Bonus Content: Not In My Name
I have again opened up my usually paywalled weekly Diary to all. It is of the utmost importance that people are aware of the historical significance of what has occurred in Ireland this week.
Unprecedented times call for unprecedented responses. More and more I feel the need to share my Diary with everyone. This is my attempt to put words on the feelings that rise up in me these days but somehow seem to defy words, so I have to go on long walks, or sit alone in a park for an hour or two, or lie like Ratzinger prone on a couch for the whole of a wet day in an attempt to excavate a handful of words to make all this somehow real. My Diary usually comprises the outcomes of a week of these efforts.
This week, though deceptively nondescript, has been one of the most momentous in all the years and days of our lives after a year that has been the most disturbing and unprecedented of all our lifetimes — and not in a good way. It was the week Apartheid Ireland was born. There’s no getting away from it: A bunch of political puppets who for two decades have prated on about ‘ee-qwal-it-ee’ have now, under cover of a spurious pandemic, introduced a measure that radically differentiates between vaccinated and unvaccinated person, discriminating against the latter to an extent that reduces them to second-class citizens. Be prepared for the outraged scoffing if you utter something like this, but also be aware that this will be the outworking of a cultivated, indoctrinated response designed to cow you into silence and inarticulacy. Be assured that, if these thoughts come to you, you are not alone. We have entered what may become the darkest period of our entire history, subject to a tyranny led by some who claim to be of our own people. You are not wrong in your apprehension of this. Trust your repugnance of what is happening, and of those who are doing it.
Worst of all is that, in legal and practical terms, this is being done to us with our own power. The coercion being applied to our people now — to be subjected to a dangerous vaccine, to accept vaccine passports, to allow themselves to be incarcerated at their own expense for seeking briefly to escape this tyranny, is not the kind of coercion applied by a mugger or a rapist. It is much worse than that. It is the usurped, misappropriated power of the Irish people, in the normal course pooled for the general well-being and security of our people, vested in politicians and State functionaries, which has here been commandeered on behalf of unseen external agents and turned upon the people themselves. We are being menaced with our own gun. The boot upon our faces is our own. In a sense, we are doing all this to ourselves, by virtue of our refusal or inability to call a halt to the present regime of bullying, corruption and lying.
Ireland is now among the worst tyrannies in the world. I know this sounds absurd but it is literally the case. We are one of only a handful of countries that continues to ban religious services (though only Christian ones). In the past few days, the European Commission has raised serious questions about the Irish system of quarantine — in reality internment without trial for the ‘crime’ of being well.
Make no mistake: This is on us. Unless we act, unless we speak, all this will continue to occur in our name. Strictly speaking, it is Ireland, not Varadkar or Martin or Donnelly that is now causing raised eyebrows all over the formerly Free World. The world does not understand that it is simply a small handful of gangsters and creeps, most of them unelected, who are orchestrating this tyranny.
It is way past time that we made clear that none of this is being done in our name, that it is being done to us by people whom we mistakenly allowed to take the reins of power in our once free country. It is time we stood up, slapped the table, kicked the chairs from under us, and declared, 'Enough!'
I invite you to share this with anyone who you think might need to read it.
SATURDAY (April 10th)
This was the day the names of Martin and Donnelly finally, incontrovertibly, came to be added to the lists of the infamous, joining Cromwell and Trevelyan and a host of other degenerates, dirtbags and monsters in the overpopulated annals of Ireland’s historical blackguarding. This was the day Apartheid Ireland was born, courtesy not of some invading hoor of Babylon but of our own, homegrown hoors of Ballymagash, Ballygobackwards and Ballyhoorisky.
Shame, sorrow, is this day.
First there was Oliver Cromwell and his infamous injunction: ‘To Hell or to Connacht!’ Then there was Charles Trevelyan and his ‘Judgement of God’. Now there is Martin and Donnelly with their vaccination apartheid, by which, in the words of the Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, vaccinated people will be extended more ‘freedoms’.
It is clear that Varadkar has not the faintest idea what freedom is. Nor does he care. But it will be Micheál Martin’s name that, as fate would have it, will accompany history’s noting of the sordid events of this sad April and the contents of Statutory Instrument 168 of 2021, dated 10th April, 2021, and signed in the hand of Stephen Donnelly, Minister for Health. His too will be remembered among the cruellest, most ignoble names in the history of Ireland’s long Passion.
