Dean Buckley Irish Politics

Interview: Francis O’Toole, Aontú Candidate for Tipp North

For the general election, I have decided to conduct a candidate interview series with the candidates seeking to represent Tipperary in the 34th Dáil. I initially hoped to arrange to do proper interviews with as many candidates as possible, but in the interest of giving the candidates equal time and opportunity to respond, I’ve emailed them each ten questions. Nine of the ten questions are the same for all candidates, with one question (#9) tailored to the candidate. All candidates of the same party were given the same tailored question. I will be publishing responses in the order I receive them.

First up: Francis O’Toole, Aontú candidate for Tipp North.

Continue reading “Interview: Francis O’Toole, Aontú Candidate for Tipp North” →
Dean Buckley Irish Politics

A Skeleton in Florida

When I look back on the year in Irish politics, I think of a skeleton in Florida. On its east coast, about fifteen minutes’ drive from the Kennedy Space Center, is the Windover Archeological Site, a muck pond where the skeletal remains of 168 people were found buried in peat at the bottom. The skeletons are all thousands of years old, and some date from thousands apart: generations upon generations of people used it as a burial site.

Among the skeletons was a 15-year-old boy with a host of developmental issues, including spina bifida. Given the extent and severity of his disabilities, he likely couldn’t walk, let alone directly contribute to his people’s survival in a hunter-gatherer society. He probably had to be carried everywhere he went his whole life. Yet even in an environment as hostile to human life as prehistoric Florida, his people did not view him as a burden or a strain on resources. They didn’t leave him to die of exposure so they’d have one less non-productive mouth to feed. He was just another member of the tribe, so they cared for him. They carried him.

It’s 2024 and here in Ireland, the environment is not hostile to human life, quite the opposite. People bend the environment to their will. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and most of us enjoy a level of comfort and convenience no one buried in Windover could even begin to imagine. Yet parents of children with spina bifida have spent this entire year – and so many years before this – begging our government to provide the medical treatment to which they are entitled.

I could tell a lot of different stories about why that’s the case. A ruling class with an electoral monopoly. The legacy of Catholic anticommunism on healthcare. Ireland as the neoliberal dream curdled into nightmare. But all these stories, while part of the picture, turn on one fundamental fact.

Disabled people are not respected in this country, and our lives are not valued. We are not, perhaps, subject to as much open hatred and contempt as we might be elsewhere, or in times past. But we are generally not seen as human beings with the right to fully participate in all aspects of society, and if we are, it’s usually because people think our disabilities don’t count or aren’t real. It is not respect that underpins how disabled people are treated in this country, but pity, so you must be pitiful to count as disabled. We are poor things, to be tutted over and talked past, or tokenised as inspirational.

It’s better than a kick in the teeth, but pity kills too. Pity says a disabled life isn’t worth living, so why make it a good one? Pity says disabled people can’t speak for themselves, so why bother trying to listen? Pity is the tear rolling down your cheek as you press the pillow over our sleeping faces.

We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet a significant number of disabled people here receive a primary school education or less. We are one of the wealthiest countries in all human history, yet disabled people are routinely locked away in residential institutions rife with abuse rather than supported in living in our communities. We are one of the wealthiest countries there is ever likely to be, yet parents of children with spina bifida are begging the government for medical treatment.

Today, the 33rd Dáil is dissolved, and the voters of this republic have once again been asked what kind of country we want to be. I don’t know what to expect, nor what to hope for. I just know we deserve better than this.

Dean Buckley Irish Politics

Candidate Interview Series: General Election 2024

For the general election, I have decided to conduct a candidate interview series with the candidates seeking to represent Tipperary in the 34th Dáil. I initially hoped to arrange to do proper interviews with as many candidates as possible, but even when the candidate pool was much smaller, it was going to be hard to pull off. Now that the number of candidates has increased sharply, and with the window for the election itself closing, it would be impossible.

Given the logistical difficulties, and in the interest of giving the candidates equal time and opportunity to respond, I’ve emailed them each ten questions and will be accepting written or recorded responses. Nine of the ten questions are the same for all candidates, with the tenth question tailored to the candidate. All candidates of the same party were given the same tailored question. No interview will be published if the candidate does not answer all ten questions.

A number of candidates have already agreed to participate, but again, in the interest of giving them equal time and opportunity to respond, I have also emailed those candidates who did not respond to my initial query. I will be publishing responses in the order I receive them.

In the interest of transparency, I want to acknowledge that I am a member of Tipperary Welcomes, a network of community groups and civil organisations working to promote integration and fight for the needs of everyone who calls Tipperary home, whose members include Tipp Sinn Féin, Tipp People Before Profit and Tipp Greens, as well as the Clonmel-based Workers and Unemployed Action. Additionally, I am a member of a community group with similar values called Clonmel Together alongside WUA candidate Séamus Healy. The uniformity of the questions beyond the tailored ones is intended in part to mitigate against my own bias in that regard, but I hope you’ll agree the tailored questions aren’t softballs either. I will be repeating these disclosures at the start of all relevant interviews.

