Cassandra Voices

Tag: Ciara Sidine

  • Walking at Night

    Night Walking Deserves a Quiet Night

    I’ve always walked alone in the city after dark. Recently, it’s with my dog, along the banks of the Royal Canal. Of a winter evening, the path is quieter than during the day, when bikes and scooters fly by, and the dog’s senses are lit up by the city wildlife revealed in the still of night.

    Last week, as we strolled along a quiet stretch, a man entered the canal path from the road and began walking towards us. Something wasn’t right about him.

    For so many women, there is an understanding, so quietly absorbed that we don’t even give it much thought, that there are risks attached to walking alone at night: of physical violence, of sexual violence, of harassment. It’s the water in which women swim. It’s the reason why our male loved ones show concern for us over their male counterparts when out walking alone – because we all know there are greater risks to it by virtue of being a woman.

    I saw a post on social media, in the aftermath of the recent shocking murder of Ashling Murphy. It was by a male journalist who decried the blaming by women of men ‘en masse’ for individual atrocities by men against women.

    The ‘not all men’ mantra seems to me as dull-minded as it is deflective, for whoever made the claim that it was?

    The perpetrator is the person to blame. What is being called to account in women decrying male violence against women is a culture that means all women, including female children, swim in the waters of often unconscious fear when facing the public world of men, from a young age.

    In this world, we know what it is to go from feeling safe to on edge in the blink of an eye, from puberty on, if not before – when we flinch in the face of that first catcall, or unsolicited approach on the street. Ani DiFranco sings of it in her resonant song ‘The Story’:

    I would’ve returned your greeting

    if it weren’t for the way you were looking at me.

    Only men can change that.

    It doesn’t make all men to blame; but it does make them potential agents of change for the better.

    The man who began walking towards me last week was young and, as I said, something wasn’t right about him. His behaviour was heightened, edgy. Maybe he was high. He shouted greetings at the dog, but it didn’t sound friendly. My adrenaline kicked in. I furtively glanced behind to see if I was alone. I was.

    I braced myself for his approach. It wasn’t that I thought the worst, it was that I knew that whatever came to pass on this canal path with nowhere to escape to, I was to a fair degree at his mercy. I gripped my key between my fingers – that reflexive move women make even if only to feel safer.

    The whole thing probably unfolded in less than thirty seconds but it felt longer. He knew that I was the vulnerable one and I sensed his knowledge as he approached. He came closer than he needed to. ‘How are you, love?’ Spoken loudly, into my face. We both knew it wasn’t a genuine question.

    I answered as friendly-casual as I could. Not too nice, not too nonchalant. Definitely no hint of aggression. In my voice I was trying to impart lots of things. I’m relaxed. I don’t see you as a threat. I’m friendly (whatever the nature of your problem is, I don’t judge you). That wasn’t true. I did judge him – for getting his kicks from being able to be scary towards a lone woman just by virtue of being a man. Any soothing note my tone might have imparted was tactical.

    After he passed, I slow-counted to twenty. I was afraid to turn around too soon in case it gave him cause to return. I glanced over my shoulder, then exhaled slowly, relieved to see he had continued on this path – and I was nearing the road.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that I don’t think I’d even have committed the incident to memory, let alone mentioned it to anyone, if I hadn’t returned home to the devastating news that a young woman had been murdered while out jogging on a Tullamore canal path. Ashling Murphy was a beautiful, talented, generous spirit, with her life in front of her. But this is the water in which women swim, the air in which we walk, or run – where risks, conscious and unconscious, sometimes, brutally, come to pass.

    The particular attributes of her murder – that it took place in broad daylight, that it looks to have been an attack by a stranger– make it ripe for description as a tipping-point event, and the outpouring of grief and anger in its wake suggest this may be so. Time will tell.

    For while the cold threat of such an attack may strike the greatest fear into most women, the reality remains that for victims of male violence, the perpetrator is rarely a stranger.

    Per the Women’s Aid Annual Impact Report 2020, since 1996, 236 women have died violently in the Republic of Ireland. 61% were killed in their own homes; 55% were killed by a partner or ex (of the resolved cases) and almost nine in ten knew their killer.

    And while domestic and gender-based violence prevails across social class, often its victims face higher rates of social inequity, including homelessness – in a European study some 92% of homeless women had experienced violence or abuse throughout their lives.

