Czech border police snoop along the rail carriage as we pass the frontier from Germany. They seem to linger outside our compartment long enough to survey the light pigmentation of the young Dutch couple and this Hiberno-Norman specimen inside, passing by without seeking identification.
White skin remains a passport – carte blanche – to unspoken liberties in ways most of us carriers hardly understand; a darker hue, with an out-of-date visa, might bring quiet indignities inside a dank room in some god-forsaken border-town.
Born in the city of Brody, near Lviv in present-day Ukraine in 1894, the novelist Joseph Roth wrote: ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.’ A melancholic alcoholic and wandering Jew, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 before the cosmopolitan Old Europe he had evoked was consumed by the flames of racial hatred.
Human lives are dangling like threads from passports in Europe again as borders perceptibly harden: the sword of Damocles hangs over the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, while in the UK at large, drawers are being scoured for the birth certificate of that long-lost grandparent that will yield the Paddy-pass. Throughout Europe, dour forms of patriotism exclude diversity; even in liberal, social-democratic Scandinavia shutters are coming down, as the Far Right surges.
Entirely open borders might be unworkable, but widespread anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is rarely based on any rational assessment of the pros and cons of migration, but appears as an unconscious turning away from the world. After all, the European population is aging and many countries are short of workers in fields indigenous populations are reluctant to enter.
Racists identify the physical features of classes of people with defined cultural traits. This error is often a product of isolation, usually emanating from individuals living in ethnically homogeneous areas, especially small towns. Demagogues prey on those left behind by free-wheeling market economies, but the imagining of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is not purely economic in origin. It is also linked to a patriarchal sense of traditional family units being undermined by liberated women, open sexuality and even dietary choices. The ‘person of colour’ is another unwelcome intrusion of a modern world in flux.
Thus Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s offer to make women who bear four or more (presumably ‘pure-blooded’) children exempt from taxation is a chilling reminder of a time when women’s bodies were pressed into service for the imagined community of the nation. Across Europe an irrational fear of a ‘promiscuous’ Semitic ‘other’ is used to stoke hatred by unscrupulous politicians.
There is also a growing reassertion of the nation state, beyond Brexit. Thus the French government has withdrawn its embassy from Rome in the wake of the Populist Italian administration’s outspoken support for the revolutionary gilets jaune ‘yellow vest’ movement.[i]
Is this a turning of Europe’s mythological gyres: a cycle of one hundred years of recovery and prosperity, before decline and confrontation? The continent really needs to outgrow the truculent teenager phase, and instead rise to the challenge of making our way of life sustainable, and ultimately assist other parts of a world we have made in our own image of nation states.
Any retreat into sullen autarky appears untenable unless most of us are prepared to revert to being small farmers. We are, nevertheless, right to wonder whether European institutions have been overtaken by shadowy lobbyists serving multinational corporations. Big brands are strangling small enterprise, homogenising streetscapes, and upholding the grand theft of in-built-obsolesce underpinning our model of economic-growth-without-end. It begs the question: what keeps the European dream on track?
Romantic Travel
An extensive rail network is perhaps Europe’s greatest asset, and guarantor of a fluid community. Like the capillaries of a great oak, it connects the high branches of Scandinavia to the roots of Italy, and beyond. Whether high-speed behemoth, or squealing rust-heap, train-travel permits a form of contemplation distinctively European; where a delay is simply an invitation to read one’s book, engage in light conversation with travelling companions, or fix lunch.
I wonder whether future generations will experience the slow transitions in scenery, the fading grandeur of old world stations, and the whistle of the guard to set you on your way. Perhaps railways will give way to electric pods or warp drives, but I fear the best-laid techno-Utopian plans of Elon Musk and others will only cater to a select wealthy few. The benefits of railways, a technology that catalysed the Industrial Revolution, altering life on Earth forever, are likely to endure.
As Minister for Transport the current Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described train travel as being for romantics.[ii] This suggests it is sensible to depend on stifling airports with queues and intrusive searches, before the deep vein thrombosis and ear-popping altitude of air travel. The rapid conveyance of tourists to safe spaces in historic cities has brought uniform hotels, chain restaurants and stores selling the same products, in different selfie locations.
For those unable to afford air travel there are bus services leaving from anonymous stations on the asphalt fringes of cities, before cramped seating and desolate road stops. Otherwise, there is the false freedom of a car, wheeling at high speed along a motorway from which nothing can be seen, and where road deaths are a permitted tribute to the car gods evoked by advertisers. All other passenger experiences pale by comparison with a train journey.
Sail-Rail
At times even I, a born-again railer, weary of train travel in Britain. The effects of a decidedly unromantic privatisation are apparent in the sardine can-spacing between seats, the gaudy plastic furnishings, and staggering crowds at peak times, which no doubt make bean counters beam. Wholescale privatisation of an inherently monopolistic service seems to have been the height of folly.
Unmistakably London.
Ticket prices are jarringly expensive too. For example, a journey of eighty-odd miles from Oxford to Birmingham costs over £38 one-way. A return costs much the same, which is of little use if you aren’t going back on your tracks.
There are cheap deals if you reserve in advance – though not on the Oxford-Birmingham line as it happens. A one-way ticket from Oxford to London is available for under £10, compared to the standard rate of £27. But booking weeks in advance negates the old world appeal of train travel, which is to turn up at a station, purchase a ticket and catch the next available service – setting off on a whim perhaps, along with a picnic basket.
One of the great mysteries of this life is how the Sail-Rail deal between the UK and Ireland has endured into present, unromantic, times. I can simply turn up at Dublin Port, purchase my ticket which includes the price of the ferry, before catching a train at a flat rate from Holyhead – with marginal increments depending on distance and speed of ferry – to anywhere in the UK. Very occasionally, after Christmas, or at summer’s end, there is insufficient space on the ferry for all passengers, but this is rare indeed. I only book in advance to avoid the small handling fee charged by Irish Ferries when you purchase at the Port.
Going Sail-Rail from the UK is even easier, as you purchase your ticket at any station – without the handling fee – just like a regular ticket. The full price of approximately €50 between London and Dublin may not be as low as the ludicrous cost of some plane tickets – a form of transport which, perversely, is not subject to the added cost of VAT on its fuel. But by the time you have born the cost of the Stansted train to London (usually costing £18), having avoided the crushing two-and-a-half-hour cheap bus alternative, you won’t be thanking uncle Michael.
Last time on Sail-Rail I went as far as Oxford, met friends for a lavish Indian supper, before wobbling cheerfully back to the station to resume my journey to London. At such times the Sail-Rail pass seems like a golden ticket inside Willy Wonka’s factory, as bemused attendants waive you onwards.
On the Irish side, the main inconvenience is the lack of a decent public transport connection between Dublin city and Port, which has no trains running along the tracks out to it. The 7.15am 153 bus from Westmoreland Street won’t even get you to the Port in time for the 8am sailing. Alas, the Dún Laoghaire-Holyhead connection, conveniently linked to a DART rail service, came to an end in 2015.
The other annoyance is the apparent unwillingness of the UK train companies to align their timetables with the arrival of the ferries, often meaning delays on arrival in insalubrious Holyhead. Contrast this with how on some European train-ferry lines – between Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Denmark and Germany – trains actually mount a ferry and trundle out the other side.
Delays, usually on Wales’s underfunded Arriva line, may require a longer stretch in the less than charming entrepôt, on an otherwise underrated coastline. The town’s appeal has changed little since Jonathan Swift’s 1727 evocation:
Lo here I sit at Holyhead
With muddy ale and mouldy bread
All Christian victuals stink of fish
I’m where my enemies would wish
Convict of lies is every sign,
The inn has not one drop of wine
I’m fasten’d both by wind and tide
I see the ship at anchor ride
The Captain swears the sea’s too rough
He has not passengers enough.
Holyhead notwithstanding, it is now possible to travel in one day, using Sail-Rail and Eurostar, from Dublin Port, via London Euston, proceeding by foot to King’s Cross St. Pancras, to Brussels or Paris. I dream of more links from Holyhead to major UK cities, especially London, and perhaps even a high speed spur through Wales. That might tempt a few more romantics out of taking flights, and make life on our island seem less insular.
Inter-Rail
Last month I purchased an Inter-Rail pass, giving me five days of unlimited travel within a month throughout Europe for €300; albeit with some high-speed lines (especially, inconveniently, in France if you are arriving from Ireland) requiring a reservation, and/or the payment of a supplement. There are, however, reductions available on ferry prices, and with an overnight journey you only need to use up one day of your allotment.
Having taken the Eurostar from London on the new service to Amsterdam, I proceeded immediately to Hamburg, Germany’s understated and cosmopolitan second city. I then headed north, through Denmark, crossing the Copenhagen-Malmo bridge into Sweden, arriving above the snowline in Oslo. I had not maximised my first three day’s travel, but made it as far as I needed.
Cross-country skiing near Oslo, Norway.
After enjoying an all-too-brief cross-country skiing trip with Irish friends now resident there, which included another short train journey into the hills, along with our skis, I returned south. This time taking two days (overnighting in Copenhagen) to get to the Czech Republic.
Arriving in a continental climate with further snow cover, I proceeded east by train out of Prague towards the Jesiniky mountains. This involved a journey on one of a growing number of private lines – the Leo Express – which provides a degree of pampering and efficiency beyond that associated with the state railway company, Cesky Drahy, and cheap deals if you book in advance.
At first blush, this would suggest partial or limited privatisation brings benefits. But I rather suspect that once this neo-liberal genii of de-regulation is let out of the bottle it will be reluctant to return. I expect further calls (in a subservient media) for privatisation in the name of efficiency, preceding a carve-up unfavourable to Czech rail-users, with ‘uneconomic’ lines phased out – as occurred in the UK – and prices hiked, once the ‘dead wood’ of the state company is phased out of existence.
The Czech Republic is endowed with almost ten million kilometres of track, giving it one of the densest networks in the world, and making it a Mecca for train-lovers. Most people, even those living in rural villages, can reach their place of work without a car. The capital, Prague, also has two metro lines and an extensive tram network. It still costs a pittance to get to the airport by Metro and feeder bus.
But more and more Czechs are embracing car culture, in part, no doubt, due to the skillful advertising of this ‘indispensable’ source of freedom. A way of life is being jeopardised by the appeal of autonomous vehicles, but for the moment the railway blood still flows.
Jesiniky Mountains, Czech Republic.
‘the enemy within’
In a worryingly development last January a seventy-one year-old man, Jaromir Balda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for terrorism. He felled trees to block railway lines, pretending Islamists were responsible by leaving messages at the scene proclaiming Allahu Akbar – ‘God is great’ in Arabic. Two passenger trains hit the trees, but fortunately no one was injured. The far-right sympathiser admitted he had hoped to spread fear of Muslim migrants.[iii]
One may assume Balda – like the really murderous Anders Breivik in Norway – considered his actions a form of tough love to his countrymen: waking them up to the danger posed by the ‘enemy within’ – the miniscule Islamic population of the Czech Republic, a country that has, by and large, displayed an unsympathetic attitude to the plight of refugees, especially those with darker skin.
This racism can partly be attributed to long-standing antipathy towards the indigenous Romany (‘gypsy’) people. In contrast, the pale-skinned foreigner, ‘the ex-pat’, is treated with deference, and a little envy, albeit marauding stag parties have sullied the reputation of the English at least.
Balda’s choice of target was darkly symbolic, potentially evoking fears in day trippers from rural parts into cities; and among city dwellers who take trains all the way to remote regions, along with their bikes and skis. This gives way to the delusion of safety offered by the autonomous car journey, and further fracturing of community.
Inter-continental
Three years ago I travelled by train and bus from Portugal as far as Ukraine, on what was a redemptive trip, fulfilling an ambition to visit the former Soviet Union. Crossing the border from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine a distinct culture came into view. At the interchange of Çop trains halt on account of the different rail gauges used on either side. Stalin had ordered this inconvenience in order to slow down invading armies, and prevent people from easily escaping. An enduring cultural fault line is the result. It felt as if I had reached the limit of a Europe I know as a backyard I have not fully investigated.
I hope to continue regular overland peregrinations, ideally by train, but the cost seems to rise each year, with further privatisations on the horizon. I fear that as train connections lapse, the life blood of Europe will cease to flow. Then we will experience the false freedom of driving our cars on anonymous highways, or taking flights to green zones in historic cities, conveniently cleared of native populations that don’t fit with the desired impression the authorities wish to leave.
As Europeans grow wary of diversity it is worth considering the vital role played by railways in fostering community and tolerance. An annual holiday by train ought to be available to anyone living on the continent, even those on a peripheral island that tore away its tracks after independence. Connecting Europeans, in real comfort, to cities, mountains and the sea is perhaps the greatest service the railways still provide, and with continued intermingling our heterogeneous communities might seem more inviting.
Man-made climate change is as good as a fact, but the consequences are uncertain in any specific location. Indeed, the island of Ireland could actually be more hospitable to human habitation under certain scenarios: drier and hotter summers are predicted, albeit with an increased likelihood of storm events; higher atmospheric CO2-levels could also increase crop yields.[i] Our rising emissions could have greater impacts elsewhere.
Mitigation strategies may also have adverse side effects. Witness the expansion of sitka spruce plantations across Ireland, which acidify soils and strangle biodiversity,[ii] in pursuit of an improved carbon balance sheet permitting increases in dairy production. There are also question marks around the impacts of wind farms, especially those sited on blanket peat[iii], requiring hundreds of tonnes of concrete in construction, and disrupting the flightpaths of birds. If this energy is devoted to a new generation of electrified autonomous vehicles, rather than communal transport, it will be in vain.
Climate change opportunism includes the distortion of supermarket shelves being stacked with organic products wrapped in plastic and flown halfway around the world. It is most obvious in the greenwashing of the agricultural sector,[iv] which consistently argues that Irish livestock’s lower emissions profile justifies expansion – as beef and dairy would only be produced elsewhere with higher emissions. Thankfully, the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument is more easily dismissed as data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), analysed by An Taisce, shows that Ireland is, in actual fact, the most carbon-intensive beef producer in Europe, and ranks third on emissions from its dairy sector.[v] Most importantly, however, narrowing the environmental agenda to climate change alone obscures the equally pressing consideration of the Sixth Extinction, the unarguable reality of which is apparent in Ireland.
With this in mind, Is it possible that interested parties could assert rights, already implied by the Irish Constitution, to protect Irish nature itself? Could spiralling emissions then be reduced alongside meaningful biodiversity-gains? Such an argument would build on a foundation of Natural Law, a school of thought embedded in the language and historic interpretation of the Irish Constitution. It can be traced to Classical antiquity, as Sophocles’s Antigone puts it: ‘the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven’, beyond the temporary, and occasionally illegitimate, laws of any state.
During the Middle Ages, especially through Thomas Aquinas, ‘pagan’ Classical arguments were adopted by the Roman Catholic Church. In more recent times these became associated with a toxic and myopic focus on human sexuality, especially women’s bodies. Natural Law still transmits, however, compelling arguments for a universal justice beyond, and above, positive law, informed by dialectic, rather than Christian Revelation as is widely assumed.
The jurist and former President of the High Court, Declan Costello wrote: ‘It has more than once been judicially observed that it can clearly be inferred that the [Irish] Constitution rejects legal positivism as a basis for the protection of fundamental rights and suggests instead a theory of natural law from which those rights can be derived.’[vi] Thus, from the 1960s, Natural Law interpretations ascribed a host of ‘Unenumerated Rights’[vii] to all citizens, including rights to bodily integrity, work, marry, privacy in marital relations, and free movement within the State. These rights are not explicitly identified in the Irish Constitution but are considered intrinsic to the human condition, flowing in particular from a generalised protection of personal rights under Article 40.3. With the Sixth Extinction now upon us, there is an urgent need for Natural Law to be extended to imply an Unenumerated Rights of other species to exist, along with ourselves.
For this to occur, however, the Court must overcome a contemporary moral relativism, and aversion to decisive ethical responses. No doubt truth is a shifting target, and any single account is insufficient, but faith in our capacity to settle ethical arguments at a given point in time needs to be restored. As Aristotle – whose influence on Aquinas’s Natural Law theory was immense – pointed out:
The theorizing of truth is in one sense difficult, in another easy. This is shown by the fact that whereas no one person can obtain an adequate grasp of it, we cannot all fail in the attempt; each thinker makes some statement about the natural world and as an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry; but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable.[viii]
Post-modernists will argue otherwise, but an outlook of ambient confusion is an admission of failure. Holes can be picked in any argument, but the argument as a whole – “a combination of all conjectures” – may stand. One cannot propose anything meaningful without the conviction of arriving at “something considerable” – an elusive truth. A capacity to determine justice requires we overcome a ponderous Post-Truth incoherence.
A contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre sees in the dialectic process, ‘the movement from thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such’. Contemporary environmental challenges require new logical departures, disclosing “how things are”, “as such.” Natural Law theory should encompass an Earth Jurisprudence. Then our laws may confront the reality of an oversized human population radically out of balance with its environment, with Ireland presenting a difficult case.
Currently, however, environmental laws are generally seen as a body of rules foisted on the populace, often in exchange for a subsidy, rather than practices adopted for the commonweal. Accordingly, Coyle and Morrow claim such regulations are seen ‘as a technical instrument of social goals and policies, rather than a body of principles aiming at the articulation of a concept of justice and the good life.’[ix] This can partly be attributed to the prior failure of Natural Law theorists to identify inherent rights in other species.
