Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin’s North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe’s largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture.
He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore and information about this lost world, as well as a collector of histories of it.
In the 1970s, Fagan began his historical work by recording oral histories from local residents, many of whom remembered formative events such as the 1913 Lock-Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, and the War of Independence and Civil War. These interviews also documented memories relating to life in Dublin’s tenements, experiences in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries, dock work, women’s roles, deaths of children, money lenders, orphanage life, and more, covering both the public and intensely personal history of inner-city Dublin.
Fagan’s work extends far beyond oral interviews. He is the longtime director of the North Inner City Folklore Project, an initiative that began as a jobs program and allowed him to preserve and publish stories from his community. Over decades, he has amassed a vast collection of tenement artefacts: photographs, books, letters, coins, dockers’ buttons, children’s toys. His vision has always been to open a dedicated museum so this vital social history is preserved within, and for, the local community rather than being housed elsewhere.
This museum has been a reality in the past and Terry’s current passion is to reestablish it.
Terry has published works such as “Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle” and “Dublin Tenements: Memories of Life in Dublin’s Notorious Tenements,” both drawn from his extensive oral history collections. He is also a popular walking tour guide, interweaving tales from his own life as well as audio samples from the collections he oversaw. The Monto tour includes tales about brothel madams, dockers, and a “hidden Dublin” many would prefer to leave interred in the past.
Are the Eurocrats and their allies most delusional about the topics they profess to find most urgent? Or are they just setting out to delude the rest of us?
This was Ursula Von Der Leyen speaking at the 9th Brussels Conference on Syria, on Saint Patrick’s Day last:
The agreement between the central authorities and the Kurdish SDF… is nothing short of historic. As is the signing of a constitutional declaration by interim President al-Sharaa. On the other hand, the attacks on security forces and the violence against civilians in Syria’s coastal region show that the situation remains fragile…
The Syrian authorities’ commitment to bring the perpetrators to justice, to protect minorities, and form an inclusive government – all of this is vital for reconciliation.
As these words were being prepared in the run-up to the conference, informed observers of Syria’s situation could see a different picture: targeted sectarian massacres of Alawites, not just “violence against civilians”, had begun. To precious little outcry in the West, death squads indifferent to calls for restraint from Damascus were fanning out in coastal Latakia. Far from cohering into a place of “inclusive government”, Syria looks more likely to be approaching a condition of volatility and chaos, not a “fragile” democracy with “freedom of opinion, expression, information, publication and press”, as claimed in the text of the interim constitutional document. Quoting an acquaintance living in Maaloula, a Christian town Northeast of Damascus, Patrick Cockburn relates how multiple groups have been plunged into trepidation: “The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened, even the secular Sunnis are frightened…”
That fear relates not only to who is supposedly in charge in Damascus, but to the extent of their control, if any, over the forces made up of jihadis from around the world who are now the primary wielders of military power across most of the core of the country. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Council, meanwhile, has actually been outspoken in its criticism of the Islamist-shaded constitution, saying it has “reproduced authoritarianism”.
Every single premise of Von Der Leyen’s statement as quoted above is questionable.
Its conclusions are absurd.
Why do we start by picking out the ancient Christian redoubt of Maaloula? This frame of reference helps to show how far back in time the communities of modern-day “Syria” go, as well as Cockburn’s in-person familiarity with their inheritors’ attempts to survive in the horrible present. Writing back in 2012, Cockburn concluded a piece for the Independent by observing that “the sufferings of the Christians of Syria are no worse than those of the Muslims, but they feel that whatever the outcome of the Civil War, their future will most likely be worse than their past.” The omens, he felt were not good. He was right.
In Syria, they seldom are. This Post-Ottoman, Post-French mandate state goes back to 1945 in its current form. Will it even continue to exist in another few years? The massacres now taking place in Latakia, Cockburn would write a few days after our conversation, are being “ignored”, but “may shape the Middle East”. (iPaper, March 15)
As the second part of the conversation in this episode outlines, European leaders and their friends are prone to magical thinking in the matter of their proximate crises as well as distant. In recent coverage on Ukraine for the iPaper, Cockburn has argued that “Western governments, media and PR firms” have crafted a depiction of the conflict as a replay of WW2. In this vision, “compromise was ruled out as practical policy, meaning that the war could only end with a Ukrainian victory and Russian capitulation – though nobody seriously believed this was going to happen since… the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.” In an echo of that argument, Cockburn’s contemporary Peter Hitchens stated, in an interview in Slovakia’s Standard magazine:
“The whole of the Western world has been told things about Ukraine which make it very difficult for a compromised peace.”
