A month on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European states, including Ireland, are faced with some of the most significant challenges in decades. How should the West react? With humanitarian aid? With issuing a welcome to refugees? With weapons? With direct military interventions such as imposing a ‘no fly zone’ and therefore potentially extending the conflict beyond Ukraine’s borders?
It’s a pity that the European Union has in effect forfeited a potential diplomatic role, due to the decision of some member states to supply arms to one of the belligerents (albeit the victim of aggression), to the extent that diplomatic efforts at securing a settlement are being hosted by Turkey under Erdogan, which is not exactly a country renowned for protecting civil liberties or democratic values.
It’s also a pity that the popular uproar greeting Putin’s invasion has not been seen in the past few years in response to other conflicts, including the war in Yemen which has raged, without an end in sight, since 2014.
The pictures shown here are of a protest organized by theIrish Anti-War Movementin an effort to raise awareness of the tragedy Yemenis are still experiencing, as well as a call for Ireland’s neutrality or non-alignment to be maintained. They hope instead that the State can play a major role in leading necessary diplomatic efforts to resolve conflicts around the world, including the war in Ukraine.
There now seems to be a concerted efforts on the part of the political establishment to push to formally abandon the country’s neutral status, already strained by past and current use of Shannon Airport by NATO forces.
The Irish Anti War Movement @IrishAntiWarMvt are holding a protest at 6PM at the Dáil in solidarity with Ukraine for peaceful solutions to the war and to defend Ireland's neutrality.
Patricia McKenna addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO, Dublin.Crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO, Dublin.Ibrahim Hashem addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO, Dublin.Crowd marching at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in towards the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.
Crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 marching towards the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Dáil Éireann, Dublin.
crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Richard Boyd Barrett TD addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Abdulaziz Almoayyad addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.Ivana Bacik TD addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the Saudi Embassy, Dublin.
Father Peter McVerry has been working with homeless people for over forty years. When he started there were about a thousand homeless in Ireland. Now, there are officially about eight thousand, with many others unofficially so. Last week, Daniele Idini caught up with the legendary social justice campaigner.
Daniele Idini (DI): You have seen different types of crises related to housing in Ireland, but what are the constants?
Fr McVerry (McV): What has been constant over the forty years is the attitude of decision makers to those who are homeless. When I started, the big issue was fourteen and fifteen year old kids living on the streets. When I opened my first hostel for those kids, the attitude was that these kids who kept running away from home were bad kids, and the solution was to call the police, pick them up and bring them back home again. The idea that there was huge abuse and violence and neglect hadn’t registered yet. So, the attitude was that we shouldn’t be reaching out and helping these kids. They’re just bad kids. Then the problem shifted to young adults with drug problems and again – the same attitude. Well, these are people that started using drugs. It was their fault. So, we shouldn’t really have too much sympathy for them. Then the issue became homeless families, and again, there’s a stigma attached to being homeless, and that stigma is accepted by some decision makers. What has been constant is this negative stigma that is attached to homeless people, and affects some decision makers’ thinking.
DI: Where do you think this stigma comes from?
McV: It permeates the whole of society. The only homeless people who are visible are the ones who are sleeping on the street and begging, and who generally do have a drug problem. This leads to a perception among the public that homeless people must have a problem, and that’s why they’re homeless. But the vast majority of homeless people don’t have a drink or a drug problem. The vast majority becoming homeless today are being evicted from the private rented sector, either because they can’t pay the rents, or because the landlord says they’re selling the flat.
DI: Can we draw a connection between this and the economic policies that have been implemented in the last few decades?
McV: Well, at an immediate level, when families become homeless, having been evicted from the private rented sector, there is no social housing to move into. In 1975, this country built 8,500 council houses. In 1985, and we were in a recession in the 80s, we still built 6,900 council houses. By contrast, in 2015 this country built seventy-five council houses. So the immediate effect is that there is no housing for those families to move into. They have only got one problem and it’s not drugs and it’s not drink. They don’t have enough money to be able to go out and afford alternative accommodation.
Now,why did that happen? It happened because of an ideology. The ideology that the private sector is supposed to solve all our problems. And so, low income families were pushed into the private rented sector, which no longer can cope. But it was that ideology. We’ve privatized everything. We’ve privatized childcare, and that’s in a bit of a mess at the moment. We’ve privatized care for the elderly. Most private nursing homes are privately run. We have privatized much of the health system and now we have privatized the housing system and it simply doesn’t work.
The private market might build lots and lots and lots of houses, but only for people who can afford them. They’re in the business of making a profit. They’re not going to build housing for low income families. And so it’s the State that has to do that. The State has been very reluctant, over the last twenty years or so, to invest in social housing, and therefore they’re pushed people into the private rented sector. That wouldn’t be too bad, if we didn’t have a crisis in the private market where there aren’t even enough houses for people who can afford to buy them. It is estimated that we need between thirty-five and fifty thousand new houses every year just to keep up with the increase in population. Yet we’re only building in the region of twenty to twenty-five thousand. So there are lots of people who could buy a house, but can’t find a house to buy, and they’re being pushed into the private rented sector. So, everybody is being pushed into the private rented sector, and it can’t cope. Rents are going through the roof.
DI: In Ireland, we still have relatively high home-ownership, but, especially after the crisis, there’s a rush into the new model of renting for life. This is a bit of a paradox, however, in terms of a neoliberal ideology which aims at protecting the right to private property; yet, in Ireland, owning private property has become out of reach for a significant percentage of the population.
McV: Absolutely, yes. So over the last twenty years, the State has failed in its responsibility to build social housing, pushing people into the private rented sector. They had to create a culture for that to happen. The State did two things. First of all, it looked at the continent. It looked at the rest of Europe and said: Well, most people rent. So, any progressive democracy and an economy which is growing must have a lot more people renting. The mistake there is that the rental market in the rest of Europe is totally different from the rental market in Ireland. Most rental markets in Europe are highly regulated: prices and rents are controlled, and you can become a lifelong tenant. Here, you can’t. You get a tenancy for maybe twelve months, or at most four or five years. You’re living with high insecurity, and the rents are increasingly way beyond your means. It’s a totally different rental market to the rest of Europe. But if you read the last government’s housing strategy, there is so much ideology in it trying to persuade us that the rental market is the way we have to go. The rental market has all of these advantages, and it is the only way for a progressive economy to go.
DI: According to a recent Irish time article Ireland has the 10th highest rate of vacant homes in the world, with 183,312 homes classified as vacant. We have a society that does not regard it’s housing stock as a basic national infrastructure like ports, rail network, airports or the electricity grid.
How might the public become more aware of the benefits of a more distributed housing stock?
McV: Well, I think the public are well aware of the empty homes that exist in every town and village. Ireland is blighted by empty properties lying derelict, often being used for antisocial or drug using young people. But there is very little political will to go after those properties. There is a lot of work involved in trying to identify the owners of some of those properties and trying to sort out any legal problems that may exist with relation to that. But we ought to be promoting compulsory purchase orders on properties that are left idle for longer than one or two years. It is a scandal. 1830,000, you mentioned. One of the issues was the Fair Deal Scheme, where if you go into a nursing home, the value of your home will be taken by the State when you die. Eighty percent of the value of your home will be taken by the State when you die to pay for your care in the nursing home. That meant that people in nursing homes couldn’t rent out the empty house they had been living in, even though they’re never going to go back to it.
They can’t rent it out because most of the rent would be simply taken up by the nursing home to pay for their care. So, you had empty houses there that couldn’t be used. You had empty houses where we couldn’t find out who the owner was.
The government did make a couple of schemes such as a Repair and Leasing Scheme where the owner can benefit from a grant of, I think it’s now €60,000 to bring the empty building back into use and then lease it to the State for a period of up to twenty years. And there was a Buy and Renew Scheme where the State could buy the property and then repair it. But there was very little uptake of those two schemes. So yeah the amount of empty properties is a scandal.
DI: What other measures would you suggest should be put in place to deal with the situation?
McV: There are two problems at the moment. One is housing those people who are waiting for social housing. There’s an even more urgent problem, and that is preventing more and more people from coming into homelessness and needing housing. That’s the more urgent problem, and that can be solved overnight.
During the pandemic, there was a ban on evictions and there was a ban on a rent increase and the number of homeless people and families dropped by almost two thousand. We should extend that to a ban on rent increases and a ban on evictions for at least three years in order to try and get a grip on the problem. The counterargument will be that it’s against the right to private property. But I don’t buy that argument. I don’t think the Supreme Court would uphold that argument.
So the solution involves passing a law banning evictions and rent increases and sending it to the President to sign. The President can send it to the Supreme Court and fast track a decision. Let’s do that. Let’s find out if it’s against the Constitution. If it is, you bring in a constitutional referendum on the right to housing and make that right at least place level with the right to private property, because every argument we present to try and address the housing-homeless crisis comes up against the argument that it is against the right to private property in the Constitution. Now, that right to private property was established in the 1930s at a time when Communism was expanding around the globe. And one of the tenets of communism was that you could not own private property. So, the idea behind it was to prevent Ireland ever having a Communist government. But now it’s being used to prevent Irish people getting their own home, which is absolutely absurd.
A fascinating insight into the mechanics of dysfunction in housing. Great work by Daniele and Liam. https://t.co/dI7pQ4CXu2
DI: Isn’t it a paradox that a good percentage of the population does not have access to private property because we have to defend the right to private property?
McV: Yeah, it is a total paradox. The Catholic Church, for example, supports the right to private property, but what is meant by that is that everybody should have access to private property because that’s our little security. That’s their little fallback if things go wrong. But the right to private property has been hijacked by the wealthy to hold on to what they have already acquired. And that was never, never the intention, certainly of the Catholic Church in supporting private property.
DI: Is there space here for a discussion of morality? Is it morally right to continue pursuing economic policies which, as experience is showing, are causing unnecessary pain and suffering to a growing percentage of the population? How do indicators such as GDP relate to the percentage of homelessness?
McV: Firstly, GDP is a very ineffective criterion for the wealth of a country. Every time there’s a car accident, the GDP goes up because the cost of repairing the car and the cost of treating the victims all adds to GDP. And the more serious the car accident, the further GDP goes up. So, GDP is not a reflection of the wellbeing of a society. We can never agree on what is moral. If you own a big house in a nice area with a nice car what is moral is your right to protect those assets. But if you’re homeless on the street, your concept of morality is going to be very, very different. So, I don’t think we’ll ever agree on what is moral. This is a political question. This only way it is going to be solved is politically. We have to ask the question: who benefits from rising rents and rising house prices? The answer is three groups.
