Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Poem: ‘External Return’

    Eternal Return

    My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about
    Patrick Kavanagh.
    O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth
    And I can see those fucking potatoes,
    The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan!

    Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected
    To this kind of shit?
    Isn’t Life bad enough without having to force poetry
    About bleeding potatoes down their bloody throats!

    And then, just as I am almost in despair,
    And I’m a bloody poet myself,
    Her voice pipes up again, and she adds;
    “Although, Epic isn’t half bad, at least he mentions Homer!”

    And, I see again my reading of the poem through her eyes,
    When I too saw the ancient importance ricocheting
    In Paddy Boy,
    As she too recognised the importance of Homer
    And his epic take on Life.

    Staring across the kitchen table at her,
    With not a potato in sight,
    I somehow saw the great blind ancient hovering above us
    Monumentally human, whispering to us both
    Across the infinite.

  • Fiction: The Cliff

     

    “It’s been two days. We gotta to do something. It’s gonna go rotten.”
    “I know. I’m thinking.”
    “About what we talked about?”
    “What?”
    “Get on the Great Ocean Road. Out past Martyrs Bay.”
    “Yeah. I know the place. Near the twelve apostles.”
    “We were there with Jessie that time, remember?”
    “Yeah, I remember. Alright. Let’s do it then. Get some sleep, we’re leaving here at two.”
    “In the morning?”
    “Course in the fucking morning.”
    “How long will it take to get there?”
    “We’ll get there before sun up.”
    ‘I’ll get the weights.’
    “On ya.”
    Wilko and Daz settled it that night. How to get rid of the body. They had bought half a kilo of speed from Jock Cooper up in Melbourne and things had gone wrong. In the fight, Daz shot Jock dead and now they had him wrapped in carpet and duct tape in the boot of Wilko’s blue Ford Cortina. They had never killed anyone before and both had a dread feeling about their circumstance. They were consumed with dark emotion. At this point they were the only ones that knew about the murder. No-one had heard the gun shot. The next farm house was four miles away. Anyway, the sound of gunshots out there wasn’t uncommon even if someone had. Shooting kangaroos was one of Wilko’s jobs. In short, no one was looking for them, yet. They hadn’t left Wilko’s farm since the killing. They had been living with the body for two days, wondering what to do.
    The adrenaline rush of the kill surprised them by its force. The weight of becoming a killer threatened to overwhelm Daz, but the two days he had spent with the body had given him time to meditate on their situation. The fury that led to the murder was now partly subdued by a lack of remorse. Daz had pulled the trigger, but their history was intertwined closely, and to betray each other would be to betray their childhood selves. A notion beyond their imaginings. They were in it together and they knew it. They both understood that if they didn’t keep cool heads they were done for. And now, after two days, the time had come to act. There had been a heavy rain storm that day and the area around Woodend was drenched through. There was a chill wind in the evening air.
    ‘Fucking cold.’ Said Wilko as he put on an extra sweater and zipped up his coat.
    “Chat.”
    Perhaps that’s why the country exists in the first place, so the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish didn’t have to suffer the winters any longer. Wilko looked out the kitchen window as it was being battered by the rain.
    “We’ve fucking gone and done it now.” He said to Daz.
    “If you haven’t got anything useful to say don’t say it. Alright? Now get ta fucking sleep. We’ve got work to do. If we don’t get it right it’s thirty-five years in the slammer. So, I’m only going to say this once. You be careful hey. Or I’ll fucking kill ya.” Daz turned out the light and soon after began snoring, but Wilko stayed by the window watching the rain. He was too alive to sleep. The game was on. Wilko looked over at Daz sleeping and burned a cigarette, each draw he took carefully and deliberately. Looking carefully, he became fascinated by his sleeping friend. Wilko was scared of Daz at times. Ever since they were kids there had been a hierarchy. Daz was both older and stronger and those two factors clinched it. If it had to be called, Wilko was probably the cleverer of the two but there wasn’t much in it. Neither of them had a handle on science, or God for that matter, they were men who were characterized by action rather than thought. And that, if the truth be known, was how they found themselves in the situation they were now in.

