Cassandra Voices

Tag: 2018December

  • Building the Book: Cassandra Voices Volume I

    ‘This is madness’, two friends chimed one night upon hearing I planned to bring out a book, reminding me I had no marketing strategy or distribution network. I would lose a fortune they maintained, consigning good paper to land fill.

    I was at least reassured by the designer’s, Distinctive Repetition, insistence on the most stringent environmental standards; meaning, whatever else, the book would not be expensive on the Earth.

    Perhaps I should have listened to my friends’ heartfelt remonstrances, and issued a countermanding order. But I held a strong attachment to the idea of bringing out a hard copy in time for the Christmas market after a year working online.

    For convenience Cassandra Voices is now a limited company, but we have always had more of the character, and pitfalls, of a rock band. The money required by participants is just one constraint among others including time, technical abilities and mental health.

    Short-term financial reward is only one metric for success; providing a platform for progressive writers and artists not ordinarily present in the media landscape brings its own rewards. Salaries will hopefully follow diligent application.

    Anyway, so far we have managed to shift over half of the editions and will continue to flog them over the next few months. The investment has cut a swathe through what small capital I held in reserve, but in return I feel Cassandra Voices is more relevant having made its print debut. I may have little business acumen, but am familiar with the saying that ‘you must speculate in order to accumulate.’

    Our economic system, predicated on the fiction of money, ascribes little reward for writing, particularly journalism that bites, so it was never going to be easy to bring to life this publication, fostering views that go against the grain .

    Bringing out digital monthly editions over the course of the year required a lot of persuasion from an editor without a cheque book, but we managed to attract excellent contributions nonetheless. I had a strong sense that many of these articles deserved to be cast in the relatively permanent form of a book, which minimises distraction and imparts information more effectively than online reading.

    It would also offer a showcase for my photographic partner Daniele Idini, and an award-winning graphic design studio. I was determined to bring out the print edition, even if it did not make short-term business sense. In so doing I hope we are performing an important role in our democracy.

    Since publication our friend Sé Merry Doyle of Loopline Film has made a short documentary on our efforts to sell the book,featuring a number of quirky Dublin characters, and a dying world of independent bookshops.

    Finis.

  • No Comment – Jenny Hauser

    All Images © Jenny Hauser

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”35″ gal_title=”No Comment”]

  • A Monk Manqué

    PROLOGUE

    ‘The reverend Judge leaned over and addressed the defendant’

    ‘I have taken your spotless record into account.’

    ‘However…by the power vested in me I am obliged to sentence you to three score years and ten, maybe more, maybe less.’

    ‘You will serve this time in an open facility.’

    ‘Allowing for the normal remission for good behaviour as well as dungeon fire and sword, flood, war, illness, acts of God, built-in obsolescence and unforeseen accidents, you will enjoy a limited amount of personal freedom.’

    ‘As soon as you have interiorised the rules you will be left to your own devices.’

    ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’

    The newcomer beamed up at the man with the dog collar and gurgled happily.

    ‘Goochy goochy,’ smiled the Judge as he dribbled icy water from a chalice, down onto the infant’s head.  The victim’s face contorted in shock at this first betrayal and its bawled protests echoed and re-echoed round the cathedral walls.

     

    A MONK MANQUE

     

    1/  Birthday

    The recommended way to tiptoe through one’s eighties is to move as appropriately, delicately and prudently  as possible.

    But Oscar Wilde knew that ‘the tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is still young.’  Picasso agreed: ‘It takes a long time to grow young.’

    Therefore, as the sun sets over your absent-minded yardarm there remains a sliver of light and life, a tincture of  your compos (or, if you prefer, compost) mentis, implying the detritus of a long life. In the face of imminent extinction an extra birthday should be less a celebration than an act of defiance, a flinging of caution to the winds. What have you to lose? A dribble of sand in your hourglass? A narrowing shadow on your sundial, a mark on the wall of your cell, an acceptable stay of execution – anything but the conventional wisdom of decrepitude. Just face the fact that life has lived you, rather than the reverse.

    On such an occasion avoid the liars who say: You’re Looking Great, Haven’t Changed a Bit. Translated, they are saying ‘you’re fucked.’

    My exact contemporary, holocaust survivor Ben Barenholtz, who produced Coen brothers films and brought bread and vodka for he and I  to ritually consume at the Galway Film Fleadh, told me he had an ex-friend, another liar who had said exactly the same thing to him every year for the previous twenty years.

    The amusing thing about this compliment is that we ancients can’t help believing it. We skip and dance down the road – a pathetic, not to say gruesome image until we are forced to pause for breath. We then resemble the attitude of the nun in Elizabeth Jenning’s poem who was breathless with adoration. The cruel realisation is that we have simply run out of puff. In a Copenhagen pub not long ago that truth dawned on me in the company of two of my sons when I couldn’t resist dancing a hornpipe with a lovely young stranger. My legs needed  a rickshaw taxi to get me back to the hotel while my fine sons continued their frolics until morning.

    My actual state of health – fit  as a trout in the opinion of doctors – is ironic. The pair of elderly Jehovah Witnesses who used call to my door, assuring  me I could live to be one hundred and fifty if I accepted Jehovah, stopped visiting when I rejected their kind offer by quoting George Gershwin –  loudly and in song

    ‘Oh, Methusaleh lived 900 years, but who calls that livin’ when no gal will give in to no man who’s 900 years…’

    There’s the rub. As many of our faculties slither into the wings, the biological imperative insists on slyly hanging around, hoping like Lazarus for stray crumbs. When he was in his fifties actor Rod Steiger blamed his manic depression on those unreliable faculties. Myself, twenty five years younger than Steiger, had already intuited the tragic side of the human comedy.

    But then I had the accumulated experience of  three centuries – the 19tht, 20tth and 21stst – and five generations of my tribe. Three of my late grandparents – I never met the fourth – were born in the eighteen eighties and are as vivid and present to me in this room as their great-grandchildren when the latter noisily visit me. I can see all their faces, hear their voices, remember their gestures as well as I do those of my parents and my own children and grandchildren. Assuredly as their DNA, much of their experiences must lurk in my consciousness, co-exist in my eyes and ears – through which, after all, come my only perception of reality – and are as real to me as the screen before my eyes or the billion-celled stew of cells bubbling in the cauldron of our shared genes. This room is crowded and can be disturbing  to one who always fled the proprietary demands of the tribe. To age is not to run out of ideas but to acquire a confusion of ghosts amidst the living.

    They, young and old, are all here and not here, as simultaneously as Schroedinger’s cats. They so vividly exist, so demanding of my attention, that my direct and indirect human experience amounts to nearly one hundred and fifty years, just as the Jehovahs promised! So why am I not yet a wise and quiescent old man, nodding by the fire?

    The reason is that I am male.

    Females are blessed. They may suffer in our coming and going, but in time most of them lose interest in things libidinous – their body instructs them so – and they achieve a kind of equilibrium. Their vanity takes a different form – pride in their home, their children, an inside track to God and love of cats. They live longer than males by ceasing to chase windmills, by settling for less: security.

    In my experience males were once listened to and females could safely be leered at. This was disastrous for both. The former became bores, the latter withered under the stares. Suddenly everything is reversed. Males are tentative and silent; females are garrulous.and assertive, to me an interesting evolutionary experiment.  Mature, compliant females are an oxymoron but, as with unicorns, males still believe in  the myth.

    Such creatures must exist somewhere. Otherwise life is not worth living. Males are condemned to this poetic possibility ad infinitum or longer, a lifetime. Patsy Murphy diagnosed us as having ‘too much libido’. The libido is the killer, nature’s trick to keep the species going. A person can die of it.

    Fifty years ago they conducted an experiment in the University of Berkeley (named after an Irishman, wouldn’t you know!) in California. They immersed a healthy male human specimen in a saline solution at body temperature. He floated as lightly as if he were in the Dead Sea. They doused the lights and plugged his ears. He was rendered sense-less, devoid of all stimulation. The outcome? Involuntary erection. I’ve read that it also happens to hanged men. Is that what Dylan Thomas, at nineteen, intuited when he wrote of  the force that through the green fuse drives the flower? The French writer Michel Houellebeq is obsessed with the phenomenon, gaily mixing philosophy and social commentary and ending up with with sheer pornography. I would guess it has made him a Franc millionaire.

    The fading of the faculties, the sense of impending annihilation, is the greatest imperative since Henry Kissinger boasted about the aphrodisiacal qualities of power. Hence the epithet: Dirty Old Man. Kurt Vonnegut jr. was more charitable when he wrote to me (always in block capitals on postcards): OLD MEN ARE OBSCENE AND ACCURATE.

    Mr Vonnegut was my late and great penfriend who, like George Bernard Shaw conducted his correspondence by postcard. One of them was emblazoned: LIFE IS NO WAY TO TREAT AN ANIMAL.

    When Pandora’s box is opened and releases all evils into the world the only thing left is Hope. During the conquest and annihilation of Berlin in 1945, all ages copulated desperately and publicly. Innocent courting games like ‘spin the bottle’ were discarded. Adolescent boys, knowing they would soon die defending their city sought a first and last joyful petit mort. For the girls it was to pre-empt their inevitable rape by a Russian soldier. War has that effect. The youngster were like rabbits transfixed in the headlights of tanks and they grew up faster than Margaret Mead’s famous teenagers in Samoa. They followed their first and last instinct: make love not war – but with somebody suitable. The few remaining active adults led by example. Threatened German cities were like chaotic brothels and all for free. I did not see the city of Munich until a dozen years after the sale was over. My timing is always haywire. Firebombed cities were inhabited by cripples, widows and orphans, many of the latter with high-boned Tatar faces, although starvation must have aggravated  the effect. It is estimated that at the end of that last spot of European bother fifty percent of all surviving German females were raped. I read that in a book. I get all my real information from books. If the internet kills the printed book, my mind will go blank. I often quote Thomas Moore, the Irish balladeer: ‘All my books have been woman’s looks, and follie’s all they’ve taught me.’

