Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Ivor Browne R.I.P

    It’s hard for those of us who work in the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy to put into words how much of a visionary Dr. Ivor Browne was. He was a pioneer of LSD psychedelic-assisted therapy in San Francisco and London in the 1950s. He also pioneered the therapeutic use of LSD, ketamine and holotropic breathwork in the 1980s in Dublin, when he was the Chief Psychiatrist at the Eastern Health Board, and ​​Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin.

    He worked with LSD and ketamine group therapy in St Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Dr. Ivor Browne was a maverick and, I would say, a truly great man, in many ways a man before his time.

    I had the privilege of getting to know him personally when he was running a regular meditation group every Tuesday in the Lantern Centre Dublin City near where I lived. Even though he was in his late eighties or early nineties at the time, his wisdom, compassion and wicked sense of humour radiated when in his presence. Despite showing up every week, I recall that he could never remember my name, due to his great age, failing hearing, and the staggering amount of people he had met over his lifetime; yet he greeted me and all the other participants each week with a beaming smile, like we were long lost friends.

    Browne’s work on trauma

    In his book Ivor Browne, the Psychiatrist: Music and Madness, based on work he had originally published in 1985, he speaks of the concept of trauma stored in the body as ‘the frozen present,’ which involves unprocessed emotions. To help process the unprocessed he referred to the use of altered states of consciousness, cathartic states, music and group therapy.

    This concept received very little attention from the psychiatric profession at the time, and a paper he published in the Irish Journal of Psychiatry, entitled ‘Psychological Trauma, or Unexperienced Experience’ in 1985, received zero citations at the time. This work, nonetheless, paved the way for the subsequent work of Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk on trauma, somatic trauma therapy and psychedelic assisted therapy. In the 1980s – in recognition of the importance of his pioneering work – Dr. Stan Grof came to Dublin to collaborate with Dr. Ivor Browne, as did R.D. Laing.

    Thus, decades before later-day pioneers on somatic trauma therapy like Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, Browne was speaking of trauma as the ‘frozen present’, using altered states of consciousness to help people process trauma frozen in their bodies, and using group psychotherapy, breath-work, bodywork and music as a means to do this.

    In a 2017 article published in Network Ireland magazine, Browne explains his attitude to trauma :

    Once that shut down (through a traumatic experience) happens, then that experience is frozen. So it is not a case of a threatening memory being repressed, it is that it has never gotten in properly. Once it is frozen it is outside of time, so twenty years later this can activate – some everyday event can trigger it – and you then experience it as if it is happening now. You don’t think about it and remember it – you feel it and experience it. And, of course, at that point you think you are going nuts because you look around and nothing traumatic is happening, yet you experience this traumatic feeling. That is why I called it “the frozen present”, because when it comes, it comes through as the present, not as the past. Eventually when it works its way through and you experience it a few times then it moves into the past.

    He continued:

    The best example is grief. If you have lost someone you have to do a lot of work over time in order to integrate that to allow it to become a memory. Then it becomes less threatening. When my wife died five years ago, the first year was absolute hell, and I couldn’t imagine feeling any joy. The second year was bad, but not quite as bad as the first. Now after five years I am quite contented. I have a different life. By processing the trauma, it has shifted into memory, but this approach is not possible in the current psychiatric model.

    Vocal critic

    Browne was a  vocal critic of the reductionist, purely bio-medical model of psychiatry. An outspoken critic of the mental health discourse, he said: ‘we are living in a society that is driving people mad’, emphasising that

    Psychiatry is a reductionist system that explains everything by the parts……The tragedy of psychiatry is that this is the only way you can think. Because in the psychiatric model you cannot ask how the behaviour or upbringing of a person is affecting their biochemistry – you can only ask how is the biochemistry effecting the person. Psychiatrists don’t take a history, so they don’t understand the problem in the context of the individual’s life.

    What is even more extraordinary is that he did this at a time when Irish society was incredibly conservative and the Catholic Church still held tremendous power. Professor Ivor Browne was censured by the Medical Council over his role in the Father Michael Cleary affair in 1996 after he had spoke out in support of one of his patients, Phyllis Hamilton, who revealed her affair with Fr. Cleary.

    The relationship with the heart

    He also proposed the heart, rather than the head, as being of central importance in mental health, and wellbeing, and that love was essential in the processing of trauma:

    Key to processing trauma is cultivating a relationship that allows it to be processed, and that ultimately involves love, and the deepest traumas we can experience involve a separation from love.. the truth of all this is that the heart is the centre, and if our heart is closed we cannot experience love.. if your heart opens, then you can connect.

    A deeply spiritual man, who became a devotee of an Indian spiritual guru, Browne believed, ‘These are the kind of things that we can talk about through poetry, or through the therapeutic model, but we can’t deal with these concepts through the psychiatric model. At the deepest level, a lot of our problems are spiritual.’

    In Ireland, we sometimes do not celebrate our own. Today we celebrate Dr. Ivor Browne as a truly great man. He was offered a professorship at Harvard University, and I have no doubt if he had taken it he would be much more well known outside of Ireland.

    Instead, he choose a life of service, helping his patients, and reforming the psychiatric services in Ireland, and Greece. Browne also played an important role in the closure of the infamous Leros island psychiatric hospital in Greece, infamous as one of the most brutal psychiatric hospitals in Europe.

    Here is a link to a paper he co-wrote in 1960 with Dr. Joshua Bierer, the pioneer of social psychiatry in the UK, on the therapeutic use of LSD and group psychotherapy.