    *

    The alarm clock went off at precisely 2.00 am and Daz was up and dressed in seconds. He splashed a bit of water on his face from the sink and lit a cigarette, trying to prepare his mind and body for the grim task ahead.
    “Oi. Get up ya fucking bludger, we gotta go. Get a move on!” And Daz kicked the edge of Wilko’s cot. As Wilko rose up quickly in the bed something went wrong.
    “Ah fuck!” Wilko let out a low, doleful whine.
    “Come on, what are ya waitin for?”
    “Me fucking neck mate. I’ve pulled a fucking muscle in me neck. Ah ya cunt.” Wilko sat up and almost screamed with pain but managed to suppress it with a chuntering kind of sigh.
    “Oh, this is fucking all I need. Where’s the fucking beer? I need a fucking beer. My neck’s fucking crook mate. Ah fuck.” Daz went over to the fridge and pulled out a six pack of beers. As if his mind refused to believe it, he tried to move his neck in a normal way and there it was again. The intense pain of a pulled neck muscle.
    “Come on get ready. No drinking in the car though. We gotta keep our heads down and out of any copper’s sight.”
    “What about me neck?”
    “Fuck ya neck mate!” Came suddenly, shouting. We gotta get rid of him. You hear me? I’m not fucking joking. Get your shit together, we’re leaving. Now.”
    A forlorn looking Wilko stood up, clasping his neck, and followed Daz out of the farm house and towards the truck. The rain was coming down hard when they opened the farmhouse door. Wilko looked up into the rain as he stepped off the porch to wake himself up and the pulled muscle gave him a shooting pain that rattled his whole body. He grimaced and left his hand firmly by his throat to remind him of the pain he had suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. The rain pounded them as they walked towards the car, and there was an audible ‘fuck me’ from Daz as he put the key in the door and turned it. Wilko could now only move the top half of his body in a robotic way. If he needed to look in a certain direction he had to move his whole torso towards the object, keeping his head and neck as rigid as possible. As Wilko sat down and shut the car door he turned too quickly and again an intense shooting pain bounced from his neck muscle to his brain. He grimaced and found himself unable to muster words. He felt acutely miserable. He put on his seat belt slowly, taking great care not to turn his head. He still had sleep in his eyes. ‘Drive slow and safe, I can’t move me neck.’ Daz turned the key in the ignition but even the engine starting wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of the drumming rain on the car. The headlights came on and they started moving cautiously along the country lane in the wild storm. Before long they turned on to the main road that would take them south towards the twelve apostles, the great rising stones that awaited them in the fortress of the swirling sea. That would be the three of them. Daz, Wilko and the dead, now decomposing body of Jock Cooper in the boot.
    One of the bonuses of trying to dispose of a dead body in Australia is its vast emptiness. It has half the population of Spain spread over a continent almost the size of Europe. The only problem was that driving that late at night might arouse suspicion, in the unlikely event of them passing the police. There had been no sign of the law as they reached the Great Ocean Road. They glimpsed the Southern Ocean, singing in the moonlight. Wilko had one hand on his neck as he lit a smoke and opened the window a few inches, only to feel the rain speckling his face.
    ‘What do we do if we get pulled?’ Asked Wilko.
    “Stay calm. I’ll tell them I just found out me mums had a fall and we’re on our way to the hospital. I’ve done it before. It’s about the performance.”
    ‘Bit of an actor hey? Fair play. So, what’s the name of the hospital?”
    Daz didn’t know.
    “Fuck’s sake.” Wilko said in a disappointed, worried way and looked out the window, suddenly mesmerised by the glimmering ocean light. As Wilko turned naturally to take in the view, pain pulsed through his neck and he leant forward with a sigh. They both fell into a melancholy silence.
    The one thing they knew to be well careful of was the potholes. Ruin the suspension or burst a tyre out in the wilderness in a storm and you were done. It was still pitch black when they reached the Great Ocean Road and the pelting rain turned the Ford Cortina into a kind of bongo. There was almost no one out there. Every ten minutes or so they would be passed by the rolling headlights of a car, with their eyes peeled for the coppers.
    “How much further d’ya’reckon?” Said Wilko.
    “Get the map out, it’s in the glove compartment. We’re coming up to Lorne.”
    “Righty-o.”
    As Wilko studied the map in the passenger seat, a sign flew past in the rainy lights that said ‘THE TWELVE APOSTLES 145 KMS’. They both thought about the body in the boot of car, driving on in silence with the storm making the music about them, Wilko with his head down to the map and Daz with his hands high up on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road ahead, unblinking. They would be there at the cliff in a few hour’s tops.
    “We’ll get there well before sun up.” Daz reiterated. ‘Rain’s slowing us down.’ Forgetting about his neck momentarily, Wilko turned to look at Daz and felt a fierce shooting pain shot through his neck again. Now, the agony rendered him silent, and he slowly closed his eyes, wondering whether it was all worth it. Life. Was it worth the suffering. Daz looked at him and knew he wasn’t faking. Then there was a flash of sheet lightening as Daz turned his eyes back on the road and in the illumination, he suddenly saw a fully grown female kangaroo bouncing across the road in the headlights.
    “Fuck,” Shouted Daz and he hit the brakes. Never swerve a roo was a thing his dad had taught him from his earliest years. As the pain in his neck subsided Wilko opened his eyes to the sound of screeching wheels, and the first thing he saw was the Kangaroo smashing into the windscreen with an almighty bang.
    “Cunt!” Shouted Daz in the death flash. After the great thud there was the sound of shattering glass, then the airbags, and then the halting tyres on the tarmac. Finally, the falling rain from the womb of the car. Inside silence. The vehicle was still on the road as they came to a complete standstill with the dead Kangaroo up on the bonnet, dead in the broken windscreen. Time passed before they began to stir. They came to their senses almost simultaneously.
    “Fuck a duck.” Said Wilko. Daz laughed a mad laugh. Wilko turned his painful neck to look at him and Wilko registered the bright red and scarlet in Daz’s face as he laughed, as the insignia of a maniac. The body of the Kangaroo was half inside the car and Daz could see its dead eyes staring vacantly between the air bags.
    “Fuck.” Came the groaning Wilko, he now had whiplash on top of the pulled muscle. Daz pushed the airbag away the best he could, opened the door and stepped out into the rain. He retched a little and spat out bile but there was no puking. His heart was beating fast, getting wetter by the second in the downpour. The sight of the dead Kangaroo on the bonnet increased the mania in his laughter. He was feeling the overwhelming sense of providence that surviving death can invoke. He did a little dance in celebration with his arms in the air. Then he heard Wilko’s voice screaming out of the darkness.
    “What are doing ya mad cunt?! Remember what we’ve got in the boot? What if someone sees us hey?! Get in the car. Fuck’s sake. Come on. Get in the fucking car! Let’s go.”
    Daz looked up and down the rain soaked, night time highway. There was nothing out there, except the great swaying trees and the night. This was the boundless country. They both became lost in thought as they tried to keep calm. Using all their strength they took hold of each end of the dead kangaroo, lifted it off the bonnet and dropped it on the grass by the side of the road. They both stared down at the dead animal, their silence revealing the quick flow of their thoughts. They got back in the car and drove away.
    The night sky over the sea, illuminated by the hiding moon, glowed in the grey mist. The seaward clouds cloaked the galaxy from sight, returning their minds to the here and now, to life, the thing that matters only. They were alone on the road. The coast was theirs, the marvellous world around them, brimming at oceans edge. The headlights of the car were being studied by the birds in the sky riding down the dark road, swinging down above the electric headlight beams to investigate this unnatural thing stalking the marsh. The two men in the car drove on in silence. They had survived. The storm came rolling over them, the rain beat down on the windscreen, and nature, the sea, the sky, the rain and the wind, went on behaving as though they didn’t exist. They tingled to be alive.
    Rain was seeping through the broken windscreen as the front left wheel hit a pothole and they bumped and lurched violently making Wilko’s neck spasm in agony. He muttered to himself. He took the pain. He knew it was nothing compared to what was to come if they didn’t get rid of the body. Their minds now had a steely focus. Once the body was in the sea their trouble would end. Their worries would be over. Jock Cooper hadn’t even been reported missing. Nothing on the news. The police were nowhere to be seen. If the body was swept away by the ocean and devoured by the bottom feeders, they would be home and dry with only their consciences to trouble them, which wasn’t any real danger at all.
    The rain quietened and the forest gave way to barren scrub. They both looked up out of the windows and saw the parting of the clouds revealing the glowing white disc of the moon. Wilko slowed the car and dimmed the headlights. When he was sure there was nothing in their way he turned them off. In the far distance the faint outline of the twelve apostles signalled their destination approaching. The giant cylindrical rocks worn through eons by the punishing waves seemed strange and lonely. They had been forged by time, and birthed by the undying sea.
    “Fuckin’ bonza.” Said Daz. It was the first time he had smiled in a while. They took a moment to appreciate the spectacular view, surely one of the rarest on the entire continent, and then trundled on down the vacated road, towards the cliff.
    They took the last turning and slowed the car to a crawl. The headlights were off but there was still enough moon light to navigate. They parked the car next to a grass knoll about fifty metres away from the edge. Daz turned the engine and lights off and they sat there for a few moments in the hope the rain would pass.
    “Where did you put the weights?”
    “I already tied ‘em on. Don’t worry we’re strong enough. Come on. Let’s get a move on.”
    They got out of the car and were greeted by a sweeping drizzle, not the heavy battering rain of before. Wilko opened the boot wide and they both looked down at the rolled carpet, with a pair of black shoes visible at the end. Daz took out a Stanley knife and began to saw at the duct tape. Soon the carpet opened and the lifeless corpse of Jock Cooper was revealed, his eyes open, with an eerie, surprised expression on his face. They both were able to ignore it, because of contempt. Daz was tempted to spit on the body but held himself back. “Focus. Focus.” He said to himself, and himself alone.
    “What are we going to do with the carpet?”
    “Cut it up and burn it.”
    “Right-O.”
    “Get his legs.” Wilko reached down, obeying the order. Daz threaded his arms under those of Jock Cooper and they headed out towards the cliff with their heads tilted down. The wind was whipping up strong enough to give them the feeling it was raining from the ground.
    The cliff was giant. Not as high as the Cliffs of Moher, or the cliffs of Dover, but high enough to put the fear of God into them both. Both of them were scared to look over the precipice. As they approached the edge, the wind came up again and rain began to beat down harder than ever. Maybe nature was trying to stop them. Maybe the wind and the rain did know after all. That’s what Wilko thought as he trudged to the edge with the body, slipping on the muddy, rain sodden grass. It was Daz who was terrified of heights though, but he was the one who did the killing and he was the one who had the idea to throw the body off the cliff and into the sea.
    “Nearly there!’ Shouted Daz through the howling wind and rain. Their hair and their clothes were already soaked through after a quick two minutes. There was a slight incline rising up towards the precipice and as they reached it Wilko lost his grip on Jock Cooper’s legs and they fell, splatting into the muddy earth.
    “Fuck’s sake!” Shouted Daz, his voice carrying on the wind. “Careful ya fucking dumb cunt!’
    “Don’t crack the shits, I’m fuckin trying alright!!”
    “Fuck I got blood on me daks.”
    “Burn ‘em later.”
    “Ah me fucking neck! Cunt.” Wilko had dropped the dead legs hard into the mud, the pain in the muscle in his neck was too much to bear.
    “Come on, lift! We’re nearly there!” Shouted Daz. Wilko straightened up his back as the rain beat down on him and the pain subsided enough to grab the dead legs and lift them back up. On they went in the dark and rain.
    The wind was coming at them so hard they had their heads bent down towards it like they were pushing in a rugby scrum. The wrath of the storm had no mercy. When they were about ten metres from the very edge, they both lay down and began to roll the body. The wind felt less fierce on the ground but they could feel the wet cold mud and grass soaking through their shirts. As the dead body rolled over, the dead arms of Jock Cooper kept getting stuck underneath the weight of his body. The eyes were now closed as if he were sleeping drunk, getting rolled into the bed after a long night.
    The wind abated as they got the body to the very edge of the cliff.
    “Alright!” Shouted Daz. “After three, push as hard as you can!! One, Two…. Three!!” And they both simultaneously launched the dead body off the edge of the cliff into the crashing sea below. They both lay there motionless for almost a minute, experiencing an emotion not unlike a mountaineer at a summit. They had no words. It was done.
    “Look over the edge.” Said Daz.
    “Get fucked! You look over.”
    “Fuck that mate.” The wind was blowing so hard it felt like it was pushing them towards the precipice.
    “Let’s get the fuck outta here.” Said Daz, keeping his vertigo hidden. They felt the rain again and crawled backwards on their bellies before they stood up, turned and started running back to the car through the night tempest, shouting and cheering and jumping for joy as they went. Daz had taken his shirt off and was swinging the waterlogged garment around his head, laughing the relief of the prisoner freed. They jumped into the car, turned the engine on and sped away down the back roads and country lanes that led to Melbourne.
    The body of Jock Cooper fell lifeless from the edge of the cliff. Down it dropped. Fifteen metres below was a ledge the size of a living room. And there the body landed with a quiet thud, made silent by the storm. It bounced slightly forward coming to rest at the edge of the promontory, his left-hand peeking slightly over the edge as if it were a man clinging to the side of his bed. And there it stayed on the ledge, twenty metres above the sea.

