Cassandra Voices

Tag: 2019March

  • No Comment – Daniele Idini

    All Images © Daniele Idini

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  • Brazil Special Report: Families Still Seeking Bodies after Brumandinho Dam Disaster

    Last January 25th a dam burst over the town of Brumandinho from a height of eighty-six metres. It unleashed a tsunami of approximately twelve million cubic metres of toxic red sludge over the valley below, eviscerating all in its path.

    The structure had been built as part of an iron-ore-mining operation in Minais Gerais, Brazil’s second most populous state. This is the heartland of the country´s extractive sector, servicing industries all over the world.

    Responsibility for the humanitarian and ecological disaster in Brumadinho lies squarely with Vale, a Brazilian-owned mining company, which has been extracting minerals from the region for decades. Reports circulating indicate the company had been aware of the risks, but failed to adopt precautions in line with international guidelines.[i]

    In prioritising profit, the company externalised the inherent danger of retaining toxic by-products from a mining operation in a tailing dam.

    In late February I visited Brumadinho and Mina do Feijão district, the scene of one of Brazil’s worst Brazilian humanitarian and ecological disasters.

    With main access roads to the town destroyed, I journeyed via unpaved, narrow streets through lush Atlantic forest, enhancing my awareness of the breath-taking ecology still surviving in this region.

    The mountainous state of Minas Gerais is rich in iron, gold, niobium and other minerals, and responsible for more than half of the country’s mineral extraction, with over three hundred mines operating. According to a report published by the Nacional Agency for Mining (Agência Nacional de Mineração), Minas Gerais concentrates 63.1% of the high-risk mining dams in the country.[ii] As in Brumadinho and Mina do Feijão district, most of these dams sit atop mountains, posing threats to villages, towns and ecosystems located in valleys adjacent to the sites.

    Walking down the dirt road towards the epicentre of the disaster, I was hit by a wave of unpleasant odour. A mixture of smells, from decomposing bodies to toxic metals, charges the atmosphere, growing stronger at the approach to the worst scenes of devastation.

    The sight of what greets me is as striking as the odour. At the end of the street, a sea of red mud has consumed all before it. Its force so intense that it has uprooted trees, crushed houses and swallowed human lives. It spread nine kilometres, as far as the Paraopeba River where it has killed aquatic life, adversely affecting local indigenous communities, whose subsistence depends on fishing, and a healthy river for drinking water.

    A month on, families are still looking for bodies. So far, the Brazilian civil defence has set the official death toll at one-hundred-and-eighty-six, but one-hundred-and-twenty-one are still unaccounted for.

    Despite there now being almost no chance of finding anyone still alive, firefighters tirelessly keep up the search for bodies.

    One-hundred-and-twenty volunteers from different parts of the country sustain the rescue mission. Their courage is a lesson in solidarity and care, in the midst of Vale´s criminal negligence and indifference. While firefighters heroically contribute their time and strength, equipped with rescue dogs, bulldozers, drones and helicopters, Vale continues to extract minerals, even from the very site where the tragedy occurred.

    The sound of trucks carrying minerals from the open pit speaks louder than the silenced cries of victims.

    At the disaster´s scene I encountered a woman whose husband is still missing. Martha (not her real name) had arrived with two relatives. Every day she travels the hour’s journey from a neighbouring town, hoping to hear news of her husband José (also not his real name).

    The dam collapsed, without warning, during lunchtime. Around two hundred employers were dining at Vale´s refectory when the walls of the barrage burst. In less than two minutes the mud consumed all, including the refectory.

    According to three surviving workers, José was waiting for the shuttle bus at the time of the disaster. His shift had ended, and having finished his lunch, he was waiting outside, under a tree – the usual spot where the shuttle bus picked-up staff.

    Alas, on that last Friday of January, the shuttle bus never arrived, and José remains missing.

    Martha is grieving her loss. She endures the agony of not knowing what has become of her husband. At least a body, or even a piece of it, would allow her to dignify him with a funeral.

    Martha´s grief resonates with the sorrow of an entire town. Most of Brumadinho´s forty-thousand inhabitants either work for Vale themselves, or know someone who does.

    the sacred soil

    When I think of mud, I think of earth and water, essential elements to life on planet Earth. I also think of soil and its healing properties. Pure mud is the foundation of life, the sacred soil out of which food grows.

    On the contrary, toxic mining mud is lethal.

    When I speak of toxic mud, I speak of earth and water contaminated by heavy metals and poisonous chemicals. Mining operations are sources of pollution and harm. Among the chemicals involved are lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury. These kill people, other animals and soil.