In contrast, the sanctity of human property rights have been vigorously upheld. Early modern theorists, drawing more on Christian revelation than reason, assumed rights of virtually unrestrained possession, along with dominion over all wild creatures therein. The seventeenth century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius described this as ‘a grant which was renewed on the restoration of the world after the deluge’. To deprive any owner of this would, he said, be ‘an act of injustice.’[x] Importantly, however, up to that point there had been little necessity to assert the rights of wild animals, even in Europe, as humans were living in relative harmony with nature, or at least allowing other species to survive. According to Tim Flannery: ‘after the last muskox died in what is now Sweden about 9,000 years ago, the European mainland did not lose another species until the seventeenth century.’[xi]
Since then the picture has changed dramatically across the world with sixty percent of wild animals wiped out since 1970 alone.[xii] Coyle and Morrow affirm: ‘The very agricultural practices which were held out as a moral necessity by the natural rights theorists can, it seems, create untold environmental damage.’ Given the scale of ecological damage that has ensued – associated with European colonisation of the globe – they argue that ‘the ethical assumptions of the seventeenth century conception of property cannot survive in such circumstances.’[xiii] The accumulating impacts on our planet of over seven billion human beings, living longer than ever, enjoins alternative approaches to land ownership. As Coyle and Morrow put it: ‘If human agriculture was ever in harmony with nature it certainly is not any longer and the sanctity of individual ownership must be restrained. Duties must join rights.’[xiv]
Natural Law is an ongoing, truth-seeking dialectical process with the aim of disclosing, “how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.” If Natural Law is to have continued relevance it must adapt to current conditions. A re-imagining of Natural Law is evident in the field of Earth Jurisprudence, or Wild Law, a term coined by Cormac Cullinan to refer to human laws that are consistent with Earth Jurisprudence.[xv] According to one of its inspirators, Thomas Berry: ‘The Universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects and every member of the Earth Community has three inherent rights: the right to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.’[xvi] These rights ought, logically and morally, to be incorporated into Irish law.
But how can these aspirations be given tangible legal form? In a seminal 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’[xvii] Christopher D. Stone explores how Wild Law might apply. He argues that natural objects could have legal standing by analogy with companies, states, infants, incompetents, municipalities or even universities. Thus, a court appoints a trustee when a corporation displays incompetence. He writes:
On a parity of reasoning, we should have a system in which, when a friend of a natural object perceives it to be endangered, he can apply to a court for the creation of a guardianship … The guardian would urge before the court injuries not presently cognizable – the death of eagles and inedible crabs, the suffering of sea lions, the loss from the face of the earth of species of commercially valueless birds, the disappearance of wilderness areas.
He also draws an analogy with the law of patents and copyright:
I am proposing that we do the same with eagles and wilderness areas as we do with copyrighted works, patented inventions and privacy: make the violation of rights in them to be a cost by declaring the piracy of them to be the invasion of a property interest.
Furthermore, he suggests this could lead to modifications in our representative democracies:
I am suggesting that there is nothing unthinkable about, and there might on balance even be a prevailing case to be made for an electoral appointment that made some systematic effort to allow for the representative “rights” of non-human life.
Stone envisages changes in our legal culture informing wider social norms, as, ‘a society that spoke of the “legal rights of the environment” would be inclined to legislate more environment-protecting rules by formal enactment.’
Intriguingly, he also speculates, ‘What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of geophysics, biology and the cosmos’, proposing ‘that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism of which mankind is a functional part’. Similarly, Coyle and Morrow argue: ‘The problem is that meaningful change responding to environmental and social imperatives will require a true paradigm shift in how we regard our relationship with the world of which we form a part.’
A transformation in our legal relationship with the natural world requires the participation of other fields. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley who famously described the poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The philosopher Timothy Morton makes the provocative claim that putting ‘something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy did for the figure of women.’[xviii] Perhaps W.B. Yeats’s identification of Irish nature with a ‘glimmering girl’, ‘with apple blossoms in her hair’ distracts from an ongoing exploitative relationship, linked to our colonial inheritance. Indeed, rather than celebrating a patriarch ‘Digging’ for turf, as in Seamus Heaney’s poem by that name did, new accounts might draw inspiration from an often-overlooked visionary poet of the early twentieth-century Irish Revival, Eva Gore-Booth. She gave up the wealth and privilege of her aristocratic background to devote herself to the poor. Gore-Booth also recognises the right of all creatures to exist on the land, notwithstanding human ownership in her 1906 poem ‘The Landlord’
O the bracken waves and the foxgloves flame,
And none of them ever has heard your name –
Near and dear is the curlew’s cry,
You are merely a stranger passing by.[xix]
Hearteningly, all around the world, from Ecuador to New Zealand, conceptions of Earth Jurisprudence, Wild Law or Pachamama are actually taking route. For example, Germany’s constitution makes protection of ‘the foundations of nature and animals’ a national imperative, applicable to government agencies, the legislature and the judiciary. The provision has been cited in over seven hundred cases. Moreover, echoing Christopher D. Stone, Oliver A. Houck points out this ‘does not include the more numerous acts of compliance that drew no litigation at all.’[xx]
Meanwhile in Ireland species loss continues apace. Liam Lysaght recently records: ‘of the 3,000 species that have undergone a red list conservation assessment, one in every four species is threatened with extinction here.’[xxi] Of particular concern is the continued exploitation of peat bogs for fossil fuel extraction – where considerations of nature conservation align precisely with keeping fossil fuels, and embedded methane, in the ground – as well as the impacts of grazing ruminants.
Unfortunately, existing environmental legislation, including the EU’s Habitats Directive, is failing to protect endangered species adequately, including the iconic curlew, which is now on the red list. This can partly be attributed to a lack of enforcement, but also, as we observed, such laws are currently considered an encumbrance on property owners, and not a scheme of protection for a common inheritance. So how do we spare what remains of Irish nature from the ravages of human exploitation?
A constitutional amendment enshrining nature rights, similar to that operating in Germany, should be the long-term goal. But this will take time to bring to fruition, especially as mainstream media only falteringly highlights extinction threats, and none of the main political parties prioritise protection of biodiversity.
I propose the alternative of a test case, applying Thomas Berry’s tripartite rights to a particular native species; proposing, for example, the curlew has a right to be, to habitat and to reproduce, alongside humans, based on a Natural Law interpretation of the Irish Constitution – as a previously Unenumerated Right. It seems crucial that such rights are ‘discovered’ sooner rather than later before further, irreversible, losses occur.
The Court could certainly injunct particular activities to protect species under threat, or prohibit certain classes of herbicides or insecticides outright, or even declare particular lands under private ownership as protected habitats. This will require expert witness from recognised authorities to distinguish competing rights of native, invasive and naturalized species. Property owners should be compensated for any loss, but under the Irish Constitution all rights, including that to property, are subject to the common good, which is served by preventing extinctions.
The allocation of reserves and prohibition on the use of certain chemicals would be a proportionate appropriation by the Judiciary of the powers of the Legislature and Executive branches, in circumstances where there has been a serious dereliction of duty. The Sixth Extinction is an emergency happening before our eyes with recognisable victims, unlike the unpredictable devastation that climate change is wreaking.
Cattle and sheep farmers can find new roles as landscape guardians. Re-wilding may begin with marginal lands, where farming is already uneconomic, while better land currently under pasture can be converted to tillage in order to accelerate what a recent article in The Lancet has referred to as the ‘Great Food Transformation.’[xxii]
Eventually, beyond legal prescriptions, habitat reclamation can endear the population to the landscape, and reform destructive behaviours. In developing our appreciation of the soft sounds and sweet aromas in nature we may consider reducing dependence on noisy, polluting motor cars. Greater biodiversity also offers scope for judicious harvesting of foodstuffs, building materials and fuel. The tragedy of the loss of other species is almost impossible to convey.
Many of us wish to see our laws go further: putting an end to the perverse subsidy regime that only benefits the Beef Barons; or dignifying all animals with a decent life, in the wild. For the moment, however, our best legal argument is to assert the rights of all resident Irish species, living in ecological balance, simply to exist. Reduced emissions will be a happy by-product of biodiversity-gain, raising environmental awareness to a point where destructive behaviours are recognised, and changed. In beginning to liberate the natural world from human dominion let us recall the small victories won in the battle against human slavery along the road to the great milestones. Wild Law can emerge incrementally in Ireland through our existing constitutional framework.
[vi] Declan Costello, ‘Natural Law, the Constitution, and the Courts’, from Lynch and Meenan (eds.) Essays in Memory of Alexis FitzGerald, Dublin, The Incorporated Law Society of Ireland, 1987, p.109
[vii] The original ‘Unenumerated Right’ to ‘Bodily Integrity’ was approved by the Supreme Court in Ryan v. A.G. [1965] IESC 1; [1965] IR 294 (3rd July, 1965)
[xvii] Christopher D. Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing–Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review. 45 (1972): 450–87.
[xviii] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p.5.
[xix] [xix] Eva Gore-Booth ‘The Land to a Landlord’, from Sonja Tierney (ed), Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems, Dublin, Arlen House, 2018, p.166
[xx] Houck, Noah’s Second Voyage: The Rights of Nature as Law, 31 Tul. Envtl. L.J. 1, 2017
[xxi] Liam Lysaght, ‘The six steps needed to save Irish Biodiversity’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times
[xxii] Prof Walter Willett, MD et al, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.
How Irish Propaganda Operates Part I (HIPO I) identifies an ‘essential constituency’ of farmers, which offer an overwhelmingly preponderance of their support to representatives of the political duopoly in rural constituencies. Upsetting this cohort frays a brittle alliance maintaining the dominant consensus of steady economic growth, and rising rents. As a result the media and politicians exercise caution where direct criticism of their interests is concerned, exemplified by Leo Varadkar’s volte-face in response to revealing he was cutting down on his red meat consumption.[i]
To define the ‘farming’ sector as such is, however, misleading: what is really referred to is the cartels, which control the export and domestic trade in livestock products. These have, over decades, manipulated farming opinion, especially through the in-house Irish Farmers Journal and pro-industry IFA, into falsely assuming an alignment of interests. Transnational corporations also influence national nutritional guidelines, and contribute to the state’s ‘laggardly’ response to climate change.
It would be incorrect to suggest that the sector is immune from criticism – habitually referred to as ‘our farmers’ by the state broadcaster – in mainstream Irish media. Any reputable news organisation which ignores compelling stories covered in the international press would lose credibility, and there are conscientious journalists working within these organisations. Moreover, the Irish media must appear to be balanced – ‘facts don’t have opinions’ as the Irish Times advertises – and conscientious. But the paper of record neglects to run investigations – thus the horse meat scandal of 2013 was broken by The Guardian – while subtly shaping public perception.
Veganism, in particular, is treated with a mixture of contempt and fear. This reaction may be symptomatic of an older generation’s contempt for a thrusting, and increasingly environmentally-informed, ‘snowflake’ generation, but anti-vegan invective also advantages many of their main advertisers. A recent article in the Irish Times by Brian Boyd warned: ‘Beware the perils of Veganuary’; quoting ‘renowned chef’ Anthony Bourdain’s description of vegans as ‘the Hezbollah-like splinter faction of vegetarians.’[ii] The article recycles arguments previously made in UK publications likening the philosophy to the dietary disorder called orthorexia – an unhealthy preoccupation with eating healthy food.
Yet the science on the matter is clear, with the American Dietetic Association advising that ‘appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.’[iii] The rise of Veganism is the least of Ireland’s nutritional problems: the country is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, linked to the standard Irish diet. What is striking about the paper’s coverage of veganism is that vegans themselves are rarely, if ever, permitted to speak directly to the reader.
‘Cartels have manipulated farming opinion for decades’ Image (c) Daniele Idini
Lancet Recommendations
Last month The Lancet published a paper entitled ‘Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems’, which ‘found strong evidence’, indicating ‘food production is among the largest drivers of global environmental change by contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and land-system change’.
The paper convened thirty-seven leading scientists from sixteen countries in various disciplines including human health, agriculture, political sciences, and environmental sustainability. They argued we can provide ‘healthy diets … for an estimated global population of about 10 billion people by 2050 and remain within a safe operating space’; crucially, however, ‘even small increases in consumption of red meat or dairy foods would make this goal difficult or impossible to achieve.’ This will require ‘unprecedented global collaboration and commitment’ and ‘nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.’[iv] The headline, in the Irish media at least, was a recommendation that red meat consumption should decline by 90% in developed countries such as Ireland.
This radical and timely proposal appeared on the front page of the Irish Times. But a subtle fight back soon commenced, undermining its contents. Was it by coincidence that on the following day a recipe by Lilly Higgins appeared in the paper for sirloin steak?
More substantially, two days on, Kevin O’Sullivan interviewed Professor Alan Matthews; the headline writer emphasising his academic credentials. Matthews argued that ‘Ireland had a role in continuing meat and dairy production, provided it backed up its sustainability credentials with rigorous evidence.’[v] This is a significant proviso given that leading environmentalists have decried the government’s flagship Origin Green as an exercise in ‘greenwashing’.[vi]
The bias of the piece is demonstrated by a failure to canvass the opinion of an environmental scientist who could have offered an alternative perspective (and any number would have done so) to counter Matthews’s opinion. Instead the partisan views of the IFA’s Joe Healy were dutifully conveyed.
The editorial stance of the Irish Times (penned perhaps by O’Sullivan himself?) is made clear a few days later, when it described the report as ‘narrowly prescriptive’.[vii] The message is the equivalent of a ‘fuck you’ to the thirty-seven scientific authors, saying we in Ireland prefer to invert the food pyramid and will continue to devote 90% of our land to livestock.
The Irish Times also misleadingly conflates production with consumption. Allowing (without accepting) that Ireland enjoys a comparative advantage in low carbon-emission livestock production, which we continue to export, albeit within a reduced market: why should Irish consumers adopt a different diet to the rest of the world – especially given the authors are not only exploring environmental impact but also healthy nutrition – simply because we are living in a country currently dominated by pastoral agriculture?
As long as we operate within a global food system – where the bulk of our own agricultural products are exported and we import essential commodities including most of our fruit and vegetables. We cannot have it both ways, and say domestic consumption should mirror domestic production.
The Irish Times, for its part, is not displaying the “unprecedented global collaboration and commitment” the authors have called for. The editors are in no position to question the veracity of the Lancet analysis, leaving their pronouncement in Post-Truth territory.
Change of policy in the National Broadcaster
Hitherto virtually a cheerleader, a perceptible change in reporting policy on climate change is setting RTÉ on a collision course with the agricultrual sector.
The legitimacy of expressing climate change denial is being denied. Shutting down discussion on any subject may seem prescriptive, and a dangerous precedent to set, but considering the overwhelming scientific consensus, and the cataclysmic scenarios painted, the response appears proportionate. This works to the disadvantage of the cartels, which have been expanding the dairy industry in particular, while cloaking its emissions.
Michael Healy-Rae, ‘Self-styled Kerry man Joke’.
The new policy of zero tolerance became obvious on a recent episode of RTÉ’s Liveline, when Tim Boucher-Hayes refused to accept the validity of Michael Healy-Rae’s ‘opinion’ on climate change, before giving him enough rope to hang most political careers. Boucher Hayes exposed the self-styled Kerry man joke, who insisted he was being insulted, but could not say how.[viii]
After many years of watching, and occasionally appearing on RTÉ, I was amazed to hear the dialogue. I fear, however, that advertisers will make their feelings known, highlighting the threat to ‘livelihoods’, ignoring how most farmers’ incomes are derived entirely from EU subsidies. If anything, farmers should be paid to cultivate healthy fruit and vegetables, or re-wild their estates.
The sector makes great play on its importance to the Irish economy, but the input costs, including direct payments to farmers, imported feedstuffs, fertilizer, machinery, and fuel are not acknowledged; nor are externalised costs such as the pollution of waterways affecting the availability of potable water. This points to the long-standing failure of the Irish media to interrogate the structure and impacts of the sector.[ix] In this respect the environmental and agricultural correspondent George Lee has been a serious disappointment.
It should also be emphasised that the environmental argument has moved on from a narrow focus on climate change, which can lead to damaging outcomes, such as encouraging sitka spruce plantations which acidify soils and reduce biodiversity, in order to allow the dairy sector to expand.
The beef industry is more vulnerable to the environmental and nutritional arguments being laid against it, but the challenges to the dairy sector are mounting too, especially in terms of the idea that consumption is essential to human health, or event beneficial: the Harvard School of Public Health say that dairy is neither the only nor the best source of calcium.[x]
The shady global manipulation of nursing mothers who are encouraged to top-up with formula, or give up on breast feeding altogether, is a scandal waiting to erupt. Ireland, as the second highest exporter of powdered milk in the world, will be at the heart of it.
Unsurprisingly to date there has been no coverage in mainstream Irish media of the decision of the Canadian government to no longer identify a specific function for dairy produce in a healthy, balanced diet. Their new guidelines lump dairy in with other proteins. Canadians are advised to fill half their plates with fruits and vegetables, a quarter with carbohydrate-rich foods, and a quarter with protein sources.[xi]
Canada’s new healthy guidelines do not contain a separate dairy section.
Previously, Ireland’s leading environmental writer John Gibbons – notably writing for DeSmogUK rather than the Irish Times which he occasionally contributes to – exposed the use of fake data by the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed purporting to show emissions from the sector were not rising as fast as they were in reality.[xii] The plot is curdling, and the message can only be managed for so long, especially with EU fines looming over rising emissions.
Source: Ireland Environmental Protection Agency.
‘Two sides of the same debased coinage’
Fintan O’Toole is the Irish Times’s most high profile columnist. Alone arguably in the Irish media, he is permitted to do investigative work alongside editorial commentary. But he has now positioned himself as a global intellectual, rather than simply an Irish hack, devoting himself to the subject of Brexit in particular in publications such as the New York Review of Books and New York Times. His articles condemning Britain’s ‘mad’ imperial hubris increasingly appear like word magnets on a fridge that are shuffled about from week to week. It means one of the progressive ‘slots’, essential to the Irish Times’s distinctive brand of conscientious virtue-signalling, is rarely focused on Irish issues.
Moreover, O’Toole has long displayed a blind spot towards environmental issues. As an urban, literary man he might be excused for playing to his strengths, and avoiding environmental questions, but how these are dealt with is increasingly important to the understanding of any country. His current emphasis is all the more frustrating given during his early career O’Toole forensically exposed the collusion between Charles J. Haughey’s administration and Larry Goodman’s Anglo-Irish Beef Processors, culminating in the Beef Tribunal of 1991.
Goodman’s company APB continues to dominate the Irish beef processing industry. Symbolically at least in 2012 the family of Larry Goodman acquired the former Bank of Ireland headquarters building on Dublin’s Baggot Street.
