‘Human bone’ at centre of Jersey children’s home inquiry is actually a piece of wood or coconut shell

By DAVID ROSE – 18th May 2008

Police chief was told about forensic lab finding six weeks ago but kept it quiet

He is being investigated for “abuse of authority” by detectives from outside his force

Firms of lawyers are planning to claim damages for 27 former residents

The “remains of a child” discovered by police investigating allegations of abuse at a former children’s home on Jersey is really a small piece of wood or broken coconut shell, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

The discovery of the fragment in February prompted police to open an inquiry into a possible murder at the Haut de la Garenne home; and this week detectives are set to announce further evidence which they believe shows that another two dead children were buried in the cellar.

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Vital evidence: Dr Tom Higham found that the fragment was not bone but a piece of wood or coconut shell

But Jersey police were told almost six weeks ago that tests by Britain’s top carbon-dating laboratory showed that the original evidence – supposedly a fragment of a child’s skull – was not bone.

The island’s controversial deputy police chief, Lenny Harper, who is heading the investigation, has consistently failed to mention the vital results in public statements since the tests were completed.

Interviewed in the home last Tuesday, he repeated: “It is a fragment of a human body…we don’t know how, when or where that person died.”

Last night Mr Harper admitted that his team had received emails reporting the test results on April 8, including a message that stated: “This one ain’t bone.”

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Eddie the ’sniffer’ dog who allegedly smelt ‘bone’ through several inches of concrete

But he insisted that had “never seen” a letter setting out the findings in more detail, which was addressed to him personally and dated May 1, until it was emailed to him yesterday.

Mr Harper also conceded that “clothing and other items” which he previously said had been found at the home – fuelling speculation that a child’s grave had been unearthed – amounted to a piece of a button and a leather toggle.

However, he said he remained confident that the fragment was bone, based on the opinion of his forensic anthropologist, Julie Roberts, even though she had not been able to carry out detailed tests.

“As far as I am concerned, it was diagnosed as bone, and bone it remains,” he said.

Scientists from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit spent weeks investigating the fragment with the world’s most sophisticated equipment, whereas Ms Roberts had to reach her conclusion in a hurry – between the fragment’s discovery at 9.30am on February 24 and Mr Harper’s Press conference that afternoon.

Deputy Police Chief Lenny Harper was told about the forensic lab finding six weeks ago but kept it quiet

Mr Harper said he hoped to announce the results of new tests this week on further bone fragments and milk teeth unearthed more recently from the Haut de la Garenne cellars.

“We believe the bone fragments are human,” he said. “They have been submitted for DNA testing and carbon dating.”

According to Mr Harper, Ms Roberts identified the newly discovered bones as parts of a tibia from a child aged between eight and 11.

She said some of the teeth appeared to have come from a child of the same age, and others from one aged between five and eight.

The length of the roots indicated they had not fallen out naturally before either child died, and both the teeth and bone fragments appeared to have been burnt. They are thought to date from between 1940 and 1980.

However, the disclosure that Mr Harper did not reveal the results of the tests on the first “skull fragment” may cause serious damage to his high-profile investigation, which is by far the largest in Jersey’s history.

Mr Harper has made influential enemies on the island.

Having mounted a campaign against what he claimed were “corrupt officers” in his own force, he is now being investigated himself for alleged abuse of his authority by detectives from Devon and Cornwall, who were called in by his chief officer, Graham Power.

However, Mr Harper said that two of the five complaints against him had already been rejected as ‘malicious’, adding that he was confident he would be cleared of the others.

Mr Harper is also facing criticism for courting media attention in the Haut de la Garenne case. Last week the island’s chief minister, Frank Walker, attacked the “remorseless denigration of Jersey” in the coverage of the inquiry.

“I am not joining the criticisms of the media. In the main, coverage has been very accurate and objective.”

When he first revealed that his team had found part of a child’s body, Mr Harper had already spent many months investigating allegations of physical and sexual abuse at Haut de la Garenne and elsewhere on the island.

But until this discovery, the case had attracted little interest.

When the Oxford scientists told Jersey’s forensic services manager, Vicky Coupland, that the fragment was not bone, she urged them not to mention their conclusion in public, saying the police hoped to avoid a media row, which risked “detracting from the investigation as a whole”.

The scientists, led by the lab’s deputy director, Dr Tom Higham, were so concerned by Mr Harper’s continued insistence that the fragment was human bone that they wrote to him formally on May 1.

They restated their findings and added that they had been endorsed by a second opinion from a leading bone expert, palaeontologist Dr Roger Jacobi.

“We concluded that the sample was not in fact bone but almost certainly a piece of wood,” the letter said.

“Its curvature may have had something to do with it being misidentified. It appears to be more likely a seed casing or a small piece of coconut. Our conclusion is that this sample is a) not bone and b) not human.”

Dr Jacobi said last night: “I share Tom’s conclusions. I believe it is a piece of coconut shell, such as you might come across on a beach.

“I have been handling bones for more than 30 years, ranging from ones a few months old to those dating back several hundred thousand years. In my opinion, this is not a piece of bone.

“It isn’t like any piece of bone I’ve ever seen: it’s light and porous. It certainly has none of the structures you would find in a human skull.”

Inquiries into “historic abuse” cases are notoriously difficult, as witnesses and forensic evidence are often hard to find. The Mail on Sunday has seen documents showing that evidence of abuse in another Jersey home was ignored in the early Nineties and charges against an alleged abuser were dropped.

