Curious, quiet quango emerges from 11-month coma

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has finally emerged to warn — selectively — about the most egregious breaches of human rights seen in Ireland since independence.

(With apologies for invading your Inbox again, in view of the impending judgement in our ‘lockdown’ appeal, I felt impelled to remark on the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission’s evasive intervention on the Covid question.)

If you wish to understand how far the concept of ‘human rights’ has travelled from its true meaning, please consider the recent pronouncements of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) on the topic of Covid and the law.

The commission — one of these heavily-subsidised quangos that have imposed sclerosis and confusion on the human rights instincts of our judicial, legal and policing systems in the very recent decades — has published ‘research’ which it claims inter alia shows that the Government has ‘persistently blurred the boundary between legal requirements and public health guidance in its response to Covid-19.’

Really? What a surprise! Some eleven months on from the introduction of the most radically restrictive and coercive set of public measures ever imposed on a free and democratic Ireland, our leading ‘human rights’ body sees fit to ‘find’ what was already blitheringly obvious by Easter of last year. 

The IHREC ‘report’ — or ‘study’, or ‘research’, according to various descriptions in an RTÉ ‘report’ — was authored by the Covid-19 Law and Human Rights Observatory in Trinity College Dublin. [This is how it’s done: words like ‘report’, ‘study’ and ‘findings’ are stamped on to self-interested arrangements of unsubstantiated opinions so as to give them the semblance of authority and rigour.]

The ‘study’ has been published by the commission ‘as part of its mandate to keep under review the adequacy and effectiveness of law and practice in the State relating to human rights and equality.’

Good news then? 

Let’s see. Apparently, this ‘report’ by the IHREC sets out ‘significant concerns that human rights and equality scrutiny have been sidelined when emergency powers have been put in place.’

Of course, this has been obvious for the guts of a year. In recent months, we have seen Robocops drag little old Catholic ladies away by their rosary beads because they were protesting their losses of freedom and the protections of decent journalism outside the national broadcaster and the Four Courts. We have seen prayer events in graveyards (specifically sanctioned under the Covid ‘regulations’) being broken up by a police force now utterly out of control. We have seen countless episodes of people being frogmarched out of shops and public transport vehicles because they sought in vain to claim a right to exemption from wearing face coverings, despite this right being explicitly extended in the relevant legislation. We have seen much else as well, but in truth these facts have been rehearsed so often in the non-mainstream media that anyone who is not yet aware of how far the administration of justice has strayed from its foundational principles in the past year must have been on a staycation in their basement for the duration.  

The IHREC report apparently finds that the Covid ‘laws’ have exhibited ‘a tendency to blur the distinction between the regulations and public health advice, making the content of the law unclear’ which it is alleged is ‘contrary both to domestic legal principles as well as foundational principles of international human rights law’. No shit? Actually, this is a point very sternly made by High Court judge Mr Justice Garret Simons in his judgement several months ago in Ryanair v. An Taoiseach. Judge Simons said it would ‘offend against the separation of powers’ were the government to create the mistaken impression that ‘certain recommended restrictions are legally enforceable if, in truth, there is no legislation in force to that effect.’ Were this to occur, he said, it would ‘undermine the rule of law, and offend against the separation of powers.’ The IHREC had nothing to add to, or indeed to say in support of this irrefutable statement of the facts. In fact, it chooses to say much the same thing, but watered down and with a far narrower purpose. 

On April 15th last year, Gemma O’Doherty and I went to the Four Courts building in Dublin to file a legal challenge to the package of legislation and regulation-making the IHREC appears to be talking about. At the time, the IHREC was nowhere to be seen or heard, and this invisibility and silence was to continue for the ensuing months of May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December of 2020, and then all through January and the first 24 days of February, 2021. In that time, there was an almost total silence also from other ‘human rights’ and ‘civil liberties’ groups. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, for example, did some ineffectual foot-stamping in early summer and promptly disappeared. In all that period, not a single judge or former judge has emerged, in the manner of Lord Sumption, former judge of the UK Supreme Court, to call out these egregious breaches of legal and constitutional principles. Former minister for justice and attorney general, Michael McDowell, emerged in  late summer, did some brief foot-stamping of his own, and promptly ran out of steam. He has not been seen or heard from for close on six months. 

An innocent individual, reading the RTÉ report on the IHREC ‘research’, might have been forgiven for thinking that, in spite of all these failures and evasions, the cavalry had at last arrived: the IHREC, astride its white chargers was now galloping down the quays to call a halt to the incarceration, torture, intimidation and looting of the Irish people that has gone on now for nearly a year. 

‘Govt blurring lines on emergency Covid powers — IHREC’, screamed the RTÉ headline. ‘Watchdog raises concerns on Covid rules,’ declared a headline over a similar report in the Irish Times. 

Alas, reading further down the media reports, it becomes clear that this is just another exercise in minoritarianism, the appropriation of a real, authentic human rights catastrophe to bang yet again the Cultural Marxist drum by implying  — nay, explicitly claiming — that these impositions bear down disproportionately on resident minorities within Ireland, of which there is no evidence at all.

We are informed by RTÉ:

‘The report suggests that garda enforcement of emergency Covid-19 powers has disproportionately affected young people, ethnic and racial minorities, and Traveller and Roma communities.’

Really? Where? When? Having observed not the merest scintilla of evidence that the sundry illegalities of Government, Oireachtas, gardai and judiciary have impacted disproportionately on young people, ethnic and racial minorities or Travelling or Roma communities, we read on in expectation of coming upon the evidence for this assertion. 

There is none. 