    Kurt Vonnegut happened to be in Dresden at the height of its firestorm so he was well qualified to have an opinion.  He briefly summarised the calculated destruction of cities like Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and Pforzheim with the pithy: ‘So It Goes’.

    So far this seems to be all about love and sex and death? Pretty much. Next to food, what is more important than our driving forces, especially love, the engine room of the ship? We are all Darwinians now. Young optimists believe that love is an experience that is, has been or will be as neat, orderly, delightful and well conducted as ordained by someone called God, a part-time Hollywood producer. I remind ye who keep this faith (while all others are losing theirs)  that ye are not paying attention. The bottle does not spin forever. A love affair is a mini-life: it begins in joy and ends in despair. Roll on the next one. We are a cosmic ditty, accompanied by a honkytonk piano in a sleazy bar.

    Socrates put it more gracefully: ‘much of what men do is a desperate attempt to immortalise themselves; sensible women take the more direct route of having children’. Socrates regarded founding a family as a terror management strategy. The only simple reaction I have to these ponderous considerations is to keep singing and dancing  provided, in keeping with subtle requests, that I do so in the privacy of my own kitchen.

    The truth of that great platitude, ‘yourelookingreathaventchangedabit’ is simply this: you are decommissioned. Writer Joe MacAnthony has described our generation as tourists in the departure lounge.  We are in our anecdotage. Who would have thought that ‘Riobárd’, the child in the frontispiece to these words would survive so long?

    How can I be the same person as  that innocent four-year-old pencilled in my teetol father’s 1940 portrait?

    Riobárd, as the child was named, must have had some intimation of what was ahead of him. How else could innocence survive the tripwires of life? Noam Chomsky said that there is an inbuilt matrix for complex language in a baby. Is there also an inbuilt preparedness for the hard truths of life?

    It is a fact that my Uncle Jim Toner– who had run away from his home in Dublin to join the British Army and survive the slaughter of WWI – long afterwards described me, the child in the portrait, thus: ‘He may be alright but he has the head of a bloody rogue.’

    I overheard that remark and worried about it, but nobody reassured me. Maybe Uncle Jim, a teenager in the Royal Army Medical Corps who had collected body parts of youngsters on the killing fields of Picardy – where the roses bloomed – was reminded of something unbearable in that innocent portrait?

    Back in Dublin from his war service, Uncle Jim married what was known as ‘a servant girl’, begat no children of his own, endured public resentment at his fighting for the Old Enemy and sometime in the nineteen fifties decided to dull his pain with the aid of a gas oven. Post-traumatic stress syndrome was not then recognised. I have looked him up in the British Military Archives. He was awarded  the DCM, abbreviation for Distinguished Conduct Medal, meaning he was immature enough to do something foolhardy in the midst of carnage.

    Conferment of the D.C.M. gallantry award was announced in the London Gazette (1920) and accompanied by a citation.

    Award Details: 61586 Pte. J. Toner.  During the period 17th September to 11th November, 1918, while acting as a bearer, particularly at the capture of Bohain. There being a congestion of wounded, he repeatedly led forward squads of bearers over very difficult country during the night and greatly assisted in the evacuation of them

    This had never been revealed to us children by our nationalist father although my mother, who concealed guns under her dress when céilís were raided during the War of Independence, often said  ‘We were better off under the British.’

    There were other military associations. When the British army abandoned our sacred soil in 1922, my mother’s sister Kathleen ran away with a British Tommy who, like her own father, my grandfather, reared pigs at their home in Berkshire. Their son Sydney, my uncle, became a teenage frogman in WWII and my hero. Years later I enticed Sydney’s daughter Kathy to elope with me to Ireland where we were known for a brief interlude as ‘kissin cousins’. Kathy later married a Red Devil, one of those RAF types who put on daring aerial displays. Admitting these connections makes me wonder if I am not an honorary member of that suspect class, a West Brit or Shoneen.

    For a start, I was born in the Pale. My childhood radio listening consisted mainly of the BBC Home Service because Radio Éireann was broadcast for only a few hours per day. My first language was English, albeit in a dialect light years from the received pronunciation  of the Home Counties BBC accent. My early reading was what we called the comic cuts: The Rover, Hotspur, Eagle, all published in England.  My favourite authors were Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.A. Henty, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, John Wyndham, Leslie Charteris and so forth. Even the Irish language detective story writer Reics Carlo,  who was obligatory reading in school, turned out to be English.

    Among our official heroes, Pádraic Pearse was half-English, James Connolly was half-Scottish and James Larkin was a Liverpudlian. No wonder I am ambivalent about nationalism, both Irish and English. The last night of the Proms in the Albert Hall with its sea of Hooray Henrys roaring out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ fills me with dismay and not a little envy. Filming American children reciting their oath of allegiance with hands on hearts every morning in school amazed me. Nationalism has become a dirty word in Ireland. How do the English and the Americans get away with their jingoism?

    Perhaps because they are, respectively, past and present empires and Ireland’s only imperial achievements were spiritual and vanished into the ether.

    As very soon must I.

    This started off as a note on my birthday but could end up as a memoir, the grandiloquent lie. Every act of memory is an act of imagination, As all lives end in failure, my guess is that an honest memoir would produce in the reader a depression as deep as Killary Harbour.

    Therefore this must, de facto, be another fictional memoir, a scrapbook, an anecdotal antidote to a life. Fortunately I am a magpie and keep the evidence: love letters, photos, notes, theatre programmes, membership cards, birth, marriage and death certificates, diaries, expired passports, manuscripts, film scripts, and so on and so forth. How I have kept them together after a peripatetic life is a wonder, but such memorabilia may keep me relatively, at least chronologically honest. They may raise an occasional giggle or even a sharp intake of breath in the wrong places.

    I am past caring, one of the few benefits of ageing.

    Bob Quinn is an Irish filmmaker, writer and photographer. His documentary work includes Atlantean, a series of four documentaries about the origins of the Irish people.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Who did pay that Restaurant Bill Mr Varadkar?

    Following an account of a New York banquet in a recent biography of Leo Varadkar[i], we submitted a Freedom of Information Request (FOI) to the Department of the Taoiseach. We are seriously concerned at the close proximity between the Taoiseach and leading Irish journalists, including one of the authors of Leo: A Very Modern Taoiseach, Phillip Ryan, who is deputy political editor across the titles of the generally pro-government Independent Newspaper group.

    That book revealed that the ‘Taoiseach has made a virtue out of wining and dining journalists who accompany him on international trade missions’, believing, ‘it is important to spend time with them socially’. Perhaps most troubling is that the authors seem entirely unashamed about spilling the beans on one of these junkets.

    On one New York jolly, ‘More than twenty guests, who included journalists from print and broadcast media, joined the Taoiseach and foreign affairs officials for a five-course, three-hour-long meal’. The authors, at least one of whom seems to have been present, recall the guests devouring ‘French onion soup, foie gras, filet mignon and mushroom ravioli dusted with black truffles’, followed by further drinks in Fitzpatrick’s Manhattan Hotel in Midtown.[ii] Yum yum yum.

    Our FOI sought, ‘records of department expenditures from an Taoiseach’s visit to America this year in Boucherie Restaurant and FitzPatrick’s Manhattan Hotel, both in New York on March 16th and 17th, 2018.’ We were intrigued to know who paid the bill in a restaurant where the ‘Butcher’s Block’ of 16oz filet mignon, 16oz, ‘hang steak’ and 16oz ‘bone in New York strip’ costs an eye-watering $205, and that’s leaving aside its environmental impact.[iii]

    According to the officer, the department holds no record of any such expenditures. But it is hard to believe that the Taoiseach stumped up, or that journalists were asked to put their hands in their pockets, a notoriously rare occurrence. We are now flummoxed, and invite any journalist or government official present to let us know who paid the bill by emailing admin@cassandravoices.com.

    ‘Tubs’ entertains Varadkar on the ‘Late Late’

    Fresh from selling as many toys as possible on the Late Late Toy Show, amid paeans ‘to those less fortunate this Christmas’, Ryan Tubridy interviewed Leo Varadkar on the ‘Late Late Show’ on December 11th. At the recent Fine Gael Ardfheis Varadkar pledged to reduce income tax cuts if he is re-elected Taoiseach[iv], which will presumably increase toy sales next Christmas.

    To date, we have enjoyed no success with any of our FOI enquiries into Tubridy’s third party dealings. RTÉ’s solution to the problematic situation of employees and contractors receiving payments from third parties has been to introduce a Catch-22 rule whereby potentially damaging material is withheld if it is commercial sensitive.[v]

    Tubridy previously offered this plug of the Varadkar biography, enthusing that it, ‘offers the reader and voter a fascinating insight into an intriguing and public figure that none of us really know. With incisive background detail coupled with up-to-date analysis, this is a very welcome account of a private man in the most public role in Ireland.’

    On his light entertainment show, Tubridy went through the motions of grilling the Taoiseach, demanding whether the HSE is fit for purpose, to which Varadkar replied: ‘Not as the organisation it is now,’ intimating ‘structural change’, a move to ‘slim down’ the organisation and bring ‘a lot more autonomy’, which sounds suspiciously like an impending privatisation. But it was all soon sweetness and light between RTE’s leading man and the top of the political class,

    In a departure from the Irish Times’s usual Varadkar veneration, especially the use of cutesy images obviously supplied by government press office, Peter Crawley offered this assessment:

    If, like any number of its international guests, you had no idea what kind of a programme The Late Late Show is, last night’s broadcast was as good an introduction as any.

    What kind of talk show, for instance, would interview the leader of the country as its first guest, as a warm-up act for two crooners and a comedian?[vi]

    ‘Murph’ shows up for the team

    Meanwhile, Varadkar’s loyal fixer, and founding member of the legendary Five-A-Side Club of Young Fine Gael Turks, Eoghan Murphy was before the Dáil, opposing the Solidarity-People Before Profit Anti-Eviction Bill, which includes a ban on renovating a property as grounds for ending a lease.

