‘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.
‘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
THE LONG READ: Ireland is neither a totalitarian state, nor even a dictatorship. Nonetheless, the propaganda of an economic elite has forged a dominant consensus, in which two centre-right parties compete for power. Across a print media duopoly and national broadcaster well-honed techniques of social control divert attention and sow confusion, while subtly instilling dogmas. The education system also plays a vital role in propagating social norms and channelling aspirations. The dominant consensus is not doctrinally extreme or even illiberal, at least by international comparisons, but it insulates embedded wealth in the form of land and property from taxation, stimulates demand for mortgages among the young, and protects the farming sector from environmental oversight.
I – We have ways of making you think…
As Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels had one major difficulty: a taste for dark-haired beauties. His marriage to the perfectly-Aryan-looking Magda (with whom he would later ‘loyally’ commit suicide inside Hitler’s bunker in 1945, after they first murdered all six of their sleeping children) became a sham. Poor Josef could not help taking advantage of the brunette actresses over whom his role effectively gave dominion, controlling movie sets that were a Harvey Weinstein paradise. In particular, Goebbels conceived a passion for a Czech – untermensch – beauty Lída Baarová, which almost drove him to end the marriage in 1938. Hitler himself intervened demanding his propaganda chief remain with his wife and children. The mask concealing the hypocrisy could not be allowed to slip.
Despite occasional differences of opinion, Hitler realised that Goebbels was crucial to the smooth functioning of the Third Reich. While Leni Riefenstahl delivered innovative blockbuster effects, Goebbels genius lay in delivering subtle cues, released under a comfort blanket of light entertainment. Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not even care to see der Fuhrer appear in cinema news reels. In a totalitarian society a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics.
He had immersed himself in the golden era of the silver screen, expressing particular fondness for the 1937 Disney classic ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Overtly political films were not only useless but also counterproductive he believed. The depravity of ‘the Jew’ should be integrated into pictures which carried an audience along, such as the lively 1940 ‘historical’ drama Jud Süss, ‘Jew Suss’. This contrasted with the heavy-handed style of Der Ewige Jude (1940) ‘the Eternal Jew’, directed by Fritz Hippler that depicted Jews alongside rats inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Goebbels correctly predicted this would bomb in the box office.[i]
Light entertainment diverts, as does outright nonsense, which George Orwell referred to as ‘Duckspeak’ in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. Its effect is to lower the intellectual level of conversation, spread confusion and allow the speaker to evade responsibility: a tactic increasingly familiar in our era of ‘post truth’. In the novel the official language of Oceania is overtly-propagandist Newspeak, but Duckspeak’s capacity to accommodate contradictions, even midway through a sentence, was much valued by the ruling regime.
There are societies such as North Korea’s, or previously Mao’s China when children informed on their parents, where freedom of expression is almost completely eradicated and replaced with Newspeak – and probably Duckspeak – to such an extent that individuality is effectively extinguished. One result is a severe lack of economic dynamism. Market economies, however, require freethinking innovators in order to thrive; a small resistance movement even survived in Nazi Germany because Newspeak had not entirely permeated that society. ‘Hard’ propaganda – or Newspeak – is thus only of limited value. Instead, the ‘soft’ propaganda of light entertainment and, increasingly, Duckspeak – including the obfuscation by politicians who ‘duck out’ of answering questions – is more generally deployed to support indispensable fictions in liberal democracies – like the canard of opportunity-for-all. Moreover, even in democratic societies educational filters screen for obedience.
Variants of these influences can be identified in Ireland, where great wealth subsists alongside grinding, long-term poverty. Irish society is generally tolerant, but growing inequality is unraveling the social fabric, and creates conditions for the scapegoating of minorities.
II – Ireland’s Two-Party System
Foreign multinationals are a transient presences on the Irish scene. Their indigenous handlers, an aging cohort of predominantly male, property-owning, car-driving, privately schooled, health-insured professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors, financial service providers and other high-earning business people – are the enduring economic elite of the state. Its dominant consensus does not emerge from smoke-filled rooms any longer. Rather, it is an aggregate conception of what a ‘normal’, self-interested person of this class aspires to. Indeed, those upholding what is a neo-liberal orthodoxy may be unaware – like Ebenezer Scrooge – of its detrimental effect. What is an often passive propaganda is expressed through a media dependent on advertising revenue, and in the policies of the two largest political parties.
A recent poll showed seventy percent of the highest (AB) social class support one or other of the two main centre-right political parties, in particular Fine Gael (Irish Times MRBI poll, October 16th, 2018), now the ‘natural party of government’ for the dominant interest.
The ‘bricks and mortar’ of property remains, overwhelmingly, their preferred asset, with many acting as landlords. Thus, according to economist David McWilliams the wealthiest top five-percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, with eighty-five per cent of that held in property and land. The key objective of Irish propaganda, and we may call it that, is therefore to keep the economy on an even keel of steady growth, and rising rents, while ensuring that wealth, mostly property, is subjected to minimal taxation. The result is that in the last financial year a mere €500 million out of total tax receipts of over €50 billion, derived from land or property.[ii]
The dominant consensus also insists that it is necessary to keep a lid on government expenditure on public services (most of which the elite does not use), so as to avoid the over-heating of Bertie Ahern’s ‘boomenomics’ before the crash of 2008. Then low taxation on income and wealth went hand-in-hand with spending increases, and public sector salary ‘benchmarking’ with the private sector. The ineptitude of these policies were partly to blame for a property bubble before the crash of 2008, and has consigned Fianna Fáil to its present subaltern role, in which it now flaunts a more centrist approach.
In a clear signal to the economic elite, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan launched his Budget 2016 claiming the days of ‘boom and bust’ would be consigned to the history books.[iii] Throughout his tenure (2011-2017) no serious public housing initiatives were embarked on. In 2015, for example, by which time economic growth for the year was at 7.8%, a mere 334 social and affordable units were built.[iv] The ensuing scarcity ensured a dramatic recovery in property prices, including that held by the state bank NAMA.
Another salient feature of Irish propaganda is the essential delivery of buy-in from young adults, who continue to purchase property at inflated prices. Prior to the crash Dublin prices soared to such an extent that a residence in the city became more expensive than New York or London.[v] Dublin prices are set to reach boom-time levels this year according to Pat Davitt, head of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV), with an average family home costing over half a million euros.[vi] Meanwhile average Dublin rents now exceed the heights of the Celtic Tiger by thirty percent. This means those landholders, and institutions, that weathered the recession have seen huge dividends.
Source daft.ie
Any new property purchaser instantly becomes a stakeholder in the dominant consensus. The buy-in of upwardly-mobile youth not only maintains market demand, but also brings political support for the dominant consensus. Political parties threatening the ‘stability’ under the centre-right axis are subtly undermined as the ‘loony’ left and not given a platform in the mainstream media, or co-opted into governing coalitions and discredited, as was the case with Labour, the Greens and now the Independent Alliance.
Importantly, up to fifteen percent of the population are foreign-born nationals. Apart from UK nationals, they do not enjoy a right to vote in general elections, unless they take out Irish citizenship, costing almost one thousand euro. Unlike native-born Irish, who historically had among the highest rate of private home ownership in the world, peaking at 80% in 1991, (declining to 71% in 2011),[vii] many come from countries where renting for life is the norm, and may not wish to reside here long-term. Politically, this large cohort only exerts influence via multinational employers, who face demands for wage increases due to spiralling rents. At the bottom of the ladder are unskilled (or at least unqualified) non-EU migrants – gastarbeiter – many of whom are on short-term- (often student-) visas, and permitted to remain in the country only insofar as they serve an economic purpose.
III – The Crucial Constituency
The elite’s longstanding hold on power, via the two main political parties, relies on a crucial constituency of farmers and their extended families, who are evenly distributed throughout the state, apart from Dublin. Although continually declining in number, they are overwhelmingly native Irish – thus enfranchised – vociferous campaigners, and of a vintage that tends to vote. This ensures their supposed interests, more accurately those of comprador multinationals that trade their commodities, are protected by Irish propaganda.
A remarkable eighty-percent of farmers, working on almost eighty-five thousand separate farms, support either Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil according to the aforementioned poll. The former are especially reliant on their allegiance, which means the national (and global) interest in reducing GHG emissions in order to avoid up to €600 million every year in EU fines after 2020 may be overlooked.[viii] Agriculture produces almost a third of total national emissions, yet contributes a mere 1.7% of carbon taxes.[ix] The farming sector is, however, an increasingly fragile alliance, with the average annual income on dairy farms approximately €85,000, but averaging only €15,000 on the average dry cattle (beef) farm, all of which, derives from subsidies.[x]
An urban working class of unskilled, semi-skilled and unemployed, has been mollified by comparatively generous social welfare payments, but is increasingly impoverished by the scarcity and cost of property, rising rents, and a failing system of public health. Eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds are discriminated against by lower social welfare payments, but tend not to turn out for elections, and are inclined to emigrate, so can easily be ignored.
Preserving a share of working class support remains important, in terms of optics at least, for the two main political parties, especially Fianna Fáil, which preserves the charade of being a party for all classes. Unlike farmers, however, historically a working class consciousness has not been evident in Ireland, and approaches to the national question and moral or religious concerns have tended to sway this cohort. Also, while farmers have clear objectives in terms of maintaining a subsidy regime, and avoiding environmental regulation, the working class is more easily distracted from establishing fixed political aspirations.
