I don't want to be here no more.

Had an unpleasant run-in with the police yesterday, minor enough for me but was left feeling very unsettled for the rest of the evening.

Late yesterday afternoon I was on my way out to buy a light bulb or two to replace the ones shorted out in our recent flood, and as I crossed the road I noticed that a middle-aged Chinese woman on a bicycle had been corralled by two motor-cycle cops. One had pulled in front of her at an angle, and the other behind her also at an angle, forming a triangle with her pinned against the curb. When I came back from the shop a few minutes later, she was still on her bicycle in the cycle-lane trapped between the two motorbikes, though the guards had dismounted and were now questioning her quite intensely about why she was in Ireland and how she got here.

As I wondered what traffic offence could necessitate not one but two cops to pull her over I heard them demanding to see her immigration papers and ID, and simultaneously saw my old company logo on her bicycle. A few years ago we gave every employee in Dublin (that wanted one) a bicycle, quite distinctive and painted in the company colours with our logo festooned across the crossbar quite prominently. Never on sale to the public, and an exact match to the one that gathers rust quite happily in the bike shed outside my house, the sight of it triggered the animalistic pack-mentality part of my brain and I found myself pushing past the Guards to see if she needed any assistance.

My former company had a very international workforce, and on more than one occasion I received frustrated calls from employees who had been refused entry onto Dublin-bound flights flights, or held up by the Gardai at Dublin airport immigration for imagined visa infractions. The fact that in every case the employee was Asian, African or Arab was never lost on me. Although I no longer work there I found myself still feeling protective towards this employee, and thought that at the least I could call the HR Director or the company lawyer and inform them of what was going on, for in my time the company was very protective of its employees, particularly those on secondment from another country.

To the visible disbelief of the Gardai, I pushed between them and approached the woman, asking her if she was an employee of the company. She looked confused, and I pointed at the bike and asked again if she worked for the company, to which she finally shook her head and said no. With that statement my self-confidence vanished, as I now realised I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The Gardai saw this and told me to leave or be arrested myself for obstruction.

To my shame, I backed away.

The problem was that I felt an immediate powerlessness, if she had been an employee I would have been able to place a few phone calls and set the wheels in motion to provide her with a proper level of support. Without the mechanism of the company behind her I was left with no idea as to how I could assist her in the face of such police intimidation. There was also the question rising in my mind as to how exactly she came into possession of the bicycle in the first place, but middle-age Chinese women are not known to be Dublin's most formidable bike thieves, and in any event it seems unlikely that two motorbike cops would be that interested in a lone bicycle thief given that a single bike cop couldn't be arsed putting down his kebab a few weeks ago to intervene when a scooter was being stolen (slowly) by a group of kids a hundred meters or so away.

As far as I could tell this was police intimidation of a non-white migrant worker, pure and simple. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

I have no respect for our police force. It's not that they are corrupt (which they are, from the actions of the entire Donegal force through to the drunken fistfight between two machine-gun toting on-duty officers in a pub near the American Embassy over whose round it was), racist (which they are, these are the folks who refused Youssou n'dour entry to the country to play a gig because they thought he would try and stay illegally) and ignorant (as my own experience of trying to motivate three separate officers to intervene in a crime is sadly indicative), its the fact that they know they are all of these things and wear this knowledge as a badge with pride. They know their reputation and they wallow in it, for they know they are untouchable.

And these are the people we have just given sweeping new powers to in the new Criminal Justice Bill, despite the protestations of over 130 criminal justice solicitors and barristers, who issued a statement saying:

"[The bill] has been introduced without any research to support its desirability and without canvassing expert opinion or inviting contribution from interested parties on the issues,"

They added that they were most concerned about the following proposals in the bill:

* The abolition of jury trial for a range of new offences (organised crime trials would be held in the non-jury Special Criminal Court).

* The use of opinion evidence from any garda as to the existence of a criminal organisation.

* The failure to require that the Garda opinion evidence be corroborated.

* The provision for secret hearings to extend detentions without the presence of the suspect or their lawyer.

"It is quite simply astounding that we as a society would jettison ancient rights and rules of evidence in such a manner and seemingly without regard to the effect such impetuous legislating might ultimately have on the respect for the rule of law in this country," the lawyers said."
(from the Irish Examiner).

Despite these serious objections the new Criminal Justice Bill passed yesterday by 118 to 23.

We are now living in a country where secret courts can convict people on the uncorroborated word alone of any Gardai, serving or retired. The same gardai two of whom are being tried in Cork for making false statements in a case where a member of the public was assaulted by a third Garda, four of whom are on trial for breaking into a youth's house and assaulting him, and a further is on trial for making false insurance claims. These incidents are all from the last three months alone, and are merely the tip of the iceberg.

As with the racist motorbike cops yesterday, so too with the Criminal Justice Bill as a whole, I am left sitting here genuinely despondent with a feeling of utter powerlessness.

And if I as a white middle-class male feel like that, what must life be like for the Chinese woman on the bicycle?

Moral Sentiments and a Theory of Justice

Went in to an interesting lecture last night given by Amartya Sen, the Indian Economist and Nobel Laureate, in TCD. Professor Sen was in Ireland to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity, and spoke for over two hours between a prepared lecture and an engaging Q&A session.