One, the banks. The banks benefit because as house prices go up, they can lend more and more money out as mortgages and make more profit. And if they repossess a house, they will get more money for that house. They have an interest in a house and rent goes up.
Second, the big international investment funds. They also have an interest in rents going up. And indeed, many of them are leaving some of their properties empty rather than reducing the rents to what people can afford.
Third, the Landlords.
But who doesn’t benefit? Almost all Irish people don’t benefit from rising house prices and rising rents. For most people it is a huge disadvantage.
The second question we have to ask is which side is the government on? The government is on the side of the banks, the big international investment funds, which they attracted in with extraordinary tax concessions, and it’s on the side of landlords.
In one episode Simon Coveney brought in a rent cap of four percent. Where did that four percent come from? Simon Coveney wanted to bring in a rent cap in line with inflation, which was hovering around zero at that time. The big international investment funds held a number of meetings with the Minister for Finance and told him that four percent was the minimum they would accept if he wanted them to continue being involved in this country.
So four percent it was, and since then the rents have gone up far more than that. In those five years, the rents have potentially gone up by twenty percent. At the same time the HAP payment which you received from the government if you’re on a low income hasn’t gone up in those five years. So now the rents are on average twenty percent higher than they were when the payment was introduced, and lots of people are having to pay top ups to the landlords. Anything between €125 and €200 is what I’m coming across. And you have a single person on social welfare who’s getting €204 or €205 a week, and they have one week in a month where they have to pay €200 to a landlord as a top up because the HAP payment hasn’t increased sufficiently.
People on low incomes are just being screwed, screwed by landlords, screwed by investment funds, screwed by banks, and the government is on their side, not on the side of renters or people paying a mortgage who are struggling to try and keep their heads above the water.
DI: The inability of successive governments in dealing with this issue is more and more being perceived by the public as the result of either State corruption or pure negligence.
McV: I wouldn’t call it either of those. We have had conservative governments. Conservative governments are on the side of those who own capital because it’s the capital that develops the economy. So they’re on the side of capital, of the capital owners, which are the banks, and the large investment funds. And they don’t want to do anything which would frighten any of those away, anything which would make Ireland a less attractive place for them to operate. So I think there’s a conservative mindset which I totally disagree with. It’s not a mindset I would put down to malice or corruption or anything like that. I would put it down to what I would consider a very, very mistaken perspective on what’s happening in the country.
For example, in Germany they have passed a rent freeze for the next five years on rental properties, and in Berlin, they introduced a referendum to take back from the big international investment funds all the apartments and buildings that they had built. Now, it probably won’t pass, but that’s the sort of thinking we need to do. That sort of thinking is totally absent in Ireland.
The people who make the decisions here are doing very well. They’re on good salaries. They live in nice houses and nice parts of the town. Their children are going to third level education and in a few years time they’ll live in a nice house in a nice part of town. So they have a different perspective from somebody who’s struggling to pay the rent. They don’t understand somebody who is struggling to pay the rent. They say they do, but they don’t. For them the housing problem the problem of people on low incomes struggling to pay rents and mortgages. That’s a problem in a file on their desk. It’s not a personal problem for them, and it’s not a problem anybody they know is facing.
So for them it’s more theoretical. For me it’s real. It’s real because I’m meeting them every day and I’m frustrated and I’m angry. I want to see somebody with a passion for dealing with this. I want to see a decision maker who has a passion for dealing with this, who’s angry about what’s happening and who’s prepared to put their neck on the line. That’s what I want to see. I don’t see it at the moment.
DI: And as we are coming slowly out of a pandemic, what lessons can be drawn in regard to emergency accommodation and homelessness?
McV: The pandemic actually had one positive feature for homeless people. They were able to get accommodation because a lot of Airbnbs came back into use as private residential accommodation. And because there was a pandemic, you didn’t have queues of people outside wanting to view them. So landlords were ringing us and saying, You have anybody that needs a place? And they knew we wouldn’t put in somebody who was going to wreck the place. They knew we would support that person. And if difficulties arose, we’d have to step in. So it was a Win-Win for everybody.
Now is the time to regulate and demand that Airbnb’s get planning permission and to regulate, inspect and ensure that those planning permission and regulations are enforced. That would bring a lot of Airbnb’s back into private residential properties and would be a big addition in helping the housing crisis. It could be a condition that anybody who wants to advertise their property on one of the sites, like Airbnb, must produce evidence of planning permission. That would get rid of a lot of Airbnbs and bring them back into residential use.
DI: With tourism opening up again have you noticed any effects on homeless people, who were housed in hotels and hostels during the pandemic, and are now, again having to rely on shelters?
McV: That’s already happening. The lease is now up on a number of hotels that were taken over as accommodation for homeless people, and they have been returned to the owners to be used as hotels. And it’s a real pity because homeless people love the hotels. You have your own en suite room. And now some of them are getting thrown back into hostile situations, and it’s very depressing for them. So yes, that was a feature of the pandemic that’s now disappearing. And it won’t come back.
One option is to buy those hotels, buy them back, buy them from the owners and use them as accommodation for families and that, but that’s very expensive. They’re not going to do that.
One of my ideas for homeless hostels is that everybody should have their own room. Homeless hostels are often unsafe. Many people get assaulted. People’s belongings get robbed. I’m arguing that every homeless person should have their own room all the time that provides security and safety for their belongings.
That’s expensive, and they’re not going to do it. It’s much cheaper to get a house and put four people into a room with bunk beds than to provide four separate spaces for homeless people. So, they’re not going to invest the money in that. But to my mind, what we offer to homeless people sends a message to them, and the message is, this is how society values you. This is what society thinks you’re worth. So when you cram them into rooms and bunk beds, some rooms without even a window in it, they’re getting the message. And that message is very negative. But that is the message that many of our decision makers don’t mind giving to homeless people because that’s the attitude that they’re coming from. This is good enough for them. I heard one person ringing up the free phone number to try and get a bed for the night, and he was offered a bed in a hostel. And he said, I can’t go to that hostel. It’s full of drugs. I don’t use drugs. And the answer I overheard was “beggars can’t be choosers.” And that’s the attitude I think that many people have towards homeless people.
It is an attitude that has political ramifications. Why else would we have reduced our building of social housing? Whenever the state tries to build social housing, you’re going to have huge objections from all the neighbours. And the local councillors who have to approve of social housing in that area are looking to the next election. And if they are alienating the people in the area where the social housing is going to be built, they are not going to approve that social housing for fear that they will lose out in the next election. So, we have this attitude that anybody in social housing is undesirable. Anybody in social housing is a problem, has a problem and therefore we don’t want to be anywhere near them. And the political system has to go along with that because of our democracy.
In interview with Daniele Idini, photographer Graham Martin reveals he was drawn to cover the Twelfth in Northern Ireland after developing an interest in geopolitical events while living in Brazil. Before his trip North he expected trouble, but encountered a surprisingly welcoming atmosphere, even in hardcore Loyalist areas, although much of the iconography remains disconcerting to any visitor from the South.
Daniele Idini: Are you a regular visitor to Northern Ireland?
Graham Martin: No not really, and that’s part of why I wanted to go with a camera. As you know, photography is a great tool for attempting to explain things to others, but also to yourself. It’s a great way of coming to terms with things, understanding things and I, like many in the South am aware of all the stigmas attached to the North. Having been born in the 1980s I do remember going up with my parents as a kid and although already relatively peaceful, there was still a physical border and I can remember passing through the checkpoints, seeing the walls and turrets without fully understanding what it all meant. Since then, any visit I made up there and over the border was for a shopping trip or for touring the Giants Causeway and Antrim coastline. My initial impression crossing the border was how good the quality of the roads were compared to the South, the red letterboxes, or the Union Jack painted on the curbs. Later, when I had a cell phone, there was the network switching over; it always felt slightly surreal. It was only in later years, when I started to orientate my photography more towards photojournalism that I started taking an interest in geopolitical events. Mostly abroad at first (I really began to take photography seriously when I emigrated to live In São Paulo, Brazil from 2012 to 2016), but then, you start to become curious about your own backyard; which you mainly ignore at first, because it always seems like it’s something that you want to get away from. So, for me, this recent trip was the first time I went up looking at it in a new light, and that was because of photography.
A child adds to the pyre before the Eleventh Night bonfire at Mountview Street estate off the Crumlin Road
Daniele Idini: In a previous article, which included interviews with a number of influential actors, we reported on rising tensions. We encountered a delicate situation, with a multitude of factors are at play. A combination of a Covid-19-related crisis; the effect of Brexit negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement, which was implemented in the context of the UK being a part of the European Union. What did you expect to happen on the Twelfth this year, and did it transpire?
Graham Martin: I genuinely thought it could go either way. There was all this talk of it potentially being heated, and I did reach out to some contacts who are originally from the North, and from the Protestant community, to ask advice on where would be interesting for me to go to see the parades and what bonfires would be accessible to outsiders. They gave their advice and warned that it looks like it’s going to be quite a heated Twelfth this year, because of everything that is going on at the moment. The advice I received was generally like “So, you know, keep your distance, keep your accent down, be sharp, keep your wits about you”, that kind of thing. When you get that kind of advice from people who are from there and who know the place, that colours your perspective and perception of things. I still went with an open mind, but like with everything, whenever there’s a lot of discussion, build-up and anticipation, quite often it doesn’t quite end up amounting to much at all, which ended up kind of being the case. There were some contentious bonfires built close to peace walls and talk of the PSNI forcibly removing some, which ultimately they didn’t.
Smoke rising in the Sandy Row area on July 10th indicates a pyre has been set alight a night early perhaps by Nationalists saboteurs…
Some of the bonfires were set alight the night before and I think there was one youngster, of maybe fourteen years-of-age, who got badly burned, which is a separate issue, but that was kind of the extent of any major incidents or outbursts and I actually felt warmly welcomed there. Any kind of feeling of apprehension was ultimately my own based on preconceptions. I arrived there with my guard up and found that there was no real need for that. I could walk around freely, could photograph in any neighborhood, could approach and talk to people on the streets. Even on the Shankill, which is notoriously Loyalist, I was taking pictures of people openly and they would want me to send them to them by email.
Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.
There was a little bit of bemusement and surprise when they realised that I was from the South, but perhaps they respected that. So I got comments like “fair play to you” . You could say that that general calm I experienced was very much a planned thing, in light of everything in the news and I think there was a marked intention to keep things civil and peaceful.
Spectators at the Sandy Row bonfire on July 12th night.
On seeing my camera one guy at the bonfire on Sandy Row came up to me and said, “don’t go making this look like something it’s not. Nobody’s fighting here. Everybody’s happy. You know, everybody’s peaceful. There’s going to be no violence here. Don’t go back reporting something that it isn’t, like the papers tend to do.” They notice that this big night of the year for them is always marked with negative press, with criticism, and I think there was an intention overall to show people that the Twelfth could pass off peacefully, and there was going to be no tension.
Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.
Daniele Idini: We can say then that there was an effort to keep the tension to a minimum. Yet, as I see from your pictures, there were some controversial messages and flag burning. What do these provocations, if we can call them this, really mean in this context?
Graham Martin: Every year the same flags and slogans are burnt on the fires. The Irish tricolour is burnt. You have effigies of Bobby Sands burnt, the gay flag, the Palestinian flag. You have pro-Israel graffiti around on the walls, which is just as provocative. It seems paradoxical that they identify themselves with Israel as a kind of a small nation that has the right to be in that particular territory. It’s just very confusing to see the Tricolor and the Palestine flag up in flames, and yet the people are warmly welcoming. They’re quite civil in person, but at the same time you see graffiti around stating K.A.T. (“Kill All Taigs”). Taigs is what they call Catholic nationalists, the Irish. You’re walking around meeting people, photographing people, and to your left, there’s K.A.T. graffiti, to your right, there’s a big, multi-storey bonfire with your nation’s flag on!
Bonfire Pyres on July 10th ready for The Eleventh Night celebrations at Sandy Row, Shore Road, Tigers Bay and Donegal Pass.
They’re demonstrating that they hate you and at the same time, they’re willing to open up and talk to you and shake your hands, so what’s the true feeling there? It’s very jarring. On the other side, when you walk through Catholic neighbourhoods like Ardoyne, not too far from the Shankill, in peace time, although IRA murals still exist, most of the more aggressive ones have been decommissioned. Many now are promoting sports and social community activities, environmental issues, and there are little or no flags. The odd tricolor maybe, but when you cross over onto the Shankill the murals feel more aggressive, more provocative. You’ve got those kind (such as the U.V.F murals and graffiti) up around the Shore Road, that would make you weary to enter into such areas. I walked up to one pyre as it was being built, the one that commenting on the Irish News (see image in grid “Fuck the Irish News”)* and there were a few guys hanging around finalising it’s construction. They basically told me to get the fuck out of there, so not such an open vibe. That’s the thing though; they put up these things, huge pyres with large signs and slogans that are clearly intended to seek attention, but then if you go and try and document it, you’re quickly warned to get the fuck out, so it’s quite challenging .
A line of PSNI Land Rover Tangis approach passing a conflagration in the Sandy Row area.
Daniele Idini: I guess it would depend on who is the intended audience for these displays. Some might include the press, but some, might be predominately intended for the community itself, and the aversion toward media is actually part of the message.
Graham Martin: Essentially, you know, you’re seeing slogans that are saying ‘Kill Catholics’. It’s beyond provocation. They can say it’s their culture and “let us let us have our night”, but there has also been homophobic and other racist graffiti on the Protestant side, denouncing the Black Lives Matter campaign for example. There a lot of topical issues that they are intentionally taking a side on. So this seems to me like a statement and not just aimed at their own community. There are paralells with the global push to a more Populist, right-wing ideology, you’ve seen pre-Brexit with Nigel Farage, and with ethnic nationalism in the U.K.
Spectator at the Sandy Row bonfire on the Twelfth.
Daniele Idini: The discontent in Loyalist communities, still focused on the Partition question, now seems to be directed equally towards Westminster. There’s a feeling of betrayal aimed at the likes of Boris Johnson, a Conservative. It has created an identity crisis, wherein there’s a feeling of abandonment from the rest of the United Kingdom; which brings a sense of fragility.
Graham Martin: It’s been building for years, I suppose. You’re talking about communities there that are really marginalised, under-developed and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see why they would be jumping on that kind of thing, and out of frustration picking on the Black Lives Matter campaign, Climate Change, or adopting the anti-masks / anti-vax campaigning. It’s really masquerading as something else. It’s a kind of rhetoric that it’s normalised that it doesn’t even get questioned anymore. The burning of flags, for example, could be seen as a form of hate crime, yet it’s completely normalised and permitted. Also, the bonfires aren’t regulated at all. There’s nobody in an official capacity to make sure they’re safe. If one falls over, which happens from time to time, it’s the size of a building falling, and on fire, It’s kind of surreal that it’s allowed to proceed as it does.
Rex Bar, a well-known UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group) meeting place on on the Shankill Road, July 12th.
Daniele Idini: I guess there is a level of negotiation going on with the authorities to try to keep the tensions to a minimum. To go back to the wider issues, Northern Ireland finds itself for the first time facing the possibility of a United Ireland that is being seen as not too remote of an option, and the result of Brexit’s negotiations is perceived by some as incompatible with the Good Friday agreement. It could be a treacherous path to save a peace treaty.
Graham Martin: There needs to be good faith and efforts from both sides, and a period where controversies aren’t dug up from the past. The difficult thing for sure is that the Troubles are within living memory for many people still; it’s not ancient history. And it’s going to take a long time for people to forgive and forget. Now it’s the Sea Border that’s causing fresh tension, and the announcement of the Statute of Limitations on investigation into the Bloody Sunday Massacre. Who knows what it will be next. It seems like it’s such a consistently fractious and volatile situation.
‘Summer of ’69’ mural on Hopewell Avenue in the Loyalist Shankill Road area, referencing the August 1969 violence which helped spark the Troubles.
And it’s not about religion, of course, but the symbolism of the churches, and the ephemera surrounding the divided beliefs remains ever present in the murals, tattoos, and the wearing of either the Catholic Celtic or Protestant Rangers football shirts. I think it’s harmful to be carrying that around as a constant reminder of superficial dividing lines between communities. But I don’t think young people are really identifying with their own faith any more, or their religion they’re born into quite as much as they used to. I think there’s a move away from labelling people based on their beliefs. That might sound naively optimistic, but I think that’s going to help things there. People can inform themselves better with the Internet and the global exchange of information, and question ingrained fears or hatred of their neighbours. You’ve seen how such a turnaround can happen in Southern Ireland over the last twenty years, where the power of the Church has waned, and all positives that have come out of that with marriage equality and Repeal the 8th. That is happening in the North also: an easing of hardline traditions which are loaded with sectarianism. And I think it’s going to hopefully have positive knock-on effects in time.
Continuing tensions in Greece over that State’s handling of the refugee crisis contradicts a carefully constructed public image the ruling right wing Nea Demokrita (New Democracy) wishes to project to a domestic and international audience. The issue of illegal ‘push-backs’ of migrants has continued to generate outrage, controversy, and outright denial in European media. This contradictory policy is reflected in events over this past week, as an attempt by the Greek President to honour a noted refugee-rescuer resulted in swift push-back by members of the ruling party keen to downplay such defiant gestures.
Technically head of state – although her role is primarily ceremonial – Greece’s first female President Katerina Sakellaropoulou had issued a list of Greek citizens who were to be honoured for their contribution to society in various fields. The conferral ceremony was part of a wider series of events held last weekend commemorating the forty-seventh anniversary of the restoration of Greek Democracy.
Those chosen to be honoured were drawn from various fields, including academia, medicine, and the arts. Amongst them was activist Iasonas Apostolopoulos, who over several years has been working as a sea rescuer of refugees around the Mediterranean Sea. Currently working with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) on such missions, Apostolopoulos has previously received honors for his humanitarian actions from the Mayor of Palermo, and the Danish Navy.
He was invited to attend the ceremony on Saturday 24th of July at the Presidential Hall. According to his testimony, however, he received a phone call from the Ministry of the Exterior on Friday 23rd July – after midnight – informing him he would not be decorated after all. Not only was this a highly unusual turn of events, but Apostolopolous had already been publically named as a recipient of this public honour. The cancellation was bound to stir controversy.
Worryingly, hours before Apostolopoulos had been informed by phone news of the cancellation was leaked on Twitter and Facebook by Konstantinos Bogdanos, a member of parliament from the ruling party of Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy). In his post, Bogdanos described the refugee rescuer as an ‘aggressive critic of the border policy and our security corps,’ and attached social media posts of Apostolopoulos critical of the well-documented illegal push backs by the Greek authorities, which have been linked to refugees drowning at sea.
The process of “pushing back” is designed to prevent migrants from arriving in a jurisdiction, or immediately returning them once they have arrived there. It prevents asylum seekers from declaring themselves as such, from presenting papers or other documents to the authorities, or even from receiving basic first aid or other essentials such as food, medicine and drinking water.
The practice has become all too commonplace as ‘Fortress Europe’ attempts to prevent and discourage the movement of victims of war and its economic consequences, and, increasingly, climate change.
Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy justifiably claim the burden of dealing with the refugee crisis has fallen disproportionately on them, a situation exacerbated by the regulations surrounding the Dublin Protocol and the increasing militarization of Frontex, the European Border Patrol Agency.
This burden has also fallen on non-EU Turkey, which is commonly believed to be foisting refugees onto their Greek neighbours, who in turn are forcing these unfortunate travellers back into the jurisdiction of the Turkish Coast Guard. The fear, frustration and terror suffered by those on the receiving end of these often fatal tactics is unimaginable.
Pushback by Greek security forces has received wide attention in the international media, and a recent Oxfam report from June 2021 described the practice of pushbacks at the Greek border are ‘persistent and systematic’.
Nonetheless, Minister of Migration and Asylum, Notis Mitarachi, has claimed that these allegations are ‘clearly unfounded’, despite eyewitness testimony, mobile phone footage from on board migrant vessels being attacked, and the testimony of the Turkish Coast Guard and other authorities. The practice was also thoroughly investigated in a recent New York Timesarticle, less than a week before Apostolopoulos was defamed as a traitor to his country.
