Cassandra Voices is an independent Irish media outlet, specialising in long reads on politics, art and contemporary culture. It was founded in 2017 by Frank Armstrong, an established Irish journalist and law graduate, and Daniele Idini, an Italian photographer and trade unionist. Produced in Dublin, Cassandra Voices has featured writers from around the globe.
The magazine aims to provide a non-partisan platform for voices across the political spectrum to inspire new thinking, while allowing for critiques and discussion on topics often overlooked in mainstream media.
Apart from the online platform, the magazine has also released three print editions, as well as a book of poetry, and hopes, through readers’ contributions, to produce more in the near future.
As an independent journalistic enterprise, Cassandra Voices depends on readers’ ongoing support through Patreon and one-off donations from as little as $2 through Buy Me a Coffee. All contributions work towards sustaining a diverse media ecosystem, essential in the current climate.
Helping Hands for €4.50 a month: this tier is for anyone looking to extend the hand of friendship to a relatively new, independent media organisation.
Long Haulers for €9.50 per month: this tier is for those who wish to express a committed support for the continued work and growth of Cassandra Voices.
Patron of the Artsfor €43.50 per month: this tier is for the happy few who wish to contribute substantially and support our work and safeguard our independence.
Our final bit of news is that we are delighted to welcome Ben Pantrey on board as a contributing editor.
Ben is a young writer from Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. His creative work, including poetry and an Irish-language short story ‘Eibhlín’ have appeared in student magazines such as Scáthán and Grass. As a non-fiction writer, he wrote a number of pieces for the music section of TN2 magazine, and later worked as deputy music editor for the same publication from April 2020. In Trinity College Dublin, he took an English Studies course, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 2021.
In the controversy surrounding the leaking of a confidential document by then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar last year, a key point has been missed regarding whistleblower Chay Bowes’s motivations. As an insider and former head of the VHI Homecare division Bowes gained significant insights into the operation of the Irish health system, especially the HSE. This interview probes into the obstacles he faced in attempting to deliver an effective model of community care away from overcrowded hospitals. He argues the HSE perpetuates dysfunction to the benefit of the private system.
Chay Bowes first interfaced with medicine through the Irish Army Medical Corps in 1988. This stoked a passion for healthcare which led him to take up a job as a phlebotomist, where he encountered an older generation of hospitals, such as St James’s, where he worked with elderly patients in the country’s public health system.
This experience coloured his view of the health system as it evolved to become, as he puts it, ‘more focused on financial outcome rather than patient outcome,’ and led him to set up his own company, focused on clinical work in people’s homes.
He had found that general hospitals tended to be ‘Victorian constructs, where we put all the sick people who are susceptible to infections, so that they can mix with other sick people.’ He concluded ‘that much of what happens in the hospitals doesn’t really need to happen there, and a huge volume of those patients could be treated at home in a cheaper and safer holistic fashion.’
After the dismantling of small, community hospitals Bowes observed ‘pressure building on the larger general hospitals to become the catchall for all kinds of diseases and complexities,’ and that this ‘contributed to the ongoing perpetual dysfunction which is today what we call the HSE.’
Taking out a bank loan, he purchased a van to move around the nursing homes, taking blood samples. By that stage he had observed thousands of elderly arriving into hospital in taxis and ambulances for routine blood samples. There they were catching flus and colds, so he said to himself: “why don’t I develop a system to treat those people out in the community?” This was back in 2004-2005, but he was told that’s not how things are done.
Undeterred, he decided to take an extended leave of absence from the hospital to set up a service doing these blood tests in the community, which proved very successful. The only limitation was that he was working alone.
At that point, he expanded his service to give vaccinations in the community too and took on a few employees. The first company evolved into another, leading to a contract with the HSE in 2007 worth €14 million. That business was focused on patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chest diseases. Its rationale was to keep various types of patients in the community, who were repeatedly being admitted to hospital with lung diseases.
‘So, they didn’t go into a hospital, where people tend to get sicker, particularly those with lung diseases. It also helped these patients,’ he says, ‘that their social networks were intact.’ Soon there were two hundred working for the company.
Resuscitation room bed after a trauma intervention.
Tara Healthcare
At that point he brought Dr. Gerry McElvaney on board, ‘a really patient focused guy,’ he says, ‘who was highly intelligent and super-committed to doing things differently.’
Together, they pushed forward with what became Tara Healthcare. When patients were surveyed, he says, ‘ninety-eight percent preferred to remain in the community under our scheme rather than go into hospital: all the data was saying that this was a much safer.’ It was also cheaper to deliver, and the patients’ families were delighted to remain with their loved ones.’
He argues that they had created a perfect example of how a community-based scheme could be delivered cheaper with better patient outcomes, and where staff were really happy too, as they could get out of the acute hospitals.
However, he encountered, ‘an incredible level of scepticism around innovation in Irish healthcare.’ In one case, he says, there was a hospital in Dublin, which ‘wouldn’t send patients to this new service, because they didn’t like our medical director because he came from another hospital group. Professional rivalry is rife in Irish Medicine, sometimes to the detriment of patients.’
HSE Logic
Time and again he was met with the perverse HSE logic of ‘it’s doing really well, so let’s shut it down and send all these patients back into the hospital.’
The HSE’s reaction to the Financial Crisis of 2008 was just like its dysfunctional approach to COVID-19 he argues. They closed his operation down because hospitals ‘which were in perpetual crisis wanted us to move this service into their area.’ A senior HSE figure told him directly that ‘“what you’ve done in Dublin is almost too good. Everyone’s going to want it. They’re going to want it in Galway. They’re going to want it in Limerick” So, they wouldn’t fund it because they were already funding the dysfunction.’
The agency funds the dysfunction to a certain level of service with tens of billions of euros. And when something outside of the system comes along and demonstrates efficacy, financial viability, and good patient outcomes, that’s irrelevant because they still have to fund the dysfunction. It’s like trying to repair an airliner in mid-air – you don’t want to land because it could expose the rottenness of the system.
So, we sent the patients back to hospital, further highlighting the dysfunction of the HSE at the time. They had to pay us a penalty for terminating the contract prematurely, which cost them more than running it for the subsequent two years.
Working for the HSE he found innovation was met with suspicion: ‘the hospitals want to hold onto patients because without patients occupying beds, they can’t justify their budgets.’
And because budgets are pinned to occupancy and the size of the facility, hospitals seemed slow to manage overcrowding at the cost of lesser funding.
Fair Deal?
He argues that we should ‘evolve to a place where we simply don’t treat people with certain uncomplicated infections in hospitals, like in Canada and Australia.’
Now, he says, the only fast track for vulnerable patients is into a state or private nursing home, which is excessively expensive, ‘or their home is taken from them in what the government very cynically calls a Fair Deal:
someone works all their life, pays taxes, builds a home for their family, and contributes to the state and to society. But when they get ill, go into a nursing home or require dignified care the state wants to take their home from them to pay for that care.
Moreover, despite earning huge praise from patients, peers and when he presented the scheme to the NHS in the UK, he found the HSE ‘were always finding fault with what we were doing.’