In historic abuse cases, police tend to rely on “similar fact evidence”, when several people testify about similar abuse by the same person.

“We do rely on similar fact evidence to a huge degree,” Mr Harper said, adding that “almost all” of those now coming forward were prompted to speak out by the publicity surrounding the case. The danger is that some people may make false allegations in the hope of obtaining damages.

Since Mr Harper’s media blitz began, Jersey law firm Ozannes has been taking statements from former residents of Haut de la Garenne and is planning a class action for damages on behalf of 27 of them with the help of Portsmouth solicitors Dyer Burdett.

Allan Collins of Dyer Burdett said: “It’s widely recognised that traumatised victims of abuse may suppress memories of what they went through in order to be able to deal with life. They have only now come forward because they have seen the home featured on TV, and it has brought it all flooding back.”

Mr Harper conceded that “a substantial number” of those who had made statements had long criminal records. But he claimed that made them more credible because they came forward despite previously “hostile” encounters with police.

He remained convinced that almost all of the alleged victims interviewed by detectives – numbering more than 160 – were telling the truth. “There are only three we’ve got some doubts about,” he said.

But none of them has made specific claims about a murder, raising further questions over Mr Harper’s inquiries. Legal sources in Jersey last night said they feared his investigation might jeopardise the chances of genuine abuse victims getting justice.

His murder inquiry began when Eddie, an “enhanced victim recovery dog”, began barking in the cellar of Haut de la Garenne – the sign, according to its handler, that he had detected the scent of human remains.

By coincidence, the dog, from South Yorkshire Police, is the same animal that supposedly picked up “the scent of death” in the apartment where Madeleine McCann was last seen in Praia de Luz in Portugal.

According to Mr Harper, Eddie smelled the decades-old skull fragment through “several inches” of concrete, which police then smashed through. Eddie had the same reaction at another six locations at Haut de la Garenne but nothing was ever found.

“I don’t believe a dog can pick up such a scent through a layer of concrete,” said Mike Swindells, a former Lancashire officer who wrote the standard sniffer dog training manual.

“It’s really very unlikely.”

In his early media briefings, Mr Harper did not make clear that the first “human remains” consisted only of a single fragment the size of a 50p piece. Doubts were cast over the evidence when it first arrived at the Oxford lab early in March.

The first step in dating remains is to treat the bone with chemicals that separate its soft collagen protein from the harder mineral content. Only the collagen can be dated reliably.

However, the pre-treatment did not produce any collagen. The conclusion was unavoidable: the fragment was not bone.

At the time, a police Press statement admitted scientists had been unable to date the fragment because its collagen content was low. But Mr Harper said this was because it had been found in a “lime-rich environment”, to which Ms Coupland added:

“The experts who tested it said that was why the collagen had degraded.”

In fact, the Oxford scientists and Dr Jacobi say the opposite is true. “If it had been kept in a temperate, lime-rich environment and was actually bone, it would have been well preserved,” Dr Jacobi said.

“It would very clearly be bone, which this is not.

“The Oxford scientist who did the pre-treatment has tested thousands of pieces of bone and she felt instinctively from the outset that this was not bone. She was right.”

Last night Mr Harper angrily denied he had ever knowingly misled the media about his investigation. “That’s not how we do things. We are transparent,” he said.

The dangers we all face when police are too terrified to think for themselves

By KEITH HELLAWELL - 17th May 2008

This has been a difficult week for West Midlands police. It is rare for public servants to be sued for libel, and the High Court apology the force gave to Channel 4 and the Dispatches programme was both humiliating and unprecedented.

For all its unique features, however, this case is symptomatic of a broader set of failings: a loss of nerve, a warped sense of priorities and, in particular, a culture of weak-minded politicisation that should concern us all.

Undercover Mosque, the edition of Dispatches at the heart of the legal case, made disturbing viewing.

Broadcast in January last year, it showed clerics at mainstream mosques making extreme and inflammatory statements, advocating the murder of homosexuals, for example, and praising the killer of a British soldier in Afghanistan.

Yet, instead of lauding the programme makers for their careful and enterprising work, West Midlands police said Channel 4 should be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred.

They accused Dispatches of deliberately distorting the views of the clerics through misleading editing and, when their own investigations foundered, they complained to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.

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Disturbing: Undercover Mosque showed clerics making inflammatory statements

The whole sorry episode reached its conclusion on Friday with a joint apology from the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, and a promise to pay £100,000 – out of public funds, presumably. They had no evidence to support their case.

Such an astonishing lack of judgment is difficult to comprehend, perhaps, but it is by no means unusual. Police forces around the country grow ever more bizarre in their decisions on who and what to prosecute, leaving the public angry and confused.

How can it be, for example, that prominent figures from the worlds of art and fashion seem immune from prosecution despite clear evidence of drug-taking, while unassuming office workers are dragged through the courts for dropping an apple core or placing the wrong piece of rubbish in the wrong bin?

Why do complaints from ethnic minorities appear to be given so much more attention than those from the majority?

Why do police forces take action against parents who shout at their children while refusing to act in cases where property has been damaged by fully grown adults?

As a former police officer of 36 years experience, who worked my way up through the ranks to become Chief Constable of Cleveland and then West Yorkshire, later becoming “drugs tsar” for the Government, I am disturbed by what I see around me.

I know of a 14-year-old – the daughter of a serving police officer, as it happens – who attempted to intervene in a case of playground bullying.