The widespread protests over water charges in 2014 were one of the few occasions when the dam broke, and working class discontents spilled onto the streets. But this single issue could be conceded, and sustained engagement with politics avoided. Yet, according to Social Justice Ireland, last year 790,000 people were living in poverty, of whom 250,000 were children.[xi]
Similar to farmers, most civil service workers, including senior teachers, have been kept on side with generous pay and conditions. Teaching salaries averaging over $60,000 per year compare favourably with other OECD countries. As with the social welfare system, new entrants have been discriminated against, with many being forced to emigrate during the crash, but they count for less politically than their senior colleagues. The current modus vivendi between the teaching unions and the ruling parties is reflected in the terminal decline of the Labour Party, their traditional voice in the Dáil.
The new Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, recently described secondary teachers as being overburdened by ‘initiative overload’[xii], which might come as a surprise considering they enjoy more than sixteen weeks of holidays per year, and curricula that have changed little in decades. Secondary school teachers play an important role in upholding the dominant consensus.
The spiral of inequality, globally and nationally is, however, accelerating, and the coalition of interests maintaining the dominant consensus is unstable. Multinationals siphon off vast profits from a market one Tesco executive allegedly referred to as ‘Treasure Island’, with consumer prices, on average, twelve percent higher than in the UK,[xiii] while some avoid corporation taxes altogether. Meanwhile the state labours under a debt of over €200 billion after a bailout the terms of which (including the creation of NAMA) protected the interests of those members of the economic elite that did not speculate wildly prior to the crash – such as former solicitor Brian O’Donnell who was evicted from his Dalkey home in 2015 – while working to the detriment the poor, and the impressionable young who had been encouraged to take out crippling mortgages.
The Irish economy is vulnerable to global financial shocks – with just fifty large firms accounting for three-quarters of all exports[xiv] – a recrudescence of nationalism after Brexit, and the growing obsolescence of many forms of work, including our current farming model. The economic elite is intellectually rudderless, and only knows the way of economic growth-without-end, where ecological constraints are ignored, and in which the retail cartels make a mockery of the notion of a free market. The centre-right cannot hold for long, but in the meantime, the wheels of Irish propaganda keep turning.
IV – The Propaganda Model – Education
State secondary school pupils are encouraged to take subjects that will prepare them for work in multinational corporations, with an emphasis on science and technology, rather than arts, humanities or social sciences. Philosophy is unavailable as a secondary school subject, while history has been downgraded in recent years.
In the state school system, which I observed as a supply teacher, rebellious students are removed from obedient peers and housed en bloc in ‘pass’ classes, or entire schools, which are little more than advanced creches, or holding facilities. There behaviours and performances deteriorate in the absence of positive role models. Ill-equipped for work or even social life, the dole queue awaits, or worse. Importantly, this underclass is unable to articulate their grievances – one in six of the adult population is functionally illiterate.[xv]
The essential breeding ground of the economic elite is found in the paradoxically state-funded system of private education, in which the state pays the salaries of teachers – costing around €90 million per year. This ensures a private education is not prohibitively expensive, broadening the base of the elite, with over twenty-five thousand students enrolling in 2017.[xvi] In these institutions lasting ties are formed, and the best preparation for the Leaving Certificate offered, which is generally a code to be cracked. Behavioural problems among middle class students are less pronounced, in my experience, but where rebelliousness, or just a lack of conformity, is apparent authorities employ long-standing methods of control. The sport of rugby emphasises the collective in a test of manhood, with dissenters often subjected to homophobic slurs.
As far back as the 1920s, one of the leading Dublin Catholic secondary schools for boys of its time, O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, recommended its pupils in the following terms: ‘Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possess the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team.’[xvii] Little has changed in a hundred years. The abiding ambition of most all-male private schools remains not only examination results, but also to develop a cast of mind disposed to “pull with the team”, while instilling an idea of what is ‘normal’ in the dominant consensus.
Widespread single gender education keeps more troublesome and sports-obsessed male adolescents apart from females, who streak ahead academically. But when both enter the workforce, the demands of motherhood generally count against women working the long hours necessary for career advancement in most of the elite professions. ‘Early-rising’, workaholic male professionals are the praetorian guard of the dominant consensus.
Irish class boundaries are not impermeable, or based on race or creed – as Leo Varadkar’s background illustrates – but it is increasingly difficult for anyone who is not from an elevated social background to rise up through the educational ranks to become a lawyer, doctor or even a banker. For example a young barrister, after a minimum of four years full-time study, is required to work without a salary for a further two, while he ‘devils’ under a senior colleague, thereby excluding a large proportion of the population. That profession is the bulk supplier of the country’s judiciary, which goes some way towards explaining the Court’s historic deference to property interests – notably: In the matter of Article 26 of the Constitution and in the Matter of The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, 1981.
Privileged classes, nonetheless, still produce offspring with intellectual or artistic aspirations that survive the stultifying educational system. As the economic benefits of the humanities and arts are now grudgingly recognised these pursuits are indulged with financial support available from state and private sources, albeit generally via laborious application processes. Ideally, however, the ‘creative’ is an advertising executive. Due to high rents, artists are pushed into becoming ‘art-repreneurs’, and conscripted into marketing the state as a place to do business.
Academia once offered a platform for meaningful critiques of Irish society, but little interaction with the public now occurs, as excessive specialisation has brought abstraction to most subjects. As in other countries, young academics are required to ‘publish or perish’ prolix articles addressed to their peers, leaving little time for political engagement. In 2012 Tom Garvin, Emeritus Professor of Politics decried the dismantling of prior ‘semi-democratic’ structures in University College Dublin, claiming: ‘internal representative structures and freedom of speech were closed down and replaced with Soviet-style top-down “councils” that passively received and passed on instructions from on high’. As non-academic staff began to outnumber academics Garvin found ‘an indescribable grey philistinism’ characterise the public culture of the college ‘and a hideous management-speak’ drowned out ‘coherent communication.’[xviii]
IV – The Propaganda Model – Print Media
The Irish media is subject to global trends, but also internal dynamics. The reputation of journalists as crotchety, difficult people, so often depicted on screen, belies how most now “pull with the team”, or see their careers stall. The journalist that questions dominant consensus is depicted as a conspiracy theorist, but this cautionary distrust of authority now appears to be in short supply. Print media in Ireland is on its knees as young readers, in particular, opt for online content, which has resulted in significant redundancies. Precarious freelancing is the norm for new entrants.
Denis O’Brien – who a tribunal of enquiry in 2011 concluded had handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to a government minister, who it was ‘beyond doubt’ had given ‘substantive information to him, of significant value and assistance to him’ in securing a mobile telephone licence[xix] – controls a great swathe of Irish media, including the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent – the widest-circulating daily and Sunday newspapers – thirteen regional publications, commercial radio channels, Newstalk (the Orwellian association seemingly lost on them) and Today FM. O’Brien’s outlets are generally pro-business, or more accurately pro-multinational, and often critical of the institutions of the state and even individual ministers, but generally support the economic elite with selective regurgitation of government Newspeak.
For example, the headline of the Irish Independent on October 18th 2018 ran: ‘Varadkar’s Government in crisis after one minister resigns, another faces fight for survival.’ The article simulates the drama of Fianna Fáil calling time on the coalition, thereby maintaining the fiction of two opposing forces – or only two options in the event of an election. The dominant consensus is woven into the piece with the reminder: ‘The instability has created a major crisis for the Government after a Budget that was well received by most sectors’. In contrast, Social Justice Ireland argued that the budget disproportionately benefited high-earners, noting: ‘Budget 2019 fails to make any notable impact on Ireland’s entrenched inequalities and fails to tackle any of the major challenges the country currently faces.’[xx]
The ‘Indo’ also ostentatiously stimulates demand among upwardly-mobile youth for property and health insurance. Thus the headline on the 19th of October 2018 read: ‘Families to save in home loan and health shake-up’. Its consumer affairs correspondent announced: ‘Families are to enjoy the benefits of a price war in health insurance, and increased competition with even more entrants into the mortgage market’. Mostly, however, it provides the mainstays of effective propaganda: light entertainment, especially blanket sport coverage, celebrity gossip and sexual titillation.
There is only one other genuinely daily national indigenous newspaper – the Irish Times – which has hoovered up the Irish Examiner and regional titles to create a duopoly. It is considered, and styles itself, ‘the paper of record’, but rarely conducts meaningful investigations, tending only to print sensitive material once it has been aired elsewhere, such as when reporting on the harassment of employees by Michael Colgan, the former director of the Gate Theatre.[xxi] The catastrophic purchase of www.myhome.ie at the height of the last boom makes it a vested interest in the property market, which is reflected in extensive property supplements. Often seen as a bastion of Irish democracy, its credibility was undermined by the hosting of unmarked advertorials of the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plan.[xxii]
The imprint of government Newspeak was also evident on October 13th, the morning before the last budget was announced, with the headline ‘Significant spending increases for housing and health’ emblazoned across the front cover. Importantly, it gave a positive spin on the budget, which could be seen from every newsstand in the country, ensuring, even if the paper itself was never read, it maintained the ambient feel-good-factor. Was the positive spin provided as a quid pro quo for the scoop, or strategic leak?
The fingerprints of the economic elite are also apparent in the opening words of an article by chief political reporter Pat Leahy on October 14th. He cautioned the following: ‘First, do no harm. Any finance minister should heed the primary precept of the Hippocratic oath, and ensure that their fiscal and economic prescriptions do not damage the Government, or the economy.’ “Doing no harm” appears to involve upholding the dominant consensus, and avoiding the issues of social exclusion and sustainability.
The ‘Old Lady of D’Olier Street’ still provides a platform for left-leaning and progressive journalists, including Fintan O’Toole, Una Mullally and David McWilliams, but this does not imply relentless focus on Ireland’s economic and social structures. Their emphasis has tended to be on identity politics, issues of individual liberty, particularly reproductive rights, gender equality, and from O’Toole the ongoing dramas of Trump and Brexit. Only McWilliams consistently nails the social structures. Ultimately, the paper cannot afford to affront AB readers or farmers with ‘shrill’ left-wing commentaries or sustained campaigns, but in keeping these writers on board it maintains the illusion of being progressive.