The influential journalist Elena Akrita attended the ceremony. The following Sunday, she posted her response on her Facebook page: ‘What is 100% cross referenced is that the entire Far Right section of Nea Dimokratia fell on top the issue. They riled up a big fuss and managed to take his name off the list.’
The affair has brought a wave of outrage on social media, and is bound to reach the chambers of Parliament over the coming days and weeks, as left wing parties SYRIZA and MERA25, have already issued statement demanding explanations.
To some extent Apostolopoulos’s exclusion has backfired on those behind it, as it has brought the issue of illegal pushbacks of refugees back into Greek public discourse, and indeed the wider world.
The plight of refugees seems to be forgotten by those justifying the tactic of preventing safely landings on Greek territories such as Lesbos.
In reponse to this controversy, Iason Apostolopoulos made the following statement to independent mediaThe Press Project:
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of time to deal with whatever is going on in Greece. At the moment I am in the central Mediterranean Sea on board the rescue boat Geo Barents, of Doctors Without Borders. Our priorities here are different. Since the 2nd of July, we are pinned down by Italian maritime police in Augusta port, they won’t let us sail, we can’t even come ashore and they keep us anchored. A few miles away, hundreds of people every day struggle for the lives on decrepit blow up boats, facing the waves but also the utter indifference of European authorities.
Any people who manage to survive, are returned to the slave markets and torture centers of Libya, in joint operations of Frontex and Libyan Navy.
This is the reality that we are experiencing and whoever doesn’t want us to talk about it, is covering up and essentially supporting a European border regime which everyday produces mass death, violence and misery.
The debate over the tactics the EU is using to discourage migrants from attempting to reach its borders will continue. In the meantime, activists like Apostolopoulos can expect varying levels of opposition from state actors. Events in Greece this past week have shown how deep the divisions are between those seeking humanitarian solutions and those seeking complete control of the narrative around the refugee crisis.
The strange death of Dr. David Kelly was explored in celluloid at the premiere of Killing Kelly documentary at the Everyman Theatre, Muswell Hill, North London on Saturday, July 17 2021 at 9 pm.
This is the second in what could well turn out to be a series of documentaries of collaborative works between George Galloway and director Sean Murray from Belfast.
Murray has earned accolades for his documentaries including Unquiet Graves where he investigated the role of the British government in the murder of one hundred and twenty civilians in counties Armagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland, between July 1972 and 1978. This involved the infamous Glenanne murder gang, with ties to loyalist paramilitaries, British intelligence, locally recruited soldiers and police.
The role of British intelligence, its assets, and associated terror gangs has always been a part of the dirty war in Ireland. The counter-revolutionary strategy of successive British governments in Ireland, has had parallels throughout the world. With the mysterious death of David Kelly we appeared to be witnessing this approach in action on the British mainland.
George Galloway is a former MP, and now a media presenter for a host of radio and television shows, to include the Mother of all Talk Shows on Sputnik Radio International and Kalima Horra on Lebanese Al Mayadeen television.
The film draws on the book, The Strange Death of David Kelly by Norman Baker. Mr. Baker, Mr. Galloway, and Mr. Murray all made themselves available for questions and answers after the documentary presentation.
Just attended the premiere of the explosive new film Killing Kelly, which demonstrates on the balance of probabilities that Dr David Kelly did not kill himself 18 years ago. This is a cover-up by the British state. Unredacted documents must be released alongside a proper inquiry! pic.twitter.com/bRxRIamoRB
The film was crowd-funded through online donations, and follows the critically acclaimed The Killing$ of Tony Blair released in July 2016 by Mr. Galloway. This sequel, dealing with the same topic, is a timely addition to the history of Britain’s involvement in the illegal invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The infamous Weapons of Mass destruction ‘sexed-up’ dossier was used by Blair to inform the British people and the British Parliament, that Iraq had the capability to target the United Kingdom with chemical weapons in just 45 minutes; and as such Iraq and Saddam Hussein could not be allowed to continue to both engineer and deploy these armaments, which were a direct threat to world peace. Blair was beating the drums of war.
Once the darling of the US, UK, Israel, and NATO, Saddam had gone rogue. Despite sacrificing 800,000 troops in the Iran-Iraq War, a proxy fought on behalf of the West, following the successful Iranian revolution of 1979, by 2003 it was time for Saddam to go.
Having committed no act of aggression against the West following his humiliating retreat from Kuwait, in the wake of 9/11 a plan was hatched to destroy Iraq.
It is claimed in the film that Tony Blair and George W Bush conspired to create conditions for war and to prepare a narrative during Blair’s visit to President Bush. But a pretext was required to manufacture consent for military action. Thus, the dossier was used to frighten the UK and US public into accepting another intervention into the oil-rich region
Daily Walks
This film documentary is a testament to vigilant investigative journalism, including interviews with some of the major players involved at the time. Although the Kelly family, senior politicians, and military personnel declined to be interviewed, the facts speak for themselves.
On the day of his death, Kelly headed off on one of his many daily walks, chatting to a neighbour he met on his way. His wife was at home having a nap and he had arranged to meet his daughter later that evening.
A former head of Britain’s Porton Down chemical weapons research facility, Kelly was also one of UNSCOM’S chief weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
On May 22nd, 2003, Kelly met with Andrew Gilligan a thirty-five-year-old defense and diplomatic correspondent for BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program. According to Gilligan’s account, he asked how the dossier had been transformed, and Kelly replied with one word: “Campbell”; i.e. the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction on the United Kingdom, within 45 minutes, was inserted into the dossier on Iraq’s military capability at the insistence of Alaisder Campbell, chief advisor to Tony Blair.
Alastair Campbell lecturing at the LSE series ‘From Kennedy to Blair,’ 7 July 2003.
These allegations formed part of an investigation by the Intelligence and Security Foreign Affairs Select committee. After giving evidence on July 15th, Dr. David Kelly was found dead two days later. Kelly may have been the unwitting fall guy for the political spin doctors of Tony Blair. Whatever else he could have exposed was taken with him to the grave.
Death by Suicide
The official death certificate records ‘death by suicide’, but certain facts remain elusive.
When his body was discovered his knife was found lying beside him, with which, it was claimed, he had severed his ulnar artery. A bottle of tablets was found beside the body.
The following timeline was reported in the Guardian newspaper: at 3 pm Dr. David Kelly received a phone call from the Ministry of Defense. He then left his home at 3.20 pm. Having not returned from his walk, the Kelly family contacted the police at 11.40 pm.
Within 15 minutes three officers had arrived at the family home. A search operation started immediately, with a helicopter and search teams called in.
The helicopter with equipment for body-sensory imaging failed to locate the body. But he was found by a volunteer search party the following morning. It seems implausible that body should have lain undetected not far from his home for over nine hours.
His home was searched not once but twice by police and other investigating officers during that night. They took away many items including according to some reports the very wallpaper from the walls.
The police were searching his home while he evidently was not there. They made the family leave the home during this period, preventing them from knowing exactly what was going on inside, and what they were taking.
At the scene where the body was found, there is no evidence of significant blood loss consistent with a fatal wound to an artery. The medication he had ingested found in his stomach was a total of two tablets. The knife beside the body had no fingerprints nor did the bottle of tablets, and Dr Kelly was not wearing gloves
Unknown Unknowns
What occurred in the period between Kelly’s disappearance, just two days after giving evidence to a Parliamentary Inquiry, and the discovery of his body may never be known.
The facts hardly support the official account that he committed suicide, nor even that he died where his body was found.
The involvement of state operatives in his death cannot be ruled out, but official papers will remain classified for many decades.
British troops looking at Baghdad, 11 June 1941.
There are parallels with the suspension of inquests, and prosecutions relating to British state counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland, Iraq, and in Afghanistan – soon to be under a statute of limitations if proposed legislation comes into l\aw.
The ruthlessness of their approaches around the world from Aden to Kenya and beyond, suggests that elements within the UK government would be prepared to create a pretext for war – such as the Iraq dossier – and possibly collude in the murder of one of its leading scientists. Blair’s government may indeed have given them a license to kill.
Unusually after Davids’s body was found Tony Blair initiated a public Inquiry under Lord Hutton, which was widely condemned as a whitewash. A full Coroner’s Inquest would probably have elicited more information.
Dublin Bay South by-election candidate Peter Dooley has an impressive track record of fighting for a just society, especially through the Dublin Renters’ Union, and unlike many on the left in Ireland, has drawn attention to the devastation to ordinary people’s lives caused by the longest lockdown in Europe.
This by-election in Dublin Bay South allows voters to say enough is enough with the FG, FF and Green coalition government’s inadequate approach to the housing, health and climate emergencies. But some lifetime left-wing voters are now feeling politically homeless due to the adoption by the established left-wing parties of a ZeroCovid policy, which apart from being hopelessly Utopian, would hand draconian powers to corrupt State institutions and impede the free movement of people in and out of the country, including the Irish diaspora living abroad.
Throughout Ireland’s never-ending lockdown, Peter has openly questioned the wisdom of handing extraordinary powers to the Minister for Health, which infringe basic constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly. Not only do lockdowns come with a huge human cost – in particular to school children denied an education for months and small- and medium- sized businesses prevented from trading – with little impact on the virus itself, but it has also created a political vacuum, where people affected don’t know where to turn for representation.
Observing the colossal transfer of wealth to the billionaire class, while small businesses go bust and workers see their jobs disappear, Peter asks whether the Irish government’s response has been proportionate.
Peter Dooley stands for an equal opportunity Ireland. He walks the talk through his daily activism, galvanising grassroots movements around housing and tenant rights.
As a co-founder of the Dublin Renters’ Union in 2017, he has helped prevent evictions and supported renters. Peter’s ideas on housing involve resistance to the vulture funds, and ensuring that the rentier class pays a fair share in taxes. Although Dublin Bay South is the most affluent constituency in Ireland it also has the highest number of homeless people living in tents in Ireland.
Peter has also called for a full public inquiry into the unprecedented scale of nursing home deaths at the beginning of the pandemic in Ireland, when the elderly seemed to have been sacrificed due to a flawed epidemiological assessment, and for the utility of antigen testing and drugs such as Ivermectin to be adequately examined.
Unlike the other main opposition candidates in the area he has expressed deep opposition to divisive and exclusionary vaccine passports.
He calls for the end to a two-tier healthcare system, and for a proper cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken if any lockdown is ever contemplated again.