One month later, the local Violent Crime Squad banged on her door and she was arrested – because another girl had ended up with milkshake on her coat following the dispute.

I have rarely come across such a waste of time and money with so little public interest at stake.

Now I have left the force, I have time to write a regular column for my local paper, the Huddersfield Examiner, and I know from our readers that these puzzling inconsistencies abound.

One man told me he found his car being smashed by vandals, who turned on him when he remonstrated. Yet he was told by police it would be best not to complain because the thugs might return to exact vengeance.

I know of a vicar in near despair because his church is under siege from vandals. The police do nothing.

Yet he knows for a fact that a single concerned phone call from the local mosque will bring an immediate police response, often from senior officers.

Which brings us back to the strange behaviour of the West Midlands force. There are numerous causes of this sorry situation, but two stand out.

First is the behaviour of central government, which for more than a decade has stripped its police officers of autonomy, preferring to believe its university-educated advisers know better than themen and women paid to do the job.

This has left police forces terrified to take independent action, believing – wrongly – that judgment and discretion play no part in their job.

Second is a national culture of political correctness that elevates concerns for equality above those of ordinary policing. On both counts, the micro management and the politicisation – a poisonous mixture – New Labour has been the greatest culprit.

The first signs of danger came under a different regime when, in the mid-Nineties with Michael Howard as Home Secretary, the Conservative Government introduced centrally directed policing priorities.

There was nothing sinister in this attempt to make the national force more effective, but from that moment on central control has grown and police autonomy has dwindled.

Then we had the decision to abolish tenure for chief constables and put them on fixed-term contracts. Now no one can expect to be in post for more than five years.

There may be benefits, but it means forces are run by people fearful for their career prospects and unwilling to speak out.

But the real damage came in the years following 2001, when David Blunkett arrived at the Home Office. He seemed determined to take personal control of almost all aspects of police operations.

Chief constables were picked out and humiliated in public.

Ministers now seem to prefer politically sympathetic figureheads to those with any real experience of reducing crime.

A new financial regime has ensured that forces receive no extra cash unless they agree to implement the Government’s pet projects, such as the introduction of “Community Support Officers”.

Terrified to speak their minds, terrified to act without permission, some in the police force have forgotten how to think for themselves.

One result is a lack of even-handedness, which diminishes the force in the eyes of law-abiding citizens. Why, they ask, should some people be punished disproportionately while others are judged too sensitive for scrutiny?

The damage goes way beyond the principle of equity, important as that might be.

Political cowardice-now hampers the authorities in the most serious matters and has, in my view, already contributed to the appalling scenes of 7/7 and the London bombings.

Large areas in our inner cities, primarily those occupied by minority communities, are no longer policed effectively and these include those streets where home-grown terrorists have lived and conspired.

For fear of appearing racist, police forces tolerate levels of crime, including drug dealing, that should properly demand immediate action.

The victims, ironically, are overwhelmingly the very members of the ethnic minorities that the university-educated police chiefs are trying so ineffectively to appease.

The recent appalling series of black-on-black murders in London is evidence of this.

Community elders express their fears, but only in private because, with teenage gangsters operating beyond the law, they dare not speak out.

If the problems have been caused by politics, politicians must find the answers. Police forces must have their power and autonomy returned, however uncomfortable that may be for central government.

Until we return to the sort of policing I recognise and that the public demands, this dangerous state of affairs will not merely continue, it will get worse.

Exposed: How scheming power firms rig prices to con families out of £400 every year

By SEAN POULTER – 17th May 2008

Bills could spiral for families if power companies do not stop ‘fixing bills’

Households are being overcharged by more than £400 a year for gas and electricity because power companies are fixing prices, it is claimed.The official consumer body Energywatch says the power supply industry in Britain and Europe is rigged against consumers.

It also accuses the Government of being docile and complacent while millions struggle to pay their bills.

Householders have already been hit with a 15 per cent increase this year, and the industry is suggesting another 25 per cent rise.

The giant power suppliers claim they are simply passing on increases in the wholesale cost of gas, which has been driven up by a record leap in the price of oil to more than 120 dollars a barrel.

However, Energywatch says this link between the gas price and oil is unjustified, artificial and outdated. The watchdog says the link amounts to a form of price-fixing.

MPs on the House of Commons Business and Enterprise committee have begun an inquiry into the prices.

Energywatch chief executive Alan Asher will tell them that bills could be slashed if the price of gas and electricity was linked to the normal market pattern of supply and demand.

He said: “There is no shortage of gas, yet consumers are being bombarded with dire predictions of huge price rises.

“The prices being charged for gas and electricity bear no proper market relation to the cost of production or the availability of supplies.

“The commodity cost for gas would be about 25p-30p per therm, however the winter price is currently 85p.”

Mr Asher, who is due to give evidence to the MPs’ inquiry, complained: “There is no logic for the link to the price of oil.

“It is a form of price-fixing, although probably not illegal. The way it works is to give the gas producers an external reference point to keep their prices high.

“If the link was broken, consumers could realistically expect that gas prices would fall by half and electricity by about one-third.”

Consumers are paying an average of just over £1,000 a year for gas and electricity. It appears the figure could come down by as much as £400 if the link to oil was broken.

Energywatch believes the Government, the industry regulator Ofgem and the EU have done too little to challenge the price-setting systems used by European energy suppliers such as RWE and E.on of Germany, EDF of France and Iberola, of Spain.

