The Trib

by David Kenny

  ‘The law in this country protects nice people and not so nice people,’ Judge O’Higgins told the jury. ‘A man with eighty previous convictions [as Ward had] is entitled to the same degree of protection as the Lord Mayor of Dublin.’

  After nearly sixteen hours’ deliberation, over three days, the jury decided that Nally had acted reasonably in following Ward out onto the road that day and shooting him dead.

  The eight men and four women were charged to consider only the facts of the case, but it must have taken a huge effort to keep the world outside from seeping into the jury room.

  When Nally was sentenced to six years for manslaughter after the first trial, all hell broke loose. A law that would send a man to jail for defending himself and his property was decried.

  The facts were conveniently overlooked, as there was capital to be made on the killing, and the jailing of a man of impeccable character.

  There had to be ‘rebalancing of the law’, a political term currently in vogue. Nobody said that Nally should have been protected by the law in his actions, but that subtext informed the debate. Some grubby politicians suggested that homeowners would now be in fear of defending themselves or their property in their home.

  Then the Law Reform Commission produced the paper referred to by the judge. Cue more fire and brimstone, more waffle about ‘rebalancing’ and ludicrous suggestions that this was the homeowner fighting back.

  The reality was that the Commission merely clarified what ‘reasonable force’ entailed. Legislation following on from the recommendations won’t change the amount of force permissible, but will clarify it in respect of homeowners. It always has been legal to use a reasonable amount of force. (Ironically, if such clarity had been in the law at the time of the killing, Nally might have found it more difficult to defend his position in court.) Against this backdrop of heightened fear, the retrial was conducted. Then as the evidence closed, and deliberations began, another element of crime exploded. The recent gun murders sparked further debate. The court system was called into question once more. In the battle against crime, the system is being portrayed as protecting the criminal rather than society. That such an analysis is top-of-the-head stuff, purveyed by vested interests, is glossed over. The desired message is getting though.

  And in the Nally trial, a large section of the public mind had the dead man cast as the criminal, the accused as victim. To some, convicting Nally would once more be playing into the hands of criminals. Against this backdrop, the jury raked over the killing of John Ward. Charged to consider only the facts, their long spell deliberating indicates they did that in some detail. Any suggestion that the world outside seeped into their collective sub-consciousness can only be speculation.

  THE AFTERMATH:

  Nally said afterwards that he was ‘surprised’ at the verdict. So were his supporters. So was almost anybody who sat through the trial. Now, he will return to his farm outside Cross in Co. Mayo and attempt to rebuild his life. Few would wish him ill luck. Prior to Ward’s attempt to rob him, Nally led a blameless life.

  Ward’s widow Marie reacted to the verdict with dismay. Earlier this year she married a Ghanaian asylum seeker and now lives in Longford. The court heard that she intends to pursue a civil action against Nally.

  She and the wider travelling community see the outcome in stark terms. For them, we may all be equal before the law, but some are more equal than others.

  Iceland melts down under unfriendly fire

  Like the Celtic Tiger cubs, Icelanders lived on the economic never-never. Then their country became a byword for disaster, and the streets resounded not with building work, but protest.

  15 February 2009

  It’s eight below zero and the racket is echoing across the low roofs of the old town in Reykjavik. There is the sound of a hooter, powered by a barrel of oxygen, the rhythmic beat of drums, the clang of aluminium and the sporadic popping of fireworks. Most of all though, there is the sound of saucepans being battered with all manner of implements. Welcome to the saucepan revolution, and don’t forget your earplugs.

  Last Tuesday morning, around fifty recruits were wringing the last out of the revolution. Positioned outside the Central Bank, they flailed away at making noise, stomping feet against the bitter cold, attempting to drive the governor of the bank from office by sheer force of cacophony.

  Across the road, against the backdrop of sun and snow on the hills ringing the city’s quay, four tower cranes are silent and redundant. They stand over a half-finished building that was to have been a retail paradise. Scaffolding testifies to the abrupt halt of work. The money just ran out.

