Cassandra Voices

Category: Society

  • Mental Disharmony and the Instagram Mask

    A dim, rainy afternoon in August. This summer was not meant to be warm. We didn’t get a chance to shake our wintered souls. We lived in a sort of trapped heat, a fishbowl that had the skin of an overcast sky, blocking any escape for humidity. Sweating in the rain underneath a puffa jacket and thin t-shirt became commonplace.

    I’d like to relieve myself from the thought that my entire mood can be dictated by the weather. Perhaps I need the special lightbulbs for people who have Seasonal Affective Disorder. Four personalities, that’s not too many.

    It’s especially difficult in Ireland to live in the aftermath of what were ‘ground-breaking!’ temperatures the previous year. This was the grieving period. I talked about it to a man who takes the shuttle bus with me to work. The one who makes a point of giving parking instructions to the driver. On this day, he got on late and squeezed into the back next to me.

    ‘See, we had a scorcher last year. It’s only ever one in four.’

    ‘But it’s getting hotter everywhere in the world.’

    ‘Not at all. Climate change? I’d like to see us getting one of them heatwaves.’

    Everyone was talking about it. I eavesdropped in lifts, coffee queues, phone calls. Mournful confessions of changing weekend plans, tensed shoulders that held bags of beach towels and sun lotion, capri shorts that had been soaked on the way to the office. The weather is not small talk for us. It is of genuine concern.

    Even still, I like the soul of a wet summer. It gave me time to consider my reality and not get high off heated daydreams. For the most part, the past three months felt like an infected sleep. As I began to nod off, something would interrupt R.E.M – my cat climbing in from the window with a drunken stumble, the yawn of a midnight aeroplane, the scrapings of the mice that live underneath the floorboards, smelling the return of the cat.

    ‘I thought I’d feel happier in a couple’

    Each day, I would wake with a heavy, unrested head and eyes that couldn’t hide from the hospital yellow of corporate lighting. Living in the city, cushioned by the recent shoot up of tech companies, meant that I was never in perfect, solitary darkness. Except for inside my mind, which is not exactly the same thing as getting blackout blinds.

    Depressive moods are painfully boring for all involved. The after-dinner crying and mood swings did not attract sympathy. They were a burden. I was a burden. I don’t know who came up with the vapid phrase ‘It’s OK not to be OK,’ but it’s been circling social media like a growing tumour. It is definitely not OK not to be OK. And Instagram bloggers writing ‘You can DM me anytime!’ underneath a copy-and-paste list of helpline phone numbers will not make it any more OK.

    What’s the in-between phase? The ‘I haven’t been diagnosed and I don’t support self-diagnosis but there are depressive signs and panic attacks that erupt from some type of unnamed trauma.’ That’s where I was. It’s less dark than the darkest place. But at times, it felt pretty close. There was no fixed reason for the crying. And going through it all while someone was watching meant I had to keep making up reasons.

    ‘I’ve switched birth control, my hormones are adjusting.’

    ‘Work has been hectic. It’s sucking all the energy away for the things I want to do.’

    ‘I’m not sure if living in Dublin is best for me, what with the rent crisis, and how they treat the homeless. It’s hard to see that. Are we supposed to just step over them? Is that what this government wants?’

    I thought I’d feel happier in a couple, as a pair. There has always been two of me. One therapist mused that my feelings of incompleteness comes from my twin sister exiting the womb first.

    ‘She left you behind.’

    It’s an interesting theory. I think it was simpler than that, this time around. I wasn’t protecting my vocation. Everybody has one. Some have many. Mine is currently tied up in a book. Is it possible, I wonder, for me to become mentally sick by not maintaining a writing schedule? It can be scary to think of how much it means. How much it fills. It might be the only thing I am sure about. And I’m not even that sure.

    A billion monthly active users

    The same therapist asked what it would feel like if I changed my Instagram page from selfies to updates on the novel. Pictures of quaint cafés and abandoned cups of coffee, vlogs of chapter progress, inspirational quotes. Well, that would be all well and good if courting still existed in real life. But nowadays, the only way for people to know that you are single is through your social media profile. My friends thought I should announce my updated status like it was a news report.

    ‘It needs to be a little cryptic. Poke fun at yourself. Take a picture of a Marks and Spencer’s meal deal for one with a crying-lauging emoji. Something like wild night in.’

    ‘Seems morbid. I’m not getting divorced.’

    ‘No no, it’s endearing, it’s cute! Or you could screenshot those headphones that say Single Use Only. Underline the single part.’

    I took neither suggestion. I haven’t downloaded any dating apps: first, because I don’t want to date and secondly, because there’s no need. The last few times I’ve spoken to guys on a night out, they asked for my profile name instead of a number.

    Only recently did it occur to me that I labour under a dangerous misconception: that I have control over how people see me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this fantasy. Instagram has fuelled one billion of their monthly users to think the same – why else would we put so much effort and value into what we post?

    Of course we can control how little or how much we post, who sees what and who can message us privately. But there are many uncontrollables too. We have no say over what gets attention or the most likes, or what type of people follow us or what they are expecting. And we can’t decide who watches our weekly, hourly, half-hourly live updates. This last is the most frustrating. I currently have two thousand people watching my stories. The last time I liked someone, I caught myself scrolling those two thousand mini profile names, searching for the name I wanted. One day, I counted the lot eight times. One thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine Insta handles just to place my thumb over the one that mattered. That’s a lot of scrolling.

    ‘Orbiting’

    The best advice I have received has been from my sister, who said: ‘If someone ghosts you, don’t make it mean anything when they still watch your stories. It means absolutely nothing.’

    This was both a relief and a let-down. In case you are unaware of the term ‘ghosting’ the Merriam Webster defines it as: ‘Informal: the practice of suddenly ending all contact with a person without explanation, especially in a romantic relationship.’

    Perhaps this phenomenon has always existed. But in a dual-lens reality, where our lives are being self-documented on this billion-user app, ghosting is taking over the dating scene.

    Instagram seems to have exacerbated the ghosting epidemic by adding the option of ‘orbiting’ after ghosting. Orbiting can be explained by giving zero contact back to a person, usually in the middle of a dating spell, and then continuing to follow, watch, and ‘orbit’ over their profile. Take for example this story of a friend of mine, who was having, she fervently insists, great sex with a guy for a couple of weeks. He ghosted her in the middle of a text conversation about what film they should go and see together. He then unfollowed her but continued to watch all her stories.

    ‘So, he is searching for my name and going onto my profile just to see what I’m up to. That means something!’

    It didn’t. He was back with his ex three weeks later. He continues to orbit happily.

    ‘It seems the more you give, the less you get back’

    Let’s add another important phrase: ‘the thirst trap’. A how-to dating article from the New York Times[1] told me that I will be able to see if someone is interested in me by putting out a thirst trap – a suggestive photo, one where you look attractive or pose at an angle such that your legs appear longer than they really are; or you turn up the saturation on the image to give the illusion of a sun-kissed body. If the person takes the bait – likes it, comments, or the ultimate goal, DM’s you – then you have the answer you want.

    I think I was unknowingly sending out thirst traps the weeks before my relationship broke down. It seemed to get more likes the less clothes I wear. I don’t resent that. I’m not blaming society or anything. But I’ve learned that a couple of hundred likes for a bikini picture will not make me feel better. Any positive comments and ‘Yaaas queen’s’ are usually silenced by the fear of coming across as vacuous and self-obsessed.

    Women’s bodies have been sexualised for decades with little control or choice; it’s ironic that now that we are starting to take ownership of that sexuality on a platform that in many ways is an empowering marketplace for us, we get judged for doing so.

    Times where I was posting the thirstiest traps were also times where I felt the most depressed. The itch in me to keep up with this dual setting of virtual and real: the first where I have well-placed make-up, regularly sea swim and make vegan lasagne with homemade garlic bread, was never satisfied. It seems the more you give, the less you get back in real life. I think it’s important to question what we lose when we give so much to something that ultimately thrives off ego expression.

    Recently I posted a selfie in good lighting with the caption ‘getting that Vitamin D.’ On the same day I had to take two Xanax after an hour-long panic attack that caused me to hyperventilate and bang my head against a glass table until it swelled. It’s harder to see the hypocrisy in the moment. It’s harder still when the only person who can see the hypocrisy is yourself. Instagram allowed me to maintain an existence when I didn’t want to exist.

    ‘I go swimming without filming it’

    One of my favourite bands CocoRosie have a song called ‘The Sea is Calm’. This is how the last couple of weeks have sounded. If the Amazon forest is the earth’s lungs, then the sea is our blood. Washing us clean, restoring, renewing again. I’m out of the darkness, looking back on it like an estranged friend whose name escapes me. Hearing the soft patter of my mother’s slippers on the wooden floorboards and being coated in the damp air of salt and bamboo leaves. This saved me.

    Back at home in our lilac beachtown, I’ve found renewed love for my sisters. I didn’t think it was possible for that love to strengthen. There’s always been so much of it. I see the babies every other day, feeding their sleepy eyes with berries for breakfast; filling their cups with chocolate milk and kisses. I go swimming without filming it. The grip of Instagram has weakened.

    There was no revenge picture. I’ve stopped looking at story views. I’ve been shit at putting up pictures, just blurry videos of being stoned with my forever friends surrounded by someone’s pet cat. I am rich in love. I feel thankful for the rainy summer. Sitting inside, feeling trapped, facing darkness and finding release, that probably would never have happened if we’d had a Climate Change heatwave.

    And only two more years of shitty summers to go, then we’re onto the magical fourth.

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    [1] Valeria Safronova, ‘Instagram Is Now a Dating Platform, Too. Here’s How It Works.’, The New York Times, December 21st, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/style/instagram-thirst-traps-dating-breakups.html.

  • George

    Yesterday, I met George. Several times before I’d seen him working on my corner, where Pontchartrain Boulevard crosses Veterans Boulevard. For our part of New Orleans, he was unique. George was black, very black, and very strong. Very strong and yet very confined to a wheelchair. From a hundred feet down the street, I’ll tell you what stood out was how powerfully he propelled his chair.

    A few days before, I’d decided I would try to get to know George. Marginalized to the grassy median, he perches on its curb, and poised there, he hopes to benefit from oncoming traffic in the left lane. So approaching that corner in the far-right turning lane, I was always too far away from George.

    Over the last few years, by observation I’ve analysed the various types of our ‘corner workers’ around town. You’ll yield to the sort that wash your windshield, and find others looking for support, if you put your mind to it. I attempt to aid those in need and avoid financing the next fix for chronic alcoholics, addicts, and freeloaders. I suppose like most people, I lumped them all together, under the label ‘Bums.’

    But I learned a thing or two from my daughter. Leslie developed a kind of understanding with every panhandler on Royal Street. She regularly encountered the same characters on her daily walk home. She knew them and they knew her. Sometimes Leslie doled out the odd tip, but there was always a cordial exchange. That inspired my curiosity, and I began to chat up corner-workers. Pressing a few bucks into a palm, I’d politely inquire if I could “put a name to a face” and sometimes glean a little more about their particular challenges.

    So yesterday it was a little after 5 p.m. when I saw George on the far corner. I drove home, parked my car in our garage and took a $20 bill out of my wallet. That’s a far larger denomination than my typical handout. But by the time I walked back to the corner, George was gone. Like a flywheel, he reeled furiously back up Pontchartrain Boulevard and there was no way I would overtake him. But finally he paused at a spot I later learned to be his bus stop. And that’s where I gave him the cash. I told him my name and spent the next twenty minutes talking to George.

