Cassandra Voices

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  • Artist of the Month – Doireann Ni Ghrioghair

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”60″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the month: Doireann Ni Ghrioghair”]

    There is many a country that has decided to establish a capital city with grandeur, efficiency and unity of the central government. In ancient times, urban planning was pursued in Egypt, in a large number of cities in China, Greece and Rome. There are examples of this today in Washington, New Delhi, Ankara and Canberra.
    There is no need to tell why the location of Tara is suitable from the historical point of view. But there are many other recommendations, which make it suitable as the Capital of Ireland. It is in the centre of the country (25 miles from Dublin; Belfast, 78; Derry, 127; Limerick, 99; Tralee, 159; Sligo, 106; Athlone, 72; Kilkenny, 94). It would satisfy the people of Belfast, who have a congenital hatred of Dublin, as a city of conflict and not only as a capital: it would break the alien influence of the people of Rathmines, Rathgar and the Royal Irish Academy on the persons of the Government of Ireland. Therefore, it would not be too far “at all”, from Dublin, and it would not oblige all the officials of the Government to be brought from Dublin nor from Belfast. The new city of Tara would not be removed from rural life, as is Dublin, and it would be a clear sign that we have left for good, the old-bad-days that we have had during the seven centuries, during which we were under the heavy yoke of England; may it be our intention, sincerely, to build a new epoch in Ireland for ourselves.

    • Daithí Ó hÁinle
                                              extract from ‘Maoidheamh ar Árd-Cathair Stáit I dTeamhair’,
      Áiserighe 1942 – published by Ailtirí na hAiséirghe
      *translated by Paddy Greer

    Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (Architects of the Resurrection) were an Irish fascist political party active in the 1940’s They envisioned a united Ireland where emigration as well as the speaking of the English language would be banned. Highly conservative and religious, they also saw women’s role as to produce as many offspring as possible in order to form a large army and imagine Ireland rising as a supreme leading nation after all other countries had been decimated during World War II.

    ‘Maoidheamh ar Árd-Cathair Stáit I dTeamhair’ (Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara) by the architect Daithí Ó hÁinle appeared in one of their regularly published periodicals and included ‘Speer-esque’ urban planning and buildings such as a ‘National Avenue’, a stadium, ‘A Garden of Heroes’ and a ‘Column of the Resurrection.’ Later in his career, Ó hÁinle would progress on to be an architect for Dublin City Council, as well as designing the Garden of Remembrance and the Basilica at Knock.

    In an age where ideology is becoming increasingly polarised, the rise of the right-wing normalised, open racism and bigotry espoused by world leaders, this way of thinking can no longer be dismissed, however bizarre sounding.

    In a new series of sculptures made as resident artist at the College of Architecture & Engineering, UCD as part of Parity Studios, I presents a dystopian vision based on Ó hÁinle’s plans, that aim at interrogating notions of Irishness and national identity, particularly coming up to more centenary commemorations and Brexit.

    A very special thank you to John Ryan, School of Civil Engineering, UCD.

    Doireann Ni Ghrioghair’s exhibition ‘Declaration of the State Metropolis at Tara’ runs at the Pallas Projects/Studios in Dublin from November 1st to November, open Thursday-Saturday 12pm to 6pm.

     

  • Musician of the Month: Natalia Beylis

     

    The Steadfast-Starry Sky in the Shannon 

    Do you remember last year when the weather was nice for ages? Six weeks of sunshine and warmth. There hadn’t been a picture-book summer like it. Not since 1995. I wasn’t living in Ireland in 1995 but still I know all about that summer.

    Sometimes, during a relentlessly rainy June, July or August, I hear people wistfully murmur ‘95′, and in their eyes, I watch them dreamily retreat back there. Last year, with weeks of skies stretching blue as far as you could see, we finally had that same kind of summer.

    July, 2018.

     

    Every evening we swim in the river by the bat bridge in Drumsna. I have never gotten into the river before. I have shivered in the cold of the lakes and the sea. Somehow though, the river had always seemed too fierce for me – as it flowed with the strength of a green-and-rust-orange serpent down through the countryside. Rare weeks of constant sun have now turned the waters warm and shallow, and just about, manageable enough.

    After we swim, we sit on the bank and open packets of crisps to share around. Swallows swoop to brush the water. On the far shore, a cow pokes its head out between the willow and alder. Swans, mostly in pairs, sail casually up towards The Flaggy Bottom.

    There is always the same lone swan. He floats over and hisses at the dog – who is sprawled in the heat licking the ends of the crisp packets. He floats over to hiss at us for the fun of it. A swan couple try to manoeuvre past him. He assumes battle form and chases them with a wing display like a ballerina dancing across the river’s stage. We affectionately dub the solitary bird, Grumpy Feathers.

    When we come home the sky is periwinkle. It’s never fully dark here at this time of year. I measure the fall of night by the animals. When they settle – like matching-curled foxes – onto their chosen couches I know it is time to move to the music room.

    I switch on my two Fender amps and the ’70s electric piano that came home with me from the recycling centre in Mohill. The piano notes travel through blue tweed cables into the Supersonic and the Fender Roc Pro 1000. Triangulated stereo.

    When I first sit down at the piano, I always play whatever free-form shapes reach my fingers. Each of my hands tends to keep its own company – clashing or harmonising without seeming to mind the other. My left hand might tap out notes in morse-code fashion, while my right flutters in triplets. Doing the daily swim up the river has changed my muscle memory.

    My arms start to mirror each other’s movements on the keys. My hands on the piano replicate the patterns of the breaststroke that I push against the current. The notes surge forward ever faster until I’m spent. The river follows me further into the night. In my dreams I struggle against its current.

    Maybe summer won’t stop until autumn. This glorious, amazing warmth, this sun, this kind of weather that people in Ireland often claim they could remember from childhood. The summer everyone has been waiting for since 1995. But in case it all suddenly turns I keep swimming. And sharing picnics. And eating ice creams by the water. And having little cans from the cooler, that too has been waiting for this summer for years, so that it can finally show its full potential.

    I keep a close eye on Grumpy Feathers and wonder about his past. Has he always been grumpy? Is that the reason he is alone? In the late evenings I sit down to the piano and settle into swim strokes across the keys.

    It is deep in the night. In my dream I am frantically scrambling against the water’s flow. I keep moving forward yet I want to stop, in awe at the wonders of the dream-river that are flashing past. Suddenly… BOOM! I become aware that I am in a dream. I stay calm like they teach you to do in these situations. I stop moving my arms. I no longer need to.

    Free from the physical constraints of waking life I float casually upriver past The Flaggy Bottom and towards the Shannon Pot. Trout and salmon and schools of two-tailed-rainbow makeyupeys dance around me. Translucent bubbles pop up from the deep beneath. The shimmery plants growing on the banks reach their tendrils delicately towards me. There’s Grumpy Feathers gliding in the opposite direction. He’s trying to say something but I can’t understand.

    I turn onto my back and drift beneath the water’s surface. The moonlike eyes of a cow blink down at me as she drinks from the river. I halt so I can watch her.

    Later I will think back on the dream while my fingers move across the piano keys in that new way that they like to; I’ll slow the notes right down and pay microscopic regard to the quiet in between the sounds. But for this split second, deep in my lucid-river slumber, the steadfast-starry universe shines behind the cow and the stars, to reflect down into the water and back up from its surface, merging together above and below me.

     

    Upcoming performances from Natalia Beylis:

    Wednesday 13 November: Clare – Kilstosheen – Soundings No. 2 with Tola Custy.

    Thursday 14 November: Galway – The Roisin Dubh – Tulca Festival (solo).

    Saturday 23 November: Sligo – The Model – Spilt Milk Festival with BB84.

    Saturday 30 November: Dublin – The Project Arts Centre – Sound Collector (solo).

     

  • The November Events

    What is it they say about going bankrupt? Slowly at first, and then all at once. As we crossed the precinct yard and I saw the scale of the operation in real terms, the vehicles crowded into rows, still more throbbing outside, as I heard all those boots, I knew the slow part was coming to an end.

