Cassandra Voices

Category: Society

  • UK’s Surveillance Regime in Breach of European Convention on Human Rights

    In a previous editions of Cassandra Voices we discussed the Russian surveillance system, called SORM, and the far-reaching data privacy impact it may have vis-à-vis private individuals and communication service providers.

    Russia is not the only state struggling to strike a balance between national security concerns that often mandate extensive surveillance measures, and the right to data privacy of its citizens. Recently, the approach employed by the UK in this area, specifically, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 that provides a legislative basis for governmental surveillance, was subjected to the scrutiny of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECHR’) in Strasburg.

    In particular, in the case of Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom the ECtHR had a chance to opine on the legality of the UK bulk interception regime, its intelligence sharing policy with foreign governments, and the manner in which it may collect data from communications services providers.

    Concerns around the UK government surveillance techniques were triggered following Edward Snowden’s allegations about the British Government Communications Headquarters’ (‘GCHQ’) surveillance protocols being even more extensive than the equivalent powers resorted to by the US government. Specifically, Snowden referred to the GCHQ-driven operation codenamed ‘TEMPORA’, which has supposedly facilitated tapping and storing of an unprecedented amount of data about private citizens in the UK. The British government has since neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such an operation.

    The issue has been subsequently picked up by civil rights activists, journalists and non-governmental organizations, including Big Brother Watch, Transparency International, Privacy International, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Open Rights Group etc., with the ECHR passing final judgment on September 13th, 2018.

    By five votes to two the ECHR judges ruled that the bulk interception regime adopted by the UK violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), specifically a right of respect for private and family life/communications, in the absence of sufficient safeguards to prevent abuse. The Court noted that while the bulk interception techniques themselves did not constitute a breach of Article 8, the failure to secure adequate safeguards did.

    The Court also held, by six votes to one, that the approach for collecting data from communications service providers breached Article 8, and that both the bulk interception regime and the regime for obtaining data from communications service providers violated Article 10 – the right to freedom of expression and information – of the ECHR, again, due to an absence of safeguards to prevent the abuse of systems, guaranteeing an appropriate level of confidentiality.

    Notably, the UK regime for sharing intelligence with foreign governments was found to be in compliance with Articles 8 and 10.

    It should be noted that the Court issued its judgement in the context of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 that currently forms a legal basis for surveillance activities pursued by the government in the UK. The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is a new piece of legislation that was supposed to come into force after the allegations have been made and, therefore, fell outside of the scope of the present case. Once fully in force, this Act is expected to heavily amend the existing regimes with the recent ECHR judgement, hopefully, a timely guidance for this purpose.

  • The Torture of my Irish Visa Application

    I am writing this account for the sake of those who follow. As victims of serious negligence by the state bureaucracy, my family and I feel vulnerable, and thus wish to remain anonymous. In any case, revealing my identity will add nothing to what I am about to disclose. If anyone wishes to contact me for support or guidance, please contact the editor of this magazine.

    I – The Background

    I am an Irish citizen originally from Pakistan. By the time of my citizenship application, I had already been living in Ireland for ten years, at all times on a valid visa. I am married to a Lithuanian national (and EU citizen), and we have a child, who is Irish by birth. We availed of the welfare system for a few years after the recession, when we struggled to find work despite our Irish university educations, but we have both since gained full-time employment.

    I entered Ireland on a student visa. A few years later, I met my partner, and we got married. The effect of marrying an EU national in an EU state is that it elevates your legal status in that country. It allowed me to take out a five-year 4EUFam visa, meaning I had a right to remain, live, and work in Ireland.

    Fast forward five years, in 2015, I contacted the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (henceforth INIS), asking them what my options were, as I wished to remain in the country permanently. They replied that I had two options. Either, apply for a ten-year Permanent Residence Card (Form EU3), six months before the expiration of my visa, or apply for full citizenship.

    In February 2016 my wife applied on my behalf, as is required, for the ten years visa. We expected the application to run smoothly, as we had always lived here in accordance with the Free Movement of Persons Regulation, had no criminal records, an Irish child, and had been consistently resident in the country.

    Also, importantly, my wife had also applied for, and received, a Permanent Residence Certificate in 2010 (Form EU2), which provides leave to remain in the state, which can only be obtained after living and working in the country for at least five years.

    Once certain conditions are met, this certificate grants that person’s family leave to remain. The free movement of EU citizens and their family members is a fundamental right under EU Law, enshrined in Article 45, and developed by EU secondary legislation and the case law of the European Court of Justice.

    Nine months passed, because of a backlog at the INIS, as applications, which were supposed to be processed within six months, were taking much longer. But I hear this is only happening to Pakistani nationals, and a few select others.

    In the meantime my five year visa expired, but the INIS sends a letter, which I can take with me to the notorious Burgh Quay, and request a 6 month extension, while my application is being processed. I had already, optimistically, sent my application for citizenship.

    II – The Bombshell

    In November 2016 we received a letter from the INIS, saying the Minister has decided to refuse my application, for the following reason:

    You have not submitted the necessary documents which were requested.

    The documents requested were as follows:

    For each period of study, copies of the following documents should be supplied:

    -Letter from college/course provider including start date and (expected) completion date

    -Letter from private medical insurance provider for EU citizen and any dependants

    -Evidence of financial resources and corresponding bank statements

    For each period of involuntarily unemployment, copies of the following documents should be provided:

    -Letter from Department of Social Protection with details of benefit claims

    -Letter from previous employer outlining circumstances of redundancy

    -P60s for prior 2 years of employment

    Therefore your application does not meet the requirements of Regulation 15(2) of the Regulations as you have failed to submit the necessary supporting documentation set out in Schedule 7 of the Regulations.

    In order to qualify for permanent residence under Regulation 12(1) of the Regulations, you must reside in the State with the EU citizen in conformity with the Regulations for a continuous period of 5 years. You have submitted the following as evidence of the EU citizen’s activity:

    (long list of documents)

    This does not satisfy the Minister that the EU citizen has resided in the State while engaged in employment, self-employment, the pursuit of a course of study, involuntary unemployment or the possession of sufficient resources in conformity of Regulation (6)(3) of the Regulations. Therefore, it does not appear you are entitled to permanent residence as a family member in accordance with Regulation 12(1)(b) of the Regulations.

    It is now open to you to make representations to the Minister as to why your application should not be refused. Such representations must be made within 15 working days of the date of issue of the letter.

    Naively, we assumed there had been a mistake, because we were sure we had submitted all the documents correctly. I had just fifteen days to re-submit all the necessary documentation for the application, without even knowing what exactly was missing in the first place.

    In February 2017, after three months, we received a letter from the INIS, stating:

    The Minister has examined your application based on the documentation on file.

    I am to inform you that the Minister has decided to refuse your application for a permanent residence card under the Regulations. This is for the following reasons:

    In order to qualify for permanent residence under Regulation 12(1) of the Regulations, you must reside in the State with the EU citizen in conformity with the Regulations for continuous period of 5 years. You submitted the following as evidence of the EU citizen’s activity.

    (list of documents)

    This does not satisfy the Minister that the EU citizen has resided in the State while engaged in employment, self-employment, the pursuit of a course of study, involuntary unemployment or the possession of sufficient resources in conformity of Regulation (6)(3) of the Regulations. Therefore, it does not appear you are entitled to permanent residence as a family member in accordance with Regulation 12(1)(b) of the Regulations.

    …

    Request for review:

    If you feel that the deciding officer has erred in fact or in law, then you may request a review of the above decision. This must be done in accordance with Regulation 21 of the Regulations and should contain the details set out in Form EU4. A request for a review of a decision must be made on Form EU4 within 15 working days.

    It is noted that you now have no immigration status in the State. In the event that you do not submit a request for a review of the decision not to grant you a Permanent Residence Card within the prescribed 15 working days, your file will be referred to the Removals Unit, Repatriation Division for consideration under Regulation 20 of the Regulations.

