Cassandra Voices

Author: frankarmstrong

  • Bunker Mentality

    I was en route to Leitrim for a second time in a month when ‘Zooropa,’ the U2 song from the album of the same name, came on the stereo (a consequence of Spotify’s predictive algorithm). I hadn’t heard the song in thirty years, the year the album came out and I was a student working in Bavaria for a long hot summer. Suddenly, I was back in the apartment room in Straubing, listening and thinking about the Europeanisation of U2 that had come on the back of Achtung Baby and now Zooropa. The previous summer I worked on an old Soviet style pig farm about a hundred kilometres from Berlin. As U2 hung old Trabants from the stage, I considered driving home to start university in one of these relics of the old world: the former Soviet Bloc that bewitched my younger self. The two U2 albums shouldered my journey into Old Europe, experiencing the stark contrast between the former DDR and the richer region of the Bavarian West.

    It was only as I set out for Leitrim the second time and the song played that I thought of its significance as a harbinger of the future: the lurch into Capitalist Realism and the End of History. Zooropa is steeped in contradiction as a song, marking the creative energy that pulsated across Europe at the time and the strange perpetual present that would define the new age. ‘No particular place names, no particular song,’ Bono sings, an incendiary criticism of the new Europe’s neoliberal squashing of tradition and place.

    Before this Bono implores us to ‘skip the underground…go to the overground’ in a raucous anthemic lament predictive of the exploitation and extortion of the underground music scene in the decades to come. Perhaps it is this very exploitation that led Mark Fisher to coin the term Capitalist Realism in his book of the same name in the first place (ironically, Bono has been at the forefront in legitimising neoliberalism as a social and economic force).

    Fisher defines capitalist realism as the ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ This contractual entrenchment in a singular ideology brings with a fatigue culture. In response to a lengthy quotation from The Communist Manifesto, Fisher would offer the retort ‘capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.’

    For Fisher, who took his life in 2017, neoliberal consumerism is defined by an orgy of the recycled without the commitment that defines the properly political. We watch The Truman Show, all the while laughing at the naivety and innocence, unaware that the media is owned by similarly large corporations, and much of the news curated for the masses.

    It is not that, therefore, that we skip the underground, as Zooropa suggests. We move up to an overground feeding on an ever-dwindling underground that becomes a proxy for it. Most of today’s ‘alt’ music would not sound out of place in the 1990s. Ruins, relics are everywhere, fodder for commodity production, without ritual and symbolic currency.

    Image: Darn Thorn

    Monumental Failure

    It is perhaps for this reason the Sligo-born artist Darn Thorn’s solo exhibition Monumental Failure at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, my second reason for travelling to Leitrim in the space of a month, leaves such a mark, the photographic document resistance to the consumer-spectator fix. Thorn’s show consists of old and new work, the main body of which is a video projected slide show containing haunting photographs of the destroyed bunkers along Europe’s northern coastline.

    High in the hills of Leitrim, a reservoir of natural colour and landscape, is the Centre itself. As one drives into New Line, Manorhamilton, in my case on a sunny summer evening, the blue and white colours of the centre are a dalliance with sun-soaked hills that lie all around. Thorn seems aware of this, given the curation of the show and the placement of work within the labyrinth spaces of the gallery.

    On entering the space, itself, a series of older framed photographic works, two of which are in colour – all directly or indirectly concerned with the process of ruination as it transforms natural and manmade habitats – are hung. The two works in colour, titled Unknown Zone #8 and Unknown Zone #10 respectively, are images that seem to hang some way between the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ as landscape erupts in a sea of colour, and the ‘index’ is less a known quantity in comparison to the black and white images. These are sumptuous, and often mystifying photographs that seduce the senses in a far different capacity to drier, more contemplative and ‘index’ directed black and white photos.

    Produced over a decade, and part of prior exhibitions in Thorn’s catalogue of work, the prints in the first space are primers for the meat of the exhibition projected by video in the main gallery space. In the first area black and white photographs produced between 2010 and 2016 are hung, one of which is ‘Oakhampton Castle in Ruins (after Turner).’ This is a giclee print, aligning photographic process with present day content, both of which the viewer is invited to connect in one. Thorn’s use of technical equipment is important, part of a broader aim to make time palatable as a process that exists as a continuum. Working against the desire to simply appropriate and recycle the past in objects of rebuilt ‘time’, a mainstay of capitalist realism, one finds here a measured engagement with the history of art via a ruined building that carries through Turner’s career as artist, used to define a graduating romantic sensibility.

    Thorn is obviously familiar with the romantic preoccupation with ruins. His stark black and white rendering of the great castle (in its (post-)modern iteration) is that of an object to be approached cautiously. It is a kind of wry commentary on the genius of Turner in rendering landscape both ‘beautiful and ‘sublime.’ It is also, in this regard, something of an austere commentary on the site of exhibition: deep in the West of Ireland, the Leitrim hills. How do we make sense of this landscape? In the post-Covid, climate change era, is it even possible to look at landscape as anything other than commodity? Because, in my estimation, Thorn can do beautiful and sublime if that is what is needed. But his concern with landscape as a genre of art is to help connect with the past in a way that is primal and other to that of commodity culture.

    Image: Darn Thorn

    Perfect Location

    Perhaps this is why Leitrim, with its traces of an older, less atomised Ireland, is the perfect location for this exhibition. Ruins lie everywhere, in the built environment or the landscape, as the Old and New Ireland face off against one another. It is difficult not to think of the coastline near Manorhamilton on entering the exhibition space and confronting the mainstay of Monumental Failure: austere analogue and monochrome images of the destroyed bunkers that litter Europe’s beaches like ghosts in the machine.

    As mentioned in the short text accompanying the exhibition, French architect and theorist Paul Virilio began a career documenting these bunkers in the 70s, traces of an historical war machine that had become spatial and unmoored from time: bombs could fall at any moment, in night or day. Virilio, like Thorn, approaches the bunkers as monuments to a regime of power, whether the Atlantic Wall Hitler dreamed of becoming a ruination to rival Greek Civilisation, or a nation’s resistance to the Soviet March towards a future that is dialectically driven by Progress itself.

    The destroyed bunkers that Thorn fixates on in three separate series, whether in Denmark or Lativa, are upended, torn apart, existing as traces of totalitarianism to which Europe’s past is intrinsically bound. Unlike the real landscape around the Sculpture Centre, these often-melancholic images present regimes of power best understood as evil.

    They can be read in an implicit socio-historical or moral context, an art historical context as periodic movements, or as primers for an imagination that has no context other than a subject reckoning with time. It is the latter position that implored me to respond to the austere force of the imagery. Maybe Ireland’s recent Covid past was a trigger, but the ruins seemed more than mere historical indexes of a long-lost history, depictions of time that preceded the critic and artist. The idea of retreating to a bunker and hiding away in hope that the war would pass spoke to me of the pandemic lockdowns, the society-wide shutdowns ordered in lockstep across Europe during the Covid 19 pandemic. By looking at Europe’s past Ireland’s past began to stare back at me.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    The War on Covid

    ‘The War on Covid,’ as Michael Casey referenced it in a timely article, (as really a ‘war on people’) is not a glitch in the smooth functioning of the West, but the continuation of social atomisation that accelerated in the previous decade. As capitalist realism bears its ugly teeth, the masses emerge as the ultimate consumers in every facet of life. Stay in, shut up, consume. The lockdown is the bunker mentality of global capitalism, delivering ‘goods’ while ‘keeping you safe’ becomes the key mantra spluttering from the mouths of bureaucrats high on the capital involved in controlling movement of people in space.

    Is it mere coincidence that Thorn completed the series titled Monumental Failure, presented in four parts (there is an architectural drawing for an Atlantic Wall bunker by the Lodt organisation projected onto the floor in addition to the photographs of ruins projected on screen) as lockdown ended and the war in the Ukraine usurped it as a media focus? The ruins depicted in these haunting, exquisite, ‘failures’ are symptoms of totalitarianism that persists in our wake. They are signifiers of a bunker mentality that atomises and reduces human beings to bodies in hiding.

    A certain symmetry therefore exists in knowing that these images document the beaches of Europe as of today, comment on Europe’s historical war machine, and pay homage to the medium of photography as practiced at the time the bunkers were constructed. Thorn spent considerable time in Lativa, a country that was invaded by the Soviets and Nazis in quick succession, the ruins acting as monuments to liberation and signs of an imminent fascist return.

    The complex history of the region, as one regime of power succumbs to another, becomes manifest as haunting blots on landscape, the ruins left uncared for like remains of alien life. Recently, I stumbled upon an online debate concerning the Memorial Museum at Auschwitz, that morally debated the transformation of the death camps into a visiting centre (we see the museum at the end of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest) to remind us of genocidal horror. The thrust of the debate concerned the morality of memorialising something as horrific as the camps that killed so many. Why, the argument went, build a monument to genocide? As I drove home from Leitrim thinking of the ruined bunkers whose various parts lay scattered on the beaches of Europe, meticulously rendered in Thorn’s monochrome images, I thought of a bunker mentality born less of a credo to murder than to ‘keep us safe.’

    If the Memorial Museum is intended to engender memory of an event, what, we might ask, is the purpose of the ruined bunkers? Once intended to hide away from terror, the bunkers soon became the object of terror. Would destroying the bunkers trigger a mass forgetting, or do the ruins simply invoke the credo that one person’s idea of safety is another’s idea of terror? If there’s an ethical purpose to Thorn’s Monumental Failure it is to help see both positions as one.

    Feature Image: Image: Darn Thorn

    Darn Thorn’s exhibition ‘Monumental Failures’ runs until June 22nd in the Leitrim Sculpture Centre.

  • Ireland Urgently Requires a Covid Inquiry

    It should be a source of embarrassment that in Ireland we still have had no public inquiry into the State’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite talk of terms of reference, nothing has materialized, and nor does this situation seem likely to change during the lifetime of new Taoiseach Harris’s government.

    The mainstream media, which received millions in advertising revenue throughout the pandemic, would appear to have no interest in searching questions being asked. It may not be appetising to recall overwhelmingly uncritical coverage; placing the daily tally of new cases and deaths on their front pages news for almost two years; seemingly oblivious to everything else happening in the world.

    Nor does the main opposition party in Dáil Éireann, Sinn Féin seem gung ho for one either. During the pandemic, they failed to interrogate adequately the domineering, even dictatorial, role of Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan in particular, or the runaway budgets that developed in that period. Despite this spending, our health service appears to be no better equipped to deal with medical emergencies.

    In my view, Sinn Féin (and other opposition parties) should reconsider this stance as it hands a huge political opportunity to opponents on the far right as we enter a period of elections. The Irish people require accountability on this era-defining response.

    For all its faults, and failure to interrogate basic premises, the U.K. Covid inquiry is at least holding power to account. That inquiry implicitly acknowledges that extraordinary and unprecedented measures were taken, undermining basic civil liberties, and causing grave harms, including to children denied education and those caught in situations of domestic violence. The damage to our collective mental healths may be more difficult to quantify.

