The significance of Joe Duffy (Liveline, June 26, 2023) insisting that Ryan Tubridy (from 12.30) “really is a unique talent” should not be overlooked.
It isn’t simply that Joe and Ryan (along with a host of RTÉ’s household names) share Noel Kelly as an agent. It also reveals Joe’s interest in maintaining a near-feudal pay structure, rewarding “unique talent”.
Notably, Joe is fixated on maintaining high ratings for his show. As he put it in 2017: ‘One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up.’
The Joe Duffy Show is a careful balancing act between heart-rending accounts appealing to an older, pearl-clutching, audience – often sparking moral panic – and outright absurdity or light entertainment (including ‘Funny Fridays’). That is not to say that the show never addresses important issues or even breaks stories, but the formula is clearly calibrated by experienced – and even talented – producers. That’s why other presenters seamlessly ‘take the chair.’
Undoubtedly, the issues they choose to lead on arise from careful consideration. Joe doesn’t simply allow members of the public to have their say. This certainly seemed evident during the June 26 programme, as a succession of callers ‘spoke out’ in favour of Ryan Tubridy. At a point when most of the country was up in arms, wagons were circling.
Joe’s particular skill lies in not offending anyone that matters; this extends to the car company sponsoring his show, but crucially finds him reinforcing key government messages.
For example, during Covid, rather than allowing for a reasoned debate among experts on the thorny question of vaccination policy, Joe chose to platform an individual claiming the vaccine was a ‘mark of the beast.’ Naturally, reasonable Joe rode to the rescue to restore our collective sanity.
Latterly, he has weighed in with belligerent statements on Russia-Ukraine that align with the government’s response. Thus in May, 2023 he opined: ‘War only ends primarily when one side is beaten by the other side.’ As Mick Heaneyput it in the Irish Times: ‘He’s so impassioned that callers with mildly divergent views struggle to get a word in edgeways at times. Talk to Joe? Not when he’s in this form.’
During his 9am radio slot and as presenter of the Late Late Show Ryan was rarely overtly political, although he was happy to endorse a complimentary biography of Leo Varadkar, and chose to interview Micheál Martinon his penultimate outing as Late Late Show host.
Tubridy plays a different role to Joe Duffy, which I have previously arguedis essential to a distinctively Irish propaganda. This is to maintain the feel-good factor. Light entertainment on the airwaves provides a comfort blanket for all sorts of troubles, from Covid to the cost of living. Indeed, Tubridy’s relentless chirpiness recalls the Depression-era song, popularised by Bing Crosby: ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and Dream your Troubles Away)’
Almost uniquely on RTÉ Radio 1 – the Ray D’Arcy show has a similarly vacuous quality – Tubridy’s programmes became an extended commercial: a kind of dream factory or Late Late Toy Show for adults. Rather than engaging in tiresome arguments over our response to climate change, listeners and viewers are subliminally guided into treating themselves to the latest car model. Smile, it’s easy.
In this argument-free zone, the mask occasionally slipped, as where Tubridy suggested on the Late Late Show in 2018 that cyclists who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned’.
A significant proportion of the Irish public ignore RTÉ, and aren’t in the least bit surprised by the revelations. The real outrage emanated from RTÉ staff who did not take kindly to their highest earner being over-paid in an underhand fashion. This arrived at a time when, presumably, many are feeling the pinch during an extended Cost of Living and Housing Crisis.
RTÉ staff are a formidable and influential body that seem to have gained control of the news rooms, even if the likes of the Joe Duffy Show may be acting in the interest of Tubridy. The sans culottes seemed determined to eviscerate the ancien regime. Whether the defenestrations of Dee Forbes and Ryan Tubridy will be sufficient remains to be seen.
The looming question is whether these RTÉ journalists, who appear to be led by Education Correspondent Emma O’Kelly are committed to a long overdue overhaul of public service broadcasting. This ought to entail an end to programming that serves as a vehicle for so-called ‘talent’. Notably, BBC Radio 4’s schedule does not contain a single programme that takes its name from a presenter.
But RTÉ staff may have to be prepared to cut their cloth further. It is unclear whether public service broadcasting is compatible with selling advertising space.
A fully state-funded model would also bring its own problems – as we witnessed during the Covid-era when RTÉ often became a conduit for government propaganda – but safeguards, as in the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, could be put in place. A slimmed down model – with a primary focus on current affairs and high culture – would surely represent an improvement on the kind of schlock – epitomised by Ryan Tubridy – we have become accustomed to.
A Basic Requirement
In 2017 I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request seeking details of payments by third parties to a number of RTÉ stars, including Ryan Tubridy, approved by RTÉ management falling under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance for 2017.
The officer refused to divulge precise details, claiming this could be advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.
He revealed, however, that ‘the total number of requests to engage in external ventures that RTÉ received was 122. Of that number, 114 were approved and 8 were refused. Of those granted, 97 were independent contractor requests and 1 was a RTÉ employee request. Of those refused, 7 were independent contractor requests and 17 were RTÉ employee requests.’
That the vast majority of requests were approved, particularly to independent contractors, demonstrated that the organisation was taking a permissive approach on conflicts of interest.
RTÉ claimed the majority of payments were for ‘non-commercial events, and mostly in support of charitable or other not-for-profit organisations’. In the absence of further details, however, it was impossible to verify this claim. If their work really was benign, why were they withholding the information?
The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy would have been lost to commercial competitors if information entered the public domain. That contention may be questioned, in the case of Tubridy at least. After moonlighting with the BBC in 2016 Tubridy admitted he had found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would have represented a career regression.
Most of RTÉ ’s household names found fame, and fortune, through extended exposure on RTÉ. The failure of Pat Kenny to draw a substantial number of his former listeners away from the station, when he departed for Newstalk, indicates most people are in the habit of tuning into the state broadcaster, rather than to listen to the unique talent.
Transparency?
This week I sent in another FOI seeking records (if they exist) of payments or payments-in-kind to the same ‘stars’, approved by RTE management falling under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance since 2017. It will be interesting to find out whether transparency is now given a higher priority than “contractual negotiations”.
Last November, in one of his final outings as Taoiseach, Micheál Martin delivered the annual Romanes Lecture at Oxford University. It’s unusual to find a senior Irish politician laying out a political philosophy, and for this he deserves credit, even if I take issue with his claim to occupying a ‘liberal’ middle ground.
Since the nadir of the 2011 election, when Fianna Fáil won just 20 seats with 17.6% of the vote, Martin has steadied that ship; winning 44 seats with 24.3% of the vote in 2016, and 38 seats with 22.2% in 2020, in the face of Sinn Fein’s surge.
Importantly, during this holding pattern, Martin has restored the party’s access to levers of power and patronage. A romantic yearning for an overall majority associated with the leadership of Charles J. Haughey is a distant memory. In its place, we find steely pragmatism under Martin.
One commentator recently argued that Martin, ‘has remade Fianna Fáil from a party with pretensions of national leadership into a reduced but successful vehicle for its leader.’ This seems unfair. It is difficult to imagine any leader re-invigorating the party sufficiently to remain ‘the natural governing party’ after the car crash years of Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen.
Whatever about the morality of the issue, Martin’s decision to endorse the Repeal of the Eighth Amendment in 2018 – in contrast to the majority of his parliamentary colleagues – was politically astute, given the low age profile of the ‘yes’ vote.
Nevertheless, Fianna Fail is still struggling to attract younger voters, remains moribund in Dublin and vulnerable to rural independents. It is still being argued that a party lacking obvious rising stars could cease to exist. A competent leader, however, cannot be blamed for the relative mediocrity of his colleagues.
Martin’s relationship to his lieutenants recalls a story about Charlie Haughey bringing his cabinet to the exclusive Coq Hardi restaurant. The princely Haughey ordered Steak Tartar, and when asked, “what about for the vegetables?”, replied “they won’t be dining.”
Moreover, Martin’s personal approval ratings consistently exceed those of the gaff-prone Leo Varadkar. This has implications for the forthcoming general election, when we may expect presidential campaigning, with relentless media focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the main party leaders.
Finally, when it comes to deciding the composition of the next government, Martin’s Fianna Fáil is in less of an ideological straightjacket than Fine Gael. With an election looming, Martin may be happy to occupy a putative political centre, while watching sparks fly between Sinn Féin and Fine Gael.
Charles J. Haughey in 1989.
Embattled
Thus, in the Romanes Lecture Martin lays claim to what he describes as an ‘embattled liberal middle ground’, pointing to threats posed by the technological rupture of the Internet and nefarious Russian interference in our democracy. These developments he ties to the recent political earthquakes of Brexit and the Trump Presidency, as well as the expression of conspiracy theories.
This familiar narrative contains some truth, but ‘an angry public discourse’ in most countries can be traced primarily to a decline in manufacturing and heavy industry, the widening gap between rich and poor and a global housing crisis.
Martin nonetheless contends: ‘In terms of basic concerns such as incomes, life expectancy and education, the scale of progress over the last century is beyond anything which was predicted, yet this is largely absent from the public discourse’.
This idea that we have ‘never had it so good’ ignores that since the 1970s real wages have barely budged; life expectancy now appears to be declining, in the U.S. at least; and how in Ireland we have an education system designed to produce nothing more than ‘second class robots’, according to an OECD expert. And that is to ignore more existential threats such as climate change.
He weakly recalls ‘the best’ losing ‘all conviction’ from W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, a poem anticipating the victorious march of ideologies such as Communism and Fascism in the 1920s. Today, in contrast, we find a distinct absence of fixed ideologies animating the ‘Populist’ movements Martin decries.
Thus, Martin’s broad-brush account of Populism joins left (including Sinn Féin presumably) opposition with that on the right, to a point where, it seems as if anything other than his own centre-right viewpoint is, at best, fiscally irresponsibility, or, at worst, a ‘threat to core principles of liberal democracy.’
Implicitly, any deviation from a neoliberal consensus reigning ascendant in Washington and Brussels is illegitimate. This amounts to a denial of a core principle of democracy: the sovereignty of the people in determining policy decisions through their elected representatives; as opposed to politicians facilitating a permanent government of unelected civil servants and unaccountable corporations.
Martin with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, Ukraine in July 2022.
Undermining Democracy?
Furthermore, Martin’s assessment that ‘the efforts by autocratic governments to undermine democracies is a relatively recent development in terms of its scale and ambition’ absolves the U.S. from responsibility for its long-standing interference in democracies, including Ukraine. He expresses no condemnation for the U.S. hatching coups.
Moreover, according to the American Bar Association: ‘Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not find sufficient evidence that President Donald Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the United States’ 2016 election and did not take a clear position on whether Trump obstructed justice.’ Thus, to insinuate otherwise is simply a conspiracy theory.
A lack of perspective is also evident in his contention that ‘Russia’s escalation of its eight-year war against Ukraine draws on a vision of restored imperial grandeur, but it is ultimately more about the desire to prevent liberal democracy succeeding in a former imperial domain.’
This disregards an obvious reason for the invasion, anticipated by, among others, George Kennan the architect of containment: the prospect of NATO expanding as far as the Russian frontier. Democratically elected, or otherwise, any Russian leader would object to this. This is not to justify the invasion, but to explain it.