Statutory Instrument 168 of 2021 contains a series of the by now predictable ‘restrictions’ on public activities and movements — in their entirety unconstitutional and unlawful — which have characterised the recent and continuing tyrannical period of our national life. These include a series of specifications concerning the updated ‘regulation’ of ‘events in dwellings’.
A vital word is missing from this section, which contravenes Article 40.5 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, which states that ‘[t]he dwelling of every citizen is inviolable . . .’ The missing word, ‘inviolable’, means the same thing as sacrosanct, just about the highest word that exists short of ‘sacred’. Among the things this means is that it is not for the State or the Government, or any Minister of said Government, to tell the citizen what can and cannot happen in his or her dwelling, or what kind of people should go there or how many of them.
On page 12, paragraph 3, of Statutory Instrument 168, it is stated, under the section ‘Restrictions on events in dwellings’ that, ‘a vaccinated person may organise, or cause to be organised, an event to be held in a dwelling in a relevant geographical location where he or she has reasonable excuse.’ This is in contradistinction to unvaccinated persons, who have no entitlement, according to Stephen Donnelly, to organise, or cause to be organised ‘events’ to be held in their own homes.
Paragraph 4 elaborates:
‘For the purposes of paragraph (3), a vaccinated person has reasonable excuse for organising or causing to be organised an event in a dwelling in a relevant geographical location where –
(a) the dwelling is the vaccinated person’s place of residence,
(b) the event is attended only by vaccinated persons, and
(c) persons who are part of no more than 2 households, including the household of the person organising the event, attend the event.’
Let us set aside as proven the case concerning the illegitimacy of these ‘measures’. That goes without saying. We already know that we are dealing with a lawless administration, and outlaw ministers. We have been aware that we have been dealing with lawless administrations and lawless ministers for more than 13 months.
There is here, however, not so much a more serious matter as a more scrofulous one: the introduction of a system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of immunisation against the common cold. In other words, the introduction of apartheid, listed by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court among the most foul acts of inhumanity.
Of course the equivocators and dissemblers are out in force with their usual so-whattery: This is about saving lives.
Well, take a glance at the ‘excess deaths’ for 2020, which are now more or less available in finalised form. There were precisely no excess deaths in 2020: Including the deaths attributed to Covid, the annual fatality graph touches, just about, the line indicating the average deaths over the past five years. The only pandemic in Ireland in 2020 was a pandemic of lying.
So, it has, or had, nothing to do with saving lives. The past year of mendacity, bullying and conjuring has been about preparing for the vaccine passport, which in turn is about the scapegoating of those who seek to stand up to the ‘health’ junta by defending their right to bodily integrity against an untested and demonstrably dangerous vaccine that is utterly unnecessary, insidious and, at best, useless. It is about creating a two-tiered society such as was created, yes, by the National Socialists in, yes, Nazi Germany in the 1930s. To feel obliged to say such things is to be overcome by a mixture of grief and tedium: grief at what has befallen our beautiful country; tedium at the imposed necessity to spell out again one of the most fundamental lessons of history: that making fish of one and flesh of the other leads all but inexorably to an apocalypse of bloodshed.
All this, I know, renders useless the normative vocabularies of social apprehension, commentary or comprehension. Before, over the course of our lives — actually just about always, aside from moments of sudden tragedy or brief horror — we operated easily on the signal amplitude available to us, which in almost all circumstances allowed us to receive and transmit with adequate, unthinking ease. Very occasionally, this capacity was inadequate by reason of sudden or unthinkable grief or fear, but in such situations it seemed appropriate to be ‘beyond words’. Otherwise, when we spoke, we did not need to strain to grasp what was happening, to find words that satisfied us we had described it adequately. Now, confronted by skunks masquerading as leaders whose Hush Puppies have metamorphosed into jackboots, the words we essay seem just to skate across the surface of things. The bandwidth of societal conversation reveals itself as obsolete, in part because the media refuse to do the heavy-lifting, in part because it is difficult to survey the behaviour of our ‘leaders’ without asking if perhaps their bodies have not been invaded by aliens from a different universe. I hear things that have been decided or mandated that seem impossible, weird, wrong, evil, but nobody seems to notice, or even look up from what they’re doing, which is usually staring into their phones or jumping into the path of an approaching bus.