    *

    Almost two weeks went by. Early in the morning Noel Manning and his son Joshua got in their trawler and headed up the coast towards the Twelve Apostles to see what the fishing was like, as they had a couple of times a week for the past few months, concentrating their work in the waters to the west. It was a calm, beautiful sunny morning and the white horses were resting. They went at a steady pace of eight knots, with the nets strung out behind them. They sailed a couple of kilometres from the coast most of way and then turned starboard to see what they could find in shallower waters. Noel turned the engine off and they bobbed a hundred and fifty metres or so from the land. Joshua’s keen eyes spotted it first by chance as he glanced up at a flock of seagulls swooping to feed on the cliff. He saw what he correctly thought to be a human hand, dangling.
    “Dad. Can ya see that?”
    “What?”
    “Up there on the cliff. Is that a hand?”
    “You’re havin me on.”
    “Look.” Noel went in to the cabin and fetched a pair of binoculars that he used for birdwatching. He stood there on the deck and pressed his face against the eyepieces. It took a few moments to get the binoculars in focus against the edge of the cliff and he tracked the ledge from right to left. He paused as his eyes and brain joined. He put the binoculars down a couple of inches and then back to his eyes in disbelief. A human hand and a denim shirt cuff dangling over the grassy lip.
    “Alright I’m turning the boat around. Get on to the police.’ He told his son.
    That afternoon a police helicopter swooped in and identified a body on the ledge and before nightfall it had been recovered. Daz and Wilko had stripped the body so it took a while to identify the body, but Jock Cooper was a well-known face around Melbourne and had been reported missing less than a week after his disappearance by his girlfriend Tammy. The cadaver had been partly eaten away by scavenging birds and his remains were a disgusting sight to behold. Tammy had to identify the body and was left a traumatised landlady in Alice Springs.
    The forensic team discovered the bullet hole almost immediately and a murder investigation was underway that night. Almost two weeks had passed by but the crick in Wilko’s neck was still giving him jip. He was still holding his neck in his hand as Daz switched the TV on and slumped down on the sofa next to Wilko with a can of VB and a lit cigarette. It was a news story saying the remains of Jock Cooper had been found on the ledge of a cliff near the Twelve Apostles in Victoria. When Wilko and Daz said ‘cunt’ in unison, there was a kind of musicality to the syllable.

    – –

    Feature Image: Richard Mikalsen

     

  • Poem: ‘What comes to mind in Ireland’

    What comes to mind in Ireland

    What is black? An absence of light,
    the cassocks of parish priests,
    dark peat in an Irish bog.

    What is brown? A leather belt,
    decaying plants, veins of iron in stones,
    the layered bark of a log.

    What is grey? Lowering clouds,
    skies threatening rain over windswept water,
    the speckled muzzle of an old dog.

    What is silver? A crucifix round a neck,
    handcuffs and shackles, thirty shiny coins,
    a flash of light through heavy fog.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Musician of the Month: Ciara O’Donnell

    Ciara O’Donnell is an artist performing under the name of Domhan. She creates music inspired by her love of the Irish Celtic spirit, shamanism and Eastern spirituality. She is also a member of Irish band Bog Bodies a heavy folk rock outfit unearthing ancient Irish tribal tones and rich melody through an archaeological lens. Ciara is from the West of Ireland and is inspired by world influences and reverent, magical modes of music.

    Image: Josephine Doyle / Síoraí Photogrpahy.

    My most profound early musical influences began aged of five when I was an Irish dancer and learning Irish music. At that point I was a huge fan of the Eurovision Song Contest, fascinated by how each country portrayed their culture through music and performance, using varying tones, scales, instrumentation, costume and language.

    I was blown away during the 1994 Eurovision when the act ‘Riverdance’ appeared during the interval. My whole body went into shivers hearing the etheric quality of the singers’ entrance.

    It opened a portal of remembrance in me to an Otherworld, something my logical mind knew nothing of until that point. Then came the dancers, the rhythm and percussion; the dance between light and dark; light shoe and heavy shoe; jumping toward sky and pulling up energy from the earth. I began to understand something deeper, an ancient memory and ritual of expression had been triggered.

    My soul was understanding the true meaning of dance, music, creation and a traditional influence merged with contemporary culture. A sound of the past, but fresh to a modern era. The music was a journey to a beyond timeline.

    I was only aged five and couldn’t intellectualise it, or understand fully what its meaning was to me. All I knew was that I was obsessed.

    From that point on I watched the Eurovision religiously every year, but nothing hit me in quite the same way, although I still loved absorbing new learnings through this cultural lens.

    I then began obsessively re-watching on video the full ‘Riverdance’ show in full. My mind opened further through encountering its mysticism, and the power of a hands free Irish dance adopting innovative Irish traditional and a new pulsating other-worldly influence. I had never heard anything like it.

    I am forever influenced by Bill Whelan’s fusion of World music, rooted in the Celtic spirit. Nothing up to that point did it better than the innovative sound of Riverdance, sampling Irish traditional music with Eastern European influence, Spanish flamenco, Jazz, Persian and Indian scales. I was blown away by its power to evoke so much through melody.

    As a teen I experienced another shiver moment after being given a compilation CD with the song ‘Return to Innocence” by Enigma.

    Once again I had never heard anything like it. This song hit something deep inside my core, and again this piece was on repeat, as I encountered a world music sound that had something else: a prayer, a majesty, a life, an essence.

    This became my spur to create music with a spirit in it, a memory, a life, a prayer an essence through sound and form.

    Now I work on music with the artist name “Domhan” meaning ‘World’ in Gaelic Irish. World music and tonality has been a huge influence, in how it enlivens and enriches memory and allows the musical ear to be drawn by an energy of evocation.. Sound is not just sound in some World music. It can be a prayer. A profound expression of something other.

    An evocation such as this has become my life’s dream. I aspire to create music that glimmers with the mystical, offering a connection to that unseen place from which creativity arrives.

    My muse is a vision of a balanced world that once was and that could be – just as I heard in the prayer song “return to innocence’.

    My songs from Domhan are like prayers returning us to a vision of a harmony and balance with nature within, in deep connectivity with country, nation, tribe, land and planet. To be inspired from this place, and perhaps inspire from this place.

    In working on this I feel a guidance in how it wishes to be expressed, trusting my own lens and passion for Celtic Mythology, the Heart and the power of feeling and imagining.

    I have released a single called ‘Trócaire Brighid’ and EP called ‘Spirit Works’ as my debut pieces. I am currently working on a ‘Journey’ album, inspired by the elemental spirits of Water, Wind, Fire and Earth, journeying musically through their landscapes and essences.

    With Bog Bodies

    My band ‘Bog Bodies’ has also released an album called ‘Reclaim the Ritual’, weaving ancient Celtic memory, archaeological references with a tribal folk rock sound. We have been performing this album at major festivals since then, and are excited to be releasing a new album next year.