    A self-fulling prophecy

    Writing for the Irish Times on May 23 2020 clinical psychologist and author Maureen Gaffney reckoned that ‘Covid-19 has scored a direct hit on our most basic psychological drives.’ She seemed oblivious, however, to how statements such as her own that ‘the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic may have changed life more permanently’ might have been contributing to the anxiety of her readers.

    The direct health impact of what Peter Hitchens acutely described as ‘the Great Panic of 2020’ are fairly obvious. But the ripple of psychological effects is less easy to assess. Psychological injury, or so-called nervous shock, is difficult to quantify in law. A successful claim requires reasonable foreseeability, and the presence of a duty of care.

    Dr Gabor Maté, in particular, has pointed to the effect of stress and trauma on our health. Thus, if a national leader with a duty of care says that thousands of people are likely to die from a deadly disease and imposes a stay-at-home order for an indefinite time period, serious collateral damage in terms of stress and even trauma is reasonably foreseesable. Unless they are working from a firm evidence basis and/or a robust rational, political leaders should exercise great caution in making such pronouncements or laws.

    A 2017 study demonstrated that people who feel lonely report worse cold symptoms than individuals who are not. The exacerbating factor of loneliness on Covid symptoms may be just the tip of the iceberg.

    In 2020 Dr Marcus de Brun highlighted in this magazine how psychological stress would be a major determinant in one’s experience with Covid-19: ‘Psychological stress is (medically speaking),’ he said, ‘a self-fulling prophecy. People who are most anxious about becoming ill are most likely to become ill. If you ask yourself often enough whether or not you have a headache, you will eventually experience one.’

    The experience of photographer Barry Delaney also writing for Cassandra Voices is instructive:

    By early March a few cases were being recorded in Ireland, the media went into hysterical frenzy, almost shaming the inevitable innocent cases.

    Then I got an email to say that my next project was now cancelled. Devastated, I went for my usual swim, sometimes the magic water doesn’t work, it didn’t that day. I came home frozen, riddled with fear, no work, fear of how to pay my rent; suddenly I became unwell. A sore throat and mild fever, paralysed me, as I lay alone on my sofa.

    But no cough. Back then the only symptom mentioned was the hacking cough. I checked my phone and there was now talk of Ireland entering lockdown around St Patrick’s Day. Armageddon was arriving  Supermarkets running out of food, even fucking toilet paper. I was now in a delirious state of panic.

    The next day the fever went, but I still had the sore throat. On the Monday I tried phoning my Doctor; no answer; permanently engaged or just automated messages to contact some new HSE hub.

    I was now in a state of constant anxiety, with no food in the house, and yet I couldn’t leave home. and I live alone.

    I phoned my ex wife. She kindly said she’d shop for me. On St. Patrick’s Day Leo made his grim, great speech. I still felt he knew something that he wasn’t telling us. Maybe this virus was as deadly as the Spanish flu of 1918-20 that killed up to fifty million, including my grand-uncle aged just nineteen. Death figures of 85,000 were being predicted in Ireland by our Fear driven media.

    All that week I had an intermittent sore throat, but still could not get in contact with my Doctor.

    The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.

    Barry’s panic is likely to have been replicated across the population.

    Around for a lot longer than initially understood

    Yet Covid-19 had been around for a lot, lot longer than we imagined by the time in February 2020 it was presented to us as a SARS-like illness. Indeed, Spanish virologists found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, some nine months before it was identified in China, according to the University of Barcelona. Similarly, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of Italy found that it was circulating in Italy in September, 2019.

    Even the first Irish death attributed to Covid-19 demonstrates that the panic of March, 2020, when cases seemed to be spreading from Europe, was unfounded.

    That patient presented himself at Cork University Hospital on February 29th, 2020, days before the first confirmed case (via a PCR test) of COVID-19 in the Republic. Analysis later established the particular strain in his case showed ‘very little difference’ from the original strain from China’s Hubei province, and had none of the characteristic mutations found in strains then prevalent in Bavaria or Lombardy.

    The man, however, had no epidemiological link to any area where the virus was prevalent at the time or any link to a confirmed case.

    All this vindicates Oxford’s Professor Sunetra Gupta, assessment from the outset that Covid-19 had been circulating for months prior to the imposition of lockdowns, and was far less deadly than assumed by Imperial’s Professor Neil Ferguson in his famous paper. Tellingly, it was hardly registering in our hospitals in the winter of 2019-2020.

    Long Covid

    It may be that many of the symptoms associated with Long Covid or ‘long haulers’ as sufferers are known in the U.S., are the product of that collective panic; a combination of disease and trauma locked bodies over months of painful lockdowns.

    In March 2021 Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, argued for a more critical appraisal of Long Covid. Having expressed scepticism around a condition characterised by symptoms such as ‘brain fog’, he recalls being contacted by a journalist who said: ‘I’m asking as much as a person as a journalist because I’m more terrified of this syndrome than I am of death.’

    Gaffney acknowledges ‘myriad long-term effects, including physical and cognitive impairments, reduced lung function, mental health problems, and poorer quality of life’ from severe bouts of COVID-19 – long recognised as post-viral syndrome – but cites a survey showing two-thirds of ‘long haulers’ had negative coronavirus antibody tests, and another, organised by self-identifying Long Covid patients indicating around two-thirds of those surveyed had undergone blood testing reported negative results.

    He asserted: ‘it’s highly probable that some or many long-haulers who were never diagnosed using PCR testing in the acute phase and who also have negative antibody tests are “true negatives.’ In other words, for many this may have been a disease with a psychological origin, which Gaffney attributes to ‘skyrocketing levels of social anguish and mental emotional distress,’ referencing a paper showing that about half of people with depression also had unexplained physical symptoms.

    Class Action?

    Investigating the consequences of that social anguish may, in fact, be one of the less contentious matters which any COVID-19 Inquiry in Ireland would consider, as members of the government could reasonably point to the global hysteria, in large part generated by social media.

    What is likely to have deterred the government from setting up an inquiry in the first place is a fear of a class action from relatives of care home residents, who seem to have died unnecessarily: Ireland experienced the second highest proportion of care home deaths in the world, during what is called, inaccurately the first wave, of spring 2020.

    Throughout, Irish people were effectively lied to, via a compliant media, regarding the nature of deaths from COVID-19. Thus, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) adopted WHO guidance listing COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death when:

    confirmed by laboratory testing irrespective of severity of clinical signs or symptoms.

    diagnosed clinically or epidemiologically but laboratory testing is inconclusive or not available.

    Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan even acknowledged a remarkably low threshold in April, 2020: ‘Clinically, the “index of suspicion” for the disease would be “a good deal higher” than would normally be the case for flu.’

    Our democracy demands an inquiry into what led our government to take many of their decisions. Was it simply a lack of expertise that led the State to adopt flawed policies, or did they know more than we have been told?

    How is it possible that decision-making was almost entirely devolved to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Tony Holohan in 2020?

    We must also scrutinise the manner in which subsequent decisions were taken on masks, further lockdowns, and perhaps most insidiously, vaccine passports.

    If indeed we are to prevent the precedent of the COVID-19 response changing life more permanently, questions need to be answered. It is incumbent on the main opposition parties, Sinn Féin to demand this of the government, and promise one to the electorate if they come to power. If not, I suspect the far right will continue to make inroads into their support.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Lockdowns: “Thinking in One Dimension”. Podcast Interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta.

    Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-ii-100102849

    Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep4-lockdowns-thinking-in-one-dimension-with-guest/id1728086643?i=1000648655188

    In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected.

    This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, whose modelling assumed Covid-19 had just arrived in the West and that we had no cross-immunity from other coronaviruses against it, meaning it would kill almost one in a hundred of those who contracted it. For reasons still inadequately explored, the U.K., Irish and most Western governments – along with many in the Global South – followed Ferguson’s (and others’) doomsday prediction and chose untested lockdowns in anticipation of a vaccine – a containment strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, as opposed to a (Chinese-style) elimination strategy.

    Sunetra Gupta has been vindicated in her assessment that Covid 19 had been circulating far longer than initially understood, and also that it had a much lower fatality rate than Ferguson and others assumed from limited data. Moreover, it was obvious that this social experiment would cause serious harms, while its inability to contain the virus was unknown.

    Sunetra Gupta did not take lockdown lying down. She and a number of academic colleagues authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, advocating for an end to lockdowns, and promoting the targeted protection of the elderly – who were by far the most susceptible to death from the virus.

    What followed was not, as she hoped, a civilised discussion weighing the costs and benefits of each strategy, but abuse and even an attempt to have her silenced.

    Sunetra Gupta argues that what we experienced with lockdowns represented a distortion of the precautionary principle, arguing:

    I think that people were incorrectly assuming that they were applying the precautionary principle to all of this. So they were thinking, okay, well, you know, the worst case scenario is what we should be going by. And that’s because they were thinking in one dimension, which is we’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop this pandemic from unfolding, because it is compatible with the idea that 1% of the population will die if it just unfurls. What they were missing was the fact that these very measures that they were seeking to employ to stop the spread were ones that came at a very huge cost – and that was known at the time – what we didn’t know is whether those measures would stop the spread. And even if they did, what effect that would actually have eventually on the final death toll. But what we absolutely knew for certain – because it was happening in front of our eyes – is that these lockdowns would cause people to die. People were already dying from not being able to sell toys in the pavement in Delhi and being told to go back home to their villages, so the costs of lockdown were known, the benefits of lockdown were completely unknown. And under those circumstances, what you should be doing if you’re adopting the precautionary principle is to not go with lockdowns, but think of other solutions.

    Image: Andrea Piacquadio

    Universal Influenza Vaccine

    Some years ago, Sunetra Gupta and colleagues theorized that parts of the influenza virus ‘targeted by the immune system are, in fact, limited in variability and acts as a constraint on its evolution.’

    The current, relatively ineffective, vaccines against it, have to be updated every year to catch up with changes in that virus. She reveals to Cassandra Voices that ‘we now have the ingredients to make this [universal] vaccine.’ This will mainly address endemic influenza which kills almost half a million people, including a high proportion of infant babies, every year.

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta argues here that the possibility of an influenza pandemic was ‘actually eliminated a long time.’ She bases this assessment on how until 1918: ‘we experienced influenza only in pandemic form, just because of the demographic characteristics of the time. But since 1918, we’ve had influenza as a seasonal, regular endemic occurrence.’

    Today, she says, we are ‘all regularly exposed to influenza,’ giving us protection against severe disease.’ She further argues:

    What happened in 1918 was that, in my opinion, there had been no flu around for thirty years. So when the virus arrived, people under the age of thirty were extremely vulnerable. And that’s why you saw such high death rates in young people. People over the age of thirty were more protected.

    She says it’s true, to an extent, that international travel predisposes us to pandemics, but, paradoxically, ‘we are regularly exposed to different viruses, which gives us a wall of immunity against these emerging threats.’ She assumes that without regular exposure to the other seasonal coronaviruses ‘we would have been more susceptible’ to COVID-19.

    Based on her evolutionary theory, she had predicted the Swine Flu pandemic (that generated unwarranted hysteria) of 2009 two years before it hit. She says she ‘wasn’t the least bit worried in 2009 because, first of all, I thought even if it weren’t basically identical to the 1918 flu, that most of us would have a considerable degree of immunity against severe disease.’

