Cassandra Voices

Author: casswp

  • Fiction: The Text

    Saturday morning and Lil’Johnny was on his way to work on the Market. He walked along the long curve of street that ran along the bottom of the hill bordering the old marshes where now stood council estates. The tall towers stood like giants against the clear cold blue sky where the first rays of orange-golden sunlight lit up the morning sky. The road was shiny and quiet, anticipating the monotonous roar of traffic that was sure to follow. A pair of skittish wood pigeons leapt from the ground at Lil’Johnny’s approach, the heavy beat of their wings breaking the silence. 

    Lil’Johnny walked the long road until the bend where he turned into the park. The park too stood at the bottom of the hill, a great field ringed by trees. Up on the hill the close-knit silhouettes of Victorian facades looked down into the park and out over the marsh. In the park the sky opened out as if one looked up at an ocean above, a great blue expanse. He crossed the park, entering the walkway beneath the railway line and from there along a long sliver of park-lined path. Then abruptly right heading cross-country to the gate on the far side of a grassy green playing field.

    As Lil’Johnny turned right the Singing Bush tweeted and chirruped making him smile. The Singing Bush is a large undistinguished shrub that emits the sound of chirruping finches although not one of the little birds can be seen, completely invisible in the thicket of branches and leaves. Looking at the Bush one sees and hears a spirited shrub singing.

    Through the gate onto a little path along a row of houses, across the road, down a backstreet and then up the grafitti-ed cobbled alleyway onto the Market. The metallic clink of poles of stallholders erecting their metal-frame structures, greets Lil’Johnny. Boxes litter the road, vans parked across, the movement of bodies, soul music from a radio, a cluster of chain-smoking locals sitting outside the cafe. Lil’Johnny walks briskly down the street, looking neither left nor right, dodging the assorted obstacles living and inanimate.

    Lil’Johnny arrives at the Shop, just one of the hodge-podge of shopfronts lining either side of this mile-long medieval street that acts as Market on some days and High Street on others. “Robert Walkers” is written in large golden letters over the Shop. Below the sign is a large plate-glass window and to the right a single doorway leading inside. The Shop consists of a long wide corridor bordered on either side by high shelves overflowing with cut-price groceries and products – an Aladdin’s cave.  At the far end of the Shop is a wooden table with cash register. Out the back is a vast storeroom.

    Outside, Raja patiently sets up the stall, his slow thoughtful movements speak of his three decades performing this ritual. He turns his old lanky frame and smiles at Lil’Johnny’s approach, revealing a set of brilliant white teeth set against his dark Tamil skin, a sharp hooked nose and streaky black hair combed over his shiny pate. As usual he is smartly turned out in shiny dress shoes, sharp suite trousers, button-down shirt and overcoat. Lil’Johnny salutes him as he passes though the door into the Shop.

    As Lil’Johnny is about to head into the back he brushes against the corner of a shelf inadvertently and CRASH! An avalanche of junk falls off. ‘Fucking, fuck, fuck – Big Johnny you bastard – clean your shit up!’ he curses to the empty shop. He hastily clears up the fallen boxes, dirty plates, cups of mouldy rotting tea-bags and assorted out-of-date packets of god-knows-what. He heads out the back into the storeroom, down the rickety wooden stairs and dumps the smeared crockery in the small sink. “You can clean up this bloody mess yourself,” Lil’Johnny says to the Boss who is not there.

    Thus his workday begins. Lil’Johnny leverages the weighty front door off its hinge and drags it into the  back; he hoovers the floor with the trusty but mutilated Henry patched up with masking-tape; he fills baskets with nuts and, bending over the stall outside, flips the bags expertly into rows. In the middle of his routine Lil’Johnny spies Big Johnny, the Boss, sauntering towards the Shop. The Boss’ belly sticks out before his tall wide ageing frame, his white button-down shirt falling out of his baggy trousers and comfortable shoes adorn his feet. “Here comes Johnny!” calls Lil’Johnny to the approaching figure. “Mornin’” the Boss says by way of return.

    Big Johnny is vexed as usual. “Come on, come on, we’ve got to get this stall out,” he says impatiently, pulling out a box here, dumping something out of another there, rearranging one corner then another in a seemingly pointless haste. Raja gesticulates wildly at the Boss and shouts something about buying too much junk which the Boss ignores. Lil’Johnny smokes an insolent cigarette, watching the passing scene of early shoppers and day-trippers. Lil’Johnny hears the beep-beep of his phone. He pulls out the little brick of plastic and looks into the archaic screen which reads:

    “How was the DJ gig last Saturday? (heart)”

    Yes, there was a gig last Saturday, and yes Lil’Johnny had DJ-ed. But who was the text from? Lil’Johnny hates it when people did not sign off their texts with their name. It made for the situation that had just arisen. The number, ending 611, had not been saved to his phone. He had no idea who had sent it. “Come on, come on,” orders Big Johnny, “Get me a barrel out the back.” Lil’Johnny snaps to attention and rushes out the back leaving the Text till later.

    The stall consists of a long low table out in the street, piled with goods – herbal teas, 2litre olive oil, boxes of latex gloves, bags of sweets, 3kg brown sugar, packets of broken biscuits, nuts and dried fruit, bars of chocolate, spaghetti and lasagna sheets, dried chickpeas and tins of powdered milk. The stall’s flank is protected by a wall of blue barrels. On a stack of yellow crates sits a round battered Quality Street tin which acts as the cash register. Looking behind, Lil’Johnny can see through the door and into the back of the Shop where Raja and Big Johnny stand serving customers; there’s an animated conversation going on Lil’Johnny can’t hear. “Ah – that Text…” he remembers.

    “Sat woz good fun. Sorry u couldn’t make it. What u up to 2nit? Lil’Johnny” he punches into the keypad – Send – thinking, thinking – Sent.

    This gets Lil’Johnny wondering who it could be. Marta –lovely long legs, wide strong back, cute bob? Sally – older, tresses of long golden hair, a subtle bust he hasn’t quite figured out yet? Or one of those random meetings in the pub which had lead to a conversation and exchange of numbers? It puzzled Lil’Johnny. “Stop slacking and serve that customer,” barks Big Johnny pointing to a woman at the end of the stall holding out a box of tea. Yikes! Lil’Johnny pulls out a blue plastic bag and slopes across the stall with a servile “Madam…”.

    Thereafter the trade begins. “Yes sir, that’s £1….4 for £1 on those Madam….Would you like bag?……The price of the oils? £7 for the Extra Virgin, £6 otherwise…..Oi kid stopping hitting that packet…..What’s it like? I am afraid I can’t eat it for you sir, you need to decide for yourself……That’s £3.50, you’ve given me £10, £6.50 change coming….No Madam we don’t take cards, only cash…..A bank transfer? Sorry we only take hard currency ……Price for that? Let me check” – Lil’Johnny holds the item high in the air and shouts into the back of the Shop; Big Johnny signals with his fingers ‘4’ which Lil’Johnny repeats verbally to the customer. “It’s cheaper in the supermarket,” gripes the customer and walks off. “Yeah well buy it from there then” Lil’Johnny imagines himself saying.  Things quieten down and Lil’Johnny pulls out his phone. There is a message waiting. It reads:

    “Hey – that’s great. At the Bolton Arms tonight. There is a good band lined up. Hope to see you down there?! xx”

    “Bah! Sign your name!” thinks Lil’Johnny aloud. He wasn’t really planning on heading so far from his usual stomping grounds. The Bolton was an old Victorian pub someway along the path that runs beside the Great River. Would it be worth it? It all depended who it was on the other side of that number – 611. The number started to fascinate him. “Who are you Madam 611? I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to know,” he concluded with a determined air.

    The day proceeded in its timeless routine. Come 4pm Lil’Johnny starts packing up the stall, moving its constituting parts into the back of the Shop. By 5pm he is supping on a can of beer. By 6pm Raja has surreptitiously handed Lil’Johnny a little bundle of cash that constitutes Lil’Johnny’s wages. Lil’Johnny carefully deposits the cash in his secret pocket. Then there passes much banter and familial conversation between the three as they wait for the last of the custom to evaporate. At last they vacate the darkened Shop and lock up. Raja’s nimble fingers weave the weighty metal chain through gaps in the shutter and with the ‘snap’ of the lock, Lil’Johnny feels released.

    ————————————

    The Oxford Arms sits on a forgotten corner between a busy road, a raised railway line and the Creek. It’s a spit-and-sawdust, no frills live music pub. Lil’Johnny decides to go there first. At the end of a road coming off the Market sits the handsome, lonely building acting as a beacon for pirates and other ne’r-do-wells.

    Lil’Johnny enters, orders a lager and slips back outside. He sups the clear pishy liquid quenching a thirst more mental than physical. He takes a deep pull on a spliff and breathes a deep sigh of relief.

    Inside the pub there is a band playing some of sort of naff pseudo-punk. One of their songs is called “Wisdom of the Blues”. Lil’Johnny goes in. The lead singer struts his stuff on the dance floor while an older crowd bop to the music. It’s boring music – a mish mash of everything and nothing at all – a noisy mess, played overloud. Two sexy older ladies dance, mobile phones in hand. Members of the band strut off the stage whacking people in the face with their instruments. “Thank you, good night”. “One more” the crowd shout. This last song has a terrible guitar solo.

    Phil Sick – critic, DJ, music nerd – arrives. He is short with a great bush of ratty white hair; he wears glasses, long shorts, canvas Converse trainers and a black-and-white polka dot shirt. “Oi oi, Sick” calls Lil’Johhny. Phil starts waxing lyrical about the “orgasmic” female noise artist he has just seen at a bar at the end of the road; he describes the dry-ice and strobe in the dark basement. “It was loud,” he says looking up at Lil’Johnny with a glow of euphoric bliss. Sick then goes to stand in front of the speakers waiting for the next band looking like an untidy teenage girl.

    The pub is busy. DJ Toffee is playing between sets, a munchkin of a man peeping out from behind the decks. There the crackle from his overworn records. He plays an eclectic mix of: “The Israelites”, “I want to hold your hand”, “Disco inferno”, “Leader of the pack”, “How long has this been going on…” and “Black Betty” in succession. The Soundman moves about the pub like a malevolent force, vexed because he can’t play HIS playlist of neurotic trance. Will – patron saint of the Oxford Arms – is at his usual seat at the bar wearing a camouflage baseball cap, pint in hand, looking on blankly.

    Lil’Johnny looks up at the clock on the wall – it reads 8:00pm. “Time to move on me’thinks. Don’t want to be too late, just fashionably” he says to himself. The Coyote Men, a four-man Newcastle rock band, its members dressed in tutu’s and Mexican wrestling masks, come on stage. They start playing a surfy caveman rock with a funky rolling bassline; Americana rock-and-roll with a Mexican twist. As Lil’Johnny leaves through the side door, he catches a line from one of their songs: “Loopy Loopy Lopez \\ Break my heart, I break your legs..”. “Geez! Just when the bands were getting good. Oh well, it can’t be helped.”

    *************

    Along the Creek and over it, through the busy town centre and onto the path that runs alongside the Great River. The almost-full moon hangs high and bright in the inky-black sky; Lil’Johnny salutes it. The Great River is at high-tide and tonight it has a flat, reflective surface like a field of mud – smooth and defined. One can just hear the rushing river like the rustling of paper over the mournful drone of the air traffic above.

    Beams of light shine across the River, shimmering pillars. On the other side skyscrapers are lit up like constellations organized by bureaucrats, geometric glittering anthills. Its dark by the river and people cut figures against the glowing skyline. Cylindrical metal buoys pockmarked with raised ridges make black patches against the luminescent river as if mines waiting for contact. A river bus pulls out of the quay and rides gracefully up the river trailing waves in its wake. A few seconds later the Great River speaks: the lapping of water, gurgle – slap – wash – the elemental crashing of waves.