    At that moment panic set in. Shocked, confused, alone and scared, after receiving the letter, we immediately contacted a prominent immigration lawyer, booked an appointment and went to see her. Assuming the INIS is overworked, we thought a mistake had happened in their offices. After ten years in Ireland, we had reasonable amount of faith in the public services.

    We disclosed everything, looking for realistic, practical advice. What did we get from her? Scaremongering and incorrect advice. She told us that not only my own, but also my wife’s immigration status was not certain, even though she had a Permanent Residence Certificate, which was a serious shock. She said the INIS had become very strict on people who were receiving social welfare and were an economic burden on the State. She said they were deporting as many immigrants in that position as possible.

    It seemed even my wife, an EU citizen, could be deported. I felt belittled after being questioned as to why I had even considered applying for a ten-year visa, and not just settled for reapplying for the five-year visa.

    We were told that we might have to fight our case in court, and that she would get in touch with a barrister, and get back to us to say what further steps needed to be taken, which she never did.

    She took €100 for the consultation. We contacted her a few more times, but she was never available and despite our leaving messages, she never responded.

    As a last ditch effort, she had advised us to re-submit our documents and appeal the decision, and also apply for leave to remain in Ireland based on the European Court of Justice’s judgment in the Zambrano case.

    She also advised us to take out a Freedom of Information Request to obtain records of the original application.

    III – Digging Deeper

    We started dissecting the Regulations ourselves, because the solicitor’s advice did not sit well with us. The more we dug, the more we realized that her advice had been misleading.

    We racked our brains about what could be wrong with the application. We could not think of any other reason apart from that a document was missing. The letter from the INIS, however, did not specify the exact reason. We collected all the documents again and re-sent them to the INIS.

    We were absolutely certain we had provided all proofs and all documents as requested, and that my wife and I both had a legal right to remain in the country.

    We decided to appeal the Minister’s decision, meaning more letters, more documents, more legislation, more time, and more effort. I also sent an application for a visa under the Zambrano judgement.

    We were considering our options, and we did not have many immediate ones. If I were deported, it would be horrendous for my family. For starters, my wife would be left to look after our child alone in Ireland. It would also make it very difficult for me to return as a deportee. Plus, I seriously feared living in Pakistan as an atheist vegan.

    If we were all to move, as non-Muslims, my family would be treated as dangerous outsiders in an intolerant and violent country.

    The only other option was to try to move to Lithuania, but for that we needed to show one year of private health insurance costing €5000, paid up front, and enough money in our bank accounts to survive for a year. There was also the small matter that I did not speak Lithuanian, which would have made getting a job extremely challenging.

    I also made a Freedom of Information Request to the relevant Officer at the Department of Justice and Equality for a full copy of my original application and supporting documents, so we could go through everything they had on file as part of the application. That was the only way we had of finding out what was actually missing.

    The INIS had never been specific about which document was missing, or what were the shortcomings of my application.

    Meanwhile, my wife had been getting headaches and having sleepless nights because of the stress of fighting my case, as well as forthcoming exams.

    We did not let them break us. We continued our full-times studies, while working part-time. We were sure we had the right to live here, and knew there must be something wrong. But at the same time we knew we were in an extremely vulnerable position.

    Also, the temporary extension on my visa was about to expire, and I had exams coming up, which I could not sit if I was thrown out of the country.

    This also threw my citizenship application into jeopardy as it cannot be processed without a valid visa.

    IV – Aftershocks

    We started to delve deeper into the legislation, and sent numerous emails and letters to the INIS, stating relevant legislation which safeguarded my right to remain as a family member of an EU citizen.

    The weeks were passing, and we were hardly receiving any responses, even when we were asking for an extension to my temporary visa, while we appealed, and also while the visa under the Zambrano judgement was in process.

    We told them about my forthcoming exams, and the threat to my employment which required a valid visa. Even on the rare occasion when we did receive a response, it was completely useless and frustrating, more or less stating:

    Your correspondence has been forwarded to the relevant section.

    The clock was ticking. Desperation was setting in.

    A friend of our’s suggested contacting our local TD, as we could not get answers from the INIS ourselves.

    She was quick to reply, and genuinely willing to help. She agreed to send correspondence on my behalf to the INIS, firstly to get an update on my three applications (the appeal, the visa based on Zambrano judgement, and the citizenship application), and secondly, to request a temporary visa extension because of my work and academic circumstances.

    Lo and behold, in only a matter of days, I received direct correspondence from INIS via email and post, with a clear update on my three applications, and also with an entitlement to a temporary extension.

    The letter had said my appeal was still being assessed, and I would be informed as soon as the Minister had made a decision. It is funny how people higher up in the pecking order can get information about you faster than you can get information about yourself.

    When we visited their office on Burgh Quay to extend my visa, we were spoken to very rudely, including being shouted at that we did not have any rights here in this country because my wife was at that time involuntarily unemployed.

    But at least we had found a bit of calm in the midst of very rough seas.

    V – Another Angle

    There was no time to rest while the appeal was in motion. We knew at least that the INIS would have to take all our documentation on file into account at the time of making the final decision.

    Looking for another way of communicating our case to the INIS, we came across SOLVIT.

    We told them our story, and they offered to send a letter to the INIS spelling out all our legal rights, and why the INIS had no legitimate basis for refusing the application. They performed this service for free, for which we remain extremely grateful.

    SOLVIT confirmed that based on all the factors, including that my wife had been resident for over 10 years in Ireland, was involuntarily unemployed, and also had a Permanent Residence Certificate, we indeed had a right to remain as a family in the state.

    A few days later they got back to us stating that after pressing the INIS for an answer, they were informed that the INIS had not received a P60 form from my wife, which is why they had rejected my application.

    But we were sure we had sent it!

    We wrote to the INIS stating that we had already submitted the P60 at least twice. Of course, we also took the precaution of sending a copy again ourselves, and via SOLVIT for good measure too.

    More weeks passed by, until one afternoon, I received a call from someone in the INIS, admitting that there had been a mistake with my application (note the passive voice).

    They apologised, and said my visa would be approved. She also casually asked me if I could withdraw my Freedom of Information request.

    To make it clear, that is all I ever got from them in terms of an apology.

    I wonder how many officers go through a single application before the INIS decides to reject it? Are there checks in place, which can offset or safeguard against negligence, laziness or carelessness?

    This is the cold and inefficient system we are up against, which has total power to decide the fate of individuals and their families.

    VI – Relief at last

    A few days later, in May 2017, I finally received a letter stating my application had been approved:

    Your application has been examined under the provisions of the Regulations and the Directive.

    I wish to inform you that your application has been approved, as you fulfill the relevant conditions set out in the Regulations.

    No mention of any mistake, as if the six months of torture had never happened.

    A few months later, we received the records in response to our Freedom of Information request. These contained disturbing revelations, which included an internal memo from within the INIS, admitting that the initial application had been ‘incorrectly refused’, and which sought to rectify their mistake by withdrawing their refusal, and closing down the Freedom of Information request itself, unless I responded within ten days. It also suggested that they had only attended to our case because SOLVIT had applied on our behalf.

    The Freedom Of Information records contain other information which I will be investigating in the months to come.

    *******

    I wonder was the INIS even aware of how the legislation operates?

    And what of human rights? My child is Irish, and I, as his father, should have an inherent right to be with him in this State. I shudder to consider that I was almost deported because of this.

    After being granted my visa, I wanted to complain about my treatment by the INIS. We went to the Ombudsman, but they do not handle immigration matters. We also went to FLAC, and other prominent immigration law firms, who all said that because we had not incurred monetary loss, the INIS had no case to answer. Do stress, mental pain and anguish, as well as a huge amount of wasted time, count for nothing?

    Fast forward a few weeks, and my citizenship was granted too.

    I wonder what if we had not been fluent in English? We would never have had a chance of overturning this injustice, and been expelled from the country.

    So what advice would I have for someone in the situation I found myself? Do your research, and know the legislation like the back of your hand. Don’t blindly trust solicitors to fight for your case. Also, look for ways of using organisations like SOLVIT to communicate with state bodies, or an elected representative, although it should be noted that access to SOLVIT is restricted to EU citizens.