    For society at large, the issue of gender-based violence is one that remains behind closed doors, dealt with within the confines of the private rather than public domain. Charities that support victims of gender-based violence consistently struggle from underfunding, and consecutive governments have treated the issue as one of low priority.

    Lockdowns have been shown to create the most serious impacts for the socially disadvantaged, so it is no surprise that the 2020 Women’s Aid report reveals a startling 43% increase in contacts with their services, compared to 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic and its measures have had an ‘unprecedented and exhausting impact’ on victims of abuse. Surely this and other social inequities of lockdowns must be given consideration as Covid-19 policy shapes itself towards the future.

    As the government quickens pace to steer through its new strategy on domestic and gender-based violence, due to be published in March – its stated goal being a zero-tolerance approach – time will tell what it delivers on a structural level, and we can only hope that it signals meaningful change.

    Whatever comes to pass, it remains the case that on a societal level, all men do have a role in changing the waters within which women swim, along with the air within which we walk, run, and carry out our lives – private and public. And owning that fact may be what separates the men from the boys.

  • Notes from a Segregated Island

    Your antennae are up months before it comes. You’ve gotten to the point where, if Leo Varadkar says something won’t happen, you brace yourself for its certain announcement, in good time.

    When the axe finally falls, you’re on holidays in Donegal in July, and the uncomfortable reality sinks in that the house and the rain-sodden outdoors will have to do you, pubs and restaurants will have to wait. Because you’ve long known that the game that’s made its way onto your table – one of freedom by way of the barcode – is one you won’t play.

    There are many quiet tears across the country, many tummies in a familiar pattern of churning, as a new breed faces an uncertain dawn. They’re greeted, at best, with a wall of silence, at worst with opprobrium and unflinchingly entitled judgement.

    The air of suspicion they have increasingly felt around them, in a quietly charged atmosphere that has made it harder to be in the thick of things, even among some cherished family and friends, has become solid and tangible.

    And yet the day is like any other, the view from the window just the same. Nothing but a simple QR code and a biddable hospitality sector, understandably desperate to re-open its doors, signals the birth of a new Irish underclass.

    Considered Thinking

    Research shows that people have many reasons for declining a medical intervention. These are mainly born out of considered thinking: medical history and experience, including vaccine-injury; research and knowledge of what is right for their own body; the practice of natural healing modalities as a first recourse to health.

    Gym membership cancellation rates at the recent extension of medical segregation to that sector suggest that those who have a strong investment in their wellbeing through exercise may assess the risk/benefit of Covid-19 vaccination in a different way to those who may be more vulnerable to Covid’s worst effects.

    There is no one-size-fits-all. Such is life. If we believe that this turns a vaccine-free person into a walking biohazard, perhaps we have bought into fear over an inspected view.

    We are now some twenty-two months into a pandemic that has fundamentally shifted the course of our existence. It is fitting to ask whether, along with a potentially very serious virus, we have also been visited by a kind of collective trauma, stemming from news streams delivering non-stop daily scrutiny of Covid-19, along with rolling curtailments of our lives and those of our children. Never before has an idea of safety been so rigidly attached to a single concept: being Covid-19-free.

    Serious Illness

    I don’t make light of Covid-19. I know what a serious illness it can be, particularly for those who are older or have underlying vulnerabilities. However, in a new world characterized by fear and caution – surrounded by visual reminders that something frightening is in our midst – I believe that something vital to a healthy society is being dangerously side-lined: the checks and balances necessary to healthy democratic governance.

    We are in the process of enshrining into law a piece of primary legislation, the Health and Criminal Justice (Covid-19) (Amendment) (No.2), granting the extension of extraordinary emergency powers to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, powers that prior to Covid-19 we never could have countenanced handing over to the State.

    These extend the medical segregation that has become normalised in society, where the paradoxically named “immunity certs” – granted after double vaccination to access supposedly inviolable freedoms – are widely seen as a reasonable and proportionate response to pandemic times, rather than a human rights’ issue in urgent need of inspection.

    Do we wish to live in a world where a person can be stripped of their basic freedoms because of their private medical status? A world where the unproven threat of asymptomatic transmission is greater than the threat of authoritarian, technocratic rule?