    My aspiration for the future is to make music more frequently. Music that feels like it is a gateway to the Otherworld, that helps remember another time and uplift true nature within. It’s only real because I believe it to be, and so there it is.

    Feature Image: Josephine Doyle / Síoraí Photography.

  • Carnsore Point: Ireland Goes Nuclear

    In 1977 Fianna Fáil Minister for Industry and Commerce, Desmond O’Malley, announced the government’s intention to build a nuclear power reactor at Carnsore Point, where the Irish Sea meets the southern Atlantic. Members of Cork Friends of the Earth, along with other groups and individuals, decided to oppose the idea.

    Four rallies by opponents of nuclear power took place each August at Carnsore Point in Co. Wexford from 1978 until 1981. I attended each rally and helped to write reports and observations in a fringe peace magazine that I helped to produce, called DAWN – an Irish Journal of Nonviolence.  I won’t attempt to write a comprehensive account of the anti-nuclear campaign. I recommend Simon Dalby’s pamphlet as a good starting point for anybody researching the matter.

    I want to mention about half a dozen names: Mary Phelan, Eoin Dinan, Adi and Sean Roche,  Christy Moore, American scientist Keith Haight and his South African born wife Maureen Kip Sing (Chinese ethnicity), Petra Kelly (German Green Party MEP), some of whom I encountered.

    Simon Dalby studied at Trinity College Dublin for his first degree and subsequently did a Masters at what is now the University of Limerick. He wrote an account of the Carnsore anti-nuclear rallies and the national campaigning of various anti-nuclear groups. This was published in A4 pamphlet form by DAWN magazine. A comprehensive history of the antinuclear movement remains to be written, outlining the pro- and anti- arguments put forward in public meetings and radio-tv discussions during those years.

    Simon Dalby’s article, ‘The Nuclear Syndrome. Victory for the Irish Anti-Nuclear Movement’  was first published in Dawn Train No. 3 Winter 1984-85 and is now lodged in the University of Limerick archives. The U.L. description begins: The collection comprises published and unpublished material collected by Simon Dalby for the preparation of his MA thesis, Political Ecology: A Study of the Irish Anti-Nuclear Movement, for the University of Victoria (Canada) in 1982. Published material includes articles; books, booklets and pamphlets; conference proceedings, speeches and public lectures; EEC communiqués; newsletters; periodicals; press cuttings; reports; and treaties and acts.

    German MEP Petra Kelly 1947-1992.

    First Rally

    The first Carnsore rally was held in August 1978. Attractive posters listing ballad and rock groups that had agreed to perform were circulated around Dublin, Cork and other towns. Get to the Point was the slogan. Right from the start free music was on offer to protesters. I am not sure if a chartered diesel train termed The Anti-Nuclear Express was arranged by Mary Phelan that year, but I took the train from Westland Row station down to Rosslare with Mary Condren. Passengers brought drinks and sandwiches for the trip and were ferried by buses to the rally site. There they were greeted by volunteers directing them to a huge marquee on which they could place sleeping bags and groundsheets. Information about toilets, a concert and public discussion venue, and food. Another area was available for people who had brought their own tents.

    Mary Phelan was originally from Waterford City and had lived in West Germany for a few years, where she befriended German Green Party MEP Petra Kelly (whose Irish-sounding name came from her stepfather, a U.S. army officer stationed in Germany). Mary Condren was a Dubliner who had studied in Hull University and became interested in feminist theology and journalism. She obtained seed money from feminist contacts in the USA, notably New York, and asked Mary Phelan to co-run a Resources Centre in Rathgar Road.

    The resources centre was supposed to earn rent from groups using the facilities and gradually become self-financing. That aim was not fulfilled alas. Many anti-nuclear activists visited the Resources Centre, even though it was not intended as a central contact point. The downstairs office was used to cut stencils and roll off on a Gestetner inky duplicator copies of their magazine called Contaminated Crow.

    I worked in a basement office with Mary Condren honing my journalistic skills by producing a student magazine called Movement. Every other month with half a dozen people I also used the basement and the resources centre to produce a cut-and-paste periodical called DAWN.

    We had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with disposable carbon ribbon cartridges – a laborious process that took 2 or 3 days to complete. On alternate months we met at Rob Fairmichael’s home in Ormeau Road Belfast. From early morning we could hear the rumbling of machinery in the Ormeau Bakery behind the house as daily bread was being baked for delivery around the city. A small backstreet business in the Lower Ormeau called The Print Workshop printed issues of DAWN at reasonable rates. Some of our pamphlets were prepared with typeset, after special fundraising, and laid out mainly by Rob. He was a good self-taught layout artist.

    The first rally drew everal thousand, including Sunday afternoon visitors from Wexford and other counties. There had been light rain on Saturday, but Sunday was glorious sunshine. On Monday morning an aerial photograph appeared on the front page of the Irish Times, making a great impression. The next day an eminent Professor of Jurisprudence at UCD, John Kelly, also a top politician in Fine Gael, issued a statement warning the government of the day, Fianna Fail, not to treat the protesters like children. He mentioned huge sit-down protests by antinuclear activists in Tokyo. The professor’s warning may have been somewhat exaggerated, but the publicity was gleefully welcomed by rallyists.

    On Sunday many individuals spoke from an open-air stage about their nuclear concerns. Visitors from France, Germany and Italy spoke of their vehement opposition. A continental European contribution to an Irish protest movement undoubtedly worried mainstream Irish politicians – they envisaged co-operation in the EEC with governments, bureaucrats and captains of industry. Instead they encountered opposition from unmoneyed, ad-hoc, uncontrollable protest groups.

    Free music concerts, headlined by Christy Moore and others, entertained crowds in the evenings. People sitting near the stage enjoyed free music. Others listened in other locations to amplifiers.

    Christy Moore

    Post-Rally Clean-Up

    After the crowds went home a lot of detritus had to be collected and carefully tidied away by voluntary workers. The latrines were maintained with copious shovels of sand and sprinklings of Jeyes Fluid during each rally. Then they were filled in. Recyclable bottles and drinks cans were brought to wherever money could be received. Paper was buried in pits for eventual decomposition. My colleague Eoin Dinan worked the latrines and supervised other maintenance activity. Ordinarily, he drove a taxi in Dublin. During the years of the Carnsore protests he made friends with people and went on to help  found the Dublin Food Co-Op.

    Eoin Dinan was a quiet individual who didn’t give platform speeches, but he contributed constructive suggestions at committee meetings. His taxi experience came into play when the Children of Chernobyl project was set up by Adi Roche and her husband Sean Dunne after the 1986 accident which released huge doses of radiation, connected to a host of diseases.

    Eoin helped with transport convoys carrying medical supplies, food and bottled water from Rosslare through France, Germany and elsewhere to hospitals in Belarus. It would be interesting to see maps of the routes taken. People in the UK, Germany and North America soon began to emulate the Cork project. Adi Roche published her book The Children of Chernobyl about the work, badly interrupted by the Covid lockdown of 2019-20.

    Adi Roche in 2024.

    Friendly Internal Criticism

    Some friendly criticism of Carnsore appeared in issues of DAWN. For instance, in number 51, probably from September 1980, Auveen Byrne of Cork Friends of the Earth remarked in a personal capacity: ‘…it involves en masse camping and thus mainly attracts ‘young trendies’ and passes up the opportunity to influence the greater portion of public opinion.’

    Also, in 1980 an unsigned article by a trade unionist said: ‘The third Carnsore anti-nuclear rally simply marked time for the movement to stop nuclear power and uranium mining. He added that ‘the six-pack brigade were bored’ by the dragging on of the event and the resort to recorded muzak on amplifiers when live concerts were finished.

    In DAWN 73 in the autumn of 1981 I signed a personal article with the headline ‘Labouring the Point – Which Way from Carnsore?’ in which I noted the declining numbers attending. I finished up with a suggestion that instead of being anti-whatever, interested activists might positively organise an Ecology Festival at a different venue and stress positive living.

