Cassandra Voices

Author: frankarmstrong

  • Welcome to the Jungle

    Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.
    The New York Evening World    , 1906.

    Perhaps others, better acquainted with the genre, may argue to the contrary, but Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is surely a contender as the Great American Novel. Though far from an ideological bedfellow, Winston Churchill nonetheless wrote admiringly that Sinclair had marshalled his forces like the general of an army on the attack.[i]

    That the work is not better known today is probably on account of the butcher’s blade it takes to the American Dream, and the presentation of an alternative vision for humanity. Thus, Socialism is described as ‘the new religion of humanity – or you might say it was the fulfilment of the old religion, since it implied but the literal application of all the teachings of Christ (p.346)’.

    The Jungle is generally credited with the swift passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in June 1906 – eventually leading to the creation of the FDA – after laying bare to the American public the unsanitary practices of the Beef Trust in Chicago’s Packingtown.

    Notably, however, action was only taken when the health of the US population at large seemed at stake. Sinclair claimed the “embalmed beef” scandal ‘killed several times as many soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards(p.105)’ in the war of 1898.

    The Act did not, however, address the frightful working conditions of mainly immigrant workers in the meat packing industry; let alone the millions of animals subjected to industrial slaughter. Moreover, in certain respects, the industrial food system is now more disturbing than ever, while the FDA has long been subject to Regulatory Capture.

    At least we have The Jungle to remind us of ongoing fraudulent misrepresentations:

    The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences of the wayside, the lamp-posts and telegraph-poles, were pasted with lies. The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country – from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie(p.82).

    A Time of Hope

    The opening chapter introduces an unlikely hero, Jurgis Rudkus – ‘he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands (p.4)’ who is ‘the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of(p.23)’ – a recent Lithuanian immigrant to ‘Packingtown’, Chicago, along with an extended family group, who are being ground down by unrelenting work and squalid conditions.

    In spite of abject poverty the family nonetheless insists on a proper occasion for Jurgis’s wedding to his beloved Ona: ‘these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls – they cannot give up the veselija(p.15).’

    At that point, still imbued with optimism, Jurgis’s response to any of the multiple challenges he confronts is to shrug his broad shoulders and say he will just have to work harder. It makes him an early model for Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. His love for Ona – recalling in certain respects Odysseus’s journey towards Penelope – means he resists the lure of the saloons, which most workers frequent.

    But in a pedagogic aside – after the family are confronted with a higher than expected bill for the wedding – Sinclair intimates that the brutal nature of the work in Packingtown erodes moral as well as physical beings: ‘for men who have to crack the heads of an animal all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice it on their friends, and even on their families.(p.20)’

    At the time about ten thousand head of cattle and as many hogs and half as many sheep were disposed of every day, amounting to eight to ten million live creatures turned into food every year.

    It was ‘the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place’, employing thirty thousand men, supporting directly two hundred and fifty thousand people in it neighbourhood, and indirectly half million, and ‘furnished the food for no less than thirty million people(p.45)’ – or at least whatever could be passed off as such.

    Speeding up the Gang

    In what is a distressing account, the reader is introduced to a succession of despicable practices that drain away human life by degrees, while imperilling consumer health. One such is “speeding up the gang”, where a foremen alternates picked men to set up a hectic pace ‘and if any man could not keep up with the pace, there were hundreds outside begging to try(p.63)’.

    As he works, Jurgis finds numerous examples of shoddy corruption. Thus, a good many so-called “slunk” calves turned up every day:

    Any man who knows anything about butchering knows that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is not fit for food … if they had chosen, it would have been an easy matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food.

    This inconvenience would lead to a loss of revenue however, thus:

    whoever noticed it would tell the boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice the carcass of the cow would be cleaned out(p.68).

    There were also “Downers”: cattle that are injured or die on the long journey to slaughter. These too are surreptitiously placed alongside healthier specimens.

    Shockingly, the meat of tubercular cattle is also permitted to enter the food chain, in return for ‘two thousand dollars a week hush money.(p.104)’ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the book triggered a political scandal.

    Property Swindle

    On arrival in Chicago the family find a dilapidated boarding house to reside, but strive to purchase a property in fulfilment of their American Dream – assuming this will be a saving in the long run for a working family.

    Jurgis chances on an advertisement featuring a brilliantly painted house, under which there is a picture of a husband and wife in warm embrace. Underneath is written – helpfully in Lithuanian – “Why pay rent?” “Why not out own your own home.(p.51)”

    When they view the house, however, it is not ‘as it was shown in the pictures(p.52)’ –albeit it has been freshly painted. Despite the agent’s exhortations that the sale must be closed without delay, or they risk losing the opportunity, they follow their gut instinct and hold off from purchasing. They are eventually duped into signing on the dotted line by a dodgy lawyer who assures them it is a perfectly regular deed.

    So, they part with their savings, leaving them on the hook for a monthly repayment that stretches them to the limits of endurance.

    As if this isn’t hard enough – especially in return for what they soon discover is a house that is barely fit for human habitation – a few months later they are presented with an annual insurance bill that threatens to starve them into submission.

    Predictably, after Jurgis gets into trouble with the law and cannot work, the family loses the home – and their hard-earned savings – and are forced to return to the boarding house from whence they came, where further trials await.

    Ironically, a century later millions of Americans, and others, had a similar experience of losing their homes, and savings, in the Financial Crash, in large part due to banks offering easy credit.

    Cartoon from Puck, August 9, 1899 by J. S. Pughe. Angry Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters and demands, “Why should I let these freaks cast whole ballots when they are only half Americans?”

    Shenanigans

    The novel explores the ethnic composition of Packingtown’s workers. Waves of cheap foreign labour have fed an industry which, Sinclair argues, is ‘every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave-drivers(p.117).’ Based on this account, it would be hard to disagree.

    First came the Germans, and afterwards the Irish, who Sinclair generally casts as profiteers and political fixers. After that came Bohemians, followed by Poles, then Lithuanians, who were then giving way to Slovaks.

    Having ascended a grease-laden pole, many of the Irish in the novel seem determined to keep others from scaling the heights. Sinclair’s is perhaps demonstrating that success in Packingtown depends on a willingness to embrace corruption and exploitation; at the behest of the Beef Trust itself, ‘a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land(p.346).’

    Some are damaged souls, however, such as Tommy Finnegan, ‘a little Irishman with big staring eyes and a wild aspect’, who expounds on ‘The method of operation of the higher intelligence’. Finnegan informs Jurgis that ‘shperrits … may be operatin’ upon ye(p.97-98)’

    Far more sinister is the ruler of the district, Mike Scully who, ‘held and important party office in the state, and bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket.’ As a result, ‘He was an enormously rich man(p.101)’.

    Eventually we learn:

    It was Scully who was to blame for the unpaved street in which Jurgis’s child had been drowned; it was Scully who had put into office the magistrate who had first sent Jurgis to jail; it was Scully who was principal stockholder in the company which had sold him his ramshackle tenement, and then robbed him of it(p.287).

    Yet when we do finally encounter Scully he is ‘a little dried up Irishman, whose hands shook’; who is ‘but a tool and puppet of the packers(p.288).

    Jurgis’s beloved Ona is also raped and beaten by Connor ‘a big, red-faced Irishman, coarse featured, and smelling of liquor(p.167).’ In revenge, Jurgis violently assaults him, landing him a spell behind bars.

    This brings him before another Irish-American, ‘the notorious Justice Callahan’:

    “Pat” Callahan – “Growler” Pat, as he had been known before he ascended to the bench – had begun life as a butcher-boy and a bruiser of local reputation; he had gone into politics almost as soon as he had learned to talk, and he held two offices at once before he was enough to vote.

    Unfortunately for Jurgis, Callahan had developed a ‘strong conservatism’ and ‘contempt for foreigners(p.173).’

    Yet another Irishman called “Buck” Halloran, ‘was a political worker and on the inside of things(p.281)’. He employs Jurgis to enlist fictional voters for forthcoming elections in a sham democracy.

    At last, we meet one Irishman, working in an enterprise owned and managed by a socialist who pays a decent wage and sets reasonable hours. He explains to Jurgis ‘the geography of America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave him an idea of the business system of the country.’ Sinclair seems to be showing that in circumstances where labour is not alienated, even an Irishman is capable of decency and culture.

    How were immigrants persuaded to work in such appalling conditions? Sinclair tells us that ‘old man Durham’ (the proprietor of the Beef Trust):

    was responsible for these immigrations; he had sown that would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of of work and high wages at the stockyards(p.72).

    The grotesque lie places naïve workers such as Jurgis at the mercy of a system that degrades its victims by degrees. Sadly, it was not just adults who are engaged. Thus, even the young children in Jurgis’s family group are obliged to work – and die – joining the million and three-quarter of children who were at the time similarly compelled.

    Sing Sing prison (New York). Date unknown.

    Off the Rails

    While incarcerated Jurgis encounters men for whom, ‘love was a beastliness, joy was a snare, and God was an imprecation.’ He shares a cell, and befriends Jack Duane, a likeable, though ultimately callous, rogue, who reveals the possibilities of a life in crime. Jurgis avoids this temptation for he still has a wife and child to keep him on the straight and narrow.

    After being released from his first stretch, Jurgis is black-listed and thus unable to work. He then loses his beloved Ona to childbirth. From that point on – like so many others of his class – he numbs his pain with alcohol. He remains with the extended family group, nonetheless, on account of his baby son Ananas. But the tragedy is complete when the infant dies too – drowning in a puddle in an unpaved street.

    At that point, Jurgis is a lost soul, with his dreams of a new life in shreds: ‘So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them(p.235).’

    He leaves Chicago in the spring as a hobo, working for farmers and foraging wild berries along the trail, which restores his health, but he cannot escape reminders of the old life:

    Ah, what agony was that, what despair, when the tomb of memory was rent open and the ghosts of his old life came forth to scourge him!(p.244)

    Thus, he returns to Chicago in the fall – like a moth to flame – where further obstacles and humiliations await. There he reconnects with Jack Duane, who introduces him to a life of crime. On their first outing they mug a man who, they learn afterwards, has suffered a concussion on the brain. This troubles the conscientious Jurgis, ‘but the other laughed cooly – it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it.’

    Duane assures Jurgis, “He was doing it to somebody as bad as he could, you can be sure of that(p.279).” Duane seems to assume that ‘behind every great fortune lies a great crime.’

    Jurgis’s moral descent is complete when he takes on a job as a foreman and then a scab worker during a general strike.

    Brothel “The Paris”, 2101 Armor Street, Chicago.

    The Only Way to Get Ahead

    Jurgis’s career as a thief and strike-breaker brings a measure of financial success, implying the only way to get ahead in Chicago is to debase oneself. By then, however, having lost all family connection – and lacking a belief system – he cannot develop a stable existence. Instead, he frequents the saloons and sprawling flesh pots.

    Earlier we learn of Chicago: ‘there was no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl(p.116)’:

    Thousands of them came to Chicago answering advertisements for “servants” and “factory hands,” and found themselves trapped by fake employment agencies, and locked up in a bawdy-house(p.282).

    One of the saddest episodes, among many, is Jurgis’s reconnection with Marija Berczynskas, Ona’s stepsister. At the beginning of the novel, like Jurgis, Marija displays all the characteristics of a model worker, but by the end she has been forced into prostitution in order to feed the family, and is addicted to morphine.

    Prior to this Marija conducted a touching love affair with the fiddler Tomaszios, who previously spell bound the wedding party with his music. But Packingtown is no place for an artist – or romance. Marija tells Jurgis that Tomaszios has left her, having ‘got blood-poisoning and lost one finger(p.320)’ in a work place accident, meaning he cannot play the violin any longer.

    Marija has interesting insights into her fellow prostitutes:

    Most of the women here are pretty decent – you’d be surprised. I used to think they did it because they liked to; but fancy a woman selling herself to every kind of man that comes … and doing it because she likes it(p.327).

    Cartoon by Udo Keppler, first punlished in New York by ‘Puck’, 15 October 1913.

    Commercial Competition

    Towards the end of the novel, after a quasi-religious conversion to socialism, and securing a steady job with a socialist proprietor, Jurgis meets a number of talking head intellectuals in a kind of underworld sequence.

    Here he learns that the Beef Trust are just one part of the capitalist system:

    There are other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the Beef Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in winter – there is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail in your shoes – there is the Oil Trust, that keep you from reading at night.

    This character asks rhetorically, ‘why do you suppose it is that the all the fury of the press and the government is directed against the Beef Trust?’

    He informs Jurgis: ‘the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the war path’, then ‘poor common people watch and applaud the job’, but this is ‘really the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition.(p.355)’

    The hysterical reaction of so many in the media to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter suggests that this age-old “battle of commercial competition” continues – as the billionaire class squabble over the spoils.

    Campaign poster from his 1912 presidential campaign featuring Eugene Debs.

    Much Abides

    The Socialist Party of American became a powerful political force around the turn of the last century – at least until it was beaten into submission. But already by mid-century, in response to the excesses of the Soviet Union, the socialist ideal had become to many in the English-speaking world ‘The God that Failed’. A hybrid social-market ‘New Deal’ emerged under FDR in the 1930s, but neoliberalism has reigned ascendent since at least the Reagan Presidency. In today’s muddled era of identity politics, activists often lack commitment to countering the structures that produce an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

    Today, US workers are afforded far greater protection compared to Sinclair’s day, and child labour has largely been eliminated. However, in ‘the most health-obsessed society, all is not well.’[ii] Sixty percent of adults suffer from a chronic condition, and over forty per cent have two or more of such conditions.[iii]

    Most Americans still live on the edge of financial ruin. A recent poll found 63% are living from paycheck to paycheck — including, remarkably, nearly half of six-figure earners, as the cost of living continues to rise.

    The stress caused by this precarious existence seems to lie behind ongoing substance abuse, including an Opioid Crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands, while enriching Big Pharma that preys on the country’s pathologies. Other self-destructive behaviours – such as over-eating – are normalised in a rigid two-party political system that leaves little room for dissent.

    Alarmingly, there is little sign of political change in the US, while many other countries appear to be embracing neoliberal norms. Since the 1970s inequality has spiralled, and most political radicalism seems more inclined towards self-reliance than cooperation, but as Gabor Maté points out, in what could be a commentary on The Jungle:

    If I see the world as a hostile place where only winners thrive, I may well become aggressive, selfish and grandiose to survive in such a milieu … beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building[iv].

    The Jungle characterises US society as being one where willingness to participate in a “gigantic lie” underpins success. This deceit goes on, as people continue to be persuaded to buy things they don’t need, while a successful boss still extracts as much as possible from workers. It means that even some of the best, like Jurgis Rudkus and Marija Berczynskas, are still being ground down – unless they too are prepared to display the required “aggressive, selfish and grandiose” qualities that success depends on.

    [i] Hugh J. Dawson, “Winston Churchill and Upton Sinclair: An Early Review of The Jungle,” ALR, 1991.

    [ii] Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté, the Myth of Normal: Trauma Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, Random House, London, 2022, p.1.

    [iii] Christine Buttorff et al, Multiple Chronic Conditions in the United States, Santa Monica, CA RAND Corporation, 2017.

    [iv] Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté, 2022, p.31.

  • Classic Paddies

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

    Night Crossing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Extended Fairground

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

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

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

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

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

    Hooliganism

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

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

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

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

    He argues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Big Red Fun Bus

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

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

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

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

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

    It begins fittingly:

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

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

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

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

    He chimed in:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ‘this dying land’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Critics

    Acording to Joe Cleary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [ii] Cleary, p.283

    [iii] Cleary, p.277

    [iv] Cleary, p.271

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

    [vi] Greaber and Wengrow, p.54

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

    [viii] Cleary, p.290

  • Donal Fallon’s Burning Question

    Deities or daimons held strong associations with the cities of Classical Rome and Greece, projecting how freemen, and sometimes women, wished to represent their civic virtues. Thus Athena, the patron god of Athens, combined an association with crafts such as weaving and valour on the battlefield.

    The gods of Antiquity yielded to saints or angels in Europe in the Christian era. The twelfth century, Archbishop Lorcán Ó Tuathail is the patron saint of Dublin. He began the construction, in stone, of Christchurch Cathedral and was renowned for making peace between warring groups. Mediating between competing factions to produce lasting building stock might not be the worst attribute to find in a contemporary civic champion.

    Architects are the most obvious authors of cities. The skyline of Dublin is indebted – or otherwise depending on your view – to the varied talents of Gandon, Scott and Stephenson. Craftsmen and builders are generally forgotten, although some see the hidden patterns of freemasonry, while street names still bear the names of the first developers – notwithstanding post-independence re-branding.

    At a deeper level it has been writers, musicians and visual artists that have forged a distinctive consciousness among the inhabitants of the bricks and mortar of Dublin city. Historians, too, have helped impart an essence of place, by joining past and present, lest we forget…

    Donal Fallon is a very modern historian who has used new technology to excellent effect throughout his career, while retaining a commitment to the craft: engagement with sources primary and secondary, and reflections on the role of history and historians. Unusually among his peers, he approaches a mainstream audience without indifference.

    His latest work, Three Castles Burning: A History of Dublin in Twelve Streets (New Island Books, 2022) cleverly uses twelve street as a window on an array of historical episodes, and personalities, which touch on contemporary concerns, notably a housing crisis.

    Numerous themes are explored throughout the book, perhaps most evident is an enduring tension between preservation and development: ‘All cities must develop and grow’, he writes, ‘The balance of development is key’ (p.2). This extends to reconciling an alluring multiculturalism with the cultural distinctiveness of the native-born population.

    Housing

    The first street Fallon surveys is Henrietta Street, the impressive early Georgian terrace that was reduced to squalid tenement-dwellings over the course of the nineteenth century. It found an unlikely champion in the shape of a veteran Republican architect and planner Uinseann MacEoin (1920-2007), who unlike many of his comrades, admired the city’s Anglo-Irish architectural inheritance.