You can reach Peter Dooley and his campaign policies here:
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was founded by the Reverend Dr. Ian Paisley in 1971. Paisley was an enigmatic figure in Northern Irish politics, offering a heady mixture of fundamentalist Christian values, Unionist rhetoric, and a cult of personality, culminating in a power sharing agreement with his greatest foes.
Paisley was a maverick, non-establishment figure who appealed to biblical scripture and a Unionist siege mentality. His rallying cries – some would say war cries – were: ‘For God and Ulster’ and ‘No Surrender’.
By ‘No Surrender’, he meant no surrender to ‘Papish’ Catholicism, and no dilution of the British identity which Ulster Protestants so obstinately cherish, and of course no diminution in British sovereignty over Northern Ireland. A more accurate description of this ‘No Surrender’ mantra could perhaps be no compromise.
This meant no compromise with Irish nationalism, with Irish Republicanism, with the Catholic Church, the Irish Republican Army, the Irish government or anyone holding an Irish identity in Northern Ireland.
Paisley also represented a branch of the global fundamentalist Christian Protestant Right, and its political voice became the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). He would lead that party for thirty-five years. Never elected, he was nonetheless the supreme leader.
Ultimately, however, he came in from the cold to lead the Northern Ireland Assembly as First Minister. The man who cried ‘No Surrender to the IRA’, eventually joined a power-sharing executive with Sinn Fein, the political faction associated with the IRA, which became the largest Nationalist party.
Towards the end of his political career, Paisley was unceremoniously pushed aside, having lost the confidence of the party he had established. His son Ian Paisley junior seemingly still harbours a grievance about what he sees as a betrayal of his father, and his legacy.
After Paisley senior’s resignation in 2008, the DUP leadership baton was passed on to Peter Robinson, Paisley’s long time protege; then Arlene Foster in 2016, and most recently to Edwin Poots before Jeffrey Donaldson assumed the mantle just three weeks later. Arlene Foster’s demise came about as a direct result of Britain’s exit from the European Union. Brexit had been endorsed by the DUP through its Westminister MPs, but ultimately their interests were ignored.
Brexit has resulted in the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was agreed between the British Government and the European Union in order to preserve the Good Friday Agreement. The Northern Ireland Protocol creates a custom’s border between Northern Ireland and Britain. Thus, Northern Ireland remains within the European Common Market, creating a de facto border between Britain and Northern Ireland.
Sections of Unionism, Loyalism, and the DUP view this border as a dilution of their Britishness. A DUP party fed on a diet of No Surrender of their British identity at any price is again circling the wagons. When Foster was seen as incapable of removing the Northern Ireland Protocol she was dismissed as weak and a sell-out.
Ian Paisley junior is a DUP M.P. in Westminster who continues to represent his father’s old constituency of Antrim North. He seems to have been a driving force behind the coup that ousted Foster as leader.
In a throwback to the leadership of Paisley senior, in its first democratic leadership election the party elected another Christian fundamentalist in Edwin Poots, by the narrowest of margins.
Having been anointed by the ‘No Surrender’ brigade of the DUP Edwin Poots was chosen to resist any ‘surrender’ to the British government, and to continue the struggle over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Like King Canute, he stood against an unstoppable tide of forces beyond his control.
In order for him to nominate a new Joint First Minister to the Northern Ireland Assembly after Foster’s resignation, he needed to have the agreement of Sinn Fein, the other party in government. Sinn Fein price for jointly nominating leaders and preventing the structures of government from collapsing, was the implementation of the Irish Language Act – an Act, which had been previously agreed to by the party, but never implemented.
Poots, and Loyalists aligned to the party, would have no truck with the advancement of the indigenous language. They want no interaction with anything Irish. A settler-colonial identity refuses to contemplate the advancement of indigenous rights. But Poots also wanted to have his man elected as First Minister.
In order to find a way of working around to the Irish Language Act Poots and his Assembly team leader came up with a plan to allow the British parliament to legislate for the Act. Thus, Poots and his designate Paul Girvan signed an agreement with Sinn Fein and the British government, handing Westminster the power and a mandate to approve the Irish Language Act, in some form at least.
Poots and Girvan probably thought this would suffice to appease its base of voters, as the legislation would be the responsibility of the British government, rather than the Northern Executive including the DUP.
Instead, it created a mass revolt in the party, and those who lost the party leadership election to Poots joined with his erstwhile fundamentalist supporters to force him out. Once again, the No Surrender, No Compromise brigade within the party had triumphed.
Arlene Foster couldn’t renegotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol, a Loyalist and Unionist red line, and had to go. Seemingly even Poots had also sold out Unionism by permitting an Irish Language Act, which just goes to show how uncompromising the party has become.
By agreeing to the Irish Languagte Act and nominating Paul Girvan as First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly without his party’s approval Poots had signed his political death sentence.
In a year that sees the centenary of the establishment of Northern Ireland by Britain – when the island of Ireland was partitioned in 1921 – Unionism appears to be in complete disarray.
With the DUP fragmenting, we may also be witnessing the enduring wrath of a scorned political legacy. Those who felt the party had betrayed Paisley senior’s message of ‘No Surrender and No Compromise briefly recaptured the party leadership, seemingly only to surrender it again with Donaldson’s election.
Ian Paisley junior and those around him may be about to destroy the party his father created. Hell hath no greater fury than a political family scorned.
Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of three indicators: Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens.
These features of a healthy republic, he wrote, diverge from a narrow form of republicanism associated with Rousseau ‘which argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will: ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy.’ Up to that point in Ireland, O’Toole argued, this latter, narrow version had predominated, which he associated ‘in vulgar terms’ with appeals being made to ‘pull on the green jersey’’; and where ‘an idea of accountability implicit in mixed government is ditched.’
‘For most of the history of the state’, O’Toole concluded that the state ‘failed miserably in the basic task of ensuring citizens were free from subjection to the arbitrary will of others.’[i]
Now, as Ireland slowly unwinds from an interminable lockdown that tendency of Irish governments to pull on the green jersey, avoid accountability, reject obstreperousness and a conspicuous failure to ensure that citizens are free from the subjection to the arbitrary will of others, is evident once again. This regression has arrived especially through what O’Toole himself described on April 28th, 2020 as the ‘top-down, command-and-control approach’ of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), which the elected government has deferred to throughout most of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to reshape the Irish political landscape, eroding foundational certainties of left and right. When the dust settles new formations may crawl from the debris, with democracy itself in peril, as the coalition government chooses to extend emergency powers until November, while other countries such as Denmark aim for a swift return to normality.
In terms of the pandemic’s wide-ranging impact, there are parallels with the outbreak of a global war. As Hannah Arendtput it: ‘The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of the an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.’[ii]
Placing billions under lockdown around the world had a shuddering effect on daily routines, altering intimate exchanges and gestures, besides radically reducing the ambit of daily peregrinations. It’s a very modern form of trench warfare that confined most of us to within 5km of barracks – spilling out invective on (anti-)social media.
In Ireland, with the advent of bigger government, there is a confidence among some on the left that their time has arrived, and that a relatively youthful population will vanquish age-old privileges of wealth and caste through a permanently enlarged state.
However, as Eric Hobsbawm records, one reason Engels (and even the late Marx) ‘began to turn away from calculations that the international war might be an instrument of revolution was the discovery that it would lead to ‘the recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries’ which would serve the ruling classes.’[iii]
Similarly, nationalism chauvinism – ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex’ – has been witnessed throughout the pandemic in Ireland. This is perhaps unsurprising as, historically, infectious diseases have given rise to, and fed, plagues of prejudice and outright racism; the diseased ‘other’ at the gates of the city is a recurring theme. Ruling classes have often put forward strongman rulers to harness this xenophobic sentiment.
Since March 2020 we have poured over spreadsheets of daily deaths, infections, testing rates and vaccine roll outs to determine how ‘we’ are doing relative to ‘them.’ In Ireland we tend to measure achievements and failures against the noisy neighbour next door, whose boorish leader has somehow managed to transform one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from Covid-19 into a great British victory pageant, through a rapid vaccine rollout. Boris now looks unassailable, notwithstanding Brexit storm clouds, Dominic’s revenge, Indian variants; and just the suspicion that the vaccine may not prove quite the panacea it seems now in winter 2022. Time will tell.
Indeed, the narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic should serve as a warning to the Irish left that ruling classes can easily steal their best clothes. In this respect, Johnson operated with far greater flexibility than Donald Trump, shifting from a ‘take on the chin’ herd immunity approach in March, 2020 to championing what he would have previously decried as a ‘nanny state’ lockdown. He and his chumocracy used the pandemic as a pretext for introducing draconian legislation againstprotest and civil disobedience, apparently aimed at movements such as Extinction Rebellion.
The End of American Leadership by Christopher Parkison FDR said there was nothing to fear but fear itself, while JFK asked what you can do for your country; now Donald Trump resorts to blaming foreigners.#FDR#JFK#Trump#TrumpMeltdownhttps://t.co/JrJupSJhKI@broadsheet_ie
Similarly, though less dramatically, Leo Varadkar resuscitated his political career after Fine Gael’s disastrous performance in General Election 2020, donning proverbial scrubs for the initial phase of the pandemic. Having identified himself with “early-rising” middle class voters Varadkar was smart enough to realise that his preferred Thatcherite policy of reliance on an Invisible Hand of market forces could lead to a public health disaster during a pandemic.
Since entering the coalition, Fine Gael Ministers have emphasised a law and order approach – Simon ‘TikTok’ Harris was quick off the blocks denouncing as ‘disgusting, grotesque and obscene’ a comparatively unobstreperous anti-lockdown protest in Dublin by European standards. Fine Gael have also allowed Fianna Fail to act as a mudguard for a failing system of public health: Ireland’s health expenditure is the third highest in the EU, yet we have only 5 ICU beds per 100,000, compared to 35 in Germany and 28 in Austria.
Fine Gael represents itself as a centrist party, placing emphasis on its belated support for marriage equality and abortion referendums, which obscures from a failure in government to address structural inequalities and ongoing environmental damage. Replacing James Reilly as Minister for Health in 2015 Leo Varadkarpromptly abandoned universal health insurance (UHI).
After becoming leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar claimed he would represent thrusting early risers – tantamount to saying he would not alter structural inequalities that are most apparent in access to housing. In combination with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael has represented the dominant interest of large property owners, indifferent to whether their wealth is maintained via independent corporate entities, the state, or as in Ireland’s case increasingly, a corporate-state nexus.
Simple distinctions of left and right are often misleading. Thus, when considering the virtues, or otherwise, of big government it should be clear that administrative levers and patronage may drive inequality; most obviously through mind-boggling salaries, such as the €420k paid to the Director General of a dysfunctional HSE, Paul Reid – ironically a former Workers’ Party activist. Reid has no medical or scientific qualifications, and previously acted as chief executive of Fingal County Council.
Moreover, left-wing politicians and their supporters are often drawn from higher income groups; a tendency that within Fine Gael circles used to be referred to as noblesse oblige – accompanied by the obligatory glass of fine Cognac – of which the Just Society was the apotheosis. But a left-wing identity may be superficial, as the distribution of state largesse, or patronage, apart from being expressed in high public sector salaries, often benefits established professional elites of lawyers, academics and indeed doctors.
Big government patronage motors along fine in Ireland for all concerned as long as the tech and pharma sectors do the heavy economic lifting. This is the ‘Leprechaun Economics’ that Paul Krugman referred to dismissively. But now the Biden administration’s taxation proposed changes to the global tax system may make the current Irish model unworkable. The ECB is also likely to desist eventually from quantitative easing, with inflation looming.
Renewed fiscal rectitude and the prospect of multinationals leaving a perpetually unaffordable capital city for workers, will place increasing reliance on those indigenous SMEs that have endured the Crash of 2008, and the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. Yet whole sectors have been furloughed for over a year, with some such as events and tourism wondering whether they have a future at all. The Central Bank has warned that one in four firms could fail when pandemic payments cease.
It should be unsurprising, therefore, for a small businessperson living from transaction to transaction to be wary of parties promising higher taxation on the left, and instead be attracted to politicians on the right, or even far-right, that are acquainted with the language of commerce, however superficial this may be, in the case of Leo Varadkar at least, whose concern for SMEs has disappeared after his supportive comments proved unpopular last October.
'None of those people would have faced being on #PUP, none of them have to tell someone they are losing their job, none of them will have to shutter a business for the last time' – Tánaiste Leo Varadkar on #NPHET#cblivepic.twitter.com/ZAw7sDxGLo
An objective for a progressive left should be to attract support from an increasingly marginalised mercantile class, emphasising that a favourable environment for entrepreneurship, as in Scandinavia, is enabled by efficient public service, including a one-tier, functioning health system. The left can argue that leaving healthcare to market forces – as in the U.S. – is not only deeply unfair, but also, crucially, leads to greater costs than a functioning one tier public system which also – as in most European countries – delivers better outcomes overall.
The inherent danger of Ireland’s two-tier model, where health care provision is subject to market forces is epitomised by a question recently posed by a Goldman Sachs executive: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” In an age of profound health insecurities – which are amplified through subtle advertising cues – market forces will continue to distort public health priorities.
It was the father of economics Adam Smith who warned: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ However, while resisting a buccaneering tendency in the delivery of a vital government service such as healthcare, the left cannot afford to dismiss the dynamism of entrepreneurship in society at large. Just imagine the food you would be served if the government was running all the restaurants.
Following Public Health Guidance
While there are a range of financial supports available to SMEs, the world-beating length of Ireland’s lockdown has made trade impossible for many businesses, some of which may never recover. The failure of the two centre-right parties in government to represent their concerns arguably, lies at the heart of Ireland’s deeply flawed response to the pandemic.
From March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years. Yet, despite having the youngest population in the Union, according to a Reuters by February Ireland had endured 163 days of workday closures. This was the highest, by some measure, of all the European countries surveyed at that point. By contrast, Denmark had lost just fifteen days, having experienced a death toll almost half that of Ireland’s per capita.
The uncritical attitude of mainstream Irish left wing parties towards public health officials should also be reconsidered. Recall the major mistakes in particular by Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan, who saw nothing wrong with fans going to Cheltenham in early March, 2020, ordered care homes to re-open to visitors that same month, and then transferred 4,500 untested patients back into care homes – surely contributing to the second highest level of care home mortality in the world during the first wave. Yet Irish left wing politicians have consistently complained about the government failing ‘to follow public health advice,’ despite Holohan’s long history of cock-ups and cover-ups.
Even before Christmas NPHET – a body composed primarily of career civil servants and notably short on scientific expertise – seemed to have been all on board for the ’meaningful Christmas’ of Micheal Martin’s imagination. The only significant deviation between the government’s approach and NPHET’s advice was that the latter preferred to permit household gatherings rather than opening the hospitality sector. Cue raucous Christmas house parties, as opposed to what were mainly orderly affairs in pubs and restaurants.
In fact, Ireland’s ‘third’ wave, which coincided with the more transmissible B.119 variant (although apparently not more lethal as was widely reported) actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.
Sadly, public health obscurantism has also brought denial of their own data, which said outdoor transmission of Covid-19 is about as frequent as curlew sightings.
The latest embarrassment over NPHET refusing to acknowledge the benefits of antigen testing, underlines that if left-wing politicians are slavishly going ‘to follow the public health advice,’ and whatever Yes Minister civil servant advises then we won’t see radical reforms in Ireland any time soon.
Frank O’Connor
Guests of the Nation
Over the course of the pandemic Irish attitudes have hardened against the free movement of people in and out of the country, culminating in the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantines for some foreign, including EU, arrivals at the end of February.
Contemporary Irish attitudes to hardworking foreigners resident in Ireland recall Frank O’Connor’s classic 1931 short story ‘Guests of the Nation.’ Set during the War of Independence 1919-21 it portrays a bond of friendship that grows up between two IRA men, Bonaparte (the narrator), and Noble, who are detailed to guard two captured English soldiers Belcher and ‘Awkins who have a natural affinity with the country:
I couldn’t at the time see the point of me and Noble being with Belcher and ‘Awkins at all, for it was and is my fixed belief you could have planted that pair in any untended spot from this to Claregalway and they’d have stayed put and flourished like a native weed.
Ultimately ‘Awkins and Belcher are sacrificed at the altar of of a narrow nationalism, just as a today the Populist appeal to ‘protect our own people’ has ordained that the rights of immigrants in Ireland, and abroad, to see their families was disregarded.
"We need to protect our own people. We have a duty to protect our own people to the maximum. This legislation fails to do that"✖️
That's why we have proposed an amendment to make hotel quarantine mandatory for everyone travelling here with the exception of essential travel 🛬 pic.twitter.com/wwaFueUbvz
This appears to stem from a widespread notion that ‘we,’ like faraway New Zealand and Australia, can eliminate the disease from ‘our’ shores altogether – devolving into the juvenile #wecanbezeros hashtag adopted by some politicians on the left. The problem is that ‘we’ are a society with lots of ‘them’ immigrants living here, and an enormous diaspora of ‘us’ beyond the shores of an island divided into two jurisdictions, highly dependent on international trade in goods arriving on trucks (with drivers).
Moreover, apart from the extreme geographic isolation and sparse populations of Australia and New Zealand, ‘we’ in Ireland have legal obligations to preserve freedom of movement under European treaties and the Good Friday Agreement, enshrining a porous open land border. Apart from committing economic hari-kari, pursuit of ZeroCovid appears legally impossible, unless of course we want to pursue an Irexit and build a wall along the Northern border.
Nonetheless, egged on by febrile – ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – coverage in a national media increasingly reliant on government advertising, a prevailing view is that all deaths from Covid are essentially preventable; emanating from the failing of the state, or the reviled Covidiot, rather than being the tragic consequence of a pandemic, the death toll from which has been systematically exaggerated.
Moreover, intercepted correspondence within the ZeroCovid ISAG group of independent scientists – who have taken on the Opus Dei role to the Catholic hierarchy of NPHET – reveals, among other disturbing insights, that they were looking ‘for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.’ As these revelations first appeared in right-wing Gript, however, the left-wing echo chamber refuses to acknowledge it is being played.
Are you right there Michael?
Nonetheless, a number of politicians have come forward representing an anti-authoritarian left, concerned by the harms of lockdown and favouring a targeted approach – protecting the elderly – and building up ICU capacity. In a recent blistering Twitter attack the independent (and former Labour) TD for Clare, barrister Michael McNamara – who as chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Covid-19 Response became as well acquainted as any Irish politician with diverging epidemiological assessments of the pandemic – identified a recurring Irish deference to vested authority.
In response to a Fintan O’Toole article critiquing the DUP McNamara wrote: ‘Instead of criticising unionism, let’s look at the complete mess we’ve made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We’re ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same.’
He continued: ‘If it wasn’t for Unionism, we’d be like Hoxha’s Albania now. There’d be no way off this island. But there is a beacon. Belfast Airport and Larne are beyond the reach of NPHET, just as surely as the rule of the Archbishop’s palace in Drumcondra didn’t pass the bridge in Portadown.’
He added more controversially:
‘We can’t blame the medics for their experimental therapy, any more than we could blame the clergy for their zeal. Successive governments have abdicated their democratic responsibility throughout this State’s short history. So why would Unionists want to be “governed” by Dublin?’
Instead of criticising unionism, let's look at the complete mess we've made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We're ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same. https://t.co/05VbBmHnSI
It was a fair question, when one considers the North is reopening far sooner than the Republic. Although this has arrived after a rapid vaccine rollout, the experimental nature of which McNamara raises problems with.
Facing Up to Errors
Here we come to the crux of an unhelpful cultural division between left and right that the ruling parties will use to divide and conquer. This is the new identity politics arising out of the pandemic, epitomised by attitudes towards face masks.
For too many on the left the science on this issue is proven as opposed to followed. Wearing a face mask now appears to have become an article of faith. Yet a recent report by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention entitled ‘Using face masks in the community: first update – Effectiveness in reducing transmission of COVID-19’ stated:
The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect, but there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect. Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty.
Additional high-quality studies are needed to assess the relevance of the use of medical face masks in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreover, the Irish left should consider our dependence on pharmaceutical behemoths that jealously guard intellectual properties, notwithstanding huge state aid grants, and indemnification against adverse reactions. It is akin to the dependence of small farmers in developing countries on genetically modified seed, under a model of Philanthrocapitalism overseen by Bill Gates, who according to a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik has shown “a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies,” and devotes hundreds of millions of dollars each year to whitewashing his reputation through “charitable” media grants.
