Indymedia Statement Concerning the Former Editor Pat C

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Thu Dec 12, 2013 13:09

I asked that the filthy accusations the indymedia collective leveled against me be fully investigated. Why couldn't you carry out such an investigation? Because it would implicate you and the rest of the moderators who have been covering up for Mather and Corcoran for many years

The "filthy accusations" originated from P.C. I take no responsibility for these. Implicate me how? I've covered up for nobody. I may have hidden comments attacking other moderators as per our site guidelines. This is clearly not allowed. I wouldn't call it "covering up for Corcoran" though. I had many disagreements with P.C., as you well know.

And regarding the "filthy accusations", in point of fact I DID conduct an internal investigation. I did make contact with you and, for no personal gain (just more grief!) I spent my own personal time corresponding with people, chasing up the source of those allegations, composing and sending carefully worded emails to people I often did not see eye to eye with, in an effort to see justice prevail on the matter. My investigations exonerated you regarding the allegations made by P.C. I then issued you a public apology.

If you don't see anything worth investigating now and still want to believe that Corcoran was overall a "good moderator " there's no amount of "hard evidence" will ever convince you.

Convenient! Saves you having to bother backing up your smears and allegations with actual facts.

Well considering no amount of "hard evidence" (i.e. none) is exactly what you have thus far produced, I would have to agree with you. Perhaps if you produced at least "some amount" of hard evidence, then I might change my opinion. :-)

Going on your past record , "Interesting background information" is what you would say were I to produce any such evidence and then you would blithely ignore it .
I don't think you are interested in evidence .

I don't think you are either.
IMHO much of what you post here amounts to just smearing and undermining the work of others. However you do occasionally post some items of interest which is why I personally give you the benefit of the doubt. I think your S/N ratio is pretty awful though. And you deliberately set out to antagonise people quite often. Why do you do this?

I produced ample evidence to show that the anti-Iranian propagandist Yassamine Mather , who you describe as a respected activist , works for a university department that has been described as part of the outsourced R and D department of British Aerospace Engineering - Europe's biggest arms manufacturer. .

I disagree.
IMHO, for all your talk, you haven't actually produced anything other than tenuous circumstantial evidence for your theories about Y.M. in all your posts on this site. I'm open to actual evidence on the matter if you care to supply it.
For the record, I strongly oppose any imperialist attempts to undermine the Iranian state.

I have told you that I was prepared to meet with moderators

You can understand why we would be somewhat reluctant to do this if we believed you might be an agent provocateur or someone out to destroy this website.

You and your fellow moderators have been spreading lies about me for a number of years - a pervert, a stalker, a Mossad agent ,"how much are you being paid " as an agent provocateur etc .All this without any evidence whatsoever

Aw come on Joe.
I think it's quite clear I made a reasonable effort to deal with the (groundless) pervert allegation made by P.C. and a public apology was issued (by me) on behalf of the site

Regarding the other things you mention, it's true that people did occasionally speculate on your possible motivations for persistently attacking this website over a protracted period of time in moments of annoyance and frustration at your behaviour. Much as you speculated (wildly!) over our motivations for hiding your divisive trolling posts. But that's all it was. Speculation. You did it. We did it. I think you did considerably more of it. And you are apparently still doing it.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Thu Dec 12, 2013 12:59

as didn't wish to draw attention to the sketch from Pat Corcoran which portrays Allah in a very poor light - IN CASE I ENDANGERED YOUR LIVES by drawing attention to the fact it was there. You chump.

You mean like you are doing now Hugh?

by JoeMc Thu Dec 12, 2013 11:22

Indymedia used to regularly get the "Mohamed was a paedophile" line from Cocoran and his cohorts , Hugh. It was all aimed against Iran and in support of the HOPI group - Corcoran and Anne MacShane from the CPGB are the leading representatives of the group in Ireland . According to internet reports , CPGB friends are posting on facebook in support of Corcoran and against what they call the "smears" being directed against him .

"He [Corcoran] was also very active on facebook where he befriended a lot of people involved in left and republican politics. Some of them have apparently refused to unfriend him! One of his friends who is member of CPGB even accused people of organising a "with hunt" against the poor chap!"
http://www.politics.ie/forum/justice/218392-5000-child-....html

by Hugh Murphy - Sackedbyunion Thu Dec 12, 2013 11:01

Indymedia cherry-pickers. You say "you can't please everyone" in reference to a comment about a article that I said shoud've been taken down. I was being diplomatic as didn't wish to draw attention to the sketch from Pat Corcoran which portrays Allah in a very poor light - IN CASE I ENDANGERED YOUR LIVES by drawing attention to the fact it was there. You chump.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/no-jail-over-7000-....html

by JoeMc - joemcivor@gmail.com Thu Dec 12, 2013 10:37

Going on your past record , "Interesting background information" is what you would say were I to produce any such evidence and then you would blithely ignore it . I don't think you are interested in evidence . You and your fellow moderators have been spreading lies about me for a number of years - a pervert, a stalker, a Mossad agent ,"how much are you being paid " as an agent provocateur etc .All this without any evidence whatsoever other than the fact that I produced ample evidence to show that the anti-Iranian propagandist Yassamine Mather , who you describe as a respected activist , works for a university department that has been described as part of the outsourced R and D department of British Aerospace Engineering - Europe's biggest arms manufacturer. .

I have told you that I was prepared to meet with moderators , show them work records, bank accounts , give references . I asked that the filthy accusations the indymedia collective leveled against me be fully investigated. Why couldn't you carry out such an investigation? Because it would implicate you and the rest of the moderators who have been covering up for Mather and Corcoran for many years. If you don't see anything worth investigating now and still want to believe that Corcoran was overall a "good moderator " there's no amount of "hard evidence" will ever convince you.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Wed Dec 11, 2013 21:40

Joe:

We're not covering anything up. I don't think P.C. was a rat, but I can't be certain about that. In a previous post, which You seem to have forgotten about, I have encouraged you to follow it up and produce some hard evidence for the theory, and it would make a great story.

some quotes from my posts:

I'd like to thank Joe for bringing the matter to our attention.

I don't believe it was all with the deliberate intention of destroying this site. I am of course open to hard evidence to the contrary.

I'll gladly entertain the notion that P.C. Was an agent provocateur if you can produce even one shred of hard evidence for this. I was actually the person who featurised the mark stone article so, contrary to your statements, I am always very happy to help rid activist movements of police or state infiltration whenever possible in my capacity as moderator on this site and outside. again I say, bring it on. You talk the talk now perhaps you might consider backing it up with hard evidence?

Rather than just making speculative posts, Why not go do some proper research with the groups you mentioned etc, and the court records. Try and dig up some actual hard evidence for your theory. Then publish it here as a proper article. If indeed true, you would be doing us all a service. It would be the Irish version of the Kennedy stone affair. A big breaking scandal about Irish political policing and justice. I can see the headline now: "Irish state deliberately lets off paedophile so it can spy on democratic protesters".You'd be famous. Frankly I don't hold out any hope of such hard evidence turning up though. But If you do find some then I can't really argue with that can I?

Does it really sound like I am covering anything up here Joe?? The fact is, I'd be as interested as you to know for sure. Probably more. I don't think P.C. was a rat, but quite honestly, I really don't know for sure. He could have been. It IS a fact that he was well able to maintain lies to a number of people, by omission or otherwise, over a long period of time. If you DO find any real evidence he was working as a snitch to undermine activists, it would certainly make a great article and I'd be most happy to see it posted here and even featurised, as I said previously. Bring it on Joe. Back up all the insinuations with a good article and some hard evidence

But until such a time that you can properly back up what you are implying, what value have these posts except smear value? And it certainly looks to people as if that is the only place you are interested in going with this.

I wish you good hunting with any real investigations you choose to conduct. But try to show some sensitivity. These organisations were victims, no doubt harmed by the revelations about P.C. too, and if your theory turns out to be correct (a big IF!), then they were also the victims of state interference and systematic intelligence gathering. Tread softly!

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Wed Dec 11, 2013 21:02

2 quotes from Hugh Murphy (in the same post!) :

WHY WAS THIS NOT TAKEN DOWN?

How long will the Thought Police allow this to stay up?

There is no pleasing some people!!

by JoeMc Wed Dec 11, 2013 20:37

Hugh asks , "Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?"

I see a clear enough pattern as well : an ongoing cover-up . And yet indymedia moderators who would be in probably the best position to challenge that cover-up don't think there is anything to be overly concerned about. Wageslave who has been calling Corcoran a decent and hard working activist for years concluded within a day or two of the revelation that he couldn't possibly have been working for the other side : "I have already considered the possibility and discounted it".
It's that sort of arrogance mixed with reckless naivety that I find disturbing .

I have written to a few places aside from Seomra . The letter I reproduced above in no way holds seomra responsible for Corcoran's paedophilia , it informs them of Corcoran's conviction and asks if they had also been kept in the dark about his activities . It's like the email threw them into a panic , which wasn't my intention .Had the email come from the Indymedia collective , I think there would have been a response other than the one Bobby posted .

by Hugh Murphy - Sackedbymyunion Wed Dec 11, 2013 17:31

Yes Joe Mac, I am very concerned. It's perfectly obvious that the Granada Institute was only a "get out of Jail card" for Corcoran as it did not prevent him continuing his odious addiction to child pornography, and thus allowed him to acquire a further tranch of this disgusting material. No doubt his attendance at Granada was able to allow Judge Nolan to tick the 'No Jail Box' for Corcoran.
Why were the Guards not able to charge this paedophile? Your post raises some interesting and serious questions, both for the Guards and the people running this site - who seem to view Corcoran's behaviour at the lesser end of the imaginary Paedophile Scale. I sincerely hope the reasons were, that Corcoran was singing his head off and they Guards were investigating all that he was "fully cooperating" about, with a view to future prosecutions...? Yes, he did re-offend and thankfully his perversion [as far as we know] remained of the viewing kind. However, in one of my redacted posts I pointed out "and it came from the mother of an abused child who had suffered it" that this perversion is of the progressive kind.

Joe Mac, it beggars belief that the Granada Institute was ran by a Catholic order, the St John of God Order, which was one of the eighteen congregations named in the Ryan report into clerical abuse. Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?
The Granada Institute was closed down around the time that Corcoran was charged, so he attended therapy sessions which obviously did him no good - at least in relation to curing him of his perversions,
which are obviously to the fore in his posting of the offensive Crucifixiion Party and the advertising of it on indymedia. WHY WAS THIS NOT TAKEN DOWN? The paedophile Pat Corcoran, like Granada Institute are gone, who knows what evil the sponsored, spread or covered up.

How long will the Thought Police allow this to stay up?

Hugh Murphy - my real name

by JoeMc Wed Dec 11, 2013 15:22

According to the Independent report on the court case , which is the only report I've come across, “Det Gda Clohessy agreed with Philipp Rahn BL, defending, that his client said he’d contacted the Granada Institute for sex offenders for treatment following the first seizure in 2009. “

For an unexplained reason the gardai “were not in a position" to charge him then - this was despite the fact that Corcoran had admitted to ownership of the paedophile material and was “fully cooperating” with the gardai. It should have been a straightforward guilty-plea conviction for the DPP and the gardai . How does the Dept of Justice account for the delay that allowed Corcoran time to reoffend ? During those three years , he was being monitored by the Granada Institute , but by the time the gardai charged him in February 2012 , Corcoran had collected a further 1,100 child pornography images and 21 videos at his current home at Longford House, Spencer Dock. .

According to the Clerical Whispers blogspot the Granada Institute was itself run by a Catholic order- the St John of God Order -which was one of the eighteen congregations named in the Ryan report into clerical abuse .
http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.ie/2009/12/granada-ins....html
The Institute was closed last year around the time that Corcoran was eventually charged. .
So, Corcoran was attending “therapy” sessions at the catholic Granada Institution at the same time that he was organizing Seomra's Crucifixiion Party and advertising it on indymedia ireland! It doesn't make sense. All the time he was out on gardai bail and the Granada Institute was supposed to be monitoring him.

by JoeMc Tue Dec 10, 2013 20:23

The Crucifixion Party was held at Seomra, Bobby . It was promoted on the seomra website by Corcoran himself .Corcoran had been involved with Seomra for a number of years before .

This for instance is from Corcoran in 2009 writing on Queer Spraoi's yahoo pages .He had been canvassing David Norris to attend a Queer Spraoi open workshop . Venue: Seomra Spraoi, 10 Belvedere Court, off Gardiner Street in Dublin 1
Hi Folks
 
I got this response from Davis Norris. It would be good to have him a[sic] the workshop.
 
Rgds
 
Pat
 
 
Dear Pat,

Thanks for sending on the note about the open workshop. It conflicts with
private members time in the Senate so I am probably not going to get there
but if I can I will drop in towards the end.

Best wishes
David Norris

by Bobby Tue Dec 10, 2013 16:47

Oh, and I should say, it was confirmed to me that the space seomra is using now has not seen the involvement of Pat C once in it's five years.

You're a liar and you're trying your hardest to tie other people into Pat's actions. You care more about trying to make political groups look bad, rather than trying to provide people with useful or helpful advice. You don't know what it's like for other people to discover these things and you could have been an ally to those who found out. There could have have been victims of child abuse involved with these groups that will be scarred by these revelations, but you don't care as long as everyone who you don't like suffers.

by Bobby Tue Dec 10, 2013 16:40

'His defenders', 'he remains on first name terms with Corcoran'. You're a pathetic, nasty piece of work.

My Mother was viciously abused by the church when she was a child, this included a stint in a hospital to wipe her memory with the use of electrical currents to her brain. This 'therapy' helped her forget her childhood. My Mother is one of a few family members who were sexually, physically and mentally abused as children. I don't think there's anyone here defending these disgusting actions, but you, you're a nasty abusive person using real victims of a heinous act to attack political movements. You should hang your head is absolute shame. I'm disgusted the more I see you trying to use this as, as it was once eloquently put forward by this gentleman - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jHqndf9Kx4, as political football.

I don't know how you continue your little game, it's sick.

by Joe Mc Sun Dec 08, 2013 16:09

Bobby is embarrassed by my email and thinks the issue of child abuse is so serious that it shouldn't be raised here – other than by himself presumably . At the same time he remains on first name terms with Corcoran . The reason I "had the nerve" to post here the email I sent to Seomra was because Bobby had the nerve to mention it here and report its content in a way that might suggest that I am organizing some sort of a paedo hunt against Seomra .That is not the case.

To be clear . Like the vast majority of the population, I find paedophilia disgusting , but it's the security issues involved for decent committed activists that I'm primarily concerned with on this thread and which I raised in my email to Seomra. A self-confessed paedophile -somebody who is therefore totally compromised by the state – has been working under gardai supervision monitoring and disrupting the indymedia site for four years. His defenders argue that a four year time frame to convict somebody who has admitted to a crime and who is fully cooperating with the gardai is normal, but it isn't .

When the state took his hard drive in 2009 they discovered -if they hadn't already known - that Patrick Corcoran was a paedophile . But they would also have discovered after examining his computer (again if they didn't already know) that as well as being a paedophile he was: a hardened revolutionary machete man , a bash- the-fash street fighter with AFA , a LBGT and women's rights defender , a supporter of dissident republican causes, a defender of covert animal liberation “actions” involving the release of minks into the countryside , a prominent gender rights activist , a member of HOPI, an activist at Seomra and a moderator at Indymedia Ireland.

by Bobby Sat Dec 07, 2013 13:35

Get off your high-horse. You're turning a very serious issue into a farce. Your email is embarrassing to read and I don't know how you have the nerve to post it. 'Your activist', what are you on about?

Cop on and stop trying your damned hardest to drag other people's name's through the dirt because of ideological differences, it's disgusting. Child abuse is a serious issue and you're using it for malevolent personal reasons, you don't know how many people who read this thread have been victims of sexual or violent abuse as children and you're taking the piss out of every one of them and even trying to insinuate that other people/groups of people (who you clearly have no idea who they are) are somehow responsible for Pat's actions. Shame on you.

by JoeMc Thu Dec 05, 2013 10:50

Bobby says he “heard” that I contacted Seomra , from which I assume he hasn't read the email ,so here's a copy . There were a couple of typos . I had hoped that Seomra volunteers would reply to the email themselves.

“I'm contacting you about your activist Patrick Corcoran regarding his conviction two weeks ago on child pornography possession charges. The convictions relate to incidents that occurred in 2009 . After his arrest, Corcoran admitted to the possession of child pornography and cooperated fully with the gardai . Despite his admitting the offences , it was four [year]s before the time of his court case . During those four years ,between 2009 and 2013 , Corcoran was involved with many left causes including Indymedia Ireland , where Corcoran was a site moderator from 2009 until the day he was convicted . The indymedia collective has issued a statement (see below) saying that his fellow moderators were completely unaware of the charges against Corcoran . Was Seomrai Spraoi also kept in the dark ? I have checked the Seomra website and haven't seen anything about this. Perhaps you would consider making a statement either on your own website or on indymedia ?”
........................................

Looking through the Crucifixtion party thread again I can understand why Bobby or Seomra would want to deny responsibility for Corcoran , but the fact is that the thread was initiated by Magdelena from Seomra,and the gig was authorised by Seomra . It was defended on the thread by Corcoran without objection from Seomra despite Corcoran admitting that the gig would insult and humiliate the likes of Ciaron O'Reilly .
“Who are we humiliating? There are no masses of progressive catholic activists. Is there even a CWM in Ireland anymore? They keep a low profile if they exist.

We are insulting the old reactionaries such as the bishops, clergy, reactionary lay catholics which includes you. Given your comments above and veiled threats about molotov cocktails you could only be classed as a reactionary.”
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/99569?search_text=cruci...=true

by Bobby Tue Dec 03, 2013 11:19

I'm super confused. How is Indymedia Ireland responsible for Corcoran?

