In today’s Ireland, the deadliest sin of all is prejudice, divided into well over seven “isms” – sexism, racism, ageism, etc. It is strange, then, that one of the most chronic “isms” in modern Ireland is virtually unacknowledged.

On 4 March of last year, 24-year old Derek O’Toole was run over and killed by a car driven by an off-duty Garda and three colleagues, in Lucan. O’Toole had been out with friends and was lying in the road when hit.

Although the jury at the inquest found “death by misadventure,” one revealing element was the credulity with which several newspapers and the national broadcaster quoted “Garda sources” as saying the Clondalkin resident was “known to the Gardai.”

In fact, Mr O’Toole, a leukaemia survivor, had no involvement with crime. But a falsehood, however quickly retracted, serves to muddy the waters through innuendo. Known to the Gardai? Well he was from Clondalkin, after all.

No apology to the O’Toole family has been forthcoming in the Irish media. Yet within a week of the Garda Representative Association asking its members and their families to “refrain from supporting” three newspapers over their coverage of Tania Corcoran, a Garda sergeant who died in childbirth in a Drogheda hospital, both ‘Independent’ titles published grovelling apologies to her family.

Just how much all deaths are equally tragic, but some are more tragic than others, was demonstrated in December, when Katy French’s cocaine use cost her her life.

The media had its “Diana” moment, indulging in the grand old Irish tradition of producing an ersatz version of whatever Blighty does. Although, in fairness, the fatuity of the Irish media in 2007 matched anything said or written in 1997.

Rosanna Davison told the ‘Irish Daily Mirror,’ “the nation was in mourning.” By his own admission, tears were spilling down the cheeks of John Waters as he typed an elegy for a life ended by “our collective helplessness.” Moreover, Katy French “was a personification of our fantasies, of what we were becoming, of how we might unfold ourselves.”

While stopping short of dubbing the late Ms French “the people’s model,” Bertie Ahern did send his aide-de-camp to her funeral.

And yet almost exactly a year before, when another young life was cut short because of cocaine, the aide-de-camp had remained in Leinster House.

Anthony Campbell, a 20-year old apprentice plumber from St Michan’s flats in Smithfield, never used cocaine. But due to our “collective helplessness” in combating drug-related crime, he happened to be working in the Finglas home of drug-dealer Martin ‘Marlo’ Hyland on the December day Hyland’s gangland assassins came for him.

Surely, given how so many young men like Mr Campbell were on the dole or forced to emigrate in the pre Celtic Tiger Ireland of 20 years ago, his death was cause to mourn “a personification of what we were becoming?” Surely, to paraphrase the weepy Waters, Mr Campbell was “my son and Eoghan’s son and Eamon’s son and Pat’s son and Bertie’s son. He was your son, your little brother?”

Not a bit of it. The HSE may have postponed a cocaine awareness advert out of respect for Katy French’s family, but the grieving Campbell’s had their ordeal compounded by Michael McDowell describing details of Anthony’s murder on ‘The Late, Late Show,’ before he had even met Anthony’s parents.

If there is a truism for today’s Ireland, it is that the poor and white matter least. Snobbery is the last acceptable prejudice.

“If there is hope, it lies with the proles,” wrote George Orwell in ‘Nineteen Eighty Four.’ As D J Taylor wrote in 2002: “But here Orwell...was wrong. The proles are either addling their heads with drugs or scuttling into the warm embrace of the bourgeoisie.”

Taylor’s essay, ‘They’re all middle class now,’ was published in ‘The New Statesman,’ a left-wing political journal, set up by Fabian socialists nearly a century ago as Britain’s industrial proletariat became politicised.

The working class of the time comprised people of vastly poorer education, alcoholic dependency and even shorter stature than their socio-economic equivalents of today. And they had been derided by the Victorian middle classes of the previous generation in much the same terms of today: irredeemably slovenly, vulgar and anti-social.

In short perceptions have come full circle in a century: from scum of the earth to salt of the earth and back again.

Indeed, it is unsurprising to read such sentiments in a magazine like the ‘New Statesman’: if one thing now unites the middle class left and right, it is their disdain for “poor white trash.”

Such people either leech off the welfare state and commit violent crime or dumb down our culture and attack immigrants. When the ‘Irish Times’ published Kevin Myers’ infamous “mothers of bastards” article, most of the subsequent indignation focused on his perceived slandering of women. But he was hardly including children born out of wedlock to middle-class women when he wrote: “our welfare system is creating benefits-addicted, fatherless families who will be raised in a culture of personal and economic apathy- and from such warped timber, true masts are seldom hewn.”

As we like to imagine, there is no class bigotry in Ireland because there is no class system.

Our Taoiseach is proud of his North Dublin vowels. We were never like our next door neighbours with their grouse-shooting toffs and cloth-capped socialists. The last time this country saw class warfare was during the 1913 Lockout when the entire island was part of the larger British Empire.

Thereafter, we entered several decades of insular independence, when a powerful land-owning block in the country and a bloated civil service in the towns precluded the emergence of the usual Left-Right political axis seen in most other European democracies.

Nowadays, though, the consensus is that the Irish are pretty much like everyone, mostly middle class and with a much shrunken proletariat and a worrying new phenomenon: a burgeoning “underclass.” But the concept of an underclass is in fact, nothing new. Karl Marx wrote of the “refuse of all classes,” later amended to lumpenproletariat, as early as 1845.

Also, membership of the working class was conferred by dint of selling one’s labour. “Cultural” factors, like accents and dress codes, do not enter the equation. The “new” Irish middle class is not as large as we might think.

But in all the debates we are told we must all have to deduce the direction that “post Celtic Tiger” Ireland must take, only the middle class seems relevant.

The thesis of David McWilliam’s bestseller, ‘The Generation Game,’ is that the crucial conflict in today’s Ireland is generational, between the newly-enriched “Jagger Generation,” middle-aged and property-owning, and the younger, credit-ensnared “Jugglers,” living beyond their means.

In the opening chapter where Dublin Airport is depicted as a classless microcosm of contemporary Ireland, we are introduced to the “Jiffy” (an acronym of “Jaysus it’s effin’ freezin’ yeah”). This is the first and last time the “overweight, under-dressed and over accessorised” Jiffy makes an appearance in the book.

One might contend that if McWilliams’ hypothesis is correct, the Jiffy caste is just as exposed to a generational chasm as the “Jugglers.” The disappearance of manufacturing, and competition for jobs from immigrants, are things Jiffy parents never experienced. Moreover, senior Jiffies lived in an Ireland with a degree of social cohesion that is now gone.

But if we think of class as irrelevant, we have certainly held on to its caricatures. Describing the female Jiffy arriving at Dublin Airport, McWilliams writes: “She’s stooped from years of sticking her mouth out and dragging deeply on cigarette butts, giving her the disturbing appearance of a pigeon wearing blusher.”

The male of the species has “bare Johnny Adare arms” and a “razorblades-under-the-arms swagger.”

It seems that “Jiffies,” “Skangers” and “chavs” provide an easy scapegoat for other people’s insecurities in an age where prejudices around race, gender, age or disability are officially forbidden.

In his award-winning 2006 book, ‘The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Woking Class,” Michael Collins noted how the Victorian establishment despaired of the “vulgarity” of the poorer classes whenever their lot started improved.

For a contemporary echo, consider this piece of sneering, know-your-place snobbery in the ‘Sunday Independence’ in August 2005, following the E115 million EuroMillions win of Dolores McNamara, who was working part-time as a cleaner in Limerick at the time of her win.

“Dear Dolly, I’m not sure if you read the big newspapers,” wrote Brendan O’Connor, a journalist who was previously ticked off by the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism for calling Travellers “knackers and scumbags” in a 1997 article.

“You have shown people that Limerick is just like the rest of Ireland. Not only did you actually buy something in a shop, you also had champagne when you heard you had won.”

Much was reported about the criminal proclivities of some of Mrs McNamara’s relatives. A tabloid newspaper also obtained and published details from her social welfare records, alleging that she had committed fraud by claiming unemployment benefits when she was working. When officials at the Department of Social Affairs investigated these leaks, they discovered at least 72 civil servants had illicitly accessed her welfare records in the days following her EuroMillions win.

While the case sparked some public debate about the security of information in the government’s computer systems, there was precious little asked about the attitudes laid bare by those doing the leaking. Welfare fraud? Well “that sort” have it honed to a fine art, don’t they?

Having absorbed 400,000 nationals in over a decade, many of whom will, and indeed should, remain here, racial harmony has become a central priority for the new Ireland.

Again, the “Jiffies” are conspicuously absent, except in the abstract, from what little debate occurs; perhaps their perspectives on immigration would be unpalatable to affluent liberals. But take a walk down Dublin’s Parnell Street, with its sprawl of African and Asian restaurants and food stores, south to Baggot Street. Near Parnell Street are Council flats; the city has become wealthier and whiter by the time you reach Baggot Street.