Yet O’Toole’s subsequent book on the subject claimed that the ‘emerging democracy of the Irish State was in a fundamental way incompatible with the power of the beef industry’; likening Ireland to a Latin American country where conversion from tillage to grassland depopulated the land and brought speculative investment, with the difference that in, ‘Ireland, the land was cleared by emigration rather than the slaughter of the Indians’[xiii]
He went so far as to claim:
The strength of the beef industry has been such as to limit the development of the kind of coherent, confident civil and political society which could control that industry and integrate it into a working notion of the common good. It is no accident, therefore, that the events described in this book are as much about political failure in contemporary Ireland as they are about the behaviour of the beef industry. They are two sides of the same debased coinage.[xiv]
O’Toole effectively conveyed the extent to which that Fianna Fáil government, especially the then Minister for Industry and Commerce Albert Reynolds, did the bidding of a company that exposed the state to a export credit liability of €100 million, and a wanton disregard for human health in the processing of cattle for food.
At one point O’Toole described how the Irish government’s relationship with the company had:
definitively pushed the government beyond the bounds of democratic authority and into the realms of the arbitrary abuse of power. The most basic norm of democratic government – that the state is not above the law – had been breached. And it had been done at the request of Larry Goodman.[xv]
The horse meat scandal of 2013 provided further evidence of a permissive attitude towards breaches of health and safety regulations in Goodman’s company or subsidiaries, yet he has remains untouchable. The mainstream Irish media, including Fintan O’Toole are seemingly uninterested, or unwilling, to conduct further investigations. Instead we get great rollicking tales about English ineptitude.
Pastoralism
After independence, pastoralist farmers (including the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan 1924-32) have effectively conveyed the idea that their interests align with the population at large. This account has rarely been challenged either by historians (with the exception of the late, Raymond Crotty) or journalists. Yet the pattern of immigration that continued into independence from rural Ireland was a product of a mode of production requiring low labour inputs, as O’Toole pointed out.
Wheat production even for domestic consumption did become uneconomic once mechanization became widely available from the early 1950s. Moisture levels during harvesting of Irish cereals make them unsuited to combined harvesters. The traditional method of tying or ‘bindering’ wheat by hand and drying it bundles before storage had become too labour intensive. It then became axiomatic from the 1960s that Ireland’s comparative advantage lay in livestock production, beef in particular, despite the historic inefficiencies of the sector.
One opportunity cost of relying on beef and dairy for export has been that overall food prices in a predominantly rural society have remained comparatively high, even by comparison with a highly-urbanised country such as Britain. This has worked to the detriment of urban workers, and even those living in rural Ireland, most of whom still live on imported foodstuffs.[xvi]
Furthermore, since independence a lack of variety in the range of crops being grown for the domestic market is apparent. In part this was a consequence of a stunted gastronomic culture. The result has been that the traditional Irish diet is notably low in fruit and vegetables consumption, increasing the likelihood of obesity. An historic missed opportunity was the failure of the state to support an emerging cooperative movement, advocating state-assisted greenhouse construction across the West of Ireland during the 1960s.
Today, with a climate not dissimilar, and a landmass far smaller, the Netherlands is the second leading exporter of vegetables in the world by value.[xvii]
The arrival of EU subsidies in the form of the CAP from the 1970s ossified the structure of Irish agriculture, driving up the price of land, and thereby decreasing the scope for the kind of cutting edge horticulture the Dutch have mastered.
Dig deeper into the substrate of Irish society and one discovers further ill-effects from Irish pastoralism’s inversion of the food pyramid. One-off housing is often seen as the scourge of rural Ireland. In contrast the Clachan of pre-Famine times involved substantial consolidated settlements, where farmers mostly grew crops for direct consumption. The Great Famine came about because of the tiny holdings of so many farmers, which brought intensive mono-cropping, and reliance on a single foodstuff.
Abandoned settlement, County Sligo.
Furthermore, extensive motor car reliance is connected to these one-off-developments; also bringing problems with subsequent urban development, as the preference of the pastoralist migrant to the city was for a detached home, rather than an apartment. We now contend with low density, suburban sprawl which has led the European Commission to describe Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario’ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.’[xviii]
There appears to be little genuine opposition to the political duopoly, with Sinn Fein increasingly occupying the position held by Fianna Fáil in the nationalist spectrum. Sounding off on non-issues such as Venezuela belies a growing accommodation with the dominant consensus. The worst case scenario is that a Far Right party will derive support from the rising discontent with widening inequality, a housing crisis and the ongoing crisis in the provision of publish health.
Until we develop a functioning Irish media, interrogating the economic and social structures, including agriculture, and bringing accountability, the advance of genuinely progressive politics will remain stalled.
[iii] Craig WJ, Mangels AR; American Dietetic Association.’ Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets.’ J Am Diet Assoc. 2009 Jul;109(7):1266-82. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864/, accessed 26/1/19.
[iv]Prof Walter Willett, MD, ,Prof Johan Rockström, PhD, Brent Loken, PhD, Marco Springmann, PhD, Prof Tim Lang, PhD, Sonja Vermeulen, PhD, Tara Garnett, PhD, David Tilman, PhD, Fabrice DeClerck, PhD, Amanda Wood, PhD, Malin Jonell, PhD, Michael Clark, PhD, Line J Gordon, PhD, Jessica Fanzo, PhD, Prof Corinna Hawkes, PhD, Rami Zurayk, PhD, Juan A Rivera, PhD, Prof Wim De Vries, PhD, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, PhD, Ashkan Afshin, MD, Abhishek Chaudhary, PhD, Mario Herrero, PhD, Rina Agustina, MD, Francesco Branca, MD, Anna Lartey, PhD, Shenggen Fan, PhD, Beatrice Crona, PhD, Elizabeth Fox, PhD, Victoria Bignet, MSc, Max Troell, PhD, Therese Lindahl, PhD, Sudhvir Singh, MBChB, Sarah E Cornell, PhD, Prof K Srinath Reddy, DM, Sunita Narain, PhD, Sania Nishtar, MD, Prof Christopher J L Murray, MD, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.
[vi] Manus Boyle, ‘Fine Gael accused of greenwashing over Green Week campaign’, August 24th, 2018, Greennews.ie, https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/
[ix] The cost of inputs https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/was estimated at over €5 billion in 2017: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/oiiaf/outputinputandincomeinagriculture-finalestimate2017/ accessed 25/1/19.
[x] Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, ‘Calcium and Milk’, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/calcium-and-milk/
[xviii] Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html
‘This is madness’, two friends chimed one night upon hearing I planned to bring out a book, reminding me I had no marketing strategy or distribution network. I would lose a fortune they maintained, consigning good paper to land fill.
I was at least reassured by the designer’s, Distinctive Repetition, insistence on the most stringent environmental standards; meaning, whatever else, the book would not be expensive on the Earth.
Perhaps I should have listened to my friends’ heartfelt remonstrances, and issued a countermanding order. But I held a strong attachment to the idea of bringing out a hard copy in time for the Christmas market after a year working online.
For convenience Cassandra Voices is now a limited company, but we have always had more of the character, and pitfalls, of a rock band. The money required by participants is just one constraint among others including time, technical abilities and mental health.
Short-term financial reward is only one metric for success; providing a platform for progressive writers and artists not ordinarily present in the media landscape brings its own rewards. Salaries will hopefully follow diligent application.
Anyway, so far we have managed to shift over half of the editions and will continue to flog them over the next few months. The investment has cut a swathe through what small capital I held in reserve, but in return I feel Cassandra Voices is more relevant having made its print debut. I may have little business acumen, but am familiar with the saying that ‘you must speculate in order to accumulate.’
Our economic system, predicated on the fiction of money, ascribes little reward for writing, particularly journalism that bites, so it was never going to be easy to bring to life this publication, fostering views that go against the grain .
Bringing out digital monthly editions over the course of the year required a lot of persuasion from an editor without a cheque book, but we managed to attract excellent contributions nonetheless. I had a strong sense that many of these articles deserved to be cast in the relatively permanent form of a book, which minimises distraction and imparts information more effectively than online reading.
It would also offer a showcase for my photographic partner Daniele Idini, and an award-winning graphic design studio. I was determined to bring out the print edition, even if it did not make short-term business sense. In so doing I hope we are performing an important role in our democracy.
Since publication our friend Sé Merry Doyle of Loopline Film has made a short documentary on our efforts to sell the book,featuring a number of quirky Dublin characters, and a dying world of independent bookshops.
Picture this scene. Next to a Martello tower, a grimy concrete shelter below which a motley crew, ranging from whooping lads to fragile ladies, make their way, often daily, into the ocean at Seapoint, Dublin. Some swim significant distances – measured in buoys and other landmarks – others simply ‘take the waters’. There are New Irish here, while native Dubliners mix easily with country friends, in the collective gasp before wading in.
I have visited the sea most days so far this winter. It is the dread of the cold, not the cold itself that holds the most fear. Once enclosed by the water my limbs thrash a course, and I am no longer conscious of the temperature. That is as long as I go in every day. If I leave it for any length, the cold will sting, even in the summer months.
Is this a sport I wonder? There is no zero sum game of winners and losers. No match reports. No fandom. But there is conviviality, life affirmation, fitness and even a boost to the immune system I have been told. But something deeper motivates my immersions, and any health benefits are tangential.
I am dreading the months of January, February and March. It is hard to contemplate temperatures that will have dropped a further three or four degrees to eight degrees.[i] Remarkably, the average sea temperatures in December is higher than in May, when the difference between air and water could be fifteen degrees. This month the water is often warmer than the air, although you lose heat a lot quicker without your clothes on.
Also this month the solstice coincides with a full moon. I have no idea if this has a symbolic significance. What I do know is that swimming with a crowd during a full moon is great craic. I have attended these lantern-lit gatherings for the past two months, and am hoping to brave it again on the 21st. One trick to stave off hypothermia is to bring along a hot water bottle to pour over extremities afterwards, making sure to avoid giving yourself a scalding.
I have just started wearing protective gloves – which I found on the street – into the water. It makes quite a difference to my hands on the twenty-five minute cycle home. I am thinking of acquiring booties that I see other people wear, but that would involve a financial investment in this lowest maintenance of sports. Really all you need are togs, towel and a good dollop of madness.
I take pleasure in seeing an array of birdlife by the seashore: there are the usual suspects of gulls and cormorants – which I now see are colonising the River Dodder near where I live as fish numbers decline in the sea – but also Brent Geese along with Waders some of which make their way from Iceland, so I guess they find our waters positively balmy! It is shocking to hear that shards of plastic are affecting these migrants’ welfare.[ii]
Most days I take a picture from the same spot overlooking the Poolbeg stacks. I do wonder about posting these on social media, but I have available to me the superb technology of a telephone, which takes fine pictures of sky, sea and land converging. Obviously in the process I am selling the platform of an irresponsible multinational, but cannot the same be said of any author whose book is on display in a chain store? I just want to convey the beauty of my city and its hinterland, and how we should treasure the wildlife, and examine carefully issues like the emissions coming from that eerie incinerator by the stacks.
This summer my mother died. Losing a parent is generally a seismic life experience. I think my dedication to the swimming has had something to do with that. Cycling to and from Seapoint I pass by places I associate with her. It is sad, but I don’t want to avoid it.
When my mother went into a hospice I immediately returned from the UK where I had been working. The following day she said: ‘don’t let me stop you from going for a swim’, much to our amusement. Two days later she passed away.
The other landmark near where I swim is Dun Laoghaire pier. It is so much a part of the geography of this place that it seems timeless, but it was built on the initiative of a private citizen, Richard Toucher, a Norwegian sailor who settled in Dublin, passing away in 1841. He provided, at great personal expense, most of the granite for the building of the harbour. This philanthropic enterprise saved many lives, and now provides a bit of shelter as we swim at Seapoint, where it can still get quite choppy.
This is an extract from one of his letters:
I write not for fame, but for utility. It is my aim rather to be understood than admired. To elegance of composition I aspire not. But I have some nautical experience…and…the idea of an Asylum Port at Dunleary is ever first in my thoughts.
The Merchants, Ship Owners and Ship-Masters of Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport, Harrington and Parton, are also preparing a petition to be presented to His Grace The Duke of Richmond, praying his aid and support for the erection of this much wanted pier at Dunleary. This I am not astonished at, when I reflect how many of their relatives have been lost on the coast of our Bay, the numbers of widows and fatherless children that are left to bemoan that this pier had not long since been built, which would have saved to them what was in this life most valuable.
For his troubles Richard Toucher died a bankrupt.[iii] We recall his great legacy today, this Cassandra Voice, who devoted his fortune to the continuing benefit of others.
Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com
THE LONG READ: In the last edition ‘How Irish Propaganda Operates’ explored how political and media duopolies uphold a dominant consensus of steady economic growth and rising rents, to the benefit of a shrinking, propertied elite. The Irish media sector is commented upon in a 2018 survey of press freedoms by Reporters Without Borders which found that the ‘highly concentrated nature of media ownership in Ireland continues to pose a major threat to press freedom, and contributed to Ireland’s two-place fall in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index.’ They also pointed to the chilling effect of high awards in defamation actions.[i] Curiously, however, that report neglected to mention the 2018 acquisition by the Irish Times of the Cork-based Landmark Media group, which includes the Irish Examiner, to create the current print duopoly.
As regards the ‘crucial constituency’ of farmers supporting the political duopoly, and concomitant failure of the government to compel reductions in GHG emissions – of which the agricultural sector produces over one third of the national total[ii] – a recent report found Ireland was the worst-performing state at tackling climate change in the EU.[iii]
This sequel explores how the Internet, especially social media, is shaping the future of Irish politics. The wider global context is a rise in support for the Far Right, a tendency to which Ireland is not immune. This resurgence is prompted by deepening inequality, and the political, moral and economic failure of the Russian Communist model, but also disorientation in the wake of technological change;and a fundamental failure at the heart of liberalism to identify universal values. We may be on the brink of a new age of barbarism, but cannot afford to give up hope of reforming state and supranational institutions.
I –Changing Politics
To my surprise a few months ago I received email correspondence from Leo Varadkar: ‘Blooming hell’, I thought to myself, ‘His Early-Riserliness, contacting me!’. ‘Perhaps he’s ready to commit to decarbonisation, public housing and basic income, and is looking to this hitherto unheralded journalist for advice. Now where did I leave my singlet…’
My ego crumpled on discovering it was political spam with a sender address of finegael@fiinegael.ie. There would, alas, be no warm breakfast awaiting on Merrion Square after we had buddied-up at the gym.
Then I got annoyed. I had never given my email address to anyone from that organisation, let alone consented to receive Mr Varadkar’s grimacing impressions of a vlogger. I decided, however, against channelling subsequent missives straight into the ‘junk’ folder – where I would consign other unsolicited mail – to see how the story unfolded.
The emails are an intermittent reminder of just who is in charge of this country, and what he and his party pals are up to. There is little sophistication or depth to the presentations – boil-in-the-bag corporate fare – but they leach into my consciousness like the jingle on an annoying commercial, or ear worm. I may yet complain to the Data Protection Commissioner, but will settle for writing this article, for the time being at least.
With its ample resources, Fine Gael has been fastest out of the new technology blocks among Irish political parties. We may assume the rest are catching up, or will go the way of the Progressive Democrats.
The din from online chatter is rising, and parties are steeling themselves for a long digital ground war. Politics has travelled a great distance since Alexis de Tocqueville in his seminal account of Democracy in America (1830) declared that ‘nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.’[iv]
Now we are confronted with a barrage of information from multiple sources on a digital screen. It is early days, in historical terms, in our relationship with a new technology, but our neural pathways are already being reconfigured in ways we do not yet comprehend. Just as the invention of writing altered how the brain processes and retains information, so it has been with the Internet.
As the character Mark Renton puts it in the original Trainspotting: ‘Diane was right. The world is changing. Music is changing. Drugs are changing. Even men and women are changing. One thousand years from now, there will be no guys and no girls, just wankers. Sounds great to me.’ Politics is changing too, and the calibre of some of those in power is an indictment on the failure of more of us to get involved: as Micheal O’Siadhail warned: ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy.’[v]
Political parties have been using focus groups, analogous to those used in the advertising industry, to test the popularity of policies for decades. Analysis of Internet browsing offers far greater and wider insights. A graphic presentation produced by Eoin Tierney for a previous article in Cassandra Voices illustrates the extent of our data leakage.[vi] Unless we take various precautions, records of our online movements are available to the highest- – or best-connected – bidder.
Some years ago I attended a conference at which one of the speakers was said to be, in hushed tones, ‘Obama’s scientific advisor’. He described how the former president’s second campaign team had made use of extensive data mining – tapping into data from Amazon purchases in particular as I recall – but warned the other side ‘would catch up in time for the next election’.
Pandora’s box had been prised open, and various troll armies have since crawled out, now led by an aging commander-in-chief with disconcertingly bright hair, while in the background another short, middle-aged man – who looks suspiciously like a trophy hunter clad in combat apparel – is whipping the troops into a frenzy. But it is important to recognise that the supposed good guys actually began this particular arms race.
Anarchic social media offers rich bounties for these excavations. In particular Facebook has an addictive quality built around the narcissistic pleasure of external validation. Its dystopian possibilities are powerfully conveyed in ‘Nosedive’ (2016), an episode of Netflix’s Dark Mirror, in which individuals rate each other from one to five stars based on social interactions. High aggregate scores are a passage to wealth and privilege, while low ratings spell poverty and exclusion. The main character ‘Lacie’ sees her attempts at social climbing implode spectacularly, ending in despair, poverty and isolation. It is as bleak a prophecy as you could find on the damage social media could wreak if we are not very careful.
Since a whistleblower revealed the sinister machinations of Cambridge Analytica on Facebook the fear that our political preferences are being conditioned by artificial intelligence tools has risen to panic in some quarters. Their trick appears to involve outspoken contributors taking ‘ownership’ of subtly positioned political messages, which confirm, amplify and ultimately modify opinions.
The commentariat links this to a quarter of Europeans now voting for Far Right parties[vii], and there is some truth to this contention. But mainstream media may be overstating Facebook’s role for their own purposes. Discrediting social media is part of ongoing attempts to salvage the sunset technology of the newspaper, which makes the case for regulation and taxation of the former. But the Internet is a multi-headed hydra, and the trolls are usually ahead of the game. Insulated and seemingly innocent WhatsApp groups are the next target, as was the case during the recent Brazilian election[viii]. We need better, transparent social media not rid of it altogether.
