Feckers (24 page)

Opposition to Lisbon was not, we were assured, directed at the European Union per se, but only to particular aspects, although nobody seemed sure which ones. There were vague fears about increasing bureaucratic encroachment and the loss of autonomy in legal and fiscal affairs, but the most effective slogan of the campaign was ‘If you don’t know, vote no’. Many of those who voted against the treaty subsequently admitted they did so because they did not understand it. Others referred to alleged provisions in the text with implications for Irish neutrality, taxation or abortion, which had no more validity than in any of the previous referendums concerning aspects of EU membership. The plain truth – that the Lisbon Treaty was simply a series of complicated but anodyne technical measures, a nut-tightening exercise following recent expansions – was not believed by large numbers of people.

After it was all over, there was no sense of exhilaration or achievement, other than among a tiny proportion of activists of the extreme left and right. It is as though we found ourselves in the moment of realization after a heated but meaningless row, when the parties look into each other’s eyes with a feeling of embarrassment and dawning awareness. There was a sense that the frenzy of the moment had taken things too far, and now we had to sweep up the broken crockery. A survey conducted by the European Commission immediately after the vote revealed that many people who did not understand the treaty voted No; that the overwhelming majority of women voted No; that young people voted No by a margin of two to one; and that immigration (i.e. xenophobic sentiment) was a significant factor. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that the Irish had voted No because of irrelevancies, or marginal issues, or, in many instances, just plain spite, pique or ignorance. There was even a feeling that many people voted No in the belief that enough people would vote Yes to absolve them of responsibility for the consequences of their empty, petulant gestures.

The outcome seemed to articulate something much darker than anything remotely to do with the treaty, a kind of fury with no precise centre. It is as though Lisbon acted as a poultice to draw out a whole range of festering resentments, many unspecified and even publicly denied.

Declan Ganley was the main agent in this occurrence. And yet, twelve months later, in the summer of 2009, the non-ignition of Libertas was one of the most striking outcomes of the European elections. With the Lisbon issue still unresolved, and indeed with the victory chants that followed the 2008 Lisbon result still ringing in his ears, Ganley was himself defeated in the North-West constituency, and none of his fellow Libertas candidates got a look-in.

Ganley, of course, was not the kind of figure who tends to attract approval in the heartlands of Connacht; a self-made businessman with a plummy accent who had not served his time in service to the tribe. Though adept at tailoring his message to tap into the various disgruntlements that were current in a time of growing economic upheaval, he lacked any real empathy with the people he was addressing. Though possessed of a formidable array of insights into the history of Ireland’s relationship with Europe, he never succeeded in obtaining real traction for his ambitions, whatever they were.

In the end, Declan Ganley probably did more to set back any possibility of a real engagement with the deeper issues of the European project than if he had never intervened at all. For some time to come, anyone seeking to raise these issues will be immediately struck down in the public imagination as coming ‘after Ganley’ – who came, saw, was defeated and gave up. As a result, Irish Euro-scepticism faces the prospect of going down in history as a briefly flowering hubris arising from prosperity, just one more example of how we lost the run of ourselves.

43
Judge Mary Fahy

O
nce upon a time, Good Friday was a day of peace and quiet. For religious reasons, it was an exceptional day, but that was not the whole of the story. It was a day, perhaps the only day, when people were able to reclaim a sense of innocence. Because the pubs were closed and you weren’t supposed to eat meat, everybody knuckled down to doing a bit of penance and grumbling only a little. Secretly, most people felt okay about it. The pubs were shut, so it was the only day of the year when you had a good excuse for not drinking. Christmas Day, the other day the pubs were shut, didn’t count, for obvious reasons. Whenever someone complained about not being able to get hammered on Good Friday, only idiots made a fuss about it. Most people just shrugged, shook their heads and thanked their lucky stars there was one day that was genuinely special. Maybe they could sneak into church without anyone seeing them and re-enter their childhoods, when the shops had closed and only the emergency services were working. There was a double benefit: a sense of being at peace with the world and the feeling that you could really enjoy having a good drink on Easter Sunday, when purity-of-conscience would make it taste ten times better.