As in Britain’s cities, it will be mainly the indigenous working class who live and work with, and date and marry the new arrivals. But to deny or dismiss their voices in the changes now taking place is to virtually guarantee that, a few years down the line, such pestilent cretins as France’s National Front or Britain’s British National Party have Irish cousins.

As it stands, when every other attribute of a human being is viewed as a potential catalyst for intolerance, socio-economic prejudice is casually shrugged off. There are winners and losers. If there were no “warped timber” to look down upon, society’s go-getters would have no motivation.

It might be remembered that these are the people who in the 1980s bore the brunt of the cutbacks and “belt-tightening” that helped make our current affluence possible, not to mention being first in line for the privations that will accompany any downturn.

Official Ireland can do better than making them an invisible people. Otherwise, its claims towards inclusiveness and social mobility are empty ones.

It is an environment as alien as can possibly be. Bobbing in an ocean of liquid hyrdrocarbons are icebergs made of frozen methane. From time to time, the icebergs coalesce into continent-sized icecaps, some of them flanked by ‘volcanoes’ that emit ‘lava’ made of icy ammonia slush.

If any human explorer were to sail across these chemical seas, they would see all of this emerging from an orange-brown fog. High above, a vast sphere might break through the clouds, appearing twenty times as large as the Moon does from Earth and encircled by brilliant multi-coloured rings. The Sun would be less than half its Earthly size here, a luminous smudge in the chilly murk.

This is Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons and one of the most perplexing places in the solar system, and it is into Titan’s atmosphere that a probe will be released on Christmas Day, assembled by the European Space Agency (ESA) and with input from the Malahide-based technology company, CAPTEC.

“There’s battery time once it actually gets to the surface for an extra hour or so,” says project director, Richard Cluff. “But the main mission is between entry to the atmosphere and the surface. If it survives impact and transmits extra data from the surface, that would be considered a bonus.”

Orbiting the Sun every 29 years, the sixth planet of the solar system is instantly recognisable. An immense balloon of hydrogen, trace elements in Saturn’s upper atmosphere give it the appearance of a sphere, banded into golds, creams and yellows.

Bizarrely, owing to its density being less than water, if a large enough ocean could be found, the entire planet would float in it.

When the astronomer Galileo Galilee pointed his primitive telescope towards Saturn in 1610, he was perplexed to observe ‘ears’ that would mysteriously wax and wane across the planet’s circumference. It was the Dutchman, Christian Huygens who correctly identified a ring system in his book, Systema Saturnium in addition to discovering the moon Titan (with a 31,000 km diameter, much larger than our Moon) one of 33 so far discovered. At the same time, the Paris-based astronomer Giovanni Cassini observed the gap in the rings, later called the ‘Cassini Division.’

It is after both men that the joint NASA-ESA mission is named. The triumph of Cassini-Huygens will be a much needed morale-boost to enthusiasts of space exploration. Last year was something an annis horriblis, underscored by the obliteration of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the destruction-on-impact of the Beagle 2 Lander on Mars.

“It’s a shame because the whole Mars Express was a success in terms of the orbitter,” says Dr Jon Kennedy of CAPTEC, “it’s just there was a lot of bad press around the landing device...”

Even President Bush’s pledge to put men of the Red Planet by 2020 was howled down as a cynical vote-grabber when the stupendous cost of the venture became clear. This year has had its disasters too: most notoriously the Genesis probe that had collected particles hurled from space from the surface of the Sun. The Genesis parachute failed to open, sending the probe bouncing over the Arizona desert.

But unlike Mars or Earth, the surface of Titan is largely a matter of speculation. Scientists cannot be sure if Huygens will splash into an ocean, impact on solid ice or squelch into chemical sludge. And there will be no second chances.

“It’s so far away that once it’s dropped and starts its mission, there’s no calling back to Earth and saying: “what do we do now?” says Richard Cluff.

“It all has to be preprogammed to deal with the problems along the way.”

The Cassini-Huygens probe was launched in October 1997 and has had to jet across 3.5 billion kilometres of space to reach the Saturn system. The space probe Pioneer II swept past Saturn in 1979, followed by Voyagers I and II in 1980-1, their findings throwing up as many questions as answers. It is speculated that the ring system was formed over 150 million years ago, around the early dinosaur era on Earth, perhaps by the break-up of a 200 kilometre long icy object. Some of the rings are broader than others, some have gaps between them and one of them, the F-Ring, appears quite anarchic.

“You’re looking at a ring that’s being continually perturbed by objects on either side of it,” says Belfast-born Professor Carl Murray, of the Mathematics and Astronomy Department at Queen Mary University London.

“And internally, there may be objects we haven’t even seen yet, hidden in the dust of the F-Ring. My guess is that it’s a ring in torment; it hasn’t been able to sort itself out. There are chaotic interactions between the ring particles and moons. There’s all sorts of interesting dynamics going on whereas the rest of the ring looks well behaved, it’s had time to sort itself out.”

According to physical laws, the ring particles should be spiralling into Saturn’s upper atmosphere and the smaller moons drifting outward. It is hoped Cassini can solve the mystery as to why this doesn’t seem to be happening and glean more information on the composition of the particles.

“We know that they are at least covered in ice but you have to start thinking of what this ice could be,” says Carl Murray.

“Because even on Earth, ice comes in different forms. Think of a hailstone compared to a snowball: they’re both made of ice but one has got a very fixed density but in the other, there’s a lot of empty space between the particles.”

Professor Murray adds that the data coming back suggest discrepancies between the density of the ice particles within Saturn’s rings and that found on the surface of some of its smaller moons. “All we know for certain is that they’re made of material that’s at least covered with ice. But there is a contamination as well. There’s evidence that there’s dust particles which is what we’d expect, because this is important for micro-material bombardment.”

On Christmas Day, the six-ton Huygens Lander will detach from the main Cassini probe and begin its approach towards Titan. The largest of Saturn’s moons appears as an opaque orange ball, a notable contrast with the other moons, each of which has been gouged by impact craters over millions of years. Although Titan’s atmosphere, a thick curtain of nitrogen and methane, is impenetrable to the human eye radar and infrared scanners aboard Cassini have already begun mapping the surface. And the first surprises began arriving back this summer.

According to Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University, principal investigator of the probe’s Surface Science Package (SSP): “I was at a meeting in mid-November where you had many of the world’s leading experts on Titan, and whereas for ten or twenty years, they’d been very prepared to pontificate about Titan with very little information, now suddenly they’re getting very coy.”

Of particular interest is a huge feature discovered on Titan’s southern on Titan’s southern hemisphere, larger than Australia, which has been named ‘Xanadu.’ “There’s obviously a lot of structure down there but that feature, Xanadu, whether it’s ice, whether it’s a hydrocarbon lake or sea, to be honest we just don’t know,” says Zarnecki.

The surface of Titan may indeed have oceans of either liquid methane or liquid ethane, perhaps dotted with nitrogen icebergs. There could be a ‘rain’ of methane onto the surface or even icy sludge erupting from the Titanian interior. A more unearthly setting would be hard to imagine.

But in certain respects, Titan is not as dissimilar to Earth as it might seem. As sunlight seeps into the hydrocarbons on Titan, it is probably causing more complex molecular chains to form, just as happened here countless eons ago.

“Nobody’s suggesting that life has evolved on Titan for various reasons,” says Professor Zarnecki. “It’s too cold, so the process would not have gone far enough downstream and there’s the lack of liquid water and paucity of oxygen. But it should represent the very, very early stage of the chemical chain and the sort of thing that in some way, would have occurred on Earth four billion years ago, which started off life here.”

Furthermore, in several billion years’ time, it is known that the Sun will turn red and vastly expand. The Earth will almost certainly be rendered uninhabitable and may even be engulfed by the swelling Sun. But in that far distant era, Titan will be a much warmer place.

“It’s absolutely fascinating,” says Professor Zarnecki. “We’ve got this place which is presumably coated in this organic stuff. And when the Sun becomes a red giant and the temperature rises, could life kick off?”

Based in Malahide, CAPTEC has been in existence since 1979 and has also contributed to ESA’s Rosetta and Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellites. More recently, they have participated in research programs in the aerospace industry and a new synchronous viewing facility between Dublin’s St James’ and Sligo General Hospital to assist cardiologists and consultants.

Managing director Fred Kennedy travelled to the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral for the 1997 launch. But the take-off was almost prevented by threats of legal action by local environmentalists in Florida.

“They were very concerned about the potential danger of the launch of this particular satellite because it had radioactive batteries due to the length of the mission,” he says.