    Lil’Johnny stops along the path, leans against the balustrade and looks out over the Great River, that still molten pond of glass. It exudes its primal silence. Lil’Johnny gets to thinking: “What the hell am I doing? Does it really matter? I wouldn’t be out this evening if I didn’t have this mission to fulfill, this mystery to solve.” “My little manor,” he thinks panning from the hills behind to the Great River before him. “I hardly ever leave this place. My little corner of the Earth. Some people want to travel but I just want is to follow my little circuit, see me old muckers, listen to music and dance the night away. In short – to party. Am I looking for love tonight? I don’t know. I’m looking for something….I’m just not sure what it is yet. An answer, a sign, an auspice, destiny?!”

    The stupid clump of a jogger and their loud rasping guttural breathing disturbs Lil’Johnny’s train of thought. Then the gabble of voices in the dark, moving forms. Lil’Johnny pulls himself together and continues along the river path, gazing dreamily up at the evening star stuck up in the sky like a brilliant satellite.

    Off the river path, halfway down a side street, a corner pub sits – a dumpy Victorian relic – painted black. It’s the Bolton Arms and Lil’Johnny quickens his pace because he knows he’s late. In through the door and straight to the bar; he’s gasping for a drink. The pub is packed.

    Lil’Johnny looks around making a visual inspection of the punters. While he is never good at remembering names or numbers, Lil’Johnny has an uncanny memory for faces – he knows that if Madam 611 is there, he’ll know. She is not there in that mass. While Lil’Johnny waits to be served he surveys his surroundings. The pub is painted in a dark coat; there in one corner a raised stage stands with a cut-glass mirror behind and neon-red lights spell out “Bolton” above – the red light reflects off the black ceiling and splashes across tables. A discoball, small and lonely, hangs high above the stage. There is a band setting up. Fairylights strung from the ceiling reflect in the large handsome windows creating a starry infinity. A big stuffed fish sits in a glass case above the bar.

    “What you having?” asks the young barmaid. “Pint of the pale ale please”. Pour – clunk – “Cash or card?” – beeeep! Lil’Johnny takes a long sip and returns to surveying the pub. People wearing leather jackets and denim shirts, young men with long hair, quiff’s black and grey, blonde bobs, pates, leopard print, glasses of white wine, teeth, smiling faces. There a mobile phone so sparkly that a magpie would be off with it. At the bar long blonde hair frames an angelic face with long eyelashes. A wealthier set than Lil’Johnny is used to. They talk and eat and generally look bored.

    Its the “Magic City Trio” playing tonight. Lil’Johnny knows them. A husband and wife outfit who sing and play guitar. The band includes a double bass, brass and drums. There are lots of pairs of glasses in the band. The husband wears a floral-print Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, tall with big lips and long greying hair; she is short and wears a glittery silver dress. They start off with “Spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you…”. Their sound is a vibrant country honky-tonk with drawling vocals and twangy guitars. A mother with a snub nose sitting near the stage covers her young daughter’s ears with her hands; the child has a big unhappy look on her face. The young child looks askance at an older lady dancing wildly in front.

    Lil’Johnny decides to go out into the garden – a strip of gravel on which sit rows of wooden picnic benches. He lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag and watches the curling of smoke rising and dissipating into the sky. Looking up he sees the sweep of new build flats. From the flats emanates a dull green-grey light punctuated by chaotic, disjointed, angular shapes of the stuff inside;  there the flitting light of a large TV screen. “Sorry, the girls are coming with me” says a lady to some leery lads chatting up her friends perched on the benches nearby. Lil’Johnny surveys the garden and no Madam 611.

    The reader may ask why Lil’Johnny doesn’t just text Madam 611? Why not just ask who she is and where she is? That would be unthinkable to Lil’Johnny. He believes in fate, in chance – what adventure would there be if we just got all our answers from pressing some buttons on a phone? Its a matter of principle. If Lady Luck should favour him tonight he will meet up with Madam 611. She will appear from around a corner, they will recognize each other, embrace and sit down to talk; they will move closer to one another and nuzzle. Lil’Johnny must continue on his mission until the battle is won or lost.

    The beer has loosened Lil’Johnny’s hips and inhibitions. He joins the throng of dancers inside. “Burning ring of fire…” plays from the stage. Being the hill-billy he is, Lil’Johnny slaps his thighs and keeps time to the music with his stomping feet. He sees the back of bobbing heads and heads and heads behind which the band can just be seen. Closing his eyes the rhythm runs through him and into his moving body. Things become fuzzy, ephemeral and euphoric, the spirit of Dionysus unleashed. Around him bodies pop, shuffle, jiggle and jive. Shaking hips, dancing bums, tossed hair and furtive glances. Lil’Johnny is carried away, lost in the scene.

    Time passes and the band has come to an end. The Strokes plays softly off a playlist. Lil’Johnny falls into a large leather armchair and once more surveys the pub. The crowd has thinned and empty glasses fill the tables. Lil’Johnny strikes up conversation with a pretty lady sitting nearby. They get to talking about how they each came to be here this night. “Well, I got this text from a number ending 611 and I had to see who she was…”. The lady looks at Lil’Johnny biting on her curled finger, laughing. “I was just being honest…” protests Lil’Johnny feebly. She leaves shortly thereafter and he is alone once again. An old couple trundle out of the pub, fingers intertwined in a caring embrace.

    Lil’Johnny gets his things and pats his secret pocket to see that his wages are still safe – all is well. He does one more circuit of the pub. Just as he thought – Madam 611 is not there. He knows the routine – she won’t text him again, he won’t text her, a stalemate of obstinate wills – such is the way in this cosmopolitan dump. He will now never know who Madam 611 is, she will be just another unsolved and soon forgotten mystery of his life. Despite his inebriated state, Lil’Johnny He takes his leave of the Bolton and joins the darkness of the river path. The moon has shifted round and the tide on the Great River has dropped. Lil’Johnny is drunk, happy and alone. He walks along the dead quiet river path homeward bound with an uneven swinging step, singing that classic reggae song out loud: “I got money in my pocket // But I just can’t get no love….”

    —

    Feature Image: Katerina Holmes

  • Exit through the Vestry

    Vestry 

    /ˈvɛstri/                                         

    Noun

    • a room or building attached to a church, used as an office and for changing into ceremonial vestments.
    • a real estate investment trust (REIT), incorporated in the Republic of Ireland.

    There comes a moment when you discover a person the trajectory of whose business affairs appears to embody the rotten nature of Irish housing. Such people are often perceived as visionaries of the real estate market, top of their class in producing a return on investment through a system that permits widespread human suffering. One such visionary is Richard Moyles, director and largest shareholder of The Vestry General Partner DAC, one of Ireland’s most powerful landlords. Moyles is also a director of Be Lettings, the letting agent Vestry uses to manage its tenancies and properties. Characters like Moyles are endemic in our communities. We are told that their investments are what make the world spin. Sure, only for them, wouldn’t it all be so much worse? Or, as the American President laughed with the Taoiseach on the subject of the Housing Crisis, “It’s a good problem to have.” In this piece, I push against this narrative – with Richard Moyles as a touchstone, and paint a picture at the iceberg’s tip. This is not, however, Richard’s story. It’s the story of a mother and her young son with nowhere to go; the same story as thousands of other tenants whose lives are determined by the decisions of men and women like him.

    Jen has lived in an apartment in Dublin 1 for a decade, becoming Vestry’s tenant when the group acquired the property in 2021. Her son, Danny (aged 5), has known no other home. Vestry bought the apartment from Grant Thornton for €325,700, after the previous landlord went into receivership and Grant Thornton took control of the property. “The landlords were changing like socks,” Jen told me over the phone. She received a letter through the door, explaining that the property had changed hands, and that she would now be Vestry’s tenant. “No one asked me”, she said, “if they want to sell the apartment, I should be the first person they asked.” Vestry’s control over the property immediately made Jen and Danny’s situation insecure. Under the previous owner, Jen had signed a lease until January 2026. Vestry were under no legal obligation, however, to honour this agreement. “The law is on their side,” Jen said.

    Jen’s case is among the fifteen disputes between Vestry and their tenants that have come before the Residential Tenancy Board over the last six months. Her story is quite typical of many of those before the RTB – the landlord wants to sell, and the tenant, caught in the tempest of the housing crisis, cannot leave. Jen told me that Dublin City Council offered to buy the property under the tenant-in-situ scheme. Vestry, however, declined the offer which would have secured a “market rate” purchase for Vestry and a home for Jen and Danny. A win-win scenario, one would have thought. “My main issue is that there is no transparency between government bodies, landlords, and tenants. I don’t understand why it [the DCC offer] was so secret.” A representative from Be Lettings told Jen that they were looking for between €350,000 and €375,000 for the apartment. When Jen asked the DCC worker charged with acquisitions under the tenant-in-situ scheme what offer was made to Vestry, she was looked at “like (she) had two heads.”

    When I went to visit Jen and Danny, accompanied by members of the Mountjoy-Dorset branch of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), Danny’s energy and curiosity was infectious. Jen and the CATU members decided to knock on every door in the apartment building, with Danny’s exuberant voice echoing through the stairwells as his mother pleaded her case to her neighbours. He showed us his favourite book, Torben Kuhlmann’s Lindbergh – The Tale of the Flying Mouse. The book tells the story of what Danny described as a “genius mouse”, who is forced to flee Germany after the humans create a labyrinth of mouse traps, leaving himself and his friends on the run. The similarity between Danny and the little mouse was, frankly, striking. Surplus to Vestry’s requirements, little Danny and his mother must now make their way in a city filled with the sorrow and stress of displacement.

    One of the CATU members pointed to a leaflet poking out from under the door of one of Jen’s downstairs neighbours. He had left it there a couple of weeks previously. “Well, there’s no one in that house”, the member remarked. How could it be that this woman could be facing homelessness, while a perfectly suitable house seemingly lay vacant, right under where they slept? Such is the effect of a political economy whereby a basic human right, housing, is treated as a speculative asset for men like Moyles to gamble with.

    CATU are currently representing a number of Vestry tenants who are facing eviction by the investment trust. “⁠It’s typical that our members are being put at risk of homelessness due to no fault of their own. It’s also typical that private landlords are prioritising their shareholder profits at the expense of housing insecurity for our members and other tenants,” Lily Palmer, communications officer for CATU Mountjoy-Dorset told me. In response to the evictions, and fearing that Vestry may be carrying out mass, citywide evictions, CATU Mountjoy-Dorset have purchased a dedicated phone for Vestry tenants to contact them, should they want representation from the Tenant’s Union, called the “Vestry Hotline”.

    In 2023, The Ditch reported that Vestry controlled more than 850 homes in the Irish rental market, posting more than €20 million in profit. Company records show that Moyles is the company’s largest single shareholder, through an investment firm wholly owned by him, called Apsone Investments Ltd. Mr Moyles keeps good company with his fellow shareholders, a who’s who of property moguls. Let’s take Silk Shadow Ltd, who control 10% of Vestry. Silk Shadow is owned by property power couple Hilary and Christy Dowling . In 2011, Newlyn Homes Limited, which controls 100% of Silk Shadow had €22 million of its loans transferred to the National Management Asset Agency (NAMA). Christy is also a co-director of Vestry and Beo Ventures Ltd, along with Robert Kehoe and Andrew Gunne. Andrew Gunne, incidentally, was previously a director of Focus Ireland, a charity apparently tasked with alleviating the humanitarian crisis of homelessness. The Vestry group reveals a complex web of companies, all with their fingers in the Irish home market, or indeed, the Irish homeless market.

    Moyles, along with Vestry co-director, Robert Kehoe, are directors of Be Lettings. Be Lettings describe themselves as “a leading residential letting and management business with a nationwide portfolio of houses and apartments”. In at least one case Be Lettings has sold properties to Vestry itself. One effect of such ‘house flipping’ is rampant inflation in the housing market. For example, a 3-bed, 2-bathroom, semi-detached house in Dublin 15 was bought in November 2019 for €287,500.00. In January of 2025, the same property was sold to Moyles’ Vestry by Moyles’ Be Lettings for €400,050.00. Land registry documents show Vestry is this property’s current owner. It was surely no coincidence that Be Lettings facilitated the sale, allowing Moyles to benefit through his shareholdings both from the sale of the property, and from its future tenancies. According to Vestry’s accounts this home, and Jen’s, are listed as a security for a company called Situs Asset Management Limited. This means that should Vestry fall into financial trouble, the home can be seized by Sistus, with little recourse or security from homelessness for whatever tenant may be renting the property.