‘I became used to that,’ he says ‘and very quickly realized the only thing the Irish public system does very well is perpetual dysfunction. It manages to procure massive budgets from the State, and despite this consistently overspends,’ despite ‘terrible outcomes for patients.’
He suggests that it takes ‘a concerted effort to continually do health as badly as we do in Ireland’, a system of public health, ‘with such huge budgets for such a small population.’
He says it is important to question why, given a very small and young population, ‘half of that population pays out of pocket expenses, approaching €2 billion, for private health insurance.’ He reckons this is ‘to protect ourselves from the dysfunction of the public system.’
🚨A record 908,519 people in Ireland are now on some form of a public hospital waiting list to be treated or assessed by a consultant. Meanwhile Gov lacks meaningful action on addressing capacity deficits #CareCantWait @DonnellyStephen @mmcgrathtdhttps://t.co/8ye5e4DoWw
‘It’s a very simple problem,’ he says, ‘too many of the same actors are involved in the public and private systems.’ The analogy he uses is of two separate doorways in a clinic: the public and the private:
You knock on the public door, and say, “Look, doc, I’ve got a terrible hip. It’s really hurting me. And he goes: “Yeah, you need a relatively simple, hip replacement, but it’s going to be probably three, three and-a-half years, because the system is overloaded.”
But the doctor adds unless of course you’ve got health insurance. So you say, “OK, I’ll go and get health insurance.” But by this stage you are too old to avail of this. But what are you going to do now, as your hip is only going to get worse?
You’ve been to the first door, where you met the doctor in the public system about the hip, who we’ll refer to as Dr Jim. Then you go ten feet down the corridor and knock on the door. “Who’s there? Why it’s Dr Jim again!’” And you say “Hey, Dr Jim, you just told me that you couldn’t fix my hip for three years.” and he responds: “not exactly. I can fix it if you pay me via your insurer.”
In a country of five million people, we have almost one million people waiting for care of one sort or another in a public system, which is one of the best funded systems in the developed world.
And, Bowes says, ‘it just so happens that the man running the show, Paul Reid, has no specific health care experience, for example. The UK’s NHS employs around 1.4 million people to serve a population of nearly 67 million. Its CEO Simon Stevens is paid €210,000 a year, while Ireland’s HSE employs around 102,000 people with a population of only 4.9 million, Reid is astoundingly paid over €426,000 a year.’
We have hundreds of people who work for the agency on long term sick leave. The dysfunction runs into every fractional part, IT, training, resourcing, recruitment, and services. The dysfunction is almost at a cellular level. But again, we are consistently told that we can’t land the jumbo jet to fix it, because if we do that, what will happen?
COVID-19
When COVID-19 landed, Bowes says, ‘with the stroke of a pen, we bought up every single private bed in the State. This occurred despite people saying since the foundation of the State, “Oh, you know, you can’t publicize the private, it would never work, but it was done overnight because the will existed.’
Health policy in Ireland, he says, reflects:
the laissez faire attitude of a class of people who are running the medical system, advising the agency and the legal system. They of course all have health insurance. I don’t know anybody who served on the board of the VHI or any doctor working in the system who doesn’t have private healthcare. I myself have to admit that I took out private health insurance purely because I know how difficult it is to access care via the public system. It’s sad but true and I am lucky enough to be able to pay, unlike more than 50% of the most needy In our society who cannot.
‘Irish People’ he says are dying ‘for the lack of basic diagnostic care.
Bowes muses on how: ‘The further up the pyramid you go around a health product in Ireland, the less you hear about the patients. And when you get to the board level, patient outcomes are in some way superfluous to the real issues, which are profit and the market.’ He argues that there ‘isn’t a single private provider in the country here’ which ‘isn’t preoccupied with profit.’
He says:
We’re happy to ostensibly starve a public system and propagate a private system which is absolutely predatory on the dysfunction in the public system. And in many, many cases, the people providing the care in the public system also have been or currently are providing care in the private system.
That’s our medieval, dysfunction and immoral system. It’s actually, and I don’t use this term lightly, an apartheid system. We have a segregated, apartheid system in health care. It simply isn’t based on needs of the patients. Ok, obviously, if someone’s at death’s door, they’re going to get seen, but I’m talking about this grinding dysfunction, where both sides are nodding to each other as they pass each other in the night, knowing that it’s so wrong. It’s so wrong. There are super doctors out there, super surgeons, super nurses and staff operating in the health system. It’s definitely a case of lions being led by donkeys.
Really encouraged by response of a leading figure in Irish culture over the past 50 years. "Daniele's interview with Fr.McVerry is classic. Cassandra is rapidly becoming the most important vehicle for ideas in the land." ***@danieleidiniph1@BowesChayhttps://t.co/7N1bz38X77
Bowes muses ‘I have no problem with doctors wanting to make a decent living. You’ve got to pay people appropriately. But now we’re flooding the system with locums from overseas who are often poorly trained and have poor English and patient interaction skills .’
And points to another ‘incredible dysfunction, which is again, state sponsored.’
We train more doctors than any other country of our size in the world, but we export them to Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It costs the state a significant amount to train these guys, and then they can just catch a plane to Bondi Beach. Of course, we can’t force people to work here – no more that we can force a health care worker to take a vaccine – but there are ways to incentivize the system, and develop better methods of training doctors, because we still use the archaic Leaving Cert as the basis for deciding who we train as doctors.
He also wonders:
How is it that while we train more doctors than anyone else that we are importing more doctors and nurses than anyone else? Countries like the Philippines, India and others are being bled of their precious nursing and medical staff to come to Ireland to look after our sick. There’s something wrong, right? But in the Irish system nothing changes. No wants to take on the vested interests. No one wants to take on the big personalities in health care and medicine. The political nexus between medicine, law and politics in Ireland is so tight because of insular practices and local allegiances trumping national welfare with some of the biggest political donors and influencers being waist deep in the sector.
He wonders ‘Who’s going to challenge the vested interests and speak out for vulnerable patients? The CEO of the HSE? Absolutely not. The past CEOs of the HSE seem to be only good at one thing, which is saying, “We’re trying…” But they walk out at the end of the end of their contracts with a big pension and usually into guess where? Yes, you guessed it, the private sector.’
He reveals how ‘a former CEO of the agency said to my face that he was the most powerless man in the health system.’
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Dysfunction Funds Profit
Bowes wonders:
How can you operate a business with a hundred and twenty thousand employees and seem to be powerless to sack people for not delivering, or in many cases simply doing their job wrong? Where’s the accountability in that system?
How can you amalgamate numerous health boards which are operating as satellites into a single “dynamic entity” and nobody loses their job? Not one manager is made redundant. Not one of them is even sanctioned.
How can a health system pay out tens and tens of millions in malpractice claims for egregious malpractice and incompetence in both governance and clinical care? For essentially killing women who are pregnant by denying them an abortion? By condemning young women to terrible life ending illness by failing to diagnose their cancers? How can you pay out these tens and tens of millions again and again, year after year, and nobody is sanctioned for it? How does that work?
It works because the dysfunction funds profit, and that profit is harvested by vulture funds, by private hospitals and private investors, by their legal advisors, some of whom don’t even pay taxes in this country, and who pays the price? The citizens that languish on public waiting lists accruing ill-health because they can’t pay for treatment. The man with the simple requirement for treatment, he’s invisible to the system, he is superfluous to the profit motive.