    If you are sure you have a right to remain, never give up, keep fighting, and finding new ways to advance your case.

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

  • The Towering Qualities Needed in an Advocate

    Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’ is a short history, and valedictory, to the tradition of songwriting, fusing aphorisms and personal reflections on failure with nostalgia and regret. In this ‘Tower’, like that of Babel, the songsters of history communicate unsatisfactorily:

    I said to Hank Williams “How lonely does it get?”
    Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
    But I hear him coughing all night long
    Oh, a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song

    Cohen also hints at the immortality of his verse:

    Now, I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
    They’re movin’ us tomorrow to the tower down the track
    But you’ll be hearin’ from me, baby, long after I’m gone
    I’ll be speakin’ to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.

    As advocates barristers, especially those representing criminal defendants, see themselves as part of a great tradition: maintaining a vocation in eliciting the truth, and telling it. We also trade in ambiguity, testing the veracity of an opponent’s case in order to establish reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury.

    What sort of qualities should an advocate have? Fearlessness is intrinsic, which does not mean hysteria or histrionics. Flailing arms should give way to precision bombing, and the careful assembly of evidence.

    A true advocate is honest, and never misleads a court, or fabricates evidence: offering persuasion within ethical bounds.

    Nonetheless, the best bend the rules, leading a witness through examination-in-chief, at least until challenged.

    An advocate should be unafraid to criticize the vectors of established authority. Thus Sir Edward Carson, frustrated by the proceedings of a tribunal presided over by a judge, who claimed he was not acting in his judicial capacity, responded: ‘Any fool can see that’.

    Another great skill is knowing when to keep shtum. Silence can be golden, and verbosity pointless. This extends to deciding who to call as your witness. The old lawyers’ joke is that your client is your worst enemy. A question too far, when you cannot anticipate the answer, is a journey into unknown, perilous territory.

    Advocacy is more art than science, and thus demands a high degree of creativity. It requires nimble thinking, judgment, and a degree of circumspection. This branch of alchemy cannot be taught in law schools, as is assumed in the United States.

    It often benefits from non-linear sequences of thought that are the hallmark of a person who is out-of-the-ordinary. This may involve throwing out the rule book for that most devastating of interrogations: the surprise question. This remains the height of creativity in the often gentle, though far from gentile, art of cross examination.

    Great advocates have their idiosyncrasies: from the thespian US lawyers, or indeed the late Adrian Hardiman in Ireland, to the blind courage and rhetoric of the aforementioned Carson, who displayed a unique combination of fearlessness and cold judgment.

    After being frustrated by a playful deluge of responses from Oscar Wilde on his apparently innocent relationship with boys, Carson asked him about one Graingier, and, ‘had he kissed him’?

    Wilde fell for the trap, responding, ‘oh no he was far too ugly’, and Reading Gaol beckoned. Implicitly he had revealed that his relationships with boys was of a different order.

    It goes to show that a witness should never be over-confident. A witness box is the last place to send a stage performer, or for anyone who plays to the gallery.

    Cross examination involves strategies, ruses, subtle discrediting, and of course laying traps. The strategy should be mapped out in advance, and requires the prosecution’s evidence to be parsed meticulously, in order to be dismantled.

    In appealing to a jury, the great advocate often eschews the chronology of a case, instead presenting a fluid and protean account. They often mix it up, and it may not be initially apparent what they are getting at.

    Any aspiring advocate ought to study and indeed listen closely to how senior advocates go about their trade. To attain greatness anyone must commune with the dead, and living, and be humble.

    Increasingly, I believe great advocates should have a commitment to social justice. Alas, few do. Victory and payment is one thing; serving the community, or that nebulous notion of justice, another. Amidst the scramble for Mammon this often gets lost sight of.

    The greater the capacity of an advocate for empathy, the more she will be prepared to do on behalf of her client, though it should be noted that even the best have their foibles.

    I am deeply skeptical, from wide experience, about the motivations and funding sources of the human rights industry, and the type of advocacy we often hear that arrives in the form of sound bites. This is safe sex advocacy on politically correct issues such as gender equity, funded by shady organizations like the Ford Foundation, while ignoring far more pressing issues of homelessness, poverty and social exclusion.

    The crucial test is whether you are willing to represent the wretched of the earth: including the gangster, the property speculator and the drug baron.

    I intensely dislike those who take up causes driven by populist bandwagons. These are not advocates, but politicians in disguise.

    The world is full of public avengers, and family lawyers often deserve contempt for the fake outrage and indignation peppering their speech, while they enrich themselves on cultivating misery with contrived, and even state-sponsored, fabrications.

    As mentioned, advocacy intersects with creativity, which always contains an element of mystery. As when a tennis players enter the ‘zone’, great advocates are often inscrutable in their methods, and react instinctively. Great, as opposed to good, advocacy cannot really be taught. That ability is innate.

    That is not to diminish the value of the science behind the trade: a closing speech should scrupulously assemble the weaknesses of the opponent’s evidence, establishing corroboration, or otherwise, and exposing holes and contradictions.

    From his rhetorical palette the advocate paints in mosaic, fusing a degree of passion with calculated mind games.

    An advocate should be a psychologist in his approach to keeping a jury as a criminal barrister, or judges elsewhere, on side.

    What should be said before a judge, as opposed to a jury, is markedly different. A judge is case-hardened, and less likely to be swayed by the tricks of the trade, unlike a jury, whose affection should be courted.

    But trial courts are becoming increasingly like reality television, or beauty contests. It is getting like Crufts, or a horse parade.

    As I have indicated, a much underrated virtue is discerning when to leave something unsaid. Evidence that may seem advantageous may remain unexplored in a closing speech for fear it will generate ambiguity, and even implode another argument. But this should not lead to timorousness. Points should be put decisively, which may border on stridency.

    I am increasingly of the view that advocacy is a necessary life skill, with application far beyond the courtroom. We all have to sell ourselves and relate to others: our daily lives involve persuasion, and to be too timid in discussion may invite disaster.

    It is important to be confident and assertive, but never too sure of yourself. The minute you believe your own hype, or that you are the cleverest man in the room is when you need to get out of there. This unfortunately is often a feature of the ruling class of any country.

    Like artists, most great advocates are assailed by doubt. These are complex and ambiguous creatures, whose practice of the dark arts may lead to a perception that there is something of the night about them. Perhaps as a result, the burden, and not just of proof, can be onerous.

    In our times public advocacy, not confined to the court room, is in high demand. As Leonard Cohen sang:

    Now, you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure:
    The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
    And there’s a mighty Judgement comin’ but I may be wrong
    You see, I hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song

    The world is completely out of balance and spinning towards the disasters of an economic and environmental apocalypse. The acceptance of neo-liberalism dogma is accelerating the prospect of social and economic collapse.

    This has been steered by a diabolic trinity of religious fundamentalism, neo-liberalism, and the post-truth peddling of relativists in the universities: academics who sing for their supper. But there’s a “mighty Judgement comin’”.

    Public advocacy from the likes of Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy and our own Cassandra Voices is rising up.

    Where better to learn advocacy than in the criminal and public courts of the Tower of Song? For the advocate is a truth-teller, who exposes bullshit wherever it is found. Real training in these skills is difficult to find. The art is increasingly diminished by failure to engage in adequate self-reflection.

    The mark of the truly great advocate is a resolute independence. He is never a dutiful servant of the state: the best would never dream of acting for the prosecution. That is left to careerists, and others who can only dream of advocacy’s Tower of Song.

  • The Limits of Artificial Intelligence

    The 2018 FIFA World Cup was an unqualified success. While the number of goals scored per game was the same as four years previously in Brazil, the entertainment value was way ahead, as were the number of close games.

    One of the pre-tournament favorites, France, won, and deservedly so. Still, luck played a significant role: both in the absence of technology in the build-up to the first goal, when a free kick was incorrectly awarded, and for the second – the result of a controversial VAR penalty decision. This served to remind us that technology is only as good as the humans using it.

