Cassandra Voices

Author: casswp

  • The Carbon Tax Scapegoat

    We are regularly presented with press releases from government departments that express empathy for those struggling to make ends meet while facing exorbitant day-to-day living costs—not least among them the price of petrol, diesel, and home heating fuel. Yet, in the next breath, government bureaucracies issue statements justifying the ‘need’ to raise Carbon Taxes so that we can ‘do our bit’ for the environment and society. These contradictory messages serve only to exacerbate the hardship felt by those who, day in and day out, live under the weight of economic and political pressure.

    We regularly hear about problems and disasters attributed to climate change. There are, we are told, endless challenges stemming from this phenomenon—and as responsible citizens, we must be willing to pay the price for its effects.

    As of May 2025, nearly 50% of the price of petrol and diesel at the pump is made up of various taxes, with the Carbon Tax accounting for almost 10%. It is worth remembering that motorists are paying VAT not only on the fuel but also on the tax applied to the fuel. Those using natural gas to heat their homes are paying close to €130 a year in Carbon Tax, while those using home-heating oil are paying €63.50 per tonne of CO₂ emitted in the same tax. With all these sources of Carbon Tax, the State’s revenue from this ‘green initiative’ reached €1 billion for the first time in 2024.

    Unravelling the Hysteria

    The seemingly endless chorus of climate change consequences can leave one feeling helpless, subservient to an invisible, unquestionable force beyond comprehension.

    But just as the old saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, perhaps understanding the burden of the consequences of this unchallengeable doctrine begins with asking the most basic questions.

    Are the repeated justifications for never-ending increases in Carbon Tax truly the result of the general population’s failure to make sufficient sacrifices to combat climate change, or could they stem from other factors—politically inconvenient ones—that are more easily scapegoated as climate issues? Climate change has become a topic so shielded from scrutiny that questioning anything presented as its direct result is rare, for fear of being labeled a climate change denier.

    Just as Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984, began to question the scapegoating ritual of the “Two Minutes Hate”, a daily exercise designed to convince citizens that society’s problems stemmed from disloyal citizens rather than a deeply flawed system, we, too, might benefit from stepping back. Perhaps some of our societal and economic struggles are rooted in deeper, overlooked issues that are being ignored or glossed over due to the incessant rhetoric of climate change effects, paradigm blindness and groupthink.

    Take, for example, the recent introduction of water usage restrictions in areas of Ireland that experience some of the wettest spring months in Europe. Just recently, a hosepipe ban was announced for Mullingar in Co. Westmeath, Milford in Co. Donegal, and Kells-Oldcastle in Co. Meath, set to last for six weeks due to yet another climate change-attributable factor. The official stated reason?

    “Below average rainfall over the last seven months.”

    According to the Uisce Éireann website:

    “Climate change is leading to more frequent and intense weather events, such as flooding and dry spells. This impacts our water resources, which can mean we need to put restrictions in place.”

    And who must pay the price for this catastrophe? Why, each and every one of us, of course—as good comrade citizens, all for the common good!

    But is the need for the hosepipe ban—and the accompanying Carbon Taxes supposedly meant to remedy the ‘harms done by carbon’, truly the result of the general population’s ‘carbon greed’? Or is it, at least in part, a form of scapegoating used to avoid answering some rather politically awkward questions?

    Let’s, without venturing down the well-worn road of climate change denial, consider an alternative to the familiar mantra that supposedly justifies yet another increase in Carbon Tax to solve yet another ‘climate problem’.

    Since its foundation in 2013 as a state-owned water utility company, Uisce Éireann has promised to revitalise Ireland’s water infrastructure. Despite having a multi-billion euro budget, the utility has faced significant criticism for massive overspending and making unrealistic claims about fixing leaking pipes and upgrading infrastructure—largely due to its lack of transparency, particularly regarding how funds are allocated for operational costs and repairs.

    Considering the lavish funding allocated to this company—€16.9 billion from 2025 to 2029, including €10.3 billion for infrastructure and €6.6 billion for operating costs, one might reasonably expect that leaking pipes and inefficiencies would no longer be an issue. Yet, even in the month of May, water shortages persist even in some of the wettest areas of Europe raising serious questions about where this investment is going.

    Multi-million euro contracts are regularly awarded by Uisce Éireann as part of a massive overhaul of Ireland’s long-neglected water infrastructure. However, there is little to no scrutiny or transparency when it comes to assessing value for money or the efficiency of the work carried out. When water shortages do occur, it becomes all too easy to deflect the hard questions by reinforcing the idea in the public’s mind that the fault lies not with the state, but with the ever-looming spectre of climate change.

    At the implementation of the Government’s Climate Action Plan in 2019, the people of Ireland were told:

    “Climate disruption is already having diverse and wide ranging impacts on Ireland’s environment, society, economic and natural resources. The Climate Action Plan sets out an ambitious course of action over the coming years to address this issue”.

    This same plan told the burden carriers

    “For most areas of environmental damage, a key problem is that those inflicting the damage do not pay the cost of the damage they inflict. This is the rationale for charging a carbon price for carbon emissions which reflects the growing damage that they are inflicting. This serves to discourage emissions and to make carbon abatement more profitable.“

    The Flaccid Fourth Estate

    Ireland’s media, one would assume, should challenge the government on its climate policies should there ever be any possibility of it dodging responsibility. But alas, as history has proven time and time again—especially with the specific example of the Irish Banking Inquiry of 2011 into the causes and impact of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and the housing market crash of 2008. it has been clearly shown that Ireland’s established media has repeatedly failed to question the sustainability of government policy, lacked investigative reporting, and played a role in normalizing risk to the general populace. The established media in Ireland, therefore, simply does not criticise government policy in any meaningful way.

    Let’s take a step back and analyse the broader picture. If, by chance, the water shortages in Ireland are at least partly due to operational inefficiencies of a multi-billion-euro state company responsible for ensuring there are no shortages, perhaps many other problems regularly used to justify a crippling carbon tax are also, at least in part, the result of systemic issues within government operations and not solely the fault of climate change.

    If this is the case, wouldn’t it make a lot more economic and political sense to reform the system rather than continue to tax the burdened?

    Of course, one can argue that taxes are essential for the government to fund the functioning of the country, and that point is not being disputed here. However, when additional taxes are introduced in the name of improving society, while transparency, accountability, and efficiency in government spending and state operations continue to decline, and the number of exposed instances of public fund wastage continues to rise, this does little to benefit either society or the economy.

    Is it not time to press the pause button on the ever-increasing rates of ‘green’ taxes on the people of Ireland and to begin a thorough investigation into how public money is spent on projects—from the Irish Water scandal, with millions wasted on the setup of this monolith, to the National Children’s Hospital cost overruns, making it the most expensive hospital in the world, to the bicycle shed in Dáil Éireann, and so on and so on?

    The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
    ― George Orwell, 1984

  • Emotional Regimes of the Pandemic

    This Mortal Coil

    The Covid pandemic brought a public health emergency, political and legal challenges, intense media coverage, social divisions, and intense debates among scientists. Yet, in public commentaries, attention fell almost exclusively on a single cause of suffering: the virus itself.

    This framing of the crisis contributed to an atmosphere of extreme danger, a sense that disease and death lurked around every street corner. Public messaging, media reports and daily statistics reinforced the idea of omnipresent risk. News cycles focused relentlessly on case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities, making the threat feel immediate and inescapable.

    Five years on, we can collate how the pandemic sparked a surge of research across many fields: medicine, public health, economics, education, and sociology all responded. This burst of academic activity was not, however, spread evenly. Bibliometric studies show that, at first, research focused mainly on clinical medicine, immunology, biology, genetics, and pharmacology; the social sciences, psychiatry, and economics received less attention (Funada et al., 2023). Within the social sciences, early research looked at wellbeing, the plight of healthcare workers, vaccines, and inequalities. Emotions were also studied, but far less often, ranking only as the twenty-fourth most common keyword in published papers (Hamdan & Alsuqaih, 2024).

    Nevertheless, a closer look at emotion-related research reveals a problematic focus. Most of these studies examine mental health issues and depression, fatigue, sleep, fear, anxiety, coping strategies, resilience, and attitudes toward vaccines. They treat emotions as individual reactions to a threatening situation, mainly, the risk of illness or death. From this almost exclusive perspective, emotions are considered as disruptions to psychological balance, responses to a biological danger separate from society or culture. They are private experiences, signs of mental strain when facing mortality. Fear, grief, and anxiety are viewed as symptoms of danger and of risk, highlighting the personal impact of living through a threatening time.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Moving Beyond Reaction: Constructing the Emotional Field

    This framing of emotions overlooks a crucial point: emotions are not simply automatic, hard-wired biological responses to external situations or threats. Rather, they are often actively produced and shaped within particular moral, cultural, and political frameworks. How people come to fear, endure, or worry is continually influenced by the signals and expectations set by public discourse, media narratives, institutional practices and prevailing social norms.

    The news media do obviously more than report mere facts; they select, emphasize, and dramatize certain aspects of events, contributing and even constructing the emotional climate of crisis according to preconceived judgments. Hence, the emotional atmosphere of the pandemic, marked by vigilance, anxiety, and collective tension, was not just a consequence of the virus, but the result of ongoing processes that shaped how people understood and responded to the unfolding situation.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    ‘Be a hero, wear a mask’

    Several notable examples illustrate how governments and media employed rhetorical and psychological techniques to shape public emotions.

    In the UK, the slogan “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” became one of the most widely disseminated and emotionally charged messages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Designed to evoke both communal duty and existential fear, it mobilised public sentiment around the act of staying at home, not simply as a health measure, but as a moral obligation to shield others, particularly frontline healthcare workers. Ubiquitous across television, newspapers, and social media, the slogan fostered an emotional climate of collective responsibility and latent anxiety about overwhelming the national health system.

    Rhetorically, the slogan is striking: its simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence render it both memorable and persuasive. It appeals simultaneously to national solidarity, civic duty, and the highest ethical imperative, saving lives, thus activating a complex affective mix of fear, guilt, and altruism.

    This emotional construct was neither accidental nor incidental. A report by the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, dated 22 March 2020 and titled “Options for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures” (SPI-B, 2020), explicitly recommended the use of emotionally charged messaging. It advised that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,” and further emphasized the need to frame compliance as a duty to protect others. Public messaging was a deliberate instrument of affective governance.

    In France, the famous “Nous sommes en guerre”, “we are at war” slogan, pronounced by French President Emmanuel Macron recruited the French citizens for “general mobilisation” against an “enemy […] invisible and elusive”. This phrase, repeated six times during a single televised address, anchored the pandemic within a wartime imaginary, framing the virus as an invisible enemy and the French population as combatants in a national struggle (Lemarié, A., & Pietralunga, C. 2020).

    The affective environment in France was thus shaped around sacrifice and mobilisation. Staying at home became not merely a health directive, but an act of national resistance, evoking allusive memories of the World War II. This rhetorical strategy, deeply embedded in French republican traditions of unity and state authority, reactivated symbolic repertoires associated with past national emergencies.

    Perhaps the most disquieting illustration of planned disciplinary and emotional control during the Covid-19 crisis in Europe was to be found in a leaked strategy document from Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior. Widely referred to (ironically yet revealingly) as the “panic paper”, this internal memorandum, drafted in March 2020, exposes the deliberate mobilisation of fear and terror as legitimate political tools. The paper explicitly recommends heightening the population’s sense of threat to ensure compliance with lockdown measures, even proposing emotionally manipulative narratives targeted at children.

