Banana Republic mk 2

We've been thrown our bone.

Brian Cowen said something had to be seen to be done, and hence now we're getting some token action months after it might have been relevant.

The Gardai, at the instigation of the Financial Regulator (the new one, not the utterly incompetent one who quit and swanned off into the sunset with a big swagbag of a golden handshake), have gone into Anglo Irish Bank yesterday evening seeking evidence of wrongdoing.

They follow the path beaten by the Fraud Squad only a day earlier.

There is now a faint outside chance that some of the gobshite criminals responsible for the mess that we're in will actually face criminal charges.

But it's only a bone. The time for all this activity was four months ago not now. You can shred a lot of incriminating evidence in four months.

Don't forget, we still live in a Banana Republic. For those of you who forget that we had a country before the Celtic Tiger hallucination, here's a little bit of Bob to remind you:

Police State, anyone?

As Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, comes under increasing Chinese terror, murder and genocide, it is always useful to suspend thoughts like 'It couldn't happen here' and question the nature of the freedoms we hold dear.

One of the problems in Tibet, as in Burma, is that when the ruling junta own the media, there is little possibility of the truth of their appalling atrocities reaching the outside world. And without media coverage to remind us, the rest of us, cosy in our Western democracies, go back to sleep or turn on some more enlightening reality shows instead.

After all, who's in uproar about Burma now? Nobody is who. And without support in the West, Tibetans will be equally crushed. They will be crushed because they can be crushed and no one will know because no one will hear about it.

The silencing of independent media is where a police state begins.

Now, here's a story, fresh today that should raise concerns. Four BBC journalists have been arrested by Gardai while making a programme about dissident Republicanism.

No doubt, as we still have a semblance of an independent media here and in Britain, the facts of this case will emerge over the forthcoming days. What is already clear is that the BBC are standing by their reporters and have stated that they were on duty, working on a programme for the network.

It will be interesting to see what charges, if any, the Gardai seek to press against them. It will be interesting to see what programme, if any, is eventually aired on television.

In the meantime, let us all hope that this isn't the start of something sinister.

I mean, it's not like the Gardai in Donegal to invent evidence, fit people up for crimes that didn't happen and generally behave like amoral criminals themselves, is it?

Skinner Towers Attacked!

Fair play to the boys in blue. Perhaps they aren't all the keystone cops and corrupt Donegal shysters I took them for, after all.

Last night, some scumbags tried to break into my house. I heard them before they got in, thankfully, and warned them off, calling the plod for good measure.

While I waited in the darkened house, mobile in one hand and huge knife in the other, watching the shitheads trying to make their next move, the local Gardai arrived within a mere fifteen minutes.

By that stage, the cunts had fucked off to try some house that didn't have an irate, awake Northerner with a huge knife in it, but the plod took a description, had a word with another neighbour whose gaff they'd tried to break into, and circled the neighbourhood for a good hour looking for them.

I don't know if they caught them in the end, but fair play for the effort.

I really hope the boys in blue did catch them, though, because if I ever see them again, my knife hand is very twitchy.

Bailey libel action collapses

The Ian Bailey libel action against five newspaper groups has ended suddenly. It seems that the eight year action, which Mr Bailey took when the newspapers suggested he may have been considered a suspect in the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, was settled out of court yesterday.

The newspapers' defence was always that they had not said he was the murderer of Ms du Plantier, but that he was considered a suspect by the Gardai. Bailey sought to argue that they had attempted to pin the blame for the murder upon him.

But following the sudden end of the action yesterday, when the newspapers agreed to pay some of Mr Bailey's costs from a previous action which he lost in the Circuit Court and waived the costs they themselves had been awarded, the allegation that Mr Bailey was a reasonable suspect in the case, for which no one has ever been charged, remains standing.

Cutting through the jargon for a moment, it seems that either Mr Bailey murdered Ms du Plantier or he did not. If he did, then the correct forum for these debates is in the criminal court, not in a long-running libel action. If he did not, then he has been tried in the court of public opinion.

Either way, the call from the newspapers to reform the libel laws is correct. But they should have added that a full review of the competence of the investigating Gardai in this murder case is also necessary.

It is now over a decade since Ms du Plantier's death. The fact that no one has been charged and tried for her murder is yet another indictment of the Gardai. A woman died in hugely dubious circumstances. Ten years on, her family still do not have the facts of her death.

That should not be lost in the legal to-ing and fro-ing between a ruined former hack with a penchant for spousal abuse and the red-tops that fingered him as a likely murderer without his having been convicted of the offence.

Scrap the Gardai and start again

It's time to scrap the Gardai and start again. I was thinking this around the time that the Patton reforms in the North were announced years ago. If there is a police force on this island in desperate need of reform, it's the Gardai, not the PSNI.

Now, that's not to suggest that all is well with the Nips. It's not. But they have moved on from the sectarian nature that the RUC once displayed and are continuing to move in the right direction, in a climate which still makes proper community policing extremely difficult.

It's time, as Mairtin O'Muilleoir has pointed out, for Sinn Fein to endorse the PSNI, so that they can help to achieve the final reforms necessary to make the PSNI truly a police force for all in the North.

But what about the keystone cops of the Republic? This week they finally arrested Joe O'Reilly on charges of murdering his wife Rachel. Now, Joe is currently innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But this development indicates that such a trial is now likely.

Joe himself has previously acknowledged that he was a leading suspect. Newspapers like the Evening Herald all but identified him as the only suspect Gardai were investigating. Yet it has apparently taken over two years and hundreds of thousands of euro spent on investigation to bring Mr O'Reilly to the point of being charged.

This would be the same police force, incidentally, which has been caught fitting up people for non-existent murders in Donegal, planting evidence of bombmaking, and allegedly lying in court in relation to a suspect who was charged with offences relating to the Omagh bombing.

The same force that threatened to go on strike if a reserve force was introduced. The same force who earn spectacular wages and overtime for one of the worst records of serious crime solving in Europe, even after they pretended to solve some of the cases that they hadn't.

I reckon it's time the Gardai were completely overhauled. Let's scrap them and start again.

Incidentally, now that I have the queasy image of the Evening Herald in my head, let's consider a headline from former Murder Squad (that's the disbanded and discredited murder squad) detective Gerry O'Carroll's column, which appears in the Herald each Wednesday.

Commenting on the appearance of radical Islamic speaker Anjem Choudary at Trinity College this week, O'Carroll's article was titled 'Hate-filled rants must be silenced.' This is surely the height of irony, given the bile that he spews weekly.

O'Carroll, as many Herald readers may be unaware, was involved in the Gardai's 'Heavy Gang' in the 1970s, which Amnesty International accused of extracting confessions from suspects using torture. O'Carroll, like others involved, denies the Heavy Gang existed.

He was also the legend who got Joanne Hayes to confess to murder in the 'Kerry Babies' saga, and apparently still maintains that she gave birth to both babies, even though scientific evidence has long since proven otherwise.

O'Carroll has current Evening Herald editor Steven Rea to thank for his elevation from dodgy copper to red-top ranter. Rea, as many people may not recall, was formerly the editor of the Garda Review, so to describe him as having friends in the Garda establishment would be akin to stating that Gary Glitter shows an interest in young ladies.

'Hate-filled rants must be silenced', alright. Let's start by petitioning Mr Rea to remove his discredited pal's column. And then we can move on to dealing with the dodgy cops still practising in the police service.

Two years to bring a single-suspect case to charges? The public deserves better than that.

No Sleep till Breakfast

I notice Cllr Seamus Ryan complaining on his blog about bangers and fireworks being set off by what were once called juvenile delinquents down in Waterford.

Obviously, the staccato of bangs followed by the howling of petrified domestic animals is not restricted to the sunny South-East.

Last night, the little feckers in my neighbourhood kept it going well into the night, through the small hours and into the big ones again, leaving me with no sleep whatsoever.

The good councillor feels that more needs to be done to prevent those illegally importing and selling fireworks. I have an idea myself in relation to that.

A few years back, the Gardai invited me down to a little spot they have between Heuston Station and Kilmainham in Dublin to witness what happens when shoddy fireworks bought (or in the case of the Gardai, siezed) from shifty market stallholders go off.

In their illuminating demonstration, it was mainly fingers that went off, followed by eyes and the skin of the upper torso. Thankfully, the demo was performed on dummies.

I'm a believer in leaving explosives to the experts, like that genius who does the Paddy's Day fireworks along the Liffey, or the Provos. But it amazes me how many people want to play with fireworks without having the slightest idea what safety measures to take.

And what gets me is the gradual lengthening of all holidays these days. Christmas marketing begins in November if you're lucky, we have a week long St Patrick's festival instead of just the one day, and Hallowe'en begins with a bang in early September and goes on and on and on.

Why can't people restrict the fireworks, self-maiming and scaring of animals to the one day it was supposed to be?

Given that in the month before Hallowe'en each year, old people and animals are terrified each evening by the constant noise, that people like me can't get to sleep because of it, and especially because the kids buying and using these things swamp the hospital A+E departments in their dozens, I propose a modest solution to the problem.

Every person caught importing or selling fireworks and bangers illegally should be punished by having one superglued to their hand then lit.

Then perhaps next October, I can get some bloody sleep.