Cassandra Voices

Author: frankarmstrong

  • Housing: Enshrining the Gambler

    To understand the origins of the Irish Housing Crisis we also need to look beyond our shores, and excavate the substrate of the modern global financial order. This will reveal a slow journey towards the neoliberal financialisation of property as an asset today – overwhelmingly bought and sold regardless of the needs of society at large. Today, individuals act as private companies, but invariably lose out to better organised and resourced institutions, while the periodic burstings of speculative bubbles widen inequalities, and create conditions for Populist uprisings.

    In particular, it should be recognised that our capitalist system is not simply a market economy, of which there have been numerous variants through history, none of which, including our own, truly “free” in any meaningful sense. Capitalism in its current guise exhibits a dispassionate face, but ultimately relies on violent enforcement of interest-bearing loans by officers of the State. It arrived in the wake of widespread acceptance of what was previously considered the sin of usury – the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender – by Protestant reformers during the Reformation.

    Markets in goods and services have existed since civilisations first emerged in the Middle East, but these were invariably softened by community solidarity, wherein laws and norms ensured trade was not conducted – as we see increasingly today – as an impersonal, zero-sum game between competing parties. Of course, there were various categories of people – including women and slaves – that were excluded from such commonwealths, nonetheless a sense of mutual obligation and reciprocity was more pronounced in the trading arrangements of pre-modern polities.

    It is only in recent history, as living standards have risen through technological advances, enhanced food supply and sanitation – along with the arrival of various forms of income redistribution associated with the welfare state – that property – in material terms shelter – has emerged as central to the achievement of a basic standard of living, and the good life we now expect. Its acquisition has become an all-consuming preoccupation in many countries, Ireland not least.

    Subsistence Level

    Even in Europe and North America, until the twentieth century the primary challenge for most families was to obtain sufficient food for survival. Due in part to a veneration of an economic philosophy of laissez faire, associated with Adam Smith, ample sufficiency was slow in arriving, despite increased supplies arising out of the Second Agricultural Revolution from the seventeenth century onwards; along with the arrival of subsistence crops from the Americas, including our beloved potato, and maize.

    In Europe, initially at least, the ascent of the bourgeois from the seventeenth century worked to the detriment of peasants and a new working class. Thus, despite technological developments, such as the invention in Europe of the printing press, and a more stable food supply in the years between 1500-1650 prices rose by 500%, but wages rose much more slowly.

    There were continuous interruptions to, and distortions of, food supply in a nascent capitalist market. The beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed grain surpluses in England as agricultural capacity exceeded the requirements of the population. Carryover inventories of food averaged between 33 and 42 percent of annual consumption. Therefore, in that period: ‘famines were man-made rather than natural disasters.’[i]

    The typical English subsistence crisis after the ascendancy of Henry VIII did not take place because of insufficiency but because ‘the demand for inventories pushed prices so high that labourers lacked the cash to purchase grain.’ In essence, merchants were hording, and the poor were starving.

    The Procession Picture, c. 1600, showing Elizabeth I borne along by her courtiers.

    During the late Tudor period ‘paternalistic’ authorities recognised this and acquired surpluses, selling it on at prices affordable to the lower echelons of society, much to the annoyance of millers, brewers and bakers. That progressive market intervention unravelled during the Civil War of the 1640s, when Roundhead mercantile interests began to exert authority over government decision-making.

    It was only in the 1750s, in the wake of food riots of ‘unprecedented scope’, that the State began to subsidise grain once again. As a result, by the early nineteenth century, famines had been conquered in England ‘not because the weather had shifted, or because of improvements in technology, but because government policy… had unalterably shifted.’[ii] Sadly that policy did not extend to Ireland.

    Today, in order to achieve social harmony it seems likely that governments, including the Irish, will have to treat property as an essential commodity, similar to food, wresting control from a system that has enshrined the gambler.

    Sealing of the Bank of England Charter (1694), by Lady Jane Lindsay, 1905

    Bank of England

    In the U.K. a financial system emerged associated with the creation of the Bank of England in 1693, when a consortium of bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. ‘In return’, according to David Graeber, ‘they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes … a right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king owed.’[iii]

    A system of credit enforced by military might went global during the colonial era, leading to the enrichment of a class of financiers operating out of the city of London in particular. Fernand Braudel characterises this form of capitalism as first and foremost the art of using money to get more money.[iv] The capacities of this system appear to have reached a perfect pitch in our contemporary era.

    But what system preceded this? And could there be an alternative? Prior to the arrival of paper money IOUs issued by the Bank of England, below the surface, older market systems based on mutual trust and solidarity operated. These were overwhelmed by the impersonal calculation that continues to characterise financial services, underpinned by the violent capacity of the State.

    Thus David Graeber observes: ‘Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it.’[v]

    In his indispensable A History of Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber argues the ‘great untold story of our current age’ is of the destruction of an ancient credit system found in small towns and villages across England, and beyond. This was a complex market based not on coins, but on trust. In a typical English village: ‘the only people likely to pay cash were passing travellers, and those considered riff-raff.’ Reveallingly, he observes that ‘just about everyone was creditor and debtor’ and that ‘every six months there would be a public reckoning’ when the community would resolve their debts to one another based on a person’s ability to pay.[vi]

    Such a system reflects a passage in the New Testament (Matthew 20:1-16) in which a landowner pays workers the same sum at the end of the day despite each one working different hours. When one of the workers complains the landowner responds:

    ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

    So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

    In any community there are those less fortunate than others, and a pre-capitalist system of resolving debt, and rewarding work, acted as an impediment to excessive accumulation of resources in a few hands. Importantly it was not simply barter, as value was ascribed based on an ability to pay, and material needs, as much as on the labour or other input into the good or service. A cobbler might therefore produce shoes for an impoverished widow at a lower price than that set for a prosperous miller. No doubt it wasn’t idyllic, but it seems to have led to a fairer and more harmonious existence than what followed in its wake.

    Graeber argues that ‘this upsets our assumptions [as] we are used to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called the market’, but these ‘English villages appear to have seen no contradiction between the two.’[vii]

    John Constable – Parham Mill, Gillingham.

    Money was Trust

    In this world trust was everything: ‘Money literally was trust.’ Neighbours appeared he says ‘quite comfortable with the idea of buying and selling, or even with market fluctuations, provided they didn’t get to the point of threatening poorest families’ livelihoods.’ Thus Graeber describes the origin of capitalism as ‘the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest.’

    The new legal order of strictly enforceable loans had serious consequences for debtors, a position which was connected to sinfulness, and led to imprisonment. Graeber goes so far as to argue that this amounted to  ‘the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasised that in a small community, everyone normally was both lender and borrower.’

    He also argued that this transition provided ample space for swindlers and cheats:

    What seems to have happened is that, once credit became unlatched from real relations of trust between individuals … it became apparent that money could, in effect, be produced simply by saying it was there, but when this was done in … a competitive market place, it would almost inevitably lead to scams … causing the guardians of the system to periodically panic and seek new ways to latch the value of the various forms of paper onto gold and silver.

    Moreover:

    Only the wealthy were insulated, since they were able to take advantage of the new credit money, trading back and forth portions of the king’s debt in the form of banknotes.[viii]

    Eventually the price of bank notes stabilized once notes became redeemable in precious metal. This is referred to as the Gold Standard, which emerged following the South Sea Bubble Crash of 1720. But this crash was far from the last in what appears an inherently unstable system. As Graeber puts it: ‘it does seem strange that capitalism feels the constant need to imagine, or to actually manufacture, the means of its own imminent extinction.’[ix]

    Hogarthian image of the 1720 “South Sea Bubble” from the mid-19th century, by Edward Matthew Ward.

    Separate Legal Personality

    Companies were established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250, and applied to monasteries, churches, guilds and other institutions, but were in no sense profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense. However, according to David Graeber ‘once companies’, such as the East Indian Company, ‘began to engage in armed ventures overseas … a new era in history might be said to have begun.’[x]

    The inherent danger of profit-seeking corporations was once widely recognised. Thus, between 1720 and 1825 it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, during a period of rapid economic expansion.

    In the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first involved those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest, such as canal building; the other regime issued charters of a general character, allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable.[xi]

    The latter category emerged triumphant, divorced from responsibility to fellow citizens; an unaccountable abstraction with separate legal personality established in the landmark 1897 case of Salomon v. Salomon. Thus capitalism discovered the perfect vehicle for wealth accumulation, and as wealth begets wealth, increasingly multinational companies overwhelmed smaller family-owned businesses as a wander down any high street today confirms.

    Moreover, as corporations have swelled in size, a chasm has opened up between the pay levels of senior officers and rank and file workers. Thus, whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, then the model of a successful US business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned as much as 1,500 times as much as an ordinary employee.

    Moreover, according to Theodore Zeldin: ‘In the twentieth century, the British colonial empire was replaced with a less visible but even more powerful financial empire compose of an archipelago of some sixty offshore tax havens presided over by the City of London.’[xii]

    As companies grow in size and internationalize, the pursuit of profit becomes an overriding purpose, and the connection between management and workers diminishes to a point where companies are no longer embedded in communities. This is particularly evident in financial services, where making money out of money has become a conjuror’s act, increasingly incomprehensible to the uninitated. It was surely only a matter of time before property would be adopted as a speculative asset to an all-consuming leviathan.

    Property Today

    For obvious reasons, throughout history land has been a paramount concern for peasant societies, primarily as a source of food, grown for subsistence and as a commodity. Agricultural land, however, must be worked, so speculation in rural land produces scant reward unless there is skilled labour and capital attached. A surviving aristocracy has continued to draw incomes from rural rents, but this has been severely dented by agrarian movements that emerged in Ireland and elsewhere to produce a class of petit bourgeois peasant proprietors.

    Similarly, at least until the end of World War II, in urban areas property brought significant trouble and relatively scant reward for any landlord, with tenancy considered a transitory existence associated with student years; while public housing schemes assisted the urban poor to leave tenement dwellings that had bedevilled many cities, including Dublin, which had the worst housing conditions of any city in the United Kingdom at the turn of the last century.

    However, since the post-War period workers, including those engaged in monotonous ‘unskilled’ work, joined forces to win a series of improvements to their conditions. These included a five-day week and eight-hour working day, along with aspirations to a living wage. It allowed scope for many, if not most, of those pointedly referred to as ‘the working class’ to enjoy a reasonable, and improving, standard of living across the Western world. Importantly, a steady job permitted home ownership.

    Moreover, in the wake of the so-called Green Revolution in agriculture after World War II – which led to a radical reduction in the cost of food – steadily rising living standards in the U.S and Europe brought a profusion of recreational activities including sports, and unprecedented access to the arts, especially film – the defining cultural form of the twentieth century – along with access to higher education, even for the children of the poor. In these circumstances property became an increasingly prized asset – pent-up demand ripe for exploitation if circumstances permitted.

    Crucially, from the 1970s, an ascendent neoliberalism led to governments around the world withdrawing from the housing market, leading to dramatic decreases in the stock of social housing. In 2015 in Ireland, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[xiii]

    In the meantime, regular stock market crashes underline to financiers the reliabiity of bricks and mortar as an investment. Pension funds especially relish the assured income that property generates. Thus, even when there is a crash in property prices, as in Ireland, rents continue to be paid, and with assistance from the State – socialism for the rich – property prices rise once again.

    Throughout most of history the quest for a crust of bread has been the dominant struggle for the bulk of humanity. Today, in the Western world at least, somewhere to rest one’s head in a place of one’s own has become the overriding concern. At the heart of the housing crisis in Ireland, and elsewhere, lies a yearning for the good life that most us see as a right, but which is being exploited by a buccaneering class of financiers, many of whom survived the Crash of 2008, and continue to exert control over the institutions of the Irish state.

    It appears that just as governments had to regulate food supplies in order to avert famines and accelerate development in the early modern period, similarly today it has become necessary for states, especially the Irish State, to regulate a property market which is working to the detriment of a growing proportion of the population. More generally, whether we can do away with the rigidity of a capitalist system of debt enforcement, and return to a market based on greater social solidarity and reiprocity remains to be seen. But at least we should radically reform an inherently unstable and unfair housing market, which is failing to deliver the good life we have a right to expect.

    Feature Image: Stockbrokers, New York, 1966 from United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.03199.

    [i] Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p.116

    [ii] Floud et al, pp.117-118

    [iii] David Greaber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House, London, 2011, p.49

    [iv] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down’ The Journal of Modern History Vol. 63, No. 2, A Special Issue on Modern France (Jun., 1991), pp. 354-361 (8 pages) Published By: The University of Chicago Press.

    [v] Graeber, 2011, p.321

    [vi] Graeber, 2011, p.327

    [vii] Greaber, 2011, 327

    [viii] Graeber, 2011, pp.328-341

    [ix] Graeber, p.360

    [x] Graeber, p.305

    [xi] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Everyday Life. A new Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, Maclehorse Press, Quercus, London 2015 pp.232-233

    [xii] Zeldin, 2015, p.109

    [xiii] Dan MacGuill, ‘FactCheck: How many social housing units were actually built last year?’, 9th of February, 2016, www.thejournal.ie, https://www.thejournal.ie/ge16-fact-check-election-2016-ireland-social-housing-2587923-Feb2016/

  • Irish Housing: Historic Roots of a Crisis

    As a UCD undergraduate I recall Professor Tom Bartlett likening Irish history to a pint of Guinness, ‘with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth everything else, including all the political movements.’

    Old habits die hard. The issue of property remains a paramount concern. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at approximately 82%, a proportion that only declined, to 69% in 2014, after the Crash from 2008, precipitated by reckless lending, often to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers. This reflects the ongoing effect of a global financialisation of property as a speculative asset from the 1980s, leading to the exclusion of a substantial proportion of a younger generation from home ownership across most of Europe, North America and beyond.

    Ireland’s housing crisis is a special case however. In order to understand its long term causes – Dublin is now the most expensive city in the euro area primarily due to staggeringly high rents – it is necessary to explore an historic relationship with land, arising out of a colonial experience. This has brought an economy where the land grabber reigns ascendant.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Urbanisation

    A nation derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits. Over recent centuries, in Ireland, as elsewhere, mass urbanisation, disproportionately directed at Dublin, has occurred, but we have built our cities on historical patterns of land ownership.

    There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish relationship to property that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation, in particular the Plantations, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation through the Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    The second is the dominance of pastoral, livestock agriculture, particularly since the late nineteenth century under a system of individual land ownership – as opposed to treating property as a collective patrimony under Brehon Law in Gaelic Ireland.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    It is incorrect to assume cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlements emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture; and in earlier centuries cattle were kept for domestic milk production rather than to produce a (beef) commodity for export.

    Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato from the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, bringing marginal land into cultivation for the first time. Although, ominously, according to John Reader in The Untold Story of the Potato (2008), ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated.’ It acted like cheap credit in generating a ready source of subsistence on small parcels of land, but the potato cannot be preserved for a long period like grain so cannot easily be traded, thereby impeding development.

    Over time, the impact of Irish agriculture, especially extensive grazing, on Ireland’s nature has been profound. According to Frank Mitchell in Reading the Irish Landscape (1997): ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape.’ This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, before the most intense period of colonisation at the end of the eighteenth century when a poet lamented:

    Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? / Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár;
    Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that further degrade the land, while offering little scope for biodiversity.

    The sixteenth and seventeenth century Plantations trapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society, in a Malthusian grip that culminated in the Famine.

    Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s

    Describing the acquisition of annual leases by small farmers, who had previously held land in common under the Brehon Law system, Seán O’Faoláin wrote in The Irish (1947): ‘The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession.’ Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory, as land became an asset to be bought and sold, rather than a collective patrimony.

    Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century. The raising of cattle, often exported ‘on the hoof’ to England for eventual slaughter, began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage as the British discovered cheaper sources of grain after Napoleon’s blockade ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Henceforth, the cheap labour of the Irish peasantry – a substantial proportion unconnected to the market economy – were an anachronism to the British administration in Ireland.

    The Famine (1845-1851) was, according to Charles Trevelyan the architect of Britain’s response ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil.’ Anticipating the Shock Doctrine, the Famine, he declared, was:

    the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…

    Wood engraving, 1886. cc Library of Congress

    Strong Farmers

    The Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture, increasingly under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this mode of production was (and is) that profitability depends on a low labour input. It made no sense for numerous sons and daughters to remain on the land, and so the tsunami of emigration that formed during the Famine gave way to steady migratory waves. Over the long term this brought precipitous population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

    As Joseph Connolly put it in his Labour in Irish History (1910): ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places.’

    This process should not, however, be attributed solely to remote authorities in Westminster working on behalf of absentee landlords, as is commonly assumed. Significant gains were made by Catholic Irish farmers holding farms above twenty acres. As Kerby A. Miller wrote in The Atlas of the Great Famine (2012): ‘an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties.’

    As Ireland did not witness an Industrial Revolution, except in the North-East corner, this shift from tillage to pasture led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world with a lower population now than in the 1840s, when the population stood at almost nine million. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold.

    National Independence

    The struggle for Irish independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, a comprador class selling their primary products on the Imperial market, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures, culminating in Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903, the British administration sought, but failed, to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country.

    This allowed their sons to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. This cohort entered the professions, established a National University in 1908 (Maynooth University had also been established in 1796) and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to an individualist and competitive approach to land, in contrast to collaborative arrangements typically associated with tillage, including the Clachan settlements of pre-Famine Ireland. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was a cattle farmer, and duly aligned the national interest with the economic fortunes of his ‘grazier’ class.

    After independence in 1922, pastoral Strong Farmers continued to sell mostly cattle onto the Imperial market, notwithstanding the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to more labour-intensive tillage for domestic consumption; except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing subsistence crops.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Individualist Outlook

    The outlook of the peasant-pastoralist has informed our laws and values since the inception of the State, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it:

    we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like a beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch.

    The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, high levels of precipitation and humidity make Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited to mechanised harvesting. The traditional method of ‘bindering’ – drying the harvest over months in stacks – became uncompetitive due to high labour inputs, and so the population drain form rural Ireland continued.

