Some Opinions On law, Lawyers And Liars

“Lawyer: The only man in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.”  Elbert Hubbard

Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please.  David Dudley Field

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, and fishing nets in the hands of the government.  Pierre Joseph Proudhon

A lawyer is a gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it for himself.  Lord Brougham

The houses of lawyers are roofed with the skins of litigants. Welsh Proverb 

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There is no such thing as justice — in or out of court. Clarence Darrow

If you think good legal advice is expensive, you should see the cost of bad legal advice.  Anon
“More Laws, less justice”. Cicero

Order your copy now from: lawlawyersand liars.com

Law, Lawyers And Liars

This book is about Law, lawyers and liars and the threads that bind all three. A story of captive audiences in a court where justice is an illusionary prize for most, even for the winners of a court action. A place also where an inconvenient truth is often beaten down by a lie and an inconvenient lie can be beaten down by the truth. In essence what this book is about is getting a clearer and more broad picture of the judicial system. As Wendell Holmes Jr (Former American Chief Justice) so succinctly said, "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions'. This what I want for the reader. To be better informed always makes for better choices in a place where a person of means can lose everything because of the practices of the courts itself. Please press on the link below to order your copy.

Barry Clifford

http://lawlawyersandliars.com

The great mass starvation of 1847

There is always a certain sense when writers write about the great famine, which is sometimes called the ‘great hunger’, in Ireland of 1847 starting with the word ‘great’ in order to draw a particular picture. It is words that either add description to something or detract from its reality by their economy and form. Of course there is or was nothing great about hunger or that it was a famine in the true sense of the word; It was mass starvation on a national scale perfected by, at least at that time, one of the most powerful countries in the world, Great Britain. Again, there was nothing ‘great’ about Britain either unless you factor in a monstrous tyranny against people of every race and culture across the globe starting with their nearest neighbour, us. 

                                                       Digging their own graves

When the biggest mass starvation raged in Ireland, it was just another one in the long catalogue of others that went before it. Four raged in that century alone while none has happened in our near century of freedom. Writers have for generations tried to label that last attempt at mass starvation as more to do with neglect, mixed in with officialdom and bureaucracy, as being heavily to blame because of a mere potato blight. In Ireland today if every single potato died in the ground no free citizen would die with it. There lies the only difference and evidence that ever mattered. During every year of every mass starvation in Ireland, record exports of wheat and cattle, that benefitted only the British landlord and the government that protected them, left for other lands except ours. 

How Britain saw us as a country historically is the undercurrent as to how they see us now, even though it is edging toward a more positive change than ever before. The writer, Niamh O’ Sullivan recently wrote in the Irish Times that: “The racialisation of poverty justified government policy then, leading the Times to condemn the ‘wretched, indolent, half-starved tribe of savages who never approached the standard of the civilised world.’ Even Niamh could not resist labelling in part this historic mass starvation of a people as: "…..the outcome of a systematic neglect by the richest empire in the world." I can neglect or forget to feed a child or myself but neither of us will ever starve as a result.

There is some residue from a historical sentiment and argument still used against refugees today, even by former refugees and migrants who have pulled themselves up from abject poverty a couple of thousand years ago. Positively tribal I say. Cheery picked amnesia is easy for the beggar who has found himself a horse in order to ride over those still starving on the ground. Yet many slaves of the 1800's, free and indentured, along with tribes of indigenous peoples in America and elsewhere, sent money to relieve the appalling suffering of the Irish people as it even outweighed their own. We must not try to cover up our past or compromise on its horrors for political and commercial gain, for our shared past with England and the world is at least a moral blueprint for the helping hand that means freedom rather than the jackboot that represents oppression.       

I leave you with a quote or two from one infamous landlord at that 'never to be forgotten time', Sir Charles Trevelyan, who considered the ‘famine’ and said: “the judgement of God sent this calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.” He also added: “It was an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” He must have read Charles Dickens character ‘Scrooge’ sentiments on the matter.

Barry Clifford

"The law must take its course."

From the rear of the courthouse on all of the first floor rooms, the views from the windows would be of the impressive looking cathedral just the other side of the bridge that spans the river Corrib and joins them both. This cathedral replaced an old prison that closed for good in 1939 that ended a chapter in history that most people back then would have preferred to forget. For the rest of us it should not never be forgotten. It was a pitiless building from a pitiless time where the grim and unjust sentences and miscarriages of justice of the Galway courthouse rendered many a man and woman to die there slowly from a living hell. Others were dispatched more quickly where their innocence was just a moot point afterwards. 

