Schools’ discrimination of pupils with health needs out of order

Photo credit: Luke Kelly Meli, above, has cerebral palsy and was denied his assistance dog at school and was awarded €5,500 in August. Another school refused to take an emergency kit for a child with anaphylaxis and has to pay out €9,000. 

LAST month this newspaper highlighted a case in which a boy with cerebral palsy was awarded €5,500 by the Workplace Relations Commission for discrimination over how he had been treated at his primary school.

Another ruling published on Friday last suggests this was not an isolated case. The latest example concerns a gaelscoil that failed to keep vital medicine on its premises for a boy with a respiratory disability during a stand-off between the school and the boy’s parents. (The WRC ruling does not identify the school or the boy at the parents’ request).

The boy suffers from wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis — which means a severe allergic reaction is triggered after ingestion of wheat-based foods when followed by physical exercise.

The condition is not uncommon. Four pupils in the school in question suffer from the same ailment, but it does require that the sufferer has access to an emergency medical kit, which contains auto-injectors, inhaler, and antihistamines.

The boy began school in 2011. His parents informed the school of his condition and there was no issue. The parents arranged for three volunteer teachers to be trained in what to do in the event of an emergency.

At the beginning of the 2013 school year, the parents were handed an indemnity form in which they were required to agree “to see whether one of the three members of staff trained to administer the emergency medicine were working that day”.

The parents were shocked. The requirement would compel them to check every day when dropping off their son whether one of the three were working. If one of the three were not visible outside in the morning, the parents would have to go in search of them within the school to confirm their presence.

The principal said she would bring the matter to the school board, which confirmed the requirements, adding that “it is also the view of the board that it is a matter for you, as parents, to make the necessary alternative arrangements should it be that none of the listed volunteering teachers are in attendance or available in school on any given day”. The school, it added, would accommodate in any “reasonable way” in such an eventuality.

A compromise was then reached in which the principal would contact the parents if the three staff members were absent on any day.

The situation came to a head the following September at the start of the school year. On the first day, the father handed the emergency kit for the new school year to the vice principal but was then told by the principal that it couldn’t be accepted because the staff had not received up-to-date medical training.

There had been attempts by the parents to arrange for training for the staff over the previous few weeks, but that hadn’t been possible. In any event, the training received the previous January was still valid until the end of the calendar year.

One issue that arose was who was responsible for arranging the training. According to INTO policy, that was down to the school. A public health nurse approached by the parents also responded that the school should contact her to arrange a time for training. On that basis, the parents asked that the school policy document be adjusted to reflect that the school take responsibility for the training.

On the second day of the school year, the boy wanted to go to school but the emergency kit was not on the premises as the policy issue had not been sorted out. In order to facilitate him his father stayed in his car outside the school for the day, just in case any emergency would arise.

Then a bereavement occurred that kept the boy out of school for three days, but when he wanted to return thereafter the matter was still not resolved. The father, who had missed a week at work between the bereavement and being on guard outside the school the previous Friday, couldn’t take more time off. Yet the school still wouldn’t play ball.

The boy had to go home. “He wanted to see his friends as he had been at a funeral the previous three days,” according to the evidence heard at the WRC.

“His parents say he remained upset for the rest of the weekend.”

The stand-off persisted for another four days, despite the intervention of the parents’ GP who phoned the school on behalf of the family. The parents were left in an invidious position. At one stage, the principal said she would take responsibility for some of the kit only.

“Realising the seriousness of the situation, Anaphylaxis Ireland [which had been contacted by the family] contacted the school directly and informed the principal that she cannot pick and choose which parts of the emergency kit that she decides is necessary for the child’s safety.”

Over the following days, the issue got sorted, but not before the boy and his family had been put through major worry. They brought an action on the basis that their son had been treated differently because of his disability.

The school argued that its board and the principal acted in good faith at all times and that the three other pupils with a similar condition did not experience any problem.

However, the WRC ruled that discrimination had occurred, although it rejected complaints of bullying and victimisation. The ruling noted that: “The school should regard themselves as fortunate that they are not defending proceedings in the superior courts, or, worse, giving evidence in a coroner’s court. Had his parents not detained the complainant at home for a day, his father sit [sic] in his car outside the school for another day and dosed him up on antihistamines on the other days that is what the board of management could have been facing.”