    Contrary to Bill Gates, who claims the world must create ‘a fire department for pandemics’ to avoid catastrophic outbreaks, Sunetra Gupta says ‘we don’t need to panic to the degree that we do about new pandemics; what we need to do is to be clear headed and rational and try and think about ways of protecting those who might die or might be severely ill and hospitalised from these pandemics or these events.’

    The Role of the Epidemiologist

    The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum wrote in Pandemic Century – One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris (2019) that ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as risky, it is medical science, and the science of epidemiology in particular, that is often the source of irrational and often prejudicial judgments’. Then in 2020, the Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt claimed that epidemiologists see their function ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore, if they say it is one hundred times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s okay.’

    Sunetra Gupta argues:

    the role of epidemiology is to provide a conceptual framework within which you can understand what is happening and, rather than preventing pandemics or epidemics, which I’ve always been skeptical about, what you want to prevent is the death or the consequences of these events.

    She reckons: ‘it’s a hubris, really, as we saw to think that you can stop the spread of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.’ However, ‘where you can intervene is to try and prevent the consequences of that spread, in that you can protect the vulnerable, or at least try to. But the idea that you could stop the spread was, I think, extremely misguided.’

    She calls for greater resilience in the health system, pointing to the nefarious influence of neoliberal capitalism on public health.

    If you’re trying to maximize what they call efficiency, you end up with these big hospitals instead of sort of more local, smaller units. And that creates the conditions for vulnerable people to be exposed more easily to the virus.

    Professor Neil Ferguson.

    SIR Model

    Unlike Neil Ferguson, Sunetra Gupta’s team made no assumptions about the infection fatality rate in March 2020. She now says:

    The purpose of that paper was to show that you can take a simple model, an epidemic model, which applies to coronavirus or any virus that gives you some level of immunity for a certain period of time, at least in the case of coronavirus. Of course, that would be short. Measles would be long. But any such model, which is called an SIR model – simply because people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recovering – you can fit a model like that to the available data under a very wide range of infection fatality rates.

    She says Ferguson and his colleagues fitted the available data based an IFR of almost 1% because: ‘They were using data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and a few other bits of data from Wuhan.’ In such a model as this the two variables, she says, ‘are the infection fatality rate and when the epidemic occurred … So what we showed is what we were seeing could easily be the result of an epidemic that had already occurred [that] had a very small infection fatality rate. Or as Neil proposed, there was an epidemic that was just taking off and had a high infection fatality rate.’

    Later she was asked a guess about what the infection fatality rate might be. What she said, she stands by, that it was definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably close to 1 in 10,000. She adds, in hindsight, however:

    What I probably shouldn’t have done is given any answer at all, because the infection fatality rate is not really a number that you can think of in terms of the average across the population. So there will be parts of the world where, because there is [a high proportion of] elderly or people with comorbidities… [there is greater] vulnerability to death … So it is actually somewhat meaningless to think of the IFR as an average number, but it’s certainly not 1%.

    ‘What I was trying to do with that paper’ she says ‘is just to say, you can’t have that level of certainty in this situation.’ She agrees that ‘at the time you wouldn’t be able to discriminate between lockdown and the build-up of immunity and the contributions of seasonality. But now, because we have more data, you can and so it’s much more likely that we had built up what’s known as herd immunity in certain pockets or substantially it had accrued in certain areas.’

    She adds:

    We couldn’t tell then because we hadn’t done the experiment of lifting lockdown and seeing what would happen. But we did do that experiment a year later. And at that point you could discriminate between those two hypotheses. And I think what now I will say is that you can explain what happened almost anywhere in the world, using a simple model in which you accumulate immunity, but you also lose it quickly, which is known for all coronaviruses combined with the effects of seasonality. And that simple model … will explain qualitatively all patterns that we see.

    Gold Standard

    On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle wrote in The New York Times. ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s W.H.O. ties, the authors noted ‘Imperial was treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    Not long afterwards on March 24th, a report appeared in the Financial Times, quoting Sunetra Gupta to the effect that perhaps as much as half the UK population had already contracted Covid-19. However, the author of that article added that her group’s modelling was ‘controversial; and ‘its assumptions were have been contested by other scientists.’

    Despite their differences, Sunetra Gupta speaks of a respectful relationship with Ferguson, with whom she had ‘friendly chats’ during the period. There was ‘no disagreement’ about ‘the basic ideas and assumptions.’ It’s just that he said ‘he thought that their worst case scenario was more likely than what I was saying, which is that we didn’t know, and perhaps veering more towards [that there had already been] substantial waves in areas like London … But we both acknowledged there were a spectrum of possibilities. And until we had the full data, we wouldn’t know where we were.’

    She acknowledges, nonetheless, that ‘it’s hard not to have emotion about these things. But you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to think about whether an intervention is achieving its purpose and whether the collateral damage is too great or not.’

    ‘Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta says she had ‘a great time’ during lockdowns as she lives in ‘a nice house with a big garden, and my daughters, who were in their early twenties, came back home for six months.’ She now wonders whether ‘at some point someone should write a play called Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    She says that’s the point: ‘the lockdowns … were put in place by those of us who are privileged; [what] Martin Kulldorff called them the laptop classes … while throwing the poor and the young under the bus.’

    Regarding an extraordinary article in The Guardian by George Monbiot calling for ‘a time delimited outright ban’ on lies that endanger people’s lives, referring to people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta ‘who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic,’ she says she was ‘absolutely shocked that someone like Monbiot would claim to know more [than me] about how the pathogen spreads, about epidemic behavior and control measures.’

    She wonders, ‘why would someone with … no qualifications to speak of these things accuse me of spreading lies and misinformation … Why would he do that? I mean, it’s shocking.’

    She says she tried:

    to ask common friends to tell him. You know what? Pick up the phone to me. I’ll explain to you. I mean, that’s what he should have done. He should have said, oh, why is she saying this? Maybe I should just pick up the phone to ask for an interview and get her opinion. And then … he’s free to disagree with it. Although from a position of someone who is not precisely qualified to make those judgments. So I find that kind of behavior absolutely shocking.

    ‘They Should Apologise’

    Sunetra Gupta says she has repeatedly called for debates, for example, with Neil [Ferguson] with whom she has only ‘ever had a respectful engagement.’ She expresses surprise ‘that places like the Royal Society didn’t put on more debates and instead ‘just toed the line on this and just went with the consensus.’

    She says:

    I have not been approached with an apology from any of [her critics at the time]. An apology on account of how they behaved, but nor, indeed an apology on having got a lot of things wrong … So they criticised me for wrong reasons, and they should now come and say to me, we are sorry. We now see that lockdowns are indeed very harmful and that school closures didn’t prevent transmission, or that vaccines don’t block infection. They should apologize to me, but they haven’t.

    She also has some harsh criticism for the way in which academia now operates:

    I think the circumstances now under which academia is expected to operate are ones that are conducive to people … forming these sorts of groups, consensus groups, because that’s how they fund their research … by reviewing each other’s grants and just generally agreeing with each other. And of course … some of these funds are coming through some form of philanthro-capitalism. Those are all features of the system which lend themselves to this kind of aggravation of an idea of a risk. And … there’s also the … huge temptation of putting yourself in the middle of it being the saviour … “I had to get a burner phone because I’m so important.” And, you know, “I was the one who delivered the world of this scourge.” Those are the sort of rather more simple … reasons why we saw what we saw, rather than some huge conspiracy.

    Reflecting on the period where she earned such publicity she says:

    I’d always hoped [it would be] through my writing, through my novels, not necessarily through science. So I know it’s not something I particularly find to be that gratifying because this is just sort of my job and … it’s caused nothing but distress to me and to my family; for my daughters, it’s been a difficult period to have to deal with this fame, notoriety, that I achieved.

    However, she doesn’t buy into the idea that the role of a scientist is simply to deliver the science:

    because I think that one can always hide behind one’s profession. I mean, the best example … I often talk about [is from] the film Mephisto [1981, directed by István Szabó], where the central character, the actor … has kind of accepted the patronage of the Nazis at one point [and] when he’s accused of that, just says, “please leave me alone. I’m just an actor,” … nobody is just an actor or just a scientist. It’s not good enough to say, “I’m just a scientist. I just do mathematical modelling and you know, whether lockdowns work or don’t work or harm other people, it’s none of my business.” That’s not acceptable to me.

    Childhood Covid-19 Vaccination

    Regarding the vaccination of children against Covid-19 she says:

    from the outset that there should never have been given to people who were effectively at zero risk of dying from Covid, particularly because it was never likely to prevent transmission for any more than a few weeks … so there was no logic. Again, if we talk about logic rather than anything else, there is no logic to vaccinating people who are not at risk if the vaccine does not prevent transmission.

    She links this policy failure to recent measles outbreaks in the U.K., and Ireland:

    we warned against this early on by saying one of the reasons not to vaccinate young children, even if it is completely safe, is because it doesn’t prevent infection. So it will create vaccine hesitancy against vaccines that actually people do need … we have limited resources, so it has an opportunity cost. And what we’re seeing in this country and across the world is … the diversion of funds that are meant to tackle these serious endemic diseases … And it’s very, very sad because it’s causing deaths and particularly in places, not so much the UK and Ireland, but … in sub-Saharan Africa or India, I mean, the infection control programmes and vaccination programmes have collapsed in many places, and this is going to lead to many more deaths than Covid, particularly in children, not to mention starvation and other issues.

    She does not, however, believe that the excess deaths we have witnessed in recent times should be attributed to Covid-19 vaccines, pointing to the example of Sweden ‘which doesn’t have many excess deaths, but did vaccinate its population.’

  • The Emerald Delusion

    Let no feeling of vengeance presume to defile
    The cause of, or men of, the Emerald Isle.
    From William Drennan’s ‘When Erin First Rose.’ (1795).

    The intense green colour of much of the landscape of Ireland – the so-called “Emerald Isle” – bears testimony to Garrett Hardin’s assessment that ‘As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain’[i]. The predominance of highly verdant grassland across most of Ireland is not a natural phenomenon. In most regions hazel and oak are the summit vegetation. The synthetic fertiliser used on the abundant pastures creates an artificial glow. An outsider might assume that the absence of a ‘strong state’ is to blame for an unwieldy agricultural system dedicated to the production of meat and dairy for export, but this is not necessarily the case. This essay argues that state intervention, in the form of a land tax, could provide an important means of ameliorating a system that rewards a shrinking number of farmers, at a high environmental cost. The state can also facilitate the development of ‘alternative agriculture’, involving more sustainable environmental practices, higher employment, improved health outcomes and a reduction in the cost of living for the wider population, but this must allow farmers as Silke Helfrich puts it ‘to act like entrepreneurs on a local scale’[ii].

