Jenny Ní Ruiséil is a musician and Yoga teacher, based in the west of Ireland. She creates music inspired by her roots finding her voice through singing in the Irish language, as well as taking inspiration from medicine music around the world and devotional chanting tradition of bhakti yoga and other spiritual traditions. Jenny is inspired by the continuously changing landscapes of the natural world, our human bodies, and the relationship between mind, body and awareness that we navigate on a daily basis.
My earliest musical influences were quite classical in nature – I trained from a young age on the classical flute and played in orchestras and concert bands throughout primary and secondary school. I was always enamoured with the idea of being a singer but I didn’t officially take any lessons until I was in about 5th year in school. I taught myself guitar at fifteen – on a right-handed guitar that my dad had lying around the house (I’m left-handed).
During my teenage years I was fortunate enough to attend the Gaeltacht (Coláiste Lurgan), where I subsequently worked. It was there that my love for music and songwriting was really given a space to flourish. I often say that if it wasn’t for Gaeilge (the Irish language) and Coláiste Lurgan, I would not be a singer today. Gaeilge literally gave me my voice. My boss in the college Mícheál Ó Foighil was the first person to ever put me in a room and say – ‘tá tusa ag canadh an amhráin seo’ (you are singing this song) – for no other reason that he believed me capable of it.
I can’t tell you how impactful that was. Or how impactful it was to be part of a community centered around speaking the Irish language and creating music for young people to reconnect to it. As I got older I began spending whole summers there, and ended up working as a múinteoir and stiúrthóir ceoil (musical director). My job (along with a small group of others) was to translate songs into Irish and adapt them to suit groups of teenagers to sing in groups. We would then record the songs in a studio and shoot music videos to upload to Youtube for them to enjoy at home.
Eventually, myself and the other teachers responsible for these projects formed a band, Seo Linn, who I sang with for nearly five years. Our music was mainly as Gaeilge (in Irish), with some bilingual songs too. We were really lucky to be given some amazing opportunities to travel to Uganda, Boston, London, Scotland and all over Ireland. We played for Micheal D. Higgins on a few occasions, as well as in venues and college bars all over the country, and I can safely say they were my ‘wildest’ days!
I took a ‘break’ from the band aged twenty-two that ended up being permanent, as my mental health wasn’t good and I was struggling with an eating disorder. It was from there that yoga and meditation became important staples in my life, and I went fully into studying and practicing yoga while I travelled. I didn’t sing for a couple of years then, until one day I found myself at a Kirtan session (a form of call and response chanting), and fell in love immediately with the practice.
It was a bit outside of my comfort zone at the time, as the only reference point I had for ‘devotion’ was something I associated with mass and the Catholic Church growing up. But I quickly realised that Kirtan (and yoga for that matter) were speaking to something much more universal, and something that any human with a heart has the capacity to connect to and feel impacted by.
I began hosting kirtan sessions back in Dublin in around 2019, and was starting to write my own original songs again by this point. It is still a journey for me to reclaim the idea of being a
singer-songwriter, but I feel that mantra and my yoga practice has really bolstered me to trust my creative instincts and capacity again.
My music now reflects this, and is still deeply influenced by the land, music, spirituality and mythology of Ireland as well as my own personal healing journey.
My hope for the future is to continue writing and creating more music that can connect people to the healing capacity of song and chanting, whilst also capturing some of the essence of Ireland and the magic contained within the language and landscape of this land.
The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of the deep pit”, he wonders, “where I’ve been / this three and a half years?” Physical and intellectual lethargy, it would seem, can be the stuff that poems are made of. Luckily for us, at any rate, Paulin’s “gift survived it all.”
If the volume, his first in a decade, has been justly lauded for its ethical courage and linguistic zing, it also confirms Paulin as successor and torch-bearer to a generation of Northern poets, whose time has largely passed. When he freeze-frames two young victims of a loyalist murder-gang – “Each in his open coffin / each with a polo-neck jumper / to hide the slashes” – we hear a murmur of Seamus Heaney’s shade, still grieved and grounded by “the actual weight / of each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped.” Likewise when we encounter, in “The Spare Room”, “the light’s ekeing growth” like “a bandage being torn off very slowly, / always with a sense of the damage / and the fictive hand’s quiet sloth”, we’re restored to the kind of hard-edged perceptual cogency pioneered by Derek Mahon, adrift “in a riot of sunlight / watching the day break and the clouds flying.”
The list could be extended. The canny imaginative shape-shiftings of Paulin’s title-poem, for instance, seem to have a Muldoonian tinge – and the same may be said of “Not to Speak of the Cheese”, a playful flex of ancestral speculation, which is also an inspired “trip”, attempting to locate “our common awkward surname / back in the town of Nîmes”, a site of “impacted paint” where “the Huguenots were massacred / in the White Terror / that followed the Hundred Days”. The book as a whole might be understood as the final flare of an aurora borealis that once seemed nearly permanent, and unassailable, in its rich, revelatory shining.