    He’s not tall but his barrel chest and muscular arms are topped by a big bald head. Missing a few teeth, he’s a true entrepreneur who knows his business. George has to be, because he’s got no legs.

    The right one ends just above his knee and the left is shorter. At forty-nine years of age, he’s been married to the same wife his whole life, and they have teenage children who’re doing well in school. Being on dialysis for seventeen years, he gradually lost his limbs. George lives in the 9th Ward of New Orleans where he and his wife bought their modest house years ago. He told me, ‘I wouldn’t continue if it wasn’t for my kids. I’d just be a homeless and live on the street, much easier.’

    George picks his corner work-stations carefully. Our corner sees desirable drivers coming from Lakeview, an affluent neighbourhood. The traffic light is long there. I mean it remains red for an excruciating length of time. Too bad George can only “work” the first car that stops in the left lane, as wheeling in the grass isn’t a viable option. All things considered, he said it’s worth the long trip across town from his home to here, that is, to my corner. George took the bus at 5:30pm, expecting to arrive home, with luck, by 7pm. That’s quite a commute after a day’s worth of gruelling work.  George is an exceptional individual. But I suspect everyone on the street has a story.

    The solution to homelessness and hunger is simple. We can sink these hardships in a single stroke. Let’s provide room and board for the ignored. Raise the minimum wage and those half a million people seeking shelter will be able to afford a home. We could make quite a dent in these sobering statistics for cents on the dollar. Building safe places with public baths where people can shower, and launder their clothes in a pinch, would be a cinch. Some presidential candidates propose to eliminate poverty by instituting a universal stipend for all citizens. Why? Because the expense compares favourably to the price of programmes already on offer; those outdated doles that drain our coffers.

    All we lack now is the political will, written down in black and white, up on Capitol Hill. Clearly, cost can’t be a factor, when the impact of a fairly assessed universal income tax promises a pax humana. But in the land of milk and honey, our politics are controlled by money. Money that slobbers over obstacles, when if wisely spent it will pave the way toward intelligent jobs, and deployment for the indigent. There exists plenty enough to forge a gorgeous future. For all of us. You, me and George.

    Featured Image Jacob Pynas ‘The Good Samaritan.’

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  • An Open Letter to the Irish Supreme Court in Response to the Angela Kerins Decision

    To My Fellow-Citizens in the Supreme Court,

    I write this letter because I think your decision in the Angela Kerins case creates a crisis in the government of this country. It will be critical of that decision and of some decisions of your predecessors, but please do not react to it defensively, or reject it out of hand.  Its aim is to urge you to address and cure a problem, and it invites a positive response, though it does not hide or gloss over the fact that if its arguments are right, you and your predecessors share much of the responsibility for the problem it discusses.

    The ‘Doctrine’ of Enumerated Rights

    Article 15.2.1o of our Constitution vests in the Oireachtas the sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State. The role of judges is to administer justice in courts established by law (Art 34.1) and every judge promises to uphold the Constitution and the laws (Art 34.5.1o). The Constitution you promised to uphold, obviously, is the text the Irish People adopted, enacted and gave to themselves in 1937, with any amendments made by referendum since then.

    The laws you promise to uphold can only be those enacted by the Oireachtas under its sole and exclusive power. The only limit on that power is that if the Oireachtas enacts a law that is ‘repugnant to the Constitution or any provisions thereof’, you are authorised to annul it. (Arts 15.4.1o and 34.3.2o). But since 1965 judges have put a gloss on that concept.

    The following is an attempt to describe how it operates: first, you entertain claims by Plaintiffs that they have a legal right not mentioned in the Constitution; then you label the claimed right an ‘enenumerated right’; next you deem that an ‘unenumerated right’ to be included in the text of our Constitution, though it is not, so that finally, you annul legislation incompatible with that ‘unenumerated right’, as though it had been ‘repugnant to the Constitution’ within the meaning of Article 15.4.1o.

    Undeniably, this process has produced good results. It liberated Mary McGee from a situation where she and her husband had to choose between celibacy and her probable death, because of a foolish law, with sectarian overtones, that forbade the importation or sale of contraceptives. It also contributed to partially dismantling our disgraceful ‘Direct Provision’ system, though only by ignoring the fact that (with one exception) our Constitution guarantees rights only to citizens. But it is open to criticism on the following grounds:

    1. It allows you effectively to amend our Constitution by deeming it to include provisions the Irish people did not vote for;
    2. It thereby circumvents Article 47 of our Constitution, which provides that only we, the Irish People, may amend it;
    3. Good government requires that citizens should be able to find out what the law is. Nobody can tell in advance what new ‘unenumerated right’ you judges are going to discover or what existing Statute you may annul. So, nobody can say for sure what the law is.
    4. Judges introducing new rights into our law involves two things. First, it means you repeal Statute Law enacted by the Oireachtas, as if it were repugnant to the Constitution, though it is not.  (You may label the process annulment, not repeal, but that is a legal fiction.)  Secondly, it means you make law.

    All of these are serious matters, but the fourth is the most worrying to a thoughtful citizen. Our Constitution’s primary aim is to create a democratic State, where all powers of government derive from the People (Arts 5 & 6). In order to achieve that objective, it does a number of things.

    First, it declares that all citizens are equal before the law (Art 40). Next, it requires elections to the Dáil to be by proportional representation, and provides that elections cannot be indefinitely postponed, so that the Dáil must return reasonably often to the People to renew its mandate (Art.16). Then, it ensures that the Dáil will be the dominant House of the Oireachtas (Arts 16, 23 & 24). Finally, it vests in the Oireachtas the sole and exclusive power to make laws for the State (Art 15.2).

    These Articles together constitute the machinery that delivers to the Irish People a State where all citizens are equal, all have equal rights to vote for our representatives, and to remove them if they fail to satisfy us, and those representatives are the only people who may make laws for that State. They are the machinery that delivers the democracy our Constitution promises. Any interference with that machinery undermines our democracy.

    Our Constitution says your function is to administer justice in Courts established by law (Art 34.1). But what does ‘justice’ mean? Or, to put it another way, who decides what justice requires and what it permits? Is it for you judges to define what is just and what is not, and to decide issues that come before you accordingly?

    Or does someone else decide what justice requires, and is your authority limited to administering justice, not defining it? The answer must surely be in Article 15.2, mentioned above, which vests the sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State in the Oireachtas. Clearly, neither the drafters of our Constitution nor the citizens who in 1937 voted to adopt it intended that there should be two systems of right and wrong in the State, one consisting of laws made by our elected legislators and another, identified by judges, called ‘justice,’ and superior to mere law. That would be inconsistent with the basic promise of our Constitution, that ours is to be a democratic State. It would also be absurd.

    Only one view seems tenable. The function of judges is to administer laws made by the Oireachtas in any issue that comes before them that is governed by Statute Law. If an issue comes before a judge and there is no Statute governing the facts of the case, a judge should decide it consistently with what he or she considers justice requires. If the issue is governed by Statute Law, the judge must apply the law, as he or she undertook to do when first appointed to the Bench. A message to the Oireachtas suggesting that its legislation may not be perfect and might advantageously be amended is as far as a judge would be entitled to go – and would probably be welcomed and respected by our legislators.

    Let me expand briefly on the importance of the Oireachtas. In all representative democracies the elected legislature faces the most difficult and responsible task, that of deciding what kind of society it should be, at many different and not always compatible levels, and shaping it to their blueprint by enacting legislation. If there is a hierarchy between the different organs of government, the legislative is the most important and responsible, and the others owe it deference. The primary duty of the other organs is to give effect to the decisions of the elected legislature.

    Our Constitution is the direct expression of the People’s will, so no Statute may be passed that is incompatible with it. Judges decide whether a Statute is incompatible with our Constitution, and if it is, declare that the impugned Statute is not part of our law. But the question you address must surely be: ‘Is this Statute compatible with the People’s Constitution?’ It should not be: ‘Is this Statute consistent with a right that judges think should form part of Irish law?’

    My conclusion is that since 1965, relying on a questionable obiter dictum of one of our most thoughtful judges, John Kenny in Gladys Ryan v. A.G ([1965] 1 IR 294.), judges have been acting in a way that our Constitution does not allow, and have gradually augmented your authority at the expense of the People’s elected representatives. This citizen’s response is to thank you for the benefits you have conferred on us in many cases – and to ask you to stop.

    To any suggestion that this would remove protection for human rights in Ireland, my answer is that the comprehensive European Declaration of Human Rights now forms part of our Statute law, and any future decision to extend legal protection to other rights not currently defined and protected should be made by legislators, not by judges.

    ‘The Abbeylara’ Decision

    If this letter were to discuss this decision in detail it would become intolerably long, so I will only say that neither the High Court nor your Court seems to have considered in depth the needs of the Oireachtas or its powers. To serve us well, it needs to access accurate and reliable information on topics that may call for legislative intervention. And its power to make laws must surely include power to enable itself to gather and assemble such information, and to decide how to do so. Nor, as the text of the judgments shows, did either Court show the Oireachtas much respect.

    The Angela Kerins Decision

    Your decision in Angela Kerins v. McGuinness and others ([2019] IESC 11 & 42.) has to be seen against that background. We do not need to examine Ms. Kerins’ claim except to note that it was made against members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Dáil arising from how they had spoken to her and questioned her when she attended one of their meetings.

    When the Irish people adopted our Constitution in 1937, we adopted a rule going at least as far back as the 17th century that our legislators should be answerable to their constituents and to nobody else, including judges. So we provided in Article 15 that they should be immune from legal claims for how they might do their work.

    This was not some whimsical gift to public representatives but a decision, both principled and hard-headed, that we needed to give them this immunity if they were to serve us as we wanted to be served. That is how the High Court approached Ms. Kerins’s claim, and it is worth quoting from its judgment:

    For upwards of four centuries it has been recognised in common law jurisdictions throughout the world that the courts exercise no function in relation to speech in parliament. This is fundamental to the separation of powers and is a cornerstone of constitutional democracy. The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech in parliament, not to protect parliamentarians, but the democratic process itself. The constitutional order requires that speech in parliament remain unfettered by considerations such as jurisdiction. If members of either House were constrained in their speech in the manner contended for by the applicant, the effective functioning of parliament would be impaired in a manner expressly forbidden in absolute terms by the Constitution.

    Your principal decision runs to fifty-six pages in single space typing, and its conclusion is:

    The privileges and immunities of the Oireachtas, while extensive, do not provide an absolute barrier in all circumstances to the bringing of proceedings concerning the actions of a committee of the Houses of the Oireachtas.

    The rationale for that conclusion appears on p.41, paragraph 9.27 and also on p.53, paragraph 15.2 (iii). The reason for keeping judges out of our National Parliament, obviously, is that the Oireachtas should do its work without interference by the Courts. But you insert an additional word, “undue”, before “interference”.  Obviously only judges can decide what interference would be “undue”. That word accordingly allows the judges to enter Leinster House, and adjudicate on what happens there. It negates the wording, and, more important, the intention of the Constitution.

    The Dáil as substitute defendant 

    Faced with the immunity we have conferred on our representatives, you decided that the Dáil should be held responsible for actions by its members you considered were unlawful. That decision seems to me to lack logic, for four reasons.

