ALongsWord

A version of  this article originally appeared in The Irish Times, Friday October 19, 2012.

By Angela Long

Times are tough: many of you reading this are worried about the mortgage, the bills, the future. But imagine a nasty situation blows up in your street or estate, so nasty that you have to head for the airport and leave the country. When you arrive in a seemingly civilized destination, you have to tell an inquisitor the original name of Croke Park stadium, before you are allowed stay in the country.*

Absurd? It might be, but this is the equivalent of the type of question considered suitable as a test for people seeking asylum in Ireland. And, if the person cannot answer correctly about their home country, they are deemed to be ‘unreliable’ or mendacious, and their case takes a turn for the worse.

The 5,000 people living in our country today seeking asylum are at the bottom of the pile of concerns for legislators, authorities and the average citizen. But that should not mean they suffer inhumanitarian treatment. And the way they are treated by the Irish ‘system’ is nothing less than racist and cruel.

Innocent people can be put in limbo for three, six, even 10 years while a lethargic civil service dabs occasionally at their cases.

On September 27 a Congolese man who has been awaiting a decision on his refugee application for six years took his life at the refugee hostel in Mosney, Co Meath – a pleasant setting, but a remote location, like most of the hostels.

Suicide is a regular feature of the so-called system whereby Ireland lives up to its obligations under international treaties. Another, deportation, is the target of a new campaign for justice launched by asylum-seekers and their supporters.

Read more…

Angela is a Labour Party supporter – but it’s not that which makes Michael D. the best choice for the next Irish president

Sean Gallagher seems a nice bloke, but surely Michael D. Higgins, after a life as a public representative, activist, artist and social justice campaigner, deserves to be president of Ireland more than a mere businessman?

Last night (October 24) the seven candidates in Ireland’s presidential election fronted up for the final all-in debate of the campaign. Screened by national broadcaster RTE, the encounter was adjudicated by Pat Kenny, RTE’s highly-polished senior man. It was an entertaining affair on several levels, at once more light-hearted and yet more intense than the meetings earlier in the campaign, when most of the candidates had a hope of success (the two women, Dana and Mary Davis, became also-rans fairly early on).

Gallagher, way ahead in three polls of voting intentions taken at the weekend, got a rough ride. He was skewered on two issues: an amount of €89,000 which was paid into a personal rather than business account some years ago; and, probably worse from an electoral point of view, his role as a money-collector for Fianna Fail during the dying days of the Celtic Tiger.

Martin McGuinness (who has faced a relentless tide of questions over his role in the IRA) dared to suggest that Gallagher’s past as a bagman for the former party of God was ‘murky’. Murkier than murder? But Gallagher, normally straightforward and unruffled, was obviously fazed by the questions, and dithered between ‘not remembering’ whether he had collected a €5,000 cheque and claiming that the person who said he had given the cheque was an unreliable witness with a chequered past.

The question was whether all this will damage Gallagher sufficiently to snatch victory away from him this Thursday [October 27] when voting takes place.

He’s an affable, straight-talking guy, and has garnered a lot of approval from young people and closet Fianna Failers, as well as some of the more overt kind. The Fianna Fail candidate who dare not speak its name.

My question is whether a man, pleasant as he may be, who has a background almost entirely as a businessman, with no political representation or across-the-board engagement, is what Ireland needs or should have as a president at this stage. Read more…

By Angela Long

Rapper Reveal, a dapper gent with a small geometric tuft of beard, has an interesting theory about the British riots. The kids, he says, are merely aping the behaviour they’ve seen in adults all their lives – naked pursuit of stuff, shiny fashion stuff, material goods.

It’s a sour twist on the triumph of capitalism.

Me, I blame the internet. Digital platforms, that’s what’s done it. And I do have a serious point here, not just referring to the well-publicised use of the closed Blackberry messaging system for the rioters to arrange their next ‘spectacular’.