    Murphy maintained that the government is showing a clear commitment to social housing, but his sympathies clearly lie with embattled ‘small’ landlords, bemoaning, ‘We are losing landlords in this country, it is a fact.’

    He cited the statistic that eighty-five percent of landlords own one or two properties, but this tells us nothing about the proportion of the rental sector held in those circumstances. Moreover, a single property could be a four-bedroom house in his Dublin Bay South constituency costing €6,000 per month;[vii] lies, damn lies and statistics, as Mark Twain put it.

    Murphy’s claim that it is ‘wrong to demonise these people because they are providing homes for other people’ is a subtle abuse of the English language. A landlord does not ‘provide’ for a tenant, providing for someone implies generosity, not offering a property in exchange for a rent, which in Dublin, for too long, has been left to ‘market forces’, and the gumption of gouging landlords.

    The rhetoric about protecting the small guy – beloved of neo-liberals the world over – affords protection to owners of multiple properties, who are increasing their assets, as Murphy’s speech concedes. His political colours are revealed in this passage which will anger anyone caught in an impossible rental situation:

    We have to be very careful in interfering more than we are at the moment. We have to make sure that we are not placing extra burdens on these small landlords. And we have to make sure that we are not prohibiting someone from selling a property that they own when they might need to sell that property for perfectly legitimate reasons in their own lives. They may not have the money to re-compensate the person living in the property at that point.[viii]

    God help anyone renting in Dublin at this time, because this government’s sympathies (and Eoghan Murphy’s it would appear) lie with the wealthiest five percent in the country, who own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. We suggest a more important priority: to make sure everyone has a roof over their head.  Unfortunately many of the leading journalists in this country, who should be pursuing this injustice, are themselves dining at the top table.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

    [i] Frank Armstrong, ‘Leo-Liberal’, Cassandra Voices, October 5th, 2018.

    [ii] Phillip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach, London, Biteback Publishing, 2018, p.321-322

    [iii] Boucherie, New York, Menu, http://boucherie.nyc/menu/, accessed 18/12/18.

    [iv] Juno McEnroe, ‘Varadkar pledges income tax cuts if re-elected as Taoiseach’, Irish Examiner, 17th of November, 2018.

    [v] Frank Armstrong, ‘RTÉ Says: ‘Stars’ In Their Own Cars’, Cassandra Voice, July 1st, 2018.

    [vi] Peter Crawley, ‘Leo Varadkar on the Late Late Show: Taoiseach has become ‘CEO’, Ireland ‘the organisation’, Irish Times, 8th of December, 2018.

    [vii] Daft.ie, https://www.daft.ie/dublin/houses-for-rent/ranelagh/dartmouth-road-ranelagh-dublin-1858718/, accessed 18/12/18.

    [viii] ‘Deputy Eoghan Murphy – Private Members’ Business – 12.12.2018’, YouTube,   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1RRw0lM9iI, accessed 18/12/18.

  • Hello Julian Assange

    It was sunny outside. Manus still felt something akin to minor guilt at lying in bed on a sunny day. Just having the option carried a guilt. He had spent most of his life not having to get up in the morning, not working, living off social security benefits.

     There was a certain amount of guilt involved but it was easy to rationalize away. In a world that accepted the waste of half of its food production each day, and for thousands of kids to die of hunger each night, rationalizing guilt away came easy.

    He would have liked to fight against the injustices of the world but it seemed like a global system with no head to cut off that wouldn’t pop back up immediately. Manus had not spent his life researching and exposing corporate crimes or hacking computers. He wouldn’t know where to begin with research and when it came to computers he was technologically challenged.

    His lifestyle choice to just take drugs and scrounge off the state as much as they would allow had been as proactive a revolutionary stance as he could manage, which the less enlightened members of society failed to understand, instead viewing him as a lazy good-for-nuthen-opportunist-bum, but Manus didn’t hold it against them. ‘There but for fortune’ after all.

    No, regardless of mainstream social exclusion, condemnation and relative poverty for someone living in the privileged sector of the planet, Manus had often enjoyed his choice: to lie in or get up.

    This morning, however, he had allowed himself to be robbed of all enjoyment.

    This morning he was cursed with the knowledge that he had pushed a young woman away from him.

    She liked to keep her options open and he had texted her more or less demanding that she give him a definite date for their next meeting. In a ‘normal relationship’ this might well have been acceptable but this was not a ‘normal relationship’. In fact this was not a ‘relationship’. Avril had insisted from the start. She didn’t want a ‘relationship’. She liked to call round. Once or twice a week. Just for sex. And sex had nothing to do with anything. So Avril said.

    But after a few months, Manus got used to her and when she didn’t call for a week or so he was pushing her for rights he didn’t have.

    It was in the contract. She was younger than him by over two decades. All she wanted was a bit of fun and instead of being grateful he had pushed the last woman who would ever fuck him away. Now there was guilt.

    He didn’t want to get out of bed all day. He was stupid and now he was condemned for his crime. Sentenced for the rest of his life to be alone.

    (It wasn’t really true as his thirteen year old daughter who lived with him seventy-two hours a week every weekend would have been quick to point out. But this was the other ninety-six hours of the week, and he was alone.)

    Ah the suffering and the pain.

    He would lie with it all day. No, that might have been excusable had he been thirty or forty years younger, but he wasn’t and though he was very tempted to visit an old favourite familiar haunt, he was just too old. He knew he didn’t have that many days left to waste, no matter how favoured and familiar an old haunt it might be.

    And he had things to do.

    It was Assange’s birthday for a start. Manus was to meet people at Saint Stephen’s Green at a quarter past one. They were going to deliver a letter to the Australian embassy. Originally they had just talked of making a cake and Manus had thought to hassle a friend or two over to play guitar, and maybe see if they couldn’t get something like a small street party going. But that had been before Avril had ditched him. Since then Manus was lacking the strength or enthusiasm to hassle anyone. Yet again his broken heart had got in the way of political activism, or positive action of any kind.

    Ciaron O’Reilly had instigated the protest.

    Amongst other things Ciaron had taken a hammer in his hands and damaged American war planes that would otherwise kill or harm the poorest people in the world.

    Acting like a responsible citizen had earned Ciaron hard time in high security prisons, and Manus’s respect.

    So perhaps it was for Ciaron, as much as for Julian, that Manus would get out of bed and make his way into town. Manus imagined Julian Assange wouldn’t be overly impressed with their protest. Nobody could be. There would be half a dozen people, a dozen people at the most.

    Most passers-by wouldn’t know who Julian Assange was.

    Against a tsunami of banners and all the technology money can buy, which told people that what Julian Assange was doing just wasn’t important, Manus and a few others would stand with a single banner saying ‘free jullian assange’. The few standing with the banner, if they got noticed at all, would look like weirdo nutters. Manus was going to go, perhaps just to show some solidarity with the weirdo nutters.

    Around 11a.m. George Kirwan called for Manus.

    George was one of them smart ass bastards from a fairly privileged background; a former chairman of a Trinity debating society, who would come up with a nuanced argument against anything you said. Manus was one of those dumb ass fuckers from a fairly unprivileged background, where debating skills ran from shouting to yelling personal threats, to physical violence.

    Manus asked George why he wasn’t going to the protest. George said he didn’t protest anything because he thought it was ineffective. Manus asked if all ‘protest was ineffective’ then should we do nothing? George backtracked saying ‘he very seldom protested and saved his energy for the ones he felt were important, which did not include Assange.’  Furthermore, George wasn’t sure Assange was his political ally since Wikileaks had, ‘not just published, but directly funnelled leaked documents to the Trump campaign first’; George continued: ‘directly dealing with a dime store Hitler was naïve in the extreme and a wrong act’.

    It didn’t ring true for Manus that Assange or Wikileaks would be dealing directly with the Trump campaign, though as usual he hadn’t done much research and couldn’t say with any certainty. George as always was certain: ‘there was a server in Wikileaks communicating with a server in Trump Tower’, George swore it with rather more venom in its delivery than the truth needed. Trinity’s training got lost and George could be as emotive as any uneducated thug when he defended a false position.

    Manus said that since he had started speaking for Assange he had heard all kinds of negative fact and fiction. All of which for Manus sidestepped the main issue.

    Publishing the crimes of the powerful should be applauded, not a punishable offence.

    For none of these other reasons, fact or fiction, would Assange be imprisoned.

    Wikileaks was known all around the globe for telling the truth. It had an effect on the way the world was perceived, with potential to affect how it’s citizens and environment were treated.

    Allowing the Wikileaks founder to be imprisoned would send a clear message ringing around the world. Exposing government and corporate crimes would not be tolerated.

    George lost some of his evangelical zeal against Assange and relented with, ‘their wasn’t enough evidence against him for a conviction, but enough to lose him the support of the left.’

    George spouted on then about some group in America who used to fight legal cases for poor black communists to have the right to preach communism and then they fought for rich white fascists to have the right to preach fascism. Then they decided they didn’t have enough resources to fight for both and decided to just fight for the Commies. Not that he was saying Assange was a fascist.

    How had the so-called left gone along with this crap? How had the most effective exposer of corporate and government crimes been turned into the left’s enemy, or person of no worth, or person they least wanted to defend? The answer was obvious, corporate power had attacked Assange because he exposed their crimes and the corporate media swamped the world with their attack, but it was the left’s acceptance of such obvious diversions and spurious attacks that bothered Manus.

    Manus had a frazzled brain. Too much: drugs, drink, punches to the head. He couldn’t always take in a lot of info and he could retain less. George hadn’t done half as much drugs or drink and had probably never been punched in the head in his life. Manus wasn’t fit for arguing with him.

    The two were friends of a sort. They had both protested against the Dublin Housing Crisis; they had both helped out at a social centre. They helped each other sometimes. For all their differences they had things in common.