“There was a lot of concern that in the event of an accident this would contaminate the whole of the Florida landscape. So it was only at the last minute, or a couple of hours before the launch that the courts ruled against the application to prevent the launch.”

As Huygens drops from its ‘piggy-back’ position atop Cassini, a number of sensors wills weep across the surface of Titan, measuring its topography and density. “So basically, the probe is looking at all this information constantly through the mission and if any of those sensors fail or would give an odd reading, the onboard software has to decide what to do,” says Cluff.

Numerous contingency plans now exist wherein the software will redirect these sensors, but for now, the mission relies on a lot of guesswork.

“There are a number of scientists who’ve developed models of Titan and its atmosphere, but there’s a lot of uncertainties,” says Richard Cluff.

“And even quite late on at the stage in the south of France, the system engineers were getting phone calls saying: will the probe float in liquid methane?”

In a sense, the voyage to Titan will take us not just across an immensity of space, but also across eons of time. This frozen world, with its hydrocarbon oceans, provides us with hints about where we have come from. And where, if we are not careful, we may be going.

 

The elderly woman has waited a quarter of a century to break. Crowded into a dusty hut somewhere in East Timor’s Viqueque district, she appears before us glassy-eyed trembling in the oil lamp’s glow.

I am travelling through the forested hills with two Australians and a party of Timorese; a rendezvous has been arranged with ‘Falintil,’ the armed wing of the resistance movement.

It is a gruelling night time trek, wading through rivers and dense vegetation. The stop off at the house for tea and food brings us into contact with a woman who has not met foreigners since before the 1975 invasion. She whispers in her Tetum dialect how she was once a contact for Xanana Gusmao, the jailed rebel leader.

With a shell shocked look, she relates her secret: how she was arrested in 1975 by the hated military, stripped and tortured with cigarette with cigarette butts. She does not mention rape but we wonder.

Our three days spent with Falintil rebels in the hills leave us in no doubt that terrible things have happened here. We also learn how the Indonesians managed to kill 60,000 people in the first ten weeks they were here. How by 1977, having captured just the capital, Dili, and a few clumps of territory, the Indonesians commenced Operation Encirclement and Annihilation using American-supplied ‘Bronco’ bombers.

Tens of thousands of people who had fled to these mountains were forced down under a ferocious aerial onslaught. Falintil fighters tell me most of the population was relocated in what were virtually concentration camps after they surrendered.

“We were bombed twelve times a day at different times during 1978-80,” says Commander Sabica, one of only ten Falintil fighters still alive since 1975 and leader of Region 2. “I don’t know how many were killed then.”

Violence against women has been fundamental to the 24-year effort to ‘Indonesianise’ the island.

Located in the non-volcanic Sunda island chain, 300 miles off Australia’s Northern Territories, East Timor was a Portuguese colony for 400 years, the island’s western half being part of the Dutch East Indies.

In April 1974, after the ‘Carnation Revolution’ in Lisbon ended 48 years’ of fascist dictatorship, Portugal began relinquishing its colonies. From the beginning, two main political parties emerged in Dili: the more conservative Timorese Democratic Union (UDT) and the socialist Fretilin (from the Portuguese acronym of Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor).

Indonesia, which had coveted the island since the 1940s, argued that Fretilin would create ‘Cuba in the Pacific’, and began gearing up for invasion, persuading UDT elements, with a combination of blackmails and bribes, to stage a coup in Dili as the Portuguese withdrew.

A brief civil war erupted where Fretilin emerged as a de facto administration, winning local elections and on 28 November 28 1975, declaring the Democratic Republic of East Timor.

The following week, US President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State paid a visit to Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, a visit later described as ‘the big wink’; as Airforce One left for the States, a massive air and sea invasion began in Dili. People tell me repeatedly over my seven weeks in East Timor about the December 1975 invasion.

There was just one western eye witness, the elderly waiter at Dili’s Hotel Tursimo says; Australian freelance reporter Roger East, shot in the head by Indonesian troops and dumped off Dili’s wharf. The waiter remembers him well.

A single, desperate radio signal, almost buried in static, was picked up in Darwin, Australia: “The soldiers are firing indiscriminately...” it said.

“Women and children are being shot in the streets...We are all going to be killed...This is an appeal for International help. This is an SOS. We appeal to the Australian people. Please help us...”

No action from Canberra. Sixty thousand Timorese had died in World War Two, helping the Australians stall the Imperial Japanese. In 1974-5, they earnestly hoped the radical reformer, Labour prime minister Edward Gough Whitlam would be their champion.

But Whitlam had met the Indonesian dictator, General Suharto, in September 1974 to rubber-stamp the ‘integration’ of Indonesia’s 27th province.

Washington had said Fretilin was red and besides, the Timor Sea is rich in oil and gas.

“The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs’ dead hand has influenced all the prime ministers and foreign ministers over 23 years to say Suharto was someone we must support, because in doing so, we would diminish the threat Indonesia posed to Australia and thus cut our defence budget in half...” says Rob Wesley Smith, an Australian activist.

Fretilin put up a fierce resistance, backed by most of the population, but armed to the teeth with Western-supplied weapons, the Indonesian Army devastated the island.

Since 1975, 200,000 people, one third of the population, have died in East Timor. The island was closed to all foreign visitors until 1989, the scale of the Timorese holocaust only becoming clear to the world in November 1991, when a brave British cameraman, Max Stahl (a pseudonym) filmed scores of Timorese protesters against Indonesian rule being gunned down by the military at Dili’s Santa Cruz cemetery.

“There was a huge silence...it was a vacuum from the late seventies. People in the towns never knew what was going on in the countryside. We knew nothing about Xanana. The fear was so stuck in, people were afraid to talk,” says Maria Soares who left East Timor in 1985.

Timorese women since 1975 have been brutalised, through rape, torture and murder, confirming to the overall pattern of enslavement and extermination.

But they have also been subject to state-sponsored population-control programmes. Forcibly regulating their fertility, restricting birth rates and forcing institutionalised ‘concubines’ or ‘comfort women’ to service Indonesian soldiers is part of ‘Indonesianisation.’

So is resettling large numbers of Muslim ‘transmigrants’ from Java in the predominantly Catholic island to dilute the local population.

I travel to Fokupers (derive from the Indonesian acronym of Communication Forum for East Timor Women) to meet Laura Soares Abrantes. She describes a woman Fokupers has worked with; a girl who was forced to work as a ‘concubine’ at an Indonesian Army base.

“We meet many women who were raped. One example is ‘Lucai.’ She had five children by different men...the Indonesian military, the oldest daughter is about 17 now.

“She and her family were suspected of supplying logistics to Falintil. She was unmarried, young...After they raped her, she was put in camp. Everyday she had to cook for them, get water from the sewers, get wood. At night...they had sexual relations with her...they forced her to change partners.

“When she opened up, she told us: ‘If I didn’t follow orders...they give me the gun.’

“She cried and cried, she said: ‘My personality is under my feet. I am not a human being any more.”

Signora Abrantes says that a woman like ‘Lucai’ will be ostracised, called a ‘whore’ and her children shunned. She does not know how many ‘comfort women’ are now being held by the military.

Counselling and rehabilitation facilities for rape victims are almost non-existent in East Timor. Fokupers has also worked with survivors from the notorious ‘Widow’s Village.’ Says Signora Abrantes: “In 1983, lots of men aged 13 or 14 up to about 50 were killed in front in front of wives, daughters and sisters in Kraras. We have four target groups: widows, political prisoners’ wives, female political prisoners and rape victims.” She adds:

“The main problem is the war...but also our culture marginalises women...they are subordinate to men. When the Portuguese were here, it was all hierarchy...our culture is patriarchal.”

Fundamental to the process of gradually eradicating the East Timorese race is the notorious KB Program (Program Keluarga Berencana).

Birth control and reproductive rights will, of course, be contentious social issues in a deeply Catholic and patriarchal society when independence is achieved.

But as the poorest of Indonesia’s provinces, almost two third of women here and half of men have never attended any kind of school; 52.7 % illiteracy rates in people over 10 are twice those in West Papua, the next worst province.

The coercive or forced methods of implementing the KB program thus breach Article 2(d) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, prohibiting the deliberate limitation of births within minority groups.

The right to free, informed and consenting methods of birth control are also enshrined in Chapter 7 of the 1994 Cairo Declaration and the 1985 Beijing Declaration.

I travel to Ermera, the island’s coffee-growing uplands; every month, at the town’s hospital, Indonesian doctors arrive and administer the KB program.

Says Maria Genovera da Costa Martins of the resistance-affiliated OMT (Organizcao Mulhern Timor) or Timorese Women’s Organisation.