On grave matters of peace and war, European leaders are failing to adopt a realistic vision, concludes Cockburn.
This is something of an understatement.
With Europeans apparently determined to tool up for armies that don’t exist (and would be unlikely to have much fighting morale even if they did) and prone to praising the emergence of “progressive” states that have all the long-term prospects of a snowman in the Sinai, we are looking at a new era of wishful, read delusional thinking.
The first Cassandra Voices Podcast, hosted by Luke Sheahan, features a long form interview with the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn. Please Subscribe!https://t.co/mEQSm0fI0k
This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first guest. Back then we mostly spoke about his father Claud, the subject of a new biography by his Cork-born son. This time, we jump to more familiar terrain: the battlefields of the present day, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza. Cockburn once praised his late friend Robert Fisk as a “historian of the present”. Like Fisk, Cockburn began in Ireland, then spent decades doing mostly Middle-east-based journalism, mostly in person. This meant cultivating friendships, survival skills and a sense of discernment for the historical roots of ongoing events. More sedentary now than, say, the start of the Syrian Civil War 14 years ago, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (both of which he covered while on the ground), he is better placed than most to share useful perspectives on far-off theaters of fighting. We’re honored to have him back.
This is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, where host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy.
In a suburb of Tokyo, sometime in the future, a Japanese scholar of Irish literature is studying an obscure text. He has heard of it through a Joycean friend. The work is Beyond the Pale, an immersion into the mind of a character not unlike its author, Patrick Healy, who was an Irish critic and philosopher who spent much of his life in Amsterdam. The whole heavy volume of Beyond the Pale sits before him. It is a little daunting.
Who is Patrick Healy? The Japanese scholar has been finding out, bit by bit. Reliable information is hard to find.
Some of this is by design. Some of it because of the cruelty (or at least indifference) of the writer’s early fate. Healy was a gifted child, but born to an unmarried mother in postwar Ireland, and thus was sent to foster families and to the care of various “Sisters” of the church.
The Japanese scholar has been able to locate a separate, early text published by Healy back in 1985, called Up in the Air and Down. It is a short novella, a stream of consciousness spoken from the point of view of a child living through such a reality. Near the start of this work he reads:
I didn’t have a mummy or daddy because they died just like one of the cats who was Snowy’s mammy and now I remember I cried because the cat would never come back (p.10).
The Japanese scholar likes this detail of the cat. However, he already knows this account of the parents may be an untruth told to the boy narrator, if the character can be said to closely match the real Healy. He finds more of this apparent attempt to placate and to steer the boy’s thinking on the next page:
Sister was my mammy now and so were all the big girls and I was lucky because I had lots of mammies and daddies and Sister said that some little boys and girls have only one and I had lots and I should be very happy and that these two nice people who were going to be my mummy and daddy are waiting for their new boy and I wasn’t to be afraid and they lived far away but we would see them soon, but I wanted to go back and play and why was Sister taking me away and not being my mammy anymore, maybe Sister was going to heaven too, and I was afraid. (ps. 10-11)
The short book ends with the boy narrator affirming his existence in the celestial terms of his day, showing his need for play and exploration:
I am not a secret because God knows who I am even when I play with the yo-yo that goes Up in the Air and Down. (p.55)
All of this is important because the huge, late-life opus the Japanese Joycean will now begin to study is likewise framed around a life in 20th century Ireland. A growing up given form by a dislocation of parenthood, and an attempt to seize upon a renewed existence in young adulthood, through language and music and sensation.
The Japanese scholar knows that the Irish cultural output of books and films addressing the plight of “fallen” women who were separated from their offspring and often pressed into misery and forced labour in laundries and convents has been substantial. Yet here it is: a little-known testament by someone who emerged from such circumstances and sought to form his own mind, rather than let it be formed negatively by them. Not directly concerned with the young boy’s voice, it instead forms an internal, semi-conscious portrait of the man who emerged, grasping life through an adoration of words and ideas.
The Japanese scholar begins to read Beyond the Pale, and he can hear the melodies of Healy’s voice, which he already knows from his epic recording of Finnegan’s Wake. It thrills him that this Joyce-evoking book begins with an unexpected burst of Japanese words: as the “story” (if it is a story) meanders out into existence, we encounter a young Irish lad being tutored in Japanese by a “Viscount Taffe”, who seems to be simultaneously preparing a beef consommé; a consommé “devoutly to be wished.”