    I met Maureen Kim Sing, an ethnic Chinese in exile from apartheid South Africa, and her academic freelance journalist husband Keith Haight from the U.S.. They spoke with detailed knowledge of nuclear power and radiation releases at Carnsore and meetings of groups at various venues throughout the year. Keith sold a couple of articles to the Irish Times and contributed many others to U.S. publications. They also spent time campaigning against apartheid.

    At Carnsore and elsewhere they conducted nonviolence workshops. Later they went to France and had a baby girl called Kim. She had automatic French citizenship, was brought to America when Keith resumed academic life, and has lived in continental Europe since Keith died in March 2005 and Maureen died in January 2006.

    Mary Phelan’s friendship with German Green Party MEP Petra Kelly, and Mary’s fluency in German, were important for forging links with anti-nuclear activists on the Continent.

    Although Petra Kelly visited Dublin for antinuclear conferences, I don’t think she visited Carnsore, but she did develop a strong rapport with the head of the ITGWU (today known as Siptu) John F. Carroll. They produced a pamphlet called ‘A Nuclear Ireland?’ in 1978, which was highly influential and came as a shock to government decision-makers.

    Mary Phelan presented on RTE radio programme on ecological and environmental matters. Later she worked on a Dublin FM channel called Radio Liffey, I think. After that she went west of the Shannon and lived in Galway from where she drove a campervan turned into a mobile studio. As a freelance radio documentary producer she interviewed the travel writer Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore Co. Waterford. A 4-part series was broadcast by the national radio.

    In the early 1970s Mary helped produce a 12-page feminist magazine called Wicca in Dublin. She had a daughter who as a young adult went to India and was profoundly affected by chemical damage done by multinational companies. She remained in India promoting non-polluting energy systems and lifestyles. Mary Phelan died suddenly in March 2015. Her passing and key role in the anti-nuclear campaign was not noted in the national newspapers.

    Adi Roche was nominated by the Labour Party to contest the Presidential election of 1997. Eoin Dinan became her driver during the campaign and was described thus in an Irish Independent report: ‘Eoin Dinan, a Project director, former taxi-driver and quiet, supportive presence, is acting as her driver and personal support. Joe Noonan, a poker-faced Cork solicitor, veteran of the [Raymond] Crotty legal challenge to the SEA and friend of 15 years, is on hand for legal expertise.’

    It was a bruising campaign with five candidates, Mary McAleese eventually received 45.2 percent of the votes after the first count. Roche limped in with a mere 6.9 percent. She was later awarded the Tipperary Prize and other honours for her Chernobyl work.

    Dervla Murphy.

    Reminiscences

    Full Tilt: from Ireland to India with a bicycle, was the travel book that launched Dervla Murphy as a major travel writer. In 1981 she published a book in London called Race to the Finish? – the nuclear stakes.

    She was unimpressed by the Carnsore protests, which apparently she attended but did not speak at. On page 55 she caustically noted: ‘In 1979, at the Carnsore Point demonstration in county Wexford, I was aghast to find myself surrounded by Women’s Libbers, IRA representatives, Abortion for All, Hari Krishna and Co., the Communist Party of Ireland and sundry other enthusiasts for whom I feel little or no sympathy. In a rigidly conservative society like Ireland’s such hangers-on make it more difficult for the embryonic anti-nuke movement to gain support.’

    So what did the Carnsore anti-nuclear movement achieve? Firstly, it was an independently run, decentralised movement of Irish citizens and supporters from other countries. That cosmopolitan protest initiative caught mainstream politicians off guard.

    Moreover, Carnsore brought many individuals together who, after 1981, promoted environmental and non-consumerist lifestyles. Organic vegetable growing was promoted in Dublin and other areas. It is likely to have brought support to the Green Party/Comhaontas Glas. Some of the protesters eventually left the city for the countryside and contributed to wholesome rural alternatives. Major political figures today visit, in muddy wellingtons and raincoats, youth-oriented musical events like the Electric Picnic to pay tribute to The Youth, also called the yoof.

    Now that the ‘six-pack brigade’ are a lot older I wonder do they ponder the moon and the stars, and wonder about the meaning of it all? Do they reminisce about Carnsore and tell children and grandchildren about the good old days of free music?

  • Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist

    Sé Merry Doyle’s latest documentary, Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist, serves as an excellent introduction to the stirring painting of Bernard Canavan. It offers an intimate portrait of a man whose distressing backstory has yielded extraordinary works of art that amplify our understanding of an appalling system that held sway for so long in Ireland. The film is to be screened at the Cork Film Festival on November 10.

    Bernard, like Shane MacGowan, is an artist who speaks, through his lived experience, for what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’

    “Disembarkation”

    There is an added ingredient here. Bernard Canavan was born in Ireland in 1944, but that wasn’t his birth name. As a newborn, he was cruelly removed from the care of his young parents and placed in an orphanage. That his mother and her then-boyfriend had decided to marry didn’t matter. An infant born out of wedlock was viewed as the personification of sin.

    This was an all-too-familiar experience under what can accurately be described as a theocracy governing Ireland after independence. This was a fusion of devout Catholicism with a set of post-colonial Victorian values that emerged in the wake of the Great Famine. This made Ireland a dark place for many decades. Indeed, Ronan Sheehan refers to a ‘theology of incarceration’ governing most aspects of life at that time, realising W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save.’

    ‘Gods love for mothers and their infants’

    In the orphanage, punishment of sin formed only a part of what was also a business enterprise. Children were commodified, offered for adoption or experimented on by pharmaceutical companies.

    Fortunately, as a young child Bernard was rescued by a woman called Margaret Canavan, who was born into an Irish family living in Argentina. After her father’s death, she retuned to Ireland and settled in Edgworthstown, County Longford. This midlands town is the scene of some of Bernard’s most captivating work.

    There, he grew up under a nurturing mother who protected him from the brutality of the education system, and instilled a lifelong love of reading. This autodidact earned a scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, later studying politics, philosophy and economics at Worcester College.

    The film includes a memorable visit to the midlands town, where Bernard confronts memories of the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving a broken Ireland to face the indignity of the cattle boat and a new life in England. The men would face the harshness of the building sites and lodging houses, the world of subbies, piece work, being ‘on the lump’.

    Whatever you say, say Nothing’

    Bernard’s has long campaigned against the injustices that thousands of children suffered in Irish orphanages. In an emotive scene, Bernard visits Hampstead Heath where a man called Peter Tyrell set himself alight in 1967. As a young lad Peter endured rape and abuse in Letterfrack Industrial School and eventually succumbed to the trauma. The only clue as to his identity was a torn postcard addressed to the Irish civil rights activist and Senator, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom he had corresponded – and who had made efforts to bring his case to light.

    A highlight of the film is where Bernard makes an emotional return to the place of his incarceration, Saint Patrick’s Guild, ‘The House of Shame.’ There, he bears witness to what happened to him, speaking for other unfortunates who suffered a similar fate, most of whom have not had an opportunity to tell their tales.

    ‘In the Free State’

    Eventually, Bernard emigrated to England, returning briefly to Ireland in the 1960s to work as a marketing executive in Dublin. After two years, however, he returned to England, taking up residence in London, where he still lives. There, he worked on a freelance basis for a variety of underground papers and magazines, producing illustrations, cartoon strips and political satire for the likes of OZ, Peace News and International Times.

    Great credit is due to Sé Merry Doyle for making this film on a shoestring budget. It makes one wonder why so much of Ireland’s interesting cultural output is still occurring on the margins or abroad, unaided and underfunded. Our theocratic model appears to have been replaced by a neoliberal logic of profit and loss, where the work of an artist such as Bernard Canavan becomes a slightly awkward memory.

    Feature Image: “The Innocent”

  • Poem: Vitruvian Woman

     

    Vitruvian Woman
    For Laura
    A Poem for Halloween

    Svelte limbs, aquiline and flow, her enjambment;
    The whole pelvic girdle hypnotically balances,
    Famously compared to a serpent which dances,
    And which has all full-blooded heterosexual males entranced…!

    And, there you have it! The Feminists declare,
    “No more male gazing here!”
    Where are we? How did we get here?
    Whatever happened to coup de foudre, colpo di fulmine ?