“East Timorese are told they only need two children...some of the people who accept this, they hide it from the Church who forbid it. Every month the Indonesian doctors come, with Timorese nurses...every district. At the clinic they show women how to use coils or inject them with hormones...”

The KB program was introduced here in 1980, once most of Fretilin had been killed. Documents from Fokupers say that East Timor’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is now 3.3 births per woman, a population density in 1980-90 of 37 people per square kilometre having risen to 50 people in that time, half the average in other Indonesian provinces.

The KB program is mainly implemented through the National Family Planning Co-ordination Board (BKKBN) who have offices in each administrative district.

There were reportedly 92 KB clinics in East Timor in 1993. They liaise with the Department of Health (Department Keseshatan) and the hated Armed Forces (ABRI) in its ‘dual function.’

Signora Genovera says that women who decline the ‘advice’ and coaxing of the government-run Women’s Brigade, the Dharma Wanita, to attend KB clinics, risk ABRI harassment; at the very least, if they bear more children than the two they are “allowed,” these have no State entitlements.

Women who suffer side effects (sometimes fatal) are not entitled compensation or specialised care.

The twin methods of the KB Program, hormonal injections and IUD coils, have caused many problems, including ectopic pregnancies, cancer, weight loss and menstrual difficulties.

OMT workers tell me there are two injected drugs used: Net En and Depo-Provera, given every three months.

My trip to Ermera includes a visit to refugees, displaced by a bloody massacre the previous day in a church in Liquica, a combined “Besir Merah Puteh” (Red and White Iron) and ABRI job.

Several people are killed by the BMP here on a bus two days later. BMP and other groups e.g. ‘Mahidi’ and ‘Rati’ are “pro-integration” paramilitaries, armed and trained by the military, locally-recruited mercenaries and enforcers have long been an element of the occupation.

Maria Soares tells me: “Maybe the government realises there is no point in holding East Timor...there is nothing in it. They can’t live with defeat. The Indonesian military has other ideas. They are trying to make things impossible, saying: “If we have to go, we’ll just wreck the whole place.”

Despite a period of so-called ‘reformasi’ following May 1998 when, after 32 years of despotic rule, General Suharto was forced to step down, things are grim.

His successor, the millionaire technocrat BJ Habibie, has inherited a deeply undemocratic and corrupt state.

Most of the nearly 200 million Indonesian population live in densely populated Java, but most of the national revenue is generated in the ‘outer islands’ from oil and gas and where, as in East Timor, Javanese domination is resented.

A free East Timor might give other people ideas in an archipelago of 13,300 islands with four religions and countless ethnic groups.

Amid talk of ‘referenda’ on independence, ABRI is trying to contrive ‘civil war’ here to abort any UN presence or peaceful transition to independence. Despite this, many young Timorese women, exiled to Australia as children or born there after 1975, hope they can return.

“I don’t know, I’m hoping to go back this year. I’m not ready to get my hopes up and have the rug pulled from under me as has happened before...” says Laca Bernardino, who fled to Darwin as a 14-year old.

Sandra dos Santos, who was an infant when the invasion came about, says she hopes she and the other exiles will be able to return to a free East Timor:

“I really hope it will be soon...I don’t know if it will be to live, but I will go there on and off...I’ve now seen a lot of young people involved in Timor, that I hadn’t seen before. A lot of them said they want to go back. But until the time comes...”

One day these women will be reunited with the women in East Timor. All of them hope it will be under their flag, not Indonesia’s. All of them hope it will be sooner not later.

Drug dependency nearly ended Ramo Kabbani’s life. But the drug she battled was handled out by a qualified GP, is being taken by 40 million other people and is still being lauded as a ‘wonder drug.’

On 16 February, she will celebrate her fifth ‘clean’ year and a full decade has passed since her descendent into an anti-depressant poisoned hell. Not that she has yet fully escaped.

“It’s taken a long time to put back on the weight that I lost, my weight plummeted to five stone.”

“I also still have the seizures. I’d say it averages out at about nine in a day although I have the odd day where I’ve not had any.”

Ramo is chair of the UK Prozac Survivors Support Group (PSSG), founded in March 1998 to advise and help people prescribed anti-depressants in the Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitor (SSRI) class. This is a class that some atrocious side effects.

For the majority of people taking Prozac and similar medications, the impact of these drugs on their lives has been positive. But Ramo’s experience serves as a grim medical parable. Where the use of medicine hinges upon theories of ‘chemical imbalances’ and where drug companies are not fully open about their possible side effects, a minority of patients are at great risk.

“I’m no longer battling anxiety-depression, that’s the ironic thing,” she says.

“I’ve developed seizures through being prescribed these drugs. I’ve no longer got the problems for which these drugs were prescribed but I’m still battling the problems  that these drugs caused.”

In August 1991, Ramo’s fiancé died suddenly, one month before their wedding. “I was never offered any bereavement counselling or any alternative...I was just put on these tablets and it was downhill from there.”

Some months later, while working at Manchester’s Fountain Street Employment Service, she broke down. A visit to the GP led to the instant prescription of fluoxetine (Prozac). Initially, she was transfused by an unnatural ‘high,’ a manic sense of exhalation. Six weeks later, Ramo crashed, becoming actively suicidal and haunted by anxiety, insomnia and dread.

Over the next few years, each worsening side effect was met with one response: another prescribed drug. She made several suicide attempts.

“There was one particular one which, to be honest, I can’t believe how close I’d come,” she says.

“Looking back I can see that I was in a trance-like state. What actually brought me back to reality was I had Spot my dog who was a little puppy at the time and he literally jumped up at me as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with a knife against my throat, ready to slit my throat. My first thought was ‘Oh my God! What am I doing?’ What am I doing? It was ‘Oh my God! I can’t do this in front of Spot.’”

Ramo recalls the various cocktails of alcohol and pills she would take in overdose: “Sometimes I’d be unconscious for about a week. The only way I’d know I’d been out of it was that I’d go into the newsagent, look at the newspaper and I’d go ‘Oh my God...’

“I’d even started looking into my own funeral arrangements. And this is somebody who used to live life to the full. I’d never felt down. I thought ‘depression’ was a case of the Monday morning blues...”

It was an angry encounter at the Royal Oldham Hospital in Manchester, with a psychiatrist who was referred to as a neurologist (Ramo had previously suffered 23 seizures in a day) that compelled her to research her own drug therapy. Reading up on Prozac and other case studies set her towards setting up the PSSG and weaning herself off drugs.

For millions of people, Prozac and its sister drugs are very helpful, releasing them from much psychic pain. But they are now being handed out across GPs’ desks, from everything from post-natal depression to menopausal problems. Moreover, they are being marketed with a not-fully-proven theory of ‘chemical imbalance’ that is based on the theory that topping up the brain’s supply of a chemical called serotonin will alleviate depression.

Just as happened with the earlier so-called ‘minor tranquillizers’ of the 1960s, the benzodiazepines, including Atavan, Xanax and Miltown, a backlash may now be imminent. In its own way, this could prove as unhelpful as the current vaunting of the SSRIs as ‘miracle drugs,’ causing them to acquire an unnecessarily sinister ring.

“It’s going to a replay of the benzodiazepine story.” This is the prediction of UCD-educated psychiatrist DR David Healy, now based in the University of Wales, Bangor.

“Part of the problem with will have been caused by the pharmaceutical industry. The way they handle these things, trying to deny there are problems mean that when people get disenchanted, they really get disenchanted and it’s very hard for someone like me who thinks that the SSRIs can be useful to actually prescribe them. So they move from a situation where they’re being overused, to one where they’re being underused...”

Certainly the drug companies, previously hailed as the saviours of millions of depressed people, are now feeling an increasingly chill wind blowing. The high point came so far came in June 2001, when the Glaxo SmithKline company had to give $6.4 million to the family of a man who had shot to death his daughter and grandchildren before turning the gun on himself, while put on Seroxat (paroxetine) for sleeping problems.

Cases, involving aggression or suicide, are extremely rare. However, Seroxat, whose sales match those of Prozac, now looks as though it could emerge as potentially highly addictive for some people. Last year, America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered Glaxo SmithKline to warn GPs that for some people, Seroxat (packaged as ‘Paxil’ in the US) could be as addictive as Valium.

Mark Harvey, a solicitor with the Cardiff firm Hugh James Ford Simey, has something to say on the subject: “My feeling is GSK knew, and they certainly know damn well now, their drug had the capacity to cause a lot of harm to small number of people. In particular in relation to coming off it and they’re not being honest to either prescribing doctors or patients.”

Hugh James Ford Simey has already been contacted by over 120 people, complaining of problems with Seroxat. They’re coming in, says Mark Harvey, at a rate of nearly three a week. In order to facilitate these people, the firm is setting up a ‘User’s Group’ to form the focus for future litigation against the drug companies. Many of these people have experiences ‘cold turkey’ like symptoms while coming off the drug.

