Cassandra Voices

Category: Comment

  • RTÉ: Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams

    The significance of Joe Duffy (Liveline, June 26, 2023) insisting that Ryan Tubridy (from 12.30) “really is a unique talent” should not be overlooked.

    It isn’t simply that Joe and Ryan (along with a host of RTÉ’s household names) share Noel Kelly as an agent. It also reveals Joe’s interest in maintaining a near-feudal pay structure, rewarding “unique talent”.

    This seems to reflect Joe’s assessment of his own qualities, justifying a salary of €350,000 per year. Does it really take a “unique talent” to field complaints from parents about having to pay €60 for a child’s confirmation?

    Notably, Joe is fixated on maintaining high ratings for his show. As he put it in 2017: ‘One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up.’

    The Joe Duffy Show is a careful balancing act between heart-rending accounts appealing to an older, pearl-clutching, audience – often sparking moral panic – and outright absurdity or light entertainment (including ‘Funny Fridays’). That is not to say that the show never addresses important issues or even breaks stories, but the formula is clearly calibrated by experienced – and even talented – producers. That’s why other presenters seamlessly ‘take the chair.’

    Undoubtedly, the issues they choose to lead on arise from careful consideration. Joe doesn’t simply allow members of the public to have their say. This certainly seemed evident during the June 26 programme, as a succession of callers ‘spoke out’ in favour of Ryan Tubridy.  At a point when most of the country was up in arms, wagons were circling.

    Joe’s particular skill lies in not offending anyone that matters; this extends to the car company sponsoring his show, but crucially finds him reinforcing key government messages.

    For example, during Covid, rather than allowing for a reasoned debate among experts on the thorny question of vaccination policy, Joe chose to platform an individual claiming the vaccine was a ‘mark of the beast.’ Naturally, reasonable Joe rode to the rescue to restore our collective sanity.

    Latterly, he has weighed in with belligerent statements on Russia-Ukraine that align with the government’s response. Thus in May, 2023 he opined: ‘War only ends primarily when one side is beaten by the other side.’ As Mick Heaney put it in the Irish Times: ‘He’s so impassioned that callers with mildly divergent views struggle to get a word in edgeways at times. Talk to Joe? Not when he’s in this form.’

    RTE Kitsch: Room to Improve.

    Tubridy’s Unique Ability?

    During his 9am radio slot and as presenter of the Late Late Show Ryan was rarely overtly political, although he was happy to endorse a complimentary biography of Leo Varadkar, and chose to interview Micheál Martin on his penultimate outing as Late Late Show host.

    Tubridy plays a different role to Joe Duffy, which I have previously argued is essential to a distinctively Irish propaganda. This is to maintain the feel-good factor. Light entertainment on the airwaves provides a comfort blanket for all sorts of troubles, from Covid to the cost of living. Indeed, Tubridy’s relentless chirpiness recalls the Depression-era song, popularised by Bing Crosby: ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and Dream your Troubles Away)’

    Almost uniquely on RTÉ Radio 1 – the Ray D’Arcy show has a similarly vacuous quality – Tubridy’s programmes became an extended commercial: a kind of dream factory or Late Late Toy Show for adults. Rather than engaging in tiresome arguments over our response to climate change, listeners and viewers are subliminally guided into treating themselves to the latest car model. Smile, it’s easy.

    In this argument-free zone, the mask occasionally slipped, as where Tubridy suggested on the Late Late Show in 2018 that cyclists who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned’.

    How Irish Propaganda Operates.

    RTÉ’s Peasant Revolt

    A significant proportion of the Irish public ignore RTÉ, and aren’t in the least bit surprised by the revelations. The real outrage emanated from RTÉ staff who did not take kindly to their highest earner being over-paid in an underhand fashion. This arrived at a time when, presumably, many are feeling the pinch during an extended Cost of Living and Housing Crisis.

    RTÉ staff are a formidable and influential body that seem to have gained control of the news rooms, even if the likes of the Joe Duffy Show may be acting in the interest of Tubridy. The sans culottes seemed determined to eviscerate the ancien regime. Whether the defenestrations of Dee Forbes and Ryan Tubridy will be sufficient remains to be seen.

    The looming question is whether these RTÉ journalists, who appear to be led by Education Correspondent Emma O’Kelly are committed to a long overdue overhaul of public service broadcasting. This ought to entail an end to programming that serves as a vehicle for so-called ‘talent’. Notably, BBC Radio 4’s schedule does not contain a single programme that takes its name from a presenter.

    But RTÉ staff may have to be prepared to cut their cloth further. It is unclear whether public service broadcasting is compatible with selling advertising space.

    A fully state-funded model would also bring its own problems – as we witnessed during the Covid-era when RTÉ often became a conduit for government propaganda – but safeguards, as in the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, could be put in place. A slimmed down model – with a primary focus on current affairs and high culture – would surely represent an improvement on the kind of schlock – epitomised by Ryan Tubridy – we have become accustomed to.

    A Basic Requirement

    In 2017 I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request seeking details of payments by third parties to a number of RTÉ stars, including Ryan Tubridy, approved by RTÉ management falling under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance for 2017.

    The officer refused to divulge precise details, claiming this could be advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.

    He revealed, however, that ‘the total number of requests to engage in external ventures that RTÉ received was 122. Of that number, 114 were approved and 8 were refused. Of those granted, 97 were independent contractor requests and 1 was a RTÉ employee request. Of those refused, 7 were independent contractor requests and 17 were RTÉ employee requests.’

    That the vast majority of requests were approved, particularly to independent contractors, demonstrated that the organisation was taking a permissive approach on conflicts of interest.

    RTÉ claimed the majority of payments were for ‘non-commercial events, and mostly in support of charitable or other not-for-profit organisations’. In the absence of further details, however, it was impossible to verify this claim. If their work really was benign, why were they withholding the information?

    The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy would have been lost to commercial competitors if information entered the public domain. That contention may be questioned, in the case of Tubridy at least. After moonlighting with the BBC in 2016 Tubridy admitted he had found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would have represented a career regression.

    Most of RTÉ ’s household names found fame, and fortune, through extended exposure on RTÉ. The failure of Pat Kenny to draw a substantial number of his former listeners away from the station, when he departed for Newstalk, indicates most people are in the habit of tuning into the state broadcaster, rather than to listen to the unique talent.

    Transparency?

    This week I sent in another FOI seeking records (if they exist) of payments or payments-in-kind to the same ‘stars’, approved by RTE management falling under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance since 2017. It will be interesting to find out whether transparency is now given a higher priority than “contractual negotiations”.

  • Regulating Online Safety: Ireland v. U.K.

    U.K. lawmakers, unlike their Irish counterparts, are currently agonising over the Online Safety Bill 2023. It is far less draconian than the recent Irish Bill, which I recently assessed. 

    This is currently being reviewed in the House or Lords – a body not to be automatically dismissed. This archaic assembly is still capable of acting as a real corrective to the excesses of Parliament. They can delay and amend, but also, crucially, awaken moral authority to invite reconsideration, as with Tony Blair’s draconian anti-terror legislation.

    Thus, the U.K. is not passing a misguided and extremist Hate Speech Act, as in Ireland, but will continue to rely on its existing empiric and specific Protection Against Hatred legislation.

    The core differences between the Irish legislation and that being considered for the U.K. are as follows:

    First, the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill is primarily concerned with protecting underage minors from harmful content online. Assuming material is not subject to an existing criminal sanction, adults are allowed to be self-regulating, when viewing, for example, pornography or extremist political content. This is a sensible response that recognises that censorship can often be counter-productive, and treats adults as adults.

    Secondly, the U.K. is not establishing a potentially political controlled commission in Ireland which will fine, pressurise, and finally enforce compliance.

    Finally, the U.K. legislation is primarily concerned with taming the Wild West of the internet and social media, not established media. The Irish legislations targets all media.

    At one level this shows that the British state is confident in the conformity of established vectors of public opinion. But there is a world of difference between the rambunctious content found in, for example, the right-wing Telegraph or the left-wing New Statesman, and servile and increasingly anodyne content found in legacy Irish media. However, the Overton window is narrowing over on Fleet Street too.