It has also dumbed-down considerably recently in the face of ‘commercial realities’, in other words a high salary overhang. Stodgy book reviews have been marginalised, with increasing emphasis on business, vox pop reporting –with leading articles like ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’[xxiii] – consumer affairs and, as usual, lavish sport coverage: all of these fit with the propaganda model of distraction with light entertainment.
We have relied on UK publications to break stories such as labour abuses in the fishing industry, the substitution of horsemeat for beef, and the recent scandal of unmarked government advertorials. Serious interrogation of the role of the Gardaí has been conducted at a remove from the mainstream.
Two political magazines, The Phoenix and Village Magazine, offer satire and dissent, but the former is not available for free online and thus has limited political clout. The latter is yet to develop a viable commercial model, but at least upheld freedom of expression and Dáil privilege by publishing online (along with www.broadsheet.ie) a record of Catherine Murphy’s speech accusing Denis O’Brien of corruption, after he had taken out an injunction against RTÉ, and when the Irish Times took fright.
VI – The Propaganda Model – the State Broadcaster
The state broadcaster receives a compulsory licence fee from anyone with a television set in the country, but still depends on advertising revenue to remain financially solvent. Like the Irish Times, RTÉ is a broad church, but both TV and radio stations are awash with light entertainment, including vox pop phone-ins like Joe Duffy’s Liveline which also offers an outlet for nonsensical Duckspeakers, while Ray D’Arcy and Ryan Tubridy provide distraction throughout the day on the news and current affairs channel RTÉ Radio 1.
Tubridy is Ireland’s highest-paid broadcaster, and often its public face as host of the prime time, Friday night ‘The Late Late Show’. A scion of a well-known Fianna Fáil family, he has assumed a seemingly unassailable position, and rarely courts controversy; although he recently suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘,[xxiv] and once compared breastfeeding in public to urinating on the street.[xxv] Mostly however he tugs at the heartstrings of viewers, while devoting his spare time to writing children’s books.
RTÉ mostly anesthetises the population with light entertainment, especially sport – one recent survey showed that on ‘Morning Ireland’, the highest-rating radio show in the country, environmental stories were covered for only 0.92% of the time, whereas sports news accounted for 12.41% of content.[xxvi] Elsewhere, shows such as ‘Claire Byrne Live’ offer a small screen outlet for Duckspeak. At the end of one episode last year, during which evidence for human-influenced climate change was ‘debated’, thirty-four percent of respondents did not believe this would pose a serious threat in their lifetimes, while nine-percent did not know.[xxvii] Damien O’Reilly has also provided an outlet for Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary to express the Duckspeak of climate denial,[xxviii] the farming lobby no doubt delighted by this muddying of the waters.
What passes for news and current affairs coverage generally consists of assessments of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics, or commentaries on controversies stirred up in the print media. A case in point was in the recent presidential election when the previously unknown, and unsupported, Peter Casey made a demeaning remarks about Travellers, which was greeted with such ‘outrage’ that he became a serious candidate in the election, thereby providing plenty of fodder for Joe Duffy, and others.
Ironically, the most serious political critique is found in the weekly comedy show ‘Callan’s Kicks’, where a degree of latitude is permitted. But as Theodore Zeldin explains, comedy can actually have the effect of reinforcing conformity ‘by being its safety valve’. Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools, ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down’, but ‘did so only for a few days.’[xxix]
*******
Ireland is a free country without an oppressive secret police force systematically monitoring communications. Despite the chilling effect of current defamation law, freedom of expression is enshrined in the Constitution and European Charter of Human Rights. Nonetheless as George Orwell put it in his proposed preface to his 1945 novel Animal Farm: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.’ Orwell observed how:
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Irish propaganda upholds a dominant consensus: preserving low taxation on wealth, especially property; encouraging steady economic growth, including rising rents; maintaining buy-in from young property purchasers; and insulating the agricultural sector, often referred to as ‘our farmers’ on the state broadcaster, from criticism. This is achieved through straightforward manipulation of the media as well as instilling conformity through the education system, but also in the use of light entertainment, especially sport, as distraction, as well as in the peddling of plain nonsense, on RTÉ especially. With the advent of social media we are seeing new and sinister methods of achieving these objectives, which this article has not addressed, but which Ireland is not immune from.
The relatively new medium of the internet need not necessarily be feared however. It can, even through increasingly compromised social media, counter propaganda, by allowing like-minded individuals to converge and orchestrate campaigns. Propaganda can easily be exposed and alternative viewpoints expressed. But we must guard against its capacity for offering further light entertainment distraction, and platforms for madcap Duckspeakers.
The most important weapon against propaganda is education, both childhood and lifelong, which must address adult illiteracy. A priority should be reform of that sector in Ireland: first by ending subsidised private education; then placing greater emphasis on the enquiring humanities and arts, before addressing the decline of higher learning institutions.
The water charges campaign failed to generate long-term political engagement among the working class, or an increasingly squeezed middle. Representatives of the economic elite could concede on that single issue and take the rug from underneath organisers, who had seen the campaign in broader terms. Future campaigns should directly confront a taxation system which fails to alleviate rising wealth inequality. As we have seen, the top five percent in the country own over forty percent of its wealth, eighty-five per cent of which is held in property or land. A long-standing regime of minimal property taxes, along with the failure of the state to construct social housing to any extent, have severely accentuated wealth inequalities and seen property prices and rents spiral. A campaign for housing as an ‘inalienable and imprescriptible’ right enshrined in the constitution[xxx], should become the main progressive objective.
[i] ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’, TV mini-series, BBC (1992)
[xvi] Carl O’Brien, Jenna Clarke-Molloy, ‘Private school enrolment returns to boom-time high’, Irish Times, December 28th, 2017.
[xvii] David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 2010, p.10.
[xviii] Tom Garvin ‘The bleak future of the Irish university’, Irish Times, May 1st, 2012.
[xix] The report summaries the payments made to the then Fine Gael Minister Michael Lowry saying, ‘In aggregating the known payments from Mr Denis O Brien to Mr Michael Lowry, it is apposite to note that, between the granting of the second GSM licence to Esat Digiphone in May 1996, and the transmission of £420,000 sterling to complete the purchase of the latter of Mr Lowry’s English properties in December 1999, Mr O’Brien had made or facilitated payments to Mr. Lowry of £147,000 sterling, £300,000 sterling and a benefit equivalent to a payment in the form of Mr O’Brien’s support for a loan of £420,000 sterling.’ From: Untitled, ‘Lowry helped O’Brien get mobile licence’, Untitled, RTÉ, 22nd of March, 2011, https://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0322/298935-moriarty_background/, accessed 16/11/18.
[xxi] Laurence Mackin, Conor Gallagher, ‘Seven women allege abuse and harassment by Michael Colgan’, Irish Times, November 4th, 2017.
[xxii] Kevin Doyle, ‘Varadkar orders review of Project Ireland €1.5m publicity campaign amid controversy’, Irish Independent, March 1st, 2018.
[xxiii] Rosita Boland, ‘Life on the Luas: a tale of two tracks’, Irish Times, October 14th, 2017.
[xxiv] Untitled, Stickybottle, ‘Flood of complaints to RTE after ‘Late Late Show’ cyclists item’ 14th of March, 2018, http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/complaints-rte-cyclists-item/
[xxv] Denise Deighan O’Callaghan, Letter to the Editor: ‘Tubridy’s comments on breastfeeding’, Irish Times, November 8th, 2004.
[xxviii] Sasha Brady, ‘Michael O’Leary slams climate change as ‘complete and utter rubbish’’, Irish Independent, April 8th, 2017.
[xxix] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, London, Maclehouse Press, 2015. p.177.
[xxx] See Eoin Tierney, ‘The key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution’ July 1st, 2001, Cassandra Voices, http://cassandravoices.com/law/the-key-change-to-fix-the-irish-constitution/, accessed 21/11/18.
Leo Varadkar dismisses his father Ashok’s claim to be a socialist, which came in an interview after his son became Taoiseach. According to Leo he does not really know what the term means:
You’ve probably seen stuff where he describes himself as a socialist but that’s total rubbish .. It’s not that he believes in high taxes or generous welfare, quite the contrary … Nor the nationalisation of the means of distribution of wealth or any of those sort of things (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.24).
It is not simply that Ashok Varadkar has misrepresented his real position, but that socialism is to be rubbished. As he put it recently in the Dáil, ‘What the Socialists want … is to divide society into some people who pay for everything and qualify for nothing …’
As a politician Leo has long represented those people who “pay for everything”, only to be preyed on by ‘parasitic’ socialists. It is a neat inversion of the Marxist argument that capitalism exploits workers, which has been used by conservatives in the United States with enduring success.
The Fine Gael party has traveled some distance from the days of former Taoiseach John A. Costello, who urged in 1969: ‘to put upon your banners the Just Society, that Fine Gale is not a Tory party’ (McCullagh,, 2010, p.398). Under Enda Kenny Tory strategists were brought in as advisors, and Varadkar now firmly positions the party in the centre-right of Irish politics.
I – The Young Turk
Trenchant criticism of Fine Gael’s social democratic legacy helped Leo Varadkar make his name within the party. In a notorious speech in 2007, which he retrospectively considers ‘terrible, crass and disrespectful’, he described the beleaguered Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Brian Cowen as ‘a Garret FitzGerald’, who had ‘trebled the national debt and effectively destroyed the country (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.88)’.
