Northern Ireland Talks Plod Onward – The talks to prop up the seriously troubled Northern Ireland political situation have seen the departure of Richard Haass and soon after followed British Prime Minister David Cameron. Enter Gary Hart, who may or may not be in the North of Ireland as this is going to press. There is serious business in progress and there is real concern in the North that the peace process, absent some top level corrective measures, could be in danger of collapsing. This is what has caught the attention of both the Irish and British governments.

The troubles (small “t”) focus on parades, emblems, flagpole space, and parity of esteem for the DUP and other unionists who are immersed in a melange of real and imagined slights about today and “the past.” Attached to a litany of complaints energizing the current talks is the lingering question of welfare reform and other policy matters, and, as ever, the devolved government’s budget.

The budget request – it’s really a demand – for a $3.3 billion bailout for the North is the latest price that the five executive parties are asking from the British government as the cost of striking a deal and bringing some order to the Stormont government.

The parties have been in largely unproductive talks for ten weeks and the northern Ireland Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, has been reluctant to give the parties an open-ended tenure. While some may claim that the budget and welfare reform lead the list of complaints, it is the ideological battle between the DUP and Sinn Fein, and the contentious parades, flags, and the legacy of past deaths and violence that constitute major obstacles to an agreement.

Christmas is fast upon us and as this is written, nobody at the table is sure if an agreement is even possible.

Holiday Turkeys Edge Lamb, Goose, Beef – It may be somewhat different in the nether regions of the Republic, but in the North of Ireland the main course for the recently celebrated Christmas holiday was “by a long shot” that longtime American favorite, turkey. While turkey, the whole bird, is king of the table, more Irish are leaving the carving to others and opting for turkey breasts and boneless fillets. This is a development that was rarely seen or sold a decade ago.

Irishman Wins Visa Case Against British – A County Kerry man, Sean McCarthy, who is married to Helena McCarthy Rodriguez, a Columbian who holds an EU residency card, has spent five years and thousands of euros contending that his wife is entitled under EU rules to travel freely without a visa. The British government said no, echoing Prime Minister Cameron’s pledge to limit the number of foreigners.

McCarthy, a man of determination, took the British to court, contending that Mrs. McCarthy should be able to travel freely within the European Union carrying only a residency permit, and is not obliged to present herself every six months to a British diplomatic mission to (in essence) seek permission to travel. McCarthy challenged the law, citing the EU’s “Freedom of Movement” within the Union, and took the case to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

McCarthy won his case there, assuring his wife’s ability to travel anywhere within the EU.  As McCarthy said following the court’s decision, “By accepting the existing British ruling I would be betraying the many millions of EU citizens who are in a similar position as us but lack financial muscle to take an action all the way to Europe.”  Way to go, Sean.

Torture Demeans & Hurts USA – US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it.” On a different issue, but almost as soul-scorching, is torture, and former US vice president Dick Cheney’s immense difficulty not only in seeing it but also in conceding that it exists. His full-throated defense of the interrogation tactics used by CIA officers as outlined in the final report of the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence was as inelegant as it was untrue. Cheney on torture and the Senate findings: “The report’s full of crap.”

Well so is Mr. Cheney, and it’s a condition that has existed, at least, since he used his VP clout to ravage CIA files in search of a rationale for the Bush-Cheney war on Iraq. Mr. Cheney was wrong on most things in those pre-invasion shouts of bravado: Remember them? “We’ll be greeted as heroes” … “the oil will pay for our stay there” … the non-existent weapons of mass destruction … and his lies and corrupted verbiage that betrayed America and her citizens.

The National Catholic Reporter calls torture what it is: torture, and it says editorially: “The use of torture ...is an indelible stain upon the nation’s conscience...” The Irish Times said “Somewhere ...between the legalistic documents and the Senate report, we can see the truly corrosive nature of torture. The abuse of the hooded men of Northern Ireland ultimately led to the abuse of the hooded men of Abu Ghraib. It is time to break that chain.”

Cheney’s Dec. 14 session with Chuck Todd on “Meet The Press” was an exercise in obstruction supported by a series of Cheney myths and self-serving lies by a man who advocated policies that resulted in an unnecessary war and the death and maiming of thousands of young Americans. They deserved better and so did we.