Admittedly, few of Paulin’s poetic peers and forebears have ever dared to broadcast, in print, their “regret” for “the loss / of the educational genius / of Martin McGuinness”, a former paramilitary commander who would, Paulin posits, quite sensibly, “have dropped the 11+”, and with it
the whole sectarian and therefore necessitarian system of training the minds of the young and imagine all those smug fee-paying schools taxed out of existence swept off the face of the province!
This is pure Paulin, lippy and punctilious, skillfully converting bowsy provocation into good politics and better poetry. That he’s managed to smuggle such an honourably elegiac salute into a Faber-published manuscript, indeed, may be considered a small victory in the long peace – which has yet to be won. For as Paulin reminds us, “direct rule / means the same old skules”.
In contrast to many of the younger luminaries of the Irish and Northern Irish poetry scene, for Paulin, we sense, politics means more than selective self-projection in the name of art, and necessarily transcends the well-crafted, fully costed pleas for balance that often pass for liberal opinion. Paulin is the kind of lateral thinker, instinctively partisan, for whom, bravely, there is “nothing” anymore “to be said” about “the sight of Ben Bulben, / massive and tabled”, fringed by “wild rhododendrons”: a pained vacancy that calls to mind Robert Emmet – dying for a vision of Irish nationhood that remains unrealised – and the “epitaphs / that could neither get written / nor chiselled in hard stone.” As here, the experience of personal despondency Paulin charts often comes across as the weariness of an emancipationist whose cause, for now, has been forced into dormancy.
In a literary landscape grown sleek, and chic, amid an unceasing rain of sinecures and market opportunities, the Oxford don stands out from the pack, combining the fire of a citizen-poet with the sad intelligence of a gnarly visionary. Like all great stylists, he is distinctive and elusive with every breathing lyric. To pilfer a phrase of Mahon’s, Paulin has become “The Last of the Fire Kings”: an anomaly and outsider, strangely attuned to the deeper weathers of his time and tribe. As in his tribute – one of a few – to the Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar, Namanlagh grants us entry and permission to “poke about in his darkness”: a “puzzle” that impels us with its intricacy and power, “though” we “can tell that in spirit / he’s gone out the door.”
A reliable source, who happens to be representing him, now informs me that Banksy is to be prosecuted over his RCJ mural. This form of artistic censorship, leads me to consider the important role that art has played in terms of political commentary, and how some of the masterpieces in this genre resonate with contemporary events.
Many of the atrocities of our time are today hidden from view, as computer game technology permits de-humanised genocide. War reporters are often banned from reporting on the ground, or if they do they are generally ’embedded,’ as tools of propaganda. There is no Robert Capa or Don McCullen visible in this age. As a result, death and barbarism are remote, with disinformation omnipresent. Thus we rely on an artist such as Banksy to redress the imbalance, and provoke a moral response.
Today we can, at best, only partially bear witness to our reality. The news media offers up a version akin to a flame throwing shadows on the wall of a cave. Previously art engaged more closely with politics, but today few artists speak to our time.
Many great artists throughout history have of course remained non-political and focused on the human condition. Moreover, political art often veers into dogmatism – recall socialist realism or Italian fascist art. One must carefully distinguish art from propaganda. Satire and caricature walk an uneasy path in this respect.
The origins of European art lie in the depiction of mainly Biblical scenes, which yielded little of an overtly political nature, although the proton-surrealist work of Hieronymus Bosch especially ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ (1490) speak of a world of chaos and brutality. This is not dissimilar to our present universe. Depictions of hell provide a commentary on social entropy and evil.
Among the pioneers in depicting ordinary human life was the Flemish master Peter Breughal the Elder. Scenes of social gatherings and festivities contain subtle and unobtrusive political messages. So, for example in the ‘Census at Bethlehem’ (1566) you have to look very closely to find Jesus and Mary arriving in on a donkey and trap amid representations of peasant life. His paintings provide hints into the nature of the institutions and practices of the time, and the plight of poor folk.
In Renaissance Italy Titian and Raphael’s Cardinals often show cruelty or majestic temporal power. In those hardened faces one often gets a sense of that time. The demonic religious paintings of Caravaggio are almost a textbook exercise in conspiracy, murder and intrigue. How much fun would he have hid with the Jeffrey Epstein revelations!?
Mary and Joseph are registered in the census at Bethlehem.
Durer and Beyond
The only Renaissance giant who is markedly different, and often avowedly political by way of mysterious and hidden social commentaries, is the great German painter Albrecht Dürer. It is the woodcuts and the lithographs where the apocalyptic commentary is most evident. The fourth woodcut of his Apocalypse cycle ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, (1497) depicts the first four of seven seals that must be opened for the Apocalypse to begin, These are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. All are now evident internationally.
