What are the real government policies being pursued in modern Ireland ?

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Sunday May 13, 2007 09:08 by Brian

This is just an attempt to see if some of the large social changes taking place in Ireland right now are the result of deliberate government policies, aimed at controlling dissent, rather than just random acts.

"I could honestly say that I regretted having wasted my time contributing all my life to this awful system, to this denial, to this con democracy, this cod democracy, that was being administered by cod civil servants, cod public servants. Because that is all I would call them. I mean contributing both as a teacher and even in just living here. In a way I had wasted 40 years functioning in an environment that I found out didn't exist."(1)

Those strong words are by Micháel O'Sheighin, from Rossport, and unfortunately I think they reflect quite well the experiences of some Irish people who have seen the modern Irish state at close quarters. We are told we live in a democracy and then sure its supposed to be the case that the policies pursued by the state are the ones freely chosen by the people and all that but you'd wonder if that is what really happens right now. So anyway I am just attempting in this article to trace the threads of four 'real' government policies that I think are being pursued in modern Ireland with the aim of controlling dissent by subtle long term social engineering techniques. I hope I'm wrong and that these policies are not being pursued but if you get fed up enough about what is going on in Ireland right now then you might be inclined to believe me! I know this is a mouthful :-) but in deference to some well known policies from the troubles I call them bureaucratisation, indebtedisation, cosmopolitanisation and isolationisation:

1. Bureaucratisation
It is I think perfectly obvious that any properly functioning police state, like famously the former East Germany, always tries to get centralised government control over all economic and social activities within the state. In that type of society you have to get permission from the state to do virtually anything e.g. East Germany compelled all businesses to get centralised licenses to be allowed to exist etc etc. This brought with it certain advantages of political control, for example:

(a) It created a vast intelligence database that the domestic intelligence agencies used to keep tabs on the population. Whenever a person would register for anything they would have to supply a huge amount of personal - they might have felt irrelevant - data which unknown to the populace was systematically indexed and used by the huge secret police apparatus.

I respectfully submit that many people in Ireland right now, especially Social Welfare recipients and the self employed, spend an enormous amount of time informing the state about all aspects of their lives via hugely complex and rigorously enforced state regulations. Also nearly all the self employed have quietly become subservient to state licensing schemes, like even recently private security personnel and driving instructors. It has also become much more necessary to have tax clearance certificates and P.P.S numbers which might point to the way that the Irish intelligence agencies are indexing this data hoard!

(b) In countries like East Germany sometimes 'bureaucratic' problems would start to arise whenever the citizens fell foul of the state for some reason. Dissidents in the Eastern Bloc countries found that the state regulations, that controlled their lives so much, discriminated against them making their lives a misery.

Obviously there is great potential in Ireland for the state to act like this against citizens who offend it. Drawing again on the experiences of Rossport I notice that Micháel O'Sheighin says this about some of that community's dealings with Mayo Co. Council:
"At various times, they were refused photocopies. Other times they'd get them but be held up all day. There was all this petty bureaucracy nonsense trying to frighten people, trying to intimidate them."(2) There are also some very serious examples of state agencies turning on Irish citizens and seeking to put them out of business using various 'bureaucratic' regulations like in the case of the Department of Agriculture and its dealings with John Fleury (3) in Offaly and the Hanrahan family in Tipperary (4). I personally think that Michael Lowry should be looked upon as an Irish dissident because of his attempts to root out corruption in the semi state sector which in turn drew harassment on him by state agencies:
"Here is one of the things I want to get off my chest: I was disappointed that a system in any democracy would download to such an extent on any individual or citizen. I have felt a sense of State oppression against me. I got a sense of the power of the State's institutions, how domineering and controlling they are when they turn their sights on you." (5)
Of course like all dissidents, East and West, they are always assailed by whispering/slander campaigns against them and this is as true in Ireland as elsewhere. Michael Lowry has obviously had his character assassinated in the media over pretty minor tax matters while the Hanrahan family have been able to identify Frank Dunlop, the former government press spokesman, as one of their tormentors in the usual whispering campaigns.(6)

(c) It has a useful psychological effect on both the population in general and on state employees in particular. What happens is that as people get used to just filling out forms and spend half their lives abiding by all kinds of regulations they then start to lose their independent character and common sense. For a lot of people abiding by the regulations - and the laws that underpin them - becomes a kind of a religion and they begin to dehumanise and lose touch with the 'common sense' aspect of the regulations.