    (One where, in perhaps the greatest twist of all, those who have retained their “privileges” are of course no less immune from the Covid transmission chain.)

    Do we wish to be part of a society where, for instance, a medically vulnerable person who is not suitable for vaccination is left out in the cold – because GPs currently have no authority to grant meaningful medical exemptions?

    Do we want to raise our children in a world where a person who exercises their right to informed consent, as enshrined in every human rights in healthcare covenant since Nuremberg, can be readily pegged as plainly reprehensible?

    Sins of the Past

    In Ireland, we are thankfully now alert to the impacts of the sins of the past – where the “othering”, for instance of women and children in mother and baby homes, was an accepted thing – yet are we willing to face uncomfortable truths about our present?

    At this moment, we have effectively “othered” a cohort who are subject to a particular kind of derision. Ireland’s vaccine rollout, which sees the highest level of coverage in the EU, has not transpired into the panacea promised. Despite this, we see blame at times verging on incitement to hatred publicly levelled at those who choose not to or cannot, due to medical reasons, avail of this medical intervention. The failure of the medicine is somehow the fault of those who didn’t take it.

    Even as reputable medical journals caution against stigmatising the unvaccinated, the vaccine-free are relentlessly pegged as the scapegoat of this difficult episode, where goalposts keep shifting and promised remedies fail to deliver. Those in power conveniently use this to deflect from their own failures.

    “Anti-vax”, a dehumanizing, broad brushstroke term, has become common parlance. Nothing short of a creeping obsession has developed towards a group stigmatised with this label, among some of Ireland’s most trusted, supposedly liberal media commentators, and among some of our most powerful political voices.

    Terminology that casually stigmatizes people has the twin impacts of eroding human dignity while effectively silencing dissent and debate – two essential tools of a functioning democracy. And if the ensuing social media outcry was anything to go by, many found it chilling to witness Minister Donnelly level this term at a fellow deputy in the Dáil chambers, for presenting peer-reviewed scientific information.

    Taking one for the Team

    While we can casually cast blame, without evidence, upon the cohort who didn’t “take one for the team”, those who should actually be answerable almost two years in operate without meaningful scrutiny from either a critical media or political opposition. And here, I believe, is where we should all be looking to.

    We have empowered Minister Donnelly to strip some seven per cent of the Irish population of their basic social and civil rights. If this legislation extends until its “sunset” of June 2022, we will have placed a minority of Irish society at the back of the bus for almost one year. And who knows how much longer they’ll even be allowed to travel on the bus? If past form is anything to go by, we might then expect another piece of similar legislation to follow it.

    I struggle to understand how all this is compatible with a liberal democracy. As medical segregation and the removal of human rights flourishes across Europe, and our social credit becomes increasingly tied to barcode-accessed living, at what point do we begin to seriously look at the potential harms of this brave new world, for which we are hard at work laying down the building blocks?

    A medical officer having the power of detention over you, in an undefined “designated place”, if you are merely suspected of having Covid-19, is not democracy. Coerced medication is not democracy, and the championing of Covid Certs by Leo Varadkar, on the basis that it drove up vaccination rates, only celebrates this lapse.

    When does Emergency Phase End?

    Decision-making that impacts everyone in Ireland, taken by a group of eight middle-class, middle-aged white men, who fail to represent the cross-section of Irish society, including those most vulnerable to the effects of lockdown – working-class people, women, and other minority groups – is not democracy.

    Almost two years in, it no longer holds for our government to act as if we are in the emergency phase of the pandemic. This ongoing abuse of emergency legislation and power is causing untold damage to the communities trying to stay afloat around it.

    There is evidence aplenty now to begin an assessment of the broad impacts of pandemic measures, and this must be done with independent expertise provided by those who have not been at the helm. The bigger picture must now come into view. We need to properly consider the economic, social/cultural and in the context of overall healthcare.

    I believe, special attention must be paid to Covid-19 policy impacts on our young people. Strategies need to be rebalanced towards carving out a future that allows us to respond proportionately to the threat of Covid-19, while maintaining people’s human and civil rights, their entitlement to dignity and privacy, and ending a nasty division that has crept in with terrifying stealth, in a time of crisis.