    It was a Friday night, I had been sitting, drinking with colleagues,
    When you entered the public bar dressed in your finery;
    The cream- coloured micro-skirt, the flesh coloured tights,

    The pliant leather of your black knee high boots!…
    Colpo di fulmine!… my ass jumped off the bench, reflexively!
    We have known each other now for 25 Halloweens.

    Feature Image: Norbert Szomszéd

  • Musician of the Month: Cory Seznec

    It’s always been a challenge to compress my life into tidy, coherent narratives full of hidden meanings and uniting threads with distinguishable identity signposts that give audiences an obvious sense of who this person is. My artistic identity has, in many ways, been an attempt to seek some form of ‘personal style,’ by tossing together what, at face value, might seem like incongruous interests into a gumbo of my own making. In all this digging in the dark, the ‘ego’s’ quest was to forge some form of authentic artistic voice out of a chaos of unknowing. With no mentors to guide me, and no institutions to mould me, it was all very freeing, very scary and a complete mess.

    I’ll begin with the early days of ‘professional’ gigging. London 2004-2005. A young man completing a Masters in history is wondering how to break away from academia, play gigs and earn money from music. Early on in his studies he posts an ad on Craig’s List: ‘American folk musician in London looking to collaborate with any musicians who play guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, percussion, piano, and/or accordion.’

    The only response received is from an accordionist. They call each other. All the young man recalls of the conversation is wondering if the person on the other end is on a Witness Protection Program. A strong Long Island accent. They arrange to meet at the Witness’ place in south Wimbledon. They jam and are surprisingly ambitious about developing a professional project around accordion and banjo, as well as a strange percussion stick called the ‘Freedom Boot.’

    Looking back, it was at this moment that the Witness, a.k.a. Michael Ward-Bergeman, appeared to me as a clown-roshi-seeker-mentor figure, undergoing the beginning of his own transformation to another life. We started a duo and began touring, sending out millions of emails, knocking on doors and taking every paying gig that came our way. No smartphones, no GPS.

    We then recorded our first album with my brother as sound engineer over a span of four nights in the gymnasium of Harefield Hospital outside London, sleeping on chairs, with hospital guards waking us up (one was very surprised to see us when he opened the door at 6am). We printed up a thousand CDs and sold them at all our shows during our insane jaunts around the UK. It was all starting to get exciting, yet also very real. I was starting to wonder: is this my profession?

    With the Masters finished I was out of a dorm and started crashing on couches around town, before finally moving in with my future wife to a small apartment in Brooklyn, New York. There I tapped into the folk scene, worked carpentry to pay rent, and taught fingerstyle guitar and banjo at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, regularly hopping over to London for tours with Michael.

    After that blip we moved to Paris, France where I soon became an intermittent du spectacle (state-sponsored artist support scheme) playing in all sorts of venues with all sorts of other musicians to get my cachets (declared gigs). During that time, I made my first trip to Africa – an unforgettable three week trip around Mali.

    But back to the U.K.. The ‘long strange trip’ continued, touring around England, Scotland, Wales, the U.S. and mainland Europe (although I never made it to Ireland!) with Michael, and the eventual addition of another brilliant, lunatic, Canadian percussionist, performance artist, sound engineer and anarchist called Paul Clifford. We went by the name of The Groanbox Boys, then Groanbox Boys, then just Groanbox. Did we grow up or shrink down? This whole trip lasted about ten years; with peaks and valleys; ebbs and flows; collaborating with classical composers and ensembles, packed out village halls, and played to two people in a pub in the Lake District; big festival crowds; hospital patients, and a wall of chavs in Yeovil not listening to a note we were playing. We made warts-and-all guerrilla records on the fly that contained both unlistenable discordance and mellifluous magic that we could sell DIY by the carloads at all these venues we navigated to with frayed roadmaps in beat up rentals from a used car dealer named Mel in Kent. Sea legs were obtained.

    The absurdity of all this is that the music and the whole ‘business’ of it might have been just some cosmic pretext to get the gods – or someone – laughing. In the van (where all the actual stuff happened) we surmised that we were living in a simulation created by a ten-year-old named Benny, who had created us on a lark. Case in point – we had asked Paul to find a tree log to play on stage, since our second album featured percussion that included the sound of logs being struck by axes and other objects. He did so with gusto, locating not just any old piece of wood, but a very strong and gnarly piece of yew. Surely Benny was behind this.

    Sacred to the Celts, venerated in Christian traditions, called the world tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, we became obsessed with taxus baccata, visiting yew groves and churchyards across Britain, engaging with (manifested as a worship ritual involving deep meditation, musical farting, and general obscenities) ancient yew-god avatars in some strange restorative communion during our gruelling tours (we would block book tours of 30-60 shows, performing once, sometimes twice a day, with occasional days of respite). We were totally burned-out and these yew baths were magical balms for our weary souls.

    And you thought this was about music.

    Let me jump forward 10 years to Touki, my project with Senegalese artist Amadou Diagne and London producer Oscar Cainer. We had put the project together in 2019, securing Arts Council funding to record an album as a duo at Real World Studios. All our tour dates and album release were planned for March 2020, which imploded with the Covid-19 pandemic. We picked up steam again the following year and got some more funding to record, this time with American cellist and violinist Duncan Wickel, who joined us on the road for a couple of U.K. tours. We then joined forces with Marius Pibarot for a couple of years, who was an excellent addition to the group. Earlier this year, however, Marius wasn’t available to tour with us so we called someone we all knew well. Michael Ward-Bergeman.

    Did we even call him, or did Benny make him appear out of thin air? All I know is the laughing gods were back. We were no longer just playing music but visiting ancient standing stones and cairns in remote Scotland at sunrise. Early in the tour we were joined by Little John, a clown puppet sidekick who’s accent and intonation sounds eerily like Michael’s Long Island accent in falsetto. And, always, the pairing of the numinous and the flatulent, an Ancient Monolith – High Street Curry Shop negotiation, with awe being expressed by mouths and sphincters alike.

    And you thought this was about music.

    But I digress. ‘Normal’ gigs did occur and are projected to continue to happen in my career. I’ve been teaching in music camps around the US and in France, and recorded video lessons for Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop. I released a bunch of solo records, and performed with numerous artists over the years, playing festival stages, theatres, music camps, clubs, pubs, cafés-concerts, village halls, churches, hospitals, prisons, schools, museums…in Europe, North America, Ethiopia.

    Ah Ethiopia. Another inflection point. I spent three years there (2013-16) with my wife holding down a ‘real’ job. Learned many of the Ethiopian modes, assisted on rugged and totally manic field recording trips through the highlands, held a weekly gig at Mulatu Astatke’s jazz club, hopped down to Kenya to study with omutibo guitarists, and generally had my mind slowly blown to bits. I miss it all terribly, and getting into it more than this almost seems pointless, at least until I write my memoirs.

    These experiences brought me to some realization that going back to school to study ethnomusicology might be promising for my quest. As I write this, I’m sitting in Takoma Park, Maryland and commuting everyday to the University of Maryland – College Park to sit in graduate seminars and teach undergraduates a course on World Music & Identity (this time mainly sans instrument). A new chapter, in my ‘home’ country, which now feels oddly like an alien planet.

    As for where I’m headed … who knows? If the music vibrating from within me can help people in various ways, then that’s probably good enough for me. If I can be a good dad to my kids and a decent husband, that’s probably good enough too. A recent conversation with Michael in which he stated he still ‘has no idea what is going on,’ made me think that this is what drew us together in the first place. Alongside him, Oscar, Paul, Amadou and all my other compagnons de route the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) quest somehow seems to be an exaltation in this very unknowing. Perhaps it feels like the only real, honest thing anyone can say about anything.

    https://www.coryseznec.com/

  • 360-Degree Leadership in Times of Crisis

    ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ – it takes a lot more than these kind of words today to get listened to, followed, and to exert influence and effectiveness over time. Effective change leaders remove barriers to employee success. Leaders of unsuccessful change tend to focus on results, and more often than not employees don’t get the supports they need for change. ‘Process’ and ‘people’ components of leadership are both equally critical, and therefore hard to prioritise since in reality they run parallel.