In the famous engraving ‘Knight Death and Devil’ (1513) the knight seems resigned, and his facial features are downcast with the devil enveloping him. It is believed the portrayal is a literal, though pointed, celebration of the knight’s Christian faith, and of the ideals of humanism threatened or protected by the fox.
The engraving Melancholia (1514) is a magus of ideas, clearly influenced by paganism, alchemy, and astrology – the dark demonological arts. It is also a cold mathematical work and exercise in numerology. It contains a brooding central figure, best represented as an allegory of the limits of reason, and a personal or collective descent into madness when reason no longer makes sense. To anyone scrolling through Twitter on a daily basis this may sound all-too-familiar.
William Hogarth’s tremendous political engravings are also worth mentioning in respect of contemporary afflictions. His most famous print, Gin Lane (1751) graphically depicts infanticide, drunken oblivion, disinterment of corpses, starvation, beggary, poverty, impalement, suicide, debt, debauchery and the collapsing buildings of society. Also notable are his anti-corruption election cartoons such as An Election Entertainment (1757).
Hogarth’s only contemporary competitor was James Gilroy and his famous ‘Plum Pudding in Danger’ (1805), which seems most apt for our present world, dividing into competing trading blocks. In this Napoleon and Pitt divide the world up and gorge themselves. Napoleon is cutting away a slice of land to the east of the British Isles marked ‘Europe’, but his piece of land is much smaller than Pitt’s portion of sea. The inscription reads: ‘state gourmets taking a little supper’. Greenland, Ukraine take your pick.
Goya is the greatest political artist of them all in my view. In his oeuvre we encounter a treasure trove of commentary for our time. First and foremost, there is the incredible execution painting ‘The Third of May’ (1808), revisited by Manet, as well as lithographs of torture and brutality. His work curiously presages contemporary debauchery and cannibalism, societal and solipsistic that is.
French Revolution
In the same period there is the great portrait painter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era Jacque-Louis David. Some might consider his Neo-Classicisal style a little austere, but it’s nonetheless worthwhile visiting the main gallery in Bruges just to see The Death of Marat (1793).
David was a propagandist for the Jacobins. Marat, the Montagnard faction, was murdered by Charlotte Corday, who supported the opposing Girondins. She blamed Marat for his involvement in numerous executions that had taken place during the Terror quite correctly, but the painting strengthened support for the Montagnards as David successfully presented him as a tireless revolutionary betrayed by conniving forces. A martyr covered in a holy glow, taking his last breaths, with revolutionary pen in hand.
Indeed, the Reign of Terror only heightened after this painting’s release and after the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David shifted allegiance to the Emperor Napoleon, for whom he produced fawning political art including The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). Admirers of the Marat painting should read Albert Camus’s The Rebel (1951) as to the true Marat and the extremist terror.
A near contemporary of David, Delacroix of course creates the famous painting of the flag and revolution Liberty Leading the People (1830), but we should be cautious about that French notion in its unrestrained form, certainly at this juncture, although the argument for protest and change are greater than ever.
Death of Marat by David
Greatest Epoch
The greatest epoch in my view for political art was just after World War I. Many artists experienced the devastation of the trenches, and used this to condemn bellicose militarism. In the Weimar Republic we find the apogee of political art and social commentary through caricaturists such as George Grosz, and Otto Dix. No wonder the Nazis considered this degenerate art.
If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926) – with the superior subtitle Shit for Brains – you will see one of the paragons of virtue, with, well, shit for brains. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapses, while the Nazi judges and commissars worked hand-in-glove with their jackboot associates.
The etchings and paintings of Otto Dix also perfectly capture the collapse, most obviously The Match Seller (1920), The War Triptych or the engraving Stormtroopers Advance Under Gas (1924). These are among the greatest anti-war works. He survived the Somme and intellectual pretentiousness to produce paintings of the calibre of Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).
Close to the Prada hangs the most monumental work of political art. To see it in the flesh is extraordinary. That is Picasso’s fatal depiction of the massacre of the innocents during the Spanish Civil War Guernica (1937). It now hangs symbolically now over Gaza or The Ukraine as a rebuke, as is the core symbol the dove of peace.
The Spanish Civil War produced many other great works of art particularly the photography of Robert Capa, which is disturbing in its brutality, as are the later pictures of Cartier Bresson after the liberation of Paris where collaborators were made examples of. Likewise, the extremism of our time cuts in all sorts of ways, as does the demonisation of those we disagree with.
Other great war photographs show the aftermath of Hiroshima and the liberation of the Concentration Camps, documented in Resnais documentary Night and Fog (1945). Unforgettable also is the photography of the bullet to the head of the Viet Kong activist. Even in this de-sensitised social media age that still has the capacity to shock.
Picasso’s Guernica.
Animation and Cartoons
Animation substantively begins with Walt Disney, and his films are at times wonderful and at other times an expression of crass American values. The figure of Cruella de Ville from The Dalmatians appears crucial to our time, conveying the theme of the murder of the innocent for personal self-aggrandisement. A few contemporary figures would appear well equipped for the role, Ghislaine Maxwell in particular.