    Moreover, since the 1970s price supports from the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy have reduced flexibility and dynamism in land use, by inflating values as farmers were guaranteed payments, even on poor land, without adequately addressing the associated population drain.

    Legal Protections

    As the sons and daughters of peasant-proprietors migrated to cities, especially Dublin, Ireland’s politics of clientelism embodied in the two main political parties took hold. An urban population with roots in raising livestock prizes land as an asset from which profit is derived, as opposed to a situation where crops are cultivated for the family table and traded within the community.

    An inherited skill in deal-making was readily applied to urban development, which is also reflected in strict judicial interpretations of private property, allowing enterprising developers to make a killing. Thus, State institutions have favoured the landed interest over the property-less, in a troubling reminder of a bygone era.

    In 1973 the Kenny Report recommended that land around the hinterland of Dublin should be compulsorily purchased by local authorities for 25% more than its agricultural value. According to Frank McDonald, the former Environment Correspondent of the Irish Times, Dr Garret FitzGerald, a member of the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government that received the report could not remember why it wasn’t acted upon. ‘It just slid off the agenda’ he said, and no subsequent government acted upon it. McDonald said that ‘Ostensibly, the reason for this was that Kenny – a constitutional lawyer himself – had proposed something that would be unconstitutional. But no attempt was made to test this in the courts.’

    That was until Part V of the Planning Act 2000. This was referred to the Supreme Court which held that the acquisition of land for social and affordable housing did not offend against the Constitution. Unfortunately, however, that provision did little to ameliorate the housing crisis during the Celtic Tiger as developers evaded responsibility by paying over sums to local authorities, and successive Ministers watered down the provisions.

    The reluctance of politicians to implement the Kenny Report reflected a genuine fear that any such provision would fall foul of the Court, which has tended to vindicate a constitutional right to property under Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1.2 over competing interests of renters to security of tenure or a controlled rent.

    Thus, in 1981 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional attempts to introduce rent controls under The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, while the wide scope of Article 45 has been given little attention.

    This reflects a sectional bias as the common good (to which all constitutional rights are subject) should allocate a reasonable prospect of basic accommodation to all permanent residents.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Unenumerated Rights

    The idea of an ‘unenumerated’ Constitutional right – in that instance a right to bodily Integrity – was first identified by the same Justice Kenny in his landmark High Court judgment of Ryan v Attorney General (1965). A right to adequate shelter may also be unenumerated. For instance, Kenny’s seminal Ryan judgment cited the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) which states that: ‘every man has the right to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care and finally the necessary services.’ Yet the Court has avoided vindicating a basic human right to adequate shelter.

    Now, underpinned by legal and political deference to the property interest, we see huge swathes of land and buildings that have been left fallow in urban areas: a 2016 report in The Dublin Inquirer identified at least 389 derelict sites. We are unaccustomed to urban density, or community developments, except as a sign of poverty – with the 1930s schemes of Herbert Simms a rare and inspiring exception. Strict demarcation between properties, and a lack of community spaces, may be interpreted as a legacy of extensive cattle-rearing for the imperial market.

    Furthermore, the sons and daughters of nineteenth century pastoralists, accustomed to low-density living with few neighbours on the horizon, sought distance from their neighbours, and the assurance of owning a motor car. This accounts for the sprawl, and prevalence of needless boundary walls, in Irish suburbia; as well as a preference for one-off housing.

    The commercial culture can also be linked to the pastoral outlook. It is revealing that few successful Irish businesspeople have been technological innovators. Rather, success has been built on buying low and selling high, just as a cattle farmer buys a calf and seeks to sell him at a higher price – the entrepreneur Tony Ryan was quoted as saying ‘you make your profit the day you buy.’ Thus developers often purchase land at a low price and sit on this until financial conditions improve. The Irish dream is built on living off the fat of the land, creating conditions to the liking of the vulture and cuckoo funds our government now accommodates.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Historic Failings

    No Western economy experienced growth, at least in the period 1995-2007, comparable to that of the Celtic Tiger, but this was achieved, at least in part, through the availability of cheap, and ultimately ruinous, loans, by unscrupulous bankers. But like the wonder crop of the potato, these loans generated ultimately ruinous growth.

    Failure of both property and potatoes emanated from America. In the case of the Famine it was the dreaded blight, phytophthora infestans, which first blackened the leaves and then reduced the crop to inedible mush. The pin that burst the Irish property bubble, a large boil on a global wart, was marked with another American sign, that of the ruinous Lehman Brothers. Both the potato blight and subprime mortgages afflicted other countries, but perhaps nowhere as severely as Ireland.

    The austerity that followed may be likened to the extreme Shock Doctrine practised by Charles Trevelyan, while the feeding frenzy that occurred through NAMA recalls the land-grabbing in the wake of the Famine.

    In order to address Ireland’s Housing Crisis we must face up to the sins of our fathers, including an enduring bias in favour of strict individual ownership preached by the two main political parties in government, as well as the judiciary.

    A version of this article appeared in Village Magazine.

    Title Image: House in proximity to Dog’s Bay, Connemara. ©Daniele Idini

  • Peter Dooley: An Independent Candidate for Political Homeless

    Dublin Bay South by-election candidate Peter Dooley has an impressive track record of fighting for a just society, especially through the Dublin Renters’ Union, and unlike many on the left in Ireland, has drawn attention to the devastation to ordinary people’s lives caused by the longest lockdown in Europe.

    This by-election in Dublin Bay South allows voters to say enough is enough with the FG, FF and Green coalition government’s inadequate approach to the housing, health and climate emergencies. But some lifetime left-wing voters are now feeling politically homeless due to the adoption by the established left-wing parties of a ZeroCovid policy, which apart from being hopelessly Utopian, would hand draconian powers to corrupt State institutions and impede the free movement of people in and out of the country, including the Irish diaspora living abroad.

    Throughout Ireland’s never-ending lockdown, Peter has openly questioned the wisdom of handing extraordinary powers to the Minister for Health, which infringe basic constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly. Not only do lockdowns come with a huge human cost – in particular to school children denied an education for months and small- and medium- sized businesses prevented from trading – with little impact on the virus itself, but it has also created a political vacuum, where people affected don’t know where to turn for representation.

    Observing the colossal transfer of wealth to the billionaire class, while small businesses go bust and workers see their jobs disappear, Peter asks whether the Irish government’s response has been proportionate.

    Peter Dooley stands for an equal opportunity Ireland. He walks the talk through his daily activism, galvanising grassroots movements around housing and tenant rights.

    As a co-founder of the Dublin Renters’ Union in 2017, he has helped prevent evictions and supported renters. Peter’s ideas on housing involve resistance to the vulture funds, and ensuring that the rentier class pays a fair share in taxes. Although Dublin Bay South is the most affluent constituency in Ireland it also has the highest number of homeless people living in tents in Ireland.

    Peter has also called for a full public inquiry into the unprecedented scale of nursing home deaths at the beginning of the pandemic in Ireland, when the elderly seemed to have been sacrificed due to a flawed epidemiological assessment, and for the utility of antigen testing and drugs such as Ivermectin to be adequately examined.

    Unlike the other main opposition candidates in the area he has expressed deep opposition to divisive and exclusionary vaccine passports.

    He calls for the end to a two-tier healthcare system, and for a proper cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken if any lockdown is ever contemplated again.

    You can reach Peter Dooley and his campaign policies here:

    FB: @PeterDooleyDublin

    Twitter: @PeterDooleyDUB

    Email: peterdooley@gmail.com

    IG: @PeterDooleyDublin

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Our Barmy Bread

    The appeal of exotic cuisines and esoteric diets has done little to diminish bread’s status as the primary foodstuff of the Western world, and many areas besides. Symbolic as the ‘staff of life’ and ubiquitous, the Oxford English Dictionary describes it in wholesome simplicity as a ‘well-known article of food prepared by moistening, kneading, and baking meal or flour, generally with the addition of yeast or leaven’.

    But charges of adulteration have long been laid against the baker, the miller and the farmer. Today, more than ever, bread has departed from the purity of its essential elements: flour, water and usually salt for flavour. In the early modern era, however, fast-acting yeast, derived from brewers’ barm, began to replace the traditional sourdough leaven: simply flour and water containing a live culture similar to yoghurt. The addition of yeast was the beginning of a downward spiral culminating in today’s industrial loaves, products of the insidious Chorleywood Bread Process.

    A list of the ingredients, wheat apart, of a familiar brand of sliced white bread reads like pharmacopoeia: Emulsifiers, E471, E472e, Soya Flour, Preservative, Calcium, Propotionate (added to inhibit mould growth), Flavouring, Flour Treatment Agents, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), E920, Dextrose. Such bland uniformity and chemical defilement led the great cookery writer Elizabeth David to muse: ‘A technological triumph factory bread may be. Taste it has none. Should it be called bread?’[i]

    The quality of loaves from an Irish market worth €1.9 billion in 2019 should be a matter of public concern, as the consequence for our health of inferior bread is devastating. Perhaps more importantly, the satisfaction derived from the breaking of quality bread approaches the divine.

    Wheat

    The most commonly used grain (or ‘corn’ as this was referred to historically) for bread is wheat. A grass native to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where agriculture and civilization originate, it is now cultivated across the globe, though often in marginal climatic zones. Worryingly, the last century has seen erosion of the genetic variety of wheat strains, and dependence on artificial fertilization.

    From the 1940s Norman E. Borlaug and his collaborators developed new strains of wheat, correcting a structural deficiency in the stalk which couldn’t support heavy grains. Previously the most fruitful plants collapsed under the weight of their own seeds, before maturity. Borlaug’s group developed dwarf strains that could stand up to the weight of bulbous grains, thereby more than doubling yields.

    Today, almost every kernel of wheat consumed by man and beast is derived from Borlaug’s selective breeding. But the resulting monocultures require greater use of pesticides than genetically diverse plants, while farmers must purchase hybrid seeds from large corporations.

    Animal waste and crop rotation – traditional methods of restoring nitrogen to the soil after each growth cycle – are insufficient for the dwarf strains, which require synthetic fertilization. Wheat is now dependent on human intervention, just as modern domestic turkeys are generally unable to reproduce unless artificially inseminated.

    The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer requires natural gas, both for heat and as a source of hydrogen. According to Fraser and Rimas ‘without a secure supply of nitrogen the world would starve’.[ii] Our agricultural model, and perhaps survival, is hopelessly dependent on a finite fossil fuel.

    Further, it is said that stressed vines make better grapes. The same principle applies to today’s pampered wheat crop, insulated from any struggle with nature by human intervention. The diverse strains of wheat from yesteryear offered superior nutrition, and more varied flavours.

    Two Methods

    Notwithstanding the use of unleavened bread in Western (though not Orthodox) Christian ritual, it might be argued that such bread is not deserving of the the name, as the flour is not fermented before baking. Fermentation is achieved using one of two agents: the age-old sourdough leaven method, or through the addition of yeast.

    Sourdough is a combination of yeast and bacterial culture, which aids digestion of the grain. This compensates for our relatively short intestines compared to dedicated herbivores like cattle. Human ingenuity has produced what amounts to an external stomach.

    Good bread, like Swiss Cheese, contains holes or ‘eyes’ left by carbon dioxide produced by fermentation and trapped by glutinous flour. This is especially apparent in strong white flours with a high gluten content; lower-protein ‘soft’ flour is usually reserved for cakes and biscuits, although it is now used in mass-produced breads.

    A late-seventeenth century French journal succinctly describes the two methods of fermentation in use at the cusp of modernity:

    the most commonly used one, called French leaven, is dough made with only water and flour and kept until it becomes sour… The other, which is called yeast, is the foam released from beer when it ferments. French leaven acts more slowly, causes the dough to rise less, and makes a heavier, denser bread. Yeast ferments more quickly, makes it rise more, and the bread it makes is light, delicate and soft.[iii]

    These same methods are in use today, though since the breakthroughs of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), brewers’ barm (usually derived from barley beer) has been replaced by cultured yeast with the same fast-acting effect but greater consistency.

    Sourdough bread, leavened by a fermented dough ‘starter’ which has ‘caught’ yeast from the air, is denser than yeast bread. This starter contains a lactobacillus culture with sufficient yeast for bread to rise, though it is less active than pure yeast. The acetic note – its extent depending on the culture and method used – emanates from lactobacilli assisting the benign bacteria in our digestive tract.

    Lactobacillus

    Police Enquiry

    In the seventeenth century, bread was a vital element of the diet for the average poor Parisian, who ate an impressive kilo-and-a-half per day. Indeed, the price of bread was one trigger of the French Revolution, inspiring Marie Antoinette’s famous – though apocryphal – solution: ‘let them eat cake’.

    The perceived adulteration of bread with barm was, therefore, controversial. A dispute between guilds of bakers and innkeepers over the sale of bread brought the matter to a head. Innkeepers claimed that traditional sourdough Gonesse bread, purchased from out-of-town traders for retail, was superior to the yeasted ‘Queen’s bread’ sold by bakers. This bread, the innkeepers alleged, was a corruption of pure bread, i.e. dough made with only water and flour and kept until it became sour.

    This early health scare led to the formation of an expert medical panel to address the issue of the use of barm, mostly imported from breweries in Flanders, sometimes in a state of autolysis. The origin of the adjective ‘barmy’ recalls the distrust, even in beer-friendly Britain, for this puzzling, fizzing substance. At that time, as today, wine was the preferred beverage in France and the inclusion of barm from beer in bread making was considered unpatriotic.

    Following the debate between the guilds, a French police inquiry observed that one could take precautions against bread that was visibly poorly baked, but added: ‘It is not the same with fermentation, which makes the dough rise; which refines it and makes it lighter. Because the worst is sometimes what gives bread the best appearance of goodness.’[iv]

    This echoes the sentiments of Elizabeth David centuries later in relation to the deceptive scent of baking, as she put it: ‘it is a fact of life that all bread, homemade, factory-made, bakery-made, good, indifferent, gives out a glorious smell, but to buy bread on its smell while hot is asking for disillusion.’ It seems that human senses are not always equipped to immediately discern good quality bread. Quality is revealed not just by sight, smell, or even taste, but through digestion, or rather the extent to which micro-organisms have already digested it. This accords with the oft-misrepresented Epicurus, who argued that one should avoid those foods which, though giving pleasure at the time, afterwards leave one feeling deprived.

    Peasants sharing bread, from the Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, France, 14th century.

    In condemning the use of yeast, the leading medical expert in the case Gui Patin stated:

    To say, as those who defend it do, that they have not seen anyone drop over sick or dead from eating this bread is not a good way to clear it of the faults with which it has been charged. It is like sugar refined with lime or alum, or heavily salted, peppered and sliced meats, or wines in which one tosses lime or fish glue, or other things bad in themselves which men concerned about their health avoid, even if none of these things causes death or threatens one’s health on the day it is ingested.

    In spite of this advice the Paris parliament maintained a policy of laissez faire. The preference for yeast may be explained by its faster action than leaven, and in truth many still prefer the fluffiness it imparts. Today in France pain au levain is less common than baguette de tradition française made with yeast, which is now, ironically, a symbol of France. In most countries fast-acting yeast has taken the place of the slow action of traditional leaven. Yet worse was to follow with advances in industrial technology.

    Elizabeth David.

    Caustic Assessment

    Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery, first published in 1977, provides an outstanding contribution to the subject of baking, exploring the history, science and practice of the craft. It offers a caustic assessment of the baking industry that remains as vital today as when first published, though one limitation is that most recipes call for yeast rather than sourdough leaven.

    David wrote in the wake of the Chorleywood Bread Process, invented in 1961, and known in chilling Orwellian language as the ‘no-time method’. Eighty-percent of bread in the U.K. is currently prepared using this method, which involves a super-quick fermentation; the slow maturation of dough is replaced by a few minutes of intense mechanical agitation in special high-speed mixers. This sounds miraculous, but solid fat is necessary to prevent the loaf collapsing and a large quantity of yeast is added: David asserts that sixteen times as much yeast is used with the CBP as in some traditional recipes; a bit barmy really.

    Such a huge amount of yeast is used in order to speed up the process, and to increase volume by maximizing dough expansion. Powdered gluten may also be added to lower-protein soft flour. Admittedly this has reduced the U.K.’s dependence on the ‘harder’ strains of wheat imported from warmer countries. Writing in the wake of the CBP, Elizabeth David remarked: ‘It will be interesting to see the efforts of the milling industry to sell us bread which is more suitable for cake, or at any rate for cattle cake.’

    In fact preparing bread with soft British and Irish wheat strains is possible using artisanal methods, it just requires a longer fermentation period to develop the gluten. Perhaps as a result, over-worked bakers in the past acquired a reputation for being strong, and dumb. But the convenience of modern methods comes at a nutritional cost.

    Give Us Our Bread

    In the early feudal period a lord of the manor held a milling monopoly over grain grown within his domain. But by the late fourteenth century the situation had changed with the emergence of independent millers, who acquired a reputation for unscrupulous behaviour.

    Robin the miller, unknown 15th century artist.

    Thus, in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c.1400), millers are lampooned as cheats who over-charge for grinding corn. This is an enduring stereotype revealing resentment against the wealth of an emerging capitalist class of millers, at a time when field crops formed 80% of the diets of poorer sections of society.

    Our bread-dependent civilization has tended to generate and perpetuate social hierarchies dependent on the ownership of land, milling technology and the storage conditions required to preserve a year round supply, and sufficient seed for the following year.

    Until recently, when health authorities recognised the importance of roughage in our diets, white or, more accurately, a yellowish-shade of bread was more expensive and reserved for the wealthy. This snobbery against darker loaves can be explained by their common adulteration with inferior grains, unground husks, and even indigestible matter.

    Relative whiteness indicated purity, though the bran and wheatgerm was never entirely extracted using pre-industrial techniques. The first roller mill was opened in Glasgow in 1872 and since then white bread has been affordable for the masses, who assumed the bread esteemed by their social superiors was of a superior quality. Soon bread was even being bleached to conform to the consumer’s expectation for pristine whiteness, though most bleaching agents are now banned under E.U. (though not U.S.) law.