I will give one example of that type of psychological wearing down of people's intelligence and 'common sense'. In rural areas in Meath it is extremely difficult for anybody to get planning permission for any type of building with e.g. structures like two storey houses - as opposed to dormers - being pretty much banned completely on the grounds of being visually intrusive. This is especially true of any building that would be visible from Tara because we are told that the Council takes particular care to preserve the view from that historic hill. Also any ordinary house, or any kind of development, being built within any of the historic areas of Meath - like near Tara - has to undergo an archaeological dig to determine if there is anything historic there and if so the house is of course never built. (All these regulations btw cost the ordinary people of Meath enormous sums of time and money to abide by.) But then the same Council makes no objection when a six lane motorway comes crashing through that landscape that they claim to be so keen on preserving ! And in fact even many of the ordinary people see no contradiction here, after all the motorway comes under a different bureaucratic heading and I'm sure they have all the forms filled out ! So as you can see, I hope, the government employees, and to an extent the ordinary people, start acting like intellectless bureaucrats after a while under this overly bureaucratic type of atmosphere. That is how the famous 'nomenclatura' was created in the Soviet Union, an army of unthinking and heartless state employees that can afflict all kinds of inhumanity on the citizens in the name of state regulations and laws.

So if you think about it maybe you can see that this wave of bureaucracy, which is crashing over the heads of Irish citizens right now, has 'good' qualities to it from a corrupt state's point of view ! Hence maybe it is not an accident that the Irish state is developing along these lines right now.

2. Indebtedisation
It is obvious now that the economic boom in Ireland is by and large caused by individuals and families borrowing large sums of money, in many cases taking on huge 40 year mortgages to pay for astronomically expensive housing. Imho what is happening is that capital flowed into Ireland under large scale government borrowing from the mid 70s to the mid 90s and that has been replaced by this large scale personal borrowing. Just like in the case of that state borrowing, this boom has to be followed by a corresponding bust because people inevitably have to tighten their belts to try and pay back the huge debts.

I think it is fair to say that the state has encouraged this effect by, for example, sponsoring 'social and affordable' housing schemes that actually just involve encouraging poor people to borrow heavily. This is in total contrast to the past where social housing meant building houses at the expense of the state and giving them to people at a nominal rent. So why would the state want to sponsor this splurge of personal borrowing? I can think of two reasons. Firstly maybe the banking institutions (and international banks ?) have huge sway over the Irish political system and can simply force this policy through. This policy after all is obviously in their interests, making, as they do, huge profits out of it in wide interest rate differentials and extortionate banking charges.

The other point is that this process of indebtedness brings with it useful social control aspects. I think a person tied to a huge mortgage often becomes obsessed with money, unlike the more footloose rent paying person, and might trim his/her political or rebellious instincts in order not to scare off the next paycheck! I'm convinced anyway that if you ever have some grand war crimes tribunal in Ireland in the future asking why government employees didn't speak out you'd be told that they had the mortgage to consider ! This 'had to pay the mortgage' might turn out to be the Irish equivalent of the German 'only following orders' !

I think therefore that this indebtedness has a subtle but definite social control aspect to it.