    The document’s authors do not hesitate to make emotionally manipulative claims, unanchored to any scientific or empirical evidence. One of the more disturbing passages reads: “Children will easily become infected, even with restrictions on leaving the house […] If they then infect their parents, and one of them dies in agony at home, they will feel guilty because, for example, they forgot to wash their hands after playing. It is the most terrible thing a child can ever experience.” (Bundespapier, 2020)

    Under the guise of public health strategy, the experts thus suggest that the state should conjure worst-case scenarios to shock citizens into obedience. This weaponisation of fear, particularly the psychological targeting of children, marks a disconcerting threshold where public communication slips into psychological coercion. It represents a calculated use of terror to engineer behaviour.

    Surprisingly enough, this narrative was not limited to governments or the media. Even prominent intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading voices in the theory of deliberative democracy, perceived democracy as having ground to a halt. Under the threat to “the life and health of members of the species Homo sapiens across the globe,” Habermas declared in 2021, in strikingly dramatic terms, that humanity found itself in a truly existing Hobbesian state of nature, engaged in a metaphysical and biological war for the survival of the species. In such a situation, Habermas thought, the “legally mandated acts of solidarity” required by the authority of the state must override individual rights and liberties without exception (Habermas, 2021). In other words, the recourse to a temporary dictatorship is defended as a legitimate means of safeguarding democracy itself.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Reframing the emotional pandemic

    Such tactics reflect a biopolitical logic in which emotions are instrumentalised, manipulated, and weaponised in the name of security. As the American historian William Reddy’s notion of ‘emotional regimes’ reminds us, the state not only regulates action but prescribes feeling. What the “panic paper” reveals is an attempt to institutionalise anxiety and guilt as tools of governance, undermining democratic trust and ethical responsibility in the process.

    Insights from the history and anthropology of emotions, particularly the work of Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, invite us to rethink this framing of emotions. Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ (2006) highlights how emotions are shaped, valued, and regulated within particular social groups, each with their own norms and expressive codes. From this standpoint, emotions during the pandemic cannot be reduced to individual reactions but must be understood as patterned and normative, reflecting the affective economies of distinct communities: communities of fear, of denial, of moral indignation, or of solidarity.

    Similarly, Reddy’s theory of ‘emotives’ (2001) emphasises the performative and world-shaping nature of emotional expression. Emotions are not merely responses to a given reality; they participate in shaping that reality by enacting or challenging dominant scripts.

    Shaping the emotional landscape of the pandemic through these theoretical lenses allows us to move beyond the medical paradigm and to interrogate the normative, political, and cultural scripts that governed which emotions were considered legitimate, intelligible, or deviant. It also opens the way to analyse how emotions were mobilised to sustain or contest public policies, shape collective identities, and articulate forms of belonging or exclusion.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    How to do emotions with words

    Although traditional theories of public relations and propaganda from Bernays and Adorno to Ellul have long emphasized the central role of emotions in shaping public opinion, the American historian William Reddy offers a strikingly original lens through which to examine how speech, when instrumentalised, not only conveys but actively produces emotional states. The framework he developed in his book The Navigation of Feeling (2001) allows us to reconsider emotional expression not as a by-product of persuasion, but as a form of action in its own right.

    The expressions and formulae he calls “emotives” work at the same time as expressions and speech-acts that do not merely reflect a feeling but also act upon the feelings expressed.

    Let us consider one of the slogans widely used in the UK during Covid: “Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re helping by staying at home?” The formula obviously expresses sentiments of moral urgency, it purveys a sense of guilt, and it evokes a feeling of shared suffering. By mobilising emotional responses in its audience, the message not only seeks compliance but also helps produce an imagined community of responsibility, what Benedict Anderson might describe as a politically constructed sense of belonging forged through shared affect and narrative. “Not staying at home” not only becomes a morally shameful act, but it also transforms those who do not abide by the rules into antisocial or even dangerous outsiders.

    As such, the formula is not simply descriptive (“you are harming people”), nor purely persuasive (“please help us”), but it performs a moral-emotional judgment that invites internalisation: “You are failing us, your community, unless you feel what we want you to feel.” In this sense, that emotives express and reshape emotional experience by realigning the narrative sense of oneself and the expected moral position of the community.

    The same analysis applies to Macrons “war”. The expression declares a collective crisis state, it evokes gravity, calls out a clear and present danger and warns about an existential threat. Thus, it installs an emotional climate of wartime unity, emergency discipline, and patriotic mobilisation. Unlike the English moral community, French citizens are summoned in the guise of soldiers and patriots, enlisted in the defence of the state.

    The German example seems politically the most unsettling. The consultants emphasise horrific imagery (death by suffocation) in order to induce “primal fears” and uncontrollable panic. They instrumentalise guilt in children to heighten family responsibility by evoking a nightmarish parricide that results from disobeying.

    -Germany’s response corresponds in function (if not in scale) to Jacobin emotional regimes analysed by Reddy in the period of French Terror (September 1793–July 1794). Emotional authenticity is measured by conformity to the collective fear. In the context of post-Revolutionary France, not fearing enough becomes a sign of counter-revolutionary disloyalty. Similarly, in 2020 Germany, not appearing afraid (or questioning the panic narrative) could make one suspected of being reckless, not acting in solidarity, or worse, of being a right-wing-extremist-enemy of the state.

    To push things even further, Germany’s federal domestic intelligence service – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – established, in 2021, a new ‘phenomenon area’ for verbal “delegitimisation of the state” as part of a broader affective disciplining.  Much like the East German state’s attention to emotional attitudes and moral tone (Brauer, 2011), pandemic-era Germany began to police not only what people did or said, but how they felt, or more precisely, which emotions they were publicly permitted to express. The result, in Reddy’s terms, was the emergence of a strict emotional regime, wherein fear, trust, and compliance became not just encouraged but expected, while scepticism, defiance, and even calm detachment were marked as dangerous deviations from normative feeling.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    The Touched and the Untouchable

    As Reddy shows, emotives do not exist in isolation but operate within broader emotional styles that can transform into hegemonic “emotional regimes”. These regimes then constitute the officially sanctioned or dominant norms governing which emotions are deemed appropriate or required. An emotional regime may be conceptualised as the emotional dimension of a culture’s ideological structure.

    This perspective helps explain how distinct emotional regimes were deliberately constructed within varying national and cultural settings. The aim was to cultivate specific emotional landscapes which, according to political figures, scientific experts and media outlets were perceived as the most effective means to encourage, persuade, or even compel populations towards the desired attitudes and behaviours. This was to be achieved, in large part, by aligning public sentiment with state goals and framing non-compliance as morally reprehensible.

    By dictating appropriate feelings such as patriotism, calm obedience, compliance, solidarity, anxiety or even panic, while discouraging dissent, critique, lack of fear or apathy, the Covid responses installed what Reddy calls a “strict” emotional regime. In strict regimes – as was the case in most Western democracies – authorities heavily dictate emotional responses (e.g. demanding constant displays of patriotic fear or fervour), whereas a “looser” regimes (like Sweden) allowed more individual emotional freedom.

    The construction of a strict emotional regime evidently leaves little room for individual “emotional navigation”. Emotional navigation, in Reddy’s theory, is the process through which individuals explore and reorient their feelings, often by attempting to name or express them using available emotional descriptions. Hence, within strict regimes, the mandated emotions and suppression of others are always at risk of creating a conflict with individuals’ authentic feelings. Pressure to conform reduces our autonomy to explore and articulate genuine emotional experiences.

    Reddy’s work suggests that strict regimes inevitably inflict “psychological pains”. This psychological pain arises from the discrepancy between one’s internal emotional state and the external expectation of how one should feel or express emotions. The deliberate heightening of threat and weaponisation of fear, as seen in the aforementioned pandemic policies, lead to significant emotional suffering.

    This approach mirrors what the German memo proposed (making individuals, even children, feel accountable for tragic outcomes) and what SPI-B had called “shame” by conflating compliance with virtue and non-compliance with deviance (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).

    Indeed, psychologists reported a rise in what they dubbed “COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome,” where individuals became obsessively fearful (avoiding public spaces, constant symptom-checking, etc.), effectively locked into a state of chronic anxiety (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022). Professor of psychology Marcantonio Spada, who studied this phenomenon, warned that by “deliberately inflat[ing] the threat and perceived fear of Covid-19 (in combination with lockdowns)”, the government made it likely “that a significant proportion of the population would develop psychopathological responses and end up locked into their fear or develop related forms of anxiety such as health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviours” (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).

    As a consequence, when people find an emotional regime oppressive or alienating, they seek “emotional refuges”, that is, social spaces or subcultures that permit the free expression of forbidden feelings. These refuges (such as the historic salons, Masonic lodges, cafés in Reddy’s research) let individuals “breathe” emotionally and share sentiments that the dominant discourse suppresses.

    In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms played a crucial role as digital emotional refuges, allowing individuals to articulate forms of scepticism, frustration, irony, or grief that were often unwelcome or delegitimised in mainstream public discourse. Whether through Telegram groups, Facebook forums, YouTube comments, or encrypted chat channels, these online spaces became vital arenas not only for a delegitimized critique, but also for affective expression, especially for those who rejected the emotional scripts of fear, compliance, or trust in government authority.

    Here, alternative emotional narratives could circulate: defiance against confinement, sarcasm toward official slogans, or empathy with marginalised voices such as vaccine sceptics, small business owners, or distressed adolescents. It was these spaces that functioned as emotional counter-publics: informal communities where dissonant emotions could be shared, validated, and amplified outside the normative emotional regime that attempted to monopolise the emotional field.

    Yet even these emotional counter-publics did not remain untouched. As expressions of dissent or ambivalence became increasingly vilified and pathologised, many of these refuges were themselves subjected to forms of surveillance, content moderation, public denunciation and censorship. Social media platforms intensified their control of discourse through algorithmic filtering and deplatforming, while governments and media denounced certain emotional expressions, especially those critical of official policy, as irrational, dangerous, or politically subversive. In this way, the emotional regime extended its reach, constraining the very spaces where alternative affective orientations could emerge, intensifying emotional suffering and narrowing the horizon of legitimate emotional life.

    Bibliography

  • Ностальгия

    ‘I confess I do not believe in time.’
    Vladimir Nabokov

    On a hostel rooftop in Morocco, I met a Russian man who had not been home since the war broke out. I was there to catch the last of the sun and read my book in peace so when he first introduced himself I made no effort to be friendly. It soon became clear that he wasn’t motivated by any particular attraction to me, as I had immediately and arrogantly presumed, but because he had seen that I was reading Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Some mingled instinct of nostalgia and boredom had led him to overcome his aversion to intruding on strangers, he explained.

    I invited him to sit and the conversation roamed freely. He described late spring in St Petersburg and the peculiar sense of dissolution that comes with moving through endless bars and the sun never setting. I told him about the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin and people in green hats strewn on the bridges at dawn. We spoke about the war and about La Rochefoucauld and about rap. We agreed that Tolstoy was better than Dostoevsky; we disagreed about Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Soon it was dark so we got a six pack of Casablanca beers and sat by the pool. We shared a pack of Marlboro Golds and began to talk about heartbreak, naturally. He said that in Russian there are more specific words for sadness: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I gave him my pen so he could write them in the back of my book. When we finished all the beers he retrieved a half bottle of vodka from his room. We made light of our romantic humiliations. You can speak most openly with people you know you’ll never see again.