    Moyles currently has a case before An Bord Pleanála, which was lodged in October of 2024. The case concerns an application for a fire safety certificate for a property he leases at 21 Denmark Street, Dublin 1. The case file reads “for material change of use from flats/bedsits to B&B rooms with other material alterations”. This is precisely what Dublin does not need: more B&Bs at the expense of permanent residences.

    When I visited the property it was clear that work was ongoing in the building. Stacks of rubbish were piled high next to it, and the door was bolted shut with two heavy padlocks. This property – a listed building built in c.1790 – is not owned by Vestry, Moyles, or other associated entities. The building’s Land Registry file shows that it is currently held under a leasehold from a company by the name of Dubres Strategies Limited. This company is not registered in Ireland, but Malta, according to leaked documents found in the Paradise Papers. The Paradise Papers is a global investigation into the offshore activities of some of the world’s most powerful people and companies, led by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. A man named Rodney Lee Berger is Dubres Strategies Limited’s director. He and Corinne Hilary Berger are directors of Dubres Capital Limited, a company incorporated in the Republic of Ireland, with an address at 13 North Great George’s Street, a stone’s throw from the property at 21 Denmark Street.

    Vestry’s purchase of Jen’s apartment was not the first time Moyles had cause to deal with Grant Thornton, in their capacity as receivers. In 2011, when Moyles was a director of Shelbourne Development (Europe) Limited, The Bank of Scotland appointed Grant Thornton as receiver. According to the receiver’s abstract submitted to the Companies Registry Office, dated 18/12/2019, Grant Thornton collated receipts of €33,511,913. In 2014, National Asset Loan Management Limited appointed Mazars as receivers to Moyles’ Shelbourne Properties Limited. Remarkably, this is a different entity to Shelbourne Development (Europe) Limited. According to the receiver’s abstract presented by Mazars, they took control of €23,975,661.56 of assets associated with the former company. It’s strange how the same man can be a supporting character in the downfall of one property giant, dust himself off, and appear on the other side of the ledger, purchasing a stressed asset from the very same receiver who had previously confiscated his holdings. As Mac from the 2005 comedy TV series ‘It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia’ put it: “I’m playing both sides, so I always come out on top!”

    Artist’s impression of the ‘Chicago Spire’.

    Moyles shared his directorship in both companies with Garrett Kelleher, who tried to sue NAMA for $1.2billion in a U.S. court, after his Anglo-Irish Bank-funded “Chicago Spire” vanity project failed to get off the ground. In 2009, prior the  resignation of Chris O’Connell as the head of Shelbourne Development (Europe) Ltd, O’Connell told the Irish Times: “In the short term it’s (referring to the establishment of NAMA) going to mean uncertainty for developers, bankers and investors alike, but it’s the key to the resurrection of this market over the next decade and it’s going to generate significant business opportunities at a number of different levels,”. And indeed, the offloading of bad loans from the bankers’ books by NAMA has created significant business opportunities. It could certainly be argued that this mechanism has allowed Moyles, Kelleher, Dowling and the crew to continue their honest work as lowly property moguls.

    “He doesn’t want to leave”, Jen told me, “he has his swimming lessons here, he has his little pals, his little life is going to be disrupted”. We must confront Jen and Danny’s reality, and the reality for some 15,286 people currently in homeless accommodation in this “Republic”, 4,653 of whom are children, with countless more contending with crippling rents, inflated high prices and insecure tenancies. If this is a “good problem to have”, who is it good for? Certainly not those people, and certainly not those paying exorbitant rent for mouldy studios. Is the problem housing supply, that “Ireland is Full”, or something else entirely? When we start asking the right questions we may start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Once we establish, as a basic cultural norm, that little Danny’s right to a roof should take precedence over Moyles’ right to make money from that roof, then, we might start excavating what is rotten about Irish housing. Until then, the carousel of real estate investment will keep turning, and little Danny and his mother will remain on the sidelines, not knowing what comes next.

  • Musician of the Month: Ronan Skillen

    Music has always been my favourite mystery. As a medium, an energy or exchange, there’s no other frequency that carries as much potential.

    I grew up learning classical music as a French horn player in orchestras. Most of my teenage years were spent exploring musical brass ensembles from the Baroque era. However, deep down, I was always drawn to rhythms and unusual textural sounds, and fascinated by music production. I initially discovered improvisation by playing the didgeridoo, before going on to study tabla in India and other hand percussion in West Africa and South Africa. I’ve continued to explore a combination of hybrid contemporary percussion, which I incorporate in my music and ever-changing percussive set-up.

    A large part of my musical career has been influenced by me having lived in different parts of the world. I was born in Northern Ireland and grew up in Germany, where I spent 18 years before moving to South Africa, where I lived for 25 years. Now I’m back in Ireland, living in Dublin. As a performing artist, I’ve had a very diverse career, spanning many genres, bands and projects, both as a side man and band leader. I’ve toured extensively, and have had the great fortune of sharing the stage with greats such as Johnny Clegg, Rodriguez and Manu Dibango.

    Much of my experience as a percussionist has involved me refining the process of capturing the sounds of my instruments, especially in a live context. This has given me a better understanding of the sonic spectrum of sound, production and recording, prompting me to explore production music for films. This knowledge, coupled with my years of experience as a recording artist who’s played on more than 100 albums to date, further enhanced my understanding of the role of a producer in studio contexts, and has characterised my more current and recent projects.

    As with many artists, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to reinvent myself as a musician, and saw me pivoting from being more of a performing artist to creating soundtrack music. What fascinates me about this genre is the simplicity with which music can function: the musical score provides the emotional content, setting the tone and directly influencing the dramaturgy of a storyline. This type of music-making has been a constant source of exploration, ever since I was involved in creating the score for the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary film, My Octopus Teacher. Ultimately I’d like to be involved in scoring a feature-length film or providing the theme music for a TV series. I’m always working on some sort of soundtrack music, and have made specifically curated library music for several labels over the past few years.

    Soundtracks

    There is a downside to making this kind of music, though. It can be quite solitary and often takes hours of recording specific sounds in sequence, like a puzzle that forms over time. Also, this process can become quite self-indulgent, which is why I’ve been realising of late that the performer in me would like to get back on stage and be part of a new project that I could collaborate on.

    The Dublin music scene is still very new to me, and I’ve not had a chance to explore my place in the live music scene as yet. Irish traditional music fascinates me and I’d be interested in collaborating with trad musicians. I have great respect for the cultural significance of traditional music of this nature, and I realise that my role as a percussionist would have to be carefully curated. I’ve always felt that as long as you learn the basics and don’t disrespect the origins, then you’re in honest territory. It’s important to understand the heritage of musical offerings and find appropriate ways to build bridges with old and new sounds. Instruments evolve, compositions adapt accordingly, and people and new collaborations shape new contemporary styles and genres.

     

    Currently, I’m part of the Ingrid Lukas band, which is based in Zürich, Switzerland. We have regular shows and usually tour at least once a year. There is also a new album in the making. Apart from that, I am a guest lecturer at the University of Limerick’s World Music Academy, teaching tabla and percussion on a part-time basis. One of the concepts I’ve been developing with the students is part of a future project that I’ve been distilling for a few years and is finally coming to fruition. Essentially, it’s a space within which rhythmic exercises can take shape in a group dynamic, where the focus is on listening, working as a unit and understanding the “ghost notes” that make up the space between the beats.

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/didgi_taal/

    Website: http://ronanskillen.com/

    Linktree: https://linktr.ee/didgitaal

  • The Dog that Sang the Blues

    It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

    It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect. I never doubted things of beauty then, and that helped me to find solace later, from what would reveal itself as pitilessness. We can say doomed to die, but not to love. Even if love fails and falters, if it was true, it was worthwhile. It has taken its place in the hallowed halls. My heart was broken by a rejected love, and because she was everything and all else paled, the rejection made everything the world could offer dour, grey almost, even on the brightest of days. She robbed me of its flavour, but she wasn’t to blame. When you fall in love with someone that isn’t in love with you, you rob yourself. Even if it is accidental. The fire in life’s colour was doused. I was one of the heart broken ones. The heartbreak gave off a physical pain as I walked one morning to the inter-city bus station in Buenos Aires and searched on the departures board for the bus that would take me to Bolivia.

    The journey from Buenos Aires to La Paz was long. It took days. Up through Paraguay. My only previous contact with that country and been as a boy, and the 1986 World Cup sticker album, and now here I was. Asuncion the capital city and the accompanying thought, ‘I never imagined I’d be here.” Quite right. I spent a happy night there. Alone but never lonely, the gentle prospect of adventure held me in its embrace. No one to talk to, alone with my cigarettes, the hotel bar and thoughts and dreams and memories and ideas, paintings on the walls, anticipations, and then return to the twirling of smoke. And now those times, like all those unrecorded, exciting moments brimming with life, love and expectation, have now become mysteriously void of most of their content. The thought processes blurred and misty, the shower and shit, what was I reading? What was the room really like? The hotel foyer? Gone forever, lost in times rip tide, taken out to sea by its vast whirlpool. Only the vivid haunts. Maybe God is only time, the thing that has dominion over all things.

    We were driving down the highway in Paraguay on the thundering bus, over the rattling bogs, when suddenly there was an almighty thud and the bus shook with the explosive cacophony of the passenger’s screams. Delight ensued when it was confirmed it was a large hog we had hit, so the passengers dragged the great dead boar onto the bus and away we went. There would be some full bellies that night. Quite right again. Waste not, want not. Their good fortune was greeted with singing, and I remember that I smiled. I must have slept plenty as the next part of the journey on to Bolivia has become vague. I remember looking out of a bus window for hours as it went through the lowlands, green and tumbling to the horizon, with still white clouds in the reddening sky, dreamlike, unfolding the night.

    At last, I arrived in the town of Humahuaca deep in the north of Argentina. The lunar landscape surrounding it gave the impression at dusk that we were driving on Mars. In the distance I could see the so called ‘Hills of Many Colours.’ I was the only one to disembark the bus and found myself totally alone in a town that seemed deserted. Night had fallen. There were no people anywhere. The desolate town greeted me with both tranquillity and foreboding, as if I was being watched secretly. It felt as if someone or something had been expecting me. I looked up and saw the galaxy was visible, our suburb looking magnificent, truly. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen outside the smile in her eyes. I stared up, and my insignificance equalled my luck.

    We are on the edge of our Galaxy, if its centre is Trafalgar Square, we are Theydon Bois, or perhaps Croydon. I recently learned that there is a giant black hole at the centre of our milky way so this could be a good thing. I sat on a wall where the bus dropped me off and lit a cigarette, dazzled by the stars. I looked around for the neon light of a hotel but there was nothing. I was three puffs in when I realised something was watching me. It was like a feeling that some entity is boring into your skull without you knowing. I looked down from the silent night to the uneven cobbles of the street and there in front of me was a rag tag dog, looking up as if we had met before. Its head was slightly tilted to the left. It was dark brown, very dark brown with unkempt matted hair and had wide friendly brown eyes, full of sorrow and expectation. I said hello. It didn’t react. Maybe it doesn’t speak English I thought. ‘Hola’ I said. It tilted its head slightly to the right with an inquisitive look. That made me smile. My loneliness seemed to evaporate into the balmy night of stars and sands.

    I stood up and it lifted its head with an air of loyalty. I walked on to where I thought the town centre was and the dog immediately followed, walking alongside. I reached a crossroads and my spirits lifted again. I began to walk towards the sign that said HOTEL with an independent air. The Bois de Boulogne it was not. The dog followed. I looked down and straight away noticed that it was limping. Wait, was it a limp? I stood a step to the side and focussing in the dim light noticed it only had three legs. Three legs. Poor thing. Must be a hard life out here on Mars. I looked up again at the stars and as I did so two drifting clouds ate the moon. I lit another and said to the dog, ‘Alright hop-a-long. Vamos.”