The maximum allowable award for this kind of case is €15,000, and taking the circumstances into account, the deciding officer made an award of €9,000.

“In considering redress, I am cognisant that the complainant was only denied reasonable accommodation for nine days. However, it bears repeating that his emergency medical kit contained life-saving medication so it was a serious breach of the acts.”

The boy and a sister are reported to still be attending the school and are happy there.

Like the earlier case reported here this one shows what happens when the priorities of a school get all mixed up. In such cases, it is the children who come off worst, when their welfare should be the primary concern at all times.

Michael Clifford

Illegitimate

                                              

‘The very private drama of mother and son began on May 12, 1965, when O’Mara gave birth to an illegitimate child, the product of a brief liaison with actor David Orchard.’ This was part of an article that was printed in a major British newspaper recently written by a writer who has not caught up yet with the 21st century or the more enlightened healthy norms that are associated with it. The article was about the life and death of a British actress called Kate O’ Mara. He is not alone of people who write like this; many writers for the Catholic Church and other “Christian’ faith propaganda news sheets do too. It is the word ‘illegitimate’ that inflames any reasoned free thinking person of the past, the present, and hopefully always the future.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines the word illegitimate as this: (1) Not recognized as lawful off spring; specifically: born of parents not married to each other. (2) Not rightly deduced or inferred: Illogical. (3) Departing from the regular: erratic (4) Not sanctioned by law (5) Not authorized by good usage.

Please note: some other dictionary definitions define the word illegitimate as 'bastard'  

There is more but you get the point, though how can a child be associated in part or in full with such a word that is more intentioned to define fraud and white collar crime is beyond me, or that the miracle of birth of a truly innocent is a crime, or of the parents that committed that natural act of lovemaking have it classed as a heinous act? 

It is all about power and indoctrination that is religion, any religion, where the only proof asked and given is that you be one of the faithful from a long tradition that was founded on fear. That tradition is the only proof that is offered for such a twisted morality on the miracle of birth. Religious right is driven only by the might of numbers, much like politics, and mercifully those numbers are falling fast even with the die hard members of the major mainstream occult religions that can brand any baby as illegitimate.

For the many children abandoned, and given away for profit by religious groups that were in involved in ‘illegitimate’ adoptions just in this small country of Ireland alone; for those who were buried in secret here by shamed mothers because of the scaremongering of the local Taliban priest; for those hidden on remote islands and hilltops less they assail the purity of thoughts of the faithful or spoil the view of the countryside, may this never happen ever again. 

To those yet to be born, or their parents, may they never again be stigmatized by a word that is so misused to describe them as that word called ‘illegitimate’ that started the destruction of many children and their parents down through the ages before and after the darkness; and may Philomena Lee yet be reunited with her beloved 'illegitimate' son somewhere in the light beyond just above the clouds and the fear.

Barry Clifford 

The conundrum of mind and matter: what is consciousness?

Mind control: Inside Out is set in the brain of a girl, Riley, with her emotions played by five different actors.

It’s early in the morning and still dark outside. Your heart rate has dropped to a single beat per second and your blood pressure is the lowest it will be for the next 16 hours. Your respiration has fallen to 12 breaths a minute, while your blood glucose is at rock bottom. Despite the ingenious physiology remorselessly at work in all your organs, you sleep on, oblivious. In this state, your brain and body are preventing entry to a private inner universe that poses one of the biggest challenges in science – but any minute now, when the alarm buzzes, this special place will be all yours, exclusively.

However close you are to someone, however articulate, poetic, musical or compassionate you are, you will never, ever, be able to share your direct subjective experience with anyone else. But right now, for just a little longer, you are unconscious – “dead to the world”.

Without consciousness, life would indeed be pretty much the same as death. The conscious condition makes life worth living. But what is it, this insubstantial, intangible inner… what, exactly? Across the centuries, our predecessors have struggled to define and understand how to grapple with what is so intellectually elusive yet so familiar that we take it for granted day after day. Over the past 40 or 50 years, the issue has been thrown into ever sharper focus with the ascendance of neuroscience and the massive increase in our knowledge of the brain. But with this wealth of insight the problem becomes ever more glaring. How can your individual, subjective experience, within your physical brain, be translated into squirts of chemicals and electrical blips, and vice versa? What would prove definitive insight into consciousness?