I heard seomra spraoi also got an email off Joe asking them for info and suggesting they make a statement! Why? He was never part of the collective there. Why are some people trying to hold others responsible for Corcoran's actions?

by Periodic visitor Sat Nov 30, 2013 01:14

Having been a periodic visitor to indymedia.ie for several years I feel eligibleto note that the site has had its ups and downs.

On the Down side:-

a. the moderators have had to deal with lots of dodgy posters including trolls, agents provocateurs, nutters and commercial spammers
b. one of the moderators pat c has been exposed as a totally unsuitable person for the task. He censored many individuals wrongly.
c. as on this thread there have been several personality antagonisms and/or ideological fractures that impair the smooth functioning of thread discussions
d. a few well-intentioned individuals like Ciaron Reilly and Sean Crudden who give their real names have been abused, sometimes by people who don't seem to really believe in cultural diversity
e. the relationship between the editorial collective and the general radical public it wants to serve seems a bit nebulous. I have above suggested twice-yearly public events, organised by the collective, at which posters and others could receive indymedia.ie feedback, while donating funds.

On the Up side I'll note just a few achievements of the site:-

1. the coverage of the Shell-to-Sea campaign in Erris has been more comprehensive than that of the docile mass media. The economic and environmental issues of investing companies in Ireland and elsewhere have been pinpointed. Indymedia has 'outed' a security company that recruited the luckless Michael Dwyer who was induced by the volatile Flores from Hungary to go on a crazy adventure to Bolivia, where they were both murdered by the police. Relatives are still trying to learn the circumstances.

2. There has been a useful focus on cronyism in state appointments to quangos and other bodies. Recent revelations about huge salaries of CEOs on 'charities' highlight the need for indymedia and its posters to continue exposing and criticising what happens.

3. Small groups and individuals who have concerns about unemployment, welfare services, depression, mental illness, illiteracy, homelessness, street people trying to earn a pittance etc. have been able to air their views and reveal information on indymedia.

4. Peace and international events are constantly being covered in a way that the mass media fail to / refuse to cover them.

My concluding plea is that posters on this site will try to keep respectful when disputing with one another. My hope is that hardworking moderators will succeed in maintaining the stated principles of indymedia, against efforts by mischief makers and others with axegrinding agendas.

by Robbies Mon Nov 25, 2013 12:53

I hope imc.ie isn't gone by the time I've collated the data on Patrick Corcoran.

As part of the IIIC collective from Feb 2006-2007, I performed many tasks and duties, one of which was moderation. I took a lot of time at the latter, parsing everything according to the guidelines (albeit interpretations are subjective), and I tried to carry out the role without fear or favour to personalities on the left etc.

PatC only came to my attention for the first time in July 2006
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/77294?search_text=Peter...eston

His protests on the lists caused me to believe that he was the troll "Cynical". I didn't care who it was, but it was my first introduction to his monotonous trolling style. I believe his trolling escaped the attention of other editors because he'd leave the offensive, personalised stuff until several paragraph into a monotonously droll (and often repetetive) comment. The hotter things got on a thread (and the longer the therad got with more work to do if one was to disentangle it), the least interest anyone had in sorting it out. Seán Ryan was the first victim of this, as far as I know (i.e., the editors came to the conclusion that the named Seán Ryan always appeared to get involved in impenetrable rows with other (anonymous) posters, and then, occasionally, gave out on the list when he wasn't being defended.

Seán Ryan was a prolific and important reporter for wwwindymedia.ie, but was driven away by a combination of PatC's anonymous stalking, and the IIIC's unconstitutional disassociation with SR, Iosaf and ChrissM (another matter of the dysfunction of the collective, but for another time, maybe).

But, back to this Peter Preston thread in July 20006: PatC accused me on the lists of...wait for it...posting on a thread that I was editing. What followed was a sustained attack on me on the lists which lasted about a month. This attack included PatC actually calling me repeatedly, "a rogue editor". Eventually, the "Mouse" commenteer who PatC had accused me of being, identified herself through a neutral channel, and proved 100% that PatC was wrong in his accusation. He refused to apologise, and there was no sanction against him. During the whole time of my trying to defend myself, I never personalised the situation, but tried to deal what whatever spurious points were being thrown at me.

Not for the first time with PatC, an all-out attack on the collective (or one of its members), was put down to being a 'flame-war' - see the thread of his nomination as editor in January 2009.

Once I'd been vindicated at the end of August, I was worn out and had to take a month's break from editing.

In early September, 2006, the list guidelines were suspended for a thread (which I think has long since been hidden), which discussed the way forward for www.indymedia.ie, the IIIC and the IMC. Without telling members of the collective, such as myself, Chekov had the monitor turned, and announced some way down the thread that PatC was engaged in sock-puppetry - arguing with himself.

On the thread of the minutes of an IMC conference in the middle of September 2006, PatC decided that he'd be better off using his own name, but amazingly, the trolling and insults were as bad as ever.
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/78476?condense_comments...false

In October 2006, the evening before the big conference to ratify the 'Constitution', Patrick Corcoran threatened me on the lists with violence if I showed up for the meeting, saying that he was getting his machettie ready and that it was good to know where I would be.

There was no sanction for this, really. At the meeting, it was condemned after I raised it, but as far as I remember, the condemnation never made it to the final record of the minutes.

I was informed by people who had been on the lists before me, that he had made a similar threat against someone else (named) a year or two before. It was just laughed off.

PatC ignored the new list etiquette where I was concerned and continued to try to bully me. He did receive a 24-hour ban from the lists in November, but when he continued as before, nothing happened. I actually made a proposal that the list-moderator be instructed to ban him for seven days, but on reading the labarynthine constitution, I found that my request had some technical problem, and had to withdraw it.

He was a large reason for my leaving the IIIC, not least, because I no longer had the same trust in the collective; or at least, that the respect was not reciprocated.

In hindsight, I think that PatC was treated with kit gloves and allowed to abuse me continuously, because he was higher up in the cuidos ranks in real world left politics (of Dublin). This is probably why more lenience was given, or a blind eye turned to him elsewhere.

The key here, is that the nature of his trolling made his damage difficult to detect by a casual onlooker, but he was very effective nonetheless. Looking at his patterns (re cluster of posts, style of trolling and content), I conservatively estimated that he was responsible for about 30% of the trolling (i.e., comment-hides) that I'd have to make.

There's no reason why he would have desisted once I left! There's no evidence that anyone else in the job ever cottoned on to his trolling excesses; hence, he was made an moderator in February 2009 - a mistake which certainly compounded his pre-existent threat to the project.

This has just been a really quick summary to show that PatC was more influential than Terence thinks. In fact, Terence was a member of the collective for all of this time. He did abstain in PatC's nomination (having opposed the original motion of unfettered membership), but no lessons had been learnt. How could there be when the obvious wasn't even seen at the time I was there?

The pressure of the group can cause people to put aside their misgivings, and I witnessed groupthink at work in the IIC on several occasions (generally along the lines of in-group/out-group and being uncritical of certain valuable members to the point that their proposals were always carried).

Terence, in my research on PatC in the lists, I came across a discussion/debate on the lists involving heads from other indymedias two. It was about the dangers of embedding YouTube links. Your suggestion that GCHQ or NSA already had anything they wanted in terms of net-traffic information was scoffed at, and were even called 'paranoid', I think. Prescient, indeed, spot on you were. I hope your expert trend-spotting analysis re imc.ie is not gainsaid, despite your closeness to and expertise on the project.

I'll put off all further data-analysis until I've written ideas for the future in another comment.

by Terence (personal capacity) Sun Nov 24, 2013 23:07

The graph attached -click on to enlarge, shows the number of comments per month on Indymedia since almost the start. The reason this is published is because it is probably a good index of traffic whereas traffic figures themselves can be hard to work with as things like Google Bot and Bing Bot can make up a large fraction of traffic. So going with comments, we can see Indymedia's popularity peaked quickly in 2003 around the time of the Iraq War when there were worldwide protests. There was lots of activity at this time. A second broader peak was around 2006 and then the long decline to the present day started. At the current rate Indymedia Ireland will cease to exist shortly.

The question raised here is whether Pat C had a role in this decline. Even though he became an editor and unpopular one too in Feb 2009, it is clear the decline was already well under way. The question has also been asked as to whether he was an informant or at least acted on behalf of the state to help destroy the site. Certainly this is a real possibility and it is highly likely that the delay in his case going to court of 4 years explains this and he may have thought that if he helped the state then he might avoid court. In fact they could have easily threatend him with a very long jail sentence if he didn't. This sort of thing happens time and time again all over the world so there is absolutely no reason it isn't the case here. But the puzzle is that he eventually did go to court and even appeared in the newspapers which ensured maximum exposure and complete destruction of his credibility and any social standing that he have had and so if he was co-operating then why did this happen?

One conclusion could be that the Left in Ireland is so ineffective that he generated little information of value that the state was not already aware of and they decided not to waste any more time and decided to hang him out to dry and if that was done right they might even get to kill of Indymedia into the bargain. One could speculate that it was arranged he would get off going to jail, so as to stir up even more controversary and maximise the exposure and damage. A good measure of this whether the signatures against the judge dies a death quickly which I assume it has. There are many decent and committed people in the Left in Ireland with good intentions etc but given it has achieved so little and attracts so few and has largely a minor role in society with not much credibility, we can only conclude that the state has the Left sowen up pretty good, as good as the Soviet state had of any opposition in Russia in its day. Again as we know from other places and times, the state always has many players in the game and has all the time and their involvement never ends.

Returning to the decline of Indymedia, then a better way to view it is in terms of the many forms of 'attack' and methods of undermining it. The ideal way to operate is not to have an open offensive but to do it in such a way it seems almost normal so that it is difficult to identify the real attackers with the result being you can seem paranoid and it is almost impossible to obtain proof and join the dots. These types of 'social' attack are hallmarks of the COINTELPRO operations both past and present. As anyone who has followed Indymedia over the years will know it has suffered a long string of disruptive trolls and other individuals. There is no way of telling who or what was geninue although if one had time, looking for patterns may help. In the Pat C saga, we have one case where it is pretty clear given the surrounding context. We must also accept that Indymedia may have declined for good reason and would have happened anyhow because of the group dynamics of the people using it and changes in the nature of the Internet itself and that the role, if any, of the state, was to help nudge it in the direction it was going anyhow. Nobody is likely to get any proof for their theories no matter what they think, but the best we can do is to weigh up the probabilities and consider what is most likely and even this will be a subjective thing.

In the last decade or so some of the key changes on the Internet have been the advent of blogs, free software for quickly building your own websites and forums, YouTube and of course Facebook and Twitter. There are now a huge number of groups on Facebook trying to organise their activism through it. These are the sort of people who might have used Indymedia in the past because at one point it was sort of a one-stop shop. The problem for these people was that once they submitted something to Indymedia, they effectively lost control. For people writing articles, keeping it on your own site or blog, allows them to retain control of moderation. I'd say this is a fairly strong incentive. For the networking aspects Facebook is much more effective at this type of thing because it already has and knows all the networks and relationships amongst it users and can automatically notify users of updates and provide links although given its purpose is to make money then this aim will be subverted to some degree. Recently an analysis of Facebook has shown it is now far less effective for posting events and users get directed to more commercial types of pages. There is also a distinct possibility that a large fraction of Facebook's revenue comes from Intelligence black budgets because it is a system made in heaven for intelligence services. In the long run, using Facebook is bound to have very negative effects and is probably doing so already except we can't see the true extent of them.

Click on to enlarge

by RobbieS Sun Nov 24, 2013 16:29

With screen-readers, it appears that Oscailt thinks that pressing the Enter Key is a command to move the cursor out of the text entry field, hence somewhere along the line my 1 and 2 disappeared. Yes, wageslave, moderators should only edit in threads that they are not involved in - except in exceptional cases. PC seemed to treat it as the norm. Such moderator action should be prohibited as a red-card offence, except in emergencies. In this thread, for instance, with the shortage of moderators and given the subject-matter and importance of hiding the worst trolls, all editors might be expected to add comments, and give lacitude to other contributors. There is precedence for this going way back. My second point was the problem of named individuals receiving personalised abuse by anonymous commenters. This is particularly bad when the authors of stories (the lifeblood of indymedia) are the targets of this abuse under their stories. There should be zero tolerance for this, always.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Sun Nov 24, 2013 15:37

Yes Robbie, I agree. It was a constant battle to try to rein in P.C.'s excesses and his sock puppetry / moderation of threads he was a part of. I was not exactly person of the month here myself much of the time, so nobody really listened to me very much on this or any other subject

I was not aware of the conditions put on P.C.'s admission to the moderators group by ec. If I had been I would have certainly raised the issue. Especially after his behaviour on our previous "moderation thread" at which time I was calling strongly for his dismissal as a moderator through back channels.

If Ciaron would like, I will revisit the "good friday" thread and unhide any responses hidden by P.C. when he was also actively taking part in the thread.

by RobbieS Sun Nov 24, 2013 14:57

The Good Friday thread raises two more important questions which should remain as primary concerns for the IIIC.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Sun Nov 24, 2013 10:34

If you observe how Italians drive, you will see how seriously they take rules.
How much has this (obssession with foibles etc.) been transferred from the Irish (colonised) church
to the Irish (colonised) left?
Dunno? Worth tihinking about tho.

Obviously the church in Ireland the church has fell from such a height because they put
all their ethical chips on sexual ethics (ignoring economic ethics, torture flights through shannon etc etc)

So Ireland throws the spiritual baby out with the religious bath water and embraces consumerism for
identity and that's progress?

Yes, Interesting points. Vapid consumerism is definitely not progress in my book.

Not sure if I will make it to this on 29th I rarely visit Dublin:
https://www.indymedia.ie/article/104272

But if not, please do give a big thank you to the Manning family to pass on to Chelsea on behalf of the volunteers here at Indymedia, for all she has done for us. Chelsea is a modern hero.
rgds
Wageslave

by Ciaron Sun Nov 24, 2013 07:10

"it was me that had to apologise to Ciaron, "

apology accepted quite some time ago.
People waitng for an apology fro me for vaious misbehaviour having taken a number and patiently queuing .
The queue stretches around the corner.

Shit happens, we have to come up with processes to deal with predicatble minsunderstandings,
conflicts etc.
"Abandon your perfect offering, everything has a crack in it that;s how the light gets in"
- L. Cohen

An Italian high school teacher told me once holding his hand high
"The Irish hold up perfection like that and beat themselves up all their lives for not reaching it.
Holding his hand up to the same level he said "Italians hold up perfection too"
then he lowerd his hand half way down and said,
"but they say, hey that's not bad either"

As some one observed about the Cathoic Chursh
"the rules are written by southern Europeans and applied by northern Europeans"

If you observe how Italians drive, you will see how seriously they take rules.
How much has this (obssession with foibles etc.) been transferred from the Irish (colonised) church
to the Irish (colonised) left?
Dunno? Worth tihinking about tho.

Obviously the church in Ireland the church has fell from such a height because they put
all their ethical chips on sexual ethics (ignoring economic ethics, torture flights through shannon etc etc)

So Ieland throws the spiritual baby out with the religious bath water and embraces consumerism for
identity and that's progress?

if you wanna jump the queue I will be back in Dublin this week for several daze with the Manning family.

Solidarity with those trying to keep Irish indymedia afloat and relevant!

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Sat Nov 23, 2013 15:06

For the record, a very unpleasant troll (hidden) intent on unproductively attacking the remaining volunteers on the site has just insinuated that I am using the sock "ohDearyMe". This is, of course, a complete lie intended to derail a very useful and productive thread. Please ignore this troll. (you can check his disgusting post out in the hidden articles if you wish)

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Sat Nov 23, 2013 14:53

Opus Diablos was NOT a P.C. sock. But he did put off quite a few users it seems. and P.C. was certainly very sympathetic to this poster and defended him from moderation (by me) on several occasions it's true.
I believe my moderation and a short ban I imposed on opus was the reason he stopped posting. Candidly I quite liked his wordplay sometimes but he swamped every single thread with his musings, never posted an actual article and was very often a nuisance.

Jerry Cornelius was definitely a P.C. sock. Jerry Cornelius was a character from Michael Moorcock stories. P.C. quite liked sci fi I believe. He had quite a few socks. Perhaps we will collate some of them and post a list.

Regarding religion:
Just because P.C. turned out to be a kiddie porn downloader, does not excuse the many "sins" perpetrated in the name of religion. Many religious people are guilty of (even worse) crimes in this area too.

I have posted against religion on occasion, and I confess to being foolishly drawn into some of P.C.'s attacks on religion too. However rabid atheist as I may be, I was most unhappy with P.C's attacks on Ciaron and had a huge spat with P.C. over it through the back channels. I managed to wring some sort of grudging apology out of him, but in the end as usual it was me that had to apologise to Ciaron, of whose activism I am a big fan, religious or not. Religion should be open to criticism like any other concepts, but there is a balance to be struck. We went over the line on several occasions. I will note that after the Ciaron thread, I am much more aware of this line. Apologies again Ciaron for that whole episode.

That said Joe, no matter what you say, I still don't consider religion to be equivalent to race. (It's probably more like a franchise!) I can change my religion tomorrow, but I can't change my race. We should be free to criticise dogma conceptually while standing up for the rights of people who believe in such dogma. There is no contradiction there for me. But I have learned my lesson here and more sensitivity should be shown and any such "conceptual discussions" should never be to the point of alienating activists from using this site freely.