    Prior to the tournament, all the big investment firms used data analysis and artificial intelligence to predict the eventual winner. Goldman Sachs ran over a million simulations and concluded that Brazil would emerge victorious. Another corporate giant, UBS predicted Germany would win after running ten thousand virtual tournaments through its software.  Well Germany was knocked out in the group phase, while Brazil only made it as far as the quarter-finals, only to be knocked out by Belgium.

    Recognizing the limits of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and technology in general, is important. Predictive tools may be excellent at setting the correct price for a product, or service, according to consumer demand and competition (full disclosure – one of my clients is an award-winning pricing analytics firm), or at predicting how many teachers will be needed in a given school district. But when it comes to predicting the future of our economy (the Crash), our culture (#MeToo), our politics (Trump), or even a sports tournaments like the World Cup, it does not perform so well.

    Yet there is no shortage of effort to turn messy and complex scenarios, into neat algorithms and software programs, in an effort to control or predict those variables that make us human. 

    For example, human resources departments increasingly use AI and data analysis to track and predict employee performance, run training programs and vet potential employees.  Political campaigns also use past behavior and demographic data to bombard us with targeted messages, playing to our fears and hopes. In the echo chambers of social media, we are constantly subjected to commercials for products or services curated and micro-targeted to our (supposed) needs. 

    There are those who argue the problem is not with the technology, but with the data – if we had access to better data than our predictions would be more accurate. This may be true, but only to a point.

    This still would not take into account unpredictable occurrences, or the flashes of inspiration which can make ordinary people do extraordinary and unusual things.

    The truth is, past behavior, and success, is no guarantee of future behavior or success.  Technology is most life-changing and effective when it is used as an enabler of human performance, not as a predictor. This is good news for those among us who are put off by the artificial constraints imposed on us in the daily doses of propaganda, curated specifically for each individual by machines.

    The more we continuously train ourselves to think and act independently the more we prepare ourselves for an uncertain and unpredictable world.

    I, for one, am hoping to be the next Croatia, the one that few saw coming…

  • What One Thing Could Make You Happier?

    Studies show that if you get married and then divorce, your happiness will dip below what it was before you married. One might conclude that pursuing the perfect relationship to fulfil your happiness is, at best, a risky business.

    Ninety-five percent of ‘the Feel Good Hormone’ serotonin is produced in your gut, a scientific fact that directly links nutrition to mood and happiness. But most people would find it hard to believe that their guts could have the slightest bearing on their happiness.

    Ask people ‘What One Thing Could Make You Happier?’, and you are bound to receive a wide range of replies, none of which are likely to have a connection to the physical body. The answers you receive, will inevitably include at least one, if not more, of the following: a great job; more money; amazing sex; better friends; more free time; looking better; being more intelligent (or more educated); or finding ‘the one’ to form that perfect union.

    Since the pursuit of love and the perfect relationship lists highly among the beliefs that society at large holds as to the key to establishing lifelong happiness, let us examine some studies, that link relationships to happiness or joie de vivre.

    According to John Gottman of the University of Washington, a world leading researcher on the subject of marriage, married people are a mere ten per cent happier than unmarried. The afterglow of a wedding, with all its pomp and ceremony, lasts approximately two years over which time, there is an increase in overall happiness.

    Less depression is also reported within couples who are married. So yes, to some degree, marriage can elevate happiness, at least temporarily. But like most things in life, it is not that straightforward.

    If you get married and then divorce, your happiness seems to dip below its level beforehand. Hopeless romantics, don’t lose heart: in time your happiness level will return to what it was before you were married. Non-romantics, however, might conclude that the pursuit of a perfect relationship, to fulfil ultimate happiness, is at best, a flawed enterprise.

    The good news for women in their thirties and forties is that the struggle to deal with romantic relationships and societal pressures to conform, by finding the perfect mate and having children tend to disappear.

    A sense of contentment and happiness prevails, as the luxury of discovering the true self and recognising personal needs, for the first time perhaps, comes into view. Overall, in both males and females, happiness increases with age, whether attached or not.

    In marriage, the mental health of males improves overall. However, compared to women, men deteriorate emotionally and physically with notable increased levels of depression as a result of a separation or divorce. For those considering a long term relationship which excludes the certificate of marriage, the news is not good either – those who live together are less happy and have a higher chance of breaking-up than those who marry.

    A number of studies conclude that the arrival of children into a marriage also causes happiness levels within the relationship to decline. But it gets worse when those offspring hatch into teenagers during which time happiness reaches its nadir.

    Indeed, in her acclaimed book Flourishing, Maureen Gaffney cites evidence that the happiness levels experienced by mothers when taking care of their children is lower than that which they experience preparing meals or doing shopping.

    In this age of cosmetic surgery and digitally-enhanced social media imagery, it is tempting to believe that a beautiful body and a perfect face would greatly increase ones happiness. Oh to be younger, slimmer, more attractive, to rid ourselves of that extra ten pounds, increase bust or butt size, harvest more hair follicles, remove wrinkles, turn back the clock, a nip and a tuck, some suction there, a syringe here. Sure what would be the harm?

    Surely then, true happiness would cease to evade us so cruelly if we were only more beautiful? Not so. Whilst there is a slight correlation between a more attractive appearance and increased happiness levels, appearance only accounts if you manage to attract more partners and friends: the mirror is no use.

    There is one area of life that is guaranteed to increase happiness, without exception. People who have five or more close friends are sixty percent happier than those who do not. Friendships actually bring more happiness than family, mostly because they are free from the duties, obligations and expectations that many family bonds involve.

    The factors that make it easier to form new friendships include: ease with strangers; getting involved in social activities; team sports; and being socially active in general.

    Yet again it is not that simple. Unsupportive friendships can have the opposite effect. Choose wisely. Your friendships have a major influence on your happiness levels, so be open to new ones. Cut away old ties that no longer serve your emotional needs. Leave behind friendships that are unreliable, destructive or negative.

    Notice how you feel around the people you consider friends. If the answer is positive, you are on to a winner. Cherish and nurture those relationships because they have the potential to bring a major increase in happiness, often greater than any other external factor, aside maybe from gut health, which is the subject of my forthcoming book Lets Talk About Happiness – The Ultimate Guide to Gut Health in line with the launch of the Vitality Centre on Grafton Street, a clinic which offers overall body wellness, starting with the gut.

    Health and mood have a definite effect on our overall levels of happiness. And what is more, these two things are profoundly linked to your physical body, or to your gut to be more precise, through one very important hormone.

    That hormone is serotonin, referred to previously as ‘the Feel Good Hormone’, because it relates directly to how happy you feel. During bouts of depression it drops. Now here comes the clincher. Ninety-five percent of serotonin is produced in your gut. That is why anti-depressants are used to treat Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). These drugs boost serotonin production, not in your brain but in your gut, where the effect is to lift your mood.

    Relief from both depression and bowel problems are often achieved. That is because an increase or decrease in serotonin in your gut (or bowels if you prefer) caused by impaction or other gut related issues can lower your mood and vice versa.

    A game changing monument of research arrived on bookshelves in 1999 called The Second Brain by Dr Michael Gershon, who devoted his career to understanding the bowel (the stomach, oesophagus, small intestine, and colon) collectively referred to as the gut.

    Most people rarely ponder the colon, that five foot tube of colon, the importance of which has tended to be overlooked by the medical profession, and society in general to the point that IBS was considered a problem of the mind, before Dr Michael Gershon shone his light on the powerful connection between the gut and brain, affecting our serotonin levels and therefore, happiness.

    To conclude, to any reader who searches for happiness through the pursuit of a perfect relationship, reduce your efforts. Increase your investment in friendships of value and look inward, but not only to the mind but also to the bowel or gut, for there may lie the treasure that you seek.

  • How to Free Yourself from a Narcissist

    A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person’s eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes care of all his mirrors.
    Milan Kundera The Festival of Insignificance

    In the beginning, I thought about him endlessly, night and day, over and over again. I didn’t think the thoughts would ever stop. They were constant, circular and exhausting, and the crushing pain of the descending reality had me questioning everything about my life. I wondered what he was thinking, if he missed me, if he had realised what he had done or if knowing that he’d never get me back would mean there would be no self-reflection. If so, now he would despise me with even more conviction than he had before. It was a limb amputation, an exorcism I didn’t want but knew I needed, an offering of my very cells back to the universe.

