of Sderot causing one minor injury and another struck Ashdod but caused no known damage or casualties. A house in Ashkelon took a hit from a more powerful Grad rocket but there were no fatalities. 12 Qassam rockets hit the Sdot Negev area on Saturday; all landed in open fields and caused no injuries. The main impact of these strikes continues to be psychological, as it has been for the last seven years.

The Gaza Strip has been separated from Israel by a security barrier since 1996. In 2005 Israel withdrew its civilian and military presence according to its unilateral disengagement plan, but retained control over airspace and maritime access. The attacks began after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The rockets were the only way that Gaza Palestinians could continue to carry the war into Israel. After Hamas won control of Gaza in June 2007 elections, Israel imposed a blockade on the Strip and its 1.5 million inhabitants. They allowed only basic humanitarian items in and permitted no exports paralysing the economy. The Israeli government declared Gaza a "hostile entity" in response to continued rocket attacks, and said it would start cutting fuel imports. The reduction in fuel supplies and a chronic lack of spare parts has severely impacted sewage treatment, waste collection, water supply and medical facilities. Aid agencies said the situation had become a humanitarian crisis.

Gaza began launching Qassam rockets in 2001. As of February 2008, they have killed 13 people, mostly in the nearby border town of Sderot. There has been no effort at negotiation in that time. Israel refuses to talk to Gaza’s rulers because Hamas in turn refuses to acknowledge the Jewish state's right to exist, will not renounce violence and doesn’t adhere to previous peace agreements signed by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction. Nevertheless as recently as February 2008, Israel’s public attitude was that a large scale ground operation would not put an end to the rocket fire.

But as the frequency has increased, Israeli public pressure had been mounting on the government to stop the rockets. With an Israeli election and a less friendly US administration in the wings, the Israeli government finally believed the time was right to react. In the past week, IDF artillery bombs have killed more than 480 Palestinians and injured 3,000 in Gaza. In same period, four Israelis have been killed and 59 wounded in Hamas rocket attacks. The rockets remain the Palestinians most potent, albeit random, weapon of retaliation.

Qassam rockets are named for the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s military wing) which in turn was named for the 1930s Palestinian leader Mojahed Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. Bombmakers supplied the first prototype in 2001 and a year later produced the Qassam 2, an improved version which attacked nearby Israeli settlements and towns. The rockets consist of a warhead, an engine and a tail segment. The warhead is filled with TNT and urea nitrate. They are fuelled by mixture of sugar and potassium nitrate (which is widely available as a fertiliser). Often they are crudely made explosives-packed pipes with metal fins welded onto the end. Qassam rockets are free-flying and lack any guidance system. As a result, they are notoriously inaccurate and many fail to even cross the border into Israel.

The rockets have a range of four to forty kilometres and spread their submunitions over a broad area. A large number remain unexploded and become defacto landmines. But they rarely cause any injuries, and they did not kill an Israeli until 28 June, 2004. The main success of the rockets has been psychological and has created an atmosphere of fear in all of the Southern Israeli border towns. The number of attacks has increased dramatically in recent years. By November, Israel had indicated it had lost patience: PM Ehud Olmert ominously told his audience "The question is not whether there will be a confrontation, but when it will take place, under what circumstances, and who will control these circumstances, who will dictate them, and who will know to exploit the time from the beginning of the ceasefire until the moment of confrontation in the best possible way.” Israel has begun the confrontation but the question will be whether it can control the consequences.

Redefining Fukuyama: The start of the end of history

Israel’s policy on Gaza is political and all about timing. They have a short two week window for a defacto invasion of the Strip before Obama is released from his self-imposed “one president at a time” shackles and Israel wakes up to a less-warm American leadership. That time block also gives Tzipi Livni a fortnight to present her credentials as a tough wartime leader before she herself goes for a “battle of the hawks” electoral showdown with Binyamin Netanyahu in late February. War, in this case, is a valid liberal democratic tool and thousands in Gaza will pay for it with their lives.

It was the victory of the capitalist liberal democratic idea that was the central thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s now almost notorious 1992 book with the portentous and pretentious title of “The end of history and the last man”. This book managed to offend everyone including historians, feminists, Marxists, Christians, economists and philosophers. His opponents took glee in pointing out that Fukuyama’s new world order era idea was declared destroyed as early as 11 September 2001. The recent death of Sam Huntington brings Fukuyama back to attention. Huntington's own 1993 “Clash of Civilisations” was an early model to contradict Fukuyama’s somewhat Pollyanna-ish view of the power of liberal democracy. Yet, no one has managed to come up with a convincing response to the central argument: what political system is better than the Capitalist Liberal Democratic model that is now a cornerstone of most countries across the world?

To get a good answer to that question it is necessary to move beyond the facile analysis that Fukuyama has been “proved wrong” and look at how a smart and highly-educated man might even consider the idea that history has ended. Fukuyama didn’t invent the notion. He argued strongly that the success of liberal democracy had less to do with the philosophies and ideas of Hobbes and Locke. Instead he attributed it to a rehash of the universal histories of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as filtered through the obscure work of Alexandre Kojeve.