Regarding Hugh. I have huge sympathy for Asbestosis sufferers and was the mod that featurised the previous article about ringaskiddy / raybestos etc. However Hugh was very focussed on Attic and we were under pressure of Being litigated against by them and had to tread carefully. Hugh insisted on making it about attic instead of the Actual victims and their stories. Then we had a sock puppet writing under several names on the thread. Who was genuine, and who was not?? To cap it all, we had differing ideas on how to moderate it. Quite honestly Hugh's thread was a moderators nightmare.

In the interests of greater transparency and interaction with users, I'm happy to respond to posters Re: P.C. and his activities on this site and FWIW to give a personal capacity individual mod perspective but please don't drift too far off topic here...

by OhDearyMe Sat Nov 23, 2013 00:17

Was "opus diablos" a sockpuppet of Pat Corcorans?

I suspect he was

he shared a hell of a lot in terms of biases and also in terms of how he operated.

Slimy, very dishonest in his tactics and basically a time-wasting troll. Sounded to me like the very twin of Pat Corcoran

Maybe I'm wrong - maybe my own bias is showing

Frequently, during his self-pitying many many rants against the church, I pointed out to Diablos that the church couldn’t have done what it did were it not for the collusion of the State.

Diablos not only seemed uninterested but was actively hostile whenever I pointed this out to him

He CLAIMED to be a victim of Clerical Paedophilia, (I never believed him in that regard simply because I found him to be incredibly dishonest and severely lacking in integrity) so one would think that he might have been interested in the notion that maybe the State shared some culpability regarding the immunity that the Church Paedophiles seemed to enjoy over many many decades, but he was in fact severely actively hostile whenever I brought up the subject of State culpability, frequently accusing me of saying so in order to protect the Church, which I found seriously weird.

If you'd been molested as a kid by clerics and the State had protected them, as it undoubtedly did, wouldn't YOU want to make sure that they shared some of the blame.

Apparently NOT, according to the despicable Opus - rant rant non-stop against the church and viciously attack anyone that pointed out that maybe, just maybe, the State had to share some of the blame.

by RobbieS Fri Nov 22, 2013 22:16

I recognized 'Jerry Cornelius' (an alias of Patrick Corcoran's, as being one of the primary trolls in that Good Friday thread in April 2011. He was clearly trolling anonymously and abusing his moderating priveleges to hide and stifle attempts of refutation and attempts to put the thread back on topic.

More insulting yet, PC changes Jerry Cornelius to JC (an allusion to Jesus Christ, I suppose) for the second half of the thread.

I wrote to the lists, saying I recognized this persistent abuser/troll as being PC. I responded by saying I couldn't prove it unless I was in cahoots with an editor who had the monitors on (or some such).

I replied, supplying evidence that 'Jerry Cornelius' was Patrick Corcoran from two old email admissions on the lists and from one inadvertent admission (2006).

The IIIC did nothing about this, despite it being a condition in ec's proposal which gave him moderator status on February 9th 2009, that Pat C would not edit on any threads on which he had any other involvement. ec was more concerned in this diluted proposal, that PatC would have absolutely no access to Features editing.

ec and Terence were both on the IIIC in Jan/Feb 2009 and should have retained the institutional memory of Pat C's haenus trolling and list abuses (including threats of violence) from 2005, 2006 and 2007, at least.

I'll be providing data for much of this time.

by JoeMc Fri Nov 22, 2013 19:33

From my BAe-infiltration perspective , which I realise most here don't share , the Good Friday binge party advert depicting the crucified rebel slave Jesus in the crudest, cruelest way imaginable and then the nasty mean-spirited Christmas feature that followed it were deliberate provocations aimed at driving Christians off the site - specifically Ciaron. I pointed this out at the time but my comments were hidden by Corcoran . The "new atheists" like Wageslave who joined in Corcoran's Christian -bashing fun at the time were not intentionally being sectarian I'm sure , but sectarianism like any other form of racism is almost by definition unconscious . The same deliberately stirred-up shite that's been dividing Catholics and Protestants in this country for centuries ,using almost identically dirty mores (for Dawkins' fans the same filthy memes) - only this time coming from people who professed to being atheists .

It should be remembered as well that it was Corcoran who published the Danish anti-Muslim cartoon provocations here in 2005. That publication and the backing given to Corcoran by editors on the Iran issue drove anti-war Muslims like Bazooka Joe away forever - some of them into the camp of the extreme right unfortunately . Under this rat's protection , atheists , whose world view always used to be marked by expressions of genuine tolerance towards people of faith, started "mocking" both Christians and Muslims for their beliefs- sometimes using the notion of freedom of expression , or freedom of art (holy of holies) as an excuse for the most hateful mockery . I'm afraid that this could rebound badly on atheists and perhaps artists at some stage .

by Ciaron Fri Nov 22, 2013 16:56

I pretty much disengaged from regular use of this site after P.C. set a rat trap for me in the
great Crucifixion debate of Easter 2011.

PC's sock puppetry and deleting responses that I wasted time writing .
was quite a head fuck.

In terms of being censored on the "libertarian left"
I think I prefer dodging pint glasses in Liverpool
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/11/513614.html

& engaging the historic enemy of self entitled space invading Brits at
London Anarchist Bookfair
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/10/513250.html
on the rocky road out if Dublin.

Hope you can revive the site in these deflated times
It has had a significant role in Ireland
which must be one of the most centralised mainstream media environments in the world?

by Joe Mc Fri Nov 22, 2013 16:42

Robbie .I'm not clear what you meant in the scenario you presented for why it took four years to prosecute Cocoran .
"imo. this is moer likely than deal-brokering between this excerable individual and the authorities." what specifically is more likely?

There's nothing in what you wrote in the preceding two or three sentences that explains a "more likely" scenario than the rat one . Wageslave is fond of invoking Occam , but doesn't apply his razor to help explain her former colleague's behaviour . He was a fink being protected to spy on the left . That's the simplest way of explaining Corcoran's Modus Operandi , isn't it ?

It isn't possible for one person to work out with any accuracy the exact reason why the police decided to charge Corcoran after that amount of time . There are procedures that have to be followed following a complaint . In this case Corcoran's activities were brought to,the attention of the cops by work colleagues. They do sometimes have to prosecute touts eventually under such circumstances. But he had been largely exposed as a tout by the time he was arrested anyway. Most people on the left in Dublin at least suspected him , smelt that there wa something rotten about him . Indymedia's traffic had slowed to a trickle , people like Oh Deary had sussed out his various disguises and manipulations . He was of no further use to the authorities.

On the subject of the other two editors , I do think they are responsible for covering up for Corcoran down the years , and also for slandering me in his defence . But what happened to me on a personal level is insignificant compared to what happened to Hugh Murphy , so I keep a sense of proportion in that regard. I'm really more interested in an objective account of what went on than on vilifying moderators past or present or on self-vindication . This affair needs to be investigated ;for that indymedia obviously needs some fresh blood . A good way to re-launch the site perhaps ?

by OhDearyMe Fri Nov 22, 2013 14:36

it was actions such as his spamming as "FLD" in that thread that made me begin to suspect that he had some hidden agenda

IMO Frontline Defenders are clearly just another of the many NATO-backed fake "Human Rights" NGO's that NATO uses for "Soft Power" Projection purposes.

one sees them all over the place now

by OhDearyMe Fri Nov 22, 2013 14:21

Perhaps wageslave could now remove the sea of spam that Corocroan posted, under the name "FLD" in that thread. It would certainly clean it up a good bit and make it more readable.

by OhDearyMe Fri Nov 22, 2013 14:13

Was a combination of sock-puppetry and spamming with large amounts of posts which were nothing more than cut+pasted info from elsewhere

When something appeared that he did not like he would make tons of posts in the thread in order to hide the comment he did not like in a sea of spam

Here is an example of that tactic by Corcoran in operation - In this thread he posted as "I" and "FLD" (and possibly other sockpuppets) as you can see he basically drowned good info in a sea of spam http://www.indymedia.ie/article/101677?search_text=fron...nders

The collective was informed of his sockpuppetry but did nothing about it

by OhDearyMe Fri Nov 22, 2013 14:01

Hey, welcome back. Thanks for the extra details. An analysis of P.C.'s activities as a moderator might certainly prove interesting at this point.

It certainly would and is overdue - and not only the collective could learn something useful from it.

It would be interesting to see how a deceptive person operates, patterns of behaviour etc.

One of the methods by which Corcoran censored was by removing comments he disagreed with, but could find no legitimate grounds for censoring, and the quietly returning them to the thread days or weeks later. IMO it was so that if someone complained he could then claim that he either did not censor them or that he did but later, being the fair chap that his is, re-considered. That way the conversation would move on, people would not notice the censorship, so relevant points would be left out of the debate, but would appear to the casual observer to have never been censored in the first place

Another method he used was to censor and then somehow make sure that no record of his censorship appeared in the lists or on the "hidden articles" page. That way not only did he censor commentary but also censored the evidence of that censorship

The man was as devious as the day is long.

His claims regarding only having DL'd Manga etc shoud be regarded with deep suspicion in light of his obvios penchant for all-round deviousness

by RobbieS Fri Nov 22, 2013 13:53

@Joe:
1. Why would he have been ever arrested then? i.e., why wouldn't the authorities have continued to let him go on being a tout. Remember that one postulate that you put was that his sentence might have been more leniant because of a possible spy-role, so one might have expected his purported information to have been of some (continued) value for such a reward.

2. I'm glad you've clarified that you think that the two main moderators are clean, so-to-speak, because any inuendo to the contrary would be extremely unfair and contemptable. But there were other questions which I needn't bother with now, that should have dispelled any such malodorous lurkings in the back of minds.

@wageslave: Your welcome is much appreciated, and means a lot.
Unfortuneately, I am not, currently, in a position to contribute in the same way I did (either before or after I became a moderator). I with the IIIC all the very best though in its regrowth, and hope the salutory lessons have been learnt by all the members. Yes, honey is better than vinegar for catching flies, and the site should be a media platform for the voiceless in particular, and not a site of competing editorial political or right-on doctrines.

The them-and-us culture that could be discernable, and that was just between elements of the collective and the site-contributors, has been very corrosive for the project, imo. Perhaps, a certain amount of that is inevitable with any group/institution, but I believe there is a sustainable level of trust possible between the collective and the (other) contributors which should lead to a more thriving site-community. I admit, this seems a bit wishy-washy, but I have some ideas I'll send to the lists, and if they're useful, that's great.

My history, unfortuneately, will only be a potted one, since I've only been on the main list since shortly after I resigned.. Also, I rely on screen-reading technology which slows accessibility to info, somewhat, and restricts it at times. I've more suggestions on how this accessibility might be improved (if volunteers have the time to implemen)t.

My history will be from 2006-2011: it will be factual, but, of course, the selection has to be subjective. So extensive have his miscrescences been, that, I believe, many such histories could be done without yet fathoming the depth of damage and ill-will that Patrick Corcoran has caused down the years on www.indymedia.ie and on the IIIC lists.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Fri Nov 22, 2013 12:48

@Hugh:
I agree that P.C. should be monitored, should go on the sex offenders list and should never be allowed to work with children. Ever!

But I don't think he should be imprisoned and treated now as if he was a full blown real life child sex abuser at this point. Nobody knows that for certain he will go on to abuse in real life the future. The experts consulted would seem to think not. But he is a deceptive individual as we have all discovered to our cost.

I do completely agree with you if your point is just that precautionary monitoring measures should be taken and he should never be in a position to work with children in future.

If this was indeed all you wanted to say then I really wish you had just said it clearly and succinctly in one line as I have above instead of going about it in such a roundabout fashion.

@Robbie:
Hey, welcome back. Thanks for the extra details. An analysis of P.C.'s activities as a moderator might certainly prove interesting at this point. Looking forward to further posts from you :-) I think It's highly unlikely that P.C. would try to become a moderator again under a pseudonym. It is established procedure that some / all of the other editors always meet new candidates face to face at least once before they come on board. But I think it's fair to say that we will be more careful choosing future moderators after this debacle!

by JoeMc Fri Nov 22, 2013 12:21

But there has obviously been some sort of deal done , Robbie .; Corcoran was certainly execrable but he was more than just an individual . Anne MacShane is a solicitor and Contrarian obviously knows a lot about the workings of the law , perhaps they'd care to comment on the time lapse on what should have been a straight-forward prosecution . The learned experts I’ve consulted on this legal matter –admittedly these people aren’t part of the prosecution / defence/judge continuum - all say that Corcoran is definitely a rat .

Anne seems to think that my comments here are more dangerous to her group than the fact that the Gardai have known for years that her henchman in the HOPIeire group is a paedophile. I’ve called Corcoran a tout and a rat , but others here don’t agree . Should we perhaps ask the Ombudsman why the gardai left Corcoran to control and manipulate this website and involve himself so much with left-wing causes in this country ? The top cop in the country warned just two days ago that ,if the gardai were forced to reveal their touts to the Ombudsman , there would be “bodies in the street.”

According to Wednesday’s Examiner, Garda chief Martin Callinan said he “needed reassurance on certain disclosures to the ombudsman relating to informants and warned there could be mass assassinations if the force’s watchdog was given unfettered access to classified records”. http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/calli....html

by RobbieS - IIIC moderator Feb 2006 - Feb 2007 Fri Nov 22, 2013 11:32

"When Patrick Corcoran was finally located and arrested in January
2012, he had stashed in his new abode, 21 child pornography videos and
about a thousand more images (according to the Irish Indo article).
imo, this further suggests that the garda visit to his Longford House
abode and the consequent arrest were a surprise to him, and therefore,
that he expected to get away with it and to be able to continue as
before.

the IIIC should be ware of him attempting to try the same as troll and
post-reporter on www.indymedia.ie in future.  He has shown that he has
a brass neck, and as such, may well try this.

by JoeMc Fri Nov 22, 2013 11:31

I haven't received any email from you. Could you quote the defamatory words I have supposedly written that you want me to retract ?

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:59

That's exactly why I'm giving you so much leeway Joe. Because you were treated badly and wrongly accused by P.C.and others in the past and comments were made about you which were completely unfair in hindsight. I tried to rectify some of it previously. Now that your nemesis P.C. is gone, I'd like to draw a line under all this and start afresh.

However, you must concede that you acted pretty badly at times yourself too though, throughout this whole affair, although I can understand much of your anger, given the false accusations levelled at you. But even before those unfounded accusations you were busy stirring things weren't you?

And you certainly gave P.C. as good as you got and regularly went out of your way to make life difficult for all the moderators here, hence drawing the ire of other moderators too at times.

Wrongs were perpetrated on both sides here. But, leaving aside some of the rather paranoid unfounded bits, I think you have also made some valuable and informative posts to the site, and ultimately we all want the same things here, a decent independent media site, social justice etc etc.

I am just going through some of the internal emails we exchanged in the past about P.C.'s behaviour as a moderator here and I wish I could share some of them. It would show you what we were thinking about all this at the time. You might be quite surprised.

Anyway, Joe, moving on, lets try to work together towards our common worthwhile goals in future and not fight ok?

peace???

by RobbieS - a moderator with IIIC from Feb 2006 - Feb 2007 Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:57

Firstly, as someone who suffered frequent, sustained, and unprovoked abuse, insults and threats from Patrick Corcoran, and someone who tried to highlight the dangers of this scum to anyone who would hear - but all to know avail at the time - I feel vindicated, but I still feel queazy just thinking about this latest episode in his depravity.

For the first time his he first attacked me in August 2006, I feel that I have the oppertunity of reasonable right of reply. The best way I can do this is in another post which I've been preparing whenever possible, for the past week - a potted history of his salient abuses with times and most interesting quotes against his pet targets in particular.

But for now, The question has been brought up about the delay in arrest and prosecution

On first reading the last week's Irish Independent article, I assumed:
a). it seems that he'd only attempted illegal downloads at work, but had successfully downloaded nearly 6,000 images at home. On being informed that he'd been caught rapid in his workplace re attempts to download, he wasn't going to even to go near his home on the NCR for fear of being arrested for the workplace stuff, nor was he likely to go back to work.

b).even though a warrant for a search of his home would take some time, he calculated that it would be safer to leave everything at home and start completely afresh, and thus be untraceable. He may have been counting on the relative lack of data-sharing among government departments at the time to make it worth while keeping his old name.

c). An appartment in Longford House, Spencer Dock costs E300,000 today, but was cheaper, somewhat (perh. even E200,000 at the time). He could be just renting, of course. Either way, Longford House is safe enough, because there's security and a concierge there.

imo. this is moer likely than deal-brokering between this excerable individual and the authorities.

Insum: as on www.indymedia.ie, he was arrogant enough to think that he'd remain unaccountable for his wrongdoings.

p.s. if anyone knows his precise address, I'd appreciate an email (anonymously, of course), so that I can pursue a civil remedy against him for an outrageous defamation he perpertrated against me on the lists in May 2010. My regular email is saoririseoir@gmail.com

by Hugh Murphy - Sackedbymyunion Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:54

Wageslave,

Thank you for stating that comments later in your post were meant to be more general, not aimed specifically at me - but then you do attack me and say I'm starting to annoy you, how terrible. You are blindly ignoring that the harrowing points I raised were in fact real cases and not hypothetical ones. How can you say that these are unrelated to Corcoran when I pointed out - that the mother in in question stated that her daughter's abuse started off with the abuser getting the abused child to cut out Page three girls which led on to photographs of a disgusting nature.

DO YOU NOT SEE THE CONNECTION or is it a case of there are none so blind as those who will not see - this led to "actual abuse" and you cannot deny that Corcoran was convicted of downloading illegal pictures of children. Please drop the waffle about 'future crimes' and deal with the present, HOW can you know - ne his record - that he will not go on to abuse children? What I am saying is he must be watched and never left alone with children. How can you say the facts I raised are unrelated, and are the deeds of completely different people - when it is their perversions that are related.

