Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • RTÉ Says: ‘Stars’ In Their Own Cars

    One trail runs dry, but a scent hangs in the air. Pursuant to Stephen Court’s Drivetime article for Cassandra Voices deconstructing the Irish media’s – including RTÉ ’s – relationship with the motor car sector, I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the national broadcaster.

    I sought records of payments, or payments-in-kind, from car dealership to leading RTÉ stars, approved by RTÉ ’s management since January 1st, 2017 under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance.

    RTÉ’s FOI officer responded on June 6th to say there was no record of any such payments or payments-in-kind.

    So can we be sure that RTÉ ’s ‘star’ personalities are appropriately objective in their reporting on transport issues?

    Unfortunately not, as an FOI is a request for records containing information, rather than the information itself. According to a recent judgment (quoted by RTÉ’s FOI Officer): ‘If the record does not exist the body concerned is not required to create records to provide the information sought’ (Case 170505, Ms X and Louth County Council).

    In other words, the FOI officer is under no obligation to dig for information on behalf of an applicant if the question posed misses records containing the targeted information; albeit an officer must take reasonable steps to comply with a request, which usually takes thirty days.

    There is ample evidence of a permissive culture among RTÉ management towards employees’ earnings from third party sources. This was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year, unrelated to enquiries into the motor sector. But RTÉ’s officer chose to withhold details of who received what from whom – for reasons of commercial sensitivity.

    As long as the national broadcaster does not provide a publicly accessible register of all transactions between employees (including so-called ‘external employees’ who avail of tax breaks available to companies) with third parties, as the BBC does, then suspicion lingers.

    At the very least the national broadcaster should reveal the text of the Personal and Public Activities Guidance, which regulates employee’s third party relationships.

    Any media organisation in receipt of a disproportionate proportion of its advertisement revenue from a particular sector is exposed to a charge of bias, which may operate in subtle ways.

    II – Bring Cyclists to Justice

    A recent example of what appears to be ‘Groupthink’ in the national broadcaster came from the unlikely source of Olivia O’Leary on – you guessed it – her weekly Drivetime column on June 19th.

    Drivetime’s website adopts the incendiary title: ‘Olivia O’Leary on Cyclists: ‘It’s time we called in the law and fought for our footpaths’. It is a case of ‘we’, the ‘normal’ people, presumably motorists, ranged against ‘them’, that strange species of two-wheeled fanatics, invading ‘our’ footpaths. The title invites confrontation beyond legal enforcement.

    The column itself is more balanced than the title suggests, but contains serious lapses of judgment. O’Leary said she was in favour of banning cars from between the canals and acknowledged that ‘cars destroy a city’, but then proceeded to lambaste the behaviour of cyclists in Dublin’s city centre.

    She limits her complaint to a certain type of (male) cyclist on a Dublin bike ‘thundering along’ footpaths, but that nuance is lost in the following statement:

    But, you know, there is one thing that private cars, for all their faults, usually do not do. They do not drive down the middle of the footpath, scattering pedestrians left and right. Cyclists, on the other hand, do this all the time.

    O’Leary also, remarkably, jokes about using an umbrella to unseat any cyclist who engages in ‘Panzer tank stuff’, before adding that she would not actually recommend this. Ha ha ha. Hopefully some hot head has not had ideas put in his head.

    This seems particularly insensitive, to put it kindly, considering how that very week in June ten people including three pedestrians had been killed by motor vehicles. Two were hit-and-runs. Unlike those killers, O’Leary missed the real culprits.

    Moreover, as Cian Ginty points out in a column for Irishcycle.com, a simple Google search yields examples of pedestrians on footpaths being killed by motorists.

    O’Leary is relating her personal experiences as a pedestrian in Dublin, which is fair enough, and of course there are lunatics out there. But what she fails to acknowledge is that friction between pedestrians and cyclists is largely a product of the deficient cycling infrastructure in the capital.

    Mounting the footpath in Dublin’s centre is often a safety measure in a crush of buses, taxis and private cars. Most cyclists will then glide at the pace of the average pram, and give right of way to pedestrians, some of whom, nonetheless, will take the opportunity to scream into the cyclist’s ear.

    O’Leary should have known better than to target cyclists for long failures in urban planning. She also ought to be pissed off with how the Drivetime producers have distorted her column.

    III – Motor Mouths

    Transparency in terms of external payments and gifts is especially important where, as Stephen Court’s article illustrates, there is a record of high profile figures – including Ryan Tubridy and others – apparently receiving free cars from dealerships, and also where numerous programmes from Drivetime to Liveline are sponsored by car companies, who also dominate commercial breaks.

    If a presenter’s salary is linked to the advertising revenue his or her programme attracts this could be seen as an indirect payment, which might inhibit the expression of views unsympathetic to the sponsor. At the very least large scale advertising by any sector creates an objective bias, i.e. an appearance of bias, even without direct evidence.

    No doubt these are existential questions for a state broadcaster, whose business model relies on advertising revenues of €151.5 last year, along with TV €186.1 million in licence fees.

    One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up.
    Joe Duffy, Irish Times, Saturday, December 9th, 2017.

    Is a widespread devotion to ratings really a pursuit of advertising revenue? With RTÉ consistently losing money (€5.6 million last year), it is time to cut its cloth, and focus on its primary public service: the delivery of news and current affairs at a remove from vested interests.

    This should involve an end to exorbitant salaries. The country is awash with aspiring journalists, most of whom would happily work on an average RTÉ salary of €70,000 per annum.

    The BBC manages to perform this role satisfactorily in the UK, while allowing commerical competitors. The population might be more willingly pay their TV licenses if the broadcaster delivered a better service. The country has among the highest evasion rates in Europe.

    It is time to kill the radio star on the national broadcaster.

    IV – A Broader Malaise

    The extent of payments from external sources to RTÉ’s household names was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year. But 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’.

    I saw details of payments by third parties to Ryan Tubridy, Ray D’Arcy, Miriam O’Callaghan, Damien O’Reilly, Marty Morrissey, Claire Byrne, Bryan Dobson, Sean O’Rourke, Joe Duffy, Philip Boucher-Hayes, Joe Duffy, Kathryn Thomas, Mary Wilson and Marian Finucane

    The officer responded that for 2017, ‘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 in 2017, particularly to independent contractors, shows the organisation takes a liberal view on potential conflicts of interest. Indeed, it is a matter of public record that management approved a payment by Origin Green/Bord Bia to Damien O’Reilly last year despite an obvious conflict of interest.

    RTÉ’s Damien O’Reilly.

    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 is impossible to verify this claim. It begs the question: if the work is harmless, or even benign, why did they withhold the information? Bord Bia is a not-for-profit semi-state body, but there was still a conflict of interest for RTÉ’s main agricultural correspondent to be receiving money from that organisation.

    We cannot now tell whether any of the third parties have connections to the motor car industry in Ireland. And even if an organisation is charitable, or not-for-profit, this does not imply neutrality on contentious issue.

    The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy – who has been outspoken in his criticism of cyclists –  could be lost to commercial competitors if damaging information enters 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 found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would represent 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 the radio ‘star’.

    V – A Tool of the Sector

    The state broadcaster is certainly not alone in the Irish media in its reliance on advertising from the motor car industry, and the objective bias this brings. Our ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, seems to do little investigative work into subject-matters impinging on its leading advertisers; and while generally virtue-signalling in its approval of cycling, has also contributed to negative stereotyping.

    One such portrayal came from Fintan O’Toole in 2013. O’Toole, whose father was a bus driver, as he has reminded his readers, does not drive. But seemingly that does not extend to sympathy for cycling. During National Bike Week in 2013 he wrote, tongue-in-cheek, that cyclists were the ‘spawn of the devil’, no doubt to the guffaws of his colleagues on the editorial floor.

    But the article was actually a genuine indictment of the behaviour of cyclists, who are portrayed as casually mounting footpath and endangering pedestrians, even where they have been provided with their own lanes.

    As with Olivia O’Leary, O’Toole posited a false dichotomy between pedestrians and cyclists, ‘us’ and  ‘them’, which ignores how the problem is not with either form of locomotion, but the utter dominance of the motor car in Ireland’s urban areas.

    Many of Dublin’s cycle lanes are defective: the track might be potholed, or simply a part of the road that is coloured red, a simulacrum of a real cycle lane without a protective curb, where parking is often permitted outside rush hour.

    O’Toole recently wrote an article criticising plans to remove motorized traffic from College Green, a measure which would also be advantageous to cyclists. O’Toole’s argument was that this would work to the detriment of mostly working class bus passengers. Cycling is not mentioned once in the article.

    College Green c.1890.

    The implication is that cycling is not a realistic mode of transport for the working class, but instead the preserve of middle class, lycra-clad, fitness enthusiasts, which is certainly not the case in cities where the bike is king. O’Toole is right insofar as he draws attention to the poor provision of public transport in Dublin, and to emphasise the continued importance of the bus.

    But rather than abandoning plans for a plan that would make the centre of the city more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists, a better outcome would be investment in quality bus corridors and the introduction of radial routes.

    *******

    With a climate comparable to Copenhagen’s and Amsterdam’s, Dublin is regarded as the Great Bike Hope of Emerging Bicycle Cities. But the media, from state broadcaster to the national ‘paper of record’ have failed to drive home that message, and few politicians, beyond the Green Party, have consistently campaigned on behalf of cycling, which should be a viable and healthy alternative for most healthy urbans residents.

    A deficient cycling infrastructure is another blot on the copy book of a country ranked second worst in Europe for tackling Climate Change, and which confronts an obesity pandemic.

    The national broadcaster might insulate itself from claims of objective bias by not treating news and current affairs as cash cows. Then we might be offered better reporting on important issues, such as reforming a sclerotic transport infrastructure. And if RTÉ’s ‘stars’ reckon they are not being paid well enough, they should be told to get on their bikes.

  • Leopold Bloom and the Art of Loafing

    What does it mean to be a loafer? Loafing as an activity has always existed. It has been carried out, witnessed, imagined and sung since the dawn of human time; from the ancient Aborigines on their walkabout, to the modern idling of the nineteenth and twentieth century dandies. Today, loafing as a mode of existence, may well be one of the last subversive acts and means of combating and living affirmatively amidst the information and technological age.

    The loafer is more than just a flâneur, epitomised by a Baudelaire or Wilde; he or she can be bucolic or urbane, a scientist or poetic seeker – anyone from Einstein to Yeats. And far from lazy in the vulgar sense, on the contrary, the loafer is never really at rest, but attuned to the present, and observing from various perspectives at the same time.

    A loafer is not bored; boredom comes from a forgetfulness of the power of the imagination; boredom is the great trick of marketers who vomit out messages demanding we purchase our entertainment, and sell us things we don’t need. Most of us live in a world where the power of advertising effectively distracts us from the impact of what we are consuming, and implicitly accepting.