    Browne also recognised the healing power of psilocybin, and the ancestral Irish use of magic mushrooms, mentioning in a podcast in 2017 that: ‘Magic mushrooms were probably available to the druids, back at that time, so several thousand years later, similar, to the sort of relationship you have (with ayahuasca) in Peru or Brazil.’

    Freud reputedly said that the Irish were the only people impervious to psychoanalysis, and that may be true, certainly in previous generations due to the ancestral trauma that was so prevalent. But Ivor Browne is the closest thing we have to an Irish Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung.

    Thank you Dr. Ivor Browne, from all the people you helped and for your visionary qualities.

  • Musician of the Month: Shortsleeve Conor

    Shortsleeve Conor was born in Lisbon, but started playing in Aberdeen when I was a 21-year-old pizza chef. One Sunday, after finishing the close, the team headed over to a pub nearby called the Prince of Wales. We walked through the double doors to be met by the most joyous music I’d ever experienced. Fiddles, banjos, guitars, loud chattering, singing, tin whistles, flutes, pints pouring and a saxophone. I fell in love with trad and folk music right then.

    My family is Irish, though I grew up in the U.K. on the Wirral, so I already knew the music but hadn’t really experienced it. I was at that time a DJ playing house and disco. Now I decided folk music was something I wanted to pursue. The next week I brought my guitar to the session and asked if I could join in. Everyone was really nice and I think I sang Raglan Road or something. I listened to lots of the Dubliners, the Pogues, Margaret Barry, Hamish Imlach and the Fureys around that time.

    There was a fella who played in the session called Sandy Cheyne, who I now know is an artist and brilliant banjo picker. He soon showed me it was more useful to play a five-string than a guitar in this environment, because there are so many of the latter to compete with.

    He encouraged me to adapt old Scottish tunes to be played on the five-string banjo. Sandy had a huge influence on my musical direction. I started listening to all sorts of country music and learnt about the roots it had in Scottish and Irish.

    I listened to lots of on musicians like Bob Dylan, Dock Boggs, Ola Belle Reed, Jean Ritchie, Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, Nathan Abshire and too many other names to mention. But it was the trad session approach to music which had the biggest influence on me.

    I learned how to entertain a crowd, often using humour in the songs. It also showed me how to be vulnerable with my writing. Things I like to talk about in my songs are non-traditional relationships, mental health issues, class politics and the end of the world. Also love. Lots about love.

    I moved to Lisbon to study in 2021 and did what I always did when I moved to a new place: looked for the music. Funnily enough the only Irish trad session in town was a five-minute walk from my new home.

    By then I had a few songs under my belt and wanted to take them to some open mics. I was then introduced to a musician called the Mighty String at the city’s oldest open mic in a nice venue called Camones. We decided to do some terracing – where you busk to tables at restaurants – and became mates. He sat me down one day and told me I need a new name. Conor Riordan was too difficult to pronounce over there and he’d always noticed I wore short sleeve t-shirts. Shortsleeve Conor was born.

    I’m a really lucky person. When things are not meant to work out they usually do. So when I moved to Lisbon I wasn’t expecting there to be a blossoming folk music scene I could jump straight into. But I soon made a great group of friends, who all happened to be excellent musicians.

    I’m also really lucky that I didn’t have to pursue the Shortsleeve project too hard. Gigs just seemed to happen and the response was generally encouraging. But there was always one problem question: “Have you got any of your music online?” I didn’t and I didn’t really have a plan to. But I had a friend who had just decided to start a record label to capture this special moment in the city’s cultural history.

    Cheap Wine Records was founded by Lee Squires with the ambition of promoting Lisbon’s folk music scene. It also aims to nurture future talent, showcasing their work so they can tour and go on to bigger things. Shortsleeve Conor was one of the first projects, so again I was very lucky.

    The album – ‘Whatever that means’ – was put together at Estudio Roma 49 in Lisbon, with my friends and fellow musicians coming together to make it happen. The same goes for the production, marketing and funding. This community-led approach to the music made me feel right at home. It’s the same mindset as being back in the Prince of Wales, sitting in a circle playing tunes over a few pints. Only now I was blessed with a hot Portuguese sun, instead of the freezing North Sea winds.

    I’m writing this the day the Doomsday Clock moved 90 seconds closer to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot going on in the world to be happy about. But being from northern England I have to find what’s funny in everything. It takes the edge off. That’s why in my writing I contrast the rise of fascism with not being able to get a parking space in my song Pink Champagne. That’s why my song about being in an abusive relationship is so upbeat.

    I like to write about these things, but to add some humour into them. It helps because I also really struggle to express how I feel, which can be really frustrating when I’m in a relationship. I’m only at my most vulnerable when I’m telling an audience how I feel about someone who should have heard it first. I really try to leave nothing to the imagination with lyrics.

    Now my album is out I don’t really know what to do. I hope to use it to travel with my music and meet new people. When we started this record project the Mighty String asked me to write down what my long-term goal was for the album. I said I’d like for it to be well appreciated in a small but enthusiastic audience so I could disappear into anonymity without worrying about it too much and become a furniture painter or something. Then in forty years I’d like for it to be rediscovered and for it become a country classic so I can go on tour with it globally in my seventies.

    Follow Shortsleeve Conor on Spotify.

