Update: all tests are complete, and we are going for the transfer today. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to transfer standing comments, so whilst we'll have all the stories complete, we are going to have to jettison some great work from the comments file. The Blogroll will go missing for a while too, but will gradually re-instated.

The Britain and Ireland site has been live for nearly a week now. But we have a launch reception at the Institute of Governance in Queens tomorrow evening starting at six o'clock. Trevor Ringland, former Irish rugby International and British and Irish Lion will be giving the keynote speech for the first sports related issue. If you want to come along let Catherine know at britishcouncil@dhr.ie or call 00 353 (0)1 707 1929.

Perhaps significantly, the BBC report of reaction to the total smoking ban in Northern Ireland did not note any responses by our own elected representatives.

In the absence of Stormont, the only means of expressing dissent over spending and tax decisions is through local councillors. However the various quangos (about 150 of them) who spend a large tranche of the public money in Northern Ireland are only indirectly accountable to councils. In turn, Hain is left with making choices for which he is primarily accountable to the UK taxpayer in general. It puts severe limits on the extent he can be amenable to local views.

And for that state of affairs, the current Secretary of State is not solely to blame.

Tele subscribers can read a Davy Gordon backgrounder here.

In his hare-brained attempt to strike a blow against capitalism - in this case offering the multinational businessman his freedom in exchange for jailed IRA comrades - Gallagher could hardly have imagined the scale of working-class disgust at his actions.

Herrema was seen as a jobs provider and beneficial to the local economy, even though his company would, argues Eamonn McCann plausibly, be leaving Ireland as soon as the tax breaks dried up. So when Ferenka did eventually shut up shop, it wasn't the Irish Government or the company that got the blame - it was Eddie Gallagher and his friends.

No wonder he sounds so disillusioned in McCann's revealing interview.

The BBC report also notes the discovery, during the initial stages of the project, of a previously unknown manuscript history of Ireland -

The work, which is being carried out by the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages, is being officially launched in Dublin on Tuesday by the Republic's Minister of Arts, Sport and Tourism John Donoghue.

During the course of initial research the project team discovered a previously unknown manuscript about the history of Ireland, the Historia, which was written by Robert O'Connell in the 17th century.

It will also be translated and published for the first time.

And from the University of Ulster press release -

The Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster is at present translating the Commentarius and will host this translation online at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages. The website which will be launched on Tuesday 25 October contains the first tranche of translated material.

The English translation of the Commentarius Rinuccinianus will be completed by October 2007 and will be made available online.

The project team intend to publish the translation on-line at three-monthly intervals, in advance of the formal explication of the text by the Editorial Board.

The translation project is being funded by the Irish Government Department for Arts, Sport and Tourism

I'm still looking for the online content.. which is due to be hosted at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages.. I'll update when I find it.

As Susan McKay reports, ANC Executive member and South African Communist Party member, and current SA minister for intelligence, Ronnie Kasrils, had this to say -

"I could never accept that Sinn Féin has debased republicanism," said Mr Kasrils. "They carried the flag of republicanism in the most difficult of times. We respect the Irish Government, but I would say that is sour grapes, and a sign they are feeling the pressure, with the growing popularity of Sinn Féin. The Irish struggle is a particularly heroic one."

He's also a fan of the much vaunted Truth and Reconciliation Process, for understandable reasons -

Mr Kasrils, a former deputy minister for defence, is on the ANC's executive, and is a member of the South African Communist Party. He said he was proud of his "military service".

He believed in the need for a process of truth and reconciliation as had occurred in South Africa. He had taken part in the process. "We detonated a car bomb in front of the headquarters of the air force in Pretoria - 30 people died and 300 were injured. As part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I met an air force officer who was blinded during that attack.

"It was the most moving experience for me. He came to see why we had done it, and he has now dedicated himself to spreading understanding about the conflict and its resolution."

Meanwhile Fintan O'Toole takes a look at the various attempts by the Irish Government to commemorate 1916, and, in addition, points out that Sinn Féin's more recent focus on anniversaries has much more to do with the present and the future than the past -

At Bodenstown, the comrades were told that "We also need to start preparing to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Rising." The party's agenda in all of this is admirably explicit.

It is not about the past, but about the present and the future. It recognises, implicitly at least, that the IRA's atrocities tarnished the glamour of traditional armed nationalism, especially in the Republic. The car bombs, assassinations and disappearances disappearances undermined the claim to continuity with the noble past.

By reclaiming that past, Sinn Féin is, in Conor Murphy's words, "re-popularising the republican struggle." Next year, with its co-incidence of the 90th anniversary of the rising with the 25th anniversary of the hunger strikes, offers a perfect opportunity to link two sets of martyrs who sacrificed themselves for the continuing cause, to merge Patrick Pearse and Bobby Sands into a single, resonant image of past sacrifice that demands future fulfilment.

In contrast the Irish Government's attempts at anniversaries have been undermined by the public's luke-warm reaction to the absence of, what Fintan O'Toole describes as, the death-cult -

This is, as we know, potent stuff, and constitutional politicians have long been unsure about how to deal with it.

The Free State government tried to make the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty into an annual Independence Day, but heroic compromises don't have the same charisma as heroic violence, and the experiment was dropped after a single effort in 1924.

The National Day of Commemoration, which strives to honour the complexity of 20th century Irish history by commemorating all the Irish dead in all wars, was instituted in 1985 but has never caught the public imagination, probably for the same reason. The 1798 bicentenary in 1998 explicitly sought to shift attention "from the military aspects of 1798 . . . Towards the principles of democracy and pluralism which the United Irishman advocated." Again, the aim was worthy, but it was hard not to feel that drawing attention away from the military aspects of one of the bloodiest episodes in modern history was rather missing the point. As for 1916, the State dealt with it by not dealing with it at all. After 1970, when the apparently harmless rhetoric of the 50th anniversary celebrations in 1966 had taken on a grisly reality on the streets of Belfast and Derry, the Easter parade, in which the army marched past the GPO, was stopped. The 75th anniversary in 1991 was marked by a hideously embarrassed semi-revival of the tradition in which a desperately uncomfortable President Robinson laid a wreath and everyone scarpered before the populace had its nationalist passions inflamed.

Having failed to come up with a form of commemoration that is both sufficiently emotive to matter and sufficiently balanced to be healthy - perhaps an impossible task - the Government has now panicked and decided to pretend that the Northern Ireland conflict never happened. We are to return to the assumptions of 1966 - that you can hold up as role models to the young an armed, unelected elite which seeks to impose its will by force of arms, without suffering any consequences. We will play the game of military glamour and win it by insisting that the men and women of the Defence Forces trump the men and women of the IRA.

He argues that, while it may be a worthy attempt by Fianna Fáil, it's a PR battle that faces some obvious obstacles -

Ask yourself this. Who is Kevin Joyce? Who is Bobby Sands? Both died in the same year on what each regarded as Irish military service.

Kevin Joyce's body is still somewhere in the Lebanon. Which is the more potent figure in Irish popular memory? If republicanism is understood as a death-cult, Sinn Féin's claims to control it will always beat the Government's.

The only way to reclaim republicanism, for Fianna Fáil and for everyone else, is to give it meaning by taking liberty, equality and solidarity seriously.

He wonders:

...whether Murrow's triumph did not lead, if inadvertently, to a half-century of journalistic haughtiness, self-importance and separation from the public, which is proving to be the downfall of the news business today.

Specifically:

Murrow's disciples came to believe that the wattage of their broadcast towers entitled them to equivalent power in society. They thought they were no longer just hacks looking out for the common man - as common men themselves - but were instead saviours of society, and rich ones at that. Not merely "newsreaders", as you call them in Britain, our TV faces dubbed themselves "anchors". And they gave Murrow's home, CBS, not a diminutive nickname like "the Beeb", but instead crowned it "the Tiffany Network". They thought they could do no wrong.

These founding fathers of TV news could convince themselves of their invincibility because they came into journalism just as television itself destroyed competition among local newspapers. In almost every market in America, TV's entrance established an era of media monopolies, of fewer voices and less diversity of views. CBS News, and the rest of TV and print journalism, became isolated atop the pedestals they built for themselves.

He goes on to make the case that the role of the everyman is being played these days by a legion of bloggers, where the big market news organisations have failed to keep listening to people. However, towards the end he wonders about the long term effects of endless disaggregation that blogging is so often dependent upon:

Yet Good Night did gave me pause. It made me wonder whether we might miss the omnipresent platform that broadcast news was. For it was that power that allowed Murrow to subdue McCarthy and defend democracy. In our new, distributed world, we'll have to re-aggregate ourselves into a powerful chorus of voices to be heard. Will we be loud enough? We don't yet know.

Empey has said that old style UUP dissent will have to have limits and Danny Kennedy has talked of the need for the party to speak to itself first: "We want to provide mechanisms for contact between constituency organisations, councillors, Assembly members and headquarters and it is not so much about legal change as a cultural change."

He is effectively appealing to those, perhaps, some 30% of Catholics that may emotionally feel themselves to be Nationalist, but who are likely to put economic questions foremost when considering the consequences of constitutional change.

As most Germans will say, there were cultural differences that grew in the lifespan of the DDR but in the main that did not the reflect the historical and cultural split in Germany. As one German teacher remarked to me back in the 80s, "when they cut the country, they cut it the wrong way - it should have been North South, not East West".

The analogy with the Berlin Wall is an interesting one. It seemed to require the moral collapse of eastern government to propel the population towards a western lifestyle that they'd seen on tv, but had been forceably (on pain of death) kept from. It's hard to see what might act similarly on the (for want of a better term) 'dissenting Catholics' in Northern Ireland.

The story as published was primarily based on information provided by a highly regarded source in Moscow who works with both the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and statements made by the Moscow City Police Information department.

Now the Minister of Justice is resurrecting a plan for the introduction of a press council to monitor complaints and to take punative action where necessary.

According to the statement by Peter Hain, the Interim Commissioner will carry out the following duties -

Review arrangements for service delivery and coordination of services for victims and survivors across Departments and Agencies, identifying any gaps in service provision.

Review how well the current funding arrangements in relation to services and grants paid to victims and survivors groups and individual victims and survivors are addressing need. At present around 50 groups are in receipt of Government grants.

Consider the modalities of establishing a Victims and Survivors Forum.

And this is to be carried out without permanent premises.. all contact is to be conducted through the Victims Unit of the Offices of the First and Deputy First Minister.

However, according to the Victims Unit website, the then-Victims' Minister reported a summary of responses to her consultation on those services in October 2004 -

Victims’ Minister, Angela Smith, has now published a summary of the responses (pdf 91kb) she received to her consultation on the next phase of Government policies to address the needs of those affected by the troubles in Northern Ireland. The Minister is now in the process of drawing up proposals for improvements in the arrangements for the planning, coordination and delivery of the services provided to victims.

This was followed by a further consultation by the then Secretary of State Paul Murphy, issued in March 2005 -

The Secretary of State Paul Murphy has made a Written Ministerial Statement to Parliament on the future of victims’ and survivors’ services in Northern Ireland including the Government’s initial proposals for a new Victims’ and Survivors’ Commissioner. A consultation document (pdf 399 kb) on the proposals for future services and a Victims’ and Survivors’ Commissioner has been published by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. The consultation period will run until 30 June 2005.

Any sign of a report on that consultation?

And with legislation still to be brought forward to establish a permanent post of Victims Commissioner, a post which I've already noted my dissent on, the statement by Peter Hain further calls into question both the timing and the purpose of this appointment.

Anyone in favour of joined-up Government? Anyone??

Whilst speaking as an invited guest and not being a party member, his comments were as scathing on the DUP as they were on HMG:

It is crucial that we need to set aside the carping that is the property of the Democratic Unionist party and look towards a positive aspect

David Burnside opened his remarks by drawing attention to the novel properties of his support for party policy; that is retention of at least one Battalion of the Home Service. When such a question was raised during the debate, both Collins and East Belfast UUP Chairman, Colonel Isaac Clark stated their belief that this was not a possibility. Collins restated his assertion that with the success of Operation Banner, the men and women of the Royal Irish Regiment Home Service can "stand down with pride".

Towards the end of the debate former Councillor Colonel Harvey Bicker requested that the term "RIR" not be used given the abbreviation is officially "R IRISH" and spoken as "Royal Irish". He requested that referring to the Regiment as the RIR should be left to Jeffrey Donaldson and Gerry Adams.

As RTÉ notes -

The Eurovision Song Contest stars, including Johnny Logan, Eimear Quinn, Linda Martin, Riverdance, The Olsen Brothers and pop celebrities like Ronan Keating will perform spectacular medleys of the most loved, most popular and most memorable moments from the Eurovision Song Contest.

Which Riverdance are performing, however, isn't quite clear..

Those who are attending are listed here

From the Guardian report -

In an interview with the Guardian, Sir David King said there were economic as well as environmental reasons for a new generation of reactors. He said nuclear power had "the safest record of all the power industries in the world". Professor King, who has previously said more nuclear power stations "may be necessary" to meet carbon dioxide emission targets, said the decline of North Sea oil and gas could tip the balance.

"We need indigenous energy sources so we don't rely on imported gas from Russia. We're the last in the pipeline across Europe, so a second requirement is that we have a secure energy supply. Indigenous supplies include all renewables and nuclear."

Relying on renewable sources including wind, solar and wave power to replace lost capacity when existing nuclear power stations close would be a "remarkably tough challenge," he said. "At the moment 24% of energy on the grid comes from nuclear power; by 2020 that will be down to 4%. That gap of 20% is going to be very difficult to cover over the period 2010 to 2020 without new nuclear build."

According to the UTV report, Reg Empey's speech included an attack on the now Rt Hon Ian Paisley's DUP -

In the two years since the DUP became Northern Ireland`s largest party in the Assembly elections, Sir Reg said republicans had been able to secure a tidal wave of concessions.

"It is nearly two years since the DUP assumed the mantle of the largest union party," the East Belfast MLA said.

"In that time, instead of their promises being fulfilled, we have seen a tidal wave of concessions which continue to father[gather?] momentum, a failed so-called comprehensive agreement in December last year where the DUP agreed in principle to enter government with Sinn Fein.

"After two years we still have no devolution.

"Sinn Fein, Downing Street and Dublin form the main decision-makes axis.

"Unionists are back where they started in the 1980s. All this concerns me greatly but Ian Paisley is fit to say that unionist confidence has never been higher! I don`t know where he is living at present."

It's an analysis which, while possibly playing well to the party faithful, is somewhat undermined by the comments which preceded it -

"Let`s be clear about this: the Provos have suffered a military defeat.

"No victorious so-called army hands over weapons to a commission established by its enemy.

"Oh yes, they`ll still be around, doing a bit of enforcing here, a bit of smuggling there.

"For republicans who murdered, maimed, bombed and robbed for 35 years their needless and futile war is at an end.

"But generally speaking, they`ll become political just as others have and we in the Ulster Unionist Party and the DUP will have to deal with that reality.

"Let me say it again: The Provisional IRA has failed."

Perhaps Reg will clarify how those seemingly contradictory analyses co-exist in the coming months..

However, he seems to have ended his speech with a rather unlikely, and unflattering, comparison -

"Together we can secure our cherished Union. We will settle for nothing less.

"In the slightly amended words of the current governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger: we`ll be back."[added emphasis]

Honestly.. give him a pair of shades and a leather jacket and you wouldn't be able to tell them apart...

When promoting it in the pages of The Nation, Davis – the descendant of a Cromwellian soldier – knew what he was talking about when he told his Catholic fellow countrymen that “if you would liberate Ireland and keep it free, you must have Protestant help – if you would win the Protestants you must address their reason, their hopes and their pride”.

And that depended on conciliation. “For if,” he wrote, “instead of kindness by zealous love and by candid and wise teaching, you insult his tastes and his prejudices and force him either to adopt your cause or to resist it... if instead of slow persuasion, your weapons are bullying and intolerance, then your profession of moral force is a lie, and a lie which deceives no one, and your attacks will be promptly resisted by every man of spirit”.

Dick Keane is right when he calls for a “decommissioning (of) our nationalist mind-set”.

But it needs to be replaced by one based on the concept of nationality preached by Davis which would include and actively involve the Protestant unionist/loyalist people.

As reported by Michael O'Regan in the Irish Times -

Mr Treacy was replying, on the adjournment, to Dublin South East deputies John Gormley (Green Party), Ruairí Quinn (Labour) and to Pat Carey (FF), Dublin North West.

He said the upholding of the rights of Irish citizens, arrested outside the jurisdiction, was an ongoing part of the work of the Department of Foreign Affairs. "Our officials work to ensure that Irish citizens are in no way treated in a discriminatory manner and that they are provided with appropriate legal assistance at all times."

But for a flavour of the tone of debate in the Dáil the comments of Green Party TD, John Gormley, are worth noting -

Mr Gormley said the US had little time for civil liberties unless, of course, it involved one of their own citizens, which was why, he presumed, they had not signed up to the international criminal court. "The presumption of innocence, until proven guilty, is the cornerstone of our legal system. Mr Garland may have political views that the US does not approve of; he may have political views that I, or indeed Deputy Quinn and Deputy Carey, do not approve of...

"The issue here is justice and we, as Irish parliamentarians and Europeans, cannot afford to abandon those hard-fought principles of justice for a legal system that has been devised by George W. Bush."

A legal system devised by George W Bush?!! Shome mishtake there.. shurely?

Oh dammit, the comments are still off aren't they. Pay up and get them on again!

From the Belfast Telegraph report -

Mr Corry warned party procedures were completely contrary to company law and must be changed as soon as possible.

"In my corporate experience I have never heard of this timing," the recently-appointed Mr Corry said.

"It seems to me totally unbelievable to ask officers to stand for election to a board which will be run by persons unknown. It is the norm to have the senior members appointed first, then the potential candidates for the balance of the posts can make an informed judgement as to whether they want to serve under those senior officers."

According to a report on TalkBack the UUP sought legal advice to confirm that the selection of party officers at the conference could go ahead as planned.

From the Press Association report -

IMC member Dick Kerr said that the IRA`s July 28 pledge to disarm was potentially very significant but it was too early to make an informed assessment on whether it would become a purely political body by next year.

He told a Dublin news conference: "It`s too early to make more than a limited assessment although the initial signs are encouraging.

"We`re talking about a very limited amount of time and that time has not allowed us to reflect on the whole range of activities. "

IMC member and former Northern Ireland Assembly speaker Lord Alderdice cautioned against the term "clean bill of health" being used and said that activities like exiling were still being carried out.

"I`ve cautioned people against the use of the term `clean bill of health`," he said. "I`m a doctor and I genuinely think it is ill-advised to give anybody a clean bill of health because they sometimes go straight out the door and collapse on you.

"We will monitor things and give the evidence as we see it and others must then make their judgment on what that means for the future."

On the issue of exiling, Lord Alderdice said: "There is not evidence that this has been set aside."

He said that some media reports of the IMC`s 60-page dossier had said that the IRA`s criminal activity had stopped.

"That is not what we have said," he added.

Feel free to consult any previous comments you may have made on the topic of surcharges and fitness for office at this post.

In accordance with BBFC guidelines. Eric the Unread got a 12A certificate.. and I get an 18, for some reason.. hmmm.. btw the quiz itself is definitely 18. See what your rating is! Created by bart666

What this supposedly means -

Suitable for 18 years or older. This is real life. Anything in this category is considered to be of subject matter relating to adult life, that happens day in and day out. Walking down the street is an 18 certificate. You have a life, well done.

Examples: American Beauty, Scary Movie

Who knew!?!

To fix it satisfactorily, we need to move Slugger from Moveable Type to a more reliable and flexible platform. To do that, we are going to need to spend money. How much I don't yet know, since I've not been able to talk to the guys at Big Blog Company to find out how much it will cost. But it will cost a hell of a lot more than I have sitting around in my back pocket.

Without the comments Slugger would continue to be a blog - certainly. But the ability of people with such a mix of views to (mostly positively) kick political footballs with people they might never otherwise meet has emense value. We know that, because that's what you've told us!

But, at risk of being overly vulgar, it's not going to happen without money.

So we're going to kick off a SOS - Save Our Slugger - campaign. We'll shortly have a new Paypal donation button which can accept Visa and other payments. There also the old fashioned way, by cheque and pony express. So please, if only half our regulars gave a tenner each, we could do it tomorrow. And there'd be a few pounds left in the kitty.

So please: give, give, give!

In relation to the activities of the Provisional IRA it has this to say -

3.18 In conclusion, on PIRA we emphasise again that as the PIRA statement of 28 July came at a point when 5/6ths of the period under review had already elapsed it is too early to be drawing firm conclusions about possible overall changes in behaviour, although we do note some indications of changes in PIRA structures. Clearly we are looking for cumulative indications of changes in behaviour over a more sustained period of time, building on the PIRA statement of 28 July and the decommissioning of weapons reported by the IICD on 26 September.

While on the UDA its verdict is damning -

3.26 The UDA said in a statement it issued in November 2004 that it would desist from “military activity”. Whatever meaning the UDA may ascribe to this term, we believe it is clear that the organisation is involved in violent and other serious crime and that it remains an active threat to the rule of law in Northern Ireland. Some of the recent activities of the UDA described above raise questions about the status of the UDA ceasefire. We will address this more fully in our next report.

And equally damning on the UVF -

3.30 The UVF continues to recruit members; some recruits receive extensive training, including in the use of firearms, others receive basic training. The UVF is also involved in organised crime, including drugs. We conclude that the UVF is, in the words of our Fifth Report, “active, violent and ruthless” and we believe it will continue to use violence where it thinks that would be in its interests. It remains an extremely dangerous organisation.

But despite these assessments, and the recommendation that, on Sinn Féin -

6.4 We have said earlier in this report that five of the six months under review precede the PIRA statement and that it is therefore too early for us on this occasion to be drawing firm conclusions about possible changes in the organisation’s overall behaviour. Although the initial signs are encouraging we do not therefore make any comment at this stage on the recommendation we previously made about the financial support Sinn Féin receives in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Nor do we pursue the point we then made separately about whether it should receive public money from other sources.

and, on the PUP -

6.6 Finally, on the PUP, up to the time of presentation of this report we have not seen evidence which presently causes us to change our previous recommendation on the removal of financial support for the Party in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The IMC's recommendations are worth noting -

Recommendations

7.3 Article 7 of the International Agreement allows us to recommend:

Any remedial action we consider necessary in respect of the matters on which we are reporting under Article 4.

Any measure we think might appropriately be taken by the Northern Ireland Assembly. This part of the Article does not apply while the Assembly remains unrestored, but that does not prevent us from saying what we would have done had it been sitting, or from making recommendations to the Secretary of State about the exercise of the powers he has in these circumstances. We have done both these things in earlier reports.

7.4 In responding to paramilitary crime we recommend that the Governments of the UK and of Ireland should introduce licensing regimes which would enable the
closure of businesses which have been engaged in the illicit fuel trade and would keep out of the industry all those who have been involved in that illicit trade,
together with anyone fronting for them.

In response, Secretary of State, Peter Hain, has already stated that he will restore the Assembly alloweances to Sinn Féin as well as their Parliamentary expenses.. and he will continue to allow the PUP to receive their Assembly allowance in spite of their continued and restated links to the UVF - and in spite of the repeated recommendation of the IMC first given in the 5th IMC report, published in May, that the PUP's Assembly allowances be withdrawn.

Here's the list of the 30 least corrupt countries on the Index, and the full results [pdf file] -

Figures indicate - Rank, Country, 2005 CPI score

1 Iceland 9.7

2 Finland 9.6
New Zealand 9.6

4 Denmark 9.5

5 Singapore 9.4

6 Sweden 9.2

7 Switzerland 9.1

8 Norway 8.9

9 Australia 8.8

10 Austria 8.7

11 Netherlands 8.6
United Kingdom 8.6

13 Luxembourg 8.5

14 Canada 8.4

15 Hong Kong 8.3

16 Germany 8.2

17 USA 7.6

18 France 7.5

19 Belgium 7.4
Ireland 7.4

21 Chile 7.3
Japan 7.3

23 Spain 7.0

24 Barbados 6.9

25 Malta 6.6

26 Portugal 6.5

27 Estonia 6.4

28 Israel 6.3
Oman 6.3

30 United Arab Emirates 6.2

Update The BBC report on the Corruption Index... and the RTÉ report are both worth noting.

As the RTÉ report points out -

Ten years ago Ireland was deemed the 11th least corrupt country with a score of 8.57.

Transparency International, which compiles the rankings from among 159 countries, says the Irish ranking is relatively high in international terms, but falls well short of the scores allocated to its northern European neighbours. Iceland is perceived to be the 'least corrupt country' with a score of 9.7 and is closely followed by Finland on 9.6 out of 10. The UK also scores highly with 8.6 out of 10.

According to John Devitt, acting CEO of Transparency International Ireland, the 'sobering' decline in Ireland's international standing should provide the impetus for reform.

Orange rule from Stormont was characterised by systematic discrimination against Catholics and contemptuous disregard for human rights. The civil rights movement was both inevitable and entirely justified. But Orangeism wasn't Nazism and it is an insult to the victims of Nazism to imply that their suffering was on a par with the pain of any section of the North's people under Stormont.

The plain Protestants never denied a Catholic a job or a house or anything else. They didn't have the distribution of these commodities in their gift. Did the Protestants of the Fountain, Rosemount, Bishop Street etc. run Derry Corporation as a bastion of bigotry from the inception of the State to the onset of the civil rights movement? Hardly. In all of that time, there was scarcely a woman and fewer than a dozen men of the working class on the Unionist benches in the Guildhall.

Love this note on the NewsBlog

Ms Widdecombe had in fact been queueing patiently to cast her vote from 12.50pm and was first in line, but unfortunately was waiting at the wrong door.

Oops.

Although I'm wondering how those findings will be different from the reports from the Poverty and Social Exclusion Project?

"The danger to those strong communities founded on homogeneous individuals who have character is growing stupidity, which follows all stability like a shadow. It is the individuals who have fewer ties and are much more uncertain and morally weaker upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities; they are the men who make new and manifold experiments."

Lloyd argues that every party/tradition, needs a leading dissenter to effect real change. He draws mostly from British parliamentary history, citing D'Israeli, Churchill and Ernest Bevan as prime examples of men who thought and acted across the currents of orthodoxy in their own traditions and in doing so effected substantial and lasting changes.

But his thesis is one that could be fed on and made relevant to the local scene in so many, many ways. Who'll give us a starter for ten?

Instead he conducted a silent comparison with the history of the city he was in and now provides a useful historical corrective to those, like Jude Collins, who simply look to the response of Ian Paisley Jr for validation of Fr Reid's absurd claim -

We love to talk about the exquisite and allegedly unique dilemmas of our national identity, how complicated and confusing it is, how richly ambiguous, how deeply unsettled.

Wroclaw, a single city of around 650,000 people, has had about 50 names in its recorded history; among them Vratislavia, Vrestlav, Vraclav, Presslau and, until 1945, Breslau.

It has been Slavic, Hanseatic, Polish, Bohemian, German and Polish again. Its multiple languages, teeming identities and shifting religious allegiances have been shaped by forced as well as voluntary migrations.

Prior to the Nazi rise to power, Breslau had one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany, with 20,202 members in 1933. Within weeks of Hitler's rise to power, the thugs of the SA attacked Jewish judges and lawyers in Breslau's courthouse, signalling the start of the city's "purification". Gradually, the Jewish population was moved to the suburbs, then to "housing communes" in the Polish countryside.

From these camps, those who had not already died from the rough treatment and woeful conditions were sent on to the concentration camps at Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and elsewhere. It was to the university in Breslau that the sexual organs of Jews, who were the subject of horrific medical experiments in the camps, were sent for study.

The suffering in Breslau was not only that of Jews, however. The Polish population was expelled from the city. Polish Catholics, political dissidents, homosexuals, the disabled and the mentally ill were murdered. The German population itself, some of which had been moved in by the Nazis to replace the exterminated Jews, experienced horrific violence in the last months of the war. The city was unfortunate enough to be declared "Fortress Breslau" by Hitler and to be the site of a fanatical Nazi resistance to the Soviets that made it the last German city to surrender, four days after Berlin. In the course of the siege, an estimated 170,000 civilians died and 70 per cent of the city was destroyed. Many of the surviving women and girls were raped by Soviet troops. The entire German population was then forcibly expelled. Breslau got a new Polish name (Wroclaw) and a new Polish population. All of this happened within living memory. (The "persecution" of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland evoked by Fr Reid went back as far as 1921.)

And he argues that there is no excuse for an absence of a general sense of proportion, for being wary of comparisons, or analogies, that are as inaccurate as they are offensive -

Whatever the "provocation", any Irish person should have an instinctive knowledge that the very real sufferings of Catholics in Belfast or Derry don't even begin to compare with those of the Germans in a city like Wroclaw, never mind those of the Jews. How would we feel if some English twit compared post-war rationing of food in Britain to the Famine?

The irony of all the hyper-inflation of the experiences of Catholics in Northern Ireland after partition by invoking the Nazis or, as Sinn Féin tends to prefer, apartheid South Africa, is that it actually occludes those experiences themselves. It discredits history itself as a context in which we can understand the present. You can't really talk about the present-day consequences of decades of structural discrimination if you treat the past as a balloon to be filled with so much hot rhetorical air that it either floats off into absurdity, or bursts with violence. And it also comes back to haunt you. If, as Fr Reid claimed, the present Protestant community "should be absolutely ashamed of itself" because of unionist misrule, it follows that the entire Catholic community has to accept responsibility for the atrocities of the IRA.

Avoiding responsibility is what this self-pity is all about, for it tries to invent a Catholic community that suffered everything and perpetrated nothing. To believe in that illusion, you need to perfect your ignorance of the recent history, not just of Europe but of Ireland.[emphasis added]