Cassandra Voices

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  • Manus in Seomra Spraoi

    Seomra Spraoi was a hub of resistance. The space was located just off the quays close to Dublin’s city centre. It was used to organise campaigns against, Shell oil’s Mayo pipeline, the World Bank and the deportations of non-nationals, among many other worthwhile causes.

    It is hardly surprising Seomra Spraoi was closed down under ‘fire regulations’. It had probably only been allowed to stay open for as long as it did due to a lack of visibility. No one caused trouble, there were no fights and the Gardaí were never called out over loud music late at night, until they were one night.

    When they came over they were not overly-impressed with some of the anti-capitalist and anti-police posters. Perhaps they began to perceive the space as a possible threat. In any event, Seomra was closed down under fire regulations a few days later.

    But that’s just political spiel. Seomra Spraoi was also a social centre. A place where personal stories unfolded.

    *******

    Manus had just finished with a relationship. The woman had moved out and even though he had custody of the child for more than half the week he still felt a yawning gap in his life. Even more so when the child, Shirifa, went to her mothers.

    Mentally, physically, and economically, Manus couldn’t afford the pubs, and while he could pass the time reading and writing, he still craved human contact.

    For Manus, Seomra Spraoi was manna from heaven. A; social club/drop in/resource centre, not-for- profit, non-hierarchical, and run for and by the people who used it. Those were the ideals to which the centre aspired. Of course ideals and humans don’t always get along perfectly together. It’s hard once you’ve invested time and energy into creating and maintaining something to think of it in any other way than as your baby. It may belong to everyone, but it still belongs more to you. Unofficial hierarchies and cliques seem to evolve naturally regardless of ideology. But having said that the centre did its best, and its best was pretty good.

    Sundays had activities specifically catering for kids but it was child-friendly in general.

    Shirifa loved it.  Even when there were no people her own age the older people took an interest in her, made allowances for her and in general showed her the respect we are all due.

    There is an old African saying, ‘it takes a whole village to bring up a young person’, and Seomra Spraoi was as close to a village as could be found anywhere in Dublin. Manus was enjoying bringing her up in the right type of atmosphere. An atmosphere of mutual respect.

    It was in Seomra Spraoi that Shirifa and Manus heard about the protest against the World Bank, and Manus and Shirifa, along with a handful of others, decided to participate.

    ‘We do very well out of it,’ Manus explained to his daughter. ‘It’s  because people in other countries are kept so poor that we are rich.’

    Shirifa nodded her three year old head and looked serious.

    Manus laughed. He wondered about his motivation for attending the protest. There was only a dozen or so people in attendance. Manus wondered about that too. How come there was so few protesting? Did everybody believe the world order was set like concrete and could never be changed? That protest seemed futile. Or did nobody else care that the poorest countries in the world were having to pay the richest countries in the world lots of money, and as a direct consequence thousands of people lived and died with intolerable hardship?

    People’s apathy amounted to criminal negligence. Manus applied uncle Noamy’s example and felt like a German civilian during the Second World War, looking at the smoke coming from chimneys and saying, ‘am I really sure what’s happening in there and even if I was what could I do about it?’

    Manus didn’t feel like he was doing much but he supposed standing in the cold outside a hotel where members of the World Bank were meeting and saying ‘boo’ was better than doing nothing.

    Anyway the protest in Malahide was a day out for Manus and Shirifa.

    After a few hours they headed off for cake and coffee in a café along with two single parent mums and their kids. Manus was a single parent dad and he had to get used to the idea. He had to start looking at other women, or looking for another woman.

    Phrases like, ‘back on the market’, or, ‘on the hunt’, could now be applied to him.

    Mostly he had enjoyed monogamy but he wasn’t cut out for abstinence.

    These women seemed sensitive, intelligent, strong, independent and politically aware lefty types. Manus was pleased to think they existed, and pleased to have their company. He wondered if he would stand a chance with either of them. Either would do, but shouldn’t he have a preference?

    He would have been hard-pressed to decide. He wondered if his need denied him a preference. One of the women appeared more youthful than the other, more impulsive.

    He had vague recollections of other women he had known when he had been younger. Impulsive times.

    Manus wondered what it would be like to live with either of them over a period of years. He had visions of both women wearing completely different faces from the pleasant persona’s they presented at this moment.

    How far away were the faces of anger, resentment  or painful sadness? How long before he would see those faces?

    Manus had made a few quid that morning. It was the first bit of cash he had made in months and he was pleased to have money in his pocket.

    He offered to buy both women their dinners with wine at the café, but they each refused. He didn’t know them that well and they were of a different gender.

    Manus had an easy-come eas- go attitude to money and would have offered to pay for the food and drink regardless. He was pleased to be able to offer and pleased to sit with two adults who brought their kids to protest against the World Bank. But that didn’t take from the fact that he was still a mate-less male and these were two seemingly mate-less females. He wondered if his offer was really him making a play for the women or if he was just being human and wanting to share in his good fortune.

    In any event they had both refused dinner. The single parent mums were younger than him. Everyone was younger than him.

    They all travelled back on the train together. The three lone parents and their three children.

    One of the women told a story about a skeleton that gave one of its bones to make soup, but when the soup wasn’t shared out the skeleton chased the nasty people out and let a poor little boy stay in the house.

    The story kept the kids happy the whole way back.

    Manus couldn’t help comparing the women to Shirifa’s mum Janice.

    Janice was thirty one going on nineteen. She longed for the heady social life of her late teens and early twenties. For Janice things had taken a distinctly downward turn around the year two thousand and one, when she had been twenty-four years old, and met Manus for the first time.

    For Jan the relationship was never meant to be anything more than a cheap thrill for a fleeting moment. The satisfaction of idle and lustful curiosity. But what should have been a passing fling turned into a prolonged nightmare. She felt trapped by her pregnancy too, and her relationship with this man, an older man, someone from another place and another time.

    She had even been unfaithful to him as a ploy to get him to end it. Shagging someone else had always worked before, but not with Manus. He stuck like shit to her shoe. Just to make her suffer she sometimes thought.

    Janice had fought against and in many ways denied the relationship most of the time but for the sake of convenience, and due to economic restrictions, she ended up living in the same space and even sharing the same bed as Manus, for the best part of six years.

    Receiving a bequest of fifteen thousand euro from her grandfather gave her the freedom to re-arrange her life. So Janice and Manus had officially broken up. That is, they no longer lived under the same roof or slept in the same bed, but they still had to deal with each other.

    Throughout the relationship Janice had fluctuated between being churlish and rude to being needy and crying. Sometimes she wanted his emotional support, other times she just wanted him in bed.

    The break up hadn’t changed the nature of the relationship.

    When she needed him or even just wanted him, she had only to ask and he would be over in a flash, panting like a puppy on her porch. Occasionally he might hesitate for a moment, but it seemed so pointless. Why would he lie on his own and deny himself the warmth and pleasure of her body?

    There were a couple of reasons why. After sex she might pat his crutch and say ‘you were always a great shag’. She probably thought she was flattering him, but a part of him would want to quote Billy Holiday, ‘you’ve had the best now why not take the rest, come on, have all of me.’

    But Jan didn’t want the rest and the parts she didn’t want felt lonely and rejected.

    She would never let him stay the night and he would feel like the dog getting put out at the end of the day.

    He would try to rationalize that lots of people would love such a relationship. Sex and then piss off, but for some reason it didn’t always appeal to him.

    Looked at from a certain slant of rationality, Jan was doing everyone a favour breaking out of a relationship she felt trapped in. Manus didn’t always look at it from that particular slant of rationality.

    It’s funny how unrequited love can turn to hate.

    But then life could sometimes be seen as a very funny experience, especially if you are living in the wealthy West.

    And Manus was living in the wealthy West.

    *******

    He brought Shirifa to a protest against deportations. Manus had friends who had been forced out of Ireland. He had felt frustration and anger. He didn’t have that many friends and couldn’t afford to lose any of them. One of his friends was called Addi. They had met in a border town. They both lived in the same housing estate . They both felt very isolated amongst the remnants of die-hard Republicanism, and the alcoholism which seemed to dominate the estate. They met on a regular basis for over a year, never doing much other than smoking African bush weed and talking or listening to music.

    But contacts like this were an oasis of human interaction in his otherwise social desert. Manus felt close to Addi. Then one day Manus got a message on his mobile saying Addi was in prison and asking for help. Manus didn’t know how to help. He never heard from Addi again. Apart from feeling useless and guilty Manus didn’t know what else he could do.

    His friend Okoro was a different story, which ended with Islam Okoro not being allowed back into Ireland, even though he had three kids who were born and living in the country at the time.

    So now the government was having a pre-Christmas round up of Nigerian fathers. They would be deported and their wives and children would follow them back.

    Manus was angry about the loss of his friends and infuriated that the government still used the tactic of separating fathers from their children. If any one for any reason thought they had the right to separate Manus and Shirifa, they were wrong. They had no such right. Manus was sure of that.

    He got himself a bit worked up as he walked down to the protest.

    Shirifa was sleeping in the buggy. He stood outside the immigration office with a dozen others. He was given a placard that read ‘no deportations’.

    He was glad to show some of the people going into the building that not all of the Irish thought it was ok to deport these men.

    Then a racist, a male in his thirties; poor, uneducated and socially deprived, went by and shouted: ‘shouldn’t let the black bastards in in the first place.’

    The words ‘fucken wanker’ erupted out of Manus in a loud and violence-threatening voice.

    It was always impossible dealing with blind ignorance and hatred. Manus had dealt with a lot of it as a child on Belfast’s Ormeau Road. Then it was called sectarianism.

    ‘Taigs out’ would get painted on the walls, and he and others were chased through the streets. Sometimes people were caught and killed stone dead because they were Taigs.

    Manus could never really figure it out. Was it that perpetrators of these types of crime had defects which they tried to compensate for by showing off an ability to hate? Were they acting under the influence of a crowd with a collectively low IQ? Probably a lot of the blame lay with newspapers, clerics, and bosses who told them it was right to have contempt for people even slightly different from themselves.

    As a child Manus could never figure out why people he had never met could hate him. And there would be no chance to talk, to rationalize. These people wanted to stop you talking, stamp out your rationality.

    Manus’s instant and uncontrolled reaction at the racist statement had shocked him by the depth of violence it carried in its tone. By its vicious rage.

    It shocked the racist too, who kept moving for a bit but then decided to come back and stand up for his right to be a loud-mouthed racist.

    ‘Who called me a wanker? are you looking for a fight?’

    Manus followed his breath closely as he took off his shoulder bag full of nappies and wipes, set it gently on the child’s buggy and stepped out to meet his would be assailant.

    ‘You looken for a fight?’, the man repeated.

    Manus felt centred enough, and just tried to keep his eyes on his opponent’s feet and fists. A head butt would also be a danger as they squared up.

    It crossed Manus’s mind as he approached that it might be best to just lash out with a kick. He was glad he wore heavy shoes and if it was going to happen it would be better to get the first blows in. It would end the tension for a start. But how would it look on the camera? Surely they were on CCTV camera?  Maybe Manus could just stand him down. As he drew closer Manus cursed his own stupidity for having brought a blimp of draw with him to the protest. Manus wasn’t the brightest.

    Then he had Shirifa with him and if they arrested Manus what would they do with his daughter?

    Manus squared up to the man. ‘Just leave’ said Manus and luckily for Manus the racist left.

    Pauline stuck a small camera in Manus’s face just as the racist left. She asked Manus how he felt. Manus had felt slightly overwhelmed by the spontaneity and ferocity of his own reaction, but all he could say to Pauline was, ‘I feel too emotional about the whole thing. I just wish they’d stop this shit.’

    He wasn’t even clear what ‘shit’ he was referring to. Racism. Deportations. The main stream press, who’s messages divided people and diverted them from the real issue of the destructive policies and practices of the world’s greedy, wasteful corporations;

    All of the above he supposed.

    *******

    Shirifa woke up hungry and a bit grumpy. After the protest he brought her round to Seomra Spraoi. They boiled rice and ate it with yogurt. Pauline’s daughter played with Shirifa. So did Patrizia. Pauline was about the same age as Manus. Patrizia wasn’t half his age. Both females seemed fit and healthy, and he wondered if either would consider him a potential shag. He seemed more detached about this question than his sexual needs usually allowed. Did detachment come with age?

    Both women seemed worthwhile human beings. Human contact meant a lot to Manus and although he still worshiped sex more than money or any other god, he sometimes preferred it when sexuality took a back seat to a more rounded and fully human interaction.

    Seomra Spraoi was a slightly different social setting to most. Alternative social relations were possible. Manus didn’t feel like he had a need to show sexual interest in any one, nor would he be too offended if no one showed that type of interest in him.

