Cassandra Voices

Category: Society

  • Covid-19: A Flawed Consensus

    Covid is a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. But whether the unprecedented response represents a singularity, or the beginning of an era of authoritarian capitalism, is unclear.

    Many of us remain incapable of distinguishing a reliable version of reality from lonely projections. Thankfully, telling insights arrive in a new publication: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left. Authors Toby Green (a professor of African history and culture) and Thomas Fazi (a writer and journalist) navigate a path through the scientific thickets, to reveal the socio-economic and cultural factors that shaped the pandemic response.

    The temporary elevation of public health officials in many countries to positions of almost unfettered power led the Mozambique writer Pedrito Cambrao to observe that ‘the secular West has essentially turned science into a religion and scientists and healthcare workers into a priestly caste that cannot be challenged. (p.346)’

    Media, new and old, brought unrelenting focus to a single challenge, while only rarely surveying accumulating evidence of collateral damage. As in Albert Camus’s great novel, The Plague: ‘Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.’[i]

    Additionally, as I propose in this review, a “left-brained” positivism appears to have informed the Covid Consensus that Green and Fazi define.

    Positivism is a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified, or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, but this can lead to a narrowing of perspective. Thus, long-standing challenges yielded to a singular metric, the waxing and waning of “the virus” – as defined by the PCR test, a dubious diagnostic tool that accounts for exaggerated mortality statistics.

    Positivism is identified with the nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte (d.1857), whose conclusions, according to Albert Camus, ‘are curiously like those finally accepted by scientific socialism.’

    Comte conceived of a hierarchical society that looks similar to what we witnessed over the course of the Covid Consensus:

    [S]cientists would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience ‘of action, of thought, and of feeling’ would be given to the high priests who reign over everything.[ii]

    In our time, technocratic rule relied on an underlying hysteria founded on a generally irrational fear of premature death, whipped up by social media in particular.

    Only once this dissipated – arguably when wide availability of rapid antigen tests revealed the widespread prevalence of basically harmless infections – was normality restored. As in Camus’s novel The Plague: ‘Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.’[iii]

    Questioning Authority

    The paucity of left-wing lockdown critiques, ignoring the plight of Global South, where more than one hundred million people fell below the poverty line (p.286), despite the minimal impact of the virus itself, demonstrates an intellectual impoverishment in a broad-based movement that achieved extraordinary progress during the twentieth century, by questioning established authority in terms or wealth, gender and race.

    In contrast, the veteran Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris observed that what went missing during the pandemic was an understanding that ‘science and technology are not neutral’.

    All too many who identify as left-wing, Green and Fazi argue failed to recognise, ‘something much more profound than a straightforward conflict between left and right’, but instead,

    a struggle at the heart of capitalism between the traditional press and business interests it has always represented (hotels, restaurants, high street shops) and the new corporate giants which did not require such promotion. (p.19)

    A sympathetic explanation might trace broad left-wing approval for what were ineffectual lockdowns to the accompanying state largesse. Below the surface, however, a huge transfer of wealth occurred to billionaire owners of giant corporations. Thus, the ten richest men in the world doubled their fortunes during the pandemic, while supports to workers proved transient, and were based on unsustainable quantitative easing, which has, predictably, given way to inflation.

    Through effective control over online content, including outright censorship, and regulatory capture – including of the WHO – the corporate giants successfully narrowed the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Dissenters from a dominant narrative were stigmatised as far-right, libertarian or conspiracy theorists.

    Importantly, statements of President Donald Trump were weaponised by architects of the Consensus. Green and Fazi contend that it was ‘no longer possible for left-leaning progressives to question ‘the science’ since that is what Trump had done. (p.78)’

    Beyond Conspiracy Theories

    Various conspiracy theories purport to explain the decisions of governments to quarantine almost half of humanity for almost two years to inhibit (rather than eliminate) a virus with a median infection fatality rate of c. 0.27% (the figure for Spanish Influenza in 1918-19 was > 2.5%) that posed a vanishingly low risk of death to anyone under the age of seventy, prior to the arrival of vaccines that were not designed to save lives.

    The Covid Consensus addresses a more interesting question however, namely: why did Western populations overwhelmingly consent to unprecedented infringements on civil liberties, culminating in the population-wide, medical coercion of vaccine mandates and passports?

    Indeed, leading experts seem to have been surprised at the power they wielded. Thus, after the British government adopted Chinese lockdown policy, Professer Neil Ferguson observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    It should also be noted that any idea of locking down healthy people was contrary to best practice in global health prior to 2020. An article from 2014 on the history of quarantine, ‘Gold, fire and gallows: quarantine in history’ by Médecins Sans Frontières’s Duncan Mclean found:

    There is limited and far from definitive research on quarantine effectiveness and far too many other factors at play that are difficult to ascertain from the historical record. Yet while present understanding about the pathology and transmission of hostile pathogens is far advanced on centuries past, there are some basic conclusions that can be made. For example, it is fairly certain that isolating a healthy population alongside an unhealthy population risks causing more harm than good, especially when access to food, water and medical care is taken into account. For quarantine to be successful, it requires perfect compliance and transmission without symptoms.

    Moreover, notwithstanding the dubious achievement of temporarily excluding Covid-19 from certain countries through a Zero Covid policy, the idea that a highly infectious respiratory pathogen causing a low level of morbidity (a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19) could have been eliminated was never a serious proposition.

    The lockdown-to-vaccine strategy was also predicated on a misplaced article of faith, which is that vaccines – what Boris Johnson referred to as “the scientific cavalry” – would essentially eliminate Covid-19, or at least the transmission of the virus. The progressive – or “left-wing” – argument to take vaccines for the sake of others never stood up to serious scrutiny from the outset; but mainstream media had suspended critical assessment as part of what was immediately likened to a war-time effort.

    Despite failing to achieve what most people assumed it would, i.e. block transmission, which its inventor claimed it could achieve, seemingly pre-planned measures were rolled out, while serious harms largely went unreported in a mainstream media dangerously reliant on ‘philanthro-capitalism’.

    Social Distancing

    According to the authors of the Covid Consensus the pandemic ‘provided a radical continuity of many trends which had been latent in global society.’ They point to a steady growth over many years in social inequality, ‘the power of computing, information wars, and the shift towards increasingly authoritarian forms of capitalism across the world had all been growing.(p.2)’ Arguing:

    we should perhaps consider the troubling hypothesis that the Chinese and Western regimes, far from representing two opposites may actually have come to embody two different types of authoritarianism, conflictual but symbiotic at the same time – as the striking convergent responses to the pandemic would seem to suggest. (p.398)

    Notwithstanding the similarities Green and Fazi point to, the approaches of East and West did diverge in one significant respect: China’s early adoption of a highly authoritarian Zero Covid policy ensured life continued for most of the time “as normal”, whereas Western governments promoted a more consensual social distancing approach that relied on an unprecedented propaganda campaign.

    The disturbing effects of social distancing might be viewed as the apotheosis of neo-liberalism. The virus seems to have provided a welcome pretext for the wealthy to remove themselves from the hoi polloi.

    Covid-19 also laid bare the widespread out-sourcing of manufacturing to lower wage economies (such as China). Lockdowns demonstrated that many workers in the West were no longer in productive employment, and instead engaged in what the late David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’, often as part of swollen bureaucracies.

    Thus, Green and Fazi identify the lockdown response as ‘a symptom of the ever-increasing removal of people in wealthier societies from economic production. (p.2)’ For many Western consumers concern for ‘the implications of lost harvests, ruptured supply chains, and abandoned industrial plant machines was not as real as the threat of a new virus to this group of disproportionately influential people. (p.3)’

    An important cultural facet the authors refer to is a crippling fear of death. Over many decades Western governments have cleansed ‘the dead from daily life’ (p.11). This contrasts with the far more obvious folk rituals and religious practices attending a person passing away in the Global South.

    A collective inability to reconcile ourselves to death best explains the panic generated by coverage of events in Lombardy, Italy in February, 2020: as ‘the shadow loomed of death re-entering the normal spaces of society people sought to seal themselves away from something which terrified them. (p.11)’

    Ferguson’s candid testimony suggests it is highly unlikely that anyone in power anticipated the propaganda value of “the scenes in Italy”. Indeed, many governments displayed little appetite for lockdowns initially. Most quickly rolled over, however in the face of an enduring hysteria; even after initial mortality projections of 0.9% (used by Ferguson in his infamous paper) had been show to be seriously inflated.

    A fear of premature death is most obvious explanation for why peopled consented to unprecedented infringements on their civil liberties.

    Left-brained?

    Another cultural factor the authors point to is ‘the undermining of social science and humanities degrees by governments … in favour of STEM subjects’. They contend that ‘these subjects were routinely ignored in the shaping of major policy decisions by both government and the media. (p.14)’

    This educational trend, I would argue, reflects a longer term tendency in advanced industrialised societies (now including China) to perceive the world disproportionately through the left hemisphere of the brain, which has yielded a distinctive version of reality.

    In an extraordinary work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), Iain McGilchrist charts the ascendancy of left-brained thinking over that emanating from the right. He stresses that both are involved in most mental processes, but that each nonetheless retains discrete functions.

    McGilchrist argues that since antiquity we find an ‘increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness.’[iv] This sounds suspiciously like the prevailing state of mind under lockdown.

    McGilchrist also averts to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, arguing the real horror of the Concentration Camps lay in ‘the detachment with which the detailed plans of the extermination camps were developed, often relying on expertise of engineers, physicians and psychiatrists that makes the Holocaust so chilling.’[v]

    It is inappropriate to compare those who promoted lockdowns to the architects of the Final Solution, or the Gulags for that matter. Indeed, many lockdown agitators were probably motivated by a misplaced altruism. The architecture of lockdowns, however, also required a detachment from the far-reaching consequences of shuttering societies and undermining community life.

    Lockdowns and vaccine roll-outs depended on (“left-brained”) technical approaches – relying on engineers, physicians and psychiatrists for disease modelling, track and trace and “psy-ops”. In an era of positivism, the role of governments essentially narrowed to curbing the spread of Covid-19. This obscured “big picture” determinants of health and well-being such as social connection, as well as causing almost incalculable educational loss by closing schools for up to two years in some countries.

    An acknowledged tendency to mislead the public over the course of the pandemic may also be traced to the left hemisphere; as McGilchrist puts it: ‘The left hemisphere is the equivalent of the person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admitting to not knowing the way.’

    Thus, more proportionate policies, such as those followed in Sweden, were sadly lacking in the response. The consequences of a detachment from other determinants of health and well-being seem to be reflected in the troubling excess death statistics we are now witnessing.

    A Singularity?

    The belated repeal of emergency powers in most countries indicates that we have not entered a prolonged period of government led by public health officials. Indeed, conversely, there are strong arguments for greater emphasis on health initiatives to contend with other, more profound, challenges such as the obesity pandemic.

    However, the overnight shift from blanket coverage of the virus to the War in Ukraine suggests we may have entered an era of ‘permanent crisis.’ This, according to Green and Fazi, ‘means being stuck in a perpetual present where all energies are focused on the fight against the enemy of the moment. (p.397)’

    As with the response to Covid-19, the populations of Europe and America are presented with a single prescription – here a total victory for Ukraine – seemingly at all cost. This is, arguably, indicative of an ascendant “left-brained” positivism, which narrows or simplifies the range of possibilities to the “enemy of the moment”.

    Moreover, our dependence on compromised technology accelerated under lockdown. This increases a susceptibility to propaganda, although freedom of association blunts the insidious power of the smart phone device.

    Also, fear of Putin and Russia has not awakened a similar hysteria to that generated by Covid-19, although the plight of Ukrainians has certainly been used to garner sympathy for the war effort. A major difference, is that many, though certainly not all, on the left in Europe are questioning a dominant narrative; alert to the fingerprints of the military industrial complex; in contrast to the Covid response – where the role of Big Pharma was generally overlooked.

    Importantly, the power structures of the Covid Consensus remain intact. There is a serious dearth of critical media and investigative reporting into the ties of the Biden administration to the world’s largest asset manager, Blackrock, which along with Vanguard and State Street manages a combined total of over twenty trillion dollars.