Garret FitzGerald was the leader of Fine Gael between 1977 and 1987, a two-term Taoiseach whose last administration was marked by soaring national debt, in part due to his reluctance to impose swingeing cuts, and also because of the presence within his coalition of the Labour Party, and opposition to austerity measures from the opposition Fianna Fáil, which changed its tune after winning the 1987 election.
Away with the old – former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.
FitzGerald was identified with the Keynesian economic policy of using government spending to stimulate economic activity. This approach goes back to John A. Costello’s First Inter-Party Government, 1948-51, when balanced budgets were abandoned and a capital budget first introduced. There was, however, always a conservative wing within the party aligned with the legacy of the two Cosgrave (father and son, W.T. and Liam) administrations of 1922-32 and 1974-77, and subsequently influenced by Milton Friedman’s Monetarist approach, underpinning Thatcherism.
MEP Brian Hayes remains an apologist for Varadkar’s speech: ‘There was a large part of Leo, me as well, who resents how the Garret FitzGerald government didn’t do the things they said they’d do to fix the economy. There were a lot of people in Fine Gael who were very disappointed [with the FitzGerald government] and he was trying to articulate that (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.87)’.
From the outset Varadkar had cannily identified that cleavage within Fine Gael. This is clear from one of his early missives to the Irish Times, written in the wake of the debacle of Michael Noonan’s loss to Bertie Aherne’s Fianna Fáil in the 2002 general election. He described an ‘internal conflict between its conservative Christian democrat base (which it is set on deserting) and its liberal, social democratic base from the Fitzgerald era (which deserted it some time ago) (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.46).’
In Varadkar’s view, the only strategic option was to appeal to that conservative, Christian Democratic base, and dispense with social-democratism altogether. This is consistent with rubbishing his father’s socialism today, but actually misrepresents the Christian basis of Fine Gael’s social-democratism, particularly that of John A. Costello’s son Declan Costello, the author of the Just Society.
For Varadkar Christian Democratism was synonymous with right-wing conservative politics, which was evident in his thinking from the outset. Initial Progressive Democrat inclinations gave way to respect for the leadership qualities of John Bruton. Membership of Young Fine Gael followed, while studying medicine in Trinity College.
This brought a Washington Ireland Programme for Service and Leadership internship in 2000, under Republican Congressman Peter King. The New York representative’s politics were centrist in American terms – where socialism is still a dirty word – but included an enduring commitment to state infrastructure, such as rail, while maintaining a conservative attitudes to same-sex marriage and abortion.
Ironically, given his current identification with liberal causes such as marriage equality, and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Leo appears to have initially drawn from the same conservative playbook. In 2010 he argued in relation to abortion services that ‘it isn’t the child’s fault that they’re the child of rape’; while on the question of marriage equality he once argued: ‘Every child has the right to a mother and father and, as much as is possible, the state should vindicate the right’. He even courted Ronan Mullen for a time, inviting him to address a constituency meeting in 2007 on the issue of civil partnerships (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 131, 169 and 170).
Varadkar is a late convert to social liberalism, but he remains a fiscal conservative. In power he has evinced little enthusiasm for government investment, including describing rail travel as being for romantics. Thus far Leo-Liberalism has entailed doing very little to alter Irish society. Inactivity in office might be considered an attribute, but this predisposition suggests little will be done to tackle the current housing crisis, or address Ireland’s runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions.
II – Double-Jobbing?
Leo Varadkar is a preternatural politician, an exotic insider who has, with great alacrity, climbed the greasy pole to become the youngest Taoiseach in the history of the state, while others around him floundered. In achieving this impressive feat he has displayed unmatched understanding of the dark political arts, which Niccolò Machiavelli believed necessary to advance a politician’s ends. But the Renaissance Italian warns his Prince to shun flatterers.
A recent biography Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach casts Varadkar as ‘the tall, dark and handsome’ icon of the new Ireland, whose ‘photographic memory’ (a facility also once attributed to Garret FitzGerald) allowed him to waltz through a medical degree on this way to high political office (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 15 and 39). This ‘young foggy’ honed his abilities in the trenches of student politics alongside comrades, many of whom have now fallen by the wayside – a recurring theme throughout his career – such as Lucinda Creighton.
The two young authors appear close to the subject, to the point where dispassionate assessment is not apparent: one, Niall O’Connor, was recently appointed a special adviser to the Ministry of Defence; the other Phillip Ryan is deputy political editor across the titles of the generally pro-government Independent Newspaper group, owned by Denis O’Brien.
Call me Dave.
The book was published by Biteback Publishing, partly owned by Tory grandee and billionaire Lord Ashcroft, which also released a biography of David Cameron Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron (Bitback, London, 2015), co-written by Ashcroft himself, alongside works attacking the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
But as any historian is aware, an apparently tainted source may nonetheless yield valuable evidence. Time will tell whether our Prince has erred in allowing damaging material to enter the public domain.
In his review of the book Diarmuid Ferriter drew attention to a passage explaining how Varadkar: ‘floated the idea to one TD of creating anonymous accounts to make positive comments under online stories on popular news websites.’ But it seems likely that this going on in political parties across the board.
Far worse was Varadkar’s conduct while Minister for Social Protection (2016-17), where he launched an advertising campaign against welfare ‘cheats’. In the meantime he used the Department as a launchpad for his leadership bid, after first hatching an escape from the ‘Angola’ of Health.
An unnamed adviser relates how visits to Intreos, Department offices located in every county, were used to further his ambition to lead Fine Gael: ‘Social protection was great for us … We travelled everywhere. We went to every parish hall. Every councillor we got to meet. The campaign indirectly started when we were meeting councillors’ (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.254)
Masquerading as Department business, these were tours on what former Fianna Fáil leader Charlie Haughey called the ‘rubber chicken and chips circuit’ of constituency branches, all at the expense of the Irish taxpayer. Considering Varadkar’s attacks on ‘welfare cheats’, this double-jobbing is the height of hypocrisy. Such conduct may be normal in Irish politics, but that does not make it right.
Unfortunately, doing little, while generating a lot of noise, marked Varadkar’s stint in the Department of Social Protection, as has been the case in his other roles.
What also emerges is just how embedded many of the most influential journalists in the country appear to be. The authors unashamedly reveal how 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’.
During one recent jolly in New York, ‘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, who may have been present, gleefully 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; all, we may assume, at the expense of the Irish taxpayer (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, pp. 321-322).
Few journalists could resist the prospect of such intimacy with a sitting Taoiseach, fewer still could emerge from such lavish entertainments with objectivity intact.
The attitude of one of his predecessors John A. Costello, who inveighed against ‘the era of the expense account … the era of the expensive restaurant (McCullagh, 2010, p.390)’, has long since fallen into abeyance.
It should also raise an eyebrow that Ryan Tubridy, Miriam Callaghan (both of RTE) and Ursula Halligan (of TV3) endorse the book on the back cover.
III – ‘Dr’ Varadkar
In Irish society, as with many others, the position of doctor carries an unmatched aura of respectability. As the son of a respected G.P. Leo had an immediate advantage of name recognition, and respect, in his constituency when he began his political career.
In the meantime he was studying for a medical degree himself, though he admits he was a dilettante student, and perhaps ought to have studied law, that other passport to bourgeois respectability. Nonetheless, training to be a doctor has given this career politician an enduring credibility, and mystique, which still impresses commentators.
As a young councillor, we are told he would travel ‘straight from hospital to the chamber dressed in his medical attire, with a stethoscope around his neck’. He now denies the full extent of this, but the nickname of ‘Scrubs’ that emerged in the local media, was hardly damaging (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52).
His biographers claim that medicine is among the interests that Leo shares with his partner, Matthew Barrett, who is a practising cardiologist, but as Minister for Health Varadkar showed a discernible lack of interest in staying in the job. An anonymous cabinet colleague remains critical:
The fact he walked away from it after such a short time, I think if you ask most of the parliamentary party, even some of his biggest supporters, they were disappointed with that. It was obviously done with a view to the leadership election. There was obviously a calculation made that you cannot go from health to the Taoiseach’s office. Certainly not in a contested election when you have to go around canvassing (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.235)
One might have expected a young doctor to be brimming with ideas on how to address the major public health questions of our time – just as Dr Noel Browne spearheaded efforts to eradicate T.B. when he was Minister in the late 1940s – or even dismantle the expensive bureaucracy in the health service.
Varadkar’s first decisive move, just two weeks into office, was to abandon the Coalition government’s promise, and long-term Fine Gael commitment, to universal health insurance (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.154). He went on toboast publicly that he had taken out his own private insurance, and urged other young people to follow suit.
The two-tier system would remain, and nor was Varadkar prepared to reform what remained of public provision, and dispense with the Health Service Executive: that layer of bureaucracy insulating a Minister from direct criticism, bequeathed by one of his confidantes, former Minister for Health (2004-11) Mary Harney.
After Kenny’s calamitous election campaign in 2015, when the party lost twenty seats, Varadkar knew his time was nigh. He forced his way out of Health by demanding ‘a large bag of cash and a mandate for sweeping change’, whereby he could bypass the rules surrounding recruitment (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.232). These were demands he knew Kenny would not be accede to. The doctor had more than Health on his mind.
The Reluctant Taoiseach: John A. Costello.
IV – ‘Murph’ and the Whistleblower
It seems the Housing ministry has become the new ‘Angola’ among government Departments, with any Minister operating with fiscal and monetary constraints over which he has no control. The incumbent, whether Simon Coveney or Eoghan Murphy, appears like a hapless pilot frantically playing with the instruments on an already doomed vessel as it descends through the sky.
To make real progress, the Ministry of Housing would have to be develop a construction agency headed by the minister, integrate with the Transport Department, and be given a direct line to Finance. Instead the Housing Building Finance Bill 2018 ‘will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.’