    Henrietta Street also offers a vantage on nearby Henrietta House, one of a number of schemes designed by Dublin Corporation Housing Architect Herbert George Simms (1898-1948). His signature rounded corners and communal courtyards demonstrate that social housing need not necessarily succumb to brutalist functionality.

    In the following chapter on Watling Street, Fallon recalls a 1939 speech by Simms before a Housing Enquiry in City Hall: ‘housing of the working classes would have to be accepted sooner or later as a permanent service, like water or other municipal services.(p.36)’ Simms would surely have despaired at the subsequent financialisation of property led by his countrywoman Margaret Thatcher. Sadly, overwork drove him to suicide.

    Watling Street also allows Fallon to explore the origins of the Liffey Swim, immortalised in the painting of that name by Jack B. Yeats, ‘a piece of work … ingrained in the mind of the city’(p.49).

    Remarkably, women were only permitted to compete for the first time in 1991, seemingly in response to the demands of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973), who maintained that ‘mixed athletics and all cognate immodesties are abuses that right-minded people reprobate, wherever and whenever they exist(p.50).’

    ‘Disturbed Pits’

    A wander down Fishamble Street allows Fallon to transport us to Viking Dublin and also to the controversy over the development of Wood Quay, which became the site for the Dublin City Council offices. As the poet and campaigner against the development Thomas Kinsella put it: ‘Disturbed pits and drains trickled with unease.’

    Fallon takes a characteristically measured stance, arguing that Sam Stephenson’s buildings ‘are an important part of the built heritage of the city … Alas, if only they had been built at less contested sites, we could appreciate them more fully(p.71).’

    Rathmines Road Lower brings Fallon to the affluent suburbs beyond the canals. Rathmines became a staunchly Unionist enclave after becoming a township through an Act of Parliament in the early nineteenth century.

    One contrarian resident of Rathmines prior to independence was Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was murdered by a deranged British Officer during the 1916 Rising. The social campaigner and pacifist adopted the label of crank with pride. ‘A crank, according to Skeffy, was a small instrument that makes revolutions(p.87).’

    A look at South William Street allows Fallon to enter the legendary hostelry of Grogan’s or The Castle Lounge, which he commends as ‘one of the few pubs in the city continuing to shun unwanted modernity in the lives of drinkers and conversationalists(p.111).’ The pub also holds the distinction for being one of the few in the city during the 1960s to serve unaccompanied women.

    Fallon seems less than impressed with Lovin’ Dublin proclaiming the street to be at the heart of ‘the Hipster Triangle’ and christening it ‘without doubt the hippest street in the city. P.115)’ ‘Such hollow titles can change quickly’ Fallon acerbically notes. Perhaps he would like to see this occur sooner rather than later, which might make it easier to secure a seat in the aforementioned hostelry.

    Next up on Fallon’s tour is Parnell Street East, described as Chinatown on Google Maps. Fallon appears to bridle at the suggestion that the Tech giant should be bestowing the title. He seems more inclined to the Vietnamese food on offer, allowing him to recall the arrival of Vietnamese Boat people in Dublin from 1979 onwards.

    Up to Monto

    Fallon points to ‘a special irony in the renaming of James Joyce Street, formerly Mabbot Street … after a client of Monto (p.137).’ Monto – an area to the east of what is now O’Connell Street – which was Dublin’s notorious red light district, where prostitution was on very public display.

    The city’s notoriety was perhaps deserved. Fallon reveals that in 1870 there were 3,255 arrests for prostitution in the city, compared to just 38 in Belfast, while in London the figure stood at 2,163 (p.141).

    However, the religiously-inspired clearances after independence did little to ameliorate the situation, as Ronan Sheehan recalls In Dublin: The Heart of the City, ‘The unfortunate women did not have reputations to lose. They simply moved elsewhere.’

    Ship (a corruption of Sheep) Street, leads Fallon to engage with the suffragette protests on that street in 1912, when ‘windows belonging to the Castle at Ship Street were smashed by members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (p.163).’

    Also, a nineteenth century resident Giuseppe Cervi ‘is widely credited with opening Dublin’s first fish and chip shop (p.171)’ emphasising the long history of immigrants broadening Dubliners’ paletes, and perhaps their waistlines.

    Divisions

    Church Street was the site of a tenement collapsing in 1913 – inspiring such an incident in Joseph Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City – as well as Dublin’s worst industrial accident in 1878, which claimed fourteen lives.

    Fallon also explores class divisions in Dublin, where ‘traditionally the Liffey itself has been thought of, rightly or wrongly, as a dividing line.’ However, he recalls that ‘there was a time when East-West was a better way of thinking of such things’, adding, in parenthesis, ‘and perhaps it is once more (p.181).’

    At least progress was made after independence with housing. The 1911 census revealed that some 63% of the city were working class, of whom 45% lived in tenement accommodation. It was estimated that some 37,500 Dubliners were ‘housed in dwellings so decayed as to be on the borderline of unfitness for human habitation.’

    Eustace Street in Temple Bar is a notable flash point in terms of the balance of development and preservation. Indeed, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern once declared that this could be Ireland’s answer to the West Bank.

    More prosaically, the former Dublin City Council planner Paul Kearns argued ‘Dublin has, for far too long, favoured the temporary, often fleeting visitor, over the local urban resident(p.204).’

    Before getting its touristic makeover, Temple Bar was slated for destruction, to be replaced with a bus station. ‘In acquiring the property with the eventual aim of demolition, the bus company began leasing out units at low rents,(p.204)’ which brought a host of artist studios, cutting edge music venues and off-beat retailers.

    Fallon observes that ‘Temple Bar today may not bring ‘neo-bohemian’ to mind, but a surprising array of institutions from that moment of great optimism remain in the district.’ He also lauds ‘the brilliant Meeting House Square(p.205).’

    The penultimate street Fallon considers is Pearse Street (to Westland Row), site of Pearse Street Garda Station, once home to the counter-revolutionary G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Fallon reveals that the name ‘G’ is simply ‘the seventh letter of the alphabet and these men formed the seventh division(p.226)’ of the DMP.

    Pearse Street was formerly known as Great Brunswick Street, before being re-named in honour of Patrick Pearse the leader of the 1916 Rising, who was born on 27 Great Brunswick Street.

    James Pearse, Patrick’s father, was ‘a Unitarian raised in England [who] … specialised in ecclesiastical and architectural sculptures.’ Patrick fondly wrote of his father’s work, which can be seen in churches across the city: ‘If ever in an Irish church you find, amid a wilderness of bad sculpture, something good and true and lovingly finished you may be sure that it was carved by my father or by one of his pupils.(p.242)’

    Finally, to Moore Street, where Fallon again explores the competing aspiration of breathing new life into an impoverished area and preserving the famous open-air market, along with sites of the 1916 Rising. Fallon wonders whether some kind of ‘proper market’ could prosper on the street in future (p.269).

    Outsiders

    From its foundation as a slave market by Viking raiders Dublin has had a fraught relationship with the rest of the island. The nickname Jackeen is a term of derision applied to ‘West Brit’ Dubliners, who enthusiastically welcomed Queen Victoria with the Union Jack.

    Donal Fallon’s account reminds us that Dublin has long been subject to the ebb and flow of migration, whether Norman, English, Huguenot, Italian, Vietnamese or Chinese. As capital and main entrepot it became an important political, commercial and cultural hub from the seventeenth century. This engendered enduring civic pride, that can spill into arrogance, breeding resentment in rural Ireland, a sentiment which often persists even among those who have made it their long-term home.

    The stereotype of a true Dub is one who regards a cow pat with horror, and any beverage other than a pint of plain with deep suspicion. But such rare specimens now generally feel a profound alienation in a city increasingly dominated by office blocks, hotels and cafes. Dublin is a city of outsiders.

    Today most long- and short-term residents of Dublin don’t live in the city proper – generally considered to be the area between the canals –  but in the sprawling suburbs. Many of us who grew up there are never quite sure where we fit in. Perhaps Donal Fallon will deign to explore this unglamorous hinterland in a subsequent work.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Cost of Living: Digging for Victory

    Standing outside a Dublin hostelry in the drizzle, I fell into conversation with an Ulsterman who arrived with impeccable republican-socialist credentials. I assumed, this would make him sympathetic to the recently vanquished Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

    I breezily opined that the long-serving MP for Islington had been the first post-War Labour leader to challenge a neo-colonial consensus in British politics, to which I received a surprising response.

    “He’s just like the rest of them,” he said, pausing before almost spitting out the words, “the allotment,” and muttering “that’s how you can tell.”

    Only on reflection do I recognise the origin of a prejudice against anyone holding an interest in the dark arts of composting, training vines, or even the life cycle of the carrot fly.

    He echoed savage criticism of privileged do-gooders with an evangelical zeal for horticulture, from that most quintessential of English writers, George Orwell.

    Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall

    ‘food-crank’

    In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) Orwell dismissed a certain type of socialist ‘food-crank’, ‘sandal-wearer’, ‘fruit-juice drinker’ as ‘a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcass; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.’

    He maintained: ‘The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.’ But added, revealingly: ‘the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.’

    Orwell articulated an enduring English working class aversion to a New Age paternalism, which my Republican-Socialist interlocuter outside the pub appeared to share.

    Well-intentioned, but often tone deaf, efforts to instil passion for horticulture continues to emanate from aristocratic scions such as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. His Dorset estate became a TV showcase for sustainable gastronomy in a country more renowned for mushy peas and fried batter, washed down with Irn-bru.

    There is, however, a curmudgeonly quality to Orwell’s critique, reflected in a stated preference for Anglo-Saxon words over those of French or Classical origins in ‘The Politics of the English Language’. In England, and not only among working class, plain food, as well as plain words, are generally preferred over anything sophisticated, complex or, worst of all, French.

    However, in my view, Corbyn comes from an honourable lineage of Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: genuine social reformers that secured parliamentary approval through the 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act. This brought 1,500,000 plots into cultivation by 1918, thereby ensuring a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables in many metropolitan districts.

    It also led to a wide diffusion of gardening skills, which became a valuable resource during World War II when, denied of imports, the population was urged to Dig for Victory, with impressive results.

    Nonetheless, what Orwell acknowledged as “the peculiar evil” of working class people turning their noses up at healthy produce suggests early industrialisation of food production in Britain – particularly the preponderance of refined sugar – had a lasting effect on the British pallet, and sadly the Irish one too.

    In England today organic is a by-word for posh, and unaffordable: “not for the likes of you and me.”

    Sadly, reflecting the colonial experience, Irish tastes are often just as blinkered. This is apparent in a lasting aversion to cultivating fruit and vegetables, which has informed the state’s agricultural priorities since independence.

    Today just one percent of all Irish farms now produce vegetables – for reasons I explore.

    Irish Food

    Notably, the celebration of specifically ‘Irish’ food did not figure prominently among Irish nationalist at the end of the nineteenth century. Crucially, with the inception of the state, agriculture was identified as a primary source of export revenue.

    This perpetuated a pattern of development that can be traced to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, when a reduction in the price of grain on the British market created economic conditions in Ireland favouring raising cattle for export, often ‘on the hoof’.

    The potato has long been identified with the Irish people, but it has not become a cherished foodstuff in the same way rice is to the Japanese for example. Early nationalists were more concerned with promoting self-sufficiency in wheat. Moreover, the Great Famine remains a relatively unexplored trauma, at least in terms of the Irish relationship with food, and the land.

    Tony Kiely describes Dublin working- class meals in the 1950s as follows: ‘Family diets were very basic, consisting in the main of bread, tea, oatmeal, cocoa, potatoes, cabbage, herrings and pairings of cheap meat pieces for stews and soups .…’ While: ‘Bread was both a staple, and a constant companion at all meals.’[i]

    Anthony Farmar suggests that an absolute rule among the Irish middle class in the 1960s was never to talk about food: ‘to enjoy eating as such was unbecoming to a serious person’. He quotes an American commentator who claimed cooking in Ireland was ‘a necessary chore rather than an artistic ceremony, and that in restaurants “‘nine out of ten ordered steak every time with nine out of ten ordering chips with it.”’[ii]

    Among the post-Great Famine diaspora, there is little evidence of recreation of native dishes. Panikos Panayi claims that in Britain: ‘Irish food did not have enough distinction from that of the ethnic majority to warrant the opening of specifically designated food shops.’[iii]

    Regarding nineteenth-century Irish-American immigrants, Hasia R. Diner reveals: ‘They rarely talked about food, neither did they sing about it, nor did it contribute to community institutions and rituals.’[iv]

    Self-consciously Irish recipe books emerged only after independence. Most Irish nationalists did not view eating distinctively Irish food as an important cultural marker, except perhaps when it came to eating bread made from home-grown wheat.

    Thus, in a pamphlet addressed to the women of Ireland, the writer and Irish language activist Mary Butler crafted a list of fifteen ways in which to foster authentic Irishness in their homes. Revealingly, ‘no traditional recipes, foodways, food names, or food practices as instruments for building Irish identity were included.’[v]

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Aping the English

    According to Benedict Anderson, ‘by the second decade of the nineteenth century if not earlier a model of the independent nation state was available for pirating.’[vi]

    This is important in the Irish context as the model most readily available was English or British nationalism, a society that prized letters and sporting prowess, and in which a native culinary tradition had been ‘decapitated’[vii] by the end of the nineteenth century.

    In 1880 the surgeon and polymath Sir Henry Thompson observed:

    On questioning the average middle-class Englishman as to the nature of his food, the all but universal answer is, ‘My living is plain, always roast and boiled’—words which but too clearly indicate the dreary monotony, not to say unwholesomeness, of his daily food; while they furthermore express his satisfaction, such as it is, that he is no luxurious feeder.[viii]

    The disinterest exhibited by the English in cookery and the discussion of food was compounded by the nutritional impoverishment of the working class.

    Sidney Mintz estimates that by 1900 nearly one-fifth of average caloric intake came in the form of refined sugar, which was mainly consumed in tea or jam.[ix] Apart from being nutritionally deficient, this diet lacked variety and bred conservatism as older traditions of food preparation yielded to bland industrial products.

    With no sophisticated models of food consumption to compete against, the Irish cultural elite was not drawn to food as an expression of identity; unlike Italians, for example, situated within the domineering cultural orbit of French cuisine.

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

    Poverty

    This was compounded by the virtual extinction of many traditional foods as a result of poverty and changes in agricultural production in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution.

    David Dickson ‘suspects that much of what is today regarded as traditional Irish cuisine—soda bread, barm brack, boxty, champ, colcannon etc—’ was only developed in the nineteenth century ‘in the kitchens of the solid farming class.’[x]

    During the Famine, those unaffected by starvation bore witness to suffering on a scale that is hard for those of us living in contemporary Ireland to fathom. Joseph Lee likens its effects to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and explores a psychological legacy:

    They will have seen corpses, if not in their own dwellings, then on the roads and in the ditches. Many are likely to have felt a degree of guilt, of the type that often afflicts survivors of tragedies, not only of the Holocaust, but of events like earthquakes and mining catastrophes. Why did you survive when others in your family did not? A sense of guilt can simmer below the surface, to perhaps breakout in uncontrollable and, to uncomprehending outside observers, in apparently inexplicable ways.[xi]

    Crawford and Clarkson concur, suggesting that survivors carried psychological scars and that their physical and intellectual developments were stunted.[xii]

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Alternative Crops

    The dominance of the market generated a snobbery directed against foraged foods, which according to Louse M. Cullen acquired a ‘stigma.’[xiii]

    Kevin Myers once mused in his Irishman’s Diary that: ‘It’s almost as if those who live on the land here are culturally and emotionally disengaged from its essence as a living thing.’[xiv]

    The impact of colonisation cannot be overlooked. According to John Feehan: ‘it seems more than likely that the loss of the Gaelic tradition of farming was accompanied by a decline in the lore of wild plants and animals as food or medicine.’[xv]

    Furthermore, the absence of a native ‘improving’ gentry, especially after the Act of Union in 1801, limited experimentation in and demand for ‘alternative’ crops: fruit and vegetables varieties with limited market value.

    By the eve of the Great Famine three million (out of a population of eight million) were living on a mere one million acres of land, which represented just 5% of a the total acreage of 20 million.’[xvi] It is remarkable that until the blight arrived, without modern machinery or chemicals, so many were able to subsist on such small plots .

    Moore Hall, County Mayo.

    Lack of Variety

    Writing in 1971, Rosemary Fennel bemoaned the demise of country markets, saying a ‘frequent complaint in Ireland is the lack of variety of in vegetables for sale and the high prices charged.’[xvii] Media coverage of the subject of food in the form of recipes, reviews and features only really took off in the 1990s.

    It may be that the enduring absence of alternative agriculture and gastronomy owes something to the rejection of the ‘Big House’ in whose walled gardens, orchards and hothouses horticultural experimentation had occurred prior to independence, which precipitated the departure of a significant proportion of what remained of the landlord class.

    In an independent state dominated by a petit -bourgeois farmer class, the Big House, was despised. In 1944 the Minister for Lands Sean Moylan condemned them as ‘tombstones of a departed aristocracy’ remarking ‘the sooner they go down the better. They are no use.’[xviii] More recently Nuala O’Faolain admitted: ‘We cannot, or at least I cannot, look at the Big House without some degree of rage.’[xix]

    Certainly, since independence the focus of the state has been on securing export revenue from agricultural produce. In her history, Mary Daly argues that ‘it is evident that the Department [of Agriculture] has traditionally looked at agricultural matters from the perspective of the producer rather than the consumer.’ She cautions that the identity of interests between farmers and the Irish nation ‘does not necessarily apply on issues such as food policy, or the environment.’[xx]

    Securing land has never been easy. Frank Mitchell and Michael Ryan observed in 1997: ‘In Ireland it is still next to impossible to rent land on a lease of sufficient length to make improvements and where land can be bought it is often in small parcels at too high a price.’[xxi]

    The Irish Breakfast Roll.

    Changing Habits of a Lifetime

    Pierre Bourdieu claims that ‘it is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning.’[xxii] Developing a taste for brown bread and carrots perhaps does not come easily if white bread and jam have been childhood staples.

