Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • Musician of the Month: Matthew Noone

    The Other Side of Knowing

    I’ve always experienced music as a way to access another kind of reality.

    My earliest musical memory is of falling asleep in the back seat of the family car, drifting through the Northern suburbs of Brisbane.

    Enveloping Darkness, the hum of the engine, the radio playing, soft orchestral music, timpani drums, cavernous reverb, drifting into dreams.

    I’ve spent most of my life searching for musical experiences of that access profound wonder, the ephemeral and transcendental.

    It began with guitar. First, five years of classical guitar tuition followed by an inevitable turn to the dark side. The Blues. Rock N Roll. Grunge. Punk. Indie. Lo-Fi and Post-Rock.

    Eventually, I succumbed to the lure of drum machines and samplers. IDM. Trip-hop. Drum N Bass. Ambient and Glitch. Then, inspired by the work of John Cage, I gave up making music altogether and worshiped the primal vindication of noise. Tape Loops. Junk Ensembles. Free Jazz. Avant Metal. In my mid twenties, I got involved in Zen and took lay Buddhist vows. I was enchanted by Zen’s focus on the elusive dichotomy of sound and silence. Reciting sutras. Drumming on wooden blocks. Clanging Bells.

    Following the footsteps of the historical Buddha, I went to India.

    Lumbini, Bodhgaya, Sarnath, Kushingar, Kapilvatsu.

    Enlightenment was the plan.

    But while in a monastery in Bodhgaya, I had an argument with the head abbot.

    He told me that I wasn’t allowed to play a small wooden flute in my room at night.

    No music in the temple.

    So, I packed my bags and went in search of music.

    Then, in Varanasi, I heard the sarode for the first time.

    I was hooked.

    Luckily in 2003 I met my first teacher, Sougata Roy Chowdhury in Kolkata. Through him I found a channel to that inexpressible world of the profound. I became obsessed with learning Indian Classical music. For five years, I kept returning to India for talim (learning) with my teacher. I practised like a demon. Soaked up the Kolkata vibe. Drank loads of chai, smoked biddies and ate far too many biscuits. Eventually, I became competent on the instrument.  With the blessings of my teacher, I began to perform and settled in the West of Ireland.

    While living in Ireland, I became aware of the idea that there was some sort of connection between Irish traditional music and Indian culture. I wanted to explore how Irish music might sound on the sarode but I also wanted to avoid it becoming a gimmick relying on cliches. So, I undertook a four-year structured PhD (Arts Practice) in the Irish World Academy at the University of Limerick. During these four years, I apprenticed myself to a number of traditional musicians in an attempt to learn Irish music in somewhat of an authentic manner. Through Ged Foley I began to learn tunes on the fiddle and learnt how to behave at a session. Steve Cooney put me in touch with something deep and ancestral and Martin Hayes guided me into a world of feeling.

    The Sound of a Country

    Moving to East Clare, I was lucky enough to find a common bond (and neighbour) in legendary percussionist Tommy Hayes. With our project An Tara, we began to explore the spaces in-between Irish traditional and Indian classical music. We experimented with different rhythms, improvisation approaches, tonalities, timbres and new compositions. Eventually, this partnership became less about being Irish or Indian and more about us becoming authentically ourselves. Playing with Tommy gives me an incredible freedom because I feel like I am supported no matter where I go, that Tommy is really with me, both aurally and in spirit.

    Through the freedom and support given to me by many other musicians previously mentioned, I began to feel more and more confident to ‘compose’ my own music on the sarode. What came out was a music that was neither Indian nor Irish. Sometimes tunes. Sometimes not. Over the last few years, I have become very interested in going deeper into this creative space which is not just in between cultures but perhaps pre-cultural, pre-cognitive and intuitive.

    Then lockdown happened.

    In April 2020, I moved myself into a small wooden cabin surrounded by woodland in Faha, East Clare. I setup my recording equipment. I left my instruments laying around. I watched the sunrise. I listened to the morning robin song. Watched the stars. Shook with the wind.  Absorbed the rain and sun. Then let my intuition guide me. The result is my third solo album The Other Side of Knowing. Everything on the album came in the moment. Captures something of my knowing or more accurately my unknowing in that moment. The tracks were then sent to be mixed and mastered by the wonderfully talented Seán Mac Erlaine.  When I listen back to it now, it all feels like a dream fragment.

    And I am reminded again of my childhood, being in the back seat of my parent’s car with the radio on. I feel into my memories of my parents; my father’s sense of humour, his love of the blues, soul and sixties rock; my mother’s intuitive creative world view, her deep empathy and thoughtfulness. I think of my sisters; two mischievous identical twins, one of them outgoing and gregarious and the other quiet reflective and loyal. I remember myself as a quiet curly haired kid who lived in a world of fantasy amongst the backdrop of noisy, yobbo beer drinking men, spendings hours down at the creek or in a make believe world in our backyard pool.  Then, I am back again, here in Ireland, in my middle aged body, the feeling of damp and the sound of rain. And I wonder what I have learnt from the musical journey of my life so far. The honest answer is, I do not know. And yet, when I sit with my instrument and listen; to my own body, the room, the rain, the sound of breath, the gentle scraping of a string, I feel that something can come which is beyond me and my experience. An Other Side of Knowing.  I can’t put anymore words on it than that.

    It’s probably best just to listen.

    Link to Download Album

    https://matthewnoone.bandcamp.com/album/the-other-side-of-knowing

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    https://www.facebook.com/matthewnoonemusic

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    https://www.instagram.com/matthewnoonemusic/

    Twitter

    https://twitter.com/NooneMatthew

     

  • Purchase Cuban Love Songs

    ‘They sang Cuban love-songs and moonsweet madigrals and selections from the best and finest of Italian opera’.
    Flann O’Brien
    At Swim-Two-Birds

    Edited by Ronan Sheehan under the imprint of Cassandra Voices, Cuban Love Songs is a joint effort of the Writers and Artists Union of Cuba (UNEAC) and a variety of Irish writers and poets, including established names and rising talents. Tastefully designed by Kate Horgan, it is an Irish salute to Cuba and a Cuban salute to Ireland.

    ‘Two islands, together in a sea of struggle and hope,’ was the phrase used by Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins when visiting Cuba in 2017, and also in welcoming the President of the Republic of Cuba H.E Mr Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, along with his wife Lis Cuesta Peraza to Ireland in October 2019

    José Martí

    The outstanding figure among the fifty Cuban poets represented in this volume is José Julián Martí Pérez (1853-1895), who is generally referred to as José Martí. The literary-political career of this poet, essayist, classicist, journalist, translator, university professor, publisher, and revolutionary is evocative of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, or even the organisers of the 1916 Easter Rising. His lyrics for Guantanamera became Cuba’s best known song.

    A widely travelled abolitionist who mourned the death of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Martí settled in New York during the 1880’s and 90’s. There he encountered the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario and possibly our own Oscar Wilde. He believed that Latin American countries needed to gain an awareness of their own history and nurture native literature, a view echoed in the writings of Patrick Pearse.

    Martí died at the Battle of Dos Rios on May 19th, 1895, and is still revered as a national hero.

    Purchase Cuban Love Songs through our Shop Page.

    Ronan Sheehan. Image (c) Daniele Idini.

  • Reform or we are Scrooged

    Often dismissed as ‘worthy’, but perhaps overly wordy, products of the nineteenth century, the novels of Charles Dickens retain great wisdom argues human rights lawyer David Langwallner, who explores aspects of the author’s work to inform an understanding of contemporary challenges.

    Dickens and the Law

    Jaundice and Jaundice drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.
    Charles Dickens, Bleak House, (1853).

    It remains the case that real compassion should animate my legal profession, not the enduring casuistry and competition that Dickens observed in his time. This is not fake compassion but such that reveals a refined understanding of the human condition. This should also feed into judgment. Above all else a judge should be compassionate, occasionally bending the rules to achieve a compassionate result in the circumstances of an individual case.

    People often leave courtrooms with a burning sense of injustice, having had their lives ruined. Compassion mitigates such unpleasantness, curbing the excesses of an imperfect system. Legal advocacy should not all be about winning, although in the heat of battle it may seem so. Ultimately, it is about the service of justice, and what happens to the poor misfortunates presenting in court, who are not so very different to those of Charles Dickens’s time.

    This idea was beautifully expressed by the legendary English barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall In 1894 when he defended the Austrian-born prostitute Marie Hermann, who had been charged with the murder of a client; Marshall Hall persuaded the jury that it was a case of manslaughter. Although he made full use of his oratorical skills, the case is best remembered for an emotional plea to the jury at the end: ‘Look at her, gentlemen… God never gave her a chance – won’t you?’

    Of course the law of equity permits, indeed requires, a judge to do justice or equity. This involves finding a solution suited to an individual case. Thus, injunctions are discretionary remedies. Many, though not all judges, take this responsibility seriously. He who seeks equity must do equity.

    In a sense the maxims of equity are the moral bedrock of the legal system. They exist in principle but often in our Courts of Chancery alas – particularly in highly expensive banking cases – lawyers often behave like those observed by Dickens in Bleak House.

    But what chance today for the little person against the deep corporate pockets? Should the poor still have to submit to the humiliation of requesting for one more spoon of gruel? Charles Dickens may yet guide us through the spectral forms of the legal past, present and yet to come.

    Lawyers Abound

    Illustration for “The Children’s Dickens: Stories selected from various tales” (1909) London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton by Gilbert Scott Wright.

    Lawyers appear in no less than eleven of Dickens’s fifteen novels. Some even resemble human beings, though not pleasant ones. Uriah Heap from David Copperfield (1850) is a ‘red-eyed cadaver’ whose ‘lank forefinger,’ while he reads, makes ‘clammy tracks along the page … like a snail.’

    Meanwhile Mr Voles from Bleak House is ‘so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,’ that he is ‘always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.’

    Dickens, like Kafka, that other great writer about the law, was experienced in the trade. Aged just fifteen, he was hired as an ‘attorney’s clerk,’ serving subpoenas, registering wills, copying transcripts. He went on to became a court reporter: for three formative years commenting on the chaos of the Victorian profession. At thirty-two he filed his first suit against a pirate publisher, and would spend most of his life lobbying for copyright reform.

    Dickens’s response to one copyright suit, expressed to a close friend, might serve to encapsulate his entire view on the system of justice in his time: ‘it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.’

    Greedy Businessmen

    Bleak House best presages perhaps our day and age. Spare a thought this Christmas not for lawyers, but lay litigants dealing with receivers and bankruptcies. Are we really saying to families this year that if their homes are repossessed that they and their children will be put on the street?

    Then there are the Christmas stories including the seminal A Christmas Carol (1843) with the notorious Ebenezer Scrooge, the archetypal dishonest and exploitative businessman, wholly dedicated to the pursuit of profit at the expense of others.

    Scrooge is not an isolated example. Dickens’s oeuvre is populated by an array of greedy Victorian businessmen, such as the infamous Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, among a plethora of unscrupulous lawyers who, as a profession, are on the receiving end of the full force of Dickensian odium. It is the culture of greed and human exploitation that most strokes his ire.

    Famously in A Christmas Carol Scrooge Is visited by ghosts of past, present and yet to come. In an unlikely twist of fate, the miserly man of commerce recognises the perversity of his ways, especially in his treatment of Bob Crotchet and his destitute family. Scrooge repents –  deus ex machina – after a ghostly visitation by his ex-partner who he drove to an early death, and also a pitiful vision of the the Cratchet family should he persist.

    Scrooge and Bob Cratchet

    Dickens was the great chronicler of the instabilities and social malaise of Victorian society to which our current age of increasingly unchecked capitalism may see us return to. This theme was taken up by George Orwell in ‘How the Poor Die’ (1946) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and he lauded him thus in another piece:

    Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.

    Thus Dickens spoke for the poor of Victorian England, and is the prototype of a public intellectual, having not limited his writing to fiction.

    Debt Laden Age

    In terms of our debt-laden age David Copperfield is also peculiarly relevant. Mr Micawber defines the difference between happiness and unhappiness after he ends up in a debtor’s prison:

    My other piece of advice, Copperfield,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.’

    David Home illustration from Character Sketches.

    The abiding message is to take care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. It seems a foretaste of Thatcherism – the penny-pinching approach to government of ‘Forthright Grantham grocer’s girl’. This is the commoditization of everyday life, where one’s income is an index of one’s happiness. This idea has clearly penetrated into Mr Micawber’s consciousness, as indeed it has been largely internalized in our present age.

    Invariably still, it is the little man or woman who meets trouble, with ever disproportionate inequality and wealth cartelization threatening economic and ecological meltdown.

    And in Dickensian fashion, the super-rich or the banks ‘too big to fail’, the speculators and lawyers who have facilitated dodgy loan instruments work away safely in well-appointed homes at a far remove from the consequences of their actions.

    Since the last recession, especially under David Cameron in the UK – but perhaps especially in Ireland after the EU/IMF bailout – austerity measures were used to balance the books and pay for costly mistakes at the behest of large corporations that then preyed on the economic debris.

    Christmas Chronicler

    To revert to Dickens as the supreme chronicler of Christmas. If someone has the temerity to present themselves like Oliver Twist with an empty bowl and ask for more will our modern day workhouses permit another spoon of porridge?

    Or will they ask: ‘are you not happy with your existing pile of gruel – the charitable food banks that ease the conscious of the rich?’ Now with Covid-19 restrictions in full force diminishing most incomes – but especially those least well off – many now need a bit more, just to survive. This should involve chasing down the artful dodgers in the large corporation, who have picked a pocket or two avoiding paying their fair share of tax.