    In truth Manus doubted his ability to go with anyone other than the mother of his child. She was the only one he’d known for six years. He figured he would miss the familiarity and resent the break in intimacies continuity. Maybe he was just scared of the unknown.

    After Seomra Spraoi was shut down under fire regulations Manus felt a terrible sense of loss at the news. He felt isolated again. Where would he go? Where would he bring his daughter?

    With no where else to go Manus called on two people he knew. Unfortunately Seamus from County Clare had returned to smack, while Ghanny from Nigeria had found Christianity again. Manus turned first to alcohol, and then to scribbling.

    Seomra Spraoi would open again, even if it was in another building. It was a place where people could get together and exchange ideas and go some way to creating social norms, maybe even a social revolution that suited themselves rather than their rulers. But that’s just back to political rather than personal spiel.

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  • Can the European Project be Kept on Track?

    Czech border police snoop along the rail carriage as we pass the frontier from Germany. They seem to linger outside our compartment long enough to survey the light pigmentation of the young Dutch couple and this Hiberno-Norman specimen inside, passing by without seeking identification.

    White skin remains a passport – carte blanche – to unspoken liberties in ways most of us carriers hardly understand; a darker hue, with an out-of-date visa, might bring quiet indignities inside a dank room in some god-forsaken border-town.

    Born in the city of Brody, near Lviv in present-day Ukraine in 1894, the novelist Joseph Roth wrote: ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.’ A melancholic alcoholic and wandering Jew, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 before the cosmopolitan Old Europe he had evoked was consumed by the flames of racial hatred.

    Human lives are dangling like threads from passports in Europe again as borders perceptibly harden: the sword of Damocles hangs over the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, while in the UK at large, drawers are being scoured for the birth certificate of that long-lost grandparent that will yield the Paddy-pass. Throughout Europe, dour forms of patriotism exclude diversity; even in liberal, social-democratic Scandinavia shutters are coming down, as the Far Right surges.

    Entirely open borders might be unworkable, but widespread anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is rarely based on any rational assessment of the pros and cons of migration, but appears as an unconscious turning away from the world. After all, the European population is aging and many countries are short of workers in fields indigenous populations are reluctant to enter.

    Racists identify the physical features of classes of people with defined cultural traits. This error is often a product of isolation, usually emanating from individuals living in ethnically homogeneous areas, especially small towns. Demagogues prey on those left behind by free-wheeling market economies, but the imagining of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is not purely economic in origin. It is also linked to a patriarchal sense of traditional family units being undermined by liberated women, open sexuality and even dietary choices. The ‘person of colour’ is another unwelcome intrusion of a modern world in flux.

    Thus Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s offer to make women who bear four or more (presumably ‘pure-blooded’) children exempt from taxation is a chilling reminder of a time when women’s bodies were pressed into service for the imagined community of the nation. Across Europe an irrational fear of a ‘promiscuous’ Semitic ‘other’ is used to stoke hatred by unscrupulous politicians.

    There is also a growing reassertion of the nation state, beyond Brexit. Thus the French government has withdrawn its embassy from Rome in the wake of the Populist Italian administration’s outspoken support for the revolutionary gilets jaune ‘yellow vest’ movement.[i]

    Is this a turning of Europe’s mythological gyres: a cycle of one hundred years of recovery and prosperity, before decline and confrontation? The continent really needs to outgrow the truculent teenager phase, and instead rise to the challenge of making our way of life sustainable, and ultimately assist other parts of a world we have made in our own image of nation states.

    Any retreat into sullen autarky appears untenable unless most of us are prepared to revert to being small farmers. We are, nevertheless, right to wonder whether European institutions have been overtaken by shadowy lobbyists serving multinational corporations. Big brands are strangling small enterprise, homogenising streetscapes, and upholding the grand theft of in-built-obsolesce underpinning our model of economic-growth-without-end. It begs the question: what keeps the European dream on track?

    Romantic Travel

    An extensive rail network is perhaps Europe’s greatest asset, and guarantor of a fluid community. Like the capillaries of a great oak, it connects the high branches of Scandinavia to the roots of Italy, and beyond. Whether high-speed behemoth, or squealing rust-heap, train-travel permits a form of contemplation distinctively European; where a delay is simply an invitation to read one’s book, engage in light conversation with travelling companions, or fix lunch.

    I wonder whether future generations will experience the slow transitions in scenery, the fading grandeur of old world stations, and the whistle of the guard to set you on your way. Perhaps railways will give way to electric pods or warp drives, but I fear the best-laid techno-Utopian plans of Elon Musk and others will only cater to a select wealthy few. The benefits of railways, a technology that catalysed the Industrial Revolution, altering life on Earth forever, are likely to endure.

    As Minister for Transport the current Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described train travel as being for romantics.[ii] This suggests it is sensible to depend on stifling airports with queues and intrusive searches, before the deep vein thrombosis and ear-popping altitude of air travel. The rapid conveyance of tourists to safe spaces in historic cities has brought uniform hotels, chain restaurants and stores selling the same products, in different selfie locations.

    For those unable to afford air travel there are bus services leaving from anonymous stations on the asphalt fringes of cities, before cramped seating and desolate road stops. Otherwise, there is the false freedom of a car, wheeling at high speed along a motorway from which nothing can be seen, and where road deaths are a permitted tribute to the car gods evoked by advertisers. All other passenger experiences pale by comparison with a train journey.

    Sail-Rail

    At times even I, a born-again railer, weary of train travel in Britain. The effects of a decidedly unromantic privatisation are apparent in the sardine can-spacing between seats, the gaudy plastic furnishings, and staggering crowds at peak times, which no doubt make bean counters beam. Wholescale privatisation of an inherently monopolistic service seems to have been the height of folly.

    Unmistakably London.

    Ticket prices are jarringly expensive too. For example, a journey of eighty-odd miles from Oxford to Birmingham costs over £38 one-way. A return costs much the same, which is of little use if you aren’t going back on your tracks.

    There are cheap deals if you reserve in advance – though not on the Oxford-Birmingham line as it happens. A one-way ticket from Oxford to London is available for under £10, compared to the standard rate of £27. But booking weeks in advance negates the old world appeal of train travel, which is to turn up at a station, purchase a ticket and catch the next available service – setting off on a whim perhaps, along with a picnic basket.

    One of the great mysteries of this life is how the Sail-Rail deal between the UK and Ireland has endured into present, unromantic, times. I can simply turn up at Dublin Port, purchase my ticket which includes the price of the ferry, before catching a train at a flat rate from Holyhead – with marginal increments depending on distance and speed of ferry – to anywhere in the UK. Very occasionally, after Christmas, or at summer’s end, there is insufficient space on the ferry for all passengers, but this is rare indeed. I only book in advance to avoid the small handling fee charged by Irish Ferries when you purchase at the Port.

    Going Sail-Rail from the UK is even easier, as you purchase your ticket at any station – without the handling fee – just like a regular ticket. The full price of approximately €50 between London and Dublin may not be as low as the ludicrous cost of some plane tickets – a form of transport which, perversely, is not subject to the added cost of VAT on its fuel. But by the time you have born the cost of the Stansted train to London (usually costing £18), having avoided the crushing two-and-a-half-hour cheap bus alternative, you won’t be thanking uncle Michael.

    Last time on Sail-Rail I went as far as Oxford, met friends for a lavish Indian supper, before wobbling cheerfully back to the station to resume my journey to London. At such times the Sail-Rail pass seems like a golden ticket inside Willy Wonka’s factory, as bemused attendants waive you onwards.

    On the Irish side, the main inconvenience is the lack of a decent public transport connection between Dublin city and Port, which has no trains running along the tracks out to it. The 7.15am 153 bus from Westmoreland Street won’t even get you to the Port in time for the 8am sailing. Alas, the Dún Laoghaire-Holyhead connection, conveniently linked to a DART rail service, came to an end in 2015.

    The other annoyance is the apparent unwillingness of the UK train companies to align their timetables with the arrival of the ferries, often meaning delays on arrival in insalubrious Holyhead. Contrast this with how on some European train-ferry lines – between Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Denmark and Germany – trains actually mount a ferry and trundle out the other side.

    Delays, usually on Wales’s underfunded Arriva line, may require a longer stretch in the less than charming entrepôt, on an otherwise underrated coastline. The town’s appeal has changed little since Jonathan Swift’s 1727 evocation:

    Lo here I sit at Holyhead
    With muddy ale and mouldy bread
    All Christian victuals stink of fish
    I’m where my enemies would wish
    Convict of lies is every sign,
    The inn has not one drop of wine
    I’m fasten’d both by wind and tide
    I see the ship at anchor ride
    The Captain swears the sea’s too rough
    He has not passengers enough.

    Holyhead notwithstanding, it is now possible to travel in one day, using Sail-Rail and Eurostar, from Dublin Port, via London Euston, proceeding by foot to King’s Cross St. Pancras, to Brussels or Paris. I dream of more links from Holyhead to major UK cities, especially London, and perhaps even a high speed spur through Wales. That might tempt a few more romantics out of taking flights, and make life on our island seem less insular.

    Inter-Rail

    Last month I purchased an Inter-Rail pass, giving me five days of unlimited travel within a month throughout Europe for €300; albeit with some high-speed lines (especially, inconveniently, in France if you are arriving from Ireland) requiring a reservation, and/or the payment of a supplement. There are, however, reductions available on ferry prices, and with an overnight journey you only need to use up one day of your allotment.

    Having taken the Eurostar from London on the new service to Amsterdam, I proceeded immediately to Hamburg, Germany’s understated and cosmopolitan second city. I then headed north, through Denmark, crossing the Copenhagen-Malmo bridge into Sweden, arriving above the snowline in Oslo. I had not maximised my first three day’s travel, but made it as far as I needed.

    Cross-country skiing near Oslo, Norway.

    After enjoying an all-too-brief cross-country skiing trip with Irish friends now resident there, which included another short train journey into the hills, along with our skis, I returned south. This time taking two days (overnighting in Copenhagen) to get to the Czech Republic.

    Arriving in a continental climate with further snow cover, I proceeded east by train out of Prague towards the Jesiniky mountains. This involved a journey on one of a growing number of private lines – the Leo Express – which provides a degree of pampering and efficiency beyond that associated with the state railway company, Cesky Drahy, and cheap deals if you book in advance.

    At first blush, this would suggest partial or limited privatisation brings benefits. But I rather suspect that once this neo-liberal genii of de-regulation is let out of the bottle it will be reluctant to return. I expect further calls (in a subservient media) for privatisation in the name of efficiency, preceding a carve-up unfavourable to Czech rail-users, with ‘uneconomic’ lines phased out – as occurred in the UK – and prices hiked, once the ‘dead wood’ of the state company is phased out of existence.

    The Czech Republic is endowed with almost ten million kilometres of track, giving it one of the densest networks in the world, and making it a Mecca for train-lovers. Most people, even those living in rural villages, can reach their place of work without a car. The capital, Prague, also has two metro lines and an extensive tram network. It still costs a pittance to get to the airport by Metro and feeder bus.

    But more and more Czechs are embracing car culture, in part, no doubt, due to the skillful advertising of this ‘indispensable’ source of freedom. A way of life is being jeopardised by the appeal of autonomous vehicles, but for the moment the railway blood still flows.

    Jesiniky Mountains, Czech Republic.

    ‘the enemy within’

    In a worryingly development last January a seventy-one year-old man, Jaromir Balda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for terrorism. He felled trees to block railway lines, pretending Islamists were responsible by leaving messages at the scene proclaiming Allahu Akbar – ‘God is great’ in Arabic. Two passenger trains hit the trees, but fortunately no one was injured. The far-right sympathiser admitted he had hoped to spread fear of Muslim migrants.[iii]

    One may assume Balda – like the really murderous Anders Breivik in Norway – considered his actions a form of tough love to his countrymen: waking them up to the danger posed by the ‘enemy within’ – the miniscule Islamic population of the Czech Republic, a country that has, by and large, displayed an unsympathetic attitude to the plight of refugees, especially those with darker skin.

    This racism can partly be attributed to long-standing antipathy towards the indigenous Romany (‘gypsy’) people. In contrast, the pale-skinned foreigner, ‘the ex-pat’, is treated with deference, and a little envy, albeit marauding stag parties have sullied the reputation of the English at least.

    Balda’s choice of target was darkly symbolic, potentially evoking fears in day trippers from rural parts into cities; and among city dwellers who take trains all the way to remote regions, along with their bikes and skis. This gives way to the delusion of safety offered by the autonomous car journey, and further fracturing of community.

    Inter-continental

    Three years ago I travelled by train and bus from Portugal as far as Ukraine, on what was a redemptive trip, fulfilling an ambition to visit the former Soviet Union. Crossing the border from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine a distinct culture came into view. At the interchange of Çop trains halt on account of the different rail gauges used on either side. Stalin had ordered this inconvenience in order to slow down invading armies, and prevent people from easily escaping. An enduring cultural fault line is the result. It felt as if I had reached the limit of a Europe I know as a backyard I have not fully investigated.