    One way to bring about a shift in Irish tastes could be through increased participation in small scale agriculture. This might lead to wider agricultural reforms, as people gain an appreciation of seasonality and even terroir ­– the unique flavour imparted by the growing environment.

    A gastronomic awakening could lead to the cultivation of gardens across suburban and rural Ireland, and in more built-up areas public allotments – yes “allotments” – ought to be developed, but this will require state intervention.

    More public land should be set aside for allotments given the importance of consuming sufficient fresh fruit and vegetables in our diets; not to mention the potentially huge savings if people were able to grow more of their own. Recall that on the eve of the Great Famine three million were subsisting on a mere one million acres of land!

    My own district of Dun-Laoghaire Rathdown, which contains vast under-utilised parklands has just two public allotment sites available for a population of over two hundred thousand. One at Goatstown with 136 plots and another in Shankhill with 95 plots. Unsurprisingly, both are over-subscribed.

    Meanwhile in the more congested Dublin City Council region, where there is still ample public land availabe, some zoned Z9 for Lands/Green Network, there are nine, again over-subscribed, sites.

    Until there is an adequate distribution of land, horticulture will remain a privilege of property owners with gardens. This has important implications for the endurance of the perception that fresh fruit and vegetables are ‘posh’ food.

    [i] Tony Kiely, “We managed”: reflections on the culinary practices of Dublin’s working class poor in the 1950s’, in Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher (eds) Tickling the palate, gastronomy in Irish literature and culture (Oxford, 2014), p.108.

    [ii] Anthony Farmar, Privileged lives: a social history of middle class Ireland 1882-1989, (Dublin, 1989), p.180-2

    [iii] Panikos Panayi, The multicultural history of British food (London, 2008), p.43.

    [iv] Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish foodways in the age of migration. (Cambridge, 2002), p.114.

    [v] Ibid, p.84.

    [vi] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, (London, 1991), p.81.

    [vii] Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Taste: eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present (Oxford, 1996) p.214.

    [viii] Ibid, p.296.

    [ix] Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the place of sugar in modern history, (New York and London, 1985) p.6

    [x] David Dickson, ‘The potato and the Irish diet before the Great Famine’, in Cormac Ó Grada (ed.), Famine 150 commemorative lecture series (Dublin, 1997), p.19.

    [xi] Joseph Lee, ‘The Famine in Irish history’, in Cormac Ó Grada (ed.), Famine 150 commemorative lecture series (Dublin, 1997), pp.168-9

    [xii] Leslie Clarkson and Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine, (Oxford, 2001), p.134.

    [xiii] Louse M. Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland 1600-1900 (London, 1981), p.173

    [xiv] Irish Times, 30 January 2001.

    [xv] John Feehan, Farming in Ireland, (Dublin, 2003), p.201.

    [xvi] Raymond Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure, (Cork, 1966), p.63

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

    [xviii] Terence Dooley, ‘The Big House and Famine memory: Strokestown Park House’, in Crawley, Smith and Murphy, Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, p.625.

    [xix] Ibid, p.628.

    [xx] Mary Daly, The First Department: a history of the Department of Agriculture, (Dublin, 2002), p.428

    [xxi] Frank Mitchell and Michael Ryan, Reading the Irish Landscape (Dublin, 1997), p.356

    [xxii] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. by Richard Nice, (London, 2010), p.71.

  • COVID-19: Torches of Freedom

    ‘Harold Evans used to say that an investigation only really began to count once the readers – and even the journalists – were bored with it’
    Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?

    In New York city on Easter Sunday 1929, in a premeditated move, a group of women brought the annual parade to a halt and proceeded to light up cigarettes. In a choreographed response, the tobacco industry, guided by the legendary Edward Bernays, re-branded cigarettes ‘Torches of Freedom’.

    This manipulated scandal had the desired effect of connecting smoking cigarettes with female empowerment. Within a few years, a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke had largely been conceded. Effectively doubling its market, the tobacco industry laughed all the way to the bank.

    Such an apparently spontaneous public spectacle is arguably the gold standard in advertising, wherein an avant-garde movement is associated with a product or service – all while the consumer is blissfully unaware. Importantly, radical or even rebellious social groups often inform mainstream taste, as with the popularity of so-called ‘ghetto styles’.

    This article explores how the pharmaceutical industry, in league with technology corporations and so-called stakeholder capitalism – which entails giving corporations more power over society and democratic institutions less – successfully associated global support for universal vaccine uptake against COVID-19 with a ‘left-wing’ political outlook, infused with youthful idealism.

    In particular, global Black Lives Matter demonstrations appear to have been harnessed – without the consent of organisers – to popularise the use of face masks, which became the enduring global symbol of the pandemic. The fretful atmosphere these inculcated offered a chilling reminder that COVID-19 was constantly in our midst.

    This arrived despite an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2020 dismissing calls for widespread masking as ‘a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic’. That same month the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine referred to 14 trials on the use of masks vs. no masks, saying these ‘showed no effect in either healthcare workers or in community settings’. Thereafter, even experts who questioned their efficacy were censored on social media.

    Masks were supposed to play an equivalent role to the assumed purpose of vaccines: protecting others. They were made – and in some cases remain – compulsory in many settings in numerous states, foreshadowing similar laws enforcing vaccine compliance. In essence, the vaccine would set us free from an obligation to wear masks.

    Summer, 2020

    By the summer of 2020, with case numbers plummeting, many were wondering whether COVID-19 had become an endemic, seasonal respiratory infection. We learnt that France’s first known case was in December, 2019. Later, it was discovered to have been circulating in Italy from September, 2019 and in Spain from as far back as March, 2019, apparently without overwhelming medical systems.

    But a whole industry had been waiting for a pandemic to occur, with the incentive of producing a vaccine for global use and, seemingly, an architecture of surveillance that had been publicly discussed from the outset. In contrast to the Swine Flu debacle, this opportunity would not be lost.

    Moreover, it was being reported that PCR testing was inflating case counts (and thus mortality statistics) through false positive results. Publicity stunts that generated a wave of global hysteria were by then appearing increasingly absurd. Meanwhile, extraordinary predictions for mortality, suggesting we were contending with a challenge equivalent to the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1919 were proving seriously wide of the mark.

    Spanish Influenza caused approximately 75 million deaths, whereas COVID-19 may have been responsible for a global death toll of 6 million, the vast majority of whom were beyond average life expectancy, at a time when the global population was about five times that of 1919.

    Indeed, the early spike in deaths from (or with) COVID-19 in some countries can be attributed to hospitals transferring sick older patients into care homes, where outbreaks followed and only basic medical care was available.

    The ‘Scientific’ Advice Changes…

    After a period of social isolation brought about by unprecedented stay-at-home orders and lockdowns, there were no significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in the wake of large and often disorderly Black Lives Matters demonstrations triggered by the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25.

    In response, some outlets claimed protestors’ use of face masks had prevented outbreaks. However, most of those in evidence were cotton fabric, which health agencies now acknowledge to be next to useless. Furthermore, masks had been worn as a defence against tear gas, or in order to preserve anonymity prior to COVID-19, as the feature image for this article from 2014 demonstrates.

    Whatever the purpose, an impression was created of ‘caring’ mask-clad protestors demanding racial justice around the world. Subsequently, Joe Biden’s own lawyers helped Whole Food workers mount a legal challenge to allow them to wear Black Lives Matters-branded facemasks while on the job. More revolutionary aspirations – including to disband the police – were conveniently ignored by lockdown-enthusiasts who craved enforcement.

    Circumstantial evidence suggests that demonstrations were seized on by an alliance of vested interests that exert control over a swathe of media, new and old.

    The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appears pivotal. The Foundation is the second-largest contributor to the WHO budget, and put over $10 billion into universities in 2020 as well as at least $250 million into journalism in the first half of 2020 alone.

    Unprompted by the publication of any scientific study, the WHO changed its advice on wearing masks on June 5, 2020 shortly after the Black Lives Matters demonstrations. Most national health agencies – long subject to regulatory capture – followed suit, although a few countries declined to alter long-standing advice.

    In the U.S., NIAID director Dr Anthony Fauci claimed he had previously told a white lie to the effect that wearing a mask offered no protection in order to prevent a run on stocks. But emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal he was giving the same advice in private — against mask use.

    Manipulation of mortality statistics can also be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. This set out strict new rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths that differed fundamentally from registration for other causes.

    The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’

    The achievement of universal vaccine uptake – no matter how limited its usefulness – offered dizzying possibilities to the super-rich intent on engineering a new world order, which was openly being referred to as the Great Reset.

    Political Identification

    There was also a direct political purpose for stoking fears around COVID-19, which goes some way towards explaining the involvement of actors beyond the pharmaceutical sector. Application of ‘the science’ against COVID-19 would undermine right-wing Populist movements around the world, which had been to the fore in challenging globalisation – alongside chauvinistically asserting national and religious identities.

    The political quiescence of the radical left in a period of authoritarian lockdowns led by rapacious global corporations arrived following the defeats of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and a concomitant decline in investigative journalism. Fresh from seriously undermining Corbyn with bogus charges of antisemitism, the once-progressive Guardian became a leading conduit for fearmongering coverage of COVID-19. It now provides fawning interviews with Bill Gates, whose Foundation subsidises the newspaper.

    Nonetheless, in the era of the internet political allegiances retain a tribal dimension that can be exploited. Thus, at the outset of the pandemic when lockdowns were first mooted many identifying as left-wing assumed that in ‘following the science’ and/or ‘listening to the experts’ they would be preventing the medical system from collapsing.

    But as the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris put it: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    In fact, from the outset there were huge divisions, and arguments, in the scientific community over the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports. But these debates were largely concealed from public view through online censorship of authoritative academic sources.

    2020 was also the year of the U.S. Presidential election during which the Democrats used the pandemic as a weapon against incumbent Populist President Donald Trump, who actively antagonised those identifying as left-wing.

    In order to defeat Trump, the Democrat establishment seems to have entered a Faustian Pact with Big Tech, ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and Big Pharma.

    One still hears partisan support for vaccines against COVID-19 being expressed by those identifying as left-wing. Most seem oblivious to the world’s ten richest men doubling their fortunes during the period, while the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fell; besides the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies.

    It is axiomatic that young people are drawn to idealistic ‘left-wing’ ideas – any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head. This was also the cohort that would be most difficult to persuade to take a vaccine.

    Therefore, apart from allaying individual health concerns, taking a COVID-19 vaccine was sold as an exercise in civic virtue. Hold outs were decried as selfish and put other people’s lives at risk, even unAmerican, while ‘anti-vaxxers’ were portrayed by a prominent (however hypocritical) left-wing ideologue Fintan O’Toole as a motley crew of ‘egoists, paranoiacs and fascists.’

    Generally ignored in this coverage is in that in the U.S. vaccination rates lagged among people of colour, and that leaders of the Black Lives Matters movement were steadfastly opposed to vaccine passports.

    ‘We Realised We Could’

    In a revealing interview with The Times Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, whose unpeer-reviewed paper in March, 2020 proved pivotal – ‘due to the professor’s WHO ties’ – to the introduction of lockdowns in the U.K. and elsewhere, revealed amazement at the influence he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he 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.’

    “Getting away” with imposing lockdowns – that appear to be causing ongoing excess deaths – was predicated on the assumption that a vaccine, or vaccines, against COVID-19 would be invented within eighteen months or longer.

    A subsidised vaccine against COVID-19 would be all the more lucrative if it was not simply a one-off treatment, and as long as states were offering a captive market, through coercion if necessary.

    It also represented a unique opportunity to trial new technologies. Unsurprising, the industry, and their supporters, were highly resistant to any suggestion of a safe, off-patent treatment being used instead.

    Since the nineteenth century, the pharmaceutical industry has been implicated in a host of scandals, including the recent opioid epidemic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, dean of Harvard Medical School concluded in 1860 that ‘if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the seas, it would be all the better for mankind – and the worse for the fishes.’

    Moreover, in a history charting advances in longevity, The Changing Body (2012), Floud et al argue that ‘it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it.’

    Of course medications such as antibiotics continue to save many lives, but as David Healy put it ‘we are living off scientific capital accumulated in an earlier age.’

    Peter C. Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre has argued that the industry’s conduct today closely resembles organized crime syndicates. He wrote perceptively: ‘Drugs always cause harm. If they didn’t, they would be inert and therefore unable to give any benefit.’

    A recently published work entitled The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research (2020) by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry argues:

    Pharmaceutical spin doctors are the contemporary counterparts of the sophists of fifth century Greece. The essence of sophistry is to shape public opinion by skilful mastery of persuasive speaking without regard for any considerations of truth. Pharmaceutical marketing is a form of sophistry, whereby the serious attempt to discover efficacy or safety in medicine is subjugated to the goal of promotion. Medical rhetoric has usurped medical science – an embarrassment in an age allegedly devoted to evidence-based medicine (p.126).

    Qualitatively Different

    Attitudes to the COVID-19 vaccines were also scaffolded on tried and tested paediatric vaccines against common infectious diseases such as measles. Parents are encouraged to vaccinate their kids not just for their own sake, but for the sake of all children.

    The COVID-19 vaccines were, however, from the outset qualitatively different to most traditional vaccines, which generally produce a herd immunity that diminishes childhood morbidity – and even mortality – from infectious diseases, notwithstanding at times spurious claims of adverse reactions.

    All COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ produced so far are qualitatively different to most – with rare exceptions – traditional vaccines that are designed to prevent an infection from occurring.

    At the very least, one would have expected the trials to determine whether a COVID-19 vaccine would seriously diminish illness; yet as British Medical Journal associate editor Peter Doshi observed in October, 2020: ‘The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.’

    He continued:

    None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

    Moreover, the companies were busy covering their tracks, meaning efficacy, and long-term safety data, would be difficult to determine. In January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. Yet Doshi and Light argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    The information in the public domain was easily manipulated by servile media. In April, 2021 a Lancet article by Ollario et al referred to the ‘elephant (not) in the room’, wherein vaccine efficacy was being reported overwhelmingly in terms of a relative risk reduction. This gives percentages of around 95% efficacy, whereas the absolute risk reduction of developing a serious illness was in the region of just 1%.

    Importantly, relative risk reduction only considers ‘participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population.’

    Peter Doshi has since publicly argued these ‘products which everyone calls MRNA vaccines are qualitatively different from standard vaccines.’

    Whistleblower

    In November, 2021, Paul D. Thacker in the British Medical Journal brought to light a whistleblower’s account of poor practices at a contract research company carrying out Pfizer’s trials. Brook Jackson raised questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight which, once again, gained little or no traction in mainstream ‘progressive’ media.

    The real scandal is that often coercive attempts to persuade the entire adult – and in many cases child – population was not based on a cost-benefit analysis.

    Recently, a peer reviewed article in Vaccine – the premier journal for vaccine research – found the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with a 16% higher risk of serious adverse events.

    The study was limited to an analysis of trial data the companies had submitted to the FDA and did not evaluate the vaccines’ overall harm-benefit. The authors argue that

    The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.

    A young, healthy person faces a vanishing risk of hospitalisation from COVID-19.

    However, throughout the pandemic industry-aligned ‘fact checking’ initiatives served to undermine scientific integrity. The tactic of so-called fact checkers is to highlight absurd claims from random sources that serve to undermine informed criticism of the lockdown-mask-vaccine policy.

    Apart from its political ramification, the vaccine was, and is, a cash cow. It is instructive that the AstraZeneca vaccine, which in an apparent appeal to left wing sentiment was to be sold ‘at cost’, never received U.S. authorisation, and the manufacturers have since announced that it will be sold for a profit.

    The failure to interrogate vested interests reflects a serious decline in contemporary journalism, especially from publications previously associated with progressive viewpoints, many of which now depend on philanthro-capitalist handouts. We have reached an absurd juncture where a centibillionaire such as Bill Gates is attacked for being ‘left-wing’.

    Sell to Anyone

    The COVID-19 pandemic realised former Merck CEO’s Henry Gadsden dream of making drugs for healthy people, which Merck would be able to ‘sell to anyone’, as he candidly revealed to Fortune magazine in the 1970s.

    This could not have been achieved without the active collaboration of technology corporations and stakeholder capitalism in an era of surveillance capitalism. The censorship and disinformation used to bring the world to a halt in 2020, and beyond, represents a unique attack on democracy and worked to the benefit of a global financial elite.

    As Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry anticipated ‘the ideal of an open, democratic society is threatened by an oligarchy of corporations’ (p.23).

    However, at least much of the evidence that was used to permit coercion is slowly being decoded by investigative journalists such as Paul D. Thacker and research scientists of the calibre of Peter Doshi. We can remain optimistic that the truth will eventually out, at least on the margins, despite continued social media censorship.

    Nonetheless, the willing dissemination of disinformation in once-reputable publications has been increasingly normalised. Thus, the first and enduring casualty of the war in Ukraine has been the truth.

    On September 10, 2022 the Guardian reported that ‘the much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive was a disinformation campaign to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s special forces have said.’ Strikingly, the authors do not refer to the Guardian previously publicising that disinformation.

    COVID-19 generated a conveyor belt of disinformation that has cast doubt over the reliability of contemporary journalism, and revealed how medico-scientific discourse can be captured by vested interests. It is vital for the future of humanity, as we confront environmental challenges, warfare and crushing poverty that scientific rigour, coupled with values that can be traced to Aristotle, are reasserted.

    Feature Image: Black Lives Matter demonstration in Oakland, California, December 2014.

  • North as Religious Experience

    And the people came from far,
    And they came from near,
    To see the troubadours.
    From ‘The Troubadours‘ by
    Van Morrisson.

    I – Lockdown Daze

    I was strung out on the bed, for the zillionth time, listening to a Van Morrison record. For a large part of the lockdown Van’s music played over and over. I walked the driveway at Glenstal Abbey in the evenings with my dogs, mostly in dark. And most of the time, I would side with Van: his music luring me into the ‘viaduct of a dream.’

    The lockdown isolation was anything but a lightning rod for the imagination; but music was a panacea for the humdrum banality of days lurching into each other. Music satiated my thoughts as I wandered up a driveway originally designed by the Barrington family in the nineteenth century. The same estate was handed over to the Irish state in the 1920s and handed over to the Catholic Church later. It is now Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine monastery and elite boarding school for boys.

    Every day I walked the dogs, one a mature border collie, the other a young puppy of the same breed, to the top of the driveway, I imagined a different century. I would enter the ‘viaduct of a dream’ Van sings about on ‘Astral Weeks’, the song from the album of the same name that has been my guiding light since my teens.

    And to further escape the banality of lockdown my mind would conjure up a time when the young mistress of Glenstal, Winnie Barrington, rode her horse along the driveway, her friend following on a bicycle, en route to Newport.

    There she would encounter the notorious Black and Tan officer, Ronald Biggs and his entourage. They would drive to their death at Coolboreen in Tipperary – killed in a rebel ambush during the War of Independence. Winnie had worked as a nurse during WWI in London, and her savage death – many believe – sparked the familial retreat.

    And as the spirit of Winnie’s seemed, for me, to linger somewhere on the landscape, pushing into my thoughts, Van’s focus on rebirth on the song ‘Astral Weeks’ was like a sumptuous call to the imagination. It triggered my desire to escape the lockdown boredom. I would imagine Winnie, a woman gunned down a century before (May 21st 1921) engulfing the spirit of a puppy called Janey Mac.

    Janey Mac.

    Janey Mac, a gift from a friend the previous September, was a handful for six months. Border collies are such energetic, intelligent dogs that to raise one is not entirely different to raising a child. A certain level of care and attention is required. They push you to your limits, bite at your ankles at dawn, chew treasured sofas, display an incessant need to engage everything in sight. And then, just as you begin to reach the tether of your wit, along comes a lifelong companion, attentive to every need.

    The tarantula becomes a soul mate, as close to you as a family member. The rain kept pouring down as the dogs pulled me along the former Barrington Estate. I imagined the ghost of a woman dead almost a hundred years to the day passing into the soul of a little collie pup. ‘Could you find me,’ Van sang, ‘could you kiss-a my eyes, lay me down, silence easy, to be born again.’ ‘Born again’? As the Indian mystics say.

    Winnie Barrington.

    The same evening, I was sprawled on my bed, having just finished a short manuscript that gave expression to these ideas in prose. The manuscript weaved the facts of the assassination on Winnie and Biggs a century prior, into a tapestry of the imagination.

    Janey would embody the young mistresses’ ghost, and I would bear witness to rebirth: the phrase ‘to be born again’ simmering in my thoughts as I walked the driveway each day. In my mind it was no mere coincidence my daily walk with a puppy in tow was taking place a century after the ambush had led to the young woman’s untimely death: it was an arrow pointed in my direction from the angel of history. I would tell her story in my own way.

    I would draw inspiration from music. I lay on the bed googling upcoming Van Morrison concerts, as answers began to trickle in on-screen. For some reason I purchased – tired and wine sodden – and with an electronic swish of the hand, two tickets for a rescheduled festival gig in Derry that coming November. It was still months away. The Delta Wave was consuming the airwaves and the pandemic seemed never-ending. I was nervous. For two years I had been working from home, with intermittent days on site. I was a natural extrovert confined to a small circle of contacts.

    Most of my free time at this time – mostly in the early hours of the day – was taken up writing interconnected stories about the border collies in my life. The second, From This World, is a fiction woven from within the ‘viaduct of a dream’ – the imagined life that hovered like a ghost over the surrounding landscape. I would travel back in time, back to an Ireland before independence – ­when corncrakes sung out in nearly every valley – and when vast swathes of land lay unclaimed by commerce.

    Along the driveway the dial on my phone would always seem to congregate on the name Van Morrison; ‘Crazy Love’, ‘St Dominic’s Preview,’ ‘Sweet Thing’; songs that directed my thought to the story of Winnie like an obsession that would not relent until her death made its way onto the page. I sourced material from journals, sought people from the village from whom the story had been passed as a product of myth as much as truth, visited her grave in the cemetery. I even hovered around the Church of Ireland in Abington thinking of her playing with friends before Sunday service.

     

    Abington’s Church of Ireland church.

    In the end, the limitations of the factual confronted me. No matter how much rooting I did, how many articles I read, the same hollowed truth edged out: we must always imagine certain details of the past. In uncovering the myths of the ambush, piecing together reasons for Winnie’s motivation in travelling that day into a text worth reading, I would set upon the same thing set upon plodding through the fields listening to ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’: imagination. I imagined Van wandering the streets of San Francisco, thinking of home. Suddenly, a sign for a forthcoming mass dedicated to peace in Northern Ireland at the Church of St. Dominic appears.

    Entrenched in thought, mystery overcomes him: someone, irrespective of religion, is thinking of his home in a corner of the world. ‘It’s a long way to Belfast city too’ he will later write, San Francisco and Belfast City edging close together in his heart. All around him is a banal conformity, preying on the modern urban city.

    Some otherness of spirit has materialised in this unforseen act of care: prayers offered in a distant church for the Troubles in his homeland. Years later, as if these prayers have been answered, a US envoy helps to broker peace in Northern Ireland. And around the same time, I begin to suspect, Van starts to think about the album he will call The Healing Game. The album is a much-heralded return to form for the singer; a compelling vision of healing in its many forms.

    I was on a long journey through a catalogue of music while dreaming of a dead woman, letting each of Van’s albums spark new ways to think about landscape. The Waiting Game played a role. Alone in my thoughts one evening the first side played through. The song ‘Waiting Game’ shuffled into the light with its recognizable harmonica. ‘I am the observer who is observing’ ushered forth in those enticingly vague lyrics, giving no indication that the song is anything but a personal lament. Perhaps Van is passaging through middle age, seeking ‘the presence deep within you.’ But it is the same presence he calls ‘higher flame,’ in possible reference to the wait for peace in Northern Ireland.  Here’s the thing: it was a spiritual quest I identified with in these songs; a yearning to connect with something beyond the material grist. Is it possible the goal of Van’s search in song is the same thing that I was yearning for?

    In the early days of the pandemic, before Winnie’s story gelled in my mind with the music of Van Morrison, I spoke for some amount of time with a priest about the effects of isolation; the wave of destruction he believed would result from delayed grief. We stood outside a church in conversation.

    My thoughts began to drift back to a time when I had stood in a funeral parlour, shaking hands with the different people who came to pay their respects. My hands were so badly blistered after. Yet the procession of people, their faces contorted in shock, was a panacea for the grief that would begin to manifest in the months that followed. What might have happened without that show of tradition unique to Ireland and its culture, I thought? A delay of sorts. A drift into unfettered pain: a world without others to soften a fall?

    The faces that evening were pillows laid out in time. When removed a body would fall on a cold floor. These thoughts came to me outside a church while I was talking about death with the priest of a religion I no longer practiced, each of us struggling with the covid restrictions in our own interminable way. Our two-bit conversation brought some relief from the sudden descent into a half-life of zoom classes and waited upon DHL deliveries. At that time my social life consisted of one weekly outing: a trip to a supermarket to see those waiting in line.

    Then something strange happened during the lockdown. I was listening to Van Morrison records when Van began speaking out about lockdowns and restrictions on musicians. Rolling Stone ran a story about Van as anti-lockdown.

    Then Van took to YouTube in defense of his views. The comments below his video post unfolded in a spew of hate. He was selfish, inconsiderate in wanting to play live music. He was working on Latest Record Project, a record with a considerable number of protest songs rallying against the state’s incursions into his life.

    For Van, the lockdown policy was a gross overreach, an intervention he felt lacked scientific proof. Fair enough, I thought at the time. Our world is made of different points of view. But then I began to think about these statements in relation to my own frustrations. Was it really that strange that a seventy-five-year-old old man wanted – in whatever way possible – to play live during a pandemic?

    ‘Stay home, stay safe’ was the public health moto of the time but it was far too obtuse in the way it equated isolation with being safe, particularly at a time when the WHO called isolation a major killer. So much public health policy in the period leading up to that time had focused on ageism: attempts to determine a person’s value based on age alone. Van was ageing. He wanted to play the music that defined his profession. Like me, he found it frustrating to stay away from others. Beyond everything, I admired his honesty in speaking.

    But suddenly Van’s name brought the baggage of Covid 19 politics to bear on pop music. Lifelong fans dumped his catalogue in a show of partisanship. Van called out Northern Ireland health minster Robin Swann for intervening in his life. He did not help himself when a video began to circulate of him cavorting with Ian Paisely jnr. in a Belfast hotel. Undoubtedly irked by the ban on music events in Northern Ireland, maybe at his age, I thought, time was slipping away.

    Each minute away from the stage was an incursion into a life of music. Was this selfishness? Was it a lack of concern for those who believed we could defy the virus? Or was his decision to risk his health to perform music for others something eminently admirable in him? I lay on the bed thinking about this, as the needle dropped on a cover of Van’s ‘Sweet Thing’ by The Waterboys from the album Fisherman’s Blues. Then, all at once, the next song played. ‘Strange Boat’ seemed to reach from the past into the present:

    We’re living in a strange time
    Working for a strange goal
    We’re living in a strange time
    Working for a strange goal

    And then – of course – the conclusion:

    We’re turning flesh and body into soul

    Things then began to click. At Abington cemetery the epitaph ‘here lies all that could die of Winifred Frances Barrington’ appeared on a newly renovated gravestone. Flesh and bone withered away, leaving something of a ‘soul’? It was an ephemeral quality that had lost currency in our time. And just as The Waterboys turned their strange times into a spiritual quest, it felt I was searching – not even consciously so – for something eternal in a world defined by fear. It was fear directed at a future point; a time that might never even materialise as real. Every evening I walked into the blanket darkness of the pandemic night, the ghost of a dead woman breathed down upon me. I moved into the ‘viaduct of a dream.’ It began to dawn on me I was searching for something that had yet to die, something known in the vernacular as soul. ‘Chambois, cleaning all the windows’, I heard Van sing on ‘Saint Dominic’s Preview’ – a metaphor he returns to on mid-career masterpiece ‘Cleaning Windows’ — before stressing, ‘singin’ songs about Edith Piaf’s soul.’ Maybe Van’s window cleaner is a soul seeker, I thought, cleaning away the grime that prevents us from seeing clearly?

     

    In my imagination Van was standing on a Derry stage singing ‘Cleaning Windows’, the lights shining down. Love, labour, the transcendence sought after in the blues dwindled into rock n roll bliss. Is there a beter celebration of pop as a panacea for the ills of working-class life, I imagined, than a song about a window cleaner who dreams of Jimmy Rodgers? Perhaps not?

    The song, beyond all of Van’s songs, concerns perseverance in the mundane: physical labour typical of urban life. As I started to dream of a journey North, passing from County Limerick to County Derry, passing along the stonewalls of Galway and Mayo, against the looming shadow of Ben Bulben, a crystalline image of a window cleaner formed in my mind. The image ushered me back to a summer spent packing tiles in a Bavarian factory. Loneliness and boredom marked each passing day. What did I dream of then? Was it music? Love? Was it the desire to turn flesh and body into soul?

    All the time away from family and friends during the never-ending pandemic impacted upon on me to such a degree I yearned for some kind of mystical experience: a kind of commune. On ‘Deadbeat Saturday Night’ Van gives voice to a similar craving, a yearning to escape the daily grist and to finally to sing for others. ‘I’m alone, telephone, virtual reality,’ he bristles angrily, ‘it’s no life, no gigs, no choice, no voice.’

    Latest Record Project is made up of protest songs slammed by critics. More online criticism surfaced on its release. Van was called an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist etc. There was even talk of burning his records. It was difficult to express a judgment of Latest Record Project without succumbing to the politics of the pandemic: the pro or anti binary regarding lockdown.

    Rarely had the politics of popular music been so intensely focused on a singular point of view in my lifetime. One evening during the lockdown – long before I began contemplating journeying North – I looked for inspiration in old live albums, turning eventually to Nirvana’s Unplugged.

    As the album played out, all knowledge of the junkie Kurt Cobain became in later life, prisoner of his body, seemed to dissipate in a moment of soul. Beyond the opprobrium of fame and celebrity, beyond the cravings of a drugged body, was a sense of peace. ‘I formulate infinity,’ Kurt sings on the band’s sumptuous cover of The Meat Muppet’s ‘Oh, Me’ cushioning the lines by saying ‘and store it deep inside me.’ Years after death something like a soul still resided as the aura of the physical record: the infinite.

    II – Northbound

    You were only waiting for this moment to be free..
    ‘Blackbird’
    The Beatles.

    The night before the journey North I had two dreams. Both would resurface in my consciousness when driving the next day. In the first dream I was walking in a forest. A metal object in the shape of a breast stared up at me. I turned to look around, peering through the gap in the trees, as the sun made its way in through the branches. A bird swooped down upon me, its lifeforce fading in my presence.

    I picked up the body to see if it was dead, before attempting to replace its breast with the metal object that had been left on the ground. But I was unable to make the object work. Instead, I ran home in tears.

    In the second of the dreams, I was lying on a steel bed in a room that formed part of an office in a university accommodation. Several staff members were welcoming me onto a campus in a country that seemed to be somewhere in Eastern Europe. I mentioned that the lodgings were perfect for my stay and that I planned to stretch my legs. The others got up to leave the room, smiling at me, saying goodbye in a broken English. No sooner had they gone than a sudden urge of excitement – one that travel brings – overcame me. I got up from the bed, grabbed my jacket, and checked around for my keys. I tentatively opened the door to discover the apartment was on ground level, situated at the center of an old Roman university. The door opened to a sea of students moving at pace. They were all bunched together into groups, in deep conversation.

    There was something unusual about the second dream: none of the students wore face coverings. There were just faces, of which no two are the same. It was a thought that heralded my waking up: no two are the same. Life had returned to normal. The lockdown was over. I was on route to Derry, thinking of where to stay in Sligo and of what to do while in Donegal.

    Once I got to Ballyboffey a friend would drive us to Derry. Everything was planned to get to the gig on time but the dreams, so incredibly different in tone, troubled me. I mulled over their content pushing into a turbulent sky. The dying blackbird had brought such sadness I immediately fled the forest of my dream.

    In contrast, the second dream brought some elation. All the months of isolation, unable to identify the faces of people I met in shops, relented into antithetical bliss. Were the dreams an oracle of the future? A wish? And if so, was the blackbird shorn of its essence? Why did faces bring such elation? What did it mean? The time I had spent thinking through the two contrasting dream sequences passed quickly when driving. Then it appeared on the landscape like it always does: a signal of majesty in the land.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Ben Bulben towers over the county of Sligo like a beached whale. It interrupts all movements of the gaze. We stand aghast in its shadow. Once it appears the mystery of the landscape also makes itself known.

    As you follow the sign for Bundoran, when bypassing Sligo, Ben Bulben meets your every gaze. I had planned to walk at Mullaghmore, before pulling into a B&B for the night. But no sooner had I arrived at the car park and stepped out of the car to begin walking, then along came a torrential downpour.

    Image (c) Fellipe Lopes

    It was near impossible to appreciate the views. An elderly woman, decked out in the gear needed to survive the weather, saluted at me while walking with her dog. ‘Not a bad day for a walk’ she said smiling. But I was soaked to the bones, and my jacket was still battling hard to resist the rain. I saluted back at the lady before closing the car door and taking a deep breath. I was glad to escape the weather. Twenty minutes later I drove through a village that, because of the rain, was difficult to make out by name: not knowing whether I had ventured into the North (as Donegal is known in the vernacular). Usually, it is clear: hillside sheep signal an untrammeled beauty in your midst.

    It was at that point a small B&B sheltering a little shebeen-like pub appeared on my eye line. Both establishments seemed like variations on traditional cottage style, devoid of the thatch roof typical of pre-nineteenth century builds (signifiers of an older time persisting in the present).

    I rang the B&B bell a few times before a hunched over woman suddenly appeared inside the door. Her mask concealed a smile, her soft Northern brogue welcoming in tone. A room on the ground floor was available for a night, she said, and a Chinese takeaway would open in the village at seven.

    The pub didn’t do food since reopening, apart from toasted sandwiches, and there was no restaurant in the vicinity. If it was cooked food I was after – I think she meant a gastropub – I would have to drive to Donegal town. Whatever the name of the village – and I didn’t want to know given the point of the journey was to cultivate uncertainty – drinks followed by a takeaway seemed more than an ideal proposition.

    I had a shower in the room, changed clothes and did a little jig to celebrate the unknown breaking through the habitual. The jig was designed to augur in the wrenching back of a spontaneity from the clutches of the Covid pandemic. I was at the pub in minutes, ready to forget the rain.

    It took me some time to locate the cert adopted for pubs and restaurants by the Irish government, before I stumbled in the door. Since the restrictions were introduced, I had hardly ventured near a pub, feeling a certain unease with everything: the virus and the regulations.

    Maybe it was a distrust of authority, a yearning for the old ways. But once I had opened the door, expecting to see one or two people, the artificial light was blinding, like it was battling the darkening of winter. A young man – with a moustache and a Kangal hat turned the wrong way around – appeared on my right behind the bar. A sprightly young woman was stood beside him. The bar was full of drinkers in breach of the protocols. My instinct was to turn away, but the occasion lured me in. It was a ‘life before’ that called to me.

    On the bar counter baskets of sandwiches were sitting beside baskets of cooked food. It seemed like I had interrupted a party. There were people standing at tables, sandwich and sausages baskets untouched, yet no television or music was on that would distract from conversation.

    The lights were blinding bright. I crept to the bar, trying to blend in as best I could. Faces turned in my direction: I was taken aback by the groups of people together. It was like stepping back in time. And then the occasion made itself known. I had arrived at some kind of Irish wake. A blown-up photograph of a man’s face was placed at the cabinet bar.

