As events in Ukraine demonstrate, ineluctably, war diminishes our humanity, possessing men – and mostly men – of a callous disregard for life, and a capacity for often inexplicable cruelty.
As such, the invasion of one state by another without a casus belli – as we have witnessed in Russia’s essentially unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and also with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and other incursions since – has long been considered an injustice: any aggressor thus bears a level of responsibility for what follows.
This does not, however, absolve an injured party from guilt for mistreatment, or worse, of prisoners of war, or other breaches of the Geneva Convention; notoriously described as ‘quaint’ by George W. Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with apparently horrifying consequences.
Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.
A Single Murder
In peacetime the violent ending of a single life is newsworthy, but during a military conflict the deaths of thousands are often defined as mere casualties, calculated to diminish one side or another’s capacity to wage war. A cold-blooded logic often underpins such strategic analysis.
‘What was a single murder’ Stefan Zweig asked of World War I, ‘within the cosmic, thousand-fold guilt, the most terrible mass destructive and mass annihilation known in history?’
Beyond the mindless trench warfare of World War I, the twentieth century also produced the exquisite evils of World War II, when the carnage reached the civilian sphere as never before; the leading industrial nations harnessing advanced technologies to produce Concentration Camps, Gulags, carpet bombing, and of course – supposedly bringing wars between Great Powers to an end – the atomic bomb.
In that war’s wake there emerged a new understanding of international law, previously dominated by an insistence that this should only apply between states, as opposed to allowing individual rights to be enforced against officials of an offending state in a foreign jurisdiction.
This traditional understanding was emphasised by a British official during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I: ‘The new League of Nations must not protect minorities in all countries,’ he complained, or it would have ‘the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from the more serious problems such as the Irish.’
According to Phillipe Sands: ‘Britain objected to any depletion of sovereignty – the right to treat others as it wished – or international oversight. It took the position even if the price was more injustice and oppression.’ [i]
But the depravities of World War II changed the global mood, even if Hermann Goering could persuasively assert that ‘the victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’ Indeed, there is a reasonable argument that Russian, American and British officials should also have been in the dock to account for what occurred in Katyn, Hiroshima, Bengal and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, the universal ambit of human rights was one of the great advances of the post-Second World War period, culminating in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In theory at least, it was no longer permissible for states to act with impunity even within their borders, as the Rule of Law gained universal jurisdiction, at least where atrocities were concerned.
Looting of an Armenian village by the Kurds, 1898 or 1899.
Genocide v. Crimes Against Humanity
Thus, charges of Crimes Against Humanity and, arguably more problematically, Genocide, were laid against leading Nazi at the Nuremberg trials.
Coincidentally, the two Polish-Jewish jurists Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht responsible for developing these novel concepts both studied in the University of Lwów, a Polish city between the Wars, before being annexed by the USSR at the end of World War II. Today Lviv, as it is now called, is the main city of Western Ukraine.
Amidst accusations of war crimes, including that of Genocide, being levelled against Russia, it is worth considering important distinctions between Crimes against Humanity and Genocide.
The author of the former concept, Hersch Lauterpacht argued that ‘The well-being of an individual is the ultimate object of international law.’ In contrast, in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Rafael Raphael Lemkin adopted an approach which aimed to protect groups, for which he invented the new crime of ‘Genocide.’
In response, Lauterpacht worried that the protection of groups would undermine the protection of individuals. He challenged the ‘omnipotence of the state,’ suggesting atrocities against individuals should be referred to as Crimes Against Humanity, whereby no longer would officials from any state be free to treat their people with impunity.
Lemkin also wrote of the misdemeanours of the ‘Germans’ rather than the Nazis, arguing that the ‘German people’ had ‘accepted freely’ what was planned, participating voluntarily, and profited from their implementation. This was similar to the War Guilt Clause contained in the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which was deeply resented by Germans.
Genocide concerned acts ‘directed against individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of national groups.’ For Lemkin Germany’s terrible acts reflected a militarism born of the innate viciousness of the German racial character. He selectively included a quotation from Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt who noted that one of Germany’s mistakes in 1918 was to ‘spare the civil life of the enemy countries’[ii] and that one third of the population should have been killed by organised under-feeding, but not all Germans shared this mentality.
Collective Guilt
The difficulty, therefore, with the crime of Genocide is that in purporting to protect one national, ethnic or religious group it often implicates another via its ruling authority; this may perpetuate racial stereotypes, such as innate viciousness, and contains a potential for indiscriminate reprisals, or even further wars.
Under the original conception of the crime of Genocide, any Russian, even an expatriate opposed to Putin, might be held responsible for the conduct of the Russian army in Ukraine. This idea of collective guilt – a species of Original Sin attached to a national or racial group – generally based on supposedly timeless national characteristics, could also permit crippling sanctions and even bombing campaigns impacting on civilian life.
Punishing an entire nation for the conduct of its government – even if that government is democratically elected – is therefore unjust, not least as it tends to bolster the authority of belligerent elements within a state – who may point to the aggressor posture of the opponent – diminishing the likelihood of lasting peace.
Far less problematic is the idea of Crimes Against Humanity, which simply asserts a universal jurisdiction for atrocities committed by the officials of any state, including ‘legally’ against their own people.
But charging Russian officials with Crimes Against Humanity might lead us to consider whether the leaders of other nations, including the US – which along with Russia (and Ukraine) is not a party to the International Criminal Court – should be similarly indicted.
Drone Strikes
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the US has been waging warfare through extra-judicial assassination operations: drone strikes, aimed at suspected ‘terrorists’ living in some of the world’s most deprived and defenceless countries. As of 2021, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claims that there have been at least 13,072 confirmed drone strikes on Afghanistan alone since 2015.
These remote attacks represent a new phase in the cruelty of warfare, as the leading Superpower maintains a social distance from each hit. The consequences, or ‘collateral damage’ is rarely investigated by a mainstream media that now howls in anger at Russia’s excesses.
As LSE’s Maarya Raabani puts it: ‘Buoyed by mainstream media, an alarming preponderance of metaphors and passive-voice reporting have denied any chance to hold drone atrocity perpetrators to account.’
Moreover, ‘Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,’ said Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. ‘These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the U.S. government that owes the public an accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.’
In July 2021, U.S. President Biden announced the adoption of an ‘over the horizon’ counterterrorism strategy. According to the Brookings Institution:
The new plan would rely on armed unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones — to respond to terrorism threats around the globe without deploying American boots on the ground. But although the strategy was designed to overhaul policies that had kept the United States embroiled in conflict for 20 years, it failed to address the unintended consequences of counterterrorism strikes, namely civilian casualties. On August 29, 2021, with most U.S. soldiers withdrawn from Afghanistan and regional bases shuttered, this challenge became clear. The U.S. military conducted a strike that killed 10 civilians, including women and children, rather than the intended target.
TAS13: GENOA, JULY 22. Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and US President George Bus.
In striking unison, mainstream media in the West has reacted to the invasion of Ukraine with outrage, and conveyed statements of the President of Ukraine with uncritical approval. Russia certainly deserves opprobrium for his war of aggression against Ukraine – and its officials may be responsible for war crimes – but the failure to interrogate the actions of the US and its allies including Israel and Saudi Arabia over many years makes the self-righteousness ring hollow.
Russia is operating in a context established by the US’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that destabilised the Middle East causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Putin exploited the anarchy in the international system with his invasion of Georgia in 2008, having divined that the rules of the game had changed. There is a continuum between Russia’s attacks against Georgia, the Donbass and Crimea campaign in 2014, and this latest invasion of Ukraine.
Once Western leaders and their allies are also held accountable for their actions we may move to an environment where the Rule of Law attains a universal character; then the invasion by one state of another without a legitimate casus belli may become unthinkable.
Unlike during the period of the USSR, Russia exerts little ‘soft’ power. Putin’s propaganda relies on the hypocrisy of the West, especially the US which continues to baulk at becoming a party to the International Criminal Court and allies with rogue actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Confronting Russia should also involve Western governments pursuing morally consistent foreign policies.
[i] Phillipe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, (Knopf, New York, 2016) p.72
You enter here a taut quintet Where theorists can shift or shape How we make sense of market flow; How men and how it’s mostly men, Explain the ways our commerce works. No Flash of insight, more a slow Encroachment that in turn creates Our understanding how by stealth New certainties of common sense Construe the weave of life and wealth. Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Dealing, Canto 1, Mechanisms, p.67.
‘Is what is written on a piece of paper worth the paper it’s written on?’ was the simple question posed by the Master of the High Court, Edmund Honohan, at the beginning of a recent Decision, delivered on the 9th of February, 2022 in the case AIB PLC vs Gary Lennon.
Curiously, unlike other Decisions, this is still unavailable on the court’s website, and certainly didn’t make many headlines; although an article in the Irish Times provides a simplified account.
Could this be because of its seemingly complex legal arguments; or perhaps because it reveals too much about how banks and Vulture funds are taking advantage of Ireland’s permissive legal environment?
The Decision relates to a case in which AIB were claiming payment of an outstanding debt, from Mr Lennon. However, Mr Lennon counterclaimed that AIB had not furnished the necessary evidence to the Court entitling them to substantiate or prove the claim.
The first thing that a bank or vulture fund needs to do when claiming payment of an outstanding debt or repossess a house, is to prove, with supporting hard (’probatory’) evidence, that it owns the rights to that property or debt.
Unsurprisingly, this often proves a difficult exercise after the individual debts are bundled up (securitised) and sold on the international market via ever more and more complex financial structures; Section 110 companies, SPVs, Subsidiaries of subsidiaries. These structures allow our banking system to handle non-performing loans, but also to facilitate a lot more capital outflow, often in the form of un-taxed profits.
AIB PLC vs Gary Lennon
In this Decision (which to be clear is not a judgment) by the Master of the High Court we find, apart from the case in question, some serious warnings in relation to the use in courts of the Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020, which now allows business documents, previously considered mere hearsay – out of court statements that are generally inadmissible in proceedings – as evidence in financial cases.
Simply put, when it now comes to such cases, it has become acceptable for a bank to adduce hearsay evidence, laying claim to a property or debt, and for this to be accepted in good faith.
Thus, according to Honohan’s Decision, creating a situation where:
In banking cases, the plaintiff has deep pockets and a reputable firm of lawyers to present the case. Is there any risk of an overarching judicial prejudice in the plaintiff’s favour? The lay litigant thinks there might be.
We cannot overlook, either, the alarming phenomenon of banks telling the courts to not even think of requiring their witnesses to come to court and submit to cross examination. A belief that summary judgment is there for the asking?
Confusion around what actually constitutes acceptable evidence and the institution of legal procedures that overwhelmingly favour big financial institutions over ordinary citizens, could be yet another channel for regulatory capture.
There is currently €16 billion worth of loans on this roulette table in Ireland, all of which are in some way securitised and being traded as we speak.
With politicians and the media are now furiously engaging with more accessible aspects of the housing crisis, like simplistic explanations of supply and demand, and the necessity for foreign investment, it is also important to look into how the law has been altered to give more leeway to banks and Vulture funds.
Citizens, as much as the financial institutions, should demand a justice system that satisfies basic criteria of fairness and impartiality. This should make it realistic for any citizen to challenge a bank or Vulture fund.
This ought to be regardless of how deep, shallow, or broken, your pockets are.
“Wolf of Golfgate” Country
Readers may be familiar with a movie about the 2008 subprime market collapse called ‘The Big Short.‘ It is constellated with explainers like Margot Robby in a bubble bath illustrating subprime mortgage backed securities, and chef Anthony Bourdain making a fish soup with left over mortgages with low values to explain securitisation.
The financial collapse, as described in the movie, actually happened, after some twenty years of head spinning financial innovations. In that period, investment banking went from being a relatively boring and stale career into what may be referred to as the “Wolf of Wall Street” life.