Twitter, unlike Facebook’s ‘secret sauce’ algorithm deciding what we see on our feeds, has kept its own feed mainly organic, although advertising is increasingly apparent, and relative anonymity seems to bring out the worst qualities in keyboard warriors. Donald Trump’s brand of hectoring nonsense seems to be ideally suited to that medium, at least to his fifty million followers. He won the presidential election with most major newspapers bitterly ranged against his Nativist agenda.
Twitter permits direct access to those who specialise in this attenuated form of speech – its one hundred and forty characters the social media equivalent of a haiku. The interactivity is key, with famous figures accessible as never before. This can even have geopolitical ramifications. At an EU summit last year British Prime Minister Theresa May offered to mediate between Europe and the U.S., to which Dalia Grybauskaitė, the president of Lithuania replied there was ‘no necessity for a bridge’, when they could all communicate with the American president via Twitter.[ix]
Irish politicians have not transitioned entirely into new media – the state broadcaster and print duopoly remain the main political battleground, or talking shop – but Twitter is an increasingly powerful vehicle for individual campaigns, and the intimacy of the Facebook environment suits it to subtle messaging.
Until we go about fixing the Internet, including social media platforms, a level of paranoia is justifiable. If Varadkar and his advisors are willing to harvest email accounts, what else are they willing to do? We know he has already floated the idea of creating anonymous accounts to make positive comments under online stories on popular news websites.[x] We have no way of knowing what conversations go on when Varadkar meets Mark Zuckerberg. Ultimately ‘we the people’ must eventually assert control over the social media we use, and integrate it into the fabric of democracy.
II – Inequality
The disorientation of technological change is only one aspect of the profound changes occurring in societies around the world. The era of the Internet coincides with, and is partly generating, unprecedented inequality – to the extent that just eight billionaires control half the human planet’s financial wealth.[xi]
As elsewhere, in Ireland we see disturbing concentrations, especially expressed in property, insulated by our political and print media duopoly from significant taxation. Thus, the wealthiest top five percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. In the last financial year a mere €500 million (or just 1%) out of total tax receipts of over €50 billion, derived from land or property.[xii]
Indicatively, between 1996 and 2012 the number of qualified accountants in the state grew by a staggering eight-three percent to number 27,112. A sign of the times is that there were just 6,729 Catholic priests and nuns at that point[xiii], indicating we have moved from worship of God to Mammon.
The accountancy profession assists individuals and companies in financial consolidation. This can lapse into unethical forms of tax avoidance as was revealed in the Paradise Papers, where ‘top five’ accountancy firms channelled assets or income through countries with low taxation regimes.
High professional fees make accountants vested interests in asset preservation, and in the process many are stakeholders in the political and media duopoly. The wider influence can be seen in an obsession with imaginary money as a measure of value. In a previous article for Cassandra Voices Diarmuid Lyng identifies a ‘reducing eye – the Súil Mildeagach’ at work in contemporary Ireland which sees only uses and benefits; where ‘a cow is looked on as pounds of beef, and a tree is assessed for the length of its timber.’[xiv]
The decline of the Irish left, especially if the Labour party is counted as such, is part of a global social democratic downward spiral, seen vividly in the precipitous fall in support for the German SPD. This can partly be traced to the economic, political, and moral failure – and ultimate demise – of the Soviet Union at the end of the last century. In response, Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in the U.K., and Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party in the U.S. moved into the centre- or even the centre-right ground, and pursued latter-day colonialism.
The rightward drift of traditionally left-wing parties has brought an ideological vacuum now being filled by the Populist Right, which appropriate Marxist analysis, decrying capital flight and corrupt state institutions. Ironically, it is generally the New Labour old guard and Clinton Democrats that are to the fore in defending free trade arrangements, including the European Union, which is increasingly beholden to corporate lobbyists, and NAFTA. Previously free trade had been one of the major planks of conservative parties around the world, but these (including the Republican Party and the Tories in the UK), are increasingly in thrall to Far Right factions.
The ‘old’ Left is not entirely dead. The success of Jeremy Corbyn and his allies in the U.K. Labour Party in building the largest socialist party in Europe in the face of unstinting media opposition, including in the apparently left-wing Guardian, has been highly impressive.[xv] In the last election, Corbyn’s supporters bypassed mainstream media and used memes and vlogs to powerful effect online, besides grass roots activism through the Momentum organisation.
Spain’s Podemos is also bucking the trend in the face of a hostile mainstream media. It shows that social media, in concert with grass roots organisation, remains a conduit for left-wing agendas. The fear is, however, that that space is increasingly dominated by the highest bidders, who generally do not advocate that their wealth should be subject to greater taxation.
What differentiates the New Right or what used to be called the Far Right – or just plain fascists – from the Left is a marked rejection of universal values applying to all of humankind. The appeal is always to ‘our’ people, ‘our’ families, and ‘ourselves’, certainly not, ‘them’, ‘that lot’, or ‘those’ foreigners who are amassing on ‘our’ frontiers.
Fascism plays to selfish self-interest, and individual striving for status as part of an identity seen in opposition to others. Left-wing arguments are a weapon to be deployed against pampered ‘elites’, but leaders like Trump aspire to the same pampering once they have ‘drained the swamp’. Many of his supporters also aspire to climb the greasy pole that leads to a notional Trump Tower.
A comparatively generous social welfare system – in part a legacy of Labour’s period in office between 2011 and 2016 – is one reason Ireland is largely bucking the trend in terms of developing a rebranded fascism. Also, historically, our over-bearing near neighbour has been the target of nationalist ire, and we do not carry the same racist colonial baggage afflicting relations between indigenous and migrants seen elsewhere. Moreover, for all its faults, Catholicism does not distinguish between people on the basis of ethnicity or race. But the universalism of the Old Left and Catholicism are fading away and, as in the 1930s, Ireland is not immune from continental movements, especially as the Housing Crisis and evictions ensue.
Ascendant neo-liberalism does not encourage xenophobia. It is bad for business. Migration keeps down labour costs, and ethnic variety generates economic dynamism. The late Peter Sutherland, neo-liberal high priest, was one prominent supporter of tolerance.[xvi] But free movement of people is only an addendum – almost a good will gesture – to the core principal of neo-liberalism: the free movement of capital and individual enrichment. Contemporary fascism pitilessly highlights any policy failings relating to integration policies, while only superficially addressing capital flight, as unscrupulous politicians like Trump (and others) are often self-interested players themselves.
III – Wasted Lives
The late Zygmunt Bauman argued that economic migrants become scapegoats as long as the real powerbrokers of a neo-liberal Globalisation are untouchable. In his book Wasted Lives (2010) he contends:
Refugees and immigrants coming from ‘far away’ yet making a bid to settle in the neighbourhood, are uniquely suitable for the role of the effigy to be burnt as the spectre of ‘global forces’, feared and resented for doing their job without consulting those whom its outcome is bound to affect. After all, asylum-seekers and ‘economic migrants’ are collective replicas (an alter ego? fellow traveller? mirror images? caricatures?) of the new power elite of the globalised world, widely (and with reason) suspected to be the true villain of the piece.
Like that elite, he considers:
they are untied to any place, shifty, unpredictable. Like that elite, they epitomise the unfathomable ‘space of flows’ where the roots of the present-day precariousness of the human condition are sunk. Seeking in vain for other, more adequate outlets, fears and anxieties rub off on targets close to hand and re-emerge as popular resentment and fear of the ‘aliens nearby’. Uncertainty cannot be defused or dispersed in a direct confrontation with the other embodiment of extraterritoriality: the global elite drifting beyond the reach of human control. That elite is much too powerful to be confronted and challenged point-blank, even if its exact location was known (which it is not). Refugees on the other hand, are a clearly visible, and sitting, target for the surplus anguish.[xvii]
This kind of scapegoating is beginning to be seen in Ireland. A small online publication www.theliberal.ie offers a news carousel, previously plagiarized[xviii], alongside vindictive comments about migrants. One headline from November 12th read: ‘Uproar from locals as Wicklow hotel set to become direct provision centre’, the ‘report’ by James Brennan went on to say:
‘Locals are said to be “very concerned” over the proposed centre with one social media telling The Liberal: “Locals have held meetings about it and have both privately and publicly stated that they’re very concerned about the new centre. There will be uproar if this goes through”.
More disgraceful even than this ‘post-truth’ abandonment of evidential standards, is a headline to another ‘report’ written by James Brennan, which read: ‘As more migrant Direct Provision centres pop up, a 48-yr-old homeless Irish man DIES on the street in Waterford’. The message is clear: it is a zero sum game between homeless Irish dying on the streets, and migrants who are being provided for. The publication was also vocal in its support of Peter Casey’s Presidential candidacy. He made incendiary comments about members of the minority Traveller community – a traditional Irish scapegoat.
Interestingly, the editor and owner of the magazine, Leo Sherlock, is the brother of Cora Sherlock, deputy chairperson of the Pro-Life Campaign. Well accustomed to the emotive language of protecting ‘our own’, it could be that the Pro-Life campaign will provide the resources and know-how for a new campaign against immigrants, just as in America the Far Right has moved from anti-abortion to anti-migrant.
In a disturbing turn of events, investigative journalist Gemma O’Doherty has adopted anti-migrant slogans from the Far Right playbook, especially attacking George Soros.[xix] She recently tweeted that his ‘twisted Open Society Foundation … seeks to destroy nation states’.[xx] Also, her Youtube channel recently featured an interview with John Waters in which both interviewer and interviewee conveyed the idea of a migrant tide overwhelming Ireland[xxi], a country more sparsely populated today than in the mid-nineteenth century.
As wealth inequality rises, and homelessness increases, in this small open economy a desperation sets in that is easily manipulated. The Celtic Tiger has become a Paper Tiger, where most of the population does not enjoy the fruits of extravagant economic growth. For most rising gross domestic product leads to rent hikes and unaffordable property. As Bauman explains, in circumstances where the global elite are untouchable, outrage against vulnerable outsiders is likely to follow.
IV – The Mediated People
Technology is leaving a profound impression on all our minds. The smart phone is altering homo sapiens at a profound level of consciousness. We are now, as Bill McKibben puts it, a ‘mediated species’:
Everyone I know seems a little ashamed of the compulsive phone-checking, but it is, circa 2017, our species-specific calling card, as surely as the bobbing head-thrust identifies the pigeon. No one much likes spending half the workday on e-mail, but that’s what work is for many of us. Our accelerating disappearance into the digital ether now defines us—we are the mediated people, whose contact with one another and the world around us is now mostly veiled by a screen. We threaten to rebel, just as we threaten to move to Canada after an election. But we don’t; the current is too fierce to swim to shore.[xxii]
The compulsive checking is attritional and ultimately lonesome, as we avoid direct contact with one another. George Steiner attributes these habits to a ‘dread of solitude, an incapacity to experience it productively’[xxiii], which afflicts the young, but this extends well into old age.
Linked to the advance of the smart phone is a declining opportunity for book reading. The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye identifies the properties of the book with the preservation of democracy itself. It is he says the:
by-product of the art of writing, and the technological instrument that makes democracy a working possibility – avoiding all rhetorical tricks designed to induce hypnosis in an audience, relying on nothing but the inner force and continuity of the argument … Behind the book is the larger social context of a body of written documents to which there is public access, the guarantee of the fairness of that internal debate on which democracy rests.
The book is non-linear, he says, allowing us to flick back and forth: ‘we follow a line while we are reading but the book itself is a stationary visual focus of a community.’
He distinguishes this from:
the electronic media that increases the amount of linear experience, of things seen and heard that are quickly forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superficial alertness combined with increased difficulty preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief characteristic of education.[xxiv]
Frye was writing in the 1970s when electronic media meant television. He might despair at contemporary attention spans, with kids unhinged and transfixed by a Snapchat that brings the inbuilt obsolescence of a social media posting to the next level. But he might also encounter knowledge and insights far exceeding those he found in his own less technology-addled students.
We have developed remarkable specialisms through advances in book-learning, but these are increasingly remote from one another. The Internet brings more generalised understandings – new horizons of knowledge – which could de-mystify formerly esoteric fields and inaugurate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (d.1832) vision of weltliteratur, ‘world literature’, and perhaps more clearly, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight could be available to all, everywhere. It could really lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming.
The raging digital torrent is inherently unstable, as the content on any screen (including this article) can easily be tampered with. This makes it easy to develop superficial arguments that shift with circumstances. But latter-day fascists are arguably less ominous a presence in the absence of complex ideological statements, conventionally expressed in books, such as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or even Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As the dissident Soviet writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn put it: ‘Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at ten or so cadavers. Because they had no ideology.’[xxv] Thus, even the book, which performs an important role in preserving democracy, can, paradoxically, be used to undermine it. Similarly, the Internet can have positive and negative effects on our politics.
The online contributor may exert an influence on the outcome of elections and referenda but there is a sedentarism to his political participation. How many people attended Donald Trump’s inauguration? Historically, any political credo lacking a clearly outlined ideology tends to lack durability. What will remain of Trumpism after Trump? This recalls Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’: ‘Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Similarly, the incipient Irish Far Right lacks a convincing ideologue. John Waters has an intellect to be reckoned with, but it is difficult to see how he can reconcile the universal values of the Catholic faith he espouses with the xenophobia evident in Far Right movements. Moreover, Ireland is an increasingly liberal society – even decriminalisation of marijuana cannot be far off – where Catholicism is commonly disparaged, but the policies of the duopoly which brought the rise in rents, and a Housing Crisis, threatens a new form of serfdom, or rage on the streets.
V – A New Age of Barbarism
Apart from technological shifts, and the moral and political vacuum brought by the demise of the Soviet Union, which permitted a corporate takeover of societies, the value system of a dominant neo-liberalism rests on decidedly shaky foundations. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre identified a ruling ‘Emotivism’: ‘the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.’[xxvi]
In other words we operate at a time when justice, including economic justice, is seen as an expression of arbitrary norms. MacIntyre traces this to the Enlightenment, when David Hume and later Fredrich Nietzsche led the attack on the universal values which the Aristotelian philosophical tradition had laid down. Thus, Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics begins: ‘Every art and every scientific inquiry and similarly every action and purpose, may be said to aim for some good.’[xxvii] In contrast liberalism, or Emotivism, identifies no “good”, only self-interest.
In what is a remarkable passage MacIntyre despairs at the onset of a new age of barbarism:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our present predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.[xxviii]
So what are Irish “men and women of good will” to do in these times? Retreat from the Dublin metropolis and carve out cooperative self-sufficient communities? This is one alternative. But the European imperium has not been lost entirely, and the pressing environmental problems of our time require world governance. Moreover, multilateralism is the only way to preserve peace in the nuclear age.
The institutions of the Irish state and European Union at present do not serve the interests of the people, but this could change if a broad Left-Green alliance, espousing universal values, is forged. In this respect, Irish progressives should get behind a new group, led by the economist Thomas Piketty, offering prescriptions for a fairer and more sustainable Europe.[xxix]
Irish Democracy is in for a long bumpy ride as we struggle to contain our online urges and the challenge of grotesque inequalities. To counteract a slide into barbarism, we must think globally and act locally, doing what we can in our own way, and never succumbing to despair. In these times we also need artists to sustain us.
Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com
[i] Reporters Without Borders, ‘Ireland: Unhealthy Concenrtation’, World Press Freedom Index 2018, https://rsf.org/en/ireland, accessed 12/12/18.
[ii] Ciaran Moran, ‘Emissions from agriculture increase by almost 3pc in 2017 due to dairy expansion’, Irish Independent, December 8th, 2018.
[iii] Jeo Leogue, ‘Ireland worst performing European country at tackling climate change’ Irish Examiner, December 10th, 2018.
[iv] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Henry Reeve, Hertfordshire, Wordworth Editors Ltd, 1998, p.220.
[v] Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Waco, Baylor University Press, 2018, p.149
[vi] Eoin Tierney, ‘A Guide to Preventing Data Leakage’, Cassandra Voices, June 1st, 2018.
[vii] Paul Lewis, Seán Clarke, Caelainn Barr, Josh Holder and Niko Kommenda, ‘Revealed: one in four Europeans vote populist’, The Guardian, 20th of November, 2018.
[viii] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro business backers accused of illegal Whatsapp fake news campaign’, The Guardian, 18th of October, 2018.
[ix] Andrew Rawnsley, ‘Mrs May discovers you can’t be a bridge builder and a bridge burner’, The Guardian, 5th of February, 2017.
[x] Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘‘Leo Varadkar: A Very Modern Taoiseach’ is shallow, flimsy and exaggerated’, Irish Times, September 8th, 2018.
[xi] Melanie Curtin, ‘These 8 Men Control Half the Wealth on Earth’, Inc., undated.
[xii] David McWilliams, ‘Why do we tax income instead of wealth?’, October 9th, 2018, http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/why-do-we-tax-income-instead-of-wealth/, accessed 10/12/18.
[xiii] Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing, Stroud, The History Press, 2018, p.12
[xiv] Diarmuid Lyng, ‘A Hurler’s Silver Branch Perception’, Cassandra Voices, June 1st, 2018.
[xvi] Ruadhán Mac Cormaic ‘Selfishness on refugees has brought EU ‘to its knees’, Irish Times, December 26th, 2015.
[xvii] Zygmunt Baumann, Wasted Lives, Modernity and its Outcasts, Oxford, Polity Press, 2004.
[xviii] Joe Leogue, ‘TheLiberal.ie goes offline amid plagiarism row’, Irish Examiner, January 10th, 2017.
[xix] Jon Henley, ‘Enemy of nationalists: George Soros and his liberal campaigns’, The Guardian, 29th of May, 2018.
[xx] Gemma O’Doherty, ‘George Soros names 5 Irish MEPs @MarianHarkin @LNBDublin @MaireadMcGMEP @SeanKellyMEP @brianhayesMEP as proven or potential allies of his twisted Open Society Foundation which seeks to destroy nation states. Which of them will deny this?’, December 1st, 2018, 12:32pm. https://twitter.com/gemmaod1/status/1068965965940043777, accessed 11/12/18.