    The era of Covid-19 has witnessed unprecedented conformity, censorship of scientists and censorship-by-omission. This dangerous trend recalls Clarence Darrow’s speech in the Scopes Monkey Trial in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school is apposite:

    Today it is the public-school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honour, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century weights burdened the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

    The British have a long tradition of being protective of intellect and permissible disagreement, which is, arguably, innate to Protestantism. They have never been subject to Savonarola figures, as in culturally Catholic countries like Ireland. Today civil society in the U.K. has not uniformly approved of a glossary of politically correct terms – as we seem to have in Ireland, where the Bishop’s crozier has been replaced by the corporate induction.

    The recent criminalisation of the mere possession of offensive materials in Ireland is akin to the banning of books from libraries in the U.S. Bible Belt.

    Yet remarkably, when the Irish government consulted the public over 70% of those who responded suggested they should not enact it. The rubber-stamping exercise had backfired. In response, Leo Varadkar airily claimed ‘the vast majority of people, don’t make submissions to public consultations’, meaning they’re ‘not necessarily reflective of public opinion.’ So why bother with the exercise?

    Yet it is clear the Irish establishment does not appreciate expert independent opinion when this diverges from an intended outcome – an opinion recently expressed by Supreme Court Justice Charleton. Intelligent opinion cannot be allowed to upset vested absurdity. There really is nothing worse than a so-called moral principle cloaking a vested interest.

    The ultra-censorious Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid offers an interesting case study in this context. He was like Richelieu or Talleyrand – more important than the monarch du jour. In Ireland today religiously ordained censorship has been replaced by proto-corporate social control. Fintan O’Toole’s is probably the leading ideologue in Ireland today.

    Sinn Féin’s unwillingness to oppose the Bill demonstrates a distinct lack of judgment, naivete and even a certain quality of turkeys voting for Christmas, as we the inexorable crisis in what Jürgen Habermas calls participatory democracy continues.

    I suspect that prior to the forthcoming 2025 election the new law will be used to nullify dissent, perhaps extending to opposition to support for the War in Ukraine. Sinn Féin may wish to become the arbiters of acceptable speech, but they must get into power first. That ought to have led to a cautionary opposition.

    It is of course necessary for the State to regulate the Promethean capacity of the internet and, in particular, protect children from harmful content. The question is how to police and monitor it. One solution that China offers is complete censorship. It is fair to say that Ireland is veering in that direction.

    The question is thus one of nuance and balance. The U.K.’s Online Safety Bill seeks to protect children in a variety of ways from accessing illegal content, by providing for risk assessments and modes of entry, including age identification.

    But the Irish act applies this restrictive approach to adults and established media and then sets up a commission of politically appointed individuals to determine whether the content provider is to be fined or prosecuted.

    The Irish polity has never trusted independent adults to form their own opinions, and the current legislation reflects that paternalistic attitude. A chill wind blows in the U.K. but a hurricane is raging in Ireland, with the steady denudation of what Habermas has called the civic space.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • The Dying Nerve of the Liberal Class

    Outrage is the currency of the times. Nearly everyone in New York City and a healthy proportion of Americans are by now aware of the latest outrage to command Gotham headlines: the tragic death of a mentally ill ‘black’ man on an NYC subway after being choked out by a ‘white’ ex-marine. Some said the victim died while pinioned in the arms of his attacker. Others said he died later, on arrival at the hospital. After questioning the police let the marine go, and he vanished into the night. He was later arrested for homicide.

    I italicize the words above because they are not factually derived descriptions so much as ideologically derived. Another common recap of the event puts it differently: A deranged criminal, arrested forty  times and released each time by Democratic government, threatened violence to innocent subway passengers. A heroic ex-marine approached him, put him in a headlock and, in UFC parlance, put him to sleep. The individual later died in hospital. Cause of death as yet unknown.

    A Jesuit priest once said that nobody argues about reality; rather we argue about our interpretation of reality. The former interpretation is the version of events embraced by most liberals, the latter by most conservatives and many independents. The liberals have come under intense criticism for their—some would say—extremist approach to policing, or rather not policing.

    In liberal capitals, prosecutors no longer prosecute misdemeanors, and hoodlums of all kinds are released back into the public despite their offenses. Police are decried for systemic racism. Immigration is embraced without question. Whites are reviled. Men are despised. Trans people are celebrated without rest and anyone who objects is deemed transphobic. Gender pronouns are enforced. Anyone expressing traditional values or ways of communicating are labeled with a battery of accusations, including being patriarchal, privileged, racist, sexist, and of committing horrid microaggressions. Social media has been aflame with predictable hot takes from both sides of the proverbial aisle.

    ‘A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.’ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

    Apogee of liberal decadence?

    It makes one wonder if we are witnessing the apogee of liberal decadence. A bonfire of ideals. Something of the kind that emerged in Weimar Germany before it fecklessly succumbed to the National Socialists. It seems the liberal ideology of multiculturalism and identity politics has run its course. As I understand it, it was first encouraged in the Sixties as a left counterbalance to the Communist left and, crucially, a form of progressivism that didn’t threaten capitalist profiteering the way Soviet socialism did. From there it progressed through the mild discomfort of political correctness to the full-blown hysteria of misgendering crimes.

    We are now witnessing a liberalism that is by many accounts excusing crime at the expense of its victims. A liberalism that is practicing an extreme form of social engineering, attempting to hire for diversity sometimes at the expense of merit, forwarding reparations legislation as the middle class drowns in debt, and driving immigration even as homelessness among citizens swells. In short, racism and sexism mean that minorities and women are blameless and ought to be privileged at the expense of whites and males.

    I am reminded of passages in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. After being extorted by a small-time crook with mafia connections, the narrator, Charlie Citrine, an effete and wealthy writer and intellectual, is subjected to regular visits from the criminal, who sees an opportunity to expand his horizon of scams. Citrine comments:

    Rinaldo was ticking me off for my decadence. Damaged instincts. I wouldn’t defend myself. His ideas probably went back to Sorel (acts of exalted violence by dedicated ideologists to shock the bourgeoisie and regenerate its dying nerve)…Maybe this was in part a phenomenon of modern capitalist society with its commitment to personal freedom for all, ready to sympathize with and even to subsidize the mortal enemies of the leading class, as Schumpeter says, actively sympathetic with real or faked suffering, ready to accept peculiar character-distortions and burdens. It was true that people felt it gave them moral distinction to be patient with criminals and psychopaths. To understand! We love to understand, to have compassion! And there I was.

    Later he notes that “Goethe was afraid the modern world might turn into a hospital. Every citizen unwell.”

    Seems Bellow—a Nobel Prize winner and one of America’s great pulse readers—had identified decadent virtue signaling liberalism in its infancy. In the name of progress, of multiculturalism and diversity as progress, liberals find themselves surrendering their class privileges and even the conventions of societal security and law and order since these must by definition not be civilization guardrails but instruments of oppression for which we, via our ancestors (sins of the father, in the old language), are wholly responsible.

    Saul Bellow.

    Reenacting Oppression

    What is lamentable in this capitulation is that the minorities—at least in the public realm—to whom bourgeois liberals are ceding every cultural corner seem to have few better ideas than to reverse and reenact the oppression itself, driving toward a mythical notion of equality of outcome that confuses inequality with unfairness. Many have critiqued the ideology, even a small minority of liberals, on a variety of grounds including evolution. Is this justice or thinly veiled vengeance?

    The entertainment industry is perhaps Exhibit A in this phenomenon. Hence the relentless insertion of minority actors into the old vestments of oppression worn by white people in the near and distant past. Blazoned across the marquee of my Netflix app is, “Queen Charlotte,” a beautiful black woman adorned in royal vestments. At once the show denies the historical accuracy of the British/Irish queen and repurposes the oppressed as the oppressor, as though it were some sort of social progress. It is progress in the cinematic universe, as people of color are now playing characters previously withheld for white actors in the interest of historical accuracy. But now fidelity to history has been discarded to advance minority representation in film and television. Soon we will march to make the executioners’ union more diverse. More females manning the gallows. Be careful not to misgender your local hangperson.

    In his prescient comments, Bellow notes Sorel and paraphrases Goethe. Then he cuts to the chase, hoping to explain the feebleness of liberal society, “Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor who said: mankind is frail, needs bread, cannot bear freedom but requires miracle, mystery, and authority.”

    Too true. One can trace the need for the miraculous to the liberals’ desperate embrace of draconian public health mandates and a swift demonization of anyone that resisted. As the hysteria of the pandemic has worn away, the public health response is increasingly seen to have been a series of disastrous dictates from compromised public health institutions beholden to amoral industry. A society of the unwell, gratefully heeding the guidance of benighted institutions. Goethe and Dostoevsky together confirm the worst elements of mankind, realized in the 21st century.