Hegel was one of the great scholars of modernity and had enormous influence on those who followed him. Fukuyama considered Marx to be the best nineteenth century interpreter of Hegel’s ideas and Kojeve the foremost of those of the twentieth century. It was Kojeve who came to the conclusion that Hegel was right and that history had ended. He was even able to point to an exact event that ended it: the 1806 Battle of Jena which established the Napoleonic code as the cornerstone of European law. Teaching in Paris’s influencial Ecole Practique des Haute Etudes in the 1930s, Kojeve said that all the wars since Jena were merely an “alignment of the provinces”. The impact of the Bolshevist revolutions, he said, was to spread existing principles of liberty and equality.

Just as Fukuyama was ridiculed after 9/11, Kojeve’s own ideas became unfashionable after the devastating impact of World War II. Kojeve proclaimed the end of history would arrive when humans developed a complete satisfying political system. He argued that liberal democracy (despite its manifest faults of discrimination and poverty) provided such satisfaction. Kojeve saw entities such as the European Union as the most advanced form of liberal democracy and would eventually quit teaching and spend the rest of his life working for the EU.

His central idea was that all human action is based on the desire for recognition. This idea runs contrary to most Enlightenment thinking. In their influential writings, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke propagated the notion that citizens of society are primarily interested in their own material well-being. Their ideas were imbibed by the framers of the US constitution, a document which is pre-occupied with material well-being. But Kojeve said it was Hegel’s appeal to a “struggle for recognition” which was the real motor of civilisation. It is not self preservation but the prideful and assertive side of human nature that causes Palestinians in Gaza to toss rockets across the border and Israelis to respond with heavy artillery.

Humanity, according to Hegel, did have its natural side that demanded sleep, food and sex. But many human actions contradict these natural tendencies. They are sidetracked by thorny matters such as prestige, recognition, respect, honour, and dignity. Fukuyama identified the seat of all these complicated emotions as “thymos” which is a Greek word approximate to “spiritedness”. Thymos drove this desire for recognition, he said, and it was as crucial a cause of human action as both desire and reason.

Fukuyama saw the desire for recognition as the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics. As people become wealthier they demand not simply more wealth but also recognition of their status. It drives the demand for democracy. The struggle for recognition out of thymos might take thousands of years but it would in the end, be “completely satisfying” because recognition was the most deep seated and fundamental human longing.

At the end of the twentieth century liberal democracy stood alone without ideological competitors. Fukuyama wrote that outside the Islamic world, there was a “general consensus that accepts liberal democracy’s claims to be the most rational form of government, that is, the state that realizes most fully either rational desire or rational recognition”. He would be eventually hoist on the petard of his own Islamic exclusion but has not yet been challenged on whether there are better systems available. The question for the 21st century is whether liberal democracy remains the best vehicle to tackle the growing list of global issues: environmental impact, water and food, international law, disease, biodiversity, and poverty.

Yet it is too easy to be stuck in the stasis of pessimism. The end of history seems no where on the horizon, thankfully, and the ability to create our destinies remains as strong as ever. Fukuyama’s thoughtful provocation on the subject should be seen for what it is, a brave and informed attempt to establish dialogue about the very real impact of motivations. It should not be condemned nor ignored for the obvious fact (quite apparent to the author himself) that history, in the sense we understand it, has continued. Thymos deserves to be better known.

Guinea emerges from Lansana Conte's dark shadow

"I am ill. My leg hurts. You have chosen me as your candidate, so you get on with it." These were the exasperated words of Guinea’s long term dictator Lansana Conte to a journalist before his last election victory. It was a lie, of course. It was Conte who chose himself as the candidate and the election was rigged in his favour. But what was true was that he was ill. The 73 year old man who had ruled Guinea with an iron fist for 23 years was dying and about to create a power vacuum. His eventual death before Christmas unleashed chaos in the West African country of ten million people. Announcing the president’s death on national TV, the head of the country’s National Assembly solemnly told viewers Conte had "hid his physical suffering for years in order to give happiness to Guinea”.

But in truth it was the people of Guinea who had suffered physically under his reign. Guinea was one of the poorest countries in Africa and an economic basket case. In October the nation marked 50 years of independence from France. It was not a time of celebration. The popular cry in the capital was “50 years of poverty”. Despite having rich bauxite and other mineral resources, the country is one of the poorest in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006, UNICEF calculated that 63 percent of the population live below the poverty line. Government paralysis has also allowed the country’s external debt to balloon to unsustainable proportions.

Meanwhile, the economy has collapsed riven by cronyism. In 2004, the EU tried to tie aid to political and economic reforms and forced Conte to eliminate crony-monopolies and limit “off-budget expenses” (a EU euphemism for theft of government monies). But by 2007, there was no apparent rise in living conditions and people erupted in a wave of strikes and rioting. Conte’s forces react by ransacking strike headquarters and beating up union leaders. More worryingly for Conte was a revolt by junior army officers in June, which he eventually put down by agreeing to their pay demands.