    Oven Ready

    The oven is the last piece in the jigsaw of technology and accumulated wisdom required in bread-making. Bread may be baked in a pan over an open fire in the form of ‘griddle cakes’, but a hot oven serves best, filled with steam which gelatinizes the outer layer of bread to give it a firm crust. A critical mass of population and wealth is, however, required for such ovens to be built, and the necessary fuel gathered. Thus, less technologically developed societies usually heat a cauldron over an open fire, consuming grain in the form of soup called frumenty and other stir-a-bouts.

    The Second Agricultural, beginning in the seventeenth, which preceded the Industrial Revolution, led to the demise of most domestic bread-making in Britain: the Enclosure Acts denied rural communities access to common land where fuel could be gathered; it was too expensive for urban households to maintain ovens; and coal which came into widespread use billows black smoke unconducive to baking.

    George Russell (Æ)

    Over the course of the nineteenth century, shop-bought bread became the norm, especially as many women joined the labour force. In Ireland this process occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1913 George Russell Æ observed the effect of the transition in Ireland:

    There is no doubt that the vitality of the Irish people has seriously diminished, and that the change has come about with a change in the character of the food consumed. When people lived with porridge, brown bread and milk as the main ingredients in the diet, the vitality and energy of the people was noticeable, though they were much poorer than they are now… When one looks at an Irish crowd one could almost tell the diet of most of them. These anaemic girls have tea running in their veins instead of blood. These weakly looking boys have been fed on white bread.[v]

    Cultural Indicator

    The story of bread is like a Russian doll, a multi-layered revelation exposing a great deal of our civilization. Perhaps above any other food it requires human ingenuity in agriculture, engineering and cuisine. No wonder it provides the metaphor of transubstantiation.

    Sadly, the dominance of indigestible white bread from unmatured dough has been a nutritional and gastronomic calamity. Constipation is the large and rather pained elephant clambering about the room, and bread is now marked with the dreaded sign of fat, as a contributor to the global obesity pandemic. But it shouldn’t be this way: unadulterated sourdough bread combines nutritional benefits with supreme gustatory enjoyment, in the true Epicurean sense.

    One issue for us to consider is an over-reliance on hard wheat strains, considering other grains are more suited to our growing conditions. The present fluctuating climate recommends diversity, and as omnivores this is to our nutritional benefit.

    The Classical Greek author Atheneaus records seventy-two varieties of bread baked in his time. Today we expect homogeneity. The spectre of food shortages looms, however, due to over-reliance on finite fossil fuels.

    Individuals and communities can begin to take control of their own bread supply. Domestic baking is tricky but rewarding. In Denmark all schoolchildren are taught how to bake, a valuable lesson that could be introduced to our schools.

    With more time on our hands during lockdown may have shown a willingness to make bread to a reasonable standard. Apart from saving money, this shouldn’t be too labour-intensive as sourdough keeps well without preservatives, and can be baked in batches. For most of us bread is a com-pan-ion for life, and nothing less than the best should suffice.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery Cookbook, Grub Street, London, 2010,

    [ii] Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas, Empires of Food , and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Free Press, New York, 2014, p.2

    [iii] Madeleine Ferrières, Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, (translated by Jody Gladding), pp.111-133

    [iv] Ibid, Ferrières

    [v] Leslie Clarkson, Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920 Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p.238

  • Covid-19: A New Irish Social Contract?

    Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of three indicators: Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens.

    These features of a healthy republic, he wrote, diverge from a narrow form of republicanism associated with Rousseau ‘which argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will: ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy.’ Up to that point in Ireland, O’Toole argued, this latter, narrow version had predominated, which he associated ‘in vulgar terms’ with appeals being made to ‘pull on the green jersey’’; and where ‘an idea of accountability implicit in mixed government is ditched.’

    ‘For most of the history of the state’, O’Toole concluded that the state ‘failed miserably in the basic task of ensuring citizens were free from subjection to the arbitrary will of others.’[i]

    Now, as Ireland slowly unwinds from an interminable lockdown that tendency of Irish governments to pull on the green jersey, avoid accountability, reject obstreperousness and a conspicuous failure to ensure that citizens are free from the subjection to the arbitrary will of others, is evident once again. This regression has arrived especially through what O’Toole himself described on April 28th, 2020 as the ‘top-down, command-and-control approach’ of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), which the elected government has deferred to throughout most of the pandemic.

    Times of War

    The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to reshape the Irish political landscape, eroding foundational certainties of left and right. When the dust settles new formations may crawl from the debris, with democracy itself in peril, as the coalition government chooses to extend emergency powers until November, while other countries such as Denmark aim for a swift return to normality.

    In terms of the pandemic’s wide-ranging impact, there are parallels with the outbreak of a global war. As Hannah Arendt put it: ‘The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of the an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.’[ii]

    Placing billions under lockdown around the world had a shuddering effect on daily routines, altering intimate exchanges and gestures, besides radically reducing the ambit of daily peregrinations. It’s a very modern form of trench warfare that confined most of us to within 5km of barracks – spilling out invective on (anti-)social media.

    In Ireland, with the advent of bigger government, there is a confidence among some on the left that their time has arrived, and that a relatively youthful population will vanquish age-old privileges of wealth and caste through a permanently enlarged state.

    However, as Eric Hobsbawm records, one reason Engels (and even the late Marx) ‘began to turn away from calculations that the international war might be an instrument of revolution was the discovery that it would lead to ‘the recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries’ which would serve the ruling classes.’[iii]

    Similarly, nationalism chauvinism – ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex’ – has been witnessed throughout the pandemic in Ireland. This is perhaps unsurprising as, historically, infectious diseases have given rise to, and fed, plagues of prejudice and outright racism; the diseased ‘other’ at the gates of the city is a recurring theme. Ruling classes have often put forward strongman rulers to harness this xenophobic sentiment.

    Since March 2020 we have poured over spreadsheets of daily deaths, infections, testing rates and vaccine roll outs to determine how ‘we’ are doing relative to ‘them.’ In Ireland we tend to measure achievements and failures against the noisy neighbour next door, whose boorish leader has somehow managed to transform one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from Covid-19 into a great British victory pageant, through a rapid vaccine rollout. Boris now looks unassailable, notwithstanding Brexit storm clouds, Dominic’s revenge, Indian variants; and just the suspicion that the vaccine may not prove quite the panacea it seems now in winter 2022. Time will tell.

    Indeed, the narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic should serve as a warning to the Irish left that ruling classes can easily steal their best clothes. In this respect, Johnson operated with far greater flexibility than Donald Trump, shifting from a ‘take on the chin’ herd immunity approach in March, 2020 to championing what he would have previously decried as a ‘nanny state’ lockdown. He and his chumocracy used the pandemic as a pretext for introducing draconian legislation against protest and civil disobedience, apparently aimed at movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

    Recovery Position

    Similarly, though less dramatically, Leo Varadkar resuscitated his political career after Fine Gael’s disastrous performance in General Election 2020, donning proverbial scrubs for the initial phase of the pandemic. Having identified himself with “early-rising” middle class voters Varadkar was smart enough to realise that his preferred Thatcherite policy of reliance on an Invisible Hand of market forces could lead to a public health disaster during a pandemic.

    Since entering the coalition, Fine Gael Ministers have emphasised a law and order approach – Simon ‘TikTok’ Harris was quick off the blocks denouncing as ‘disgusting, grotesque and obscene’ a comparatively unobstreperous anti-lockdown protest in Dublin by European standards. Fine Gael have also allowed Fianna Fail to act as a mudguard for a failing system of public health: Ireland’s health expenditure is the third highest in the EU, yet we have only 5 ICU beds per 100,000, compared to 35 in Germany and 28 in Austria.

    Fine Gael represents itself as a centrist party, placing emphasis on its belated support for marriage equality and abortion referendums, which obscures from a failure in government to address structural inequalities and ongoing environmental damage. Replacing James Reilly as Minister for Health in 2015 Leo Varadkar promptly abandoned universal health insurance (UHI).

    After becoming leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar claimed he would represent thrusting early risers – tantamount to saying he would not alter structural inequalities that are most apparent in access to housing. In combination with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael has represented the dominant interest of large property owners, indifferent to whether their wealth is maintained via independent corporate entities, the state, or as in Ireland’s case increasingly, a corporate-state nexus.

    Simple distinctions of left and right are often misleading. Thus, when considering the virtues, or otherwise, of big government it should be clear that administrative levers and patronage may drive inequality; most obviously through mind-boggling salaries, such as the €420k paid to the Director General of a dysfunctional HSE, Paul Reid – ironically a former Workers’ Party activist. Reid has no medical or scientific qualifications, and previously acted as chief executive of Fingal County Council.

    Moreover, left-wing politicians and their supporters are often drawn from higher income groups; a tendency that within Fine Gael circles used to be referred to as noblesse oblige – accompanied by the obligatory glass of fine Cognac – of which the Just Society was the apotheosis. But a left-wing identity may be superficial, as the distribution of state largesse, or patronage, apart from being expressed in high public sector salaries, often benefits established professional elites of lawyers, academics and indeed doctors.

    Leprechaun Economics

    Big government patronage motors along fine in Ireland for all concerned as long as the tech and pharma sectors do the heavy economic lifting. This is the ‘Leprechaun Economics’ that Paul Krugman referred to dismissively. But now the Biden administration’s taxation proposed changes to the global tax system may make the current Irish model unworkable. The ECB is also likely to desist eventually from quantitative easing, with inflation looming.

    Renewed fiscal rectitude and the prospect of multinationals leaving a perpetually unaffordable capital city for workers, will place increasing reliance on those indigenous SMEs that have endured the Crash of 2008, and the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. Yet whole sectors have been furloughed for over a year, with some such as events and tourism wondering whether they have a future at all. The Central Bank has warned that one in four firms could fail when pandemic payments cease.

    It should be unsurprising, therefore, for a small businessperson living from transaction to transaction to be wary of parties promising higher taxation on the left, and instead be attracted to politicians on the right, or even far-right, that are acquainted with the language of commerce, however superficial this may be, in the case of Leo Varadkar at least, whose concern for SMEs has disappeared after his supportive comments proved unpopular last October.

    An objective for a progressive left should be to attract support from an increasingly marginalised mercantile class, emphasising that a favourable environment for entrepreneurship, as in Scandinavia, is enabled by efficient public service, including a one-tier, functioning health system. The left can argue that leaving healthcare to market forces – as in the U.S. – is not only deeply unfair, but also, crucially, leads to greater costs than a functioning one tier public system which also – as in most European countries – delivers better outcomes overall.

    The inherent danger of Ireland’s two-tier model, where health care provision is subject to market forces is epitomised by a question recently posed by a Goldman Sachs executive: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” In an age of profound health insecurities – which are amplified through subtle advertising cues – market forces will continue to distort public health priorities.

    It was the father of economics Adam Smith who warned: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ However, while resisting a buccaneering tendency in the delivery of a vital government service such as healthcare, the left cannot afford to dismiss the dynamism of entrepreneurship in society at large. Just imagine the food you would be served if the government was running all the restaurants.

    Following Public Health Guidance

    While there are a range of financial supports available to SMEs, the world-beating length of Ireland’s lockdown has made trade impossible for many businesses, some of which may never recover. The failure of the two centre-right parties in government to represent their concerns arguably, lies at the heart of Ireland’s deeply flawed response to the pandemic.

    From March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years. Yet, despite having the youngest population in the Union, according to a Reuters by February Ireland had endured 163 days of workday closures. This was the highest, by some measure, of all the European countries surveyed at that point. By contrast, Denmark had lost just fifteen days, having experienced a death toll almost half that of Ireland’s per capita.

    The uncritical attitude of mainstream Irish left wing parties towards public health officials should also be reconsidered. Recall the major mistakes in particular by Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan, who saw nothing wrong with fans going to Cheltenham in early March, 2020, ordered care homes to re-open to visitors that same month, and then transferred 4,500 untested patients back into care homes – surely contributing to the second highest level of care home mortality in the world during the first wave. Yet Irish left wing politicians have consistently complained about the government failing ‘to follow public health advice,’ despite Holohan’s long history of cock-ups and cover-ups.

    Even before Christmas NPHET – a body composed primarily of career civil servants and notably short on scientific expertise – seemed to have been all on board for the ’meaningful Christmas’ of Micheal Martin’s imagination. The only significant deviation between the government’s approach and NPHET’s advice was that the latter preferred to permit household gatherings rather than opening the hospitality sector. Cue raucous Christmas house parties, as opposed to what were mainly orderly affairs in pubs and restaurants.

    In fact, Ireland’s ‘third’ wave, which coincided with the more transmissible B.119 variant (although apparently not more lethal as was widely reported) actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.

    Sadly, public health obscurantism has also brought denial of their own data, which said outdoor transmission of Covid-19 is about as frequent as curlew sightings.

    The latest embarrassment over NPHET refusing to acknowledge the benefits of antigen testing, underlines that if left-wing politicians are slavishly going ‘to follow the public health advice,’ and whatever Yes Minister civil servant advises then we won’t see radical reforms in Ireland any time soon.

    Frank O’Connor

    Guests of the Nation

    Over the course of the pandemic Irish attitudes have hardened against the free movement of people in and out of the country, culminating in the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantines for some foreign, including EU, arrivals at the end of February.

    Contemporary Irish attitudes to hardworking foreigners resident in Ireland recall Frank O’Connor’s classic 1931 short story ‘Guests of the Nation.’ Set during the War of Independence 1919-21 it portrays a bond of friendship that grows up between two IRA men, Bonaparte (the narrator), and Noble, who are detailed to guard two captured English soldiers Belcher and ‘Awkins who have a natural affinity with the country:

    I couldn’t at the time see the point of me and Noble being with Belcher and ‘Awkins at all, for it was  and is my fixed belief you could have planted that pair in any untended spot from this to Claregalway and they’d have stayed put and flourished like a native weed.

    Ultimately ‘Awkins and Belcher are sacrificed at the altar of of a narrow nationalism, just as a today the Populist appeal to ‘protect our own people’ has ordained that the rights of immigrants in Ireland, and abroad, to see their families was disregarded.

    This appears to stem from a widespread notion that ‘we,’ like faraway New Zealand and Australia, can eliminate the disease from ‘our’ shores altogether – devolving into the juvenile #wecanbezeros hashtag adopted by some politicians on the left. The problem is that ‘we’ are a society with lots of ‘them’ immigrants living here, and an enormous diaspora of ‘us’ beyond the shores of an island divided into two jurisdictions, highly dependent on international trade in goods arriving on trucks (with drivers).

    Moreover, apart from the extreme geographic isolation and sparse populations of Australia and New Zealand, ‘we’ in Ireland have legal obligations to preserve freedom of movement under European treaties and the Good Friday Agreement, enshrining a porous open land border. Apart from committing economic hari-kari, pursuit of ZeroCovid appears legally impossible, unless of course we want to pursue an Irexit and build a wall along the Northern border.

    Nonetheless, egged on by febrile – ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – coverage in a national media increasingly reliant on government advertising, a prevailing view is that all deaths from Covid are essentially preventable; emanating from the failing of the state, or the reviled Covidiot, rather than being the tragic consequence of a pandemic, the death toll from which has been systematically exaggerated.

    Moreover, intercepted correspondence within the ZeroCovid ISAG group of independent scientists – who have taken on the Opus Dei role to the Catholic hierarchy of NPHET – reveals, among other disturbing insights, that they were looking ‘for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.’ As these revelations first appeared in right-wing Gript, however, the left-wing echo chamber refuses to acknowledge it is being played.

    Are you right there Michael?

    Nonetheless, a number of politicians have come forward representing an anti-authoritarian left, concerned by the harms of lockdown and favouring a targeted approach – protecting the elderly – and building up ICU capacity. In a recent blistering Twitter attack the independent (and former Labour) TD for Clare, barrister Michael McNamara – who as chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Covid-19 Response became as well acquainted as any Irish politician with diverging epidemiological assessments of the pandemic – identified a recurring Irish deference to vested authority.

    In response to a Fintan O’Toole article critiquing the DUP McNamara wrote: ‘Instead of criticising unionism, let’s look at the complete mess we’ve made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We’re ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same.’

    He continued: ‘If it wasn’t for Unionism, we’d be like Hoxha’s Albania now. There’d be no way off this island. But there is a beacon. Belfast Airport and Larne are beyond the reach of NPHET, just as surely as the rule of the Archbishop’s palace in Drumcondra didn’t pass the bridge in Portadown.’

    He added more controversially:

    ‘We can’t blame the medics for their experimental therapy, any more than we could blame the clergy for their zeal.  Successive governments have abdicated their democratic responsibility throughout this State’s short history. So why would Unionists want to be “governed” by Dublin?’

    It was a fair question, when one considers the North is reopening far sooner than the Republic. Although this has arrived after a rapid vaccine rollout, the experimental nature of which McNamara raises problems with.

    Facing Up to Errors

    Here we come to the crux of an unhelpful cultural division between left and right that the ruling parties will use to divide and conquer. This is the new identity politics arising out of the pandemic, epitomised by attitudes towards face masks.

    For too many on the left the science on this issue is proven as opposed to followed. Wearing a face mask now appears to have become an article of faith. Yet a recent report by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention entitled ‘Using face masks in the community: first update – Effectiveness in reducing transmission of COVID-19’ stated:

    The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect, but there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect. Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty.

    Additional high-quality studies are needed to assess the relevance of the use of medical face masks in the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Moreover, the Irish left should consider our dependence on pharmaceutical behemoths that jealously guard intellectual properties, notwithstanding huge state aid grants, and indemnification against adverse reactions. It is akin to the dependence of small farmers in developing countries on genetically modified seed, under a model of Philanthrocapitalism overseen by Bill Gates, who according to a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik has shown “a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies,” and devotes hundreds of millions of dollars each year to whitewashing his reputation through “charitable” media grants.