    George had brought his three-year-old daughter Paulina. Paulina and Manus had gone through a number of high and low points over the three years of her life. Manus had been a fun distraction one night while both her parents had sneaked off but when Paulina became aware of the dirty trick that had been played on her she screamed all night. It had taken a long time but Paulina was gradually forgiving Manus. She got Manus to flush the toilet for her. Which Manus did again and again and again and again. Paulina was delighted. It was nice for Manus too, to perform a task that seemed a worthwhile and appreciated service.

    Nick phoned and arranged to meet Manus on Saint Stephen’s Green. Like Manus, Nick came from the North. Like Manus, Nick had been called names and spat at a lot when he walked the streets as a youth. They both shared the experience of gangs of loyalist thugs throwing bricks and bottles and chasing them. Manus was a taig in a mostly prod area and could run for one of the taig streets. Nick was actually a prod in a totally prod area but his family would have been the only black family in his whole estate. Loyalists in the North of Ireland were known for their sectarianism, but Nick’s family gave them a chance to prove they were just as racist. Nick developed fighting skills whereas Manus was just a great runner. Manus figured Nick had always tried and usually managed to beat the bastards at their own games. He could fight better, play sports or chess better and stand at the bar and talk bullshit about football better than anybody.

    Nick was over six feet tall and when he let his dreadlocks out of his big hat they came down to the floor.

    Manus and Nick had coffee, sat on the grass on Saint Stephen’s Green. Manus babbled about his own child’s graduation from primary school and how it looked like an American teen movie. And how he felt depressed since he had just pushed that woman away. And how he hoped to get a ‘coffee with Chomsky’ van together which would permanently play Chomsky speeches or Democracy Now! episodes or CounterPunch news, or any alternative to corporate news and views of the world. Everywhere you looked there was a corporate message. One small screen wasn’t going to achieve much, but it just might keep his personal sanity.

    Nick loved the idea. Nick was a cobbler by trade but still hoped to build a studio and record his own music. He had two grown boys up North who visited regularly, but Nick at fifty years of age now lived in Dublin with his new partner and their five year old son Thor.

    Nick babbled about his partner going to some medium who had said Thor was a really old soul. Manus’s mother used to go in for that type of stuff. Nick also went on about how England was still in the World Cup and how Manus, even though he wasn’t into football or nationalism, had to join in the world’s prayer that England couldn’t win the World Cup. The world would never hear the end of it. They still hadn’t shut up about their win in 66.

    At least, thought Manus, Nick didn’t repeat the football being more serious than life or death crap.

    Manus and Nick met May O Byrne at the main gate outside Saint Stephen’s Green. Nick had to go to pick up his kid but Manus introduced them anyway. Telling Nick: ‘come on and meet this one she’s cool.’

    ‘Nick this is May she’s an activist. May this is Nick he’s not stopping today but he’s one of us.’

    Nick went on and May and Manus stood alone.

    May had the petition letter, but said she wasn’t that pleased with it because it quoted Obama. The fact that Obama had been responsible for so many deaths in his time put May off.  Manus shrugged. He didn’t reckon the Australian government would give a shit what the letter said. They were never going to protect Assange. What government in the world was going to thumb its nose at America?

    May was even older than Manus. She said her husband wasn’t well enough to attend. He was eighty-five. Her hubby had been a newscaster in Australia. She said he could see the telexes that came into the news office which never got read. After a while he found it impossible to put on a face that looked like it believed what it was reading and so he lost his job.

    May said there was another Australian coming. A woman called Kate. Manus tried to check himself from his ridiculous notions of finding a partner, long or short term, in Kate. At his age looking for a partner. How long did he think he had left? Still his mind ran on. She would probably have rolls of fat hanging over her pants and a squashed up ugly face. He was shallow.

    She turned up. Fit-looking and highly attractive.  When May went to shake hands Kate insisted on a hug. Manus got a hug too. A bit of much needed physical for Manus. She had been visiting her parents. Catching a flight back at the end of the week.

    Just right for a non-committal shag on a holiday thought Manus.

    Kate said she had emigrated to Australia on her own in the seventies. Had Manus heard that right. Emigrating in the seventies on her own made her around his age. Was that possible? Had he found an attractive woman from his own age group? Could she feel attracted to him?

    Youth went for sexual gratification, age expected accomplishments or at least a place in society. Manus was the least accomplished person in the world, with the lowest place in society.

    He had to stop with the negative self-image. It was that Avril ditchen him thing. It was the getting no nouky. Being the least accomplished person in the world or his place in society didn’t bother him so much when he was getting laid.

    Kate had been shoe-shopping. ‘Well shoes are just so expensive in Australia.’

    Believe in the corporate portrayal of the world or not you still had to live in it.  And despite his own choice, he understood that being a bum was not a popular preference.

    Sid turned up with his bowler hat, scarf, waistcoat and corduroy trousers. A talented singer song writer. Sid and Manus were close enough in years. They talked of Ciaron O Reilly’s unceasing efforts. They both did little bits now and again but Ciaron was full time, twenty-four-seven, year-in year-out. They talked of their kids. Sid’s daughter, born when Sid was in his twenties, was in her forties now. Sid said he had been there when his daughter was a child but he may as well not have been. Sid didn’t drink now but he had been a hard drinker. Manus was coming on fifty before a woman had decided not to abort his kid. Age must have granted him some semblance of sense then, as he had stopped drinking and hard-drugging in order to look after his daughter.

    It had clearly been the better buzz.

    Liam arrived. Almost in his forties, with a twenty-one year old son that he had fought for and gained joint custody over when the child was young. A clean cut man from a stable background. Manus and Liam had put the movie Underground: The Julian Assange Story on in a social centre before Assange’s sixth year in detention. They were useless at getting an audience. They got the usual suspects: June; Sid; Manus; Liam; Dave; and Brian (Brian couldn’t stay though, he was no spring chicken and probably didn’t enjoy the music plus, any talk of computers confused him. He had never used one). There had also been a new face, a Polish girl who actually came to the protest the next week. Liam had remained upbeat and positive. The Polish girl was a new convert. One at a time huh? Even if he was getting laid, getting paid and had a place in society other than lowest, Manus’s optimism couldn’t turn the idea of one person into the possibility of victory. Liam was realistic enough too though. Like Manus he saw no victory possible through their pathetic efforts. And like Manus he didn’t know any other tactics. And while the effort and its lack of effect made them feel useless, not to make the effort made them feel worse.

    Paul arrived. Manus didn’t know much about him. Seen him at a few protests. In his thirties maybe.

    He lived down the country somewhere, but if he was in the capital and something was happening he would go. He looked a solid, stubborn sort that would be good to have beside you in a line against thugs in uniforms.

    Ann arrived. Manus had never met her before. She was writing a piece for a Russian magazine. Younger than Manus by a few decades. In a flouncy dress. Manus’s attention switched. Them flouncy summer dresses always got Manus.

    Sometimes he could be such a letch.

    They walked through the park. Manus asked Sid if he had had much success as a singer-songwriter. Sid said, ‘No. Thank god.’ ‘Why? Did you not want success?’ asked Manus, to which Sid replied ‘my head’s so big already it would have blown up completely. Sure I’d a had to get myself a new hat and everything.’

    Manus understood how difficult it would be to cope with success. And agreed with Sid’s sentiment, but in actuality he could have done with a bit of it.

    They walked through the park and after a wrong turn or two found the embassy.

    Martine was there with his two kids who were both under ten years old. Martine had thought of becoming a priest, but had backed out at the last minute. Thank fuck.

    The letter requesting that the Australian government start looking after Julian Assange’s human rights, signed by two and a half pages of Australians living in England and further afield, was read. Photos were taken. Manus held a banner: ‘free Julian Assange’.

    That was it.

    Martine and his kids went off.  Everyone else decided to go to the park for coffee and tea and small buns with a single letter of the birthday boy’s name on each one. Thirteen buns.

    They had the banner spread out in front of them on the grass.

    Free Julian Assange.

    Kids were still starving to death while half the world’s food production was being destroyed. Ecological and nuclear disaster threatened the planet like never before while the corporations’ need for constant profit kept pushing us all towards said disaster. And Julian Assange was hold up in some room in London, threatened with life imprisonment for publishing the truth.

     And it was a beautiful sunny day in Dublin’s Saint Stephens Green.

    The group talked and exchanged phone numbers. Manus didn’t offer or ask and wasn’t offered or asked for a phone number.

    Sid called to him as though the two should walk off together, but Manus stalled. He wanted to walk with Sid but what was Kate doing?

    Liam was showing Kate where the museum was. Manus went too. Perfect, Liam would walk off and Manus could show her round. It was almost too pat. Walk and talk round a museum with an attractive woman he had met at a protest. Engaging conversation and curiosity glances. They would get some food. Time would pass and she would have to get the last bus back out the country unless she wanted to stay in Dublin for the night.

    As usual his mind ran on fantasies. but his mouth said nuthen.

    Liam hugged her goodbye.

    Manus hugged her goodbye too.

    On their walk through town Liam asked Manus if he would like to write a letter to Julian. Manus kina shrugged his laugh. Manus had spent his life trying to ignore or block out what he thought he could do little about. And now he wanted to write to Julian and say he supported him. Hopefully there were better more effective supporters than Manus.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Musician of the Month: Massimiliano Galli

    This statement might make me sound old, but I have been through many different phases as a musician during my fifteen year career. I began as the talented kid in the school of music, where I started playing guitar in the 1990’s. Next, I was the super-unprofessional teenager, with no clue as to what I was doing with my crossover band. There followed the wannabe rockstar period. Currently I am the Italian guy playing and producing music in Ireland. I am still discovering who I am as a musician.

    After many years of gigging and recording albums, I now find it most rewarding to integrate my research into my practice. This has influenced my sound – and also probably made my career more complex. Sometimes I think I overcomplicate things, at other times I fear I will be considered banal. The conclusion I have come to is that I just want to be authentic, and honest with myself. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about what I do.