Guinea is used to strong long-term leaders. Only two men have ruled Guinea since 1958. Independence leader Sekou Toure caused General de Gaulle to leave a meeting in a furious rage when he told him Guinea would rather having poverty in freedom than remain a French colony. De Gaulle took him at his word and withdrew all French aid. Toure broke ties with France and turned to the Soviet Union for support. In the best Communist tradition pursued a revolutionary socialist agenda and crushed political opposition in a reign of terror. When he died in 1984 the country was a shambles and Conte emerged from a cabal of military leaders to assume full control in a coup.

Lansana Conte ended the Communist experiment but was unable to end the country’s crushing poverty. He courted the west but like Toure he treated Guinea as his personal domain. He won “elections” in 1993, 1998 and 2003, but each time independent monitors denounced the polls as fraudulent. Conte became more despotic as the years entrenched his power. His regime was partially destabilised by the 2000 refugee crisis in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia when half a million people fled to Guinea to avoid the fighting. The region instability generated suspicion and ethnic tension and added to Guinea’s economic woes. The last decade of his reign were dominated by assassination attempts and his growing health woes. Conte spent much of his later years in clinics abroad searching in vain for elixirs to prolong his greedy life.

Conte did not groom anyone to follow him and the succession battle was always expected to be messy. The all-powerful secretary-general at the presidency, Fode Bangoura, was the most likely candidate to take over. He had already assumed day-to-day control of the country whenever Conte was out of the country seeking treatment. But with low growth and low income, the country was fertile ground for a coup.

It began in time-honoured fashion two days after Conte died when armed officers took over the state radio station to announce that the Constitution and the government had been suspended. Troops patrolled the streets in armoured personnel carriers but the coup was mostly bloodless as there was widespread support for action against the Conte faction which Bangoura was fatally associated with. Captain Moussa Dadis Camara emerged as the new junta leader and immediately sacked 20 generals in order to consolidate power. He also made the usual promises to rid the country of graft and nepotism and to hold elections by 2010.

While many are doubtful Camara will live up to these promises, he has made a good start with his appointment of Prime Minister. On 30 December, he chose Kabina Komara to lead the interim government. Komara has a financial background and a former member of Guinea’s central bank. He now works as a senior director at the Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank which promotes trade between African states. Komara was one of four men whom labour leaders nominated for Prime Minister following anti-government protests in 2007 but was turned down by Conte. Conte’s action is probably the best compliment to Komara’s abilities and he will need to be at the peak of his powers to negotiate his way through the minefield of Guinea’s economic and political crisis with the support of the people while not stepping on the toes of the country’s military rulers. It will be the toughest of tough tasks.

The fourth siege of Waterford

The ancient Irish city of Waterford has seen and survived four major sieges in the last millennium. Each siege left its mark on the city and on the course of Irish history. The first siege in 1170 raised by “Strongbow” the Earl of Pembroke, hastened the beginning of English rule in Ireland. Barely two years later King Henry II would arrive in the city to claim the land for the crown of England and seek obeisance from all the Irish kings and bishops. The second (and only unsuccessful) siege occurred in 1495 when forces led by the Earl of Desmond attempted to foist Perkin Warbeck on the people as the pretender to the English throne. The resistance of Waterford earned it the motto “urbs intacta manet” ("remains the untaken city") from another grateful King Henry, the seventh. The third and longest siege was during Cromwell’s Irish reign of terror. For almost a year, his armies isolated the city and thousands died of starvation and disease before General Ireton accepted its exhausted surrender in August 1650.

The fourth and final siege came in the warm summer of 1922. While the weather may have been glorious, this was a mean and tragic time for Ireland as it cut itself to pieces in a murderous civil war. The new Free State government besieged Waterford in its campaign to defeat the rebels in the aftermath of the divisive treaty with Lloyd George’s government in Westminster. The odds were stacked. The Free State army had modern artillery and the support of the powerful organs of the church, the press and the captains of Irish industry. However, the defenders did have military expertise as the majority of the IRA’s officers supported the anti-Treaty forces. It was the south of Ireland which bore the brunt of the conflict and Waterford’s turn began on 18 July.

A West Waterford man named Pax Whelan led the Anti-Treaty forces in the city. They were poorly organised and content to wait for the attack. No attempt was made to secure the heights above the city north of the river. Anti-Treaty forces were instructed to operate independently in their own areas leading to slipshod communication and there was no overall plan. By contrast, the Free State side was much better prepared. It was led by former American cavalry officer Colonel John T. Prout assisted by two local men Paddy Paul and James McGrath. Paul was a gunnery officer in WW1 and then joined the IRA as brigadier of East Waterford. Paul and his enemy Whelan had worked together during the War of Independence and the pair led the only attack on British forces in Waterford: the unsuccessful ambush at Pickardstown near Tramore in January 1921.