    Moreover, all too often, media debates around Covid-19 fail to acknowledge the link between pre-existing morbidities – ‘underlying conditions’ – and morbidity and mortality from Covid-19. Thus, US Studies have shown that having a BMI over 30—the threshold that defines obesity—increases the risk of being admitted to hospital with covid-19 by 113%, of being admitted to intensive care by 74%, and of dying by 48%, making it almost as relevant a consideration as having been vaccinated.

    In Ireland, moreover, Mayo coroner Patrick O’Connor recently questioned the attribution of deaths to Covid-19, saying: ‘In reality, a lot of people have terminal cancer or multiple other serious co-morbidities. People can die from Covid and or with Covid. I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis.’

    https://twitter.com/SunTimesIreland/status/1383791062846562307

    Furthermore, by embracing ZeroCovid Utopianism many on the Irish left failed to focus on the failings of a decrepit Irish health system. This epitomises a tendency among politicians to dance to the tune of a corporate media that has placed relentless focus on the disease itself, regularly interviewing mendacious ISAG figures, while generally ignoring underlying social and environmental factors that drive morbidity and mortality.

    The canard that Ireland could simply shut its borders and reach ZeroCovid perhaps points to the need for reform of an Irish secondary educational system, which according to the a rather unkind assessment from the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher is designed to produce ‘second-class robots.’ Perhaps too many of us are lacking the requisite critical faculties to look beyond news headlines.

    In fact a radically different, defiantly left-wing approach to the pandemic been put forward by, among others, Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kuldorff in The Jacobin. They pointed out:

    Elites have seen their stock portfolios balloon in value, and many professionals have been able to keep their jobs by working from home. It is the country’s poor and working-class households, particularly those with children, who have borne a disproportionate share of the burden. Lower-income Americans were much more likely to be forced to work in unsafe conditions, to have lost their livelihoods due to business and school shutdowns, or to be unable to learn remotely.

    Beyond ZeroCovid, the Irish left should emphasis the harms of Ireland’s reliance on lockdowns, and harness the malcontents of the poorest, including small business owners. Otherwise they court irrelevance as the traditional ruling parties have already taken on the role of ‘caring’ for the people, while retaining the power to ease restrictions in the face of opposition from the left.

    Science and Technology are not Neutral

    Also, as opposed to running in fear from being labelled anti-vaxxers by a cheerleading corporate media, the left might at least consider the wisdom of foisting vaccines that have been granted under emergency use conditions on all age groups. Indeed, many on the left in Ireland seem unwilling to question dominant institutional narratives, a tendency recently criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris in The Jacobin, who said: ‘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.’

    It remains unclear whether universal immunization will bring about long-term ‘herd’ immunity; while in the absence of long-term safety data the benefits to young, healthy subjects of vaccination may not outweigh the cost in terms of adverse events from treatments granted under emergency use licences. Sober assessment seems to have given way to an ideological and, at times, a coercive approach.

    In terms of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, writing in the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, pointed to how in the media ‘a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%’ for severe disease.’ Ollario et al in The Lancet referred to absolute risk reductions of ‘1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.’ The authors also pointed to how ‘considerations on efficacy and effectiveness are based on studies measuring prevention of mild to moderate COVID-19 infection; they were not designed to conclude on prevention of hospitalisation, severe disease, or death, or on prevention of infection and transmission potential.’

    Doshi has also 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 those who received a placebo the opportunity to receive its vaccine.

    Doshi argued 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.’

    An alternative policy would be to reserve vaccines for those most susceptible to severe symptoms – the old and the obese – along with healthcare workers and others unavoidably working around the world in congested environments. Devoting scarce resources to increasing ICU provision to bring us into line with European averages might be a better approach than relying exclusively on the quick fix of the vaccine.

    The Irish left should now desist from identity politics around vaccine uptake that the centre-right is relishing. ‘Tiktok’ Harris previously stoked tensions with talk of mandatory vaccines and promoting vaccine passports. The left should resist vaccine apartheid, nationally and globally, while demanding the release of patents earned through state supports.

    On the Horizon

    Ireland can expect significant social problems to emerge out of our world-beating lockdown strategy that recalls a prior devotion to austerity; a mental health pandemic and mass youth unemployment are upon us already. Moreover, the young are currently denied the safety valve of an easy hop to another English-speaking country for work. This may be a recipe for radicalism, but unfortunately genuinely dark forces on the far-right are ready to pounce on malcontents.

    It is surely vital that we maintain our European connections, thereby scrapping Mandatory Health Quarantine that is an insult to immigrant groups in Ireland, as well as the diaspora. 90% of scientists believe that Covid-19 will be with us forever, so it seems there will always be ‘variants of concern’ to contend with, just as there are with influenza.

    As a country Ireland has serious work to get on with in terms of addressing a housing crisis and improving our environment. A narrow focus on the pandemic should not be allowed to derail these efforts. This may be like a war but it is not a war. Even prior to vaccines, this is a virus with an infection fatality rate of less than 0.2% in most locations. Moreover, up to 86% of those infected may not have symptoms, such as cough, fever, or loss of taste or smell, according to a UK study from October. We require better provision of public health and an adequate plan to address the ongoing obesity pandemic.

    We also need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about Long Covid, considering ‘at least some people who identify themselves as having Long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.’

    We need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about long Covid

    A New Social Contract?

    The pandemic calls for a new social contract to be negotiated in Ireland that acknowledges republican values of Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens. The French COVID-19 Scientific Council led the way in a paper for The Lancet:

    it is time to abandon fear-based approaches based on seemingly haphazard stop-start generalised confinement as the main response to the pandemic; approaches which expect citizens to wait patiently until intensive care units are re-enforced, full vaccination is achieved, and herd immunity is reached.

    They continue:

    Crucially, the new approach should be based on a social contract that is clear and transparent, rooted in available data, and applied with precision to its range of generational targets. Under this social contract, younger generations could accept the constraint of prevention measures (eg, masks, physical distancing) on the condition that the older and more vulnerable groups adopt not only these measures, but also more specific steps (eg, voluntary self-isolation according to vulnerability criteria) to reduce their risk of infection. Measures to encourage adherence of vulnerable groups to specific measures must be promoted consistently and enforced fairly. Implementation of such an approach must be done sensitively and in conjunction with the deployment of vaccination across the various population targets, including all generations of society.

    They argue against reliance on lockdowns:

    Using stop-start general confinement as the main response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer feasible. Though attractive to many scientists, and a default measure for political leaders fearing legal liability for slow or indecisive national responses, its use must be revisited, only to be used as a last resort.

    To date, many on the Irish left appear to have had their heads in the sand promoting a Utopian ZeroCovid solution. This should give way to a more balanced appraisal that considers the interests of all of Irish society. With the youngest population in Europe, and as one of the richest countries, the Irish government could have preserved a far higher standard of living for the population during the pandemic. We now need to draw up a social contract that takes a more balanced approach.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] O’Toole, Fintan (editor), Up The Republic: Towards a New Ireland. Faber and Faber, London, 2012, p.1-52.

    [ii] Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.22

    [iii] Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, Tales of Marx and Marxism, Little, Brown, London, 2011, p.79

  • ZeroCovid’s Neoconservative Traits

    So-called ‘ZeroCovid’ is a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to the virus, promising to eliminate community transmission in Ireland. The concept has gained traction among young people, especially, desperate for an end to a seemingly endless cycle of lockdowns, and others worried by the danger posed by the disease itself.

    The original ‘zero-tolerance’ policy is identified with Donald Trump’s associate Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor of New York (1994-2001), and involved punishment for even minor infractions.

    Rudy Giuliani

    Most criminologists agree, however, that zero-tolerance, based on the ‘broken window’ theory of policing, made little difference to overall crime rates, which seem to have been falling in New York prior to Giuliani’s period in office. New powers of arrest simply handed police carte blanche to remove homeless people from affluent neighbourhoods. Thus Time Square became a safe haven for tourism, but ghettos remained no go.

    Zero-tolerance policies emerged in a neoconservative era alongside ‘humanitarian interventions,’ culminating in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, led by U.S. President George W. Bush, and supported by U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair also backed a zero tolerance approach to crime in the U.K., and has recently inveigled his way back to prominence as part of the ‘war’ effort against Covid-19.

    Neoconservatives engineered a War on Terror which, apart from direct military actions, included ‘shock and awe’ tactics to cow opponents, galvanising support through appeals to nationalist sentiment and by demonising – often phantom – enemies.

    Finally, neoconservatism is aligned with neoliberal austerity adopted in the wake of the Financial Crisis, beginning in 2007-2008. Austerity proponents assume purgative measures – described as ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein – are required to heal the body politic of its economic woes.

    Family Resemblances

    The ZeroCovid elimination approach in Ireland bears significant family resemblances to an illusory zero-tolerance policy to crime. There are also shades of the War on Terror’s ‘shock and awe’ tactic of elevating fear and appealing to narrow national self-interest. The imprint of austerity is apparent in a promise of deliverance after painful expurgation, as a population already frayed by successive lockdowns is exhorted to double down and accept greater stringency. Naomi Klein has also identified a Pandemic Shock Doctrine.

    It may seem surprising that Irish leftists should be attracted to a policy which seems to have a neoconservative mentality, but notably ‘recovering socialists developed neoconservatism in the sixties and seventies,’ and the Marxist dialectic permits great suffering before the achievement of a socialist paradise.

    Leading spokespeople do not, however, give the impression they welcome the embrace of leftists. Tomás Ryan recently called for ‘more of a grand coalition attitude’; while another, Anthony Staines is, or was, a member of Fine Gael. Among the few practising doctors associated with ZeroCovid is Maitiú Ó Tuathail, whose friendship with then Fine Gael Taoiseach Leo Varadkar gave him access to a confidential agreement between the State and the IMO, which is now the subject of a Garda enquiry.

    ZeroCovid is certainly not a blueprint for a socialist republic – the narrowness of its focus its quite striking – and advocates assert pro-business credentials, Ryan emphasising that ‘ZeroCovid countries are ranking highest in business confidence.’ Far from being treated as revolutionaries in the mainstream media, its spokespeople have become household names during the pandemic, blurring a distinction between expert witness and political actor.

    Some on the left may be attracted to ZeroCovid in the hope that ‘Napoleonic’ state mobilisation witnessed during the pandemic will be carried into ‘peacetime,’ to address poverty and environmental destruction. The shady dealings we have witnessed in this period, however, set a dangerous precedent, as the executive director of the British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi put it:

    Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

    Given the paucity of investigative journalism in Ireland it is difficult to assess corruption levels, but the one euro billion spent on PPE in 2020 raises a red flag, while allegations of contracts being awarded inappropriately are ventilated on social media.

    End of the Truce

    It is also notable that despite the obvious distinction between the government’s suppression approach, and ZeroCovid’s elimination policy, there has been no direct confrontation between the two groups. At the end of January, however, the truce ended with the chair of the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group Philip Nolan decisively branding ZeroCovid ‘an utterly false promise.’

    This intervention may have been linked to recent politicisation, as the Social Democrats, and to a lesser extent Labour (which announced ‘a national aggressive suppression strategy, zero Covid-19 by another name’), followed People Before Profit’s earlier embrace of the project.

    Throughout the pandemic ZeroCovid spokespeople have been welcomed within the dominant media consensus – assessing the virus a once-in-a-generation challenge – with nationalist appeals – adopting the hashtag #wecanbezero – perhaps seen as a way way of channeling latent radicalism away from opposition to reliance on strict lockdowns.

    Origins of ZeroCovid

    The genesis of the movement in Ireland is unclear. Last summer the Wellcome Trust, whose offshore dealings were exposed in the Paradise Papers, launched a global ‘Zero Covid’ fundraising initiative for vaccine research, with the support of Goldman Sachs Gives and others.

    The Irish initiative traces its origins to a disparate group of academic scientists led by Staines that brought forward a Crush the Curve petition in July, preceding the emergence of a Zero Covid Island group. It has since morphed into another organisation called ISAG: ‘a multidisciplinary group of scientists, academics, and researchers who have come together to advocate for a SARS-CoV-2 elimination strategy for the island’.

    Yaneer Bar-Yam preparing to speak at an event in 2014.

    Among those involved is a MIT Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, who does not appear to have had any previous connection to Ireland. Bar Yam previously advised the Pentagon ‘about global social unrest and the crises in Egypt and Syria’, and the National Security Council and the National Counter Terrorism Council on global strategy, elsewhere described as ‘preventing ethnic violence.’ He also advised policymakers on the elimination of Ebola, a disease which presents a very different challenge to Covid-19.

    Tomás Ryan is himself a former Post-Doctoral Fellow (2010-2016) at MIT, having previously been a Junior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wolfson College, Cambridge (2009 – 2010). Ryan’s background is in neuroscience and has no publications in virology or epidemiology.

    Bar-Yam set up an organisation called ENDCRONAVIRUS.ORG (https://www.endcoronavirus.org/) in February 2020, and may see Ireland as a potential testing ground for counter-viral methods.

    ZeroCovid appeals to national self-interest, requiring exclusion of a diseased ‘other,’ through mandatory quarantines for foreign arrivals, and promotes the creation of zero-transmission zones within the country. In August Bar-Yam co-authored a paper entitled, ‘A green zone strategy for Ireland,’ which recalls Baghdad’s ‘Green Zone’ under U.S. occupation, and districts ‘purified’ by the application of a zero-tolerance approach to crime.

    Indefinite elimination of what appears to be an endemic seasonal virus from a globally integrated country such as Ireland appears Utopian however, with most scientists assuming Covid-19 will be with us forever.

    Last month, Nature asked more than one hundred immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists working on Covid-19 whether they believe it can be eradicated. Almost 90% responded to say it will become endemic

    According to one of those surveyed Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. ‘Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon.’

    Jacinda Arden

    New Zealand

    For obvious cultural reasons, Irish ZeroCovid strategists often cite New Zealand’s as a model to follow – factors other than suppression policies appear to be inhibiting Covid-19 in east Asian countries –  but this ignores the extreme isolation of a sparsely populated island nation situated on the other side of the world, under a depleted ozone layer that brings elevated levels of virus-killing ultraviolet light. Moreover, New Zealand does not have a disputed border with another jurisdiction to contend with. Also, importantly, New Zealand’s imports arrive in containers, as opposed to Ireland’s reliance on ‘roll-on roll-off’ trucks.

    https://twitter.com/John_McGahon/status/1360552471345717249

    Moreover, it seems significant that there have been less than two thousand cases of Covid-19 detected in New Zealand so far during the pandemic. Common cold viruses display infuriatingly unpredictable behaviour, waxing and waning seasonally, like influenza, which derives its name from the influenza degli astri, or ‘influence of the planets.’

    A paper from 1973 entitled ‘An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation’, discusses the case of six of twelve men wintering at an isolated Antarctic base that sequentially developed common cold symptoms after seventeen weeks of complete isolation.

    According to the authors: ‘Examination of specimens taken from the men in relation to the outbreak has not revealed a causative agent,’ which the authors say could ‘well have been the effects of a coronavirus.’ Bewildered, they conclude: ‘in some way virus persisted, either in the environment or in the men.’

    Furthermore, in an article for Cassandra Voices Justin Frewen observed how decisive political leadership encouraged personal responsibility:

    In addition to providing Covid-19 related information through standard media channels, the NZ Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has communicated directly with the public, making herself available to the media and holding daily public press conferences, led by New Zealand’s director-general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Together they have displayed “a reliable, measured and authoritative face for New Zealand’s Covid-19 response”.Of particular value has been the clarity of Jacinda Ardern’s communication on the virus. Her leadership style has been assessed by one commentator as ‘one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.’

    The virus returned mysteriously to Auckland in August, however, leading to a second lockdown. Civil liberties advocates may take issue with the mandatory confinement of anyone testing positive – and mandatory quarantining of all visitors – but the response to the virus has been to the benefit and satisfaction of the vast majority of New Zealanders, and the satisfies a principle of proportionality.

    But another outbreak at the beginning of February has brought yet another lockdown to Auckland, and Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has since signalled that the country’s elimination strategy is to be abandoned in the wake of the arrival of vaccines, stating: ‘Our goal has to be though, to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally, with the flu. It won’t be a disease that we will see simply disappear after one round of vaccine.’

    Yet surprisingly vaccines are not seen as a game changer by ZeroCovid advocates. An ISAG webinar on January 21st found Staines arguing in favour of mandatory quarantine facilities, on the basis that new variants could ‘dodge some of the effects of vaccines.’

    It begs the question: if new variants are swirling around the world indefinitely – just as strains of influenza vary from year-to-year occasionally evading the effect of vaccines – will Ireland maintain quarantine requirements indefinitely, as a true believer associated with Bar-Yam’s organisation has proposed? This seems unthinkable for a country with a diaspora of three million and a high proportion of immigrants, some of whom may leave Ireland if this approach is adopted. Unfortunately, as in the War of Terror, the enemy is within, and the war unwinnable.

    Australia

    A more tortuous, and arguably disproportionate, route to the elimination of Covid-19 was witnessed in Melbourne, Australia, which may serve as a warning to an Irish public desperate for the pandemic to end.

    With a similar population to the whole of Ireland’s Melbourne experienced a winter outbreak, beginning in June, that brought a stringent lockdown lasting almost three months. Notably, however, the number of cases peaked at seven hundred per day and the virus declined with the arrival of spring. Ireland has had ten times that number in a single day in January, and as of mid-February has still not brought case numbers down to that level.

    Just this month Melbourne went into another lockdown again after an outbreak in a Holiday Inn, giving the lie to the notion that elimination avoids recurring lockdowns; especially in a country such as Ireland conteding with leaky borders, a poorly resourced health system, and a history of distrust in State institutions.

    Advocates of ZeroCovid now call for a level of stringency that brought an end to the Melbourne outbreak, in particular advocating schools close until late April, seemingly oblivious to the damage on children, already denied months of education.

    Apocalyptic Warnings

    Irish ZeroCovid advocates have been unusually apocalyptic in their assessment of the danger posed by Covid-19, with Tomás Ryan projecting in June that a herd immunity approach, involving successive lockdowns, would result in 50,000 deaths, while Sam McConkey warned in March there could be up to 120,000 deaths.