However close you are to someone, you will never ever share your direct subjective experience

Perhaps the answer can be discovered in a brain scan. Or will the experience be pinned down in a mathematical formula? These “solutions” would never account for how objectively observable events turn into the first-hand feeling of a private experience. Somehow, a subjective perspective is generated – we could almost say “conjured up” – but no one has been able to explain how this apparent miracle takes place.

This tension between the objective and the subjective has seemed insoluble ever since the great philosopher René Descartes first raised it in the 17th century, when he chose to segregate a conscious mind from the biological brain. This conceptual chasm is tough to cross. When we describe a human being, or any animal, as having “perceptual experiences” or “conscious states”, we are talking about some of the most basic features which distinguish living from non-living things. A stone is not “about” anything and neither does it have subjective properties, but a perception is “about” what is seen (or experienced), such as what it is like to see the colour red.

These features are obvious to us from our first-person view, but when we shift perspective to the third-person stance of objective science we find ourselves in difficulty. We can speak of brain states, which may be reduced to neurons sparking and pulsing out chemicals, but it is hard to see how this neurobiological maelstrom relates to the features of consciousness that are so apparent in everyday experience – the taste of chocolate melting slowly in your mouth, the sunshine on your face, the sound of crashing waves. Small wonder that the black night outside your bedroom window is as nothing compared to the intellectual darkness that gives rise to this conceptual impasse.

A Day in the Life of the Brain by Susan Greenfield 

Proud man or angry ape?

Do humanity's fantastic tricks make the angels weep or Darwin laugh?

What did a 29-stone gorilla do when he escaped his London zoo enclosure? He hit the juice boxes. The silverback guzzled five litres of undiluted blackcurrant squash before being sedated and put back in his cell. It might be behaviour worth of an unruly toddler, but primates fascinate us. Another of our evolutionary forebears, an orang-utan, stole the headlines this week after being snapped hunting for figs in the jungle of Borneo.

As it happens, I’ve been to another part of that jungle and seen orang-utans there. While visiting a friend in Jakarta after university, we took a boat trip down a river in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo).  The first day was spent listening to the sounds of chainsaws as the rainforest was hacked down around us. On the third day, we turned up a smaller tributary

A protective mother Orangutan shoos away a wild boar with a stick in Borneo CREDIT:  YULIA SUNDUKOVA/ YULIA SUNDUKOVA

Why? I asked our guide. It turned out that much of the river was downstream from a goldmine, which regularly dumped its waste into the waters, turning it cloudy. We’d finally reached an unpolluted part of the watercourse. The orang-utans were strange and interesting – swinging and falling their way from tree to tree in a movement both athletic and lumbering.

During the sunset boat ride back, I looked up into the trees and was astonished to find them filled with dozens of monkeys, visible as far as I could see along the river. They weren’t chattering and fighting, but sitting peacefully in little groups on the longest branches overlooking the water, their long, bluish tails hanging below them as they gazed into the dusk.

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Male western lowland gorilla; London Zoo’s Kumbuka CREDIT: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY

Food: Fruit, supplemented with grubs

Habitat: West Africa, centred around Gabon, Guinea and the Republic of the Congo

Size: (male) 5' 1" tall, 25st.; (female) 4' 5" tall, 12st. 12lbs

Conservation status: Critically endangered, with about 170,000 individuals worldwide

Chief threats: Ebola, poaching and deforestation

Notable western gorillas: Koko, Harambe, Guy (immortalised as a statue at London Zoo)

Monkeys, we were told this week, can produce stone tools that archaeologists had, until now, always credited exclusively to humans. The monkeys don’t actually use the tools, but make them as a by-product of smashing rocks whose dust they like to eat. This humanlike behaviour by primates has thrown into doubt widely accepted tenets of evolutionary science.

This keeps happening. Some years ago, geneticists at the Harvard/MIT Broad Institute (one of whom, I should disclose, is my brother-in-law, David Reich) discovered DNA evidence suggesting human and chimp ancestors might have interbred for thousands of years. This challenged the idea that humans and chimps split off from each other cleanly on different evolutionary tracks, as had been previously assumed.

