Cassandra Voices

Category: Society

  • A User’s Guide to ‘Sail-Rail’ with Bicycle and Opportunities on the Dublin-London Route

    Sail-Rail passage between Dublin and London currently takes about eight hours – but could be slashed to under four. The emergence of what the Swede’s call ‘flight shame’ in this era of Climate Change, may motivate many to look for alternatives on what is Europe’s busiest air corridor. 

    I – Outset

    An era of climate challenge requires changes in all sectors. Among those calculated, air travel is reckoned to have one of the fastest-rising greenhouse gas emissions’ profiles – with each passenger trip disproportionately contributing to man-made climate change.[i] Accordingly, where an alternative mode is viable, it seems reasonable to consider, and indeed try this out.

    For inhabitants of Ireland, it is noteworthy that the Dublin-London air corridor is the ninth busiest in the world, and the busiest in Europe, accounting for 15,000 flights per annum.[ii] According to ‘the Man in Seat 61’ website, a trip by plane from London to Dublin produces 174.8 kilograms of CO2 emissions per passenger.[iii]

    This is not an exact science, nonetheless, with numerous passengers conveyed by Boeing 737s, which typically carry one-hundred-and-eighty passengers, a reasonable guesstimate is that this results in almost half-a-billion kilograms of CO2 emissions per annum. In contrast, as also noted by the Man in Seat 61, choosing to travel sail-rail rather than by air between the two cities brings a 71% reduction in emissions, or 46.8 kilograms of CO2 per passenger.

    In a recent flight of fancy, I decided to take a trip to London with bicycle by boat and train. This journey involved a planned detour via Oxford, but these observations apply also to the direct London trip.

    II – Preparation

    Departure times are available on the British Rail website, along with those of the ferry operators. Both Irish Ferries and Stena Line sail from Dublin ferry port to Holyhead. Irish Ferries has two early morning crossings: the first, a slightly faster ferry leaves at 7.30am – having previously departed at 8.30am – while the second, slower ferry, leaves at 8.05am. The Stena Line ferry leaves at 8.10am, and is even slower. Passengers must check-in a half-hour before departure.

    The journey time for the one-hundred-and-twenty-kilometre crossing is typically three-and-a-half hours – with the fastest currently operating taking two hours. Previously there was a faster ferry, which only took one hour forty minutes,[iv] travelling between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire, where it met Dublin’s DART rail service. Alas this is no longer operating.

    As with air travel, it is prudent to check ahead regarding weather conditions as ferry crossings can be affected, particularly the fast crossing, which may be cancelled in rough conditions; although it is extremely rare for the slower crossings to be held ashore.

    Trains departing and arriving in Holyhead do not necessarily align with the arrivals and departures of ferries. However, the ferry departing Dublin at 7.30am docks at Holyhead and connects with a service train to London – requiring a change at Chester involving a twenty-minute layover (12.15pm to 12.35pm) – with scheduled downtown arrival at 2.38pm.

    A number of differences are apparent with the experience of travelling by sail-rail, rather than by plane, on this route. An obvious drawback is the time involved; a minimum of almost eight hours – as opposed to approximately four for the equivalent by air. The journey is, nonetheless, generally less stressful, and has a lower environmental impact; nor are passengers exposed to the potentially hazardous atmosphere associated with airline travel.[v]

    Moreover, as the price is a set at a flat rate of €53/£43, increasing by small increments depending on the distance from Holyhead, which can be booked via www.thetrainline.co.uk, or the Irish Ferries or Stena Line websites up until the last minute – or even at the port itself – this may compare favourably with the cost of an air ticket between the two cities, if booked only a day or so beforehand, especially during peak periods.

    Sail-rail may thus suit a variety of people: not least families with young children; persons with heart or other health conditions; older people; and those happy to exchange more time for less stress.

    Other differences in the journey experience which may attract prospective travellers include, an absence of weight restriction on passengers’ baggage, and, in general, lesser queues at passport controls.

    While booking a sail-rail ticket is straightforward, making a bike reservation is complicated, when attempted from Ireland. In this case calling a helpline to ask an operator – seemingly unfamiliar with such a request – was required to book the bike on board the train. Contact then also had to be made with each of the train companies involved with each leg of the journey.

    Ironically, rail privatisation in the U.K. has become a bureaucrat’s dream. For persons already in the U.K., sail-rail with a bicycle is far simpler, as bike tickets can be purchased along with the rail ticket itself at any station – although, in this instance, when travelling back to Dublin from Oxford, the process resulted in a ludicrous number of about ten tickets being produced to cover each leg of the journey.

    III – Departing Dublin

    Cycling to the ferry port from Dublin city centre could be more pleasant and safer. The 3.2 kilometre route to the ferry terminals from the Point Depot was approached via Alexandra Road – rather than Tolka Road, which is much busier. Neither have cycleways, and the surface along Alexandra Road is ridged concrete that is uneven and pot-holed.

    There are also Iarnrod Eireann tracks along this route, which, alas, only convey freight rather than foot passengers – or indeed cyclists! Consequently, foot passengers generally rely on taxis or rare and relatively expensive buses – while cyclists must negotiate the Iarnrod Eireann rail tracks criss-crossing the road, as no cycle provision has been made.

    Take great care if using these roads, as there are also frequently fast-moving large articulated lorries – of the kind notorious for blind spots, and disproportionately associated with fatalities of cyclists in Dublin in recent decades.[vi]

    It is regrettable, but necessary to observe, that cyclists that consider themselves potentially more vulnerable – such as parents travelling with children – would be advised to travel by taxi along this section. Moreover, as the road is quite long and runs through industrial areas, walking is not advised.

    Upon reaching the Dublin ferry terminal, cyclists must check in at the same desk as foot passengers. Rather than walking onto the boat with one’s bicycle, however, direction was given on this occasion to cross the road and cycle up the same ramp as that used by articulated lorries and cars – albeit empty at the time.

    This adds a circuitous route of circa three hundred and fifty metres up a steep ramp, which should not pose any problems for more athletic sorts, but could be off-putting for more vulnerable cyclists. If this is a concern, the ferry company could be contacted prior to booking to allow the bike to be carried on by different means.

    IV – En Route

    On arrival at Holyhead, cyclists must wait until all cars and lorries have disembarked from the ferry. A bus then conveys all foot passengers to the ferry terminal. Bicycles must be held by the rider on what are often crowded buses, although, fortunately, it is a short ride of about three minutes. An improvement for both pedestrian and cyclist would be for an external hook to be attached to the back of the bus to convey bicycles. Or, better again, if cyclists were permitted to disembark from the ship ahead of motorized vehicles, as happens elsewhere.

    Travelling on a Sunday, regrettably the experience involved trains carrying excessive numbers of passengers. Seemingly, it is often necessary to perch in between carriages on busy routes. Unlike other jurisdictions, conditions of travel on U.K. train tickets only specify passage on board a train, rather than assurance of an actual seat. Staff seemed genuinely well-meaning and helpful, yet regrettably refreshment carts were rare, while dining cars operate only on the busiest of routes.

    British people understandably bemoan the standard of their rail services, especially considering these are among the most expensive in Europe.[vii] For Paddy going to and from London, however, the cost is far less than for a person travelling similar journeys within the UK – and tickets can be booked at a fixed price until the last minute.

    V – The Arrival

    One of the great advantages of travelling by rail instead of air is that termini are generally sited in the heart of the destination city. London is no different, where melodious station names may be familiar to many Irish people – having featured in countless ballads over the last century. And for the cyclist, the recently built network of so-called Super Cycle Highways developed across the metropolis offer a pleasant way to peruse it. This is far superior to previous provision, and allows the the often-over-crowded London Underground to be avoided.

    Buckingham Palace, London.

    VI – The Return

    The fast ferry from Holyhead leaves at 4.45pm, returning to Dublin at 7.00pm, with the latest train departing London at 12.10pm, and arriving at 4.14pm, half an hour before departure.

    On this occasion, travelling from Oxford, alas the last leg of the journey from Chester to Holyhead did not prove reliable. With the train running twenty-five minutes late, the ticket inspector helpfully offered to phone ahead – presumably via his own superior – to let Irish Ferries know the train was delayed. We proceeded ‘to make good time’, by bypassing a number of stations, which resulted in the delay being cut to ten minutes.

    Regrettably, however, on arrival at the port it emerged that the ferry had already departed. Staff stated they had not been forewarned, in which case they would would have held the boat. It is not possible to say where the communication breakdown occurred inconveniencing twenty people.

    At least a Sail-Rail ticket allows for exchange of tickets between operators, and all Irish Ferries passengers were accommodated on the Stena Line ferry departing a few hours later at 8.30pm. Stena Line are to be commended for allowing bicycles to travel for free, unlike Irish Ferries which levies a rather mean-spirited additional €10 charge each way.

    VII – Holyhead

    Unfortunately, for passengers stranded in Holyhead no lockers are apparent. These basic facilities would facilitate anyone wishing to store luggage while visiting the town. Happily, in this instance, freight was light.

    In times gone by, the gap between the joint port terminal-rail station and the town of Holyhead was notorious among foot passengers, as it required an onerous and relatively lengthy journey. Hence, the ‘Celtic Gateway’ pedestrian bridge linking the station and Market Street in the town, which opened in 2001, is a notable improvement, resulting in a journey of circa two-hundred-and-eighty metres, rather than approximately eight-hundred-and-fifty metres by road.

    Although the bridge is a distinct improvement and visually attractive, arguably it is due an upgrade. It could be covered, heated, and equipped with a travellator to entice visitors out of the station and into town. Dowdy looking tiers of terraces overlooking the harbour that greet the arriving traveller could be transformed by a colourful paint-job.

    Holyhead, one of the more deprived areas in the UK,[viii] is the shop window of Wales for Irish people, who generally otherwise travel non-stop through the principality. Unfortunately Holyhead fails to capitalise on its assets of human-scaled urban spaces with vernacular Victorian architecture, as it is car-dominated. The town also contains ruins of a Roman fortified settlement,[ix] yet sadly the closure of the local tourist office[x] will not help publicise this any time soon.

    VIII – Arrival In Dublin

    Despite departing later than originally planned, the voyage back across the Irish Sea with Stena Line was pleasantly uneventful. Disembarkation, however, after midnight means foot passengers without bicycles may rely on taxis to reach the city centre. Yet, for cyclists not only have they already their own means of carriage, but also the disembarkation process was markedly more straightforward than it had been when departing Dublin and around Holyhead – with no ramps or buses, but instead, simple disembarkation as a foot passenger carrying a bicycle as hand luggage.

    IX – Summary of Experience

    At present the journey from Dublin Port to central London using Sail-Rail takes a minimum of seven and half hours, with trains arriving in the U.K. capital just after 2.30pm. By comparison a trip by air from Dublin typically takes three and half to four hours, including boarding time at Dublin airport and the overland journey to the centre of London.

    Taking a plane seems a no-brainer for anyone but the intrepid crank or someone wishing to avoid luggage weight restrictions. It could, however, be so much better.

    X – Opportunities for Future Development

    Restoration of the high speed catamaran ferry between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead would cut journey time by twenty minutes. Separately, a high speed rail line, the HS2, is being developed between London and Liverpool, with expected journey times of just one hour twenty five minutes.[xi]

    This will leave a relatively small gap of a hundred kilometres between Liverpool and Holyhead. If this stretch is upgraded to HS2 standard so as to be a mere fifteen minutes travel time, it would bring the overall journey time between the city centres of Dublin and London to just three hours and fifty minutes (including checking-in time) – providing a serious alternative to the four hours often needed via air.

    Amidst the ongoing Brexit debate, the Irish authorities have emphasised the importance of the so-called ‘land bridge’ route via Wales and the U.K. to Dublin – yet this is in marked contrast to the silence regarding ease of conveyance for foot passengers, cyclists, or train users along the same route.

    In recent decades, numerous other European cities have been building up their high-speed rail connections, linking cities and different jurisdictions, such as Copenhagen in Denmark to Malmo in Sweden via the iconic Oresund Bridge.[xii]

    The current standard of the service from Dublin through Wales and England to London varies between local, regional, and intercity – rather than international. It is sub-optimum, with gaps, and, consequently, slower passage than is necessary.

    XI – EU Funding

    It is puzzling that little improvement is seemingly envisaged given the E.U. specifically prioritises funding for transnational infrastructure to better inter-connect Member States[xiii] – rather than projects within a single country for which far fewer funds are generally available.

    As the HS2 Project has been developing, there was the opportunity for an Anglo-Irish-Welsh bid to seek funding from the E.U. on the basis that it would improve the international corridor between London and Dublin. Naturally, it would be a prerequisite that any such bid would be include the aforementioned Liverpool-Holyhead HS2 Spur as a core component. In a best case scenario, overall project costs could be slashed for the British Exchequer – while journey times would be greatly diminished to and from Ireland.

    Inherently, this voyage should be very pleasurable – emerging out of Dublin Bay into the Irish Sea, before reaching the incredible scenery of Snowdonia, and passing beside the striking medieval and picturesque buildings of Conwy along the rail route. Passage for foot passengers and cyclists should – and could relatively easily – be encouraged. This would greatly benefit both parties, with tourism for Wales from Ireland, and with Wales offering a pleasant approach to Ireland, and the prospect of inducing more affluent tourists from Europe, and further afield.

    Indeed, cycling based ‘green tourism’ is now demonstrated to be a great opportunity for an area to develop itself.[xiv]

    Separately, given Ireland’s overall CO2 emissions’ profile, and notwithstanding Brexit, it would seem prudent for the Irish authorities to advocate for an upgraded link to Holyhead.

    It should, however, be noted that any construction using concrete releases almost a tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere from every tonne of concrete manufactured.[xv] Accordingly, the embodied energy involved would have to be taken into account in the contemplation of any such scheme.

    Therefore, the environmental cost of the construction of any tunnel between Dublin and Holyhead would probably prove prohibitive. And, based on other Irish projects, the incredibly high financial cost of €20 billion euro and upwards appears to rule out such a notion. As such, a HS2 spur and a high speed ferry appear to be the optimum improvements that could be made to the London-Dublin route.