    First, you accept that Ms. Kerins has no right of action against T.D.s who upset her, but instead of dismissing her claim you substitute new defendants, so that she suddenly has a right of action, not against those who (she says) injured her, but against other people, who didn’t.

    Secondly, in order for one person to be legally liable for another person’s action (what lawyers call ‘vicarious liability’) that action must have been wrongful. But Article 15.13 of our Constitution forbids you to decide that the members of the PAC acted wrongfully. If there is no primary liability there can be no vicarious liability.

    Thirdly, how can the Dáil be liable in justice if some of its members acted wrongly?  If I choose an employee, offer him a job and tell him how to do it, I have responsibility for how he does his work, and may fairly be told to pay up if he injures someone while doing for me the work I hired him to do. But the Dáil does not select T.D.s and Senators. We do. Nor may it supervise or control how legislators perform their functions. That would be inconsistent with democracy. If a T.D. has done something he or she should not have, how can the Dáil be to blame for the actions of people it did not select and cannot control? Making it legally liable for their actions is inconsistent with justice as most citizens understand that word.

    Fourthly, the Dáil is composed of its members (Art 16.2.1o), so any liability you impose on it must fall on them. So your starting point must be that one-hundred-and-sixty-six T.D.s are personally liable (presumably ‘jointly and severally’) to pay any damages and costs the Courts might decide to award to Ms Kerins. But those one hundred-and-sixty-six T.D.s include the thirteen PAC members she complains of. They may not be sued, because Article 15.13 of our Constitution forbids it. So you have placed the liability on the remaining one-hundred-and-fifty-three T.D.s, who did not authorise the thirteen to do what they did, and could not stop them.

    Consequences for our democracy

    So, as I see it, you judges have entered Leinster House, against the intention of our Constitution. You now claim authority to review not only the law our legislators produce but how they do their work, again contrary to the intention of our Constitution.

    Even if you never again intervene in the legislative process, the possibility that you may do so will inevitably be in the minds of T.D.s and Senators as they go about their duties, and influence how they perform them. How can that be reconciled with ‘Separation of Powers’? To me, your Kerins decision is an attack on the democratic principles on which our Constitution is founded.  It’s as simple as that, and as serious as that.

    Confidence in the Judiciary?

    When I thought you judges exceeded your authority by applying your ‘unenumerated rights’ formula, I disapproved, but felt that many of the laws you set aside were ones we were better off without. Similarly, I disapproved of your decision in Abbeylara to interfere in how the Oireachtas informed itself so that it could legislate wisely, but did not think your restrictions would be too damaging. Where the authority of the Oireachtas was not involved, you seemed to me in general to produce sensible judgments, upholding the law.

    In some other respects I was critical: I think you failed to prevent the litigation process from becoming too slow, too verbose and too expensive, so that most of us no longer had access to justice. But I criticised you hesitantly, and respectfully. Your Kerins judgment has changed that. I see it as a direct attack on our democratic system of government. That it was unanimous frightens me. I no longer feel confidence in the body that heads our judiciary. I also suspect – fear – that as more people get to understand its implications more will be alienated.

    Looking at decisions I have mentioned in this letter, your ‘unenumerated rights’ decisions, your Abbeylara decision and now your Kerins judgment, it seems to me they have a common root: lack of respect for the Oireachtas. Members of that body, particularly the Dáil, may sometimes behave in a way that exposes them to ridicule, but the Oireachtas is – and rightly is – our sole and exclusive lawmaker, and the corner-stone of our democracy. All of us, including you, owe it respect.

    The next step should be to recognise and acknowledge the problem the Kerins decision creates, and consider how best to extricate yourselves – and the Irish people – from it. If you succeed in doing that, as I fervently hope you will, you will also have taken the first step towards restoring confidence in our judiciary.

    In ending this long letter I urge you to remember that no human institution can be perfect. We all blunder from time to time. When we err, as we must, acknowledging the error and striving to correct it is the best – indeed the only – way to earn and keep the confidence of those we serve.

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  • Dubliners Deserve Better Than Bus Connects

    Under normal circumstances, developing a bus network should confer great benefits on a city: it is cheap, quick to implement, and causes little disruption. Yet, remarkably, the BusConnects plan manages to achieve precisely the opposite effects.

    Furthermore, ever since BusConnects has been on the agenda, it has diverted public attention away from other improvements that should be ongoing. Delivering more buses with clean, non-diesel engines would be a tangible improvement that could happen without controversy, as would priority traffic lights. Instead we seem to be forging ahead with a costly megaproject, which threatens the city’s character, and ultimately may not even come about.

    Dublin has an unenviable history in terms of delivering public transport megaprojects. DART Underground is an obvious example, while the Airport Metro has been in gestation since 1966: to date the only element is a station recently built beside the Mater Hospital.

    I have repeatedly sought details as to cost of that station, by way of Access on the Information on the Environment Requests to the National Transport Authority, yet these have gone unanswered, after being initially acknowledged.

    Where megaprojects have been touted in the past, this has tended to divert progress that could more easily be made in other areas. For instance, there was little interest in getting the Phoenix Park tunnel brought into passenger use while the DART Underground project was being advanced.

    Failed megaprojects can also be incredibly costly: reports indicate that €200 million was spent on the last effort to build the Airport Metro.[i]

    The real issue is that, if realised, BusConnects will make permanent space for private motor cars. This would be achieved at the cost of the city’s built heritage and green infrastructure – including thousands of road side and privately owned trees. As such, this element appears to contravene both the Dublin City Development Plan[ii] and the EU Habitats Directive[iii].

    Thus, Objective GIO27 commits: ‘To protect trees, hedgerows or groups of trees which function as wildlife corridors or ‘stepping stones’ in accordance with Article 10 of the EU Habitats Directive.’

    While Policy SC15 seeks: ‘To recognise and promote green infrastructure and landscape as an integral part of the form and structure of the city, including streets and public spaces.’

    And Policy SC12 aims: ‘To ensure that development within or affecting Dublin’s villages protects their character.’

    It is noted that at a public meeting earlier this year in the Clayton Hotel off Leeson Street, on behalf of the National Transport Agency (NTA), Hugh Creegan, stated that plans have not yet been prepared for replacement of trees.

    Given the massive scope of the scheme, it seems essential to provide plans for what will occur after the initial destructive phase – otherwise, the plan is missing key elements, and is premature.

    Road-widening schemes for Dublin during the 1970s and 1980s were not a solution to our transport ills then – and do not provide one now.

    Areas along the inner tangent such as Summerhill, Bridgefoot Street, and Christchurch, are still scarred by those developments. Other areas, including both canals, were also under extreme danger – yet fortunately, the megaproject of road-widening was never realised.

    This brings us to the real question: why is a road-widening project being foisted on Dubliners, when they clearly prefer rail and tram transport to bus? Luas and DART provide end-to-end services and enhance neighbourhoods (and property values) along the routes. This is certainly not the case with road-widening schemes, which contribute noise and air pollution.

    BusConnects envisages 1,400+ compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), including the removal of many private gardens, bringing traffic closer to people’s front doors. Costs are far from clear. There is a major discrepancy between values suggested by the NTA ranging between €30,000 to €60,000 per CPO, and the potential diminution in the value of certain properties along the routes. A figure suggested for some properties has been as high as €500,000,[iv] a difference by a factor of ten.

    The assumption that bus represents better value for money does not hold true when assessed over a thirty-year time span: trams last longer and carry more people, as well as requiring fewer drivers. Moreover, road surfaces generally demand more frequent maintenance than rail tracks.

    According to an ArcGIS assessment I undertook, over 100,000 Dublin residents could have access to the Irish Rail network, if stations were opened at logical sites along the route, such as Ballyfermot, Cabra, Dublin Zoo, Croke Park, East Wall. and Dublin Ferry Port. As with the Phoenix Park tunnel being brought into use, there is no serious impediment to extending the city’s existing rail network – except for a lack of will, combined with an apparent preference for meretricious megaprojects.

    Moreover, BusConnects also effectively gets in the way of decent cycling infrastructure being developed. Although the adverts proclaim that over two hundred kilometres of cycleways are to be built as part of BusConnects, in reality that scheme has priority over the extensive cycleway plans announced five years ago by the NTA.[v] Hence cycle provision is once again put on the back burner.

    This Bus Connects plan does not represent value for money, and would destroy wildlife, diminish the built environment. It should be set aside. Dubliners deserve better than Bus Connects. The NTA are expected to make planning applications so as to develop the BusConnects scheme during 2020.

    Do you think this piece is valuable? If so, you might consider providing us with financial support via Patreon, or simply pay us a small sum directly using PayPal: admin@cassandravoices.com. Thanks for supporting independent journalism. Subscribe for free to our monthly newsletter here. 

    This piece has been composed from a submission filed with the National Transport Authority (NTA) by Ruadhán MacEoin BSc. MSc., who is a planner and urban designer. For his Master’s Degree in Richview UCD (2017), he assessed recent delivery of public transport in Dublin, and produced a thesis entitled ‘Democratic Accountability or a Speculator’s Blank Cheque: What Lessons Have Been Learned from Dublin’s Experience of Transport 21?’. In the past, MacEoin wrote for numerous publications on planning matters, including The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, and Plan Magazine. He lives and works in Dublin.

     

    [i] Hugh O’Connell, ‘Government denies €200m spent on Metro North is ‘money down the drain’’, thejournal.ie, November 11th, 2011. https://www.thejournal.ie/government-denies-e200m-spent-on-metro-north-is-money-down-the-drain-276605-Nov2011/

    [ii] ‘Dublin City Development Plan 2016-22’ http://www.dublincity.ie/main-menu-services-planning-city-development-plan/dublin-city-development-plan-2016-2022

    [iii] ‘Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora’ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A31992L0043

    [iv] Tim O’Brien, ‘South Dublin homes affected by BusConnects could get €500,000 each, resident claims’, Irish Times, March 4th, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/south-dublin-homes-affected-by-busconnects-could-get-500-000-each-resident-claims-1.3812877

    [v] Rónán Duffy, ‘These maps show the planned 2,840km of cycle routes for the greater Dublin area’, thejournal.ie, April 11th, 2014, https://www.thejournal.ie/dublin-cycling-plan-1410242-Apr2014/

  • Culchies – An Excerpt from ‘A Monk Manqué’

    In the mid-1990s Seosamh O Cuaig and I were filming a programme for TG4 in the State of Minnesota. It concerned an 1880 shipload of emigrants from Conamara.

    In the city of St. Paul we were told that the term ‘Connemara’ was a century-old Minnesota synonym for lazy. This was curious, because nobody in the 19th century could survive on the rocky garrantaí of Conamara without hard, relentless physical work. There was no dole.

    We learned that the ‘Connemara’ slander originated in 1880 when a Catholic Bishop, John Ireland, publicly blamed his financial troubles on a group of fisher-families from this area. He had taken them from their rocky fields and canvas currachs in the West of Ireland, and settled the oldest and youngest members of the families, against their will, miles from the city on the vast prairies.

    They were instructed to become farmers. For the fit and young of the same families the bishop organized jobs in the city of St. Paul. Then came the worst winter in living history with temperatures thirty below.

    The plight of those raw prairie dwellers was so desperate that they became the subject of national debate in the American Press. The Bishop, responding to WASP criticism, said they were too lazy to work. His criticisms were widely reported.