There are also concerns that some of them are using their control over Europe’s pipelines to block exports of cheap gas to the UK from Russia.

Mr Asher said: “The Government should be pushing this as a key issue in the European parliament.

“They should have the competition authorities in Europe jumping up and down about it. Instead they are being docile and complacent.”

Any price-rigging on gas feeds through to higher charges for electricity. This is because around 40 per cent of the UK’s electricity comes from gas-fired power stations.

Energywatch believes that a Competition Commission inquiry is necessary.

Mr Asher believes the commission would take the view that long-term contracts that tie the price of gas to oil are uncompetitive and against the consumer interest.

It would also investigate the fact that supplies in the UK are in the hands of only six major players – British Gas, E.on, nPower, EDF, Scottish & Southern Energy, and Scottish Power.

The companies insist a succession of inquiries have given their industry a clean bill of health.

How Europe fuelled our dearer gas

When Britain was self-sufficient in gas from the North Sea, the price was directly linked to the cost of getting it out of the ground and rules of supply and demand.

This meant the UK enjoyed relatively cheap gas and electricity for decades.

But three years ago Britain became increasingly reliant on gas from Europe, where monopoly companies have been charging high prices for years.

The major European power companies such as RWE and E.on of Germany have historically bought and sold gas on the basis of very long-term contracts linked to the price of oil.

Unlike in the UK, there has been no meaningful competition among them. Consequently-these monopoly companies had no reason to cut prices or scrap the price link to oil.

Now that the UK is reliant on imports from Europe to cover 20 per cent of our need for gas, the high prices on the Continent are being imported to this country.

The European Commission has told member states that they need to break up the monopolies and introduce competition into the system. However, progress has been painfully slow.

As a result, British families and business are being held to ransom by European gas companies who can, for example, use their control of the pipelines to block access to cheap gas from Russia.

Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist?

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Street signs to just about anywhere in Ballyvaughan in the west of Ireland.

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By DAN BARRY

Published: May 18, 2008

AN August night in the sea-scented village of Kinvara finds us at Connolly’s, a pub so permanent that if some codger were to tell you it was here before Galway Bay, lapping now just outside the door, you’d nod and buy him a pint. My wife and I are hunched at a small table with friends when a smiling woman in a peasant skirt sits beside us, carrying a perfectly appropriate accessory in this corner of Ireland — a button accordion.

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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

The village of Cong, where “The Quiet Man” was filmed. More Photos »

She is Mary Staunton, a musician known throughout the Irish west. When the inevitable call goes out, she obliges, her fingers skipping across the buttons like children playing frantic but sure-footed hopscotch. Then a white-haired man mentions an old song from his childhood. Does she know it? Why yes, she does, and when her fingers finish their dance, leaving the man smiling, there suddenly rises from across the room the hesitant but clear voice of a young woman who has summoned the nerve to sing. (“And I said let grief be a fallen leaf/At the dawning of the day.”) As she sings, all talking stops: an entire pub, transported. And I think to myself, now this would never happen where I’m from.

Was this the real Ireland? Or was it a rare dash of magic, sprinkled into Connolly’s to validate an antiquated sense of Ireland — a sense rooted in the days when economic inequity between two countries allowed American tourists to spend as though Ireland were one sprawling duty-free shop? Though the country is now experiencing some economic uneasiness, you still cannot help but think: How times have changed.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the western counties of Galway and Clare, and if nothing else, this is what I have gleaned: Ireland can be that place you missed as you traveled around Ireland, looking for Ireland.

Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.

You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.

There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland.

Well versed by now in the lesson that to search for Ireland is to miss it, my family and I once again settled into a self-catered apartment in Kinvara, a village cleaved to Galway Bay near the Clare-Galway border. A generation ago, even a decade ago, you might have called it an unhurried place; now Kinvara captures the transformation of Ireland in so many ways.

The village has a few narrow streets, some shops and pubs, and a stone-walled pier more than 200 years old, from which the distant lights of Galway City can be seen at night and the inhalations and exhalations of the sea can be measured. Across from the pier there looms Dunguaire Castle, which for nearly five centuries has stood on grounds near the ancient fort of Guaire, seventh-century King of Connaught.

The castle’s topmost open windows offer a panoramic view of a Kinvara in flux. Much of the surrounding farmland is being subdivided for new homes, some of them being offered for the equivalent of $1 million and more; they appeal to young professionals looking for an easy commute into Galway, and to affluent Dubliners seeking a second-home getaway. It all leaves one wondering whether the village’s aesthetics are at risk; whether these new developments, and the taxing of the fragile infrastructure they represent, will make Kinvara less — Kinvara-like.

But for now, Kinvara presents curious juxtapositions of the old and the new. Here, for example, an inviting place called the Burren Beo Café occupies an old stone storefront where wireless access is available and where tombstones from a long-gone churchyard adorn the patio. You can sip your caffè latte and imagine the life led by one Bryan Daly, who departed this life at the age of 33, in 1816, and whose headstone lies flat at your feet.

THOUGH Kinvara is perfectly situated for day trips to other points of the Irish west, I often struggle with whether to stay or to go, lulled as I am by the mundane daily rhythms of a village I have come to know in all seasons.

In the mornings, I watch the same white-bearded fisherman — said to be Kinvara’s last — park his old black bicycle by the pier, row a skiff to his rusty-green vessel, and disappear into the bay. Sometime later I see him rowing back to shore, where he mounts his bicycle and vanishes down a narrow lane, leaving me to wonder whether I had actually seen him or simply imagined him.