    XII – Absence of Advocacy

    In 2015, as preparations were being advanced for HS2, a Request for Access to Environmental Information was submitted to the Irish Department of Transport, seeking a record of any correspondence with their counterparts in the U.K. as to the possibility of extending a spur from the HS2 to Holyhead.

    The response indicated that no formal correspondence had occurred. It seems unlikely there have been any developments since.

    Closer to home, regrettably there is little evidence that the approaches to Dublin’s ferry terminals will be improved for cyclists or public transport passengers any time soon.

    Stranger things have happened however: recently Irish Rail rediscovered another Dublin railway under the Phoenix Park for new use by passengers[xvi] – a move long advocated by this writer.[xvii] As such, is it unthinkable that a service could be developed along the port railway to link with the ferry terminals?

    A conceivable option would be to extend an existing Intercity or regional service that presently terminates at Heuston or Connolly to operate as far as the port; complimented by new platforms at Docklands Station. Such a scheme should not incur inordinate expense.

    As with Holyhead, an inter-terminal bus could be used for any local gaps. Hence, access by rail would be reinstated for Dubliners traveling by boat – while arriving tourist would have the option of services to destinations beyond Dublin, such as Cork, Kerry, Galway, Sligo, Waterford, or Limerick. Separately, the development of safe cycleways to the ferry terminals is long overdue. Again, this could surely be achievable at minimal cost.

    In comparison with Dublin Airport, which carries over 30 million passengers per annum,[xviii] Dublin Port only carries circa 1.5 million,[xix] where the emphasis is clearly on facilitating freight rather than foot passengers.

    Different factors are obviously at play: Dublin Port is presently best suited for foot/cycle passengers with a U.K. destination, whereas Dublin Airport obviously has global reach.

    The overall experience of passage is not the worst – perhaps a six out of ten on a good day. The withdrawal of the one-hundred-minute ferry and separately the additional charge now levied for bicycles by Irish Ferries is lamentable – as arguably was the relocation of all ferry services away from Dun Laoghaire, where previously ferry passengers had immediate access to DART and regional rail services.

    For a capital city of an island nation, conveyance to and from ferry port terminals should and could be a lot easier and safer. Whether reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or inducing ‘green tourism’, proportionally speaking, any money spent would buy little beer – yet yield great returns. With or without Brexit, the Dublin-London route will continue to be heavily used. Perhaps, one or two of the suggestions contained above may yet be considered.

    [i] Untitled, ‘Dublin-Heathrow Busiest International Route In Europe’, 21st of January, Roots Online, https://www.routesonline.com/airports/2412/dublin-airport/news/276780/dublin-heathrow-busiest-international-route-in-europe/, accessed 31/3/19.

    [ii] Untitled, ‘Dublin-Heathrow Busiest International Route In Europe’, 21st of January, Roots Online, https://www.routesonline.com/airports/2412/dublin-airport/news/276780/dublin-heathrow-busiest-international-route-in-europe/, accessed 31/3/19.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Cut your CO2 emissions by taking the train, by up to 90%…’, The Man on Seat 61, https://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm, accessed 31/3/19.

    [iv] Deirdre Falvey, ‘First Look: Dublin Swift, the new fast ferry to Holyhead’, May 14th, 2018, Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/travel/first-look-dublin-swift-the-new-fast-ferry-to-holyhead-1.3494521, accessed 31/3/19.

    [v] Arwa Lodhi and Vineetha Reddy, 5 SURPRISING HEALTH RISKS OF FLYING, Eluxe Magazine, https://eluxemagazine.com/travel/surprising-health-risks-of-flying/, accessed 31/3/19.

    [vi] Road Safety Authority, ‘Online Video Puts Cyclists and Truck Drivers in each other shoes’ 17th of June, 2011, http://www.rsa.ie/en/Utility/News/2011/Online-Video-Puts-Cyclists-and-Truck-Drivers-in-each-other-shoes/, accessed 31/3/19.

    [vii] Tom Pritchard, London Rail Fares Are the Most Expensive in Europe, Reports Bear Shitting In Woods*, August 2nd, 2017, Gizmodo, http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/08/london-rail-fares-are-the-most-expensive-in-europe-reports-bear-shitting-in-woods/, accessed 31/3/19.

    [viii] UK Local Area, Holyhead Town, http://www.uklocalarea.com/index.php?q=Holyhead+Town&wc=00NAMQ accessed 31/3/19.

    [ix] CastlesFortsBattles.co.uk, Holyhead Roman Fort, http://www.castlesfortsbattles.co.uk/north_wales/holyhead_roman_fort_watchtower.html

    [x] North Wales Tourist Information Service, website, http://www.northwales.info/Tourist_Information_Offices/Holyhead_Tourist_Information_O/holyhead_tourist_information_o.html, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xi] Liverpool City Region, website, https://www.liverpoolcityregion-ca.gov.uk/high-speed-rail-milestone/, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xii] Visit Copenhagen, website, https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/copenhagen/oresund-bridge-gdk711853, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xiii] Mobility and Transport, ‘Infrastructure – TEN-T – Connecting Europe’ European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/infrastructure_en, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xiv] Manchán Magan ’The Story Behind Ireland’s Greenway Success’, January 20th, 2018, Irish Times,  https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/travel/ireland/the-story-behind-ireland-s-greenway-success-1.3352239

    [xv] Cement CO2 Emission, globalgreenhouswarming, website, http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/cement-CO2-emissions.html, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xvi] Conor Feehan, ‘The big day is here: Phoenix Park’s 139-year-old tunnel reopens for rail commuters’, November 21st, 2016, Irish Independent, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/the-big-day-is-here-phoenix-parks-139yearold-tunnel-reopens-for-rail-commuters-35232070.html, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xvii] Ruadhán MacEoin, ‘Think tank: Radical departure for Dublin rail plan’, August 23rd, 2009, The Times, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/think-tank-radical-departure-for-dublin-rail-plan-nsth0bld0z3, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xviii] ‘Dublin Airport Sets New Passenger Record’, 15th of January, 2019, Dublin Airport website, https://www.dublinairport.com/latest-news/detail/dublin-airport-sets-new-passenger-record-2, accessed 31/3/19.

    [xix] Untitled, ‘Tourist Vehicle And Ferry Passenger Numbers Fall At Dublin Port’ October 18th, 2018, Hospitality Ireland, https://www.hospitalityireland.com/tourist-vehicle-ferry-passenger-numbers-fall-dublin-port/66470, accessed 31/3/19.

  • Spain’s Grand Inquisitors Send Out an ‘Indisputable Message’

    Repost…

    The year is 1500 and Jesus Christ returns – to the city of Seville in Spain. There he performs a sequence of miracles, whereupon he is arrested and hauled before the Grand Inquisitor, as imagined by Ivan Karamazov – a character from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

    In his infinite mercy he walked once again among men, in the same human image in which he had walked for three years among men fifteen centuries earlier.

    Surprisingly the aged Grand Inquisitor is decidedly unwelcoming to the putative messiah, warning him that ‘man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it.’ There can be no muddying of the message; this interloper cannot be permitted to renew the Christian gospel.

    He resolves to hide the true Christ’s identity from the masses, ‘for this time we shall not allow you to come to us’, and intends to burn him as a heretic. He acknowledges: ‘We shall deceive them again, for this time we shall not allow you to come to us. This deceit will constitute our suffering, for we shall have to lie.’

    The Grand Inquisitor holds those under his power in low esteem: ‘never will they able to share among themselves.’ Instead they should marvel at their rulers: ‘man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it.’

    In addition, he adds, ‘we will allow them to sin, too; they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin.’[i]

    Five centuries later in Spain, a new breed of Grand Inquisitor sits atop the judicial tree, sending out an indisputable message, insisting on the territorial unity of the state under the rule of corrupt men, who appear to see women as ‘fair game’, and where left-wing and secessionist parties are subjected to espionage and fake news stories calculated to discredit them.

    For the past year, nine Catalan leaders have been incarcerated before being tried on charges of violent rebellion for the crime of holding a peaceful independence referendum. A leaked text message from a leading Partido Popular (PP) senator claimed a proposed carve up with the Socialist government of judicial appointments, which would see the trial’s presiding judge, Manuel Marchena, being made president of the Supreme Court would allow conservative forces to dominate the judiciary ‘through the back door’.[ii] Legal experts in Spain say that a guilty verdict seems a foregone conclusion, with a draconian sentence of up to twenty years in prospect.

    Moreover, bizarrely, the Far Right party, Vox, has been permitted to act as a third ‘people’s prosecutor’ along with the public prosecutor and state’s council.[iii]

    The treatment of the Catalan leaders is in marked contrast to the leniency shown towards a group of men, coincidentally from Seville, calling themselves ‘the wolf pack’ who appear to have gang-raped a woman during San Fermin – the running of the bulls festival in Pamplona.

    In April 2018, all five were acquitted of rape, but found guilty of the lesser crime of ‘sexual abuse’. This came down to a fine point of law: as the men had not used violence to coerce the woman into the act, the crime could not technically be categorised as sexual assault, a crime which includes rape. The men were thus sentenced to nine years instead of the twenty-two to twenty-five years sought by the prosecution.

    On June 21st, however, there was another twist as the five men were released from jail on bail, pending an appeal against their sentences. In their decision, the judges said the men’s ‘loss of anonymity’ through the trial made it ‘unthinkable’ that they would attempt to flee the country or commit a similar crime.[iv] Or perhaps: “they are weak and powerless, and they will love us like children for allowing them to sin.”

    Most recently, Spain has been rocked by allegations of spying directed against the left-wing Podemos party and prominent Catalan nationalists. This surveillance was not justified by suspicion of any crime – it was simply the ruling party using the organs of state security to wage a dirty trick campaign against opposition parties. High-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry granted residency to a Venezuelan man in April 2016 in exchange for documents purporting to show the existence of offshore bank accounts belonging to its leader Pablo Iglesias and other Podemos leaders.

    Although these payments were revealed as bogus, the information was, nonetheless, circulated throughout national media, at a time when Podemos and the Socialists (PSOE) were negotiating over a possible government coalition.

    Recordings have been leaked featuring a police officer saying that whether the evidence is good or bad doesn’t matter, the only thing important is to be able to accuse Podemos of illegal party funding from Venezuela.[v] It was carried out in a way similar to how fake Swiss bank accounts were used to discredit the Catalan independence movement. In other words “We shall deceive them again, for this time we shall not allow you to come to us.”

    As the rest of Europe stares goggle-eyed at the Brexit drama, a more sinister drama is being played out on the Spanish stage, where three Grand Inquisitorial parties – the Partido Popular, Ciududanos and the Far Right newcomer, Vox, compete with one another in their vilification of Enemies of the One, True Spanish State – “so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it.”

    [i] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, London, 2004, Vintage Classics, pp.248-259

    [ii] Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene, ‘The Republic on Trial’, 19th of February, 2019, The Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/catalan-independence-trial-elections-referendum, accessed 29/4/19.

    [iii] Ibid

    [iv] Meagan Beatley, ‘The shocking rape trial that galvanised Spain’s feminists – and the far right’, April 23rd, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/23/wolf-pack-case-spain-feminism-far-right-vox, accessed 29/4/19.

    [v] Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene, ‘Assassinating Podemos’, April 11th, 2019, The Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/podemos-spying-pablo-iglesias-psoe-elections, accessed 29/4/19.

  • HEY POCKY WAY

    In the year of our Lord 2019, what remained engrained was an émigré from the hoi omphaloi of confusion and strife. The Easter in question came late on the calendar but much like the highly controversial transubstantiation, the bitter end of Holy Week started as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. In other words, all at once.

    Living in the mountains one can’t escape the effects of a full moon and my particular suburb of the Vatican that is Ireland has finally ended its unconscionable 90 year Good Friday booze ban. So there I am in the supermarket, and U2 with whom despite a vast disparity in our respective net assets, I’ve been periodically privileged to mingle, were piping over the sound system. I noticed there was a sale on vodka. So I mixed a pitcher of Bloody Mary and let the games begin. Think Joaquin Phoenix playing his role as the emperor Commodus in that movie he stole from Russell Crowe called Gladiator shouting ‘AM I NOT MERCIFUL?’

    So, I whipped up a polenta, mostly because I was craving grits and I’ll let you in on a little secret… they are and always have been one and the same. Irresistible on my second drink, just ask anyone I’ve shamelessly hit on, I stirred the pot and began to twang melancholy as Dolly, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”

    Dancing barefoot in one’s own living room provides all the benefits of a Pilates course or an extramarital affair with none of that nasty documentable collateral damage and I am nothing if not prudent in my pursuits. The solitude of sleep did not elude me, furthermore it elucidated a dream from my childhood.

    Hours before church I awoke with a lurch to the bleat of an atypical fauna for the sauna that is my beloved Big Easy. A live goat was yoked to a wagon loaded with lovingly hand decorated eggs and sticky store-bought jelly beans. From the centre of this embarrassment of riches, the obligatory bunny leaned toward me like a chocolate Tower of Pisa. Its stature notably stunted by the harsh amputation of what had been fine upstanding ears. Still partially wrapped in jewel toned tin foil, the spoiled candy was a solemn crime scene yet somehow reassuring in that its carnage by friendly fire was an annual event.

    This animal sacrifice was no trespass by a neighbouring spaniel, fancy treats foraged while we ate our porridge. No indeed, it was none other than the predictable ritual of our pedigreed bitch. The eternally fertile Irish Setter, Kathleen Haggerty O’Shane, whose thirteen pups had been hijacked under cover of darkness was addicted. Probably on account of those bags of Oreo cookies I shared with her on a regular basis.

    It was not our habit to bet if she’d get the rabbit, just when. Only then did we pause in alarm for the second act. Not charming at all in fact, while the goat, who had taken this opportunity to escape, was being confiscated by local authorities, our impeccably bred show dog’s finale included an overwhelming urge to purge her decadent sins with a roiling encore of blood and semi-digested chocolate-soiled tin regurgitated across the floor. Cave Canem.