Varadkar’s long-standing resistance to asking those who “pay for everything” to provide any more, does not appear to preclude a revival of the public-private partnerships which were a hallmark of Bertie Aherne’s tenure as Taoiseach.
Yet the account of Eoghan Murphy that emerges in this biography does not align with the bumbling, statistic-addled media performer, labelled the ‘Craig Doyle of Irish politics’. He was Leo’s loyal fixer, largely responsible for Varadkar capturing an overwhelming share of the parliamentary party’s vote.
Varadkar’s Fixer: Eoghan Murphy.
According to one of his colleagues: ‘You had to have a multiple ways into people and no one moved into a “solid yes” unless Murphy was 100 per cent satisfied (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.277)’.
Murphy was the founder of the so-called Five-A-Side Club of young Fine Gael TDs and at one point the sole member in Varadkar’s corner. As such, he was crucial to the latter’s rise (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.125).
Murphy’s gregariousness compensated for Varadkar’s frank admission that he ‘probably should not be in politics at all; I am not really a people person (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.112)’. Unlike Varadkar however, and perhaps to his cost, Murphy appears quite serious in his attempts to govern. He will remain a lightning rod for dislike of the government, however, as long as the state continues to shirk a constitutional responsibility to provide affordable accommodation for citizens.
When Enda Kenny finally resigned from office last year, apparently after egotistically ensuring he had surpassed John A. Costello as the longest-serving Fine Gael Taoiseach, Varadkar’s main rival Simon Coveney was hit with a political blitzkrieg, foreclosing any leadership race before a shot had been fired in anger.
From his free-roaming position in Social Protection Varadkar had captured the vast majority of the parliamentary party, making the 65% of the vote Coveney received from the wider political party an irrelevance.
What had brought Kenny down, along with two Ministers for Justice and two Garda Commissioners, is perhaps the greatest scandal in Irish public life since the turn of the century: the alleged framing on charges of child sex abuse of the Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe after he had revealed industrial scale non-prosecution of drink-driving charges. This has led to the appointment of the first Garda Commissioner from outside the state.
In this regard at least, Varadkar has been on the right side of history, famously referring in the Dáil in 2015 to McCabe (who he had previously met and appraised) as an ‘honourable man’, after his conduct had been described as ‘disgusting’ by then Garda Commissioner Callinan.
The one part of this narrative that rankles, however, flows from the toxic relationship that existed between Varadkar and Alan Shatter, who as Minister for Justice appears to have been mislead by senior Gardaí. Did Varadkar’s own ambitions inhibit him from reaching out to a cabinet colleague? The political cadavers the affair made of so many of the Fine Gael old guard certainly cleared the way for Varadkar.
Nonetheless, Varadkar must be given credit where it is due, and many of his ideological opponents were impressed by his respect for Justice and the Rule of Law. This impression is bolstered by his rejection of an idea floated by the current Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan for a ban on Gardaí being photographed in the course of their duties.
V – A Land of Opportunity?
It seems de rigeur for any fiscally conservative politician to display a commitment to ‘opportunity-for-all’ when he ascends to high office. Thus, in his acceptance speech Varadkar urged ‘every proud parent in Ireland today’, to dream ‘big dreams for their children’.
He said:
Let that be our mission in Fine Gael, to build in Ireland a republic of opportunity, one in which every individual has the opportunity to realise their potential and every part of the country is given its opportunity to share in our prosperity (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.xi).
Opportunity for Varadkar is distinctly upwardly mobile, along the lines of the American Dream, which has been fools’ gold for many. Nothing is said of those who inevitably fail to live up to their own, or parent’s, aspirations, and depend on the state for help. His approach seems at odds with John A. Costello’s Fine Gael being, ‘for all sections of the Irish people, but particularly for the poor and the weak and the distressed (McCullagh, 2010, p.398)’.
Perhaps the one measure that would achieve the parity of opportunity which Varadkar claims a devotion to, would be to develop a truly equal educational system. But the best model for primary and secondary education seems to be found in Finland, where private schooling is effectively prohibited, and educational attainment among the highest in Europe. Instructively, this socialist society maintains an income tax rate in excess of fifty per cent.
Varadkar has in the past opposed reforming the Irish education system, where the state pays the salaries of teachers in the private institutions, which achieve the highest grades in state examinations. In 2003, he said dividing Ireland ‘into a country of those who pay for everything and receive nothing and those who pay for nothing and receive everything, with only a small minority in between, would deal a fatal blow to what is left of Ireland’s social contract (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.52)’.
There is perhaps no clearer statement by Varadkar of whose interests he would serve in fulfilling his “contractual” role: those who “pay for everything”, the wealthiest strata of society who have throughout the history of the state used educational attainment, including access to careers in medicine and the law, as a barrier to wealth and influence.
That affiliation has been apparent from the beginning of his political career: with his excoriation of the social democratic tradition in his party; it proceeded through an inclination to work with the Republican Party, and sympathy for the Progressive Democrats; it showed in a willingness to dispense with a promise of universal healthcare and accept a two-tier system, and with the shaming of welfare ‘cheats’. It was also apparent in his entreaties on behalf of Donal Trump’s Doonbeg golf course, and open invitation to visit the country.
Leo’s liberalism is uniquely adapted to further his ambitions, and take care of his supporters. The Prince appears to have no plan beyond the end of achieving power, and it trappings.
In a revealing aside in this most beige of biographies we discover him telling colleagues ‘he feels at his most comfortable when holding meetings with other world leaders, some of whom he regularly texts’. Most worryingly perhaps, he has also ‘struck up warm relationships with’ among others the Far Right Hungarian President Viktor Orban (Ryan and O’Connor, 2018, p.319).
*******
Times have changed in Irish politics, where once John A. Costello had to be persuaded to serve as Taoiseach, today a career politician unashamedly plots a course to power. Who would wish to enter this tawdry scene? Micheal O’Siadhail’s insight appears apt that ‘the thieves of power / Come noiselessly in nights of apathy (O’Siadhail, 2018, p.149)’.
Raising political standards in Ireland goes far beyond removing Varadkar, who is a product of a political system informed by clientalism. It requires an evolution in our understanding of the role of government, and a shared acceptance of the need for genuine equality of opportunity, beginning with educational reform.
Varadkar’s own party is now what he and others aspired for it to become: a conservative party, untainted by social democratism, which wields power on behalf of the property-holding, private-school-attending, privately-medically-insured cohort of the population. As long as he remains in power those who “pay for everything” will remain ascendant.
References
David McCullagh, The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 2010.
Philip Ryan and Niall O’Connor, Leo: Leo Varadkar – A Very Modern Taoiseach, Biteback Publishing, London, 2018.
Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Baylor, Waco, 2018.
The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:
Directive Principles of Social Policy
The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.
As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.
Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:
to promote the welfare of the entire people.
to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.
There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.
An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.
There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.
Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.
Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.
Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis
The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.
Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.
Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:
to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.
The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.
This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.
Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:
that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.
This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.
Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.
This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.
Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.
It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.
At the age of sixteen, in 2001, I took a job in a small factory which built appliances in Cardano al Campo, near Milan’s Malpensa airport. I worked there for four years.
As with the majority of the manufacturing industries in the area, including the spring-making factory I had worked in the previous year, it was a family-run, small enterprise, with just a handful of clients. Much of the machinery dated from the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, as it turned out, they had invested in modern machinery that would allow them to diversify their offerings, and therefore survive the global economic crash, from 2008.
I vividly recall the three newspapers that were delivered to the factory each morning: the Sole 24 Ore, the Italian equivalent of the Financial Times; LaPrealpina, a local newspaper; and La Padania, the mouthpiece of the then rising Northern League (Lega Nord), which was allied at that time with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
I also remember my colleagues being outraged at the protestors defending Article 18, which governs labour rights, despite this being to their benefit. I heard comments such as ‘they are mainly students with nothing better to do than going about shouting in the streets and smashing shop windows.’
Back then Northern Italy was still one of the most prosperous regions in the world, and probably still is. From 1979 to 1998, Italian industrial production actually outpaced Germany’s by more than ten per cent, and most of that was in the North. But when the crisis struck businesses similar to the one I had worked in began to cascade like dominoes.
In that factory’s industrial district more than half of the businesses folded within five years. Today in their place are parking lots for Malpensa airport.
II – Separatism
Italy is a country with strong regional identities, although separatism has been rare throughout its history, apart from sporadic outbursts in Sardinia, Sicily and small Alpine enclaves of German speakers.
When the Northern League emerged in the early 1990s it captured a lot of support in my region. The then leader Umberto Bossi was born in nearby Cassano Magnago.
As the first cracks of an unsustainable economic model were becoming apparent – well before the earthquake hit – mistrust and cynicism towards the political establishment had become widespread. This was especially apparent among the working class in the kind of businesses that I worked for, which formed the backbone of the region’s, and arguably the nation’s prosperity.
In the beginning the Northern League called for a federal model of government, inspired by nearby Switzerland, but the leadership soon became outspoken in their separatist aspirations. This was, however, quite different to nationalist movements elsewhere, such as in Sardinia, as the Northern League ceased to be a genuine threat to the territorial integrity of the country once they entered the labyrinth of national politics.
Blaming Italian society’s ills on an enemy within was their main tactic for gaining support from the beginning: the corrupt political class from Rome, Roma Ladrona, the lazy Southerner and the parasitic Roma community were convenient scapegoats, at a time when political discourse had been coarsened under Berlusconi’s dominance.
The Italian economy began to fragment in the wake of joining the euro, which did not allow for the periodic currency devaluations that had kept the country competitive. The government failed to control the price of consumer goods after the changeover, while salaries remained static. This eroded significantly the purchasing power of households.