But at the end of that war, Paddy Paul opted for the Free State side. The new government in Dublin struggled to enforce its authority and on 22 May 1922 they sent Paul with orders to take command of Waterford and secure the barracks. On arrival in town, he was arrested by anti-Treaty forces. Paul was injured in the arrest but later managed to escape from the Infirmary Hospital dressed as a nun. He fled back to Dublin to plot the re-capture of Waterford.

By 18 July he was back on top of Mount Misery overlooking the attack of his native city. It would not be easy. All approach roads were mined. The rebels were reinforced by volunteers from Cork and Kerry and had seized the barracks and fortified Ballybricken jail. They set up outposts in shops and hotels along the quay, the post office and Reginald’s Tower. They also opened the spans on the road and rail bridges across the Suir. They outnumbered their opponents with 700 defenders in the city facing 550 Free State troops, many of whom had served in the British army. But the Free Staters had power on their side: two artillery pieces including an 18 pounder placed over the railway station and one lighter calibre piece. The 18 pounder was initially hamstrung as it faced rapid fire from the quays and a sniper on Ballybricken hill but would eventually prove to be a devastating difference.

All businesses in the city closed down except for the Tramore railway which operated continuously through the four days of the siege. Most townsfolk took advantage of the sunny weather to evacuate to the seaside until the fall of the city. At 6:45pm on Tuesday 18 July the attack began in brilliant sunshine. Paul’s first shell landed near his own home near Brewery House in Newgate St. His mother was working in the kitchen and narrowly avoided injury. But the majority of shells found their mark landing in Barrack St or near Ballybricken jail.

The guns blazed away for four or five hours of firing on the first night. The eerie silence was shattered again at 6am the following morning as the guns opened up in excellent visibility. There were many direct hits on the barracks and the jail on top of the hill. Whelan moved his sharpshooters to Bilberry cliffs west of the quay and they managed to keep the attackers pinned down. The defenders inflicted heavy casualties from accurate machine gun fire from the post office on the quay with garrisons under the command of Ballybricken chemist Pierce Power. But the shelling continued all day.

During a lull in the fire, Prout moved his major artillery piece onto the bridge but was prevented from using it by persistent gunfire from across the river. Prout had to come up with an alternative plan. The following night 150 men led by Captain Ned O’Brien moved down the Rosslare railway to Giles Quay under the cover of darkness. O’Brien’s day job was a journalist for the Waterford News but now he was making the news not reporting it (he would later be killed on patrol in the city). His forces commandeered boats moored at the quay and rowed to the opposite shore. They encountered no resistance and suddenly the back door to the city was wide open.

At Newtown school, they encountered a motorised Anti-Treaty patrol. The attackers quickly captured the car and locked the occupants in the boot. They bypassed a rebel garrison in the park and found a prominent local Unionist known as “Lame” Dobbyn. Dobbyn was anxious to see the Republicans defeated and he gave the intruders the key of the Country Club on the strategic corner of the Mall and the Quay opposite Reginald’s Tower. The men entered the back of the building and overpowered a sleeping garrison stationed there. They had secured a vital corner of the city without firing a shot.

At 7:45am the next morning, they opened fire on the Tower across the road and also raked the Mall and the Quays with machine gun fire. The element of surprise gave Prout the opportunity he needed to secure the artillery on the bridge. Its gunfire from close range suddenly made the Quay garrison untenable. The republicans retreated to Ballybricken. When a direct hit exploded in the magazine of the artillery barracks that evening, the area had to be evacuated. The end was near.

Pax Whelan gathered his Dungarvan, Cork and Kerry units to escape to the west leaving Jerry Cronin in charge of a small band to defend the city. Cronin's men retreated to Ballybricken Hill to fight the final battle for Waterford. At 11:50am on Friday 21 July 1922, shellfire breached the jail walls. After some bitter hand-to-hand fighting, Cronin’s forces surrendered. The fourth siege of Waterford was over.

The rebels were dispatched to Kilkenny and Newbridge jails, none of them taking up the offer to join the Free State army and swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Prout spent the weekend in an open car with Paul and McGrath touring the city. The two local men were able to point out Republicans who had escaped arrest. The civil war would drag on for almost another year in West Munster. On 24 May 1923 anti-Treaty leaders issued unceremonious orders to “dump arms”. The civil war was over. By its end 3,000 people were dead, and 21,000 prisoners were in jails and internment camps. The war left a legacy of bitterness that infected the Irish polity for decades to come.