Here, in fact, is the evidence — right there in the RTÉ ‘report’ — that there is no evidence:

‘The report finds that shifting relationships between the Government and the National Public Health Emergency Team and limited opportunities for Oireachtas oversight have made it difficult to ascertain where, if at all, human rights and equality concerns are being addressed.’ Or, indeed, where, if at all, the measures have disproportionately affects any of the categories the IHREC claims they have.

The report continues: ‘However, the IHREC says effective human rights and equality analysis of these powers is hampered because An Garda Síochána has resisted repeated calls, including from the IHREC and the Policing Authority, to publish its data on how enforcement powers are exercised against particular groups.’

Translation:

‘In setting out to justify its existence and guarantee its continued access to public funding, the IHREC has tried to scrape together some semblance of evidential support for our perennial ideological certainty that minorities are constantly being discriminated against by Irish racism, but the trickery of the Government and NPHET has led us a merry dance and the cops have refused to publish anything in accordance with their public remit that might allow us to claim there is still some basis for our existence.’

In other words, there is no evidence of anything other than that, as a matter of basic observation, the plain fact that the Government has ceased to function on anything resembling a democratic or lawful basis; that NPHET has in effect taken over the running of the country; that An Garda Siochána is now a self-governing institution, accountable to no one, not even the ruling ‘health’ junta. 

We knew all that. We knew that these ‘laws’ were constructed on the foundations of a 73-year-old Act designed for a purpose unrelated to the incarceration of the population or the destruction of their lives and livelihoods. We have known that there was a total absence of parliamentary oversight when these pseudo-laws were rushed through the Oireachtas, that in fact the whole thing was readied-up by the Ceann Comhairles and party leaders in March last year. We have known it since within a few hours of the silent coup in the course of which our Government received a transplant of the mind of something akin to the Chinese Communist Party and began implementing a policy never before considered outside that totalitarian jurisdiction. We have known since Holy Week last year that An Garda Siochána was out of control — or, rather, under the control of an out-of-control commissioner with, self-evidently, a mission to destroy the peace and security of this Republic. These are the reasons why Gemma O’Doherty and I tried to intervene, when it became clear that no one else was going to. We were not surprised that the IHREC did not offer to join or support our action, but for the record it did not. Now it comes up with ‘research’, a ‘study, a ‘report’, asserting that it has not found any evidence for the categories of breaches it is interested in, to the exclusion of all others. 

Now, a year after the most fundamental freedoms were snatched from the people of Ireland, the ‘Irish’ ‘Human Rights and ‘Equality’ Commission, undoubtedly with its annual funding in mind, while bowing obsequiously before the God of Covid, comes out to demand sunset clauses on all future emergency powers legislation and a ‘specialist Oireachtas committee on equality, human rights and diversity . . . to scrutinise emergency legislation and ministerial regulations.’ Nearly a year after the event, the IHREC declares that ‘it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the delegation of legislative power to the Minister for Health has resulted in a black hole for the consideration of human rights and equality concerns’, by which it means only the human rights and equality concerns accruing under its own ministrations and advocacy to categories of human person conforming to certain ideological criteria. 

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland the other day, the IHREC Chief Commissioner Ms. Sinéad Gibney stated: ‘Criminal prosecutions have far-reaching implications into peoples' everyday lives so it is critical we know when we are subject to that law.’

That is true. Over the past year, criminal prosecutions have been brought against innumerable decent Irish people who have done nothing wrong, have broken no decent or moral or lawful law, have done nothing other than seek to go about their country and conduct their business, defend their basic human rights and freedoms, support their families and care for their ill or elderly relatives, in the expectation that their elected Government would support their right to do so. Instead, these decent people have found themselves set upon by thugs in the uniform of our national police force, using the spurious cover of concocted regulations to intimidate and confuse, bully and bamboozle the public into compliance with measures that are, from start to finish, utterly repugnant to their Constitution — a document, incidentally, that the IHREC and its spokespersons seem loath to refer to. 

And, unlike the IHREC, Gemma O’Doherty and I have produced voluminous evidence of these infringements — in the form of witness statements obtained from those affected, which have been placed before the Court of Appeal which is currently deliberating on these and related matters. Neither RTÉ nor the Irish Times has shown the slightest interest in reporting on any of this activity.  

The fundamental truth behind all this palaver is that the body claiming the authority of ‘human rights watchdog’ is no such thing. It is, rather, an ideological body directed at implementing in Ireland a programme of radical and, yes, far-reaching change, without democratic consultation or assent, behind the backs and over the heads of the Irish people. ‘Human rights’ and ‘equality’, we observe again, are no longer concepts with any applicability to the general population, but refer only to the client groups of state-sponsored quangos who exist for no reason relating to the good of Ireland or its actually existing people. 

Never before, in the history of Ireland, were the Irish people more in need of some body that would speak up for and seek to protect their human rights. Over the past year, they have had their fundamental freedoms, their livelihoods, their intimate relationships and homesteads subjected to a sustained attack from their own government, but the IHREC has sat on its hands and said nothing. Now it tries to tell us that these impositions have affected nobody except members of ‘minority communities’, but which they mean everyone but the core, tax-paying, law-abiding community of this unfortunate one-time republic. 

*  On the same date as the IHREC statement referred to was issued, we were informed that the written judgment in the case formally known as O’Doherty & Anor. v. The Minister for Health & Ors. — in which Gemma O'Doherty and I seek leave to obtain a judicial review of the Covid laws — will be delivered electronically on Tuesday next, March 2nd 2021, at 11am, by the President of the Court of Appeal, Mr Justice Birmingham, sitting remotely with Mr Justice Edwards and Ms Justice Costello. If the appeal succeeds, Gemma O’Doherty and I will submit our papers to the High Court, which will conduct a judicial review of the measures referred to above, and many other aspects of these impositions; in the event that the appeal for leave is rejected, our intention is to appeal to the Supreme Court straightaway.