    A 360-Degree Leader

    The qualities that a 360-degree leader possesses, as per John Maxwell’s work, include adaptability, discernment, perspective, communication, security, resourcefulness, maturity, endurance, and the ability always to be counted on. This list is certainly not exhaustive but does capture the essentials.

    The difficulty in generalising this skillset is that they can differ across markets, crises, industry, and perspectives in specific contexts. For such individuals, who are or aim to become 360-degree leaders, there is also a form of assessment that provides feedback in which their skills, effectiveness and influence as an executive, leader or manager are evaluated. This is an effective process in organisations to give leaders clear feedback from their peers, employees and managers. At the same time, this is mostly done in context, e.g. how any process is conducted for a Human Resources director would differ from Sales Leader or Communications Head. Both the process and feedback are tailored to roles and contexts.

    (a) Influence

    The role of influence is critical to leadership. It is not only about ensuring compliance, but also the commitment essential to drive change, and therefore includes the ‘people’ part of the change most. At the same time, looking at wider stakeholder expectations today, developing a ‘reward culture’ also goes a long way.

    In particular, when the immediate fire of a crisis is over the leaders must reflect on who rose to the occasion, who struggled and why. Several organisational roles will change post-crisis and therefore leaders can strategise who they want to be at the table both during and after the crisis to head to the new normal.

    During periods of business-as-usual, influence can shape and affect long-term strategy making, talent acquisition and retention mechanism as well as seek knowledge and business partners as fitting.

    In some cases, where exercising command is difficult, since leaders are working in peer groups and therefore the dynamic is different, i.e. not the typical leader-follower setting, influence comes out to be the strongest and the most effective trait that an individual can demonstrate. This is because it involves leading across levels, including peers involved in the same stage.

    (b) Operations and Strategic Management

    The effectiveness of good leaders can be demonstrated firstly by mobilising realistic and time-bound goals; secondly, laying out clear objectives and setting up the deliverables; thirdly, by building high-performance teams; fourthly by creating a risk-resilient company culture; fifthly by creating organisational knowledge building; and finally by creating a culture of value.

    For sure, however, these are not magic bullets, nor meant to address the challenges or promote business growth overnight. The strategies and planned action that leaders take within firms, whether a large corporation or Small or Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME), would be largely determined by the stage of growth where a company find itself at a given point in time. In addition, building a reward and trust culture would make employees more confident in making decisions and not being risk-averse.

    Besides effectively managing operations, business development, consolidation or a strategic integration of mergers and acquisitions, new research by McKinsey shows that leaders have the following six broad functions: Aspiration; Inspiration; Imagination, Creativity, Authenticity; and Integrity. When it comes to either managing culture at the workplace or leading others through crisis, leaders also need to develop the right mindset based on introspection and self-awareness, which are equally critical skills. Several studies by Sloan and HBR show that it is the mindset, adaptiveness and change that leads to growth and, at times, survival.

    (c) Leading through Crises

    A crisis is very often systemic in nature and call therefore for solutions that are not quick fixes. In the business world, depending on the nature and scale of a crisis which can make or break a business in the medium-to-long-term needs careful identification and scrutiny after early detection signs become evident. Over the years, studies have evidenced that there is a strong correlation between organisational culture, learning, market orientation, the degree of risk and resilience embedded within the firms. The role of leadership is undeniably paramount.

    Most often, it requires that rare ability to dive and drive through the unknown against the known patterns from the past. Leaders should gain new insights, work through new patterns, and determine timely and effective responses to any crisis. For example, during the pandemic, the primary function of leaders of large or high-growth firms was driving innovation, exploring new markets, and enhancing market share.

    When the pandemic struck, the immediate focus shifted to reducing costs while maintaining the essential liquidity! Most firms, big and small, faced supply chain and logistical impediments, downsizing the firms and other operational challenges on a daily basis. All of this while working through health and safety issues, managing remote working and also offering empathy to employees and their families.

    d) Talent Recognition and Retention

    During team meetings it is a good practice to delegate to the right people and establish ‘who’s who’ and ‘who’s doing what’ to avoid confusion and overlap of roles. Leaders need to break through the inertia for business continuity today, while increasing the odds of mid-to-long-term success by focusing on the few things that matter most. Above all they need to listen to advisors and smart people to seek insight and information from diverse sources, and not only from in-group sources. Effective leaders always extend their antennae across the diverse ecosystems in which they operate, while also creating a culture of accountability and transparency during tough times.

    e) Leading Change

    Most research on organisational change, cognitive flexibility of both leaders and followers, and also managing fast change illustrates a necessary connection between the ‘process’ and the ‘people’ part of the change. These 3Cs that unite effective change leadership are a) Communicate – leaders and followers need a continual discussion on the larger purpose of the change and how it would connect to the organisational values, and more importantly establish the purpose of change by focusing on ‘what’ and the ‘why’. B) Collaborate – aligning organisational values with personal values is something that effective leaders constantly strive for; we can nonetheless admit that doesn’t always happen. It is a level above when cross-cultural leaders bring people together to plan and execute change going beyond barriers of borders and boundaries. They should also include employees in decision making and thereby in a way solidifying their commitment to change while promoting inclusivity. C) Commit – research shows that leaders who negotiated a change successfully are resilient and persistent, and willing to step outside their comfort zone. On the contrary, unsuccessful leaders failed to adapt to challenges, started a blame culture while creating a toxic workplace environment, and were impatient with a lack of results.

    f) Leading Remote and Hybrid Work

    With hybrid working becoming increasingly formalised, leading a remote workplace becomes a key priority. This sudden change in the working environment comes with pros and cons and is new to all employees. So they need leadership to guide them through the transition.

    If your business has employees with more remote working experience than you, let them take charge. Feed off their expertise and appoint them to your business’ remote leadership team. This is the time for them to step up.

    Have communication plans ready. Many employees will have an area where they can relax and have a quick chat with colleagues, and a separate area where they can discuss pressing work issues.

    Businesses can recognise their ‘at-risk clients,’ who can cope with this eventuality to a certain extent. Similarly, losing staff can have the ripple effect on a small business of losing a clients, leading to a loss of revenue. A lack of profitability, in turn, leads you to have to make hard decisions as to which members of staff are worth retaining. Maintaining a ‘punishment’ or ‘fear’ culture makes people afraid of taking decisions and being accountable for their actions.

    Leading Dynamic Capabilities in SMEs

    Research into leadership shows how significantly they can affect the morale and confidence of staff (or followers). This will depend on the extent to which leaders perceive mistakes either to be opportunities for learning or leads to them brutally nudging their followers, thereby damaging the self-worth of the latter.

    As Sir Richard Branson once said, ‘clients do not come first, employees come first. Take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.’ Leadership, by its nature, can cultivate the foundation of a culture that empowers employees to achieve the company goals and allows you to recognise how vital each of their contributions are to furthering those goals. At the same time, the pandemic showed how important it is for a leader to diversify efforts and strive to innovate for future success.

    The core of any leadership’s role is to develop dynamic capabilities that allow organisations to respond and adapt effectively to rapid changes to the external environment. This includes sensing opportunities and threats, seizing opportunities, and transforming the organisation accordingly. This is particularly important for SMEs who may not have the scale or resources of larger firms but can excel through agility and innovation.

    By embedding a culture of learning, continuous improvement, and resilience, leaders can position their SMEs not only to survive crises but emerge stronger. This involves empowering employees at all levels to take initiative, encouraging experimentation and calculated risk-taking, and maintaining open communication channels to gather feedback and insights.

    Inherent Volatility

    Markets today are defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Thus, leadership can no longer be confined to positional authority or tactical decision-making. It requires a 360-degree orientation, one that integrates strategic foresight, operational discipline, emotional intelligence, and which exerts influences across hierarchies and functions. Effective leaders today must navigate crises not just by reacting to disruption but by proactively reimagining systems, realigning cultures at every level of the organisation.