    My concern is not simply that the billionaire class is enriching itself through proximity to power. It is also with the dominance of a “left-brained” caste of mind reigning ascendant in both the West and the East.

    Perhaps Bobby Kennedy Jr’s bid for the Democratic nomination will bring greater attention to the influence of the corporate money men in power. An outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the military industrial complex over many years, Kennedy might previously have been easily dismissed as an “anti-vaxxer”, but that term may have lost its valency in the wake of Covid.

    Unless, or until, there is a thorough evaluation of what has occurred during Covid-19, the possibility of a renewed assault on basic liberties at the behest of the billionaire class remains. Green and Fazi’s Covid Consensus represents an important first draft of history, which should inform that inquiry.

    Feature Image: A classroom with socially distanced desks.

    [i] Albert Camus, The Plague, (1947), p.18

    [ii] Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin, London, (2013), p.145

    [iii] Albert Camus, The Plague, (1947), p.272

    [iv] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009), p.3

    [v] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (2009), p.165-66

  • Weighing up Ireland’s Hate Crime Law

    The new so-called Hate Crime Bill [Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022] in Ireland has generated quite a furore, including outright condemnation by Elon Musk, who described the measure as a “Massive attack on freedom of speech.”

    It has also been branded “insane” by Donald Trump Junior, which was used as a distorted form of justification for the law by Minister Simon Harris. However, criticism has also come from Paul Murphy of People Before Profit from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the Trump family. There has also been criticism from human rights bodies.

    The crucial provisions are Section 7 and Section 8.

    Protected Characteristics

    Section 7 is the mechanism by which offences against those of protected characteristics can be criminalised. At one level it is an admirable measure. Indeed, I have represented people with disabilities, who are one of the categories included.

    More controversially, transgenderism is one of the protected categories. It was surely not hate speech for the feminist author Germaine Greer to say that a man who becomes a woman can never really understand what it is to be a woman.

    In my view it was a serious violation of fair comment to no platform Greer for the comments – no matter whether one agrees with her ideas or not. To criminalise such a statement would be a return to the Dark Ages of the Papal Index.

    One hopes that a statement such as that made by Greer would be protected as legitimate political or cultural criticism, which are important delimiters and qualifiers contained in the Act, but the defence would arise only if the matter actually came to Court. The existence of a criminal charge might still be bandied about to damage the reputation of an individual or publisher. Malicious prosecutions are not unheard of in the Emerald Isle.

    Perhaps what really stoked the ire was Greer also stating “because he does not have a smelly vagina”. This brings us to the subject of ridicule. Ronald Dworkin wrote an article on the right to ridicule inspired by the Danish Cartoons incident.

    ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended….

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, enjoys a right not to be insulted or offended. Christopher Hitchens and the English judge Stephan Sedley have also remarked that any freedom to speak inoffensively is worthless.

    In more carefree times, political opponents Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley came together as pundits at the behest of a failing network for the 1968 Democratic and Republican Party Conventions. This has recently been documented in a film called ‘Best of Enemies’, which is now a West End play by the same name.

    William F. Buckley was the archangel of neo-conservatism, while Gore Vidal was an embodiment of what now seems an excessive liberalism. They deliberated on a state of siege, with riots in Chicago and democratic legitimation in question. America, along with the rest of the world, was on the brink, just like today.

    The debate famously culminated after the Republican Convention nominating Richard Nixon, who now seems a more sympathetic figure when compared to what followed him. Indeed, Nixon’s statement in 1969 that government has a great role to play in health care, ‘but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the federal government,’ is perhaps an idea that still has some merit; especially when one considers the damage of the top-down, dictatorial approach taken by many governments in response to Covid-19.

    In front of a live TV audience of millions, Buckley vented an anger, which he later regretted, calling Vidal ‘a queer’; in response to Vidal describing Buckley as a crypto-Nazi.

    Hate Speech

    Let’s consider both comments in the light of the current Irish legislation, Section 7 and Section 8 in particular. Buckley’s comment is arguably hate speech directed against a protected characteristic, i.e. gay people, although a term that was originally meant as an insult has since been appropriated by the gay community as almost a badge of honour, in a way similar to the artistic licence taken with the “n-word” among African-American (or Black?) communities. Can offensive terms be used by those with a protected characteristic?

    Moreover, in a 1974 essay for the New York Review of Books ‘Fascinating Fascism’ on Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag wondered how it had come about that ‘a regime which persecuted homosexuals [had] become a gay turn-on?’ Under the current legislation would it be a crime to suggest that the Nazi (anti-)aesthetic could be ‘a turn on’ to a gay person?

    A latter-day Gore Vidal might also be prosecuted for branding a right-wing Republican such as Buckley a crypto-Nazi, as Section 8 criminalises grossly trivialising genocide, crimes against humanity and peace.

    Crucially Section 11 of the act allows for a defence of criticism with respect to protected characteristics. But this does not apply, remarkably, to crimes against humanity under Section 8. To this we now turn.

    The language of Section 8 which criminalises inter alia crimes against humanity may be desirable in principle, although the overly broad language sets off alarm bells.

    Arguably, condoning or negating such crimes ought to be a criminal offence. Imagine being an Armenian and having to listen to Turkish propaganda justifying what is considered the first orchestrated attempt to eliminate a national group in the twentieth century?

    But this may easily become a legitimate subject for debate, such as exploring whether the Malthusian policies of the British Crown in Ireland during the Famine of 1845-51 should be described as a genocide.

    Also, who decides whether a genocide has taken place, a body of historians, or a court of law? Do we need to allow the fog of war to dissipate before any such adjudications with criminal ramifications are determined?

    Could it now be an offence to claim that Putin’s war in the Ukraine is really about Great Powers competing for resources rather than an attempt to eliminate Ukrainian national identity? By assessing the attendant brutality of the war in terms of Great Power politics, would a publisher or individual then be “trivialising” a crime against humanity.

    A measured denial of genocide – such as claims that the ICC’s Putin arrest warrant was based on State Department funded report that debunked itself – is completely different to an ahistorical assessment of a wide range of primary sources. The crucial issue here is adherence to the facts. It must be open for historians, journalists and lawyers to scrutinise questionable narratives around controversial events, such as the Kennedy Assassination. A distinction perhaps is that crimes against humanity are generally on a scale such as to make them undeniable.

    Criminalising that which grossly trivialises crimes against humanity is far too opaque and subjective a ground for a prosecution. The Act ought to be challenged under Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution: ‘The right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions.’

    An Article 26 Reference (by the President to the Supreme Court required within seven days of his receiving it) poses the risk however that if is unsuccessful there will be no further opportunity challenge any aspect of it in an Irish court.

    Ecocide and Economicide

    There may, however, be certain unintended consequences of the Act that could be used to advance progressive causes.

    In international law there are established candidates which are part of customary international law so called lex lata (established principles of customary international law), and more speculative controversial candidates over which there is an increasing lack of consensus, called in international law terms de lega ferenda (not yet firmly established).

    Thus, for example, one potential crime against humanity supported from the 1970’s proposed by Richard A. Falk is ecocide or crimes against the environment. Since such a crime involves various forms of intent and can include a conspiracy, it would involve at least the meeting of minds of the major oil and gas companies, and those who profit from them, including legislators.

    There is also a potential new crime against humanity for which there is less authority to date of economicide. Perhaps all of those who peddle a neoliberal world view, or support vulture or cuckoo fund, or allowed wealth to be siphoned off by Big Pharma during Covid-19 could and should be prosecuted!

    It could be said that the lifting of the eviction ban by the government is a form of economicide, as it is indirectly fuelling far-right wing extremism, led by gangsters attacking people with baseball bats. Thus, arguably, government policies, or the lack thereof, have indirectly generated racial hatred, and racism (speech directed against a protected characteristic) is criminalised by the Act.

    The framing of the innocent is also a de ledge ferenda candidate as a crime against humanity. One might argue that the Garda and/or the Department of Justice have condoned or been in denial of this.

    European Convention

    The Act is also likely to be challenged, and is subject to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Irish courts are bound, but rarely properly observe the Charter, despite the interpretative obligation. In reality we follow the ECHR selectively, ignoring it if it is too awkward, as in the nefarious Dwyer case.

    In a number of cases such as Jersild v Denmark (1994) and Lingens v Austria (1986) the ECHR have indicated under Article 10 of the Convention that speech encompasses a right to outrage and shock. These are deemed hallmarks of pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness in a society.

    Not everything is permitted. Thus, Holocaust denial or racist speech are excluded from protection, but the parameters are wide and restricted categories do not go quite as far as this Act.

    The crucial case of Lehideux and Isorni v France (1998) is particularly instructive. Here Le Monde newspaper were protected under Article 10 of the Convention for publishing an article celebrating the career of Marshall PĂŠtain, the Vichy French leader who collaborated with the Nazis. The content was not set out in a way to negate or revise clearly established facts.

    It should also be noted that no action of publication or broadcast of hateful material is required, bringing us into the territory of thought crimes. The much-trumpeted defence of legitimate artistic and political criticism only applies to possession of such material.

    Considering the imposition of close to absolute liability for the distribution of so-called offensive material on the internet, and even a reversal of the burden of proof, it is no wonder Elton Musk is concerned. He may be put out of business!

    Moreover, the term ‘may be prosecuted’ is very loose statutory language. On whose behest?

    Stress Test

    Let us stress test the crucial sections of the Act against potential scenarios.

    1. Stating that Leo Varadkar is like Verruca Salz from Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a spoilt privileged brat, and a wart on the body politic offence falls short of being a criminal offence on a literal interpretation of the Act. But what if one called him a crypto-Nazi or inferred that Nazism could be a turn-on to him? Would that be grossly trivialising crimes against humanity or demeaning to a protected category? Crucially, the defence of political criticism is unavailable for crimes against humanity.
    2. Adrian Hardiman, our finest judge since Declan Costello, once addressed my King’s Inn class to defend his decision in the Portmanock Golf Club case (2009) where he sanctioned the barring of women members from the club, much to the distress of the Equality Authority, which had taken the case. He then argued that a lesbian rugby club should not be obliged to accept him as a member given he was not a lesbian and couldn’t play rugby. These comments by a Supreme Court judge were in a public place. We may have to shut down, or sanitise beyond recognition, the hallowed debating societies of Ireland in response to this Act.
    3. Is Michael O’ Leary the Chairman of Ryanair in his denial of man-made climate change grossly trivialising the crime against humanity that is ecocide? Or what if one were to say that supposed climate change activists including the IMF and Bill Gates are themselves guilty of crimes against humanity for condoning Malthusian practices, rather than focusing on regulating the extractive corporations devouring the planet?

    Book Collector

    I have been a book collector of first editions since I was sixteen. One book in my collection is a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov Lolita, (1959) which narrates in baroque language an affair between a middle-aged man and an under-age girl. I also possess a first edition of the notorious fascist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night (1932). In possessing works that seemingly supports crimes against humanity, and another that undermines protected characteristics am I guilty of an offence?

    Even if I am not prosecuted, does the very existence of such an offence generate opprobrium towards great literature?

    One fears that even the great Dostoevsky’s books may soon be de-platformed if any of these are deemed a “Kremlin-favoured work.”

    Simon Harris has suggested that there is no conspiracy, or campaign being orchestrated against free speech in response to condemnation. The jury is still decidedly out on that question. Perhaps what we see at work is a coalition of interests, or a just a confederacy of dunces.

    A chill wind blows. Slow train coming and more acts to follow.

  • Reform of Defamation Law in Ireland

    Irish Times journalist Naomi O’Leary wrote an article recently commenting on how journalists are curtailed in what they can write by the threat of defamation actions, which contributes to an omerta or code of silence, undermining free speech.

    This leads to self-censorship, dictated by fear of suit. But the Irish Times trust also appears to be compromised by association with vested interests, which dictate the blandishments and glorified stenography passing for journalism commonly encountered in its pages.

    In the aforementioned article, O’Leary cited emotive evidence of a landlord attempting to evict ‘an entire apartment block’, and a civil society group ‘highlighting privatisation in healthcare’ being silenced. She notes, fawningly, that Minister for Justice Simon Harris this week ‘laid out a planned defamation reform, saying it should not be perceived as a “rich man’s law”.’

