Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • Refugee Pushbacks in the Balkans

    On the last day of February, the first Ukrainian refugees arrived in Serbia. Radoš Đurović, the director of the Center for the Protection and Assistance of Asylum Seekers in Serbia believes that approximately 600,000 Ukrainian refugees will come to Hungary and will be expecting them to come to Serbia, once Hungary has reached capacity.

    Despite the Russian National anthem being played at train stations in Serbia and pro-Russian protests happening in Belgrade. Nonetheless, Radoš Đurović states that ‘Ukrainians think of Serbia as a friendly country.’ The question is where is this friendliness to other nationalities?

    Medical Volunteers International have been providing medical care along the EU borders in the Balkans and have witnessed the abuse that is being carried out at the hands of the EU, as well as those whose job is to protect the people.

    A press release by UNHCR just last month states: ‘What is happening at European borders is legally and morally unacceptable and must stop. Protecting human life, human rights and dignity must remain our shared priority.’

    But after the influx of refugees over six years ago, shouldn’t this be something we should have improved on greatly? With the current EU policy, razor-wired fences, brutal pushbacks and the prevention of the right to claim asylum, sadly things are getting worse, not better.

    Frontex states that they have seen a 148% increase on the western Balkan route in January 2022 alone. Serbia is known as an important transit country for people on the move (POMs). It is estimated that 60,000 people moved through there in 2021, heading to the EU to seek safety from war, persecution, poverty and many other human rights violations.

    Yet the Višegrad Four, an alliance that has been set up between the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, have on the one hand deployed more police to the Serbian/Hungary border to assist with the violation of EU laws in pushing back refugees from Afghanistan, but, on the other hand, has declared how they will be accepting refugees from Ukraine, along with Serbia and Romania. All of these countries are involved in the mistreatment of refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

    In 2015, Hungary built a four-metre high razor wire-topped fence along its borders to Serbia and Croatia. This spans the 109 miles (175 km) length of northern Serbia and all the locations this report mentions are within this area. With first-hand documentation of wounds caused at the hands of the Serbian police and those involved with the pushbacks from Hungary and Romania, the human rights violations at our borders seems to be going unnoticed, or perhaps uncared about by our governments.

    Many POMs have spoken about how they have made it across Hungary but have been caught at the Austrian border, then pushed back without the opportunity to claim asylum or any type of documentation to Serbia. This is due to the pushbacks in Hungary being made legal. A report found here gives in a lot more details however in short, due to a state of emergency declared in Hungary in March 2016, pushbacks have been allowed. Many people are returned through special gates built in the border fence however reports of robbing, beatings, and humiliations by the police are regularly being reported to the team. This has been criticised by the EU and violates international treaties such as the Geneva Convention which Hungary has signed yet Hungary has now been getting away with this for 6 years.

    During 2020/2021, 22,204 people were pushed back from Hungary. Most of these people are from Syria and Afghanistan. There were also increased reports towards the latter end of last year of people being pushed back from Austria to Hungary, then Hungary to Serbia. This report talks about the places along the Serbian/Hungary borders, and what exactly is happenings to the people who are seeking safety in the EU.

    A young man uses his phone to contact family after using Collective Aids generator to charge his phone.

    A registered organisation called Collective Aid also works along the northern Serbian border giving showers, non-food items and uses a generator to help POMs to charge their phones and even offers the basic requirement of a shaver for a haircut to maintain people’s dignity.

    Evictions by the police are common in these locations which are mostly squats within abandoned buildings. Mass raids happen every couple of months and are mostly linked to protests from the local fascist group.

    Recently a mass eviction happened where police hit each place along the Northern border one after the other. A few hundred people were taken but many also managed to escape.

    People messaged stating that the police smashed open the doors and some people escaped out the window. They beat the people, robbed them of their money and phones then they were loaded onto buses and driven to a camp in the south of Serbia. They even hit the hotels where sick and vulnerable POMs stay. The injuries from these evictions are evident for weeks following this, and also the psychological effects on already scared and vulnerable people are massive.

    Horgoš

    Horgoš is a small town next to the border of Hungary in North Serbia. There are two main locations where POMs live. One squat is against the border fence and near a road checkpoint for crossing the border which can be easily viewed from the watchtower.

    Here there are mostly Arabic-speaking people from Morocco and Tunisia but some from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. In recent months there have been approximately seventy people living here, but this is set to increase again in the warmer weather. The people living here, like all locations spoken about, are very transitional.

    The second location is at an old farm. Here there are many squatted buildings and it is more spread out over the area. There are normally 90-110 people here. Here there are mostly Farsi, Urdu, etc. speakers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. It is very rare to find Arabic Speakers staying here however in the past week a Kurdish-Turkish group have been staying there as well as a young family from Syria.

    One of several abandoned buildings that people on the move are living in, Horgoš Farm, North Serbia.

    As with the border area, living conditions are very poor here. With the abandoned buildings being used as squats, with leaking roofs, many tired and weary people sleep off their exhaustion after spending the night on “game”, the name given by many to the act of crossing the border and arriving at a destination where there is no risk of being pushed back from.

    It becomes a game when night after night is spent trying to achieve this. There are many reports of phones being smashed and money being stolen during pushbacks by Hungarian and Romanian authorities.

    As with most of the squats, due to such a high transition of people, there is a major outbreak of scabies, particularly with people coming from the refugee camps which are commonly referred to by POMs as a place that is highly infested with scabies mites. With open sores caused by the reaction to the mite, many of the people living here are in dire need of treatment.

     

    Abandoned farm near Horgoš

    Taxis are regularly driving to this location bringing people back from the “game”, bringing people food/supplies, and also delivering live sheep to be killed. There are many fleeces around the property from slaughtered sheep that the POM’s have purchased from local people.

    One of the many stray puppies sitting on slaughtered sheep to stay warm.

    At the farms, the crossing of the border is very well organised where groups hit the fence at the same time with ladders. We see many injuries to hands from the razor wire on the top of the fence as well as injuries to knees and ankles from jumping down the opposite side.

    You see many people going on “game” with thick gloves to protect their hands. Building barriers is not going to deter people who are fleeing their homeland but makes the lives of the POMs trying to make it to a safe country to ask for protection much more difficult, forcing them to take dangerous routes across Europe or into the hands of smugglers.

    Giving wound care to a young man who has frostbite to his feet from walking in the snow in inadequate shoes.

    There are many pushback stories from this location. One man from India tries every single night to go across the border. If he makes it into Hungary, he is typically gone for a few days before being returned through gates in the fence by police. If he makes it and is gone for a few days then pushed back, he has one night of rest before attempting again.

    When I spoke to him, he had been in Serbia for 80 days and his only focus is getting through Hungary to prevent a pushback. He told me that if the border police know you speak English then they will beat you more to try and get information from you such as your route, how you crossed the border etc. After experiencing this a few times, he now pretends he cannot speak English.

    He is trying to reach Spain as he has family there. He isn’t safe at home and he describes how his life is in danger if he returns home. He entered Serbia legally with his passport. He said that there is now an increase of advertised travel packages offered by travel agencies in India also to Belarus. As his passport was stamped and he would soon become illegal by overstaying his days, he then posted his passport to his family in Spain so that he is undocumented.

    Turkish-Kurds huddled around a fire to keep warm whilst boiling two eggs.

    We see many people who have been subjected to police brutality. One Moroccan man at the border was caught by the Hungarian police who saw our bandages on his feet, therefore, beat his toes. He has a major wound there caused by frostbite.

    Police brutality cases are referred to Collective Aid who takes Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) Reports from every case that they have time to do so to document the police brutality situation.

    Subotica Train Tracks

    The train tracks run through the city. Many people from Afghanistan and Pakistan live in abandoned buildings along the train tracks. There are many minors living here but we never come across families here as the conditions are too poor. There are approximately one hundred and fifty people living along the railway.

    Minor warming himself in the sun. The kettle was boiled at the electric box that has been tampered with to get electricity.

    As this area is in the city, they are regularly targeted by the police. The police often raid the places in the early hours of the morning and beat and rob the people. They seem to do this for a few nights and then leave them alone for a week or so. Perhaps it is to do with when they get paid as they only rob the people of money rather than belongings. With no way of making a complaint, these POM have no option but to accept that this will happen.

    Recently these raids and cases of police brutality are becoming more and more frequent. During the day on the 1st of March, police raided the train tracks and took the people to the police station and told them they should either pay a fine or they would be taken to the camp in the south. Over one-third of the POMS that the team saw that day had signs of police brutality. Many people arrived back from being transported to camp three hours away in taxis with many injuries which the medical team assisted with.

    18-year-old boy from Afghanistan’s injuries following Serbian police brutality on 3rd March 2022. Photo taken on 10th March 2022

    One had what he thought was a receipt for the money he had paid at the police station however it was a Decision on Return. Unbeknown to him, this is a declaration that he entered Serbia without legal grounds and therefore legally has to leave Serbia within thirty days. If he does not leave then he can be forcibly removed and in addition following this decision, he cannot apply for asylum in Serbia.

    A lone refugee from Afghanistan sat on the train tracks trying to stay warm in the afternoon sun.

    Two days later, evictions were carried out in this same location. The police openly in broad daylight beat the POMs as they put them in their vans. One of these locations was very public outside a supermarket with many local people around. The POMs were forced into the vans. There were approximately three police vans, six police cars, and around fifteen police personnel, so ample opportunity for one of the law enforcers to speak out about the brutality used against the POMs.

    A young man from Afghanistan sleeping on a disused area of the train tracks after spending the night on the “game” and being pushed back.

    Then again on the 8th March, the police had been and targeted the young men living here. They beat and robbed them. One man has a bandage wrapped around his head and a large bruise under his eye. No one wants to stay here, but again these people have no choice after being pushed back night after night.

    Distributions of much-needed bags of food outside a squat.

    We find many people in this area who are without warm clothing, sleeping bags, and even shoes. Additionally, at the end of last year, a POM was killed on the train tracks. It’s a dangerous place to live. Not only due to the trains but also due to the extremely poor living conditions but also due to the frequent police and fascist attacks. They sleep with their shoes on ready to run from the police. Not having any shoes is a big problem as the train tracks are littered with broken glass, nails and oil from trains.

    Two Afghan minors cook over a fire whilst other members from the squat await their turn to cook.

    One story from a minor from Afghanistan is a young man aged fifteen years who we met on the train tracks. His English was perfect and he helped with much-needed translation for the team. His family invested everything they have in him so he could make the dangerous trip to the EU in the hope that his asylum claim is accepted and that family reunification would allow them to be together again in a safe place. He has been stuck here for nearly a month now and has been subjected to many beatings from the police.

    Srpski Krstur

    In Srpski Krstur, there is an informal camp where many people live in tents in a wooded area along the river. Here the river is used as part of the Serbia/Hungary border therefore there is no fence. Many people live in tents in this area so over winter, many people left for official camp or hotels that accept POMs but also a number remained. The numbers are now increasing here. They are all Arabic speakers here and a good mix of Syrians, Iraqis, Tunisians, Moroccans, and Palestinian.

    Currently, about seventy people are living here. It is a long walk to the local village here so access to drinking water is not readily available. Many people drink from the river here and we see many gastrointestinal illnesses. During January, the temperature was always below zero during the day. You would see people walking along the riverbank with bags of food that they had bought in inadequate clothing. Tissue damage due to the cold in this area is a problem.

    We have started seeing an increase in families in this location and will no doubt see many more in the warmer weather. They generally cross the river here in inflatable boats provided by someone that works for a smuggler. The river here is deep and fast flowing so is very dangerous.

    Djala

    Last year, the number of families living in Srspski Krstur decreased due to mounting repression by the police. Many relocated to an abandoned house on the outskirts of the village. This squat is where Arabic families stay, mostly from Syria but a few people from Iraq. There are normally ten to twenty adults here with children and young babies at any one time. It is very close to Srpski Krstur so they use the same way to cross the border in boats. This is better for families with young children who cannot climb the fence but also very dangerous in terms of the fast-flowing river.