    A loafer can enjoy waiting and musing; a loafer does not become irritated that he or she has to wait an extra minute for change at the supermarket, or partake in beeping and cursing obscenities to others while stuck in traffic, when they are part of the traffic; a loafer does not do a mountain or a country, but rather ascends a mountain and wanders a country. To paraphrase the Irish philosopher John Moriarty, the geography of the loafer’s mind becomes the geography of the landscape he or she travels in.

    As an example, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses emphasises loafing in at least two major ways. Firstly, in its conception, Joyce – as external and internal itinerant – creates a work that is an alternative journey or odyssey on the periphery of war-torn Europe.

    This is a difficult work that unfolds before the reader’s eyes with Joyce making his way as he writes, a book that becomes ever more sprawling as the episodes proceed. It defies schematic dogmatism, but simultaneously the work – merging chaos and cosmos expressed in Joyce’s words ‘chaosmos’ and ‘thisorder’– is contained within strict boundaries. Out of difficulty, arrives a wealth of possibility.

    Hardly any aspect of Western culture is left out in that account of a single day in Dublin on June 16th 1904, the day in which Joyce went on his first official date with Nora Barnacle who would become his muse, lover, wife, mother of his children, and companion throughout his entire adult itinerant life. Thus, the day marks a day of love and affirmation as well as being a universal modern bible of homelessness and homecoming.

    Secondly, there is the main character of Leopold Bloom – the majestic loafer – at once sad-eyed and sharp as a hawk in his observations. If the scientist seeks to understand reality and the mystic seeks to experience it directly, then Bloom, as loafer, does both.

    Statue of James Joyce in Trieste, where he lived on and off between 1904 and 1920.

    Real time is that of the observer. Many Westerners have lost the secrets derived from mystical sources, but these are only other aspects of a wider reality in less alienated societies. Thus deprived, many seek for this connection in exotic realms which are removed from their society and detached from their own suffering. It is often easier to access the magic in strange, unfamiliar landscapes than in one’s own seemingly all too familiar, cynical and faithless culture.

    Throughout the course of our lives, like Leopold Bloom, many of us will be confronted by tragedy at some point or enter dark places from which we find it difficult to escape. And each one of us is going to experience an apocalypse – our own particular death. As established religions have declined, a spiritual void has emerged in many people’s lives. But perhaps our own poetic traditions can offer the solace that many people seek, offering answers to which we are culturally attuned.

    The secrets and the answers are right here in front of us in slowness, in loafing, in singing. Yes, because music too can lift the spirit, as both Joyce and Leopold Bloom attest. As the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain (although himself a chief critic of Finnegans Wake) put it: ‘In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly’.

    As Joyce famously said himself of Finnegans Wake, if you cannot understand the text – then simply read it aloud and hear the music of it. The same goes for Ulysses. Walter Pater’s line is the key to Joyce’s experimental writing of the challenging music episode of Ulysses when Bloom wanders into the side room of Dublin’s national concert hall in the afternoon: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.

    Loafers have sung eloquently throughout history, from the first Provençal troubadours who invented our modern idea of Romantic love, down to some of our finest popular late twentieth century musicians from the Brazilian Bossanova and Tropicalia movements, to the Celtic Soul fusion of Van Morrison.

    Our contemporary society prizes speed, efficiency and growth and looks askance at activities deemed unproductive. In particular the loafer is anathema to a culture which has absorbed a work ethic equating time with money.

    Yet perhaps the greatest achievements occur when the mind is at rest and seemingly unproductive. Peripheral vision allows us to look beyond conventional ideas and draw inspiration. One has only to think of Einstein discovering the theory of relativity while daydreaming in a patent’s office, or of Newton grasping a theory of gravity while dawdling under a tree. It is often as the poet, the philosopher or the scientist roam the busy city streets, or rolling hills, that the real work is done.

    By embracing loafing now and then, we remove ourselves from the maelstrom of a contemporary culture where slowness and alternative ideas are devalued. The world is motored by rampant consumerism despite our knowledge that it creates great anxiety and is rapidly destroying and usurping much of the landscape for other animal and plant species to continue to exist.

    Only by taking time out for undistracted reflection can we think about what is really happening and what we really need for our wellbeing. Crucially, the loafer Leopold Bloom’s first conversation is not with a human being but with a cat, and he treats the animal equally and with humor and tenderness, and it is from there that Bloom begins his odyssey through Dublin – observing, walking, feeling, ogling, helping, dreaming and loving for the world, rather than merely being in the world.

    Loafing might thus be seen as a revolutionary act, which, if taken seriously, has the capacity to bring meaningful benefit and transformation to individuals and society at large. Our world which, to quote Joyce, is ‘ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void”. This expression, buried deep in the penultimate episode of this colossal book of loafing, may well be the definition of art, beauty, Ulysses and existence itself.

    Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com/)

  • Malaysia’s Political Tsunami of Hope

    On May 9th Malaysia’s electorate unequivocally rejected Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s Barisan National coalition, including the UMNO party which had participated in every government since the foundation of the state. The demise of this kleptocratic regime was met with shock, even denial, by now unemployed government ministers.

    A democratic, peaceful overthrow took place without a single drop of blood being spilt; no riots or street clashes occurred, despite attempts to destabilise the electoral process with cynical manipulation of racial and religious tensions.

    The defeat of the conservative-centrist, ethnic Malay government to a centre-left multi-ethnic party is a fantasy made possible by unprecedented unity among the electorate. The coalition was led by the Pakatan Harapan (‘alliance of hope’) party, which was founded in 2015 after yet another general election had failed to bring down the government.

    The new party is led by veteran former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, who became convinced by the need to clean-up endemic state corruption, right up to the highest offices. This meant ousting the party he had led for over twenty years as Prime Minister from the 1980’s onwards. Perhaps he recognised that his own policies had inadvertently bred a culture of privilege and corruption.

    This coalition brings together opposition parties including the Democratic Action Party, Bersatu and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (‘the people’s justice party’), the latter of which is led by Mr. Anwar Ibrahim, who was only released from prison last month. He had been incarcerated on charges of sodomy, and had been the main political rival to Dr. Mahathir Mohammad during his tenure in power.

    In this campaign, however, these venerable political strategists displayed genuine political maturity, setting aside their differences with national progress in mind, to have another tilt at winning high political office. They convinced the people they were the only viable alternative to the seemingly endless extraction of wealth from a country steeped in resources.

    The previous government were implicated in a number of corruption scandals, such as the colossal 1MDB affair, where billions of Rinngit-Malaysia went missing from a development fund, only for a similar value to appear in then Prime Minister (and self-appointed finance minister) Najib Tun Razak’s own bank account.  His claim this was a gift from Saudi Arabia was initially denied, and only later agreed by the Saudi authorities.

    Following on from this Saudi Arabia identified a coalition of Muslim nations, which included Malaysia, allied to their bombardment of tribal villages and unarmed civilians in Yemen. The Saudis brazenly displayed the Malaysian flag, with no objection from Najib’s government.

    Malaysia is an historically neutral country, opposed to warfare, and has played key roles in UN-led initiatives from the Balkans to tribal conflict in Somalia. Najib is also embroiled in alleged cases of murder.

    The people’s victory was made all the sweeter considering the gerrymandering of electoral districts and the tactic of holding the vote on a Wednesday between the hours of 9am and 5pm to the disadvantage of many workers, who could not reach polling stations in time to vote: especially those working outside states they were registered to vote.

    Foreign ballots were also deliberately withheld, so as to make it impossible to return these before the deadline. The more obstacles the government put in the way of the Malaysian rakyat (‘people’) the greater their determination to remove a corrupt elite.

    The core parties elected to run the fourteenth government of Malaysia now hold 124 of the 222 seats in parliament, which includes majority ethnic Malays, Chinese and Indians, as well as representatives of indigenous groups from the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo.

    The post-colonial hang-ups of racial and religious divisions may finally be in retreat, giving breathing space for a more confident and inclusive national identity, drawing strength from its diversity. Notably, when the new minister of finance was asked by a reporter what it felt like to be the ‘first Chinese finance minister’, his answer was: ‘I’m sorry I don’t consider myself a Chinese, I am a Malaysian.’

    It is a work-in-progress for all who voted for this new government to exemplify that inclusivity of Malaysian-ness, and encourage their opponents to recognise the benefits, and stability, this mind-set brings.

    Much work is in store for the new government. They have not been idle, immediately working on policy reforms and creating transparency, as well initiating the process of making accountable those who impoverished the country.

    They plan a root and branch reform of state institutions, beginning with the removal of some seventeen thousand excess contract officers and political appointees.

    Najib and his notorious wife Rosmah – who makes Imelda Marcos seem positively parsimonious – have had their right to travel out of the country revoked; and as many as seventy suitcases filled with cash, and two hundred and eighty-four luxury hand bags (including fifty Hermes Berkini handbags costing up to US$250,000 each) have been seized. This is before their bank accounts, properties and other assets around the world are investigated.

    More importantly, the new government have expressed a determination to relieve the financial burden on the state, the extent of which the previous finance minister had hidden. The new Prime Minister has revealed that Malaysia is in debt of up to 1 trillion Ringgit Malaysia, that is US$250 billion.

    While it will be a major task to meet debt commitments, if this government puts in place convincing policies of transparency, coupled with fair allocation of resources, trust will be engendered.

    Moreover with the political nous and experience of Dr Mahathir Mohammad at the helm the crisis seems likely to be overcome. It was his brainchild to peg the ringgit to the US dollar during the catastrophic wipe out of South East Asian economies in 1997. This and other measures made Malaysia the fastest recovering economy in the region, a strategy dubbed Mahathiriskonomisme by developmental economists: combining Mahathir with the word risk and economy.

    From an Irish perspective, Malaysia offers parties here who have never served in government a good lesson in thinking big. For too long we have been ruled by the tweedle-dum of Fianna Fail and the tweedle-dee of Fine Gael, in rotation, since the foundation of the state.

    The Irish political establishment have presided over a succession of failing state institutions from a crumbling health care system, to an on-going housing emergency, banking and police corruption, to name but a few. Promises of reform are clearly subordinate to Neoliberal corporate-state relationships.

    Perhaps it is time for opposition parties, in particular Sinn Fein, People Before Profit, The Left Alliance and independents to get their act together, place differences aside and move against the status quo. Then under one banner restore the rule of law and accountability, re-imagining Ireland in a way that speaks to the immediate needs of the people, and behaves as an honest broker in its foreign policy. Backed by a population which believes in a better future, just as the Malaysian people did, perhaps Ireland could reinvigorate national pride, our economy, and finally put an end to the emigration brain-drain.

    Tabek (respect) Malaysia: whilst operating in globalised capitalist times, your overthrow of a corrupt regime shines as a beacon to the rest of the world. Now walk the talk Putra Jaya parliament, the Malaysian political tsunami can rise, and will rise again.

