I have a story for all kinds of weird sleep-related shenanigans. Walking, talking, singing, dancing, fucking, wanking.
One of my earliest memories is of sleep misadventures. Waking in my parents’ bathroom, freezing cold, alone in the blue predawn hue. The long narrow room, icily humid like all 90s Irish lavatories, except filled with a fear I didn’t yet know. No Video Nasty I had seen inappropriately young felt like this. This was real. I was afraid to call for help, early onset male ego: it’s ok to die, just don’t be caught whinging about it.
Some of said issues have been worse than others.
Take sleep paralysis. Stephen Hawkinged to the bed, seeing everything in black and white, entombed in my mind, while in the corner of the ceiling the witch in grey is glued like spiderman, supersonic wailing at me, the dimensions of the wall palpitating somehow bringing her closer to me with every pulse.
As frightening as that was, I don’t count it as full on binge-induced sleep paralysis because it only felt like a twenty minute experience. Everyone else says it feels like hours. Maybe they’re just pussies. Maybe the taste of madness that psychosis gives us chosen ones hardens us up to comparatively mundane horrors of everyday life.
I’ve seen videos of after parties where my legs are more alive to the beat, passed out on the couch, than they ever were in the club earlier in the night before finding their way to this den of street urchins. Oddly, I could gum a 50 bag of Mandy or unwrap 25 dollars of sneachta from a folded single to the back of my skull with ferocious snorting, and sleep like it was a benzo treated suicide Tuesday.
This particular story all started with atypical innocence. Laying down to sleep in San Francisco with Evelin, the lady I shared some nights with during that period of my life.
As off the rails as my drinking had been – and rails being fitting as the joy of blow will knock the fear of drink dependence out of your mind as long as the ocht liathróid will roll, it being a barometer of a weekend’s deviance – I had responsible adulting nailed down that night. It was a rare night of sobriety. I know this because I remember burritoing myself up in the lightly chilled duvet, or comforter, when in Rome. You know the kind where the fabric is so cold it feels slightly damp. I panic set my alarms with one eye open, hanging off the bed, and then rapid fire flipped the pillow to the frosted side, to join my face with it in a deep passionate embrace.
Then I was blinking myself awake. On the toilet. At the end of a shite I didn’t even realise I was having. Boxers around my ankles, pondering whose toilet am I in again? as I wiped. I stood up and pulled my boxers up in one motion – I’m a busy 21st century man – splashed hands with water in the way us men commit to the bare minimum of hygiene when and where we can get away with it. I stepped out into the hall, sleep falling out of my eyes, where an angry man, speaking American in an angrier Arabic twang demanded:
’Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing in my house??’
‘Relax”, I said, speeding out the door of what I assume was his home, ‘I was just taking a shit.’
On the street I thought, I don’t know that man, where I am, or what I’m doing on the street in my boxers. A much deeper cool washed over me, with no pleasantry of the pillow, and I started to run. Internally crying, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I run as fast as my drug induced malnourished legs will take me. I jump over broken glass, I dodge a traffic cone used as near always for construction site safety purposes, me the real hazzard, I use a tree to steady my panicked pacing speed wobbles. I run like Forest Gump, only signs could stop me:
Cross street?
CROSS STREET. Quickly calculate where I am.
THE MISSION
I slept in Evelin’s ‘til now! Where does she live again? But where is her house? Oh. The opposite direction.
The mission district was, and maybe still is, one of the greater parts of San Francisco. Historically it was a Latina district. I say Latina as I favour Latina porn. I do not like Latino porn, if he’s not fat enough to be a Mexican wrestler, he’s so ludicrously over-chiselled to be an MMA, but not ultimate fighter. On the day labour sites, us Micks used to affectionately joke
‘What’s the difference between a Mexican American, and a gay American? About 4 corona and lime’ . To which my favoured brothers in back breaking labour would reply
‘How many potatoes does it take to kill a Paddy? None.’
And if not too low on brain cells from the previous night, we’d chase back:
‘ANDELE ANDELE ARRIBA’
My reason for staying there (other than the party reputation of the place) was that I didn’t want to spend too much time with my ancestral brethren. It would take from the traveling experience: prevent the expansion of my mind, the myriad cultural influences, the chance of having sex with women that weren’t Irish. Within a fortnight I was on a middle name basis with all the bog folk in the region who’d escaped the fields.
I kept running. The tree looks and lunges for me more menacingly, the traffic cone is judgmental this time, the broken glass wants to kill me, the mirrored tracks of classic arcade racers were always more sinister.
Back past angry troll’s dwelling, I ran, flop-sweating like I had been bingeing hard– something I suddenly and seriously felt I needed. The harbinger pre-dawn fiasco started earlier this time than at 5 years of age. It was the depth of night, black, yet. Fewer homeless people frequented this street, which I found strange, as its darkness and quiet would make a better place to rest your hat, if they were fortunate enough to own one. The residential street was poorly lit compared to the main street and its tributaries, streets of odd industries, bars, churches, dollar stores, 24 hour pie, blended into a shake. Or those hotdog stands that appear out of nowhere, and the between-the-lines dealers that pop up at the perfect times, both like other realm folklore magical traders.
Evelin’s place was one of those three story bay windowed houses repurposed into naff flats. They seemed so charming at first. Maybe my labouring jobs in the swankier homes spoiled them, where afterwards I went home to shit in one wardrobe and wash my hands in another.
When I got to her house there was a long thin streak of excrement running down the low wall before the gate. Not uncommon in cities with large numbers of intravenous drug users, or a crack epidemic as the case was in San Francisco, but I would put my life on it being mine.
I was a shit altogether. I was a junkie, but the kind living in a house with a bed and clean dishes, and my drugs went up my nose and down my trap or sometimes absorbed through the soft defenceless skin of my cavities.
Thank the lord, sleepwalking me left the door ajar. I raced up the stairs to Evelin’s room. All was ok in there, my clothes still laid out on the floordrobe. But I was terrified. The room, at least how I was seeing it, awash blue like the onset of a stress-induced psychotic break. The illumination reminiscent of my parents’ bathroom, the sun rises and falls so much faster than the west of Ireland. I made the decision to dress and go home to attempt sleep, preparing myself for all the fears and endless scenarios that kept me awake at night. Not before having another cautionary wipe though, I’m not an animal.
I texted Evelin to say I had to go home to take my upset stomach medication, which was true. I wasn’t lying, only leaving out information, just like when I tell a chosen few people this story I leave out the part about definitely shitting on a wall outside this good lady’s house.
Walking, yet again, by the angry Arab man’s house, who deserved to be fucking furious, I threw up my hood and saw him speaking to the cops. Such an American image: furious man on his stoop, blue and red cycling flashes. Me on the verge of feeling the brunt of the militarized police force’s personal PTSD vent. Even if you’re white, you can’t read the news and not fear the American po po five-o yo. It’s hardly Spain, but I have enough Irish mates who have received beatings to found that fear, and I fucking deserved it.
The greatest of all walks of shame in my life, and I’ve hardly walked any other way. Strolling home into the horizon of sun rise was of no pride that day, I shared the city streets with no one but sleeping homeless people. Hotdog foil dusted the streets, excess mustard and long since sweated onions with charred edges. The city -or at least the Mission seemed in that moment more dangerous to me than it ever had done before. Fortunately, I was too empty to actually shit myself. Utterly horrific wretches brought on by self-contempt were yet to greet me at home after my adventure.
I don’t think that was any sign of the drinking problem that was flowering like an invasive weed at that stage in my life, I had a sensible head laid down on the bed that night, but it sure as shit scared the shite out of my sleep walking problem.
When the Federal Convention of 1878 had completed its work on the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin described its result as, “A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it”.
Not much later, John Philpot Curran gave a similar warning, now usually summarised as “Vigilance is the price of liberty”.
Each was saying that a written Constitution describes how a country should be governed, but does not promise that it will be. If we want to keep the system we have chosen, we must be vigilant. A single departure may not seem very significant, but if we ignore it we may realise too late that it was a step in undermining our system of government. It is not enough for political leaders to be alert. In a democracy we are all political leaders, our system of government and the freedoms it promises belong to us, and if we want to keep them we must be vigilant to protect them.
This country has a democratic Constitution. Article 5 declares that it is to be a democratic state, and other Articles, read together, deliver on that promise. The Dáil is to be the dominant power in the Oireachtas. Elections for it must be held at regular intervals, so that we can dismiss political leaders who do not serve us as we wish. Elections must be by single transferable vote. The “sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State” is vested in the Oireachtas, the only limit being that its laws may not be “repugnant to the Constitution”. Laws are made in public, at sittings the public can attend and the media can report.
That our only lawmakers are those the People choose is the foundation of our democracy, as of every representative democracy. By adopting a Constitution that said that the only people who could shape the country by making law were those we had elected, we gave ourselves a democracy in 1937 – if we could keep it.
Leinster House the meeting place of Dáil Eireann.
Have we? Partly seems to be the best answer. The Oireachtas is no longer our sole and exclusive lawmaker. In the 1960s Irish judges began to adopt what is called “judicial activism”, the view that judges should play an active role in shaping the law. In 1965 the High Court advanced that view in the Gladys Ryan case. The Oireachtas had decided that it would be good for our dental health if piped drinking water contained a tiny proportion of fluoride, and enacted the Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act, 1960, under which piped drinking water was and is fluoridated. Mrs Ryan complained that this meant she and her children had to drink contaminated water, and took High Court proceedings to have the Act annulled. After a hearing lasting many months Judge John Kenny decided she had not proved that fluoridated water was injurious to health and dismissed her claim. But he made it clear that if he had formed a different view he would have annulled the Act.
That the case went to hearing is surprising. As we noted above, our Constitution vests in the Oireachtas the “sole and exclusive power of making law for the State”. Those words seem to mean that if a citizen thought an Act was defective her only resource would be to campaign to have the Oireachtas repeal or amend it. If another authority within the State could examine the reasons that led the Oireachtas to pass the law, disagree with them and annul the legislation, the power of the Oireachtas to make law would not be “sole and exclusive”. Those words seem to mean that the judge should not have heard the claim, because he had no authority to interfere with legislation that was consistent with the text of the Constitution. The Attorney General seems not to have made that argument. If so, he effectively abandoned the Constitutional authority of the Oireachtas as our sole and exclusive lawmaker. It seems never since to have been asserted in any Court.
The Judgment was a blow to the authority of the Oireachtas in another way. The effect of Judge Kenny’s decision was: “The Constitution includes a list of rights it guarantees to citizens, and the list is clearly not intended to be complete. Other rights may be added. The Oireachtas can add them. So can judges. A judge of the High Court or Supreme Court may decide to recognise a right that a citizen claims but the Constitution does not mention and deem that right to be part of the Constitution, as though it had been included in the document the People adopted in 1937. An Act of the Oireachtas or a Section of an Act that is incompatible with a right a judge has decided to recognise will be annulled as if it were repugnant to the Constitution, even though it is not”. (Rights so identified later came to be called “unenumerated rights, and we will use that term, for simplicity.)
