Jim O’Callaghan The FFG Magician

We did not choose to be here, to watch this show. Yet all of us who belong to the bottom  99% of this country are packed into a stuffy theatre to witness the breathless spectacle. It is by design  repetitive and stultifying. A show of misdirection with often the same outcome. We’re watching Jim O’Callaghan and the Irish government make our rights, and the rights of our neighbours disappear!  

I do not write here to lay all the moral stains of the government, on the hands of this one  statesman. But rather I am writing to draw attention to his style and track record, in materially making this State a more hostile environment to live in.  

All of our public representatives have their own special party trick, that they break out when  it is time to obscure that they are betraying the interests and conscience of the people in this  country. Our own viceroy Michael Martin famously leans on his own experience as a school  principal when on the back foot. He likes to go on the offensive when defending ‘gutting the  occupied territories bill’ or giving away our land, water and electricity to data centres. 

Lecturing the country or other TDs as if they were a bold teenager when kissing the  imperial boot. Always the pretence of having no power over situations directly in his control. It  seems he is able to dispel political consequences by playing the role of the exasperated patriarch,  the real adult in the room... Why does the left, or even just liberals take it from him? Maybe it has  been so effective because it plays off a widely shared school day shaking in the Irish psyche?  

Now though this rhetorical game is quite impressive. In terms of the consequences, he is  seemingly able to weasel a corrupt and complicit government out of trouble. It does not hold a candle to  the magician O’Callaghan.  

Coming into the public eye in the 2000s to represent Bertie Ahern in defamation  proceedings, from the start he has had a penchant for the dirty jobs of a corrupt Irish State.  Brokering dialogue between the two dominant political parties seems from the outside to have been  one of them. For which he has seemingly been handsomely rewarded in a series of high office  positions.  

His current title “Minister For Justice, Home Affairs and Migration” bears special scrutiny  because it is a title especially devised for his current ministerial role. “Justice” means the justice  system and the guards. “Home Affairs”, from surveying his published workload, seems to be the softer side and extension of the justice apparatus into what gets legislated, and what gets  criminalised. “Migration” covers both asylum and ordinary visa processes.

Why do all these jobs go together? He is the authority for the corporal bureaucratic control  of human bodies within the State. And he is also tasked with maintaining the Good Friday  Agreement. As extensions of control over bodies, his work product makes sense in an unnerving and totalizing sort of way.  

He green lights pilots of surveillance gadgets, expands prisons and expands Garda capacity  to fill them. His offices dictate the racial and financial categorization of migrants into the State. The power to facilitate or suppress parts of the public sphere lies with the justice system. The reach of the ministry is both vast and objectionable.

This article is not intended as any kind of exhaustive list of the social rights that  O’Callaghan has continually materially eroded since becoming the minister. The magic trick is often hard to catch until after the fact for the privileged on lookers; and violent corporal repression  simultaneously marginalizes its subjects into an eerie silence. Readers might send in their own  examples to supplement this editorializers shortcomings, and the comprehensive list could be  forthcoming. Here are just a few contemporary examples in recent memory, or that I have seen with my own eyes.  

The widely known example is the scandal related to legislating that therapy notes from those who have suffered sexual violence, could be used against those those same people in court. This  was bundled in with other reforms as is the usual misdirection. But think about how such a bill  would control bodies. It deleteriously inserts the State to be able to examine the therapeutic  relationship of people who have been victimised. At the expense of those people, who will  subsequently seek therapy less. He is bureaucratically trampling the kind of privileged relationship  that he relied upon when he represented the shyster Bertie Ahern! Crooks have rights but the abused apparently do not! 

Here O’Callaghan has bundled in paternalistic control in a way that will, if enacted, disproportionately control women and feminised people. This is misogyny in material structural  form. He is a pig.  

What is much less visible, and has sustained far less sustained coverage by major news  outlets, is the way the department of migration facilitates stochastic terrorism against the bodies of  asylum seekers. Here the Houdini of human rights speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He  personally negotiates the lucrative contracts with private landlords who own the property of IPAS  centres, whilst espousing constant dog whistles and pushing policy to enfranchise a right wing who  are at least in rhetoric against such imposition.  

In case anyone was unaware, since 2023 it has been de facto State policy to leave adult male  asylum applicants on the street. Of the much touted 600 euro a week it costs to keep an asylum  applicant, only 30 euro for children and 40 euro for adults are given to housed applicants directly, whilst they are locked in the enforced economic paralysis of the asylum process. If they are left on  the street they get an extra 75 euro! This brutality is a really effective cost saving measure that does not materially affect his large landlord clients at all!  