Have we forgotten what happens when we forget the trains and details of history? Freedom, Ronald Reagan once said, is always a just generation away from extinction. But is there any point in saying such things: If it was not obvious a year ago, is there any chance of it seeming obvious now?
2. The Nuremberg Code, dating from 1947, to which Ireland is a signatory in common with most ‘civilised’ countries in the world, sets out the principles of ethical research in matters involving medical experimentation. These amount to essentially three: consent, consent and consent.
Hence, Statutory Instrument 168 of 2021, with its mandatory or quasi-mandatory rules in respect of vaccination apartheid, stands in contradiction to this set of principles.
The Nuremberg Code is a set of 10 points that arose from the Nuremberg Trials conducted in the aftermath of World War II. The 10 points enshrined the principle of informed consent, as follows:
1# The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
2# The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
3# The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problems under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
4# The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
5# No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
6# The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
7# Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
8# The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
9# During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
10# During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
3. Going slightly further back the path to our present calamity, the Siracusa Principles, to which Ireland is also a signatory, have to do with declarations of states of emergency and set out that the burden is on signatory states to justify any derogation of rights guaranteed under the International Covenant and sets the lawful limits on such derogations in a public emergency.
Such an emergency must be announced by way of an official public proclamation which must set out the reasons for it and the conditions for it to end. The Siracusa Principles also set out what rights are non-derogable under any circumstances, including freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
The principles incorporate inter alia that:
‘In applying a limitation, a state shall use no more restrictive means than are required for the achievement of the purpose of the limitation.’
‘The burden of justifying a limitation upon a right guaranteed under the Covenant lies with the state.’
‘The need to protect public safety can justify limitations provided by law. It cannot be used for imposing vague or arbitrary limitations and may only be invoked when there exist adequate safeguards and effective remedies against abuse.’
‘The burden is upon a state imposing limitations . . . to demonstrate that the limitations do not impair the democratic functioning of the society.’
The Principles insist that no state party shall, even in time of emergency threatening the life of the nation, derogate from the Covenant’s guarantees of the right to life; freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and from medical or scientific experimentation without free consent; freedom from slavery or involuntary servitude; the right not to be imprisoned for contractual debt; the right not to be convicted or sentenced to a heavier penalty by virtue of retroactive criminal legislation; the right to recognition as a person before the law; and freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
These rights are not derogable under any conditions even for the asserted purpose of preserving the life of the nation.
Virtually none of this was observed by the Irish Government in the formulation and promulgation of Covid ‘regulations’ last year or since. No relevant or appropriate motion or resolution was set before the Oireachtas prior to the drafting of the legislation and the procedural requirements for the declaration of a national emergency were not met. As such, no state of emergency was ever formally ratified or declared by the Houses of the Oireachtas as is required by the Constitution and the Siracusa Principles, and the ‘emergency’ referred to throughout the legislation initiated by the then caretaker government accordingly did not and does not exist. Therefore, the references to ‘emergency’ sprinkled throughout the legislation constitutes a systemic misstatement — the original and continuing lie.
TUESDAY
As of 9am today, Tuesday, April 13th, a total of 934 of the UK’s Christian leaders had signed an open letter expressing their ‘serious concern’ at the threat of vaccine passports, which they described as an ‘unethical form of coercion and violation of the principle of informed consent.’
To make vaccination the basis of whether someone is allowed entry to a venue, or participation in an activity, they declared, makes no logical sense as a means of protecting others.
If the vaccines work in limiting viral load, they argued, then the vaccinated are protected, and cannot gain further from others being so. Indeed, since according to the authorities a vaccinated person can still carry the infection, it is spurious to suggest that the vaccine offers any kind of guarantee against infectiousness.
‘Secondly’ they continue,’ the introduction of vaccine passports would constitute an unethical form of coercion and violation of the principle of informed consent. People may have various reasons for being unable or unwilling to receive vaccines currently available including, for some Christians, serious issues of conscience related to the ethics of vaccine manufacture or testing. We risk creating a two-tier society, a medical apartheid in which an underclass of people who decline vaccination are excluded from significant areas of public life. There is also a legitimate fear that this scheme would be the thin end of the wedge leading to a permanent state of affairs in which COVID vaccine status could be expanded to encompass other forms of medical treatment and perhaps even other criteria beyond that. This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives. As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics.’
