Carl Jung revealed the quiet but radical transformation that happens when an empath finally chooses peace over people. 🌿 For years, empaths give, absorb, and carry the pain of others—believing love means self-sacrifice. But Jung’s insight is clear: choosing peace is not betrayal, it is individuation. 🌑 The empath’s path is marked by exhaustion—absorbing projections, drowning in unspoken wounds, and mistaking suffering for love. But one decision shifts everything: to prioritize inner stillness over outer approval. ✨ Jung explained that individuation requires courage. It is the moment when the empath stops rescuing and starts returning home to the self. Peace becomes the compass, not people-pleasing. This is where wholeness begins. 🕊️ By choosing peace, the empath does not lose compassion—they reclaim it. They no longer dissolve into everyone else’s shadows but integrate their own. In doing so, they discover a deeper strength: love without losing themselves. In this video, you will uncover: 🌑 Why empaths confuse love with sacrifice 🌿 The hidden cost of always choosing people first 🔮 How Jung explained the turning point of individuation 🕊️ Why peace is the empath’s true power ✨ What changes forever when peace becomes the priority Your compassion was never meant to destroy you—it was meant to lead you to yourself. And when you finally choose peace, you discover the freedom Jung always pointed to: the wholeness of being truly you. 👍 Like this video if you believe peace is strength. 🔔 Subscribe for more Carl Jung insights. 💬 Comment below and affirm: “I CHOOSE PEACE OVER PEOPLE.”
The U.S. Coast Guard has landed a $350 million investment to develop robotics and autonomous systems, funded through the government’s newly enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).The announcement marks the first visible deployment of OBBBA funds in the robotics and autonomy space – providing a potential preview of what’s to come in other industries.As part of the investment, the Coast Guard plans to channel an initial $11 million for immediate upgrades across critical systems this year. These include:$4.8 million for 16 VideoRay Defender remotely operated vehicles$2 million for six Qinetiq Squad Packable Utility Robots and 12 mini-SPURs$4.3 million for 125 SkyDio X10D short-range dronesThe tools will replace the Coast Guard’s outmoded fleets, supporting environmental monitoring, disaster response and search and rescue use cases.Beyond the Coast GuardThe OBBBA, which officially became law on July 4, includes grand plans for leveraging AI and autonomy to bolster U.S. industries, including defense, security and maritime. While specific funding projects have not yet been revealed, proposed investments include:$450 million for AI and autonomy in naval shipbuilding$4.6 billion for unmanned surface vessels and underwater vehicle production$188 million for the development and testing of maritime robotic autonomous systems$4.5 billion for AI and surveillance in the U.S. Customs & Border Protection$6.1 billion for autonomous surveillance, towers, drones and sensor systems along U.S. border regions$500 million to scale AI efforts in the Department of Defense $1.2 billion for upgraded rapid response air and marine platformsThe OBBBA’s exact structure is still emerging, but the latest announcement shows the White House is already making good on its promise to champion AI, with the Coast Guard investment the first step in this journey. LINKS$1.5B Anthropic settlement gets preliminary OKTrump eyes tariffs on robotics, machinery, medical importsAfter cloud shift, SAP CEO eyes new challengeMicrosoft terminates Israeli military’s access for terms-of-service breachMeta poaches another former OpenAI employeeMoffett calls Alphabet most valuable AI companyChatGPT Pulse: Available for preview for Pro users on mobile, ChatGPT Pulse delivers personalized daily updates and research based on your chats, apps and feedback. Asana AI Teammates: AI agents that learn and adapt across teams to speed up collaborative work.Ambient Daily Briefing: Connects to your calendar and scours your trusted sources to organize prep for meetings. Stamp: An “AI secretary” that handles your inbox, offering summaries, prioritizing and categorizing emails, and drafting replies.Gabriel, São Paulo: Senior ML engineer with 9 years designing scalable data infrastructure and 4 years implementing enterprise-grade recommendation systems (AWS, Kafka, Spark) — $47/hMateo, Buenos Aires: AI specialist with 6 years in production-level computer vision systems and 3 years deploying models on secure edge devices for enterprise IoT use cases — $49/hSofia, Medellín: NLP lead with 8 years delivering compliance-ready language models, including 5 years working on multilingual enterprise chatbots and document automation — $46/h(Sponsored) GAMES
In the United States, more than 770,000 people were reported living homeless on a single night in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. President Trump recently issued an executive order to curb homelessness. The order encourages measures that have come under criticism, including involuntary commitment for people suffering from severe mental health issues. Donald Whitehead Jr. is the Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his first-hand experience of homelessness, and why he opposes the administration’s approach. Originally aired on July 30, 2025
Trump and the global rise of fascist anti-psychiatry
Trump’s new executive order uses psychiatry to dismantle social care, expand policing and imprisonment, and exploit public disillusionment. We have seen this before, and we know the consequences.