    I didn’t think about him again until recently, in a bookshop in Dublin, when I came across a copy of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which had come up that night. He’d urged me to give it another go, insisting it was worth it, even going so far as to say it was his best work, which isn’t an opinion you hear much. Even Nabakov said it was a dismal flop, and he wasn’t known for his humility.

    I should get it out of the way that I read Lolita at a formative age, close to Lolita’s age, in fact, and that I loved it completely without understanding it in the slightest. (I used to think this was a unique experience but over the years I’ve met many women like me.) Lolita is the book I’ve returned to most and my love for it has only deepened, though now I understand its awfulness. So, as a long time fan of Nabokov, I’m disposed to forgive his more unlikeable traits, which I admit are unlikeable in the extreme: his aristocratic disdain, his insistence on his own brilliance, his exhausting multilingual wordplay, his obsessive control over interpretation, his stylised indifference. Updike put it best: ‘I don’t like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ All Nabokov’s vices are displayed most opulently in Speak, Memory.

    It’s less of an autobiography than a record of personality. He sets down a few of his passions, such as lepidopterology, but more importantly, he catalogs his many hatreds. They range from small gripes with Freud’s theories or disagreements with ignorant critics to the amazingly vague, such as music (‘an arbitrary succession of more or less annoying sounds’), or sleep (‘I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of genius…the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.’) Every time I’ve attempted to read Speak, Memory I’ve gone in with good intentions and every time I’ve been thoroughly defeated.

    This time, however, the book seemed to speak directly into the conversation with the Russian man on the hostel rooftop in Morocco. I saw it as a story about exile and nostalgia, and I wondered if he had urged me to reread it because he understood that neither of us had been home for years, though his reasons were far graver and sadder than mine. The word nostalgia, as you may already know, comes from the Greek νόστος, ‘return home’, and ἄλγος, ‘ache’.

    Speak, Memory tells the story of the author’s aristocratic childhood in Russia at the turn of the century, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that forced him to flee, and his attempts to build a new life in America. Early on, Nabokov makes it clear that his project is not political but sentimental, addressing a brief chapter to ‘the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.’ ‘My contempt for the emigre who hates the Reds because they stole his money and land is complete,’ he explains. ‘The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.’

    Out of that childhood he creates something mythical and shadowless. He elevates to epic proportions something that is, in fact, very ordinary. He misses his beautiful mother and the garden where he used to play. He wishes he could go back. But he can’t admit it so straightforwardly so he invokes the Muse, like Homer. The Muse steps in and the past rushes back, intact. ‘I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.’ The motivating impulse is against oblivion. Like with the butterflies he pins to a board, he wants to take the moment in all its impossible detail, to fix and immortalise it. The enemy is time, which pulls you away from everything you love. Memory is a tool for defeating time.

    Nabokov’s exile isn’t just a matter of geography or politics; it’s a spiritual condition marked by the loss of a world that no longer exists. Speak, Memory doesn’t progress logically, it circles back on itself, drawing connections through motif and image rather than sequence. Its structure mimics the strange, folding logic of memory, where one detail can suddenly trigger a whole Proustian journey of the mind.

    This associative structure is how diasporic cultures preserve history. It is encoded in fragments, in music, in idioms, in rituals that seem personal but are weighted with collective meaning. The longing for return, or for a wholeness that never fully existed, becomes formal rather than simply emotional. Nostalgia is a structural feature. It organizes the past via symbols. In such contexts, the ache of memory is not a flaw. It is how identity endures across distance.

    In the back pages of my book, I still have the man’s careful, looping words in Cyrillic: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I’ve forgotten the precise differences between these shades of sadness, but the point remains: not all nostalgia is the same. There is the soft kind, the sentimental kind that sells postcards and heritage tours. But there is also a harder kind: nostalgia as mnemonic, as survival instinct.

    Feature Image: Walter Mori

  • Small Horses

    The big man tugged the brim of his hat and spoke gently to the camera as though a guest had newly arrived at his door.

    “Evenin’ folks. I’m here to tell you about my new picture, The Train Robbers, with a little lady you might have heard of by the name of Ann Margaret.” He inclined his head in a manner familiar to audiences who might, in that gesture, recall the earnest frontier wisdom for which his characters were renowned. “I think you’ll like it. It’s an old-fashioned Western with lots of action and—”

    “Cut!” the director yelled.

    The big man’s eyes narrowed and his throaty voice rose to a tattered yelp.

    “Well, what’s the matter now?”

    “Sorry, sir,” the director hesitated. “They’d prefer we didn’t use the term ‘old-fashioned’ anymore. They think it’ll drive away the younger audience.”

    “Who thinks?”

    A pinkish glow glazed the young director’s cheeks.

    “The marketing department.” His fingers played nervously by an earlobe. “The studio’s marketing department.”

    “Marketing department?” The big man exclaimed, his voice cracking under the incredulity. “Hell, anyone driven away by that nonsense can stay away, far as I’m concerned. I guess they’d rather we dump our regular audience and bring in a bunch of hippies instead. That it?”

    “I don’t know, sir, but that’s the direction I was given. I’m just doing my job. How about we take five while Howard works up the changes for you?”

    The big man’s eyebrows dwelled over a long cautious stare, then he suddenly released a brittle chuckle and slapped his own thigh.

    “Well, hell, you work that in there, Howard,” he cried. “You work it all the way in there while I go parlay with our noble representative of the honorable fourth estate.”

    He scurried sideways through a cloud of fussing assistants and technicians and crossed the dusty yard to a pair of canvas chairs which sat in the oblong shadow of a large parasol. The reporter, a young man with a vaguely tormented expression, lounged inattentively over the side of one of the chairs. When he saw the big man approaching, he yanked his legs aboard, drew his fingers from his beatnik beard and lurched upright, composing a large notebook on his lap as his pen made a nervous vigil over a fresh page.

    The big man sat heavily into his chair with a long, wayward grunt. He snatched a drink from the small table beside him and the ice cubes tinkled against the glass as he raised it to his lips. He took a long sideways look at the young reporter.

    “Where were we?” he said, when he’d taken a messy sup.

    “We were talking about your acting method.”

    A stern look waved the lines above the man’s brows and an unamused fissure cleaved his mouth into a half-smile.

    “You were talking about that,” he said, “not me. There’s no method. I’m myself, on purpose. It’s not much of a trick but it’s all the trick I got.”

    “Do you think that’s enough these days with people like Voight, Hoffman—”

    “It’s plenty enough,” the man snapped. “I suppose you think all this method-acting hooey is for the benefit of the audience. It’s not, you know. It’s just vanity. These modern actors feel like they gotta show the audience that they’re suffering for their art and I guess the only way they know how to do that is to sob right into the camera. The thing they miss is that heroes were never meant to be like normal folks. The whole point of heroes is to be better than normal folks and, in my book, better means better. Not darker. Or sadder. Or dirtier, either. Not shooting people in the back like you see in all these Spaghetti Westerns. Not doing drugs or whatever else you see these days. We ought to be setting an example for people. Showing them what real courage is. That’s why people come to my pictures. That’s why they been coming to my pictures for thirty years and that’s why they’ll still be coming to my pictures in a hundred years when all these fancy dan tricks is gone the way of the dodo.”

    “You seem very confident of your enduring legacy.”

    The big man gave a crippled, sorrowful laugh, “Well, I guess I am. Faith don’t cost much this side of life but, even so, it’s in surprisingly short supply.”

    The reporter bobbed excitedly and attacked the page with his pen.

    “That’s good.”

    “People need heroes they can rely on. These anti-heroes, as you guys call them, that’s just a fad the public will get tired of eventually. And, when they do, they’ll come looking for real heroes again.”

    “So, I take it you didn’t like The Wild Bunch?”

    “No sir, I didn’t. Bad guys pretending to be good guys.”

    “But can’t a person be both? Can’t a person be more than just good or evil?”

    “No sir, they can’t. They gotta pick a side and stick with it. It’s thinking like yours got the world in the upside-down mess it’s in. Men dressed like women and women dressed like men. Fellas that are supposed to be heroes blubbing about the place like sissies. People with no right to it demanding an audience’s respect. I’m no expert on scripture but I remember somewhere in there a warning against those who would try to put darkness for light and light for darkness.”

    “If you want to talk about scripture, what about Saint Paul on the road to Damascus? Wasn’t that a case of darkness turning into light.”

    The big man gave a creaking chuckle.

    “Well son, you be sure to let me know when we get another case like that one.”

    A few shouts came from the set and they both looked up and spent a few moments watching the buildup of activity there.

    “You got one more question, kid.”

    “You going to the Oscars tonight, sir? Who do you think will win for Best Actor?”

    The big man made a distasteful face.

    “Well, Olivier is a fine actor. I suppose I wouldn’t be too upset if he won.”

    “What about Brando? His performance in The Godfather is surely deserving of an Oscar, wouldn’t you say?”

    “No, son, I wouldn’t say. Too showy. Stuffing all that junk in his cheeks. All vanity and, I guess you know now, I can’t abide vanity,” he made a point of looking at the young man’s beard, “in anyone.”

    “Can’t you even admit that the movie itself is a modern masterpiece?”

    “No, sir, I can’t. If you ask me, that picture is nothing but modern un-American garbage.”

    “But surely,” the reporter started but the big man stood up and raised a meaty palm.

    “Maybe you should interview Brando. He’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear.”

    The young man frowned and the big man leaned over him, tilting his hat up his forehead.

    “I guess you’d prefer it I came off my horse like old Saul,” he said with a short chuckle and staggered back to the set, leaving the young reporter chewing his pen silently.

    The young man stood up, put away his notes and wandered over to a young lady who was smoking a cigarette in the shade of a long silver trailer.

    “Can you spare a cigarette, honey?”

    She looked at him and her lips formed a brief pout of distaste but, after a few seconds, she yanked a corner of her lip into a dazed smile and held out a long cigarette.

    “Here you go, Daddy-o.”

    When he’d lit his cigarette, he leaned against the trailer and nodded his head in the direction of the renewed activity.

    “So, what’s he like to work with?”

    “The living legend?”

    “Yes.”

    She looked him up and down.

    “Off the record?”

    “Sure,” he said, clutching the cigarette between his teeth as he dived into his bag for his notepad and pen.

    She pursed her lips carefully and blew a long thin plume of smoke toward the subject of their discourse.

    “He’s a royal pain in the ass.”

     

    *          *          *          *          *

     

    “No, dammit!” the big man said with a hoarse growl, flinging a despairing arm at the apprentice wrangler. “It’s still too tall. We’re shooting a promo here, son. You’re gonna want to get his head in the frame, otherwise people will think someone sawed a foot off me or I’m standing in a trench.”

    The apprentice wrangler, a kid no more than nineteen, opened his mouth to say something but the man wasn’t waiting for an answer.

    “Take it back and bring me another,” he said and wafted the air between them with the back of his hand.

    This was the third horse he’d returned, each with the same fatigued gesture, like an imperfectly cooked steak being waved back to the kitchen.