                                                          Myles Joyce

One of them was a man named Myles Joyce who was to be hanged in 1882 along with two more innocent men because they had been implicated falsely in the Connemara Maamtrasna murders. The family that were slaughtered there that fateful night were a man, his mother and his wife  including their daughter and son. Another nine -year old son was badly injured but survived and his older brother was lucky to have been away that night. Because of the murders, these two newly orphaned boys ended up later in a children's prison: the Artane Industrial reformatory Institution in Dublin.

The heavily pregnant wife of Myles Joyce wrote in part of her appeal for clemency to try and save her husband from the hangman: "I earnestly beg and implore his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant to examine and consider this hard case of an innocent man, which leaves a widow and five orphans to be before a long drift in the world." The response from his Excellency was as cold as the cell that held Myles: "The law must take its course."

The last words spoken by Myles in his only language that was Irish just before the noose was tied around his neck were: "I am going before my God. I was not there at all. I had no hand or part in it. I am as innocent as a child in a cradle. It is a poor thing to take this life away on a stage; but I have my priest with me." Then he stepped onto a platform where the floor dropped beneath him. His life was extinguished slowly and very painfully  for he was not hung but strangled to death because the hangman had not set the stage properly.     

Two years later, one of the three false witnesses against Myles Joyce admitted that he lied in his testimony in a type of public confession to all that attended his local church one morning; but that was long after this liar and the other two with him had been paid the staggering sum of £1,250 between them which is equivalent to around £157,000 (sterling) or over $200,000 American dollars today. An amount simply unheard of before or since for witnesses in Galway or much anywhere else. The man who paid them their blood money was the same Lord Lieutenant. A journalist who wrote about the case in 1885 said: "The British government couldn't contemplate the appalling vista of having to admit to convicting innocent people." There has never been an official apology since.

The now famous cathedral that stands on that site today of the infamous prison is the focal point for locals and tourists alike. Even anyone with no particular religious point of view would be impressed by the external and internal stonework, the reliquaries, the beautiful mosaics and other artwork within; not to mention the feeling of peaceful solitude and community spirit that it all seems to bring. There every Sunday, the main players or priests with a bishop now and again for guest appearance, wear their costumes well for church services that includes weddings, births and deaths for most other weeks of every year. In many ways this building represents the draping over of past injustices for it would be a fitting memorial to all those that died and were buried here if even a plague served as their obituary. But there is none, as it is often an Irish custom to cover up by covering over the wrongs of the past and the present in the hope that they won't be found out in the future.

Back at the court house on that same first floor room, yet another group of actors huddle around tables making deals in secret union with one another. Many of these men and women also wear costume wigs and gowns befitting to their roles; portraying themselves to the public galleries in the building and to their clients, as legal combatants with morals. They call themselves lawyers or solicitors and barristers at law. At any day's end in this trinity of buildings, it is about how well each performances will go down by the actors, and how it was believed by those that it mattered to. Shakespeare wrote: "The worlds a stage and all the men merely players. They have their exits and their entrances..." Oscar Wilde added his spin on it by saying "The world is a stage and the play is badly cast." This Galway courthouse with it's courtroom and stages, badly cast or not, would become a familiar arena for Vincent Coyne. He also happened to hail from the same area as Myles Joyce in Connemara, while his grandmother, who's maiden name was also Joyce, was related to him. Let the play begin......

Barry Clifford 

An excerpt from my forthcoming book: Law, Lawyers and Liars

The Irish Police Ombudsman or GSOC....are useless

The Irish Police Ombudsman or GSOC: Those are the guys that are supposed to be overseeing the rights and more of the wrongs of the Irish police force. Another group, unfortunately, which is also a toothless and seriously gummy lot. Take the pulse system, a police data base that has been accessed illegally by police for their own personal ends and has being the Internet vehicle for destroying people's characters, for wrongful arrests, and has became a feeding tube to the media for the same purpose and much more. The GSOC in all these instances has done little or nothing except do a public wringing of their hands every now and then. Not that the Police themselves, their intended target, have or ever will be of any help to them, and in that it is understandable in any human context for they are hardly going to participate in their own hanging. 

The police too have years of combined experience in holding the glue together on the blue wall of silence even though it has shown a few cracks in recent years. It will take more than a few cracks though to be able to drive a wedge through it. Failure to cooperate with any investigation is a failure itself by virtue of the fact that when it comes to the police doing it, it is not viewed as a serious crime. When it is viewed that way, if ever, that wall of silence will crumble very fast. For now, as with all police forces internationally, we can only live in hope and have a lot of it for the complaints against the police keep on rising year on year.

In just a four year period there was over 10,000 complaints against the 13,000 strong Irish Police force and the main problem with the GSOC is that it is an investigative body/agency only. Any file collected on a suspect or errant policeman is then sent to the Department of Public Prosecution or DPP afterwards, and if an unlikely prosecution is warranted by them it then moves to trial. Ultimately, if any sanctions are deemed necessary against a police man/woman after a guilty verdict then this is reverted back to the boys in blues boss: the Police Commissioner. 

Here are some of the run of the mill police sanctions in Ireland for policemen: turning up drunk at a murder scene or any scene, a policeman will face only a minimum two weeks loss of pay not to exceed 10% of his salary; if he runs over an innocent or guilty citizen with his trusty patrol car while drunk, he 'may' face an internal enquiry by, you guessed it, other policemen. This, in a nut shell, is why it is not a good idea to cooperate with the police at anytime unless it is for a very good cause starting with yourself last and in the first instance.

Barry Clifford

An excerpt from my forthcoming book: Law, Lawyers and Liars

No need for words.......

Rich man, poor man on lawyer costs

At the prices mentioned below, a rich man will become a poor man very quickly and not knowing the distinction between the word 'or' and the word 'and' can be just one of the reasons why. A lawyer 'middle of the lower road' firm in Ireland today will cost, very conservatively speaking, the following charges for every hour that they are contracted:

The principal owner: €350 per hour

One journeyman lawyer: €250 per hour

Legal secretary: €120 per hour

All these costs can be lumped together as firm or company costs that works out at a grand total of €720 for each hour worked. And that is before they even get to court!

The above rates are exclusive of VAT at 13.5% and any other outlays outside of those charges, such as a barrister or junior counsel while and senior counsel will be more. To put that in perspective: a medical doctor working in an Irish hospital currently receives €35 per hour he works before tax and without contract, pension or other benefits. A lone barrister can cost anywhere from €400 per day to over €7000 and more and junior barrister is €4,752. Subsequent days thereafter can cost €1,562 for each day. Lawyers can cost the same brief fee as the barrister and each day thereafter can be another €750 in addition. 

In the circuit court they are cheaper, if you could really call it that: Senior counsel is €1,716 a day, a refresher fee is €858 with junior counsel and lawyers getting €1,144 per day and €572 and €418 per day respectively. The refresher fee sounds like they are going out for a soda, a massage and a sauna. Maybe they were as long as doleful and unsuspecting clients keep on paying for it. 

Ciara Murphy of the Barristers Law Society thinks those fees are actually quite moderate and only level now with 2002 fees. To soften the blow of that minority opinion in case it might not be compatible with a majority one, she added that 'the work' is now much more complex and demanding. Wait till she decides to go working for a living, though these fees and her comments helps illustrate what planet she and other likewise alien forces think they are on. One lone barrister, Emily Egan SC, earned over €1 million for herself working for state bodies last year (2017) with four more costume figures just like her earning over €500,000 each. These fees, comparatively speaking, are more often than not twice what they are in England. 

Then, to keep all of these fees under wraps the taxing master, that quasi-judicial body, rarely publishes their findings against overcharging by lawyers or barristers and anything in between. Neither does it provide a public register of findings or determinations, and, as always, only questions remain in its wake and never full answers. 

What is a lay litigants time worth in big or small matters? Are these prices not motivation enough to know that what a person can be saving is €750 an hour minimum, which is the same as earning it just by their own research! Belief in oneself is the starting point here and only gets better from there before or after anyone starts researching in earnest. Another way of getting there is engaging a law student who would be happy with just €10 an hour to put a person in the right direction and can be found at any university. Plus, this real time experience can help any student on their academic journey. 

Barry Clifford from my forthcoming book called: Law, Lawyers And Liars