    Here there was a malnourished baby called Yousef. Yousef was just twenty days old when he was found to be very low in weight. With education to the mother about increasing feed and close monitoring of the weight, Yousef became a lot stronger.

    It took a lot of coordinating to see Yousef in this time due to his mother desperately going on “game” very regularly. At one point they were gone for several days and made it to the Austrian border to be caught and pushed back to Serbia. During this time they were held outside in freezing conditions by the Hungarian authorities despite the mothers pleading for the month-old baby to be taken inside out the elements.

    Yousef, unfortunately, developed a respiratory condition and conjunctivitis following this experience which was successfully treated by the medical team. Recently it was heard that she has made it with her two children to Austria.

    It is in the area of Djala and Srpski Krstur that there is a very angry Commissariat. The Commissariat is here to protect the needs of the refugees but this female officer is very difficult. She aggressively speaks to organisations who are there to help and sets them time limits for how long they can be in an area despite the needs of the people.

    Sombor

    Sombor is on the Serbian/Croatia/Hungary border and is known for its fascist area involvement. People have been photographed who help the POMs here and posted on a Facebook page and death threats have been issued.

    Old train carriages on Sombor train tracks where people on the move live.

    There is a group of people living in abandoned train carriages most of which are from Afghanistan but some from Pakistan. At the moment about forty people are living here but it has been very few over winter as it is extremely cold to live here. Numbers can raise to between 100 -150 during the spring and summer months.

    A tent in one of the many abandoned train carriages at Sombor where people on the move live.

    There are a group of minors aged just thirteen years old here. They have been here for some time and are completely alone. You see them playing in amongst the carriages and on the tracks as well as cooking boiled eggs for themselves. The eggs are provided by Collective Aid during their once-weekly food distribution here. This is a horrendous place for these children to be.

    Rough hands of a 13-year-old child as he peels an egg he has boiled for himself.

    This area is targeted a lot by the police. During raids, they smash the sides of the old train carriages so that in winter it is impossible to stay out of the elements. There are areas along the train tracks where people have wired plugs into the electric boxes so they can charge their phones.

    This is common in a lot of squats but is exceedingly dangerous as its mains electricity. There is a squat in the middle of Sombor next to Lidl and a bus station. Here there are a lot of Indians, Pakistani, and Afghans. Numbers are around thirty people in recent weeks and set to rise in spring. It is not a very nice place at all and everyone has respiratory problems due to the cooking being done inside without ventilation. Also. there is a massive scabies problem here.

    The cat that lives with the minors in the train carriage with the youn boys, all from Afghanistan in the background.

    An old factory outside of town has many people living around. It is mostly Arabic speakers. There can be over one hundred people here but over winter there is on average of about 40-60 people. There is a large amount of rubbish here and a massive rat problem. A few weeks ago, part of the factory where people lived fell down, luckily no one was hurt.

    Old abandoned buildings at the factory where many people on the move live, North Serbia

    Here a group of young men from Syria who were attempting to cross the border at Kladusa, Bosnia spoke at length about how they had been pushed back and beaten so many times by the Croatian police that they decided to come to try at this border instead. They also experienced this same brutality from the Hungarian police. Here, a young man shows his bruises on his shins following the Hungary authorities catching him, then beating them with batons before pushing them back to Serbia.

    Bruises on the shins of a young man from Syria who was beaten by the Hungarian authorities, North Serbia.

    Majdan

    Majdan is a village on the Serbian/Romanian/ Hungary border which has become an increasingly set route in the winter of 2019/2020. During this time, pushbacks were mostly unheard of so POM’s didn’t ever collect at the border in squats attempting the game, as the passage into Romania was accessible. It was during the summer of 2020 that reports of Pushback materialised and POMS started staying in abandoned houses and a milk factory in this area to attempt the game.

    We see a lot of police brutality wounds here mostly due to the Romanian police. People try and get around the fence on the Hungary border by crossing into Romania and then moving upwards. There seem to be more broken bones due to police brutality here than in any of the other places. It is also very poor living conditions with no access to running water and with the nearest official camp fifty kilometres away.

    People on the move collecting outside the milk factory as a distribution happens, Majdan North Serbia.

    Arabic speakers live in an abandoned milk factory in poor conditions in tents within the building. There are normally approximately fifty people here but this will continue to rise as it gets warmer. There are so many reports of violence from the Romanian police during pushbacks where they use tricks of humiliation as well as violence to try and deter POMs from crossing the border here into Romania.

    Additionally, Romania, during pushbacks are denying the people fleeing persecution in Syria and Iraq, the right of claiming asylum. Instead, they were taken to the bordered and told “no asylum here” and whilst being beaten, robbed, their personal belongings destroyed and in some cases attacked by dogs.

    This is another place, where if POMs are handed over to the Serbian police by the Romanian authorities after they are denied the right to claim international protection, they receive a Decision on Return, giving them thirty days before they can legally be removed from Serbia.

    During some mass evictions in February, a POM managed to conceal his phone. He was on the bus heading south to a camp and messaged to see if it was known where he was going and if there was any assistance for him. He reported a raid at the milk factory by Serbian police. All the POMS were beaten, robbed, hands cable-tied behind their backs and loaded onto buses. They were humiliated and beaten throughout the seven-hour trip south. They were put in a camp and the very next day he left and got the bus back to the north. The polices had slashed all their tents and destroyed his belongs including his asthma inhaler.

    A group walking back to Rabe with their food supply given to them at Majdan, North Serbia.

    Hotels

    Several hotels across the north of Serbia open up their doors to POMs giving them a safe and warm place to stay but obviously like all hotels, at a cost. Many of these places are criticised by local people and may have to pay money to the Serbian mafia to continue providing accommodation to these people in need. The medical teams visit a couple of these hotels, providing much needed medical care to these at-risk people.

    Many people with serious frostbite wounds were seen over the cold winter months after being forced into paying for a room as they are unable to live in the cold, poor conditions of the squats due to extreme tissue damage. Many people share a room to reduce the cost but the hotels that accept the medical team do genuinely tend to care greatly about the human suffering they are seeing.

    First photo of frost bite injuries to refugee from Syrias hands in North Serbia. The follow up images are too severe to show.

    A lot of patients were seen this past month with frostbite due to exposure to the cold. A Syrian man has been seen for the past four weeks after having severe frostbite on all his fingers. He is likely to lose the end of two of his fingers to one of his hands and will need support to access the hospital when the time comes to operate.

    The police do come and raid these hotels and like all places they mistreat the POMs, rob them and transport them to camps in the south of the country. Many people return from their trip on the game with injuries caused by brutality from the Hungarian authorities. Again resting their bodies from the beatings before attempting the game again.

    Recently a young man from Syria showed us a dog bite. He spoke about the beating he received from the Hungarian police after he was caught. He thought the torture was over and he was free to go but as he walked away, they released the border dog on him and he received a dog bite to his upper arm.

    Two men from Syria were assessed who had jumped from the fence between Serbia and Hungary and damaged their ankles. As they couldn’t mobilise during their pushback, they had an x-ray whilst in Hungary, and their ankles were found not to be broken. However, as they could not walk at all, they were given blood thinning injections to prevent blood clots before them being returned to Serbia through the gate and left out in the cold on the other side.

    As the refugees from Ukraine are welcomed into the EU borders, these forgotten people stuck at the EU external border of Serbia continue to be the forgotten ones. Left bruised, robbed and traumatised time and time again, frustration amongst humanitarian workers grow as they watch limited but much need funding moved from here to the borders of Ukraine. Our hearts break for the people trapped here, whose only crime is in the eyes of some, is their lack of white European features. I ask myself regularly where is the compassion?

  • Travels in Ukraine 2015

    Frank Armstrong recalls two overland trips into Ukraine in 2015. The first was through the former Czechoslovak territory around Uzhhorod, as well as the former Polish city of Lviv or Lviv. Later that year he travelled by bus as far as Kiev and then east as far as Dniperpetrovsk.

    Part 1 Summer, 2015

    Crossing from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine at the Çop junction, trains from the West halt in deference to the different rail gauges used on the other side. Stalin contrived this to prevent easy entry for invading armies; or escape. Crossing the frontier into the former Soviet Union might instil a little trepidation even into a seasoned traveller.

    Çop train station.

    An illuminating mural in the cavernous train station depicts heroic scenes of a triumphant Socialism. Beyond at the platforms, trains retain wooden benches that recall another age. I knew I had left a rapidly converging Europe when the conductor smilingly declined payment after I presented too large a denomination.

    I was among three other visitors to Ukraine arriving by train from Slovakia, although a border guard told me frequent car trips are made to avail of cheap petrol. The frustration of waiting inside a stationary carriage – akin to a panelled sardine tin – during a heatwave was offset by the friendliness of customs officials who simply checked for contraband medicines. No visa is required for EU visitors but the continued low-level warfare in the faraway east is deterring visitors despite a favourable Euro to Hryvnia exchange rate.

    The River Uzh in Uhherod.

    Borders are often a legacy of ancient battles or coincide with impassable mountain ranges or rivers that deterred conquest and absorption. A change in topography often gives rise to socio-economic boundaries; shifts from upland, semi-nomadic pastoralism to settled arable land bringing larger settlements: different political regimes and ethnic compositions may arise.

    On the road between Uzhhorod and Lviv.

    But twentieth-century Europe brought more artificial borders imposed by distant remote peace treaties or later omnipotent Superpowers, and saw the decline of multi-ethnic empires. Thus, Hungary was reduced from one part of a dual Austro-Hungarian Empire to a disgruntled rump that ruefully surveys its over two million ethnic brethren in neighbouring countries. The hated Treaty of Trianon after World War I was reflected in that country’s alignment with Nazi Germany during World War II. Revanchist Hungary remains a potential source of instability.

    Traditional hay stacks between Lviv and Uzhhorod.

    There is no obvious difference in terrain between Trans-Carpathian Ukraine and eastern Slovakia, and the region contains a sizeable Hungarian minority. Yet as one travels into the surrounding countryside a different agriculture becomes apparent: a shift from the ubiquitous cash crop of maize on the Slovak side to traditional hay stacks in Ukraine, seemingly gathered in traditional manner with scythe and pitch fork. Since the twentieth century, political frontiers have acted like natural boundaries accentuating patterns of development.

    On the road between Uzhhorod and Lviv.

    In Eastern Europe north of the Balkans, the legacy of Soviet victory in World War II remains largely intact. Apart from the relatively amicable separation of Czech Republic from Slovakia in 1993 the frontiers are unchanged. The recent land grab by Russia of Crimea and incursion of irregular troops into Donetsk may herald a more turbulent phase in European history. Borders rarely shift without an accompanying tide of blood, even more perilous in an era of mutually assured destruction.

    Lviv

    The most dramatic territorial legacy of World War II was Poland’s westward shift, forcibly ceding significant territory to the Soviet Union in return for large swathes of eastern Germany. Millions of Poles were removed from their ancestral homes and re-located in the west. Among the territory lost was the historic city of Lviv (Lvov to Poles) to Ukraine.

    Prior to World War II, it contained a population two-thirds Polish. It is now almost entirely Ukrainian although reminders of the Polish period include a statue to their national poet Adam Mickiewicz, who was actually born in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

    Lviv.

    Lvov was annexed by the Austrian Hapsburg Empire (and re-named Lemberg) in 1772, in the first Partition of Poland, becoming capital of Galicia which was the poorest province of the Empire. But this period left a remarkable architectural legacy that prompted UNESCO to designate the historic centre as ‘World Heritage’.

    Today Lviv as it is now called is relatively prosperous, drawing a large number of tourists from neighbouring Poland. Predictably the old city is fringed by a swathe of functionalist Soviet-era apartment blocks, but it retains an abundance of old world charm and the hum of cafés that spill onto carless streets.