Fast forward about a decade, banks get bailed out, while austerity cripples the most vulnerable. 2013 is the year that Reits and Cuckoo Funds came to Ireland and begin to dictate the kind of supply of housing the Irish should have. This has led to the artificial inflation of prices in the housing market.
In the Land of the Wolf of Golfgate there are thousands upon thousands of loans being bundled together, as we speak, and traded around the world like you would soya beans or any other asset. The reality on the ground is that these are mostly homes that many of us are living in, or should be.
Securitisation and other complex financial structures to recover outstanding debts, are not always a bad practice and are actually an essential tool to limit banks’ exposure to risk; thereby ensuring a country’s financial stability.
But if financial predators go unchecked, especially when it comes to housing, and the courts are not up to speed with the financial innovations involved in the cases that it encounters, the country offers fertile ground for those financial entities, and their money, to become overwhelmingly more powerful than the ordinary citizen.
As Edmund Honohan warns in his recent Decision:
Courts are not yet up to speed with the byzantine multiple-player transactions in the capital markets. Even the Financial Times, in a full page ad in the edition of 27/28 November 2021 warned “Fakery is now everywhere, Regulation has failed.” Our courts are still exploring the mechanics of securitisation. Wait till we start getting “synthetic” securitisation! And as for encryption and blockchain software, who will interpret the “hash”? (77)
Moreover, in this often unbalanced relationship between the judiciary and high finance, the use value of a house is deemed to be superseded by its exchange value.
Another explanation is that unequal access to quality legal representation creates a great disparity between individual citizens and these institutions when it comes to access to housing stock and credit.
This is an issue for which a petition has recently been launched to address a problem that could affect over 200,000 people. It is called ‘Legal Support for possession proceedings on homes.‘
“There are currently thousands of citizens battling to save their family home in Irish Courts, not represented by any legal team.” Legal Support for possession proceedings on homes | Uplift https://t.co/Hz99SW6K8Y
For the above to happen as smoothly and quietly as possible, you need lubricant in the machinery, which normally comes in the form of extra virgin political oil. This speed up things and make sure the machinery of claims and repossessions works like clockwork, and without any unnecessary impediments.
As we previously mentioned, one of the widespread practices for banks, Vulture funds and Cuckoo funds, to lubricate the passage of cases, is to present hearsay evidence, something somebody says out of court, and for it be accepted in good faith: This practice now seems even easier despite ad hoc clarifications in the Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020.
The Act was passed shortly after the case, Promontoria (Aran) vs Burns, wherein Promontoria, a notorious investment fund, often referred to as a Vulture, (I didn’t say it, it’s hearsay) was barred from presenting business records in evidence, and therefore lost the case.
At that point most people in the country were absorbed with dealing with a pandemic, and shortly afterwards there was the Golfgate Scandal, which included Brian Hayes, CEO, Banking & Payments Federation of Ireland; a prime examples of Ireland’s revolving door between politics and the private banking sector.
With an urgency rarely seen for other problems, such as the homeless and healthcare crises, the Act was fast-tracked through the Oireachtas.
Here is how Minister of Justice and Equality, Deputy Helen McEnteeintroduced the Act in the Dáil debate on the July 30 2020:
The commission’s report recommends that records compiled in the course of business, because they are generally reliable, should be admissible in civil proceedings as an inclusionary exception to the hearsay rule, subject to the safeguards that have been set out in the Bill. Separately, the Court of Appeal was called in a recent case, Promontoria (Aran) Ltd. v. Burns, to interpret and apply the law as it currently stands regarding the admissibility of business records in civil cases. Both judgments delivered by the court last April were clearly of the view that the law in this area needs to be updated by legislative reform. More recently, the Judiciary has specifically identified legislative reform of the civil law rules on business records to my Department as among the most urgent priorities for it to be able to advance cases fairly and without unnecessary delays and costs to all parties concerned.
It introduced the possibility, or rather encourages the use of business documents as evidence, even if they are mere hearsay, although it does allow the other party to challenge the validity of such evidence.
But best of luck if you are a lay litigant, without legal aid and in a precarious financial situation, attempting to challenge a skilled team of lawyers pitted against you, by the bank or Vulture fund in question, full of good faith.
The inherent risk to private citizens posed by the the misinterpretation of this new law in front of the disarming power of the law firms which the banks rely on, was articulated in an earlier decision by Ed Honohan, AIB PLC vs McGrane, on the 9th June 2021, under the heading EU Charter of Fundamental Rights:
Given that at least some of these issues – contract terms, debt restructure etc. – are now the subject of EU Directives, the courts will have to satisfy themselves, under Article 47 of the Charter, that the defendants are given “effective access to justice” and, for cases of complexity of the sort above described, that “Legal Aid shall be made available to those who lack sufficient resources insofar as such aid is necessary.
Most litigants in person just show up in court on the day the case is listed and it may then be too late to make up for lost ground. The chances of framing and corroborating a second bite at the cherry, on Appeal, may be vanishingly small, even if they manage not to miss the ten-day deadline for an Appeal (which many do).
Writing in Prospect Magazine in 2018, David Neuberger, former President of the UK Supreme Court, said:“Without the rule of law society becomes unjust, violent and poor. It is of fundamental importance that courts are open and accessible.
“Accessibility means that people with grievances and those being sued must get access to legal advice and to courts. It is an affront to justice if people cannot understand or enforce their rights.
It’s always a difficult task to communicate to a wider audience how the intricacies of the law, full of carefully crafted language, are at play in underpinning how our society, and economy operates.
Especially when true complexity arises, actual trials are needed and the public needs to know it can trust their judicial public servants “the adults in the room”, in the making of these key decisions.
The thicker the blanket of legal fog, the more political “good intentions” and “good faith” are but a faded image of what people’s actual needs are.
This leads to a society dominated by cynicism, unable to envisage any change, and politically impotent.
When discussing health these days, if we’re not dissecting the latest updates on the pandemic, we’re often focusing on nutrition and dietary choices –– or mental health and wellbeing. These are areas, after all, in which it’s possible to quickly implement practical changes. For instance, we can make easy changes to our diets, particularly with more access to vegetarian and vegan options now widely available, and eateries becoming more inclusive with their menus. Indeed, we’ve even discussed The Vegan Dining Trail from Galway to Cork, where each restaurant along the route is completely meat-free! We might not have imagined such a thing existing several years back.
One thing that doesn’t seem to come up anymore in conversations about health and lifestyle, however, is smoking. Most millennials and older generations will remember when smoking in restaurants was totally acceptable; bars and clubs had indoor smoking areas; smoking on public transport was permitted; some workplaces would even allow ashtrays on desks.
There‘s no significant, identifiable moment to refer to as the point when all of this stopped being normal. It all just seems to have faded into the past, so gradually yet so completely as to be somewhat baffling in retrospect. So when did we stop talking about smoking? Did anyone even notice it went away?
The most obvious change in the quest to phase out smoking came in the form of restrictions imposed across Ireland. Somewhat ahead of the game, Ireland was the first country in the world to implement comprehensive legislation back in 2004, creating smoke-free workplaces –– including bars and restaurants. It was an historic moment, and it caused uproar amongst publicans who claimed it would be the death of the hospitality industry for Ireland. Of course, it wasn’t, like most adjustments, we accepted the inconvenience, changed our behaviours and got on with our lives.
It was a risky step to take though. In fact, fifteen years after restrictions were imposed, the Irish Examiner took a look back and acknowledged that the extent of the knock-on effects were unknown. At the time when restrictions were imposed, there was fear of factory-floor rebellions, as well as nervousness amongst employers and employees, business owners, and smokers. The contrast to today is stark. Just imagine seeing a patron, elbows on the bar, lit cigarette in hand; you can practically feel eyebrows reaching hairlines, and mouths agog. The very idea almost seems treacherous!
With such an immediate “nip it in the bud” change back then, the simple fact is that many had no choice but to change their habits –– though many were loathe to surrender nicotine. Plenty were not relishing the thought of standing in the path of a biting Irish wind, trying to light a cigarette whilst shivering in the bitter cold, however. Thus, in response to an influx of determined quitters, a market for alternative nicotine products emerged, slowly but surely.
That market has evolved over time, with smokeless tobacco products, nicotine gum, nicotine patches, and various types of lozenges all helping smokers to adhere to restrictions at various points in the past fifteen years or so. Today, nicotine pouches are surfacing as the latest popular options. A post on nicotine pouches by Prillaexplains that clean, discreet use and a range of flavours are proving to be appealing to consumers. In short though, numerous “nicotine replacement therapy” (or NRT) alternatives have helped smokers to maintain their lifestyles without having major issues with habits and cravings in places where smoking is prohibited.
So, with the majority of the world following suit with smoking restrictions and the NRT industry providing more socially acceptable alternatives to puffing on a cigarette, smoking really has become almost a taboo subject. With these significant changes now well established, smoking naturally and gradually faded into the shadows rather than abruptly ceasing to be a topic of discussion.
Recommending the best place for Mujadara, comparing the newest nicotine pouch flavours and staying safe and sanitised is truly the new norm for those who might once have been labelled “smokers.”
Today bottled spring water is an everyday drink, and sales run into the billions every year throughout the world. In polluted cities many inhabitants don’t trust the public water supply and use it only for washing. For relaxation and thirst quenching they are willing to pay for bottled spring water from their own country or imported from distant lands.
Indeed, there is a widespread belief in the value of spring water, even if in many localities tap water is just as rich in mineral content as the bottled water described with impressive statistics, on colourful labels.
Throughout continental Europe, as far back as Roman times, people have made secular pilgrimages to springs and wells with folkloric reputations. During the so-called Celtic era around Britain and Ireland people flocked to holy wells which they believed contained magical healing powers. Christian evangelists like St. Declan and St. Patrick acknowledged the ancient beliefs and urged their flock to say prayers and perform penitential rituals at these water sources – hence the designation of thousands of Holy Wells throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, many of which have vanished into oblivion as a result of changes to the underground water table and urbanisation.
19th century photochrom of the Great Bath at the Roman Baths.
Bath
The springs at the base of hills near Bath in Somerset, a town founded by the Romans about 60 AD, were cherished from Celtic times for their purity and health effects, but the Roman emphasis on hygiene gave an added boost to the reputation of the place and over the centuries Bath developed into a major health resort.
Hydrotherapy i.e. the medicinal use of water, became fashionable from the late 16th century. People bathed in cold waters, rubbed painful parts of their bodies with water, or bathed in thermal springs to relieve arthritis, rheumatic pain and other ailments related to skin, stomach and bodily organs.
In continental Europe from the end of the 18th century onwards members of the landed aristocracy began holidaying in rural idyls, often in the mountains, where chalybeate waters were found.
In this period, Hotels were founded to cater to the card-playing, horse riding and other costly inclinations of this leisure class of visitors. The urban haute bourgeoise followed the fashionable aristocratic trends.
In the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian empire Kurorte (places with reputations for curative waters) thrived. It could be a mixture of complacent decadence and health seeking. Many places in today’s Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria and south-eastern Germany still incorporate the word Bad (baths) in their names. The languid decadence has departed and serious health therapy regimes now prevail. Trades unions in Germany and elsewhere organize health holidays for workers and their families.
A geyser in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.
Irish Health Waters
In the 18th and 19th centuries several places around Ireland were major attractions for both rich and poor seeking comfort and cure from health-giving waters. Local economies thrived as hotels, shops, taverns and local transport catered seasonally to thousands of visitors coming from England and closer to home.
Only Lisdoonvarna in Clare remains to remind us of a tourist boom from former days. Below are a few details about places that once featured on the health map for urban sophisticates.
Thomas Davis Street (Main Street), Mallow in August 1903.