    The three-legged dog walked beside me, looking up at my face. The immediate fealty impressed me, there was a certain loyalty in its manner and an irrepressible eagerness for life. I stopped and waited. The dog stopped too, looking curious as to what I was doing. I breathed a plume to the night sky and carried on walking, and the dog followed by my side. We parted company for a while as I booked in and put my bag in my room. The hotel was old but clean. I lay on the bed for a while staring at the ceiling, wondering what to do. ‘A beer’ I thought. I looked at the clock on the wall and it read nine, so I launched off the bed and returned to the warm evening. The cripple dog was waiting for me at the end of the path to the hotel.

    As I approached, he looked up at me in friendship, so I smiled back and said ‘Hola.’ Then I went to look for a bar and sure enough, the three-legged dog followed. I stopped walking just to see what it would do. It stopped and looked up at me. I carried on. The dog followed by my side. I stopped again. So did he. He looked up but now with an expression that read ‘don’t fuck about.” No more testing. I saw some empty plastic chairs outside a well-lit window and presumed it was a bar so I crossed the desolate street. The dog hobbled along with me to the door and then stopped and sat down under the beer light, awaiting my return.

    I drank many beers, smoked my mind, and indulged in whiskey until the light’s glow behind the bar told me that I was drunk. I have for many years found it difficult to both get in and out of bed. Could be a sign of depression, not sure. I’m usually happy. Maybe content is a better word. I thanked the barman in Spanish and he nodded warmly and waved me goodbye. I was surprised to see hop-a-long waiting for me. It must have been hours. I looked up at the waxing moon lighting the night world dreaming. I lit a cigarette and started the wander back to my hotel in the full knowledge the dog would follow. In the middle of the empty square, I sat down on a wall to take my measure of the town. The crippled dog stood in front of me on three legs where I sat. We looked at each for a while under the watchful gaze of the night. Then he began to sing.

    The first note sat still on the air, full of loss and pity, but constructing a harbour for hope out of notes alone. It was full of duende. Fulloftheheartbreakingbeautyoftheworld. And then the music soared up to the stars above us. How could such a perfect blue note be produced by an unwanted animal like this? I thought. Then I saw that the answer was in the question. It put its head by its missing leg and again the song came. It was the rawest blues I’ve ever heard. I remember thinking to myself, well raise my rent, you make Muddy Waters sound content. But it was just a three-legged dog on the lunar earth. He made me smile on a low ebb, which is what good friends can do. In the perfect moment, just as the moon disappeared behind the clouds, the dog stopped singing. All that could be heard was silence. I realised music, like poetry, is not academic. All academic pursuits require evidence. Music does not. I don’t know how long I stayed with the three-legged dog, untalkative. After a time, the beer began to wear thin in my mind and I decided to go to bed.

    “Well, good night.” I said, but the Argentine hound didn’t understand. I looked at him in the eye and he understood I had acknowledged his song. Then I turned and went into the hotel and slept. I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices and the distant rumble of a motor car. I got up scratching my spinning head. I realised I hadn’t gotten undressed which saved some time and headed out of the hotel to find the bus that would take me on to Bolivia. Hop-a-Long was gone. I felt a pang of sadness and regret. I looked up and down the desolate street but there was no sign of him. That afternoon I boarded the bus and departed. I looked out of the window as the bus passed by the frontier of town and saw a truck being loaded. There in a cage carried by the dog catchers was hop-a-long looking forlorn and scared. I jumped up with my bag and guitar, ran up to the front of the bus and banged on the window as he pulled out. I asked the driver to stop and he obliged. I ran back and told the dog catchers the he was mine. They believed me after I gave them some money, and the dog looked up at me and smiled. I looked away to the horizon and pictured distant La Paz in my mind’s eye. I noticed he was also looking out to the distance.

    ‘Looks like we’re walking there’ I said.

    Hop-a-long sang. And off we went together, towards the childhood of mountains.

    Feature Image: Hector Perez

  • Podcast: Patrick Cockburn on Syria and Ukraine


    Are the Eurocrats and their allies most delusional about the topics they profess to find most urgent? Or are they just setting out to delude the rest of us?

    This was Ursula Von Der Leyen speaking at the 9th Brussels Conference on Syria, on Saint Patrick’s Day last:

    The agreement between the central authorities and the Kurdish SDF… is nothing short of historic. As is the signing of a constitutional declaration by interim President al-Sharaa. On the other hand, the attacks on security forces and the violence against civilians in Syria’s coastal region show that the situation remains fragile…

    The Syrian authorities’ commitment to bring the perpetrators to justice, to protect minorities, and form an inclusive government – all of this is vital for reconciliation.

    As these words were being prepared in the run-up to the conference, informed observers of Syria’s situation could see a different picture: targeted sectarian massacres of Alawites, not just “violence against civilians”, had begun. To precious little outcry in the West, death squads indifferent to calls for restraint from Damascus were fanning out in coastal Latakia. Far from cohering into a place of “inclusive government”, Syria looks more likely to be approaching a condition of volatility and chaos, not a “fragile” democracy with “freedom of opinion, expression, information, publication and press”, as claimed in the text of the interim constitutional document. Quoting an acquaintance living in Maaloula, a Christian town Northeast of Damascus, Patrick Cockburn relates how multiple groups have been plunged into trepidation: “The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened, even the secular Sunnis are frightened…”

    That fear relates not only to who is supposedly in charge in Damascus, but to the extent of their control, if any, over the forces made up of jihadis from around the world who are now the primary wielders of military power across most of the core of the country. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Council, meanwhile, has actually been outspoken in its criticism of the Islamist-shaded constitution, saying it has “reproduced authoritarianism”.

    Every single premise of Von Der Leyen’s statement as quoted above is questionable.

    Its conclusions are absurd.

    Why do we start by picking out the ancient Christian redoubt of Maaloula? This frame of reference helps to show how far back in time the communities of modern-day “Syria” go, as well as Cockburn’s in-person familiarity with their inheritors’ attempts to survive in the horrible present. Writing back in 2012,  Cockburn concluded a piece for the Independent by observing that “the sufferings of the Christians of Syria are no worse than those of the Muslims, but they feel that whatever the outcome of the Civil War, their future will most likely be worse than their past.”  The omens, he felt were not good. He was right.

    In Syria, they seldom are. This Post-Ottoman, Post-French mandate state goes back to 1945 in its current form. Will it even continue to exist in another few years? The massacres now taking place in Latakia, Cockburn would write a few days after our conversation, are being “ignored”, but “may shape the Middle East”. (iPaper, March 15)

    As the second part of the conversation in this episode outlines, European leaders and their friends are prone to magical thinking in the matter of their proximate crises as well as distant. In recent coverage on Ukraine for the iPaper, Cockburn has argued that “Western governments, media and PR firms” have crafted a depiction of the conflict as a replay of WW2. In this vision, “compromise was ruled out as practical policy, meaning that the war could only end with a Ukrainian victory and Russian capitulation – though nobody seriously believed this was going to happen since… the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.” In an echo of that argument, Cockburn’s contemporary Peter Hitchens stated, in an interview in Slovakia’s Standard magazine:

    “The whole of the Western world has been told things about Ukraine which make it very difficult for a compromised peace.”

    On grave matters of peace and war, European leaders are failing to adopt a realistic vision, concludes Cockburn.

    This is something of an understatement.

    With Europeans apparently determined to tool up for armies that don’t exist (and would be unlikely to have much fighting morale even if they did) and prone to praising the emergence of “progressive” states that have all the long-term prospects of a snowman in the Sinai, we are looking at a new era of wishful, read delusional thinking.

    A final note:

    This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first guest. Back then we mostly spoke about his father Claud, the subject of a new biography by his Cork-born son. This time, we jump to more familiar terrain: the battlefields of the present day, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza. Cockburn once praised his late friend Robert Fisk as a “historian of the present”. Like Fisk, Cockburn began in Ireland, then spent decades doing mostly Middle-east-based journalism, mostly in person. This meant cultivating friendships, survival skills and a sense of discernment for the historical roots of ongoing events. More sedentary now than, say, the start of the Syrian Civil War 14 years ago, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (both of which he covered while on the ground), he is better placed than most to share useful perspectives on far-off theaters of fighting. We’re honored to have him back.

  • Electronic Music: ‘stepping into a space of anticipation’

    I play electronic music, experimental ambient sets or hypnotic techno sets. It’s exciting to begin a set, stepping into a space of anticipation. The audience doesn’t know what’s to come, nor do I. I start with something and if I’m lucky, I catch them – they follow me. Together, we create a journey in the very moment. I feel the concentration in the room, the energy shifting, and I adapt, choosing the next track, deciding when to layer it on the other, manipulating the tonality, intensity and speed of the track, laying the foundation stones for the subsequent trip…

    It needs a little while to let go of the rest of life, of everyday thoughts, to feel into yourself with your eyes closed and then – finally to dissolve in the darkness accompanied by flashes of coloured light, immersed in the mass of moving bodies. You become part of the whole, swaying as one, moving uniformly, like a vast, flowing, breathing organism – connected here on the dancefloor where identity dissolves and perception reshapes itself: time blurs, bodies merge, the individual dissipates into the collective.

    It can be truly spiritual. In this experience, you forget yourself entirely, your body, your thoughts, your presence. You let go of everything. You don’t think, you just feel, you follow, you become. Like water you adapt, you yield, you move with the currents, faster, slower, dissolving into rhythm, merging with vibration. Water is fluid, like identity, layered, ever-changing, in a constant process of becoming. It carries both clarity and ambiguity, flowing freely yet shaped by its surroundings, suspended between movement and stillness. Boundaries shift, the line between self and environment blurs. You are neither fixed nor defined; you are in motion, open to change. Everything is allowed, everything can happen.

    Image: Olena Goldman

    These are transitional moments, where structure dissolves and individuals arrive at a threshold where identity is fluid and communal experience transcends social hierarchies. This is how Victor Turner describes rituals (1969). The dancefloor, much like a ritual space where music dictates movement, where sound sculpts space, is where a new kind of freedom emerges. It is a place outside of everyday roles, outside of expectations, where for a moment, nothing is fixed. Turner speaks of liminality, of states in which the usual order is suspended, and something new can take shape. That is exactly what happens here: identities blur, connections form in ways they wouldn’t elsewhere, and everything feels open, undefined, possible.

    It is rare to be carried away like that. It’s magical. Unpredictable and each time original. Both the DJ and the audience are surprised, overwhelmed, grateful for this truly sacred moment of presence and synchronization. A fleeting peace of mind.

    This dissolving is in the purest sense meditative – also for the DJ. A set is never just their own, it is co-created, woven together in the moment, unique, ephemeral, unrepeatable. The DJ is not a solitary figure but a responsive entity, deeply intertwined with the audience. They do not dictate the atmosphere, they translate and amplify it and therefore have to be deeply concentrated. The energy in the room is never the same, it is dependent on the sound system, the light, the composition of people, their level of awareness of the fact that everything contributes to the situation, the experience. And it depends on the kind of space that is given. Can people trust, do they feel safe, are they open, do they respect? The energy changes constantly and the DJ has to sense these shifts, adapting to them in real-time, building, withholding, intensifying, releasing. DJs are looked at as in charge, they are in a power position but it is much more a collaborative, spontaneous cooperation of the delicate, symbiotic relationship between the DJ and the crowd. Everything is a shared responsibility: every time searching for a new balance.

    Image: Francesco Paggiaro.

    We shape everything by the way we interact. And all is based on the shared possession and experience of our senses at this very moment; overlaying everything: the music we all hear.

    Techno is a pulse, a steady bum bum bum bum, as Underdog Electronic Music School puts it in words in their YouTube Video “The Ten Rules of Techno“. The kick, four-on-the-floor or broken-up, lays the foundation, a force that grounds everything in 1, 2, 3, 4… But this is not rigid. Techno moves, it steers, it teases. The drum machine drives the sweat, bouncing off rumbles, basslines, toms, syncopations pull against, making you want to move while acid synths carve out liquid, geometrically branching paths that make you follow in unknown heights and depths. It is simultaneity, the parallel pursuit of different sequences, complexly layered, sometimes offset, mixed up, chaotic. Then there is the play between fullness and emptiness, it’s a game of tension and release, build things, fill things, scoop it up, scoop it up and then drop it: release back into simplicity or – into silence. Suddenly.