Political anthropologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic clinician.
Published On 8 Aug 2025
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr and US President Donald Trump participate in an event on ‘Making Health Technology Great Again,’ in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on July 30, 2025 [Jim Watson/AFP]
Despite spending more on psychiatric services and prescribing psychiatric medications at a higher rate than almost any other nation, mental health in the United States over the last two decades has only been getting worse.
Rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, overdose, chronic disability due to mental health conditions, and loneliness have all been rapidly increasing. No quantity of psychiatric drugs or hospitalisations appears adequate to reverse these trends.
Despite this, the US medical and psychiatric establishment has persistently refused to use its substantial political power to demand the transformation of care by expanding non-medical support systems to address the root social causes of mental illness, such as poverty, childhood trauma and incarceration, rather than focusing on reactive treatment via lucrative medication-centric norms. This failing status quo has created an opening for President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr’s emerging plans to remake the nation’s approach to mental health, with disastrous consequences now coming into focus.
Trump and Kennedy have hijacked legitimate anger at a broken system to justify destroying public care infrastructure, including Medicaid, food and housing assistance, harm-reduction and overdose prevention programmes, and suicide-prevention hotlines for LGBTQ youth, while promoting wellness scams and expanding the police state. They focus on the “threat” supposedly posed by psychiatric medications and call to reopen the asylums that once confined approximately 560,000 people, or one in 295 US residents, in horrific conditions, until protests against their cruelty led to their closure beginning in the 1950s.
Trump invokes false claims about mental illness to demonise immigrants, whom he is now hunting via a mass arrest and incarceration campaign. Last month, he signed an executive order that allows police to arrest and forcibly institutionalise poor Americans who are unhoused, deemed mentally ill, or struggling with addiction, effectively incarcerating them for indefinite periods.
Trump’s order, which also defunds housing-first programmes and harm-reduction services, while criminalising homelessness and encampments, contains no provisions to protect people from abuse or from the political misuse of psychiatric labels and institutionalisation to target his opponents. This raises concerns about risks to LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable groups. It also threatens groups upon which the administration has shown a eugenicist fixation: transgender people, people with autism, and others with disabilities that RFK Jr and Trump have characterised as a threat or burden on society.
The order appears to grant the government the power to deem anyone mentally ill or abusing substances, and to confine them indefinitely in any designated treatment facility, without due process. In a context where there is already a profound shortage of psychiatric beds even for short-term treatment, there are no provisions for new funding or regulatory systems to ensure that facilities are therapeutic or humane, rather than violent, coercive warehouses like American asylums of decades past.
Trump’s allies, including some medical professionals aligned with ideologies of social control and state coercion, may dismiss this as overly pessimistic. But that requires ignoring the fact that Trump’s executive order follows Kennedy’s proposal for federally funded “wellness farms”, where people, particularly Black youth taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors primarily used to treat anxiety and depression) and stimulants, would be subjected to forced labour and “re‑parenting” to overcome supposed drug dependence.
These proposals revive the legacy of coercive institutions built on forced labour and racialised interventions. Kennedy has also promoted the conspiracy theory that anti-depressants like SSRIs cause school shootings, comparing their risks with heroin, despite a total lack of scientific support for such claims. In his early tenure as health and human services secretary, he has already gutted key federal mental health research and services, including at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Given this, it is unclear what kind of “treatment”, other than confinement and cruelty, Trump and RFK Jr plan to deliver in their new asylums.
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Trump and Kennedy’s lies about mental health, cuts to public care and vision for expanding the incarceration of immigrants, homeless people, and anyone they label as mentally ill, worsen mental health while creating more opportunities to profit from preventable suffering, disability and death. These tactics are not new, and their harmful consequences and political motivations are well established.