A few years after that, another genetic study by the same scientists further challenged our idea of Homo Sapiens as uniquely clever beasts. The data suggested that, after moving out of Africa and coming across Neanderthals, humans had interbred with them too. And there’s a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals weren’t the dumb, grunting creatures of Hollywood lore, but were capable of conceptual thought and possibly even religious rituals involving mysterious piles of stalactites.

Our surprise at these discoveries just goes to show how attached we are to the myths of creationism, even if we think we’re modern. Darwin’s theory has been accepted in the West, but we keeping searching for that moment, that line in the sand, when humans stopped being animals and became instead that special creature made in God’s image. Was it with the appearance on earth of a strange alien monolith that apes suddenly picked up and used tools, as Stanley Kubrick imagined in 2001? Was it when we finally stood fully upright and donned loincloths? Was it when we invented sponge cake?

Or perhaps evolution isn’t a linear, teleological story, but a messy, chaotic process full of dead-ends, switchbacks and lulls, arriving at the modern juice-swilling gorilla and his cousin, the juice-guzzling toddler. Humans are unique, of course, but only in being a particularly advanced breed of animal. I find it helpful to remember that when I witness the strange, imitative mating rituals of the flirting couple, the prowling, chest-thrusting postures of the presidential candidate or the vicious squabbling of young children. The wonder is not how far we’ve come. The wonder is how savage we still are.
Juliet Samuel

Teens triumph over troubles with Happiness Skills book

Method helps young people focus on getting happy, says Ailin Quinlan

Think adolescence and you think angst and negativity — it’s not a phase that many of us remember with much pleasure. However, according to positive psychologist Michaela Avlund and schoolteacher Margaret McCormack, while happiness may not be an emotion familiar to many teenagers, they can be taught it. They know, because they’ve tried it — and very successfully — with nearly 60 teenagers.

Last autumn, the two teamed up to provide courses in happiness to Transition Year students in Coláiste Chraobh Abhann in Co Wicklow. It all started with a chance meeting between Michaela , who has a master’s degree in positive psychology, and second-level teacher Margaret, then a transition year co-ordinator, in a local café. Michaela happened to mention that she was preparing to publish a book about happiness skills — Happiness Skills; Based on Positive Psychology.

Margaret was instantly intrigued: “I feel that teenagers today seem to struggle more than they would have 10 or 15 years ago. They appear to have more challenges, partly as a result of the pressures exerted by social media. Life today can be more cruel,” she says, adding that Coláiste Craobh Abhann promoted the need for positive mental health.

“We were interested in bringing the skills into the school.”

Michaela, who is Danish by birth but has been living in Ireland for more than 20 years, was then invited to teach the skills of happiness to 58 students in two groups through weekly workshops during September, October, and November 2015.

Michaela, who is scheduled to present a number of workshops and talks at the Mind Body Spirit Festival at Dublin’s RDS later this month, recalls: “I was writing my book at the time. It was about the happiness skills and how important they are and how we need these skills to give us the resilience required to withstand the tough parts of life.

“Margaret thought that what I was talking about was very relevant to teenagers. “Research has shown that you can change the environment of your brain. When we get into a very ‘down’ frame of mind and begin to ruminate about negative things, there are skills which can help us out of that space and create a happy life that makes us well.”

Michaela Avlund, the author of ‘Happiness Skills’, sought to teach students that they themselves had the power to create positive relationships with other people.

She set out to teach the teens how to stimulate the ‘feel-good’ part of their brains using these skills: Research, says Michaela, has shown that a particular part of the brain, the right pre-frontal cortex, is a kind of defence system which promotes the production of stress hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol. If this area is overly-stimulated, too much of these hormones is produced. They build up in the body, causing stress, illness, and negative thinking.

However, she says, stimulating the left pre-frontal cortex produces of ‘feelgood’ hormones such as serotonin and dopamine. The teenagers were intrigued by the idea that they could literally control their emotions by stimulating the production of more positive hormones through managing their perceptions and behaviour.

They studied different strategies and formulas which showed them how to view situations or experiences in a more positive light. Part of it is learning how to turn around an unpleasant occurrence by taking the time to consider how it may have happened, she says. Michaela gives the example of an apparently inexplicable argument between friends.

“This is about finding alternative interpretations of what happened,” says Michaela, who explains that one friend might already have been upset about something else before the row occurred. Students also learned about the need to consciously attempt to have positive interactions with other people.