    Years pass and now I’m an extra-cold Cava sippin’ lass livin’ ass backwards but six hours ahead of the time zone I left behind. The import tax on Champagne resigns me to Spanish bubbles for washing away my troubles with a lava-like curry. I write in a hurry because no matter how bold, the past becomes a blur and then you’re just old. It’s late and I’d hate to mention how many Mardi Gras I might’ve seen. It’s not the naughty nights that get you, but more the mournings.

    Cancer snuffed another friend on Friday. Felt like a power failure and I can’t find the phone number to report the fault. Alternatively, I’m thinking Lent put a dent in my drinking year. At least the feast of Easter promises a queer quench for that wrenching thirst.

    Easter is called Pâque in French and in Louisiana’s patois, especially around Ascension Parish like Lafayette, ‘pâque-ing’ is a verb that refers to a sort of seasonal combat. Kissing cousins bang boiled eggs that, in anticipation, were dyed on Good Friday. We bang’em until one breaks. See, that’s the loser and beware because next time, it could be you.

    If you were from Orleans Parish like me, at this stage you’d break into a funk tune by The Mighty Meters, ‘HEY POCKY WAY.’ The illustrious musician, Dr. John, explains: ‘This talk was the Indians’ own Creole language, part French, part Spanish, part Choctaw, part Yoruba, and part mystery to an outsider like me. What the first one said basically was, ‘Where yaatt, bro?’ or the like. And the second one said, ‘Everything’s oaks and herbs’ – which means everything’s cool because they had smoke lots of herbs. If the second one responded ‘No om bah way,’ then y’all had problems…

    Saw my first lambing, leaning on a doorjamb here in Wicklow. Don’t forget Joaquin, bein’ a prophet of PETA, wouldn’t have watched the wool I’d always worn being born in the dappled light of a chapel-like barn. It’s the darndest thing to recall my Crescent City slicker’s eyes finally falling on a supersized old poster of Bertie Ahern looking unconcerned. Ain’t no harm in nailing him way up there in the rarefied air, with spare farming gear. After all, Christ rhymes with heist.

    Libations risen from Malin to Mizen Head, the grateful dead will come back one day and like pearls before swine, even porcupines and protestants will line up in designer tops. The corks popped should sop every drop of the popish black pool while the so-called cool twine their way like vines exhausted by Pentecost. When the last ground seems lost, between you, me and Jesus, even he knew it’s no use hanging around.

    Amazingly, I awoke safe under a duvet in bed. Miraculous, mostly because my mandatory mid-century modern spiral staircase whose perilous design challenges both the sensual and sober, lends that compulsory edge for this over-examined life I’ve yet to deem not worth living.

    It’s dawn and smoking the last cigarette in the house, a prayer comes into my head… ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to …’ Never mind that. Take me to the river. Considering the difference between the words slaughter and laughter is a single  ‘S’, a letter of the alphabet which also sits, like a little snake, at the beginning of the word ‘sacrifice’, my advice to you is : Never let’em get your goat.

  • Early Days in RTÉ

    Back in Dublin again, I was one of thirty, all-male trainees destined to become the camera, lighting and sound operators with the new television service.  I started late, in November 1961 and found the first work ambience I had ever enjoyed. We were based in the hall of a school near Ringsend and then in a warehouse on Lower Middle Abbey Street, where we pre-recorded dramas and musical programmes for broadcast when the station would go on air.

    So began a love/hate relationship with RTÉ which, though I have been a free spirit since 1969, has endured to the present day. My early attempts to become a writer, lover, lieder singer, piano player, actor, writer, travel agent all faded away like the morning dew, sublimated into this exciting new medium. My flibbertigibbet nature – as my father described it – had paid off. He had also described it as ‘divine discontent’, which I quite liked.

    As I write, the TV station and I are sharing over a half-century of uneasy co-existence.

    I spent the first two years as a sound operator, a job whose initial glamour soon wore off. Kevin McClory, producer of the early James Bond movies, once told me that it was as a lowly microphone boom operator he first learned how to produce films. He had regularly and stealthily let his boom microphone linger above the producers’ conversations.  He learned their Machiavellian ways by eavesdropping.

    However, for me, RTÉ was far from James Bond and after two years the old demon of boredom raised its fickle head. How much longer could I endure days of cable-bashing, boom-swinging, disc-playing, the only functions for which I was qualified, having no technical insight into the mysteries of sound?

    Frustration was not alleviated by my occasional writing, which included devising and presenting a couple of radio programmes. Only concern at my parents’ likely final disillusionment postponed my certain departure.

    In the new year of 1962 we moved into Montrose, the Michael Scott-designed television studios in Donnybrook. The place was soon named ‘fairyhouse’ after the alleged number of homosexuals employed. The term ‘gay’ had not yet been appropriated by that lobby. I could identify only a very few, among them Hilton Edwards, Head of Drama  and Alpho O’Reilly, Head of Design. Alpho made no secret of his revulsion at the first appearance of finely-contoured mini-skirts in the canteen and corridors. I am still acquainted with the two first, magnificently-thighed girls who bravely wore them. Alpho disappeared one day and neither he nor his car were ever found.

    There was also a popular young floor manager named J. whose wit was legendary. Once he was unlucky enough to hire a taxi driver who was openly ‘homophobic’ – years before that word was coined for queer-basher. It was a rainy night and J. caused the driver to search endlessly for an address. Finally when the destination was found and J. alighted, he left his umbrella on the back seat. The driver thrust it at him with the farewell: ‘Hey Fairy! Don’t forget your wand.’

    Jeremy clutched his property, pointed it at the driver and said: ‘Turn to shite.’

    The rest of us were boringly straight. But we had fun. Our coming-of age-occasion was when we dared have a drinking party on Good Friday when all pubs were closed. It was the initiative of Tom Mack, a fellow worker in the sound department who regaled us with tales of his enviable, and probably imaginary, sex life. Reality caught up with Tom: he was dismissed for sexually harassing a make up girl in a dressing room.

    James Plunkett once described the RTÉ organisation to me as ‘compassionate’. He was referring to the organisation’s capacity for forgiving those who succumbed to alcoholism and other social diseases. But Tom Mack’s crime was sexual, which was beyond the pale. It was officially described in Civil Service terms as ‘moral turpitude’, and he ran away to England with the wife of the Head of Graphics. For an inhibited colleague like me, what was there not to admire about him? I was bored and desperate.

    Out of the blue the cavalry came to my rescue. RTÉ management offered me simultaneously a choice of three jobs: production assistant for commercial radio programmes (which, with the hindsight of my detestation of consumerism, is ironic); trainee newsreader was the second offer – Mike Murphy was a fellow trainee. This was the initial path trod by most of the first batch of Irish TV personalities: Bart Bastable, Gay Byrne, Andy O’Mahony, Frank Hall, Bunny Carr, Terry Wogan et alia.  I now murmur ‘Whew!’ at the narrow escape I had from the delusions of minor celebrity. But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it to me: ‘I could sure do with the money’.

    The third offer was everyone’s dream job at the time: TV producer. It did not take any heart-searching to choose it. Looking back on my various jobs, I wonder how employers were blind to my chronic unemployability. Perhaps all they saw was malleable innocence and may have mistaken it for humility. If you can fake that you can fake anything.

    I spent five busy years as a producer/director, working with some of the above talented people in programmes which included the original Late Late Show. But mainly I made documentary films, which enabled me to escape the straitjacket of a studio

    In our youth in the Coffee Inn in Duke St. the late Nuala Ó Faoláin said to me: ‘You have unresolved adolescent complexes’. I had unwisely revealed my private thoughts to a journalist – worse, to a sophisticate. Twenty years later in West Virginia I met Nuala and happily told her I still had the same complexes, but now found them a useful spur to creativity. ‘Lucky you’ she said.

    As I had recently produced a fictional memoir, Smokey Hollow, she asked my advice about doing the same. I could offer nothing except the jaded: apply thy bottom to a chair and start writing. Not long afterwards she began her acclaimed autobiography Are You Somebody? We had each learned that personal versions are the only antidote to objective reality. However, I was taken aback by her portrait of her father, bon viveur journalist Terry O’Sullivan, as the villain of her upbringing. He, a music lover, had once rung me in studio after a music programme which I had devised for Radio Eireann and wistfully said: ‘I wish I’d made that.’ I never met the man in person but it softened the feminist version of him later portrayed in Nuala’s book.

    Ironically, Father Romould Dodd – another Dominican – head of Religious Programmes asked the powers-that-be in RTÉ that I, sceptic, agnostic, non-believer, take your pick, be appointed to his non-existent department. Thereafter, I could make films on any subject I liked. I would merely decide on a theme, meet Romould over his gin and tonic in the RTÉ social club, and tell him what I had in mind. He would nod approval, smile affably and regale me with tales of his time as a chaplain in the oilfields of the Middle East.

    My illusions stayed with me when I was making documentary films. Early efforts concentrated on the old-fashioned truth that we are each a fallible link in a social chain made strong by cooperation i.e. we are completely interdependent. I even titled a film on the Cheshire Homes ‘The Weakest Link’ to argue that the apparently handicapped are just differently endowed and that the apparently healthy are just as handicapped, certainly less than perfect.

    My penchant for fantasy was soon recognised by the new Head of Drama who invited me to join his department. I declined and told him about Robert O’Flaherty, maker of ‘Man of Aran’ and ‘Nanook of the North’, who had invited a friend to join him in documenting the lives of exotic and primitive peoples. The friend, John Grierson, replied that his personal preference was to document the lives of the savages in Birmingham. Grierson went on to found the National Film Board of Canada and become another hero of mine.

    Meanwhile, I was finding out that my childhood version of Christianity was an imposter, a pretender. I had been led up the garden path. Fundamental Christianity and Socialism, though apparently deadly enemies, were actually the same thing and neither were being practised! Quite unconsciously I fell for the worst of both worlds and became that contradiction in terms, a Catholic Marxist, just like Arthur Dooley, the Liverpool sculptor. Dooley had  shown my colleague Jim Fitzgerald and myself his absurdist two-story miniature Model T Ford which he had called after the Tory bigwig, The Sir Alec Douglas Hume. Because, Arthur explained, ‘it doesn’t work either’. Fitzgerald kept the sculpture until poverty forced him to sell it to Charles J. Haughey.

    These vague ideas I tried desperately to reconcile, despite two realisations that blunted my idealism. The first was watching my films as they were broadcast under the RTÉ religious ‘Horizon’ banner every Sunday at teatime. The family would briefly glance at the screen (“Oh, another of yours’) and resume eating. The second was Catholic-induced guilt: I was a whited sepulchre. How could I preach social virtues to others when I myself was a confused hotbed of lust and decadence? How else explain being locked up with a cageful of prostitutes in a Parisian gendarmerie in 1966? Here is my version:

    On the RTÉ rugby football team actor Frank Kelly (aka ‘Father Jack’) and myself were the centre three-quarters who outdid each other in physical unfitness. The team travelled to Paris to play the RTF (French TV) team and see the Irish/French international. Our ruthless opponents forced cognac on us and kept us up until 4.00 am. At 9.00 am we staggered onto the rugby pitch, were soundly thrashed and that afternoon saw the Irish team suffer the same fate. There was then another sorrow-drowning dinner with a cognac-scoffing competition and a French tie-snipping ceremony – presumably a symbol of our rugby castration that morning – which led to mild violence.

    That night we attended a discotheque whose air I found suffocating. I climbed on to a window sill on the 2nd floor to get a breath of the balmy Paris night air and a little peace. It appears that some overwrought dancer then looked up, spotted my legs dangling overhead, screamed and gave everybody the impression that there was a suicide in the offing. Soon a group of uniformed men arrived to talk me down. I explained my breathing difficulties to the Gendarmes but they missed the point and insisted I come along with them. I did so, protesting mildly about free will and democracy.

    That is how I ended up in a cage in the police station, being fed cups of black coffee and sharing mimed jokes with some ladies of the night who had also been rounded up. One of my team mates with a smattering of French finally persuaded the Gendarmes that I was not a serious threat to public order or myself, and they released me.

    I continued my television campaign for illusory decencies until 1967 when the effort proved too much. My labours had produced no change in the world, certainly none apparent to me; the majority of people were as sensibly pragmatic as they’d ever been. Most were – to this arrogant observer – living unexamined lives, concentrating their energies on careers, ignoring my filmic exhortations to observe the lilies in the fields.

    Literature gave me intimations that everybody lived unadmitted lives of quiet desperation. I remember devouring, on successive lunch hours in Kiely’s pub in Donnybrook, two books that were mind altering: R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience and Peter L. Berger’s The Precarious Vision. I would defy any impressionable person of the time to read those books and carry on their normal humdrum lives. They certainly changed mine because I had not been defused by third level education, and was that homemade time-bomb, an autodidact. The first book questioned our definition of ‘normality’; the second demonstrated the relativity of all belief systems. They incited me to question the very ground on which I walked, and established a lifelong pattern of querying every fixed position.

    I also got an insight from the late writer Francis Stuart.

    In the Arts Club in Dublin I asked him whether he resented the likes of Frederick Forsyth making a fortune from reactionary potboilers while he had to soldier on modestly. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I see myself as a backroom researcher. My findings will gradually filter down.’ This demonstrated to me his modesty as well as faith, hope and confidence, attributes to which I hopelessly aspired.

    Stuart defined for me the only unique perspective a person possesses, the one that alone distinguishes him or her from their fellows: his ignorance. That cheered me up. Not possessing much talent but plenty of ignorance, it became my lifejacket. In his advice Stuart was echoing T.S. Eliot’s dictum: ‘what we know is what we do not know’, and  ‘the only wisdom is humility’.

    I became confident in my ignorance, enough to stop trying to conceal it, actually revelling in it. As a direct consequence a producer colleague once rhetorically asked whether I was very humble or very stupid. I answered that I was very stupid, which reply the arrogant wretch was forced to concede as quite clever, covering both bases. It even saved him a bloody nose. I discovered that an admission of ignorance on my part invited confidences from others. This proved invaluable in the making of documentary films.

    I did not pause to assess the truth of Stuart’s or Eliot’s wisdom; I was too busy picking theirs and everybody else’s brains for answers. I thought Stuart’s was a good philosophy for a writer who sensed the abyss. It was not inconsistent with his youthful throwing in his lot with the Nazis, for which many would never accept his artistic excuses. Although I found his autobiographical Black List Section H to be a little self-serving, designed to de-nazify his reputation, its frankness was startling and his novels were thought-provoking. Francis Stuart was a devout, perhaps even a mystic Christian, who enjoyed a very long life and whose funeral I attended in County Clare.

    The challenge of ‘that which we do not know’ is for me balanced by the insight that we are all in the same gluepot, just guessing, studying form. The exceptions are those – among them career academics, high priests and politicians – whose busy eyes and mouths are full of certain certainties. I could add much more on this subject, having spent the second half of my life trying to rid myself of what I learned in the first half.

    I think I have by now earned an honorary PhD in ignorance.

    In the sense that a doctor ‘practises’ medicine, never mastering it, I practised the art/craft of film for many years. Now I realise I was merely treading water, blundering around and, unlike doctors, unable to bury my mistakes: twenty of my films were recently re-run on Irish national television With few exceptions, they resigned me to the futility of any attempt at excavating truth or changing the world by one tiny iota. Rather late have I discovered that all change begins with oneself.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

  • HAP-less – Addressing the Needs of Homeless in Temporary Accommodation

    Brilliant white cinder-block walls and pastel-coloured floors. In between, lightweight partition walls carve up what is essentially a warehouse, and inspire confusion in short tangential corridors. Varying odours and temperatures permeate the air, where a multitude of individuals experiencing homelessness have the fortune of a roof over their head. Some move quickly, others slowly, some stagger.

    It being my first day in this service, the four o’clock room check is an opportunity to familiarise with a few of the residents, and the complicated building. My colleague hands me the bed-list and a pen, and we make sure our walkie-talkies are working. He’ll check if they’re in, and I’ll mark the list accordingly.

    ‘You have to be careful with the women,’ so the warning goes. ‘Always go in pairs. If they accuse you of something and you’re alone, that kind of stuff can stick. Protect yourself.’

    Announcing ourselves as, ‘male staff,’ we enter the first, and exclusively, female, corridor. As we move from room to room we check the toilets – each cubicle. We say ‘hi’ to a number of the ladies, my colleague checks my notations, and we move along to the next corridor.

    I find myself standing away from the doors, clipboard in hand, behind my colleague. I feel an urge to be more visible to those in the rooms; I hardly want my presence to resemble some kind of warden.

    Making things easy for me, my colleague introduces me to a number of the residents, which in many instances goes well. But, to complicate things further, I soon realise that I should avoid being too friendly.

    Many are almost completely uninterested by my presence; I begin to feel I should have respect not so much for people’s privacy (largely non-existent), as more basically their space, my entry into which is that of yet another new face. It is, after all, their home.

    Lying on a bed, in the corner of a square room, with partition walls which do not reach the high aluminium ceiling above, is a young woman, no more than twenty years-of-age, coming around from a worrying drug experience, initiated some days previously. At least she’s definitely breathing.

    Sharing a room with a ‘crack-head’ must be difficult – just as sharing a room with someone who doesn’t appreciate your addiction to the substance may be.

    I follow my colleague as we move from room to room, ticking the boxes and making brief greetings. Through a door bursts a notably thin woman, with a number of others behind her, electrifying the atmosphere as she confronts my colleague, keen to set the record straight.

    Arms raised, she proceeds to direct our attention to the common area where, according to this woman, there is a ‘bitch,’ who needs to ‘shut her fucking mouth.’ I can’t help recalling the words of a member of management: ‘Many of our clients are seriously underdeveloped, cognitively. It is not unlike working with children.’

    My colleague endeavours to calm the situation down, encouraging the woman to ignore others around her. She must focus on herself. The woman is responsive despite her warning that the ‘bitch’ inside had better keep out of her way. She relents: ‘I just need to get out of here.’

    Another passing service user gets my attention: ‘It’s like Big Brother in here.’ The woman moves on hurriedly, the others behind her disperse, and we carry on with our checks. My colleague ensures I have ticked the right boxes, given the momentary commotion.

     

    Prior to room checks, meal times had been a source of some controversy at handover. It being my first day, I had hardly contributed to the discussion. But now it comes up again with the colleague I am shadowing: ‘We don’t want to create a culture of smoking crack and eating cereal all day,’ she says. The service users are not to be provided with food, other than toast, before or after dinner. Staff are supposed to stick strictly to meal times. That means no pot noodles, soup, rice pudding, or cereal.

    ‘Right… so that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with?’; ‘Yes, loads of crack in here, and spice.’

    It is difficult to deny a person in this environment food – but telling them what time of the day they can have Rice Crispies makes sense. If I tell them it is twelve o’clock often some ask whether I am referring to day or night. Strict mealtimes encourage routine, a reason to get up in the morning and be somewhere in the evening – despite its illegality, many bedrooms don’t have windows. They are set to encourage people to be up during the daytime; a bedroom may be safer and more comfortable than a doorway on the street, but it can offer fertile ground for despair nevertheless.

    Outside their bedrooms service-users are that bit more likely to avail of support from key workers or social workers. Of course when a physical environment inhibits anyone’s capacity to look outside – the inverse being an effort to inhibit others looking in – hope is a hard sell. But, in any case, that is why it is done.

    Entering the next hallway, I see shower curtains draped over the doorways – that morning another staff member, who had greeted me, apologised for the doorways, something she felt made the place feel like a Concentration Camp. The council, she said, are yet to install the doors.

    We knock on the partition walls before announcing ourselves: ‘Staff. Hi fellas. How are you doing today?’ My colleague’s admirable rapport with the residents takes the edge off his gallows humour. How does a person perceive an authority manifested in a prohibition on Corn Flakes?

    The drunk or ‘crack-head’ stereotype loses relevance when the service user has a job, whose hours are such that they get home(?) after dinner time. The person may just want a bowl of cereal before bed, as I surely would, importantly, on getting home. What about the person who fancies a bowl of cereal at any time of the day?

    Homeless is an umbrella term used to classify thousands of individuals who don’t have their own front door. But exactly why a person ends up in that situation varies widely. There is a Homelessness Crisis, meaning identifying and ordering the different classifications of homeless individuals relative to their needs is a luxury – we are led to believe – the country cannot afford. All kinds of people – highly dependent and highly independent – are lumped together. When someone asks for cereal, it is perhaps best to suspend judgement. There is not necessarily a negative consequences to a bowl of cereal at midnight.

    It is suggested by a new member of staff that a particular client may be on the autistic spectrum, as his social etiquette is deeply lacking. It is something my colleague thought we should consider. That colleague had worked with autistic individuals in the past, so it seems plausible. But following conversation with another member of staff, who had known the client since he first entered the service – over ten years previously – another probable explanation turned up: the client had entered the service in his early twenties when his social interactions were far from a central concern. Ten years on, having spent a decade in a shelter, his capacity to interact with the outside world has been all but destroyed.

    You often think of elderly men, savvy in the ways of surviving as rough sleepers, as those to whom the epithet ‘entrenched homelessness’ applies. But this is a young man who doesn’t sleep rough, whose home is the homeless services.

    Another client argues given that he has lived in the country for over twenty years he should not have to listen to people asking him whether he would like to go home. He cannot go home: actually Ireland is home. We are discussing his recent transfer from the social housing list into a relatively new scheme called HAP (Housing Assistance Payment), whereby the government subsidises rent payments to private landlords, on behalf of HAP-approved tenants. That he should be continually asked to return home is a worrying reflection on the HAP scheme, packaged as an opportunity for the service user, but subject to the arbitrary decisions of private landlords, who often reject aspiring HAP tenants precisely for being aspiring HAP tenants.

    He has been given a number of months to find a landlord who will accept him as a tenant. His more immediate concern, however, is his cancer, for which he really needs employment so he can look after himself.

    The government policy which focuses on the one thing all homeless people by definition lack, has repercussions for those with complex needs. One might argue that housing this particular individual in private rental accommodation would have the beneficial consequence of increasing his chances of attaining employment, and maintaining good health, and avoiding the stress of being moved from accommodation to accommodation.

    The stress of sharing a room with strangers, sleeping on his valuables is effecting his mental health he tells me. I’m struck by the reasonably well accredited hypothesis linking mental ill-health with physical infirmity, and I think once more of his cancer. Arguably, this emphasises the importance of getting this person housed, but my client is cynical, has little money, and potentially little time. He is frightened of adding to the statistic of homeless fatalities in 2019.

    His immediate need is money. He needs prescribed medication, healthy food, and perhaps a counsellor or psychotherapist. That people aren’t being housed is disgraceful in itself, but in the interim they are suffering, deteriorating mentally and physically, and potentially dying. People suffer in the services, as they wait, often hopelessly. These are the vicious consequence of being unable to live independently.

    Later, we discover a client rolling uncontrollably on the floor, experiencing what appears to be a seizure. He’s banging his head, and almost frothing at the mouth. We calm him, briefly, before he wriggles out of our control and continues. His head is our primary concern, which we endeavour to get a pillow underneath of. I get on the phone to my colleague who is down in reception. She gets on to the emergency services. They want to know if he is experiencing breathing difficulties. As far as I can tell he is breathing relatively normally. To make sure, I ask him directly. Managing to control him, I gain his attention and ask. Rather than responding verbally, he proceeds to demonstrate what sounds like incredibly strained breathing –  as though on cue. He looks directly into my eyes and begins to cough in between episodes of holding his breath. Although we continue to calm him and inhibit self-harm, I am now less fearful for his well-being.

    Once the paramedics arrive they work out quite quickly there isn’t much wrong, at least with what they can help with. They sit him up, holding him still from beneath the arms and probe him with questions. He manages to ignore them until they, somewhat more hands on, start pinching him somewhere around the chest. This certainly gets his attention and he finally blurts out: ‘fuck off.’ There’s a pause as we all come to understand that whatever is wrong with this service-user, it does not require emergency medical attention. He needs to go to bed and sleep it off.

    A few weeks later, at a staff outing, I converse with a colleague who understands that despite the somewhat theatrical nature of the episode, there was, below the surface, a man reaching out for help, however desperately. It seems his only way of having his suffering recognised was to act out the part, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. He was not suffering in the way his behaviour suggested, but that is not to say he wasn’t suffering, as he drunkenly played out the part on an otherwise uneventful night in another homeless service.

    Homelessness is complicated. These three words cannot do justice to what they purport to express. We are dealing with thousands of different lives under the umbrella term. What is at issue are the needs of individuals; and you can be sure these will multiply the longer one remains homeless. Whilst housing people is a reasonable objective, we cannot obscure the compelling needs of each individual.

    Most homeless services adopt the Housing First approach. Of American origin, the original idea was that individuals experiencing homelessness should be placed automatically into independent living, bypassing temporary accommodations such as hostels. Once the client is established in their home, so it goes, outreach services will work on supporting individual needs. The initiative has a track record of success, and been adopted by a number of the leading services in Ireland. The issue today, however, is the vast numbers of those experiencing homeless who, after not being offered their own accommodation, end up in temporary accommodation.

    Is there not a paradox to services advocating Housing First when the existence of those very services demonstrate the shortcomings of the Housing First approach? More worryingly perhaps: does it potentially license those who could otherwise support people in these services to delimit their support, on the basis that they can, in accordance with the Housing First approach, legitimately claim it is better to wait until those in need of such services are housed? Focus on permanent housing, and permit short-term suffering.

    Inasmuch as a singular vision for the future is something to be celebrated amongst policy makers, public services, charities and NGOs, we cannot allow it to obstruct recognition of current needs. Most homeless services additionally advocate the person-centred approach. Better to consider the individual where they are at, and offer support accordingly. If a service user’s mental health deteriorates, we abide by the person-centred approach insofar as we have compassion and understand that person’s particular state of mind, and support them accordingly. The trouble is that in our current situation, the Housing First approach, is, arguably, in contradiction with the Person-Centred Approach, as it draws attention and resources away from individual needs.

    As I’m covering a shift in a family accommodation unit. Over a cigarette break I take the opportunity to find out more about the service. ‘Many of the families don’t like HAP. They don’t want to be at the mercy of a private landlord, who could sell up next year,’ my colleague begins. ‘They wait on the social housing list. Could be years. Mental health begins to really suffer. Lots of them smoke a lot of cannabis. And then the children suffer.’

    I tell him about some of the men I am more familiar with, from another service, and how a number of them grew up under child protection services: ‘You can see the cycle.’ To reiterate, I am hardly opposed to housing the homeless. People should be getting housed. But at issue is meeting the varied needs of the many people experiencing homelessness, at a time when the prospect of finding private rental accommodation is remote. Numerous individuals have many and complicated needs, and these should be considered simultaneously.

    Homelessness is indeed a challenging issue. People’s many basic needs are complicated by the experience of homelessness. There is no universal panacea. We should be housing the homeless. But whether a young woman out of her mind on street drugs, an exhausted shift worker unable to get a snack before bed, a cancer patient with no money, or an alcoholic despairing at six o’clock in the morning, I cannot help but think that a slogan more fitting would be: ‘listen to the homeless.’

  • My Grandmother’s Life Under the Third Reich and Behind the Iron Curtain

    Irene H.

    Going into your house, I sat in the conservatory waiting for the door to open. Waiting for your familiar rasping voice to call, “Mann! Herzenskind, komm rein.” I remained there still in the leather chair, trying to pluck up the courage to open the door and be met with emptiness. You’d snuck out one night three weeks earlier.

    In almost a century of life, history marked Irene Hauser (née Leitgeber) and she, in turn, was determined to leave her mark. Born in Berlin’s Wedding district in 1924, her life was shaped by passages in history books. As a twelve year-old girl she sat in the stands watching Leni Riefenstahl film the 1936 Olympics, so awe-struck by the cameras that she almost forgot to watch any of the tournament.

    She left school without graduating and when she told her parents at the end of the war that she wanted to go to university they thought she had lost her mind. It wasn’t her first choice. She had wanted to become a fashion designer but with barely enough food around to feed the population, whatever about fabric, that seemed like an even more fanciful idea. So Irene became the first person to go to university in her family and enrolled in physics at East Berlin’s Humboldt University, where she accounted for one half of the female student population on her course.

    The city had been bombed into the ground and few possessed the creativity to imagine how this heap of rubble could ever resemble a functioning city again. Irene’s lectures were held inside some of the brick skeletons that remained scattered through the city, and during the icy winter months she sat in the auditorium wrapped in an over-sized fur coat.

    In the 1980’s she retired as a professor in physics. Much must have happened between those two moments and sometimes she spoke about her work but it was the stories of what seemed like fantastical adventures that burned themselves into the mind of her youngest granddaughter. She told of her trip to Hanoi during a ceasefire in the Vietnam War. Her delegation was sent to provide expertise to Vietnamese scientists in the war effort, and Irene spent much of her time there trying to avoid the local food. In the 1960s she and her husband, also a physicist, worked on a secret research programme near Dresden to develop nuclear power.

    The lust for life you possessed made everything seem possible and any fragility a bewildering concept. As we all sat in the chapel, your funeral seemed such a ludicrous event.

    Although Irene knew how to bring her experiences to life in the stories she told, there was much silence about the suffering she witnessed and endured. Like many of her contemporaries, it was her actions that provided clues about the war that marked her.

    No scrap of food was ever thrown away. Instead she tried to redistribute what she didn’t want to eat. Once she attempted to cajole her granddaughter into packing a half-eaten sausage for her trip back to London.

    When she did speak about it, it was so matter of fact that there was little room for emotions. Anecdotes like the dead body lying in the hallway of the apartment block, which stopped her home being looted or the ridiculousness of her trying to salvage a carpet from her aunt’s burning home after an air raid seemed like abstractions. Even then, recounting herself walking through one of Berlin’s wide avenues lined by blazing buildings drew a harrowing image.

    Irene was just twenty then. She grabbed life whichever way she could. So when she met the funny and clever Oskar at a laboratory she worked in, she didn’t see his limp. When an overseer, whose only function was to report to the SA (Sturmabteilung), threatened her with concentration camp if she carried on seeing the Halbjuden, meeting Oskar in secret seemed the only plausible solution to her dilemma.

    Oskar didn’t want to let her marry him — him! A cripple. But Irene had made up her mind. And so it went. The two celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany with a wedding and a rhubarb pie. Four years later, Irene gave birth to her only surviving child while Oskar was imprisoned on trumped up smuggling charges and cultivating his life-long aversion to Skat, a card game he played from morning till night with other inmates to pass the long days. His imprisonment had mobilised a student movement and although newspaper clippings of the protests and petitions for his release had been kept in a folder, Irene gave them to an archive soon after his death. Forward was the only direction she knew.

    You always had a solution to everything and knew how to cover your tracks when you didn’t. Your quirky pride left no room for any admission of defeat. After you gave up smoking, you developed an affinity for checking on the washing behind the shed after each meal. Even your own son had no idea that you couldn’t cook until granddad died.

    Much was left untold. Secretly we pieced some of your story together not to feel so inadequate in your shadow. To get to know the fallible human. Next to you our failures sometimes stung unbearably.

    Perhaps a growing awareness of her silence prompted Irene to write a small booklet about her life in her last years. No one was to read it until she was gone. There was little sense that writing it gave her much joy. Rather it was a task that had to be completed, and like every task in life, complete it she did.

    It recounts her childhood experiences in the Third Reich: pushing her parents to allow her to join the Bund Deutscher Mädchen (the equivalent to the Hitler Youth for girls) against their will; the turmoil of the post-war years, and the division of Berlin; her many professional achievements, and some reflections on the political life of the time in which she was inevitably involved. Maybe some modesty stopped her from indulging personal impressions and feelings in her booklet, but an impatience for anything that lay in the past certainly did.

    In our last phone call you told me to never grow this old. The thought of being a burden to anyone was a greater weight on you than you could bear. ‘But grandma, we’re all so happy you got this old.’ Although I didn’t know it then with that I let you go. That day I stopped tearing and pulling at you. Life would be ok. Your death was befitting of your life. Fast and impatient.

    Photo Caption: A photo of Irene, perhaps strict and stern to any stranger. But for those who knew her those lips hold back a smile and those eyes are filled with a lively curiosity that lasted as long as she did. By Franziska Hauser

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  • The Limits of Law

    ‘What is law?’ This is a fundamental question posed at the outset of any course in the philosophy of law. The standard form of response includes that it is a system of rules, according to a tradition known as legal positivism. Such is a ‘black letter’ lawyer, and Anglo-American approach. This is a product of a tradition of formalism, pioneered by scholars such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, and latterly taken up by Christopher Columbus Langdell and H. L. A. Hart.

    In a nutshell it says that if you want to ascertain what the law is then you simply look it up in a statute, or derive it from the interpretation of a case or precedent, and, hey presto, there you have it.  As a lawyer you then arm yourself for battle with this information. Such an outlook matches the common-sense approach of most lawyers. But interpretations of case laws, statutes and constitutions differ. Even within black letter law the meaning of language is never clear. Facts are never exactly the same. Rules are opaque, seen through the looking glass as in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland:

    When I use a word Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I chose it to mean-neither more nor less. The question is said Alice whether you can make words mean so many different things.[i]

    In fact, the central assumption of certain positivists, such as Hart[ii] that facts are plain, and all meaning is shared, is eminently contestable. It leads to the fallacy within the black letter tradition that law, or legal meaning, can simply be ‘downloaded’ from a case or a statute and technically applied to any case at bar.

    In contrast, the leading rights-driven lawyer, Ronald Dworkin[iii] (in for example Laws Empire, 1986) saw law as a matter of argument, and interpretation. Law and legal meaning are thus intensely creative. He concluded that the best or superior interpretation succeeded – as in Herman Hesse’s last novel The Glass Bead Game – but often this fitted, subjectively, with an overarching liberal agenda. For Dworkin, the right or best answer was always the liberal answer, which allowed his critics to pillory him, arguing his approach was a trojan horse laden with premeditated answers.

    But questions of what law is cede to questions of legal validity. Thus, whether something is there on a statue book, or in a court case, must be related to whether that which is law is itself valid.

    Ultimately an impasse is reached in that legal validity, in order to have normative and thus binding force, cannot simply rely on legal validation. Or to put it more simply, black letter, legal validity must be cross-checked against the moral or ethical quality of any law.

    Nonsense on Stilts

    Thus, the argument runs, in order to be valid black letter law it must also be morally reasonable. This concept is deeply alien to an Anglo-Saxon mindset. It invokes the spectre of supernatural deities and that abomination that Bentham referred to as ‘Nonsense on Stilts’, natural law.

    Ever since Bentham, the architect of legal positivism, English lawyers have frowned and derided such abstract speculation. Within the British intellectual tradition, from Hobbes to Hitchens, the existence of a supernatural deity is either not accepted, or treated with utmost scepticism. Even devout Christian defer to the intellectual wisdom of traditional British empiricism.

    Yet there is still a widely maintained view, of which residues exist even within the British mindset, that in extremis when a law has forfeited all claims to legitimacy it should be abandoned.

    This was also the perception of the reformed German positivist lawyer Gustav Radbruch at the end of World War II in response to Nazism. He argued that once a law abandons all principles of humanitarian morality it ceases to be law. This became known as Radbruch’s formula, and forms the basis of modern human rights instruments and charters.

    Here we approach the kernel of the problem namely, if a law departs from fundamental moral principle should one comply with it; or instead engage in civil disobedience to unsettle and repeal it? Furthermore, should a judge invalidate it on moral grounds?

    Law in Action

    This then throws up the thorny question of morality, a world conjuring images of Baptist street preachers, and public avengers screaming from the rooftops. The moral majority often contends, in Lord Devlin’s terms, that what disgusts the average man on the Clapham omnibus should be declared illegal (see Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals, 1959). But given how many minds are polluted with prejudice that may be a perilous formula.

    Such is the positivist dilemma, and also a pragmatic and realistic one. The view I increasingly lean towards is that it is less important what the black letter law says, as opposed to what are the repercussions of the law.

    As Oliver Wendell Holmes, the quintessential realist, put it: ‘The prophecies of what the courts do in fact are what I mean by the law and nothing else.’[iv] Thus, Holmes maintained there was no law as such until a court had pronounced on the matter. This has morphed into the concept of law-in-action, which is a useful corrective to black letter legal theorising of the ivory tower type.

    It is all well and good to talk about rules, but in the trial and family courts it is not rules but fact, semi-fact, prejudice and bias that condition outcomes. Such technical law as there is contested often is agreed beforehand, and irrelevant to the outcome.

    The question thus becomes: where statute and the practice of the courts is manipulated to favour certain outcomes, what recourse does any citizen have, and what obligation are owed in terms of obedience?

    The Subversion of Subversion

    What are you to do if you are confronted with a corrupt state and attacked personally and professionally by an abuse of process or lack of standards. The current imprisonment and trial of the Catalan leaders in Spain, who had the temerity to organise a referendum trial in Spain is one good example of the distortion of law.

    A number of options are available: you can fight back in a loaded game with predetermined outcomes; comply and sympathise with the plight of your torturers, who are only doing their jobs after all. Stockholm Syndrome must always to be resisted. You can also engage in civil disobedience or write letters to newspapers, or refuse to recognise the legitimacy of a subversive state. Then you may be imprisoned or even murdered either in detention or on the street in plain view, like the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. More likely you will be bankrupted. Such today are the perils of dissidence around the world.

    In practical terms this often means exile is the best option, either as a professional or as a political refugee.

    A place of sanctuary, however, may not provide an adequate haven due to its failure, deliberate or otherwise, to understand the intricacies of the laws of another state. It may feel obligated to comply with reciprocal extradition treaties. Fortunately a court in Schleswig-Holstein refused to extradite the Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, as it was clear that the charge of violent rebellion laid against him was an abomination. This world is nonetheless increasingly dangerous for enemies of the people: politicians, human rights lawyers, journalists and whistle blowers.

    It leads to the unsettling question of whether, if a state engages in criminali behaviour, is retaliation against a state officials permissible?

    I believe that self-help, disobedience and fighting fire with fire even in an extra-curial sense can in certain circumstances be justified. In general, however, the pen is a mighty counterweight to the sword and a weapon when the legal system no longer functions. The Fourth Estate can still blow smoke up the arses of the establishment.

    This leads to the worrying conclusion that we expect too much from law and that the overlap between law and justice is extremely tenuous. That at least is the case in those states where a crisis of legitimacy is leading to a breakdown in the rule of law.

    Law in societies no longer complying with the rule of law, is whatever works to bring about a desired outcome, which is often the incarceration of the alleged subversive.

    Civilised states at least pay lip service and occasional adherence to justice. Those who believe in legalism and the rule of law, encompassing such diverse figures as the Dworkin, Jurgen Habermas and the late Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, suggest law can be a force to check tyranny.

    As Thompson wrote in Whigs and Hunters:

    But the rule of law itself, the imposing of effective inhibitions upon power and the defence of the citizen from power’s all-intrusive claims, seems to me to be an unqualified human good. To deny or belittle this good is, in this dangerous century when the resources and pretensions of power continue to enlarge, a desperate error of intellectual abstraction.[v]

    The rule of law can, however, only obtain if the legal system has not descended into barbarism.

    Radbruch’s Formula

    As aforementioned, a crucial juristic figure is Gustav Radbruch, both a law professor and government minister during the Weimar Republic. It is often argued that opinions expressed in his earlier writings are positivistic. In 1932 he was a relativist in terms of the question of whether moral standards existed in law. He wrote that a judge had an obligation to uphold an unjust law. The Second World War changed his mind.

    In the famous ‘Radbruch’s Formula’ (Radbruchsche Formel) he argued that where statute law was incompatible with positivist law to an intolerable degree, and if it negated the principle of equality which is central to justice, it could be disregarded. In 1946 he wrote:

    [P]reference is given to the positive law, duly enacted and secured by state power as it is, even where it is unjust and fails to benefit the people unless it conflicts with justice reaches so intolerable a level that a statute becomes in effect false law and must therefore yield to justice … where there is not even an attempt at justice, where equality the core of justice is deliberately betrayed in the issuance of positive law then the statute is not merely false law it lacks completely the very nature of law.[vi]

    Radbruch suggests that where a government’s conduct is intolerable, the statue ceases to be valid. Law and must yield to justice. It was clear for Radbruch that this sense of justice (Gerechtigkeit) was linked to human rights. Thus, in Funf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie he argued for ‘justice as moral equality as applying the same measure to all or guaranteeing human rights to all.’[vii]

    As Hart indicates:

    His considered reflections led him to the doctrine that the fundamental principles of humanitarian morality were part of the very concept of Recht or legality and that no positive enactment or statute, however clearly it was expressed and however clearly it conformed with the formal criteria of validity of a legal system, could be valid if it contravened basic principles of morality.[viii]

    Fuller also argues in oft-repeated quote:

    To me there is nothing shocking in saying that a dictatorship which clothes itself with a tinsel of legal form can so far depart from the morality of order, from the inner morality of law itself, that it ceases to be a legal system. When a system calling itself law is predicated upon a general disregard by judges of the terms of the laws they purport to enforce, when this system habitually cures its legal irregularities, even the grossest, by retroactive statutes, when it has only to resort to forays of terror in the street, which no one dares challenge, in order to escape even those scant restraints imposed by the pretence of legality – when all those things have become true of a dictatorship, it is not hard for me, at least, to deny to it, the name of law.[ix]

    But is the moral answer ever completely clear and who is to judge?

    The Fog of War

    In this respect it is worthwhile considering a fascinating film documentary by Errol Morris about Robert McNamara, called The Fog of War. McNamara was Secretary of Defense under Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, and a man of many private accomplishments. In his documentary he surveys his career through a glass darkly.

    McNamara reveals that as an assistant to the American General Curtis Le May he was responsible for the carpet bombing of Tokyo. He admits that if the US had lost the Second World War, he could have been prosecuted for war crimes. He ultimately concedes he was a war criminal, but his side had won. Victory is not necessarily the victory of the morally just.