We might reasonably expect greater historical insight from a holder of an MA in the subject. Approval for Timothy Snyder’s ‘wonderful work in linking historical insight to contemporary action’ suggests he is not reading widely enough.
A withering 2018 assessment of Snyder by Research Professor and Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University Dr Marlene Laruelle is worth recalling:
The fact that Timothy Snyder is an influential public intellectual and respected historian is no reason for scholars not to challenge his facile and polemical analysis of the contemporary Russian state … Distortions, inaccuracies, and selective interpretations do not help illuminate what motivates the Russian leadership’s self-positioning on the international, and in particular the European, scene. Simplistic reductionist techniques and invalid reasoning further confuse the analysis—and bias policy responses.
The hawkish Snyder recently dismissed the danger of nuclear weapons being used in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, blithely claiming a nuclear bomb ‘would make no decisive military difference.’
Martin meets with U.S. President Joe Biden at Carlingford Castle in April 2023.
Atlanticist
It might be noted that in 2003, immediately after the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq that caused up to one million deaths, as Minister for Health and Children, Micheal Martin voted alongside his government in favour of a motion endorsing ‘the long-standing arrangements for the overflight and landing in Ireland of US military and civilian aircraft’ – essentially sanctioning the refuelling of U.S. jets in Shannon.
During that debate then Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny warned perceptively that the U.S. invasion invited anarchy in the global system. Indeed, it is believed to have had a significant effect on the psychological and political climate in Russia.
It should also be noted that as chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations then Senator Joe Biden actively championed the invasion of Iraq. As President he has included in his cabinet neoconservative hawks, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO from 2005 to 2008. In early 2008, NATO promised Ukraine and Georgia they would one day join the alliance ‘after rebuffing U.S. demands to put the former Soviet republics on an immediate path to membership.’
Both as Taoiseach and now as Foreign Minister Martin has proved a staunch ally to the Biden administration, using Ireland’s platform as a member of UN Security Council to argue that Russia’s conduct could not be reconciled with its place on the Security Council. This hardly enhances the prospect of Ireland ever using its non-aligned status to work as an intermediary for a negotiated settlement to the war.
Any Irish leader is likely to bow to realpolitik considerations, but Martin might have done well to peruse the response of his former party colleague, and Minister for Foreign (or External) Affairs, Frank Aiken to the U.S.-funded Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
In the U.N., Ireland supported the U.S. position, but Aiken also expressed an understanding of the Cuban reaction. He counselled the Cubans on the fundamentals of de Valera’s neutrality policy, specifically towards our own large neighbour: ‘That principle was that under no circumstances would we allow our country to be used as a base for attack against our neighbour Britain … It has special validity in the case of small countries placed beside powerful neighbours with whom they have disputes or disagreements.’
The same logic might apply to a smaller country such as Ukraine, offering a base from which NATO could attack its powerful Russian neighbour. Martin might have let it be known that Ireland favoured de-escalation, acknowledging Russia’s anxieties arising out of a collective memory of World War II, when the Soviet Union suffered up to 27 million deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies. Instead, we hear unrelenting belligerence towards Russia – including an apparent disavowal of Irish neutrality.
Also in that lecture, Martin referenced the apparently undifferentiated views of the people of Ukraine:
Just as they did in 2014, the people of Ukraine have been willing to sacrifice everything because they want to secure a free and prosperous future for their country.
In the Romane Lecture, Martin argues that the liberalism he espouses ‘is a set of values which inherently respect the legitimacy of diverse political and social views.’ But this hardly tallies with his record as Taoiseach.
The reaction of the Irish state under Martin as Taoiseach to Covid-19 can hardly be described as liberal. Lockdowns, vaccine passes and forced quarantine for travellers in reception facilities were unprecedented interventions by the State into people’s private lives.
Doubtless, he would argue that a test of proportionality applied. In the lecture he maintains that COVID-19 ‘presented just as serious a threat to governments and institutions’ as the Spanish Influenza pandemic.
The Spanish Influenza (H1N1) pandemic of 1918-19 carried off an astonishing fifty million people, most of whom were in the prime of their lives. In contrast, globally, there have been just under seven million confirmed deaths ‘with’ Covid, the vast majority over seventy years of age and suffering from significant co-morbidities. This at a time when the global population is six times that of 1918.
We find further pieties from Martin such as condemnation of ‘widespread attempts to question core public health advice and to spread doubt about the efficacy of vaccines and the intent behind them.’ Unrestrained scientific debate is surely a key feature of liberalism.
The Irish economic model remains highly dependent on foreign direct investment, including from pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer. Martin may consider preserving their goodwill to be his priority. But it leaves him open to the accusation that he is, at the very least, inadequately attentive to the conduct of companies with a long record of corruption, and criminality.
Martin showed poor judgment as Taoiseach during Covid-19, invariably resorting to draconian interventions. Thus, Ireland became the first European country to re-enter lockdown in October, 2020, based on speculative projections. Then he promised a ‘meaningful Christmas’ later that year, when opening up prior to the annual winter respiratory season, generating the world’s highest Covid rate.
Commendably, Martin ‘placed an unrivalled emphasis on keeping schools open,’ but he played a curious role in the introduction of face mask mandates. In Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic by Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O’Connell we learn that Martin’s phone had been ‘buzzing with texts from his sister-in-law in Singapore. ‘Masks, masks, masks,’ she told him.’ Earlier, however, Professor Martin Cormican informed NPHET that, ‘if there is a benefit, it is very small’, and that ‘widespread mask use also rapidly degenerates with poor practice, which could increase the risk of Covid-19 transmission.’
We also learn of Angela Merkel ringing up the Taoiseach to air her concerns about the Irish case trajectory in the Christmas of 2020, and Martin recalling her bringing this up again ‘at the bloody EU Council meeting.’ Merkel appeared to be demanding a level of stringency in other European states that ignored wider impacts. Just as during the era of austerity, the Irish government under Martin endeavoured to be the best boy in the European class and disregarded the consequences.
Paddy Cosgrave in 2022.
Pervasive Division
As a politician who has survived in government, and as leader of Fianna Fáil, for longer than most, Martin obviously recognises the importance of maintaining warm relations with the press corps. Critical, or investigative, journalism, however, would hardly be a welcome intrusion into his affairs. The press, as the editor of the Times wrote in 1852, ‘lives by disclosure … The statesman’s duty is precisely the reverse.’
Martin nonetheless said:
Support for professional and independent journalism has become an urgent need in our societies. We can see what happens when we no longer put value on journalism which takes time, involves expertise and operates to high ethical standards. The dominance of current affairs by partisan media or by a limited number of the wealthiest in our societies is always destructive.
His recent broadside, however, impugning the motivations of Paddy Cosgrave, Chay Bowes and The Ditch, delivered under Dáil privilege, is more revealing of his attitude. This further lapse into participation in “an angry public discourse” was criticised by the National Union of Journalists.
Associating the Ditch’s impressive record of exposing corruption with Russian interference is a worrying sign of Martin being prepared to employ ‘McCarthyite’ tactics.
Martin refers to ‘a pervasive division in public discourse is directly undermining the ability to develop effective responses to complex problems.’ His problem is that young people, in particular, angrily contest the effectiveness of his government’s response to these complex problems.
In his role as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Tánaiste Micheál Martin may be somewhat insulated from the enduring failure of the Irish government to deliver on housing, which is now being preyed on by an incipient far right. But possessing an ability to survive in Irish politics is surely not the only epitaph he craves.
Micheál Martin may only consent to his epitaph being written once a majority of the young people of Ireland look forward optimistically to a reasonable standard of living under a Fianna Fáil-led government. Unless there is a significant change in circumstances, however, any second coming for him as Taoiseach appears remote.
Covid is a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. But whether the unprecedented response represents a singularity, or the beginning of an era of authoritarian capitalism, is unclear.
Many of us remain incapable of distinguishing a reliable version of reality from lonely projections. Thankfully, telling insights arrive in a new publication: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left. Authors Toby Green (a professor of African history and culture) and Thomas Fazi (a writer and journalist) navigate a path through the scientific thickets, to reveal the socio-economic and cultural factors that shaped the pandemic response.
The temporary elevation of public health officials in many countries to positions of almost unfettered power led the Mozambique writer Pedrito Cambrao to observe that ‘the secular West has essentially turned science into a religion and scientists and healthcare workers into a priestly caste that cannot be challenged. (p.346)’
Media, new and old, brought unrelenting focus to a single challenge, while only rarely surveying accumulating evidence of collateral damage. As in Albert Camus’s great novel, The Plague: ‘Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.’[i]
Additionally, as I propose in this review, a “left-brained” positivism appears to have informed the Covid Consensus that Green and Fazi define.
Positivism is a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified, or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, but this can lead to a narrowing of perspective. Thus, long-standing challenges yielded to a singular metric, the waxing and waning of “the virus” – as defined by the PCR test, a dubious diagnostic tool that accounts for exaggerated mortality statistics.
Positivism is identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions, according to Albert Camus, ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’
Comte conceived of a hierarchical society that looks similar to what we witnessed over the course of the Covid Consensus:
[S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priests who reign over everything.[ii]
In our time, technocratic rule relied on an underlying hysteria founded on a generally irrational fear of premature death, whipped up by social media in particular.
Only once this dissipated – arguably when wide availability of rapid antigen tests revealed the widespread prevalence of basically harmless infections – was normality restored. As in Camus’s novel The Plague: ‘Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.’[iii]
Questioning Authority
The paucity of left-wing lockdown critiques, ignoring the plight of Global South, where more than one hundred million people fell below the poverty line (p.286), despite the minimal impact of the virus itself, demonstrates an intellectual impoverishment in a broad-based movement that achieved extraordinary progress during the twentieth century, by questioning established authority in terms or wealth, gender and race.
In contrast, the veteran Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris observed that what went missing during the pandemic was an understanding that ‘science and technology are not neutral’.
All too many who identify as left-wing, Green and Fazi argue failed to recognise, ‘something much more profound than a straightforward conflict between left and right’, but instead,
a struggle at the heart of capitalism between the traditional press and business interests it has always represented (hotels, restaurants, high street shops) and the new corporate giants which did not require such promotion. (p.19)
A sympathetic explanation might trace broad left-wing approval for what were ineffectual lockdowns to the accompanying state largesse. Below the surface, however, a huge transfer of wealth occurred to billionaire owners of giant corporations. Thus, the ten richest men in the world doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while supports to workers proved transient, and were based on unsustainable quantitative easing, which has, predictably, given way to inflation.
Through effective control over online content, including outright censorship, and regulatory capture – including of the WHO – the corporate giants successfully narrowed the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Dissenters from a dominant narrative were stigmatised as far-right, libertarian or conspiracy theorists.
Importantly, statements of President Donald Trump were weaponised by architects of the Consensus. Green and Fazi contend that it was ‘no longer possible for left-leaning progressives to question ‘the science’ since that is what Trump had done. (p.78)’
Various conspiracy theories purport to explain the decisions of governments to quarantine almost half of humanity for almost two years to inhibit (rather than eliminate) a virus with a median infection fatality rate of c. 0.27% (the figure for Spanish Influenza in 1918-19 was > 2.5%) that posed a vanishingly low risk of death to anyone under the age of seventy, prior to the arrival of vaccines that were not designed to save lives.