Mallow Springs in Cork
With the advent of Christianity one of the Mallow springs was dedicated to St. Patrick. The largest of the group is known as Lady’s Well. The belief that the spring had medicinal properties stems from the work of Dr. Rogers of Cork, who in 1727 treated a sick woman in Mallow and observed that the only liquid she could retain was water from the spring.
After her recovery Dr. Rogers invited Mr. J. Rutty from Bristol Spa to visit Mallow. Rutty wrote a book called Mineral Waters of Ireland, published in 1757, and highlighted the medicinal aspects. He quoted Dr. Rogers as reporting a wide range of cures including for: disorders of the stomach and skin; respiratory problems such as catarrh, coughs, and asthma; urinary disorders; and diabetes. Mallow became a popular health resort for about thirty years, especially in spring and autumn, but by 1850 it had ceased to function due to the social effects of famine and a switch of focus on English spa towns and glamorous resorts on the continent.
Mallow seems to be the only place in Ireland where thermal springs were known to exist. Many modern 5-star hotels offer so-called spas, which are really designer ‘hot tubs’ and Jacuzzis in luxury wellness centres created for moneyed holiday makers.
Struell Wells, near Downpatrick, County Down (pictured in feature image).
Located about three kilometers from the historic town of Downpatrick in Down, Struell (derived from the Gaelic word tSruthail or stream) comprises two wells, two bathhouses and the ruins of a church. It is a remarkable archaeological site. The evidence from Struell strongly suggests that it was an important sacred site in pre-Christian times. It is not far from Saul where St. Patrick is said to have met Dichu in the fifth century and made his first convert.
There are two roofed wells believed to have curative effects, the Drinking well and the Eye well. From the 17th century until the 1840s Struell was a popular place of pilgrimage. Today it still attracts people in search of cures and spiritual inspiration, and is an important stop on the St. Patrick Trail laid out by the Ulster tourism board.
Swanlinbar, County Cavan
In the 18th century people from England flocked to the three spa wells near the village of Swanlinbar, near the border with Fermanagh. Three wells had water rich in mineral trace elements and had a “rotten egg” taste and smell.
A hotel located at the well in Gortoral hosted the health pilgrims, who were told that drinking the water would allay scurvy, depression and bad appetite. The rotten egg flavour comes from the sulphur content.
Drumod well just south of Swanlinbar is still accessible and attracts visitors to this day. In his book about the mineral waters of Ireland above mentioned J. Rutty devoted many pages to the area of Swanlinbar and spread its fame around Britain and continental Europe.
The remarkable tale of the healing waters of Ballyspellan in Kilkenny https://t.co/DDI4Cbfqsx
Ballyspellan Spa, about 20 kilometers from Kilkenny city, no longer exists, but the spring water that flows through the limestone-rich Clonmantagh hills is still available to visitors who know about the medicinal properties.
There is a well near Johnstown village where people go to fill bottles with the water. In the early 18th century the gentry of Dublin and other towns made holiday visits. Rochfords’ Hotel nearby offered hospitality. Some of these well-heeled visitors enjoyed hunting foxes and hares, horse racing and dancing. Hurling was another attraction for whoever enjoyed the clash of the ash.
The poet Thomas Sheridan wrote about the spa. The area was the birthplace of Dr. Ronan Tynan, a noted singer, bone setter and limb amputee. Long after the fashionable gentry ceased to spend their holidays in the area the well remained a summer focal point where locals congregated to drink the water and divert themselves with sports and pleasant conversation.
St. Munn’s Well at Brownscastle in County Wexford
Near Taghmon in County Wexford ‘patterns’ were held during the 18th century on the saint’s feast day 21st October. The waters at nearby St. Munn’s Bed were sought by pilgrims in search of cures for back ailments.
Unfortunately, however, a lot of drunkness and fighting ensued from the partaking of strong poteen distilled in the hills and sold to pilgrims, and by the early 19th century the annual custom was banned by the clergy, but some locals continued visiting the place discreetly.
In the mid-twentieth century two local men, Jack Sinnott and Christy Murphy drained and piped the vicinity and Seamus Seery with others built a footpath access so that the general public could visit without difficulty.
Lisdoonvarna in County Clare
The medicinal waters of Lisdoonvarna were first written about around 1740 and the gentry from far and wide began flocking to an area not far from Ennistymon in County Clare, where no village existed at the time.
In the second half of the 19th century hotels were built and the precious waters, rich in sulphur and iron, were under the control of private owners. The Guthrie family built a pump house for dispensing the water, one prominent woman in the family being known as Biddy the Sulphur. A certain Dr. Westropp purchased the site and introduced baths. The main visiting season was in September when harvesting was complete. Several hotels and boarding houses competed for customers.
Lisdoonvarna became associated with matchmaking as parents brought marriageable daughters on holidays there. Matchmaking festivals still take place, and many young people independently take trips to Lisdoonvarna in search of fun and friendship.
Although I have never tasted the sulphur waters, Lisdoonvarna is important has a personal significance as it is the place where my parents met in the autumn of 1942: my mother visiting from Limerick and my father from more distant Kildare.
Lisdoonvarna has attracted German and other young continentals seeking out pubs in Clare where traditional Irish music is to be heard. The popular song Lisdoonvarna was first sung by Christy Moore in the 1980s, and helped publicise the folk music festival. It is fair to say that drinking pints in ‘singing pubs’ is now more popular than ‘taking the waters’ among this age profile.
Glencar Waterfall at Glencar Lough.
Lesser Known Spa Waters in County Leitrim
Several localities which are not well known nationally have water springs and wells that have been sought out by health connoisseurs.
County Leitrim has sulphur and chalybeate (iron-rich) water sources. Around Sliabh and Iarainn (the iron mountain) overlooking Lough Allen in mid-Leitrim old ordinance maps indicate the presence of twenty spa wells, but hardly anybody visits the spots nowadays, although hillwalkers find the whole area overlooking Lough Allen attractive, and remains of old sweat houses can be found. In the Mohill district the neglected remains of a spa well rest obscurely on a private farm
Drumsna in South Leitrim is reputed to have a number of sulphur streams, not universally prized by locals on account of the ‘rotten egg’ flavour and smell.
One well in MacManus Cross, between Jamestown and Carrick-on-Shannon is still visited by individuals seeking water to cure worms in children and horses.
Not far from Dromahair in North Leitrim is a little-known locality on the side of a wooded hill known as Derrybrisk (Doirebriosc in Gaelic, which suggests woodland with oak trees).
Older inhabitants of Dromahair, Killenummery and Ballintogher remember sweet summer Sunday afternoons until the 1960s when people from the adjoining townlands and visitors from Sligo town, arriving on bicycles, congregated at Derrybrisk spa, as it was then known. Card playing and chatting was the point, not tasting the sulphur water. Farmers came to fill bottles of the sulphur-rich water and use as medicine for sick animals. The water, diluted in ordinary water, was also said to cure worms in young children.
The advent of motorised transport and mass media such as radio and television seems to have brought these social afternoons to a halt. The spot is difficult to access today. Several farms in the Ballintogher area have streams tasting of sulphur, indicating that there is a lengthy vein of sulphrous limestone in the hills around.
Modern medicine and improved diets have lessened the traditional appeal of medicinal waters, but folklorists and natural health enthusiasts hanker after the old ways.
Leitrim largely missed out on the 19th century enthusiasm for taking the waters, but today the ‘forgotten county’ as it is sometimes termed, is ripe for a reimagined rural outdoor tourist industry.
Hill walkers can be brought on guided trips to view the remains of archaeological sites and curiosities. Old abandoned sweat houses, spa wells, holy wells, dilapidated monastic sites, dolmens and abandoned mining projects – all these and some important War of Independence memorials invite domestic and foreign tourists.
Craft whiskey and gin are among other spirit waters which have made an appearance. In Drumshanbo in mid-Leitrim Gunpowder Gin has proved to be a dynamite product for domestic and export consumption. Now if only a daring chemistry graduate would invent a novel sulphur water-based alcohol elixir, preferably with the rotten egg smell removed.
It is coming up to one of the best times of the year; those early days of January following the sixth – a period I cheerfully refer to as ‘The Anti-Christmas’!
Alas December has first to be endured. It is a month dominated by two types of people: those who project that the time is fun for commercial purpose; and those who do so for social advantage. Although each was a monstrous individual, nonetheless Joe Stalin and Ollie Cromwell may have each separately been onto something – in so far as they both banned aspects of Christmas.
As if an orgy of collective consumerism can offset the unrelenting bleakness of the year’s dullest days? On a more serious note, it is sad that the ‘festive season’ correlates with an annual spike in altercations, hospital admissions, relationship break-ups, etc.
There is no other way to put it: December fills me with dread. Daylight dropping by a few minutes each day, and worse if cloudy when even the shadows refuse to come out to play amid grim gloom. The rain that fell yesterday does not seem dry on these grey days, as thermometers shiver with the temperatures in single digits. For certain, these must count as the bleakest weeks of the calendar.
All too often, people behave in a manner unacceptable at any other time of the year. One only has to cross a street during these weeks to witness the manic impatience – and occasional dangerous behaviour – by countless drivers.
Yet just a few weeks later, the streets are quieter, calmer, and indeed sometimes serene. The same individual who was driving crazily is often a character transformed, taking far more care on the road.
Maybe it is the guilt-trips associated with December that are most objectionable. These generally take two forms. There is the necessary attendance of social occasions – so as it is less likely to be perceived as an antisocial malcontent – and then there are those innumerable good causes seeking charitable donations. It can be a hard challenge to simply battle on, but it’s vital all the same.
The usual routes for psychological escape, however, tend to be stymied. Anything outdoors involves cold or damp. Try turning on a radio or TV and you are bombarded with advertising, promising either unbelievable joys after a purchase, or else soliciting charity for desperate heart-breaking catastrophes; a choice between strychnine smiles and poor unfortunates suffering dreadful distress. Possibly not a great recipe for people’s mental health, I suspect.
Fortunately, the crescendo of craziness usually peaks in the days leading up to Christmas Eve. By then, the sloppiness associated with the Christmas office party mobs has mostly dissipated. Nitwits likely to attempt to attend twelve pubs are also typically in retreat, having succeeded or failed in their valiant missions.
New Years’ Eve can pose a threat, but usually it just amounts to an Amateurs’ Night, where chaos is confined to those determined to participate. And unless one is unfortunate to live where Orthodox Christmas occurs, the future gets brighter – literally!
From around January seventh our world starts becoming more pleasant and civilised. It is by then nearly four weeks since earliest nightfall! Contrary to common perception, daylight in evening time begins to extend around the thirteenth of December – although mornings continue getting darker until the thirty-first, hence the twenty-first being the day with least daylight overall. Thus, a week into January, it is bright for nearly an hour longer than the depressing days of mid-December.
All the nonsense and excess of previous weeks is thankfully finished with for another year. Coca-cola put away their crappy red cloaked Santa Clauses until its annual marketing requirement ten months later –likewise the other big brands that have rendered bland any sense of occasion the time of year ever contained. With January’s arrival, the phrase ‘Sure, it’s Christmas’ becomes invalid, and can no longer be cited in defence of unsatisfactory actions, or lack thereof.
There is a defence made about Christmas having a ‘real’ meaning before it was commercially hijacked. Yet there again, it is worth noting it was an annual pagan festival before it was pilfered or ‘culturally appropriated’ by Christians. It used to help sell Rome; now it sells Coca-cola.
All too often, securing a restaurant table in December is a competitive heat, where the victors’ spoils consist of queues and confined spaces, served-up with a dollop of top-dollar prices by overworked staff at the end of their tether. Yet walk into the same establishment in January – at least in ‘normal times’ – and savour the personal attention you are likely to receive from staff glad of the custom. The January lunch or supper liberates the individual; company is by choice rather than obligation.