    Yet, of all the pollutants the most hazardous is greed, the moving force in our economic system that demands the extractive industries.

    To truly decontaminate the affected region and purify river and soil, we as individuals and societies must first decontaminate the financial greed from our economic and political systems. We may purify our hearts and minds by awakening an understanding of the Earth as a source of life to be cared for, not a resource to be exploited.

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    All images (c) Bruna Kadletz

    [i] Beatric Juca, ‘Detenidos otros ocho empleados de Vale por el desastre de la mina de Brumadinho’, 15th of February, 2019, El Pais International, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/02/15/politica/1550262453_887391.html accessed 4/3/2019.

    [ii] Matthew Bloch, Scott Reinhard and Sergio Pecanha, ‘Where Brazilians Live in High-Risk Areas Downhill From Mining Dams’ February, 14th, 2019, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/14/world/americas/brumadinho-brazil-dam-collapse.html, accessed 4/3/19.

  • From Psalm 119

    Gimel/Retribue servo tuo

    O do well unto thy servant

    Vincible world, I see blown blossom
    hurled with the crumpled rooks before May’s
    impertinent, spooky breezes; newly-dressed
    branches rattled already before
    counter-prevalent and centrifuge gusts.

    Vincible earth, no stranger to kenosis, then;
    it’s what you do. I can’t arrive at saying it.

    I’m lip-deep in the unsayable, (don’t you know?)
    dealing out, let’s say, deuteranopic cusses
    to a space and time all-too-green, in fact,
    to observe Coverdale’s green observations
    in the bright shadows of Hebrew’s plenty.

    Lip-labour for our vincible domain
    in the light and shadow of opulence.


    He/Legem pone

    Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes

    Prayer’s printed page whitens out of seeing;
    self-divesting, and on the run, leaked
    in a voiced extinction, even as the fire
    among the thorns,
    _                            its bright dereliction
    without self-favour, but spoiling
    immarcescibly into faith’s erasures;
    a pale palimpsest, even Cranmer’s gift.

    My page is blinded. Its tongue is stolen.
    God’s syntax is glass, o! cerulean
    titmouse! It’s entropy’s hard vacancy.
    Don’t be caught,
    _                            songbird iconoclast!
    not in time’s continuum, but before
    untimely Abraham. Good philosopher,
    teach us the way of thy statutes.


    Yodh/Manus tuae fecerunt me

    Thy hands have made me and fashioned me

    It’s the waiting. Waiting for the form
    of a hand, in likeness as the appearance
    of fire, from Ezekiel’s amber chambers.

    There in the nonsense, today, of my roustabout
    apple trees and oak, the willow next door,
    though not the form of a fiery, friendly hand.

    It would all be too easy. There’d be no need
    for Empson’s monstrously clotted language –
    antagonyms of faith in affliction.

    Swelling with the skittery breezes, willow
    is no open hand but clutched then hurling,
    yes, a likeness as the appearance of fire.

    And, monstrously clotted, Ezekiel wavers
    into afflicted speech, and this faithful, fiery hand.

    Sections of Psalm One Hundred and Nineteen have also found a home in Scintilla journal. Poems from An Atheist’s Prayer-Book are forthcoming at Litter. Reviews have appeared at Litter, and at Stride. A PhD, Natural Strange Beatitudes, can be found at www.pearl.plymouth.ac.uk. Jonathan Wooding has spoken at academic conferences in Plymouth, Oxford and York on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. 

  • Making Films

    I’ve just made my last film, a short called Bog Graffiti. Another last film.

    I always make that resolution when a film is put to bed. Never again, I say, will I go through the pain.

    In my childhood the cinema was already a fantasy, one which we could only occasionally afford.

    When as day trippers we went on excursions to Bray, one of the novelties was a machine with a handle. If you inserted a penny – a large investment – you could wind the handle and view a jerky series of photos which constituted a thirty-second epic of what the butler saw. The technique was analogous to that of Edison fifty years before, when he filmed a five-second sneeze.

    Though moving images are what have been laughingly called my livelihood for too long, the medium was never my first love. I merely stumbled into it, an accidental activity that seemed to fit me like a glove, rather like a loyal and unappreciated wife.

    I am no longer considered by apparatchiks to possess the puff to make another, but I can still enjoy the rare film of excellence made by somebody else and, if provoked, become long-winded about the process of becoming a film maker.