    For SMEs in particular, the imperative is clear. Developing dynamic capabilities is no longer a luxury, but a strategic necessity. These capabilities, whether it’s cultivating a learning mindset or institutionalising innovation, allow small firms not only to survive shocks, but to emerge stronger and more competitive to shifting market demands.

    Crucially, leadership in this context is not merely about managing transitions; it is more about stewarding transformation, mobilising collective purpose, creating meaning in moments of ambiguity, and holding the long view while delivering in the present.

    As Peter Drucker rightly opined: ‘The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic.’

     

    Feature Image: A highway sign discouraging travel in Toronto, March 2020

  • Grandmothers’ Fight for Stolen Generation

    Review: A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland.

    Between 1975 and the first half of 1978, it has been estimated that the Argentinian dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla killed and ‘disappeared’ 22,000 people. As far back as 1984, the National Commission of the Disappeared People (CONADEP) estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people were disappeared by the dictatorship from 1975 to 1983.

    The rationale that “If they were taken, there must be a reason,” employed by Argentinians during the dictatorship in a bid for personal safety is immediately imparted in Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book, A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Avid Reader Press, 2025). The book tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – a group of grandmothers whose sons and daughters were disappeared by the dictatorship, and whose grandchildren were kidnapped and illegally adopted by members of the dictatorship’s state institutions.

    The book opens with the kidnappings of Jose Manuel Perez Rojo and his wife Patricia Roisinblit, who were both involved in left-wing activism and resistance with the Montoneros against the right-wing turbulence in Argentina that culminated in General Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship. Jose and Patricia’s toddler Mariana was taken to her grandparents by the parents’ kidnappers. In her late stages of pregnancy, Patricia gave birth to a boy while detained at the School of Naval Mechanics, known as ESMA.

    The book focuses on the Roisinblit family as it traces both Argentina’s dictatorship history and that of the Abuelas. Rosa Roisinblit, who passed away in September this year at the age of 106, was one of the Abuelas’ founding members. For Rosa, the disappearance of her daughter and abduction of her grandson altered her existence from a person who completely avoided mention of politics to a driving force behind the organisation that openly challenged the dictatorship. At first through persistent presence and silent protest at Plaza de Mayo, the Abuelas would find themselves at the helm of exposing the systematic disappearances of dictatorship opponents and their stolen children.

    Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla swearing the Oath as President of Argentina, 29 March 1976.

    Videla’s dictatorship attempted to avoid the scrutiny which the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ignited. Argentina obscured its description of opponents, and by doing so widened its net to encompass not only those involved in resistance but also anyone remotely linked to the disappeared detainees. The author notes, “For the junta, these covert abductions were the perfect tool: brazen enough to incite fear, but subtle enough that Argentines could pretend they weren’t happening.” As the “disappeared” started making its way into conversations and rhetoric, Videla himself utilised the word in a press conference to bolster dictatorship impunity: “The desaparecido is an unknown … they are an unknown entity, neither dead nor alive, they are disappeared.”

    Of Jewish descent but born in Argentina, Rosa at first turned to Jewish organisations and even the Israeli embassy for help, but none was forthcoming, despite the fact that many Jewish people had been detained and disappeared by the military dictatorship. Videla’s manipulation of Christian values to justify atrocities was also either tolerated or supported by the Catholic clergy in Argentina, leaving the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared with little recourse. It was during one such futile meeting that Azucena Villalfor, the mother of a disappeared detainee, determined to stage a protest at Plaza de Mayo – a gathering for relatives of the disappeared to recognise and know each other.

    Fourteen women gathered for the first meeting and the group later called themselves the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. It was from this group – the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – that the Abuelas formed their own distinct group, as they were looking for both their disappeared children and grandchildren.

    The Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires, where the grandmothers have consistently protested since 1977.

    When Rosa joined the group of women, she realised that some stories of the disappeared children held some commonality – some women were also looking for their grandchildren. As support for their mission grew, some people came forward to report that their neighbours suddenly were raising babies, despite no earlier signs of pregnancy. The first inklings that the junta in Argentina had systematically abducted their grandchildren came when two Uruguayan children were located in Valparaiso after being abducted from Buenos Aires in 1976. The transnational operation was linked to Operation Condor – a US-backed plan that sought to eliminate all Communist and socialist influence in South America, and in which Argentina also participated.

    Alfredo Astiz, a naval officer who worked as ESMA, was tasked with infiltrating the group, posing as the brother of a disappeared detainee. The bodies of two mothers and a nun, supportive of their cause, were discovered decades later in a mass grave as a result of this operation.

    The Abuelas followed up on clues to piece together the broken narratives that could shed light on the disappearances and illegal abductions, since it was clear that no help from the state would be forthcoming. The military would not divulge information about the disappeared and it was through contacting other human rights organisations and a breakthrough in genetic testing that the Abuelas were able to prove the identity of the stolen children they eventually tracked down, and those of the children who came forward after the fall of the dictatorship in 1981.

    Cohen Gilliland gives a detailed account of the forensic anthropology that was employed to identify the remains of the disappeared buried in mass graves, as well as the setting up of Argentina’s National Genetic Data Bank in 1987. American geneticist Mary King devised a grandpaternity test that would allow the analysis of DNA samples from the grandparents and grandchildren to prove their family lineage. Cohen Gilliland writes: “In many cases, such as Rosa’s, the Abuelas were looking for grandchildren who had disappeared while still in their mothers’ wombs.” Following the return to democracy, the grandpaternity test became accepted as evidence in court cases relating to the abducted and illegally adopted children of the disappeared.

    Argentina’s truth commission report noted the abduction of the disappeared’s children, stating: “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.” The report also lauded the Abuelas’ work and determination to establish not only the identities of the stolen children, but also the contribution of their efforts towards seeking justice for crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship.

    “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.”

    Despite the scientific success of genetic testing, several of the abducted grandchildren who came forth, as well as the Abuelas, did not anticipate the ramifications that disappearances and abductions would have on the affected families. Amid campaigns to discredit the Abuelas, and lawsuits contesting custody, the book illustrates how the dictatorships tore families apart and created new ones founded on torture, disappearances, abductions and lies. Reconciliation with biological family at times came at a cost, where justice was achieved at the expense of psychological trauma. Justice did not necessarily ease the endured past.

    This trauma is highlighted in the book through Rosa’s story and her search for her abducted grandson, Rodolfo, who was given the name Guillermo by the couple who raised him. While Guillermo – as he is referred to in the book – swiftly seeks out the truth about his identity, he is also faced with the repercussions of the decision. The psychological and emotional toll is evident as he navigates through two distinct realities: one in which the dysfunctional and abusive family he grew up with disintegrated, and the other in which he sought to reconcile himself with the history of his biological family, which should have belonged to him.

    One memory Guillermo narrates is his adoptive mother asking him, at the age of eight, what would happen if another woman claimed to be his mother. As memories of his past contend with the present, and the contradictions arise, particularly the discrepancies in his upbringing, Guillermo faces a major identity crisis. “You kidnapped the grandson of the vice president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,” he told Francisco Gomez, his adoptive father who worked for the military.

    Yet Gomez’s eventual arrest and its effects upon his adoptive mother brought a new round of implications for Guillermo, who found it difficult to distinguish emotionally between healthy and traumatic bonds. Even within his biological family, Guillermo and his sister became estranged over the rupture caused by the dictatorship’s abduction, despite the fact that Guillermo went on to become a lawyer and participate in bringing the dictatorship perpetrators to justice alongside the Abuelas.

    Milei shaking hands with Donald Trump in February 2025.

    Cohen Gilliand’s book is particularly important at a time when Argentina’s right-wing government is resolutely waging war against memory institutions in the country. Argentina’s quest for justice already faced hurdles during Mauricio Macri’s presidency, but current President Javier Milei has exceeded Macri’s measures since the start of his tenure, attacking not only sites of memory but also directly targeting the Abuelas. In a decree that was rejected by the Chamber of Deputies in August this year, Milei sought to remove the autonomy of the National Genetic Data Bank. This book treats the delicate subject of disappearances and abductions with dignity, yet with the clarity and sense of justice that must be employed against dictatorship oblivion.

    Feature Image: The mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo enter the former Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics detention center.