It is not that January is the winter tunnel’s end – but an unmistakable brightness is beginning to hove into view. There will be further dark days ahead, but none darker than those past; the dreariness is finally passing. Media continues to push commercial adverts, but those flogging insurance and holidays tend to use far less shrill ditties than those carried at Christmas time. In January, the hard sells are off, enforced engagement is over; and we can escape – we can get away from the maddening crowd.
It is understandable then why the period around January the sixth has long been known in Ireland as ‘Little Christmas’ or ‘Nollaig na mBan’, meaning ‘Women’s Christmas’.
I may call it ‘The Anti-Christmas’ – but perhaps the older title is better, luring buy-in from erstwhile festive fanatics. This is the moment when reasonable people breath a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge they are as far as possible on the calendar from the annual madness of the ‘holiday season’.
A light is there on the horizon, beckoning us forth, promising a beginning of better and brighter days: Hooray for Jolly January!
Joe MacAnthony might be considered the greatest investigative reporter to have ever operated in the history of the Irish State. His career in Ireland, however, was cut short by vested interests that still appear to insulate those with money in power from accountability and criminal sanction.
Having exposed the staggering corruption lying behind the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes, he eventually ran out of Irish publishers, and was forced to take a job with the Canadian Broadcasting Authority. After receiving threats to his life, he moved to Canada with his wife and four children, where he lived for thirty-five years.
0:00 Introduction 1:13 The Irish Sweepstakes 14:42 Story on Ray Burke 19:30 Closed down in RTE 24:00 Move to Canada 29:00 Death Threats 31:00 Unable to Work in Ireland 32:58 Views on the Irish Times 34:10 ‘We have sick journalism in Ireland’ 38:00 Possibility of Solution
As testament to MacAnthony’s stature in Irish journalism, on November 15 2020 Liam Collins wrote for the Sunday Independent:
The first Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes draw took place 90 years ago this month and it quickly became a global phenomenon. Behind the razzmatazz and the instant riches, however, was a hidden tale of greed. More than four decades later, investigative journalist Joe MacAnthony broke the biggest story in the history of the Sunday Independent and revealed where the Sweep millions went.
The state-sponsored lottery was set up under the first Cumann na nGaedhal (later Fine Gael) government of the State in 1930, and would bring unheard of riches to former Minister for Industry and Commerce Josephy McGrath, and his heirs, who became firm fixtures in the commercial life of the country, with many influential friends. MacAnthony estimates their fortune amounted to up to four hundred million dollars by 1972.
Last week filmmaker and Cassandra Voices contributor Bob Quinn sent us a recording of a film he made in 2006 entitled ‘They’ll Never Show That.’
Having blazed a trail with his work on the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes, MacAnthony explains how his revelations into the corrupt affairs of former Fianna Fáil Minister Ray Burke as far back as the 1970s, hastened the end of his career in both the Sunday Independent and RTE, who withdrew his security card for a period of six months, while he continued to draw a salary.
MacAnthony provides a chilling assessment of Irish media:
the Irish Times, when you look at the manner in which this whole thing seems to be fitted to whoever can make the most money in the upper circles of that paper … that is a total disgrace, an unconscionable disgrace in terms of Irish press freedom … the result is we have sick journalists in Ireland and it is sick journalism, and it’s not due to the people who want to be good journalists. It’s the people who control what the good or bad journalists say and who encourage triviality … I mean, the level of triviality that you read. It’s unbelievable.
He argues that corruption has come about through what he calls ‘facilitators’ – accountants and lawyers – who ensure that few, if any, politicians are ever held to account.
Ray Burke would serve just four and-a-half months of a six month sentence behind bars, while Liam Lawlor served a few weeks for contempt.
MacAnthony traces the lenient treatment of politicians to a class distinction, between those who get ‘six years and who gets probation,’ while ‘basically no lawyer in this country and no accountant ever imagines he’s going to go to jail for playing ducks and drakes.’
He asserts
it’s just embedded. A culture is embedded … that you can get away with murder.
MacAnthony proposed the solution of a ‘counter power,’ similar to the FBI, which could set up ‘stings on politicians.’
He concludes:
Nobody goes to jail … I mean, these exile millionaires like Denis O’Brien, I mean, that’s disgusting … here is a guy who makes … money out of Irish assets and then goes off and lives somewhere else and only comes in here … when he has the prospect of taking more money out of the system.
He warns:
You know, every time you take money out of the system somebody pays and they’re paying [with their] health or they pay in other areas, but they always pay. So these people, I mean, there is conscience involved here. You know that when you make a lot of money, somebody’s suffering at the other end of the scale.
It was one of those frequent blustery evenings, Wednesday May 18th, 2011. I was driving back to Rosses Point from Sligo town. In five minutes one could get soaked, as I had earlier and would after. The wind would blow like hell and clouds give the sky over to shades of light blue and grey as dusk approached. That morning, the water in the tidal channel connecting Sligo Bay to the town was choppy, wind- churned, a kind of deep green. By evening’s light it was calmer, a fuller cerulean than the sky itself.
I had been having a bout of sinus headaches. A great man for the self-diagnosis, here’s how I assessed the possible causes: 1) indoor dampness from the more or less daily Irish rain; 2) drinking too much, not stout or John Power whiskey, rather strong black tea by the gallon; 3) consuming lashings of white flour in the form of croissants and sausage rolls from the bakery run by the French family off Rockwood Parade; 4) a non-fatal overdose of the scones dished up warm with butter by Jill Barber and her crew at the Drumcliffe Tea Shop by the Churchyard where W.B. Yeats is buried. I felt like I was coming down with something.
My friend Martin had waxed lyrical about a Leitrim-born homeopath in Sligo town, Maura. He characterized her as a good listener, a healer. He said she might have something for what ailed me. My batch of Euros was dwindling. That year everything in Ireland was twenty-five percent more expensive when compared to American prices, yet I was curious enough to see could she help the sinus ache or maybe persuade a high-pitched constant companion – screeching in my ears – to abate. More than that, I thought I’d get an appointment because frequently my default mode could be characterized as uptight, on alert – shoulders up, jaw clenched, muscles clamped down, my head mimicking a fist. The resultant drag on my energy wore me down.
I had a 6 p.m. appointment with Maura. Inevitably, I got caught again in a blast of horizontal Northwest rain during the short walk from the Tesco’s parking lot in the centre of town around the corner to the faded elegance of the office buildings at the West end of Wine Street. A British legacy, eight three-story grey Georgian houses were built in a terrace in the 1830’s with large square windows, decorative semi- circular glass above thick wooden front doors and terra cotta pots atop concrete chimneys. They still look decent despite pipes running down the front of several to drain rainwater off the slate roofs.
Imbibing Sligo Life
Born a stones-throw away in Garden Hill Nursing Home, I had imbibed life in Sligo as a toddler. Gripping my father’s trouser leg, I observed the goings on around him. I would scamper after him into Blackwood’s General Store on Grattan Street, a place of creaky wooden floorboards sprinkled with sawdust, populated by white-coated shop assistants. After forking out for a pound of rashers, my father would point to the cylinders flying about the ceiling on wires. The shop assistant wrote up a slip and put it along with cash into a cylinder, pulling a handle to send it flying up to a mezzanine office that appeared to be suspended from the ceiling. From that vantage point a bespectacled old dear made up the change and zipped the cylinder back down. Once or twice every summer, my father bundled me into the front seat of his black Ford Consul and drove me down Cartron Hill into Wine Street to the Café Cairo, its floor tiled in black and white squares, for a whipped ice cream cone.
The world of my early boyhood was circumscribed by the wider landscapes of Sligo – limestone encrusted Ben Bulben, the fresh waters of Lough Gill and the Garravogue river running through town past Foley’s Brewery to the weir at Hyde bridge where we tossed lumps of sliced pan to the swans. Along the coastline, I ran after my father to keep up on his walks in the salted air off the Atlantic coast: Raghley, Strandhill, Rosses Point, Mullaghmore. Running in place against the wind, knees reddened by the chill, brown long socks pulled up tight in wellie-boots I watched my father, his shoulders thrown back, stride away from me into the ghostly distance of the mist enshrouded second strand at Rosses Point.
I stepped through the glass front door of number two Wine Street through the vestibule into an office to the right. In the old days, doctors had offices along this part of Wine Street. Maura’s place was a new twist – a gang of alternative practitioners sharing space, naming it the Wine Street Wellness Center. Maura arrived in and walked me up the U-shaped staircase to the first landing. To the left, her high-ceilinged office looked shared – no visible personal items or files – and the furniture was second-hand. I sat in a low uncomfortable chair with my back to the door while my soaking raincoat dripped across the only spare chair. I viewed Maura in profile at her bare desk facing the wall.
She asked me all kinds of questions, about my aching back, ringing ears and all of the things happening in my body certainly but also in my emotional world. She had a series of gently probing questions. As I blabbed replies, she seemed to let my story wash over her, writing the odd clue she extracted down on a notepad. She asked how did I feel about this or that time in my life, all with a view to “restoring the body’s natural balance,” said she.
Balance, as far as I was concerned, was something others might attain not me. I had been keeping my eye out for balance of some sort for years – balance between my tired body and racing mind; between work and play; between pushing myself to forge forward and sitting back to rest. I wasn’t sure what balance felt like.
Massive Turning
Prompted by her expansive questions, my mind’s eye drifted to a massive turning in my life – February 1989. My mother, Mella, took ill suddenly, fatally. I talked to her on the phone the day of the hastily scheduled surgery – open heart – and she said, “Don’t come now; bring the kids in a couple of months, it will be just the tonic I need.” She called my toddler sons her little darlings. Barely twelve hours later, a loud phone bolted me awake in the early hours – the call every emigrant dreads. My elder brother Vivian killed me softly, “She’s in a bad way; come home as quick as you can.”
Sitting there in the thrift store low chair, I told Maura I was remembering the agonizing wintertime plane trek home to Ireland. Every minute of the journey from Pittsburgh to JFK in New York to London Gatwick and on to Dublin was drawn out, excruciating. “Six hundred miles an hour, bollox,” I remember thinking somewhere over the Atlantic as the steward poured another weak tea into my flimsy plastic cup. At Gatwick, extra security checks delayed me further. With the IRA active, all Irish travelers were suspect.
Years before, just passed my twenty-sixth birthday, when my eldest brother Ian phoned to tell me my father had died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-two, I knew by the tone of his, “Hello,” what was coming. When he said, “I’m afraid I have bad news,” that sealed it. His news was not entirely unexpected. My father had drifted downhill after retiring at the age of sixty-seven. This call, though, this one struck like the once in a lifetime tornado that had ripped up parts of Pittsburgh, my adopted hometown, in 1980. Out of the blue, Mella, ten days before her 70th birthday, was lying in a hospital bed in Dublin close to death; nothing I could do would speed me to her side. Stuck in mid-air over mid Atlantic, I resorted to talking silently to her.
“I’m coming. Hold on, dear one, hold on.”
Vivian awaited at Dublin airport. He shepherded me to his green Mercedes with the tan leather seats. In silence, my brother the motor racing champion sped me through the early morning fog like a VIP, across the semicircle of Dublin Bay anchored by the chimneys of the Bull Wall, past the strand at Sandymount where people braved the early morning wind and drizzle to walk dogs. Ignoring speed limits, he revved the purring engine as we waited at the railway crossing for a DART commuter train to rumble and clatter past. The back end of the Merc fish- tailed as he turned left with a screech onto busy Merrion Road – bobbing and weaving in and out of clogged traffic lanes – straight to the Blackrock Clinic.
A Preternatural Tristesse
“What are you feeling now?” Maura asked. “Sad,” I told her.