    George Cruikshank original etching of the Artful Dodger (centre), here introducing Oliver (right) to Fagin (left).

    Yet it is still open to those in authority, like Scrooge, to mend the error of their ways and reflect on how incompetence, greed and neo-liberal norms are destroying the social fabric. Indeed in some respects social distancing seems a perfect neo-liberal ploy, allowing elites to remove themselves entirely from the great unwashed, or diseased ‘other.’

    Copyright

    Finally, one of Dickens’s bugbears was the impact of pirate printers on his book sales, especially in the unregulated free market of America, where outright banditry took the place of copyright law. On his first visit to America Dickens incurred the wrath of the Boston press by lobbying in what was supposed to be a polite after dinner speech for international copyright regulation.

    In Hartford Connecticut, in a hushed voice, he revisited the theme. In a voice likened to thunder, he claimed Walter Scott would not have died in penury if such a law had existed. This brought howls of rage from the press galleries. Dickens was, however, defended by the legendary Horace Greely of The New York Tribune with the Delphic phrase: ‘who should protest against robbery but those robbed.’

    This is the situation that many in the music industry find themselves in today, as platforms such as YouTube and Spotify offer few rewards for artists, who are now no longer even able to play live gigs in our current time.

    Occasionally noble sentiments in preserving intellectual property are carried too far. Thus, as Irish Senator David Norris pointed out, the James Joyce estate sued the living daylight out of anybody who had the temerity to breach copyright. This allowed his grandchild to profit from the labour of a long deceased author. Joyce passed away in 1941, but the copyright lasted another seventy years until 2011. Author’s rights should be protected but not excessively.

    Dickens in New York, circa 1867–1868.

    Yet to Come

    At least this Christmas – which alas may be the grim version of Scrooge’s dark imagining – we might use the down time wisely and take a dusty copy of one of Dickens’s tomes from off the shelf. Readers are sure to find guidance for the times we are in. Then perhaps 2021 will be a year when we begin to mend our ways, like Scrooge himself.

    Featured Image: Dickens’s Dream by Robert William Buss

    Admirers of Charles Dickens may wish to support London’s Charles Dickens Museum Appeal. The independent museum has been forced to close its doors during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    Presidential

    When you finish reading this poem,
    you’ll remember only
    the Black Forest Gateaux
    I bought you once.

    I had no option but to vote for
    that tax on women’s shoes
    but greatly admired the fight you put up against it;
    have kept all the press cuttings,
    especially those that took care not to mention me.

    As you, me, and the mirror know
    I’ve always been a great
    pro-choice advocate;
    that’s why I spent thirty years
    never mentioning the issue.

    When I stop talking
    all you’ll remember is
    the Black Forest Gateaux
    I bought you once.

    When I signed this bill to keep
    what we did to the children secret,
    you, me, and my bodyguards know
    how vehemently I’m against it.

    Trick is: what to remember
    and what not,
    because of a Black Forest Gateaux
    I ordered you once.

    The history books are littered with
    shit I voted for but was against
    in the restaurant afterwards,
    as I eyed the Black Forest Gateaux
    and thought of you.

    And as I explain at length in my book
    ‘The Art of Statecraft’,
    when the Fourth World War descends
    and the division bell rings,
    I’ll have no alternative but to leap up –
    with nothing in my heart but peace –
    and, at best, abstain.

    As you’re vapourised
    you’ll remember nothing
    but the Black Forest Gateaux
    I fed you once.

  • A Background in Science

    Most Saturdays they stood outside the GPO in Dublin. People holding signs bearing slogans both contradictory and confused. “Fake Covid Virus.” “RTE IS the Virus.” “End Barbaric Halal Slaughter.” “Our Irish Catholic Heritage is Under Attack.” “End the Paedophile Cabal.” Weren’t many of them. Sixty maybe. Not enough to be taken seriously. No real threat. Nobody in government yet.

    Seventy-five years ago, the world had said no to fascism. But now, empowered by America’s evil clown of a president, it seemed the right wing were making their comeback. On a global front, our world was at a precipice. It could fall towards the scramble model, one where while they were destroying the planet, the corporations created shortages, and by grabbing everything for a few, left the many to fight, amongst themselves, for whatever crumbs fell. Or to try and make a more equitable world, the people could dismantle those banks, hedge funds and large corporations which reward the greedy and punish the needy.

    With their anti-racist placards, a couple of people would stand in opposition to the anti-maskers, on the island, in the middle of the road, facing the General Post Office, known in Dublin as the GPO, on any given Saturday. The anti-maskers would shout at the anti-racist crew, “Pedo Scum! Off our streets!” Sometimes they’d cross over the road, in order to physically attack the anti-racist crew. It made for a very unpleasant day. Manus resented that he had become embroiled in such an activity. It seemed so pointless. Just because a few people stood opposite them, the anti-mask, sectarian, and anti-immigrant crowd weren’t going to change their minds. So why the hell did he do it? He just found it hard to walk past and not say anything in response. Anti-mask conspiracy theories mixed with sectarian and racist rhetoric is dangerous.

    Sectarian and racist views mildly couched, in that they weren’t necessarily anti-Muslim, but against the “Barbaric halal slaughter.” They weren’t anti-immigrant, just “Sick and tired of seeing Irish people homeless, while immigrants got housed.” They believed that in the Irish government, there existed a paedophile cabal. Anyone who opposed the anti-maskers was, by definition, also a paedophile. Loosely bound together by their angry frustration at the uncertainty of Covid-19 and its effects on their lives, they’d dox people who opposed them on social media, give out their names and addresses, and accuse them of paedophilia.

    As a teenage Catholic male, one living in a Protestant area, during the sectarian insanity of Belfast’s 70s, Manus had often been harassed by other teenagers. Young males wearing tartan scarfs, those keen to prove their manliness through violence, would dunt into his shoulder as they walked past. Spit on him. Call him names. He was in the minority. They were the majority. There was already a sectarian cultural history and an existing sectarian state; so, the politicians who’d gained power and position through stirring speeches, those which also brought sectarian murders to their height, aren’t totally to blame. But neither should their part be overlooked.

    Once, Manus was on the street with four friends when, headed in the opposite direction, two loyalist blokes walked past them. For the first time Manus was in the majority, and he dunted one of them in the shoulder. It’s a funny thing, the dunt. Technically speaking, it’s not quite a physical attack. You simply throw your shoulder into theirs, as though they weren’t there. As if, you refuse to acknowledge their right to occupy any available space.

    “Did that make you feel big?” demanded one of his friends. An inquiry which, at the time, gave Manus pause. He didn’t harbor any ambition to imitate his enemies. He wasn’t out for revenge. What he wanted was to walk the streets without fear of physical or verbal attack.

    And Manus now had to ask himself why he insisted upon standing in opposition against racist rhetoric. The anti-mask stance bothered him, but apart from thinking them foolish, he hadn’t given it much thought. No, it was the sectarian and racist rhetoric, so often thrown in, which troubled him.

    The correct response could be a counter demonstration that via logic and rationale examined and pointed out the right wing’s flawed views. But for whatever reason, Dublin’s Left couldn’t muster a weekly counter-protest of more than half a dozen people. Manus could complain about the lack of organized resistance, but he himself was a solitary man, one who wouldn’t join two bits of string. Couldn’t have organized a piss up in a brewery. And without group organization, it seemed you ended up with half a dozen stood against sixty. With such bad odds, what was the point?

    “To act as though you believe your actions have some effect is foolish. To act as though you believe your actions had no effect is cowardly.” He had read that, or something close to it, somewhere.

    So now, it was Saturday morning. He sat at the backdoor drinking a cup of tea, and not having a fag, while his porridge simmered and settled. Apart from those anti-maskers and the couple of people who would stand to oppose them, there was also going to be an Assange protest today. Protest. Ha ha. Two, three or four people would stand outside the GPO from twelve to one with signs saying “FREE ASSANGE.” Manus hoped to be one of them. But again, he had to ask himself, what was the point? It might be nice for the protestors to see each other. Reaffirm their beliefs. But the effect it would have on the American, English or even the Irish government would be nil.

    Most people on the street didn’t know about Assange. Those that did, didn’t care. Why should it matter to them? How would it effect their real world? One that consisted of going to work, paying their bills and buying the latest app or blockbuster. Just getting paid and getting laid. Funneled into a self-absorbed life style. Assange had attempted to inform people on the street as to what corporate-run governments were doing in their world. Democracies were being undermined or overthrown. Wars waged and climate destruction, all for the short-term profit of a few. But people were too busy consuming corporate media and goods to take much notice.

    Having had his porridge, Manus went to the toilet, and then seeking some self-awareness, he sat for an hour, practicing some techniques that might help him get through the day. At eleven o’clock, he went out onto his own street, to help with the monthly community clean up. He hoed weeds. At the end of an hour, he found himself outside Fergus’s house, where the two discussed pros and cons of weeding.

    “The bees need the weeds and the dandelions, I know people say they’re just weeds, but they’re pretty!” said Fergus, to which Manus agreed. He didn’t mind weeds, and anyhow, hoeing them down only encouraged them. It wasn’t like he could get at their roots. And scraping them away just made deeper ruts for them to grow. Still, it got him out with his neighbours, on the street, and jokingly he added, “As they would have said where I grew up, it made the place a bit more Protestant looking.” Clean, tidy and weedless. He kind of half stalled when he said this, realizing that Fergus was actually a Protestant and had probably faced sectarian shit throughout his own life. Not on the same level as the North yet still Manus figured the man had experienced sectarianism and could have been a little put out by a mocking Ulster colloquialism. But it was ancient history and Fergus just laughed.

    Manus didn’t stay to have coffee with his neighbours, but before he left, received praise for his weeding. It was nice to have neighbours, though the others on the street owned their own homes.  He just rented. It made a difference.

    He’d be twenty or twenty-five minutes late to join with Peter, Ruthy and possibly John who were going to try to make people aware that Assange was facing life in prison for exposing the horrendous crimes of corporate governments. It wouldn’t do much good but it wouldn’t do any harm. They were unlikely to take much abuse too. That was always a positive factor these days. They’d been standing from one o’clock to two o’clock, but the yellow vest, anti-immigrant, anti-maskers and the counter demo had put them off. So now Peter had said they would meet at twelve. Manus had fallen out with Peter the week before.

    Peter had said he was anti-mask. Because of their racist overtones, he wouldn’t be standing with the anti-maskers, but as a rule, he didn’t agree with masks. Said something about “the herd immunity and how we would never get it because we were stopping the spread. And how diverse approaches by governments made no real difference, the virus had a life of its own.” Peter claimed he had “A background in Science.”

    The fact that such views had caused the death of thousands really angered Manus. He respected Peter for protesting about Assange, but his anti-mask stance made him look, at least to Manus, like a conceited, childish fool. Still, you work with the tools to hand, and Manus made every effort to set differences aside when it came to their common protest. Julian Assange getting imprisoned for exposing corporate government crimes stood out as important. How would we even know about the horrendous crimes committed in the name of oil and power, if we allowed whistleblowers to be imprisoned? But today, there was no one at the GPO at noon. Peter and Ruthy must have cancelled.

    Though there were lots of cops on O’Connell street, Manus just walked on by. He bought a samosa from Govinda’s. The same pretty woman served him. He had often wondered about her. She’d been serving him samosas for over a decade. But they’d never had any real communication. Thoughts were as far as his contact with her ever went. He had to take it on board that he was old. He’d lost two front teeth and whatever remained of his boyish good looks had gone with them. All that boy/girl or man/woman stuff was over for the likes of him. No longer did the wild dogs of lust pull him violently any which way they chose. And even if they still nosed around, they’d need some sort of signed statement of avowal, before making a move.

    In spite of Govinda’s seeming a reasonable enough place to sit, he decided against that and exited, samosa in hand, to eat it on the street. His daughter phoned him. She’d been with her mother for the week, and was meant to meet Manus later in the day, but suggested that since she was in town, they might cross paths earlier. She had not only changed her name to Sawyer, but also her gender, to nonbinary. Until his little tranarchist, Comrade Sawyer arrived, he had coffee in the Train Café by the Brown Bull. Amongst others, Sawyer had been part of a black block action that had run into the “Irish National Party” protest and stolen their speaker and microphone one week. However, this week, because of Covid, and because the violence at last week’s counter-protest had put them off, The Left were going to stay away from any counter demonstration. The Dublin Left were such wusses.

    Sawyer texted her mother. Was it all right to stay with her father? But Mom complained she’d seen little enough of Sawyer that week. So, Sawyer said she’d be back in the evening. Hence Manus walked around on his own. Seeing not a soul he knew, that is until he spotted Aisling and Veronica having coffee. So, he stopped beside them.

    “It’s the fuckin’ hard core!” Is what he said. And it was true. They were the hardcore of resistance who stood, every Saturday, against the racist sectarian speeches being made on O’Connell street. They’d both taken lots of grief for their almost constant counter-protests. Both had been subjected to physical and online abuse. They both looked skinny as sticks with worry, but they kept going down on a Saturday to stand on the road island opposite the GPO and take a stance against racism.

    More comrades, Gina and Martin, joined them. Manus was useless at figuring age or for that matter, relationships. On the relation front, Gina and Martin could have been lovers, friends, or both. On the age front, he figured they could possibly be nearly as old as him. Veronica and Aisling were younger. Caroline, the youngest at twenty-nine years of age, also turned up.