    It is an adventure, fluid, unpredictable. The presence becomes an experience: to dive into the sound, to let it carry you, beyond thought, into the here and now, into somewhere in space, into a dark forest deep within yourself, and then back into this room where you stand among others, feeling their presence, their nearness. You sense they are on the same journey. Your breathing synchronizes, heartbeats align. You are connected, finally, existing together, in this fleeting moment of peace. Finally.

    The British anthropologist and music journalist Simon Reynolds explores this idea in Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1998), where he describes techno not as a genre built on melody or lyrics, but as something far more primal: a textural experience, a hypnotic layering of sound that dissolves the listener into a state of flow. He argues that techno’s essence lies in its ability to bypass conventional musical structures and instead operate on a deeply physical and neurological level – music that is felt rather than merely heard – an architecture of sound where basslines function like heartbeats, where synth waves stretch and contract like breath, where the absence of words opens space for unfiltered emotion.

    Music moves us, sooner or later, inevitably. We cannot resist, it happens naturally, subconsciously. It affects us on a fundamental level. It is human to be touched by music. And it is not just emotional, it is also physical. The sound waves go through our bodies, we shiver. The beat carries us forward, makes us move, quickening our breath, accelerating our heartbeats, making us sweat. We are hypnotized by the repetitive patterns, captivated, entranced, seized, our entire brain capacity taken up by it. It is uncontrollable. And it is so, so sweet to surrender to the power of sound, to let go, to dissolve into the collective moment, open and unguarded. This shared experience, this mutual surrender, this collective awareness of the here and now, it unites. It brings people together. It is a purely human experience, perhaps the most human experience. In that moment, you are stripped back to your essence, reduced to your body, to sensation, to togetherness, regardless of age, origin, social background, gender, or religion, it is unity, and that is incredibly valuable. It brings peace. It is gratitude, fulfillment. It reminds you that you are enough – all of us, together, each of us individually, free from pressure, from expectations, from obligations, from time, from fear. You do not have to do anything. You just are. And you are part of something vast, something beautiful.

    Image: Mark Angelo Sampan,

    Techno pulses through bodies, vibrating between structure and chaos, identity and anonymity, self and collective. Its relentless repetition, its resistance to narrative, creates an experience that is both deeply personal and entirely communal. A space where bodies are freed from definition, where identity becomes a shifting echo of sound and sensation. Here, structure collapses not into chaos, but into something more elusive: a moment outside of time, a fleeting immersion into something beyond the self. You follow the music, and you do not know where it will take you. That is trust. To listen to, to dance to, to experience techno is to let go, to be carried, to become rhythm. It is freedom.

    Feature Image of the author by Saskia Schramm
     

  • At the Colònia Güell

    ‘There are only so many times you can be expected to look at the Sagrada Família,’ said my uncle. He was visiting me in Barcelona, where I had returned for a few weeks. He said he wanted to take me to see the Colònia Güell, a lesser-known Gaudí site. ‘You mean the Park Güell?’ I said, thinking he was after sweeping views and stone lizards with mosaic skin. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the Colònia Güell.’ I had never heard of it, despite having grown up in the city. We agreed to go early the next morning.

    We took the tram, sitting in sleepy silence. The grey landscape unfolded. Low walls covered in graffiti, dark tunnels with snaking pipes, tower blocks, warehouses, farmlands, greenhouses with shattered panes. Raindrops made diagonal rivulets on the windows. They squiggled wildly whenever the tram picked up speed. On the chain link fences the occasional yellow ribbon flew by, leftover tokens of solidarity with political prisoners of the Independence referendum.

    When we got out the rain had stopped. The sky was very pale. Light filtered through evenly, making the landscape look strangely bright and shadowless. There were no signs past the ticket barriers, just one long road bordered by pine trees. At the bend, a cluster of brick houses came into view, built on a slope. There was nobody around. No traffic on the road. No place to get a coffee. Leaves collected at the curb, turning to mulch. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and wasn’t used to being awake before noon. Besides, my lighter had run out of fuel so I couldn’t even have a cigarette. ‘Maybe we got out at the wrong stop,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should turn back.’ My uncle took out his phone to check the blue dot on the map. ‘No, we’re in the right place.’

    Barcelona. Image: Enrico Perini.

    We walked towards a large, clay-coloured house, with small windows cut irregularly into the sides and a big chimney of bricks that had been arranged in patterns. The bricks continued at the front of the building, where they were organised into elaborate latticework around the entrance. The walls around were made of rough rock, the surface oddly pocked so that it looked porous. It was the colour of gingerbread. If a nice lady had invited us in I felt sure we would be cooked in an oven.

    We stood looking up at the house for a while. I said nothing because my uncle is an architect, and for all I knew this building was some great masterpiece.

    ‘What an eyesore,’ he said, to my relief. ‘Look what they’ve done. Taking idioms and juxtaposing them in totally inappropriate ways.’

    ‘Yeah.’ I said. ‘What’s with the crazy zig zags?’

    ‘So faux naif.’

    ‘And the chimney?’

    He shook his head sadly. ‘A disaster.’

    We carried on looking.

    He waved his hands in front of him. ‘That texture.’

    ‘What’s that word for the phobia of porous surfaces?’

    Neither of us could remember so I looked it up.

    ‘Trypophobia.’

    ‘Ah.’

    Next to the definition there was a helpful illustration of a hand with some kind of disease spread over the skin in a pattern of small, symmetrical holes surrounded by raised edges.

    ‘Disgusting,’ I said, holding the phone out to my uncle.

    He leaned closer to the screen. ‘Christ,’ he breathed.

    I scrolled down and saw a similar image, this time of the side of a face, the skin of the cheek all eaten away.

    ‘Ugh! Look at this one!’ I held out the screen.

    ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Please.’

    We finally came to a tourist information centre, where a young woman behind a perspex screen charged us twenty euros for two entries. After taking the payment she explained in a mellifluous Catalan accent that because it was a Monday, the exhibits were closed, and it would not be possible to go into any of the buildings, though we were more than welcome to walk around the streets and look at their exteriors. She asked if we would like some audio guides, adding that they were free. This struck me as a perverse way to frame the situation but I accepted them anyway. She handed us two devices like old Nokia brick phones, along with a glossy brochure containing a fold-out map with numbered stops.

    Outside, I pressed 0 and the guide thanked me in a smooth, robotic voice for choosing to visit the Colònia Güell. Then came a potted history of the place. Founded in 1890 by Eusebi Güell as an industrial colony, the workers’ houses were arranged around the textiles factory that was fitted with the most modern technology of the time. The factory employed 1,000 workers in 1908. There were 24,000 spinning wheels and 760 weaving looms, all operated by a 1000 horsepower steam engine. It was conceived as an urban centre with its own character and its own social and religious life, and it was Güell’s mission to improve the conditions for the workers, the voice said, before the introduction abruptly ended. My interest was piqued. It sounded like a truly terrible idea.

    A visit to Colònia Güell in 1910 by the Bishops of Barcelona, Tarragona, Lleida, Vic and Valencia accompanied by Count Güell.

    We continued along the numbered stops: the former consumption cooperative, the storage cellars, the secretary’s house, the convent, the union, the library, the school, and the doctor’s house. The audio guide informed me that the buildings had been designed by Francesc Berenguer i Mestres and Joan Joan Rubió i Bellver in the Catalan Modernist style, that their influences were Gothic and Arabic, and that the brick they used was typical of this region. I learnt about how the factory used brick latticework for ventilation, and to provide areas for the textiles to dry without being exposed to direct sunlight, which would bleach them.

    The guide went on and on like this, flooding me with fairly useless information while holding back the only thing I wanted to know. It described these houses only as structures that let air circulate in certain directions, that let sunlight fall across them at different angles throughout the day, shadows rotating and lengthening. But hadn’t people lived inside them? There was something creepy about this obvious omission.

    The feeling of unease crested outside the doctor’s house, a simple two-storey square building with pillars at the corners. After a detailed description of the cornice where the airing holes of the attic were disguised by a zigzag pattern of more bricks, the guide uttered this staggeringly creepy sentence, in the same smooth monotone: The doctor made house calls to visit patients not only to cure them, but to make sure they really were as ill as they claimed.

    I remembered the free therapy sessions I received during my time working as a content moderator one hideous summer after university. My therapist was a kindly gay Chilean man who I lied to week after week, inventing dying family members and killing them off in increasingly unlikely and tragic ways, all in an attempt to get more time off work. The office was in a long glass building with a gym in the basement and a rooftop cafe where I would go along with my colleagues to play ping pong and get abjectly drunk on sugary sangría at the end of each day before stumbling home. I remembered reading about offices with built-in sleep pods and Silicon Valley work campuses so convenient that nobody ever leaves. I remembered my elation the morning that I decided that I would not go into work that day or ever again, that if I spent a single moment longer in that place it would permanently damage my capacity to see beauty in the world. This is what it finally came down to: an instinct to protect beauty, which is really an instinct towards survival. I remembered the faces of my colleagues like a deserter remembers the faces of the ones he left to die.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Something vast and inchoate was rising to the surface. I tried to articulate it to my uncle: that I found the premise of this colony, and the notion of paternalistic capitalism itself, to be false and condescending. It mimicked a utopian vision of communal work and life, but the people in it never saw the fruits of their labour, so it took on a dystopian quality, made crueller by its benevolent pretence. Even if this model town, inspired by the experiments of the English industrialists, represented a considerable improvement on the working conditions of the time, it was still depressing, particularly because it was a cruder and therefore more starkly visible expression of the kind of logic we are still living under, of the kind of existence we have learnt to accept as fair.

    I don’t think any of this made much sense. My uncle just said: ‘Let’s get lunch.’

    The day improved enormously. The restaurant was on a small plaza, a typically Catalan interior; unpretentious and stylish. High ceilings run with beams, glass lamps, star-patterned marble floor, carved mahogany chairs. Two old men sat by the entrance playing chess, and a large dog lounged at their feet. A whole family was gathered on a long table at the back, filling the place with cheerful chatter. The waitress came with a bottle of red wine and a basket of bread. We had asparagus pasta and fish soup for starters, followed by lemon sole. We gossipped about different family members. We finished the wine. Dessert was mel i mato and dark coffee with a shot of cognac.

    Maybe it’s not so bad, I thought to myself as we made our way back out. You go to work, you earn some money, you squander it on a long, boozy lunch, and you do the same thing the next day.

    Image: Colònia Güell, Renato Rocca.

  • Musician of the Month: Dee Armstrong

    I am a self-taught musician, playing fiddle, viola, hammer dulcimer, bodhran and tunes percussion. I am mainly known as a composer, arranger and fiddle player with Kila for the last thirty-four years. I also play with Freespeakingmonkey and The Armagh Rhymers.

    Several generations of my family were and are musicians. My grandmother Maggie Armstrong was a great singer and storyteller who sang old traditional and gospel songs. My father was taught traditional and classical music by Derek Bell of the Chieftains and my mother was a brilliant classical piano player and teacher. Many cousins and my sister all play. My four children play and /or sing.

    I also make massive willow puppets and structures for carnivals and am a community arts worker. I run a Rockschool for kids aged 10 to 18, where kids learn to play in bands, write their own songs and perform gigs and record.

    I have just released my first solo album, Deichtine’s Daughter. The title comes from a poem by Louis De Paor, which I love. Deichtine was the mother of Cúcullin, one of Irelands great mythological heroes. Deichtine means “Ten Fires” in Irish as a literal translation and I loved that.

    However, we know much more about Cúcullin than Deichtine, which is a recurring theme in Ireland where women get written out of history. What if Deichtine had a daughter, or Cúcullin a sister, what would she have been like? Louis de Paor was asking that question to himself, and then he saw her…walking down the road in Galway, swinging a hurl…and she made such an impression on him he wrote a poem for her.

    The poem hit me immediately. It was more a feeling than anything of strength, having a voice, fighting for your rights, fighting for your life. Fire and inspiration. So, the piece of music says that to me. It’s an expression of that. I wrote this piece on the hammered dulcimer, which has an ancient sound, but is very rhythmical, very strong, though at times it can sound delicate like a harp.