    I stood at the car as the others loaded up. The late afternoon light hummed something to me about the absurdity of the local force leading out this mission of supposedly unspeakable importance. The light’s inclusion was as chance as ours, it seemed to say, our roles entangled, a collective witness, it the light and we the eyes. My colleagues called from inside the car and I stooped in and shut the door.

    We rolled past familiar sights, the rusted gates of old mills, the sagging roofs of tanneries, the husk of the shoe factory that defied demolition, tattooed with graffiti inside and out. We beheld them in glassy eyes, our thoughts communal. All the bristling and division of the previous weeks seemed redundant, replaced by a palpable relief to be so far down the clearance list, so removed from the frowning, pacing people we’d watched through the blinds of the chief’s office. The weight they bore, the towering science irreducible to anything we could be expected to understand. And yet, we surely sensed the change, as intangible as ownership, rippling out in waves as our convoy carved a line between before and after. Our little town would not sleep that night.

    [Fig. 7 – Remains on ice rink. Barton Thewes, Toronto, Canada, 1997]

    Our other car peeled off west on a decoy run to divide unwanted attention. Who and what was in the trucks rumbling along behind us, half of which turned off after our other car, it was not our job to know. Maybe our car was the decoy. Of all the deflections and analogies they’d used, none worked better for me than referring to the whole thing as an ‘operation’. It most certainly resembled surgery, an intrusion under the glare of lights, of figures moving in and out of focus, beyond awareness, of terminology shared behind masks.

    We gazed out the windows, wary, our sense of place in soft dissociation. The looming slant of the train station, the red-bricked menace of the old hospital reconciled into quiet obsolescence as we moved forward, dragging the future behind us. As we approached the broad river channel, I closed my eyes against the swathe of sunlight. I didn’t need to look around me. Our town wasn’t exactly a place people visited, but there was this view up and down the river between bridges, a reflection of a brief golden age, a blip of prosperity our forefathers had chosen to enshrine in oddball architecture. The turrets of slick, green tiles with the round windows at the top, the mosaic of battlements and hanging balconies, where the men behind these buildings, owners of mills, tanneries and shoe factories, could stand and admire themselves in the warp of the river below. As kids, we’d learnt to be charmed by this fairytale skyline. As teenagers, we learnt to squint and spit at its small-time vanity. By the time we were adults, it was a reminder that a short-sighted, grandiose artistry ran within us all. To think big, but not too big.

    The sun was blocked off again and I opened my eyes and the people on the footpaths swam in the blue shade, watching us obliquely like fish on a reef.

    [Fig. 4 – Taxi stopped in traffic. José Almeida, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1999]

    We headed south along the avenue. I was glad I’d been assigned to this car. LKJH was in the other. I knew his leg would be twitching, that he’d be taking notes, still urging the others to think, to ask themselves why things were happening the way they were. This was our town, he’d be saying, and we were its local police. There would be no peace, however brief or superficial, in that car. Someone would surely have had to tell him to stop, to just let them be.    

    The chief had called myself and LKJH into his office a couple of weeks back and told us an international investigation of some sort had apparently identified our town as the most likely site for the next November event. LKJH began trembling, questions coming so fast he was unable to verbalise them. The chief asked if this was the same business our dads had had a thing for. We nodded. The chief sighed and said he’d never understood what they were talking about. He asked us to prepare a briefing for the senior crew. I could feel LKJH looking at me, but I didn’t look back. The chief rubbed his moustache just under his nose and asked if all this was real, if someone was really going to just. I felt LKJH nod. The chief leaned back in his chair and squinted at the wall.

    Outside, LKJH had hammered me with questions though I knew it was just to hear his own voice. What international investigation? When had that started? Who was behind that? How could they predict location? What parameters were they using? What sort of tech? He said crazy stuff about destiny, about the two of us as integral parts, how our whole lives had led us to that point. I stopped him there. I told him he was on his own. There was no ‘us’. But I don’t think he heard me. He was talking about calling by his mother’s place to get the stuff, telling me to imagine what our dads would have said. An event happening here. But I didn’t feel like imagining anything. Our dads were dead and gone, as was my interest in the events, as was my attachment to many things, I found right then as I tried to get myself away, as he followed me for a while, asking me where I was going, asking me how I could deny our destiny. But it wasn’t ‘our’ anything.

    [Fig. 4 – Armchair and fireplace bearing remains. Lukás Koller, Senec, Slovakia, 2000]

    Up a ramp off the national into suburbs that stretched before us into hills all the way up towards The Shoulder, the low mountain that rose before us. The wild green ruffles against a golden biscuit stone. A view worth considering too, perhaps, I thought, with our town’s stock about to rise. Someone said that one of our colleagues lived out this direction. After a moment, someone else asked why he’d said that, if that was important. We drove on for a while and the first said no, that just maybe that was why he was in the other car. Someone asked if any of us in our car lived out this way. No, we said, one by one. Again someone asked if that was important. The silence spoke for itself.

    I was two years older than LKJH. We’d gone to different schools and our dads had served in different units. If they hadn’t bonded over the events, then me and LKJH would probably have never even met as kids. We only became cops because that was what our city was like. The doctor’s kids became doctors, the shopkeeper’s kids became shopkeepers, and so on. Some didn’t, of course, but many did. Some specifically tried not to, myself included, but ended up doing so all the same. There was a saying in our city, or used to be at one point, that childhood was an apprenticeship.

    The radio bleeped, directions coming turn by turn, next left, second right, again and again, and each time we moved more slowly, more uphill. For security reasons, they’d told us, we couldn’t be given our destination. After every turn, the radio asked for our location and someone ran it off, we listened to our accent, its sound making more sense than all the procedural talk of this whole undertaking. These were the nice neighbourhoods, the places we were taught to aspire towards, places where we could quite literally look down on the rest of the town. I looked at the long, high hedges, the pedestrian crossings, the broad pavements, the cafés and florists, the jolly shop fronts and school railings, a cushioned playground where a swing trembled.

    [Fig. 5 – Office canteen showing event radius. Zhou Chen, Baoding, China, 2004]

    When the date came around each year, our dads held what they called an ‘observation’ in LKJH’s dad’s garage. Boxes of filings and photos taken down from the skewed shelves and spread across a workbench, a big old map hung in the corner, covered with pins and curling notes. The junk was moved back so our dads could sit in fold-out canvas chairs, with us two cross-legged on stinking upturned fruit crates. All in the light of a single candle lit for the latest victim. By the time we gathered there in the evening, the event had sometimes already happened, and our dads told us to do the paperwork, the logbooks, to stick the pin in the map. If it hadn’t happened yet, we sat in the stale, vegetable air and waited for the phone to ring. Our dads quizzed us, made us name the year, the victim, the location and circumstances. LKJH bouncing on his crate when I didn’t know an answer, as our dads urged me to think, told me it was easy. LKJH with his hand raised, punching the air, and it was always my dad who’d eventually ask him, and he’d get it right and all three of them wondered how I hadn’t known such an easy one.

    When our dads had drunk all their beer, LKJH’s dad would reach behind one or other pile of junk and produce a bottle, unlabelled and wrapped in a rag. They jokingly called it the ‘magic potion’. They passed the bottle and mulled over theories. They improvised freely. Talk always turned to speculation about an event occurring in our town. The intrusion from outside, our townsfolk forced to reckon questions without answers. LKJH sitting rapt. They grew less and less coherent, and spoke of rebirth in death, of the need for sacrifice. If someone had to go, they said, then why not one of us? If there was no way to avoid it, should it not instead be sought? The bottle passed like a pendulum between them, and each November, they reached the conclusion with the soft, malicious ambiguity our region is famous for, that it might have been the best thing that could happen to us.