Unlike this hypothetical Japanese scholar, in the summer of 2024 I had the opportunity to meet Patrick Healy, in Amsterdam, where he was completing work on Beyond the Pale in a cavernous apartment looking like the workshop of an ancient Egyptian priest. Confined there during Amsterdam’s hard lockdowns, he had begun to submerge more deeply in his memories. This was something of an intimidating foray into his world for me, at first. I had heard stories, including from my own father, and other intellectually-minded people of their generation, about this brilliant and erudite figure. Perhaps more than a little rogueish, he would sit in Bewley’s in 1980s Dublin and mesmerise them all with his sophistry. The reputation for seduction and for cunning behaviour was reinforced for the Healy of that long ago time by many. Yet his life in the meantime, hard to unwind and with very little detail available, made more sense through the encounter with him and with his work. He had invented a career for himself unlike those of his peers: as a scholar he spent significant time in Germany and German archives, mastering that language, eventually settling in Holland where he taught at the university of Delft. HIs links to Ireland were kept in tenuous health over the years. He was a very close friend of the barrister and historian Frank Callanan, also a personal friend, who had sadly passed away unexpectedly in 2021.
Healy—who once performed a read through and recording of Finnegan’s Wake in the early 90s, getting through the whole thing in four days—has a famously fine voice.
Selections from our affable 3-day conversation in Amsterdam follow here. After, you may access the bonus episodeto hear more of Patrick reading at length from Beyond the Pale. Don’t worry about the Ariadne’s thread of the story, if there is one. Just try to hear the Irish soul that is alive in his voice. This is, I feel, the best way to savor the hidden currents and magical word play that Healy has worked into his text.
My Mother (at the Time) – Bonus Episode
Available to all our Patreon supporters.https://t.co/5yBxikDm7w
Here below are two testimonials from writer and journalist Bridget Hourican and human rights lawyer David Langwallner
Bridget Hourican
I’ve been haunted by a poem of Patrick Healy’s called ‘Stoic Fire’ since I read it maybe ten years ago. The title, and as I recall it, the poem itself, is a kind of oxymoron because fire is passionate, a conflagration, and stoicism is dispassionate, quietly enduring. I think stoic fire describes Patrick.
He is poet, visual artist, art critic, translator, philosopher of aesthetics and novelist. Before he was all those, he was – I’m told reliably by everyone who was there then – the best debater in UCD and Trinity (he attended both). His heckles were legendary, his voice astonishing. Reviewing his translation of Karl Kraus’s epic play ‘Last Days of Mankind’, Eileen Battersby shrewdly noted that ‘Healy’s musicality and feel for the rhythms of speech… possibly explains why his Kraus is so vibrant’. Perhaps the greatest use of his voice is his recording of Finnegans Wake, which my late husband, Frank Callanan told me, he listened to right through one night with Margaret O’Callaghan, and it left them shattered, delirious, in tears, ecstatic. I believe this was one of the things that spurred Frank to write his book on Joyce.
Luke Sheehan introduced me to podcasts, more or less. Before he (or anyone) was making podcasts, he was seeking out unusual and arcane material and people. He would come back and recount his findings in ways that were unanticipated, circuitous, marvellously detailed (by marvellous I mean the detail was not where you would expect it) and funny, always very funny. Luke is also poet, critic and short-story writer but I’ve always thought his great gift was for oral narratives (or as we now call them, podcasts).
Although I know both of them, I’m not quite sure how Luke tracked Patrick down and got him on the record, but what a fabulous thing that he has done this, and that we have Patrick’s voice telling his story and exploring his ideas, in this immensely subtle and moving curation by Luke. I noticed, very early on when I was with Frank, that every time he mentioned Patrick’s name, someone would whip round and demand with fierce urgency ‘Patrick Healy? where is he?’ It is like Luke to have acted on his own fierce urgency and brought us this.
David Langwallner
I am very pleased that Luke Sheehan is doing this podcast on Patrick Healey. From the late 1970’s through the late 1980’s often in great penury he was one of the most outstanding cultural figures in Dublin. A winner of The Irish Times debating competition as he stresses as an individual where he became the kind of fool to the King Lears of his contemporaries. Mostly dead.
He is the greatest conversationalist and cafe side philosopher I have ever encountered and that includes the jurist Ronald Dworkin.
He is man of Olympian intellect and great personal grace charm and civility which the Dutch through his architecture Professorship have recognized. The loss was Irelands. He was also a great mentor to me and when he played Oscar Wilde to my playing Edwards Carson in a reenactment of the trial of Oscar Wilde strange to say now with David Norris and Alice Glynn as expert witnesses he queues to the graduate memorial building extended the full extent of Westmoreland street.
In this trial Oscar won and so has Patrick!
Since then an interest we very much share in common and crucial to our times he has become an expert in the Viennese intellectuals of the Weimar Repubic most noticeable Karl Krauss.
He is the last of great old Dublin Joycean in fact and one hopes his new book gets the attention he richly deserves.
As a journalist, Anya Parampil is unafraid of rattling the cage. She now writes for the Grayzone, founded by her husband Max Blumenthal in 2015, an online publication which aims to ‘break through any narrative of the day that is pushing the United States’ public in support of war.’ Previously she worked as a producer and broadcaster, then an anchor correspondent, for Russia Today (U.S.), from which she was fired, after refusing to accept restrictions on her reporting of U.S. foreign policy.
In this podcast Anya likens writing about U.S. foreign policy from Washington D.C. to working inside ‘the belly of the beast’. Her work charts the policy machinations emanating from what she describes as a ‘deep state’ whose power, she argues, exceeds democratically elected politicians.
Anya is the author of Corporate Coup – Venezuela and the End of US Empire (Or Books, New York, 2023), which dissects the motivations of the U.S. government, under the presidency of Donald Trump – directed in particular by figures such as John Bolton and Eliot Abrams – to sponsor a shadow government of Venezuela under Juan Guaído to challenge President Nicolás Maduro.
As we approach another Presidential election, Anya sees little hope of a change in approach from the U.S. towards a country containing greater oil reserves than any other country on planet Earth. She maintains hope, however, that an alliance that includes isolationist supporters of Trump and progressive elements within the Democratic Party could in time tame the beast of this seemingly permanent government, and retains a faith that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on free speech will allow her to continue her work.
For the Irish, living as we do on a divided island, the question doesn’t have to be facetious. As a negative example, to try to land on a positive answer, Northern Ireland comes to mind. Wherever that congenitally deformed statelet ends up, its passage through the twentieth century will form a storyline we will never stop arguing about. God bless us.
Lebanon, where I lived briefly from January 2011, is a mystifying and compelling organism.
Were it on the seafloor, it would be brightly coloured, shape-shifting and perhaps equipped with a defensive poison. A territory carved out of the Ottoman Empire via the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, it formed with Syria the ‘French mandate’. It has held together against expectations, and enjoyed tangible golden ages through the same century-long lifespan as our post-colonial Ireland.
At the Beittedine Palace, 2011.
The local cultures, which still roughly map onto the religious arrangements of the confessional political system, have incredibly deep roots. I say ‘cultures’ and ‘roughly’ because this is a land where people will seriously make the case that they are the direct descendants of the Phoenicians, if not the Canaanites. Some of the ingredients here are antiquated enough to make monotheism look like a recent fad.
Other claims include references to identifiable cities and mythologized landscapes in ancient history that remain traceable today: the cedar tree that appears on the flag is of the stock used to build the Jewish Temple, and the forests are referred to in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In cities like Batroun, Saida and Sur, the phantoms and visible stubs of Phoenician harbours can still be observed. Compressed between the plains and deserts leading to Mesopotamia, and the coastal route to the Nile and Egypt, it has produced merchants and travellers over the millennia. The Lebanese diaspora may number seventy million.
Beirut’s Green Line after the Civil War.
To live in Beirut at the time I did, was, I now realize, a taste of a brief golden age all on its own. One of the clichés that had to be learned was the fable of the glorious 1950s and 1960s: the period after the Second World War and before the domestic civil war, when the traditional merchant classes were joined by elite émigres from other parts of the defunct empire to create prosperity. They became ‘bankers to the Middle East,’ a role now occupied by Dubai.
Wealthy post-Ottoman families that retreated there included the Sursocks, who would form a link to Ireland, and Jewish families from Iraq and beyond. Nadim Shehadi, the guest speaker on our latest podcast, is a product of the cosmopolitan confidence of that time.
Sursock Palace before the explosion of 2020.
In 2011, the Arab Spring was triggered by events in Tunisia the week I arrived. Through connections, I had the opportunity to meet the renowned journalist Robert Fisk for coffee, and as we sat in a place on Sadat Street, the TV in the corner was flashing images of Mohamed Bouazizi burning. I had been reading about the story, and Fisk hadn’t, so for a few minutes I was the one explaining events to him.
My journalistic Larp brought me up and down the country. No-one ever called me out on it. I wrote one story for the Daily Star, the Saad Hariri-sponsored newspaper, about a scheme to write essays and theses for brattish students at the American University of Beirut. My real job was writing multiple choice questions for a rich private school and educational company.
I had a blast. Young and hopeful journalists were everywhere, and the dismal course of that profession, with Facebook annihilating the business side and ISIS looming into view with plans to cast them in their snuff movies, was not yet obvious.