    Featured Image: A member of the Peruvian Army with a police dog enforcing curfew on 31 March 2020.

    Pandemic

    The pandemic revealed the open sore of liberal credulity, as it clutched the hems of the CDC and NHS and the other infallible acronyms of our salvation. But liberals had been trending in this direction for some time. The unforgivable original sin committed by unlettered philistines in flyover states and incalcitrant financiers in coastal megacities was the denial of Hillary Clinton of her rightful coronation—which was to be the capstone achievement of liberal Boomers of the old identity politics left.

    Elevating a black man and a woman to the highest rank in consecutive terms would have been the ultimate confirmation of their identity politics. In the wake of this catastrophic defeat for liberals (a catastrophe in their worldview), the bourgeoisie dropped their long-held antipathy for federal intelligence agencies and embraced the CIA, NSA, and DIA, taking their word as gospel in the prosecution of Donald Trump. How easily they forgot Cointelpro, the slaughter of the Panthers, not to mention their murky proximity to the deaths of both Kennedys and King. So the miraculous authority of the daddy state has once more taken hold of a significant portion of the population.

    It is a perhaps positive sign that on Rotten Tomatoes, Queen Charlotte scored an all-time low audience score of 1 percent (spilled popcorn icon) and just 11 percent with critics. Though it must be noted in fairness that the series has tripled its ratings among viewers since then, now subsisting at three percent approvals. Likewise, the disastrous Bud Light campaign using a deeply controversial minor trans celebrity has thus far engendered some $15.7 billion in losses. Thanks in part to its line of Pride month clothing for toddlers, Target has watched $9B vanish from its coffers in like fashion.

    But the mainstream media wages its holy war. Vogue furiously said of Queen Cleopatra criticism, “Let’s call it what it is: racism.” The Guardian said, “…the idea that you need a white actor is utterly insidious.” The New York Times couched the negative critiques as revealing, “Fear of a Black Cleopatra,” and offered its usual casuistic evasions by declaring nobody meaningfully identified as white in Cleopatra’s time. (Note, of course, how identifying as a race supersedes being a member of an actual race. Of course, liberals have long argued there is no such thing as race, much as transgender activists often argue there is no such thing as biology, aside from a patriarchal construct ginned up by mad misogynists.)

    Writer A.J. Kay nicely summarized the  movement as, “The rigid moral paradigm in which anything short of ‘affirmation’ is bigoted and hateful.”  It is an ideology of total affirmation of ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and women, behavior notwithstanding. Its flip side is the total condemnation of whites and males, behavior notwithstanding. If white, one’s only recourse is to don the sackcloth and ashes, fall to one’s knees, and beg forgiveness from one’s victims. Their response is immaterial. One must atone.

    This stridency is born of extreme ideological bias. We are no longer a united states. We now live in a society of seething ire beset by social division, with a doddering senior citizen in charge, a carnival barker awaiting a second act, a legacy of Camelot calling for a great renewal. Everyone angry. Everyone lost. Some blinded by despair, some by rage. The collapsing scenery is perhaps more Shakespearean than Bellovian, Recall the opening scenes of King Lear, “In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ‘twist son and father… We have seen the best of our time.” As an infamous communist once wrote: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

    Julien Charles is a critic, corporate drone, and New Yorker hoping to call attention to the authoritarian drift of states across the Western world, and the narratives promoted to gain consensus for such measures. He has been published in,  Off-Guardian and The Hampton Institute, among other publications.

    Feature Image: Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama among those in the White House Situation Room getting real-time updates on the May 2011 mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

  • Requiem for a Profession

    We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.
    Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York (2018)

    I doubt there are many career guidance counsellors now advising school leavers to become journalists. This is down to a serious depletion of the Fourth Estate, in Ireland and around the world, especially attributable to the technological rupture of the Internet. Investigative reporting is really being squeezed. This spells danger for our democracies, as power is not being adequately held to account.

    In Ireland Mediahuis, a Belgian company which owns a host of newspaper titles including the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and Belfast Telegraph recently announced a voluntary redundancy programme. It seems highly unlikely that any of these positions will be re-filled once “re-structuring” is complete.

    In 2022 the profitability of that company’s Irish operation fell considerably (€117.3 million to €65.3 million) from the heights of 2021, when the government’s Covid advertising bonanza was still in full swing. Although online subscriptions increased by 13% over that period, this does not translate into direct profitability.

    Journalism, as an industry, is still reeling from the original sin of publishing online in the early noughties. Once a legacy publisher – the Guardian under Alan Rusbridger in particular – broke ranks and put “the news” online for free, the rest were forced to follow suit, with varying paywalls, or risk irrelevance.

    Declining newspaper sales eventually brought an end to what now seems an Edenic era: when real journalism represented a viable career option for a young graduate, or even a person straight out of school.

    In America the number of journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[i] a pattern seen all around the world.

    As revenues have diminished workloads have increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. This showed an average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they previously enjoyed to perform their jobs.[ii]

    This gives rise to an unprecedented amount of what Nick Davies has defined as ‘churnalism’, as journalists become passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[iii]

    One suspects recent developments in AI will accelerate existing trends, and hollow out the industry further. A latter-day Napoleon might not now consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets, as government subsidies or a philanthropic grant might easily quell opposition.

    There are a few bright spots on an otherwise bleak horizon – such as the vibrancy of contrarian podcasting – but it’s hard to disagree with the pessimistic conclusion of ‘the last great American reporter’ Seymour Hersh:

    The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high costs, unpredictable results and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive law suits.[iv]

    We now encounter an industry captive to social media behemoths, who demand coin in exchange for boosting and blue ticks. In order to finance the few remaining full-time employees, legacy media relies increasingly on biased “philanthro-capitalism”. Moreover, without a steady sales income, the sensitivities of advertisers – including emanations of the state in the era of Covid – are also less easy to disregard.

    By its nature, investigative reporting struggles against constraints, legal or otherwise. Indeed, Seymour Hersh’s frustrations with his employers in the New York Times over a lack of support for his investigations into corporate America in the late 1970s led him to hurl his typewriter out an office window at one point.

    If current trends continue the practice of investigative journalism in legacy media will go the way of the newspaper boy and shorthand.

    Is it any wonder then that surveys show that less than fifty percent of the populations of the UK and US trust mainstream media? The figure for Ireland is marginally over fifty percent, but falling.

    In this country an aspiring journalist would want to be well insulated against poverty to challenge the dominant neoliberal consensus expressed through the print duopoly, and RTÉ. Having investigated any aspect of the state-corporate nexus a job applicant might have to field uncomfortable questions in any subsequent job interviews. Ireland is a small country after all, where whistleblowers are generally considered a nuisance.

    Those decent ones still working within the profession must maintain a steely reticence, recalling Seamus Heaney’s poem about ‘politicians and newspapermen’ in Whatever You Say Say Nothing (1975):

    ‘O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
    Of open minds as open as a trap,

    Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks’

    Successive revelations of corruption among elected politician by what is essentially a two-man journalistic operation at On the Ditch – backed by Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave – serves to expose the paucity of investigative reporting among the dominant legacy players, where hundreds of journalists rarely, if ever, land direct hits on the political class. Some are obviously frustrated in their efforts, while others are presumably selected for deference.

    Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s crass characterisation of the founders of On the Ditch ignores the existence of a revolving door in Ireland between media and politics that has long inhibited criticism.

    In Irish journalism today, a little investment goes a long way, especially when combined with a willingness to contend with defamation actions, and the more insidious methods that have been employed by emanations of the state in the recent past.

    We hear repeated warnings on RTÉ and in print about the dangers of conspiracy theorists and the purveyors of disinformation. This blithely ignores that, time and again, mainstream media has erred in its assessments and failed to provide an adequate account of “the facts”, let alone acknowledge their own internal contradictions.

    In Ireland the collective failings of the media came to a head during Covid, when a cabal of civil servants unlawfully usurped power from elected politicians and set in train an unprecedented spending bonanza. There have been few if any sustained investigations into how all that money was spent from a media that was awash with advertising revenue. Nor was there significant dissent from clearly damaging policies, such as extended school closures, or the undermining of previously sacrosanct civil liberties.