    Eventually, the radio gave us an address. As we slowed and peered out for house numbers, the trucks swelled past us. They already knew where they were going, someone said. It was only the locals kept in the dark. Too close to be trusted. Why have us leading out then, someone else said. Why have us there at all? They fell silent then, aware that this was pretty much what LKJH had been saying for weeks, that we’d been told next to nothing, that our role in proceedings seemed little more than a front for something much deeper, much larger, and very far from random.    

    [Fig 29 – (c) Graph of Van Allen radiation belt and (d) SAA zone.]

    LKJH had taken care of the briefing himself. He’d set up the shaggy old map in the office, the tables spread with the files and charts. The senior bunch passed photos around as LKJH told them about Toronto. The ice hockey game. Local fan Barton Thewes, rink-side with his family. The event happened, all over the glass, all over the people around him, into the air, raining down onto the ice. It happened just off camera but the panic was live. An infamous image of steam rising from the bright remains on the rink. It was news for a while, though when investigations produced nothing, it was soon outpaced by other matters, and left to linger on hard drives, what they’d scooped from the ice kept in a forensic deep freeze somewhere. LKJH swept his hand across the map. Every event had been investigated thoroughly, but none had produced anything useful. The investigators were asked to confirm at least that the events were linked but from a strictly scientific perspective, successive teams explained, it wasn’t conclusive whether they were or not. Public records and chronicles were examined for inexplicable events, anything occurring on that date, parameters so wide there was any number of potentially linked events; sinking ships, disappearing livestock, strange lights in the sky.

    The senior bunch leaned, arms folded. So what you’re saying, someone said, is this is going to happen in our town? LKJH said that it was going to happen somewhere, but he didn’t know about any way of predicting an event with the local and temporal accuracy they were talking about. Then why, someone called up, was this international investigation saying it would happen here? LKJH shook his head, said it was the first he’d heard about it. There hadn’t been any interest at all for years, and nothing concerted or sustained. He had no information on who was behind it or how they were operating. But members of the international team were due any day, he said, and then we’d know more. He took his phone from the desk and poked at it with his thumb and chimes came from phones around the room. Some links, he said. Sites, more background, some thought. The senior bunch took out their phones, looked at screens. I saw how he savoured their downturned heads, as he watched them wonder what exactly was awaiting them.

    [Fig. 12 – Detail (6a) from Aboriginal artwork, The Kimberley, Australia. Detail (6c) from graffiti in Utrecht, The Netherlands.]

    In the back room at The Bell, where the wooden panelling shone, polished by generations of unofficial policework, the discussion grew heated. They demanded to know if it was happening or not, what exactly he was saying. I watched LKJH explain that no one actually knew when the events had begun. They might have always existed. There were holes everywhere in the records, years with nothing reported, other years with numerous conflicting accounts of disappearances. This was not the senior crew’s modus operandi. They opened the small hatch doors in the wall and bellowed for more beer. Why were they only hearing about this now? Why wasn’t this common knowledge? LKJH told them that was exactly what they should be asking themselves. Eventually, our malicious ambiguity emerged, that it was just one person, that it hardly mattered. Others nodded. Maybe, said LKJH, though what if it’s one of us? The frayed patience tautened again.

    The trucks gathered on a corner, where houses all around sat hidden behind hedges. We passed around the grid of coloured squares we’d been given back at the precinct. We found our space at the end and radioed in and sat still as other vehicles moved past towards their place. The radio crackled again, calling our car number, telling us to move out. We popped the doors and the air throbbed with engines. Someone said at least we knew who the decoys were. The biggest vehicles were stopped end to end, creating a sort of barrier around the corner. Still more pulled up tight, waved into place by back-pedalling figures. Any gaps were quickly filled with international troops in mirror shades, weapons high across their chests. Boots planted on tailgates as equipment was unloaded onto trolleys. We showed our badges and were directed to a channel between vehicles where a large white forensics canopy with zipped doorways was being erected. Technicians waved us on.

    Inside was a generous, sloping, L-shaped garden with bark-chip paths and tiered flower beds. We went up three slate steps to where the house stood behind fan-like shrubbery, the broad front door under a dark wooden porch. From there we stood and looked back down towards the technicians bringing metal cases through the plastic portal and lining them up on the lawn. The engine throb, the distant pounding of boots, the close-up clack of the handles springing closed against the metal cases.

    [Fig. 14 – Japanese investigators bow at press conference, Yokohama, Japan, 1998]

    When the international team had indeed showed up at our precinct, accompanied by government officials who briefed us on our role, LKJH’s hand was up from the start. The officials eventually paused and LKJH asked if we were the first city the ‘operation’ was being conducted in, if this predictive model had been tried elsewhere. He asked who was behind the international team, why there was this sudden concerted revival of interest in the events. The chief told him to stop, but LKJH repeated his questions. The officials reminded him our full cooperation was expected, but he asked what exactly we were cooperating in. Why now? Why here? He began to quiz the international team in broken English, name the year, name the victim, the location and circumstances, till they shook their heads, and the man in charge, a tall, thin man they’d introduced as the ‘Doctor’, frowned at the government officials, who told LKJH to shut up, and when he didn’t, to get the hell out.

    Down at The Bell, some of them had a go at LKJH. Who the hell did he think he was with his raggedy old map and his photos? He asked them why he was the only one standing up to them. For all our badges and oaths, for all our local swagger, he said, we’d been silenced, made redundant, marginalised in our own town. He reminded us that we were police officers, and we should have been investigating, asking why all this was suddenly being treated so seriously, asking whose interests this whole international operation was serving. Did they really think it was chance that had brought them to our little town? Or did they think this was just what our town needed? A little sacrifice to get the blood flowing again. Exasperation became anger and voices were raised until the barman had to stoop to the hatch doors and plead with us to keep it down. It was up to us, LKJH said as he necked his beer and stormed out, meaning, once again, that it was up to him.

    When LKJH left, the senior crew asked me what his problem was. I shrugged. When they asked if I really believed an event was going to happen here, in our town, I said the only honest thing I could: ‘why not?’

    I didn’t tell them that one time during an observation our dads had made us fight. They said we had to toughen up and learn to protect ourselves. This was deep into the magic potion. I refused, but they goaded LKJH till he came squealing at me and hit me and both of them were bellowing at me to hit him back and even LKJH hung off a bit, waiting for me to do something. The intensity in his eyes, the fear, not of violence, but of disappointing our dads. I stood there lumpen as he tried a few more exaggerated, theatrical punches, his eyes swelling with mortification.

    [Fig. 9 – Wedding ring, flowers. Máire Donovan, Castlebar, Ireland, 2020]

    The chief called me into the office. He asked if LKJH was okay. I asked what he meant. The chief paused. Could LKJH be trusted, he wanted to know. With what, I asked. The chief squinted at the wall. LKJH was taking things very seriously, he said. Very personally. How was he supposed to take things, I asked softly, rhetorically. I liked the chief. He sat silently, focusing on a seemingly tiny but essential piece of the wall. He rubbed his moustache just under his nose. He said people were constantly telling him what a big deal this was for our little town. I shrugged. I said I didn’t know. The chief then said that people were calling for LKJH to be removed. Distanced. I asked if it was our people asking. There was a knock on the door then, and people came in, and we apologized to each other as I left.

    The observations were the first thing I rebelled against. One year, I said I wasn’t going. I can’t remember how old I was, but I was as tall as my dad. I told him the events were stupid. He asked if I was denying them. No, I said. He asked what was I talking about then. I couldn’t say what I meant. It was an affront to something I couldn’t define at the time, but I knew I was right and stood my ground and refused to go. The dads sent LKJH over to try to convince me to come. He said what they’d told him to say, tried to make it his own as they’d told him to. ‘Our little tradition,’ he said. ‘Our thing.’

    I told him to get real, that the events were trivia, for trivial people, that nobody else gave a shit about them. He went back and repeated that pretty much word for word, and I don’t think my dad ever really forgave me.

