Cassandra Voices

Category: Politics

  • How Irish Propaganda Operates

    THE LONG READ: Ireland is neither a totalitarian state, nor even a dictatorship. Nonetheless, the propaganda of an economic elite has forged a dominant consensus, in which two centre-right parties compete for power. Across a print media duopoly and national broadcaster well-honed techniques of social control divert attention and sow confusion, while subtly instilling dogmas. The education system also plays a vital role in propagating social norms and channelling aspirations. The dominant consensus is not doctrinally extreme or even illiberal, at least by international comparisons, but it insulates embedded wealth in the form of land and property from taxation, stimulates demand for mortgages among the young, and protects the farming sector from environmental oversight.

    I – We have ways of making you think…

    As Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels had one major difficulty: a taste for dark-haired beauties. His marriage to the perfectly-Aryan-looking Magda (with whom he would later ‘loyally’ commit suicide inside Hitler’s bunker in 1945, after they first murdered all six of their sleeping children) became a sham. Poor Josef could not help taking advantage of the brunette actresses over whom his role effectively gave dominion, controlling movie sets that were a Harvey Weinstein paradise. In particular, Goebbels conceived a passion for a Czech – untermensch – beauty Lída Baarová, which almost drove him to end the marriage in 1938. Hitler himself intervened demanding his propaganda chief remain with his wife and children. The mask concealing the hypocrisy could not be allowed to slip.

    Despite occasional differences of opinion, Hitler realised that Goebbels was crucial to the smooth functioning of the Third Reich. While Leni Riefenstahl delivered innovative blockbuster effects, Goebbels genius lay in delivering subtle cues, released under a comfort blanket of light entertainment. Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not even care to see der Fuhrer appear in cinema news reels. In a totalitarian society a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics.

    He had immersed himself in the golden era of the silver screen, expressing particular fondness for the 1937 Disney classic ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Overtly political films were not only useless but also counterproductive he believed. The depravity of ‘the Jew’ should be integrated into pictures which carried an audience along, such as the lively 1940 ‘historical’ drama Jud Süss, ‘Jew Suss’. This contrasted with the heavy-handed style of Der Ewige Jude (1940) ‘the Eternal Jew’, directed by Fritz Hippler that depicted Jews alongside rats inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Goebbels correctly predicted this would bomb in the box office.[i]

    Light entertainment diverts, as does outright nonsense, which George Orwell referred to as ‘Duckspeak’ in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. Its effect is to lower the intellectual level of conversation, spread confusion and allow the speaker to evade responsibility: a tactic increasingly familiar in our era of ‘post truth’. In the novel the official language of Oceania is overtly-propagandist Newspeak, but Duckspeak’s capacity to accommodate contradictions, even midway through a sentence, was much valued by the ruling regime.

    There are societies such as North Korea’s, or previously Mao’s China when children informed on their parents, where freedom of expression is almost completely eradicated and replaced with Newspeak – and probably Duckspeak – to such an extent that individuality is effectively extinguished. One result is a severe lack of economic dynamism. Market economies, however, require freethinking innovators in order to thrive; a small resistance movement even survived in Nazi Germany because Newspeak had not entirely permeated that society. ‘Hard’ propaganda – or Newspeak – is thus only of limited value. Instead, the ‘soft’ propaganda of light entertainment and, increasingly, Duckspeak – including the obfuscation by politicians who ‘duck out’ of answering questions – is more generally deployed to support indispensable fictions in liberal democracies – like the canard of opportunity-for-all. Moreover, even in democratic societies educational filters screen for obedience.

    Variants of these influences can be identified in Ireland, where great wealth subsists alongside grinding, long-term poverty. Irish society is generally tolerant, but growing inequality is unraveling the social fabric, and creates conditions for the scapegoating of minorities.

    II – Ireland’s Two-Party System

    Foreign multinationals are a transient presences on the Irish scene. Their indigenous handlers, an aging cohort of predominantly male, property-owning, car-driving, privately schooled, health-insured professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors, financial service providers and other high-earning business people – are the enduring economic elite of the state. Its dominant consensus does not emerge from smoke-filled rooms any longer. Rather, it is an aggregate conception of what a ‘normal’, self-interested person of this class aspires to. Indeed, those upholding what is a neo-liberal orthodoxy may be unaware – like Ebenezer Scrooge – of its detrimental effect. What is an often passive propaganda is expressed through a media dependent on advertising revenue, and in the policies of the two largest political parties.

    A recent poll showed seventy percent of the highest (AB) social class support one or other of the two main centre-right political parties, in particular Fine Gael (Irish Times MRBI poll, October 16th, 2018), now the ‘natural party of government’ for the dominant interest.

    The ‘bricks and mortar’ of property remains, overwhelmingly, their preferred asset, with many acting as landlords. Thus, according to economist David McWilliams the wealthiest top five-percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. The key objective of Irish propaganda, and we may call it that, is therefore to keep the economy on an even keel of steady growth, and rising rents, while ensuring that wealth, mostly property, is subjected to minimal taxation. The result is that in the last financial year a mere €500 million out of total tax receipts of over €50 billion, derived from land or property.[ii]

    The dominant consensus also insists that it is necessary to keep a lid on government expenditure on public services (most of which the elite does not use), so as to avoid the over-heating of Bertie Ahern’s ‘boomenomics’  before the crash of 2008. Then low taxation on income and wealth went hand-in-hand with spending increases, and public sector salary ‘benchmarking’ with the private sector. The ineptitude of these policies were partly to blame for a property bubble before the crash of 2008, and has consigned Fianna Fáil to its present subaltern role, in which it now flaunts a more centrist approach.

    In a clear signal to the economic elite, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan launched his Budget 2016 claiming the days of ‘boom and bust’ would be consigned to the history books.[iii] Throughout his tenure (2011-2017) no serious public housing initiatives were embarked on. In 2015, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[iv] The ensuing scarcity ensured a dramatic recovery in property prices, including that held by the state bank NAMA.

    Another salient feature of Irish propaganda is the essential delivery of buy-in from young adults, who continue to purchase property at inflated prices. Prior to the crash Dublin prices soared to such an extent that a residence in the city became more expensive than New York or London.[v] Dublin prices are set to reach boom-time levels this year according to Pat Davitt, head of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV), with an average family home costing over half a million euros.[vi] Meanwhile average Dublin rents now exceed the heights of the Celtic Tiger by thirty percent. This means those landholders, and institutions, that weathered the recession have seen huge dividends.

    Source daft.ie

    Any new property purchaser instantly becomes a stakeholder in the dominant consensus. The buy-in of upwardly-mobile youth not only maintains market demand, but also brings political support for the dominant consensus. Political parties threatening the ‘stability’ under the centre-right axis are subtly undermined as the ‘loony’ left and not given a platform in the mainstream media, or co-opted into governing coalitions and discredited, as was the case with Labour, the Greens and now the Independent Alliance.

    Importantly, up to fifteen percent of the population are foreign-born nationals. Apart from UK nationals, they do not enjoy a right to vote in general elections, unless they take out Irish citizenship, costing almost one thousand euro. Unlike native-born Irish, who historically had among the highest rate of private home ownership in the world, peaking at 80% in 1991, (declining to 71% in 2011),[vii] many come from countries where renting for life is the norm, and may not wish to reside here long-term. Politically, this large cohort only exerts influence via multinational employers, who face demands for wage increases due to spiralling rents. At the bottom of the ladder are unskilled (or at least unqualified) non-EU migrants – gastarbeiter – many of whom are on short-term- (often student-) visas, and permitted to remain in the country only insofar as they serve an economic purpose.

    III – The Crucial Constituency

    The elite’s longstanding hold on power, via the two main political parties, relies on a crucial constituency of farmers and their extended families, who are evenly distributed throughout the state, apart from Dublin. Although continually declining in number, they are overwhelmingly native Irish – thus enfranchised – vociferous campaigners, and of a vintage that tends to vote. This ensures their supposed interests, more accurately those of comprador multinationals that trade their commodities, are protected by Irish propaganda.

    A remarkable eighty-percent of farmers, working on almost eighty-five thousand separate farms, support either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil according to the aforementioned poll. The former are especially reliant on their allegiance, which means the national (and global) interest in reducing GHG emissions in order to avoid up to €600 million every year in EU fines after 2020 may be overlooked.[viii] Agriculture produces almost a third of total national emissions, yet contributes a mere 1.7% of carbon taxes.[ix] The farming sector is, however, an increasingly fragile alliance, with the average annual income on dairy farms approximately €85,000, but averaging only €15,000 on the average dry cattle (beef) farm, all of which, derives from subsidies.[x]

    An urban working class of unskilled, semi-skilled and unemployed, has been mollified by comparatively generous social welfare payments, but is increasingly impoverished by the scarcity and cost of property, rising rents, and a failing system of public health. Eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds are discriminated against by lower social welfare payments, but tend not to turn out for elections, and are inclined to emigrate, so can easily be ignored.

    Preserving a share of working class support remains important, in terms of optics at least, for the two main political parties, especially Fianna Fáil, which preserves the charade of being a party for all classes. Unlike farmers, however, historically a working class consciousness has not been evident in Ireland, and approaches to the national question and moral or religious concerns have tended to sway this cohort. Also, while farmers have clear objectives in terms of maintaining a subsidy regime, and avoiding environmental regulation, the working class is more easily distracted from establishing fixed political aspirations.

    The widespread protests over water charges in 2014 were one of the few occasions when the dam broke, and working class discontents spilled onto the streets. But this single issue could be conceded, and sustained engagement with politics avoided. Yet, according to Social Justice Ireland, last year 790,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 250,000 were children.[xi]

    Similar to farmers, most civil service workers, including senior teachers, have been kept on side with generous pay and conditions. Teaching salaries averaging over $60,000 per year compare favourably with other OECD countries. As with the social welfare system, new entrants have been discriminated against, with many being forced to emigrate during the crash, but they count for less politically than their senior colleagues. The current modus vivendi between the teaching unions and the ruling parties is reflected in the terminal decline of the Labour Party, their traditional voice in the Dáil.

    The new Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, recently described secondary teachers as being overburdened by ‘initiative overload’[xii], which might come as a surprise considering they enjoy more than sixteen weeks of holidays per year, and curricula that have changed little in decades. Secondary school teachers play an important role in upholding the dominant consensus.

    The spiral of inequality, globally and nationally is, however, accelerating, and the coalition of interests maintaining the dominant consensus is unstable. Multinationals siphon off vast profits from a market one Tesco executive allegedly referred to as ‘Treasure Island’, with consumer prices, on average, twelve percent higher than in the UK,[xiii] while some avoid corporation taxes altogether. Meanwhile the state labours under a debt of over €200 billion after a bailout the terms of which (including the creation of NAMA) protected the interests of those members of the economic elite that did not speculate wildly prior to the crash – such as former solicitor Brian O’Donnell who was evicted from his Dalkey home in 2015 –  while working to the detriment the poor, and the impressionable young who had been encouraged to take out crippling mortgages.

