Bøker av Seamus Breathnach

This book was written as part of a much wider criminological enterprise, designed at creating a real and critical basis for criminological enquiry in Ireland.Properly understood the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is every bit as important to society as the circular flow of money. No government would dream of conducting its business without the advice of an economist or, indeed, providing an econometric model of the economy. Yet when it comes to the CJS, governments take the opposite view and legislate in the dark, hardly reconnoitering for a moment to see what effect proposed legislation will have on the several institutions it invariably affects. Maybe this was okay when those effects could not be calculated. But such is no longer the case.In 1967 a President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice featured a model of criminal justice entitled "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society." Incredibly misunderstood and widely neglected, this model marked a breakthrough -- the first step, as it were -- in coming to terms with the multiple agencies that go to make up what has come to be called the Criminal Justice System (CJS).In Volumes 2 and 3 of the present series Seamus Breathnach traces the initial steps necessary to complete the revolution begun by the President's Commission. In doing this he reveals the systematized neglect of the CJS in the Republic of Ireland for years 1950-80. In eight lectures he delineates the Republic's inability to get its act together or to engage the terms or significance of the '67 landmark - an inability that is anchored both in a deep religious resistance to the secular social sciences as well as an exaggerated estimation of the criminal lawyer as social commentator. From this study it appears that the first step for criminologists is to see the CJS as a totality - to see it as a social process clamoring to be rescued from the spokesmen of the discrete agencies that comprise it.

In December 1875 captain George ''Bully' Best found himself in Buenos Aires without a crew and without a cargo. His men had for the most part deserted him. Before making his way to Antofogasta, where he loaded up with Saltpetre (nitrate), he recruited a' mixed crew' of Greeks and British. The British refused to sail with the Greeks, and rather than allow them onshore to see the British Consul, captain Best beat them and put them in irons. Even before the Caswell sailed for Queenstown on January 1 1876, an Irishman and a German jumped ship and were never heard of again. Obvious tensions might lead one to expect a British mutiny. And perhaps this might have happened had not the Greeks beaten them to it. For some unexplained reason the Greeks, under the influence of 'Big George' Peno, mutinied and killed the captain, the first and second mates, and the black Welsh steward. All four bodies were lashed to an anchor and thrown overboard. By February two of the mutineers, the brothers Pistoria, escaped by boat up the river Plate to Buenos Aires. The remainder drifted under Greek command until March 11th, when the British counter mutinied and killed two of their captors. A third mutineer was brought back to Queenstown to be tried for Murder on the High Seas. Young Christos Emmanuel Bombos found himself imprisoned with a sixty three year old Fenian named Thomas Crowe. Both men provided the spectacle of a 'double hanging' in Cork's male prison. A full eyewitness account is given of the executions, which happen to be one of the most striking events in nineteenth century penological literature. Three years later one of the escaped mutineers was arrested in Monte Video and a second trial was staged in Cork. Of the sixteen persons who set out from Buenos Aires: two jumped ship; four were murdered in the mutiny; two were murdered in the counter-mutiny; one was hanged in 1876 and another in 1879; and six returned to tell the tale.