    It was the familiar that me pushed me in the door. I would come to learn of the man in the photograph’s fate when ordering my first drink, once it had seemed ok to intrude. The people at the bar welcomed me in without any fuss. Although difficult to understand the brogue, to adjust to the old way of life – a culture temporarily replaced with the public health protocols of the Covid pandemic – that had vanished to such a degree in the years that had passed since the pandemic began, I settled in at the bar. It was just folk waking the dead in the only way they knew. Soon I was helping them on their way.

    Public houses, bars subject to much criticism during the years of the pandemic, saw purpose return as a place of communion. We come to drink and remember. We come to raise a glass to the eternal: the soul that lives on after death. A local GAA man, wearing a green and yellow Donegal scarf, returned from the toilet to take his seat beside me. He spoke about a ‘wild sadness’ that had befallen the village.

    But, in truth, it was not all sadness. It was a scene I understood: a ritual of sorts. To raise a glass is to say – in the gesture of a tradition – ‘we miss you.’ You, the other person, one of a community transcending the ‘I.’ The time that I spent in the pub was a sort of unexpected gestural confirmation of what the journey North was meant to affect. All the isolation of the previous months gave way to something immeasurable. I stayed to hear about the man in the photograph; to hear he left the pub in good spirits; waving goodbye to his friends in good health. He was known all around for his wit, the numerous pranks he liked to pull on friends.

    The man’s face stayed with me as an image waiting in the rain beside the local Chinese takeaway in a village that name of which I cannot recall. As I write now, I wonder did the village exist? Did the pub exist?  Or had a dream taken the place of reality?

    Two friends had passed away during the pandemic. When news broke, I walked country roads trying to repress a desire to jump in the car and drive; to pay respects in whatever capacity possible. On one occasion, my group of friends took to a Zoom meeting as a virtual substitute for the pub experience. We wanted to raise a glass to a friend, celebrate his life. But the screen meant to connect people seemed to contradict the message it was meant to impart.

    Cut off from the other, material bodies were mere images, dependent on the vagaries of a Machine. At any point the connection could break, the face of another no longer visible. Presence is shadowed by an imminent threat of absence: a void that can swallow up the connection at any given time.

    I returned to the B&B with a fried rice in one hand and my phone in the other. In the distance Ben Bulben bore down like a God of the mountains. There was such a mystique to its presence: a gateway into the sublime landscape of the Northwest. When driving the same landscape the next day, bypassing Donegal town in the process, I took the decision to stop at Murvagh Beach. I wanted to gaze across the terrain – so impressive in reach – at the cliffs of Slieve League.

    In more accessible counties, the cliffs would attract huge numbers. The morning was taken up in conversation with the proprietor of the B&B, a retired lady in her late 60s, over cups of tea. She said the cliffs viewed from Murvagh are the biggest in Europe.

    A few hours later I was waiting in my friend’s car outside Jackson’s Hotel in Balyboffey for him to return. A river bridge was at my rear, like a postcard. Its autumnal colour seemed designed for the gaze. Tommy would drive that evening, once we had eaten. The last stage of the journey North would see us lost in conversation. Time would pass unnoticed. Darkness soon began to cover the night as our car moved from country roads into Derry’s urban décor, a contrast to the distant bogside. We passed by the new developments along the river, before a P sign stood out for a carpark Tommy said was in walking distance of the Theatre. Once we had parked and arrived at the Theater, the concert goers were waiting outside, ready to enter.

    The venue was practically full when Van and his band arrived on stage. Van was a diminutive figure who had lost a significant amount of weight. He was an elderly man with renewed purpose. From our balcony seats we could gaze at the band from ahigh. Wearing black sunglasses and a trilby hat, Van had the aura of a singer finally given back a stage; happy to know he could do his job again.

    For the duration of the show, he just leapt from song to song, never speaking directly to the audience. He began the gig by playing songs from his most recent album, all – to some degree – commentaries on the stay-at-home orders he was so critical of. But he then went on to play a load of songs from his back catalogue that drew me in so many different directions. ‘Sometimes We Cry’ was a cue for joy, Van moving between numerous instruments during the song, his saxophone like a magical wand.

    Awe of a sort arrived with ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go,’ drifting into a rendition of Muddy Waters’ ‘Got My Mojo Working,’ signaling that we were witness to a great blues musician and testament to a lasting tradition. It was also testament to the power of live music, a feeling the performance of ‘Cleaning Window’ confirmed. I had played the song repeatedly throughout Covid, trying to harness the pleasure of labour and music in our youth. But it soon began to dawn on me, however, as I gazed upon an elderly man singing ‘what’s my life?’ that Van was asking his audience an important question. Is to sing for people – nothing more – a source of our being?

    It was the affecting moment the journey North was intended for: the words ‘no 36’ sang in a soothing Belfast twang. Van has a singular (as an artist) ability to alter intonation to maximize lyrical affect. The way he sings ‘No. 36’ in a Northern accent is one example. But there are many. ‘Angelou’ builds by way of difference and repetition, ‘in the month of May, in the city of Paris’ repeated with intonation amplified each time.

    The music, all the while, builds in tempo. Van left that evening after two hours performing on stage, departing the scene with an affirming rendition of a song that personifies the above-mentioned lyrical affect: ‘Gloria.’ Once he had left the stage the band members went solo for a few minutes. The crowd then began to clap and sing along with the remaining musicians, shouting ‘G-l-o-r-i-a’ in something of a fervour. I looked around, thinking, for no reason, of Winnie, of Janey, of lockdowns and isolation. Then a strange sensation came over me: a grandiose feeling of hope.

    In 1978, ten years after the release of Astral Weeks legendary music critic Lester Bangs wrote,

    My social contacts had dwindled to almost none; the presence of other people made me nervous and paranoid. I spent endless days and nights sunk in an armchair in my bedroom, reading magazines, watching TV, listening to records, staring into space. I had no idea how to improve the situation and probably wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had.

    Lester’s reflections chimed with my own experiences during the stay-at-home policies of the pandemic. The famous critic found in Astral Weeks something of a spiritual retreat: an album that helped release him from paranoia’s clutches. Lester’s was a dilapidating malaise, a condition pushing body and soul into competing realms.

    Astral Weeks was a Godsend. The album helped him to live again. It was a cold and dark winter night when we left the Millennium Theatre once the concert had ended. There was a film crew in situ outside, shooting the latest series of the TV show Derry Girls set in the city. The night, nonetheless, seemed to glisten with possibility. ‘It’s the great search,’ I thought, recalling those writings on Astral Weeks, ‘fuelled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable.

    Or may at least be glimpsed.’ Illumination, a glimpse of the divine, seemed more than abstraction. Maybe, faithful to Lester’s experience, I too had glimpsed something of the divine, without really knowing, like watching a firefly moving in the sky at dawn.

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  • A Variety of Voices

    ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’
    Vincent Mercier on his editor at The Bell Sean O’Faoláin.

    In this second and final instalment, Frank Armstrong reviews Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices edited by Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin this year.

    It follows his review of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    This book delves deeper into the canon of dissenting Irish journalism and weighs up the consequences of the arrival of the internet for critical journalism in this country.

    Digital Flood

    John Horgan observes in Great Irish Reportage (Random House, Penguin, London, 2013) that ‘Writing about current events will have been transformed by the rise of digital media in ways we can only guess at.’ This may seem an obvious statement, but we can surely hazard a guess as to some consequences for journalism that goes against the grain, in particular.

    If the invention of the printing press in Europe in 1450 germinated a diverse range of ideologies and religions, signs are a distracted and smart-phone-addicted civilisation arising out of the technological rupture of the Internet is inclining towards homogeneity and conformity – not least in terms of the sub-Americana patois increasingly mouthed in the Podcast-verse.

    Thus, we have just witnessed widespread uniformity in the response of governments around the world to Covid-19, as dominant – group-thinking – academic scientists, doctors, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies harnessed traditional and social media to manufacture consent for unprecedented curbs on civil liberties to contend with a contagious respiratory pathogen.

    We may argue into the night over whether the response was right or wrong, proportionate or disproportionate, motivated by mamon or otherwise, but no one can now doubt the global reach of digital power, controlled especially from Silicon Valley. A latter-day Napoleon would not consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets. Rather he would surely recognise the capacity of social media to mould opinions and frame political choices: concluding the algorithm to be mightier than the best opinion writer.

    Moreover, the profound challenges legacy publications contend with pale in comparison to that faced by dissenting journalism that in Ireland has generally appeared in the marginal periodicals explored in these reviews.

    Thus, the editors of A Variety of Voices find it ‘hard to envisage that it will be possible – or profitable, in intellectual or any other terms – for historians of the future to compile two volumes on twenty-first century Irish periodicals like we have done on the twentieth-century ones.’

    Contemporary dissenting journalism that is not dependent on the financial largesse – and whims – of wealthy institutions and individuals faces extinction. This point is driven home by the recent demise of www.broadsheet.ie, a resolutely independent news and satirical website, representing no fixed political abode, apart from exhibiting a deep suspicion of state and corporate institutions that left it subject to charges of being informed by conspiracy theories, but which on a number of occasions displayed a willingness to publish purportedly defamatory material that mainstream publishers shied away from.

    Revealingly, the recently published Tolka – ‘a journal of formally promiscuous non-fiction’ – displays the logo of the Arts Council. A first edition lacks any obvious political intent, and hosts among other contributions a whimsical essay by Irish Times funny man Patrick Freyne on the origins of his attachment to list-making. It contains no advertising, so we may safely assume it will last as long as its annual grant applications proves successful.

    Other magazines funded by Arts Council in 2022 include: Banshee, €75,000; Comhar Teoranta, €46,800; Crannog Magazine, €18,000; Cyphers Magazine, €13,000; Dublin Review of Books, €25,000; The Dublin Review, €75,000; The Journal of Music, €75,000. Such magazines are not necessarily apolitical, but generally do not directly address political questions or engage in investigative journalism.

    The huge problem attendant to the public-private RTÉ model, emphasises the difficulty with the State directly funding political journalism and investigative reporting. With readers generally unwilling to pay for content, however, publishers are increasingly beholden to advertisers, including the state. This insulates powerful institutions and individuals from investigative journalism and critical commentary.

    Finding a Voice

    According to the editors A Variety of Voices the periodicals featured in their second volume ‘are mainly organs of important communities within Irish society – not always mainstream, but significant communities nonetheless that would not otherwise have a voice in Irish media.’ The authors acquaint us with important titles representing a feminist outlook that has remained distinctly marginalised until recent times, as well as publications emanating from a gay community whose sex lives were only decriminalised in 1993.

    There is also a strong analysis of myriad religious periodicals representing the full spectrum of views on the political, social and economic questions of their times. This includes the Catholic Bulletin (1911-1939) under firebrand editor Timothy Corcoran SJ as editor, who, according to Patrick Maume, considered the leader of the Blueshirts General Eoin O’Duffy insufficiently fascist.

    There are also accounts of other Jesuit publications from Declan O’Keefe that challenged the illiberalism associated with the Catholic Church in Ireland, under Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid especially; and an analysis of the shifting outlook of the Church of Ireland Gazette from Ian d’Alton.

    This volume also finds room for more contemporary publications such as the resilient Phoenix and In Dublin, although it is disappointing to find no entry for the literary and intellectual publication The Crane Bag (1979-1983) edited by Richard Kearney, and others including Ronan Sheahan; or for that matter, Envoy Magazine (1949-51) edited by the late John Ryan; although there is a passing reference to his correspondence with J.P. Donleavy, discussing the prohibitive cost of publishing.

    Ryan went on to become the author of a wonderful memoir celebrating Baggatonia, entitled Remembering How We Stood (1975). It provides intimate accounts of writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien, and a memorable description of the first Bloomsday in 1954, organised by Ryan himself along with Flann O’Brien. He was, coincidentally, the father of his namesake former editor of www.broadsheet.ie.

    In eschewing self-consciously literary publications, the authors perhaps draw too firm a line between the political and the poetic. It might suggest to a contemporary editor that the two do not mix easily, but Irish history suggests that an emulsification of forms – especially evident during the Irish Revival at the turn of the last century – animate political action. Empiricism or strictly factual journalism has its limitation, if we acknowledge as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

     

    The Fourth Estate

    This volume draws attention to a remarkable series of articles (1944-5) in The Bell by Vincent Mercier and Conor Cruise-O’Brien (under the nom de plume ‘Donat O’Donnell’) assessing the Fourth Estate in Ireland, including dominant titles the Irish Independent, Irish Times and Irish Press. Mercier also attempted to define the timeless nature of Irish humour in his assessment of Dublin Opinion.

    In his account Felix M. Larkin describes it as a ‘dramatic intervention’ for a series of articles to critically assess fellow newspapers and periodicals, including itself.’ Recalling a contemporary reluctance on the part of Irish journalists to criticise directly one another, Larkin argues that

    to dig deeper into the affairs of other organs might delegitimize the status of the press generally, diminish its influence and give ammunition to those wishing to circumscribe its freedom. There was also a certain esprit de corps within the press, notwithstanding often fierce competition between individual newspapers and periodicals – a sense of ‘dog doesn’t eat dog.

    He further opines that ‘The idea linking all six articles is that the Fourth Estate was accordingly complicit in the stagnation that followed the revolution.’

    Mercier identified the Irish Times as the newspaper of the Protestant professional classes rather than of landowners ‘the true ‘people of Burke and of Grattan’, but observed how ‘slowly but surely it is becoming the organ of the entire professional class, Protestant and Catholic.’ He characterized the politics of the Irish Times as ‘on the left’ but qualified this by intimating it had ‘its own particular brand of conservative progressivism’. He nonetheless regarded its journalism as ‘ten times more alive than its rivals in the newspaper world.’

    O’Brien argued that the Irish Independent was first and foremost a business undertaking. He observed how: ‘Middle class Catholic families who were reading the Independent ten years ago are reading the Irish Times today’. He anticipated that it might react by using ‘its commanding financial position to get better features that other papers could afford.’ One such contributor would be Cruise-O’Brien himself!

    The now defunct Irish Press – of which then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera was still the principal shareholder – was also analysed by Mercier. According to its first editorial in 1931 the publication stood ‘for independence, for the greatest temporal blessing a nation may enjoy, the full liberty of all its people … Our ideal, culturally is an Irish Ireland.’

    By the mid-1940s, however, Mercier believed ‘it could justifiably be described as ‘the Government organ’ and that it was ‘almost as closely linked with the new Big Business of Ireland as the other two daily papers’. Nonetheless, he conceded that it is ‘mainly read on its merits as a newspaper rather than on any political count.’

    The same writer also analysed the Bell itself under Sean O’Faoláin as editor. Among O’Faoláin’s uncompromising articles was one entitled ‘The Stuffed Shirts’, where he fumed: ‘[T]he final stage of the Revolution was – and is to this day – a middle-class putsch. It was not a society that came out of the maelstrom. It was a class.’

    In a refreshingly iconoclastic piece Mercier wrote of Sean O’Faoláin: ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’; but asserted that he ‘is not just a figurehead, he is the magazine.’

    In his essay ‘The Parnellism of Seán O’Faoláin’ O’Brien described O’Faoláin as ‘parochial’

    He [O’Faoláin] neither affirms nor denies anything of universal importance… His stories are illuminating about Ireland; an anthropological entertainment to the curious foreigner, an annoyance and a stimulus to the native. To Ireland, the stimulus is of great value; in a time of sleepy stimulation Mr O’Faoláin’s irascible and dissenting temperament has struggled, not without success, to preserve some honest intellectual life among his people.

    It is hard to imagine a contemporary Irish publication subjecting its own editor to such stern critical analysis.

    Irish Humour

    According to Larkin, Vincent Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition (Dublin, 1962) asserts that ‘comedy is the central tradition of Irish and Anglo-Irish literature and can be traced back to oral Gaelic roots in the ninth century.’ Mercier identified apparently timeless elements of this tradition as ‘a bent for wild humour [and] a delight in witty world play.’

    His article: ‘Dublin Opinion’s Six Jokes’ represented a foretaste of later scholarly work. These include the Civil Service Joke, which is also the Cork Joke: ‘if you took away the Corkmen, where would the civil service be? And if you took away the Civil Service, where would the Corkmen be?’

    There was also the Where Were You in 1916 Joke, the Irish Navy Joke’, emphasising its miniscule size, the ‘New Ireland Joke’, a ‘back-handed cut at the more absurd manifestations of the Gaelic Revival’; the Ourselves-As-Others-See-Us Joke, ‘usually located in Hollywood, and pigs in the kitchen generally figure in it somewhere.’

    And finally, The Farmer Joke, depicting the archetypal Irish farmer ‘filling up forms, submitting to inspection, resisting inspectors, selling his cattle, giving them away the price goes to hell etc.’

    Mercier regarded Dublin Opinion as ‘one of the most political funny papers in existence’. ‘The real secret’ he argued was its impartiality. He believed that ‘its sympathies were with the losing side [in the Civil War]’, but that it could not ‘attack those in power, who then had the majority of the people behind them. At least … if it wished to keep its circulation, or even, perhaps, some freedom of speech. On the other hand, it had no desire to persecute the unhappy Republicans.’

    However, he criticized the magazine for ‘failing to address such issues as unemployment and the Dublin slums’, at least since the end of Arthur Booth’s Cassandra-like prophecies of war and famine.’

    Fortnight

    Another important contemporary magazine covered in this edition is Fortnight, which emerged as an important voice of moderation during the Northern Ireland Troubles under the stewardship of an academic lawyer Tom Hadden in 1970. The article in A Variety of Voices was written by a former editor Andy Pollack, who reveals how he valued the opportunities it gave him to use controversial material he could not publish in ‘a more risk-averse national broadsheet newspaper’. This included accounts from the notorious Kincora boys home in east Belfast.

    At times the magazine experienced embedded resistance to its human rights advocacy, as when staunchly Unionist Lurgan printers made it clear that they did not want to continue to print it after an issue came out strongly against internment.