    We need solidarity regardless of medical status. Please stand with me to reach out to your political representatives to insist they convey our call to reject segregation and division, and to demand checks and balances from a government that many increasingly see as being power-drunk at Ireland’s wheel.

    Ciara Considine is a book publisher, singer-songwriter (Ciara Sidine), civil rights activist and mother of two, living in Dublin.

    This article was first published in A Mandate Free Ireland, a weekly campaign newsletter, on 13 December 2021 (Click here to subscribe: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kvmw7).
    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

     

  • Musician of the Month: Ciara Sidine

    In Blood, Sex and Death, I Found Her

    Janet is pregnant and alone. Her boyfriend is god knows where and her dad is having none of it and wants to marry her off to a man of his choosing. She’s having none of that, and wants an abortion. And she’s damned if any man will tell her what to do. It is any time between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, in Scotland.

    Frankie Baker loved her boyfriend Allen Britt but she shot him anyway. Her gun was a .38 pistol, and when the time came, her aim was true. By the time Allen died, slowly and painfully in hospital days later, from a single shot wound to his stomach, a ballad about the event was already selling on street corners. It told a story in notes that swung, capturing the imagination of generations. It just wasn’t her story.

    A .38 pistol. In ‘murder’ ballad ‘Frankie and Johnny’, the real-life perpetrator of the shooting, Frankie Baker, was unhappy with how she was represented. Among other things was the gun detail. ‘It wasn’t a .44,’ she said, ‘it was just a little old Harrington & Richardson .38. And it couldn’t have gone roota-toot-toot, ’cause I only shot once.’ My new song ‘Don’t Do Me Wrong’ sets the record straight on the events of that fateful night in 1899.

    The old woman who lived in the woods killed a baby. We don’t know why she was left holding it, just that she was. Her chorus is a keening wail, a weile-weile-waile that rises from the depths of the well. It is so transcendent, so collective, that others can carry out its ancient, visceral work. Locate the cry in Famine times and its echoes might offer a clue to the circumstances that gave to it.

    Lily goes to war to be with her lover, which means pretending she’s a man. Into the bargain she saves his life. She gets to be a soldier and a heroine of the battlefield. You have to hand it to her. But I’m not completely convinced she set out on her heroine journey just to be with her guy. Perhaps she believed in the cause. Perhaps she was just deathly bored with her lot and craved some action.

    Polly Amorous

    Polly was savagely murdered while pregnant, by her boyfriend, who threw her body in a hole in the ground he’d chillingly spent the night before digging. She had it coming, he saw how other men looked at her – how would he ever truly possess such a woman? He goes off to sail the seas, but her ghost is furious and manifests on his ship, in her arms a revenant child. And he will not resist her beauty now, of this she makes sure, as she lures him to his death among the waves using the temptress charms of his projection.

    These were some of the voices that called out to me, as I set about exploring women’s experience in the folk music canon two years ago, voices that were captured at a moment in time, that shape-shifted according to its passage, and that carry with them its cultural and social context. As a singer-songwriter interested in and inspired by women’s perspectives, explored in such songs as ‘Finest Flower’ and ‘Trouble Come Find Me’, I hungered to know them, to explore their possibilities, their hidden aspects, their hearts. Were there new expressions asking to emerge?

    Ciara at the Unbroken Line album launch at the Sugar Club, Dublin, with members of Tuam Home Survivors Network Peter Mulryan, left, and Michael Flaherty, right. Ciara’s song ‘Finest Flower’ was inspired by the testimony of home mothers. Image © Lucy Foster.

    Spotify link to ‘Finest Flower’.

    Live recording of ‘Trouble Come Find Me’, inspired by the life of pioneering midwife Philomena Canning, with whom Ciara campaigned for justice for five years, until Philomena’s death in 2019:

    ‘Frankie and Johnny’

    It began with ‘Frankie and Johnny’. First written in 1899 in St Louis, Missouri, it was my grandmother’s party piece, the unlikely star of a repertoire that was more readily identified by rousing rebel songs of bold Fenian men, and mournful ballads to Cathleen Ni Houlihan, penned by her beloved uncle, songwriter Peadar Kearney.

    But Frankie and Johnny, telling the story of a cheating man and his jealous girlfriend, was the favourite of us kids, with its bold declaration that ‘there ain’t no good in men’, inevitably delivered with finger-pointing gusto by my grandmother Kay Considine. When I later discovered that the ballad was based on real-life events, I wanted to know more.