The greatest cartoonist of all was the Belgian Hergé (George Prosper Remi), who has been accused, unfairly, of fascism for writing for Le Soir during wartime. This is an accusation almost as absurd as that levelled against P.G. Wodehouse, which is not to say that the character of the creator of the immortal Tintin is unimpeachable.
Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès identifies the character of Tintin as representing a personification of the ‘New Youth’ concept promoted by the European far-right. Indeed, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) was a work of anti-socialist propaganda, but then, in fairness, Tintin in America was designed as a work of anti-Americanism, highly critical of capitalism, commercialism, and industrialisation.
Many would counter that Hergé was far from right-wing, as exemplified by his condemnation of racism in the United States in the introduction to Tintin in America (1932), and that the wonderful The Blue Lotus (1936) took a distinctly anti-imperialist stance, unlike Tintin in The Congo (1931), which has shades of Colonel Kurz. During the fascist era he did not join the far-right Rexist Party, later asserting that he ‘had always had an aversion to it’ and that ‘to throw my heart and soul into an ideology is the opposite of who I am.’
From his earliest years, Hergé was openly critical of racism. He lambasted the pervasive racism of U.S. society in the prelude to Tintin in America published in Le Petit Vingtième on 20 August 1931, and ridiculed racist attitudes toward the Chinese in The Blue Lotus.
Whatever the ambiguity, the art is riveting as Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen observed: ‘Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.’
Of moralism and cartoons Roald Dahls illustrated by Quentin Blakes books are less ambiguous and more unsettling as portrayals of human evil and the macabre. not least the character of Willie Wonka. His character anticipates the soma-induced greed of our age.
Animation has of course transmogrified into manga and anime, where the master is Miyzaki. In My Neighbour Totora (1988) the forest is warding off the evil spirits. Gai regenerating as when the industrial demons are confronted and beaten in his ecological masterpiece Princess Mononoke (1997). A little spring blossoms.
Preserve his Anonymity!
“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” David Langwallner discusses the recent Banksy memorial in terms of the right to protest and its limitations.https://t.co/nBLYDJpWGp
The important role of art as a form of political commentary should be re-asserted, and the forthcoming prosecution (if my source is to be believed) of Banksy sets a very dangerous precedent. It sends out a clear message to other artists, and will have a chilling effect in all likelihood. At the very least Banksy’s anonymity should be preserved in the event of him being prosecuted. Very few comment in a visual form so presciently on our times. He is the greatest political muralist since Diego Riveria, and the world needs more, not less, political art as a way of vitalising people and as an antidote to propaganda.
Feature Image: The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray
I remember as a child picking them out
from the bow, and peering down at currents
moving freely through their masks – the net draped
from an orderly row of cork floaters, near shore.
There a canopy of beeches could dapple light
onto the water’s surface, or space between two pine boughs
slant a shaft that widened undertow
to an aquascope’s beam stretching my fathom,
to where I could spot a sea trout’s glint
in the haze of algae-motes flickering,
or the larger shadow of a salmon gliding
over rocks in olive sea-moss at the bottom.
But I never witnessed the billowing out
and tangling; the settlement upon giving in –
I came always to the hush of fires smouldering.
Oil painting of gillnetting, The salmon fisher, by Eilif Peterssen
Only minus seven this morning
but the gate latches are frozen solid.
‘We’ll need a kettleful to unfreeze them.’
There’s more snow forecast and a gale warning.
‘We need to get hay up to the sheep
before it blows in.’ The cart’s struggling.
The sheep are gathered, waiting. ‘They’re patient,
I’ll give them that.’ The snow’s firm, packed deep.
‘Nay, don’t all push at once! You’ll get your share.’
Sheep surge forward, eyes fixed on the hay.
The lads flick it up. It falls in bundles on the snow.
Strewing the hay shows the sheep they care.
It would surely be a great piece of good fortune for Paddy … if English cultivation could drive all his fairies out of his head Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers
What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes? Charles Trevelyan
At the end of March last year, during what proved a marvellously sunny spring, a horticulturalist friend imparted the rudiments of potato cultivation. Granted, I wasn’t a complete novice. I knew about chitting (allowing seed potato to sprout in an egg box on a sunny windowsill) before planting, and banking (piling earth on a potato plant as it grows), but his instructions elevated my gardening to another level. An area knotted with grass and weeds would be transformed into neat potato hillocks – or ‘lazy beds’ – within a few hours, breaking that ground up for further cultivation in subsequent years.
First, my guide carefully measured the length and width of each bed, using string attached to an iron stake to mark the boundaries, thereby giving each plant space to thrive. Next, he layered a bag of manure along the length of each row, sprinkling potash on top, and placing chitted potatoes at even intervals atop.