“I’ve seen an advert in the States. It actually says ‘Talk to your doctor about non-habit forming Paxil,” says Harvey. “That’s outrageous, that’s clearly designed to catch patients and it deals with what they want to know, which is if it’s non addictive...”

Far from being a zealot against the use of drugs to treat psychological distress, Dr Healy researched serotonin effects at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, after leaving Ireland.

But as the author of the The Anti-Depressant Era (Harvard Press), he is candid about the pitfalls of SSRIs, such as Prozac, Seroxat, Lustral and Cipramil.

“The estimates are that one in 20 of us gets so agitated on a SSRI that we have to stop treatment,” he says. “One in 100 of us going on a SSRI will make a suicide attempt. One in 1,000 might commit suicide. There are other hazards: probably 30-50 % of us going on a SSRI will have problems trying to withdraw. The withdrawal symptoms will be severe; for some people they may continue for a year.”

“It’s hard to know how many. It may be only five per cent who have a really severe problem. But if 40 million people have gone on Prozac and 100 million have gone on a SSRI, five per cent is five million people so it is a major problem...”

The relentless marketing has apparently repackaged, not just the medicines, but the condition they are used to treat. Depressed people use serotonin through ‘re-uptake’ between the brain cells: take a SSRI and you get more serotonin. But the biology of the brain is barely understood: serotonin might not be the key to mood and the drugs may not even work by stimulating it.

Anti-depressants were invented in the mid 1950s and the majority of people who these days get Prozac or Seroxat would have once been given minor tranquillisers. Thus, when SSRIs were launched, the companies’ emphasis was on ‘depression’ as a chemical deficiency to avoid association with the minor tranquillisers, by then known to be addictive.

Limerick-based psychiatrist Dr Terry Lynch, author of the book Beyond Prozac, is highly critical of the way a theory about depression has become accepted wisdom. This, he believes, reflects the doctors’ relationship with the drug companies.

“Certainly, I think psychiatrists and GPs to a certain degree need to feel that they’re the ones driving the whole thing. They’re the ones with the knowledge and the patient’s job is to follow the doctor’s advice,” he says.

“I also thinks that the pharmaceutical companies are involved here because over the past 50-60 years, medicine in general but maybe particularly psychiatry has become very closely aligned to the pharmaceutical industry.

“Psychiatry has allowed itself to become very dependent on the industry for funding for its meetings, of its research, of its ongoing education. I’m guessing, but my sense is that the majority of psychiatric post-graduate education meetings are funded by drug companies and I think that that’s unhealthy.”

Among those people who have approached Hugh Ford James Simey regarding legal action is Glenys (not real name), a grandmother with no previous history of depression. When she suffered her first panic attack, she was showing symptoms that may well have been hormonal and associated with the menopause. She did not meet the traditional diagnostic criteria for depression when given Seroxat.

Previously, she had been given HRT, then Valium and Prozac; the Valium had caused withdrawal problems, something that is a recognised risk. But Glenys was not warned about problems coming off Seroxat. It seems she belongs in the five per cent Dr Healy warned would have withdrawal. Now off Seroxat for 18 months, she has been told she may have to wait up to five years for the physical and mental effects to clear.

“I never had headaches really, until I started the menopause,” she says. “All I can say it’s like it’s crushing my head like an eggshell. After the head, the face will burn, my body will shake and I’ll get pins and needles in my arms. It’s just horrendous and the agitation is terrible...”

She plans to contribute to the ‘Seroxat Users Group’ soon to be set up. In the meantime, she waits for her problem to clear:

“I just feel it’s taken part of my life away. I want to be normal...I just hope it hasn’t done any permanent damage.”

It might seem like the most unlikely place on earth to find Connemara Marble, but it’s there nonetheless. Close to North Korea’s Mount Myohangsan is the International Friendship Exhibition (IFE). It’s a grand, multi-storeyed palace of the sort despots are wont to build. Visitors are required to put on special slippers to keep its marble floors clean, and rifle toting soldiers guard its huge gold leaf doors. Inside, in the shadow of immense chandeliers, are cabinets stuffed full of ‘gifts’ to North Korea’s late President, Kim Il-Sung. North Korea may these days be branded a ‘rogue’ state’, part of the Bush administration’s ‘Axis of Evil,’ but judging by the range of presents bestowed upon Kim, he was a popular man indeed.

In the European section of the palace, there is a glass cabinet marked ‘Ireland’. The ‘Guaranteed Irish’ sticker can still be seen on a Connemara marble pen holder, an antique clock and some Waterford crystal. These were deposited after The Workers Party sent official delegations to North Korea in 1982, 1986 and 1989. But the array of foreign goodies here is vast: tributes from the great and the good as well as the terrible and the bad pack the IFE. There is a Zil limousine from Stalin, a railway carriage from Mao, presents from Jimmy Carter, Madeline Albright and even Billy Graham.

A visit to the IFE usually has a macabre culmination, as the guides pull open two huge doors and sombre martial music drifts out. Inside, a cheerful grin on his face, is a perfect wax replica of Kim Il-Sung. The visitors and guides are required to bow diffidently before him...

It was late 2003 when I boarded an Air Koryo flight from Beijing to North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. But the complimentary inflight copy of the Pyongyang Times told me that this was the year ‘Juche 92’. As part of the ongoing process of transforming Kim Il-Sung, who died in 1994, from despot to deity, the Roman calendar was discarded a few years back. The calendar now begins at 1912, the year of Kim’s birth. And ‘Juche,’ North Korea’s uncompromising ideology of isolation from all other nations, has brought about a society where mobile phones are banned, the internet is non-existent and all foreign television signals are banned.

My entry visa for North Korea was a rare privilege; few westerners are allowed in. Despite devastating famines in recent years, the NGO community in Pyongyang is probably still in double figures. Most of the other passengers on our flight were from the World Food Program or Chinese businessmen. Leaving aside thousands of starving refugees who have fled into China since the 1990s, very few North Koreans are allowed to leave. Those on my flight were undoubtedly party faithful. They were instantly recognisable. Young or old, male or female, each had a metal badge on their chest showing Kim Il-Sung’s face.

The sense of unreality persisted after our plane passed over Korea’s dour beige-brown countryside to land at the airport. The terminal, naturally, was dominated by a huge portrait of Kim. As a foreign visitor, I was assigned two guides and a driver. We were taken into the capital, distinctive for its endless clusters of identikit tower blocks, monolithic and Stalinist. The wide-laned boulevards were nearly traffic free. Not a single neon sign pulsed, not a single ‘capitalist’ item was to be seen on the roadside billboards. Instead, heroic workers, peasants and soldiers bounded to glory and hated ‘US Imperialist Aggressors’ were shown being thrashed by North Korea.

On the tops of many buildings were Korean alphabet characters, usually extolling the genius of Kim Il-Sung and his philosophy of Juche. On the pavements, Koreans walked and cycled, some wearing cotton overalls and caps, all seeming subdued. Everywhere, I saw knots of soldiers, a red star on their fur hats, many brandishing rifles. Some engaged in roadside work details but mostly they whizzed along in trucks and jeeps that seemed to date from World War II.

On my second day in Pyongyang, myself and a Canadian fellow visitor were taken down to Mansu Hill near the banks of the River Taedong. Opposite Party buildings was a great reef of bronze and stone statues, laid out in the shape of a billowing flag. Led by soldiers holding (Kim’s) books or rifles aloft, a column of soldiers and workers followed, blowing bugles, pointing weapon, urging their compatriots forth. A little girl and her mother hovered nearby, sweeping the ground with fan brushes. I snapped a picture of the small child.

In every other Asian country I have visited, children will wrestle with each other to be photographed by a foreigner. There is nothing that ingratiates a parent more than having you take a picture of their kid. But the girl scampered away as her mother turned red with anger, barking at my guides and me in Korean. I was warned by one of them not to photograph Korean citizens. It was against the law.

Next, we were taken to a massive bronze statue of Kim Il-Sung, built in 1972 and looming 20 metres high. Both myself and the Canadian tourist were obliged to buy wreaths, lay them before the statue and bow politely. I was not about to refuse. It would have grossly offended my guides. This is perhaps the world’s only nation with a dead President. The North Korean constitution in 1998 named him ‘President for Eternity.’ In as far as his son Kim Jong-Il is leader, he is a caretaker.

It would be tempting to imagine cabinet meetings these days involving a Ouija board. Pyongyang is quite simply a vast shrine to the ‘Great Leader.’ Other architectural delights include an ersatz version of the Arc de Triomphe, deliberately built larger than its Parisian inspiration. The huge ‘Juche Tower,’ with its pulsating red beacon, is visible from everywhere in the capital.