     

  • Allen Jones: Pulling the Trigger

    When it comes to veteran rock journalists, few could lay more genuine claim to the title than Allan Jones. After joining Melody Maker as cub reporter in 1974, with no previous writing experience, but an application letter which concluded: ‘Melody Maker needs a bullet up its arse. I’m the gun – pull the trigger’, he rose to editing the magazine ten year later. On leaving the fabled inky at the height of the excesses of Brit Pop – about which he was less than enthusiastic – he founded and edited Uncut, providing a British-based forum for the emerging Americana/New Country scene. Now in semi-retirement, he has produced two volumes of rock’n’roll anecdotage – 2017’s Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down, and the recently published Too Late To Stop Now. Des Traynor caught up with him to discuss these and sundry other matters at last year’s Kilkenny Rhythm’n’Roots Festival (a.k.a. ‘the best little weekend music festival in Ireland – and the known universe’), now celebrating its 25th anniversary.

    It seems like there are more lengthy pieces in this book than the last one?

    Yeah, partly due to the circumstances in which it was written. The first book they were interested more in a compilation of the stories as they were already written, and I didn’t really think of elaborating on them. I just packed the book with as many stories as possible, which meant that a lot of them had to be shorter than they could have been. I started writing stories for the second one just at the beginning of the first lockdown. As I explained in the book, I thought people would be using their time productively – you know, learning the harpsichord or how to juggle or a foreign language, whatever.

    You didn’t want to emerge empty-handed?

    Yes, I mean, I could quite happily have spent lockdown getting stoned and watching Netflix, there’s loads of movies. I’ve got a link to the BFI player. So, endless hours of viewing available, and a vast record collection I could reacquaint myself with – but when I started writing the stories there was no inhibition in terms of words, so I tended to let the stories dictate the length they would be.

    Were you always confident about your own abilities as a writer and critic, or did you feel like maybe you were a bit out of your depth when you started?

    I had loads of opinions. I wouldn’t call them well-informed in a lot of instances, but they were opinions and I wasn’t shy about sharing them. That came out of an Art School background. If there was one thing that Art School taught me, it was that you had to stand up for your work and your opinions, and be unfazed by criticism. So I hadn’t realised that at the time, but it did give me a lot of confidence, more bravado and bluff really.

    But you could do the work?

    It was very simple. I wasn’t stupid. I’d read Melody Maker for years. I’d recognised the basic template of writing a 2000 word feature on somebody who’d just had a chart hit. You went in, you established the fact that they had a new single, let them tell you how it was different from the last single, how it was a step forward, how it was a new vision for the band or whatever. That usually took about five minutes. To liven things up, you’d hope that one of the band’s chart rivals had a new single out. So you’d ask them for an opinion on that, hopefully it would be a bit controversial, they’d slag it, which would give Ray Coleman the chance to put a big headline on the cover: ‘Sweet slam Rubettes’, or ‘Shawaddywaddy slam Glitter’. And all they would say, basically, was ‘I’m not really keen on it’, or ‘It’s not very good’. But that was enough: that stirred up a bit of controversy.

    The other thing I learned to get a band talking was to tell them that you’d heard a rumour that one of them was leaving, or doing a solo album. And sometimes they’d go: ‘How did you know that?’ ‘Oh, just a wild guess.’ But it would get them talking about band dynamics. But I found that, a band like Mud for instance, who were really sweet guys, they were used to churning out these interviews, very pat answers. They weren’t really engaged with the interview process. But if you stopped for a drink with them, after they got this contractual obligation out of the way, I’d start asking them about their early days: anecdotes galore! Fucking brilliant stuff! Les Gray: really a very funny man. So I started to introduce some of those anecdotes to change the shape of the copy that was expected. At first they’d just get cut out, ‘Stick to the news story that you’ve been sent to do.’ So I just started to fracture that as much as I could. And although I hadn’t read Lester Bangs or people like that, I had read Tom Wolfe, and I’d read Hunter S. Thompson. I had an idea of what the new journalism was: contravening traditional journalistic rules about not involving yourself in the story. So I started introducing myself as a character. At first, they were the bits that would be cut. But as I became more successful at that kind of integration, the opportunities opened up. I mean, at that time, I would accept anything they asked me to do. I’d never written before, and I had to learn how to write well and quickly. So ‘I’ll do anybody, just send me out, I’ll do it. I’ll come back and I’ll write it up and see where we go from there.’ And once as the readers’ responses started to come in…

    Lou Reed in 1977.

    You hit it off with Lou Reed?

    How extraordinary was that? I could have wept. I was such a huge, huge Velvets’ fan.

    Why do you think he took a shine to you?

    When I walked in, with some presence of mind, I pressed record on my tape recorder. And for twenty minutes there was just this torrent of abuse. His first words to me were, ‘Do you know your head is too big for your body?’ And ‘What toilet did Melody Maker find you in, faggot?’ It was effortless on his part. It just went off. But I was just laughing. This was the Lou Reed I wanted. I could feel the piece writing itself. And I thought even if he tells me to fuck off when he’s finished this tirade, I’m gonna have enough to write something.

    I then took a breath. And I just said something like, ‘Are you doing this because this is what you think I expected Lou Reed to be like? Or is this you being Lou Reed? Or are you just turning it on because, you know, you think this is how the public want to see you?’ And he thought about that, and he said, ‘Sit down’. So I sat down, and he said, ‘Drink?’, and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, the first of two that we got through that day. I think, because I had a sense of humour, and I wasn’t intimidated by him, he just liked it. And I wasn’t deferential to him, and I think he liked that as well.

    And at the end of the interview, when the chief of press came in, Lou said, ‘By the way, book Allan into the hotel I’m staying in in Sweden. You’re coming on the road with me.’ And I thought he’d forget about it, but come the next Tuesday, there was a fucking limo outside my flat, drove me to the airport, got on a flight to Stockholm, there was a car waiting at Stockholm airport, took me straight to the hotel, and Lou is waiting in the lobby, saying, ‘Where have you been?’