    Lviv.

    There are nonetheless signs of a country at war with stands erected by the extreme nationalist Svoboda Party supporting the war effort and offensive toilet roll featuring a picture of Vladimir Putin available in souvenir shops. I spoke to one women of student age who railed against a terrorist, separatist threat to the integrity of the state. She could have been mistaken for someone referring to the existential threat posed by ‘enemies of the people’ in Soviet times. The uncompromising language of extremism is unmistakable.

    Lviv.

    The demise of the archaic, multinational Hapsburg Empire after World War I might be seen as the death knell for so-called Mitteleuropa. Most successor states that emerged in the Versailles settlement were inspired by a nationalist vision promoting a singular cultural identity, and hostile to diversity within the confines of the state. In contrast during the imperial era cities at least were a mosaic of religious and linguistic groups.

    Market stall, Lviv.

    The population of ethnically variegated Mitteleuropa was particularly unsuited to the identification of a nation with a single state that reached a violent apotheosis with the Nazi ideology of the master race.

    Lviv.

    Transnational Jewry were the most obvious victims, but anti-Semitism was not limited to the Nazis, continuing into the Cold War-era: as late as the 1960s thousands of Jews fled Poland in the wake of a number of purges.

    Jews had flocked to Poland in great numbers at the end of the Middle Ages due to the tolerance shown there compared with in the rest of Europe. It became known as paradisus Iudaeorum (paradise for the Jews) and contained two thirds of the continent’s Jewish population. Great centres of learning were establish in cities including Lviv, and agrarian settlements known as shtetl that contained many layers of Jewish life dotted the countryside. There Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew script, found its highest expression.

    Lviv.

    The writings of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) recall the extraordinary cultural diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire. Born a Jew in the city of Brody near Lviv in the province of Galicia, The Radetzky March is a paean to the fallibility of that Empire; his journalistic account of Eastern European Jews, The Wandering Jews, remains a valuable insight into the remarkable diversity of the Jewish populace.

    Roth despised the numerous frontiers erected in his lifetime, that impeded his passage and that of many others throughout Europe. He wrote

    a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.

    The possession of a particular passport at that time was indeed a matter of life or death.

    A melancholic alcoholic, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 just before the Europe he knew was consumed by the fires of hatred.

    The Versailles settlement also created what now seems the curious state of Czechoslovakia, stretching almost a thousand miles from east to west, as a homeland for Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians (or Rusyns as they were then known), but also containing large and disgruntled German and Hungarian minorities.

    In the aftermath of the Munich Agreement of 1938 which dismembered that country, the far eastern province of Ruthenia containing most of that Ukrainian population was annexed by Hungary, but was transferred to Ukraine itself after the arrival of the Red Army in 1945.

    The First Czechoslovak Republic was a microcosm of the Hapsburg Empire with republican institutions. Although clearly dominated by its Czech constituent, many of its first leaders such as Thomas Masaryk were socially progressive, and eschewed narrow-minded nationalism.

    It is perhaps Europe’s tragedy that his vision of a multi-ethnic democratic state did not endure.

    The Europe of Joseph Roth and Thomas Masarky was torn asunder by the twin hydras of Nazism and Stalinism. Ironically one of the groups that suffered most was the German populations who were forced out of their ancestral lands across Eastern Europe, many thousands perishing in the process.

    Europe is the poorer for the homogeneity of many states.

    Perhaps the arrival of the idea of a political and cultural Europe might generate a more accommodating reaction to minorities, but unfortunately attitudes in Ukraine suggest the idea of Europe itself can be exclusionary, as if humans feel the need to find an oppositional Other.

    Lviv.

    This exclusionary idea of Europe is not limited to Ukraine as vociferous Hungary and several nearby states also identify enemies within. The Romany people remain a pitiable underclass in most places they live.

    Latterly migrants fleeing political turmoil in the Middle East have been greeted by barbed wire fences on the Hungarian border.

    We have yet to reach an epoch when cultural diversity is seen as a boon. It would be tragic if the political idea of a Europe, a response to the conflagrations of the early twentieth century could become the case of further conflict.

    Part II, Autumn, 2015

    Ukrainians like to say they live in the largest fully European country. That scale is enhanced by a transport infrastructure relying on unwieldy, Soviet-era rail and roads that are mostly potholed outside of a few stretches of motorway, as I discovered to my discomfort on a recent trip into eastern Ukraine. Moreover, with average salaries less than €200 per month travel is a rare luxury for most in this profoundly unequal society. In a country of great diversity and relative youth, national identity is fragile.

    Kyiv.

    The depredations of the Soviet era when Ukraine was theoretically an autonomous republic but really an integral part of a vast imperium are apparent in the unforgiving architecture of its cities. In the outskirts of Kiev, as elsewhere, tower blocks loom at heights unknown in Western Europe, and inside the capital concrete monoliths sully the splendour of a pre-Revolutionary heritage that includes the UNESCO medieval site of Santa Sophia Cathedral.

    Kyiv.

    The deadening weight of the Communist aesthetic recalls the advice of Marxist theorist George Lukács:

    What is crucial is that reality as it seems to be should be thought of as something man cannot change and its unchangeability should have the force of a moral imperative.

    In the long shadow of imposing structures and heroic monuments people would accept the inevitability of the triumph of Communism. Alas, since independence in 1991 the trend has been to replace this with the brash sheen of American capitalism, an implicit genuflection to the Cold War victor and its consumerism.

    Kyiv.

    Obviously architecture was the least of the excesses of Communism in Ukraine. That mantle is reserved for their great famine known as Holodomor when Stalin’s policy of de-kulakization (1929-1932) killed something between two and seven million Ukrainians and annihilated the social fabric of village life: either you took a job in a collective or went to a city elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

    Kyiv.

    Simultaneously, entire nations, including the Tartars who once occupied Crimea, were forcibly relocated to different parts of the empire. This destruction was compounded by the German invasion in World War II, although Ukrainians had an ambivalent, and in some cases collaborative, relationship with the Nazis during over two years of occupation.

    Kyiv.

    Today in Ukraine most cities in the south and east are Russian-speaking. Parentage is often, unsurprisingly, mixed: a group of young professionals I met in the city of Dniperpetrovsk revealed ancestry Ukrainian, Russian and even Tartar. All spoke Russian as their first language but considered themselves Ukrainian. Even religion, historically, did not separate Ukrainians from Russians as both followed the Greek Orthodox rite. It evoked the question: what does it mean to be Ukrainian beyond living within the borders of that state?

    Kyiv

    A civic nationalism divorced from the kind of destructive ethnic identification that bedevilled the break-up of Yugoslavia would minimise lethal divides. But the current taste for symbols of Ukrainian identity, such as the surge in popularity for traditional dress, suggests this is not on the agenda. Pride in cultural inheritance can easily be skewed towards atavistic violence.

    Kyiv.

    I discovered an increasing despondency among my new-found friends at the capacity of Ukraine’s politicians to bring meaningful improvement to the country. Each revolution, including the latest Euromaidan against the staggering corruption of former President Victor Yanukovych has brought disappointment. The oligarchs remain dominant, led from the front by billionaire President Petro Poroshenko, the richest man in the country.

    According to a recent report from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group a desultory one in five cases against high-ranking officials ends with conviction and imprisonment.

    River Dniper, Dniperpetrovsk.

    The aspirations of the young and dynamic quivering at the possibility of joining the European mainstream remain frustrated. Inevitably in some quarters there is nostalgia for a more authoritarian era proximately represented by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. According to my friends in Dniperpetrovsk the divisions in Ukraine are often generational.

    Dniperpetrovsk.

    Nearby Donetsk is still controlled by Russian-led insurgents. An unsteady ceasefire has held there since September. There have even been attempts, as in Russia, to rehabilitate Stalin. The city was previously called Stalino. Nostalgia for the Soviet Empire is being incubated.

    Russian aggression feeds extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Military build-ups have pernicious effects wherever they are found. In Kiev an array of tanks is parked outside the foreign ministry and the distinctive grey camouflage of the Ukrainian army now seems a fashion accessory, most of all for supporters of the far-right Svoboda (Truth) party.

    Kyiv.

    An encounter I had with one character in a Kiev hostel was revealing. When I said I was Irish he proclaimed his admiration for the IRA, and was a little put out to hear that I was not a supporter of what he perceived as another underdog fighting an imperial foe. The fighters against the Russian-led rebels in Donetsk were his heroes.

    Ukraine offers huge rewards for Russia. It is an agricultural powerhouse, once the bread basket of the Soviet Union, and today is the world’s fifth largest corn producer and the largest producer of sunflower oil. Further, although corruption even extends to the awarding of degrees, its educated population especially in technical disciplines are an important asset.

    Kyiv.

    All nations have their myths that bind disparate groups together inside one state. The complication for Ukraine is that its history is deeply entwined with that of Russia’s. Even the name ‘Rus’ originates in the medieval kingdom with its capital Kiev established by Viking colonists before it was gradually Slavicised. Ukrainian identity was forged through contact with neighbouring empires: first the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that once stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and afterwards the partitions of Poland beginning in the eighteenth century, under the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire which served as a hothouse for numerous nationalist identities, including Zionism and Nazism.

    Memorial to victims of the Holocaust, Dniperpetrovsk.

    As their language crystallised in a form and with a script different to that of Russian, and poets especially Taras Shevchenko illuminated a national character, nineteenth century nationalists turned to the Cossacks as a distinguishing source of identity.

    Historical Museum, Dniperpetrovsk.

    Translated as ‘free man’, Cossacks were bands of escaped serfs that resisted the Catholicism of their Polish landlords and established military settlements along the Dniper and elsewhere, in the late Middle Ages. Their indomitable spirit strikes a chord with modern Ukrainians and is resurrected in re-creating of their settlements in Dniperpetrovsk’s impressive historical museum. The tragedy for the Cossacks was that after throwing off the shackles of the Polish nobility they succumbed to the Russian Empire. This has an obvious contemporary resonance.

    Passing through the interior, where vast fields stretch beyond the horizon, one sees the great possibilities for this country. Encountering the wide-eyed interest of people in world affairs, their knowledge generally beyond that of their Western European counterparts, fosters a visitor’s optimism; witnessing small kindnesses from those with few possessions is touching. But the current system is failing people and the longer that endures the further the already pronounced wealth inequalities will grow, and with that the entrenchment of petty tyrannies.

    Russian Dolls, Kyiv.

    Membership of the European Union is not a panacea for Ukraine. Ensuing emigration could lead to a crippling brain drain, and a free market could be problematic in some sectors. But equally Europe cannot allow a new Iron Curtain to develop. In the end Ukraine needs to find an accommodation with its Russian neighbour to whose fate it is bound.

    Young Ukrainians need reassurance that their country can be reformed. Countering Lukács: reality as it seems to be ought to be thought of as something we can change.

    Versions of these articles were originally published in Village Magazine.

  • George Monbiot’s Hall of Mirrors

    In 2010, having advocated for veganism in 2002, George Monbiot wrote: ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly.’

    Having just read Simon Faerlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Monbiot acknowledged serious environmental problems with the prevailing model of cattle production, but complained that pigs ‘have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat.’

    Surprisingly perhaps, while rhapsodising on the efficiency of giving ‘sterilised scraps to pigs,’ he expressed no concern for animal welfare in feedlot production.

    ‘It’s time we got stuck in,’ he concluded, no doubt to the anger of genuine vegans who refrain from consuming animal products for ethical reasons, not simply because laboratory grown meat is more efficient to produce.

    By 2016, however, Monbiot had ‘[re-?]converted to veganism to reduce’ his ‘impact on the living world;’ while in 2017 he asked: ‘What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?’

    ‘There are plenty to choose from,’ he opined, but one he believed ‘will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk.’

    Whatever one’s views – vegan or meat-enthusiast – on this issue, it is fair to say that Monbiot has been ethically vacant and that his knowledge of “the science” isn’t always up to speed, even by his own admission.