    Then the Covid crisis gave way to the Ukraine crisis – in what appears a continuation of the Shock Doctrine – and we find a fresh wave of manipulation seemingly designed to nudge a reluctant Irish public into acceptance of NATO membership. Even a token left-wing voices in the mainstream media often reveal themselves beholden to the dominant interest.

    It is instructive how many mainstream journalists seem inclined to undermine the case for neutrality, despite successive opinion polls showing the Irish public overwhelmingly wish to remain non-aligned, or militarily neutral. There are some obvious conflicts of interest, at the very least.

    It is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness in Ireland that as English-speakers we are subject to relentless propaganda, but are equipped linguistically to cut through the Gordian Knot.

    Key critical skills are, however, often lacking, in large part due to an Irish education system that has downgraded the humanities and social sciences, and which according to the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher must avoid producing ‘second-class robots’ – the obvious implication being that is exactly what it currently produces.

    Perhaps this explains the cacophony of bewildered voices on social media that lapse into outlandish conspiracy theories. False prophets like John Waters offer a vision of a return to de Valera’s Ireland, which was in many respects a miserable, post-colonial epoch with no place for youth or vibrancy.

    Foreign friends wonder why the Irish people are so passive when it comes to housing and securing other rights vis-à-vis the state and dominant corporations. The absence of investigative reporting and critical insight is crucial to maintaining this status quo, where young workers are fleeced by landlords, including REITs that barely pay tax in this country.

    Stopping the rot, and saving Irish democracy, surely begins with reforming the public broadcaster, which barely maintains the pretence that it conducts investigative reporting. Sadly, it has long been beholden to advertisers.

    The malaise has been brewing for some time. The director and author Bob Quinn in 2001 argued that RTÉ had become a:

    bloated and swelling corpse, feeding the increasing number of parasites but incapable of directing itself because there is no life, no human spirit to quicken it … This despite the efforts of bright young men in advertising to string gaudy beads around the neck of the corpse, the vile body, in an effort to persuade the people of this country that their property is still working on their behalf. It is not. It is simply the vehicle for the frustrated fantasies of ad-men, the megalomania of insane technocrats and the sanctification of the acts of a conservative government. If one looks closely at those lines, one will see evidence of the greatest sell-out ever perpetrated on a nation – by the nation itself, through its sons.[v]

    In the past there was at least one national newspaper that tended to go against one or other of the dominant centre-right parties, who have since entered coalition.

    Any country lacking a media prepared to conduct hard-hitting investigative reporting and which prevents divergent opinions from being ventilated cannot remain an independent republic, or a genuine democracy, for any length of time. Despite a groundswell of support for the opposition, removing the current coalition from power without a change in the media landscape may prove extremely difficult, just as in other European countries.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.163

    [ii] Ibid, p.181

    [iii] Ibid p.181

    [iv] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York (2018), p.5

    [v] Bob Quinn, Maverick: A Dissident View of Broadcasting Today, Dingle, Brandon Books, 2001, p.xxxiv-xxxv

  • The Cruel End Result of the Affair

    In the wake of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s extraordinary gaffe in Washington the day before Paddy’s Day, I‘ve been thinking about Monica Lewinsky, the intern he so crassly referred to in his ‘off the cuff’ remark.

    So who was Monica Lewinsky? What went on between herself and Bill Clinton, then the most powerful man in the world, and twenty-seven years her senior? And what were the outcomes for her. And for him.

    Back to when it all kicked off. She was a bright, freshly minted grad who jumped at the chance of an internship at the White House. She developed a ‘crush’ on Bill and soon the ever-opportunistic Mr. President was inviting her into the Oval Office for an increasingly intense sexual affair.

    Not only was the affair ‘reckless’ on his side, it took place as the Republican Party were gathering forces under a new, viscously partisan cabal made up of right-wing parliamentarians, partnered with a shadowy group of lawyers and key professionals known as ‘the Elves’, all desperate to bring this Democratic Love God down.

    This nasty lot had cosied up to a distraught young woman Bill had exposed himself to, and asked to, eh, kiss the mighty phallus.

    At the same time a years long, $70 million trawl conducted by Judge Kevin Starr into Bill and Hilary’s involvement in a land deal in Little Rock, had pretty much come to a dead end, when the circling sharks were handed live meat: forget the girl asked to kiss yer man’s pee pee, currently the President of the United States is shagging a twenty-two-year-old intern. In the White House.

    But, Monica Lewinsky was no longer in the White House. Her superiors, worried by this semi-blatant affair, had shunted her off to the Pentagon, where aged twenty-two, miserable, heartbroken and horribly confused – why wasn’t her powerful lover bringing her back to him? – she confided her woes in a tough older woman, named Linda Tripp.

    Tripp by name and Tripp by nature, the lovely Linda, surely spotting gold was to be made, began taping her conversations with the distraught young intern and doing the rounds of literary agents, and journos with dynamite tale in hand.

    It’s still blood chilling to hear this older woman advice a confused and clearly lovestruck Lewinsky to keep every gift the President has given her, make sure NOT to dry clean the blue dress with the President’s semen still on it, and not to worry, all will be well. All the while taping the conversations, leading the young woman deeper and deeper into a trap.

    Next, the judge who’d unsuccessfully spent millions trying to entrap the Clintons via a land deal in Little Rock, was tipped off by a helpful member of ‘The Elves’ as to what was going on.  Smelling blood in the water, he pounced. This could actually bring the President down.

    The sting took place one day in a shopping mall where Linda and Monica were to meet for coffee. Linda approached, flanked by FBI, and a terrified Monica was escorted to a pre-prepared upstairs hotel room where lawyers for Mr. Starr awaited.

    Monica, refused a lawyer, refused even a call to a lawyer, still unaware that all her conversations had been taped, and shared, was told she MUST co-operate fully and agree to wear a wiretap to entrap the President, and unnamed others. The alternative was years in jail. Jail perhaps also for her Mum and Dad?

    She was alone, terrified, mortified, suicidal.

    God love her, she refused to co-operate. She still loved Bill.

    Eventually, after hours of this travesty of justice, she was allowed phone her Mum.

    Her Mum, very sensibly, urged co-operation. Her Dad got a lawyer. Eventually she and her Mum were allowed creep off, battered and exhausted, to her Mum’s apartment where they holed up for months, the press camped outside their window.

    The big guns now turned their sights on the Pres.

    For months the American media, public, and Congress were convulsed  with fascinated horror as the details of the affair tumbled out.

    In thanks for her co-operation every snog, every orgasm, every breathless gush, pace Linda Tripp’s tapes, was made public. All detailed by Monica herself.

    The President eventually slithered free: ‘I did NOT have sex with that woman’.  Went on to finish his term, write a bestselling memoir, charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches, and keep his marriage. Hilary her hair coiffed to within an inch of its life as the drama dragged on, standing by her man: ‘He was a hard dog to keep on the porch’. The hard dog grinning away, delighted with himself, doling out settlements for hundreds of thousands of dollars for women he’d sexually harassed to women he’d outright raped.

    Monica meantime was universally pilloried.

    She became a national joke. ‘A slut’. ‘A Bimbo’. ‘An over sexed blabbermouth who couldn’t keep her mouth shut’.

    Even solid gold feminists and lefties like Gloria Steinem and Michael Moore got stuck in.

    She was fair game.

    For years, in her own words, she ‘floundered’. She tried celebrity schlock. Handbag design. Dieting endorsements. But eventually removed herself from the public eye. She went to the London School of Economics and did a Masters in Social Psychology . She decided to take control of her story. She co-authored a book. She supported MeToo. ¸She did a Ted Talk. She became an ambassador for anti-bullying, helping ‘survivors of the shame game’. She openly criticised the ex-President who to this day likes to cast himself as the helpless boy and she ‘just a buffet and he couldn’t resist the desert’.

    It’s a tale Shakespearian in its breadth. And tragedy. But she is the one who has  emerged with flying colours. The President, and sadly his wife, once a proud feminist, and the cohort of savage Republican lawyers and parliamentarians, do not come out of this so well.  Oh no.

    So perhaps next time Leo goes off piste in one of his speeches he might do a little background reading first. Make certain who is the butt of his jokes, made only hours after cosying up to Mrs. Clinton.

    Fuck the Patriarchy. Let the Patriarchs starve.

    Feature Image: Clinton with Lewinsky in February 1997.