“I wanted to teach the students that in them lies the power to create positive relationships with other people by encouraging, listening to each other’s dreams, being supportive and being able to forgive when we get hurt,” says Michaela, who is creating a series of Youtube clips to accompany each chapter of her book.

Students discussed the concepts of assertiveness, problem-solving, character strengths, and forgiveness, and received a specific formula for letting go of emotions such as hurt or anger. It was fascinating, according to Happiness Skills participant Sinead Conway, 17 , now a 5th year student at Coláiste Chraobh Abhann.

“We’d never had anything like this before. Most of it was about how to take the positive out of the negative,” she says, adding that she found the course encouraged character development.

“I learned a lot of skills — we learned how to ‘write out’ a problem and look at the different possible solutions, and how to focus on your strengths rather than weaknesses,” says Sinéad, adding that learning how to see a situation “from someone’s else’s point of view” helps in relationships and family life.

“I learned from the classes – it made me feel that it’s your own responsibility to make your thinking better.”

Sinead suffers from stress, and believes that the skills will help her tackle the challenges of the Leaving Certificate course.

“I think I’ll take a lot of what we did in class forward into the Leaving Certificate course.”

Michaela adds: “You can do so much if you use these tools, but you need to keep doing them on a day-to-day basis. It can create positive habits that will stand to teenagers.”

Manus de Paor, 16, in fifth year at Chraobh Abhann, also attended the course. It opened his eyes in a number of ways, he recalls — and taught him the benefits of just chilling.

“There’s a big stigma for lads about talking about the challenges you have in life but, the way this class was set up, it was very easy to discuss challenges so you were going to open up about stuff the way that lads would not normally do.

“We learned how it can help you to act kindly towards others and do things that are beneficial to others and take the time to act nicely. I think everyone in the class changed a bit, and in a positive way — we were friendlier, nicer, less cliquey!”

Learning the importance to your happiness of taking time out for yourself rather than obsessing with online games was fascinating, says Manus.

“I tried that during the summer, just taking time out to just chill and not to do an activity like playing a game on your phone but to reflect. I find it helps. It gives you more perspective on things that are going on. I think it makes you feel more chilled and happy and I found that the classes give you more confidence to talk to people.

“It encourages you to be more confident and to start from a point where you accept that maybe everyone has some good in them. I felt it was all very relevant.”

Margaret says that, after those first workshops finished — the school plans to run them again in early 2017 — she felt it had improved the students’ sense of well-being.

“They learned about how making the right decisions makes your day and your life. “As a class this group decided that if they saw someone doing something nice they would say well done.

“Another thing that got across to them was the strength and power of a smile and a greeting — that really struck a chord.”

Positive psychologist Michaela Avlund will be speaking at the Mind, Body, Spirit, and Wellness Festival in Dublin’s RDS from Saturday, October 29 to Monday 31. Her talk will explore how ‘You have the power to change your brain’. she will also present an assertiveness workshop on ‘Knowing what you need and pursuing it with kindness’.

• T — Tell yourself the story. Write it down as it happened.

• U — Understand why it impacted on you so badly.

• R — What’s the result of what happened?

• N — Now change your way of looking at it. Could there be another explanation for what happened? Find an alternative interpretation of, or explanation for, what happened.

Past injustices for Ireland is to recover sovereignty in Europe

The right response to past injustices is to recover sovereignty in a Europe where the powerful are prevented from preying on the weak, writes Yanis Varoufakis

DESPITE their unequivocal Europeanism, the Irish have been serially mistreated by the European Union.

When Irish voters rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008, the EU forced them to vote again until they delivered the “right” outcome.

A year later, when private Irish banks imploded, threatening their (mainly) German private creditors with severe losses, Jean-Claude Trichet, then the European Central Bank’s president, immediately “informed” the Irish government that the ECB would shut down ATMs across the Emerald Isle unless Ireland’s unsuspecting taxpayers made the German banks whole.

Ireland acquiesced, its public debt ballooned, emigration returned, and the country remains bruised and despondent. With the EU still refusing meaningful reduction of a debt burden unfairly borne by the younger generation, the Irish remain convinced, correctly, that the EU violated their sovereignty on behalf of foreign bankers.