    There are two accepted routes. The first is the apprenticeship method: you watch and listen to other people doing it. The second is through formal media courses which produce experts rather than film makers. Neither of these processes has much to do with actually making a film – it largely depends on not being very good at anything else. The same principle applies to most art forms: they are not a matter of loving or wanting, but about desperation. You either have to do it or you do not. I needed it, or at least something like it. Film would do for what is referred to ‘as the time being’ – a period which in my case extended to a half-century.

    My first short film took as its theme Eliot’s, ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’. It featured a middle-aged actor paddling in the sea, listening for the mermaids while his withered wife lay on Killiney beach, settling the pillows by her head and murmuring about Michelangelo. At least that was what I hoped to imply. Surefire box-office. Six of us RTE trainees had spent a few months listening to two Danish film experts. First they showed high-class documentaries. Secondly they loaned each of us a 16mm camera for a day. I went into the city and filmed shadows. I was hooked: it wasn’t like work at all.

    My early attempts have been lost in the bowels of RTÉ. In those early days, the concept of posterity did not exist. Nobody was going to die. Until Seán Ó Riada did, aged forty.

    It is not easy, in this impenetrably complex era of digital reality, to re-imagine what film-making once involved. Principally, film was a chemical, rather than the electronic process which now dominates the activity. The former meant controlling a light source (usually daylight) so that it would disturb the silver nitrate particles on sensitised celluloid in such a precise fashion as to produce a desired image.

    Whether it was 16mm gauge film, which was the TV standard in those days, or 35mm which was the cinema standard, there were twenty-four of those images exposed per second. In between, each of those images was a fraction of a second of black whose quickness of passing deceived the eye so that it was not noticed.

    Next, the same celluloid had to be treated in chemical baths to remove the silver and reveal the negative images. It was rumoured that film laboratories in England made more profit from the recycling of silver than from the processing fees they charged.

    The late and much-travelled Barney McKenna, banjo player in The Dubliners, once confided to me his advanced ideas on the subject. He said that the Rhine was so polluted with chemicals flowing down from Switzerland that the film industry didn’t need laboratories. German film makers simply dipped their films in the chemical stream. That’s how Germans could make films cheaper, Barney said.

    At our basic level the director and cameraman had to work without a picture monitor. Using the tiny camera viewfinder and a light meter, the framing and exposure of the picture had to be imagined beforehand. The resultant images could not properly be seen until they were processed and returned from the London laboratory as ‘rushes’.

    Nowadays there are LCD viewfinders on video cameras, which allow you to see precisely what the lens is producing. If you still don’t know what you are doing or can’t make up your mind, that is no obstacle. Videotape, mini-cards and something called cloud technology now mean that you can cover your vacillations by shooting endless hours and unlimited ‘takes’ of the same scene. You can rely on the editor to spend hours and days selecting the most appropriate shots from the chaos. That is why film editors develop a nice line in profanity and why post-production costs escalate.

    Previously the director had to describe the shot and movement he wanted. The cameraman had to interpret this wishful thinking and, sighing, mark the lens barrel with slivers of white camera tape to remember his different points of focus. Nothing was automatic. He had to meter the available light and adjust the lens accordingly. All these matters had to be addressed after the important creative decisions were made: what was the purpose of the shot, what should the actors say and do, how much film stock and daylight are left, how can the sound man pick up dialogue without revealing the microphone but, principally, what time is coffee break?

    The process was tangible, especially the editing which was done by physically manhandling the film on a Steenbeck machine and winding the magnetic soundtrack backward and forward to acquire synchronisation of sound. The latter required, at the beginning or end of each take, a distinct noise in precise coordination with an image of that sound’s source. This requirement was usually met with the clapperboard. Sometimes you just clapped your hands in front of the lens.

    It was not just a rumour that the late Fr Joe Dunne, intrepid Radharc oneman film crew, solved this problem in non-unionised foreign parts with his shoe. He would start the camera (a Pro 1200 monster which I inherited from him) and focus on an interviewee, then take off one shoe and fling it at the visible wall behind the subject – which might easily have been a flinching Archbishop or a South American dictator, for all Joe Dunne cared. All human beings were accorded equal respect by him, and his primitive technology worked, according to his talented editor Dáibhi Doran.

    As film stock and processing were expensive, the ratio of exposed film to the final product was at most 4:1 and even that, I remember, was extravagant. To save money, every shot involved making up your mind beforehand. Film had some of the physical satisfaction of a sculptor choosing his subject and material and then eliminating all that was superfluous to his or her vision. I liked working with my hands – a trait presumably inherited from my cooper father and every one of his similarly-employed ancestors.  I approached every subject through the prism of my own experience and prejudices. The job was to analyse first impressions, pin down the essential, eliminate the superfluous and then gaily use the material to say what you yourself wanted. Objectivity in TV and film is a myth. The same goes for all of our perceptions.

