Social Items

TPQ

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Sixty

 

A Morning Thought @ 3232

Jim Duffy ✍ The Presumptions Are Well Known.


1. Fine Gael will demand that any supports with electricity, etc Must be universal - meaning much of the money will go to millionaires (who admit to being embarrassed at getting it. Michael O'Leary called giving him those payments "disgusting"). 

Most of the money will go to people who don't need it and those that do will not get enough as so much is wasted on those that won't. Fianna Fáil, independents and the civil service will try to block such a dumb policy. Fine Gael will threaten to collapse the government unless all aid is "universal". So the dumb policy will continue - despite being condemned by every expert and everyone from the ESRI to the Fiscal Council. Fine Gael is fixated on the idea. 

When working for Fine Gael I tried arguing against the idiotic idea of "universality" in payments. It was impossible to convince Fine Gaelers of the idiocy of the policy. Even the Fiscal Council, which is hardly left wing, calls the policy idiotic. However for some reason it is an article of faith for Fine Gael.
 
2. Harris will demand that social welfare recipients not get payments adjusted for inflation so he can give the middle and upper middle class tiny tax cuts. Fianna Fáil will say "over our dead body" and threaten to collapse the government. Fianna Fáil, thankfully, will win that one.
 
3. Chambers will demand cuts to spending on Defence, calling them savings, despite the fact that Defence in Ireland has been so chronically underfunded that there is no room whatsoever for cuts. Asking it to cut spending is like suggesting to a skeleton that they lose weight. Hopefully, Fine Gael will stand their ground on that one and threaten to walk if Defence spending is not increased as committed to.
 
4. Chambers will demand a complete embargo on hiring staff in the health service - despite mental health services chronically understaffed to such an extent that an "urgent" appointment, that elsewhere is provided in days or weeks in Ireland takes six months or more. 

It is literally third world standard. That is not an exaggeration. It is quicker to get urgent appointments in much of Africa than it is in Ireland. In Britain there were calls on the health secretary to resign due to a delay of three Weeks. In that very week I was offered an "urgent" appointment eight Months away!
 
As a result there are people dying by suicide in every parish in Ireland as they cannot get appointments with psychologists. I have heard of a scary number of suicides in my home parish. I was in a group of people who used to meet weekly in a support group. Two of that group killed themselves entirely because of the lack of access to appointments. One young woman killed herself when for the fourth time her appointment was postponed and she was offered an appointment in the following year. She could not take it anymore. She killed herself. DPER simply saw that as having one less person to pay money to and one less person in the queue.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Budget 27 🪶 The Human Cost

The Guardian 📰Written by Patrick Wintour. Recommended by Tony Roche.

By dragging out talks, Tehran aims to damage the US president politically – but some fear a bruised and weakened Trump could lash back

Tehran has set out a protracted negotiating timetable designed to keep Donald Trump embroiled in the Iran conflict until the midterm elections, in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the 1979-81 US embassy hostage crisis.

For many inside Iran, inflicting meaningful revenge on Trump is a legitimate and self-standing war aim, reflected in the mood of those attending the funeral of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei where demands for retribution were ubiquitous.

While Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic revolution have never trusted the US, that animus is now also directed personally towards Trump. He not only tore up the painfully negotiated nuclear deal in 2018, but he sanctioned the assassination of the military leader Qassem Suleimani and twice involved Iran in negotiations on its nuclear programme only to launch wars against it. He shows no remorse for the killing of the country’s supreme leader, or for the attempt on the life of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

Continue @ The Guardian.

Iran Plots To Deal Trump A Blow In Midterms By Keeping Him Entangled In War

Barry Gilheany ✍ It was a “gotcha” moment for opponents of “woke” culture and its institutional manifestation: DEI (or Diversity, Equality and Inclusion). 

And for those whose belief in meritocracy is often wilfully colour blind. On the other hand, it was a moment for serious reflection for genuine anti-racists. 

Last Wednesday, Jason Arday, the “youngest black professor at Cambridge University” resigned from his post as Professor of Sociology of Education after a welter of allegations concerning his academic credentials including plagiarism in the course of acquiring his PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University and his backstory in which he had supposedly learned to speak at age 11, and to read and write at age 18, having been diagnosed with global developmental delay and autistic spectrum disorder as a child. 

