The truth will set who free?

I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against. – Malcolm X (1925 – 1965)
Those who commit crimes against their communities in most democracies are generally punished. They are not, as was the habit in times gone by, dragged to a public place and executed for the entertainment and education of a baying crowd.
Such barbaric places as the United States still incorporate a form of this retributive punishment into their modern law but for most progressive democracies with an eye on a human rights agenda it has become a thing of the past.
With this reasonable assumption of criminal activity being punished appropriately, I feel there may be a little light at the end of this very dark tunnel in which Ireland finds itself.
I am following this line of thinking based solely on the recent WikiLeaks release of US diplomatic correspondence. If such highly sensitive information was available to one or more persons to access and pass on to the website then surely there is a massive amount available to a lot of people in Ireland.
In the hours after the release of the US government communiqués, Forbes has published a story online stating that a major US investment bank is next on the list to have its dirty laundry aired in public. The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, said in the Forbes interview that the website has a massive backlog of information on a range of topics waiting to be released so why don’t those in a position to do so in Ireland send the relevant information to the site so that the people can finally get to grips with what exactly went on behind closed doors to bring the nation to the verge of destruction?
It has been heart breaking in the last few days to listen to the coverage of the cuts proposed by the government at the behest of their potential creditors. The shameless targeting of the easy (public sector) victims and the poor proposed while the wealthy escape unscathed is vomit inducing.
There is not a shred of decency in what these people are proposing, it is akin to entering a fancy restaurant and holding the dish washers to ransom for their meagre wages while the patrons continue to gorge themselves and laugh drunkenly at the plight of the victims. The proposals put forward by Fine Gael in their opportunistic, opposition-politics-by-numbers inspires even less confidence.
They wish to privatise the remaining semi state companies, exposing their barely concealed Thatcherite tendencies in the process. Of course Fianna Fail would not be averse to such a move either given the fact that they are the other half of this same catastrophically destructive Irish political zombie.
I would ask a member of either one of this grim civil war double act how a person on the minimum wage, supporting a family would afford a train ticket from Ennis to Galway or Limerick on a privatised train service?
If they put forward any pathetic arguments regarding competition I would urge them to get a train from any part of Britain to Edinburgh to discuss it. Even on their bloated salaries the trip will prove a most costly one.
In most of our modern political discussion certain facts have been lost. A reduction in public service is a reduction of investment in the public. If the people of any nation are left entirely in the hands of the private sector for both work and services they are at the mercy of the private sector’s desire for profits.
The private sector pays as little as possible to most of its employees and charges as much as possible for the services it provides. The basic arithmetic of this relationship seems to have escaped many politicians for the past decade. They are guilty of incompetence, ignorance or indifference.
For this reason there must now be some form of justice served. There are people working in both the public and private sectors who have access to information that will expose the level of corruption that has led Ireland to this point. The crony politics which has crippled the nation sits in paper or electronic form somewhere in Ireland and it must be made public. The time for official intervention has passed; what is needed are acts of citizenship. Tribunals have proved overly expensive and essentially ineffective in exposing the truth. Those who expose this truth should be protected to the last, to the point of physically hiding them, from the security forces of the state because whatever law would try to convict them for exposing these details must be considered invalid.
Any journalist will tell you that among the most difficult things to achieve in Ireland is to have a major story published. The libel laws, as they exist in the country, make it extremely dangerous to publish a sensitive story even with supporting documentation.
Editors, with the best will in the world, are subject to the will of the private owners financial interests. In the case of a WikiLeaks type exposure such an issue is avoided. There is no story, there are merely facts. There is no commercial interest in selling papers, there is only truth. Handshakes and backslaps in the big tent at the Galway races may not appear in official documentation but something exists somewhere and some of you have the access to release it.
What has been released regarding the United States government is essentially just diplomatic information and while it is interesting and a little embarrassing for the Americans it will have little effect.
There is information in Ireland that will, for once and for all, expose what has been happening for many years to bring the nation to this dark point in its history. This must be revealed in the public interest and those who were involved must answer to justice.
Just as a heroin addict steals to pump opium extract into their veins, a group of people in Ireland have robbed to feed their financial avarice. These two examples are no different, except perhaps the heroin addict is worthy of a little sympathy.  The time has come for the exposure of the real facts of the last 15 to 20 years; the elite have robbed the poor and they must answer for their crimes.