Furthermore, I am not self righteousness, nor am I cynical and neither should I be ashamed of myself,
I do not and did not plug my own work and I find even answering this distasetful - BECAUSE it is you who is "exploiting this serious thread and the harrowing suffering of children" to pretend that Corcoran is' a wronged old man who deserves a second chance'. I believe it was 7,000 chances that Corcoran got although I may be wrong and it could be more.

I am on no slippery slope, and I as I said to you before, when you have children of your own you will have a very different viewpoint. And yes - I am completely focused on what Corcoran did. This is - I think is what is annoying you. The rest of you post is just waffle and not worth answering.

Regards

Hugh Murphy

by Anne McShane - Hopi Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:36

Wageslave I can see that you are making a fine attempt to inject some objective reasoning into this debate and counter the smears and defamation. I again repeat my point that the allegations in relation to Hopi that were made by Joe McIvor against Hopi and Yassamine Mather are very serious both for us as individuals and the lives of other people. There are already problems for people. Making groundless defamatory allegations of the kind that he has made has very serious consequences. It is not a game where people's reputations and the safety of their relatives can be put at stake. This site is of course available to anyone in the world. I have asked Joe McIvor to retract the allegations and he has not done so. Legal advice is now being obtained.

by JoeMc Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:20

I said it before and I'll say it again , I'm sorry if you were offended . Here -just off the top of my head - are some of the very kind labels that Indymedia's honey-tongued moderators have hung on me over the past few years :

stalker , agent, predator , pervert, liar , nutter , deranged troll, mossad agent ...... mild aspergers syndrome sufferer ! I'm really not interested in catching flies btw after just catching such a huge stinking rat .

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Fri Nov 22, 2013 09:43

@Joe
Ok fine. Since you retracted your comments so gracefully (hah!!) I might forgive you for blatantly implying in public that I was a cop and a paedophile sympathiser. Now please stop giving us so much grief Joe. Remember you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. You can make exactly the same points politely without the defamatory innuendo, or rubbing everyone up the wrong way so much like you often tend to do. And people would listen more as a result. Your nemesis has departed. Perhaps you should take the opportunity to hit the reset button and try to get along here. Work with us not against us?.

Rather than just making speculative posts, Why not go do some proper research with the groups you mentioned etc, and the court records. Try and dig up some actual hard evidence for your theory. Then publish it here as a proper article. If indeed true, you would be doing us all a service. It would be the Irish version of the Kennedy stone affair. A big breaking scandal about Irish political policing and justice. I can see the headline now: "Irish state deliberately lets off paedophile so it can spy on democratic protesters".You'd be famous. Frankly I don't hold out any hope of such hard evidence turning up though. But If you do find some then I can't really argue with that can I?

@ Contrarian
Thanks for injecting a little objectivity and clarity here. I must confess It's worrying when the self confessed zionist seems the most reasonable poster on the thread! ;-)

The phrase "lonely old man" was used by Hugh and I only echoed it in response to his post. Yes It's probably much too sympathetic a description of P.C., I agree.


@Hugh
The points later in my post were meant to be more general, not aimed specifically at you at all.
With all due respect, you are starting to annoy me now. You bring in these other admittedly harrowing yet completely unrelated cases of actual child abuse, and use them to infer that somehow because these cases happened once, therefore P.C., who was convicted of downloading illegal pictures of children, not actual abuse and of whom the court (and garda / qualified psychologist) said that there was no question of any actual abuse or likelihood of same, will inevitably do similar things in the future, therefore I am some kind of paedophile sympathiser for suggesting that people be tried for what they actually did do as opposed to some tom cruise minority report "futurecrimes" based on the unrelated deeds of completely different people.

Then in the midst of all this self righteousness, innuendo and certainty about the futurecrimes you know people WILL commit, you then start plugging your own work and hinting about your own cause. How cynical. You should be ashamed of yourself. Exploiting this serious thread and the harrowing suffering of children in this way to plug your work and your cause!

Ok, lets run with your idea of justice for a moment and carry it to it's logical conclusion:
"I think we should we arrest you and imprison you now for the futurecrime of killing the head of the trade union Jack O'Connor. You know you've thought of it. And after all, I know for certain you will kill him. Because that is what all wronged disgruntled workers inevitably do. I can cite the case of Joe bloggs who once shot his boss because he did x and ruined his life. Now thus far you are only guilty of a little public defamation, but we all know that it's inevitable that you will progress to take the next step as all wronged disgruntled workers do, so we had better arrest you now and put you away for life for murder. It's the only way. "

Now you are probably annoyed and thinking that my example and my previous suggestion of self promotion are offside but then again you yourself seemed quite happy to imply that I was some sort of paedophile sympathiser (because I don't believe in being part of daily mail type "virtual lynch mobs" or convicting people for "futurecrime"?) and in your eyes that was perfectly ok, so I figured the gloves were off here. Don't be surprised if people get irked and you get a little pushback when you imply such things on a public forum. Anyway, digs aside, I hope you get the picture Hugh! These notions of justice of yours are a very slippery slope.

So to summarise: Keep the thinly veiled self promotion and plugs to yourself (you can include a related link at the end). And stop with the personal innuendo and trying to drum up even more hysteria. There is already more than enough on this particular subject as it is. A bit more clarity and rationality is really what's required here, not less. And we all agree here that what P.C. actually did is completely unacceptable, thats why he was immediately fired. So stop trying to imply otherwise

On a more general and separate note:
Too often it seems to me that we only allow ourselves to be outraged at certain things and not others which are no less outrageous in terms of the actual damage caused.

It reminds me of the 2 minute hate in Orwells 1984 where a hate figure was presented on a screen and for 2 minutes everyone raged, screamed and vented their anger. A structured safety valve to channel and release anger on cue that might otherwise be directed towards the oppressive big brother state.

I think often the media does similar things in our society. They present us with a hate figure. The tabloid front pages are filled with stories. The MSM rabbits on endlessly about them for weeks on end. We rail on twitter and on social media. We start petitions, email each other, build facebook pages etc. Then it's on to the next one. And often the hate figures are paedophiles, or celebrities making a name for themselves in some "bad boy" PR campaign. And we always seem to fall for it. Gary Glitter, Michael Jackson, Jimmy Saville etc etc etc.

Sure, these are all horrible human beings. But most of the people we really need to be angry at for most of the ills in our society remain quietly in the shadows, rarely bearing the brunt of this collective anger. I think we need to stop letting our collective anger be controlled manipulated and released on cue in this manner. It's a powerful weapon. We need to start directing and focussing it ourselves a bit more. And maybe more often at some of these other people hiding in the shadows who cause proportionally far more suffering, both to children and adults.

by Contrarian Thu Nov 21, 2013 19:37

I'm well aware of the change in modes of address that were brought in in 2006 or thereabouts. However, the change is optional, not compulsory and many practitioners still use the "m'lord" and "may it please your lordship" mullarkey. In fairness, the younger barristers are now taught to use "judge" as the correct form of address and most do, but some of the older ones are pretty set in their ways.

Likewise, barristers are no longer required to wear wigs in court and many don't. But again many still do. And some members of the judiciary take a dim view of the reforms and subtly discourage the new form of address and wigless legal eagles.

BTW, not since pre-independence have judges been referred to as Lord anything. Pre 2006, Pat C's barrister would have worn a wig and would used "m'lord" when addressing Judge Nolan. The wig is now optional and (s)he may address the same Judge Nolan simply as "judge". Clear?

by Anne McShane - Hopi Thu Nov 21, 2013 19:35

I am just responding to the very serious and scurrilous allegations made by Joe McIvor. I have written to him directly and asked him to withdraw the allegations that Hands off the People of Iran campaign is being run by British aerospace. Joe clearly has an an agenda to undermine the credibility of our campaign motivated by a very dubious attitude.
Hopi is an anti imperialist campaign and has consistently opposed all western intervention in Iran. We have a principled record of doing so. Look at our website for details. Joe is spreading nasty defamatory allegations both against Yassamine Mather and our campaign here in Ireland. I have responded to him directly and want you all to know that we are not going to just ignore this nasty smear campaign by Joe McIvor. Anne

by JoeMc Thu Nov 21, 2013 19:14

Sorry if I was OTT with Wageslave ,it was nothing personal against a mod who always does try to be fair and has the decency to come here and respond to criticism . By the way Contrarian could do with going to court himself and listening to the titles of address they use nowadays . No more m'luddiing since 2006 . Patsy would have bowed and scraped and pleaded to Judge Nolan , not to Lord Nolan .

Judge Nolan , "the paedophile's friend" they are calling him on the new website set up for registering details about Irish sex criminals . Scumbags Who's Who , I think they call it .The leniency shown to Corcoran has shocked a lot of people . But as I said above, I don't want to turn this into a paedo hunt .

by Contrarian Thu Nov 21, 2013 18:09

..... Joe Mc's attack on wageslave is a bit OTT and undeserved. Quite a pity really as Joe makes many good points about moderation standards that should be addressed anyway, even if the P.C. thing never happened. It just underlines the point I've been trying to make for years here. You can't suppress dissent. This is the 21st century and people have got used to freedom of expression. If you censor posts in a heavy handed manner, the users get frustrated and resentful and those frustrations and resent will bubble up elsewhere on the site, probably in a way which damages the site. Then the mods get annoyed too, have a go at the poster and/or censor even more heavily and you got a classic vicious cycle. Textbook stuff. The JoeMc/Wageslave spat on this thread could be used as a case study to illustrate the point! Solution?? As always, ease up on the moderation and accept that points of view differing from your own have a right to be heard too. I know I probably sound like a scratched record on this, but I only bother saying it because I think the basic concept behind non-government, non-commercial independent media is a good one.

@wageslave
Perhaps it's an innate sympathy for a guy down on his luck, commendable as that is, but you're coming across as overly sympathetic to P.C. I found the phrase "lonely old man" a bit jarring, actually. FFS, he's only 53 years of age!! I'm nearly 53 myself and I'd be shocked if anybody called me an old man, lonely or otherwise! Seanie Fitz, Sean Quinn etc, are all well past 53 and I don't think anybody would excuse what they did on the grounds of age! And you're right; the financial criminals have caused vast damage to man, woman and child and deserve to be severely punished for it. But then, every sort of crime is treated with undue leniency in this country. White collar crime, rape and sexual assault, common assault all regularly attract non-custodial sentences or very brief custodial sentences. Burglary, which can be devastating for the victim, particularly if elderly, rarely merits a custodial sentence and virtually never for a first or second offence. The legal profession has made an industry out of pleading mitigating circumstances no matter what the defendants circumstances actually are. A day in the courts would open your eyes. You will hear plenty of:
"He comes from a good family m'lord and this has devastated him."
"He comes form a difficult background m'lord and had a troubled childhood."
"He's already lost his job and further punishment is unnecessary."
"He's holding down a job and this will help rehabilitate him if your lordship sees fit to impose a non-custodial sentence"
These and more are regularly trotted out and are swallowed by the judiciary, probably conscious of the fact that we're chronically short of prison space. And of course the ubiquitous "depression" that all defendents including P.C. claim to suffer from and medically unrefutable. It's enough to turn me into a cynic!

by Joe Mc Thu Nov 21, 2013 18:09

I’m not sure whether or not you or other members of the editorial board are cops Wageslave. I've heard a lot of people saying that though over the past few days and the possibility has crossed my mind . I have practically begged you to investigate Corocran for years but even now you’re going easy on somebody who is now clearly a rat .On balance I’d say in your case probably not a cop, because you’re too snooty , Terence probably not either because he does actually seem to believe some of the stuff he comes out with.

In 2008 I provided this site with plenty of hard evidence to establish that Yassamine Mather was working for the BAe-linked university department, but nobody wanted to even look at the evidence. I don’t think that this attitude has changed at all as evidenced by the fact that editors refuse to face up to the possibility let alone what for most people is the reality , of Pat Corcoran being a police informer.
Have you raised this matter outside of indymedia ireland as I asked ? Have you asked the Department of Justice to explain why the trial of Corcoran - who had admitted to possession of paedophile porn and who was “fully cooperating” with the gardai - was delayed four years ? Has it ever crossed your mind over the past week to approach a solicitor to seek damages for what Corocoran did to indymedia ireland while he was awaiting prosecution ? Or asked the Data Protection agency for an opinion ? Have you attempted to contact groups like AFA about him? You wrote in reply to Anne that Indymedia is a victim. But you’re not behaving as if you are victims. I don’t get any sense of outrage other than towards people raising legitimate questions . Your “sigh ......here we go again” title is typical .

by Hugh Murphy - Sackedbymyunion Thu Nov 21, 2013 17:53

Wageslave,

While you did not use the words your whole attitude was condescending and forgiving. Why have you ignored the first hand accounts I gave, that came straight from mothers of the abused children.
And that one father in particular started off by getting his daughter to cut out page three girls from the newspaper while he was grooming her. And then progressed to photos of the lot - including with animals. This -grooming - was so thorough that the young child actually wanted and asked for more.

THIS IS WHAT LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS OF CHILDREN LEADS TO - THANK GOD CORCORAN WAS STOPPED.

This child will have needed many years of psychiatric treatment to overcome what happened to her AND to overcome her own perceived guilt.

Wageslave, just what are you trying to suggest in your later paragraphs - that I don't care about the abuse of children? As you well know I have written a hard-hitting stage play about child abuse entitled 'DADDY'. Last year this received a rehearsed reading from Attic Studio and was very well received - although this happened while they were still fulfilling their stated aims of promoting New Writing. This mission statement can be read on their website - which they no longer adhere to. I won't go into the reasons here but they're well documented on other threads.

In conclusion, while you may think Corcoran has been punished enough I disagree - and if you had children of your own or had listened to the anguished cries from the mothers of abused children - who blamed themselves for not seeing what was going on - I think you'd agree with me.

Best regards

Hugh Murphy

by wageslave - (mod) Thu Nov 21, 2013 15:50

Just click on "show all comments" on the comments page

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Thu Nov 21, 2013 15:29

@Joe

Spit it out joe. What are you really saying here? That I'm a cop?

You really go out of your way to be an ass sometimes don't you? you are a master at twisting words to your own ends. I'll gladly entertain the notion that P.C. Was an agent provocateur if you can produce even one shred of hard evidence for this. I was actually the person who featurised the mark stone article so, contrary to your statements, I am always very happy to help rid activist movements of police or state infiltration whenever possible in my capacity as moderator on this site and outside. again I say, bring it on. You talk the talk now perhaps you might consider backing it up with hard evidence?

In spite of your unpleasant post i'll try To answer your actual queries:
(1)I was suggested as a candidate moderator to the collective by MarkC as a result of helping out on the lists, posting regularly and showing a sustained interest in the site as per the standard procedures
(2)P.C. Claimed that many of the images he downloaded were manga in his short disingenuous apology email to the collective. that's where this bit of info comes from. That may be a lie of course
(3)yes P.C. Implied at the time that you were stalking him and may have phoned his workplace and informed them about his work as an activist and a moderator on this "anti state" site etc etc.and it may have contributed to him losing his job. In hindsight what a crock, I agree! But you were being quite a nuisance at the time and from past experience this kind of thing had happened before here so it was in that context that the story was floated.
(4)I don't think P.C. Is a "great guy". I think he is a lying two faced kiddie porn downloader who has done this site and many other decent organisations he was involved with a lot of damage by his actions.

some facts
I know little about P.C. Apart from our interactions about hidden posts and other site activities. I never met the person. I get most of my information from you it seems. For instance I found out from you about his activities when you posted about them on this site on thursday last. I was not aware until your post now that P.C. Had the means to buy an expensive apartment. I thought he was a low paid civil servant on a reduced pension after losing his job, who was well known in activist circles and who engaged with some worthy causes in the Cork/Dublin areas. that's about it.

Hey, since YOU seem to be the one who really knows so much about the guy, maybe you and P.C. were secret kiddie porn ring buddies and were a double act intent on destroying this site to get a reduced sentence or something eh Joe? Since anything goes on this thread it seems, why not that? I'm sure I could make a half decent case for it if I put my mind to it. As long as no hard evidence is ever required of course!

Now clearly I don't believe this to be the case Joe, but it seems no less reasonable than what you are implying about me now. That is why there is a requirement for actual evidence. See, it really is not very nice when people make unfounded smears, insinuations or allegations about you which have no basis in reality or for which ther is no actual hard evidence for in a public forum is it?. You of all people should realise this. Yet now here you are doing exactly the same thing to me as you objected so much to P.C. doing to you and which I apologised to you for (even though I didn't do it!). Talk about gratitude. And how very ironic indeed!

for the record (and Joe knows this well) I have defended Joe from P.C. And other moderators on this site on numerous occasions, in his own words I was the only moderator who called out P.C. On his baseless allegations against Joe and publicly apologised for these. Yet now I am P.C.'s greatest ally. go figure? You can't have it both ways. You really can be an ass Joe and just to let you know, I'm really starting to regret ever taking the time and effort to stand up for a muck stirrer like you on this site. And to think I even suggested you as a possible candidate for moderator.

I won't respond further to your transparent attempt to smear the remaining volunteers here and damage this site even further, but I will leave your post up to illustrate the kind of baseless slurs we have to put up with as volunteers on this site.

@Hugh
please do not misrepresent me.
I did not say that the pictures downloaded by P.C. Were "not even page three material". I said they were illegal images. To clarify, according to the independent article they were pictures of children from 8-14. according to P.C. himself in his brief apology email, many were manga, which are cartoons/illustrations and a grey area but also currently illegal. However, given his record of honesty with us, that might be another lie of course. There is no question in my mind that what this guy did was disgusting and wrong. Let there be no misunderstanding about that. It is indefensible behaviour. And I'm not defending it. To cap it off he has treated us pretty shoddily at this site too.