In the afternoons, I sometimes see the beer truck pull up to Connolly’s, and I watch the deliveryman throw a seat cushion on the ground, bounce the beer kegs precisely onto the cushion, then spin them like squat and silvery dance partners toward the pub door.

And in the evenings, I take walks with my wife and two young daughters along a worn path that meanders along the shoreline and through pastures where cows, horses and donkeys approach, as if seeking the latest gossip from Connolly’s. At the stony pier we watch the bobbing of moored Galway hookers, traditional wooden sailing boats with single masts and glorious billowing sails. Once used to import turf from rocky Connemara, the hookers are now the star attraction of a mid-August festival called Cruinniu na mBad, or Gathering of the Boats.

The sun drops, and somewhere voices are raised in song, seducing you to stay snug in Kinvara. But other places beckon, places dotted through the west that represent the old, the new, the real Ireland. If you were to climb again up those stone steps of Dunguaire Castle and peer again through one of those narrow windows, you would see beyond the village a limestone moonscape of hills and crevices, of wild goats and wildflowers, that stretches for more than 100 square miles across North Clare. This is the Burren.

Take any crooked Burren road, whether to Kilfenora or to Lisdoonvarna, to Tubber or to Cassidy’s Pub, and something ancient — a solitary Celtic cross, a crumbled farmhouse, one of the megalithic tombs of stone called dolmens — presents itself. One rain-swept afternoon, friends led us to a Burren mountain called Slieve Carron, which stretches across the horizon like a giant in repose. We donned slickers and walked a mile across cow-pocked fields, through some brush, up a muddy hill, to a tree-canopied pocket as lush as any hobbit’s grotto. Here was an altar made of rock slab beside a spring. And here, deeper in, was a cave where St. Colman MacDuagh is said to have lived and meditated. No beeping of backhoes clearing way for another luxury home; just the beating of rain against leaves.

This sense of exposure, even oneness, with sky, rock and water continues through the short, winding drive from Slieve Carron to New Quay. Found there is a semi-secret place called the Flaggy Shore, a stony stretch along Galway Bay that is alive with lime-green seaweed and bruised-purple algae, with tidal pools and breath-catching winds, with — well, best to step aside and let the unmatchable Seamus Heaney describe the Flaggy Shore experience in his poem “Postscript”:

… You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Half a mile away, at the back door of Linnane’s Lobster Bar, fishing boats rock in the impatient tide; at its front door, two rumpled regulars sit on upturned kegs, offering nods and how-are-ye’s. Between these portals, fine fish and chowder are served. But on this day, and on a patch of pasture just outside Linnane’s and beyond a stone wall, there sit two sleek private helicopters, so out of place in these simple surroundings — and yet very much in their proper place in the Ireland of today. The very rich in Ireland think nothing of zipping by helicopter the 130 miles from Dublin to Galway or Clare for a leisurely lunch of oysters and then back again, thus avoiding the off chance of traffic congestion caused by sheep on some secondary road.

In the Ireland of today, even the famous Cliffs of Moher are different. Not long ago the amenities included a small parking lot, a modest cafeteria and a gift shop. But with the completion early last year of a multimillion-dollar renovation, the country’s most popular tourist attraction now includes the Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience, a multimedia center cleverly built into the hillside. It could have been cheesy; instead, it is mesmerizing, with audio-visual presentations that celebrate the intertwined stories of rock, water and humankind.

But the real always trumps the virtual. The cliffs remain a pulse-racing place where a four-mile stretch of improbable green land suddenly stops, and walls of shale and flagstone drop several hundred feet to receive the angry white-foam crashes of the Atlantic.

A change in infrastructure is one thing; a change in culture is quite another. And nowhere is this change more strongly felt than in Gort, about 40 miles northeast of the cliffs and just a dozen miles from Kinvara. My mother grew up on a farm near there, and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-like subdivisions.

The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities — from maracuja to mandioca — in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.

And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.

You will see the Irish at the Quadrilha, some of them wearing the soccer jerseys of Brazil’s national team, just as you will see Brazilians two months later at the Gort Show, an annual agricultural fair, where inside the community center, locals compete for best mince pie and handsomest heads of garden cabbage, while in the fields outside, judges in bowler hats ponder before selecting the best-colored colt, filly or gelding. The new Gort is reflected in the flags of Ireland and Brazil that sometimes hang in shop windows, the green in both nearly blending.

Any day trip through the west of Ireland will lead to some new discovery, some new reflection of the steady departure from a twee past that was never quite as twee as tourists might imagine. Yes, there are still places like Cong, the adorable little village in County Mayo whose economy even now hinges on its serendipitous role as the setting for “The Quiet Man,” a movie from 1952 that starred John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. But a short drive from Cong into the Connemara wildness, where there are often stretches of nothing more than rock, craggy hills and the occasional car, you can find beside an abandoned stone farmhouse a recently built summer getaway, and another backhoe carving into the scenery to make way for another second home. Remote Connemara is no longer remote, and no longer cheap.

There is so much to experience in Connemara, from the ruggedness of its Twelve Bens mountain range to the refined comfort at its old Renvyle House Hotel, that it can seem almost too much at times. And so I return to that place I know a little, Kinvara.