The Covid Consensus addresses a more interesting question however, namely: why did Western populations overwhelmingly consent to unprecedented infringements on civil liberties, culminating in the population-wide, medical coercion of vaccine mandates and passports?
Indeed, leading experts seem to have been surprised at the power they wielded. Thus, after the British government adopted Chinese lockdown policy, Professer Neil Ferguson observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
It should also be noted that any idea of locking down healthy people was contrary to best practice in global health prior to 2020. An article from 2014 on the history of quarantine, ‘Gold, fire and gallows: quarantine in history’ by Médecins Sans Frontières’s Duncan Mclean found:
There is limited and far from definitive research on quarantine effectiveness and far too many other factors at play that are difficult to ascertain from the historical record. Yet while present understanding about the pathology and transmission of hostile pathogens is far advanced on centuries past, there are some basic conclusions that can be made. For example, it is fairly certain that isolating a healthy population alongside an unhealthy population risks causing more harm than good, especially when access to food, water and medical care is taken into account. For quarantine to be successful, it requires perfect compliance and transmission without symptoms.
Moreover, notwithstanding the dubious achievement of temporarily excluding Covid-19 from certain countries through a Zero Covid policy, the idea that a highly infectious respiratory pathogen causing a low level of morbidity (a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19) could have been eliminated was never a serious proposition.
The lockdown-to-vaccine strategy was also predicated on a misplaced article of faith, which is that vaccines – what Boris Johnson referred to as “the scientific cavalry” – would essentially eliminate Covid-19, or at least the transmission of the virus. The progressive – or “left-wing” – argument to take vaccines for the sake of others never stood up to serious scrutiny from the outset; but mainstream media had suspended critical assessment as part of what was immediately likened to a war-time effort.
Despite failing to achieve what most people assumed it would, i.e. block transmission, which its inventor claimed it could achieve, seemingly pre-planned measures were rolled out, while serious harms largely went unreported in a mainstream media dangerously reliant on ‘philanthro-capitalism’.
According to the authors of the Covid Consensus the pandemic ‘provided a radical continuity of many trends which had been latent in global society.’ They point to a steady growth over many years in social inequality, ‘the power of computing, information wars, and the shift towards increasingly authoritarian forms of capitalism across the world had all been growing.(p.2)’ Arguing:
we should perhaps consider the troubling hypothesis that the Chinese and Western regimes, far from representing two opposites may actually have come to embody two different types of authoritarianism, conflictual but symbiotic at the same time – as the striking convergent responses to the pandemic would seem to suggest. (p.398)
Notwithstanding the similarities Green and Fazi point to, the approaches of East and West did diverge in one significant respect: China’s early adoption of a highly authoritarian Zero Covid policy ensured life continued for most of the time “as normal”, whereas Western governments promoted a more consensual social distancing approach that relied on an unprecedented propaganda campaign.
The disturbing effects of social distancing might be viewed as the apotheosis of neo-liberalism. The virus seems to have provided a welcome pretext for the wealthy to remove themselves from the hoi polloi.
Covid-19 also laid bare the widespread out-sourcing of manufacturing to lower wage economies (such as China). Lockdowns demonstrated that many workers in the West were no longer in productive employment, and instead engaged in what the late David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’, often as part of swollen bureaucracies.
Thus, Green and Fazi identify the lockdown response as ‘a symptom of the ever-increasing removal of people in wealthier societies from economic production. (p.2)’ For many Western consumers concern for ‘the implications of lost harvests, ruptured supply chains, and abandoned industrial plant machines was not as real as the threat of a new virus to this group of disproportionately influential people. (p.3)’
An important cultural facet the authors refer to is a crippling fear of death. Over many decades Western governments have cleansed ‘the dead from daily life’ (p.11). This contrasts with the far more obvious folk rituals and religious practices attending a person passing away in the Global South.
A collective inability to reconcile ourselves to death best explains the panic generated by coverage of events in Lombardy, Italy in February, 2020: as ‘the shadow loomed of death re-entering the normal spaces of society people sought to seal themselves away from something which terrified them. (p.11)’
Ferguson’s candid testimony suggests it is highly unlikely that anyone in power anticipated the propaganda value of “the scenes in Italy”. Indeed, many governments displayed little appetite for lockdowns initially. Most quickly rolled over, however in the face of an enduring hysteria; even after initial mortality projections of 0.9% (used by Ferguson in his infamous paper) had been show to be seriously inflated.
A fear of premature death is most obvious explanation for why peopled consented to unprecedented infringements on their civil liberties.
Left-brained?
Another cultural factor the authors point to is ‘the undermining of social science and humanities degrees by governments … in favour of STEM subjects’. They contend that ‘these subjects were routinely ignored in the shaping of major policy decisions by both government and the media. (p.14)’
This educational trend, I would argue, reflects a longer term tendency in advanced industrialised societies (now including China) to perceive the world disproportionately through the left hemisphere of the brain, which has yielded a distinctive version of reality.
McGilchrist argues that since antiquity we find an ‘increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness.’[iv] This sounds suspiciously like the prevailing state of mind under lockdown.
McGilchrist also averts to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, arguing the real horror of the Concentration Camps lay in ‘the detachment with which the detailed plans of the extermination camps were developed, often relying on expertise of engineers, physicians and psychiatrists that makes the Holocaust so chilling.’[v]
It is inappropriate to compare those who promoted lockdowns to the architects of the Final Solution, or the Gulags for that matter. Indeed, many lockdown agitators were probably motivated by a misplaced altruism. The architecture of lockdowns, however, also required a detachment from the far-reaching consequences of shuttering societies and undermining community life.
Lockdowns and vaccine roll-outs depended on (“left-brained”) technical approaches – relying on engineers, physicians and psychiatrists for disease modelling, track and trace and “psy-ops”. In an era of positivism, the role of governments essentially narrowed to curbing the spread of Covid-19. This obscured “big picture” determinants of health and well-being such as social connection, as well as causing almost incalculable educational loss by closing schools for up to two years in some countries.
An acknowledged tendency to mislead the public over the course of the pandemic may also be traced to the left hemisphere; as McGilchrist puts it: ‘The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admitting to not knowing the way.’
Thus, more proportionate policies, such as those followed in Sweden, were sadly lacking in the response. The consequences of a detachment from other determinants of health and well-being seem to be reflected in the troubling excess death statistics we are now witnessing.
The belated repeal of emergency powers in most countries indicates that we have not entered a prolonged period of government led by public health officials. Indeed, conversely, there are strong arguments for greater emphasis on health initiatives to contend with other, more profound, challenges such as the obesity pandemic.
However, the overnight shift from blanket coverage of the virus to the War in Ukraine suggests we may have entered an era of ‘permanent crisis.’ This, according to Green and Fazi, ‘means being stuck in a perpetual present where all energies are focused on the fight against the enemy of the moment. (p.397)’
As with the response to Covid-19, the populations of Europe and America are presented with a single prescription – here a total victory for Ukraine – seemingly at all cost. This is, arguably, indicative of an ascendant “left-brained” positivism, which narrows or simplifies the range of possibilities to the “enemy of the moment”.
Moreover, our dependence on compromised technology accelerated under lockdown. This increases a susceptibility to propaganda, although freedom of association blunts the insidious power of the smart phone device.
Also, fear of Putin and Russia has not awakened a similar hysteria to that generated by Covid-19, although the plight of Ukrainians has certainly been used to garner sympathy for the war effort. A major difference, is that many, though certainly not all, on the left in Europe are questioning a dominant narrative; alert to the fingerprints of the military industrial complex; in contrast to the Covid response – where the role of Big Pharma was generally overlooked.
My concern is not simply that the billionaire class is enriching itself through proximity to power. It is also with the dominance of a “left-brained” caste of mind reigning ascendant in both the West and the East.
Perhaps Bobby Kennedy Jr’s bid for the Democratic nomination will bring greater attention to the influence of the corporate money men in power. An outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the military industrial complex over many years, Kennedy might previously have been easily dismissed as an “anti-vaxxer”, but that term may have lost its valency in the wake of Covid.
Unless, or until, there is a thorough evaluation of what has occurred during Covid-19, the possibility of a renewed assault on basic liberties at the behest of the billionaire class remains. Green and Fazi’s Covid Consensus represents an important first draft of history, which should inform that inquiry.
Feature Image: A classroom with socially distanced desks.
We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President. Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York (2018)
I doubt there are many career guidance counsellors now advising school leavers to become journalists. This is down to a serious depletion of the Fourth Estate, in Ireland and around the world, especially attributable to the technological rupture of the Internet. Investigative reporting is really being squeezed. This spells danger for our democracies, as power is not being adequately held to account.
In IrelandMediahuis, a Belgian company which owns a host of newspaper titles including the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and Belfast Telegraph recently announced a voluntary redundancy programme. It seems highly unlikely that any of these positions will be re-filled once “re-structuring” is complete.
In 2022 the profitability of that company’s Irish operation fell considerably (€117.3 million to €65.3 million) from the heights of 2021, when the government’s Covid advertising bonanzawas still in full swing. Although online subscriptions increased by 13% over that period, this does not translate into direct profitability.
I review in depth a recent history of dissenting journalism in 20th Century Ireland. It is a concern for Irish democracy that the editors wonder whether it will be possible for future historians to compile two volumes on 21st century Irish periodicals.https://t.co/aRG0FSymnp
Journalism, as an industry, is still reeling from the original sin of publishing online in the early noughties. Once a legacy publisher – the Guardian under Alan Rusbridger in particular – broke ranks and put “the news” online for free, the rest were forced to follow suit, with varying paywalls, or risk irrelevance.
Declining newspaper sales eventually brought an end to what now seems an Edenic era: when real journalism represented a viable career option for a young graduate, or even a person straight out of school.
In America the number of journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[i] a pattern seen all around the world.
As revenues have diminished workloads have increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. This showed an average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they previously enjoyed to perform their jobs.[ii]
This gives rise to an unprecedented amount of what Nick Davies has defined as ‘churnalism’, as journalists become passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[iii]
One suspects recent developments in AI will accelerate existing trends, and hollow out the industry further. A latter-day Napoleon might not now consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets, as government subsidies or a philanthropic grant might easily quell opposition.
There are a few bright spots on an otherwise bleak horizon – such as the vibrancy of contrarian podcasting – but it’s hard to disagree with the pessimistic conclusion of ‘the last great American reporter’ Seymour Hersh:
The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high costs, unpredictable results and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive law suits.[iv]
We now encounter an industry captive to social media behemoths, who demand coin in exchange for boosting and blue ticks. In order to finance the few remaining full-time employees, legacy media relies increasingly on biased “philanthro-capitalism”. Moreover, without a steady sales income, the sensitivities of advertisers – including emanations of the state in the era of Covid – are also less easy to disregard.
By its nature, investigative reporting struggles against constraints, legal or otherwise. Indeed, Seymour Hersh’s frustrations with his employers in the New York Times over a lack of support for his investigations into corporate America in the late 1970s led him to hurl his typewriter out an office window at one point.
If current trends continue the practice of investigative journalism in legacy media will go the way of the newspaper boy and shorthand.