3. Cosmopolitanisation.
I use that phrase as meaning the same thing as de-nationalisation, a kind of process of changing a country in order to make a nation lose its sense of unique identity. I think the best example of that type of policy can be seen in the history of the Soviet Union. The Soviets always felt that it was easier to control their Union if they could de-nationalise (and incidentally de-Christianise) the various peoples they controlled. They did this firstly through a myriad of complicated migration policies e.g. by encouraging Russians to migrate to the Baltic States in order to dilute their sense of identity and by various forced migrations of races like the Chechens. And secondly they used the media and education systems to play down the historic and separate identities of the various races, including even the Russians themselves as Alexander Solzhenitsyn relates:

"During the 20’s the very understanding of Russian history was changed—there was none! And the understanding of what a Russian is was changed—there was no such thing! And what was most painful, we Russians ourselves willingly walked along this suicidal path. The period of the 20’s was considered the dawn of liberation…. I recall from my school days that even the word ‘Russian’, such as ‘I am a Russian’ sounded like a call to counter-revolution…. But everywhere was heard and printed the term ‘Russopyati’." [a curse word for ‘Russian’].

The Russian national character and sense of solidarity then broke down under this pressure, which left them more vulnerable in the gulags:
"All nations in the Gulag crawled in order to survive and the lower to the ground they got, the better the chances of survival. But Russians in ‘their own Russian’ camps were the lowest order."
Based on these experiences Solzhenitsyn feels that nationalism is very important for everybody:
"Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn't be noticed—nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity - too bad for you." (7)

So that process of encouraging people to feel as if they are just one atomised member of 'universal humanity' as opposed to feeling as an integral part of a unique nation is what I am calling 'cosmopolitanisation'. As we stand today I think that a wave of cosmopolitanisation - particularly the large immigration inflow - is hacking away at the intellectual and emotional roots of Irish nationalism:
Intellectual
In some ways what we are seeing now is a sort of race for the intellectual high moral ground on this issue, with the winner being able to throw down 'racist' and 'fascist' insults at the loser coming up the hill !lol. As I see it the modern roots of Irish nationalism derive from the period 1890-1910 say when our ancestors rebelled against the bland uniformity of the British Empire and sought Irish independence in order to protect and foster what were seen to be the unique characteristics of the Irish race. At that time they obviously emphasised things like the Irish language, folklore, music, Gaelic games, the struggles of the Catholic Church in a Protestant country, and Irish genealogy and modern Irish nationalism grew from this into a feeling that we needed Irish Independence in order to protect this heritage and these characteristics. This feeling culminated maybe in the various Irish Race Conventions held at that time, like in Dublin in 1896 and New York in 1916, and in expressions of people like Pearse saying that Ireland should become 'not free merely but Gaelic as well' etc. Sometimes this is known simply as the 'Irish Ireland' movement and I think you can see that there is now a faint whiff of 'racism' and 'fascism' beginning to attach itself to phrases like that in the intellectual atmosphere now in Ireland. Its obvious to me anyway that the new thinking about 'inclusiveness' for the new immigrant population is in fact intended to have the effect of casting aspersions on what is, I suggest, the intellectual underpinnings of Irish nationalism. Again I'm suggesting that this is no accident, this imho is one of the reasons why huge immigration inflows are being sponsored by Irish government agencies (8), it is quite consciously intended to weaken Irish nationalism and identity. One might think looking at this that there is no reason why Irish identity couldn't coexist quite happily with the increasing immigrant population, and maybe it can but that is not what our government has in store for us in my opinion.

Just look at the church for an example of this kind of thinking. According to the recent census 87 per cent of Irish people are Catholics and the proportion in some areas, like Mayo, is probably a lot higher. Yet despite that background when a group of nurses wanted to set up a crib in Castlebar hospital recently they were told that they couldn't because to do so would be "racist" and uninclusive of other faiths.(9) The management of the hospital explained that a crib would be the thin end of the wedge, if they allowed that they might have to allow a crucifix ! As you can see this is quite a change from a few years ago and clearly 'inclusiveness' is in fact being used to crush the faith of the majority. I'm convinced that the same thing is going to happen to Irish culture. Already it is the case that the Irish language requirement in the Gardai and for some university courses has been dropped "in the context of an increasingly multicultural Ireland."(10)