The poor he says have no bargaining power because:
the bargaining power is money and influence, and the people who have the influence to change the system are receiving huge salaries to manage and essentially perpetuate dysfunction. Again, the private system predates on the mismanagement of the public system. If it functioned there would be no need for a private system, right? Therefore, you have to wonder, who does the current dysfunction benefit? It’s an easy one: the private providers. But nobody who is of the machine is working against it. No one in Leinster House is saying to the CEO of the HSE: “What are you doing for your four hundred grand? We’ve got less intensive care beds per capita than Lithuania or Latvia. Two years into a pandemic, we still don’t have a dedicated COVID hospital which is just insane.
Apparatchiks of a state system who’ve worked, like Paul Reid in state jobs are seen as a safe bet. They’re nominated in as managers, managers of dysfunction, gatekeepers for their political sponsors and marked for future cushy roles on the private side of the wall.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Perpetual Crisis
He adds that ‘things like this mysterious and much vaunted “Cyber Attack”, which apparently “destroyed the abilities of the system” seem to be a perfect excuse to deflect from the internal failures of HSE management and external incompetence of its political masters.’
Bowes says: ’what I know, and anyone that has worked in the system knows, is that there was and is no viable system to attack.’ The HSE have ruminated for decades on the implantation of an electronic patient record: they have spent millions evaluating, re-evaluating, procrastinating, and failing to implement a viable solution.
Months after this “Attack”, you’re still running Windows 1998. Somebody needs to be held accountable.
But, he says: ‘the Minister doesn’t talk to the to the HSE, the relationships between the “Three Masters” of Health are utterly flawed, the Department of Health is cumbersome and cautious, the HSE is a lumbering leviathan with no real direction other than self-preservation, and the Minister is preoccupied with surviving a potentially career ending stint in the mire of the Irish Health system.’
Consider this, with such a huge annual Health budget and such poor outcomes for patients alongside such terrible value for money, the dysfunction and paying for it becomes central to the rational of the organisation. They actually need this dysfunction. Without the dysfunction, they’d be screwed because there would be an open accounting of what we’re doing in a system which is delivering horrendous results.
He also criticises Stephen Donnelly’s policy of giving more money to the National Treatment Purchase Fund, which sends public patient overseas for treatment, arguing that ‘this is not the same as a really equitable national health system where everybody gets treated on the basis of need.’
He says that people could argue that in a free-market economy if someone wants to purchase health insurance it’s up to them: ‘However, that’s different to paying almost half a million a year to a CEO to perpetuate a dysfunctional system.’
He says the HSE is only interested in crises, ‘in things like COVID’ and saying ‘but COVID is why the system is screwed, or we’re dealing with the cyber attack, which has caused this perpetual dysfunction, which is, you know, all entirely untrue.’
His conclusion is ‘the managers, architects and political apologists for the segregated and morally bankrupt system have done an exceptional job of screwing the Irish people out of their tax dollar and their rights to health and dignity. I’m not sure they are capable of doing anything else. It’s time to demolish and rebuild.’
Promoter, venue and band manager, Conal Lee reflects on the experience of musicians over the course of lockdowns, and considers the ongoing difficulities for musicians and venues in Dublin, as well as the challenges of dealing with new controls.
Conal Lee.
How have you survived through the lockdown?
Having an enforced break, albeit as a result of the pandemic, was needed for two or three months as I had been working non-stop for a long time, and I was not going to take a break of own accord anyway. But the novelty soon wore off as I began itching to get back to work and start creating. My mind and wallet needed it. Unfortunately, there was very little to do. I could not create live music events, which is mainly what I do.
What was the general mood among musicians you know? Did many acts break up, or come together?
I think some musicians held a similar view that a month or two of a break was a nice opportunity to sit back and reflect on things, and record some music, but only a few months! Obviously, financially the past twenty months or so has been very, very tough on the pocket, but the effect to the mental health has gone unnoticed I feel. Musicians are artists, creative people, that need to be busy developing work and need to have that end goal of preforming the music live to an audience.
There have been some bands that have fallen away during lockdown, after not being able to meet up, rehearse and play, which develops the band and keeps the momentum alive.
What were the main challenges putting on gigs prior to the lockdown?
Running a venue dedicated to blues and jazz, it is always going to be hard to pull in a big, consistent audience as they are very niche genres, and generally attract an older crowd. So, to find the balance between putting on the right act, on the right nights, and trying to attract a younger audience by having a mix of all the sub-genres of blues and jazz can be the most tricky part. Any venue’s bar has to make money as do the musicians and sound engineer, door person and myself, so another part of it is putting enough acts into this balancing act that tend to bring a bigger, thirsty crowd.
Do you think there has been anything good to have come out of the lockdown for musicians? Are there new outdoor venues for example, or has a more tolerant attitude towards on street performance emerged?
A lot of musicians have been working a lot for years. Gigging many nights and trying to raise family etc., so the time to reflect on what was important, and then to have some time to record singles, EPs and Albums where there may not of been enough time previously.
Venus have closed and will not reopen, there are a few outdoor spaces that have popped up, but it’s of little comfort considering the amount that have closed or that just may not do live music again, as they will use the space for more drinkers/eaters to catch up financially on lost time.
Now, as we return to ‘normality’, what new challenges are you facing as a promoter?
I think many of my audience may be wary about going into a small, hundred-person capacity Blues and jazz venue. I will, like others, have to increase admission prices and do more ticketed events which most of my punters are not used too. Again, it’s generally an older crowd that attend those concerts. I’m hoping that there has not been too many bands that have broken up, as something like this could kill off these genres.
How do you feel about venues having to require prior bookings and vaccine passes?
It will suit some gigs, some audiences but not others and vaccine passes just added extra work, but if it had to be done then that’s fine.
Are there specific reforms the government could make to improve the life music offering in Ireland?
An area, or quarter if you like, that’s dedicated to top quality music or a variety of musically genres through the area seven days/nights a week.
Bigger grants for sole promoters to help run venues as there are too many big companies promoting gigs in many of the venues in town
What advice would you give to your younger self entering the music industry?
Believe more in what you are doing and stick to your ideals
What is your favourite venue in Dublin, and why?
Possibly The Sugar Club for the different types of artists performing, the regularity of the shows and the size, and space or the venue. And of course Arthur’s Blues & Jazz Club.
If you were to design a venue of your own, what would it be like?
Apart from Arthur’s, a venue dedicated to folk and traditional music.
What do you think is speical about the live music scene in Dublin?
The level of talent for a small-sized capital city. Live music is part of the city’s culture. It’s the music and arts that makes the city special.
In a rousing introductory speech, retired diplomat Philip McDonagh described the publication of Cuban Love Songs as a ‘significant moment for the Irish province of the Republic Letters.’ He spoke of the ‘importance of the Republic Letters for us all’, that space where we ‘can explore intelligently and in a disinterested way both the world and our place in the world.’
McDonagh also spoke about his concerns over the blockade against Cuba. He argued that there had never been a level playing field to allow the Cuban economy to prove itself and looked forward to a better dialogue between Washington and Havana.