    The film editor was crucial. The basic skill he demanded from a director or cameraman was a cutaway to any relevant object in the scene. With this he might execute the desired sleight-of-hand transition from one angle or scene to another. That was until Godard made ‘jump-cuts’ fashionable. Dáibhí Doran always called these little cutaways his ‘bananas’ because of the exotic locations frequented by Fr Joe Dunne. ‘Where’s me bananas?’ was his plaintive cry. From Dáibhí, Merritt Butler, Martin Duffy, Victor Power, Bill Lawlor, Gordon Bric, Manuela Corbari and many other patient people, I learned everything worth knowing about film editing, even how to edit my own work. That came in useful in Connemara when I became the only independent film maker outside Dublin. Now I have the impression that there is a standing army of such foolhardy souls vying for pittances from the Irish Film Board – now titled Fís Éirean, which daringly suggests that the state body might have a vision for Ireland.

    Since the microchip has made computers accessible and all the work is now performed on their sophisticated programmes, much of the satisfaction has gone out of the job. I am like a steam train stoker replaced by the diesel engine. The physical approach to the material is obsolete. The director now sits helplessly for hours beside the editor, or is told to come back to-morrow, is sometimes even allowed to voice a suggestion. It is the difference, on the one hand, between the late sculptor James McKenna hacking away for months at wood or stone and, on the other, the subsequent breed of conceptual artists who merely have to state their intentions in order to be taken seriously by art critics.

    For a long time I refused to  learn  the technique of computer editing. Besides, female editors were now in the ascendancy because of their quicker minds and fingers. They also knew that the way to be re-employed was to refrain from telling the director or producer that their material was rubbish. There is no more disillusioned breed than television film editor, male or female. That is part of the reason why the enormous bulk of  TV and film today consists of trailer-trash reality directed by schedulers at female consumers. I call it flatpack film and TV. Anybody can assemble it and at the end it resembles product but it falls apart under close examination.

    The tail is wagging the dog.

    I was lucky. I had so many disparate ideas that I could never hope to express them in formal or traditional artforms. In film I had to filter my ideas through dedicated professional camera, sound and editing people. No matter how chaotic my imperatives might be, those artisans still had to concentrate on their own corner, make sure pictures were appropriate and at least in focus, that the sound was crisp and clear, that the ingredients could be cut together in some coherent way. This was the only process that could have disciplined me and I am indebted to all of those people who kept me up on the tightrope. They are the real artists. We directors are the flippertygibbets and I suppose we have some higher purpose but I no longer can remember what it is.

    Alas, in the craven new world of film and TV, the director has slipped down the ratings and now is more like a bus driver, merely keeping tightly to a schedule and subject to ticket inspectors – the bean-counting executive producers. My brilliant director son modestly describes the job as shot harvesting.

    The apparatchik reigns, the auteur is dead. So are Kieslowski and Tarkovsky, both at too early an age.  My theory is that they died of shock, along with eastern-bloc Socialism which, despite its repression of ordinary citizens, had actually nurtured their genius. The field of art was regarded as a legitimate battlefield between ideologies. Artists were cherished as front-line combatants. When the Iron Curtain vanished so did the concept of film as State-supported art. Those two eminent film makers’ optimistic embrace of Western freedom and democracy exposed them to a harsh market ruled by pragmatism and bean counting. Having survived the heirs of Stalinism they perished under global capitalism.

    The irony is that this petty island of Ireland, which always stoutly denounced the evils of socialism and was itself denounced for aesthetic narrow-mindedness, is the only State that now officially and consistently supports the individual artist with an institution called Aosdána. And the politician responsible for realising this vision? The much-derided but far-sighted Charles J. Haughey. He knew that the new economic reality of Globalism would turn us all into homeless beggars or advertising whores.

    Feature Image: © Hugh O’Conor.

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  • ‘Focused on Phibsborough’ – An Interview with local election candidate Sean McCabe

    After working for the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice at global conferences, Sean McCabe is now relishing the chance to represent the local concerns of his Phibsborough community. He intends to bring meaningful improvements to people’s lives, and help build community-owned initiative to tackle threats posed by climate change and inequality. Cassandra Voices interviews this first-time independent candidate in the May 24th election.

    What motivated you to enter politics?