    I hope to continue regular overland peregrinations, ideally by train, but the cost seems to rise each year, with further privatisations on the horizon. I fear that as train connections lapse, the life blood of Europe will cease to flow. Then we will experience the false freedom of driving our cars on anonymous highways, or taking flights to green zones in historic cities, conveniently cleared of native populations that don’t fit with the desired impression the authorities wish to leave.

    As Europeans grow wary of diversity it is worth considering the vital role played by railways in fostering community and tolerance. An annual holiday by train ought to be available to anyone living on the continent, even those on a peripheral island that tore away its tracks after independence. Connecting Europeans, in real comfort, to cities, mountains and the sea is perhaps the greatest service the railways still provide, and with continued intermingling our heterogeneous communities might seem more inviting.

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    [i] Angelique Chrisafis, ‘France recalls Rome envoy over worst verbal onslaught ‘since the war’’, 7th of February, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/07/france-italy-ambassador-macron-di-maio-salvini-second-world-war, accessed 18/2/19.

    [ii] Online Editors, ‘Leo Varadkar: ‘I’m romantic. I love the railways. I had a train set as a kid’’ April 3rd, 2014, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/leo-varadkar-im-romantic-i-love-the-railways-i-had-a-train-set-as-a-kid-30152502.html, accessed 18/2/19.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Czech pensioner jailed for terror attacks on trains’, January 14th, 2019, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46862508?fbclid=IwAR1rLbhjW_fpVyao8MjooDZe4muAR8bYCyyg5I_x1JzL6HytguW0PPoPFPU, accessed 18/2/19.

  • Is George Orwell’s England Now Home to Fintan O’Toole’s Swivel-Eyed Loons?

    It was flattering to read Fintan O’Toole respond, however oblique, to my criticism of his generally hysterical book on Brexit. In an Irish Times article on February 19th he claims the English eccentricity I praised has morphed into sinister idiosyncrasies, personified by what he impolitely refers to as the ‘swivel-eyed-loon’ Brexiteers. The association of physical disability with an opposing point of view is a low blow indeed in a bigoted article attempting to define apparently timeless national traits.

    As a last throw of the dice O’Toole adduces evidence from George Orwell to the effect that the English have always been, in actual fact, rather a conformist lot, now queuing obediently for the train marked oblivion.[i]

    O’Toole realises you cannot blacken the reputation of all things English, and seemingly as an afterthought, invokes the authority of the English secular saint. Never mind that Orwell actually credited his compatriots with an abiding belief in the Rule of Law and in holding power to account, a trait the once inquisitorial O’Toole seems to have forgotten.

    It is fair to say that Orwell has never been unfashionable, but the spectre of his ideas is much evident in this zeitgeist. Beyond even his novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), which define and anticipate the nature of totalitarian rule, Orwell was probably the greatest essayist of all time, foreseeing, like a clairvoyant, so many of the problems we now confront. He still stands for decency and humanism.

    O’Toole, in a spurious impression of radicalism – reminiscent of an intellectual Father Brian Trendy – appeals to the baser instincts towards English-bashing in Ireland; essentially condemning the vainglorious Brexiters for cutting off and undermining our gravy train of inequitable farm subsidies.

    Unlike O’Toole, Orwell respected the common sense of the common man, and never resorted to popular prejudice or vulgar nationalism.

    In ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1940) Orwell claimed that English people held a belief in justice, not a fear of power. He further argues, in ‘Inside The Whale’ (1940), that this stemmed from a lack of experience of government repression:

    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.[ii]

    In ‘Homage to Catalonia’ (1938) he shows how extremism imposed no restraints or boundaries, leading to a descent into lawless banditry. England today is still suffused with moderation, incrementalism, and the population are not generally exposed to licensed thuggery.

    In my experience of living in the country, people commonly still do not understand and do not tolerate the manipulation or abuse of law by Power. In this respect they are increasingly alone in Europe, with Spain mounting show trials against Catalan ‘putschists’ for daring to hold an independence referendum, and fascist taking power in Hungary and Italy.

    O’Toole could profitably read various pieces I have written on the Rule of Law and corruption of state agencies in Ireland.[iii] These are all available for free online – unlike the subscriber-based Irish Times. He should take note of the following points, which might cause indigestion in his pampered readership of retired, or retiring, civil servants.

    1. An Garda Siochana, the Irish police force, has been a criminally-led organisation.
    2. A politically-anointed judiciary have contributed to the undermining of the Rule of Law by supporting this police force, and have failed to build on existing Constitutional rights to alleviate the Housing Crisis.
    3. Government agencies have framed ‘enemies of the people’, who blow the lid on corruption (Orwell in ‘Such Were The Joys’ is remarkably insightful about the manipulation of children, whereas O’Toole, with a unique platform in the Irish media, does nothing to draw attention to ongoing injustices).
    4. Ireland is the perfect neo-liberal shit storm, where high economic growth is an illusion, as evictions continue apace, amid spiralling inequality.

    Without succumbing to timeless stereotypes, I suggest the English still commonly believe, in the confused conversation around our global meltdown, that the underdog should be protected. As a barrister I have found that the obligation to vindicate the Rule of Law against the interests of the powerful, and holding elites to account, is taken seriously. Among the myriad motivations for the Brexit vote was a discomfort among ordinary people with the idea of being undermined by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

    In contrast Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times upholds the obligation of the common man to repay his debts to predatory international financial institutions.

    In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ Orwell also notes how the English instinctively despise miscarriages of justice and hold power to account, believing in the impartial administration of the law by independent magistrates. In contrast, I find little attention being paid to the daily injustices occurring in Ireland in Fintan O’Toole’s current output.

    Orwell is also very attuned to misuse of language. A prevalent theme is how expression should be clear and unequivocal, and in a plain style that emphasising informality and flexibility. He would have no truck with the cheap rhetorical devices O’Toole trades in.

    In ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946) Orwell intimates that the enemies of truth and freedom of thought are press lords and bureaucrats. In Ireland today a preening Irish Times sits atop the tree, reassuring all and sundry about what a wonderful creative country this is – and never mind you can’t find somewhere to live.

    O’Toole’s sanctimonious brand of journalism works a treat, offering sufficient distraction to the little people to allow the ‘adults in the room’ to get on with plundering the larder.

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    [i] Fintan O’Toole, ‘The English Love of the Eccentric has Turned Sour’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-the-english-love-of-eccentricity-has-turned-sour-1.3797907, accessed 22/2/19.

    [ii] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/english/e_itw, accessed 22/2/19.

    [iii] David Langwallner, ‘The Fragile Rule of Law in Ireland’, 18th of February, 2018, https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2018/02/unruly-2/, accessed 22/2/19.

  • Old School

    I felt him sliver under my shirt as she belted me in with a quicksilver click. The shoulder strap muffled my mouth and eclipsed an eye. Mom sipped her coffee, singing along to the song on the radio, ‘One less egg to fry … ’ Only half of what lay ahead was in sight, but one wide eye watched her cigarette ashes take flight and land in one hundred percent humidity on the dashboard. Sticky plastic sword in hand, I grappled with an apple for breakfast in our Volkswagen, spieling, ‘Nein, nein, nein,’ all the way uptown. The Beetle was a shade of blue I think you’d call Tiffany.

    The epiphany that something sublime writhed round my collarbone, that I hadn’t come alone occurred before lunchtime. Frank and furtive, Alfred recoiled pretzel-like in the well of my tender clavicle, his tiny tongue darting at everyone in my kindergarten. Fraulein’s wrists regrettably garbled into a sort of swastika, as she hissed, ‘It won’t be long now.’ The kids thronged to see me prove the venomous Frau wrong. To her dismay, I displayed his length, with all the strength of my Lilliputian limbs. Adamant even, that while he had not a leg to stand on, my king snake, Alfred the Great’s congenital regalia exhibited double genitalia. I was only bested by Mom’s suggestion I stroll my two-penised pet in the yard. I’d hardly let go when he stole away, and you know, I bet she planned the hole thing.

    ‘Roll’ simpered the director. I’d been pimped and primped, as per the script. It was cool to skip school and spend all day in a pool of hot light. The blazing burlesque began with the future governor grilling me over an antique desk. He gave me the third degree and being only four, I took The Fifth. If the camera had closed in tightly on Edwin Edwards, it might’ve seen the politician took pains to burn book learning into my brain. The necessary votes were sustained, note not without substantial commercial gain. The campaign to elect the high roller hit a nerve. As 50th Governor of Louisiana he served an unheard of four terms during a legendary sixteen years. I fear that’s longer than he spent pent up in federal prison for conspiracy, money laundering, racketeering, extortion and fraud. The ‘Silver Zipper’ is still lauded to this day for his rebuke of the KKK’s David Duke, ‘We’ve both been wizards under the sheets.’ This is my ode to a sweltering state still sheltered by Napoleonic Code.

    A child is a sponge, able to absorb the plethora of Playboy and Cosmopolitan’s iconic chronicles accumulating on the coffee table. These juicy pages, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare’s complete works and other tearjerkers make for a berserk library. Wary I’d acquired precocious social skills, my father enrolled me in an experimental public school program where pupils deemed pliable were thrilled to be drilled under controlled conditions. Seditious teaching techniques were scrutinized, I expect for their effect on us like fruit flies in an elite Petrie dish. We learned Latin in togas, and outside in the arena, laughing like hyenas, lay the hoi polloi. We graduated to the vulgar gate of a junior high school, massive and without barriers to entry, except for the metal detectors at the door. The Creole elite monopolized the air-conditioned gym, while the Latinos rolled in the leafy shade of live oak trees outside. One hot day, I pushed a fellow, pell-mell, out of a second floor window, garnering for myself an enduring infamy as a ruffian, a femme fatale, gone feral. Maintaining my new found tough talking notoriety mortified my mother. Veering around in her Volvo, she voiced her vexation that my vocabulary had evolved.

    Mom resolved to commit me for a stint at a sporty Spartan school, just south of Bayou Sauvage. Not for fauves, was this amply proportioned concentration camp on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, presided over by a megalomaniac vegan grammarian on mega-doses of vitamin C. At lunch break, saving me for last, Mr. Bentham spanked the bad boys’ backsides, swinging that baseball bat in a tiny room at the top of a tower, underpinned by bunkers where a curious curriculum was cobbled together by his wife. It operated like a panopticon, from which he took a jocular view through his binoculars. Noontime came soon enough, confined with the solitary Dr and his most contrary students. Stockholm syndrome smarts, but art transmogrifies the purge of pubescence, and it seems there’s really no scourge for true incandescence.

    The time was right to wear black and white. I was in like Flynn with the Dominicans. The inquisitive sisters came from Dublin’s Cabra convent, to cope with girls who hoped to propagate with Jesuit-made men. Something about that sub-tropically pugnacious khaki uniform issued by Saint Ignatius drove me right up the nearest palm tree. So much better was it built than our off-kilter tweedy chastity belts, I confess to cross-dressing. Borrowed one from a boy named Boyle. The nuns were sore. Defrocked my puerile attire at the door, but not before Harry Connick Jr picked me out. Don’t doubt he had sonic pitch way before he got hitched. Back then, the seminarian parked his bike on my porch. We sat scorching on the swing, talking about most anything from Buddha to the birds and the bees. Pleased as rum punch, Harry had that hunch to go hear the now dearly departed Hunter S. Thompson at Tulane University. Perverse Promethean. Slurred convictions. Should we blur fact with friction? Bless the good doctor’s heart, before I tested his best thesis, Hunter self-canonised. Rest in pieces.

    Image (c) Mike Skinner.

    Without a real care in the world, I twirled my pencil and stared at the exchange student’s daring hairdo. It was an iron curtain beehive and I didn’t behave. I connived to perform a vivisection, a dissection on something alive. Why stab a frog when you can go whole hog on the foreigner? Who knew she had haemophilia? My heresy hastened a schism with Superior Sister Delia. Habitual offenders get sequestered until the end of the semester. Clearly the clergy weren’t big on surgery, and saw me as the straw that broke the Carmelite’s back. Sacked in March, I was informed the Archdiocese would have one girl less.

    Yes, knowing the New Testament by heart, I had a strong start at my next school. When they mentioned the Second Coming I didn’t dumb down. A class clown, I waywardly won the award for Wit and asked the valedictorian to the prom. A ticking bomb squad, we patrolled the bars in a police car. Arguably an all-nighter, it was getting lighter when I limped in to the parents. An errant heir, in their purview, I’d scantly measured my curfew, and was out of control, ergo, out on my ear. No clocks to tick-tock, no loud locks to click, nor bones to pick. Newly emancipated, it went undebated, I dinner dated and drank Chablis insatiably.