    Through available writings, along with newspaper reports and court documents of the time, I pieced together an alternative tale, which shifted it from a crime of passion into an act of survival, for a young black woman, a sex worker, who was the breadwinner in the relationship and asked in exchange for respect.

    The song, created in the direct aftermath of this pivotal event in her life and which dogged her until its end, failed to reflect an important fact, one which led to her acquittal on Friday 13th of October, 1899. (According to Frankie’s testimony, being granted her freedom on this most damned of dates had the welcome bonus of vanquishing her superstitious ‘omens black’.)

    As for what happened: Allen had entered Frankie’s bedroom in the small hours of the morning drunk, angry and wielding a knife. She shot in self-defence.

    Frankie Baker.

    This seemingly small detail blew me away. As I stared at my computer screen into the arresting, disquieting gaze of this queenly young woman – finely dressed, notably composed – I felt deep love for her memory.

    Later in life – ground down by events, unable to shake off the story that had been landed upon her, no matter where she went, and powerless over its representation of her (she even tried to sue two movie studios, to no avail) – she would live out her last days in penury, in an asylum.

    ‘Don’t Do Me Wrong’ is an homage to Frankie Baker and gives life to her perspective of the fateful night in 1899 when her young lover met with an early grave.

    Menstruation

    As I explored the folk music archives deeper – an uninvited, self-styled confidante of Her – I felt alive and open to nuance, to the spaces between the lines, to that which could not be spoken, and my love for the embattled heroine expanded.

    Her blood is lavishly spilled in folk balladry, but there is no mention of menstruation. Her body is readily filled with extra-marital pregnancies that locate her as an outcast, and yet there is no mention of male responsibility.

    She is raped and left bereft, and there is no justice. She commits infanticide in extreme desperation, and is cast as a crazed crone. All of women’s struggles through time – the desperate lot of wounded or deprived agency – find expression in our song heritage, and at times I wondered at how deep our keening goes, and if it is indeed as bottomless as a well. Yet her endurance, inner strength and tenacity reminds us that just as a wrecking ball can turn a world to rubble, something new can always be created from the ruins.

    The songs of Blood Sex Death platform heroines whose brave, often embattled, lives are offered new expression in unexpected ways, where Gothic tragedy, twisted tenderness and fierceness abound.

    A grant from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media as administered via the Music Industry Stimulus Package 2020 enabled me to begin recording this six-song EP of original material inspired by her voice, and once I secure funding to complete them, I look forward to releasing and performing the new material.

    Musical Origins

    As to how I came to music, perhaps motherhood was the metaphorical wrecking ball out of whose rubble I located my creative desire, and pursued it. In the new world order of an upended life, as two babies slept I fought maternal panic and exhaustion with poor guitar skills, an ear for melody and the strangely solid sensation that came from writing lyrics. Late-night bouts of songwriting alone in the kitchen were, my husband sensed, something urgent and tension-laced, not to be disturbed, even if it meant distance and loneliness for us both.

    And he was right. It was only through an imagined creative life being ripped from me as easily as a wet Band-Aid that I knew I’d been sleepwalking. A living heroine, Joni Mitchell, spoke of her grandmother’s descent into madness, and I sensed thwarted creativity in its mix.

    Fear can be a great motivator, and the chaos of early motherhood an effective stoker of its flames, especially when you’ve long had a nose for the smoky scent of female madness-terror. It was time to wake up from the dream. There is never a good time to start, so I might as well start now.

    Over a decade and two albums on, both independently produced, I can’t say it has been an easy road, but it has been a fascinating and rich one that has led me to places I could not have dreamed of in that kitchen space, late at night, afraid for what I would become if I hadn’t found a means of artistic expression. I’ve gotten to steer a course in music through a career in book publishing, motherhood, and activism, and keep on keeping on, through highs and lows.

    My latest project ‘Blood Sex Death’ feels like a coming of age. As I move steadily towards my half-century birthday, some might say it’s about time. For a late developer like me, dabbling in songs hundreds of years in the making, perhaps it is right on course.

    Feature Image: Fran Veale

    www.ciarasidine.com

    www.facebook.com/ciarasidine