Sad wasn’t the half of it. A preternatural tristesse had descended on me, as if I was touching an opening, a small portal atop an immense reservoir of sadness, a deep subterranean lake of tears like an underground aquifer. I was surprised, nonplussed, to discover it. The grey twilight threw shadows scything at an angle across the top of the wall and along the corner of the high-ceilinged room.
“Right,” she replied with an inflection that combined, “I hear you,” with “I accept your story.”
Slumped slightly in the non-ergonomic chair, I felt my shoulders relax a little, involuntarily let go of a layer of tightness clamping them down. There’s not enough time in one lifespan, I thought, to cry all of those tears. I sat there wondering if I had somehow not dealt with buried grief around the loss of my mother, whether words unspoken – words of love and affection, respect and gratitude – were still stuck in my gullet after all these years, or whether part of that lake of tears might even belong to her and my father or ancestors, not be mine at all.
As Maura consulted a large reference book, I remembered that my father and the gregarious Denis Boland regularly sipped John Powers in the second floor living room of the Boland’s Wine Street house a couple of doors along, the one with the plaque outside that stated simply Surgeon Boland.
They drank pints in the Yeats Country Hotel in Rosses Point with the town’s elite, Tommy Mulligan of Western Wholesale Company, Jimmy Doherty the Accountant, Toher the Chemist who drove a Volkswagen Beetle, Armstrong the Solicitor, the businessman Soden and cigar smoking wit Doctor Charles McCarthy.
My mother too enjoyed friendships in these houses along Wine Street with May Quinn, the dentist’s wife, and big-hearted Moya Boland who held court from her kitchen, always at the ready to entertain visitors who wandered in off the street. May Quinn’s early death from cancer rattled my mother. They were like sisters the two of them – good looking, blond and wispy with tan makeup. Golf buddies at the links in Rosses Point, after playing a round they giggled together over gins and tonics in the member’s lounge.
“What we are looking for,” Maura said, “is a constitutional remedy; one that gets underneath surface symptoms to draw out the body’s own capacity to heal – physically and emotionally.”
First Train Trip
Memories were overtaking me. I didn’t tell her that earlier that day a walk to the train station at the West end of town had caused me to re-live my first trip in a train – from Sligo to Dublin with my father and younger sister Adrienne. I was six or seven. Oblivious to what packing up must have been going on, I thought we were on some sort of adventure to see Dublin, a dream-place I could not conceive of.
I quizzed my father at each stop. “Where are we now?” Longford, Edgworthstown, Mullingar, Kinegad. The train stopped along the way while in the hushed carriage people shuffled on and off puncturing the quiet by banging the thick green doors shut then dragging bags along the light brown linoleum floor before heaving them onto overhead racks.
On the outskirts of Dublin approaching the city centre the train slid by small brick-walled back gardens. The train tracks were high. I could see over the back walls into tiny yards where between light rain showers daily washing blew on lines. In some places there were narrow laneways between the back walls and the railway. Elsewhere, smashed up bicycles, beat up chairs and prams, Walkers brand with metal springs sticking out, lay rusting beside the tracks. Approaching Westland Row station, small windows with white lace curtains hid tiny darkened bedrooms from the train.
Somehow, we landed up in 72 Cowper Road, a tall elegant Victorian with stained glass on the front door, a half block down from busy Rathmines Road. Welcomed in by my maternal grandparents, I followed the adults like a duckling to the kitchen at the back of the house, down a couple of narrow steps behind a door with curtained glass. My mother and two elder brothers had arrived by car; suitcases had been unpacked. How did these ancient, quiet people – gentle souls – Joseph and Margaret Hynes, cope with six of us landing in on top of them, sharing beds, sleepily whizzing into piss-pots in the middle of the night? Even then I wondered.
We Weren’t Going Home
As one day rolled into another it dawned on me gradually, we weren’t going home to Sligo. We were enrolled in schools. We had moved to Dublin for good. I walked to Miss Carr’s elementary prep school on Highfield Road, my brothers to the bottom of Cowper Road and over the railway footbridge to the Jesuits at Gonzaga College in Ranelagh.
After a couple of months of this routine, we moved to a new house nearby in the quiet leafy confines of Merton Road, number 42. I recall no explanation at the time, or at least none that I could comprehend. As an adult I inferred there was sacrifice involved for my parents. They moved us from Sligo, where years on my mother would confide they had enjoyed their happiest times, for a fresh start – to be closer to aging parents, enroll us in top schools and expand the family to five children with the Dublin birth of my brother Colman.
I was an hour in the chair answering questions, pausing for Maura to make notes or look something up, when she declared she had an idea for a remedy for me but wished to think about it further – I could stop by for it in a couple of days. A gust of wind shook the windows just as she opened the office door to graciously escort me downstairs to the front door.
Steering left out of the Tesco’s lot, I drove West along Wine Street, then turned right on the Inner Relief Road, the new bypass that cuts off the West End of Sligo from its center. Past Hughes bridge where the Garravogue joins the tide, I veered left off Markievicz Road up Cartron Hill past my boyhood home, called Inniscara this longtime, down the other side, across the causeway and out the Rosses Point Road.
I found myself teary-eyed approaching the village at the neo-Gothic limestone Protestant Church on the left marking the widening onto the “new” promenade road built in the 1970’s, the one that “desthroyed” the village, according to two locals, semi-permanent fixtures on the bar stools of Austie’s Pub. Uachterán na hÉireann, President of Ireland Mary McAleese was coming over the car radio on RTÉ addressing a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth 2nd – Head of State, Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, top mega-wealthy Royal personage reigning over millions of subjects – Eílis a Dó as they were calling her on the News in Irish.
The last British monarch to visit Ireland had been Elizabeth’s grandfather George the Fifth, who landed in 1911 in Kingstown Harbor, we know today as Dún Laoghaire, to receive the muted admiration of his Irish subjects. At that time Ireland was a colony agitating for home rule, a modest form of self-governance within the Union with Britain.
“What do you think of Eílis a Dó?” a woman juggling a quart of milk, car keys and an Irish Independent newspaper in the village shop in Rosses Point had asked me that morning, pointing to a front page picture of her nibs dripping with royal jewels? “Isn’t she great all the same, for a woman of 85, and yer man is gone 90?”- yer man being His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, longtime sidekick to Eilís a Dó.
Mary McAleese acknowledged centuries of conflict between Britain and Ireland while asserting those days were well behind us. The whole island, besotted with English football, Downton Abbey and royal weddings, had achieved normal relations with England untainted by mutual threats of violence.
“The past,” said she, “No longer threatens to overwhelm our present or our future.”
A few drops of tears were making thin tracks along my face. Eílis a Dó got up and brought the house down with her opening words in Irish: “A Uachtaráin,” she intoned inserting a barely perceptible pause for dramatic effect, “Agas a cháirde,” President and friends.
“Fair play to her,” our friend Myra Curley, a genial elder in Rosses Point village would declare the following day. Myra followed the royal goings on closely.
Oyster Island
The better to listen, I pulled the car over on the promenade road a stone’s throw from where Oyster Island lies across a narrow tidal channel. Evening wind blew low hanging grey-stained clouds across the sky. Gazing over the undulating tidal waters, it occurred to me it was my lot to be removed at an early age, exposed the way maybe gannets or terns off the coastal headland at Mullaghmore, twenty-eight kilometers North of where I was parked, are battered by the elements.
Migrating birds return again and again to their origins, over and back, over and back, tracing and retracing infinite invisible patterns on the air. For four decades, I have mimicked their returns.
Since leaving Ireland at the age of twenty-three I came back every chance I got, always returning to Sligo, never feeling fully American yet I was cut off from the day-to-day routines and interactions that would render me an Irish local once again. Toward the end of every trip before returning to Pennsylvania I pined, the way a long-distance lover’s heart cracks a little at the prospect of further separation from a beloved.
Here I was again, rummaging around the landscapes and buildings of my early boyhood, a familiar desiderium setting in. My mind drifted like a cloud to the year of my father’s death, 1979. In quiet Mullaghmore on the morning of August 27th, the IRA blew Earl Mountbatten of Burma to bits in his small fishing boat, Shadow V. Three others were killed too when the creaky boat exploded beyond the long sandy beach where the harbor opens to Donegal Bay. Among the dead were Mountbatten’s fourteen-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, whose twin brother Timothy survived, and Paul Maxwell a fifteen-year- old summer helper from Northern Ireland. Prince Philip, Mountbatten’s nephew, stood silently and stoically with the Prince of Wales as the coffin draped in the Union Jack arrived back in England. Surgeon Boland of Wine Street had treated survivors at Sligo General Hospital.
Years later Paul Maxwell’s courageous father, John, somehow found it in his heart to publicly support the release under the Good Friday agreement of one of the perpetrators, Thomas McMahon of Carickmacross, after nineteen years in prison. McMahon would refuse requests to meet with John Maxwell, who wanted to see as he put it, “Would he be capable of putting himself in my shoes?”
The Good Friday agreement having settled more or less the Troubles in Northern Ireland, rendered possible the Royal visit and the elegant speeches coming over the car radio. It occurred to me that seeds of sadness in me, the trickle of tears on my face, may have their origins in grief and loss engendered by leaving Sligo as a small boy, Ireland itself as a young man.
In the late seventies, there was nothing much in the way of opportunity for young people. For most of the eighties Ireland exported a hundred thousand young people annually – a diaspora largely forgotten and wholly ignored in the country’s public discourse. Idealism and romance were calling my name and I chose to flee to the States with my American beloved.
It took several years to break upon me what had happened. I had removed myself from places, landscapes, language, people, culture and the very air I took for granted breathing. The poet Eavan Boland put it this way, “An ordinary displacement, had made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.”
To be sure, my migrant’s longing was no match for loss and grief suffered by Paul Maxwell’s family and the families of those killed and maimed by the troubles in the North. Sitting there in the car, I felt grateful for the magnitude of John Maxwell’s compassion, inspired to follow his example – to deploy further measures of compassion toward my uprooted younger self.
A few days later I would take a small sugary pellet, the remedy Maura doled out, and feel a further calm descend. The sinus problem would abate a bit.
Beyond the chilly tidal channel, clouds cast a shadow across Knocknarea. Evening light played hide and seek with the burial cairn of Maeve, ancient Queen of Connacht, atop the mountain. As teardrops dried on my cheekbones, Elizabeth Regina declared, “We should bow to the past, but not be bound by it.” I felt my neck muscles relax further as a soft rain peppered the windshield.
In a recent review, my colleague Ben Pantrey argues Richard Kearney’s Touch is itself out of touch with the ‘maddeningly Baroque … meme-ified soup of internet discourse.’ Given the Boston-based Irish philosopher is from an older generation, a relative lack of insight is perhaps unsurprising, but in dismissing the work in at times caustic terms, the reviewer perhaps missed its central thrust.
Touch provides a compelling narrative on an intimate connection between healing and touch, pointing to a dominant tendency in Western medicine – writ large during the Covid-19 pandemic – to disregard the role of the healer, in favour of what Kearney calls a ‘model of outmanoeuvring and overcoming illness.(p.68)’
That this view now appears risqué – in the face of coercive public health – demonstrates how the argument for the type of healing that Kearney points to is being lost.
The flag of the World Health Organization, with a rod of Asclepius.
Hippocratic v. Asklepion
Kearney identifies two paradigmatic schools of medicine originating in Ancient Greece, one emanating from Chiron who taught his disciple Asclepius ‘the art of healing through touch’; and another from Hippocrates, ‘followed the way of Zeus, Chiron’s brother, who dwelt on Mount Olympus and promoted a method of optocentric supervision. (p.66)’
Following a Hippocratic approach, the patient is viewed from a distance – objectified – before the prescribed remedy, or prophylactic, is applied to an undifferentiated ‘case.’