WEDNESDAY
Mick Jagger has released a lockdown song. I choose my words carefully. It is not really an anti-lockdown song, but, in his own words, a ‘song that I wrote about eventually coming out of lockdown, with some much needed optimism’.
It’s called Eazy Sleazy and features just one other musician: Dave Grohl, on drums, bass and guitar. Grohl was born in 1969, the year the Rolling Stones released the single Honky Tonk Woman and the album Let It Bleed featuring You Can't Always Get What You Want and Gimme Shelter, and were first introduced on stage as 'The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World'. He was also the drummer with Nirvana and founded the band Foo Fighters, for whom he is the singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter.
Easy Sleazy is loud, fast, punky and evasive. As stated, it’s a not-quite-an-anti-lockdown song, but might become such in the event of just two or three amino acids shifting one way or another. It’s Mick Jagger covering his bony arse by perching it on the fence and sitting there, wriggling and cavorting.
In fairness, the song announces itself as undoubtedly written by a man who experienced lockdown, who didn’t pull his status or wallet to avoid it. The lyric is about 70 per cent anti and 30 per cent accommodation. The anti parts are suitably sardonic. The accommodation bits convey a premature reminiscence, as if we used to kind of love and loathe the lockdown but it’s all over now, and soon we’ll all look back and laugh nostalgically, haha. The anti bits fit the energy perfectly and would past muster except that the accommodation bits put you on your guard, so you notice that the references to Bill Gates might be a hedged bet: Shooting the vaccine/Bill Gates is in my bloodstream/It’s mind control/The earth is flat and cold/its never warming up/The Arctics turned to slush/The second coming’s late/ There’s aliens in the deep state. Neat, funny, but just a tad ambiguous: he could be slagging Bill or dissing conspiracy theorists and a half-deaf man on a galloping horse would be hard put to say which.
As a piece of aural rock ‘n’ roll, it’s actually pretty good — no, actually, pretty great — better than Van or Eric or Ian, which it pains me to say. All in all, it’s a bit of a blast. It might even become an anti-lockdown anthem, but only if we win and Mick and/or his record company so decides. Otherwise, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll, which is not the same as total rock ‘n’ roll, which is never ‘only’ anything.
THURSDAY
Today is the first anniversary of the lodging by Gemma O’Doherty and me of our constitutional challenge to the lockdown.
That occasion a year ago was legally uneventful, except for the fact that the judge that first day opted to put the State on notice as opposed to simply reading our submissions and granting us permission for a judicial review of the Covid package of legislation, which would have allowed us to go away and prepare our case in more detail. That should have alerted us to something odd unfolding, but we just wanted to press ahead and thought that everybody else would be as anxious as we were to make sure that everything was above board.
Man, were we wrong about that!
What was unmissable was that, from the moment we entered the Four Courts building that morning, we encountered virtually nothing but hostility — from just about everybody we met, apart from, it must be said the judge, Mr Justice Mark Sanfey, who was at least pleasant and polite, even if he was putting in place the beginnings of the stitch-up.
Everyone we had to deal with acted as if we were a pair of burglars they had found rooting through their jewellery drawers. We encountered one lunk of a Registrar, dressed like a bouncer in a sauna, sporting a skimpy T-shirt that showed off his bellybutton, who tried to bluff us that we needed to have a parade of scientists with us if we wanted to put the matter before the judge that day. Had we not had a general sense of what we were doing, he might have caused us to leave the building tugging our forelocks in discomposure and chagrin and apologising for the effrontery of our intrusion.
This ‘absent scientists’ theme has been continued to this very day, being taken up by five of the six judges we encountered and relayed via the corrupt media to the unwitting public. Waters and O’Doherty didn’t bring any scientists with them, ha ha ha! Did you ever hear worse?
In the High Court, we ended up with Meenan J., a pedestrian beak presenting no evidence of personality. Having ignored much of the catalogue of relevant facts submitted in our roughly 20,000 words of submission, the Learned Judge, in his Judgment, sought by selectivity to suggest that we had submitted no facts at all to support an arguable case that the restrictions were disproportionate to the exigencies of the situation, but instead had offered simply ‘unsubstantiated opinions, speeches, engaged in empty rhetoric and sought to draw an historic parallel that was both absurd and offensive.’
Oh yes: the ‘absurd and offensive comparison with Nazi Germany’ trope. There is a certain class of spalpeen who trots out this sophism at every opportunity, as though it were obvious that nothing can ever again be compared to anything relating to Nazi Germany, as though Nazi Germany arose from some manner of arcane and self-evidently unrepeatable circumstances, sparked perhaps by such as an abundance of Volkswagen Beetles or bad moustaches.
Quite obviously, the circumstances that led to the events in Germany between 1929 and 1945 — aside from technical ones like unemployment and hyperinflation (coming soon!) — must be regarded as having their roots in human weaknesses and venality of multiple varieties. These might include: a widespread susceptibility to propaganda, sloganeering and fear-mongering spread via up-to-date technology; a readymade external threat; an ineffectual press; a ruthless minority of psychopathic or amoral individuals in power; an inadequate judiciary’ and — oh yes — a specific proclivity for the scapegoating of individuals and groupings who do not concur with the ascendant groupthink.
To suggest that such circumstances were unique to Nazi Germany, and are, by virtue of having led in Nazi Germany to unprecedented evil — does not mean that they are unrepeatable. Indeed it means that it behoves civilisation to be all the more cognisant of the specifications leading to such a slide into tyranny — now that we have an idea what they are — the better to avoid any form of recurrence. To cling to the notion that all comparisons with those events are ‘offensive’ is to lock them into some special butsudan of wickedness, in which they are immune from use as a salutary warning to the world.
The ‘offensive’ charge is beyond stupid; the charge that the comparison is ‘absurd’ must be measured against the objective facts of every situation. What Gemma O’Doherty actually said to give rise to an opportunistic series of tirades from the judge, repeated ad nauseam by the corrupt media, was that Irish people were now being required to produce proof of identity — ‘papers’, I believe she said — while moving around their country, which had been the law in Nazi Germany. This was not part of our formal submission, but stated from the floor of the court, as part of a general exchange with the judge.
What, precisely, is wrong with this statement? Was it untrue? Which part? Already it was the case that people were being asked to show evidence of identification by Garda officers manning checkpoints, and even then we had solid information that there was a plan to force people to carry proof that they had been vaccinated before being allowed to enter shops, cinemas or chapels, or possibly even walk down a street. Hello?
The import of the judge’s harping on this incident is such as to suggest that he then believed it impossible, or at least unlikely, that an Irish government might one day introduce a requirement that Irish citizens produce evidence of identity in seeking to move about their own country. If this is the case, he has some sympathy from me: I, too, would not long ago have regarded such a proposition as objectively risible. As if it were remotely likely that the government of a free and democratic country like Ireland would dream of making ID papers compulsory!!
But, if that is the situation, Mr Justice Charles Meenan surely now owes us an apology. And, even more, a reversal of his own Order — in its entirety. If this response is not forthcoming, history — which, as I told him more than once, will be the real and true judge of these matters — will not judge him well.
FRIDAY
Another word Government ministers clearly don’t know the meaning of is ‘mandatory’. In announcing that the Government was in the process of finalising legislation to exempt vaccinated people from mandatory ‘hotel’ quarantining, the Minister For Plucking Laws Out His Arse said that he was ‘very grateful to those that have entered mandatory quarantine and for playing their part to stop the spread of this disease.’
‘Mandatory’, ‘Minister’, means ‘Something that must be done, or is demanded by law’. It is usually followed by sentences that include words like ‘must’ and ‘penalty’. People who have no choice but to do something, on pain of punishment, are not ‘playing their part’ — they are being incarcerated against their wills. The Governor of Mountjoy prison is not in the habit of thanking prisoners under his supervision for ‘entering’ their cells, or for ‘playing their part’ in reducing crime in the Great Outdoors from which they are mandatorily excluded. And this, by the way, is not by way of conceding that anything of this is lawful — it is not: It is purely by way of acknowledging that, when you have corrupted all the agencies of State, it is possible to misuse State coercion to force citizens to do things that are unlawful and immoral.
The Minister should at least do us the favour of not acting the hypocritical skunk, admit what he is doing, stop trying to be Mr Nice Guy, and get used to the fact that his name will echo down the firmaments of future time as one of the greatest scumbags that ever despoiled the soil of Ireland by his presence.