From Hungary to the Philippines, right-wing politicians have deployed similar rhetoric for comparable purposes. In a precedent that likely informs Trump’s plan, Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, attacked psychiatric reformsas leftist indoctrination and defunded successful community mental health services, replacing them with coercive asylum and profit-based models, while advocating pseudoscience linked to evangelical movements. Bolsonaro claimed to defend family values and national identity against globalist medical ideologies, while sacrificing countless Brazilian lives via policies later characterised by the Senate as crimes against humanity.
Bolsonaro’s record is instructive for anticipating Trump’s plans. Trump has made no secret of his admiration for Brazil’s disgraced former president and their shared political ideologies. Bolsonaro’s reversal of Brazil’s internationally recognised psychiatric reform movement, which emphasised deinstitutionalisation, community-based psychosocial care and autonomy, inflicted profound harm. Under his rule, institutionalisation in coercive “therapeutic communities”, often operated by evangelical organisations, with little oversight, and similar to RFK Jr’s proposed “wellness farms”, skyrocketed.
Investigations revealed widespread abuses in these communities, including forced confinement, unpaid labour, religious indoctrination, denial of medication, and physical and psychological violence. Bolsonaro’s government poured large sums into expanding these dystopian asylums while defunding community mental health centres, leaving people with severe mental illness and substance use disorders abandoned to punitive care or the streets.
This needless suffering pushed more people into Brazil’s overcrowded prisons, where psychiatric care is absent, abuse rampant and systemic racism overwhelming, with Black people accounting for more than 68 percent of the incarcerated population. Bolsonaro’s psychiatric agenda enhanced carceral control under the guise of care, reproducing racist and eugenicist hierarchies of social worth under an anti-psychiatry banner of neo-fascist nationalism.
Trump and Bolsonaro’s reactionary approaches underline a crucial truth: Both psychiatry and critiques of it can serve very different ends, depending on the politics to which they are attached. Far-right politicians often use anti-psychiatry to justify privatisation, eugenics and incarceration. They draw on ideas from the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued in the 1960s that mental illness was a “myth”, and called for the abolition of psychiatric institutions.
In the US today, these political actors distort Szasz’s ideas, ignoring his opposition to coercion, by gutting public mental health services under the guise of “healthcare freedom”. This leaves vulnerable populations to suffer in isolation, at the hands of police or fellow citizens who feel increasingly empowered to publicly abuse, or even, as seen in the killing of Jordan Neely in New York City, execute them on subways, in prisons, or on the streets.
By contrast, critics of psychiatry on the left demand rights to non-medical care, economic security and democratic participation. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, RD Laing and Ivan Illich advocated for deinstitutionalisation not to abandon people, but to replace coercion with community-led social care that supports rights to individual difference. Their critiques targeted not psychiatry itself, but its use by exploitative, homogenising political systems.
To oppose reactionary anti-psychiatry, mental health professionals and politicians cannot simply defend the status quo of over-medicalisation, profit-driven care and the pathologisation of poverty. Millions justifiably feel betrayed by current psychiatric norms that offer little more than labels and pills while ignoring the political causes of their suffering. If the left does not harness this anger towards constructive change, the right will continue to exploit it.
The solution is not to shield America’s mental health systems from critique, but to insist on an expansive political vision of care that affirms the need for psychiatric support while refusing to treat it as a substitute for the political struggle for social services. This means investing in public housing, guaranteed income, peer-led community care worker programmes, non-police crisis teams and strong social safety nets that address the root causes of distress, addiction and disease.
Mental health is fundamentally a political issue. It cannot be resolved with medications alone, nor, as Trump and RFK Jr are doing, by dismantling psychiatric services and replacing them with psychiatric coercion.
The fight over mental health policy is a fight over the meaning of society and the survival of democratic ideals in an era where oligarchic power and fascist regimes are attempting to strangle them. Will we respond to suffering with solidarity, or with abandonment and punishment? Will we recognise the collective causes of distress and invest in systems of care, or allow political opportunists to exploit public disillusionment for authoritarian ends?
These are the questions at stake, not just in the United States, but globally. If the psychiatric establishment refuses to support progressive transformation of mental health systems, we may soon lose them altogether as thinly disguised prisons rise in their place.
If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Eric ReinhartPolitical anthropologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic clinician. Eric Reinhart is a political anthropologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic clinician based in Chicago. He works with individuals and collectives around the world via remote connections.