There will ultimately occur conflagration of the whole world … nothing will remain but fire, by which, as a living being, and a god, once again a new world may be created and the ordered universe restored as before. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum ‘On the Nature of Gods’ (45BCE)
I –Buddha in the Garden
On a recent trip to Belfast my attention was drawn to a small statue of the Buddha in the garden of a house I was staying. In a cityscape distinguished by myriad places of Christian worship – from ‘low’ church chapels with gaudy signs, to matronly Anglican churches, and looming Catholic cathedrals – I wondered whether greater devotion towards the ideals of the contented-looking representation before me would prove more conducive to reconciliation than pathways offered by Christian sects, alike in their devotion to a single biblical source.
Can the tenets of any religion be dismissed as projections of economic and other power relations? A materialist conception certainly explains a lot – the use of doctrine for political ends such as keeping women in servitude – but is at odds with curious dynamics internal to traditions. Adherents may be urged into irrational acts, from welcoming a stranger into their homes on appointed days, to growing beards to a certain length. These do not appear fitted to please any capitalist overseer.
Marx recognised the suffering which impels faith in the deliverance of a higher power. Nonetheless, he viewed belief in the supernatural as an opiate, and a superstition to be overcome on the road to a rational Communism. Missing from that materialist school of thought, however, is acknowledgement of the possibility of ‘magical thinking’ co-existing with scientific rationality, even in the same brain. As the Danish physicist Neils Bohr put it: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function (Turok, 2012, p.77).’
There may of course be irreconcilable tensions between religion and science, as with the museum that Creationists have built to provide an account of the nearby Giants Causeway to fit with ‘Biblical history’. This may lead to a perception that battle has been joined between the values of the Enlightenment and barbaric fundamentalists. This could, however, lead to a denial of the creative fictions contained in religions.
Perhaps the main reason that religions endure in ‘advanced’ technological societies is because they offer a trove of stories the loss of which would diminish our humanity. The fables emanating from the sacred texts of Christianity are interpreted by each generation in novel ways. This can involve a setting aside of scientific evidence, as where Kerry TD Danny Healy Rae says God is responsible for the weather and thus Climate Change too, but not always. The account may involve a weighing of moral scales, where virtue is rewarded, and vice punished.
The will of God, or gods, may seem capricious – as where Abraham agrees to sacrifice his first born son – but might also yield powerful insights. Many atheists fixate on the interpretations of religious dogmatists, and do not allow for creative ambiguities, which a mind open to magical thinking, however fleetingly, accommodates.
It is, nonetheless, fair to say that the bible, the main corpus of the various Christian faiths, enjoins belief in one God ‘the Almighty’, which is shared with its monotheistic cousins Judaism and Islam. History suggests this story lends itself to appropriation by male autocrats justifying absolute power.
But are the mythologies of Ancient Greece and Rome which furnished their religions, or the animist faiths of tribal societies, any less prone to dominance by power-hungry males? Certainly the father of the Greek gods Zeus was a bit of a scoundrel. Are animists necessarily kinder to the earth than ‘people of the book’? This is unclear because animists religions have never exercised the kind of dominion over the Earth that the bookish people wield.
The peculiarity of Buddhism is that it is a both a religion which indulges in magical stories, and a philosophy, albeit one requiring a leap of faith into the idea of karma, which says the actions of an individual affects that person in this and subsequent lives. It is well-adapted as a method of self-improvement, impelling restraint, but the Buddha in his meditative posture seems a little removed from the cut and thrust of this world for my liking; that story by itself cannot sate my appetite for ‘true’ fictions.
Art is a repository of fictions, often requiring a suspension of belief, and a surrender to magical thinking. This is the wonder we feel when staring into ‘the heavens’ of a Renaissance basilica’s ceiling, or as we enter ‘the world’ of a novel. In many respects being an artist is akin to a religious vocation, an idea which co-habitats slightly uncomfortably with any economic assessment of utility.
The twentieth century has witnessed the implosion of many hallowed artistic forms leading to what Edward Clarke has described as post-modern decrepitude, but the fictions keep bubbling up through popular songs, cinema, and perhaps in the new wave of virtual reality via the digital medium.
II – ‘The only thing that can displace a story is a story’
Environmentalists are prone to despondency, as most of humanity blithely ignores scientific projections. Despite repeated warnings of the dire consequence of Climate Change, and the Sixth Extinction which has seen humanity wipe out sixty percent of the Earth’s wildlife since 1970, behavioural change is painfully slow.
Last year George Monbiot proposed a simultaneously simple but elusive solution: change the story, writing:
Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. We all possess a narrative instinct: an innate disposition to listen for an account of who we are and where we stand.
Monbiot argues that a string of facts, however accurate, will not correct or dislodge a powerful story, and often simply provoke indignation if a prior narrative ‘truth’ has been established. ‘The only thing’, he says, ‘that can displace a story is a story’. He concludes that those ‘who tell the stories run the world’.
Currently it is fair to say that the neo-liberal ‘story’ is ascendant. The American Dream, that anyone can be successful as long as the pesky state does not impose red tape and steal their hard-earned lucre, still animates many. The corollary is a fatalistic narrative which sees no other outcome than a steady slide into an ecological abyss.
To alter these stories we could understand better their primary means of conveyance: natural languages, which, unlike mathematics, have evolved in humans through use and repetition, without conscious planning or premeditation.
The fate of human languages has mirrored the fate of animals in Nature. The seminal technology of writing – a secondary modelling system based on a prior system of spoken language – standardised dialects previously subject to inter-flow and cross-fertilization. This brought a hitherto unexperienced permanence, superseding oral recitation in poetry, which changed subtly with each telling. We can only now look back on that oral universe preceding writing through the prism of our own literary universe.
According to Walter Ong: ‘Writing or script differs as such from speech in that it does not inevitably well up out of the unconscious.’ He asserts nonetheless that writing ‘heightens consciousness’ by creating distance, or objectivity. He adds: ‘though inspiration continues to derive from unconscious sources, the writer can subject the unconscious inspiration to far greater conscious control than the oral narrator.’
This profoundly altered ways of thinking: interiorizing consciousness; allowing unprecedented analysis in philosophy; and providing a recording apparatus crucial to scientific enquiry. According to Ong: ‘examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading. (Ong, 1982, pp.77-94)’ This tool has allowed man to assert control over Nature. Technologies accumulate as knowledge is passed down through generations, and interrogated in texts.
Later, print technology reduced the number of dominant languages, enforced by military and economic might. Less than one hundred human societies developed vernacular literatures. Thousands of languages perished, their marvels scattered like desert sands beneath towering pyramids.
Now with the arrival of the Internet barely a dozen languages exert an irresistible pull on those still standing. It is not inconceivable that the various translation tools we have at our disposal will reduce human communication to a single language, English most likely.
II – Agricultural and Technological Revolutions
Similarly, with the domestication of animals (cattle, pigs and sheep especially) and plants (principally wheat, rice and corn) over the course of the First Agricultural Revolution (from c. 10,000 BCE) homo sapiens – already in possession of fire and domesticated dogs – became dominant in most fertile regions of the world. It was then that exploitation of the biosphere commenced in earnest, although early humans had previously wiped out megafauna, once they migrated out of Africa.
It is no coincidence that writing was invented in the Middle East, where agricultural surpluses first freed a small intellectual strata from the demands of labouring to produce food. Henceforth agriculture and writing would form a mutually-enforcing alliance.
The development in Europe of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg circa, 1450 – as well as improvements in the quality and supply of paper – helped bring the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The improved legibility of texts permitted rapid, silent reading. This created further scope for interiorization of consciousness, a defining feature of the Western mind.
There followed a Second Agricultural Revolution – involving improvement in crop and animal breeding, enclosure of estates and the adoption of new machinery – that swept through north-west Europe in the eighteenth century, placing further pressure on wildlife habitats. Thus, the last Irish wolf was hunted to extinction in 1783, by which time most of the island’s native forests had been stripped away to make way for agriculture, especially cattle.
The rapid dissemination of ideas brought by the Gutenberg Press was also instrumental in the colonisation of the globe by Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards. This presented new lands and pre-agricultural peoples to exploit, as well as a fruitful exchange between the primary food crops and domesticated animals of the Americas (including corn, potato and turkey) and Eurasia (especially wheat, rice, cows, pigs and sheep).
Apart from genocide, plague and irredeemable cultural loss, this brought annihilation to wildlife, particularly in the Americas where megafauna such as the buffalo were wiped out in the nineteenth century, to make way for cattle.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed the Third Agricultural Revolution, or Green Revolution, including widespread adoption of newly-invented artificial fertilizer, derived from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process, mechanisation, and the development of high-performing cultivars. This raised crop yields prodigiously allowing human population to increase from one and a half billion in 1900 to over seven billion today.
Now in this the Anthropocene many free animals survive only through piecemeal human protection. Our dominance extends to every continent, while thousands of species die out each year. Ecocide continues apace in the Amazon rainforest, and elsewhere.
The Internet – our latest communication breakthrough – places further pressure on minority languages. Will it accelerate the Sixth Extinction and devastating Climate Change? Or could it shatter a long-standing perception of a divide between the rights of homo sapiens and all other species? Can we move from human rights towards a more expansive idea of rights for all of Nature? To do so we must change the story.
IV – The Greek Legacy
The first comprehensive writing system, cuneiform, was developed in Sumeria, just over five thousand years ago, diffusing slowly around the globe.
Later the Ancient Greek alphabet accurately fixed the sound of language for the first time by introducing vowels as letters. This according to Ong ‘analyzed sound more abstractly into purely spatial components (Ong, 1982, p.90)’, making it easier for anyone to attain literacy. It allowed fuller description than unvocalised Semitic scripts, or pictographic alphabets such as Chinese, whose vast number of characters lends itself to educational elitism.
The breakthrough in script seems to explains the extraordinary eruption of Ancient Greek culture which laid the foundations of Western music, mathematics, philosophy and literature. Regrettably however, through Plato especially, the notion of human superiority over all other animals was implanted, a philosophical assumption that furnished the Abrahamic faiths with reasoned justification for the mythology of man being made in the image of God.
This idea of a divine right over Nature became axiomatic, even surviving the profound questioning of religious assumptions in the Enlightenment. This is the story we must change.
V – Virtual Reality
The Internet brings unmatched access to knowledge: a universal human library. A young child can easily access information about the plight of other animals, and develop an understanding of the looming threat of Climate Change. But the technology also has an as yet unchecked capacity to distract and isolate, especially through the smart phone device. How are we are we then to reach a point where we accept the true fiction that any one individual’s life can make a difference?
The physicist Neil Turok describes the digital format as, ‘the crudest, bluntest, most brutal form of information that we know.’ In this form, he says, everything is reduced to ‘finite strings of 0s and 1s’, with analogue information ‘infinitely richer. (Turok, 2012, p.230)’ The Internet effectively conveys attenuated images and sounds, but other sensations, and connections, are unavailable, even those conveyed in seemingly obsolete books. This suggests it could breed isolation, perhaps compounding an apathy towards ecological collapse.
Yet through the Internet we demystify specialisations in various domains; text shifts into pictographic emoticons; hyperlinks move us beyond the linear progress of the book form; video is cinema-for-all – while photographs implant images telling a thousand tales; the division between virtual and real collapses, especially in gaming technology. There is also another avenue for the spoken word, via traditional ‘radio’ stations, and the podcast is a powerful new medium, offering an opening for the revival of oral poetry perhaps.
Down through the ages poetry has been in metaphorical play with Nature, while novels generally move into the interior world of the narrator. In the latter, phenomena such as storms or floods tend not to intrude – they serve no moral purpose – whereas the ancient poet is in dialogue with a cosmos of which he is at the centre. Poets used mythologies to bind peoples into a singular tribal identity.
For the ancients, whose laws and customs were conveyed through poetry, disastrous weather was seen as punishment by the gods, perhaps for failure to perform the requisite sacrifices. In contrast, the rational person-of-the-book, explains bad weather in terms of air currents moving around the globe, and reasons there is nothing one person can possibly do to alter these conditions. Novels according to Amitav Gosh:
conjure up worlds that became real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created, nor will they refer to the passage of a thousand year: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delineated horizon of a novel (Gosh, 2016, p.61).
The earlier poetic view, however obscurantist, actually offers a greater likelihood of someone taking responsibility for their actions, as the person-of-the-book may more easily dwell in his interior world. How then can we reconcile scientific reason with a belief that individual actions feed into a collective responsibility?
Can Homo Digitalas move beyond her solitary life into a universal scheme of responsibility? If we believe ourselves to be part of a greater whole the possibility for collective action may yet arise. The Internet may broaden the fiction of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’, enlivening what is a scientific myth of Gaia: an imagined community of Nature, including ourselves.
The novel, written from the perspective of the solitary individual at a fixed moment could pass into obscurity. The Internet can engender new artistic forms closer to the spoken tradition of poetry, with a common vision in aeons and origins. An older relationship with the word might be restored, with mythology and scientific rationality co-habiting to create a new story.
Already, however, we see social and political cleavages opening up, linked to the arrival of the new medium. Just as the rupture of Gutenberg’s Press awoke sectarian identities, leading to the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century, similarly the fingerprints of a technological shift seem evident in contemporary clashes.
To realise fresh narratives out of the Internet we need to adapt our behaviour, tempering our dependence on the smartphone device. An interface less conducive to isolation is surely necessary.
In the meantime Nature groans under the weight of human exploitation, and we demand a Fourth Agricultural Revolution bringing humans and other animals into an elusive symbiosis. Few languages may survive the Internet, but that technology may help engender a unifying mythology, maintaining our precious Nature. Without this we seem doomed.
References
Amitav Gosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016.
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Metheun, London, 1982.
Neil Turok, The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, Faber, London, 2012.
THE LONG READ: Ireland is neither a totalitarian state, nor even a dictatorship. Nonetheless, the propaganda of an economic elite has forged a dominant consensus, in which two centre-right parties compete for power. Across a print media duopoly and national broadcaster well-honed techniques of social control divert attention and sow confusion, while subtly instilling dogmas. The education system also plays a vital role in propagating social norms and channelling aspirations. The dominant consensus is not doctrinally extreme or even illiberal, at least by international comparisons, but it insulates embedded wealth in the form of land and property from taxation, stimulates demand for mortgages among the young, and protects the farming sector from environmental oversight.
I – We have ways of making you think…
As Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels had one major difficulty: a taste for dark-haired beauties. His marriage to the perfectly-Aryan-looking Magda (with whom he would later ‘loyally’ commit suicide inside Hitler’s bunker in 1945, after they first murdered all six of their sleeping children) became a sham. Poor Josef could not help taking advantage of the brunette actresses over whom his role effectively gave dominion, controlling movie sets that were a Harvey Weinstein paradise. In particular, Goebbels conceived a passion for a Czech – untermensch – beauty Lída Baarová, which almost drove him to end the marriage in 1938. Hitler himself intervened demanding his propaganda chief remain with his wife and children. The mask concealing the hypocrisy could not be allowed to slip.
Despite occasional differences of opinion, Hitler realised that Goebbels was crucial to the smooth functioning of the Third Reich. While Leni Riefenstahl delivered innovative blockbuster effects, Goebbels genius lay in delivering subtle cues, released under a comfort blanket of light entertainment. Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not even care to see der Fuhrer appear in cinema news reels. In a totalitarian society a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics.
He had immersed himself in the golden era of the silver screen, expressing particular fondness for the 1937 Disney classic ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Overtly political films were not only useless but also counterproductive he believed. The depravity of ‘the Jew’ should be integrated into pictures which carried an audience along, such as the lively 1940 ‘historical’ drama Jud Süss, ‘Jew Suss’. This contrasted with the heavy-handed style of Der Ewige Jude (1940) ‘the Eternal Jew’, directed by Fritz Hippler that depicted Jews alongside rats inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Goebbels correctly predicted this would bomb in the box office.[i]
Light entertainment diverts, as does outright nonsense, which George Orwell referred to as ‘Duckspeak’ in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. Its effect is to lower the intellectual level of conversation, spread confusion and allow the speaker to evade responsibility: a tactic increasingly familiar in our era of ‘post truth’. In the novel the official language of Oceania is overtly-propagandist Newspeak, but Duckspeak’s capacity to accommodate contradictions, even midway through a sentence, was much valued by the ruling regime.
There are societies such as North Korea’s, or previously Mao’s China when children informed on their parents, where freedom of expression is almost completely eradicated and replaced with Newspeak – and probably Duckspeak – to such an extent that individuality is effectively extinguished. One result is a severe lack of economic dynamism. Market economies, however, require freethinking innovators in order to thrive; a small resistance movement even survived in Nazi Germany because Newspeak had not entirely permeated that society. ‘Hard’ propaganda – or Newspeak – is thus only of limited value. Instead, the ‘soft’ propaganda of light entertainment and, increasingly, Duckspeak – including the obfuscation by politicians who ‘duck out’ of answering questions – is more generally deployed to support indispensable fictions in liberal democracies – like the canard of opportunity-for-all. Moreover, even in democratic societies educational filters screen for obedience.
Variants of these influences can be identified in Ireland, where great wealth subsists alongside grinding, long-term poverty. Irish society is generally tolerant, but growing inequality is unraveling the social fabric, and creates conditions for the scapegoating of minorities.
II – Ireland’s Two-Party System
Foreign multinationals are a transient presences on the Irish scene. Their indigenous handlers, an aging cohort of predominantly male, property-owning, car-driving, privately schooled, health-insured professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors, financial service providers and other high-earning business people – are the enduring economic elite of the state. Its dominant consensus does not emerge from smoke-filled rooms any longer. Rather, it is an aggregate conception of what a ‘normal’, self-interested person of this class aspires to. Indeed, those upholding what is a neo-liberal orthodoxy may be unaware – like Ebenezer Scrooge – of its detrimental effect. What is an often passive propaganda is expressed through a media dependent on advertising revenue, and in the policies of the two largest political parties.
A recent poll showed seventy percent of the highest (AB) social class support one or other of the two main centre-right political parties, in particular Fine Gael (Irish Times MRBI poll, October 16th, 2018), now the ‘natural party of government’ for the dominant interest.