    The half dozen counter-protesters went round to the GPO. They stood where the anti-maskers usually stood. Today the anti-maskers were at the RTE buildings, and going to march from RTE to the GPO. The counter-protest group knew there would be a large crowd of anti-maskers. Some of them very keen on violence. The counter demonstrators were sick and tired of being massively outnumbered, threatened and abused. They decided not to stand against them today. They left chalk messages where the anti-maskers would stand. “No place for Islamophobia! No place for transphobia! Anti-maskers are conceited fools! No place for racism! No place for hate!” Not much of a counter-protest, but what can a half dozen people do?  Gina and Martin went off for a pint. Caroline, Ashling, Veronica and Manus went off for coffee. No one felt good about letting racist and sectarian shit be spewed on the street, unopposed.

    The anti-maskers had their march on live stream, so Caroline and Veronica kept looking to see how far the march had got, and what they were up to. The sound of the marchers’ live stream coming out of Veronica’s phone gave Manus the heebie-jeebies. He explained that he couldn’t even listen to mainstream media and why righ-twing media made him physically ill. Manus went on to describe how when he was a kid, he regularly had to walk past groups of young men like the anti-maskers. Almost immediately he found himself filled with regret for making the reference. Too long ago. Too difficult to convey. Big loyalist rallies with people like Paisley calling for defense of their Protestant loyalist heritage against the papist hoards. They used words like “cleansing and liquidation.”

    Did they really say things like that?

    Yes. Yes, they did and afterwards the thugs on the corners would be emboldened.

    After coffee. Caroline decided to go on home. Manus, Veronica and Aisling couldn’t help themselves. They went back round to the GPO. Gina and Martin had come back too. They all laughed at their earlier statements, that they weren’t going to stand here today. It was like being horrified by a car accident, but unable to look away.

    So, there they stood. Five against a hundred, or more. Veronica held her battered cardboard sign. “No to Racism! No to Homophobia! No to Islamophobia! No to Hate!” Aisling had one too. “No to Racism!”

    The anti-maskers have signs “Our Catholic Faith is Under Attack!” “RTE is the Virus! “Fake Covid Virus!” “Stop Barbaric Halal Slaughter!’ Some of them cross the road to the island where the five counter protestors stand. One woman and her son (who reminds Manus of Trump’s kid,) cross over brandishing a banner saying that “The Rosary is the Answer to Ireland’s Problems!” Manus called to the sixteen-year-old boy. “Go on, the Virgin Mary’ll give ya a blow job when ya die.” Manus wasn’t proud of his words. It was just the kid seemed so smug. As he turns to threaten Manus, his saintly little face changes. Aisling kept putting her little cardboard sign in front of their larger banner about the holy rosary. The police tried to move her but she didn’t budge. One of the anti-maskers snatches her sign off her, and they started chanting, “Pedo Scum! Off Our Streets!

    More of the anti-maskers crossed to the island. One man came for Manus. Looked like he was in his fifties. Manus tried to understand the man. On a personal level. Like, wasn’t he a bit old for this type of behaviour? Why was he going for Manus? What did he believe and why was Manus a threat to that belief? The man was staring at Manus. “You and me.” He was saying. “Come on.”

    Why was the man there? Okay, he didn’t believe government or the media. Understandable. But to think both government and big media could cook up an imaginary global virus? Well, that was going a bit too far. The truth was no longer incontestable for this man. And in the absence of incontestable truth, you can just cherry pick facts at random to make up any reality of your choosing. The truth is whatever you say it is. Our earth is flat. Holocaust never happened. There is no virus.

    Or perhaps he’d not proved himself a man, back when such concepts were proved by physical violence?  Did he hope to prove it now? And Manus? Why was he there? Had he, as a kid, run too often? And now figured he was in safe territory? At a place where he could and should make a stand? There were Gards all around them so, Manus saw no reason to engage with this man. Not on his level of “Come on. You and me.’

    Inflamed to violence by the mere sight of Manus, the man didn’t care about repercussions. He was a hero for his cause, and lurching forward, made a swing. Fist connected with neck, but Manus didn’t hit him back. Not that he was a pacifist, but multiple experiences with law enforcement officers, who tended not to be left-wingers, had led him to believe that should he hit back, it would be Manus arrested.

    As the Gards stepped in, the anti-masker’s friends pulled him back. “He’s just punched me, and I want him arrested for assault!” Manus declared but the Garda did nothing. He repeated his statement and another Garda engaged with him, if only to order he “Move over there.” “No!” replied Manus. “Maybe racism is acceptable to you, but it’s not to me.” At this, the Garda turned his back. Another bloke on the island made a beeline for Manus, who touched a female Garda on her arm to say, “Excuse me, but that man is about to punch me. And when he does, I’ll hit him back. So, don’t arrest me afterwards.” The Garda came between them. Identifying Manus as a cause of disturbance, one big fat Garda dunted him out of the road. The counter-protestors parted before the protest had ended.  Touching elbows with them, Manus said, “Good to see you comrades!”

    When he got home, he was weary.

  • Public Intellectual Series: Religion

    Say it to me if you have something to confess
    I was born on the wrong side of the tracks like Ginsberg and Kerouac
    Bob Dylan, Key West (2020)

    Notwithstanding my loathing for fundamentalisms of all strands, I have always preached from a gospel of love, or at least a form of reason that leads to moderation in the Public Intellectual Series.

    Ideas about religion and the existence of God based on reason, such as that articulated by Thomas Aquinas, must yield to the facts as these emerge. The ideas contained in natural philosophy – with its harmony of the spheres – available to a medieval monk has been superseded by the discoveries of the Enlightenment that brought the hitherto unknown field of science. Yet, this yielded quantum physics that permits a layer of uncertainty, wherein the nature of an object may shift depending on one’s perspective.

    The ‘uncertainty principle’ seems to have been anticipated by the Ancient Greeks, as Albert Camus explains in his essay ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948):

    Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred, nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything into consideration, balancing shadow with light.

    This he contrasted with ‘Our Europe’ which:

    off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of disproportion. She negates beauty, as she negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason.

    We may find, therefore, an excess of reason breeding dogmatism that gives rise to unreason, or even scientism. Thus, the subtlety of the Greek mind, now reflected in the thinking of Jurgen Habermas, permits a space for religion in the public sphere, but certainly not the rule of religion, or a single moral vision.

    An awareness of the limitation of reason, or really any one individual’s capacity to reason in a divinely inspired way is not, however, to dismiss the true nature of objective facts in a given situation. As Karl Popper (‘On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance’ (1962)) points out:

    belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case; and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right.

    Therefore, dogmatism of all kinds – especially couched in religious terms –  should be excluded, but we must also accept facts insofar as we are capable of ascertaining these, using the intellectual tools inherent in science and history that have served public intellectuals through the ages.

    Extremism of Our Times

    Where divine revelation is treated by true believers as factual is truly dangerous. Thus moral philosopher Professor John Finnis assumes the existence of one God ‘the Almighty’ to be self-evident, leading to a fixed moral view that does not allow for diversity, or even mild eccentricity, within our private lives.

    In recent writings, Finnis illustrates a dominant extremism of our time. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman. Therefore, gay marriage is not a good. Furthermore, marriage involves sexual congress, which has as its aim the production of children. Not sex for the sake of having sex, but only for conception. Thus, Finnis considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful.

    Some argue that he derives such normative conclusions about homosexual relationships from factual premises of heterosexual physical contact. Moreover, in the civilised world, many of the practices Finnis sanctions are considered by homosexual and heterosexual couples both within and outside of marriage as part of normal sexual congress and behaviour.

    The issue highlights how sexuality has warped contemporary Christianity, negating more important issues around the real suffering of human beings in this world, a concern that Pope Francis is at least beginning to address. In his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti (‘All Brothers, 2020) Francis condemns, ‘a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies … creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests.’

    Shaming Culture

    The advent of shaming culture as opposed to a justice culture, involves the demonisation of others and is a reversion to social primitivism, akin to burning witches at the stake, or René Girard’s idea of the reconciliatory victim or scapegoat. It is allied to a rise in Populist hysteria and religious mania.

    The leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K., Jonathan Sacks, in a balanced way seeks to exonerate religious belief from its critics. In God’s Name (2016) is a defence of religion in terms of the values it produces. Sacks rails against extremism, a theme he revisits in Morality (2020), where he outlines positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good.

    Jonathan Sacks

    Christian jihadism encompasses such forays as the invasion of South America by Spanish Conquistadors and the Crusades, leading to mass slaughter and the destruction of indigenous civilizations. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in oil.

    Sacks equates altruistic evil with the thinking within the neoconservative group, wherein we are considered good and those outside our group are evil. This leads to the arrogant assumption that we are doing it for ‘their’ own good, killing multitudes will pave the way for democracy.

    Crusades, whether modern or ancient, are invariably cloaked in the garment of religious ideology, but are really about resources and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. They also still permit mass murder. The connection between religion and unbridled capitalism has long been evident, and is, alas, woven into the fabric of institutionalised religion.

    All of these examples are truisms historically about the search of the Church and its believers or fellow travellers for gold and money – the Kingdom of Mammon, as opposed to the Kingdom of Heaven.

    Both Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily being pointed at Islam. That religion of course provides graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists.  All of this is unconscionable, but much of the rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens’s greatest intellectual error was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq.

    Power Vacuum

    So what is the root cause of Islamic extremism and Evangelical and Catholic extremism?

    Blame is rightly attached to the misguided and illegal wars in Iraq, and going all the way back to the 1920s, the creation of client regimes in the Middle East. The unintended consequences of the occupation of Iraq led to a power vacuum in Syria, which gave an opportunity to well organized religiously inspired militants.

    This, however, was the culmination of long-term trends within Islam, wherein successive generations had been radicalized by preachers who exploited a loss of identity in the face of Western consumerism, segregation and enduring poverty.

    In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education, with all too great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.

    Primarily, however, this extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies, as far as they are concerned, even self-immolation.

    But the secularist response in France especially – under the aggressive application of laïcité – to ban or regulate the wearing of the burka or nijab, upheld in the European Court of Human Rights in the SAS case, only appears to inflame the issue. This is really little more than a sideshow to a wider collapse in values.

    A Group of Women Wearing Burkas. Afghanistan women wait outside a USAID-supported health care clinic, Afghanistan, 2003.

    As the wheels come off the economic system as we know it, and where people are searching for words and expressions to convey their understanding of the withering of societal bonds, extremist Christianity has stepped into the void to provide solace.

    In the United States, at least, we are seeing an unholy synergy developing between Evangelical Christians and right-wing Catholicism. Far-right demagogues, led by Trump, have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism, liberal elites, or straight socialism – all emanating from the decadence of the mixed race cosmopolis.

    This a descent into the racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. It is a product of a dangerous dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This is the demonisation of those we disagree with, which is also evident in social media vilification.

    Real Suffering

    The suffering expressed through religion is the genuine sigh of oppressed creatures. In Marxist terms, the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    In a world of poverty, of diminishing resources and human degradation the appeal of an afterlife is obvious. What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves a veneer of protection against the unbelievers. This leads to isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the chosen people from the disaster they have inflicted on others.

    The pandemic has led to the recrudescence of a millenarian ethos and sense of doom that is creating a society not dissimilar to that found in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, enforced against men and women alike.

    The philandering Donald Trump is merely a front man for larger interests, who control the puppet on the chain. He dances to the beat of the dark money of the Republican Party, appointing the Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was his parting gift.

    End of Days

    Another hallmark of the present distorted religious influence of the neoliberal world order is the denial of climate change, and the employment of post-truth reasoning – the denial of objective facts underpinning the rule of law as Karl Popper saw it – to justify this.

    The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his simple and illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, closes his account, with a reflection on how centuries of discoveries affect an understanding of ourselves. While generally positive, one stark passage stands out for its relevance to the challenge of addressing climate change.

    I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.

    Carlo Rovelli

    This exemplifies the difference between a man of science and objective facts, and those of a fundamentalist bent that place mankind atop the pyramid of Creation.

    More terrifying than where Ravelli places us in the grand scheme is the end of days preacher who cannot countenance that we may indeed be just an irrelevant blip on this Earth, but instead sees the Earth as something created for us to plunder and exploit.

    Cognisant of this threat, Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’ He has deliberately corrected many interviewers who mistakenly stated that in fact he said it was the most dangerous organization in the world today.

    Chomsky also mentioned in a BBC Newsnight interview that there has to be connection between the denial of science, and active attempts to undermine it, with the belief of nearly 40% of the American public that the Second Coming will occur by 2050.

    Why would a deluded mind bother saving life and civilization, when it is prophesised that it will all be over soon? Christian End of Day’s logic, or lack thereof, is not so prevalent in agnostic Europe at present, but the breakdown of the social order through the austerity shock doctrine, and now the coup de grâce of the pandemic, leaves the continent exposed to those same forces, which may be articulated in an equally millenarian scientism that sees human beings as vectors of disease.

    Loss of Meaning

    In a 2004 essay Václav Havel foresaw much of what we now find in a piece called ‘What Communism Still Teaches Us,’ describing ‘supposed laws of the market and other invisible hands that direct our lives.’ There remains an abject lack of humanism in neoliberal politics and society, comparable in certain ways to Communist totalitarianism, not least in the brainwashing of the young through solipsistic social media.