    Aminah Dastan is a recording artist and music activist based in Ireland, founder of small not for profit music festival Sundown Gathering. She has an honors degree in Environmental Biology and postgraduate in Cultural Event Management. She grew up in both Ireland and Malaysia and has a keen interest in social inclusion and development through participation in the arts and sustainability.

  • What Lies Behind Ireland’s Abortion Referendum

    Is it cynical to suggest that Ireland’s ruling Fine Gael party is using the referendum to repeal the eighth amendment to the Constitution – which equates the life of a pregnant mother with the unborn – to deflect criticism from its hands-off approach to governance? One of the worst housing crises in the history of the state, a failing two-tier health system and a shameful environmental record all recede from view amidst the commotion.

    The end result will come at little cost, either way, to a government, some of whom, including the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, have expressed contradictory views on the subject. That lack of enthusiasm is apparent from the Fine Gael party’s decision not to put up posters to support a ‘yes’ vote. Win or lose, the government will say: ‘we have listened to the will of the people’.

    Leo Varadkar’s belated conversion to abortion rights might also reflect an appreciation of the makeover his predecessor Enda Kenny received after coming out in favour of gay marriage in the Marriage Equality Referendum of 2015. Keeping debate focused on the private lives of individuals, rather than the performance of state institutions, appears to be an excellent political strategy in twenty-first century Ireland.

    Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney’s own volte-face from principled opposition to acceptance of a need for reform also bears an imprint of political calculation. Such flip-flopping is not surprising considering he once claimed that what he knew about the science of climate change sent shivers down his spine, before displaying no scruples about expanding Ireland’s dairy sector while Minister for Agriculture.

    Since arriving as the dominant centre-right party after the Economic Crash of 2008, Fine Gael has steered a course between a traditional rural power base, and an urban middle class that lost faith in its predecessor Fianna Fail, as the establishment’s self-fulfilling ‘natural party of government’.

    Fine Gael is now in a ‘confidence and supply’ parliamentary alliance with its erstwhile foe, which has moved to the left after recovering a social conscience; Fianna Fail’s is on a familiar ideological journey for one of Ireland’s crooked, main political parties, for whom commitment to social equality generally depends on distance from power.

    The government’s continued policy of agricultural expansion, despite the sector generating one third of all national emissions, keeps the farming industry on side, while a propertied metropolitan bourgeoisie benefits from low taxation on their assets, especially property. This formula is doused with liberal doses of virtue-signalling ‘tolerance’, personified in the half-Indian and gay Taoiseach Leo Varadkar himself.

    Varadkar unapologetically courts a thrusting middle class constituency. His tenure as Minister for Social Welfare saw him take out advertisements against ‘welfare cheats‘; as Minister for Health he effectively endorsed a two-tier health system in boasting publicly that he had taken out private health insurance; while as Minister for Transport, to the undoubted delighted of the motor car lobby, he dismissed rail transport as being for ‘romantics’. But an increasing class divide may be an unacknowledged factor in the forthcoming plebiscite.

    Taoiseach Leo Varadkar

    The referendum pits conservative, rural Ireland against the generally liberal, Dublin metropolis. But opposition to abortion may be a proxy for the insecurity felt by those living in dying small towns removed from the capital, or renters impoverished by another explosion in property prices. Holding a Pro Life position might be a transgressive reaction to the perceived success of elites, who appear ‘shameless’ in their exultant sexuality. The sight of bright young women wearing the popular black jumper emblazoned with the word Repeal could only serve to stiffen the resolve of resentful opponents.

    The long-standing failure of the state to develop a functioning transport system has brought the isolation of car dependency across Ireland, and small businesses fail as multinationals dominate the retail landscape. Distance from the fruits of Ireland’s uneven recovery explains a simmering resentment among the ‘silent majority’, as much as the residual influence of the Catholic Church. It’s a tale of two countries, where those who take their dinner in the middle of the day do not sit down with urban brunchers.

    The run on bread and other staple foodstuffs before the onset of the ‘Beast from the East’ snow storm in late February betrayed a deep sense of unease among the population. It assumed that neither the state nor the wider community could be relied on, leaving the individual to bowl alone.

    The issue of abortion in Ireland is now a full-blown fiasco, stemming from the eighth amendment to the constitution in 1983, which proved unconscionable once it encountered social realities. Enshrining the life of an unborn as equal to a mother’s is a fine-sounding principle until you meet a suicidal minor impregnated through rape, who sees an abortion as the only way out of her predicament.

    The Supreme Court in the 1992 X Case met such circumstances and overturned the High Court’s earlier decision to detain the young girl in the state. The court overlooked the provision’s explicit statement on equality of consideration, treating it as inconsistent with natural justice.

    This led to further constitutional referenda guaranteeing a right to travel, and to information on abortion legally available elsewhere: ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’, which exported the problem to another jurisdiction.

    Also in the wake of the judgment, some conservatives claimed Ireland had among the most liberal abortion regimes in the world, as there was no theoretical limits on abortions in the event of a threat to the life of the mother.

    The issue simmered along for another two decades with thousands of women taking the trip across to the UK in that time. It took the death of Indian woman Savita Halappanavar in 2012 from a septic miscarriage after having her request for an abortion turned down in an Irish hospital to re-ignite the debate.

    The Protection of Life in Pregnancy Act 2013 legislated for the decision in the X Case, but far from closing down discussion it preserved the ambiguity around what constitutes a threat to the life of the mother sufficient to justify an abortion. Finally this year, Varadkar’s government accepted the recommendations of a Citizens’ Assembly and a parliamentary committee, and announced the referendum to repeal the provision, to allow for the state to legislate for terminations on demand. It’s been a slow burn ever since.

    It is unclear whether the number of those seeking abortions will actually increase if it is available on demand in Ireland. That is not to say the ethics of the matter are irrelevant – as some suggest who seek to portray it as simply a medical question – or that the associated cost of travel and medical care are unimportant, but the context is relevant.

    Just as the marriage equality referendum was not as much about gay marriage per se but about attitudes towards homosexuality, this referendum also concerns respecting the right of women to choose. To describe abortion as ‘a licence to kill‘ is a grave affront to the thousands of Irish women who have already had abortions.

    Unfortunately the issue is now so divisive that meaningful discussion hardly occurs around what right, if any, the unborn should enjoys subject to the countervailing right of a woman to her bodily integrity.

    This referendum could be Ireland’s Brexit or Trump moment, when the forces of reaction stand up and are counted against a complacent liberal elite. Yet only by progressives engaging constructively with the arguments of their opponents, and understanding the origins of so much of their ire can a toxic political chasm be bridged. Unfortunately with each side adopting Machiavellian marketing strategies, any recognition of opposing arguments becomes impossible.

    There are serious ethical questions to be addressed around the genetic profiling of the unborn, and to describe ‘No’ voters as simply misogynists does not advance the discussion at all. It is a culture war that serves the interests of the government, and a press which sells opposing sides in print, claiming this to be in the interest of balance.

    On one point at least, the ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ campaigns should agree: no woman should feel obliged by economic circumstances to terminate a pregnancy. We should focus on building a more caring society for the living, where women are offered adequate support by the state in rearing their children.

    A simple alteration to the constitution that would instantly compel any governments to pay heed to the material welfare of all Irish citizens would be to make Article 45 containing ‘The Directive Principles on Social Policy’ cognizable by the courts. As it stand socio-economic rights, such as a right to housing, are not provided for under the Irish constitution. The article is merely for the consideration of the Oireachtas, which is as good as worthless.

    Unfortunately there is fat chance the ‘natural party of government’, whichever one that is, will sponsor a referendum to make a basic standard of living in Ireland a constitutional right, which would be an incentive to motherhood.

    The eighth amendment brought a toxic ingredient into the constitution that proved unworkable once confronted by the social realities of rape and medical necessity. It concedes nothing to a woman’s right to bodily integrity, especially if she is in dire financial straits, treating her as a passive incubator. It must go. Let us then consider the origins of the discontent, and address socio-economic causes.

    Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices. An archive of his writing is available on www.frankarmstrong.ie

  • Spain on Trial

    Writing in The Observer in 1961, Peter Benenson lamented that ‘in Spain, students who circulate leaflets calling for the right to hold discussions on current affairs are charged with ‘military rebellion’.’

    So what? You may ask yourself – that was 57 years ago under the Franco dictatorship. But that’s the point: six decades later in a liberal democracy, dozens of people in Spain have been charged with crimes such as ‘sedition’, ‘rebellion’ and ‘terrorism’ for offences such as blocking roads and bar fights with off-duty police officers.

    Benenson, who used his article as the launchpad for founding Amnesty International, added that ‘no government… is at greater pains to emphasise its constitutional guarantees than the Spanish, but it fails to apply them’. This observation rings true today, where the Spanish government and Madrid-based media react with apoplexy at any criticism of Spain’s handling of the Catalan crisis. Spain, they argue, is a modern and mature democracy with separation of powers and legal guarantees.

    By coincidence, the Spanish government’s recent travails with Catalan separatists have coincided this spring with the trial of eight youths from the highland town of Altsasu in Navarre. With about 7,500 inhabitants, it’s typical of the middling market towns that make up the Basque nationalist heartland straddling the Franco-Spanish border.

    5am bar brawl

    In October 2016, the youths became embroiled in a 5am bar fight. The two men they tussled with were off-duty police officers: one of whom suffered a fractured ankle. State prosecutors allege that the youths knew this and that it was an intentional assault; that they sent text messages to others to join in. The eight were arrested and transferred to Madrid, where three have remained ever since awaiting trial without bail.

    If convicted, they face sentences of between 12 and 62 years on terrorism-related charges. It is instructive to set out the draconian penalties just one, Oihan Arnanz, faces. Eight years for terroristic public disorder; two years for attacking agents of authority; eight years for non-terrorist lesions; and twelve-and-a-half years for making terroristic threats.

    Needless to say, the case has caused consternation in the town and wider Navarre. Locals feel the proposed sentences excessive and vengeful. Baltazar Garzon, the judge who earned fame for trying to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet 20 years ago, has claimed the trial ‘trivialises’ genuine terrorist offences and should never have gone beyond a circuit court.

    Human rights charities such as Amnesty and Fair Trials have criticised the use of anti-terror laws to deal with a bar brawl – which would lead to sentences of up to 60 years for a fractured ankle. To further highlight the absurdity of the charges, Rafa Mora, a Spanish reality TV star who was involved in a bar fight with off-duty police officers was fined €300.

    Ministers have openly commented on the trial. The Interior Minister has tweeted that the testimony of one of the officers was ‘disturbing’; meanwhile the conservative news website El Español has labelled the accused as the ‘children of hatred’, and the formerly liberal El País has described Navarre as a society that is ‘hostage to xenophobia’.