    On the climatic periphery of grain cultivation, and with a wet climate, over millennia farmers, mainly seeking new grazing land, steadily removed most of Ireland’s native tree cover. Thus, according to Mitchell and Ryan in Reading the Irish Landscape: ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape’[iii]. This left a mere twelve per cent of native woodland by the 1400s. An intensive period of British colonisation from the seventeenth century removed much of what was left, leading to the extinction of native fauna, including the wolf. The loss of access to woodland also presented enormous difficulties to a native population subjected to land seizure and discriminatory colonial laws. By the eighteenth century the poet Aodhagan Ó Rathaille asks “cad a dhéanfaifimd feasta gan adhmaid / tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár” (Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?). Today, despite ideal conditions, Ireland still has the third lowest coverage of forestry in the EU after Malta and the Netherlands, and much of that is in the form of non-native Sitka Spruce plantations that do further damage to the ecology.

    Contemporary Irish agriculture is dedicated to the production of food commodities for export, principally beef and dairy that fuel climate change (the Irish agriculture sector was directly responsible for 38.4% of national Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emissions in 2022). Despite excellent growing conditions, largescale horticulture is rare – and small-scale allotments are few in number – while public health authorities contend with a host of ‘lifestyle diseases’, linked to obesity and sedentarism. Irish agriculture is far from being the result of a free market. The system is underpinned by EU subsidies, and other regulations, which often do more harm than good.

    An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847

    Thus far we have not referred to the (non-native) staple crop most identified with Ireland, which appears to serve as a vivid illustration of the tragedy of the commons, and the pessimistic view of Thomas Malthus that food production fails to keep pace with population growth over time. Ireland was the first European country to adopt the potato (solanum tuberosum) as a widespread staple. This was an inauspicious development, according to John Reader, as ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated’[iv]. The catalyst for the potato’s successful adoption was the traumatic wars of the seventeenth century especially Oliver Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland (1649-53) since ‘the potato could both be cultivated and stored in a manner which might intuit the spirit of destruction, and the malevolence of the enemy’[v]. However, Henry Hobhouse argues that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazybed, was in the end the most damaging’[vi]. Another author, A. T. Lucas denigrated the ‘dark reign of the potato’ for ‘banishing’ most other foods from the table.[vii]

    For the Irish peasant farmer the advantages of the potato far outweighed its disadvantages. The remarkable growth of the population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from approximately two million to over eight million is unlikely to have occurred without the availability of a subsistence crop whose yield exceeds that of wheat, and which was suited to Ireland’s moist, friable soil. The potato has a nutritional profile that allows for almost exclusive long-term consumption unlike most cereals, which lack the essential amino acid lysine; although the tuber has the drawback of a high glycaemic load. At the start of the nineteenth century Irishmen’s heights were greater than those of equivalent Englishmen in a variety of occupations and situations, and life expectancy was higher than most Europeans of that time. Daly has described it as ‘a wonder crop the only subsistence foodstuff which provides a nearly perfect diet, a crop which would feed a family on very little land, in almost all types of Irish soil, irrespective of rain or lack of sunshine’[viii].

    As any student of Irish history knows the story ended in tragedy with the Great Famine of 1845-51. The potato blight (phytophthora infestans) proved devastating for the three million out of a population of eight million almost exclusively dependent on it. According to Sen: ‘In no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famine of the 1840s’[ix].  This was because by the eve of the Great Famine three million (out of a population of eight) were living on just one million acres of land which represented a mere five per cent of the total acreage of twenty million. Crotty argues that ‘with twenty million, instead of one million, acres of land available for the production of the population’s food requirements even with the worst conceivable crop failures, an abundance of food could have been grown to feed eight or more millions of people’[x]. This view is endorsed by Mokyr who argues that Ireland was not overpopulated on the eve of the Great Famine.[xi] Perhaps uniquely in the world, the population of Ireland has never scaled similar heights.

    Over generations, peasant proprietors would have noticed that holdings were being continuously sub-divided, and that sustenance was increasing dependent on the unpalatable but prolific Lumper variety of potato. Yet the pattern of early marriage and large families endured; gynaecological brakes were not applied as seems to have occurred in other European peasant societies at that time. Importantly, during these decades of unprecedented fecundity, political activism was lacking, even in the face of the continued injustices of the Penal Laws. Notably, most of the leadership of the first republican independence movement, the United Irishmen, were from Protestant and Dissenter minorities in Dublin and, in particular, Ulster, the northern province. A Catholic society denuded of its native leadership (the Earls flew in 1607 and ‘the Wild Geese’ in 1691) failed to mobilise politically.

    Surprisingly, Crotty laments the tenant land purchase schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as: ‘[t]he abandonment of competitive rent in favour of a system of peasant proprietorship naturally introduces an element of immobility into the allocation of land among farmers’. He argues that: ‘[t]here are reasons to believe that under Irish conditions this immobility is likely to be particularly severe, leading in turn to serious misallocation of land’.[xii] Thus, between 1850 and 1900 the number of cattle on Irish farms increased by over 60% and the number of sheep more than doubled. The area under tillage declined from 4.3 to 2.4 million acres, but the rural population fell from 5.3 to 3 million. The revolutionary socialist James Connolly identified the effect on rural Ireland: ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places’[xiii]. Crotty argues that:

    concentration on cattle and sheep . . . has had an extremely harmful effect on Irish agriculture and on the whole Irish economy. While on the one hand is has led to the enrichment of the numerically small landed interest, on the other it has given rise first to famine and subsequently to chronic emigration and to very slow economic progress for the numerically much greater non-land-owning section of the population’[xiv].

    The successful movement for land reform in the late nineteenth century created a society with a preponderance of peasant proprietors who maintained a model of production that offered few employment or investment opportunities.

    According to Crotty: ‘The structure of the agriculture, characterized by the predominance of beef-cattle and sheep, provided little opportunity for the employment of labour or capital and with a static volume of output these opportunities did not improve’. He further contends that the interests of farmers, or landowners, and the nation ‘are essentially conflicting’; because: ‘[t]he scope for intensifying grassland beef production is very limited. The profitability of the system depends on a low rate of expenditure’[xv]. Thus, the Irish population continued to decline after independence, while the price of food tended to be at least as high as in Britain, despite far lower population density, and greater possibilities for local production.

    Patrick Hogan 1891-1936.

    Independence brought little change in agricultural priorities with Ireland remaining a primary producer of livestock products and cattle often exported ‘on the hoof’ to Britain. This was driven by the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan (1922-32) whose sympathy lay with large cattle farmers. The early commercialisation of agriculture has cast a long shadow as farmers have continued to produce commodities for the international market, and purchase their own food from the same anonymous source. In an address to Macra na Feirme in 1974, the psychiatrist Ivor Browne observed the irrational scenario of: ‘a small farmer in Mayo taking his calf to the town to sell and his wife asking him to pick up a chicken for dinner in the supermarket while he is there; he manages to sell his calf for £1 and pays £1.50 for the chicken for dinner’[xvi]. Similarly, writing in 1968, Fennell bemoaned the demise of country markets and how a ‘frequent complaint in Ireland is the lack of variety of in vegetables for sale and the high prices charged’[xvii].

    From 1972 the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) perpetuated this pastoral model, generating further specialisation and reducing the unprotected horticultural sector which struggled, as a result, to compete with cheap, often subsidised, imports after the removal of trade barriers. Farm supports did allow large farmers to earn incomes comparable often to urban dwellers but generated further imbalance: a miniscule proportion of Irish farmland is devoted to tillage, much of it used as animal feed; there are over seven million cattle and almost six million sheep in the country.

    The Organic Centre, Rossinver, Co. Leitrim.

    The adoption of agricultural alternatives from a variety of international ‘toolkits’ could confer significant advantages through reduced dependency on imported food, and increased employment in more labour-intensive tillage and horticulture as well as raising the health of a population that is beset by lifestyle diseases linked to a stunted food culture. One challenge for alternative agriculture is the historic inflexibility in the land market which thwarts diversification. It remains the case, as Mitchell and Ryan observed that ‘In Ireland it is still next to impossible to rent land on a lease of sufficient length to make improvements and where land can be bought it is often in small parcels at too high a price’[xviii]. The CAP subsidy regime maintains the high cost of land, as farmers are guaranteed incomes from privileged pastoral farming.

    Any alternative agriculture should involve far wider direct participation than is the case today. Farmers and farm workers could work on a part-time or seasonal basis. The hinterland of cities would be especially important. Crotty argued that: ‘A land-tax offers the only means of reconciling future increases in cattle and sheep prices, relative to those of other farm products, with the general welfare’[xix]. This would involve the broadening of the property tax to encompass agricultural land. Taxation revenue emanating from any land tax could be redistributed in the form of low-interest loans, allowing enterprising individuals or cooperatives to acquire land. However, the involvement of government agencies should be restricted as according to Thirsk:

    [T]he strong assumption of our age that omniscient governments will lead the way out of economic problems will not in practice serve. The solutions are more likely to come from below, from the initiatives of individuals, singly or in groups, groping their way, after many trials and errors, towards fresh undertakings. They will follow their own hunches, ideals and inspirations, and obsessions, and along the way some will even be dismissed as harmless lunatics. The state may help indirectly, but it is unlikely to initiate, or select for support the best strategies; and, out of ignorance or lack of imagination, it may positively hinder.[xx]

    Thus, it will be important for farmers to “act like entrepreneurs on a local scale”.

    A relatively sparsely populated island such as Ireland ought to be equipped for self-sufficiency as we enter a turbulent era in human history. Above all, for this to occur, we require a political leadership representing the interests of the people in alignment with entrepreneurial opportunities and environmental constraints. The introduction of a land tax could allow for a more equitable distribution of land, revenues from which could be used to allow individuals or cooperatives to acquire land. Any government should be mindful, however, that over-regulation may hinder development. The role of the state should be to provide access to land. Thereafter, farmers should be allowed to experiment. The history of Irish agriculture prior to the Famine, when three million were subsisting off just one million acres without artificial fertilisers or machinery, demonstrates how fertile Ireland can be. It will be necessary, however, for farmers to avoid dependence on a single staple, and for the state to insist on an increase in the coverage of native trees which provide additional ‘services’, including clean water and air.

    [i] Hardin G. (1968): The tragedy of the commons.  Science, New Series, 162 (3859), S.1243-1248, doi:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1724745

    [ii] Helfrich S. (2009): Gemeingüter sind nicht, sie werden gemacht. In: Ostrom E. (2009): Was mehr wird, wenn wir teilen. München: oekom, S.11-19. (Helfrich 2009, p.13)

    [iii] Mitchell, F. and Ryan, M., Reading the Irish landscape (Dublin, 1997), p.8.

    [iv] Reader, J., The untold history of the potato (London, 2009). p.14

    [v] Salaman, R., The history and social influence of the potato (Cambridge, 1949). p.215

    [vi] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..

    [vii] Lucas, A. T., ‘Irish food before the Famine’, Gwerin 3 (1962)

    [viii]Daly, M. ‘Farming and the Famine’, in O´ Grada, Famine 150 commemorative lecture series., p.39.

    [ix] Sen, A., Identity and violence: the delusions of destiny (New York, 2006), p.105.

    [x] Crotty, R., Irish agricultural production (Cork, 1966), p.63.

    [xi] Mokyr, J., Why Ireland starved: an analytical and quantitative history of the Irish economy 18401850 (New York, 1985), p.291.

    [xii] Crotty, 1966, p.93.

    [xiii] Connolly, J., Labour in Irish history (Dublin, 1973). p.15-16)

    [xiv] Crotty, 1966, p.236.