    The Irish economy is vulnerable to global financial shocks – with just fifty large firms accounting for three-quarters of all exports[xiv] – a recrudescence of nationalism after Brexit, and the growing obsolescence of many forms of work, including our current farming model. The economic elite is intellectually rudderless, and only knows the way of economic growth-without-end, where ecological constraints are ignored, and in which the retail cartels make a mockery of the notion of a free market. The centre-right cannot hold for long, but in the meantime, the wheels of Irish propaganda keep turning.

    IV – The Propaganda Model – Education

    State secondary school pupils are encouraged to take subjects that will prepare them for work in multinational corporations, with an emphasis on science and technology, rather than arts, humanities or social sciences. Philosophy is unavailable as a secondary school subject, while history has been downgraded in recent years.

    In the state school system, which I observed as a supply teacher, rebellious students are removed from obedient peers and housed en bloc in ‘pass’ classes, or entire schools, which are little more than advanced creches, or holding facilities. There behaviours and performances deteriorate in the absence of positive role models. Ill-equipped for work or even social life, the dole queue awaits, or worse. Importantly, this underclass is unable to articulate their grievances – one in six of the adult population is functionally illiterate.[xv]

    The essential breeding ground of the economic elite is found in the paradoxically state-funded system of private education, in which the state pays the salaries of teachers – costing around €90 million per year. This ensures a private education is not prohibitively expensive, broadening the base of the elite, with over twenty-five thousand students enrolling in 2017.[xvi] In these institutions lasting ties are formed, and the best preparation for the Leaving Certificate offered, which is generally a code to be cracked. Behavioural problems among middle class students are less pronounced, in my experience, but where rebelliousness, or just a lack of conformity, is apparent authorities employ long-standing methods of control. The sport of rugby emphasises the collective in a test of manhood, with dissenters often subjected to homophobic slurs.

    As far back as the 1920s, one of the leading Dublin Catholic secondary schools for boys of its time, O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, recommended its pupils in the following terms: ‘Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possess the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team.’[xvii] Little has changed in a hundred years. The abiding ambition of most all-male private schools remains not only examination results, but also to develop a cast of mind disposed to “pull with the team”, while instilling an idea of what is ‘normal’ in the dominant consensus.

    Widespread single gender education keeps more troublesome and sports-obsessed male adolescents apart from females, who streak ahead academically. But when both enter the workforce, the demands of motherhood generally count against women working the long hours necessary for career advancement in most of the elite professions. ‘Early-rising’, workaholic male professionals are the praetorian guard of the dominant consensus.

    Irish class boundaries are not impermeable, or based on race or creed – as Leo Varadkar’s background illustrates – but it is increasingly difficult for anyone who is not from an elevated social background to rise up through the educational ranks to become a lawyer, doctor or even a banker. For example a young barrister, after a minimum of four years full-time study, is required to work without a salary for a further two, while he ‘devils’ under a senior colleague, thereby excluding a large proportion of the population. That profession is the bulk supplier of the country’s judiciary, which goes some way towards explaining the Court’s historic deference to property interests – notably: In the matter of Article 26 of the Constitution and in the Matter of The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, 1981.

    Privileged classes, nonetheless, still produce offspring with intellectual or artistic aspirations that survive the stultifying educational system. As the economic benefits of the humanities and arts are now grudgingly recognised these pursuits are indulged with financial support available from state and private sources, albeit generally via laborious application processes. Ideally, however, the ‘creative’ is an advertising executive. Due to high rents, artists are pushed into becoming ‘art-repreneurs’, and conscripted into marketing the state as a place to do business.

    Academia once offered a platform for meaningful critiques of Irish society, but little interaction with the public now occurs, as excessive specialisation has brought abstraction to most subjects. As in other countries, young academics are required to ‘publish or perish’ prolix articles addressed to their peers, leaving little time for political engagement. In 2012 Tom Garvin, Emeritus Professor of Politics decried the dismantling of prior ‘semi-democratic’ structures in University College Dublin, claiming: ‘internal representative structures and freedom of speech were closed down and replaced with Soviet-style top-down “councils” that passively received and passed on instructions from on high’. As non-academic staff began to outnumber academics Garvin found ‘an indescribable grey philistinism’ characterise the public culture of the college ‘and a hideous management-speak’ drowned out ‘coherent communication.’[xviii]

    IV – The Propaganda Model – Print Media

    The Irish media is subject to global trends, but also internal dynamics. The reputation of journalists as crotchety, difficult people, so often depicted on screen, belies how most now “pull with the team”, or see their careers stall. The journalist that questions dominant consensus is depicted as a conspiracy theorist, but this cautionary distrust of authority now appears to be in short supply. Print media in Ireland is on its knees as young readers, in particular, opt for online content, which has resulted in significant redundancies. Precarious freelancing is the norm for new entrants.

    Denis O’Brien – who a tribunal of enquiry in 2011 concluded had handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to a government minister, who it was ‘beyond doubt’ had given ‘substantive information to him, of significant value and assistance to him’ in securing a mobile telephone licence[xix] – controls a great swathe of Irish media, including the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent – the widest-circulating daily and Sunday newspapers – thirteen regional publications, commercial radio channels, Newstalk (the Orwellian association seemingly lost on them) and Today FM. O’Brien’s outlets are generally pro-business, or more accurately pro-multinational, and often critical of the institutions of the state and even individual ministers, but generally support the economic elite with selective regurgitation of government Newspeak.

    For example, the headline of the Irish Independent on October 18th 2018 ran: ‘Varadkar’s Government in crisis after one minister resigns, another faces fight for survival.’ The article simulates the drama of Fianna Fáil calling time on the coalition, thereby maintaining the fiction of two opposing forces – or only two options in the event of an election. The dominant consensus is woven into the piece with the reminder: ‘The instability has created a major crisis for the Government after a Budget that was well received by most sectors’. In contrast, Social Justice Ireland argued that the budget disproportionately benefited high-earners, noting: ‘Budget 2019 fails to make any notable impact on Ireland’s entrenched inequalities and fails to tackle any of the major challenges the country currently faces.’[xx]

    The ‘Indo’ also ostentatiously stimulates demand among upwardly-mobile youth for property and health insurance. Thus the headline on the 19th of October 2018 read: ‘Families to save in home loan and health shake-up’. Its consumer affairs correspondent announced: ‘Families are to enjoy the benefits of a price war in health insurance, and increased competition with even more entrants into the mortgage market’. Mostly, however, it provides the mainstays of effective propaganda: light entertainment, especially blanket sport coverage, celebrity gossip and sexual titillation.

    There is only one other genuinely daily national indigenous newspaper – the Irish Times – which has hoovered up the Irish Examiner and regional titles to create a duopoly. It is considered, and styles itself, ‘the paper of record’, but rarely conducts meaningful investigations, tending only to print sensitive material once it has been aired elsewhere, such as when reporting on the harassment of employees by Michael Colgan, the former director of the Gate Theatre.[xxi] The catastrophic purchase of www.myhome.ie at the height of the last boom makes it a vested interest in the property market, which is reflected in extensive property supplements. Often seen as a bastion of Irish democracy, its credibility was undermined by the hosting of unmarked advertorials of the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plan.[xxii]

    The imprint of government Newspeak was also evident on October 13th, the morning before the last budget was announced, with the headline ‘Significant spending increases for housing and health’ emblazoned across the front cover. Importantly, it gave a positive spin on the budget, which could be seen from every newsstand in the country, ensuring, even if the paper itself was never read, it maintained the ambient feel-good-factor. Was the positive spin provided as a quid pro quo for the scoop, or strategic leak?

    The fingerprints of the economic elite are also apparent in the opening words of an article by chief political reporter Pat Leahy on October 14th. He cautioned the following: ‘First, do no harm. Any finance minister should heed the primary precept of the Hippocratic oath, and ensure that their fiscal and economic prescriptions do not damage the Government, or the economy.’ “Doing no harm” appears to involve upholding the dominant consensus, and avoiding the issues of social exclusion and sustainability.

    The ‘Old Lady of D’Olier Street’ still provides a platform for left-leaning and progressive journalists, including Fintan O’Toole, Una Mullally and David McWilliams, but this does not imply relentless focus on Ireland’s economic and social structures. Their emphasis has tended to be on identity politics, issues of individual liberty, particularly reproductive rights, gender equality, and from O’Toole the ongoing dramas of Trump and Brexit. Only McWilliams consistently nails the social structures. Ultimately, the paper cannot afford to affront AB readers or farmers with ‘shrill’ left-wing commentaries or sustained campaigns, but in keeping these writers on board it maintains the illusion of being progressive.

    It has also dumbed-down considerably recently in the face of ‘commercial realities’, in other words a high salary overhang. Stodgy book reviews have been marginalised, with increasing emphasis on business, vox pop reporting –with leading articles like ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’[xxiii] – consumer affairs and, as usual, lavish sport coverage: all of these fit with the propaganda model of distraction with light entertainment.

    We have relied on UK publications to break stories such as labour abuses in the fishing industry, the substitution of horsemeat for beef, and the recent scandal of unmarked government advertorials. Serious interrogation of the role of the Gardaí has been conducted at a remove from the mainstream.

    Two political magazines, The Phoenix and Village Magazine, offer satire and dissent, but the former is not available for free online and thus has limited political clout. The latter is yet to develop a viable commercial model, but at least upheld freedom of expression and Dáil privilege by publishing online (along with www.broadsheet.ie) a record of Catherine Murphy’s speech accusing Denis O’Brien of corruption, after he had taken out an injunction against RTÉ, and when the Irish Times took fright.

    VI – The Propaganda Model – the State Broadcaster

    The state broadcaster receives a compulsory licence fee from anyone with a television set in the country, but still depends on advertising revenue to remain financially solvent. Like the Irish Times, RTÉ is a broad church, but both TV and radio stations are awash with light entertainment, including vox pop phone-ins like Joe Duffy’s Liveline which also offers an outlet for nonsensical Duckspeakers, while Ray D’Arcy and Ryan Tubridy provide distraction throughout the day on the news and current affairs channel RTÉ Radio 1.

    Tubridy is Ireland’s highest-paid broadcaster, and often its public face as host of the prime time, Friday night ‘The Late Late Show’. A scion of a well-known Fianna Fáil family, he has assumed a seemingly unassailable position, and rarely courts controversy; although he recently suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘,[xxiv] and once compared breastfeeding in public to urinating on the street.[xxv] Mostly however he tugs at the heartstrings of viewers, while devoting his spare time to writing children’s books.

    RTÉ mostly anesthetises the population with light entertainment, especially sport – one recent survey showed that on ‘Morning Ireland’, the highest-rating radio show in the country, environmental stories were covered for only 0.92% of the time, whereas sports news accounted for 12.41% of content.[xxvi] Elsewhere, shows such as ‘Claire Byrne Live’ offer a small screen outlet for Duckspeak. At the end of one episode last year, during which evidence for human-influenced climate change was ‘debated’, thirty-four percent of respondents did not believe this would pose a serious threat in their lifetimes, while nine-percent did not know.[xxvii] Damien O’Reilly has also provided an outlet for Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary to express the Duckspeak of climate denial,[xxviii] the farming lobby no doubt delighted by this muddying of the waters.