    Moral arguments can become even more complex. A recent documentary by Claude Landsman – responsible for perhaps the greatest documentary ever made Shoah (1985) – called The Last of the Unjust traces the life of Benjamin Murmelstein during World War I through a series of interviews prior to his death, alongside contemporary reflections by the director. The moral complexity of Murmelstein, a rabbi to the Jewish community at the Theresienstadt ‘model’ Concentration Camp, is such that he is difficult to place, in the seemingly straightforward narrative of the Shoah, as victim or vector. It is only thirty years later that Landsman revisits the footage.

    The argument of the film is replete with moral ambiguity. As head of the Jewish Council in Warsaw Murmelstein liaised with Adolf Eichmann. Then as leader of the Jews at the propagandistic Theresienstadt he was responsible for maintaining the illusion of happy campers; the salutary consequence was that many Jews were saved from the death camps.

    But many others were sent to the gas chambers from Theresienstadt and Murmelstein was privy to those decisions, and saved his own skin. At the end of the war he was prosecuted but the case was dropped.

    What have I done wrong he asks constantly through the film? Did I not do my best? Did I not do good? What would you have done in the same circumstances?

    Should he have been prosecuted or acclaimed like Oscar Schindler, Nazi War Profiteer, Drunk and Womaniser yet a saviour of the lives, at great personal cost, of over one thousand Cracow Jews, rights beside Auschwitz? Schindler is now buried alongside the Israeli hierarchy in the national cemetery in Tel Aviv.

    Conclusions

    Thus, even the invalidation of laws based on morality creates problems. So, in summary, what can be said about law, legality and morality?

    1. That judges should adhere to the process of legality and avoid bending the rules to suit the interest of those who appoint them. They ought to be independent, and not subject to political pressure or motivated by dogma.
    2. That justice must be blind to class or colour, and neutral and dispassionate. Show Trials, such as those going on in Spain today, reveal the mob ascendant.
    3. That judges ought to jettison strict adherence to black letter outcomes, unmitigated by flexibility.
    4. That the judiciary and fact finders must be committed to the process of truth elicitation and non-fabrication.
    5. That in extreme circumstance of an immoral legal code or state-sponsored illegality, a judge should reserve a discretionary right to strike down a statute or a precedent.

    Perhaps people have too much faith in the law and indeed lawyers, but in our times a faith in justice is one of the few things to hold on to.

    A just system is one administered by independent-minded gatekeepers of flexibility, motivated by principle and not corrupt or politically compromised. Fortunately there are many such judges left in the UK.

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    [i] Lewis Carroll, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Chapter 6, 1871.

    [ii] A. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, London, Clarendon Law Series, 1961.

    [iii] Ronald Dworkin, Laws Empire, New York, Belknap Press, 1986.

    [iv] Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Path of the Law, 10 Harvard Law Review, 1897 457-58

    [v]  E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, London, Allen Lane, 1975, Appendix 1.

    [vi] Gustav Radbruch, Five Finutes of Legal Philosophy, 1945

    [vii] Radbruch Gesetetchiches Unrecht Und Bergesetiches Recht Sufddeutsche Juristrazeitung (1946), p.107

    [viii] A. L. A. Hart, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morality, vol 71. 1984, p.617.

    [ix] Lon L. Fuller, Morality of Law, 1964, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964, p.660.

  • Making Films

    I’ve just made my last film, a short called Bog Graffiti. Another last film.

    I always make that resolution when a film is put to bed. Never again, I say, will I go through the pain.

    In my childhood the cinema was already a fantasy, one which we could only occasionally afford.

    When as day trippers we went on excursions to Bray, one of the novelties was a machine with a handle. If you inserted a penny – a large investment – you could wind the handle and view a jerky series of photos which constituted a thirty-second epic of what the butler saw. The technique was analogous to that of Edison fifty years before, when he filmed a five-second sneeze.

    Though moving images are what have been laughingly called my livelihood for too long, the medium was never my first love. I merely stumbled into it, an accidental activity that seemed to fit me like a glove, rather like a loyal and unappreciated wife.

    I am no longer considered by apparatchiks to possess the puff to make another, but I can still enjoy the rare film of excellence made by somebody else and, if provoked, become long-winded about the process of becoming a film maker.

    There are two accepted routes. The first is the apprenticeship method: you watch and listen to other people doing it. The second is through formal media courses which produce experts rather than film makers. Neither of these processes has much to do with actually making a film – it largely depends on not being very good at anything else. The same principle applies to most art forms: they are not a matter of loving or wanting, but about desperation. You either have to do it or you do not. I needed it, or at least something like it. Film would do for what is referred to ‘as the time being’ – a period which in my case extended to a half-century.

    My first short film took as its theme Eliot’s, ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’. It featured a middle-aged actor paddling in the sea, listening for the mermaids while his withered wife lay on Killiney beach, settling the pillows by her head and murmuring about Michelangelo. At least that was what I hoped to imply. Surefire box-office. Six of us RTE trainees had spent a few months listening to two Danish film experts. First they showed high-class documentaries. Secondly they loaned each of us a 16mm camera for a day. I went into the city and filmed shadows. I was hooked: it wasn’t like work at all.

    My early attempts have been lost in the bowels of RTÉ. In those early days, the concept of posterity did not exist. Nobody was going to die. Until Seán Ó Riada did, aged forty.

    It is not easy, in this impenetrably complex era of digital reality, to re-imagine what film-making once involved. Principally, film was a chemical, rather than the electronic process which now dominates the activity. The former meant controlling a light source (usually daylight) so that it would disturb the silver nitrate particles on sensitised celluloid in such a precise fashion as to produce a desired image.

    Whether it was 16mm gauge film, which was the TV standard in those days, or 35mm which was the cinema standard, there were twenty-four of those images exposed per second. In between, each of those images was a fraction of a second of black whose quickness of passing deceived the eye so that it was not noticed.

    Next, the same celluloid had to be treated in chemical baths to remove the silver and reveal the negative images. It was rumoured that film laboratories in England made more profit from the recycling of silver than from the processing fees they charged.

    The late and much-travelled Barney McKenna, banjo player in The Dubliners, once confided to me his advanced ideas on the subject. He said that the Rhine was so polluted with chemicals flowing down from Switzerland that the film industry didn’t need laboratories. German film makers simply dipped their films in the chemical stream. That’s how Germans could make films cheaper, Barney said.

    At our basic level the director and cameraman had to work without a picture monitor. Using the tiny camera viewfinder and a light meter, the framing and exposure of the picture had to be imagined beforehand. The resultant images could not properly be seen until they were processed and returned from the London laboratory as ‘rushes’.

    Nowadays there are LCD viewfinders on video cameras, which allow you to see precisely what the lens is producing. If you still don’t know what you are doing or can’t make up your mind, that is no obstacle. Videotape, mini-cards and something called cloud technology now mean that you can cover your vacillations by shooting endless hours and unlimited ‘takes’ of the same scene. You can rely on the editor to spend hours and days selecting the most appropriate shots from the chaos. That is why film editors develop a nice line in profanity and why post-production costs escalate.

    Previously the director had to describe the shot and movement he wanted. The cameraman had to interpret this wishful thinking and, sighing, mark the lens barrel with slivers of white camera tape to remember his different points of focus. Nothing was automatic. He had to meter the available light and adjust the lens accordingly. All these matters had to be addressed after the important creative decisions were made: what was the purpose of the shot, what should the actors say and do, how much film stock and daylight are left, how can the sound man pick up dialogue without revealing the microphone but, principally, what time is coffee break?

    The process was tangible, especially the editing which was done by physically manhandling the film on a Steenbeck machine and winding the magnetic soundtrack backward and forward to acquire synchronisation of sound. The latter required, at the beginning or end of each take, a distinct noise in precise coordination with an image of that sound’s source. This requirement was usually met with the clapperboard. Sometimes you just clapped your hands in front of the lens.

    It was not just a rumour that the late Fr Joe Dunne, intrepid Radharc oneman film crew, solved this problem in non-unionised foreign parts with his shoe. He would start the camera (a Pro 1200 monster which I inherited from him) and focus on an interviewee, then take off one shoe and fling it at the visible wall behind the subject – which might easily have been a flinching Archbishop or a South American dictator, for all Joe Dunne cared. All human beings were accorded equal respect by him, and his primitive technology worked, according to his talented editor Dáibhi Doran.

    As film stock and processing were expensive, the ratio of exposed film to the final product was at most 4:1 and even that, I remember, was extravagant. To save money, every shot involved making up your mind beforehand. Film had some of the physical satisfaction of a sculptor choosing his subject and material and then eliminating all that was superfluous to his or her vision. I liked working with my hands – a trait presumably inherited from my cooper father and every one of his similarly-employed ancestors.  I approached every subject through the prism of my own experience and prejudices. The job was to analyse first impressions, pin down the essential, eliminate the superfluous and then gaily use the material to say what you yourself wanted. Objectivity in TV and film is a myth. The same goes for all of our perceptions.

    The film editor was crucial. The basic skill he demanded from a director or cameraman was a cutaway to any relevant object in the scene. With this he might execute the desired sleight-of-hand transition from one angle or scene to another. That was until Godard made ‘jump-cuts’ fashionable. Dáibhí Doran always called these little cutaways his ‘bananas’ because of the exotic locations frequented by Fr Joe Dunne. ‘Where’s me bananas?’ was his plaintive cry. From Dáibhí, Merritt Butler, Martin Duffy, Victor Power, Bill Lawlor, Gordon Bric, Manuela Corbari and many other patient people, I learned everything worth knowing about film editing, even how to edit my own work. That came in useful in Connemara when I became the only independent film maker outside Dublin. Now I have the impression that there is a standing army of such foolhardy souls vying for pittances from the Irish Film Board – now titled Fís Éirean, which daringly suggests that the state body might have a vision for Ireland.

    Since the microchip has made computers accessible and all the work is now performed on their sophisticated programmes, much of the satisfaction has gone out of the job. I am like a steam train stoker replaced by the diesel engine. The physical approach to the material is obsolete. The director now sits helplessly for hours beside the editor, or is told to come back to-morrow, is sometimes even allowed to voice a suggestion. It is the difference, on the one hand, between the late sculptor James McKenna hacking away for months at wood or stone and, on the other, the subsequent breed of conceptual artists who merely have to state their intentions in order to be taken seriously by art critics.

    For a long time I refused to  learn  the technique of computer editing. Besides, female editors were now in the ascendancy because of their quicker minds and fingers. They also knew that the way to be re-employed was to refrain from telling the director or producer that their material was rubbish. There is no more disillusioned breed than television film editor, male or female. That is part of the reason why the enormous bulk of  TV and film today consists of trailer-trash reality directed by schedulers at female consumers. I call it flatpack film and TV. Anybody can assemble it and at the end it resembles product but it falls apart under close examination.

    The tail is wagging the dog.

    I was lucky. I had so many disparate ideas that I could never hope to express them in formal or traditional artforms. In film I had to filter my ideas through dedicated professional camera, sound and editing people. No matter how chaotic my imperatives might be, those artisans still had to concentrate on their own corner, make sure pictures were appropriate and at least in focus, that the sound was crisp and clear, that the ingredients could be cut together in some coherent way. This was the only process that could have disciplined me and I am indebted to all of those people who kept me up on the tightrope. They are the real artists. We directors are the flippertygibbets and I suppose we have some higher purpose but I no longer can remember what it is.

    Alas, in the craven new world of film and TV, the director has slipped down the ratings and now is more like a bus driver, merely keeping tightly to a schedule and subject to ticket inspectors – the bean-counting executive producers. My brilliant director son modestly describes the job as shot harvesting.

    The apparatchik reigns, the auteur is dead. So are Kieslowski and Tarkovsky, both at too early an age.  My theory is that they died of shock, along with eastern-bloc Socialism which, despite its repression of ordinary citizens, had actually nurtured their genius. The field of art was regarded as a legitimate battlefield between ideologies. Artists were cherished as front-line combatants. When the Iron Curtain vanished so did the concept of film as State-supported art. Those two eminent film makers’ optimistic embrace of Western freedom and democracy exposed them to a harsh market ruled by pragmatism and bean counting. Having survived the heirs of Stalinism they perished under global capitalism.

    The irony is that this petty island of Ireland, which always stoutly denounced the evils of socialism and was itself denounced for aesthetic narrow-mindedness, is the only State that now officially and consistently supports the individual artist with an institution called Aosdána. And the politician responsible for realising this vision? The much-derided but far-sighted Charles J. Haughey. He knew that the new economic reality of Globalism would turn us all into homeless beggars or advertising whores.

    Feature Image: © Hugh O’Conor.

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  • Can the European Project be Kept on Track?

    Czech border police snoop along the rail carriage as we pass the frontier from Germany. They seem to linger outside our compartment long enough to survey the light pigmentation of the young Dutch couple and this Hiberno-Norman specimen inside, passing by without seeking identification.

    White skin remains a passport – carte blanche – to unspoken liberties in ways most of us carriers hardly understand; a darker hue, with an out-of-date visa, might bring quiet indignities inside a dank room in some god-forsaken border-town.

    Born in the city of Brody, near Lviv in present-day Ukraine in 1894, the novelist Joseph Roth wrote: ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.’ A melancholic alcoholic and wandering Jew, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 before the cosmopolitan Old Europe he had evoked was consumed by the flames of racial hatred.

    Human lives are dangling like threads from passports in Europe again as borders perceptibly harden: the sword of Damocles hangs over the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, while in the UK at large, drawers are being scoured for the birth certificate of that long-lost grandparent that will yield the Paddy-pass. Throughout Europe, dour forms of patriotism exclude diversity; even in liberal, social-democratic Scandinavia shutters are coming down, as the Far Right surges.

    Entirely open borders might be unworkable, but widespread anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is rarely based on any rational assessment of the pros and cons of migration, but appears as an unconscious turning away from the world. After all, the European population is aging and many countries are short of workers in fields indigenous populations are reluctant to enter.

    Racists identify the physical features of classes of people with defined cultural traits. This error is often a product of isolation, usually emanating from individuals living in ethnically homogeneous areas, especially small towns. Demagogues prey on those left behind by free-wheeling market economies, but the imagining of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is not purely economic in origin. It is also linked to a patriarchal sense of traditional family units being undermined by liberated women, open sexuality and even dietary choices. The ‘person of colour’ is another unwelcome intrusion of a modern world in flux.