    I think we are all in politics whether we like it or not. In January 2010 I moved to Calcutta, India where I spent a little under two years working in a hospice, serving people whose lives were devastated and extinguished by poverty. It was a formative time. The depth of injustice made me angry and shaped how I understood life and my opportunities in it. I made a promise to myself that I would use whatever ability I have to serve people. I think lots of us feel like that – we want to contribute positively to society and support the people around us – but maybe we don’t necessarily look to politics as an avenue to achieve this. Back then, in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis, I didn’t have much faith in the political system.

    My understanding evolved in the years after I returned home. It took time to find the type of work I wanted to do. I had studied physics and worked in finance for several years, so transitioning to people-focused work was not easily done. That was a difficult time, full of uncertainty which, after time, can lead you to doubt the path you’re on. If anyone told me then I would go on to spend five years working closely with Mary Robinson, I’d have thought they were mad.

    But that’s how it turned out. My work with the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice shaped my understanding of political engagement, and the right to participate in society. A focus of our work was ensuring that people with lived experience of the impacts of climate change had their voices heard during international negotiations around climate and sustainable development. I had the opportunity to listen to, and learn from, many conversations where community leaders, mostly women, told their truth to world leaders and decision-makers. I grew to understand the importance of meaningful participation in addressing injustice. In this time I also became involved in projects related to homelessness, Direct Provision and mental health.

    The injustices that exist in Ireland and elsewhere will only be overcome by communities engaging directly with the decision-making processes that affect our lives. Similarly, to tackle climate change and build a sustainable, safe future, we will have to ensure that anyone can participate meaningfully in the design of action, and benefit from sustainable development. So in answer to the question, I am not motivated to enter politics, I am motivated to play my part in addressing the serious challenges of our time. I see participation as fundamental to addressing these challenges and that is why I am running in the local elections.

    Are there specifics polices for your local area that you are focusing on?

    We are hoping to secure a voice for the Phibsborough community on Dublin City Council. Due to adjustments to the Local Area boundaries, 2019 is the first time all of Phibsborough will be voting in the same constituency. This gives us an important opportunity to address a lack of long-term investment in the area.

    I want to ensure the redevelopment of Dalymount Park goes ahead. It offers a wonderful opportunity to significantly enhance community life in the area as the plans includes cultural and recreational facilities. A concerted political push is required to ensure it receives the funding it requires. I also want to address the issue of traffic in Phibsborough. Despite relatively low levels of car ownership, the community is dominated by the roads that divide it. I want to work to deliver infrastructure improvements that ensure that pedestrians and cyclists can move safely and effectively. I want to see Bus Connects and Metro North developed in as inclusive a manner as possible to avoid potentially regressive impacts on the area.

    I will also work to ensure the community start seeing the benefits of climate action through renewable energy cooperatives that can reduce heating and electricity bills, as well as carbon footprints.

    We are taking note of lots of other issues coming up on the doorsteps, including illegal dumping which suggests a lack of pride in the area that we aim to address.

    Another concern is the prevalence of anti-social behaviour and crime. This needs to be addressed firstly with enhanced community policing, but also through development and enhancement of youth services.

    I also want to help create a local food cooperative along with more allotments and urban gardens which will enhance biodiversity.

    Why did you choose to run in the local elections rather than a general election?

    They are different very different roles. My decision to run in the local elections is based on a belief that local government has a very important role to play in mobilising the action required to create a fairer, more inclusive and sustainable world.

    I was in New York in September 2015 for the adoption of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 2030 Agenda was signed by 193 countries and applies to all. Through it, world leaders committed to eradicating poverty, addressing inequality, and protecting our planet for present and future generations.

    During the celebrations at the United Nations Headquarters I remember feeling a million miles away from the communities that this agenda is supposed to help. I felt the ambition was not matched by a concrete understanding of how ownership would be passed to regular people and communities. We must have communities around the world that are empowered with the information, tools and resources to implement the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals contained within the 2030 Agenda. Only then will we be able to create the world free of suffering and want which the 2030 Agenda calls for.

    The past three decades have seen the edge being taken off community agency in Ireland with people encouraged to view themselves as individual consumers, rather than citizens and community members. But that spirit still exists and is ready to build a fairer, sustainable and more compassionate society, it just needs to be set free.

    I love living in Phibsborough because I’m surrounded by people who dedicate their time and energy to their community. There is an abundance of grassroots organisations, actively enhancing social, cultural and environmental wellbeing. Even Bohs is a collective, member-owned football club run by volunteers. It’s remarkable!

    Local government should be facilitating and building on this active engagement. Together we can channel the agency that exists within our communities and develop a new approach to local governance in Ireland; one based on deliberative democracy, where people participate meaningfully in the decision-making processes, to the benefit of everybody.

    To address poverty, inequality and climate change, we must start with local solutions, building the world we want from the ground up.