What there is a question about is whether we should act like the daily mirror mob in such cases and get out our torches and pitchforks and convict people of "future crime" as per the movie minority report. in my opinion we shouldn't.

I'll also point out how lenient we have been on financial terrorists who in practice have caused untold real misery to many many children in our society. Personally I wish we would get just as angry or more at these people as we seem to get about internet perverts! Or is it a case that you can destroy children's lives in any way you like to make a buck as long as you don't do it by taking pictures of them or molesting them?

by Joe Mc Thu Nov 21, 2013 13:31

The Latest Comments section hasn't been fully registering posts to this very important thread - Hugh Murphy's posts for instance .In fact , looking at the record on the Latest Comment section you'd get the impression that nobody commented on this statement apart from myself since it first appeared .Why is this happening ?

by JoeMcivor Thu Nov 21, 2013 13:02

He lied and span yarns , was a bit of a paedophille – very "complex" and all that , but Wageslave believes that Corcoran is basically a sound guy who is “genuinely interested” in the many left-wing causes he “ passionately” espouses ; a man who has lost so much over the past week shouldn't now be “witch hunted” by the likes of Hugh Murphy . Patsy indeed had a few personality problems , but haven't we all got “a few skeletons in the cupboard” and at some stage Pat -not a banned user please note - might even come here, fess up , give a high-five and say sorry to the readers and editors of indymedia ireland . That's if people aren't all so terribly horrible to him ," kicking him while he's down" . The poor chap joined indymedia with the very best of intentions after all and was always "passionately" engaged in the causes he supports." Etc , Etc

A week since Patrick Corcoran's conviction on child pornography charges , and after due consideration and consultation with his fellow moderators presumably , Wageslave has concluded that this “lonely old man “ is not a rat. Ok, but can people here be expected to go on the belief of somebody who has been such a faithful defender of Corocoran and his yarns down the years ? Corcoran bought a new apartment in one of the most prestigious areas of Dublin's Spencer Dock shortly after he was caught by the gardai and while he was out free on police bail . According to Wageslave just last year ,Pat Corcoran had “ no money to give anybody. He's poor just like the rest of us “ . I got no answer at all when I asked Wageslave to substantiate this.

While knowing full well that the site was getting a huge amount of hits a day before Corcoran came along as editor , Wageslave, (who was first proposed as a site moderator by Corcoran, perhaps?) - believes that the gardai wouldn't have been bothered about indymedia . Nor would the gardai be interested in Anti-fascist Action a group that Corocran was very much involved with , according to Wageslave's logic , nor in the republican and socialist demonstrations and meetings where Corocoran could always be seen on the periphery and sometimes as an organizer. The gardia wouldn't be interested in other left anti-establishment causes that this lonely old man took a keen interest in - the pro-choice movement , Seomrai Spraoi , Shell to Sea , the Anti-War Movement . They wouldn't be in the least interested in balaclave-wearing animal rights activists - that's all “a little far fetched” for Wageslave .When an article was published here in 2010 showing how police had infiltrated the UK indymedia networkt through “animal rights” provocateurs , Corocoran promptly hid the article . Wageslave backed him up at the time and continues to do so .

Like Judge Nolan, Wageslave seems to believe that paedophile pornography isn't abuse in itself and that this genuinely-engaged activist has now been punished enough . Corcoran's use of paedophile sites didn't "fund the production of this nasty material "because he only accessed "inappropriate" images from free sites according to what Wageslave writes in his defence (again without substantiation) . It's becoming more and more evident that Patsy wasn't the only "yarn spinner" around here .

Wageslave , two points :
1 clarification/source on the what you wrote about Corcoran downloading manga drawings as well as paedophile pornography . I haven't seen this information published anywhere else .
2 . Corcoran referred to “a stalking crazy poster that had it in for him” being partly responsible for his getting sacked in 2009 .Could you expand on this please - was I this stalking crazy poster?

by Periodic visitor Thu Nov 21, 2013 11:39

As a periodic visitor to indymedia.ie I have been shocked by the recent revelations about one of its active moderators. I know the rest of the moderators must be reeling from the shock of disclosure about this individual. What moderators and the general readership of the site learn from the episode will have an important bearing on the future functioning and content of this radical free access news and opinion facility.

Some of the key learning points should include:

a. The actual crime for which P.C. was convicted - possession of freely downloaded illegal kiddy porn
b. How easy it seems to have been for him to become a moderator on the site, and the way that other moderators knew nothing about his life
c. How he actually moderated, something that requires painstaking research of past threads. Does anybody have spare time to trawl the threads?
d. The open access policy to the site, including posting of news items and comments without the need to register. It's a democratic ideal, but has its dangers.
e. The need for posters and organisations that use the site to feel assured that there is no devious manipulation by control freaks. The Hidden Articles list partly fulfils this role.
f. The need for an annual or twice-yearly feedback process by some of indymedia's users. Possibly meetings organised by moderators at public venues, where fundraising might also feature.

Over the years I've got the impression that we visitors and users are quite a mixed bunch. Some of us are activists, some just visitors. Some of us are genuinely interested in topics covered; some of us are spoofers and potential mischief makers.

I wish indymedia.ie all the best in recovering from a traumatic experience. An apology to everyone from P.C. would be one helpful step.

by Hugh Murphy - sackedbymyunion Thu Nov 21, 2013 11:15

Wageslave,

You are cherry picking your answers and ignoring what the mothers of abused children said - that it graduated over time to the full blown offence.

One distraught woman spelt out in graphic detail the pictures the bastard she was married to showed to her daughter as he was grooming her. This started, with him getting her to cut out page three girls and to keep it "as their secret". According to you the pictures Corcoran confessed to having were not even page three material. It is just as well he was caught when he was.

You say you're not defending Corcoran but keep on defending him. I sincerely hope you are right and he never goes on to harm a child in a physical manner. Maybe the suspended sentence and the destruction of his reputation will deter him but remember what I said - there is no such thing as an ex pedophile. You can never know he won't - and I hope you can sleep at night if he does.

Hugh Murphy

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Wed Nov 20, 2013 21:44

@Joe:
I have already considered the possibility and discounted it. I don't honestly believe the state actually care enough about indymedia that they would hire a nicked kiddie porn downloader to destroy it in return for a reduced / suspended sentence. That's just a little far fetched for me. If you look at P.C.'s articles, posts and comments, I think it's obvious that he was genuinely engaged here as an activist and passionately interested in the causes he supported. People are not one dimensional cardboard cutouts. They can be very complex. And they can have many different interests. P.C. was clearly a complex individual. But I don't honestly believe he was a rat.

@Hugh:
But from here, It does sound like you are engaging in a witch hunt against this particular lonely old man. According to the gardai / HSE / court He never actually approached or hurt anyone in the real world nor did they (gardai / psychiatric professionals) consider this likely. The facts are these: He downloaded a pile of illegal porn and manga drawings from free websites. As a result of his actions, he lost his job and his life and his standing in the community, is on the sex offenders register and has a big custodial sentence hanging over him for the foreseeable future. I think that is adequate punishment for what is classed in the DSMV as a psychiatric disorder.
You say: " I simply would like to see - anyone convicted in any way of corrupting children to be prosecuted and watched for the rest of their lives"
Fair enough, I would tend to agree, but P.C. was not convicted of this type of offence. He was convicted for downloading free but illegal material.

Again, not wishing to defend what he did, but In light of the way sex offenders are often treated in prison, putting this guy in prison might have been a worse crime than the one he committed in some respects (but he may still yet end up there). Considering the cost of incarceration, the nature of his offence, and his co-operation with the gardai, I believe therapy and a suspended sentence were probably appropriate in this case. Surely we should save those precious prison places for the monsters that actually do go after real kids in the real world, or who produce or fund the production of this nasty material. And there are many of these still at large in our society. No doubt many would hold a different view on the matter. It's certainly a difficult and emotionally charged topic.

@Ann - unmanageable:
I don't know who proposed him. I was not an editor at the time. I assume he was brought on board because he helped out a lot on the editorial lists and showed himself to have reasonable judgement and a good knowledge of activist politics at the time. Anyone is free to engage in this process. However in practice, few do. I presume that the women you refer to did not properly engage in this process so were not taken on as candidate moderators. However without their specific names, I cannot give you a definitive answer to that question. (and frankly it's quite off topic )
I am not aware of a female moderator being banned for making such a comment about P.C.
Perhaps another moderator can answer these queries for you.

The title of your comment is "apology not statements please"

Ann, what exactly do you think indymedia should be apologising for? We are also victims here. Should victims apologise?
We had absolutely no knowledge of P.C.'s extra curricular activities until Thursday last, at which point we acted swiftly to remove him as a moderator here. This site was not used in any way to further his activities.

Personally I'm not in the business of apologising for the bad behaviour of other autonomous human beings. If anyone should apologise, it should be P.C. himself, and I would welcome a public apology to the readers and the moderators, but I can't honestly see him doing that on the site at this stage. He did say sorry to the other moderators when he was told to resign. However right now, having to respond too these comments, leaving aside my personal opinions regarding his rather dubious personal morality, it rings pretty hollow and I can't say I'm at all happy about how he handled this whole situation then ran off and left the rest of us completely in the shit to deal with the fallout from it. He should have fessed up and resigned immediately when he was sacked from his job, if he had any decency. Instead, he lied to us and spun a yarn that his dismissal likely had something to do with his postings / work on this site, and possibly a stalking crazy poster that had it in for him. I thought it sounded a little off at the time, but I never pursued it and I never for a moment considered that it was actually because he was caught downloading this kind of nasty porn at work. In fact we all felt kinda sorry for him at the time. Even a bit guilty / responsible. We were led to believe that the site might have been instrumental in his job loss. Another moderator had previously had serious problems at work as a result of the actions of a very nasty troll, so it was not an unreasonable story. He was a pretty good liar it seems.

Anyway, this site was a victim here too and IMHO it has nothing to apologise for except perhaps that our recruitment process failed to filter this person out. I can assure you we will be more careful in future though!

by Ann Unmanageable Wed Nov 20, 2013 18:36

"Pat C joined Indymedia in Feb 2009 through the procedure outlined in this link http://www.indymedia.ie/HowToJoin whereby he showed an interest in the work of Indymedia, was proposed by another editor and was voted in."

Who was the Editor that proposed him ? Why was he selected when Women who were contributing were not ? Why did the majority of Indymedia.ie ban their only female editor for a period when she accused the collective of behaving like "The Catholic Church" in their dealing with complaints about Pat C ?

by Hugh Murphy - Sackedbymyunion Wed Nov 20, 2013 11:39

Dear wageslave,

I have no wish to attack anyone for what they might do in the future, based on what they have done in the past - except - anyone who is guilty of paedophilia. I am sure even you, with your wonderful humanitarian qualities must consider, that there is the distinct possibility of reoffending when such a heinous crime is committed.
This is why police forces around the world keep records and why there is a Sex Offenders Register. Which begs the question, was this convicted paedophile placed on it, and if not why not?
However, from my time as a Taxi Driver ferrying abused women and children to battered women's hostels - and hearing the horrendous stories of child abuse from the mothers of the abused children, this never starts as full blown abuse but is progressive, often taking a number of years.
Many of the women were adamant that they did not want to go to court, most to protect their children. You are right I'm no psychiatrist but I am the grandfather of four granddaughters and have a vested interest in removing paedophiles from the society - often the higher echelons of society where they can hide, mingle and recruit deviants of a similar persuadion, with whom they exchange this loathsome material.
Wageslave, rather than engage in a witch hunt against lonely old men, who have done no wrong, and to whom the very thought of committing a crime or viewing images of naked children would be against their principles - I simply would like to see - anyone convicted in any way of corrupting children to be prosecuted and watched for the rest of their lives. There is, and cannot be such a thing as an ex paedophile. When you have daughters of your own you will understand. Surely the cases in the last number of years in England and across the world must alert you to what can happen if these convicted paedophiles are given access to our children.

Best wishes

Hugh Murphy

by JoeMc Wed Nov 20, 2013 11:33

Wageslave thinks it blindingly obvious why the gardai didn’t contact the site about Corcoran’s paedophile activities and allowed him carry on censoring what had been a left wing , anti-state site ! Before Corcoran’s reign here indymedia was getting half a million hits a day , since he was brought onto the site as moderator the readership has dropped rapidly , so much so that the site doesn’t publish statistics any longer. Seeing that he’s such a good mind reader Wageslave can perhaps explain why he thinks the case took four years to reach the courts even though Corcoran had admitted possession of the paedophile material?

"The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up."
Bob Woodward

by Contrarian Tue Nov 19, 2013 23:18

And thank you too for your kind and gracious remarks. We probably do agree more than you might think. BTW, my brand of capitalism would be far more social democratic capitalism than right wing capitalism. I have often voted for the Labour party and my friends regard me as a bit of a leftie. (maybe that says a lot about my circle of friends!!) However, I know that around here Labour is regarded as a right wing party. OK. Indeed, one poster recently lumped FG, FF, Lab, SF, Socialist Party and whatever acronym RBB goes by these days as the right wing establishment! I remain an unrepentant Zionist and am an admirer of what the State of Israel has achieved in the short time since the Holocaust. If the Palestinians (and their Arab neighbours) had put a fraction of the effort into building up their own societies as they put into attempts to destroy Israel and its Jews then they would be in a far better position today. I am not a pacifist and believe that sometimes societies need to go to war to protect themselves from forces intent on their destruction.

I do wish indymedia well, it is important to have an outlet that is free of either government or commercial interests. My belief is that this can and should be politically value-free also. In other words, it's about the media, not the message. Or put it another way, a right wing Zionist should be as welcome as a left wing intifadist. It's up to both to argue their point of view with passion and intellectual rigour; the audience makes its mind up and the marketplace of ideas thrives. Otherwise you just got a left wing echo chamber where the same old voices preach to the converted. And that's not really much use, is it?

A modest proposal: The rules currently allow any moderator to delete a post. It then requires TWO further moderators to agree to overrule this and undelete the post. In practice, this seems to be cumbersome and rarely used. How about simply reversing the onus? Allow any moderator to undelete a post. In other words, if ANY moderator thinks a post should remain, it should require TWO moderators to keep it hidden.

now about that vacant moderator's position...... ;-)

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Tue Nov 19, 2013 20:18

Thanks for your reasonably constructive comment Contrarian, and for not taking the opportunity to kick us when we are down as others have chosen to do. I know we have had our differences in the past.

For once we seem to agree on a few things too! Especially your point regarding some troublesome indymeejits who persist in posting rambling nonsense that degrades the site and drives away readers.

Not right wing capitalism being a solution to all the world's ills of course, or Zionist behaviour in Palestine!! ;-)

Perhaps as you say, there is an opportunity for some changes here and it is possible that the character of moderation here might become somewhat softer and lighter touch now that P.C. has left.

by Contrarian Tue Nov 19, 2013 19:42

I'm not coming on here to give indymedia Ireland a kicking, although it would be all too easy to do so if I was an "enemy" of indymedia. Several obvious enemies (or perhaps one such person with multiple identities) have already taken this facile and softest of soft options. When you think about it, it is ludicrous to condemn this site (or its censors) on the basis of the non-indymedia related criminal activities of a single one of the censors. I'm happy to accept that the other censors knew nothing of Corcoran's extra curricular onanistic activities. I suppose, in passing, I could point out that many contributors to indymedia are perfectly happy to condemn the entire Catholic clergy on the basis of the paedophilia of a small minority of its members and its subsequent cover-up by another small minority. Yes, I know, not exactly like for like, but you get the point, I'm sure. Anyways, unless evidence to the contrary emerges, the remaining censors are untarnished by Corcoran's criminality and, in fairness, acted reasonably swiftly once matters were brought to their attention. I could quibble about the standard of disclosure; was he sacked or did he resign; both versions have been put about by members of the collective. Also the use of the phrase "former" editor is frankly a bit disingenuous and snacks of a very amateur effort at obfuscation and distancing. No matter.

Of considerable more interest is Corcoran's activities as a censor and the approach of the other censors to him. The spectrum of editorial severity runs from mildly stalinist centralism (eg wageslave) to hardline totalitarianism (the aforementioned IMC Dalek aka pat c aka a few other aliases too) with totally different standards being applied to those who toe the party line and the few dissenters such as myself. Wageslave has admitted in previous postings that such different standards are indeed applied and has attempted to justify this. Those who monitor the editorial lists will be aware that debates between the censors are very rare (one or two per month at most) and even more rarely lead to an overturning of a decision to suppress a post. Inevitably this results in a descent to the lowest common denominator and the standards of the most hardline censor become the default position. In this case, that was pat c. I don't ever recall him voting to overturn a single decision to suppress a post and his comments on the editorial lists were inevitably the most unsympathetic to posters.

The pat c approach to censorship has two undesirable effects: (a) posts that challenge the consensus get removed, even though they might, if left up, stimulate more robust debate and force some rigour into the argument of the party liners and (b) utter drivel and barely comprehensible posts of low standard which are in accordance with the party line remain. I need hardly list the regular indymeejits who lower the quality of the site! I don't come to the facile conclusion of some posters that the pat c approach to censorship was a conspiracy to damage indymedia; however, it has had that exact effect. Almost certainly unintended, but very effective nevertheless. Perhaps the collective could now take the opportunity presented by the Corcoran affair to institute a root and branch review of the censorship policy.

I must stress again I am not an enemy of indymedia. Sure, I come from a different point of view to the party line here. I believe that democracy and capitalism has brought more prosperity and standard and quality of life to more people on this planet than any other system ever tried. Those who would replace it have a high bar to jump and need to be able and prepared to defend their theories in robust debate. I support those countries who best exemplify the democratic capitalist sytem, eg EU, Canada, US, Israel, Australia, NZ etc. The very countries most vilified on indymedia while basket cases such as Gaddafi's Libya are praised to the hilt. For all their faults, they are the best societies available and the beacons to which would be immigrants vote with their feet. While I have very different views to the Censors here, ultimately I believe we all want the best for humankind as a whole. There are differing views on how to achieve this noble end. Indymedia could be a useful arena in which to conduct the debate as to how this might be achieved. The problem with indymedia is the abysmally low tolerance for those who wish to achieve it in a manner than departs from the party line.

As a slight side issue, wageslave's comment on internet freedom are interesting and I'd go a long way in agreeing. Ironic, though, that (s)he disowns such a liberal approach to freedom of expression and information on donning the stasi censors' uniform!!

I hardly bother to comment here anymore as the quality of the site has plummeted in recent times. Once more I invite the collective to make the obvious link between a censorship policy that discourages free thought and the ongoing decline of the site. Even the Soviet Empire eventually realised that glasnost had to break out. Can indymedia ireland hold out forever?

by mary murphy - johns wife Tue Nov 19, 2013 18:05

I don't think anyone here is defending what P.C. did. They fired him remember!

by john Murphy - none Tue Nov 19, 2013 17:42

By downloading child porn , Pat Corcoran is creating a market for this material ,that others will supply to. Of course he's guilty.

What I don't uunderstand is Indymedia's attempt to defend him.

seems odd.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Tue Nov 19, 2013 17:23

Hugh

Thanks for your comment.

I've no particular wish to defend P.C. But neither do I wish all the unreasonable commentary about this matter to be allowed "to pass unchallenged" either.

Perhaps it's true that people do sometimes abuse the notion of psychiatric illness as a means to "get out of jail free". However I'm not a psychiatrist, nor have I ever met P.C. so I cannot reasonably comment on whether that applies in this case or not. For the same reasons Neither can you. It would be just idle and somewhat unfair (since the subject of the allegation likely won't respond) public speculation on both our parts.

I said that paedophilia was "classed as a psychiatric condition". It is. Check out the link I supplied.
I am not a psychiatrist so I leave it up to those better qualified than I to decide on such matters.
I'd hazard a guess that you are not a psychiatrist either. Perhaps you should too?

You cannot condemn someone in advance of a crime you think they might commit in the future.
This is not the tom cruise movie "minority report" here Hugh. There is no such thing as "futurecrime" just yet!

Surely we are all Innocent until proven guilty? Surely this is an important principle of justice worth upholding??

P.C. is guilty of downloading underage porn from free internet sites. That much is certain. However, there is currently no evidence to suggest he ever engaged in real life child abuse. And no way you can reasonably say with any certainty that he will in the future.

You also need to remember an important axiom of good science here, i.e. that correlation is not causation

by Hugh Murphy - Sackedbymyunion Tue Nov 19, 2013 16:39

Wageslave, I must declare a vested interest in the matter of child pornography - as I have written hard-hitting expose on the dreadful subject of child abuse. This play received a rehearsed reading from Attic Studio in Dublin [A collective of Actors, Writers and Directors] dedicated to the promotion of the Arts.

However, I feel I would be doing abused children a grave injustice if I allowed your comments about Pat Corcoran to go unchallenged. You say he had psychiatric problems - as if this is a reason for what he has done, It is not - while ignoring the fact - that he was sentenced to three and a half years in Jail - albeit that it was suspended. If the people who do have psychiatric problems behaved as he did then, the child protection services [such as they are] would be swamped, not just under pressure.

While there can be no doubt that Pat Corcoran used his influence and predilections [psychiatric condition noted] to take down posts which exposed the psychiatric condition of many others - not yet arrested - I believe that his psychiatric condition is just a forerunner to ful blown child abuse? It's perfectly obvious that someone inclined to view pictures of children will gravitate to more serious deviousness. You may disagree with this but the facts speak for themselves. Abused children grown into seriously damaged adults and go through a living hell in life - abusing themselves with alcohol and drugs. Freud said Child hood abuse is not forgotten - just not remembered - and in an out of control person you can see what they are not remembering.

I must, in all fairness to the many good people he worked with in his day job, in the department of the arts, ask - was his psychiatric condition to the fore when he decided on funding for any Art events that would expose the psychiatric condition of himself and others - not yet before the courts.

Furthermore, I find it distasteful in the extreme, to lump into what Corcoran was found guilty of - the fact - that almost all convicted paedophiles claim that they suffer from a psychiatric illness and use it as a 'get out of Jail' card.

by Mark G Tue Nov 19, 2013 16:21

Joe Mc once again makes baseless allegations. Calling me one of Pat C's closest associates/friends is completely false as is other claims of money passing hands/former editors hiding in their beds

And as wageslave said if you pen an article/comment that is actually grounded in fact rather than throwing out wild baseless and false accusations as you tend to do sometimes then it would be left alone.

You can engage with me only through the email lists I have no interest and will not engage in personal correspondence with you.

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Tue Nov 19, 2013 15:19

just to add:

I made the above comment before I saw Joemc's last one about BAE.
Now Joe, no doubt you do certainly get it right sometimes, but in this case, you are off the mark completely.

I can assure you, BAE are NOT telling me what to do on this site. As a pacificist, I abhor the arms trade and it's facilitators. Such allegations are complete nonsense. Nor have I ever been approached by P.C. or ANYBODY else who offered me money in exchange for supporting any organisation or causes in the execution of my duties as a volunteer on this website.

I can safely say that this is also the case for the other moderators currently helping out on the website.

Feel free to test this by penning a half decent article exposing the arms trade and specifically highlighting the corrupt and underhand behaviour of BAE in the name of profit. Make sure to discuss their links with Ireland. I'd love to see such an article. I despise the arms trade. So do the other moderators currently working here. Bring it on Joe.

The link between HOPI and BAE via the university workplace of Yassamine Mather which you have posted about on numerous occasions is IMHO at best tenuous and circumstantial and in any case, none of the remaining moderators are members of HOPI (or AFAIK of any political organisation) so even that tenuous link dies with the exit of P.C. as a moderator on this site.

I agree that HOPI statements have sometimes been co-opted and used by imperialists whenever advantageous as propaganda to beat Iran with. Imperialists are wonderful opportunists. But they only use the bits that suit them, not the bits dissing the imperialists themselves. Such is the nature of imperialism and the media. And the fine line that needs to be treaded by organisations like HOPI.

This is not to say that most people who join such organisations are not genuine activists striving for a better world. Would you agree Joe?

by wageslave - (personal capacity) Tue Nov 19, 2013 13:35

Thanks for your comments. Or at least, for the ones that were intended to be constructive criticism!

"Patrick Falvey"
"Adrian O'Connell"
"Noel Thorton"
"LiamQuinn"
"parents watchdog"
"wendy s elliot"
"inspector pierre of interpol"
"equaliser and observer"

Judging by the posting style etc, these are likely all the same person. (and we think we know who!) Clearly a person intent on issuing wild hysterical nonsensical statements, inferences and accusations and intent on smearing and putting the boot into indymedia over the personal behaviour of an individual which this site and other volunteers here had nothing to do with and had no prior knowledge of until Thursday last when the news surfaced.

But anonymous sock puppets kicking this site while it is down is nothing new. Indymedia has made quite a number of enemies over the years. No doubt some of them would be quite happy to see this site close.

Gardai have not contacted this site regarding this matter. Evidently they saw no reason to. No doubt it was blindingly obvious to them, as it should be to all those posting here , real or sock puppet, that this site and the volunteers working here had no knowledge of and nothing to do with the activities of P.C.

Most articles on indymedia tend to about government corruption, corporate malfeasance, state warmongering, justice for poor people and disempowered minorities. Topics unrelated to P.C.'s extra curricular "activities". In those cases, I don't see P.C.'s outside "activities" having very much of a bearing on his moderation.

I disagreed with quite a number of P.C.'s decisions on the mod discussion list over the years, some of which stood, some of which did not. On the whole, without being aware of his other "activities" or his psychiatric condition, I think for the most part, he did an ok job as a moderator. For example, I don't really see how a penchant for viewing dubious porn would influence somebody unduly about whether the war in Libya is justified or fracking is good etc etc.

However, I would be open to revisiting any moderation done by P.C. on any sensitive threads relating specifically to sexual matters. If you think that there have been any such articles where P.C. hid posts in a manner you think was overly influenced by his "tendencies" in this area then I will be happy to reconsider those editorial decisions on a case by case basis if people wish to supply specific links

My understanding of what P.C. did is that he downloaded a whole bunch of manga and porn for his own personal use from free legal sites on the internet.

Downloading pornographic pictures of actual children under the age of 18 is wrong. Period.
Downloading manga drawings is a grey area. For all intents and purposes it is a victimless crime.

P.C. was fired from his position here because this sort of behaviour is not at all appropriate for somebody in a position where they might occasionally have to moderate on sensitive topics of a sexual nature such as child abuse and rape.

However, that said, I am not personally in favour of conducting some hysterical daily mirror type witch hunt here against P.C.

Clearly the guy had a few psychiatric problems. He lost his job over this, he lost his position here. He has a custodial sentence hanging over him. This is probably the worst country in the world to be a sexual offender of any kind and his name is now mud in Ireland. Frankly I think the guy has been punished enough.

In his defence I will say that, according to the article in the indo, he suffered from depression, he didn't actually hurt anyone in the real world, the internet porn was for his own use he did not share it, he did not pay anyone for it, and he sought appropriate treatment and therapy for his condition and co-operated fully with the Gardai.

This kind of behaviour is classed as a psychiatric condition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophilia
Psychiatric conditions are considered as an illness and should be treated as such, medically / with therapy and not with a custodial sentence assuming the person is not considered a danger to the public.

In any case P.C. is officially no longer a moderator on this site.

On a general note, there is a lot of hysteria surrounding the topic of internet pornography.
All too often the topic of child porn is used as an excuse by the state and others to impose restrictions on freedom of speech on the internet and an excuse to monitor the communications of people. Sadly the debate over freedom of speech is often (deliberately) staged in the seedy marshes of pornography. Because the people who would take away such freedoms and who want the big brother state know that nobody of good character and reputation (and wishing to keep them) wishes to be seen to be defending these things publicly.

Only today, Google and Microsoft have come out saying that they are now blocking searches.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/google-a....html
David Cameron has said that intelligence services will be directed to investigate "darknets".
This is of course the thin end of the wedge, along the lines of the hidden state website blocking lists that came to light as a result of revelations by wikileaks.

Now we all know that folks like Cameron don't honestly give a hoot about child porn. These are the type of sociopathic people happy to order men to their deaths in covert wars, eviscerate the social safety nets of the poor etc etc.. However they do like to snoop and undermine/destroy our civil liberties and they do like greater powers to restrict the internet and they like it even better when the public voluntarily gives these powers to them instead of just having to take them on the sly. They use porn as a lever to make us hand over these powers and give away our rights. More fool us if we do so. We should be quite careful before taking up our torches and pitchforks on these matters. Often we are being played by cynical opportunists seeking more powers and seeking to take away our liberties.

Judging from internet traffic statistics probably most of the male population of the planet have viewed internet porn images at some stage so the cognitive dissonance and hysteria that often accompanies the catching and conviction of people for downloading freely available porn is often rather ironic.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paedofinde...&sm=3

By all means do comment on the details of this story and give your opinions, but please stop implying or suggesting that because P.C. liked animals and was a moderator, that therefore all animal welfare activists, or all indymedia moderators must be paedophiles. If anyone else does this your posts will be hidden as "unsubstantiated" and "trolling" as per our guidelines. Such statements / inferences are clearly nonsense. I suspect some, such as those from posters "Jerry" and "chris" may come from disgruntled coursing / greyhound supporters recently exposed on this site for their blatant racist comments. 'Nuff said!

We are certainly open to criticism for our complete lack of awareness of this matter and P.C.'s condition, but the fact remains we did NOT know anything about P.C.'s downloading activities or his psychiatric condition until last Thursday. When we found out, we acted promptly on the matter. What else could we have done?

I'd like to thank Joe for bringing the matter to our attention. I do believe from our communications that Joe does have the best interests of this site at heart. Some others posting here, I'm not so sure about.

Joe, whether P.C. was an agent out to destroy this site is a matter of pure conjecture. People can cause harm without that being their actual objective. I think Occam's razor applies. He certainly did harm us as a result of all this, and arguably because of some of the entrenched positions he took on certain topics in the past, but I don't believe it was all with the deliberate intention of destroying this site. I am of course open to hard evidence to the contrary.

What I can say is that, regardless of his other activities, P.C. has also supported many good causes in his time here (and elsewhere) and highlighted many important issues in articles he posted. On the whole, despite many disagreements over moderation between us over the years, I think he did an ok job as moderator for the most part.

We were understaffed with volunteers as it was. Now with P.C. gone, we definitely need some new volunteers. Fancy trying out for the job JoeMc? :-) You could help keep us honest as you have been doing.

In answer to some other "points" raised:

Regarding IP addresses, this site deliberately by design does not easily facilitate or encourage the wholesale gathering of IP addresses and identifying information of it's users, or the keeping of logs of such information. If necessary we can monitor IP addresses for short periods of time to help identify sock puppets and prevent abuses, but it is not possible to do this without alerting the entire collective. And using this facility is generally frowned on here unless there is a good reason for doing so. Only small numbers of IP addresses are held during any such monitoring and All IP data is flushed automatically after the monitoring period and is not retained or stored. Abusing this facility to try to gather IP address info in an effort to try to personally identify people would be an exercise in frustration at best unless you were working for an ISP or the state or something. I seriously doubt any underage children would bother coming on this site at all, let alone commenting on it. Even if they did, how could we possibly figure out what age they were from their IP address? We're not an ISP or the NSA you know!! We don't have a registration process unlike most other sites where comments are allowed. Commenters are effectively anonymous.

In any case, P.C. can no longer log in as a moderator, so he has no access to this facility now.

As for P.C.s previous moderation decisions, these were made on the basis of our editorial guidelines. Over the years, I and others had disputes over some decisions made by PC and agreed with others. His editorial decisions were subject to the same process as all our editorial decisions are.

In response to Damien regarding my stalinist moderation. I'm sorry you feel that way. Some others would disagree it seems (thanks!). I guess no matter how you try to do this job, some will inevitably be unhappy and others will be happy. If you want to be liked by everyone then I suggest you don't volunteer to moderate on a political website!

Regarding coverage of this story on indymedia, Our job is not to write the articles, just keep the site going so the public can have some independent place to publish news articles easily. For the umpteenth time, this is a self publishing website. if anyone cares to write a decent article on this case that does not contravene our guidelines then I don't see any problem with that. I personally would be happy to see a half decent article on the matter if anyone cares to write it.
And, as with any other article, If it's good enough, we will consider featurising it on the front page.

However bear in mind that a thinly veiled one sided hatchet job on the site created by someone with an agenda is not what I mean by "a half decent article". So try to show at least a little balance if writing such an article.

by JoeMc Tue Nov 19, 2013 13:26

Just to correct a mistake. I thought that only two moderators were left on this site. Mark Grehan , one of Corcoran's closest associates, is now back moderating comments . Grehan was instrumental in chasing me away from the site at the time Corcoran joined the collective ;he has always backed his friend up whenever Corcoran needed a vote on the collective. Until he makes a statement about what he knows about Corcoran, he shouldn't be allowed moderate this site.

I wrote to Grehan and other editors some time ago asking if they had ever received any payments or services from Corcoran . This was in connection to Corcoran's leading role in the Hands Off the People of Iran , a group that is fronted by Yassamine Mather , who works for the British Aerospace Engineering funded Dept of Aerospace at Glasgow University . BAe is the biggest arms dealer in Europe and has a long record of corruption. It's agents regularly attempt to infiltrate left -wing and anti-war groups . This is what has been happening at indymedia ireland - BAe has been running the show here for the past few years . If Grehan or any other moderator past or present wish to contact me , my email address is: Joemcivor@gmail.com

by OhDearyMe Tue Nov 19, 2013 12:39

I have no bias here. I don't do puppet-socketry

sure you don't. So far you've posted as:

• "Patrick Falvey"
  
• "Adrian O'Connell"
  
• "Noel Thorton"
  
• "Liam Quinn"
  
• "Wendy S Elliott"
  
  And
  
  
• "Inspector Pierre Clouseau of Interpol (no less)"

ye loon

Inspector "Pierre" of Interpol pays Indymedia a visit

by Equaliser and observer - Dutch media Tue Nov 19, 2013 11:16

One person seems to have complete monopoly of opinions re paedophilia and Pat Corcoran. To state that downloading 4 year olds in their thousands is not a form of paedophilia is completely incoherent nonsense. I notice it is the same moderator who has taken down the posts at free will. Would the other people who work voluntarily on this site reign this idiot in. Otherwise you are all making the same mistakes as you did and admitted to same in relation to convicted paedophile Mr Pat Corcoran.

Pierre, my foot. Then to call him socket-puppetry and troll is completely dishonest and biased. It was Pierre who contacted me in relation to the current scandal which is very alive at present on this site. Today, like here in Holland, Irish papers have headlines in relation to Google and their new policy on how to deal with website predators to protect families. I now would like to ask the headless moderator who wants to protect his old friend to stop because this site is going downhill fast right across Europe right now and I have friends who will write on various Indymedia sites who will state the various let the people have an opinion. I have no bias here. I don't do puppet-socketry but it appears to me somebody certainly wants to cover up something and this is blatant.

Good luck

by pseudonym Mon Nov 18, 2013 22:37

For those who claim they knew about Pat C's child porn arrest and claim that Indymedia editors also knew before last week can you please show us the email you wrote to the editors to warn them when you found out years ago.

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 17:08

Anybody watching paedophile movies is paying the person who made the film , surely?

Joe, there's free prom ALL over the web - both adult and pedophile - in fact imho a lot of the pedo websites seem to be honey-traps run by Gov't agencies such as the FBI etc etc

The same goes for snuff movies.

Joe just go to Youtube/Liveleak/DailyMotion etc and search for videos of NATO sponsored terrorists in Libya and Syria in action -

Snuff Movies galore, Joe. All the beheadings and torture you could possibly want

And all for free -

It's almost as if Gov'ts and the companies in question actually WANT people to watch that stuff

by Joe Mc Mon Nov 18, 2013 16:47

thanks for the mugshot oh deary , I can never work out how to put pics up . I agree about not turning this into a paedo hunt , but not with what you say about the viewing of paedophile images . Anybody watching paedophile movies is paying the person who made the film , surely? The same goes for snuff movies.

You should be careful about describing people you disagree with as "moronic" . Had Corcoran still been around he'd have deleted you for that seeing as you clearly disagree with him on other matters.

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 16:02

He seems to have surrounded himself with like minded people, he felt comfortable with indymedia and animal rights groups, this I think merits serious investigation.

Clearly a Troll - essentially you are implying that because Pat C was an Indymedia Moderator and also DL'd Child abuse images in his workplace and on his home computer, then ALL Indymedia Moderators do the same

Corcoran also was Civil Servant.

Following your trail of "logic" to it's inevitably ridiculous end, it follows that ALL Civil Servants must DL Child abuse images in their workplace and on their home computer.

- again this is a good example of moronic hysteria.

We have seen in Europe where paedophile groups included ministers, judges etc, is it possible we are seeing something similar here?

Yes, ministers and judges - all people in positions of power within their respective societies.

What "position of power" does being a Hare-coursing activist or Indymedia Moderator confer on one, in Irish Society?

Almost none as far as I can see.

In fact being a Civil Servant confers more power in Irish Society than being a Hare-coursing activist or Indymedia Moderator

by Jerry Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:49

He seems to have surrounded himself with like minded people, he felt comfortable with indymedia and animal rights groups, this I think merits serious investigation.
We have seen in Europe where paedophile groups included ministers, judges etc, is it possible we are seeing something similar here?

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:41

anyone else who chose to facilitate Corcoran's sordid reality in relation to the abuse of children.

Who chose to facilitate Corcoran's sordid reality in relation to the abuse of children.?

Who are you talking about?

of the 3 comments you highlighted above - 2 are directed at JoeMc and have little or nothing to do with Corcoran or his crimes, and the other was basically incomprehensible rambling nonsense

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:26

Out of a handful of anti-hare course activists in Ireland, one is the zionist Felix Quigley who is a notorious Islamophobe and supporter of the EDL , another Alan Shatter , Ireland's zionist Minister of Justice . Another two were moderators of indymedia ireland up until Thursday

Who was the 2nd one?

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:24

happy now?

Illegal Wanker Pat Corcoran (53) leaving Dublin Circuit Criminal Court - Photo: Collins Courts.

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:21

could indymedia have been used to facilitate the distribution of child abuse images for example

This is what I mean about moronic hysterics and flies to shit.

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:19

a pedophile ring of animal activists.

Seriously, other than demonstrating a propensity for creating hysteria, what do you hope to achieve by making statements like that?

Firstly PC was never charged or convicted of Pedophilia - that would involve actually going out and procuring real live children for himself to abuse.

He was convicted of downloading images of child abuse from the net. Most likely all he ever did was sit alone in a room playing with himself. Perhaps, if not caught when he was he MAY have gone on to commits actual acts of sexual abuse on real children, perhaps not - we'll never know.

Active Pedophiles try to infiltrate positions of power where the might be able to gain access to children. As far as I know neither Indymedia Moderator-ship nor Anti-Greyhound activism is likely to get one into a position where one could have unfettered access to vulnerable children, especially 8 to 14 yrs old, which seems to have been the age-group Corcoran downloaded abusive images of

Having typed all of the above, it occurs to me that no doubt some of the more moronic hysterics that this subject seems to attract, like files to shit, will accuse me of "defending a Pedophile"

by Cat P Mon Nov 18, 2013 15:06

Surely indymedia knew about corcoran's child porn accusations, whcih he was peleading guilty to for a while. Why was he not kicked off the editorial group immediately. Brings a bad stain on indymedia and they whole group of editors collectivly that action was not taken straight away. It leaves serious questions, could indymedia have been used to facilitate the distribution of child abuse images for example? is it possible for an editor to have these facilities? Lots of questions.

For the good of indymedia the WHOLE editorial group should resign. If not how can indymedia really credibly report on scandals on child abuse?

by JoeMc Mon Nov 18, 2013 14:38

I agree that ireland is basically divided between cheese haters and cheese lovers ; millions take sides on this issue every day. But it's not at all the same with hare coursing. Only a handful of people are involved or interested one way or another , most wouldn't be aware of it as an issue at all . Out of a handful of anti-hare course activists in Ireland, one is the zionist Felix Quigley who is a notorious Islamophobe and supporter of the EDL , another Alan Shatter , Ireland's zionist Minister of Justice . Another two were moderators of indymedia ireland up until Thursday . Did Corcoran really ever care about hares? I think it's something that's worth looking into .

How can the indymedia collective investigate Corcoran? By putting up a picture of him on this page for a start . By recognizing that he was always a tout and consulting with other indymedia outlets that have been infiltrated by touts in the past . Indymedia's two mods can't do it alone , they should put out a call to readers and contributors to ask for help . Hold public meetings to discuss this issue and how to get the site back running properly. Treat this as a news story ,make a feature of it . Corcoran has a lot of decent people compromised , which is how people like him work , through blackmail , but he's gone now .I know an ex mod who knows him ; the poor man has been hiding in bed and not answering the phone since last Thursday evening !

by OhDearyMe Mon Nov 18, 2013 13:50

When I said “political links “ I meant exactly that . If you think that political links aren't concrete it's up to you

But you have not demonstrated any "political links" - pointing out that they both are anti-greyhound-racing is about as useful right now as saying "they both hate cheese". As a basis for claiming they have "political links" it is just as useless

I'm not bullsitting and will be looking into the subject of Corocran's links to the animal rights movement more closely.

Do please do so - I'm all for it - but until you demonstrate something more concrete than the equivalent of "they both hate cheese" as a basis for claiming that both Shatter and Corcoran are politically-linked, it's just bullshit imho.

So far you have yet to demonstrate that they ever even so much as glimpsed each other across a crowded room.

Abuse victims have expressed anger that Corcoran received a suspended sentence from a judge known to be lenient on paedophilles. According to reports of the court case , Judge Nolan said that child pornography “encourages the abuse of minors and children and is a serious offence”- as if child porn isn't abuse of minors in itself .

Yes, but what has that to do with the Indymedia Collective? In what way are they responsible for Corcorans actions outside of Indymedia?

Were any strings pulled , are they still being pulled?

Good question, but you fail to provide anything that might help one answer that question. For example it could be, if we can speculate, that the judge himself has some secrets in his closet, ones that might cause him to have some sympathy with a man such as Corcoran. Who knows? Certainly not you or I, and without that sort of info it would be very hard to determine one way or the other why he was so lenient with Corcoran when compared to the sentence handed down to an importer of Garlic

But Corcoran's role has to be investigated.What was he up to? He certainly wasn't acting out of any genuine interest or regard for the many causes he was involved in down the years. So why was he putting all that effort in?I have never believed that he was mad .

Yes I have long suspected that Corcoran had an alternative agenda, one which seemed to include destroying this website and it's reputation by being as vile as possible. The man was a mass of contradictions, if one examines his actions and behavior.

But in what way can the Collective "investigate"? about the only thing that they have the power to do is comb the records of his editorial decisions and his comments to see what patterns can be discerned. That would take a long time and a lot of effort - and they are, as has been pointed out, merely volunteers.

They most they can do, it seems to me, is to examine the reasons for their own inaction in the face of a mountain of complaints over the last 4 years regarding Corcoran's obvious lack of integrity and honesty

The Collective's culpability here extends only to allowing Corcoran so much time to destroy this website through his dishonest behaviour.

Anyone could see, had they chosen to look, that Corcoran was an individual of very dubious moral integrity. So why did the Collective allow themselves to not see what ALL the site users could plainly see.?

by Jerry Mon Nov 18, 2013 13:44

It is rumoured that Shatter, Claire Daly and Maureen o Sullivan are involved in ICABs and animal rights alongside the pedophile Pat C, this is most probably where the conspiracy theories have come from as the above 3 named politicians were involved in the dail question last week about comments made by an anonymous poster about the Roma, it was posted on this site immediately by the resident animal rights supporters, why Shatter allowed such a question when it was obvious that the thread on the greyhound forum could not be considered as incitement to hatred is what people are talking about along with indymedia having a moderator who is a pedophile involved in animal rights, the sentence also has people talking.

by Chris Mon Nov 18, 2013 13:24

Im at a loss here, don't know what to make of it all. If Pedo Pat was connected or his motivations for his involvements dodgy then surely the case would have been squashed or at least the judge would have given an order preventing his identification. But everyone knows about it. PP is in disgrace.

But the animal rights thing, there might be something in it. But it needs more than both Shatter and an ex editor both wanting coursing banned.. See what you can do. Good luck.

by Joe Mc Mon Nov 18, 2013 13:00

There are only two moderators at the moment as far as I know , both of whom have been trying to stand up to this bully for a long time. Wageslave recognised a year or so ago that the stalking allegations Corcoran made about me were baseless and had the decency to say so publicly on the site , Terence tried to oppose Corcoran's original attempt to hound me off the site and lists .I want indymedia to succeed and get back to it's original anti-capitalist purpose , so please don't either of you think that I'm raising these things to discredit the site. But Corcoran's role has to be inestigated.What was he up to? He certainly wasn't acting out of any genuine interest or regard for the many causes he was involved in down the years. So why was he putting all that effort in?I have never believed that he was mad .

by Joe mc Mon Nov 18, 2013 12:42

When I said “political links “ I meant exactly that . If you think that political links aren't concrete it's up to you, but I'm not bullsitting and will be looking into the subject of Corocran's links to the animal rights movement more closely. Abuse victims have expressed anger that Corcoran received a suspended sentence from a judge known to be lenient on paedophilles. According to reports of the court case , Judge Nolan said that child pornography “encourages the abuse of minors and children and is a serious offence”- as if child porn isn't abuse of minors in itself . Were any strings pulled , are they still being pulled?
(Current Indymedia editors should be posting to this important thread under consistent user names by the way. Current moderators and those who have moderated this site in the past please note it when writing . Thanks )

by Jerry Mon Nov 18, 2013 12:23

I notice on the greyhound website thread the IMC have stated they have done the right thing by asking the paedophile to resign but they seem to be making the comment relative to the greyhound site not asking their moderator to resign.
To even put these two issues together is absurd for the following reason alone, the greyhound site had an anonymous poster call Roma vermin while the indymedia editor had over 7000 child abuse images, please tell me the moderators on here can see the difference between anonymous name calling on a private members site against one of their most trusted moderators whom they defended time after time having 7000 child abuse images on his computer.

by Keith Harris - nmn Mon Nov 18, 2013 00:23

I don't know who runs it now but years ago one fair moderator was Keith Harris.

I have posted many items and comments to this site over the years but don't recall ever being a moderator. Perhaps another Keith Harris ?

Not complaining, just puzzled.

Being an editor of my own news site and a former staff news editor for a large regional newspaper in the UK, I am well aware of the difficulties in effectively managing editorial responsibility where the mods are volunteers.

Given that, it would still seem wise to have a 'buck stops here' desk that could keep live time cognizance of postings and related matters.

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 23:32

Going to take an educated guess here and state that the posts by

"Patrick Falvey"
"Adrian O'Connell"
"Noel Thorton"
"LiamQuinn"

Are actually all from the same person

This person seems determined to try and associate Indymedia with Pat Corcorans paedophillic tendencies. This person repeatedly implies that Indymedia has some sort of responsibilty for Corcorans illegal actions.

This person repeatedly makes claims s/he could not possibly have knowlege of, regarding "thousands of people."

This person repeatedly states "think of the children" as iif Indymedia had any ability, or legal responsibility above that of any organisation or individual, to physically protect any child anywhere

Corcoran was convicted of posessing photos of 8 to 14 yr olds. There really aren't many, if any, 8 to 14 yr olds visiting indymedia.

Clearly the person sockpuppeting here is doing so with an agenda that involves smearing Indymedia with Corcoran's paedophilic tendencies, as if Indymedia somehow is responsible for Corcoran's criminality

by Noel Thornton - Youth worker - London Sun Nov 17, 2013 22:53

http://ukpaedos-exposed.com/2013/11/14/patrick-corcoran...blin/

Reading the above postings it sickens me to see a personality debate between two or three individuals. Looking at this from the UK the facts state Pat Corcoran stands convicted of Child Sexual paedophilia. He received a three and a half year sentence last Thursday in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court by Judge Nolan. As Patrick Falvey and Wendy S Elliott stated the protection of children must be paramount. It saddens me to see the moderators are not getting the point here. Thousands of people now are logged on to Indymedia since last Thursday and the IMC collective must get a wake up call shortly or the credibility of this site will wash down the drain. I don't care what personal grievances happened in the past between some moderators, the fact is that this is now.

Pat Corcoran had some close friends ie moderators in 2009 onwards. I have friends who have written on this site for years. I don't know who runs it now but years ago one fair moderator was Keith Harris. In the last number of years names like Terence would crop up and MC and of course now the paedophile PC ie Pat Corcoran. As other writers have stated, this site has given people hope and a voice against cronyism and corruption. Now it needs to start telling the full facts and truth as to how Corcoran could be arrested four years ago while being processed going through the court system and yet remain on as a moderator and a sick ruthless bastard on this site. Corcoran as one individual said above me almost destroyed this site. Now men and women must stand up and stand down evil otherwise there is no hope. The time is now to sort out this mess and also bring back the writers of the past that were hounded out by Corcoran and his cronies. As one poster above stated - Adrian O'Connell - Has Corcoran still got the mechanisms to spy in on peoples personal IP addresses. Would the IMC collective please answer this question? Have the moderators been in contact with the Gardai since or for that matter before the court case? A question again that I would like answered:

I will close by saying the IMC statement beggars belief. It does not mention the children and the exact number of despicable pictures that were down-loaded were in excess of 7,000. Innocent children Indymedia moderators I say to you now come out and state that children should be protected at all times. Otherwise credibility and people will walk away from Indymedia and I hope this does not happen.

Check the above link again. It is a warning to predators and abusers and keeps the public informed.

Noel Thornton

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 22:24

I don't know what your problem is with wageslave.

Personally I found Wageslave to be one of the few decent Moderators here, by a long way

She (? I think) behaved with far more respect for diverse opinion than did the despicable Pat Corcoran, and as far as I recall had many disagreements with him regarding his behaviour.

Again, as far as I recall, Wageslave fought many a losing battle trying to reign in this despicable scumbag, but was repeatedly over-ruled by other members of the collective.

Credit where it's due, to Wageslave at least.

She frequently went out of her way to communicate as much as she reasonably could with the users, regarding the behind-the-scenes disputes regarding Pat Corcoran's dishonest behaviour.

As for those in the collective that always seemed to side with the Stalinist Pat Corcoran?

Well they should hang their heads in shame - but given their past behaviour, their constant support of the lying despicable antics of the deceitful scumbag Pat Corcoran, I seriously doubt that those other members of the collective see much wrong in THEIR own behaviour - their stance seems to suggest that they want to wash their hands of this whole sordid affair asap.

The Irony is that had those of us who complained about Pat Corcoran been listened to, and had the collective taken action, and done the only decent thing and tell the clearly dishonest Pat Corcoran to take a hike, then they would not find themselves in the very embarrassing and reputation-damaging "guilt by association" position that they now find themselves in today.

by Damien M - PW Sun Nov 17, 2013 22:03

..and it's suppression of any dissenting opinions.

Only logged onto IM for the first time in God knows and now this has shone a light on all the goings on here at IM, I stopped bothering posting due to the Stalinist censorial actions of Mods like Wageslave and from what I recall anyway to a lesser extent Pat C .

The board should have been aware of all this carry on and stamped it out, however the left, and its million and one splinter leftist groups (they all break away due to someone having an opposing opinion and then everyone shouting them down ...) I mean look at Irish Socialist groups all breaking away every second week, and then the million and one versions of the Communist Party in GB.

Pat C was the ideal mod for the left !

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 17:34

I have no love for JoeMc, BUT the continued existance of the 2 comments by sockpuppet "Tom Eile" suggests that the collective has not learned a thing, regarding "ethical behaviour", from this fiasco.

Clearly ignoring your own rules regarding what's acceptable here is still the order of the day, it seems.

Hypocrisy-by-sockpuppetry rules, eh?

Clearly "tom eile" is a sockpuppet for a member of the collective. Clearly the collective is determined to continue on as before, as if Pat Corcoran's paedophillc tendencies were the only issue with man.

Had the collective taken a stance in favour of ethical behaviour regarding Pat Corcoran's despicable dishonest antics as a moderator, he would have been run out of here years ago. But they refused to do so, despite being repeatedly requested to do so.

Well done.

Continue on as before seems to be the order of the day here, as expected.