I also want to be upfront about the fact I did not extend three of the candidates an opportunity to participate. I believe strongly in giving everyone a fair shake, but at the end of the day, this is my blog, and I have to live with what I publish on it. That being said, I could not in good conscience offer space on my blog to John McGrath, the National Party candidate in Tipp South, Peter Madden, the independent National Alliance candidate in Tipp North, or Justin Phelan, an independent candidate in Tipp North. I consider the National Party – and I don’t use this term lightly – a Hitlerite party established in open imitation of the Nazis, and anyone who would run for it is beneath contempt. As for Madden and Phelan, they have been personally involved in the harrassment, intimidation and abuse of friends and comrades of mine in Roscrea, and I couldn’t look them in the eye if I gave either a platform.

All other candidates have been asked to take part.

TIPP NORTH

TIPP SOUTH

Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

The Dundrum “Injunction” is a Sham

If you have previously heard about a legal action brought in the High Court by “residents of Dundrum” in Co. Tipperary at the end of July, you probably heard the story like this. A group of outspoken residents of a small Tipperary village filed an injunction to try and stop Dundrum House, a shuttered hotel contracted to house Ukrainian refugees since 2022, from becoming a hybrid accommodation centre that also houses non-Ukrainian refugees, or “International Protection Applicants”, as the government insists on calling them. They submitted over 280 affidavits expressing their “legitimate concerns”, but the judge denied their application for an ex parte emergency injunction because they did not persuade him there was any emergency to address.

The problem is that’s not what happened, and every news outlet that’s publicised the story this way has either missed or ignored copious red flags that should have alerted to them to the real story.

No one from Dundrum filed an injunction in the High Court. A man called Patrick McGreal from Westmeath had already filed his own injunction against a statutory instrument that allows the government to build temporary accommodation for displaced persons without going through the usual planning process. He then attempted to file an ex partie emergency injunction against Dundrum House, supported by affidavits from the protesters, but without any residents of Dundrum as applicants. The Dundrum protesters – many of whom are not in fact residents of Dundrum at all – also separately tried to join McGreal’s injunction against the statutory instrument, even though it’s not clear to me the statutory instrument in question is even at issue in the case of Dundrum House.

I don’t know if those protesters even realised that’s what they were doing, because it was all the hare-brained scheme of McGreal himself, a vegetable farmer and conspiracy theorist who took the protesters for a ride by promising them a nonsense legal solution to their woes based on his own crank theories and magical thinking. He wasted their time, effort and money on a frivolous legal action that never had any chance of succeeding, and now he’s using the notoriety he’s gained from his role to raise money for further vexatious litigation.

Worse still, four elected Tipp representatives – three councillors and TD Mattie McGrath – lended this effort their official support without seeking any independent legal advice or doing any due diligence to vet Mr. McGreal’s credibility. All were asked to comment on this story, and all refused but one, who immediately changed his mind once I made the scope of the story apparent. These elected officials helped a charlatan mislead their constituents, and now they’re hiding from the responsbility.

Continue reading “The Dundrum “Injunction” is a Sham” →
Dean Buckley Housekeeping

Concluding Unjournalistic Postscript to Local Investigations

I first started this blog in 2011, when I was still in secondary school, and I’ve rebooted it four or five times since then. The last time I rebooted it, early last year, I wrote a post giving some context for whatever I wrote next. This was partly to lay out my political beliefs clearly so that I could avoid the tedium of clarifying them in every post or in response to future questions or comments. All that stuff is still accurate and up to date, but the rest of the post was meant to stress that “unless I say that what I’m writing about on this blog is important, please presume I merely find it interesting”.

I wanted to frame future posts that way because at the time, I was still in the midst of what we’ll call a years-long case of writer’s block because I don’t want to get into it and the main point is that I had stopped writing. This was highly unusual for me, as I’d been writing pretty much constantly since I was in primary school. From 2012 to 2016, I was mainly a poet, and I’ve mainly been a film and TV critic since then. Since 2017, I’ve written all but exclusively for The Sundae, a blog I co-created and co-edit with my friend Ciara Moloney. I’ve written almost nothing there, or anywhere, since 2021. When I rebooted this blog last year, it was part of a semi-failed effort to get writing again and I wanted to make the stakes as low as possible. I wrote two short pieces on neutrality and tax subsidies that I was pretty happy with, but I just couldn’t properly smash through that writer’s block until late April, when I began investigating a small group of anti-migrant agitators in my area, and ultimately wrote three pieces (1, 2, 3) about what I learned. I now find myself highly motivated to write again, but I can’t do that in good faith without acknowledging the change in context since I last rebooted the blog. I’m not planning to exclusively write investigative pieces here, but I am going to continue writing about local politics, amongst other things.

I can’t do that honestly under the premise that reader should presume I don’t think what I’m saying is important. I want to write for and about things that are important to me, including my community, and if I’ve learned one thing over the last three years, it’s that I can’t write if I don’t write with my heart on my sleeve. I always try to say what I mean and mean what I say, but I’ve let fear of vulnerability and responsibility limit what I write in the past. Not anymore. I’m writing again, and I’m not going to stop.