    Thus Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s offer to make women who bear four or more (presumably ‘pure-blooded’) children exempt from taxation is a chilling reminder of a time when women’s bodies were pressed into service for the imagined community of the nation. Across Europe an irrational fear of a ‘promiscuous’ Semitic ‘other’ is used to stoke hatred by unscrupulous politicians.

    There is also a growing reassertion of the nation state, beyond Brexit. Thus the French government has withdrawn its embassy from Rome in the wake of the Populist Italian administration’s outspoken support for the revolutionary gilets jaune ‘yellow vest’ movement.[i]

    Is this a turning of Europe’s mythological gyres: a cycle of one hundred years of recovery and prosperity, before decline and confrontation? The continent really needs to outgrow the truculent teenager phase, and instead rise to the challenge of making our way of life sustainable, and ultimately assist other parts of a world we have made in our own image of nation states.

    Any retreat into sullen autarky appears untenable unless most of us are prepared to revert to being small farmers. We are, nevertheless, right to wonder whether European institutions have been overtaken by shadowy lobbyists serving multinational corporations. Big brands are strangling small enterprise, homogenising streetscapes, and upholding the grand theft of in-built-obsolesce underpinning our model of economic-growth-without-end. It begs the question: what keeps the European dream on track?

    Romantic Travel

    An extensive rail network is perhaps Europe’s greatest asset, and guarantor of a fluid community. Like the capillaries of a great oak, it connects the high branches of Scandinavia to the roots of Italy, and beyond. Whether high-speed behemoth, or squealing rust-heap, train-travel permits a form of contemplation distinctively European; where a delay is simply an invitation to read one’s book, engage in light conversation with travelling companions, or fix lunch.

    I wonder whether future generations will experience the slow transitions in scenery, the fading grandeur of old world stations, and the whistle of the guard to set you on your way. Perhaps railways will give way to electric pods or warp drives, but I fear the best-laid techno-Utopian plans of Elon Musk and others will only cater to a select wealthy few. The benefits of railways, a technology that catalysed the Industrial Revolution, altering life on Earth forever, are likely to endure.

    As Minister for Transport the current Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described train travel as being for romantics.[ii] This suggests it is sensible to depend on stifling airports with queues and intrusive searches, before the deep vein thrombosis and ear-popping altitude of air travel. The rapid conveyance of tourists to safe spaces in historic cities has brought uniform hotels, chain restaurants and stores selling the same products, in different selfie locations.

    For those unable to afford air travel there are bus services leaving from anonymous stations on the asphalt fringes of cities, before cramped seating and desolate road stops. Otherwise, there is the false freedom of a car, wheeling at high speed along a motorway from which nothing can be seen, and where road deaths are a permitted tribute to the car gods evoked by advertisers. All other passenger experiences pale by comparison with a train journey.

    Sail-Rail

    At times even I, a born-again railer, weary of train travel in Britain. The effects of a decidedly unromantic privatisation are apparent in the sardine can-spacing between seats, the gaudy plastic furnishings, and staggering crowds at peak times, which no doubt make bean counters beam. Wholescale privatisation of an inherently monopolistic service seems to have been the height of folly.

    Unmistakably London.

    Ticket prices are jarringly expensive too. For example, a journey of eighty-odd miles from Oxford to Birmingham costs over £38 one-way. A return costs much the same, which is of little use if you aren’t going back on your tracks.

    There are cheap deals if you reserve in advance – though not on the Oxford-Birmingham line as it happens. A one-way ticket from Oxford to London is available for under £10, compared to the standard rate of £27. But booking weeks in advance negates the old world appeal of train travel, which is to turn up at a station, purchase a ticket and catch the next available service – setting off on a whim perhaps, along with a picnic basket.

    One of the great mysteries of this life is how the Sail-Rail deal between the UK and Ireland has endured into present, unromantic, times. I can simply turn up at Dublin Port, purchase my ticket which includes the price of the ferry, before catching a train at a flat rate from Holyhead – with marginal increments depending on distance and speed of ferry – to anywhere in the UK. Very occasionally, after Christmas, or at summer’s end, there is insufficient space on the ferry for all passengers, but this is rare indeed. I only book in advance to avoid the small handling fee charged by Irish Ferries when you purchase at the Port.

    Going Sail-Rail from the UK is even easier, as you purchase your ticket at any station – without the handling fee – just like a regular ticket. The full price of approximately €50 between London and Dublin may not be as low as the ludicrous cost of some plane tickets – a form of transport which, perversely, is not subject to the added cost of VAT on its fuel. But by the time you have born the cost of the Stansted train to London (usually costing £18), having avoided the crushing two-and-a-half-hour cheap bus alternative, you won’t be thanking uncle Michael.

    Last time on Sail-Rail I went as far as Oxford, met friends for a lavish Indian supper, before wobbling cheerfully back to the station to resume my journey to London. At such times the Sail-Rail pass seems like a golden ticket inside Willy Wonka’s factory, as bemused attendants waive you onwards.

    On the Irish side, the main inconvenience is the lack of a decent public transport connection between Dublin city and Port, which has no trains running along the tracks out to it. The 7.15am 153 bus from Westmoreland Street won’t even get you to the Port in time for the 8am sailing. Alas, the Dún Laoghaire-Holyhead connection, conveniently linked to a DART rail service, came to an end in 2015.

    The other annoyance is the apparent unwillingness of the UK train companies to align their timetables with the arrival of the ferries, often meaning delays on arrival in insalubrious Holyhead. Contrast this with how on some European train-ferry lines – between Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Denmark and Germany – trains actually mount a ferry and trundle out the other side.

    Delays, usually on Wales’s underfunded Arriva line, may require a longer stretch in the less than charming entrepôt, on an otherwise underrated coastline. The town’s appeal has changed little since Jonathan Swift’s 1727 evocation:

    Lo here I sit at Holyhead
    With muddy ale and mouldy bread
    All Christian victuals stink of fish
    I’m where my enemies would wish
    Convict of lies is every sign,
    The inn has not one drop of wine
    I’m fasten’d both by wind and tide
    I see the ship at anchor ride
    The Captain swears the sea’s too rough
    He has not passengers enough.

    Holyhead notwithstanding, it is now possible to travel in one day, using Sail-Rail and Eurostar, from Dublin Port, via London Euston, proceeding by foot to King’s Cross St. Pancras, to Brussels or Paris. I dream of more links from Holyhead to major UK cities, especially London, and perhaps even a high speed spur through Wales. That might tempt a few more romantics out of taking flights, and make life on our island seem less insular.

    Inter-Rail

    Last month I purchased an Inter-Rail pass, giving me five days of unlimited travel within a month throughout Europe for €300; albeit with some high-speed lines (especially, inconveniently, in France if you are arriving from Ireland) requiring a reservation, and/or the payment of a supplement. There are, however, reductions available on ferry prices, and with an overnight journey you only need to use up one day of your allotment.

    Having taken the Eurostar from London on the new service to Amsterdam, I proceeded immediately to Hamburg, Germany’s understated and cosmopolitan second city. I then headed north, through Denmark, crossing the Copenhagen-Malmo bridge into Sweden, arriving above the snowline in Oslo. I had not maximised my first three day’s travel, but made it as far as I needed.

    Cross-country skiing near Oslo, Norway.

    After enjoying an all-too-brief cross-country skiing trip with Irish friends now resident there, which included another short train journey into the hills, along with our skis, I returned south. This time taking two days (overnighting in Copenhagen) to get to the Czech Republic.

    Arriving in a continental climate with further snow cover, I proceeded east by train out of Prague towards the Jesiniky mountains. This involved a journey on one of a growing number of private lines – the Leo Express – which provides a degree of pampering and efficiency beyond that associated with the state railway company, Cesky Drahy, and cheap deals if you book in advance.

    At first blush, this would suggest partial or limited privatisation brings benefits. But I rather suspect that once this neo-liberal genii of de-regulation is let out of the bottle it will be reluctant to return. I expect further calls (in a subservient media) for privatisation in the name of efficiency, preceding a carve-up unfavourable to Czech rail-users, with ‘uneconomic’ lines phased out – as occurred in the UK – and prices hiked, once the ‘dead wood’ of the state company is phased out of existence.

    The Czech Republic is endowed with almost ten million kilometres of track, giving it one of the densest networks in the world, and making it a Mecca for train-lovers. Most people, even those living in rural villages, can reach their place of work without a car. The capital, Prague, also has two metro lines and an extensive tram network. It still costs a pittance to get to the airport by Metro and feeder bus.

    But more and more Czechs are embracing car culture, in part, no doubt, due to the skillful advertising of this ‘indispensable’ source of freedom. A way of life is being jeopardised by the appeal of autonomous vehicles, but for the moment the railway blood still flows.

    Jesiniky Mountains, Czech Republic.

    ‘the enemy within’

    In a worryingly development last January a seventy-one year-old man, Jaromir Balda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for terrorism. He felled trees to block railway lines, pretending Islamists were responsible by leaving messages at the scene proclaiming Allahu Akbar – ‘God is great’ in Arabic. Two passenger trains hit the trees, but fortunately no one was injured. The far-right sympathiser admitted he had hoped to spread fear of Muslim migrants.[iii]

    One may assume Balda – like the really murderous Anders Breivik in Norway – considered his actions a form of tough love to his countrymen: waking them up to the danger posed by the ‘enemy within’ – the miniscule Islamic population of the Czech Republic, a country that has, by and large, displayed an unsympathetic attitude to the plight of refugees, especially those with darker skin.

    This racism can partly be attributed to long-standing antipathy towards the indigenous Romany (‘gypsy’) people. In contrast, the pale-skinned foreigner, ‘the ex-pat’, is treated with deference, and a little envy, albeit marauding stag parties have sullied the reputation of the English at least.

    Balda’s choice of target was darkly symbolic, potentially evoking fears in day trippers from rural parts into cities; and among city dwellers who take trains all the way to remote regions, along with their bikes and skis. This gives way to the delusion of safety offered by the autonomous car journey, and further fracturing of community.

    Inter-continental

    Three years ago I travelled by train and bus from Portugal as far as Ukraine, on what was a redemptive trip, fulfilling an ambition to visit the former Soviet Union. Crossing the border from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine a distinct culture came into view. At the interchange of Çop trains halt on account of the different rail gauges used on either side. Stalin had ordered this inconvenience in order to slow down invading armies, and prevent people from easily escaping. An enduring cultural fault line is the result. It felt as if I had reached the limit of a Europe I know as a backyard I have not fully investigated.

    I hope to continue regular overland peregrinations, ideally by train, but the cost seems to rise each year, with further privatisations on the horizon. I fear that as train connections lapse, the life blood of Europe will cease to flow. Then we will experience the false freedom of driving our cars on anonymous highways, or taking flights to green zones in historic cities, conveniently cleared of native populations that don’t fit with the desired impression the authorities wish to leave.

    As Europeans grow wary of diversity it is worth considering the vital role played by railways in fostering community and tolerance. An annual holiday by train ought to be available to anyone living on the continent, even those on a peripheral island that tore away its tracks after independence. Connecting Europeans, in real comfort, to cities, mountains and the sea is perhaps the greatest service the railways still provide, and with continued intermingling our heterogeneous communities might seem more inviting.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [i] Angelique Chrisafis, ‘France recalls Rome envoy over worst verbal onslaught ‘since the war’’, 7th of February, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/07/france-italy-ambassador-macron-di-maio-salvini-second-world-war, accessed 18/2/19.

    [ii] Online Editors, ‘Leo Varadkar: ‘I’m romantic. I love the railways. I had a train set as a kid’’ April 3rd, 2014, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/leo-varadkar-im-romantic-i-love-the-railways-i-had-a-train-set-as-a-kid-30152502.html, accessed 18/2/19.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Czech pensioner jailed for terror attacks on trains’, January 14th, 2019, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46862508?fbclid=IwAR1rLbhjW_fpVyao8MjooDZe4muAR8bYCyyg5I_x1JzL6HytguW0PPoPFPU, accessed 18/2/19.

  • ‘Wild Law’ is the Path of Natural Justice

    Man-made climate change is as good as a fact, but the consequences are uncertain in any specific location. Indeed, the island of Ireland could actually be more hospitable to human habitation under certain scenarios: drier and hotter summers are predicted, albeit with an increased likelihood of storm events; higher atmospheric CO2-levels could also increase crop yields.[i] Our rising emissions could have greater impacts elsewhere.

    Mitigation strategies may also have adverse side effects. Witness the expansion of sitka spruce plantations across Ireland, which acidify soils and strangle biodiversity,[ii] in pursuit of an improved carbon balance sheet permitting increases in dairy production. There are also question marks around the impacts of wind farms, especially those sited on blanket peat[iii], requiring hundreds of tonnes of concrete in construction, and disrupting the flightpaths of birds. If this energy is devoted to a new generation of electrified autonomous vehicles, rather than communal transport, it will be in vain.

    Climate change opportunism includes the distortion of supermarket shelves being stacked with organic products wrapped in plastic and flown halfway around the world. It is most obvious in the greenwashing of the agricultural sector,[iv] which consistently argues that Irish livestock’s lower emissions profile justifies expansion – as beef and dairy would only be produced elsewhere with higher emissions. Thankfully, the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument is more easily dismissed as data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), analysed by An Taisce, shows that Ireland is, in actual fact, the most carbon-intensive beef producer in Europe, and ranks third on emissions from its dairy sector.[v] Most importantly, however, narrowing the environmental agenda to climate change alone obscures the equally pressing consideration of the Sixth Extinction, the unarguable reality of which is apparent in Ireland.

    With this in mind, Is it possible that interested parties could assert rights, already implied by the Irish Constitution, to protect Irish nature itself? Could spiralling emissions then be reduced alongside meaningful biodiversity-gains? Such an argument would build on a foundation of Natural Law, a school of thought embedded in the language and historic interpretation of the Irish Constitution. It can be traced to Classical antiquity, as Sophocles’s Antigone puts it: ‘the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven’, beyond the temporary, and occasionally illegitimate, laws of any state.