The ‘bricks and mortar’ of property remains, overwhelmingly, their preferred asset, with many acting as landlords. Thus, according to economist David McWilliams the wealthiest top five-percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. The key objective of Irish propaganda, and we may call it that, is therefore to keep the economy on an even keel of steady growth, and rising rents, while ensuring that wealth, mostly property, is subjected to minimal taxation. The result is that in the last financial year a mere €500 million out of total tax receipts of over €50 billion, derived from land or property.[ii]
The dominant consensus also insists that it is necessary to keep a lid on government expenditure on public services (most of which the elite does not use), so as to avoid the over-heating of Bertie Ahern’s ‘boomenomics’ before the crash of 2008. Then low taxation on income and wealth went hand-in-hand with spending increases, and public sector salary ‘benchmarking’ with the private sector. The ineptitude of these policies were partly to blame for a property bubble before the crash of 2008, and has consigned Fianna Fáil to its present subaltern role, in which it now flaunts a more centrist approach.
In a clear signal to the economic elite, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan launched his Budget 2016 claiming the days of ‘boom and bust’ would be consigned to the history books.[iii] Throughout his tenure (2011-2017) no serious public housing initiatives were embarked on. In 2015, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[iv] The ensuing scarcity ensured a dramatic recovery in property prices, including that held by the state bank NAMA.
Another salient feature of Irish propaganda is the essential delivery of buy-in from young adults, who continue to purchase property at inflated prices. Prior to the crash Dublin prices soared to such an extent that a residence in the city became more expensive than New York or London.[v] Dublin prices are set to reach boom-time levels this year according to Pat Davitt, head of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV), with an average family home costing over half a million euros.[vi] Meanwhile average Dublin rents now exceed the heights of the Celtic Tiger by thirty percent. This means those landholders, and institutions, that weathered the recession have seen huge dividends.
Source daft.ie
Any new property purchaser instantly becomes a stakeholder in the dominant consensus. The buy-in of upwardly-mobile youth not only maintains market demand, but also brings political support for the dominant consensus. Political parties threatening the ‘stability’ under the centre-right axis are subtly undermined as the ‘loony’ left and not given a platform in the mainstream media, or co-opted into governing coalitions and discredited, as was the case with Labour, the Greens and now the Independent Alliance.
Importantly, up to fifteen percent of the population are foreign-born nationals. Apart from UK nationals, they do not enjoy a right to vote in general elections, unless they take out Irish citizenship, costing almost one thousand euro. Unlike native-born Irish, who historically had among the highest rate of private home ownership in the world, peaking at 80% in 1991, (declining to 71% in 2011),[vii] many come from countries where renting for life is the norm, and may not wish to reside here long-term. Politically, this large cohort only exerts influence via multinational employers, who face demands for wage increases due to spiralling rents. At the bottom of the ladder are unskilled (or at least unqualified) non-EU migrants – gastarbeiter – many of whom are on short-term- (often student-) visas, and permitted to remain in the country only insofar as they serve an economic purpose.
III – The Crucial Constituency
The elite’s longstanding hold on power, via the two main political parties, relies on a crucial constituency of farmers and their extended families, who are evenly distributed throughout the state, apart from Dublin. Although continually declining in number, they are overwhelmingly native Irish – thus enfranchised – vociferous campaigners, and of a vintage that tends to vote. This ensures their supposed interests, more accurately those of comprador multinationals that trade their commodities, are protected by Irish propaganda.
A remarkable eighty-percent of farmers, working on almost eighty-five thousand separate farms, support either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil according to the aforementioned poll. The former are especially reliant on their allegiance, which means the national (and global) interest in reducing GHG emissions in order to avoid up to €600 million every year in EU fines after 2020 may be overlooked.[viii] Agriculture produces almost a third of total national emissions, yet contributes a mere 1.7% of carbon taxes.[ix] The farming sector is, however, an increasingly fragile alliance, with the average annual income on dairy farms approximately €85,000, but averaging only €15,000 on the average dry cattle (beef) farm, all of which, derives from subsidies.[x]
An urban working class of unskilled, semi-skilled and unemployed, has been mollified by comparatively generous social welfare payments, but is increasingly impoverished by the scarcity and cost of property, rising rents, and a failing system of public health. Eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds are discriminated against by lower social welfare payments, but tend not to turn out for elections, and are inclined to emigrate, so can easily be ignored.
Preserving a share of working class support remains important, in terms of optics at least, for the two main political parties, especially Fianna Fáil, which preserves the charade of being a party for all classes. Unlike farmers, however, historically a working class consciousness has not been evident in Ireland, and approaches to the national question and moral or religious concerns have tended to sway this cohort. Also, while farmers have clear objectives in terms of maintaining a subsidy regime, and avoiding environmental regulation, the working class is more easily distracted from establishing fixed political aspirations.
The widespread protests over water charges in 2014 were one of the few occasions when the dam broke, and working class discontents spilled onto the streets. But this single issue could be conceded, and sustained engagement with politics avoided. Yet, according to Social Justice Ireland, last year 790,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 250,000 were children.[xi]
Similar to farmers, most civil service workers, including senior teachers, have been kept on side with generous pay and conditions. Teaching salaries averaging over $60,000 per year compare favourably with other OECD countries. As with the social welfare system, new entrants have been discriminated against, with many being forced to emigrate during the crash, but they count for less politically than their senior colleagues. The current modus vivendi between the teaching unions and the ruling parties is reflected in the terminal decline of the Labour Party, their traditional voice in the Dáil.
The new Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, recently described secondary teachers as being overburdened by ‘initiative overload’[xii], which might come as a surprise considering they enjoy more than sixteen weeks of holidays per year, and curricula that have changed little in decades. Secondary school teachers play an important role in upholding the dominant consensus.
The spiral of inequality, globally and nationally is, however, accelerating, and the coalition of interests maintaining the dominant consensus is unstable. Multinationals siphon off vast profits from a market one Tesco executive allegedly referred to as ‘Treasure Island’, with consumer prices, on average, twelve percent higher than in the UK,[xiii] while some avoid corporation taxes altogether. Meanwhile the state labours under a debt of over €200 billion after a bailout the terms of which (including the creation of NAMA) protected the interests of those members of the economic elite that did not speculate wildly prior to the crash – such as former solicitor Brian O’Donnell who was evicted from his Dalkey home in 2015 – while working to the detriment the poor, and the impressionable young who had been encouraged to take out crippling mortgages.
The Irish economy is vulnerable to global financial shocks – with just fifty large firms accounting for three-quarters of all exports[xiv] – a recrudescence of nationalism after Brexit, and the growing obsolescence of many forms of work, including our current farming model. The economic elite is intellectually rudderless, and only knows the way of economic growth-without-end, where ecological constraints are ignored, and in which the retail cartels make a mockery of the notion of a free market. The centre-right cannot hold for long, but in the meantime, the wheels of Irish propaganda keep turning.
IV – The Propaganda Model – Education
State secondary school pupils are encouraged to take subjects that will prepare them for work in multinational corporations, with an emphasis on science and technology, rather than arts, humanities or social sciences. Philosophy is unavailable as a secondary school subject, while history has been downgraded in recent years.
In the state school system, which I observed as a supply teacher, rebellious students are removed from obedient peers and housed en bloc in ‘pass’ classes, or entire schools, which are little more than advanced creches, or holding facilities. There behaviours and performances deteriorate in the absence of positive role models. Ill-equipped for work or even social life, the dole queue awaits, or worse. Importantly, this underclass is unable to articulate their grievances – one in six of the adult population is functionally illiterate.[xv]
The essential breeding ground of the economic elite is found in the paradoxically state-funded system of private education, in which the state pays the salaries of teachers – costing around €90 million per year. This ensures a private education is not prohibitively expensive, broadening the base of the elite, with over twenty-five thousand students enrolling in 2017.[xvi] In these institutions lasting ties are formed, and the best preparation for the Leaving Certificate offered, which is generally a code to be cracked. Behavioural problems among middle class students are less pronounced, in my experience, but where rebelliousness, or just a lack of conformity, is apparent authorities employ long-standing methods of control. The sport of rugby emphasises the collective in a test of manhood, with dissenters often subjected to homophobic slurs.
As far back as the 1920s, one of the leading Dublin Catholic secondary schools for boys of its time, O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, recommended its pupils in the following terms: ‘Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possess the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team.’[xvii] Little has changed in a hundred years. The abiding ambition of most all-male private schools remains not only examination results, but also to develop a cast of mind disposed to “pull with the team”, while instilling an idea of what is ‘normal’ in the dominant consensus.
Widespread single gender education keeps more troublesome and sports-obsessed male adolescents apart from females, who streak ahead academically. But when both enter the workforce, the demands of motherhood generally count against women working the long hours necessary for career advancement in most of the elite professions. ‘Early-rising’, workaholic male professionals are the praetorian guard of the dominant consensus.
Irish class boundaries are not impermeable, or based on race or creed – as Leo Varadkar’s background illustrates – but it is increasingly difficult for anyone who is not from an elevated social background to rise up through the educational ranks to become a lawyer, doctor or even a banker. For example a young barrister, after a minimum of four years full-time study, is required to work without a salary for a further two, while he ‘devils’ under a senior colleague, thereby excluding a large proportion of the population. That profession is the bulk supplier of the country’s judiciary, which goes some way towards explaining the Court’s historic deference to property interests – notably: In the matter of Article 26 of the Constitution and in the Matter of The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, 1981.
Privileged classes, nonetheless, still produce offspring with intellectual or artistic aspirations that survive the stultifying educational system. As the economic benefits of the humanities and arts are now grudgingly recognised these pursuits are indulged with financial support available from state and private sources, albeit generally via laborious application processes. Ideally, however, the ‘creative’ is an advertising executive. Due to high rents, artists are pushed into becoming ‘art-repreneurs’, and conscripted into marketing the state as a place to do business.
Academia once offered a platform for meaningful critiques of Irish society, but little interaction with the public now occurs, as excessive specialisation has brought abstraction to most subjects. As in other countries, young academics are required to ‘publish or perish’ prolix articles addressed to their peers, leaving little time for political engagement. In 2012 Tom Garvin, Emeritus Professor of Politics decried the dismantling of prior ‘semi-democratic’ structures in University College Dublin, claiming: ‘internal representative structures and freedom of speech were closed down and replaced with Soviet-style top-down “councils” that passively received and passed on instructions from on high’. As non-academic staff began to outnumber academics Garvin found ‘an indescribable grey philistinism’ characterise the public culture of the college ‘and a hideous management-speak’ drowned out ‘coherent communication.’[xviii]
IV – The Propaganda Model – Print Media
The Irish media is subject to global trends, but also internal dynamics. The reputation of journalists as crotchety, difficult people, so often depicted on screen, belies how most now “pull with the team”, or see their careers stall. The journalist that questions dominant consensus is depicted as a conspiracy theorist, but this cautionary distrust of authority now appears to be in short supply. Print media in Ireland is on its knees as young readers, in particular, opt for online content, which has resulted in significant redundancies. Precarious freelancing is the norm for new entrants.
Denis O’Brien – who a tribunal of enquiry in 2011 concluded had handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to a government minister, who it was ‘beyond doubt’ had given ‘substantive information to him, of significant value and assistance to him’ in securing a mobile telephone licence[xix] – controls a great swathe of Irish media, including the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent – the widest-circulating daily and Sunday newspapers – thirteen regional publications, commercial radio channels, Newstalk (the Orwellian association seemingly lost on them) and Today FM. O’Brien’s outlets are generally pro-business, or more accurately pro-multinational, and often critical of the institutions of the state and even individual ministers, but generally support the economic elite with selective regurgitation of government Newspeak.
For example, the headline of the Irish Independent on October 18th 2018 ran: ‘Varadkar’s Government in crisis after one minister resigns, another faces fight for survival.’ The article simulates the drama of Fianna Fáil calling time on the coalition, thereby maintaining the fiction of two opposing forces – or only two options in the event of an election. The dominant consensus is woven into the piece with the reminder: ‘The instability has created a major crisis for the Government after a Budget that was well received by most sectors’. In contrast, Social Justice Ireland argued that the budget disproportionately benefited high-earners, noting: ‘Budget 2019 fails to make any notable impact on Ireland’s entrenched inequalities and fails to tackle any of the major challenges the country currently faces.’[xx]
The ‘Indo’ also ostentatiously stimulates demand among upwardly-mobile youth for property and health insurance. Thus the headline on the 19th of October 2018 read: ‘Families to save in home loan and health shake-up’. Its consumer affairs correspondent announced: ‘Families are to enjoy the benefits of a price war in health insurance, and increased competition with even more entrants into the mortgage market’. Mostly, however, it provides the mainstays of effective propaganda: light entertainment, especially blanket sport coverage, celebrity gossip and sexual titillation.
There is only one other genuinely daily national indigenous newspaper – the Irish Times – which has hoovered up the Irish Examiner and regional titles to create a duopoly. It is considered, and styles itself, ‘the paper of record’, but rarely conducts meaningful investigations, tending only to print sensitive material once it has been aired elsewhere, such as when reporting on the harassment of employees by Michael Colgan, the former director of the Gate Theatre.[xxi] The catastrophic purchase of www.myhome.ie at the height of the last boom makes it a vested interest in the property market, which is reflected in extensive property supplements. Often seen as a bastion of Irish democracy, its credibility was undermined by the hosting of unmarked advertorials of the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plan.[xxii]
The imprint of government Newspeak was also evident on October 13th, the morning before the last budget was announced, with the headline ‘Significant spending increases for housing and health’ emblazoned across the front cover. Importantly, it gave a positive spin on the budget, which could be seen from every newsstand in the country, ensuring, even if the paper itself was never read, it maintained the ambient feel-good-factor. Was the positive spin provided as a quid pro quo for the scoop, or strategic leak?
The fingerprints of the economic elite are also apparent in the opening words of an article by chief political reporter Pat Leahy on October 14th. He cautioned the following: ‘First, do no harm. Any finance minister should heed the primary precept of the Hippocratic oath, and ensure that their fiscal and economic prescriptions do not damage the Government, or the economy.’ “Doing no harm” appears to involve upholding the dominant consensus, and avoiding the issues of social exclusion and sustainability.
The ‘Old Lady of D’Olier Street’ still provides a platform for left-leaning and progressive journalists, including Fintan O’Toole, Una Mullally and David McWilliams, but this does not imply relentless focus on Ireland’s economic and social structures. Their emphasis has tended to be on identity politics, issues of individual liberty, particularly reproductive rights, gender equality, and from O’Toole the ongoing dramas of Trump and Brexit. Only McWilliams consistently nails the social structures. Ultimately, the paper cannot afford to affront AB readers or farmers with ‘shrill’ left-wing commentaries or sustained campaigns, but in keeping these writers on board it maintains the illusion of being progressive.
It has also dumbed-down considerably recently in the face of ‘commercial realities’, in other words a high salary overhang. Stodgy book reviews have been marginalised, with increasing emphasis on business, vox pop reporting –with leading articles like ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’[xxiii] – consumer affairs and, as usual, lavish sport coverage: all of these fit with the propaganda model of distraction with light entertainment.
We have relied on UK publications to break stories such as labour abuses in the fishing industry, the substitution of horsemeat for beef, and the recent scandal of unmarked government advertorials. Serious interrogation of the role of the Gardaí has been conducted at a remove from the mainstream.
Two political magazines, The Phoenix and Village Magazine, offer satire and dissent, but the former is not available for free online and thus has limited political clout. The latter is yet to develop a viable commercial model, but at least upheld freedom of expression and Dáil privilege by publishing online (along with www.broadsheet.ie) a record of Catherine Murphy’s speech accusing Denis O’Brien of corruption, after he had taken out an injunction against RTÉ, and when the Irish Times took fright.
VI – The Propaganda Model – the State Broadcaster
The state broadcaster receives a compulsory licence fee from anyone with a television set in the country, but still depends on advertising revenue to remain financially solvent. Like the Irish Times, RTÉ is a broad church, but both TV and radio stations are awash with light entertainment, including vox pop phone-ins like Joe Duffy’s Liveline which also offers an outlet for nonsensical Duckspeakers, while Ray D’Arcy and Ryan Tubridy provide distraction throughout the day on the news and current affairs channel RTÉ Radio 1.
Tubridy is Ireland’s highest-paid broadcaster, and often its public face as host of the prime time, Friday night ‘The Late Late Show’. A scion of a well-known Fianna Fáil family, he has assumed a seemingly unassailable position, and rarely courts controversy; although he recently suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘,[xxiv] and once compared breastfeeding in public to urinating on the street.[xxv] Mostly however he tugs at the heartstrings of viewers, while devoting his spare time to writing children’s books.
RTÉ mostly anesthetises the population with light entertainment, especially sport – one recent survey showed that on ‘Morning Ireland’, the highest-rating radio show in the country, environmental stories were covered for only 0.92% of the time, whereas sports news accounted for 12.41% of content.[xxvi] Elsewhere, shows such as ‘Claire Byrne Live’ offer a small screen outlet for Duckspeak. At the end of one episode last year, during which evidence for human-influenced climate change was ‘debated’, thirty-four percent of respondents did not believe this would pose a serious threat in their lifetimes, while nine-percent did not know.[xxvii] Damien O’Reilly has also provided an outlet for Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary to express the Duckspeak of climate denial,[xxviii] the farming lobby no doubt delighted by this muddying of the waters.
What passes for news and current affairs coverage generally consists of assessments of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics, or commentaries on controversies stirred up in the print media. A case in point was in the recent presidential election when the previously unknown, and unsupported, Peter Casey made a demeaning remarks about Travellers, which was greeted with such ‘outrage’ that he became a serious candidate in the election, thereby providing plenty of fodder for Joe Duffy, and others.
Ironically, the most serious political critique is found in the weekly comedy show ‘Callan’s Kicks’, where a degree of latitude is permitted. But as Theodore Zeldin explains, comedy can actually have the effect of reinforcing conformity ‘by being its safety valve’. Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools, ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down’, but ‘did so only for a few days.’[xxix]
*******
Ireland is a free country without an oppressive secret police force systematically monitoring communications. Despite the chilling effect of current defamation law, freedom of expression is enshrined in the Constitution and European Charter of Human Rights. Nonetheless as George Orwell put it in his proposed preface to his 1945 novel Animal Farm: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.’ Orwell observed how:
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Irish propaganda upholds a dominant consensus: preserving low taxation on wealth, especially property; encouraging steady economic growth, including rising rents; maintaining buy-in from young property purchasers; and insulating the agricultural sector, often referred to as ‘our farmers’ on the state broadcaster, from criticism. This is achieved through straightforward manipulation of the media as well as instilling conformity through the education system, but also in the use of light entertainment, especially sport, as distraction, as well as in the peddling of plain nonsense, on RTÉ especially. With the advent of social media we are seeing new and sinister methods of achieving these objectives, which this article has not addressed, but which Ireland is not immune from.