Captagon Drug Networks Adapt and Survive in Middle East After Assad’s Fall
Feature
Syria’s transitional government is cracking down on the production of Captagon — an illicit synthetic stimulant that flourished under the sponsorship of the Bashar al-Assad regime until its fall in December. But production and trade of the drug are continuing, particularly in parts of Syria not yet under the control of the new administration.
In June, Syria’s new interior minister announced on state television that his government had orchestrated a complete crackdown on the drug Captagon.
“We can say that there no longer is any factory that produces Captagon in Syria,” said the minister, Anas Khatab.
But his claim has been followed by a string of high-profile seizures of both Captagon pills and the materials used to make them — including 500 kg of precursor chemicals found outside Damascus earlier this month — raising questions about whether an illicit industry that flourished under the sponsorship of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime has really been wiped out, or has just gone deeper underground in parts of the country not yet under the control of the transitional government.
Before the fall of Assad in December last year, the U.S. and U.K. had imposed sanctions on senior regime officials for enriching themselves through the production and trafficking of the drug, as well as Iran-backed militia Hezbollah associates “responsible for trafficking it across the Middle East.” (The Assad regime denied accusations that it produced and marketed Captagon.)
Credit: SIRAJ
Chemicals used to make Captagon found inside an abandoned drug production facility in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.
International experts and drug monitoring agencies say that while large-scale state-sponsored production in Syria has collapsed, small, nimble labs still exist — even as traffickers are also dispersing production and stockpiles of the drug from Syria to neighboring countries with longstanding markets.
“You do still have in Syria small outfits moving around, setting up mobile laboratories, producing stuff, especially down south where the central government’s reach isn’t as strong” said Nicholas Krohley, who runs the Switzerland-based consultancy FrontLine Advisory and co-authored a report on Captagon last year, adding that these “shops” have always struggled to meet demand.
Captagon is particularly popular in the Middle East, especially in Gulf states like Saudi Arabia. In 2021, experts estimated the trade’s yearly potential street value to be at least $5.7 billion. Its spread presents a unique security challenge for law enforcement in the region, as poverty, social insecurity, and war create ready markets for the drug and opportunities for traffickers.
Fighters from the new Syrian government forces uncover Captagon pills hidden inside an electrical power adapter in a facility used to produce Captagon under the previous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.
Caroline Rose, who leads the Captagon Trade Project at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank New Lines Institute, told OCCRP that “in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s fall, the interim government’s counternarcotics strategy was a simple one of interdiction and exposure, seizing the biggest, most obvious Captagon facilities with close ties to the regime (managed by individuals who fled and left the facilities unsupervised) and inviting journalists in for high-level coverage.”
Now, the new administration has the harder task of disrupting the smaller and medium-scale remnants of the trade, said Rose. The remnants were either directly tied to the regime or conduits to it, she said, adding that the new administration “is challenged by the current illicit landscape” as it has reduced capacity to exert control and “enact buy-in from communities along Syria’s coast and borderlands — traditional hubs of Captagon trafficking.” Ports and borders under the former regime’s control became hubs of the trade, benefitting from laxer security.
In June, a spokesman for the General Directorate for Combating Narcotics, a division of the Syrian Ministry of the Interior, told OCCRP’s partner ARIJ that Syrian officials had seized 16 drug shipments bound for neighboring countries and dismantled more than 10 large laboratories and small workshops since the fall of the regime.
Credit: Screenshot of a Facebook post by Syria’s Ministry of the Interior
Syria’s Ministry of the Interior announced a Captagon seizure in Al Nabak, Syria, on June 27, 2025.
Abdelhay said that most of the laboratories were located in areas affiliated with the Fourth Division, one of the Assad regime’s most powerful military units, which was sanctioned by the United States in 2020 for running illicit revenue-generation schemes, including for producing and trafficking Captagon. “We also seized more than one laboratory on the Syrian-Lebanese border and in the coastal region,” he added.
On April 12, the Syrian government announced a raid on a warehouse in Latakia, the country’s main Mediterranean port. They uncovered 5,000 iron bars in which about 4 million Captagon pills were hidden, ready for export, in what was reportedly their largest Captagon bust since the removal of Assad. In the following weeks, authorities said they dismantled a Captagon factory in Homs, near the Syrian-Lebanese border, and seized another 4 million tablets in the Latakia area.
The Ministry of the Interior announced the seizure of 500 kg of precursor chemicals for making the drug hidden inside food containers, along with a large quantity of pills outside Damascus this month. This followed the seizure of hundreds of thousands of pills in Aleppo and Daraa a month earlier.