One young English writer I knew noted that “the next few years are looking pretty good for work.” She might have been right, but that sort of attitude, shared by the foot soldiers of the international NGOs, was already watering seeds of uncommon bitterness among the Lebanese. Their rivers of trouble were sources of fresh water for well-paid and often decadent hordes of expats. One wonders how high the shoots might have grown by now.
At the moment of the horrific Port explosion of 2020, I was living in Paris. A Lebanese woman I knew there, a filmmaker[1] and activist, called me briefly, with her voice inflamed from sobbing. “Really Luke, what have we done to deserve all this?”
Sursock Palace after the explosion of 2020.
Add to this the financial collapse which wiped out savings and plummeted the domestic currency, the Syrian refugee influx which increased the population by at least 30%, the pandemic pains and now a very possible Hezbollah-Israel war, and you might have a country that even her most ardent lovers will leave. Who will stay, and who will join the seventy million-strong diaspora? What cause for hope might persist?
One of the characters I met during my time there was Nadim, during a dinner at the palace of the Sursocks in Gemmayzeh. With characteristic Lebanese curiosity and openness, he simply stayed in touch with me, a random person who had breezed through then strayed very far from Beirut, like most of our overconfident cohort running around at the time.
One also wonders, incidentally, whatever happened to all those little girls and boys?
[1]Of course she was, and is. Her first films were beautiful, artful, personal things shot through with a heatwave of avant garde, mostly concerned with her much-traumatized locality of the Shia south. Some recent work is here.
This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, whose modelling assumed Covid-19 had just arrived in the West and that we had no cross-immunity from other coronaviruses against it, meaning itwould kill almost one in a hundred of those who contracted it. For reasons still inadequately explored, the U.K., Irish and most Western governments – along with many in the Global South – followed Ferguson’s (and others’) doomsday prediction and chose untested lockdowns in anticipation of a vaccine – a containment strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, as opposed to a (Chinese-style) elimination strategy.
Sunetra Gupta has been vindicated in her assessment that Covid 19 had been circulating far longer than initially understood, and also that it had a much lower fatality rate than Ferguson and others assumed from limited data. Moreover, it was obvious that this social experiment would cause serious harms, while its inability to contain the virus was unknown.
Sunetra Gupta did not take lockdown lying down. She and a number of academic colleagues authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, advocating for an end to lockdowns, and promoting the targeted protection of the elderly – who were by far the most susceptible to death from the virus.
What followed was not, as she hoped, a civilised discussion weighing the costs and benefits of each strategy, but abuse and even an attempt to have her silenced.
Sunetra Gupta argues that what we experienced with lockdowns represented a distortion of the precautionary principle, arguing:
I think that people were incorrectly assuming that they were applying the precautionary principle to all of this. So they were thinking, okay, well, you know, the worst case scenario is what we should be going by. And that’s because they were thinking in one dimension, which is we’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop this pandemic from unfolding, because it is compatible with the idea that 1% of the population will die if it just unfurls. What they were missing was the fact that these very measures that they were seeking to employ to stop the spread were ones that came at a very huge cost – and that was known at the time – what we didn’t know is whether those measures would stop the spread. And even if they did, what effect that would actually have eventually on the final death toll. But what we absolutely knew for certain – because it was happening in front of our eyes – is that these lockdowns would cause people to die. People were already dying from not being able to sell toys in the pavement in Delhi and being told to go back home to their villages, so the costs of lockdown were known, the benefits of lockdown were completely unknown. And under those circumstances, what you should be doing if you’re adopting the precautionary principle is to not go with lockdowns, but think of other solutions.
Some years ago, Sunetra Gupta and colleagues theorized that parts of the influenza virus ‘targeted by the immune system are, in fact, limited in variability and acts as a constraint on its evolution.’
Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta argues here that the possibility of an influenza pandemic was ‘actually eliminated a long time.’ She bases this assessment on how until 1918: ‘we experienced influenza only in pandemic form, just because of the demographic characteristics of the time. But since 1918, we’ve had influenza as a seasonal, regular endemic occurrence.’
Today, she says, we are ‘all regularly exposed to influenza,’ giving us protection against severe disease.’ She further argues:
What happened in 1918 was that, in my opinion, there had been no flu around for thirty years. So when the virus arrived, people under the age of thirty were extremely vulnerable. And that’s why you saw such high death rates in young people. People over the age of thirty were more protected.
She says it’s true, to an extent, that international travel predisposes us to pandemics, but, paradoxically, ‘we are regularly exposed to different viruses, which gives us a wall of immunity against these emerging threats.’ She assumes that without regular exposure to the other seasonal coronaviruses ‘we would have been more susceptible’ to COVID-19.