    Does she seriously think that any reform of defamation laws has simply been designed to restrict the casino capitalism of the current level of awards in defamation cases?

    Indeed, in some instances a high level of damages is appropriate. For example, Lord Aldington was entitled to millions in damages for the outrageous slur that he had participated in sending the Cossacks back to Stalin. The unjustified staining of reputations with crimes against humanity requires vigorous restraints.

    Reforms

    Predictably, the draft guidelines for what lies in store do not look auspicious, as it appears designed to protect the powerful, who dominate legacy media.

    It should be noted that recently both Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Micheál Martin suggested that Sinn Féin were using legal action and menacing solicitors’ letters to undermine free speech and robust questioning of political motives. There was obvious concern arising out of strict conditions for an RTÉ interview with Shane Ross, discussing his biography of Mary Lou McDonald.

    I have some empathy with Ross – whose views I generally find abhorrent – as when I went on RTÉ they stipulated certain matters, such as overt criticism of the Gardaí, were out of bounds.

    What Ross wrote about the Sinn FÊin leader may not have been defamatory, but simply ideologically tainted.  After all, Ross has what might be regarded as extreme views on certain issues, as, arguably, do elements within Sinn FÊin. The difference is that Ross is indulged by the establishment with publishing deals and a column in a Sunday paper. Go figure.

    If you want to be a journalist in Ireland it is generally advisable to espouse neo-liberal views.

    Leo-Liberal.

    Village’s ‘Putinistas’

    Moreover, remarks made by Leo Varadkar last year in an interview with the Sunday Times to the effect that those associated with the Leo the Leak story in Village Magazine were Russian sympathisers is a classic example of the degradation of contemporary political discourse, conveyed by media which offers an uncritical platform to those in power. It was, of course, clearly defamatory towards its editor Michael Smith, who has been vocal in his condemnation of Vladimir Putin.

    He might not expect a justified windfall, however, if the case comes before a Fine Gael-appointed judge, as opposed to a jury, as the defamation bill proposes.

    The renowned jurist Geoffrey Robertson QC has criticised gagging orders silencing critics, which serves the interests of the kleptocracy, including Russian oligarchs, in a recent book. but be we should be careful for what we wish for.

    A gagging orders might have been appropriate to counter Labour’s recent absurd slur against Rishi Sunak, which Keir Starmer doubled down on despite internal criticism from within his own party. All too often it has been the fake left, epitomised by Alastair Campbell, which has pandered to press hysteria in criminal justice in the UK.

    Blackmail

    I note the word ‘aggressive’ being used by Ms O’Leary in the context of pre-emptive threats, which is similar to the menace required to ground the criminal offence known as blackmail; the definition of which is menace backed by threats. Such tactics are something the government parties in Ireland and apparatchiks in the police and justice department know a considerable amount about.

    So, spurious defamation actions for ulterior motives may come close to the criminal charge of blackmail backed by threats, but only if these are spurious and untrue. But what if they are true? And where should the balance lie?

    It is almost universally agreed, including, apparently, by the incumbent Minister for Justice, Simon Harris that ‘Democracy cannot truly flourish without robust protection for the right of freedom of expression.’ In a certain respect, however, this Bill will in fact seriously curtail freedom of expression, a point that Naomi O’Leary strikingly ignores.

    Indeed, one wonders whether the whole article was conceived in cahoots with said Minister, who she has previously quoted approvingly over his role in the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, while ignoring that he once adopted a Pro-Life stance. The article is also presented with a flattering shot of the Minister emblazoned over it, depicting him as the champion of free speech.

    Online Disclosure

    Freedom of expression is the central hallmark of a democracy. Anthony Lewis, referring to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, said that free speech should be a search engine for the truth. The great legal scholar Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition of legitimate government and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, a great English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens the government and indeed opposition to intense scrutiny. The prior restraint of gagging orders invites scepticism.

    So, bearing this in mind, let us explore the motivation of the current government for reforming the defamation laws.

    The proposed government Bill on Online Disclosure applies to all media, including Twitter, and potentially criminalises certain categories of ‘hate’ speech.

    It could amount to the most dramatic curtailment of free speech in the history of the state. Thus, if Naomi O’ Leary had the temerity to compare Leo Varadkar to a wart on the sole of one’s foot in jest she might be prosecuted, and appear before a Fine Gael appointed judge.

    The much-trumpeted new Whistleblowing Act ineffectively opposed, and badly amended, is also worth considering. It does not protect media breaking stories; nor does it adequately protect employees including journalist from reporting externally.

    A legal environment that favours legacy publishers that employ expert legal advice in advance of publication, as opposed to private individuals ranting on Twitter – often to very small audiences – also ignores the restraints imposed internally by an increasingly corporatized press, which acts as a stenographer to the powerful. This is a role which Naomi O’Leary herself seems proud to perform.

    The Irish Times is a trust, but dependent on its sponsors and connections; so it does not, and arguably cannot, provide genuinely truth-driven coverage that a true democracy requires. It is institutionally neutered and not just by prospective defamation actions.

    Defamation suits and pre-emptive injunctions chill free speech, and are frowned on by lawyers and responsible journalists. Such injunctions sought to shut down Watergate and Wikileaks. The judgment in the seminal US constitutional case the Pentagon Papers frowned on it. Politicians ought to be thick-skinned when it comes to obloquy and ridicule, it goes with the territory of assuming power.

    What we are dealing with is a far wider problem in contemporary political discourse. Jürgen Habermas – perhaps the leading public intellectual alive on the planet – developed the crucial idea of ideal speech or communicative action, which serves as an argument to the effect that speech should be proper and non-ideological in order to achieve optimum technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    Sadly, most of what passes for debate in DĂĄil Eireann would be at the very opposite pole to the kind of Enlightenment salon discussions he imagines.

    Outer Limits of Free Speech

    The criminalisation or suing or gagging of speech – generally of those that most need protecting – is an awful feature of these woe-begotten times.

    Given the approving coverage that legacy media already provides to representatives of the parties representing large corporations in Ireland, the least we might expect is that debate on online fora continues remains robust, and, in general, conducted without fear of suit.

    Rarely, if ever, does the Irish Times land a blow against vested interests in Ireland, channelling instead a latent anger against distant caricatures over whom we have no control. Online fora at least offer an opportunity for citizen journalists to provide accounts that challenge dominant narratives in a way that legacy media does not.

    Naturally, speech has its outer limits. Hate speech that inspires violence against minority groups cannot be tolerated in a civilised society. Social media publishers have a responsibility to moderate content, but cannot be allowed to decide what constitutes ‘disinformation’, and censor according to the whims of bodies that may be subject to regulatory capture. Censorship is always dangerous.

    Surely, with respect to Fine Gael for example, one should be allowed to describe them as crypto-fascists, or indeed suggest that Mary-Lou McDonald is associated with terrorists as Mr. Ross seems to have done.

    Fintan O’Toole constantly warns against the dangers posed by Sinn Féin, but rarely does he offer a searing critic of the corporatocracy and dominant political parties. His sympathies seem to lie with a weary establishment, which ‘have no choice’ but to coalesces with the neoliberal parties.

    Untrammelled freedom of expression should only be accorded to those who say something of significance – those who have something to lose by speaking out.

    Robust Debate

    The solution, of course, is not litigation but robust debate in civil society; as one of the great defenders of speech the late great Christopher Hitchens put it: ‘If you disagree with me, do so and stand in line so I can kick your ass.’ Or words to that effect. Possibly slurred.

    A defamation action can ruin a person’s life. A casual disregard for the truth in Ireland and premptive publication fed by the police and its journalistic cohorts in the gutter press can have serious consequences. The Irish Independent and much of RTÉ deserve no special protection.

    Given the platform he is accorded, nor should the gaffe-prone Leo Varadkar be allowed to shelter behind loose laws that should be designed to protect real journalists. His big mouth was most recently in evidence with his crass sub–American Monica Lewinsky comment.

    Indeed, give the parlous state of media in Ireland, one shudders to think what nonsense will be published if we are to dispense with reasonably strict defamation laws, and jury trials.

    Nonetheless, I can agree with a certain amount of what Naomi O’Leary’s recent article argues. No doubt defamation awards should be curtailed and are out of kilter with other jurisdictions, but negating jury trials where liars are exposed would be a retrograde step, and the criminalisation of the nebulous concept of hate speech could be disastrous, rendering satire almost impossible.

    Freedom of expression has its limits. Indeed, one wonders about the responsibility of a publisher such as the Irish Times, which gives a platform to an ideologue like Michael McDowell, who attributes the world’s problems to Vladimir Putin as opposed to the neo-liberal shock brigade that he and his Irish Times acolytes belong to. They have provided cover for mass evictions, a declining quality of life and incipient far-right fascism.

  • In Memoriam: Moira Woods

    Such sad news. Another member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement is gone. Not just any member, but Dr. Moira Woods, one of the three founders.

    She was something else. By the time us younger ones were venting our rage outside Dáil Éireann in blue jeans and curly hair, thinking we were the bee’s knees, Moira had already shaved her head in support of victims of tarring and feathering in the North, conducted a mock trial of Richard Nixon on the back of a lorry during his visit here, carried an effigy of him on a coffin to the American Embassy, and burnt it. Another day she suggested setting her coat alight in Church in protest against the latest Catholic Church outrage.

    Talk about fearless.

    She was also very clever and enjoyed film star looks. As Marie McMahon put it, ‘besides being by far the most beautiful person in the (IWLM) group to look at, which is an awful sexist thing to say but it’s true! she also had a brilliant sense of humour. And was extremely politically courageous’.

    1950s Ireland. Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    Early Years

    Born in 1934 – a child of the Raj – to an English father and an Irish mother, her family were stationed in Burma before being evacuated to Australia after the Japanese invasion. She was then sent ‘home’ to be educated by nuns, where according to Susan McKay she ‘received thrashings and expulsions’.

    She was, nonetheless, a brilliant student, ready to matriculate for Oxford aged just fifteen, but switched at the last minute to study in Trinity to allow her begin her medicine degree at sixteen.

    ‘In her final year’ writes Susan McKay, she won ‘a medal for psychiatry, a gold medal for surgery and the hospital prize for medicine.’

    Her first marriage was to a fellow student, Roger Hackett. They had two children.

    She later re-married, a surgeon Bobby Woods, who was aged sixty-two, while she was thirty-one. Mary Maher, Woman’s editor of the Irish Times and fellow member of the IWLM said she had ‘never seen a happier marriage’. They went on to have four children.

    While raising her family, running the big house on Ailesbury Road – Deirdre McQuillan remembers her ‘at the stove cooking something wonderful while children and people milled about’ – she became intensely committed to political justice – protesting against the war in Vietnam, the Dublin Housing Acton Committee, and the Northern Troubles.

    Snooty neighbours were not always impressed. The Woods were accused of being ‘communists’, of harbouring Viet Cong. Neighbouring children were forbidden from playing there.

    I don’t think it took a feather out of her. She had bigger fish to fry.

    A mural outside the Bernard Shaw Pub in Portobello, Dublin depicting Savita Halappanavar and calling for a Yes vote in Ireland’s referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment.

    Justice for Women

    More and more, she joined the fight for justice for women, so that one day she and Margaret Gaj, owner of Gaj’s on Baggot Street, and heroic fellow fighter for justice Máirín de Burca – fresh out of jail for pelting eggs at Richard Nixon’s car the same day Moira was conducting her mock trial – got together in Bewley’s on Grafton Street and decided – HURRAY! – to found the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.

    Pretty much every gain made in rights for women in Ireland can be traced back to that modest get together of these three women.

    This was an Ireland where women were discriminated against from the day we were born. As we detailed in our pamphlet, ‘Chains or Change’, in every aspect of their lives women were hobbled.

    This began with an education system which funneled us into our designated roles as wives, mothers and caregivers. After primary school we were obviously too thick to do higher level mathematics, thereby excluding us from most properly paid careers, from medicine to airline pilots to bank manager. If a few ladies managed to jump through the various hoops, the infamous Marriage Bar lay in store.

    Once married you were out on your ear, and it wasn’t just for civil service jobs, but also banks, accountancy firms, respectability itself demanded you go home and become, literally, a ‘chattel’ inside your marriage, where you enjoyed few civil rights. Legally you barely existed.