I know that when the evening tide rises at the pier in nearby Parkmore, the sprat-chasing mackerel nearly leap into your pail. I know that on the short ride back to town, in a stamp-size spot called Nogra, there’s a century-old pub and store called Fahy’s Travellers Inn; you drink your pint, hear the murmur of local chatter, then toss your spare change into the can for the African Mission that sits on the bar.

And I know that music tends to break out.

Another August night finds us with 20 others, talking and drinking under an awning outside the Pier Head, a bar and restaurant across the quay from Connolly’s. Those majestic boats called hookers rock gently in the bay. Dunguaire Castle, set aglow by floodlights, watches over Kinvara, as always. It is raining.

Then a man I know starts singing, as is his habit at moments like these. With eyes closed, he sings an old song written by a Kinvara poet long gone, about the cuckoos calling from the woods within, and his love beside him and the tide full in. People fall quiet, many with heads bowed, creating a sense that in all of Ireland there are only these sounds: seawater lapping, rainwater tapping, and one man’s song.

BUSTLE AND STILLNESS

WHERE TO STAY

One of the better options in and around Kinvara are “self-catered” accommodations that range from renovated thatched cottages to modern homes with up-to-date amenities and weekly rates of 270 to 900 euros ($425.60 to $1,422 at $1.58 to the euro). A list can be found at www.kinvara.com.

As for Connemara, the twinning of the rugged and the luxurious can be found at the Renvyle House Hotel (Renvyle, County Galway; 353-95-43511; www.renvyle.com), once owned by the Irish writer Oliver St. John Gogarty. It offers a heated pool, a golf course, a fine restaurant that prides itself on using local ingredients (try the sea bream, for example) and the wild Atlantic just outside the door. In July and August the rates are about 120 euros a person, including breakfast, though the hotel also offers various family packages.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

For local seafood and ambience near the Burren, try Linnane’s Lobster Bar (New Quay, County Clare; 353-65-7078120). For about 80 euros, two can enjoy a lobster dinner with drinks. But a bowl of robust seafood chowder, with a pint, can fill you up for 9 euros.

The Pier Head (The Quay, Kinvara, County Galway; 353-91-638188) has a more refined atmosphere, along with a fireplace and a view of Galway Bay. There’s a prix fixe menu for 35 euros that includes chowder, an entrée (anything from sea trout to duck) and dessert, and an inviting bar menu that includes, for example, a smoked salmon platter for about 11 euros.

Finally, for drink and chat and occasional bursts of music, try Connolly’s (The Quay, Kinvara; 353-91-637131) and Fahy’s Travellers Inn (Nogra, Kinvara; 353-91-637116).

DAN BARRY is the This Land columnist for The New York Times.

Did this man really regrow his finger with magic dust?

By ANDREW MALONE – 16th May 2008

Holding his finger up to the light, Lee Spievack is in no doubt that he is a walking miracle.A Vietnam veteran, the 69-year-old was wounded during hand-to-hand combat on the battlefields of South-east Asia. A bayonet was thrust through his palm as he struggled for life before his enemy was shot dead.

That wound healed naturally. But Spievack is now at the centre of an extraordinary furore over a new “miracle” that he insists could change the future of the human race.

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Finger of suspicion? Lee Spievack shows off his ‘miracle’ middle finger

It holds out the astonishing – and seemingly implausible – prospect that new limbs and organs can be grown with the help of a mysterious substance dubbed “pixie dust,” taken from the bladders of pigs.

Amid derision from scientists and claims that he is just a “snake oil salesman,” Spievack insists that his astonishing recovery from a recent injury sustained during an accident with a model aeroplane is proof that a way has been discovered to make the human body regenerate itself.

Spievack will today be paraded before an international conference to show off the middle finger of his right hand – supposedly severed when it was caught in the propeller of a model he was trying to fix, only to be magically restored.

After a lavish dinner, the self-proclaimed “miracle man” will tell his remarkable story to an audience of world medical experts.

The barest details of what he will say – that his finger grew back after being treated with pixie dust – were leaked two weeks ago, and Spievack has already been inundated with requests from around the world by the sick and the dying.

Desperate for supplies of this supposedly wondrous dust, thousands have been in touch with him in the hope that he can transform their lives.

So what is the truth? Is he a quack? Or can we really believe Spievack’s story of a finger regenerating itself – along with the extraordinary implications for medical science?

Spievack’s finger when it was severed

For an answer, I travelled to Spievack’s home in Cincinnati – and uncovered an astonishing saga.

Far from being a hustler or a fantasist, this decorated former soldier appears to be entirely sincere – yet he’s also the public face of a business involving vast sums of money, and Supreme Court battles, and which has attracted the interest of the U.S. President.

With countless people hoping this “breakthrough” could help them grow new limbs as well as vital organs – replacing diseased livers, kidneys and even hearts – Spievack’s finger has spawned a multi-billion- dollar industry.

This month, the White House agreed to pump in more than $500m (£256m) to research whether pixie dust can help thousands of wounded soldiers grow new limbs, fingers and toes lost during the war in Iraq.

With the use of high-tech laboratories and special facilities built to create the dust, President George W. Bush hopes any breakthrough could ease the political fall-out from the war.

As for Lee Spievack himself, he insists he stands to make nothing from the pixie dust even if it does get proved to work.

In fact, he had never even heard of the research to develop pixie dust until his brother, a doctor, insisted he used it to treat his damaged finger.

“I didn’t plan on cutting off my finger,” he says, showing me where it was chopped off by the propeller of the model plane at his hobby shop.