    With the loss of religious forms, however, many living in modern technocratic societies experience a loss of meaning, and even a moral void. The social structure of religions fostered close relationships and inculcated a sense of community, as well as charity, the protection of human dignity and a commitment to public service. The Bible injuncts kindness towards strangers, and to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, which also derives from Aristotelian philosophy.

    To rectify contemporary problem such as poverty and environmental degradation, undoubtedly we need to shift from a conception of ‘I’ to ‘we’ as Sacks argues.

    In The Godless Gospel, Julian Baggini also calls for a form of religion shorn of hatred for our age, where we develop personal and social goods through deeds not pious words. Through this we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion, a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth. Above all we should try and do as little harm as possible he asserts.

    All of these are good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion lacking in moral clarity.

    Thus from a secular perspective, Jürgen Habermas understood how religion engenders social integration, and is the basis for communicative action. As far back as 1978 he argued, from an agnostic perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. Those of faith must learn to communicate reasonably, which means the renunciation of violence and extremism. We must learn to talk and communicate our differences, agreeing on facts to ground the rule of law.

    Pope Francis

    Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preaches tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice. This has largely been stripped of the condemnation of sexuality and sexual expression evident in his predecessor John Paul II.

    Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s message is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican, and he does not go the way of John Paul I, or ‘God’s Banker’ Roberto Calvi, found hanging from Blackfriars bridge in 1982, just outside the site of my Chambers.

    Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.

    If inequality grows any further – amid ever-greater accumulations of wealth – then neoliberalism may well give way to neo-feudalism. Viewed in this regard it is easier to understand the potential for an alliance between church and capital in subjugating the masses. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the earth which has led to a scorched earth approach towards environmental regulations that will ultimately impoverish us all. For too long Christianity has married the exchange of goods with the exchange of gods.

    Scopes Trial

    In parts of American Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is accorded equal weight and validity as Creationism in schools. Children are taught that the world was created by God the Almighty in the space of seven days.

    It’s been a long time coming. In the Scopes Trial of 1925 – where a High School teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism – the legendary American attorney Darrow anticipated what happens when a society abandons reason altogether.

    Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!

    In a period of declining belief in a broad liberal education, and where the art-repeneur has taken over from true artists, there is a desperation for something to cling on to, whether Creationism, neoliberalism or even scientism. We are living in an age of pervasive ignorance, which can be traced to our putative higher educational institutions, where students are taught to believe and comply. Or as Foucault would have it, punishment is becoming internalized through control vectors.

    Lost in all of this is the message of Christian socialists such as Pope Francis, Sacks, and even their ideological fellow-traveller Habermas. This is a form of Christian decency that reflects the needs of human beings battling for survival in an increasingly hostile environment, where adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, education, housing and even dignity are denied.

    Thus organised religions appear to be experiencing an existential battle between the neoliberals and Christian socialists. Exclusionary family values that are a hallmark of religious neoliberalism conceal a corporate existence and controlled sexuality. Its tenets are designed to diminish any radicalisation among the young.

    But let us hope a new-found empathy with the Wretched of the Earth can emerge, in Catholicism at least under Pope Francis, and perhaps other Protestant more tolerant faiths. This would reflect the moderation and human decency of public intellectuals in this series such as Jürgen Habermas, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Edmund Burke, all of whom in their own ways rejected the moral absolutes that lead to human degradation.

    No Time to be Making Enemies

    On his deathbeds the great Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778) was asked by a priest in attendance to renounce the devil. Voltaire considered this advice, but approaching the pearly gates he decided against doing so: ‘This is no time,’ he said, ‘to be making new enemies.’

    At this stage in our history it is important to be open to all belief systems, including Christianity in spite of its diabolical history. Christianity, and other religions, must confront a dark past, but can provide moral guidance in the face of a culturally dominant neoliberal cost-benefit analysis of life. Dogmatic secularist should concede that there are lessons to be drawn from religions. These may help generate a genuine brotherhood and sisterhood among human beings to confront the real evil in this world.

  • Niall

    Dublin, 2015

    Four hours after his head gets kicked in, he’s wheeled into the A&E on a gurney. Splayed, supine, he looks like a crash test dummy; blood soils his tracksuit. Only the saliva oozing from his lower lip tells them he is human.

    His breathing is shallow but steady, hence why none of the nurses see him. They think he’s sedated from the morphine. He is still dazed, but resurfacing. He keeps his eyes shut and listens, sneaking the occasional glance around the room to which he’s been brought. Best not draw any more attention, he tells himself.

    The corridor they leave him in reeks of piss. He reckons it always does. Dried pools of blood splatter the floor; someone has recently tried to haphazardly mop them up. Bodies and scarring lie in both directions; from outside, the wail of sirens say yet more will soon come crashing through the door, battered and gory as he. Wearing blood-speckled gloves, nurses ricochet between patients, administering drugs and wrapping bandages. He hears a shrill bleeping noise followed by a monotone voice crackle over the intercom: “D reg to resus, please.” Passing around packing gauze or tubes, orderlies and paramedics shout to one another. A girl lies on the gurney next to his, frayed mini-dress blanketing her fractured limbs and her face smeared in mascara. On the other side, a man is awake, his shirt torn off and draped in IV wiring, a white tube bandaged to his wrist; he looks as if he is doing his best not to scream. Opposite them are a pair of lads covered in blood; some aul’ one wailing that she wants to go home, the drunk in the next stretcher making stifled gurgles, while a phlebotomist with panic in his eyes works hard on pumping his patient’s stomach. Wailing fills the air as a senior doctor stands at the centre, clipboard in hand, under the laser-like arc lights.

    He doesn’t expect anyone to take much notice of him, because in the grand scheme of things, his injuries are minor. He’s probably one in a thousand that night at St. James’ Emergency Ward, and with a number like that, far more pressing concerns than his bloody mug go on around him. In rooms like this, blood is everything. It has to be preserved, or rinsed clean of whatever disease threatens to pollute it. And yet, for the nurses and medics, like antibiotics or stale coffee, it remains just another part of the job.

    He must’ve been unconscious for hours. At first, he wonders what difference the initial injection makes. He is quiet, probably the only quiet patient in the entire ward. The pain, an insistent throbbing in his head, thuds at a low intensity, unlike before, when it had been the sun and the moon, the sum of all life, a rogue wave flooding his body, burrowing into every limb and pore, robbing him of even the sense to scream out. Or was that just his hangover, stinging vestiges of the cider he’d skulled back at the hall? But to be able to breathe normally again was a relief.

    Niall Keane remembers nothing since he left the Dark Horse Pool Academy. He wasn’t brought here in an ambulance; that’s dead certain. Someone drove him here, in a van; someone whose face he can’t quite recall. No one knows he’d been out at the Dark Horse; not his ma or brother, nor even any of his mates. It might have been one of them who’d driven him here, someone who bolted the second they pulled up. But he shrugs that thought off.

    The hospital personnel aren’t worried about him dying. If they were, they’d have seen him by now, wrapped his head in fresh bandages like a teenage mummy, and sent him home. That’s a good sign. He thinks.

    He feels in his pocket; the solid square lump of his phone is a reassurance. Ma’s going spare, he just knows it. He sees her compulsively dialing his number and, once it goes to voicemail, leaving nervy, sob-wrenched messages for him to call her. The sound of his voice will calm her down, but only for a sec; she’ll bombard him with questions about where he is, and he’s in no humour for that.

    All the same, as he takes the phone out, he curses under his breath: the black screen tells him the battery is gone. More so than letting ma know his whereabouts, he wonders again who dropped him off here in the first place.

    Unmoved by all the chaos whirling around her, the senior doctor flip through her clipboard,. She has her eye on him. And with one eyelid open, Niall watches her turn to stride out toward the waiting room. None of the nurses seem to notice her leave. His vision is blurred; everything is unclear, fog-bound. Maybe she didn’t leave; maybe she hadn’t been there at all. He looks around; though he’s sure the noise in the room was close to operatic, he barely hears anything. Every agonized wail, every shout, every door-slam or slapping footfall from out in the corridor, amounts to a garbled drone in his ears.

    How the fuck did y’end up here, Horsebox? Who brought yeh?

    His brain swirls. He can’t concentrate; flares of light and sound, voices and faces he doesn’t recognize, drift and tangle through his skull like kelp, before sinking back into the ghostly murk of his subconscious. He’s unsure if he’s thinking to himself or babbling aloud.

    Well, sure, in a place like this, does it really bleedin’ matter?

    Damo’s voice rustles in his head. As it always does in moments of crisis.

    He wonders how many people in the ward will die tonight. No matter how hard the medics try, how much they inject or cut or bandage, he knows he’s sharing a room with a few soon-to-be corpses. Perhaps the nurses and medics know who’s doomed and who isn’t before they even set to work on them.

    But we’re all soon-to-be corpses, Horsebox. No-one gets a pass from tha’ queue.

    Rapid and fleeting, a shiver of panic, cuts through him: will he die as well? Can you die from a headwound that isn’t a bullet?

    So I believe, Horse. Depends on how much blood you’ve lost.

      How many others in the room have head wounds like his? Is he the worst to roll into the A&E that night? No, he couldn’t be. At least he’s sentient. He hasn’t forgotten his name. He’s not knocked out cold; the concussion didn’t kill him. But he’s going to vomit any second.

    It’s then that he remembers how he ended up there.

     

    *

     

    The usual shite of a Wednesday evening kicks off, but in a different place this time. The place being the Dark Horse, the time being after dark. It’s one of those pubs tourist manuals make a point of ignoring. Every county in Ireland has at least twenty of them. The boozers that time forgot.

       It’s a kip, an ancient kip. Despite the smoking ban, a tang of stale nicotine still ghosts it. Niall’s been inside three times already. It huddles at the end of Talbot Lane, an unwashed relic refusing to die well into the new millennium. Walking through its doors is like entering a filthier end of recent history, when people were masters at being skint and cheerless. The same five or six aged pissheads sit slumped over their pints, on any given night, with only the ticking of a clock for company. Des, the place’s lone, unsmiling barman, eyes all newcomers like he’s a hawk. The Clancy Brothers or Wolfe Tones or something similarly lachrymose blare harshly from the antique jukebox. Beams of dusty, slender light ooze through the lace-curtain window. The cigarette machine by the jacks glimmers for a euro. Cracked photos of everyone from Connolly and Pearse, Michael Collins, JFK, Archbishop McQuaide and Yeats, along with grainy, archival shots of Dublin from the early twentieth century, clog the wall like a hall of withered fame. There’s no cash register; an old jam jar half-full with coins and rumpled banknotes, placed beside the beer taps, waits for the night’s earnings.

        It doesn’t even have that aura of dangerous glamour that such places reputedly have; it’s just a kip. ‘Strictly over 21s!’ reads the sign above the entrance, but no-one’s ever bothered asking for his ID. One look inside tells him that things like late licenses and IDs aren’t a major priority in the Dark Horse.

        The more Niall is warned against going in there, the more his curiosity grows.

       It’s the pub’s poolroom, below in the converted basement, that gets him. It’s where the younger crowd goes; it’s where the billiards and dartboard are. They stay here after hours. They congregate at the table, arrange the red and yellow balls in a perfect triangle under the lamp.  Once the cue clacks off the white ball to scatter them, the game starts in earnest. Of curlicues, ricochets and pensive maneuvers, scores are vigilantly kept. Like sharks in a tank, you and the lad you’re playing against circle each other, choosing your targets, knowing the others will watch your every move. Every time you sink a ball or miss a shot, roars of approval or mockery bounce off the walls like a war-cry. But pool isn’t a yob’s game – you need to have a plan. The games usually go on long after midnight, closing time is never too strictly enforced, and there are usually girls around.

       No girls tonight, sadly. On a Wednesday, there never are. Felt most keenly by the lads, their unaddressed absence is an overwrought dearth that sinks into each boy’s bones, sullying the air like the cigarette smoke they exhale.

       Niall’s surprised there is no Garda van parked out across the way. Though he’d never admit it, the lads intimidate him with their pugnacity, their arch and profane banter, their predatory laughter at seeing him in their zone. They’re not unlike the lads at school; but these are men. Lords of the late hours, afraid of nothing and no-one. They make most of the cunts he has to call peers look like choirboys. Under their words seethes real danger, and he wants to join in. Finally, he dares himself to head out there, slipping down the laneway like a man going undercover.

       On a crisp March evening, bag sagging off one shoulder and resolve in his eyes, he stalls it into town on a DART. He gets off at Tara Street and shapes across the river to the northside, cutting down the side street which winds past Marlborough Lane, gulping from a can of Karpackie. Sporting his hoodie and Reeboks, he looks as dodgy and feral as any seventeen-year-old with no street smarts can hope to, in that part of the city. His phone’s switched off and no-one knows he’s here. The few mates he does have probably think he’s at home, spliffing it up by himself. His ma thinks he’s at evening study; she’s better off being left in the dark.

       In a week’s time, he’ll be sitting the first of his mock exams for the Leaving Cert; he’s done fuck-all study, and has fuck-all intention of starting. The life’s being slowly but surely sucked out of him with each day he spends hunched over one of the flaked and graffiti-slathered desks, trying to get his head around maths, geography or whatever they advise he fills his brain up with, in order to pass the year. Evening study, past papers, CAO applications; his head is wrecked by it all.

       Mainly, he does it for his ma,; to keep her happy and off his case. But if he were honest with her, in a way he knows he never can or will be, he’d say he wants out, that school’s a waste of time, that he’d just love to get hold of an Uzi and several pipe bombs and detonate the place, teachers and students alike, out of existence. He loves his ma, but since Damo fucked off to Australia, he’s now the centre of her world. All her hopes and dreams rest on his shoulders.