Emotional
What seems to be happening on an emotional level now in Ireland is that Irish people are beginning to feel like strangers in their home localities. They are beginning to tune out of really caring about what happens here because they don't identify with the country anymore, it just doesn't feel like home. This is being noticed by some recent visitors to Ireland:
"There was such manifest sadness in the eyes of the few “old Irish” we encountered. Their homeland is becoming unrecognizable to them."(11)
It doesn't feel like their homeland because most, or very many, of the people they meet as they walk down the street don't seem like people of their own ethnicity, and don't use the familiar accents and even language that Irish people are used to. So Irish people are starting to feel rootless, and are beginning to lose their identity in their own country.(12)

One other point, which I think ties in with this, are the wholesale changes being made to the Irish landscape. Clearly Ireland has become a concrete jungle of motorways and anonymous housing estates which makes the whole country look indistinguishable from California or Germany or wherever, which again weakens the sense of a unique Irish identity. One person writing to the Irish Independent has mentioned how people feel anonymous in this landscape:
"Urban sprawl increases traffic, congestion and related problems. It also creates an anonymous society which leads to social isolation and related ills, such as crime, violence, drugs and the culture of death."(13)
I think again that this is a deliberate planned effect pushing the ever expanding motorway network, they want people to feel like nobodies in a bland world, they are easier to control that way!

Anyway like cutting Samson's hair :-) when a people lose confidence in their right to a separate national identity, which is what happens when those intellectual roots are cut off, and when they psychologically lose the sense of an Irish homeland then Irish nationalism weakens making it easier for supra national organisations, particularly the EU, to control us. This I think is the reason why these policies are deliberately pursued like this. It also has the effect of helping to control internal dissent in Ireland. Just look at Rossport as an example and ask yourself why has that protest proven to have infinitely more teeth than any other recent protest in modern Ireland. I think you'd have to admit that the people out there amidst an heroic landscape, steeped in Irish folklore, language, music and historical traditions - maybe even with strong religious traditions as well - simply put up a much better fight than protests which are based in transient communities situated in bland housing estates off some motorway or other.(14) The powers that be in Europe know this perfectly well, they know that peoples and communities with a strong cultural and ethnic identity are more of a threat to them than the cosmopolitan or multicultural type. So in fact I think they are quite deliberately destroying that unifying and enriching sense of identity among the Irish people.

4. Isolationisation
(That's a perfectly good word btw :-) you just have to keep going when you get lost in the middle!lol) According to Julianne McKinney, who served as a US intelligence agent in Berlin during the Cold War, the Soviet Union had a policy of trying to "divide and isolate the populace" in order to maintain its control over the subject peoples of the Soviet Union.(15) The thinking here was that strong community structures made it difficult for the KGB to isolate those dissidents that they wished to harass, so where possible they would prefer to break down those communities everywhere.

Again if you look at Rossport you can see why a government might feel threatened by communities and groups much more than by individuals. What started there was that about two people initially dug their heels in and opposed the pipeline, then in court about five people were prepared to go to jail rather than be bullied by the system, then after they were jailed maybe about 1,000 people in the same community rose up and challenged the authorities. Its obvious that when you have a strong community that sticks together like this then the government has much more problems than in those parts of Ireland where people have been jailed in almost total community silence and anonymity. Its the existence of a tight knit community itself that causes problems for the state, it would be much better from their point of view if people didn't have wide circles of friends, family or neighbours that will defend each other. You need to isolate people to crush them !

I believe that governments at a high level know this very well and maybe you can see some of that thinking in events like the crushing of the mining communities in England in the 80s. They were probably the most close knit and rebellious communities in Britain before they were wiped off the map, some would say on the basis of exaggerated economic problems.