New York ball could be Waterford Crystal’s last flourish

Workers in New York are putting the final touches to a dazzling Waterford crystal ball which will descend into Times Square on New Years Eve. The ball is over three and a half metres in diameter, weighs over five thousand kilos and is covered with 2,668 Waterford Crystal triangles. The massive new ball continues a Times Square new year tradition and will have a new permanent home on the roof of One Times Square. The $5 million project has taken a year to complete and engineers built an entire roof structure and reinforced the steel columns to cope with the ball’s weight. The ball was created at the crystal factory in Waterford and is a major marketing boost for the troubled glassware giant. God knows we need some joy coming into this new year," Waterford spokesman Peter Cheyney said. "That's the truth."

Cheyney’s relief for the New York project came on the same day as the announcement a US private equity fund was looking to buy out the company. Negotiators said the unnamed investor group were poised to take a controlling stake in struggling Irish crystal and ceramics manufacturer Waterford Wedgwood PLC for 600 million euros ($846 million). The company has until 2 January to make mounting loan payments or face the possible forced liquidation of assets. The date is the third postponement of loan repayment and there is now a race against time to save the company. Most of the glass is now manufactured in Eastern Europe with only the showrooms and a small operation left at its Waterford base.

If it happens, it will be the second time the industry will have gone under in glass's 230 year association with Waterford. While glass blowing dates back to techniques invented by the Phoenicians in the first century BC, it was relatively late arriving in Ireland. Before 1780 Irish glass was a pale imitation of the British product. England was influenced in the 16th century by Belgium which turn looked to the Italians. Antwerp was the chief glass making centre in northern Europe and attracted glass makers from Genoa and Venice. In 1571 Giacomo Verzelini came to London and was given sole royal licence to produce glass in the “thin fragile” Venetian style. In 1674 George Ravenscroft applied for a patent for a “particular sort of crystalline glass” made from high purity silica which was the forerunner of flint glass, also known as lead glass.

England developed its own lead glass style. German and Bohemian craftsmen brought their engraving skills to England in the peace and prosperity that followed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. But in 1777 an excise tax to support the fight against the US war of Independence crippled the English and Scottish industry. In 1780 restrictions were lifted on Irish industry including manufacture of glass. Free trade in Ireland lasted until 1825. These 45 years were the great era of Irish glass, what glass historian Phelps Warren called “the Age of Exuberance”. The product was made in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, but it was the Waterford Glass House which quickly became pre-eminent.

The growth of Waterford’s glass industry coincided with a time of great prosperity for the city. Growth was fuelled by a newly improved mile-long Quay and its associated maritime industry which profited from provisions for the expanding Newfoundland fishing fleet. These opportunities were exploited by an emerging astute Quaker business community. One such Quaker family were the Penroses who initially made their money in ships' chandlery. In 1783 George Penrose and his nephew William (often erroneously assumed to be brothers) began glass manufacture with a £10,000 enterprise which employed 70 people to cut, blow and engrave glass.

A week before they opened for business, the Penroses placed an ad in the Dublin Evening Post on Saturday 4 October 1783 under the headline “Waterford Glass House.” The ad read: George and William Penrose having established an extensive Glass Manufacture in this city, their Friends and the Public may be supplied with all kinds of plain and cut Flint Glass useful and ornamental: they hope that when the Public know the low Terms they will be supplied at and consider the vast expense attending this weighty undertaking they will not take offence at their selling for Ready Money only. They are now ready to receive orders and intend opening their warehouse 10th of next month. Wholesale Dealers and Exporters will meet with proper Encouragement. September 22, 1783.”

Public relations aside, the key to the Penroses success was the employment of fellow Quaker, and master glassmaker, John Hill from Stourbridge, Worcestershire. Hill spent three years at Waterford and his knowledge of glass, chemistry, standards and quality and sense of design quickly established the brilliance of the Waterford product. In the early days, the factory obtained sand from nearby Woodstown strand. In later years they obtained high quality silica sand from the English port of King’s Lynn. But despite the quality and elegance of Hill's glass and the Penroses growing reputation, they struggled to make a profit. They sold the business in 1797 to the Gatchell family. Jonathan Gatchell turned it into a prosperous business. He used his connections and business acumen to expand the industry and gain an export foothold in America despite the negative effect of the 1800 Act of Union. He employed close to 200 people at the factory. But by 1826, heavy duties against crystal glass were setting back the industry. Conditions gradually worsened and by the middle of the century, the Irish glass industry was dead. Waterford’s factory shut down in 1851. Another hundred years would pass before glass would be made in the city again.

The citizens of Waterford never forgot the reputation and prestige Penrose glass had given the city and there were many attempts to restore the industry. The opportunity finally arose after World War II when refugee German, Czech and Italian glass cutters and artisans were enticed to Waterford to found a crystal factory. It began in Ballytruckle on a three acre lease. The first General Manager was the Czech immigrant Karel (Charles) Bacik and the chief designer was the Slovak Miroslav Havel. The two men (who both died recently) would devote the rest of their lives to Waterford and its crystal. In January 1948 a £15,000 development was mooted for the fast developing factory. Bacik and Havel trained up locals and by 1950 the factory settled on a new site at Johnstown with room for expansion. The plant employed 100 people and grew rapidly. It quickly reclaimed pride of place as Ireland’s foremost glassware company and was the great success of post-war Waterford industry. In the late 1960s production began at a 40 acre site in Kilbarry. The factory expanded three times and employed 2,000 people. In 1971 a second factory was built in Dungarvan. At the time, it was one of the largest handcraft industries in the world and its glass was unique in using the very highest lead content(thirty percent).