    Your husband could flip over to the UK, divorce you, get full custody of your children and sell the family home from under your feet – all above board!

    Having made sure marriage was the only ‘career path’ open to women the powers that be – the celibate elite of the Catholic Church and the politicians who kowtowed to them – aimed to turn us into little more than domestic servants and baby-making machines.

    There was no sex education, no contraception, and absolutely no termination of pregnancy available. Talk about going to war blindfolded, with your hands tied behind your back!

    Mother and Baby Homes

    Life was less dire for middle class, urban women, but the damnation of a Mother and Baby Home awaited most working class and rural girls unfortunate enough to become pregnant outside of wedlock.

    For many unfortunate middle class women locked into marriages – ‘drowning in babies’ in Nuala Fennell’s immortal phrase – Valium taken by the bucket load was the only source of comfort.

    And women were still ‘churched’ after giving birth, that is brought in and ‘cleansed’, as if birth itself, so ferociously trumpeted by the good fathers, was filthy.

    As Nell McCafferty famously found out, you couldn’t even get a television on the never-never without a male signature. Even if that male was unemployed and pulled in off the street and you’d just been hired by the Irish Times.

    Naturally Moira became the go to person within the IWLM for all matters medical, and psychological. June Levine remembered warmly comforting words from Moira when accessing a nasty memory during a consciousness raising session in Gaj’s, revisiting a man thrusting his penis between the bars of her cot.

    As Moira increased her involvement in women’s rights the damage wrought on our society by crazy levels of inequality, and repression became clearer to her.

    It helped that she had been brought up outside of Ireland. She remained a Catholic, but totally rejected ‘Rome’s’ assumption that it could regulate women’s reproductive lives down to the minutest detail.

    Her presence as an educated and privileged woman carried weight. On a practical level, as one of the few women in the IWLM with ‘means’ she was, as MĂĄirĂ­n de Burca says, ‘always there to bail us out of the Bridewell after we’d been arrested. She was incredibly generous. I once landed a homeless family on her and she just took them in.’

    By the late 1970s, Moira was helping set up the first Well Woman Centres, the country’s first menopause clinic, and had begun seeing patients referred to her by the Rape Crisis Centre.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    The Eighth Amendment

    1983 was the year when the backlash against the liberalisation of life in Ireland began in earnest, Moira was at the forefront of the campaign against the insertion of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution..

    Right-wing Catholicism, representing the most repressive aspects of the religious Patriarchy, had marshaled its forces. Recalling the names of the various organisations sends a shiver down my spine: PLAC, SPUC, the Congress of Catholic Secondary School Parents’ Associations, the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Guild, the Guild of Catholic Nurses, the Guild of Catholic Pharmacists, the Catholic Young Men’s Society, the St. Thomas More Society, the National Association of the Ovulation Method, the Council of Social Concern, the Irish Responsible Society, the St Joseph’s Young Priests Society, and the Christian Brothers Schools Parents’ Federation.

    Passing the infamous Eighth Amendment, giving a foetus equal rights to life to that of the mother, inserted into the Constitution was their sole aim. Shamefully, three separate governments allowed themselves to be terrified into submission and the Eighth was ‘in’.

    It was a bruising battle, and Moira was at the centre of it.

    Within a year of ‘winning’, the disastrous consequences for young women became apparent. Thus, schoolgirl Ann Lovett was found bleeding to death in a grotto in Longford – her little baby lying dead beside her.

    Six months later Joanne Hayes was to be crucified on Ireland’s terrifying patriarchal altar, having been wrongly accused of the death of a baby found on a strand eighty kilometres away.

    An indication of just how desperate things were for young women comes from a remark made by the undertaker who buried the little one found on the strand. He lived beside a quarry, and said it was not unusual to find babies bodies thrown there by desperate mothers.

    How could a society descend to that level of brutality?

    Cassandra imploring Athena for revenge against Ajax, by Jerome-Martin Langlois, 1810-1838.

    Sexual Assault Unit

    Moira’s next move was to head up a Sexual Assault Unit in the Rotunda. As Emily O’Reilly wrote in a piece for the Sunday Business Post in 2002, Ireland’s first SAU ‘sprang indirectly from the 1983 anti-amendment campaign’ after discussions between Anne O’Donnell, Moira and Dr George Henry, then Master of the Rotunda.

    Dr. Henry had seen SAU’s in Australia, setting one up in an Ireland reeling from sexual violence and guilt, seemed obvious and Moira was the obvious person to put in charge.

    She set about doing things with her usual vigour, but was soon stunned at the tsunami of cases coming her way involving abuse, incest and rape. The outer limits of sexual violence.

    It was a rape case that once again pushed her centre stage. The so-called ‘X’ case.

    A suicidal fourteen-year-old girl, pregnant as a result of rape, was taken to London by her parents to see if they could extract DNA from the foetus for a court case against the perpetrator and were told that would involve a high risk of miscarriage.

    When her parents asked the Gardaí if DNA from the foetus could be used in evidence the Gardaí immediately informed the Attorney General, who sought an injunction, granted by the High Court, compelling the girl and her parents to remain in Ireland.

    In the High Court Declan Costello ruled that despite the rape, the age of the victim, and her being suicidal, she had good loving parents and so the pregnancy must go ahead.

    Five days later an appeal was lodged in the Supreme Court, which decided that termination, in England, could go ahead.

    The child miscarried two days later in a London hospital. Moira was the doctor in charge. The misery wrought on those parents, and that raped, suicidal fourteen-year-old being put through by the system, left her shaking with fury.

    Tragically for her it put her in the cross hairs of the latest iteration of misogynistic religiosity.

    Working alone, with absolutely minimal resources, Moira had seen over 1,000 children in the Rotunda. Incest, barely mentioned at the time, was one of the biggest problems presenting.

    Moira’s methods of work were unheard of at the time in Ireland. She actually spoke to the children, and used ‘anatomically correct dolls’ to help them demonstrate what had occurred.

    She also named fathers she deemed guilty of abuse, which was also unheard of. As Deirdre McQuillan says the practice had been to keep fathers in the family no matter what.

    The ‘no matter what’ was of course crucial. As Sebastian Barry has been so eloquently shouting out in publicising his new novel, God’s Old Time, abusing a child or a young person is akin to murdering them. Protecting the breadwinner – no matter what – could, and often did, mean abandoning the child.

    As one lawyer who saw the subsequent crucifixion of Dr. Moira Woods unfolding put it, ‘part of the problem was she was way ahead of her time. In those days there was no culture of reporting abuse. People wouldn’t believe you, they didn’t want to believe you, that a father had sexually abused his daughter.’

    ‘If it happened now there would be much deeper investigation, and she wouldn’t be in any trouble at all’.

    Sadly it was then, and not now. And the bad people won.

    War of Attrition

    Moira’s stellar career in unflagging support for Irish women and children was mired in vileness, heaped on her by those desperate not to be named.

    Just as happened with Dr. Noel Browne over the Mother and Child Scheme in 1951, the medical profession stood idly by as one of their finest was thrown to the wolves.

    It was a five year, savage war of attrition, with the Medical Council producing a redacted report (as is standard Irish practice), which, wrote Emily O’Reilly, concluded ‘while Woods was found not to have observed proper protocols, it makes no claims about the validity of the accusations.’

    ‘Proper protocols’ were demanded while working alone, and completely under-resourced, in a bat-shit, sexually dysfunctional country.

    Moira didn’t appeal.

    My lawyer friend said, ‘she’d had enough’. She had just separated from her partner of twenty years, and father of her two youngest children, Cathal Goulding, and decided to leave town to live in Italy.

    Deirdre McQuillan says it makes her happy to think she found a new, good life there. Met with an Italian man, Guido, ran a big house, and kept in touch with home via the steady stream of visitors from Ireland, her eight wonderful children and grandchildren – Penny, Denis, Christopher, Catherine, Timothy, Benjamin, AodgĂĄn and BanbĂĄn with grandchildren Ben, Erin, Jack, Rowan, Katharine, OisĂ­n, ClĂ­odhna, Darragh, Sophie, Emily, Sophie and Cathal.

    I’m torn between rage and sorrow thinking about her. Her valour. Her beauty. Her passionate advocacy for Irish women, that ‘the issues on which she campaigned throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in twenty changes of legislation involving women,’ (according to Stephen Dodds in the Irish Independent in 2002), and the shameful way she was treated by an embedded, religiously inspired, misogyny.

    It is terrifying how blackening people’s reputation works; how repressing the truth works, including taking injunctions out against biographical works. Indeed, Google searches for one of Ireland’s greatest advocates for women, show up pitifully little information.

    Here’s hoping she’s up there with the Great Spirit in the Sky fashioning flaming swords and thunderbolts to hurl down on her torturers – they know who they are. You! And You! And You!

    Rest in Power beautiful Sister.

    Rosita Sweetman received this message from Moira’s old friend President Michael D. Higgins in advance of the publication of this appreciation.

     

  • Napoli: It Hurts

    It’s an exciting time to be Neapolitan right now. Or should I say a supporter of Napoli FC? I have to clarify, as there’s hardly a dull moment to be Neapolitan.

    Wherever I go, it doesn’t matter whether it’s New York or Tenerife, when I answer the classic question “Where are you from?” so many emotions rage inside me that I am unable to handle, because I know there will be questions. And if there are no questions they will be insinuations. And if there are no insinuations there will be sterile rhetoric. Or unbearable clichés.

    In short, being Neapolitan is a bit of a blessing, and a bit of a curse. Having clarified this, it is indeed an exciting time to be a Napoli supporter. This illness (in Napoli we don’t say “I am a supporter” or “I’m a huge fan”. We say “I’m ill for Napoli”, which is a literal translation of “So’ mmalato pe ‘o Napule”) got to me when I was just a kid.

    It was not easy falling in love with the team, as during my whole childhood and adolescence Napoli SUCKED. During the second season after I started following them, we had the worst record in our (why is that supporters think they’re part of the team is something to investigate) history. Fourteen miserable points in thirty-four games. We even managed to lose at home to Lecce; a shameful 2-4 result.

    So, you can probably understand when I say that I never expected what we have been seeing from the team thus far in Serie A.

    Napoli is dominating the championship, and it has done so from the beginning. In August, after half the squad was changed, it was impossible to foresee anything like this.

    We are seeing things we’re unaccustomed to, and the enthusiasm the team has brought to the city is incredible. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Victor Osimhen, Stanislav Lobotka, Andrè Frank Zambo Anguissa, Min-Jae Kim, Piotr Zielinski, and the other players are writing their names in Napoli’s history, making likely what we thought would be impossible: winning a scudetto.

    What’s more they are making it look EASY! And they are also working wonders in Europe, winning their group stage and putting four goals past Liverpool and six (SIX!) past Ajax at their home ground. Recalling this makes me quiver with excitement. This is Real Madrid or Barcelona stuff. It’s crazy, but it’s happening for real.

    Over-thinking…

    A normal human being would just enjoy what is going on without reflecting too much on it. Unfortunately, I was gifted with an exceptional talent for over-thinking, and therefore began reflecting on how much this team can positively affect the city’s image.

    It all started a couple of weeks ago when I was walking close to La Sagrada Familia where I live in Barcelona and some teenagers came up to me speaking a language I did not understand. They began pointing at the Napoli crest that is on the back of my tracksuit jacket.

    It turned out they were Georgian students, over on holiday. They wanted a picture with me to express their love for Napoli, and Kvaratskhelia. It was an unfamiliar feeling, so I started to go around wearing the jacket to see if it would happen again.

    Since then, I have been stopped, waved at, and had “Forza Napoli!” shouted after me. The other day, entering the office, the guy that works at the bar downstairs and two security guys I had never spoken to before, asked me about Napoli and expressed their admiration for the team I support, expressing their sincere hope that Napoli win the Champion’s League.

    I am astounded by all this attention. I don’t know how to feel about it. And the astonishment does not end there.

     

    Time Out 

    Time Magazine has put Napoli in its top fifty destinations to travel to. Ryanair has added more routes to and from Naples, and their representative even had a Napoli jersey on.