I suppose i can expect to be ignored, possibly labelled as a troll, cos thats how the collective seems to react whenever they are asked to not be hypocritical

by Adrian O'Connell - Irish Medical emigrant Sun Nov 17, 2013 17:23

I am five years living in the USA. I left because of corruption and cronyism which is well documented on this site. It is only the last 10 months I began reading Indymedia thanks to topics like Pensions by T and Secrets of Cronyism in semi-state by Flannery. Now, sadly, I see cronyism raising its dark head again but this time in defence of a convicted paedophile. Indymedia statement states the only knew last Thursday. I have no reason to doubt anybody but facts are reality. My question is: Pat Corcoran former moderator of Indymedia was four years going through the legal system before the outcome which was his conviction some days ago. So I can now assume that Pat Corcoran kept his dark secret of being a paedophile and his arrest by Gardai from the attention of every moderator on Indymedia over the past 4 years. This is shocking and despicable to say the least.

As Wendy S Elliott stated - People clearly knew. It was well known in Arts and Tourism ie government sector - Fact. I have to ask again some moderator please come forward and tell us the exact truth. This site is essential for ordinary people to express their opinions without obstruction or favour. I spent five hours last night going through Pat Corcoran's involvement on Indymedia. I had emails in relation to Pat Corcoran sent from Kerry, Cork and Dublin, to assist me in trying to find out how this paedophile could try and destroy the credibility of this site and the decent people who take time to write their topics on it. Cocoran may still have in his possession IP addresses of thousands of people across Ireland and beyond. This is very serious because it includes children and I ask the moderators now to interact with the Gardai again and make sure this site is completely cleansed from Pat Corcoran and his legacy.

Yes I also agree with a posting above. What about the hidden? I got an email last night. It had saved a comment by Forster. It stated that deviance by Mr Corcoran. Moderators stated many errors in this posting. Please for the sake of children and the credibility of this site read the posting again. Deviance is Pat Corcoran. For fucks sake and excuse my bad language - are people blind here? I also noted Corcoran's arrogance. He told one meeting - go to Siptu and get a mediator. Check your site. Get rid of Corcoran's rants. But above all as my sister back in Kerry said apologise to the people that Pat the Paedophile Corcoran abused and banned off this site because he felt they were a threat to his dark secrets. This tragic and dark saga needs to be stood one with direct honesty but also moderators have the responsibility to act on behalf of the decent people who have written and kept this site running for over a decade.

I am only a newcomer to this site but some of my friends and family at home are veterans and feel deeply wounded tonight. Children must be protected always.

Adrian O'Connell

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 17:20

So when you said "political links" you were actually bullshitting by pretending a more concrete connection than actually exists.

Thanks for for clearing that up

And- instead of engaging in a pointles bun fight with joe mc, could the collective actually address the quite important points I raised earlier?

Or will they just cintinue to ignore those points because arguing with joe mc is easier than addressing their own shortcomings as an alternative media collective, something they have avoided for years now

by Joe Mc Sun Nov 17, 2013 16:36

Would mods please remove the comment written under the user name Tom eile , which is possibly coming Corcoran himself ? Tom Eile is a name I used at one time on this site until Corcoran and other mods banned its use here . Corcoran and his ring on the editorial board alleged that Tom Eile was a predatory stalker of Yassamine Mather who is the founder of the anti-Iranian group called Hands Off the People of Iran. Corcoran fronts for the HOPI group in Ireland alongside Anne MacShane from the CPGB . I have asked for the charges of stalking made against me to be investigated several times as mods already know .I repeat that now. I am willing to answer charges personally and in public

The possible political links to the Justice Minister are through the animal rights movement. Corcoran is one of the most vocal supporters of introducing a ban on hare-coursing in Ireland . This is a cause whose most high-profile supporter in Ireland is of course Alan Shatter.

by IMC Collective Sun Nov 17, 2013 16:27

The above comment makes a lot of wild accusations. For the record, Pat C resigned on Thurs evening as it clearly states above in the statement. Therefore the title says he is a former editor. Had we said he was an editor, then that would be incorrect. We would then also be accused of even more ridiculous claims. JoeMc seems to be implying some kind of nexus between Pat C, Indymedia, Alan Shatter and the Gardai and claims of deals and asks why the case took 4 years. None of this makes sense. Any deals would have been between the state and Pat C. Indymedia is not part of the Dept of Justice. Joe asks why other Left wing groups Pat C was involved in were not advised by Indymedia. Why do you suppose Indymedia know anything above the other groups? Does Joe think there is some kind of physical office where we work at Indymedia all day and chat to each other? He knows well there is no such office. Joe is annoyed and rightly so but the inferences he is making are just that and plain wrong.

Regarding the feature on Thursday and it's timing. Most half decent features take several days if not a week or more of research and writing. The fracking feature was about an event taking place on Friday so it was important it be published before that. Again you are looking for conspiratorial links where none exist. The above comment says there has not been a feature in months. A simple check of the front page, will show there was two in June, one in July, one in Aug, one in Sept, one in Oct and one in Nov. It would be nice to have more features but they are time consuming to prepare. Perhaps more writers would come forward and write one.

by Concerned - Barnardos Sun Nov 17, 2013 15:48

Comments moved to this thread
by IMC editor Sun Nov 17, 2013 01:49
All the recent related comments have been moved to this thread

Editors

What about those hidden?

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 15:31

During those four years Corcoran was censoring reasonable posts to this site while composing lurid comments of his own along the lines of "Mohammed was a Paedophile"

Personally I found it quite disgusting that the despicable Pat Corcoran was allowed to do this at a site that claimed to be against hate-speech and racism

The excuse that Islam is not a racial designation, constantly put forward by the Indymedia collective was always a particularly lame one - and they know it.

Corcoran's actions, his obvious dishonesty, his blatant hypocrisy (and by extension Indymedia's also) and disdain for ethical behaviour (and by extension Indymedia's also), demonstrated time and time again just how unsuitable he was as a Moderator.

Indymedia cannot now pretend that they were not aware of his COMPLETE UNSUITABILITY as a Moderator, and using the excuse "We're just hard working volunteers" or "Democracy is HARD!" is just another example of the obvious disdain and disregard for the opinions of the site-users, that the collective have repeatedly shown over the years

PS: just a head's up: there's a bug in the editing function - I posted and then edited and in the [quoted] section above the closing tag reverted to [em][/blockquote] rather that the "/quote" it was originally tagged with

PPS: just edited a second time and same issue - only this time the opening "quote" tag has changed also, to "blockquote style etc etc "

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 15:07

I in no way blame Indymedia for Pat Corcorans disgusting Child-Abuse-Image collecting actions.

BUT what I do blame them for is their complete lack of response and action concerning the man's despicable actions as an Indymedia editor.

Many people have complained over the years about Corcoran's actions. Those actions were not al all hard to notice.

The man was plainly dishonest in his dealings here, and one would have to have been blind to miss it. He broke EVERY rule in the Indymedia handbook as far as I can see.

for example it was well-known that he frequently sockpuppetted in order to hide the fact that he was both censoring and commenting on the same threads at the same time - this was pointed out many many times, but was always ignored. Indymedia cannot pretend they did not know that this was going on - in fact every time anyone pointed out they were then censored, often by other members of the collective - so Indymedia cannot claim they were not aware of the charges that he was frequently breaking the rules.

This should have been a very loud warning that the man was fundamentally dishonest - and therefore completely unsuitable to act as a moderator on ANY website since it was blindingly obvious that he clearly had no regard for notions such as "honesty" "fairness" "ethical behaviour".

These warnings were completely ignored, time and time again. Complaints were dismissed out-of-hand, without so much as a moments consideration.

As a collective the Indymedia team failed miserably to live up to any of it's own self-declared ground-rules, time and time again.

The despicable Pat Corcoran SHOULD have been kept far far away from any Moderation duties a very loooooooong time ago. The Indymedia collective were informed many many times of Pat Corcoran's destructive influence, and his consequent effect on reducing number of visitors and commentors at this website - I personally brought it up at every opportunity, and was ignored, time and time again, with my comments censored most often.

I would be happy to bet that there exists a DIRECT correlation between the fall-off in visitor numbers at this website and the commencement of Pat Corcoran's destructive tenure as a Moderator here

and if I could notice that - without having access to the actual numbers - then why could not you lot notice it - and more importantly act on it?

Oh wait, I know - you lot managed to convince yourselves that it was all down to the growth in so-called "social media" if I remember correctly - and guess what? I posted a comment at the time informing you that the fall-off had as much to do with the despicable Pat Corcoran as it had to do with anything else - and guess what? It was immediately deleted -

Well done Indymedia - hope yer proud of yerselves!

Why was he allowed to continue with this destructive and very dishonest behaviour for so long?

THAT is what you SHOULD (but probably won't) now be concerned with.

by OhDearyMe Sun Nov 17, 2013 14:39

Joe Mc said-

"Did the political links shared by Corcoran and the present Minister of Justice have any bearing on the delay?"

What "Political Links"?

Please elaborate.

by Joe Mc Sun Nov 17, 2013 13:50

The case against Corcoran was heard by judge Martin Nolan four years after the paedophile IMC editor was first arrested .During those four years Corcoran was censoring reasonable posts to this site while composing lurid comments of his own along the lines of "Mohammed was a Paedophile " .
AN ONLINE PETITION calling for Nolan's resignation has attracted over 2,000 signatures.
“Judge Martin Nolan this week handed down a suspended sentence to a former civil servant who was found to have over 7,000 indecent images of children on his computer.”
http://www.thejournal.ie/2000-signatures-on-petition-ca...2013/

by Joe M - joemcivor@gmail.com Sun Nov 17, 2013 13:22

Indymedia ireland editors have been covering up for Corcoran for years . They are evidently still covering for him with the two or three self-serving, damage-limitation statements they have made since his conviction on Thursday .The first two sentences of the above statement repeats an inaccuracy twice :

“On Thursday evening it was reported through one of the comments on this site that former editor Pat Corcoran had been convicted of possession of child porn images. When we became aware of this information, former Indymedia moderator Pat Corcoran was immediately asked via email for his resignation from this collective and he duly resigned from the IMC collective.”

I don't think that this is just a matter of sloppy writing or bad grammar or syntax . Going by the editors' past record in support of Corcoran , I take the view that these introductionary sentences were deliberately designed to put the now-convicted paedophille's role at the site somewhere in indymedia's misty past by saying that Corcoran was a former editor when convicted . Corcoran was of course a current editor of indymedia ireland up until his conviction on Thursday .

After how many months was it that the editors introduced a new front page feature yesterday ? A very worthy article about fracking no doubt . But it appeared on the same day that indymedia should have been addressing the agent Patrick Corcoran and the destructive role he and his circle have been playing on this site - this goes back years before Corcoran was welcomed on to the editorial team in 2009 . There should have been a call put out for a thorough investigation of Corcoran's role , an apology given to those hounded off the site by this provocateur . Why did it take four years for this to go through the courts ,what deals were made ? Did the political links shared by Corcoran and the present Minister of Justice have any bearing on the delay ? Have the many left-wing groups and decent individuals that Corcoran was associated with up until Thursday been advised by editors that Corcoran was compromised ? Has there been a wanted poster put up ? Where is he now , did he make any further statements about what he has been up to when contacted by editors . Was he asked?

Wageslave made a comment yesterday of the "sure haven't we all a few skeletons in the cupboard" variety . You're not going to get away with it Wageslave . This is the skeleton of an elephant that has been slowly rotting away for over four years and it still stinks. It is not "utterly ridiculous" to think that fellow travellers of such a "respected activist" would "even consider someone as a member if there was even a hint of such behaviour."

by IMC editor Sun Nov 17, 2013 01:49

All the recent related comments have been moved to this thread

by Chris Sun Nov 17, 2013 01:34

The statement is here. Seems to deal with issues raised by you and the other concerned people.

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104264

by Liam Quinn - University Lecturer Sun Nov 17, 2013 00:57

As an Irish emigrant working abroad for several years, I have been reading Indymedia over the past decade. I enjoy the topics especially the ones on cronyism, Tara and the Corrib. Tonight in Ireland many people feel let down and reading the previous poster and in particular the link questions are rising. Corcoran was exposed by staff at Tourism and Arts by sheer accident, after an ungrade, of computer system and laptops at the workplace. Corcoran became a moderator after or in and around this time. Now here lies many questions. Did any other moderator know of what was going on eg 7,000 plus images of naked children found on his lap-top and other locations. Indymedia is an essential component for people to express their views on various topics as other postings have stated. Corcoran needs to be deleted from Indymedia completely. Children come first not a make-over and continue you on regardless scenario.

There are many brilliant writers on Indymedia. Naming them all would take time. However, this year, one topic has hit California and New York. This is the topic about cronyism in semi-state Ireland. Indymedia became a serious site and the topic attracted thousands of readers. But tonight Indymedia needs to come out and make a full statement in relation to Pat Corcoran.

I will say it as others have before me. Children come first and must be protected by society at all times. Corcoran is a convicted paedophile and now is picture is on blogs across Europe and also tonight he is on blogs in the USA. Police globally take paedophiles extremely serious and rightly so.

This needs closure and people need space to express their views. I noticed some people were hidden tonight. I believe moderators now should learn a hard lesson and look back on Corcoran's legacy as a moderator for Indymedia. I had one friend, a brilliant writer, she and others were hounded off by Corcoran and his cronies by pure bitterness. This site deserves better and when closure finally comes, hopefully, it will get back to doing what it is good at ie exposing corruption, wrong-doing and bank scandals in Ireland.

Liam Quinn

by Parents Watchdog - Protection of Children Sun Nov 17, 2013 00:26

http://ukpaedos-exposed.com/2013/11/14/patrick-corcoran...blin/

The above link states all the facts.

Tonight, like all readers of Indymedia, I am shocked to the core that Patrick Corcoran is a convicted paedophile. I totally agree with previous postings especially Wendy S Elliott. A statement is essential now from Indymedia and the people who are the moderators. Children must be protected always and not the credibility of Corcoran and others like him. This man has had an input into Indymedia for many years - fact. Corcoran has been through various topics under different names - fact. I myself work with children who have been abused and I can assure you it is horrendous. People like Corcoran should be exposed at every level and tonight I hope that readers and writers on Indymedia are given the freedom of expression to let their anger out. People need to be heard not hidden. By God, Corcoran, when he became a moderator was responsible for hiding many people out of pure hatred.

Some friends who work in Arts and Tourism have told me, just like the previous poster, that Corcoran's dark secret was well known. I support Indymedia. I believe this site is necessary for people to have a social network and also have the opportunity to express themselves on topics that are of interest to them and to society. Sadly tonight we have this scandal and questions have to be answered in relation to Pat Corcoran. I admire Wageslave for coming out in the early hours of this morning in response to Joe Mc but I say tonight to the rest - don't lie on this for too long. Make a statement and let the credibility of this site continue.

Parents Watchdog

by Wendy S Elliott - Teacher Sat Nov 16, 2013 20:47

I have worked in Dublin for 15 years before returning home to Canada. I always read Indymedia and I totally agree with Patrick's comments ie the previous posting. I worked as a teacher and also had a deep interest in Irish tourism and the arts. Corcoran's name came up in many conversations especially since his arrest in 2012 and conviction this week. My friends in Dublin had known about the ongoing case for over 14 months. This was no big secret.

Children come first. This has to be the statement from Indymedia and the people who run this site.

Only in the last few days in Irish and Canadian newspapers and media, we see and read the paedophile ring across the globe. Canadian police forces along with Interpol have made several arrests and also the Garda Siochana in Dublin have located three men, all with families, involved with the downloading of child pornography. It was a very well organised sting operation that involved police forces globally. There is no point in not allowing people make their feelings and thoughts known on this site. I repeat again - sites can be dangerous and the people who run sites at all times must be alert to the predators and the paedophiles.

To close:-

This site has always brilliant topics ie the Pension scandal by T and Cronyism by Brian Flannery but now it needs to stand up and make a full statement. Otherwise it will lose credibility and I like many more would not want that to happen.

Protection of children always.

Wendy S Elliott

by Patrick Falvey - Protection of Children Sat Nov 16, 2013 20:21

I have been observing this site since 2012. I think this site has massive potential but I also feel it needs to give people room to express their opinions, within reason and logic. I am based in London and I work with abused children and also minors with alcohol and substance abuse. I trained back home in Monaghan.

First: I see Pat Corcoran's name and writings all over this topic. Why? This morning, I read the reply Wageslave gave to Joe Mc. There would be a statement today by Indymedia IMC. We are all still waiting. Not rambling now, just waiting.

Children come first. The protection of children is paramount not Corcoran's credibility or when or when not he was a moderator. I went back through 2002 and onwards. Corcoran had input on Indymedia at that time. I have no interest when this paedophile became a moderator. My interest now is solely that the statement comes out and condemns paedophiles. I am shocked that this statement has not come out earlier. I have one personal friend who works in Tourism and Arts and who told me on the phone this morning that Pat Corcoran and this is well known was under investigation since 2009. The Gardai did not have sufficient evidence until sometime later when Corcoran was arrested.

Again, I ask Wageslave who is a reasonable individual and say that this needs to be talked about, written about, and then closed and life and fresh air can run through Indymedia again.

I had friends who wrote on this site for many years and were hounded off by Corcoran. He was and still is a complete control freak. This needs to close now. A statement is essential to condemn Corcoran and his like (abusers). Judge Nolan will appear tomorrow on some newspapers. The reason is very simple. This is not the first paedophile to walk free from his court. Let us not forget Mr Begley who got six years for the garlic importation. Nobody is off the topic here but Pat Corcoran should not be on any topic now and his opinion should not be read. This man is a danger to children. FACT. This man is a convicted paedophile. FACT. There are hundreds if not thousands of Irish people tonight in London who are blog roamers like myself waiting to see how the people who run Indymedia handle this crisis and again like me they know the protection of children is paramount.

Patrick Falvey