  • Privatisation is the Enemy

    When writing about JobPath in 2016 I attempted to articulate something disturbing I had seen when the DSP appeared to collude with private companies to deceive welfare recipients into entering into contracts with the private companies, contracted by the DSP to deliver the JobPath “service”.

    I never quite articulated the more general problem of privatisation, and ended up ghettoised really in arguments about welfare and “willingness to work”, exactly as the propaganda of the time was designed to frame the problem. Interestingly, Ken Loach’s film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, which is concerned with the same anomalies in the employment activation system, also ended up similarly ghettoised in the welfare question.

    Corner-Cutting for Profit

    But during my research I noticed something even more sinister than state collusion with private entities duping the citizenry: for instance, certain private prisons in the United States – which were run by the same companies who ran JobPath – were shut down by the Obama administration when it was discovered that prisoners were suffering malnutrition and dying: due primarily to severe cost-cutting for profit on the part of the private companies.

    Similar scandals have emerged here with regard to the Direct Provision service, where services to the “clients” are cost-cut to boost company profits. As I write, a similar scandal is emerging with reports from Ukrainian refugees of inedible food in a migrant centre somewhere in the south of the country.

    Similarly, the cervical smear scandal is essentially also a result of cost-cutting as a result of privatisation, cost-cutting that has cost some people their lives, most recently Vicky Phelan, whose final message to us was to always ask questions, the very thing our mainstream media often fail to do.

    Privatised Armies

    Meanwhile, it has come to light that the Russian state is using private military companies to conduct the war in Ukraine. The arrangement is similar to all other privatisation deals, where a private company inserts itself between public money and the people in return for providing a “service”, depleting the quality of the original service to siphon off as much as it can for its share-holders.

    The difference in Russia is that the “clients” – in this case conscripts – are being used as cannon fodder. The US of course has labelled one of these companies, Wagner, a transnational criminal entity. But in a world of transnational corporate bodies that’s just the pot calling the kettle black.

    In the YouTube video by Johnny Harris, ‘Who got rich off the war in Afghanistan’, Harris reveals a system of military privatisation in the US that becomes a free-for-all of public-money-siphoning, under the pretext of war, for a plethora of private government contractors, with members of Congress even holding shares in some of the companies receiving the contracts.

    And as is often the case with such things, all the shady dealing is hidden and obscured behind innocent-seeming terminology. Like the old song, you say tomayto and I say tomato, it’s a case of you say security and I say mercenary.

    Harris’s video shows most clearly the manner in which corporate privatisation of state services is often little more than a system by which private entities, in collusion with rogue government representatives, conspire to basically ransack tax-payer generated public funds for the benefit of private investors.

    Put simply, why should millions of poor people have education, health and welfare benefits when a small gang of wealthy people could just as easily have all that money for their yachts, private planes and nose jobs? Hm? Makes sense to me.

    Pardoned to Death

    In Russia, to find recruits for the war in Ukraine the Russian government offered pardons to prisoners in the prison system who were then contracted as soldiers to the private military company Wagner, becoming the very essence of cannon fodder.

    For instance, it is a routine tactic on the front, according to captured Russian soldiers, for commanders to deploy troops of conscripted convicts into conflict areas in order to identify gun emplacements and other targets for their artillery. They achieve this by the simple expedient of allowing the conscripts to be gunned down, giving the commanders the opportunity to see where the gun emplacements are and relaying this information to their artillery.

    The point is, like the prisoners in the US private prison system, or the migrants wasting away in Direct Provision, or the people on trolleys in hospital corridors,  or the sincere young men pedalling furiously through traffic as delivery “companies” to make a buck that won’t even pay a rent, while the parent company grows fat and rich; the Russian prisoners on the Ukraine front, having made a pact with the devil in the hope of amnesty, are nothing and no one in the greater game of profit and loss. A great game being conducted by governments and those private interests, often the buddies of government officials, insinuating themselves between public expenditure and the people this expenditure was intended for.

    Privatised News

    Politics has moved far beyond the old simplicities of left and right, and is now firmly established as corporation versus the individual. This is perhaps why mainstream media in general seems so oblivious to the insidious creeping nature of privatisation into all corners of the culture, since big media is itself corporate.

    This is why privatisation is the enemy, because the traditional protector of democratic freedoms, the so-called serious mainstream media, is itself already corporate and privatised. Even when it emerged that the private companies contracted to deliver JobPath were slyly attempting to blur the lines between welfare and criminality, it was reported only by one rag tabloid, while the serious media looked away.

    Surrender and Conform

    Like that old movie ‘The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers’, privatisation invites you to surrender and conform, softly crooning that it’s the end of all anxiety and worry to simply give up on yourself and just get in line with the company’s needs.

    As Barbara Ehrenreich showed in her book Smile or Die, How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World corporate propaganda designed to disarm workers is knowingly implanted by the use of positive thinking and the concept of team-work. In work situations where precarity is the reality the worker is advised to be upbeat at all times.

    This insanity-inducing expectation has the effect of controlling potential worker dissatisfaction at source, saving the company the problem of individual grumbling that might lead to unionisation. This allows companies to lay-off workers by the thousand for profit, depending on market fluctuations, without any blowback. Such a culture sends workers the message that they are worthless.

    The only way out of this is to find a company to surrender to and hope that you get lucky enough to be kept, a situation that ultimately devours the human qualities of independence that make a culture healthy and productive and generous, the workers under the privatisation cosh of corporations becoming resentful of those dependent on welfare.

    In this way the systems of privatisation consume all the good in society and in people. All the virtues that created the society becoming little more than the raw materials the corporations feed off.

    Feature Image: Direct Provision centre at Lissywollen, Athlone, in 2013.

  • Climate Change: What’s Driving us Crazy?

    Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018) by the recently deceased French philosopher Bruno Latour points to a conspiracy theory perpetrated by elites since the 1970s to conceal the true nature of climate change.

    Latour argues the intervening period, associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ‘was initially marked by what is called “deregulation”, alongside ‘the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities.’

    This coincided, he says, with another phenomenon less often stressed: ‘the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change’. He defines “climate change” in broad terms as ‘the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives,’ rather than simply the climatic consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, as the contemporary environmental challenge is commonly reduced to.

    This broader definition of “climate change” therefore encompasses ecological constraints – the material conditions of our lives – which even the most vociferous denier cannot gainsay, as well as other readily ascertainable phenomena such as pollution and nature loss.

    Latour continues, ‘It is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone.’

    He contends: ‘they [“the elites”] decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally.’

    Thus, ‘From the 1980s on the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others.’

    He offers the stark conclusion that any observer of social media can attest to: ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.’

    Dominant players in the fossil fuel industry were undoubtedly aware of climate change by the late 1970s, and developed communication strategies designed to confound the public. Through their risk analyses, leading investment banks – representing the real elites – would surely have been privy to such information that had been circulating since the 1960s.

    Latour is correct to assert that since the 1970s inequalities have spiralled to the advantage of these elite ruling classes. However, his book fails to anticipate how canny operators among the elites – while preparing boltholes in remote locations – shifted approach on climate change

    Rather than ignoring what had emerged as a scientific consensus on the need to find alternatives to the extraction and use of fossil fuels, elites recognised mouth-watering opportunities for further wealth accumulation from renewable energy.

    Thus, investment portfolios were diversified, and bets hedged. It hardly mattered that technologies branded “clean and green” could still have devastating environmental impacts, or lead to new relationships of dependency in developing countries. In this re-alignment, companies create halo effects around products through greenwashing strategies. This explains the unprecedented attention to climate change we now see across mainstream media.

    The belated embrace of environmentalism – once the preserve of hippies – by elites also distracts from the urgent need for structural adjustments.

    The delusion of elite-led reform is sustained by a compromised and sycophantic media, reminiscent of the fawning courtiers of unaccountable monarchs. But all the indicators are that reforms will be cosmetic, as successive emission reduction targets are not met.

    Lacking “a common world”, where resources and opportunities are shared equitably within countries and internationally, populists may point to the hypocrisy of a system that permits “vertiginous” inequalities. Under private ownership, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables yields profits for the elites, but may impoverish many who are already living on the edge.

    Since Latour’s book, much abides, but much has changed too. The apparent “symbol” of our collective madness, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 Presidential election, while other populist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have also exited stage right, for the time being at least. But inequalities only increased during the pandemic, when trust in science was undermined by profiteering.