    Fortnight also contained one prescient critique of the Northern Ireland Peace Process from David Guelke who warned that that – unlike its South African equivalent – by concentrating on securing and sustaining ‘ceasefires by paramilitary actors at the margins’, it could actually make the situation more difficult by freezing in place ‘a Cyprus-type bloodless conflict’, where there would be ‘no incentives for cross-community collaboration’

    The publication received ‘substantial grants from the British charity the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.’ However, according to Pollack the advent of a social media – which spelt ‘the death knell for small, radical print publications everywhere’ – led to its demise. It did, however, resume publishing in September, 2020.

    Phoenix

    In his article on Phoenix Magazine Joe Breen cites a warning from Tony Harcup’s Journalism: Principle and Practice (London, 2009)] to the effect that investigative journalism, while achieving notable results might be seen as ‘perpetuating a myth that society is divided into a large number of fundamentally good people and a smaller number of fundamentally bad people’.

    Harcup asks where the investigative journalism is into structural forces in society answering: ‘Largely notable for its absence. Instead, particularly on television, we tend to have personalised stories of goodies, baddies and heroic reporters’.

    Nonetheless, the achievements of The Phoenix under the control of John Mulcahy and with Paddy Prendevilll as editor (a bulldog quality, untainted by ideology is also attributed to deputy editor Paul Farrell) in this vital sphere are arguably unsurpassed in the history Irish journalism.

    Fittingly, an Irish Times obituary describes John Mulcahy as ‘one of the most significant journalists and publishers of the last half century in this country’. Phoenix’s major scoops have included: Charles Haughey receiving £1 million from Ben Dunne; the pension of £27.6 million paid to Michael Fingleton; Father Michael Cleary fathering a child with his housekeeper; and Anglo-Irish bank being technically bankrupt

    In October 1991, Dick Spring quoted a Phoenix article at length in the Dáil. It had been pulled from the magazine when Smurfit Web Press refused to print it.

    The magazine’s investigations are still accompanied by a Private Eye-infused humour, where Breen argues ‘laddish sexual innuendos were a staple’: as with the cartoon: ‘How’s the queen?’ Queen Elizabeth: ‘Edward’s fine, thank you’. The magazine has also displayed an unusual sympathy – in an Irish journalistic context at least – for the Republican cause in Northern Ireland.

    Despite its achievements, Breen warns that that ‘it is notable that with the rise of social media, where people play fast and loose with facts, rumours and innuendo, The Phoenix has lost some of its traction.’

    Second row: Far left: Hilda Tweedy

    The Irish Housewife

    The origins of the unradical-sounding The Irish Housewife magazine can be traced to a public ‘Memorandum on the Food and Fuel Emergency’ authored by Hilda Tweedy, Andreé Sheehy Skeffington; Marguerite Skelton and Nancy Simmons in 1941. According to Sonja Tiernan they ‘drew up an economic plan urging the government to ration all essential foodstuff, control prices and supress black-market sales.’

    In response it was denigrated by journalists as ‘a housewives’ petition’. The authors appear to have inverted these prejudices by using ‘housewife’ in the title of the Association they founded, which went on to publish the magazine.

    It is instructive that after Hilda Tweedy ‘applied for a teaching job in a Protestant girls’ school, she was told that as a married woman she was unsuitable; the headmistress said it would not be nice for girls if their teacher became pregnant.’

    Importantly, according to Tiernan the Irish Housewives Association ‘had made a rather astute business deal with an advertising agency: The agency printed and distributed the magazine and in return they kept all of the advertising income.’ As articles were contributed for free it was kept at an affordable price.

    Among its contributions, Katherine Watson recorded her experiences of visiting female prisoners in Mountjoy, while George Yeats (the daughter of W.B.) published an article entitled ‘Can Your Child Draw’ in which she warned: ‘don’t be too cautious! Beware of all that restricts a child’s boldness of hand and of imagination. More is at stake than his future as an artist.’

    The advertising market began to slow down in the 1960s and by 1966 it was no longer viable for the agency to print the magazine. Nonetheless, it had provided an important outlet, and Tweedy later mused: ‘Who would have thought in 1942 that women would move from the kitchen to Áras an Uachtaráin.’

    75th Anniversary of the Easter Rising, O’Connell Street, President Mary Robinson. Source: Dublin City Library Archive.

    Status

    Signs of the rise of future President Mary Robinson’s generation of successful and ambitious women can be identified in Status Magazine, a short-lived feminist news magazine from 1981.

    Its origins lie in in the gathering of about 1,000 women and several men at a conference in Liberty Hall, which led to the founding of the magazine with Marian Finucane as editor. She was already a well-known Irish media personality. 31,500 copies of the first issue of Status were printed and these sold out quickly; yet curiously ten months later Status closed down.

    The decision to launch a magazine squarely focused on women’s rights had come from the proprietor of Magill Magazine Vincent Browne’ who said: ‘News coverage and investigative journalism from a woman’s perspective is what we are aiming for.’

    Cutting-edge reportage included Nell McCafferty writing from inside one of the mother and baby homes where single, pregnant women effectively went into hiding until their babies were born.

    One regular feature that scared advertisers was a page headed ‘No Comment’, which reproduced snippets of sexist nonsense sent in by readers including advertisements and articles from national newspaper. This included one from the Irish Times, which observed that ‘sitting TDs, Mr Eddie Collins and Mr Austin Deasy, are regarded as “Garret men”, though not fanatically so: the young and pretty Mrs Bulbulia is taken for a dedicated “Garret woman”’.

    Without adequate advertising revenue it was, however, doomed. Vincent Browne felt from the start the magazine was ‘gratuitously offensive to advertisers … There was too much sniping which antagonises people to no purpose.’ He noted that ‘marketing managers are male dominated and – dare I say it – some of them maybe, a little frightened’. Status was, he felt, a ‘bit too aggressively women’s lib’.

    According to Tiernan: ‘The usual rules did not apply: Those controlling these decisions did not want to see their advertisements in Status no matter how many educated women were buying the magazine.’ Eventually, even those stalwarts of magazine advertising – cigarette companies – abandoned ship.

    A Future for Hard Copy Journalism?

    A final word goes to John S. Doyle the former editor of In Dublin, which was inspired by Pariscope, the New Yorker and London’s Time Out. It remained largely removed from the cut and thrust of national politics, apart from assessing the planning decisions of Dublin Corporation, and then providing an outlet for the campaign against the development of Wood Quay.

    Intriguingly, Doyle revealed that

    none of the people who started In Dublin, or who came to in the first few years, considered themselves to be journalists, or had thought of that as a career. They were people who, in their different ways, wanted to write, and one of the strengths of the magazine was that it attracted so many of them.

    It may be that through some such formula – involving those with a desire and even need to write – we may revive dissenting journalism.

    The challenge may be to find a broad-based platform that is not dependent on an increasingly commercialised and censorious social media for citizen journalists to publish. In this respect we mourn the demise of www.broadsheet.ie, which showed an usual willingness to court controversy, even if this occasionally placed them in the company of characters who apparently set out to cause offense.

    A future for dissenting hard copy journalism that is not funded by an emanation of the state or philanthropy is difficult to identify, but it may be – just as music connoisseurs are now purchasing vinyl which was once considered obsolete – that readers will revert to a tangible format as the promblems with the digital medium become increasingly apparent.

     

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  • Writing Against the Grain

    This is the first of two articles occasioned by the recent publication of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices, edited by Mark O’Brien & Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin. Here, Frank Armstrong reviews the first instalment in this illuminating study, Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    In their introduction to the first volume the editors stress the importance of what were often minority publications – generally with brief lifespans – to cultural and political developments in the Irish State and beyond; describing them as ‘the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.’ Their contents often anticipated ideas and movements that would go on to gain greater popular adherence, and their varied approaches remain an inspiration to contemporary journalists.

    Movable Type.

    “More formidable than a thousand bayonets”

    Most of those living through a Print Revolution in Europe after 1450 were unlikely to have been awake to seismic changes occurring in how information was being distributed and absorbed. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention, the first of its kind in Europe, as well as increased availability of paper, foregrounded the Renaissance and Reformation; increasing literacy levels and consolidating a few dominant vernacular languages through new literary forms, especially the novel and then, increasingly, newspapers, magazines and periodicals.

    From as early as the seventeenth century newspapers, magazines and periodicals were being published. A newspaper is printed matter acknowledging – unlike haughty books – its obsolescence ‘on the morrow of its publication’[i], as Benedict Anderson put it. Ireland’s first newspaper, devoted to foreign affairs and political intelligence, The News-Letter was published in Dublin in 1685.

    By the early nineteenth, Napoleon described a journalist as ‘a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations,’ concluding that ‘four hostile newspapers are more formidable than a thousand bayonets.’ Newspapers were crucial to directing or even forging collective identities such as the nation.

    Unsurprisingly, therefore, the powerful – whether state bureaucracies or dominant corporations – have long sought to control their offerings, and by extension journalism itself, through the carrot of patronage and advertising, and the stick of censorship and outright suppression.

    Traditional newspapers are also tangible products to be sold. Thus, proprietors stimulate demand especially through headlines demanding attention. The daily cry of the newspaper boy summoned a new scare or disaster – yellow journalism has long antecedents – downplaying or ignoring certain facts, while amplifying or even inventing others; often preying on fears and prejudices, just as click bait does today.

    Becoming a Thing

    Alongside meretriciousness and outright propaganda journalism provides an opportunity for visionary – or delusional depending on your outlook – editors and writers who believe in the capacity of collections of regularly published print materials – generally containing short form articles aimed at the general public – ‘to speak truth to power’, ‘move hearts and minds’ and expose hypocrisy and corruption.

    This form of idealistic journalism most frequently appears in magazines or periodicals that may succeed in eschewing obsolescence, even if it is ‘printed on lavatory paper with ink made of soot’, as Sean O’Faolain the former editor of the Bell memorably described the low-cost approach of his publishers.

    With a longer shelf life, the magazine or periodical falls somewhere between the immediacy of the contents of newspapers and the greater durability of ideas contained within books. As Joe Breen puts in his article on Hot Press: ‘One of the great strengths of periodicals is that by operating outside the routines and demands of 24/7 news-flow, they are afforded the space and grace to react thoughtfully to events.’

    To succeed, such publications usually require the guiding hand of a charismatic, single-minded and tireless personality as editor. The social historian Edward Hyams once observed how:

    When a journal is started, a number of minds combine under the dominion of one, the editor’s, to bring it into existence … What the editor and his colleagues have to do is contrive to make such disparate materials as news, views, fiction, criticism, poetry, even competitive word-games, jell into coherence … if this be done successfully then, after… a certain number of issues, the new paper takes on a quality, which is indefinable, and which is apparent, for example, in a work of art or well-designed machine … At that point the paper, to exaggerate a little, becomes a thing…

    Thus, in their introduction to the first volume of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland the editors observe of their subject matters covered: ‘The most obvious common feature is the omnipresence within each of them of a dominant personality, or two – as editor and/or proprietor.’ The problem with such an approach is that if the guiding hand is lost these publications may struggle to endure.

    A Docile Lot

    Michael O’Toole observed that up to the 1960s in Ireland journalists had been ‘a docile lot, anxious to please the proprietor, the advertiser, the prelate, the statesman’. This era was, he argued, characterised by ‘an unhealthy willingness to accept the prepared statement, the prepared speech, and the handout without demanding the opportunity of asking any searching questions by way of follow-up.’ The fundamental defect of Irish journalism during this time was, he noted, ‘its failure to apply critical analysis to practically any aspect of Irish life.’

    Terence Brown was harsher still, noting that ‘almost all Irish journalism in the period had contented itself with the reportage of events and the propagandist reiteration of the familiar terms of Irish political and cultural debate until these categories became mere counters and slogans often remote from actualities’. While in 1935, the novelist Frank O’Connor declared that Irish daily newspapers were ‘intolerably dull’, were ‘not trying to educate the public’, and ‘trying to camouflage reality.’

    The editors of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland, however, assemble those rare, eccentric, publications ‘providing an outlet for those writing against the grain of mainstream Irish society’, who ‘made freedom of expression a reality’ and created a ‘space for diversity of opinion’.

    Importantly, they argue that ‘the influence they had via that readership was entirely disproportionate to their circulation levels and profits, if any. They were the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.’

    Prior to the Irish Revolution ultimately led, as Kevin O’Higgins memorably put it by ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’ an ideological ferment was articulated through a variety of seminal publications. Certain contemporary political strands can be traced to the twilight of the British administration in Ireland. At that point journalism was characterised by anything but the grey philistinism of the post-independence era.

    Articles by Colum Kenny, Regina Uí Chollatáin, Patrick Maume, Sonja Tiernan, James Curry and Ian Kenneally in this volume consider Sinn Féin, the United Irishman and others under Arthur Griffith’s editorship, Irish language publications such An Claidheamh Soluis edited by Eoin MacNeill, D.P. Moran’s The Leader that lasted until the early 1970s, the suffragette Irish Citizen, primarily edited by Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and James Connolly’s The Worker.

    Finally, there is The Irish Bulletin, a publication produced by the first Dáil, offering what might be described as well-intentioned propaganda – insofar as its (truthful) contents was aimed at a particular readership and served a clear strategic purpose.

    Arthur Griffith (right) with Michael Collins.

    Arthur Griffith

    James Joyce ‘said that the United Irishman was the only paper in Dublin worth reading, and in fact, he used to read it every week.’ Griffith, according to Joyce:

    was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines … A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life in Ireland … what I object to most of all in the paper [Sinn Féin] is it is educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly

    Mischievously, Joyce had a character in Ulysses claim that Bloom ‘gave the idea for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper.

    Undoubtedly, Griffith was a formative influence on Irish nationalism, and it is indicative that his paper incubated the most enduring political movement – Sinn Féin (ourselves) – on this island. This combined, at times uneasily – hence the splits – a somewhat fuzzy ethnic nationalism with a go-it-alone petit-bourgeois mentality, alongside a visceral anti-colonialism that eschewed strict ideology.

    Griffith was a bundle of contradictions. A great writer – ‘an inspired journalist who combined style and temper in a way no one else could match’ according to F.S.L. Lyons – disinterested in literature that did not strengthen the nationalist outlook. Thus, he disdained Synge’s Playboy of the Western World that dared to question certain nationalist orthodoxies.

    Moreover, Griffith wrote sympathetically about the plight of colonised Africans, while excusing his hero John Mitchel’s reactionary views on slavery. His anti-Jewish statements leave him open to a charge of antisemitism, and even proto-fascism, yet he argued in favour of a Zionist state in Israel.

    Despite highlighting poverty, Griffith was antagonistic towards international socialism, suspecting British trade unions of weakening nationalist statements. If he had lived into the 1920s, however, it is questionable whether he would have supported the free trade policies of the first Cumann na nGhaedhal administration.

    James Connolly

    Challenging Authority

    The more radical political strains that emerged at this time were less evident in the post-independence period. Nonetheless, they provided a lasting body of opinions that served as an inspiration for future movements: the fulcrums “on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.”

    According to Sonja Tiernan the suffragist Irish Citizen was ‘edited by men [notably Francis Sheehy-Skeffington] so that women could devote their energies to political campaigns’. It combined feminism with a radical pacifism that put it at odds with, among others, Emmeline Pankhurst (though not her daughter Sylvia) who supported the British government’s recruitment drive.

    Francis’s wife Hannah pointed to the sacrifice of mothers who had to ‘deliver up the sons they bore in agony to a bloody death in a quarrel of which they know not the why or the wherefore, on the particular side their Government has chosen for the moment.’

    Francis organised anti-military meetings in Dublin, at which he argued that the leader of the main nationalist party in Westminster, John Redmond, simply ‘sold Irish people to the British army for nothing’ Recalling the old nationalist cry of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity, on 23 May 1915 he declared ‘Anything that smashes and weakens England’s domination of the seas is good for Ireland. Germany has never done us any harm. The only power that has ever done us any harm is England.’

    He would be arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act, and was ultimately murdered by a deranged British officer during the 1916 Rising.

    Another revolutionary editor of this period was one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising itself, James Connolly, who would later rage about how he had been the editor of ‘the only paper in the United Kingdom to suffer an invasion of a military party with fixed bayonets and to have the essential parts of its printing machine stolen in defence of freedom and civilisation.

    According to James Curry his ‘Irish Worker was a crusading paper of vitality that adopted a forcefully direct journalistic style to ensure readers understood its stance at all times’.

    The industrialist William Martin Murphy – apparently ‘the most foul and viscous blackguard that ever polluted any country’ – was regularly in its crosshairs.

    In response to alleged German atrocities, Connolly instead concerned himself with those perpetrated by ‘capitalist barbarians’ closer to home, arguing that the Dublin housing crisis was destined to be forgotten ‘amid the clash of arms, and the spectacular magnificence of international war’.

    In his article ‘The Huns in Ireland’, which led to the paper’s suppression, he argued:

    The steadily increasing cost of the necessaries of life since the war began brings home to the mind of even the most unreflective amongst us, the utterly heartless nature of the capitalist class … The enemy is within our gates. We need fear no Hun from across the waters of the North Sea.

    It is notable that James Connolly’s anti-war rhetoric is recalled by Irish activists today.

    A group of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries outside the London and North Western Hotel in Dublin following an attack by the IRA, April 1921

    The Irish Bulletin

    To achieve independence the government of the first Dáil dedicated significant efforts to garnering sympathy from an international, including moderate British, audience by highlighting the atrocities committed by British forces: the dreaded Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. This was achieved primarily through an underground publication: The Irish Bulletin, 1919-21, which apparently caused consternation in British government ranks. Thus, in Parliament, the chief secretary for Ireland, Hamar Greenwood, claimed that ‘critics were being duped by a mendacious Irish periodical’

    Unsurprisingly perhaps, Arthur Griffith was active in its early days, but Desmond FitzGerald became a guiding influence thereafter. Its power lay in its credibility. Ernest Blythe recalled how FitzGerald:

    resisted the pressure to which he was constantly subjected from most quarters in favour of painting outrages by British forces in a blacker hue than was justified by the facts …. The result of this attitude and the personal impression that he made was that independent foreign pressmen who admired and trusted him did ten times as much to make Ireland’s case known throughout the world as would have been done if the advocates of heavy expenditure had their way or if a less transparently honest man had been in charge of propaganda.