None of these disadvantages were to stand in the way of his appointment to that prestigious Cambridge post at 37. As well as the deconstruction of his academic credential, Jason Arday’s fantastical claims about his sporting achievements including that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days helping to raise £5m for charities over a twenty-year period and that he had played football for Crystal Palace as an under-18 (he actually turned out for Lewisham Borough in the Southern Counties East Division One – near the bottom of English non-league pyramid)[1]. As is inevitable on these occasions, this saga generated a quotidian of online and offline abuse towards the central character; “I told you so” triumphalism about the conservative media and academia and yet another culture war for respective combatants to engage in.

A hint of the looming storm ahead when Jason Arday delivered a talk entitled Wanted Dead or Alive: The Playbook at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year. It is unusual, to say the least, for such political polemics to be sounded at academic events such as these as they are usually occasions where academics discuss their work and possible breakthroughs. The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history described the MO of the playbook to his audience of academic peers. 

In order to bring down some of the stellar names in US academia; conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics; looking for any scraps of scholarly infractions to weaponise against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their works that appeared similar to work in existing papers. Errors duly identified would trigger pile-ons by right-wing media and political figures on universities to pressurise them to sever ties with the offending academic. High profile figures such as Claudine Gray, the first African American woman to become president of Harvard, fell victim to this blitzkrieg with her being forced to resign over plagiarism allegations. Other academics were forced to become passive spectators to the trashing of their work and some even committed suicide after being hounded out of their positions. But Arday warned that these tactics were being imported into the UK to deal similar fates to its high-profile black academics. He called for his peers to defend him from “the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”[2]

As if on cue, at the end of July 2026, the Telegraph reported that analysis had found that more than 100 passages in his PhD resembled another thesis by Paula Zwozdfiak-Myers, a student at Brunel University, published six years earlier. This followed two denouncements of Arday’s work by two academics with controversial views on race which for some anti-racists served as confirmation of the playbook narrative that Arday had expounded on at the British Sociological Association. The first was Nathan Cofnas, a self-styled “race realist” sacked by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after he suggested in a blogpost that, in a meritocracy, there would be “close to zero” black professors” at Harvard, who claimed in a Substack post that he had put Arday’s PhD through plagiarism detection software, which found that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source” (A disciplinary investigation into his blogpost about black academics concluded that Cofnas was not guilty of “discrimination or harassment” and that his views, “while seen by many as offensive, did not breach the law and did not contravene university regulations designed to uphold free speech.” He now works at Ghent University in Belgium).[3]

The second race-controversial critic of Arday was Dr David Harris, a professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, who had previously written to Cambridge with claims about Arday’s work. Harris had been stripped of his professor emeritus title after he wrote a post about critical race theory that was deemed “controversial” by colleagues, but it was reinstated this year. After Harris’s earlier queries about Arday’s work, two corrections were made to papers released in 2018 and 2020.[4]

The fact that his critics held so controversial views on race appeared to lead to a doubling down of support for Arday from those at the opposite end of the academic and political spectrum. Cambridge called the plagiarism claims a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.” An open letter in support of Arday, signed by the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, (never one to pass up an opportunity to burnish his “woke” credentials regardless of the possible electoral and reputational impacts on his party) and the prominent black studies academic Kehinde Andrews, argued there was “an orchestrated and grim effort to delegitimise a brilliant, young working-class academic for the sin of being successful while Black”.[5] An open letter from the Good Law Project, signed by prominent public figures, denounced the allegations as “entirely false”, a “smear campaign” to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”[6]

But yet, despite John Moores University’s rebuttal of the plagiarism allegations concerning him, more troubling evidence emerged about Arday’s scholarly attributes and achievement including his claims to have held a string of prestigious visiting fellowships and professorships at other universities. The website for Jesus College, where Arday was a fellow, stated that he had been a visiting professor at the Ohio State University and the University of Glasgow which both institutions have denied. This biography also stated that Arday was still an “honorary professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology” where he had previously worked. The university told the Daily Mail that he no longer held any role there. He has also claimed to have completed a master’s degree in psychodynamic practices at Birkbeck, University of London which, according to enquiries by the Guardian has no record of any student named Jason Arday having studied there. He has claimed to have published a book with Palgrave Macmillan but while this publisher have confirmed that they took a proposal from Arday, the book was never published.[7]

And the suspicions about his false representations of his work did not go away. Prominent academics of colour, including one who has worked in the area of race and education for decades, who have spoken to the Guardian on conditions of anonymity, have agreed that the claims of plagiarism were legitimate. John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, asserts: “Having seen the evidence, it triangulates and there is, in my judgment, a case to answer here”.[8]

And so Cambridge’s DEI icon resigned and a full inquiry into the circumstances of Jason Arday’s appointment and his academic credentials has commenced. 

 But what has been and what will the likely fallout from the affair? For eminent black sociologist Paul Gilroy and other academics of colour, the manner of Arday’s appointment and the divisions around it, will have a chilling effect on blacks and other ethnic minorities in academe to come. For Gilroy, the 

unthinking culture warriors who have supported Jason Arday unconditionally share responsibility with his racist critics for making life harder for black academics and dragging UK higher education deeper into the mire . . . (emphasising that) . . . reckoning with [Arday] and his impact-chasing enablers should not be allowed to obscure the vicious, irrational cuts to humanities that are wrecking UK universities.[9]

For Jason Okundaye, the “inspiring story” media circus around Arday’s appointment and the framing of his story as the “youngest black ever” asterisked by a tale of hardship has left the field wide open to the right to frame criticism of DEI on its own terms rather than a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of examining how for many organisations and corporations symbolic or tokenistic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform. For, in his view, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Arday was treated as a mascot rather than a scholar, an expedient gesture for an institution frequently found wanting over its record on race in matriculation records such as in the Okundaye’s 2015 cohort in which there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students; single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism. 

The lesson of the Jason Arday scandal is that the left must advocate for diversity not tokenism, the celebration of excellent BME and other minority scholarship without the iconography of exceptionalism or celebrity academic. It does not entail taking on trust the entreaties of someone who alleges a racist campaign of intimidation including a severed pig’s head, a masked man wielding a knife and bullets in the post on the reasoning that “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me” as Jason Arday responded to the Guardian after their queries found they were either non-existent or could not be verified.[10]

As is often the case with disability and neurodiversity, the story of the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history was framed as a triumph over adversity. However such heroic narratives prioritise the individual story of amazing success over the struggle for equality and justice by the community of group from which they have. Black, disabled, neurodiverse or any other minoritised excellence deso not have to be redemption stories to be coherent or empowering.

The Jason Arday affair can be seen as another deleterious example of imported US style, tick box, institutional feel-good DEI culture whose outworkings have disastrous consequences for societal harmony as well as the advancement of genuine equality for BME and other marginalised groups as the Henry Novak case showed in policing. To counteract the “DEI hires”, surrender of academia to “wokeness” and “bogus” disciplines like sociology jibes from the right means not just acknowledging plagiarism and fraud where it is found even among black academics but also attacking the falsity, tokenism and blackwashing of corporate wokeness. It means also resistance to the self-appointed guardians of woke orthodoxy in parts of the left – – the dictatorship of the woketariat as Anthony McIntyre has christened them.

References

[1] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head. New claims surround a star Cambridge professor. The Guardian. 3-August.pp.6-8

[2] Ibid, p.6

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid, p.7

[6] Kenan Malik, 2026. The racism black academics face isn’t helped by leaping to Jason Ardat’s defence. The Observer Forum 9 August. p.25

[7] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Jobs, sport and charity. Long list of Arday’s claims now being scrutinised. The Guardian. 7 August. pp.12-13

[8] Bakare, 3 August op cit p.7

[9] Chris Osuh. 2026. Jason Arday. Scandal has a chilling effect on black lecturers. The Guardian. 8 August 2026 p.5

[10] Jason Okundaye, 2026. The right made DEI a weapon and the left just let it happen. The Guardian Opinion. 6 August. pp.1-2

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Jason Arday 🪶 Poster Boy For Or Victim Of “Woke”?

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Fifty Nine

 


Hate Theology @ 11

 

A Morning Thought @ 3231

Gary Robertson ⚽ Saturday August 8th saw the 45th anniversary of the passing of Thomas McElwee. 

The 23 year old boy from Bellaghy, Derry, the ninth of the 1981 hunger strikers to give their lives, my thoughts are with his family, friends and comrades.

On the Scottish football front Saturday saw week two of the SPL & SPFL seasons and with Celtic and Rangers both playing Sunday this gave us a chance to focus our attentions elsewhere.

Dundee V Aberdeen, and after an inauspicious start to the season for Dundee having lost out to a solitary goal at Celtic, and Aberdeen running out 2-1winners against last season's runners up Hearts, I expected better of the visitors. But they were poor, a very poor side and despite edging it on possession they did little with it the majority of the chances and shots on target from the home side the Dens Park men ran out comfortable 2-0 winners. A Westley flick past the Dons keeper in nine minutes, it took far longer than it should have for Dundee to extend their lead but finally it came when a powerful shot from Bevan in the fifty sixth minute put the game to bed.