    A recent article in an Italian newspaper has revelead that for the month of May it is almost impossible to find a hotel room there now.

    Georgian authorities are attempting to create a direct connection between Napoli and Tbilisi to help locals fly to Napoli to see their favorite player. The Diego Armando Maradona stadium has now a diversified audience, with Koreans and Georgians in regular attendance.

    YouTubers are now flocking to Napoli to see the team play, and in the meantime enjoying the city’s mesmerizing sights, art, and food. Thousands of tourists climb the alleys of the Quartieri Spagnoli in pilgrimage toward the mural of Maradona which is famous throughout the world.

    I should feel proud that my city and team are performing so well. It is just that this is unleashing the usual Italian rhetoric about the Neapolitan being a ‘special people’, and of a ‘special city’, which is experiencing a ‘particular moment.’

    The truth is that I’ve had it up here with that kind of talk about Napoli FC, and Naples. It is hard for me to explain what it feels and means to be Neapolitan. I’ll do my best, but I know that in the end, I might start using the clichés I hate so much.

    Volcanic

    Being Neapolitan means you have to excuse yourself for everything you did not do, every time something bad happens in the city. It means fighting with other Neapolitans, who think that Scudetto celebrations will lead some people to destroy the city and its monuments.

    It involves the frustration of knowing that it doesn’t matter if it’s only ten people’s fault, it will be all the Neapolitans taking the blame. I even saw that a newspaper is worried that there will be killings and robberies throughout the event.

    Being Neapolitan means watching #Vesuvio trend on Twitter every single freaking time there is an earthquake in the southern part of Italy. Let me explain this to anyone who think this sounds strange. It’s worse: it’s stupid. You have to know that being Neapolitan entails having a song sung to us that goes:

    My dream I will fulfill / Il mio sogno esaudirò
    Vesuvius erupts / Vesuvio Erutta
    All Naples is destroyed / Tutta Napoli è distrutta
    Vesuvius erupts / Vesuvio Erutta
    All Naples is destroyed / Tutta Napoli è distrutta

    On the subject of ‘Freed from desire’, some brilliant minds even brought out a single that was distributed on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, and many other platforms, before somebody had the decency to take it down.

    It means that people from Bergamo, in the northern part of Italy, will happily join the German supporters of Eintracht Frankfurt destroying a part of the city because they hate our guts.

    It means that every taxi driver I meet has seen the film Gomorrah, and I am too ashamed to tell them that I grew up in that neighborhood. It means that you will be the butt of many unpleasant jokes. It means that the lazy and incompetent Chief Wiggum of the Simpsons will speak with your accent.

    It Hurts…

    So, how does it FEEL to be Neapolitan? It fucking hurts! And that’s the harsh truth. It is a debilitating struggle, because whenever you talk or reason about your city, you are never right.

    It does not matter who you’re talking to, or about what. You are never right, because you’re Neapolitan. You are wrong because you are Neapolitan. You are ‘special’, you are deceitful, you are the one who steals, who is lazy. They say that in stereotypes there’s always a grain of truth. And that hurts more.

    What I’ve been asking myself during this incredible year is how I should feel about it. I don’t know anymore.

    Should I already feel guilty for what some shitheads will do? Should I feel sorry about it? Should I be proud of what is happening or afraid it will not happen again? Should I laugh about the insults we receive because it’s just that the other supporters are sore losers, or should I be worried that the next time we go to an away match it will not be just a small part of the stadium singing about our sleepy giant?

    I don’t know. What I do know is that I cried while and after Kvaratskhelia had received the ball from Osimhen, then dribbled past the whole Atalanta defence and midfield, turning three times in a very tight space before painting with his right foot a supersonic shooting star which ended its run in the top bin. It was simply too much. There’s only so much beauty you can witness without tears.

    I know it can’t last forever and that I should be far happier. I know that I should be proud of how we’re doing, because as my terminally ill and short-memoried father said after I finished telling him (for the fifth time in six hours) that Napoli had won the Coppa Italia final against Juventus on penalties, “See… in the end it’s not so bad being Neapolitan.”

    Diego Pugliese, Naples, 2020.

    Featured images by Daniele Idini, Naples, July 2020.

    Title image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:19870510_sanpaolo.jpg#/media/File:19870510_sanpaolo.jpg

  • Eviction Ban: Towards an Unjust Society

    An earlier version of this article was recently published in the Irish World newspaper, we commend the courage of the editor Bernard Purcell for doing so, but a week is a long time in politics and we felt it required updating and a short addendum on the possibility of a legal challenge.

    Indirectly, the failure to deal with the issue of housing and homelessness has led to the rise of far-right protests, tar­geting immigrants in temporary accommodation. This is the slippery slope to fascism.

    Housing is the defining issue of this Irish generation. By extension, it is the defining issue of Ireland’s next general election.

    One slender thread of hope to ensure matters did not decline further was Ire­land’s temporary ban on evic­tions. But that has been re­scinded.

    In contrast, Scotland had the good sense to extend its own evic­tions ban until September. But in the midst of the worst housing shortage in the country’s history, the Irish government is prioritising the financial interests of land­lords.

    Ireland’s recently ap­pointed Attorney General Rossa Fanning SC had advised the Irish government that landlords’ groups could mount a constitutional chal­lenge to the extension of the ban. But the Irish government subsequently insisted its de­cision to revoke the evictions ban was a political one, rather than one based on the AG’s advice.

    Nevertheless, the Irish governments have frequently hidden behind the issue of constitutionality. It’s the first line of de­fence whenever the question of genuine rent control is pro­posed, and the last line of de­fence when the calls for the introduction of the eviction ban were first made.

    Constitutional Problem?

    We believe there is a constitu­tional solution to a suppos­edly intractable constitutional problem. The origin of the problem is that in Blake v Madigan (1982) The Rent Restrictions Act 1960, (1981) limited the amount of rent which could be charged on certain con­trolled dwellings.

    It also made it difficult for a landlord to recover posses­sion of a dwelling affected by the legislation. Landlords argued that the legislation amounted to an unjust attack on their property rights.

    The Irish Supreme Court agreed, referring to how the scheme operated in an arbitrary manner, with no means testing of either landlord or tenant, and that no compensation was available for the restriction of the prop­erty rights of the landlords af­fected.

    So, under the Constitu­tion, the right to property is to be protected against “un­just attack and the landlords’ rights unjustly attacked.”

    But constitutionally, this idea of an unjust attack is sub­ject to the proviso that the rights of landlords must give way to the common good – where the legislature is informed by Directive Principles of Social Policy set out in Article 45  – and also that the means used to intrude on property rights are proportionate.

    Social and Affordable Housing

    The social justice and common good arguments for maintaining an eviction ban are, in our view, overwhelming. But, of course, this would limit and restrict the property rights of landlords in an increasingly neolib­eral Ireland.

    Compulsory purchase schemes have, however, been upheld in such cases as Dreher [984], with the suggestion that sometimes there is no need to pay any compensation.

    In Re Article 26 and Part V of the Planning and Devel­opment Bill [2000] 2 IR321, Part V of the Bill aimed to provide affordable housing and social integration, imposing a con­dition that planning permis­sion for residential developments would either have to cede some of the de­velopment for affordable housing, or instead pay com­pensation.

    There was no require­ment that the State pay com­pensation to the developer under the scheme, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in a judgment which focused largely on the reasons for the restriction on property rights.

    The Court noted that the restriction on property rights was justified and proportion­ate to the objectives of the Bill.

    Based on this precedent, today the government could acquire properties at less than market rates, paying a measure of compensation to the landlords and thus avoid­ing the unappeal­ing vista of increased homelessness, leading to further social divisions further social divisions, and creating conditions for the rise of a far-right fas­cism, which may serve the interests of this neoliberal coalition, and its apolo­gists.

    It could also have a wel­come deflationary impact on the price of property which now exceed Celtic Tiger levels.

    Shared Equity

    Alas, it appears the Irish government does not want this and has pro­posed an alternative. They are currently drawing up leg­islation which in effect will extend their Shared Equity scheme to second hand homes where the land­lord wishes to sell but has a tenant in situ.

    The drive to introduce this Shared Equity scheme came from the two main property lobby groups – Property Industry Ireland and the Irish Institu­tional Property.

    Neither group came up with the idea itself. It is based on an English scheme which research by the London School of Eco­nomics (LSE) found pushed up London house prices by 9per cent.

    In effect, it operates as a dual mortgage, whereby the tenant in situ would have a mortgage to a bank and also be required to repay the State who would take an “equity stake” in the property.

    This is unlikely to work, or even be ready in time, for the forthcoming wave of Irish evictions. A simpler proposal is to follow the South African model of amending the Consti­tution to include an enforce­able right to housing in an emergency context.

    The Irish government’s promise of a housing referen­dum has foundered on a dis­agreement about the wording. We suspect that it will not implement what is needed for an immediately enforce­able emergency housing right, as is enforceable in other jurisdic­tions.

    A Just Society?

    We doubt the pre­sent government has the po­litical will for meaningful action on housing. But there is an al­ternative, which is to launch a constitutional challenge so the Supreme Court can recant on such ne­farious cases as O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation [1989] in which Mr Justice Declan Costello (1926-2011) held that he lacked jurisdiction to compel the defendant to pro­vide the plaintiffs with ade­quately serviced halting sites, because this was a question of distributive justice.

    Such matters of social justice, he intimated, were for Leinster House, not the Four Courts. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC [1994].

    Costello (1926-2011), the son of former Taoiseach John A Costello, was a former Fine Gael TD, Attorney General, barrister and judge, who served as President of the Irish High Court from 1995to 1998.

    As a politician he was the author of Towards a Just Society, a policy document which shifted Fine Gael towards the left and social justice, and which made Fine Gael a more at­tractive coalition partner for the Irish Labour Party.

    Costello also created Ire­land’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Law Reform Commis­sion, making him the most effective and consequential Irish Attorney General in the history of the State.

    He was a thoroughly de­cent man, and a visionary, but also a product of his background. Fine Gael has long since parted company with Costello’s vision of the Just Society for Ireland. Just like Fianna Fáil, it has been completely cap­tured by business interests, landlords and property de­velopers.

    Their politics is little more than the shadow cast upon society by big business, as the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) might have said.

    The portents for a constitutional challenge in this period of an unprecedented housing emergency are not, however, all bad. In a fledgling way recent judgments have hinted at a more interventionist approach, in pro­portionate terms where there is recklessness or bad faith.

    Well, if throwing people out on the street, disrupting family units with no afford­able place to go, is not reck­less, what is?

    The very fabric of Irish society frays, as dust is left to gather on those copies of Just Society which remain shelved and unread in Fine Gael’s basement.

    The current crop of Fine Gael TDs have no interest in reading that document, but are happy to deploy it for public relations purposes when it suits them.

    Last week Sinn Féin forced a vote on the govern­ment’s lifting of the eviction ban, which led to one Green T.D.’s Nessa Hourigan breaking ranks and voting against the government.

    As the doomsday sce­nario for terrified tenants looms large, and the Irish government looks on with complete indifference to such pain, we are reminded of the word of a Christy Moore song- “the spirit that dwelt within, now sleeps out in the rain”.

    Addendum

    With the government’s rejection of last week’s motion from Sinn Féin to extend the eviction ban, and with the help of certain “independent” TDs, the same result is now likely to be reached today. The Labour Party’s no confidence motion has also fallen short.

    This government and its drive to break all homelessness records is bruised and battered, but not unbroken. In our view the last remaining hope for the thousands facing eviction rests upon the kind of last-minute legal challenge our initial article set out.

    Papers could potentially be lodged on Thursday seeking an interim injunction for violations by the government of Article 43, Article 40.3 and Article 45 of the constitution. This will require state-sponsored lawyers to show cause, and seek a return date for a fully-fledged interlocutory hearing with skeleton arguments and detailed consideration.

    The logic is that the implementation of the lifting of the eviction moratorium on Friday would not happen as mandatory relief and an injunction would be sought against the lifting. This would require careful judicial consideration, and thus time for cool judicial heads to resolve whether it could be secured.

    If a lawyer cannot be enabled to seek an interim injunction on such short notice any member of the public can do so.