    I write intuitively, I don’t read music very well and I learn tunes by ear, and do string arrangements by ear and use the recording process to arrange music usually, as I can’t write it down. It’s all in me head. Tunes usually pop into my head as I am sitting playing the fiddle or banjo or whatever. They express whatever is going on in my life at the time I guess. I try not to get in the way and let it happen.

    My sons will tell you, I often don’t like doing more than one or two takes. I like catching the initial spirit of the piece. Music is an amazing communicator. The feeling of the story is there, as I write tunes and music, there are no words. I often focus on the atmosphere of a piece of music; what’s coming through and emphasise that.

    I studied film in Dun Laoghaire VEC, way back. I ended up doing soundtracks for numerous short films, and this experience was valuable when Kila got soundtrack work with Cartoon Saloon doing animated features for Wolfwalkers, Song of the Sea etc.

    I love working with my sons, writing and recording. Plenty of craic, arguments and door slamming! We are all quite particular, but generally we all get on great. We have a similar musical sensibility I think. Lughaidh and I have been working on soundtracks and stuff for theatre since he was about 14 or 15. He’s a very gifted musician. We both love creating atmospheric soundtracks, and indeed I think this is a shared composing trait with us. There is a visual element, we are painting a picture. Diarmaid is a dancer and he brings another angle into it all with that. We all have a zany imagination and made strange short films over lockdown. We are a creative family

    My daughter Rosie is a lovely singer and my other son Tiggy plays bass. His son, my wee grandson Leon is very musical. He sings away. Sure, who knows what will pop out. Music is my anchor, and it will probably be theirs.

    My cousin Bridget is a great musician, and her kids are all musical and so it goes. If there is a love for it, it will probably continue.

    I didn’t want to play music as a kid, I wanted to be a dancer! So, I came late to the party. My parents tried to get me to play fiddle, and I got a few lessons from an amazing violin player Mary Gallagher, but I just wanted to dance.

    I was into Heavy Metal, Rock, Disco and Funk as a teenager. I never imagined I would play traditional music, but it was always there in the ackground, especially the Chieftains as Derek Bell would come and make reeds with Dad and we would visit Paddy Maloney sometimes. I took up fiddle aged 16 or 17, then had a baby, so it wasn’t till I was 19 or 20 that I took up learning tunes properly.

    Writing music became an expression for me. It depends on the tune, but often I’ll write a tune for a person, as in The Prince of Laughter, or one of my children, as in Django’s. Ed the Visitor is for our legendary dog Ed who was a constant companion through good times and bad.

    Sometimes they just come to me. I dreamt the Killi Willi Waltz. It was funny. I wonder was it the shit loads of B52s I had consumed the night before! Luckily, I crawled over to the fiddle and managed to extract the tune to the fiddle before I forgot it!

    I have dreamt other tunes, but they have slipped away. I think the best tunes come to us in unexpected moments. Wandering down the road, after chatting to a friends; while trying to learn a tune; after a good shag. You just never know.

    I included an old Jewish dance tune, a ‘frailach” on the album. I’m a huge fan of Roma gypsy and Irish Traveller music, also Middle Eastern music, Jewish Music. Nomadic people carry the music with them, absorbing everything they hear and turning it into their own versions of gold. Often the most powerful music comes from the most oppressed. Look at the history of the Blues. The experiences of the people live in the music.

    Music is the lifeline. It can’t be taken away, and then it speaks to us down through the generations. We are witnessing the attempted obliteration of Palestine, and the Palestinian, people currently. So many Jewish people have spoken out against this genocide as it is a repeat of their own suffering. This tune is for them and the people of Palestine and their children, who suffer occupation, death, starvation and destruction every day.

    The album is made up of all original compositions bar Frailach, and Yon Do, which is a traditional Selkie song from Scotland. I liked the combination, and I wanted them all to fit together and these did fit. I wanted it to be an album of primarily my music.

    Eoin Dillon, longtime piper in Kila, and I were playing a few tunes one day, and he wrote one part of the Bearna Waltz. Bobby Lee wrote Prince of Laughter together. He wrote the chords and I wrote the tune and strings. Bobby played a lot of guitar on the album and I loved playing with him.

    Leitrim. Image: Morgan Bolger

    I live in a very wild and beautiful place in North Leitrim, on the side of Benbo Mountain near Manorhamilton since 2001. It’s very different to Dublin, where I grew up!

    Up until the 50s and 60s there were 158 families living in this small townland, all with loads of kids. They nearly all had to emigrate because the land was poor, and it was too hard to make a living. This always resonated with me, and it’s so sad that this had to happen.

    There were lots of music on the mountain and musicians. There was a great musician Micheal Clancy, who was called the man of 1000 tunes. He was from Boihy and his cottage is still there, though he died in the 80s. I am making a documentary about him, as he taught all the people of the area music in his day.

    I had to move to Leitrim because if was impossible to afford rent in Galway or Dublin any longer. You could get a bedsit or a small flat in Dublin in the 80s and 90s for 12 or 15 quid a week. Even if you had little money you could still live in the middle of town where all the action was. You could go busking, go to sessions, meet other musicians and walk home.

    I had a young baby as a teenager, so I was lucky to live with my friends on Wexford Street and they helped me with the baby. Otherwise, I would have been very isolated.

    The scene in Dublin was buzzing when I was growing up. This Lizzy, Sinead O Connor, Dolores O’Riordain and the Cranberries, U2, Aslan, Waterboys, and so many more. There was a sense of excitement with so many great bands and a freedom of musical ideas across the board, traditional and folk included.

    Riverdance and Ireland getting in to the World Cup helped as well! All this meant a lot to us. Suddenly, people across the world wanted to hear us. The Celtic Tiger didn’t do us any favours.

    No one can afford to live in the cities in Ireland now. If you don’t have affordable housing, musicians and artists and ordinary people will have to leave and the community and music scene will be dissipated.

    Luckily, the folk and traditional scene is having a real revival in Ireland again. Look at the wonderful Lankum for example. It’s brilliant to see. I’m looking forward to getting out to a few gigs after being a single mum for years and years!!! It’s exciting!

    I am just finishing a thirteen date tour around Ireland to launch the album. I have more music recorded with my sons. Music the three of us wrote together, and I am hoping to finish that off in the next few months. I’ll be playing festivals in Ireland in the summer and we will see after that!

    Link to Dee Armstrong’s Bandcamp

  • Dog Years

    Then the Lord said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.” – Genesis 18:20-21

    They were an ancient and patient race. Sympathetic. Considered. Sarcastic.

    The first they knew of us were radio waves which pierced their silence like dilating klaxons. At first, they couldn’t fathom the meaning of those faded, tinny excretions. Their initial thought: a cosmic butt-dial of some distant world’s collective mental breakdown. After prolonged examination, the significance of the messages became clear and, even clearer, what they needed to do about them.

    It took time to get psychologically and technologically prepared. There were details to be drawn out. Matters to be pondered.

    Through a freak of physics I cannot explain, they reached Earth long before the messages which dispatched them to us. They were a little disappointed when they learned they would have to wait a while for Eurovision and the last season of Succession and for Dr. Pimple Popper but, as mentioned, they were a patient race and took some comfort in having arrived just in time to witness firsthand the legendary fall of Troy.

    It was to be their first encounter with humanity’s propensity for exaggeration.

    “This shithole?” one of them exclaimed on first sighting the mythical city of horses and discovering it to be a place of meagre towers and ramshackle fortifications, behind whose crumbling walls lay a sprawl of hovels.

    “Neither epic nor poetic,” someone remarked.

    “A packed lunch might be in order,” another cautioned, indicating the worrying proximity of food preparation to sanitation.

    They thought it best not to bust right in. They didn’t quite have the saying “First impressions…” but it was close enough. They brainstormed the best approach and decided to remain in stationary orbit over a different country for fifty years each, and to quietly observe (occasionally shop). They took our word that countries or political states were the best way to chunk the task up. Boy, did they come to regret that.

    They held position above us and watched carefully over years which became centuries and centuries which became millennia, waiting for the right moment.

    They picked up and discarded accents, nurtured short-lived loyalties in the manner of ardent telenovela devotees (which they would also eventually become) and squandered hope on numerous lost causes (including, eventually, many of the aforementioned telenovelas).

    Again and again, they were bemused by our ability to disremember, or to downright forget. They saw whole civilisations lost to memory: Atlantis, Arcadia, dusty old Troy. Again and again, they witnessed reality turned inside-out and history stitched from the torn lining.

    “Do these people write anything down?” they frequently wondered.

    They never failed to be impressed by our ability to bend the truth, to sweep inconvenience beneath the most conveniently located carpet and to normalise the most extraordinary fuck ups.

    Many of our greatest achievements, they viewed with distrust or scorn. Despite having had a ringside seat for the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal, they could only view these projects the way we might a child’s meandering sandcastles: estates driven by ego rather than necessity.

    “Hanging, my arse,” one concluded acidly.

    “Oooh,” another cooed, “you can see it from all the way up here.”

    “Not at all a massive waste of bricks,” someone deadpanned.

    They were stationed over Britain during the industrial revolution and watched with contained alarm as six million tonnes of coal was ripped from the ground each day to feed mankind’s growing appetite for boiling water.

    “You can see why they might think this is a good idea,” one noted.

    “What could go wrong?” another sighed.

    They saw Hitler coming from miles away. Literally.

    “The facial hair doesn’t exactly scream stability,” one observed.

    They were not overly fond of wars or revolutions. Not that they were squeamish; it just meant a lot of re-work. All that coming apart, then coming back together, resulted in devilish admin. Political pacts and alliances meant more red tape. The Foedus Cassianum, Treaty of Versailles, the EU; each gave them pause but, in the end, they stuck to their guns and to fifty years per country.

    In this way, they’d covered sixty-four countries and had been over the sixty-fifth, Ireland, for about forty-five years when word came through.

    It was time.

    Mary and Dessie were given the assignment and they took a small craft down to the surface, coming in low over the Irish capital.

    “Should I engage the cloaking device?” Dessie asked.

    “Have you seen their air force?” Mary said.

    They landed on the grounds of the official residence of the President of Ireland but not before they’d made a spectacular pass over North Dublin.  A group of young men in loose-fitting leisurewear (embellished with the branding of a mid-table American basketball team none of them had ever seen play) briefly suspended their assault on two German tourists to allow their jaws tip wordlessly open as the silver craft banked overhead with a loud, satisfying whine.

    By the time they disembarked, a hurried cordon had been thrown around the craft, which Dessie had parked somewhat inelegantly between a waterless fountain and a stone bench on the large front lawn of the estate. A steady stream of curious citizens trespassed onto the parklands along the northern boundary, edging closer with each minute, as news of the visitors spread.

    A local news crew had been diverted from interviewing dog walkers about the amount of dog shit on surrounding pavements in the nearby Phoenix Park and now perched at the opening of the cordon, hand-combing windblown hair and assembling game-faces while allowing themselves full-contact daydreams about Sky News discovering them and the opportunity this might afford to invite Mister Feeney, their dictatorial news director, to stick his maggoty job sideways up his hole.

    The president, a short, ancient, scholarly man with a friendly face but accusatory eyes which lurked beneath scurrying eyebrows, tarried on the edge of the lawn, torn between a sudden clench of self-preservation (spawned by vivid recollections of sensationalist Cold War films in which proxy commies in rubber alien outfits rampaged through cities with ray guns) and a bone-deep drive to fulfill his solemn duty as welcomer-in-chief. With a stoicism born of a hundred rugby international red-carpet greetings he came down on the side of duty.

    The president was flanked by his wife, the first lady, and his aide-de-camp, a military woman with a serious, square face, thick angry eyebrows and a ceremonial sword which she stroked mercilessly.

    The president’s wife, a sturdy, astute Cork woman, piloted her husband with the merest contact to his elbow, weaving a delicate path through growing numbers of police, soldiers and officials as a long liquidy gangplank telescoped out from the silver craft and the two occupants made their way slowly and carefully down the ramp towards them.