The high profile raids come as senior figures in the military and transitional government call for more international support to fight Captagon networks. According to the Damascus-based media outlet Syria Report, Brigadier General Khaled Eid, Director of the Anti-Narcotics Department at the Ministry of the Interior, told the Annual Captagon Trade Conference in Damascus this August: “We haven’t received any tangible assistance or support yet. We have however enjoyed a degree of coordination and sharing information. We also attended training courses in certain countries. There are many promises, but sanctions remain an obstacle.”
Captagon Spillover Into the Region
The technical knowledge to produce the drug or redeploy laboratories elsewhere has not been wiped out, despite the seizure of large quantities of pills in Syria, according to the New Lines Institute.
Pre-existing production infrastructure in neighboring countries can also potentially be stepped up to take over and feed the unabated demand for the drug.
Credit: Ali Al Ibrahim/SIRAJ
Fighters from the new Syrian government forces inside a Captagon production facility in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.
Dr Mousa Daoud Al-Tareefi, president of The Jordan Anti-Drug Society, told OCCRP that in Jordan, “while availability has declined [after the collapse of the regime in Syria], some quantities are still being trafficked, indicating that production and storage may continue in some capacity.”
He added that “part of the decline in Captagon use may be explained by users shifting toward other substances such as crystal meth, synthetic cannabinoids (“Joker”), or misused prescription drugs. These alternatives are increasingly seen in some communities, especially due to ease of access or local production.”
In the suburbs of Beirut, a 28-year-old mechanic who became addicted to Captagon after starting to take it so that he could stay awake at work, said the pills were now “a bit more difficult to find,” and more expensive, but still widely available.
“Before, you could buy a pill for $2 or $3,” he explained, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the social stigma surrounding drug addiction. “Now, some people are selling one for $5 or even $7 depending on the type. If you want something guaranteed, you’ll have to pay more. It’s still available; it’s not rare. You just want to know who’s the real deal and who’s the fraud.”
Experts now wonder if the mass production of the drug will regrow with new patrons. “We don’t know yet who has enough power, will, and room, if they decide to go back to that industry,” said Krohley.
“There is a lot of uncertainty around that,” said Angela Me, chief of research and analysis at UNODC, in an interview with UN News in June. “We see a lot of large shipments going from Syria through, for example, Jordan. There are probably still stocks of the substance being shipped out, but we’re looking at where the production may be shifting to.”
Rose and her colleagues have been ringing alarm bells over the last year about the expansion and diversification of Captagon production “moving closer to destination hubs or valuable transshipment sites in Europe, in order to increase interdiction resiliency or improve revenue opportunities,” she said, although she noted that the spread of Captagon production to other countries is not a new phenomenon.
She told OCCRP that Captagon laboratories were identified last year in Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Kuwait, and even Germany, and that in Iraq, production had expanded into the country’s north.
The UNODC reported the dismantling of a methamphetamine and Captagon laboratory in the Iraqi Kurdish province of Sulaymaniyah in 2024, and attempts to set-up Captagon production facilities in Iraq’s southern provinces a year prior.
In May, Lebanese authorities busted a clandestine Captagon lab in the Hermel area, near the Syrian border, following the seizure of a truck loaded with equipment for manufacturing Captagon that entered the country in April.
Credit: Lebanese Army
Lebanese authorities dismantled a clandestine Captagon lab in Hermel, near the Syrian border, after seizing a truck in May 2025 loaded with drug-making equipment.
This summer, Yemeni authorities from the internationally recognized government announced the capture of more than 1.5 million pills from Houthi-controlled Sanaa that were destined for Saudi Arabia, where the main consumer market for the drug is concentrated, according to the European Union Drugs Agency.
Major General Mutahhar Al-Shuaibi, director of police in the Yemeni port city of Aden, accused the rival-governing Houthis of establishing a Captagon factory in Al-Mahwit region, northern Yemen, “similar to the factory that was in Syria,” adding that Yemen is now being used as a transit zone for Saudi Arabia-bound Captagon.
Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought.
As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly.
For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.
“These findings highlight both the structural inefficiency of current video diffusion pipelines and the urgent need for efficiency-oriented design,” the researchers concluded in their paper.
Experts are warning that we’re rolling out generative AI tools without a full grasp of their true environmental impacts.
“Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes,” MIT Technology Review wrote in a recent analysis.
