Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • Policing Must Return to First Principles

    The Garda Síochána will succeed, not by force of arms or numbers, but by their moral authority as servants of the people.
    Michael Joseph Staines, First Garda Commissioner (1885-1955)

    The above statement is, in my opinion, a good founding principle for any Police Service in a free democracy. What is meant by “moral authority”? Merriam Webster defines this as   ‘trustworthiness to make decisions that are right and good.’ This is authority based on principles – norms which are independent of written, or positive, laws.

    Under its current leadership, An Garda Síochána has become increasingly politicised by this government and its predecessor. This undermines the moral authority which Michael Staines rightly recognised as being so vital to its success as a Police Service. The Gardaí should indeed be servants of the people, not private political and ideological enforcers. Unfortunately, we are seeing policing in Ireland increasingly take its cue from the double standards of its hypocritical political masters.

    Last April, Gardaí broke up a demonstration by ordinary citizens protesting the loss of their jobs at Debenhams. Ironically, in light of recent events, the Debenhams protests were endorsed by prominent voices from the Irish Left.

    However, in June 2020  a five thousand-strong Black Lives Matters protest paraded through Dublin with hardly a Garda in sight. This demonstration, supposedly in the middle of a deadly pandemic, drew no condemnation from the political establishment – quite the contrary, in fact. There was no rush to social media to raise any public health concerns, nor to condemn the protest as an affront to the “people who have sacrificed so much”, “frontline workers”, and “those who have died.”

    Last December, there was a media blackout and no arrests made after BLM violence in Blanchardstown. This is in stark contrast to the political, media, and Garda reaction to an anti-lockdown demonstration last Saturday 27th February in Dublin where peaceful protestors were met by a phalanx of Gardaí (both mounted and on foot) who were suited and booted with dogs and batons at the ready, long before the lobbing of a firework by one individual set off a media storm of condemnations.

    There have also been political, media, and enforcement double standards in relation to funerals under government restrictions, as well as other incidents, notably parties.

    The behaviour of Gardaí at evictions has also been called into question. The role of An Garda Síochána at an eviction is quite clear: they are there to prevent a breach of the peace and to ensure the safety of all concerned. If they witness a breach of the peace or any other offence, then they are duty-bound to act. It really is that simple. With respect to the assertion in an Irish Independent article that ‘An Garda Síochána is a learning organisation’ and the request for an urgent external report so that the organisation can ‘learn lessons’ –  isn’t that exactly the purpose of  the expensive two-year training course which Garda recruits undergo?

    There have been other incidences of the organisation and its members acting inappropriately and outside of its remit in furtherance of various agendas unrelated to policing, such as participation by a Garda in the “Yes” equality campaign, and the organisation’s promotion of vaccines on social media.

    Then there’s the TikTok dancing, supposedly to “Lift the Nation’s Spirits”. The participation of An Garda Síochána in an inane (but undoubtedly very expensive) dance production at a time when livelihoods, and perhaps lives, are being lost as a result of the government restrictions which they are enforcing was completely inappropriate. At best, it was in bad taste. It was unnerving and slightly sinister, like a bully wanting to be your friend. Notably, the Defence Forces and The Coast Guard wisely chose not to follow their example.

    There is no doubt that the relationship between a politicised Garda Síochána and the ordinary citizen is changing – particularly under the current government restrictions – and not for the better. Policing by consent is being replaced by coercion. The image of a gaggle of dancing Gardaí does not juxtapose well with the image of a cohort of Gardaí detailed to arrest and remove a woman from her place of business for exercising a constitutional right to earn a living and provide for her family. Ordinary people are being criminalised for just trying to live their lives.

    In a force (and An Garda Síochána can certainly be described once more as a force) comprising in excess of fourteen and a half thousand members, it is not unreasonable to believe that there are many who have their doubts about the direction policing has taken both generally, and specifically in relation to current government restrictions. They can see the damage being wrought by these restrictions on the people they are supposed to serve. Many undoubtedly have families themselves who are also suffering and they must look their children in the eye each morning. So where are the Garda whistleblowers now?

    All members have made a ‘Solemn Declaration’ (albeit watered down from the original Sworn Oath)  to uphold the Constitution – which is superior to all positive law – and hence to defend the rights and freedoms of all citizens which Bunreacht na hÉireann asserts and guarantees. Is there really nobody prepared to raise their head above the parapet? Remember, five thousand members found it within themselves to take (forbidden) action over their pay in 1998 via the “Blue Flu”.

    Meanwhile on Merseyside in the UK, there was a scene somewhat reminiscent of a relatively recent Garda photoshoot, but far less subtle: four officers from Merseyside Police – one wielding a large stick – posing in front of an advertising van bedecked with a rainbow-coloured billboard bearing the large slogan “BEING OFFENSIVE IS AN OFFENCE”. The ill-advised stunt proved to be a goose-step too far, however, and the resultant public backlash forced Merseyside Police into an embarrassing apology, a Superintendent being required to clarify that “being offensive” is, of course, not in itself an offence.

    Although having occurred in a neighbouring jurisdiction, such “woke” (and legally incorrect) virtue-signalling should also ring alarm bells here, particularly in the context of the impending enactment of  identity politics-based “Hate Crime” legislation.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “Identity Politics” as “Politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group”.

    Identity politics is by definition inherently divisive and inequitable. Legislation (and obviously enforcement) based upon it is not a good fit for a Republic that purports to assert the equality of all citizens before the law.

    The drive to enact such legislation, supposedly in the midst of a deadly pandemic, is pure opportunism, an effort to make ideological hay while the political skies are clear. In truth, one would now be hard-pressed to separate the government parties ideologically, and the oxymoronic “Opposition” lie even further to a version of the left that emphasises these identity politics over socio-economic questions.

    The Covid-19 narrative continues to provide fruitful opportunities for the government parties to achieve long-held political and ideological aims. Many of those who have championed this legislation, and who seek desperately to discover a fascist bogeyman to help justify it, are the same people who have spent the last eleven months steadily eroding the fundamental rights and freedoms of Irish citizens. The irony appears lost on them, but the fact remains that these are the people dictating the policing agenda.

    An Garda Síochána must return to the first principles advocated by Michael Staines. They must repudiate the service of political agendas and reprise their role as servants of the people. Politicisation and poor leadership is undermining the moral authority of An Garda Síochána. Care should be taken to ensure that it is not lost, or the loss of the support, trust, and consent of the people would surely follow.

    Cassandra Voices is a home for independent voices to inspire new thinking that publishes a wide variety of viewpoints, check out our submissions guidelines and drop us a line: admin@cassandravoices.com.

    All Images: Daniele Idini

  • Is there a Doctor in the House?

    Imagine if you will, a government that nobody actually voted for. A government with no opposition that legislates at the behest of a committee of unelected civil servants. A government that took over from a “caretaker” administration that had been voted out of office nearly five months previously, yet still held full executive powers and introduced legislation resulting in civil restrictions unprecedented in the history of the State.

    How did we get here?  Well, if it were not already apparent, the last twelve months have certainly served to expose the shocking state of ill-health of Irish democracy. In addition to the scenario referenced in the first paragraph, there exists a web of inherently unhealthy relationships, both familial and commercial, spanning the entire Irish political class, a tamed, nodding media, and the pharmacological and technological industries. This political and financial incest between those who introduce legislation, those who control and disseminate information, and those hawking their wares is evidently self-serving, but most certainly does not serve the public interest, and represents an existential threat to genuine, transparent democracy.

    Sandwiched somewhere in the middle is a Police Force. Once upon a time it had designs on being a Police Service, but over the past twelve months it has most definitely reverted to being a Police Force; one whose members appear unable or unwilling to question the legality – or at the very least the morality – of their orders from their political masters, preferring instead to seek the comfort of overtime and the surreality of TikTok dance challenges.

    A pliant citizenry have, of course, played their own role, and the ease with which the majority have demonstrated their willingness to surrender unquestioningly their most fundamental rights and freedoms has been truly shocking. It would almost lead one to believe that the people no longer wish to bear the onerous burden of personal responsibility, instead wishing to cede responsibility for living their own lives to the State. Everything has its price, of course. Perhaps public acquiescence is not so surprising after all, considering that for some time now indoctrination has been masquerading more and more as education.

    Stateism may very well turn out to be the life choice of a generation reared on an intellectual diet of The X-Factor, but it will be a shocking legacy to leave to their children, who didn’t sign up for it.

    Evidently, the political situation in Ireland mirrors a broader trend towards “Super-Stateism” and the erosion of democracy and its associated freedoms in the Western world generally, and – more pertinently in Ireland’s case – the European Union.

