Only thing that this quango is combating is the truth
Look, I know I shouldn't be surprised that the state quango Combat Poverty has been channelling EU money to Shinner-linked organisations. I really shouldn't. And I really shouldn't be surprised that one of the recipients of this money is an organisation which boasts former gunman Owen Carron as a director. Nor should I be surprised that he is now a headmaster in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim. But stay!
I run ahead of myself already. I see that it is necessary to remind some of you who Owen Carron is. A Sinn Fein former-MP, in the late 1980s he was caught by the RUC in a car in Fermanagh with an AKM automatic rifle and 58 rounds of bullets.
Given bail, he absconded to this fair Republic, and successfully resisted extradition (to the evil administration which had given him bail in the first place) on the grounds that his possession of an AKM automatic rifle was in pursuit of a united Ireland. Since a united Ireland was a constitutional objective (went the argument), the lad was only doing his constitutional duty; and so the Supreme Court let him walk free. I needn't paint any pictures here. I'll leave you to decide whether or not he was wandering around Fermanagh with a Soviet AKM rifle in order to do some hedgerow school-teaching for a united Ireland.
Why school teaching? Because that's what he was doing before his little escapade with the AKM. One might have thought that the latter would have put paid permanently to his Socratic dialogues with schoolchildren; ah, but not so, not in this fine republic of an apparently infinite moral elasticity and endlessly recycled amnesia. For once south of the border, he once again became a schoolteacher, and where? In Ballinamore, of course. Ballinamore, Ballinamore; how is that name familiar? Ah well, in Ballinamore, in 1983, during the kidnap of the supermarket executive Don Tidey, IRA terrorists murdered garda recruit Gary Sheehan, and a soldier of the only real Republican Army there is in this country, father-of-four Private Patrick Kelly.
And Mr Carron is now the headmaster in the local school there. I wonder. Does he tell the schoolchildren in Ballinamore that there is, and was, but one lawful Republican Army in this island? Does he tell them that it is not the one which, in that very village, wickedly murdered those two loyal servants of this state? And unless he does, how is it possible that such a man is now running a school in such a village? For it's clear that there has been a revolting inversion of the truth for a long time now. We have seen killers being turned into the victims, while the bereaved have been made invisible. Unvisited UDR and RUC widows gaze at their wet, green border fields, and grieve. That's the peace process for you.
Combat Poverty channels almost a million EU euro annually to six ex-prisoners' groups in the Border area. And who is the director of one of these groups? Why, step forward Owen Carron, school teacher and gallant defender of our constitution! And La Nua -- an organisation operating out of, where else, only dear old Ballinamore -- has been given nearly €700,000. It has used this to renovate a single house. Yes, a single house. Whose house? Don't know, but it's unlikely to be that of one of the many UDR widows that Owen Carron's IRA colleagues left to fend for themselves along the many miles of Fermanagh border.
But what about Combat Poverty? This is truly the quangissimo of quangos. So what does it actually do? Hard to say. Its last annual report says that it spent just €865,120 on programmes to combat poverty. However, the salaries and expenses of its staff cost two-and-half times as much, at €2,276,065, while rent and administrative costs reached €889,499, which is around €24,000 more than it spent on so-called poverty programmes.
Okay, not looking too good so far. So, what do these "poverty programmes" actually consist of? Well, one involved an extensive survey of employees working in the public sector, and this found that 60pc of the respondents thought that their "senior management were highly committed". Good, that's really worth spending lots of public money on, combating poverty away like billy-oh.
For Combat Poverty certainly does its heroic best to combat poverty amongst the civil service. Its 35-strong workforce (remember, total salary and expenses €2.25m) includes: one director; four communications officers; six research officers; 10 project/programme officers; two financial controllers; a librarian; one research administrator; one (I imagine, pretty bored) receptionist; one "corporate services executive/PA to director" (elsewhere known as a secretary); and, in a body of people which is no larger than a Ballinamore school class, a human resources manager.
kmyers@independent.ie