While the subject of Professor Sen's lecture was nominally 'On Global Confusion', touching on the current economic meltdown, he really focused on two core intertwined areas, the quest for a 'fourth way', and a rescuing of Adam Smith from the hands of the neoliberal agenda. He began by examining the three main failed (in his eyes) economic systems, Capitalism, Socialism and what is currently being offered as a New Capitalism by Blair, Sarkozy and Merkel. Unfettered and unrestricted markets have failed, he suggested, and it is clear that some government management in key areas was necessary. Planned economies of the Soviet Socialist model had also failed, despite initial early successes productivity and personal motivation suffered enormously under an over bureaucratized system. Sen also rejected calls for a 'New Capitalism', saying rather than simply trying to tweak the current system why not throw it out altogether and start afresh with something new?

But what is this new "Fourth Way" (my term, emphatically not his)? On this he was unfortunately less clear, and chose to describe it in terms of a reevaluation of the early work of Adam Smith, particularly "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", to which Sen has just finished writing an introduction for the new Penguin edition. First published 17 years before "Wealth of Nations", it sets out the moral framework in which all of Smith's later works should be read, and begins by stating:

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it."

Sen argued that the modern capitalist is flawed when they use Smith to justify their belief in the unregulated and unfettered hand of the market as the ideal, that in fact Smith would have been appalled by the current US economic system as it operates in a moral vacuum.

Sen's "Fourth Way" seems to stem from an absolute moral imperative; in answer to a later question from Mary Robinson he categorically stated that individuals had the moral duty to speak out against violations of universal human rights regardless of whether those violations occurred in anther sovereign state or within a system that did not regard its actions as violations of human rights. In a similar way any economic system must have at its heart the promotion of human sovereignty and dignity, based upon an explicit acknowledgment of a universal morality.

Where he wouldn't be drawn, even after further prompting from Mary Robinson, was on naming or labeling his alternative economic model. He argued that society gets too caught up on trying to label and apply a narrow definition to ideas, thereby simplifying and restricting them. No doubt these ideas are fleshed out more in his new book "The Idea of Justice", but at the end of the lecture I will admit to being left somewhat unsatisfied, feeling that he wasn't as outspoken as he could have been (or has in the past been), and left quite a lot of his arguments unfinished. It was a very enjoyable two hours nonetheless.

Also worth mentioning was the first question in the Q&A session, posed by veteran Labour parliamentarian Michael D. Higgins, asking whether a strict adherence to the tenants of rationality as a doctrine has damned us all. The asking of the question itself took almost ten minutes, but was done so in such an erudite and engaging manner that Sen seemed genuinely delighted to answer (he disagreed with Michael D, gently suggesting that there was a lot of truth in his question, but like a little knowledge, a great deal of truth can still lead to the wrong conclusions). Michael D. identified himself as an academic first, and a parliamentarian second, and I found myself genuinely depressed that we do not have more parliamentarians of his intelligence, education and oratory skills, who are in office because of their abilities, and not their genes.

"The Idea of Justice" is out at the end of July in Europe, and the Penguin edition of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" is out at the end of October.

You go away for a few days...

The advantage of traveling abroad with no internet access is the euphoric sense of isolation from the rest of the world and the escape from the infuriating realities of mundane life such isolation engenders. The disadvantage of such travel is the overwhelming sense of depression and futile anger that arise once one is confronted with all the nastiness that occurred while you were away, and confronted with it en masse.

In the last week alone the Government has announced the date of the Lisbon II Referendum, which asks the people to vote yet again on the same piece of legislation defeated last year (an action which within the proposed timeframe I was almost positive was in and of itself unconstitutional), given the green light to sweeping new police powers, non-jury trials and secret courts, and introduced unmerited curbs to free speech in a manner seemingly designed to incentivise legal action by religious groups against writers, broadcasters, film-makers and artists.

The Lisbon II campaign will be fought by the government on the basis of scare-tactics and fear mongering, again the public will be kept in the dark as to the content of the Reform Treaty, and will be told "Vote Yes, or our economy will destroyed". The sweeping police powers are being introduced under the guise of combating criminal gangs in Limerick and Dublin; instead of tackling the core problems of unemployment and deprivation that lead to drug dependency and give rise to gang activity the government is adopting the zero-tolerance approach that has proven to be fatally flawed in the UK and the US. The Blasphemy Bill is one that has arisen from nothing - no one is looking for it, it addresses no immediate need and the country has done quite well without for the last 72 years; quite why the government would spend any energy or resources on it at this particular point in time is beyond baffling.

More than ever I am convinced that the government continues to be completely out of step with the citizenry on so many issues because of the dynastic and hereditary nature of Irish politics. Our political representatives inherit their positions from their parents and spouses, and have no real skill, talent or aptitude for the job. They are elected on the basis of familial pedigree and lineage, and while in years gone by a theoretically strong and independent civil service has been able to keep the country afloat by pasting over the cracks caused by ministerial ineptitude, the deformities bred into our political classes by their Fibonacciesque multiplications are starting to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down around us.

If our current system of representative democracy is to be preserved (and I am not wedded to it myself in any way), a clean sweep of the decks is needed to allow it any chance to succeed. At the Green party conference earlier this year a motion was unsuccessfully tabled to prohibit any immediate relative of a politician to stand for the Green Party as their relative's immediate successor. The best thing that could happen to Irish politics would be to see a similar motion enacted as national law.

Well, not the best thing, but the best thing within the existing system of representative parliamentary democracy.