    Naturally his urban flock and his separated brethren – the Freemasons of Morris County – did not doubt his word. But the Conamara immigrants, being neither literate or English speakers, could not defend themselves in that language, had no access to the print media.

    In Spring the Bishop relented, the ‘Connemaras’ were delivered back to the city of St. Paul – which was where they had thought they were going in the first place. They made a success of their lives, one of them eventually becoming mayor of the city.

    At least one Conamara family persevered on the prairie – that of Learaí Ó Flathartha – and also thrived.  Nevertheless the slander of ‘laziness’ had persisted to this day, mainly because the immigrants could not defend themselves in English.

    ‘But,’ as Seosamh O Cuaig grimly said to me during the course of making the film, ‘I can read and I can write, in English’ Therefore we intensified our researches and the film eventually showed how these people had been used as scapegoats for the failed ambitions of the colonizing Bishop, a Republican and an entrepeneur. Helped by a laicised Bishop Shannon we detailed his predecessor’s personal ownership of the railway land awarded to him for the purposes of Catholic settlement. It seemed clear that as time was running out on his contract, Bishop Ireland used these poor people simply to buy time and fulfil his undertakings to his friends in the Railway company.

    So fraught were his financial dealings that after he died his sister, a Mother Superior, destroyed all of the personal papers that related to the incident. But the mud stuck. Two Irish-American Minnesota lawyers happily told us, on film, that their Limerick-born father had emphasized to them: ‘Make sure people know you are from Limerick, not from Conamara.’

    ‘the cash crop’

    Nearly a century after the Minnesota mess, in 1973 in Conamara I had recorded a vox populi with youngsters attending the Irish Summer Colleges in Conamara. All townies, they unanimously dismissed the place as consisting of nothing but rocks, with no attractions whatsoever. The locals, according to a few, were lazy.

    How could they have made this judgment in three weeks? Presumably they had brought that bit of baggage with them from their suburban homes. Luckily, they know a little better now and there certainly is no local resentment to the Summer College industry.

    Business is business and the modern students are referred to locally by the affectionate term ‘the cash crop’. Nevertheless, from Marx with his term ‘rural idiocy’ to Garret Fitzgerald’s opposition to Knock Airport; from John D. Sheridan’s bucolic ‘Thomasheen James’ to stand-up comics today, there is something universal in this urban contempt for rural-dwelling ‘culchies’.

    The painter Michael FarrelI would jokingly ask sculptor Eddie Delaney and myself: ‘Are you two still rotting away in Connemara?’ The perception is based sometimes on ignorance, sometimes on fear of the wild men of the West.

    A film editor whom I brought to Conamara years ago confessed to me that his ventures beyond the Pale had hitherto never brought him further than Leixlip – fifteen miles from Dublin.

    Over the years, and quite separately, I remember two old friends of mine, a journalist and an actress, saying they felt threatened in the company of people in South Conamara. In forty years I have never felt thus threatened. My friends could not explain why they felt that way. I can only speculate on the reasons.

    Dancing at the Crossroads

    First, there may be resentment at the imposition of obligatory Irish on the monoglot English-speaking population of the island. This State policy was a Dublin invention but the resentment it engendered was directed at the imagined native speakers in their ghettoes in the West, as well as at soft targets like the writer Peig Sayers, and former Taoiseach (prime minister) and President Éamon de Valera, universally known as ‘Dev’.

    The latter’s quite admirable ambitions for human beings on this island were regularly ridiculed. Incidentally, what precisely is wrong with good-looking girls and athletic young men, small local industry, and the human activity of dancing which Dev advocated?

    Whatever his faults, Dev was way ahead of E. F Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ philosophy. The small linguistic communities of the Gaeltachtaí may in the past have been a material source of resentment in that the grants the natives received were positively discriminatory and favoured Irish-speaking households. But they did not get electricity until 1956!

    The pure and simple truth of the resentment, according to research by Mairtin O Catháin, published in the Galway Advertiser, is, as Wilde said, rarely pure and never simple. O Catháin showed that substantial Gaeltacht grants – not the petty ones based on linguistic facility but the serious ones for business and enterprise –  actually benefit more the fictional ‘gaeltacht’ residents of booming suburbs such as Bearna, Moycullen, Knocknacarra and Claregalway than the actual Irish-speaking families in small villages like Cill Chiarån or Carna.

    Garnering votes from such dense English-speaking suburbs once guaranteed Fianna Fáil success in elections to such quangos as the Board of Udarås na Gaeltachta. Indeed one of that party’s proud successes was a man from Claregalway who could speak no Irish whatsoever!

    This is the pragmatic reason why the outrageously fictional extension of ‘the gaeltacht’, invented by Fine Gael’s Patrick Lindsay more than fifty years ago, could be maintained by Fianna Fáil’s clever directors of elections. The result is that the only community for which Irish is the first language gets a minimum of the kudos and all of the brickbats for speaking Irish.

    The above Mr. Lindsay actually spent his retirement as my neighbour in Conamara. He once said publicly and in my presence that he was attracted to the place by its ‘touch of savagery.’ Despite his unconscious racism, the locals drank happily with him in Tí Michael Jack’s pub.

    One can be sure that the modern version of W.B.Yeats’s freckled fisherman in Connemara cloth going to a place ‘where stone is dark under froth’ is no Irish speaker at all. He probably has a pad in Ballyconneely, Connemara where three-quarters of the houses belong to weekend visitors from Dublin and environs.

    Then there is the neo-liberal urbanite’s association of the Irish language and rural life with poverty and idiocy. There is the canard that, as in the nineteenth century, incest flourished because the roads were bad and that this resulted in a population of malformed retards.

    But a medical doctor’s RHA survey of Leitir Mealláin in 1891 – which I possess –  described this community as the healthiest and handsomest he had ever seen. The endless parade of bright and beautiful young native speakers on TG4 for more than the past decade should by now have given the lie to that perception.

    ‘Going to the Source’

    But a lie that’s big enough – as Goebbels proved – becomes the conventional wisdom. Years ago I attended a Temple Bar debate in Dublin where Dr. Terence Browne of Trinity College and Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times locked horns. In the course of it Terence Browne referred to Irish as a dead language. Fintan did not disagree.

    I had just driven up from my Béal an Daingin post office, where the staff and customers all joked and did their business in Irish. I mentioned this as evidence that the rumours of the demise of Irish might be exaggerated, and asked Terence how he could support his impression. His dismissive answer was couched in analogies to ‘dead’ Latin.

    I concluded this was not personally researched, and a second hand opinion derived from the conventional East coast urban wisdom, i.e. that Irish was a suspect badge of the unholy trinity of nationalism, Catholicism and Provo-ism.  I did not have the nerve to remind this fine scholar to take his own academic advice and ‘go to the source’, before dismissing the language.

    The source of my own experience is over forty years living and working in the only bilingual community in Ireland, whose tradition is neither narrow nor insular: it knows Boston better than Enda Kenny, and all the main cities of England better than Bertie Ahern – in other words, Conamara is made up of men and women of the world.

    Long before Sir Anthony O’ Reilly said Ireland was a great place to tog out in, but that the real game was ‘elsewhere’, the people of Conamara and rural Ireland in general were forced to explore that ‘elsewhere’. And it was not to play the gentleman’s game of rugby, but to survive their abandonment by the entrepreneurial class from whom O’Reilly sprang.

    In the time I have lived in Conamara most of my work has been devoted to countering this subconscious racism, trying to persuade Irish urbanites – including its professional gaeilgeoirs – that my rural neighbours are not lazy thugs, but the hardest-working people I ever encountered; not ‘thick’, but the most coherent and smart, bilingual community in this island.

    At a practical level, every family in Conamara could build their own house and make any repairs necessary, grow their own food, build a boat, excavate their own fuel, subtly negotiate the traps of central bureaucracy, and be on first name terms with their local and national public representatives. Such skills are pretty thin on the ground in suburbia and, when global warming intensifies, my neighbours are the kind of people from whom I will certainly be seeking survival advice.

    Reference Group Theory

    Years ago in Canada I learned the principle of reference group theory. It is better known as the pecking order, establishing who we are in relation to the echelons above and below us. Thus, Toronto English speakers look down on the French of Quebec. They both look down on the Scots of Nova Scotia who in turn look down on the Irish of Newfoundland or ‘Newfies’.

    In the US the WASPS looked down on the Irish Catholics, who looked down on the Italian Catholics. And everybody agreed that all a Polack fish was competent to do was drown. At the bottom of the heap were the Blacks and then the aboriginal native Americans.

    It was social benchmarking, each group maintaining its pecking order. Conamara is not entirely free of this. I have heard a man from An Spidéal expressing doubts about the degree of civilization of people twenty miles west of him.

    Reference group theory is not just financially and socially alive in a class-ridden society such as ours. It has deep roots in our insecurities. It emerged in Kerryman jokes, yummy mummies and SUVs, the DART accent, Ross O’Carroll Kelly and especially the terms ‘culchies’ and ‘knackers’ It is accepted as part of the natural order.

    But we are essentially social animals and have depended for our evolutionary survival not on our individual natures being red in tooth and claw, but on the social behaviour called cooperation which is designed to keep the more ugly parts of our nature under control.

    No bypasses or rat-runs

    It is a poor reflection of Western civilization that, before and since Hiroshima, the animal species most actively practising cooperation is the ant. The ruthless competitor, the profiteer at all cost, those CEOs who show a paper profit by getting rid of as many employees as possible are still our heroes, no matter how often they have revealed their feet of clay.

    Is this an argument against Market values and modern Progress? Yes, if progress and the oil that lubricates the so-called free market and our modern lifestyle mean the death of community and consequent lack of empathy with our neighbour, quite apart from the distant deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, together with the destroyed lives of 30,000 decent young Americans. Not to mention the imminent decay of our planet.

    Is there any point anymore in pleading for non-consumptive lifestyles – not to mention understanding, tolerance, respect, love your neighbour, kiss a Traveller for Christ?  Did the warnings of Mountjoy prison ex-Governor John Lonergan, or homeless children’s protector Fr. Peter McVerry have any effect?

    Did Bono and Geldof and all the NGOs make us deaf to the fact that Charity begins at home? The corporations and advertisers who make so much money from our insecurities, fears and petty snobberies have set us on a material and metaphysical road which has no bypasses or rat-runs or backwaters.

    There may be no escape from our unsustainable lifestyles and topsy-turvy values until the sea levels rise, oil runs out, the tankers grind to a stop and clean water is $100 a barrel. It will end in tears. Perhaps sooner than we think. But I am an optimist. That’s why I long ago embraced the rural life, planted trees for my six children and ten grandchildren and cut wood for my stove.

    I believe that despite all the spin-doctoring, truth will out, that we are all now aware of our responsibilities, all travellers on the road to God-knows-where, tourists in the departure lounge, mice sailing on a ship of cheese. But I’m also realistic enough to remember Dorothy Parker’s words:

    ‘O life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea / And love is a thing that can never go wrong / And I’m Queen Marie of Romania.’

    Do you think this piece is valuable? If so, you might consider providing us with financial support via Patreon, or simply pay us a small sum directly using PayPal: admin@cassandravoices.com. Thanks for supporting independent journalism. Subscribe for free to our monthly newsletter here. 

    Featured Image is of Dara Beag O Fatharta.

  • Kilbride

    SINGLE. That’s what my train ticket says. It sticks out in the rain like a young tongue between the teeth of an old machine’s slot. Besotted as I am with the tingle to mingle, naturally I snatch it whispering, ‘Thanks a lot.’