    How do you intend to get yourself elected?

    I want this campaign to be inclusive and participative, and we are planning a few community-based direct-action projects that will hopefully encourage people to consider the role of local government in their lives.

    Traditional canvassing also plays an important role. A great team has been coming out with me, as we seek to understand the specific needs of the community.

    This is a grassroots campaign. We would love for people to join in and take part – even if they have no prior experience in this kind of thing. The more people we have, the more we can do. We want to have fun doing it too. People can get involved by messaging us through Facebook or sending me an email on smccabe@outlook.ie.

    How do you overcome voter apathy?

    I’m not sure I have the resources to address that as an individual candidate. I want to avoid the type of cynical campaigning that I think contributes to voter apathy. We have a set of principles that govern our campaign which include taking the people we meet, and their concerns, seriously; avoiding echo chambers; not stealing ideas from, or taking credit for, community initiatives; not undermining other candidates; and ensuring complete transparency. We are publishing the campaign incomings and outgoings live online. My hope is that constituents will recognise our approach has integrity and that this will encourage participation in local politics.

    Why did you choose to run as an independent rather seeking the nomination of one of the established political parties?

    I don’t really see the point of political parties at a local level. Local government should be about empowering communities by electing representatives to the council that give them a direct channel to the decision-making table. Party politics is the antithesis of this. As a member of a political party, I think it seems inevitable that, on occasion, it would be necessary to put the interests of the party ahead of the community. That just seems wrong to me.  I want to see community-led local government, where deliberative approaches are used to seek common ground, sharing the benefits and burdens of administration across the city.

    Which of the parties would your ideas tend to align you with and are there any political parties that you would not work with?

    That is hard to answer. I prefer to see public representatives as individuals and decide how best to work with them based on the substance of the proposals they wish to bring forward. Unfortunately however, especially at local level, party politics can cloud decision-making processes and risk obscuring priorities.

    Which writers have inspired your political ideas?

    That’s a difficult question. I don’t sit around reading books on political theory. I’m inspired by writers like John Steinbeck, Boris Pasternack, Amartya Sen and Maya Angelou. I just finished reading Fredrick Douglas’s Narrative which is a remarkable account of unrelenting courage in the face of oppression in all its forms. Musicians like Luke Kelly, Woody Guthrie, Harry Bellefonte, Dominic Behan, Kris Kristofferson, Ewan MacColl and Paul Robeson, and their life stories, have shaped my political outlook as much as writers.

    What is the burning political question of our time?

    I suppose the simple answer is how are we going to muster the political courage to tackle climate change. The more complex answer is how to build a movement based on solidarity to secure climate justice. Climate change confronts us with our interdependence. No country or leader alone can change course. If we do not find a way of including everyone in a transition to a green, low carbon economy, then we are facing an existential crisis.

    The impacts could occur a lot sooner than most people are anticipating, and there is no technological silver bullet to save us. We need solidarity – locally, nationally and globally. The children’s climate strike gives me hope. They are fighting for their future. Our communities and our leaders must listen to them.

    What further ambitions do you have for your political career?

    Right now, I’m only concerned with running an inclusive and participatory campaign until the May 24th local election. Let’s see what happens then. Whether successful or not, my ambition is to continue working with the community to play my part in addressing the challenges we face. I have no grand plan!

    If you were Taoiseach for the day what would you do?

    Not much that can be achieved in a single day. I would probably pay a surprise visit to a Direct Provision centre and then spend the night typing up detailed notes of my conversations there for whoever was taking up the office after me.

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  • The Path of Pollen and the Seed Facilitators Way

    The path of pollen: the lovers’ tale between bee and flower. Once upon a time, bees were carnivorous – entering into flowers to gain access to smaller insects as a means for protein food supply. After frequent visits to the opening of the flower, curiosity began to mount in the bee. The flower was so visually beautiful, producing aromas incredibly alluring, what else could this elusive creature have to offer besides a convenient fast food location?

    Inching its way deeper into the delicate flower, the bee dabbled the sweet nectar and nutrient-packed pollen. Fireworks. Explosions. The bee bid farewell to catching flies and raised its standards, dedicating itself to the bees new life partner: the show-stopping flower.

    With a vegetarian pledge, bee and the flower began a co-evolution, involving nourishment for the bees in exchange for seeds for the plant. A balanced, harmonious relationship. The bee still earns its stripes as one of the plant’s best allies in reproduction.

    Will this love stand the test of time?