    What passes for news and current affairs coverage generally consists of assessments of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics, or commentaries on controversies stirred up in the print media. A case in point was in the recent presidential election when the previously unknown, and unsupported, Peter Casey made a demeaning remarks about Travellers, which was greeted with such ‘outrage’ that he became a serious candidate in the election, thereby providing plenty of fodder for Joe Duffy, and others.

    Ironically, the most serious political critique is found in the weekly comedy show ‘Callan’s Kicks’, where a degree of latitude is permitted. But as Theodore Zeldin explains, comedy can actually have the effect of reinforcing conformity ‘by being its safety valve’. Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools, ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down’, but ‘did so only for a few days.’[xxix]

    *******

    Ireland is a free country without an oppressive secret police force systematically monitoring communications. Despite the chilling effect of current defamation law, freedom of expression is enshrined in the Constitution and European Charter of Human Rights. Nonetheless as George Orwell put it in his proposed preface to his 1945 novel Animal Farm: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.’ Orwell observed how:

    At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

    Irish propaganda upholds a dominant consensus: preserving low taxation on wealth, especially property; encouraging steady economic growth, including rising rents; maintaining buy-in from young property purchasers; and insulating the agricultural sector, often referred to as ‘our farmers’ on the state broadcaster, from criticism. This is achieved through straightforward manipulation of the media as well as instilling conformity through the education system, but also in the use of light entertainment, especially sport, as distraction, as well as in the peddling of plain nonsense, on RTÉ especially. With the advent of social media we are seeing new and sinister methods of achieving these objectives, which this article has not addressed, but which Ireland is not immune from.

    The relatively new medium of the internet need not necessarily be feared however. It can, even through increasingly compromised social media, counter propaganda, by allowing like-minded individuals to converge and orchestrate campaigns. Propaganda can easily be exposed and alternative viewpoints expressed. But we must guard against its capacity for offering further light entertainment distraction, and platforms for madcap Duckspeakers.

    The most important weapon against propaganda is education, both childhood and lifelong, which must address adult illiteracy. A priority should be reform of that sector in Ireland: first by ending subsidised private education; then placing greater emphasis on the enquiring humanities and arts, before addressing the decline of higher learning institutions.

    The water charges campaign failed to generate long-term political engagement among the working class, or an increasingly squeezed middle. Representatives of the economic elite could concede on that single issue and take the rug from underneath organisers, who had seen the campaign in broader terms. Future campaigns should directly confront a taxation system which fails to alleviate rising wealth inequality. As we have seen, the top five percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, eighty-five per cent of which is held in property or land. A long-standing regime of minimal property taxes, along with the failure of the state to construct social housing to any extent, have severely accentuated wealth inequalities and seen property prices and rents spiral. A campaign for housing as an ‘inalienable and imprescriptible’ right enshrined in the constitution[xxx], should become the main progressive objective.

    [i] ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’, TV mini-series, BBC (1992)

    [ii] David McWilliams, ‘Why do we tax income instead of wealth?’ http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/why-do-we-tax-income-instead-of-wealth/, accessed 13/11/18.

    [iii] Author unspecified, ‘Noonan: Budget 2016 the end of ‘boom and bust’’ Irish Examiner, October 13th, 2015.

    [iv] Dan MacGuill, ‘FactCheck: How many social housing units were actually built last year?’, 9th of February, 2016, www.thejournal.ie, https://www.thejournal.ie/ge16-fact-check-election-2016-ireland-social-housing-2587923-Feb2016/, accessed 21/11/18.

    [v] Lisa O’Carroll, ‘€43m knocked off Ireland’s most expensive house’ The Guardian, 22nd of September, 2011.

    [vi] Fran Power, ‘Property prices in the Dublin market to hit boom-time levels ‘within the year’’, Irish Independent, September 3rd, 2017.

    [vii] National Economic and Social Council, ‘Home Ownership and Rental: What Road is Ireland On?’ No. 140, December, 2014.

    [viii] John Downing, ‘Ireland faces annual EU energy fines of €600m’ Irish Independent, April 30th, 2018.

    [ix] Mark Hilliard, ‘Households pay most green taxes but emit one fifth of emissions – CSO’ Irish Times, October, 18th, 2018.

    [x] Emma Dillon, Brian Moran, John Lennon and Trevor Donnellan, Teagasc National Farm Survey Results 2017, July 27th, 2018.

    [xi] Cillian Sherlock, ‘790,000 people living in poverty in Ireland: Social Justice Ireland’, Irish Examiner, December 19th, 2017.

    [xii] Carl O’Brien, ‘Teachers under pressure from ‘initiative overload’, says new Minister for Education’, Irish Times, October 18th, 2018.

    [xiii] Numbeo, ‘Cost of Living in the UK’, https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=United+Kingdom, accessed 13/11/18.

    [xiv] Eoin Burke-Kennedy, Mark Hilliard, ‘Extent of State’s exposure to Brexit revealed by CSO figures’, Irish Times, October 18th, 2018.

    [xv] National Adult Literacy Agency, ‘Literacy in Ireland’, https://www.nala.ie/literacy/literacy-in-ireland, accessed 13/11/18.

    [xvi] Carl O’Brien, Jenna Clarke-Molloy, ‘Private school enrolment returns to boom-time high’, Irish Times, December 28th, 2017.

    [xvii] David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 2010, p.10.

    [xviii] Tom Garvin ‘The bleak future of the Irish university’, Irish Times, May 1st, 2012.

    [xix] The report summaries the payments made to the then Fine Gael Minister Michael Lowry saying, ‘In aggregating the known payments from Mr Denis O Brien to Mr Michael Lowry, it is apposite to note that, between the granting of the second GSM licence to Esat Digiphone in May 1996, and the transmission of £420,000 sterling to complete the purchase of the latter of Mr Lowry’s English properties in December 1999, Mr O’Brien had made or facilitated payments to Mr. Lowry of £147,000 sterling, £300,000 sterling and a benefit equivalent to a payment in the form of Mr O’Brien’s support for a loan of £420,000 sterling.’ From: Untitled, ‘Lowry helped O’Brien get mobile licence’, Untitled, RTÉ, 22nd of March, 2011, https://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0322/298935-moriarty_background/, accessed 16/11/18.

    [xx] Social Justice Ireland, ‘Budget 2018 Analysis and Response Webinar’, https://www.socialjustice.ie/content/budget-2018-analysis-and-response-webinar, accessed 13/11/2018.

    [xxi] Laurence Mackin, Conor Gallagher, ‘Seven women allege abuse and harassment by Michael Colgan’, Irish Times, November 4th, 2017.

    [xxii] Kevin Doyle, ‘Varadkar orders review of Project Ireland €1.5m publicity campaign amid controversy’, Irish Independent, March 1st, 2018.

    [xxiii] Rosita Boland, ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’, Irish Times, October 14th, 2017.

    [xxiv] Untitled, Stickybottle, ‘Flood of complaints to RTE after ‘Late Late Show’ cyclists item’ 14th of March, 2018, http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/complaints-rte-cyclists-item/

    [xxv] Denise Deighan O’Callaghan, Letter to the Editor: ‘Tubridy’s comments on breastfeeding’, Irish Times, November 8th, 2004.

    [xxvi] ‘Only one feature story over the two weeks carried an environmental angle, a story about new research into how dandelion seeds fly’ – ‘Gluaiseacht’, ‘Morning Ireland coverage: Sport 13 – Environment 1’ http://gluaiseacht.ie/content/morning-ireland-coverage-sport-13-environment-1, accessed 18/11/18.

    [xxvii] David Hayden, ‘Shocking Climate Change denial aired on RTE during Claire Byrne Live’, Green News.ie, https://greennews.ie/shocking-climate-change-denial-aired-rte-claire-byrne-live/, accessed 13/11/18.

    [xxviii] Sasha Brady, ‘Michael O’Leary slams climate change as ‘complete and utter rubbish’’, Irish Independent, April 8th, 2017.

    [xxix] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, London, Maclehouse Press, 2015. p.177.

    [xxx] See Eoin Tierney, ‘The key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution’ July 1st, 2001, Cassandra Voices, http://cassandravoices.com/law/the-key-change-to-fix-the-irish-constitution/, accessed 21/11/18.

  • Leo-Liberal

    Leo Varadkar dismisses his father Ashok’s claim to be a socialist, which came in an interview after his son became Taoiseach. According to Leo he does not really know what the term means:

    You’ve probably seen stuff where he describes himself as a socialist but that’s total rubbish .. It’s not that he believes in high taxes or generous welfare, quite the contrary … Nor the nationalisation of the means of distribution of wealth or any of those sort of things (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.24).

    It is not simply that Ashok Varadkar has misrepresented his real position, but that socialism is to be rubbished. As he put it recently in the Dáil, ‘What the Socialists want … is to divide society into some people who pay for everything and qualify for nothing …’

    As a politician Leo has long represented those people who “pay for everything”, only to be preyed on by ‘parasitic’ socialists. It is a neat inversion of the Marxist argument that capitalism exploits workers, which has been used by conservatives in the United States with enduring success.

    The Fine Gael party has traveled some distance from the days of former Taoiseach John A. Costello, who urged in 1969: ‘to put upon your banners the Just Society, that Fine Gale is not a Tory party’ (McCullagh,, 2010, p.398). Under Enda Kenny Tory strategists were brought in as advisors, and Varadkar now firmly positions the party in the centre-right of Irish politics.

    I – The Young Turk

    Trenchant criticism of Fine Gael’s social democratic legacy helped Leo Varadkar make his name within the party. In a notorious speech in 2007, which he retrospectively considers ‘terrible, crass and disrespectful’, he described the beleaguered Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Brian Cowen as ‘a Garret FitzGerald’, who had ‘trebled the national debt and effectively destroyed the country (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.88)’.

    Garret FitzGerald was the leader of Fine Gael between 1977 and 1987, a two-term Taoiseach whose last administration was marked by soaring national debt, in part due to his reluctance to impose swingeing cuts, and also because of the presence within his coalition of the Labour Party, and opposition to austerity measures from the opposition Fianna Fáil, which changed its tune after winning the 1987 election.

    Away with the old – former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

    FitzGerald was identified with the Keynesian economic policy of using government spending to stimulate economic activity. This approach goes back to John A. Costello’s First Inter-Party Government, 1948-51, when balanced budgets were abandoned and a capital budget first introduced. There was, however, always a conservative wing within the party aligned with the legacy of the two Cosgrave (father and son, W.T. and Liam) administrations of 1922-32 and 1974-77, and subsequently influenced by Milton Friedman’s Monetarist approach, underpinning Thatcherism.

    MEP Brian Hayes remains an apologist for Varadkar’s speech: ‘There was a large part of Leo, me as well, who resents how the Garret FitzGerald government didn’t do the things they said they’d do to fix the economy. There were a lot of people in Fine Gael who were very disappointed [with the FitzGerald government] and he was trying to articulate that (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.87)’.

    From the outset Varadkar had cannily identified that cleavage within Fine Gael. This is clear from one of his early missives to the Irish Times, written in the wake of the debacle of Michael Noonan’s loss to Bertie Aherne’s Fianna Fáil in the 2002 general election. He described an ‘internal conflict between its conservative Christian democrat base (which it is set on deserting) and its liberal, social democratic base from the Fitzgerald era (which deserted it some time ago) (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.46).’

    In Varadkar’s view, the only strategic option was to appeal to that conservative, Christian Democratic base, and dispense with social-democratism altogether. This is consistent with rubbishing his father’s socialism today, but actually misrepresents the Christian basis of Fine Gael’s social-democratism, particularly that of John A. Costello’s son Declan Costello, the author of the Just Society.

    For Varadkar Christian Democratism was synonymous with right-wing conservative politics, which was evident in his thinking from the outset. Initial Progressive Democrat inclinations gave way to respect for the leadership qualities of John Bruton. Membership of Young Fine Gael followed, while studying medicine in Trinity College.

    This brought a Washington Ireland Programme for Service and Leadership internship in 2000, under Republican Congressman Peter King. The New York representative’s politics were centrist in American terms – where socialism is still a dirty word – but included an enduring commitment to state infrastructure, such as rail, while maintaining a conservative attitudes to same-sex marriage and abortion.

    Ironically, given his current identification with liberal causes such as marriage equality, and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Leo appears to have initially drawn from the same conservative playbook. In 2010 he argued in relation to abortion services that ‘it isn’t the child’s fault that they’re the child of rape’; while on the question of marriage equality he once argued: ‘Every child has the right to a mother and father and, as much as is possible, the state should vindicate the right’. He even courted Ronan Mullen for a time, inviting him to address a constituency meeting in 2007 on the issue of civil partnerships (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 131, 169 and 170).

    Varadkar is a late convert to social liberalism, but he remains a fiscal conservative. In power he has evinced little enthusiasm for government investment, including describing rail travel as being for romantics. Thus far Leo-Liberalism has entailed doing very little to alter Irish society. Inactivity in office might be considered an attribute, but this predisposition suggests little will be done to tackle the current housing crisis, or address Ireland’s runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

    II – Double-Jobbing?

    Leo Varadkar is a preternatural politician, an exotic insider who has, with great alacrity, climbed the greasy pole to become the youngest Taoiseach in the history of the state, while others around him floundered. In achieving this impressive feat he has displayed unmatched understanding of the dark political arts, which Niccolò Machiavelli believed necessary to advance a politician’s ends. But the Renaissance Italian warns his Prince to shun flatterers.

    A recent biography Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach casts Varadkar as ‘the tall, dark and handsome’ icon of the new Ireland, whose ‘photographic memory’ (a facility also once attributed to Garret FitzGerald) allowed him to waltz through a medical degree on this way to high political office (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 15 and 39). This ‘young foggy’ honed his abilities in the trenches of student politics alongside comrades, many of whom have now fallen by the wayside – a recurring theme throughout his career – such as Lucinda Creighton.

    The two young authors appear close to the subject, to the point where dispassionate assessment is not apparent: one, Niall O’Connor, was recently appointed a special adviser to the Ministry of Defence; the other Phillip Ryan is deputy political editor across the titles of the generally pro-government Independent Newspaper group, owned by Denis O’Brien.

    Call me Dave.

    The book was published by Biteback Publishing, partly owned by Tory grandee and billionaire Lord Ashcroft, which also released a biography of David Cameron Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron (Bitback, London, 2015), co-written by Ashcroft himself, alongside works attacking the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

    But as any historian is aware, an apparently tainted source may nonetheless yield valuable evidence. Time will tell whether our Prince has erred in allowing damaging material to enter the public domain.

    In his review of the book Diarmuid Ferriter drew attention to a passage explaining how Varadkar: ‘floated the idea to one TD of creating anonymous accounts to make positive comments under online stories on popular news websites.’ But it seems likely that this going on in political parties across the board.

    Far worse was Varadkar’s conduct while Minister for Social Protection (2016-17), where he launched an advertising campaign against welfare ‘cheats’. In the meantime he used the Department as a launchpad for his leadership bid, after first hatching an escape from the ‘Angola’ of Health.

    An unnamed adviser relates how visits to Intreos, Department offices located in every county, were used to further his ambition to lead Fine Gael: ‘Social protection was great for us … We travelled everywhere. We went to every parish hall. Every councillor we got to meet. The campaign indirectly started when we were meeting councillors’ (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.254)

    Masquerading as Department business, these were tours on what former Fianna Fáil leader Charlie Haughey called the ‘rubber chicken and chips circuit’ of constituency branches, all at the expense of the Irish taxpayer. Considering Varadkar’s attacks on ‘welfare cheats’, this double-jobbing is the height of hypocrisy. Such conduct may be normal in Irish politics, but that does not make it right.

    Unfortunately, doing little, while generating a lot of noise, marked Varadkar’s stint in the Department of Social Protection, as has been the case in his other roles.

    What also emerges is just how embedded many of the most influential journalists in the country appear to be. The authors unashamedly reveal how the ‘Taoiseach has made a virtue out of wining and dining journalists who accompany him on international trade missions’, believing, ‘it is important to spend time with them socially’.

    During one recent jolly in New York, ‘More than twenty guests, who included journalists from print and broadcast media, joined the Taoiseach and foreign affairs officials for a five-course, three-hour-long meal’. The authors, who may have been present, gleefully recall the guests devouring ‘French onion soup, foie gras, filet mignon and mushroom ravioli dusted with black truffles’, followed by further drinks in Fitzpatrick’s Manhattan Hotel in Midtown; all, we may assume, at the expense of the Irish taxpayer (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 321-322).

    Few journalists could resist the prospect of such intimacy with a sitting Taoiseach, fewer still could emerge from such lavish entertainments with objectivity intact.

    The attitude of one of his predecessors John A. Costello, who inveighed against ‘the era of the expense account … the era of the expensive restaurant (McCullagh, 2010, p.390)’, has long since fallen into abeyance.

    It should also raise an eyebrow that Ryan Tubridy, Miriam Callaghan (both of RTE) and Ursula Halligan (of TV3) endorse the book on the back cover.

    III – ‘Dr’ Varadkar

    In Irish society, as with many others, the position of doctor carries an unmatched aura of respectability. As the son of a respected G.P. Leo had an immediate advantage of name recognition, and respect, in his constituency when he began his political career.

    In the meantime he was studying for a medical degree himself, though he admits he was a dilettante student, and perhaps ought to have studied law, that other passport to bourgeois respectability. Nonetheless, training to be a doctor has given this career politician an enduring credibility, and mystique, which still impresses commentators.

    As a young councillor, we are told he would travel ‘straight from hospital to the chamber dressed in his medical attire, with a stethoscope around his neck’. He now denies the full extent of this, but the nickname of ‘Scrubs’ that emerged in the local media, was hardly damaging (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52).

    His biographers claim that medicine is among the interests that Leo shares with his partner, Matthew Barrett, who is a practising cardiologist, but as Minister for Health Varadkar showed a discernible lack of interest in staying in the job. An anonymous cabinet colleague remains critical:

    The fact he walked away from it after such a short time, I think if you ask most of the parliamentary party, even some of his biggest supporters, they were disappointed with that. It was obviously done with a view to the leadership election. There was obviously a calculation made that you cannot go from health to the Taoiseach’s office. Certainly not in a contested election when you have to go around canvassing (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.235)

    One might have expected a young doctor to be brimming with ideas on how to address the major public health questions of our time – just as Dr Noel Browne spearheaded efforts to eradicate T.B. when he was Minister in the late 1940s – or even dismantle the expensive bureaucracy in the health service.

    Varadkar’s first decisive move, just two weeks into office, was to abandon the Coalition government’s promise, and long-term Fine Gael commitment, to universal health insurance (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.154). He went on to boast publicly that he had taken out his own private insurance, and urged other young people to follow suit.

    The two-tier system would remain, and nor was Varadkar prepared to reform what remained of public provision, and dispense with the Health Service Executive: that layer of bureaucracy insulating a Minister from direct criticism, bequeathed by one of his confidantes, former Minister for Health (2004-11) Mary Harney.

    After Kenny’s calamitous election campaign in 2015, when the party lost twenty seats, Varadkar knew his time was nigh. He forced his way out of Health by demanding ‘a large bag of cash and a mandate for sweeping change’, whereby he could bypass the rules surrounding recruitment (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.232). These were demands he knew Kenny would not be accede to. The doctor had more than Health on his mind.

    The Reluctant Taoiseach: John A. Costello.

    IV – ‘Murph’ and the Whistleblower

    It seems the Housing ministry has become the new ‘Angola’ among government Departments, with any Minister operating with fiscal and monetary constraints over which he has no control. The incumbent, whether Simon Coveney or Eoghan Murphy, appears like a hapless pilot frantically playing with the instruments on an already doomed vessel as it descends through the sky.

    To make real progress, the Ministry of Housing would have to be develop a construction agency headed by the minister, integrate with the Transport Department, and be given a direct line to Finance. Instead the Housing Building Finance Bill 2018 ‘will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.’

    Varadkar’s long-standing resistance to asking those who “pay for everything” to provide any more, does not appear to preclude a revival of the public-private partnerships which were a hallmark of Bertie Aherne’s tenure as Taoiseach.

    Yet the account of Eoghan Murphy that emerges in this biography does not align with the bumbling, statistic-addled media performer, labelled the ‘Craig Doyle of Irish politics’. He was Leo’s loyal fixer, largely responsible for Varadkar capturing an overwhelming share of the parliamentary party’s vote.

    Varadkar’s Fixer: Eoghan Murphy.

    According to one of his colleagues: ‘You had to have a multiple ways into people and no one moved into a “solid yes” unless Murphy was 100 per cent satisfied (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.277)’.

    Murphy was the founder of the so-called Five-A-Side Club of young Fine Gael TDs and at one point the sole member in Varadkar’s corner. As such, he was crucial to the latter’s rise (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.125).

    Murphy’s gregariousness compensated for Varadkar’s frank admission that he ‘probably should not be in politics at all; I am not really a people person (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.112)’. Unlike Varadkar however, and perhaps to his cost, Murphy appears quite serious in his attempts to govern. He will remain a lightning rod for dislike of the government, however, as long as the state continues to shirk a constitutional responsibility to provide affordable accommodation for citizens.

    When Enda Kenny finally resigned from office last year, apparently after egotistically ensuring he had surpassed John A. Costello as the longest-serving Fine Gael Taoiseach, Varadkar’s main rival Simon Coveney was hit with a political blitzkrieg, foreclosing any leadership race before a shot had been fired in anger.

    From his free-roaming position in Social Protection Varadkar had captured the vast majority of the parliamentary party, making the 65% of the vote Coveney received from the wider political party an irrelevance.

    What had brought Kenny down, along with two Ministers for Justice and two Garda Commissioners, is perhaps the greatest scandal in Irish public life since the turn of the century: the alleged framing on charges of child sex abuse of the Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe after he had revealed industrial scale non-prosecution of drink-driving charges. This has led to the appointment of the first Garda Commissioner from outside the state.

    In this regard at least, Varadkar has been on the right side of history, famously referring in the Dáil in 2015 to McCabe (who he had previously met and appraised) as an ‘honourable man’, after his conduct had been described as ‘disgusting’ by then Garda Commissioner Callinan.

    The one part of this narrative that rankles, however, flows from the toxic relationship that existed between Varadkar and Alan Shatter, who as Minister for Justice appears to have been mislead by senior Gardaí. Did Varadkar’s own ambitions inhibit him from reaching out to a cabinet colleague? The political cadavers the affair made of so many of the Fine Gael old guard certainly cleared the way for Varadkar.

    Nonetheless, Varadkar must be given credit where it is due, and many of his ideological opponents were impressed by his respect for Justice and the Rule of Law. This impression is bolstered by his rejection of an idea floated by the current Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan for a ban on Gardaí being photographed in the course of their duties.

    V – A Land of Opportunity?

    It seems de rigeur for any fiscally conservative politician to display a commitment to ‘opportunity-for-all’ when he ascends to high office. Thus, in his acceptance speech Varadkar urged ‘every proud parent in Ireland today’, to dream ‘big dreams for their children’.

    He said:

    Let that be our mission in Fine Gael, to build in Ireland a republic of opportunity, one in which every individual has the opportunity to realise their potential and every part of the country is given its opportunity to share in our prosperity (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.xi).

    Opportunity for Varadkar is distinctly upwardly mobile, along the lines of the American Dream, which has been fools’ gold for many. Nothing is said of those who inevitably fail to live up to their own, or parent’s, aspirations, and depend on the state for help. His approach seems at odds with John A. Costello’s Fine Gael being, ‘for all sections of the Irish people, but particularly for the poor and the weak and the distressed (McCullagh, 2010, p.398)’.

    Perhaps the one measure that would achieve the parity of opportunity which Varadkar claims a devotion to, would be to develop a truly equal educational system. But the best model for primary and secondary education seems to be found in Finland, where private schooling is effectively prohibited, and educational attainment among the highest in Europe. Instructively, this socialist society maintains an income tax rate in excess of fifty per cent.

    Varadkar has in the past opposed reforming the Irish education system, where the state pays the salaries of teachers in the private institutions, which achieve the highest grades in state examinations. In 2003, he said dividing Ireland ‘into a country of those who pay for everything and receive nothing and those who pay for nothing and receive everything, with only a small minority in between, would deal a fatal blow to what is left of Ireland’s social contract (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52)’.

    There is perhaps no clearer statement by Varadkar of whose interests he would serve in fulfilling his “contractual” role: those who “pay for everything”, the wealthiest strata of society who have throughout the history of the state used educational attainment, including access to careers in medicine and the law, as a barrier to wealth and influence.

    That affiliation has been apparent from the beginning of his political career: with his excoriation of the social democratic tradition in his party; it proceeded through an inclination to work with the Republican Party, and sympathy for the Progressive Democrats; it showed in a willingness to dispense with a promise of universal healthcare and accept a two-tier system, and with the shaming of welfare ‘cheats’. It was also apparent in his entreaties on behalf of Donal Trump’s Doonbeg golf course, and open invitation to visit the country.

    Leo’s liberalism is uniquely adapted to further his ambitions, and take care of his supporters. The Prince appears to have no plan beyond the end of achieving power, and it trappings.

    In a revealing aside in this most beige of biographies we discover him telling colleagues ‘he feels at his most comfortable when holding meetings with other world leaders, some of whom he regularly texts’. Most worryingly perhaps, he has also ‘struck up warm relationships with’ among others the Far Right Hungarian President Viktor Orban (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.319).

    *******

    Times have changed in Irish politics, where once John A. Costello had to be persuaded to serve as Taoiseach, today a career politician unashamedly plots a course to power. Who would wish to enter this tawdry scene? Micheal O’Siadhail’s insight appears apt that ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy (O’Siadhail, 2018, p.149)’.

    Raising political standards in Ireland goes far beyond removing Varadkar, who is a product of a political system informed by clientalism. It requires an evolution in our understanding of the role of government, and a shared acceptance of the need for genuine equality of opportunity, beginning with educational reform.

    Varadkar’s own party is now what he and others aspired for it to become: a conservative party, untainted by social democratism, which wields power on behalf of the property-holding, private-school-attending, privately-medically-insured cohort of the population. As long as he remains in power those who “pay for everything” will remain ascendant.

    References

    David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 2010.
    Philip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach, Biteback Publishing, London, 2018.
    Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Baylor, Waco, 2018.

  • We Need Another ‘New Deal’ and Umbrella to Unite Under

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), U.S. President between 1933 and 1945, was born to enormous privilege. He came from one of the most aristocratic families in America. A distant cousin, Teddy, had even been elected President.

    In his youth FDR was a bon vivant and ladies man, who strayed from Eleanor, his saintly but still formidable wife. This blue blood seemed an unlikely person to buck the entire system of US capitalism. He remains a hate-figure for U.S. Conservatives today.

    Any account of his life should include the enormous personal tragedy of his incapacitation due to polio. He could not walk, and this disability may have broadened his empathy for others’ suffering.

    Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 on a platform of change: to provide a New Deal to the American people after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing global depression. The destitution of the American people is movingly depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, where a group of ‘Okies’, led by Tom Joad, are ruined by dustbowl conditions, and the calling in of loans by ruthless bankers.

    Similarly, devastation arrived in the urban centres, captured in the lyrics of the song and Broadway musical E.Y. Yip Harpurg’s ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime’. Even brokers were forced to eat from soup kitchens, as erstwhile respectable folk were reduced to ‘hobos’.

    What had happened was that the bull market of speculation had simply collapsed. The unregulated free market had built mountains of sand out of folly and greed. A dominant economic philosophy of laissez faire had brought light touch regulation and government passivity, as with our own, similarly hegemonic, neo-liberalism.

    The view then, as today, was that government had no business interfering in private transactions and that wealth, growth and efficiency are best achieved by the operation of the invisible hand.

    The crash beginning in 2007 was not that different from the 1929 version, and the political consequences are increasingly similar too. A neo-liberal consensus endorses a shock doctrine allowing crisis to follow crisis, precipitating social and economic collapse.

    FDR adopted the seemingly paradoxical, and certainly heretical, advice of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes that to save capitalism it was necessary for the government to intervene in the market. Thus Roosevelt set up national agencies and support structures for aid and assistance. It was a bailout to protect the poor and disenfranchised, not the rich.

    His New Deal was in the national interest. Not a shibboleth or paper mask, cloaked in woolly ideas, to protect vested interests.

    The Supreme Court initially blocked New Deal legislation, rejecting what the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes contemptuously branded social statistics in his dissenting opinion in Lochner Herbert Spencers. He insisted the court had no business varying contracts.

    ‘the switch in time’

    The assumption of liberty of contract is that anyone has the freedom to enter into a bargain under whatever terms they choose, and once a contract is struck they are bound by their word. But that is based on the pretence that the market is a level playing field, which it never has been. Many still sign on the doted line without fully understanding the implications. Moreover, neo-liberalism sells short term fixes which often fail.

    An exasperated Roosevelt informed the Supreme Court that if they did not approve his legislation he would appoint new judges, which soon led to a change of heart. This became known among wags as ‘the switch in time that saved nine’.

    Roosevelt displayed an ambivalence towards democracy, but was the best of all leaders: a benevolent dictator. He favoured those at the bottom of the social ladder, who were increasingly aware that democracy had been sabotaged by vested interests. At that time, just as is the case today, transnational corporations and law firms were dictating to governments.

    Roosevelt revived the U.S. economy, with Keynesian pump-priming: government expenditure increasing aggregate demand. It did not lead to a bail out of corrupt banks, but their nationalisation. This brought investment to help ordinary people, not the infliction of wanton cruelty in the form of perma-austerity, which runs contrary to even capitalist logic.

    The best evidence is that a mixed economy, combining private enterprise and public initiative, with social safety nets and public assistance for small enterprises, is a model that works best for society as a whole, rather than the cartelisation of wealth, under the voodoo promise of trickle down.

    Keynes was right then, and still is, but over time he became unfashionable and was derided.

    In late 1970’s Britain, in particular, the excesses of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three-day-working-week, litter on the streets, and the stranglehold of the Unions. With initiative thus stifled, Thatcher and Reagan championed the old formula of untrammelled free markets: new clothing for old and obsolete ideas of unregulated markets, conveniently referred to as neo-liberalism.

    The ideological underpinning came from the Austrian Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago school under Milton Friedman. The curious assumption was that wealth would trickle down like manna from heaven from rich to poor, if a market is left alone. Instead we got the yuppies, like Donald Trump, who siphoned off great wealth.

    Over time we have seen the dismantling of the welfare state; the removal of social protections and safety nets. More sinister developments are of a more recent vintage.

    ‘the new serfdom’

    Firstly, a rapidly declining percentile of the global population is controlling an ever-increasing share of the wealth and resources of the planet, with everybody else increasingly impoverished.

    As a result the distinction between working class and middle class is being eroded. The new class system is a reversion to a medieval pyramid of landlords and serfs: feudal capitalism.

    This blurring of class boundaries is an important point to appreciate, making Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an accommodation between working and middle class interests more compelling than ever. Old-fashioned Marxist class divisions no longer make sense, amidst corporate feudalism, where working and middle classes are both succumbing to serfdom.

    Conversely Hayek, one of the architects of neo-liberalism, actually called socialism the new feudalism or serfdom. It is ironic in the extreme therefore that his ideas have led precisely to what he sought to avoid. Socialist brainwashing has been replaced by neo-liberal.

    More to the point, the unprecedented banking collapse after 2007 led to bail-outs being award to those responsible who were responsible, and the infliction of austerity on the wretched of the earth. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stieglitz, referred to this false paradigm as ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’.

    Those countries which adopted ‘Roosveltean’ or Keynesian approaches, including nationalisating banks, such as Iceland have been vindicated. This brought stabilisation and recovery.

    Ireland achieved the worst of all possible ends. It established a bad bank NAMA, which cut deals with failed property speculators and lawyers and the congeries of the corrupt. As the IMF and Europe imposed austerity on the defenceless masses those responsible were bailed out and their debts cancelled.

    The fraudulent Irish banks had made their money on misrepresentations, and providing negligent lending advice about the value of stocks, investments and credit ratings. This had caused the economy to overheat and generated a property bubble that many had warned against.

    Now the institutions foreclose against the poor and defenceless, as sanctity of contract is insisted on. The perversion of the system it that the richer you are, the more easily you can cut a deal: the logic of ‘a bank too big to fail’.

    homo economicus

    The neo-liberal recasting of homo sapiens into homo economicus, also initiates a new form of Social Darwinism, permitting only the survival of the fittest or rather the most ruthless in a dog eat dog universe.

    We have seen a slippage in standards, where the young are habituated to lying, as deceit has become the norm among holders of high office. The lines between fact, semi-fact, lies and deceptions have been blurred entirely. Even in the courts of law fabricated cases have reached pandemic proportions.

    It has also led to increasingly vicious tactics against those who demure: like a plague the corruption of banks has spread to other private agencies and even state institutions, where those who blow the whistle or otherwise expose toxic levels of corruption are systematically destroyed.