Honoring Ireland, Serving Humanity – Dave Terry from Blarney, Co. Cork, didn’t get to celebrate the recent Christmas at home. For the fifth year out of the last six, he was on foreign soil as a member of GOAL, the Irish charity founded in Dublin in 1977 to serve the poorest of the poor. His mission this Christmas was to help run a GOAL ebola treatment center. Since May of 2014 there have been 1,800 confirmed ebola deaths in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, and the struggle to treat and save the seriously ill goes on.

Dave Terry is a GOAL lifer, having served so far in places like Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, South Sudan, Haiti, and now in Sierra Leone. The days are long and the entertainment and social life is sparse to none, to say the least, but Terry says “there will be plenty of time for holidays when I  return to my home on the Aran Isles when I get too old for this job. In the meantime there are many lives to be saved and people to be helped.”

GOAL is an international humanitarian agency dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the poorest of the poor. Non-denominational, non-governmental, non-political, it has spent over a billion dollars on programs in over 50 countries, responding in every humanitarian disaster since 1977.  To contact GOAL to donate or for more information, visit them at goalglobal.org.

Memories: Biggest Ever Northern Bank Robbery – It was by any measure a spectacular robbery, the biggest and boldest caper in terms of bank robberies in British history at the time.  It has been estimated (but not yet proven in court) that up to 30 Irish republicans, most likely Sinn Fein operatives or remnants of the provisional Irish Republican Army, planned and successfully executed the Belfast robbery. They escaped with 26.5 million British pounds sterling in December 2004. The money in equivalent American dollars was over $60 million.

Three months after the robbery the British put in place a major security operation to replace some new 240 million British paper notes from the Northern Bank in an attempt to render the stolen notes worthless. Around that time, some 50,000 unused Northern
Bank British pounds were found in a police recreational club toilet. Some called it a prank; police officials say it was an attempt at misdirection.

Charges were brought against two suspects but were dropped in early 2007. A Cork financial adviser was given a five-year suspended sentence for laundering more than 3 million pounds from the robbery. In 2008, a Northern Bank employee became the only person to face trial in the huge bank heist. In 2008 he was cleared of all charges. Some 20 years later, the robbery remains unsolved, and nobody has yet to serve a day in prison for playing a role in the heist.

Own a Piece of the Emerald Isle – The problem is one that has haunted Ireland: It is the least wooded place in Europe. In the North of Ireland, at best, only 3 percent of native woodland is left. While the European Union woodland average is around 34 percent, it would take Ireland some 80 years to reach that percentage level, even with the work local government and charities are doing.

Lyn Nelson, a native of the North Coast of Ireland, had an idea that natives and visitors alike might want to own a little piece of Ireland, and at the same time help to protect and conserve the country’s native landscape. Thus was born an enterprise called Emerald Heritage, which hopes to use funds raised (not by government grants) to preserve and enhance Irish woodlands through restoration and expansion.

Nelson and a friend and colleague, John Langlois, teamed up with Emerald Heritage looking to “involve the community, children, volunteers, and land owners to come and plant trees and take pride of their very own plot of land. We already owned land in the beautiful area of the Glens of Antrim,” she said, “and we realized that we could make a difference with the public’s help. Together we can ensure that this valuable natural resource will never be destroyed by developers, thus assuring its conservation for future generations.”

The Emerald Heritage has recently teamed up with the Ulster Historical Foundation, a Belfast-based charity. To learn more about Emerald Heritage and their goals, visit them at emerald-heritage.com.

American Nuns Grade Better Than Expected – I spent ten years in school in Somerville staffed by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston. Those were good years when I was learning how to grow up and coming together with women, who, like my mother, taught me to read and gave me the gift  of passion for reading. I owe them and my mother, Anne Elizabeth Flaherty O’Donnell, a debt that I can never repay, nor ever be casual about. I stayed with the good sisters until I left as a teenager to enlist in the Marine Corps. But their lessons are never far away.