    I was walking through a park wondering if I should fulfil my original intention to dedicate an article to bees, or focus on Spring Tonics (maybe another time). Suspended in this mind chatter, I stumbled upon a dead bee on the pavement. Thank you for hearing me and delivering this obvious sign, Universe.

    I examined the bee – it could have just been taking a break. It was sitting on its legs, wings side up. I sat with the bee, not spotting any obvious injuries, but I did not sense any movement either.

    Wishing not to leave it alone in the middle of the foot path, I regretfully took a leaf of ivy and scooped the bee up – a perfect fit. Looking around for any nearby flowers to rest the bee by, I had to settle for a mossy green spot that had collected morning dew next to a stream.

    It struck me again (double thank you, Universe) that the initial direction in my head for writing this article was to raise awareness of our responsibility to plant food for bees, and Nature was presenting me with a perfect illustration.

    Around this time of year, humans have adapted the ritual of planting bulbs ‘for Spring’. Flowering Daffodils and Tulips being the most obvious example. While a pop of long overdue colour is therapeutic, these plants generally are not the best options for pollinators. Modern hybrids have been heavily manipulated by plant breeders to select uniform eye-candy for human adoration, heedless of the side-effects such as loss of nectar and pollen.

    These Frankenstein-flowers come at a major cost to bees: after hibernation, without early sustenance, a bee will die.

    We as seed facilitators need to plant with others in mind and treat the soil and seeds as sacred. We can do so by adopting these three rule of thumb:

    1. Prioritize bulbs and seeds or ‘in the green’ plants that are Organic. A number of commercially produced bulbs are manufactured with pesticides. What is toxic to humans is also toxic to bees. When a seed or a bulb is modified with pesticides, do you think these chemicals disappear when the plant develops?
    2. Buy local! And plant locally, too.What plants are indigenous to your environment? These plants will be the most attractive to your local pollinators.
    3. Shapes and sizes matter.Consider the depth of different flowers in correlation to the anatomy of different species of bees. Variety will help attract all sorts of beneficial pollinators. A varied selection of plant species is required not only for a balanced diet, but also to ensure a steady food supply throughout different species blooming times.

    These three points flow in the same vein as what is important to consider when shopping for honey. Choose Organic, Local, and Variety. To me, it is best practice to purchase seeds with the understanding that everything you plant enters into a common space for fertility: the same soil we as humans and all those alive depend on for existence. Put another way, mirror purchasing seeds to the way you would choose your own food for optimal health.

    Your body being the soil; and food the seeds. A full circle.

    Still not sure what to plant? A lot of seed providers will actually state on the packet whether a plant is attractive to pollinators. You can also consider the following bee magnets:

    – Crocus
    – Snow Drops
    – Hellebores
    – Clover
    – Heather
    – Herbs (Borage, Rosemary, Thyme, Lavender, Marjoram, Calendula, St. John’s Wort and many, many more!)
    – Trees (Fruit, Rowan, Hawthorn, Elder etc.)
    – Wild Flower Mix

    Finally, nature provides some of the best early bee foods without any human intervention. Many human-classified ‘weeds’, such as dandelion, are a fantastic first food source for hungry bees, and can aid in fostering greater biodiversity within a collective ecosystem.

    Ethical, local seed resources in Ireland try:

    Irish Seed Savers (Co. Clare):
    www.irishseedsavers.ie

    Brown Envelope Seeds (West Cork):
    brownenvelopeseeds.com

    Check out Ireland’s Pollinator Plan from 2015 -2020 for excellent tip, advice, and a full list of native bee friendly plants.
    www.pollinators.ie

    You can also contact your local community garden! Mindfully harvesting seeds is very therapeutic, and the rewards speak for themselves.

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  • Musician of the Month – Matthew Jacobson

    A Brother’s Influence

    I distinctly remember this day, aged about twelve, going for a family walk down (up?!) the west pier in Dun Laoghaire when my older brother by seven years was teaching me different rhythms, while the rest of the family discussed the day’s concerns as the seagulls squawked overhead. He would first get me to repeat the same rhythm that he was clapping, before teaching me a second alternate rhythm that would interlock with his original. We walked along with our footsteps creating the pulse and our hands beating out polyrhythms to the bemusement of other families and dog walkers.

    Around the same period, I also clearly remember being at home doing homework when my brother came in and put on John Coltrane’s Giant Steps album. I can still recall the sense of wonder at this chaotic and exotic sound coming out of the CD player. A seed had clearly been planted.

    Another memory is of being in the kitchen before dinner one day and my brother putting on a Sonny Rollins album and getting me to try and click on beats ‘2’ and ‘4’ – as is customary in that particular idiom. At that stage I just could not fathom how it was possible to discern which beat in the bar was which.