“The piece of finger flew up into the air. We all looked for it to pack it in ice in the hope it could be sewn back on, but we couldn’t find it. I was prepared to face the rest of my life without it, thinking things could have been much worse.”

With blood spurting from what was left of his finger, Spievack was taken by paramedics to the local hospital, where the wound was bandaged. He was told that all the surgeon could do was to graft skin from his arm or thigh over his finger to seal the stump.

Instead, his brother Alan – a doctor who had researched cell regeneration on account of a childhood obsession with the fact that salamanders and lizards can re-grow severed limbs – told him to cancel the operation.

“I didn’t question my brother. He’s older than me and he’s a doctor, so I just did what he said.”

Alan sent Lee a white, talc-like powder in a small bottle and told him to sprinkle it on the open wound every two days.

Lee did as he was told. The finger, he says, started growing. And growing.

Within four weeks, he says his recovery was complete. His finger was back – to exactly the same length and dimensions as before. Producing pictures he took immediately after the accident, they show his finger to be a bloody pulp, cut off at the point where his nail begins and with bone visible. Beside the pictures, Spievack holds out his new finger for inspection.

Apart from a tiny scar on the tip, it is now impossible to tell that the finger was ever damaged.

I touch the “wound” – it is calloused, like the hard skin on the heels of feet.

“I have not had any problems with it,” says Spievack, who won the Purple Heart for gallantry during combat in Vietnam.

“But I have to cut the nail of that finger three times a week, compared with once a week for my other nails.

“That nail seems to grow at a crazy speed. I just hope my story can help others. I repeat, I have nothing to gain from all this.”

The pixie dust saga began more than 50 years ago. Growing up in Cincinnati, Lee and Alan Spievack raised salamanders in their mother’s pie dishes. Like children around the world, they were fascinated by the animal world around them. Lee’s job was to feed the salamanders with pieces of hamburger held on tweezers.

But Alan, five years older than Lee, took it further. After graduating, he won a Fulbright Scholarship and later a place at Harvard Medical School after producing academic papers on the way that these reptiles could re-grow limbs.

He knew this was true: with the cruelty of childhood, he and his brother used to chop off their pets’ arms and legs, and watch in astonishment as new body parts grew to replace them.

Then, as Lee went off to Vietnam, Alan continued his salamander “studies” as a sideline while working to become one of the top surgeons in America. A chance meeting during a conference 12 years ago made him step up his research.

He listened as Dr Stephen Badylak, a former veterinary surgeon and civil engineer, described how his pet dog, Rocky, was dying from a faulty artery.

Badylak explained how he had removed part of Rocky’s intestine and stitched it in place of the artery.

The inner lining of the intestine regenerates itself every six days. And, astonishingly, he says the intestine he put in Rocky mutated and became indistinguishable from a real artery, changing its own shape and composition naturally.

He tried the same procedure on other dogs, replacing tendons, bladders and ligaments successfully. He realised that the intestine’s cells had been used by the body as a scaffold around which new tissue and organs can grow.

While the exact details of how the new powder works is a closely-guarded secret, some doctors say it appears to trick the human body into thinking that it needs to grow new flesh or organs.

In the same way that cells “tell” a baby in the womb that it has not fully developed, instructing it to grow fingers, organs and eyes, clinical trials appear to show that compounds taken from a pig’s bladder and modified in laboratories trigger a similar process in adults.

There have been numerous cases of children re-growing fingers and toes up to the age of two, though nobody had been able to pinpoint how this happens, or why it stops at that age.

Badylak thinks he now knows the secret. However, despite publishing countless papers about his findings, he was dismissed as a fraud by the medical establishment. But Alan Spievack was transfixed, asking Badylak afterwards why his methods were not being used to save human lives.

“Because nobody believes me,” Badylak replied.

The two formed a partnership and a company called ACell to patent their research. They also set up a special laboratory, with filtered air to keep out disease, to breed donor pigs (the animals have many biological similarities to humans, which Badylak says makes their cells ideal for stimulating regrowth).

More than 1,000 pigs are now killed each day at ACell’s farm, and specific cells from their bladders are harvested before being dried and turned into powder – the white substance Lee Spievack sprinkled on his finger to make it grow. In essence, it is said to stop scar tissue forming so that the organs can grow back.

Already, appeals have been flooding in to Badylak and Spievack.

“I’m a mother from Bologna, Italy, and my daughter was born with a defective hand,” says one letter. “She’s three years old now. She’s being made fun of in school. We’d like her to have a normal life. She’s a beautiful child. We’re willing to travel to the States. What can you do for her?”

Badylak says: “These letters are just just heartbreaking. I got another last week from the family of a little girl who fell off a wagon and into a meat-grinder – it included a picture of her hand all chopped up. I think that in ten years we will be able to help people like that.”

Yet many experts still do not believe that pixie dust works, pointing out that Lee’s injury was relatively minor and his finger could have re-grown anyway. They mock the fact that the “experiment” was not monitored by independent doctors.

“This man lost some skin and flesh from the tip of his finger,” says Ben Goldacre, a doctor and editor of the Bad Science website.

“Fingers grow back very well if that’s all you’ve lost. In particular, skin grows back amazingly well.

“It never ceases to astonish me, when I take a heroic fall on my roller-skates, that a few months later there is no evidence of any foolishness on my palms, knees, or face.”