The relatively new medium of the internet need not necessarily be feared however. It can, even through increasingly compromised social media, counter propaganda, by allowing like-minded individuals to converge and orchestrate campaigns. Propaganda can easily be exposed and alternative viewpoints expressed. But we must guard against its capacity for offering further light entertainment distraction, and platforms for madcap Duckspeakers.
The most important weapon against propaganda is education, both childhood and lifelong, which must address adult illiteracy. A priority should be reform of that sector in Ireland: first by ending subsidised private education; then placing greater emphasis on the enquiring humanities and arts, before addressing the decline of higher learning institutions.
The water charges campaign failed to generate long-term political engagement among the working class, or an increasingly squeezed middle. Representatives of the economic elite could concede on that single issue and take the rug from underneath organisers, who had seen the campaign in broader terms. Future campaigns should directly confront a taxation system which fails to alleviate rising wealth inequality. As we have seen, the top five percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, eighty-five per cent of which is held in property or land. A long-standing regime of minimal property taxes, along with the failure of the state to construct social housing to any extent, have severely accentuated wealth inequalities and seen property prices and rents spiral. A campaign for housing as an ‘inalienable and imprescriptible’ right enshrined in the constitution[xxx], should become the main progressive objective.
[i] ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’, TV mini-series, BBC (1992)
[xvi] Carl O’Brien, Jenna Clarke-Molloy, ‘Private school enrolment returns to boom-time high’, Irish Times, December 28th, 2017.
[xvii] David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 2010, p.10.
[xviii] Tom Garvin ‘The bleak future of the Irish university’, Irish Times, May 1st, 2012.
[xix] The report summaries the payments made to the then Fine Gael Minister Michael Lowry saying, ‘In aggregating the known payments from Mr Denis O Brien to Mr Michael Lowry, it is apposite to note that, between the granting of the second GSM licence to Esat Digiphone in May 1996, and the transmission of £420,000 sterling to complete the purchase of the latter of Mr Lowry’s English properties in December 1999, Mr O’Brien had made or facilitated payments to Mr. Lowry of £147,000 sterling, £300,000 sterling and a benefit equivalent to a payment in the form of Mr O’Brien’s support for a loan of £420,000 sterling.’ From: Untitled, ‘Lowry helped O’Brien get mobile licence’, Untitled, RTÉ, 22nd of March, 2011, https://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0322/298935-moriarty_background/, accessed 16/11/18.
[xxi] Laurence Mackin, Conor Gallagher, ‘Seven women allege abuse and harassment by Michael Colgan’, Irish Times, November 4th, 2017.
[xxii] Kevin Doyle, ‘Varadkar orders review of Project Ireland €1.5m publicity campaign amid controversy’, Irish Independent, March 1st, 2018.
[xxiii] Rosita Boland, ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’, Irish Times, October 14th, 2017.
[xxiv] Untitled, Stickybottle, ‘Flood of complaints to RTE after ‘Late Late Show’ cyclists item’ 14th of March, 2018, http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/complaints-rte-cyclists-item/
[xxv] Denise Deighan O’Callaghan, Letter to the Editor: ‘Tubridy’s comments on breastfeeding’, Irish Times, November 8th, 2004.
[xxviii] Sasha Brady, ‘Michael O’Leary slams climate change as ‘complete and utter rubbish’’, Irish Independent, April 8th, 2017.
[xxix] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, London, Maclehouse Press, 2015. p.177.
[xxx] See Eoin Tierney, ‘The key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution’ July 1st, 2001, Cassandra Voices, http://cassandravoices.com/law/the-key-change-to-fix-the-irish-constitution/, accessed 21/11/18.
Leo Varadkar dismisses his father Ashok’s claim to be a socialist, which came in an interview after his son became Taoiseach. According to Leo he does not really know what the term means:
You’ve probably seen stuff where he describes himself as a socialist but that’s total rubbish .. It’s not that he believes in high taxes or generous welfare, quite the contrary … Nor the nationalisation of the means of distribution of wealth or any of those sort of things (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.24).
It is not simply that Ashok Varadkar has misrepresented his real position, but that socialism is to be rubbished. As he put it recently in the Dáil, ‘What the Socialists want … is to divide society into some people who pay for everything and qualify for nothing …’
As a politician Leo has long represented those people who “pay for everything”, only to be preyed on by ‘parasitic’ socialists. It is a neat inversion of the Marxist argument that capitalism exploits workers, which has been used by conservatives in the United States with enduring success.
The Fine Gael party has traveled some distance from the days of former Taoiseach John A. Costello, who urged in 1969: ‘to put upon your banners the Just Society, that Fine Gale is not a Tory party’ (McCullagh,, 2010, p.398). Under Enda Kenny Tory strategists were brought in as advisors, and Varadkar now firmly positions the party in the centre-right of Irish politics.
I – The Young Turk
Trenchant criticism of Fine Gael’s social democratic legacy helped Leo Varadkar make his name within the party. In a notorious speech in 2007, which he retrospectively considers ‘terrible, crass and disrespectful’, he described the beleaguered Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Brian Cowen as ‘a Garret FitzGerald’, who had ‘trebled the national debt and effectively destroyed the country (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.88)’.
Garret FitzGerald was the leader of Fine Gael between 1977 and 1987, a two-term Taoiseach whose last administration was marked by soaring national debt, in part due to his reluctance to impose swingeing cuts, and also because of the presence within his coalition of the Labour Party, and opposition to austerity measures from the opposition Fianna Fáil, which changed its tune after winning the 1987 election.
Away with the old – former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.
FitzGerald was identified with the Keynesian economic policy of using government spending to stimulate economic activity. This approach goes back to John A. Costello’s First Inter-Party Government, 1948-51, when balanced budgets were abandoned and a capital budget first introduced. There was, however, always a conservative wing within the party aligned with the legacy of the two Cosgrave (father and son, W.T. and Liam) administrations of 1922-32 and 1974-77, and subsequently influenced by Milton Friedman’s Monetarist approach, underpinning Thatcherism.
MEP Brian Hayes remains an apologist for Varadkar’s speech: ‘There was a large part of Leo, me as well, who resents how the Garret FitzGerald government didn’t do the things they said they’d do to fix the economy. There were a lot of people in Fine Gael who were very disappointed [with the FitzGerald government] and he was trying to articulate that (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.87)’.
From the outset Varadkar had cannily identified that cleavage within Fine Gael. This is clear from one of his early missives to the Irish Times, written in the wake of the debacle of Michael Noonan’s loss to Bertie Aherne’s Fianna Fáil in the 2002 general election. He described an ‘internal conflict between its conservative Christian democrat base (which it is set on deserting) and its liberal, social democratic base from the Fitzgerald era (which deserted it some time ago) (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.46).’
In Varadkar’s view, the only strategic option was to appeal to that conservative, Christian Democratic base, and dispense with social-democratism altogether. This is consistent with rubbishing his father’s socialism today, but actually misrepresents the Christian basis of Fine Gael’s social-democratism, particularly that of John A. Costello’s son Declan Costello, the author of the Just Society.
For Varadkar Christian Democratism was synonymous with right-wing conservative politics, which was evident in his thinking from the outset. Initial Progressive Democrat inclinations gave way to respect for the leadership qualities of John Bruton. Membership of Young Fine Gael followed, while studying medicine in Trinity College.
This brought a Washington Ireland Programme for Service and Leadership internship in 2000, under Republican Congressman Peter King. The New York representative’s politics were centrist in American terms – where socialism is still a dirty word – but included an enduring commitment to state infrastructure, such as rail, while maintaining a conservative attitudes to same-sex marriage and abortion.
Ironically, given his current identification with liberal causes such as marriage equality, and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Leo appears to have initially drawn from the same conservative playbook. In 2010 he argued in relation to abortion services that ‘it isn’t the child’s fault that they’re the child of rape’; while on the question of marriage equality he once argued: ‘Every child has the right to a mother and father and, as much as is possible, the state should vindicate the right’. He even courted Ronan Mullen for a time, inviting him to address a constituency meeting in 2007 on the issue of civil partnerships (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 131, 169 and 170).
Varadkar is a late convert to social liberalism, but he remains a fiscal conservative. In power he has evinced little enthusiasm for government investment, including describing rail travel as being for romantics. Thus far Leo-Liberalism has entailed doing very little to alter Irish society. Inactivity in office might be considered an attribute, but this predisposition suggests little will be done to tackle the current housing crisis, or address Ireland’s runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions.
II – Double-Jobbing?
Leo Varadkar is a preternatural politician, an exotic insider who has, with great alacrity, climbed the greasy pole to become the youngest Taoiseach in the history of the state, while others around him floundered. In achieving this impressive feat he has displayed unmatched understanding of the dark political arts, which Niccolò Machiavelli believed necessary to advance a politician’s ends. But the Renaissance Italian warns his Prince to shun flatterers.
A recent biography Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach casts Varadkar as ‘the tall, dark and handsome’ icon of the new Ireland, whose ‘photographic memory’ (a facility also once attributed to Garret FitzGerald) allowed him to waltz through a medical degree on this way to high political office (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 15 and 39). This ‘young foggy’ honed his abilities in the trenches of student politics alongside comrades, many of whom have now fallen by the wayside – a recurring theme throughout his career – such as Lucinda Creighton.
The two young authors appear close to the subject, to the point where dispassionate assessment is not apparent: one, Niall O’Connor, was recently appointed a special adviser to the Ministry of Defence; the other Phillip Ryan is deputy political editor across the titles of the generally pro-government Independent Newspaper group, owned by Denis O’Brien.
Call me Dave.
The book was published by Biteback Publishing, partly owned by Tory grandee and billionaire Lord Ashcroft, which also released a biography of David Cameron Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron (Bitback, London, 2015), co-written by Ashcroft himself, alongside works attacking the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
But as any historian is aware, an apparently tainted source may nonetheless yield valuable evidence. Time will tell whether our Prince has erred in allowing damaging material to enter the public domain.
In his review of the book Diarmuid Ferriter drew attention to a passage explaining how Varadkar: ‘floated the idea to one TD of creating anonymous accounts to make positive comments under online stories on popular news websites.’ But it seems likely that this going on in political parties across the board.
Far worse was Varadkar’s conduct while Minister for Social Protection (2016-17), where he launched an advertising campaign against welfare ‘cheats’. In the meantime he used the Department as a launchpad for his leadership bid, after first hatching an escape from the ‘Angola’ of Health.
An unnamed adviser relates how visits to Intreos, Department offices located in every county, were used to further his ambition to lead Fine Gael: ‘Social protection was great for us … We travelled everywhere. We went to every parish hall. Every councillor we got to meet. The campaign indirectly started when we were meeting councillors’ (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.254)
Masquerading as Department business, these were tours on what former Fianna Fáil leader Charlie Haughey called the ‘rubber chicken and chips circuit’ of constituency branches, all at the expense of the Irish taxpayer. Considering Varadkar’s attacks on ‘welfare cheats’, this double-jobbing is the height of hypocrisy. Such conduct may be normal in Irish politics, but that does not make it right.
Unfortunately, doing little, while generating a lot of noise, marked Varadkar’s stint in the Department of Social Protection, as has been the case in his other roles.
What also emerges is just how embedded many of the most influential journalists in the country appear to be. The authors unashamedly reveal how the ‘Taoiseach has made a virtue out of wining and dining journalists who accompany him on international trade missions’, believing, ‘it is important to spend time with them socially’.
During one recent jolly in New York, ‘More than twenty guests, who included journalists from print and broadcast media, joined the Taoiseach and foreign affairs officials for a five-course, three-hour-long meal’. The authors, who may have been present, gleefully recall the guests devouring ‘French onion soup, foie gras, filet mignon and mushroom ravioli dusted with black truffles’, followed by further drinks in Fitzpatrick’s Manhattan Hotel in Midtown; all, we may assume, at the expense of the Irish taxpayer (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 321-322).
Few journalists could resist the prospect of such intimacy with a sitting Taoiseach, fewer still could emerge from such lavish entertainments with objectivity intact.
The attitude of one of his predecessors John A. Costello, who inveighed against ‘the era of the expense account … the era of the expensive restaurant (McCullagh, 2010, p.390)’, has long since fallen into abeyance.
It should also raise an eyebrow that Ryan Tubridy, Miriam Callaghan (both of RTE) and Ursula Halligan (of TV3) endorse the book on the back cover.
III – ‘Dr’ Varadkar
In Irish society, as with many others, the position of doctor carries an unmatched aura of respectability. As the son of a respected G.P. Leo had an immediate advantage of name recognition, and respect, in his constituency when he began his political career.
In the meantime he was studying for a medical degree himself, though he admits he was a dilettante student, and perhaps ought to have studied law, that other passport to bourgeois respectability. Nonetheless, training to be a doctor has given this career politician an enduring credibility, and mystique, which still impresses commentators.
As a young councillor, we are told he would travel ‘straight from hospital to the chamber dressed in his medical attire, with a stethoscope around his neck’. He now denies the full extent of this, but the nickname of ‘Scrubs’ that emerged in the local media, was hardly damaging (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52).
His biographers claim that medicine is among the interests that Leo shares with his partner, Matthew Barrett, who is a practising cardiologist, but as Minister for Health Varadkar showed a discernible lack of interest in staying in the job. An anonymous cabinet colleague remains critical:
The fact he walked away from it after such a short time, I think if you ask most of the parliamentary party, even some of his biggest supporters, they were disappointed with that. It was obviously done with a view to the leadership election. There was obviously a calculation made that you cannot go from health to the Taoiseach’s office. Certainly not in a contested election when you have to go around canvassing (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.235)
One might have expected a young doctor to be brimming with ideas on how to address the major public health questions of our time – just as Dr Noel Browne spearheaded efforts to eradicate T.B. when he was Minister in the late 1940s – or even dismantle the expensive bureaucracy in the health service.
Varadkar’s first decisive move, just two weeks into office, was to abandon the Coalition government’s promise, and long-term Fine Gael commitment, to universal health insurance (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.154). He went on toboast publicly that he had taken out his own private insurance, and urged other young people to follow suit.
The two-tier system would remain, and nor was Varadkar prepared to reform what remained of public provision, and dispense with the Health Service Executive: that layer of bureaucracy insulating a Minister from direct criticism, bequeathed by one of his confidantes, former Minister for Health (2004-11) Mary Harney.
After Kenny’s calamitous election campaign in 2015, when the party lost twenty seats, Varadkar knew his time was nigh. He forced his way out of Health by demanding ‘a large bag of cash and a mandate for sweeping change’, whereby he could bypass the rules surrounding recruitment (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.232). These were demands he knew Kenny would not be accede to. The doctor had more than Health on his mind.
The Reluctant Taoiseach: John A. Costello.
IV – ‘Murph’ and the Whistleblower
It seems the Housing ministry has become the new ‘Angola’ among government Departments, with any Minister operating with fiscal and monetary constraints over which he has no control. The incumbent, whether Simon Coveney or Eoghan Murphy, appears like a hapless pilot frantically playing with the instruments on an already doomed vessel as it descends through the sky.
To make real progress, the Ministry of Housing would have to be develop a construction agency headed by the minister, integrate with the Transport Department, and be given a direct line to Finance. Instead the Housing Building Finance Bill 2018 ‘will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.’
Varadkar’s long-standing resistance to asking those who “pay for everything” to provide any more, does not appear to preclude a revival of the public-private partnerships which were a hallmark of Bertie Aherne’s tenure as Taoiseach.
Yet the account of Eoghan Murphy that emerges in this biography does not align with the bumbling, statistic-addled media performer, labelled the ‘Craig Doyle of Irish politics’. He was Leo’s loyal fixer, largely responsible for Varadkar capturing an overwhelming share of the parliamentary party’s vote.
Varadkar’s Fixer: Eoghan Murphy.
According to one of his colleagues: ‘You had to have a multiple ways into people and no one moved into a “solid yes” unless Murphy was 100 per cent satisfied (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.277)’.
Murphy was the founder of the so-called Five-A-Side Club of young Fine Gael TDs and at one point the sole member in Varadkar’s corner. As such, he was crucial to the latter’s rise (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.125).
Murphy’s gregariousness compensated for Varadkar’s frank admission that he ‘probably should not be in politics at all; I am not really a people person (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.112)’. Unlike Varadkar however, and perhaps to his cost, Murphy appears quite serious in his attempts to govern. He will remain a lightning rod for dislike of the government, however, as long as the state continues to shirk a constitutional responsibility to provide affordable accommodation for citizens.
When Enda Kenny finally resigned from office last year, apparently after egotistically ensuring he had surpassed John A. Costello as the longest-serving Fine Gael Taoiseach, Varadkar’s main rival Simon Coveney was hit with a political blitzkrieg, foreclosing any leadership race before a shot had been fired in anger.
From his free-roaming position in Social Protection Varadkar had captured the vast majority of the parliamentary party, making the 65% of the vote Coveney received from the wider political party an irrelevance.
What had brought Kenny down, along with two Ministers for Justice and two Garda Commissioners, is perhaps the greatest scandal in Irish public life since the turn of the century: the alleged framing on charges of child sex abuse of the Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe after he had revealed industrial scale non-prosecution of drink-driving charges. This has led to the appointment of the first Garda Commissioner from outside the state.
In this regard at least, Varadkar has been on the right side of history, famously referring in the Dáil in 2015 to McCabe (who he had previously met and appraised) as an ‘honourable man’, after his conduct had been described as ‘disgusting’ by then Garda Commissioner Callinan.
The one part of this narrative that rankles, however, flows from the toxic relationship that existed between Varadkar and Alan Shatter, who as Minister for Justice appears to have been mislead by senior Gardaí. Did Varadkar’s own ambitions inhibit him from reaching out to a cabinet colleague? The political cadavers the affair made of so many of the Fine Gael old guard certainly cleared the way for Varadkar.
