The students speak (III)

There has been no further communication from DCU to this ex-student since 2003, who obviously needs closure for the sake of his well-being and to get on with his life. He has been promised a reply, and it has been delayed nearly 7 years.

I shall comment further on this anon; in the meantime, anyone who believes my judgement of P. was harsh might take a look at the behaviour below





























































Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 20u Meitheamh 2000

The students speak (II)

So far there is an account of a meeting, at which unspeakable breaches of "duty of care" are implemented by management in order to secure a case against a staff member. Today let's look at

1. The class rep's view of events. As it happened, he was at the meeting.

2. The further pressure put on two students, as described in yesterday's post. Had they done what was asked, and agreed to incriminate me, no doubt DCU management would have done them a few favours. No-one should send their kids to DCU until the rule of law is established there.

If anyone from outside Ireland who reads this wonders why no criminal charges have been filed, it is because that this behavior reflects a powerful criminal interest group within Irish society. We did get the case brought up, repeatedly, in parliament. The answer was that this sort of behavior is no-one's business except management's, and they can do whatever they want. Many of these proceedings are quoted elsewhere on the blog. This is of course BS; however criminal investigations are routinely stopped by political pressure in Ireland. A previous such - that of theft of research money at DCU, again brought up in Parliament - was also thwarted.

Surely, then, the thing to do is contact the President? He has kids of his own, nicht wahr? He surely would see the potential for destruction of lives of the students by the behavior of the likes of Grey, Smeaton, Morris and Verbruggen??


























Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 20u Meitheamh 2000

Letting the students speak

The following three entries here will be the voices of students as they saw what happened in 2001-2002. Their anonymity is being respected, and their names will be redacted as necessary from their correspondence with senior members of DCU management.

I feel no similar obligation to DCU management, so will frame the above by noting that

1. Registrar Jim Murray had, months before this incident, advised Smeaton that the subject in question was examinable. More specifically, he said DCU's legal position would be weak if it refused credit

2. The "senior member of the school" referred to at the meeting was Mr Renaat Verbruggen

No attempt has been made by management to compensate the students for the sadistic and criminal treatment meted out to them and I did not solicit any of this material from them.








































Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 19u Meitheamh 2009

The state, civil society, and academic tenure

I am about to break up a very busy schedule, in which I work daily with the most talented and most generous-spirited people I have ever met in the world's attested crucible of symbolic creativity in order to attend Paul Cahill's Supreme court case, at my own expense. One of the reasons for this is that Paul is a truly great human being ; he has taken on forces beyond the ken of 99.9% of humanity and won. Not just the congeries of globalized corporatism and catholic nationalism which defines DCU, the Irish Times and its acolytes at DCU; what is at stake is a totalizing view of the state and society, which must be resisted. Another reason is, of course, the sheer consequentiality of this issue. Let us explore these in turn.

Civil society is a paradoxical concept. It refers to a rule-based set of functions which (as yet) do not have the legislative imprimatur of state. Due to its colonial heritage, Ireland is full of benign civil society structures; the Irish music session; the GAA; traditional Irish music, until IMRO privatized it in the 1998 deal; the intensity of the democratic process which, unlike that in the USA, survived electronic “voting”. Italy is full of benign such, as well as malignant such like the Mafia and Camorra (see the movie and read the book “Gomorrah”; this is what FF would have become, had they not been domesticated; the 1990's saw them revitalize this antinomial dream). The work we Irish people, and our allies from other countries (many of whom were married to Irish people, surely the ultimate vote of confidence in a country) did in setting up DCU, while paid by the state, was largely civil society; we went every day beyond the call of duty, which Danny O'Hare nevertheless attributed to his own Roman Catholic genius. (He never taught there)

FF's impetus has always been to bend the state toward its scams, and then extend the state so that no competition is possible. And now, of course, the Irish state under FF has bankrupted itself, and the IMF calls the shots, as already predicted on this blog:

IMF and NAMA


DCU takes lawsuits against its staff rivalling anything from the Munster circuit at its most extreme;

As frivolous and vexatious as Tom Mallon

A thought experiment; the DCU president shoves mail into your door at home, repeatedly, asking you to do something illegal. Do you agree to do it? Are you in violation of your contract if you don't? No and no, surely? More to the point, we can, I assume, take a criminal case against him and his "legal' advisers after the dust settles - which will be sooner than they think, because even the state is sick of this unsuccessful incursion into civil society.