In 1986 Waterford Crystal took over the Wedgwood pottery group just as the winds of change were set to blow through the company. The late 1980s and 90s saw a slow but sure throttling of plant capacity and a steady stream of redundancies. In 2005, they closed the Dungarvan plant to consolidate its workforce in Waterford. Today much of the glass is produced more cheaply off-shore, ironically including the Czech Republic and Slovakia where many of the original designers hailed from. These shifts sharply reduced overhead costs but the company's crippling debts continued to mount. The falling dollar of much of the last decade badly hurt the company in its key US export market and its share price has been worthless for many months. Although the dollar has now bounced back, a combination of slow sales and the global credit crunch have put its financial future at risk and there have been two redundancy batches already this year. Unless the new mystery backers come to the party, Waterford Crystal could be set for another century of hibernation.

The story of New Geneva Barracks

Despite their close geographical proximity, the south eastern Irish counties of Wexford and Waterford have not always shared a close heritage. The two are separated by the broad expanse of Waterford Harbour and there are no bridges between them. Only in recent times have the two been linked up with the opening of the car ferry between Passage East in Waterford and Ballyhack in Wexford. But when Wexford rose in rebellion against the English in 1798, the county across the harbour remained quiet. Waterford’s only real link to the rebellion is a building just outside Passage with the unusual name of New Geneva Barracks.

In the late 18th century, Ireland was in a rare period of prosperity as Britain temporarily relaxed customs duties. In 1783, the new Irish parliament in Dublin was determined to fund a colony from Geneva who wanted to settle in Ireland. They were Protestants who wanted to leave their homeland after an unsuccessful rebellion against their Catholic French rulers. The Irish parliament voted £50,000 pounds to buy land and build a town to house the immigrants. The sum was increased by £6,000 pounds and land set out in the barony of Gaultier (east Waterford county) in 1653 for the support of Duncannon Fort (across the river in Co Wexford). These tenanted lands near Passage East were owned by the Alcock family, one of whom was MP for Waterford city. The government bought out the land from the Alcocks for £12,400 and compensated the tenants. They then began building with the intention of accommodating 1,000 Genevans. The public reason for bringing them over was to build a body of skilled merchants to give impetus to trade and commerce in the city of Waterford and the nation as a whole.

But there were ulterior motives. Authorities secretly hoped the Swiss Protestant ethos might infect the local Catholic population. Earl Temple, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote a letter to Grenville, the Chief Secretary, where he noted putting the Swiss in Waterford “might make an essential reform in the religion, industry and mores of the South who want it more”. This also meant setting up an educational establishment. The government wanted to establish a Genevan College but needed to keep it secret from the governors of Trinity College who had a monopoly on education.

But the Trinity governors never had to worry as the mission failed before it began. An advance party of Genevans arrived in Waterford determined to set up a silk industry. Work on the New Geneva site proceeded but concession talks between the Irish government and Genevan leaders broke down over persistent Swiss demands the government felt were unreasonable. The whole arrangement fell through, the Genevans returned home and the buildings were left derelict.

With the threat of an uprising in 1798, the Government took possession of New Geneva, raised the compound walls and provided accommodation for 1,500 soldiers. When fighting broke out in Wexford, Waterford remained peaceful. However the Government was uneasy if the United Irishmen had triumphed in New Ross, the nearby city and county of Waterford would have risen. The soldiers of New Geneva were suspicious and showed great cruelty towards locals. More than a century afterwards, the memory of the 1798 cruelties and outrages lingered among the people and New Geneva was to them a symbol of tyranny and oppression.

In Watty Cox’s Irish magazine for February 1816 there was a vivid account of the “blanketing” of a woman at Geneva Barracks in 1798. A Mrs O’Neill had travelled from Co Antrim to see her son imprisoned at the barracks. By bribing sentries she was permitted an interview but as soon as mother and son saluted each other, she was ordered into the presence of Colonel Scott and his wife. The couple subjected her to a rigorous examination and then handed her over to some highlanders for a “blanketing”. Blanketing was a common punishment whereby the soldiers would grab a blanket, strip the victim naked and hoist her in the air repeatedly. Mrs O’Neill suffered this indignity for more than 20 minutes. She implored soldiers to leave some clothes on but when Col Scott saw this departure from custom he was encouraged by his wife to cut off her clothes with his sword. The inhabitants of the area could see her naked body repeatedly rising and falling above the walls of the barracks. Afterwards the woman was taken to a neighbouring village where she died the next day. The fate of her son was not recorded.

Today all that remains of Geneva Barracks is a dilapidated farmhouse and the remains of watch towers erected in 1798. In the 19th century the lands passed to Lord Waterford who sold them to a local merchant. This man named Galwey dismantled the barracks and moved the stonework to augment his premises in Dungarvan. A marker now commemorates the Geneva site with a prisoner's description of the barracks as “the filthiest, most damp and loathsome prison, devoid of any comfort”. It is also remembered in James McBurney’s The Croppy Boy (which featured in James Joyce’s Ulysses) the last verse of which reads:
At Geneva Barracks that young man died
And at Passage they have his body laid
Good people who live in peace and joy
Breathe a prayer and a tear for the Croppy Boy”.

Brief Encounters: Raymond Chandler and Waterford

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great American crime writer Raymond Chandler, creator of the fictional detective Philip Marlowe. Anniversary books have started to emerge with the New York Times review last week of Judith Freeman’s “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved” about his 30 year marriage to Cissy Chandler. The Irish city of Waterford should also have a part to play in any celebrations as his mother came from the city and both the mother and her only son spend many summers in the city at the turn of the 20th century.

In his book “Brief Encounters: Meetings with remarkable People”, Waterford-born author and radio documentary maker Bill Long (he also wrote a history of Irish lighthouses) wrote about his meetings with Chandler in London in the summer of 1958. The pair were neighbours; they met several times that summer and became friends largely due to the Waterford connection. On their first meeting, Chandler correctly picked Long’s Waterford brogue which pleased the American greatly as he deemed himself a “great judge of accents”.

Chandler’s mother Florence Thornton was from an old established Waterford Quaker legal family. The Thorntons had offices in Waterford, Cork and Dublin and Raymond inherited Thornton as his middle name. He told Long his mother was one of the Thorntons of Cathedral Square. According to Long he was grinning at the time “with the shadow of a cynical smile and the slightest edge of mockery in his tone”. Chandler enjoyed describing the family with mock pomposity: “I. Thornton and sons, solicitors and notaries public,” he intoned.

Chandler first went to Waterford with his mother after his alcoholic American father deserted the family when Ray was just seven. The Thornton family rallied round and they arranged for Florence and her son to leave America. After a short period in Waterford, they settled in London with a grandmother and aunt. For many of his pre-teen and teenage years, Chandler and his mother spent every summer in Waterford. “Uncle Ernest – my mother’s brother that is – was the head of the family then, and of the legal practice. Ruled both with an iron hand in an iron glove. A regular old tyrant was uncle Ernest! Upper middle class Protestants the Thorntons and god-awful snobs! Not just Uncle Ernest but the whole family were god-awful snobs. Full of bloody righteousness. Tension in the house all the time. And every goddamn thing had to be Protestant. The maids, the cook, even the man who worked in the garden.”

Despite the snobbery, Chandler was happy on his holidays. "I always had a good time in Waterford," he told Long. Chandler loved to reminisce about the upper-class Waterford families. There was the Dawneys, the Grubbs, the Carews and the Congreves, mostly Quaker or Protestants at whose homes he played tennis and croquet. Long noted Chandler’s childhood experiences in Waterford made an indelible impression. Summers with the Thorntons gave him an appreciation of social distinctions in a society which Long described as “neither urban nor rural but county”. Chandler admitted the Thornton snobbery had rubbed off on him. He hated to be called an Irish American because in his estimation that usually mean “Catholic and working class”. The Thorntons, he said, "saw to it that I grew up with a ferocious contempt for Catholics and to this day, I have a problem with that”. He continued, "the only Irish patriots with any brains came from the professional classes”. To Chandler, this meant being Protestant, but Long thought the real issue was not religion but class and education. Chandler thought it was more important where people came from rather than where they were going.

During his holidays, he enjoyed walking around the Mount Congreve estate a few miles outside Waterford on the banks of the River Suir. The Congreves were fellow upper-class Protestants and clients of the Thorntons. Chandler preferred some of the homelier aspects of the estate. “What I remember best,” said Chandler, “is the smell of the tobacco the old bothy-man smoked in his enormous bent-shank pipe. I remember resolving when I was ten or eleven at Mount Congreve to smoke a pipe when I grew up. And by God, I did and still do!”

The city also left an indelible imprint on the writer. He and Long swapped childhood memories of a long-gone bookshop in Cathedral Square. The shop was called Stickyback Power’s. Power is a common Waterford name but neither Chandler nor Long could remember why this Power gained his unusual nickname. Chandler loved the bookshop and told Long about the germ of an idea to set a Philip Marlowe novel using Waterford and the bookshop as locales. The storyline had Marlowe on holidays in Ireland and in a pub on the quays in Waterford. There he witnesses a sailors’ brawl. Later he hears one of the sailors has been murdered in the brawl and his body has been found slumped in the corner of a bookshop. Marlowe agrees to the captain of the ship’s request to investigate the murder which leads him into the low life of the city and he discovers a vicious prostitution racket.

Having given Long an outline of the plot, he asked him whether there was ever much prostitution along the quays. Long said Chandler wasn’t really interested in the answer and the project never came to fruition. Chandler’s health was poor in 1958 and his workrate was low. Long never met him again after that summer and he found out that Chandler died a year later of pneumonia at his villa in La Jolla, California. Chandler never returned to the city of his childhood but never forgot it. “You know of all the places – and I mean all the places – I’ve lived in,” he told Long, “Waterford is the place, that in the mind, draws me back all the time.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien dies

The death has taken place in Dublin of Irish intellectual giant Conor Cruise O’Brien. He was 91. O’Brien’s brilliant career led to important roles in politics, diplomacy, journalism, academia and the world of literature. Leading the tributes for Cruise O’Brien was Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen who said he was blessed with a strong intellect and strong intellect and a leading light in Irish life in many spheres. “While Dr Cruise O'Brien's political views were not always in accordance with those of my own party over the years,” said Cowen, “I never doubted his sincerity or his commitment to a better and more peaceful Ireland".

Cowen’s reference to Cruise O’Brien’s political views was his major involvement in the regeneration of the Irish Labour Party in the 1970s. His biggest fame in his native land was his stint as Minister for Post and Telegraphs during the Garret Fitzgerald-led Fine Gael and Labour coalition government between 1973 and 1977. During office, he was renowned for his strong anti-IRA stance and he enforced controversial strong media censorship before he was voted out of office in the Fianna Fail 1977 landslide election win.

Although O’Brien was subsequently elevated to the Irish Upper House (the Seanad), his main influence was in other fields. He was editor-in-chief of the London Sunday broadsheet The Observer, and a historian who wrote several critically acclaimed books. He was also appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin. He always remained an outspoken opponent of republicanism and was for a brief period in the 1990s a member of the now defunct United Kingdom Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. However he was later forced to resign after publishing his memoir where he called on Unionists to consider the benefits of a united Ireland.

The roots of Cruise O’Brien’s political and anti-republican leanings can be found in his birthright. His father Frank Cruise O'Brien was a journalist who edited a key 19th century tract on the pervasive influence of the clergy on Irish politics. His mother Kathleen Sheehy was an Irish language teacher, grammarian and Suffragette whose father was a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party and a Land League organiser. Their son Conor was born in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines in 1917 as the Great War raged but as Irish opinion began to turn against Britain. Frank died when Conor was 10 so the strong-minded Kathleen was the major influence on her son.

She gave him a mixed education. His first school was Muckross College, a Catholic convent school. Later he went to Sandford Park, which was nominally secular but strongly imbued with a Protestant ethos. The brilliant pupil won a scholarship to study Irish and French at Trinity. He overcame the devastation of his mother’s death in 1938 and supported himself by tutoring and journalism. He married young, enrolled with the Labour Party and joined the Irish Civil Service on graduation in 1942. It did not take long for Cruise O’Brien to become a leading figure in the Foreign Ministry. He played a major role in the agenda of the UN notably in the organisation of China's admission to the assembly. He was also caught up in the Congolese Civil War in 1961 and controversially ordered UN troops into action. He was ditched after the UN deaths mounted up and he resigned from the Irish civil service.

Despite this, he had a good reputation in Africa and became the vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana for three years. When New York University offered its Albert Schweitzer chair in the Humanities, he left Ghana and President Nkrumah saw him off, thanking him "for what you did for the university, whatever it was". During his Congolese adventure he met the poet Máire Mac An tSaoi. His marriage had failed by 1962 and he and Maire became romantically involved.

In 1969 he returned to Ireland, where he was elected to the Dail for Dublin North-East. When Labour agreed to a Coalition with Fine Gael in 1973, it was obvious Cruise O’Brien would become a cabinet minister. His most infamous act in power was Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act which banned Sinn Fein and IRA members from being interviewed on RTE. Given that the state broadcaster had a monopoly in radio and TV at the time, it was effectively a nationwide censorship. While the rule was introduced by Fianna Fail in 1971, Cruise O’Brien greatly strengthened its provisions. The act went so far as to prevent a Sinn Fein member from speaking about a trade union dispute in which he was the spokesperson. The law was eventually repealed in 1993. O'Brien believed that there was too much sympathy for Sinn Fein in RTE saying "If the Provos are successful, there will be civil war into which the south will be drawn."

His views on the North brought him into conflict with Charles Haughey. Cruise O’Brien coined the phrase GUBU ("grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented") which were the flowery words used by Haughey to describe the arrest of double murderer Malcolm Macarthur in the home of the attorney general, Patrick Connolly. Cruise O'Brien was a tireless critic of Haughey not only about his stance on Northern Ireland, but he also publicly questioned his integrity years before any large-scale evidence emerged that Haughey was on the take. It was Cruise O’Brien who said “man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.” His own history will be the deserved subject of more than an occasional passing flicker.