    Bleating about European militarism from some of the usual suspects on the Irish Left ring hollow. They signed up for this, one and all. The days of Ireland opting out of aspects of the European Project that it finds unpalatable are long gone. The cent began to drop in Brussels and Berlin the day the Irish people acceded to having a second EU referendum force-fed to them after returning the wrong answer first time around.

    The cent dropped all the way when the political class volunteered Ireland to be Europe’s fall guy for the economic crash of 2008 and the people went along with it. It’s all or nothing with the EU now, comrades. Are these people really so naïve that they don’t realise that once political and monetary union have been achieved, then military union must necessarily follow? Perhaps those who resolved to vote for them in the last election can answer the question for them in the next one.

    Looking at the current lie of the Irish political landscape, it is honestly hard at the moment to see from where meaningful change will come. Despite their virtue-signalling, hand-wringing (and hand-sanitising), from a political point of view there is actually very little to dislike about the current situation for those on the red and green wavelengths of the political spectrum.

    The long-term prognosis for the return of healthy democracy does not appear to be great. However, the Covid-19 narrative that has been created now seems to have almost taken on a life of its own. Trial balloons are being floated up on an almost daily basis in order to gauge the receptiveness of a fearful, weary public to absolutely ridiculous, dystopian nonsense. The political class and their allies have created a monster, but they would do well to remember that artificial monsters, having once gained self-awareness, do have a habit of eventually seeking out their creators and… well, let’s say, coming home to roost.

    The Irish body politic needs a prescription for a Great Reset, alright – just not the type of Great Reset that the self-serving elitists who are currently pulling the strings are working towards.

    Cassandra Voices is a home for independent voices to inspire new thinking that publishes a wide variety of viewpoints, find our submissions guidelines here.

  • ZeroCovid’s Neoconservative Traits

    So-called ‘ZeroCovid’ is a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to the virus, promising to eliminate community transmission in Ireland. The concept has gained traction among young people, especially, desperate for an end to a seemingly endless cycle of lockdowns, and others worried by the danger posed by the disease itself.

    The original ‘zero-tolerance’ policy is identified with Donald Trump’s associate Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor of New York (1994-2001), and involved punishment for even minor infractions.

    Rudy Giuliani

    Most criminologists agree, however, that zero-tolerance, based on the ‘broken window’ theory of policing, made little difference to overall crime rates, which seem to have been falling in New York prior to Giuliani’s period in office. New powers of arrest simply handed police carte blanche to remove homeless people from affluent neighbourhoods. Thus Time Square became a safe haven for tourism, but ghettos remained no go.

    Zero-tolerance policies emerged in a neoconservative era alongside ‘humanitarian interventions,’ culminating in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, led by U.S. President George W. Bush, and supported by U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair also backed a zero tolerance approach to crime in the U.K., and has recently inveigled his way back to prominence as part of the ‘war’ effort against Covid-19.

    Neoconservatives engineered a War on Terror which, apart from direct military actions, included ‘shock and awe’ tactics to cow opponents, galvanising support through appeals to nationalist sentiment and by demonising – often phantom – enemies.

    Finally, neoconservatism is aligned with neoliberal austerity adopted in the wake of the Financial Crisis, beginning in 2007-2008. Austerity proponents assume purgative measures – described as ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein – are required to heal the body politic of its economic woes.

    Family Resemblances

    The ZeroCovid elimination approach in Ireland bears significant family resemblances to an illusory zero-tolerance policy to crime. There are also shades of the War on Terror’s ‘shock and awe’ tactic of elevating fear and appealing to narrow national self-interest. The imprint of austerity is apparent in a promise of deliverance after painful expurgation, as a population already frayed by successive lockdowns is exhorted to double down and accept greater stringency. Naomi Klein has also identified a Pandemic Shock Doctrine.

    It may seem surprising that Irish leftists should be attracted to a policy which seems to have a neoconservative mentality, but notably ‘recovering socialists developed neoconservatism in the sixties and seventies,’ and the Marxist dialectic permits great suffering before the achievement of a socialist paradise.

    Leading spokespeople do not, however, give the impression they welcome the embrace of leftists. Tomás Ryan recently called for ‘more of a grand coalition attitude’; while another, Anthony Staines is, or was, a member of Fine Gael. Among the few practising doctors associated with ZeroCovid is Maitiú Ó Tuathail, whose friendship with then Fine Gael Taoiseach Leo Varadkar gave him access to a confidential agreement between the State and the IMO, which is now the subject of a Garda enquiry.

    ZeroCovid is certainly not a blueprint for a socialist republic – the narrowness of its focus its quite striking – and advocates assert pro-business credentials, Ryan emphasising that ‘ZeroCovid countries are ranking highest in business confidence.’ Far from being treated as revolutionaries in the mainstream media, its spokespeople have become household names during the pandemic, blurring a distinction between expert witness and political actor.

    Some on the left may be attracted to ZeroCovid in the hope that ‘Napoleonic’ state mobilisation witnessed during the pandemic will be carried into ‘peacetime,’ to address poverty and environmental destruction. The shady dealings we have witnessed in this period, however, set a dangerous precedent, as the executive director of the British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi put it:

    Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

    Given the paucity of investigative journalism in Ireland it is difficult to assess corruption levels, but the one euro billion spent on PPE in 2020 raises a red flag, while allegations of contracts being awarded inappropriately are ventilated on social media.

    End of the Truce

    It is also notable that despite the obvious distinction between the government’s suppression approach, and ZeroCovid’s elimination policy, there has been no direct confrontation between the two groups. At the end of January, however, the truce ended with the chair of the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group Philip Nolan decisively branding ZeroCovid ‘an utterly false promise.’

    This intervention may have been linked to recent politicisation, as the Social Democrats, and to a lesser extent Labour (which announced ‘a national aggressive suppression strategy, zero Covid-19 by another name’), followed People Before Profit’s earlier embrace of the project.

    Throughout the pandemic ZeroCovid spokespeople have been welcomed within the dominant media consensus – assessing the virus a once-in-a-generation challenge – with nationalist appeals – adopting the hashtag #wecanbezero – perhaps seen as a way way of channeling latent radicalism away from opposition to reliance on strict lockdowns.

    Origins of ZeroCovid

    The genesis of the movement in Ireland is unclear. Last summer the Wellcome Trust, whose offshore dealings were exposed in the Paradise Papers, launched a global ‘Zero Covid’ fundraising initiative for vaccine research, with the support of Goldman Sachs Gives and others.

    The Irish initiative traces its origins to a disparate group of academic scientists led by Staines that brought forward a Crush the Curve petition in July, preceding the emergence of a Zero Covid Island group. It has since morphed into another organisation called ISAG: ‘a multidisciplinary group of scientists, academics, and researchers who have come together to advocate for a SARS-CoV-2 elimination strategy for the island’.

    Yaneer Bar-Yam preparing to speak at an event in 2014.

    Among those involved is a MIT Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, who does not appear to have had any previous connection to Ireland. Bar Yam previously advised the Pentagon ‘about global social unrest and the crises in Egypt and Syria’, and the National Security Council and the National Counter Terrorism Council on global strategy, elsewhere described as ‘preventing ethnic violence.’ He also advised policymakers on the elimination of Ebola, a disease which presents a very different challenge to Covid-19.

    Tomás Ryan is himself a former Post-Doctoral Fellow (2010-2016) at MIT, having previously been a Junior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Wolfson College, Cambridge (2009 – 2010). Ryan’s background is in neuroscience and has no publications in virology or epidemiology.

    Bar-Yam set up an organisation called ENDCRONAVIRUS.ORG (https://www.endcoronavirus.org/) in February 2020, and may see Ireland as a potential testing ground for counter-viral methods.

    ZeroCovid appeals to national self-interest, requiring exclusion of a diseased ‘other,’ through mandatory quarantines for foreign arrivals, and promotes the creation of zero-transmission zones within the country. In August Bar-Yam co-authored a paper entitled, ‘A green zone strategy for Ireland,’ which recalls Baghdad’s ‘Green Zone’ under U.S. occupation, and districts ‘purified’ by the application of a zero-tolerance approach to crime.

    Indefinite elimination of what appears to be an endemic seasonal virus from a globally integrated country such as Ireland appears Utopian however, with most scientists assuming Covid-19 will be with us forever.

    Last month, Nature asked more than one hundred immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists working on Covid-19 whether they believe it can be eradicated. Almost 90% responded to say it will become endemic

    According to one of those surveyed Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. ‘Eradicating this virus right now from the world is a lot like trying to plan the construction of a stepping-stone pathway to the Moon.’

    Jacinda Arden

    New Zealand

    For obvious cultural reasons, Irish ZeroCovid strategists often cite New Zealand’s as a model to follow – factors other than suppression policies appear to be inhibiting Covid-19 in east Asian countries –  but this ignores the extreme isolation of a sparsely populated island nation situated on the other side of the world, under a depleted ozone layer that brings elevated levels of virus-killing ultraviolet light. Moreover, New Zealand does not have a disputed border with another jurisdiction to contend with. Also, importantly, New Zealand’s imports arrive in containers, as opposed to Ireland’s reliance on ‘roll-on roll-off’ trucks.

    https://twitter.com/John_McGahon/status/1360552471345717249

    Moreover, it seems significant that there have been less than two thousand cases of Covid-19 detected in New Zealand so far during the pandemic. Common cold viruses display infuriatingly unpredictable behaviour, waxing and waning seasonally, like influenza, which derives its name from the influenza degli astri, or ‘influence of the planets.’

    A paper from 1973 entitled ‘An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation’, discusses the case of six of twelve men wintering at an isolated Antarctic base that sequentially developed common cold symptoms after seventeen weeks of complete isolation.

    According to the authors: ‘Examination of specimens taken from the men in relation to the outbreak has not revealed a causative agent,’ which the authors say could ‘well have been the effects of a coronavirus.’ Bewildered, they conclude: ‘in some way virus persisted, either in the environment or in the men.’

    Furthermore, in an article for Cassandra Voices Justin Frewen observed how decisive political leadership encouraged personal responsibility:

    In addition to providing Covid-19 related information through standard media channels, the NZ Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has communicated directly with the public, making herself available to the media and holding daily public press conferences, led by New Zealand’s director-general of health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Together they have displayed “a reliable, measured and authoritative face for New Zealand’s Covid-19 response”.Of particular value has been the clarity of Jacinda Ardern’s communication on the virus. Her leadership style has been assessed by one commentator as ‘one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.’

    The virus returned mysteriously to Auckland in August, however, leading to a second lockdown. Civil liberties advocates may take issue with the mandatory confinement of anyone testing positive – and mandatory quarantining of all visitors – but the response to the virus has been to the benefit and satisfaction of the vast majority of New Zealanders, and the satisfies a principle of proportionality.

    But another outbreak at the beginning of February has brought yet another lockdown to Auckland, and Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has since signalled that the country’s elimination strategy is to be abandoned in the wake of the arrival of vaccines, stating: ‘Our goal has to be though, to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally, with the flu. It won’t be a disease that we will see simply disappear after one round of vaccine.’

    Yet surprisingly vaccines are not seen as a game changer by ZeroCovid advocates. An ISAG webinar on January 21st found Staines arguing in favour of mandatory quarantine facilities, on the basis that new variants could ‘dodge some of the effects of vaccines.’

    It begs the question: if new variants are swirling around the world indefinitely – just as strains of influenza vary from year-to-year occasionally evading the effect of vaccines – will Ireland maintain quarantine requirements indefinitely, as a true believer associated with Bar-Yam’s organisation has proposed? This seems unthinkable for a country with a diaspora of three million and a high proportion of immigrants, some of whom may leave Ireland if this approach is adopted. Unfortunately, as in the War of Terror, the enemy is within, and the war unwinnable.

    Australia

    A more tortuous, and arguably disproportionate, route to the elimination of Covid-19 was witnessed in Melbourne, Australia, which may serve as a warning to an Irish public desperate for the pandemic to end.

    With a similar population to the whole of Ireland’s Melbourne experienced a winter outbreak, beginning in June, that brought a stringent lockdown lasting almost three months. Notably, however, the number of cases peaked at seven hundred per day and the virus declined with the arrival of spring. Ireland has had ten times that number in a single day in January, and as of mid-February has still not brought case numbers down to that level.

    Just this month Melbourne went into another lockdown again after an outbreak in a Holiday Inn, giving the lie to the notion that elimination avoids recurring lockdowns; especially in a country such as Ireland conteding with leaky borders, a poorly resourced health system, and a history of distrust in State institutions.

    Advocates of ZeroCovid now call for a level of stringency that brought an end to the Melbourne outbreak, in particular advocating schools close until late April, seemingly oblivious to the damage on children, already denied months of education.

    Apocalyptic Warnings

    Irish ZeroCovid advocates have been unusually apocalyptic in their assessment of the danger posed by Covid-19, with Tomás Ryan projecting in June that a herd immunity approach, involving successive lockdowns, would result in 50,000 deaths, while Sam McConkey warned in March there could be up to 120,000 deaths.

    The latter death toll would be greater than has been witnessed in the U.K., which has the second highest mortality rate (after Belgium) in the world, and a population ten times that of Ireland. Even in almost libertarian scenarios – such as in the two Dakota states in the U.S. – death tolls have been nowhere close to those proportions.

    While ZeroCovid might be dismissed as a fringe organisation, or cult, the degree of media exposure its advocates have enjoyed, and their tendency to ‘shock and awe’ with outlandish projections has distorted debate in Ireland, drawing attention away from the profound damage of lockdowns.

    The Irish media has developed a fixation on the virus to the almost total exclusion of other challenges we face. Mortality from Covid-19 is not portrayed as equivalent to death by natural causes, but a consequence of moral failings in the population or an indulgent government. It has parallels with the attitude of the Pro Life movement.

    Looking forward to life improving.

    And yet, as spring approaches case numbers will surely recede, with a range of vaccines and new treatments reducing severity and mortality. Socially distancing has become second nature to many Irish people, and there is increasing knowledge of the importance of ventilation.

    The Irish government should resist a social experiment that holds no promise of success, and the public should look forward to life improving. In time we are likely to accept a seasonal mortality from Covid-19, just as we tolerate the burden of seasonal influenza, along with many of the environmental factors that cause or exacerbate the non-infectious diseases that remain our leading killers by far.

    Percentage breakdown of top ten registered causes of death, January – October 2020. Source CSO

  • Matt Talbot and the ‘Theology of Incarceration’

    The Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has unleased another wave of soul-searching in Ireland. How could a society claiming to be ‘Christian’ have failed to protect, and even to have harmed, its most vulnerable – unmarried mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children? The harrowing accounts fit within a wider ‘Theology of Incarceration’ that inculcated subservience and prevailed on the downtrodden to await their rewards in heaven.

    ‘The story of Matt Talbot is significant because it reflects the traditional approach of the Irish Catholic Church to the question of social justice’ wrote Ronan Sheehan in his seminal account of enduring exclusion in Ireland’s capital: The Heart Of The City by Ronan Sheehan and Brendan Walsh Brandon Books, (Dublin 1988); a second edition was published as Dublin: The Heart Of The City by Lilliput Press (Dublin, 2016).

    Matt Talbot’s legacy continues to resonate through Dublin, and beyond: in the name of Talbot Street off O’Connell Street; and in one of its foremost bridges: the Talbot Memorial Bridge linking Memorial Road (and Custom House Quay) on the north bank of the river to Moss Street (and City Quay) on the south where there is a sculpture of Matt Talbot by James Power erected in 1978 and irreverently called ‘the pain with the chains.’ There is also a shrine to the ‘Venerable’ Matt Talbot’s inside the Neo-Romanesque Church of Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street dating from 1954, and a plaque on Granby Lane off Parnell Square.

    Granby Lane, Dublin 1.

    Life and Death

    The ascetic figure of Matt Talbot assumes centre stage in a chapter in Sheehan’s book entitled ‘Moral Issues and the Catholic Church’. After Talbot’s death in 1924 the example of his life would serve as propaganda for the Church. This posthumous status far exceeded any ambition in a humble working man, who drew solace from a profound religious conviction after struggling with alcohol addiction during his youth.

    Sheehan recalls:

    In his teens and twenties Talbot, like the other men in his family, drank heavily and was probably an alcoholic. Like the drug addicts of today the Talbots often stole to finance their habits and one occasion they took a street musician’s fiddle. Matt would pawn his boots for drinking money and walk barefoot. One day in 1884 after an idle week that had left them penniless, Matt and his brothers, Phil and Joe, stood outside a public house waiting to be invited inside for a drink. No one asked them ‘if they had a mouth on them’. Talbot went home and later that evening went to Clonliffe College where he took the pledge.

    And so began Talbot’s recovery, engendering a moral rectitude that saw him repaying gambling debts and vainly searching for the fiddler whose instrument he had misappropriated. From that point onwards Talbot became a regular mass-goer at St. Saviour’s Dominican Priory on Upper Dorset Street. Indeed, it was while on his way to mass on nearby Granby Lane that he collapsed and died of heart failure. There is now a plaque dedicated to his memory at the site.

    Plaque to Matt Talbot on Granby Lane.

    Labourer and Ascetic

    For much of his life Talbot worked as a labourer at a timber yard, at a time when workers’ movements were in ferment, and revolution in the air. Sheehan writes:

    His [Talbot’s] relationship to the labour movement is a matter of dispute. He was on strike in 1900 and in the General Strike of 1913 and he was a member of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He refused to collect strike pay and when his colleagues pressed it on him, he gave the money to strikers with young families. Unusually for a Dublin man, he often admitted publicly that he could not understand issues and was prepared to be guided by people he felt were better informed. ‘Jim Larkin knows the rights and wrongs of it,’ he is quoted as saying with reference to the strike of 1913. Most frequently he referred issues to his spiritual advisors, or consulted texts they recommended.

    Talbot’s mortification of the flesh included sleeping on a plank with block of wood for a pillow. Sheehan tells us that ‘When he died, in 1925, it was discovered that he had worn chains about his body.’ In death rather than life he would play an important role for the Irish Catholic Church: ‘Talbot’s subservient piety was adopted by the Church as a symbol in ideological crusades of the thirties, forties and fifties,’ and any deference to Jim Larkin’s methods would be obscured.

    Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    Irish Catholicism

    A strong association between Church and State was perhaps predictable in a newly independent Ireland, given Catholicism’s role in preserving a distinctive Irish identity after the failure of the United Irishmen movement in the 1790s to bring lasting unity between Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter. Declining use of the native language after the Great Famine of the 1840s made religion an obvious point of distinction between ‘Catholic’ Irish and ‘Protestant’ English.

    The Catholic basis of Irish nationalism was affirmed during the struggle for independence: the 1916 Easter Rising was consciously suffused with religious symbolism; and in its aftermath prominent Republican figures from Protestant backgrounds such as the Countess Markievicz, and Roger Casement converted to Catholicism.

    After independence in 1922, devotion to the ‘one true Church, Apostolic and Universal’ crossed the political divide between the Pro- and Anti-Treaty Civil War factions of what became Fianna Fail (1926) and Fine Gael (1933).

    In conformity with Catholic doctrine, in 1925 divorce was prohibited in Ireland, a bar that was only removed after a referendum in 1996; while in Dublin in March, 1925 – the year after Matt Talbot’s death – according to Sheehan, ‘the police mounted a massive raid on an area variously known as the kips, Monto, the digs, the village. This was the brothel zone.’

    Moreover, the Constitution that came into force under Éamon de Valera in 1937 – and accepted by a majority of the electorate – identified a ‘special position’ for the Catholic Church, in an article only deleted after another referendum in 1972.

    Right up until the 1990s – the revelation in 1992 that Bishop Eamon Casey had fathered a child with an American woman is often viewed as a pivotal moment – there was little challenge to the pre-eminence of a Church, which created a state within a state through the provision of education and health that brooked no opposition. Thus in 1951 a combination of the Church hierarchy and the medical profession scuppered the ambitions of Minister for Health Noel Browne to introduce a measure of universal health care through the Mother and Child Scheme.

    In its aftermath then Taoiseach John A. Costello of Fine Gael announced unapologetically: ‘I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.’ In truth, few among the political class would have demurred from Costello’s unequivocal deference to the Catholic hierarchy.

    Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    ‘Dominion of Damnation’?

    Nonetheless, Fintan O’Toole arguably goes too far in a recent assessment of the Church’s ‘Spiritual Terrorism’: ‘There was no such thing as ”society” as distinct from … dominion of damnation, no neutral State beyond its reach. It pervaded everything and invaded all of our bodies.’

    For Irish men, at least, an independent caste of mind, and sense of humour, remained possible within fixed parameters. Building on the Irish Literary Revival, by the 1950s Dublin contained a remarkable artistic community, which included writers such as Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and J.P. Dunleavy, while the gay artist Patrick Scott was emerging on the scene; meanwhile many Irish Republicans of that period were being influenced by Marxism, to the consternation of the Church.

    Notwithstanding greater emphasis on social supports under Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fail from 1932, including an ambitious house building programme; and the introduction from 1948 of Keynesian fiscal policies under Fine Gael’s John A. Costello – whose son Declan would develop the idea of Christian socialism within that party with his Just Society document – for most of the population even socialism remained a dirty word; while Communism was considered the work of the devil.

    Shrine to the ‘Venerable’ Matt Talbot, Our Lady of Lourdes on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1.

    Archbishop John Charles McQuaid

    According to Ronan Sheehan, ‘The political message that the image of Talbot is supposed to communicate is that the working class is properly a subject class.’ This ‘theology of incarceration’ was expressed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in an introduction to the first full-length biography of Talbot:

    Yet it will be seen that the author in setting out the main events of the life of the Dublin workman has helped us to understand the sanctity to which he ultimately attained. The evidence is of a very remarkable spirit, or rather, gift of prayer, the practice of self-denial in poverty and work, the habit of recollection in the presence of God, a very tender graciousness towards children and a deep love of the most Holy Mother of God … We cherish the hope that the Church may set the seal of her approval from the virtues that made this obscure and gentle workman an image, in our midst, in Dublin, of the Patron of the interior life, St Joseph.’

    McQuaid’s unctuous benediction seems the realisation of W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save’; in political terms, as Sheehan, put it:

    When proletarian energy is focused upon the ‘interior life’ it is rendered politically tame. In Talbot the class struggle for justice is replaced by an individual struggle for holiness. It is precisely because he was a worker that we can see in Talbot’s spirituality the epitome of the negative ideological role Marx and Engels attributed to religion.

    Sheehan caustically observed: ‘Instead of attempting an analysis of the society in which he lived, he meditated.’

    Through no fault of his own, the political quiescence of Matt Talbot produced an ideal role model for the Catholic Church of an uncomplaining working man, who awaits his reward in heaven. Importantly this was before the arrival of a Theology of Liberation in the wake of Vatican II that animated many Irish radicals in the 1960s, including the journalist Vincent Browne.

    The importance of religious devotion to Talbot in his battle against alcoholism remains significant. Developing spiritual practices or a religious faith can often be beneficial to recovering addicts. However, Talbot’s apparent deference to authority as a working man suited the capitalist structures which the Catholic Church of that period legitimated.

    Granby Lane, Dublin 1.

    God after God?

    A more activist Irish Catholicism infused with Liberation Theology is now closely associated with the continuing work of Father Peter McVerry, whose approach to poverty, according to Sheehan, ‘stands in contrast to that of the promoters of the cult of Matt Talbot.’

    The philosopher Richard Kearney in his book Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia, New York, 2010) proposes ‘the possibility of a third way beyond the extremes of dogmatic theism and militant atheism: those polar opposites of certainty that have maimed so many minds and souls in our history.’

    Thus the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer awaiting execution in a Nazi concentration camp for participating in a plot to kill Hitler proposed a reformed Christianity after the ‘Death of God’ heralded by Nietzsche, Freud and totalitarianism. Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘The God of religion, of metaphysics and of subjectivity is dead; the place is vacant for the preaching of the cross and for the God of Jesus Christ.’ To Kearney: ‘Christianity thus becomes not an invitation to another world but a call back to this one, a robust and challenging ‘Christianity of this world’, a secular faith that sees the weakness of God as precisely a summons to the rekindled strength of humanity.’

    Throughout most of the history of the State Irish Catholicism reinforced a social order in which the working class were asked to count their blessings rather than their wages; while ‘fallen’ women and their progeny were treated with indifference and cruelty. A sanitized account of Matt Talbot’s life provided a useful lesson in subservience. Now that the spell is broken, it remains to be seen whether a Catholicism after Catholicism can yet emerge in Ireland.

    All Images (c) Daniele Idini

    Statue of Matt Talbot on the south side of Matt Talbot Bridge.

  • Vaccination: A Matter of Trust, with Caveats

    The palpable relief being felt by many over the accelerating approvals of apparently safe and efficient Covid-19 vaccines is hardly surprising. But away from triumphalist headlines, partially satiric messages have circulated widely on social media essentially stating: “I can’t wait for a new vaccine to come out so I can refuse it.”

    These are easy to dismiss as frivolous, or the ravings of an unhinged libertarian fringe, but such statements also evoke a frequent paradox in Western societies; namely calls for scientific breakthroughs to benefit the health of all, while maintaining a scepticism about public health measures enacted by governments and reliant on a mercantilist pharmaceutical industry. And more ominously, concerns over anti-vaccination lobbying distract from life and death issues surrounding equitable vaccine access for a large portion of humanity.

    Edward Jenner 1749-1823.

    Pitfalls of the Public Good

    Heralded as a milestone among Enlightenment advances, Edward Jenner’s late 18th century inoculation of his gardener’s son with cowpox is a path well-trodden by medical historians. In attempting to provoke an immune reaction to the far more dangerous smallpox virus, this precursor to modern vaccination built on centuries of traditional practices, notably in Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.

    By subsequently infecting his test subject with live variolous matter to prove his point, Jenner likewise carried on a long tradition of dubious experimentation. Despite minimal understanding of disease transmission – let along virology – vaccine development has consistently provoked opposition, whether political, philosophical, spiritual, or from scientists themselves.

    A significant factor in the dramatic European demographic expansion over the course of the 19th century was the spread of smallpox vaccination. There is a reasonable corollary between the broadening of States’ responsibilities over health matters and the emergence of openly anti-vaccine movements. Both processes accelerated during the Pasteur-Koch era even as the array of infectious diseases that were understood and potentially preventable expanded.

    Uncertainty and disbelief shifted to the questioning of the basic premise of vaccination, manufacturing conditions, and even the means of prescription to a population. More familiar incarnations include arguments over the presence of aluminium adjuvants; discredited studies pointing to the occurrence of autistic disorders; the possible corruption of decision-makers for the benefit of laboratories; or a broader discordance between the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and those of public health.

    A succession of scandals led Ben Goldacre in Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Fourth Estate, London, 2012) to write: “I think it’s fair to say that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are a kind of poetic response to the obvious regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.”

    Far from being solely a European issue, health coercion, including the authoritarian imposition of mass vaccination, has unsurprisingly manifested itself in colonial history. A highly toxic plague vaccine developed in India was tested on prisoners (along with the microbiologist responsible for its discovery), before being made obligatory for Chinese residents of San Francisco during an outbreak of Bubonic plague in turn-of-the-century San Francisco.

    An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.

    Attempts to tackle African sleeping sickness are similarly striking. The example of pentamidine in the 1940s, an antibiotic which was believed to treat sleeping sickness (ten million preventive injections would prove as useless as they were dangerous), highlighted not only the irrationality of colonial policies in place at the time, but also a blind faith in scientific progress. Public health policies could indeed seem far removed from what was being referred to as the common good.

    Past failings and Understandable Reservations

    Vaccines have since become a highly symbolic element of the State’s power over the human body, with objections today frequently based on claims of infringement on individual liberties. But while the dismissal of scientific evidence is disturbing in and of itself a far more sinister side exists, the assassination of health workers administering polio vaccines in Pakistan being an obvious example.

    As opposed to a demonstration in national power it is rather a question of a State failing in its responsibilities, be it through limited health infrastructure or outright negligence. And the CIA’s fake Hepatitis B vaccination campaign used to determine the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden in 2011 has hardly reassured those living in areas beyond the government’s remit. Rather, long-standing doubts about the motives behind mass vaccinations have been reinforced.

    Delta Force GIs disguised as Afghan civilians, while they searched for bin Laden in November 2001

    A comparable incredulity can be observed at present in Europe, where compliance with health measures taken by various States to fight the Covid-19 pandemic remains closely linked to the trust of populations in their respective governments – a trust that has unfortunately long since been waning in many societies. Hopes in scientific research for the health of the greatest number of people is confronted with the reality of a mercantilist pharmaceutical industry, or even the possible instrumentalization of public health by certain opportunistic governments to suppress pre-existing social discontent. All amidst a backdrop of wider deteriorating democratic norms and respect for basic human rights.

    Debate, or Lack Thereof

    While it is undeniable that an army of researchers was required to secure a Covid-19 vaccine, a cynic would question the speed with which pharmaceutical companies have developed a serum for a large and clearly solvent market, while many diseases remain outside the agendas of these laboratories. The legitimacy of a vaccine passport can also be challenged, not only because its medical effectiveness is still questioned by many, but also because it could prove a powerful deterrent to migratory phenomena and the right to asylum. The well-intentioned rush to digital health could unfortunately prove to be an additional obstacle for many countries for which access to Covid-19 vaccination may be late or even logistically impossible in view of refrigeration requirements.

    If there is one matter on which there should be a consensus among populations, it is that of equitable access to these new therapies, especially given the infusion of public funds to finance the research. In particular, the terms of agreements between laboratories on the operation and licensing of Covid-19 vaccines should be made public and openly debated.

    Whether or not one is convinced of the merits of vaccinating at this time against this particular virus; whether or not one questions the way this pandemic has been managed by our respective governments; and whether or not one criticises the manufacturing conditions of the serums, it would seem deeply naive to leave in the hands of competing economic powers one of the essential pillars of any society: the possibility of preserving the health of the greatest number of people. The history of vaccination, despite all the missteps and at times understandable reservations, provides an apt demonstration of this goal.

    Featured Image: World Health Organization photo by D. Henrioud preparing for production of measles vaccine.

    The authors are researchers with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières – Switzerland. The views expressed in this article are theirs and in no way represent the organization to which they belong.

  • The Mad King’s Final Stand

    “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it,” Lindsey Graham, May 3, 2016

    With the world looking on, on Wednesday January 6th President Trump incited his followers to storm the U.S. Congress in order to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election. An election which he lost by millions of votes.

    Over the last four years President Trump has mocked the Office he holds and the country he swore to defend to the great amusement of his followers, and the exasperation of his detractors. And his efforts have paid off. Some of his followers have ceased to be patriots and can now officially be labeled terrorists.[i]

    Republican leaders and conservative voices were quick to condemn the violence. As House minority leader Kevin McCarthy – who had previously indicated his support for Trump on every conceivable occasion – finally muttered ‘this has gone too far.’

    This has only now gone too far?!

    It wasn’t ‘too far’ to ask a foreign power to spy on political rivals? It wasn’t too far to ask that your political rivals be attacked or locked up? It wasn’t too far to suggest American POWs like John McCain and members of the military killed in action were losers?  It wasn’t going too far when he said ingesting bleach could kill coronavirus?  It wasn’t going too far to tear gas peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square in Washington DC for a photo op with a bible? It wasn’t too far to claim the 2020 election was fraudulent? It wasn’t too far to ask the Georgia Secretary of State to ‘find’ twelve thousand votes? It wasn’t going too far to demand that Vice President Mike Pence violated the Constitution to block the certification of the election? Seen in this light, the storming of the Capitol was inevitable. And even welcome.

    And that is because President Trump has been going too far a long time. And he has been aided and abetted by Republican leaders, the media looking for shock value (and thereby revenue), and by all ‘the other side does it too’ apologists.

    To Republicans who wanted conservative judges and justices appointed, lower taxes, less immigration, and the repeal of Obamacare, all this behavior was acceptable. Even a source of amusement. After all, Trump was a reliable turn-out machine. He was a golden ticket; the entertainer-in-chief to a conservative base long since tired of liberals and coastal elites telling them how to lead their lives.

    Republican after Republican laughed away the President’s shortcomings as foibles. As long as he pushed their agenda and helped their candidates get elected, all the President’s failures were acceptable.

    In the days to come conservative voices may claim the storming of Capitol Hill was the work of foreign infiltrators, saboteurs or left-wing pederasts. Or maybe they’ll say the other side started it in 2016 when they started the campaign ‘#notmypresident. But they will be hard pressed to undo what the American people have now seen is a real-world consequence of the tweeting of falsehoods; the ineptitude and the lies that Trump has spewed for the last four years.

    By backing Donald Trump to the hilt, no matter what he did or said, they have now ensured his supporters will only listen to him. Republican leaders who now call for peace won’t get it from Trump supporters. Fully 75% of Georgian Republican voters in the recent Senate runoff believed the Presidential election was won fraudulently. A claim that is simply false, but has been repeated ad nauseum by Trump and numerous Republicans.

    The result is that many of these voters lost enthusiasm for the Senate runoff, and Georgia just ensured that the Senate is now also in Democratic hands. Republicans lost, and it is now too late. And this has now gone too far.

    And yet it is said the darkest hour is just before the dawn. A silver lining to all of this is that these disgraceful scenes may lead to soul-searching in the Republican Party; once of Abraham Lincoln that put an end to slavery, and which broke up monopolies under Teddy Roosevelt. Perhaps they can get back to their roots as a Party of limited but just government, genuinely free markets, self-determination, and even global leadership. Such sentiments may seem far-fetched but at times like this we need is a little optimism.

    Happy New Year from across the pond!

    [i] Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).  https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005.

    Feature image: Washington DC, United States. 6th Jan, 2021. Protesters seen all over Capitol building where pro-Trump supporters riot and breached the Capitol in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. Rioters broke windows and breached the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. Police used buttons and tear gas grenades to eventually disperse the crowd. Rioters used metal bars and tear gas as well against the police. (Photo by Lev Radin/Sipa USA) Credit: Sipa USA/Alamy Live News

  • When the Unthinkable Becomes the Everyday: Covid-19 and Authoritarianism

    The idea that our society might be moving in a fundamentally bad direction is an extremely difficult one to grapple with. We are aware that society is deeply flawed, sometimes even to the point of cynicism; and yet there is a certain basic soundness in the orientation of our society which we assume as a kind of bedrock.

    Nevertheless, societies and whole cultures have gone bad in the past. We read about these slow, incremental drifts into authoritarianism and fascism in the history books of the twentieth century, always assuming with the benefit of hindsight that we would recognise the threat, and resist it if it ever emerged in our own time. In reality, however, to live through such a period must be quite different from reading about it in a history book. The sensation, I suspect, would be akin a child discovering some deep flaw in their parent. Our first impulse would be to  repress the awareness, often until it is too late.

    The idea that our response to the Covid-19 pandemic might be moving us in the direction of the authoritarian horrors of the last century is one that a great many are resistant to. They may feel, for example, that we are living with an extraordinary circumstance, and that the response, however undesirable and unprecedented, remains unavoidable in the face of the threat.

    Even to those who feel this way, however, the danger of authoritarianism is something which we should all meditate very deeply on. The comparatively free societies which we have grown up in are a rare and precarious achievement; we are simply not aware how precarious because they are the only world we have ever known.

    As the former Supreme Court justice and historian Lord Sumption pointed out in July: ‘Despotisms arise not because our liberty is forcibly taken away by tyrants but because people voluntarily surrender their liberty in return for protection from some perceived threat, and it is in the interests of governments to exaggerate that threat in order to procure compliance.’

    Or, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben reminds us in August, ‘The state of emergency is the mechanism, history teaches us, by which democracies become totalitarian states.’

    ‘Parasite Stress’

    The state of emergency is precisely when the free society is most imperilled, and pandemics are perhaps the most threatening to free democracy. The fear of contagion is deep-rooted in our genetics. It is for this reason that the language of infection and disease is so often the primary tool of demagogues and dictators.

    The ‘Parasite Stress’ hypothesis holds that ‘authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterised by a high prevalence of disease-carrying pathogens.’ Students of the psychology of politics have long noted a correlation between obsessive fear of contamination and the maintenance of rituals of cleanliness and order with the emergence of right-wing authoritarian tendencies. The theories of racial hygiene which underpinned the Nazi movement remain the most notorious and disturbing example of a regime utilizing the language of infectious threat to promote a totalitarian and racist ideology.

    Others will reject concern about the increasingly authoritarian turn our societies have taken on the basis of an association with conspiracy theories. However, no conspiracy of any kind is really necessary for a society to slide into authoritarianism.

    An awareness of psychology and history tells us that such a thing can happen entirely organically. Power is an innate appetite of human beings. It is such a strong drive that it can frequently seduce individuals without their conscious awareness. There is a reason why our liberal democracies are essentially predicated on the principle of providing checks and balances to curtail the powers of our ruling classes and bodies: unchecked power is dangerous.

    This, again, is why the state of emergency is so perilous: it is the period where those checks and balances are willingly revoked by the population, and this is why the emergency is the best friend of the would-be dictator. What I think is particularly alarming about our current situation with Covid-19 is that we have now excepted the state of emergency – with all its suspension of democratic norms, civil liberties and curbs on state power – on an indefinite basis. Lets look briefly at how that happened.

    Lockdown

    The initial decision to lock down was perceived as momentous, and there was considerable discussion and soul-searching as to whether or not it was the correct course of action to take. The crucial moment, however, came later and passed largely unnoticed. The initial premise for locking down, it is vital to remember, was that it would be a short-term measure whose entire function was to prevent health services from being overwhelmed. Whether or not the decision was ultimately correct, it can at least be said that this first notion of lockdown was not entirely unreasonable on the face of it. It was an emergency measure which had a distinct goal and a set duration. The pivotal moment in all this was not when we agreed to lockdown, but rather when the underlying rationale for the lockdown was changed.

    The happened in April, and in a quite peculiar way. There was no explicit announcement, no suggestion that such a significant matter should be a subject of national debate. Rather, there was a distinct change of language, a process whereby certain ideas were slipped into the conversation.

    We would be ‘doing this until there is vaccine’ ministers suggested for the first time. On April 16th, for example, UK health minister Nadine Dorries testily announced on Twitter: ‘Journalists should stop asking about an ‘exit strategy.’ There is only one way we can ‘exit’ full lockdown and that is when we have a vaccine.’

    This was also when we first began to hear the expression the ‘New Normal,’ repeated ad nauseam as a kind of spell to ward off critical reflection and debate. With virtually no debate or scrutiny from the media or political opposition, the rationale of the lockdown was changed from stopping the health service from being overwhelmed to suppressing the spread of the virus, putatively until a vaccine or some other innovation emerged.

    The significance of this manoeuvre cannot be understated: it meant that the state of emergency, with all its dangerous suspension of democratic norms, has been extended, without oversight or opposition, indefinitely into the future. There needed to be a discussion in April about how sustainable and harmful such a process might be in the longer term, and how much sacrifice and suffering was effectively being gambled on the speculative efficacy of a vaccine which didn’t even exist at that point. Sadly, this conversation never really happened, owing to the decline of adversarial journalism and the torpor of political opposition.

    For myself, I can remember being stunned and deeply shaken by this development. It felt as though freedoms which I had taken for granted all my life were suddenly, starkly cast away, perhaps forever. It seemed quite clear to me that the new model of suppression was entirely self-perpetuating: the more successful you are at suppressing the virus, the longer you will have to suppress it, because what you are also suppressing is natural immunity. We were committing ourselves to a endless cycle of deeply harmful measures and restrictions, supposedly on the basis that the eventual emergence of a vaccine would restore normalcy.

    However, the efficacy of the vaccine was by no means guaranteed, and what was far more certain was that we would have done more harm to ourselves through the restrictions than the virus itself by that point. It was madness – the kind of self-destructive madness that emerges once a century or so, and completely unseats one’s faith in the power of human reason.

    Fear and Mobilisiation

    To return then to the theme of authoritarianism: how might the ongoing Covid-19 response be compared to an emergent system of authoritarian or even totalitarian control? In both instances, you will have a population whose attention is riveted to one subject to the exclusion of all others. The subject will always be an enemy or threat of some kind: the Communists, the Jews, or, in this particular instance, a virus.

    Once the population is sufficiently afraid, the next step is mobilisation. By means of a joint government/media propaganda drive, the public is mobilized to a grand communal project, which can be the building of socialist paradise or Third Reich, a war effort, or indeed a unified national effort to slow the spread of a respiratory virus.

    By this time, certain psychological effects become apparent in the populace: critical reflection is replaced by the repetition of command slogans (For King and Country! Stay Home, Stay Safe, Slow the Spread), and spontaneous acts of conscience are replaced by blind adherence to rules. As in the infamous Milgram Experiment, once a person concedes their autonomy to the State, their conscience goes with it, and the authoritarian regime is characterised by a slowly creeping banality of everyday evil.

    The question remains, of course, are we really moving into authoritarianism, or are some of us simply imagining it? There was a peculiar period in late May and June when I thought my anxieties had been unfounded. Following the death of George Floyd, the media focused all its attention on racial justice and police brutality, and for a period of about two weeks, Covid-19 literally vanished from the public consciousness.

    Black Lives Matter, Dublin, June 1st.

    At that point, it looked as though things were getting back to normal: the epidemic had peaked, deaths and hospitalisations were beginning to flatline, and here in Ireland we had a roadmap back to normalcy with actual set dates. Since that brief oasis, however, things have taken a turn which has far exceeded my worst fears in April.

    In hindsight, the mandating of masks seems to have been a pivotal turning point: just as the public were induced to cover their faces, the mask of a voluntary partnership with our governments began to slip away. Indeed, the whole communal, consent-based spirit of the initial lockdown was soon abandoned: increasingly bizarre, absurd and self-contradictory edicts emerged on a daily basis, and new police powers to enforce them. And we began to see disturbing scenes emerging in Australia, and increasingly, in our own countries.

    A Kind of Trance

    What would it be like then, to live through the emergence of authoritarianism? I think that it would be exactly like the last nine months. The drift into authoritarianism is a kind of trance whereby things which would once have appeared appalling and impossible slowly insinuate themselves into our lives and societies. We now find them acceptable because we have been brought to the acceptance of a new reality. We have been made so hyper-conscious of one harmful thing (Covid-19) that all other harms begin to recede in significance, and all things become justifiable to a monomaniacal individual or society. The characteristic moment of authoritarian creep is that where the unthinkable becomes the everyday.

    There have been so many instances of the unthinkable in the last nine months – moments that feel like stark warnings, like episodes from a historical slide down the path of authoritarianism – that a whole other essay might be taken up with them.

    For example, in Australia in April the police interrupted a funeral as the coffin was being carried out to do a head count; in September they handcuffed a pregnant woman and took her from her home because of a Facebook post.

    In the UK on the 26th of September, German doctor Heiko Schöning (a member of the German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee) spoke to citizen journalist Anna Brees before he was due to address the Trafalgar Square Freedom Rally. Schöning told Brees that Germany was the epicentre of the anti-lockdown movement because of its historical awareness of authoritarianism. A couple of hours later, Schöning was surrounded by police, handcuffed and bundled into a van, and then detained for 22 hours for no other discernible reason than intimidation.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gurnp8qgEWo

    More recently at a protest in Berlin, human rights lawyer Markus Haintz and his girlfriend were brutally set-upon and arrested by police, again for no immediately discernible reason.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sDNd4P60F0

     

    It is difficult to say which is more unsettling: that these things are happening in our societies, or that virtually nobody is talking about it. That, however, is probably how the authoritarian society always takes root: the conviction that it couldn’t be happening is so strong that people refuse to acknowledge the explicit evidence unfolding before their eyes that it is.

    In our familiar conception of the deeply flawed society, we can easily demarcate ourselves from the villains, and many others will applaud us for criticizing them. The emergent authoritarian society, however, requires that we are all complicit; and eventually, mutual silence and complicity leads to a point of no return.

    Again, however one feels about the proportionality of the Covid response, we must begin to take seriously the perilous path our societies have gone down.

    I can’t shake the conviction that 2020 has been a kind of vast Milgram experiment, and of the European countries, Sweden alone has emerged with its democracy and humanity fully intact. The rest of us have unfettered the powers of the State to engage what has been arguably an assault on everything that is precious and meaningful in life: intimate contact, freedom, work, risk, childhood, youth and the future.

    We are sleep-walking into what will be the greatest economic depression most of us will ever experience in our lifetimes; and doing so while while granting unchecked powers to our governments that likely would have horrified us only a few short months ago. What degrees of the unthinkable will have become part of our everyday existence in nine months time, if we continue along this course?

  • Irish Government Requires Additional Insights

    On April 28th Fintan O’Toole brought a telling revelation to light in an article entitled, ‘Government ditched its own plan during this crisis’. He claimed that ‘Within the nexus of experts engaged in the management of the crisis, there are increasing concerns about the systems part of the operation’

    He then revealed that:

    the Government has a very well thought through system for managing emergencies – but it more or less completely ignores it … There are reasons why the Government missed the huge part of the crisis that was unfolding in nursing homes and residential institutions. One of them is the tunnel-vision that results from a top-down, command-and-control approach that is utterly at odds with what is supposed to be State policy

    O’Toole refers to a 60-page document called ‘Strategic Emergency Management: National Structures and Frameworks’, which specifically envisages ‘the potential widespread spread of a pandemic’.

    When Covid-19 cases began to multiply, however, ‘it was shoved in a drawer.’ ‘Power instead was taken over by the Taoiseach’s department and information was fed into it, primarily by a single body of experts, the National Public Health Emergency Team [NPHET]’, which ‘lacked voices from the nursing home sector.’

    The mistakes that were made at the height of the pandemic in March/April, when sick patients were returned to care homes may be traced to defective leadership structures, but at this stage there is little value in pointing the finger of blame, as we may assume that individuals were acting to the best of their abilities under enormous pressure, as epidemiological assessments were projecting a far worse death toll than was ultimately the case.

    But structural problems remain in the organisation. It is high time we re-examined how the government is being advised to bring the population to the promised land of ‘living with the virus.’ At this stage other forms of advice should be sought. Presumably the government is already receiving significant inputs from the business sector, but other important viewpoints are not part of the conversation.

    Varadkar’s Comments

    In what was a stark reversal of the situtation in late April when Dr Tony Holohan when asked about possible easing of restrictions replied, “I haven’t made up my mind,” the now Tánaiste Leo Varadkar identified a growing cleavage in Irish society between the private and public sectors on Claire Byrne Live. He commented that the pay packets of those on NEPHT (and his own) would not be affected by further restrictions and that cabinet would be the ones making any decisions on imposing further restrictions.

    That such a provocative comment, which perhaps only “Dr” Varadkar – whose background as a doctor was generally perceived as advantageous at the height of the crisis – could have been aimed against the doctor-in-chief in NPHET, which although composed primarily of civil servants, rather than doctors or scientists, nonetheless appears to have a higher standing in the eyes of the public than government Ministers.

    In fact, it might be expected that an expert grouping would see it as their responsibility to put forward a variety of courses of action as opposed to plumping for one, leaving it to the government to weigh the total implications of the various options.

    With case numbers – blunt statistics which have assumed a frightening importance – not reaching the stratospheric levels that some were predicting earlier this week, the government’s gamble to take a less draconian approach, which is more in line with Ireland’s European partners, may just be paying off. Also, Varadkar’s suggestion that the number of hospital admissions, especially requiring ICU, and mortalities, will become the guiding indicators may also signal a change in the way in which State will be contending with the virus in future.

    Varadkar’s comments, along with Fintan O’Toole’s earlier insights, may also highlight a broader problem, as to whether a body with the composition of NPHET can, in coping with an emergency, be prone to an element of ‘groupthink,’ such as we have witnessed in the past in controversial situations in Irish public life, notably the Bank Bailout in 2008.

    Advisory Groups

    HIQA, for its part, established a COVID-19 Expert Advisory Group on September 29th to support an evidence-based response to COVID-19, under the chairmanship of Cillian de Gascun. This includes what appear to be most of the leading scientists in the country, who will have insights on the virus itself.

    There is also an EAG Research Subgroup the members of which are:

    Prof. Colm Bergin (Co-Chair), Consultant Infectious Diseases, St. James’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin
    Prof.Cliona O’Farrelly (Co-Chair), Professor Comparative Immunology, Biochemistry, Trinity College Dublin
    Dr Teresa Maguire, Head of Research Services and Policy Unit, Department of Health
    Dr Siobhán O’Sullivan, Chief Bioethics Officer, Department of Health
    Dr Mairéad O’Driscoll, Director of Research Strategy and Funding, Health Research Board
    Dr Mark Ferguson, Director General, Science Foundation Ireland
    Prof.Stephen Kinsella, Associate Professor of Economics, University College Limerick
    Prof.Orla Feely Vice President for Research, Innovation and Impact University College Dublin
    Prof.Ivan Perry, Professor of Public Health, University College Cork
    Dr Ana Terres, Head of Research and Development, HSE
    Dr Sarah Gibney Senior Researcher, Research Services and Policy Unit and IGEES, Department of Health (replaced by Peter Doherty, Research Servicesand Policy Unit, Department of Health)

    Again this contains a significant number of civil servant administrators and a single individual from a non-scientific discipline, tellingly perhaps, economics.

    Guiding Philosophy

    It is hardly surprising that the Government has looked to administrators and academic scientists to guide it through this crisis. There must be some concern, however, that apart from economic cleavages between the private and public sector a scientific or technocratic background will not necessarily equip an individual to weigh up choices with profound ethical implications, affecting all strata of an increasingly diverse Irish society.

    In contrast in Sweden, where the effectiveness of government messaging in the absence of draconian measures has been roundly praised – even by those critical of an unwillingness to impose a lockdown – philosophers have been advising the government from the outset. Problematic policy choices and ethical dilemmas are faced and addressed.

    Notably, the National Board of Health and Welfare, one of Sweden’s main agencies for handling the COVID-19 pandemic brought in philosophers to design guidelines for priority-setting in medical care. The work was led by philosopher Lars Sandman, director of the Centre for Healthcare Priority Setting and a professor of healthcare ethics at Linköping University.

    Sandman said:

    In Sweden we are not allowed to take chronological age into account, but biological age—so the main thrust of the guidelines is how to interpret biological age in this situation—and we interpret it as covering both probability to survive the treatment and life-expectancy in terms of years. Hence, we propose that if doctors and other healthcare providers have to choose between helping patients with the same probability to survive but different life-expectancies, they should choose to help the patient with more years left. In relation to the ethical principles in the platform this is a somewhat new interpretation or clarification that has never been explicitly done before.

    These, we may assume, are the kind of ethical choices that NPHET and the medical establishment faced at the height of the pandemic, but behind closed doors. Perhaps a different philosophical approach would be to the fore in Ireland, with greater emphasis on preservation of life as opposed to overall public health. But it would surely have been beneficial for NPHET to have had recourse to the intellectual clarity provided by professional philosophers, and for there to be greater transparency around this decision-making.

    The Aosdána

    Moreover, as we build towards ‘living with the virus’ it is worth considering other forms of expertise. Harking back to Ancient Ireland we might consider a new role for the Aosdána (áes dána, ‘people of the gift’). These were the skilled men of early Irish society, whose hereditary or demonstrated skills were in law, medicine, history, music, masonry, carpentry, metalwork – but primarily in poetic composition. The recovery of public art in Ireland is not an idle concern. Artists may prove to be healers, as we navigate these choppy waters.

    An obvious body to consult already in existence is the Aosdána, an association of artists created in 1981 and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. The Aosdána could select from its members individuals to represent artistic creation in Ireland, which is essential to nurture during this global crisis.

    There has to be a concern that a body constituted such as NPHET is associated with what Iain McGilchrist might describe as ‘left-brained’ thinking, a tendency which is often associated with those heavily specialized in their chosen fields. Indeed, their very expertise may leave them less resourced to offer a broader wisdom enabling us to answer the hard question: yes, but what are we to do in the here and now?

  • Covid-19: What is in a Name?

    In Plato’s dialogue ‘Cratylus,’ Socrates and his friends Cratylus and Hermogenes discuss the issue of how phenomena are named. At the heart of the discussion lies the question of whether names have a natural relationship with the things they signify; or is this a random exercise, determined by custom, and are these names therefore mutable? So could the name ‘table’ simply be adjusted to ‘elbat’ by government decree?

    Many years ago I listened to the legendary publisher John Calder (of Calder and Boyars) at an afternoon session in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. By that time he had published approximately fifteen Nobel Prize winning authors, including Samuel Beckett. He mused on how fifteen years had passed since the first of Beckett’s publications and his rise to becoming ‘a household name,’ after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Ideas are not grasped overnight, they take time, John Calder observed.

    Socrates, Cratylus and Hermogenes might well stand a better chance of grasping the nature of the current pandemic than many contemporaries, as many of the main terms in use are of Greek origin.

    Epidemic: from Greek ἐπί epi ‘upon or above’ and δῆμος demos ‘people.’

    Pandemic: from Greek πᾶν, pan, ‘all’ and δῆμος, demos, ‘people.’

    Equally important terms derive from Latin:

    Virus: from Latin ‘poison, slime, venom.’

    Vaccine: from the Lain ‘vacca,’ meaning cow, a named conferred by Louis Pasteur in honour of Edward Jenner who pioneered the concept by using cowpox to inoculate (mid-15c., ‘implant a bud into a plant,’ from Latin inoculatus, past participle of inoculare ‘graft in, implant a bud or eye of one plant into another,’) against smallpox.

    Exponential: from Latin exponere ‘put forth.’

    At another point in their discussion the philosophers look up at the sky. They point to various planets and speak their names. Then one says: ‘There are things up there which do not have a name.’

    And another adds: ‘There are things down here which do not have a name.’ This brings to mind a disturbing thought, which is that if all things in the universe are related, and some things do not have a name, can the system of naming be relied upon?

    Take the proposition that someone, anyone, may carry the virus but show no symptoms. That, I believe, is a novel idea. One which did not have a specific name, in common parlance anyway.

    At least one eminent virologist has dismissed the claim outright that a ‘healthy-sick’ individual can pass on the virus as a ‘crowning of stupidity,’ when he explained ‘Why Everyone Was Wrong’ in their initial assessment of Covid-19. No doubt other experts hold differing views, but we are clearly in new linguistic territory when ‘asymptomatics’ are suffering from (or is that experiencing?) a disease.

    A few days ago I observed a group of teenagers, aged around twelve or thirteen, pushing, shoving, hugging, flirting, shouting, laughing, jumping, dancing, and even kissing around the Triangle in Ranelagh in Dublin.

    I doubt any of them are as yet familiar with the Classical etymology of important medical terms, or the nomenclature around ‘the virus’ now in circulation. If they knew what the Covid-19 restrictions are at all, they were blatantly flouting them with the enthusiasm of a Republican at a White House garden party.

    Perhaps instinctively they knew they had little or nothing to be concerned about themselves. A report in the Wall Street Journal in May quoted the U.S. Center or Disease Control to the effect that since February only fifteen children under the age of fifteen in the U.S. had died of Covid-19, compared to about two hundred who had died of flu and pneumonia. I just hope their instinct to embrace the fullness of life will not betray any older relatives who might be more susceptible.

    At another point in Plato’s dialogue a row breaks out between Cratylus and Hermogenes. Cratylus tells Hermogenes that ‘Hermogenes’ is not actually his name. This infuriates Hermogenes. It is so his name. His name is Level 3, not level 5! Level 3, Hermogenes! As Leo Varadkar might have said to Tony Holohan.

    Feature Image: The Death of Socrates (1787), by Jacques-Louis David.

  • Game Over: American Democracy in Tatters

    The death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg signals the death knell of the tradition of liberal American judges from William O’ Douglas, to the Irish-American William Brennan, and Harry Blackmun. In recent times we have had Stephens, and perhaps Souter, who went on a  voyage of passage from conservatism to moderate liberalism. Such warning signs ripple across the pond as America sneezes and Britain catches a cold. Or rather all catch Covid-19, and Trump appoints Amy Coney Barrett before the election.

    And it is abortion that at one level is the defining issue or rather the side-tracking defining issue. America has been down this road before when Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first female Supreme Court judge, as an ardent anti-abortionist, only for her to endorse to a limited degree the fundamental right to procreative autonomy in Planned Parenthood v Casey (1993). I do not think Trump has made the same mistake, much to my chagrin.

    Let us be clear: the appointment of a woman because she is a woman is not a cause for unique celebration. It is a Populist gesture to deflect criticism from her judicial philosophy. She is in fact a deeply conservative alt-right human being, whatever about her personal qualities.

    Populism joins religious fundamentalism with a veneration of unregulated free markets in American. Top it off with a clean cut corporate fascism and you have a signature hemlock cocktail.

    An ardent Catholic with seven children (two adopted), contraception not I suspect being permitted; a supporter of the ownership, possession and use of handguns even for non-violent felons (see Kanter v Barr (2019)), something she has inherited from the recently deceased Supreme Court Judge Anthony J. Scalia. She clerked affectionately for the guy we like to call Tony the Phoney.

    It now gives hardline conservatives an in-built majority of 6-3 to overturn the case of Roe v Wade (1973). Thus the case which established the right to abortion in America is imperilled and a neoconservative appointed to the bench. Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade foresaw this calling it in Planned Parenthood (1973) the light flickering at the end of his moving judgment. That light is now soon to be extinguished.

    Of significant concern to Irish and U.K. nationals, even allowing for special relationships, she also voted as a circuit court federal judge for Trump’s hard line legislation on Green Cards and will no doubt also support the expansion in the protection of religious rights, which the Supreme Court has hitherto been agnostic on.

    Gay rights groups have been very troubled by her views. She has gone on record and is appointed to dismantle even the remnants of Obamacare, narrowly endorsed by the Supreme Court in truncated form. Hard right-wing Republicans see health care as an entitlement not a right.

    Trump’s greatest legacy according to the Senate majority leader is the stacking of the Federal courts with 217 hard line conservatives and now three in rapid succession to the Supreme Court. The conservatives understand that the three recent appointments will dictate policy for perhaps forty years and are unlikely to be impeached. So the Thermidorian Reaction has seized control, irrespective of the outcome of the forthcoming Presidential election.

    To understand the ascension of such a person to me is to understand the stranglehold that the alt-right now exerts over U.S. politics. The conservative hard rightist is the new norm. Politics has shifted to the extent that even modest liberalism is equated with the dread spectre of socialism, and Trump in the recent debate with Biden can sanction and endorse alt-right fascism and thuggery without restraint, thus encouraging disparate sympathisers throughout the planet and in the U.K..

    In terms of judicial philosophy, following her mentor Scalia, she is a strict constructionist textualist and an adherent of original intent, thus handgun use, even by felons, is acceptable as if we were still in 1776.

    No doubt she will also be well placed if rushed through quickly by November 5th under unorthodox emergency procedures on a carefully engineered Senatorial confirmation with limited scrutiny to oversee any electoral problems her mentor Trump has; or for that matter if he loses to assist in his probable declaration of a state of national emergency; followed by the Federal invocation of martial law to extinguish American democracy.

    Her appointment signals not just the dying of the light, but, quite frankly, game over for American democracy, and perhaps global democratic values. This is a power grab that will take generations to undo.