    The latter death toll would be greater than has been witnessed in the U.K., which has the second highest mortality rate (after Belgium) in the world, and a population ten times that of Ireland. Even in almost libertarian scenarios – such as in the two Dakota states in the U.S. – death tolls have been nowhere close to those proportions.

    While ZeroCovid might be dismissed as a fringe organisation, or cult, the degree of media exposure its advocates have enjoyed, and their tendency to ‘shock and awe’ with outlandish projections has distorted debate in Ireland, drawing attention away from the profound damage of lockdowns.

    The Irish media has developed a fixation on the virus to the almost total exclusion of other challenges we face. Mortality from Covid-19 is not portrayed as equivalent to death by natural causes, but a consequence of moral failings in the population or an indulgent government. It has parallels with the attitude of the Pro Life movement.

    Looking forward to life improving.

    And yet, as spring approaches case numbers will surely recede, with a range of vaccines and new treatments reducing severity and mortality. Socially distancing has become second nature to many Irish people, and there is increasing knowledge of the importance of ventilation.

    The Irish government should resist a social experiment that holds no promise of success, and the public should look forward to life improving. In time we are likely to accept a seasonal mortality from Covid-19, just as we tolerate the burden of seasonal influenza, along with many of the environmental factors that cause or exacerbate the non-infectious diseases that remain our leading killers by far.

    Percentage breakdown of top ten registered causes of death, January – October 2020. Source CSO

  • Matt Talbot and the ‘Theology of Incarceration’

    The Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has unleased another wave of soul-searching in Ireland. How could a society claiming to be ‘Christian’ have failed to protect, and even to have harmed, its most vulnerable – unmarried mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children? The harrowing accounts fit within a wider ‘Theology of Incarceration’ that inculcated subservience and prevailed on the downtrodden to await their rewards in heaven.

    ‘The story of Matt Talbot is significant because it reflects the traditional approach of the Irish Catholic Church to the question of social justice’ wrote Ronan Sheehan in his seminal account of enduring exclusion in Ireland’s capital: The Heart Of The City by Ronan Sheehan and Brendan Walsh Brandon Books, (Dublin 1988); a second edition was published as Dublin: The Heart Of The City by Lilliput Press (Dublin, 2016).

    Matt Talbot’s legacy continues to resonate through Dublin, and beyond: in the name of Talbot Street off O’Connell Street; and in one of its foremost bridges: the Talbot Memorial Bridge linking Memorial Road (and Custom House Quay) on the north bank of the river to Moss Street (and City Quay) on the south where there is a sculpture of Matt Talbot by James Power erected in 1978 and irreverently called ‘the pain with the chains.’ There is also a shrine to the ‘Venerable’ Matt Talbot’s inside the Neo-Romanesque Church of Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street dating from 1954, and a plaque on Granby Lane off Parnell Square.

    Granby Lane, Dublin 1.

    Life and Death

    The ascetic figure of Matt Talbot assumes centre stage in a chapter in Sheehan’s book entitled ‘Moral Issues and the Catholic Church’. After Talbot’s death in 1924 the example of his life would serve as propaganda for the Church. This posthumous status far exceeded any ambition in a humble working man, who drew solace from a profound religious conviction after struggling with alcohol addiction during his youth.

    Sheehan recalls:

    In his teens and twenties Talbot, like the other men in his family, drank heavily and was probably an alcoholic. Like the drug addicts of today the Talbots often stole to finance their habits and one occasion they took a street musician’s fiddle. Matt would pawn his boots for drinking money and walk barefoot. One day in 1884 after an idle week that had left them penniless, Matt and his brothers, Phil and Joe, stood outside a public house waiting to be invited inside for a drink. No one asked them ‘if they had a mouth on them’. Talbot went home and later that evening went to Clonliffe College where he took the pledge.

    And so began Talbot’s recovery, engendering a moral rectitude that saw him repaying gambling debts and vainly searching for the fiddler whose instrument he had misappropriated. From that point onwards Talbot became a regular mass-goer at St. Saviour’s Dominican Priory on Upper Dorset Street. Indeed, it was while on his way to mass on nearby Granby Lane that he collapsed and died of heart failure. There is now a plaque dedicated to his memory at the site.

    Plaque to Matt Talbot on Granby Lane.

    Labourer and Ascetic

    For much of his life Talbot worked as a labourer at a timber yard, at a time when workers’ movements were in ferment, and revolution in the air. Sheehan writes:

    His [Talbot’s] relationship to the labour movement is a matter of dispute. He was on strike in 1900 and in the General Strike of 1913 and he was a member of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He refused to collect strike pay and when his colleagues pressed it on him, he gave the money to strikers with young families. Unusually for a Dublin man, he often admitted publicly that he could not understand issues and was prepared to be guided by people he felt were better informed. ‘Jim Larkin knows the rights and wrongs of it,’ he is quoted as saying with reference to the strike of 1913. Most frequently he referred issues to his spiritual advisors, or consulted texts they recommended.

    Talbot’s mortification of the flesh included sleeping on a plank with block of wood for a pillow. Sheehan tells us that ‘When he died, in 1925, it was discovered that he had worn chains about his body.’ In death rather than life he would play an important role for the Irish Catholic Church: ‘Talbot’s subservient piety was adopted by the Church as a symbol in ideological crusades of the thirties, forties and fifties,’ and any deference to Jim Larkin’s methods would be obscured.

    Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    Irish Catholicism

    A strong association between Church and State was perhaps predictable in a newly independent Ireland, given Catholicism’s role in preserving a distinctive Irish identity after the failure of the United Irishmen movement in the 1790s to bring lasting unity between Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. Declining use of the native language after the Great Famine of the 1840s made religion an obvious point of distinction between ‘Catholic’ Irish and ‘Protestant’ English.

    The Catholic basis of Irish nationalism was affirmed during the struggle for independence: the 1916 Easter Rising was consciously suffused with religious symbolism; and in its aftermath prominent Republican figures from Protestant backgrounds such as the Countess Markievicz, and Roger Casement converted to Catholicism.

    After independence in 1922, devotion to the ‘one true Church, Apostolic and Universal’ crossed the political divide between the Pro- and Anti-Treaty Civil War factions of what became Fianna Fail (1926) and Fine Gael (1933).

    In conformity with Catholic doctrine, in 1925 divorce was prohibited in Ireland, a bar that was only removed after a referendum in 1996; while in Dublin in March, 1925 – the year after Matt Talbot’s death – according to Sheehan, ‘the police mounted a massive raid on an area variously known as the kips, Monto, the digs, the village. This was the brothel zone.’

    Moreover, the Constitution that came into force under Éamon de Valera in 1937 – and accepted by a majority of the electorate – identified a ‘special position’ for the Catholic Church, in an article only deleted after another referendum in 1972.

    Right up until the 1990s – the revelation in 1992 that Bishop Eamon Casey had fathered a child with an American woman is often viewed as a pivotal moment – there was little challenge to the pre-eminence of a Church, which created a state within a state through the provision of education and health that brooked no opposition. Thus in 1951 a combination of the Church hierarchy and the medical profession scuppered the ambitions of Minister for Health Noel Browne to introduce a measure of universal health care through the Mother and Child Scheme.

    In its aftermath then Taoiseach John A. Costello of Fine Gael announced unapologetically: ‘I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.’ In truth, few among the political class would have demurred from Costello’s unequivocal deference to the Catholic hierarchy.

    Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    ‘Dominion of Damnation’?

    Nonetheless, Fintan O’Toole arguably goes too far in a recent assessment of the Church’s ‘Spiritual Terrorism’: ‘There was no such thing as ”society” as distinct from … dominion of damnation, no neutral State beyond its reach. It pervaded everything and invaded all of our bodies.’

    For Irish men, at least, an independent caste of mind, and sense of humour, remained possible within fixed parameters. Building on the Irish Literary Revival, by the 1950s Dublin contained a remarkable artistic community, which included writers such as Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and J.P. Dunleavy, while the gay artist Patrick Scott was emerging on the scene; meanwhile many Irish Republicans of that period were being influenced by Marxism, to the consternation of the Church.

    Notwithstanding greater emphasis on social supports under Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fail from 1932, including an ambitious house building programme; and the introduction from 1948 of Keynesian fiscal policies under Fine Gael’s John A. Costello – whose son Declan would develop the idea of Christian socialism within that party with his Just Society document – for most of the population even socialism remained a dirty word; while Communism was considered the work of the devil.

    Shrine to the ‘Venerable’ Matt Talbot, Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    Archbishop John Charles McQuaid

    According to Ronan Sheehan, ‘The political message that the image of Talbot is supposed to communicate is that the working class is properly a subject class.’ This ‘theology of incarceration’ was expressed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in an introduction to the first full-length biography of Talbot:

    Yet it will be seen that the author in setting out the main events of the life of the Dublin workman has helped us to understand the sanctity to which he ultimately attained. The evidence is of a very remarkable spirit, or rather, gift of prayer, the practice of self-denial in poverty and work, the habit of recollection in the presence of God, a very tender graciousness towards children and a deep love of the most Holy Mother of God … We cherish the hope that the Church may set the seal of her approval from the virtues that made this obscure and gentle workman an image, in our midst, in Dublin, of the Patron of the interior life, St Joseph.’

    McQuaid’s unctuous benediction seems the realisation of W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save’; in political terms, as Sheehan, put it:

    When proletarian energy is focused upon the ‘interior life’ it is rendered politically tame. In Talbot the class struggle for justice is replaced by an individual struggle for holiness. It is precisely because he was a worker that we can see in Talbot’s spirituality the epitome of the negative ideological role Marx and Engels attributed to religion.

    Sheehan caustically observed: ‘Instead of attempting an analysis of the society in which he lived, he meditated.’

    Through no fault of his own, the political quiescence of Matt Talbot produced an ideal role model for the Catholic Church of an uncomplaining working man, who awaits his reward in heaven. Importantly this was before the arrival of a Theology of Liberation in the wake of Vatican II that animated many Irish radicals in the 1960s, including the journalist Vincent Browne.

    The importance of religious devotion to Talbot in his battle against alcoholism remains significant. Developing spiritual practices or a religious faith can often be beneficial to recovering addicts. However, Talbot’s apparent deference to authority as a working man suited the capitalist structures which the Catholic Church of that period legitimated.

    Granby Lane, Dublin 1.

    God after God?

    A more activist Irish Catholicism infused with Liberation Theology is now closely associated with the continuing work of Father Peter McVerry, whose approach to poverty, according to Sheehan, ‘stands in contrast to that of the promoters of the cult of Matt Talbot.’

    The philosopher Richard Kearney in his book Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia, New York, 2010) proposes ‘the possibility of a third way beyond the extremes of dogmatic theism and militant atheism: those polar opposites of certainty that have maimed so many minds and souls in our history.’

    Thus the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer awaiting execution in a Nazi concentration camp for participating in a plot to kill Hitler proposed a reformed Christianity after the ‘Death of God’ heralded by Nietzsche, Freud and totalitarianism. Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘The God of religion, of metaphysics and of subjectivity is dead; the place is vacant for the preaching of the cross and for the God of Jesus Christ.’ To Kearney: ‘Christianity thus becomes not an invitation to another world but a call back to this one, a robust and challenging ‘Christianity of this world’, a secular faith that sees the weakness of God as precisely a summons to the rekindled strength of humanity.’

    Throughout most of the history of the State Irish Catholicism reinforced a social order in which the working class were asked to count their blessings rather than their wages; while ‘fallen’ women and their progeny were treated with indifference and cruelty. A sanitized account of Matt Talbot’s life provided a useful lesson in subservience. Now that the spell is broken, it remains to be seen whether a Catholicism after Catholicism can yet emerge in Ireland.

    All Images (c) Daniele Idini

    Statue of Matt Talbot on the south side of Matt Talbot Bridge.

  • Irish Prison Reform Long Overdue

    The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
    Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1862).

    The quote above is from a work of fiction, but the author was drawing on a memory of four years imprisonment, following conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle – a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded intellectuals opposed to Tsardom.

    The great novelist only narrowly avoided a firing squad too – a stay of execution arriving at the last moment – which shaped his views on the death penalty. In The Idiot (1869) Prince Myshkin offers a salutary critique: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’

    A sketch of the Petrachevsky Circle mock execution.

    For morals reasons – the idea of the state descending to premeditated killing – most jurisdictions no longer permit execution of prisoners following conviction for capital crimes. The strong likelihood of miscarriages of justice makes the argument against the death penalty appear insurmountable. A 2014 study indicated that one-in-twenty-five sentenced to death in the U.S. had been innocent.

    The idea endures, nonetheless, that certain offences place perpetrators beyond the pale, incapable of redemption – diabolic even – wherein they are viewed as a perpetual threat to society, or even a moral contagion.

    But, like it or not, the vast majority of prisoners do eventually re-join society, and it is in the wider community’s interest – with due regard for a victim’s or their relatives’ thirst for retribution – that convicts are rehabilitated to the extent they emerge as law-abiding and, ideally, self-sufficient citizens.

    Given an estimated one in every two re-offend within three years of release in Ireland it appears the correct balance between punishment and rehabilitation is not being struck. A ‘Bibilical’ ‘eye for an eye’ view – reconciling moral accounts – still informs Irish attitudes to incarceration, with overcrowding exacerbating difficulties in an inadequate prison infrastructure.

    According to Fíona Ní Chinnéide, of the Irish Penal Reform Trust in July: ‘At the outset of the pandemic, Irish Prisons were way overcrowded, you had people sleeping on mattresses on the floor.’

    With courts resuming normal service, she feared prison populations would rise sharply, leading to further overcrowding: ‘I mean, in the best of times overcrowded prisons do not support rehabilitation and lead to increased tensions, drugs and violence, but Covid-19 brings an additional layer to this.’

    Small Scandinavian countries such as Norway (20% after two years), Denmark (29% after two years) and Finland (36% after two years) currently lead the world in curbing recidivism. This can be attributed to prisons preparing inmates for life on the outside, including through open prisons that reintegrate offenders back into communities.

    Slopping Out

    A de-humanization of prisoners is evident in the nineteenth century layout of Mountjoy Prison, the conditions of which could drive anyone to madness, or at least perpetuate a life in crime. Any visitor can discern a judgmental Victorian morality pervading the edifice.

    Mountjoy Prison, Dublin 1850 Illustrated London News Public Domain.

    The spectre of Henry Martin Hitchins, formerly Inspector for Government Prisons in Ireland, who oversaw its opening in 1850 lingers. He advised the first governor:

    prisoners committed to your charge have been convicted of grave offences against God and man, that they have forfeited their civil rights and are confined much to protect society against their evil practices as to afford them an opportunity of repentance and reformation. It is therefore of primary importance that the prisoners should be brought to a proper sense of their condition and after the religious exhortations of the chaplains nothing so directly tends to effect this object as a firm and steady exercise of a severe discipline.

    Inhumane features of the nineteenth century regime endure wherein the prisoner forfeits basic civil rights and experiences degrading treatment. Gary Simpson was held in Mountjoy Prison between February and September 2013. As a ‘protection prisoner’ he was kept in isolation from other prisoners – detained in cells on the D1 wing prior to its refurbishment. During that period there was no in-cell sanitation, nor even a sink providing running water.

    Prisoners were normally provided with a ‘slopping out’ chamber pot and a plastic bucket of water for washing their hands. Simpson brought an action for damages in response, alleging he was regularly compelled to urinate into empty milk cartons as the chamber pot was too small to be used more than twice without being emptied. He claimed he had to defecate into a refuse bag for the same reason.

    Simpson received damages of €7,500 in 2019 after contending with conditions the Supreme Court agreed breached a constitutional right to a basic level of dignity while in prison. The paltry nature of this award – commensurate with a soft tissue injury – is a damning reflection on the degree of Irish civilisation.

    Disturbingly, despite a government pledge in 2017 to end the practice by this year, it was revealed in August that fifty-one inmates in Irish prisons are still slopping out.

    It could be you…

    Most of us, generally law-abiding citizens are not kept awake at night at the prospect of a stretch behind bars, but even among ‘respectable’ families there are often members who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. And delving into family histories invariably yields an ancestor who has offended against dominant morals expressed in the laws of the day.

    In my own case, a great-grandfather Luke Armstrong (1853-1910) of Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo was subjected to at least two stretches behind bars for activities he viewed as political – the so-called Land War of the early 1880s – but which the Crown authorities considered criminal. An ambitious shopkeeper, ‘who was better dressed than his Tubbercurry companions,’ he was arrested in April, 1884 and charged with his fellow conspirators with being a member of the Fenian Society, and conspiring to murder a land agent.

    An eviction during the Land War.

    Luke Armstrong and his co-defendants were eventually transferred to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, and brought to trial the following November at Green Street Courthouse. Thankfully, given the gravity of the charges, all the accused were acquitted based on the unreliability of the Crown informant’s evidence.

    As a high-ranking member of the IRB, this was not Luke’s first brush with authority. He was also incarcerated in Enniskillen Gaol earlier in the 1880s where he was subjected to ‘two days’ solitary confinement by the Governor. Luke must have gained extensive experience of slopping out during these unwelcome sojourns.

    The Land War of the 1880s may seem like a far off, almost mythical, period, but as recently as the 1940s Irish political prisoners were held – for years on end in many cases – without trial under Emergency Powers Orders in Nissen huts in the Curragh – labelled Tin Town (Baile an Stáin or an Bhaile Stáin) by internees that included the novelist Máirtiín Ó Cadhain.

    According to the historian Tony Gray, the EPOs ‘were so draconian that they effectively abolished democracy for the period, and most aspects of the life of the country were controlled by the dictatorial powers the government acquired.’[i]

    Ironically, another great-grandfather of mine, former Taoiseach (1948-51 and 1954-57) John A. Costello, was responsible for drafting emergency legislation while Attorney General in 1926 in response to the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins; although according to his biographer David McCullagh: ‘While portrayed as draconian, the response was in fact far more measured than might have been expected, or than was initially considered.’[ii]

    At least, to Costello’s credit, in opposition when emergency powers legislation came before the Dáil again during World War II he insisted on a right of appeal to the courts from special tribunals.[iii]

    John A. Costello 1891-1976.