The Ryan decision changed how we are governed, in three ways. First, judges could examine why the Oireachtas had passed legislation and interfere if they disagreed with its reasons. Secondly, the Oireachtas’ authority to make laws was no longer sole and exclusive, because judges might decide to recognise and enforce an “unenumerated right”. Thirdly, such a decision by a judge would override legislation enacted by the Oireachtas. That may seem to be a transfer of power from one organ of State to another, but it was an erosion of our democracy, because representative democracy depends on laws being made by those we have elected and by nobody else. Authorising people we had not elected and could not get rid of to override decisions of those we had elected was and is inconsistent with our claim to be a democratic state.
The Ryan decision also undermined our authority in a less obvious way. Our Constitution provides that only we, the People, may amend it, but when judges import “unenumerated rights” into it they in effect amend it. Our authority to do so is no longer sole and exclusive.
Separation of Powers.
Finally, it effectively changes the meaning of “separation of powers” and “separation of functions”. These used to mean that each of the three organs of government, the legislative, executive and judicial, had its separate function in which neither of the others should interfere. It now seems to mean only that the legislature and executive may not interfere in the judicial function.
There was no protest. We did not show vigilance in defence of our freedom.
Judges have invoked the “doctrine of unenumerated rights” (a “doctrine” is more impressive than a “theory”) many times since 1965. Unlike legislators, judges deal only with issues others bring before them, so they produce new “doctrines” or “rights” only if litigation gives them the opportunity. However, a substantial number of unenumerated rights have been established and a substantial amount of legislation annulled in the last thirty-six years. For example:
Although all of the rights the Constitution lists except Habeas Corpus are promised only to citizens, that is only to people who, as it says, owe loyalty to the Nation and fidelity to the State, the Supreme Court decided to grant an “unenumerated right” to a non-citizen. (V.H. v. Minister for Justice Supreme Court No 31 & 56/2016)
It forbade the Dáil to conduct an inquiry into matters of public concern that might call for legislative intervention. (Maguire and others Seán Ardagh and others [2001] No. 329 JR; S.C. Nos. 324, 326, 333 and 334 of 2001] – the “Abbeylara case”.)
On dubious grounds it invalidated legislation designed to protect young girls from sexual exploitation. C. v. Ireland & ors [2006] IESC 33
It refused to hear a Habeas Corpus claim by a citizen who claimed to be unlawfully imprisoned, although the Constitution promises that right to anyone to making such a claim. (Edward Ryan v. Governor of Midland Prison [2014] IEHC 338)
In a puzzling decision, it held that a police officer who is asked to approve a search warrant must act “judicially”, and that an officer involved in the relevant investigation cannot do so. The essence of us acting judicially is hearing both sides before reaching a conclusion. That does not seem to be what the Court meant, but it did not explain what it did mean. (Damache V. DPP {2012] IESC 11
Although tradition and the Constitution both say that elected legislators in the Dáil or Seanad are to be free to perform their duties without judicial oversight, the Supreme Court decided that someone who claimed to have been injured by what had been said to her in a Dáil committee could pursue a claim. Kerins v. McGuinness & Ors. [2019] IESC 110
One Supreme Court judge, Judge O’Donnell, complained in a written Judgment of the quality of legislation, in language reminiscent of an irritated employer complaining about incompetent subordinates. (Clarke O’Gorman [2014] IESC 72)
Each of these decisions further undermined the Oireachtas, and, through the Oireachtas, the Irish People’s power to shape the country we live in. Two of them, N.V.H. and Edward Ryan, are incompatible with the text of the Constitution. The list shows how much of our lives, which we agreed in 1937 should be governed by our elected legislators are now subject to the Court’s intervention – or interference. Again we have not shown vigilance.
Nor did those we elected to represent us. On the contrary, they have recently enacted the Judicial Council Act, which, after bringing the Council into existence, invited it to prepare “Guidelines” for compensation to be paid to successful plaintiffs in personal injury claims.
Superficially, that may have seemed rational. Individual judges decide what money should be paid as compensation for injury, so why should not judges as a group agree Guidelines to be applied, or at least consulted, in all cases? The answer is simple. Deciding what compensation should be paid to an injured plaintiff is administering justice, which is the role of judges. Guidelines to be consulted in all cases have the effect of law, even if they are given another name. Judges have no role in making law. Only the Oireachtas has. So in passing the Act the Oireachtas declined to perform a function that the Constitution imposes on it, and delegated it to a body that has no authority to perform it. This also meant that questions that elected parliamentarians should have teased out will not get the attention they need. Here are some examples. Readers may think of others.
Personal injuries actions operate on an assumption that pain, past present and prospective, can be compensated for by money, and only by money. Is that assumption valid?
If it is, is it right to assume that the extent of the pain, not the circumstances of the sufferer, determines the amount of compensation? €10,000 might seem a life-saver for a young couple struggling with high rent or mortgage and household bills, but be next to useless to a retired person living on an adequate pension.
Our system protects a wrong-doer from having to address and acknowledge the consequences of his or her wrong-doing, because insurance companies forbid any contact between their insured and his or her victim. Does that serve us well? Would we drive more carefully if we knew we would have to confront personally the consequences of any carelessness?
The criminal court of justice, Dublin. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices
Most Superior Court judges nowadays are “Judicial activists” as described above. The concept is obviously attractive to judges and perhaps to others who believe trained intellects shape a society better than “ordinary people” could. But it is incompatible with democracy. That the Oireachtas invited a Council of judges to make law and the judges agreed tells us how far this country has travelled from the democratic ideals set out in our Constitution. Incidentally, the Guidelines emerged only after judges had circulated among themselves documents that they discussed in private, and that we did not get to see. With limited exceptions, our Constitution requires the Oireachtas and the judges to do their work in public, but, understandably, it did not consider how judges should do the work of the Oireachtas.
This article is critical of judicial decisions, and might seem to be hostile to our judiciary. Not so. Most of our judges are admirable men and women, with a deep understanding of the law and a strong commitment to justice. The purpose of each decision mentioned above (except the refusal of Habeas Corpus, which still seems incomprehensible) was to do justice. For a dedicated judge to deny someone justice, because our legal structure does not permit it must be disagreeable, almost like a physician refusing treatment to someone who needs it. Most judicial decisions were well motivated and most were beneficial to the community.
So, the argument that our precious democracy has been and is being eroded by decisions of judges does not mean we should denounce them. It would be wiser to suggest to them, politely, that our country would be better served if they respected the authority of our legislature more than they do at present, recognising that even a little judicial activism risks putting the judiciary in competition with the legislature and that carried to extremes it is inconsistent with democracy. If judges came to accept that, we can be sure they would act to address the problem. They are used to examining and evaluating evidence and arguments, and if the arguments stand up and are supported by the evidence, we should expect our judges to accept them, consider what they need to do to remedy the situation, and do it. If they accept that an imbalance has grown up between our organs of government that threatens our democracy, we can be confident that change will follow.
But if they do not, we should remember what Franklin and Curran taught us.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blase Pascal
While researching my new book Feminism Backwards (Mercier Press, Cork, 2020) long held worries about the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland, particularly its role in relation to women, really snapped into focus for me.
At this moment, as a nation, we are in shock at the horrors pouring into the public discourse about what went on in Mother and Baby Homes. But just step back a minute to consider where this viciousness and misogyny came from.
Most of us are probably aware that the Catholic Church’s hatred of women has a long tail: the first bad girl being of course Eve, who ate the apple, and then persuaded Adam to take a nibble, and whizz-bang-wallop everything went to hell. Since time immemorial, as far as the Church ‘Fathers’ have been concerned, women are the ‘root of all evil.’
The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel the Elder, c. 1615.
And, just as centuries of antisemitism reached its apogee in the Holocaust, so centuries of Catholic anti-woman propaganda culminated in the ‘Burning Times’, the Inquisition, and the burning alive of 80,000 women, some believe many more, as ‘witches.’
While the Inquisition didn’t reach here, we got the Great Famine (1845-51) instead. Things were appalling for almost everybody under centuries of British occupation, but after the Famine life suddenly became considerably worse for Irish women. Before this the Catholic Church was not all-powerful: there were few churches, and priests had to be sent to France to study, while seminaries and convents were almost non-existent.
Then the British government made a devilishly clever intervention: trebling its annual subvention to Maynooth University so that from then on the teaching of priests would be done at home, far from revolutionary ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité! With the terrible outcomes of the Famine scarring Irish society indefinitely their objective was achieved more fully than they could have imagined.
With the last remnants of a clan-based, more matriarchal Gaelic culture destroyed, the big farmers – those who collected rents for landlords – along with the ‘gombeen men’ who extended credit, would decide, no matter what the cost to their sons and daughters, that the family farm should never be subdivided. Ever. These early capitalists suddenly found common cause with the freshly-funded zealots of Maynooth.
Late marriage or no marriage. Permanent Celibacy. Emigration. A convent or a mad house – take your pick young lady.
Abandoned cottage, County Sligo.
Late Nineteenth Century Catholicism
The newly funded, and energised Catholic Church, with their big farmer foot soldiers – only big farmers could afford to send their sons to Maynooth, or their daughters to a newly opened convent – filled the power vacuum left by the post-Famine societal collapse.
Repression became the order of the day.
How was it possible that normal people could be made to accept it? As Goretti Horgan writes in her paper: ‘Changing Women’s Lives in Ireland’: ‘normal life after the Famine was impossible.’ Millions had died horrible deaths, hundreds of thousands had emigrated in ‘coffin ships’, the template for survivors of a repressed, patriarchal, misogynistic, conservative, anti-sex and anti-woman Ireland had been laid, and the Virgin Mary, a goddess stripped of sex, agency and colour, was to be the icon to which all Irish women were to henceforth aspire. ‘Passive, virginal, pious, humble, with an unlimited capacity to endure suffering’, as Tom Inglis put it in ‘Origins and legacies of Irish prudery: Sexuality and social control in modern Ireland.’
The Church gained further power when Charles Stewart Parnell promised them control of education and health in return for support in the national struggle. And after the 1916 Easter Rising, when many of the poets and revolutionaries had been shot and thrown into pits of lime by our old friends the British, once again the Church and the gombeen men slithered into the power vacuum, establishing what Sean O’Faolain famously described as their ‘dreary Eden’.
As Peter Lennon says in his wonderful 1967 film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ – which has still not been shown on RTE! – we’d survived seven hundred years of British occupation only to sink under the weight of our new (deeply conservative) leaders, and the Catholic clergy. Or as Sean O’Faolain put it: ‘We became a society of (browbeaten) urbanised peasants, without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWY8hkF3yWk
Bloody hell.