In contrast:
Chiron comes from the word kheir, meaning hand, or, more precisely, one skilled with the hands. The related term kheirourgos means surgeon. As healer, he accompanied the art of touch – often portrayed as laying on of hands and bodily massage – with medicinal plants from the earth, music, and sleep potions. (p.66)
Asklepion healing is a two-way process that includes: ‘tactile acts of bathing, ritual massage, and the ingestion of curative herbs. (p.68)’ This sounds similar to so-called ‘alternative’ medicinal practices – dismissed as ‘unscientific’ by some doctors – and also encompasses much of the fading role of the general practitioner, where a physical presence before each distinct patient is generally considered important.
This form of healing, however, is severely compromised by exhortations – backed up by unprecedented draconian laws – to ‘socially’ distance – which is surely an oxymoron.
Kearney’s work points to profound damage that occurs when physical contact is lost, heightening a pre-existing epidemic of loneliness, which a report in 2014 found to have even worse effects on our health than obesity. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist goes so far as to argue that all medicine should be viewed ‘as a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy.’[i]
Indeed, recognising a psychological origin to physical symptoms might explain our current impasse: transfixed by the challenge of a particular virus, seemingly to the exclusion of all else. This collective hysteria suggests widespread trauma, which may be the legacy of diminished physical contact in a digitally mediated age, accelerated by what Naomi Klein described as a ‘Screen New Deal,’ rolled out under cover of lockdown.
It begs the question: what happens to society when we shrink in fear from the flesh, blood and microbes of one another? ‘Touch’, Kearney says, ‘serves as the indispensable agency of intercorporality – and by moral extension, empathy. (p.47)’
The School of Athens by Raphael.
Aristotelian Touchstone
According to Kearney, Plato’s Academy held sight to be ‘the highest sense because it was deemed the most distant and mediated.’ In contrast, according to Kearney, Aristotle, ‘makes the startling claim that human perfection is the perfection of touch, (p.35)’ writing in Metaphysics (chapter 10, 105ib, 23-25):
The being to whom logos has been given as his share is a tactile being, endowed with the finest tact.
Kearney argues convincingly that in Western medicine the Aristotlean approach, drawing on Asklepion wisdom, has been drowned out by a Platonic, ‘heroic-Hippocratic model’, which ‘only tells half the story. (p.68-69)’
In support of this thesis, in his history of the origins of the scientific discipline from the late eighteenth century, Richard Holmes has drawn attention to a delusional optimism wherein there emerged, ‘the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost.’ This was the idea of a ‘Eureka’ moment: ‘the intuitive inspired instant of invention or discovery, for which no amount of preparation or preliminary analysis can really compare.’[ii]
Arguably, blind faith in dazzling scientific genius distorted public health priorities in the era of COVID-19. Lockdowns were aimed at keeping the population ‘safe’ before the invention of a ‘miraculous’ vaccine. Many seemed to assume this would act as a panacea, allowing us to awaken from the nightmare of ongoing restrictions. But a cycle of anxiety endures with the arrival of each new variant, however mild the symptoms it produces, suggesting an underlying anxiety is itself the problem.
in pursuit of a single-minded, Hippocratic “model of outmanoeuvring and overcoming illness”, morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 was inadequately weighed against the health impacts of lockdowns. According to Ari R. Joffe, the response of Western nations threatens to make ‘and likely has already made, several Sustainable Development Goals for the most vulnerable among us in low-income countries out of reach.’ The same paper also argues the ‘destabilizing effects may lead to chaotic events (e.g., riots, wars, revolutions).’
A van set on fire during the riots in Rotterdam on 26 January 2021.
Merleau-Ponty
Another philosopher Kearney cites is Maurice Merleau-Ponty who ‘took the novel step of applying the phenomenology of touch to the question of healing. (p.49)’ In response to increasing dependence on ‘optocentric’ remote diagnostics, it is worth revisiting passages Kearney quotes.
Merleau-Ponty emphasises the importance of tactility in the treatment of psychiatric illness in particular:
In treating (certain illnesses) psychological medicine does not act on the patient by making him know the origin of his illness: sometimes a touch of the hand puts a stop to the spasms and restores to the patient his speech.
Moreover,
The patient does not accept the meaning of his disturbance as revealed to him without the personal relationship formed with the doctor, or without the confidence and friendship felt towards him, and the change of existence resulting from this friendship. Neither symptom nor cure is worked out at the level of objective or positing consciousness, but below that level.
He concludes with a revolutionary idea in the context of this pandemic, where the patient-doctor relationship is side-lined in favour of generalised prescriptions, addressing one particular disease:
What this implies is that human symptoms cannot be explained by either biochemistry or intellectual volition alone – though both have their role. Ultimate healing involves an existential conversion of one body-subject in tactful communion with another. (p.49)
Moreover, Kearney adds that ‘untimely withdrawal of touch may do worse psychic damage than outright hostility or anger. (p.102)’ He refers to the findings of the Austrian doctor René Spitz in 1945, concerning an orphanage, which prevented contact between children in order to reduce a risk of them being exposed to contagious diseases, while giving them excellent nutrition and medical care. Startling, thirty-seven percent of the infants died before reaching the age of two.
Kearney also draws attention to epigenetic research demonstrating ‘key alterations in our bodies are made not just by toxins and biochemical stimulants but by the way we resonate with our fellow beings. (p.104)’
Image: Daniele Idini (c)
Responding to Covid
Given Kearney completed the book just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, his observations are of a provisional nature.
Nonetheless he makes a far-reaching claim that ‘In the first half of 2020, the virus went viral. Homo sapiens became Homo cybernens. (p.136)’ He assumes, however, an upbeat tone that now seems misplaced, saying ‘what we lost on the roundabout we won the swings’, recalling, how friends had received ‘unexpected messages from old friends and old flames (the “ex-factor”) wishing to “reconnect” at a time when physical travel and tactile contact was suddenly suspended. (p.134)’
Almost two years into the pandemic another philosopher, Byung-Chul Han has a far less rosy assessment. Writing for The Nation he describes what he calls ‘The Tiredness Virus’ in the pandemic’s wake. A triumph of sight over touch has generated what Han describes as ‘Zoom narcissism’ such that a ‘digital mirror’ encourages ‘dysmorphia’ (an exaggerated concern with supposed flaws in one’s physical appearance).
‘Digital communication is a very one-sided, attenuated affair’ Han argues, ‘There is no gaze, no body. It lacks the physical presence of the other.’ Moreover, he fears this this form of communication will become the norm, recalling all that we have lost:
The rituals we have been missing out on during the pandemic also imply physical experience. They represent forms of physical communication that create community and therefore bring happiness. Most of all, they lead us away from our egos … A physical aspect is also inherent in community as such. Digitalization weakens community cohesion insofar as it has a disembodying effect. The virus alienates us from the body.
Prolonging Covid?
Could an enforced absence of touch be linked to outright pathology in the context of COVID-19?
In response, Professor Robert Dingwell criticised ‘this very strong message which has effectively terrorised the population into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you.’
Is it possible that widespread conviction that a disease “is going to kill you” had unforeseen consequences in terms of adding to the burden of ‘Long Covid,’ or Covid ‘Long Haulers’ as it is referred to in the U.S.?
Long Covid is a condition fitting within the general category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue, which is ‘a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection.’ which ‘can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’ Notably, prior to the pandemic there were up to 150,000 who were already affected by ‘extreme and disabling exhaustion,’ with no apparent origin in the U.K.. Yet virtually no attention was given to this condition until the pandemic.
Moreover, in October, 2020 a leading advocates for sufferers, Professor Trish Greenhalgh clarified that Long Covid is only very rarely a long-term affliction: ‘The reviews we’ve done seem to suggest that whilst a tiny minority of people, perhaps one per cent of everyone who gets Covid-19, are still ill six months later, and whilst about a third of people aren’t better at three weeks, most people whose condition drags on are going to get better, slowly but steadily, between three weeks and three months.’
Ordinarily, one would expect public health officials to downplay such a condition, given broad acceptance that psychological stress – including a lack of touch or loneliness – is a factor in the subjective evolution or pathogenesis of most diseases. Instead, Long Covid has been widely highlighted in the media, often as a warning to young people, who might otherwise be insufficiently scared of a virus highly unlikely to kill a person under the age of fifty.
Frequent, graphic accounts, espeically via social media, may have had unintended consequences. Curiously, an informal survey of 450 people by Survivor Corps, a patient advocacy group for people with Long Covid, found that 171 said their condition improved after vaccination. That a vaccine would alleviate a post-viral syndrome is surely grounds for suspicion, hinting at a psychological origin to objective pain and suffering.
Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, has argued for a more critical appraisal of Long Covid. Having expressed scepticism around a condition characterised by symptoms such as ‘brain fog’, he recalls being contacted by a journalist who said: ‘I’m asking as much as a person as a journalist because I’m more terrified of this syndrome than I am of death.’
Gaffney acknowledges ‘myriad long-term effects, including physical and cognitive impairments, reduced lung function, mental health problems, and poorer quality of life’ from severe bouts of COVID-19, but cites a survey showing two-thirds of ‘long haulers’ had negative coronavirus antibody tests, and another, organised by self-identifying Long Covid patients indicating around two-thirds of those surveyed who had undergone blood testing reported negative results.
He asserted: ‘it’s highly probable that some or many long-haulers who were never diagnosed using PCR testing in the acute phase and who also have negative antibody tests are “true negatives.” In other words, for many this may be a disease with a psychological origin, which Gaffney attributes to ‘skyrocketing levels of social anguish and mental emotional distress,’ referencing a paper showing that about half of people with depression also had unexplained physical symptoms.
Getting Back in Touch
Recovery from the trauma of the pandemic should lead to a reappraisal of public health priorities. It is apparent by now that no “miracle” cure is available, decisively “outmanoeuvring and overcoming” COVID-19, and that lockdown measures, including pysch-ops instilling fear, have left deep wounds.
Works such as Kearney’s remind us of the importance of healing touch, inspired by Asclepius, which should be accorded equal importance to the Hippocratic inheritance. Now, with an ever-increasing burden of morbidity in society, particularly a veritable epidemic of mental ill-health, a paradigm shift is required.
However, Bessel Van Der Kolk describes in a recent work quoted by Kearney how mainstream medicine ‘is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs, [that is] by such basic activities as breathing moving and touching … is rarely considered.’[iii]
This issue could become one of the most important political questions of our time, and may lead to political realignments in the wake of a pandemic that has changed our lives.
Featured Image: A member of the Peruvian Army with a police dog enforcing curfew on 31 March 2020.
[i] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, New Haven/
[ii] Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p. xvii
[iii] Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, New York, Penguin, 2015, p.38.
It was about one in the afternoon by the time I reached 23 Prussia street. Earlier in the day I had received a group text saying: ‘Illegal eviction, Help Needed’!
By then a human wall had formed outside the front door to Sunnyvale and the mood was upbeat. I was told the police had tried to break up the crowd but failed miserably. Instead some of them had been absorbed into the crowd, swamped by it. Now clinging to the wall, under the heat of both sun and crowd, they were sweating hard.
‘Illegal eviction’, cried a voice from the crowd. A cheer rang out.
Another voice called out, this time singing: ‘Who protects landlords’?
‘GARDS PROTECT LANDLORDS’, the crowd sang back.
Who protects landlords?
GARDS PROTECT LANDLORDS!
As the singing continued, I asked around to find out what had happened. Everybody was telling the same story.
Morning Raid
When they came, they came spitting flame, vitriol, and all sorts of hatred. No eviction notice for this one; no ‘please-fuck-off’ letter through the door; no legal nicities this time. Just a dozen thugs or so, swinging two-by-fours and crowbars: aiming for window and skull.
The sun had not yet risen when they arrived, cutting power in the dark, before stealthily scaling the back wall. Thieves in the night, and bailiffs come dawn – bollocks to the lot.