    Today, new emergency legislation in response to the pandemic awakens fears that “generally law-abiding citizens” could yet fall foul of draconian laws intended to protect the community. Indeed, the term ‘lockdown’ is derived from the lexicon of incarceration: the confinement of prisoners to their cells for all or most of the day as a temporary security measure. Perhaps our experience of stay-at-home orders will instil greater empathy with the loss of liberty and privations endured by a prisoner.

    One should be hesitant, therefore, to assume prison to be the fate alone of an underclass or those exhibiting extraordinary moral deviancy. Any one of us could face a stint behind bars, either through weakness, as a result of a mistake or error, a miscarriage of justice, or even where a moral conviction leads to a stand against a law or authority we consider illegitimate.

    In accepting this possibility, we should consider the minimum duty of care owed by the State to any person incarcerated, and the purpose of a prison sentence.

    Principles of Sentencing

    Objectives of sentencing include revenge, retribution, just deserts, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restoration.[iv] The most familiar type of sentencing is a custodial sentence, but judges can also levy fines, or make community service orders; contributions to the poor box are often accepted as a form of contrition in lieu of sentencing.

    The handing down of a prison sentence demonstrates to the community that morally repugnant behaviour will receive its just deserts. The threat of incarceration may also act as a deterrent, and a victim’s desire for revenge or retribution should be respected and vindicated.

    The current conditions of Ireland’s prisons now amply provide for deterrence and revenge: who in their right mind would relish even a night in ‘the Joy’?

    To an extent this is how it should be. Unless the State administers sentencing proportionate to a crime – as agreed by the community through its laws – faith could be lost in the rule of law. Indeed, vigilantism could emerge in its absence – as we have witnessed with extra-legal pursuit of drug dealers in some Dublin neighbours, and especially in Northern Ireland, where horrific kneecapping still occurs. The State should endeavour to monopolize the use of force with the objective of reducing violence, and other antisocial behaviours, overall.

    Mandatory sentencing of ten years under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1999 for possession of drugs with a value over €13,000 has not, however, proved an effective deterrent and in most cases judges find exceptional circumstances apply to avoid the full imposition of the term for what is a non-violent offence.

    It is understandable that judges would wish to avoid the nuclear option of a prison sentence, which often hardens individuals to lives in crime. If, however, Irish carceral institutions adequately rehabilitated young offenders in particular – nipping errant behaviours in the bud – judges might be inclined to prescribe short interventions. This could offer a chance for someone to turn over a new leaf, and even learn new skills in a safe environment.

    Legislators might also consider broadening the range and reducing the period for convictions to be ‘spent’ – fixed at seven years for particular offences. This might diminish the social stigma of serving time behind bars, allowing for it to be seen as a therapeutic intervention rather than a lifelong stain on one’s reputation.

    One means of addressing victim impact and an understandable desire for retribution or revenge is through non-adversarial mediation. This includes the idea of restorative justice, which brings perpetrators together with victims of crime. Ideally, a consensus is formed around what the offender can do to repair the harm caused by the offence. See Alan Gilsenan’s documentary The Meeting (below).

    Anders Breivik

    Incapacitation is also a necessary ingredient to sentencing, where an individual presents an ongoing threat to society, or even to fellow prisoners. This is a familiar justification for the death penalty, and there remain scenarios where an agent of the state – usually a police officer – acting in the common good, may lawfully kill someone, notwithstanding the twenty-first amendment to the Irish Constitution prohibiting the death penalty. Such a response is only lawful if it is proportionate to the threat – a test similar to justifications for self-defence.

    Dostoyevsky’s moral argument, and the likelihood of miscarriages of justice, are convincing arguments against the death penalty, but the ongoing danger posed by individuals must still influence the severity of sentencing.

    Thus, the continued solitary confinement of Anders Breivik – currently serving twenty-one years for a bomb and shooting attack that left seventy-seven people dead in Oslo – was not held to violate Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, relating to the prevention of torture and inhuman or degrading torture, and the right to privacy and family life.

    Flowers laid in front of Oslo Cathedral the day after the attacks. Image: Johannes Grødem

    The test employed is one of proportionality. The court obviously took into account that Breivik is a mass murderer who had admitted to indiscriminate killing for a political end. Authorities fear he could exert a nefarious influence over fellow prisoners given an opportunity to do so. This view may be correct but it sets a dangerous precedent; albeit the Norwegian government argued that Breivik’s three-cell complex, with access to video games, TV and exercise facilities, is better than the conditions of most other prisoners, thereby compensating for his solitary confinement.

    In recent times terrorism has emerged as a justification for harsher sentencing – and even torture – and extended periods of questioning before charges, but the definition of a terrorist is loose and unsatisfactory, and a form of structural racism (or Islamophobia) appears to inform treatment of offenders in many jurisdictions. My own great-grandfather was considered a Fenian terrorist in his day.

    Satirical drawing, ‘the fenian-pest,’ Punch Magazine, 1866.

    Open Prisons

    The temporary removal of liberties such as conjugal rights between husband and wife is generally considerate a proportionate punishment when a guilty verdict is found. This view was upheld in Ireland in the case of Murray v. Ireland [1985]. But what if the denial of such a liberty impedes rehabilitation or the restoration of a flourishing individual to society? This judgment may merit re-examination if we are to prioritise rehabilitation.

    The interest of the community in ensuring a prisoner is equipped to transition back into civilian life should trump an understandable desire for revenge felt by victims of crime and their relatives. But this reasoning does not now inform sentencing in Ireland, where even posting a letter requires a lengthy review process at either end. Enjoying the privilege of just one phone call a week means prisoners cannot easily stay in touch with family members.

    Among the reasons for Finland’s low rate of recidivism is the open prisons developed to prepare convicts for life on the outside. Instructively, Finland has the lowest per capita incarceration rate in the European Union, with just 51 people per 100,000 in some form of prison, according to the World Prison Brief, while Ireland’s stands at 84 per 100,000, which might well be higher but for current overcrowding inhibiting sentencing.

    The former prison building of Katajanokka, Finland is being renovated into a hotel.

    Also, instructively, Ireland ranked sixth worst in Europe in a crime index conducted by Numbeo scoring 44.52, whereas Finland lies in thirty-fifth place overall on 22.80. Thus, despite a significantly smaller prisoner population, Finland is also a safer country than Ireland, scoring 77.20 against 55.48. Given Ireland’s GDP per capita ($89,383) exceeds Finland’s ($49,334) by a considerable margin, this is clearly a question of priorities rather than resources, and sadly, an indicator of our respective “degrees of civilisation.”

    Sasu Tyni, a researcher at Helsinki University and the Criminal Sanctions Agency (RISE), says that the Finnish system is based on a belief that locking people up is a last resort. ‘Closed prisons are more or less grounded in security purposes, while open prisons aim to be closer to society, family, work etc,’ she explains. ‘The strategy of the Criminal Sanctions Agency has for years been to use closed prison as the last option. We assume an open prison system can decrease the risk of recidivism.’

    Prison governor Kaisa Tammi-Moilanen explains that prison authorities have ‘purposely tried to avoid everything that we can which are associated with a prison,’ which means there are no physical barriers stopping prisoners from escaping. Tammi-Moilanen explains this is intentional, as it encourages prisoners to develop a sense of self-control.

    Prisoners in a closed prison don’t need to learn any self-control, because everything they do is controlled. But to be a normal citizen you need to have inner control of your life, so you know how to behave, you know what is good for you and you know what is good for the society.

    In contrast in Ireland, according to the annual report of the Inspector of Prisons from 2008:

    At present the open prisons at Loughan House and Shelton Abbey are, to an extent, used to cope with the overcrowding in the closed prisons and therefore in their current use could only play a minor role in the effective management of prisoners through the prison system.

    There is no evidence that international best practice has been taken into account since.

    Reskilling

    Re-evaluation of the role of Irish prisons does not appear to be on the immediate horizon. The new Minister for Justice Helen McEntee indicated that Garda reform, domestic violence and the modernisation of the sector’s IT services were her three priorities in an interview with the Sunday Business Post in August.

    Yet historic shortfalls in rehabilitation have brought high rates of recidivism at significant cost to the exchequer: the average price of an ‘available, staffed prison space’ was €75,349 in 2019. Moreover, the lawlessness evident in parts of Ireland can be traced, at least in part, to the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate adequately.

    Targeted investment should produce long-term savings by reducing recidivism. The new Minister thus has a huge opportunity to leave a profound legacy that could ameliorate conditions in certain ‘no go’ neighbourhoods.

    Introducing meaningful open prisons to reintegrate prisoners into communities would require a cultural shift however. Prevailing Irish attitudes towards crime are informed by enduring social cleavages: in Dublin expressed in euphemisms about someone being ‘from the inner city;’ or ‘of Traveller origin’ in rural Ireland. Yet prison reform could address long-term poverty and social exclusion. Any progress would be a significant feather in the new Minister’s cap.

    It seems obvious that prisons should offer inmates a chance to break the chain in a life of crime, rather than perpetuating one. Sadly, incarceration remains a breeding ground for criminality. Fresh thinking is required to address shortfalls in mental health provision, drug addiction counselling, and general education – especially illiteracy: one in six of the adult population in Ireland is still functionally illiterate.

    In 1997 the Irish Times reported: ‘It is widely accepted that the standard of education of most inmates adults and juveniles is somewhere between third and fifth class of primary school.’ Twenty years later the same paper reported: ‘Overall, four out of five prisoners (80 per cent) left school before their Leaving Cert, more than half (52 per cent) left before their Junior Cert, and just over a quarter (26 per cent) never attended secondary school.’

    Anyone hoping to leave a life in crime behind should be able to glimpse viable alternatives while in prison. A Leaving Certificate is generally seen as a foothold for advancing one’s career. In 2011 the Irish Times reported that 117 prisoners were sitting the Leaving Cert and 161 were taking Junior Cert exams that year, but current figures are not easily accessible.

    Alternatively, offering prisoners business skills has been floated as one approach by chef-entrepreneur Domini Kemp, who participated on a programme at Wheatfield Prison. As she it put it:

    I read that prisoners cost north of €68K a year in Ireland and it struck a chord with me that if you could teach them how to start their own business and reduce the rate of reoffending, how much you could save.

    An entrepreneurial career path will obviously not suit every ex-prisoner. The challenge of starting a small business should not be underestimated. But the state should be empowering prisoners with career alternatives for when they return to their communities.

    Mountjoy Campus, North Circular Road, Dublin, Dublin 7, Ireland

    Wellbeing

    In an enlightened society such as Finland’s it appears as if the traditional prison is being phased out. This may be attributed to many factors including an inclusive education system, as well as advanced ideas on wellbeing. Minister of Social Affairs and Health in Finland, Pirkko Mattila, explains the connection between economic growth and wellbeing:

    Economic growth improves people’s wellbeing, whereas wellbeing and health of the population enhance economic growth and stability. This interlinkage must be better recognised. In Finland, we are putting forward a holistic approach to this question that requires horizontal thinking and cross-sectoral co-operation. We call this approach, the Economy of Wellbeing.

    This holistic approach seems to play an important role in keeping crime to a minimum in Finland. In contrast the steady acquisition of wealth in Ireland appears to be decoupled from the Economy of Wellbeing. A more enlightened prison system could help bridge that divide.

    Nevertheless, it may be impossible ever to extinguish the evil that leads to certain crimes. The example of Anders Breivik in Norway demonstrates that even highly civilised countries witness heinous crimes, or black swan events.

    We may always require prisons to act as a deterrent and to protect society from evil behaviour, but it is worth bearing in mind that any one of us could find ourselves behind bars. It is in all our interests that prisons assist inmates to become functioning members of society. The Irish prison system is now perpetuating criminality, and the new Minister should make reform a priority.

    Featured Image: main hall of Kilmainham Gaol.

    [i] Tony Gray, The Lost Years: The Emergency in Ireland 1939–45 Little Brown & Co, London, 1997, p. 5.

    [ii] David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 2010, p.63

    [iii] Ibid, p.139

    [iv] See Frank Schmalleger & John Ortiz, Corrections in the 21st Century, 4th Edition, 2009, p.71

  • When the Unthinkable Becomes the Everyday: Covid-19 and Authoritarianism

    The idea that our society might be moving in a fundamentally bad direction is an extremely difficult one to grapple with. We are aware that society is deeply flawed, sometimes even to the point of cynicism; and yet there is a certain basic soundness in the orientation of our society which we assume as a kind of bedrock.

    Nevertheless, societies and whole cultures have gone bad in the past. We read about these slow, incremental drifts into authoritarianism and fascism in the history books of the twentieth century, always assuming with the benefit of hindsight that we would recognise the threat, and resist it if it ever emerged in our own time. In reality, however, to live through such a period must be quite different from reading about it in a history book. The sensation, I suspect, would be akin a child discovering some deep flaw in their parent. Our first impulse would be to  repress the awareness, often until it is too late.

    The idea that our response to the Covid-19 pandemic might be moving us in the direction of the authoritarian horrors of the last century is one that a great many are resistant to. They may feel, for example, that we are living with an extraordinary circumstance, and that the response, however undesirable and unprecedented, remains unavoidable in the face of the threat.

    Even to those who feel this way, however, the danger of authoritarianism is something which we should all meditate very deeply on. The comparatively free societies which we have grown up in are a rare and precarious achievement; we are simply not aware how precarious because they are the only world we have ever known.

    As the former Supreme Court justice and historian Lord Sumption pointed out in July: ‘Despotisms arise not because our liberty is forcibly taken away by tyrants but because people voluntarily surrender their liberty in return for protection from some perceived threat, and it is in the interests of governments to exaggerate that threat in order to procure compliance.’

    Or, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben reminds us in August, ‘The state of emergency is the mechanism, history teaches us, by which democracies become totalitarian states.’

    ‘Parasite Stress’

    The state of emergency is precisely when the free society is most imperilled, and pandemics are perhaps the most threatening to free democracy. The fear of contagion is deep-rooted in our genetics. It is for this reason that the language of infection and disease is so often the primary tool of demagogues and dictators.

    The ‘Parasite Stress’ hypothesis holds that ‘authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterised by a high prevalence of disease-carrying pathogens.’ Students of the psychology of politics have long noted a correlation between obsessive fear of contamination and the maintenance of rituals of cleanliness and order with the emergence of right-wing authoritarian tendencies. The theories of racial hygiene which underpinned the Nazi movement remain the most notorious and disturbing example of a regime utilizing the language of infectious threat to promote a totalitarian and racist ideology.

    Others will reject concern about the increasingly authoritarian turn our societies have taken on the basis of an association with conspiracy theories. However, no conspiracy of any kind is really necessary for a society to slide into authoritarianism.

    An awareness of psychology and history tells us that such a thing can happen entirely organically. Power is an innate appetite of human beings. It is such a strong drive that it can frequently seduce individuals without their conscious awareness. There is a reason why our liberal democracies are essentially predicated on the principle of providing checks and balances to curtail the powers of our ruling classes and bodies: unchecked power is dangerous.

    This, again, is why the state of emergency is so perilous: it is the period where those checks and balances are willingly revoked by the population, and this is why the emergency is the best friend of the would-be dictator. What I think is particularly alarming about our current situation with Covid-19 is that we have now excepted the state of emergency – with all its suspension of democratic norms, civil liberties and curbs on state power – on an indefinite basis. Lets look briefly at how that happened.

    Lockdown

    The initial decision to lock down was perceived as momentous, and there was considerable discussion and soul-searching as to whether or not it was the correct course of action to take. The crucial moment, however, came later and passed largely unnoticed. The initial premise for locking down, it is vital to remember, was that it would be a short-term measure whose entire function was to prevent health services from being overwhelmed. Whether or not the decision was ultimately correct, it can at least be said that this first notion of lockdown was not entirely unreasonable on the face of it. It was an emergency measure which had a distinct goal and a set duration. The pivotal moment in all this was not when we agreed to lockdown, but rather when the underlying rationale for the lockdown was changed.

    The happened in April, and in a quite peculiar way. There was no explicit announcement, no suggestion that such a significant matter should be a subject of national debate. Rather, there was a distinct change of language, a process whereby certain ideas were slipped into the conversation.

    We would be ‘doing this until there is vaccine’ ministers suggested for the first time. On April 16th, for example, UK health minister Nadine Dorries testily announced on Twitter: ‘Journalists should stop asking about an ‘exit strategy.’ There is only one way we can ‘exit’ full lockdown and that is when we have a vaccine.’

    This was also when we first began to hear the expression the ‘New Normal,’ repeated ad nauseam as a kind of spell to ward off critical reflection and debate. With virtually no debate or scrutiny from the media or political opposition, the rationale of the lockdown was changed from stopping the health service from being overwhelmed to suppressing the spread of the virus, putatively until a vaccine or some other innovation emerged.

    The significance of this manoeuvre cannot be understated: it meant that the state of emergency, with all its dangerous suspension of democratic norms, has been extended, without oversight or opposition, indefinitely into the future. There needed to be a discussion in April about how sustainable and harmful such a process might be in the longer term, and how much sacrifice and suffering was effectively being gambled on the speculative efficacy of a vaccine which didn’t even exist at that point. Sadly, this conversation never really happened, owing to the decline of adversarial journalism and the torpor of political opposition.

    For myself, I can remember being stunned and deeply shaken by this development. It felt as though freedoms which I had taken for granted all my life were suddenly, starkly cast away, perhaps forever. It seemed quite clear to me that the new model of suppression was entirely self-perpetuating: the more successful you are at suppressing the virus, the longer you will have to suppress it, because what you are also suppressing is natural immunity. We were committing ourselves to a endless cycle of deeply harmful measures and restrictions, supposedly on the basis that the eventual emergence of a vaccine would restore normalcy.

    However, the efficacy of the vaccine was by no means guaranteed, and what was far more certain was that we would have done more harm to ourselves through the restrictions than the virus itself by that point. It was madness – the kind of self-destructive madness that emerges once a century or so, and completely unseats one’s faith in the power of human reason.