    What about Van Morrison, whose music you obviously love, but all your encounters with him were ‘difficult’.

    Well, the first one especially, it was backstage at Knebworth, not ideal. He’d just come off stage, in a sulky mood. In the end, I just said, ‘Fuck it, man. If you’re not gonna chat, you know, we’re wasting time. I’ve got things to do, you’ve got things to do, I’m gonna leave.’ I was fuming, absolutely fuming. But I must say it never dented my admiration or love for his work. His work transcends any personal faults that he has, and to this day it does.

    He is a paranoid fucker.

    He’s always been like that. People who know him better than I would will trace it back to the way he was treated in the early part of his career. So comprehensively ripped off that he just hates the music business, which has offered him such success. So I can understand that level of bitterness. But five minutes in the presence of virtually anything that Van’s recorded, and any kind of negative thoughts that I have about him as a person  immediately evaporate. I saw four gigs over three months, that they played just after COVID, at the Palladium, Hampton Court, a small Dingwall’s gig he did, and then at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. And he was just incredible each time, absolutely astonishing.

    Do you think that there’s a lot of compromise in reviewing now, that rock journalism has become an extension of PR?

    Well, I think that is true to a certain extent: it’s certainly not the kind of confrontational journalism that I became attached to. Also, the idea that the writer as a character becomes involved in the story isn’t much encouraged, it seems to me, from current reading of Mojo or Uncut. There seems to be a greater deference to artists these days.

    Are there any younger writers now that you particularly like?

    I don’t read so much that I could say. But here’s a point that addresses your thinking about the PR nature of it, and the way the writing has changed since my days. I can read a whole issue of Uncut, and if it didn’t have byline names on the page, I wouldn’t really know who had written it. They really are quite interchangeable. There is a template that everybody adheres to. It’s not compromising the features, which are good in themselves. But what I miss is an individual, indeed, an idiosyncratic, voice. It’s just not there. However, there’s a writer in Uncut called Damian Love, who I really, really like – probably because his taste and mine are  really similar. And another writer who doesn’t appear as much as he should in Uncut, because he’s got a separate career as a political commentator and broadcaster is Andrew Mueller, who has written a couple of very, very good books – one about his life as a political foreign correspondent, and the other a memoir of his career as a music journalist, including coming over from Australia.

    I really enjoyed the books, not just in terms of subject matter, but because they are so funny, especially the way you often describe things in exaggerated terms.

    Well, I think that came out of not having any musical training and not knowing anything about musical theory. So I can’t break down a piece of music into something well informed about the actual musical content like, you know, Richard Williams was able to do, in the old Melody Maker.

    Did you ever try learning an instrument, or playing?

    No. At school – first year, comprehensive – we had to do music as a subject, and apparently to get good grades in that exam you had to play an instrument. And it wasn’t the kind of school where you wanted to be seen carrying a violin. So I thought: what comes in something square that looks like it’s a suitcase? So I ended up supposedly learning the trumpet. But when I went to the first lesson and I just couldn’t a noise out of the fucking thing. I was just blowing and blowing, I believe so hard that I burst a blood vessel in my nose and had to be taken to hospital. So I never went back for the second lesson.

    The end of your musical career.

    Indeed.

    And with that ripping yarn, so characteristic of the man, he’s off for a fun-filled afternoon with his old mucker, B.P. Fallon.

    Too Late To Stop Now: More Rock’n’Roll War Stories was published by Bloomsbury, on May 25th. Available in all good book shops.

  • Responsible Business

    The ten principles of the U.N. Global Compact, formed in 2000, sought to realign business as a force for good. They include compliance and support for human rights; upholding good labour practices and eliminating discriminatory and forced labour; taking up proactive environmental stewardship; and fighting corruption.

    Several institutions across the planet joined the Compact, including large corporations, SMEs, universities and think-tanks. These principles are now starting to inform corporate, business, and operational level actions and strategies. In some cases, these principles are considered at every stage and improved responsible practices have been introduced.

    Broadly, ‘responsible businesses’ that embed sustainable practices take a number of different initiatives. These can firstly be classified under actions that do not harm people or the planet while making profit; secondly, those that focus on their ESG (environmental, social, governance) investments.

    In order to make a larger impact on society and the environment, businesses can work on improving the lives of the people they impact. e.g. by creating green services, and making value chains more sustainable and inclusive.

    This could also come about through investments that promote and support social sustainability. Also, firms in any given sector may consider choosing to work with ‘responsible businesses’ who are their partners, investors, and suppliers. So, in the end, it is not only about the firm in question, but also its partners and wider associates, who share similar values and goals.

    Businesses caring about their wider stakeholder groups and not simply shareholder wealth, has led to increasing recognition and action around people-planet-profit, or The Triple Bottom Line. Some of the largest corporations, including Amazon, IBM, and TESLA have all set net-zero targets and micro-level reduction of carbon footprints. In addition to this, business goals such as using only ethically sourced materials, becoming more energy efficient, streamlining logistics practices, and applying the components of industry 4.0, offer the prospect of ‘win-win’ situations.

    Environmentalism on United States stamps.

    People-Planet-Profit

    Empirically, high shareholder value is considered an indicator of success. Today, however, more than ever, it’s about scoring highly on indices such as sustainability, managing employees responsibly, supporting (instead of exploiting) other stakeholders in the supply chain, and looking after the well-being of community members.

    Values-driven business tends to have better public perception and P.R. images than traditional ones with a narrow focus on profit. These are important variables that feed into success today.

    In 2017, a sustainability survey by Cox Conserves, revealed that 88% of small and midsize businesses, across various sectors have already implemented sustainable activities. It can be argued that the triple bottom line needs to be a part of every company’s culture and values to be successful in the long run, and to manifest responsible practices in various forms.

    Broadly, ‘The triple bottom line’ can be defined as a sustainability framework that examines a company’s social, environmental, and economic impact. The following definitions in this context might prove useful.

    People: the positive and negative impact an organisation has on its most important stakeholders.

    Planet: the positive and negative impact an organisation has on its natural environment (reducing its carbon footprint, responsible usage of natural resources, etc).

    Profit: the positive and negative impact an organisation has on the local, national and international economy (includes creating employment, generating innovation, and paying taxes, amongst others). It is important to remember that organisations need to remain solvent in order to do good! Hence ‘profit’ remains integral to success.

    Managing the paradox…

    The question, therefore remains: how can the Triple Bottom Line [“3BL”] be a lucrative and long-term strategy?

    Well, for starters, having 3BL raises transparency that mitigates shareholders’ concerns about concealed information. In fact, it helps fulfil one of the pillars of corporate governance too – transparency. Moreover, it involves accountability around organisations’ actions, while delivering growth and improved economic situations/opportunities for a business

    It also lines up a business to be a part of ‘world betterment’. At a local level this should translate into boosting community development through better practice. Finally, 3BL improves a company’s competitive advantage vis-à-vis its peers.

    For most businesses implementing reforms come at a cost, thereby creating a paradoxical scenario. There are paradox theories that identify such conflicting situations and which argue that organisational tensions remain latent until environmental factors of scarcity, plurality, and change demonstrate the contradictory nature of the tensions, making them salient to organisational actors.

    Conditions of scarcity refer to limitations on the resources available to the organisation, such as factors of production and finances. Plurality represents conditions of uncertainty as to organisational goals and the strategies necessary to achieve them. For example, as mentioned earlier in the article – the 3BL need to become part of the values, culture, and strategy of an organisation to function effectively in most markets. Finally, change signifies shifts in contextual conditions, which leads organisations to adapt and adopt new practices.

    A paradoxical approach understands that long-term success requires continuous efforts to meet multiple demands, not by trading off or prioritising one goal over others, but by a dynamic process of splitting and synthesis, as explored in a study by Smith and Lewis in 2011. However, synthesis means that this short-term splitting process is repeated cyclically, with new priorities emerging in each cycle, and in the long run, a dynamic equilibrium emerges.

    This involves “purposeful iterations between alternatives in order to ensure simultaneous attention to them over time”. In essence, this means that organisations can attend to the competing demands of the triple bottom line to varying degrees over time, thereby reaching a dynamic equilibrium to effectively manage all three objectives.

    Doing so promotes “…a virtuous cycle of tension and resolution as the firm responds dynamically to the changing and competing demands of sustainability management”. This is one way to overcome the paradox, which is applicable in many circumstances.

    Former tennis player Anna Kournikova in 2009.

    Become a role model…

    It pays to be good! A study surveying thirty thousand people in sixty countries conducted by Neilson explores the factors shaping consumer perception towards brands. One of the key findings of this work was that about two-thirds of the respondents would be willing to pay for sustainable products.

    Particularly, the millennial groups are willing to pay between ten and twenty-five per cent more for sustainable products, and be grouped under ‘responsible consumers’. However, the results were not consistent in certain advanced economies, where some of the major social ills are less evident, such as income inequality, limited job opportunities, and a lack of safety at the workplace.

    Good business practice builds a competitive advantage for firms. Selected large corporations address inter-connected global goals and improve their operations, some being more innovative and cost-efficient than others.

    This is generally reflected in an improving share price over time. The competitive advantage arrives not only from how businesses are conducting their operations more responsibly but also from increased stakeholder engagement. Sustainable businesses, who tend to normally fall within the ‘responsible business’ category anyway, create value for all stakeholders, including employees, supply chain partners and wider associates, civil society, and the environment.

    Michael Porter and Mark Kramer proposed the ‘shared value creation’ theory proposing exactly the above, i.e. that a business can be a force for good and simultaneously generate economic value by identifying and addressing social problems which intersect with their business.

    The struggle is often to balance the trade-off which makes a few stakeholders better off at the cost of others. There is rarely a pure ‘win-win’ scenario. However, regular dialogue with stakeholders should lead to reduced conflicts and increased cooperation. Revising business practices and running new iterations gradually helps a company to be better positioned and maintain its niche competitive advantage, aligned with a core sustainability agenda.

    Finally, another critical advantage to working closely with wider stakeholders on ESG issues helps build critical support mass over the long term. This also allows businesses to deal with external forces that assists with risk management strategies.

    Besides a focus on planet welfare, alongside keeping shareholders content, consumer interest in sustainable products is another significant dimension. Consumers value transparency, fairness, and explore the global impact of brands they associate themselves with. This has become a matter of perception, in the sense that there is no real scorecard that is used to measure these impacts quantitatively.

    However, the footprints of large corporations in particular is far easier to identify today than a generation ago. Several studies by Deloitte and Global Economic Forum demonstrate that consumers are more loyal to brands that have a positive ESG image. Another study shows that about two-thirds of consumers studied in six countries believe they “have a responsibility to purchase products that are good for the environment and society” — 82% in emerging markets and 42% in developed markets.

    We await a reliable scorecard…

    Moving forward with such sustainability and social strategies is a requirement for almost all businesses nowadays. Thus, organisations are creating newer forms of partnerships, and alliances with other actors such as governments, local agencies, and community groups to work together and contribute towards larger objectives.

    It is advisable that companies do not over-promise on these wider societal goals, and instead focus on delivering on a small number of actionable ones that leave an obvious impact. This is largely, also, because the resources of any organisation are limited. Therefore, investing selected key resources aimed at a few high-impact goals will also maintain shareholder confidence.

    Companies should consider re-framing their sustainability strategies in the current global economic environment, where the complexity of change is increasingly overwhelming. What is still missing, however, are more reliable scorecards that convince stakeholders and consumers. The challenge remains to quantify evidence of ‘where is the impact’.

    Feature Image: The California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California, is a sustainable building designed by Renzo Piano.

  • Fiction: Yer Man

    Inside the castle’s gift shop stood White, reading the biography of the artist whose work was on exhibit. She was not a local. White had expected as much. It was often the case. Arts councils promote the work of foreign writers and artists, liminal beings that they are.

    Yes, I mean, why else would they have done it? Artists are, after all, liminal beings forever inhabiting society’s margins, and that is why so many among their number are consigned to travel abroad. Even on foreign shores their natural domain is to live out on the perimeter. So to be permanently precarious, is in a sense, an ontological grounding for them, of sorts.

    The work on display was surprising and novel, he thought. Artistic tropes were being explored in both complex and perhaps popular ways. A Bacchic display of human like heads whose hair had been transformed into great tresses of grapes at once reminded him of those chiseled river gods which adorned so many public buildings and bridges in the inner city, or humorous reworkings of the once risqué Sheela na gig, now easily hung on the walls of someone’s room. But whose?

    No, there was something not quite right there. White considered the surrounding geography, the demographics of the local populace. What used to be thought of as middle class couples;  a dying breed that were the glue cementing a working class on one end to the rich on another.

    How were they immediately indentifiable, the middle class? Typically, two cars. The drive- way foregoing any semblance of lawn or front garden as now the mortgage payments to maintain a three-bedroom plaster board edifice made it imperative that both parents work. Which meant two cars despite one’s carbon footprint on the environment. What an utter sham, and it had happened almost overnight. The newspapers had just announced an average cost now for these three-bedroom abodes was over half a million euros.

    White couldn’t afford one and he was convinced that this was one of the reasons why his father had only ever stepped foot in his place once during the last decade, out of shame. Although, unless pressed on a drunken night, he would never dare admit to it.

    Appearances were everything. Post-colonial societies were a bloody nightmare. The REP was no different. REP was White’s name for The Republic of Ireland, which was such a fucking mouthful, that if you uttered the phrase it was as if your mouth was overflowing with snot and phlegm.

    The elderly woman behind the gift shop’s small counter remained on the phone. White hung about now just trying to get a bit of information on the whereabouts of a local writer’s group he had once been a part of, so many years ago. Well, being a part of was perhaps too strong a word for it. White had long since ceased being a joiner. He was the most liminal of them all.

    A stroll might reveal if there was any indication at all of the existence of the writer’s group to be found in the shop. He had already checked the walls in the hall leading into the café but to no avail. Then, hovering by the counter, he noticed a few paperbacks placed on a corner table by an entrance leading into the castle itself. Sure enough, he found what he had been looking for. Two titles were by members of the writers group. One was a local who had been a tradesman all his life in the inner city who upon retirement had moved out to Sker to settle down in a three-bedroom house built in the nineties. An older housing estate to the one where White lived.

    John Freed was the man’s name. White had met him about a decade ago when attending the writer’s group one Saturday morning. John was almost mono-syllabic at the time, but that was what was attractive about him back then. Now, emboldened by so many open mic sessions, and with the latest coup of finally getting a book out, John had left behind his former persona filled with quiet reticence and smouldering frustration, a rather charming cocktail White had thought, only to replace the former qualities with a newfound confidence and stupidity that filled White with despair.

    What is it about society these days? he thought. Everyone’s a poet or an artist. You would see it on their LinkedIn accounts; Profession: Poet at Writer. How many poets actually made a living from writing poetry? With six published collections behind him, White wouldn’t put Poet as his profession. In thirty years of writing, he had earned about six thousand euros. In all that time.

    White felt the furies coming on, so he made for the door of the gift shop and got the fuck out. Far as he could away from that place. Anything might set him off.

    On the way, he would message John and ask him about the possibility of a gig. He was going up to the castle on a regular basis now, particularly as he was using the rose garden in the castle grounds as a centre-piece, in a sense, to the new novel that he was working on. So, it made perfect sense to reach out and enquire about facilitating a reading or a workshop of some kind. Readings and workshops! Hardly were the words out of his mouth and he was again driven to the depths of despair. Christ, but what a god-awful fucking society they had become!

    Looking downhill on the whole surrounding territory before him, White sent a brief message to Freed enquiring about the possibility of a reading followed by a workshop or something and a nominal fee of fifty euro or so. Should he invite Freed out for a drink down in the bill local where they both used to read together? White liked Freed, as a person. He simply hated what he had become and this was more a societal thing as Freed was just caught up in it all.

    White’s iPhone addiction was getting to the point that he would find himself either reading texts or making audio messages while he was out in the middle of one of his hikes. But now he stopped on the pathway that interrupted the flow of the descent. The view was simply overwhelming if you actually took the time to take it in.

    His surroundings went back to the mid-seventeenth century. A main house and an estate which had been cleared of woodland. But the castle itself had really only come into its own at the beginning of the eighteenth century and then was further developed in the early 19th. It was easy to imagine, White reflected, looking around him at the great expanse of sea before him. The little harbour floating illusory upon the waves of sometime mercury only to be replaced by emeralds and aquamarine when the sunlight danced upon it. Sker’s own micro-climate could be summer-like which White was experiencing just now, only for the skies to suddenly cloud, and he would beat a retreat back into the woods from whence he came.

    Yes, it was very easy to think back to the early 19th century, the time of Jane Austen and Napoleon. Or Ludwig van Beethoven, who White once listened to for years on an old Walkman. Until that ancient machine finally gave up the ghost. It had been a kind of statement. His stubborn refusal to use Spotify. Somehow, playing compact discs, which he carried around in a special satchel, allowed him to keep connected to the eighties and nineties, to a mythical past when he had attained his apex.

    Now, most certainly, he was in the grips of irreversible decline, which was fine. One could not reverse the inevitable. That would be folly. Acceptance then? Nay! Embrace, rather. One had to embrace one’s age. One’s own and also that age into which one was born.

    Besides, White thought, it had all really started, his decline, in his early thirties. That had been the start of it. Age thirty-three to be precise. The age of Christ! What a fucking joke. It was too rich really, but then, life had always been surprising and rich in irony. White recommenced his walk. The slow decent of the hill sped him gently on his way. Freed had responded by a thumbs up. Detestable habit. What a cunt, White thought, laughing to himself through the almost audible strains of the Eroica booming again in his ears.

     

     

  • Poem – ‘Psalm’

    Psalm

    The light and the wind on the water these wild winter days are breath of it
    The cardinal sun below cumulus flaring up skybeams a pulse
    Gathers the gloom but high in the east celestial moon unhides behind heart-racing clouds
    All in the arms of physics and this is heaven we are blessed to happen in

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    In the poem your butchers
    fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries

    are clean, the brimming
    table-top restored – your every room

    aflush with idleness again,
    a bowl of flying spices

    near to hand, the oven-bread
    uplifted through the haze: a feast

    the windy air will sing
    from the open-hearted balcony

    to the salted promenade below,
    where a boy

    is counting ripples out to sea,
    and the market-men

    are bundling their wares,
    the coming dark

    a gentleness
    and rustling of wings:

    no raining heat
    or carnage to allay,

    the waterways unpoisoned
    by cruelty or death.

    You see – the dream
    your fingers fashioned like a sail

    is soaring in the breeze;
    your pen

    outlives the bullets
    of the eviscerator’s gun.

     

    The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed along with his family in Gaza on December 6th. His final broadcasted poem, “If I must die” makes reference to his statement in an interview that if soldiers arrived on his doorstep he would fling his pen, his only weapon, in their faces. 

  • Musician of the Month: Cara Coyle

    The music I am performing at the moment mostly came from three different sets of songs that I began writing in 2018. The first batch I wrote when I was living in a small cabin my dad built near my family home in Donegal.

    At the time, I felt the songs come to me and I just wrote them down. I never experienced songwriting like that before. I did write in my early twenties, but It felt different with these songs.

    Since then, another batch of songs came to me in 2020 just after Covid hit. I realised that each set of songs felt that they had their own colours. The early batch felt black with bits of white. So I refer to them as the black and white songs. The songs that arrived in May of 2020 are mostly orange and my most recent songs have mostly been pink. I’ve got lots of pink songs.

    Sharing Music

    I never meant to share my music with others in the way that I am now. I was quite wary of doing so for a long time. If I shared them it was just for the fun of playing and experimenting with friends.

    There are two acts that currently inspire me to write and perform my music to others – Rónán Ó Snodaigh and Shakalak.

    At the moment I feel particularly moved by live music and feel very lucky that my favourite acts are Irish. When I go and see Rónán or Shakalak perform I want to go straight home afterwards and make something new to share. They make me feel like strengthening my inner voice and using it more.

    Their example shows how transformative live music can be and each time I’ve heard them perform I feel that I have learnt something new about myself or about the world we’re in. They remind me that music can bring us closer together. That we are all going through similar things in different ways, and we can relate to each other through our art. They continuously inspire me to bring what I have inside of me out into the world.

    Returning to Dublin

    When I came to Dublin in 2018 – having spent two years in Donegal – I began playing my music at open mic nights in the city. This helped me to integrate back into city life. I didn’t realise it would take a while for Dublin to feel like a home again.

    Playing in venues helped me connect with others and so began the feeling of community. One of the most valuable rewards of playing music has been witnessing the community that comes with it and watching that community grow. I have got to meet so many beautiful people and feel genuinely supported and encouraged by them.

    During Covid – whenever it was possible to do so – I began to play my orange tunes with a talented and intuitive drummer, Jason McNamara. Last year I was granted an Agility Award and with it I wrote more pink tunes.

    It was strange for me to sit down and say “ok, I need to write some songs” because prior to this the songs came about very naturally. It worked out though, and I’m currently enjoying hearing these songs grow legs and arms and gain a life of their own on the stage.

    Self-Expression

    Rather than pursuing music as a career, I have always just been interested in music as a way to express myself. It’s an art form for me. I feel I get to see myself grow through making art in ways that I might not find the space for in day-to-day life.

    Performing live is what I enjoy most. I did a small bit of work in theatre in the past and loved that a play would be this live, living and breathing thing for a little while.

    It existed just for the people who showed up to see it and then it would be gone. I often feel that my music was written as if it were made for the theatre stage.

    For years I have played music on the street for fun, and for experience. There, I learned how to project my voice; perform with confidence; receive a compliment; to be rejected; experiment with other artists; and connect with all kinds of people. A lot of my own music would have debuted on the streets of Dublin.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    On the Liffey

    Once Covid ended I started to make changes that meant I was playing my music to others quite frequently. In 2022 I was offered a beautiful gig that runs in the summer called ‘Music under the bridges’ by a company called City Kayaking.

    The gig usually starts under Capel Street Bridge where a group of people on kayaks gather to listen to a musician sitting on a little dingy under the bridge. The setting is just beautiful and different every time. Nature dictates the stage. Sometimes bringing sunlight that hits off the water and projects on to the arches. Sometimes you might catch a seal listening in. It’s magic no matter what the weather is like.

    The very kind and lovely thing about this company is that they hire artists to play their original music, which meant that I was suddenly playing my music to an audience on a weekly basis.

    From playing on the Liffey, things seemed to progress like a rolling stone. Next, I found myself playing at mini festivals and events in the city and beyond.

    I started to meet more artists and felt inspired to continue to create and find more ways to spend my time playing music in my days.

    At the beginning of this year I was introduced to the opportunity of playing music in nursing homes which I still do now on a regular basis. I was delighted to stumble into this area. It’s really grounding and the exchange with the people there can be very rewarding.

    At the moment I am considering some projects for 2024. I have a little studio in the city centre that I work away in. I haven’t recorded a lot of music yet since I’ve been more interested in performing live, but It seems it might be a next step for me.

    There’s talk of collaborating with an artist to make a music video for my song ‘Paper Thin Woman’ which would be magic! I’m starting to play with a wonderful bass player now as well as Jason on drums. This is new and exciting territory for me. I look forward to the adventure ahead!

    Follow Cara Coyle on Instagram.

  • Shane MacGowan’s Madonna

    So, it’s Thursday night in Dublin, I’ve found some Poitin, and am thinking of Shane MacGowan. How very sad it is that he’s gone. ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ playing on the radio.

    I had a funny connection with Shane.

    His wife Victoria gave me a photo of her and Shane for an auction, to raise money for a battle against a semi-state body spraying pesticides.

    I had to get it signed. ‘Come on over!’ Victoria said. Next thing I’m in their  house, Victoria has scarpered, and I’m alone with Shane.

    I’ve had the photo of them blown up and printed on canvas. Shane loves it,  grabs it, asks me what it’s for, takes a green marker and scrawls, ‘Fuck Those F—  Hypocrites! Love Shaney XXX’.

    Wow.

    Business completed, joints are rolled. Blue gin poured.

    My head is melting.

    My heart is too.

    Shane talks poetry. Seamus Heaney. James Clarence Mangan. The Famine. The Rising. Have I ever been ‘strung out’?. Where do I live? With whom? I explain I’m with my children and their partners. ‘A commune!’.

    Would I like some music? Absolutely I would. Shane leans over the arm of the sofa where he’s sitting to rummage through a box of CD’s.

    ‘I used to play with this band’ he says, shyly, ‘the Pogues’.

    I want to jump up and hug him. I want to say everyone in the whole world knows the Pogues and your incredible music Shane!

    ‘That would be lovely’ I say. ‘I’d love to hear you and the Pogues’.

    Shane slides in ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’.

    Victoria re-appears.

    Shane looks around. ‘Hey Vic, give ‘er that’, he says, pointing to a floor tile on which he’s drawn the Virgin Mary.

    In brightest greens and blues, Mary is standing, holding one arm up. ‘What’s she doing?’  ‘Calming her people’ says Shane. ‘And the little guy with a Kalsnikov?’. ‘He’s minding her’.

    I’m unsure if I should take it. Victoria, who’s probably seen hundreds of items given away, is graciousness itself: ‘He’s delighted to give you something’.

    I finally leave, my head ringing, thinking when I’d asked Paul McCartney if he’d sign a rare Beatles EP, a frosty PR company replied: ‘Sir Paul does not sign memorabilia’

    Thinking how CRAZY it is that notorious hellraiser Shane MacGowan has just given me a picture of the Virgin Mary. On a floor tile.

    And also, this thought: it’s the middle of the recession. I can’t keep asking artist friends for help. I’ll collect Virgin Mary’s instead. And sell them.

    The Irish Museum of Modern Art IMMA made a beautiful print of Shane’s original, ‘Gra agus Beannacht’ added in Shane’s hand.

    I was on my way.

    I had to visit Shane and Victoria again to get the prints signed. Exhausted after a UK trip, Shane lined up something for himself and said: ‘Okay give me those fukken things’ then, gent that he is, signed them all.

    He and Victoria were guests of honour at our first exhibition of Virgins in the local Arts Centre. He the first to buy. A beautiful print of his beloved Sinead O’Connor as Mary by Aga Szot (who previously featured as an artist on Cassandra Voices). Nobody else moved. ‘Fukken tight fist fukken cunts’ Shane growled.

    Sinead O’Connor as Mary by Aga Szot.

    O Lord.

    Truth be told, a Catholic boarding school girl, I’d never much liked Mary. She seemed cold. Distant. Pastel. Shane turned me on to a different one. A powerful female icon. A warrior woman, ‘Calming her people’.

    With everything he cut to the chase.

    ‘I just wanted to shove music that had roots, and is just generally stronger and has more real anger and emotion, down the throats of a completely pap-orientated pop audience.’

    He sure succeeded. He sure was loved for it.

    He was beautiful. Impossible. Sensationally gifted. Honest. Punk. Sensationally sensitive. Spiritual. Political. Wild.

    ‘Gra agus Beannacht’ in the fullest measure.

    He will be sorely missed in this ‘pap-orientated’ world.

  • Fine Dining in Ireland During WWII

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

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

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

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

    Jammet’s

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

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

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

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

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

    Red Bank

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

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

    The Blueshirts salute their leader Eoin O’Duffy.

    The Unicorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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