It seems probable that Éamon de Valera, ‘the father of the nation’, suffered a nervous breakdown during fighting in 1916 and must surely have suffered from PTSD and Survivor Guilt, having been the only signatory of the Proclamation to avoid being shot and thrown into a lime pit thanks to his American passport.
Once in power after 1932 he got joined forces with the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid – the J.Edgar Hoover of Irish society – a prelate with spies everywhere; a sexually repressed celibate, obsessed with women’s sexuality . The imprint of these two damaged men over the Irish Constitution of 1937 is clear.
John Charles McQuaid and Eamon de Valera, December 1940.
The Constitution of 1937 is a document very different from the wonderful Proclamation of 1916. Misogyny, sexual repression, and a viciously anti woman theocracy was set in legal stone, and over the following decades Ireland slowly sank into economic, physical and psychological stagnation, characterised by hypocrisy and widespread mean-spiritedness – if I’m not having a good time then sure as hell you can’t either; with sex the only real sin.
The Church, with its supposedly celibate priests, brothers and nuns had set up a dictatorship; and the State backed them all the way.
The terrible ‘architecture of containment’ – eerily similar to the brutal Workhouses set up by the British complete with terrible food, contempt for inmates and mass graves – grew like a cancer over the whole country. Mother and Baby Homes. Industrial Schools. ‘Orphanages’. Magdalene Laundries. Lunatic Asylums. The Church had control over, and benefited financially, from them all.
By the 1950’s Ireland, proportionately, had more people incarcerated in such institutions than the Soviet Union.
Of course the middle classes were affected by the general repression, ferociously implemented by the Church – our very own Taliban – but the real horror and damage fell on the working classes, and the rural poor.
Throughout most of the history of the State Irish Catholicism reinforced a social order in which the working class were asked to count their blessings rather than their wages while ‘fallen’ women and their progeny were treated with indifference and crueltyhttps://t.co/8MqMIs0VQO
There was inter-generational incarceration. Children snatched by the ‘Cruelty Man’ were dumped into Orphanages, from there graduating to Industrial schools, the girls going on into Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene laundries and, if they dared speak out or speak up, into the nearest lunatic asylum. All of the institutions were abusive. Once inside escape was virtually impossible.
The worst of all the institutions were the ‘Mother and Baby Homes’. The most vulnerable of all: mostly teenage mothers, very often rape victims, and their ‘illegitimate’ babies were hit hardest. Having a baby ‘outside wedlock’ was never a crime, at least on the statute books. but an all-powerful Church punished ‘offenders’ with torture. The damage usually lasted a lifetime, and the place of incarceration was a charnal house, while the State looked the other way.
The hideous farce was not lost on everyone that all of this took place in a country where you couldn’t even buy a bloody condom, where the priests said ‘life’ was too precious to put on one, that contraception was against God’s will.
After five years work, with an €11 million euros tab for the taxpayer to pick up, breath was bated.
The government held a webinar for a handful of surviving mothers. The Taoiseach issued a rote apology. Survivors, in confusion, begged for time. They hadn’t even received the Report yet, so how could they comment? The government told them to download it. Download and print a document running into thousands of pages? For many of the women the height of technology at their disposal was a smart phone.
Within hours, social media had exploded with shock and dismay. The historian Catherine Corless, whose tireless work had uncovered the unlawful deaths of 796 babies, and toddlers, stacked and wrapped in rags in old septic tanks once belonging to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, and forced the government into commissioning this Report, looked deflated and exhausted. ‘It’s a whitewash.’ she said on the evening news.
Catherine Corless says feedback from survivors says the are very 'disappointed', today.
The mothers, the survivors, who’d waited so patiently for their stories to be finally taken seriously, to be apologised to for the horrors they had been through in the Homes, were gutted at the Report’s conclusions, the choicer of the conclusions were: there was no abuse; there were no forced adoptions.
The girls were doing the same work they would have been doing if they were at home. There was no coercion for girls to enter these places. They were refuges, harsh refuges yes, but refuges all the same. And choicest of all: Society, and the men who fathered these children, must take blame. Everyone in the whole country must take blame.
If everyone’s to blame, no one is to blame, right?
Liveline went into meltdown. Could it really be, after everything that was said and explained and poured over, that this whitewash was the best they could come up with? Joe Duffy often sounded as if he might break down himself. Could it really be that this whitewash was the best they could come up with?
Survivors
I spoke to some survivors.
Ann O’Gorman described being taken pregnant and aged seventeen into Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork. Her head was shaved, her clothes appropriated, and her name was taken. She remembers ‘a terrible place of sadness, mothers crying, babies crying.’ The girls worked all day, every day, scrubbing and cleaning on their hands and knees. Cutting the nuns’ precious lawns with hand scissors. Every girl lived in fear behind twelve-foot high walls, forbidden to talk to each other, forbidden to make friends. Forbidden to even think of leaving. If any girl did so the Gardaí would pick them up and haul them back again.
When the time came for Ann to give birth she was brought into a bare room and put on a table, with one nun in charge. She didn’t even know where the baby would ‘come out of’. She was terrified. The labour was long, and very difficult. There was no pain relief. Not so much as an aspirin. When her baby was finally born she knew there was something wrong: the nun turned her back and was ‘working on the baby.’ The seventy-three-year-old nurse, asleep upstairs, was sent for. She ripped Ann’s afterbirth out so savagely that Ann passed out for two days. When she awoke, still haemorrhaging, a nun said, ‘You have an angel in heaven’. Ann ran to the window and saw two men, one carrying an orange box, the other a shovel. Were they off to bury her baby?
Ann cried and cried and cried.
For fifty-two-years she begged and pleaded and wept beseeching the nuns to give her information about her baby. She had called her Evelyn. Could she see a birth certificate? Could she see a death certificate? Could she be told where little Evelyn was buried?
The nuns slammed the door in her face. They denied Evelyn had even been born.
Two years ago with the help of another survivor, Catherine Coffey O’Brien, Ann finally got a death certificate for her baby. She and other survivors once again begged the nuns to tell them where their babies were buried.
It turns out there are nine hundred missing babies in Bessborough, though as Ann says, ‘they weren’t buried, they were just thrown in a field.’
Surely the Commission would help? For Ann, for all these mothers, finding their dead babies was all they cared about.
The Commission said the nuns couldn’t remember.
And that was that.
Ann is not looking for redress. She is not even looking for heads on plates (I know I certainly would be), she just wants to know where her baby is buried so she can mark the spot, put in a wildflower garden and a bench so that all the mothers grieving so dreadfully for so many years for their disappeared babes can have somewhere nice to sit. To heal.
I spoke to Sheila. When her baby, a little mixed race boy, was born the nun held him up and asked: ‘What is this?’ When he was being Christened the priest said her father’s offering wasn’t sufficient and raped her in the sacristy.
She said for the nuns it was always all about money. Every week the nuns would take the women in a van down to the social welfare office to sign on. Then the nuns kept the money. The nuns also got money for each mother, and for each baby, from the government. They also got money from the families. They got more money for the rosaries and baby clothes the mothers were forced to make. And they got lots and lots of money when the babies were adopted. Sometimes they kept on getting money for a baby who’d died, or been adopted, by ‘forgetting’ to tell the authorities.
The girls came out of the homes broken-hearted. Empty. You couldn’t speak about it to anyone. You were just dirt.
As for having a choice, Sheila laughs bitterly, We had nothing. None of the girls had anything. The priest would go to the hospital and make sure you wouldn’t be allowed in. He’d go to the baby’s father and tell them to avoid having anything to do with you: it would ‘spoil their chances’ in the future, as for a landlord letting you in pregnant, or with a baby, are you joking me? There was nowhere to go. There was no choice. Nothing. You were blacklisted. They made sure of that.
Sheila says she’ll never forgive the nuns. Ever.
Catholic Emancipation Centenary procession from the Phoenix Park, 1929
Torture and Exploitation
Other Survivors filled the airwaves screaming their outrage over what has been done to them. And now over what is being done again by this whitewash.
Of course there was torture! Of course there was exploitation. Of course there was abuse on a massive scale. Of course the mothers were half-starved and many of the babies starved to death. Of course there were ‘dying rooms’ where babies were left to die. Of course there was brutality, what else do you call giving birth on a table with a nun screaming at you?
“You weren’t shouting and roaring like that when you were having sex were you?”
Of course it was inhuman to labour without so much as an aspirin, with you and your baby butchered in the process by nuns who had no training in midwifery, and zero interest in making your labour and little babe’s passage into the world any easier, au contraire, your labour was in return for your sins; your little babe was the result of sin; if your baby died, or you died, what of it? Both of you were contaminated, you were nothing, you were filth and nobody wanted you. Nobody.
Of course there were forced adoptions. What else do you call a child ripped out of a mother’s arms? What else do you call a mother shown the door, her little one kept back so it could be sold: sometimes for thousands of dollars to returning WWII American GI’s; to ‘good Catholic families’, and/or whoever else fancied a baby? Passports, birth certs, names, all handily manufactured by the powers that be.
The nuns put advertisements in the Lost & Found offering babies, as if they were puppies.
Of course there was abuse on a massive scale. What else do you call the discovery of seven-hundred-and-ninety-six little bodies wrapped in rags and ‘stacked like Cidona bottles’ in old septic tanks in Tuam? What else do you call the ‘burials’ of nine hundred babies in the field in Bessborough? What else do you call death certificates that showed babies died of heart failure, malnutrition, ‘choking on porridge’, rickets?
And of course the government, successive governments, knew. One infamous inspection in 1944 described a room crammed with babies, ‘emaciated and not thriving’, aged between three weeks and thirteen months there were ‘fragile, pot bellied and emaciated.’ Another doctor lifted nappies to find them ‘crawling with maggots’.
For decade after decade the government looked the other way.
Now many survivors believe the Commission is compounding that dereliction.
What happened was, and is, the Church the State’s responsibility. They were the people in power.
Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)
It Can’t Be Goodbye
After a week of agony for the mothers, the Commission responded to the flood of desperate queries with a message to the effect that their job was done, and that they were shutting up shop. Goodbye.
Except it can’t be goodbye.
The government, the Church and the Commission in refusing to engage, and in trying to spread the blame so widely that no one is really to blame, are compounding an already ghastly wound. It’s a bit like what happened when the first little bones were discovered in Tuam: the local priest came in, threw a bit of holy water around and said a prayer, then the government came in and dumped a load of concrete on their graves. It might have seemed like a clever solution in the 1970’s. This time round it just won’t wash. It shouldn’t wash.
This time round the Catholic Church needs to be put in the dock.
All of their assets, currently handily concealed under ‘charitable’ status must be revealed, their ‘charitable’ status removed. Now, and forever.