As the global banking system imploded, and businesses migrated to distant countries with lower labour costs, fortunes were lost, savings dried up and many were left unemployed. This coincided with a rapid rise in immigration; first from Eastern European countries such as Albania, then later from Africa and Asia.
Almost overnight Italy became a multicultural society, and government services, especially in housing and education, were not prepared for the influx.
The migrants who settled in Italy became symbolic of the global forces that had proved so ruinous to many. They became the new target for the Northern League, which under Matteo Salvini conveniently buried its difference with the South of Italy, re-branding itself as simply the League (La Lega), and finding new scapegoats.
III – The New Government
As I worked in the factory I managed to complete my high school education by night, which gave me the opportunity to travel and gain a greater perspective on the world. But I recognise from my region the kind of talk about foreigners that I hear now from Salvini, and others.
How do we explain the rise of Salvini? In the last election his party emerged as the third largest in the country and the main party of the Centre-Right alliance, which included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and other Centre and Right wing parties.
After discussions which took months, an agreement was reached to form a government between the largest party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), which had insufficient representatives to form one alone, and the League. Crucially, Salvini was allowed to become Minister of the Interior, where he is in a position to implement xenophobic policies.
Salvini seems to understand that power is increasingly located in the social media space and below-the-line commentaries on newspaper articles and videos. One tolerant commentator might find himself against ten online reactionaries, who in their normal lives may have a quite peaceful disposition. This kind of short-attention-span politics is an ideal breeding ground for racist stereotypes and armchair experts.
When Salvini says we need to repatriate five hundred thousand illegal immigrants he receives a wave of online endorsement, despite this being a remote possibility without outrageous human rights violations being perpetrated.
Likewise, he says that we will expel all illegal ‘Roma’, but ‘unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian ones’. The key word here is “unfortunately.”
Of course it might just all be hot air. But he has tapped into an angry mood.
III – Migrations
I have been living beyond the borders of my native Italy for fourteen years now, but I am still transfixed by our dysfunctional politics as much as the next Italian, and have access to the world’s media. I have witnessed how state institutions fail and even persecute people, and could tell stories that only Italians would believe.
Like many among my generation, born in the 1980s, I had begun to despair that politics would continue to be dominated by corrupt elites – complicit or just plain lazy members of the public administration – and mafias with tentacles extending throughout every aspect of the Italian economic system.
At the same time, Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire seemed to have made pulp out of our collective brains. His Forza Italia party took over from the Christian Democrats and the Craxian left-wing faction as the dominant force after the Mani Pulite (clean hands) scandal in the 1990s. But real power lay with global elites and organised crime.
Not even the vestiges of our great civilisation and the Rule of Law could actually bring down Berlusconi. It was left to the European Community to deliver the coup de grâce. In return Italy was sentenced by its European partners to perma-austerity. Guess what: Berlusconi is still alive and kicking.
Italy has been the first port of call for the majority of Africans seeking to make Europe their home, and they have been prevented from moving further afield due to the unfair Dublin Regulation of 2014. Many new arrivals have been reduced to virtual slave labourers, or become entangled in the mafias of the South.
Meanwhile, in order to stanch the flow, the Italian government, along with its European partners-in-crime, entered into an agreement with the Libyan authorities, which has led to the establishment of internment camps for aspiring migrants, where NGOs report appalling abuses. Just last week, the European Community agreed to attempt to build further reception centres around Africa, and even within Europe. But reception of refugees by another state is on a voluntary basis, meaning nothing of any consequence will happen.
The Trumpian use by Salvini of the migrants aboard the rescue ship the Aquarius as political pawns was an absolute disgrace, but it is worth bearing in mind that what we are not hearing about in the news is probably worse. Every minute of uncertainly for every migrant creates further unnecessary suffering.
There are no easy solutions to the problems faced by Italy, and Europe. Migrants are entering what is already a densely populated country with an ineffective government. The absence of adequate accommodation makes migrants more visible, and an obvious target.
George Soros is a hate figure for many Italians because of his support for migrant rights. But his proposal for the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for Africa makes a lot of sense. It would also be useful for Italians to understand that the country’s declining birth rates mean the economy will soon need more workers. But short-attention-span-politics makes that argument difficult to make.
The hateful message of Salvini grows more powerful by the day.
V – The Cuckoo in the Nest
The emergence of the M5S seemed to offer the hope of revolutionary change in Italian society and politics. I followed Bebe Grillo’s blog from its inception, and it was a breath of fresh air, although I did not agree with everything he had to say.
The appeal of M5S is analogous to the League’s. It is Populist, reflecting, right or wrong, what ordinary people think. In particular it challenges the elites.
The question is whether the alliance which the M5S has entered into with the League is a pact with the Devil. But it was the only conceivable way for a government to be formed, once the Democratic Party stubbornly refused to enter negotiations to form a coalition. That party’s credibility faded when they embraced the politics of perma-austerity, and the sight of former leading figures like Elena Bosci cavorting with Berlusconi fills most left-leaning Italians with disgust.
Recent polls and local election results show clearly that the big winners of the coalition have been the League, who are now the most popular party in the country. The Guardian has even referred to Salvini as Italy’s de facto prime minister, which only serves to bolster his legitimacy.
But this is not true, and I remain hopeful that aspects of the M5S’s policies will be implemented, such as tackling the ridiculously high pensions awarded to retired officials. Grand infrastructural projects costing billions of euros, such as the Lyon to Turin high speed rail, which bring few benefits to the working class, may also be shelved. Perhaps too they can set about cleaning up the toxic poisoning of places such as Terra dei Fuochi, and just maybe challenge the extensive networks of organised crime.
However, the agreement entered into between the parties is highly aspirational, ranging from a regressive plan for a flat tax and a guarantee of a basic income for all Italians. It is difficult to see the government lasting very long, and the worry is that Salvini, with the wind in his sails, emerges as the big winner. Like the cuckoo in the nest.
Tune into any Irish radio station, and it is hard to escape the constant flogging of motor cars: RTE’s flagship ‘Morning Ireland’ is associated with Opel; sports bulletins on the same programme are brought to you by Kia; traffic introduced by Hyundai, only afterwards to be announced as ‘AA Roadwatch’. Ads for other brands such as Mercedes and Peugeot generally feature during commercial breaks, seemingly every third or fourth slot. By early evening it is ‘Drivetime’; while over on Newstalk, you find Ivan Yates’s ‘The Hard Shoulder’.
Meanwhile, national newspapers carry regular motoring supplements – with adverts also layered through the main sections. In Ireland car ‘culture’ not only prevails, it dominates.
Ostensibly innocuous, if anything the adverts appear reassuring: smooth voices caressing parents into protecting their little cherubs inside whichever metal-cocoon-on-wheels they are selling. Branding imbues these vehicles – or ‘estates’ – with a pioneering sense of ‘Discovery’; a ‘Highlander’, ‘Land Cruiser’ or ‘Land Rover’ ranging across a great sweep of virgin landscape, as opposed to the reality of sitting for hours in traffic.
The not-so-subliminal-message is that a shiny-new-car is a good sign. But car-usage is blatantly contrary to the national interest, if we are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated fines. Transport, a substantial proportion of which is private car-usage, accounts for approximately 20% of all national emissions.
As long as media outlets receive hefty advertising revenue from car importers, there will be an inducement to avoid questioning our car culture. More obviously, vehicles are frequently offered as prizes in competitions, most recently on RTE’s ‘The Late Late Show’ on the 25th of May(3). By contrast, the lowly bicycle is rarely, if ever, considered prize-worthy.
Lone cyclist, Charlemont Bridge, Dublin.
II – Cyclist ‘deaths’
Typically, when a cyclist is killed headlines and news bulletins state he has died in a collision – a passive inevitability arising from being on the wrong side of an autonomous vehicle. Yet such machines are under human control. Would it not be more accurate to say a cyclist has been killed?
Alas, neither cyclists, public transport users, nor pedestrians tend to purchase media space, despite comprising the vast majority of those in transit across Ireland, particularly in urban areas, in which most of the population now resides. Where there is coverage of transport alternatives it usually relates to how these affect motorists, as where bus lanes generate traffic jams, or where cyclists create a nuisance by failing to observe the law.
Little substantive probing occurs into improvements to the transport infrastructure – or indeed how Ireland stacks up internationally.
Apart from being presented as a nuisance, on those rare occasions that cycling is treated positively, it is depicted as good for children or fitness. But rarely, if ever, is it taken as a realistic alternative to the car. Overwhelmingly, the message is: four wheels good, two wheels bad.
Last month, a cyclist was killed by a driver turning a lorry at the main N11 junction immediately outside RTE’s premises in Dublin(4). Coincidentally, currently there are plans to develop a new vehicular junction along the N11 on lands formerly owned by RTE that are being redeveloped for housing. The plans are attracting objections, alleging the proposed provision for cyclists is unsafe and substandard(5).
Notably, the route is a major cycle artery to the country’s largest university, University College Dublin. The RTE radar does not appear to have picked up an important story on its doorstep.
III – Cars In Their Eyes
One basic measure the national broadcaster could make to raise public confidence would be to provide an easily accessible public declaration of any direct remuneration, ‘gifts’, or other contractual arrangements into which RTE or its senior personnel enter into with third parties, including car dealers and importers. This would be in line with the transparency the BBC demands of its employees(6).
It is of interest that over the years reports have emerged of various ‘stars’ being provided with complimentary cars by dealerships. As far back as May 2005, Tommy Broughan TD called for transparency, informing Dáil Éireann that Ryan Tubridy had the use of a Lexus, while Pat Kenny and Gerry Ryan (both then contracted to RTE) had ‘relationships’ with BMW and Mazda respectively(7).