Reflecting on a challenging period in international relations, McDonagh wondered:
are we prepared to wait for the gifts of the muses, on political truths that do not depend on what Shelley called the calculating faculty? Are we prepared to work towards restoring the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope?
He said:
we need the poets and the public authorities to come together in something like the Republic of Letters to practise humility and re-evaluate key aspects of our culture, and this must be done of course in freedom … where citizens are prepared to discuss public challenges on the basis of first principles.
There were also readings from Anthony Colclough, Caoimhe Lavelle, Karl O’Neill, Anne Haverty, Luke Sheehan, and Ronan Sheehan.
The event took place in Merrion Cricket Club and drew a colourful crowd.
This is an abridged interview with jurist Laurent Pech, Professor of European Law, Jean Monnet Chair of European Public Law (2014-17), and Head of the Law and Politics Department at Middlesex University London. Professor Pech identifies rapid autocrisation in a number of EU states, particularly Hungary and Poland, where the Rule of Law has been undermined in a three stage process that has been exacerbated by the emergency conditions of the pandemic.
On Mandatory Hotel Quarantines
Technically it has always been possible for national authorities to restrict EU free movement rights on a number of grounds, such as public health. But EU law is normally opposed to collective measures. So you can only restrict on a number of grounds the exercise of free movement on a case by case basis. And you must always comply with the principle of proportionality, so you cannot impose disproportionate measures in the name of public health. You have to have a compelling reasons and you have to demonstrate them on a case by case basis. I’m not familiar with the measures contemplated by the Irish government …
Without knowing the details of any general policy of containing EU citizens or more generally, [a mandatory hotel quarantine for] EU residents, regardless of citizenship, in my view, would not be compatible with the law, as I understand it.
What I can tell you is that public health can only be used as a grant of derogation for individual cases, not for the blanket prohibition on arrivals from other EU countries. I don’t think … the European Commission, would let it fly.
…
I’m not familiar with any [other] EU country … which is essentially preventing residents in the EU from travelling as a collectively speaking, as a country, imposing on EU residents, trying to get to another EU country and then the mandatory quarantine.
On the Rule of Law
I can tell you what the Rule of Law is in EU law in the law of the European Convention on Human Rights, in fact, in our Constitution, constitutional law … the case law has defined the rule of law quite compellingly. Why are we debating these days the definition of the rule of law?
…
the concept is being challenged, especially from current authorities in Warsaw and Budapest. The argument is the Rule of Law is too vague and meaningless. It does not exist. And it’s just kind of an intellectual subterfuge to impose neoliberal policies or whatever. But as a matter of EU law, actually, the Rule of Law can be defined. It’s normally defined, understood as a set of legal principles, such as the principle of legal certainty, the principle of judicial review before independent courts, respect for human rights, these kind of principles.
…
The Rule of Law is to be found in the EU treaties and has been exhaustively defined both in EU legislation and in the case of the European Court of Justice.
…
The essence of the Rule of Law is that we have rules to prevent the abuse of power so we can do something about the abuse of power. We can fight abuse of power, abuse of public power both. But to do that, we need independent consent, which is why one of the components of the Rule of Law is independent courts, where you can assert your rights against the public authorities. So the essence of the Rule of Law, is essentially that even the king, even the president, is subject to the law. There are no distinctions; everyone can assert a right against the public authorities. So this is the essence of the Rule of Law even before the EU itself was created.
It’s one of the many checks and balances on what we can call unhealthy democracy … certain countries in the European Union have gone down a path where, as for the Rule of Law being challenged in its conception, in its very existence, also other type of checks and balances such as freedom of the press. I mean, it looks like that once one is gone. Then the other one follows.
Hungary and Poland
In the case of Hungary and in the case of Poland, essentially, we have a new breed of autocrats. They’re not like the old autocrats, where you see tanks one morning in the streets and then a clear change of regime in the afternoon. It’s much more difficult and they’re much smarter than the previous generation. So I have used the concept of Rule of Law, backsliding of democracy and the Rule of Law; I use the term backsliding to describe what has been happening in the past ten years in these two countries.
To summarize briefly the process … They only need to get free and fairly elected once and then as soon as they’re elected their job is to make sure to rig the system, to undermine the checks and balances before the next legislative elections. How do you do that? … they tend to always apply the same playbook or the same cooking recipe. The first two steps you’re going to take is you’re going to capture of the Supreme Court or the constitutional court of the country.
You either purge the current membership of the Supreme Court or you appoint new judges to the Supreme Court … You don’t care whether you comply with the Constitution, because by the time you have captured the Court, then you can get the new court to argue that what you want is not a violation of the Constitution…
At the same time, what we’ve seen in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere is that while you are violating the Constitution in plain sight, you have to capture the public broadcaster. Or do you do that? If you have a parliamentary majority it is very easy. You can violate the Constitution and you can just pretend it’s not a violation of the Constitution. You’re going to appoint a new board and you’re going to appoint a new president and you’re going to use the taxpayers’ money essentially also to bully or try to corrupt or bribe the private media outlets as well into submission. Why is it important to capture the media? Because you need to shape the public narrative while you are openly violating the Constitution.
Scapegoats
You have to explain or try to convince the people that yes, maybe, yes, we are violating the Constitution … but we are doing this in the name of the people. And you are going to convince them this is what you want and then you going to use this some scapegoats in the process. So what you see, what we’ve seen in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere is that they always have a huge need for scapegoating.
So it’s going to be George Soros … you name a new thing and then they change. They rotate. … It was perhaps worth stressing that you have a change of scapegoat every six months to twelve months when you have exhausted one you need another scapegoat … then it could be also academics. So it could be a corrupted journalist, it could be Communist judges. You need to smear, essentially, the guardians of the Rule of Law. So once you have captured the Supreme Court and the media, you’re going to use scapegoating … You’re going to then bully into submission, order what are called guardians of the Rule of Law, guardians of democracy, the press being one of the key checks on power.
…
What I’ve seen emerge in the past few years, is that to avoid European criticism, what they do, they use proxies … what do I mean by proxy? A fake association, a fake NGO which indirectly or directly is given taxpayers’ money … You use a story as a way of distracting the people from the destruction of checks and balances.
The new would-be-autocrats are much more difficult to fight because a lot of time by the time people wake up it’s a bit too late … the media sector is gone, judicial branch is gone. And then obviously they’re ready for the next elections with the press either bullied into submission or brought to bankruptcy.
The Last Steps
One of the last steps in this kind of Rule of Law backsliding process is to radically change the rules of the game. So by the time you have the next legislative election, they’re going to have reformed completely the electoral code. They’re going to capture the electoral commission as well. So it means that they can essentially rig the elections … usually it’s enough to control the ecosystem of the public media. But then also, if need be, you can also rig electoral results in a specific constituency … Also, remember, if you have captured the judicial branch, it means that there’s no place for you to go to challenge the results of the election, even if the results have been gained through unlawful means
You can you still have elections. Yes, the opposition can win … but it’s virtually impossible to win in these conditions.