    The class voted me Best Personality. There was no award for promiscuous thighs, but the guys prophesied when my dimples were done I’d contemplate a wimple. Be a nun, take the cloth. In a slothful simulation, one day I’ll mirror the moth. Before it’s too late, negate earthly aggravation, and commune with the moon for celestial navigation.

    Did the university need another Margaret Mead, who can’t stand the ant in Anthropology? Documentaries about Mbuti Pygmies put a bee in my bonnet, and I wrote sonnets about insects being my bugaboo. Through Totem and Taboo, I found Freud, the human zoo and allow me to assure you in our age, the cage is online.

    Flunking math, my path went west, for the best PhD at a mountain monastery. Those Jesuits wouldn’t quit till I’d got the gist of Psychology. One day my professor tidied his toupee, promising that with a little private practice he could improve my score by 69. I dodged the codger’s inclination to roger. Not a priest in the least, he’d hoisted his own petard, ignited by my vapid paper, ‘The Southern Belle: An Exaggerated Sex Role and its Indications for Therapy’.

    God gave me sisters, but I relate to baroque A-listers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico’s Tenth Muse was a philosophical feminist who knew foolish men were led by a thread through love’s labyrinth. Not full of papal bull, through a plague this phoenix flew till she too was dead. Would Wicklow Head’s Pharos light the shipwreck of my lustrated soul’s intellect? Erudite. An Anchorite. Can I join that club? A Petrarchan archetype parked at the pub, gallivanting like Dante. A dilettante, my Ezra Pound of flesh extracted, exacting in the end. Outspoken. Unbroken. A bar nun.

    I hear after the hurricane hit New Orleans, some of the Dominican mendicants came back to their convent in Ireland. I hear too, albino crawfish are indigenous to our bit of the Liffey. The river runs under this old school house where I live, and shiver about how much there is to know. So I claw my way to the water’s edge on dodgy days and see no smart salmon but I crane for cunning crustaceans. Trust the clever are forever caught up in what we’re taught, lest our thoughts paint palimpsests. Suggest we cut class but keep an eye out for that old snake in the grass.

    Featured Image (c) Sonny Carter.

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  • Demon Cum

    DEMON CUM

    I

    He’s the latest spawn of Hell
    with a lanyard and a notch lapel
    and “there is no alternative,”
    as if nothing has to give,
    a stench of sulfur to intrigue
    some think-tank from the Ivy League.
    Gray-flecked beard and close-cropped hair,
    a ruin that’s beyond repair
    but crying out for management,
    refurbishing, and rising rent,
    but atop primordial slimes,
    an op-ed in The New York Times,
    a view where people look like ants,
    paid by fellowships and grants,
    a Predator drone with mark on lock,
    an unpaid intern on his cock,
    a data-driven genocide,
    a seminar taught on the side,
    a speech into a thousand mics,
    a million viral Facebook likes,
    a sociopath with lots of friends,
    a handshake that never fucking ends,
    a five-star meal, a rail of blow,
    the so-called former status quo.

    II

    The poem is reduced to a statistic
    of lines and syllables, attempted tropes,
    and stresses. Still, you should be realistic—
    you’ll hold off the degenerates with rhyme,
    with Ivy League credentials, and you’ll cope
    in little magazines, marking time
    with versifications of the status quo—
    a plea for dialogue, an early snow
    beatified, a metaphor that’s felt
    in the flipping of a calendar,
    one more year before the ice caps melt.
    It’s either not our fault—or all our fault.
    Shake your head and grip the bannister.
    Head to bed or dress up like John Gault,
    content there’s really nothing you can do.
    content that all real change must start with you.

    III

    Resistance wears a muu-muu now.
    “Yes we can” and “we know how”
    becomes your mother on the line.
    You tell her everything is fine,
    but she knows better. All the fuss
    takes on shades of Oedipus—
    a tired old lady on a stage,
    the slapstick ending of an age.
    Daddy Warbucks, Howard Roark.
    A NASDAQ surge. A high-tech dork.
    A mother-god is on the phone,
    scolding you in monotone.
    A shattered statue, endless sands—
    a poem no one understands
    despite iambic clarity.
    Inside a tent marked “VIP”
    our goddess goes back to her crypt.
    The tripwire, yet again, is tripped.

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  • The Limits of Multiculturalism

    I have previously warned that austerity economics and moral relativism are giving rise to a new fascism, last seen between the World Wars. First published in English in 1926, perhaps the most influential text of that period was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, which blamed Slavic and other ‘degenerate’ races for Europe’s impoverishment. The counterpoint of his argument was that ‘noble’ Aryan blood, whether Germanic or Anglo Saxon, was the highest expression of humanity. This slow train of pseudo-scientific conjecture terminated in the nightmare of the Holocaust, or Shoah.

    Until recently merely of historic concern, debased Social Darwinism is back in vogue. I fear a new corporatised Shoah of economic liquidation and social-atomisation is on the horizon. The rehabilitation of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s reputation by Steve Bannon, and others, is laying the tracks.

    The words of Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in Brazil after fleeing Hitler’s Europe are returning to haunt us: ‘I feel that Europe, in its state of degeneracy has passed its own death sentence.’[i]

    There is evident an increasingly differentiation between ‘them’ and ‘us’, involving unedifying forms of class warfare and demonization of those outside the dominant culture, whether foreigner, migrant or displaced. ‘Killing an Arab’, the central theme of expurgation of ‘the other’ in Albert Camus’s L’Etranger ‘The Outsider’ is writ large in our culture.

    Within this discourse lies the vexed question of immigration or mass migration. Who should be expelled? Who can stay? And why?

    The mainstream Left – the hopeless and incoherent Left – has hitherto uncritically endorsed mass migration and diversity, equating any form of immigration control with incipient fascism. This is the soppy, unthinking multi-culturalism of ‘Nadia’ Guardian reader. During the Blairite regime one of his ministers Barbara Roche, gave carte blanche to unrestrained abuse of the asylum system, telling officials, ‘Asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Britain. Removal takes too long and it’s emotional.’[ii] How times have changed.

    A Wandering Cosmopolitan

    Let me lay my multi-racial and cosmopolitan cards on the table. I am a mongrel breed of Irish Catholic – a disease from which I am still recovering – Austrian Catholic; with a soupcon of Jewry, and distant Welsh. Educated in Britain, America, and Ireland, and much travelled, I am a shaggy dog of various stamps. Labels of multiculturalism and internationalism are plastered all over me. Paddington bear from Peru arrived in London. I have no built-in prejudice against other races in the pot.

    I believe in the idea of the best man or woman for the job, but baulk at political correctness, affirmative action or quotas, and all other self-protectionist strategies that justify the promotion of the indigent or semi-competent. I also believe that anyone should be given the opportunity to develop and fulfil their potential in a chosen fields, now increasingly difficult in a world of zero-hour or short-term contracts.

    Britain in Brexit limbo is a crucible for these cross current. Babylondon, a Babel’s Tower of voices and many vices; a petri-dish for immigration policies over which I have had a ringside seat in London’s extradition courts for the past year

    It is taking on the appearance of the coliseum with non-nationals being thrown to the lions, for the amusement of a generation of global political leaders on a spectrum from Caligula to Nero; Gore Vidal’s ‘United States of Amnesia’[iii] has gone viral.

    In the 1930s the UK was a refuge for those extirpated by fascism. Freud fled to the UK in 1938, alongside numerous Jewish intellectuals, including the historian Eric Hobsbawm and jurist Hersh Lauterpacht, who nourished the UK’s intellectual life for decades. That was then, and British tolerance, an indicium of the national character, is not as open to the reception of the poor huddled masses today, while under Trump, America is developing a siege mentality.

    The idea of American universities being staffed by left-wing intellectuals such as Thomas Adorno and Hannah Arendt, as in the 1950s, is now decidedly quaint. In Trump-land even moderate liberalism is an invitation to censure or disempowerment by squeamish authorities. A quick word from our sponsors. A quiet petition. A public shaming for the temerity to speak the truth in Post-Truth-land.

    The New Determinants

    The reception of the genuinely talented, who add spice to the melting pot, is still desired by the UK authorities, and perhaps America. The question has narrowed to what adds and what detracts? These new determinants are increasingly based on financial calculation, or on the requirements of the service industry; servility and obsequiousness have acquired a new currency.

    As a result of its colonial heritage, the UK had to accommodate former imperial subjects from the Caribbean, South Asia, and even its neighbouring island. Now the Home Office is rigorously scrutinising all claims, as I discovered in the case of a white South African client invoking the ancestral clause.

    The apocalyptic warning by Enoch Powell at the time of mass immigration in the 1960s was of ‘Rivers of Blood’. The inflammatory racism was reprehensible, but Powell’s prophecy was not entirely without foundation.

    The question of how those communities would ultimately integrate has been inadequately settled, with Asians in a city like Bradford still ghettoized: a sealed-off and closed community, not so much Rivers of Blood, as opposite sides of the fence.

    Norman Tebbit’s famous remark that to be properly British one should have to pass a cricket test of loyalty is apposite in that many second generation Asians still support Pakistan or India in cricket. The same can be said of the Irish in their preferred sports.

    Upon migrating anywhere it is surely advisable to wear the colours of the host nation, without necessarily negating your own inheritance. There is an obligation to adapt and make reasonable accommodations, and the host nation may absorb aspects of your culture too, just as the Indian curry has been taken to the bosom of the UK, all too literally in some cases.

    Caribbean, and indeed Irish communities, have settled better, but racially targeted police surveillance was a phenomenon in places such as Brixton, and IRA bombings led to the false prosecution of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six.

    Acceptance is often on the terms of the host nation. The integrated Irish now excel at light entertainment, from Danny La Rue to Graham Norton via Tony Clare. They offer amusement but not much more. Perhaps we have found our level, considering public intellectualism is virtually extinct in Ireland. At home, indulgence of ‘the craic’ has brought sub-Trumpean political discourse, and the circus clowns of our political, legal and media classes.

    New Species of Racism

    The Labour Left in its present UK incarnation displays a distinctly contradictory attitude towards multiculturalism, and indeed racism. Ken Livingston was surely not an isolated case of virulent antisemitism. Unfortunately anti-Zionism easily morphs into outright antisemitism in supposedly radical left circles. Why?

    Even before fascism there was widespread hatred of the shadowy figure of the cosmopolitan Jewish financier, epitomised by members of the Rothschild family. Anti-capitalism easily falls prey to fictitious Zionist financial conspiracies to rule the world, regurgitating tropes from the Protocols of Zion forgery. The ingenuity and wit of hard-working Jewish communities around the world is rarely acknowledged. This attitude is not evident across the Left, and certainly not in Corbyn. But it is there.

    Also – and here I enter transgressive territory – the rise of antisemitism is linked to the influence of the rich Asian community within the Labour Party. The hostility of Islam towards Israel and Judaism has transmuted into discernible antisemitic attitudes in a purportedly tolerant and multicultural party. The Jewish community can be forgiven for sensing a throwback to another era.

    Brexit extremists are also hostile to multiculturalism, and inheritors of Enoch Powell’s odious strain of English nationalism. The objection to Europe is at one level an objection to undeserved immigrants poaching ‘our’ jobs. It is Spenglerian in that much of the ire is directed against the Slavic ‘degenerate’ races, and despairs at how a ‘nanny’ state permits degenerate lifestyles among the indigenous English working class.

    Puritanism often morphs into sexually-sanitised racism, just as J. Edgar Hoover targeted Martin Luther King’s tomboy promiscuity. It is no coincidence that non-nationals are often portrayed as sexually degenerate, while the religious mania of the U.S. Republican Party promotes a generally hypocritical sexual purity.

    We are seeing a growing hostility towards miscegenation, mixed marriages and corruption of bloodlines. This is apparent in Ireland, where members of the blue-blooded, ‘Anglo-Norman’, Fine Gael party display an absurd sense of entitlement.

    The Right also adduces arguments about abuse of welfare or health care entitlements by migrants. Socio-economic rights are often denied altogether. It all leads to the impression that migrants are sponging off us.

    Other disturbing trends are also on the rise. The vigilante Catholic Right inveighs against alleged paedophiliac Asian men, while ignoring the litany of its own abuses.

    Britain is enmeshed in Brexit dialogue, and arguments about multiculturalism are also pertinent in other jurisdictions. Indeed it has become the burning European issue.

    Thus in France their version of a cricket test was to ban the wearing of garments such as the hijab in public institutions. This was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in S.A.S. in 2014[iv]; where it was justified within the parameters of secular ordre publique. The consequences were profound: civil unrest, bombs, and murder of journalists and cartoonists.

    Yet orthodox Islam has no truck with the core Enlightenment principle of freedom of speech, which an English judge describes as the ‘lifeblood of democracy’. As Stephen Sedley points out, the word ‘lifeblood’ is particularly apt, since ‘free speech enables opinion and fact to be carried round the body politic.’[v]

    But extremism is not restricted to Islam. The Marxist and gay Italian film director Pasolini may have alienated the Roman Church, and mafia, in his 1971 One Hundred Days of Sodom to the extent that he was murdered at their behest on a beach near Rome, with a gay hustler framed for the crime.

    Let us nonetheless hesitate before regulating expressions of culture, particularly as Muslim women see their dress code as an expression of who they are, and ignore the views of some American feminists. The Turkish secular state set up by Ataturk took a similar exclusionary stance towards religious garments; yet, as Orhan Pamuk’s splendid 2002 novel Snow illustrated Turkey was still beset by religious fundamentalism. Liberty demands tolerance of cultural distinctions, albeit there are limits.

    It is clear that excessive multicultural tolerance has permitted the rise of religious fundamentalism, extremism, and indeed terrorism in ‘Londonistan’. Fundamentalism is not, however, limited to Islam, and actually the word can be traced to descriptions of early twentieth century Protestantism. Catholicism has a similar strain – seen vividly throughout Irish history under autocrats such as Archbishop McQuaid.

    The Outsider

    I recently read The Meursault Investigation, written by the Algerian writer Kemal Daoud in 2015. The book is a rebuke to the greatest Algerian, and indeed French, writer of the last century Albert Camus, and his iconic The Outsider, about, as aforementioned, killing an Arab.

    The book is implicitly critical of Camus’s putative racism or imperialism, or at least, a lack of empathy with the murdered Arab. It is certainly not univocally hostile, and the author himself has been the subject of a fatwa, and clearly despises what Camus presaged, namely the rise of religious extremism; one aspect of the multicultural meltdown.

    The book concludes with a consideration which Camus would identify with, namely how do we hold on to the precious commodity of truth?

    The attribution of racism to Camus has been made by others, including Edward Said in his 1993 Culture and Imperialism, which argued he essentially approved of French dominion over Algeria. But Camus is unfairly criticised. He was in origin a member of the French community in Algeria, doubly despised by mainland French as a pied noir outsider, and by the Islamic majority population of Algeria as an occupier.

    Above all he was a product of the Enlightenment, and the French tradition of letters and reason. A devotee of Voltaire with an epigrammatic style redolent of Pascal. There is an austerity about his prose, but also a romantic lyricism born of a mongrel Algerian background.

    In his writing on Algeria – as in his 1951 The Rebel, a book length treatment of secular extremism in the French Revolution – there is a distaste for fundamentalism, secular or religious, which is why he remains relevant. It should be stressed that he advocated co-existence between the transplanted French and native Islamic population in Algeria and condemned the torture and the death penalty inflicted on the Islamic population by the French authorities, graphically conveyed in the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.

    This all seems impeccable multiculturalism, but Camus saw clearly that there was going to be bloodletting in Algeria. He despised religious fervour, just as he had contempt for the secular extremism of the French Revolutionary Terror. Those qualities of middle-of-the-road restraint are in short supply today.

    So what conclusions do I draw from limbo Brexit-land, and with Euro-wide fascism and racism on the rise, about multi-culturalism?

    Here are some tentative, provocative and perhaps disturbing conclusions.

    The liberal consensus based on such values as the Rule of Law, humanism, tolerance, the promotion of excellence irrespective of race, and affirmative action to compensation for historic discrimination has broken down. In an Age of Extremes, the Left and the Right are demonising each other. Reason and moderation are in desperately short supply, as are the Enlightenment values of Camus. Alas, extremism will continue to rise even in multicultural Britain.

    The Extradition Courts in which I appear are going to be flooded with cases resulting in deportations of ‘undesirables’. Only economically productive non-nationals will be allowed to remain in post-Brexit Britain. All non-nationals, perhaps even Irish, will become part of the precariat. Racially motivated crimes and targeting will continue apace, unchecked by an increasingly authoritarian state.

    Merkel’s Open Door policy cannot last, there are limits to the number the continent can accommodate, and the interests of indigenous workers are damaged by an incessant stream of migrants willing to work for less and longer.

    But given the state of Europe with fascist enclaves in Hungary, Poland and the iridescent fascism in Austria – no to mention the deep-seated extremism of Irish neo-liberalism – Britain will probably be the last place to see the Rivers of Blood flow. There are still residues of those precious qualities of rationality, rigour, tolerance and humanism espoused by Camus.

    All is not lost in Britain, but even in the polyglot cosmopolis – the ultimate melting pot that is London –  the sense is that multicultural tolerance has been eroded substantially, and is being replaced by fractious intolerance, class warfare, intimidation and social fragmentation. The European experiment is over, in truth, having contributed to its downfall, but islands of humanity endure.

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    [i] Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, London, Pushkin Press, 2014, p.425.

    [ii] James Slack, ‘Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules: Explosive new biography lays ex-PM’s betrayal bare’, The Daily Mail, February 27th, 2016,  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3466485/How-Blair-cynically-let-two-million-migrants-Explosive-biography-reveals-PM-s-conspiracy-silence-immigration-debate.html, accessed 6/2/19.

    [iii] Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation, p.55, London, Little, Brown, 2006.

    [iv] Eva Brems, ‘The European Court of Human Rights and Face Veil Bans’, E-International Relations, February 21st, 2018, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/02/21/the-european-court-of-human-rights-and-face-veil-bans/, accessed 6/2/19.

    [v] Stephen Sedley, ‘The Right to Know’, 10th of August, 2010, The London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n15/stephen-sedley/the-right-to-know, accessed 6/2/19.

  • Artist of the Month – Emily Robyn Archer

    It’s a dark, stormy night in the middle of January, 2016 and I am listening to gale force winds slam on the tin roof overhead. We are in a small fishing cottage in Donegal, on one of the most remote headlands in the country. There is no electricity, the closest neighbour is a twenty minute drive away and the nearest pint a hike over the looming mountain. As harsh as this sounds, it is exactly what I need.

    I am suffering from ‘burn out’ you see, so these icy blasts of Atlantic air are a soothing balm to my scorched senses, the isolation a tonic. For six years I have been a freelance artist, environmental activist and educator, based in Dublin.

    In that time I have scraped, salvaged and hammered large-scale art installations into being. Using reclaimed materials as my medium and naivety as my armour, I have tried to raise environmental awareness through art.

    These attempts have included vertical ‘window farms’ in school foyers, multi-storey cardboard dragons in Barcelona, and a shoal of two hundred tin can fish to highlight the blight of overfishing. Suffice to say, I am a bit tired.

    We are facing environmental collapse and I am holding a pencil

    The journey began quite some time ago. I was under ten when I staged my first ‘protest’ (solo and quite ineffective, but charming I’m sure). I filled my bedroom with hand-drawn environmental posters. My heroes then were the bedraggled eco-warriors living atop trees in the Glen-of-the-Downs, who I had seen on RTE’s Six One News in 1990’s Ireland. I idolised them from a threadbare armchair in West Cork.

    If Nature was my first love and inclination, Art became my boon and in 2010 I graduated from the National College of Art and Design. Emerging from the shuttered, blue gates on Thomas Street into peak-recession Ireland, I felt distinctly confused, and became caught up for a while in the art-clique-jargon-speak of galleries, shows and funding proposals. I engaged for a while, until realising with a jolt I had lost my way.

    I came across a headline stating: ‘Scientists say by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.’ I remembered my ten year old self and the joy of playing by the sea. By the time I would reach sixty-four systems such as these could be in irreversible crisis. The more I read, the starker the prognosis became: species loss; extreme climate events. We are facing environmental collapse and I’m holding a pencil.

    As an alternative to all out panic, there ensued six years of magical, exhausting and invigorating creative activity. ‘In flow’ I found huge resources of energy, produced installations incessantly and started my own environmental education company. I cycled, danced and skip-dived through my twenties in fabulous company, finding like-minded people and speaking plainly. I became so contented I almost forget the instincts of my ten-year-old self.

    That was until I began spending more time with ten-year-olds, visiting schools all over Dublin to educate them on environmental issues, and inspire creative activism.

    Native Circles by Emily Robyn Archer

    I find all young people intuitively care about the natural world. This is despite many being cut off from its beauty, solace and life-giving force. I also cannot help noticing that ‘proper’ grown-ups, while claiming to care about the environment are unwilling to change what are often destructive behaviours. Over time we become disconnected from Nature, and cease to really care.

    Oh dear, here I am again. Except now the climate science is more alarming and the political situation even more dire. What on earth can I do from this small art studio on Francis Street? I stare at the wall. I pretend to be busy. I help others with their projects, to distract from my latest creative paralysis. I am asked to speak at events as an ‘art-activist.’ I flick through slides of my work feeling like a fraud. Global Warming Anxiety and Creative Burnout, sweat prickles my brow, ‘Can someone please open the window?!’

    Mysterious circular patterns

    I walk from the fishing cottage down to the foamy shore. All is white in a terrific whipped cream, post-storm sea. The wind is still strong and I have to concentrate to stay upright as I watch flurries of sea birds find shelter in their cliff-face hide outs. Inky-black, an otter weaves in and out of the zinc white surf. With oil-spillery movements she is making the most of the many fish swept in by the mighty Atlantic heaves.

    For two weeks we walk and explore, allowing our cheeks to be pelted pink by the icy winds. Venturing over the mountainside for a pint, we discover a small village with ancient standing stones scattered in unlikely positions: one is propped up by the local post office; another serves as one side of a farm gate; yet another towers conspicuously tall in a famine graveyard. All of them display mysterious circular patterns, which I trace with a gloved finger.

    Back at the cottage, by the fire, I am reading Jung and his ideas of circle mandalas as a complete expression of self. I think about my own inner cycle, restless with creative energy before an inevitable collapse. Things come into focus, and I feel like a beach pebble finding the shape and warmth of beachcomber’s palm. At the old wooden table I begin drawing circles and start filling them with what I know of Nature.

    And so from the darkest point in winter again flowers an impulse to art and curiosity. I draw circles depicting natural cycles. The wheel of the year, the phases of the moon, a woman’s energy cycle – cycles I know support whole life systems. I locate myself somewhere on this wheel, shifting through different seasons, through different levels of uncertainty.

    Peaks and troughs

    There are periods between budding and blossoming; times requiring rest and reflection, as in a rich compost. I am beginning to understand that I, like the plant or a tree, am a cyclical being. This is the greatest connection I have forged with the natural world, and one that I know is vital for me to share.

    Native Circles is my latest art-offering in the ever-confusing, messy and beautiful landscape of earthly human experience: a field guide to a life more connected to the natural world.

    www.nativecirclesart.ie

    www.emilyrobynarcher.com

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”30″ gal_title=”Featured Artist of the Month: Emily Robyn Archer”]

  • ‘Wild Law’ is the Path of Natural Justice

    Man-made climate change is as good as a fact, but the consequences are uncertain in any specific location. Indeed, the island of Ireland could actually be more hospitable to human habitation under certain scenarios: drier and hotter summers are predicted, albeit with an increased likelihood of storm events; higher atmospheric CO2-levels could also increase crop yields.[i] Our rising emissions could have greater impacts elsewhere.

    Mitigation strategies may also have adverse side effects. Witness the expansion of sitka spruce plantations across Ireland, which acidify soils and strangle biodiversity,[ii] in pursuit of an improved carbon balance sheet permitting increases in dairy production. There are also question marks around the impacts of wind farms, especially those sited on blanket peat[iii], requiring hundreds of tonnes of concrete in construction, and disrupting the flightpaths of birds. If this energy is devoted to a new generation of electrified autonomous vehicles, rather than communal transport, it will be in vain.

    Climate change opportunism includes the distortion of supermarket shelves being stacked with organic products wrapped in plastic and flown halfway around the world. It is most obvious in the greenwashing of the agricultural sector,[iv] which consistently argues that Irish livestock’s lower emissions profile justifies expansion – as beef and dairy would only be produced elsewhere with higher emissions. Thankfully, the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument is more easily dismissed as data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), analysed by An Taisce, shows that Ireland is, in actual fact, the most carbon-intensive beef producer in Europe, and ranks third on emissions from its dairy sector.[v] Most importantly, however, narrowing the environmental agenda to climate change alone obscures the equally pressing consideration of the Sixth Extinction, the unarguable reality of which is apparent in Ireland.

    With this in mind, Is it possible that interested parties could assert rights, already implied by the Irish Constitution, to protect Irish nature itself? Could spiralling emissions then be reduced alongside meaningful biodiversity-gains? Such an argument would build on a foundation of Natural Law, a school of thought embedded in the language and historic interpretation of the Irish Constitution. It can be traced to Classical antiquity, as Sophocles’s Antigone puts it: ‘the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven’, beyond the temporary, and occasionally illegitimate, laws of any state.

    During the Middle Ages, especially through Thomas Aquinas, ‘pagan’ Classical arguments were adopted by the Roman Catholic Church. In more recent times these became associated with a toxic and myopic focus on human sexuality, especially women’s bodies. Natural Law still transmits, however, compelling arguments for a universal justice beyond, and above, positive law, informed by dialectic, rather than Christian Revelation as is widely assumed.

    The jurist and former President of the High Court, Declan Costello wrote: ‘It has more than once been judicially observed that it can clearly be inferred that the [Irish] Constitution rejects legal positivism as a basis for the protection of fundamental rights and suggests instead a theory of natural law from which those rights can be derived.’[vi] Thus, from the 1960s, Natural Law interpretations ascribed a host of ‘Unenumerated Rights’[vii] to all citizens, including rights to bodily integrity, work, marry, privacy in marital relations, and free movement within the State. These rights are not explicitly identified in the Irish Constitution but are considered intrinsic to the human condition, flowing in particular from a generalised protection of personal rights under Article 40.3. With the Sixth Extinction now upon us, there is an urgent need for Natural Law to be extended to imply an Unenumerated Rights of other species to exist, along with ourselves.

    For this to occur, however, the Court must overcome a contemporary moral relativism, and aversion to decisive ethical responses. No doubt truth is a shifting target, and any single account is insufficient, but faith in our capacity to settle ethical arguments at a given point in time needs to be restored. As Aristotle – whose influence on Aquinas’s Natural Law theory was immense – pointed out:

    The theorizing of truth is in one sense difficult, in another easy. This is shown by the fact that whereas no one person can obtain an adequate grasp of it, we cannot all fail in the attempt; each thinker makes some statement about the natural world and as an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry; but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable.[viii]

    Post-modernists will argue otherwise, but an outlook of ambient confusion is an admission of failure. Holes can be picked in any argument, but the argument as a whole – “a combination of all conjectures” – may stand. One cannot propose anything meaningful without the conviction of arriving at “something considerable” –  an elusive truth. A capacity to determine justice requires we overcome a ponderous Post-Truth incoherence.

    A contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre sees in the dialectic process, ‘the movement from thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such’. Contemporary environmental challenges require new logical departures, disclosing “how things are”, “as such.”  Natural Law theory should encompass an Earth Jurisprudence. Then our laws may confront the reality of an oversized human population radically out of balance with its environment, with Ireland presenting a difficult case.

    Currently, however, environmental laws are generally seen as a body of rules foisted on the populace, often in exchange for a subsidy, rather than practices adopted for the commonweal. Accordingly, Coyle and Morrow claim such regulations are seen ‘as a technical instrument of social goals and policies, rather than a body of principles aiming at the articulation of a concept of justice and the good life.’[ix] This can partly be attributed to the prior failure of Natural Law theorists to identify inherent rights in other species.

    In contrast, the sanctity of human property rights have been vigorously upheld. Early modern theorists, drawing more on Christian revelation than reason, assumed rights of virtually unrestrained possession, along with dominion over all wild creatures therein. The seventeenth century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius described this as ‘a grant which was renewed on the restoration of the world after the deluge’. To deprive any owner of this would, he said, be ‘an act of injustice.’[x] Importantly, however, up to that point there had been little necessity to assert the rights of wild animals, even in Europe, as humans were living in relative harmony with nature, or at least allowing other species to survive. According to Tim Flannery: ‘after the last muskox died in what is now Sweden about 9,000 years ago, the European mainland did not lose another species until the seventeenth century.’[xi]

    Since then the picture has changed dramatically across the world with sixty percent of wild animals wiped out since 1970 alone.[xii] Coyle and Morrow affirm: ‘The very agricultural practices which were held out as a moral necessity by the natural rights theorists can, it seems, create untold environmental damage.’ Given the scale of ecological damage that has ensued – associated with European colonisation of the globe – they argue that ‘the ethical assumptions of the seventeenth century conception of property cannot survive in such circumstances.’[xiii] The accumulating impacts on our planet of over seven billion human beings, living longer than ever, enjoins alternative approaches to land ownership. As Coyle and Morrow put it: ‘If human agriculture was ever in harmony with nature it certainly is not any longer and the sanctity of individual ownership must be restrained. Duties must join rights.’[xiv]

    Natural Law is an ongoing, truth-seeking dialectical process with the aim of disclosing, “how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.” If Natural Law is to have continued relevance it must adapt to current conditions. A re-imagining of Natural Law is evident in the field of Earth Jurisprudence, or Wild Law, a term coined by Cormac Cullinan to refer to human laws that are consistent with Earth Jurisprudence.[xv] According to one of its inspirators, Thomas Berry: ‘The Universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects and every member of the Earth Community has three inherent rights: the right to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.’[xvi] These rights ought, logically and morally, to be incorporated into Irish law.

    But how can these aspirations be given tangible legal form? In a seminal 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’[xvii] Christopher D. Stone explores how Wild Law might apply. He argues that natural objects could have legal standing by analogy with companies, states, infants, incompetents, municipalities or even universities. Thus, a court appoints a trustee when a corporation displays incompetence. He writes:

    On a parity of reasoning, we should have a system in which, when a friend of a natural object perceives it to be endangered, he can apply to a court for the creation of a guardianship … The guardian would urge before the court injuries not presently cognizable – the death of eagles and inedible crabs, the suffering of sea lions, the loss from the face of the earth of species of commercially valueless birds, the disappearance of wilderness areas.

    He also draws an analogy with the law of patents and copyright:

    I am proposing that we do the same with eagles and wilderness areas as we do with copyrighted works, patented inventions and privacy: make the violation of rights in them to be a cost by declaring the piracy of them to be the invasion of a property interest.

    Furthermore, he suggests this could lead to modifications in our representative democracies:

    I am suggesting that there is nothing unthinkable about, and there might on balance even be a prevailing case to be made for an electoral appointment that made some systematic effort to allow for the representative “rights” of non-human life.

    Stone envisages changes in our legal culture informing wider social norms, as, ‘a society that spoke of the “legal rights of the environment” would be inclined to legislate more environment-protecting rules by formal enactment.’

    Intriguingly, he also speculates, ‘What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of geophysics, biology and the cosmos’, proposing ‘that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism of which mankind is a functional part’. Similarly, Coyle and Morrow argue: ‘The problem is that meaningful change responding to environmental and social imperatives will require a true paradigm shift in how we regard our relationship with the world of which we form a part.’

    A transformation in our legal relationship with the natural world requires the participation of other fields. It was Percy Bysshe Shelley who famously described the poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The philosopher Timothy Morton makes the provocative claim that putting ‘something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy did for the figure of women.’[xviii] Perhaps W.B. Yeats’s identification of Irish nature with a ‘glimmering girl’, ‘with apple blossoms in her hair’ distracts from an ongoing exploitative relationship, linked to our colonial inheritance. Indeed, rather than celebrating a patriarch ‘Digging’ for turf, as in Seamus Heaney’s poem by that name did, new accounts might draw inspiration from an often-overlooked visionary poet of the early twentieth-century Irish Revival, Eva Gore-Booth. She gave up the wealth and privilege of her aristocratic background to devote herself to the poor. Gore-Booth also recognises the right of all creatures to exist on the land, notwithstanding human ownership in her 1906 poem ‘The Landlord’

    O the bracken waves and the foxgloves flame,
    And none of them ever has heard your name –
    Near and dear is the curlew’s cry,
    You are merely a stranger passing by.    [xix]

    Hearteningly, all around the world, from Ecuador to New Zealand, conceptions of Earth Jurisprudence, Wild Law or Pachamama are actually taking route. For example, Germany’s constitution makes protection of ‘the foundations of nature and animals’ a national imperative, applicable to government agencies, the legislature and the judiciary. The provision has been cited in over seven hundred cases. Moreover, echoing Christopher D. Stone, Oliver A. Houck points out this ‘does not include the more numerous acts of compliance that drew no litigation at all.’[xx]

    Meanwhile in Ireland species loss continues apace. Liam Lysaght recently records: ‘of the 3,000 species that have undergone a red list conservation assessment, one in every four species is threatened with extinction here.’[xxi] Of particular concern is the continued exploitation of peat bogs for fossil fuel extraction – where considerations of nature conservation align precisely with keeping fossil fuels, and embedded methane, in the ground – as well as the impacts of grazing ruminants.

    Unfortunately, existing environmental legislation, including the EU’s Habitats Directive, is failing to protect endangered species adequately, including the iconic curlew, which is now on the red list. This can partly be attributed to a lack of enforcement, but also, as we observed, such laws are currently considered an encumbrance on property owners, and not a scheme of protection for a common inheritance. So how do we spare what remains of Irish nature from the ravages of human exploitation?

    A constitutional amendment enshrining nature rights, similar to that operating in Germany, should be the long-term goal. But this will take time to bring to fruition, especially as mainstream media only falteringly highlights extinction threats, and none of the main political parties prioritise protection of biodiversity.

    I propose the alternative of a test case, applying Thomas Berry’s tripartite rights to a particular native species; proposing, for example, the curlew has a right to be, to habitat and to reproduce, alongside humans, based on a Natural Law interpretation of the Irish Constitution – as a previously Unenumerated Right. It seems crucial that such rights are ‘discovered’ sooner rather than later before further, irreversible, losses occur.

    The Court could certainly injunct particular activities to protect species under threat, or prohibit certain classes of herbicides or insecticides outright, or even declare particular lands under private ownership as protected habitats. This will require expert witness from recognised authorities to distinguish competing rights of native, invasive and naturalized species. Property owners should be compensated for any loss, but under the Irish Constitution all rights, including that to property, are subject to the common good, which is served by preventing extinctions.

    The allocation of reserves and prohibition on the use of certain chemicals would be a proportionate appropriation by the Judiciary of the powers of the Legislature and Executive branches, in circumstances where there has been a serious dereliction of duty. The Sixth Extinction is an emergency happening before our eyes with recognisable victims, unlike the unpredictable devastation that climate change is wreaking.

    Cattle and sheep farmers can find new roles as landscape guardians. Re-wilding may begin with marginal lands, where farming is already uneconomic, while better land currently under pasture can be converted to tillage in order to accelerate what a recent article in The Lancet has referred to as the ‘Great Food Transformation.’[xxii]

    Eventually, beyond legal prescriptions, habitat reclamation can endear the population to the landscape, and reform destructive behaviours. In developing our appreciation of the soft sounds and sweet aromas in nature we may consider reducing dependence on noisy, polluting motor cars. Greater biodiversity also offers scope for judicious harvesting of foodstuffs, building materials and fuel. The tragedy of the loss of other species is almost impossible to convey.

    Many of us wish to see our laws go further: putting an end to the perverse subsidy regime that only benefits the Beef Barons; or dignifying all animals with a decent life, in the wild. For the moment, however, our best legal argument is to assert the rights of all resident Irish species, living in ecological balance, simply to exist. Reduced emissions will be a happy by-product of biodiversity-gain, raising environmental awareness to a point where destructive behaviours are recognised, and changed. In beginning to liberate the natural world from human dominion let us recall the small victories won in the battle against human slavery along the road to the great milestones. Wild Law can emerge incrementally in Ireland through our existing constitutional framework.

    [i] Stephen Flood, ‘Projected Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Irish Agriculture’, October, 2013, Stop Climate Chaos, https://www.stopclimatechaos.ie/download/pdf/projected_economic_impacts_of_climate_change_on_irish_agriculture_oct_2013.pdf, accessed 19/2/19.

    [ii] Mary Colwell, ‘A forestry boom is turning Ireland into an ecological dead zone’, October 10th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/10/trees-ireland-biodiversity-sitka-birds-extinction, accessed 19/2/19.

    [iii] Richard Lindsay and Olivia Bragg ‘WIND FARMS AND BLANKET PEAT. The Bog Slide of 16th October 2003 at Derrybrien, Co. Galway, Ireland’, November, 2005, School of Health & Biosciences University of East London. https://web.archive.org/web/20131218090914/http://www.uel.ac.uk/erg/documents/Derrybrien.pdf, accessed 28/2/19.

    [iv] Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Environmental group calls Origin Green a ‘sham’’, October 4th, 2017, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/environmental-group-calls-origin-green-a-sham-1.3244507, accessed 28/2/19.

    [v] Press Release ‘Bombshell for Irish Peace’, 12th of February, 2019, An Taisce, http://www.antaisce.org/articles/bombshell-for-irish-beef?fbclid=IwAR0uPTUu1TEoZToCGugOCIoS-nmsigAQNU0g_U3XrIZHNU3PKbF2_zO0YIU, accessed 19/2/19.

    [vi] Declan Costello, ‘Natural Law, the Constitution, and the Courts’, from Lynch and Meenan (eds.) Essays in Memory of Alexis FitzGerald, Dublin, The Incorporated Law Society of Ireland, 1987, p.109

    [vii] The original ‘Unenumerated Right’ to ‘Bodily Integrity’ was approved by the Supreme Court in Ryan v. A.G. [1965] IESC 1; [1965] IR 294 (3rd July, 1965)

    [viii] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 2, Part 1.

    [ix] Coyle and Morrow, The Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law. Property, Rights and Nature, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2004, p.211

    [x] Coyle and Morrow, p.15

    [xi] Flannery, 2018, p.251

    [xii] Damian Carrington, ‘Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds’, 30th of October, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds, accessed 20/2/19.

    [xiii] Coyle and Morrow, p.206

    [xiv] Ibid, p.209

    [xv] ‘Discovering the meaning of Earth jurisprudence’, Legalbrief, August 27, 2002

    [xvi] Quoted in Mike Bell, ‘Thomas Berry and an Earth Jurisprudence’, http://rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/earth%20jurisprudence/Earth%20Justice.htm, accessed 20/2/19.

    [xvii] Christopher D. Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing–Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review. 45 (1972): 450–87.

    [xviii] Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p.5.

    [xix] [xix] Eva Gore-Booth ‘The Land to a Landlord’, from Sonja Tierney (ed), Eva Gore-Booth: Collected Poems, Dublin, Arlen House, 2018, p.166

    [xx] Houck, Noah’s Second Voyage: The Rights of Nature as Law, 31 Tul. Envtl. L.J. 1, 2017

    [xxi] Liam Lysaght, ‘The six steps needed to save Irish Biodiversity’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times

    [xxii] Prof Walter Willett, MD et al, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.

     

  • Inside China: What My Students Knew about European Culture

    Up to my retirement several years ago I taught spoken English at an agricultural university in North-East China. The routine was relieved by an assignment to deliver an elective course that I called ‘Western Art and Culture’. I was given carte blanche to draw up a curriculum to fill the ten weeks allotted.

    From my experience of teaching at this and two other Chinese universities I was aware that young students have only a patchy knowledge of visual arts, theatre and music. At middle school they study Dynastic nature poetry, and read some of China’s classic novels including the sixteenth century Ming masterpiece Journey to the West.

    I once glanced at a middle school textbook, in Chinese, on ‘Western Culture’. It carried black and white photos of Greek temple, ceramic pots, an armless Venus de Milo, the Roman forum and Colosseum, and Leonardo’s rendering of Mona Lisa. Musical and artistic instruction is only offered in a serious way on curricula of select urban fee-paying schools. Middle class parents in the booming cities often pay for their sons and daughters to be privately tutored in piano or violin, or traditional string instruments like the erhu or the guzheng.

    Guzheng practice.

    Sweatshop Art Reproduction

    I discovered that few third level Chinese students have ever visited a city art museum. One reason is the high cost of admission relative to most students’ disposable pocket money. A lucky few have visited the Summer Palace and Forbidden City in Beijing, or lit incense sticks ‘for good luck’, at a Buddhist temple during the annual spring festival. Downloading free movies on their laptops in student dormitories is the most common cultural experience.

    Female students in China are particularly draw to romantic B-movies, churned out in South Korea, with Chinese subtitles attached. Japanese Manga comic books, infamous for lurid depictions, cater to lowbrow reading taste.

    Around China you might see replica Mona Lisas in cafes, restaurants and hotel rooms. Van Gogh’s expressionist studies of ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase’ are other common wall-fillers. Renoir’s charming portraits of the late 19th-century French bourgeoisie are also to be found.

    There are two or three factories in South China where teams of skilled painters churn out reproductions of these and other Western classic. One week they might have to recreate a Constable, the following a Rubens. It is sweatshop reproduction art.

    In other sections of the factories workers on assembly lines fit the canvases into gilt frames. Every six months business people from all over the world attend the trade exhibition held in the southern boom town of Guangzhou (formerly Canton). There they buy up large quantities of these as well as mock-period furniture for export. The next time you see Monet’s sunset-red grain stacks at Giverney on a European café wall, pause and reflect that it might have been made to order by a Chinese sweatshop painter.

    The Origins of Western Civilisation

    For my course I chose to begin with Leonardo and Michelangelo, moving on to Johannes Vermeer, Goya, the French impressionists, Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and finally Picasso, whose political work is officially praised in China; though his erotic material is never reproduced in schoolbooks, and shocks the curious who seek out more online.

    The Ancient Greeks and Romans form a composite myth about the origins of western civilization, succinctly laid out in the approved middle school textbooks of Communist China. Chinese school-leavers are at least familiar with photos of the Parthenon in Athens and Roman Colloseum.

    I happened to have a DVD of the film ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. which fictionally recreates the household circumstances in which Vermeer painted a work that has appeared on everything from chocolate boxes to 1500-piece jigsaw puzzles. I emphasised that the Girl is often called the Mona Lisa of Northern Europe. My students empathised with her simple peasant garb and down-to-earth prettiness. They were aware that the pearl earring had been supplied for the portrait.

    Shyness and lack of of art observation practice made it difficult for me to elicit comments on selected screened paintings. I persisted and let every student in class take his or her turn.

    Admiring Leonardo’s Guts

    Knowing that Chinese secondary school students only learn about Leonardo da Vinci through the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile, I took the trouble to show several of his anatomical and engineering drawings. Communist leaders are constantly exhorting young citizens to cultivate a serious ‘scientific outlook’ on life.

    I made it clear to my students that Leonardo first trained as an engineer before discovering his gift for drawing and painting. I revealed how he had been given permission to dissect and draw bodies in a hospital mortuary, amid the smell of summer putrefaction, and that reproductions of muscles, veins, organs and skeletons drawn by Leonardo were scrutinised by European medical students for hundreds of years; until the publication of Gray’s Anatomy in 1858 with its stunning illustrations by Henry Vandyke Carter.

    Some of my Chinese undergraduates admired Leonardo’s guts; others squirmed audibly when confronted with graphic details of skulls and skeletons and a dead baby in the womb, as most students would.

    In another push to get beyond the Mona Lisa stereotype I also showed reproductions of his other portraits and explored religious themes. ‘The Woman with an Ermine’ impressed students with her natural beauty, carefully groomed fawn hair and colourful dress. La Belle Ferroniere moved them similarly. I hoped this would give Chinese students a more rounded understanding of Leonardo’s stature in western art history.

    In one class I showed a selection of traditional Chinese landscapes from various dynasties and juxtaposed them with selected Dutch landscapes of the 17th and 18th centuries. I noted that Chinese and Renaissance painting styles were different but not unequal in merit; artists in different cultural milieus attempting to achieve varying social-aesthetic objectives.

    Students performing dance moves to pop music.

    Final Grades

    Music was an additional focus of my courses. I prepared a series of pictures of orchestral instruments, moving on to American popular music in Britain and America.

    Finally, I assigned short writing pieces about the painters and a final paper was written on the subject of ‘art and music in my life’.

    I was generally underwhelmed by the manuscripts. Many students wrote about listening in their dormitories late at night to popular music; none listened to Classical or jazz. Only a few wrote about paintings and sculptures. I hope my students have taken something with them about Western art, music and cultural norms. Maybe a few will drop into an art museum on their travels, assuming they are earning enough money to purchase the admission..

    Garreth Byrne lives in retirement in Leitrim, Ireland after teaching English at universities and other institutions in five different cities in China, where he spent twelve years.

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  • How Irish Propaganda Operates III – the Inversion of the Food Pyramid

    How Irish Propaganda Operates Part I (HIPO I) identifies an ‘essential constituency’ of farmers, which offer an overwhelmingly preponderance of their support to representatives of the political duopoly in rural constituencies. Upsetting this cohort frays a brittle alliance maintaining the dominant consensus of steady economic growth, and rising rents. As a result the media and politicians exercise caution where direct criticism of their interests is concerned, exemplified by Leo Varadkar’s volte-face in response to revealing he was cutting down on his red meat consumption.[i]

    To define the ‘farming’ sector as such is, however, misleading: what is really referred to is the cartels, which control the export and domestic trade in livestock products. These have, over decades, manipulated farming opinion, especially through the in-house Irish Farmers Journal and pro-industry IFA, into falsely assuming an alignment of interests. Transnational corporations also influence national nutritional guidelines, and contribute to the state’s ‘laggardly’ response to climate change.

    It would be incorrect to suggest that the sector is immune from criticism – habitually referred to as ‘our farmers’ by the state broadcaster – in mainstream Irish media. Any reputable news organisation which ignores compelling stories covered in the international press would lose credibility, and there are conscientious journalists working within these organisations. Moreover, the Irish media must appear to be balanced – ‘facts don’t have opinions’ as the Irish Times advertises – and conscientious. But the paper of record neglects to run investigations – thus the horse meat scandal of 2013 was broken by The Guardian – while subtly shaping public perception.

    Veganism, in particular, is treated with a mixture of contempt and fear. This reaction may be symptomatic of an older generation’s contempt for a thrusting, and increasingly environmentally-informed, ‘snowflake’ generation, but anti-vegan invective also advantages many of their main advertisers. A recent article in the Irish Times by Brian Boyd warned: ‘Beware the perils of Veganuary’; quoting ‘renowned chef’ Anthony Bourdain’s description of vegans as ‘the Hezbollah-like splinter faction of vegetarians.’[ii] The article recycles arguments previously made in UK publications likening the philosophy to the dietary disorder called orthorexia – an unhealthy preoccupation with eating healthy food.

    Yet the science on the matter is clear, with the American Dietetic Association advising that ‘appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.’[iii] The rise of Veganism is the least of Ireland’s nutritional problems: the country is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, linked to the standard Irish diet. What is striking about the paper’s coverage of veganism is that vegans themselves are rarely, if ever, permitted to speak directly to the reader.

    ‘Cartels have manipulated farming opinion for decades’ Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Lancet Recommendations

    Last month The Lancet published a paper entitled ‘Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems’, which ‘found strong evidence’, indicating ‘food production is among the largest drivers of global environmental change by contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and land-system change’.

    The paper convened thirty-seven leading scientists from sixteen countries in various disciplines including human health, agriculture, political sciences, and environmental sustainability. They argued we can provide ‘healthy diets … for an estimated global population of about 10 billion people by 2050 and remain within a safe operating space’; crucially, however, ‘even small increases in consumption of red meat or dairy foods would make this goal difficult or impossible to achieve.’ This will require ‘unprecedented global collaboration and commitment’ and ‘nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.’[iv] The headline, in the Irish media at least, was a recommendation that red meat consumption should decline by 90% in developed countries such as Ireland.

    This radical and timely proposal appeared on the front page of the Irish Times. But a subtle fight back soon commenced, undermining its contents. Was it by coincidence that on the following day a recipe by Lilly Higgins appeared in the paper for sirloin steak?

    More substantially, two days on, Kevin O’Sullivan interviewed Professor Alan Matthews; the headline writer emphasising his academic credentials. Matthews argued that ‘Ireland had a role in continuing meat and dairy production, provided it backed up its sustainability credentials with rigorous evidence.’[v] This is a significant proviso given that leading environmentalists have decried the government’s flagship Origin Green as an exercise in ‘greenwashing’.[vi]

    The bias of the piece is demonstrated by a failure to canvass the opinion of an environmental scientist who could have offered an alternative perspective (and any number would have done so) to counter Matthews’s opinion. Instead the partisan views of the IFA’s Joe Healy were dutifully conveyed.

    The editorial stance of the Irish Times (penned perhaps by O’Sullivan himself?) is made clear a few days later, when it described the report as ‘narrowly prescriptive’.[vii] The message is the equivalent of a ‘fuck you’ to the thirty-seven scientific authors, saying we in Ireland prefer to invert the food pyramid and will continue to devote 90% of our land to livestock.

    The Irish Times also misleadingly conflates production with consumption. Allowing (without accepting) that Ireland enjoys a comparative advantage in low carbon-emission livestock production, which we continue to export, albeit within a reduced market: why should Irish consumers adopt a different diet to the rest of the world – especially given the authors are not only exploring environmental impact but also healthy nutrition – simply because we are living in a country currently dominated by pastoral agriculture?

    As long as we operate within a global food system – where the bulk of our own agricultural products are exported and we import essential commodities including most of our fruit and vegetables. We cannot have it both ways, and say domestic consumption should mirror domestic production.

    The Irish Times, for its part, is not displaying the “unprecedented global collaboration and commitment” the authors have called for. The editors are in no position to question the veracity of the Lancet analysis, leaving their pronouncement in Post-Truth territory.

    Change of policy in the National Broadcaster

    Hitherto virtually a cheerleader, a perceptible change in reporting policy on climate change is setting RTÉ on a collision course with the agricultrual sector.

    The legitimacy of expressing climate change denial is being denied. Shutting down discussion on any subject may seem prescriptive, and a dangerous precedent to set, but considering the overwhelming scientific consensus, and the cataclysmic scenarios painted, the response appears proportionate. This works to the disadvantage of the cartels, which have been expanding the dairy industry in particular, while cloaking its emissions.

    Michael Healy-Rae, ‘Self-styled Kerry man Joke’.

    The new policy of zero tolerance became obvious on a recent episode of  RTÉ’s Liveline, when Tim Boucher-Hayes refused to accept the validity of Michael Healy-Rae’s ‘opinion’ on climate change, before giving him enough rope to hang most political careers. Boucher Hayes exposed the self-styled Kerry man joke, who insisted he was being insulted, but could not say how.[viii]

    After many years of watching, and occasionally appearing on RTÉ, I was amazed to hear the dialogue. I fear, however, that advertisers will make their feelings known, highlighting the threat to ‘livelihoods’, ignoring how most farmers’ incomes are derived entirely from EU subsidies. If anything, farmers should be paid to cultivate healthy fruit and vegetables, or re-wild their estates.

    The sector makes great play on its importance to the Irish economy, but the input costs, including direct payments to farmers, imported feedstuffs, fertilizer, machinery, and fuel are not acknowledged; nor are externalised costs such as the pollution of waterways affecting the availability of potable water. This points to the long-standing failure of the Irish media to interrogate the structure and impacts of the sector.[ix] In this respect the environmental and agricultural correspondent George Lee has been a serious disappointment.

    It should also be emphasised that the environmental argument has moved on from a narrow focus on climate change, which can lead to damaging outcomes, such as encouraging sitka spruce plantations which acidify soils and reduce biodiversity, in order to allow the dairy sector to expand.

    The beef industry is more vulnerable to the environmental and nutritional arguments being laid against it, but the challenges to the dairy sector are mounting too, especially in terms of the idea that consumption is essential to human health, or event beneficial: the Harvard School of Public Health say that dairy is neither the only nor the best source of calcium.[x]

    The shady global manipulation of nursing mothers who are encouraged to top-up with formula, or give up on breast feeding altogether, is a scandal waiting to erupt. Ireland, as the second highest exporter of powdered milk in the world, will be at the heart of it.

    Unsurprisingly to date there has been no coverage in mainstream Irish media of the decision of the Canadian government to no longer identify a specific function for dairy produce in a healthy, balanced diet. Their new guidelines lump dairy in with other proteins. Canadians are advised to fill half their plates with fruits and vegetables, a quarter with carbohydrate-rich foods, and a quarter with protein sources.[xi]

    Canada’s new healthy guidelines do not contain a separate dairy section.

    Previously, Ireland’s leading environmental writer John Gibbons – notably writing for DeSmogUK rather than the Irish Times which he occasionally contributes to – exposed the use of fake data by the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed purporting to show emissions from the sector were not rising as fast as they were in reality.[xii] The plot is curdling, and the message can only be managed for so long, especially with EU fines looming over rising emissions.

    Source: Ireland Environmental Protection Agency.

    ‘Two sides of the same debased coinage’

    Fintan O’Toole is the Irish Times’s most high profile columnist. Alone arguably in the Irish media, he is permitted to do investigative work alongside editorial commentary. But he has now positioned himself as a global intellectual, rather than simply an Irish hack, devoting himself to the subject of Brexit in particular in publications such as the New York Review of Books and New York Times. His articles condemning Britain’s ‘mad’ imperial hubris increasingly appear like word magnets on a fridge that are shuffled about from week to week. It means one of the progressive ‘slots’, essential to the Irish Times’s distinctive brand of conscientious virtue-signalling, is rarely focused on Irish issues.

    Moreover, O’Toole has long displayed a blind spot towards environmental issues. As an urban, literary man he might be excused for playing to his strengths, and avoiding environmental questions, but how these are dealt with is increasingly important to the understanding of any country. His current emphasis is all the more frustrating given during his early career O’Toole forensically exposed the collusion between Charles J. Haughey’s administration and Larry Goodman’s Anglo-Irish Beef Processors, culminating in the Beef Tribunal of 1991.

    Goodman’s company APB continues to dominate the Irish beef processing industry. Symbolically at least in 2012 the family of Larry Goodman acquired the former Bank of Ireland headquarters building on Dublin’s Baggot Street.

    Yet O’Toole’s subsequent book on the subject claimed that the ‘emerging democracy of the Irish State was in a fundamental way incompatible with the power of the beef industry’; likening Ireland to a Latin American country where conversion from tillage to grassland depopulated the land and brought speculative investment, with the difference that in, ‘Ireland, the land was cleared by emigration rather than the slaughter of the Indians’[xiii]

    He went so far as to claim:

    The strength of the beef industry has been such as to limit the development of the kind of coherent, confident civil and political society which could control that industry and integrate it into a working notion of the common good. It is no accident, therefore, that the events described in this book are as much about political failure in contemporary Ireland as they are about the behaviour of the beef industry. They are two sides of the same debased coinage.[xiv]

    O’Toole effectively conveyed the extent to which that Fianna Fáil government, especially the then Minister for Industry and Commerce Albert Reynolds, did the bidding of a company that exposed the state to a export credit liability of €100 million, and a wanton disregard for human health in the processing of cattle for food.

    At one point O’Toole described how the Irish government’s relationship with the company had:

    definitively pushed the government beyond the bounds of democratic authority and into the realms of the arbitrary abuse of power. The most basic norm of democratic government – that the state is not above the law – had been breached. And it had been done at the request of Larry Goodman.[xv]

    The horse meat scandal of 2013 provided further evidence of a permissive attitude towards breaches of health and safety regulations in Goodman’s company or subsidiaries, yet he has remains untouchable. The mainstream Irish media, including Fintan O’Toole are seemingly uninterested, or unwilling, to conduct further investigations. Instead we get great rollicking tales about English ineptitude.

    Pastoralism  

    After independence, pastoralist farmers (including the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan 1924-32) have effectively conveyed the idea that their interests align with the population at large. This account has rarely been challenged either by historians (with the exception of the late, Raymond Crotty) or journalists. Yet the pattern of immigration that continued into independence from rural Ireland was a product of a mode of production requiring low labour inputs, as O’Toole pointed out.

    Wheat production even for domestic consumption did become uneconomic once mechanization became widely available from the early 1950s. Moisture levels during harvesting of Irish cereals make them unsuited to combined harvesters. The traditional method of tying or ‘bindering’ wheat by hand and drying it bundles before storage had become too labour intensive. It then became axiomatic from the 1960s that Ireland’s comparative advantage lay in livestock production, beef in particular, despite the historic inefficiencies of the sector.

    One opportunity cost of relying on beef and dairy for export has been that overall food prices in a predominantly rural society have remained comparatively high, even by comparison with a highly-urbanised country such as Britain. This has worked to the detriment of urban workers, and even those living in rural Ireland, most of whom still live on imported foodstuffs.[xvi]

    Furthermore, since independence a lack of variety in the range of crops being grown for the domestic market is apparent. In part this was a consequence of a stunted gastronomic culture. The result has been that the traditional Irish diet is notably low in fruit and vegetables consumption, increasing the likelihood of obesity. An historic missed opportunity was the failure of the state to support an emerging cooperative movement, advocating state-assisted greenhouse construction across the West of Ireland during the 1960s.

    Today, with a climate not dissimilar, and a landmass far smaller, the Netherlands is the second leading exporter of vegetables in the world by value.[xvii]

    The arrival of EU subsidies in the form of the CAP from the 1970s ossified the structure of Irish agriculture, driving up the price of land, and thereby decreasing the scope for the kind of cutting edge horticulture the Dutch have mastered.

    Dig deeper into the substrate of Irish society and one discovers further ill-effects from Irish pastoralism’s inversion of the food pyramid. One-off housing is often seen as the scourge of rural Ireland. In contrast the Clachan of pre-Famine times involved substantial consolidated settlements, where farmers mostly grew crops for direct consumption. The Great Famine came about because of the tiny holdings of so many farmers, which brought intensive mono-cropping, and reliance on a single foodstuff.

    Abandoned settlement, County Sligo.

    Furthermore, extensive motor car reliance is connected to these one-off-developments; also bringing problems with subsequent urban development, as the preference of the pastoralist migrant to the city was for a detached home, rather than an apartment. We now contend with low density, suburban sprawl which has led the European Commission to describe Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario’ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.’[xviii]

    There appears to be little genuine opposition to the political duopoly, with Sinn Fein increasingly occupying the position held by Fianna Fáil in the nationalist spectrum. Sounding off on non-issues such as Venezuela belies a growing accommodation with the dominant consensus. The worst case scenario is that a Far Right party will derive support from the rising discontent with widening inequality, a housing crisis and the ongoing crisis in the provision of publish health.

    Until we develop a functioning Irish media, interrogating the economic and social structures, including agriculture, and bringing accountability, the advance of genuinely progressive politics will remain stalled.

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    [i] Cormac McQuinn, ‘Varadkar dines out on steak amid beef backlash’, January 16th, 2019, Irish Independent, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/varadkar-dines-out-on-steak-amid-beef-backlash-37716772.html, accessed 26/1/19.

    [ii] Brian Boyd, ‘Beware the perils of Veganuary’, January 14th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/beware-the-perils-of-veganuary-1.3757316, 26/1/19.

    [iii] Craig WJ, Mangels AR; American Dietetic Association.’ Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets.’ J Am Diet Assoc. 2009 Jul;109(7):1266-82. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864/, accessed 26/1/19.

    [iv]Prof Walter Willett, MD, ,Prof Johan Rockström, PhD, Brent Loken, PhD, Marco Springmann, PhD, Prof Tim Lang, PhD, Sonja Vermeulen, PhD, Tara Garnett, PhD, David Tilman, PhD, Fabrice DeClerck, PhD, Amanda Wood, PhD, Malin Jonell, PhD, Michael Clark, PhD, Line J Gordon, PhD, Jessica Fanzo, PhD, Prof Corinna Hawkes, PhD, Rami Zurayk, PhD, Juan A Rivera, PhD, Prof Wim De Vries, PhD, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, PhD, Ashkan Afshin, MD, Abhishek Chaudhary, PhD, Mario Herrero, PhD, Rina Agustina, MD, Francesco Branca, MD, Anna Lartey, PhD, Shenggen Fan, PhD, Beatrice Crona, PhD, Elizabeth Fox, PhD, Victoria Bignet, MSc, Max Troell, PhD, Therese Lindahl, PhD, Sudhvir Singh, MBChB, Sarah E Cornell, PhD, Prof K Srinath Reddy, DM, Sunita Narain, PhD, Sania Nishtar, MD, Prof Christopher J L Murray, MD, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.

    [v] Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘No need for 90% drop in meat consumption, says Irish professor’, January 19th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/no-need-for-90-drop-in-meat-consumption-says-irish-professor-1.3763038, accessed 24/1/19.

    [vi] Manus Boyle, ‘Fine Gael accused of greenwashing over Green Week campaign’, August 24th, 2018, Greennews.ie, https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/

    [vii] Untitled, ‘The Irish Times view: Making our diets more sustainable’, January 21st, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/the-irish-times-view-making-our-diets-more-sustainable-1.3764519, accessed 26/1/19.

    [viii] Margaret Donnelly, ‘Eating less meat over climate is ‘crazy’, says Healy-Rae’ January 18th, 2019, Irish Independent. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/eating-less-meat-over-climate-is-crazy-says-healyrae-37723934.html, accessed 26/1/19.

    [ix] The cost of inputs https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/was estimated at over €5 billion in 2017: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/oiiaf/outputinputandincomeinagriculture-finalestimate2017/ accessed 25/1/19.

    [x] Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, ‘Calcium and Milk’, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/calcium-and-milk/

    [xi] Untitled, ‘Is milk healthy? Canada’s new food guide says not necessarily’, January 22nd, 2019, BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46964549, accessed 26/1/19.

    [xii] John Gibbons, ‘Ireland’s Government Using Fake Date to Pretend Dairy Emissions aren’t Rising’, 26th of January, 2019, DeSmogUK https://www.desmog.co.uk/2018/06/25/exclusive-ireland-s-government-using-fake-data-pretend-dairy-emissions-aren-t-rising, accessed 16/1/19.

    [xiii] Fintan O’Toole, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: the Politics of Irish Beef, London, Vintage, 1995, p.11

    [xiv] Ibid, p.21

    [xv] Ibid, p.202.

    [xvi] See Frank Armstrong ‘Beef with Potatoes: Food, Sustainability, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Section C 115(1):405-430 · January 2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292163391_Beef_with_potatoes_Food_agriculture_and_sustainability_in_modern_Ireland, accessed 26/1/19.

    [xvii] Frank Viviano ‘This Little Country Feeds the World’, September 2017, National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ accessed, 26/1/19.

    [xviii] Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html