    However, a powerful symbol would be the representatives of the opposition in DĂĄil Eireann coming together, in conjunction with some of those currently facing eviction, to try and avert the inevitable prospect of a humanitarian catastrophe on our streets in the months to come.

    A new Socialist Lawyers’ Association of Ireland announced its establishment in January of this year, so perhaps they might even want to lend a hand. There are also organisation likes CATU and other campaigning groups. But time is of the essence.

    Our conservative political classes seem to have either sleep-walked or deliberately created this unprecedented housing crisis and its dysfunctional property market. Sterile and detached cost benefit analysis where households are units and people products lead to the increasing dehumanisation of those impacted by policy decisions.

    Even the most basic rights we can think of like housing and a safe and secure upbringing seem to wither on the vine. To quote someone who Fine Gael should know well:

    “We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood, and complacency must be dispelled, and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.”

    Those are the words of the late Declan Costello former Fine Gael TD, Attorney General and author of the “Just Society”. They seem to ring truer than ever.

    The time has come for a Housing challenge, for we the people.

    David Langwallner is an Irish Barrister based in London. Cillian Doyle is a political economist and policy advisor. The views expressed are their own.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • COVID-19: Shame on You

    A new book COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK (Bloomsbury, 2023) co-authored by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose explores how the British government under Boris Johnson used shame as an instrument of coercive control during the pandemic.

    ‘Shame’, the authors contend, ‘is commonly understood to be a personal experience that arises when one feels judged by another or others (whether they are present, imagined or internalized) to have transgressed or broken a social rule or norm.’

    It appears to exert a particular force in Westminster politics where cries of “shame” or “shame on you” are regularly hurled across the floor of the House of Commons. An anthropologist might trace this to the public school upbringing of a significant proportion number of MPs – David Cameron recalls in his biography, ‘At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster’ – or a proletarian habituation through spectator sport.

    The stigmatisation of apparently errant behaviour through shaming is not, however, unique to English (or British) culture.

    Over the course of the lockdown in the U.K. the authors argue that shaming became ‘an important component of the ‘collective suffering, exacerbating and complicating other negative experiences and emotions.’ Those that stepped out of line were dubbed ‘covidiots’, while people questioning canonical scientific accounts could be dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorists’, belonging to the ‘tin-foil hat brigade’.

    Arguably, a drawback of the work is a tendency to assign primary responsibility to the bumbling and often insidious response of the British government, as opposed to a wider international consensus around COVID-19 within which that government’s face-saving policies emerged.

    The authors also seem reluctant to criticize a medical profession, which, they argue, were subjected to widespread shaming. Surely governments lionised ‘front line’ doctors, albeit for their own ends?

    Moreover, some doctors even participated in the shaming effort, agitating for stringent measures that often were not based on cost-benefit analyses, while demonising ‘granny-killing’ objectors.

    The book contains important insights into the lives of ordinary people, many of whom suffered in silence as a result of a British government strategy that often relied on ‘Second World War kitsch.’

    Social Media

    Gabor Maté describes neuromarketing as ‘a strategic invasion of human consciousness.’[i] The extent of the role of social media companies in generating fear and curbing dissent is only now being revealed. The authors draw attention to its enabling role:

    Pandemic shaming was enabled by the rapid formation and spread of virtual groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, created by physical neighbours to stay in touch and help each other out during lockdown.

    They recall that, ‘[a]lthough often started with the noblest of intentions, solidarity and shaming frequently inhabited the same virtual spaces.’

    ‘At times,’ they observe, ‘the groups became mediums for ‘curtain twitching’, or the unspoken, unofficial surveillance or monitoring of one’s neighbours.’

    Thus, ‘So-called pandemic ‘transgressions’ … were  documented by ordinary citizens on these platforms and elsewhere, presumably looking out for themselves and other concerned members of their community.’

    It should also be noted that social media companies platformed so-called fact checkers that were responsible for disseminating misinformation that cast opposition to a dominant narrative as simultaneously absurd and sinister. A ‘Strawman Conspiracy Theorist’ was used to stifle reasonable scientific debate.

    ‘Covidiots’

    When historians get around to providing an account of the pandemic response – that increasingly seems like a bad dream – the cartoon villains of Johnson and Trump will surely figure prominently.

    Thus, the authors observe that when the term covidiot began trending on social media in early March, ‘there seemed to be only one covidiot for Anglophone Twitter, and that was Trump.’

    They say this ‘gave the earliest iterations of the term a political valency: it offered an insult that the otherwise powerless might use as a means to humiliate a powerful individual.’

    They argue:

    [this] relied upon a historical tendency to portray Trump as morally and intellectually deficient throughout his candidacy for, and eventual elevation to, the US presidency. Seen in this light, the neologism owed its first success to the ease with which it fitted into an existing paradigm, as a novel shorthand for describing an existing situation.

    Whatever came out of Trump’s mouth was consigned to covidiocy, even if he, occasionally, made sensible suggestions such as that the cure should not be worse than the disease. Profound antipathy towards Trump seems to have been exploited by lockdown evangelists, which caused profound damage, especially in developing countries such as India.

    The book provides harrowing accounts of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of what became a culture war. The authors point to poignant accounts of the effect on society from the Mass Observation project:

    I went out on Tuesday, with my son, to buy stamps. I sensed a slight hostility. People who would usually smile and let you through a door now avoid eye contact and stay their distance. The woman working in the Post Office was expressing her anger at people who had congregated on the beach the previous day. She hadn’t seen it herself, she said; but it was on Facebook (it must be true!) She said they were idiotic. It differed from her usual affable small-talk and it made me un-easy. I said we had been ourselves on Sunday and there was no-one around.

    Irish Experience

    In Ireland we witnessed similar shaming tactics. Thus, in the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, a column from Dr Padraig Moran from November, 2020, arrived with the by-line: ‘Mindless rule-flouting behaviour is the real problem in the pandemic.’ Another article by Kathy Sheridan from 2020 referred to ‘maskless ignoramuses with Trumpian belief systems.’

    A grandmother was even jailed in Ireland for refusing to wear a mask in shops and restaurants.

    Unsurprisingly, we have seen no retractions or reassessments on the subject of those “maskless ignoramuses”, despite a Cochrane review stating that the ‘pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.’

    The shaming reached a crescendo in Ireland with vaccine passes and the scapegoating of an unvaccinated minority by politicians and prominent journalists in late 2021.

    Gabor MatĂŠ provides a fitting description of the political class that exploited the virus for their own ends:

    The system works with cyclic elegance: a culture founded on mistaken beliefs regarding who and what we are creates conditions that frustrate basic needs, breeding a populace in pain, disconnected from itself, others and meaning. A select few – especially those with the sort of coping mechanisms that prime the to deny reality, block out empathy, fear and vulnerability, mute their own sense of right and wrong, and abjure looking at themselves too closely – will be elevated to power.[ii]

    Sadly, many among the medical profession were fully on board with this effort, disregarding the traumas caused by lockdowns, which seems to be contributing to the excess deaths we are witnessing in the wake of the pandemic. The fact that Sweden has experienced the lowest level of excess death in Europe over the period is widely ignored by those that condemned that country as a pariah state.

    This is perhaps unsurprisingly given Gabor Maté’s observation that, ‘[a]t present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession’[iii]

    Given so much of what we saw during the pandemic in the U.K. and beyond was guided by the medical profession it seems, as Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry put it ‘a complete revolution in medicine is exactly what is required.’[iv]

    [i] Gabor MatĂŠ, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, New York, 2022, p.299

    [ii] Ibid, p.357

    [iii] Ibid, p.277

    [iv] Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry, The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research, Wakefield Press, South Australia, 2020, p.198.

    Feature Image: Village stocks in Bramhall, England, c. 1900.

  • Leitrim’s Glass Half-Full

    In a recent article Frank Armstrong traces the historic decline in the population of Leitrim, triggered by the Famine of the mid-19th century. He notes that Leitrim County Council’s recent attempts to encourage people to buy and rehabilitate derelict cottages has been disappointing.

    This analysis is based on cogent statistical analysis. ESRI analysts have reached similar conclusions. As somebody who first became acquainted with Leitrim and the North-West of Ireland in the early 1980s – I went on to purchase a house through a non-profit housing organisation in the mid-1980s – I would have agreed with the glass-half-empty-pessimism.

    Decades later, however, as an inside-outsider with a physical stake in the county, I would argue that the historic decline has shifted and if only government and non-state actors can push the pull the right levers I am optimistic about the future.

    My childhood was spent in a Kildare village near the Curragh. After five years studying in Dublin I spent almost three-and-a-half years teaching English and promoting school agriculture in a remote boarding school in Zambia. After further book-learning I returned to a town school in Zambia and again promoted school food production in addition to my English language teaching duties.

    I grabbed an opportunity to leave the urban bubble of Dublin early in 1981 and took up a development education post based in Sligo. Much of my emphasis was on cultural education, using slides and attractive artifacts, touring schools and a few Irish Country Women’s groups in counties Sligo, Leitrim, Donegal and north Mayo.

    I spent six years until 1987 travelling around in a second-hand Renault van – the model then driven by An Post mail delivery personnel – organising hotel and community hall exhibitions in Sligo, Letterkenny and Ballina on development challenges in the Third World.

    Deserted Villages

    Enough about me. The visual and socio-emotional feel West of the Shannon was different from what I was accustomed to in Leinster.

    The rural hinterland, small villages and stagnating towns, had Third World characteristics, minus famine and ethnic wars. On crooked country boreens I came across ‘deserted villages’ with derelict schools and abandoned cottages.

    Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem The Deserted Village about Sweet Auburn came to mind. I thought parts of the North-West could figuratively be termed “a Sahel with rain”. Figurative language is colourful but has its limitations.

    At the same time, however, I saw positive attempts by blow-ins (incomers) from other parts of Ireland, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France – even a few from Italy – to restore dilapidated cottages with a few acres around them.

    Such in-comers had begun arrived in dribs and drabs from the 1970s. They cleared scrub and stones from small plots of land, brought in topsoil and grew unusual vegetables in things called polytunnels.

    Indigenous locals knew the “pollies” were different from friable glass houses that the gentry in Big Houses used in walled gardens. Sceptical locals also thought that reconditioning the soil for vegetable tunnels and trying to make ends meet by keeping she-goats for milk and cheese was a hopeless enterprise.

    They were right. Some in-comers worked their guts out, became ill in mind and body and returned to their urban societies.

    I tried to paint a broad picture of this, the North-West, the West and the South-West mostly, in a 2007 article published in a fringe pacifist magazine edited by a friend in Belfast. Read it see what you think. Link: Blow-in rural settlers made an impact in Ireland (innatenonviolence.org).

    Relative Affluence

    Relative affluence came to Leitrim and nearby counties when Ireland became awash with EU money and foreign direct investment, systematically enabled by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA).

    We were told that the housing boom of the 1990s until the financial meltdown of September 2008 filled the coffers of county councils and gave local employment. Polish and other immigrant workers aided the indigenous workforce. The intelligent Poles remitted money; some repatriated savings for business start-ups; a few married Irish locals – beneficial to both societies.

    I know of country folk who never caught sight of the money sloshing about in ‘the economy’ of the Celtic Tiger era. They lived frugally to the end of their days. Then dispersed relatives either left the ancestral cottage to rot or sold it off to divide the money.

    An originally German real estate agency, Schiller & Schiller, sold lots of derelict cottages in Leitrim and Sligo. Dublin-based Sherry FitzGerald did its business. Leitrim and Sligo agencies sold many places. Sites near towns and important roads sold well. Off-road properties in the back of beyond were left to dereliction.

    Urban statistical numbers crunchers don’t realize that North Leitrim (from Ballinamore to Kinlough and Kiltyclogher) differs in developmental growth from South Leitrim.

    The county town of Carrick-on-the-Shannon is ideally situated on the Shannon with its cabin cruiser tourism. The Sligo to Dublin railway line and the frequent bus services are an added boon. Dromod, Jamestown and Rooskey have also experienced increases in population along with opportunities in the food and hospitality sector. Rooskey alas witnessed recent hostility to an empty hotel being made ready for refugee and asylum seekers. There was mysterious arson, possibly with involvement by outside racists.