    The years went by and our dads retired, pottered around, grew slow, and died. LKJH had a son and a daughter who’d shown little interest in the events despite his best efforts. The older they got, the more they dismissed him, out in the garage, the sick photos and yellowing charts. They eventually used it against him in the custody hearing. For me, the events became all but forgotten, a low throb once a year when LKJH would find me, follow me down a corridor, tell me the details of the latest, letting me know me he’d update the records, gather some info. I’d nod till he went away and took his empty throb with him. Sitting alone in the garage, staring at the map, year after year. A single candle lit.

    Maybe I should have told the chief these things. He knew I had no kids, no wife to fight for them. He could have used this knowledge to frame my contributions, to temper the breach of confidence, staring at the wall as he factored them in, factored them out. Maybe I’d been distracted by what the chief didn’t ask; why I wasn’t taking it more personally. If he’d asked, I’d have told him something. But he didn’t. As I said, I liked the chief.

    [Fig. 7 – Forensics teams mark remains on rocks. Abidemi Eze, Enugu, Nigeria, 2018]

    From where we stood under the porch, I could see through a gap in the two houses opposite, a broad slice of our town below, a wedge of oblique, cryptic crossword dozing in the valley haze. This light of ours, I noted, that hung like kind, wise words, reminding us of the onset of dusk. The sun would soon dip behind The Shoulder and the valley would be left to measure itself against deepening shadow. We didn’t pay enough attention to our light, to its daily saga, to its glorious demise. We took nightfall for granted when we locked our doors and thought that nobody could hear us think. We yawned and lay down and dreamt of an innocent morning we never suspected might not come.

    Someone said listen up, that no matter what happened inside, we were going to The Bell afterwards, okay, just us lot, nobody else, that the first round was on him. We hummed agreement. Then someone else said sorry but if it was a child, he didn’t think he’d be able to. That he was sorry, but if it was a child, no way. There was no acknowledgement. The technicians stacked the last of the cases and stared back at us across the lawn.

    [Fig. 10 – Overlaid graphs of mean age, height, weight and blood type]

    Our colleagues from the other car came through the white portal into the garden. They approached up the steps, looking drawn. Someone asked what they were doing there. What was the point of a decoy if we all ended up in the same place? One gave a thumb over his shoulder, and said ask him, and we looked and saw LKJH enter, taking his time, turning, inspecting the rows of cases. When he reached the porch, he asked what we were doing. Someone said we were waiting for the chief to arrive with the first contact team. LKJH frowned and said they were already inside. Someone asked him how he knew that. Police work, he said. We stood and reckoned on this.

    Someone asked if that meant we were all decoys.

    [Fig. 11 – Aerial view of rioting in Lyon. Rochelle Ngogo, Lyon, France, 2022]

    To be approached one day at your own front door and have a local voice tell you were a key piece in an ongoing worldwide project. To be told its purpose was to discover something solid, something to confirm that a methodology was sound, that answers lay therein. To hear how profound a victory this would be. To be led back to your sitting room or kitchen and told that they needed you to be strong, needed you to trust them, and then to watch as they stood back to weigh your stammered confusion, to note how you searched their cold, foreign faces for impossible explanations.

    The trucks fell silent and we heard the sound of the forensics portal being zipped shut. The front door creaked open and we turned. The chief leaned out, gave us a soft nod, and went back inside, leaving the door open. LKJH swept past me and straight in. Troops stooped to the handles on the equipment cases. I looked across at the image of our town between the two houses, how snug it lay in the hazy lavender sunset, though for all my romanticism I knew news of this operation would by then be rushing through its veins, and would infect the oncoming dusk with a mental neon glow. I turned back to the gaping hole of the door and stepped inside.

    The first thing I saw was the photo hanging in the hall. Parents and kids. A family smile. Low curses from those who followed me. The hallway led into a broad living room, its thick carpet and mantelled, candlesticked table, where numerous people in fatigues or lab coats already moved around. The chief stood, absently rubbing his moustache. I went and stood beside him and he said something as light as breath that I didn’t catch. There was a man and a woman holding each other on a sofa. They looked up at the matt-metal cases, the uniforms and helmets in their living room. Technicians compared readings from hand-held devices, others set up tripod stands. LKJH crouched by the couple. I heard him telling them not to worry, that the local police had their back, that the whole thing was a bit of a mix-up. That it was an exercise. At best a simulation. The international community, he said, with a familiar malicious ambiguity. The couple held each other tightly. The chief called him back in a hollow voice. LKJH stood up again, hands on hips, labouring under the weight of the rest of what he wanted to say.

    [Fig. 13 – Excerpt from the Popol Vuh. Guatemala, transcribed in 1550CE approx., from Mayan oral tradition]

    The white-coated team asked the man to make space as they worked around the woman, leaning her this way and that, whispering necessity, fixing a sensor to her temple, another on her neck. She acquiesced wordlessly. They slipped a small black ring onto her fingertip, a tiny red light with the rapid blink of her pulse. The process was distracting enough to allow her to look past them again, past us all, and just then there were muffled shouts and two little girls came running, squeezing between bodies, crying in unison, terrified. The team members who’d been assigned to them followed and reached, but stopped short as the woman took the children together, shushing and calming them, smoothing their hair. As they begged her to come, their mother’s voice washed over them, sound beyond words, a trembling melody to linger in their ears.

    At a murmur from the doctor, the minders stepped forward again and whispered the girls’ names and the crying grew intense, the strength of a child’s cling, the arms reaching for mama and papa as the minders worked on each grip, blocked and ushered the children out. The man on the sofa blinked red-eyed confusion. The little voices grew more desperate and even the closed doors and distance along the hallway couldn’t block the sound.

    They began setting up cameras on tripods and draped light plastic sheeting across the furniture, taping more to the ceiling and letting it hang. The woman asked why, and the man stood up, mouth hanging, overwhelmed, the creak of troops leaning in. The man trembled as he asked what they were filming and the doctor rubbed the point between his eyes and the man pushed back at the figures leaning in and limbs quickly tangled and he was shouting that he just wanted to hold her, that he wouldn’t leave her, that he would protect her, but she said no, no, to be calm, that he had to take care of the girls, that he had to go to them. He struggled against the words but she said again that it was fine. That it was just a simulation. The man’s desolate appreciation of her, barely resisting as he was taken from his own sitting room. He sobbed from the hallway that she’d be fine, that they’d all be together in no time. That the girls needed her. That he was blessed to know her. That they loved her so much.

    [Fig. 15 – Screenshot from redacted government documents, on Project Argus, London, UK, 2009]

    The doctor nodded and someone threw a switch and lights came on and the plastic glared and we all looked down. The small cameras were trained and technicians nodded to each other. Surrounded but alone, the local woman sat straight in her chair blinking through tears. She asked if we were recording and someone said yes and she stared into space, into time, and controlled her breathing and began speaking again to her absent girls. She told them she wasn’t afraid. Her trembling smile as she removed tears with the heel of her hand. She wasn’t afraid. It was an exercise. There was nothing to fear. We sat around and listened, in our big boots and bulletproof shields. The sound of tapping at a laptop computer, looping differently to the woman’s speech. She paused every now and again, as if to let it catch up.

    All through which, I kept my eye on LKJH as he paced about in a corner, as it all dissolved in his hands. He asked the chief what exactly the woman had been told. The chief shushed him but he asked again, and the chief turned a pained look and said please not now, but LKJH turned to the doctor and spoke in English, clear enough to make the tall man wince. LKJH turned back to us. She doesn’t know, he said. They didn’t tell her anything about the events. Voices of compressed urgency ordering him to stop speaking, but he turned back and stepped right into the doctor’s personal space and both troops and lab coats converged to block him. LKJH told the doctor straight to his face that he was full of shit. At the doctor’s terse, glassy patter, the troops grabbed LKJH and wrestled him swiftly towards the door. Gurgling through the choke-hold as they dragged him past, he locked desperate eyes on me and I thought he trying to say something about destiny, a disoriented final appeal to ‘us’. I hope all he saw on my face was that this had never been about him and he knew it. Then he was gone and we were left alone with the only sound in the room, the woman sitting on the sofa, speaking softly to her girls.