On Saturday we also had the joy of the Saints derby when St Mirren faced St Johnstone at home. I say “joy” because I believe it’s the job of any author of any piece to hold the attention of the reader but it’s pure clickbait. This isn’t a game we will be looking back upon with fondness. The fact Sky Sports managed to find three minutes of highlights is credit to them. Yes there was incidents, a penalty each end. St Johnstone's effort saved by St Mirren's Chapman and St Mirren's scored by Phillips in the seventy third minute. Dreary, yes, but it must feel pretty good being a St Mirren fan with six points from six and sitting top of the table on Saturday evening.

In the Championship Partick continued their hundred percent record running out comfortable 2-0 winners against last season's Premier League relegated Livingston on Friday night. A crowd of almost four thousand turned up which isn’t bad for a Friday evening. The worry (for me at least having a soft spot for Livi) is Livingston only managed one shot on target in the entire match, and even playing three up front Glenn Whelan (Livingston manager) must be wondering what went wrong.

League One, and Hamilton and Ross County have both collected maximum points so far with County leaving it late (a goal in the eighty sixth minute) to overcome a stubborn Montrose, who without their talismanic striker Taylor Sutherland who’s moved on to play for Hamilton, find themselves rooted to the foot of the table, but only on goal difference as Queen of the South are equally poor at this stage and remain only above Montrose by a single goal.

League Two and poor old Edinburgh City find themselves once again on a minus points start to the season having been docked five points for “suffering an insolvency event” (being broke I suppose) so bottom of the table minus four points it’s early enough for themselves to get out of trouble. But honestly it must be hard being a City fan as the SPFL seem determined to kick you out of the league. Last year they survived but only just. This year has already started difficultly for the men from Scotland's capital. I suppose it could be worse. I mean, your club could have spent a small fortune on decorating a bus for a victory parade only to see that victory ruthlessly ripped from your grasp by a pensioner and a mishmash of players that he somehow managed to bond as one. I’m not sure where that bus is now but I do hope it’s overcome its embarrassment.

And so to Sunday …
 
First up we have the glorious Glasgow Celtic facing the threat of Kilmarnock who have finally ripped up their artificial pitch and replaced it with grass.
 
Rugby Park isn’t always an easy venue to play at but with Martin O’Neill at home recuperating from minor surgery - sending regards and best wishes, Martin Shaun Maloney taking charge of the team I expected a tight nervy encounter but what we got instead was a master class from the hoops. New bhoy Kasper Høgh put on a performance that has Celtic fans excited again. A hat trick in 33 minutes and a statement of more to come, it was difficult not to get carried away in a wave of invincibility. Celtic were imperious. Kilmarnock weren’t awful, they were simply blown away by the men from Paradise. Goals from Nygren and Mcowan, a late consolation for Killie from Schjønning-Larsen - the day however belonged to the Viking that is Celtic's new number 9. Finally we have a proper striker at the club. Big things are expected this season.

On the other side of the country and Hearts faced Dundee Utd. Again a remarkably one sided affair which didn’t look obvious on paper,  Hearts having capitulated the week before to Aberdeen, and Dundee Utd who took a point snatching a draw from the jaws of victory against Rangers. I expected much better from Jim Goodwins side. The match ended 4-0 to the Jambos and a performance that left the Arabs scratching their heads, shaking them in disbelief. Contrary to rumour, their defeat is not down to my prediction they’d win this game. They were just awful and if they had any decency they’d apologise to their fans, and the club would reimburse travel costs. Granted it’s only 60 odd miles (120 round trip) between the cities, it’s far enough on a Sunday to watch your side do bugger all.

Rangers v Hibs, and a chance to see the McInnes era at Ibrox take off. Having spent almost €17m euro (roughly £15m pounds) and bringing in Shankland and Devlin from Hearts it was the new boys time to shine. Hibs had other ideas though.
 
The opening penalty to be honest was a little harsh and if I’d been on the receiving end of the decision I’d have been “pure raging” but after Don Robertson was called to the monitor there was only ever likely to be one outcome and a spot kick awarded to Hibs. Taken with aplomb by Campbell the atmosphere inside Ibrox became hostile. Whilst chances came and went for Rangers, at half time the boos from the home fans could be heard across Scotland.
 
Second half and it has to be said Rangers were better but Hibs upped their defensive game and had chances themselves to extend their lead. It seemed on the cards as the clock ticked round to 80 minutes that Hibs would hold on for all three points. Then the sucker punch - a ball rifled in from Gassama deflected off the valiant Chaiwa and past his keeper, giving Rangers what looked like a lift and definitely a lifeline.
 
With commentators in full cry that “Rangers can still win this” Ian “I’m not a Rangers fan but …” Crocker led the cries. Tucked away in a quiet Scottish village one scribe wrote on Bluesky “c'mon Hibs there’s still time, c'mon you can still win this”, the prophetic words of this unassuming scribhneoir came to pass as in the last minute of stoppage time Hibs' Wright fired past the new Rangers keeper Pandur and sent the away fans into ecstasy. Three points secured, a victory over Rangers and a victory over Hearts' former manager and captain, rounded off the perfect afternoon for the Edinburgh men.

One note from the game was the what appeared to be a very serious injury to Rangers' Chermiti. Rivalry aside I wish him well in his recovery.

So that’s it for another weekend in the SPL/SPFL summed up as Celtic impressive, Hearts admirable, Rangers poor, and Dundee United rank rotten.

Enjoy your week

Til next time ……

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Høghs Better, Høghs Best?

Micheál Choilm Mac Giolla Easbuig ★ I am encouraged, by the recent podcast by Gerry Adams ( Joe.ie ) in relation to the rise of the far right i Éireann but I’m not fully convinced.

Is Gerry now, directly challenging the Far Right’s attacks, violence and killing; and is he calling out his own party's failure to challenge the Blueshirts’ ideology that is now on the march across the country?

Remember how the Blueshirts violently attacked and tried to kill Republicans back in the 30s?

I would hope to see all progressive people and groups come together, in alliances, to closely examine what Adams has said, and to hold him and Sinn Féin, to account; and formulate a stronger action group to fight against this Right Wing 'cancer' in our society.

The Proclamation of 1916 states very clearly that society holds humanity, justice and religious freedoms for all, as its clear identity. We must be certain of one thing. We must not fall into the trap of the working class, fighting the working class; which only, has ever benefited the powerful and wealthy.

I certainly do not agree with the political direction of Sinn Féin. But progressive groups should come together in strong alliances, with a clear revolutionary understanding, to fight against the rise of the Right Wing, both i Éireann and across the world.

I call on Gerry Adams to go further and clarify his latest podcast, about the Right and Racism; and to assure everyone that it was not just tokenism. I would ask Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin to follow up on the podcast content, with action. That is, direct action against this 'cancer' in our society, on the streets.

And other questions arise here. Is Gerry Adams speaking for himself or for the Sinn Féin party? Will he now ensure that Sinn Féin changes direction so that the party moves away from it's conservative, safe, bourgeois politics; and the consistent move to the centre right, by some senior Sinn Féin politicians. That must end, if we are to take seriously what Gerry Adams has said.

I Dún na nGall we had a number of anti-racist demonstrations when fascists and some racists tried to organise i Leitir Ceanainn agus Gaoth Dobhair. Unfortunately and predictably, Sinn Féin did not support our Anti-Racist counter demonstration. Why?

Go Raibh Maith Agat to all the other politicians who did show up and took a clear stand against racism and fascism on those days.

Furthermore, will Sinn Féin stop, trying to ride two horses and clarify their thinking on migrants and migration, at the very least or is the centre right element within the party that's now in full control?

Are the consequences of imperialism and capitalism being considered, or discussed, around these issues, by Sinn Féin?

A fairly recent document on migration issues that was published by Sinn Féin called, 'International Protection: A Fair System That Works', does not exactly inspire confidence either, or indicate that they are going to go 'all out' to directly confront anti-migrant, Right Wing nationalist groups i Éireann. In fact, it reads more like a pacification document to these groups; and that SF will 'deal' with migrants and migrant issues, inter alia, to the satisfaction of the Right Wing forces, (if and) when they (ever) get into power. What could that mean? Is it a 'vote catching' document?

On the basis of Gerry A's podcast on the Right Wing groups, is Sinn Féin now going to review it's thinking on this major issue?

Will we soon see, well organised, politically clear anti-Right Wing and anti-fascist, street demonstrations by Sinn Féin? Will they, also, show solidarity and work with, all of those who oppose Right Wing politics and it's origins?

As a part of all of that will they show their total support for all minority groups i Éireann; who are regularly and viciously attacked by these same Right Wing groups?

Will we, also, now see, the clear Republican line of class struggle, anti-fascism, anti imperialism, anti capitalism and anti-Zionism, coming to the fore?

Only time will tell, but, of course, 'actions, always, speak louder than words'.

#SinnFéin

#AlwaysAntiFascists

#SinnFéinIreland

#MaryLouMcDonald

Micheál Choilm Mac Giolla Easbuig 
is an independent councillor on Donegal County Council.

Gerry Adams And The Far Right

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Fifty Eight

 


A Morning Thought @ 3230

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)