As well as the question of communities like this being able to sustain long strikes and protests against the state I think there are two other specific reasons why governments prefer to break up community structures. One reason is that the flow of information in tight knit communities is often directly by word of mouth from some primary source e.g. there is a good chance that somebody might personally know a guy in the Gardai say and will pass the information along to everybody else whereas when people are isolated their only source is the, typically government controlled, mass media.

Another reason is that when people are not used to knowing a wide circle of friends etc. they start to lose the capacity to judge people properly. In otherwords they find it hard to accurately assess a persons integrity and even sanity and stuff like that. In the Soviet Union this then allowed the KGB to go around claiming that such a such a dissident was 'mad' or an 'enemy of the state' and the general public just believed the state agencies when they said this about a person because they themselves had become such poor judges of character. Don't think for a second that this issue is only relevant to the former Soviet Union ! If you follow the Irish media with respect to intelligence whistleblowers you will be amazed at how many of them are called 'Walter Mittys' by the media and the state. In fact even Frank McBrearty has been fighting a lonely battle trying to testify in the courts in the teeth of "sinister" government attempts to compel him to go for repeated psychiatric examinations.(16)

So anyway I think it is a cardinal rule of political control that the state would like to destroy any sense of community or comradeship that may be developing, in so far as it can. Hence I think people should be a bit suspicious of any changes that they observe in that line in Ireland today, and should ask themselves if some of those changes are deliberate. A simple example might be all those complaints about tight knit Dublin communities being transported out of the city into anonymous housing estates where no facilities were provided - even shops - which would have allowed them to develop a community atmosphere. That might have been the whole idea !lol Another example might be where community facilities are run down in rural areas, like Post Offices, Garda Stations, banks etc, using what maybe over hyped economic excuses to crush the community atmosphere? I personally think you could make a case that all the current social outlets in Ireland seem to be under siege from government regulations and suspiciously unremedied transport problems. Think of over the top security procedures - necessary to comply with government drug laws - hyped up drink driving campaigns, the smoking ban, and shorter opening hours for nightclubs, all leading to a situation where many people no longer go out and meet people and instead stay in and become slaves to the mass media! This again might not be far from what the government actually wanted to achieve with things like the smoking ban. A few other specific areas might be worth looking at in the same vein:

(a) Some of the older companies in Ireland are home to a staff with a strong sense of community and solidarity. I would suggest companies like Aer Lingus, the Irish Sugar Company and Irish Ferries, all of them under various stages of siege or abolition, and maybe not accidentally!

(b) Believe it or not I would include boarding schools under this heading. They tend to be characterised these days as very expensive and exclusive but in the past many poor people went there, especially to get around transport problems in rural areas. Anyway they fostered a very deep sense of community and are now in various stages of collapse, supposedly from random problems like insurance costs.

(c) I actually think that Bebo and internet chat sites are seen by the powers that be to be a threat in that they can build up quite a few friendships and a community atmosphere. (I think as well that is why some sites discourage idle chat making among their users, anything to stop strong trust and groups forming.) Its obvious when you follow the Irish media that the powers that be don't like those sites and are hyping paedophile stuff to discredit them. (Which is not to denigrate the seriousness of that problem outside of the internet.) As well as this Irish second and third level institutions have been encouraged to introduce special rules designed to block Bebo and the other social networking chat sites.(17)

(d) It seems to me as well that some of the new community policing and ASBO type rules that are being rolled out are now being used to stop communities forming in some areas. It seems to me anyway that three people at a street corner doing absolutely nothing but chatting are now being accused of 'anti-social behaviour' - ironically enough !- and are being asked to move on by the community police.

(e) Maybe some of the planning and local authority rules are deliberately designed to break up communities e.g. in rural areas by denying the locals housing, and in small towns by introducing draconian parking arrangements that drive people out of those towns into more soulless out of town shopping centres.