    Next year I will release my new album in Italy. Around ten years ago I founded a band called rumori dal fondo in my hometown of Milan. This will be our third studio album. During this period I moved to Ireland, in 2013, and there I developed, along with my musical brother Stefano Schiavocampo, another band called SignA. We played at most of the major Irish music festivals for a couple of years, an experience which helped me grow as a musician. I still learn a lot from Irish colleagues, and have met incredible talents like Villagers, Damien Rice, Bantum, Meltybrains, Donal Dineen, Fehdah and Loah, to name a few.

    Rumori dal fondo, Le Mie Facoltà

    Every musician has a different story to tell and tries to convey this to an audience. All of us want our music to be listened to, but the perception of success has changed so much over the last twenty years.

    I am increasingly uncomfortable with the way this industry works. We are living in a time when social media followers, views, likes, and tiny pixelated hearts are the main barometer establishing who is doing well, and who isn’t. Perhaps the difference between success and failure has always been based on superficial measurements, and this is simply the transition between analog and digital technology. It just seems part of the collective madness in our evolving relationship with technology.

    Social media seems to be the only show in town. Everyone must have a ‘presence’, even when, paradoxically, you are singing a song in opposition to the platform you are using to promote yourself (as we did, and will continue to do).

    Memory Shithole by SignA

    MySpace, then Facebook, now Instagram. Where has the damn music gone? An algorithm based system operates in the background, so people post anything just to gain exposure. We end up knowing more about a musician’s smile, workouts, or pet poodle than their songs.

    I start feeling a bit deranged when I think about these things. Perhaps it is because I grew up in the 90’s when the concept of fame was completely different. After a decade of glitter and glam in the 80’s, to be an outsider was suddenly cool. ‘Success’ itself was deeply uncool.

    Nirvana were the most popular band in the world, but the celebrity culture ate them alive, contributing to Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Perhaps this explains my resistance to the idea of ‘listener interaction’, or ‘followers’.

    My theory is that Kurt understood the game, but ended up playing it against his better judgment. Undoubtedly it was easier to tour in a comfortable bus, and sleep in decent hotels, but after a while he became an alternative Madonna in the mainsteam. It was a twist of fate that has cost us all. Now every time I spot a Nirvana t-shirt in a H&M shop I think how disappointed he would be to see his face in there, especially next to a Guns & Roses t-shirt, a band he despised.

    Kurt Cobain interview

    What kind of game are we all playing were anyone is able to produce their own album in the comfort of their own living room with a computer, before releasing it as a product on every digital platform in the space of twenty-four hours?

    What happens if no one likes what you produce? A world where success is measured in clicks could be tricky to handle, especially for an sensitive young person, struggling to find their place in the world.

    On my new album there is a song called Abilità (Ability), which is about not falling apart if you struggle to reach the goals you have set. There is a sort of autoanalysis: a pathway towards overcoming the disappointments you feel at failing to achieve life, work, or relationship aspirations.

    I realise, at the end of the day, that remaining true to oneself is the only way forward. Sometimes this can be difficult, because not everyone will appreciate what you do.

    Everyone is unique and reacts differently to challenging situations, but I thought my experience might be useful to others making their way. I once saved myself from myself by making music. I am sure it will continue to save me, no matter who, or how many people, are listening.

    I love to do it and I always will.

    Massimiliano Galli is the musician of the month for December, 2018.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Artist of the Month Luz Peuscovich: ‘the power of the bonds’

    Nothing is born alone. We all come from somewhere and are the result of thousands and thousands of bonds over time.

    To be an explorer of nature is to discover those webs, networks, circuits and fluids. And reconnect with the subtle dimensions of nature, looking over those multiple and diverse universes of the organic kingdoms.

    That is the collection phase. But the work does not end there, then comes the construction stage.

    But what to build? For What, Whom, and Why?

    My work is an ongoing research into the perception of the senses in space – of the body in different contexts. I am interested in the experiences that we keep in our memories and unconscious. I am fascinated by the integration of human beings with nature, and in re-evaluating the forgetfulness that we suffer from in city life. But what is fundamental for me is to talk about the environmental realities of the places I visit.

    The process begins with trips to explore the territory, to know the particular qualities of its ecosystem and collect carefully the necessary materials.

    Thus I present a conglomeration of unique information from each site. This set of experiences results in the development of installations that operate as symbols and formal configurations, habitable, immersive and floating spaces.

    The REFUGE is a central concept, as well as life in COMMUNITY, and the search for the SUSTAINABILITY of the work. In that intention to reconnect with nature and its forms, my research brought me into closer contact with native communities. I have witnessed the links they keep with the natural world in their daily habits, but also (like us) living under this sad domestication of capitalism, and the enormous complexity of living in a system that does not measure the true cost of consumption in terms waste.

    Over time I have discovered that the collection outings and subsequent construction of installations are ways of weaving points of view and amplifying perceptions.

    This involves reevaluating found objects; linking similar materials from different places, and at the same time meeting the same human reactions on one side of the world as another. This brings my interest to a point of integration. I channel the bio-diversity that surrounds us in order to revisualize our relationship with Earth, our planet, and question our ways of inhabiting it.

    The power of these bonds offers a possibility of a broader understanding of Who we are, What we are doing, and Why that is.

    Luz Peuscovich is our Artist of the Month for December. For more details her website is www.luzpeuscovich.com; follow her on Instagram @luzpeuscovich.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

    [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”24″ gal_title=”Luz Peuscovich”]

  • Review: Adventures in Philosophy: Stories & Quests for Thinking Heroes, by Brendan O’Donoghue and illustrated by Paula McGloin

    I think that Adventures in Philosophy – Stories & Quests for Thinking Heroes is a brilliant book. If you are a curious person who loves short stories then this is the book for you, and you learn all about philosophy and philosophers without even realising it.

    The book is divided into three sections: Part 1: Step into the Unknown, Part 2: Discover New Trails of Thought, and Part 3: Return Home to Begin Again. Then the three sections are divided into smaller sections which include a beautiful illustration, then a mythical story, then a conclusion to the story with a couple of questions to make you wonder, and after there are the thoughts of lots of famous philosophers on the subject. The illustrations are amazing and make me almost want this book to be a picture book, almost. I hope you enjoy this book immensely if you read it, and have great adventures in philosophy.

    Part 1: Step into the Unknown says it all in the title, as the heroes set off into the unknown, on the start of their adventure. The introduction to it is very touching and really makes you feel confident. The heroes are all different but are all courageous and confident in their own way. I really liked stories 6. Plato’s Cave which is all about reality and 7. The Brain in the tank.

    Part 2: Discover New Trails of Thought is the part when you’re really starting to ponder on all these questions. The stories that I love lots are 1. A different kind of Hero: Theseus and the Minotuar, which is a very confusing story but very enjoyable all the same, and 6. Artificial Intelligence (AI): Opening Pandora’s Box which really makes me wonder whether humans are doing the right thing or not. I really like this part because it is very questioning and amazing.

    Part 3: Return Home to Begin Again… is when the heroes come back to their homes. My favourite stories are 8. The Animals Return: The Coming of the Buffalo Dance because it’s all about animals but it’s sort of a sad story too and of course 9. Adventuring Home to Earth. I think this story is actually my favourite one out of all of them because it’s linked with the very first mythical story in the book The Frog in the Well but I won’t spoil it for you!

    This book made me think of a lot of questions such as:

    • What life is there after death?
    • What is death?
    • What is good and bad? And how can we live a good life?
    • And what is art and why do we make art?
    • What should we do about the planet and the environment?

    Finally, the question came up a few times – should we eat animals? Is there a respectful way to live with animals but still eat animals without being greedy? Such as the way it is discussed in some of the stories such as “The Animals Depart: The Hunter and the Fox-woman” or “The Animals Return: the Coming of the Buffalo Dance”. And do these questions help with today’s problems with the environment?

    These are hard questions and there is probably no right or wrong answer. We need to think about questions like these and I think that philosophy can help us. Some of the stories even show us how to be in harmony with nature and the environment which is really important nowadays with climate change and environmental disasters. Philosophy can seem a bit strange and useless on its own, as we’re not used to thinking like that, but this book shows us how to use philosophy to look at everyday problems.

    I hope you enjoy this book and have a great adventure in the forest of your mind. I loved this book and I hope you will too.

    Lena Muzellec is eleven years old, and in sixth class in her primary school in Dublin. Her favourite hobbies include playing camogie and chickens, reading and hanging out with friends.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Migrant Crisis

    I raise myself into the UNHCR’s prefrabricated 10×20 ft unit; directly in front of me is the 5×4 latrine I was looking for. Occupied. I’ll have to wait, glad, in fact, just to be cool.

    I turn my attention left to the man whose workplace is this metal container, a stocky Afghan, with thick, combed, black hair. I’ve seen him before, here and around the camp. There is a warmth about his demeanour – he has a smile that makes you want to smile – offset however by an expression alluding to something more cerebral about his character. His deep set eyes haven’t escaped my notice, and ever suggest his mind is attending to thoughts which, evidently, prompt less than a continuously cheerful disposition.

    I’m a little bit nervous, I suppose. So I lean against the cool interior, the idea being that a casual comportment will mask any anxiety I feel, now that I’m in this man’s space. Its thirty-five degrees outside – ‘hot’, I gasp, and raise my eyebrows. He nods in jovial agreement.

    Now more comfortable, I look around the room. A shaded white room, with laminate flooring, the equidistance of the wall-to-wall-to-ceiling dimensions induce feelings of claustrophobia, though he seems comfortable. He stands to one side, elbow on the sill of the window, two dainty tables and an equally dainty chair to his other side.

    On one of the tables I spot something about which in the past I’ve been curious; so I now take the opportunity to query the small packages stacked on the collapsible tables to his left. He gives them a glance, and then his eyes revert to me, once more. Fifty food packages, I now understand, for the fifty unaccompanied children, currently residing in Camp Skaramangas – the parentless refugee children ten kilometres north-east of central Athens.