Just why does such an enclave of poverty and isolationism exist, surrounded by such economic success stories as Japan, South Korea and now China?

“The South Koreans bang on endlessly about being the new hub of North East Asia,” says Aidan Foster Carter of Leeds University, an expert on Korea.

“But in fact if you look on the map, the hub is actually North Korea. That’s the gap or the piece in the jigsaw that’s blank in terms of existing logistics and links.”

An integrated North Korea would clearly benefit from being the bridge between Seoul and Beijing.

“But I suspect an idea like that is really rather outside the mindset even of Kim Jong-Il and certainly of his generals,” he says. “They prefer what they know: they can control what is there and take their own cut and arm themselves to the teeth in case anyone wants to take it away from them.”

Later that week, we went to the The Grand People’s Study House, a vast university distinctive for combining the monstrous grandiosity of communist architecture with the ‘hip sadle’ styled roof of a traditional house or pagoda. There were hundreds of students here, moving from floor to floor. We looked in on a language class, then a computer room.

In the music library was a collection of 78s and audio cassettes from around the world. I put on headphones as a tape was slid into a stereo. This was the library’s latest example of western pop music: Drive My Car by the Beatles. Later on, I tried the names of some recent pop icons on the guides. J-Lo, Eminen, REM, U2? No, they hadn’t heard of any of them.

With its overblown cult of personality, Stalinist rhetoric and absolute illiberalism, North Korea seems like a hideous throwback to the worst excesses of the recently ended century. Like all the worst 20th century tyrants, Kim and Son have had no compunction in letting millions die, lest the go-it-alone ethos of ‘Juche’ be corrupted. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to be and North Korea lost its main trading partner and supplier of oil. Worse, South Korea was opening up trade and diplomacy with China. North Korea’s factories fell silent, its coal mines became flooded.

In the mid 1990s, floods decimated North Korea’s arable lands. Much of the population was already chronically malnourished. Mary Healy of Trocaire was one of the few western aid workers to see the devastation at first hand and travelled through the countryside in September 1997, accompanied, as always, by government ‘minders.’

“The floods were used by the government to allow aid agencies in without admitting why, using the natural disaster as an excuse for the situation,” she says. “But everybody knows, including the government, that the floods were not the cause. It was a whole range of reasons and economic policies and the Soviet Union and so on, the floods were just a small exacerbated.”

Trocaire’s subsequent appeal for North Korea raised £2 million in Ireland and to date, the organisation has invested E4 million in the country, focusing mainly on food aid to orphanages and nurseries plus agricultural imports to State farms. But Kim Jong-Il has long been accused of diverting much of the food aid of the mid 1990s to the military, whom he must keep sweet if he is to survive. In any case, it is estimated that the North Korean famine during this period cost between one and three million lives.

The road south towards the border was almost free of traffic, save the occasional packed truck. Clusters of concrete bungalows squatted on the brown and yellow scrubland. We reached Panmunjom, the village where in July 1953 an armistice was signed, ending three years savage fighting, wherein an American-led UN taskforce supported South Korea against the North, backed by Red China. But no formal peace treaty was ever forthcoming, and more than 70 per cent of North Korea’s one million man army is deployed within 12 hours of the border.

In the heart of Panmunjom, three blue huts straddled the Military Demarcation Line, splitting Korea in half. Beyond that, American troops from the United Nations Military Armistice Commission stood, legs apart, faces motionless as granite. The US has 37,000 troops in South Korea, backing up 690,000 South Korean military.

“We object to being called ‘evil,’ If the United States wants peace, there will be peace. If the US wants war, we will fight,” said Captain Pak, the 25-year old officer who took me to visit the Joint Security Area (JSA). This was a reference to George W Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech in 2002, where North Korea was castigated along with Iraq and Iran as a “rogue state” that is “arming to threaten the world.”

North Korea’s ‘media’ hasn’t much to say about life beyond its borders. But reportage of the Coalition’s difficulties in Iraq tends to veer between smug depictions of a hopeless quagmire and vengeful promise to exterminate any US-led attempts to repeat the effort here. Whether that will ever happen seems debatable. Having last year pulled out of the Non Proliferation Treaty, it is probable that North Korea has at least two atomic warheads.

That could well ensure the survival of a regime where the image of its ‘Great Leader’ is everywhere, including everyone’s jacket lapels, and his countless statues require a courteous bow at all times.

In the classical version of the Hippocratic Oath, one line caught my attention while researching this article: “I will not cut for stone, even for whom the disease is manifest; I will leave the operation to specialists in this art.”

As an exemplar against quackery, Hippocrates (460 BC-370 BC) might not be a perfect example. After all, he believed in illnesses coming from “four essential biles” in the body.

But the above line does indicate that the reputed “founding father of medicine” recognised that the essence of a good healer is the ability not to be consumed by hubris and to be honest about a patient’s prognosis.

Mineke Lamper is a Dutch-born “healer” based in County Mayo who, according to Independent TD Jerry Cowley, was still active there as this article was being prepared.

“It’s regrettable that there are still people who would still go to her, especially after all she’s responsible for, but she is very persuasive,” says Cowley, a Mulranny-based GP.

“If somebody is told ‘well if you don’t you’re going to die,’ what can people say?”

It was the threat of death that Kamper used to bully Paul Howie, a married man and father of one, into forgoing conventional medicine.

The “stone” in question was a tumour that “specialists in this art” could have removed from Mr Howie’s neck, but in April 2003, the Ballinrobe man did indeed die.

Last April, speaking to reporters at his inquest in Castlebar, his tearful widow Michele said: “Mineke Kamper said that if we got conventional medical attention, Paul would die and she could and would cure him...I realise now he was dying in front of me...we felt we had no choice.”

A laboratory test of tablets given to Mr Howie by Kamper showed that they contained no drugs or active ingredients. Although the case of Kamper, an unqualified healer and homeopath, is often cited as underlining the need for statutory regulation of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), the use of which is expanding exponentially in Ireland, regulation alone may not be the answer. There is something badly wrong with Irish law when Mineke Kamper’s only punishment was being fined less than E10 for failing to attend Paul Howie’s inquest.

Last December, a few months after Mr Howie’s inquest, the National Working Group on the Regulation of Complimentary Therapists presented its report to the Minister for Health and Children. Among its eight main recommendations are the statutory regulations of herbalists, acupuncturists and Chinese medicine practitioners.

For all others, there should be “the development of a robust system of voluntary self-regulation.”

The report also calls for “a forum for dialogue” between the complimentary and conventional medical sectors. Ireland has had no figures with the prominence of Cherie Blair or Prince Charles pushing CAMs.

The latter’s Foundation for Integrated Health seeks to increase the use of CAMs such as osteopathy and homeopathy within the NHS.

This was despite a meta-analysis in the Lancet magazine last August that failed to find any validity for homeopathy.

The following month, Germany’s leading consumer protection agency Stiftung Warentest produced an alternative medicine handbook that concluded that two thirds of CAMs studied were of no benefit and one third had mild benefits at best.

But are all CAMs useless? Are apparent success stories explained away by spontaneous remission of the illness or the “placebo” effect, wherein patients’ expectations of a cure convinces them that they are better?

Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complimentary Medicine at the University of Exeter, has for some years subjected CAMs to rigorous testing.

“There is some reasonably good evidence that acupuncture may be effective for certain conditions, usually chronic pain,” he says.

“Some herbal medicines like St John’s Wort and Gingko are backed up by quite good evidence also.”

Acupuncture, ki massage, crystals, bio-energy, homeopathy, ayurvedic medine: where does one start in the quest for healing?

My weak flesh and blood has done me a favour and served up a mild but irritating dysfunction. I am thus postponing a trip to the GP whilst scanning Holisto.com, where the purveyors from everything from reflexology to colour therapy and chakra advertise their wares.

One or two websites are coy about what I could expect: “I don’t generally talk too much about the healing services that I offer as I am of the opinion that those who are in need of my help with be drawn to me by Divine Order,” proclaims one.

But for the most part, practitioners gush about the efficacies of their therapies for a wide range of physical and psychological ailments.

Most carry disclaimers medicine. But reading between the lines, it is often implied.

“I personally believe that had I gone down the conventional route that I would be feeling extremely sick due to the chemical medication that I would be prescribed.”

The testimony on one website concerns a woman whose therapist “saw in my aura cancer,” although it reads suspiciously like a medical false alarm.

The healing sessions were “full of visualisation whereby I could see things in my body being healed.”

That was not quite my own experience when I went to see a very pleasant-natured woman for an hour-long Reiki session, costing E50.

The process, discovered (its detractors would say invented) in early 20th century Japan, is a simple one. I lay on my back as soft music played.

“I thought I detected some resistance around your arms,” the therapist said afterwards.