Based on her evolutionary theory, she had predicted the Swine Flu pandemic (that generated unwarranted hysteria) of 2009 two years before it hit. She says she ‘wasn’t the least bit worried in 2009 because, first of all, I thought even if it weren’t basically identical to the 1918 flu, that most of us would have a considerable degree of immunity against severe disease.’
Contrary to Bill Gates, who claims the world must create ‘a fire department for pandemics’ to avoid catastrophic outbreaks, Sunetra Gupta says ‘we don’t need to panic to the degree that we do about new pandemics; what we need to do is to be clear headed and rational and try and think about ways of protecting those who might die or might be severely ill and hospitalised from these pandemics or these events.’
The Role of the Epidemiologist
The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum wrote inPandemic Century –One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris(2019) that ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as risky, it is medical science, and the science of epidemiology in particular, that is often the source of irrational and often prejudicial judgments’. Then in 2020, the Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt claimed that epidemiologists see their function ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore, if they say it is one hundred times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s okay.’
Sunetra Gupta argues:
the role of epidemiology is to provide a conceptual framework within which you can understand what is happening and, rather than preventing pandemics or epidemics, which I’ve always been skeptical about, what you want to prevent is the death or the consequences of these events.
She reckons: ‘it’s a hubris, really, as we saw to think that you can stop the spread of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.’ However, ‘where you can intervene is to try and prevent the consequences of that spread, in that you can protect the vulnerable, or at least try to. But the idea that you could stop the spread was, I think, extremely misguided.’
She calls for greater resilience in the health system, pointing to the nefarious influence of neoliberalcapitalism on public health.
If you’re trying to maximize what they call efficiency, you end up with these big hospitals instead of sort of more local, smaller units. And that creates the conditions for vulnerable people to be exposed more easily to the virus.
Professor Neil Ferguson.
SIR Model
Unlike Neil Ferguson, Sunetra Gupta’s team made no assumptions about the infection fatality rate in March 2020. She now says:
The purpose of that paper was to show that you can take a simple model, an epidemic model, which applies to coronavirus or any virus that gives you some level of immunity for a certain period of time, at least in the case of coronavirus. Of course, that would be short. Measles would be long. But any such model, which is called an SIR model – simply because people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recovering – you can fit a model like that to the available data under a very wide range of infection fatality rates.
She says Ferguson and his colleagues fitted the available data based an IFR of almost 1% because: ‘They were using data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and a few other bits of data from Wuhan.’ In such a model as this the two variables, she says, ‘are the infection fatality rate and when the epidemic occurred … So what we showed is what we were seeing could easily be the result of an epidemic that had already occurred [that] had a very small infection fatality rate. Or as Neil proposed, there was an epidemic that was just taking off and had a high infection fatality rate.’
What I probably shouldn’t have done is given any answer at all, because the infection fatality rate is not really a number that you can think of in terms of the average across the population. So there will be parts of the world where, because there is [a high proportion of] elderly or people with comorbidities… [there is greater] vulnerability to death … So it is actually somewhat meaningless to think of the IFR as an average number, but it’s certainly not 1%.
‘What I was trying to do with that paper’ she says ‘is just to say, you can’t have that level of certainty in this situation.’ She agrees that ‘at the time you wouldn’t be able to discriminate between lockdown and the build-up of immunity and the contributions of seasonality. But now, because we have more data, you can and so it’s much more likely that we had built up what’s known as herd immunity in certain pockets or substantially it had accrued in certain areas.’
She adds:
We couldn’t tell then because we hadn’t done the experiment of lifting lockdown and seeing what would happen. But we did do that experiment a year later. And at that point you could discriminate between those two hypotheses. And I think what now I will say is that you can explain what happened almost anywhere in the world, using a simple model in which you accumulate immunity, but you also lose it quickly, which is known for all coronaviruses combined with the effects of seasonality. And that simple model … will explain qualitatively all patterns that we see.
On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle wrote in The New York Times. ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s W.H.O. ties, the authors noted ‘Imperial was treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’
Not long afterwards on March 24th, a report appeared in the Financial Times, quoting Sunetra Gupta to the effect that perhaps as much as half the UK population had already contracted Covid-19. However, the author of that article added that her group’s modelling was ‘controversial; and ‘its assumptions were have been contested by other scientists.’
Despite their differences, Sunetra Gupta speaks of a respectful relationship with Ferguson, with whom she had ‘friendly chats’ during the period. There was ‘no disagreement’ about ‘the basic ideas and assumptions.’ It’s just that he said ‘he thought that their worst case scenario was more likely than what I was saying, which is that we didn’t know, and perhaps veering more towards [that there had already been] substantial waves in areas like London … But we both acknowledged there were a spectrum of possibilities. And until we had the full data, we wouldn’t know where we were.’