    Corbynista?

    Monbiot displayed a similar inconsistency and lack of staying power in his attitude to Jeremy Corbyn. In 2015 he hailed the Islington MP Labour leadership candidate as ‘the curator of the future. His rivals are chasing an impossible dream.’

    By the beginning of 2017, however, he was tweeting: ‘I was thrilled when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, but it has been one fiasco after another. I have now lost all faith.’

    That was just months before Corbyn’s high water mark: the 2017 General Election when the Conservatives under Theresa May were reduced to a minority administration reliant on the support of the DUP.

    At least the surprising result gave Monbiot pause for reflection. He mused later that year on a crushing defeat for the liberal media which had ‘created a hall of mirrors, in which like-minded people reflect and reproduce each other’s opinions.’

    He noted that ‘broadcasters echo what the papers say, the papers pick up what the broadcasters say.’ and how a ‘narrow group of favoured pundits appear on the news programmes again and again.’

    Covidiocy

    Having acknowledged “a hall of mirrors” in the media’s treatment of Jeremy Corbyn it seems surprising he wouldn’t consider that this phenomenon may have operated during the pandemic. Instead, we found full-blooded commitment to lockdowns and all that followed. The nadir arrived with an argument for what amounts to scientific censorship.

    On first glance, his proposal for a time delimited ‘outright ban on lies that endanger people’s lives’ might seem proportionate in an emergency period, but this proceeds a passage in which he refers to ‘people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.’

    “and Sunetra Gupta”!!!

    For anyone who has not heard of her, apart from being a published novelist, Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.

    In March 2020, Gupta and her colleagues posted a paper challenging the modelling of Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson which persuaded many Western governments to adopt lockdowns. Gupta’s paper argued that prior coronavirus infections would diminish the spread and posited a far lower infection fatality rate. Its predictions proved optimistic, but Ferguson projected a minimum U.S. death toll of a ‘best case scenario’ of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario that also proved inaccurate. It is fair to say that epidemiology is not an exact science.

    Monbiot’s disturbing article conflated Gupta’s more optimistic assessment – which brought vilification – with denial of human responsibility for climate change and the role of smoking in lung cancer.

    He also slipped in an attack on the Great Barrington Declaration that Gupta co-authored, misrepresenting proposals for targeted protection as championing ‘herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims.’ Presumably Monbiot would have consigned that document to the bonfire too.

    Covid Expertise

    A new paper in the British Medical Journal by John Ionnidas reflects on the echo chamber – generated by social media in particular – in which Monbiot operates. Ionnidas compared the social media following of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration to its rival John Snow Memorandum that advocated for the opposing view of continuing with lockdowns.

    He concluded that both included ‘many stellar scientists’, but that ‘JSM has far more powerful social media presence and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.’

    This paper is unlikely to inform Monbiot’s understanding of “the science” of COVID-19, which has been reduced to a political ideology. Thus, anyone questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and universal vaccination – with recourse to draconian laws if necessary – is essentially adopting “conspiratorial” “right-wing” ideas.

    Rather than dispassionately assess the merits of lockdowns or medications via cost benefit analyses – as a critical journalist or scientist ought to – Monbiot blithely argues that the ‘anti-vaccine movement is a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures.’

    Notably absent is an acknowledgement that he, George Monbiot, could possibly err in his evaluation of scientific or political questions.

    Monbiot’s views on COVID-19 are consistent with opinions expressed across most of a liberal media (including the Guardian) which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support from the Gates Foundation, arguably manufacturing consent for the status quo.

    Monbiot is hardly a gun for hire, but operating within the hall of mirrors he previously acknowledged has brought an intellectual meltdown.

    His diminished credibility as a commentator, and tendency towards divisive political tribalism, should be of concern to environmentalists; who also ought to be wary of the steady encroachment of philanthrocapitalism.

    Feature Image: Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles

  • Russia-Ukraine: Everything to Lose

    A hundred years on from the blood-stained birth of a partitioned island of Ireland, another European country faces the prospect of settlement or war. If any people should understand the Ukrainian Question it is surely the Irish, who also confront a larger and far more powerful neighbour, a shared history and religion, and a population divided along ethnic lines.

    It is important to understand that a significant minority of Ukraine‘s population consider themselves Russian. Indeed, there are striking parallels with the conflict on the island of Ireland.

    In the North of Ireland a majority consider themselves British first and Irish second, just as in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea a majority consider Russian their primary identity. The roots of these ethnic divisions are also similar: Northern Protestants in Ireland arrived as planters in the wake of invasion in the seventeenth century; just as ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea arrived during the conflicts of the early twentieth century.

    Both modern Russia and Ukraine trace their origins to the establishment of the Kievan Rus Federation, a loose federation of east Slavic, Baltic and Finnic people from the late ninth to the mid-thirteenth century. This is how Russia acquired its name, and Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, too. Shared claims of ancestry endure to the present through the personage of the eleventh century Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Thus, Ukraine awards the order of Prince Yaroslav for services to the state, while a Russian frigate patrolling the Baltic also carries his name. Yaroslav’s image also appears on bank notes in both countries.

    The most probable (live) picture of the Yaroslav the Wise is his seal.

    Collapse of the Soviet Union

    More recently, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a slew of post-Soviet Republics declared independence, and began a perilous journey towards sovereignty and democracy.

    The Soviet Union, particularly under the rule of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) had modernised and terrorised Russia and its subordinate states in equal measure. And, just as the Catholic minority in seventeenth century Ulster suffered at the hands of state-sponsored pogroms and appropriation of land, the Ukraine did not escape the brutality of the Soviet Union’s inhumane policies of state-sponsored murder, cultural oppression and famine.

    It is always easy to retreat behind a flag or portrait when facing down an enemy, or to take refuge in language, culture and identity politics when justifying belligerence. It is more difficult to engage with geopolitical and cultural realities and mediate conflicts between states.

    Crucially, Russia’s most important ally, China, will back them economically should Russia be targeted with further sanctions. Russia with its continental landmass, seemingly infinite resources, nuclear arsenal and modern professional military is a force to be reckoned with. In terms of resolving the conflict over Ukraine, Western strategists should recognise Russia’s regional interests, and the balance of power.

    A mutually acceptable settlement is urgently required to avoid military conflict, the repercussions of which are likely to include an unprecedented energy crisis in Europe, another wave of refugees and, potentially, a global economic recession.

    Ethnic Divisions

    Ukraine is a country divided, essentially, along ethnic lines; an industrialised east and Crimea with its strategic ports and access to the Black Sea being almost entirely Russian speaking, with strong cultural, political and indeed financial connections to Russia.

    The most recent Ukrainian government assessment of the scale of the ethnic Russian population puts this at approximately 17.5% of the total, a figure not dissimilar to the proportion of Protestant Unionists living on the island of Ireland.

    It is simplistic to cast Russia as a deviant nation hellbent on suppressing and oppressing its neighbours, particularly those previously a part of the Soviet Union. The truth is far more complex.

    The idea of the Soviet Union continues to exert an influence over populations in Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’. There are also tens of millions of ethnic Russians living in former Soviet Republics, including in Ukraine where a person could identify simultaneously as Ukrainian and Russian, as in the North of Ireland where dual identities are common.

    Inevitably, the current Russian government under Vladimir Putin also has regard to a long history of foreign incursions from Napoleon to Hitler, through Ukraine, and that this area was the bread basket of the Soviet Union. Despite war in the east of Ukraine since 2014 strong economic ties remain, which could be stimulated further in the event of détente.

    The recurring insistence we hear from Western commentators that Russia harbours secret desires to dominate these post-Soviet territories simplifies a complex scenario. Many would argue that NATO should have been disbanded at the end of the Cold War, rather than expanding into former satellite states of the Soviet Union.

    Russia has suffered significant deprivations since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It has prosecuted several wars, most notably in Chechnya on two occasions and also against Georgia. Most recently it has supported ethnic Russian separatist in the east of Ukraine that perceived a threat to their identity. Recently, ethnic Russians unable to speak Ukrainian were excluded from civil service positions by an Act of the Ukrainian parliament.

    A simplistic Western view of Russia as an aggressor ignores the Russian government’s perceived obligation to protect its people, who by an accident of history find themselves beyond the protection of its borders.

    The idea that an increasingly resurgent Russia would simply abandon ethnic Russians to an increasingly nationalist Ukraine is naive.

    Imbalanced Reporting

    While giving ample space to Russian military involvement in the east of Ukraine and alleged war crimes involving ethnic Russian militias, Western media is more reticent on the infiltration of the Ukrainian armed forces by far right groups, nor has it highlighted attacks on ethnic Russians by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

    Moreover, NATO‘s past performances during catastrophic, and illegal, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq do not instil confidence regarding their benign intentions, certainly from a Russian perspective. NATO’s membership includes Turkey under Erdogan, Hungary under Orban, an increasingly regressive Poland, and post-Brexit U.K..

    Political Scientist John Joseph Mearsheimer has pointed to Western interference, ill-advised foreign policy and a lack of understanding of regional geopolitics as the origin of the current situation in Ukraine. He also refers to a lack of trust existing between NATO and Russia, particularly in the light of alleged promises to the latter at the end of the Cold War.

    To understand the dynamics currently playing out between Ukraine and Russia we should examine Ukraine’s Maidan Revolt in 2014. Depending on your perspective or ethnic identity it was either a cynical coup backed by Western intelligence agencies or a moment of national re-awakening, asserting Ukraine’s ‘Western’ identity.

    What is indisputable is that the democratically elected government – whatever its faults – under a pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted over a period of four months. It began peacefully, but descended into violence perpetrated by both sides. The outcome is a polarisation of Ukrainian society, with NATO and the E.U. overtly supporting Ukrainian nationalists and Russia supporting ethnic Russian separatists.

    Map of the Russo-Georgian War.

    Parallels

    There are parallels between the current brinksmanship in Ukraine and the Russian conflict with Georgia in 2008. From a Russian outlook, Georgia had been led by the nose into the disputed Russian-speaking territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after a promise of NATO support. When battle was joined, however, no such support materialised, and the Russian military easily defeated the Georgian incursion, pursuing its forces into Georgia proper.

    Today some Ukrainian commentators are cautioning against reliance on a NATO that foments conflict, seemingly without being willing to enter the fray.

    British and American officials claim they will stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine, but are refusing to put troops on the ground; although they are willing to send lethal weaponry to Ukraine, no doubt to the satisfaction of an arms industry that President Eisenhower once described as the Military Industrial Complex.

    It now behoves a non-aligned State such as Ireland with an intimate understanding of ethnic conflict, and now a full U.N. Security Council member, to recognise the interests of both sides in what is in many respects a civil war arising out of the legacy of the Soviet Union. Rather than echoing the bellicose statements of one side, Ireland should be attempting to mediate a solution to avoid a proxy conflict between nuclear powers.

    Featured Image: Pro-Russian protesters in Donetsk, 9 March 2014

  • Walking at Night

    Night Walking Deserves a Quiet Night

    I’ve always walked alone in the city after dark. Recently, it’s with my dog, along the banks of the Royal Canal. Of a winter evening, the path is quieter than during the day, when bikes and scooters fly by, and the dog’s senses are lit up by the city wildlife revealed in the still of night.

    Last week, as we strolled along a quiet stretch, a man entered the canal path from the road and began walking towards us. Something wasn’t right about him.

    For so many women, there is an understanding, so quietly absorbed that we don’t even give it much thought, that there are risks attached to walking alone at night: of physical violence, of sexual violence, of harassment. It’s the water in which women swim. It’s the reason why our male loved ones show concern for us over their male counterparts when out walking alone – because we all know there are greater risks to it by virtue of being a woman.

    I saw a post on social media, in the aftermath of the recent shocking murder of Ashling Murphy. It was by a male journalist who decried the blaming by women of men ‘en masse’ for individual atrocities by men against women.

    The ‘not all men’ mantra seems to me as dull-minded as it is deflective, for whoever made the claim that it was?

    The perpetrator is the person to blame. What is being called to account in women decrying male violence against women is a culture that means all women, including female children, swim in the waters of often unconscious fear when facing the public world of men, from a young age.

    In this world, we know what it is to go from feeling safe to on edge in the blink of an eye, from puberty on, if not before – when we flinch in the face of that first catcall, or unsolicited approach on the street. Ani DiFranco sings of it in her resonant song ‘The Story’:

    I would’ve returned your greeting

    if it weren’t for the way you were looking at me.

    Only men can change that.

    It doesn’t make all men to blame; but it does make them potential agents of change for the better.

    The man who began walking towards me last week was young and, as I said, something wasn’t right about him. His behaviour was heightened, edgy. Maybe he was high. He shouted greetings at the dog, but it didn’t sound friendly. My adrenaline kicked in. I furtively glanced behind to see if I was alone. I was.

    I braced myself for his approach. It wasn’t that I thought the worst, it was that I knew that whatever came to pass on this canal path with nowhere to escape to, I was to a fair degree at his mercy. I gripped my key between my fingers – that reflexive move women make even if only to feel safer.

    The whole thing probably unfolded in less than thirty seconds but it felt longer. He knew that I was the vulnerable one and I sensed his knowledge as he approached. He came closer than he needed to. ‘How are you, love?’ Spoken loudly, into my face. We both knew it wasn’t a genuine question.

    I answered as friendly-casual as I could. Not too nice, not too nonchalant. Definitely no hint of aggression. In my voice I was trying to impart lots of things. I’m relaxed. I don’t see you as a threat. I’m friendly (whatever the nature of your problem is, I don’t judge you). That wasn’t true. I did judge him – for getting his kicks from being able to be scary towards a lone woman just by virtue of being a man. Any soothing note my tone might have imparted was tactical.

    After he passed, I slow-counted to twenty. I was afraid to turn around too soon in case it gave him cause to return. I glanced over my shoulder, then exhaled slowly, relieved to see he had continued on this path – and I was nearing the road.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that I don’t think I’d even have committed the incident to memory, let alone mentioned it to anyone, if I hadn’t returned home to the devastating news that a young woman had been murdered while out jogging on a Tullamore canal path. Ashling Murphy was a beautiful, talented, generous spirit, with her life in front of her. But this is the water in which women swim, the air in which we walk, or run – where risks, conscious and unconscious, sometimes, brutally, come to pass.

    The particular attributes of her murder – that it took place in broad daylight, that it looks to have been an attack by a stranger– make it ripe for description as a tipping-point event, and the outpouring of grief and anger in its wake suggest this may be so. Time will tell.

    For while the cold threat of such an attack may strike the greatest fear into most women, the reality remains that for victims of male violence, the perpetrator is rarely a stranger.

    Per the Women’s Aid Annual Impact Report 2020, since 1996, 236 women have died violently in the Republic of Ireland. 61% were killed in their own homes; 55% were killed by a partner or ex (of the resolved cases) and almost nine in ten knew their killer.

    And while domestic and gender-based violence prevails across social class, often its victims face higher rates of social inequity, including homelessness – in a European study some 92% of homeless women had experienced violence or abuse throughout their lives.

    For society at large, the issue of gender-based violence is one that remains behind closed doors, dealt with within the confines of the private rather than public domain. Charities that support victims of gender-based violence consistently struggle from underfunding, and consecutive governments have treated the issue as one of low priority.

    Lockdowns have been shown to create the most serious impacts for the socially disadvantaged, so it is no surprise that the 2020 Women’s Aid report reveals a startling 43% increase in contacts with their services, compared to 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic and its measures have had an ‘unprecedented and exhausting impact’ on victims of abuse. Surely this and other social inequities of lockdowns must be given consideration as Covid-19 policy shapes itself towards the future.

    As the government quickens pace to steer through its new strategy on domestic and gender-based violence, due to be published in March – its stated goal being a zero-tolerance approach – time will tell what it delivers on a structural level, and we can only hope that it signals meaningful change.

    Whatever comes to pass, it remains the case that on a societal level, all men do have a role in changing the waters within which women swim, along with the air within which we walk, run, and carry out our lives – private and public. And owning that fact may be what separates the men from the boys.

  • The Good Terrorist

    Even if these operations are shocking revelations to those who have a romantic notion of the past then the risk of their disillusionment is worth the price of finally exposing the hypocrisy of those in the establishment who rest self-righteously on the rewards of those who in yesteryear’s freedom struggle made the supreme sacrifice.
    Sinn Féin Pamphlet, The Good Old IRA, 1985.

    It’s fair to say we shouldn’t apply the same judgment to people of the past as we do to our contemporaries. Throughout history, men and women have been conditioned to live and think in ways quite alien to prevailing sensibilities. Looking back into pre-history, we find infanticide commonly practised by hunter-gatherer communities, probably to ensure collective survival.

    Many Irish people in the 1930s supported either Fascism in Italy and Germany, or Communist Russia, without being acutely aware of what was happening under those regimes; let alone what would happen during World War II, and beyond.

    At that point democracy seemed in global retreat, as a civilisation-defining war loomed between two rival systems, while the surviving democracies contended with a Great Depression that suggested an inherently dysfunctional capitalist system. A person might reasonably be attracted to a radical alternative, however horrifying these totalitarian systems may appear to us now.

    Arguably the best did not lose their moral scruples – or democratic values – albeit they may have lost ‘all conviction,’ as Yeats anticipated in ‘The Second Coming’; indeed, he has been described as a fascist ‘fellow-traveller’ himself.

    It begs the question: when does the past become a foreign country, where they do things differently? When do we stop judging people by the standards of today? At what point does a new era begin? Can a person even straddle two epochs?

    For example, the Sinn Féin party that now stands on the brink of power in Ireland are commonly castigated for the conduct of the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yet few, if any, members of that party in Dáil Eireann actively participated in the Provisional IRA.

    In contrast, the origin of Fine Gael, which emerged as a combination of Cumann na nGhaedhal, the Irish Centre Party and the National Guard, better known as the Blueshirts, in 1933, tends to be ignored, or even qualified.

    O’Duffy leading a salute with the Blueshirts, December 1934.

    Thus, Irish Times columnist Stephen Collins defines the Blueshirts as ‘best understood as para-fascists,’ which according to one source is ‘a larger category of regimes that adapted or aped ‘fascist’ formal and organizational features, but did not share the revolutionary ideological vision of genuine fascism.’

    Such nuance might have been lost on General Eoin O’Duffy and his more earnest acolytes; albeit my own great-grandfather, John A. Costello – whose commitment to human rights made him an acceptable Taoiseach to former IRA chief of staff and leader of Clann na Poblachta Sean MacBride in the First Interparty Government of 1948 – injudiciously declared in 1934: ‘the Blackshirts were victorious in Italy and … the Hitler Shirts were victorious in Germany, as … the Blueshirts will be victorious in the Irish Free State.’

    During periods of crisis even decent people can be carried along by waves of hysteria that cause civil liberties and common decency to be cast aside. A famous 2003 documentary ‘The Fog of War’ features former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara attempting to rationalise the U.S. bombing campaign in South-East Asia. Our present era where we witness a Populist clamour for mandatory vaccination may, in time, be viewed as one such illiberal period.

    A youth growing up in a Catholic, or Protestant, working class neighbourhood in Belfast during the 1970s might easily, and perhaps reasonably, have become involved in what we now define as terrorist organisations. That individual might even have committed awful terrible crimes in the Fog of War.

    It is a very delicate question as to what point we should let bygones be bygones and allow even participants in a sectarian, or post-colonial, struggle to participate in government without being constantly reminded of their past. Fine Gael certainly had no problem going into government with Clann na Poblachta in 1948, despite the latter’s association with the Republican cause.

    Belfast, 1969, Bob Quinn.

    The Northern Ireland power-sharing executive represents an imperfect attempt to move on from the Troubles. It has at least diminished the level of politically motivated violence in that society.

    This process was actively encouraged by successive Irish governments, especially through the mechanism of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, culminating in the participation of Sinn Féin in government.

    Yet what we hear today in Ireland from the likes of Fintan O’Toole is that Sinn Féin somehow has a flawed pedigree, and must apologise, again and again. Frankly, it’s boring and inconsistent.

    There is a larger question around how we represent political violence in an Era of Centenaries. The decision of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to enter into a coalition might be viewed favourably in terms of a definitive end to ‘tribal’ Civil War politics.

    But what of the use of historical figures associated with those parties? In particular, is it appropriate for Fine Gael to remind the public of its association with Michael Collins, one of the great exponents of what supporters define as urban guerrilla warfare and detractors terrorism, or at least extra-judicial assassination?

    Moreover, Collins participated in the Easter Rising led by Pádraig Pearse who said in 1913: ‘Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood … There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them.’

    The shell of the G.P.O. on Sackville Street (later O’Connell Street), Dublin in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising.

    Political violence was intrinsic to Pearse’s, and arguably Collins’s, approach to the birthing of the nation. They were men of their time, but were a faction within a faction that enjoyed less popular support than the Provisional IRA during the Northern Troubles.

    Besides, while the British authorities in Ireland prior to independence were hardly a model of good government, they had at least distributed much of the land among peasant proprietors and developed reasonable infrastructure. Home Rule was on the statute book. It might be argued that 1916 made Partitition inevitable.

    In contrast, the sectarian Unionist government – ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’ – in Northern Ireland was denying civil rights to Catholics, gerrymandering constituency boundaries and sponsoring the B Specials, a sectarian, quasi-military reserve special constable police force.

    The Northern Troubles was a dark period in the history of the island, but to suggest those involved were, and are, inherently evil rather than, in most cases, products of historical forces, is lazy reasoning. Let’s put to bed the idea the Troubles disqualifies Sinn Féin’s participation in government for ever more, and move on to scrutinising the detail of their policies, in particular a failure to adopt a discernible position on the optimum response to COVID-19 in Ireland.

    Featured Image: Michael Collins by John Lavery, 1922.

  • Notes from a Segregated Island

    Your antennae are up months before it comes. You’ve gotten to the point where, if Leo Varadkar says something won’t happen, you brace yourself for its certain announcement, in good time.

    When the axe finally falls, you’re on holidays in Donegal in July, and the uncomfortable reality sinks in that the house and the rain-sodden outdoors will have to do you, pubs and restaurants will have to wait. Because you’ve long known that the game that’s made its way onto your table – one of freedom by way of the barcode – is one you won’t play.

    There are many quiet tears across the country, many tummies in a familiar pattern of churning, as a new breed faces an uncertain dawn. They’re greeted, at best, with a wall of silence, at worst with opprobrium and unflinchingly entitled judgement.

    The air of suspicion they have increasingly felt around them, in a quietly charged atmosphere that has made it harder to be in the thick of things, even among some cherished family and friends, has become solid and tangible.

    And yet the day is like any other, the view from the window just the same. Nothing but a simple QR code and a biddable hospitality sector, understandably desperate to re-open its doors, signals the birth of a new Irish underclass.

    Considered Thinking

    Research shows that people have many reasons for declining a medical intervention. These are mainly born out of considered thinking: medical history and experience, including vaccine-injury; research and knowledge of what is right for their own body; the practice of natural healing modalities as a first recourse to health.

    Gym membership cancellation rates at the recent extension of medical segregation to that sector suggest that those who have a strong investment in their wellbeing through exercise may assess the risk/benefit of Covid-19 vaccination in a different way to those who may be more vulnerable to Covid’s worst effects.

    There is no one-size-fits-all. Such is life. If we believe that this turns a vaccine-free person into a walking biohazard, perhaps we have bought into fear over an inspected view.