    The young wrangler grimaced and nervously tightened his grip around the reins. Mr. Mitchell, the head wrangler, had told him to keep it simple and to bring him one of the Quarter horses. He stepped apart from the horse, looking up at it and across its felted light brown flanks as though re-evaluating its suitability for himself.

    Between horses, the big man had dragged his canvas chair out from beneath the large white parasol and into the light. Now, as he watched the kid conduct his silent inspection, he lay back into the seat and stretched his long limbs into the warming midday sun. The man measured the moment with a throaty chuckle before taking himself slowly out of the chair. He removed his hat and slapped it once against his right thigh before refitting it and taking his famous lopsided stride over to where the kid stood, awaiting his approach with visible concern.

    The AD stepped beside the kid, pulled his white baseball cap over his eyes and tugged at his greying beard, offering a physical demonstration of his concern.

    “We can work around this,” he said. “A wide shot from further back. Then you’ll have everybody in the frame.”

    The big man shook his head and his eyes crinkled in a stern smile.

    “Hell, Bob, we’ll look like ants. You want folks to have to guess who the hell is in the picture?” He pointed at the kid. “You telling me we ain’t got one regular sized horse in that whole remuda back there?”

    He started walking in the direction the kid had come from.

    The director joined the AD and the kid beside the horse.

    “Where are you going?” the director called.

    “I’m going to pick myself out a normal-sized horse. You stay here and take five or six or whatever you guys call it these days.”

    The big man followed the track around past a set of worn outhouses to a series of fresh-boarded corrals. The kid followed at a short distance and watched the man let himself into a large pen with about a dozen horses in two groups, stepping nervously in opposite corners.

    The man noticed the kid and gestured to a cream and brown colt in the nearest corner.

    “What about that little Paint Horse?”

    “Oh, not Bobbin, sir. He’s mighty ornery. We only got him around for a special show that needs a bad-tempered ride. I wouldn’t recommend using him for this type of show, sir”

    “Well,” the man said, “I reckon I can handle him.”

    He strolled slowly over to the horse and carefully patted its flanks and head, whispering and clucking to the animal as he stepped closer.

    The horse turned one side of his head to look at the man. The large eye, wet and brown, studied him.

    “You know me, don’t you?” the man said, easing his hand across the thick mane and patting the horse’s neck softly.

    He was about to chide the kid for his foolishness, when the horse suddenly bucked hard, slamming him against the fence and he lost consciousness.

     

    *          *          *          *          *

     

    “What the hell you let him in there for?”

    “I’m sorry sir. He said the other horses was too big.”

    “Too big? They’re always too big. Is he riding them or are they riding him?”

    The boy gestured to the big man.

    “He just moved.”

    The big man opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed in the silver trailer. The kid was pressing a damp cloth to his head. A dull ache sat just above his eyes.

    A grey-haired man with a long black moustache in a dark suit stood over him, looking concerned.

    “You okay?”

    The big man sat up. He took the damp cloth from the kid and pressed it to the ache above his eyes.

    “I’ll live, I guess.”

    “You remember anything?”

    “I remember a little horse kicking the shit outta me.”

    “That’s Bobbin. He’s the devil himself if he don’t know you. Raúl had no business letting you go in there.”

    “I’ll live,” the man said and made to stand up.

    The grey-haired man put a hand on his chest to keep him gently on the bed.

    “You best take it easy sir. You had a sizeable bump. Doctor needs to check you out. Anyways, they told everyone to go home.”

    “Go home? You sure?”

    “Well, pretty certain. They’re all clearing out for the day.”

    He stared at the big man.

    “You recognize me?”

    “Sure I do. You’re Mitchell, the head wrangler, but,” he gestured at his own outfit—jeans, boots, spurs and all—then at the grey-haired man’s smart suit and tie, “there’s something wrong with this picture, cowboy.”

    “I had to attend a funeral,” the grey-haired man said, inspecting himself self-consciously.

    “Well,” the big man said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

    “Thanks.”

    The big man rose to his feet.

    “I gotta get myself into one of them suits too, so I can attend the 45th Academy Awards. I got a thing I gotta do there.”

    “You sure you’re up for all that, sir?”

    The big man loosened a soft chuckle that scraped through the relative quiet of the trailer.

    “I guess I’m pretty certain,” he said.

     

    *          *          *          *          *

     

    The little hippy girl in the Red Indian getup walked slowly to the stage. She looked Apache. Chiricahua or maybe Western Apache. Jet black hair swung at her waist. A tan beaded dress. He’d killed lots of Apaches in his movies. No women, of course, though he’d probably widowed plenty.

    For a second, he wondered if he was seeing things.

    He was in the wings, getting ready for his bit when he saw the little Indian girl come up—almost float up—to receive the award and it was as though an invisible thread drew him to her. He moved closer to the stage, between a group of heavy-set security men. He was sweating heavy and breathing hard as she commenced her speech about Native Americans and respect, love and generosity, but then she said something about declining the award and booing broke out on the main floor.

    She looked so small and scared flanked by those two giant props of the Oscar statuette and she glanced nervously toward the wings, where he stood, and hesitated in her speech. The large sheet containing her speech quivered in her grasp and her sad little mouth saddened further.

    He moved toward her and one of the security guards, a dark-haired, squat fellow, placed a thick hand on his shoulder and pinched the flesh there urgently.

    The big man was listening to the speech. He absently shrugged the man’s hand away but another security man tugged at his elbow from behind and a taller, blonde haired security man stood beside him and tried for his other elbow.

    “Sir, you’d better stay here.”

    “And you’d better leave off,” the big man croaked as he yanked his elbows away. He tried to take another step but a fourth, a fifth then a sixth security man barred his path.

    “Sorry sir but we can’t let you do that?”

    “Do what?” the big man said with a grimace. “I’m just trying to talk to her.”

    “I’m sorry sir. We can’t allow that right now.”

    “It’s not your business,” the big man said but when he looked back at the stage the little Indian girl had vanished like a heat mirage in the desert.

    The band struck up and the audience applauded and, soon after, he found himself being introduced and he made his own speech and the filming wrapped up, but he kept thinking about the little Indian girl mirage he’d seen.

    When the ceremony was over, the stars mingled in small careful groups along political and historical and status lines. He kept an eye out for a reoccurrence of the Indian girl mirage. He didn’t see her again but, talking to other guests, he learned she wasn’t a mirage. She’d really been on stage. She’d really spoken those words. She’d really stood there, hands quivering lightly, while the audience heckled and booed her.

    He excused himself and waved for his personal driver, a quick, bright-eyed, sharp-faced man in his late twenties with slicked-back hair and a reluctant smile.

    “Get me into Brando’s party,” the big man said. “I don’t care how you do it.”

    His driver returned twenty minutes later.

    “You’re in,” he said.

    They drove to Mulholland Drive. He gave a lift to a couple of young up-and-coming actresses whose names he didn’t know and he couldn’t remember when they told him but who giggled and chatted carelessly the whole way to the Santa Monica Mountains. They all entered the large Spanish-style house together and the actresses’ laughter and general gaiety covered his entrance better than any gunpowder keg had in his pictures.

    The party was in full swing. People were drinking and shouting and laughing; little dabs of mirthful giggles and loud uncontrolled splashes of laughter as though emptied from a fire bucket. A haze of marijuana smoke clutched his nostrils as he wandered through the different rooms.

    A five-piece jazz band occupied a corner of the large open-plan living room and the lead singer, a tall, dark, graceful lady swirled effortlessly around a microphone stand, launching a series of winsome pleas into the warm night. On the other side of the house, by the pool, a keyboardist, guitarist and another singer performed a selection of modern hits. This singer—a pale, willowy fellow—decanted his soul into each song, almost collapsing into the outro before seemingly renewing his vigor for the next number.

    As the big man moved through the house the sound of one or other band would dominate and, each time, the conquered song would idle sedately into the background only to re-emerge moments later when he crossed some invisible threshold. As he made his way up the wide circular stairs, the two sounds grappled in the air around him, locked in close combat.

    A large dimly lit room of cushions and candelabras opened onto a long veranda. He picked a path through cushions and half-seen bodies which writhed with the apocalyptic fervor of drunken ardor.

    A set of thin white curtains floated across the wide doorway and the night air parted them just enough for him to see her standing on the balcony, looking out at the city lights in the distance.

    He approached cautiously. She was alone.

    “I heard your speech,” he said softly and she weaved back in surprise.

    He raised his hands.

    “I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to speak to you, if that’s okay.”

    She looked at him for a long moment and eventually nodded slowly.

    He pointed to a metal table and chairs nearby.

    “Do you mind if we sit, miss?”

    She glanced about uncertainly then shook her head quickly. He pulled a chair out and gestured her into it before taking the seat opposite her.

    “You mind if I smoke,” he said, smiling. “I smoke when I’m nervous.”

    “No, it’s fine.”

    He smiled as he took out a pack of cigarettes then, smiling again, he offered her one, which she took, and he lit both their cigarettes with a light snap of his lighter.

    Out on the veranda, the modern music dominated again. The band were playing a song he’d never heard before called Peaceful Easy Feeling and the people around the pool below and the singer all swayed as if caught in the same mellow current.

    “This is nice,” he said.

    “Yes,” she replied, smiling timidly. Her dark eyes glittered in the light from half-a-dozen ornate lamps which stood at intervals along the balcony.

    He pulled his chair closer.

    “I heard your speech earlier,” he said.

    “Yes,” she said, her eyes staring unabashedly into his, “but did you see it?”

    “See it?”

    Her voice took on a dreamlike quality.

    “Did you see the oppression of the weak? The bloody war against nature? The long veil of hypocrisy that hangs over this nation? The thousands of bones lying unburied on the prairies?”

    He moved excitedly toward her, their faces inches apart.

    “I saw,” he said. “I saw all of it and I felt all of it, as though you were speaking just to me, directly into my brain.”

    “In a way, I was. I’ve seen all your pictures. I know you better than any man.”

    He frowned sadly.

    “You saw only a shadow of me in those movies. The shameful shadow of delusion. I decided today, I’ll never make another of those pictures. I’m done with that life. Do you believe me?”

    She smiled tenderly.

    “I believe we can be whoever and whatever we want to be, if we want it hard enough.”

    “I do want it. Truly, I do. It’s not something I thought about before today but so much has changed in this day. This morning I was an adolescent, knit in kin and afraid of the universe, and tonight I am become a man. The old me skulked in the shadows of that curtain, hiding in the wings, but then, bathed in your radiant candor I was baptized into the world and here I am.”

    Her eyes were aflame now. The music rose below them but neither of them heard it anymore.

    “I was drawn to you,” he said. “Like I’ve never been drawn to another. Like a celestial body stranded millennia in the cold immensity of space, suddenly feeling an urgent tug from somewhere in the vast emptiness. When those people started booing, I wanted to rush to your side. To be there with you.”

    “You did?”

    He stubbed out his cigarette and took her hand.

    “Yes, I did.”

    “And they stopped you?”

    “They tried to, but they can’t stop me now. Here I am. I want to be with you now, if I can. I can’t explain but something happened to me when I heard your speech. The scales fell from my eyes, and I suddenly saw the world, cold and hard, through your eyes. All the needless slaughter and butchery. All the lies and deceit. All the self-deceit. A world bereft of love or generosity waiting to be stocked. By us.”

    She urgently extinguished her own cigarette and placed her hand on his and their fingers intertwined.

    “I want that too,” she said and they stared long and hard into each other’s eyes, cataloguing the thousand mysteries there, counting each glimmer of light like beautiful little fireworks being tracked across the sky.

    An apprehensive cough came from behind them. They turned and his driver was there.

    “Your wife’s here,” the driver said.

    “Oh yeah,” the big man said. “Shit.”

  • Turkey, Journalism and Erdoğan

    The following is a Q and A between Luke Sheehan and Deniz Güngör.

    Can you summarize the political crisis in Turkey? 

    First, I must say that in Turkey, a person must have a university diploma to be eligible to run for president. After the main opposition CHP’s Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu announced his presidential candidacy, judicial operations were launched. First, İmamoğlu’s diploma was annulled, then he was detained on March 19 and subsequently arrested. Following this, a series of protest demonstrations were organized in Saraçhane, where the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality building is located.

    What is happening in Istanbul? What is the atmosphere like now? 

    The protests ended due to the interjection of the Ramadan holiday. However, it is safe to say that all these developments have awakened the social opposition. Turkey had not witnessed such large-scale, nearly nationwide protests since the 2013 Gezi Park resistance. Even though the protests have ended, the smallest decision from the government drives the opposition back to the streets.

    Recount the key moments of the last few months in your own experience? 

    One of the most critical moments of the last few months was the police violence during the Saraçhane protests on March 23. After a rally organized by the CHP in Saraçhane, the police attacked demonstrators and journalists near the Bozdoğan Aqueduct with pepper spray, plastic bullets, and batons. (The reason the protesters tried to push through the police stationed at the Bozdoğan Aqueduct was that they wanted to march to Taksim Square. The government has been banning all protests at Taksim Square since the Gezi Park resistance due to fear of its symbolic significance.) Many people were injured, including me. A police officer sprayed pepper gas directly into my face and kicked me in the stomach. Since that day, 301 university students and young people have been arrested and sent to prison. Most of them have now been released, but some are still imprisoned despite serious health issues. Calls for their release continue on social media.

    How would you recount İmamoğlu’s path in politics? How did he come to represent a threat to Erdoğan? 

    Before becoming the mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, İmamoğlu was the mayor of the Beylikdüzü district in Istanbul. He was hardly known before becoming the metropolitan mayor. Until the 2019 elections, Istanbul was governed by Erdoğan’s party, the AKP. Erdoğan once said, “Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey.” For this reason, Istanbul holds great significance for them. When İmamoğlu narrowly defeated the AKP’s candidate Binali Yıldırım in 2019, he first caught Erdoğan’s attention. The election was annulled, and İmamoğlu was subjected to many provocations. However, in the re-run election in June 2019, İmamoğlu was elected mayor by a landslide. After CHP took over Istanbul, corruption under the AKP administration was exposed. Religious cults embedded within the municipality were removed, and a policy of social municipalism was adopted. Projects like municipal daycare centers and public canteens (designed to support the people suffering under the economic crisis) were developed. Despite all the AKP propaganda, İmamoğlu was re-elected in the 2024 local elections. 

    Since 2019, a large portion of society has expressed the desire to see İmamoğlu as president. This made him a target for Erdoğan. The AKP regime is terrified of losing power, especially since people still demand answers about the $128 billion that went missing from the Central Bank. If the AKP loses power, they know it won’t end well for them.

    Compared to previous flare ups and crises [Gezi Park protests 2013], what is different about these events? Apart from factual differences, how does it feel different? 

    The Gezi Park resistance began as a movement to protect Gezi Park, and the police violence and deaths deepened it. But Saraçhane is a direct response to political maneuvers, increasing repression, arrests, and is directly against Erdoğan. It still is. The protests found expression in universities through academic boycotts, and people from all walks of life took to the streets. The Saraçhane protests were a stand against Erdoğan and his Islamist, authoritarian policies.

    How is journalism functioning in this environment?

    The police try to prevent journalists from recording as much as possible. Their goal is to keep the torture they inflict from being documented. Often, journalists are detained together with protesters, surrounded by police.

    Your colleagues were detained in February, can you describe what happened? Was that business as usual for journalists in Turkey?

    Every month in Turkey, journalists are detained or prosecuted for the news they report or for their social media posts. This has become one of the regime’s mechanisms of repression and has sadly become normalized. It’s now rare to find a journalist who doesn’t have at least one lawsuit filed against them. In February, detentions were carried out after BirGün reported on a visit by Sabah newspaper to Istanbul’s Chief Public Prosecutor, Akın Gürlek, in his office. Sabah had also reported on the same visit.

    Uğur Koç, Berkant Gültekin, and Yaşar Gökdemir were taken to Istanbul Police Headquarters in Vatan in the evening to give statements and were initially denied access to their lawyers. None of the three were summoned; they were directly taken from their homes. After their statements at the police station were completed around noon, they were referred to the Istanbul Courthouse in Çağlayan. Berkant Gültekin was released after giving his statement to the prosecutor. Uğur Koç and Yaşar Gökdemir were also released by the court with judicial control measures. All they did was report a visit already published by Sabah.

    How is the violence being applied in the response to protest? Is it different to the past?

    Unfortunately, tactics like reverse handcuffing and pepper spray have become normalized forms of police brutality in Turkish protests.

    Can you single out a story of an ordinary family and how they have been affected?

    On April 8, university student Esila Ayık was arrested in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district for holding a sign that read “Dictator Erdoğan” at the Kadıköy Dayanışma Stage, accused of “insulting the president.” Ayık suffers from chronic heart and kidney disease. She has collapsed in prison and been hospitalized multiple times. Despite all these health problems, she has not been released. Her father repeatedly pleads, “Please release my daughter,” but Esila remains imprisoned.

    Do the pro-Imamoglu people feel a connection to any citizens elsewhere locked in some kind of struggle?

    Honestly, I don’t think so. People in Turkey see the struggle here as unique and particular to their own circumstances.

    You are 25. You have lived almost your whole life under the government of one leader. What does that feel like for your generation? Do you feel like Turkey can be called a democracy?

    Unfortunately, I have lived my entire life under the Erdoğan regime. From the moment he came to power, he embraced an Islamist political identity and had ties with the Gülen movement. However, after the 2016 coup attempt, he pretended those ties never existed and started accusing dissidents of being linked to FETÖ (Fetullahist Terrorist Organization). After the state of emergency was declared in 2016, repression increased, freedoms were restricted, and the economic crisis deepened. I believe this has especially impacted my generation and the ones after me. The generation before us wasn’t afraid to take to the streets to demand their rights. But until the Saraçhane protests, people were silenced by fear — “What if I get arrested, detained, what if I can’t find a job in the future?” Even something as simple as going to the cinema has become unaffordable for young people. Going out for a drink or to the theater has become a luxury. Most of us are unemployed university graduates. People no longer trust the election results, nor the judiciary. So no, as long as Erdoğan’s regime continues, it is not possible to talk about democracy in Turkey.

    If you could summarize the current situation with a metaphor, what would it be?

    The wall of fear the dictator built over 23 years had already cracked — now it’s crumbling.

    Images all copyright © BirGün

    Deniz Güngör graduated in 2023 from the Department of Journalism at the Faculty of Communication Sciences, Anadolu University in Eskişehir Turkey. Since 2021, Deniz has been working at BirGün Newspaper. She was awarded in the 65th Turkey Journalism Achievement Awards organized by the Turkish Journalists’ Association (TGC) for her interview “The Hope We Carry Is Our Reason to Live”, and again in the 66th TGC Awards for her news report titled “Unauthorized Surgery at a Private Hospital: They Lied to the Judiciary”.

  • Rain in the Face

    Dawn sun, distant mountains, red cliffs near, white clouds scattered, still world, until a breeze caresses the desert floor, and a scorpion awakes, resting on a piece of earth where no human ever stood. In this wilderness stands a horse, and sitting on the horse a rider. Tail swishing, standing still, a motionless man watching, intently, an eagle high above, hunting, alive, living to fly. The warrior wears the painted face and the feathered headwear of his long fathers. He looks up at its broad wings, he smiles, the way eagles can’t.

    The dream maker is hiding. Morning departs, lifest part of the day, sleep distant, last night’s dreams evaporate. The man and his horse make the wilderness less lonely. Every day he starts at dawn. The man is thinking, no words, words know, within their boundaries. He wonders whether his friend, the horse, thinks thoughts. It is his destiny to be chieftain. Kick the stirrup, the horse moves on slowly, distant mountain west, snowy summits beckon, through sand, clip clop, the scorpion lifts her tail, otherwise still, the horse and man wander away, red cliffs of hues, scorpion watching, like she always does.

    Horse walking in the desert, solitary in the wilderness, desert sands have no mind, just beauty, the thirsty horse knows. The thirsty man sees the distant river. The world was made for him. He thinks. He doubts. The dream maker dances in the flames of the fire the man has made, to keep him warm in the night and to ward off evil spirits. He is safe near the fire, under the stars. His tribe is at home, sleeping in the teepee, but he must search, with his horse, for his spirit guide. Then he will discover his name, and finally reach manhood. Now they are far away, beyond horizons, past the setting sun. Four months he has been gone, alone, searching, travelling where the stars are strange, waiting for the spirit guide to reveal itself, now just wilderness, loneliness, risk becoming destiny. Look to the clouds, a formless shape, no sitting bull, no crazy horse, who found their spirits in the shapes of clouds. His spirit is hiding, somewhere in the world. Like the dream maker does.

    The horse drinks from the river, the man stoops beside it, water in a cup of hands, he drinks, life itself returning, fear turns to laughter, there was never a first time, there was never a last. The sun sets, night falls, the universe emerges from the sky, the horse sleeps, the man is awake, seeing other worlds, not understanding, only understanding here, this world that created him, from nothing. He watches the stars at night, he is life, as much as the horse, as much as the river and the forest, the bear, the antelope, the eagle riding high in the morning, and the stars become memory, in his learning mind. At night, by the fire, he searches for his spirit guide in the galaxy rain.

    He raises his head, they see mountains, the horse knows and they walk, through the day, upwards, high near the summit, stone cliff juts, they stand on the precipice together, horse and man, looking out, over the great valley below, and above, the grey wanderers, summoning thunder, electric flashes in the distance, their hair blows, they are unwavering, a galloping storm approaches, they alone are conscious, they remain still in the oncoming storm, the man looks up, the skies open, the spirit guide arrives, he looks to the universe hiding, down comes the water, beating like drums, front hooves rise high, and the man speaks for the first time in months, “Rain in the Face’. It is done.

    Feature Image: Frank Cone

  • Kneecapped at Coachella

    Kneecap caused a stir at Coachella this year—though you wouldn’t know it from the official festival footage. The Belfast rap trio opened their set with a searing visual: a burning police car, references to British imperialism, American complicity in Palestine, and a general tone of “we’re not here to play nice.” The response? Censorship. The land of the free doesn’t want freedom with a pulse.

    Now the Metropolitan Police are investigating them. For what, exactly? Performing a politically charged rap set in California? The timing is transparent. This isn’t just about bad vibes—it’s a coordinated attempt to silence a group that refused to dilute its politics for a global stage.