    I yearned for him because I didn’t know the truth. How could I? I had believed him, believed who he was pretending to be. Who could intentionally deceive another like that? It couldn’t be so. We had played together, laughed together, cried in each other’s arms. Protected each other. Championed each other. Loved each other.

    It took forever to see past the act. To understand that my baby didn’t care about me, that he wasn’t able to. That my darling didn’t see me, just the things that he could manipulate to draw me in. Everything I gave him, every way I depleted myself, every single thing I sacrificed for him, for us, was invisible to him. Instead, he branded me an ungrateful, unloving, pathological, pathetic joke. And this is what he believed.

    The hardest part for me in the aftermath of my discovery that my love was a narcissist, was accepting that there was nothing I could do to change him. It was the injustice of knowing that despite everything he promised me, he could close himself off to my pain, and move himself on with no remorse. He could convince himself that I was bad, and shred my heart to pieces without a dent to his conscience. And I could never get him to see otherwise because you cannot reason with somebody that depends upon delusion for survival.

    The abandonment hits you like a freight train. There is no way to soften this collision. You may fear that the impact will kill you, or that you will dissolve in desolate depression – your forgotten, worthless, ragged body strewn upon the tracks. Worthless, because nobody could treat another this way, unless it was somehow deserved.

    You find that it takes more strength to stay still than to chase after the train, with all its precious cargo. You desperately want to lasso your ropes to the back of the carriage as it thunderously speeds past you, but you know that if you do so, you will be dragged along those haunted rails toward a phantom promise, forever. And so you wait, but for what you do not know.

    This is not the end. It’s the beginning. Change is coming and this change is going to teach you how to free yourself. Because you are a survivor, and survivors have a deep and powerful instinct to keep on moving, no matter how torn your skin and battered your bones, no matter how much your swollen heart might weigh you down. You survive without becoming like them because despite the pain of choosing someone that manipulated and abused your sacred, trusting offering of love, you do not close yourself to it.

    Slowly, you begin to understand, and later to believe, that none of this was your fault. And that you are not the person your narcissist convinced you that you were. That the world is full of bruised and damaged people that are not as strong as you. People that inflict pain, to feel pleasure in their power, while you and your loving heart absorb their abuse to lighten their load. It’s easy to be like them. They are weak.

    You are here because you have been tough enough to take what they have given you, tough for far too long. You are here because you were chosen for your gorgeous light and your beautiful soul. If you did not shine so brightly, you would not have been valuable to them. They may have learned to drain this light but they did not deplete you. You will regenerate. Because this is who you are.

    Your narcissist fed off you because they cannot create their own goodness. With a closed heart and a suffocated soul they have no true power at all. None. You do. Love, the most powerful energy source on earth is what kept you with your abuser, what caused you to shoulder burdens that were not yours. And love is what will set you free.

    But first, you need to learn to direct it at the person that really deserves it – yourself. Learn to parent yourself with love and see how strong you become. Practice the art of supporting yourself, and refusing to self-abandon and you will never be caught again. Feel the nourishment of your own love and kindness and watch the joy that will spring forth from your powerful heart.

    Float confidently away from those heavy iron tracks. You’ve got something so much better than the train now. You’ve got wings.

  • The Key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution

    The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:

    Directive Principles of Social Policy

    The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.

    As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.

    Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:

    • to promote the welfare of the entire people.
    • to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
    • to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
    • to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
    • to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
    • to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
    • to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
    • to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.

    There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.

    An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.

    There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.

    Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.

    Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.

    Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis

    The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.

    There are almost 100,000 empty houses in Ireland, and about 10,000 homeless people, of which some 3,755 are children, in 1,739 families.

    Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.

    Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:

    to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.

    The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.

    This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.

    Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:

    that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.

    This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.

    Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.

    This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.

    Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.

    It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.

     

  • World Cup Fans Conquer Russia

    How to fathom the phenomenon of ‘fandom’? Certainly it is one of the most familiar, most recognisable, and common, of personality traits – yet oddly, one of the least analysed personality traits.

    We all have a tendency towards being a ‘fan’ of something or other. It is a near-universal inclination evident in everyone from tech titans to favela-dwelling street kids. Yet that doesn’t make this thing called fandom any easier to comprehend.

    Becoming a fan of the right thing, at the right time, can be a liberating gateway to an array of regular natural highs, and an excuse for completely out-of-character behaviour. But it can lead to frustration and a pain that only eases when you abandon hope.

    There are genuine physiological and mental health benefits, and even employment opportunities in fandom, even if it defies rational explanation. Fandom may define a person’s life: ‘He was a fine father, a good friend, and as everyone knows, a passionate Waterford hurling fan all his life,’ it might be said.

    Nick Hornby always pops to mind whenever I consider the topic (as I do more than is good for me). Like most struggling writers, Nick had been tipping along for years, when a lightbulb switched in his head. He dropped his Dostoevsky-lite pretentions, and tapped directly into his Arsenal FC obsession. He came up with the novel Fever Pitch (1992).

    He followed this up with another global bestseller High Fidelity (1995) – a novel built entirely around musical obsession, and the butterfly effect it can have on a life. The success of both books lies in their unique, and accessible, capacity to get under the skin of fanatical fandom.

    Hornby’s is the simplistic, embedded fandom that most of us get sucked into at some point in life. There is none of that nauseating need ‘finally to meet my hero’ – or fulfilment of a deep quest to reach ‘the destination of a lifelong journey.’   No, none of that horseshit, Nick Hornby’s global bestsellers are simply about the reality of being a fan.

    One of the defining features of fandom, as Hornby explained, is that pleasure of reading newspaper reports after a favourable result, and knowing that friends and family are reading the same report and thinking of you. But my word there are many more aspects.

    II – From Russia with Love

    As I write I am travelling from Moscow to St. Petersburg on day seven of the 2018 World Cup, the biggest sporting event on the planet, by any metric. It really is something to behold.

    The host nation is Mother Russia, and in the midst of a toxic sameness afflicting an increasingly globalized world, this place remains, unmistakably, Russia, an intoxicating brew which hits you as soon as you arrive.

    Or at least that is how it was before this. As with anywhere, the World Cup month is an entirely different beast and – whether you really believe it or not – this month of madness every four years is still all about Football and Fans. Nothing else. To battle against that reality would be a fruitless endeavour.

    Even the legendarily terrifying Russian authorities have succumbed to World Cup madness. To such an extent that the normally reserved Russian people have followed suit.

    Y’see, just  like fandom, the World Cup itself is a bizarre and inexplicable thing. It temporarily requires even the most autocratic and despotic regimes to drop tools and play nice. But it ain’t some well-meaning peace initiative organised by the UN. It is a deeply corporate enterprise – the colossal plaything of an openly corrupt and corporate governing body named FIFA.

    To be given the right to host the event by the Swiss-based sportocrats, Russia has had to commit to the biggest societal and behavioural shifts since the fall of Communism, and by Jove it is running smoothly.

    Napoleon may have made it to Moscow before a ruinous retreat, and Hitler came close too, but only FIFA and Football fans have found the ingredients to the secret sauce required to tame the Russian Bear – albeit temporarily.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1as1IceOALY

    III – The World Cup in Unison

    So here we all are now. Hundreds of thousands of the most colourful and diverse visiting fans, mixing delightfully with millions of ethnically-diverse Russians. While the spell lasts, it is bizarre and wonderful.

    Everything is choreographed to within an inch of its life, but nothing is familiar. To anyone. In normal times most people enjoy the chance to show wide-eyed visitors around their homelands, taking pride as they see the place for themselves through fresh sets of eyes.

    But not this time. The World Cup is entirely its own domain – familiar to nobody – a surreal pop-up-football-country and unique cultural mix built entirely around the unlikeliest blend of fans in full expression.