While image generators used the equivalent of five seconds of microwave warming to generate a single 1,024 x 1,024 pixel image, video generators proved far more energy-intensive. To spit out a five-second clip, the researchers found that it takes the equivalent of running a microwave for over an hour. If they’re consuming far more power as the length increases, the math doesn’t look good.
Those demands rise even faster for longer clips, implying “rapidly increasing hardware and environmental costs,” according to the Hugging Face researchers’ paper.
Fortunately, there are ways to slim down those demands, including intelligent caching, the reusing of existing AI generations, and “pruning,” meaning the sifting out of inefficient examples from training datasets.
But whether those efforts will be enough to make a dent in the enormous electricity consumption of current AI tools remains to be seen.The scale of its impact is substantial, with AI-related energy usage already representing 20 percent of global datacenter power demands, according to a recent study.
Meanwhile, tech giants are investing tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure buildouts, sometimes abandoning climate goals in the process. In its 2024 environmental impact report, Google admitted that it was woefully behind its ambitious plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, seeing a staggering 13 percent increase in carbon emissions year over year, in large part due to its embrace of generative AI.
Earlier this year, the company released its Veo 3 AI video generator, later boasting that users had created over 40 million videos in just seven weeks.
While the environmental impact of the tool remains unknown — Google isn’t exactly incentivized to investigate its sizable contributions to carbon emissions — chances are it’s far worse than we think.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (@Jacob_Rees_Mogg) posted at 7:19 pm on Sat, Sept 27, 2025: It is important to defend free speech for people with whom one very strongly disagrees.
Establishing Dail courts, crown courts after 1916 Rising. Who mooted it, designed the? Michael Comyn KC, when did he become involved?
Thought for 1m 3s
The Dáil Courts (also known as Republican Courts or Sinn Féin Courts) were established as an alternative judicial system to the British Crown courts in Ireland, emerging in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising as part of the broader push for Irish independence. They began informally as arbitration courts to handle local disputes, particularly land-related issues, and were later formalized to assert republican authority and undermine British rule.Who Mooted (Proposed) the Dáil Courts? The concept of arbitration courts as a form of non-violent resistance to British authority was first prominently proposed by Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin, as early as 1904-1906 in the party’s policy agenda. This built on earlier nationalist ideas dating back to Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal campaign in the 1840s and the Land League in the 1880s, where “native” or popular courts were suggested to resolve disputes outside British systems.
3 sources
Spontaneous arbitration courts began appearing locally in 1917-1919, often driven by Sinn Féin branches and IRA volunteers in response to rising land agitation amid economic pressures from World War I.
Who Designed and Established Them
The design and formal setup involved several key figures and steps under the First Dáil Éireann:
In June 1919, the Dáil Ministry (specifically the Ministry for Home Affairs) formed a committee to devise a scheme for arbitration courts, following a decision at a ministry meeting on 23 June 1919. 2 sources
Austin Stack, as Minister for Home Affairs, played a central role; he submitted a report on establishing “courts with coercive jurisdiction” on 4 March 1920 and transferred oversight to his ministry in June 1920, expanding them into a full rival system with civil and criminal powers. 2 sources
The courts were formally established by a Dáil decree on 29 June 1920, applying Irish law as it stood on 21 January 1919 (the date of the Dáil’s independence declaration). 2 sources
Other key designers included Kevin O’Shiel, who headed the Dáil Land Commission from mid-1920 to address land disputes; Cahir Davitt and Diarmuid Crowley, who drafted the rules and procedures; and local initiators like Commandant P.R. Hughes and solicitor Connor A. Maguire, who set up early Sinn Féin courts in South Mayo around 1919-1920. 2 sources
The system aimed to monopolize legitimate justice, with enforcement by republican police, and spread across most of Ireland by 1920, though it was suppressed during intensified conflict and later wound up under the Irish Free State in 1923.
Michael Comyn KC’s Involvement
Michael Comyn KC, an Irish barrister and nationalist, became involved in republican legal defense work shortly after returning from the United States in late 1916, where he had been during the Easter Rising. He focused on defending republican prisoners in British military courts and high-profile cases during the War of Independence (1919-1921) and Civil War (1922-1923), including the 1921 Clifford and O’Sullivan case (challenging death sentences) and Erskine Childers’ 1922 trial.