There is no electoral level playing field anymore. Within three, four years, the system has been completely captured … Hungary is no longer a democracy. I expect Poland to be another electoral taken custody within the next two years.
In fact, Poland is quite dramatic in a way. They had two presidential elections last year. Both of them were completely unconstitutional. I mean, there is not even a room for discussion. They were held in unconstitutional conditions.
It’s possibly what I call the authoritarian gangrene is going to spread to other EU countries because people are watching, people are paying attention and they’re saying, well, look, it’s working, it’s working fine for Orban and Kaczyński, so why not me? Why not implement this recipe as well in my own country?
In Hungary the main newspaper, which is not in the control by the government, now has sixty defamation lawsuits pending against. Essentially they’re trying to bankrupt these main opposition newspaper through lawsuits … then you’re going to punish judges if the lawsuits are wrongly decided, so to speak. In addition to that, you have the death threats, that you have a smear campaign. So much so that essentially, if you’re a critical journalist, then you may have no choice but to leave your own country if you want to pursue your profession. What’s happening to journalists is also happening across the board to judges, lawyers, academics. And so we are talking here essentially about a return to the old fashioned de facto one party state. And so I’m afraid we have to be aware of the gravity of the situation
The Silver Lining
The silver lining is that Poland and Hungary are the two most extreme cases of autocratic nations, at least in the EU … But maybe we’re going to get there slowly but surely in terms of third possible candidate in the EU. Now, we’ve been talking about Slovenia in the past few weeks because of the parameters of the attacks essentially trying to take control of the Slovenian state agency. And this Slovenian prime minister is indirectly funded by Orban. So essentially Orban is trying to export his model into the Balkans and also into Slovenia. We’ve been talking about the situation in Romania and Bulgaria for quite some time. Malta has also been in the news following the assassination of a journalist who was investigating corruption cases.
I would say some political entrepreneurs are looking at how successful Orban and Kaczyński have been. Some of them are wondering whether, in fact, this is a good way forward, not for ideological reasons, just possibly this autocratic playbook is a good way of wining power and retaining it.
The Situation in the U.K.
Poland and Hungary are just the two most advanced cases in the EU. I have personal worries about the situation in the U.K. if we leave the EU for a minute … there are clear indications that the ruling majority in the UK is trying to dismantle or capture the checks and balances. So essentially they’re trying to annihilate any accountability, including changes to elections. Usually when you see changes being contemplated regarding the electoral commission or electoral rules or IDs to be required to vote and then surprise, surprise, those most disadvantaged by the new electoral rules are those not voting for the ruling party. So this is when you have to get worried. And also in the U.K. we’ve been talking about changing judicial review to make it more difficult to challenge that. And we’ve been talking also about possibly reducing the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
[During the pandemic] I’ve seen an excessive use of secondary legislation. So the parliament has essentially abdicated its role as the key legislator and the government has taken over defining or restricting free movement, something which normally can only be done by the parliament. So I would say this is also part of a potential authoritarian pattern. So we need to really make clear, because once the government is in the business of de facto legislating in place of the parliament, then essentially abuse of power can easily be committed. And if at the same time judicial review is undermined, then you find yourself essentially without any avenue to challenge the excessive use of power. I’m not a libertarian myself, but certainly as a lawyer, I have strong concerns when I see the government essentially becoming the de facto parliament in the name of the Covid-19 emergency.
Press Freedoms
So there is ongoing work in the EU to make it more difficult for politicians or oligarchs, these regimes, to sue or bully (journalists) into submission.
We need to go back to what was the case in the nineteen eighties through strong anti-concentration rules in the media market … if we want to have media pluralism, we need to have a properly functioning media market. You cannot have dominant players essentially asphyxiating the market. So you need to prevent abuse of a dominant position … if we had a well-functioning media market, we would be protected from public abuse of power, but also prevent abuse of power. And the abuse of power does not necessarily come from overbearing governments, it can also come from overbearing private actors. Think of Amazon, think of Google. There is a lot of work to be done in this regard. So concentration of power, whether private or public must be constrained, must be restricted and subject to the law applied by independent courts.
Covid-19 and Authoritarianism
Covid-19 has been kind of a blessing in disguise for these autocratic regimes …. giving them even more powers than they used to have … an exceptional situation calls for exceptional powers. But the problem is, once these kind of governments get accustomed to exceptional powers, then they don’t want to give it back …
So then that’s going to be the next battle as soon as the covid-19 situation is under control. I mean, we need to make sure that parliaments everywhere get back into the business of what they’re supposed to be doing in the first place, which is legislating and controlling the executive these days. What we’re seeing is just an executive without being subject to any meaningful scrutiny from any national parliaments anywhere. So this is actually the widespread issue.
On February 1st, 2018 we published the first edition of Cassandra Voices as a monthly online edition. On this our third anniversary we recall its contents. Help us enhance our offering in the years to come by becoming a Patreon supporter.
An amateur sporting organisation would hardly tolerate its managing agreement and fundamental members’ entitlements to float in such fashion, and it is surely inappropriate for a modern democracy. Ancient sources such as Magna Carta are cited as formative on the UK Constitution, but without a definitive text any principles are nebulous, and ephemeral.
Connor Blennerhassett brought our attention to ‘numerous cases that have made headlines in Spain, and which raise serious doubts over Freedom of Speech.’
Spain is not currently involved in a foreign war, but is instead embroiled in an existential conflict with itself. One of the most unpleasant aspects of this is a deluge of draconian sentences being handed down, mostly to young people for ‘offending the symbols of Spain’.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Meanwhile in Culture of Complaint human rights lawyer David Langwallner fulminated against:
political correctness, and the dumbing down it has brought to personal relationships and public discourse. In many instances it has marginalised forthright criticism, protecting vested interests, who employ the tactic of character assassination. Relationships between men and women are also distorted.
In an article that was circulated widely Sandra Higgins revealed the motivation behind her Go Vegan World advertising campaign:
Most people imagine themselves to be animal lovers. Few scenes on television spark more awe than those featuring animals in their natural habitats, or more affection than those featuring companion animals in documentaries exploring their complexity and playfulness. We find ourselves moved when we witness the precariousness of their lives in TV veterinary series. If we witness one of them being chased or threatened, we find ourselves with bated breath until they escape.
For Joyce and Casement, to be a radical cosmopolitan is to be an exile soul – ‘self exiled in upon his ego’ as Joyce put it in Finnegans Wake – perpetually on a homeward journey. Thus, while every page of Ulysses is rooted in a specific place in Dublin, it is also what Yuri Slezkine called, ‘the Bible of universal homelessness’.
Concussion is the greatest concern. American Football, Rugby, and Soccer, are all under investigation for short- and long-term consequences of the sudden jarring of brain in skull. Injuries in general worry parents all over the world. Excessive wear and tear on leg joints that will yield early arthritis, surgeries on shoulders, wrists, hands, and feet, dietary aberrations and poisonous supplements, drugs and therapies of dubious efficacy, all and more are suffered to maximise the sporting capability of young bodies.
