The discharge of citizenship through jury duty is perhaps the most powerful expression of service to your country, writes ELAINE BYRNE in The IRISH TIMES June 30, 2009

JURY DUTY invokes images of Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic film, 12 Angry Men . The movie powerfully examines the entrenched prejudices of the all-male, middle- aged and middle-class jury. In a seemly open- and-shut case, just one dissenting juror initially votes not guilty. He then goes on to persuasively argue reasonable doubt, compelling the other jurors to re-evaluate their own personal perceptual bias and indifference towards the teenage defendant, an uneducated, frightened boy from the slums.

We may be overlooking the nature of Ireland’s modus operandi when we yell for change, writes ELAINE BYRNE . in IRISH TIMES June 23, 2009

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME is a psychological response by kidnap victims who become sympathetic and loyal to their kidnappers. Hostages bond with the hostage taker as a basic survival strategy. Isolation induces the prisoner to adopt the captor’s mindset.

Is this phenomenon also known as Irish political culture? Are our political institutions trapped by a mindset which is angry but accepts the New York hip-hop philosophy of Run DMC: “It’s like that, and that’s the way it is!”

Trinity College Dublin and the Political Studies Association of Ireland hosted a conference yesterday to ask these questions: Are our Institutions Fit for Purpose? Political Reform in the Republic of Ireland.

The objective of the conference was to provide a forum for Ireland’s leading political scientists, political commentators and interested practitioners to discuss their views on political reform. Jane Suiter, Matt Wall, both PhD scholars at Trinity, and I sat down over a cup of coffee a few weeks ago to organise the conference. By presenting accessible, informed and dispassionate analysis to a wider public, we innocently hope to motivate public participation as part of a process to drive institutional change.

Iranians are using Twitter to advise on what internet portals to use to circumvent government filters, writes ELAINE BYRNE in the Irish Times June 16, 2009

‘ HEY YOU, out there on the road/ Always doing what you’re told,/ Can you help me?”

Pink Floyd’s Hey You is the first track on the third side of their album, The Wall , released in 1979, the same year as the Iranian revolution. This famous lyric was Yasaman’s message on her social network facebook on Saturday, the same day that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected for a second term as Iran’s president.

In the video of the song, the lyric denotes the point when the riot police appear in a dark and menacing manner. The song is asking for help because of the madness that raw isolation has created.

Yasaman is an Iranian friend from Tehran and since Saturday she has posted shocking YouTube clips of police randomly beating protesters senseless with truncheons. In one clip, a dozen police clothed entirely in black with their faces masked are filmed from a rooftop violently kicking a young man lying motionless on the ground. In another, members of the army indiscriminately strike with their batons women waiting at a bus stop.

Are Our Institutions Fit for Purpose? Political Reform in the Republic of Ireland.

Conference Programme

Monday, June 22nd

More Information:

http://irishpoliticalreform.wordpress.com/conference-programme/

www.politicalreform.ie

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the first Dáil session at the Mansion House. In keeping with this spirit of regeneration, this conference will provide a forum for Ireland’s leading political scientists, political commentators, and interested practitioners to come together to discuss their views on political reform. The conference will seek to provide an accessible analysis of our current political institutions, as well as laying out options for future reform, based on extensive academic research.

The conference will be structured into three sessions and will close with a round table discussion involving participants from all three sessions as well as members of the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution. Each session will include two expert speakers who have published academic research on the institution being discussed, and two respondents, who have intimate knowledge of that institution from the worlds of politics and journalism.

The swing from FF to FG is a vital move. But the electorate must authorise a deeper ideological overhaul, writes ELAINE BYRNE in the Irish Times, June 9 2009

PRESIDENT BARACK Obama celebrated his birthday last Friday – the day Irish voters cast their votes in the local, European and Dublin byelections. Obama, the first black president of the United States, personifies a fundamental political shift, the implications of which the world has yet to fully appreciate. The spirit of change was certainly in the air on the island of Ireland over the weekend.

Or was it?

Fianna Fáil obtained its lowest share of the vote to date and, for the first time, Fine Gael now boasts the largest representation in local and European constituencies. Yet the combined Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael first-preference local election vote from 2004 to 2009 remains unchanged at 57 per cent.

OPINION: We have a responsibility as citizens to adopt a mindset which accepts and embraces the exposure of wrongdoing, writes ELAINE BYRNE

FRANK DUNLOP is not the first Irish person to be convicted for corruption.

In the mid-1940s, a former chair of Dublin County Council and a civil servant from the Department of Education were found guilty of bribing councillors to vote for senators in Seanad elections.

An undercover sting operation caught the men red-handed. In the subsequent court cases, it emerged that Nelson’s Pillar on O’Connell Street and the Ormond Hotel on Abbey Street were the bribing meeting points for those travelling from the country looking for money for their votes.

Indeed, such was the entrepreneurial spirit of the two men that they were known to sell a first preference vote which they then converted into a 10th preference, thus selling the first preference vote again.