    Everything is being made up as it goes along, and to this writer it is a joyous space to inhabit temporarily (in spite of the best efforts of the English fans). I believe everyone should make this kind of pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime.

    This really is unchartered territory for all of us – even seasoned fans such as myself attending the sixth World Cup, who are brief residents of World Cup Fantasy Land.

    Everyone – from the dourest cop, to the openly gay charmer who cut my hair, is on their very best behaviour for the month.

    The diplomatic top brass in all the foreign embassies are on high alert too, and stocked with temporary crisis staff. Legions of PR gurus focus on protecting each country’s reputation from a potential humiliation in front of a watching world.

    For instance yesterday a group of Columbians were caught sneaking alcohol into a stadium concealed in a pair of binoculars. This became a huge incident – a national embarrassment – requiring ministerial-level apologies to the Russian authorities. And that’s from a country that allowed Pablo Escobar run riot for decades, and one of whose players was shot for missing a penalty after USA 1994.

    Even a train journey during the World Cup is an uplifting experience. Reportedly, all Russian train conductors have been compelled to attend training exercises in ‘pleasantries and tolerance’, and the country’s vast rail network is free-of-charge for any fan with a match ticket.

    IV – Fiesta Time

    Extravagant hospitality is normal at World Cups – national stereotypes go out the window – but this visiting horde of fans seem on better behaviour than usual.

    My apartment until mid-July is in a leafy, well-to-do corner of Moscow called Sokolniki – a sleepy neighbourhood with playgrounds, and parks aplenty. However, an entire block in this normally placid area has been taken over by the hugely charismatic and enigmatic fans of Senegal.

    Masses of wildly-enthused, tall and athletic-looking Africans are crammed into one building, spilling out in groups to dance and sing loudly on the street in support of ‘The Lions’ of Senegal, while festooning the locality with their flags.

    Honestly, it’s Fantastic. The energy, the vibrant colours, the pumping music, the tribal moves – all delivered with a World Cup-imbued civility and joy that the normally stiff locals are warming to. It is brilliant and contagious.

    And that is one single building – just one set of visiting fans. There are thousands of other fervent groups spread right across the enormous country for the month. Even the usually stiff and well-groomed Scandinavians and Germans are going batshit crazy.

    And then there is the remarkable juxtaposition of fans gatherings in iconic places like Red Square, Nikolskaya Street, and outside the Bolshoi theatre.  A wild and widespread array of colour and noise has caught all of Russia off guard, and foreigners already living here are giddy at the sight of their normally reticent neighbours smiling and casually chatting to strangers.

    Even the over-organised and branded FIFA ‘Fanzones’ have a lovely vibe to them, mostly down to one simple fact: these are the places where you will find the South Americans.

    Their fans raise so many questions. Even after a week of asking around, I have found nobody who can explain how so many South American fans have managed to make it to Russia. How in god’s name have they been able to afford the trip when most of these countries are falling apart economically, while so many Western Europeans have ‘sensibly’ skipped it?

    Where are all these South Americans living, eating and sleeping while they are here, and how the hell did the Peruvians manage to carry their hundreds of street-long flags and blow-up Llamas?  Imagine the excess baggage costs alone!

    What a thing Fandom is, eh? It might be dismissed as just a curious personality trait, but as the first world gets ever blander, with toxic sameness delivered via massive global brands like Apple, Facebook and Nike – I see fandom as an important way of keeping human life interesting on planet Earth.

    In this time of multiple global tensions and unreported traumas, the World Cup in Russia is arguably the most hopeful place to be in the world – now who could have guessed that?

    Russia might well go back to being the stiff scary place of yore, but after this experience there will certainly be a residual warmth towards Russia felt by fans who have been caught off guard by how welcoming it has been. And the effect on Russians could be the same. That’s the brilliance of a World Cup.

    *******

    ‘Ahhh but Ed… How can you praise an event hosted in a place with a reputation for x, y and z …?’, I was repeatedly asked by well-meaning liberal mates before leaving for Russia.

    They have a point, but they don’t get it. The host country is merely a vessel for this event to bloom, a landscape where a pop-up utopia flourishes regardless of everyday norms. In fact, the more damaged a country is, the greater the benefit of a mass influx of World Cup fans.

    So sod the haters and the cynics. With a fortnight to go in Russia 2018, I am already plotting how to get to the next one in 2022, due to be hosted in the utterly-illogical FIFA choice of Qatar. There you will find the full menu of human rights abuses; and strict public alcohol bans, and female repression, and dark laws against homosexuality.

    But I will still go to Qatar, along with hundreds of thousands of fans, because I get it. I have seen at first-hand how transformative a month of fan-delivered warmth can be – and will enjoy watching Qataris melt in different ways when the hordes descend, and the World Cup fiesta takes over.

    The legacy of an unstoppable force meeting an objectionable object is not easy to quantify, but I would defy any human with a soul to come to this event and not be moved to appreciate the joys of life as a football fan.;

    My train has arrived in St. Peterburg. A Costa Rican has already invited me to/ visit his solar farm over an 11am beer. Another one has offered to help carry my equipment. Brazil kick off their second match in a space-aged stadium in the centre of the most beautiful city in Europe. If you can’t be a fan of this experience, then I pity you.

  • If on a Winter’s Night a Lithuanian Spoke with Leo

    The great Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities imagines a conversation between the Mongolian emperor Kubla Khan and the legendary traveller Marco Polo. Kubla Khan asks Marco Polo to describe for him the great cities he has visited.

    After a number of vivid and enthralling accounts it becomes clear that Marco Polo is confining himself to a description of his native Venice, as if the rest of the world counts for little, a view for which I have some sympathy.

    Let us imagine another fictional conversation, set in contemporary Ireland, in which Taoiseach Leo Varadkar encounters a non-national – from Lithuania we’ll say – and asks her for a description of Dublin and its hinterland.

    You will indulge this far-fetched conceit I hope, dear reader, of our imperator deigning to converse with a migrant of modest means.

    Suave Leo will be confident– ‘our GDP growth is off the charts’ he assures himself – in a favourable verdict on his achievements as Taoiseach, and the state of the country after almost a decade of Fine Gael in power.

    ‘She will surely recognise this as ‘the best little country in the world to do business in’, with near full employment; an economic powerhouse, like Venice in its day – they might have built St. Mark’s and the gondolas, but we have the Dundrum Shopping Centure and the M50; a land of céad míle fáilte – as long as you are an ‘an ex-pat’ with a decent credit line; of milk and honey, so much dairy in fact that we are the second leading exporter of powder milk to Chinese mothers, who can now work longer hours to produce the consumer goods we don’t need; of comely maidens at cross purposes. The boom is getting boomier, again!’

    Using the structure of Calvino’s book let us imagine her response, chapter by chapter.

    Chapter 1

    She concedes Ireland has given her employment:

    ‘Which requires me to work long, often anti-social, hours, though I am grateful for it, as others haven’t been so lucky and ended up on the street, or involved in organised crime. But I have to say that since the economic crisis I have encountered significant hostility from native Irish, even though I speak perfect English – perfect you understand – albeit with an accent.’

    ‘Taoiseach I can’t help feeling I have had to work significantly harder than the younger generation of wealthy Irish, who don’t recognise my achievements. I am well educated but my academic qualifications are often disparaged. There is a Little Islander mentality, though I guess you might find the same attitudes if you came to work in my ex-Soviet republic.’

    ‘We Lithuanians are also a small nation, like your own Taoiseach’, she says, pausing to reflect that he might empathise with her plight, given his mixed-race background.

    ‘Currently I live in a satellite town of Dublin, where I work and have studied in the past. I find the environment harsh and uncomfortable, and public transport pathetic, which forces most people into their cars.’

    ‘Many Irish people I meet seem very nice, but this can be superficial, and I have been subjected to racist abuse for speaking Lithuanian with my friends on the bus.’

    ‘I have the impression the country is being run for the sake of a privileged few. I have found out quite a bit about your country Taoiseach, and it seems there are dynasties that run it, especially in politics where I see the same names cropping up again and again, just like the former Soviet officials who re-invented themselves as democratic politicians where I am from.’