All of their financial entanglements with our schools, hospitals, day care centres, mental health facilities – everything – must be revealed.
They must be forced to pay the remainder (74%) of the redress they slithered out of previously, and pay in full, proper and generous redress to the mothers and babies, the families, they tortured in their terrible ‘Homes’.
Not that it’s going to be easy. Last weekend the ‘Primate’ of all Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin – sounding spookily like Daniel O’Donnell – said he didn’t wish the Church to be ‘scapegoated’ for what happened.
Scapegoated? Really?
A growing number of people believe the Church should be criminally prosecuted for what happened. They orchestrated this terrible hate against women. They kept at it and at it and at it, until the whole country was distorted and weird. They kept at it until their coffers were bulging and when finally, FINALLY, the State was forced by the Women’s Movement to bring a pittance in for ‘unmarried mothers’ and terrified young girls found they could manage, they could keep their babies, and didn’t need the terrible ‘Homes’ anymore, the nuns said; “Grand so”, sold the properties for millions and pocketed the cash. Same as they’ve always done. Just like other dictatorships drunk on power, hypocrisy and an inflated sense of their own importance have done.
This time it has to change. This time we, as a society, and the government in our name, has to stand up to the Church.
So many of the survivors who’ve spoken out in the last week say the one good thing this time around is that society is listening to them. That this time around society is turning the nuns’ and the Church’s weapon, used so viciously against all those terrified young mothers, for so long, against them: NOBODY WANTS YOU. Nobody.
We’ve had so many reports, so many television programmes, so many books, radio documentaries, films, plays. We’ve had the Ferns Report, the Ryan Report, the Murphy Report, the McCoy Report, and now this Report. All of them documenting in vivid and horrific detail the violent abuse – sexual, physical and psychological – by the religious of the Catholic Church. Their victims? Irish babies, Irish children, Irish teenagers, Irish mothers.
The government Reports take years and cost millions in taxpayers money. The Church says sorry. The government says sorry. A pathetic redress scheme is put in place mostly for the benefit of lawyers, and which taxpayers mostly finance. Criminal convictions for criminal behaviour by priests? By nuns? The stumping up of millions by the Catholic Church? You must be joking.
We’ve come so far in liberating ourselves in Ireland. We have a young, educated, and brilliant population absolutely aghast at what has happened. It is time to bring the whole horrible mess out into the light of day. It is past time to separate the Church from the State. It is time to grow up, and face the Church down.
It is what we, as a society, what the mothers and survivors, desperately need.
This time we must do it properly. For once, and for all.
Featured image: A shrine, with an image of the Virgin Mary, is seen in the corner of an enclosed area on part of the site of the former mother-and-baby home run by the Bon Secours nuns, where the remains of an unknown number of babies and toddlers were found buried, in Tuam, Co. Galway, March 7, 2017. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls
Yeah, been in a funk. These last few weeks. Couple of things contributed to it. But an overarching feeling is one of restlessness. My worst fears were realized when I moved back to the suburbs. Always associated my youth with a debilitating depression. Growing up here. Feeling so different.
For much of my life I dealt with depression. Finding things that interested me, with which I then filled my days. Found a job I loved and overworked. Took pride in my resilience. Stamina. Charting how productive I was. Seemed to stave off the sadness. Both from the business itself, and seeing myself get so much done.
I’ve infinite time on my hands now. Had hoped the Spanish tutorials and woodworking would pique my interest. Maybe take over. Didn’t realize how much of my identity is comprised of being like this. Type-A personality. Working myself to death. Raised by people who honored above all, the work ethic. Bootstrap economics. Wasn’t prepared for the fact that I’d struggle with a sense of worthiness. When unemployed. And underpaid. The rational me knows better. But at my core I wonder. What will develop. From this radical new chapter.
Integrating shadow work on family issues is deceptive. And exhausting. Feeling a bit stuck at times. So, all apologies for not showing up. At least not in the ways I usually do. Trust some good will come from this. But man, does it suck.
On the plus side, at Christmas I was reminded just how much I enjoy wrapping presents. So, there’s that. And also this amazing autumnal light. To help me hang in there. With grace. And patience. In solidarity.
Dervla Murphy’s father was one of Pádraig Pearse’s patriots. Schooled in St Enda’s, aged eighteen he was incarcerated in an English prison for three years, ‘sewing sacks for the post office, wretchedly fed and crawling with lice’, as she wrote in her autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels. The Murphys were anti-Treaty Republicans. Every one of the family was jailed ar son na cúise.
Her mother’s family the Dowlings, on the other hand, were terribly respectable, and wealthy, until her mother’s father, a drinker, fell into the Royal Canal and died. His wife, Jeff, happened to be passing when his corpse was lifted out. Maybe as a result of this trauma, Dervla’s grandmother Jeff retained ‘a tight-lipped aversion to pleasure, however innocent.’
But at the home of Dervla’s father’s people, in Charleston Avenue, Rathmines, ‘there was poverty too, but it was happy-go-lucky rather than gloomy and self-pitying,’ Dervla wrote.
When Feargus Murphy and Kathleen Dowling married they immediately left Dublin for Lismore, a remote and beautiful tiny town in the Blackwater Valley of Waterford. Feargus had been appointed county librarian, and immediately settled in to create literary centres out of country libraries. He founded Ireland’s first mobile library with the help of Kitty – the couple sometimes sleeping in the library van as they toured the county.
Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford.
Dervla was born in 1931. By the age of two, her twenty-six-year-old mother had been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. After travelling to England, Italy and Czechoslovakia in search of a cure she returned to Lismore, a hopeless cripple whom doctors advised to avoid having any more children.
The family loved and cosseted their one fierce chick. Dervla spent time in Dublin with her mother’s people, the enduringly Unionist Dowlings, and with her beloved paternal grandparents and cousins in Rathmines. There she roamed a house filled with Pappa Murphy’s books and her grandmother’s endless bridge games. Pappa had been on hunger strike in England for six weeks at the age of forty-eight, dragging his health down, and Granny had also been jailed.
In Lismore, Dervla grew up with a healthy level of wilfulness. Among her friends were the neighbouring Ryans, a conservative family. She spent as much time in their home as in her own; their son Mark, an intellectual priest, became a second father to her.
At home, she was raised on her mother’s preferred diet for her only child of raw beef, raw liver, raw vegetables and brown bread, with four pints of milk a day, with no place for tea or coffee let alone fizzy drinks. Cooking could be problematic: at one stage Dervla and her father made dinners on an improvised electric cooker which he had repaired; they wore wellington boots to prevent fatal shocks!
For her tenth birthday received a a secondhand atlas from her Pappa, and a second hand bicycle from her parents. This combination brought the realisation one day as she cycled up a favourite hill near Lismore that she could actually get to India if she simply kept pedalling.
At twelve she was supposed to enrol in St Angela’s Ursuline College in Waterford – her aunt Kathleen wrote to her enthusiastically from Mountjoy Prison promising she’d love it – but on account of the circumstances of her mother’s illness and perhaps also the meagre pay of librarians in the new Irish State, this was not possible until 1944, when she was thirteen.
Dervla loved the school and thrived there, but by the following year a crisis had developed in Lismore. A series of housekeepers had nursed her mother and kept the ragged home together. But this situation could not endure, leading to a conference with her parents where three options were laid before her: Dervla could leave school and nurse her mother; she and her mother could go to live with relatives in Dublin where it would be easier to find help and Dervla could attend another school; or Dervla could return to school in Waterford and her parents could somehow soldier on.
The decision was left to the fourteen-year-old Dervla: ‘We had just finished dinner and I saw my father’s hand shaking as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips,’ she remembered. Of course she chose to leave school and look after her mother.
The Murphys in Dublin were incandescent at the decision. A cataclysmic row erupted leaving the family at permanent loggerheads. ‘As a result of our tribal warfare I never saw Pappa again,’ she wrote. A period of love and funniness had come to a sudden end.
Dervla became her mother’s full-time carer until she was almost thirty, nursing by day and by night an increasingly helpless woman. Even in the early stages of her illness she was compelled to manipulate knitting needles just to turn the page of a book.
The only respite for Dervla were long walks with Mark Ryan, the neighbouring priest, and long cycle rides. On one such, aged seventeen, she met a solitary Englishman who, like her grandfather and her father, had been imprisoned for the cause – in his case in a Japanese POW camp in Burma during World War Two. Godfrey and Dervla established a private companionship until his death in 1959 in London when she was aged twenty-eight.
She had been writing since childhood, but in these years she did so with greater discipline and intent. She completed a novel about an illegitimate girl growing up in a small Irish town, which she sent out to half-a-dozen publishers; one of whom hinted that a happy ending would make it publishable, but Dervla was not prepared to compromise.
At least Dervla gained some relief from her onerous duties with a few long cycling trips – to Wales and Spain, through Italy, France, Belgium, Germany – but her increasingly mentally ill mother’s autocratic insistence on perfect housekeeping brought on a complete crack-up.
Her mother passed away in 1961 and her father a year later. Then in the terrible winter of 1963, Dervla headed off on her bicycle Rozinante, with a meagre bag of supplies, a few quid and a pistol. She was on her way to India.
Her thrilling account of the trip, Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle was snapped up by the prestigious British publisher John Murray. This was before the days of the hippie trail. Her journey had been unimaginably exotic (and yes the pistol did come in handy) as she cycled over the mountains of Pakistan, breaking her ribs, experiencing ravings after heatstroke, among other mis-adventures.
Dervla travelled and wrote about it for another forty years. Her books became classics in their genre. These covered work with the Dalai Lama’s sister in a camp for Tibetan refugee children that was a central experience in her spiritual life; riding a mule through Ethiopia, along with travels in Nepal, India, Madagascar, Peru, Cameroon, Palestine, Romania, Laos, and even Northern Ireland.
Dervla Murphy with Michael Palin in 2012.
When she gave birth to a daughter and brought her up single-handed, she may just have kicked out the first stones of the wall that then surrounded Irish women; this was in the age of Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. She demonstrated that a single woman with a baby did not have to be at the mercy of church and state and all-seeing respectability.
Dervla Murphy’s books have remained in print for longer than any other modern writer. She remains our greatest explorer, and a stirring voice of a liberal worldview that Ireland has only gradually accepted; a voice calling for a new world.
Ostensibly, Christmas is the occasion when Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ; its origins, however, aren’t Christian at all but Pagan.
It is no coincidence that Christmas should fall just after the Winter Solstice on December 21st, which is the shortest day of the year. From that point on the days lengthen into ‘a fine stretch in the evening’, as we optimistically portray it in Ireland on December 22nd!
The importance of the occasion in pre-Christian Ireland is demonstrated by the orientation of the ancient passage tomb at Newgrange, which predates Stonehenge and even the pyramids. The entrance is aligned with the sun rise on the days around December 21st: sunlight floods into the inner chamber through a roofbox located above the entrance to the amazement of the lucky few that have managed to squeeze in.