So what will happen next? Well, IMHO the Supreme Court will throw out DCU's appeal, and comment that it should never have gotten this far. Wrt the EAT; an offer has been made to DCU to obey the law, and deal with all the issues internally. The central issue – of education, and the organic formation of young women and men – was historically made in Ireland through the hedge schools, an a fortiori civil society construct. It is my opinion that we are heading back there from this miasma of criminality, incompetence, and ripping-off taxpayers to pay for perhaps the most laughable self-elected elite since the Hapsburgs . We even have a Prussian – one not married to an Irishwoman - involved.

Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 18u Meitheamh 2009

Countdown to the Supreme Court

Despite SIPTU's depredations in this area, the union at DCU - considered as the voluntary association of faculty and other staff – is still strong. It is increasingly reasonable to argue that we have been lulled into giving up all employment rights over the past 15 years since SIPTU allowed management unilaterally to change our contracts to weaken tenure. In the meantime, management has been allowed by SIPTU to get away with egregious – and indeed often criminal – acts of bullying and denial of basic rights both to staff and students.

It is clear that we should try and get rid of the school of journalism, hard though this may be. I have argued before that it has no business at a university; moreover, the disgraceful line taken by the (often PhD less) “faculty” who scribble for the Irish Times is anti-tenure and anti-scholarship. (Of course, we should also ban the IT from anywhere union members congregate for its blatant attack on tenure)

I confess that I have felt the burden of trying to keep tenure alive for those tenured before Bloomsday, 1997, a weighty one, particularly as it is clear that SIPTU were prepared to throw the case. The situation as it stands is that NOTHING can be done to prevent individual dismissals of anyone, pre or post 1997. However, what I and Fanning have succeeded in doing is making sure that the application of the statute to anyone pre 1997 is illegal. Believe me - I have refused two settlement offers, and given up much to uphold this principle, which holds regardless of how the EAT turns out.

Paul Cahill more than kept this flame alive in my absence. Now Paul faces the might of the Irish state in the Supreme Court on 29 June. It is incumbent on us to turn up in numbers to show our support; I am coming back from the USA to attend. There have been many who supported Paul and myself, and of course we cannot name them for fear of reprisals in their direction from management, disgraceful though this reality (at a university!) is in fact. I will, however, list a bunch of people who have been less helpful

It divides between the criminal, the treacherous, and useful idiots. There are some who fall on the intersection. In some cases, I will give an explanation.

Criminals

Prondzynski, Conry, Walsh, Smeaton, Morris, Burns, Pratt

No explanation necessary, and I caution P. VERY strongly never to stuff illegal material through the door of my home, nor to defame me in public again. Regular readers will note that I won the libel suit against him; everything here is valid, and nothing he has said about Paul and myself is valid, nor truthful, nor legal .

Traitors

Ian Marison, Niall Moyna, Morris, Smeaton

All have turned up on management's side to give evidence, often perjured such evidence

Traitors/Useful idiots

Eddie Holt and Colm Kenny have taken management's side in their weekly drivel

Heather Ruskin and Marnie Holborow refused to give evidence at the EAT; that latter also at the High Court, even after being summonsed

Renaat Verbruggen and Brian Stone joined Morris, Smeaton and Prondzynski in the bullying of students.

More will be named as events unfold. Strange the paucity of Irish names in the above list. Apart from Kenny and his buddy Conry's , the only one is Moyna's. That name in turn brings up memories of the special Branch uprooting floorboards in the EE department,a counterfeit $$ trail in the US leading to deportation, and DCU faculty explaining in court that "bomb timers" were for one-armed bandits. Ah, the years, the years . Funny what recognizing the Irish state did to these people; did Niall have to show that much enthusiasm for it?


Again, sorry to state the obvious; however, the often ethical expert testimony given by DCU-based expert witnesses at, for example, the Gibraltar shootings inquiry derived partly from their protection by tenure. Moyna and Marison gave evidence at the High Court to help management destroy tenure.