    The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, alongside simmering US-Chinese tensions over Taiwan, indicate the era of globalisation has come to an end. In this new edition of the Cold War, conservative, authoritarian leaders are pitted against Western governments dominated by elites that appear to be profiting from another crisis.

    Environmentalists ought to recognise that we are facing a nuclear winter, worse even than the impact of climate change, if the Ukrainian-Russian conflict escalates, and support attempts to broker a negotiated settlement. Moving forward, a new global compact is urgently required to address environmental challenges and rampant inequality.

    The environmental movement should develop a more nuanced understanding of the social and political forces ranged against meaningful reforms in the West. To develop, as Latour puts it a “common horizon” – and overcome collective madness – in the face of climate change and inequality, democratic governments must act to reverse the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s, and in particular assert control over a highly profitable renewable energy sector.

    Feature Image: “Rebellion Day” on Blackfriars Bridge, 2018.

  • Covid-19 in Ireland: Why and How?

    Did you a struggle to understand and navigate your way through events surrounding our response to Covid-19 in Ireland?  Did what at first appear to make sense, as a reasonable and decisive reaction to a dangerous virus, seem, over time, to become increasingly absurd?

    Even cursory examination of the data shows large inconsistencies in our response, which at the very least warrants further investigation. The facts and primary data kept pointing to a counter-narrative, very much at odds with the official line relentlessly and consistently being pushed on us from the media and official sources.

    From mask mandates, lockdowns, the media campaign against Ivermectin, mass vaccination and finally and most chillingly, the vaccination of children and pregnant women. Policies did not appear to stand up to even the most basic medical or scientific scrutiny. Yet few appeared to be questioning them. Apart from a few dissenters who were cast away as heretics, there was a complete absence in traditional Irish media, or the medical and scientific communities, of scrutiny or challenge.

    So we now find ourselves, almost three years from the start of this unprecedented event, in a world that seems to want to move on, and forget what happened as fast as possible. There is little appetite for reflection, or any possiblity of individuals acknowledging mistakes and suggesting we will respond differently in future.

    Indeed, in a recent interview on RTE’s Brendan O’Connor Show, when gently prodded by the presenter as to whether we might have been a bit stringent, Professor Luke O’Neill claimed ‘the only option we had at that time was to lockdown’ in March, 20202, otherwise ‘a lot of people could have died’. As this was on radio it was impossible to know whether he was saying it with a straight face, but he is surely aware that Sweden, despite refusing to lockdown, had one of the lowest death rates in Europe over the course of the pandemic.

    Across the political spectrum, there is almost complete denial of errors and even less appetite to take responsibility for the long-term consequences of policies. Yet, as more and more facts emerge showing the fundamental flaws in our response to Covid 19, the larger questions that remains are: why did policies that were clearly not in the public’s best interest become government policy, and how did this come about?

    Unless we understand why this happened the questions on how it was handled will be candles in the wind. Untethered to a motive it makes no sense. This requires an understanding of context and motive.

    Mass Formation

    Mattias Desmet’s theory of Mass Formation offers an extraordinarily insight into both why and how this kind of event can happen. Desmet, a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, draws on his clinical experience of the behaviour of crowds and group think, as well as the work of others in the field, in particular Hannah Arendt.

    Unsurprisingly, Mass Formation and its role in our response, did not occur as a result of Covid nor is it the first time in human history it has happened. The roots and causes have been emerging  for many years with the growth in what Desmet describes as the mechanistic society.

    Since the Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth century, the Western world has seen continuous improvements in wealth, living standards and health. No matter what the problem, there seems to have been a scientific solution or medicine to solve it.

    However, we have become increasingly averse to risk and uncertainty as technology has solved problems and cured illnesses.

    In parallel, the steady decline in organised religion and a spiritual dimension to our lives has left us increasingly adrift and rudderless. We have been left without a north star of substance, dependent on a mechanistic world to deliver food, entertainment and pleasure in never-ending supply.

    In that mechanistic world there are no grey areas. There is either a solution or no solution. The application of the mechanistic model to social and philosophical questions has left no space for ambiguity. The nuances and complexity of life that our poets express is lost in a world where you are either right or wrong.

    Social Conditions

    It is within this social milieu that Mass Formation can occur, but for it to take hold requires a number of specific conditions. Desmet outlines the first condition as generalised loneliness, social isolation and lack of social bonds in society.

    The digitalised society we live in has given us immense connectedness with our fellow humans, from next door or the other side of the world, but the quality and texture of that connectedness does not compare to direct human-to-human contact, which we have been drawn away from.

    That lack of connection to a religious or spiritual grounding has left people in a constant state of underlying anxiety. Desmet talks about the vibrations of a people and how this anxiety is a constant in their lives, as evidenced in the relentless increase in the use of antidepressants and anxiety medication.

    The global market for antidepressants in 2020 grew from $11.7bn to $14.9bn representing a 28% increase in a single year. At a time when we have never had such abundance, we have never been more unhappy. The more we own and can do, seemingly, the more unhappy we have become. The connectedness, sense of purpose and spirituality we enjoyed, has been replaced with an ‘always on’ digitised anxiety.

    Finally, there is the search for meaning in life. As our worldly needs and desires are met, we are confronted with a more fundamental question as to the meaning of our lives. The connectedness we had in the past, where we interacted with the people who manufactured a product or povided a service has almost completely disappeared. Most of us are now small cogs in the global supply chain. We are part of a mechanistic world, which seeks efficiency and productivity, but which leaves the human cogs feeling soulless and lost.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Suggestive Story

    So how does Mass Formation emerge from this world? Desmet describes how the catalyst for Mass Formation can be a suggestion or story in the public sphere. With society so conditioned, any suggestive story causing anxiety and fear can be the ignition point. The process leads to psychological gain. The anxiety that roamed through society like a fog can attach itself to a specific cause. It is no longer free-flowing but has a cause to attach to and draw energy from.

    As the level of fear increases, the cause developing it draws in the masses with a call to solidarity and collectivism. Those refusing to participate are accused of lacking solidarity and civic duty. “You don’t want to kill granny” was levelled against offenders as an unarguable fact that only the most callous would ignore. As the Formation deepens it no longer relies on facts or data. The masses believe the story, not because it is accurate, but because it creates a new social bond.

    The strategy of dealing with the perceived object of anxiety creates ritualistic behaviours. The function of ritualistic behaviours is always to create group cohesion. They are symbolic and aimed at subjugating the individual to the group. The more absurd the ritual, the more power it has in forming group cohesion. We think of space markers in public parks, fences around concert goers and Ireland’s most renowned scientist appearing on prime time TV in a plastic bubble, as only some of the ridiculous ritualistic behaviours we were sucked into performing. Few questioned them: the more outrageous they were the more we adhered.

    The psychology of crowds is well researched and to those that ask well ‘surely all the doctors and scientists can’t be wrong’  one can point to the well-known conformity experiment by Solomon Asch. Participants are asked which line from A B or C is the same length as Exhibit 1. The experiment is set up with a single participant in a group of 8 where the other 7 members are Asch’s employees. The 7 employees declare that line B is that same length as 1. Faced with the pressure of the crowd 75% agree to what a blind man could see to be untrue. Group formation is more important than the accuracy of the story.

    Enemies of the People

    Finally, the masses need an enemy. The dominant group needs to contrast the virtues of good citizens with the demonic followers of a counter-narrative. Pent-up frustration and aggression are released. Those that do not go along with the Mass Formation feel the brunt of this behaviour. There evolves a rapidly reduced empathy and intolerance towards those not in the group.

    Statements from public figures that those who choose not to take vaccines should be denied hospital care were greeted by the mob with relish. Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president stated in Dec 2021 that the “EU must consider mandatory vaccination”.

    The Nuremberg Code of 1947 and codified into law by the UN in 1966 was built on the principle of informed consent, yet this fundamental human right was jettisoned without debate or question.

    Statements from ‘liberal’ Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada and Ahern in NZ intimating they would make the life difficult for the unvaccinated difficult contained an explicit menace and threat that is not normal in our society. It betrays a shocking abuse of power.

    Final Question

    So, the remaining question is whether those in power knowingly planned and executed the greatest breakdown and dismantling of some of the most cherished values in Western society? Was there a master plan with covert meetings and messages shared among the key players? The answer is probably no, or at least that’s not necessary for it to happen in what appears to be a cohesive manner.

    The world was ripe for a Mass Formation and the leaders of the Western world, one by one, consciously or unconsciously, seized on the fear and anxiety that Covid generated to exercise extraordinary power.