    It’s a tale as old as time. An artist speaks plainly and suddenly everyone forgets their free speech talking points. Protest is fine, apparently, as long as it’s vague, aesthetic, and monetizable. Hashtags are fine, but don’t actually use your platform to say something real.

    Let’s be honest, Kneecap was never a good fit for Coachella’s algorithm-optimized playlist of “vibe music for brand partnerships.” This is a festival that sells an illusion of bohemianism and alternative living: surface-level aesthetic progressivism, but just inoffensive enough for corporate sponsors.

    Real politics, especially the messy kind grounded in colonial trauma, don’t do numbers on TikTok.

    So, when Kneecap dared to connect U.S. foreign policy to real-world consequences in Gaza, or referenced the British state’s still-rotting legacy in the North, it wasn’t just disruptive. It was unprofitable, and Coachella was never going to protect art that costs money.

    Philip Anschutz, the billionaire owner of AEG and founder of Coachella, himself keeps a little black book full of far-right sponsors. He’s spent years quietly funding conservative and far-right causes, including anti-LGBTQ+, climate denialist, and anti-union organisations. When this became public in 2017, there was outcry, but no real reckoning, just a vague statement about “reviewing donations”,  then back to business as usual.

    It’s a real-time contradiction: we sell rebellion, but the money is filthy lucre. So, when an act like Kneecap turns up and delivers a protest that isn’t product-tested, the machine grinds to a halt.

    The hypocrisy is unreal. People will invoke “free speech” to defend actual ideological fascists on YouTube, but feel uneasy as soon as someone mentions the IRA or shouts “Tibet” in Shanghai.

    Björk did just that in 2008, ending her song “Declare Independence” with a cry of “Tibet! Tibet!” at a concert in Shanghai. Chinese authorities were livid. Western media downplayed it. Promoters distanced themselves. Her remaining tour dates in the region were effectively cancelled. It was a single, spontaneous act of solidarity, and it cost her.

    Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992, declaring, “Fight the real enemy,” in protest of abuse within the Catholic Church. She was vilified. Media outlets called her insane, radio stations boycotted her. Joe Pesci threatened to hit her during the very next episode of SNL. Madonna, herself no stranger to co-opting Catholic imagery or controversy in general, mocked her. The crowd at Madison Square Garden booed her offstage at a Bob Dylan tribute show. It took twenty odd years for the world to admit she was right, but she didn’t live to hear an apology.

    The problem isn’t just the festivals or the corporations. Green Day are another perfect example. They made a half-hearted nod to genocide and fascist governments during their set, altering a lyric or two. Fair play to them, I suppose, but it was so blatantly performative. “We stand with humanity,” Billie Joe said, He probably later stood at the bar with his mate, Mark Zuckerberg, too.

    Dissent is just content, now. Discourse is clickbait, and anything that can’t be simplified into a slogan or sold on a t-shirt is “too much.” But protest isn’t a playlist. It’s not supposed to make you comfortable. It’s supposed to make you act.

    If the music industry actually cared about free speech, it would protect artists like Kneecap. Instead, it gives us curated rebellion. Safety pins in ears. “Resist” T-shirts made in sweatshops. Festival stages that erase the parts of performances that weren’t “brand-aligned.”

    Kneecap didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t try to fit in.

    But let’s be honest. They’re not martyrs either. They’ve since walked back their most controversial comments, stating that they do not support Hamas or Hezbollah. It’s not betrayal as much as it is survival, however. They have a career to protect, fans to answer to, and possibly legal consequences on the table.

    There’s a case currently before the U.K. High Court to remove Hamas from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations. They could’ve used this moment to say, “Actually, let’s have that conversation” but they didn’t, and perhaps they couldn’t.

    After the fallout, Kneecap didn’t apologise. They didn’t roll out a PR strategy. They posted a defiant message: “We will not be silenced.” It’s not clean, it’s not simple, but it’s real, and in a culture obsessed with diet dissent, that’s rare enough to be worth defending.

    Thankfully, several of their peers have. Following the decision to drop the trio from Cornwall’s Eden Project festival this summer, more than 40 music acts signed an open letter in support of their unwavering stance. Those included come as no great surprise, given their public support for progressive causes.

    Art is inherently political. The fact that one act has not spoken but shouted their truth to power, with the endorsement of so many, some luminary and legendary, is not just worth defending. It’s worth celebrating.

  • Musician of the Month: Oscar Carmona

    Loose Notes with a Cup of Coffee

    “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.
    Who would be born must first destroy a world.”
    — Hermann Hesse, Demian

    1. The first time I ever touched a piano must have been when I was 10 or 12 years old. It was the piano at my school, set in the library. One day, I was there alone, opened it up, and pressed down some of its old ivory keys. Though out of tune, the sound had such an impact on me that, unknowingly, it would alter the course of my life forever.

    2. One day, still a child, I saw one of the many versions of The Phantom of the Opera on television. I didn’t know it at the time, but one of the pieces featured in that film was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. I think that experience and the 1985 earthquake in Santiago de Chile are among the most powerful memories I have from those early years.

    3. I cannot live without making music. I don’t want to live without making music. I don’t want to, I can’t, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t.

    4. My relationship with music is constant, deep, intense, passionate, radical, playful, violent, cubist, serious, abstract, warm, tender, emotional, multifaceted, energetic, imaginative, luminous, dark, dense, fragile, mechanical, sweet, loving, experimental, eternal, fast-paced, arid, quick, vertiginous, surrealist, poetic. And so on.

    A brief journey through my work across formats, exploring contemporary composition, electronics, and music theatre.

    5. My mother encouraged my approach to classical music. She always suggested that I listen to it, saying it would be good for me. One day, with all her love, she handed me a cassette. Everything changed after that. I must have been around 12. I owe her so much.

    6. One day, my father bought me a piano. It was a significant financial effort at the time, but he did it with love, so I could dedicate myself to music, to learn and to play. I’m still making music. I owe him so much.

    7. Although classical music has been the core of my life, I’ve ventured in many directions. Classical, experimental, “neoclassical,” free improvisation, contemporary, graphic scores, improvisation guides, music theatre, electronics, hybrids of all kinds, music for dance, for film, ambient music, strange experiments for interactive installations, and on and on. There’s nothing better than navigating through different sonic worlds, getting to know them, playing with them, combining them, rejecting them, incorporating them.

    8. Sometimes I ask myself: what’s my tribe? And I respond: choose only one kind of music and you’ll have a tribe. So, I prefer to remain without a tribe and stop asking myself such useless questions.

    9. I’d say I’m a musical explorer, perhaps an adventurer, close to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also ventured in countless directions, or to Bryce Dessner, or Laurie Anderson. But undoubtedly, I am much closer to Sakamoto than to anyone else. Thank you, Sakamoto-san.

    10. First Bach and Sakamoto, then Jarrett, Bruckner, and Mehldau. Later Sassetti, Satie, Fauré, Poulenc, Ligeti, Takemitsu, Awadis, Goebbels, Glass, Richter, Mompou, Johannsson, Lutoslawski, Feldman, Kilar and so many more. If only there were enough life for so much music.

    “Memoria”, for piano and electronics, from my latest Ep Invisible (live version):

    11. I compose in different ways depending on the project I’m working on. Sometimes I do it by improvising at the piano and recording. Other times in Ableton, playing with sounds and ideas or provoking situations I can’t control to find things I didn’t know I could achieve. Mistakes are a fundamental part of my creative process.

    12. I read a lot—whatever I can, whatever interests me. Essays. Novels. Poetry. Philosophy. Astronomy. Science. Reading is a fundamental pillar of my creative practice.

    13. I listen to a huge amount of music. Sometimes, I even listen to music while I’m already listening to music. Sometimes, I listen to music while I’m composing. It might sound chaotic, but in my internal order, everything has its place. It’s like listening to myself and the world at the same time, making the right (or wrong) connections.

    14. Sometimes I read about music and different creative processes. I like developing new ways to approach creation. I copy everything that interests me, or rather, everything that resonates with me. Sometimes it’s just to learn an approach, but sometimes it’s to incorporate a new method. Sometimes I realize it doesn’t serve me, but the pleasure of knowing it and learning it outweighs everything. I’m full of useless knowledge.

    15. I use many notebooks to jot down ideas, thoughts, projects, lists, and whatever comes to mind. I try not to discard anything, no matter how exotic it may seem. I try to do the same with my musical ideas; I jot them all down when I come across something I like. My musical notation notebooks are full of ideas, scribbles, bits and pieces, unfinished works, moments, fragments, microfragments, sounds, chords, situations. Sometimes I feel like a collector of ideas.

    16. A good part of my music is basically literature. I’ll say no more, but first Cortázar, Bolaño, Tomeo. Then Aira, Auster, Perec, Manguso, and many more.

    17. My music, especially for piano, doesn’t usually begin with any specific emotion. I can create deeply sad music without feeling even the slightest sadness, or the other way around—I can create tremendously intense or joyful music without internally being in that state. I don’t believe one should always make catharsis and transfer their feelings to music. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. What fascinates me are the colors, the physical sensations of sound, the rhythm, the superimpositions, the harmonies, the modulations, the dissonances. Let emotions arise from the music for the listener—I am just an intermediary.

    18. Sometimes my music is based on concrete ideas, concepts, situations, constraints. In smaller pieces, sometimes I just want to explore solutions based on a rhythm or the exclusive use of certain notes that come to mind in the moment. But in my larger works, especially in music theatre, there are always concepts that carry significant research behind them. I never start composing until I’ve clarified everything that underpins the work. And most of the time, I write all the texts first (Insomnia, Microteatro, etc.).

    19. I borrow a lot from cinema: rhythm of the image, camera movements, time jumps, counterpoint, editing, transitions, lighting. Pure gold for making music. And yes, my music is often quite cinematic. Kubrick, Nolan, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Villeneuve, Wenders. Scorsese, Herzog, Eggers. Buñuel, Lanthimos, Garland, Joon-ho, Lang. More time, I need more time…

    20. I’ve had more failures than successes. I believe I have very few of the latter, or perhaps none at all. But failures—yes, plenty. And the big, resounding kind. It’s quite a long list.

    YouTube: “Artificial”, Part II, excerpt (violin, viola, percussion, electronics)

    21. My tempos are slow. Though I’ve been making music for many years, it’s only since the pandemic that my own voice, my sound, my true artistic self has begun to emerge. It’s not something static—far from it. It mutates, shifts, moves, transforms. But whatever makes it mine (something ineffable, perhaps) is always there. It wasn’t easy to find, nor did it happen overnight. It was a conscious, almost desperate search to uncover it. Some readings helped spiritually: La música os hará libres (R. Sakamoto), Words Without Music (P. Glass), Vertical Thoughts (M. Feldman). Others helped psychologically: Art and Fear (Orland, Bayles), The Artist’s Way (J. Cameron), La vía del creativo (G. Lamarre). But without a doubt, reading between the lines, listening, listening to myself, stripping away everything, and leaping—that was the most important thing. I went back to the basics (Sakamoto), and then everything else came.

    22. Although I always wanted to dedicate myself fully to music, for reasons I still haven’t entirely clarified (though I certainly understand them well), I spent 22 years in academia. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy teaching, but I am not a teacher. I am an artist.