A thuilleadh nios deanai




Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 14u Meitheamh 2009

The politics of tenure in Ireland

Non-Irish readers of this blog may be astonished at many of the industrial relations (IR) goings-on. Why did the faculty not strike, after several ballots approving such action? Why is a case that may result in summary dismissal for everyone being allowed by SIPTU (the “union”) to go to the supreme Court on June 29, 2009, since a loss there would result in all IR negotiation becoming null and void? (If they can legally dismiss summarily, all negotiation is irrelevant). Why did SIPTU not make any attempt to enforce the numerous verdicts obtained by staff against management? Why did they not attempt to pursue the criminal and other sadistic behaviour by management of which their own correspondence evinces knowledge? In short, will tenure in Ireland be revoked de iure by daylight robbery, with only god knows what consequences internationally?

Tenure in Ireland has de facto been revoked some time ago, and it was a political decision made by SIPTU. As soon as they allowed the principle of individual dismissal, no-one's job was ever safe; there is no way of keeping together a research lab while one goes through the Kafkaesque IR processes of the Irish state. Yet this IR process allows SIPTU to continue to exert pressure on the government, and claim that the dismissal is illegal for as long as it suits them, while interfering in our lives. So there is much to be gained for them; however, a loss by Cahill in June would make SIPTU, as well as many staff, redundant. In this entry, I will try and summarize the situation, and speculate about the motives of the players.

First of all, DCU is a closed shop; all staff are forced to join the ruins of the old James Connolly/Jim Larkin behemoth, SIPTU, contorted into its present shape on the say-so of Bertie Ahern as a way of preventing real unions from emerging in the public service. Faculty in other Irish universities join IFUT, which did a goodish job in negotiating provisions for tenure in the 1997 act. SIPTU had no part in this, and wrongly declared the 2001 DCU statute to be legal. For that alone, they should be kicked out of DCU. Since DCU was the only university with a SIPTU closed shop for faculty, it was the wedge for faculty summary dismissal; IFUT would have won this case way back.

However, that is just the start. The most maddening thing about this is that staff voted to strike in 2002, and none of the disasters visited upon the lives of talented and sensitive people since then should have happened. The Labour court verdict of 2002 was another point at which everything should have ended, as also the EAT verdict of 2003. Finally, the Cahill (2006, 2007) and Fanning (2005, 2008) verdicts afforded the opportunity for closure, as did the no-confidence vote of Nov 2008 and the further formal strike ballot of 2009. At any point, a real strike threat would have forced management to rescind the "summary dismissal" statute, and get back to the negotiating table for real. That is not what SIPTU wanted apparently; a phony war can be kept going for longer than a real one; indefinitely, in fact, with many opportunities for them to get jobs for their boys and girls, and posture politically.

SIPTU's history was recently analysed in one of our yellowish papers;

The Colombian connection

Note the reference to the grandiose lifestyles of the "union" top brass, who have taken about $5 million since the 1997 act was conceived from their “members” at DCU to fund their extravagant sybaritism . Many of them and the associated “Labour” party (I have yet to see any of these do a real job) are ex-members of the paramilitary-connected “Workers' Party” (see previous parenthesised comment). It seems rather that, for whatever reason, like Fianna Fail (FF)they believe that the rest of us owe them a living. Their central political aim is political power, in government with FF.

So let's look at the tactics here. Every time a victory has been won at DCU (usually by an act of individual brilliance a la Cahill), they attempt to gain control of the process, and string it out as much as possible with their rising stars like Alex White and Chris Rowland being parachuted into our lives. They have perfected the “Duke of York” strategy; call a strike ballot, and then rescind the strike action, thus wearing out their members' will. At all these points, they are nodding and winking to their handlers in FF, who after all inflicted them on us.

Yet, given the weekends' political results, with the Ahern mafia gone,this repellingly immoral strategy may prove to be too clever by at least three-eights (SIPTU will call their boys in to negotiate the final 1/8). At the end of this process, they will be either ejected by their "members' from DCU (if both Cahill and I win) or by management (if either of us lose). Even the win/win scenario still allows an occasional "individual" dismissal; this is a loophole we must close, at least by insisting on procedural correctness, as well as a temporal definition of "individual"(Dismissals two minutes apart? two years? etc)



Seán O Nualláin Ph.D. 4u Meitheamh 2009