In this country an aspiring journalist would want to be well insulated against poverty to challenge the dominant neoliberal consensus expressed through the print duopoly, and RTÉ. Having investigated any aspect of the state-corporate nexus a job applicant might have to field uncomfortable questions in any subsequent job interviews. Ireland is a small country after all, where whistleblowers are generally considered a nuisance.
Those decent ones still working within the profession must maintain a steely reticence, recalling Seamus Heaney’s poem about ‘politicians and newspapermen’ in Whatever You Say Say Nothing (1975):
‘O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks’
Successive revelations of corruption among elected politician by what is essentially a two-man journalistic operation at On the Ditch – backed by Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave – serves to expose the paucity of investigative reporting among the dominant legacy players, where hundreds of journalists rarely, if ever, land direct hits on the political class. Some are obviously frustrated in their efforts, while others are presumably selected for deference.
F**king Ditch
Without The Ditch, Robert Troy would still be a Minister, without The Ditch, Damien English would still be a Minister – no wonder you are attempting to undermine the Ditch, because they have been quite successful in exposing corrupt, unethical practices by… pic.twitter.com/dPPr7mQRLF
In Irish journalism today, a little investment goes a long way, especially when combined with a willingness to contend with defamation actions, and the more insidious methods that have been employed by emanations of the state in the recent past.
We hear repeated warnings on RTÉ and in print about the dangers of conspiracy theorists and the purveyors of disinformation. This blithely ignores that, time and again, mainstream media has erred in its assessments and failed to provide an adequate account of “the facts”, let alone acknowledge their own internal contradictions.
In Ireland the collective failings of the media came to a head during Covid, when a cabal of civil servants unlawfully usurped power from elected politicians and set in train an unprecedented spending bonanza. There have been few if any sustained investigations into how all that money was spent from a media that was awash with advertising revenue. Nor was there significant dissent from clearly damaging policies, such as extended school closures, or the undermining of previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
Then the Covid crisis gave way to the Ukraine crisis – in what appears a continuation of the Shock Doctrine – and we find a fresh wave of manipulation seemingly designed to nudge a reluctant Irish public into acceptance of NATO membership. Even a token left-wing voices in the mainstream media often reveal themselves beholden to the dominant interest.
It is instructive how many mainstream journalists seem inclined to undermine the case for neutrality, despite successive opinion polls showing the Irish public overwhelmingly wish to remain non-aligned, or militarily neutral. There are some obvious conflicts of interest, at the very least.
It is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness in Ireland that as English-speakers we are subject to relentless propaganda, but are equipped linguistically to cut through the Gordian Knot.
Key critical skills are, however, often lacking, in large part due to an Irish education system that has downgraded the humanities and social sciences, and which according to the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher must avoid producing ‘second-class robots’ – the obvious implication being that is exactly what it currently produces.
Perhaps this explains the cacophony of bewildered voices on social media that lapse into outlandish conspiracy theories. False prophets like John Waters offer a vision of a return to de Valera’s Ireland, which was in many respects a miserable, post-colonial epoch with no place for youth or vibrancy.
Foreign friends wonder why the Irish people are so passive when it comes to housing and securing other rights vis-à-vis the state and dominant corporations. The absence of investigative reporting and critical insight is crucial to maintaining this status quo, where young workers are fleeced by landlords, including REITs that barely pay tax in this country.
Stopping the rot, and saving Irish democracy, surely begins with reforming the public broadcaster, which barely maintains the pretence that it conducts investigative reporting. Sadly, it has long been beholden to advertisers.
The malaise has been brewing for some time. The director and authorBob Quinn in 2001 argued that RTÉ had become a:
bloated and swelling corpse, feeding the increasing number of parasites but incapable of directing itself because there is no life, no human spirit to quicken it … This despite the efforts of bright young men in advertising to string gaudy beads around the neck of the corpse, the vile body, in an effort to persuade the people of this country that their property is still working on their behalf. It is not. It is simply the vehicle for the frustrated fantasies of ad-men, the megalomania of insane technocrats and the sanctification of the acts of a conservative government. If one looks closely at those lines, one will see evidence of the greatest sell-out ever perpetrated on a nation – by the nation itself, through its sons.[v]
In the past there was at least one national newspaper that tended to go against one or other of the dominant centre-right parties, who have since entered coalition.
Any country lacking a media prepared to conduct hard-hitting investigative reporting and which prevents divergent opinions from being ventilated cannot remain an independent republic, or a genuine democracy, for any length of time. Despite a groundswell of support for the opposition, removing the current coalition from power without a change in the media landscape may prove extremely difficult, just as in other European countries.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
[i] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.163
A new book COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK(Bloomsbury, 2023) co-authored by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose explores how the British government under Boris Johnson used shame as an instrument of coercive control during the pandemic.
‘Shame’, the authors contend, ‘is commonly understood to be a personal experience that arises when one feels judged by another or others (whether they are present, imagined or internalized) to have transgressed or broken a social rule or norm.’
It appears to exert a particular force in Westminster politics where cries of “shame” or “shame on you” are regularly hurled across the floor of the House of Commons. An anthropologist might trace this to the public school upbringing of a significant proportion number of MPs – David Cameron recalls in his biography, ‘At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster’ – or a proletarian habituation through spectator sport.
The stigmatisation of apparently errant behaviour through shaming is not, however, unique to English (or British) culture.
Over the course of the lockdown in the U.K. the authors argue that shaming became ‘an important component of the ‘collective suffering, exacerbating and complicating other negative experiences and emotions.’ Those that stepped out of line were dubbed ‘covidiots’, while people questioning canonical scientific accounts could be dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorists’, belonging to the ‘tin-foil hat brigade’.
Arguably, a drawback of the work is a tendency to assign primary responsibility to the bumbling and often insidious response of the British government, as opposed to a wider international consensus around COVID-19 within which that government’s face-saving policies emerged.
The authors also seem reluctant to criticize a medical profession, which, they argue, were subjected to widespread shaming. Surely governments lionised ‘front line’ doctors, albeit for their own ends?
Moreover, some doctors even participated in the shaming effort, agitating for stringent measures that often were not based on cost-benefit analyses, while demonising ‘granny-killing’ objectors.
The book contains important insights into the lives of ordinary people, many of whom suffered in silence as a result of a British government strategy that often relied on ‘Second World War kitsch.’
Gabor Maté describes neuromarketing as ‘a strategic invasion of human consciousness.’[i] The extent of the role of social media companies in generating fear and curbing dissent is only now being revealed. The authors draw attention to its enabling role:
Pandemic shaming was enabled by the rapid formation and spread of virtual groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, created by physical neighbours to stay in touch and help each other out during lockdown.
They recall that, ‘[a]lthough often started with the noblest of intentions, solidarity and shaming frequently inhabited the same virtual spaces.’
‘At times,’ they observe, ‘the groups became mediums for ‘curtain twitching’, or the unspoken, unofficial surveillance or monitoring of one’s neighbours.’
Thus, ‘So-called pandemic ‘transgressions’ … were documented by ordinary citizens on these platforms and elsewhere, presumably looking out for themselves and other concerned members of their community.’
It should also be noted that social media companies platformed so-called fact checkers that were responsible for disseminating misinformation that cast opposition to a dominant narrative as simultaneously absurd and sinister. A ‘Strawman Conspiracy Theorist’ was used to stifle reasonable scientific debate.
When historians get around to providing an account of the pandemic response – that increasingly seems like a bad dream – the cartoon villains of Johnson and Trump will surely figure prominently.
Thus, the authors observe that when the term covidiot began trending on social media in early March, ‘there seemed to be only one covidiot for Anglophone Twitter, and that was Trump.’
They say this ‘gave the earliest iterations of the term a political valency: it offered an insult that the otherwise powerless might use as a means to humiliate a powerful individual.’
They argue:
[this] relied upon a historical tendency to portray Trump as morally and intellectually deficient throughout his candidacy for, and eventual elevation to, the US presidency. Seen in this light, the neologism owed its first success to the ease with which it fitted into an existing paradigm, as a novel shorthand for describing an existing situation.
Whatever came out of Trump’s mouth was consigned to covidiocy, even if he, occasionally, made sensible suggestions such as that the cure should not be worse than the disease. Profound antipathy towards Trump seems to have been exploited by lockdown evangelists, which caused profound damage, especially in developing countries such as India.
The book provides harrowing accounts of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of what became a culture war. The authors point to poignant accounts of the effect on society from the Mass Observation project:
I went out on Tuesday, with my son, to buy stamps. I sensed a slight hostility. People who would usually smile and let you through a door now avoid eye contact and stay their distance. The woman working in the Post Office was expressing her anger at people who had congregated on the beach the previous day. She hadn’t seen it herself, she said; but it was on Facebook (it must be true!) She said they were idiotic. It differed from her usual affable small-talk and it made me un-easy. I said we had been ourselves on Sunday and there was no-one around.
In Ireland we witnessed similar shaming tactics. Thus, in the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, a column from Dr Padraig Moranfrom November, 2020, arrived with the by-line: ‘Mindless rule-flouting behaviour is the real problem in the pandemic.’ Another article by Kathy Sheridan from 2020 referred to ‘maskless ignoramuses with Trumpian belief systems.’
Unsurprisingly, we have seen no retractions or reassessments on the subject of those “maskless ignoramuses”, despite a Cochrane review stating that the ‘pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.’
The shaming reached a crescendo in Ireland with vaccine passes and the scapegoating of an unvaccinated minority by politicians and prominent journalists in late 2021.
Gabor Maté provides a fitting description of the political class that exploited the virus for their own ends:
The system works with cyclic elegance: a culture founded on mistaken beliefs regarding who and what we are creates conditions that frustrate basic needs, breeding a populace in pain, disconnected from itself, others and meaning. A select few – especially those with the sort of coping mechanisms that prime the to deny reality, block out empathy, fear and vulnerability, mute their own sense of right and wrong, and abjure looking at themselves too closely – will be elevated to power.[ii]
Sadly, many among the medical profession were fully on board with this effort, disregarding the traumas caused by lockdowns, which seems to be contributing to the excess deaths we are witnessing in the wake of the pandemic. The fact that Sweden has experienced the lowest level of excess death in Europe over the period is widely ignored by those that condemned that country as a pariah state.
This is perhaps unsurprisingly given Gabor Maté’s observation that, ‘[a]t present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession’[iii]
Given so much of what we saw during the pandemic in the U.K. and beyond was guided by the medical profession it seems, as Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry put it ‘a complete revolution in medicine is exactly what is required.’[iv]
[iv] Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry, The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research, Wakefield Press, South Australia, 2020, p.198.
Feature Image: Village stocks in Bramhall, England, c. 1900.
Irish Times health correspondent Paul Cullens reported on February 13, 2023 that a disturbing 1,300 patients had ‘died over the winter as a result of delays in hospital admission from emergency departments, according to an analysis of Health Service Executive data.’
Importantly, Cullen acknowledges that COVID-19 itself ‘can only explain a fraction of the additional number of people dying.’