Moreover, all too often, media debates around Covid-19 fail to acknowledge the link between pre-existing morbidities – ‘underlying conditions’ – and morbidity and mortality from Covid-19. Thus, US Studies have shown that having a BMI over 30—the threshold that defines obesity—increases the risk of being admitted to hospital with covid-19 by 113%, of being admitted to intensive care by 74%, and of dying by 48%, making it almost as relevant a consideration as having been vaccinated.
In Ireland, moreover, Mayo coroner Patrick O’Connor recently questioned the attribution of deaths to Covid-19, saying: ‘In reality, a lot of people have terminal cancer or multiple other serious co-morbidities. People can die from Covid and or with Covid. I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis.’
Furthermore, by embracing ZeroCovid Utopianism many on the Irish left failed to focus on the failings of a decrepit Irish health system. This epitomises a tendency among politicians to dance to the tune of a corporate media that has placed relentless focus on the disease itself, regularly interviewing mendacious ISAG figures, while generally ignoring underlying social and environmental factors that drive morbidity and mortality.
The canard that Ireland could simply shut its borders and reach ZeroCovid perhaps points to the need for reform of an Irish secondary educational system, which according to the a rather unkind assessment from the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher is designed to produce ‘second-class robots.’ Perhaps too many of us are lacking the requisite critical faculties to look beyond news headlines.
In fact a radically different, defiantly left-wing approach to the pandemic been put forward by, among others, Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kuldorff in The Jacobin. They pointed out:
Elites have seen their stock portfolios balloon in value, and many professionals have been able to keep their jobs by working from home. It is the country’s poor and working-class households, particularly those with children, who have borne a disproportionate share of the burden. Lower-income Americans were much more likely to be forced to work in unsafe conditions, to have lost their livelihoods due to business and school shutdowns, or to be unable to learn remotely.
Beyond ZeroCovid, the Irish left should emphasis the harms of Ireland’s reliance on lockdowns, and harness the malcontents of the poorest, including small business owners. Otherwise they court irrelevance as the traditional ruling parties have already taken on the role of ‘caring’ for the people, while retaining the power to ease restrictions in the face of opposition from the left.
Science and Technology are not Neutral
Also, as opposed to running in fear from being labelled anti-vaxxers by a cheerleading corporate media, the left might at least consider the wisdom of foisting vaccines that have been granted under emergency use conditions on all age groups. Indeed, many on the left in Ireland seem unwilling to question dominant institutional narratives, a tendency recently criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris in The Jacobin, who said: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’
It remains unclear whether universal immunization will bring about long-term ‘herd’ immunity; while in the absence of long-term safety data the benefits to young, healthy subjects of vaccination may not outweigh the cost in terms of adverse events from treatments granted under emergency use licences. Sober assessment seems to have given way to an ideological and, at times, a coercive approach.
In terms of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, writing in the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, pointed to how in the media ‘a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%’ for severe disease.’ Ollario et al in The Lancet referred to absolute risk reductions of ‘1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.’ The authors also pointed to how ‘considerations on efficacy and effectiveness are based on studies measuring prevention of mild to moderate COVID-19 infection; they were not designed to conclude on prevention of hospitalisation, severe disease, or death, or on prevention of infection and transmission potential.’
Doshi has also objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’ This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer those who received a placebo the opportunity to receive its vaccine.
Doshi argued that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’
An alternative policy would be to reserve vaccines for those most susceptible to severe symptoms – the old and the obese – along with healthcare workers and others unavoidably working around the world in congested environments. Devoting scarce resources to increasing ICU provision to bring us into line with European averages might be a better approach than relying exclusively on the quick fix of the vaccine.
The Irish left should now desist from identity politics around vaccine uptake that the centre-right is relishing. ‘Tiktok’ Harris previously stoked tensions with talk of mandatory vaccines and promoting vaccine passports. The left should resist vaccine apartheid, nationally and globally, while demanding the release of patents earned through state supports.
On the Horizon
Ireland can expect significant social problems to emerge out of our world-beating lockdown strategy that recalls a prior devotion to austerity; a mental health pandemic and mass youth unemployment are upon us already. Moreover, the young are currently denied the safety valve of an easy hop to another English-speaking country for work. This may be a recipe for radicalism, but unfortunately genuinely dark forces on the far-right are ready to pounce on malcontents.
It is surely vital that we maintain our European connections, thereby scrapping Mandatory Health Quarantine that is an insult to immigrant groups in Ireland, as well as the diaspora. 90% of scientists believe that Covid-19 will be with us forever, so it seems there will always be ‘variants of concern’ to contend with, just as there are with influenza.
As a country Ireland has serious work to get on with in terms of addressing a housing crisis and improving our environment. A narrow focus on the pandemic should not be allowed to derail these efforts. This may be like a war but it is not a war. Even prior to vaccines, this is a virus with an infection fatality rate of less than 0.2% in most locations. Moreover, up to 86% of those infected may not have symptoms, such as cough, fever, or loss of taste or smell, according to a UK study from October. We require better provision of public health and an adequate plan to address the ongoing obesity pandemic.
We also need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about Long Covid, considering ‘at least some people who identify themselves as having Long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.’
The pandemic calls for a new social contract to be negotiated in Ireland that acknowledges republican values of Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens. The French COVID-19 Scientific Council led the way in a paper for The Lancet:
it is time to abandon fear-based approaches based on seemingly haphazard stop-start generalised confinement as the main response to the pandemic; approaches which expect citizens to wait patiently until intensive care units are re-enforced, full vaccination is achieved, and herd immunity is reached.
They continue:
Crucially, the new approach should be based on a social contract that is clear and transparent, rooted in available data, and applied with precision to its range of generational targets. Under this social contract, younger generations could accept the constraint of prevention measures (eg, masks, physical distancing) on the condition that the older and more vulnerable groups adopt not only these measures, but also more specific steps (eg, voluntary self-isolation according to vulnerability criteria) to reduce their risk of infection. Measures to encourage adherence of vulnerable groups to specific measures must be promoted consistently and enforced fairly. Implementation of such an approach must be done sensitively and in conjunction with the deployment of vaccination across the various population targets, including all generations of society.
They argue against reliance on lockdowns:
Using stop-start general confinement as the main response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer feasible. Though attractive to many scientists, and a default measure for political leaders fearing legal liability for slow or indecisive national responses, its use must be revisited, only to be used as a last resort.
To date, many on the Irish left appear to have had their heads in the sand promoting a Utopian ZeroCovid solution. This should give way to a more balanced appraisal that considers the interests of all of Irish society. With the youngest population in Europe, and as one of the richest countries, the Irish government could have preserved a far higher standard of living for the population during the pandemic. We now need to draw up a social contract that takes a more balanced approach.
Featured Image: Daniele Idini
[i] O’Toole, Fintan (editor), Up The Republic: Towards a New Ireland. Faber and Faber, London, 2012, p.1-52.
[ii] Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.22
[iii] Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, Tales of Marx and Marxism, Little, Brown, London, 2011, p.79
There is a strong impression of the same old story of the Troubles in Belfast, all over again. The new element is the pandemic affecting teenage lives. Words and images by Fellipe Lopes in collaboration with Daniele Idini.
It is hard to see a purpose behind the recent violent protests in Belfast that have fleetingly come to global prominence. On the ground, community leaders identify continuities, as recreational rioting is all too familiar, ever since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
There is, however, a perception that the intensity of this year’s disturbances are a product of uncertainties around the new Irish Sea border and Northern Ireland’s position in the post-Brexit context.
Brexit has clearly increased insecurity in the Unionist or Loyalist community, many of whom voted against withdrawal from the EU. Now the establishment of a commercial border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, through the Northern Ireland Protocol, designed to protect the Good Friday Agreement, has created a sense of betrayal. This has hardened the rhetoric of struggle and conflict.
The Unionist side of the argument is that this creates further distance from the rest of the U.K. amidst a sense that they are the ones being sacrificed in the divorce from the E.U.. Moreover, talk of a possible United Ireland in the Southand persistent grievances over the failure to prosecute senior Sinn Féin politicians for a perceived failure to abide by social distancing rules at the Bobby Storey funeral fans the flame.
Added to all this, Northern Ireland’s lockdown has affected the lives of young people in particular: directly through extended school closures, and loss of job opportunities, but also by creating a despondency that leaves many feeling they have little to lose.
Finally, the long-standing educational segregation between Catholic and Protestant communities perpetuates a sense of “us” and “them.”
So, how to explain these violent outbursts? What is different now from the usual activities? And what role has the pandemic played, especially on the youth involved? We spoke to a politician John Kyle, an activist Eileen Weir and an academic Dr Katy Hayward to find out more.
According to John Kyle, a Councillor on Belfast City Council, and former interim leader of the centre-left ‘Loyalist’ Progressive Unionist Party in Northern Ireland:
“There are different factors involved. The first is that young people have been restricted. They have been unable to go to school, unable to meet with their friends, unable to go to the movies, unable to do, you know, stuff like that. If then there’s an opportunity to go out and get a bit of excitement, they will take that opportunity. Secondly, here in Northern Ireland, there is a tradition of what we call recreational rioting. In other words, if there were kids at an interface between two communities in the summer nights, sometimes, they arrange on Facebook to meet up for a fight. And so you might get 100 kids, sometimes 30, sometimes 50 kids. They meet up, start shouting at each other and throwing stones and bottles. And that’s what we call recreational rioting.”
But Dr Katy Hayward, an academic and writer based at Queen’s University in Belfast says:
“Something different has happened in the past few weeks, and that is that you’ve had a change in the political situation whereby the rhetoric in particular, from Unionist communities, and leaders has been one in which people have begun to really, doubt the process of basically the core elements of the Peace Process, for a long time. And amongst Loyalist communities, there has been a sense of frustration and anger about the Good Friday Agreement and compromises there. This is now beginning to get into the wider mainstream political field. And that’s primarily as a result of the conditions of Brexit, also you’ve had a new dimension, which is the criticism of the police service”
On the other hand, Eileen Weir, Peacemaker and Community relations worker at Shankill Women’s Centre speaks of persistent social problems:
“yeah, I think it is partly down to boredom. The things that people are not picking up on is that we have interface violence all year round. Right? This is not the first. They are usually not to that extreme where things are being burned or anything, but the two communities come together for a fight all year round and every year. We have a big, big drug problem in our communities and a lot of our young people are addicted to some type of drug, whether it’s illegal or prescribed. So we have a big mental health problem in our communities. It’s like they put a plaster on a thing that actually needs an operation. Our rate of suicide, and not just with young people with adults as well, is through the roof.”
Walking around the predominantly Protestant areas of Shankill and Lanark Way, as well as in the Catholic Springfield Road and Falls, reveals a tranquil environment with bustling local shops, active community centres and friendly characters, more than willing to share their views on the current situation.
These are among the areas of Belfast most affected by the long period of the Troubles and the scars are apparent. Chatting to locals from both communities living alongside the so-called the Cupar Way Peace-Wall the general impression is of a desire to leave behind a troubled past.
“we do have peaceful communities, OK? I mean, the woman that I work with, you know, we’re from North and West Belfast and we have a fantastic relationship. I don’t like to label anybody. But within that group I have Republicans, I have Nationalist, I have Loyalists, but building relationships is not enough. And we can all build relationships. But that relationship doesn’t happen overnight.”
By Monday April 19th the moratorium on Loyalist protests in the wake of Prince Philip’s death had lapsed. That morning, in front of the Irish Secretariat, a two man protest against the Northern Irish Protocol, organised by the Loyalist Communities Council’s Chair David Campbell and former politician and co-founder of the group David McNarry, was in full swing.
Before long, however, it was interrupted by David McCord, whose brother Raymond was allegedly killed by members of the UVF in 1997. With a picture of his late brother in hand, he confronted the two men who were holding a banner that had appeared in different locations across Northern Ireland the previous night, addressed to the large media presence before them.
There is a big gap between the government and these communities that reflects uncertainties over the decisions being made, especially the government’s failure to recognise the serious impact of their policies. Our conversations in the neighborhoods reveal a lack of understanding of the practical implications of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol. This incoherence is reflected in the seemingly pointless violence.
Now there is particular concern around the escalating misbehaviour of teenagers, leading shop owners in the affected areas to coordinate closures.
Meanwhile on social media, calls to resume Anti-Northern Ireland Protocol protests across the region started to circulate. This included tweets about one to be held that evening at Lanark Way, where in previous weeks the violent riots had taken place.
In the hours leading up to the anticipated protests on Monday April 19th in the Springfield Road area, rumours circulated about community efforts to prevent local teenagers from taking part.
But by that evening approximately thirty teenagers were blocking Lanark Way on the Shankill Road side, setting fire to furniture and rubbish in the middle of the street.
The protest soon descended into stones and pieces of iron being thrown at police cars. Over the course of the disturbances we saw no visible expression of what was motivating the protesters; no posters criticizing the governments, or otherwise communicating reasons for the violence.
After a couple of hours, the PSNI asked journalists to leave the area and move to Springfield Road, as they closed the gate. This raises an important question as to what happens in the fight between teenagers and the police when media outlets are absent. A lack of media coverage fuels growing resentment towards the PSNI.
Katy points to this new antipathy towards the PSNI:
“you’ve had this new dimension, which is the criticism of the police service. That’s something very new. So for some time, Loyalists have been feeling that the police service no longer backs them … what changed in the past week was that the First Minister of Northern Ireland called on the chief constable to resign, and we had all the political leaders of Unionism calling for the same thing.”
@ Fellipe Lopes
Katy adds:
“They don’t trust political representatives or institutions to manage Northern Ireland’s interests. So you can see here all these factors exacerbating the sense of insecurity and that it only takes a few individuals. We know those individuals who have been present for a long time, presenting the Peace Process, presenting the compromise, thinking that violence pays. There’s a new narrative in Loyalism now that looks at what happens with the Protocol … They say the threat of Republican violence led to the Irish Sea border. So that’s another element.”
Another important dimension is the difficulty faced by women in particular during the pandemic, as Eileen puts it:
“the reason why this impacts on women more so is that there is homeschooling – working from home and often caring for an elderly relative. A lot of women’s jobs are low paid … zero hours contracts. We get very little recognition for the work of women. In the present situation, if it wasn’t for community workers being on the ground, you’d be seeing a hell of a lot more problems. And really, that’s not what community workers are for. That’s what our political representatives are for.“
We also raised the question of a United Ireland and whether it is healthy to talk about this now. Katy said:
“the more you talk about it, the more unnerving it is for Unionism. And that’s perfectly understandable because, of course, it’s anathema to the Unionist identity and certainly that is a factor. Because Brexit has taken Northern Ireland outside of the European Union, that’s a bereavement for some people and particularly for Nationalists. Northern Ireland is on the wrong side of that European external border, but that’s kind of overlooked because that leads to, certainly amongst Nationalists, a growing desire for Irish unity. They wish to see that happen and happen soon. But that has increased the uncertainty and insecurity for Unionists and we have both communities feeling more insecure in their position, thinking that the other is secure because basically they got what they wanted. ”
Unsurprisingly, John holds a different view:
“I personally think that the best outcome is a Northern Ireland that is part of the United Kingdom, but that has a close relationship with the Republic of Ireland. People here who identify as Irish have got free movement between the North and the South. They can work anywhere in Ireland and celebrate their Irishness and vice versa. There is good things in the British system and good things in the Irish system.”
Right now there is considerable focus on the decisions that the governments are making. The other part is about the lives and futures of these teenagers. Several communities in Belfast have paid a high price for the lack of access to education and job opportunities. Teenagers are now paying this bill. With their futures appearing bleak many have been drawn into unsuitable activities.
Discussion of the protest should look beyond the intricacies of the Brexit deal and the Northern Ireland Protocol. Society and government should be forming a long-term plan for the social and cultural integration.
On the streets you see violence involving teenagers and a decisive response from the police. What we did not discover is whether external forces are guiding and supporting these teenagers. Perhaps the real question is who stands to gain from the disorder?
These communities are experiencing challenges very similar to what happened from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Good Friday Agreement created peace, but the record player is still playing the same scratched tune, with an extraordinary new phenomenon at play, which is the pandemic.
The response of these adolescents represents another side to the impact of the pandemic. Mental health problems present as an issue in the lives of many families. The social projects around the Shankill and Falls Road do their best, but at this point the government has a responsibility to intervene, not only through policing, but also with social supports, inclusion programmes, enhanced access to education, job opportunities, improved living conditions and greater support for social workers, and psychologists.
The pandemic is leaving a distinct legacy in Belfast: the ashes from the street bonfires; the stones hurled at police and journalists, and a new generation of teenagers accustomed to fighting the police. But the locals we spoke to all want peace and integration. They don’t want this generation to experience the same story as their parents.
The fear is reborn of a new chapter to the Troubles. What happened over the last few weeks in Belfast has reawakened fears in these communities. No doubt this is a political issue, but the psychological scars are borne by individuals, families and communities.
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At the beginning of the pandemic, the Paraisópolis Favela Residents Association (G10 Favelas) hired a team of doctors, nurses and first responders with ambulances to serve the favela residents, because the SAMU (Mobile Emergency Care Service) could not provide services to the local community.
Pedro Dell’Antonia Gymnasium transformed into a field hospital in Santo André, São Paulo, with a capacity for 110 patients. PH André LucasRescuer, community leader Renata Alves with doctors after an assessment of Covid-19 cases in Paraisópolis. PH André LucasDoctors examine a patient. PH André LucasChild cries at the sight of a man being taken away in an ambulance with suspected covid. PH André LucasA doctor performs a clinical examination on a man who had ben unable to get out of bed. PH André Lucas
The Paraisópolis favela is the second largest community in São Paulo with 75,000 residents, and the daily effort continues to raise awareness among the local population of the dangers of Covid-19. According to Daniel Cavareti, National Coordinator of G10 Favelas:
We divided the community into 50 micro-regions and elected local volunteers. Each takes care of a region. They are residents who help to distribute donations without agglomerations and who call the ambulance, in case anyone needs it.
Daniel Almeida sanitizing alleys in the Vietnã favela. PH André LucasDaniel is president of the “Amigos da Molecada” association of the Vietnã favela, in São Paulo. He uses equipment to clean the streets around the community. PH André LucasChildren play in the alleys of the Vietnã favela as Daniel sanitizes. PH André Lucas
In São Paulo, the Butantan Institute implemented mass testing in favelas which began in the Favela São Remo, the Western-most and most vulnerable part of the city.
Some 1,600 tests were carried out in June 2020, once of which diagnosed Palmira Costa, aged sixty-six, with Covid-19. She lives with her eight-year-old granddaughter Fernanda.
Palmira with her 8-year-old granddaughter Fernanda. PH André Lucas
‘My mother takes oxygen at home already due to respiratory problems, so I was always very concerned to avoid this disease affecting her. She was very fearful when she tested positive, but at least she did not develop the symptoms. She is very afraid, you know?’ reports Fernanda, daughter of Palmira.
The average number of daily deaths in Brazil (a country with a population over 200 million) currently exceeds 3,000 per day, a macabre number that may be understating the real figure. The official death toll from Covid-19 in Brazil stands at 313,866, second in the world only to the United States.
Nurse Marcelo Silva, in attendance at the temporary hospital in Santo André in São Paulo. PH André Lucas
Thirty-five-year-old nurse Marcelo works at the Santo André field hospital. He finds that the affection and support there creates a lighter atmosphere for patients caught in this moment of uncertainty.
The work is exhausting, but apart from sad stories of death, Marcelo points to the love on display where multiple members of the same family are hospitalized at the same time.
It is increasingly common for there to be severe cases among patients as young as thirty, but with the help of doctors, physiotherapists, and nurses most recover.
Doctors assess the patient’s pulmonary situation. PH André Lucas
All cases that need tomography and diagnosed with Covid-19 in one of the 7 UPA (Emergency Care Unit) or one of the 35 UBS (Basic Health Unit) in the municipality are referred by ambulances to the Hospital at the Gymnasium Pedro Dell’Antonia, which was set up on an emergency basis due to a lack of ICUs in the city.
Fortunately, the hospital created especially to attend to cases of Covid-19 in Santo André does not lack for basic health tools such as PPE and respirators. But working conditions have become more challenging as the government has taken almost no measures to reduce the spread.
The patients at the Gymnasium Pedro Dell’Antonia are the most serious cases, those who are not intubated are using non-inhalant masks and nasal catheters.
Inpatient with oxygen assistance. PH André LucasDoctors and nurses in the makeshift corridors of the Hospital de Campanha in Santo André, Sao Paulo. PH André Lucas