I know most people reading this are saying "yeah right! there is no deliberate long term plan here!" but I think people ought to be a little more suspicious, and unfortunately, maybe a little less naive about the workings of the modern EU controlled Irish state. I think we have to get away from this idea that the Irish state is run by morans who don't know what they are doing, it could be that the people are the foolish ones who are not scrutinising properly what the state is really doing ? Because if you look again at some of these drifts you might feel that this 'isolationism' policy is a better way to explain what is really happening than what we are usually told. I think even if you look at what has happened to the close knit community of Ballymun you might wonder if this type of "social engineering" is what is happening there rather than a genuine effort to regenerate that community.(18)

So I think we should stop criticising the powers that be in Ireland as incompetent or unintelligent, their project Ireland is progressing very well thank you very much !

Footnotes
1. The Rossport 5 "Our Story" (Magheramore Co.Wicklow, 2006) p.75.

2. Ibid p.74.

3. For references to John Fleury see http://oireland.tripod.com Chapter 1 footnote 19.

4. For the Hanrahan family see the Irish Independent 3 Feb 2007.

5. Sunday Independent 1 April 2007 p.33.

6. Irish Independent 20 May 2000.

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn "200 Years Together" (2001-2002) quoted at http://www.vdare.com/allen/070427_solzhenitsyn.htm.

8. For which see http://www.indymedia.ie/article/78897 .

9. “The crib is very symbolic and while you wouldn't describe it as offensive we don’t want to set a precedent that is difficult to move away from. It could easily lead to a crucifix...." (http://archives.tcm.ie/westernpeople/2005/12/20/story28...2.asp). The 'racism' reference is from the Irish Family Press newspaper at the time of this controversy. A discussion on the controversy can be read here: http://www.castlebar.ie/board/2006/jul06/133189.htm . It became a big issue in Mayo and the HSE eventually had to give in.

10. A report on the Department of Irish Folklore in UCD:
"While recognising the major importance of the Irish language material in the Department's teaching and research programmes, the PRG recommends that in the context of an increasingly multicultural Ireland, where deemed appropriate, the Irish language requirement for entry to year 2 and 3 be relaxed. " (http://www.ucd.ie/quality/reports/summaryirishfolklorer...c.doc)
This letter was written in response to the dropping of the Irish language requirement for the Gardai :
"However, by changing the rules on Irish, admittedly for all applicants, the Government is making the kind of error made by British and Dutch governments. That is to say, they are downgrading the norms and culture of the State in the vain hope that this will somehow make the State seem more tolerant. In reality, however, immigrants, as in Europe, will take this as a signal that integration is not required and full participation is not expected.
Furthermore, what signal does this action send to the many who speak Irish and are proud that their language is an official language of the State? Is Irish to be official only for native-born Irish and not for others? What other norms will be dropped in the near future to make us more inclusive? Lowering standards has been shown to be a failed concept and once that particular Rubicon has been crossed other ideas, standards and norms cherished by the Irish people will surely fall on the altar of multiculturalism.- Yours, etc,
TREVOR TROY,
Connaught Place,
Athboy,
Co Meath."(http://www.gaelport.com/index.php?page=clippings&id=509...=date)

Also its now apparently forbidden for people to register their addresses in Irish with An Post because:
“Tá go leor inimirceach ag obair linn agus ní bheadh siad in ann Gaeilge a léamh.”(http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=20260)

11. http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/archives-2006-...6.htm .

12. Here are just a few references that show how some Irish people are beginning to feel that their culture is being threatened by the extent of the immigration inflow:
"And what was once a wonderful urban village neighbourhood in Dublin, complete with artisanal shops of long tradition and history, has long since had those shops removed and replaced with call centres operated by ... [various immigrant groups.].....That's the erosion of culture at work and it has led to an erosion of values, as neighbours no longer know or care for each other..."(http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=18768&postdays=0...rt=24)
"Our Identity, Culture Language are under threat like never before.What we have witnessed over the past 10yrs regarding Mass Immigration to our Country beggars belief!!
.... Social engineering thats what it is!!" (http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?t=17946&start=576&...747b5)

13. Letter by William A Thomas in the Irish Independent 30 April 2007 p.33.

14. To see the way that these factors have strengthened and inspired the Rossport community see The Rossport 5 "Our Story" (Magheramore Co.Wicklow, 2006) p.59-61 and this from p.96:
"People will tell you locally that the last battle from some prophecy or other will be the battle of Ballinaboy. To me this is an echo of the awareness of people back to the Bronze Age time. An awareness that having a grip on a place is tenuous and can be destroyed."