    [xv] Crotty, 1966, p.117.

    [xvi]  Brown, I., The writings of Ivor Browne: steps along the road: the evolution of a slow learner (Cork, 2013), p 90.

    [xvii]  Fennell, R. ‘The domestic market for Irish agricultural produce’, in Baillie and Sheehy, Irish agriculture in a changing world, (Dublin, 1968). p. 106.

    [xviii] Mitchell and Ryan, 1997, p.356.

    [xix] Crotty, 1967, p.236.

    [xx] Thirsk, J, Alternative agriculture: a history from the Black Death to the present day (Oxford 1997), p.256.

  • False Prophecy

    Imaginative fiction offers invaluable insights into everything from national characteristics to institutional malaise and pathological violence. The musings of psychologists, philosophers and historians often appear clumsy and verbose beside the epiphanies that flow from the creative hand. Thus, the visions of long dead novelists continue to colour our understanding of who we are, and where we’re heading.

    We can draw a distinction between imaginative fiction and the fantasy genre. The latter according to Iain McGilchrist ‘merely recombines what we are already familiar with in a new way,’[i] (p.340) whereas works of imagination bring new experiences into being. ‘A defining quality of the artistic process’ he argues ‘is its implacable opposition to the inauthentic.’[ii]

    Authenticity should be distinguished from realism. Mythology and indeed allegory – as in the The Lord of the Rings – are distinct from fantasy. A myth is not a lie, as many, including our Taoiseach, seem to assume. Rather, as Northrop Frye put it: ‘It is obvious that the world we want to live in is mythological. That is, the world we construct is built to the model of a common social vision produced by the imagination.’[iii]

    Besides a lack of authenticity, fantasy does not reveal a common social vision. Usually, it aims at entertainment – a gripping thriller for example – often featuring cardboard cut-out characters representing a particular virtue or vice. At worst, we find simplistic manifestations of good and evil in a synthetic world.

    This review explores whether Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song (One World, London, 2023) belongs to the genre of fantasy. My motivation is to assess the artistic value of a recipient of a prestigious prize, and further examine why such an accolade might have been bestowed.

    Successively Increasing Violence

    The novel charts the struggles of a middle-class Irish family – seen mostly through the eyes of the mother Eilish – living under a far-right, fascist and, according to the headline writer in the Irish Times, totalitarian regime inhabiting what is recognisably Dublin. Here, constitutional rights no longer apply, and a malevolent Garda Síochana are imprisoning, without trial, opponents of a government we learn little about.

    Members of the family are subjected to successively increasing levels of violence perpetrated by agents of the state, beginning with the arrest of the father of the house Larry, a mild-mannered trade unionist. It is certainly not fantastical to assume that a trade unionist would be targeted by a fascist regime. During the 1930s many were imprisoned and sent to Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, but especially under Mussolini in Italy ‘many even held key posts.’

    A more subtle, and perhaps credible, account could have explored how a fascist regime co-opts individuals in positions such as that occupied by Larry – or even Eilish, a scientist working for a bio-tech firm. Larry does not appear to hold particularly radical views. He comes from the same background as an interrogating Garda, who he claims to have played GAA against while in UCD (p.9). Foregrounding the character of a trade unionist seems like a device allowing the author to proceed with his gory account.

    Thus, we find police with batons ‘beating the marchers into grovelling shapes’ (p.30); ‘talk of internment camps in the Curragh (p.36); journalists being imprisoned (p.36); government control of the judiciary (p.58); and unmarked cars pulling up silently to lift people off the street (p.76).

    What is seriously lacking in the novel, however, is any attempt to portray the insidious soft power of a fascist regime, which historically appealed to a bourgeois desire for stability and prosperity. Subtle forms of this were evident under Salazar in Portugal, who demanded that literary works observe ‘certain limitations,’ and embrace guidelines defined by the New State’s ‘moral and patriotic principle.’

    Further, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not want even der Fuhrer to appear in cinema news reels, believing that a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics. Although conditions did worsen dramatically in Nazi Germany after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, throughout much of their rule the Nazis maintained high living standards, only inflicting extreme cruelty on minorities and ideological opponents among the German people.

    In contrast, Prophet Song portrays a cascade of violence carried out by agents of the state in public spaces, alongside a rapidly failing economy, where food commodities run scarce. This culminates in what seems to be the wanton murder of the adolescent child Bailey: ‘The skin before her clouded with bruising, the missing and broken teeth… nails torn from his hands and feet … a drill through the front of his knee… the cigarette burns along the torso’ (p.272). The purpose of this horrifying sequence is unclear. Perhaps it reflects the author’s dark broodings on the latent malevolence of the human condition. Later, revealingly, we are informed that insurgents are ‘just as bad as the regime. (p.206)’

    True believers, such as Mrs Stamp (the wife of the nominatively determined Garda Stamp), are colourless stooges, while Eilish’s new boss, the Teutonic-sounding Paul Feisner speaks ‘not the company speak but the cant of the party, about an age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading into expansion.’ (p.71) These are formulaic utterances, anachronistically recalling the 1930s. However, we find none of the magnetic charisma we might expect in a fascist leader, or the stored-up resentment and scapegoating that fuel their rise.

    At best, we have Larry telling Eilish that ‘the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and say it enough times, then it must be so (p.20). But we can only wonder why anyone would accept such lies. There is no evidence of the infectious cynicism that Hannah Arendt observes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951):

    The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their tactical cleverness.

    Ignorant Savages

    Supporters of the regime are portrayed as ignorant savages: ‘tattoos emblazoning arms and throat … the man bringing down a bat upon the windscreen … [he] takes out his sex and urinates on the car, the apish laughing teeth as the man zips up and jumps down the gravel (p.139); who are barely literate: ‘the word TRAITER sprayed again and again in red paint.’

    Thus, we find support for the regime emanating from unfortunate people at the bottom of the social ladder: ‘Two civilians are helping to build the checkpoint and she knows one of them, an odd-jobs man from the flats nearby, an ex-junkie with hardly a tooth in his mouth.’ (p.187)

    There are suggestions that those in power are targeting minorities – such as when we learn that a certain Rohit Singh has been arrested – but no account is offered from the perspective of any minority group. A novel should not be an exercise in empowerment, but the prevailing cultural homogeneity in Prophet Song hardly diminishes the deadness of this account.

    There are also apparent endorsements of an Irish economic model that produces galloping growth rates amidst a housing crisis and rampant homelessness. A sign, therefore, of the country’s decline in the novel is where ‘every day another international firm closes its doors and makes its excuses’. (p.124) We must assume the presence of multinational corporations in Ireland is ipso facto a good thing, rather than underlying the development of a two-tier society, now generating serious social cleavages.

    There are nods to contemporary concerns, such as when Larry points to the ceiling and warns his wife to keep her voice down (p.5), but the characters rarely appear concerned about creeping surveillance, as violence is largely inflicted in random fashion.

    Raqqa, Syria.

    Depicting Another Country?

    Prophet Song is a novel that seems better suited to the depiction of a post-colonial country, where a distinct ethnic or religious group has assumed control over the levers of power and monopolises violence in a divided society. It might have been written about Syria, where army and state have long been dominated by a distinct religious group.

    It provides no insight into the insidious means by which a fascist government could take power in Ireland. The regime is a resident evil inflicting at times wanton suffering. Any such government would surely only appeal to the most base or desperate. This may reflect the author’s assessment of the human condition, but even if we accept there is a murderer in us all, it is surely incumbent on a fictional account to demonstrate how any diabolic metamorphosis occurs. Here the main characters are simply victims. In the absence of authenticity or a common social vision it should be consigned to the fantasy genre.

    I do wonder why the novel has received critical acclaim, and the accolade of a Booker Prize? Aside from a general neoliberal degeneracy now infecting most cultural organisations that place a higher premium on sales potential than artistic expression, the best explanation I can think of is that it reflects, and arguably exploits, the anxieties of the British cultural establishment in the wake of Brexit and Trump, making it ‘crucial reading’ according to the The Guardian.

    Essentially, it is a politically correct thriller ungrounded in political reality. Contrary to the feverish headlines, the November Dublin riot can be traced to decades of government neglect of the inner city; sporadic attacks on refugee housing do not reveal a broad-based political movement on the brink of power in Ireland. Perhaps the panel of Booker judges are oblivious to how – unlike many European countries – Ireland has not seen an upsurge in support for far-right parties. Even to suggest that we face the prospect of fascist, totalitarian governments across Europe stretches credulity.

    With shifts in technology, contemporary forms of totalitarianism may be very different to what we have witnessed in the past, which is not to dismiss the relevance of dystopian prophecies such as Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). Sadly, Prophet Song offers no such timeless lessons.

    Why does any of this matter? In an interview in 1994 Harold Bloom argued that what he described as a school of resentment had destroyed the art of reading, marginalising three thousand years of imaginative literature. He added ominously that if shallow authors are promoted for political reasons you will not augment memory or cause the mind to grow and that ultimately this would impoverish our imaginations.

    [i] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (Yale, 2009), p.341

    [ii] Ibid, p.374

    [iii] Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi – Essays on Literary, Myth and Society, (Indiana University Press, 1976), p.89

    Feature Image: The Devil whispers to the Antichrist; detail from Sermons and Deeds of the Antichrist, Luca Signorelli, 1501, Orvieto Cathedral.

  • The Passing of Shane MacGowan

    I sat for a while by the gap in the wall
    Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
    Heard the cards being dealt and the rosary called
    And a fiddle playing “Sean Dun Na Ngall”
    lyrics from ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ by Shane MacGowan.

    I wasn’t close to Shane – celebrity brings an understandable reserve – but he was someone I hung out with in latter years, travelled alongside, and helped take care for a short time.

    I have also been told he gave a typically back-handed compliment to an article I wrote describing his last trip to London for the launch of an exhibition of his art work: “God he’s a windbag, but then so was James Joyce.” Needless to say, I am still chuffed. Alas, he was rather less enamoured by my amateurish songwriting – which I recall later in this piece. This at least provides some reassurance that he wouldn’t give a compliment unless he meant it.

    Shane MacGowan‘s funeral mass on Friday, December 8 might have re-awakened a Catholic faith in its most ardent opponents, while conservatives regard it as scandalous. Who else could have summoned leading mourners into dancing joyously before the altar, after a sublime ceremony that merged tradition with frivolity, and formality with raucousness? In death, as in life…

    Shane MacGowan’s Madonna.

    Holy Mary Mother of God / pray for us sinners / now until the hour of our death…

    In Shane’s mind, Mary was a powerful female icon. A warrior woman, ‘Calming her people’. He was capable of reconciling – as only a poet can – anger at the Church over covering up paedophilia, and what he viewed as a betrayal of the Irish Revolution, with a simple Catholic faith.

    As with many second-generation Irish emigrants, Catholicism seemed intrinsic to his identity. Importantly, this was a choice rather than an imposition. However, while his heart throbbed with a paradoxically profane Catholicism, this was not to the exclusion of other faiths and traditions. The array of deities, daemons and angels festooning his mantlepiece suggested syncretic beliefs. Spiritual nourishment was maintained by a steady supply of pre-blessed Eucharists, ferried up from Nenagh. Shane could always get his hands on the best stuff.