Given this is a global issue, attributing additional mortality primarily to the parlous state of emergency medicine in Ireland is a difficult argument to sustain. It could be a contributory factor, but conditions in 2022 were no different to the preceding years. For example, prior to the onset of the pandemic, in January, 2020 Cullen reported that ‘[t]he first week of the new year has been the worst ever for hospital overcrowding, according to figures from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.’
The first of Cullen’s recent articles, in particular, appears to have been written in response to high mortality being ‘attributed by some online to Covid vaccines.’ He summarises his arguments to the effect that ‘[t]his limited data does not appear to support claims of a vaccine-related rise in deaths in this age cohort.’
He then reveals,
While the vast majority of medical specialists we asked in recent months about claims of vaccine-induced harm say they have no cause of concern, it is fair to say a small number of doctors do, though for now they are reluctant to speak publicly.
This reluctance among members of the Irish medical profession “to speak publicly” about adverse reactions to the vaccines should be setting off alarm bells, but what is really striking about the current coverage of elevated mortality is the detached, clinical tone.
This contrasts starkly with the emotive way in which death, and illness, attributed to COVID-19 was reported during the period of the emergency powers (March 2020 – January 2022).
Stalin (in)famously said the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic. In Ireland during that period a single death from COVID-19 was treated as a tragedy, whereas today thousands of additional deaths only seem to be eliciting comment when vaccines are implicated.
Over the course of the pandemic the mean age of death from COVID-19 (as of 09/08/2021) in Ireland was eighty years or older, just two years younger than the average age of death. Four in five deaths from COVID-19 had at least three medical conditions. Revealingly, CSO mortality figures through the years 2018-2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) show little difference between the first year of the pandemic and preceding years.
There remain also serious question marks over how deaths are attributed to COVID-19. 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 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.’
Even allowing for a high mortality from COVID-19 in the early part of 2021, the death toll of 33,055 for that year – after vaccines had arrived – is striking. The full set of figures for 2022 are not yet available, but the CSO say that in Quarter 2 (Q2) of 2022 there were 2,626 more deaths (39.2%) when compared with the same period in 2021. Assuming that pattern is evident throughout 2022 and beyond then perhaps we should be describing this is as a calamity.
This article, however, proposes another determining cause, which is that heightened stress levels generated by lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to instil fear of contracting COVID-19, and actively promoted by emanations of the state and mainstream media, are the primary cause of excess deaths in Ireland and beyond.
Frank Armstrong reviews a new book on the Irish government's response Covid-19 and wonders whether it will be said once again: “We didn’t know, no one told us”https://t.co/vikPQsuFMa@broadsheet_ie@danieleidiniph1
Even after case numbers and deaths had plummeted by early summer 2020, legacy Irish media remained fixated on COVID-19. Writing for the Irish Times on May 23 clinical psychologist and authorMaureen Gaffney reckoned that ‘Covid-19 has scored a direct hit on our most basic psychological drives.’ She seemed oblivious to how statements such as her own that ‘the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic may have changed life more permanently’ might be further stressing out her readers.
Yet the first wave of COVID-19 afflicted few Irish people directly. An “omni-shambolic” testing infrastructure meant it was impossible for most people to determine whether symptoms synonymous with the common cold were COVID-19 or not. Despite early evidence of the unreliability of PCR testing, almost seven hundred million euro would be spent in Ireland on testing over the course of the pandemic.
However, so-called ‘confirmed’ cases (via PCR) appear to have served a purpose beyond diagnostics. Speaking on RTÉ in November, 2021, Dr Deirdre Robertson of the ESRI’s Behavioural Research Unit said one ‘of the biggest predictors’ of social activity has been the level of worry over the virus: ‘As cases have gone up, worry has gone up and that has changed behaviour.’
The authorities seem to have identified a correlation between case numbers and “worry over the virus” which influenced “behaviours”. By maintaining case numbers at a sufficient level through mass testing, worries could thus be maintained.
This perhaps explains NPHET’s almost comical resistance to antigen testing. The availability of these cheap, over-the-counter kits would eventually allow people to self-diagnose, but the results could not be used to induce fear.
It might also be noted that after leaving his post of Chief Medical Officer, Tony Holohan took up a role with Enfer, one of the primary testing provider to the state, which earned €122.4 million in 2020.
Irish people were subjected to unprecedented social atomisation during a first lockdown that extended into the summer of 2020 – beyond most other European countries. Public figures such as then Minister for Health Simon Harris sent out subtly misleading messages, cultivating the idea that the virus was far more deadly than it was in reality.
Our world is now full of statistics and numbers. I wanted to share an important one with you – our latest figures show 19,470 people have recovered from #COVIDー19. That is 84.3% of those who have contracted this virus.
Later in 2020, Fianna Fail TD Cathal Crowe referred to ‘a fatality rate at the moment in this country of 6.2% of those who contract Covid.’
However, research by Professor John Ioannidas reveals a far lower pre-vaccination infection fatality rate, especially among non-elderly populations, than previously assumed. This is as low as 0.03% for under sixties. Notwithstanding this easily accessible information, the Irish public were reminded ad nauseum of the ‘deadly’ coronavirus by mainstream media.
This generated a distinctively modern Irish form of hysteria – often vented on social media platforms – which found fullest expression in the enraged response to Golfgate at the end of August, 2020.
In hindsight the breaches by politicians were relatively mild. It was the hypocrisy that stung, as people recalled being denied a last visit to a loved one on their death bed. Suppressing a natural human inclination to socialise was putting people in a semi-permanent state of repressed anger.
A nation of obsessive smart phone users was confronted by an unprecedented onslaught of information tailored to stress them out. The only ‘sensible’ opposition to the lockdown policy presented by the mainstream media came in the form of a delusional ZeroCovid movement that promised an end to lockowns by locking down more strictly.
From the outset, Irish journalists and other public figures adopted a best-in-class superiority, contrasting the chaos in Britain under Boris with the virtuous restraint of Irish people. After early prevarication, clean-cut (caretaker) Taoiseach Leo Varadkar struck the right note of gravity as he heroically re-registered as a doctor, having warned of a death toll of 85,000 in a worst-case scenario. Headline writers were uninterested in the best-case scenario.
Mainstream Irish media hardly raised a murmur at an unconstitutional power grab by NPHET. The millions of euros poured by the government into advertising seems to have had a chilling effect, while a pliant national broadcaster was quietly bailed out by the government.
Anyone calling for moderation was subjected to ridicule or attack; guilt by association with Qanon followers calling it a hoax, and who immediately mounted a challenge in the courts to the unprecedented restraints on liberty. Thereafter, anyone calling for moderation was branded far-right.
Independent TD Michael McNamara bravely articulated a sceptical middle ground after chairing the Oireachtas Special Committee on the Covid Response, but to little avail. Despite their unreliability, opinion polls were often taken to represent the will of the people.
A doctor in a Dublin nursing home describes the cruel impact of a chaotic response to Covid-19 https://t.co/lQGN32LwNv
While the virus had little direct effect on Europe’s youngest population, Ireland did witness the second highest proportion of care home deaths in the world during the first wave. To some extent this was a product of an understandable failure to recognise that the virus seems to have been circulating for over a year. Thus, CMO Tony Holohan ordered private care homes to re-open to visitors in early March, 2020.
Less forgivably, testing was withdrawn at the height of the surge, and many older people were removed from hospitals, to create space for an expected onslaught of younger people that never arrived.
The scale of care home deaths revealed longstanding neglect of older people in those setting. A Pandemic Doctor wrote despairingly:
The airwaves and print media are bursting with opinion, analysis and occasional outrage as the crisis unfolds and consumes the institutionalised elderly. The great and the good understand and discuss, sounding wise and all-knowing. But week after week we are alone. Where is the calvary? Where are the boots on the ground? Who is going to help?
Difficulties were exacerbated by staff shortages caused by outbreaks among workers living in crowded accommodation. One resident of a county Meath nursing home – fittingly called Kilbrew – died two weeks after being admitted to hospital with an infestation of maggots in a facial wound.
Never before in the history of Irish media and politics had there been such unrelenting emphasis on a particular disease, generating what Maureen Gaffney described as ‘our version of the spirit of the Blitz.’ But it was fear rather than resilience that were to the fore.
In June, 2020 RTÉ Investigates ran a two-part documentary called Inside Ireland’s Covid Battle. This stretched the war time metaphor to its limit, bringing the spectre of patients gasping for breath into living rooms around the country, to devastating effect.
You could cut through the paranoia on streets festooned with two-metre markers and yellow-coloured public health notices. Pedestrians would take refuge on to the road to avoid a close shave with another living human being. Joggers became hate figures.
Later in the summer of 2020, the Irish Times launched an emotive Lives Lost Series. It reads: ‘Those who have died in Ireland and among the diaspora led full and cherished lives’; the series was ‘designed to tell the stories behind the numbers.’
These included Richard Brady, an ‘Avid Dubs fan who loved his family dearly’; Ann Hyland, who ‘wrote a children’s book, climbed the Great Wall of China, rode a camel in Morocco, jet-skied in Barbados’; and Vincent Fahy who ‘began his career with ESB ‘putting the light’ into rural areas.
These are touching tributes to ordinary people among a generation that built Ireland as we know it, but these lives were only cherished after their deaths. It begs the question: why are additional people now dying being treated as numbers? Where are the TV cameras to witness them gasping for breath?
The name chosen for the series ‘Lives Lost’ is also instructive. Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles is a well-know book containing short biographies of the victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles. It was adapted into a film by the same name in 2019.
The linkage between Lives Lost and Lost Lives is surely deliberate. It conveys the impression that any death from COVID-19 was not really by natural causes, but caused by the terrifying virus.
Over the course of the summer of 2020, the Irish public also became acquainted – via social media – with the phenomenon of Long Covid, or ‘long haulers’, through social media. This too seems to have been used to sustain worry, once many had discovered the low infection fatality rate for COVID-19. Thereafter, mainstream media, including the Irish Times and RTÉ, ran a series of articles emphasising the struggles of previously healthy individuals suffering from Long Covid.
It is notable that no hue and cry was raised by the mainstream media when the Mater Hospital lost its fight to maintain a Long Covid clinic in late 2022.
https://vimeo.com/426871719
‘We Need a Reckoning’
Considering the calamitous excess deaths we are now witnessing, Irish society ought to be reflecting on the efficacy, and morality, of adopting the lockdown-to-vaccination policy promoted by the WHO. What Maureen Gaffney referred to as ‘Our version of the spirit of the Blitz’ may come to be regarded as the most damaging public health intervention in history – the military equivalent of turning guns on ourselves.
In a powerful video message called ‘We Need a Reckoning’, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy describes the infliction of a two month lockdown on her country as a Crime Against Humanity causing untold suffering to millions of impoverished workers in particular. Ireland needs a reckoning too.
In his article on excess deaths, Paul Cullen at least acknowledges that ‘many non-Covid deaths arose from the pandemic and its impact on our wider physical and mental health.’
We are not alone. According to Eurostat in September, 2022:
Excess mortality in the EU climbed to +16% in July 2022 from +7% in both June and May. This was the highest value on record so far in 2022, amounting to around 53 000 additional deaths in July this year compared with the monthly averages for 2016-2019.
Throughout 2022, EuroMOMO pooled estimates of all-cause mortality for the participating European countries showed elevated excess mortality. Most shockingly there has been a clear uptick in deaths among young people, especially children under the age of fourteen.