15. "KGB strategies were addressed in some detail during these discussions [discussions entitled "Understanding the Solzhenitzyn Affair: Dissent and its Control in the USSR"'at Georgetown University]. It was noted that the KGB's success depended on the extensive use of informant networks and agent provocateurs; and, following Brezhnev's rise to power, on the use of drugs and
psychiatrists for further purpose of manipulation and control. Shadowing, bugging, slandering, blacklisting and other related tactics were also cited as serving KGB purpose. Participants in
the conference agreed that the KGB's obvious intent was to divide and isolate the populace, to spread fear, and to silent dissenters. Agencies of our own government are on record as having employed
precisely these same tactics on a recurrent basis." ( http://www.naicr.org/aps/McKinney.htm ) . For some examples of how intelligence agencies isolate and control individual dissidents see http://oireland.tripod.com Chapter 1.

16. "McBrearty Jnr has branded the move as "sinister" because the proposed psychiatric and psychological assessment will be carried out by practitioners nominated by the tribunal....The tribunal is obviously intent on not allowing me to get on with my life even though the state has examined me three times."(Sunday Tribune 12/11/2006 http://www.tribune.ie/article.tvt?_scope=TribuneFTF&id=...c&FC= )

17. http://www.tomrafteryit.net/irish-schools-being-blocked...orks/ .

18. The Craig Gardner Report of August 1993 stated that the authors initially looked upon Ballymun as a 'community in crisis' but instead concluded that "Ballymun is an estate with a very strong sense of a community identity, and a level of community activity which is very high."(http://www.brl.ie/pdf/Ballymun_A_History_1600_1997_Syno...s.pdf p.63. (Its obvious when you read that account that the Ballymun residents were very active opponents of Dublin Corporation and the powers that be.) From here on indymedia in the same vein: "For all its problems, Ballymun has always had a strong sense of social identity."(http://www.indymedia.ie/article/73355).

Inho this sort of thing is always bad news from a corrupt governments point of view so I am suspicious about the way they moved in to demolish the flats in the teeth of resistance from many local residents, one survey that was undertaken "included 539 face to face interviews and demonstrated that 86% of the residents of the flats preferred partial or full refurbishment to the demolition of their homes."(http://web.archive.org/web/20030717231324/ourworld.comp...2.htm).

After the flats had been mostly knocked the government unveiled surprising new Social Welfare rules which seem, to this observer anyway, to be designed to disperse the community atmosphere that developed in the flats. See http://www.oneparent.ie/pdfs/1_Rent%20Supplement%20Camp...n.pdf and http://www.indymedia.ie/article/66799 . From comments on the latter article: "City planning out in Ballymun is beginning to look more like some form of "social cleansing"." And this by John:
"This has been happening for some time.

I would ask anyone to point out a single area of Dublin city that has been "regenerated" and where after five years anyone on a salary similar to the original occupants could afford to live there.

Smithfield, Temple Bar, in fact, the entire city centre looks like going this way over the next few decades and the children of families that have lived there for generations can, as far as the government is concerned, make do with a 2-bed semi in Clonee and a three hour commute to work / family."

This is the current view of some local activists about the 'regeneration' process: "By involving as many people as possible in its activities they [the local BPBP activist group] plan to turn around the disastrous effects that “regeneration” is having on the social fabric of Ballymun."(http://www.indymedia.ie/article/73355). Is this by accident or design ?