    Koreans claim a girl is gold till she’s old. Silver tarnishes on the shelf, which itself if left unvarnished will end up driftwood. There I stood, pretty petrified in Manhattan’s Meat Packing District, watching a guy with more hair plugs than spark park his Maserati. Momma was right, nothing good happens after midnight. I took flight, aspiring to retire in Gay Paree with Pinocchio the day he proposed.

    A prenuptial meal sealed the deal with the heir’s parents. In scintillating Italian, I sprinted to recite the forgettable motto printed on the spaghetti. Where There’s Barilla, There’s Home. La Mama beamed at me like we’d won the lotto. I was blotto. Not at all the polyglot who swirled in similar circles, but her only son had got a girl. She gushed with glee, ‘Si! The Barillas! You know them too?’

    In a few years, the fourth generation pasta multinational was brought to its knees by a boycott thrashing brothers Guido, Luca and Paolo for gay bashing. So maybe their branding should be Where there’s Barilla, There’s a Homo.

    Sapience and savagery ensued even as the finer points of European protocol eluded me. There were frequent free-for-alls that called for much wine and few true friends. At the end of such an evening we were down to three when I dashed out for smokes. Zooming back in to our baroque ballroom what did I find? My fidanzato in a bind. The kind that demoted me to a fag hag bragging we’d a new majordomo employed. Rome wasn’t destroyed in a year and I hear Emperor Tiberius too was queer.

    St. Theresa said, ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than those left unanswered’ and I have to agree. See, long before these cards were dealt, I felt quite at home with subcontinental husbands, you understand, none of them mine. The mostly male sales team in Mumbai joked Shiva, their divinity, would deliver me a bloke.

    Torches on the porch of a temple barely extoll the size of a drowsy leviathan yawning its jaws wide to swallow women of an ilk willing to wallow in a rainbow riot of silk. I lacked their long black hair powerfully perfumed by flowers. But no slacker, I simply slipped, tight-lipped, right into the river of dimples, hoping to elope.

    Inside the candle-lit cavern, my manicured hands slipped sandals off to bare ten professionally pale toes. Posed with new Indian skirts tied high around my thighs, I waded into the ankle deep creamy waters washing around like an albino hurricane had hit this technicolor dreamscape. Two thousand years of time telescoped before me, obscured by fragrant wreaths of incense, illuminated in the half-light. Hordes hankering for a husband, filled vessels of all shapes and size from a fountain somehow flowing with holy cow’s milk. In multiple slaphappy chapels, the onslaught slung their supernatural soup, sowing it from amorous amphorae over obliquely symbolic and cucumbersome stones.

    After a first pail, without fail, pre-filled buckets lucked into my hands. I nodded, trodding toward a line of lingams ready for anointing. Disjointed fingers pointed up at big bells dangling while juveniles jangled them. Bollywood Pollyannas tugged ropes thick as tree trunks that terminated with a thud in frayed coils on the floor. More deafening ding-dongs added their clang to the hellish cacophony of peals peppered with lusty squeals of laughter that licked the length and height of tall walls heaving with an insane Samsara sensation. I thanked the banker boys for not leaving when I stumbled out wet to the waist, in a tantric sweat, and betting on a new mantra. Marriage means never having to sell your sari.

    I’m no Mata Hari. I never intended to blend in. For better or for worse, my university decreed me a couples counselor. Landing in L.A. like a fish out of water, I was the Episcopalian shiksa slurping down sushi at a Jewish/Catholic wedding. The Zen garden variety… unique to the Hollywood Hills. Thrilled to be a bridesmaid, I saw my friend say I DO in Hebrew. Were it welded to my cupped hand, I couldn’t have held up her huppa any higher. Cross-examined about my own samurai, I had to admit he’d sent me alone. So the bona fide Freudian father of the bride took me aside and specifically advised against pacific playboys. I deployed instead to Hong Kong, toying with a ping-pong plan to wed.

    There’s no escape. Scraping the sky on the 50th floor with a harbour view, a trusting housewife in this life can’t rise above putting on the gloves. I was just dusting when I paused over a passport page busting him for distorting his age. Shorty’s I.D. reported he was ten years senior to the tall tale he’d told me. With laser-like pupils and no scruples, I skipped the sweeping. What other secret was he keeping? Deposited securely in his closet, sitting up erect, was an anatomically correct bedtime biddy. A hideous golden-haired booby trap, so real she could’ve given you the clap. Tawdry applause for the doll’s bridal veil, a vital tattle-tale on the dilapidated Japanese Dorian Gray. There comes a day when you’ve had enough. This wife-sized effigy was stuffed with promises to miss him. I LOVE YOU signed, Sue.

    I knew, unlocking the door, he’d look tired when I inquired, So um, how’s Suzanne? A man frozen with fear can suddenly show ten falsified years. He merely loosened his tie with a sigh, and started to tell the third lie. He’d tarried to marry because he never divorced! Of course, Madame Butterfly desisted to wed a polygamist. You see I was done shadow boxing and even Muhammad Ali would insist the shadow had won.

    I’ve heard it’s never as good as the first time. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there. My first proposal took place whiIst I sang a Latin cantata in the church choir. Once home, I waltzed in to a Superdome-sized quagmire. My step-mom was on the phone in a fevered pitch about somebody getting hitched. At least she hung up on the family priest before demanding, When did you last see Old Dick? I kicked off my black and white shoes. Dirty ashtray. Used glasses. The usual clues that Dick had dropped by.

    Dick was an odd duck. He puttered around muttering in the marina aboard a boat he’d been living on and fixing up for years. Said it had potential and when he was done he’d sail around the world with his battered cat for company. Alongside Dick’s vessel, Dad kept our well-loved wooden skiff. If resolutely, I saluted, Dick hadn’t computed I was jailbait cruising away most summer evenings with thirsty first mates. I rowed right out in skin tight sweaters on winter weekends too.

    The sun streaked his tousled tobacco-coloured locks all morning on deck, after which Dick lolled, smoking cigarettes he rolled in the shade. Leathery face immersed in an overdue library volume, he didn’t mind digressing when politely pressed upon. He’d don a corduroy jacket over his dirty denim and with a dab of perfume, come quick, if called to our house for a digestif. He always stayed for dinner but was equally content to stick below, as sailors say, in his boat’s galley. Carefully the thin skipper prepared cosmopolitan picnics of kippers, escargot at his own pace or a hardy foie gras, all of it from tins. Sometimes he shared them with me, as if we were lost at sea, on mismatched plates of chipped china with paper napkins. You couldn’t call it lunch or dinner, nothing definitive but something sinful in-between. Little by little I lingered, for lady fingers and caffè corretto, his crocodile eyes crinkling, without an inkling of the cardiovascular task he was about to ask.

    The flask rather empty, I gathered my step-mom not happy the sap had thought long and hard. She not so pleased he sought parental consent to make an honest woman of me and hit the high seas. The crux of it is, Old Dick was banished to Biloxi. The young psych nurse unrehearsed in this sort of mistaken urge to merge, stood her ground. There would be no more messing around. Shaken, she stirred herself a stiff drink. If I was 15, I think, no offense meant, none taken.

    Thrice wed in her own proxy war, my workaholic mother swore, ‘You’ll marry more in a minute than you can make in a lifetime.’ In my prime, I put on a skirt and flirt full throttle with a bottle to quiet my constant cogitations about a hodge-podge of wedding invitations lodged in my black mail box.

    A petty tom cat can break your heart. Yet, if you’re drawn to pawn it for spare parts you’ll like that even the town bike is recyclable, as typed in this ad sent by dear old Dad: Diamond bridal ring set $4000 Robeline, Louisiana. 14k white gold Total weight 1.5 ct. with 3 bands Size 4. Was wore for a very short time by the devil. Retail price is $8000-$9000 What I’m selling it for is negotiable. My loss is your gain.

    Let not what God has joined together be torn asunder by this blushing bard’s unbridled blunders. These undotted I’s and uncrossed T’s are rushingly written. Smitten by time spent under a lime tree, I’m tempted to see the whole world through a glass half empty. And me being not to the Manor bourne but just outside, a stone’s throw from Kilbride.

    Feature Image: © Jennifer Hahn

  • Freedom of Speech in the Facebook Age

    Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called for more stringent Internet privacy and election laws saying, ‘We need a more active role for governments and regulators.’[i] In advocating what amounts to censorship, he seems to have at least awoken to the Promethean beast he has summoned.

    It opens a dangerous vista, however, and is hypocritical for Zuckerberg to complain about hate speech, given his company provides a forum for its ventilation, while deriving vast profits off the advertising of post-truth nonsense.

    Among the essential features of any democracy is freedom of speech, without which other rights are superfluous. Woven into the fibre of the American character, Anthony Lewis described freedom of speech, which is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as ‘a search engine for the truth.’[ii] It is also enshrined in various international human rights instruments, albeit generally using more attenuated formulae.

    The scope of freedom of speech came before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Snyder v Phelps et al in 2011, which concerned the picketing by Westboro Baptist Church at the funerals of U.S. service men and women over the military’s tolerance of homosexuality.

    The Supreme Court held that the constitutional guarantees do not permit any State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action.

    In his judgement, Chief Justice Roberts indicated that:

    Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.[iii]

    In contrast the European Court of Human Rights will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial from prosecution. Similarly, that Court permits the restriction of speech on grounds of public health and morals, or order public. These are, however, malleable concepts easily manipulated by state authoritarianism. It is worth emphasising that it is the speech we most dislike and disagree with that deserves most protection. An appeal to ordre publique involves the demonization and criminalisation of those we disagree with, but our own views could one day suffer the same fate, if we speak out of turn.

    My own opinion is enough for me

    Central to speech protection is defending the rights of others to speak, even if we disagree with their point of view. In his classic formulation Oscar Wilde said, ‘I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.’

    In latter times the late Christopher Hitchens’s robustness verged on arrogance:

    My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.

    However rudely expressed, Hitchens was attesting to the importance of argument and rational disputation in an increasingly degraded intellectual climate.

    Far earlier, Francis Bacon famously equated knowledge with power; although we should be cognisant of Michel Foucault’s qualification that power determines what counts as knowledge. Thus, speech imparts knowledge, but vested interests determine and condition the parameters of acceptable discourse.

    Elsewhere, the great Ronald Dworkin went further, arguing that ‘free speech is a condition of legitimate government.’ He indicated that the universality of speech as a mode of rational discourse and scientific inquiry could act as truth-seeking counterweight to mass hysteria, negating unreason and prejudice.[iv] Moreover, Stephen Sedley, the great English judge, called it ‘the lifeblood of democracy.[v]

    Speech and words matter, as Orwell trenchantly put it: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

    In retrospect Christopher Hitchens seems to have been at the tail end of a freedom of speech tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero Orwell, and culminating in his own rich tapestry of public utterances. His final collection of essays, and summation, is entitled Arguably, which is, arguably, the most important concept to defend – producing a discourse shaped by rational argument.

    Cultural Degradation

    In an increasingly controlled and technocratic age, fearless independent criticism is being expurgated. The press is controlled by vested corporate interests, and often, in offering ‘balanced’ coverage, editors grant credibility to pure nonsense. There are two sides to every story: Creationism or Darwinism, take your pick.

    Social Media solipsism has leached into the popular press at a time when the appropriate ambit of the freedom of speech proves ever more difficult to define. In this New World Order of endless Internet chatter, character assassination, simplifications and casual defamation are the order of the day.

    The Internet may ultimately prove a force for liberation, but it puts on public display ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries, often implanted via sinister advertising. This cultural degradation is picked up by social media, which offers a forum for uninhibited cant. Zuckerberg is intervening belatedly, and to save his skin.

    The consequence are the belittling of politics and intellectual discourse – just compare the quality of the Clinton-Trump debates to those of an earlier epoch, such as Kennedy-Nixon. Similarly, the Brexit debates are conducted in a manner reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies, as opposed to the elevated Parliamentary debates preceding the decision to enter World War II.

    Post-Modernism

    Richard McKay Rorty’s observations about language having a fluid structure, which alters over time, is insightful, but can slide into abject moral relativism. The Post-Modernist argument has, in certain respects, been appropriated by the Far Right, who insist that truth is not truth, and that humans have nothing to do with climate change.

    What we are seeing is a free-for-all where all opinions are equal. Aneurin Bevin, as great an orator as Churchill, once remarked to the House of Commons that listening to a speech from Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee was, ‘like paying a visit to Woolworths: everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ Thus, to be taken seriously, one must actually have something to say.

    Great speeches should have content, while any speaker should not get carried away by his rhetoric, which often serves propagandistic purposes. This sound-bite-generation might do well to follow the cautionary words of Wittgenstein that whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.[vi] So respect for freedom of speech should not devolve to giving every clown a stage on which to perform.

    Curbing Advertising

    Whether freedom of speech protects jihadi websites handing down fatwas or exhibiting pornographic beheadings is often up for debate. Less commonly do we hear questions around protecting the population from the sponsored blathering of Trump, the Clintons or Goldman Sachs; or whether freedom of speech extends to protecting the nonsense emerging out of Fox News, which often controls the political narrative. In short, it is pie in the proverbial Sky News to argue that no credence or weight, or indeed audience, should be given to the Neo-Cons or Religious Rights, since they own many of the networks and set the agendas.

    This brings us to the vexed question of whether freedom of speech should be used to protect Internet providers. We know freedom of speech vitalises any democracy, but arguments in its favour may be deployed for nefarious ideological ends, where politically motivated advertisers frame political narratives. When Facebook accepts remuneration from political parties and online publishers in exchange for ‘boosting’ posts there is an implicit endorsement.

    In 2010, while acting as CEO, Eric Schmidt famously let slip that Google needed to secure its ‘borders’ before correcting himself to say ‘networks’,[vii] but the implication is clear that Google, and other corporations such as Facebook, act as Superpowers, which transcend national sovereignty. They then deliberately conflate freedom of speech assertions with the selling of products.

    Far less protection should be extended to commercial free speech, or the so-called freedom of the Internet, where big beasts spy and target you with advertising. Mark Zuckerberg’s call for the regulation of the Internet in fact opens an appalling vista of social control. Clearly his corporate interests are threatened by a veritable shitstorm of abuse, and never mind that Facebook has been used to manipulate voter sentiments.

    Ultimately it is up to constitutional courts, not Zuckerberg, to define the parameters of privacy. Given the storm he has unleashed, there is no way that he should be handed the role of policeman.

    I fear the information we receive from his organisation, among others, is turning us into passive nodal receptors, and permitting artificial intelligence to rewire human identity. This descends into the inevitable containment of speech, suppressing that which can be said, and even that which can be thought before it is mentioned. Or, to quote the title of a novel by Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said.

    Moreover, the fluidity of the information superhighway, enables jihadists and other extremists to find one another. This leads Cass Sunstein, the American legal scholar, to argue that the Internet contributes to group polarisation.[viii]

    Worryingly, in academia free speech is now often bound by commercial sponsors, such as the Ford Foundation. In this context of academic self-abnegation and outright ass-kissing it is worth recalling the observation of Karl Marx that there is no point, after all, speaking on Hyde Park Corner when you have nothing to eat. Empowering those without a capacity for speech to the extent of your own is a lawyer’s vocation.

    Speech and communication allow people to do good and negate bad. An understanding of the nuances and tropes of speech also leads towards untangling disinformation, lies and misrepresentations. Online commercial advertising, which often illegally targets its audiences, cannot draw on the defence of freedom of speech.

    Furthermore, there seems little point supressing so-called hate speech, while permitting post-truth circumlocutions and psycho-babble to run riot. Nonsense deserves no protection, and Mr Zuckerberg is the last person we should entrust with regulating this.

    [i] Spencer Kimball, ‘Zuckerberg backs stronger Internet privacy and election laws: ‘We need a more active role for governments’, March 30th, 2019, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/30/mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-tighter-internet-regulations-we-need-a-more-active-role-for-governments.html, accessed 10/4/19.

    [ii] Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought we Hate – A Biography of the First Amendment, New York, Basic Books, 2010.

    [iii] Snyder v Phelps 562 U.S. 443 (2011), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/562/443/, accessed 26/4/19.

    [iv] Ronald Dworkin ‘The Right to Ridicule’, March 23rd, 2006, The New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/the-right-to-ridicule/, accessed 26/4/19.

    [v] Stephen Sedley, Law and the Whirligig of Time, London, Hart Publishing, 2018.

    [vi] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractaus Logico Philoophicus, London, Keegan Paul, 1922.

    [vii] The Editorial Board, ‘There May Soon Be Three Internets. America’s Won’t Necessarily Be the Best.’, October 15th, 2018, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/opinion/internet-google-china-balkanization.html, accessed 26/4/19.

    [viii] Cass Sunstein, ‘The Law of Group Polarization’, University of Chicago Law School, John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 91, December 13th, 1999. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=199668, accessed 26/4/19.

  • A Poor Relation’s Rich Associations

    A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.
    Charles Lamb

    In 1954, when I was aged nine, my youthful uncle, aged twenty-five, returned to Ireland from what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. To a child growing up near Sligo town this was a dramatic arrival. The KLM baggage labels read, ‘B K Fitzsimons, passenger from Dacca to Dublin.’

    A retired British army major had fixed Bryan up with a three-year position as personal assistant to the managing director of an English company in the jute trade. Born in Liverpool, of Irish immigrant parents, his father had died young and his mother had returned to her native Sligo during World War II. A period of schooling as a boarder at St. Nathy’s College in Ballaghadereen had not yielded pointers to a suitable career for a student who had not shone academically, but had shown a keen interest in the good things in life, especially the company of friends.

    The regimen at St Nathy’s had not suited Bryan’s tastes or his appetite, requiring his doting mother to send weekly food parcels to supplement the standard fare. Eventually this drew a postal edict from the headmaster banning the practice. Whereupon Bryan wrote to his mother, ‘if you don’t send me food you can send John Gallagher.’ The latter person was Sligo’s foremost undertaker.

    My mother, I believe, had hoped that Bryan’s overseas posting might place a family embarrassment at a safe and permanent remove. The daughter of an impoverished widow, she had made what was seen as a socially significant marriage to a successful solicitor in the town. But BKF was back.

    Bryan lived with our family, off and on, for years. I had two fathers. He took an interest in my education and brought me on many expeditions in my father’s car. Schooling me in the manners of the remnants of the British Raj, he paid particular attention to elocution. He openly announced the hope his protégé would manifest ‘the brains of his father, and the personality of his uncle.’ A caution occasionally uttered, courtesy of Oscar Wilde, was the possibility of the reverse occurring.

    At various points in the 1950s, Bryan went on the high seas. His superior social skills and affinity for the good life helped him find a position with P&O Liners, serving as a waiter in the first class dining compartment. He seems to have been popular with crew at all levels, including the captain and upper echelon. In the course of duties, however, subservience did not come easily to him. Passengers whose dismissive demeanour implied he belonged to the lower orders met with brusque treatment. A drawling American woman who put the question, ‘What’s black pudding waiter?’, received a curt reply not designed to enhance her appetite: ‘pigs intestines madame.’ Other diners deemed ‘trouble’ by virtue of excessive demands could be pitilessly dealt with. One such had a dollop of Silver Dip added to her soup, confining her to cabin for several days, or at least that is how he recalled the episode to his amused nephews and nieces.

    Bryan returned to Sligo after such voyages with a little money in his pocket, which was quickly dispensed in socialising. Staff at the Great Southern Hotel would not have guessed this high society figure in their dining room, entertaining in grand style, was one of their own. Always at ease in company, he was, indeed, the life and soul of any party, and a considerable raconteur. His signature apparel was definitely ‘Çountry’: extrovert plaid sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers.

    After the seafaring interlude my father found clerical work for Bryan at his solicitors’ firm, dealing with insurance claims and the like. His disposition towards hilarity contrasted with the rather sombre atmosphere that had previously prevailed, and an easy telephone manner was increasingly called upon; he would develop a taste for the bustle and excitement around sittings of the District and Circuit courts.

    Along the way he decided to read for the Bar. Undeterred by a lack of savings – it was always his practice immediately to spend any money that came his way – he talked the manager of the Provincial Bank into granting him a substantial loan. I assume my father augmented that regularly over the years that followed – and there were many of those years. Bryan found it difficult to settle into a life of study, and several exams had to be repeated. Yet he had also managed to woo a doctor’s daughter – one of the most admired young women in the town – and needed to do justice to that relationship.

    After five years at boarding school myself, I caught up with Bryan in the realms of third level education in Dublin. It felt a little odd to have an uncle as a fellow law student. However, he entertained my friends enormously, always the last to leave a party and a dogmatic adherent of the ‘rounds’ system of ordering drinks.

    I even shared a flat with him at one point, which became rather a drain on my own modest student allowance. One weekend, when I too was broke, he raided the landlady’s telephone call-box, which delivered a cascade of noisy copper pennies that he transported to a pub in Ranelagh, laying fistfuls on the counter in exchange for his nightly quota of Smithwicks. In due course, I began to see a situation where I might complete my legal education leaving my familial senior behind. I therefore put the skids under him to get him to apply himself to his final exam for the Bar. My sister and I reined him in, virtually standing guard over him by night, with no drink allowed unless several hours of study had been completed.

    On the day of the exam I arrived early in the morning at his digs. To my relief he was awake and looking chipper. After a hearty breakfast I escorted him out the door whereupon we met glorious morning sunshine. He paused. I said, ‘let’s get going Bryan.’ To which he responded by throwing back his head and laughing, before sauntering down the street, in the wrong direction.

    But ‘the uncle’ was not without resources. During a later attempt at his finals, he deployed the full possibilities of emerging short-wave technology. ‘I’m wired for sound’, he confided in the run-up to his repeats, opening his coat to reveal an array of the latest electronic equipment. These would enable him to communicate with a loyal friend on the outside, who could supply answers to the questions submitted sotto voce in the cavernous dining hall of the King’s Inns.

    Indeed, he had been previously implicated in a plot designed to get an entire class of his aspiring barrister friends through oral tests for the ‘Junior Victoria Examination.’ These were administered by the fearsome Professor Fanny Moran, who charged her students with being, ‘ferociously accurate and ruthlessly precise.’ For her oral exam, students were herded into a room from which there was no means of exit, save through another room where the redoubtable Fanny lay in wait as examiner. Only after the interview were they released, one by one.

    In the interests of fairness, each student was asked the same question, which was the reason for the incarceration. Bryan, however, had by this time formed a friendship with a wireless engineer, who lent him the latest in walkie talkie sets. The scheme ensured a level playing field for all candidates, except for the first to be examined. There had to be one martyr, who was tasked with carrying news of the question to a car waiting outside the King’s Inns, from whence the message would be radioed back to the rest of the students, who could consult their textbooks for the correct answer.

    Unfortunately the first candidate misunderstood the question, which was, nonetheless, dutifully relayed to those remaining in the room. By the fourth interview Fanny Moran burst forth: ‘I don’t know why it is, but all of you seem to give the same wrong answer.’ When this frightful intelligence reached the control vehicle feverish attempts were made to regain radio contact with the rest of the candidates, who had by this stage switched the equipment off. In the course of the failed operation a barrister-tutor, later a judge of the Superior Courts, chanced to pass down Henrietta Street. Glancing at the car and its occupants, he immediately surmised the situation. ‘Lads’, he said, ‘ye have gone a long way since we used to slip five shillings to the porter to get hold of the question.’

    By fair means or foul, Bryan did receive a call to the Bar. Money, however had run out and there were debts undischarged. He went to London from time to time to replenish his coffers, returning at intervals. In the course of a visit home, my father having passed away, Bryan was called upon to give away my eldest sister. By this stage he was drinking heavily. The family exerted all manner of pressure to ensure he would be ‘in form’ to discharge this role with style and dignity.

    In spite of solemn undertakings, Bryan visited Sligo town on the morning of the wedding and returned the worse for wear. Shortly before the bridal car departed for the church he was seen grasping, not a glass of gin and tonic, but a jug. As bride and uncle linked arms in the traditional passage up the aisle one onlooker was heard to say it was unclear who was supporting who.

    In the late 1970s Bryan again took the boat to England, and effectively disappeared for some years. The family attempted to trace him, but without success. By this time I was established in corporate law practice and had occasion to visit London on business. On receiving a tip-off of an address where he might be located I managed to make contact, and arranged to meet him at my hotel.

    After consuming as many drinks as were compatible with my work assignments for the following day, I invited Bryan to share my twin-bedded room at the hotel. I had learned that he was living in cheap accommodation and had taken up casual employment as a waiter for banquets and the like. The suit and shoes he wore were the only outer garments in his possession. The following morning he asked if I would meet him again that evening, saying, ‘there’s a friend of mine I’d like you to meet.’

    Joining up, we set off towards a smart address in Chelsea, arriving at one of those elegant bijou dwellings where curtains are left undrawn, allowing passers-by to peer enviously into elegantly furnished rooms. A tall, handsome woman opened the door, and I was introduced to ‘Jane’ as ‘a friend from Ireland’; I was just glad to be wearing my business suit in this rarefied environment. Chit-chatting over a glass of Sherry in the drawing room, Bryan mentioned a connection with the politician Garrett FitzGerald, who was known to the lady. He then asked her in jest, ‘where are you taking me now?’ Jane expressed a desire to go out for dinner, so we made our way to ‘The Gay Hussar’ restaurant in Soho.

    Settled at a comfortable table, the ordering complete, Bryan looked at our guest (mine really – it was obvious who was going to foot the bill), and in a most sympathetic tone said, ‘my dear, you look tired.’ ‘Well I am’, she replied, ‘I have been in the house all day.’ I had a momentary vision of her bent for hours over domestic tasks. Then it twigged, as I recalled an invitation card addressed to one ‘Jane Ewart-Biggs’ lying on her mantelpiece. ‘The House’’ I realized, was the House of Lords, and this was the wife of the former British Ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, assassinated by the IRA in Dublin in 1976.

    Bryan confided to me afterwards that he had written a letter to the grieving widow to express his abject shame at what his countrymen had done. He further added that that if she was ever in need of company of an evening he would be glad to give what comfort he could offer, to which she had responded.

    Having been run to ground in this way, the family resolved to repatriate him and provide some level of support. A little house was purchased on the edge of Sligo town. My then circumstances enabled me to pay him a modest stipend to provide for his basic needs. Banking systems had advanced sufficiently to allow an account to be programmed so that a maximum amount could be withdrawn every week, thereby avoiding splurges when the monthly transfer arrived in the account.

    From this base Bryan attempted to develop a legal practice. A number of solicitors in the town were willing to pass undemanding District or Circuit Court cases his way, and he was said to be impressive on his feet. Where a case demanded a greater level of legal knowledge, he would post the papers to me in Dublin and I would endeavour, with the help of my office library, to ghost the sort of reply that I hoped would meet the satisfaction of his clients. Bryan ‘got by’ for a number of years pursuant to these arrangements. He also struck up a relationship with a good and loving woman, whom he had known in his youth.

    During this period, while visiting a renowned tailor from Sligo, Martin & Son, with a base on Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin, I asked whether it ever happened that a client, for example one from the U.S. – this tailor visited California regularly to take orders – failed, for whatever reason, to take delivery of a suit. I was thinking of Bryan, I explained, who was well known to the Sligo native. ‘Leave it to me’, he said.

    I heard nothing more until another family wedding came around. This time the family were taking no chances. I was to give away the bride. Bryan was, in fact, well behaved on the day. He took his place in a pew looking the proverbial million dollars in an impeccable dark suit and pink tie. I caught up with him in the bustle of the reception at the family home, and asked how he had come by such a fine suit. ‘The suit?’, he responded, ‘I thought you knew all about that!’ ‘Tell me more’, I said.

    ‘Well’, he answered, ‘I was walking down Wine Street and a head peeped out from the tailoring emporium. ‘Bryan’, a welcoming voice said, ‘there’s to be a suit for you.’ I thought to myself – this is the chance of a lifetime. I asked them to bring out the finest quality English and Italian materials available in the shop, but I didn’t like any of them so I asked for the sample books and chose another to be ordered in.’

    As I listened, my jovial mood ebbed away somewhat. Some weeks later, I called into the tailor, and it became obvious a serious breakdown in communication had occurred. We agreed a settlement satisfactory to neither of us.

    A short time after these events, Bryan, perhaps under the influence of his good woman friend, abstained from alcohol throughout the Lenten period. We had high hopes. But Easter Sunday arrived with a vengeance. After a course of pre-prandials at Austie Gillen’s pub in Rosses Point he weaved an unsteady course down the driveway to the family home. As he approached, my mother was heard to rasp, ‘here comes trouble.’ Some days later Bryan breathed his last. It was speculated that the transition from Lenten abstinence to Easter inebriation was more than his system could tolerate.

    I was in Dublin and dissolved on hearing the news. As the arrangements for the funeral proceeded, I received a call from my solicitor brother. He said the tradition had been for burial in a funerary habit, but that this was beginning to change in favour of contemporary dress. ‘He does have a fine suit’, he said, ‘but it’s barely worn.’ ‘Bury him in the suit’, I gasped.

    Footage (at about 4:40) of Bryan in that suit, with gin and tonic in hand, can be seen in this family movie shot by my fourteen-year-old nephew Ed Rice.

  • Waiting for Colonel Ghaddafi

    I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, and were bumping over scrub and dunes on an invisible track, when the realisation dawned on me.

    The convivial chat amongst my companions – an Irishman, an Englishman and my Arab interpreter – dried up, and silence filled the jeep. Suddenly it was quite clear: we were being brought out here to be shot.

    I knew  the Englishman had lied about his Public School background. Had Ghaddafi found this out and deduced he was a spy for the Brits? This was around the period Libya was supplying arms to the IRA.

    I was mixing in strange company, but my excuse was scholarship: my work on the Irish/North African connection had brought me to the regime’s attention as a person sympathetic to Islam, and who might also be sympathetic to Libya and its Leader.

    My interpreter told me that twelve months previously he had turned down an offer to become Minister for Information: ‘You don’t say No to this man, but how could I work for the regime, having seen friends hung in the public square?’

    He too had good reason to be nervous. He was the one who introduced me to the concept: ‘Bone in My Meal’ – meaning  there’s a fly in the ointment or, life is great except for one tiny thing.

    We two Irishmen could not think of any reason why they should try to get rid of us, except as awkward witnesses. On the other hand, maybe we had corrupted his aides by persuading them to smuggle our hard liquor into this strictly dry country. Worse, I had allowed one of them to polish off half my vodka (he explained that vodka didn’t leave a smell on his breath). Were they suspicious because I wrote my daily notes in the Irish language, and their regular surveillance of my room frustratingly divulged nothing?

    One morning, after crying off on an excursion, I answered a knock on the door to find three burly and embarrassed men. They carried one towel between them and pretended that was the purpose of their visit. They entered, installed the towel, and departed sheepishly.

    Perhaps I had not shown sufficient enthusiasm in the discussions about writing the Leader’s biography. Yes, it’s true. This was an exploratory visit. In preparation I had read most of the existing accounts of the man. The indigenous works were grossly sycophantic, the foreign ones mostly antagonistic, many written in British tabloid style.

    Apart from a few objective demographic and economic descriptions of the country, I found only one account, Ghadaffi’s Libya, by Jonathan Bearman, with a preface by Claudia Wright, which struck me as fair-minded.

    Perhaps I had insulted the Great Man at our first meeting when I spoke in Irish, leaving him and the interpreters upstaged until I translated my own words? I knew I was privileged. Five years earlier Kenneth Clarke, a Minister for Health representing the Thatcher Government, had hoped to meet Ghaddafi but was fobbed off with functionaries. My guides said the access granted to me was unparalleled in their experience. But I already knew flattery as the lingua franca of North Africa.

    There again, it might have been my direct question: ‘How, sir, with the absolute power at your disposal, have you not become corrupt?’ Could the interpreter have translated that as an accusation?. No, not likely, because Ghaddafi replied: ‘But I do not have absolute power. The People have it.’

    Hence the nervous silence as the jeep groaned and bucked all over the place. The military man seemed unsure of his path: he constantly peered around into the blackness, and occasionally up into the dark sky. I followed his glances into the dark and thought: ‘Yes, this would be a handy spot to lose four bodies.’ I had already seen the Kalashnikov resting handily on the floor beside him.

    The driver suddenly jammed on the brakes. ‘This is it’, I thought. But all he did was get on the radio, and apparently ask for directions.

    We resumed our helter skelter ride, and an hour later saw lights across the scrub. A circle of car headlamps greeted us. Should we be relieved, or was this to be some kind of show trial and execution?

    At the far side of the circle stood a figure straight out of Sigmund Romberg’s 1926 Broadway Musical ‘Desert Song’: a tall sheikh in flowing robes.

    I have to confess that my first ever ‘encounter ‘ with North Africans was in a musical comedy in which I sang and acted in 1961, and in which I was described by the music critic of the Irish Times, the late Charles Acton, as ‘the only unconvincing character on stage’; a comment which fortuitously  saved me from making a greater fool of myself in the theatre for the rest of my life. This did not, of course, prevent me from exposing my inadequacies in other areas.

    A quarter of a century later Acton penned an enthusiastic endorsement of my Atlantean speculations, saying he was entirely convinced of an Irish-Bedouin musical connection. We never met.

    The real Sheikh who now faced me was Ghaddafi. I realised this was his answer to my question about avoidance of corruption: the implication was that he was at heart a Bedouin, a man of the desert. The utter cleanliness of the desert kept man pure.

    He answered my first question – about Bedouin incorruptibility – by handing me a jackrabbit and a pigeon which, to judge by their warmth and the tiny pulse I could still feel in the rabbit, were only recently sacrificed. These gifts did not reassure me.

    I thought I might as well get a photograph and sought his permission. He gestured to his Bedouin costume and half-grinned: ‘If they see me dressed like this they will certainly say I am a terrorist.’

    A rug was spread on which we sat, in front of a small fire. Our host lowered himself onto a stool, deftly slipped into place by an armed female bodyguard, one of his so-called ‘revolutionary nuns.’ He did not even glance behind him. ‘Now that’, I thought, ‘is the confidence of power’. She also draped a cloak around his shoulders and made sure we kept a respectful distance. Then, of all things, he poured us each a cup of tea.

    In an effort to avoid staring, I ventured that in his youth in the desert he must have often drunk tea round a fire like this. ‘No’, he said. ‘We did not have the luxury of tea in those days.’

    That put me in my privileged Western place. Conversation with this man had not been easy. Perhaps he just wanted to be stared at.

    Then I had an inspiration: I remembered that the feast of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac was imminent. It had seemed to me that Ghaddafi’s father was sparsely mentioned in accounts of his life – even though the father lived to the age of ninety-five – whereas the Leader’s mother was very prominent in despatches. ‘Ah-ha’, thought I, ‘maybe there’s something Oedipal in the background’.

    ‘I wonder’, I said, ‘about Abraham and Isaac and your relationship with your own father’.

    ‘I share your wondering’, he said and refilled my cup.

    No more questions for the moment, your honour.

    The Englishman referred to an alleged whipping episode of Arab boys by the Brits in Egypt. He asked whether this had fuelled the Leader’s anger.

    ‘Not especially’, he replied, ‘I saw all of humanity being whipped, I saw cruelty towards humanity everywhere.’

    I realised this man should have been a film director. He did in fact finance the epic ‘Lion of the Desert’, at a time when oil revenue was unparalleled. His four months of army training in England were largely spent at Beaconsfield – now the location of the National Film School. The elaborate scenario he had set up for us was a masterpiece of wide-screen cinema. Only the dialogue needed a little polishing. We were flattered at the show put on for us but, needless to say, were, quite literally,  a captive audience out there in the desert.

    There was a certain amount of polite conversation which did not last long. My fellow Irishman made a reference to Samuel Becket, quoting the phrase ‘Imagination dead Imagine’, which resulted in blank looks all round. I’m still not quite sure what his point was.

    I enquired, fairly disingenuously, whether Mr. Ghaddafi saw himself as a kind of philosopher king in the Socratic mould. I forget the answer, if he gave one at all. The conversation was desultory. What must he have thought of these idiot Irishmen who spoke of literature and philosophy as if they were keys to understanding life’s great mysteries?

    In a practical tone, Ghaddafi referred to a letter he had written to Kurt Waldheim about Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikers. I mentioned the book Ten Men Dead by David Beresford and Peter Maas, and he asked me to send him a copy. I never sent it.

    After perhaps a half-hour he stood up. The conversation petered out. Our minds, I suspect, were running on parallel tracks miles apart, and consequently doomed never to meet. He seemed to be satisfied he had made his general point: that the ascetic life of a desert Bedouin was the ideal on which to base one’s life and society. Mind you, the fancy suit, possibly Armani, that peeped out from under his desert robes slightly undermined the homily.

    A large dormobile drove up. The Leader rose, shook hands, vanished into its interior and off it trundled into the blackness. Our guide explained that the Leader suffered from some arthritic condition; hence the dormobile. I was assured that I would have at least sixteen – a figure plucked out of the air –  meetings with the man, and that if the biography was successful I would be commissioned to make a film of his life with an unlimited budget. With these dreams of grandeur we were left to face the uncomfortable ride home across the scrubland. At least we were still alive.

    It wasn’t the end.

    On the way back a couple of jackrabbits were trapped in the corridor of our headlights. Our driver  stopped the jeep suddenly, grabbed his rifle and leaped from the vehicle. Laughing, he began blasting away at the terrified animals. It was as if he was relieving the tension of the past few hours.  He missed. I got out to stretch my legs and he offered me the rifle. I declined, much to his surprise.

    We slept uncertainly that night wondering what other scenarios Mr. Ghaddafi had in store for us.

    ********

    Some months later in the Crane Bar in Galway I met five American students bound for London to catch a PanAm flight back to New York, and their University in Syracuse. I admit this may be hindsight, but even in the presence of my lively two-year-old, they seemed unusually subdued for young people. I don’t believe in premonitions. Maybe they were just worn out with travel.

    A couple of days later I heard about the horror of the plane crash in Lockerbie, Scotland. The news bulletin said many of the passenger were students from Syracuse University in New York. When it emerged that a bomb was the cause, the finger was pointed at Libya.

    I did not refer publicly to my encounters with Ghaddafi until much later. I feared my musings might endanger the people who confided in me there –  despite their urgings at the time to tell the world. I hope it is safe for them now if I mention in passing that one of them brought me to a beach in Cyrenaica and said: ‘When you go home, tell the Americans that this is the easiest place to invade.’ Not far away was a place called Tobruk, which even I had heard of.

    Interesting things happen to me in North Africa.

    All images (c) Bob Quinn.

  • The Secret Model – Subtle Complaints

    Entering the dragon’s den

    I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are never ‘women’, always ‘girls’ – most likely because no grown-up woman would tolerate the treatment we endure on a daily basis.

    I sit down on one of the few cheap chairs propped up at the back of the room, next to the other girls. Most idly scroll on their phones, knowing they have time on their hands, because this is not a regular casting. This is a casting with the dragon.

    The dragon, among the most feared casting directors in the fashion world, is responsible for the booking of models for clients like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga and Jil Sander. She got into hot water in 2017, when it came to public attention that before Paris Fashion Week she had locked one hundred and fifty models in a dark stairwell while she went out for lunch.[i]

    Though not well received, the conduct was insufficiently reprehensible for her to lose a seat on fashion’s Mount Olympus once and for all. A rap on the knuckle and the incident was soon forgiven, though certainly not forgotten by the models left in the cold stairwell for up to three hours – a duration the dragon still denies.

    At the end of the room someone has pushed together some tables, forming a long line. Behind the tables there’s an abundance of sweating assistants typing into their MacBooks. But I am not paying attention to them, as I cannot take my eyes off the dragon, seated at the left hand side of the table. In front of her – weirdly reminding me of the feasts in Harry Potter – there lies a pile of greasy McDonalds paper bags.

    It seems sickly ironic that a woman who hires other women based on the suitability of their bodies (preferably size XXS) is unashamedly spooning an Oreo McFlurry into her mouth in front of us. Now the windowless room is beginning to fill with the smell of grease, but the dragon takes no notice of this, or of us, lurking in the back of the room.

    At this stage she seems to be enjoying herself, wise-cracking with her assistants,. The room is starting to fill up with other I models. I recognize a few of them; some I know from previous castings, others I have seen in campaigns or in magazines. There are insufficient chairs for everyone, models start to crouch on the floor. The casting was supposed to begin forty minutes ago.

    Stale sweat and make-up stains

    Suddenly there is movement. One of the assistants gets up and asks the first five girls to put their names down on a list. We are led to a small toilet and handed undergarments to put on. The assistant tells us to be quick, blushing as she says so. With few words we strip down in front of each other. We are used to it.

    My dress, black, cheaply-made nylon – the sort you might pick up at the checkout of a drug store – has undoubtedly been worn before, smelling of stale sweat and caked in make-up stains.

    The assistant returns. ‘Low ponytail’, she says, and orders us to line up – as if we are being chosen for a game of dodge ball. We walk back into the room. The McDonalds paper bags have magically disappeared. Instead there’s a list in front of the dragon. She calls my name.

    It feels odd standing in front of her; her name – taken in vain more often than not – being a staple in fashion industry gossip. Even odder is how charming she becomes once you are in front of her, and no longer a nameless model, but an actual person. Almost like a human being?

    Why we put up with it…

    I now wonder when I first became habituated to the absurdity that is the fashion industry. I remember how glamorous it all seemed at the outset – like a high school clique that I desperately wanted to be a part of – and once I had made it, I was even more desperate to remain a part of it.

    It took a while for me to realise that it is not all glamour and champagne. It demands countless hours at airports, sleepless nights in lousy hotel rooms, and blue lips from icy shooting locations.

    Latterly I no longer feel as exclusive as I once did. The features that made it so exciting to begin with are now annoying routines: constantly having your hair done becomes irritating; sitting still for hours while you are made-up causes back pain; waiting for what seem like eternities during lighting tests makes it all become a blur.

    I wonder if all so-called dream jobs crash against reality at some point. Or is it only models who are not supposed to talk about the negative sides of their profession, and who must pretend every day is glorious and lock away their mental problems?

    An insider gag is that we all want to quit, and yet here we remain. While the lows may be really low, it seems the highs are too addictive to let go of. It is all too alluring to earn a regular person’s monthly salary in the space of a day; too tempting to visit places you would otherwise never reach; too fascinating to abandon the dream.

    How can anyone who travels the world and meets people we all grew up seeing on TV complain? It seems tasteless to moan about non-sensical work conditions, when life could be so much harder.

    Most of the time models keep quiet. The only safe space for venting our annoyances seems to lie within the industry itself. Though competitors, fellow models are often the only allies we have. Every model understands the pressures, stresses, body dismorphia, loneliness and petty jealousies.

    We exchange knowing looks before pulling out phones to broadcast our fabulous life on social media. We are models after all, so we must maintain the fantasy.

    They probably all want to quit

    The casting is over within five minutes. The dragon is precious with her own time – it is ours that is of no value to her. She orders me walk in a straight line, scribbling down something on a sheet of paper. She asks me to walk again. And again. I walk up and down the room three times, the eyes of everyone in attendance following my every step.

    The dragon makes no comment, she just watches. When I am finished she asks the next girl to do the same walk, I stand with the others and watch. After the five of us have done our walk she calls me up again and takes some pictures with a 2007-esque bubble gum-coloured digital camera.

    I have met her before, at another casting in another city. She pretends to remember me when I tell her, though fails to look me in the eyes. Yet I can feel her gaze all over my body, scanning every flaw, comparing ‘it’ to the countless (and to her nameless) other bodies she has surveyed before.

    I am ordered to look left, right, chin up, chin down, profile, smile, smile with teeth, smile with less teeth, sit-down, fetch. When she has finished the examination she moves on without addressing me again. As I turn, her assistant waves me over to her. She has an amateurish spreadsheet in front of her with a set of questions.

    ‘Would you walk topless?’

    ‘Would you wear fur?’

    ‘Would you wear leather?’

    I wonder if anyone ever dares to say no to any of these questions. If so I have never heard of it. We didn’t make it this far to limit our chances by refusing anything we are offered. She ticks every category next to my name.

    Then I am free to go. I hurry back into the toilet, handing my disgusting gown over to the next girl, waiting alongside the others in the tiny room, like battery chickens at a factory farm.

    As my eyes adjust to the sunshine outside, it all seems surreal – that there are some of the most beautiful girls of Paris stuffed into a back room in a nameless shop in a nameless street. They probably all want to quit.

    ‘Roxanne Smith’ is a pseudonym, if you have stories you wish to share in confidence contact us at admin@cassandravoices.com.

    [i]Landon Peoples, ‘The Plot Thickens In The Casting Directors Vs. Models Case’, March 2nd, 2017, Refinery29, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/03/143463/balenciaga-james-scully-models-casting-drama, accessed 27/4/19.