Then began the real work, mainly using what he referred to as a Fermanagh spade with a long thin blade that lifted the sod on each side over the potatoes, sealing them off and creating a small ditch between each row. The cherry on top was a sprinkling of pine needles to cover the gaps and keep the weeds at bay.
Initially the effort required to lift and turn the sod defeated me. My height seemed an unshakable impediment until, after much grumbling, I grew accustomed to lowering the spade sufficiently to use a thigh to make the lift. After another lesson I was equipped to dig my own beds, allowing me to go forth and evangelise about how easy it is to grow the tuber.
Beyond occasionally removing nettles and thistles, I expended no further labour on the potato beds over the course of spring and summer. A potato’s vigorous growth in Irish conditions easily outpaces any weed and requires no watering. Then, after just over three months, my ‘earlies’ were ready, and, as any grower will smugly volunteer, there’s nothing quite like the taste of your own, not to mention the joy of letting everyone know about it.
In growing potatoes, it felt as if I was partaking of an ancient ritual. Yet the potato plant solanum tuberosum is an exotic, native to the Americas, probably introduced to Ireland by Basque fishermen, rather than Sir Walter Raleigh, in the early seventeenth century. Potatoes are a very modern phenomenon in Ireland.
Nonetheless, it is a remarkably fecund crop in Irish conditions. Thus, before the Great Famine, an acre of potatoes could amply feed a family of six, as well as sustaining pigs and fowl. Indeed, prior to the famine half of all potatoes were fed to domestic animals, which were primarily used to pay the rent, with little meat consumed on their farms. At that time, an acre of grain was reported to produce about 4,200 pounds of saleable produce, while an acre of potatoes yielded as much as 72,100 pounds of food for subsistence.
Such abundance seems miraculous, but as Virgil’s Georgics warns us: ‘The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth.’ Over-reliance on any subsistence crop brings great danger, and the dependence of the Irish poor on the potato was extreme. Indeed, an entire rural economy, benefitting a largely absentee landlord class, was built around it.
The wars of the seventeenth century led the Irish peasantry to take advantage of its unique nutritional profile – unlike wheat it contains all eight essential amino acids – and suitability for small scale storage, but not largescale export. In retrospect, Henry Hobhouse opined that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazy bed, was in the end the most damaging.’[i] In the meantime it allowed the Irish population to scale heights in the mid-nineteenth that still haven’t been returned to.
Peasant Funeral in the Mam Turk Mountains of Connemara, Ireland.
Modernity
In Rot: A History of the Irish Famine Padraic X. Scanlan explores the modernity of Ireland’s experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans in 1845. He details how ‘[p]otatoes allowed landlords to hire cheap and plentiful labour to work large, export-orientated farms while also collecting rent from subdivided and subleased farms and potato grounds.’
Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Scanlan asserts that ‘[t]he staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potato failed.’
In their impoverishment, ‘[t]he Irish poor made complex wagers on their rent and potato yields, hoping to find any marginal advantage. They knew that changes in a day’s trading price of crops and livestock in London might ruin them.’ Scanlon therefore argues that ‘the Irish economy resembled the precarious future of capitalism more than its feudal past.’ He suggests that Ireland’s rural economy had many features of a squalid modern slum, where faith in luck, supernatural or otherwise, prevailed, just as ‘pyramid schemes, lotteries, and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation’ are evident today.
An early nineteenth century German visitor to Ireland, Johann Kohl, had never seen anything like Irish poverty, wherein ‘Irish labourers had no national dress, no institutions of peasant life that could contest the power of their landlords.’ This was a society in terminal decline, stemming in particular from the departure of its remaining tribal leaders in the early seventeenth century Flight of the Earls. This permitted the seizure and plantation of the entire country, heralding a steep cultural decline, including the gradual loss of the native tongue.
The Great Famine would provide the coup de grâce that shattered the bonds of social life and civility. That is not to say societal collapse was inevitable – the famine of 1741 actually had a higher proportionate death toll, but its ill-effects did not linger in the same way. By 1845, however, a seemingly inexorably rising population was placing intense pressure on scarce land. Most of this remained in the possession of landlords, who cared little for their tenants and were often seeking to convert small, intensively cultivated plots into extensive pasture, in conjunction with a rising class of indigenous ‘strong’ farmers.
Ireland’s social segregation, especially in the wake of the Act of Union – reflected in and reinforced by sectarian divisions – was the underlying cause of the country’s vulnerability to famine. There was certainly sufficient food to feed the population – only in 1847 did grain imports exceed imports – but most produce was destined for the English market.
It’s hard to imagine a disaster on a similar scale occurring in England at that time, or any major European country for that matter, where landowners maintained a more paternalistic relationship with their tenants. Notably, the proposal by the leading nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell, himself a landlord, to embargo food exports for the duration of the Famine was greeted with derision in Westminster.