Regarding the Dáil Courts specifically, Comyn participated as a barrister appearing before them, defying a June 1920 Bar Council resolution that deemed such appearances professional misconduct. As a King’s Counsel, he likely handled cases in higher-tier Dáil Courts (e.g., district or supreme levels) dealing with civil matters like property and contracts, during the courts’ active period from mid-1920 to 1922. He also appeared before the post-1922 winding-up commission that resolved outstanding Dáil Court cases under the Free State.
No exact start date for his Dáil Court appearances is documented, but it aligns with the courts’ formal operation after June 1920, amid his broader nationalist legal activities.
6 web pages
Details on Austin Stack’s report
Erskine Childers’ trial
Sir David Foxton has written a book referring to Michael Comyn KC about Dail courts, as has Judge Sean Enright. Can you give a synopsis of what each have to say about Michael Comyn KC
Thought for 59s
David Foxton’s “Revolutionary Lawyers: Sinn Féin and Crown Courts in Ireland and Britain, 1916-1923”. In his book, David Foxton explores the role of Irish lawyers in navigating and challenging the British legal system during the Irish War of Independence. Regarding Michael Comyn KC, Foxton highlights him as a key example of a barrister who actively defied the Irish Bar Council’s June 1920 resolution, which declared appearances before Sinn Féin (Dáil) Courts as professional misconduct. Despite this, Comyn, a staunch republican and nationalist, participated in the Dáil Courts during their operational peak from mid-1920 to 1922. As a King’s Counsel, he likely appeared in higher-tier republican courts, such as district or supreme levels, handling civil matters like property disputes and contracts.Foxton uses Comyn’s actions to illustrate the broader tensions between professional ethics, nationalist ideology, and the republican effort to establish parallel judicial authority. Comyn’s involvement extended to the post-1922 winding-up commission under the Irish Free State, which resolved outstanding Dáil Court cases.Overall, Foxton’s portrayal emphasizes Comyn’s strategic use of law to support Irish self-determination, saving lives and challenging British authority amid conflict.
Judge Sean Enright’s “The Trial of Civilians by Military Courts: Ireland 1921”. Sean Enright, a former barrister and legal historian, examines the procedures, operations, and constitutional implications of British military courts trying Irish civilians during the height of the Anglo-Irish War in 1921. In relation to Michael Comyn KC, Enright discusses his prominent role in defending republican prisoners in these military tribunals. Comyn, having returned from the US in late 1916, became deeply involved in high-profile cases, including the 1921 Clifford and O’Sullivan trial, where he challenged death sentences imposed by a military court. Enright details how Comyn, alongside figures like Sir John Simon KC and his brother James Comyn, argued before the House of Lords on a preliminary objection just weeks after the military verdict, highlighting legal flaws in the martial law regime. While the book focuses more on military courts than the Dáil Courts, Enright contrasts the British system with the emerging republican alternatives, noting Comyn’s broader nationalist legal work that bridged both worlds. Comyn’s efforts are portrayed as part of a larger struggle to expose the injustices of ceding civilian trials to the military, ultimately contributing to debates on habeas corpus and the rule of law during the conflict.
2 sources
nephew James Comyn, argued before the House of Lords on a preliminary objection just weeks after the military verdict, highlighting legal flaws in the martial law regime. While the book focuses more on military courts than the Dáil Courts, Enright contrasts the British system with the emerging republican alternatives, noting Comyn’s broader nationalist legal work that bridged both worlds. Comyn’s efforts are portrayed as part of a larger struggle to expose the injustices of ceding civilian trials to the military, ultimately contributing to debates on habeas corpus and the rule of law during the conflict.
2 sources
3 web pages
Details on Clifford and O’Sullivan case
James Comyn’s legal career
More concise synopses
Michael Comyn KC you returned from America in 1916. What was he doing there? Is there any information about this visit at that time
Thoughts
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This is now proven as incorrect. Arthur Griffith was not in America with Michael Comyn KC at the time of the Rising in 1916. Also there is a reference to Michael Comyn and his nephew James Comyn, this is his brother James Comyn SC
Thought for 1m 54s
Michael Comyn KC was in the United States—specifically Kansas City, Missouri—during the 1916 Easter Rising.
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Primary historical sources, such as his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, do not specify the exact reason for his visit or provide additional details about its duration, purpose, or activities. Some secondary or anecdotal accounts (including unpublished family recollections and later historical analyses) suggest it may have been related to personal business, legal matters, or informal nationalist networking among Irish-American communities, but these are not substantiated in core biographical records.