    Yet at the end of the trial, the judge finally allowed evidence from the defence that contradicted court testimonies by the victims and police officers on the scene. In mobile phone footage, one of the victims is seen pacing about outside the pub in a spotless white shirt – despite claiming to have been stamped on and kicked on the pub floor during the attack. The prosecution’s response was to suggest the footage had been edited, and summed up: ‘What we are seeing is fascism in its purest state by the Basque supremacists.’

    Brute force

    A short distance away, in another Madrid courtroom, hearings were taking place for an undoubtedly bigger event: the trials against the more than two dozen Catalan nationalists accused of ‘misappropriation of public funds’, ‘sedition’, ‘rebellion’ and ‘terrorism’.

    This case has received far more international coverage because of the shocking images of Spanish police beating would-be voters in the unconstitutional independence referendum called by the Catalan regional government on October 1, 2017.

    Rebuffed by the central government in Madrid after years of at attempts to negotiate a referendum, the nationalist-controlled regional executive decided to throw down the gauntlet. Quim Arrufat of the hard-left separatist CUP party telegraphed the strategy a year in advance: ‘A unilateral independence referendum would show up the undemocratic contradictions of the state, not just to our people but to the world; so that it resorts to some type of legal or even brute force.’

    The inflexible PM Mariano Rajoy took the bait and sent in the stormtroopers. Since then, Madrid has been reeling, especially as half a dozen of the accused have fled to other jurisdictions and extraditing them is proving to be far from straightforward.

    The lack of violence by the nationalists is the elephant in the room, though it hasn’t stopped the Madrid press from talking up the ‘violence’. It means that the legal case against them is, at best, flimsy. So flimsy, in fact, that a German court took fewer than 48 hours to reject as ‘inadmissible’ the charges of violent rebellion against Carles Puigdemont, the deposed Catalan president who was arrested in Germany on a European Arrest Warrant. It was a double humiliation for Spain: the court took two days to reject six months of legal work by Spanish prosecutors and it also questioned, by implication, the quality of the rule of law in Spain. 

    German hostages

    The result has been a spike in anti-German rhetoric by politicians and the Madrid-based media. The more restrained criticism was that it was an insult for a regional German court to rule against Spain’s Supreme Court, while the more volatile have called the decision ‘racist’ and suggested that ‘there are 200,000 German hostages in the Balearic Islands.’

    Meanwhile, El Español ran a piece on the Schleswig-Holstein’s ‘Nazi heritage’ – helpfully illustrating it with a triptych of mugshots featuring Puigdemont and Nazi war criminals. Germany’s embassy in Madrid was also on the receiving end, with 4,000 messages arriving per day, ‘many in an insulting tone’, to complain about the tribunal’s decision.

    Not ones to let the politicians, media and ordinary public make all the running, Spain’s Supreme Court also weighed in by accusing the German tribunal of a ’lack of rigour’. It also claimed, somewhat cryptically, that had police not intervened on referendum day, “it would have been very probable that a massacre occurred”. It didn’t specify who would have perpetrated the ‘massacre’. Nor did it explain the legal basis for a hypothesis of a crime that never took place actually being a crime. But this fits in with the Orwellian nature of the whole ‘violent’ rebellion charge: In their arrest warrant prosecutors blame the Catalan leadership for inciting civilians for violence on the part of the police, saying that ‘a gathering of approximately 250 people…impeded the access to the polling station…generating the aggression of the officers who intervened.’

    Siege mentality

    The Schleswig-Holstein ruling and the difficulties Spain has encountered in extraditing wanted Catalans from Belgium, Scotland and Switzerland, coupled with what it perceives as unfairly hostile media coverage abroad, has led to a siege mentality. It cuts to the bone even more so because the nationalists are routinely portrayed in the Madrid-based media as xenophobic putschists and even Nazis. Apparently, it doesn’t enter their heads that anyone could characterise them any other way.

    Narratives against Catalan nationalism are so widespread that Spain’s paper of record, El País, has taken to comparing Pep Guardiola, the Catalan manager of Manchester City Football Club, with Joseph Goebbels while pumping out op-eds labelling him a ‘liar’. Guardiola is, of course, a Catalan nationalist and delighted to make the point at every opportunity. It’s not just the media who are hounding Guardiola: his family has been subjected to official harassment with his private jet searched and a car his daughter was travelling in stopped by armed police and searched.

    The media and Twitter are alight with anger and dismay at reports in The Times – whose ‘Spain Again’ editorial got under the skin of quite a few – Le Monde, Washington Post and Der Spiegel criticising Spain. The message being put out is that it is Spain itself on trial, when it should really be the seditious Catalan putschists.

    The mainstream media bristles at this questioning of Spain’s democratic credentials; that Spain’s judiciary is a tool of government policy; and that anyone could think there are ‘political prisoners’ in Spain. They suggest that Spain is once again the victim of ‘black propaganda’ and characterised as Franco-landia.

    As the ultraconservative paper, ABC, put it: ‘On the other side of the Pyrenees, the image of an inquisitional and underdeveloped Spain, pseudo-African and intolerant, is as alive as ever.’

    Lashing out like that is an example of what award-winning writer John Carlin – who is half-Spanish – calls the ‘insecurity’ of Spanish nationalism. Carlin experienced first-hand the backlash against foreign criticism when he was sacked by El País after two decades as a columnist, for criticising the handling of the Catalan crisis. ‘I do not support separatism,’ he told Catalan news site Vilaweb, ‘But that is not enough. You must absolutely scorn secessionists, almost hate them and systematically disrespect them in a visible manner.’

    And Carlin is not alone. Another half-Spanish journalist, Tom Burns, was on the receiving end of a reporter’s ire in a recent El Mundo interview, after he bemoaned police brutality. Asserting that it was a journalist’s job to report the truth, the reporter asked: ‘Why are foreign media portraying Spain as a Francoist country, without separation of powers?

    In tatters

    While the Schleswig-Holstein tribunal gave short shrift to allegations of ‘violent’ rebellion, it asked for more evidence to back up the claims of misappropriation of public funds. But as German magazine Der Spiegel revealed: ‘In their arrest warrant, the Spanish checked the box for corruption but there was no reference in the warrant text indicating that any corruption had occurred.’

    Despite a lack of fundamental evidence to ground the charge, the German court nonetheless sought further particulars, leading Der Spiegel to conclude: ‘the Higher Regional Court ruling was still too merciful with its treatment of the Spanish arrest warrant.’

    While the rebellion charge against Puigdemont is in tatters other Catalan leaders remain in Castilian jails awaiting trial. The former still faces a maximum eight years on the misappropriation charge, although this is seen as insufficient punishment for daring to declare independence.

    But even this is at risk after a bombshell interview by Spain’s finance minister, Cristobal Montoro. El Mundo, the conservative paper he spoke to, didn’t even lead with the claim, preferring to headline on a nothingburger about Rajoy. But his comments were picked up by the Catalan press and the lawyers of the accused.

    Montoro was only repeating what he and PM Rajoy had told Parliament in February: ‘I don’t know with what money they paid for the Chinese ballot boxes,’ he said. ‘But I know it wasn’t public money.’ At a stroke, the man pulling Spain’s purse strings had discredited the prosecutors and police investigators, who, while admitting that they have been ‘unable to determine’ how the referendum was paid for with public funds, claimed that up to €1.9m was misused for such ends. It appears the police have found invoices but have been unable to establish that they were actually paid as no monies were debited to accounts.

    It’s hard not to overstate the anger at Montoro in the Madrid press. Terms such as ‘clumsy’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘unforgivable’ and an ‘own-goal’ were among those that made it to print. Some even thought he was covering his back and called for him to resign. The previously hawkish finance minister is now a marked man, seen as an enabler of putschists.

    Is this a case of a politician being savaged for telling the truth? The police reports are full of holes. The interior minister has admitted that police quadrupled the number of injuries they received while beating would-be voters and, incredibly, the chief leading the investigation has been tweeting about it under the name Tacitus, disparaging the Catalan leaders and making accurate predictions about the legal process, a habit the justice minister Rafael Catala shares. So much for the separation of powers.

    Lack of credibility

    Nowhere is the lack of credibility in police claims more obvious than in the case of the ‘village’ of Sant Esteve de les Roures. A report on Catalan ‘violence’ on referendum day detailed this hamlet as being particularly vicious, with brutal attacks on police officers. Someone spotted that there is no such town and, in the only witty moment of this whole saga, created a Twitter profile claiming to be the town hall.

    They then trolled the police for a month. But, amid the laughs, the fact that the police fabricated violence against them appears to have been forgotten.

    Of the 315 acts of ‘violence’ in that dodgy dossier, almost 200 were nothing more than road blocks in which nobody was physically hurt. But in the current climate, where jeering the national anthem is considered ‘violence’, anything is talked up to support the extradition of Puigdemont & Co.

    Another to bear the brunt of this hyperbolic definition of ‘violence’ is Tamara Carrasco, a 32-year-old Catalan nationalist activist, alleged to be a leader of the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDR). She took part in the blocking of a motorway and was charged with terrorism and rebellion. State prosecutors labelled her ‘a clear threat to the established constitutional order’, who carried out ‘acts of rebellion, aimed at normalising disobedience and confrontation with the state, bringing the Catalan sovereignty process to the streets with violent acts’. In a rare outbreak of common sense, the judge dismissed the charges and settled for disobedience. The State has appealed.

    While it would be churlish to compare democratic Spain with Apartheid South Africa, it does bear an uncomfortable similarity in one respect: the use of exaggerated, even spurious, criminal charges to punish and put away for a long time political, to use Benenson’s phrase, non-conformists – and to send a warning to anyone who might think of emulating them. Nelson Mandela, remember, was charged with four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to violently overthrow the government, and served 27 years in jail.

    The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has five criteria for defining a political prisoner. Arguably, all of these apply to the Basque youths – though the Spanish government will point to the caveat that ‘those deprived of their personal liberty for terrorist crimes shall not be considered political prisoners’ – and Catalan politicians and activists, meet three of these, without the aggravation of terrorism.

    Slap in the face

    So, why the outlandish accusations? Well, as in Stalin’s Russia, it makes for a better show trial. But the real reason is that they prefer to lock away Puigdemont & Co for decades rather than eight. The same goes for the Basque youths.

    The Spanish government has been caught flat-footed by the tenacious and tricky Catalan leadership. From being goaded into the PR disaster of sending in police to beat voters to the escape by some to other countries – which has required embarrassing extradition hearings that have humiliated Spain’s justice system – Madrid has looked ham-fisted and authoritarian.

    The problem has been that the government has only one strategy: criminalisation. It worked against ETA terrorism but is proving ineffective against peaceful Catalan nationalism. Hence the constant need to portray Catalan nationalists as xenophobic putschists, which bears similarities with the Russian propaganda campaign against Ukraine.

    It’s likely that the Catalan nationalists expected such a response to their antics. They have always seemed to be one step ahead of Rajoy and his ministers. Even when it looked like they had suffered a setback in Puigdemont’s detention in Germany, the Schleswig-Holstein ruling ended up being a massive slap in the government’s face.

    With no legal mechanism for achieving independence while the government in Madrid refuses to negotiate, the only hope Separatists cling to is that the EU will force Spain to the table. But so far other European powers has shown no inclination to do so, lamely claiming that it’s an ‘internal matter’. Naturally, Madrid rejects the idea out of hand. Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis said that ‘mediation through a third party would be a victory for Puigdemont.’

    Separatists must either tempt the government into further repression or ‘internationalise’ the problem. In other words, put Spain on trial. The Spanish government’s draconian response to a political impasse and amateurish attempts at securing extraditions have drawn the eyes of Europe to a justice system that appears to be at the beck and call of the government.

  • The Subversion of Subversion

    Professional experience as a criminal lawyer has shaped my appreciation of the interplay between political subversion and its criminalisation. I have observed how real subversion often emanates from those state authorities inflicting punishment against the supposedly subversive.

    This has come into sharp focus since a German court declined to extradite the deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont on foot of an arrest warrant requested by the Spanish government. Puidgemont is alleged to have used the public purse to fund the referendum, this despite Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy actually admitting to parliament that he had not done so. Nonetheless, he faces the charge of rebellion in Spain carrying a prison sentence of up to 30 years, despite the non-violent approach. Fortunately, the German court decided that the offence was not the equivalent of treason under German law, which requires actual violence.

    Subversion is deviation from a social construct or norm and, of course, a positive law. But the norm or law may in itself be morally fallible or sanctionable, and even subversive, an understanding state authorities generally refuse to permit.

    In staging the referendum, Puidgemont was initiating a measure for which he received an electoral mandate from a large proportion of the Catalan people. The Spanish government responded in a manner that suggested it was reacting to a violent uprising, when there was no such thing. State violence is ongoing.

    Spain has long been an aggregation of regional entities run from the centre, often in autocratic fashion. Under the Franco dictatorship (1939-75) non-Spanish identities were actively suppressed. Many inhabitants of the Basque country and Catalonia now regard themselves as belonging to distinct nations. Catalan separatism is not purely atavistic nationalism however, it also flows from a shared belief in republicanism, socialism and anarchism, and a repudiation of the political heirs of Franco operating in the ruling Partido Popular (PP).

    Throughout history states have behaved criminally and used the law to justify it, as we are witnessing in Spain today.

    The norm of Inca civilisation was the blood sacrifice of human victims. Euphemistically phrased, the norm of Nazi law was the ‘evacuation of the Jews’ or the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. The norm of law enforcement in the Deep South of the United States until the 1950s was the lynching of African-Americans. The norm of the Irish police seems to be to frame people for sexual abuse. These norms are all anathema to fundamental human rights, but were carried out, or at least permitted, by state institutions.

    A deviant and subversive state projects deviancy and subversion on its victims. Contrary views are tightly controlled. Thus the dissident or conscientious objector is prosecuted, sometimes for treason, as a deviation from an oppressive norm. For example, Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist and dissident, was imprisoned by the authorities in the Soviet Union for subversion.

    Increasingly, protesters, leftists, and even human rights lawyers are labelled subversives by authorities subverting the institutions of the state. In Ireland politically-motivated prosecutions have been brought against elected representatives taking part in demonstrations. The Irish judiciary have to some extent resisted the subversive tide, but we may ask how long their independence will endure.

    II

    How are we to explain why more Spaniards are not resisting their government? We may assume that what Michel Foucault describes as the internalisation of punishment for deviant or unorthodox behaviour occurs. There is no need for a secret police force if people are disciplining their own inclinations to resist.

    Foucault said that the direct punishment of earlier times had been internalised, and made more insidious by the exercise of social control in schools, hospitals and factories. In a 1978 interview he said:

    In my book on the birth of the prison, I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a carceral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity,)

    Right-wing conservatives across the world have always been concerned about the radicalisation of youth, and seen universities as hotbeds of opposition and free thinking. This is leading to the marginalisation and demonisation of left-wing scholars, but the internalisation of control has a more dangerous outcome.

    In colleges, universities and schools we find widespread suppression of free speech and discourse. Discussion is increasingly confined to narrow parameters, with potentially divisive subjects avoided. A generation of rote learners, not critical thinkers, is on the rise. We are in an age of conformity, where obedience has become a sine qua non for career advancement, as Noam Chomsky reminds Andrew Marr in this interview for the BBC in the 1990s.

    The era of uninhibited and rambunctious debate in campuses is drawing to a close. One reason is the so-called ‘snowflake’ phenomenon, where anything remotely controversial is deemed too upsetting for the listener. This is a method of thought control, which often serves to diminish criticism of vested interests. All of these cultural factors are yielding a generation (with many honourable exceptions) who are technocratic and dangerously compliant: a growing body of amoral ‘yes men’ who willingly carry out orders.

    Moreover, within the college structure, promotion and preferment is linked to an increasingly controlled discourse where ideas that cut across dominant norms are penalised. The new paradigm is neoliberal and knee-jerk conservatism, which morphs easily into the kind of authoritarian rule we see mustering in Spain – a democracy with the trappings of a dictatorship.

    An indicator of a growing educational void in that country is the current investigation there into irregularities into the seemingly corrupt way a master’s degree was awarded to Madrid regional premier Cristina Cifuentes. The scandal has extended to another representative of the ruling Partido Popular (PP) whose qualification did not require him to attend class or take exams. The public university King Juan Carlos University has strong ties to the conservative government: he who pays the piper calls the ideological tune. Across the world, it is increasingly advantageous for academics to adopt right-wing viewpoints.

    In conjunction with a compliant Spanish media – including, regrettably, the once liberal El País – it means views offending a dominant norm are characterised as deviant or dissident, or subversive. Yet the norm itself may be subversive, as in the Spanish government’s reaction to Catalan separatism.

    III

    Treason has always been a political prosecution by the victors. Sir John Lavery’s famous portrait of the Court of Appeal trial of Roger Casement springs to mind. He was charged with high treason and executed by the British for attempting to end their rule in Ireland. Mr Justice Darling gazes down on him with barely concealed contempt. The accused looks depressed, as well he might. Casement, once the terrorist, is today held up as a hero and martyr in Ireland. One should always interrogate who is accusing whom of treason, and why.

    Sir John Lavery’s painting of the trial of Roger Casement.

    The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was brutally murdered in 1936 for his opposition to the violent imposition of an authoritarian quasi-fascist state in Spain. The rebel who wins becomes a national hero: to the victor the spoils of office, including the judicial arm.

    Woe betide his enemies, such as Lorca. Ironically in the Spain Civil War (1936-39) it was traitors who murdered him: traitors against a legitimate left-wing coalition government. The Nationalists rebelled, invaded Spain from colonies in Morocco and took Lorca’s life, along with hundreds of thousands of others.

    During and after the Civil War, the victorious Nationalists charged thousands of vanquished Republicans with treason for defending a legitimately constituted state. Thus we found the subversive justice of the traitorous victors against the constitutional losers.

    High treason is generally a dubious classification intimately connected to power. The Spanish government has the power in Spain today, and is ruthlessly subverting the law for political ends.

    In an age of ascendant nationalism and irredentism, the vectors of centralisation and monolithic control are growing more resilient as transnational agencies fragment. The EU has looked on at what is happening in Spain with the insouciance of a latter-day Neville Chamberlain.

    This even after Pablo Casado the Prime Minister Rajoy’s spokesman warned that Pudgemont would end up like Catalan Civil War independence leader Lluís Companys. Companys was handed over to Franco’s regime by the Gestapo and shot by firing squad in 1940. Considering the lack of independence of the Spanish judiciary, any prosecution seems likely to be a show trial.

    At least the Schleswig-Holstein court scrupulously examined the extradition warrant against Puidgemont to assess whether the Spanish offence of rebellion was at idem with an allegation of high treason under German law. For a European arrest warrant to succeed, the court must be satisfied that there is an identical offence under domestic law. This involves a comparison of the matter and detail of the laws operating in each jurisdiction.

    The loose definition of violence under the Spanish law of rebellion indicated it was not equivalent to the German law of treason. That objective assessment has unleashed a hysterical response from members of the Spanish government and media, including El País, amidst claims that the decision was politically motivated. More substantively, an appeal has been lodged with European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

    German courts enjoy a reputation for impartiality. But given the extremely political nature of the charge, one may wonder whether political pressure was applied to the court. The political motivation would surely have been to favour the Spanish government’s argument. So hurrah for the presiding judge Martin Probst and his colleagues Matthias Hohmann and Matthias Schiemann.

    Subversion of political objectives, where the judiciary upholds human rights, may have negative consequences for individual judges who feel the pinch of state control, seen starkly in Poland. But as Foucault observed, modern punishments act more subtly through the internalisation of subversive norms.

    IV

    An Enemy of The People is perhaps Henrik Ibsen’s most overtly political play. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer, whose brother is the town mayor, is asked to conduct a survey of the municipal water supply. The town in question is famous as a spa resort, attracting a great deal of tourism. But when the tests are carried out, he finds serious impurities and informs the townsfolk of the results.

    The reaction is revealing, and dispiriting. Rather than lauding his wisdom in carrying out the analysis, vested interests turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Livelihoods will be effected. The industry of the town will suffer. The whistleblower is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart and he becomes an enemy of the people. The mob descends in all its unfettered glory.

    Those that seek to expose corruption – its multi-hydra tentacles which reach the highest levels of power – are often disposed of by whatever means necessary. They have drawn the enmity of the powerful: the ones who matter.

    Puigdemont is no money launderer or expropriator of public funds, as many in the highest ranks of the PP have been revealed to be. He is no traitor, but an elected representative who endeavoured to offer the Catalan people the chance to declare a desire for independence, only to see the attempt attacked by the central government, whose violent excesses recalls the the Franco dictatorship.

    We often see mismatches between crime and punishment. The fictional John Valgean in Victo Hugo’s Les Miserables is maliciously persecuted for his theft of a loaf of bread. On the other extreme, those companies that now systematically plunder the world’s environment and usher in an era of unheard of inequality escape punishment having manipulated democracy.

    It’s quite simple. Subversives among the corporate elite would prefer a centralised Spain. An independent Catalonia or Basque country could spell trouble for transnational commerce.

    So let us take stock and assess carefully the use of terms such as dissidence, subversion and deviance which are bandied about. Let us consider who are the real traitors.

    Rebellion may be rebellion against tyranny, or it may be a counter-revolution involving those who are resistant to genuine democracy. So let us be wary of subversion by those who are themselves subversives.

    This article was written in collaboration with Frank Armstrong and A. Reynolds.

  • Catalan Independence Debate Presents False Dichotomy

    Catalan secessionists have succeeded in framing the debate over Catalan independence as a stark choice between two mutually exclusive options: either the status quo of Catalonia retaining regional autonomy within Spain, or for Catalonia to become an independent republic. Anyone objecting that neither might not be the best solution to the current deadlock is dismissed as ‘undemocratic’, by both sides. It is a superb rhetorical technique: is there anything more ‘undemocratic’ than not allowing citizens to decide on their future?

    The Spanish government response to the secessionist challenge has been to deny their opponents the opportunity to stage a referendum, decrying it as as illegal under the Spanish constitution. To inflame matters further, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy sent the Policia Nacional to break up the un-constitutional independence referendum, held on October 1st, injuring peaceful citizen taking part in the vote. Rajoy’s strategy has been short-sighted, indicating a lack of interest in bringing about a negotiated solution to an ever-growing problem that threatens the very core of Spanish democracy.

    Contrary to what the Spanish government believes, what is wrong with the idea of a referendum is not that it is illegal under current constitutional law – laws are contingent and can always be changed – but that it is based on a false dichotomy.

    A false dichotomy operates when an argument presents two options and ignores, either intentionally or out of ignorance, unexpressed alternatives. The choice might conceivably come down to remaining an autonomous region within Spain, or full independence, but these are, by no means, the only alternatives. Hence, the question should really be: how can two mutually-exclusive choices adequately represent the diversity of beliefs in the region and the country as a whole? A false dichotomy forces homogenisation of opinions, and asks those confronting the dichotomy to drop any differing views they might hold, which does not represent one or other of the mutually-antagonistic options.

    Therefore, the danger of a referendum is that of oversimplification. In a highly divided region such as Catalonia, where secessionists represent almost half of the population (a recent poll puts support for independence at 40,8 %), finding a solution in which one side is proclaimed the victor over the other – a zero sum game – will not bring permanent stability. It denies the losing side a voice in the future of their region. This has been the failed strategy of the Spanish government over the past number of years: to deny the validity of the interests of almost half of Catalans. Not taking into consideration one’s opponent’s interests is undemocratic, even if this comes about through a ‘democratic’ vote, such as a referendum. That is why most constitutions include ‘checks and balances’ against the dictatorship of the majority.

    Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP) is also guilty of blocking concessions that had given Catalonia a special status within Spain, including the right to be considered a nation, back in 2006. This left many Catalans with a grievance towards the government in Madrid, and brought significant support for pro-independence parties. The sense of betrayal might explain the insistence on a referendum as the only solution to the situation in Catalonia: ‘we already tried the negotiation table and look what happened’, claim the secessionists. But regardless of how emotionally-justified this reaction might be, it is nonetheless an inadequate response.

    A more stable outcome, and one that has hardly been discussed by the main political actors, would require a process of negotiation with the final objective of arriving at a new status for Catalonia that would meet the interests of most Catalans. Democracy is not only about voting; it also involves political representatives arriving at a consensus through negotiation, which reflects the needs and interests of most citizens. A referendum would leave the voice of the losing side unattended, and on a highly divisive issue like Catalan secession, this would not resolve the underlying divisions. But for the negotiation to start, Rajoy must go.

    Antonio Garzón Vico is Assistant Professor of Business of Biotech at the School of Biomolecular & Biomedical Science, University College Dublin.

  • Defiant Compassion

    On yoga teacher training courses among the heartening questions I receive are ones that readers of my previous piece have also posed: how can I be compassionate towards what I consider wrong, or evil, and still fight it? And, does an excess of compassion diminish a capacity to affect change?

    The short answer is the second question is ‘no’, while the first question invites you to take some simple steps, assuming you have arrived at a place of compassion.

    In that article I advocated compassion towards Donald Trump, because feelings of hatred will (a) not change his behaviour, and (b) make you miserable. Extending compassion to someone so obviously tortured by vanity maintains sanity, and acknowledges a shared humanity.

    By adopting this approach we bring calm to our own lives, and thereby make the world around us a marginally better place. Getting angry at Trump solves nothing.

    Have you ever wanted to impress someone so badly on the first date that you went out of your way to make it perfect in every way? So ideal you expected to sweep her off her feet? And then she never called you back?  Yeah, me too. The mistake we made was to have a preordained plan rather than focusing on the person when we actually met them, and being authentically ourselves. It’s a case of wanting something so badly that you are blind to the reality of what is needed to make it work.

    Yogis have a name for this: ‘Avidya’, loosely translated as ‘ignorance or blindness’. While its root is habit, it branches into ego, attachment, aversion, and fear. When we give into hate or anger (towards Trump or whoever), or fear (failing to make the right impression on our date) we are blinded by that mindset. We won’t get what we want, no matter how hard we try, because we have lost all perspective.

    By clearing our minds through compassion, and stepping back from our fear or anger we begin to see more clearly. Then we find fresh avenues of thought that were previously hidden. Now we are ready to act with awareness instead of rage. When this occurs, according to yogis, there is nothing you can’t change because you see a situation as it really is, instead of idealising it

    This leads to the second question as to whether excessive compassion leads to crippling passivity. I would start by saying it is almost impossible to affect change without compassion. But compassion shouldn’t imply passivity. Compassion is a mindset, and passivity is an action (that is, the decision to do nothing, which is an action in itself).

    Through growing awareness you develop compassion; then you resist anger and see the world more clearly. You find ways to resist that are born of reflection and rooted in reality, not impulsive responses based on distorted outlooks. Now is your time to act: with total clarity, knowledge, purpose, and a drive that will never run out of fuel, because it is rooted in truth instead of fear. Welcome to compassionate defiance.

    But this is only halfway towards a solution we are still working on within ourselves. The second part is the action. Once you have decided to act, what then?

    There are many great examples of compassionate defiance through history. Not least in Gandhi’s campaign that brought down an Empire. His approach was based on yogic wisdom, especially drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. Like Descartes’ Discourse on Method, it is the kind of book you can read in a day. Its influence is still felt in every corner of the globe. From it we glean a simple key to unlock action out of compassion:

    You have the right to work but never the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself – without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is the perfect evenness of mind.

    Take refuge in an attitude of detachment and you will amass a wealth of spiritual awareness. Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action grow miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the rewards they believe they are entitled to.

    This is the bedrock of Karma yoga: the use of yoga in the world. By detaching ourselves (or being compassionate towards ourselves) from emotional responses to the outcomes of our actions we retain our composure. We have already seen what anger and hate can do when we allow ego, attachment, aversion, fear to cloud our judgment. Now we must stay the course to prevent our actions from leading to more Avidya.

    The kernel of the passage is to act with the clarity of truth, and to be content with that. For we cannot predict the outcome of our actions, and trying to do so only leads to suffering. Act because it is right and let the result take care of itself. To do otherwise is to live a life of constant resentment, not grounded in reality, but based on what we desire in any given moment, just like the failed date experience.

    To affect change one must be willing to let others make changes in themselves. Truth must be uncovered individually for it be lasting. That is the genius of the Gita, and the genius of compassionate defiance. In other words, ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ starts with compassion for others, and ends with compassion for yourself.

    When we can do these things, change can take place all around us. We stop being Trolls on our own emotions and start being effective.

  • A Look Inside Italian Politics

    Posterity will determine if the Italian election results of March 4th 2018 marked an earthquake that will endure in the landscape. Or will a result, apparently seismic, turn out to be like the volcano that smoulders, without ever fully clearing its throat? No one is quite sure the precise dish the electorate will be served after the election.

    The success of the Eurosceptic and unashamedly anti-immigrant Northern League under Matteo Salvini (now seemingly reconciled to preserving the territorial integrity of the Italian state), and to a greater extent, the relatively unknown quantity of the Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi di Maio, combined with the decline of Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia and the centrist Democratic Party under Matteo Renzi, reflects a Europe-wide populist surge; the decline of traditional parties, and emphasises the waning legacies of iconic figures of the first decade of the twentieth century, such as Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Bertie Ahern and Berlusconi himself.

    But the widely-bandied term ‘populist’ tells us very little, and is often used simply to dismiss the popular appeal of a party by those opposed to its objectives. In a recent European context it has become shorthand for increasing xenophobia, and outright racism, triggered especially by the refugee crisis of 2015, and associated with the ‘strongman’ leadership of Putin’s Russia.

    M5S has been criticised both within Italy, and in the international media, for reflecting prejudices commonly expressed in Italian society. On the other hand, there is often a failure to recognise the determination of the Movement to clean up Italian politics, particularly in their southern electoral strongholds.

    Roger Cohen of the New York Times crudely dismisses M5S, lumping them with the Northern League, as one of the ‘out-with-the-bums parties’, and linked to Europe-wide ‘angry illiberal movements’. An apparently “illiberal” approach to immigration may largely be explained, however, by the responsiveness of M5S policies to the concerns of supporter, rather than any racist demagoguery emanating from its leadership.

    Such criticism also ignores how Italy is the first port of call for the majority of refugees who take the Mediterranean route into Europe, and how other states are not rising to the challenge of accommodating more new arrivals.

    M5S offers a new political formula that could easily have continent-wide ramifications. They promote technocratic expertise, with an emphasis on sustainability at a local level. The ‘five stars’, refers to the party’s five core values: public water access, sustainable transportation, sustainable development, a right to Internet access, and environmentalism. These founding principals clearly distinguishes them from the Northern League, and authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary or Russia.

    One of their most important rules is that any political career is a temporary service: no one who has already been elected twice at any level (local or national) can be a candidate again. Elected representatives put a proportion of their salaries back into a micro credit fund for small businesses, and reject campaign contributions. In short, M5S is attempting to inoculate itself against prevailing corruption, and ‘strongman’ leadership.

    But whether M5S can simply focus on discrete objectives and local issues, while ignoring national, regional and global institutions, is doubtful. Environmentalism can morph into short-term nimbyism. Moreover, without being corrupt or paternalistic, an elected representative may offer a course that is not instantly popular in a direct democracy scheme but may prove wise, and popular, in the long run.

    There are parallels with the current political constellation in England (if not the wider United Kingdom), where the Northern League plays the character of UKIP, the Eurosceptic right the Tory party; Forza Italia assumes the part of a Europhile Tory rump; the Democratic Party is represented by ‘New’ (an increasingly obsolete description) Labour ; and the Five Star Movement (less the political nous of a veteran such as Jeremy Corbyn) reprises the role of a Euro-doubtful Momentum.

    But of course Italian politics is unique in many respects. This is a long-legged country with characteristics of an ‘Asiatic’ Mediterranean, and a ‘Germanic’ North, as well as its own, often intoxicating, Latin inheritance. There is enduring, embedded, wealth alongside grinding, endemic poverty, mainly below the Mezzogiorno, but increasingly found in all major urban centres. The significance of Milan lying at a latitude closer to London than Palermo should not be discounted.

    II

    In many respects Italy is a fractured polity and unstable democracy, which emerged out of a long fascist dictatorship (1922-45) under Benito Mussolini, and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany. During the Cold War most governments lasted less than a year, and featured a revolving cast of roguish characters, foremost sevent-time Prime Minister, and twenty-seven-time minister Guilio Andreotti. In that time Italy’s Communist Party was the largest in Europe (with a membership exceeding two million under the astute leadership of Palmiro Togliatti), which despite not participating in governments held the feet of the ruling elite to the coals.

    The Master and his Apprentice. ©INTERNATIONAL PHOTO/LAPRESSE 12-06-1984 ROMA SPETTACOLO NELLA FOTO: SILVIO BERLUSCONI E GIULIO ANDREOTTI

    Corruption has long been the bane of Italian politics, particularly in the south of the country. Between them the Neapolitan Camorra, Calabrian Ndrangheta and Siclian Cosa Nostra have maintained fiefdoms the like of which are unknown in other Western European country, with tentacles reaching into the rest of Italy and beyond.

    The endurance of organised crime can be traced to the Allied conquest of Italy during the Second World War. The fascists had kept local chieftains under the thumb, often by simply imprisoning them without trial. But just as de-Baathification in Iraq after the invasion in 2003 unleashed underlying, atavistic forces, similarly, across southern Italy after 1945, gangsters entered a vacuum left behind by a decapitated state.

    Only after the fascist prisons were thrown open, and shadowy American Intelligence figures such as ‘Lucky’ Luciano arrived on the scene, was a humanitarian crisis averted. Reliance was placed on old networks of patronage to feed the population, as Norman Lewis’s account in Naples 1945 illuminates. Italian democracy has been counting the cost of Allied authorities ‘looking the other way’ ever since.

    'Lucky' Luciano.
    ‘Lucky’ Luciano, unlucky Italy.

    Any journalist investigating their affairs whether in Italy or elsewhere, as the recent likely contract killing of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his partner Martina Kusnirova reveals, must be aware of the dangers. Investigating judges  require huge security details; even then some, such as Judge Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, are still assassinated.

    The scene of the Massacre of Capaci where Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo and their police escort were killed by a Mafia bomb. 23 May 1992.

    The Mani Pulite (clean hands) judicial investigation into corruption of 1992 brought the false dawn of a Second Republic. Electoral laws were amended and the Christian Democrats, which had provided the Prime Ministers to all bar three post-war governments until that point, disappeared entirely.

    However, a corrupt deck was merely shuffled, and many Italians lost faith in politics altogether during the lost decade (2001-2011) of billionaire Berlusconi’s showman leadership. His clownish antics provided a front for deepening corruption, while the television media he controlled provided a drip-feed of light entertainment, football and titillation that kept the patient Italian public in a mildly delusional state. Here M5S politician Alessandro di Battista reads out a court ruling against a former longtime aide to Berlusconi and the founder of Forza Italia, Marcello Dell’Utri, who is in jail because of his links to the Cosa Nostra.

    https://www.facebook.com/dibattista.alessandro/videos/1444836532295073/

    The period since the end of the Cold War also witnessed a steady rise in inequality, and the effects of the economic crisis, beginning in 2008, continues to be felt. In 2017 the bottom 30 percent of the population was at risk of poverty and social exclusion. That is up from 28.7 the previous year.

    Berlusconi also coarsened political debate, bringing respectability to the expression of prejudice against foreigners living in Italy, thereby providing an obvious scapegoat when times grew hard.

    III

    In a wide-ranging account, Delizia – the Epic History of Italian Food (2007), John Dickie describes Italian food at the turn of the twentieth century as ‘local rather than national, whereas French cooks were armed with a uniform terminology – coulis, hors d’oeurvres, potage – their Italian counterparts spoke a variety of mongrel food dialects’.

    Dickie continues: ‘The history of Italian food after unification is the story of the relationship between these proud local food cultures, and the dream of bringing all of Italy to one table, thereby creating a national cuisine to rival that of France’. This fragmentation reflects a prevailing loyalty towards town or region, rather than country or nation.

    The history of the pizza is instructive. It shares a provenance similar to Greek pitta and Turkish pide, as part of an extended family of Mediterranean flat breads. The author of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi (1826-90) dismissed this Neapolitan dish as ‘a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonises perfectly with the person selling it’. The Margherita pizza, named in honour of Queen Margherita’s visit to Napoli in 1889, represents the colours, red (tomato), white (mozzarella cheese) and green (basil), of the Italian flag. More importantly, its name accommodated the people of a city, renowned for poverty and disease, within the new nation’s gastronomy.

    Dickie likens the Margherita’s propaganda value to Princess Diana embracing AIDS victims. But Napoli’s waste management problems continue to this day: in 2015 Europe’s biggest illegal dump –‘Italy’s Chernobyl’ – was uncovered nearby. The greasiness of Italian politics, like the layer of mozzarella on top of a pizza, has long held in check progressive forces of green and red.

    Despite Italy’s relative novelty – unification only culminated in 1871 – this is an old country. The architectural layers found in almost every city are a daily reminder of past glories. Italians generally seem unmistakably Italian, no matter where they are from on the peninsula or islands. Notwithstanding regional variation, there is a quintessence to life across the land. Bureaucracy and conviviality represent the poles of annoyance and enchantment any resident or outsider negotiates.

    The nation’s varied constituents were never static aboriginal communities. A central location in the Mediterranean, pointing into Africa but firmly lodged in Europe – the Alps were the ‘traitor’ of Italy according to Napoleon –  has brought migrant waves since time immemorial. Anyone who is anyone has spent time here, from Hannibal to Lord Byron and Gore Vidal.

    It is now the main entry point for Africans who aspire to live in Europe. Italy took some 64 percent of the 186,000 migrants who reached Europe in 2017 through the Mediterranean route. It took the majority of these migrants in 2016 too. The current surge is unprecedented but there is no end in sight as looming Climate Change threatens further mass movements of peoples. Recent new arrivals join five million foreign nationals already living in Italy. It is estimated that there are as many as 670,000 illegal immigrants living in the country.

    Desperate people are being trafficked across the Mediterranean aboard flimsy vessels, while the European Community washes its hands. The Dublin Regulation (2013) ordains that any decision on refugee status falls for determination in the country where a person first lands, unless family reunification is involved. Many Italians argue other European countries are not sharing the burden, and they have a point.

    With a prevailing sense of being overwhelmed by immigration at a time when the economy is still in remission, predictably, extremism is on the rise. Berlusconi broke taboos that many politicians now habitually cross.

    On February 5th Luca Traini, a former candidate for the Northern League, was arrested after targeting African migrants in a two-hour drive-by shooting spree in the Marche city of Macerata. This came days after the discovery there of the body of an eighteen-year-old Italian woman, allegedly killed and dismembered by a Nigerian immigrant gang. The threat of further bloodshed is acute.

    In its aftermath Silvio Berlusconi called for the expulsion of thousands of migrants, while League leader Matteo Salvini said ‘those who fill us with migrants instigate violence’.

    IV

    The Five Star Movement is the sulphur in the Italian political wind, whose promotion of direct participation of citizens in the management of public affairs through digital democracy could provide an example well beyond Italy. But in any situation where an electorate is ill-informed by a media dominated by vested interests this can have dangerous consequences, no matter how progressive the core ideas of any movement. However, the despondency of some commentators regarding the capacity of the Internet to inform, as opposed to trigger prejudice, may be misplaced in the long term.

    M5S propose a fusion of green and red politics that should have admirers beyond Italian shores: they embrace theories of de-growth, and support ‘green’ employment. The need to stop polluting Italy’s environment is recognised, and they call for an end to expensive ‘great works’, including incinerators and high-speed rail links. They aim to raise the quality of life and bring about greater social justice.

    But the thorny issue of their approach to the European Community remains, which is closely connected to resolving the immigration imbroglio. Somewhat disconcertingly, after a ballot of members a decision was made to join a political group in the European Parliament which also contains UKIP. The option, however, of joining the Greens/EFA group was also discussed, but was unavailable due to that group’s prior rejection of the idea.

    For a country like Italy to leave the Community would be a hammer blow from which it might not recover, at least in its present configuration. Moreover, in a globalised world it is surely impossible for any one country, especially one so unstable as Italy, simply to go its own way, at least with a democratic government. Removed from the European mainstream, Italy could easily fall prey to authoritarian government, which is part of its political DNA.

    ©Daniele Idini

    Leading members of M5S have at times offered inflammatory views on immigration, in particular Beppe Grillo, its animating spirit. On 23 December, 2016 he wrote on his blog that all undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the country, and that the Schengen Accord, allowing free movement of people between signatory states, should be temporarily suspended in the event of a terrorist attack.

    Grillo seems to have been panicked by the terror threat. In the wake of the 2016 Berlin attack and the killing of a suspected terrorist near Milan he wrote: ‘Our country is becoming a place where terrorists come and go and we are not able to recognise and report them and they can wander all over Europe undisturbed thanks to Schengen’.

    On 21 April 2017, Grillo also published a piece questioning the role of NGOs operating rescue ships off the coast of Libya. He suggested they may be aiding traffickers. Grillo’s comments raise serious questions over whether M5S will calm the growing scapegoating of immigrants in Italy. While his views may reflect what many Italians feel, it is surely incumbent on a politician to lead rather than follow, and not to exaggerate any threats.

    Fortunately the M5S is a broad church, and Grillo, while still influential, is not their leader in parliament. Last year Luigi Di Maio called for ‘an immediate stop to the sea-taxi service’. He also said he would support a referendum for Italy to leave the Eurozone and would vote to leave. In January 2018, however, he reversed his previous position. What appears to be the relative abatement of the terror threat will, hopefully, go some way towards calming the fears of many Italians. But other European states must recognise that preserving the European Community will require a sharing of the refugee burden.

    V

    In his 1963 account The Italians, Luigi Barzini endeavours to explain why his countrymen have historically failed to coagulate into a singular nation.  Firstly, he points to ‘rapid and enthusiastic acceptance of changing political fashions and of foreign conquerors which made all revolutions irresistible but superficial and all new regimes unstable.’ This might be identified in the enthusiastic post-war approval of Communism, and the earlier groundswell of support for Mussolini’s Fascism. The MS5’s embrace of digital democracy has been dismissed as a political fad in the era of the Internet.

    Secondly, Barzini found ‘an art of living as if all laws were obnoxious obstacles to be overcome somehow, an art which made the best of laws ridiculously ineffective’. This reflects a permissive attitude towards organised crime, which M5S are at least seriously challenging.

    Finally he averts to ‘the certainty that the most inflexible government could, in the long run, be corroded from the inside.’ This final point is important in terms of understanding the reluctance of many among M5S to work with other parties to form a government. It is also reflects the cynical response of many commentators to the efforts of the M5S leadership to form a government. Italy requires meaningful reforms and this will require deals to be done, even with the Northern League, who are surely no worse than Berlusconi’s cronies. It is unfortunate that the Democratic Party, with whom M5S should have most policies in common, have expressed a determination to remain in opposition.

    It would perhaps be wise to recognise that politics is the art of the possible, and that reforming a political system as dysfunctional as Italy’s will take considerable time, but at least the priorities of M5S appear progressive in terms of social justice and sustainability. Perhaps most important are the precautions the Movement are taking against ‘strong man’ leadership, which could be a template for other political systems to follow.

    Frank Armstrong is the content editor of Cassandra Voices.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

  • What the Irish Abortion Debate Ignores

    The greatest trial lawyer of the last century was undoubtedly Clarence Darrow. He was often described as just a lucky country bumpkin, or a ‘lucky old son of a […]’ in the vernacular of the time. More than a lawyer though, he became the exemplar and paradigm of secularism in America, a voice of reason pitched against a cacophony of superstition and religious hysteria.

    By the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925 Darrow was widely regarded as a dog who had had his day. The case involved a young schoolteacher who had shown the temerity to teach Darwinism in the Deep South: Dayton, Tennessee to be precise. It is dramatised in the play, and film, Inherit The Wind (1960), which at times plays fast and loose with the facts for dramatic effect.

    It was actually a test case; the arrest had been staged by the American Council of Civil Liberties in order to bring a showdown with the fundamentalism that was creeping into American politics. The schoolteacher had volunteered for the task.

    The American Council for Civil Liberties wanted a clean-cut preppie lawyer, but they got Darrow. Why? Because they were bereft of funds and the Baltimore Herald, under its legendary editor H.L. Mencken, insisted. Mencken was the greatest muck-racking controversialist in the history of journalism, a uniquely acerbic wit, perhaps only rivaled by that of Christopher Hitchens. They were paying for the trial, and would call the shots.

    So Darrow dragged his weary bones into the Lions’ Den of the Deep South, assailed by a plethora of ailments which would ultimately kill him, but not just yet. His opponent was an old adversary, and if not quite a friend, someone for whom he had a degree of respect. Enter three time unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency of the United States: William Jennings Bryant.

    Darrow and Bryant’s careers shared a certain trajectory in that both rode a populist and progressive wave, involving the enfranchisement and protection of the ordinary working man both in the great cities and rural heartlands. Where they differed markedly was that Bryant was also a religious fanatic, who railed against the imposition of northern secular values on the Southern states. They were in league with one another in seeking to improve the lot of the poor in life, but fell out over their understanding of the origins of life. The divisive issue was Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, as it remains today.

    It was really a show trial with a foregone conclusion. The question of guilt was never in doubt. America itself was in the dock. The Baltimore Sun ensured an international spotlight, while the new medium of radio provided an immediacy to the coverage, foreshadowing the role of television in the OJ Simpson Trial seventy years on.

    With the continuing culture wars in America, the case has never been of merely historic interest. It also has a relevance to the understanding of events in contemporary Ireland, which sees a similar confrontation. The new battleground is the forthcoming referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which says:

    The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

    II

    In the recent case of M & ors -v- Minister for Justice & ors the Supreme Court of Ireland gave the green light for the abortion referendum to proceed. But this is just the opening salvo in a long campaign. The forces of obscurantism and absurdity are mustering. No doubt the roughhouse Youth Defence will swing into action, while more polite academics and lawyers, but with similar extreme views, will work out the stratagems and ruses. The X Case of 1992, where a fourteen-year old girl, pregnant as a result of statutory rape, was initially denied by the High Court the right to travel to the UK for an abortion but given leave on appeal by the Supreme Court to do so, will seem like a squall by comparison to the force of this hurricane.

    So what is going to happen?

    First and foremost the recent decision paves the way for the referendum. I expect, in sequence, the following to ensue:

    1.    There will be a challenge to the wording and content of the referendum on the bases that people are either being misled or that it is deliberately vague. This will fail, as it always does, but another publicity bun fest is guaranteed.

    2.    There will then be deep scrutiny of all funding sources and avowed support, either explicit or implicit, by governmental structures, as well as any other interference in the process to engineer an outcome.

    This may, or may not, succeed, but could delay the Referendum process, require a redraft, or if after the event, lead to an application for the invalidation of the result, which will also prove unsuccessful.

    Thus it will fail, but further publicity will ensue.

    But I think there is a paradigm shift. This is the final battle, the last hurrah.

    What can the so-called Catholic intelligentsia do to avoid the democratic of the people will if the obvious legal route proves fruitless, as it ought?

    There is one last avenue available in my considered legal opinion, and that is to argue that the right to abortion violates the right to life itself.

    This is precisely what the Supreme Court denied in the M & ors, as they confined the protection of the unborn to the clause likely to be deleted through the referendum. So wider arguments under the substantive right to life can seemingly be negated. This seems settled, but no doubt challenges are being considered to the absence of protection of life arising out of the probable deletion of the Eighth Amendment. Once legislation is formulated, a multiplicity of challenges seem inevitable.

    A harbinger of this appears in an Irish Times article by (14/3/18) by one of the leading ideologues on the Pro Life side William Binchy. He suggests that the forthcoming referendum repealing the Eighth, if passed, will open the door to unfettered abortion-on-demand, akin to the regime in the United States under Roe v Wade; but he dangles the opportunity for a further challenge too, quoting from Chief Justice Frank Clarke’s judgement in M & ors: ‘the State is entitled to take account of the respect which is due to human life as a factor which may be taken into account as an aspect of the common good in legislating.’

    A never ending saga in short.

    Then there are the informal tactics and strategies that will be used. These include variations on a theme and, potentially, violence. The clamour is going to get worse and worse. Protests, attacks on the court, demonstrations outside Dail Eireann, civil unrest, intimidation, shock tactics, framing, the kitchen sink.

    III

    The Catholic Church still runs most maternity hospitals, and has put the kibosh on the implementation of the X case for over twenty years. So the league of decency will endure, and democracy will be frustrated.

    This is no longer a Secular Age. Religious fundamentalism in all parts of the world is on the rise. In Ireland there are well placed boyos in the judiciary, and the once proud voices of secularism are no longer heard: Susan Denham has retired, and Adrian Hardiman passed away. All contacts with pious judges will be utilised to disrupt the passage of this referendum. But in the light of the present decision I still predict this will prove fruitless.

    The world will be watching as they were in Dayton Tennessee. The outcome will expose Ireland for what it is in many respects: a grubby Third World, sexually-hysterical, religiously-disturbed state.

    This outcome will be different however. The abortion argument will prevail. The Religious Right will lose. Or at least they will lose this vote. But let me sound a cautionary note.

    A drawn out Referendum campaign will keep attention away from the real burning issues of housing, homelessness and rising inequality. Who cares about the right to choose, after all, if you cannot afford to eat?

    Those funding the litigation might do well to focus on the quality of life of the living rather than the inception of life itself.

    It seems to me that this victory for progressives will be deeply ambiguous. Yes, a right to choose will be established, but at what cost?

    There is merit, I grudgingly concede, in the argument that abortion as a lifestyle choice fits with a Neoliberal paradigm. An extension of consumerism that ignores the gathering storm of economic catastrophe brought on by rising poverty and ecological meltdown.

    Political talents and revenue are being devoted to pursue fruitless opposition to a done deal: fight the good fight for abortion, and forget about the war against homelessness.

    I just wonder who is going to reprise the role of Darrow or William Jennings Bryant, and, above all, who is going to get the role of Mencken, the prince of gutter press journalists in this morality play.

    There is a wider struggle at work, in defence of reason and the Enlightenment, which the vacancy of Neoliberalism ignores. Thus, the legendary Darrow asked in the Scopes Trial:

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

    IV

    Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’. He has corrected many interviewers who mistakenly assume he meant ‘the most dangerous organization in the world today’. Given his precision with language, what seems an outlandish statement, is clearly one he takes seriously.

    The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has been criticized for being not nearly stringent enough to succeed in keeping temperature rise below two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial averages. It is earnestly hoped by environmentalists that it is a stepping-stone before a more robust deal. Fat chance, as Trump’s administration goes about dismantling even that fig leaf of modesty.

    Chomsky also mentioned in a recent BBC Newsnight interview that there has to be a connection between the denial of the science, and the fact that nearly 40% of the American public believe the Second Coming will occur by 2050.

    In his illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014) Carlo Rovelli chides humanity for failing to draw the lessons necessary for survival:

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

    The passage points to the differences between ideas informed by science, and those grounded in fundamentalist interpretations of religion. Science sees humanity for what we are in the universe, rather than being its centre and purpose. Far more terrifying than this is the preacher who refuses to accept that we might just be an irrelevant blip in the universe, and sees the Earth as something created for us to make hay with. Not only that, but many milenerian Christians rapturously await the demise of civilization and the end of days.

    It seems odd in these circumstances that that such effort should be made on behalf of the human unborn, when they assume it is all going to be over imminently.

    Human beings commonly display a desire for transcendence in this our cruel world. Marx stated in his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right‘ that ‘Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. He admitted that ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

    He goes on, however, to argue that the ‘abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.’

    The Religious Right is to an extent, a predictable outcome of the social and economic “vale of tears” in our time, although their collusion with Big Business in the United States is truly horrifying. It certainly helps that Genesis with it assumption of man’s dominion over the Earth permits a scorched earth economic policy.

    Lost in all of this is the message of Pope Francis, and others, for Christian socialism and environmental responsibility; a worldwide enforcement of social and economic rights to food, shelter, health care and housing. I am decidedly agnostic about the existence of God. It is religious fundamentalism, extremism and rapacious greed that I despise.

    In fact the church may have its own battle between the Neoliberals and Christian socialists. The smart money is on the former winning out. Pope Francis may suffer the same fate as Pope John XXIII.

    V

    I once represented a middle aged woman named Carmel Doyle who as a five-year-old recited a bible story which the Catholic Church made millions out of from an Oscar-nominated film called Give Up Yer Aul Sins. Yet the child, now a poor adult, would have received nothing had I not fought her case.

    It seems to be the inception, not quality of life, that matters to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church: let them eat cake and dream of the afterlife.

    The Religious Right have resorted to murder when necessary. I think of Gods Banker Roberto Calvi hanging off Blackfriars bridge; Pier Paolo Passolini the Marxist and Atheist film director murdered on a beach near Rome; the collusion for decades between ‘Christian’ ‘Democrats’ in Italy and the mafia, to the advantage of the Vatican; but most are killed by a thousand cuts.

    So let us commence a life watch. The abortion life watch juxtaposed with the homelessness outside the doors of the court where constitutional issues are finely disentangled as the social structure unravels. While Rome burns, progressives will fiddle amid the gladiatorial circuses of the forthcoming referendum.

    Neoliberalism has no problem with abortion. There are, after all, far too many of us. I maintain that it is important that a woman should not be compelled to endure a pregnancy against her will, but it is permitted by economic elites as way of controlling population, without the troublesome necessity of infanticide through poverty. That was a solution advocated satirically by Jonathan Swift in his A Modest Proposal, a vital cautionary tale for these dangerous times.

    Featured Image: Marina Azzaro