Automation in a variety of sectors could liberate millions from mind-numbing labour. But despite technological advances workers’ earnings have stagnated since the 1990s, while the rich have grown seriously richer, as we face an unemployment cliff. A powerful remedy to the impending obsolescence of many types of work, and grotesque inequality, could be the introduction of universal basic income. This would provide an unconditional payment to every citizen sufficient to avert poverty, providing an opportunity for individual flourishing, to the ultimate benefit of society. Another appropriate response would be for the law to require all companies to register a defined social purpose, beyond simply the exploitation of opportunity for profit. That way the dynamism of entrepreneurship might be harnessed for the common good.
Featuring contemporary approaches to printmaking, this show explores textures of light, line, colour and shape in new configurations. The title of the exhibition is a neologism based on the adjective ‘diaphanous’ – derived from the Greek words dia and phainein, meaning to ‘show through’. This new body of work sees diaphanous textures relaying atmospheric scenarios and quiet spaces.
Compassion is the answer. Seriously. Show compassion towards Donald Trump. Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, consider how you have reacted to him over the past year. Have those responses made you any healthier or happier, or helped you sleep at night? Have you instead grown more bitter and angry? Donald Trump isn’t going to change, but your reactivity towards him can. And by altering this you will make the world a better place.
And so the time came to rent an office space. We must all find our space. I wanted to read and create and explore, and where was everyone? Where were all the artists? Apparently they had ‘spaces’. One Friday evening I woke up in the National Library, my cheek pressed to the desk and a man’s face a few inches from mine. It was a big, sympathetic face.
Image (c): Daniele Idini
In poetry Edward Clarke brought us: The tune / Of ‘Wolves A-Howling’, / So you can make no tarrying, / And hurry / Out across / The peaks of wild Arkansas, / The heights of south Missouri
Welcome to the second Cassandra Voices podcast introduced and written by Nicola Bigatti, and produced by Massimiliano Galli. This podcast was recorded in the heart of Dublin 8 in what used to be the studios of the 2014 indipendent project Radio Liberties.
This podcast continues a journey through Italian ‘Library Music,’ a vast catalogue of records composed mainly in the 1960s and 1970s by some of Italy’s finest musicians, with Rome and Milan becoming centres of excellence.
Although recording artists associated began with generic soundtrack music, this provided a springboard for an innovative music scene. From a commercial base in T.V. series and advertising jingles, musicians forged unique styles, and developed distinctive sounds such as that associated with Spaghetti Westerns, a genre known as Film Poliziesco-groove.
Ennio Morricone in 2015
Foremost among these composers was Ennio Morricone, who achieved global fame for soundtracks to films such as ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984) and ‘The Good the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966). Morricone passed away in July of this year at the age of ninety-one, and this Podcast is dedicated to his memory.
This Italian Library encompassed avant-garde composition, classical harmony, psychedelia, and funk with brash horns, guitars, and futuristic synths prominent. It was a fertile ground for experimentation and creativity, strongly influenced by the social, economic and political dynamics of that epoch.
Composition occcurred under the shadow of political and social turmoil in Italy – ‘the Years of Led’ (Anni di piombo) as a succession of bombings and assassinations by extremist groups shattered an uneasy post-War consensus.
The restrictions in 2020 presented more challenges for some careers than others. For musicians in Ireland it was an unprecedented year when most were unable to perform live.
In a long read, meanwhile, Marcus de Brun contemplated The Algorithm of Evil that advertising uses to increase our consumption of products we often don’t need.
What role does the Algorithm play in the election of a President? In taking to the streets in Dublin because a black man is murdered in America? What role does it play in hatred? In being afraid of a virus, or in wearing a face mask? In taking a vaccine, or in taking one’s own life? The darkness in our world may not be the workings of conspiracy – nor the consequence of irrational political allegiance – it might just be a consequence of sublimation: of a gullible embrace of the thoughts of others.
In December Frank Armstrong turned his attention to penal reform as an estimated one-in-every-two prisoners re-offend within three years of release. He also revealed a poignant episode in his own family history regarding a great-grandfather Luke Armstrong (1853-1910) of Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo who ‘was arrested in April, 1884 and charged with his fellow conspirators with being a member of the Fenian Society, and conspiring to murder a land agent.’
Thankfully, given the gravity of the charges, all the accused were acquitted based on the unreliability of the Crown informant’s evidence.
That month David Langwallner turned his attention to the U.K.-based, German writer W. G. Sebald:
The attention in W. G. Sebald’s writing to the fascist era in European history anticipates many of the controlling measures of our time. Images abound throughout his work, leading to observations and recollections both of historical incidents, literary tradition and the lives of friends and immigrants, as well digressions on nature. We find a unique blend of memoir, historical and philosophical disquisitions, and a form of narrative storytelling based on fact with the occasional intrusion of fiction.
Boidurjo Rick Mukhopadhyay turned his attention to Cross-Cultural Branding: ‘Glocalisation.’ He recalled a social experiment conducted by Enrique Iglesias. A performance at a packed auditorium where ‘even the cheap seats went for about $100 a pop’ was greeted by ecstatic applause. Later on, however:
he decides to go into a subway station in New York city (which had great acoustics). He dresses up as a busker, posing as a random musician on the street trying to earn a crust.
Iglesias sang the same hits with the same gust one weekday morning. There is security around, nonetheless. You can imagine what happened next. A crowd gathered and everybody was hushed and mesmerized, and it all ended with a big applause at the end.
The practice of putting up and decorating a so-called ‘Christmas’ trees – usually an evergreen conifer – can be traced to the pagan worship of Ancient Rome. Evergreen wreaths were brought into Roman homes during the Saturnalia celebrations (a festival for the god Saturn).
The sedimentary rocks of the peninsula are festooned with fossils of long departed sea creatures, which creates a very special ambience. These soft rocks have been pounded by violent waves, where the Irish Sea meets the mighty Atlantic.
The Ocean swells have sculpted a labyrinth of gullies and rock walls, encrusted with a cornucopia of multi-coloured sponges and anomies. This unique topography, mixed with the clear waters around the Hook, gives the diver an impression of being on a flight through a surreal landscape.
Musician of the Month for December Matthew Noone’s musical journey began with rock’n’roll in the Northern Melbourne suburbs before following in the footsteps of the historical Buddha to India, before settling in Clare in the West of Ireland:
While living in Ireland, I became aware of the idea that there was some sort of connection between Irish traditional music and Indian culture. I wanted to explore how Irish music might sound on the sarode but I also wanted to avoid it becoming a gimmick relying on cliches. So, I undertook a four-year structured PhD (Arts Practice) in the Irish World Academy at the University of Limerick. During these four years, I apprenticed myself to a number of traditional musicians in an attempt to learn Irish music in somewhat of an authentic manner. Through Ged Foley I began to learn tunes on the fiddle and learnt how to behave at a session. Steve Cooney put me in touch with something deep and ancestral and Martin Hayes guided me into a world of feeling.
Also in music, Greg Clifford announced his latest release:
Brontide, which is defined as the sound of distant thunder (created by seismic activity), is a song and video about isolation, alienation, confusion and fading memories. According to Clifford, ‘this is an emotionally layered and charged production. Brontide, for me, symbolises impending doom and gloom. Dementia, in this case, is the suggested source of sadness’.
using windows, doorways and reflections to frame the people and their stories. It started as a way to bring some art creation back into my life. I had learnt photography from my father who taught me how to work a darkroom, film cameras and the joy that comes from capturing an image. I went on to study photography after school and fell completely in love. The years went on and the need for enough money to live, and then life pulled me away from the practice. But once I hit my thirties I realised how much I was missing, and it was time to make it happen once more. So I challenged myself to capture images on the way to and from my work. My obsession with commuters had begun.
There was plentiful poetry in the month of December, as Kevin Higgins berated ‘Our Posh Liberal Friends.’
I ask the barman for more finger food, picture the ocean raging into the restaurant, and them still sat there muttering at the chicken goujons: the people we talk to won’t vote for such extreme solutions. No one wants to live in Cuba, one of them says, as she’s washed out the door.
Edward Clarke meanwhile recalls, ‘One morning during the first week of Advent,/ When I was possessed, / After a birthday’s dark exhilarations,’
Image (c) Daniele Idini
And finallyJames Harpur brought us a poetic white Christmas:
Christmas Snow
Never came that year, and yet
It came in other ways, remembering the Light;
As suds frothing in the Garavogue
Around bridge arches, a scuttled trolley;
It fell from lamps in Henry Street
Illuminating tracer-lines of sleet
And shoppers gripping rods of sleek umbrellas
As if playing giant straining fish;
It fell as stars above the Sugar Loaf
Lit up as cats’ eyes by the gaze
Of a farmer standing by a gate
Above Wicklow and its mercury lanes.
The idea that our response to the Covid-19 pandemic might be moving us in the direction of the authoritarian horrors of the last century is one that a great many are resistant to. They may feel, for example, that we are living with an extraordinary circumstance, and that the response, however undesirable and unprecedented, remains unavoidable in the face of the threat.
Even to those who feel this way, however, the danger of authoritarianism is something which we should all meditate very deeply on. The comparatively free societies which we have grown up in are a rare and precarious achievement; we are simply not aware how precarious because they are the only world we have ever known.
Dr Billy Ralph, meanwhile, questioned a cosy scientific consensus in Ireland:
Throughout this pandemic we have witnessed very little meaningful scientific debate in Ireland. Irish experts are drawn from a small circle of academics, some with vested interests, supporting the government’s highly successful publicity campaign. In other countries, in contrast, there are heated public debates between scientists as to whether to adopt a dominant approach of blanket policies, or one of shielding elderly populations.
But in Ireland Nobel laureates and professors from prestigious universities around the world are routinely dismissed with smart quips by gullible journalists. But let us examine the three mantras in a dispassionate way that acknowledges each of their adverse impacts.
Featured Image: Dickens’s Dream by Robert William Buss.
With a Dickensian Christmas forming on the horizon David Langwallner drew on the wisdom and compassion of the great author Charles Dickens in an impassioned appeal for meaningful reforms:
To revert to Dickens as the supreme chronicler of Christmas. If someone has the temerity to present themselves like Oliver Twist with an empty bowl and ask for more will our modern day workhouses permit another spoon of porridge?
Or will they ask: ‘are you not happy with your existing pile of gruel – the charitable food banks that ease the conscious of the rich?’ Now with Covid-19 restrictions in full force diminishing most incomes – but especially those least well off – many now need a bit more, just to survive. This should involve chasing down the artful dodgers in the large corporation, who have picked a pocket or two avoiding paying their fair share of tax.
Also that month, notwithstanding a deep antipathy to all forms of religious fundamentalism, David Langwallner drew on the theme of Religion in his Public Intellectual Series.
With the loss of religious forms, however, many living in modern technocratic societies experience a loss of meaning, and even a moral void. The social structure of religions fostered close relationships and inculcated a sense of community, as well as charity, the protection of human dignity and a commitment to public service. The Bible injuncts kindness towards strangers, and to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, which also derives from Aristotelian philosophy.
‘The Dead House’
There was also debate around what to do with Dublin’s historic buildings, as Neil Burns decried the elitism of the Irish literary community:
Protestations against James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ House on Usher’s Island being ear-marked for a hostel are rooted in cultural-bias and emotional-led egocentrism, and exhibit blatant hypocrisy among the denouncers. Artsy sentimentality can be the lesser evil, but it is still based on emotional, and, cultural biases.
Under normal circumstances tourists flock to Ireland for its rich cultural inheritance and traditions. Indeed we live atop generations of history. When the soil offers its secrets in the form of ruins and artefacts, we either attempt to preserve or reduce them to rubble. More often than not, we choose to tear down or bury the past. This often occurs without the general public being aware of what is happening.
Their method of reproduction means you normally find patches of colour fighting for real estate. Neon Green battles with neon pink for prime locations on the surface of underwater cliff faces. Rarely seen on the east coast, they are to be found in all of the most dramatic sites I have dived along the Atlantic coast.
Around the beginning of the second century AD, the Greek writer Plutarch unknowingly created the spark for a flame of artistic inspiration which, not unlike the notion of the ancient Olympic torch, has transcended millennia until today. He might, perhaps, have nourished the expectation that his work’s renown would outlive him, but he could not have imagined that his words would be traced through the 20th century poetry of Cavafy to the 21st century songs of Leonard Cohen and Laura Marling. And yet, in a single stunning example of ancient influence and contemporary Classics, one particular story of his has been read, performed, spoken, sung, enjoyed, downloaded, streamed and reflected on in a chain of inspiration which spans over a century of creativity. The remarkable longevity of one small digression in the mass of Plutarch’s extant work demonstrates beautifully the basic humanity which has connected us from antiquity to now, reflected and refracted through the lens of varying personal and societal perspectives. As a result, the historic loss of Alexandria has become, paradoxically, our cultural gain.
We met in Dublin, as students. It was in the MA room, in the recording booth, in a fully-packed Ryan Air flight with destination to Sofia that a small but important concept emerged in my mind. By experience, or by force of habit, I had a fixed idea of the isolated composer working for countless hours on end; a dim light, a dark room, a head full of ideas. A familiar concept really, that’s how I had been making music for years. But the familiar changes, and it was in that MA room, on that crowded plane, sitting by the cliffs of the Irish west coast or on a summer night in the living room of a beautiful countryside house in Spain, that I realised that being a composer doesn’t necessarily have to be a one-woman show; that composition feeds on other creative forms, it feeds on other people, and that’s when many seemingly impossible things start to happen.
November’s featured artist Aga Szot discussed her Temple Bar-based Icon Factory:
Ten years ago I walked those streets of Temple Bar and no one could have imagined it would be possible to walk those lanes. It was a NO GO area and even Dubliners did not walk there. They were identified as dark spaces, and with anti-social behaviour, public toilets and worse. There was no reason why people would choose to walk there.
Now our art projects attract hundreds every day into the area, and are included in national tour guides, indicated as one of the most popular attractions in the area: an art centre which invites artists to participate in the project with its educational and civilised mission. We made this space safer and a better place for all.
‘Jerry Garcia, one of The Grateful Dead. They’re a band, apparently.’
‘Never heard of him or them,’ I said, realising that there was more to it than a rockstar dying and that Don was somewhat perturbed.