    It goes to show that facts can speak for themselves, and that exaggeration may only diminishes a publication’s credibility.

    Taste for Comedy

    Dublin Opinion (1922-68) styled its humour the ‘safety vale of a nation’. Its relative success attests to an enduring appetite for humorous takes on serious political events, such as we still see today most obviously in publications such as Waterford Whisperers. This apparently timeless Irish tendency to laugh at absurdities on the political stage is, however, often to the exclusion of more serious assessments. Thus, Felix M. Larkin argues that Dublin Opinion‘s humour ‘concentrated on the political to the detriment of the social and economic.’

    Nevertheless, there is some truth to the couplet carried in early issues: ‘Not seldom lurks the sage’s cap and gown / Beneath the motley costume of the clown’.

    Dublin Opinion played an important role in puncturing the reputation of Eamon de Valera, scorning his ‘professed belief that he had a unique insight into what the people of Ireland wanted.’

    Larkin argues that the publication ‘probably saved proportional representation in 1959, and it inspired T.K. Whitaker to write his seminal ‘Grey Book.’

    The renowned civil servant T.K. Whitaker said that he was impelled to undertake his famous white paper the First Programme for Economic Expansion in response to the cover cartoon in the September 1957 edition of Dublin Opinion in which the young female figure of Ireland instructs a fortune teller, peering into a crystal ball: ‘Get to work! They’re saying I have no future.’

    It also, arguably, exhibited a healthy suspicion of farmers, who are ‘seen filling out forms for grants… duping government inspectors, joining myriad associations to protect their interests, smuggling cattle across the border with Northern Ireland and constantly complaining.’

    The Bell

    Probably the most important publication of the post-War period in terms of its inspiration to future journalists was The Bell, under Sean O’Faolain as editor.

    Ironically funded in part by an investment by sweepstakes millionaire Joe McGrath, it was inspired by leftist UK publications that emphasised the importance of factual reporting. O’Faolain opined that ‘Generalisation (to make one) is like prophecy, the most egregious form of error, and abstractions are the luxury of people who enjoy befuddling themselves methodically’. Contemporary editors are still inclined to advise journalists “to show it, don’t tell it.”

    Covering generally overlooked themes such as the ongoing challenge of tuberculosis, many of its articles were created, according to O’Faolain, by ‘somebody [who] had to out with a notebook and listen, and encourage and make a record. The poor would for ever remain silent if people did not, in this way, wrench speech out of them’

    O’Faolain also bemoaned an enduring disconnect between academia and the general public: ‘with only one or two honourable exceptions our professors never open their mouths in public.’

    Mark O’Brien concludes that it ‘played a central role in prompting journalism to develop beyond the confines of party affiliation’, an endeavour ‘taken up with gusto by the Irish Times  in the early 1960s’, especially through Michael Viney.

    Sean O’Faolain

    Hibernia

    According to Brian Trench under John Mulcahy Hibernia, became a strong presence in Irish media as an independent, frequently dissenting voice. Indeed, ‘by 1973 it was already carrying articles alleging conflicts of interest and possible corruption in relation to the activities of local politicians in the Greater Dublin area.

    The magazine became a platform for dissenters such as Raymond Crotty, Desmond Fennell, Ernest Blythe and Proinsias Mac Aonghusa.

    Terry Kelleher a Hibernia journalist between 1970-75 recalls Mulchay’s ‘questioning approach to everything and everyone, but especially towards those in a position of authority. Every institution, whether it be a political party or financial grouping, artistic clique or academic ivory tower, all must be challenged, their continued existence questioned.’

    The magazine gave particular attention to stories of’ bad planning, illegal property development, councillors’ conflicts of interests and related issues,’ as well as the mistreatment of prisoners by the Royal Ulster Constabulary at a point when an anti-Republican Revisionism was increasingly prevalent in Irish intellectual circles.

    Hibernia went where most newspapers dared not go, at one point revealing that a sitting member of the Special Criminal Court was falling asleep on the job. According to Trench, ‘Irish Times journalists Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce later dealt with this incident … though they omitted to mention that their own newspaper – like the other dailies – chose not to refer to what was happening in front of them.’

    Mulcahy’s unschooled approach of relying on tip offs brought criticism. Vincent Browne claimed the publication had ‘a style that may lack the investigative edge required by a serious paper.’

    However, when the publication closed after one libel action too many, Pat Smyllie wrote in the Irish Times that ‘whether you liked it some weeks or not, it was brave, searching, cheeky outrageous but … essential to many of us’. He noted that it sometimes had to pay the price in court for uncovering ‘double dealing’.

    According to Niall Kiely the magazine was a ‘must-read’ for journalists in the mainstream media: it was a source of information and perspective not found elsewhere.’

    Another legacy, argues Trench is the ‘almost universally cynical tone of the anonymous journalism in The Phoenix may be considered an unfortunate and partial legacy of Hibernia.’ However, given the endemic corruption of the period, and beyond, and an apparent acquiescence to this in the mainstream media, such cynicism might be forgiven.

    Hot Press Magazine

    Rock n’ Roll

    Jon Street notes that ‘music plays a part in our constitution as moral beings and in our constitution as political ones. In responding to and in evaluating music we do not just give expression to our tastes, but to our political values and ideas. Music is, to this extent, part of the way we think politically.’

    According to Diarmuid Ferriter the value of Hot Press lay in ‘its value lies in the extent to which it highlighted the burgeoning youth culture of the era as well as new musical departures and a determination to embrace international influences.’

    Its remarkably durable editor, Niall Stokes acknowledged that 1977 – according to Jon Savage the ‘moment of high punk’ – was ‘not the most healthy climate in which to launch a newspaper.’ He championed a liberal social agenda – which was very much in the minority at that point – along with his editorial partner (and wife) Máirín Sheehy and brother Dermot Stokes.

    Stokes said: ‘We felt in particular that the deference shown to the Roman Catholic Church in all areas of Irish life, including the media, was entirely inappropriate.’

    The U2 connection is central to the story of Hot Press, while John Waters, a young aspiring journalist then living in remote Roscommon, was an important recruit. According to Stokes: ‘Back then, John, I think it is fair to say, saw himself as a leftist’. For his own part Waters reckons: ‘I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be writing today were it not for [Stokes].’

    An important feature was the Hot Press interview, where according to Waters: ‘The idea was to ‘get under the skin’ of people who were known in a certain context.’

    An interview with Charles Haughey ‘caused a huge reaction in the mainstream media as the Fianna Fáil leader’s use of expletives and colourful descriptions of opponents broke with convention.’

    Vincent Browne.

    Magill

    In 1986 The Guardian newspaper recorded that ‘Magill has gained a political influence that has no parallel in British or indeed European magazine publishing,’ while the Sunday Times credited it with ‘dragging Irish journalism out of its largely comfortable, unquestioning dullness’.

    According to Kevin Rater it was ‘shaped by the particular interests of its proprietor and founding editor, Vincent Browne’, who wrote in 1969: ‘In terms of its wealth, Ireland cares less for the weaker and poorer sections of its community than any other country in Europe with the exception of Portugal. Yet the popular myth is that there is no poverty in Ireland.’ Party politics, the redistribution of wealth and Northern Ireland would be its primary focus.

    Browne shared editorial responsibilities with Mary Holland, who later claimed Browne: ‘could be very cruel to people and didn’t seem to expect them to take it personally.’

    According to another journalist, Paddy Agnew: ‘the cover was the most talked about, and the most agonising thing, every month. It was torture.’ Britan Trench recalled: ‘He would snort and sniff at content ideas. And then his view of the would emerge’.

    At the end of Browne’s tenure as editor Colm Tóibín was appointed to the role. He was influenced by the ‘new journalism’ in the work of American writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Telese and Hunter S Thompson’. Another editor, Fintan O’Toole brought ‘an extraordinary range and depth of interests.’

    Ultimately, according to Rafter ‘It was outflanked on one side by The Phoenix with its mix of business and political gossip and on the other by the national newspapers that had adapted their editorial offerings to include longer articles, many by names who had first emerged in Magill.’

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Granular Analysis

    Magazines and periodicals share certain features with independent restaurants, insofar as neither tend to last very long, and are often dependent on a dominant personality, who regularly loses their shirts. Like independent restaurants they perform vital roles for a cultural avant-garde, incubating new tastes and literary styles, which the fast or convenience daily newspaper purveyors often appropriate.

    Moreover, it remains the case in Ireland that most investigative journalism occurs at a remove from mainstream daily publications.

    As adverted to, a second review of the latest volume in this series provides a more granular assessment of these publications, including magazines representing feminism and gay rights, and focuses on particularly illuminating stories, such as the nature of Irish humour and the state of the press. It will also afford a chance to reflect on the challenges of publishing in our contemporary digital environment.

    [i] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, New York, 2006), pp. 34-35

    Featured Image: Dublin, 1916, prior to the Rising.

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Pandemonium

    Robert Fisk wrote: ‘we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know, no one told us.”[i]

    To be an “impartial witness” is, of course, impossible, as Fisk concedes, but this should not deter journalists from striving for objectivity. Inevitably, reporting on “history as it happens” involves choices as to what information is recorded in the annals of daily newspapers, and decisions over whose account becomes canonical. What is left out is often as important as what is included.

    Since independence Irish journalism has often failed to interrogate the structures of power and privilege. Thus, in his seminal Ireland 1912-1985, J. J. Lee notes ‘the intellectual poverty of Irish journalism … [and] the lack of public demand for serious analysis.’[ii]

    An older generation are sometimes heard to say, “we didn’t know, no one told us”, whether concerning the treatment of children in religious institutions, or corruption in the planning process. We may be revisiting a tendency to sugar-coat our reality in the Irish media’s broadly self-congratulatory response to Covid-19.

    Writing a first draft of history, in Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O’Connell, Irish Times and Irish Independent journalists respectively, offer an insider account of truly unprecedented times. The book recalls how the spectre of a devastating pandemic gives way to a realisation that democracy and the rule of law were undermined amidst extraordinary rules that deliberately orchestrated social atomisation, with unpredictable consequences. But it avoids addressing whether we were duped into an apparently popular commitment to lockdowns.

    Anyone governing Ireland throughout the period of the pandemic would naturally wish for their choices to be vindicated, especially the approach of permitting civil servants and technocrats to make many, if not most, difficult decisions; while riding roughshod over fundamental rights to associate, travel and conduct business freely, seemingly with popular consent, however manufactured.

    As an early assessment, drawing on interviews with many key players, Pandemonium arguably suffers from its proximity to sources. After all, access is only granted to the chosen few. A reputation for being ‘difficult’ is not a recipe for a successful career in mainstream Irish journalism. This perhaps accounts for Pandemonium’s generally muted and conditional criticism.

    Nevertheless, the book brings to light important information, including an unpublished report cataloguing the catastrophe that ensued in many care homes in the early months of 2020.

    To explain the disproportionate – at times self-harming – Irish response to the pandemic a future historian might explore a Catholic inheritance conditioning acceptance of the Original Sin of asymptomatic spread; the Holy Water of hand sanitisers; the Heresy of the unvaccinated; and the Benediction of (repeated) vaccination. Our future historian, or anthropologist, might also note the Obscurantism of a dominant Hierarchy that denied the ‘snake oil’ of antigen testing; the extreme unlikelihood of outdoor transmission, and immunity conferred by natural infection.

    “The big calls”

    The authors maintain that ‘The majority of the big calls were correct.’ This judgment is made, notwithstanding the decision, ‘to clear out hospitals to prepare for a surge in admissions by decanting large numbers of elderly and vulnerable patients into nursing homes’. It should also be noted that CMO Tony Holohan ordered care homes to re-open to visitors in March, 2020. These policies contributed to Ireland suffering the second highest proportion of care home deaths in the world during the first wave.

    To arrive at a broadly positive assessment the main metric the authors use is comparative mortality attributed to Covid-19. However, besides serious questions over how mortality from Covid-19 has been assessed globally – dying ‘from’ or ‘with’ – this ignores how with Europe’s youngest population Ireland ought to have been the least susceptible to mortality from the disease.

    As a Nature article put it in August, 2020: ‘For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die.’ Indeed, from March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to Covid-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years.

    Europe’s youngest population were forced to contend with some of the most draconian laws in the world. An Author’s Note contains analysis of Oxford University’s stringency data which shows among comparator countries in the EU27 and UK that Ireland had the most restrictive regime for 121 out of 685 days, and was joint fourth overall behind Italy, Greece and Germany. Based on other criteria, the regime may have been even harsher.

    Initially, the old were to be sacrificed for the sake of the young, but ultimately it would be the young who would be compelled to put their lives on hold for the sake of the old. Some will never recover. The disgrace is that no serious cost-benefit analyses were conducted during what the authors accurately characterise as enduring pandemonium.

    The decision to empty hospitals in March, 2020 may have been medically justifiable; the real problem lay with the state of the health service, and an incorrect assessment of the danger posed by Covid-19. An ongoing failure to resource emergency medicine, resulted in a perceived dependence of lockdowns that failed to take account of seasonality.

    Rather than attempting to make a virtue out of what was surely possible in outdoor spaces the authorities adopted a no-can-do attitude that ramped up the misery.

    Deep Background

    A ‘Note on Sources’ says:

    The majority of interviews that took place for this book in 2021 and 2022 were conducted under the journalistic ground rule of ‘deep background’. This means that all the information people told us in interviews could be used, but it could not be said who provided it.

    In other words, political and senior civil service sources were at times unwilling to speak on the record, but nonetheless grasped an opportunity to manage the message, and offset any potential for reputational damage.

    We can only guess at who featured most prominently in these “deep background” interviews, but the imprint is unmistakable of core Fine Gael players in the initial, caretaker government; as well as senior civil servants, including the all-powerful Cabinet Secretary Martin Fraser.

    The authors do acknowledge that a very dangerous precedent was set in terms of powers being appropriated for long periods by unelected civil servants – and one man in particular – with only tenuous claims to expertise in infectious disease management.

    Perhaps the most shocking aspect – previously revealed in Richard Chambers’s account – was the exclusion of successive Ministers of Health from NPHET, the all-powerful group for which there was no cabinet approval or even a ministerial order underpinning its establishment.

    Yet we must wait until the Epilogue for the stark admission that ‘Some of the most drastic, expensive and cruel policies ever imposed by the State were arrived at within a system that was ad hoc and could be haphazard.’

    Dictatorial                                                                                                                        

    CMO Tony Holohan became the public face of the state’s response from early on, and this book confirms his dominance over decision-making. The CMO called the shots and assembled a team to carry out his orders.

    His decision to appoint Professor Philip Nolan – ‘The pair had known each other for years’– to oversee disease modelling ought to have prompted concern. Nolan was then President of Maynooth University, his ‘research was in physiology – specifically the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.’ With no research background or expertise in infectious diseases Nolan’s wayward models – and bizarre commentary on antigen testing – informed Irish government decisions throughout the pandemic.

    According to the authors, ‘almost everyone who attended NPHET meetings agreed on one thing above all others: a Tony Holohan production.’ An unnamed source described his style as ‘very dictatorial and autocratic,’ and ‘intolerant of alternative views.’

    One NPHET member, Kevin Kelleher, was prepared to go on the record saying: ‘I felt the debate was controlled to ensure certain outcomes were achieved.’ Thus, he felt frustrated when arguing that testing policy should have look ‘more like how the HSE tests for other infectious diseases.’

    Holohan, the son of a Garda, enjoyed ‘a good relationship’ with Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, who baulked at the former’s early attempts to prevent people from leaving the capital. Harris was apparently unwilling to impose blanket travel restrictions ‘on the basis that it could lead to Ireland becoming a police state.’ Initial reluctance to impede free movement – and become a police state – appears to have receded as the pandemic went by. Police checkpoints became a familiar sight across the country.

    The relationship between Holohan and the Gardaí was put in sharp focus when a tweet by the CMO complained of scenes reminiscent of Jones’s Road on the day of an All-Ireland preceded a Garda baton charge on South William Street in Dublin.

    Young people were grasping a rare opportunity to socialise in bizarre circumstances where pubs were permitted to serve takeaway pints but not allowed to provide outdoor seating. It came after many months of having their lives drastically impacted by restrictions.

    The contempt of one deep source for the hoi polloi is unmistakable: ‘Tony might have phrased the tweet a bit better … Basically South William Street became scumbag central, for want of a better phrase, so that’s where we had to focus the policing effort.’

    Infection Fatality Rate

    As misleading accounts of the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 informed Western governments in spring, 2020 – especially via the famous, non-peer-reviewed Imperial College paper authored by Neil Ferguson which claimed an IFR of 0.9% – a global pandemonium of toilet roll buying proportions ensued. In early March Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s forecast that 85,000 people could die from the coronavirus in Ireland (over three times as many as died during the Spanish influenza pandemic). Having initially downplayed the challenge, his caretaker government were seemingly inclined to induce fear, which generates its own pathologies.

    Based on what we now know were incorrect – duplicitous or otherwise – epidemiological assessment, many in positions of authority appear to have genuinely believed Neil Ferguson’s contention that Covid-19 represented “the next big one” – a re-run of the dreaded Spanish Influenza pandemic that took up to fifty million lives in 1918-19; as opposed to one similar to the Chinese and Hong Kong influenza pandemics episodes of the 1950s and 1960s.

    Excess death is the best measurement of mortality during a pandemic. According to a global analysis of Covid-19 by Professor Lone Simonsen this pandemic has had ‘nowhere near the death toll of the pandemic of 1918.’ In Ireland in just one year of that outbreak 23,000 died, many of them young, whereas the mean age of death in Ireland from Covid-19 was eighty just two years younger than the average age of death,  while the level of excess mortality is considerably lower than the number of deaths attributed to Covid-19.[iii] This has led the Mayo Coroner to object that Covid deaths were being skewed by other illnesses.