    I look at the packages and I look back at him again, alert and no longer leaning. ‘What’s … the story?’ I nervously query, the idiomatic expression revelatory of more than mere linguistic dissonance. He is himself a refugee and it is experiences such as these that remind us that this does indeed warrant its own respect. He paces a little and tells me of the children whose parents may not have made the journey – they could be dead, back home. Silence.

    ‘It’s very sad,’ he quickly concludes, in that way you would hope someone in charge of dispensing such basic essentials to parentless children, in a refugee camp, would, before moving on. He sits down onto the chair. ‘That’s awful,’ I concur trivially. Contrasted with my own, now no longer casual, attempt to compose myself, his expression, his tone and his body language exhibit a capacity to appreciate the gravity of what has prompted, for me, little else than a compulsion to muster an appropriate response, unsuccessfully, and in lieu of it arising naturally.

    Contemplating such human horror can of course be difficult for the onlooker, such difficulty being only amplified when it relates to utterly innocent children. One is witness to a human experience of which a claim to understanding would amount to no less than impertinence – our empathic powers curtailed given those experiences which cannot be graphed in the thin air of speculation.

    But despite this, perhaps even in spite of it, one also feels constrained to recognise no mere accident – innocent children, recall. A symptom of an injustice, a failing, a signature of what is wrong with the world; and in its symptomatic nature what is at once intangible, becomes oddly tangible.

    A human experience so far removed from my own becomes that which I feel compelled to pronounce should not be. Momentarily unhinged, a witness to the unspeakable, sense making becomes the urgent prerogative of our sociality. Yet the process in which this encounter with horror gives way to the attempt to determine it as an injustice, brings with it the unsettling self-consciousness of the futility of one’s reaction to so unspeakable an experience, even hypocrisy, as injustice is decried from the comfortable position of distance. Some moments later I am finished with the facilities and nodding a goodbye to the UNHCR man, before exiting back out to the midday sun.

    I remember first entering Camp Skaramangas following a brief induction in a petrol station café, outside the camp. A smoking area, on the platform and amongst the petrol pumps created an atmosphere that rules were, here, suspended. In the café we introduced ourselves before discussing the details of what we would be doing as volunteers in the refugee camp, nearby.

    Through a gate guarded by the Greek navy security services we walked onto the port and into the camp, gravel crunching below our feet. Few people could be seen, although it was an area wherein over two thousand people resided, in the many white steel units we could now see before us – a truly cosmopolitan setting with people from countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Sudan and more. I was of course quickly on good terms with a fellow volunteer from Coventry. We walked into the camp and we were guided through the areas in which we would be working, and shown the facilities we would be occupying. A few early risers could be seen dispersed walking to and fro.

    Young men, the likes I had previously visualised in the images of refugees ‘marching’ along European railway tracks (the connotations of an invasion framed with such percipience) strolled casually by; women and men pushing trolleys of watermelon, appeared busy, as children, similar in appearance to the young Alan Kourdi whose body appeared on our screens in what seems now like a moment in history, either aided their elders or ran around guilelessly in the early morning hours, as children do.

    Nervously, we tentatively followed the coordinator’s lead, meeting a few volunteers on the way – a mix of Spanish, English, Norwegian and Dutch accents filled the air.

    Then could be heard the tones ringing out from the residents, an altogether more foreign sound. Suddenly the nervousness I was feeling, given these new surroundings, began, as we paced through, to transmute into something else. Amid what I superficially took to be more and more foreignness, I felt myself becoming quite self-conscious. And in fact, I now felt foreign.

    An uneasiness began to settle, as I became conscious not only of the colour of my skin but my attire, my sunburn, my lanyard which felt all the more pathetic an officiation of my presence. I was entering a space wherein I found faces, half-familiar, having seen them on television and in the news, looking back at me, and I was aware of this.

    I suddenly felt like an imposition. There was a feeling I could not shake. Although I was there to help, my being, my presence, felt as though it was imbued additionally with something less benign; taking time away from the everyday goings on of European living to offer my aid to an ‘otherworldly’ situation. Basically I began to feel anxious that people might be looking at me with some bitterness, as a Westerner.

    Of course, I quickly met residents who expressed such a welcome that thoughts of their being bitter, or resentful, were not only quashed but gave way to an understanding of their having a diametrically opposite disposition; additionally for anyone who may have viewed my presence with bitterness, albeit in silence, I am inclined to suspend judgement given an understanding of the as good as warrant such bitterness has at its disposal, in view of the both historical and current catastrophes for which the West is deeply responsible, and in accordance with which the lives of many have been coerced.

    In any case the feeling was there. Introduced to the impoverished conditions of those on the Athenian port (all of whom have a story of struggle, if not travesty, and such uncertain futures, that their capacity to endure, nevertheless, is nothing short of remarkable), I was conscious of how I represented a life which they did not enjoy.

    That subtle feeling of anxiety, embarrassment, shame, which in the coming days I would be able to suppress (given the very flattering gratitude of the residents, not to mention the self-congratulation to be enjoyed in the company of my fellow volunteers), seemed to allude to some tacit recognition that my presence truly was less than benign. And, there was a feeling that despite appearances, despite the fact that in volunteering I may have appeared to care, I represented a way of life the hypocrisy of which was more typically manifest in the choices I made to more often than not, not so much as give them a second thought. It quickly felt a bit superficial.

    The fifty children, parentless, and who spend much of their day roaming around what is little more than a barren car park on what was once an Athenian shipping port and whose vulnerability can be all the more sickeningly contemplated should one consider the likelihood of the near presence of human trafficker’s, may indeed prompt one to conjecture that the world is bereft of justice.

    But in the absence of provisions, recognition of such injustice seems as pertinent as an acquaintance with the same may be brief. Of course there is the work of the Afghan of the UNHCR, for example, with the unaccompanied children, providing for their desperately needed conditions of growth, the food packages of course being the most basic instance of initiative, in this regard. But my volunteering hardly compares, and truth of the matter is that following the feel good experience I of course did just look away.

    I spent the morning and early afternoon of my last day volunteering in Camp Skaramangas with the children before having lunch with a number of the volunteers and residents. Volunteers come and go so you do not say goodbye to the children.

    So many goodbyes would be cruel, never-mind the psychological impact. So I just said goodbye to friends in the early afternoon, and then left the camp and its over two thousand residents. A number of hours later I was standing on a runway having just landed in Sofia airport, slightly dazed amid unfamiliar voices, and struck by the attire, but particularly the moustaches, of a number of my fellow eastern European passengers.

    It was roughly 9 pm and I was at this point keen to get to my hostel sooner rather later. From the runway we were guided into the airport, through the glass doors and into a large square room which led to a number of steps at the top of which was Bulgarian Passport control. We shuffled into the room, fatigued couples not speaking, children re-energised now they were finally off the plane.

    Airports and the security therewith have a way of making us all feel suspect. But being a young Irish man, and landing in Sofia, from Athens, any nerves were on this occasion eclipsed by a rather indulgent self-confidence, my being a man on the road. I stood upright, passport in hand and shifted determinately amongst my fellow travellers toward the security personnel above.

    But five minutes, then ten minutes, then twenty minutes went by, and as the man fashioning the perm came to lose what was at first his amusing quality, and as retaining posture became tiresome, the experience as a whole quickly enough became all the more frustrating. It appeared as though very little progress was being made and I came to question the old fashioned border checking that I had not been accustomed to in Western Europe.

    Had it not been for the language barrier I might have made more of an effort to engage in the mutterings of those in my company. Increasingly frustrated, I started to observe the minutes go by on my watch, arm rigid. Perspiring ever so slightly now with the frustration, and with my passport in hand, waiting freely to access Bulgaria, what an utterly ludicrous image I was.

    Craving my counterfeit cigarettes, purchased only that morning from an entrepreneurial resident of Camp Skaramangas there I was, shamelessly agitated at what was a forty minute wait for my rightful access to a country, a right so shamefully taken for granted.

    People wait years to get through European borders, and not for a holiday; good people who I had only that day had lunch with, and who had only a few hours previously expressed gratitude for my efforts in the camp, efforts the sincerity of which I could not now help but think was void.

    Given the mere hours that passed, the dictum ‘Out of sight out of mind’ came to mind, as my supposed concern for the horror of such vulnerability encountered only that morning rather belatedly reminded me of what is worthy of our frustration. Failing to uphold, satisfactorily or efficiently, my right to free travel through borders, I found myself naturally irritated – as a European citizen, I expected better. Not so for those without that birth-right. They can continue to wait.

    When I tell people this story they offer consolations: at least I volunteered – apparently enough to neutralise the fact that even should such an effort imply that I view the residents of Camp Skaramangas as equals, my behaviour suggests otherwise.

    Of course, I can hardly be expected to live frustration-free, given the comparative triviality of whatever situations may arise. Nevertheless, the alarming rate at which one can forget, immersed, once more, in those comparatively trivial struggles, intimates what little hope there might be for those who most need the attention of others.

    For the issue is all the more unsettling given the effectiveness of nullifying any concern we might have for those who must wait, through their being removed from our field of vision, as people close by.

    In a political atmosphere in which it is often suggested that it is migrants who pose a threat to ‘our’ way of life – Hillary Clinton being amongst the most hypocritical of recent voices for this sentiment – efforts to cast our eyes away from those on the shores of Europe and to the concerns of those individuals, who through the fortune of birth are entitled to expect better in life, portends the upholding of human inequality as an increasingly more likely and well-sustained global state of affairs. For of course, should we not look, we need not be concerned: out of sight, out of mind.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • Redefining Opportunities for Female Architects in the Post-Recession Era

    Architects … are better able than many other professions to ride out recessions … They will use the lean times to think hard about the directions architecture might take when the good times roll once again.
    (Glancey, 2009)

    In August 2008 Ireland was the first EU country to declare itself officially in recession. The economic downturn was swift, and in the succeeding years the country found itself in the grip of a sustained economic depression, occasioned by the convergent demise of the banking and construction sectors.