Tubridy currently presents ‘The Late Late Show’, which is ‘sponsored’ by Renault. Earlier this year his comments – which the Dublin Cycling Campaign described as ‘casual incitement of hatred’ – attracted five hundred complaints to the broadcaster. He had suggested that people who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned‘(8).
Given RTE receives almost two hundred million euro per annum from the public through mandatory TV licences, surely the Irish people have a right to know whether Mr Tubridy continues to be provided with a vehicle by any outside firms.
What information there is available is generally gleaned from marketeers’ press releases. Investigations into possible conflicts of interest are almost unheard of, at least in public.
Meanwhile, an opinion piece last year by RTE’s Countrywide presenter Damien O’Reilly in The Farmers Journal ridiculed Irish cyclists for wearing luminescent clothing to ensure their safety: this was ‘aggressively coloured’ as O’Reilly put it(9). Separately, the Sunday Times revealed (following a successful freedom of information request) that O’Reilly had been paid for work done on behalf of An Bord Bia in Dubai, which was approved by RTE management(10).
‘Moonlighting’ of RTE stars has given rise to further controversy in recent months, with Claire Byrne landing herself in hot water over work done on behalf of financial services firm Davy’s(11).
Elsewhere there has been a failure to reveal corporate funding of programming. Phoenix Magazine reported that Derek Mooney’s Programme ‘Turf Life’, broadcast on May 4th 2018, was supported financially by Bord Na Móna, but this was not declared in the programme’s credits(12).
IV – George’s Marvellous Meddling
Over on Newstalk, George Hook set himself up as the champion of the poor downtrodden motorists, while castigating other road users – such as cyclists of course!
In 2015 on daytime television Hook declared that he ‘hates cyclists with a passion‘(13), before stating: ‘They do what the hell they like. They’re a threat to themselves, they’re a threat to pedestrians, and ultimately they’re a threat to motorcars, as motorcars trying to avoid these lunatics will have an accident.’
Notably, Hook has previously been provided with a free car by Peugeot. RTE’s own website carries a report from June 22nd, 2011 in their ‘Motors’ section, entitled (seemingly without irony) ‘508 Hooked’, in which ‘Peugeot Managing Director Geroge Harbourne said: ‘George is an excellent brand ambassador for Peugeot. We very much look forward to working with him to increase the awareness of the Peugeot brand in Ireland, through his high public profile’ (15).
V – Increasing Obsolescence
Last year, national car sales dropped 10%, yet contrary to perceived wisdom this did not coincide with economic stagnation(16). Increasingly, those fortunate enough to get by without a car realise that these metal boxes no longer represent freedom, but are instead a costly burden best avoided.
Cars are good for a weekly shop – but so is a taxi – and in any case the traditional weekly shop is a decreasing habit, especially among the younger generation. Yet perversely, as more people move away from cars, the national broadcaster sings the praises of the internal combustion engine with increasing vigour.
During the ‘Bertie boom years’, many first-time buyers bought a ‘starter home’ far from Dublin, which required a long daily commute by car. This was often endured in the hope of returning to Dublin at some later date. Alas many of those dreams have receded.
These days, although accommodation in Dublin is in notoriously short supply, most of the younger generation are nonetheless opting to stay put in the capital, and avoiding the daily imprisonment that car dependency brings. Wander around the ‘go-getter ghettos’ of Google’s HQ on Barrow Street, Docklands, and East Point Business Park: cyclists, pedestrians, and public transport users abound, but there is little sign of cars.
In Dublin twenty years ago taxis were notoriously rare, and buses did not enjoy their own lanes. Having a motor in those days was a distinct advantage. Yet roll on two decades and owning a car is arguably more of a burden, and increasingly identified with ill-health.
The link between car dependency and obesity is well established(17); sadly, Ireland could be set to become the most obese country in Europe(18), which in part reflects our car dependency. Yet instead of discussing the obvious links, the Irish media is more likely to allude to the danger and zealotry of cyclists. Could it be that the idea of cycling as a normal mode of transport for regular people is too much of a threat to vested interests?
VI – A Gathering Storm
The New Scientist(19) reported that the fumes created by car engines tend to have a worse effect on those inside vehicles, rather than outside, as had previously been believed. That lovely ‘new car smell’ may actually mask toxic odours, which the driver and occupants might otherwise detect. For example, PM 10s are among the numerous known carcinogens created by diesel emissions(20).
Another report recently featured in the UK media indicates that a class action is being brought against Volkswagen(21), following the emissions scandal, which involved the manufacturer lying for years about the level of toxic fumes generated by its vehicles. This may be the tip of a large iceberg.
If it turns out that children developed asthma from riding in such vehicles – and if there is no background family history causation is plausible(22) – the emissions scandal could explode further, with major consequences in terms of costs to manufacturers, and changes in public policy.
Unsurprisingly, there has been little coverage of this in the Irish media, but the story could be of even more relevance here. Firstly, our greater car-dependency exposes us to greater danger. Secondly, the manufacturer associated with misleading governments, the public, and owners – Volkswagen – was the top-selling brand in this country between 2012 and 2016(23).
That is a triple-whammy to which Irish people may have been particularly exposed – yet hardly a peep from anywhere in the Irish media. Might we see greater coverage of such issues in mainstream Irish media in the years to come? Don’t hold your breath, unless that is you are being passed by a noxious vehicle belching out toxic fumes.
On May 8th RTE’s Freedom of Information Officer accepted a Freedom of Information Request from Cassandra Voices seeking records of payments or payments-in-kind from motor car dealership to leading RTE stars that have been approved by RTE management since January 1st, 2017. RTE have 30 days in which to respond. Details will be revealed in the next edition.
(1) Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html
(23)Melanie May, ‘These are the 5 top-selling cars of 2017 so far’, downloaded 29/5/2018 http://www.thejournal.ie/best-selling-cars-ireland-2017-3483985-Jul2017/
What does it mean to be a loafer? Loafing as an activity has always existed. It has been carried out, witnessed, imagined and sung since the dawn of human time; from the ancient Aborigines on their walkabout, to the modern idling of the nineteenth and twentieth century dandies. Today, loafing as a mode of existence, may well be one of the last subversive acts and means of combating and living affirmatively amidst the information and technological age.
The loafer is more than just a flâneur, epitomised by a Baudelaire or Wilde; he or she can be bucolic or urbane, a scientist or poetic seeker – anyone from Einstein to Yeats. And far from lazy in the vulgar sense, on the contrary, the loafer is never really at rest, but attuned to the present, and observing from various perspectives at the same time.
A loafer is not bored; boredom comes from a forgetfulness of the power of the imagination; boredom is the great trick of marketers who vomit out messages demanding we purchase our entertainment, and sell us things we don’t need. Most of us live in a world where the power of advertising effectively distracts us from the impact of what we are consuming, and implicitly accepting.
A loafer can enjoy waiting and musing; a loafer does not become irritated that he or she has to wait an extra minute for change at the supermarket, or partake in beeping and cursing obscenities to others while stuck in traffic, when they are part of the traffic; a loafer does not do a mountain or a country, but rather ascends a mountain and wanders a country. To paraphrase the Irish philosopher John Moriarty, the geography of the loafer’s mind becomes the geography of the landscape he or she travels in.
As an example, James Joyce’s novel Ulysses emphasises loafing in at least two major ways. Firstly, in its conception, Joyce – as external and internal itinerant – creates a work that is an alternative journey or odyssey on the periphery of war-torn Europe.
This is a difficult work that unfolds before the reader’s eyes with Joyce making his way as he writes, a book that becomes ever more sprawling as the episodes proceed. It defies schematic dogmatism, but simultaneously the work – merging chaos and cosmos expressed in Joyce’s words ‘chaosmos’ and ‘thisorder’– is contained within strict boundaries. Out of difficulty, arrives a wealth of possibility.
Hardly any aspect of Western culture is left out in that account of a single day in Dublin on June 16th 1904, the day in which Joyce went on his first official date with Nora Barnacle who would become his muse, lover, wife, mother of his children, and companion throughout his entire adult itinerant life. Thus, the day marks a day of love and affirmation as well as being a universal modern bible of homelessness and homecoming.
Secondly, there is the main character of Leopold Bloom – the majestic loafer – at once sad-eyed and sharp as a hawk in his observations. If the scientist seeks to understand reality and the mystic seeks to experience it directly, then Bloom, as loafer, does both.
Statue of James Joyce in Trieste, where he lived on and off between 1904 and 1920.
Real time is that of the observer. Many Westerners have lost the secrets derived from mystical sources, but these are only other aspects of a wider reality in less alienated societies. Thus deprived, many seek for this connection in exotic realms which are removed from their society and detached from their own suffering. It is often easier to access the magic in strange, unfamiliar landscapes than in one’s own seemingly all too familiar, cynical and faithless culture.
Throughout the course of our lives, like Leopold Bloom, many of us will be confronted by tragedy at some point or enter dark places from which we find it difficult to escape. And each one of us is going to experience an apocalypse – our own particular death. As established religions have declined, a spiritual void has emerged in many people’s lives. But perhaps our own poetic traditions can offer the solace that many people seek, offering answers to which we are culturally attuned.
The secrets and the answers are right here in front of us in slowness, in loafing, in singing. Yes, because music too can lift the spirit, as both Joyce and Leopold Bloom attest. As the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain (although himself a chief critic of Finnegans Wake) put it: ‘In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly’.
As Joyce famously said himself of Finnegans Wake, if you cannot understand the text – then simply read it aloud and hear the music of it. The same goes for Ulysses. Walter Pater’s line is the key to Joyce’s experimental writing of the challenging music episode of Ulysses when Bloom wanders into the side room of Dublin’s national concert hall in the afternoon: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.