      “When you’re older, son,” she’ll say, eyes proudly glazed, “you’re goin’ to be huge. Brains to burn, so y’have.” And the way she says it, elated and satisfied, as if she’s witness to a heaven-sent miracle, really gets on his wick. Like it’s a sure thing, done and dusted. If he’s heard her say it once, he’ll hear her say it until his ears bled. These past two years, she’s been like an Antichrist about the whole thing. 

      Her thinking is, he’ll go on to pass his Leaving Cert, then get into college and earn a degree guaranteed to land him a good job, with generous wage packets and a good pension at the end of it. If this happens, he’ll be the first in the family to ever go to college. What he’ll actually study when he gets there, he hasn’t a clue, and nor does she. English or Art or History, maybe, because they’re the only subjects he’s ever been any good at; they’re also the three most useless degrees he can hope to pursue. Or so Damo always tells him. Better off doing Engineering, or Computer Science; at least they’ll get him somewhere job-wise. 

       But Niall doesn’t want a job. Or good marks, or a decent Leaving, or prospects, or any of that shite adults keep insisting he should want and have. He’s a different future lined up for himself.

      He isn’t like his brother Damo, who left school in fifth year and immediately went to Sydney for work. Ma had high hopes for him, too; but Damo was too thrill-seeking, too hungry for adventure to  remain in Ireland and was always more outgoing, more eager to throw himself into the scrum of life than Niall had ever been. He probably laughed to himself when the recession hit; the only man in Ireland to do so. It gave him the perfect excuse to get out. Most of his mates expected him to leave soon; and Niall was no different.

        After overstaying his visa, Damo was living illegally in Sydney for two years; he’d ended up doing three years on FIFO work in Perth. A few of his mates had already been arrested and flown back to Ireland when their own visas were overstayed. 

        Most of this he told Niall late at night over Zoom; Niall’d watch the fuzzy image of his brother on the laptop, the day-glo sheen of Damo’s work-jacket stinging his eye. At the other end of the world, his brother is just up and getting ready for work. The conversation always ends with him having to leave. Damo treats these sessions like he’s a Delphian master-guru, sacred and sage, and Niall is a pilgrim seeking his counsel. 

       “I don’t wanna come back, man. It’s buzzin’ down under,” he’d declare, in the cheerfully defensive tone he took when trying to avoid explaining himself. “I’m free out here. And sure look, you’re wasted on the aul’ 9-to-5. ’Course, the aul’ 9-to-5 doesn’t even exist anymore, but how and ever. Y’aren’t meant to be bolted up in some shithole office, firin’ emails back and forth all fuckin’ day. That’s just the dead end, man. No, you’re better and smarter’n tha’. Smarter than me, you. Better off bein’ your own man. There’s fuck-all else y’can ever be.

       “Lemme ask yeh somethin’, Horse,” he says, lacing up his work boots. “You’re a big boy now. Have y’no plans for yourself, no? No job lined up for the summer, even?” 

      “Ah, man, don’t start this again, I’m not in the humour,” Niall wants to snarl, but even over the crackly monitor, Damo’s stare commands a response.

       He says, “Dunno what I want to do. Maybe head out there and join yeh. Lookit, I’m just tryin’ to keep Ma happy. It’s not like she’s got anyone else. I’m goin’ for the grant to get in as well –”

       “Y’are in yer bollocks,” Damo cuts him off. “Ma lives in a fuckin’ dream world, man. They’re only exams, like. They won’t get yeh anywhere, not anymore. I know they tell yis all this, that yis need to get by in life. Believe you me, they fed us the exact same shite in school, but lookit. I’d no Leavin’ comin’ out here, but here I am, workin’ away in the sun with any number of mots to ride on any night of the week. Spendin’ cash like a mad thing, me. Would y’not join me, Horse?”

        Niall peers at the screen. “Y’know I would, man. But Ma needs me around.”    

       “Y’need to break free of her. For yourself, like.”

      “Ah, but I am. I’ll be headin’ off to college, sure. It’s what I want to do.”

     “Is it, though? Or has Ma just been drillin’ into your head all these years that it’s what y’want?” 

      Niall’s teeth clamp. Deep down, there’s a germ of truth to what Damo says. But Niall won’t give him the satisfaction of staying quiet. He tries to keep his voice even and low, so as not to wake his Ma in the next room.

      “It’s far better than fuckin’ off to Australia when things get rough.”

      “Here, I’m glad I fucked off! I’m after makin’ a shaggin’ life for meself, Horsebox. What was I at before this? Beyond pissin’ about on the streets of Dublin? No cash. No future and no fuckin’ prospects. You tell me what’s worse, yeah? Gettin’ the fuck out ’cos there’s nothin’ to live for, ’cept waste away on the dole, maybe?” 

       His breathing crackles over the monitor. Niall gives him a moment. “So why’d y’leave?”

      “To improve, why’d y’think? For the fuckin’ scenery?”

      “Well, no, but – ”

     “Everyone I was in school with either fucked off like me, or else stayed back there to rot. Hopelessness, man, it’s a disease. Bad as the fuckin’ cancer. I was browned off in Dublin; I felt like an eejit with no life. I was an eejit with no life. And I wasn’t alone, believe you me. People act surprised that the suicide rate’s goin’ up. Doesn’t surprise me at all. Y’lose hope, so y’do. Ma’s kitchen knife starts to look like the right answer when y’can’t see nothin’ ahead. But not me. I didn’t want to rot at home, hopin’ things’ll get better, ’cause we both know they won’t. I’ve more experience now. And you should start doin’ the same.” Then, before signing out, he flashes a gleeful little smirk and asks: “So, ’mere to me, Horse: how’s the oul’ LC gettin’ on? Studyin’ hard, yeh?”

      This time, Niall decides to cut him off. He leans forward and says, casually as he can: “Tell us, d’you know where I can find Oren Collins?”

      The smirk disappears. “Whajusay?”

     “Where’s he? I’ve a thing I’d like to run by him -”

     “Here, you’re not to be hangin’ ou’ with him. He’s a fuckin’ dirtbird, tha’ chap!”

     “I thought he was yer mate.”

     “Yeah, was me mate! ’Til I got wise to him. Man, look, stay away from the likesa him. He’s not worth the shite on your boot heel!”              

      It’s at that point that Niall hits the ‘end call’ button and logs out.

     

    *

     

    “D’yeh know who he is?”

    “No. Never seen him before. He’s just some kid’s after ambled in. Shouldn’t’ve even been there, like.”

    “But y’brought him here in the van.”

    “Course I did. Coulda been my kid, man. Or yours, or anyone’s. Couldn’t just leave him there to bleed, like.”

    “Yeah, true enough.”

    “But man, every night in tha’ fuckin’ place, a few digs do be always gettin’ dished out.”

    “Who else was there?”

    “Oren fuckin’ Collins. He did this.”

    “Well, of course he was, and of course, he did. Holdin’ court, as per fuckin’ usual.”

    “And sure, when is he not? Only the king of tha’ kip, so he is.”

    “Not after tonight, he won’t be.”

    “He’s been in a bad way recently, from what I’ve seen. Ever since his brother died.”

    “Mmm. Heard abou’ tha’. Topped himself, didn’t he?”

    “He did, yeah. And it was Oren who found the body.”

    “Hard thing to do. To bury someone tha’ young, I mean. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

    “Doesn’t excuse any of this, though.”

    “Jaysus, no.”

    “Gas thing is, he says he’d be doin’ fine, though, tryin’ to just get on with it, y’know? Not that I’d ever ask him about it, mind.”

    “That was how long ago now?”

    “The funeral was only a few months back. He wasn’t at it, I heard.”

    “Fuck. And how was he tonight?”

    “Ah, sure, y’know Oren. Full of piss and vinegar. Givin’ it loads tonight, so he was. More’n usual, if I’m bein’ honest.”

    “How do you mean?”

    “Well, he was playin’ against Niall, and he must have missed a shot, ’co Niall started takin’ the piss out of him. Only havin’ a laugh like, anyone could see tha’. But, before y’know it, he gets a dig in the head with the bottle.”

    “Fuck. Are y’serious?”

    “Yeh.”

    “That’s just not on.”

    “I know. Oren’s after goin’ too shaggin’ far this time. He was always well able to look after himself, but it’s not a man he’s after bottlin’ here. It’s a kid, man! And that kid’s now lyin’ in that A&E over there, with his head in fuckin’ bits.”

     

    *

     

    His arms shake in tiny, fitful jolts. He can’t stop or still them – they move on their own, mutinying against the rest of him. Niall’s blinks are rapid, in an attempt to clear his vision. Again, his skull has begun to boil and, as if in time to his ever-quickening heart, that  scar on his cranium throbs threatenening to unsew the crumbly, discoloured stitching that like a track-mark, trails down his face. Along with his body, the gurney’s rocking slightly as his fingers quicken and curl into claws.

    Now unglued, Niall swims  in and out of an ether where colour and noise bubble and erupt at him. If he was even able to scream out, in fear, more than any kind of pain, he  doubts it’d make any difference.

      Say that again, y’little shitebag. I fuckin’ dare yeh.

      He knows that voice, and never wants to hear it again, least of all in his head. Reaching  up, he  runs a shaky finger over the wound where his flesh was punctured. Beneath the gauze, he feels the dried crust and somehow, the bandage has come undone so that the blood is soaking through. Life is seeping out of me, he thinks. Like bilge from a ship, torrents of vitality ooze down his jaw, in oily teardrop, and with every heartbeat, another wave of it leaves him.

    I’ve no problem breakin’ your skull, pal.

      Fighting isn’t his bag, and, he reckons, never will be.  He’s always known better than to fire his gob off. Enough lads in his year have gotten their heads kicked in for less. He keeps to himself. For the full six years he’s been there, school is still a jungle. The lads rule the tarmac roost, smoking out in the lane and getting their pick of the girls. During lunch, when they’re all off playing football on the waste patch behind the prefabs, he retreats to the library, barricading himself among the shelves and dust-gathering spines where he knows no-one’ll find him. A will to survive drives him to do this, hammered into him by years of taunts, threats and clenched fists. He knows what an easy target he is, what ripened prey he makes for the hounds. He’s sick to his back molars of being afraid, of walking the gauntlet formed by their stinging tongues and casual cruelty, of always falling for whatever wind-up they drop. He’s determined to demonstrate, if only to himself, that he can run with the lions. The real hard men, the ones that even his schoolyard tormentors fear. Any funny looks and they’d gladly dance on your head. All of them sound as a pound one minute, raring to hit you a box the next. Too much hassle hanging out with them, his mates’d say. Fuck them all, he thought. Half of them’ll be locked up or dead before they reach thirty.

    Do yourself a favour, son. Don’t slag off a fella y’don’t bleedin’ know.

    What the fuck did he say to set him off? Had to have been something. Niall knew he wasn’t being cheeky; he hadn’t been trying to make a show of Oren, he was only having a laugh. Oren had a temper, but he wasn’t a headcase. At least, not before tonight he wasn’t. Niall knows none of the lads really like Oren very much, but Des lets him hang around the Dark Horse because he keeps them in line. Des is a decent skin. No way would he have let Niall lie there and bleed.

    By now, the ether is rolling over him. The nurses don’t notice him drift off. He wonders if Oren even said half the things he remembers him saying.

     

    *

     

    More than anything, he could do with a spliff. His brother’s words thud through his skull. He clears his throat.

         “Fuck up, Damo,” he says aloud.   

       His nerves crackle steadily; he wishes he’d a few cans more. The Karepckie wasn’t enough. He suddenly remembers to slow his footsteps, let his arms hang more freely by his sides, and loosen his schoolbag’s buckle. Even with the gargle in his veins, he doesn’t feel any braver.

      Down the lane, the Dark Horse looks like it’s waiting for him. A red-gold neon shimmer bleeds from the doorway, flanked by garish signs of ‘Strictly Over 21s!’ and ‘BYOB’. Niall is glad no smokers huddle outside. His eye is drawn to a battered Honda 600, padlocked to a nearby pole. He knows that bike; knows better than to go near it. 

      The hand painted sign tacked to the entrance grabs his eye: a horse’s silhouetted head against a burnt-gold background, flanked by two pool cues crossing one another, and the place’s name stenciled in bulky, Germanic lettering: Dark Horse Pool Academy. The low pulse of grind music throbs in his ears, like a heartbeat. It gives him little spur to linger.  

       Niall glances up and down the lane, alert for anyone. He makes for the door, aware that somewhere above him, a security camera is monitoring and storing away his face, his clothes, his shuffling movements, before he stops in his tracks.

      He finds himself standing there for a long time. He keeps his eye off the bike. Once or twice, someone walks down the opposite direction; seeing him on his own, in the soiled flicker of the hall’s entrance, and they pause, before carrying hurriedly on. Each time, he tries to catch their eye and hold it; they glance warily at him before quickening their pace. A junkie shambles past and eyes him for a second before shuffling back off into the nighttime crowds.

      He’s prepared for tonight. As Damo’d say, “Never go anywhere without a plan.” There’s only one way to get in with Oren – shoot a nifty game of pool. Niall knows he couldn’t play pool or hit the rails for shite, but that’ll soon change. With more dedication and enterprise than he’d ever shown in his life, he gave himself a month to hone his skills. Then he’d seek out Oren.

