Yeah - I still remember him saying, with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth as he hammered away at a rotten brick two hundred feet in the air, that people ask him about accidents. And he said that you only have one accident in his job.

Yup. Also the people who accumulate vast amounts of money are deeply psychologically flawed/damaged (either beforehand or if not, then the process of sacrificing everything in order to amass huge wealth messes them up).

Money doesn't buy happiness.

Vast amounts of money creates isolation, paranoia, fear, megalomania, distrust, anger, detachment from reality and spiraling into an imaginary world of your own creation buttressed by sycophants who tell you what you want to hear.

www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/20...

We also have the Offences Against the State Act -designed to deal with subversive, terrorist and paramilitary activities.
And we used to have a separate prison guarded by the Army to hold terrorist prisoners during the Troubles (to prevent breakouts). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offence...

We also have the Special Criminal Court (non-jury trial where a panel of 3 judges decide guilt/innocence) to deal with terrorism and organised crime - where juries might be intimidated. www.citizensinformation.ie/en/justice/c...

Membership of a proscribed organisation is a crime here also (Ireland). Centralised European states that have experience of decades of terrorism tend to treat national security threats rather differently than the fragmented approach preferred in the US.

But being dismissed without a reference pretty much meant you would never work in domestic service again. And in a pre-WW1 society where upward mobility was difficult for the working poor and a veneer of respectability was key, it probably meant manual labour was your only option.

If you read accounts of that time, a lot of people were terrified that their servants would blab about all their dirty family laundry if they parted on bad terms. It gave them a degree of power & security in a very precarious situation. Did not apply to the lower ranks of servants doing drudge work.

In part, this was about exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam.

Coincidentally just wrote this in reply to another thread in relation to the Irish media landscape.
bsky.app/profile/ianf...

But of course we have the same internet brainrot that afflicts the rest of the world.

Lack of 24 hour news also a blessing. There is an RTE News Channel but it just repeats the morning, afternoon & evening news on a loop. Used to think it looked particularly lame compared to BBC/Sky etc... but I've changed my mind. It stops people being sucked into feeding non-stop newstainment drama

A Murdochless media has been a huge blessing.
Not to exaggerate the impact of the far-right here - still very much on the fringe. Confined to headbangers who are viewed as looney headbangers not worth voting for because they are headbangers. But they're there, lurking in the shadows.

The cry of Russian serfs since time immemorial: if only the good Tsar knew what the bad boyars were doing in his name...