Loafers have sung eloquently throughout history, from the first Provençal troubadours who invented our modern idea of Romantic love, down to some of our finest popular late twentieth century musicians from the Brazilian Bossanova and Tropicalia movements, to the Celtic Soul fusion of Van Morrison.
Our contemporary society prizes speed, efficiency and growth and looks askance at activities deemed unproductive. In particular the loafer is anathema to a culture which has absorbed a work ethic equating time with money.
Yet perhaps the greatest achievements occur when the mind is at rest and seemingly unproductive. Peripheral vision allows us to look beyond conventional ideas and draw inspiration. One has only to think of Einstein discovering the theory of relativity while daydreaming in a patent’s office, or of Newton grasping a theory of gravity while dawdling under a tree. It is often as the poet, the philosopher or the scientist roam the busy city streets, or rolling hills, that the real work is done.
By embracing loafing now and then, we remove ourselves from the maelstrom of a contemporary culture where slowness and alternative ideas are devalued. The world is motored by rampant consumerism despite our knowledge that it creates great anxiety and is rapidly destroying and usurping much of the landscape for other animal and plant species to continue to exist.
Only by taking time out for undistracted reflection can we think about what is really happening and what we really need for our wellbeing. Crucially, the loafer Leopold Bloom’s first conversation is not with a human being but with a cat, and he treats the animal equally and with humor and tenderness, and it is from there that Bloom begins his odyssey through Dublin – observing, walking, feeling, ogling, helping, dreaming and loving for the world, rather than merely being in the world.
Loafing might thus be seen as a revolutionary act, which, if taken seriously, has the capacity to bring meaningful benefit and transformation to individuals and society at large. Our world which, to quote Joyce, is ‘ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void”. This expression, buried deep in the penultimate episode of this colossal book of loafing, may well be the definition of art, beauty, Ulysses and existence itself.
Missiles flashed, and it was beautiful—
flares in the darkness of a fallen world
where Satan plays the good guy in a wig.
I’m in my safe space, a battered easy chair,
swearing at the laptop, at the stream
of video and voices, overlaid
on top of breakfast. Coffee’s gone lukewarm,
the trail’s gone cold. The woman on TV
hasn’t realized it yet. Her show
is sub-LeCarré trash, the waking dream
of self-styled cells in Williamsburg, Crown Heights,
Bushwick, even Windsor Terrace now.
They’ll surely man the barricades some time
after the co-op shift, when work slows down
and the app is live and making NASDAQ bank.
The cast of Hamilton will sing a song—
a poem by Ocean Vuong now set to music
by some ex-junkie from the punkoisie
while bombs explode, bigger than before,
to make a new crater in Afghanistan.
Quincy R. Lehr’s most recent poetry collections are The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar and Heimat. He teaches history in Los Angeles.
I first came across Dragana Jurišić’s work in the National Gallery of Ireland, when her ‘Tarantula’ was displayed as part of the ‘After Vermeer’ exhibition in 2017. ‘Tarantula’ was a contemporary response to the Vermeer exhibition, which featured a series of photographic self-portraits of overlapping dancing figures. Jurišić says she was ‘immediately struck by the two main subjects of Vermeer’s paintings: ‘women in domestic settings and the light’. Depiction of women in Vermeer’s portraits led Jurišić to consider the female condition, and ‘pre-conditioning’ more generally, in terms of the rules women must follow in life; their pensiveness and meditative status, which gives way to a mesmerised storm.
Jurišić recalls the main character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, first performed in 1879. Nora leaves her designated role in life, daring to partake in the dancing ‘struggle for life’. Similarly the mythical Tarantati women of Italy, once bitten by the spider, succumb to ‘trance-like dancing’, as the only way to access the euphoria of free expression. Jurišić’s dance, without resorting to provocative suggestions or techniques, traces a visual experiment that almost fulfils the lines of a classical figure, a preparatory drawing disclosing the artist’s creative process. As in Michelangelo’s sculpture ‘The Dying Slave’, these are unfinished sculptures, undressing themselves in the social marble, liberating their true shape from a carcass, not fully, but without shame, while displaying the melancholy and conflict of the process of self-cognition. Vermeer’s women are stuck in a composed, but not acquiescent pose, which recalls contemporary anxieties. Jurišić untangles Vermeer’s forms and empowers the female, and herself as a woman, unmasking the muses, symbols that still inform contemporary culture appreciations.[i]
Some months later I walked through Jurišić’s latest exhibition, ‘My Own Unknown’, at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin’s Temple Bar, which recalls women who wanted to free themselves from patriarchal constraints. Into Jurišić’s personal story is sewn the mysterious life of her aunt Gordana Čavić. Čavić, like Ibsen’s Nora, disappeared from her assigned role, and native country, Yugoslavia, in the 1950s, dying in Parisian exile in the 1980s: ‘A life shrouded in mystery, it involves tales of multiple identities, illicit sex and espionage’. Out of Jurišić’s archival photographs, the artist recreates a diary of a personal rebirth from a cryptic loss, defining her life as woman and artist:
My initial questioning of this statement took me to Paris to commence an exploration on L’Inconnue de la Seine, the name given to a young woman whose body was allegedly recovered from the River Seine, and whose death mask was cast in a bid to identify her. Her serene and quiet beauty became a muse for artists.
The mask and idealistic form is an object of veneration: the fake perfection of a muse, veiled by cultural layers, and detached from any real process of accomplishment. Jurišić’s own undressing, displaying her true ‘body’, provides an unflinching interpretation of her own form.
What Jurišić knew for sure was that Gordana Čavić was made of much harder stuff than L’Inconnue de la Seine:
Suddenly I was back at 11 years old, looking at a funeral procession that was beyond extravagant. … Who was she? I asked my grandmother, She just shuffled uncomfortably in response. Behind me I could hear whispers of two men from down the road.
L’Inconnue de la Seine represents the inspiring perfection ‘protecting’ the viewer from experience of the real body; the ‘other woman’, which could alter the common sense experience, and reinforce devotion to old beliefs. Who is she? Who is Gordana Čavić, Nora, or the artist Dragana Jurišić?
In Ibsen’s Women Joan Templeton observes the muse’s path through the centuries. Her powerful analysis of femininity recalls Jurišić’s artistic ambitions: ‘For Gilbert and Gubar … the lady is our creation or Pygmalion’s statue. The lady is the poem.’[ii] The lady is the sculpture, the statue Pygmalion carved and fell in love with, like L’inconnue de la Seine. This is a cast and frozen idealization of femininity. Templeton approvingly cites Simone de Beauvoir:
But women exist without men’s intervention and thus while ‘woman’ incarnates men’s fantasies, women proves the falsity of the fantasies … Man’s need for woman to remain always the Other. … Woman is necessary to the extent that she remains an idea into which the man can project his own transcendence; but she is danger as an objective reality existing for herself and limited to herself.
A more urgent consciousness is emerging in our daily experience, beginning with many women’s revelations of sexual violence during the #MeToo movement, and willingness to alter a passive condition of acceptance. Contemporary women are fighting back against an old, still unresolved disadvantage: their objectification as muses.
Why is ‘the woman’ still an ideal, mythical presence, her real body still censored by intangible projections? Why do many men feel an inadequacy in front of real presences, to the extent of displaying hostility or aggression – real or unconscious – towards that which is not a fantasy? Why are artists still confronting opposition to representations of real existing forms, from ludicrous rules against displaying women’s nipples on social networks, to outright censorship of nudes in exhibition advertisements, while at the same time, our visual environment is filled with sexualised content? Are these taboos veils that hide the truth? Is it the ideal of the muses we are still battling against?
Not only is the idea of woman in need of revolution, our concept of masculinity needs to be reappraised. According to Dr Arne Rubinstein in The Making of Men: ‘in the healthy man’s psychology, a man sees himself as part of the universe, not the centre of it; he takes full responsibility for his actions, he deals with his emotions and he looks for a healthy relationship with the feminine.’ But ‘the role-modelling and mentoring for boys and teenagers is very poor, and the messaging is terrible.’[iii] Rubinstein’s organization attempts to reconcile the masculine and feminine in men.
In her 1929 novel A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf endeavoured to awaken awareness of gender inadequacy. She suggested society should reconsider and re-educate our basic perceptions of sexuality, and the condition of women in the world, beginning with the artistic and creative processes:
For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to cooperate … But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?[iv]
In the last part of her exhibition ‘My own Unknown’, Jurišić explores her self-portraits and diaries, concluding the exhibition with a previous work made in Dublin in 2015, employing the same technique as ‘Tarantula’, but overlapping photographs of one hundred women posing as nude muses in front of her. They direct their own poses using a chair and a veil, each identify themselves with one of the nine muses of Greek mythology: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.
One of the final portraits is ‘The Mother’, an overlap of all the muses. This is Mnemosyne, mother of all the Muses, goddess of memory. On top of one another the bodies look like layers of negatives, memories overlapping into a majestic image. This conveys a scribble, an incomplete creative process, an operation of cognition in the ‘struggle for life’. Jurišić writes:
The idea of the muse often evokes images of a male artist and a passive female muse. The female muse is often depicted as nude in visual art. And in turn “the nude” – one of the biggest clichés of Western art tradition, is a genre predominantly inhabited by male artists. At the beginning of April 2015, I began the task of photographing 100 female nudes over a period of five weeks.
A powerful expression of ourselves is still needed, not only a female view on female gaze, but an entire recreation of feminine and masculine interpretation. An ‘ownership over their body’.
Gordana knew that she came to Paris to survive. Survive at any cost. Shed her skin. Shed her past. Forget about the people she left behind. Or not. But she is not going back. She will never go back.
The goddess mother of all the muses is the goddess mother of a faded memory, like Jurišić’s aunt Gordana Čavić who ‘was so beautiful, like she was her own creator.’[v]