Attendance has always been a golden ticket affair confined to an annual lottery, but due to pandemic restrictions no crowd assembled at all this year for this symbolic moment of renewal.
It has been suggested that when Pagans converted to Christianity, they maintained many of their traditions, switching from a veneration of the sun to a new born son. There is no Biblical evidence for December 25th being the birth date of Jesus Christ.
So what of the other traditions that grew up around the event?
Wherever Christmas is celebrated there are different traditions, and even individual families have developed their own idiosyncratic rituals. The standard Western Christmas includes decorative trees, stockings, wreaths, advent calendars, puddings, baked goods, and of course Santa Claus or St. Nicholas; we also find the nativity portrayed in cribs, present-giving and midnight masses. The switching on of municipal lights – to the constant refrain of ‘it gets earlier every year!’ – on prominent shopping streets is also popular. And of course, the Christmas dinner is also a major part of the tradition.
The practice of putting up and decorating a so-called ‘Christmas’ trees – usually an evergreen conifer – can be traced to the pagan worship of Ancient Rome. Evergreen wreaths were brought into Roman homes during the Saturnalia celebrations (a festival for the god Saturn).
Non-Roman peoples of the time – barbarians to Roman sophisticates – also brought branches of evergreen trees indoors at this time of year. The evergreen plant was a symbol of fertility and enduring growth. Beliefs of course varied across different cultures and times. For some it symbolised eternal life. Because of its triangular shape it eventually came to represent the Holy Trinity for Christians.
Decoration of the Christmas Tree as we know it in modern times first began in earnest in sixteenth century Germany. Trees were decorated with coloured paper, apples, wafers, tinsel as well as sweetmeats and other foods. It has been suggested that candles first appeared when the Protestant reformer Martin Luther hung them from an evergreen tree. The fairy lights are the electrical descendent of these candles, and, happily, less of a fire hazard..
Over time traditions spread throughout Europe and the New World, initially through multinational Royal families and other noble castes.
Artificial or Real?
Clearfelling of sitka plantations near Connemara National Park.
Artificial trees are an increasingly popular option for those who don’t relish hoovering up needles and disposing of the heavy load of a real one. So what are the pros and cons of each?
A benefit of an artificial tree is that it can be stored it in their attic from year-to-year, which should make it a one-off-investment. On the other hand, it is made from fire-retardant, but not fire-resistant PVC plastic, and we could do with producing a lot less of this, especially in an era of climate change. Moreover, unfortunately most artificial trees will eventually end up in landfill – hopefully after many years of service – which takes many years to break down.
On the positive side of using a real tree, while they grow they convert carbon dioxide to oxygen through photosynthesis and are of course recyclable, although the wood would have to be seasoned for at least a year for it to be used as fuel.
The variety generally used in Ireland, Sitka spruce, is a non-native species, and plantations have a seriously damaging effects on the environment, so their continued use is certainly not ideal.
One approach could be to grow a tree in a pot and bring it indoors for Christmas, or why not get creative and use loose branches to construct an alternative ‘hipster’ tree!
Who was the Original Santa Claus?
Christmas postcard with Santa Claus wearing green robes, carrying full sack, with “Christmas Greetings.” (1909).
Not much is known about St. Nicholas, the original Santa Claus, who was born in Asia Minor in what is present-day Turkey. He was known for his secret gift-giving and generosity, and became bishop of Myra where one still finds spectacular rock-cut tombs. In the Middle Ages merchants from the city of Bari in Southern Italy plundered his bones and enshrined them in the Basilica di San Nicola.
Santa Claus is based on of this legendary figure, honoured annually during the Feast of Sinterklaas on the 6th of December in some countries. This feast is celebrated with the giving of gifts on St. Nicholas’ Eve (5th of December) in the Netherlands and on the morning of December 6th, Saint Nicholas Day, in Belgium, Luxembourg and northern France.
There are countless invocations of Santa in songs and poems. Perhaps the best known is ‘The Night Before Christmas/ A Visit From Saint Nicholas’, by Clement Moore, also known as ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19XNS6SBRYA
Previously depicted wearing tan or green, it has been suggested that Thomas Nast, a German-born American caricaturist, created the modern American version of Santa’s suit that featured in the December 25th, 1866 edition of Harper’s Weekly Magazine. He drew Santa in both red and green, but the new red version proved enduring.
Beginning with 1930’s advertisements, Coca-Cola has been responsible for the modern version of Santa we are now familiar with. The company created the image of the jolly, bearded, present-giving man wearing his distinctive red and white robes. The artist responsible was an American artist of Finnish and Swedish descent named Haddon Sundblom, who created the legendary figure wearing red with white trimmed fur.
The tradition of present-giving is likely to have originated in the Roman Feast of Saturnalia, and the legends around St. Nicholas. Notably, the Roman god Saturn was associated with generation, dissolution, plenty, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation. The feast took place on December 17th of the Julian calendar, and lasted until the 23rd of the month. This consisted of feasting, role reversals where slaves and masters would swop positions for the day – similar to the medieval ‘festival of fools’ – free speech, gift-giving and general revelry.
Christmas in Other Monotheistic Faiths
The Nativity is the Biblical account of the birth of Jesus Christ, and is fundamental to the Christian celebration. At Christmas time many churches incorporate nativity scenes near to the altar. This typically involves Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus in a manger, assorted farm animals and the three wise men hovering outside with their gifts. The nativity scene is also a theme for school plays coming up to the Christmas holiday.
Outdoor nativity scene of life-sized figurines in Barcelona (2009).
The story comes from the New Testament, specifically, the gospels of Luke and Matthew, but how are Mary and Jesus depicted in other religions?
In Islam, Mary(Maryam) is the only woman mentioned in the Qur’an. She is an honoured figure. The story is essentially the same: Mary becomes pregnant through the will of God – a divine conception – and gives birth to Jesus. However, other parts of the story differ.
A palm tree is mentioned in the Qur’an, as well as a voice urging her
Grieve not! for thy Lord hath provided a rivulet beneath thee; And shake towards thyself the trunk of the palm-tree: It will let fall fresh ripe dates upon thee.
There is also an account of the baby Jesus prophesising from his cradle of his being brought to a temple. It is also agreed that she remains a virgin throughout her life. She is referred to as the daughter of Imran and the sister of Aaron, but is also associated with a range of other titles.
In Islam, Jesus’s story is similar to the Biblical tale: he is born of Mary (Īsā ibn Maryam: ‘son of Mary’), performs miracles and is seen as a prophet of God/Allah, who has been sent to guide the Children of Israel. Jesus is followed by disciples, and rejected by the Jewish establishment. Eventually he is raised to heaven. However, unlike in Christianity Jesus isn’t crucified, and nor does the Qur’an refer to him as the son of God, or God incarnate.
As regards Judaism, Mary does not appear by name in the Talmud, and doesn’t have an exalted status as in other religions. And there are even suggestions of adultery in Jewish traditions.
Toledot Yeshu, ‘The Generations of Jesus’, a medieval parody of the New Testament, (author and date unknown), reconstructs Mary’s adultery and her son’s tainted paternity. Mary’s husband is referred to as ‘Pappos ben Judah’; Jesus is called the ‘Son of Pandera’, or the ‘Son of Stada’, ‘stada’ refers to a deviant or unfaithful woman.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, at certain times the Catholic Church censored the Talmud for blasphemous references to Jesus and Mary.
Altering Traditions?
Kalettes, a trendy addition.
The Christmas meal varies considerably from country to country. It is either eaten on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day. The contents also differ considerably. The most popular meal in English-speaking countries include turkey, ham, roast potatoes, gravy, stuffing, and ‘Brussel’s’ sprouts, with a ‘kalettes’ a trendy edition to the repatoire. The dessert include mince pies and so-called Christmas cake.
The Christmas meal reflects how the U.K. was once a global empire with many dominions. It is not clear exactly when the tradition for all ingredients of the meal began. The turkey first appeared in the U.K. in the seventeenth century under King Henry VIII. However, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that it took over from goose as the dominant dish for carnivores. As the nursery rhyme puts it:
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man’s hat
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!
One unpleasant-sounding ritual that grew up around goose was in response to the tuberculosis or ‘consumption’ circulating widely in Ireland until the 1950s. According to one account:
When Christmas time came you’d put on the goose. Goose was cooked then for Christmas dinner. Your father would make up the goose grease and rub it into your chest going into school. All over your chest and around your back. It was as good as an overcoat to you.[i]
Christmas meals often give rise to considerable waste, and unfortunately this year it is more difficult to make donations of food directly to those in need. Thus, it might be an idea to avoid stocking up as if World War III was about to commence, and make a charitable donation instead.
The way in which we give presents could also definitely do with a makeover. I shudder to think of the scale of unwanted gifts that will be discarded, along with reams of wrapping paper, and cards that will be consigned to the bin. Let’s try to recycle wrapping paper, make our own cards, and only buys those that include a charitable donation; reusable gift bags and donating unwanted toys to charities are other worthwhile ideas.
Presents from Santa and Parents?!
That a child should receive a gift from both Santa and their parents (which could easily mean another two presents) is a remarkable feat of marketing that increases costs during an already expensive season. It is surely sufficient for Santa alone to give a present! For families with older children, a Secret Santa or kris kingle works fine, and reduces the expense and stress of having to buy for everyone.
In recent years in Ireland the Catholic Church has made a big effort to attract families with young children to Christmas services. As a child, it always seemed to go on forever – with all those toys at home left unplayed with – but it was still a part of Christmas. Most attendees would be dressed in their fine new clothes, or in festive jumpers that have grown more outrageous with the years. This year’s restrictions mean the embarrassing show of inebriation witnessed at some midnight masses in the past is unlikely to be repeated.
Christmas jumpers: more outrageous by the year.
Unusual Traditions
Some Christmas traditions from around the world are more unusual than others, and wonderful in their own way. Every December in the Philippines the Giant Lantern Festival is held in the city of San Fernando. Light is highly symbolic for Filipinos: the star is a sign of hope and the most important symbol of the Christmas season.
Elsewhere, Ukrainians prepare a traditional twelve-course meal. But before everybody sits down to it the youngest child in the family is told to watch through the window for the evening star to appear, which is a signal for the feast to begin.
Some countries have more sensible traditions than others. Jolabokaflodis the Icelandic tradition of giving books to a loved one on Christmas Eve. It translates as ‘The Christmas Book Flood’.
A distinctive tradition that has grown increasingly popular in Ireland is for people to swim in the sea on Christmas day. The most famous spot for doing so is the Forty Foot in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. ‘Swim’ is however an exaggeration for what is really an immersion for most people, followed by a hot chocolate from a thermos flask or something stronger!
