Matt Treacy writes for GRIPT on: The Care Bears ➧ How the Liberal Left control and populate taxpayer funded NGOs for their own agenda 
 

In his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels excoriated those wealthy philanthropists who placed themselves “before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when they give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them.”

Back then charity was the preserve of austere Victorians and mill owners who perhaps felt a twang of guilt over their new found wealth. Now it has been colonised by the liberal left, but with a much smaller proportion of the monies donated via the state or from guilt-tripped private donors actually accruing to the benefit of those in whose name it is collected.

Then again, socialists were never very efficient, except of course when using other people’s money in order to look after themselves. Having failed to capture the commanding heights of the economy, the activists of the left must now be content with infiltrating the areas in which they can establish their influence without the need to have any real popular support.

There is always the trade union movement of course; long a source of employment for graduates who have never for the most part worked in any of the jobs which “their” members occupy.

But now there is also the vast array of “non-governmental” organisations. The opportunities inherent in this as a means to incorporate potential opposition was first spotted by Charlie Haughey when he embraced Tony Gregory’s north Dublin city community apparatus. Charlie’s protégé Bertie Ahern took that to a new level during the Celtic Tiger years when there was a proliferation of state-funded organisations purporting to represent local communities. 

Tony Gregory, Charlie Haughey

The problem of course is not that some useful services may be provided but that many of the now vast network of massively funded NGOs have become sanctuaries of sanctimoniousness. The effectiveness of these virtue-signalling Care Bears – other than providing an opportunity to demonstrate how much better they are than everyone else, and ensuring their pet projects receive endless taxpayer funding – must be questioned. Not only that, but if you look at the people who administer and staff these organisations, it is clear that their political activism or affiliation may have been more than helpful in securing the positions so many of them hold.

As the unions once were, NGOs are now a means to ensure that activists are given jobs by other party members and sympathisers; thus ensuring not only that they can devote their time to things which benefit the party or the party’s agenda, and, in not a few instances, prepare themselves to be future candidates.

The difference now is that in place of the one-time bitter competition in the unions between Labour and the Workers Party, and to a lesser degree the Communist Party and Sinn Féin, for paid positions within the bureaucracy, the left is now quite happy to co-operate across party lines to ensure that NGO jobs go to others of the ‘woke’. And more importantly they co-operate to ensure the ‘unwoke’ are excluded. The same logic operates within sections of academia where they have established themselves, and of course in the mainstream media.

That is not unique to Ireland. A study conducted in Sweden found that 56% of journalists surveyed stated that they supported either the Greens or Left Party. Those parties got 12.6% of the vote in the 2014 general election. Hardly surprising then that the Swedish press was showing little evidence of the massive dislocation and concerns over the impact of mass immigration.

An incestuous nepotism operates to ensure that there is a seamless transition between jobs dominated by a coterie of activists from the left parties, for which purposes we include the Greens who have been quite adroit at exploiting their positions within the Care Bear network. An analysis of people within NGOs evinces a striking similarity in educational background, student politics, and employment by parties including within Leinster House. 


The most important thing is that they almost invariably share the same politics regardless of party. So anyone looking for a job with almost any NGO will have to tick a range of boxes on attitudes towards climate change, abortion, immigration, gender and so on.

That nexus was perhaps best illustrated by recent pro-abortion campaign in the 2018 referendum. While portrayed in the media as a grassroots movement and some sort of popular uprising, it was run almost exclusively by people who have been employed full time in taxpayer supported NGOs and even by the state itself. (Of course the Government and establishment media was on their side anyway).

The Irish Family Planning Association has long been a central cog in the Irish abortion campaign. It had an income of €2.15 million in the referendum year, 2018, of which €1.31 million came from the taxpayer. A further €100,000 came from its international body Planned Parenthood, €75,900 from Open Society and €46,551 from the United Nations Population Fund. Amnesty International Ireland and the Abortion Rights Campaign also received funding from Open Society.

At the time of the referendum the IFPA board included among others Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin’s former secretary in Leinster House, Natasha O’Brien a senior civil servant in the Department of Health, and Siona Cahill a former President of the Union of Students who makes podcasts for the Irish Independent.

The co-ordinating committee for the pro abortion campaign was the executive of Together for Yes. All continue to be professional members of the liberal elite masquerading as outsiders. Its members included Gráinne Griffin who is now a senior manager with the Citizens Information Board; Orla O’Connor who is a director of the almost totally state funded National Women’s Council and who has spent a lifetime in the NGO sector; and Ailbhe Smyth, one of the few MAs to have been made head of her own department at UCD and now a director of Age Action Ireland which has now employed a surprising number of left wing activists. 

Orla O’Connor
Others in the abortion campaign include Sineád Kennedy who is a tutor at Maynooth University and completed a doctorate on the stranger shores of Marxism and culture so ably demolished by Scruton and others. Sarah Monaghan is now campaigns manager at The Wheel and was formerly logistics manager for Michael D. Higgin’s presidential campaign; Silke Paasche is head of communications at the NWCI and previously spent four years working for FEANSTA which is part of the European Commission’s information service; Deirdre Duffy is a former Deputy Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and Amy Rose Harte runs her own communications consultancy and is a former press officer for the Labour Party.

The IFPA CEO, who was the only male member of the Together for Yes executive, is Niall Behan who used to be Proinsias de Rossa’s assistant when he was Minister for Social Welfare in the Fine Gael coalition of the 1990s. (Which is apt given that all of the above are now inseparable from the Fine Gael on every single major issue affecting the country.) Planned Parenthood’s branch in Bolivia, is funded by the Irish state through Irish Aid. So in effect the Department of Foreign Affairs is supporting an organisation whose purpose is to overturn Bolivia’s current abortion law.

Niall Behan
It is clear then that the party affiliations of leading liberal activists are pretty much meaningless. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the key role played by Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katharine Zappone in ensuring that the pet projects and activists are kept well supplied with taxpayers’ monies.

Zappone became an Irish citizen in 1995 and epitomises the strange melange that embraces everyone from government ministers including An Taoiseach to members of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party. Not only do they all share the same views on all of the key moral and social issues confronting the Irish people, but they all wet their beaks in the same trough.

Since moving here, Zappone has evinced a fanatical determination to change this country in the direction she favours. Her initial vehicle for advancing her agenda was An Cosán based in Tallaght. (It also served as the launch pad for Senator Lynn Ruane, a less articulate but nonetheless committed advocate of the Zappone agenda.)

Zappone is the Minister responsible for Tusla which has been the focus of several serious concerns and allegations in regard to the manner in which it operates. Tusla granted An Cosán €549,918 in 2018, and it received €1.69 million in total from the public purse. It has also received funding from multinationals like Accenture and IBM and from the Ireland Funds. It currently employs around 100 people.

The current CEO of An Cosán is Heydi Foster-Breslin. For years she managed to combine her ownership of a real estate company with a succession of NGO jobs. She was appointed by President Higgins to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and was until recently a member of the board of Dóchas which is the central administrative committee for Irish overseas NGOs and receives the vast bulk of its funding from the state through Irish Aid.

Katherine Zappone
Intriguingly, Foster-Breslin spent six years as the chairperson of Common Purpose Ireland, an organisation that has branches worldwide, which says it “develops leaders” and which has been described as “a left wing version of the Freemasons” and a “networking organisation for the great and good to advance their politically correct view.’

Those claims were made in relation to the British subsidiary of Common Purpose, which was officially founded by Julia Middleton who had been in the office of former British Labour Minister, John Prescott. Amongst those involved in advising Common Purpose was Joyce Thacker who was head of child services in Rotherham during the disastrous handling of the local council and police of the horrific systematic grooming of children to be raped by local Pakistani gangs.

As was later revealed “a child-protection body, of which Ms Thacker was an influential member” tried to conceal the ethnicity of the men who groomed and sexually abused at least one of the girl victims in Rotherham “because it was worried about the impact on “community cohesion”

Ms Thacker also oversaw the removal of three children from foster care because the parents of the family supported UKIP.

The Irish board and trustees of Common Purpose include Denis Leamy who is the CEO of the Cork Education and Training Board and was formerly CEO of Pobal, which operates various community schemes and has a budget of €700 million. Leamy’s holding of these public offices is an indication of the sort of members of the elite recruited globally by Common Purpose.

The question of course is, what is the common purpose and is that purpose supported by the Irish state?

Another key element in the Irish Care Bear movement is Amnesty International which not only played an outrageous part in the abortion referendum but took substantial funding from the Open Society foundation. It’s board, under Executive Director Colm O’Gorman, is a curious blend of respectable and no doubt well meaning people like journalist Razan Ibraheem, Professor Cliona O’Farrelly on the one hand; and Youth Section representative Katie O’Houlihan who professes a “keen interest in intersectionality,” and Niall Cowley who helps people to realise that they are being offended, on the other. He was a member of the National Steering Committee against Hate Speech, and in the spirit of tolerance for which the entrepreneurial woke are renowned was also an organiser of protests against the Pope’s visit.

Among the less-known lights of the NGO game are groups like The Irish Network against Racism, part of the overall European network, which is 77.5% bankrolled by the EU, and the remainder by private foundations including, of course, Open Society. It spends most of its income on wages and travel for its activists. The Irish section received €270,000 in state funding in 2019 and showed its appreciation by publishing a report claiming that Irish people, the ones whose taxes paid these people’s wages, discriminate in favour of “whites.”

Finally I will leave you with a brief vignette of one of the bottom feeders in the consumption of the vast sums dispensed by the state to improve us all with our own money, despite never having been asked nor consented.
Colm O’Gorman

Changing Ireland is a Limerick-based group which doesn’t appear to have much output to justify the €100,408 it received in 2018 – 99.56% of it from the Department of Rural and Community Development, from me and you in other words.

It did film some of the Embracing Diversity event in Ballyhaunis in October which was an opportunity to lecture the people of the west on their bad behaviour following widespread opposition to the plans to impose new direct provision centres in Oughterard and Ballinamore. One of the speakers was Anastasia Crickley who is a former member of the board of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This is the body which recently told the Irish government that it needs to do more to get us all to acknowledge our “colonial guilt.”

What is mainly interesting about Changing Ireland, however, is that its website (which would hardly cost 100 grand to administer judging by the cut of it) heralds the doings of one Minister Michael Ring, who coincidentally happens to be the Minister responsible for the Department of Rural and Community Development. Yes, the Department that bunged Changing Ireland all that moolah.

All, it seems, are friends in the world where the Irish left is basically subvented by the state and philanthropic billionaires and eccentric Englishmen living in caravans. At least the Victorians saw charity in terms of keeping people alive rather than preventing them being born in the first place. 


Matt Treacy is a writer and a former republican prisoner.

The Care Bears

Matt Treacy writes for GRIPT on: The Care Bears ➧ How the Liberal Left control and populate taxpayer funded NGOs for their own agenda 
 

In his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels excoriated those wealthy philanthropists who placed themselves “before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when they give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them.”

Back then charity was the preserve of austere Victorians and mill owners who perhaps felt a twang of guilt over their new found wealth. Now it has been colonised by the liberal left, but with a much smaller proportion of the monies donated via the state or from guilt-tripped private donors actually accruing to the benefit of those in whose name it is collected.

Then again, socialists were never very efficient, except of course when using other people’s money in order to look after themselves. Having failed to capture the commanding heights of the economy, the activists of the left must now be content with infiltrating the areas in which they can establish their influence without the need to have any real popular support.

There is always the trade union movement of course; long a source of employment for graduates who have never for the most part worked in any of the jobs which “their” members occupy.

But now there is also the vast array of “non-governmental” organisations. The opportunities inherent in this as a means to incorporate potential opposition was first spotted by Charlie Haughey when he embraced Tony Gregory’s north Dublin city community apparatus. Charlie’s protégé Bertie Ahern took that to a new level during the Celtic Tiger years when there was a proliferation of state-funded organisations purporting to represent local communities. 

Tony Gregory, Charlie Haughey

The problem of course is not that some useful services may be provided but that many of the now vast network of massively funded NGOs have become sanctuaries of sanctimoniousness. The effectiveness of these virtue-signalling Care Bears – other than providing an opportunity to demonstrate how much better they are than everyone else, and ensuring their pet projects receive endless taxpayer funding – must be questioned. Not only that, but if you look at the people who administer and staff these organisations, it is clear that their political activism or affiliation may have been more than helpful in securing the positions so many of them hold.

As the unions once were, NGOs are now a means to ensure that activists are given jobs by other party members and sympathisers; thus ensuring not only that they can devote their time to things which benefit the party or the party’s agenda, and, in not a few instances, prepare themselves to be future candidates.

The difference now is that in place of the one-time bitter competition in the unions between Labour and the Workers Party, and to a lesser degree the Communist Party and Sinn Féin, for paid positions within the bureaucracy, the left is now quite happy to co-operate across party lines to ensure that NGO jobs go to others of the ‘woke’. And more importantly they co-operate to ensure the ‘unwoke’ are excluded. The same logic operates within sections of academia where they have established themselves, and of course in the mainstream media.

That is not unique to Ireland. A study conducted in Sweden found that 56% of journalists surveyed stated that they supported either the Greens or Left Party. Those parties got 12.6% of the vote in the 2014 general election. Hardly surprising then that the Swedish press was showing little evidence of the massive dislocation and concerns over the impact of mass immigration.

An incestuous nepotism operates to ensure that there is a seamless transition between jobs dominated by a coterie of activists from the left parties, for which purposes we include the Greens who have been quite adroit at exploiting their positions within the Care Bear network. An analysis of people within NGOs evinces a striking similarity in educational background, student politics, and employment by parties including within Leinster House. 


The most important thing is that they almost invariably share the same politics regardless of party. So anyone looking for a job with almost any NGO will have to tick a range of boxes on attitudes towards climate change, abortion, immigration, gender and so on.

That nexus was perhaps best illustrated by recent pro-abortion campaign in the 2018 referendum. While portrayed in the media as a grassroots movement and some sort of popular uprising, it was run almost exclusively by people who have been employed full time in taxpayer supported NGOs and even by the state itself. (Of course the Government and establishment media was on their side anyway).

The Irish Family Planning Association has long been a central cog in the Irish abortion campaign. It had an income of €2.15 million in the referendum year, 2018, of which €1.31 million came from the taxpayer. A further €100,000 came from its international body Planned Parenthood, €75,900 from Open Society and €46,551 from the United Nations Population Fund. Amnesty International Ireland and the Abortion Rights Campaign also received funding from Open Society.

At the time of the referendum the IFPA board included among others Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin’s former secretary in Leinster House, Natasha O’Brien a senior civil servant in the Department of Health, and Siona Cahill a former President of the Union of Students who makes podcasts for the Irish Independent.

The co-ordinating committee for the pro abortion campaign was the executive of Together for Yes. All continue to be professional members of the liberal elite masquerading as outsiders. Its members included Gráinne Griffin who is now a senior manager with the Citizens Information Board; Orla O’Connor who is a director of the almost totally state funded National Women’s Council and who has spent a lifetime in the NGO sector; and Ailbhe Smyth, one of the few MAs to have been made head of her own department at UCD and now a director of Age Action Ireland which has now employed a surprising number of left wing activists. 

Orla O’Connor
Others in the abortion campaign include Sineád Kennedy who is a tutor at Maynooth University and completed a doctorate on the stranger shores of Marxism and culture so ably demolished by Scruton and others. Sarah Monaghan is now campaigns manager at The Wheel and was formerly logistics manager for Michael D. Higgin’s presidential campaign; Silke Paasche is head of communications at the NWCI and previously spent four years working for FEANSTA which is part of the European Commission’s information service; Deirdre Duffy is a former Deputy Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and Amy Rose Harte runs her own communications consultancy and is a former press officer for the Labour Party.

The IFPA CEO, who was the only male member of the Together for Yes executive, is Niall Behan who used to be Proinsias de Rossa’s assistant when he was Minister for Social Welfare in the Fine Gael coalition of the 1990s. (Which is apt given that all of the above are now inseparable from the Fine Gael on every single major issue affecting the country.) Planned Parenthood’s branch in Bolivia, is funded by the Irish state through Irish Aid. So in effect the Department of Foreign Affairs is supporting an organisation whose purpose is to overturn Bolivia’s current abortion law.

Niall Behan
It is clear then that the party affiliations of leading liberal activists are pretty much meaningless. Nowhere is this better illustrated than by the key role played by Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katharine Zappone in ensuring that the pet projects and activists are kept well supplied with taxpayers’ monies.

Zappone became an Irish citizen in 1995 and epitomises the strange melange that embraces everyone from government ministers including An Taoiseach to members of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party. Not only do they all share the same views on all of the key moral and social issues confronting the Irish people, but they all wet their beaks in the same trough.

Since moving here, Zappone has evinced a fanatical determination to change this country in the direction she favours. Her initial vehicle for advancing her agenda was An Cosán based in Tallaght. (It also served as the launch pad for Senator Lynn Ruane, a less articulate but nonetheless committed advocate of the Zappone agenda.)

Zappone is the Minister responsible for Tusla which has been the focus of several serious concerns and allegations in regard to the manner in which it operates. Tusla granted An Cosán €549,918 in 2018, and it received €1.69 million in total from the public purse. It has also received funding from multinationals like Accenture and IBM and from the Ireland Funds. It currently employs around 100 people.

The current CEO of An Cosán is Heydi Foster-Breslin. For years she managed to combine her ownership of a real estate company with a succession of NGO jobs. She was appointed by President Higgins to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and was until recently a member of the board of Dóchas which is the central administrative committee for Irish overseas NGOs and receives the vast bulk of its funding from the state through Irish Aid.

Katherine Zappone
Intriguingly, Foster-Breslin spent six years as the chairperson of Common Purpose Ireland, an organisation that has branches worldwide, which says it “develops leaders” and which has been described as “a left wing version of the Freemasons” and a “networking organisation for the great and good to advance their politically correct view.’

Those claims were made in relation to the British subsidiary of Common Purpose, which was officially founded by Julia Middleton who had been in the office of former British Labour Minister, John Prescott. Amongst those involved in advising Common Purpose was Joyce Thacker who was head of child services in Rotherham during the disastrous handling of the local council and police of the horrific systematic grooming of children to be raped by local Pakistani gangs.

As was later revealed “a child-protection body, of which Ms Thacker was an influential member” tried to conceal the ethnicity of the men who groomed and sexually abused at least one of the girl victims in Rotherham “because it was worried about the impact on “community cohesion”

Ms Thacker also oversaw the removal of three children from foster care because the parents of the family supported UKIP.

The Irish board and trustees of Common Purpose include Denis Leamy who is the CEO of the Cork Education and Training Board and was formerly CEO of Pobal, which operates various community schemes and has a budget of €700 million. Leamy’s holding of these public offices is an indication of the sort of members of the elite recruited globally by Common Purpose.

The question of course is, what is the common purpose and is that purpose supported by the Irish state?

Another key element in the Irish Care Bear movement is Amnesty International which not only played an outrageous part in the abortion referendum but took substantial funding from the Open Society foundation. It’s board, under Executive Director Colm O’Gorman, is a curious blend of respectable and no doubt well meaning people like journalist Razan Ibraheem, Professor Cliona O’Farrelly on the one hand; and Youth Section representative Katie O’Houlihan who professes a “keen interest in intersectionality,” and Niall Cowley who helps people to realise that they are being offended, on the other. He was a member of the National Steering Committee against Hate Speech, and in the spirit of tolerance for which the entrepreneurial woke are renowned was also an organiser of protests against the Pope’s visit.

Among the less-known lights of the NGO game are groups like The Irish Network against Racism, part of the overall European network, which is 77.5% bankrolled by the EU, and the remainder by private foundations including, of course, Open Society. It spends most of its income on wages and travel for its activists. The Irish section received €270,000 in state funding in 2019 and showed its appreciation by publishing a report claiming that Irish people, the ones whose taxes paid these people’s wages, discriminate in favour of “whites.”

Finally I will leave you with a brief vignette of one of the bottom feeders in the consumption of the vast sums dispensed by the state to improve us all with our own money, despite never having been asked nor consented.
Colm O’Gorman

Changing Ireland is a Limerick-based group which doesn’t appear to have much output to justify the €100,408 it received in 2018 – 99.56% of it from the Department of Rural and Community Development, from me and you in other words.

It did film some of the Embracing Diversity event in Ballyhaunis in October which was an opportunity to lecture the people of the west on their bad behaviour following widespread opposition to the plans to impose new direct provision centres in Oughterard and Ballinamore. One of the speakers was Anastasia Crickley who is a former member of the board of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). This is the body which recently told the Irish government that it needs to do more to get us all to acknowledge our “colonial guilt.”

What is mainly interesting about Changing Ireland, however, is that its website (which would hardly cost 100 grand to administer judging by the cut of it) heralds the doings of one Minister Michael Ring, who coincidentally happens to be the Minister responsible for the Department of Rural and Community Development. Yes, the Department that bunged Changing Ireland all that moolah.

All, it seems, are friends in the world where the Irish left is basically subvented by the state and philanthropic billionaires and eccentric Englishmen living in caravans. At least the Victorians saw charity in terms of keeping people alive rather than preventing them being born in the first place. 


Matt Treacy is a writer and a former republican prisoner.

3 comments:

  1. "That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plains of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer amid the ruins of Iona."

    Samuel Johnson (1775)

    ReplyDelete
  2. The " Left " gave up on poor people decades ago. Average wage among the twenty staff in Trocaire is 70 k a yr, probably no different to other charities. Limitless immigration is destroying the Dublin housing market, just as it did in every other large European city. Fourth world problems predictably ensued- why is Mountjoy jail one third foreign?
    The Red machine is humming towards a treble & 💯 points.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A lot of work went in to that....very informative...enjoyed it.

    ReplyDelete