    Sadly, as the Swedish epidemiologist John Giesecke pointed out in an interview aired on Sky News Australia in April 2020, governments around the world seemed to be assuming that people were stupid. Giesecke also argued that authorities were failing to consider how they would end their reliance on lockdowns. He pointed to Swedish data showing that between 98 and 99% had either no symptoms or only mild symptoms from Covid-19, and guessed the IFR would turn out to be 0.1%, which now appears a reasonable approximation.

    In contrast, as late as September, 2020 RTÉ’s Fergal Bowers was stating: ‘The World Health Organization says data to date suggests 80% of Covid-19 infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical, requiring ventilation.’ Remarkably, Bowers seems to have copy and pasted this from a seriously out-of-date WHO Situation Report from March 6th, 2020, stating ‘data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation.’

    It’s unlikely Bowers was working alone. Pandemonium reveals an early communications plan involving John Colcannon, indicating there would be ‘close collaboration’ with RTÉ in particular. This would be ‘critical to informing the public and helping in the national effort to respond.’ “Informing the public” did not necessarily mean a truthful account.

    It is also notable that Martin Fraser wrote that ‘RTÉ’s financial issues from the Covid-19 crisis will have to be dealt with.’ The state broadcaster acted as a conduit for government press releases and leaks, faithfully broadcasting case numbers and deaths in almost every bulletin, without questioning their reliance on a highly unreliable PCR test. The main newspapers, receiving tens of millions in government advertising throughout, also faithfully headlined the daily case numbers and death figures.

    The authors argue ‘the scenes from Bergamo were conditioning the State’s early response’, but it appears to have set the tone throughout, as politicians handed power to civil servants who tore up the social contract, amidst hysteria that owed a great deal to the penetration of social media in our lives.

    Although expensively assembled Covid self-isolation facilities and field hospitals went largely unused throughout the pandemic, the authors do not question a dominant narrative that without near-constant lockdown Irish hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed.

    Yet a recent ‘natural experiment’ carried out in the UK casts serious doubt on this orthodoxy. In a Guardian article clinical epidemiologist Raghib Ali outlines how, despite removing all, or most, restrictions in the summer of 2021, England actually had better outcomes than other UK regions:

    England has actually had a similar rate of infection and a lower rate of Covid deaths during the Omicron wave – and since 19 July 2021, England’s “freedom day” – than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, despite having far fewer mandatory restrictions, and none after 24 February. This “natural experiment” shows that having more mandates did not lead to better outcomes.

    It seems that once a generally mild respiratory virus such as Covid-19 becomes endemic restrictions have only a marginal effect.

    Loss of Proportionality

    In Ireland once lockdowns were normalised proportionality went out the window. We learn that an early influencer in this regard was Kevin Cunningham, a Dublin-born, Oxford-educated statistician – with no expertise in infectious diseases – who had previously founded Ireland Thinks with Ed Brophy, then advisor to Paschal Donohoe. Brophy had previously served as Joan Burton’s chief of staff.

    Informed by erroneous early modelling that took no account of distinctive social and environmental conditions, Cunningham wrote a series of emails to Varadkar in February painting a doomsday scenario.

    Cunningham was also able to convince Brophy that ‘Nobody will blame the government for taking too many precautions on coronavirus.’ This led Brophy to text his Taoiseach Varadkar – who was receiving less stark advice from his own public health official – to the effect that ‘We really need to fucking move on this.’

    The calculation, cynical or otherwise, of the governing class in Ireland was that no one would blame them “for taking too many precautions.” This informed one of the most stringent responses of any country in the world. A cowed and misinformed public would accept whatever medicine was applied, with opponents castigated as libertarians or far-right conspiracy nuts.

    Fault also lay with the failure of the opposition to articulate alternatives to lockdowns, especially after the Utopian ideal of ZeroCovid zealots gained traction among smaller left-wing parties, while Sinn Fein seemed unwilling to gamble on an alternative strategy.

    It certainly didn’t help having a bumbling Boris Johnson promoting a herd immunity strategy, or Donald Trump musing on the benefits of bleach. Nor was any argument for moderation helped by a far-right extremist such as Gemma O’Doherty launching foul-mouthed tirades at Garda checkpoints.

    Thus, Ireland was locked down and ordered to await our Saviour: the vaccine. Yet according to Peter Doshi in an article British Medical Journal in October, 2020, trials were not even designed to tell whether it would save lives.

    Pharmaceutical Industry

    As a trained doctor, Varadkar commanded respect during a pandemic that saved his political career. Troublingly, however, Pandemonium reveals his contacts with Pfizer executives, a company which stood to profit enormously from any vaccine – notwithstanding that the benefits could be quite marginal. Notably, despite a widely lauded vaccination roll out, restrictions stretched on, seemingly interminably, from January 2021 until almost the entire population had been infected by the highly transmissible Omicron variety. This seems to have finally dispelled the sense of dread associated with the virus.

    We learn that in September, 2020 Varadkar ‘had been told by Paul Reid (no relation of the HSE’s Paul Reid) that a vaccine would be ready by the end of the year.’ Varadkar appeared to regard the regulatory process as a mere formality. Perhaps he was right.

    In an article for Forbes in September 2020, praising the ‘unusually transparent action’ for a Covid-19 vaccine trials, William A. Heseltine a former professor at the Harvard School of Medicine wrote: ‘close inspection of the protocols raises surprising concerns. These trials seem designed to prove their vaccines work, even if the measured effects are minimal.’

    He went on to point out that ‘prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines.’ In fact, ‘their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.’

    He added that

    Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.

    Furthermore, in October leading health experts in the U.S. sent a public letter to Pfizer warning against a premature application that ‘would severely erode public trust and set back efforts to achieve widespread vaccination. In short, a premature application would prolong the pandemic, with disastrous consequences.’

    Yet Varadkar, like Trump, seemed convinced – based on his contacts with a Pfizer executive as opposed to analysis of trial protocols – that a panacea was on the horizon. What we may have got was a confidence trick, upholding the already tarnished reputation of evidence-based medicine.

    The orthodoxy that the vaccine represented the one and only solution became an article faith among the Irish governing and media class, justifying the stringency of restrictions and erosion of fundamental rights that culminated in vaccine passports and sinister broodings in leading newspapers on the mandating of vaccines.

    The authors maintain the party line that Pfizer’s vaccine was ‘incredibly effective’, yet seem perplexed that by late 2021 ‘Ireland was caught in the bizarre situation of having among the highest vaccination rates in the developed world, but again being imperilled by rising case loads and a health service that was struggling to cope.’

    Micheál Martin

    Taoiseach Micheál Martin played a less prominent role than his predecessor Leo Varadkar. He may be praised for lifting almost all restrictions at the end of January, 2022, when it could have been politically expedient to maintain a few in the face of continued hysteria. He also placed an ‘unrivalled emphasis on keeping schools open,’ which begs the question: how long would closures have continued otherwise?

    Less commendable, was Martin’s tendency to take refuge in sacred public health advice supplied by Bishop Tony. He also played a curious role in the introduction of face mask mandates. 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, 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.’

    Yet, desptie a broad scientific consensus as to their irrelevance prior to 2020, reiterated by the expert advice of Professor Carl Heneghan at the Dáil Inquiry in the summer of 2020, Ireland followed many countries in introducing mandates that summer. Here again, it is notable that the Swedish authorities adopted an alternative approach. Decisive evidence for the efficacy of face masks remains elusive. An analysis of six studies found a risk of bias ranging from moderate to serious or critical. Perhaps the public health rational was simply to induce fear of social interaction.

    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 would endeavour to be the best boy in the European class and disregard the consequences.

    Non-Sterilising Vaccines

    Non-sterilising Covid-19 vaccines, which do not prevent onward transmission of the virus, may have only made a marginal difference to the global mortality toll. Evidence to the effect that the main (Pfizer) vaccine saves lives, or even prevents hospitalisations, also remains equivocal.

    In January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    A Lancet article distinguishes an absolute risk reduction of approximately 1% from the relative risk reduction of c. 95%. Yet mainstream media outlets invariably quote relative risk reduction, while conspicuously ignoring reports of trial irregularities that emerged in the medical literature.

    Mainstream Irish media failed to interrogate the efficacy of these pharmaceutical products. In the Irish Times on October 28, 2020, Kathy Sheridan – before regulatory approval had been granted – went so far as to write: ‘One thing is clear, even when a vaccine emerges the mother of all marketing and reassurance jobs will be required.’

    That a member of the fourth estate considered marketing a medication to be her role is quite disturbing, especially given the adverse reactions that previously occurred in the wake of a vaccine being rushed to market in response to the Swine Flu Pandemic-that-never-was. Unsurprisingly, no attention was given in the Irish media to early reports of serious adverse reactions among elderly patients.

    Against the Grain

    The authors of a book such Pandemonium were unlikely to go against the grain, and question foundational assumptions that still underpin most Irish people’s understanding of the nightmarish years – at least for some – of 2020-2021. Nonetheless this is an important source explaining how Ireland was governed during the period.

    It should be acknowledged that the complexity of scientific debates underpinning the response to Covid-19 are challenging for over-worked journalists tasked with filing daily stories. Inevitably journalists rely on expert accounts. But this should be accompanied by an awareness that scientific discourses are never entirely objective, and that expertise is subject to regulatory capture and other forms of corruption, especially where the legendarily corrupt pharmaceutical industry is involved.

    A major problem, particularly during the crucial early stages of the pandemic, was a global scientific groupthink that came about through passive and active censorship of viewpoints that questioned the WHO’s global response of promoting lockdowns. Instructively in April, 2020 Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, wrote a letter about the potential harms of lockdowns which was rejected from more than ten scientific journals (and six newspapers). Baral recalls, ‘it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.’

    He also recalled that, ‘highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.’ Accordingly, the ‘net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences.’

    The big lie was that we were all in this together. Notably the world’s top ten richest men doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while the incomes of 99% of humanity fell. It was a particularly lucrative period for pharmaceutical companies, including one partly owned by Professor Luke O’Neill, a go-to figure for the Irish media, who emerged as a latter day Father Brian Trendy complete with guitar band.

    To date there has been an inadequate global reckoning over what happened in response to Covid-19. As in the wake of the last Financial Crisis, it seems that certain institutions and reputations are ‘too big to fail.’

    In Ireland, meanwhile, we appear to have “moved on” from the pandemic without any serious interrogation of what has occurred. It seems astonishing that the state could have spent close to €1 billion on PPE in 2020 alone without there being a serious inquiry into the procurement process.

    A proper national conversation might explore distinctive cultural tendencies that reasserted themselves in a period of crisis. That evaluation is left to future historians. Then we may well hear the cry once more: “We didn’t know, no one told us.”

    Feature Image: (c) Daniele Idini

    [i] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation, (Fourth Estate, London, 2005) p.XXV

    [ii] Joe Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: politics and society (Cambridge, 1989) pp.605-607

    [iii] Worldometre attributes 1,736 deaths to COVID-19 by December 31st, 2020. But the level of mortality through the years 2018-2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) show little difference.

  • RTE Kitsch: Room to Improve

    Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out.

    In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. This he argues, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ The Montrose cultural bubble has long served a crucial political purpose: denying shit while everyone acts as though it does not exist.

    Through no fault of his own, the feel good factor of Dermot Bannon’s show obscures the suffering associated with an enduring and arguably preventable housing crisis, and also, more broadly, provides an insight into how the Irish overreaction to Covid-19 occurred; which has done incalculable damage to the lives of children especially.

    It seems that our best, and perhaps only, response in Ireland to these traumas is comedy, but this has clear pitfalls.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    “fronted by classical pillars”

    Patrick Freyne reveals:

    Dermot Bannon is my muse. I would write about him in every column if I could (God knows I try). If I were the arts editor I would make the arts pages of this paper entirely Dermot Bannon-themed. If I were taoiseach, I would declare a Dermot Bannon day …

    He observes that

    On every episode of Room to Improve, Dermot Bannon goes into battle with the plain people of Ireland in the cause of justice and light. Mainly light, to be honest. In his philosophy, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by turning a wall into a window. He’d build all of his houses from windows if he could. The man is a martyr to big windows.

    Explaining that Bannon:

    is creating a metaphorical window into the heart of the Irish people, who are for the most part entirely unco-operative, ungrateful and obsessed with dark holes fronted by classical pillars and filled with Ikea furniture …

    He also marvels at how:

    Ireland is the only country with a celebrity quantity surveyor. Patricia has no time for any of Dermot’s nonsense, which is why we like her. He wants to double the size of his new house for just €350,000. The nation scoffs at this even before Patricia has a chance to say: “Not a hope.” In fact, we all say it along with her, panto style.

    As one of the jesters permitted to ply his trade in the national media, Freyne exposes RTÉ’s consistent denial of shitness – which perhaps accounts for a prevalent uncooperativeness, ingratitude and obsession with dark holes “fronted by classical pillars.”

    Much of the Irish landscape bears testament to the tragedy of the commons. It is a sad reality that most of what has been built since independence is inferior to what came before it.

    Moreover, a programme such as Room To Improve, and it’s not the only one in this genre, is devoted to the improvement of private dwellings in the possession of a shrinking middle class still transfixed by the ups and downs of the Irish property market. It is instructive that according to the website www.daft.ie at the start of May, 2022 there are just over one thousand properties available to rent in all of Ireland at a point when the Irish government has just committed to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine. Is it any wonder so many people are disinclined to have children.

    In essence Room to Improve translates into: how can someone increase the market value of their property. The lurking presence of the celebrity quantity surveyor ensures that any project is seen in terms of adding financial value to the holding.

    It is particularly tone deaf as we reach another high-water mark in an ongoing housing crisis. Missing on RTÉ is serious engagement with the corruption of a planning process, which lies behind enduring inequalities and sprawl, or the financial structures that embed generational inequalities, and permit a creeping dominance of transnational capitalism.

    It is not that housing dysfunction is denied on RTÉ – that we are lied to as such – it is that the issues are almost completely ignored amidst the day-to-day mixture of light entertainment and vox pop nonsense that are their mainstays. Room to Improve is a form of kitsch because it denies the shitstorm going on in the society around it.

    And like the rest of their programming, it appears to rely to an ordinate extent on advertising from a motor car industry that allows for the trail of bungalows that blight our landscapes. After all, living in one of the detached houses that Bannon mostly works on would be very difficult without a motor car.

    It also appears that RTÉ’s longstanding tendency to bury shitness – which is also evident in legacy print media – led to the catastrophic handling of Covid-19 in Ireland.

    Ongoing Kitsch

    It will be many years before we come to terms with what happened during Covid-19 around the world, and confront the traumas, especially to children, of living through lockdowns. It is instructive that despite having the youngest population in the EU, Irish children were subjected to among the longest school closures in the world. Simply blaming teaching unions ignores how teachers were subjected to relentless fear messaging that made them reluctant to do their jobs, despite international data from early on showing that their concerns were generally misguided.

    Yet for RTÉ ‘The deadly virus’ of COVID-19 seemed to arrive as a godsend – and an advertising windfall, or so-called Covid bounce. A slavish devotion allowed the channel to almost completely ignore all other difficult news for the best part of a year-and-a-half. The daily totals of cases and deaths, uncritically conveyed, became the staple of every radio and television news bulletin and headline on their website.

    Then, almost overnight, the issue vanished from sight, without any kind of meaningful post-mortem or reflection on the damage inflicted on the patchwork of communities that make up our society.

    It gives way to relentless coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – thick on spectacle and almost devoid of critical analysis. Images of wasted buildings now bury discussion of other stories.

    A lack of intellectual rigour – albeit their Brainstorm section is a notable exception – that is essential to RTE’s kitsch reaches right to the top it would appear. Thus, RTE’s head of news Jon Williams claims in article ‘For the first time in Europe since the end of World War Two, one country had been invaded by another.’ The mind boggles.

    Comedy appears to be the only response available; it’s just that the consequences are quite serious. Simply because political protestors aren’t subjected to imprisonment or torture as under other regimes doesn’t mean that the Irish state isn’t failing its people, and that the state broadcaster isn’t complicit for failing to interrogate our inadequacies that surely begins with a deficient education system.

    Nietzsche

    In Laughter All Evil is Compacted

    Freyne is one of a number of comedic writers and performers – Oliver Callan is another working for RTÉ itself – operating in legacy media who are permitted ‘to take the piss’ out of our national obsessions. Comedy has its advantages but arrives with a health warning.

    Theodore Zeldin traces its historical trajectory: ‘since truth cannot be easily swallowed whole or raw, jesters were usually also poets, magicians or singers, able to convey unpalatable insights in an epigram, a witty story or a song.’

    But this routinely slips into cynicism, as comedy can reinforce conformity ‘by being its safety valve.’ Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools: ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down,’ but ‘did so only for a few days.’ In a sense, comedy normalises the damaging excesses of a culture by turning it into a humorous spectacle.

    Jokes can be truly sick, as the history of totalitarianism demonstrates. Jonathan Glover notes that ‘In the death camps the Nazis turned the cold joke into an art form, with increasingly imaginative embellishment on the themes of cruelty and humiliation.’

    Friedrich Nietzsche provides a psychological insight into how this occurs when claiming that ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’ The gay release of laughter allows depraved participants to evade consideration of their actions. Thus, humour may confront tyranny, but it may also reinforce it.

    A parade of tanks of the ČSLA in Prague on Victory Day, 9 May 1985.

    Not Dangerous In Itself

    In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself. Indeed, most democratic politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina in the aforementioned novel, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth.

    These projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that had by then infected her society. Indeed, it is recalled in Czechia that under Communism love for one’s family required some of form of theft in the course of one’s professional career.

    Kundera contrasts totalitarian airbrushing with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies.

    Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

    Prior to Covid-19 RTÉ’s kitsch could largely be avoided, but when the state followed the example of its European partners in imposing undifferentiated house arrest we entered the dangerous territory, as we were subjected to a form of mass formation.

    Ireland Inc has returned to business as usual. Room to Improve carries on with an architect that looks suspiciously like Ryan Tubridy, as the housing crisis continues to the benefit of a few, and all we have are tears of laughter for consolation.