Ireland’s greatest weapon against the ensuing debt deflation was its ability to attract US-based tech giants, by offering them a combination of EU law, a well-trained English-speaking workforce, and a 12.5% corporate tax rate.

Though the shell-like subsidiaries of global tech conglomerates have little positive impact on most households’ income, Ireland’s establishment is proud of its links with the likes of Apple.

Now, the European Commission is jeopardising the Government’s special relationship with Apple by demanding that it claw back €13 billion in taxes from the company.

Is the Commission’s latest intervention another example of EU bullying, in violation of Ireland’s sovereignty? Comparing Trichet’s 2009 intervention and the current standoff over Apple holds important lessons beyond Ireland and, indeed, Europe.

In the eurozone’s early years, German financial institutions channelled a torrent of capital into Ireland’s commercial banks, which then lent it to real-estate developers.

The ensuing property bubble resulted in white elephants in Dublin’s financial district, row upon row of new blocks of flats in the middle of nowhere, and a mountain of mortgage debt. When the bubble burst after 2008, land prices collapsed, debts went bad, and Ireland’s private banks failed.

The ECB, in an affront comparable to British behaviour during the 1845-52 Famine, instructed the Government to invoke “financial stability” to force Ireland’s weakest citizens to repay every euro the defunct private banks owed to German creditors. Financial stability was obviously a smokescreen: taxpayers were forced to repay even the debts of a bank that had already been closed (thus systemically irrelevant).

The roots of the Apple deal are older than the ECB. In 1980, a young Steve Jobs visited an Ireland eager to escape underdevelopment. Apple eventually created 6,000 jobs in the country, in exchange for a sweetheart tax deal allowing it to shield its European revenues from taxation by recording them there.

To this day, the proceeds of every iPhone sold in Paris or in Stockholm (net of its Chinese assemblers’ production costs) go to Apple’s Irish subsidiary Apple Sales International. As a result of the original Apple-Ireland deal, ASI pays a miniscule tax on these earnings, effectively exempt from the ultra-low 12.5% corporate-tax rate.

This arrangement also required the usually vigilant US Internal Revenue Service to play along. ASI’s profits stem from Apple’s intellectual property (IP) rights, which are based on research and development conducted exclusively in the US (most of it underpinned by federal government funding). These profits should, therefore, be taxed in the US.

Curiously, the IRS is choosing not to enforce Apple’s obligation to pay tax on its profits from US-sourced IP returns. Instead, Apple charges ASI a symbolic fee for allowing it to profit from Apple’s IP rights, for which it pays a tiny tax to the IRS. Meanwhile, ASI is allowed to keep, in Ireland, profits representing close to two-thirds of the revenue from the sale of every Apple product sold outside the US. As a result, Apple has amassed untaxed cash reserves of up to $230 billion.

Unlike in 2009, the Irish Government is protesting the EU authorities’ recent Apple ruling, pointing out that tax policy is in the purview of national governments, not the union.

And, in a recent joint letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the EU’s other 27 national governments, 185 American CEOs alleged the EU had over-reached yet again, resulting in a “self-inflicted wound” for Ireland’s and Europe’s economy. But they are wrong: Ireland’s sovereignty is not an issue here. Apple would not have based itself in Ireland were it not for the EU’s single market, a commons that requires common rules. One of these rules is that governments cannot offer aid to some companies that is not available to others.

Suppose, for example, that the Greek government, seeking to attract 6,000 jobs to its ravaged economy, offered Apple a subsidy of €110,000 per job per year, or €660m. Over two decades, the total subsidy would come to slightly more than €13bn. Were the EU to permit Greece to offer Apple such a deal, the other EU states, including Ireland, would revolt.

Suppose further that the Greek government proposed waiving corporate tax for 20 years on all revenue Apple earned in the rest of the EU but booked in Athens — say, €13bn. The European Commission would then have a duty of care to the European commons to demand that Greece immediately recoup that €13bn — exactly as it is telling Ireland to do today.

Every time the EU acts as a colonial usurper, as it did in 2009, it undermines the legitimacy of its good and proper actions and strengthens the xenophobic, anti-European “Nationalist International”. Europe’s only beneficiaries, much to the delight of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, are isolationist Brexiteers, the far-right Alternative for Germany, France’s National Front, and illiberal governments in Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere.