Sent by Paschal Donohoe’s former ministerial driver and Fine Gael constituency treasurer Martin Sadlier of the McGrath Group, these men were ‘just doing their job’. Yanking folk outta their homes and destroying whatever remained. It’s nothing new. The same job has been done for centuries.
After finishing with the residents and cutting the power, they had gone to work on the roofs, walls and plumbing. Making certain there was nothing left of the homes that were there before – sure it’s nice work if you can get it.
A Sudden Melee
In front of me a Garda screams frantically, ‘Get back, GET BACK’! Meanwhile other Gardaí are picking people up and throwing them aside. ‘Get off me, a young man screams, GET THE FUCK OFF ME!’
At that point I felt confused, as until then things had been relatively calm. The Gardaí had been allowed to get by the human barricade at the front door, which had by then moved in front of the back entrance.
The Gardaí had merely been observing until that point, standing around in groups of two and three. But I could see something was afoot, when they all clustered around the Garda who seemed to be in charge. After he gave the word, all eighteen of them turned back towards the crowd and started forcefully breaking it up.
‘GET BACK’, the Gardaí screamed, shoving people out of their way, ‘GET BACK’!
‘I’m just here to make sure nobody gets hurt’, responded a man that had just been shoved off his feet by the incandescent Gard.
‘Get, Back,’ said the Gard, ‘nobody’s gonna get hurt’, he says.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said the man, brushing himself off, and gesturing to the surrounding melee. ‘Yous have a reputation for reefing people out of it and breaking their arms. Know what I mean’?
State Protection
I was still trying to figure out why the Gardaí only decided at that point to break the crowd up. Then I noticed the back gate had been opened, and realised they were clearing a path; which hit me like a punch I should’ve seen coming. Instead I had walked straight into a door.
The Gardaí weren’t there to keep the peace, but to seize a landlord’s property. McGrath’s security men must have been getting hungry. I figured they were allowing the Gardaí take charge, knowing they had done their work for the day. Having smashed up the premises, they were now ready to leave.
On cue, two white builders’ vans rolled out, full up with them, state protection on either side, as Gardaí pushed back the throng of protesters trying to stop the vans from leaving.
Hard questions to answer
Transcript:
Yous assist evictions, know what I mean kicking people out of their homes, is that why you joined the Guards?
It’s a hard question to answer but that’s the truth isn’t it?
Illegal evictions, with thugs, smashing people up and all. Like I just think it’s tragic,know what I mean? And I think you do too, and you keep the mask up and you keep your arms crossed and you tuck them into your vest. Trying to keep up the facade that you don’t care… I just think it’s tragic. And very easily you could have been in the same situation these people are in where they were without a home. Now they’re gettin reefed out of it… easily could’ve been any of yous.
It’s sad, you have jobs and you need your jobs to live. But… I don’t think you thought this was what being in the Guards was gonna be. I mean you probably thought you were gonna be helping I’m sure, but you’re clearly not doing a service to the community. You’re doing a service to landlords and people who have been making millions and billions out of this crisis that we’ve been in for the last ten, fifteen, twenty years! All you’re doing is helping that.
You can’t actually justify it, so you keep your mouth shut. You know back in the day, like a hundred years ago? When people were brought in to help evictions, they were socially ostracised. Know why? They were betraying their people, and everyone knew it. You’re working people right? Well, you’re betraying other working people. It’s as simple as that!
Community
Once McGrath’s men were safely escorted off the premises the Gardaí also took their leave. Their job was done. To take action against any illegal eviction that may have occurred was apparently not under their remit. They were there to protect the safety of the men who had reefed people out of their beds in the dark and thrown them out on the street. To protect McGrath’s men, who had smashed up a home out of spite.
Once they left the residents of Sunnyvale re-entered their now broken home. Oil had been thrown over all the surfaces, walls had been smashed, support beams destroyed … an horrific scene to behold. Nonetheless they persevered and began to clean up the mess. A community clean up was organised and the long road to recovery began. Of course, without resources it’s not an easy road to walk.
People sat around a fire that night talking over the day’s happenings. I didn’t make it myself, but imagine it felt good, despite all the shit.
To tell you the truth, I could easily have been a father, and I would be a father now, had my wife J not miscarried a baby we once made. This was in 2002, so he or she would have been eighteen by now. So strange to envisage it: another life – for me, for J, and for that life. And had that bundle of multiplying cells survived to become an independent living being, would it have fundamentally altered the attitudes I am expressing now? Or confirmed them? Although I have to confess that for the most part I was just going along with the whole plan for J’s sake.
Women feel motherhood from the time of conception. Men don’t feel fatherhood until they are holding their child. I even remember a trip to Holles Street Maternity Hospital to make a sperm donation, so that it could be tested for any abnormalities, due to side effects from other medical treatment I had been receiving. The next time I went to that place was to visit J in a ward when she was recovering from losing the baby. She hadn’t even known that she was pregnant.
I said terrible things to her, while she’d been campaigning for me to father her child, before I acquiesced. I’d told her she was only making love in order to conceive. I’d told her she would be a terrible mother.
Despite having her own human foibles, I was wrong – if for no other reason than the fact that she is nothing like my mother. Just as I am nothing like her father – a fear she speculatively expressed early in our relationship. Of course, she could have been a bad mother for entirely different reasons than my mother was, but, just as equally, possibly not. And how will we ever know, now?
All she ever wanted was for us to be a family. All she wanted was to nurture, to have some extension of herself to love. I was not mature enough at the time to grasp that. Instead, I’d asked her, fearing for our freedom, “What will you do with this baby?” To which she’d replied, not seeing any problem, “Love it.” (‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’ T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, II. A Game of Chess. Companionship, Tom?) I can only excuse such wretched behaviour by pointing to Paul Stewart’s study of Beckett, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work (2011), where he deflects accusations of misogyny in the maestro’s oeuvre by positing that because for him women represent the threat of progeny, they are therefore simultaneously desired and reviled.
Speaking of women, not to be upstaged, my mother chose to end her time on Planet Earth while J was miscarrying (which began before but ended after Mam died). Had J gone on to discover that she was pregnant, and had we given birth to a healthy baby, I would have read that as my mother giving us a parting gift, almost a reincarnation of her spirit.
As it turned out, I see it as my mother robbing us of our unborn child, taking our unformed baby away with her, instead of leaving it to us – as though we were unworthy, as though she didn’t trust us with it: the last thing she took from me. My mother was always terrified that I’d get someone pregnant out of wedlock. Hey Ma, not to worry: I didn’t. But when I did get married and make my wife pregnant, nothing came of it. Is that some kind of subtle revenge? And if so, by who on whom?
I could still be a father now. But not if I can help it. J can no longer be a mother. If this is still a source of sadness and regret for her, I apologise profoundly and profusely.
Foreign Adventures
Freedom?
‘Fearing for our freedom.’ Did we do so much more with it, than the breeders in our circle of friends and acquaintances? Sure, we were able to holiday in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Morocco and India, while they had to settle for annual summer trips to the Aran Islands; and we were able to take weekend city breaks to Paris, Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges, Ghent, Prague and Tallinn, while they were not kicking back but rather gearing up to arrange play dates and other activities to keep the children occupied during the days off, and ferrying them to and fro – because we didn’t have to worry about getting kids on and off aeroplanes, and because we had more disposable income.
Not that we had that much more: we just didn’t have to make as much, and what we had went further. I certainly got to go to way more gigs than my peers, not having to worry about sourcing competent and reliable babysitters and being able to afford to pay them. I’ve probably read a lot more books than someone preoccupied with childcare.
If you think the trade-off wasn’t worth it, then prove me wrong.
Paternal Bonding
Son or Daughter?
If I had had children, would I have preferred a son or a daughter? The latter, hands down. Fathers favour daughters, mothers favour sons (and, generally, vice versa) – or rather, a parents’ relationship with a same sex child is usually more complex and fraught than it is with a child of the opposite sex.
Shakespeare was fond of daughters as redeeming of all fathers’ misdeeds, at least in the later ‘romances’ (Pericles’ Marina, The Winter’s Tale’s Perdita, Cymbeline’s Imogen, The Tempest’s Miranda). However, his earlier King Lear, that most mistreated of parents – even if he did bring much of it on himself – also had daughters, and it didn’t really work out so well with the first two.
Admittedly, he did have one loving, dutiful daughter, notably getting it right with the youngest, to compensate for the elder two cruel, self-interested termagants he also spawned. One out of three ain’t bad. But Cordelia dies anyway. That’s the difference between romance and tragedy. But while there may be some slim hope for a daughter, becoming a father of a son instantly marks you out as a bad guy, to be rebelled against and toppled – even, if we are to take the story of Oedipus literally rather than metaphorically, to be killed.
While much depends on the extent of your offspring’s sedition, it is kind of impossible to win, as a Dad. No way am I re-enacting that particular little domestic yet universal drama. Some may say I am merely operating out of fear of failure as a father, and am crippled by such anxiety, which is itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: because I think I will fail as a father, I will fail as a father. But all fathers, and mothers, fail, to a greater or lesser extent.
To recast a favourite formulation from Beckett: to be a parent is to fail, as no other dare fail. Then again, ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’ But how many0 chances do you get in one life to succeed? Maybe better not to try at all. Others may posit that my lack of progeny, because of distaste at the world, because of its inherent unfairness, is also a self-fulfilling prophecy: that is, because I view the world as distasteful because it is unfair, having progeny would have turned out to be distasteful and unfair too, for me and also for them – rather than redemptive. And, indeed, it is true that one has to somehow believe in life, and the future, to have children. Or, at least, it helps. But for those who identify with Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense Of Life, the whole enterprise can seem somewhat futile. In any case, I view the failure of parenthood as inevitable – because even the most conscientious of parents will tell you that you can look after your children only up to a certain point, and you can’t stop them from making all those stupid mistakes that you made (even those you know about).
Actually, I think I would be – or rather – would have been, a pretty good father, all told. But what if, for a myriad of unforeseen reasons and circumstances, I wasn’t? I see no reason to make an irreversible bet on finding out. I don’t think the odds are great, and I still don’t see the percentage in it.
The Act of Parturition
I have always found the thought of the act of parturition, that is giving birth by pushing a baby out into the world, vaguely repulsive, definitely messy and probably very painful.
How do women do it? Maybe I’m just a wimp. Or maybe not, since quite apart from all the blood and guts involved, you can even die while doing it. (Is it really any wonder that 10 to 15 per cent of women suffer some form of postnatal depression, and that one in a thousand develop puerperal psychosis, given the utter physical trauma attendant on forcing yet another member of the next generation out into this hostile world?)
It has always reminded me of the chestburster scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a sequence specifically designed to prey on male fears, according to critic David McIntee in his Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to the Alien and Predator Films (2005). ‘On one level, it’s about an intriguing alien threat. On one level it’s about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important to the writers and director, it’s about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it’s about this happening to a man.’ He notes how the film plays on men’s fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears.
Similarly, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) taps into themes of tokophobia and fear of fatherhood, while Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) envisions pregnancy and childbirth as a form of Satanic possession.
But birth is where we all come from (unless we’ve been cloned, or are the products of in vitro fertilisation, without the subsequent implantation in a uterus – a far safer and more sensible way of doing things, in my opinion), so there must be nothing to it. (Ducks and runs for cover.) I’m joking, of course.