    They stood by and allowed power to move from elected officials to technocrats who previously held no authority. Their technocratic authority, Holohan in Ireland, Fauci in the US, Whitty in the UK, made them unchallengeable. The most benign questioning was met with a cry of being anti-science and idiotic.

    Hannah Arendt used the term the ‘banality of evil’ to describe the dull bureaucrats who participated in the Holocaust, and who wielded extraordinary power without a moral or ethical compass. They were just following orders. There may not be a conscious awareness of the harm being done, as most of these technocrats, and leaders, will have bought into and have been victims of the Formation themselves. What they were conscious of, however, were the levers they could exercise to deepen and extend it.

    As soon as it started it became very obvious, they could exercise almost unlimited power over the public without challenge. Almost no force was necessary. The number of occasion where police were needed to enforce lockdown rules were very rare. Mass Formation ensures self-governance. Those who disagree are forced by the crowd to comply or face being banished as outcasts.

    So where to now? Covid has subsided for now, but the costs and damage have yet to be fully accounted. It  will take many years to tally that human suffering and the financial bill. It may require the current actors to leave the stage to allow the facts to become readily available, and for the public to see the full tragedy of our self-inflicted wounds.

    The possibility arises that this will reoccur in the event of another pandemic. Are those who tasted almost complete power really satiated?. Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine the crack-cocaine-appeal of that kind of power will not draw them in again. The question is what event will they weaponise, what fear will they jump on as the catalyst for the next Mass Formation and the return to a totalitarian regime?

    The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mathias Desmet. Chelsea Green, London (2022).

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Nurse Amy Gallagher Takes Woke to Court

    Amy Gallagher, nurse and psychotherapist, has initiated legal proceedings against Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust for religious discrimination; racial discrimination; discrimination on the basis of philosophical belief, harassment and victimization.

    While the story has appeared in British newspapers, mainly the right-wing press, it has not been covered in Ireland. I came across it when Gallagher was interviewed on the right-wing podcast The New Culture Forum. Her story was, however, unhelpfully flagged in a partisan manner that might have the effect of alienating people in the centre.

    Amy Gallagher’s troubles came about when she was on a final two-year training course in a Tavistock Trust training centre to complete her psychotherapy credentials. She was struck by the emphasis on so-called Woke ideology in the lectures and seminars, often to the exclusion of psychotherapeutic instruction, involving handouts guiding students towards ideological harmony.

    She found this curious and irritating at first, since these diversions had little to do with the discipline she was there to study. Two lectures in particular caused her to more seriously question what she was hearing. One was based on the assumption that Christianity was a racist religion, while the other was titled “Whiteness-A Problem For Our Time,” which was summarized in the online description thus: “The presentation is rooted in the assumption that the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness.”

    Ideas and Perspectives

    Gallagher had studied Arts and was aware of the ideas being promulgated: a strange amalgam of French intellectualism married with Freudianism and Marxism to form “perspectives” that will be familiar to anyone who has studied English, Sociology or the now compulsory Gender Studies in university.

    During an interview, in response to the interviewer saying, we all know that there is “Inherent racism in all white people,” this stated as a fact, without any backup, Gallagher objected and said she didn’t believe that. The interviewer gave her a look of impatience and said it’s like the way “sexism is inherent in all men”. Gallagher said she didn’t believe that either. Gallagher was immediately seen as “difficult” and a “problem”.

    During a later interview, called to assess her as a “problematic” individual, when she continued to hold her ground, simply asserting her right to disagree with the various tenets of the ideology, she was directly ordered to “stop speaking”.

    As a psychotherapist Gallagher realized that she couldn’t simply take such blanket group judgements as fact. You just couldn’t say that all people in a certain identifiable group are this or that, based entirely on their skin colour or appearance. Her job as a psychotherapist is to treat individuals, who tend to be quite unique, regardless of group identity. To accept the prejudices being pressed on her by management would mean that she would be claiming to know her patients just by looking at them, judging them entirely by appearances and group identity, which, in her view, undermines the core idea of psychotherapy.

    Ideological Crimes

    Gallagher researched the material being promulgated by management and found that the ideas were essentially ideas taken from critical race theory populist Robin DeAngelo, ideas which Gallagher describes as academically irrelevant, backed up by nothing, and little more than racist propaganda.

    She claims that the Tavistock Trust, in seminars, refers only to this material and not to any other relevant academic material. When she queried this approach, she was told she was not up to speed on anti-racism, that she had “problematic views”, the implication being that she was racist for having queried some of the odd assertions quoted above.

    It was assumed by management that in questioning the ideology, she had committed some kind of “crime” against it. Attempts were made to strike her off the nurse’s register. But the nurses and midwifery council defended her, saying simply that nurses are entitled to disagree with ideas.

    She was then accused by a member of management of racial harassment, of making that person feel “unsafe”, and of having a twitter account that made that person feel “unsafe”. Gallagher had started a stand-up-to-Woke twitter account which was then described as putting out “hate speech”, apparently just by sheer dint of its existence.

    She was then prohibited by the faculty head from entering the main reception area any longer, based on the idea that the sight of her might re-traumatize certain people offended by her views.

    The Psychotherapist

    Then it gets really odd, and even a bit comical. Having studied psychotherapy, her training kicked in and she began assessing the various individuals in management she was dealing with.

    So, after being reprimanded for speaking her mind, and after being warned off bringing “personal opinion” to bear on what the management regarded as self-evident truths about racism and white privilege and so on, she realized that the ethos of the antiracism ideology she was facing bore all the hallmarks of neuroticism, the very conditions that she was trained to treat, to move people away from. For instance, she says:

    The ideology itself…goes against all the things that I’ve been taught as a mental health professional. It’s hysterical, it catastrophises, it jumps to conclusions about certain things, it assumes what is going on in the other person’s mind, it’s very all or nothing black or white thinking, excuse the pun, it’s kind of, you know, there’s baddies and there’s goodies. These are all psychological mechanisms that I’m generally trying to help people move away from…It’s like they’ve embraced neuroticism and they’re advocating for it…Critical race theory and woke ideology is negative thinking, essentially.

    Legal Challenge

    She says she wants her legal challenge to be as impactful as possible. That she isn’t just taking the Tavistock Clinic to court for the what they did to her, but that she is taking critical race theory itself to court.

    She describes the people who essentially bullied her as being out of control, believing themselves to be above the law and above institutional procedure. For instance, they would verbally threaten her with certain procedures of reprimand, but then wouldn’t follow up, since to do so would have required putting this in writing and on the record.

    One of the bizarre assertions made to her by a member of management was that “Christianity is responsible for racism because of its use of the words light and dark.” This is the type of observation that might be acceptable in an undergraduate essay, but it is hardly a foundation for serious philosophical progress on any front.

    The forthcoming court case should make for an interesting spectacle, assuming it is even reported on in mainstream media. In many ways, Gallagher’s action, will for some, mirror the case taken by writer Deborah Lipstadt against the holocaust denier David Irving. On the other hand, it might also mirror the case taken by Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry.

  • OPLA Erodes Irish Democracy

    The Office on the Parliamentary Legal Advisor (OPLA) was placed on a statutory footing in 2018, by amendment to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission Act 2003, without so much as a press release, let alone media coverage of an important development. This entity is delivering a hammer blow to Irish democracy.

    In the midst of the pandemic in 2021, Marc McSharry TD – an ardent supporter of whistleblowers – tabled a number of parliamentary questions (PQs) on my behalf. These mostly concerned the apparent widespread use of bogus medical doctors across state agencies.

    All of these questions were shot down, however, under Standing Order (SO) 45, which inaccurately claimed they weren’t questions of ‘fact of policy’.

    The final PQ was euphemistically ‘amended’, but was in reality an entirely new PQ, drafted so as effectively to give legislative approval to the practice of using bogus doctors, fraudently claiming to hold medical council registrations.

    These doctors are used, in particular, in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection (DEASP) and are paid a sum for each client they cut off disability payments. All doctors reviewing cases in the DEASP are obliged to be registered with the medical council.

    Signing Off

    The PQs raised on my behalf were signed off on by Leas-Cheann Comhairle, Catherine Connolly whom I implored not to put the replies on the Dáil record, as I explained it would be a violation of Standing Order 45 to alter a PQ without consent.

    However, Catherine Connolly doubled down, claiming PQs can be ‘amended’ under SO 45.