All this is gone. Good Friday is now pretty much the same as any other day, and in a couple more years there will be no difference at all. In 2010, a district court judge decided that, because there was a big rugby match in Limerick on Good Friday, the pubs should be allowed to open after six p.m. Judge Tom O’Donnell ruled in favour of an application by the city’s Vintners Federation, who said they stood to lose a fortune if they couldn’t open that day. ‘I accept that this decision may cause controversy in several quarters,’ he said, ‘and, having considered the arguments, I wish to point out that the district court is a court of record and not a court of precedent.’ Noting that Thomond Park, where the game was to take place, held a special arena licence which allowed alcohol to be served, the judge said that it was ‘somewhat absurd’ that the pubs in the locality should be closed while 26,000 people were free to buy alcohol in the grounds.

Certainly, this was one potential absurdity. Another was the idea that 26,000 people appeared to contemplate with fear the idea of having to attend a rugby match without getting hammered out of their skulls. Still another was that here, yet again, was a judge of the lowest court in the land making a decision that, legal precedent or not, was likely to lead to a further erosion of a tradition that nobody had ever voted to dismantle.

This is how laws get made or changed in modern Ireland. Politicians slide about the place, trying not to make decisions that might offend or irritate anybody, and judges step into the breach and decide things on the hoof. In fairness to Judge O’Donnell, he was confronted with an application for a ‘special event’ licence, and the match, which apparently could not be played on any other day, constituted such an event. The judge said he had heard ‘compelling evidence’ concerning the importance of the event to the hotel industry. He observed that there was no statutory definition of what constituted a ‘special event’. He appeared to be genuinely seeking a solution that would meet the exceptional circumstances without delivering a fatal blow to an ancient and sacred tradition against which he himself appeared to have no gripe.

This is more than can be said for Judge Mary Fahy, who, presiding at Galway District Court in 2008, refused to record convictions in nine cases in which restaurants were prosecuted for serving wine on Good Friday that year. Prosecuting restaurants for offering wine to their customers with their meals on Good Friday was ‘ludicrous’ and ‘ridiculous’, she said. People were ‘entitled’ to have wine with their meals. Judge Fahy marked the facts proven in all cases but recorded no convictions. She said that, while the state and the garda were ‘technically correct’ in bringing the prosecutions under the intoxicating liquor legislation, she would not be happy to record convictions. She observed that she was probably leaving herself open to judicial review by the state for taking this stance, but she didn’t mind.

‘If people want to go out for a meal on Good Friday, I would have thought they could have a drink with their meal,’ she said. ‘Technically you [the garda inspector who had brought the prosecution] are correct, but I think myself it is absolutely ludicrous that people on holidays especially cannot have a glass of wine with their meal. I’m not advocating that pubs open on Good Friday but I think restaurants should open.’

It is difficult to know where to start with this farrago of presumption and arrogance. The fact is that, regardless of what Judge Mary Fahy or anyone else thinks of it, the Intoxicating Liquor Act makes clear that people are not entitled to have wine with their meals on Good Friday, unless they choose to eat in private, in which case they may do as they please. The law makes it explicitly clear that Good Friday is one of two days in the year on which it is forbidden to sell alcohol in public. The background to why this is so, and whether it is a good idea, may well make for interesting material for debate, but such discussion has no place in a court of law. Whether it is a good or a bad idea for people to have a glass of wine with their meals on Good Friday is none of Judge Mary Fahy’s concern when she is sitting as a judge in Galway District Court. She is there in that capacity to implement the law, without fear or favour, having taken a solemn oath to do precisely that. Her sole function in court is to know the law and follow it to the letter. Whether she believes a law to be ludicrous, ridiculous or otherwise is of no relevance. She is neither a TD sitting in Dáil Éireann, nor a Senator sitting in Seanad Éireann. Nor is she the President of the Republic, with discretion as to which laws she will sign into law and which she will refer to the Supreme Court.