    I only became a cop because I rebelled against it so hard, threw myself into the wild life so completely that in the end it was the only job I could have possibly got. An apprenticeship of its own. It reached the point where my dad had left me flat on my back and leaned over me and told me I could either sign up or leave town. All those times I’d told my dad that the events were irrelevant, that more people died in their bathtubs, more were killed by their pets. Maybe it was all just because I knew I’d end up here.  

    White coats whispered things, called off numbers and letters. I heard one say something about contact and people grew utterly silent. In this room, in our town of all places, it was understood that something, no matter what, was favourable to nothing. It was nothing, essentially, that scared us more. Nothing wasn’t absence; it was totality, a reset to chaos every time. In that room, we understood that sometimes a sacrifice was needed.

    Should I have spoken out when I saw all the cameras were trained on her, as she sat alone, strong, beautiful beyond words? Should I not have asked for one camera at least to be turned in my general direction? Asked for a sensor or two? A ring for my fingertip? I began to feel a strange sensation of having reached some undeniable truth. A sense of completeness, of fullness, of being far too much for this little town.

  • Thought Leadership Required for Climate and Biodiversity Crisis

    The great English chemist James Lovelock conceived the Gaia (Gr. ‘goddess of earth’) Hypothesis in 1972, later developing this alongside American microbiologist Lynns Margulis. Later still, Lovelock, aged eighty-seven, was awarded the prestigious Wolston medal by the Geological Society of London for his pioneering concept.

    Now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that unknown forces, popularly conflated with the idea of Mother Earth, nurture our planet’s physical environment to sustain life. To draw on another famous scientific analogy, it might be said that Gaia maintains ‘just rightness’ (i.e. ‘the goldilocks theory’) through righteous homeostasis.

    As Gaia approaches her golden jubilee, however – and James Lovelock edges toward his one-hundred-and-first birthday – the evidence mounts against faith in the concept of perpetual renewal; her resilience and raison d’être has been weakened after millennia of selfless resolve .[i] The precipice lies before us.

    Gaia has tolerated humanity’s repeated abuses, but only in recent geological time has her mood turned conspicuously (and literally) stormy.

    There are, nonetheless, grounds for hope. As Gaia’s health fades, Greta Thunberg’s rage burns ever more brightly. There is an existential ecosystem crisis to be called out, and Greta has risen to the challenge.

    A strange energy reverberates whenever this Swedish teenager speaks publicly. Her unflinching delivery is as riveting as a tense drama; her conviction is that of a seasoned stateswoman, with deliciously scathing rhetoric unleashed in staccato rhythm.

    Intriguingly, the voice retains the appeal of naivety. Significantly, despite and indeed because of this innocence, the overall effect can be intoxicating to grownups who thought they had lost hope.

    ‘Futile Nobility’

    Greta’s fury has burned a hole in the establishment’s defences. The fire she started has been stoked by public sentiment. A paradigm shift in environmental attitudes is now apparent, but worryingly certain world leaders have adopted a bizarre form of stoicism in the face of Greta’s resuscitation of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’.

    Against this backdrop, scientists’ noble pursuit of rigorous data to prove what may seem obvious can seem futile.

    For instance, in the recent Special Report on Climate Change and Lands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), embodying the spirit of righteous scientific detachment, claim only ‘high (but notably not ‘very high’) confidence’ in the (surely self-evident) statement that ‘sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.’[ii]

    There are other examples of such reticence. In the midst of the Sixth Extinction, following on from a century-long campaign of insecticide, a team of UK entomologists published a paper calling for more data on insect declines, state:

    we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening—we agree—but this is not the whole story. We call for hard‐nosed, balanced, and numerical analysis of the changes taking place, and for calm and even‐handed interpretation of the changes, rather than rushing headlong into the hyperbole of impending apocalypse.[iii]

    Selling Copy

    Political leaders such as the POTUS Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a.k.a ‘Trump of the Tropics’, who recently mocked his latest nickname ‘Capitão Motoserra’ (Captain Chainsaw),[iv] provide a jarring contrast to valiant scientific rigour. Sadly but no longer surprisingly, these leaders frustrate efforts to slow anthropogenic ecosystem decay. Sadder still, we are increasingly desensitized to the toxic brew of xenophobia and climate denial.

    Whilst posing less risk to the environment than ignorance at world leader tier, the disregard of the most bombastic commentariat is equally galling. Cue journalistic tropes of Alpen-crunching tree embracers, guffawing reference to Ireland’s ecological anti-hero, the Kerry slug, and glib ‘kill the whales, save the plankton’ slogans.

    Purveyors of such sensationalist hyperbole do so to sell copy. The shock-jock Jeremy Clarkson wincingly entreats Greta, with misogynistic undertones ‘to be a good girl, shut up, and [don’t] go out in a skirt that short.’[v]

    Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious, loud, and frequently fired ,’[vi] U.S. Republican journalist Michael Graham is another exploiting an angry white male anti-environmental constituency to garner a following.

    For his part, the POTUS has also sparred with the Swedish child activist, in characteristically unbecoming fashion, mockingly referring to this ‘very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.’[vii]

    What fun would ensue if the IPCC were to invite Thunberg, Trump, and a band of other incendiary speakers to a public climate debate. The Canadian clinical psychologist and global media star Jordan Peterson could provide ruthless post-match psychoanalysis to provide car crash television on a stratospheric level.

    I suspect Thunberg might decline the opportunity as a matter of principle stressing the irrelevance of idle words.

    Yet it seems we need Greta to stimulate our senses, deadened as we are by a constant stream of ever-worsening statistics. As an example, take these statements of fact: ‘Nature declines are at rates unprecedented in human history;’[viii] an area of primary tropical rain forest the size of Belgium was lost in 2018,[ix] and these losses exceed those from 2017 when an area the size of a football pitch was lost every second.[x] Is it just me, or do these harbingers come off sounding oddly banal?

    Here in Ireland, 85% of habitats, protected under EU Habitat Directives, are in ‘unfavourable status.’[xi]  Curlew numbers – whose reverberating cry was once a soundtrack to Ireland’s uplands – have declined by 96% since the late 1980’s,[xii]  and may go extinct within five to ten years. Such statements sting and depress, but many of us seem desensitized by over-stimulation in a mediated age.

    Eco-thinkers

    ‘Ms.’ Thunberg, as she is sometimes addressed with mocking respect by her dissenters, is inarguably an ecological ‘thought leader.’ That term seems to have been first used to describe American philosopher and early ‘eco-thinker,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was said to have ‘the wizard-power of a thought leader.’

    As we face down the ecosystem crisis, we need more environmental thought leaders to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Lovelock, E.O Wilson, and Dublin’s own Frank Mitchell.

    We need effective eco-communicators to recruit followers to the environmental movement. These new recruits could heal the fatigue in long-term activists – labelled as outré or leftfield by the establishment – jaded by the inaction of policymakers.

    With environmentalism mainstreaming, new voices can dynamise and nourish environmental stewardship on the heretofore disinterested fringes.

    Hearteningly, in May 2019, Dáil Eireann became the second legislative assembly on the planet (after the House of Commons in the U.K.) to declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency. After decades of numbing stasis, law-makers in this State with the power to instigate change seen to have committed to radical environmental objectives through Ireland’s Climate Action Plan,[xiii] and Ireland’s (third) National Biodiversity Action Plan.[xiv] Let’s wait and see whether long-term institutional failures can be overcome.

    As a career ecologist, I care as deeply for slimy moss, and eels as for doe-eyed dolphins or deer. All are a part of the web of life; even the wasps we love to hate play their part as aphid predators. Yet committing my life’s work to conservation has done little to allay a sense of powerlessness to bring about meaningful changes.

    And yet – with rumination over my own more unsustainable habits a favourite past time – I see that we can all do more on an individual level, becoming, like Greta, the change we want to see in the world.

    Whoever stated: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ happened upon a problem and solution to the current biodiversity and environmental crisis.

    For the sake of Mother Gaia we must substitute kinesis for stasis. The power of one is the collective potential of all. Wizard- (and perhaps also witch-) powered thought leaders are at the ready.

    [i] Tyrrell, T. 2013, Gaia: Death of a beautiful idea. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029401-800-gaia-the-death-of-a-beautiful-idea/

    [ii] IPCC, ‘Climate Change and Land’, August 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/

    [iii] Chris Thomas, T. Jones and Sue Hartley, ‘“Insectageddon”: A call for more robust data and rigorous analyses’, Global Change Biology, March, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331456611_Insectageddon_A_call_for_more_robust_data_and_rigorous_analyses

    [iv] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro rejects ‘Captain Chainsaw’ label as data shows deforestation ‘exploded’’ August 7th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data

    [v] Clarkson, J. 2019 27 Sep 2019. The e world may be getting hotter, Greta Thunberg… but having a meltdown isn’t going to help https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10022396/greta-thunberg-meltdown-wont-help-world/

    [vi] Ward, E. He’s loud. He’s controversial. And he knows he’s right. Style Weekly. https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/hes-loud-hes-controversial-and-he-knows-hes-right/Content?oid=1382305

    [vii] Kate Lyons, ‘Donald Trump tweet appears to mock Greta Thunberg and UN speech’, September 24th, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/donald-trump-tweet-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-and-un-speech-1.4028590

    [viii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’’ May, 2019. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

    [ix] Niklas Magnusson, ‘Deforestation Wipes Out an Area the Size of Belgium’, April 25th, 2019, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/how-bad-is-deforestation-two-connecticuts-were-lost-last-year

    [x] Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett, ‘One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals’, 27th of June, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals

    [xi] NPWS (2019). The Status of EU Protected Habitats and Species in Ireland. Volume 1: Summary Overview. Unpublished NPWS report

    [xii] Unpublished data from Allan Lauder (2017) cited in O’Donoghue, B.G. (2019). Curlew Conservation Programme Annual Report 2018. National Parks & Wildlife Service, Killarney O’Donoghue

    [xiii] Government of Ireland (2019). Climate Action Plan 2019. https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/publications/Pages/Climate-Action-Plan.aspx

    [xiv] Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (2019). National Biodiversity Action Plan 2017-2021 https://www.npws.ie/sites/default/files/publications/pdf/National%20Biodiversity%20Action%20Plan%20English.pdf

  • No Comment: Philip Smith ‘Bonfire Wars’

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  • Public Intellectual Series: George Orwell – A Crucial Man for Our Time

    George Orwell has never been unfashionable, and is in vogue now more than ever. His writing, best represented by his many essays on a variety of subjects, rather than the more celebrated novels, presage in myriad ways the problems we face today.

    Those famous novels 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are visionary works depicting totalitarian societies, but in a more significant way it is the cornucopia of themes broached in his essays that anticipate a present era of thought control.

    Orwell despised abstractions, especially nationalism, but also extremism on the left. Accordingly, in his essays we find focus on the particular and daily life. All political concerns are deemed local. Indeed, his works is identifiable as part of British tradition of empiricism with its distrust of grand ideas and gestures.

    Mumbo-Jumbo

    Orwell would have no time for the mumbo-jumbo of post-modernism and structuralism, just as he dismissed the ideological psychobabble of fascism and Communism. Instead he venerated the common sense of the ordinary person, and was deeply sensitive to how ideologies crushed the human spirit.

    Yet he was also aware of how seductive ideologies could be, anticipating what Zizek has called ‘ideological misidentification’ – that includes voting for those who will undermine your interests, as blue collar America did in electing Trump; or believing what you read in The Daily Mail about foreigners.

    Orwell is nonetheless firmly opposed to the mentality of the mob. Were he alive today, he would surely be a genuine tribune for those on the margins of society, but decidedly against the recrudescence of Populism and appeals to bigotry.

    The casual racism he despised, now so evident in many cultures including Britain, was shaped by his experiences of British colonial barbarism in Burma, as indeed was his hatred of the death penalty, invoked in his short story A Hanging (1931), which was based on personal experience.

    Orwell would definitely understand how, through social media and the machinations of Cambridge Analytical the ordinary man is manipulated – brainwashed even – by subliminal messaging and online influencers. Perhaps the docile uncritical consumerism we are creating is best represented in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World (1932), a companion piece to 1984 and Animal Farm for understanding our troubled zeitgeist. Either way, both Orwell and Huxley saw what was coming.

    Throughout his writing Orwell emerges as the champion of the underdog, and zealous opponent of vulgar nationalism, whether emanating from state authorities, or the untutored blatherings of brainwashed victims.

    Orwell had no truck with popular prejudice, esteeming instead basic decency. Doubtless, he would recognise how the populace could be whipped into a mass frenzy today and vote in crypto-fascists or even for Brexit. He was sensitive to how popular decency could be corrupted by propaganda into anti-Semitism and the portrayal of Eastern Europeans as degenerates, as he addresses in Notes on Nationalism (1945).

    Uncommon beliefs

    Orwell thus is a believer in the common sense of the common man, but not popular prejudice or vulgar nationalism, or especially not the racism that spills forth from the mouths of those subjected to propaganda.

    He is prescient about how an ordinary person intuitively believes in the Rule of Law. Thus, in ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1940) he argues that the English believe in law, not power. He further opines in ‘Inside The Whale’ (1940) that this stems from a lack of experience of violence and illegality: ‘With all its injustices England is still the land of habeas corpus and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence and illegality.’

    Homage to Catalonia (1938) is an account of his his Spanish sojourn fighting on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists. There he saw clearly how extremism of both left and right has no restraints or humanitarian boundaries, and that a society morphs rapidly into lawless banditry.

    Dotty Dreamland

    The dotty dreamland of England, then and now, is suffused with moderation, incrementalism and a lack of experience of licensed thuggery. This is the basic decency Orwell finds in the novels of Charles Dickens, along with a sympathy for the underdog.

    Living in London I now recognise that the British do not seem to understand, rightly so – and certainly do not tolerate – the manipulation or abuse of law by power.

    In this, arguably, they stand alone in Europe, where we see the law used as a tool of oppression in Spain by proto-fascists, who have imprisoned those with the temerity to hold a peaceful independence referendum; not to mention the crypto-Nazi enclave of Orban’s Hungary, and with the rise of La Liga in Italy; more insidious in Ireland is the undermining of decency and corporate takeover.

    The championing of the underdog is a noticeable feature of British life, and the obligation to vindicate the rule of law against the interests of the powerful is still taken seriously, unlike in Ireland which endorses the interests of the corporations to such an extent that the state resists a tax windfall of €13 billion.

    It is not for nothing that the reasonable man test, or the notional man on the Clapham Omnibus, is intrinsic to British legalism and the Rule of Law.

    That is perhaps why the British became so resistant to the idea of their interests being undermined by faceless bureaucrats for Europe, although tragically the result of Brexit may be to deliver them into the hands of a worse set of faceless bureaucrats in the shape of the American corporatocracy.

    In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1940) Orwell emphasises how the British are repelled by miscarriages of justice, and believe in holding power accountable, which demands impartial administration of justice by independent officials, who are not bought or compromised. This originates in patterns of independent and generally depoliticised appointment not evident in most other European jurisdictions.

    Use of language

    Orwell is highly attuned to the misuse of language. A prevalent theme is how expression should be clear and unequivocal, in a plain style emphasising the virtues of informality and flexibility. Thus he sedulously exposes techno-babble, and the notorious doublespeak encapsulated by slogans such as ‘four legs good two legs better’ from Animal Farm, which anticipate the arrival of political spin doctors. In short, he saw post-truth coming.

    This includes the fakery of our present narratives, where innocent slogans conceal and occlude a multitude of evils. So terms like ‘austerity’ or ‘fiscal stabilization’, or even ‘ethnic cleansing’, are adopted to mask individual and societal destruction.

    Similarly, the anodyne word ‘evacuation’ was used neutrally by Nazi Reinhardt Heydrich at the Wanassee Conference in 1942 to convey crimes against humanity and genocide. Today sloganing by advertisers, hucksters and snake oil salesmen of all shapes and hues are inducing a form of corporate fascism, and state-sponsored murder.

    1984 is a novel about the totalitarian left, as well as the right. Orwell had a ringside seat on the evils of both in Barcelona during The Spanish Civil War, documented brilliantly in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

    Piquant Irony

    It is a piquant irony of intellectual discourse that the left should have embraced the meandering nonsense of post structuralism from the 1960’s onwards only to see it appropriated by the alt right. Truth is not truth Donald as he must have been advised, and Mr .Giuliani echoes.

    Thus as Derrida can change meaning from one sentence to another, so can Trump or Bannon.

    In The Politics and The English Language” (1947) Orwell cauterises the elevation of grammar and syntax as indicia of anything, and focuses on the precise use of language and the avoidance of cliché, or what he terms Americanisms.

    In fact, focusing on grammatical form, at the expense of content, is the classic sign of a box-ticking pedantic and second-class intelligence, or an establishment ruse designed to avoid engagement with arguments of substance.

    The post truth universe that he saw on the horizon is a feature of most his writing. Thus, in ‘Looking Back at The Spanish Civil War’ (1942) he observes that totalitarianism denies that objective truth exists, and in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) he points out presciently: ‘Since nothing is ever proved or disproved, the most unmistakeable fact can be impudently denied.’

    These are tactics evident in Mr. Giuliani aforementioned denial of objective truth and Ryanair’s Mr. O’Leary denial of climate change. An approach which, by being reported on, rather than dismissed outright, is given a veneer of respectability

    It is also increasingly evident that that those in power blind themselves to their outright criminality, as long as it comes from their own side, including the Neo-Cons and Blairite proponents of just war, known euphemistically as ‘humanitarian interventions.’

    Increasingly, the true subversives among the state and corporate oligarchy inflict criminality on others with impunity. As Orwell writes in his ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945): ‘There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when our side commits it.’

    They ask: are you with us or against us? One of us, or representing the demonised and excluded Other. This is particularly prescient in an age of increasing fractiousness, intolerance and division.

    Orwell chose the middle way, however difficult that path may be. Today being reasonable is often not viable. Alas, he who shouts loudest gains most in our present distorted politics.

    The Enemies of Truth

    In ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946) we find Orwell revealing that the enemies of truth and freedom of thought to be press lords and bureaucrats. Then as now, and let us add for good measure include social media manipulators and multinational corporations.

    Perhaps his definitive essay is ‘How The Poor Die’ (1929), a crucial text for these times of austerity, where social supports are being steadily withdrawn. The unthinking consequences of an awful ideology, or rather a deliberately planned extermination of anyone deemed unworthy, alongside the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing bands, and hands.

    The focus of Orwell is of course also on secularism and the Enlightenment; the repudiation of false Christian values.

    In an essay on Jonathan Swift the author of Gulliver’s Travels he suggests the one-time Dean of St. Patricks Cathedral rejected the Christian idea of an afterlife, a view commended by Orwell. Swift himself was also highly attuned to the interests of the poor in Ireland, subjected to the excesses of Malthusian capitalism, a theme which he brilliantly parodies in his disturbing ‘A Modest Proposal’. (1729). The consumption of babies is used to highlight a meltdown in human fellowship familiar to our present time.

    So there we have it, George Orwell, dead in 1950 but not as Dead as Doornails. Right back in fashion in fact and on the money.

    Why? Well in essence his own time of totalitarianism, economic meltdown, fascism and propagandistic post-truth are replicated in our own, while his fiction, and especially his essays, are an intellectual counterweight more relevant than ever.

    Let us thus secularly worship Eric Blair, not Tony Blair. He was the prince of journalists, a writer of mystic prescience and curiously, perhaps the single most relevant intellectual for our day and age.

    All references are from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Secker and Warburg 1968).

  • Cora Venus Lunny Launches New Album ‘Numinous Soup’

    Numinous Soup is an album I quietly made by myself in my spare room on child free evenings, releasing mp3s on Patreon as they became ready and eventually combining my favourite tracks into this collection.

    ‘Mindsomereve’ is something I made almost absentmindedly, and didn’t think was finished, but as I kept listening to it to see where to go next, I realised I liked it as it is.

    ‘I Want… Bodily Autonomy For Everyone’ – it is a vast and all-encompassing thing that I deeply wish for every person in this world. You might hear both frustration and hope in my playing here.

    ‘Incapacitate The Ecocidal Machine’ uses field recordings of frogs from Wicklow and a vast machine from Amsterdam, as well as my usual strings. I never got a glimpse of the machine but the sound was something else. It filled the air, vibrated the ground, vibrated your eyes in your head. I never managed to catch sight of it. Which machine am I talking about though?

    I named the album after ‘Numinous Soup’ because it’s my favourite track on the record, and I think it’s quite soothing. It made me think of a cold day in a remote castle, getting a bowl of tasty neon green swirly glowy soup that sends you into a dream of another dimension, possibly involving a boat slicing elegantly through still, reeded, misty waters at sunset, three moons in the aurora-splashed sky, a golden whippet in your lap. It’s also the one track that doesn’t go into any scary noise places so I thought it was a good one to finish on.

    Click on….

    http://www.patreon.com/trancebranches

    http://www.bandcamp.com/trancebranches

  • Refugee Education: Can We Regenerate Lost Generations?

    The future of a generation born during over eight years of conflict in Syria is under threat. More than half of all school-aged Syrian children living as refugees in neighbouring countries do not enjoy access to a formal education. In this two-part series humanitarian activist and author Bruna Kadletz addresses a global educational crisis for school-aged refugees.

    Istanbul, May 2016

    What are the immediate and long-term consequences of living without a fundamental human right: access to a quality education?

    In the basement of an old building in the district of Fatih, a district with the highest concentration of Syrian refugees in Istanbul, Turkey, I first contemplated this multifaceted question.

    I travelled for the first time to Turkey in May 2016. The country is host to the highest concentration of refugees in the world. Almost four million people have sought protection in Turkish territory, including 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees, as well as approximately 365,000 from other parts of the world.

    At the time of my first visit, the refugee crisis was at its peak. This prompted me to volunteer for two months in Small Projects Istanbul, an independent NGO operating a community centre for displaced persons. The organisation offers Turkish and English lessons for adults and children, as well as providing employment opportunities for women. It is a safe haven for men, women and children fleeing for their lives from a war-torn country.  

    The centre operates from the basement of an old building in Fatih. I well remember the day my mind turned to one of the most devastating outcomes of wars and conflicts: the lack of educational opportunities for displaced children and youth.

    Leila

    It was a Saturday morning when I first met Leila, a sweetly smiling nine-year old Syrian girl with long, silky hair. Leila was attending Arabic classes with her elder sisters Amal, and younger one Hanan. I sat next to her and watched as she copied the lesson from the board. When she had finished, I asked her to read what was written in her notebook.

    Leila looked at me with her expressive eyes, and timidly said, ‘I can´t read.’

    The import of her words didn´t sink in immediately, assuming she had misunderstood me. I repeated the question more slowly this time, thinking she hadn’t been able to translate what was written into English. Of course she could read her native language I assured myself. Using the same words, however, she replied in almost perfect English, ‘I can´t read in Arabic.’

    Once more, her answer puzzled me. To my mind, it didn´t make sense. How could Leila be able to communicate perfectly in both Arabic and English, copy the lesson from the board and, yet, not be able to read it?

    After telling me her story, I understood.

    This young girl had never attended school. The Syrian War began when she was just four years of age, depriving Leila and her siblings access to formal education, let alone a normal childhood. She had learned how to communicate normally, and even copy the shapes of the words from the board onto her notebook. But she had no knowledge of the individual letters or how they sounded.

    The meaning of the sentences she was copying down were a mystery to her. War had left her illiterate. Amidst all the other problems and challenges, her education had not been prioritised.

    Living as refugees in Turkey, Leila and her sisters could not access formal education. Since the girls did not speak Turkish, they could not enrol in a public school. The community centre, where they took Arabic classes, was the closest thing they experienced to a school environment.

    Ahmed

    Public schools and temporary education centres are the two main options for refugee children who wish to continue their studies. Yet more than half a million school-aged Syrian refugees in Turkey don´t access these options and are left without an education.  

    A week after meeting Leila I learned about a fourteen-year-old boy in a similar situation. Ahmed was also out of school, but for different reasons. After fleeing the conflict he and his family settled in Istanbul. His father carried on into Europe, leaving the boy as the family’s primary breadwinner.

    Ahmed worked exhausting shifts in a backpack factory to sustain his mother, siblings and disabled uncle. Yet the squalid working conditions and low wages hadn’t take away his spark. He used to spend his days off at the community centre learning English, playing football and trying his best to live a normal adolescence. Remarkably, he always had a smile on his face.

    These stories reflect a global trend. For millions of refugee children bearing the human cost of war and armed conflict, education is a distant dream rather than a lived reality. According to the UNHCR´s latest report on refugee education, ‘Stepping Up: Refugee Education in Crisis’, more than 3.7 million school-aged refugee children and youth are out of school.

    The report provides other worrying statistics: only 24% of refugees enrol in secondary education, compared to a global average of 84%; just 3% of refugees have access to higher education.

    Another statistic attracted my attention from the report: approximately 2.9 million school-age refugee children, and youth, live in just five countries, namely Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sudan and Uganda. These are developing countries in need of international support to cope with the refugee education crisis.

    ‘Zones of vulnerability’

    There are many barriers preventing refugee children and youth from attending school, including language, absence of documentation, and a lack, or absence altogether, of teachers and schools. Refugees also face restrictive school enrolment policies, lack of income to pay for schooling and social stigma.

    A lack of educational opportunities, alongside inadequate integration policies, place refugee communities in zones of vulnerability, leading to further exclusion, cycles of poverty and low prospects of finding suitable employment opportunities. These are a few of the consequences of being denied the right to a quality education.

    How can we regenerate the losses of generations adversely affected by wars and conflicts and ensure a fundamental right to education is vindicated?

    Filippo Grandi, the UN’s high commissioner for refugees, says the solution to the crisis lies in the need to ‘invest in refugee education or pay the price of a generation of children condemned to grow up unable to live independently, find work and be full contributors to their communities.’

    Investment in refugee education goes beyond including school-age refugee in national education systems and providing further funding for UN agencies. Host countries must ensure cultural and linguistic inclusion, as well as creating opportunities for parents to resume their careers, enjoy access to paid employment and provide assistance to entrepreneurs.

    Education is a major stepping stone for societal evolution, human development and psychological liberation. With an education a refugee can transcend the dehumanising labels imposed on them and potentially realise their full potential; children confined in refugee camps and urban slums can develop a sense of dignity and belonging. Moreover, education protects children from exploitation, forced marriage and child labour. Education is the pathway for a safer and brighter future.

    To invest in refugee education is to invest in the future of humanity.

  • ‘A slap in the face to bus users’ – Dublin Commuter Coalition responds to proposal to allow EVs in bus lanes

    In a press release, the ‘Dublin Commuter Coalition’ has described proposals for electric vehicles to be permitted to use bus lanes[i] as a ‘slap in the face to bus users.’ This demonstrates, they claim: ‘a stunning lack of respect for overstretched users of sustainable transport.’

    The civil society organisation reject:

    [I]n the strongest possible terms, any suggestion that bus lanes be opened to electric vehicles. The Coalition, who elected their inaugural executive committee on Saturday October 26th, said that this proposal is a slap in the face to bus users who already give up their time and freedom of mobility by travelling in a sustainable way to no thanks or, as is evident from this proposal, even a modicum of respect.

    The chairperson of the Coalition Kevin Carter said:

    ‘It is bizarre, it is astonishing and it is stunningly arrogant that this government would even suggest implementing a scheme that so specifically and brazenly harms bus users. Bus users are never rewarded for choosing to travel in a sustainable way, they are only ever subject to overcrowding, constant fare increases and poor enforcement of existing traffic laws.

    Flagrant abuse of bus lanes is a constant issue for bus users and now this government is proposing further degrading the attractiveness of this mode by making bus users sit in even more traffic that they had no hand in causing.’

    The organisation points to bus users making up 30% of Dublin city commuters in 2018,[ii] the largest single category of transport users. By choosing to take the bus they claim ‘these users have done the city a massive favour by taking cars off the road and making congestion in the city less of a problem.’

    The proposals they say: ‘shows a profound ignorance or disrespect of the very central tenets of any sound sustainable mobility policy.’

    They also point to how the Minister for Transport holds the right to drive in a bus lane as a government minister, and warn that then Ireland will continue to overshoot emissions targets if he fails to prioritise electric vehicles over walking, cycling and public transport, and Dubliners will continue to live in one of the most congested cities in the world.

    These latest moves also suggest, as Ruadhan Mac Eoin previously argued that, if realised, Bus Connects will make permanent space for the motor car.

    Cassandra Voices previously published an article by Contemplar arguing that public transport is a public good that can be cost-effectively delivered in Dublin.

    For further information please contact: Dublin Commuter Coalition:

    Feljin Jose Public Relations Officer: info@dublincommuters.ie; 0871236795

    Kevin Carter Chairperson 0851751487

    [i] Hugh O’Connor, ‘Government to examine plans allowing electric cars to use bus lanes’, Irish Independent, November 1st, 2019, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/government-to-examine-plans-allowing-electric-cars-to-use-bus-lanes-38642359.html

    [ii] National Transport Agency ‘Canal Cordon Report 2018 Report on trends in mode share of vehicles and people crossing the Canal Cordon 2006-2018.’ Dublin City Council, April, 2019.

  • Poetry – Mark Burrows

    The Resistance 

    I never knew what they really felt
    how they survived the one world
    we shared across layers of fear
    and indifference never grasped
    the bold grip of hatred that sears
    the eye and numbs the mind of
    the last shreds of decency never
    expected that the good would
    outlast all this in a world where
    the question of fair isn’t even
    mentioned in the interim report
    and could hardly imagine that
    despite all this greed would not
    have the last word in this life with
    its unspeakable joys and woes
    where the promise holds that
    the lost will somehow be found
    and the last impossibly first

     

    The Occasion

    —for Mark Jordan, with abiding gratitude

    What if beauty is a substance
    in this world of accident and remorse,
    finite and particular and dispersed
    like the sound of larks singing

    frivolously into the morning silences,
    regardless of audience or absence or
    any other need? What if our single
    purpose here is to seek what often

    falls into the crevices of disregard,
    gratefully reaching into the stream
    with dry hands and parched lips?

    And what if time is but the occasion
    for gathering these shards of loveliness
    into the heart’s hungry vestibule?

     

    The Work of Love 

    It is early, though the late night is still holding
    the long hems of darkness; dawn has not yet

    begun to imagine what the day might bring
    of shadows and of light, and those I love are

    still wrapped in the mantle of their dreams.
    But I am sitting here with a cup of tea cradled

    in my hands as I begin to bring forth the edges
    of a poem, drawing words and bits of song from

    the drifting play of dreams. And as I begin I’ve
    not yet made a single mistake; no word is out

    of place on the empty page, no thought has
    strayed into the cravings of jealousy or rage,

    and no good deed has been undone. It’s like
    this sometimes with art, as with the work of

    love, when the heart wakes to join the lark
    in her propensity to amazement and to song.