    The collapse of the construction industry ‘hit the architect profession at a faster rate than other professions’[1] with almost one third of architectural firms laying off between 61% and 100% of their staff.[2]  The constriction of the profession was seismic, disproportionately affecting marginalized and vulnerable constituents of the workforce; notably female architects.

    Despite almost gender parity in architectural education, women compose just 28% of registered architects in Ireland.[3] Burdened by unsuitable working practices, lower pay and a general deficiency in numbers, the practice of architecture can be an unforgiving topography for many women. While this predicament may seem embedded within the industry, it is clear that ‘the harsh economic climate has … undercut the conditions which are conducive to gender equality,’[4]  leading to the enduring phenomenon of highly skilled female architects disappearing from the profession.

    There has been a paucity of research in recent years on the relationship between the struggles women face and the economic factors that contribute towards them, and it is within this context that a debate on redefining the profession and production of architecture for female (and male) architects is required. Using the recession as a catalyst for change, it is essential that architects ‘recognise the importance of continuing to challenge the labour market disadvantage that women…face,’[5]  by acknowledging the factors that unduly affect them, principally: the outdated, gendered image of the architect; a pervasive long-hours working culture that disproportionately affects those caring for dependents; the profession’s intolerance toward flexible working; and the general deficiency of senior positions available to women within mainstream practice.

    In this study alternative forms of working – such as flexible, part-time working and the creation of more female-led practices to inspire the next generation of architects – will be explored as a means of fostering a more inclusive and equitable profession for all.

    The scope of this study is consciously narrow, its aim is to ignite a wider discussion on the vital contributions women make within the industry, and the efforts that must be taken to prevent the continuing trend of women leaving it.

    In recent decades the number of female students entering architectural education has risen steadily year-on-year, with female enrollment now on a par with that of male students.[6]  Despite this encouraging trajectory, women’s participation stagnates as they progress through the profession with the ‘percentage of women (falling) at each ascending management tier.’[7]

    In 2006, research conducted for the Architect Journal’s ‘Women in Architecture’ campaign highlighted the attrition of female architects from the profession, noting that while 35% of undergraduate students were female, women accounted for only 4% of retiring architects.[8]  The spectre of this missing 31% is damaging to the future of the profession and it is therefore essential to call attention to the structural issues that motivate it.

    1.1 The image of the (female) architect

    (a woman’s) intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.
    John Ruskin

    That Ruskin’s indelicate stance on the capacity and worth of creative women so closely typifies prevailing contemporary attitudes towards female architects is not surprising. Indeed, clichés abound about women in architecture today, ’many of which are destructive and detrimental…entrenched assumptions about what it is to be an architect.’[9]

    These ‘entrenched assumptions’ appear to be borne out of engendered prejudices of what an architect is and what they do. Certainly throughout history architects have been many things – artists; philosophers; master-builders – but only recently have some been women. Women’s involvement in – as Ruskin would characterise – ‘invention or creation’ has therefore been largely overwhelmed and diminished by the vast contribution that male architects have made before them.

    This, coupled with the architectural establishment’s casual misogyny in the erasure of pioneering female architects’ achievements, has done little to recast the image of the architect as anything other than male. Most notably, the awarding of the 1991 Pritzker Prize to Robert Venturi, but not his wife and practice co-founder Denise Scott Brown, led a chorus of voices to question why Scott Brown’s equal contribution and authorship were not similarly honoured. Furthermore, the removal of Patty Hopkins – co-founder of Hopkins Architects – from promotional material for the BBC’s ‘The Brits Who Built the Modern World’ series does little to foster the idea that architecture is anything other than a male domain.‘’

    This airbrushing of the contributions women have made to the profession has rendered them invisible, allowing enduring prejudices of what an architect should be to persist and encouraging female architects to feel that their efforts are not worthy of the same recognition as their male counterparts.

    1.2 Children

    While there are various factors that contribute towards the attrition of female architects at different stages in their career, maternity appears to be a principal factor.

    Having children impacts the careers of women considerably more than men,[10]  and a recent survey conducted by the Architects Journal found that 92% of female architects believed that having children had hindered their career prospects.[11] Women have commented that after having children they were ‘not taken seriously, were sometimes demoted, passed over for promotion or were seen to have failed to give the art of architecture the full attention it deserved.’[12]

    As soon as I started working part-time my employers treated me differently and assumed I was less committed. I was overlooked for promotion twice when I was on maternity leave and not even informed that structural changes were being considered.[13]

    1.3 Long hours: time-discipline in architecture

    ‘An important factor in the flow of women from the architecture profession is the family-hostile, long hours working culture that still prevails’[14] within mainstream practice.

    Long-hours have become an accepted and pervasive element of being a salaried architect, indiscriminately affecting both men and women in the pursuit of making a project the best it can be. Evening meetings, project deadline, and the over-servicing of projects beyond the negotiated fee, can prolong the working day, significantly encroaching on an architect’s personal time. ‘’Theoretically ‘work devotion’ is gender neutral, but the long working day … relies on a social foundation of gender norms that disadvantages women’[15]  more than their male colleagues.

    Consequently, flexible working is often favoured by women ‘as a strategy to reconcile the competing time demands of paid work and family life.’[16]

    Unsurprisingly, architecture is often considered to be more intolerant of part-time work than other professions, with one of the strongest barriers to flexible employment being the established long-hours culture within the profession.[17]  Periods of economic and employment uncertainty encourage this culture of working by creating ‘a climate where it is necessary to demonstrate high commitment’[18]  and ‘unfailing availability’[19]  to the job. This has led to what Karen Burns, in her chapter for the recent RIBA publication, ‘A Gendered Profession: The Question of Representation in Space Making,’ describes as ‘‘competitive overstaying’, as employees contend with each other to demonstrate loyalty and devotion to work,’[20]  in an effort to stymie possible redundancy.

    Consequently, many women forced into redundancy following the 2008 recession have commented that their inability to pursue long-hours working meant they were considered easy targets due to a ‘two-tier system where part-time and flexible workers are seen as less legitimate or committed workers.’[21]  In this context, women are unfairly disadvantaged by having responsibilities outside of the workplace, which are incompatible with working beyond contractually agreed hours with no or little remuneration.

    1.4 Career advancement

    In recent years Parlour – the Australian gender advocacy group – has challenged the long-hours system in architecture arguing that the ‘culture…retards the retention of female architects, and hinders women’s progression to senior levels.’[22]

    The growing chasm between men and women as they advance up the architectural ladder has been highlighted in research conducted by the Architectural Association, which notes that only 20% of partners in architectural practice are women, this figure dropping to just 5% in large practices.[23]

    While it is clear that women possess the same motivation and skill to succeed in senior roles, employers remain largely unsympathetic towards family life, perceiving full-time work as the only means of servicing projects, and conveying dedication to the often unrelenting and demanding expectations of the highest echelons of the profession.[24]

    Indeed, part-time working is a key factor in women’s under-representation in senior architectural positions as ‘women are more likely to have ‘atypical’ or flexible career paths, with multiple breaks, different levels of intensity and changing roles over the course of a career.’[25]   In contrast, men are more likely to follow a ‘traditional’ career model – that of unbroken and unwavering devotion to the profession via unpaid overtime – and be ‘active in the conventional areas of influence and power in the profession. (It is clear) the structures of the profession are still geared towards (the) linear, rising career trajectories,’[26]  favoured by men.

    As women are often unable to meet the loyalty and dedication that many employers expect, senior roles often appear unattainable for the majority of women. With little hope of career advancement in a profession that openly favours a ‘traditional’ working model, it is unsurprising that a significant number of women choose to leave the profession.

    It is clear that within the architectural profession a system persists that works against the specific needs of women. It is essential, therefore, that the contributory factors to this system are no longer viewed merely as accepted inconveniences, but rather as opportunities to reduce the current rate of attrition. Indeed, ‘women architects’ commonly interrupted career history, and need for flexible working conditions can be reframed not as an aberrant or problematic work pattern, but as the model for innovative new professional paradigms in architecture.”[27]

    2.1 The case for meaningful flexible working

    If the practice of long-hours is ‘read as a signal of productivity and commitment, flexibility can be perceived as a conflict with an organisation or profession’s norms.’[28]  A recent survey conducted by the RIAI has reinforced the low levels of support for part-time work in architecture, identifying 10% of architects as working part-time compared with 38% for all professions. ‘This is a particular problem for women (as) 27% of all women professionals work part-time, while only 16% of women in architecture do.’[29]

    The stigma surrounding flexible working has stymied the adoption of part-time and non-standard working methods for decades, encouraging entrenched negative perceptions of alternative working models to fester.

    Changing these attitudes is crucial if more meaningful part-time arrangements are to be developed.[30]

    Positively, flexible working policies are inherently responsive, allowing both employers and employees to react to specific needs at particular times.[31] For employees meaningful part-time work can provide a balance between external demands and the rigours of professional practice, while for employers it allows quick responses to ever-changing workloads. Practices can explore the potential of flexible working simply by cultivating job-sharing arrangements; coupling part-time and full-time members of staff on projects; and providing staff access to new technology to facilitate home working. Many practices report that implementing these measures has ‘reduced amounts of overtime required while increasing productivity and maintaining the quality of their work.’[32]

    It is important that practices make a virtue of these working arrangements as ‘a forward-looking, equitable … firm is attractive to clients and new staff.’[33] Furthermore, in the context of the recent recession ‘introducing flexible working options … in workplaces where there is a history of reducing hours or changing patterns of work in response to demand, could prove a valuable means to retain jobs … and (provide) greater flexibility for workers now and as the economy recovers.”[34]

    2.2 New (role) models of practice

    As non-traditional, flexible forms of working have increased in recent years, the notion of what constitutes a ‘career’ in architecture has been queried.

    The recent influx of equitable practices such as Assemble, Fluid and earlier pioneers such as Muf have consciously positioned their work on the fringes of the profession,[35] putting greater emphasis on social rather than financial rewards. Entrepreneurial in nature, these practices have boycotted the traditional forms of working in favour of ‘non-standard’, inventive modes of practice that have proven to be more innovative and diverse in form.

