The Trib by David Kenny Read Free Book Online

bringing to the country, principally cheap labour. There were cases of gross exploitation, ranging from mushroom pickers to construction workers. Now the market has turned and the employers hold all the aces. Inevitably, some will see the current economic distress as an opportunity. If the few jobs on offer end up being filled by immigrants, suspicions about pay levels and conditions will immediately arise. This sort of thing has already become a feature of the recession in the UK. Italian and Portugese unskilled workers have been imported to construct a power station in Lindsey Oil Refinery in Lincolnshire, prompting a series of wildcat strikes. The GMB trade union in the UK is claiming that two energy plants and an oil refinery are refusing to employ British workers.
    Scarcity of resources is another area that will provide a flashpoint of tension. Currently there is talk of cuts to social welfare payments. If such a horrendous vista comes to pass, those at the receiving end will look around for somebody to blame.
    It would be nice to believe that dear old Ireland will be able to keep tensions under wraps. However, if recent events have shown anything, it is that history keeps coming back to haunt just when you thought it had been dispatched once and for all. Leadership and tolerance are going to be at a premium to deal with what is coming down the line. Employers’ groups and trade unions need to provide direction and vision. Both have been to the fore in usurping the job of governing through the partnership process, but this is an issue in which they could make a real contribution to society.
    Leadership in the political sphere will also be vital, but don’t hold your breath. With Fianna Fáil plunging in the polls, expect some of the more nervous nellies to exploit rather than attempt to defuse racial tensions. Noel O’Flynn has already been fast out of the blocks, publishing parliamentary questions he set down on permits for foreign workers. He’s letting the frustrated element in his constituency know where he stands on the matter of Johnny Foreigner.
    Some on the wilder shores of Fine Gael have a habit of drawing a few kicks at Travellers, and these politicians also can be expected to make hay on the back of racial vulnerabilities.
    It’s not going to be pretty, but in the coming years we’re going to find out a lot about ourselves, and our capacity for tolerance when the chips are down.

Once again, agencies of the State appear to have been more concerned with protecting themselves rather than the citizen
    3 May 2009
    T HEY came for Michael Feichin Hannon early in the morning. He was awoken and told he was being taken away for questioning in relation to an alleged sexual assault of a ten-year-old.
    What followed was a nightmare for a man who was just twenty-two years of age in 1997, when the matter arose. He was convicted of sexual assault two years later. Fortunately, his sentence was suspended for four years. He moved away from the area, in an attempt to come out from under the dark cloud that envelopes anybody convicted of sexual assault of a minor. In the ignorant discourse that often surrounds sexual offences, he could have been classified as a paedophile.
    Last week, he received a certificate of miscarriage of justice following the retraction of the allegation by the girl, who is now a young woman.
    A great wrong was perpetrated by the girl, Una Hardester, against Hannon, but he also suffered at the hands of the State. He had no complaint about how the case was investigated, prosecuted or tried. But his experience since the girl’s retraction raises a recurring question about how the State conducts itself when innocent people have been wronged in one form or another.
    Hardester made her retraction in a statement to a solicitor in November 2006. She had duped the gardaí, prosecutors and the jury at Galway Circuit Criminal Court into believing her story. (The trial largely hung on