    The visitors appeared to be a regular man and a woman in their late twenties, dressed in what the president would have called “casual attire” if he hadn’t thought it might earn a tired eye-roll from his wife. The president’s wife recognized the female visitor’s blouse as one she’d considered for her own daughter’s birthday during a shopping trip on Grafton Street a few weeks earlier.

    “Céad míle fáilte,” the president said, bowing somewhat pompously as the two lithe, youthful-looking figures reached them.

    “Go raibh míle maith agat,” Mary answered in stumbling Leaving Cert Irish.

    Dessie smiled and whispered something to Mary but she cut him off with a silent elbow to the ribs.

    “You speak our native language?” the president asked, somewhat confused but permitting his face to emit only professional delight.

    “Just at an Irish level,” Mary answered with an impertinent wink.

    “Excuse me?” the president said.

    “That was a joke,” Mary said. “I meant badly. Like everyone else here.”

    “Ah, right,” the president said with a nervous laugh. He was a proud Gaeilgeoir but wasn’t sure his beloved cultural heritage warranted a full-blown inter-galactic diplomatic incident so he pumped a curious, jolly smile into his face and said, “Very good. I’m glad to see you share our…” he hesitated, “Earthling sense of humour.”

    The visitors exchanged a brief smirk and the president’s wife observed a florid diffusion in her husband’s cheeks.

    “Well,” Mary said, “You might say we are distant kin of yours.”

    “Might you,” the aide-de-camp said, directing an incredulous look towards the president who was too busy casting his hands in small, delighted circles to notice. His wife tightened her smile patiently. She loved her husband but this was his second seven-year term and sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t married into an intricately stitched straight jacket.

    Timid introductions were made. The president’s wife noted the visitors’ accents: the female’s an inner-city crumble, less frequently heard in recent years; the male’s a ringing specimen of the west Dublin twang; machiney and discordant.

    “I must say,” the president remarked excitedly, “I was expecting you to have more…exotic names.”

    “Those names are very exotic where we come from,” Mary said.

    “Ah, of course,” the president said, trying to recall some alien names from what little science fiction he’d seen or read but only coming up with “R2-D2”.

    “We like to adapt ourselves to local customs wherever we go,” Dessie explained. “We’re very…” he cast about for the right word, “adaptable.”

    Mary rolled her eyes and shrugged apologetically.

    “Those names were all the rage when we came to Ireland first, in the early 80s,” she said. “These days,” she offered a small shrug, “not so much.”

    “The 1980s?” the president’s wife exclaimed. “You’ve been observing humankind since then?”

    “Since long before then,” Mary said. “That was only when we came to this country to observe your people more closely.”

    The aide-de-camp fixed Mary with a baleful look.

    “I suppose,” she grumbled, “you’re the ones going around the place abducting innocent folks and subjecting the poor craters to cavity searches and mind probes and who-knows-what indignities.”

    “I can assure you,” Mary said, “we’ve no interest in abducting you and even less interest in your cavities.”

    “Must be someone else,” Dessie assured them.

    The first lady wafted the aide-de-camp’s remarks away with the back of a hand and gave Mary — what she hoped might be — a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

    “J’know, I can’t believe you’ve been here since the 80s,” she said. “Sure, you don’t look a day over twenty-five, dear.”

    Mary’s lips lingered in a smile.

    “Well, you should see the daily beauty regimen I have to go through to look like this.”

    When the introductions had been completed and small-talk indulged, the president suppressed thoughts of ray gun-toting aliens blowing his beautiful furniture to smithereens and gestured towards the Greek-style portico, saying, “Won’t you come inside?”

    The small group made their way past official seals, lithographs and stately pictures, acquiring more unsmiling security and glum secretarial staff as they moved further into the building. The aide-de-camp stroked the brass hilt of her sword urgently now as she entertained visions of alien necks careering against its blade and springing into the air like popped champagne corks. She tipped the silver scabbard forward and back in time to her metronomic step, like the implacable arm of a grandfather clock.

    When they were seated around the large conference table, food and drink was offered but Mary waved it away.

    “Thank you for your hospitality,” she said, “but we have something very important to speak to you about.”

    “We’re all ears, as the Americans say” the president said with a modest guffaw, his palms upturned inoffensively.

    “No doubt, the Americans will be along very soon,” Mary said with a bitter smile. “As will others. This matter affects everyone.” She unclasped her hands and spread them on the table and looked around the room. “Very well. To get right to the point, we are here to let you know that your time is come.”

    There was a collective gasp among the presidential party, security staff, dignitaries, secretaries and service staff.

    An unpretentious tea lady from the Northside of Dublin was in the process of filling the president’s cup. She looked up suddenly and said, “Ya bleedin’ wha’?”

    The misdirected teapot scalded the president’s hand and he released a shrill yelp.

    “Watch what you’re doing, Molly,” the president’s wife scolded as the president hurried the meat of his hand into his gob and the maid withdrew the pot, staring fixedly at Mary with her mouth tipped open.

    “What do you mean, our time is come?” the aide-de-camp prodded.

    “I’m sorry for putting it so crudely,” Mary said with a shrug. “Our leaders felt, given your history, the message might carry more weight if we used stark, biblical language. What I mean is: the human race is to be destroyed. In precisely seven days.”

    A new collective gasp surpassed the first in volume and participation.

    “Destroyed?” the president said removing his burnt hand and emitting a nervous purl of laughter. “This must be an elaborate joke. Why would you want to destroy the human race?”

    “To prevent a fate worse than death,” Mary said.

    “What fate could be worse than the death of billions of humans?” the president asked prodding his burnt hand delicately.

    “The fate which will happen if humans remain on their current path,” Mary said.

    “And what fate is that?” the president’s wife asked, wetting a napkin in a glass of water and dabbing blindly at the burn on her husband’s hand.

    “Untold suffering for humans and the total destruction of all life on this planet,” Mary said as Dessie provided an accompaniment of tight-lipped nodding.

    “That’s a bit vague,” the aide-de-camp said.

    “I doubt you’d enjoy us being more specific,” Dessie said with a wink.

    “How can you be so certain that this is our fate?” the president’s wife asked.

    “Because,” Mary said, “where we come from, this has already happened.”

    “Happened?” the president said, almost in a daze. “To whom has this happened?”

    Mary pointed at him and then allowed her finger to roam about the room,

    “To everyone here. To all of you. It was—will be —a global event.”

    “But that can’t be.” the president spluttered. “That’s simply incredible.”

    The aide-de-camp’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

    “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” she said.

    “You don’t,” Mary answered, “but whether you believe it or not will have little impact on whether it happens. What we are proposing is the only humane option available. Your destruction is happening one-way-or-another. I think you know this.” She looked around the table. “Deep down, you all know we speak the truth.”

    A few people among the wider staff allowed their faces to sink into devastation. Some stood rigid with anger. Most slumped in naked awe, unable to process what they had just heard.

    “Wait,” the president’s wife said. “Does that mean you’ve travelled back in time? Doesn’t that also mean you can go back in time again and change the course of history to avoid this disaster?”

    “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that,” Mary said.

    Dessie nodded glumly.

    “Time is a tricky one,” he said, “and time travel a very tricky one. It’s not like your movies. Unpredictable as hell. For example, we’ve been here much longer than we’d intended to be.”

    “How long, exactly?” the aide-de-camp asked.

    Mary and Dessie exchanged a look and Mary nodded her consent.

    “Thirteen or fourteen thousand years,” Dessie said. “Give or take a few hundred years.”

    “Fourteen thousand years!” the aide-de-camp gasped. “For fuck’s sake. Why haven’t you warned us about this before now?”

    “We have tried in many ways,” Mary said, “but you appear to need to be on the brink of destruction before you pay a blind bit of attention to the reality sitting right under your noses.”

    A burst of static came from a red-faced man with a blonde crew cut and a white earpiece and he leaned into the president and whispered something which lifted him out of his seat.

    “POTUS?” the president said breathlessly and the red-faced man turned a shade redder as he nodded carefully.

    The president sped excitedly to the windows, as though the leader of the free world might suddenly spring from behind the emerald green curtains. He performed a rushed, unpersuasive chortle and pointed out the lights of various news helicopters as they dipped and clattered over the nearby parkland.

    “You’ve certainly got our attention now,” he said, turning to them, his face a mask of grim determination. “The world will listen. Humankind will change. I’m absolutely certain of it, given this second chance.”

    “I’m afraid not,” Mary said with a curt shake of her head. “Your destruction is inevitable. This is just us giving you a chance to make peace with your end.”

    The group stared back at her in silence and disbelief and with the helpless anger of those who feel certain they have been cheated by fate.

    Mary looked at Dessie and they exchanged a silent nod.

    “Our leaders thought you might struggle to accept our message,” Mary said. “They felt a parable from your bible might be apt and may help to explain the severity of the situation you face: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; two ancient cities which brought destruction upon themselves through their own actions and inactions. I believe most of you will be familiar with that story?”

    “Of course,” the president said, “the Cities of the Plain in which God—”

    “Oh, shut up Maurice,” his wife scolded, “and let them speak.”

    “Thanks,” Mary said, “but, to be honest, I didn’t have much to add. We just wanted to establish the reference in your minds. We’re not big on unnecessary elaboration.”

    The president fidgeted nervously with his good hand. Like most Irish people of his generation, he was more than a little familiar with those passages of the bible. It was a tale which had scalded many a young mind, including his own.

    “But that story talked about terrible evil,” he said in an imploring tone. “Irredeemable evil. Surely that doesn’t apply in our case. Humanity has made some mistakes, I’ll grant you, but we have so much potential for good.”

    “Unfortunately,” Mary said firmly, “it is your potential for destruction which you seem to have fulfilled.”

    “That’s rather harsh,” the president said belligerently. “Humans have done incredible things. Music. Poetry. Literature—”

    Mary cut him off with a raised hand.

    “Yes, yes, incredible things, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re…” she hesitated, searching for the right words.

    Dessie nipped in.

    “A bag of fucking spanners.”

    “I was going to say terrifying procrastinators,” Mary said, “but that works too.” She turned to the president. “I’m afraid we are not philosophers or debaters. Our people are relatively plain-spoken and among them we are considered direct. We were chosen because it was felt we understood your culture best and might have a better chance of being listened to.”

    “What will happen in seven days?” the president’s wife asked, the simplicity of her question and the terror in her voice provoking a sudden silence in the room.

    “Don’t worry,” Mary said, “it’ll be very peaceful. You’ll barely know it’s happening. It will be as though you’re being swept away in a storm of sweet ecstasy.”

    “Jesus but don’t you make global euthanasia sound fierce comforting altogether?” the aide-de-camp muttered bitterly.

    The president’s wife had been raised on the same terrifying Old Testament stories as her husband and struggled to contain images of fire and sulphur raining down on them but, in that moment, the biblical reference suddenly offered a chink of light. She held a single index finger aloft to register her thought.

    “In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah,” she said with something approaching a litigious tone, “didn’t God give the citizens a chance of redemption if his angels could find just fifty good people?”

    Dessie nudged Mary but she shook her head as she swished an outstretched index finger decisively before the first lady’s nose.

    “Oh no, no,” she admonished, “you’re not pulling that ‘fifty good men’ shite.”

    She indicated Dessie with a flick of her forehead, “Sure, this eejit would spare the lot of ye just to save Lionel Bloody Messi. No, no, no. We’re not going down that road.”

    Dessie shared a sympathetic frown.

    “It’s not like we’re happy about the situation,” he explained with a shrug. “We’ve become very attached to you and your ways. I mean, I’m only three seasons into Breaking Bad and my team just got a new manager. We might finally get somewhere.”

    “For Christ’s sake,” the aide-de-camp muttered bitterly, “mankind’s fate is in the hands of fucking Man U fans and we all know they’d rather the world end than see them relegated.” She glared at Dessie, “Which they fucking will.”

    “Caroline!” the president scolded his aide-de-camp. “These people are still our guests.”

    “Sorry, sir,” the aide-de-camp said as she comforted herself with the molded end of her sword.

    “It’s okay,” Dessie said with a shrug. “She’s probably right about United facing the drop.”

    Mary waved her hands for calm.

    “I am sorry,” she said, “but this is the only way to avoid the terrible conditions which will occur if we don’t intervene. You have seven days. I’m afraid there isn’t much more to say. Of course, we’re happy to reiterate the same message to your television cameras.”