Fast track to the present. When I first saw the news several years ago about the “Apostolic Visitations,” or whatever those inquisitional chats were supposed to be about, I worried about quiet Sister Padraic and her colleagues and about how they might fend off the male big shots who were going to come knocking.  I thought, ‘Why are these purple-clad mandarins coming to cause problems for the hardest-working and most straight-forward volunteers in today’s Catholic Church. Why?

After reading much, not all, of the report headed up by Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, and noting the cordial content of the exchange between the sisters and the prelate, it is clear that my worst fears went pleasantly unrealized. There were no criticisms, no references to secular agendas or the like; peace and reconciliation were in the air, and in the report. There is still some fine-tuning to be done by the largest and respected of the sisters’ leadership organizations, but the presence of the two nuns, Sisters Millea and Holland, bore witness to detente and a clear recognition of the critically important role of the nuns in the Catholic Church’s social justice mission.

A New Year’s Gift from the Clinton Library – What a delightful gift from one of the Clintons who is not running for anything. The Clinton Presidential Library and Museum (I think that’s its name) has released a research treasure trove of interviews by friends, key staffers, appointees, and others close to former President Bill Clinton. I spent far too much time wallowing (a Nixon word) in the Bill Clinton persona as seen by those closest to him. What I found most  appealing are the interviews of Nancy Soderberg and Tony Lake, who did much of the heavy lifting in giving buoyancy to the Irish peace process.

The 134 interviews released in November as part of the Clinton Presidential History Project by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia is an insider’s look at events as recollected by the principals without artifice and no axes to grind. In a word or two —good stuff, neat, and a wonderful way to open the New Year. Certainly better than anything you will read in Maureen Dowd’s saintly space.

RANDOM CLIPPINGS
 Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair couldn’t buy Aer Lingus and it seems that neither could International Airlines group (British Air & Iberia), which made a serious offer and was spurned by Ireland’s premier Irish carrier. … Is there still some life in the Narrow Water Bridge proposal as a link and a living symbol between the six counties and the Republic? … Sinn Fein keeps saying “no” to suggestions that its elected MPs could take their seats at Westminster if things get tight. … Speaking of Ryanair’s O’Leary, he said on TV that “humility is a wonderful trait” after noting that it took him 25 years to get it. … By next summer, Ireland’s National Library will have nearly 1,100 parishes going back 300 years digitized and available on the internet. … Things could be going a lot  better with more than 600 interface incidents recorded in NI in the past 8 months.

Ireland, according to the Global Property Index, is the fastest growing property market in the world.  If true, what happens when it gets a second wind? … The rosy scenario crowd is predicting that 1,800 jobs will be created as part of an all-Ireland drive to promote Irish design. From God’s lips. … After a five- year campaign for recognition, Irish travellers will soon be granted ethnic minority status in Ireland. … John Carroll,  the hippest media observer in Boston, is set to join WBUR as commentator and senior media analyst. Welcome, John. … It’s time to cut back for Emily Rooney, longtime host of WGBH’s Greater Boston show. She will continue to host Beat the Press. … Just in time for Christmas: Waterford Crystal’s pensioned workers will share in the $240 million pension deal made with the Irish government. About time.

Birmingham, home In Britain to many Irish, will de-fund its St. Patrick’s Festival after 2015 unless paraders come up with $30,000. … A senior Labour member of the Dail is claiming he would earn more as a plumber than the $125,000 he makes as a politician. I hope his constituents help him out of his low-pay position. … Sinead O’Connor has asked Gerry Adams to support her application to be a member of Sinn Fein. Gerry noted she had a probationary period first. … Cloud computing and storage giant EMC is looking at a Cork location for a new data center. The Mass-based company has 3,000 workers in Ireland. … Next for Irish care homes and senior assisted living is the possible installation of surveillance systems, aka cameras, etc., to protect vulnerable patients. … The pope’s birthday gift to Rome’s homeless is free sleeping bags. OMG, has anyone checked out the Vatican water lately? What will the Curia say? … Another discovery: hundreds of millions found tucked away inside the Vatican. So take a pause on Peter’s Pence while they check the books.

A Happy New Year to all our readers and to friends on both sides of the water.