Since April 2022, according to the economist Dan O’Brien, Ireland’s excess deaths have been well above the average – 15% higher than the average pre-pandemic level (circa 2,500 people over 7 months).
Most of Europe continued to record significant excess death rates up to November 2022, according to today's monthly data. Since April, Ireland's excess deaths have been well above the average, with 15% more deaths than the pre-pandemic average (circa 2,500 people over 7 months). pic.twitter.com/fodjsKQM5i
That this unusual pattern of mortality should be occurring in the wake of a respiratory pandemic is particularly alarming, given these generate excess deaths. A wave of illness afflicting almost everybody at least once ought to have accelerated the deaths of a substantial proportion of those with underlying illnesses between 2020 (or earlier) and 2021, leaving behind a healthier population overall.
Last October, ex-Taoiseach Micheal Martin told a Fianna Fáil meeting that medical experts had warned him of ‘dramatically increasing cancers because of delayed diagnoses’ linked to the impact of COVID-19 on the health service. But we know from the UK that people missed appointments out of fear of contracting the virus, not because of insufficient capacity. Moreover, there is no evidence of an increase in mortality from cancer between 2019, 2020 and 2021.
One indicator that the stress of lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions bear primary responsibility comes from the case of Sweden, where health authorities famously took a softer approach, declining to lockdown in March, 2020. Notably, vaccination rates are above average compared to the rest of Europe.
Among a list of countries studied by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Scandinavian nation ranked lowest for overall cumulative excess deaths from 2020-22 at 6.8 per cent, compared to Australia (18 per cent), the UK (24.5 per cent) and the US (54.1 per cent). In Ireland and elsewhere, we may be witnessing the delayed impact of stress generated by repressive policies and fear messaging.
In his recent book, the Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022), Gabor Maté cites illuminating research into the biopsychosocial determinants of many illnesses, including cancer, auto-immune conditions and heart disease. ‘Stress’, he says, ‘plays its incendiary role: for example through the release of inflammatory proteins into the circulation’. This inflammation is ‘a fertilizer for the development of disease.(p.94)’
He also alerts readers to what Dr Lydia Ternoshock has described as a type C[ancer] personality. She interviewed 150 patients with melanoma and found them to be ‘excessively nice, pleasant to a fault, uncomplaining and unassertive.(p.99)’
Maté argues that ‘repression disarms one’s ability to protect oneself from stress’, explaining:
If you go through life being stressed while not knowing you are stressed, there is little you can do to protect yourself from the long-term physiological consequences.(p.100)
It is also possible that near-constant stress generated by a prevailing belief that COVID-19 was going to kill or do serious harm to you played a part in the prevalence of ‘Long Covid’.
Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School argued for a more critical appraisal of Long Covid in 2021. 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, 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 who 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, Gaffney argues that for many Long Covid is a disease with a strong psychological component, 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.
During COVID-19, a trusting Irish public were habituated to low intensity stress driven by constant reminders of the presence of “the virus” across media and in their day-to-day lives. Any form of rebellion against this state of affairs made one a social pariah, leading most to repress this impulse. This could have provided an ideal “fertilizer for the development of disease.”
It now appears that both lockdowns and much vaunted vaccines had only marginal effects on preventing mortality from COVID-19. It is unsurprising, therefore, that mainstream media in Ireland is giving scant attention to the collateral damage of policies that were, with few exceptions, uncritically accepted over the course of the pandemic.
In 1841 the population of county Leitrim stood at 155,297. By 1901, however, it had fallen to 69,343, dropping further to 41,209 by 1951, before reaching a nadir of just 25,057 in 1996. The 2022 census records a population of 35,087 – a significant increase, but still a staggering 77% reduction on the 1841 figure.
No other Irish county has experienced such a dramatic decrease over that period; although all witnessed varying levels of decline apart from two Northern counties, Dublin (which experienced a 289% increase) and its adjoining counties. The Western seaboard’s demographic pattern merits comparison with the impact of European colonisation on the native populations of the Americas.
The presence of both abandoned stone cottages and tumbledown bungalows bear witness to this long-running decline; these are nestled in a bewitching but ecologically scarred landscape of craggy mountains, gushing falls and still pristine lakes. Lough Allen, the source of the majestic Shannon, divides a mountainous north from the flatter lands of the south. A short stretch of coastline positions the county on the Wild Atlantic Way.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to CSO datathe vacancy rate for Leitrim in 2022 was 15.5%, down from 19.9% in 2016. Indeed, Leitrim has the highest rate of vacancy of any county in Ireland, followed closely by its neighbours Roscommon and Mayo. In contrast 5.5% of Dublin properties were vacant – still an unsatisfactorily proportion given there are currently (as of February 10, 2023) just under six hundred properties available rent for all of Dublin city and county listed on daft.ie.
There are various explanations for the stark population decline along the western seaboard since the Great Famine (1845-51), most obviously the Famine itself, but also a shift in agricultural priorities from tillage to pasture after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847, which brought cheaper grain to the British market.
As John Mitchel wrote sarcastically for The Nation in 1847:
You may be surprised to hear of a country having, at one and the same time, a “surplus produce” and a “surplus population” – too much food for its people, and too many people for its food. Your surprise arises from ignorance of the great principles of political economy. All produce that can be spared for export is, in the technical language of that science, “surplus;” and all people who cannot get profitable employment are also “surplus.”
Pastoral agriculture depends on low labour inputs for profitability, meaning few children from any family could stay on the land. After independence, it became state policy to encourage beef and dairy exports. Since then, European subsidies have calcified an agricultural system that produces (as of 2020) just 61,800 tonnes of fruit and vegetablesfor the domestic market, compared to imports of 890,000 tonnes.
It is also notable that two railway lines serving Leitrim were dissolved in the 1950s: the Cavan and Leitrim Railway running between Dromod and Belturbet with a branch from Ballinamore to Arigna; and the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway, which ran between Enniskillen and Collooney near Sligo, taking in the north of the county, including Manorhamilton.
The Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant provides for a sum of up to €50,000 to refurbish a vacant property. It appears tailor-made for a significant proportion of the housing stock of Leitrim. As of February 7, 2023 there are 33 properties for sale under €100,000 in the county out of 197 according to the website daft.ie. Many appear suitable candidates for the Grant.
In line with national trends, property prices have been rising steadily in Leitrim, albeit from a low base. Research on daft.ie indicates a 13.8% increase in the average price of property in the county over the course of 2022, the second steepest increase for any county apart from Donegal. Such a figure could be skewed by a few expensive purchases, but is a good indicator nonetheless.
The prospect of purchasers receiving a Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant might lead vendors to apply a premium. Anyone availing of the Grant, meanwhile, must retain the property as a principal primary residence, and be a first-time buyer or qualify for the fresh start scheme.
After receiving the Grant, if you decide to sell up or rent the property out within ten years of a successful application local authorities will claw back the Grant. If it is less than ten years, you must repay it in full; over five years, but less than ten, you have to repay 75%.
Anyone availing of the Grant would want to be sure of their desire to live in a particular area, and of this fitting with their employment prospects. Moreover, the sum involved would hardly put a roof on many of the dilapidated properties dotted around the Irish countryside, given the current cost of building materials.
The Grant does not apply where an individual is living in the house after the purchase. One contributor to boards.ie, who claimed to be sleeping on a mattress in a house in need of significant refurbishment, said he was denied the Grant on this ground alone, which seems unfair.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the onerous terms and conditions, there has been little uptake. Last year, 765 applications were made for the Grant. 105 of these were approved while another 102 were rejected. The remaining 558 are still in progress.
One can understand a need for due diligence before pay outs are made. However, assuming the Department is insufficiently staffed to carry out numerous inspections, it is surprising to hear ads on the radio promoting the Grant. Perhaps this is simply to create the impression that a beleaguered Government is taking action on the hot topic of vacancy.
On January 30 2023, Minister Darragh O’Brien launched the Vacant Homes Action Plan 2023 – 2026. In its preamble the Minister sensibly stated that the ‘most efficient home to deliver is the one which already exists’.
One of its key objectives is to support the regeneration, repopulation and development of rural towns and villages to contribute to local and national economic recovery, and to enable people to live and work in a high quality environment.
There is, however, scant evidence that Government measures are encouraging people to settle in rural Ireland, in contrast to insatiable demand for Dublin property, where almost thirty percent of the population lives. In contrast, less than 15% of the UK population inhabits London, which is generally considered disproportionate.
The rather insipid planned actions include further budgeting for the Better Energy Homes Scheme; reference to the previously established Rural Regeneration and Development Fund; plans to harness European Regional Development Funding; and perhaps significantly a new programme for the Compulsory Purchase of vacant properties ‘for resale on the open market.’
Use of CPOs is the most obvious means of addressing vacancy, as well as bringing land into use for housing and other development projects. Historically, Irish Governments have evinced a reluctance to use CPOs to generate land for housing, notably the failure to act on the recommendations of the Kenny Report (1973) recommending that local authorities should be empowered to acquire undeveloped lands at existing use value plus 25% by adopting Designated Area Schemes.
Historically, the Courts have also generally weighed a constitutional right to property over what is, arguably, a concurrent constitutional right – flowing from a generalised Right to Life – for citizens to secure reasonable accommodation. Father Peter McVerry has pointed to a paradox whereby a constitutional right to property is ‘being used to prevent Irish people getting their own home.’
The Vacant Homes Action Plan is thin on ambition, merely stating that with ‘regard to compulsory purchases/acquisitions is being reviewed with a view to streamlining and consolidating the CPO process. This will arrive alongside a review of the Planning Act and the Law Reform Commission’s examination of the use of CPOs which is ongoing.’
Although the Plan states:
The Department in partnership with the Housing Agency will examine each local authority’s Derelict Sites Register with a view to identifying potential properties that could be brought back into use through compulsory acquisition. Local authorities will be requested to review these properties in the first instance with a view to engaging with owners.
And that
Under Action 19.9 of Housing for All, it was agreed that all Government Departments would examine their existing portfolio of properties and, subject to any obligations under the Public Spending Code, the Land Development Agency Act 2021 or the State Property Act 1954, would place them on the market if they were not required and may be suitable for residential housing.
Existing Schemes
The Plan also refers to the Ready to Build Scheme, which was launched in September, 2022:
Under the Scheme, local authorities will make serviced sites available in towns and villages at a discount on the market value, to individual purchasers for the building of their home which will be their principal private residence. It is intended that the local authority will develop existing sites in their control or purchase sites.
And to The Living City Initiative, a scheme of property tax incentives first enacted in the Finance Act 2013 and commenced on 5 May 2015 aimed at the regeneration of older heritage buildings in the historic inner cities of Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick and Waterford.
The Plan acknowledges that there been a low take-up of this initiative, but points to a number of measures included in the Finance Act, 2022 aimed at accelerating uptake.
The Vacant Homes Action Plan also says that in Budget 2023, ‘the introduction of a Vacant Homes Tax was announced. Legislation providing for the introduction of the new tax is included in the Finance Act 2022.’