    Importantly, once the wild touring years with The Pogues had drawn to a close, he decided to move to Ireland to take up residence in his mother Therese’s (née Lynch) ancestral cottage in Carney Commons, County Tipperary.

    Having been born in Kent, he could easily have lived out his days in England, mournfully recalling the old country, but Shane remained ‘Loyal, true and faithful’; coming home like a Fenian prisoner ‘From dying in foreign nations’. Even the demise of The Pogues can partly be attributed to his insistent Irishness: creative differences emerged when others in the band, many of them with no Irish background, proposed moving beyond an Irish sound, as the documentary If I Should Fall From the Grace of God – The Shane MacGowan Story reveals.

    He returned, as he saw it, to Ireland when the Celtic Tiger was in full roar, restricting the pre-modern society he had encountered as a youth to the margins. It’s fair to say he struggled to reconcile himself to a brash, individualistic and increasingly homogenous society, but never departed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfEuXYpMIYc

    Patrician and Spailpín

    The Romantic poet W.B. Yeats and the Punk singer Shane MacGowan might be viewed as being at opposite points on a spectrum of Irishness: one epitomising a patrician Anglo-Irish literary tradition; the other a performer representing what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’

    Thus, when declaring his will in ‘The Tower‘ (1928), Yeats portentously claimed to be one of the ‘people of [Edmund] Burke and of [Henry] Grattan’. He also scorned ‘Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter’ and the ‘base born products of base beds’ in his valedictory ‘Under Ben Bulben‘ (1928).

    In contrast, Shane MacGowan explicitly portrays ‘the slaves that were spat on’ from the Tower in his song – based on personal experience – about rent boys, ‘The Old Main Drag’ where the protagonist is ‘spat on, and shat on and raped and abused’. His oeuvre positively celebrates intoxication and fornication, although he was in many respects even more of a romantic, as tracks such as ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘The Song with No Name’ attest.

    I heard Shane express his dislike of the Anglo-Irish poet – although he did record a version of Yeats’s anti-war poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. He preferred the aesthetic of Brendan Behan in particular.

    There is, nonetheless, a striking parallel. Both poets while living in London a century apart, consciously embraced their Irishness, which helped each of them develop distinctive voices. Yeats would no longer simply be a Romantic poet in the mould of Wordsworth: he forged a distinctively Irish Romantic tradition. Likewise, MacGowan would no longer be another Punk singer in the shadow of Johnny Rotten: he became an Irish Punk balladeer, and an inspiration to a rising generation of distinctively Irish song-writers.

    In his autobiography, Yeats describes walking homesick through Fleet Street in the 1880s and hearing a little tinkle of water, whereupon he saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball on its jet that reminded him of lake water. ‘From that sudden remembrance’, he wrote, ‘came my poem “Inisfree,” my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.’

    A body of water provides the title for perhaps MacGowan’s most poetic song, ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, which features an aging Irishman dwelling on his youth in County Tipperary after many years of living in London. The rusty tin can and the old hurley ball is Shane recalling his own childhood. It’s a song that also conveys homesickness, joining Shane MacGowan’s soul to the great river of Ireland flowing through Tipperary – where his ashes are to be scattered – just as places in Sligo will forever be identified with Yeats.

    Perhaps one day tourists will flock to The MacGowan county, just as they travel from far and wide to The Yeats County.

    Protest Song

    A few years ago a good friend of Shane’s and I took a song we had composed to him. It was a naive protest song about the government’s inaction on public transport that appropriated a melody from another song about trains popularised by Johnny Cash, called City of New Orleans. I added a few verses in a different key and thought perhaps it could work.

    I continue to maintain that my friend’s decision to bellow it a capela was fatal to its reception. A little guitar might have taken the edge off it. In any case, Shane became apoplectic, demanding he stop singing, and immediately identified the source of the melody.

    I guess you don’t become one of the leading lyricists in the world without having finely honed critical faculties. Having trawled my hard drive I can find no evidence of the recording I made of it, which is probably for the best!

    It would have been nice to sing more songs with Shane, but he seemed depressed a lot of the time, and expressed frustration at a writer’s block that was inhibiting him. At least when we were travelling to London there were a few sing-songs, but it was clear then that the isolation and inactivity of the Covid years had taken a toll.

    The scene before the funeral mass of Shane MacGowan in Nenagh.

    Regrets

    I hung on Shane’s every word, but he wasn’t the easiest of company. At times, I felt awkward about not being able to make out exactly what he was saying. A self-preservation instinct may also have inhibited me from being drawn too closely into his orbit. The atmosphere could be heavy and a bit self-destructive if you weren’t careful.

    It wasn’t that he was drunk all the time. As he once put it, tongue-in-cheek, on the Late Late Show when he was interviewed by Pat Kenny: “in England I’d be regarded as an alcoholic but in Ireland I am a sissy drinker”.

    He always seemed to have a drink in front of him, but was a sipper, abiding by certain rules agreed with Victoria. As she alluded to in her remarkable eulogy at the funeral, there are lessons on addiction to be drawn from Shane’s example.

    Being drunk – playing the fool – might also have been part of Shane’s public persona. Exhibiting intoxication could also mask the insecurities of a savant or autodidact, who was expelled from school in his early teens. His reading and creativity were haphazard and unsystematic, and worn lightly. I suspect he would have been intimidated by haughty scholars interrogating his work.

    Shane spent most of his final months in hospital, but I didn’t feel up to visiting him as my own father had passed away in the same hospital the year before. Anyway, I had the impression that a steady stream of friends and admirers were at hand.

    Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

  • Classic Paddies

    The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland of the 50’s. Behan, Kavanagh, O’Brien. Roaring Boys all. Drunken, rackety, genius bores. And Shane could be as drunk and boring and rackety or he could write as beautifully as any of them.
    Bob Geldof, Waiting for Herb, 2004.

    Night Crossing

    As the ferry lurched out of Dublin port we reminisced on crossings of yore. In response to regretful talk about the withdrawal of the service out of Dun Laoghaire – which at least had a rail connection – Shane MacGowan recalled, with typical belligerence, “Dun Laoghaire was there before a fucking DART line,” before hissing reassuring laughter.

    He then spoke wistfully of his grandfather telling him about how ‘lower order’ passengers would have to share decks with the livestock on board. It seemed a very different world to a Stena Lounge bereft of passengers on this night crossing, but at least the wine was complimentary, and Tina didn’t mind a few messers on board.

    Indeed, the aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of the Pogues was a throwback to a bygone Ireland – and Irish – often scorned by ‘respectable’ people. In particular, those compelled by economic circumstances to take up jobs ‘across the water’.

    Shane MacGowan was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent in 1957 to Irish immigrant parents, but spent his early youth living with maternal aunts and uncles in Puckane, Co. Tipperary. Formative teenage years were spent in 1970s London.

    For the emerging poet, rural Ireland – for all its faults – seemed a fairy realm, enlivened by song and alcoholic excess, compared to the industrial decay and entrenched class system of England at that time. Having dabbled in punk with The Nipple Erectors he returned to his musical roots, forming the Pogues (from the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning ‘kiss my arse’) in 1982.

    He previously described the ‘Irish look’ the band self-consciously adopted:

    The suits, black suits with white shirts which we wore, were Brendan Behan uniform and that’s why we chose them, not to look smart, but to look as if we could have come from any decade … We could have looked like people from the fifties, sixties, or seventies … we just looked like classic Paddies.[i]

    Extended Fairground

    As the night wore on, in particularly good cheer, Shane began humming a medley, beginning with the ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’, “When off Holyhead wished meself was dead / Or better far instead”, culminating in a vision of Irish inclusivity – at least before the men in the mohair suits moved in – at the ‘Galway Races’:

    There were half a million people there
    Of all denominations
    The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew,
    The Presbyterian
    Yet not animosity
    No matter what the persuasion
    But failte hospitality
    Inducing fresh acquaintance
    With me wack fol do fol
    The diddle idle day

    This evocation of carnival wherein social hierarchies disappear in joyful Bacchanalia helps understand what Shane MacGowan engendered with the Pogues during the 1980s: a two-fingered reaction to Thatcherism that helped define our Irish identity.

    As the cultural critic Joe Cleary put it in Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day, 2007) in the music of the Pogues: ‘The [Irish] nation is imagined as a kind of extended fairground.’[ii]

    He adds, however, that with the Pogues: ‘this version of carnival is never allowed to become cosily celebratory because it is always shot through with sentiments of anger and aggression, sometimes strident, sometimes more muted.’[iii]

     

    Hooliganism

    The word hooligan derives from the surname of a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song from the 1890s. Later, applied to the antics of English football fans, steeped in post-imperial hubris, it took on angry connotations.

    But the Pogues were all about the hoolie – a big noisy party – and unashamedly “Up the RA”, when it was still risqué to be so. Their song ‘Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six ‘refers to the plight of the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four and was censored by the BBC.

    Their old school, rumbunctious hooliganism, fused elements of punk and traditional Irish music with the incantations that arouse from Shane MacGowan’s errant soul.

    As Cleary puts it the Pogues, ‘merged the ‘modernist’- and ‘avant-garde’-coded aesthetics of punk with the ‘romantically’-coded idioms of the Irish musical forms.’

    He argues:

    For the Pogues to yoke together … the avant-garde future-orientated metropolitan aesthetics of punk, with the retro aesthetics of céilí and the broadly political edginess of the pub-ballad scene was an inspired act not only of musical synthesis but of semantic sabotage as well.[iv]

    Alongside self-destructive excess there was something serious going on, ‘saving folk from the folkies’ as Elvis Costello put it[v], while asserting a brash, yet accommodating Irish identity – after all, many of the band were not even Irish – notwithstanding an unashamed approval of violent Republicanism, based on a long historical memory of famine, torture and resistance.

    The success of the Pogues and Shane MacGowan – who transcended traditional Irish music to become a rockstar celebrity – may go some way to explaining an enduring, relative openness among Irish people to new cultural encounters – even multiculturalism – at least by comparison with erstwhile colonisers.

    Like it or not, any witness to an average Saturday night in Dublin can testify to the presence of a carnival of sexual deviancy, donnybrooks and nonsensical pranks. This has become a generally inclusive ritual for Irish self-expression.

    In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London, 2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest ‘[t]he really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.’[vi] That just about sums up the Pogues’ contribution to Irish culture.

    After the Pogues, along with their precursors and followers, we would wear a distinctively wild Irishness as a badge of honour, invite everyone to the party, then regale each other with far-fetched stories of nights that should have ended sooner, at least before the cops turned up, when the fun really started.

    The Big Red Fun Bus

    With the Irish Sea bathed in pale moonlight on a blissfully calm night, conversation turned to Westerns. With a glint in his eye Shane reeled off his favourites – ‘The Life and Times of Judge Roy Beans’ (1972), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), “with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne competing for the same girl”, and ‘The Searchers’ (1956).

    But fittingly for a bard whose songs are steeped in tales of underdogs – like the navigators who ‘died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where / Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur’ – his favourite was the more recent ‘Geronimo: An American Legend’ (1993), in which, unusually, a Native American victim is the hero.