Signs of such scarcity in a more urbanised country would surely have caused a major political upheaval, as in the case of the French Revolution which has been described as an extended bread riot. Ireland did experience a Young Irelander rebellion in 1848, but the starving populace were unable to summon a coherent resistance.
The Blame Game
A colonial discourse had long been evident in English accounts of the Irish, going back at least to Giraldis Cambrensis in the late twelfth century. These are akin to the ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes that emerged in Western accounts of the Islamic world, and depicted the Irish as lazy, dishonest, prone to violence and thus requiring civilising.
By the mid-nineteenth such stereotypes were joined by the discourse of political economy, positing that ‘the market was as miraculously self-organising as the natural world.’ Edmund Burke argued that God would not look kindly on ‘breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature.’
Irish reliance on the potato as their primary foodstuff was considered an affront to this spirit of capitalism. Many blamed the potato for Paddy’s laziness, ‘whereof the labour of one man can feed forty.’ The economist Robert Malthus maintained that until they starved, they would not learn.
The leading civil servant for Ireland over the course of the Famine, Charles Trevelyan considered the possibility that the blight was ‘some great intervention of Providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principle article of national food.’
The sanctity of the market would have an important bearing on the nature of famine relief. Teaching the Irish to prefer wages to potatoes for subsistence, then Prime Minister Lord Russell said would impel them ‘to study economy, cleanliness, and the value of time; to aim at improving the character of themselves and their children.’ Extensive public work schemes therefore substituted for direct aid to the starving, who were forced to expend what little energy they possessed building roads to nowhere.
Most insidiously in 1847 an amendment to exclude anyone holding land of a quarter acre or more from eligibility for poor relief was introduced by William Henry Gregory (ironically the future husband of Lady Gregory the co-founder of the Abbey), an M.P. for Galway. The ‘Gregory Clause’ caused thousands to lose their land in order to avail of the meagre relief available, forcing many into emigration aboard coffin ships.
As a result of the failure of the crop and these cruel policies up to a million starved or died of disease, and another million emigrated. Unlike after the 1741 famine, the population would not increase, as often their land was converted to pasture, which by then had become more profitable than tillage.
Old lazy beds.
Potato Myths
In Rot, Scanlan refers to numerous sources claiming the Irish peasantry ate on average between 12 pounds and 14 pounds (c.6kg) of potatoes per day. He takes issue with the veracity of these accounts, however, arguing that ‘the idea of a heroic Irish appetite for potatoes revealed a thriving British colonial vision of Ireland.’
He admonishes ‘credulous’ historians – including this one – for uncritically accepting reports that the Irish poor seemed unusually healthy compared to the British working class ‘a view that indulges in one of the most durable colonial myths that of the strapping and noble savage.’ He asks pertinently: ‘why reject only the insults and believe only the claims that flatter the Irish.’
Scanlan’s argument that the level of potato consumption was purposely exaggerated appears valid: he adduces evidence to the effect that eating such gargantuan quantities would have caused digestive difficulties. Nonetheless, in years of plenty at least, the rural Irish were surely healthier than their British working class counterparts, who were already consuming a diet high in sugar and refined wheat, deficient in protein and lacking fresh fruit and vegetables. In a rural setting highly nutritious wild foodstuffs would have been foraged or hunted. Moreover, most Irish children were not by then forced into hard labour inside factories, and, moreover, there were no ‘satanic mills’ in the countryside diminishing air quality.
Scanlan also effectively dismisses the notion that there was anything peculiarly noxious about the much-maligned lumper potato, which prevailed over other varieties at the time of the famine, arguing ‘[h]ad the blight not struck, another people’s potato would have taken its place, and the Lumper might have to be considered a treat.’
‘The weakness of potato crops,’ he writes, ‘was not the individual variety of potato planted or the mode of planting, but the genetic liabilities of using sets, rather than seeds.’
A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine in Ireland.
Legacy
Dependency on the potato plant was a product of war. Its cultivation then allowed unprecedented numbers to inhabit rural Ireland. What was really lacking in that culture was the application of demographic brakes, as the population continued to expand despite decreasing access to land. This is perhaps best attributed to the absence of an indigenous political and cultural leadership from the seventeenth century. A form of social atomisation seems to have occurred, where the individual family unit took precedence over the wider tribe or tuath.
The arrival of the potato plant to these shores is responsible for the size of the Irish diaspora around the world. Far fewer would have survived the conflagrations of the seventeenth century without it, and the rural population would not have expanded in similar fashion on a grain-based diet.
The mostly callous response of the British government to the Famine probably ensured that Ireland could never be comfortably integrated into the United Kingdom. Yet conversely it also accelerated Ireland’s absorption into the Anglophone world. This paradox yielded a distinctive national literature in English. Also, ironically independence was achieved primarily by the descendants of the petit-bourgeois strong farmers that saw their holdings expand in the wake of the Famine. Kevin O’Higgins’ description of his colleagues as ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution,’ makes sense in this light.