It estimates that 57,206 (3.2%) of all Irish properties were indicated by their owners as being vacant. A property is considered vacant for the purposes of a forthcoming tax if it is in use as a dwelling for less than 30 days in a 12-month chargeable period. Owners of vacant properties are to be charged at a rate equal to three times the property’s base Local Property Tax liability for 2023, which will apply in addition to a property’s LPT charge.
This, however, will only apply in relation to vacant properties ‘that are habitable, and therefore suitable for occupation as a dwelling.’
The Plan also provides for important exemptions to ensure, as it puts it, ‘property owners are not unfairly charged for temporary vacancy arising from genuine reasons.’ These include recently sold properties, or those currently listed for sale or rent.
It would seem that simply by putting up a property on the market for sale or rent – at whatever price – the penalty may be avoided. We seem to be in the realm of performative politics again, rather than substantive action.
There appear to be two broad categories of vacancy in Ireland. An awareness of this distinction might inform policy and the law. The existence of designated rent pressure zones already distinguishes between regions of the country.
We may observe the first category occurring in mainly urban areas – rent pressure zones – especially Dublin and its hinterland where housing is in short supply. Here, a dominant player, or players, could collude by withdrawing accommodation from the market in order to maintain, or generate an increase in, rental income. This is especially insidious and severe penalties should be available to stamp out any suspicion of any such monopolistic practices.
A second category of vacancy arises in a rural county such as Leitrim which has experienced historic de-population, leading to the abandonment of many houses. Draconian penalties serve little purpose here. Instead, there should be greater incentives for renovation and refurbishment. Here at least, the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant should not be restricted to principal primary residences.
In the case of much of county Leitrim, even for people to live for a part of the year there would be a boon for retail and hospitality businesses, and could restore life to sleepy villages that have experienced emigration over many generations. For the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant to inhibit sales for a period of ten years seems prohibitively restrictive, and would likely deter many from availing of it.
It is in the public interest for the stock of quality housing to rise through the availability of such grants. A three year restriction seems sufficient.
A second, ‘holiday’, home would offer an opportunity for residents of built-up urban areas to undertake small scale agriculture on a part-time basis in summer retreats, as one still sees in Central and Eastern European countries where an apartment in the city is often complimented with a rural residence that includes a market garden. The availability of alternative garden space for the summer months might lead “empty-nesters” and retirees to downsize from houses into apartments.
A sparsely populated country like Ireland ought to have available a stock of affordable housing in low density rural locations for second homes, such as is the case in Scandinavian countries.
Game Changer?
Policy makers need to look beyond housing itself to encourage re-population of rural Ireland, while confronting car dependency. We require a radical improvement in public transport. Extending quiet ways on treacherous roads would also allow for safer cycling. E-bikes could be a game changer for rural Ireland, permitting extended journeys for older less physically fit people, while expending far less energy than even electric cars. Buses and trains need to offer free and secure carriage for bicycles.
Hopefully the Department of Housing is working in conjunction with the Department of Transport, following Eamon Ryan’s recent proposal for rail lines to be restored in the West, to identify areas suitable for development in rural Ireland.
Reversing the decline in Ireland’s rural population, especially along the western seaboard, requires joined-up thinking and innovative approaches. Cheap, modular housing might be considered for new housing arrangements that depart from the conventional idea of the family home in a changing society.
Co-operative agricultural enterprises, inspired by the tradition of the Clachan, offer the prospect of sociability and affordability, while potentially reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing reliance on imported foodstuffs.
One way to address a seemingly intractable housing crisis concentrated in the city of Dublin is surely to make other parts of the country more attractive to live in, especially in an era of remote working.
There have been encouraging trends over recent decades along the Western seaboard, with renewed appreciation of resilient traditions and greater opportunities for adventure sports – but there is a hidden Ireland, generally at a remove from the coastline, that tends not to see benefits from tourism.
As we approach the bicentenary of the Great Famine novel approaches to life in Ireland ought to enter the mainstream. Government should act decisively and imaginatively to encourage more people to live in counties such as Leitrim.
Latour argues the intervening period, associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ‘was initially marked by what is called “deregulation”, alongside ‘the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities.’
This coincided, he says, with another phenomenon less often stressed: ‘the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change’. He defines “climate change” in broad terms as ‘the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives,’ rather than simply the climatic consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, as the contemporary environmental challenge is commonly reduced to.
This broader definition of “climate change” therefore encompasses ecological constraints – the material conditions of our lives – which even the most vociferous denier cannot gainsay, as well as other readily ascertainable phenomena such as pollution and nature loss.
Latour continues, ‘It is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone.’
He contends: ‘they [“the elites”] decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally.’
Thus, ‘From the 1980s on the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others.’
He offers the stark conclusion that any observer of social media can attest to: ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.’
Dominant players in the fossil fuel industry were undoubtedly aware of climate change by the late 1970s, and developed communication strategies designed to confound the public. Through their risk analyses, leading investment banks – representing the real elites – would surely have been privy to such information that had been circulating since the 1960s.
Thus, investment portfolios were diversified, and bets hedged. It hardly mattered that technologies branded “clean and green” could still have devastating environmental impacts, or lead to new relationships of dependency in developing countries. In this re-alignment, companies create halo effects around products through greenwashing strategies. This explains the unprecedented attention to climate change we now see across mainstream media.
The belated embrace of environmentalism – once the preserve of hippies – by elites also distracts from the urgent need for structural adjustments.
Lacking “a common world”, where resources and opportunities are shared equitably within countries and internationally, populists may point to the hypocrisy of a system that permits “vertiginous” inequalities. Under private ownership, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables yields profits for the elites, but may impoverish many who are already living on the edge.
Since Latour’s book, much abides, but much has changed too. The apparent “symbol” of our collective madness, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 Presidential election, while other populist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have also exited stage right, for the time being at least. But inequalities only increased during the pandemic, when trust in science was undermined by profiteering.
The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, alongside simmering US-Chinese tensions over Taiwan, indicate the era of globalisation has come to an end. In this new edition of the Cold War, conservative, authoritarian leaders are pitted against Western governments dominated by elites that appear to be profiting from another crisis.
Environmentalists ought to recognise that we are facing a nuclear winter, worse even than the impact of climate change, if the Ukrainian-Russian conflict escalates, and support attempts to broker a negotiated settlement. Moving forward, a new global compact is urgently required to address environmental challenges and rampant inequality.
The environmental movement should develop a more nuanced understanding of the social and political forces ranged against meaningful reforms in the West. To develop, as Latour puts it a “common horizon” – and overcome collective madness – in the face of climate change and inequality, democratic governments must act to reverse the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s, and in particular assert control over a highly profitable renewable energy sector.
Feature Image: “Rebellion Day” on Blackfriars Bridge, 2018.
According to the recently deceased Kevin Higgins: ‘Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.’
Responding to his assessment by email (sadly, I never met Kevin in person despite publishing over twenty of his poems) I wondered whether the three archetypes he had identified could be located in the Romantic canon as the suppressed Percy Bysshe Shelley, the rather banal John Keats and the decorative Poet Laureate William Wordsworth.
He replied from his death bed on Tuesday, January 3rd:
I wouldn’t count Keats among the banal. I would more be thinking of the older academicised poet of the post WWII world, who is mostly locked into an Irish Times/Guardian/NY Times world view whereby the only permitted historical variables are their own divorces and their parents’ deaths. Keats wasn’t that. Though you have categorised Shelley and Wordsworth right in that regard.
Note to self: read more of John Keats.
Paul Muldoon
Kevin’s final poem for Cassandra Voices ‘Congratulations’ responded to what he regarded as ‘a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way’ by Paul Muldoon in the Irish Times. As he saw it, for establishment poets:
Life will be mostly festivals
of enforced grinning,
during which you’ll pass the hours
counting each others’ teeth.
I had no option but to vote for
that tax on women’s shoes
but greatly admired the fight you put up against it;
have kept all the press cuttings,
especially those that took care not to mention me.
Another barbed poem, which he confided was written in the voice of Michael D. Higgins (as he imagined it), ‘having known him for forty years’ was Memorial to Myself:
I was not bought and sold at the market stall
where you can get (third hand)
Fianna Fail senators cheaper
than Mayo flags two weeks after
an All Ireland defeat.
Kevin Higgins was a poet unusually animated by political events. Invariably, he took the side of the oppressed, whether desperate migrants, or Travellers on the fringe of Irish society.
His verse took aim at those poets who engaged with what he considered the commonplace and banal. The first poem he ever published with Cassandra Voices Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat offers a caricature of a contemporary Irish poet:
I only read novels
which interrogate the relationship
between gout and Islamist terrorism,
translated from the obligatory French;
and poets whose words make me sink
more comfortably into
my brown swivel chair.
Categories will include: least authentic
poetry collection, most intellectually empty
novel, most cowardly book review,
publisher who made the biggest
eeijt of themselves this year
And in ‘Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual’ he expressed deep concern about what he considered a homogeneity of thinking around a damaging consensus reigning ascendant in Irish universities:
We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
from which you can choose your opinions,
which we’d like you to massage
so they seem different at first
but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, he expressed indifference for ‘grunts of approval / from fully clothed minor male poets’ in ‘My Approach to Literary Networking‘.
Kevin unmercifully pilloried what he perceived as latent fascistic tendencies in Ireland directed against the forces of radicalism he identified with. As he put it in ‘The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann’:
All around the snot-nosed parishes of Ireland
small people of both genders, and neither,
are flapping open
copies of The Sunday O’Duffy
getting worried
about the continued existence
of the Citizen Army, Fenian Brotherhood,
Official IRA.
It’s fair to say Kevin Higgins despised advocates of neoliberal policy in Ireland. In ‘The Ballad of Lucy Kryton’ he described her fiscal policy as ‘dampness moving / down other people’s walls.’
Further afield, Kevin reserved particular scorn for realpolitik pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger, who as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State presided over a particular brutal phase of US foreign policy under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Kevin seemed to have little faith in karma catching up with Kissinger:
Someone dies of politically necessary starvation
but that someone is never Henry Kissinger
A bomb is dropped on someone whose name you’ll never have to pronounce
because it’s not Henry Kissinger
He also railed against ‘the adults in the room’ of this neoliberal era, depicting an anti-democratic slide in ‘After Recent Unfortunate Results’:
So when all’s said and counted,
people who shouldn’t matter
can go back to not mattering.
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
donated by a casino owner who knows people
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
because it was the only available metaphor for hair
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
against an old coat with holes in it.
Nevertheless, he viewed the phenomenon of Trump as symptomatic of a sick American society, rather than the causative agent necessarily – the ‘old coat’ – which he saw as embedded in power.
Such people agreed with each other that the barrel of waste
made the raging boil on the nation’s privates
way too obvious, and hoped by throwing
the old coat over it they could again
forget it was there.
Each witch hunt is a tribute act to the last.
There is always a committee of three.
The gravity in the room is such
they struggle to manoeuvre
the enormity of their serious
faces in the door.
our gathering will resemble
less a revolution
than a church group
on its way somewhere
to pray for a cure
for rheumatism,
or even better,
no cure;
Time and again he expressed a serious worry about the neoliberal hegemony in comedic terms. Thus in ‘Our Posh Liberal Friends‘ he wrote:
This Future has a face that one day
might raise the corporate tax rate
by zero point five percent,
and is a little too insistent
that poor people be allowed live,
give or take, as long as the rest of us.