Reiki supposedly involves the universal “ki” energy from a universal “intelligence” called “Rei” being “channelled” through the healer’s hands to certain points on the patient’s body.

Energy, of course, is a common theme in CAM literature. But how come such energy cannot be detected by scientific instrumentation? And if it exists in another dimension, why should it be reachable by the human brain, which cannot even pick up radio signals?

Paul O’Donoghoe, a clinic psychologist and founder members of the Irish Sceptics Society sees the CAM phenomenon as indicative of a wider cultural shift.

“It’s almost unacceptable to say ‘that’s crap’ and that’s a problem,” he says.

“People are expressing views that are based on their intuition and based on their emotions. These are not a good foundation.”

Any appraisal of contemporary Ireland’s romance with unreason is a bittersweet experience. Or, to use Age of Aquarius vernacular, the bitter yin of reading that Gardai last year spoke to a medium in their search for missing woman Fiona Sinnot is counterbalanced by the sweet yang of hearing the CEO of the despicable Irish Psychics Live being trounced on Today with Pat Kenny.

But the replacing of one monolithic belief system that overarched Irish society with an à la carte array of philosophies goes well beyond matters of the soul.

In the new bazaar of the bizarre there are no objective rules for the universe. Your piecemeal perspective on reality is as valid as that of Stephen Hawking.

True, the Catholic Church was never noted as a bastion of scientific materialism. But Jesuit priests trained as scientists and modern genetics begins with the Augustian abbot Gregor Mendel.

In the 20th century, perhaps mindful of past experiences with one Galileo Galilee, the Church reached an accommodation of sorts with scientific modernity. Humani Generis, the 1950 encyclical on evolution issued by Pius XII, while condemning materialism, did not declare war on Darwin. John Charles McQuaid never called for the closing down of UCD’s Science Faculty.

However, sceptics of the new “anything goes” relativism are likely to be shouted down as spiritually-constipated killjoys by those who don’t realise that shallow New Agery and fundamentalist monotheism as two sides of the same postmodern coin.

Earlier this year, The Dubliner magazine dared to print an article on “Generation Mumbo Jumbo.” It pointed out a few unpalatable truths. Namely, that although yesterday’s Catholic worldview was hardly perfect, what has largely replaced it is a culture where emotional gratification trumps all else.

And the enthusiasts of anti-rational philosophies and lifestyles shouldn’t delude themselves that these are anything more than cleverly spun market commodities. The article wasn’t well received.

“Generation Mumbo Jumbo, I believe, may actually be better off than generation who came before,” sniffed an indignant Roisin Ingle in The Irish Times magazine in April. “(They) are exploring spirituality and questioning who they are of their own volition rather than out of blind belief in any one faith.”

How someone who believes they can communicate with angels and heal themselves with crystals is less blind than the elderly housewives lighting candles and saying novenas is surely debatable.

Although some CAMs require the patient to have faith in spiritual or metaphysical powers, others claim to be sanctioned by science, or at least science of a rather ersatz variety.

Possibly the best example is the “law of infinitesimals” that has underpinned homeopathy since its “discovery” by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843).

The active ingredient in homeopathy is mixed in 99 parts water and shaken vigorously. Then more water is added and more again until the ingredient is diluted to nothing.

Although homeopaths claim that the water retains a “memory” of the ingredient, this begs the question as to whether the water “remembers” every other substance that passes through it.

I kept that question to myself while visiting a homeopath in South Dublin who scribbled vigorously in a notebook as I described my symptoms. Most of his questions were far removed from my physical symptoms, but then this was a “holistic” approach.

A framed qualification from the Irish Society of Homeopaths hung on the wall. After an hour’s chat, he told me that he needed time to “have a think” about the best remedy for me, gratefully accepting E70.

Next day, I popped by a CAM “pharmacy” to pick up my “prescription.” A follow up session a few weeks later cost E50.

All in all, I was set back E120 for what, if the sceptics are right, amounted to less than two hours chat and a vial of water.

Tragic and infuriating as the Mineke Kamper case was, far more sophisticated and potentially dangerous operations exist.

In 2004, a County Clare GP, Pascal Carmody, was struck off the medical register, having offered an unproven E20,000 “laser treatment” to cancer patients.

Late last year, he was found guilty of selling prescription-only medicines and given a ten month suspended sentence.

In April, the Department of Health issued information booklets, warning seriously ill patients not to forgo mainstream medicine in favour of CAMs.

Deputy Liz McManus, Labour’s spokeswoman on Health says that this is not enough; only regulation is appropriate.

“The problem is there’s no definition for fake therapies because they can operate in a legal vacuum,” Deputy McManus told Magill.

“If we are going to make progress, we are going to have to regulate and ensure that people who are practicing safely.”

But, says Professor John Crown, head of the Oncology Department at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, regulation raises the risk of lending unproven treatments a respectability they don’t deserve.

But it is not the case that patients, especially seriously ill patients or those with sick children, are especially gullible, because “desperate people and their money are easily parted.”

And as Professor Ernst points out, regulation is a red herring for another reason.

“Last time we looked, there were 41 million websites on complimentary medicine...we tried to have a systematic approach (to evaluating a selection of them) and we found that they’re totally misleading,” says Ernst.

“They’re promotionally motivated and many of them put the health of anybody who adheres to them at risk. It’s a very odd situation where we talk about regulation in one country but the internet makes a mockery out of all this.”

So what can actually be done, besides information and regulation, to protect Irish patients?

While he despairs at the rise of “faith-based” medicine, Professor Crown wearily concedes that in the present intellectual climate, any wider protest against the delusions of crypto-mysticism and pseudo-science, will be an uphill battle.

“Trying to argue alternative medicine with a believer is like trying to argue atheism with the Ayatollah Khomenni. You just can’t do it,” he says.

He also regards it as “totally inappropriate” that VHI and BUPA provide coverage for CAMs, which tend to be cheaper than mainstream medicine.

“I think it is cynical marketing at its worst,” says Crown.

“If (their customers) believe that there’s a non-standard cheap alternative, of course it’s wonderful for VHI or for BUPA if they’re not having to pay for the treatments that have been proven to work.”

A starting point might well be a radical overhaul (or perhaps a replacing) of the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) which Crown describes as a “highly dysfunctional organisation enmeshed in red tape.” And at present, the IMB is not answerable to the Ombudsman, only the Department of Health.

“But there’s nothing in it for politicians,” says Crown.

“That’s why I believe (this issue) should be dealt with by over-arching legislation on medicines in general. Only drugs that are approved can be prescribed.”

Where the likes of Mineke Kamper and Pascal Carmody are concerned, Crown hopes that at least (for now) remains unpolluted by relativism:

“I wanted the Irish Medicines Board about Kamper and they did nothing. They did nothing. Zero. I think the state, the Department of Health and the IMB have failed completely in their obligation to protect patients from quacks,” he says, adding that he has personally seen a patient die as a result of a harmful CAM treatment, while another was given “life threatening advice.”

Crown concludes that “(There) should be the potential for prison sentences. I believe that knowingly espousing ineffective treatment for profit should be prosecuted on the basis of fraud and attempted manslaughter.”

 

They came from the skies, falling to earth like the winged seeds of some tropical flower. Some 600 paratroopers glided from the military planes, their parachutes crumpling as they hit the emerald rice paddies.

This was Aceh (pronounced a-chay), the northernmost province of the huge Indonesian island chain, scene of one of the world’s deadliest conflicts. At the same time, three warships had moved into the waters between Indonesia and Malaysia. When peace talks collapsed in Tokyo a few weeks ago, the 35,000 military personnel was upped to 70,000.

At least 50 Indonesian journalists had been ‘embedded’ with Army units after ‘indoctrination.’ The Indonesian Army has one objective: to smash a 27-year campaign for independence in Aceh, an oil rich province. The Indonesian government is also buoyed by opinion polls that show popular support for military action against Aceh.

It is not just about the oil: many Indonesians believe that the separatist cause in Aceh encourages separatists in other parts of the country, including Irian Jaya and The Moluccas. The outcome is one of particular interest to oil giants Exxom Mobil, strong supporters of US President Bush. But, although Irish Gardai and Irish Army Rangers once patrolled this part of the world, our interest in it seems to have faded of late.

In the forests, rice paddies and mountains of Aceh are 6,000 guerrillas, members of the Gerrikan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement), known as GAM. Since 1976, they have been fighting to free this province, located at the western tip of the island of Sumatra, and inhabited by 4.3 million people.

Violence abounds. On Wednesday of last week, people in Lawang told the Associated Press that troops accused one man, Abu Bakar, 35, of being a rebel, and dragged him away to a coffee plantation and killed him with shots to the head and chest. But Lt Col. Akmad Yani Basuki said the man, a suspected rebel taken away for questioning, was shot when he tried to escape.