    Yet the provision of SO 45 states that PQs can only be amended in ‘consultation’ with the Deputy raising them, which did not occur.

    Despite being furnished with a copy of standing order 45, Catherine Connolly bizarrely wrote to me and Deputy McSharry that the replies were going on the Dáil record, and she was ‘not re-visiting’ the matter. This effectively gave Dáil blessing to serious malpractice.

    I was entitled to an appeal before the Committee for Parliamentary Oversight and Privileges (CPPO) but, before I could make a submission, I received an unsolicited letter from the Cheann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl erroneously claiming I had no right to an appeal to the CPPO.

    I then engaged the service of a solicitor (at my expense), and only after two solicitors’ letters was my right to a CPPO hearing established with the Cheann Comhairle, who wrote to say he had given my submission to the clerk of the CPPO.

    Matters did not end there. After this I encountered the sinister entity that is OPLA.

    Seán Ó Fearghaíl TD

    Case Closed

    I had requested that another committee member chair the CPPO for this case, as the usual chair Seán Ó Fearghaíl, and his deputy, Catherine Connolly, had questions to answer. My request was refused, however, by the Office on the Parliamentary Legal Advisor (OPLA).

    Then I sought to appear as a witness. This too was denied. Finally, I received a brief email from the Committee clerk, a middle-ranking civil servant, saying the case had been heard on April 6, 2022, and had found against me, and that the Cheann Comhairle had chaired it.

    I received no reply from the Committee clerk to further enquiries such as whether the requisite quorum of eight committee members were in attendance. I did, however, receive a high-handed reply from a ‘legal counsel’ in OPLA, conveying what I now know to be an inaccurate account of the hearing.

    Having checked with members of the Committee, it appears my case was never heard and, my submission was not circulated to the Committee members. This is a breach of Standing Order 118.

    OPLA circulated a number of further authoritarian letters defending the Cean Comhairle’s right to chair the meeting, while maintaining that there had been a hearing by the CPPO in the first place.

    On June 10, 2022, the deputy head of OPLA, Ramona Quinn wrote a letter to me citing ‘laws and conventions going back to 1923.’

    In response, I challenged Ms Quinn and OPLA as to what Dáil Standing Order allowed the unit to intrude on – and indeed unconstitutionally usurp – the work of any Committee of elected representatives of Dáil Eireann? To this I received no reply.

    I did, however, receive a number of further, intimidating, letter from OPLA, thereafter unsigned.

    In response, I put them on notice to the effect that this constituted harassment and pointed out that they were trespassing into the constitutionally sacrosanct domain of the Ceann Comhairle, and the Oireachtas. I asked the head of OPLA for the Dáil Standing Order allowing for it. To this I again received no reply.

    OPLA

    Further enquires reveal that the OPLA quango evolved from containing just one legal advisor, Melissa English, in 2007, to twenty-four legal experts in 2018!

    English had been a sole independent legal advisor in the Houses of the Oireachtas but, according to a March 2019 article in Eolas magazine, ‘under her stewardship it is now a statutory office comprising a multi-disciplinary team of barristers, solicitors, legislation drafters and specialist researchers.’

    The article goes on to quote English saying, ‘the OPLA unit had to be structured and resourced over the last 12 years.’

    Eolas magazine reveals further that OPLA emerged from ‘a report of a retired civil servant Dunning in December 2016’, and it led to a Dáil sub-Committee headed by the Cheann Comhairle for the establishment and vast expansion of OPLA, including the provision for the head of OPLA to be appointed a deputy Secretary General in the Houses of the Oireachtas.

    The function of OPLA is supposed to be tripartite: to give legal advice to Oireachtas members; to help draft legislation in Private Members Bills; and to defend the Houses of the Oireachtas in court challenges.

    However, given English and her unit are part of the Oireachtas, and as she is a civil servant reporting directly to the civil servant and Top-Level Appointments Committee (TLAC) appointee, Dáil Clerk, Peter Finnegan, how can she defend herself and her unit in court, as it is now an integral part of the Oireachtas?

    Furthermore, English flagged the ‘colliding rights of parliamentarians to absolute privilege in respect of their speeches in the Dail and the, sometimes competing rights of outside persons whose personal constitutional rights can be adversely affected by this speech’ as part of the justification for her bloated unit.

    I maintain that English and her legal heavy gang have copper-fastened gross medical malpractice implicit to the use of unqualified medical practitioners by State departments and agencies.

    So much for the constitutional rights of citizens, English appears to have seen no problem giving parliamentary blessing to a seriously problematic practice.

    Furthermore, English appears to have seen nothing irregular about government Departments and Oireachtas civil servants distorting PQs, or the Cheann Comhairle apparently misleading me in correspondence.

    The Leas Cheann Comhairle Catherine Connolly who signed the PQ responses ought to be aware that OPLA has exceeded its remit, violated the Oireachtas and conveyed falsehoods about a phantom hearing at the CPPO in April this year. I argue that she is deepening her original violation of SO 45, and failing to correct the records of the Dáil arising from the distortion of the PQ. She is also failing to correct the erroneous assertions of OPLA.

    Four Courts Quay.

    Violation of Separation of Powers

    I wrote to Melissa English on October 15, 2022 regarding the intrusions of OPLA into the workings of a Dáil Committee.

    English defines herself as ‘being central to the defence on behalf of parliament of the cornerstone of the constitutional separation of powers’, but she seems unaware that OPLA violates the constitutional separation of powers. As a civil servant under the Dáil Clerk, English is obliged to respond in ten working days to queries from the public.

    Yet, to date, I have received no response from her to these questions I raised.

    1. What is your defence of the violation by OPLA of Dail SOs and the Constitutional Separations of Powers in taking over the CPPO committee from its clerk designate and its elected members?
    2. Sinead Fitzpatrick, legal counsel, conveyed un-retracted inaccuracies in two formal letters to me and my solicitor on 20 April 2022 to the effect that the case was heard by the CPPO on 6 April 2021. It was not heard and, the submission was not even circulated in further violation of SO 118.
    3. Why am I still being harassed by unsolicited and unsigned communications from OPLA whom I have requested to remain outside of my dealings with elected members of a Dáil Committee – a constitutional process in which OPLA has no role or jurisdiction?
    4. Are the Cean Comhairle and the Leas Cean Comhairle being consulted and informed about these communications, and do they approve of the ongoing communications I am receiving from OPLA at your direction?

    I have separately put these questions to the Cheann Comhairle and the Leas Cheann Comhairle, similarly without reply.

    Constitutional Crisis

    I notified Taoiseach Micheál Martin in late 2021 to the effect that there is a constitutional crisis in the Oireachtas because of the ongoing conduct of the Cheann Comhairle and Leas Cean Comhairle. I also informed him that OPLA and the Dáil Clerk are violating the constitutionally sacrosanct realms of the Cheann Comhairle and the Oireachtas.

    Micheál Martin responded that the Cheann Comhairle’s office was independent. It begs the question: who exactly will deal with the constitutional impasse that has emerged in this case?

    It appears that OPLA is ensuring that in certain circumstances a PQ cannot be asked on behalf of a citizen. Nor can a citizen access a Dáil Committee to redress the injustice of a wrongful PQ.

    How, one wonders, did the Oireachtas ever function before the recent creation of OPLA and its band of twenty-four legal heavy hitters?

    The answer seems obvious. OPLA is designed to muzzle the Oireachtas. That is perhaps why no press release attended its creation on a statutory footing and its wide expansion in 2018.

    It is an authoritarian quango which has mushroomed from one legal advisor to twenty-four in the space of twelve years. Masquerading as a helpful entity, its real purpose is to snuff out a crucial function of our parliamentary democracy.

    A Legal Monster

    So how did the legislation creating OPLA slip through parliament in 2018 and, how much does it cost the taxpayer? Having spoken to a number of TDs, none seem to recall the 2018 legislation creating OPLA in its current guise passing through the Houses of the Oireachtas.

    Given OPLA’s total staff, including clerical and twenty-four legal officers amount to thirty-six, we may assume it costs at least €5 million per annum.

    The spend was signed off on by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform under Robert Watt as Secretary General and Accounting Officer. Perhaps this explains Robert Watt apparent contempt for Dáil Committees.

    Democratic accountability compels a total dismantling of OPLA in its present guise. One does not need to be a constitutional lawyer to see that it is glaringly unconstitutional.