  Back on the streets, the saucepan revolution is on a roll. It acquired its name at its height last month when thousands raised a racket by making noise outside the parliament building, using whatever means possible, but principally banging saucepans.

  Their efforts drove the prime minister from office and prompted the resignation of their financial services authority. Now, they have set their sights on the man many see as the architect of Iceland’s descent into bankruptcy, David Oddsson. He is a former prime minister who implemented neo-liberal policies and then moved on to police the policies with the lightest of touches. It would be akin to having Bertie Ahern as the financial regulator during these turbulent times.

  ‘This country was run for decades by a minority who have become very rich by fooling the majority,’ says Horour Torfason, one of the main organisers of the protest. The people are claiming their country back, but the question hanging in the cold, clear air is whether or not it is too late.

  The comparison between Ireland and Iceland is growing tiresome. British media types love to trot out the line that the only difference between the pair is one letter and six months. In November, the International Monetary Fund was called into Iceland. The Brits and our own harbingers of doom predict that we’re next on the list. Last week, The Economist ran a piece on Ireland’s woes headlined ‘Reykjavik on Liffey’.

  In all of this, Iceland has become a byword for disaster, a name that is not to be uttered in front of small children lest it brings on nightmares. Some of the fear is justified. In Stansted Airport near London, the money changers are refusing to buy or sell the Icelandic kroner.

  ‘The currency is too volatile,’ a stern money changer says, as if worried that the kroner and its people may soon disappear up the North Pole.

  On paper, comparison s can be made between the lands of Ice and Ire. Iceland used to prosper on exports, principally fish. Around six years ago, the big banks were privatised and credit went through the roof. The whole country began to live on the never-never.

  ‘The banks kicked up their heels like cows in spring and went on a lending spree,’ economist Thorvaldur Gylfason explains. ‘A few years later the house came crashing down. This would have happened even without the credit crunch.’

  Construction became an end in itself. Tower cranes darkened the sky as estates and shopping malls began mushrooming around Reykjavik’s perimeter. House prices shot up and the traditional habit of long-term renting was dismissed as foolishness.

  This explosion in the illusion of wealth was even more pronounced when placed in context. Reykjavik is about the size of Cork, accommodating half the national population of 320,000. Iceland’s land mass is as big as England.

  Polish migrants arrived to do the heavy lifting. Range Rovers were all the rage and shopping was elevated to an art form. So far, so similar.

  Much of the lending was done in foreign currency, which was fine and dandy because the Icelandic kroner was sitting pretty on the back of all that prosperity. As a nation, Iceland had no problem believing that it was invincible, an economic powerhouse punching above its puny weight, just like the mythical Celtic Tiger further south in the Atlantic.

  In terms of scale, however, Iceland’s turmoil is of a different order. Danger lurked beneath the surface for a long time. Those at the top of politics and finance were the best of buddies. In terms o
f crony capitalism, these lads make Seanie Fitz and his homies look like recruits for the Vienna Boys Choir. And crucially, the banksters had little in the way of experience, having been only cast adrift in the free market in 2002.

  When the house did come crashing down, the reaction echoed with that of Brian Cowen’s administration.

  ‘The government dragged its feet,’ the economist Gylfason says. ‘Gordon Brown told our prime minister of the danger as far back as April last year. But they didn’t act. They lost precious months and this was a serious case of negligence.’

  On 9 October last, the nation awoke from its slumber to hear that the biggest bank, Landsbanki, had been nationalised. Two others followed. The economy began to shudder. Interest rates shot up six points to 18 per cent.

  Now the Poles are going home, unemployment is creeping up over 10 per cent, cranes no longer lurch and creak against the sky and the IMF has set up shop in town. The kroner is heading south, which in turn is hugely exacerbating the personal debt of the credit card and mortgage holders who took out loans in foreign currencies. One calculation has it that the party is going to cost every man, woman and child in the country around $25,000 a head.

  Reykjavik is an unlikely spot for a popular revolution. Its narrow streets twist between three- and four-storey houses of clapboard and aluminium cladding, and quaint shops and pubs. In recent months, as the shoppers thinned out, the disaffected began making themselves known.

  Every Saturday since last October a prominent artist, Horour Torfason, protested outside the parliament building, a small two-storey stone affair which would sit comfortably into a basement corner of Leinster House.

  Torfason invited the public to have their say. ‘I had a microphone and I asked people to express themselves,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, we had all become part of the problem. We had been led to believe in this absurd way of living on credit and materialism.’

  The crowd began building. By January, it was in its thousands and growing angrier by the day. Riot police were deployed for the first time since 1949, when there had been protests about the government’s decision to join Nato.

  Yet, for the greater part, there was little violence. The protestors took to wearing orange labels and armbands to emphasise their peaceful intent, and to echo the ‘orange revolution’ in the Ukraine a few years ago.

  ‘We had four demands,’ Torfason says. ‘We wanted new elections, the government to step down, the financial services authority to go and the central bank directors to go.’

  The government conceded elections first, now scheduled for May. Then on 26 January, the prime minister Geir Haarde resigned, followed soon after by the financial services authority.

  A new government was formed the following day, a socialist/ Green alliance led by the world’s first openly gay prime minister, Johanna Siguroardottir.

  There was no shifting the top man in the central bank, David Oddsson. For many, he epitomises the crony capitalism that has banjaxed the country. He instigated the bank-friendly policies while prime minister, privatised the institutions and then moved over to policing them.

  Oddsson’s refusal to yield led to the protest moving to the central bank last week. While he stewed inside, the saucepans and hooters and drums rented the freezing air without. Somewhere else in the nondescript building, the bogeymen – staff drafted in from the International Monetary Fund – were hard at work, trying to extract Iceland from the mire.

  Relations between the protestors and the complement of cops rarely descended to the level of tense. Individuals on both sides are wearing balaclavas, not in an attempt at disguise, but to keep the freezing temperatures at bay. One of the female protestors has a wok dangling from her belt, like a carpenter’s hammer, or a policeman’s baton.

  Jensson Johanson is carrying a placard depicting a man bent low by an invisible weight. He is fifty-six years of age, a school librarian by training. ‘I was working for a state school and last December they let everybody go,’ he says. ‘The small man cannot bear all the weight of this problem. Too many people are losing jobs. Rent is going very high. We need to have change.’

  He points to a young man hammering away at a drum kit nearby. ‘My son, he is an electrical engineer. He lost his job last month. Educated people like him have no work now.’

  The plight of the young is one which also resonates with this country’s economic woes, both past the present. The prospect of immigration is one of the most worrying aspects of the crisis, according to the economist Thorvaldur Gylfason.

  He is a professor at the University of Iceland, where, he points out, they have proportionately more staff with PhDs than anywhere else in Europe.

  ‘We always had a tradition of people going abroad to get qualified and then returning here,’ he says. ‘Whether that can be sustained when we have unemployment in double digits – something we have little experience of in this country – is worrying.

  ‘If people have to emigrate and don’t return, there will be severe long-term implications for the country. The main challenge for the government is to inspire enough confidence to keep the young people loyal.’

  Haukur Magnusson is one of the generation to which the economist refers. He is twenty-eight, and was present for most of the protests. ‘We are the group who will be paying for all of this and nobody consulted us on how to run society. We weren’t invited to the party and now we’re being asked to pick up the tab,’ he says. Magnusson, a journalist, is philosophical on where the future lies. He points to a recent story in a Norwegian newspaper that suggests Icelanders are the new Poles, on the move, looking for work.

  ‘Unfortunately, there is some poetic justice in what has happened. Iceland had become a nation of nouveau riche fishermen with their cellphones, looking down on the Poles, who have a fine culture of their own.

  ‘Now people are thinking what kind of society we really want to be rather than chasing after Range Rovers and flat-screen TVs.’

  DAVID KENNY

  The West’s afloat

  Hugh O’Donnell lost his Co. Galway farmhouse in the floods of 2009. His wife Kathleen lost her photos of her mother. What was taken by the surging water went beyond bricks and mortar.

  29 November 2009

  The beige-brown fields of Beagh have stopped trying to absorb the blows of the past week. They flinch as your boot sinks into them. Invisible hands snatch at your ankles as if you are stepping in a wound. The sky seems to mock the land. The sun shining one minute, the rain pelting down the next.

  ‘The muck will never come over the rim of your boot. Sure, it’s solid underneath. Move slowly, that’s the trick.’ Hugh O’Donnell is surprisingly upbeat for a man whose farm is under water. The suspicion is that he might still be in denial about what has happened to him.

  He leads us over slippery, green stone walls and ditches for half an hour, throwing stories of drunken bishops and legendary postmen over his shoulder.

  After half an hour we are looking down at a scene that epitomises the suffering the West is enduring: the abandoned O’Donnell farm is Atlantis, with broken turf stacks for fallen columns. Water is up to the windows, a car is submerged beside the kitchen door, a kettle in the window hints that family life and all its treasures are trapped inside.

  ‘It’s gone down a few feet,’ says Hugh. Moments later, he too is in the water, wading out to check on the house he was born in. He is deep in the freezing swirl. Up to his neck in it, as is his home town of Gort.

  He’s getting used to it, and so are his family. O’Donnell’s eighty-seven-year-old mother Mary is currently recovering in a nursing home after being air-lifted from her flooded home by helicopter.

  O’Donnell and four members of her family were winched 100 ft into the air as unprecedented water levels swamped their home. ‘I’m feeling an awful lot better now, but I got an awful fright,’ she told the Sunday Tribune. ‘I went to bed and said my prayers. I said a rosary for my late husband. The next thing, Kathleen [Hugh’s wife] came in at
about 3 a.m. and said, “Nana, you have to get up. The house is full of water.” It was a terrible shock to get. They tried to come in to the room, but it was too deep for the wheelchair. So I went out and up and into the helicopter. I had to lie down [in the stretcher] ... well, the pains in my arms ... The crew were very nice to me. They landed me on the hurling field and [local publican] Florry [McCarthy] and my son landed me here in the nursing home.’

  When asked if she ever planned to ride in a helicopter again, Mary O’Donnell joked: ‘I don’t know if I’ll live that long – but I certainly don’t want to again.’

  Hugh recalled the moment the helicopter arrived. ‘The man in the helicopter was great. He sat down with my mother for a couple of minutes and relaxed her – told her everything that was going to happen. If she was living alone she was lost, there are no two ways about it.’ O’Donnell, together with his two children Oisin and Suzanne and his wife Kathleen, were also rescued by the air crew.

  Miles away, up in the town square, John Counihan looks down Crowe Street, where a river runs past his front door. ‘We’ve pumped 120 million gallons of water in the last week. We’re working around the clock.’ For all its efforts, Gort is merely sticking its finger in the dam. Manhole covers have been lifted by the force of the water and lie on Crowe Street like huge pennies in a filthy brown fountain.

  Counihan lives halfway down. The torrent swept past his front door and ruined everything in its path – except his house. ‘We have a step,’ his wife Mary explains, at the twenty-four-hour coffee station at her front door. She points across the street to the grey stain which is the high water mark of her neighbours’ misery: the flood had reached up to their window sills.

  A middle-aged man is wading disconsolately through the water. ‘That’s Brian Honan,’ Mary says. ‘He’s lost his antique furniture shop and his house was flooded too.’ Both are on either side of Crowe Street.