    “Do you think you could hold on a few hours?” the president said, looking nervously at his watch. “The American president is on his way.”

    “I’m afraid not,” Mary said.

    The president’s wife looked around the room at the growing despair and confusion.

    She rose and held her hands out for silence, then faced Mary.

    “I believe you,” she said, with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I believe every word you’ve said. You’re right about us. We can’t seem to stop ourselves acting stupidly. To anyone sane, we must seem hell-bent on our own destruction.”

    Mary nodded quietly to Dessie who nodded back as the president’s wife continued.

    “But we deserve more than seven days to make peace with our end. If you are as straightforward and honest as you say, you’ll have to admit that’s fair.”

    Mary seemed to consider for a moment.

    “How long do you suggest we give you to make a good end?” she asked.

    Without hesitation, the president’s wife said, “A year.”

    The rest of the group exchanged questioning looks and the president’s wife cast an interrogating look back but no one seemed able or willing to provide a correction to her timeline.

    “A year?” Mary repeated and she looked at Dessie who bobbed his head in consideration.

    The president’s wife completed her scan of the room and nodded somberly but certainly.

    “Give us a year to make a good end,” she said.

    Mary rose.

    “We are not negotiators, nor are we empowered to make this decision, but I will take your request to those who are and we will provide an answer within twenty-four hours.”

    “How will we know if you’ve agreed?” the president’s wife asked.

    Mary gave an ironic smile.

    “We will give you a sign,” she said with a light chuckle. “If we agree to your proposal then you will see a red sky at sunset tomorrow evening.”

    “A red sky at night is a common occurrence this time of year,” the president said. “How could we be sure it was your signal?”

    Mary smiled again.

    “I doubt you will have seen a red sky like this one,” she said, “and I doubt a red sky everywhere is a common occurrence. There shouldn’t be any doubt.”

    They held their press conference. By this time, reporters from television stations across the world had gathered and the words of the visitors went out live around the globe.

    The American ambassador was keen to revisit the timelines. His team suggested detaining the visitors — by force, if necessary — until the matter could be thoroughly unpicked but this was politely rebuked by the Irish presidential staff and, with the cameras of the world’s press filming them, the small group made their way back through the crowd towards the visitors’ craft. As if by magic, the silver ramp extended from the ship and touched the grass in front of the party.

    The president’s wife hugged the visitors. Tears jeweled her eyes but she retained a determined look. She pressed Mary’s hands lightly in her own.

    “If we can change in this year, can disaster still be averted?”

    Mary looked at her with pity.

    “You have the means,” she said, “but it is unlikely that you will change. It’s better you make your peace with it. Whatever happens, you will not see us again so I’ll say goodbye now.”

    “All the best,” Dessie said and he pumped the president’s limp arm.

    The visitors waved once and walked up the gangplank through a salvo of camera flashes as the beams from overhead helicopters sliced the thickening gloom as though portioning the very air above them.

    The silver ramp disappeared into the craft and a low drone built as the ship slowly rose into the air above them and spun in a light smooth manner that could not be confused with any human vehicle. The disk bobbled in the air with a fluttering ethereality before surging suddenly into the sky and vanishing in the dark thunderheads which had formed above.

    Every word that had been spoken was reported and analysed in minute detail in the hours and days that followed.

    The American president, along with other world leaders, arrived in Ireland soon afterwards and an emergency summit of countries was hastily convened. The general consensus was that the Irish officials had handled the situation terribly. The Americans, in particular, castigated their hosts for the meek surrender of a one-year extension.

    “Fucking amateurs!” their officials lamented. “The opening pitch should have been ten years minimum. And how the hell did nobody mention money?”

    “It wasn’t that type of discussion,” one Irish official protested.

    “It’s always that type of discussion,” her American counterpart replied.

    But, for all the debate and self-important statements, all watched nervously as the sun set the following evening and crimson streaks filled the sky across the world, as though the sun were a gigantic blob of paint wiped across the firmament by a huge inestimable hand.

    Theologians and scholars scrutinised the visitors’ reference to Sodom and Gomorrah. Much focus was given to the use of that story rather than — what many felt would have been — the more fitting tale of the great flood and Noah’s Ark. It was cogently argued by some parties that the visitors had chosen very carefully in order to send a clear message for humanity to get away as fast as possible. Noah, they argued, had taken his time, constructing a vessel enormous enough to contain samples of every animal as well as humanity so that the world could be rebuilt. In the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, only Lott and his immediate family were evacuated and this was done with great haste and at the last possible second.

    Despite this, several Ark-like projects were initiated by tech billionaires with the goal of saving mankind, or more specifically, themselves, along with those tiny portions of mankind which might prove useful to a tech billionaire fleeing a doomed planet. Each contemplated the long hibernation necessary to reach distant, uninhabitable rocks with minimal potential for life and all considered the security of their person and their holdings during such a hibernation. Very little consideration was given to more practical concerns or to the fate of those who had no recourse to a tech billionaire. Nor did any of them attempt to save any other species. The visitors had been ambiguous about the prospects for other creatures and this had established a moral vacuum on the matter into which mankind poured their apathy.

    The concept of dog years took hold with many people. This was the idea that one could minimize sleep and use each second of each day more productively to eke out more value from the limited time we had. As with all human undertakings, it was carried out obsessively and profitably. Dog years became a huge industry with plans, training courses, gurus, TV shows and all manner of proselytising. To all intents and purposes, it became a new religion.

    Religions themselves — that is, the more established ones — felt strongly vindicated by these events. Priests and proponents relished the opportunity to say “I told you so” on a global scale but it was something of a pyrrhic victory. Imminent apocalypse had always been more useful when it was less imminent.

    Some efforts were made to change mankind’s path but these remained fragmented and unpopular. Again, the visitors were blamed for being too vague about what needed to change and many governments argued that the lack of specificity was proof that climate change, rampant consumerism or other obvious ills had never been the issue. More coordinated effort was put into the construction of sophisticated weaponry to enable humans to turn the tables on the visitors when they — so to speak — attempted to call time on us. Air forces and militaries spent huge quantities of time, money and effort scanning the skies above and launching physical and electronic attacks at sections of the atmosphere suspected of harboring enemy spacecraft. They were supported in this by a small residue of tech billionaires; those not busy planning their escape from the planet or who hadn’t already decamped to New Zealand in the misbegotten notion that changing their zip code and getting a new passport might spare them. These various maneuvers must have recalled for the visitors that legendary event — which they had witnessed first-hand — of Emperor Caligula’s troops futilely beating back the waves of the English Channel with their swords.

    Governments sent communications heavenward demanding more time or threatening legal action or sharing fudged statistics demonstrating mankind’s steady progress towards net zero, reforestation, world peace or any other targets they felt might sway the visitors. No reply was forthcoming and, as the year progressed, these upward communications became more desperate and self-aggrandising.

    For the majority of people in the world, however, surprisingly little changed. A year was an impossible horizon for those who did not know where their next sip of water would come from or when they might have their next mouthful of food. Also, for those who wondered when they might feel the next sudden kick through a thin, wet sleeping bag, the next rape, the next beating, the next honour killing. For these people, life continued as it was before. For these people, the end of the world was just another unaffordable luxury.

    Of course, the president’s wife was widely vilified for her role in events. Numerous conspiracy theories circulated online and in the pages of sensational publications, accusing her of having been in league with the visitors from the beginning. She was globally decried as a double-agent who had sold out humanity to save herself and her family.

    The president’s wife cared little for these lies. With her husband, she retired from public life. Their daughter made the bold decision to have a baby with her partner and it was as if the daughter’s body understood the great need for haste, because she became pregnant at the first attempt and, although her son was born two weeks premature, he was pink and healthy and went home the very next day.

    They named the baby Cervantes after the author of his mother’s favourite book, and the president’s wife, along with her husband, moved in with her daughter.

    Apart from his initial punctuality, baby Cervantes did not conform to the script demanded by the limited timescales. By day he was sweet and cherubic but, as the sunlight waned, he transformed into a despot and a sadist. All household members were called into action to walk, rock and coo the tiny screaming dictator into an unattainable sleep. They no longer spoke of dates or calendars anymore and, in their own exhausted way, found the dog years others craved.

    Sometimes, when the president’s wife saw her daughter with Cervantes, she wondered if they would all have been better off if she’d not asked for the extension, if it might have been easier to accept a single week to make their peace with everything, but she quickly dismissed these thoughts and joined her daughter and together they smiled and cooed at the child and spoke of a future that would never be. As all people must.

    Feature Image: Mark Bryan, Prime Directives.

  • Musician of the Month: Johnny Jude

    When I was ten years old a blind man by the name of Mr. John Mitchell taught me how to play the piano accordion. I learned how to read and write music over the next two years and I could play a good selection of waltz’s and  marches. The Centenary March, The Boston Burglar, You and I are a few I can remember. It’s a tricky instrument to play, with the bass keys on the left the piano keyboard on the right and the pulling and pushing it in and out. You feel a bit like Silas Marner at his loom when everything is trundling along together. With each new tune you learn you go through the process of feeling that this is impossible; this is barely possible; this is okay; I can do this without thinking about it.

    I find the process of committing something to muscle memory fascinating. It was around this time my mother, who is an excellent singer, decided she would learn to play guitar to accompany herself. She bought a wine sunburst acoustic guitar and attended a weekly class, keeping a folder of songs with chords written in over the lyrics and diagrams of the chord fingerings.

    I can still remember the first time I took it out of it’s case and began to learn these shapes from the diagrams, G… C, that was all that was needed for the first line of the first song in the folder – My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. When I sang that first line and changed the chord under the melody something switched on inside me that has never switched off ever since. My mind was blown. I could feel the vibrations of the chords and it felt like every cell in my body was resolving as the chords changed supporting the melody. From that moment on the accordion gathered dust and what could only be described as an obsession with the guitar began.

    All I wanted was more chords and more songs to play. Every day I would play through the folder of songs until my fingers were raw and I would have to wait in frustration until the following day to play more. My mother became disheartened with her progress when she could hear me flying through the chord changes and she was still struggling. The simple fact was I was practicing fifty times as much as she was. There’s no big mystery or gift involved in learning to play an instrument, it’s just a matter of whether you are obsessed with it or not.

    I’m not as obsessed with huge amounts of practice anymore. I just target specific pieces  that I am working on or gigging at the time and rehearse those for a couple of hours. I find that it’s just as important to prepare mentally for a show or recording as it is to physically prepare. I had to develop relaxation techniques and routines to calm my body and mind before and during performances. When I say develop I mean tailor my own personal program, the actual techniques themselves have all been around for centuries. I use a combination of yoga postures to ground my body and connect with my breathing coupled with the practice of positive visualization.

    There are so many things that can go wrong that could spoil a gig or a recording, if you start worrying about them you will drive yourself crazy. So stick to the positive outcomes only. Of course it pays to have all your equipment in good order and your chops down.

    I am currently the guitarist in the Dublin based band Shakalak. In this outfit I get to play fun electric guitar lines over a fusion of electro-poetry. It’s a very creative group and our songwriting process is organic and spontaneous. At our rehearsals we allocate time for creation, sometimes nothing of interest will arise and other times we write an absolute hit, start to finish in twenty minutes.

    All of us in the band have our own solo projects and we tip away at these concurrently. I am almost finished writing my second solo album and I am working on the pre-production of these songs at the moment. I am not trying to consciously target any specific genre with these new songs.

    Are they cool? I don’t really know what “cool” is anymore. There are so many different types of cool now it’s a mine field.  I am just following my gut instinct and playing what I want to hear at the moment. Hopefully they will resonate with some people and I will step on a cool bomb every so often.  I am really enjoying playing and singing these new tracks so that makes me happy. I went through a fallow period a few years ago and it feels wonderful to be back in love with writing songs. It’s easy to lose your confidence and mojo for writing. I have psyched myself out of the game a few times at this stage. You just have to keep showing up at the office and something will eventually happen. These are the glory days.

    My first solo album released 12-02-2020: https://johnnyjude.bandcamp.com/album/vitamins-wine