Any account of giving birth I’ve heard or read makes it sound like it takes place in a low circle of hell. (‘They don’t call it labour for nothing’, etc. ‘Push! Push!’ Adam’s – and, more’s to the point, Eve’s – Curse.) Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Sinead Gleeson and Jessica Traynor have all written eloquently on the vicissitudes of accouchement (some more affirmatively than others), but the prize for most visceral description must go to Shulamith Firestone, who in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1971) wrote that ‘…childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. (Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)’
Always allowing for the possibility that those describing the process are exaggerating for effect in order to elicit kudos, there still has to be a better way of doing the thing – if doing the thing must be done. Indeed, it is the same Firestone who was an early proponent of cyberfeminism, that is the idea that women need technology in order to free themselves from the obligation of reproducing, thus pointing to a future in which individuals are more androgynous and views of the female body are reconstructed. Her arguments have been subsequently developed by Donna Haraway, who in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) sought to challenge the necessity for categorisation of gender, positing that gender constructs should be eliminated as categories for identity.
About the many and various sexual acts I have performed, I can attest to no corresponding squeamishness, or horror of bodily functions, on my part.
Stroller or Buggy?
I also have a morbid fear of the vehicles known variously as Buggies (European English), or Strollers (American English). Can we settle on the more universal and neutral Pushchairs, or the perhaps posher Perambulators? – although which term we employ can create some ambiguity as regards signifier and signified: are we referring to the smaller, fold-up apparatuses where the baby sits facing away from the pusher; or the larger, more solidly built contraptions resembling nothing so much as a Sherman tank going into battle, where the little stranger faces their means of locomotion?
Whatever you care to call them – and in any case it is both I have in mind – I defiantly distance myself from them in the street and in supermarkets, full sure that they have no other purpose or mission than to nip at my heels, or crash into my shins, or crush my toes. Those in charge of them should really be more careful. Perhaps these ‘go-cars’ and ‘prams’ should come with a health warning; or better still, be licensed.
Cyril Connolly famously singled out ‘the pram in the hall’ as one of his Enemies Of Promise (1938), a phrase, along with ‘the tares of domesticity’, that has been seized on by a subsequent generation of feminist criticism as blatantly misogynistic (although maybe not so anti-women as previously thought: vide the reference to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood above). ‘The overarching theme of the book…’, according to that ever-reliable critic Wikipedia, ‘is the search for understanding why Connolly, though he was widely recognised as a leading man of letters and a highly distinguished critic, failed to produce a major work of literature.’ And we think we invented ‘creative non-fiction’? The full quotation from Connelly reads: ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ Me? I don’t even have that excuse.
Bouncy Castle
While we’re on subject of loathsome objects best avoided, here are two words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any prospective parent: bouncy castle. Also, on the positive side, it’s an unalloyed boon that I will never be obliged to read the Harry Potter books, and pretend to like them. For these small blessings, much thanks.
Most young parents of my acquaintance seem to spend their lives merely running a busy creche with someone they used to go out with (or ‘date’, as the Yanks say). More generally, openly declaring oneself an anti-natalist from the outset (out of the closet!) does help to circumvent that tiresome “Where is this relationship going?” discussion, raised at a certain point in most fledgling liaisons – at least by people whose main objective in their amatory affairs is to conduct a round of interviews for potential husbands and fathers (or wives and mothers); while furthermore, in the longer term, contributing to the avoidance of the workmanlike rigours of ‘trying for a baby’ (those daily doses of folic acid!), which can only turn what should be a spontaneous pleasure into a meticulously planned duty roster.
Imagine even having to attend a Parent/Teacher Meeting – as a parent or as a teacher. To listen to your hope for the future be praised or blamed by a jobsworth who probably hasn’t as broad an education or as much life experience as you.
Or to listen to a pushy parent, convinced their little tyke is a genius, and that the fault for any deficiencies the scamp may manifest is to be placed firmly at your door. That’s the difference between school when I was going through it, and school now: back then, parents deferred to teachers, and sat there and took it; nowadays teachers are constantly on trial by parents, and everything their little darlings say is believed. Rate My Teacher? Nah, Rate My Student, more like; or, more’s to the point, Rate That Parent.
Again, I have personal experience of this phenomenon: my mother wouldn’t talk to me for a week after my educators informed her at one such confab that “He’s only using half his ability.” I wonder whose fault that was? The teachers’ or my mother’s? The school’s or my home’s? It certainly wasn’t mine, at that age.
ChildrenofMen
Children of Men
The literary and filmic genre most concerned with human extinction is dystopic science fiction. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men (2006) (based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name, with the addition of the definite article) envisages the world of 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse.
The narrative arc of both book and film is a journey from despair to hope, sponsored by the notion that any such hope depends on the birth of future generations. Otherwise, all we can look forward to is despair, chaos and anarchy.
It is, in many ways, a modern-day nativity story, where the birth of a child is elevated to the status of The Coming Of The Saviour, who will redeem humanity from its many sins and vices. James herself has referred to her book as ‘a Christian fable’.
Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1992), which was in turn based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) makes great issue of fertility as a prerequisite for, or at least an indicator of, humanity: the ability to reproduce makes replicants more human-like, and therefore more sympathetic and relatable.
Thus, if Deckard (whose standing as human/replicant is left ambiguous) has fathered a daughter with Rachael (a replicant), it renders the termination of replicants not only futile, but unethical and murderous. In the novel, the android antagonists can indeed be seen as more human than the human (?) protagonist. They are a mirror held up to human action, contrasted with a culture losing its own humanity (that is, ‘humanity’ taken to mean the positive aspects of humanity).
Klaus Benesch examined Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in connection with Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’. Lacan claims that the formation and reassurance of the self depends on the construction of an Other through imagery, beginning with a double as seen in a mirror. The androids, Benesch argues, perform a doubling function similar to the mirror image of the self, but they do this on a social, not an individual, level.
Therefore, human anxiety about androids expresses uncertainty about human identity and society itself, just as in the original film the administration of an ‘empathy test’, to determine if a character is human or android, produces many false positives. Either the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed, or replicants are pretty good at being human (or, perhaps, better than human).
This perplexity first found an explanation in Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential essay The Uncanny Valley (1970), in which he hypothesised that human response to human-like robots would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as a robot approached, but failed to attain, a life-like appearance, due to subtle imperfections in design. He termed this descent into eeriness ‘the uncanny valley’, and the phrase is now widely used to describe the characteristic dip in emotional response that happens when we encounter an entity that is almost, but not quite, human.
But if human-likeness increased beyond this nearly human point, and came very close to human, the emotional response would revert to being positive. However, the observation led Mori to recommend that robot builders should not attempt to attain the goal of making their creations overly life-like in appearance and motion, but instead aim for a design, ‘which results in a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity. In fact, I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a non-human design.’
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) paints a dire picture of society in 2540, rendered selfish, consumerist and emotionally passive through the (mis)application by a ruling elite of huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology (prefiguring that tabloid terror, ‘test tube babies’) and narco-conditioning.
But what if these grim prognostications about the disappearance of humanity, either literally or metaphorically, could be turned on their head? In fact, they have been. This horrifying dystopia could without too much trouble and just a little finessing be flipped into a much-to-be-aspired-to utopia, as Huxley himself attempted in Island, the 1962 revision of his more famous work.
This exploration of the possibilities opened up by biochemistry and genetic engineering for curing man, the sick animal, of his desires, violence and neuroses, sometime in the distant future, is taken up in more depth by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island (2005). The distant descendants of Daniel have been culled from his DNA, with all the annoyingly rancorous human traits ironed out of the mix. So, we are transported to 2000 years in the future, where Daniel25, like the rest of these ‘neohumans’, passes his days in neutral tranquillity, adding his commentary to his ancestor’s personal history, striving to understand what could have made him so unhappy, while the remnants of the old human race roam in primitive packs outside his secure compound.
It’s a startlingly beautiful planet, Mother Earth. But we are royally fucking Mother Nature up, big time. We don’t deserve it, or her. An analogy can certainly be drawn between the harm humankind has caused to its own environment, and the harm that parents do to their own children. High time we terminated those relationships; or, at the very least, radically recalibrated them.
How do you explain to a child a world in which Donald Trump was the President of the United States of America for four years? And that his cabal of ghouls, grifters and vampires – many of them members of his own brood – held sway? And that seventy million people still voted for him a second time around? Worse, what if that child grows up thinking that state of affairs is somehow normal? Worst, what if s/he grows up into the kind of person who would vote for him or his ilk themselves, despite your best parental efforts at instruction, guidance or influence? That such people are even permitted to exercise the franchise, let alone allowed to breed, is deeply disturbing (because they would seek to curb your voting and reproductive rights). What if you, however inadvertently, breed one of them?
But, irony of ironies: to my father, I would be a failson, in terms of passing on his values and beliefs, the thing he held most dear: his Roman Catholic faith. Devotion to God sorted everything out for him, made sense of his world. God never meant much to me, after a certain age, except for the hassle encountered if you admitted to scepticism regarding his existence.
Donald Trump is a person who could have an infinitive number of pejorative adjectives affixed to his name, but none of them are necessary: everyone already knows what he is; yet many people voted for him regardless, either because they endorse this, or in spite of this. The same is true of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, where 40 per cent of the British electorate will always vote Tory, no matter what! Tell that to the children. Or, given the questionable quality of the main opposition to either Trump or Johnson, try telling them that two-party democracy is somehow a good idea. Perhaps I am just losing it. Maybe I am at the end of my tether.
Have I missed out? Undoubtedly, parenthood is a common human experience I will not share. But I don’t feel particularly bad or bereft about it, especially when I look at the hassles of child-rearing, and the often fractured relationships and tensions between my peers and their offspring (although I will concede that I estimate that this generation is making a better fist of fostering good relations with their children than the previous generation did – a vast generalisation, I know, but something in the air due in some part to less authoritarian parenting styles. I’m thinking here about witnessing a good friend of mine taking a phone call from his thirteen-year-old son, and promising when prompted to send on a copy of Led Zeppelin IV for his boy’s delectation). I read in an interview with poet Michael Longley where he said that having children was the most profound thing he’s ever done, more so than all the poetry. But would I have felt the same way? There is no guarantee.
There is the question, already broached, of who will look after me in my old age? Peasants are supposed to churn out lots of nippers, as the kind of security provided by insurance policies. (Aristos don’t need as many, because they can already rely on their inherited wealth, which will be duly passed down to their heir and the spare, which was all that was necessary and sufficient for them to sire.) But these days, such indemnification is more likely to have relocated to Australia than to be on hand for your decay and demise. They could even predecease you. The idea that your children will be a comfort to you in your old age is at best a cosmic gamble – as is bringing them into the world in the first place. It is fruitless to speculate on whether or not your offspring can or will help to alleviate the indignities and sufferings of your senescence. Such mortifications, and how I manage them, may be something I am only beginning to find out. As I would have had to do anyway, with or without children.
If I had children, would I be writing this? No, and for more than just the obvious reason (that is, that I don’t have children). Odds on I’d be so busy looking after them and preoccupied about their welfare and their future that I wouldn’t have the time, energy or inclination to write at all (just as Sheila Heti speculates). Which leads to a further consideration concerning children as a form of sublimation for personal ambition, as a kind of compensation for lacks and voids and failures in your own life up until you have them. You may believe that they complete you, but is that fair on them? Or on the world? For whom, or for what, do these proud parents think they are doing a favour? The world, or themselves? Whatever their justification, the answer is neither, I suspect.
We were all kids once. Would we really like to go back there?
Maybe it all comes down to Eros and Thanatos. What if the death instinct is stronger than the sex instinct? It always is, in the end. Love doesn’t conquer all. It doesn’t conquer Death. Unless you are talking about what you leave behind, after your own extinction. For many people, for good or ill, that is their children. But there are other things you can leave behind. Even if it is only a form of negative space. I still regard my childlessness as almost unquestionably my greatest achievement. It is part of what I will leave behind. It is my gift to the world. I bequeath to all my unborn children, imagined and unrealised, forever unsullied and unfulfilled, mercifully untainted by human existence, all my Love.
Feature Image: Three daughters of King Lear byGustav Pope