She acknowledges, nonetheless, that ‘it’s hard not to have emotion about these things. But you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to think about whether an intervention is achieving its purpose and whether the collateral damage is too great or not.’
Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta says she had ‘a great time’ during lockdowns as she lives in ‘a nice house with a big garden, and my daughters, who were in their early twenties, came back home for six months.’ She now wonders whether ‘at some point someone should write a play called Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’
She says that’s the point: ‘the lockdowns … were put in place by those of us who are privileged; [what] Martin Kulldorff called them the laptop classes … while throwing the poor and the young under the bus.’
Regarding an extraordinary article in The Guardian by George Monbiot calling for ‘a time delimited outright ban’ on lies that endanger people’s lives, referring to people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta ‘who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic,’ she says she was ‘absolutely shocked that someone like Monbiot would claim to know more [than me] about how the pathogen spreads, about epidemic behavior and control measures.’
She wonders, ‘why would someone with … no qualifications to speak of these things accuse me of spreading lies and misinformation … Why would he do that? I mean, it’s shocking.’
She says she tried:
to ask common friends to tell him. You know what? Pick up the phone to me. I’ll explain to you. I mean, that’s what he should have done. He should have said, oh, why is she saying this? Maybe I should just pick up the phone to ask for an interview and get her opinion. And then … he’s free to disagree with it. Although from a position of someone who is not precisely qualified to make those judgments. So I find that kind of behavior absolutely shocking.
Sunetra Gupta says she has repeatedly called for debates, for example, with Neil [Ferguson] with whom she has only ‘ever had a respectful engagement.’ She expresses surprise ‘that places like the Royal Society didn’t put on more debates and instead ‘just toed the line on this and just went with the consensus.’
She says:
I have not been approached with an apology from any of [her critics at the time]. An apology on account of how they behaved, but nor, indeed an apology on having got a lot of things wrong … So they criticised me for wrong reasons, and they should now come and say to me, we are sorry. We now see that lockdowns are indeed very harmful and that school closures didn’t prevent transmission, or that vaccines don’t block infection. They should apologize to me, but they haven’t.
She also has some harsh criticism for the way in which academia now operates:
I think the circumstances now under which academia is expected to operate are ones that are conducive to people … forming these sorts of groups, consensus groups, because that’s how they fund their research … by reviewing each other’s grants and just generally agreeing with each other. And of course … some of these funds are coming through some form of philanthro-capitalism. Those are all features of the system which lend themselves to this kind of aggravation of an idea of a risk. And … there’s also the … huge temptation of putting yourself in the middle of it being the saviour … “I had to get a burner phone because I’m so important.” And, you know, “I was the one who delivered the world of this scourge.” Those are the sort of rather more simple … reasons why we saw what we saw, rather than some huge conspiracy.
Reflecting on the period where she earned such publicity she says:
I’d always hoped [it would be] through my writing, through my novels, not necessarily through science. So I know it’s not something I particularly find to be that gratifying because this is just sort of my job and … it’s caused nothing but distress to me and to my family; for my daughters, it’s been a difficult period to have to deal with this fame, notoriety, that I achieved.
However, she doesn’t buy into the idea that the role of a scientist is simply to deliver the science:
because I think that one can always hide behind one’s profession. I mean, the best example … I often talk about [is from] the film Mephisto [1981, directed by István Szabó], where the central character, the actor … has kind of accepted the patronage of the Nazis at one point [and] when he’s accused of that, just says, “please leave me alone. I’m just an actor,” … nobody is just an actor or just a scientist. It’s not good enough to say, “I’m just a scientist. I just do mathematical modelling and you know, whether lockdowns work or don’t work or harm other people, it’s none of my business.” That’s not acceptable to me.
Childhood Covid-19 Vaccination
Regarding the vaccination of children against Covid-19 she says:
from the outset that there should never have been given to people who were effectively at zero risk of dying from Covid, particularly because it was never likely to prevent transmission for any more than a few weeks … so there was no logic. Again, if we talk about logic rather than anything else, there is no logic to vaccinating people who are not at risk if the vaccine does not prevent transmission.
we warned against this early on by saying one of the reasons not to vaccinate young children, even if it is completely safe, is because it doesn’t prevent infection. So it will create vaccine hesitancy against vaccines that actually people do need … we have limited resources, so it has an opportunity cost. And what we’re seeing in this country and across the world is … the diversion of funds that are meant to tackle these serious endemic diseases … And it’s very, very sad because it’s causing deaths and particularly in places, not so much the UK and Ireland, but … in sub-Saharan Africa or India, I mean, the infection control programmes and vaccination programmes have collapsed in many places, and this is going to lead to many more deaths than Covid, particularly in children, not to mention starvation and other issues.
She does not, however, believe that the excess deaths we have witnessed in recent times should be attributed to Covid-19 vaccines, pointing to the example of Sweden ‘which doesn’t have many excess deaths, but did vaccinate its population.’
The first Cassandra Voices Podcast, hosted by Luke Sheahan, features a long form interview with the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn. Patrick’s father Claud, a leading British Communist member and journalist fought in the Spanish Civil War and eventually settled in Ireland. Patrick says of his father:
He used to say the big battalion commanders want to convince the small battalions, the weaker, the less wealthy that there’s absolutely no point in resisting the big powers, they might as well give up. Claude believed exactly the opposite, the big powers are always more fragile, that they had points of vulnerability and you can attack them, and that’s why I have just published this book, which will be published later this year which is a biography of my father which is called Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied.’
Following in his father’s footsteps, for fifty years Patrick Cockburn has been practicing the art of journalism with integrity and persistence: a specialist on the Middle East, he has written extensively on wars and political machinations from Beirut to Belfast and Baghdad.
Within books like The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (2002) (written with his brother Andrew), Patrick Cockburn has revealed the workings of Arab dictatorships and Western Imperialism alike. Over the last decade, he has also created a separate, no less distinguished profile as a memoirist: The Broken Boy (2022) describes his survival of a Polio epidemic in 1950s Cork, while Henry’s Demons (2011) co-authored with his son, immerses the reader into the pain of psychosis.
For our conversation with Patrick Cockburn, we sought to sketch out the lives and work of two independent-minded writers: both himself and his father, Claud. As indicated, Claud’s fifty-year career brought him around the world, from Civil War Spain to Wall Street during the crash of 1929, back to 1930s London, where his newsletter The Week both documented and fought the rise of Fascism. It was only after WW2 that Claud moved to Ireland, where Patrick and his siblings would be born from the 50s onwards.
Making use of unclassified MI5 files, and an abundance of material directly remembered from his late father, Patrick spoke to Cassandra Voices as he was preparing the final manuscript of a new memoir, covering Claud’s life.
Patrick also spoke out passionately about coverage of the war in Gaza:
Evil becomes normalised … and a lot of the governments don’t want to recognise and the papers and those outlets that support the governments don’t want to go on about it. So it’s perfectly reasonable that we should have a big story about the Russians firing some rockets into a city in Ukraine and half a dozen people are killed and others injured. That is wrong and that gets a lot of publicity. Then several hundred people are killed in Gaza and that’s on the bottom of the page now, if it’s mentioned at all.
The first part of the podcast is freely available. You can listen to part two by subscribing on Apple podcasts. We will also be sending the second half of the show to our loyal Patreon supporters in the next few days. The decision to charge for the second half comes from our determination to maintain our independence.
In our latest podcast Frank Armstrong is joined by Massimiliano Galli and Daniele Idini to digest the result of the recent Italian general election.
This has resulted in a resounding victory for a Right or ‘Far Right’ coalition composed of The Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) led by Giorgia Meloni, League (Lega) currently under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, and Silvio Berlusconi’s – ‘the Highlander of Italian politics’ – Forza Italia.
For Massimiliano the result is entirely predictable, as Meloni led the only party that had remained on the side line during the period of Mario Draghi’s unity government. He adds that the only certainty in Italian politics is that the right will always form successful coalitions.
According to Daniele, Meloni represents a wider movement of European conservative parties. But he expects her government to gain legitimacy, and not rock the boat in terms of European membership or NATO’s involvment in the war in Ukraine. However, he suspects that not much will change for the ordinary person.
Daniele says: ‘Italian people like to vote for the new thing, even though behind the new thing there is the same people from the last twenty or thirty years.’
He also draws attention to the electoral law of 2017 which favours coalitions, and which is now favouring the right. Nonetheless, he wonders how the parties will be able to govern effectively given their differences, particularly in terms of foreign relations.
Massimiliano explores the undercurrent of resentment in Italy that leads to political instability. He draws attention to the low salaries compared to other European countries, and the paradox of working class people voting for parties that oppose a decent system of social welfare.
In our latest podcast Ben Pantrey interviews former musician of the month Bartholomew Ryan in Lisbon. They discuss his new album ‘Jabuti’ composed while on retreat in Brazil, just prior to the pandemic, as well as the creative process and the importance of loafing.
We previously published the lyrics to Ryan’s song ‘Iguatu‘.
Ben also recites an important passage from Milan Kundera‘s 1995 novel Slowness which served as the original inspiration for Ryan’s musical project.
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence in a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’. A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.
Enjoy!
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