Despite largely being ignored in mainstream discourse today, the cultural legacy of the Great Famine lingers. It may be identified in an unhealthy relationship to sex, and the absence of a gastronomic culture, and also, arguably, in a prevailing sense of futility that still pervades rural Ireland.
Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot is an important contribution to scholarship on the Great Famine, maintaining a dialogue with an unhappy past we often occlude. Perhaps those of us still living here suffer from a form of survivor guilt that prevents us from adequately engaging with its legacy.
The attention Scanlan points to the “complex wagers” pursued by Irish peasants in unstable markets is a particularly useful insight, presenting an agency that is usually denied to passive victims. This may also inform our understanding of modern Ireland, where the political class display all the skill of the middleman in attracting foreign capital, but rely increasingly on insecure taxation income from this source – a bit like our ancestors relying on the remarkable fecundity of the potato.
[i] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..
“A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk where they compose – out of the ambient, affluent bustle of London or New York, where they live – a “pattern” on the page, to make sense of the “chaos of daily circumstance”. Given the apparently placid tenor of Laird’s own routine, such “chaos” would appear to be largely symbolic, or at least to unfold outside the pale of the writer’s bubbled existence, self-absorbed and self-admiring.
Sometimes, of course, the amiable sequestration of even the most punctilious of poetic solipsists can be disturbed: by disruptive riots or bad reviews, human rights abuses or pesky up-starts who have the audacity to care. It’s then that the holy guardians are called on to defend and re-sanctify the art, imperilled by a round of “daily circumstance” grown all too intrusive. To quote Ireland’s current Chair of Poetry, speaking in 2017:
Must poetry be louder, must it be more active, more politically and socially engaged? I can’t bring myself to believe that the answer to this is yes. Poetry’s response must be to remain true to itself rather than rush into rhetoric. Poems shouldn’t be about getting a point across.
Poetry’s right to be pointless, the poet’s freedom to shun the claims of political or social conscience: these are the resounding criteria, the engraven ingredients, of literary greatness.
A new podcast and article discuss fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, with Fatima Akman Lehmann joining Luke Sheehan.https://t.co/nQzOJ3bxCP
We might wonder how such prescriptions would be received in Turkey, a country which, under the influence of Recep Erdoğan, has undergone a process of forceful “authoritarian consolidation” in recent years: the diversity of a multi-ethnic polity replaced by a top-down state “restructured along hyperpresidential lines” and specialising in “the mass persecution”of perceived “dissidents, who have been jailed in their thousands.” Where censorship and imprisonment are looming realities for citizens (including writers) who dare to ask questions – and even occasionally attempt to get their “point across” – it’s possible that the supposed right of poets not to think or care about very much beyond their own line-breaks would smack of empty-headed conformism, rather than the liberty its advocates pretend.
Perhaps post-doctoral literary scholars of the future will resolve such paradoxes and speculations definitively, for one and for all. For now, readers can occupy themselves with Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, a new bi-lingual anthology from Dedalus Press, carefully curated and translated by Istanbul-based poet, Neil P. Doherty.
Doherty’s versions pay tribute to the range and vitality of his chosen poets – spanning multiple generations, but all still in their literary prime. His own style becomes recognisable as the book progresses: each voice he presents has its own kind of under-stated wit and oneirc clarity, catching the rhythms of history in a vivider light. “The world is a saddleless horse”, observes Gökçenur Ç., “we try not to fall off”, though “we whisper ‘you couldn’t be real’ / into its ear.”
There is often a philosophical undercurrent surging just below the surface of these writers’ attentions, poem after poem, in the words of Cevat Çapan, “tirelessly / seeking for the roots of life itself.” The marginality and strange endurance of human yearnings become connecting threads in the expansive tapestry Doherty draws into billowing life. “This graveyard we call memory”, notes Elif Sofya, “grows and grows in our heads”, a “haunting of the body” now metamorphosed into words
Time and again, the richness and intensity of individual perceptions are balanced – granted weight and depth – by a galvanizing recognition of story-telling as a mode of shared (albeit frequently contested) consciousness. Gonca Özmen thus recalls and elegizes the victims of the Roboski massacre, carried out by the state military against a group of (mostly teenaged) Turkish civilians. “Branches entwined in a verdant forest” give way, in the poem, to “arms and legs entwined in an empty forest”, as a spectral crowd of grieving mothers assembles in the aftermath, “day and night clutching these soaking wet photographs”. Mustafa Köz, similarly, manages to hold the broken world, like a fallen teardrop, in delicate suspension: it “was for all of you that we exiles set out on the road at dawn”, he sings, “for the sake of these lands, crushed under bloody, iron heels.”