Nonetheless, Varadkar must be given credit where it is due, and many of his ideological opponents were impressed by his respect for Justice and the Rule of Law. This impression is bolstered by his rejection of an idea floated by the current Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan for a ban on Gardaí being photographed in the course of their duties.
V – A Land of Opportunity?
It seems de rigeur for any fiscally conservative politician to display a commitment to ‘opportunity-for-all’ when he ascends to high office. Thus, in his acceptance speech Varadkar urged ‘every proud parent in Ireland today’, to dream ‘big dreams for their children’.
He said:
Let that be our mission in Fine Gael, to build in Ireland a republic of opportunity, one in which every individual has the opportunity to realise their potential and every part of the country is given its opportunity to share in our prosperity (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.xi).
Opportunity for Varadkar is distinctly upwardly mobile, along the lines of the American Dream, which has been fools’ gold for many. Nothing is said of those who inevitably fail to live up to their own, or parent’s, aspirations, and depend on the state for help. His approach seems at odds with John A. Costello’s Fine Gael being, ‘for all sections of the Irish people, but particularly for the poor and the weak and the distressed (McCullagh, 2010, p.398)’.
Perhaps the one measure that would achieve the parity of opportunity which Varadkar claims a devotion to, would be to develop a truly equal educational system. But the best model for primary and secondary education seems to be found in Finland, where private schooling is effectively prohibited, and educational attainment among the highest in Europe. Instructively, this socialist society maintains an income tax rate in excess of fifty per cent.
Varadkar has in the past opposed reforming the Irish education system, where the state pays the salaries of teachers in the private institutions, which achieve the highest grades in state examinations. In 2003, he said dividing Ireland ‘into a country of those who pay for everything and receive nothing and those who pay for nothing and receive everything, with only a small minority in between, would deal a fatal blow to what is left of Ireland’s social contract (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52)’.
There is perhaps no clearer statement by Varadkar of whose interests he would serve in fulfilling his “contractual” role: those who “pay for everything”, the wealthiest strata of society who have throughout the history of the state used educational attainment, including access to careers in medicine and the law, as a barrier to wealth and influence.
That affiliation has been apparent from the beginning of his political career: with his excoriation of the social democratic tradition in his party; it proceeded through an inclination to work with the Republican Party, and sympathy for the Progressive Democrats; it showed in a willingness to dispense with a promise of universal healthcare and accept a two-tier system, and with the shaming of welfare ‘cheats’. It was also apparent in his entreaties on behalf of Donal Trump’s Doonbeg golf course, and open invitation to visit the country.
Leo’s liberalism is uniquely adapted to further his ambitions, and take care of his supporters. The Prince appears to have no plan beyond the end of achieving power, and it trappings.
In a revealing aside in this most beige of biographies we discover him telling colleagues ‘he feels at his most comfortable when holding meetings with other world leaders, some of whom he regularly texts’. Most worryingly perhaps, he has also ‘struck up warm relationships with’ among others the Far Right Hungarian President Viktor Orban (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.319).
*******
Times have changed in Irish politics, where once John A. Costello had to be persuaded to serve as Taoiseach, today a career politician unashamedly plots a course to power. Who would wish to enter this tawdry scene? Micheal O’Siadhail’s insight appears apt that ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy (O’Siadhail, 2018, p.149)’.
Raising political standards in Ireland goes far beyond removing Varadkar, who is a product of a political system informed by clientalism. It requires an evolution in our understanding of the role of government, and a shared acceptance of the need for genuine equality of opportunity, beginning with educational reform.
Varadkar’s own party is now what he and others aspired for it to become: a conservative party, untainted by social democratism, which wields power on behalf of the property-holding, private-school-attending, privately-medically-insured cohort of the population. As long as he remains in power those who “pay for everything” will remain ascendant.
References
David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 2010.
Philip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach, Biteback Publishing, London, 2018.
Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Baylor, Waco, 2018.
At a festival recently I fell into the company of an exuberant character in his early twenties. After a while this smiling extrovert revealed he was tripping on LSD. Between performing acro-aerobics, and welcoming lashes from a fly-swatter that generated a temporary tattoo, he declared he was going to take a further dose. I dutifully warned him to consider biding his time, but he laughed off my concerns and threw the tablet down the hatch. Last I saw he was leading a toaster around by its chord, proclaiming – wild-eyed – it was his cat.
Festival frolics.
I wonder has he since returned to a respectable job to draw a wage, that ‘one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar’, as Allen Ginsberg puts it in his ‘Howl’, with festive memories sustaining him through the tedium of spread sheets or digital marketing. I pray he has not fallen over the edge into insanity, and like Carl Solomon in Ginsberg’s epic poem of post-modernity, ended up in a mental asylum:
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
or
where fifty more shocks will return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
To be clear, LSD, or acid, can, in rare circumstances, trigger a first psychotic episode, and should be treated with extreme caution. It is also a controlled substance, with possession or intent to supply ordinarily prohibited in most countries.
But after decades of identification with an orgiastic counterculture – famously with Timothy Leary’s 1960s rallying cry ‘to turn on, tune in and drop out’ – research scientists are returning to examine its profound therapeutic capabilities, including for treatment of seemingly incurable depression.
The ritualistic abandonment that I encountered at that festival is giving way to ‘white coat Shamanism’, where guides reduce the chance of bad trips, and lasting insanity, as well as more measured ingestion, including ‘micro-dosing Fridays’ in Silicon Valley.
Could its use yet realise a paradigm shift in how humanity interacts with the world, such as was hoped for by many of the 1960s evangelists, including Allen Ginsberg himself?
I – LSD and Psilocybin
There are two main varieties of psychedelics, or hallucinogens, in use: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or ‘Acid’) , and psilocybin, commonly referred to as ‘magic mushrooms’.
Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered the properties of LSD in 1943, after deriving it from a naturally occurring compound called ergot, a fungus that infects grains, especially rye, exposed to moisture. Indeed, the visions – beatific and diabolic – commonly reported by peasants and others in the Middle Ages, and generally associated with the effects of starvation, have been attributed to this fungal growth in staple foodstuffs (Ferrières, 2006, p.141).
Hoffman himself had little doubt as to the significance of his discovery for humanity, subsequently writing:
the feeling of co-creationism with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and materialist and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong (Pollan, 2018, p.26).
The difficulty, however, for Sandoz, the Swiss laboratory which manufactured it, was to find a practical application for the curious, mind-altering compound. Throughout the 1950s the company responded positively to most requests from bodies engaged in research; this included the CIA’s MK Ultra Programme, involving trials on thousands of participants, mostly without their consent, in order to advance techniques in mind control.
Its discovery also ushered in a new class of anti-depressants, through an understanding of serotonin; and, notably, successful trials on alcoholics, before its use became tied up – inextricably it would seem – with the counterculture of the 1960s, and was prohibited in the U.S.A. from 1966. Timothy Leary believed that if four million people experienced its effects it would bring about major changes to society, in the end only two million gained the experience.
Nonetheless Michael Pollan writes of the period:
LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego and unconscious) and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material (Pollan, 2018, p.214).
Psilocybin, the other psychedelic in common use, also known as ‘magic mushroom’, is of far more ancient vintage in human culture, especially in the New World. It played a role in Mayan religious ceremonies, to the disgust of the Catholic church, which in 1620 described the use of plants for divination as an act of superstition ‘opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith (Pollan, 2018, p.109)’.
Despite the appalling repression by Spanish authorities of this and other aspects of the indigenous culture including foodstuffs like amaranth, the use of these substances survived in popular Mexican religious rituals. These were first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world in a seminal article for Life Magazine written by New York banker R. Gordon Wasson in 1956, entitled ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, which contained the first known use of that term.
Wasson and his wife inveigled there way into one of the secret ceremonies; ultimately to the cost of the healer who was shunned by her village community after the revelations encouraged a steady stream of drug tourists to descend on them.
Terence McKenna has since popularized an hypothesis – ‘the Stoned Ape Theory’ – proposing that consumption of these mushrooms brought an expansion in human brain capacity. The idea is no longer so far-fetched when one learns that several tribes still feed psychoactive plants to their dogs to improve their hunting ability (Pollan, 2018, p.123), although it remains speculative.
Psychedelic mushrooms were also probably used by the Ancient Greeks in the Eleusinian Mysteries, initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Elsewhere in Europe, the Viking berserkers may also have been under its influence, explaining a disregard for personal safety in battle.
We may safely assume that such a powerful compound was well known across Europe, and probably used in various ceremonies, before the adoption of Christianity appears to have brought an end to its use. Monotheism does not appear compatible with the ambiguity fostered by hallucinogens.
II – The Ego is Stranded
Neuroscientists have isolated a hub of brain activity in the cerebral cortex known as the Default Network Mode (DMN). This performs metacognitive processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions, moral reasoning and ‘theory of mind’, all commonly associated with expression of ego, leading it to be referred to as the ‘me’ network (Pollan, 2018, p.302-4).
Revealingly, the DMN is only operational late in a child’s development, by which time a strong sense of self has been asserted, and a roaming imagination has given way to more ‘sensible’ considerations.
The DMN exerts an inhibitory influence on lower parts of the brain, like emotion and memory, which may help someone maintain a singular focus. According to Marcus Raichle it ‘acts as an uber-conductor to ensure that the cacophonies of competing signals from one system do not interfere with those from another (Pollan, 2018, p.303)’.
In experiments carried out under Robin Carhart-Harris volunteers were given psilocybin in a controlled environment. This revealed that the steepest drops in DMN activity correlated with the subjective experience of ‘ego dissolution’. This disinhibition may explain why thoughts, and even visions, not normally present during waking consciousness float to the surface of our awareness. In this Ted Talk he explains the benefits of the experiments:
As the influence of the DMN is unseated a feelings of connection with other ‘beings’ around us tends to manifest, making us ‘at one’ with Nature, a common experience among those under the influence of psychedelics.
This occurs alongside the disintegration of the visual processing system, allowing thoughts and even music to conjure images. The brain as a whole becomes more integrated as new connections spring up among regions that ordinarily keep to themselves, or were linked only via the central hub of the DMN. As Michael Pollan puts it: ‘The brain appears to become less specialized, and more globally interconnected, with considerably more intercourse, or cross-talk, among its various neighbourhoods (Pollan, 2018, p.316)’.
Franz Vollenweider also refers to ‘neuroplasticity’, whereby a window is opened in which destructive patterns of thought and behaviour are easier to change (Pollan, 2018, p.320).
III – Invention or Creation?
When Michael Pollan consumed magic mushrooms while researching his recent book on psychedelics he finds himself believing the trees in his gardens were the equivalent of his parents. As an atheist, he dismisses the idea there was anything supernatural about this ‘heightened perception’ requiring belief in a divinity, or magic, to explain it (Pollan, 2018, p.136), but his connectedness is nonetheless a fiction without scientific basis.
No great distance would appear to lie between Pollan’s belief in the truth of his mind’s subjective, and unprovable, conjecture, and a religious outlook, which George Steiner defines as ‘an endeavour to grasp, to offer thanks for, the gratuitous miracle of creation (Steiner, 2001, p.128).’
Steiner distinguishes between creation, which he connects to a religious belief in the truth of a fiction, and invention which arrives in science and technology.
Psychedelic drugs appear to play a role in permitting advances in the latter, but, surprisingly, not the former. Among those who tried LSD in the 1960s were technological visionaries in Silicon Valley, who began to revolutionize computers. These engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, finding it helpful for visualising staggering complexities in these dimensions, and holding it all in their heads.
Scientists are not generally associated with mind-altering drugs, but the confounding influence on otherwise highly-rational, even rigid, minds may increase the possibility of technological innovation.
The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who who was fascinated by science throughout his life, once mused on the counter-intuitive nature of scientific understanding:
When we try to recognise the idea inherent in a phenomena we are confused by the fact that it frequently – even normally – contradicts our senses. The Copernican system is based on an idea which was hard to grasp; even now it contradicts our senses every day … The metamorphosis of plants contradicts our senses in the same way (Holmes, 2009, p.247).
Quantum Uncertainty is similarly counter-intuitive (how is something simultaneously a wave and a particle?). A fixed appreciation of ‘reality’ often must be set aside in order for a breakthrough to occur, permitting the vision that God plays dice.
What holds for scientific invention does not seem to apply to artistic creativity. The prevalence of LSD in the avant-garde of the 1960s Counterculture dissolved much of our cultural inheritance – not least the literary canon in the eyes of Post Modernists – but since the 1960s it is hard to identify an artistic genre that has advanced in any way comparable to previous movements, such as the Romantics, or even Surrealists, both of whom we continually hark back to in common speech.
In his account of the music of the Beatles Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald points to the effect of the LSD on the wider culture:
Though framed into terms of sexual liberation and scaffolded by religious ideas imported from the Orient, the central shift of the counterculture was drugs, and one drug above all: d-lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD.
With the removal of what he describes as ‘the brain’s neural concierge’:
The LSD view of life took the form of a smiling non-judgmentalism which saw ‘straight’ thinking, including political opinion across the board from extreme Left to Right, as basically insane. To those enlightened by the drug, all human problems and divisions were issues, not of substance, but of perception. With LSD, humanity could transcend its ‘primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility’ and, realising the oneness of all creation, proceed directly to utopia.
He continues:
Using it, normal people were able to move directly to the state of ‘oceanic consciousness’ achieved by a mystic only after years of preparation and many intervening stages of growing self-awareness – as a result of which most of them not unnaturally concluded that reality was a chaos of dancing energies without meaning or purpose. There being no way to evaluate such a phenomenon, all one could do was ‘dig it’. Hence at the heart of the counterculture was a moral vacuum: not God, but The Void.
While pop music and television flourished, initially at least, McDonald identified a clear degeneration in older artistic forms. Thus:
Classical music, once an art of expression, became a pseudo-scientific, quasi-architectural craft of technique whose principles of design, opaque to the ear, were appreciable only by examining the ‘blueprint’ of the score. Similarly the rapid succession of conceptual coups in the world of painting and sculpture, so novel at the time, turned out to be merely the end of modernism and, as such, the dying fall of Western art. Overtaken by the ‘artistic discourse’ of post-modernism, art became as literary as post-Wagnerian classical music was visual, producing the arid paradox of paintings to listen to and music to look at. Shorn of their content, art, music, and literature degenerated by increasingly inconsequential stages from art about art, to jokes about art about art, and finally to jokes about art about art (McDonald, Ian, 2005, pp. 15-23).
Artistic creativity has been described as a form of divine madness, in which an immediate reality is dismissed in favour of the constructs of the imagination. Thus the nineteenth century John Ruskin asserted a belief in ‘spiritual powers … genii, fairies, or spirits’, claiming, ‘No true happiness exists, nor is any good work done … but in the sense or imagination of such presences.’ Who in their ‘right mind’ could conceive such an idea, yet such conceit is often a necessary tool for an artist. Whatever brain activity that is going on with the artist it does not appear that her ego needs to be dissolved.
In his essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900) W. B. Yeats refers to the ‘ministering spirits’ evident in his subject matter’s poem ‘Intellectual Beauty’: ‘who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the Elemental Spirits of medieval Europe, and the Sidhe [sic] of ancient Ireland’. In quoting that poem he evokes the mythical síde, nourishing his own Art:
These are ‘gleams of a remoter world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal silence,’ ‘visions swift, and sweet, and quaint,’ which lie waiting their moment ‘each in its thin sheath, like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among ‘ever-blooming Eden trees,’ ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’ ‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’ who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,’
Louis le Brocquy’s Portrait Head of W.B. Yeats.
The vivid fantasy of the creative artist may generate eidetic images, which are a type of mental picture, a vision, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory. This sounds much like the experience of someone on LSD, but the chemical manipulation of the brain does not appear to yield the same creative fruits, probably because, as MacDonald opines, it bypasses years of preparation.
IV – Paradigmatic shifts
Michael Pollan suggests that ‘Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioural depatterning’ (Pollan, 2018, p.124), resulting in a greater environmental awareness. Here he rather appears to be reprising Timothy Leary’s suggestion that widespread LSD use would dissolve the stolid social structures of post-War America, But in artistic terms this may prove to be fool’s gold, only leading to further dissolution and isolation.
Unfortunately, a common feature of the perceived wisdom derived from drug visions is its sheer banality: love is all we need, etc. Psychedelics may shake up rigid thinking among scientists, and have important therapeutic capabilities that should be better understood, and utilised, but there seems little prospect of profound artistic departures occurring under their influence.
Art at its best is invariably a hard-won product of intense labour, and drugs are generally a distraction. Thus Yeats opined in ‘Speaking to the Psalter’ (1903): ‘All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination (italics added)’. The best works of art, capable of changing the way we think and act, seem to emerge when a narrow imaginative journey occurs, and LSD would in all likelihood just interfere.
Ginsberg’ ‘Howl’, like Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, is instructive in this regard. I am guessing he wrote while he was sober, before he had ever sampled LSD, and it is a singular journey and experience that nonetheless is part of a conversation within a canon: ‘Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war’. He knew intimately the sacred cows of meter and rhyme he appears to be dispensing with, which may not be said for many of those that have followed in his wake.
The paradigmatic shifts we require in order to generate a genuinely “oceanic compassion” will not involve, alas, seeing one’s cat in a toaster at a festival, but will surely demand intense labour, in many artistic forms, in order to overthrow the toxic assumptions of our time.
That is not, however, to say that any state should criminalize these drugs, and drive their use underground. What we need is education. Anyone who embarks on a trip should be aware of what it entails, and certain personality types should be seriously discouraged from making use of them.
Perhaps the greatest irony of LSD is that many of the flighty characters who seek out LSD are precisely those who should avoid it, whereas the rigid personality types, who are unlikely to use it, might actually benefit from its unseating of the ego, and the eureka moments of scientific inspiration it appears to impart.
But unfortunately, as Timothy Leary put it: ‘Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them’.
References
Madeleine Ferrières’s Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Harper Press, Croydon, 2009.
Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the 1960s, Pimlico, New York, 2005.
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, Penguin, New York, 2018.
George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2001.