    ‘I have also heard there are certain private schools in Dublin which most the top lawyers and businessmen attended, and now send their children to, and I think a lot politicians were educated in one of them too, including, if I am not mistaken, yourself. Do you work on behalf of these people or the wider community Mr Varadkar?’

    Leo feigns a smile that looks more like a grimace – he’s hoping the conversation won’t go on much longer, but realises he can’t ignore the woman as someone might have their camera on him. He interjects, summoning all the charm that bewitched his party when Enda finally fell on his sword: ‘Look at me, I am half-Indian and gay. I made it the top, and so can you.’ But strangely he doesn’t look her in the eye when he speaks.

    Chapter 2

    The Lithuanian lady responds: ‘As I said Irish people are very friendly, but sometimes this masks a lack of emotional depth. They love to talk but prefer not to listen. They are highly sociable, but drink to excess. They fill their minds with absurd patriotism, and tell lachrymose tales of hardship and grievance. They give out, but generally do nothing. They are often obsessed with trivia, or with pop culture, and televised sport. Politics seems to be reduced to personalities rather than the issues.’

    She continues, a steely determination entering her voice, aware that this will be her one opportunity to speak candidly to a person in power: ‘Politics, Taoiseach, is about the issues and nothing else. Irish politicians are economical with the truth, and often, frankly, lie. Compromise is not always possibly, and sometimes harsh words are required. Cover-ups of corruption are not conducive to a well-ordered society.’

    ‘More generally, it is difficult with such overt friendliness to work out when to take people seriously. In this context I have, as a young attractive woman, experienced numerous protestations of love from inadequate men, who only dare speak to me when they are drunk.’

    At this stage Leo is getting exasperated at how ungrateful she is for all the country has given her. But he manages somehow to contain a rising disgust.

    Chapter 3

    She continues: ‘when people get to know you on a personal level they are nice and there is still a strong sense of community in the rural areas I have worked in – social supports and community among the older generation. But this is nowhere near as prevalent in Dublin, where I encounter greed, selfishness and casual disregard. Homelessness is rampant and, I am telling you, you would not want to get sick. The one medical emergency I experienced I had to wait for hours in A&E, and I felt the treatment was inadequate.’

    ‘I have now taken out private health insurance – as you advised young people to when you were Minister for Health – but even still I face queues, and that is the experience of other people I know in the same situation.’

    ‘And my experience with the private sector, especially the banks, is that people are not that competent, often downright rude, yet curiously patronizing.’

    ‘But really Leo the police are particularly rude and judgmental towards non-nationals. In my community I hear a lot of complaints about them. Some of their conduct seems to be legalized banditry, as corrupt as … any country on earth. Yet I read in the newspapers that your party does not have the will to deal with the institutional scandals, or train them properly. Frankly Leo they are in many respects as bad as the criminals they are supposed to police.’

    Leo is now seething and on the point of flying off the handle. She is questioning the very essence of his Ireland, despite the opportunities it has given her. He turns accusatorial: ‘But we welcomed you, and you have lived here for over 10 years. Of course we are not perfect but which country is?’

    Chapter 4

    She responds: ‘It is true there is sufficient food to eat, but as for the standard of living, or quality of life, it doesn’t compare favourably with other countries, unless you are privileged. There is a glass ceiling on how far a non-national can climb in this country, and you Taoiseach are the exception that proves the rule.’

    ‘Non-EU migrants especially have had to endure victimisation, and the barbarities of Direct Provision. My humble abode in the sticks is far too small, and cost a ridiculous sum for negligible space, which eats into my meagre income. All around us people are being forced to live in ever-decreasing spaces. This is not conducive to emotional or intellectual wellbeing.’

    She is becoming forceful again: ‘Even applying your capitalist logic: you cannot produce creative or productive people if they are forced to live in shoe boxes. People will want to leave. They will have had enough. Even if I wanted a family that would probably be impossible, which I find quite depressing.’

    Leo, now astonished and increasingly irate at this candid and uniformly negative response, asks, with a surprising, but revealing, innocence: ‘well who is responsible for these mistakes?’

    Chapter 5

    ‘Without naming names Taoiseach, I’ll offer you a biblical reference, which became an Italian film and a byword for corruption. Ireland is becoming ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, or at least Gomorrah. No one has any confidence in many of the state institutions or private actors; there is a sense that the political class is corrupt and self-serving; dispensing patronage for favours and committing the sins of simony with Big Business and the professional classes. Our banking structure is a farce: why didn’t we just nationalize them like Iceland, which got out of its recession much sooner?’

    ‘I have to confess Taoiseach that I bought my apartment at the height of the boom, and now have difficulty making repayments. The bank won’t allow me to get back on a tracker mortgage, even though they promised to do so. The interest rates are crippling me. I want out.’

    ‘My friends who are renting are in an even worse plight, and are often randomly evicted by the purchasing power of Canadian and American vulture funds linked to Goldman Sachs. This is not right. Further, it seems to be a society where, if I may be so bold as to quote an Irishism: ‘it is not what you know, but who you know ’, that gets you ahead, which is not meritocratic.’

    ‘I am sorry to be so forward Taoiseach but governance here does not conform with that of a functioning European social democracy. I am hesitant to be so candid as my culture has imbued me with a formal politesse and deference. I am a decent and civilized person. But Ireland has the resources to become a genuine social democracy, but can’t be as long as you misapply and mismanage your revenue.’

    ‘Also the endless diet of violence both real, and magnified by the press, is undermining my quality of life. As a woman I am alarmed the stories of sexual assaults I hear in the press. Whether real or exaggerated, I do not feel completely safe walking the streets of Dublin at night.

    ‘Newspapers trivialise and sensationalise, and do not report the truth at times. Violence has unfortunately become part of the entertainment industry, but increasingly truth and fiction are difficult to disentangle.’

    But Leo, a crackle of emotion in his voice, at last gets a word in: ‘surely the youthful energy here can make this society work?’

    Chapter 6

    She replies: ‘Ah yes the youth. The youth want to leave Leo for a better quality of life. Many older people too. The brain drain is continuing. Even young native Irish in creative fields don’t have career opportunities, and prefer not to work for multinational companies. They don’t want to live in a satellite town in order to live independently of their parents. The environment you live in impacts significantly on your self-esteem Taoiseach.’

    Some of the younger generation in Ireland are doing well of course, and there is a culture of entitlement, both boorish and materialistic. Culture is commodified, and it is almost impossible for independent artists to live here with the inflated cost of living. Irish people don’t seem to read the ‘big books’ that I grew up attached to. Ignorance seems to breed a culture of compliance. Of course this is what happens when survival is the main priority. The desperation for money and pervasive avarice have coarsened social interactions. You have lost God and embraced Mammon. It is not that I am particularly religious, in fact I am an atheist, and I too want enough money for a decent standard of living, but this society seems rudderless, and unprincipled.’

    This continues on for many more chapters.

    Endlessly critical, endlessly precise, endlessly judgmental. Lucid, and scathing. By the end, Leo’s world is falling apart and he implores his vengeful demon to offer a dose of optimism.

    Chapter 7

    ‘The countryside is beautiful’, she responds, ‘in particular the Atlantic coastline. Connemara is one of the most glorious places I have ever set eyes on. I often try to hike in Wicklow, which is nearly as wonderful as the West, but much of it is inaccessible without a car, as the bus services is almost non-existent. An American friend of mine also says that Ireland is a good place to play golf. And at times in bars and socializing ‘the craic’, as they say, is ‘mighty’. But Leo not even the Irish can live on craic alone, which has its disturbing shadow.’

    She then stops abruptly and bids adieu. She has to get up early in the morning for a job interview in London, assuming, post-Brexit, she can get a visa. She is increasingly conscious of how perilous being a migrant is, and may be, throughout Europe in the future.

    Her parting shot is that it is not just Ireland, but Europe and the rest of the world, that is increasingly hostile to migrants. She may be confronting a future of further displacement.