    During the Middle Ages, especially through Thomas Aquinas, ‘pagan’ Classical arguments were adopted by the Roman Catholic Church. In more recent times these became associated with a toxic and myopic focus on human sexuality, especially women’s bodies. Natural Law still transmits, however, compelling arguments for a universal justice beyond, and above, positive law, informed by dialectic, rather than Christian Revelation as is widely assumed.

    The jurist and former President of the High Court, Declan Costello wrote: ‘It has more than once been judicially observed that it can clearly be inferred that the [Irish] Constitution rejects legal positivism as a basis for the protection of fundamental rights and suggests instead a theory of natural law from which those rights can be derived.’[vi] Thus, from the 1960s, Natural Law interpretations ascribed a host of ‘Unenumerated Rights’[vii] to all citizens, including rights to bodily integrity, work, marry, privacy in marital relations, and free movement within the State. These rights are not explicitly identified in the Irish Constitution but are considered intrinsic to the human condition, flowing in particular from a generalised protection of personal rights under Article 40.3. With the Sixth Extinction now upon us, there is an urgent need for Natural Law to be extended to imply an Unenumerated Rights of other species to exist, along with ourselves.

    For this to occur, however, the Court must overcome a contemporary moral relativism, and aversion to decisive ethical responses. No doubt truth is a shifting target, and any single account is insufficient, but faith in our capacity to settle ethical arguments at a given point in time needs to be restored. As Aristotle – whose influence on Aquinas’s Natural Law theory was immense – pointed out:

    The theorizing of truth is in one sense difficult, in another easy. This is shown by the fact that whereas no one person can obtain an adequate grasp of it, we cannot all fail in the attempt; each thinker makes some statement about the natural world and as an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry; but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable.[viii]

    Post-modernists will argue otherwise, but an outlook of ambient confusion is an admission of failure. Holes can be picked in any argument, but the argument as a whole – “a combination of all conjectures” – may stand. One cannot propose anything meaningful without the conviction of arriving at “something considerable” –  an elusive truth. A capacity to determine justice requires we overcome a ponderous Post-Truth incoherence.

    A contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre sees in the dialectic process, ‘the movement from thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such’. Contemporary environmental challenges require new logical departures, disclosing “how things are”, “as such.”  Natural Law theory should encompass an Earth Jurisprudence. Then our laws may confront the reality of an oversized human population radically out of balance with its environment, with Ireland presenting a difficult case.

    Currently, however, environmental laws are generally seen as a body of rules foisted on the populace, often in exchange for a subsidy, rather than practices adopted for the commonweal. Accordingly, Coyle and Morrow claim such regulations are seen ‘as a technical instrument of social goals and policies, rather than a body of principles aiming at the articulation of a concept of justice and the good life.’[ix] This can partly be attributed to the prior failure of Natural Law theorists to identify inherent rights in other species.

    In contrast, the sanctity of human property rights have been vigorously upheld. Early modern theorists, drawing more on Christian revelation than reason, assumed rights of virtually unrestrained possession, along with dominion over all wild creatures therein. The seventeenth century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius described this as ‘a grant which was renewed on the restoration of the world after the deluge’. To deprive any owner of this would, he said, be ‘an act of injustice.’[x] Importantly, however, up to that point there had been little necessity to assert the rights of wild animals, even in Europe, as humans were living in relative harmony with nature, or at least allowing other species to survive. According to Tim Flannery: ‘after the last muskox died in what is now Sweden about 9,000 years ago, the European mainland did not lose another species until the seventeenth century.’[xi]

    Since then the picture has changed dramatically across the world with sixty percent of wild animals wiped out since 1970 alone.[xii] Coyle and Morrow affirm: ‘The very agricultural practices which were held out as a moral necessity by the natural rights theorists can, it seems, create untold environmental damage.’ Given the scale of ecological damage that has ensued – associated with European colonisation of the globe – they argue that ‘the ethical assumptions of the seventeenth century conception of property cannot survive in such circumstances.’[xiii] The accumulating impacts on our planet of over seven billion human beings, living longer than ever, enjoins alternative approaches to land ownership. As Coyle and Morrow put it: ‘If human agriculture was ever in harmony with nature it certainly is not any longer and the sanctity of individual ownership must be restrained. Duties must join rights.’[xiv]

    Natural Law is an ongoing, truth-seeking dialectical process with the aim of disclosing, “how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.” If Natural Law is to have continued relevance it must adapt to current conditions. A re-imagining of Natural Law is evident in the field of Earth Jurisprudence, or Wild Law, a term coined by Cormac Cullinan to refer to human laws that are consistent with Earth Jurisprudence.[xv] According to one of its inspirators, Thomas Berry: ‘The Universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects and every member of the Earth Community has three inherent rights: the right to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.’[xvi] These rights ought, logically and morally, to be incorporated into Irish law.

    But how can these aspirations be given tangible legal form? In a seminal 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’[xvii] Christopher D. Stone explores how Wild Law might apply. He argues that natural objects could have legal standing by analogy with companies, states, infants, incompetents, municipalities or even universities. Thus, a court appoints a trustee when a corporation displays incompetence. He writes:

    On a parity of reasoning, we should have a system in which, when a friend of a natural object perceives it to be endangered, he can apply to a court for the creation of a guardianship … The guardian would urge before the court injuries not presently cognizable – the death of eagles and inedible crabs, the suffering of sea lions, the loss from the face of the earth of species of commercially valueless birds, the disappearance of wilderness areas.

    He also draws an analogy with the law of patents and copyright:

    I am proposing that we do the same with eagles and wilderness areas as we do with copyrighted works, patented inventions and privacy: make the violation of rights in them to be a cost by declaring the piracy of them to be the invasion of a property interest.

    Furthermore, he suggests this could lead to modifications in our representative democracies:

    I am suggesting that there is nothing unthinkable about, and there might on balance even be a prevailing case to be made for an electoral appointment that made some systematic effort to allow for the representative “rights” of non-human life.

    Stone envisages changes in our legal culture informing wider social norms, as, ‘a society that spoke of the “legal rights of the environment” would be inclined to legislate more environment-protecting rules by formal enactment.’

    Intriguingly, he also speculates, ‘What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of geophysics, biology and the cosmos’, proposing ‘that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism of which mankind is a functional part’. Similarly, Coyle and Morrow argue: ‘The problem is that meaningful change responding to environmental and social imperatives will require a true paradigm shift in how we regard our relationship with the world of which we form a part.’

    A transformation in our legal relationship with the natural world requires the participation of other fields. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley who famously described the poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The philosopher Timothy Morton makes the provocative claim that putting ‘something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy did for the figure of women.’[xviii] Perhaps W.B. Yeats’s identification of Irish nature with a ‘glimmering girl’, ‘with apple blossoms in her hair’ distracts from an ongoing exploitative relationship, linked to our colonial inheritance. Indeed, rather than celebrating a patriarch ‘Digging’ for turf, as in Seamus Heaney’s poem by that name did, new accounts might draw inspiration from an often-overlooked visionary poet of the early twentieth-century Irish Revival, Eva Gore-Booth. She gave up the wealth and privilege of her aristocratic background to devote herself to the poor. Gore-Booth also recognises the right of all creatures to exist on the land, notwithstanding human ownership in her 1906 poem ‘The Landlord’

    O the bracken waves and the foxgloves flame,
    And none of them ever has heard your name –
    Near and dear is the curlew’s cry,
    You are merely a stranger passing by.    [xix]

    Hearteningly, all around the world, from Ecuador to New Zealand, conceptions of Earth Jurisprudence, Wild Law or Pachamama are actually taking route. For example, Germany’s constitution makes protection of ‘the foundations of nature and animals’ a national imperative, applicable to government agencies, the legislature and the judiciary. The provision has been cited in over seven hundred cases. Moreover, echoing Christopher D. Stone, Oliver A. Houck points out this ‘does not include the more numerous acts of compliance that drew no litigation at all.’[xx]

    Meanwhile in Ireland species loss continues apace. Liam Lysaght recently records: ‘of the 3,000 species that have undergone a red list conservation assessment, one in every four species is threatened with extinction here.’[xxi] Of particular concern is the continued exploitation of peat bogs for fossil fuel extraction – where considerations of nature conservation align precisely with keeping fossil fuels, and embedded methane, in the ground – as well as the impacts of grazing ruminants.

    Unfortunately, existing environmental legislation, including the EU’s Habitats Directive, is failing to protect endangered species adequately, including the iconic curlew, which is now on the red list. This can partly be attributed to a lack of enforcement, but also, as we observed, such laws are currently considered an encumbrance on property owners, and not a scheme of protection for a common inheritance. So how do we spare what remains of Irish nature from the ravages of human exploitation?

    A constitutional amendment enshrining nature rights, similar to that operating in Germany, should be the long-term goal. But this will take time to bring to fruition, especially as mainstream media only falteringly highlights extinction threats, and none of the main political parties prioritise protection of biodiversity.

    I propose the alternative of a test case, applying Thomas Berry’s tripartite rights to a particular native species; proposing, for example, the curlew has a right to be, to habitat and to reproduce, alongside humans, based on a Natural Law interpretation of the Irish Constitution – as a previously Unenumerated Right. It seems crucial that such rights are ‘discovered’ sooner rather than later before further, irreversible, losses occur.

    The Court could certainly injunct particular activities to protect species under threat, or prohibit certain classes of herbicides or insecticides outright, or even declare particular lands under private ownership as protected habitats. This will require expert witness from recognised authorities to distinguish competing rights of native, invasive and naturalized species. Property owners should be compensated for any loss, but under the Irish Constitution all rights, including that to property, are subject to the common good, which is served by preventing extinctions.

    The allocation of reserves and prohibition on the use of certain chemicals would be a proportionate appropriation by the Judiciary of the powers of the Legislature and Executive branches, in circumstances where there has been a serious dereliction of duty. The Sixth Extinction is an emergency happening before our eyes with recognisable victims, unlike the unpredictable devastation that climate change is wreaking.

    Cattle and sheep farmers can find new roles as landscape guardians. Re-wilding may begin with marginal lands, where farming is already uneconomic, while better land currently under pasture can be converted to tillage in order to accelerate what a recent article in The Lancet has referred to as the ‘Great Food Transformation.’[xxii]

    Eventually, beyond legal prescriptions, habitat reclamation can endear the population to the landscape, and reform destructive behaviours. In developing our appreciation of the soft sounds and sweet aromas in nature we may consider reducing dependence on noisy, polluting motor cars. Greater biodiversity also offers scope for judicious harvesting of foodstuffs, building materials and fuel. The tragedy of the loss of other species is almost impossible to convey.

    Many of us wish to see our laws go further: putting an end to the perverse subsidy regime that only benefits the Beef Barons; or dignifying all animals with a decent life, in the wild. For the moment, however, our best legal argument is to assert the rights of all resident Irish species, living in ecological balance, simply to exist. Reduced emissions will be a happy by-product of biodiversity-gain, raising environmental awareness to a point where destructive behaviours are recognised, and changed. In beginning to liberate the natural world from human dominion let us recall the small victories won in the battle against human slavery along the road to the great milestones. Wild Law can emerge incrementally in Ireland through our existing constitutional framework.

    [i] Stephen Flood, ‘Projected Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Irish Agriculture’, October, 2013, Stop Climate Chaos, https://www.stopclimatechaos.ie/download/pdf/projected_economic_impacts_of_climate_change_on_irish_agriculture_oct_2013.pdf, accessed 19/2/19.

    [ii] Mary Colwell, ‘A forestry boom is turning Ireland into an ecological dead zone’, October 10th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/10/trees-ireland-biodiversity-sitka-birds-extinction, accessed 19/2/19.

    [iii] Richard Lindsay and Olivia Bragg ‘WIND FARMS AND BLANKET PEAT. The Bog Slide of 16th October 2003 at Derrybrien, Co. Galway, Ireland’, November, 2005, School of Health & Biosciences University of East London. https://web.archive.org/web/20131218090914/http://www.uel.ac.uk/erg/documents/Derrybrien.pdf, accessed 28/2/19.

    [iv] Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Environmental group calls Origin Green a ‘sham’’, October 4th, 2017, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/environmental-group-calls-origin-green-a-sham-1.3244507, accessed 28/2/19.

    [v] Press Release ‘Bombshell for Irish Peace’, 12th of February, 2019, An Taisce, http://www.antaisce.org/articles/bombshell-for-irish-beef?fbclid=IwAR0uPTUu1TEoZToCGugOCIoS-nmsigAQNU0g_U3XrIZHNU3PKbF2_zO0YIU, accessed 19/2/19.

    [vi] Declan Costello, ‘Natural Law, the Constitution, and the Courts’, from Lynch and Meenan (eds.) Essays in Memory of Alexis FitzGerald, Dublin, The Incorporated Law Society of Ireland, 1987, p.109

    [vii] The original ‘Unenumerated Right’ to ‘Bodily Integrity’ was approved by the Supreme Court in Ryan v. A.G. [1965] IESC 1; [1965] IR 294 (3rd July, 1965)

    [viii] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 2, Part 1.

    [ix] Coyle and Morrow, The Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law. Property, Rights and Nature, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2004, p.211

    [x] Coyle and Morrow, p.15

    [xi] Flannery, 2018, p.251

    [xii] Damian Carrington, ‘Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds’, 30th of October, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds, accessed 20/2/19.

    [xiii] Coyle and Morrow, p.206

    [xiv] Ibid, p.209

    [xv] ‘Discovering the meaning of Earth jurisprudence’, Legalbrief, August 27, 2002

    [xvi] Quoted in Mike Bell, ‘Thomas Berry and an Earth Jurisprudence’, http://rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/earth%20jurisprudence/Earth%20Justice.htm, accessed 20/2/19.

    [xvii] Christopher D. Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing–Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review. 45 (1972): 450–87.

    [xviii] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p.5.

    [xix] [xix] Eva Gore-Booth ‘The Land to a Landlord’, from Sonja Tierney (ed), Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems, Dublin, Arlen House, 2018, p.166

    [xx] Houck, Noah’s Second Voyage: The Rights of Nature as Law, 31 Tul. Envtl. L.J. 1, 2017

    [xxi] Liam Lysaght, ‘The six steps needed to save Irish Biodiversity’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times

    [xxii] Prof Walter Willett, MD et al, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.