    We are now some twenty-two months into a pandemic that has fundamentally shifted the course of our existence. It is fitting to ask whether, along with a potentially very serious virus, we have also been visited by a kind of collective trauma, stemming from news streams delivering non-stop daily scrutiny of Covid-19, along with rolling curtailments of our lives and those of our children. Never before has an idea of safety been so rigidly attached to a single concept: being Covid-19-free.

    Serious Illness

    I don’t make light of Covid-19. I know what a serious illness it can be, particularly for those who are older or have underlying vulnerabilities. However, in a new world characterized by fear and caution – surrounded by visual reminders that something frightening is in our midst – I believe that something vital to a healthy society is being dangerously side-lined: the checks and balances necessary to healthy democratic governance.

    We are in the process of enshrining into law a piece of primary legislation, the Health and Criminal Justice (Covid-19) (Amendment) (No.2), granting the extension of extraordinary emergency powers to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, powers that prior to Covid-19 we never could have countenanced handing over to the State.

    These extend the medical segregation that has become normalised in society, where the paradoxically named “immunity certs” – granted after double vaccination to access supposedly inviolable freedoms – are widely seen as a reasonable and proportionate response to pandemic times, rather than a human rights’ issue in urgent need of inspection.

    Do we wish to live in a world where a person can be stripped of their basic freedoms because of their private medical status? A world where the unproven threat of asymptomatic transmission is greater than the threat of authoritarian, technocratic rule?

    (One where, in perhaps the greatest twist of all, those who have retained their “privileges” are of course no less immune from the Covid transmission chain.)

    Do we wish to be part of a society where, for instance, a medically vulnerable person who is not suitable for vaccination is left out in the cold – because GPs currently have no authority to grant meaningful medical exemptions?

    Do we want to raise our children in a world where a person who exercises their right to informed consent, as enshrined in every human rights in healthcare covenant since Nuremberg, can be readily pegged as plainly reprehensible?

    Sins of the Past

    In Ireland, we are thankfully now alert to the impacts of the sins of the past – where the “othering”, for instance of women and children in mother and baby homes, was an accepted thing – yet are we willing to face uncomfortable truths about our present?

    At this moment, we have effectively “othered” a cohort who are subject to a particular kind of derision. Ireland’s vaccine rollout, which sees the highest level of coverage in the EU, has not transpired into the panacea promised. Despite this, we see blame at times verging on incitement to hatred publicly levelled at those who choose not to or cannot, due to medical reasons, avail of this medical intervention. The failure of the medicine is somehow the fault of those who didn’t take it.

    Even as reputable medical journals caution against stigmatising the unvaccinated, the vaccine-free are relentlessly pegged as the scapegoat of this difficult episode, where goalposts keep shifting and promised remedies fail to deliver. Those in power conveniently use this to deflect from their own failures.

    “Anti-vax”, a dehumanizing, broad brushstroke term, has become common parlance. Nothing short of a creeping obsession has developed towards a group stigmatised with this label, among some of Ireland’s most trusted, supposedly liberal media commentators, and among some of our most powerful political voices.

    Terminology that casually stigmatizes people has the twin impacts of eroding human dignity while effectively silencing dissent and debate – two essential tools of a functioning democracy. And if the ensuing social media outcry was anything to go by, many found it chilling to witness Minister Donnelly level this term at a fellow deputy in the Dáil chambers, for presenting peer-reviewed scientific information.

    Taking one for the Team

    While we can casually cast blame, without evidence, upon the cohort who didn’t “take one for the team”, those who should actually be answerable almost two years in operate without meaningful scrutiny from either a critical media or political opposition. And here, I believe, is where we should all be looking to.

    We have empowered Minister Donnelly to strip some seven per cent of the Irish population of their basic social and civil rights. If this legislation extends until its “sunset” of June 2022, we will have placed a minority of Irish society at the back of the bus for almost one year. And who knows how much longer they’ll even be allowed to travel on the bus? If past form is anything to go by, we might then expect another piece of similar legislation to follow it.

    I struggle to understand how all this is compatible with a liberal democracy. As medical segregation and the removal of human rights flourishes across Europe, and our social credit becomes increasingly tied to barcode-accessed living, at what point do we begin to seriously look at the potential harms of this brave new world, for which we are hard at work laying down the building blocks?

    A medical officer having the power of detention over you, in an undefined “designated place”, if you are merely suspected of having Covid-19, is not democracy. Coerced medication is not democracy, and the championing of Covid Certs by Leo Varadkar, on the basis that it drove up vaccination rates, only celebrates this lapse.

    When does Emergency Phase End?

    Decision-making that impacts everyone in Ireland, taken by a group of eight middle-class, middle-aged white men, who fail to represent the cross-section of Irish society, including those most vulnerable to the effects of lockdown – working-class people, women, and other minority groups – is not democracy.

    Almost two years in, it no longer holds for our government to act as if we are in the emergency phase of the pandemic. This ongoing abuse of emergency legislation and power is causing untold damage to the communities trying to stay afloat around it.

    There is evidence aplenty now to begin an assessment of the broad impacts of pandemic measures, and this must be done with independent expertise provided by those who have not been at the helm. The bigger picture must now come into view. We need to properly consider the economic, social/cultural and in the context of overall healthcare.

    I believe, special attention must be paid to Covid-19 policy impacts on our young people. Strategies need to be rebalanced towards carving out a future that allows us to respond proportionately to the threat of Covid-19, while maintaining people’s human and civil rights, their entitlement to dignity and privacy, and ending a nasty division that has crept in with terrifying stealth, in a time of crisis.

    We need solidarity regardless of medical status. Please stand with me to reach out to your political representatives to insist they convey our call to reject segregation and division, and to demand checks and balances from a government that many increasingly see as being power-drunk at Ireland’s wheel.

    Ciara Considine is a book publisher, singer-songwriter (Ciara Sidine), civil rights activist and mother of two, living in Dublin.

    This article was first published in A Mandate Free Ireland, a weekly campaign newsletter, on 13 December 2021 (Click here to subscribe: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kvmw7).
    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

     

  • “Nuances”: Fellipe Lopes in Conversation

    “Nuances” is a work in progress by South American documentary maker Fellipe Lopes. Since May 2021, Lopes has been on the ground in some of the most notorious refugee camps in Europe, on the Greek island of Lesvos (Lesbos), just off the coast of Turkey.

    “Nuances” seeks to understand the ‘refugee crisis’ from the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees, and their relationship with humanitarian workers and volunteers living and working on the island. Lopes is soon to finish the interviews and the recording of the documentary. Until now, Lopes has been working voluntarily, at his own expense. He has now started a Kickstarter to crowdsource €7,000 for the next stage of the project, including post production and distribution.

    Last month, Lopes was nominated for the Irish Red Cross Humanitarian Awards for Journalism Excellence. In the same month, Cassandra Voices journalist Daniele Idini had the chance to catch up with the documentary maker.

    Fellipe Lopes by Daniele Idini

    Daniele Idini (DI): How long have you been in Lesvos now and what’s the situation like?

    Fellipe Lopes (FL): So I have been in Lesvos for the last six months and working on this documentary since I arrived. This documentary is a collection of interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, migrants explaining the challenges they are facing. It seems like they basically have only one option when it comes to work, which is basically to work as an interpreter. And this is not something that makes all the migrants and refugees happy because they are revisiting all the trauma through other people’s experience.

    DI: So basically, you are saying this work is, in a way, necessary for the camp’s operation, but is, in a way, preventing migrants from escaping the camp’s system,.

    FL: Exactly. These migrants are well suited to this kind of work, because they often speak the necessary languages – it might be Farsi, or Arabic, Lingala or French. They also can understand the struggles other refugees have been through, having experienced similar things themselves. On the other hand, however, they have ended up working in the humanitarian sector when they actually need humanitarian support.

    This is one of the topics covered in the documentary. Another issue, is the kind of social and legal challenges humanitarian workers are facing here. It’s about the authorities. The role of the police force and the army in regards to upholding the right of media coverage.

    The documentary is set with the island of Lesvos, and its capital Myteline, in the background. But the documentary centres on the stories that happen inside the camp, stories that happens outside of the camp, and the reasons and motivations for those asylum seekers coming to Greece. And as well, we have a really interesting part of the documentary that examines the pushback happening here in the Aegean Sea, which divides Turkey and Greece.

    We have a lawyer who’s been working around issues related to pushbacks for the last five years. We also have a German journalist who’s been covering all the pushbacks as well for the last three years. Obviously, the situation in Lesbos is so dynamic and things are changing rapidly. It’s been really challenging for me to keep up with this story. Things have moved so fast, and that’s maybe the reason I’m still here, and will stay a little bit longer, because these are stories that are developing.

    The dynamics in the camps are changing, which is new. They call this the new camp, which is where they’re trying to reduce the number of asylum seekers. Since the fire that happened last year, the government promised to build a new camp. But this never happened, basically because the local community are against new camps in the area. As a result, the temporary camps have become the de facto new camp.

    DI: So your documentary also tackles the relationship between the refugee camps and the local community?

    FL: Yes. I spoke with locals. Some are understanding of the necessity for a new camp. With that said, whether there is a new one or not, there are still 3,000 migrants on the island awaiting resolution of their cases. – building a new camp won’t solve the problem. they need to be processed

    Obviously, the freedom of these people is highly restricted.

    In the end, everything goes back to the camp. It isn’t a liveable reality. There are no schools in the camp and there’s only precarious legal and medical support.

    Last week, a woman passed away inside of the camp, for example. This is the reality that is happening in Lesvos. And everybody expects another massive wave of asylum seekers coming to Greece due to the situation in Afghanistan. Less and less will reach the Greek shore, however, because of the increased activity of the Greek coastguard and the European Frontex.

    Demonstration in support to Afghanistan.

    DI: Why should the general public support the making of this documentary?

    FL: It’s an overview of a situation that’s happening in Europe; it’s happening in Greece, through Greek laws, through the Greek system. But there are comparable problems in terms of the pushback between Bosnia and Croatia. The same thing is happening between Belarus and Poland. The same thing is happening in the Mediterranean Sea, between Libya and Italy, in Libya itself, and in Spain.

    This documentary shows that there is still a massive flood of refugees coming to Europe and obviously the policies in place are not facilitating those asylum seekers to claim asylum in Greece. This documentary is set in Lesvos, but it records something that is happening throughout Europe’s borders.

    People keep using this term a ‘refugee crisis’. This is a mistake. More than a refugee crisis, there is a policy crisis.

    What we’re witnessing is a series of legal decisions that are impacting the lives of those who are exercising a right to apply for asylum in Europe. These people are not criminals. The Geneva Convention guarantees them a right to apply for asylum. But this right is not being upheld properly. People are waiting one, two, three, or even over five years to have their claims processed.

    Interview edited for brevity and clarity by Ben Pantrey.

  • In the Blink of an Eye

    In the blink of an eye everything can change in the way we live our lives. How do we manage to live, socialise and maintain public health?

    A recent article by Jennifer O’Connell ‘We are world experts at anomalies and blind eyes’ led me to recall how turning a blind eye brought incarceration of pregnant women in laundries and to others living out their lives in psychiatric institutions. But also, that the default creative solution taken by those who do not have the luxury of access, or the means, to survive and thrive within rules laid down by those who do, is to selectively blinker themselves to such rules. And how turning a blind eye to such anomalies is a usually unacknowledged aspect of the way a tate functions.

    A Belgian psychiatrist, speaking from the floor at one of the meetings called to form the European Association for Psychotherapy, proposed ‘an ability to deal with ambiguity’ as a definition for mental health.

    Jagged Lines       

    In a time of extreme change, such as that witnessed during the pandemic, and which climate change may well produce, we may have to live with increasing contradictions.

    I remember attending a talk given by the late Virginia Satir in Dundrum in Dublin. Satir was one of the earliest family therapists in the United States, focussed on bringing about system change through communication.

    She drew a jagged trajectory from one straight line to another. The jagged part indicated the chaos experienced as a system, or family, moves from stasis through change.

    As I was pregnant with my first child at the time, it was helpful to recall the jagged line as I struggled to change nappies, deal with nappy rash after soaking the cloth ones in buckets and washing them (we aspired to mind the planet in the 1980s too), before surrendering to the absorbent benefits of paper while, getting by on less sleep than I’d ever managed.

    “The first weeks of parenthood are chaotic,” a thoughtful friend rang me to say. ”It will be a lot better in six weeks’ time.”

    The jagged line has been a handy reminder in later periods of change and adjustment too, not least during lockdowns and when getting used to wearing a mask.

    Catch 22

    Pain-inducing contradictions can arise. This may lead either to a psychological pathology or, by way of rising above it, creative solutions.

    A subject explored in essays by Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Paladin, 1973) in which he critiques previous work from his Palo Alto team proposing the Double Bind theory.

    The double bind is a situation requiring the subject – in a relationship which cannot be escaped from – to choose between alternatives in which they will be wrong-footed either way. In other words, they experience themselves living in a continuing Catch 22.

    Mount Fuji

    ‘Benefits of Inconvenience’

    A recent interview on the Design Talks Plus programme from NNK Japan television offers encouragement. In what may be a turning from the belief that technical progress is always to our advantage, Professor Kawakami Hiroshi of Kyoto University of Advanced Science has spent a decade researching what he calls ‘the benefits of inconvenience’. He argues for less convenience and that the effort required to make sense of the world, while facing challenges, may contribute to a better sense of meaningfulness and wellbeing.

    Hiroshi cites a return to the use of rough earth in children’s playgrounds (balance challenging) and finding the way on foot around a city without satnav – ensuring the need to pay attention to surroundings – as examples. To emphasise his point he began by asking: ‘If you were climbing Mt. Fuji would you want an escalator’?

    The inconvenience in rising to the challenge of struggling with contradictions in rules for living with Covid 19 (and our recent further re-opening of opportunities to socialise) could be seen as an opportunity.

    Maybe the rewards will offset the difficulties. Providing, that is, those struggling are not punished for choices that, either way, will put them in the wrong.

    If restrictions spawn imaginative solutions, in line with the spirit of preventing the spread of variants of Covid-19, crucially, formulated in ways appropriate to particular local situations, then the sense of satisfaction might end up enhancing a sense of well-being

    Unlikely? Maybe. But maybe not. These regularly madden me but, and as Jennifer O’Connell indicated in her article, they are the kind of ‘Irish solutions’  we might be said to excel at.

    Mark Zuckerberg at the Congressional Hearing

    Where to Look

    I was relieved – hope restored –  hearing Roger McNamee, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s early mentors and author of Zucked (UK Harper Collins,2019), on the RTE radio morning news bulletin on October 29th 2021 saying that the Facebooker owner’s launch of Meta, his new holding company, is his way of distracting the world from Frances Haugen’s account. The Facebook whistleblower revealed to the U.S. Congress and a UK Select Committee in the last couple of weeks the ways Zuckerman prioritizes profits over safety. McNamee thought it was also aimed at saving Zuckerman from being held to account.

    What’s hopeful about that? Only that Roger McNamee spoke out and RTE radio reported what he had to say. In the same week I was fuming about an article in the Business Post (Oct, 24th) by Dan O’Brien ‘Covid 19 has brought out the inner catastrophist in our national psyche’.

    I forced myself to complete it several days after I had put it to one side. I wanted to be able to respond to it, but also to offer him at least the courtesy of considering what he had to say, especially given he has had to listen to that he clearly has found difficult in the national conversation.

    I had no argument with the generally accepted facts outlined. However, his omission of the crucial fact that the Irish health system has been more inclined towards collapse than the other European countries he mentions bothered me. That, alongside his use of adjectives, indicated a bias I saw as otherwise unacknowledged. Although mention of his Brazilian wife did offer clues.

    Photo by Daniele Idini.

    Catastrophising

    What most annoyed me was that Dan O’Brien wrote of Irish ‘catastrophising’ conversations. Longer lockdowns here contrasted with the reactions of Italy or Brazil. His hypothesis is that this might be due to their twentieth century experiences of living with war.

    How ought we best manage the fears evoked by a threat? Our bodies are wired for fight or flight. The extreme version of flight is denial, ignoring of facts that we cannot face.

    It can allow us to hide from reality or feel unrealistically invincible in our fighting. Maybe that’s what is needed in wars. In contradiction to O’Brien’s argument, the truth generally is that the more traumatised we are the more likely we may be to use these defences.

    Of course, we need psychological defences that enable us continue to cope during difficult times. Talking about our difficulties and continuing to take the difficult decisions, to find the least bad solutions that we can manage to act on, is usually considered the healthiest way of managing.

    We need to put on blinkers at times and to remain focused on the direction required. But blinding ourselves entirely to the traffic – the many difficulties and demands of the times we live in – can only lead to more of the same.

    In Addition

    We are drawn to solutions that best serve our own interests. Financial Times journalist, Tim Harmon’s book How to Make the World Add Up (2021) reveals research showing that we are more likely to make decisions based on the attitudes of the groups with which we identify than with scientifically proven facts, and that this has also been shown to be true of scientists themselves.

    We want to remain part of our group or tribe. This is research worth taking into account with regard to vaccine take up and hesitancy. Maybe it is important to acknowledge that Dan O’Brien is interested in economics and business and that my background, which also began with a social science perspective, has been a thirty-year career in psychotherapy before I turned to writing. We may have different loyalties affecting our perspectives.

    A quick re-read of what Tim Harford had to say about our use of statistics led me to his first rule for evaluating their use: ‘What are you feeling?’

    He goes on to suggest that looking at how those feelings might be influencing your use of figures can be the best way to ensure accuracy, and the avoidance of spreading ‘false news’.

    I asked myself about the anger fuelling the fingers on my keyboard. I realised it was driven by fear. My own catastrophising of how O’Brien’s article might undermine the national effort. My fear that Covid numbers are rising. I don’t want another lockdown.

    However accurate or questionable O’Brien’s hypothesis, he has given me a timely reminder about rushing to the page. Writing can be a way of working things out. Emotion may fuel effort, but it had better be interrogated to discover what it is really saying if the greater truth is to be served.

    The need to keep financially afloat and the need to save as many lives as possible can be at odds, nor are they unrelated. Funds are necessary.

    Basic services, food and shelter are as essential and contribute as much to public health as other considerations, and have to be paid for. The challenge is to engage with, and work to rise above, fear and strive to find the least damaging solutions. We are left to wonder how we decide what is best amidst the confusion during  times of change.

    Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

    Politics of Distraction

    What do Trump, Zuckerman and Johnson have in common? They are masters, albeit not alone, in offering distraction, a form of click-bait news that feeds  a greed for sensation that briefly satisfy but cannot ultimately sate humanity.

    The distraction makes us look away from what is really at hand and makes us focus instead on what we prefer.

    ‘Get Brexit done’ for Johnson. In Trump’s case, spreading so much false news that there is no longer any focus on the truth, or otherwise, in his own assertions. Listeners are led to believe all news is untrustworthy and that he alone should be listened to and receive votes.

    And, then there is the  promise of a future, technologically ‘advanced’ virtual world – with new toys – in the case of Mark Zuckerman. This is leads to a temptation to avoid looking too closely at the degree of control he has, and the damage that control has done.

    Commentators other than Roger McNamee acknowledge that Zuckerman’s plans for his venture were long in the making, and point to the direction he would like to go in future while trying to re-engage a younger demographic, but the timing of the announcement means that Roges McNamee is making sense.

    Eye on the Ball

    There will be many anomalies, distractions and frightening challenges to confront as we endeavour to live with the pandemic, while keeping our eyes open to the threat of the Earth becoming uninhabitable, at least for humans.

    We’ll need to recall Satir’s jagged line between the two straight ones that each indicated more settled times. Sometimes a withering eye may be needed and sometimes we will need to challenge ourselves to recognise our prejudices and look again, turn ourselves away from simplistic blame and less urgent conflicts, save our energy for the war by being willing to lose relatively insignificant battles.

    There will also be occasions when turning a blind eye will be compassionate and politically essential and others again when we just need to manage to turn off the news and blind ourselves to what is going on around us for our own sanity. Hopefully we will also find the fortitude in time to turn again to face what needs to be faced and take the right actions within our ambit of control.

    Featured Image: The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

  • Interview: Father Peter McVerry

    Father Peter McVerry has been working with homeless people for over forty years. When he started there were about a thousand homeless in Ireland. Now, there are officially about eight thousand, with many others unofficially so. Last week, Daniele Idini caught up with the legendary social justice campaigner.

    Daniele Idini (DI): You have seen different types of crises related to housing in Ireland, but what are the constants?

    Fr McVerry (McV): What has been constant over the forty years is the attitude of decision makers to those who are homeless. When I started, the big issue was fourteen and fifteen year old kids living on the streets. When I opened my first hostel for those kids, the attitude was that these kids who kept running away from home were bad kids, and the solution was to call the police, pick them up and bring them back home again. The idea that there was huge abuse and violence and neglect hadn’t registered yet. So, the attitude was that we shouldn’t be reaching out and helping these kids. They’re just bad kids. Then the problem shifted to young adults with drug problems and again – the same attitude. Well, these are people that started using drugs. It was their fault. So, we shouldn’t really have too much sympathy for them. Then the issue became homeless families, and again, there’s a stigma attached to being homeless, and that stigma is accepted by some decision makers. What has been constant is this negative stigma that is attached to homeless people, and affects some decision makers’ thinking.

    DI: Where do you think this stigma comes from?

    McV: It permeates the whole of society. The only homeless people who are visible are the ones who are sleeping on the street and begging, and who generally do have a drug problem. This leads to a perception among the public that homeless people must have a problem, and that’s why they’re homeless. But the vast majority of homeless people don’t have a drink or a drug problem. The vast majority becoming homeless today are being evicted from the private rented sector, either because they can’t pay the rents, or because the landlord says they’re selling the flat.

    DI: Can we draw a connection between this and the economic policies that have been implemented in the last few decades?

    McV: Well, at an immediate level, when families become homeless, having been evicted from the private rented sector, there is no social housing to move into. In 1975, this country built 8,500 council houses. In 1985, and we were in a recession in the 80s, we still built 6,900 council houses. By contrast, in 2015 this country built seventy-five council houses. So the immediate effect is that there is no housing for those families to move into. They have only got one problem and it’s not drugs and it’s not drink. They don’t have enough money to be able to go out and afford alternative accommodation. 

    Now, why did that happen? It happened because of an ideology. The ideology that the private sector is supposed to solve all our problems. And so, low income families were pushed into the private rented sector, which no longer can cope. But it was that ideology. We’ve privatized everything. We’ve privatized childcare, and that’s in a bit of a mess at the moment. We’ve privatized care for the elderly. Most private nursing homes are privately run. We have privatized much of the health system and now we have privatized the housing system and it simply doesn’t work.

    The private market might build lots and lots and lots of houses, but only for people who can afford them. They’re in the business of making a profit. They’re not going to build housing for low income families. And so it’s the State that has to do that. The State has been very reluctant, over the last twenty years or so, to invest in social housing, and therefore they’re pushed people into the private rented sector. That wouldn’t be too bad, if we didn’t have a crisis in the private market where there aren’t even enough houses for people who can afford to buy them. It is estimated that we need between thirty-five and fifty thousand new houses every year just to keep up with the increase in population. Yet we’re only building in the region of twenty to twenty-five thousand. So there are lots of people who could buy a house, but can’t find a house to buy, and they’re being pushed into the private rented sector. So, everybody is being pushed into the private rented sector, and it can’t cope. Rents are going through the roof.

    DI: In Ireland, we still have relatively high home-ownership, but, especially after the crisis, there’s a rush into the new model of renting for life. This is a bit of a paradox, however, in terms of a neoliberal ideology which aims at protecting the right to private property; yet, in Ireland, owning private property has become out of reach for a significant percentage of the population. 