    Kurds

    Carrick-on-Shannon was the major hub of Leitrim’s housing boom. Before the bust government agencies leased new houses to settle Kurdish refugees from Iraq and nearby danger zones. Asylum seekers from Africa and elsewhere also arrived in the town. Some Kurdish families settled into a low income working class estate where I saw children happily running around with Irish peers.

    We may assume they went through the local schooling system and acquired local accents. In downtown Carrick a Kurdish shop selling foodstuffs of oriental and Middle Eastern provenance opened and did good business until Covid restrictions.

    Meanwhile asylum seekers, who later took out Irish nationality and became members of the New Irish, sought group cohesion through Sunday services with a London-linked African apostolic faith group, held in a hired hotel room. African Baptists and independents found fellowship with relevant communities around town. Catholics blended into schools and parish life – along with believing Polish residents.

    Drumshanbo, linked by canal to the nearby Shannon, is half an hour’s drive north of Carrick. It was the site for Lairds Jams factory. The factory is long closed, but during the recent past has been regenerated as an industrial park.

    Whiskey and gin distilling are among new enterprises. Gunpowder gin has become a famous export. Has it arrived in Hong Kong to take its place on supermarket shelves beside the local Gunpowder Tea I wonder?

    Drumshanbo is the only town that continues to stage an An Tostal (“Ireland at Home”) festival – now named after Councillor Joe Mooney who promoted it – which governments during the depressed years of 1953-54 encouraged to drum up (excuse the pun) flagging national morale.

    The town holds another festival featuring delightful temporary sculptures made from hay and silage bales. Drumshanbo is on the way up because it has a self-confident community spirit and entrepreneurs making deft use of government-assisted inducement grants.

    Image: Morgan Bolger

    Northern Stasis

    By contrast, North Leitrim has seemed to languish in a glass half-empty stasis. Manorhamilton is the main town. Its name derives from Hamilton’s Castle built during the period of the Cromwellian conquest. Originally it was known as Cluainín Ui Ruaric – O’Rourke’s Meadows.

    This Gaelic chieftain was executed at the Tower of London for failing to submit to the colonial authority of Elizabeth I. Manorhamilton became a run-down town especially after the privately owned The Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway (SL&NCR) railway line that operated between Enniskillen and Sligo closed down in October 1957. This and containerization radically affected the cattle trade. Old family run shops closed. The main street today has numerous boarded up shops, while the old Central Hotel is no longer in operation.

    But in the wake of Covid, Manorhamilton is slowly clawing its way back. A few factories established with IDA grants have offered job opportunities.

    A number of strongly motivated entrepreneurs have sunk big bucks into developing off a side street what is called the W8 Centre. Modern buildings with a good restaurant on ground floor and self-catering apartments on the top floors have been designed to attract holiday makers from Dublin and beyond.

    Moreover, local history and heritage activists are pushing for Manorhamilton, with old buildings and historic political associations, to be declared a National Heritage Town.

    The town also has the Leitrim Sculpture Centre. A few people from Dublin and England who did ten-month sculpture courses – previously financed by FĀS – fell in love with the area and settled into renovated cottages.

    Today the Centre has residencies for emerging sculptors and they add to the lake and woodland landscape with site-appropriate sculpture trails. The Glens Centre caters for visual arts and drama in an old Methodist Church that was replaced due to a diminishing congregation by a smaller church nearby.

    One sporting innovation is the revival of handball, with encouragement and training of local girls and boys, using a reconditioned handball alley that fell into neglect a few decades ago.

    Dromahair Castle, 1791.

    Dromahair

    The village of Dromahair, with close job links to nearby Sligo town, grew considerably during the housing boom. Sadly, one still sees some houses that weren’t completed before the 2008 bust that vacant.

    It seems the Council is powerless to do anything. Would a constitutional amendment to Article 15 on property rights give local authorities effective powers to sort out the empty property syndrome?

    Dromahair has benefited from the practical talents of several incomers. One German national who restored old cottages in the area set up a successful candle making enterprise. Read here my interview with him: Pete Kern – Craft candle maker – BeesWax Candles Ireland

    In 2017 Rosemary Kerrigan and some other local like-minded colleagues were pleased to dress up in period costume and witness the official opening opposite the old railway station of a 1.2km demonstration Greenway on the old line that connected the village with other places.

    The Big Dream, of Kerrigan and the small group who labored to create the demonstration is that state backing will soon enable governments in Dublin and Belfast to develop a cross-border Greenway for cyclists and walkers linking Sligo, Collooney, Ballintogher, Dromahair, Manorhamilton, Glenfarne, Blacklion, Belcoo and Enniskillen.

    This Greenway will invite domestic and foreign tourists to savour the scenic and cultural joys of Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh. The demonstration stretch, bordered by trees and hedges protecting a SAC, has convinced British, Irish and EU dispensing inter-regional and peace funding to act. Monies have been voted and statutory consultations are taking place before work commences.

    Local Campaigns

    North Leitrim’s potential is thwarted by bureaucratic and material blockages. Decisions made and policies pursued by officialdom and companies have aroused suspicion and dismay.

    Protest groups have responded to some unwelcome phenomena. Take the decision to allow private companies to prospect for gold on Leitrim hills and along river concourses.

    Treasure Leitrim holds area meetings, distributes information brochures with maps and warns of what gold mining has done in other countries. Love Leitrim is an active anti-fracking campaign group.

    Another concern is about the visual and health impact of hillside electricity generation clusters.  Some windmillification has occurred, often by stealth, taking residents by surprise. Windmills emit a ‘white noise’ that campaigners say badly affects hearing and sleeping patterns.

    Yet another concern is about the tree planting policies of Coillte and its links with foreign investors. The curse of sitka spruce tree planting and short-term harvesting, leading to soil acidification, is decried.

    Ecological activists are happy that Coillte is steadily laying out forest trails for public recreation access in many localities, but say that indigenous tree species such as hazel, sycamore, alder, Scots pine, elm and so on, are under-appreciated. There is anger and distrust; government spokespersons and Coillte personnel argue with campaigning critics.

    The Organic Centre, Rossinver. Image: Morgan Bolger

    Organic Centre

    Individuals from the UK and Leinster who settled in North Leitrim (and many other counties of course) from the 1970s onwards went on to establish the Organic Centre at Rossinver, adjacent to Lough Melvin and the border with Fermanagh.

    The Organic Centre is on ordinary land with outside and enclosed spaces – polytunnels and a catering and classroom building featuring a live grass all-weather roof.

    It is purposely family friendly with play corners for children. Despite the practical achievements of the Organic Centre and the organic farming of UK and continental settlers throughout the county, attempts by Green Party candidates to win votes in local and general elections have been in vain.

    Farmers are set in their ways and suspicious of Green Party influence. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the two largest parties historically, and increasingly Sinn Fein attract most support, while a few strong independents win Council seats.

    What does Leitrim need? People need to branch out into new farming methods and recommence growing fruit and vegetables (as in the old days) while continuing to reduce livestock numbers and thereby reduce emissions.

    People need to see that similar challenges also face adjoining counties – West Cavan, Roscommon, Mayo and Donegal for example.

    In his pioneering work, Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered (1973) the eco-economist E. F. Schumacher developed the slogan Think Global and Act Local. For Leitrim today it might be adapted to Think Regional and Act Local.

    Slogans are catchy but are no substitute for reversal of unwanted policies. Parochial thinking is prevalent among elected representatives. Many promise to drain the flood rivers, to fix the roads or to save the rural post offices. TĂĄ said ag snamh in agaidh easa with some promises. Vain promises should never be made and only keep the glass half empty.

    Feature Image: Morgan Bolger

  • A Golden Shower

    I would imagine I am no different to many people in that I suffer from a degree of anxiety. Prior to 2019, this usually manifested in a mild degree of agoraphobia. I could manage a packed train or a bus whenever necessary, but concerts, bustling streets, or shopping malls were always places to be avoided.

    In recent years I have found that my tendency to avoid crowds, has become a more acute need, extending to the company of people whom I don’t know very well. On a ‘one to one’ basis I don’t mind engaging – my misanthropic default is often proven wrong – as I encounter people whose ideas emanate from outside the RTÉ news bubble.

    As such, attending for my car’s NCT test last week was not an impossible task, but something I was not looking forward to.

    Leitrim Life

    I moved from Dublin to county Leitrim some months ago, and as a consequence my agoraphobia is almost entirely under wraps. There are very few people where I live, down a little laneway off a quiet road, just outside the small town of Ballinamore, in the shadow of the Iron Mountains.

    Leitrim is relatively unmolested by the excesses of modernity. The population of the county would only half fill Croke Park. Forestry, fracking, semi-abandoned villages with neglected vernacular architecture, garbage in the hedgerows and ugly one-off houses, are among the few assaults a sensitive soul must endure.

    I am very fortunate to live across the road from an entire family of agoraphobics; an IRA veteran and his wife and family. They home-school their kids and similarly hide from the world; wary of its narrow materialistic ideals, the ongoing romance with consumption and superfluous technology.

    The two eldest sons of this family spend their days tinkering about with old cars: painting, sanding, welding bits of metal and fixing engines. Unemployed but gainfully so. Like me, they hide from a world they are somewhat apprehensive and mistrustful of.

    The evenings in my garden are quiet enough to hear an owl hoot in the twilight. The old Gods still reside here. Sometimes I join my neighbours across the lane for a smoke and a cup of tea, free of judgements. I gaze in wonder at the mechanical heaps of rust and rot they are about to resuscitate.

    The ‘lads’ did a service on my Yaris to get her ready for the NCT, changing the oil and brake pads. My wife hoovered it out, and I was ordered to give it a power-wash and click the rear seatbelts in place, as they are supposed to be visible – all in preparation for the big day.

    Since resigning my Dublin medical practice in protest at the mad Covid Policies, and as a means of avoiding injecting children with the stuff that was called a ‘vaccine’, I have had a lot more time to myself.

    Time to devote to bees, a polytunnel, NCT’s and other hitherto trivial things. Indeed, my wife was most concerned that the car should pass, as our son needs to use it for his driving test next month.

    Coiled Again…

    The test centre in Carrick-on-Shannon is about a forty minute drive from our cottage. As you have probably guessed, despite the attention of the two lads and all the hoovering and power-washing, the car failed. A front coil-spring wasn’t up to scratch, and one brake bulb was brighter than the other.

    I wasn’t surprised given the car is ten years old. When I told the lads the news they laughed and told me to get the parts and they would address the ‘problems.’ This I did, and after finishing the work they showed me the old coil-spring. Apparently (they informed me) a coil spring is one of the suspension springs for the car.

    They put the the old one before me and said that it was perfect, save for a bit of rust at the tip of one end. They insisted that this would cause no problem to the car, saying that the spring was tested under the heading of ‘suspension’; that it passed the physical test and that this was printed on the fault sheet that had been returned to me.

    I then asked: “if it passed the actual test of its integrity and function, how did it fail the test?”  They informed me that the chap who was looking underneath the car, saw rust on the spring and that it was a ‘visual failure’.

    The lads aren’t highly educated by any means, so what would they know? They insist that for the most part the NCT is just “a multi-million money making racket”, an enormous source of revenue for a few people, and a way for government and car dealers to get perfectly decent cars off the road and replaced by new ones.

    Buying new cars is, of course, really good for the environment, particularly if they have big lithium batteries. Across Dublin suburbia, dizzying heights of environmental virtue can be scaled at the bottle bank if one can pull up in a battery powered car.

    Nonetheless, I find it hard to get too worked up about the nefarious powers behind the NCT network. The ideals of capitalism are pretty much universal at this stage. I was happy enough that the bulb and spring had been replaced and the car was ready for her retest. I had already devoted an afternoon to the first one.

    The following week I returned for the re-test at my scheduled time of 4.30pm. The little waiting room was packed. The tests were running behind time. They didn’t get to my car until well after 5pm. I had plenty of time to listen to the people around me come and go, sharing their stories of success and failure.

    Wayward Bus

    Some years ago I read The Wayward Bus, a little known work by John Steinbeck. It’s one of my favourite stories, concerning a group of people travelling on a bus, all from different social and cultural backgrounds.