‘You wouldn’t believe it man. Jamie and Shaun rang in to say they were out for a week. That depressed this dude is dead. It’s JFK levels of impact. I’m not shitting you.’
‘A week? What the fuck?’
‘Yea. It’s like their fucking mother died. Left in the dock. I’m practically on my own here.’
‘This Garcia dude. Some kind of Jesus figure or what? A whole week because he died?’
‘Yeah. Weird. Apparently, they’ve been deadheads for years…Some fan cult thing. Can you make sure to meet Sarah tonight? And I’ll see you tomorrow? Don’t forget?’
‘No problem, man. It’s all on the itinerary.’
Image Graeme Coughlan: www.graemecphotography.com
While a seedy pool hall was the location for another of Daniel Wade’s Dublin chronicles ‘Niall’: ‘They shoot pool like they’re born for it. Some for cash,others for pride or thrills; there’s no sole reigning champion. Anyone might wear the crown’
In further fiction from Stephen Mc Randal, the character of Manus stands in opposition to an anti-mask crowd but is more bothered by the sectarian and racist rhetoric, before heading to another Free Julian Assange rally.
Each witch hunt is a tribute act to the last.
There is always a committee of three.
The gravity in the room is such
they struggle to manoeuvre
the enormity of their serious
faces in the door.
Before we turned our eyes from nudity,
Or banished certain words, death was the first
Obscenity—the one from which the rest,
In time, would find their way. The first
To make a joke of life. The first
To show us what may come of children’s games:
A skull left caked in mud, the slicing rain.
What is a rude word if not a reminder
Of the grave in which one’s coffin will be lowered?
An old man’s kiss upon a young girl’s navel
Would not be possible if not for death.
Dressed up in our Sunday best, our deaths
Seem almost hypothetical. They’re not.
Plastic surgeons, age-defying creams,
Air-brushed waistlines on the cover of Cosmo—
These prove our distaste. Death’s in the ghetto.
But only look out past your green kept lawn,
And there it is, unfazed, a grinning fact.
Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.
It is high time we re-examined how the government is being advised to bring the population to the promised land of ‘living with the virus.’ At this stage other forms of advice should be sought. Presumably the government is already receiving significant inputs from the business sector, but other important viewpoints are not part of the conversation.
Dr Billy Ralph was even more critical of the damage that had been done to the fabric of Irish society over the course of the pandemic:
Policies were adopted by an unelected government on the erroneous advice of experts listening to other experts, who predicted an enormous death toll from Covid-19 that has not come about anywhere on the globe. These same experts are now doubling down on initial errors and inflicting incalculable harm on the delicate fabric of society.
Image (c) Barry Delaney.
Meanwhile, prompted by warnings from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that 85,000 could die over the course of the pandemic photographer Barry Delaney revealed the grim foreboding he felt back in March:
The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.
This proved a false alarm, but it gave way to a period of creative impotence in his photographic practice:
As lockdown eased more and more people descended to summer in Dun Laoghaire around the Forty Foot. To swim, to escape, to even have fun in our new Covid world.
Gradually I began to photograph this migration, at first people were cautious, masked, socially distancing on the newly opened beach, but as May turned to July people began to summer properly. The beaches became crowded, like normal, not the new normal; no one wore masks. The virus didn’t spread outdoors, or so we believed.
Image (c) Barry Delaney
Classicist Ronan Sheehan, meanwhile, drew attention to the etymology of the terms in common use during the pandemic:
Epidemic: from Greek ἐπί epi ‘upon or above’ and δῆμος demos ‘people.’
Pandemic: from Greek πᾶν, pan, ‘all’ and δῆμος, demos, ‘people.’
Virus: from Latin ‘poison, slime, venom.’
Vaccine: from the Lain ‘vacca,’ meaning cow, a named conferred by Louis Pasteur in honour of Edward Jenner who pioneered the concept by using cowpox to inoculate (mid-15c., ‘implant a bud into a plant,’ from Latin inoculatus, past participle of inoculare ‘graft in, implant a bud or eye of one plant into another,’) against smallpox.
Exponential: from Latin exponere ‘put forth.’
David Langwallner continued his Public Intellectual Series with an account of the English radical historian E. P. Thompson:
His lasting contribution is the seminal The Making Of The English Working Class (1980), possibly the greatest work of history of the twentieth century that emphasised a new form of bottom-up history, related to the subaltern history that was emerging at the same time in former colonial societies.
We have entered a dark era dominated by the religious right, involving literal and historical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. A return to eighteenth century values is upon us, including the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, neglecting to remember that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, if that. Let’s not forget that the United States required a Civil War to end the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery that was not even mentioned in that document, apart from in the three-fifths clause that represented a African-American slaves as three-fifths of a white person for electoral purposes, in order to maintain a balance between slave and non-slave owning states.
We received two submissions from underwater photographer Daniel McAuley that month, the first featured shipwrecks, which become reefs:
With the combination of a long history of maritime traffic and often quite ferocious seas, it comes as no surprise that the Irish coastline is strewn with shipwrecks, many of which date back hundreds of years. Each one provides a fascinating porthole on a bygone age, telling stories that are often of historical significance, as well as allowing divers a chance to encounter what are often quite intriguing new environments for marine life.
The next introduced us to the seals living along the Irish coastline, now threatened by fishermen disturbed by a competitor as over-fishing reduced catches.
The playful nature of seals reminds any snorkeler of a dog looking for affection from its owner. So listening to news stories where people are saying the best solution to the problems afflicting the fishing community is to take a high powered rifle to these playful creatures filled me with rage and frustration around the management of our coast, and what the future holds for it.
I’ve been passionate about music from an early age, and my love of the post-punk spirit of DIY and experimentation found a crossover with the further reaches of sonic exploration coming from the Fine Art approaches to sound as a sculptural medium. I then discovered improvised music and was smitten. The possibilities just seemed wide open. There was a directness and a simplicity that was really appealing. It was also a much quicker route to producing music by sidestepping years of training. Of course, it’s not just musical ability you bring to the table, it’s imagination and intelligence too.
By DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0.
In poetry Kevin Higgins appears to have been inspired by the forthcoming elections:
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
donated by a casino owner who knows people
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
because it was the only available metaphor for hair
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
against an old coat with holes in it.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
While Ernest Hilbert mused on ‘Models, slender and famished as cheetahs,’:
The bathroom’s OUT OF ORDER. Sewage seeps
Into the restaurant. The manager’s
Frantic, alone today. The line’s
Become a mob. A voice from an SUV
Barks at the drive-through speaker. In the back,
Children cheer a whirl of color on a screen.
I feel the boredom underneath the beauty.
It’s weird, and getting desperate these days.
In auction rooms, the arms go up. And . . . sold.
The next exquisite investment’s on the block.
The views—the hills, the seas—are still pristine for those
Who can afford the heights. Who’s this beauty for?
Beauty’s boring. I do go on and on,
Don’t I? Oh, you have a nosebleed.
Here, drip some in my drink. See this?
Flick this switch. Now listen. Someone will scream.
Patron of the Arts for €43.50 per month: this tier is for the happy few who wish to contribute substantially and support our work and safeguard our independence.