If Lee’s finger had regrown from below one of the joints, Goldacre would have been more impressed, since this would involve regenerating structures far more complex than just flesh and skin. But this, he says, is not what happened.

However, Alan Spievack is not around to defend his creation: he died in March from bladder cancer – one of the deadly diseases he claimed his pixie dust could cure – after other doctors refused to use it to save him.

“That’s the biggest problem – convincing doctors that it works,’ says Lee, tears welling in his eyes at the memory that his brother did not survive to see his work accepted by the U.S. government.

“I won’t make anything from this, but I hope his family see their stocks soar when people finally realise just how important this dust is.”

The U.S. military establishment is sufficiently interested in Spievack’s dust to test it on two soldiers who lost their fingers in explosions.

The trials start this week at the Fort Sam military hospital in Texas, where Dr Steven Wolf, a burns specialist, will sprinkle the dust on the soldiers.

“We hope that we can grow back these missing parts,” he told me. “It may be that the whole finger can’t be replaced – we don’t know if bone and joints will grow back – but we’re optimistic.

“I think that in a few years we will be saving all sorts of people from horrible disabilities – not just soldiers, but civilians as well.”

Clinical trials are also being carried out into a variety of new procedures that many scientists believe will lead to entire organs being re-grown, using methods similar to those pioneered by Alan Spievack.

One U.S. company has already successfully grown human bladders in laboratories, using cells sprayed onto a scaffold built in the shape of the organ, and has transplanted them back into patients with amazing results during clinical trials. Similar work is under way to make livers and kidneys.

With other pharmaceutical companies claiming their doctors have also been working on pixie dust, legal challenges are being planned to contest patents lodged by the Spievack family’s company about their work. If pixie dust is proven to be effective, the pioneers of this research stand to make billions.

Back at Lee Spievack’s hobby shop, the man with the golden finger snorts at those who claim he is a fraud.

“I know what happened,” he says. “It’s my finger and it grew back.

“People can say what they like. All the great pioneers get mocked. My brother was a genius. One day soon, the world will come to realise that.”

Scotland: one year closer to breaking away as SNP momentum continues

By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
Saturday, 17 May 2008

JON SIMON/PA

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, called for a referendum in 2010

When Gordon Brown addresses the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh today, no doubt some in the audience will privately reflect on the widely differing fortunes of the Prime Minister and Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister.

The two rivals both enjoyed a honeymoon when they came to power last year. Mr Brown’s came to a sudden halt in October when he dithered over whether to call an election. Mr Salmond’s honeymoon is still going strong, one year into his Scottish National Party administration. Mr Brown hoped devolution would neuter demands for independence and keep Labour in power in the new Scottish Parliament for ever. After two four-year terms, Labour is in the uncomfortable position of being in opposition in its own heartland.

While the Prime Minister is fighting for his political life, even critics of the First Minister would admit he has had a very good year. Some commentators believed there would be blood on the carpet, either in the Holyrood parliament or after a battle between the SNP administration and the Labour Government.

It hasn’t happened. The wily Mr Salmond has chosen his battles carefully. He has governed responsibly, believing that a “softly softly” approach, rather than an immediate firework display, was the best way to build support for the SNP’s holy grail of independence. Although he heads a minority administration, he cleared the hurdle of seeing the SNP budget approved with the help of the Tories, after ensuring more money for policing. When he has been unable to implement promises immediately, such as free prescriptions, he blames Westminster for the lack of money. It has been a win-win year.

It was Mr Salmond’s assured start that pressured Labour into scoring a spectacular own goal. Wendy Alexander, Labour’s leader in Scotland, was itching to fight back by challenging the SNP to call an immediate referendum on independence. “Bring it on” seemed a confident move to make. But Ms Alexander’s timing was awful, in the aftermath of Labour’s routing in local elections in England and Wales. Moreover, she had not cleared her move with Mr Brown. They had discussed it, and he saw the merit of trying to put the SNP on the back foot. But he did not want to back an early referendum while he was being accused of denying one on the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty, still going through the Westminster parliament.

He was taken aback by Ms Alexander’s move, especially when she claimed he had sanctioned it. He tried to cover their differences, but it did not work. The referendum challenge became another headache for a Prime Minister in trouble.

Mr Salmond cannily declared that the SNP would stick to its pledge for a referendum in 2010. Privately, the SNP thinks holding it under a Tory government would boost prospects for a “yes” vote. The game has not been won yet. A poll published yesterday showed that 31 per cent of Scottish voters would support Scotland becoming an independent state, with 43 per cent against. But there is no doubt that the momentum is with Mr Salmond.

What the SNP’s year in power has achieved

*HEALTH

Prescription charges reduced from £6.85 to £5, saving £1.85 per item, as first step towards full abolition by 2011. Pre-payment certificates for people regularly needing prescriptions have been cut by 50 per cent. Free personal care and nursing payments to older people in care rise in line with inflation, helping more than 9,000 people.

*COUNCIL TAX

Council tax frozen for 2008-09 financial year, saving the average Scot more than £13.

*BUSINESS

Cut business rates in order to boost jobs. Introduced a £73m Small Business Bonus Scheme to help more than 150,000 small companies grow.

*TRANSPORT

Abolished unpopular road tolls.

*EDUCATION

Scrapped the graduate endowment, which has saved students who graduated last year and those still in the system a total of £2,289 each.

*INDEPENDENCE

Launched “national conversation” about Scotland’s future as a prelude to referendum on independence in 2010.