Here we see the genius of the double game he plays with his violent right flank. Whilst  being the exact person who designates IPAS centres, his office stochastically encourages their violence through the way the International Protection Office publishes information in their monthly reports. Perusing the website as of 15/09/26, it is clear that the December 2021 report, is the last monthly report that  gives any kind of breakdown of accommodation type or financial arrangement of the  accommodation. Since then, the gutted reports have featured big fuck off pie charts displaying the  racial breakdown of applicants as well as other demographic information used in reactionary fear  mongering rhetoric.  

Through this kind of selective reporting he is in a way that is plausibly deniable, playing a  numbers game for the direction of dissident violence against the bodies of the most marginalized  people in our society. This kills two birds with one stone for him. Not only can it channel violence  away from the State who enforces the bleak status quo and media environment that radicalizes reactionary dissidents. It also acts as an incentive for people who are legally marginalized by the  State and in its enforced provision to remove themselves from the State’s books, through death, disappearance or self deportation. The neoliberal State uses reactionary violence as a cost saving measure. The State and its magician bear damning culpability in the assault, arson and slashing of  tents perpetuated against the bodies of asylum seekers. There is no meaningful separation between those violent right wing cunts who attack migrants and the government:  

For all the drama of their degrading and disgusting violence, they are not the least drop  revolutionary even for their own side. The post neo-liberal hellscape can incorporate them  coherently. The right’s little technocratic masters lead them with a string, like a cat. They are not  capable of conserving anything, nor will you achieve a thing beyond the boundary of your own  pornographic satisfaction! Your racist terrorism is pathetic!  

And it is crude racism whatever intellectualized justification they might put over it. If they  actually cared about “dangerous” immigrants, then the right would be going after the influx of IDF  operatives coming into the country to develop surveillance tech, a story which  Aontacht has dealt with extensively elsewhere.

 It is black and brown bodies that are elevated  into the media spectacle in discussions of danger. Meanwhile the wealthy and genocidal can pay to  gain free access to the State. We are importing those same systems of control and surveillance that  have been used to persecute our Palestinian brothers and sisters.  

It is clear that an unprecedented Garda recruitment push and escalation in their capacity to  do less lethal violence amounts to a policy of expanding the State’s apparatus for doing civil  repression. New tasers and unionist water cannons from the PSNI, as well as utilizing the Irish army for civilian matters, are the basis for threats levelled genuine civil grievance but sparred for the racist pogroms that have recently been organized in the Capitol.  

Of those arrested in the process of enforcing injustice. O’Callaghan has done his best to see  that those working class and marginalised protestors are not afforded even the appearance of  appropriate representation. He has bureaucratically attempted to dismantle the legal aid systems of  the State by making it uneconomic for solicitors to take these cases. As we are subjected to arbitrary  waves of austerity his office underpins the enforcement of these policies through materially  undercutting people's right to “legitimately” resist.  

What we allow to be done to the most marginalized people in our society will in turn be  done to us. This is because the State machinery that gets built to control the bodies of one  classification of people in the State, can easily be turned to another. Everyone is on the convener  belt, it is just some who are first in line.  

O’Callaghan and his State machinery have materially eroded all of our rights to shelter for  ourselves and those we care about. As an emissary of the State he has a key job in the administering  of the housing crisis to the people who live in this country. Garda violence is what undergirds and sanctions the record level of evictions we are seeing at the moment. Every single one was enforced  under the auspices of Jim’O Callighan.  

I therefore give him no credit for his work in opening up domestic violence shelters, because of how many people he undoubtedly has made face the decision between abuse and homelessness,  by maintaining the system that he and his landlord colleagues benefit from. You get no points for  putting a plaster over a wound that you are also holding open.  

As a society we are very much bleeding. The swords have been stabbed in the magic box  and we are slumped over backstage. The greatest trick of the magician statesman is to bluntly insert  the sword and use the pageantry of the stage to pretend it is just another magic show. 

So what do we do about Jim O’Callaghan, the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael magician? I’d  maybe not be seen to be respectable if I suggested we incorporate some version of the Hague in  Phoenix Park. All the same it might prove convenient next time the great imperial paedophile imposes on us for a visit.  

At the very least he needs to be scoured from civil life and his office dissolved, lest its  powers be bequeathed to the next crony comprador in line. Like any dark lich, it is not enough to  deal with the corporeal body, the phylacteries containing his rotten soul must also be smashed. The  only option is solidarity between all of us subjected to this reign. We can not pretend like the rest of  the governments lies justifying austerity under the guise of ‘fiscal responsibility’ hold water when their bag man spends billions expanding the very apparatus used to take rights away! The veneer of  respectability is mere illusion. Do not watch what he says, watch what he does.  

We refuse to be your permanent underclass. All power to all the people!