    Fear and Mobilisiation

    To return then to the theme of authoritarianism: how might the ongoing Covid-19 response be compared to an emergent system of authoritarian or even totalitarian control? In both instances, you will have a population whose attention is riveted to one subject to the exclusion of all others. The subject will always be an enemy or threat of some kind: the Communists, the Jews, or, in this particular instance, a virus.

    Once the population is sufficiently afraid, the next step is mobilisation. By means of a joint government/media propaganda drive, the public is mobilized to a grand communal project, which can be the building of socialist paradise or Third Reich, a war effort, or indeed a unified national effort to slow the spread of a respiratory virus.

    By this time, certain psychological effects become apparent in the populace: critical reflection is replaced by the repetition of command slogans (For King and Country! Stay Home, Stay Safe, Slow the Spread), and spontaneous acts of conscience are replaced by blind adherence to rules. As in the infamous Milgram Experiment, once a person concedes their autonomy to the State, their conscience goes with it, and the authoritarian regime is characterised by a slowly creeping banality of everyday evil.

    The question remains, of course, are we really moving into authoritarianism, or are some of us simply imagining it? There was a peculiar period in late May and June when I thought my anxieties had been unfounded. Following the death of George Floyd, the media focused all its attention on racial justice and police brutality, and for a period of about two weeks, Covid-19 literally vanished from the public consciousness.

    Black Lives Matter, Dublin, June 1st.

    At that point, it looked as though things were getting back to normal: the epidemic had peaked, deaths and hospitalisations were beginning to flatline, and here in Ireland we had a roadmap back to normalcy with actual set dates. Since that brief oasis, however, things have taken a turn which has far exceeded my worst fears in April.

    In hindsight, the mandating of masks seems to have been a pivotal turning point: just as the public were induced to cover their faces, the mask of a voluntary partnership with our governments began to slip away. Indeed, the whole communal, consent-based spirit of the initial lockdown was soon abandoned: increasingly bizarre, absurd and self-contradictory edicts emerged on a daily basis, and new police powers to enforce them. And we began to see disturbing scenes emerging in Australia, and increasingly, in our own countries.

    A Kind of Trance

    What would it be like then, to live through the emergence of authoritarianism? I think that it would be exactly like the last nine months. The drift into authoritarianism is a kind of trance whereby things which would once have appeared appalling and impossible slowly insinuate themselves into our lives and societies. We now find them acceptable because we have been brought to the acceptance of a new reality. We have been made so hyper-conscious of one harmful thing (Covid-19) that all other harms begin to recede in significance, and all things become justifiable to a monomaniacal individual or society. The characteristic moment of authoritarian creep is that where the unthinkable becomes the everyday.

    There have been so many instances of the unthinkable in the last nine months – moments that feel like stark warnings, like episodes from a historical slide down the path of authoritarianism – that a whole other essay might be taken up with them.

    For example, in Australia in April the police interrupted a funeral as the coffin was being carried out to do a head count; in September they handcuffed a pregnant woman and took her from her home because of a Facebook post.

    In the UK on the 26th of September, German doctor Heiko Schöning (a member of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee) spoke to citizen journalist Anna Brees before he was due to address the Trafalgar Square Freedom Rally. Schöning told Brees that Germany was the epicentre of the anti-lockdown movement because of its historical awareness of authoritarianism. A couple of hours later, Schöning was surrounded by police, handcuffed and bundled into a van, and then detained for 22 hours for no other discernible reason than intimidation.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gurnp8qgEWo

    More recently at a protest in Berlin, human rights lawyer Markus Haintz and his girlfriend were brutally set-upon and arrested by police, again for no immediately discernible reason.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sDNd4P60F0

     

    It is difficult to say which is more unsettling: that these things are happening in our societies, or that virtually nobody is talking about it. That, however, is probably how the authoritarian society always takes root: the conviction that it couldn’t be happening is so strong that people refuse to acknowledge the explicit evidence unfolding before their eyes that it is.

    In our familiar conception of the deeply flawed society, we can easily demarcate ourselves from the villains, and many others will applaud us for criticizing them. The emergent authoritarian society, however, requires that we are all complicit; and eventually, mutual silence and complicity leads to a point of no return.

    Again, however one feels about the proportionality of the Covid response, we must begin to take seriously the perilous path our societies have gone down.

    I can’t shake the conviction that 2020 has been a kind of vast Milgram experiment, and of the European countries, Sweden alone has emerged with its democracy and humanity fully intact. The rest of us have unfettered the powers of the State to engage what has been arguably an assault on everything that is precious and meaningful in life: intimate contact, freedom, work, risk, childhood, youth and the future.

    We are sleep-walking into what will be the greatest economic depression most of us will ever experience in our lifetimes; and doing so while while granting unchecked powers to our governments that likely would have horrified us only a few short months ago. What degrees of the unthinkable will have become part of our everyday existence in nine months time, if we continue along this course?

  • Jerry’s Dead

    By the time I got to Lenny’s place he was pacing up and down out front; his unusually frantic movement a poor advertisement for the stuff he was peddling; the stuff I was there to collect. He had his navy blue Boy Scout shorts on with a sleeveless t-shirt that allowed tanned biceps to stick out. His sparklingly clean teeth screamed ‘fake’, and his slightly balding black hair was gelled back so he could just as easily pass as a mafia boss as a guy working in hotel estates maintenance with me. When he walked his feet stood out ever so slightly, pointing to the left and to the right. For some reason my lateness, by perhaps ten minutes at most (deemed pretty acceptable where I was from), was stressing Lenny out beyond what I would consider normal. He really didn’t want to be considered a drug dealer. The house that he shared with his partner was at the end of a long row of typical island dwellings, two story detached wooden houses inclusive of a big porch out front; where the inhabitants could sit and relax in the evenings. A traditionally wooden white garden fence was just beyond the porch, decorative more than functional. A section of scorched grass lay underneath the fence, peppered by spurts of water from a nearby sprinkler. I strolled down around the corner to the house. Lenny slipped over, pushed his hand through his hair and said:

    ‘Where in Hell’s name were you? You should have been here ten minutes ago.’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InUzFclYD00&fbclid=IwAR2fa3RLwvWa91d9RPpq9Qd0Gw2kaWSVcWvy9D32lwCVsQK8hTxdBwSJqo0

    There was sweat dripping from my forehead – the August so oppressive even in such close proximity to the sea – I exuded near monuments of it. That whole morning had been spent slouching from one end of the island to the next on various errands, the sweat from my bones burning in the summer sun. Taken aback by Lenny, I just replied,

    ‘I was hitchhiking over. Lifts were slow today. I didn’t think you’d sweat it.’

    I was attempting to calm the air. But Lenny was still pacing up and down the path, the frantic movement that confronted me only slowly beginning to ease. He was chewing gum intently, biting into his mouth like crazy, before finally slowing down. He then walked around to the garage at the side of the house, swung the door open and ushered me in; slowly closing the garage door so that a bright sun gave way to a fully darkened room. Bits of storage stood out behind a small ford coupe car on which a number of boxes were left. The car had put been away for summer. Lenny grabbed a box from one of the top shelves and carried it down. He lifted a bunch of old newspapers that had become browned around the edges and left them on the ground beside the car. He mooched around with these for a few minutes, before taking out a small translucent bag, filled with dark green bundles of grassy textures. A waft of marijuana filled the room. He opened up the bag and took out a sticky bud. ‘Feel the stickiness on that one Dara,’ he said; the tension that had resided now flittering away in the stuffy garage air. Lenny’s disposition changed when the black bud was held up to his nose. ‘Look at the tentacles, he said ‘little beauties. Real Chappaquiddick Green.’

    I took the bud and held it up to my nose, the little black squidgy form like a spider out of which red tentacles protruded towards me. The plant was so exquisitely tender and beautiful it seemed – at once – cruel to have to actually smoke it; its poignant odour so carefully organic while – at the same time – intrinsically seductive. ‘Wow, that’s lovely,’ I said to Lenny as he leant back, a horticulturalist’s gleaning grin making its way across his face like a Cheshire cat. I could see that my comment brought instant gratification; a certain pride in having procured this planted product bursting through his smile. Again, his hand pushed back through his gelled balding hair, and his teeth – no doubt false – glistened like they were commissioned for a new Colgate ad. I decided, given the degree of satisfaction he was receiving from holding up his product, to massage his ego even more. ‘So, you’re one of the main growers behind Chappaquiddick Green, number seven in The High Times list of top ten variants US weed? I’m impressed.’ Lenny has been telling me all summer about the plant he grew every year on the small island of Chappaquidick. He told me he just sprinkled the seed in an area of wild overgrowth only to return sporadically to water it throughout the summer months, when the drought hit. He harvested his plant in the final weeks of July. The island, whatever the geographic specificity, was particularly fertile, unearthing a potent strain of weed known far and wide across the United States. Chap green, he called it. I gave him fifty bucks in exchange for the luxurious product.

    I was handing over the dough when Lenny pulled back the bag and reverted momentarily to his earlier frantic self. Jitteriness returned; the momentary calming of mood offset by the powerful odour of the product. This Irish kid he was selling his dope to could end up putting it in whiskey, getting so fucked up on it he’d need ferrying to hospital on the Cape. How could he be sure the kid wouldn’t smoke himself into such a slumber the cops would be called and the trail would make its way back to Lenny? ‘Lenny, relax,’ I said, trying to calm his nerves, ‘I’ll whack it into a bong and avoid any cookies, or any of that shit. You don’t have to worry. I’ve smoked a lot.’ But it didn’t seem to work. He remained beyond edgy. He started pacing around the garage again, banging into boxes, and knocking over old discarded items. ‘What the fuck was he giving me? Mango juice shit,’ I thought to myself glancing at my watch, wondering about my schedule for the rest of the day (meet Don, get home, get bombed, meet Sarah, get home again, get bombed again). I didn’t have time to calm the dude down; whatever the reason for his overly zealous jitteriness. ‘Calm the fuck down Lenny. I’m meeting my sister’s friend for a Chinese. My friend can’t get off work. She’s coming from Boston for a night to see her brother. We’ll eat and grab a beer. I’ll smoke a joint, play some pool. Nothing too far off the charts.’ It worked. He looked at me, and seemed, for a moment, properly relieved. ‘Ok, ok, man’ he then replied, moving back to his Lenny-is-a-bit-chilled gear, and then confirming that my attempts to assuage his many-years-smoking-weed induced paranoia seemed to work.

    I worked with Lenny and his boss Sandy in the Harbour View Hotel in the village of Edgarstown that summer, doing maintenance around the estate. I got some standard Mexican weed off Lenny after a few weeks into the job. Lenny had no problem supplying the commercial Mexican stuff. But he kept waxing lyrical about the stuff coming down the line: the real stuff. Once that fancy stuffy arrived, so too did his paranoiac alter-ego, mistrustful of the same Irish kid he had worked with all that summer. I drifted away from his garage that day excited by the potential thrashing to be had from the infamous Chappaquiddick. I had a full schedule ahead. I had to get back to meet Don, give him some of the green, and find out where to meet his sister. Then I had to make my way back to the house, have a shower, get changed, returning again to Oaks Bluff to meet Sarah, show her around a bit, before making it back home. I had to be up early for work the following morning, so the level of blastedness had to remain low. I hitchhiked back from Lenny’s place, wandered up the main street of Oaks Bluff to drop off some stash to Don. He was dressed in his geeky Subway gear when he came out to meet me. I told him Lenny was more edgy than normal when making the pick up so he should try not to overdo getting heavily baked at work; who knows what might happen? He just replied ‘Jerry’s Dead.’ A whole street of kids standing outside shops had given a carnivalesque atmosphere to the village’s activities. The summer was really starting to kick off, and humidity levels were rising. ‘Jerry’s Dead’, what the fuck is he talking about? I thought before asking to elaborate.

    ‘Jerry who?’ I asked.

    ‘Jerry Garcia, one of The Grateful Dead. They’re a band, apparently.’

    ‘Never heard of him or them,’ I said, realising that there was more to it than a rockstar dying and that Don was somewhat perturbed.

    ‘You wouldn’t believe it man. Jamie and Shaun rang in to say they were out for a week. That depressed this dude is dead. It’s JFK levels of impact. I’m not shitting you.’

    ‘A week? What the fuck?’

    ‘Yea. It’s like their fucking mother died. Left in the dock. I’m practically on my own here.’

    ‘This Garcia dude. Some kind of Jesus figure or what? A whole week because he died?’

    ‘Yeah. Weird. Apparently, they’ve been deadheads for years…Some fan cult thing. Can you make sure to meet Sarah tonight? And I’ll see you tomorrow? Don’t forget?’

    ‘No problem, man. It’s all on the itinerary.’

    I handed a nugget of Chad G from the bag Lenny had given me earlier, and began to make my way back along the country roads to the trailer park where we were staying, the stultifying humidity causing spots of sweat to burst into lathers of salt; white lines marking the blue t-shirt I was wearing that day. I took off up through the country roads, up through the part of the island where workers and all year-round inhabitants lived. Beyond the huge, ostentatious mansions, the billionaire estates, was the other part; the part of the island where those who had given their life to the island lived.  Once beyond the sumptuous coastline, making your way into the inner beast of the vineyard, a distinctive odour washed over you; the smell of the large population of skunks that had become endemic on the island. When I got to the trailer-house I had a quick shower, and noticing no one was around, got the first bong of the day in order. I pulled the curtains, whipped my top off, and ploughed into the big bottle of murky smoke that hovered in the bottle as the water spilled out from the sides. Then, watching the water trickle out, the smoke hovered like a volcano about to erupt.  The sweet smell of sumptuous marijuana filled the room. As I stood watching in my underpants, the smoke filtered out across the room like a genie freed from a bottle; floating up into air, sun rays cutting through it as little patterns of smoke dissipated in the light. The hit was inhaled deep into my lungs, the smoke soothing my senses.

    And then nothing happened. I sat on the bed, feet sticking out, bong in hand, sweat dripping down from my hair onto a near naked body. ‘Lenny, talking shit, as usual,’ I thought to myself, plucking a significant portion of the black bud with the sticky red tentacles and readying it for another hit of the bong. Five or possibly ten minutes passed, most of it spent cursing Lenny for bigging up the product to such dizzying heights. I lay back on the bed, head resting against the wall, angry that someone had duped me who I had come to regard as a friend. ‘Fuck you Lenny,’ I thought again to myself, ‘you’ve stung me for half my wages for this powerdust.’ In it went again, folded neatly into the foil wrapped around the bottle neck, the water beginning to gush out again from the bucket, smoke hovering around the depleting watermark before – in one big breath – I sucked deep it into my lungs. Coughing and spluttering, I pushed the smoke out into the stuffy humid air. Again, there was nothing of significance. I waited. I waited more. And still, nothing of significance came to pass.

    ‘Fuck him,’ was the lurid expression of choice to curse my newly perceived conman workmate, as I dressed myself at the speed of Superman, checked my wallet for cash, and took to the road. It was a about a twenty-minute walk to Oaks Bluff where I would meet Sarah, take her out for a Chinese and a beer afterwards. I was hoping the bong hits would relinquish any residual social unease, so that the evening would flow. Tasked with entertaining my friend’s sister, a professional and holidaying banker, I need to be suitably caned for the occasion; to lighten the mood accordingly. Instead, I was deliberating on the non-effect of the previously purchased weed. It wasn’t working. I was down half a week’s work on a fucking placebo. I got to the Chinese, met Sarah and we started talking incessantly about the island. Then, as I was about to order noodles or something to that effect, I took a blow full blast to the back of my head from some imaginary psychedelic tennis racket, such was the speed which all sense of reason and normality evaporated from my reckoning. ‘It just creeps up on you, and then boomp’ were words trickling out from my increasingly fractured consciousness, a brain with which it was more and more difficult to maintain any rational contact. I stood up, dizzy and lacking in motion control, stuttering in Sarah’s direction ‘back in a sec.’ It was probably forty minutes since I had wandered skeptically from my digs, cursing Lenny for the low-grade product he passed off as high grade. Rushing out the door of the restaurant, I began cursing him for precisely the opposite reason: not informing me of the potency of the product. I began to see colour vibrations everywhere, waxed out collages on vineyard specific shop designs.

    Beside the harbour where ferries pull in there was a restaurant I worked in, one that specialised in ripping off tourists before returning to the mainland. It sat beside a nicely engineered boardwalk; a buffer zone between Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape.  Leaving the restaurant in a mess, I looked to dip my head in the seawater beside the restaurant; a last gasp attempt to push back the slow unraveling of my brain. There was no way I could conduct a civil conversation with Sarah, serious intake of food or not. The immersion of head in water, a head that seemed to be slowly severing from its body, was offered as the perceived panacea to newly ingrained paranoia.

    I arrived as a mass of energy, stumbling from the street where the restaurant was situated, sound and vision forming symphony of its own accord, to the sea. In it went. The water ebbed and flowed, trinkets of foam pushing up from the sea onto the lathered wood of the boardwalk. Past, present and future were no longer distinctly discernible as moments giving rise to others, but one long durational flow. I lay down on the boardwalk, my hands withholding my body mass from slipping into the water. In it went again; immersed in the cold saltiness of the water.  Out it came. In it went again; before the rush of the marijuana induced caning slowly subsided. But not gone.

    Not gone. Instead, it mellowed to a manageable state, defined by the slightly less crazy universe my head emerged back into. Time became a lovely fuzzy concept. Brain fog gave way to a sudden appreciation of my surroundings: the beautiful sunset in the distance, the sound of families nattering to one other; holiday time emerging in its essence. Newly self-baptized, I stumbled back towards the restaurant, ringing the water from my shortly cropped hair; a hardly noticeable after effect of the immersion.  Sarah’s laugh made for a mutual laugh, as the night began with noodles and chat.