    23. One of the most important moments of my life happened at the end of 2022. The Ensemble Vertixe Sonora premiered my piece Artificial in Spain. That was the year I decided to leave everything behind and devote myself 100% to music. I left my position as director and professor of a university program—with an excellent salary—to dedicate my whole mind and energy to making music, launching myself into total uncertainty. It was the best decision of my life, and luckily, I made it before turning 50.

    24. Once, my piano teacher told me I wasn’t cut out for piano—that I should dedicate myself to anything else. “I’ll study composition,” I said. He let out a loud, brief laugh while I crumbled inside. But a thousand years later, here I am, standing, happy, making music.

    25. My first trip outside of Chile was at 26, and it was to Japan. It was the most incredible and exotic experience of my life. It happened because I was selected to participate in a Contemporary Music Festival in Yokohama. They covered everything, and they performed my only string quartet. There’s definitely a before and after that trip.

    “Microteatro Psicopático” Teaser (Music Theatre)

    26. I stopped studying piano formally because of that teacher. Even so, I was never entirely distant from the instrument and managed to resume my studies seventeen years later. Since then, I not only play and record my own music, but I’ve also been able to perform it in concert.

    27. Since dedicating myself fully to music a little over two years ago, I’ve created more music than in all the 22 years before. I’ve published some of it, but there’s still so much waiting to come to light, much more waiting to be shaped, and much more waiting to be played live and shared.

    28. The next 50 years, I’ll make more music than in the previous 200. This is just the beginning.


    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oscar.carmona.i/

    YouTube: @Oscar-Carmona

    www.oscarcarmona.cl

    Linktree: https://linktree.com/oscarcarmona

  • Does Dublin Require 3 Railway Systems?

    The future of urban transport policy lies not in expansion but in the intelligent use of existing traffic areas.  The objective of ensuring mobility for people travelling to work and shopping and during leisure time requires urban traffic management based on modern information technology.
    Ernst Joos, Deputy Director of Zurich Transport. ‘Lessons in Transportation Planning from Zurich.  Economy and Ecology are not contradictions.’ (Lecture, Dublin Transportation Office, Embassy of Switzerland, Dublin, June 10 1999)

    Over the past twenty-five years, those responsible for managing Dublin have failed to draw any lessons from Zurich, one of the most desirable cities in the world in which to live. If they had, they would not now be seriously proposing to add yet another railway system to the two already existing. The proposed MetroLink is a completely different system to the existing LUAS (light rail) and DART/Commuter services (heavy rail). LUAS trams will be unable to run on the MetroLink rail, and vice versa (see About, Frequently Asked Questions, MetroLink – The Basics, par 6).

    Resources committed to MetroLink (€500m to date) have crowded out the development of other, less costly, options which would, by now, have made it easier to move around our capital city region.

    Place-making – an approach to urban planning and design that focuses on the people who use a space, rather than just the physical structures or buildings. The idea is to create places that are not just functional, but also beautiful and meaningful to the people who live, work, and play there. This has long been overlooked by the governing networks of politicians, senior public servants, policy makers, as well as the relevant planners, engineers, economists, architects, property developers and builders. Focusing on competitiveness alone will not make our capital city a pleasant place to live, work and linger.

    For some time, there has been a deliberate policy of removing through traffic from a small part of Dublin city centre. MetroLink is the most recent iteration by insiders/incumbents who did not follow through on the 1998 government decision to build a mainly on-street light rail system for Dublin.

    As proposed, MetroLink (costing anywhere from €12bn to €23bn) again fails to ensure that place-making objectives are applied consistently, and with equal force, throughout our capital city.

    Ballymun provides an excellent example of this failure. When the 1960s-built-suburb was regenerated during the 1990s, the main street of this residential area became a six-lane highway for through traffic. Such traffic is a major form of community severance.

    The proposed MetroLink will be in a tunnel, under the main street which will still have through traffic. National and local politicians, policymakers and interest groups support this. Yet the same people are actively restricting such through traffic from the city centre.

    The Government decision to extend LUAS to Finglas is an opportunity to reset the go-stop-go practices of the past twenty-five years. Our public authorities can use this to keep the experienced staff and supply chains needed to build LUAS networks serving other parts of Dublin (e.g. Drumcondra, Santry, Ballymun, Beaumont, Coolock, Edenmore, Lucan, Clondalkin, Ballyfermot, the south city centre, Harold’s Cross, Terenure, Rathfarnham, Dundrum). People in Cork and Galway would also benefit from this focus as they too adopt LUAS-type services.

    Sustaining urban areas requires the application of mutually reinforcing measures consistently over decades. Instead of being focused on the creation and maintenance of places which raise the quality of life, development in Dublin has been reduced to a very limited form of building control on a project-by-project basis.

    We can enhance our cities by adopting stable policies and continuous investment. But we cannot rely on what emerges from different programmes for government, each drawn up for a single electoral cycle of no more than five years. Rapid decision-making on arbitrary projects has not worked to make housing affordable, or available, in the Dublin area. Nor will similar incoherence deliver an attractive public transport network.

    LUAS Disconnect

    This perpetuates a lack of insight that resulted in two disconnected LUAS lines. There are no plans to remedy this lack of joined up thinking.

    On April 8, 2025 the Government approved the Revised National Planning Framework. This recognises the issue of Sustainable Mobility (National Strategic Outcome 5 p.161-2). Dublin and other Irish cities and major urban areas are heavily dependent on road and private, mainly car-based, transport with the result that there is more and more congestion.

    The National Development Plan makes provision for transformational investment in public transport and sustainable mobility solutions in the main urban centres that will progressively put in place a more sustainable alternative. For example, major public transport infrastructure projects identified in the Transport Strategy for the Greater Dublin Area to 2042 – such as the MetroLink and DART+ as well as the Luas and Bus Connects investment programmes – will keep our capital and other key urban areas competitive.

    In the Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy 2022 –2042, the National Transport Authority (NTA) continues to spin the idea that LUAS is networked, when our experience is otherwise (‘Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy 2022-2042’ asserts that ‘in conjunction with Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), in December 2017 we opened Luas Cross City, linking the Red and Green lines and providing an interchange between commuter rail and Luas at Broombridge.’ p.11).

    What is worse, NTA persists with this bluster despite their own strategy showing clearly that they propose more lines which are not interlinked.

    Figure 1. Dublin Light Rail (now LUAS) as proposed.

    In 1997, Dublin’s light rail was proposed as one interconnected system (see Figure 1). However, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce opposed on street LUAS. In May 1998, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat government decided to develop Dublin’s light rail system (now LUAS) as follows

    1. Phase 1 – Line A from Tallaght to Middle Abbey Street;
    2. Phase 2- Line B from Sandyford to Sr. Stephen’s Green;
    3. Phase 3 – an eastward extension of Line A from Middle Abbey Street to Connolly and perhaps then on to the Docklands;
    4. Phase 4 – an underground extension of Line A to Broadstone then continuing with surface running to Finglas and the Dublin Airport.

    This bizarre decision meant that another depot (for maintenance etc.) had to be built for Line B (now the Green Line), as the Red Cow depot (now on the Red line) could not service trams, although it was designed and built for three LUAS lines!

    At the time, I estimated that the cost of connecting the two lines was about the same as the cost of acquiring a site and building another depot. The only remaining green space next to the Sandyford Business district became the depot. Recently Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council re-zoned an existing brownfield site to create public open spaces.  This was a belated response to the growth of offices and residences in that area.

    Nothing was done to build the Phase 4 short tunnel under the city centre, as decided in 1998. Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Government had an opportunity to correct its basic error when ‘A Platform for Change. Final Report An integrated transportation strategy for the Greater Dublin Area 2000 to 2016’ was published.

    Figure 2. LUAS-on-street light rail.

    This proposed an on-street LUAS network (see Figure 2) as one of a set of mutually reinforcing measures designed to make it easier to move around the Greater Dublin Area. Note that this report proposed, inter alia:

    1. A LUAS line through Drumcondra to Dublin Airport with a spur line to Howth Junction, which has DART and commuter rail services;
    2. A Docklands loop across a then proposed bridge at Macken Street– now the Samuel Beckett Bridge.
    3. The LUAS Green line was to be upgraded to Metro.
    Figure 3. METRO segregated light rail.

    The Metro then proposed is radically different to MetroLink. The decision to extend the Green LUAS line through Broadstone to Broombridge on-street foreclosed the possibility of having a short tunnel between Ranelagh and Broadstone, as the Government decided in 1998.

    To see what a mutually-reinforcing set of rail-based options for the Dublin looks like see Figure 4. Bus services were supposed to be designed to complement this.

    Figure 4 Integrated rail transport for Greater Dublin Area

    Back to the Future

    It is time for a reset for MetroLink, which it is projected will cost up to a staggering €23 billion, which is two or three times the original estimate, especially given the economic uncertainty that has arisen since Donald Trump became President in January 2025.

    The application to extend the Green Line LUAS to Finglas is an opportunity to extend that project to Dublin Airport, as Cathal Daughton pointed out in a recent article. While welcome, the extension of the LUAS Green Line from Broombridge in Cabra to Charlestown in Finglas should have continued the additional 3km to Dublin Airport to create a city centre-airport rail link while the Metro is being built.

    TII estimate that the 4km LUAS Finglas project will cost between €420 and €720 million. Getting to the Airport could be done by extending LUAS through Ballymun to the old airport road at Santry (see Figures 14 and 15). That route would avoid the cost of going over or under the M50, in addition to serving more residential and business areas.

    Is journey time between Dublin City Centre and the Airport an issue?

    NTA published a number of Dublin Airport passenger surveys over the past twenty-five years .  These reports show that most passengers: take less than one hour to get to the Airport (see Figure 5); are travelling for holiday/leisure/visiting family friends (see Figure 6); and are not going to Dublin City Centre (see Figure 7).

    Figure 5. Journey Times to Dublin Airport 2001-2022.
    Figure 6. Trip purpose Dublin Airport passengers 1998 – 2022.

    The NTA reports show the purpose of passenger travel has scarcely changed over the past twenty-five years. This suggests that most passengers are not pressed for time.

    As regards the landside origin/destination of these passengers, NTA collected the data in surveys done in 2001, 2011, 2016 and 2022. The published reports do not, however, contain summary data for the years 2016 and 2022. The reports of the 2016 and 2022 surveys do not contain any explanation for this omission. The published data from the 2001 and 2011 reports show that less than one-quarter were going to/coming from Dublin City Centre (See Figure 7).  Any passengers that need faster journey times between Dublin Airport and the city centre have the options of getting taxis which can go through the Port Tunnel and use bus lanes.

    Why has the National Transport Authority (NTA) stopped publishing data on the landside origins/destinations of Dublin Airport passengers? Without such data, how can trends be assessed as a basis for investment?

    This does not correspond with what Robert Watt (then Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform) wrote in 2017. Among the outputs in 2014 from these economists is the Comprehensive Expenditure Report 2015-2017, a review of agri-taxation measures, and an evidence-based Strategic Framework for Investment in Land Transport. This work is high-quality economic analysis undertaken by Irish Civil Servants [my emphasis].

    Figure 7. Dublin Airport Passengers landside origin 2001, 2011.