    McV: Absolutely, yes. So over the last twenty years, the State has failed in its responsibility to build social housing, pushing people into the private rented sector. They had to create a culture for that to happen. The State did two things. First of all, it looked at the continent. It looked at the rest of Europe and said: Well, most people rent. So, any progressive democracy and an economy which is growing must have a lot more people renting. The mistake there is that the rental market in the rest of Europe is totally different from the rental market in Ireland. Most rental markets in Europe are highly regulated: prices and rents are controlled, and you can become a lifelong tenant. Here, you can’t. You get a tenancy for maybe twelve months, or at most four or five years. You’re living with high insecurity, and the rents are increasingly way beyond your means. It’s a totally different rental market to the rest of Europe. But if you read the last government’s housing strategy, there is so much ideology in it trying to persuade us that the rental market is the way we have to go. The rental market has all of these advantages, and it is the only way for a progressive economy to go.

    DI: According to a recent Irish time article Ireland has the 10th highest rate of vacant homes in the world, with 183,312 homes classified as vacant. We have a society that does not regard it’s housing stock as a basic national infrastructure like ports, rail network, airports or the electricity grid.  

    How might the public become more aware of the benefits of a more distributed housing stock?

    McV: Well, I think the public are well aware of the empty homes that exist in every town and village. Ireland is blighted by empty properties lying derelict, often being used for antisocial or drug using young people. But there is very little political will to go after those properties. There is a lot of work involved in trying to identify the owners of some of those properties and trying to sort out any legal problems that may exist with relation to that. But we ought to be promoting compulsory purchase orders on properties that are left idle for longer than one or two years. It is a scandal. 1830,000, you mentioned. One of the issues was the Fair Deal Scheme, where if you go into a nursing home, the value of your home will be taken by the State when you die. Eighty percent of the value of your home will be taken by the State when you die to pay for your care in the nursing home. That meant that people in nursing homes couldn’t rent out the empty house they had been living in, even though they’re never going to go back to it.

    They can’t rent it out because most of the rent would be simply taken up by the nursing home to pay for their care. So, you had empty houses there that couldn’t be used. You had empty houses where we couldn’t find out who the owner was. 

    The government did make a couple of schemes such as a Repair and Leasing Scheme where the owner can benefit from a grant of, I think it’s now €60,000 to bring the empty building back into use and then lease it to the State for a period of up to twenty years. And there was a Buy and Renew Scheme where the State could buy the property and then repair it. But there was very little uptake of those two schemes. So yeah the amount of empty properties is a scandal.

    DI: What other measures would you suggest should be put in place to deal with the situation?

    McV: There are two problems at the moment. One is housing those people who are waiting for social housing. There’s an even more urgent problem, and that is preventing more and more people from coming into homelessness and needing housing. That’s the more urgent problem, and that can be solved overnight. 

    During the pandemic, there was a ban on evictions and there was a ban on a rent increase and the number of homeless people and families dropped by almost two thousand. We should extend that to a ban on rent increases and a ban on evictions for at least three years in order to try and get a grip on the problem. The counterargument will be that it’s against the right to private property. But I don’t buy that argument. I don’t think the Supreme Court would uphold that argument.

    So the solution involves passing a law banning evictions and rent increases and sending it to the President to sign. The President can send it to the Supreme Court and fast track a decision. Let’s do that. Let’s find out if it’s against the Constitution. If it is, you bring in a constitutional referendum on the right to housing and make that right at least place level with the right to private property, because every argument we present to try and address the housing-homeless crisis comes up against the argument that it is against the right to private property in the Constitution. Now, that right to private property was established in the 1930s at a time when Communism was expanding around the globe. And one of the tenets of communism was that you could not own private property. So, the idea behind it was to prevent Ireland ever having a Communist government. But now it’s being used to prevent Irish people getting their own home, which is absolutely absurd.

    DI: Isn’t it a paradox that a good percentage of the population does not have access to private property because we have to defend the right to private property?

    McV: Yeah, it is a total paradox. The Catholic Church, for example, supports the right to private property, but what is meant by that is that everybody should have access to private property because that’s our little security. That’s their little fallback if things go wrong. But the right to private property has been hijacked by the wealthy to hold on to what they have already acquired. And that was never, never the intention, certainly of the Catholic Church in supporting private property.

    DI: Is there space here for a discussion of morality? Is it morally right to continue pursuing economic policies which, as experience is showing, are causing unnecessary pain and suffering to a growing percentage of the population? How do indicators such as GDP relate to the percentage of homelessness? 

    McV: Firstly, GDP is a very ineffective criterion for the wealth of a country. Every time there’s a car accident, the GDP goes up because the cost of repairing the car and the cost of treating the victims all adds to GDP. And the more serious the car accident, the further GDP goes up. So, GDP is not a reflection of the wellbeing of a society. We can never agree on what is moral. If you own a big house in a nice area with a nice car what is moral is your right to protect those assets. But if you’re homeless on the street, your concept of morality is going to be very, very different. So, I don’t think we’ll ever agree on what is moral. This is a political question. This only way it is going to be solved is politically. We have to ask the question: who benefits from rising rents and rising house prices? The answer is three groups.

    One, the banks. The banks benefit because as house prices go up, they can lend more and more money out as mortgages and make more profit. And if they repossess a house, they will get more money for that house. They have an interest in a house and rent goes up. 

    Second, the big international investment funds. They also have an interest in rents going up. And indeed, many of them are leaving some of their properties empty rather than reducing the rents to what people can afford. 

    Third, the Landlords.

    But who doesn’t benefit? Almost all Irish people don’t benefit from rising house prices and rising rents. For most people it is a huge disadvantage. 

    The second question we have to ask is which side is the government on? The government is on the side of the banks, the big international investment funds, which they attracted in with extraordinary tax concessions, and it’s on the side of landlords. 

    In one episode Simon Coveney brought in a rent cap of four percent. Where did that four percent come from? Simon Coveney wanted to bring in a rent cap in line with inflation, which was hovering around zero at that time. The big international investment funds held a number of meetings with the Minister for Finance and told him that four percent was the minimum they would accept if he wanted them to continue being involved in this country. 

    So four percent it was, and since then the rents have gone up far more than that. In those five years, the rents have potentially gone up by twenty percent. At the same time the HAP payment which you received from the government if you’re on a low income hasn’t gone up in those five years. So now the rents are on average twenty percent higher than they were when the payment was introduced, and lots of people are having to pay top ups to the landlords. Anything between €125 and €200 is what I’m coming across. And you have a single person on social welfare who’s getting €204 or €205 a week, and they have one week in a month where they have to pay €200 to a landlord as a top up because the HAP payment hasn’t increased sufficiently. 

    People on low incomes are just being screwed, screwed by landlords, screwed by investment funds, screwed by banks, and the government is on their side, not on the side of renters or people paying a mortgage who are struggling to try and keep their heads above the water.

    DI: The inability of successive governments in dealing with this issue is more and more being perceived by the public as the result of either State corruption or pure negligence. 

    McV: I wouldn’t call it either of those. We have had conservative governments. Conservative governments are on the side of those who own capital because it’s the capital that develops the economy. So they’re on the side of capital, of the capital owners, which are the banks, and the large investment funds. And they don’t want to do anything which would frighten any of those away, anything which would make Ireland a less attractive place for them to operate. So I think there’s a conservative mindset which I totally disagree with. It’s not a mindset I would put down to malice or corruption or anything like that. I would put it down to what I would consider a very, very mistaken perspective on what’s happening in the country.

    For example, in Germany they have passed a rent freeze for the next five years on rental properties, and in Berlin, they introduced a referendum to take back from the big international investment funds all the apartments and buildings that they had built. Now, it probably won’t pass, but that’s the sort of thinking we need to do. That sort of thinking is totally absent in Ireland.

    The people who make the decisions here are doing very well. They’re on good salaries. They live in nice houses and nice parts of the town. Their children are going to third level education and in a few years time they’ll live in a nice house in a nice part of town. So they have a different perspective from somebody who’s struggling to pay the rent. They don’t understand somebody who is struggling to pay the rent. They say they do, but they don’t. For them the housing problem the problem of people on low incomes struggling to pay rents and mortgages. That’s a problem in a file on their desk. It’s not a personal problem for them, and it’s not a problem anybody they know is facing. 

    So for them it’s more theoretical. For me it’s real. It’s real because I’m meeting them every day and I’m frustrated and I’m angry. I want to see somebody with a passion for dealing with this. I want to see a decision maker who has a passion for dealing with this, who’s angry about what’s happening and who’s prepared to put their neck on the line. That’s what I want to see. I don’t see it at the moment.

    DI: And as we are coming slowly out of a pandemic, what lessons can be drawn in regard to emergency accommodation and homelessness? 

    McV: The pandemic actually had one positive feature for homeless people. They were able to get accommodation because a lot of Airbnbs came back into use as private residential accommodation. And because there was a pandemic, you didn’t have queues of people outside wanting to view them. So landlords were ringing us and saying, You have anybody that needs a place? And they knew we wouldn’t put in somebody who was going to wreck the place. They knew we would support that person. And if difficulties arose, we’d have to step in. So it was a Win-Win for everybody. 

    Now is the time to regulate and demand that Airbnb’s get planning permission and to regulate, inspect and ensure that those planning permission and regulations are enforced. That would bring a lot of Airbnb’s back into private residential properties and would be a big addition in helping the housing crisis. It could be a condition that anybody who wants to advertise their property on one of the sites, like Airbnb, must produce evidence of planning permission. That would get rid of a lot of Airbnbs and bring them back into residential use.

    DI: With tourism opening up again have you noticed any effects on homeless people, who were housed in hotels and hostels during the pandemic, and are now, again having to rely on shelters?

    McV: That’s already happening. The lease is now up on a number of hotels that were taken over as accommodation for homeless people, and they have been returned to the owners to be used as hotels. And it’s a real pity because homeless people love the hotels. You have your own en suite room. And now some of them are getting thrown back into hostile situations, and it’s very depressing for them. So yes, that was a feature of the pandemic that’s now disappearing. And it won’t come back.

    One option is to buy those hotels, buy them back, buy them from the owners and use them as accommodation for families and that, but that’s very expensive. They’re not going to do that. 

    One of my ideas for homeless hostels is that everybody should have their own room. Homeless hostels are often unsafe. Many people get assaulted. People’s belongings get robbed. I’m arguing that every homeless person should have their own room all the time that provides security and safety for their belongings. 

    That’s expensive, and they’re not going to do it. It’s much cheaper to get a house and put four people into a room with bunk beds than to provide four separate spaces for homeless people. So, they’re not going to invest the money in that. But to my mind, what we offer to homeless people sends a message to them, and the message is, this is how society values you. This is what society thinks you’re worth. So when you cram them into rooms and bunk beds, some rooms without even a window in it, they’re getting the message. And that message is very negative. But that is the message that many of our decision makers don’t mind giving to homeless people because that’s the attitude that they’re coming from. This is good enough for them. I heard one person ringing up the free phone number to try and get a bed for the night, and he was offered a bed in a hostel. And he said, I can’t go to that hostel. It’s full of drugs. I don’t use drugs. And the answer I overheard was “beggars can’t be choosers.” And that’s the attitude I think that many people have towards homeless people.

    It is an attitude that has political ramifications. Why else would we have reduced our building of social housing? Whenever the state tries to build social housing, you’re going to have huge objections from all the neighbours. And the local councillors who have to approve of social housing in that area are looking to the next election. And if they are alienating the people in the area where the social housing is going to be built, they are not going to approve that social housing for fear that they will lose out in the next election. So, we have this attitude that anybody in social housing is undesirable. Anybody in social housing is a problem, has a problem and therefore we don’t want to be anywhere near them. And the political system has to go along with that because of our democracy.

    With editorial from Ben Pantrey.

    Featured Image by Gareth Curtis