    Research suggests that the last recession encouraged the adoption of more ‘non-standard’ working as architects sought to find relevance within an industry decimated by construction inactivity. Consequently, the success of practices such as Assemble must motivate architects to embrace new, more loosely architectural ways of working as a means of adapting more easily to ever-changing economic and work/life balance conditions.

    2.3 A Practice of One’s Own

    The embrace of new working models in recent years has largely been borne out of necessity. For those made redundant and unable to find work following the 2008 recession “a trend, common to all recessions in the construction industry, for the unwaged or unemployed to form new architectural practices, reoccurred.”[36]

    This trend follows an increasing pattern of women who ‘end up in small practice, or starting their own practice, not because they actively choose to…but because they find themselves with few other options.’[37] Indeed, according to a recent survey published by the Architects Journal, 16% of female architects become self-employed after having children due to the complexities of carving a rewarding career in mainstream practice whilst caring for dependents.

    One of my main reasons for working as a sole practitioner was for the flexibility. I have small children, and running my own practice has allowed me to juggle motherhood and my work. [38]

    That female sole-practitioners report ‘remarkably high levels of job satisfaction’[39]  should, however, encourage us to reconsider self-employment not merely as a necessary response when times are hard but an effective means of reclaiming personal autonomy and organising levels of project engagement around external demands. Moreover, for many young female architects, who cite a lack of female-run practices ‘as a factor leading to (the) under-representation of women in architecture,’[40] seeing more women subvert the established routes of career ascension and actively counter the pervasive negative stereotypes that cast doubt on their ability to perform in the profession will ‘increase (their) motivation for career advancement and success.’[41] The effects of encouraging more female role models within an overtly male-dominated profession like architecture should not be underestimated.

    Conclusion

    Recessions are a time for architects to rethink their game. They need not despair – but, rather, regroup for the next boom.
    Glancey (2009)

    Prior to the 2008 economic crisis Ireland possessed one of the highest levels of workplace gender parity in Europe.[42] This changed however as an entire framework of statutory and public bodies promoting equality endured drastic budget cuts and closures.[43] The seismic withdrawal of gender policy in the aftermath of the recession is indicative of the large-scale marginalisation of issues that affect women in the workforce, specifically in architecture.

    For a profession that claims to be concerned by societal inequalities, the recession highlighted ‘a major discrepancy … between the egalitarian rhetoric of architecture and its backstage realities.’[44] Indeed, the recession exposed a myriad of pervasive and deeply rooted inequalities within the profession that disproportionately impact women, and have contributed significantly to their decision to leave the profession over recent decades.

    Central to the inequalities experienced by women is the long-hours culture that permeates all aspects of mainstream practice. The persistent misconception that those who are unable to commit to long-hours are less committed to the profession has become a significant impediment to women who predominately undertake the majority of dependent responsibilities. This, coupled with the view that those with children are unable to undertake managerial positions, has ensured women’s career advancement has stagnated with a minority of women currently occupying director or partner positions. Consequently, the under-representation of women in leadership roles has ensured the dominant image of the architect is still male, effectively rendering women’s significant accomplishments in recent decades obsolete.

    As frustrating as this pattern may seem it is within our power to change it. Encouragingly, Ireland has a wealth of extraordinary and internationally-renowned talent, with female-led and co-led practices such as Grafton Architects, Heneghan Peng and O’Donnell and Tuomey proving that women can create meaningful change if they challenge the structures that work against them. The growth of more female-led practices could help slow the current attrition rate of women from the profession as more women ‘put themselves forward and become visible and influential.’[45] Furthermore, by implementing new strategies, such as flexible working, that ‘mediate between the day-to-day activity of producing architecture and each woman’s individual needs’[46] both employers and employees can respond better to work/life demands.

    The propositions put forth in this study are consciously simple solutions to the larger problem of inequality within the profession. While the case for more appropriate and flexible working practices is unlikely to constitute a sustained assault on the profession-at-large, it may, at least, encourage an incremental erosion of the problems that have been allowed to fester for too long.

    In short, it is clear the profession needs to retain ‘more people who think (and work) in diverse ways, not fewer’[47] if it is to deliver better working environments for all architects – not just women – and if it is to survive the next, inevitable recession.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

    [1] Prescott, J. and Bogg, J., Gendered occupational differences in science, engineering, and technology careers. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, pp.49-52., 2013, p.49
    [2] Hays.ie. (n.d.). Architectural firms have shed an average of 60% of employees in two years. [online] Available at: https://www.hays.ie/press-releases/HAYS_163705 [Accessed 25 Nov. 2018].
    [3] RIAI Membership Survey 2017. [online] The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland. Available at: https://www.riai.ie/uploads/files/RIAI-Membership-Survey.pdf [Accessed 5 Nov. 2018], p.2
    [4] Fowler, B. and Wilson, F., Women Architects and Their Discontents. Sociology, 38(1), pp.101-119. , 2004, p.117
    [5] TUC (2009). Women and Recession: How will this recession affect women at work?. [ebook] Available at: https://www.ictu.ie/download/pdf/womenandrecession.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2018], p.8
    [6]  Clark, J., Six myths about women in architecturre. In: J. Benedict Brown, H. Harriss, R. Morrow and J. Soane, ed., A Gendered Profession: The question of representation in space making. London: RIBA Publishing, 2016, p.18
    [7] Fairs, M. (2017). Female architects respond to gender survey: “It’s getting better but far too slowly”. [online] Dezeen. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/11/17/female-architects-respond-architecture-gender-survey-worlds-biggest-firms/ [Accessed 27 Oct. 2018]., 2017
    [8] Duncan, J. and Newman, V., Women in architecture: stand up and be counted. In: J. Benedict Brown, H. Harriss, R. Morrow and J. Soane, ed., A Gendered Profession: The question of representation in space making. London: RIBA Publishing. 2016, p.61
    [9] Clark, 2016, p.15
    [10] Stead, N., Redesigning practice. [online] Parlour. Available at: http://archiparlour.org/setting-our-own-house-in-order/ [Accessed 17 Oct. 2018], 2012.
    [11] Brown, et al., 2016, p.7
    [12] Manley, S. and de-Graft-Johnson, A., Why women still leave architecture? A research report. Women & Environment International Magazine, [online] 62(63), pp.19-20. Available at: https://search-proquest-com.ucd.idm.oclc.org/docview/211604807?accountid=14507&pq-origsite=summon [Accessed 5 Nov. 2018]., 2004, p.20
    [13] Burns, K., The Hero’s Journey: Architecture’s ‘long hours’ culture. In: J. Benedict Brown, H. Harriss, R. Morrow and J. Soane, ed., A Gendered Profession: The question of representation in space making. London: RIBA Publishing., 2016, p.66
    [14] Humphryes, J., Redesigning the profession. In: J. Benedict Brown, H. Harriss, R. Morrow and J. Soane, ed., A Gendered Profession: The question of representation in space making. London: RIBA Publishing., 2016, p.121
    [15] Burns, 2016, p.66
    [16] Rose, J., Hewitt, B. and Baxter, J. (2011). Women and part-time employment. Journal of Sociology, 49(1), pp.41-59, p.41
    [17] The Parlour Guides to Equitable Practice: Long-hours culture. (2014). [ebook] University of Melbourne and University of Queensland. Available at: http://www.archiparlour.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Guide2-LongHours.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2018], p.9
    [18] Craven, V. (2004). Constructing a career: women architects at work. Career Development International, [online] 9(4/5), pp.518-531. Available at: https://search-proquest-com.ucd.idm.oclc.org/docview/219290042/fulltextPDF/358285285D7E4C03PQ/1?accountid=14507 [Accessed 5 Nov. 2018]. p.524
    [19] Mark, L., Women in architecture survey 2017: Pay gap widens between male and female architects. Architects Journal, 244(3), pp.1-30., 2017, p.30
    [20] Burns, 2016, p.64
    [21] Parlour, n.d., p.3
    [22] Burns, 2016, p.64
    [23] Humphryes, 2016, p.120
    [24] Clark, 2016, p.25
    [25] Clark, 2016, p.27
    [26] Clark, 2016, p.27
    [27] Stead, 2012
    [28] Burns, 2016, p.66
    [29] Clark, 2016, p.26
    [30] Parlour, n.d., p.4
    [31] Parlour, n.d., p.4
    [32] Parlour, n.d., p.4
    [33] Rubery, J. and Rafferty, A. (2013). Women and recession revisited. Work, Employment and Society, 27(3), pp.414-432., n.d., p.426
    [34] TUC, n.d., p.9
    [35] Hamer, S., On age and architecture. In: J. Benedict Brown, H. Harriss, R. Morrow and J. Soane, ed., A Gendered Profession: The question of representation in space making. London: RIBA Publishing., 2016 p.45
    [36] RIAI Annual Report 2007. [online] The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland. Available at: https://www.riai.ie/downloads/annual_reports/2007_Annual_Report.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2018].The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, 2007, p.16
    [37] Clark, 2016, p.22
    [38] Clark, 2016, p.22
    [39] Stead, 2012
    [40] Humphryes, 2016, p.119
    [41] Stratigakos, D. (2016). Where are the women architects?. Princeton: Princeton University Press., 2016, p.35
    [42] Barry, U. and Conroy, P. Ireland in crisis 2008-2012: women, austerity and inequality. [ebook], 2013, Routledge. Available at: https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/handle/10197/4820 [Accessed 27 Oct. 2018]., 2012, p.1
    [43] Ibid, 2012, p.29
    [44] Fowler, B. and Wilson, F., 2004, p.114
    [45] Duncan and Newman, 2016, p.59
    [46] Pepchinski, M., And then we were the 99%: Reflections on gender and the changing contours of German architectural practice. In: J. Benedict Brown, H. Harriss, R. Morrow and J. Soane, ed., A Gendered Profession: The question of representation in space making. London: RIBA Publishing, 2016, p.245
    [47] Clark, 2016, p.29