When Judge Fahy told the prosecuting garda inspector that he was ‘technically’ correct, she was engaging in a form of semantics. The law recognizes no other kind of correctness but technical correctness. The garda inspector was there doing his job, implementing the law as he, just like Judge Fahy, was obliged by his calling to do. He was correct, full stop.

Of course, nobody was surprised that, in making these statements from the bench, she was applauded by certain elements in an increasingly alcohol-obsessed society as a voice of reason. In this wet-brained Ireland, anyone who supports the alleged freedom of the citizen to obtain full access to his or her drug-of-choice is likely to be feted as a hero or heroine. Thus, it was not surprising that the central meaning of what occurred at Galway District Court would be obscured or ignored. In this she was utterly vindicated by the subsequent public commentary. The ‘liberal’, anti-Catholic gallery, delighted that someone had sought to remove from it the terrible yoke of enforced public sobriety on Good Fridays, seemed not to care that what had happened in this episode was that a judge had refused to do what she was employed to do, and that the implications of this were, you might say, staggering.

44
Owen Keegan

O
nce upon a time, it was possible to walk around an urban thoroughfare in Ireland and not fear your day being destroyed by remorseless men in uniform. Nowadays, however, to meet a fellow citizen in the street is to encounter a shadow of a man or woman, unable to conduct a civil conversation without constantly consulting a timepiece.

Few events in recent history have illustrated the supine, defeated state of the Irish public as comprehensively as the introduction to Irish cities of wheel clamping. The general response to this outrage was at the time characterized by casual submissiveness and an almost sadomasochistic fascination with the clamping device itself. Those who operate this monstrous insult to public liberty informed us, courtesy of the media, that the public’s response was proving to be ‘generally very good’. Most people had been understanding, we were told, of the necessity to ‘free up’ the capital’s traffic system. Those who fell victim to this appalling abuse of their rights were philosophical, accepting their medicine with polite resignation. The law was the law, after all.

Let us be absolutely clear. The introduction of wheel clamping in Dublin had nothing at all – repeat, nothing at all – to do with easing traffic congestion. It had to do, and only to do, with extracting even more money from motorists, who were already paying through the nose, ears, eyes and other orifices for the privilege of owning cars. A leaflet distributed to Dublin households by Dublin Corporation, as part of its highly successful public relations campaign to justify the importation of this outrageous practice, described wheel clamping as a ‘traffic-management measure’ and claimed that ‘illegal parking restricts traffic movement and causes congestion’. Even if this were always true, which it is not, it would not amount to a justification of the introduction of wheel clamping. Illegally parked cars which restrict traffic movement and cause congestion were not the kind of illegally parked cars being clamped under this new, inhuman regime, which zeroed in on easy targets: people who overstayed their time by a few minutes in a parking bay, or who overslept in the morning and came downstairs to encounter a yellow encumbrance adhering to their mode of transport. Wheel clamping was not a ‘traffic-management measure’, but a form of extortion.

The previous system of parking tickets was at least redeemed by some elements of humanity. Traffic wardens were usually vaguely human, and could be appealed to on that basis. Moreover, they had systems, which could be cracked. Once you figured out how a particular warden operated, it was possible to lengthen the odds on obtaining a penalty by various stratagems which are now, sadly, about to become obsolete. Under the old system, you sometimes won and sometimes lost, but generally speaking the system was fair, reasonable and flexible. The clamping regime left no prospect of escape, being inhuman not merely in its consequences, but also in its demeanour, in its imperviousness to human intervention. What had always been a blood sport became the equivalent of hare coursing.

Wheel clamping, of course, like so much else of our public policy, was an idea imported from Britain – imitation being the most noticeable talent of those who run our public affairs. It would never, of course, occur to such people to look at the broader context in which wheel clamping is implemented in Britain – the fact, for example, that it is combined with the benefits of a functioning public transport system. Wheel clamping has been in force in London for many years, but there is virtually no place in London where one is more than ten minutes’ walk from an Underground station, a system rendering any area of a vast metropolis reachable within an hour.