The lesson to be learned from comparing Trichet’s 2009 intervention with the European Commission’s current stance on Apple is simple: Europeans’ real enemy is free riding by the few on the backs of the many. Without common institutions, Europeans cannot be defended from the exploitation and antisocial practices that big business and its political agents portray as economic common sense.

Trichet compromised Ireland’s sovereignty to facilitate German bankers’ free ride on the shoulders of Ireland’s taxpayers. As restitution, the ECB should take on its books part of Ireland’s public debt.

But the EU must not allow Ireland to abuse the European commons by offering Apple a deal that no other member state could. The right response to past injustices is to recover sovereignty in a Europe where the powerful — whether German bankers or American smartphone makers — are prevented from preying on the weak.

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is professor of economics at the University of Athens. 

Garda whistleblower’s life irrevocably changed

Keith Harrison at his Letterkenny home. Picture: North West Newspix

Garda Keith Harrison traces many of his woes back to the night in 2009 when he stopped a garda colleague for drink-driving in Athlone. The charge against his colleague was dismissed in court, but Gda Harrison has no regrets about how he handled the matter.

There were other incidents which may have contributed to him becoming unpopular with fellow officers. He had concerns about the conduct of some investigations of drug-dealing which he raised, but then let lie. He impounded a jeep in 2008 after the owner drove through a checkpoint.

A colleague asked him to cut the offender some slack. He refused to play ball.

Gda Harrison has baggage. He has been disciplined. He has been prosecuted for failure to have his car insured, but the judge in the case did remark that it was down to a misunderstanding and fined him with no disqualification from driving.

Where he finds himself today is isolated, on reduced pay, and of the belief that his road back to full employment is blocked. He also believes that he has been harassed for pointing out wrongs and having the temerity to fall in love with a woman of whose family his colleagues disapproved.

Gda Harrison first felt that he was being scrutinised when on September 4, 2009, a superintendent told him he had been appointed to examine his work and discipline. This was just three months after he arrested a colleague for drink-driving.

The investigation produced nine separate disciplinary charges. One of these concerned a complaint from a publican who claimed that, on an occasion nine months earlier Gda Harrison, had been discourteous towards him. Another was from a woman whom Gda Harrison had prosecuted for having no tax or insurance on her vehicle.

Despite the list of charges, the ultimate outcome was that Gda Harrison was fined €200, which is pretty paltry for a process that required a superintendent to investigate for a couple of months.

Then there was the claim for expenses. While attending a five-day public order training course in September 2009, Gda Harrison used his brother’s car to travel as his own was off the road for the month and untaxed. To avoid complications, he claimed the expenses for his own vehicle.

There was no monetary difference in the claim, but he was pulled up on it. (Ultimately, he didn’t even pursue the expenses.) Not just that, but a superintendent signed a statement that he had seen Gda Harrison driving his untaxed car when he had said it was out of action.

He was fined €5,200 for the offence. Prior to arresting his colleague, he had had a good disciplinary record for 10 years in the job. Following the disciplinary process, he was relocated to another office. While at the second office, he requested a transfer.

He had met an old flame whom he had known in college. Marisa McDermott was the mother of two young children whose marriage had broken down. She and Gda Harrison ran into each other and began a relationship.

Ms McDermott is from Donegal, where she was working as a secondary school teacher. Gda Harrison saw it as an opportunity for a fresh start and asked for a move north.

He was transferred to Buncrana in 2011 and things got off to a good start. He was living with Ms McDermott outside Letterkenny, half an hour from Buncrana. Then his partner’s identity became known to colleagues.

Ms McDermott’s brother Martin had been convicted of manslaughter after he rammed a squad car in 2009, killing 24-year-old Gda Gary McLoughlin. He had up to 100 previous convictions and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Ms McDermott had been using her married name. She is not her brother’s keeper, but communities in north Donegal are tightly knit. For some in the force in Buncrana, the man’s crime was such as to render anybody closely related to him toxic.

Things changed for Gda Harrison after that. There was disgust in some quarters that he would have anything to do with a sibling of Martin McDermott’s. His past had not been an issue up until then, but now it was viewed in a different light.

He agreed to a transfer, even though it would take him further from the home he was making with Ms McDermott. He ended up in Donegal town, an hour south of Letterkenny.