    We finished the Chinese with some sort of weird oriental ice cream and then made our way to a pool bar on the main street, where – in typically American fashion – we shot pool. We ordered a tray of bottles of Bud, before a feeling of breezy elation carried me through the two or more hours we spent there. Like a living replica of the Paul Newman hustler in The Color of Money, every shot I hit seemed to hit its target. The earlier discombobulating unease surrendered to merry exultation. I moved around the room with a swagger, the exuberant array of colours generated from the lighting that fell on the red-carpeted pool tables, giving an intense aura to the balls that lay upon on it.  By the time we said goodbye, Sarah still brushing off the final traces of jetlag, the sun was setting outside, and the sea was calm. The boats moored at the harbour were lying motionless, a pink afterglow over the setting sun making for a serenely painterly affect. I sat at the edge of the seashore, and smoked a one-skinner joint of pure Chap Green. Darkness came in in a blanket of incursions; my head pushed back upon the wooden boardwalk as I imagined hugging roguish Lenny; a person I had since given his VIP status; most important work colleague in the world.

    I still had to get home: the morning promised a wholly different experience cleaning up recently let condominiums. My second job was usually undertaken in the throes of a mind-numbing hangover, brought on by the reliably miserable quality of bar tap beer. The weed was proving itself to be all things Lenny had promised: slowing time down so that my presence alone seemed to sync seamlessly with the island’s inchoate rhythms. Once I said goodbye to Sarah, a moon began to shine upon me; ushering in all sorts of strange prisms; its rays no longer extraneous to nature’s form but part of a mysterious essence; the universe clicking into being as a monolithic life force. It was a force slowly propelling me back towards the trailer where I left the main stash of luscious Chad, a piece of which was nestled in my pocket. Darkness slowly introduced itself, and the trees that line the road reached out to say hello. I moved back and forward across the road with trucks steaming past, lights momentarily blinding me before pushing off into the night. Dogs barked from the back of trucks, echoing like drum beats from an evolving consciousness. I passed through the ever-changing shadows; the smell of the unseen community of skunks one of the island’s unyielding mysteries. I was about to skip over to the other side of the road when a long, elongated Cadillac came around the corner, driving at the speed of a casual cyclist, before brushing up towards me. Once lit up by the moon, I could see the spray-painted gold surface of the old, yet well-kept automobile, flowers decorating its surface along with a load of signatures written with permanent coloured markers. The Caddy had been custom designed, like some trace of a forbidden past; parsed with an accumulation of markings of a once forgotten land. I struggled to adjust my eyesight to the newly arrived vehicle, struggled to account for an intrusion of immense colour upon the dusty island road. Trees shepherding the walker from swirling Atlantic winds cast shadows all around. A man resembling Arthur Lee from the sixties psychedelic band Love, hair banded in the same manner, smiled up at me from the driving seat, before declaring – punctuating the slow drone of crickets nestled invisibly somewhere in the roadside ditch –  ‘Ok, brother. Jerry’s Dead.’ I stopped in my tracks, the spoken words echoing some earlier moment that day – travelling from a past that existed only as memories rolling along the surface of a disaffected consciousness. ‘Jerry’s what?’ I said, trying not to attract undue attention in response.

    ‘Jerry’s Dead,’ he replied again, the Caddy glistening in the heavy moonlight. A big flower was painted on the gold-sprayed bonnet, under which the words ‘The Bad Cat’ were lightly scrawled. My eyes squinted to recognise the driver in profile, but as soon as I did I could see that he was the same guy tourists gathered around on sunny days, when he drove his Caddy slowly through the island villages. Throngs of tourists would gather around his car, looking to make out the myriad of famous signatures that adorned its sides and rear. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robert de Niro, James Taylor and Carly Simon, Spike Lee, were just a few of the famous autographs that people spoke about as they walked around the Bad Cat’s Caddy. Every time I had tried to get near, tried to nestle up beside the fawned over Caddy, I was usually brushed aside by over eager tourists. ‘Rick, aka The Bad Cat’ he said to me, one hands lying over the side of the car. Before I could get my bearings, light piercing my vision, I heard the words ‘hop in.’ I pushed my body over the side of the car, as we journeyed into the night. ‘Jerry’s Dead’ the Bad Cat said again, words to which I muttered some episodic sense of affirmation, before passing through the island’s belly like surfers cutting into the sea.

    Suddenly, the Bad Cat, who was by then smoking a joint he quickly passed back to me in the rear, took a turn down a small road where a white-sanded beach lay empty in the sullen moonlight, small waves trickling in upon the shore. It was a picture of exotic serenity, so unlike the tourist hotspots adjacent to the island’s main villages, most notably The Inkwell Beach in ear shot of Oaks Bluff. We swooned down upon the white fluffy sand where the wetter sand glistened in the sumptuous moonlight, the smoke from the final embers of the Cat’s joint lingering in the sea breeze before drifting off into some alternate stratosphere. Very little was said as the Caddy pulled in at the dunes. All that was felt between us was our mutual recognition of the night; an ostensible collective hymn to the legacy of a dead man. ‘What’s happening?’ was the question that first left my lips, as the Cat walked around to attached massive audio wires to the car stereo. He opened the boot and then proceeded to take out two considerably sized speakers. ‘The music of the spheres,’ he remonstrated smiling in my direction, my head fizzing as the beach at night began to open up and entice us in. I was standing in the presence of a stranger, but the pulses of time were moving to a kind of rhythm. ‘Muzak,’ I spluttered, still unsure as to how the night had taken its turn; wondering if the Cat was an hallucinogenic vista or a dream I had come upon walking home; my brain’s unfettered response to the mysterious impact of the Chad G. ‘Yeah, cool,’ I said, ‘put on some tunes.’ Then the Cat placed the two speakers on the bonnet of the Caddy, just above the painted on pink and yellow flower. He then rumbled around in the glove compartment, before producing an old battered cassette.

    At that point the night began to calm. Lights began flickering on the horizon, fireflies buzzing in the moonlight sky, waves dancing along the shore. Sand bugs jigged around at our feet. The Cat blew the dust off an old cassette that he took from the glove compartment, that he then pushed above him in order to see the title. He glanced over at me and smiled, whispering the words ‘music.’ Before I got a chance to respond in any way he declared aloud ‘I’ll play you two songs before the other cats arrive.’ My mind seemed to slow to nothing, before I eventually asked ‘what other cats?’ still piecing together the prior events of the night to include the present destination. Any trace of linearity had banished, time taking the form of a continuum of moments, a seemingly never-ending present. I still struggled to respond to his statement. ‘The deadheads, who else?’ he said; fiddling with the cassette player. He then walked over to the car bonnet, before throwing a warm Pabst in my direction.

    The slow silence that followed ended with music spilling out from the attached speakers like sun piercing through drawn curtains, drumming a mysterious essence into the warm summer night. A fast-paced bluegrass beat began to play as the Cat suddenly jumped up onto the bonnet of the Caddy and shouted out the words ‘Cumberland Blues.’ He started to sing along to the beat, stamping his feet to make a clanging noise on the bonnet. The last thing I expected was a rush of energy propelling me onto the sanded area in front of the Caddy. Before I knew it, the Cat was jumping liked a lunatic, singing the words ‘I can’t help you with your troubles, if you won’t help with mine.’ As his arms and legs splashed out in all different directions, he bellowed out the refrain ‘I GOTTA GET DOWN, I GOTTA GET DOWN.’ I looked over to see his whole physical demeanour transforming in an instant. He leapt up and down at rapturous speed; his whole life looking to depend on making as big a movement as possible, pushing out the words into the hazy night sky.

    Soon my heels could be felt skipping to the beat with him, with each verse accompanied by the refrain ‘I GOTTA DOWN.’ A baseline arrived, making our bodies more susceptible to the pulsating rhythms of the night. The Cat jumped down on the sand again, syncing movement to the pervasive rush of a banging refrain ‘I GOTTA GET DOWN.’ As the song pushed to a close, the Cat leaned over to press stop on the stereo, before a short monologue ushered from him. ‘Now, listen sir,’ he began. My t-shirt was ripped at the side, so as to reveal red lines of sunburn. My converse runners had begun to tighten around my ankles, their sides filling up with sand. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had hardly spoken with the Cat; that he was on some sort of night crusade; that he barely asked my name. He was staring into the night sky, over across the Atlantic, his baggy trousers accompanied only by near worn out sandals. His hands were pushed in front, his tie-dyed t-shirt a perfect match for the loose headband that was now used to keep his Afro in place. Then he spoke:

    The mines man. All fuckin day. The government owned mines. You work all day. You know nothing different. And then the light. You see the light. You dig? You can’t not see it anymore. You dig? Fuck Cumberland. You’re not going down anymore. Jerry knew that man. He knew it in his heart. I gotta get down…a double fucking metaphor man. You dig. I gotta get down the mine. And I gotta get down..you know.. You know like get the fuck down…I gotta get the fuck down.

    He began bopping his head up and down, waving his hands waving around like some manic preacher, spelling out the words ‘I gotta get down’ over and over again. ‘I never heard of this guy Jerry. I never heard anything about this guy before today. I only heard he died from my friend earlier,’ I shouted back, yet he was oblivious. The Cat kept shuffling around; looking so unconvinced that I had never heard of the band. The Cat simply wasn’t buying my protestations; such was the impression his body gave off of sheer and utter disbelief. I gathered myself to pluck out the ends of a joint from my pocket, before playing around with it for a few minutes and then passing it towards the Cat again. ‘Rickie’ I said, ‘he was obviously some kind of Dylan dude?’ For whatever reason, once the song ended time seemed to stagnate, with just the waves crashing against the shore a sign of the island’s intrinsically calming force. The Cat still wasn’t offering to answer my question; his mind seemingly elsewhere entirely. Raising his finger to his lips to make a ‘ssshhh’ noise, he leant back over the windscreen of the Caddy and pressed play on the stereo again. At that point, I considered running back home so as to make it to work the following morning, but I couldn’t just leave. It would be so unmannerly to go. But then a punchy base line pulsated through the speakers the Cat had placed on the sand. My body began to jerk in all directions, to a rush of harmonic vibrations. A luscious Hammond organ echoed in the night, before an electric guitar solo intervened and the refrain rang out. All I could hear was the Cat singing along to the song, bellowing out words to the effect of ‘China Cat, China Cat;’ instruments meshing into an cacophony of sonic commotion.

    The instrumentation and chorus reached a near transcendent crescendo only for the sound of numerous cars on the dunes above us to interrupt the scene. Flashing lights arrived with the cars, piling along the road towards the beach where we parked. The Cat was pushing his arms up in the air, as a mass of bodies, all with similarly styled hair – all wearing black t-shirts with a skull like form just about discernible in the flittering darkness. There must have been twenty or more in the crowd of people who made their way from the number of cars that had suddenly arrived, quickly descending onto the beach and forming a crowd of people around the Caddy and the Cat. The Cat jumped onto the car’s bonnet again and screamed out ‘the Dead!!’ Like a murmuration of swallows that had descended from rooftops on a warm spring evening, a crowd of people – impossible to discern as individuals in the dark – formed a circle around the Caddy and the speakers. Once a lone voice singing out the words ‘China Cat’ in a moonlit sky became upwards of twenty people in a group that moved only in rhythms; an inchoate meshing together of people into a singular multiplicity.

    ‘China Cat’ was the last refrain to stick in my head as we danced until darkness was slowly swallowed by the dawn. As the sun rose over the sluggishly beating waves, my head spun off into a distant universe; the once shadowed figures who emerged from the series of cars at the side of the beach – the vast array of Deadheads as the Cat called them – suddenly emerging as individuals in a drug and booze haze. As the dial on my hand watch edged towards ‘4 am’ I made my way through a crowd of people all wearing black t-shirts with a variation of skull illustrations, perhaps grieving but joyously celebrating the life of a once great American icon. There were a number of small stalls, put together with pieces of board and collected beach pebbles, selling off juice drinks and long elongated mushrooms, various strands of weed and homemade beer. It was like a little festival had initiated itself around me, the exact point of installment a mystery from the night that had engulfed me. The Cat was no longer at his Caddy. He was with a group of oblivious Deadheads. When he saw me alone, he stood up, brushing the sand off his shorts and t-shirt, smiling over in my direction. He was no longer delirious with excitement, but calmer in his demeanour. The night had moved on and the Caddy’s sound system had played a significant part. A bright red glow of a newly arrived morning sun, appeared to cast its rays onto a glittering sea, marked the transition from night to morning; the point when time would remerge intact. I was about to leave the last remnants of the party, the words ‘Jerry’s Dead’ still echoing in my mind, when the Cat put his arms around me and said ‘One minute, good sir.’ He began walking me over towards the Caddy, where the shiny gold spray paint adorning it could be seen clearly in the light. There were loads of signatures written in permanent black marker along the sides of the automobile, some even on the boot. The Cat pointed to a scrawl from which, once focused on, the words, ‘Hi Rick, thanks for the ride, Bill Clinton’ appeared. He smiled to say ‘here last summer.’ Then he spent a few minutes eyeballing the other side, pushing his nose up against the panels to make out what I presumed was another signature by some visiting celebrity.

    Standing back, he pointed his foot again at another scribble. ‘Hey Rickie, thanks for the ride, Jerry Garcia, 94’ was a near illegible scrawl, the Cat proudly asserting ‘he sat right where you sat.’ I tried to reciprocate his enthusiasm; such was the considerable distinction of fan revealed to me over the course of the evening. Nodding in affirmation, my feet still dragging in the sand, I again moved to get away. But before I could turn around to begin the slow walk home, with two or possibly three hours sleep beckoning, the Cat made his way to the other side and began pushing me down towards the shore. The speakers had all but silenced, although people’s voices could be heard speaking in hushed tones against a mellowed-out flutter of psychedelic guitars and singing voices; the tempo of the music altered to fit the sun’s morning glow. ‘I want to tell you something before you go,’ he said. He began to walk again towards the sea, turning around and nearly tripping himself on the soft sand. His baggy pants were hanging down by his sandals, and a tie-dyed sleeveless t-shirt that reflected the early morning sun revealed an array of colours: yellow, pink, and mauve.

    I stumbled along the sand wanting to initiate the conversation that hadn’t taken place when the Caddy pulled up beside me the previous evening; memory that now seemed liked a scene from a television series I had somehow played a starring role in. The connection between then and now was a blur; like two islands separated by a vast sea, not unlike the sea that had confronted me walking with the Cat. Like the post all night partying Marcello who stumbles on the seashore in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, when an amorphous sea creature confronts the unsavoury hedonist, I staggered in a disheveled state down towards a lightly trickling sea upon a cleanly kept seashore. The small granules of crushed seashells mixed in with the sand were like diamond crystals reflecting back the low din of newly expressed sunlight. In the distance was a glimmer of sunny haze, lights that speckled out upon the skyline like the morning dew in a garden when the party is over and daylight penetrates the newly evacuated space.

    ‘Look out over there,’ the Cat said, pointing out at the sea, towards the glimmer of light that shimmered against the dawn signaling another island day. ‘America,’ he said, pointing out again. Feeling a new brush of sobriety, the wind pushed through me, my words trickled out from a newly alerted consciousness ‘this is it, Rickie. The real America. This reason I came here. Jerry is the Elvis I never knew.’ The Cat went quiet all of a sudden, his silence a cue for me to leave. But on turning around, hoping to avoid another soliloquy about a song, I was soon sucked into another chapter in a night in thrall to the shape-shifting legacy of the band. I had to wait, had to listen, and to hear. Just as the capricious residue of night began to lose sway in the chirpy magnitude of an incoming morning, the Cat lost all sense of reason. ‘This isn’t America,’ he began shouting, suppressing the sound of music still loudly discernible from the Caddy parked at the other end of the beach. ‘This isn’t America, you fool, how can you think that?’ echoed out like trinkets across the island bay, cutting through the temporary lull. The changed atmosphere hit me straight away. He kept shouting out the words, more animated with each passing gesture. ‘This isn’t America,’ he raged, wagging his finger around. And then, pointing to the sea, towards the Cape I imagined was the repository of light sparkling against the shedding glow of the moon, he shouted out ‘that’s America, over there. That’s America.’ When he spoke, white froth began to build at the sides of his mouth, fury spat out into the wind.

    An eerie quiet descended from all directions, the Cat’s once serene behaviour relenting to the inchoate ramblings of a megalomaniac. The need to stop him – to avert the look he directed at me – penetrated my own illusory attempt to cut through the malevolent anger; anger that seemed to be a cosmic corrective to the tantric balance of the previous night: the return of some deeply repressed energy to the world’s wholeness. ‘Look Rickie,’ I muttered, the sound of the music tempering – somebody had obviously turned it down – ‘I’m just saying thanks. I’m only here, on the island, in America, for a few months. A J1.’ A flock of seagulls swooned down from beside a small group of rocks at the edge of the shore, before some litter blew from one of the groups of people still huddled together in the aftermath of the party; a party that seemed like a celebration and a wake. The Cat began to hyperventilate as soon as I said this to him, becoming more and more animated in the interval between my words leaving my lips and gathering relevant meaning for him. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ I rushed out in an instant, a futile attempt to calm his nerves. But then he shouted out ‘this isn’t America,’ before pointing out again towards the sea, at the flickering lights in the distance that intimated a remote otherworld, ‘that’s America.’

    Morning’s arrival saw the lights fade on the horizon; curious markers of a land of which the island was a surrogate child. The distant lights were the embers of another universe; an affirmation of a distant elsewhere. The Cat fell to his knees holding his head, screeching the words as before ‘this isn’t America.’ And then, with the aura of the previous night dissipating into the morning light, he held his hands out crying ‘Jerry’s Dead.’ He bellowed out the words with such force that his whole body was thwarted on the sand. Some of the deadheads careful not to interrupt the discussion until then dropped everything and rushed from the congregations on the beach. A bunch of them ran down to the seashore in a desperate attempt to help the Cat to his feet. They came to form a circle around him as he shouted out the words again: ‘Jerry’s Dead.’ I took a chance to run back to the Caddy, along the road we had driven the night before, when we travelled to the beach for the first time. The mood, by that point, had changed. There was no longer any mysteriousness to the day. I skipped out along the road with my thumb held out, hoping to hitch a ride to Oaks Bluff to begin a new workday. Some semblance of music tickled my consciousness. But it was impossible to know if it was real or my hallucination. Perhaps it really was music emanating from another cosmic dimension; the hidden recesses of a new America.