    In this distorted universe the mugshots of those that should be acclaimed as heroes of our time, now feature in rogues’ galleries of infamy and subversion. The indicted include human rights lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, publicly-minded citizens, and anyone with a shred of a social conscience.

    It is a divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ social setting. ‘Them’, the poor, the migrant, the displaced, the activist, the troublemaker, the public intellectual, are all marginalised and insidiously destroyed in increments or possibly state-sponsored murder, as in the case of journalists in Malta and Slovakia.

    Targeted assassination by the state is now the norm, and not just under Mr Putin.

    Making Hodge-Podge of Everything

    Even though I am a Harvard law graduate I doubt whether Mr. Trump would grant me leave to enter the United States right now. I am no longer one of ‘us’ but one of ‘them’, what Franz Fanon called The Wretched of The Earth. I should not have given unconditional praise to human rights activists, who impede capitalist interests.

    Our corporate suzerains lead people to safe issues around individual entitlements. We are all in favour of gay marriage, gender equity and not criminalising someone for puffing on a joint. But what about more fundamental rights intrinsic to human life, such as health care, housing and social support? If you argue in favour of this just see what happens.

    Around the world courts are rapidly evicting and rendering homeless surplus populations and in India dumping them on the streets. Housing, either buying or renting, is increasingly unaffordable, diminishing the prospect of human flourishing.

    The privatisation of health care has ineluctably led to life or death being a matter not of right or entitlement, but of affordability.

    There are other sinister ramifications. Those teachers, academics or professionals in badly paid but socially worthwhile occupations must toe the line, and are fired for exposing corruption. In order to survive they have to sing for their supper, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.

    The wise sensei or village elder is no longer looked up to, but instead the old are being asked to quietly await their death.

    Intelligence and achievement have to be costed and channelled into wealth producing activities. You are not a man if you do not descend to the mentality of the hunter.

    Short-termism both in contracts and thinking, has led to reactive decision-making, wherein people are desensitised to the suffering of others.

    In my view these depredations being heaped on society are deliberate. The tactics of social disruption peddled in Chile and Indonesia by the neo-liberals in the late 1970s are now being replicated in Ireland and Greece, among other places. It is a social experiment assessing what level of suffering is required to bring compliance to authority, and obedience to the will of the mega rich.

    This is accompanied by cuts in funding for socially useful public agencies, such as libraries, which are being gradually eliminated. There have also been huge cuts to legal aid, imperiling the ability of the innocent to defend themselves against criminal charges.

    It brings to mind the prescriptions of one Dostoyevsky’s Devils Pyotr Stepanovich who advocates the ‘systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society an all its principles’, which would: ‘demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything’. Then, ‘when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical, and sceptical, but still with a desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self preservation’, his faction would, ‘suddenly gain control of it’.

    The New Deal

    We demand a New Deal. But what will that entail today, and how could it be feasible?

    1. Urgently in Ireland, and other neo liberal countries, the courts need to recognising housing (even without recourse to Article 45), including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as access to health care, as fundamental human rights. The courts need to show leadership and recognise the common good of protecting people against the corporate predation by vulture funds and transnational interests.
    1. We urgently require Keynesian stabilisation including support for small businesses, social safety nets and structural regulation of a wildcatting private sector.
    1. The EU needs to be streamlined to a form of looser associational ties, which do not impose austerity or globalisation of capital, but reinforce standards and regulatory protection of rights and resistance to the interventions of globalised capitalism. There is no point in Brexit if it is replaced by the interests of Steve Bannon and other American ranchers.
    1. The power of officers of the state needs to be strictly regulated. We are living in an age when an over powerful state and police force is intruding unconstitutionally in private lives of others, and state sponsored is increasingly apparent. Where subversion is emanating from the state, and where criminalisation is opaque and multi-faceted: where many of the real problems of criminality can be traced to the state itself.
    1. There is a paucity of political leadership at national and international level. The possibility now exists that various NGOs raising awareness on the impact of Climate Change awareness, miscarriages of justice and social and economic rights, band together in an alternative transnational organisation fronted by the good and the wise. To oppose internationalisation we need an alternative internationalisation lobbying not for growth but sustainability, conservation and a reverse to small is beautiful and artisanal livelihoods. We need to remould human nature to promote altruism, community and compassion for others, engendering a New Deal of collaborative and associative responsibilities.

    So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a New Deal for the world.

  • Steve Bannon’s Tour de Farce

    Donald Trump’s former confidante Steve Bannon has been on a latter-day American Grand Tour around Europe. But rather than making his peace ‘With learned Italian things / And the proud stones of Greece’, he embarked on an ideological excursion through the newly constituted enclaves of extreme right wing Populism; spreading a gospel on behalf of his erstwhile ally Mr. Trump, who unceremoniously dumped him last year.

    At one level this is a rapprochement with a mentor, who he praises gushingly when given the opportunity, and also an exercise in lobbying on behalf of the corporate interests he serves. All of this is treated as Populism, which originated as a recognition of the socio-economic rights of the working class.

    The U.S. Populist Party was a movement of the 1890s, involving Midwestern and Southern farmers and some labour unions, which denounced an economic system in which the fruits of the toil of millions has been stolen to build colossal fortunes for a few. It was also laced with religious fundamentalism. This latter is also an important ingredient to the Trump formula too: the rights of the poor are ultimately subordinate to the Never Never Land promise of an afterlife. Some consider Trump a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar, ‘sent by God to wreak vengeance on an idolatrous and wicked people’.

    In Europe Populist movements have also been left wing, and even Communist: including the Popular Front governments of France and Spain during the 1930s, which ultimately succumbed to Fascist invasions. Mr Bannon pretends to be unconcerned whether Populism is of the Right or Left; although Mussolini, who he praises for his virility, was also in some respects a Populist, having begun his political journey as a socialist.

    Usage was revived, erroneously, in the 1950s to describe the ‘Populist’ anti-Communist ‘witch hunt’ of Joseph McCarthy, reflecting how Populism had drawn closer to an appeal to prejudice and selfish sectional interest.

    On his recent tour Bannon sang the praises of recently elected Populist governments in Italy and Hungary, some of whom bear more than a family resemblance to fascists. Power to the people. As long as they vote for us of course.

    I – Ordinary Working Joe

    Bannon paints a picture of conflict in broad brush strokes, between a global elite and the Ordinary Working Joe. A distinction is drawn between populist nationalism, and the global establishment of what he terms ‘crony capitalism’.

    This passage from a recent Vanity Fair interview puts this in perspective:

    Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.

    I was reminded of the famous description of Richard Nixon being about as honest as a three dollar bill, and, as Noam Chomsky puts it: ‘language in the service of propaganda’.

    Let us ascertain what Steve Bannon is really saying: he wants national sovereignty reasserted against the global elite, but curiously Populist governments, such as his own, tend to favour the global elite in their tax programmes.

    There is ample resistance in Europe to transnational corporations, so Bannon’s real mission appears to be to retain European markets, and undermine the European Union, which brings unnecessary encumbrances to the interests of his sponsors: American elite capitalism; his cronies; his global elite; his gang.

    The real objection is to those global elites that threaten the agenda of Goldman Sachs and transnational U.S. capitalism. He does not appreciate the “crony capitalism” of those elites that are not his cronies.

    Superficially he favours the working man and protection of indigenous citizens. Meanwhile his mentor, after riding a wave of blue collar support, displayed his gratitude by dismantling ‘horrible’ Obamacare, ironically affecting his own constituency far worse than Democrat voters.

    By reneging on the Paris Climate Change agreement, and placing industry ‘yes men’ in the EPA, Trump and Bannon may precipitate another Dust Bowl in Middle America; creating new Grapes of Wrath, and accelerating the destruction of blue collar America, which voted for him under false pretenses.

    In the words of Zizek the working class are being sold ‘ideological misidentification’, which Marx understood as a form of brainwashing to vote contrary to one’s interests.

    II – The Scapegoat

    How better to pander to the working class than by invoking the threat of a Satanic Other, or enemy within, such as the Jews were defined by the Nazis. Today we have undocumented aliens stealing ‘our’ jobs, or foreigners polluting ‘our’ gene pool.

    Bannon emphasises sovereignty and economic autarky, but this should not prevent the free flow of ethnically-diverse American business people – commonly referred to as ex-pats – from selling into European markets.

    On the other hand, the surplus populations of the Global South and those fleeing war zones such as Syria – which he expressly invokes in the context of Hungary – are to be stopped at the borders and their human rights annihilated. The quid pro quo for adopting U.S. economic norms is that populist European states can maintain their ethnic cleanliness.

    Syrian refugees strike at the platform of Budapest Keleti railway station, September 2015.

    Their exile is of course the responsibility of the Military Industrial Complex that Bannon serves, which destabilised the Middle East. Although he criticises Bush and the GOP establishment, one wonders how much of this is a smokescreen.

    Those legal Hispanic and working class Blacks workers that are pandered to will be abandoned when their American Dreams turn to nightmares. They will remain poverty-stricken, working longer hours for less, without health insurance or pension entitlements: a source of cheap labour. ‘Power to the people’ is a carefully constructed ruse. They will have no power and be told what to do.

    Critical media has to be aligned with Globalised capitalism, or treated as an enemy of the people. They cannot be allowed to speak the truth to power, or at least to Mr Trump. Such people do not answer questions which are asked of them because they avoid them.

    Mr Bannon speaks and writes in carefully-crafted soundbites and pseudo-intellectualisms, which do not stand up to serious scrutiny. His new-found Populist narrative requires Bannon to ignore his long association with the handmaiden’s of globalisation, Goldman Sachs, while Trump’s administration comprises an assortment of cronies from the global elite.

    Ideological opposition to NAFTA, which serves certain U.S. interests, does not extend to supporting the EU’s current stance on the TTIP, which would allow American and other corporate interests to override national sovereignty, and sue the living daylights out of national governments and small businesses.

    Steve Bannon is against radicalisation, which is given an etiolated definition as anything that exposes his agenda. The new radicals he despises are liberal professors, human rights activists and journalists who expose the horrendous economic and environmental effects of neo-liberalism. In short, those who speak candidly on the media, and cannot be bought.

    The new generation of soft-skilled snowflakes cannot be exposed to what the likes of Steve Bannon has in store for them. They must be compliant and vote for the Right candidates. Self-immolation of the innocents.

    Interestingly, Bannon is now appealing to Bernie Sander’s constituency, as Sanders is the real deal and must be neutralised, and his ideological clothes appropriated. For a genuine Populist to represent working class interests would be disastrous.

    Bernie Sanders, the real deal.

    III – Calling a fascist a fascist

    In a very sinister way Steve Bannon talks about the inherent dangers of biotechnology and artificial intelligence and the challenges it presents. Yet he and his eccentric billionaire friend Robert Mercer have used artificial intelligence in Climate Change Denial through the Heartland Institute.

    Mercer funded Cambridge Analytica, whose advertising played on people’s emotions having profiled them to good effect, a key strategy in orchestrating Trump’s electoral success.

    Bannon opposes artificial intelligence and robots as China has stolen a march on his Capitalist cronies. He wants his artificial intelligence and his robots.