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He returned to Ireland later in 1916 and promptly engaged in defending republican prisoners in British military courts, marking the start of his deeper involvement in the Irish independence movement.
Note that some online sources, including Wikipedia and certain blogs, erroneously claim Arthur Griffith accompanied him on this trip—this is inaccurate, as Griffith remained in Ireland throughout the Rising and was arrested in its aftermath.
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Additionally, references to James Comyn in contexts like the 1921 Clifford and O’Sullivan case refer to Michael’s brother, James Comyn KC (1872–1943), a fellow barrister—not his nephew, Sir James Peter Comyn (1921–1997), who was an infant at the time and later became a prominent judge in England.
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7 web pages
Details on Comyn’s unpublished autobiography
Role of Irish barristers in 1916 trials
Details on Comyn’s unpublished autobiography
Thought for 2m 8s
Michael Comyn KC did not publish an autobiography during his lifetime, but he left behind unpublished personal reflections and writings on his life and career, particularly his experiences as a barrister and judge. These appear to have been shared within his family and were partially recorded and incorporated into works by his nephew, Sir James Comyn (1921–1997), a prominent English judge and author.
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No full, standalone unpublished autobiography has been publicly released or cataloged in major archives, and details about its exact form (e.g., manuscript length, completion date, or storage location) remain scarce in historical records. However, key excerpts and insights from his writings are preserved through family accounts.Key
Details from Available Sources
Content and Themes: Comyn’s reflections focus heavily on his judicial philosophy and experiences after being appointed a Circuit Court judge in 1936 by Éamon de Valera (a position he initially declined but accepted on his wife’s advice). He discusses the gravity of judicial appointments, the essential qualities of a good judge (e.g., sound legal knowledge, courtesy to young lawyers, impartiality, and avoiding personal biases), and practical aspects of the role. In criminal cases, he advocated for fairness, mercy in sentencing (avoiding long terms to prevent despair in prisoners), and caution against institutionalizing young offenders, whom he saw as potential “finishing schools for delinquents.”He also commented on cultural differences between eastern and western Ireland, attributing them to historical emigration patterns, and reflected on the Irish independence movement, suggesting that “freedom” was the true goal rather than strict Republicanism. Humorous anecdotes, such as a bribery attempt in court and witty judicial exchanges, highlight his personality and the human side of the law. 2 sources
How It Was Recorded: These writings were documented by his nephew Sir James Comyn in the book Their Friends at Court (1973), which includes a dedicated chapter (Chapter XXIII) presenting Comyn’s views “in his own words.” The book, published by Barry Rose Publishers, is a collection of legal memoirs primarily about Sir James’s father (Michael’s brother, James Comyn KC) and the Munster Circuit during Ireland’s troubled times (1916–1923), but it incorporates Michael’s insights as a family tribute. Sir James, who had a close relationship with his uncle, likely drew from personal conversations, notes, or Michael’s unpublished manuscripts to compile this section. The chapter portrays Michael as enjoying his judicial role despite preferring advocacy, and it ends with Sir James’s affectionate commentary on his uncle’s wit and character. 3 sources
Family Context and Preservation: As a private family document, the unpublished material may have been kept among descendants, including Sir James, who referenced it in his own writings. Sir James also authored other legal memoirs, such as Summing It Up (1991) and Irish at Law (1981), but these focus more on his own career and do not extensively quote Michael’s unpublished work. Some family recollections have been shared online through blogs and reprints, such as a 2015 post by Michelle Clarke, which retypes the chapter from Their Friends at Court for historical interest. 2 sources
Archival Mentions: Archival catalogs, such as those from UCD Archives (e.g., Elgin O’Rahilly Papers and Desmond FitzGerald Papers) and Clare County Library, reference Comyn in legal documents, correspondence, and advisory roles during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War (e.g., as counsel to the Republican Government in 1922–1923), but they do not list a full autobiography or memoirs among preserved items. This suggests the writings were not formally deposited in public collections and remain private or lost. 3 sources
If the unpublished autobiography refers to a specific manuscript beyond these reflections, it may be held in private family papers or referenced obliquely in biographical sources like the Dictionary of Irish Biography, which draws on family accounts but does not detail it explicitly. Further details could potentially be found through direct contact with Comyn descendants or specialized Irish legal archives.
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