This article has only scrapped the surface of the many Christmas rituals that survive in Ireland and around the world. There are some we could safely dispense with, especially the excess, but there are others that serve a need that people feel to come together at the darkest time of the year.
[i] Quoted in Ronan Sheehan and Brendan Walshe, Dublin: The Heart of the City, The Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1998 and 2016, p.30
The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1862).
The quote above is from a work of fiction, but the author was drawing on a memory of four years imprisonment, following conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle – a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded intellectuals opposed to Tsardom.
The great novelist only narrowly avoided a firing squad too – a stay of execution arriving at the last moment – which shaped his views on the death penalty. In The Idiot (1869) Prince Myshkin offers a salutary critique: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’
A sketch of the Petrachevsky Circle mock execution.
For morals reasons – the idea of the state descending to premeditated killing – most jurisdictions no longer permit execution of prisoners following conviction for capital crimes. The strong likelihood of miscarriages of justice makes the argument against the death penalty appear insurmountable. A 2014 study indicated that one-in-twenty-five sentenced to death in the U.S. had been innocent.
The idea endures, nonetheless, that certain offences place perpetrators beyond the pale, incapable of redemption – diabolic even – wherein they are viewed as a perpetual threat to society, or even a moral contagion.
But, like it or not, the vast majority of prisoners do eventually re-join society, and it is in the wider community’s interest – with due regard for a victim’s or their relatives’ thirst for retribution – that convicts are rehabilitated to the extent they emerge as law-abiding and, ideally, self-sufficient citizens.
Given an estimated one in every two re-offend within three years of release in Ireland it appears the correct balance between punishment and rehabilitation is not being struck. A ‘Bibilical’ ‘eye for an eye’ view – reconciling moral accounts – still informs Irish attitudes to incarceration, with overcrowding exacerbating difficulties in an inadequate prison infrastructure.
According to Fíona Ní Chinnéide, of the Irish Penal Reform Trust in July: ‘At the outset of the pandemic, Irish Prisons were way overcrowded, you had people sleeping on mattresses on the floor.’
With courts resuming normal service, she feared prison populations would rise sharply, leading to further overcrowding: ‘I mean, in the best of times overcrowded prisons do not support rehabilitation and lead to increased tensions, drugs and violence, but Covid-19 brings an additional layer to this.’
Small Scandinavian countries such as Norway (20% after two years), Denmark (29% after two years) and Finland (36% after two years) currently lead the world in curbing recidivism. This can be attributed to prisons preparing inmates for life on the outside, including through open prisons that reintegrate offenders back into communities.
Slopping Out
A de-humanization of prisoners is evident in the nineteenth century layout of Mountjoy Prison, the conditions of which could drive anyone to madness, or at least perpetuate a life in crime. Any visitor can discern a judgmental Victorian morality pervading the edifice.
Mountjoy Prison, Dublin 1850 Illustrated London News Public Domain.
The spectre of Henry Martin Hitchins, formerly Inspector for Government Prisons in Ireland, who oversaw its opening in 1850 lingers. He advised the first governor:
prisoners committed to your charge have been convicted of grave offences against God and man, that they have forfeited their civil rights and are confined much to protect society against their evil practices as to afford them an opportunity of repentance and reformation. It is therefore of primary importance that the prisoners should be brought to a proper sense of their condition and after the religious exhortations of the chaplains nothing so directly tends to effect this object as a firm and steady exercise of a severe discipline.
Inhumane features of the nineteenth century regime endure wherein the prisoner forfeits basic civil rights and experiences degrading treatment. Gary Simpson was held in Mountjoy Prison between February and September 2013. As a ‘protection prisoner’ he was kept in isolation from other prisoners – detained in cells on the D1 wing prior to its refurbishment. During that period there was no in-cell sanitation, nor even a sink providing running water.
Prisoners were normally provided with a ‘slopping out’ chamber pot and a plastic bucket of water for washing their hands. Simpson brought an action for damages in response, alleging he was regularly compelled to urinate into empty milk cartons as the chamber pot was too small to be used more than twice without being emptied. He claimed he had to defecate into a refuse bag for the same reason.
Simpson received damages of €7,500 in 2019 after contending with conditions the Supreme Court agreed breached a constitutional right to a basic level of dignity while in prison. The paltry nature of this award – commensurate with a soft tissue injury – is a damning reflection on the degree of Irish civilisation.
Most of us, generally law-abiding citizens are not kept awake at night at the prospect of a stretch behind bars, but even among ‘respectable’ families there are often members who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. And delving into family histories invariably yields an ancestor who has offended against dominant morals expressed in the laws of the day.
In my own case, a great-grandfather Luke Armstrong (1853-1910) of Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo was subjected to at least two stretches behind bars for activities he viewed as political – the so-called Land War of the early 1880s – but which the Crown authorities considered criminal. An ambitious shopkeeper, ‘who was better dressed than his Tubbercurry companions,’ he was arrested in April, 1884 and charged with his fellow conspirators with being a member of the Fenian Society, and conspiring to murder a land agent.
An eviction during the Land War.
Luke Armstrong and his co-defendants were eventually transferred to Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, and brought to trial the following November at Green Street Courthouse. Thankfully, given the gravity of the charges, all the accused were acquitted based on the unreliability of the Crown informant’s evidence.
As a high-ranking member of the IRB, this was not Luke’s first brush with authority. He was also incarcerated in Enniskillen Gaol earlier in the 1880s where he was subjected to ‘two days’ solitary confinement by the Governor. Luke must have gained extensive experience of slopping out during these unwelcome sojourns.
The Land War of the 1880s may seem like a far off, almost mythical, period, but as recently as the 1940s Irish political prisoners were held – for years on end in many cases – without trial under Emergency Powers Orders in Nissen huts in the Curragh – labelled Tin Town (Baile an Stáin or an Bhaile Stáin) by internees that included the novelist Máirtiín Ó Cadhain.
According to the historian Tony Gray, the EPOs ‘were so draconian that they effectively abolished democracy for the period, and most aspects of the life of the country were controlled by the dictatorial powers the government acquired.’[i]
Ironically, another great-grandfather of mine, former Taoiseach (1948-51 and 1954-57) John A. Costello, was responsible for drafting emergency legislation while Attorney General in 1926 in response to the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins; although according to his biographer David McCullagh: ‘While portrayed as draconian, the response was in fact far more measured than might have been expected, or than was initially considered.’[ii]
At least, to Costello’s credit, in opposition when emergency powers legislation came before the Dáil again during World War II he insisted on a right of appeal to the courts from special tribunals.[iii]
John A. Costello 1891-1976.
Today, new emergency legislation in response to the pandemic awakens fears that “generally law-abiding citizens” could yet fall foul of draconian laws intended to protect the community. Indeed, the term ‘lockdown’ is derived from the lexicon of incarceration: the confinement of prisoners to their cells for all or most of the day as a temporary security measure. Perhaps our experience of stay-at-home orders will instil greater empathy with the loss of liberty and privations endured by a prisoner.
One should be hesitant, therefore, to assume prison to be the fate alone of an underclass or those exhibiting extraordinary moral deviancy. Any one of us could face a stint behind bars, either through weakness, as a result of a mistake or error, a miscarriage of justice, or even where a moral conviction leads to a stand against a law or authority we consider illegitimate.
In accepting this possibility, we should consider the minimum duty of care owed by the State to any person incarcerated, and the purpose of a prison sentence.
Principles of Sentencing
Objectives of sentencing include revenge, retribution, just deserts, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restoration.[iv] The most familiar type of sentencing is a custodial sentence, but judges can also levy fines, or make community service orders; contributions to the poor box are often accepted as a form of contrition in lieu of sentencing.
The handing down of a prison sentence demonstrates to the community that morally repugnant behaviour will receive its just deserts. The threat of incarceration may also act as a deterrent, and a victim’s desire for revenge or retribution should be respected and vindicated.
The current conditions of Ireland’s prisons now amply provide for deterrence and revenge: who in their right mind would relish even a night in ‘the Joy’?
To an extent this is how it should be. Unless the State administers sentencing proportionate to a crime – as agreed by the community through its laws – faith could be lost in the rule of law. Indeed, vigilantism could emerge in its absence – as we have witnessed with extra-legal pursuit of drug dealers in some Dublin neighbours, and especially in Northern Ireland, where horrific kneecapping still occurs. The State should endeavour to monopolize the use of force with the objective of reducing violence, and other antisocial behaviours, overall.
Mandatory sentencing of ten years under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1999 for possession of drugs with a value over €13,000 has not, however, proved an effective deterrent and in most cases judges find exceptional circumstances apply to avoid the full imposition of the term for what is a non-violent offence.
It is understandable that judges would wish to avoid the nuclear option of a prison sentence, which often hardens individuals to lives in crime. If, however, Irish carceral institutions adequately rehabilitated young offenders in particular – nipping errant behaviours in the bud – judges might be inclined to prescribe short interventions. This could offer a chance for someone to turn over a new leaf, and even learn new skills in a safe environment.
Legislators might also consider broadening the range and reducing the period for convictions to be ‘spent’ – fixed at seven years for particular offences. This might diminish the social stigma of serving time behind bars, allowing for it to be seen as a therapeutic intervention rather than a lifelong stain on one’s reputation.
One means of addressing victim impact and an understandable desire for retribution or revenge is through non-adversarial mediation. This includes the idea of restorative justice, which brings perpetrators together with victims of crime. Ideally, a consensus is formed around what the offender can do to repair the harm caused by the offence. See Alan Gilsenan’s documentary The Meeting (below).
Anders Breivik
Incapacitation is also a necessary ingredient to sentencing, where an individual presents an ongoing threat to society, or even to fellow prisoners. This is a familiar justification for the death penalty, and there remain scenarios where an agent of the state – usually a police officer – acting in the common good, may lawfully kill someone, notwithstanding the twenty-first amendment to the Irish Constitution prohibiting the death penalty. Such a response is only lawful if it is proportionate to the threat – a test similar to justifications for self-defence.
Dostoyevsky’s moral argument, and the likelihood of miscarriages of justice, are convincing arguments against the death penalty, but the ongoing danger posed by individuals must still influence the severity of sentencing.
Thus, the continued solitary confinement of Anders Breivik – currently serving twenty-one years for a bomb and shooting attack that left seventy-seven people dead in Oslo – was not held to violate Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, relating to the prevention of torture and inhuman or degrading torture, and the right to privacy and family life.
Flowers laid in front of Oslo Cathedral the day after the attacks. Image: Johannes Grødem
The test employed is one of proportionality. The court obviously took into account that Breivik is a mass murderer who had admitted to indiscriminate killing for a political end. Authorities fear he could exert a nefarious influence over fellow prisoners given an opportunity to do so. This view may be correct but it sets a dangerous precedent; albeit the Norwegian government argued that Breivik’s three-cell complex, with access to video games, TV and exercise facilities, is better than the conditions of most other prisoners, thereby compensating for his solitary confinement.