Now the Indonesian President has declared martial law and has authorised Indonesia’s biggest offensive since 1975, when its forces invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.

In August 1999, the East Timorese voted decisively to cede from Indonesia. Last May, the UN formally transferred power to an independent authority. The generals in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, are determined that this will never happen in Aceh.

World attention focused on Indonesia last October when a bomb possibly planted by Al Qaida in a packed Bali nightclub, killed over 200 western tourists. But over the last five years, nearly 20,000 people have been killed in various religious and separatist conflicts across Indonesia; yet most of these have been ignored by the world’s media.

An independent Aceh would be a disastrous blow to Indonesia, which is home to 210 million people crowded into 13,3000 islands. Over a 10th of the nation’s incomes, in oil and natural gas, comes from Aceh.

A murky relationship also exists between the Indonesian Army and western oil companies, including those who funded the election campaign of the world’s most powerful man.

Shortly before GAM and the government signed a five-month peace deal, I managed to get to Aceh. The two-hour flight from Jakarta passed over the cloud drifted volcanic cones of Sumatra, the plane landing on a little airstrip flanked by rice fields and coconut palms.

In the tropical heats, members of the Mobile Police Brigade (Brimob), paramilitary wing of the police, eyed me warily as I picked up a taxi into the provincial capital, Banda Aceh.

Tourists don’t go near Aceh, and I had been warned of intelligence operatives infiltrating the hotels. Any friendly locals striking up a conversation were to be watched carefully.

Banda Aceh is a spacious, sun-baked city with bustling markets and women in colourful jilhab (veils). In the centre is the great Baiturrahman Raya Mosque, its bulbous black domes glinting in the sun. The Dutch colonists began a savage war there in 1873, killing 100,000 Achenese over 35 years. Before the Indonesian Army seized power in a bloody coup in the mid 1960s, Aceh enjoyed semi autonomy.

I had arranged a clandestine meeting with Mohammed Nazar, whom I met on my first visit to Aceh in 2,000. He had recently been released after spending 10 months in jail on sedition charges.

In November 1999, as President of the Centre for Information for Referendum in Aceh (SIRA), Nazar was working in a furtive manner. It was two months after the UN went into East Timor, and nearly two million people filled Banda Aceh’s streets, calling for a referendum here on independence.

On this visit, Nazar spoke about the oil companies and the military units guarding them: “If you enter the location of Exxon-Mobil, you can see so many troops there, and the troops always make operations into the villages. They kill, they rape and they rob.”

A few days later, I spoke to Musliadi (26) of Kegempar, an Achenese student group, one of those volunteers from NGO (Non Governmental Organisations) and human rights groups that had gathered at the SIRA office.

“Because of the human rights violations, this conflict has spread out to almost every area of the province,” Musliadi said.

One week later, I was able to go and see for myself. In the company of two local NGO workers, I took a bus into the east of the province, an area held by GAM. Starting in the morning, our bus travelled for six hours along the main highway, passing through numerous police checkpoints. Luckily, they didn’t spot the lone westerner on the bus.

In the afternoon, we reached Lhokseumawe, location of Aceh’s oil and gas fields. On the horizon, twin towers of fire gushed into the shimmering air. The US company Exxon Mobil, in partnership with Pertamina, the state-run oil company, operates five fields in Lhoksuemawe.

Exxon Mobil has faced repeated accusations that it has hired a special Army unit, Unit 113, to combat GAM. In the hinterland around Lhoksuemawe, Unit 113 is known as the Exxon Mobil army. But in Indonesia, “combating guerrilla groups” always translates as attacks on civilians.

In the evening our bus reached open countryside and the three of us alighted near some stilted wooden houses. The elderly woman there who served us food said that the village had flown the Acehnese flag in November 1999. Less than a year later, in October 2,000, her 17-year old son was taken by the police and never seen again.

That night we all had a troubled sleep on mats in a three-roomed brick house a mile or so off the main road. Without fans, the heat and whirring mosquitoes were merciless. But at least we were still there.

The next morning, at another hamlet, GAM fighters appeared: intense young men with black combats, walkie-talkies and M-16 rifles. Close by, a Honda with two guerrillas snarled up a dirt track, the passenger holding a Chinese Rocket-Propelled Grenade launcher over his shoulder. Weapons that had in many cases been sold to GAM by corrupt or deserting members of the Indonesian Army.

It took us most of the rest of the day to reach a local commander whom I received permission to meet. We travelled on motorbikes and in a rusty pick-up truck, bumping over muddy forest tracks. Finally I met Ishak Daud, a tall, rugged-featured man in his early 40s, with a satellite mobile and FN pistol strapped around his torso. When I greeted him in a rebel-held village, he grasped my hand and said he hoped people in Ireland would raise the issue of the Acehnese with their government.

Daud had trained in Libya in the mid-1980s, when GAM was afforded the tutelage of Colonel Gaddafi. Returning to Aceh, he led a successful raid on an army base in May 1990 and requisitioned a large cache of weapons. A wanted man, he fled to Malaysia, by then home to thousands of Acehnese refugees.

However, with the connivance of the Malaysian authorities, he was kidnapped and brought back by boat to Indonesia. After being released from jail, he returned to the forests.

When we spoke, Daud said: “We need the UN to come to Aceh because the UN is one of the institutions that has a responsibility to the Acehnese.”

The people of Aceh are hoping they will be allowed the opportunity to vote on remaining within Indonesia.

Over the next few days I spent there, Daud and his men brought me to meet civilians in the district. Houses, shops and even the local mosque had been chipped by bullet fire.

In one village, there was a bullet hole in the wall of a classroom. A teacher told me the children were forced to lie on the ground four hours in early 2001 when the Army raked the village with gunfire. At another hamlet, we met with survivors of an Army massacre at a rubber plantation, where in August 2001, 31 Acehnese men were taken to a field and gunned down, revenge for a GAM attack on a police post.

On the way back to Banda Aceh, we again stopped in Lhoksuemawe, in the shadow of the drilling platforms.

Exxon Mobil is the world’s biggest oil company, making profits of $210 billion in 2,000. Its Indonesian subsidiary, Exxon Mobil Oil Indonesia (EMOI), began operations in Aceh in 1968, three years after the Indonesian Army had taken power.

US-backed dictator, General Suharto, and his family, were given ‘blank shares’ in return for drilling rights.

On June 20, 2001, a lawsuit was filed in Columbia district court by the Washington-based International Labour Rights Fund (ILRF) against Exxon and PT Arun companies. The ILRF suit was on behalf of 11 unnamed Achenese villagers.

The charges against Exxon included supplying the Army with digging equipment and the use of buildings, where civilians were interred and tortured. According to the lawsuit, Exxon Mobil places ‘opinion editorials’ in such newspapers as The Washington Post and regularly lobbies Congress to further its interests. Exxon denies these charges and issued a statement after the lawsuit saying: “Exxon Mobil condemns the violation of human rights in any form and categorically denies these allegations.”

“We believe a lawsuit recently filed by the ILRF containing these allegations is without merit and designed to bring publicity to their organisation.”

The classroom debate was embarrassing for Indonesia, Exxon and the USA. So much that, despite heavy criticism, the US State Department intervened in August 2002 and asked that the case against Exxon be dismissed because good relations with Indonesia were seen as integral to the War on Terror.

The ILRF noted that, after Enron, Exxon Mobil was the second largest campaign contributor to the election of George W Bush.

Speaking in Dublin recently, Carmel Budiarjo, a veteran campaigner for human rights in Indonesia, warned against aiding an Indonesian military that has already allotted $200 million for the war.

“The Irish government should call on the EU to impose an embargo against arms sales to Indonesia,” she said.

Since my visit, Mohammed Nazar of SIRA has been re-arrested and now faces a seven year jail sentence for ‘treason.’ A week after being snatched from his Banda Aceh home by uniformed men, the body of Musliadi was found floating in a river, bearing the marks of torture.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian military pushes on with a ‘six month campaign’ to destroy GAM. They have already employed American Bronco OV-10 jets and Cobra helicopters plus Skorpian tanks and Hawk-200 jets from the UK.

The latter had been sold to Indonesia with the proviso that they would only be used for ‘training purposes.’ But the Army chief has openly admitted the Hawks may be used in military operations. Using such western-supplied weaponry, the Indonesian Army killed 200,000 people in East Timor in the late 1970s. Of course, the GAM guerrillas may simply melt into the jungle, rather than stand and fight.

Like the Americans in Iraq, the Indonesians may well break local resistance, only to find themselves bogged down amid an angry and unwelcoming populace. In an era of wars fought over resource-rich territories, winning the war and winning the peace are very different things.