His reputation preceded him. Things didn’t get much better, he says. Then he made the cock-up with his insurance, which had lapsed by a day or two, over a misunderstanding on paperwork.

The offence was not detected at a checkpoint but by a colleague of Gda Harrison’s, who noticed the disc in his car outside the garda station. The judge accepted this was an unusual case.

“Driving without insurance is a very serious matter but there are mitigating circumstances,” said the judge in imposing a fine. “It wasn’t just a blatant case of driving without insurance.”

By then, the middle of 2014, Gda Harrison was persona non grata.

He decided to document all he had been subjected to.

He compiled an affidavit and handed it to his local TD, Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty, who read it into the record of the Dáil on May 15, 2014.

“He claims that a managerial review of his high work returns and practices was instigated and persons who had past interactions with Gda Harrison in the execution of his duties were invited by the gardaí to make complaints against him,” said Mr Doherty.

He went on to say that Gda Harrison claimed that, from September 2009 until March 2011, he was office-bound while the garda arrested for drink-driving was still driving official vehicles and carrying an official firearm.

Following that, Gda Harrison met the then Confidential Recipient (the office set up to receive whistleblower complaints) and detailed what had occurred. Some of the complaints he made about malpractice in the midlands would later overlap with complaints made by another whistleblower, Nick Keogh.

An investigation was set up within the force to examine Gda Harrison’s complaints. He met the investigating officer in a hotel accompanied by a solicitor, Trevor Collins, who was on this case for the first time.

The following day, Mr Collins’ Linkedin profile was viewed by an account associated with an officer from the Midlands of whom Gda Harrison had complained.

Gda Harrison and his solicitor believed that details of the case had been leaked and that this represented a conflict of interest.

A letter was dispatched from the solicitor to Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan in June 2014 outlining the concerns.

“The failure of the investigating team to disclose this conflict prior to or during the course of the meeting is deeply concerning,” the letter read.

“This failure to disclose the conflict undermines the credibility and bona fides of the Garda investigation. The non-disclosure of the conflict of interest caused shock, distress and upset to our client. Garda Harrison believes that the investigation team you appointed is prejudiced and biased as a consequence of this conflict.”

The commissioner said she would consider referring the investigation to GSOC, which she did in August 2014.

The GSOC probe has had its own issues. Two years on from Gda Harrison’s complaint, there has been little progress. On September 2, a letter was dispatched to the chair of GSOC, Judge Mary Ellen Ring.

“Two years have now elapsed since the matter was referred to GSOC and yet there has been no progress with investigation despite the fact that our client has co-operated in full with the investigators appointed by the commission,” read the letter. “Our client is deeply concerned at the delay and its probable effect on the eventual outcome. We understand that no witnesses have been interviewed, save for our client’s partner being interviewed in the past number of weeks and despite the fact that she had made herself available for interview at the time of our client’s first interview.”

A response from a GSOC investigator was apologetic.

“As you are aware GSOC has experienced a delay in receiving information from AGS to assist in my investigation,” it read. “There is still one request outstanding and I was informed that a reminder was issued to AGS for the information.”

Over the last two years, Gda Harrison’s legal team claims he has had to endure stress on multiple fronts. He is classified as ‘on sick leave’ and wants to be allowed to return to work. He no longer has an income and has been forced to apply for disability benefit.

Then there are the allegations of harassment. On three occasions, he has been informed of death threats against him.

The third of these involved a man who rang a station from Perth in Australia in August last year, saying he had a bullet for Gda Harrison.

This man was beyond the reach of the gardaí, but in November last year, his name appeared in the local paper after he appeared in court in Buncrana.

Gda Harrison told GSOC he believes the death threats were fabricated in order to give elements of the force an excuse to patrol outside his house. He claims to have observed an inordinate number of patrols passing his home over the last 18 months.

Spokespeople for An Garda Síochána have repeatedly stated that it would be inappropriate to comment on any ongoing GSOC investigation.

Some of these claims may be exaggerated, some may result from coincidences, or accidents or misinterpretations. After seven years of being regarded in somewhat suspicious terms by some of his colleagues, Gda Harrison may have a heightened sense of persecution.

Two years on from his complaint, he still has no answers. Seven years down the road from the night he arrested a fellow officer, his life has been irrevocably changed.

Michael Clifford