In recent times terrorism has emerged as a justification for harsher sentencing – and even torture– and extended periods of questioning before charges, but the definition of a terrorist is loose and unsatisfactory, and a form of structural racism (or Islamophobia) appears to inform treatment of offenders in many jurisdictions. My own great-grandfather was considered a Fenian terrorist in his day.
The temporary removal of liberties such as conjugal rights between husband and wife is generally considerate a proportionate punishment when a guilty verdict is found. This view was upheld in Ireland in the case of Murray v. Ireland [1985]. But what if the denial of such a liberty impedes rehabilitation or the restoration of a flourishing individual to society? This judgment may merit re-examination if we are to prioritise rehabilitation.
The interest of the community in ensuring a prisoner is equipped to transition back into civilian life should trump an understandable desire for revenge felt by victims of crime and their relatives. But this reasoning does not now inform sentencing in Ireland, where even posting a letter requires a lengthy review process at either end. Enjoying the privilege of just one phone call a week means prisoners cannot easily stay in touch with family members.
Among the reasons for Finland’s low rate of recidivism is the open prisons developed to prepare convicts for life on the outside. Instructively, Finland has the lowest per capita incarceration rate in the European Union, with just 51 people per 100,000 in some form of prison, according to the World Prison Brief, while Ireland’s stands at 84 per 100,000, which might well be higher but for current overcrowding inhibiting sentencing.
The former prison building of Katajanokka, Finland is being renovated into a hotel.
Also, instructively, Ireland ranked sixth worst in Europe in a crime index conducted by Numbeo scoring 44.52, whereas Finland lies in thirty-fifth place overall on 22.80. Thus, despite a significantly smaller prisoner population, Finland is also a safer country than Ireland, scoring 77.20 against 55.48. Given Ireland’s GDP per capita ($89,383) exceeds Finland’s ($49,334) by a considerable margin, this is clearly a question of priorities rather than resources, and sadly, an indicator of our respective “degrees of civilisation.”
Sasu Tyni, a researcher at Helsinki University and the Criminal Sanctions Agency (RISE), says that the Finnish system is based on a belief that locking people up is a last resort. ‘Closed prisons are more or less grounded in security purposes, while open prisons aim to be closer to society, family, work etc,’ she explains. ‘The strategy of the Criminal Sanctions Agency has for years been to use closed prison as the last option. We assume an open prison system can decrease the risk of recidivism.’
Prison governor Kaisa Tammi-Moilanen explains that prison authorities have ‘purposely tried to avoid everything that we can which are associated with a prison,’ which means there are no physical barriers stopping prisoners from escaping. Tammi-Moilanen explains this is intentional, as it encourages prisoners to develop a sense of self-control.
Prisoners in a closed prison don’t need to learn any self-control, because everything they do is controlled. But to be a normal citizen you need to have inner control of your life, so you know how to behave, you know what is good for you and you know what is good for the society.
At present the open prisons at Loughan House and Shelton Abbey are, to an extent, used to cope with the overcrowding in the closed prisons and therefore in their current use could only play a minor role in the effective management of prisoners through the prison system.
There is no evidence that international best practice has been taken into account since.
Reskilling
Re-evaluation of the role of Irish prisons does not appear to be on the immediate horizon. The new Minister for Justice Helen McEntee indicated that Garda reform, domestic violence and the modernisation of the sector’s IT services were her three priorities in an interview with the Sunday Business Post in August.
Yet historic shortfalls in rehabilitation have brought high rates of recidivism at significant cost to the exchequer: the average price of an ‘available, staffed prison space’ was €75,349 in 2019. Moreover, the lawlessness evident in parts of Ireland can be traced, at least in part, to the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate adequately.
Targeted investment should produce long-term savings by reducing recidivism. The new Minister thus has a huge opportunity to leave a profound legacy that could ameliorate conditions in certain ‘no go’ neighbourhoods.
Introducing meaningful open prisons to reintegrate prisoners into communities would require a cultural shift however. Prevailing Irish attitudes towards crime are informed by enduring social cleavages: in Dublin expressed in euphemisms about someone being ‘from the inner city;’ or ‘of Traveller origin’ in rural Ireland. Yet prison reform could address long-term poverty and social exclusion. Any progress would be a significant feather in the new Minister’s cap.
It seems obvious that prisons should offer inmates a chance to break the chain in a life of crime, rather than perpetuating one. Sadly, incarceration remains a breeding ground for criminality. Fresh thinking is required to address shortfalls in mental health provision, drug addiction counselling, and general education – especially illiteracy: one in six of the adult population in Ireland is still functionally illiterate.
In 1997 the Irish Times reported: ‘It is widely accepted that the standard of education of most inmates adults and juveniles is somewhere between third and fifth class of primary school.’ Twenty years later the same paper reported: ‘Overall, four out of five prisoners (80 per cent) left school before their Leaving Cert, more than half (52 per cent) left before their Junior Cert, and just over a quarter (26 per cent) never attended secondary school.’
Anyone hoping to leave a life in crime behind should be able to glimpse viable alternatives while in prison. A Leaving Certificate is generally seen as a foothold for advancing one’s career. In 2011 the Irish Times reported that 117 prisoners were sitting the Leaving Cert and 161 were taking Junior Cert exams that year, but current figures are not easily accessible.
Alternatively, offering prisoners business skills has been floated as one approach by chef-entrepreneur Domini Kemp, who participated on a programme at Wheatfield Prison. As she it put it:
I read that prisoners cost north of €68K a year in Ireland and it struck a chord with me that if you could teach them how to start their own business and reduce the rate of reoffending, how much you could save.
An entrepreneurial career path will obviously not suit every ex-prisoner. The challenge of starting a small business should not be underestimated. But the state should be empowering prisoners with career alternatives for when they return to their communities.
Mountjoy Campus, North Circular Road, Dublin, Dublin 7, Ireland
Wellbeing
In an enlightened society such as Finland’s it appears as if the traditional prison is being phased out. This may be attributed to many factors including an inclusive education system, as well as advanced ideas on wellbeing. Minister of Social Affairs and Health in Finland, Pirkko Mattila, explains the connection between economic growth and wellbeing:
Economic growth improves people’s wellbeing, whereas wellbeing and health of the population enhance economic growth and stability. This interlinkage must be better recognised. In Finland, we are putting forward a holistic approach to this question that requires horizontal thinking and cross-sectoral co-operation. We call this approach, the Economy of Wellbeing.
This holistic approach seems to play an important role in keeping crime to a minimum in Finland. In contrast the steady acquisition of wealth in Ireland appears to be decoupled from the Economy of Wellbeing. A more enlightened prison system could help bridge that divide.
Nevertheless, it may be impossible ever to extinguish the evil that leads to certain crimes. The example of Anders Breivik in Norway demonstrates that even highly civilised countries witness heinous crimes, or black swan events.
We may always require prisons to act as a deterrent and to protect society from evil behaviour, but it is worth bearing in mind that any one of us could find ourselves behind bars. It is in all our interests that prisons assist inmates to become functioning members of society. The Irish prison system is now perpetuating criminality, and the new Minister should make reform a priority.
Featured Image: main hall of Kilmainham Gaol.
[i] Tony Gray, The Lost Years: The Emergency in Ireland 1939–45 Little Brown & Co, London, 1997, p. 5.
[ii] David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 2010, p.63
Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.
Anti-depressants can be beneficial in stabilizing a patient and alleviating the most distressing symptoms of whatever underlying trauma caused them to present to a doctor in the first place. The logic of medication should be that once a certain stability has been achieved, a less medicinal and more holistic approach should be available to the patient including intensive psycho-therapy, talking therapy and most crucially for any patient, being properly listened to.
This, unfortunately, is what so rarely happens with cases of depression. The initial period of chemically enabled stability is seen as progress, and the primary causes of trauma remain unacknowledged, or only partially addressed.
While the trauma remains essentially untreated, the patient will find himself having his doses upped and reduced, his prescription swapped and changed, leading to him suffering a range of side effects which take centre stage in the narrative of his condition. We become transfixed by the shadow but not the object that casts it.
It is not very different to what we are now experiencing with Covid-19 and our second lockdown. Lockdown is the strongest non-pharmaceutical intervention available. It is the equivalent of ECT bolted through every nerve end of our society. One doesn’t have to look hard to see its devastating side effects.
Like our patient, who hoped that his medically induced stability might create an environment benign and supportive enough to allow him properly to address what lay at the root of his problem. Our first and very lengthy period of lockdown should have been used to confront and mend some of the systemic flaws in our health system.
We have also out-sourced the care of our most vulnerable to privately run ‘Care Homes’ that are mostly staffed by poorly paid workers. The final years of so many of our parents’ lives, and in time our own, is a for-profit-business. There’s great money to be made in dying.
I am sure that I am not alone in feeling like a child eavesdropping on a parental row – leaning over the bannister upstairs to hear what’s being shouted in the kitchen below – when it comes to the bickering and blaming between NPHET and the government.
'None of those people would have faced being on #PUP, none of them have to tell someone they are losing their job, none of them will have to shutter a business for the last time' – Tánaiste Leo Varadkar on #NPHET#cblivepic.twitter.com/ZAw7sDxGLo
It’s a reckless side show of hopeless administration and even worse leadership. There have been failures in testing, track and trace, and screening at ports and airports. It has just been reported that the UCD lab is to suspend all Covid-19 testing over two weekends due to staffing issues.
80 people on trolleys at UH Limerick on a day when we learn that only 23 additional critical care beds have been delivered nationally since March and publication of the HSE Winter Plan is delayed for a further week. The State must step up, not just individual citizens#COVID19pic.twitter.com/QGx2y5rnTh
Fix what is broken and we might have a better tool for confronting the virus.
Now we are patronized with talk about ‘behaving well,’ and maybe being able to enjoy Christmas. We were encouraged to come out and clap overworked medical staff rather than see them receive an immediate increase in salary, something which the government lost no time in awarding themselves, just as hundreds of thousands adjusted to living on €350 or less a week.
Covid-19 has held an unflinching lens to the structural inequalities in our country. Those who can, work from home, their salaries largely unaffected. Mainstream radio and print media run nauseating life style features about how much money people are saving, while another grubbier realty is far closer to the truth, that hundreds of thousands of workers are down many thousands of euros since March 13th.
We are a great country for cake sales and 5k sponsored fun runs, but not so good at drawing a line in the proverbial sand and saying enough is enough. We acquiesce too much, and are now complicit in our predicament.
Did anyone else find an eerie symmetry – a dark poetry – to how on the very day we went into a second lockdown, our government voted to seal the Tuam Mother and Bay Home files for thirty years?
As we lock down now once again, we seem to be burying our past, perpetuating the shame, punishing again those who suffered in denying them light and justice. We live in the strangest and most disturbing times.