    I regard Steve Bannon as an ubermensch fascist who believes in Social Darwinism, and the control of the worker by the insanely rich. He does not care a jot about the working class, save as objects of exploitation to be duped.

    He is a shameless transnational capitalist, and only opposes it when regulation (referred to as red tape, as if polluting a river is just a matter of red tape) challenges his interests. He is a demagogue, who preys on the insecurities and prejudices of the working class to buttress his faction.

    He is aware of an impending environmental and economic meltdown, and is recommending compounds for the mega rich, who expect to be enriched further through his propagandistic grand tour to the now proto-fascist and compliant enclaves of Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

    He is even more dangerous than Trump because he is cleverer, his rhetoric a disturbing marriage of psycho-babble and neo-liberalism.

    What is needed to counteract him is what he despises: fearless criticism, and genuine Populism divorced from religious fundamentalism. This is coming from Bernie Saunders, NGOs, human rights activists and anyone who still believes in a liberal education, the Rule of Law, and sees the dangers inherent in an appeal to the mob.

    *******

    The aspiring Emperor Bannon has no clothes, and offers hope in the manner of a quack doctor or false messiah.

    Behind the toxic combination of Neoliberalism and demagoguery, the presentation of relativistic half-baked shibboleths, is what Chomsky describes as the most dangerous organisation on earth: the right wing of the Republican Party, controlled by religious maniacs envisaging the end of days.

    Steve Bannon is of course carefully providing escape hatches for the mega rich to weather the coming storm in compounds away from the Populist mob, which they simultaneously exploit and undermine.

    Death on the installment plan, as mortgage owners in Ireland find out, or as George Orwell put it: How the Poor Die.

  • Malaysia’s Political Tsunami of Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Spain on Trial

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

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

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

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

    5am bar brawl

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Brute force

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

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

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

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

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

    German hostages

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

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

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

    Siege mentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In tatters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Lack of credibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Slap in the face

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Catalan Independence Debate Presents False Dichotomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • What the Irish Abortion Debate Ignores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    II

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

    So what is going to happen?

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

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

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

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

    Thus it will fail, but further publicity will ensue.

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

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

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

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

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

    A never ending saga in short.

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

    III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    V

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

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

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

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

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

    Featured Image: Marina Azzaro

  • Spanish Smokescreens

    The Catalan independence movement may seem like a throwback to a bygone age of nationalism. But the disproportionate reaction of Spain’s central government to the referendum in October has served, perversely, to make the break-up of the country more likely. Along with wider curbs on freedom of expression, the repression orchestrated by a ruling Partido Popular (PP) mired in corruption scandals, is an unsettling reminder of Franco’s long dictatorship (1939–75).  Disturbingly, mainstream media and the judiciary are failing to check these trends.

    E.M. Forster once remarked that if a choice came between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. Anyone who formulates such an opposition may be said to have no country if by that we mean: a sense of belonging to a broad set of principles identified with the state.

    Thus, most Americans, notwithstanding their differences, submit to ideals of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ expressed in the US constitution, which includes restraints on the excesses of presidential power. The appeal of belonging to a country declines when its government, even acting lawfully, becomes an immoral instrument of power.

    George Orwell might have lost some friends if they had known he had provided a list of writers with Communist sympathies to MI5 in 1949. But he did so for the sake of friends he saw as countrymen, at a time when Stalin was in power in the Soviet Union.

    Such dilemmas are rarely in black and white, or represent good versus evil. Even under the Nazis there were presumably, among others, nurses tending to the sick who played no role in the machinery of death and destruction. Under late capitalism states bear less responsibility than transnational corporations for destructive technologies, ecocide and grotesque inequality. State power and that of supranational institutions needs to be bolstered, but underpinned by transparency, representative democracy and accountability.

    With large corporations exerting unaccountable influence, states, such as the Spanish, controlling public discourse and harbouring a compliant judiciary, may be tyrannical institutions.

    The current impasse in Spain appears to be an old-fashioned conflict over national identity. Any nation, as far as most historians are concerned, is an imagined construct. ‘Imagined’, as Benedict Anderson put it, because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion’. Nations loom out of an ‘immemorial’ past, generally based on dominant vernacular languages. A number emerged ascendant in Modern Europe from a stew of idiolects that co-existed in transnational empires, before the homogenising effect of Guttenberg’s printing press.

    Image: Hector Castells

    But language is not the only source of identity. An English speaker living in Wales may feel either Welsh, British or Muslim depending on the occasion. The particular identity selected to represent oneself shifts according to moods and settings, and can be stoked by demagoguery.

    After observing the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 Michael Ignatieff wrote: ‘Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalist hatred only when the surviving communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.’ Today, we find Yugo-nostalgia among many Croats, Slovenes and Serbs who lament the dissolution of their historic friendship. “Nationalist hatred” is also the product of manipulation in Spain today, and appears to provide a smokescreen for corruption within the ruling Partido Popular (PP).

    Once upon a time I knew Barcelona reasonably well, having rented an apartment there for a summer with friends after finishing university in 1998. In the days before euro-inflation the price of living was jaw-droppingly cheap, especially when it came to purchasing food in the colourful markets off Las Ramblas. Catalan was spoken widely, but we heard little talk of an independent state. Nonetheless, I was surprised by an assertion from one adult child of immigrants from another part of Spain that she was often made to feel a second class citizen.

    Growing up in Ireland, I was accustomed to daily news bulletins reporting sectarian murders. This honed an awareness for potential divisiveness around identity. I have watched, therefore, with concern the increasing stridency of Catalan nationalism. The last time I visited Barcelona, two years ago, the streets were festooned with flags hanging from windows, amid rumours of intimidation of those who did not wish to participate. I could not help wondering whether separatism was a product of the region’s relative wealth compared to the rest of Spain: the region accounts for approximately sixteen percent of the Spanish population, but twenty-five percent of all Spanish exports. These pressures have increased in the wake of Spain’s economic crisis, culminating in Eurozone finance ministers agreeing to lend the country up to €100 billion to shore up its banks.

    Image: Hector Castells

    However, the jackbooted response of the Guardia Civil to the Catalan referendum in October, which left hundreds injured, has imperiled an often tempestuous relationship between Catalans and Castilians. The kingdoms of Aragon (essentially historic Catalonia) and Castile formed a political union in 1469 in the wake of the marriage of their respective monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Catalan has remained the lingua franca in the former Aragonese territory until the present day, although large scale migration there from other parts of Spain, and elsewhere, diluted this; just over half of its population appears to feel Spanish, based on the 2017 election results.

    In the wake of the Nationalist victory of Generalissimo Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which Barcelona played a prominent role on the Republican side, thousands were imprisoned and the Catalan identity was systematically undermined. During that long dictatorship (1939-1975) schools were banned from teaching the Catalan language and sources of Catalan identity whitewashed. With the introduction of democracy in 1975 a modus vivendi developed between Madrid and Barcelona – the Basque country became the nationalist flash point – until diminution in regional sovereignty in 2010 allied with the Economic Crisis gave rise to the current strife.

    Iberian Peninsula 1400

    Since the violent scenes in October many Spaniards have pointed to the illegality of the referendum to justify the conduct of the Guardia Civil, which makes neither moral nor legal sense. Editorials in the apparently liberal El Pais often refer to the Catalan leadership as ‘Golpistas’. The word ‘golpe de estado’ is the equivalent of coup d’etat or putsch, and implies that Catalan separatists have been using violent means to bring about independence, thereby justifying the thuggish scenes.

    El Pais’ Managing Editor, David Alandete, remains obdurately unapologetic, likening Catalan separatists to Far Right extremists: ‘This is the exact same situation as The New York Times under Trump, the UK press under Brexit, German press under Alternative for Deutschland’. Like most established print media around the world, El Pais has experienced significant financial troubles in recent times. John Carlin, a sacked former columnist has argued that the parent company Prisa reflects the wishes of Madrid’s political class.

    Catalans might justifiably wonder whether their national friendship with Castile can withstand the failure of mainstream media and television to hold its government to account, and provide a reasonable witness to the events. To compare Catalan separatists to Alternative fur Deutschland is a gross distortion.

    How has this all came to pass? We are living in a European Union which guarantees free movement of labour and capital, and Spain has been a democracy for over forty years. There are certainly heirs of Franco who want to impose linguistic and religious homogeneity on the rest of the country. Individuals with connections to the lay Catholic organisation Opus Dei exert what many consider an unhealthy influence over the Spanish cabinet, but the PP holds power without a majority in the Cortes.

    We appear to be witnessing a sophisticated distortion of reality, where crucial components of the media have been co-opted into serving the interests of a governing elite now mired in economic scandals. This is not to say that the Spanish media is a monolith: reports continue to emanate from sources including El Pais furnishing evidence of government impropriety. But when it comes to reporting on the burning issue of Catalonia keen observers claim that balance has been lost.

    One disturbing hypothesis is that polarisation is actually Spanish government policy, permitting a slide towards centralised, autocratic rule. As A. Reynolds put it in his recent article for Cassandra Voices: ‘Spain remains to a large extent a liberal democracy, but there’s an unsettling authoritarian trend, which is being orchestrated by its main conservative party.’

    Oppression of Catalan separatism is part of a wider draconian policy, extinguishing civil liberties, aimed at perceived enemies of the people. This month the Spanish Supreme Court upheld a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence against rapper Valtonyc, for lyrics deemed offensive to the monarchy and supportive of terrorism. The court’s contention that the lyrics of the Mallorcan native represented an incitement to terrorism are implausible, especially considering he refers to the Basque separatists ETA, who have been in permanent ceasefire since 2011. The wholly disproportionate sentence – the same week a man was sentenced to two years for paedophilia in Palma – simply draws attention to his songs, one of which has had almost a million hits on YouTube in the wake of this latest miscarriage of justice.

    Enrique López, one of the judges in the 2014 High Court case, offered the following rational for his decision: salvar la democracia de sus enemigos, aunque sea sobre la base de redefinirla como disciplinada o autoritaria: ‘to save democracy from its enemies, it may be necessary to redefine it as disciplined or authoritarian’. He was referring to the German concept of Streitbare Demokratie, ‘well fortified’, or ‘battlesome democracy’, used to justify extreme measures against extremists who wish to dismantle democratic institutions. To compare Catalan nationalism to Neo-Nazisism is another perverse distortion, legitimating the most appalling excesses. If Lopez’s approach was accepted through history, the world would still be made up of empires.

    Ironically López himself was forced to resign from the bench in 2014 after being found driving with blood alcohol levels six times above the legal limit. He is aligned with the PP, and now laments that separatists parties cannot be banned.

    The playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by nationalist militia in 1936. By then he had written his eerily-familiar ‘Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard‘ (1928) which begins:

    The horses are black.
    The horseshoes are black.
    Stains of ink and wax
    shine on their capes.
    They have leaden skulls
    so they do not cry.
    With souls of leather
    they ride down the road.
    Hunchbacked and nocturnal
    wherever they move, they command
    silences of dark rubber
    and fears of fine sand.
    They pass, if they wish to pass,
    and hidden in their heads
    is a vague astronomy
    of indefinite pistols.
    …
    (translated by A.S. Klyne)

    No doubt these words of Lorca still offend certain Spanish sensibilities, and could conceivably land a poet in jail if he wrote them today.

    Furthermore, an exhibition called ‘Political prisoners in Spain’ has recently been shut down by the authorities in Madrid, while a book about cocaine smuggling in Galicia which mentions a PP mayor originally convicted for involvement, but absolved on appeal, has been banned.

    As with Valtonyc’s case, keeping these subjects from public attention does not appear to have been the primary purpose of the censorship. We live in the age of the Internet. The BBC exhibited the photos to the world and the book was soon selling ten copies a minute on Amazon. It seems to be part of a wider policy of drawing battle lines between patriots and traitors, which takes the sting out of ongoing prosecutions imperiling the PP elite.

    Financial irregularities also feature in the affairs of politicians from the PDeCAT, the centre-right party of the Catalan bourgeois, and historical ally of the PP, who are late converts to the independence cause. But the number of PP politicians that have been investigated for corruption in recent times is staggering. This includes a scandal involving a large number of high level PP politicians in Valencia in 2016.

    Notably, in this region, neighbouring Catalonia, Valencian, a dialect of Catalan, is widely spoken. The kingdom of Valencia was historically within the realm of Aragon. Although Valencians have always been wary of the big brother in Barcelona, a discredited PP could leave room for the ‘contagion’ of Catalan separatism to spread. The distraction of a confrontation with Barcelona takes the heat off corrupt officials.

    It is also instructive that the Valencia branch of the Popular Party (PP), under the leadership of one-time premier Francisco Camps, played a determining role in ensuring Mariano Rajoy’s survival at the helm of the national party in 2008, when he lost a general election for a second time to the Socialist Party. Ever since, Rajoy has offered stout defence to a supporter who was at the helm of a region that became a byword for corruption.

    Corruption is far from being restricted to the provinces. The Madrid branch of the PP was raided in connection with the Púnica ring, also in 2016, which is alleged to have unlawfully awarded as much as €250 million in public contracts to beneficiaries in return for bribes. The origin of the Operation Púnica investigation was the discovery of Swiss bank accounts held by, among others Francisco Granados, once the right-hand man to Esperanza Aguirre the former President of the Madrid region. It is telling that Swiss banking authorities, rather than an internal investigation, reported: ‘aggravated money-laundering operations’. This compelled an investigation leading to a trial in 2017 involving 37 suspects.

    Franscisco Correa, a businessman at the heart of the scandal allegedly liked to be known as ‘Don Vito’, after the character played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, making his protestation that he did not realise he was committing any crimes ring rather hollow.

    The confrontation between Barcelona and Madrid has been brewing for some time in a football-obsessed country. Rather than acting as a lightening rod to diffuse tensions, the morbo rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC fuels hatred. The success of Barcelona  infuriates Madridistas, and vice versa, explaining the outlandish sums both sides began to spend on players, even as the Economic Crisis was in full swing.

    It also might explain why the former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, a supporter of Catalan separatism, has been harassed by the Spanish authority. His private jet was boarded by police, apparently in search of exiled former Catalan leader Carles Puidgemont. Also, a car in which Guardiola’s ten-year-old daughter was travelling was stopped and searched by Police.

    Sides are being chosen. The apparently centrist Ciudadanos which claims to disavow nationalism is increasingly eager to assert its ‘Spanish’ credentials. The leader of that party Albert Rivera was recently photographed with a Spanish flag wristband, which was hardly an unintentional gesture. He has also expressed the uncompromising view that ‘putschists can never be part of any negotiation‘, sticking to the falsehood that separatists are violent insurrectionists. The Spanish Socialist Party have been similarly spineless, supporting the ban on the recent exhibition on political prisoners.

    Image: Hector Castells

    Spain is still coping with the legacy of the Economic Crisis, and the introduction of the euro which substantially drove up the price of living. Youth unemployment now stands at levels close to 50%, and entrenched poverty co-exists with fabulous wealth. Populist nationalism, on both sides, distracts attention from day to day concerns, cloaking the real inequities and corruption at work. But the authoritarian sentiments expressed by politicians and judges associated with the PP are especially worrying. The idea they are defending democracy represents an Orwellian inversion.

    Fellow Europeans must pay greater attention to the erosion of civil liberties and the Rule of Law in Spain, perhaps registering their disapproval by avoiding travelling and doing business with Spanish regions that support the PP. Pressure can be brought to bear on home governments to isolate the Spanish government in Europe, until negotiations begin and liberation of political prisoners occurs. Perhaps the territorial integrity of Spain can still be saved: national break-ups are rarely achieved without significant bloodshed, and often regretted afterwards. After all, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’.

    Frank Armstrong is the Content Editor of Cassandra Voices. You can find an archive of his published work here.

    Feature Image: Hector Castells

  • UK Unwritten Constitution brews Brexit Confusion

    It is necessary for him who lays and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
    Niccolo Machiavelli

    In the summer of 2007 I agreed to teach a law course to visiting American students in Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), Oxford. Preparing this, for the first time I seriously engaged with the rather paradoxical notion of an ‘unwritten’ UK constitution. I argue now that this leads to a destructive uncertainty in the wake of the Brexit Referendum.

    Oxford University is composed of thirty-eight colleges of various distinctions and reputations. Founded in 1878 as the first women’s college, LMH’s central redbrick quadrangle is an inspired recreation of French Renaissance architecture. The dreamy grounds adjoining stretch to the River Cherwell, Weeping Willows conjuring a pre-Raphaelite impression of forlorn Victorian damsels.

    The grounds of Lady Margaret Hall.

    Now accepting both genders, illustrious alumni include Benazir Bhutto, Nigella Lawson and, more incongruously, Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for Environment, and Brexiteer-in-chief. More commendably he was also the political assassin of Boris Johnson. His dismissal of expertise during the Referendum debate infuriated staunchly-Remain Oxford, and ran contrary to his alma mater’s motto ‘Souvent me Souviens’, ‘I remember often’.

    The UK legal system resembles our own, save in one crucial respect. Apart from during a brief period between 1653-57, after the English Civil War (when Oxford was a temporary Royal capital) neither England, nor the United Kingdom from 1707, has been governed under a written constitution.

    The political philosopher James Tully describes a constitution as: ‘the cluster of “supreme” or “essential” principles, rules and procedures to which other laws, institutions and governing authorities within the association are subject.’

    The absence of such an outline clearly setting out these “supreme” and “essential” principles accounts for many of the difficulties of the UK government arising from the victory of the ‘No’ side in last year’s referendum. No fixed domestic constitutional provision guides how the UK’s executive should proceed in the wake of a referendum vote. Indeed, the first such poll only took place in 1972, when a landslide vote approved UK accession to the European Community. The constitutional implications of a referendum remain unclear.

    This has put Her Majesty’s government in a state of persistent confusion. The bee in her bonnet is that decisions are vulnerable to legal challenge. It took a High Court decision last November to compel Theresa May to secure parliament’s approval to activate Article 50. In that instance the Lord Chief Justice said: ‘the most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that parliament is sovereign’.

    Parliamentary sovereignty for the moment, however, co-exists with the supremacy of European law. Moreover, eminent jurists such as Lord Bingham have also argued that the UK is also subject to a Rule of Law beyond any decision of the majority in the House of Commons, which uses a first-past-the-post electoral system that effectively excludes minority views, rubber-stamped by the House of Lords.

    Furthermore, residual powers of the monarchy reveal archaisms at the heart of the ‘unwritten’ constitution. This includes the idea of Conventions, which do not have the character of ‘hard’ law. One such is that of a reigning monarch calling on the leader of the largest party in the House of Commons to form a government. Conventions are, however, a slippery constitutional instrument, and the system relies on the sanity and decency of the monarch, who is above the law.

    In a speech on November 13th last year Brexit Secretary David Davis sought to provide bring more clarity to the issue. He said MPs in the Commons, and peers in the House of Lords, would be given an opportunity to approve any agreement with the EU, but would have no say in the case of no deal, or power to compel the government to reopen talks.

    Parliamentary sovereignty is thus seemingly upheld, though legislators are given no discretion or meaningful oversight. This division of powers between the branches of government – the executive exercising its prerogative to negotiate a treaty with foreign states before it is placed before the legislature which brings it into law – may be consistent with other political systems. But the point is that in the UK this has to be specified.

    Moreover, the constitutional status of the Good Friday Agreement is unclear; as discussions around a ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ border unfold it is worth bearing in mind that this the agreement operates as a simple act of parliament under UK law, which could be repealed by a majority, as opposed to a more durable constitutional provision in Ireland.

    An amateur sporting organisation would hardly tolerate its managing agreement and fundamental members’ entitlements to float in such fashion, and it is surely inappropriate for a modern democracy. Ancient sources such as Magna Carta are cited as formative on the UK Constitution, but without a definitive text any principles are nebulous, and ephemeral.

    There are of course advantages to constitutional flexibility, as Tom Paine’s wrote: ‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of tyrannies.’ Thus, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution ossifies the demand of a frontier society for unrestricted access to firearms. But at least the US Constitution to some degree restrains presidential excesses. And Paine also declared: ‘government without a constitution is a power without right.’

    The Irish constitution also bears anachronisms, but provides a stable managing agreement that is the hallmark of most modern democracies. The roles of the three branches of government, judiciary, executive and legislature are defined, even if, like in the UK, the absence of a clear distinction between the executive and legislature places more power than is desirable in the hands of the Taoiseach. Bunreacht na hEireann is also far simpler to amend than the US Constitution.

    The Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Crotty confirmed that any additions to European treaties should be placed before the Irish people in a referendum, rather than requiring a simple majority in Dail Eireann. This has brought considerable discomfort to the executive, especially the two referenda required to pass the Nice and Lisbon Treaties.

    But the sovereignty of the people is upheld by requiring a majority of voters to approve any constitutional realignment through a referendum. This also involves a majority in Dail voting to place any such choice before the people. Importantly, these mechanisms are all laid out clearly in the Irish Constitution.

    No such incremental approach was adopted by the UK – or most other European countries for that matter. Instead, David Cameron asked the bald question: ‘take it or leave it’. In its wake unprecedented instability reigns in a country that takes pride in its venerable institutions.

    Central to the perpetuation of this legal disorder has been the University of Oxford, which counts all post-war prime ministers among its graduates, apart from Winston Churchill, Jim Callaghan, John Major (none of whom attended university), and Scottish Gordon Brown.

    A dominant consensus has been that the ruling class knows best, delaying and stifling constitutional reforms. To justify this, conservatives point to centuries of stable government. But this has had much to do with geographic insularity, and often ruthless suppression of internal dissent.

    The Brexit crisis reveals a wider malaise – of a society in conflict with itself after a great empire has receded – now unsure of what it represents and nostalgic for a departed greatness. This awakens the need for a modern UK constitution to regulate the branches of government and enshrine fundamental rights after this inexorable Brexit. Inevitably, this will provide scope for expertise.

    Frank Armstrong is content editor of Cassandra Voices and lives in Dublin, www.frankarmstrong.ie.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini