I spent a number of years in Zambia, in the early seventies, the mid-seventies and the early nineties, teaching the English language and literature in English to school students in their early and late teens. They were preparing for public examinations including GCE overseas certificate organised by Cambridge University. It was called Literature in English because novels and nonfictional biographies by modern African authors were among the set texts in addition to Shakespeare and novels by George Orwell and Thomas Hardy.
Here is a list of texts I had the pleasure of reading and discussing with my classes. Some of them were written originally in French by writers resident in French-speaking countries of West Africa and translated into English for the benefit of readers elsewhere who could not read French. The year of first publication is given.
All of these were published in the UK Heinemann Modern African Writers series. Visit their website for many more titles.
Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (1948)
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (1958)
No Longer at Ease, by Chinua Achebe (1960)
The African Child, by Camara Laye (1953)
Houseboy, by Ferdinand Oyono (1956)
The River Between, by James Ngugi (1965)
Mine Boy, by Peter Abrahams (1946)
Down Second Avenue, by Ezekiel Mphahlele (1959) autobiography
In Corner B & Other Stories, by Ezekiel Mphalele (1967) short stories
Return to the Shadows, by Robert Serumaga (1969)
Mission to Kala, by Mongo Beti (1957)
Alan Paton was a white South African Christian, probably an Anglican, who was opposed to racial discrimination. Today he might be termed a white liberal. His novel Cry the Beloved Country portrays rural and urban society just before the race laws were passed by the all-white parliament implementing the ideology of Apartheid (so-called separate development). The novel portrays a black village priest and a white farmer who must deal with news of a murder. A Zulu priest, Stephen Kumalo, receives a message that his daughter Gertrude is ill in Johannesburg. Kumalo visits the distant city for the first time and discovers that Gertrude has taken to living from selling illicit alcohol and prostitution. His son Absalom has murdered a white man during a botched burglary. The murdered man had multicultural sympathies and was the son of a white farmer near Kumalo’s simple residence. Other characters appear throughout the novel, which is well-crafted and full of symbolism.
I read this novel with teenage African students in Livingston, Zambia in 1992-93 just as Nelson Mandela was released from twenty-seven years detention in the notorious Robben Island and was happy to remark that the warped world portrayed in Alan Paton’s text was ending.
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart (borrowing from a poem by Yeats) by Nigerian Chinua Achebe achieved worldwide fame and was translated into many languages. It describes the traditional village life of Okonkwo before colonial forces brought changes that Okonkwo could not cope with. Ultimately his anomie drives him to suicide. In many ways the personality of Okonkwo is unappealing to the modern reader – he is patriarchal and hidebound by customs which are a barrier to social progress. It recalls in a different context of Peig Sayers and her anti-modern idealisation of life on the Great Blasket Island.
In my opinion a far more satisfactory novel by Achebe is No longer at Ease (from a poem by T.S.Eliot) which looks at newly-independent Nigeria and the financial pressures that tribal loyalty exert on the main character, who yields to the temptation of bribe taking in exchange for doing favours. Achebe incidentally published a short collection of essays entitled The Trouble with Nigeria, which deals with corruption, tribalism, militarism and religious-regional tensions. Presidentialism – the cult of the President – is another peeve. He contrasts it with an occasion when he attended a cultural event in Dublin and President Patrick Hillery accompanied by his aide-de-camp arrived and took a seat without anybody in the audience rising to salute him – unthinkable in Nigeria.
Camara Laye from French-speaking West Africa published his autobiographical narrative about simple village life entitled L’Enfant Noir. I read the English version with students in a rural school preparing for the Form Three exam, the equivalent of the Junior Cert. I wouldn’t describe it as an outstanding work. It is rather sentimental and unreflective in parts. But my students enjoyed reading it.
Ferdinand Oyono’s short novel was published in French in 1956 and translated into English. The houseboy performs cleaning and simple cooking chores for the Governor of a West African state during colonial times. It is narrated in diary form, two exercise notebooks such as might be used in a school. The town cemetery has an African section and a European section. A few of the European graves contain the remains of inter-racial children that their white fathers acknowledged. The houseboy learns French taking a peek at Parisian newspapers. His interesting situation becomes dangerous in the second notebook when the Governor’s wife goes on holiday to France and he begins an affair with a white mistress. The houseboy sees too much and… there are consequences. It is a brilliant little novel.
From Kenya
From Kenya in the early twentieth century comes, The River Between by James Ngugi was written while he was studying abroad. It deals with the collision between African culture and foreign Christian missionaries who suspect ‘pagan practices’. On the ridges where members of the Kikuyu tribe dwell many miles north of Nairobi a teenage boy and his sweetheart, Waiyaki and Muthoni, are Christians, but nonetheless want to proceed with the coming-of-age male and female circumcision ceremonies. (In those days female circumcision was not identified as a patriarchal control of female sexual freedom – Ngugi uses it as a symbol of African authenticity.) Tribal rivalries and personal animosity bring matters to the boil. Muthoni says she is a Christian but also wants “to be beautiful in the tribe” through circumcision. My students in Zambia were not familiar with circumcision rites as the male form is practised only in one small area, but they enjoyed this novel, which sold well.
The writer became a cultural nationalist and changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiongo. He wrote many books and essays in Kiswahili, now the second official language of Kenya after English. He taught courses in literature in the UK, the USA and other regions of Africa. He got into deep trouble with Kenyan politicians because he thought they were neo-colonial stooges.
Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams is a sort of coming-of-age novel that describes a migrant worker’s experiences of encountering the big city in South Africa. The village boy sees young city women selling distilled liquor and fighting over their pitches. He sees loose morals everywhere and asks naively Are there any customs here? Abrahams has been faulted in not tackling the racial discrimination in this novel.
A more interesting later novel in which Abrahams draws on personal experiences of studying in the UK is entitled A Wreath for Udomo. After graduating in the UK, Udomo returns to an imaginary country called Panafrica, struggles for independence and becomes Prime Minister. A concatenation of personal and tribal antagonisms destroys freedom ideals and … read this very realistic novel. This work was not on the schools syllabus but copies could be borrowed from school libraries.
Ezekiel Mphalele
Life growing up in a shanty suburb in South Africa is graphically described by Ezekiel Mphalele. We read this set text for GCE certificate in a Livingstone school. In 1993 Zeke Mphalele was an honoured guest at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. It coincided with school holidays and I travelled to a reading and discussion with the writer hosted by secondary school teachers. He was asked why so many writers emerged in West and East Africa and South Africa, but not in Zambia, and answered that intense struggles against colonial and racial situations impel autobiographical and fictive writing. A similar intensity did not exist in Northern Rhodesia before it changed its name to Zambia in 1964.
Mphalele did not become a novelist. He wrote short stories and essays and had a most successful teaching career in USA universities. In Corner B & Other Stories, by Ezekiel Mphalele (1967) published by East Africa Publishing House (Nairobi) was not on the Zambia exam syllabus. I can recommend it for the curious.
Return to the Shadows was written by Robert Serumaga, who studied at Trinity College Dublin before returning to Uganda. The novel is set in the aftermath of a military coup in a country called Adnagu (Uganda spelled backwards) and seems to presage the terrible years of Idi Amin.
Finally, there is the humorous novel of French-speaking author Mongo Beti from West Africa, Mission to Kala, which portrays mischievous intrigue by a chief and his associates when a young city man who failed the baccalaureate is sent on a ‘mission’.
*Books about life in Africa have been written by white writers with British and other backgrounds. Elspeth Huxley, Joyce Carey (Anglo-Irish) and Doris Lessing come to mind. Africa-based writers of different ethnic orientation have published in different languages about many themes. The human condition in all its cultural and geographical variations is worth writing about. One point I wish to make here is that efforts should be made to establish financially viable Africa-based publishing companies. Metropolitan London and Paris with large Afro-populations dominate the Africa publishing scene.
Feature Image: Zambia National Assembly building in Lusaka
Around Ireland and in its online expressions, there is vocal and colourful support for the cause of Palestine. Its flag is draped from windows, hung from gate posts and serves as WhatsApp profile pictures. PLO scarves are again in vogue, while watermelon t-shirts are worn when the weather allows, and charitable fund-raisers on behalf of Gaza seem to have people cycling the length and breadth of the country. Members of Ireland’s small Jewish community have complained of anger being directed against them, unfairly, over the conduct of Israel. Pro-Palestinian advocates are, however, invariably, committed anti-racists: the kind of people who showed up for Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. It is not a Populist movement built on resentment against ‘an enemy within’ – an outlook characterising antisemitism of the past in Ireland and elsewhere – but an aspiration, however naively expressed, for a better world, and an identification which can be traced back to the Irish people’s historic experience of colonialism.
Solidarity with Palestine is identified with leading artistic figures such as the globally renowned author of Normal People Sally Rooney, who has declined to have her books translated into Hebrew. It is a cultural phenomenon as much as political agitation. Numerous musical acts – notably Northern Irish rap group Kneecap – have courted cancellation and even potential criminal prosecution in the U.K. for drawing attention to the cause. It is also, admittedly, a well-received form of protest, within Ireland at least, garnering social media likes and real-world approval. It does not risk the wrath of the community – as was the case with dissent from the Covid consensus – or police jackboots, as we see descending in other European countries, and the U.S..
Ireland’s octogenarian poet-President Michael D. O’Higgins has been an outspoken critic of Israel over the treatment of Gaza in particular. Despite occupying a largely ceremonial role, his stance has conferred legitimacy on expressions of rage on this issue. Referred to affectionately as ‘Michael D.’, his emphasis on human rights, social justice and the arts transcends ordinary politics, but a commitment to military neutrality – including in response to the War in Ukraine – has created tensions with the centre-right Irish government. This government under Micheál Martin as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) is also a vocal critic of Israel on the international stage, joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel earlier this year. There is evident, nonetheless, among the Irish government an underlying anxiety to avoid a serious rupture with a significant trading partner, and especially that country’s sponsor the United States. Ireland remains, remarkably, Israel’s second biggest trading partner.
Members of the Irish government may well care about innocent Palestinian civilians caught in the crosshairs, and having famine inflicted on them. A more cynical, and arguably realistic, view would be that political expediency is paramount in the Irish government’s response.
A low corporation tax rate regime and other incentives over the past fifty years have attracted a raft of large U.S. companies, particularly from the tech, and pharmaceutical sectors, to Ireland, along with other investment of various kinds, predatory or otherwise. Donald Trump even owns a golf club, Doonbeg, in the west of Ireland. Since the Financial Crisis, Foreign Direct Investment has delivered consistently high economic growth and near full employment, but the attendant spiralling cost of housing, in particular, has eroded support for the parties in government. Recent decades have also witnessed unprecedented immigration into a state which, for most of its history, has been ethnically homogenous, save for the North, which remains part of the United Kingdom. There, sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants generated a bitter, low-intensity thirty-year conflict that ended after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Opposing factions adopted different sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – still evident in murals on buildings across the province – thereby conflating Irish Republicanism with the cause of Palestine.
U.S. companies in Ireland also have ties to Israel – notably Intel which employs almost five thousand in Ireland and approximately ten thousand in Israel. Importantly, Israel wields even greater clout in Washington than Ireland, despite an Irish diaspora in the U.S. of over thirty million dwarfing the five million Jewish-Americans – some of whom are leading critics of Israel.
Irish government politicians often characterise Irish sovereignty as severely circumscribed by dint of our being a ‘small, open economy,’ susceptible to global shocks. As a result, government politicians tend to bend over backwards on behalf of Irish-based U.S. companies. Thus, former Taoiseach Enda Kenny is alleged to have told Facebook executives in 2013 that he would use Ireland’s presidency of the E.U. to lobby member states over data privacy laws. Although we rarely hear of such exchanges, doubtless they occur. Ireland’s strained relations with Israel – which last year removed its Irish embassy describing Ireland as ‘the most extreme country against Israel internationally’ – is surely discussed, given major tech companies’ evident (as we will see) allegiance to Israel. Presumably Irish government officials stress their vulnerability on this issue to the left-wing opposition, especially Sinn Fein, which emerged as a serious threat to a long-standing political duopoly in the 2020 General Election.
Representatives of U.S. and other capital surely recognise that their interests are best served by the two parties of the centre-right – compelled to coalesce in the wake of the Financial Crash – retaining power. This probably explains the leeway given to the Irish government in criticising Israel on the global stage, including joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in January 2025. A red line would appear to be drawn, however, under any serious interruption of trade with Israel, including the transport of munitions to that country over Irish aerospace, or the use by the U.S. military of Shannon Airport as a stopover.
A looming threat to the status quo emerged prior to the 2024 General Election when, under pressure from the opposition, the government parties agreed to adopt an Occupied Territories Bill. This bill – a version of which was previously approved by the Dáil but never brought into law – purports to place an embargo on trade with the Occupied Territories. In its current form it will not, however, apply to services. If passed, it is unlikely to amount to anything more than a symbolic gesture. It is, nonetheless, causing disquiet in Washington.
It’s also notable that in January 2025 the Irish government adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism, which according to Israeli and international civil society organisations has been used ‘to muzzle legitimate speech and activism by critics of Israel’s human rights record and advocates for Palestinian rights’. This definition was used to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and could have serious repercussions in the context of recent ‘hate speech’ legislation.
In recent times, Irish government policy tends to inform, or is perhaps informed by, the content and tone of legacy media. This includes the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, which dominates the cultural space in a similar way to the New York Times in the U.S.. The government cannot, however, easily regulate what is being said on social media platforms. As the Israeli response unfolded after the October 7 attacks, Ireland’s canny neoliberal handlers would have observed the mounting fury being expressed, often by otherwise apolitical people, on platforms such as Instagram. This also became apparent in widely attended public protests. The Irish government’s faltering embrace of the cause of Palestine might be interpreted as a form of controlled opposition, wherein they stand as a placeholder for genuine supporters of Palestine. Such controlled opposition of a relatively malleable proxy (Ireland) may also, at times, act as a useful counterweight to the U.S. in its dealings with its Israeli ally.
A developing fracture within Irish nationalism associated with the advent of multiculturalism should also be noted. A nascent nativist movement departs from traditional Irish Republicanism, sympathetic to the cause of Palestine. The emergence of what is often simplistically labelled a ‘far right’ – mainly drawing support from deprived urban areas and others on the margins – is undoubtedly inspired by other Populist movements around the world. Such movements have tended to be anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli – an influential U.K. actor Tommy Robinson is an active supporter of Israel; albeit, recent criticism of the U.S.’s unwavering support for Israel from leading MAGA figures likely exerts an influence over Irish fellow travellers. Nevertheless, support for Palestine is certainly still evident in Dublin’s working class districts, where Palestinian flags are often unfurled.
‘our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed’
A Shot Across the Bows
‘In the light of what’s happened in Israel and Gaza, a song about non-violence seems somewhat ridiculous, even laughable, but our prayers have always been for peace and for non-violence;’ so said Bono on October 8 at a concert in Los Vegas, before adding menacingly: ‘But our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed … So sing with us… and those beautiful kids at that music festival,’ he continued, before launching into ‘Pride (In the Name of Love).’
Bono would subsequently receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden. His apparent endorsement of Israel’s response to Hamas’s brutal (but far, far less impactful) attack on Israeli civilians formed part of a global propaganda wave providing cover for Israel’s actions. In the wake of October 7, dissent from the somewhat disingenuous proposition that ‘Israeli had a right to defend itself’ became almost impossible for anyone in a position of influence, including in Ireland. This became a carte blanche to attack Gaza, and elsewhere, amidst disinformation and exaggeration.
On October 13, the founder of Web Summit, Paddy Cosgrave, one of Ireland’s leading businessmen and a prominent critic of the Irish government, wrote on Twitter/X: ‘War crimes are war crimes, even when committed by allies,’ referring to Israel’s airstrikes and blockade of the Gaza Strip, which the U.N. had warned could lead to mass starvation of the 2.3 million people living there. Cosgrave followed up with a message condemning the Hamas attack. In response to criticism from leading technology figures and investors, he posted a statement on the Web Summit blog apologizing and clarifying his position. ‘I unreservedly condemn Hamas’ evil, disgusting and monstrous October 7 attack. I also call for the unconditional release of all hostages,’ he wrote. ‘I unequivocally support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself … I also believe that, in defending itself, Israel should adhere to international law and the Geneva Conventions — i..e, not commit war crimes.’
The apology was insufficient to sway major sponsors and headliners who announced they would boycott the Web Summit event. These included tech heavyweights Meta, Google, Intel, Siemens and Amazon, all with Irish operations. ‘Unfortunately, my personal comments have become a distraction from the event, and our team, our sponsors, our start-ups and the people who attend,’ Cosgrave said in a resignation statement; ‘I sincerely apologise again for any hurt I have caused.’ Cosgrave’s maverick opposition could not be controlled, unlike, arguably, the Irish government. Nor did Cosgrave have friends within the Irish political establishment to plead his case. His immediate resignation probably saved his company, and he would return as CEO six months later.
In the wake of October 7, the Irish government seemed prepared to be going along with the U.S. position and that of the E.U., under Ursula von der Leyen, which projected an image of the Israeli flag over European buildings in solidarity. Tánaiste (deputy-prime minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs, currently Taoiseach, Micheál Martin visited Israel the following month. In response to a request from Alon Davidi, the mayor of Sderot a town near the border with Gaza, to support Israel Martin responded: ‘I’m here to see this firsthand and to listen; to seek to understand the trauma that your community has gone through and not just in horrific events over the seventh but as you said for over two decades, if not three decades, in terms of rockets.’
He then set out the Irish government’s position: ‘Ireland is unequivocal in its condemnation of the Hamas attack and will give no quarter to that form of terrorism. We are explicit in our public statements in condemning without condition the unconscionable attacks on children, on women and on innocent civilians.’ Martin added that Ireland’s long-standing support for a two-state solution should not be equated with support for Hamas and ‘absolutely’ affirmed Israel’s right to exist – ‘in case that is in question.’ He noted that Irish-Israeli citizen Kim Damti had been murdered by Hamas and Emily Hand taken hostage in Gaza. Martin said he did not believe that a military solution would create a safe environment for future generations: ‘We may have to disagree on that – and I respect where you’re coming from – but our sense is that there’s a real danger that you will radicalise opinion of future generations even more.’
Martin’s approach was calculated, recognizing historic Irish support for the Palestinian cause, while making sure to be seen to be on Israel’s side. In response, left-wing opponents described it as a propaganda tour. Since then, Martin has been a prominent critic of Israel on the international stage, somehow reconciling this with his government permitting munitions to pass through Irish aerospace, and for Israel to remain a major trading partner.
Martin appears to have another, more important, agenda, which would, in all likelihood, be supported by U.S. interests in Ireland. In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war he sought to align Ireland more closely with the rest of the West, seemingly endeavouring to abandon a policy of neutrality that emerged during World War II and which continued over the course the Cold War, when Ireland remained outside NATO. Despite consistent opposition among the population to any change, Martin’s government has pushed forward with proposals to end the so-called Triple Lock, requiring the approval of the U.N. Security Council, a decision by Government and a vote in the Dáil (the legislative assembly) before Ireland commits a substantial number of troops to peace-keeping operations.
White House Criticism
In 2000, a prominent government Minister is believed to have described Ireland as being closer to Boston than Berlin. In some respects, this remains the case. Government services are generally poorly resourced relative to other European countries, while apartment-living is uncommon and the private motor car is generally relied on ahead of public transport. On the issue of Palestine, however, unlike the U.S., the Irish population has been relatively consistent in its opposition to Israeli incursions, and supportive of a two-state solution, however remote, and indeed unsatisfactory, this outcome now appears.
There are, however, a few political outliers on this issue, one of whom seemed to be former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Back in 2017, hawk-eyed Irish activists observed the then Taoiseach’s online interaction with Barry Williams, who they considered Ireland’s most ardent supporter of Israel and ran the group Irish4Israel. Then, in 2019 Varadkar replied to a letter from ten members of the U.S. Congress by noting his opposition to an Occupied Territories Bill ‘on both political and legal grounds.’
Furthermore, in early 2024 speaking once again as Taoiseach, Varadkar expressed caution about accusing Israel of genocide based on the spurious consideration that millions of Jewish people were victims of it in the past. He said the government wouldn’t use the term unless it was ‘absolutely convinced’ that genocide was occurring. Responding to the question of whether Ireland would join South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about the Israeli state’s treatment of people in Gaza he said: ‘I would be a little bit uncomfortable about accusing Israel, a Jewish state, of Genocide given the fact that six million Jews – over half the population of Jews in Europe – were killed.’ Adding, ‘I would just think we need to be a little bit careful about using words like that unless we’re absolutely convinced that they’re the appropriate ones.’
The dial seemed to have moved considerably, however, by the time of Varadkar’s last major public appearance as Taoiseach in the White House on St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, 2024. This occurred just days before he announced his surprise resignation, after his government suffered damaging defeats in two referendums on references to family and women in the constitution. In a speech that was well-received in Ireland, and which seemed unusually provocative given where it took place, Varadkar said:
Mr President, as you know, the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have so much empathy for the Palestinian people. The answer is simple: we see our history in their eyes. A story of displacement and dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now – hunger.
Adding:
The people of Gaza desperately need food, medicine and shelter. Most especially they need the bombs to stop. This has to stop. On both sides. The hostages brought home. And humanitarian relief allowed in.
A looming General Election perhaps explained the unusual force of the criticism. Indeed, the issue of Palestine did not become a significant electoral issue once the ruling parties agreed to introduce their own Occupied Territories Bill. Perhaps the U.S. Democratic leadership, with close ties to the Irish political establishment, recognised the political ramifications of his speech and even green-lighted his words. External criticism, moreover, might have been useful for the Biden administration in its own dealing with the Israelis, given student protests then occurring across the U.S., and their own unpreparedness to criticise Israel with the Republicans emphasising unwavering support. Meanwhile, Varadkar could sail into the political sunset with the approval of Ireland’s many Palestinian activists ringing in his ears, and in a good position to take up future political roles.
President Donald Trump with Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
St. Patrick’s Day 2025
The issue of Palestine did not figure prominently before Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s visit to the Trump White House in 2025. The concern at that time was over the new President’s tariffs wreaking havoc on the Irish economy, by forcing U.S. firms to transfer their operations to the U.S..
At one point, however, a reporter inquired of Martin whether he planned to discuss Trump’s previous plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza. At this, Trump jumped in, responding with a denial. ‘Nobody’s expelling any Palestinians,’ he replied. Palestinians were again brought up by Trump as he reminisced about his recent speech to a joint session of Congress. The term ‘Palestinian’ was used in a bizarre fashion to insult his rivals in the Democratic Party. He described Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader as a Palestinian: ‘as far as I’m concerned. You know, he’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore: He’s a Palestinian.’
Martin, nonetheless, in contrast to Varadkar’s outspoken comments the previous year, lauded Trump for his approach to securing a peace agreement. After Trump was asked about the St Patrick’s Day boycott, the Taoiseach interjected ‘to pay tribute to the president on the peace initiatives’ in Gaza and elsewhere. It’s clear from these exchanges that Martin and his advisors were unwilling to risk any loss of influence for the sake of Palestine. Perhaps Trump also recognised that those in power in Ireland were prepared to serve U.S. interests and were, in effect, “controlling” popular Irish solidarity with Palestine.
President Michael D. Higgins.
A Looming Presidential Election
In a recent opinion piece for Ireland’s so-called ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, regular columnist Finn McRedmond (incidentally as a student in Cambridge she wrote an article revealing how she had voted for David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2015) wrote:
Irish foreign policy is in a strange place right now. We are, as has long been the case, totally impotent on matters of global politics – with no real army to speak of, outside of Nato, militaristically neutral and never even close the so-called grown-ups table when the future of Europe is at stake. (Did that invite to the White House with Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Rutte get lost in the post?)
But simultaneously, there are plenty of members of the Irish establishment who – in full cognisance of this basic reality – believe that the world is somehow willing to listen to Ireland’s lectures on affairs of international morality.
The main object of McRedmond’s ire was, unsurprisingly, President Michael D. Higgins. She complained bitterly that he had bent ‘the shape and contours of the office [the Presidency] to his whims, professing to the world on behalf of the nation as though he speaks for us all.’ O’Higgins’ fourteen-year tenure comes to an end later this year, and McRedmond expressed concern that another left-wing candidate Catherine Connolly– the natural heir to Michael D. Higgins – could win the election this November. McRedmond professed herself:
anxious to learn that Catherine Connolly is a contender of relative significance. She has recently said Irish people should resist a “trend towards imperialism” in the European Union, as the bloc is becoming “increasingly militarised under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen and the European People’s Party”; that the EU has “lost its moral compass”; and that “the US, England and France are deeply entrenched in an arms industry which causes bloodshed across the world.
McRedmond’s own rise to prominence as a regular columnist for the Irish Times might be traced to an influential father’s acting as CEO to a commercial body – An Post the postal service – owned by the state, and political views inspired more by her time in Peterhouse College, Cambridge than the Falls Road in West Belfast.
Her piece articulates an anxiety within the Irish establishment, a section of which she castigates, that a figure similar in her outlook to Michael D. could win the presidency. While overcoming most Irish people’s reluctance to abandon neutrality – another Irish Times columnist recently described it as ‘absurd and complacent’ – and even joining NATO, appears to be the primary objective, popular Irish opposition to Isreal and attention to Gaza remains a serious inconvenience. Apart from placing the Irish government in a difficult position vis-à-vis U.S. investors, unwavering U.S., E.U. and U.K. support of Israel undermines the West’s claim to moral leadership in supporting Ukraine against Russia. Most Irish supporters of Palestine are now opposed to Ireland entering any military alliance – and are increasingly hesitant about a militaristic E.U. – in any way supportive of Israel.
Under the Irish Constitution, the President occupies a largely ceremonial position, similar to that of the monarch in the U.K.. Despite a lack of executive or legislative function, an individual, such as Michael D. Higgins – and Mary Robinson before him – may still use the platform to bring about cultural change, and legitimate outrage. Thus, what are controversial positions on Israel elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. have become the norm in Ireland. This makes it politically expedient for government politicians to represent these viewpoints. If a less radical candidate wins the forthcoming election, as seems more than likely, the heat could be taken out of criticism of Israel in Ireland. Indeed, it is possible the change to the definition of antisemitism could, in time, lead to criminal prosecutions for ‘hate speech’ under new laws, supposedly designed to counter racism.
The plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation may seem remote from an Irish Presidential election that is likely to see a turnout below fifty percent, but Ireland’s popular support for Palestine could easily be blunted in the absence of a legitimating figure in that office. This could have the effect of altering the tone, and content, of Palestine’s most consistent advocate in Europe on the international stage. The Irish government’s adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism, continued permission for Irish aerospace to be used for transporting munitions, and ongoing trading ties between the two countries, do not point to genuine conviction on the part of the Irish government on this issue.
Members of the Irish government are given to portraying the country as fragile and dependent, but this ignores the significant ‘soft power’ at its disposal. It is, by most measures, an extremely wealthy country, with an enormous government surplus, and commercial banks in a far better state than before the Crash. Moreover, the country’s geographic position on the edge of Europe insulates it from Europe’s historic zones of conflict, including the current one in Ukraine. Contrary to media scaremongering, Russia has no designs on Ireland. There is also a vast Irish diaspora around the world to call on, particularly in the U.S.. Donald Trump even referred to the importance of this constituency in the aforementioned White House meeting with Martin. It explains why any Irish Taoiseach is warmly welcomed on St. Patrick’s Day, no matter which President occupies the White House. Ireland’s outspoken opposition to Israel will, however, be easier to control if a less steadfast individual wins the forthcoming Presidential election.
JACK GILBERT WAS TOO HORNY TO BE A METAPHYSICAL POET
not that sex and metaphysics cancel each other out—
his was good news for Linda Gregg, until it wasn’t.
Interviewer: Did you and Linda ever collaborate?
JG: We were intertwined. We read each other’s poetry,
appreciated each other’s poetry,
discarded each other’s poetry.
(Quick shout-out to the procreative urge.
Are you gonna tell me the world doesn’t hinge
and turn on it? I don’t think you are.)
That desire is ungovernable produces—
or should I say begets—fear. Also verse; some good,
some not. Either way, learn to love that twinge
in your loins. I don’t mean make it lord, I just mean
bless it. Whatever else may be true,
it has plans to prosper you, wants
fruitfulness, wants multiplicity
at least as much as God does,
maybe more.
I’ve inherited Jack and Linda’s lettered
children. If you’re reading this,
you have too.
He put on the yellow marigolds with some difficulty, while at the same time remembering something a wise Roman stoic had once written that went ‘dig inside yourself. Inside there is a well of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging,’ and wondered if he had learned the line while studying for his PHD. Perhaps it was earlier when he sat long evenings in the library at Senate House attempting to become a master of arts. He couldn’t quite remember. His past was becoming a single entity, where once it had been fractured. He had woken up early that extremely cold winter morning to become a dish washer, or kitchen porter as it was advertised, and he wondered as he battled through the arctic weather, what had become of his long and arduous education. All those hours worrying about exams, all those times revising, researching, reading and editing and now at the age of forty-three he had seventy-three pounds to his name. He poured the washing up liquid into the large metallic sink under the instruction of the young Romanian woman and turned on the hot tap. “The water must be hot” she informed him. He looked into the mountainous bubbles as they slowly rose in the basin and in them, saw a galaxy emerge. Bliss came over him when he thought he could kill boredom with his imagination alone, and the silence of the universe out-manoeuvred by a simple playfulness of mind.
As he began to scrub the dirty dishes, he wondered what his thirty years of education had all been for. It couldn’t have been for the money. Like the pieces of paper tucked away in a draw in the old homestead, his past successes were quietly hidden now, to mention them a suggestion of either boastfulness or failure. The first pan he washed had burnt black crusts of pastry stuck along the sides and he began to scrub it with a wire brush. It was stubborn and he applied more washing up liquid, and gave some extra elbow grease to remove it, but the dark stain wouldn’t budge. Minutes rolled by to the sound of scrubbing. The steam from the hot water was like sweat on his face. The harder he worked the more intense his feelings of failure became. The failure of his life’s work up until that moment. Was he ‘better’ than this? Was he better than washing dishes for a living? Scrubbing dishes to make ends meet. He must be ‘better’ than this he thought, as he finally removed the last piece of caked in pastry, but he couldn’t exactly work out why.
Minh, the old Vietnamese lady that had worked in the kitchen for many years, smiled at him as she passed to go about the morning chore of cutting the bread for that afternoon’s school lunch. Her smile brightened his spirits. Three more dirty trays arrived and he submerged them in the suds. As if stuck on a treadmill like a hamster in a wheel his thoughts returned to his predicament. Only a job and a place, that would certainly change in time, as all the times and places of his life had changed up until then. He remembered another thing the Roman stoic had said, about change being a constant of all life, and was contented.
Maybe now, at his age, he should be making more money than he was. He never really cared about money if the truth be known. If he had enough, he had enough, and enough was enough. It was one of the reasonings in his life to which he stayed true. The main thing that he got out of his philosophical studies was the idea of becoming good. Then, being good, was the natural state. We shouldn’t be kind to others for our own sake but rather because being kind brings the universe, the whole, into alignment. He looked around at the clock on the wall and it was exactly noon. Then he did an hour’s worth of thinking and when he looked back up, it said four minutes past. ‘Most work is trading your life, or time, for money. Maybe the whole of nature is just hope, manifest’ he thought as he gazed down at the collapsing suds. His imagination had awakened in the uneventfulness of the morning. He felt the warlike silence.
He emptied the sink and then spent a while picking the soggy pasta and vegetables from the plug hole and decanted them into a bin bag. Then back to the sink to refill it with soapy hot water. He looked up and out of the window, and saw a crisp blue winter sky. On the thin branches of a leafless tree, glistening crystal droplets of rain shone below the grey sky of the recent Atlantic storm and his work came to a discreet standstill. Two robin red breasts danced on a twig. Behind the January tree was a road and a queue of people, some with umbrella’s waiting in the flour mist, waiting for the bus that would take them away from this same old place. None of them had noticed the rain-dropped leaves in the downpour, each one a kind of planet, a world within worlds, making up the whole.
There was an old cockney woman that worked in the kitchen that liked nothing more than power, driven on every morning, through every day, by the smallness of her sad world, butchering the language with her soulless rants and dull observations. She walked into the kitchen and ruined the moment for him by talking for twenty-two seconds about the steam that was coming from the oven. The words that came from her mouth had no value or interest to the dishwasher but it was important for her to hear her own voice to remind others that she was in charge. In charge of this small kitchen, and in charge of her small world. He didn’t attempt to say anything to her, but he thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was kinder. More dirty plates were dropped with a clang into the soapy water which meant more work, which meant more money for him, even though he was being paid minimum wage, his presence alone was earning. ‘This is the way society says self-worth is achieved of course. That in some way or other life must me earned, it’s not good enough just being born. Born poor I mean.’ He thought.
Then he thought back on his education and experienced a sublime uplift when he reasoned that learning in and of itself can never be a waste of time, but then his gladness abated as he considered the other side of the coin. What if, like those that had been brought up in religious cults, an entire life of thoughts could be wasted. If the truth lay south and you walked north for 84 years where would that leave you on your death bed? Lost, presumably, but perhaps happy and content. Perhaps not. He considered different belief systems in the world. The only wisdom he could glean was to avoid dogmatism at all costs, and to cast doubt on certainty. And then he thought that must be easier said than done when he thought about the importance of conviction, and the humiliations it is heir to. To work, to seek meaning for a lifetime, in a lifetime, and then have it robbed at the finish line may be too much to bear. Maybe Epicurus was right, in the end. Also, maybe hedonism has a value. To dance, to sing and play was good, and better than the opposite. He saw a side-burned face in the suds, ‘lose your sense of humour and you’re fucked’ came the Burslem voice from the sink water. His memory played games again. And then from nowhere the voice of Jeffrey Bernard on Desert Island Discs. Dying, and with the cigarette smoke almost travelling with the radio waves saying to the interviewer ‘to me Mozart is divinity’ and then pressed by her on the regrets he had now he faced death he replied matter-of-factly ‘I wish I had been a better person. It’s as simple as that.’ The dishwasher thought there was a beauty in this acknowledgment, in the recognition of the fact.
The dishwasher began to dream of the mountains of Scotland where he had once lived, and where he had felt, once upon a time, a thousand years pass in the afternoon rays. Memory, and dreams of a future past, vied together as if they were one entity. Why do we have to earn what we never chose? Born and demanded to work. He thought. It was a melancholy meditation. He thought ‘If life is a competition, then maybe we are just cunts, to use the proper Saxon vernacular’. For the rich to stay rich the poor must be poor, this was the application of pure logic to him, a revelation in its simplicity. It’s matter-of-factness. What if everybody was rich? What if there was no-one to wash the dishes? What then? The old cockney lady continued talking because it was something to do, but at the end of her soul destroying jabbering’s she said something that interested him very much, when she described how when she was growing up in the east end of London it was ordained in her community not to get above yourself and say or act as though you are better than anyone else, ‘because you are not.’ He witnessed a different, more humane side to her. He mulled over her wisdom, intrigued by her comment, until only a few minutes later when she described her joy as she waved her flag on the Mall up at the balcony where Prince Andrew and ‘their highnesses’ stood and waved back. His democratic socialism and her monarchism were spiritually incompatible. He began to load up the plastic tray with cups and turned on the machine once more. To the dishwasher, her way of thinking was more toilsome even than the constant repetition of washing dishes. As the machine came on, the noise allowed him to think for a moment. It didn’t matter how many material things he had. How much money. What mattered was what was felt, what was thought, what could be imagined, what could be created, out of thin air. He looked up and saw that Minh was smiling to herself as she thought a happy thought, not knowing anybody was watching.
The following morning, he arrived to work early and felt content working for a while alone, preparing for the day. That was a good time of the morning, full of potential. The dishwasher tingled with dreaming. Or was he a philosopher? With his mind and hands at work simultaneously he could be both. The plump old Cockney woman barged into the kitchen fifteen minutes late for work just as he was thinking about definitions of love, and to placate her anger at being late, began to talk at him in a loud condescending voice about the floor not being mopped. He said he would do it calmly with his body language saying ‘if you would politely leave me be.’ He remembered the word ‘Ataraxia’ which can mean ‘freedom from disturbance’. She continued talking loudly and when she said ‘we was’ for the third time he drifted off into an internal debate and wondered how many people in England who disliked foreigners and foreign languages as she did, and said so, understood that their handle on the English language was ungood. He felt certain if he brought the subject to light he would be hated for it. He would be damned as a language snob or worse, a snob. He said nothing. He thought the language of accents reflect souls in their own ways. The accent reflects belonging. ‘People who change their accents no longer wish to belong. The new tribe outweighs the old.’ He thought. He wondered about the imagination and whether it is built from the world we see, the world we experience, or is it born from something separate, like the unconscious mind being born from ancestral dreams. He had looked into Buddhism and concluded he didn’t want to free his mind of thought. Also, he didn’t want to reach Nirvana because he felt from there, there was nowhere else to go. The trick of life was to keep on learning, imagining, until all faculties are lost. A huge pile of plates came in after lunchtime and this was the signal to keep his head down working, until he clocked off at 4.30pm. He had a take away that night as he had become sick of the sight of unclean plates, and the endless necessity of washing them.
He went home to his bedsit with his fish and chips in a bag and sat down in front of the TV with a six pack of beers and a packet of cigarettes. ‘No point working if you can’t enjoy it’ was the persistent thought he had on leaving his places of work. For relaxation he played computer scrabble as a form of meditation but he found writing, the thing he dreamed of doing, difficult, and rewarding only very occasionally. He would sometimes strum away at the acoustic guitar in the corner of the room which he had had since university. It brought back good memories, just being there. All the dreams he had when he was a young man were now living memory, the whistle blown on stardom, but then he concluded his youth was hard enough without the added complication of fame. He had been friends with a man at university that had been desperate for musical stardom, and years later he had heard through the grapevine that the man had taken his own life by throwing himself into the Thames. He wondered whether the suicide and the reality of unfilled dreams were interconnected and concluded that they probably were. The sad thought was silenced by the cracking open of a can of cold lager. Television, which was once the drug of the nation, had been replaced by the internet, almost overnight, or at least while no-one was looking, but he was hanging on by his remote. He went to bed half tipsy, taking care what he wished for.
Early the next morning he was on his way to work when he saw the crowd at the bus stop gathering around someone on the floor, there was an obvious commotion. He went over to see if he could be of any help and when he leaned over the shoulders to see what was going on he saw Minh, the old Vietnamese lady he worked with, lying on the floor clutching her heart. The sight of her suffering made him panic and worry deeply. He told everyone he was her colleague and then asked if someone had called an ambulance to which they replied they had and it would be there any minute now. He leant down as she opened her eyes and she registered his presence with a smile. He smiled back. Then she closed her eyes and the hand on her heart relaxed as if she was falling asleep. He called out to her but she made no reply. In this moment the paramedics arrived with the whirring of sirens and took over. Very shortly afterwards she was on a stretcher being carried into the ambulance. He explained he was her colleague and asked if he could accompany them to hospital. They said yes. As they left, he turned around and the assembled crowd reminded him of a herd of wildebeest that look on as one of their own is devoured by a lion. He wondered what the Roman stoic would have thought and concluded it would probably be, ‘this is the way of thing’s’ or words to that effect.
At the hospital he was told the sad news that Minh, the kind Vietnamese lady that he worked with had died. He travelled back to the school kitchen where they worked by foot. Everything on the walk took on a new state of life. The glittering frost now had the soul of symphonies, the barren trees proof of nature’s fight, the foggy veil of the sun emanating a magical winter light away above the horizon. He walked through the kitchen door with the sorrow in his face reflecting the sad news he had to tell and was greeted by the plump old cockney lady who in a loud voice said to him before he had a chance to speak ‘what time do you call this you caaant!’ He looked her in the eye. ‘Minh is dead, and so are you, to me.’ He tossed his apron back on the pile. She looked shocked but instantly refused to apologise. The dishwasher looked at her and said ‘I was wondering if I was better than this job. No, I don’t think so. But I am better than being bullied by you. Dig?”
“Go on then. Do one, get aaaat!” She said loudly and waved him towards the door. He turned to leave and saw the large pile of washing she would have to do if the agency didn’t have anyone. They probably did though. There are always people who have to work for poor wages. That provides the surplus, but I suppose that’s a story for another time. He hadn’t lasted long in the job as dishwasher. ‘I can’t be having that’, he thought as he closed the door behind him and walked out into the freezing day. He carried on down the icy sludge path to freedom and recalled the Roman stoic, ‘Pain is neither unendurable or unending, as long as you remember its limits and do not exaggerate it in your imagination’. Jobless for the foreseeable, again, he was hit by the thought that his life could be ten or a hundred times more fulfilled, joyful and meaningful as someone who earned ten or a hundred, or a million times more than himself, if he had the right frame of mind. It was the destiny of the dishwasher to live in his imagination, and his imagination didn’t pay by the hour.
Discovery are coloured dark deep red.
I heard one falling as I brushed the tree —
a startled bird troubling bushy leaves —
but with more plummet, accelerated
power, crimson sinker parting waves of green,
descending progeny, seeds sheathed in a cream
flesh, webs of genes cradling what could be,
bound for the food waste bin, sequence
on sequence of supercoiled code unread.
But another journey took place instead
ascent through sound, to ears, into words
as you can almost taste that zingy first
apple of the season, sharp on your tongue,
sweet on your lips, parted and showing crimson.
Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.
The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.
There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.
The Criteria
A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.
It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?
Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healyéminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.
Karl Kraus
In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.
Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.
His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!
In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’
He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’
Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.
Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.
Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.
He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.
The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.
As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?
The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].
The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.
Jonathan Swift
The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.
Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:
I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.
Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.
How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape
And out of context but an elaboration of the above.
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.
Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:
Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
Or
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.
H.L. Mencken
In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).
Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!
Ryszard Kapuscinski
The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.
Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, topreserve oneself within oneself. Travels with Herodotus (2004)
Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:
Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.
The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:
Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.
Since before I can remember, music has been my world, and a path that I had to follow. I feel so grateful to be able to channel my feelings, emotions, heart, and experiences into music that can touch others. To be a bridge in the dark between strangers that illuminates our shared human experiences.
My parents have always supported my art unconditionally. I set my arrow on it, and they were fully on board, encouraging me at every step, no matter what struggles may come with this career and life path. From a young age I’d make fake tickets to put on a show in the sitting room, that they’d of course have no choice but to attend. I’m so grateful to them, and their championing of me to follow my own choices and dreams. Having that kind of support made me feel like the sky was the limit, that anything I could imagine I could make possible in my life. My sister has always been such an inspiration to me as well, she’s a creative Goddess and has always been a big part of my artistry since I was a kid.
I grew up around the world. I was born in the U.S. and raised predominantly in Wicklow, Ireland, as well as partly in Italy where my mother’s side of the family is from. I have been living nomadically for five-and-a-half years, and it’s been so special weaving experiences, sounds and connections from around the world into my music.
I’m currently working on my debut album, taking listeners through a very personal heroine’s journey that I’ve been on the last couple years. Losing myself, which was mirrored in the form of a challenging relationship, only to go deep within to find the parts of myself that needed love and tending to, and coming out the other side stronger than ever. This song, Learning to Love Me, and my album, are a celebration of self. All the parts of ourselves we may have not accepted, and realizing they’re all part of what makes us so special and unique. Most often it’s through our biggest challenges that we find our greatest strengths. Hopefully through this journey listeners can reflect on their own story, and this can be a little light on the path, with a few nuggets of wisdom that I’ve learned a long the way.
After the fall comes the rise. With every contraction comes a great expansion. Learning To Love Me is about coming Home to myself. After a relationship where I lost myself, and abandoned parts of me, this song is about that beautiful period post relationship where you start to devote more time to yourself and rediscover your magic, your wonder, and your strength. Where you welcome the fallen parts of yourself in from the cold, tending to them, holding them close to your Heart. It’s a song about power and self love, howling under the moonlight, re-wilding, and dancing like sparks in the night sky.
I’m about to head on my first European tour supporting U.S. artist, Haiden Henderson. I get to go through so many of my favorite cities. I’m really looking forward to connecting with fans from different countries and cultures. I love the energy in the room when you’re performing live, nothing compares. It’s electric.
I feel constantly inspired by time with community, experiences out in the world, adventures and stillness in nature, human relating, I take inspiration from everything! To me LIVING is one of the most important things an artist can do for their art. Feeling the depths of your human experience, the furthest reaches of pain and pleasure, of joy and play and heartbreak. It’s the job of the artist to feel everything and somehow make some sense of the chaos through music, painting, movement, or whatever art form you weave with. I think creativity is a birth right and that we all have this capacity to alchemize our pain and pleasure into art to help us process this complicated and beautiful thing called Life.
I’m hoping to start collaborating with more Irish artists and creatives. I’ve been living abroad for a long time but I’m bringing it back home. So if you’re a music artist, producer, visual artist, director, photographer etc. feel free to reach out! I’d love to make more art in my beautiful homeland.
And if you’ve read this far, thank you for joining me! Feel free to follow me on Instagram @flaviaspeaks.
I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace the build-up of my current library which I started developing in 1999. I should preface this by saying that before 1999, I had been living and working in France for the most part. So, when I returned to live in the Republic of Ireland, just before the millennium, I was really starting from scratch.
I should also mention, as it is extremely important, particularly in the context of tpoehe present discourse – primarily focused on both personal and professional growth – that I had just experienced a profound trauma at that time. In 2000, I lost someone very valuable to me, and not only that, but also by losing this person I lost a whole way of life. So, in many ways, when I started buying my first books they were, without a doubt, instrumental in helping me face the trauma on an daily basis.
So, what kind of books did I buy and read, twenty-five years ago? Looking at my library, which is comprised of around six hundred or so books, I know exactly which shelf – there are thirty-five in all – that I should start with. These are ones I began reading when I arrived here in Dublin; predominantly poetry books written by Eastern European authors that have been translated into English by some wonderful translators.
Why Eastern European poetry in English translation? I craved humour in my life, but not just of the glib and cynical Hollywood kind, which I was also relying on at other moments. You see life in Europe after World War II was not easy. Countries that had been torn apart by the most appalling violence were trying to put themselves back together. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Serbia were three of the main countries whose poets and poetry I was particularly attracted to. I will take each of these three countries in sequence and describe some of my poets I loved to read almost a quarter of a century ago. I will also try to identify the very specific humour that these poets displayed, and why this appealed to me at a time when I was trying to get over the traumatic event that had such a destabilizing effect on me.
Morskie Oko alpine lake in the Tatra Mountains, Poland.
Poland
Let’s start with Poland, as it is a country with which we Irish have a lot in common. Both of us experienced brutal colonial history amid violence, economic hardship and a profound engagement with the Roman Catholic church. I am going to describe very briefly the work of two Nobel Prize winning poets, Czelaw Milosz (1911-2004) and Nobel-laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), both of whom I loved to read during that period. Undergoing a lot of emotional suffering, I appreciated in particular their wonderful sense of irony.
An experience of profound suffering can do many things to you depending on your personality type. Some people, for example, simply give up. Life loses all its spark, and you sleepwalk through it for the remainder of your life. This is not living, but merely existing, and it is not my approach. Of course, you don’t know how you are going to adapt to a personal crisis, particularly of the kind that I was facing.
Of course, when you are suffering, you become very poor company to others, as all you want to do is think about yourself. Self-pity, is a terribly egotistical response, but when you are genuinely suffering, you generally don’t have any time for other people and their particular problems. These two great poets, however, allowed me to empathise with others. By reading their work I began to take an interest in other people once again, as it was quite clear from reading their poetry, that they had themselves suffered enormously. For example, Milosz particularly in his early poetry, describes the Warsaw ghetto.
Wislawa Szymborska was of the same generation of poets such as Milosz and although her poetry is less explicit about her experience of the war. There is a steeliness of spirit, as in Milosz, behind the subtlety and irony which mask these experiences. This I found deeply inspiring. Indeed, when I think of Szymborska and her poetry, I think of three lines, which were translated beautifully by her translators, Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.
The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
The last line is particularly arresting, particularly in the context of today. Revenge is not exactly a motive for the majority of so-called poets writing in this country, or so you would imagine. We are so governed to restrain ourselves from such notions – formerly by the Catholic Church, forgiveness being key – and latterly by the all-pervasive ideology of political correctness embedded in institutional ideas such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Integration). The bland platitudes that have become the calling card of spokespeople in corporate cultures and NGOs have obliterated such notions as Szymborska seems to be conveying in the lines above.
Like most people who suffer, I felt that I had been wronged, and, as a writer myself, what Szymborska had managed to do, in just three lines, was to give credence to a whole worldview, or artistic philosophy. She made me think of Dante and Joyce and other writers down through the ages, who all had the same belief. How did this translate to me? Use your suffering, but don’t be poisoned by it. Use it with some irony and wit!
You see, I was beginning to become more human. This is what reading such poets had done to me. They were achieving two results: teaching me to be a ‘mench’, and, at the same time, teaching me how to write.
The Federal Assembly in Prague.
Czechoslovakia
Again, in the former Czechoslovakia there was the poet and immunologist, Miroslav Holub ( 1923-1998). Holub became a hugely important writer to me during this early period what we affectionately now term as the ‘noughties’. I began with a wonderful collection published by Bloodaxe called Poems Before & After, referring to the period before the Soviet occupation and after. As with Milosz and Szymborska, Holub had this beautiful steely quality. All three poets were tough, resilient, and strong. They were not ‘woke’, for want of a better word. They were not full of bright, dewy-eyed idealism about the future having tasted the bitterness of Life, with a capital L,. Yet they managed to deal with it, on terms which they had made their own.
The Gift of Speech
He spoke: his round mouth opened and shut in the manner of a fish’s song. A bubbling hiss could be heard as the void rushed in headlong like marsh gas.
Sometimes the poems read almost like ‘nasty jokes’, as I came to describe them. I loved this quality the more and more I read Eastern European poetry. It was full of what you might plainly describe as ‘tough love’. This is exactly what I needed, right after getting my ass kicked by some girl. Such was my trauma! Here were poets, of such stature, writing about world war, relating directly some of their most apocalyptic experiences, Holub and Milosz particularly, and they were making light of it! What pain had I in comparison? It really helped put things into perspective. I was just a little bitch, in comparison, moaning about some girl! Jesus, I needed to Man Up!
Golubac Fortress by Danube river, Serbia.
Serbia
Finally, there were the two Serbian poets, Aleksander Ristović ( 1933-1994) and Vasko Popa (1922-1991), who brought the very self same qualities as Holub, Szymborska and Milosz: a steeliness which fortified them against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. I discovered Ristović first in a beautiful little Faber edition that had a detail taken from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Hieronymus Bosch, which had been one of my favourite paintings as a boy. The poems were translated by a fellow poet, Charles Simic, whom I later went on to read. This short collection, simply titled Devil’s Lunch, was a selection of the Serb poet’s work, and it was a delight that gave me hours of pleasure. Here is a taste.
The Glimmer of Gold
Nobody reads poetry anymore, so who the hell are you I see bent over this book?
I loved the directness of approach, the bookish and almost medieval humour. The poetry of Vasko Popa was very different. Again you found the steel, but, the humour was less present, more a kind of violence that lingered uneasily in the background. For this reason, I read less of him, but his enigmatic micro-constellations that inhabited defiantly every single page made me sit up. I came away from his poetry marvelling at the very distinct approach of these formidable writers.
Over a decade later, after first obtaining a degree in philosophy, I went on to complete a masters in comparative literature where I found myself translating the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. I would spend the next decade and a half translating his work, and I see the self-same qualities of steeliness and inimitable humour in Baudelaire. It is something that I find really lacking in contemporary life. There is a war going on in Eastern Europe yet again. I know that both Ukrainian and Russian poets are writing about this old theme, yet again. I see some of this work being posted thanks to poets like Nina Kossman, who is also an avid translator, particularly of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).
Yet, when I look around here in Dublin – a city I have been quite active in over the years organizing festivals and readings – I very rarely find Irish writing with a similar vigour. You see it in poets like Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, of course, both coming from farming backgrounds where the violent nature of life is a constant backdrop. Heaney’s first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) was all over such themes, while Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), is without a doubt one of the greatest long poems written in the English language in the last century. It is also extremely funny, confronting an eternal Irish problem, sexual repression.It also aligns with the stoic sense of detachment that all of the aforementioned Eastern masters brought to their work.
There is a hidden global superpower that dominates all our lives. It does not reside inside any government building or military base, but instead, rests snug as a bug within each and every one of us – the brain. In centuries past, it was widely believed that human consciousness was located somewhere between the heart and the gut. This medieval mindset meant people’s everyday awareness of life, and their surrounding relationships were a lot more visceral and emotional than our own. However, with the Age of Enlightenment the old world of deep feeling awareness was transformed into a more detached and reasoned approach to human cognizance. Over the years, neuroscientists have slowly revealed how the brain reigns supreme over every function of the human body, and all our everyday interactions with the world outside. It is both a living matrix of layered complexity, and a biochemical organ through which consciousness has become both self-reflective and ordered. As a result, our brain is viewed by many as the most fascinating and complex structure in the known universe.
Sadly, the brain also harbours the greatest everyday threat to all humanity. This threat comes from something that is often far more insidious and widespread than inequality, poverty and even climate disaster – our dreams. Not long ago, dreams were primary seen by psychoanalysts as the early alarm bells of emotional and psychological tensions which, left unchecked, could fester into a multitude of mental health disorders such as neurosis, psychosis, phobias etc.
Today, however, neuroscientists and psychologists have discarded this psycho-drama interpretation of dreams, preferring instead to see them as the unintended outcome of the brain simply undertaking much needed housekeeping while we sleep. Dreams emerge as a direct result of the brain recharging important memories that would otherwise be wiped clean by time. It is the arbitrariness of these memories being triggered that shape the ensuing drama of our dreams. Unfortunately, alongside the recharging of memories comes the unleashing of various electro-chemical and emotional reactions tied up with them.
Upon waking, these emotional and electrochemical disturbances permeate our everyday existence. This process can be both positive and sublime as witnessed in the form of the mysterious muse who, darkly veiled, imbues life and inspiration into poetry, literature, music and art.
In addition, there are the eureka moments experienced by scientists, mathematicians and various pioneers who following months and even years of grappling with a problem suddenly, after a peaceful sleep, experience the realisation of something that was always knowingly obvious. On a more intimate level, there is the heightened sexual arousal felt by millions of people as they emerge from their dreams drowsy, half asleep and half awake, delicately exploring the sensual surge towards climax. Lastly, and most significant of all, there is the emotional, psychological and social impact of dreams on our everyday wellbeing and relationship with others. How often have you heard someone claim that they are not a morning person, but instead are grumpy, bad tempered and full of resentment? It is these negative moods and feelings that become engrained within a person’s sense of being, as well as their everyday relationship with the world around them.
In essence, dreams are not the play ground of wishful illusions or the expression of deep seated mental health disorders, but accidents caused by one of our brain’s basic functions – the maintenance of important memories that could aid our survival. Amongst all its sublime riches, by randomly triggering our memories in the form of dreams, the brain sets in motion a flurry of biochemical reactions that linger and become the breeding ground for all sorts of social, emotional and psychological problems. It could be that dreams rather than money are the root of all evil..
Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin’s North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe’s largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture.
He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore and information about this lost world, as well as a collector of histories of it.
In the 1970s, Fagan began his historical work by recording oral histories from local residents, many of whom remembered formative events such as the 1913 Lock-Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, and the War of Independence and Civil War. These interviews also documented memories relating to life in Dublin’s tenements, experiences in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries, dock work, women’s roles, deaths of children, money lenders, orphanage life, and more, covering both the public and intensely personal history of inner-city Dublin.
Fagan’s work extends far beyond oral interviews. He is the longtime director of the North Inner City Folklore Project, an initiative that began as a jobs program and allowed him to preserve and publish stories from his community. Over decades, he has amassed a vast collection of tenement artefacts: photographs, books, letters, coins, dockers’ buttons, children’s toys. His vision has always been to open a dedicated museum so this vital social history is preserved within, and for, the local community rather than being housed elsewhere.
This museum has been a reality in the past and Terry’s current passion is to reestablish it.
Terry has published works such as “Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle” and “Dublin Tenements: Memories of Life in Dublin’s Notorious Tenements,” both drawn from his extensive oral history collections. He is also a popular walking tour guide, interweaving tales from his own life as well as audio samples from the collections he oversaw. The Monto tour includes tales about brothel madams, dockers, and a “hidden Dublin” many would prefer to leave interred in the past.