If it takes vulnerability, that’s between me, myself and I. But if it takes responsibility, I have to be responsible to more than just myself. I don’t care how pretentious, self-righteous or corny it sounds: doing the right thing matters to me. I feel a powerful, overwhelming sense of moral responsibility towards other people and I earnestly believe in an absolute moral law, ordained by God, that is the first, last and only standard against which any ethics can be judged. I will always try to hold myself to the highest possible standards – for better and worse, as far as my mental health goes – but if I’m seeking to promote the good by participating in the public square, I should be accountable to more than just my own self-assessment. If I were writing for a publication, I would have a code of conduct, but I’m writing on my personal blog. I might try to write something like a code of conduct some day, but in the meantime, a new context for future posts will have to do.

First, I need to reset the tone of the blog. I stand by the substance of everything I said in my three pieces on Clonmel Concerned Residents, and I don’t regret my willingness to express my views in the course of reporting facts. However, I was too often reckless with language, especially in the first piece, and the excessive profanity was particularly unwise. I curse like a sailor when speaking or writing freely and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I showed a lack of prudence, judgement and discipline in how I expressed myself by writing, editing and publishing those pieces in the form I did. They needed more drafts, but I let my sense of urgency about getting the information out override my better instincts as a writer and I let my fear that I’d stop writing again override my better instincts as a person. If harsh speech against others can be justified by moral righteousness, then it should be phrased as righteously as possible. Many leftists are convinced it’s okay to say otherwise unacceptable things as long as the target is sufficiently abhorrent, but I don’t believe in moral get-out-of-jail free cards and I don’t like bullies. I took too much satisfaction from insulting people in these pieces, and continuing to write so recklessly would only feed an ugly instinct toward cruelty I usually try to starve. I will try much harder in future to follow the advice of a wise commenter on my first CCR piece, who said I “need to be objective, not call people bastards etc”. It’s not the first time I’ve received that advice, admittedly, but it’s the first time I’m taking it seriously.

Second, I need to reset the intent of the blog. I want to write about things that are important to the world and things that are interesting to me. As far as opinion, analysis or commentary go, there’s no point pretending I know all the subjects I’ll want to write about, let alone follow through on writing. I’ll still be publishing future pop culture writing on The Sundae, though I have considered writing about video games here sometimes, since Ciara doesn’t play them and it seems cruel to make her edit my takes on them. Broadly speaking though, the topics I’m currently most eager to write on are politics, philosophy, conspiracism, the Internet and Ireland above all things. I have spent too much of my writing life trying to write for a general English-speaking audience and nowhere near enough writing about or for my country. I don’t feel some patriotic duty to glorify the nation or any shit like that, but I love my country and its history and culture, and I always have. I’m sick of not pursuing those passions on the page so I can be more accessible to Yanks and Brits who know nothing of Ireland. I’m done with it. I am not a citizen of the world, I’m an extremely tired man who’s lived all but five years of my life in the floodplain of a single river. I want to write like one.

But I don’t just want to write opinion, analysis and commentary here. I want to write on local issues and I will be doing further investigative work even if I only publish investigative pieces occasionally. I decided early on I could write, at most, three investigative pieces before saying “I’m not a journalist” would start to feel like a lie, and I wrote three on Clonmel Concerned Residents, so I’m all out of excuses. I still don’t feel like a journalist, but whatever I call myself, I have been doing journalism, and I’m going to do more journalism in the future, so I should be held to the appropriate ethical standards. However, I want to make it very clear that I have zero intention of pretending I have an objective point of view on anything I write about. I will never report as fact anything I cannot prove as fact, but I can’t and won’t hide how I feel about those facts. I think it’s more honest to be upfront about my opinion than pretend I don’t have one. It’s one thing when you’re part of a publication or institution that has to collectively stand over what individuals write, and where a strong firewall between news and opinion is actually very important to build credibility and maintain public trust. But I’m just a man with a blog and I’m not putting a firewall in my brain. I would rather be trusted for my independence and integrity than my ability to appear impartial. I may not have the manpower or resources of a professional newsroom, but I will always work as hard I can to ensure my reporting is reliable, accurate and fair.

To that end, I’ve set up a tip jar for readers who want to support my work by contributing towards my expenses. I have limited opportunities for paid work due to a rare sleep disorder and haven’t actively pitched as a writer for years. I’m fine with that, and I’ve been happily writing and publishing pop culture criticism for free since 2017, because I’d rather make nothing than write nothing and I’m too punk to paywall. But I’m putting a lot more work into my new writing and it costs money to access the research materials and public documents I’ll need to do it well. I’m still too punk to paywall, especially work in the public interest, and I still have a rare sleep disorder, so I can’t commit to a regular publishing schedule. The only crowdfunding option that makes sense is pay what you want, when you want, if you want. I appreciate whatever help I get.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who supported me through my long dark three years of the soul and throughout the writing of these pieces, especially my partner, my mother, my friends Ciara, Conor, Matthew and Graham, my neighbour, and everyone in the community who reached out to express solidarity, offer advice or share information. I very demonstrably could not have done it with you.