And mocked a neoliberal tolerance of diversity that provided cover for any manner of outrage, as in ‘Liberals and Death’:
… you’re the first village
no-one’s ever heard of
successfully abolished
from thirty thousand feet
by a transgender person
pressing a button;
No doubt the period of the lockdowns was tough for someone in ill-health who had previously attempted to bring poetry to the people with live events and workshops. While he appears to have been generally supportive of lockdown measures, we do find worries expressed around the arrival of a techno-dystopia in ‘The Happy Song of Us’.
Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream.
Illegal for them to lick it.
Fine to bake granny
a gleaming fruit cake,
as long as you only email her
a high resolution photo of it.
Kevin Higgins was an uncompromising poet. His verse vented a deep disenchantment with the economic structures of our time. He fought against the spiraling inequality and outright cruelty he saw in the contemporary world, sparing no one he believed was collaborating with this system. Not even Michael D..
He inveighed against the well made poem that puts on a dicky bow, and ‘which walks to the top of the hill, / and has what it calls an epiphany.’
The well made poem believes
nuclear weapons are necessary
to keep poems like it safe
from all the rough language
gathered ungovernable at the border
forever threatening to invade it.
Above all perhaps, he scorned the hypocrisy of people who only speak out only when it is safe to do so, as in ‘Safe To Say’:
Sometime the century after next.
I’ll be against giving the children of Bethlehem
something from Lockheed Martin
to occupy themselves with for Christmas.
Like I was against rhino-whipping the blacks
into line in Port Elizabeth, Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg
after it stopped happening.
But, for now, see no alternative.
Thanks for your support Kevin! We’ll do our best to keep going.
Despite all the controversies in the run-up, and as with the last World Cup in Russia, most people are now looking beyond the politics, and enjoying the feast of football.
For many of those attending sporting fixtures, this is akin to performing a religious duty in a secular age. The rest of us generally slouch in front of TV sets and even squint into smartphones to satisfy compulsive appetites. In Ireland we have a particular grá for team sports as participants but mostly viewers, or even as virtual participants, with the advent of video games.
The rewards for sportsmen, in particular, are staggering, but many are left on the scrap heap at an early age, while others count the cost in later life with psychological and physical trauma.
"the World Cup itself is a bizarre and inexplicable thing. It temporarily requires even the most autocratic and despotic regimes to drop tools and play nice."https://t.co/ymOH6ZZPxB This report from the 2018 World Cup in Russia is worth revisiting!
The popularity of sports entertainment stretches far back into European history. The gathering of crowds for sporting occasions was a feature of Classical antiquity, when these spectacles were explicitly connected to religious worship. Held in honour of Zeus, the king of the gods, the Panhellenic Olympics of Ancient Greece ran from 776BC until 393AD, and attracted participants from across the Hellenic world.
Later, Romans were fanatically devoted to circus, which featured gladiatorial duals to the death. A note of caution was sounded, however, by the poet Juvenela c. AD100, who witheringly identified panem et circus (bread and circus) as the primary concern of the people:
iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses.
[… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.]
Sport remained an important feature of life in medieval Europe, where knights tested their valour and prowess in vainglorious jousts. Hunting was also popular among the aristocracy at the apex of the feudal pyramid. Pursuit of animals, referred to as ‘game’, was generally not motivated by their value as food: consumption conferred status beyond gastronomic pleasure.
Pre-modern sports bore a close resemblance to warfare, and, the conditioning of a participant overlapped to a large extent with a warrior’s training, as one sees in ancient epic, such as with the funeral games of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad. Tests of physical prowess, advantageous on the battlefield are evident, as well as skills such as archery and javelin, which are clearly a preparation for warfare itself.
The Funerals of Patrocle, oil on canvas. Jacques-Louis David, 1778.
Fight or Flight?
At a sporting event, an audience could experience the thrill of battle without risking dismemberment, although the qualities esteemed in the heroic athlete may have whetted a thirst for blood.
This may lead to an assumption that sport fosters a destructive, competitive instinct. George Orwell was of the view that: ‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will’. But denial of the amusement seems curmudgeonly. Sport can bring us together rather than tear us apart. Perhaps it depends on the underlying psychology of the crowd.
The nineteenth century incubated most of the sports that are now prevalent in our culture, including the GAA. It was in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began in earnest, however, that mass attendance of sporting events by a new working class originates, as stadiums accommodating tens of thousands of people sprang up in a newly urbanised society. Here we find the codification of now global sports such as Association Football, Cricket, Rugby (Union and League), tennis and field hockey all of which now have a global reach. Others, such as golf and motor racing emerging in more rarefied environments.
Interesting, it is in the anglo-sphere that alternative sports emerged to confront the British invasion; in the United States, basketball, American Football and baseball; in Ireland the GAA developed our distinctive sports; even Australia and Canada developed or adapted their own codes. This demonstrates the importance of sport as a source of identity in the English-speaking world where other cultural markers such as food seem to have been of less importance.
The popular sports in our time depart from Classical and medieval precedent – notwithstanding the revival of the Olympics in 1896 – in the skills demanded of the participants. Although most contemporary sports still demand serious athleticism, their skills sets would be of no particular use to a soldier, especially one engaged in modern, technological warfare; although the skills of the gamer might prove very useful indeed.
Nonetheless, modern sports are still animated by martial fervour, accessing, and perhaps controlling, that primal instinct to compete and, for men especially, to discuss the competition. Orwell opines that: ‘At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare’, but at that time most men, unlike today, had trained to be soldiers.
Harry Hampton scores one of his two goals in the 1905 FA Cup Final, when Aston Villa defeated Newcastle United.
Judgment
The demonic ‘Judge’ Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s no-holds-barred novel Blood Meridan (1985) describes war as ‘the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence’.
He argues that:
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
The ‘Judge’ is right insofar as the higher the stakes the more gripping a sporting fixture becomes for an audience that puts aside its daily trials to vent their passions.
The worth of the participant is defined by their success or failure at crucial moments. But ‘the Judge’ is mistaken to assume that defeat is always a humiliation, as any crowd may honour a team or individual who loses with good grace, and sport is not only about winning; ‘greatness’ is also measured by how a loser conducts himself in defeat. Thus Harry Kane is above criticism despite missing a (second) penalty, while the Argentinian team are roundly condemned for rubbing defeat in their opponents’ faces.
It is striking that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung regarded games as being of the utmost importance for the wellbeing of societies. He said that ‘civilisations at their most complete moments … always brought out in man his instinct to play and made it more inventive’. Sport, he proffered, connects us to our ‘instinctive selves’.
Sporting success can really raise the morale of a nation, such as the Irish after World Cup Italia 1990. The connection to a team or individual should not be dismissed lightly. Even in defeat, fans can summon a spirit of togetherness that is not necessarily oppositional.
The popularity of sports may be connected to the decline of religious worship, but the religious origins of sport have not faded entirely – fans often pay homage to virtues of self-sacrifice and togetherness associated with spiritual traditions.
Moreover, with lives increasingly sedentary and indoor, sport returns us to the idea of a challenge that melds innate athleticism and skill. This is both a natural gift, and the product of training.
The audience also enjoys the mental side of the game, considering how a team or individual will triumph or fail in advance of a contest, and assessing why a particular outcome has occurred in the aftermath. It can be the springboard for discussion between complete strangers, generally leading to camaraderie rather than conflict.
Sport has also become one of the last redoubts for mythology at a time when this generally operates on the margins, or in childhood fantasies. Commentators are given licence to rhapsodise about the divine characteristics of participants. We bow before sporting gods, satisfying a latent desire for non-rational explanations, and a taste for supernatural interference, deus ex machina: ‘the hand of God.’
Sports journalism, unencumbered by constraints imposed on ‘serious’ journalists, vents superstitions and often casually averts to curses; ‘legends’ abound in sporting parlance.
Why did Messi not get a yellow card? Listen people, let's settle this once and for all. When a football God like Maradona or Messi handles the ball, it is not his hand at work but the "Hand of God". This is football theology 101. pic.twitter.com/GRvXrhIRwc
All this serves to enhance the appeal of ‘titanic’ battles, but sadly we are, increasingly, lured by the theatre away from examination of the vexed political questions of our time.
The assessment of Bill Shankly the former manager of Liverpool FC is worth revisiting: ‘some people say that football is a matter of life and death. I assure you it’s much more serious than that’.
It was therefore fitting then that when Jose Mourinho arrived in British football as manager of Chelsea FC in 2004 he chose to present himself as the ‘Special One’. For a time he carried all before him, with a little help from Russian billionaire Roman Abromovich.
Sporting occasions also offer a Dionysian alternative to lives that are increasingly constrained by social conventions. In what other arena of life can a grown adult scream and shout with unrestrained fervour, orr even streak naked across a pitch?
Sport imports a communal sense of belonging, evident in the crowd at a huge stadium and in the often transnational ‘imagined community’ of fans of a particular franchise. Support for national teams affirm a sense of belonging to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.
The medium is the message. First television, and now increasingly the Internet, allows individuals, living thousands of mile away to support teams, often comprised of players from around the world.
Mythological themes are played out in real time. The truly great teams, it is said, are those that learn from defeat, just as the heroes of epic returns from the trial of Hades the wiser. We also encounter the tragedy of the flawed hero whose indiscretions are captured by the ravenous paparazzi, and attributed to the wider failings of youth.
English football fans at the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Yet we can have too much of a good thing. Attention to sports has reached pathological intensity. Slick marketing has moved an instinctive pleasure into a compulsive and easily-satisfied desire, activating demand in a manner that is almost pornographic.
In particular, the multi-billion euro football industry uses every available opportunity to lure child and adult alike into compulsive purchasing of television channels and merchandise that is gaudily flaunted. More troublingly still is the expansion of online gambling.
Young men are now paid unconscionable fortunes for playing games, which many would happily participate in for far less, or no financial reward at all. Televised sport used to inspire kids to imitate their heroes, now with gaming technology they don’t have to leave their couches, and the obesity pandemic carries all before it.
Rupert Murdoch recognised that sports would act as a ‘battering ram’ for his pay TV, an example most newspapers have followed. Sports coverage underpins a neoliberal zeitgeist by providing an alternative, apolitical, space with elements of tragedy and farce; villains and saviours; loyalty and betrayal.
Grandeur is evoked through metaphors such as the ‘trench warfare’ of a tight contest or the ‘phoney war’ of a friendly fixture; ‘citadels’ are ‘stormed’, and ‘no quarter is given’, along with specifically supernatural ideas such as ‘demons’ being ‘exorcised’. Stress is laid on the grandeur and importance of the events unfolding: thus we regularly learn that ‘history is being made.’ Too much of our lives, my own included, are absorbed by the spectacle.
With the degree of psychic energy devoted to the affairs of circus, it is hardly surprising that political involvement is increasingly the province of the paid-up professional; that the percentage voting has declined precipitously; that elections are explained by analogy with sporting fixtures; and that often warfare itself is relegated to the periphery. The widespread obsession is barely questioned by a media that feeds the fervour, and certainly not by politicians that display their colours to appear like regular guys.