       The excuse he spins his Ma is, he’s either still at evening study, or else staying over at his mate Dalty’s gaff. During that full month he claims to be studying for his mocks, he’s trawled the halls, every evening and weekend  well spent sharpening his skills. A quick google search tells him where all the best tables are to be found. He’s played pool in Ryan’s, Fibbers, and even the Hideout – but the Dark Horse is where the real action is.

      He keeps an eye on his phone, so he can get home in time without arousing suspicion. Away from her prying eye, he’d wander in and see who he could get. The money she gives him for food ends up going on a game or a practice session – if there were any takers to his offer. He just hopes she doesn’t get worried and ring up the school to see where he is – that’ll be the end of him.

      Both games and practice are vital. He found he enjoyed pool; took to it more naturally than anything else in his life. Most of the lads he played against were men, with jobs and lives and experience, some of them just in for a quick after-work gargle and a game. He ran balls, sussed out which tables were good for a hustle. At the very least, it was better than being trapped in evening study or gurning over Facebook at 3am.

      The owners realized he wasn’t looking to get served or even cause hassle, just to shoot a good game; they left him to it, mostly. Niall didn’t drink when out there – he knew better than to expose himself. Kept himself confined to Cokes or Fantas. He had to, especially in the Hideout. The men who played there took full advantage of the BYOB policy, downing several cans to his single coke. Niall noticed this made them less steady on their feet, and no matter what their billiards skill was, less capable of pocketing balls with quite the same level of dexterity. He knew better than to feel shame if he lost – everyone likes a graceful loser, after all – and it wasn’t as if they were playing for champion-hood. If anyone got suspicious, he could run for cover elsewhere. Better off if he stayed quiet. 

       Gradually, Niall began playing a better game. His natural reticence allowed him to sharpen his eye to an opponent’s skills: his means of maneuver with a cue, the speed of his hits, how he handled defeat or the fact that he was losing to a kid. Soon he was playing as many as five, six or seven games a night, and winning most, if not all, of them. They were quiet games, and he knew better than to bet with cash he didn’t have or to shoot his gob without being able to back up his claims. He learned and memorised both the written and unwritten rules of 8-ball and 9, one-pocket or bank. The glare of overhead lamps. 9-foot-tables. A ball that isn’t struck by a cue tip meant a foul. Feel free to shark if you want your head kicked in.

        He wasn’t aiming to be champion – it was just a means to an end. 

       Still, Niall knew staying quiet meant they’d distrust him – the fact that he looked younger than he was, not even shaving yet, still made them write him off. Anywhere else, this would have melted his head – but in poolrooms, it could be underestimated and used to his best advantage. Once or twice some hothead he’d just bet hauled him off the floor by his shirt-front, and others rushed to his defence.     

        Finally, he pours the dregs of his can into a drain, throws his shoulders back, and heads inside.

       There’s no-one behind the bar. The pissheads don’t look up; he trundles past them to the door at the far end, down the narrow stairway leading to the poolroom, Reeboks clumping on each steel-edged step. Music rises to meet him, Dropkick Murphys blaring raucously from a jukebox somewhere. He pushes open the door. 

       Standing in the doorway, carrying a tray loaded with empty pint glasses, is Des.            

       Niall halts.

       Des the barman doesn’t even blink as he takes him in. Of everyone there, he doesn’t look like he belongs. Niall expects any employee of the Dark Horse to be a tattooed, anabolic-fuelled gouger at the very least, with a hurley stick at the ready for anyone who dares order a white Russian, not this lean, balding fella of nearly sixty, wearing a black work shirt with the hall’s logo stenciled on the breast, who strains a little under the weight of his tray and stares hard at him and his schoolbag. Des’s specs make him look more like a scholar of Jesuitical philosophy than the night manager of a northside shithole; half-moon, they catch the dim light. Just over his shoulder, Niall sees the place’s logo again, the silhouetted horse and crossed cues, framed and nailed to the far wall. A pool table stands in the centre of the room, like an altar. Suspended above it is a low-hanging lamp, spilling a harsh radiance over its green, faded cloth. A cluster of lads are gathered at it, talking, laughing, sculling pints. Two are engrossed at the baize, several rounds in. Their abrasive chatter eddies in a cavernous, nonstop clamour.

      “Here, what’re you at?” Des barks.

      “I… I’m just here for a game,” Niall replies.

      “No games for y’tonight, kid. G’wan home to yer mammy.”

      Niall looks at him, hating the feeble, snivelling quality his voice has taken on. “Here man, I only want to have a game, like. Could y’not gis a chance, no?” 

      Des jerks his head with a sage click of the tongue. “Y’shouldn’t be down here. There’s nothin’ for you, kid. ’Mon, out.”

      “Ah, man, are y’serious?” 

    “Out, now! I won’t tell y’again.” The sudden ferocity with which the bald, spindly man speaks is quite jarring.  

      Before he can answer, Niall hears the squelched gurgle of a toilet flushing, as one of the lads skulks out of the jacks, wiping his hands on his trousers. He clocks Des at the door and pauses. He sees Niall, narrows his eyes.   

      “Here, are you not Damo Keane’s brother? Fuck me, y’are! How’re y’keepin, kid?”

      Niall looks up at the newcomer.

      “Alrigh’, Oren. Whatsa crack?”

      He doesn’t notice Des’ head whip back to Oren, nor does he see his look of concern as Oren approaches Niall, pumps his hand up and down in a single grasping shake.             

      “Jaysus, man, lookat ye. All grown up since I seen y’last.” Oren’s teeth flash. “Yer a right little hard man now, wha’? Last time I saw yeh, y’were barely outta yer nappies. Niall, isn’t it?”

      “It is, yeah.” Though he’d never admit it, a flicker of pride that Oren remembers his name hits Niall.

      “Nice one, kid, fair fucks. Great t’see y’doin’ your brother proud. So what’sa story anyway? What has y’down these parts?”     

      “Well, thing is, I was lookin’ to head down and just, y’know, have a few games. Don’t think yerman over there wants me in, though.”

       Oren stares at him for a second and then at Des, who’s watching with stern-faced discontent, and smirks: “Don’t mind him, man, y’can have mine, sure. And anyway, no better place for a game than here. I’ll be shootin’ a few balls meself with onea them tossers now in a sec. ’Mon over, sure, let’s get mouldy.” He turns to Des: “Here, Dessie, bring us down two pints there, will yeh?”

        It’s a command and not a question. Des walks upstairs, shaking his head. 

       “There’ll be some craic had tonigh’ kid, donchu worry.” Oren steps in, prowling for the table. Niall scuttles after, nearly tripping over a loose shoelace as he goes.

      “Gis a shot of yer cue there,” Oren barks at no-one in particular. One of the lads promptly hands him the one he was using.

     

    *

     

    “So, what happened after?”

    “Well, Oren stood over him, breathin’ hard like he was after runnin’ a marathon. He stared at all of us, and at Des. Next thing y’know, without a word, he drops the glass and legs it outta there like a hot snot.”

    “Yis were all reelin’, I’d say.”

    “Man, no joke, I kept askin’ meself, did he just do that? I mean, it just happened so fuckin’ fast, like. And lookit, I’ve seen Oren do damage before, but this is diff’rent.”

    “Then what?”

    “Well, Des, fair play to him, was the first to snap out of it. He checked Niall’s pulse and then he told me to put him in the van and bring him out here. No time to call an ambulance. Your man’s pumpin’ blood out’ve him like a mad thing. I was too in shock to say no. And anyway, if Des gives y’an order, y’ don’t be askin’ questions, y’just work away and do it.”

    “Well, fair balls for mindin’ him. And y’didn’t just fuck off after y’left him?”

    “Well, how could I, man? I’ve to make a statement of some description soon enough.”

    “Will the guards be in, d’yeh think?”

    “They will, yeah, for all the fuckin’ good they’ll be. They’re great for the aul’ secrets in that kip. I know I won’t be sayin’ a word to them.”

    “Will y’be here for much longer, d’yeh think?”

    “I’ve to make a statement. For when the guards arrive, like. And it’ll take a while. I just know it, man.”

    “Fuck’s sake…”

     

    *

     

    Oren slips a twenty-cent coin into the table’s side-slot and presses it. There’s a hollow rumble as the balls slide up to the return box from the collection chamber. Rollie tucked behind his ear, Oren reaches gently inside, the leather stitching on his forearm twisting as he draws the balls out in twos and threes, like plucked fruit. As he racks them up, Niall can’t help but notice he’s grinning at him, a whetted incisor jutting over his lower lip. In the lamp’s buttery glare, Oren looks like a leering, unshaven prince.

       “So tellus, how’s yer bro? Been fuckin’ yonks since I seen him last.”

       “He’s sound,” says Niall.

      “He still down under?” 

      “He is, yeah. Fucked off to work out in Sydney. Might end up havin’ to follow him out there someday soon. Leave this fuckin’ kip behind.”

       “But he’s never been back since, no?” says Oren, frowning. “Not even to visit, like?”

       “If he has, no-one told me.”

      “He still bummin’ lads?” Oren peers at him and grins, but a nasty crease tugs at his mouth. He snorts. “’Monly messin,’ Soldier. He’s sound, your brother. Always was.”

      “So I believe.”

      “And so, c’mere, it’s just you and him, yeah? You’ve no other brothers, sure y’don’t?”

      “I don’t, no. Just me and Damo flyin’ the flag.” 

      Oren smirks. “Good man. And c’mere, how long’s it been since I see y’last?”

      “Few years now, it’s been.”

      “’Wan outta tha’.” 

      Oren is on the reds, and he’s soundly beating Darren, the fella whose cue he took, who now leans on his own, keeping watch. Oren stoops warily over the top rail, elbow drawn back as he readies his shot. The cue strikes the ball in a clean, straight hit; there’s a clack and the ball rolls from the left cleanly into the corner pocket. Oren throws his arms wide messiah-style.

      “Ah, fuckin’ whopper!” he howls.   

      “Nice one, Oren, fair play to yeh,” Darren, beaten, says timidly.

      “Skills, bud. They can’t be bought,” Oren replies, moon-dancing back and forth.

      “Yeah, good man, Oren,” Niall tries calling out, but no-one’s listening.

      The others give various approving grunts and mumbles as Des returns with Oren’s round. Oren hands him a folded-up tenner as he places two frothing pints on the rail.

      “’Man, Des, you’re a star,” he says. “Dig in, Young fella.”         

      Niall takes his pint with both hands, ignoring Des’s owlish glance. So far no-one’s said a word to him, or even made anything of his presence, but Niall’s fully confident that, from now on, getting served in here should be a doddle.

      The poolroom smells of disinfectant, with the residual reek of BO hovering in the air. Des keeps the place in good nick. Every square inch is scrubbed and polished to the point of sparkling. From doorway to table rail to ‘Exit’ sign, there’s no dust or spillage, not a hint of a stain anywhere. Even the scuffed floorboards are well-swept.

        Niall sips his pint, grimacing at the creamy flow of wheat on his tongue. One or two lads, he notices, look his own age, which boosts his confidence a bit, but not too much. He listens to scraps of conversation: one of them loudly boasting about some Estonian bird he claims to have shagged in a hostel down in Kerry, another talking bollocks about joining the Foreign Legion, hardest bastards in Europe, maybe the world, while his mate scoffs and tells him to fuck off with himself.

      They shoot pool like they’re born for it. Some for cash, others for pride or thrills; there’s no sole reigning champion. Anyone might wear the crown. And if girls are there, which may well be the case later on, the stakes are acutely higher for everyone.

       Niall keeps an eye out, but especially on Oren. He’s dangerous, his own man. Always has been, ever since he hung out with Damo in school. Oren was in Damo’s year, but got expelled long before he even did his Junior Cert. Ma never liked him.

      Them and their mates used to get gee-eyed on cans up in Damo’s room. Niall remembers lurking out in the hallway, feeling puny and inane, wishing he could join in, the scent of hash and the sound of lads’ stoned grunts seeping from under the door as they played Xbox to the hammering boom of Tupac or NWA or The Game, or else madouaveh in the field behind the estate.

       Oren owns the Honda parked outside, but Niall remembers him tearing up and down that field on his old scrambler, a mucky roostertail spurting up from the grass behind him, its abrasive buzz echoing for miles. Now, it seems, he’s graduated on to even louder, shittier things.

      Oren was a mad cunt, even then; in the breadth of a spark, things’d go from grand to haywire whenever he was around. There were lads four, five, six years older scared of him. The few times Niall met him, he always seemed to have a new black eye. Once, he saw Oren headbutt one of his mates just for asking if he’d a spare smoke. He didn’t know if it was the lads’ tense laughter, or the blood jetting from your man’s nose when he finally picked himself up off the floor, that shook him more. The last Niall saw of him was at Deco’s going-away piss-up before he left for Australia, three years back; he ended up getting barred from the pub they were in, for hitting the bouncer a dig. A few months ago, Niall friended him on Facebook, purely, he’d told himself later, on a whim. That was how he first heard of the Dark Horse.

      Most lads in Damo and Oren’s year ended up either on the dole or jabbing their veins full of gear; Damo got out by going to Sydney; Oren somehow avoided it. Throwing shapes and headed nowhere fast, he couldn’t give a single flying fuck. In fact, right now, he’s sucking diesel. When in the Hall, he always is, but everyone knows not to set him off. The lads surround him while he hogs the table and banter, scabbing smokes or coins and always at the top of his lungs. He’s the closest the place has to a bouncer. Even when standing still, he’s either tapping his foot or darting his eyes around the room.