As a cyberpsychologist, I’ve been interested for some years in how the internet is changing our lives at a deeper level than the obvious one of convenience. Some of it’s good, some is bad, but mostly the jury is still out on how a life revolving around digital platforms differs from previous modes of existence. And as all the emphasis has been on how to use the internet as a commercial tool – and for the media, how to make it pay – other bigger concerns have been ignored.

Look at the young people who’ve been out torching police cars, vandalising properties, stealing, casually and with impunity, from shops. A lot of them are 16 and under – perhaps not as many as the hysterical adult reaction suggests, but still a lot. These are the ‘digital natives’ – a term of disputed validity, but loosely referring to the generation which has grown up with the internet, and has no memory of life before the virtual world dominated. Laptops, screens, mobile phones, tablets – no novelty in any of it to these kids, nothing strange. And their world’s especially been formed on mobiles and smartphones. Read more…

July 19, 2011

Angela Long watched in amazement as Rupert Murdoch sat meekly at a table and let British MPs grill him about how he runs – or not – his media empire

‘Jonnie Marbles’, as he calls himself, hijacked the Murdoch hearings, towards their end, in the House of Commons. But it was only momentary, and one irony is that there is now no News of the World to buy his story.
The man in the checked shirt who tweets as Marbles waited till late in the three-hour session, then lunged at Rupert Murdoch with a ‘pie’ containing shaving cream. A number of people, notably Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng, leapt immediately to restrain him.
People had queued for eight hours to see the only show in town. Thousands of people who have only vaguely heard of Commons Committees were on the spot in London or at the screen of their TV or laptop, watching a spectacle worthy of the Roman Colosseum: the most powerful media magnate in the world, with his son and heir, being grilled by a hostile group of politicians.
Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch faced their accusers – and former captors, in their power to embarrass politicians – in the Wilson room at the House of Commons. Behind James sat a phalanx of lawyers, while Rupert had Wendi Deng, his third wife, inches away.
“This is the most humble day of my life,” Murdoch senior declared at the start of proceedings. And that’s why the crowds were there, some of them gathered still with placards reading ‘Smash Murdoch’s Evil Empire’ and ‘He’s Got to Go’.
The Twitter joke, and pic, was the resemblance to Mr Burns and Smithers of The Simpsons. And at first it did seem to have qualities of caricature, with Rupert Murdoch answering in monosyllables, unable to hear questions, or leaving long silences before he spoke. Was this a piece of theatre, with a befuddled elderly man-character set to fend questions in one way, while the youthful business-school graduate parroted “Sorry, that was before my time/I have no knowledge/I am not aware.” Read more…

Angela Long is getting punch-drunk with all the big moves in the hacking/Murdoch/BSkyB saga

Jeff Randall, immensely likeable business journalist on Sky News, was as usual giving it large. ‘I’ve seen some pretty big mea culpas in my time, but this is the biggest of them all.’
Randall was speaking last Thursday, after the astonishing news that Rupert Murdoch (for don’t think anyone but he called the shot) was closing The News of the World in the wake of a mounting, disgraceful scandal around mobile-phone hacking.
But now, we have an enormous cherry on the top of that sensational cake, as News Corporation announces it is withdrawing its bid to take over all of BSkyB, and hence have total control of Sky News.
This time last week the resiling from the bid would have had jaws on the floor all over the worlds of commerce and media. Today, it is just a logical step, as the Murdochs and News Corp are on the run from a massive and heartfelt tide of public anger.
Like me, Jeff Randall worked for The Sunday Times some 20 years ago at Fortress Wapping. In those dear distant days, the height of rascally or unethical behaviour by the bad boys at Wapping, The Sun and the NOTW, was the headline ‘Gotcha’ on page one of The Sun when the Argentine battleship the Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands War (with the loss of hundreds of lives).
Tut tut. But the editor at the time, Kelvin Mackenzie, was hugely proud of the headline and it became iconic, summing up the cheeky disregard for propriety that the British redtops personified. Read more…