    Arrival times for passengers departing Dublin Airport

    TII claim that MetroLink will result in morning peak journey time savings of fourteen minutes from St. Stephen’s Green to Dublin Airport. During weekdays, the morning peak (mainly into Dublin) is from 07.00-10.00 with an evening peak from 16.00–19.00 (mainly out of Dublin).

    NTA reported on the departure times of departing passengers. The reports for 2001 and 2011 did not contain this data aligned with peak hour travel times, see Figure 8. However, the 2016 and 2022 reports did, see Figure 9.

    Figure 8. Time of Arrival at Dublin Airport for Departing Passengers 2001, 2011.

    The 2016 and 2022 results offers insight on the impact of airport travel at peak commuting times. Note that the fourteen minute time saving is on a journey that is in the opposite direction to the normal city-centre inbound traffic we hear about in traffic bulletins covering the 07.00-10.00 morning peak.

    For 2022 (see Figure 9), over 70% of departing passengers travelled to Dublin Airport outside the peak commuting times of 07.00-10.00 and 16.00-19.00. This is up from the 60% reported on for 2016. This lack of fit between peak commuting times and the times when most people travel between the Airport and the city centre is not a robust basis for offering a cost-benefit of this MetroLink project.

    Figure 9  Time of Arrival at Dublin Airport for Departing Passengers 2016, 2022

    Commuting in the Dublin area

    Census 2016 maps (Figures 10 and 11) suggest that most commuting within the Greater Dublin Area within the M50; along corridors; to the North West (Blanchardstown N3/M3 corridor); the west (north/south of the N4/M4 Lucan Clondalkin area); the south-west (N7 Naas Road, N82 Tallaght).

    Neither Dublin Airport nor Swords stand out as places which call for exceptional investment to enhance public transport for people who live and/or work in those locations.

    The reports of the latest Census do not reproduce these maps. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) did not give any reason for dropping these maps from the Census 2022 report on commuting.

    Figure 10. Feeder Towns into each Dublin Census 2016.
    Figure 11. Catchment area of major workplace locations.

    North Dublin Compared to other parts of Dublin

    More people live in the north part of Dublin City than in any other part the Dublin area (see Figures 12 and 13). This has been the case for the past thirty years.

    Why is this area getting less attention for enhancing public transport than the route to Swords?

    Figure 12 Dublin City North population compared to other areas in Dublin 1991-2022.
    Figure 13. Dublin City North population compared to Fingal 1991-2022.

    Fingal East and Fingal West are based on the study area used for the NTA/AECOM Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study. These areas do not correspond to the new Dáil constituencies, which replaced Dublin North for the 2024 General Election.

    Comparing the North part of Dublin City to Cork is revealing. Earlier this month, the NTA began public consultation on the Emerging Preferred Route (EPR) for an eighteen kilometre twenty-station LUAS line for Cork. This is to support the objective of Cork becoming the fastest-growing city in Ireland over the next twenty years, with a targeted growth in population of 50 to 60 percent.

    In 2022, Cork City had a population of just 224,000. Growing by 50% (to 336,000) would mean that Cork’s population would still be less than the 346,000 people now living in the north part of Dublin city in 2022.

    A LUAS loop for Dublin North City

    In 2015, I commissioned two maps from the All-Island Regional Observatory (AIRO). These showed the then existing and proposed rail-based commuter services superimposed on, firstly Dublin’s Economic Core were measured as having more than seven hundred jobs per square kilometre; and secondly population density in the Dublin area, based on the then most recent Census 2011.

    In March 2024, I recommissioned an update based on the 2022 Census and the proposed MetroLink. On these, I superimposed a proposal for a North City LUAS Loop (see Figures 14 and 15)

    This North City LUAS loop would better serve the over one and a half million people in the Greater Dublin Area than the proposed MetroLink, as it recognises that most commuting takes place within the M50.

    This forms a network with the existing LUAS system, unlike the proposed MetroLink. It also serves parts of Dublin in which most people live. Furthermore, it would cost about €7 billion, i.e. less than a third of the estimated €23 billion MetroLink is projected to cost, and extends the proposed Finglas LUAS to sustain a programme of experience and supply chains required for LUAS in other urban areas, such as Cork and Galway.

    Ever since the 1998 decision to build LUAS, siloed thinking has prevailed. The public authorities did not follow through on the decisions taken then. MetroLink is just the latest example of that kind of ‘ad-hocery.’

    They have misdirected investment, as is clear by the failure to create a single integrated LUAS network as the key element of a series of mutually -reinforcing measures to enhance our capital city region.

    Figure 14. LUAS Loop North Dublin’s Core Economic Area Census 2022.
    Figure 15. LUAS Loop North Dublin Population Density Census 2022.

    Firstly, this proposed North City LUAS loop serves the northern part of Dublin’s Core Economic Area and the populated areas comprehensively, taking in Phibsboro’, Cabra, Finglas; Poppintree, Charlestown, Ballymun, Northwood; Santry, Dublin Airport, Swords, Drumcondra; Coolock, Beaumont, Kilmore, Edenmore, Donaghmede;

    Secondly it is integrated with LUAS and could link with a Docklands (North and South) LUAS loop using the Samuel Becket Bridge which is designed to carry LUAS.

    Thirdly, it offers two rail-based links between the Central Business District and Dublin Airport in addition to transport services which use the Port Tunnel, i.e. a direct link on LUAS via either Drumcondra or LUAS CrossCity; an indirect using DART/Commuter services at Howth Junction. There are also links with heavy rail services on the Maynooth/Mullingar/Longford line at both Drumcondra and Broombridge.

    It would also serve important trip attractors/generators including Mater/Cappagh/Beaumont/UPMC medical centres, Croke and Tolka Parks, all the DCU campuses, the Marino Institute of Education in addition to industrial areas at Coolock/Clonshaugh and Santry Finally it offers services to more areas experiencing social deprivation than the proposed MetroLink route.

    It would also serve important landmarks including Mater/Cappagh/Beaumont hospitals, Croke and Tolka Parks, all of the DCU campuses, the Marino Institute of Education. Finally it offers services to more areas experiencing social deprivation than the proposed MetroLink route.

    In its January 2025 Annual Review AECOM – an international consultancy company – called for programmatic thinking as a basis for investment in our future:

    As the world of infrastructure evolves, programmatic thinking is reshaping how organisations across the world approach planning and delivery. This shift to a cohesive, programme-based perspective is also gaining traction across the island of Ireland  It requires not only consistent, multi-annual funding but also a cultural change within individual delivery organisations in how projects are planned, prioritised, and executed.

    As proposed, MetroLink is the polar opposite of this kind of thinking. It reflects the politics of grand gestures more than quiet competence applied consistently over many election cycles.

    Ten years ago, NTA summarised the case for light rail in Dublin see Figure 16.  Despite the population growth, this still makes sense.

    Figure 16. Extract from NTA/AECOM Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study First Appraisal ReportNovember 2014.

  • Fearful Times, and Canada

    On Tuesday last I had an email from the Chancellor of UMass Lowell, where I sometimes teach:

    “I am sorry to let you know that this changed over the weekend. As part of the university’s proactive effort to support and inform our international students, the International Students & Scholars Office (ISSO) has been regularly monitoring the federal database used to monitor and track international students. On Saturday, the university discovered that federal authorities had revoked the visa and terminated the immigration status of a UMass Lowell undergraduate student.”

    It seems U.S. politics are circling the drain. The U.S. Constitution, I had thought, was designed to prevent the ‘Mad King’ phenomenon, but it turns out that that depended on everyone–executive, legislators, judiciary–playing by rules which, it seems, aren’t rules after all, only habits and customs.

    The U.S. has done irreparable harm to its power in the world.

    Some Canadians are inclined to jeer at the U.S. and its embarrassment on the world stage. That could become a dangerous habit. Instead let’s be honest and clear-sighted on the strengths and vulnerabilities within our own system of government and our own societal & cultural norms. We need to support leaders who understand Canada’s position within the world and have strategies to strengthen it as the rules of global trade are rewritten. Alliances, military and (is in trade agreements) economic, are not love-fests, but strategic partnerships.

    I am uncomfortable when some Canadians get all teary–the other side of jeering–about how much and how blindly they have ‘loved’ the U.S.. The goal of any Canadian government must be to strengthen Canada’s position in the world, with the understanding that no economy or society in a smart, fluid, and connected world is or should be “independent”, and that a system that works to benefit of all players is best for us. (The devil is in the details, of course.)

    I admire Prime Minister Mark Carney–the little I know of him– (three Co. Mayo grandparents!)–but he is a new type of Canadian PM: an internationally-minded elitist technocrat. Effective leadership in our decentralized democratic confederation will also demand other, quite different skills. PM Carney is the man of the hour now, though, which is his good fortune and, I hope, Canada’s. Like WSC in 1940, the man is meeting the moment, perhaps.

    I respect the measured, sensible language that Prime Minister Carney and Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly use.  They accept that the U.S. “Administration” (I think “Régime”, with its suggestion of autocracy, ossification, and damage, is a better noun) can cause immense trouble. They accept the necessity of accommodation, but in their speeches and interviews they have maintained a firm tone and offered clear warnings that somethings are not negotiable.

    A good relationship with the U.S. will always be in Canada’s interest. At certain times such may not be possible, but we should work to keep those breaks as short as possible, while maintaining a clear awareness of our own interests, and being willing to sometimes pay a price for standing firm…

    Right now, many smart people in the U.S. – undergraduates on student visas, scientists and researchers working at the highest levels – are feeling vulnerable. Canada ought to be reaching out to these victimized people with offers not just of asylum, but of freedom–to study, learn, research, contribute (and freedom to protest Israel’s project in Gaza, though that might be as career-threatening in Canada as in U.S.). Intellectual immigrants would give an invaluable, game-changing boost to the knowledge base and skill set of the nation. Just like the thousands of émigré Hungarians who sparked up Montreal and Toronto starting in the 1950s, and other waves of immigrants before and after that…

    To offer people in flight from the U.S. educational and research ecosystems place to land, Canada needs to commit to developing the quality, scale, and scope of research in Canadian universities, which have been, for most of our history, second-rate.  It will be hard to beat the Chinese in this area, but we can try. (The multitude of Chinese students and graduate students I’ve encountered as Harvard and UCLA this year–suggests that U.S. schools are still a powerful draw globally … up until January 2025, anyway). Many faculty, researchers and students in U.S. schools and institutions feel furious, scared, and – rightly – vulnerable. Canadian schools and institutions should be making offers, backed with serious support for studies and research. As an editor and writing coach, I work with tenured faculty in the highest reaches of Ivy League acclaim and renown who feel censored, threatened, and sickened by the atmosphere. Their world-renowned institutions are poisoned by fear.

    Can Canada make an all-out effort to scoop international research and teaching talent from U.S. universities? That will require the federal govt stepping in and up. Canada’s universities are for the most part significantly underfunded. And there are aspects of the U.S. university system, particularly the great public schools like U of Michigan, UTA, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UMass, U of Wisconsin, UVA, OSU, etc. that Canadians ought to take a closer look at. (Beyond the NCAA football and basketball seasons!) These are large public research institutions with global reach. Asking Canadian undergraduates to pay more, while offering them ready access to scholarships and loans might be step one in improving the landscape for scholarship and research in Canada. I can’t think it’s a bad thing to ask people to invest more deeply in their own education. And I’ll shut up now.

    Feature Image: Thomas K.