    By now the rest of our posse seemed to be asleep – it must have been passed 4am – but Shane’s mind was racing in this liminal phase. The high life of London beckoned and the rockstar in him was growing giddy.

    We had another Brendan to thank for the drive to London. He and Shane’s full-time carer Elizabeth provide vital assistance and crucially, a sense of humour, in support of Victoria, Shane’s loving wife.

    Once installed in the hotel room there was a chance for more songs, including a few Percy French ditties. Then an overlooked classic from his underrated period with the Popes: a homage to the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan: ‘The Snake with Eyes of Garnett.’

    It begins fittingly:

    Last night as I lay dreaming
    My way across the sea
    James Mangan brought me comfort
    With laudnum and poitin

    The vision moves to the scene of a public execution being held on Stephen’s Green in 1819, before another crossing

    If you miss me on the harbour
    For the boat, it leaves at three
    Take this snake with eyes of garnet
    My mother gave to me!

    The snake is a symbol of renewal, and for Shane perhaps the republican ideal. It also reveals his engagement with the literary canon. After all, he did once earn a scholarship to the exclusive Westminster public school.

    He chimed in:

    This snake cannot be captured
    This snake cannot be tied
    This snake cannot be tortured, or
    Hung or crucified

    It came down through the ages
    It belongs to you and me
    So pass it on and pass it on
    ‘Till all mankind is free

    Contrary to the association of the snake with deceit and temptation – a phallic devil – according to Chevalier and Gheerbant’s Dictionary of Symbols, the serpent is ‘a continuation of the infinite materialization which is none other than primordial formlessness, the storehouse of latency which underlies the manifest world.’

    It is an archetype representing ‘an “Old God”, the first god to be found at the start of all cosmogenesis, before religions of the spirit dethroned him.’[vii]

    This becomes the moving spirit of another vagabond poet, James Clarence Mangan who as a Young Irelander renews the spirt of the nation, suffers and dies, apparently of malnutrition at the height of a cholera epidemic, but re-appears in spectral form.

    He swung, his face went purple
    A roar came from the crowd
    But Mangan laughed and pushed me
    And we got back on the cloud
    He dropped me off in London
    Back in this dying land
    But my eyes were filled with wonder
    At the ring still in my hand

    ‘this dying land’

    Arriving in central London I am struck by the imperial grandeur. The scale and ambition of the architecture makes Dublin seem like a provincial town, but there’s a cold reserve that used to send a shiver down my spine when I lived here.

    So many buildings appear uninhabited; unimaginably grand hotels seem more like fortresses with concierge-sentries posted outside to keep the hoi poloi at bay; uttering “can I help you sir,” with a snarl. We’d have to make our own fun.

    The launch of Shane MacGowans’s art exhibition ‘The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold’ took place at the boutique Andipa gallery in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, where his art resides alongside that of Banksy’s.

    Walking in I pass Bob Geldof, an unlikely presence, given his aversion to Irish nationalism, but he has credited Shane and the Pogues with awakening an interest in traditional Irish musical forms that he had previously disparaged.

    In the relatively narrow confines of the gallery, with the king sitting contentedly on his throne, a carnival atmosphere asserts itself. He had escaped from all this, but that night he was enjoying a return to the crazy celebrity madness, which in England is built on a bedrock of aristocracy.

    The champagne flowed, as minor celebrities converged – “he’s Liam Gallagher’s brother you know” – when the ocean parted before the eternal beauty of Kate Moss. A face to launch a thousand camera phones, and sell a few paintings.

    Then on to Soho, where the weather at least remained dry. The police were even called. It took seven of them to take old Tom down, or so they say: never let the truth get in the way of a good yearn…

    Critics

    Acording to Joe Cleary:

    Ever since the Great Famine and the Devotional Revolution, and especially when they came to power after the establishment of the Free State, the traditionalists had been concerned to make Irish culture more refined and respectable by filtering out, as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘degraded’, all its more licentious and anarchic or uncouth elements – those very elements that were to make such a whoopingly triumphant return of the repressed in the Pogues’ music.[viii]

    In many respects, the unapologetic Shane MacGowan remains an embarrassment to the Official Ireland narrative, now principally articulated in the Irish Times, which inculcates a new breed of conformity that brooks no divergence.

    Previously, Irish Times journalist Joe Breen suggested that his distaste for the Pogues resembled the attitude of contemporary African-Americans who preferred contemporary music to a musical tradition obsessed with the miseries of slavery and Jim Crow.

    Breen’s reference to American culture betrays the apparent objective of many Irish neoliberal cheerleaders to establish a deracinated Americana in Hibernia, a tax haven for multinationals where the atmosphere of the carnival is strictly commodified. Here, Irish history is reduced to the struggle of modernisers against religious authority – with nothing in between – and where celebration of the national struggle is associated with Populism, or even an exclusive ‘white’ nationalism.

    The art of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues offer a rowdy alternative to a creeping homogenisation. He endures, seemingly just to spite them, and even in the dying land he can still revive the spirit of the carnival.

    This article was first published in October, 2022.

    [i] Clarke and MacGowan, A Drink with Shane MacGowan, (London, 2001), p.168

    [ii] Cleary, p.283

    [iii] Cleary, p.277

    [iv] Cleary, p.271

    [v] Nuala O’Connor, Bringing it All Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music at Home and Overseas (Dublin, 2001), p.159.

    [vi] Greaber and Wengrow, p.54

    [vii] Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan, (London, 1996), p.845

    [viii] Cleary, p.290

  • Fine Dining in Ireland During WWII

    Dublin was the second city of the British Empire until end of the eighteenth century. After the Act of Union of 1801, however, many prosperous land owners departed the city and, indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century Belfast’s population was greater.

    The former did, however, retain a residual aristocracy who formed the clientele for the few restaurants that emerged towards the century’s end; albeit, the absence, of a significant bourgeois class over the course of the twentieth century meant there was little demand for restaurants for those on middling incomes.

    It was perhaps unfortunate for Irish gastronomy to have been colonised by the English who Voltaire described as being a nation of forty-two religions but only two sauces. Besides, Ireland was a poor country by European standards in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. The Great Famine was among the most devastating of its kind in human history. Culinary celebration was muted.

    Nonetheless, numerous French chefs had already emigrated to Ireland to work in aristocratic households and gentlemen’s clubs by the time the first recognisable restaurant emerged in Dublin in 1861. The Café du Paris on Lincoln Place was intriguingly linked to a Turkish baths on the same premises. They advertised both dinners ‘a la carte and table d’hote; choicest wines and liqueurs of all kinds, [and] Ices.’

    Jammet’s

    Any history of Dublin restaurants lingers on the legendary Jammet’s which was founded by two brothers from the Pyrenne,s Michel and Francois Jammet in 1901. They purchased the Burlington Restaurant and Oyster Saloon on Andrew’s Street in 1901 and renamed it Jammet’s. Michel had been chef to the lord lieutenant so knew all about what appealed to the aristocracy whose descendents continued to patronise the establishment until its demise in 1967.

    In 1908 Francois Jammet returned to Paris leaving his brother in sole charge until 1927 when he handed the reigns to his Belvedere educated son Louis. By that time it had moved to Nassau Street to the site of the Porterhouse Central.

    One observer from the 1940s describes the interior of the restaurant: ‘the main dining room was pure French second Empire, with a lovely faded patina to the furniture, snow white linens, well cut crystal, monogrammed porcelain, gourmet sized silver-plated cutlery and gleaming decanters.’ It was the hangout for artists and the literary set such as W.B. Yeats, Michael MacLiommar and Dudley Edwards as well as wealthy professionals and men of commerce.

    The family first lived in Queen’s Park, Monkstown but moved to the sixteenth century Kill Abbey in the 1940s where vegetables were grown for the restaurant. A 1928 article in Vogue describes Jammet’s as ‘one of Europe’s best restaurants … crowded with gourmets and wits, where the sole and the grouse was divine.’

    It was during the years of the Second World War that Jammet’s really came into its own as the location for the ‘finest French cooking between the fall of France and the liberation of Paris.’ Like other Irish restaurants, Jammet’s managed to evade restrictive rationing and serve customers the fare they were accustomed to. According to one observer ‘American servicemen, cigar-chomping and in full uniform, were streaming across the neutral border to sample the fabulous food in the prodigious quantities available here.’

    Red Bank

    If Jammet’s was the location for Allied excess another long-established restaurant the Red Bank was the place of Axis intrigue. On April 22 1939 the German colony in Ireland celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler there. The Irish Times records: ‘A large portrait of Herr Hitler occupied special position in the special decorations. On either side of it were swastikas and every guest wore a swastika or Nazi party badges.’

    Disturbingly in May 1940 as the Nazis Blitzkrieged through Europe, the ‘Irish Friends of Germany’ (aka the National Club) held a meeting in the restaurant that was attended by fifty people. George Griffin, veteran anti-Semite and ex Blueshirt, spoke on the subject of the ‘The Jewish Stranglehold on Ireland’. Griffin mentioned many Jews by name and went onto advocate that … we should never pass a Jew on the street without openly insulting him’.

    The Blueshirts salute their leader Eoin O’Duffy.

    The Unicorn

    But Jewish émigrés were themselves involved in the restaurant trade and could dish out their own retribution. It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold but for Austrian Jews Erwin and Lisl Strunz from Vienna it could be salty too.

    They escaped from Vienna in 1938 and purchased a premises on Merrion Row which they called the Unicorn. They bought it for a song as Irish people thought the premises was haunted after W.B. Yeats had supposedly conducted séances there.

    Lisl would cook her mainly Austrian dishes while Erwin entertained at the front of house. He reminisced ‘during Christmas 1940 when all the lights had gone out over Europe I played my guitar in the restaurant and sang Christmas carols and folk songs in eight languages.

    But not all comers were welcome. When Edouard Hempel and his acolytes from the German legation visited Erwin became apoplectic with rage. But he kept his wits about him and calmly took their orders. Before each plates was delivered he doused each one with enough salt to clear a frosty driveway. Hempel nearly choked and the whole table walked out and never returned.

    After the war the Unicorn was sold to an Italian family the Sidoli’s and it brought exotic ingredients like pasta to its Dublin clientele. It also involved females chefs which was unusual for the male dominated profession in Dublin.

    Another immigrant who came to Ireland to work in the restaurant trade was Zenon Geldof a Belgian citizen who set up a restaurant called Café Belge. His grandson Bob retained an ambition to feed the world.

    Steeped in the haute cuisine tradition of Escoffier Jammet’s continued to prosper after the war when it was joined by other restaurants including The Russell.

    Ireland’s first phD in the history of food, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire argues that on a per capita basis in the 1950s Ireland was the gastronomic capital of the British Isles. Although this may not have been that great an achievement as given the nadir that English food had reached by the 1950s. Elizabeth David wrote of her experience in one English restaurant of the time: ‘there was no excuse, none, for such unspeakably unpleasant meals as in that dining room were put in front of me. To my agonized homesickness for the sun and southern food was added an embattled rage that we should be asked – and should accept – the endurance of such cooking.’ Perhaps she should have visited Dublin.