The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son
The age of the Antichrist has just only begun”
Air Force One coming in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at 2:38
Let me know when you decide to thrown in the towel
It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul
What’s new, pussycat?
What’d I say?
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it’s 36 hours past Judgment Day
As I have previously argued, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the death knell on a long liberal tradition of American judges, including William O. Douglas, the Irish-American William Brennan, and Harry Blackmun. More recently we have had John Paul Stevens, and perhaps David Souter, who went on a voyage from straight conservatism to moderate liberalism, can be added to that list.
This sad passing should be of grave concern to the world, as the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court is more important than any President. It has finally been subsumed by the dangerous ideologies of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism and hatred and exclusion of the other.
At one level, abortion is the canary in mine shaft, which may be distracting from other equally important issues. America has had to contend with threats to the seminal judgment of Roe v. Wade before, when Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female judge of the Supreme Court. She appeared to be an ardent anti-abortionist, but flipped to some extent in Planned Parenthood v Casey (1993). I don’t think Trump has made the same mistake – much to my chagrin – with Amy Coney Barrett.
Let us be clear. The appointment of a woman simply because she is a woman is not a cause for celebration. It is another Populist gesture from a Trump Presidency designed to deflect from criticism of her judicial philosophy. She is deeply conservative and an adherent of an historical and literalist approach to the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, which is aligned with deep-seated religious and political fundamentalism.
As an ardent Catholic boasting seven children, of whom two are adopted, it is fair to surmise that she may have reservations about contraception. Her support of the ownership, possession and use of handguns – even for non-violent felons in Kanter v Barr (2019) – is conditioned by an historical approach to interpreting the Constitution. This she has inherited from the recently deceased Supreme Court judge Anthony J. Scalia – affectionately known to liberals as Tony the Phoney – under whom she clerked. ‘His judicial philosophy is mine too,’ she said.
Scalia with President Reagan in 1986.
Justice Harry Blackmun, (the author of the majority decision in Roe v Wade) realised this might happen in Planned Parenthood (1973); the light flickering at the end of his moving judgment. That light is now extinguished.
Of significant concern to all non-nationals, she also voted as circuit court federal judge for Trump’s hard line legislation on Green Cards, and will no doubt also expand the protection of religious rights, conditioned by historicism and literalism. Gay rights groups have also been very troubled by her views. Such ‘deviant’ preferences were contrary to public morality in 1789 after all, as was the presence of inferior races.
We have entered a dark era dominated by the religious right, involving literal and historical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. A return to eighteenth century values is upon us, including the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, neglecting to remember that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, if that. Let’s not forget that the United States required a Civil War to end the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery that was not even mentioned in that document, apart from in the three-fifths clause that represented a African-American slaves as three-fifths of a white person for electoral purposes, in order to maintain a balance between slave and non-slave owning states.
Originalism
So what is the evangelical Christian conditioning of her mentors?
Old Originalism or Original Intent dates from the 1980’s scholarship of Robert Bork, and is linked to the intention of the Founding Fathers, or a subtle shift to meet objections; the ratifiers of the Constitution.
New Originalism (if it can be termed thus) or Original Meaning Originalism or Original Public Meaning focuses on the original public meaning of the Constitution. Which includes the unmistakable whiteness of the signatories. This leaves a measure of indeterminacy and thus discretion to future generations, but is really a sleight of hand designed to conceal much of the above.
A further distinction has been drawn between Original Meaning and Original Expected Application. The argument is that whereas Original Expected Application binds us to the intention of the Founding Fathers, Original Meaning gives us a text which we show attention and fidelity to, and which provides a blueprint for future generations
In essence, the original version of Originalism (now termed inter alia Old Originalism) contended that in order to interpret the Constitution, judges should search for the intention of the Founding Fathers. The view was a rejection of what was perceived as the judicial activism of the Warren and Burger courts, and was initiated by Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese, who argued for ‘Original Intention’ to put decisions back on the proper path of reflecting the views of the Founding Fathers, and respecting ‘democratic’ principles.
Thus, it is important to stress that from the outset Originalism is associated with neoliberal or even neoconservative political principles, not a middle ground Burkean conservative approach.
There has also been a subtle nuancing from Original Intent to Original Understanding or Original Meaning, to deal with the objection that it was the ratifiers’, not the framers’ intention, that was important, but even at the time there were powerful intellectual objections.
It has been repeatedly argued that we cannot access the mental states of the Founding Fathers or ratifiers. They might have had conflicting mental states, and their intentions are simply unknowable. Further, and crucially, it seems to me, the Founding Fathers or ratifiers had no particular foresight as to the state affairs and social circumstances that would emerge after they had departed, while the Constitution was presumably designed to cope with the exigencies of new circumstances.
Founding Fathers, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston.
Original Meaning Originalism
Jefferson Powell has added a further criticism, which is that the Founding Fathers themselves did not believe that looking to their intention was an appropriate approach, and that it was the public words of the text that were binding.
There is another powerful and all-pervasive intellectual objection to Original Intent, which is a dominant theme of this article: even if we are certain of the precise intentions of the Founding Fathers and ratifiers, and even if we knew they intended to bind us to their settled historical meaning, why should we care?
Why, in substance, should we be bound by the dead hand of history?
In reaction to these criticisms the Original Intent movement shifted its position. Spurred on by Justice Scalia and members of Reagan’s Justice Department, the movement began to argue it was not the intention of the Founding Fathers or ratifiers that was important, but the publicly shared meanings of the text. Or at least those shared in 1789.
The New Originalism (or ‘Original Meaning Originalism’) has as its core idea that the meaning of the constitution is the original public meaning of the document, or its conventional semantic meaning, including the meaning as changed by amendments. Such theorists then began to look at dictionaries and documents of public record to ascertain what citizen views were on constitutional matters at the time. They believed that such sources would discipline courts from engaging in judicial activism.
A Constitution Falls to be Interpreted by Successive Generations.
Barnett has argued that the text legitimates the use of the State’s coercive power, and legitimates judicial activism. That ultimately it defers to a theory of popular sovereignty in that the people gave their permission to that written text (which in this jurisdiction they extend frequently by referendum), with the government acting as agents of the people. This is correct, but it is the will of the chosen few, interpreted through the prism of Old Testament values and emergent racism.
Jack Balkin, a moderate liberal, defines Original Meaning as a commitment to the fidelity of the text and the principles of the text, which must mean different things to each successive generation; as words themselves shift in meaning over time, and the nuances of the abstract terms and vague clauses of a constitutional text shift and change.
He argues for a form of redemptive constitutionalism through the passage of history, where the open-ended language of the constitution delegates the application of terms to future interpreters, arguing that,
The whole purpose of a constitutions cannot be simply to forestall political judgements by later generations on important issues of justice, to preserve past practices of social custom or judgements of political morality, or to freeze existing assessments of rights in time. When we view these open ended rights provisions together with the more rule-like structural features of constitutions, we can see that they serve a somewhat different goal. They are designed to channel and discipline future political judgements not forestall it.
Balkin asks the question: what do abstract provisions in the constitutional text do? Are they designed only to limit future generations, or are they also designed to delegate the articulation and implementation of important constitutional principles?
Balkin later expands on the constraints on political judgement imposed by the text, but cautions against freezing political judgments at a fixed position in time. He contends that the constitution is an aspirational document and that the position of those such as Justice Scalia – who claim we are constrained by the original intent of framers or enacters – is a ‘narrative of decline.’ A “decline” has lately turned into a slide.
In contrast, Balkin argues that principles existing and embedded in the Constitution can be re-interpreted by successive generations to confront contemporary issues. Thus he argues that the class clause in the constitution can protect the right of homosexuals, even if no one at the time of the enactment approved of homosexuality.
Barret’s views on gays, immigrants and abortion suggest she thinks otherwise.
Dworkin
The late Ronald Dworkin, has written eloquently, about historicism, particularly in response to the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and the publication of Bork’s Tempting of America. In assessing the legal intentions of the framers Dworkin argues:
They intended to commit the nation to abstract principles of political morality about speech and punishment and equality, for example. They also had a variety of more concrete convictions about the correct application of these abstract principles to particular issues. If contemporary judges think their concrete convictions were in conflict with their abstract ones, because they did not reach the correct conclusions about the effect of their own principles, then the judges have a choice to make. It is unhelpful to tell them to follow the framers’ intentions. They need to know what legal intentions – at how general a level of abstraction – and why. So Bork and others who support the original understanding thesis must supply an independent normative theory – a particular political conception of constitutional democracy – to answer that need. That normative theory must justify not only a general attitude of deference, but also what I shall call an interpretative schema: a particular account of how different levels of the framers’ convictions and expectations contribute to concrete judicial decisions.
Ronald Dworkin
Dworkin elaborates that the farmers’ intent can be viewed on levels of generality and that we must seek to ‘disentangle the principle they enacted from their convictions about its proper application in order to discover the political content of their decisions.’
He expands on that by saying that Bork uses the framers’ intent inconsistently, and at different levels of generality; in a reductive fashion and in a very strict sense for the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eight Amendment (to permit capital punishment); but in a broader sense for the principle of equality (to meet the future but then uncontemplated need of outlawing racial desegregation).
Dworkin concludes that:
There is nothing abstruse or even unfamiliar in the notion that the Constitution lays down abstract principles whose dimensions and application are inherently controversial, that judges have the responsibility to interpret these abstract principles in a way that fits, dignifies and improves our political history.
Justice Brennan
On retirement Justice William J. Brennan argued against Original Intent on a number of grounds. He noted that the ‘proponents of this facile historicism justify it as a depoliticization of the judiciary,’ but ‘the political underpinning of such a choice should not escape notice,’ and that a ‘position that upholds constitutional claims only if they were within the specific contemplation of the framers in effect establishes a presumption of resolving textual ambiguity against the claim of constitutional right.’
Brennan further argues, apropos the U.S. Constitution, but of equal application to the Irish Constitution, a constitution is not just a majoritarian document, but embodies substantive value choices that are placed beyond the legislature. Contemporary courts should abide by this duty in modern circumstances.
End of Days
What Amy Coney Barret’s appointment means is that the liberal academic, political and legal agenda has lost the argument, and the Bible Belt is in the box seat. It is game over in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the interpretation of texts will now be literal and historical.
Expect decisions that are pro-gun ownership, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-health care and above all a reinstitution of Christian evangelical rights. People of colour and migrants will be excluded as unworthy to the clean and pure. It is an exclusionary and intellectually baseless approach, but it is running America and most of the rest of us by extension.
Above the duty of the court is to keep the chosen few happy and rich. A quote from Orson Welles’s ‘The Third Man’ captures the sentiment:
If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.
People are seen as insignificant dots, and objects of exploitation for the elect.
While researching my new book 