    Leo sighs bemusedly – remaining convinced of his beneficence. He will consider carefully what she has had to say. He will make Ireland better for those willing to work. But soon the failings she has pointed to slip his distracted mind, and as the problems multiply, he sees no obvious solutions: ‘Let’s just keep it business as usual’ he says to himself.

  • Rimbaud in the Emergency Room

    Interstitial space: a space between structures or objects, i.e the contiguous fluid-filled space existing between the skin and body organs.

    *******

    It is difficult

    to get the news from poems

            yet men die miserably every day

                        for lack

    of what is found there 

    from ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, by William Carlos Williams.

    I – ‘It is probably a tumour’

    It is 2:30 a.m. and the emergency room is at its busiest, crowded with nurses, rushing porters and patients. The doors to the ambulance bay swing open and a gurney emerges into their midsts. Lying on it is an old man, naked except for a green-paper hospital gown. His beard and matted grey hair make him an old testament prophet, the two paramedics pushing the trolley his head bowed acolytes.

    I watch them as they pass. He lies prone, bone-thin and hollow-cheeked. His arms stretch and move in the air as if conducting some unseen orchestra, the sinews and ligaments of his limbs like bunches of reeds under his papery skin. As the little group moves by, he turns his head and vomits a dark brown liquid on the floor.

    After he is triaged by a nurse I am directed to his cubicle to assess him. He is incapable pf answering my questions. The paramedics who brought him in tell me he was found by a neighbour, having collapsed on his kitchen floor.

    No one can say how long he had been there. His mouth is dry, his pulse quick. I gently pinch the skin on his arm. As his body is dehydrated from the vomiting, the skin remains standing in folds. His abdomen is swollen and taut.

    I lean in and listen with my stethoscope. If healthy his bowels will have a murmuring bass tone, like the burble of a theatre crowd waiting for a curtain to be raised. I hear nothing at first, and then a sound like water splashing on a metal surface, a high pitched tinkling. This sign, along with his other symptoms, indicate that something is obstructing his intestine.

    I order intravenous fluid to be set up and walk him to the radiology department. An x-ray shows his lower intestine is grossly hyperinflated, its loops ridged like giant caterpillar pupae, the deep black of the air in the lumen overblown and the intestinal wall thinned out under the pressure.

    There is something blocking his descending colon, some errant tissue  the x-rays can’t penetrate, appearing asymmetric and bright white against the black of the air. It is probably a tumour. I call the surgeon to begin the preparation for the inevitable operation. He arrives in a flurry of white scrubs and begins his own assessment.

    There is nothing to do now but rehydrate him and wait for a theatre to become free. I order more intravenous fluid to be set up, check on my other patients, and then walk to the doctor’s room for a short break.

    II – The Interstitium

    It is set away from the noise of the emergency room, down a long corridor lit by a blinking strip light. The room is empty at this hour but the low coffee table is full of the detritus of earlier shifts: paper cups half-filled with cold black coffee, pots of reheatable noodles, notepads, pens with their plastic cracked and teeth marks indented on their surface.

    A television with its sound muted shows a slick-haired anchorman mouthing silently, the endless ticker tape of 24-hour news tracing its way across his tie. The room is windowless and unloved, a nothing space to be briefly passed through.

    I lie down on the sofa and study the back of my hand, its dorsal surface, webbed by skin and hair. I imagine a microscopic view of the tissues: the cells inside which the organic chemical processes and genetic reproductions occur, the machinery of life.

    And then  I imagine the space between the cells, the interstitium, and the fluid slowly seeping into these spaces in the old man’s tissues out in the emergency room as the intravenous treatment has its effect.

    III – ‘The Drunken Boat’

    When doctors begin working in the emergency room they go through a kind of exposure therapy. No matter how long they’ve spent in medical school, witnessing for the first time the taboo of the sanctity of a person’s body being broken is a shock.

    The first trauma case I experienced  was a young man who was involved in a motorbike accident; his body crushed by the impact. My response was as anyone’s would be: a raised heart-rate, an out-of-body feeling, the running thought ‘is this real?’, ‘because this can’t be real’.

    Through experience and repeated exposure this response lessened, to a point where now the shock has disappeared and these patients are now – for the first few acute minutes at least – simply a series of problems to be solved.

    But the need to find meaning in these experiences is not something that wears off with time, nor is it something that is taught in medical schools. So where then to find it?

    In the pocket of my scrubs there are crumpled post-it notes, a pocket light, chewing gum, and a thin book of Rimbaud’s poetry. I picked the volume from my bookshelf on the way to my night shift because of its size, slipping easily into the pocket of my scrubs.

    I know nothing about the poet but I now have ten minutes before my break ends, and need some distraction. I turn the page to the only poem whose title I recognise ‘La Bateau Ivre’, ‘The Drunken Boat’, and begin to read:

    As I was going down impassive rivers,
    I no longer felt myself guided by haulers

    The poem is spoken in the voice of the eponymous boat, unmoored and adrift on a strange sea. It travels drunkenly, moving through a cascading world of imagery, going wherever it pleases.

    It has, as one critic put it, ‘the authority of thought to think itself through us’. Happy to be consumed by the poem for these short few minutes, I feel my consciousness awash with the poet’s vision, as if the walls of the anonymous room where I sit have become the banks of a swirling ocean.

    Rimbaud was sixteen when he wrote the poem, and wandering the roads between Normandy and Paris; there is a juvenility to the wide eyed imagery of the poem. It feels like it was written as he walked, the dynamism of his youth pumping though his body.

    I look at his photograph on the book cover. He is just a boy and, despite being in black and white, his eyes appear a translucent blue.  He is an unformed space, yet to be filled with life, untethered and free to produce his hallucinogenic hymn to the energy of existence.

    The boat moves across an ocean where anything is possible. It is this space, that Rimbaud calls the sea, that artists try to occupy. The areas outside the quotidian, the interstitia of life where art is created and where it has its effect. (Though I imagine these interstitia are as likely to be as easily accessed when daydreaming while doing the washing up, as they are while in some kind of self-enforced ‘artistic’ meditation).

    After this rush of movement and crazed imagery however, the poem resolves itself back in the everyday. The boat, after travelling the broiling ocean, becomes a toy  pushed around a puddle by a child.

    IV – Recovery

    The modernist poet William Carlos Williams held the conviction that poetry was ‘equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.’ Williams was perhaps a connoisseur of these bewilderments, practising as a family doctor and a professor of paediatrics throughout his life.

    Emergency rooms are life multiplied and concentrated: full to the brim with the drama, noise and emotion of its extreme moments. It would seem the furthest place away from the contemplative spaces where art is created and regarded.

    But as Rimbaud’s boat must return from the sea to the constraints of a puddle, so these interstitial spaces must communicate with real life. And as such art can have a practical use, which can be put to work, even in the noise of an emergency room in the middle of the night.

    I close the book and prepare to return to work. It is 2:50 a.m., another five hours to go before the end of the shift.

    Something has changed in the short break I have had. The reading of the poem has made my body feel skittish, as if adrenaline has been released into my system. Somewhere cogs move and blocks fall into place.

    When trying to assess if someone has had a heart attack I will ask them what kind of pain they have experienced. Was it sharp? blunt? heavy? stabbing?

    Patients find it difficult to describe a feeling that deep and visceral. The brain is finely-honed to locate exactly a superficial sensation on the body’s surface, but is often unable to give words to a feeling that profound.

    Patients will instead often fold a hand into a fist and press it against their chest to indicate what they mean. The effect of the poem is similar: some altering in the relationship between the self and the world, a communication between the interstitium and the cell, that takes place in the depths, impossible to locate precisely or accurately describe.

    I return to the emergency room and check first on the old man. The intravenous bag flowing into the vein in his arm is nearly empty. A little colour has returned to his cheeks and he appears less hollowed out.

    The sodium chloride has rehydrated him, filling his interstitium. These spaces, the spaces between cells, though empty, do have a function. They give the tissues of the body their tensile strength. They are the scaffolding on which life sits. Without them we would not be able to combat gravity, to walk upright, to reach high.

    The old man grabs the sides of the gurney as I approach. He pulls himself up to sit.