The full range of felt emotion – encompassing grief, joy, whimsy, longing – seems somehow distilled and honoured in this vibrant anthology. Among other things, its arrival may send a reviving gust of energy through the more insular spaces of Irish culture. Poetry’s horizons have always been broader than the comfortable confines within which many of our cliqued and sinecured gate-keepers have been content to keep it slotted. Its home is the world, and its journeys manifold – across languages and histories, alive with “the honour of carrying / This light.”
My first memory of music is of being very young, maybe three years old, held in my father’s arms while we danced in our living room. There was a large sound system filling the space, and I remember being completely absorbed by it. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling then, but I remember a deep sense of being alive, as if nothing else existed beyond that moment.
That feeling has stayed with me throughout my life. When I’m listening to music, making it, or dancing to it, everything else seems to fall away. These are the moments when I feel entirely present, almost touching a deeper sense of the meaning of life. Looking back now, I can see how that early experience quietly shaped the direction of my life, even when I wasn’t consciously aware of it.
I grew up dancing and spent much of my childhood and teenage years in the dance studio, moving to R&B, hip-hop, and contemporary music. R&B in particular left a strong imprint on me. I was drawn to its emotional depth and the way it centred storytelling through the voice, supported by bass, rhythm, and live instrumentation. Although my own music doesn’t sit within that genre, those elements, emotion, rhythm, and narrative, continue to influence how I create.
Music has always felt like home to me. At different points in my life, it has also been a form of escape from my humanity, yet simultaneously a place of deep connection to something greater. In my early adulthood, I spent years on dance floors and in warehouses, dancing in front of large sound systems and allowing the music to move through my body on a cellular level. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what I was seeking, but I can see now that music was helping me, almost like fanning the embers of my heart, to keep going, to keep seeking something greater than what society has imposed on us as a species. It offered connection, presence, and a sense of meaning during periods when I lacked true direction.
I recognised my voice as my instrument from a young age, but it wasn’t something I felt encouraged to share. Over time, I became shy and hesitant, and singing became a private ritual. I sang in the shower or when I was alone in the house, treating those moments as something sacred. Singing moved me deeply, it stirred my emotions, often bringing salty tears and a sense of release, yet I carried a fear that perhaps I was one of those people who loved to sing but couldn’t sing at all. That uncertainty kept my voice hidden for many, many years.
A significant turning point came when I spent time with the Shipibo tribe in the Amazon, healing a chronic pain condition I had lived with for many years. I was deeply moved by their connection to nature spirits, and I was enchanted by the healing songs sung in ceremony. I had the direct experience of feeling their songs recalibrate my being. Shortly after, my voice began to open in a new way, and I started channelling songs in my personal ceremonies at home while working with the medicine of cacao. For the past six years, I have devoted myself to creating space for these songs to emerge. I don’t experience this as songwriting in a conventional sense; the songs arrive through listening moment by moment. There is an emptying out of myself completely, and from that place, sound emerges.
In 2019, I had a moment of deep recognition during meditation, where I cried for hours, realising that music was a huge part of what I was being called to explore in my life, and that I had been unconsciously turning away from that calling. From that point on, my relationship with music shifted from something I simply loved into something I felt deeply devoted to.
Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio, creating music shaped by grief, loss, and profound heartbreak. These experiences have been painful, but they have also deepened my commitment to the work. During periods of isolation and suffering, music became my altar, the place where I could lay everything down and remain connected to something larger than myself.
My current work moves along two parallel paths. One is more shamanic in nature, rooted in channelling and ceremony. The other sits within emotional, hypnotic techno. While these expressions sometimes overlap, they exist as distinct projects, each reflecting a different aspect of my inner world. I don’t usually begin with a clear idea; the music unfolds through intuition, moment by moment.
Nature plays an important role in my sound. I’m often drawn to incorporating elemental textures — wind, birds, water, and other natural sounds — creating environments that feel immersive and alive. I see my music as a landscape that invites listeners inward, into a deeper relationship with themselves.
I’ve played the piano by ear since childhood and have always resisted formal musical structures, preferring to feel my way through sound. At the moment, I’m writing a series of piano-based songs that began during moments of strong emotion. It’s a slow and patient process, one I’m learning to trust. This year also marked an important milestone with the release of several techno tracks on Linee Sonore record label, alongside a number of self-released shamanic pieces. More music is in progress, with further releases planned throughout 2026.
As an artist, I feel I am becoming more honest and transparent. Music is the clearest expression of who I am, intimate with my own heart. I don’t create with a specific outcome in mind. My intention is simply to listen and to follow what feels true.
Ultimately, I hope my music invites people into a deeper sense of presence. I hope it allows them to feel both their humanness and their divinity at the same time, even if only for a moment, and offers a pause from the pressures of everyday life. If my art can help someone feel more connected, more embodied, or more at peace, then it has fulfilled its legacy.
Nyah has been holding sacred containers and trainings since 2018, offering immersive spaces that explore sacred movement arts, sacramental medicines such as cacao and saffron, deep self-inquiry, and sound-based ceremony.