    The bus breaks down on a lonely road, and when it does the barriers that normally separate people also break down.

    As a consequence of either boredom or necessity, when these barriers come down we may be compelled to get to know one another. I suspect that most people have had the subliminal experience of finding themselves stuck somewhere in the company of strangers, united by unforeseen circumstance.

    The experience was also recently masterfully explored and brought to a beautiful conclusion in the film ‘Triangle of Sadness’. In that passengers and crew of a luxury yacht find themselves stranded on a beach and are compelled to get to know each other after the boat sinks.

    Stripped of the relevance of their wealth and station, all must rely on actual abilities to survive. It’s a wonderful film with some great twists. Perhaps when the ship of humanity flounders, if we have time, we might pause and get to know each other a little better?

    The Moment of Truth

    As we sat in the waiting room of the NCT office I dealt with my agoraphobia by going outside for a smoke, at the point when people were getting to know each other, and social interaction seemed imminent.

    There was no public toilet in the centre and no coffee machine, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was cold outside and a cigarette doesn’t last as long as an NCT test.

    There were about ten of us seated in the plastic chairs around the wall of the waiting room. Occasionally the NCT man would magically appear at the empty hatch and call out a name for one of us. The chit-chat and various horror stories associated with tests and re-tests had brought us together, to the point where success or failure of one’s test became a shared experience.

    Soon, a round of applause was being awarded to each successful testee (no pun intended). Commiserations and a few empathetic sighs were offered to the failures.

    At last my name was called and I went to the Perspex hatch to receive the news. The man taped on his computer, and I caught a glimpse of the green and yellow of a new NCT cert emerge from the printer. The few who remained in the waiting room were anxious to know if I was deserving of applause or commiserations.

    Not wishing to be a sour-hole, I turned to the row of seats and gave my comrades two-thumbs up, informing all that I had joined the ranks of the victorious. A round of applause was tendered, and a middle-aged lady seated with her daughter offered me a handshake – which seemed a little over the top!

    Her daughter should have been heartily confused but seemed rather amused, the rules that applied to strangers were out the window.

    Small Print

    As I took the certificate, however, I noticed that the date on the new cert was only valid until May 2023. So, I had passed the test, but my car was deemed roadworthy for less than four months, at which time it would have to be retested. I felt certain this was a mistake, and brought it to the attention of the attendant.

    “This cert is only valid for four months,” I said. “I thought the test would be valid for at least a year?”

    He took the forms back from me and looked them over. “Your last test is out of date for over six months,” he replied, by way of explanation.

    By then I was a bit irked, having paid for a test, and then having paid for a re-test, and now being expected to test the car again in four months’ time.

    There was a three month wait for my first test, so, effectively, I would have to book the car in next week in order to be on time for the next test!

    Despite being conscious of the fact that he was only the messenger, I still wished to shoot him (metaphorically speaking of course).

    I replied: “but you are not testing the forms, you are testing the car, and the car has passed the test.”

    Unfortunately, the starter motor was jammed, the spark plug failed to ignite and the attendant hadn’t a clue what I was banging on about. He smiled and then disappeared from behind the screen like the cat from Alice in Wonderland.

    Flashbacks..

    My questioning and dissatisfaction did not go unnoticed by the small crowd in the waiting room. I looked about their faces as I departed with my Pyrrhic ‘victory’ in hand. One or two of the faces appeared sympathetic to my plight, others seemed mildly indignant that despite having passed the test, I still seemed unhappy – making a fuss and potentially causing a delay.

    I felt the breath quicken in my chest. It was as though, for a moment I had been plunged back into the near forgotten Covid days of ‘put up and shut up’, because we are ‘all in this together’.

    As I departed a large poster on the pane of the waiting room door said ‘goodbye.’  The poster was covered with smiley emojis encouraging people to buy an NCT disc-pocket that sticks in the window and holds ones new cert. ‘Hooray! I passed my NCT’.  I wonder do people actually buy these gimmicks on top of paying for their test?

    The poster reminded me of the smiley buttons that the HSE were dispensing to the vaccinated during Covid. I also recalled the free iodine tablets that were dispensed by the Government when they worried about the Sellafield nuclear reactor exploding, and that then reminded me of the Millennium Candle that came in the post at the turn of the century.

    I’m not sure how or why I should feel that these little tokens are related in some indistinct manner – all buttons and smiley faces to stick in the window or upon one’s chest. I recalled where I had wanted to stick the candle when it arrived in the post.

    The phrase ‘all in this together’ still makes me nauseous. As an old farmer in Rush where I once had my surgery used to say: “Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.”

    Just Political Deserts

    I suspect that for many people it’s always raining in Ireland, a golden shower that moves from Leinster House, and then on to Mizen Head and Malin Head, each day of the year. Yet I am perhaps cynical enough to believe that we get our just political deserts.

    One need only watch the recent rebranding of Bertie Ahern as the population is groomed into accepting him being provided with an armchair in the Áras. Or that recent RTÉ documentary that had Sean Quinn weeping, and staring wistfully out upon the lakes of Cavan, from the third story of his palace, like Ozymandias King of Kings.

    One of the impossibilities of democracy – perhaps its greatest limitation – is a tendency to elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear. Nowadays our cast of chosen doctors – like the bishops of old – tell us what we want to hear, and give us the pills we have been groomed to demand.  Should they venture outside of this brief and tell us what we need to hear, the ice generally thins beneath their feet.

    Perhaps the greatest evil in the world is in the realms of paedophilia, and when this was exposed within the Church, it ended many people’s belief in and respect for Catholicism.

    There is of course a sinister underbelly to our scandals, and that is the strangely complicit nature of “we the people”, whether it’s in the pew, or in the waiting room at the NCT centre.

    I recall, as I made my confirmation at the National School in Swords County Dublin, how my classmates and I innocently queued down the church aisle to partake in the ritual honour of kneeling and kissing the Bishop’s ring.

    We did it because we were sent up to do it by our parents. I also remember answering proudly in the affirmative when my grandmother asked me if I had I kissed the ring.

    I was also an alter boy for a time, a role that was foisted on me by my grandmother, with the full and enthusiastic backing of my parents. Had I perhaps returned home and informed them that something ‘bad’ had happened, that I had been ‘interfered’ with, I probably would have been given a clip on the ear, or simply told to shut up.

    Most kids who were victims of abuse, said nothing to their parents, and the reasons for this are rarely ever spoken about in Ireland. You can perhaps find traces of this in the NCT centre, or see it on the face of a teenager who is sent home from school because he has had his ear pierced.

    My parents were not bad parents, they were just typical of their time. My point here is that in Ireland we like to think that paedophilia within the Church was entirely the fault of the Church and the priests. I tend to disagree. Parents, the state and society at large were as much a part of the problem, perhaps the bigger part. ‘We the people’ were invested in the scandal as much as the perpetrators. It seems that all too often we are ‘all in this together’.

    Facing Up

    Ireland will never be capable of really face up to the abuse scandals because we will never accept the blame for our own part. We will never question our gullibility, but our children might, as they are less likely to suffer from our co-dependence upon RTÉ.

    In all likelihood, we will never explain the scandal of Covid policies, the waste and the suicides, because we the people were so invested in the narrative; a tsunami of indignant virtue in the midst of a state sanctioned pogrom in the nursing home sector.

    What has this to do with my NCT? Perhaps nothing. But the lads were right, it is indeed just a racket for making money and taking perfectly decent cars off the road – another racket that we are all complicit in.

    It’s no different to the Covid racket where billions in potential hospitals, schools and footpaths, were foolishly handed over to Big Pharma and men in yachts. In Ireland being ‘all in this together’ comes with an unspoken historical warning : you are either with us or against us.

    Against us, and you run the gauntlet of vilification or exclusion, at best being depicted as a weirdo, at worst a bad apple. If you are with us, ‘there is one for everyone in the audience’, and any ‘minor inconveniences’ one might be compelled to endure becomes just another shower of golden rain.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Finding Your Voice After Trauma

    Have you ever experienced that emptiness, that deep silence, that infinite ignorance following trauma? Well, I have. And let me tell you, it doesn’t always happen right away. Sometimes, you have to actually look past the first few weeks or months to feel it. You’ll eventually see it at some point, with support or not. You’ll find yourself entirely alone, in that nothingness where everyone else – maybe even you – thinks that enough time has passed.

    Time as an Almighty Healer?

    Like a lot of people, I used to picture time as the ultimate solution. Because that’s what we’re told since we’re little, isn’t it? “Time heals all wounds,” they say. You have obviously heard that phrase before, whether from your family, a friend, a TV show, or a book you once read.

    Now, I’m not a scientist, but I learned how wrong that expression is.

    It would be great, of course, to have one miraculous way to fix things, to simply go through life, ignoring all the issues you may have, because time will gladly deal with them for you. Except it doesn’t work that way.

    Seeing time as a cure is one of those made-up illusions we keep telling ourselves in order to feel better. It’s reassuring to think that if you’re still suffering, it’s not because of you or anyone else, but because you didn’t give yourself enough time.

    Don’t get me wrong, time does help. It sure makes you stop crying, but it won’t heal you. Letting time pass means going into a routine. Eventually you recognise the pain, the sorrow, the sadness. You know what it feels like, and you settle into it.

    Not long ago, I questioned a lot how humans respond to trauma and how we handle it, not just individually, but as a society. Well, usually, we hold it locked inside. Again, believing that time will sooner or later do its thing. I’m sure, if you’ve endured trauma, and talked about it, you’ve heard people say: “I’m here for you, but you just need a bit of time, really.”

    Like you, probably, I once thought it couldn’t hurt to speak those things. But recently, I experienced first-hand how painful it actually was.

    Time is personal. Some might need weeks, other months or years. It depends on so many factors: past trauma, education, environment, support… So truly, it’s “your time”. Now, let’s say, you need three years. Yet for a friend of yours, three months might sound enough. What happens then? What happen if you don’t improve in those three months? You gave yourself time, or at least, you suppose you did, and everyone around you assumed you did too. But still, you don’t seem okay. Well, guess what, you start feeling guilty about it. Like it’s your own fault if you don’t get better.

    It’s deeply anchored in society. Take therapy, for example. Some people, governments even, actually think that you only need a few sessions to deal with an issue, to “move on”. As if trauma only takes ten weeks to what, disappear?

    Now you see why I believe perceiving time as a healer is dangerous? Because once you start, you put a quantifiable value on trauma. Which also means that, eventually, everyone stop talking about it. For them, it’s in the past. Yet for you, it’s still very much a part of your life. So you find yourself alone, not being able to confide in anyone, feeling guilty for seeking support. Even the loved ones who first supported you think it’s all gone now, assuming that, with time, scars fade, as if they never happened.

    Yet here they are, inked. And to ignore them, worse, to declare they ceased to exist is not only a denial of reality, it’s indicating that a victim of trauma – whatever the trauma is – doesn’t have a reason to be one anymore. As they say: “It’s water under the bridge.”

    And so, it’s creating an excuse for people to stop listening, a true motive to silence the voices.

    Silencing the Voices

    You might think I’m cynical. However, by creating an illusion, you end up denying what life is like, sealing society in the unspoken and taboos. You’re not questioning the world’s problems, you’re not looking into the real issues; you’re merely waiting for things to wash away – silencing the voices in the process.

    By making the victims guilty about the depth of their recovery, you’re locking them in this inner pain, in the long aftermath that lasts only for them, for us. People get lost in that silence, in that emptiness where no one dares to speak up for fear of moving the knife again, of showing once more that “time has not yet healed all wounds”.

    Feeling as angry as I am? Well, don’t worry. It’s a good thing.

    Anger Led to Revolutions

    Want to learn something? Anger makes the changes. So don’t be afraid to awake her. Rise and shout until you turn the earth upside down. Scream at those who refuse to face reality, to see pain for what it actually is.

    Don’t look back. Don’t search your voice in some past you left behind. For she’s still here, within you. She’s in your rage, your sadness, your innocence, your beliefs, your joy, your sorrow, your despair, your fear, your bravery; she’s in all those emotions and those memories you locked yourself in when you noticed no one was listening. But make them listen; keep talking.

    For it’s not their voices that society needs to hear, but ours.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini