A Lawful Tyranny

                                                                

Tyranny is that which is legal for the government to do but illegal for the citizenry. In the recent history of Hitler’s Germany, all Jewish children were banned from public schools, and before the mass murder of Jews became law, even if it was hidden in open view, it was illegal for a jewish person to marry a German. This of course is the most extreme form of what a lawful tyranny means if you discount Stalin, the penal laws of England against Ireland, the slave trade in America and all the other countries that have had a hand in it at one time or another; dictators, monarchies and democracies have practised it and no country has clean hands whether they be Muslim, Christian, Communist, black, white, indian or anything in between. 

In Ireland’s very recent history it was legal to lock up a child that had landed in one of their Industrial Institutions or Magdalene laundries to be beaten, locked up in a lighted cell for up to 24 hours on bread and water; to be schooled for only two hours with manual labour for the remainder of the day. These laws only died when that system choked on its own vomit and the last of its kind closed in 1997. All of the above: Legal, yes, unjust, yes; normal, yes. It is that accepted normality and loss of outrage that can confuse and confound the most. Herd animals, that we are, explains a lot. Yet it is a more modern but still lawful tyranny that exists in Ireland today, getting entrenched almost unnoticed, and that is the law itself and the henchmen that run its well oiled engine. This is what I want to talk about today.

Recently, a student and victim of mistaken identity was handed a legal bill for over €1,600,000 over a small taxi fare in Dublin. His family of course are going to appeal this bill. The people that sunk this country into impossible debt by greed and corruption have not even even seen the inside of a court; it cost even more to keep them out of one. A couple fighting a neighbour over a hedge were landed a legal bill for over €500,000 by one gang of legal eagles, while Irish Water pays over €81,000 every week to another. And there is no point in starting on about what all the various tribunals has cost you and me and what it will cost our children, and our children’s children for the long and unforeseeable future. 

They say there is hope for the citizenry caught in the vice of litigation of otherwise petty cases, disallowing of course for the corrupt politicians and developers, and it may sound like real justice is standing before the light at the end of the tunnel: you can  actually apply to the Taxing Master about that rather high bill. And that is all you can do there and it has nothing to do with tax. A regal and very legal Clarence Darrow cloaked in morality while holding the scales of justice you might expect, trying to save us from all that has served to confuse, frighten and dominate us. Hold your breath.

No, it is not the Revenue department indeed, who it may be said are quite a benevolent lot compared to where you hope be going to sort out that legal robbery. If you feel you are being overcharged, defrauded, or otherwise being robbed, which is really the point of it all in the first place, you can only go to one place of all places and it is not the Taxing Master: It is the The Law Society.

As it says in the small print, this office is made up of more lawyers that judge the merits of any appeal of prospective, impoverished, and indentured slaves trying to get out from them and their secret society. One way or the other you will be shafted unless you, and only you, can find a way out. It starts with the simple knowledge of the law itself  and how the minions work that operate it for their own gain only; and it has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with law.  

Barry Clifford