  • The Restaurant Experience

    The anthropologist Jack Goody pours scorn on modern dining habits. Solitary consumption he says reverses the customary habit of ‘public input and private output’, making eating alone ‘the equivalent of shitting publicly.’

    Dining, after all, as the great gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it: ‘is the common bond which unites the nations of the world in reciprocal exchanges of objects serving for daily consumption.’

    The restaurant emerged as a distinctive forum for public consumption in eighteenth century France. Prior to that it was the simple table d’hôte, where a traiteur would present a large pot to the assembled diners, who arrived at the appointed hour.

    This could present difficulties, however, if agreed conventions were lacking on how diners were to participate. On his travels in France, the agronomist Arthur Young bemoaned the greed of his dining companions in hostelries, saying, ‘the ducks were swept clean so quickly that I moved from the table without half a dinner’. In the wake of the French Revolution, an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie sought a more recherché experience.

    Originally, restaurants (deriving from the verb restaurer ‘to restore to a former state’) sold medicinal broths. In her history, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000), Rebecca Spang recalls how the restaurants of eighteenth-century Paris differentiated themselves from other eateries by offering sustenance at any time of day. Eventually they began offering more solid fare, thereby encroaching on the traiteurs.

    The strict laws regulating the division of business between the different food guilds in France at the time led to a landmark court case in which the restaurateurs carried the day. This allowed the restaurant-style of dining, ‘characterized not by commonwealth but by compartmentalization’, to emerge as the dominant form of eating out in the Western world.

    Fine Dining,

    Elitist Quality

    Today, restaurants invariably ‘plate’ each dish before presentation to the individual customer a style known as service à la russe, which replaced the more medieval display of service à la Francaise during the mid-nineteenth century.

    The elitist quality of the restaurant experience is part of its appeal. Indeed, according to Sprang, the ‘restaurant fantasy implicitly required the presence of somebody outside: some poor devil with his nose pressed to the window’.

    Thus, a restaurant is more than merely an establishment where food is served. It involves the division of diners into parties and, generally, serves separate portions to individuals. It remains synonymous with French food, and the dominance of French cuisine is apparent in the early history of Dublin restaurants, although this has changed radically in recent decades.

    Apart from chefs, waiting staff and often indulgent investors, the most important person for a restaurant’s survival is the food critic. A bad review can sink a restaurant, while praise can bring customers flooding into the next big thing, although in recent times food criticism is being overtaken by online reviewers that are subject to manipulation.

    Grimod de La Reynière

    The First Gastronome

    A food critic may also be referred to as a gastronome. The first of this kind was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière who wrote his Almanach des Gourmands in the wake of the Revolution.

    He issued his pronouncements in the name of tradition as a member of the departed ancien regime. The son of a rich farmer-general, in his early life he displayed liberal tendencies but became disillusioned with the new order, condemning ‘everything that is despicable and vile; there in two words you have the Revolution’.

    He asserts: ‘I will never be the friend of a democrat. It is atrocious that men of letters should think as the majority do today (MacDonogh,1997).’

    According to his biographer MacDonogh, he began to write about food after being told to write about something harmless, or give up writing altogether. In this medium he ‘masked his vicious attacks behind harmless idioms’. Gastronomy became a vehicle for his reactionary views.

    An awareness of ‘good’ food revealed the true aristocrat. After the Revolution he founded what he referred to as a Jury des Degustateurs, and between 1803 and 1812 set about writing his Almanach des Gourmands. The aristocratic display of pre-Revolutionary France could re-emerge in the new forum of the public restaurant.

    De la Reynière was also alive to the possibility that he could be labelled a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’ Henceforth a glutton would be one who eats too much rather than a refined individual with an interest in talking about food.

    The gastronome in his or her most evolved form is not a professional cook. He or she is a man of letters. His or her real table is not the one where he eats but where he or she writes. It is with the flourish of the pen that he or she achieves success rather than through their knowledge of the arcane culinary arts, as ultimately the gastronome is not the one who knows the most, but the one who speaks, and writes, best.

    Garden café of the Hôtel Ritz Paris (1904), Pierre-Georges Jeanniot.

    ‘Lightning Sketches on the Table Cloth’

    Curnonsky, the pen name of the great French food critic Maurice Edmond Sailland who was elected Prince Elect of Gastronomy by Le Soir magazine in 1927 describes the role as follows:

    There are those who stare with gluttonous resentment, and those who snap impatient fingers at every passing waiter: those who flap huge newspapers in their companions’ faces, and those who shake defiant powder-puffs in their neighbours soup; those who devour bread to repletion, and those who chat so gaily, to the restaurant at large. But there are others, a chosen few who, having developed to a fine degree the study of physiognomy and, coupling this with a skilled pen or pencil, combine their talents in lightning sketches on the tablecloth.

    Pascal Ory poses the question ‘Does the chef make the gastronome or vice versa?’. Culinary evolution is largely independent of gastronomic evaluation, but without a critical audience chefs may be insensitive to diners’ tastes.

    Moreover, just as when we cook for ourselves we don’t tend to perform heroics, a cook without a responsive audience might take a more functional approach. But innovation and high standards become an imperative when the food critic is there to evaluate.

    Even if they may claim to have nothing but contempt for the breed, virtuoso chefs usually seek the validation of critical approval, and boundaries are only broken when gastronomes are there to describe them as such. More to the point, the imprimatur of the critic brings great rewards. Perhaps unfairly, the pen is often mightier than the kitchen knife.

    Notwithstanding increasing costs in a fraught business, the back breaking labour of chefing, improved takeaways, the strains of Covid and the distortion of food criticism through sites like TripAdvisor, restaurant dining endures as a sought after experience. After all, where else would anyone refer to me as “Sir”.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Julian Lloyd: Pure Luck and Happenstance

    Julian Lloyd’s iconic portrait of Nick Drake now forms part of the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery’s photographic collection. Lloyd’s friendship with the archetypal singer-songwriter, who died, tragically, aged just twenty-six in 1974, permits a rare intimacy between photographer and an elusive subject.

    In some photos Drake looks to be at peace with himself and his surroundings, but in others of the doomed troubadour – featuring in Lloyd’s new exhibition running in the Horse Gallery, Dublin 1, from July 6th to July 17th – we find a less playful figure, with Drake brooding beneath a heavy coat on a Welsh beach, inhaling urgently.

    Nick Drake, Selbourne 1968. © Julian Lloyd

    Lloyd says Drake was “a nice, easy going, companionable man, very private, but not particularly buttoned-up. Obviously he became ill – a cruel mental illness which locked him up and made him miserable. Nick was just one of the gang, but obviously he had a talent.” The budding artist, who only achieved posthumous fame, was “happy to play in front of a few of us in a room. Never anything boastful or show-offy about him.”

    Lloyd claims that it was “pure luck and happenstance” that brought him into the same social circles as figures such as Drake, and later, after he moved to Ireland – to work with horses – musicians such as Ronnie Wood and Dolores O’Riordan, along with actors such as John Hurt.

    Bo Diddley and Ronnie Wood, Sandymount House 2002. © Julian Lloyd

    Despite many of his subjects being celebrity figures, there is a lightness to the work. You really get the impression that Julian Lloyd was simply a photographer among friends.

    Crystallising Memories

    Julian Lloyd clearly possesses a keen eye for the poignancy of a fleeting moment in time, crystallising memories, whether at a carefree party or even outside a funeral, which is the hallmark of great photography, and art more broadly. Choosing when to take out the camera and start shooting is a fraught exercise, as a subject may recoil or put on a false persona before the lens. Lloyd seems to have a knack of timing this to perfection.

    Dolores Oriordan and the Cranberries, Tivoli Theatre, Dublin, 1993. © Julian Lloyd

    Lloyd is not in the least bit precious about his photography, confiding that on occasion he is not averse to having a few drinks at a party, and allowing auto-focus to prevent any mishaps. Nor does he feel threatened by the ubiquity of smart phone photography, recalling the insight of the American photographer David LaChapelle, who put it to an audience that while everybody in the world has access to pen and paper, few writers attain the level of Shakespeare.

    J.P. Donleavy, The Burren. © Julian Lloyd

    He also dismisses the idea that photographers conform to a particular personality type, recalling meeting with “ebullient, chatty, noisy photographers, and also furtive ones, who creep around in corners.” His own work has been in “fits and starts”. He was pretty broke for periods, and had no camera to work with after a theft for some time.

    Hippie Trail

    Apart from the glamour of his rock ‘n’ roll and aristocratic subjects, we also find an abiding love for Ireland in the collection, especially the characters he encountered along the way, such as the parking attendant at the Cliffs of Moher who sold tin whistles on the side.

    After leaving school he first plied his photographic trade for a local newspaper in Northumberland near the English-Scottish border, where ships would occasionally pull in undetonated World War II mines for him to photograph.

    He then moved to ‘Swinging Sixties’ London, where he secured a job in a photographic studio, and met his future wife Victoria, whose sister was going out with Eric Clapton at the time. George Harrison was also on the scene.

    There reached a point, however, when, like other hippie idealists, he wanted to move to the country. Back then “people would set off in barrel topped wagons.” He and Victoria followed suit, found one for themselves and purchased a mare to take it from Swindon to Somerset.

    This proved a life-changing experience. Despite no family or other background with horses, he grew fond of the mare and “the whole relationship with horses.” Later he found a job with a horse dealer, learning the business “from the ground up.”

    Boxer, His final winter, Leixlip, 1989. © Julian Lloyd

    Lloyd’s unusual hippie trail eventually brought him to Ireland. This was he says “a very vivid experience.” He and Victoria found “a very different culture living in Ireland than it was in Britain. It was very, very attractive.”

    In 1975 he came to work for Tim Rogers in Lucan in county Dublin, who had, he says “the best stallion operation in Europe at the time.” It would be over forty-five years before he finally returned to the U.K.. He has recently moved to live in Shropshire near the Welsh border, where Victoria’s family is from.

    He recalls a friend, Sean Doyle saying to him that “to succeed in life you must have an unfair advantage.” But unlike the relatively easy world around his photography, Lloyd enjoyed no unfair advantage when it came to horses, making it “very, very difficult.” It was a seven day a week job, to which he “gave it everything” and possessed “the zeal of the convert”. Nonetheless, he spent “plenty of years skint” during a time when it was “very, very hard to make a living.” If photography was a playful mistress, the breeding and raising of horses was a demanding master.

    Mirianne Faithfull and Keith Richards, Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin, 1994. © Julian Lloyd

    Safe Haven

    Lloyd describes Ireland as “a safe haven” – away from a prying media – for many of the English musicians and other artists who took up residence here from the 1970s. Some like Marian Faithfull found a more receptive audience for their work.

    Julian Lloyd’s photography captures that carefree world, which existed, unimpeded, alongside surviving remnants of a peasant society, which also features in his work. It was perhaps to his great advantage that he did not depend on photography for an income, but could instead indulge a passion in intimate settings, where he could blend in seamlessly with the crowd.

    Julian Lloyd’s Photography is on display in the Horse Gallery, 3 Bethesda Place, Rotunda, Dublin, D01 EY29, from July 6th-16th.