    A further recollection is of an annual holiday in Wexford by the beach (along with the rest of Dublin it seemed) and my brother trying to teach me to sing a major scale, using the intervallic approach of tone; tone; semi-tone; tone; tone; tone; semi-tone. ‘How the hell am I supposed to tell what a tone or semi-tone even sound like?’, I remember thinking.

    As you have probably gathered, my brother was at that age a very big influence on me. He was studying jazz performance, and I was more than happy to be his musical guinea pig, testing out and practising everything he was learning himself. It was around then that I also started taking piano lessons, aspiring to play music but not on the same instrument as my guitar-wielding brother. I worried there would be too much competition or that I would end up in his shadow, and there was already a piano in the house as my older sister had also been getting lessons.

    The piano lessons were going well and I had a great teacher, who literally lived at the end of our garden. These continued for about a year, before he moved out of Dublin and the lessons stopped. Over the following couple of years I continued to play a bit, getting one or two lessons with a family friend and my brother also taught me a couple of jazz standards. He said: ‘Chords in the left hand, melody in the right hand. Then to improvise just use any of the notes that are in the chords in your left hand at the time – fun!’ I got a little repertoire together including, ‘Mr PC’ (from Giant Steps) ‘Blue Bossa’, ‘Mac The Knife’, ‘All of Me’, ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ etc.

    At the age of fifteen, when I had to pick an instrument for Junior Certificate music, my teacher at school, who loved that I was playing jazz and improvising – as opposed to the many other Bach-bashing pianists – encouraged me to stick with the piano. When I asked my brother, however, he suggested I take up the drums. Perhaps he had seen some natural talent that day on the pier, or maybe he just wanted a drumkit in the house for him to rehearse on with his own band at the time! Either way, once again his words were paramount and my parents kindly signed me up for a term of lessons, understandably, before they would commit to purchasing such a large and dynamic instrument. The lessons went well and within six months I was swinging away (or at least trying to) on my wine-coloured Pearl Export.

    Image © Gabriela Szeplaki.

    I have since realised how unusual it is to sit down at your first ever drumkit and attempt to play swing grooves à la Elvin Jones, as opposed to the more common rock beat #1. This unconventional route was confirmed by my decision, once again at the prompting of my brother (surprise, surprise), to take transition year out of secondary school and take the same one-year music performance certificate course at Newpark Music Centre that had set him on his way some years beforehand. Later, after I finished my Leaving Certificate, that course became the first year of a four-year music degree programme that I went on to complete.

    This deeper delve into the world of jazz, and the connections that I had made through my brother’s involvement in the scene, meant I gained lots of experience in situations that technically I was probably unready for. I now believe this was an invaluable part of my musical education, meaning there was always a creative or musical reason for practising, as opposed to practising a mechanical exercise purely with the goal of ‘being able to’.

    These formative experiences, absorbing music from somebody I looked up to, learning the piano before the drums, and playing with a variety of seasoned musicians gaining valuable insight into the necessities of a drummer, have made me the musician I am today. And what kind of musician is that?

    Well, I feel hugely privileged to play drums in a lot of different projects, in many different contexts and with musicians from a wide variety of backgrounds. I am at a stage, twenty years on from that day on the pier, where almost every day I get to play with people I respect and love, and whose music I care about.

    My foremost aspiration is to make all of that music sound as honest and real as possible. Amazingly, all of the musicians I play with trust me to make the most appropriate choices for each situation.

    I do not think of myself as a drummer, but as a musician that happens to sit down behind a drumkit (no longer a wine-coloured Export!). For this I thank my brother (who is still very much involved in music too), along with the rest of my ever-supportive family, including parents who have travelled as far as Paris, Cologne and New York to see me perform. Thank you.

    www.matthewjacobsonmusic.com

    Featured Image: © Gabriela Szeplaki.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    Image © Gabriela Szeplaki.

  • Manus in Seomra Spraoi

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

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

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

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

    *******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Shirifa nodded her three year old head and looked serious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The story kept the kids happy the whole way back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And Manus was living in the wealthy West.

    *******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    All of the above he supposed.

    *******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Can the European Project be Kept on Track?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Romantic Travel

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

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

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

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

    Sail-Rail

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

    Unmistakably London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Inter-Rail

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

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

    Cross-country skiing near Oslo, Norway.

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

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

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

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

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

    Jesiniky Mountains, Czech Republic.

    ‘the enemy within’

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

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

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

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

    Inter-continental

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    With all its injustices England is still the land of habeas corpus and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence and illegality.[ii]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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