      Whatever deformed home life he comes from, he makes sure only his most trusted mates know. No Leaving Cert, no qualifications. He works part-time as a bike courier for one of the smaller city-centre firms, whenever he’s not happily pissing away his dole on mots, pints or the Dark Horse.

      And he’s only just in from work now: his biker jacket still clings to his torso like armour, even though the Hall’s roasting; his helmet rests on a stool.

      Niall takes a longer sip. He gasps and splutters, grips the bar to steady himself. Oren suddenly notices and eyes him with malign glee.

      “Here you, Youngfella, d’yeh fancy a game?”       

      All conversation dies down; it’s as if the volume of the place has been suddenly shut off.

      “Yeah, no bother,” Niall says, doing his best to sound nonchalant.

      “Fuckin’ whopper,” replies Oren, handing him a cue.

     

    *

     

    “Darren, is it?”

    “Doc, howiya. ’S he alrigh’?”

    “He is alive, fortunately -”

    “Ah, thanks be to fuck.”

    “- but I’m afraid he’s still falling in and out of consciousness. We’ve notified his mother and she’s on her way down here now.”

    “Ah, Jaysus. D’you know when he might wake up?”

    “I’m afraid there’s no telling with this kind of trauma. He took a fairly hard blow to the head.”

    “I know, sure. Wasn’t it me who brought him here?”

    “Well, yes, of course. Anyway, I just want to inform you that you’re not yet free to go. I have a few forms I need you to fill out first.”

    “Will the guards be along, d’yeh reckon?”

    “They usually are, in cases like this. They’ll want a statement off you.”

    “Ah, here. They’ll be a long time waitin’.”

    “Why’s that?”

    “I was just told to bring him here. I saw fuck-all with what happened him.”

    “But weren’t you on the premises when it happened?”

    “I was, yeah. But I was in the jacks. I saw nothin’ after tha.’ I swear.”

     

    *

     

    “Alrigh’ Ginger, how’s tricks?” one of the lads slurs in his direction as he pockets a yellow ball. 

      “Grand, y’mad cunt, and yourself?” he hears himself holler back. The words just slip from his lips, clean and blunt and natural, as if he’s been one of them all his life. He doesn’t bother waiting on the surly reply; he’s not going to prance in and fire his gob off right away.

      Meanwhile, Oren’s giving it loads, his concentration divided between the game and the row he’s having with Darren about recent Irish history. He’s switched from Guinness to cider, and talking faster and louder. Niall chalks his cue, waiting for his shot. His own half-drunk pint, gone flat, lingers on a nearby counter. So far, Oren’s barely acknowledged him throughout the game, instead addressing the entire room. 

      “The Irish brought terrorism to the fuckin’ table, boys. Invented it, we did. There’s ragheads out in the middle of the desert right now usin’ Irish methods of blowin’ shite up.”

      “Yeah, themselves,” some other cunt says and they all laugh.       

      “Fuck up, you. Here, it’s my shot.”

      Oren takes his measure. He shoots well, with the cheery confidence of a victor. He’s impossible to shark. Knows every trick, and how to counter them. Even when arguing with Darren, he sinks balls with a fluid, crackshot ease. For his part, Niall reckons he isn’t doing too badly himself. Still and all, he’s happy to let Oren win. If only this once.

       “Two shots to you, soldier,” Oren says grudgingly, as his shot misses.

      Niall steps over, sees a stray yellow ball that lies over the right. He knows to keep his eye on it, but he’s more aware of Oren circling nearby, about to abruptly laugh or whistle or break into harsh, tuneless song. He leans in and cuts it. The ball reels in a slow, steady arc, somehow doesn’t collide with any of the others, and plunges headlong into the right side pocket. He gives himself a second before leaning back, his face calm.

      “Good one, man,” says Darren.

      “Yeah, fair play to yeh,” one of the others says.

      He doesn’t know if they’re acknowledging a decent shot or muting their approval, but he does his best not to grin.

      Then he hears his own voice, reedy and alien in his ears, say: “The mighty Oren Collins, gettin’ his arse handed to him by a kid. Never thought I’d see the fuckin’ day.”

      There’s a split second of silence. Oren’s jaw hardens. And then, out of nowhere, the others break their shites laughing.

      “This the beginnin’ of the end, boys?”

      “Didn’t see tha’ comin’.”

      “Won’t be showin’ his face in here again, that’s for sure,” giggles a fat lad seated at the table’s far end.  

      “Shuddup you, y’thick,” Oren spits. “Sure y’can’t even hit off that shaggin’ rail, never mind get the hole!”

      “Oh, d’yeh mean like when y’got your hole with tha’ fat bird outside the Czech Inn? Lovely big tits on her, and tha’ was it. Must’ve been like ridin’ a fuckin’ whale, man!”

      “’Least I got me hole that night. Couldn’t get yer hole in a room full of halves, you!”            

      The others laugh, but Oren’s eyes shimmer dangerously. Then, out of nowhere, he smiles.

      “He’s righ’, though, boys. Even great generals have their defeats. Must be losin’ me touch after all, wha.” 

      He turns to Niall, who stays quiet. Darren’s eyes dart between them, and round the back, Des stops whatever he’s doing and paces warily out from behind the bar, his mouth tight. The laughter dies down.

       But all Oren does is grin, and hit Niall a dig in the shoulder, a little too hard.

      “Nice shot, Soldier,” is all he says, and angles his cue back over the rail.

      Niall stays quiet. He’s resolved to keep his mouth shut from now on. But he might be accepted, almost like one of them. He just doesn’t hear Darren’s sharp exhale of relief, or see Des upend one of the fake leather stools over the bar and fix one of its fractured legs with wood-glue, eyes narrowed to the task. He does it freely; no more pints ’til the game ends.     

      Oren’s gone back to laughing and slagging, but his eyes are still lit.

      Des disappears down to the cellar to change kegs. Now that he’s gone, the lads’ voices grow louder than they had been, their banter more urgent. Last call isn’t far off; a crackle of resolve sizzles in the air. One or two have since left in order to catch the last bus or LUAS home; but most stay, eager for whoever and whatever the night might bring. The Guinness and cider roil through his belly, and all Niall wants to do is gulp down more. Wherever the boys are heading off to next, he’s determined to follow.

      AC/DC’s ‘Hells Bells’ plays; its snarling riff twitches at his muscle memory. He jerks his head back and forth in rhythmic, mesmerized bobs. Oren just sips generously from his Bulmers, mouthing the words. The final shot’s now in sight. He draws his right arm back in a triangle, his left stays even and parallel to the cue. Once more he leans over and sends the white rolling to strike the last red. It misses by an inch and recoils back towards the centre. Oren grits his teeth. Niall avoids his eye.

      “Listen, c’mere to me,” Oren says, out of nowhere. “Be thankful for Damo, yeah? Be thankful he was there. We don’t all have brothers. And yours was a decent skin. D’yeh know what I’m sayin’, like?”

      It occurs to him that Oren is far drunker than he realized. He wears a feral expression, eyes radiant and bulging and locked on Niall, and his knuckles have paled as he grips the table’s upper rail. He breathes heavily, grunting almost, as if working himself up for something.

      Niall realizes he’s waiting for an answer, and tries to conjure up a quick reply.                

      “Cheers, man, thanks. That means a lot. Really, it does.” 

      “Yeah, no bother,” Oren slurs, softly. His eyes drop to the floor.

      The others ignore them. Oren is the only man speaking softly amidst a sea of shite-talk and invective. And right now, Niall’s in no humour for solemnity. He doesn’t know what’s come over him, but he suddenly takes a step forward, throws a laddish arm around Oren’s shoulder and cackles in his face:      

      “And, sure look, Damo always said y’were a shite pool player, anyway.”

      He turns away and sees Des, who has since re-emerged from the cellar, gawp in sudden alarm, his half-moon specs glinting as he sees something beyond Niall’s shoulder.

      But Niall doesn’t turn around in time, and he doesn’t see the others freeze in shock, or Daly’s head snap up in confusion from his phone. All he hears is glass shattering and boots thumping clumsily as Oren cracks his Bulmers over the table and charges. He hears the brief interim of silence as ‘Hells Bells’ finishes and ‘Unforgiven’ by Metallica starts up. He doesn’t see Oren, broken pint glass in one hand and a mouth full of venom, roaring at him to say what he just said again. The glass clouts off bone, Darren blurts out the single word “Jaysus!” and silence wafts like mist through the Dark Horse Pool Academy. All Niall sees is a brief, blinding starburst of light as he hits the floor.   

    Image used by kind permission of Graeme Coughlan (graemecoughlan@yahoo.co.uk)
    www.graemecphotography.com

  • Featured Artist: Aga Szot & The Icon Factory

    Why?

    A decade has passed since my individual and community artistic adventure began in Dublin. I very often hear about how lucky I am to have my own live painting studio, interactive installation in the middle of Temple Bar, but I know luck had very little to do with it.

    Ten years ago I walked those streets of Temple Bar and no one could have imagined it would be possible to walk those lanes. It was a NO GO area and even Dubliners did not walk there. They were identified as dark spaces, and with anti-social behaviour, public toilets and worse. There was no reason why people would choose to walk there.

    Now our art projects attract hundreds every day into the area, and are included in national tour guides, indicated as one of the most popular attractions in the area: an art centre which invites artists to participate in the project with its educational and civilised mission. We made this space safer and a better place for all.

    That involved less luck than a lot of hard work, determination, passion, love and seeing the possibility of creating impossibly. It was an idea and vision to create something out of nothing. That is what makes creativity so special. We did the impossible.


    As a young artist, graduating from a university with a Fine Arts degree I dreamed about white walls in beautiful galleries and my work being exhibited there. It turned out white walls were not my destiny.

    I ask myself ‘WHY’ the dark abandoned streets where no one would like to be? No white walls and lighted shop windows. Unconsciously, I decided to be inspired and say ‘YES’. After seeing what we did I now understand better why that was.

    Art is an action for me. I experience creativity as a development of new ideas in my charity and individual work. It is also an activity which makes a difference. I like my art and social engagement to be part of a transformation, sometimes physical, sometimes behavioural.  I pay strong attention in my work to connecting with the simple fact that art is part of our humanity, something which adds to us as humans.

    The purpose of art is to make us experience something: a feeling, an insight, a sense of connection to something greater than ourselves – that mystery that we are.

    This is what I need from art, and why the world would be impoverished without art and artists of all kinds.


    The visual images I create work towards an analysis of human relationships at different points of development in our life cycles. At any given time in the process of my work the individual paintings will be linked by a common interest, a thread of analysis that is stretched across a series of works. Taken together they pose particular questions – focus on particular phases of life, and draw attention to how relationships develop.

    Often my artworks contain scripts; short commentaries, antonyms or dictionary definitions. These are sometimes provocative additions to re-stimulate the viewer towards the analysis of a scene.

    The technique I use (oil, ink, collage) allows me to pose questions in each painting. Each painting asks the viewer to visually punctuate the image by inserting his or her own points or marks in the unfinished sentence that is the painting – the life depicted there.
    My paintings are both figurative and abstract, highly contemporary and visually arresting in my use of colour and black ink. They are intended to carry my ideas but are also open to many interpretations as well.

    Aga Szot Art Studio – Live Painting Studio Installation

    The motivation to create this installation came from some fundamental ideas I share with many artists and cultural commentators on the function and role of art for us humans. It also came from some specific ideas I had about the particular location in which it is set, that is Temple Bar, here in Dublin.

    Firstly I share the view with many others that art is vital for the soul. In creating or sharing an experience of art we learn a lot about ourselves and our world. Through art we connect with our inner selves and with each other. We form cultural bonds across a common human community dissolving inner and outer boundaries, boundaries of self and other, of race, place and time.


    I firmly believe that we need art in public spaces – not just finished art, but venues that de-mystify the artistic process, that offer non-artists the chance to share in that process. Many pop-up projects have existed in the city offering a brief chance for pedestrians to encounter artists at work. This installation, I feel, extends the opportunity for people to pause and interact with the creation of art – to reflect on this process and to experience what I’ve outlined as the benefits of encounters with art, that expansion of the self and soul, that breaking of boundaries, that chance to connect with things beyond ourselves.

    Aga Szot Art Studio is an idea to create an art installation, which is at the same time an art studio where I can work on a regular basis and allow people to watch me painting; a place where people can see an artist’s work environment; where they can see a work developing and coming into being in front of them. It is a special experience, watching artists at work, witnessing the process of creation.

    Watching an artist at work can, for both artist and audience, fixate us in ‘the amber of the moment’ and can offer a unique encounter, much more than a mere visual sight – an insightful experience.

    The Icon Walk & The Icon Factory

    By establishing an open-air cultural installation we have, for the most part, rescued the back lanes from petty criminality and improved the amenity of the entire Temple Bar area. The Icon Walk is a free open-air public art installation that promotes Irish culture and heritage.
    We use art as an educational tool and promote culture. Practice and media we use help us to communicate and encourage citizens to think differently about their environments.

    Our presence in the area has reduced crime through the use of Art/Culture and encourages a new role for artists in urban areas and society. The Icon Walk is affiliated with The Icon Factory, a not-for-profit artists’ gallery. The gallery promotes artists, provides training (internships), and experience to artists, and offers a chance for artists to display their work on The Icon Walk.

    The Icon Walk has been credited with reducing crime in the area, increasing visitor satisfaction and has been praised as offering a new educational tool to the many student groups that visit the city. As several of its larger art works feature Irish writers, of all genres, The Icon Walk has been endorsed by the city’s UNESCO City of Literature office as an important site for the celebration of Irish literary talent and culture.

    All Artworks present are by Aga Szot.

    All photographs are published by kind courtesy of the Authors.

  • The Public Intellectual Series So Far

    The Public Intellectual Series offers inter-disciplinary journalism, focusing on relevant authors and subject-matters crucial to negotiating our current age of extremes. We avoid specialisation, demystifying topics to provide readers with access to a broad view on contemporary challenges. Our aim is to contribute to a revival in the idea of the public intellectual, which we consider a necessary ingredient in a healthy body politic.

    A public intellectual is a generalist, who brings together disparate strands of knowledge with a view to placing events in context. At one level this is a Sisyphean task, but throughout the ages intellectuals have faced the same challenges as today, forcing heavy objects up steep hills only to see them roll down again the following day.

    The news media focus on the particular and the immediate sensationalism of soundbites, or the bric-a-brac of our existences, which occludes a wider field of vision.

    In authoring this series as a lawyer I have strengths but also weaknesses. I studied history and lectured on the philosophy of law for many years. I read widely and as a mongrel – half-Irish-half-Austrian, now resident in London, and formerly a student in the London School Of Economics and Harvard University in the U.S. – I am lucky to have enjoyed a wide variety of cultural, educational and workplace settings.

    I pride myself on tolerance and open-mindedness, although I am given to anger, and even despair at times. I am honouring a peripatetic intellectual tradition – of Stefan Zweig or even Walter Benjamin –  that is now in serious danger in these dark times.

    I am especially keen to preserve those parts of the European and global intellectual heritage under threat of extinction. I regard these as repositories of a civilisation which is currently being assailed by greed, religious fundamentalism and overly technocratic interference in our daily lives.

    The first article in the series is concerned with Albert Camus, and when I wrote that piece he was less relevant than he is now. Camus was a man of substance, and of independence and reason in the French Enlightenment tradition. Especially through his prophetic novel The Plague (1947), but also in book-length essays such as The Rebel (1951) he speaks from the grave to our troubled times. He endured great difficulties throughout his life for taking a stand against the fashionable extremisms of left and right, and the same middle ground moderation he occupied is being eroded today.

    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards
    Albert Camus in 1957 by Robert Edwards

    The second piece is on Edmund Burke, who is generally associated with the political right, but Burke’s conservatism was a reasoned form and, in common with Camus, he abhorred the Jacobin bloodletting. His generally benign outlook was distorted and ultimately abandoned by exponents of rampant neoliberalism – inspired by ideologues like William F. Buckley – which lies at the heart of many of the difficulties we now face.

    Burke urged us to conserve and preserve that which is good, and to oppose unnecessary violence. He emphasises the inter-generational compact and indeed the importance of protecting the environment, which both John Gray and Greta Thunberg (who also feature in this series) also embrace. It is the Burkean sense of community, including with nature, that has broken down.

    The third piece is on George Orwell and he is a crucial figure for our times. First, he demonstrates that when we have lost sight of the truth then all is lost, and he clearly understood the ever-present danger of totalitarianism developing through modern communication tools. His emphasis on uncluttered and precise language is also vital in our post-truth age.

    Noam Chomsky

    Another public intellectual notable, Noam Chomsky is also an adherent of fact over fiction, and an upholder of the truth in intellectual discourse. He provides evidence for how consent is manufactured, and truth distorted by the message managers. His views on how an evil triage of religious fundamentalism, post-truth and moral relativism espoused by the Republican party of America has seized control is all too relevant now. Alas, the recent ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court is another nail in the coffin of the rule of law.

    As a half-Austrian I have had some Germanic values instilled into me, and thus I turn to Jurgen Habermas for his crucial idea of communicative action, and preserving the salon culture now in danger of being lost forever. This is speech purged of ideology, or ideal speech. Habermas’s repugnance towards post-modernism is also shared with Chomsky and is the slippery slope to post-truth. His crucial understanding that technocracy is insufficient for good governance, and that technical solutions need to be mitigated by moral outcomes is vital to engage with in a valueless age.

    Michel Foucault is the acceptable face of postmodernism, in that his focus is on empirical – adopting historical methods, not absurd generalisations. In that sense he is truth-seeking and many of the ideas stand up to serious scrutiny. He seems to have anticipated the mass surveillance society now upon us in the Covid-19 panopticon, with ever more extreme and intrusive regulation of our intimate behaviours.

    Conference de presse sur l’affaire Jaubert. De gauche à droite: Pierre Laville, Michel Foucault, Claude Mauriac Denis, Langlois et Gilles Deleuze.

    Christopher Hitchens is a pivotal figure in that he pandered to the Republican right in his endorsement of the Bushman and Blair wars. Yet hIs hatchet jobs on Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and  Bill Clinton demonstrate his perhaps unrivalled journalistic capacities, especially in terms of exposing the hypocrisy of those who claim justification from a higher power. He may go down in history as among the last compromised but free intellects, willing to put his head above the parapet, while at the same making a living.

    Slavoj Zizek is somewhat of an aberrant choice in that some of his arguments are outlandish, yet he is gradually seeming less of an outlier, and a more central figure with his emphasis on how ideology, simplifications and message management are destroying the social fabric; and how a state of derealisation is upon us in a consumerist society disintegrating before our very eyes.

    E.P. Thompson also figures because of his focus on how individuals are rendered obsolete in our new technological age, leading to many of us being turned into Luddites. It is not a case of protest and survival, as adapt to the Screen New Deal or perish. He is vitally important in that within the Marxist tradition he offers an argument for legality, reason and the rule of law, which cements the bonds of a fragmented society.

    The multiculturalism piece is part of a more disperse band of papers focusing on how extremism has seriously undermined the tolerant consensus, and how imperialism foisted on developing countries by colonialists has given way to a form of internal colonialism, where all are being exploited and where racism is multifaceted and exclusionary.

    2/7/1986 President Reagan with William F Buckley in the White House Residence during Private birthday party in honor of President Reagan’s 75th Birthday

    The neoliberalism and neoconservative piece distinguishes neoliberalism with its endorsement of an unregulated free market from neoconservatism, a distortion of Burkean conservatism that can actually be traced to the extreme left. Neo-liberalism differs from neoconservatism in that, at least in theory, there is a respect for basic human rights and privacy, as emphasised by Lord Sumption stand in favour of basic liberties in the era of Covid-19. The ‘humanitarian intervention’ of the Iraq War was the apotheosis of the neoconservative project, and new opportunities are opening up for Blair and other neoconservatives in our present era.

    The environmental piece mixes different voices all warning of impending ecocide, and also explores the related themes of how our work conditions and the buildings we inhabit, as well as the lack of recreational spaces, are further dehumanizing us.

    The last three pieces will cover religion, socio-economic rights and feminism. I shall muster the courage to explore the good of Christian compassion, exemplified by Pope Francis and argue like Habermas for a bridge between secular and Christian decency. The social and economic rights piece is influenced by my teaching of the subject for many years. It will argue that the focus on civil and political rights in contemporary human rights debates, ignore the really crucial issues of our age (and any age) of affordable housing, debt relief, health care and securing a quality of life and a basic income of survivability. Finally the feminism piece, like the religion piece, will endeavour to assess how affirmative action has lost its way, and that gender politics has tended to distract from the more pressing issues of poverty and social exclusion.

    I dedicate all of this series  and words written and spoken over a number of years to my daughter Lara.

    Feature Image: A reading of Molière, Jean François de Troy, about 1728.

  • Aye, Dead On

    It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted.
    Aeschylus

    Protestations against James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ House on Usher’s Island being ear-marked for a hostel are rooted in cultural-bias and emotional-led egocentrism, and exhibit blatant hypocrisy among the denouncers. Artsy sentimentality can be the lesser evil, but it is still based on emotional, and, cultural biases.

    The Aeschylus quote above may seem naïve with society unsettled by the Covid-19 pandemic – anxiety heightened and spurred on by the populist mediocrity – but the reality is, these past twenty years, we have never had it so good, especially with plenty of food at our disposal, alongside acres of indoor comfort available from pulsating warm radiators, hot water galore, and lest we forget our electronic devices yielding Netflix.

    A festive analogy may be relevant here, the geese have gotten fat and inactive. Selfishness abounds. Narcissism and the age of the red-carpeted self are traits which are promoted rather than rationalised.

    A thought-tormented age

    This was perhaps anticipated in James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ from Dubliners (1914), when the character of Gabriel Conroy says:

    But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, well lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality of kindly humour which belong to an older day.

    Regularly trudging past ‘The Dead House’ on the banks of the Liffey I have noted its square, flat Georgian edifice. Its jet-black door. Joyce describes it as ‘the dark, gaunt house’.

    Over the past few years, it has come to light that this building on Usher’s Island is set to become a tourist hostel. This has led to cries of ‘cultural vandalism,’ but why were the same journalists and commentators silent when the building sat derelict for years? Unused. Unravelling and falling apart at the seams.

    For a year, I sat in on Readings of Joyce’s Ulysses in Sweny’s Pharmacy on Lincoln Place, and did not encounter a single Irish writer of any standing. At the end of each session a wooden bowl was passed around to the attendees, who would dispense a few coins to help pay the rent. No rich, successful Dublin-based writers were coughing up dough to keep this cultural institution afloat.

    The reality is that Dublin-based, and Dublin-enthralled, writers do not admit to themselves that Dublin has been swallowed up by the capitalist project. They are simply in denial.

    The cultural embargo comes out in plaintive cries of ‘How dare they wreck our heritage?’ from behind computer screen in comfortable homes. Keyboard heroes. One and all. It has to be said that some are indolent and sly, with one eye on anything Joyce-related to enhance their own reputations and further book sales.

    I do wonder – the Diogenesian cynic may ask –  whether many of them have actually deigned to read much of Joyce’s work bar a few short stories from Dubliners? They may want to be associated with his masterpiece Ulysses but are they possessed by it?

    Do they want to recreate the Cabman’s shelter under Butt Bridge or Bella Cohen’s bordello down on the now gone Tyrone street?

    In ‘The Dead’ itself, Gabriel’s face colours when asked about his writing for the Daily Express, a Unionist newspaper, and is even labelled as a ‘West Briton’ by Miss Ivors. In Dublin parlance a ‘West Brit,’ or ‘Castle Catholic,’ remains someone who would have no home-spun patriotic scruples in dealing with the mother colony for purposes of profit; the comprador elite of an ex-colony.

    How many Irish-based writers now have English agents, English publishers? How many have made their careers in London? More power to them, but the wedge of Anglo-Irish relations should narrow at least somewhat in the near-future. Here is hoping. Better to work together than at difference.

    ‘the dark mutinous Shannon’

    There is a great irony contained in Gabriel’s epiphany as he observes snow falling from outside of his hotel window in the closing monologue. He does not mention the Liffey, but instead dwells on ‘the dark mutinous Shannon waves.’

    In his biography of Joyce Richard Ellmann states:

    The fine description: “It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless bills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves,” is probably borrowed by Joyce from a famous simile in the twelfth book of the Iliad, which Thoreau translates: “The snowflakes fall thick and fast on a winter’s day. The winds are lulled, and the snow falls incessant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.” But Homer was simply describing the thickness of the arrows in the battle of the Greeks and Trojans; and while Joyce seems to copy his topographical details, he uses the image here chiefly for a similar sense of crowding and quiet pressure. Where Homer speaks of the waves silently dissolving the snow, Joyce adds the final detail of “the mutinous Shannon waves” which suggests the “Furey” quality of the west. The snow that falls upon Gabriel, Gretta, and Michael Furey, upon the Misses Morkan, upon the dead singers and the living, is mutuality, a sense of their connection with each other, a sense that none has his being alone. The partygoers prefer dead singers to living ones, the wife prefers a dead lover to a live lover.

    There are the true Joyceans who love Joyce for his unrivalled creative genius and dedication to his Art and more power to their elbows. Kudos my fair-weathered literary friends.

    A Hostel for Creatives

    What about it keeping it as ‘The Dead House’ by way of a Hostel? Let creative folk add their work inside: paintings. Musings. Writings. Musical nights. Don’t let it become a shell. A phantom dedicated to Joyce Ltd. The Irish Tourist mentality to wring money and promotion out from every Joycean occasion. He would really have detested that.

    Joyce’s attitude towards his ‘fatherland’ are perhaps best encapsulated in a memorable speech of Stephen Daedalus from Portrait of an Artist:

    I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.

    There are plenty of Joyce tributes/buildings in the city, including, The James Joyce Centre, on North Great George’s Street, Davy Byrne’s on Duke Street, and Sweny’s Pharmacy, on Lincoln Place

    Dublin is a bustling city. A garrulous metropolis. Where many, many tourists flock. No doubt they will return. Let ‘The Dead House’ vibrate and echo some of that human activity; and wouldn’t it be great if funds were apportioned to update and renovate some of the sagging grey buildings of Usher’s Island on that stretch of the quays?

    As Mary Jane says in the story that the coffin, ‘is to remind them of their last end.’ An empty, dilapidated house is a soulless thing. A crypt, devoid of life.

    And as Gabriel says in his speech to the rapt attendees of the party on Usher’s Island, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, it is not for the first time we have been gathered together under this hospitable roof, around this hospitable board.’

    And it wouldn’t be quite something to hand-over to the Land of the Living, salvaging something from the Land of The Dead?