Cassandra Voices

Tag: contract?

  • A Contract of Indefinite Duration

    The voice on the other end of the line was shaky and uncertain. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked. My wife had come upstairs with the phone just as I was getting out of the shower, ‘It’s your father,’ she said, eyebrows to the ceiling.

    My father and I have a good relationship now, a better one than when I was a teenager at least. My mind began to race as I sat on the edge of the bed, evaporating in my bathrobe, the bedroom door closed behind her with a polite click of the latch. ‘Yes I’m on my own Dad, is everything alright?’ I was half expecting a diagnosis of some kind: prostate, the big C, or something worse?

    ‘I couldn’t sleep last night son,’ his voice became a little more relaxed once privacy was assured. ‘I was up pacing the floor after watching that RTE documentary about abuse in the schools.’ As a rule, I don’t watch RTE – haven’t done so since the Covid years – so I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Child abuse has been grist to the media-mill since Angela’s Ashes. Indeed, I suspect people are becoming comfortably numb to the perennial revelations. Perhaps he was having a delayed reaction to the trauma of it all?

    ‘They mentioned Rosmini and the Carmelites,’ he continued,  ‘Jaysus it’s terrible son, terrible!’ he repeated, his voice wringing as though he was going to start crying. The penny finally dropped, and I realised where he was headed. ‘You and your brother went to those schools; Me and your mother sent yous there,’ he added soberly. ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anything happened to either of yis. So I wanted to ask you,’ he spoke slowly, struggling to find words. I sighed, somewhat relieved there was no bad news or terminal diagnosis in the offing. Quietly smiling to myself, I tried to think of a clever answer that might reassure him.

    My Dad is a good man, he likes old things and the occasional pint. He worked hard all his life; a bus man, a taxi driver, a father to nine children. He doesn’t need to be unnecessarily upset in his twilight years. Had I been abused as a child I probably wouldn’t have told him. I suspect a lot of victims tell no one, and instead try to keep the hurt buried in a dark place, away from the growth inducing sunlight. I wondered how he was going to phrase the impending question?

    ‘Did you em, did you have any bother with that sort of thing when you were at boarding school?’ he spluttered, his tone rhetorical as though he expected me to answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he suspected that some of the harmless mischief I had been up to as a boy might have been some kind of ‘a cry for help’? I got into a lot of trouble at the Carmelite Boarding School in Moate. Mostly escaping into the town in the late evenings, to buy chips, drink cider, or try to meet up with my girlfriend Maggie. I restrained a chuckle, ‘what do you mean Dad?’ I pressed him. He sighed deeply, probably assuming I was being stupid and hadn’t got to the gist of the matter.

    ‘Ah for God’s sake son, I mean did any of them ever?’ His words crackled dryly, and then he blurted it out: ‘Did any of them ever interfere with you?’ The distasteful question hung in the air like a strand of hair pulled slowly out of a sandwich. There it is, I thought, that strange word: ‘interfere’, inextricably bound to the adolescence of Irish males for generations. Joyce’s A Portrait literally climaxes on the notion.

    In 1980s Ireland, most  boys were sinners, entirely guilty of ‘interfering’ with themselves. The risk of being interfered with by a person of authority, that particular ‘sin’ wasn’t on the horizon. Indeed, given the scale of abuse in Ireland unearthed in recent years, some people might wonder if child abuse was ever considered a ‘sin’ at all?

    The RTE programme that had upset my father did not arise out of any investigative journalism on the part of our national broadcaster; rather it was on foot of a ‘scoping inquiry’ that was initiated by the government in 2023, in response to a previous run of ‘new revelations’. This inquiry findings were published in September and contain 2295 allegations of sexual abuse across 300 schools between 1960-1990. In a somewhat nauseating twist, 590 of the allegations were recorded in 17 schools for children with disabilities and these allegations relate to 190 alleged abusers. Of the 884 alleged abusers across 42 religious orders, half are now believed to be deceased.

    To describe the report as grim reading would be an understatement. The Carmelites ran my boarding school in Moate, but I knew nothing about the Inquiry until my father’s phone call. Given the difficulties experienced by the few victims who come forward in these types of inquiries, I imagine the number of allegations (shocking as they are) are but the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly, a recent BBC news report on the Inquiry findings was quick to touch on the sacrilegious question of social complicity:

    Survivors also had a “strong belief that what was happening was so pervasive that it could not possibly have gone unnoticed by other staff, and the members and leadership of the religious orders”. People who had been abused told the report authors that: “the power of the Catholic Church permeated their lives in every way” and they believed there was no-one they could tell, including their parents.

    In Ireland since the early 1990s, religious abuse scandals have become a regular staple on the news. The official response follows the same prescription: establish an expensive tribunal headed up by a retired Judge; dispense a vulgar sort of financial compensation to the victims; and hopefully that’s the end of the matter, at least until the next batch of revelations. It’s an entirely post-colonial response, closely imitating the manner in which his lordship might on occasion have compensated a peasant farmer for the rape of his daughter.

    In reality, there is little if any appetite for understanding the conditions that made systemic child abuse possible. One might reasonably argue that there is little appetite to change a culture of abuse that dates back several hundred years. In Ireland, institutions get away with abuse. In a way, it is almost expected of them. The abuse (or at least the acceptance of it) is in our very nature; with time, all that appears to change is the form that the abuse takes.

    Consider that most elderly people have a medical cabinet overflowing with prescribed medications. More often than not this is an abuse of the elderly perpetrated by the medical establishment in Ireland. The technical term for the abuse is: ‘polypharmacy’. Despite this being common knowledge, is not yet a ‘scandal’ because of the blind faith that is afforded to the medical establishment in Ireland. Polypharmacy in the elderly will only become a ‘scandal,’ if and when it becomes safe and permissible to criticise the medical profession. This will only happen if and when society comes to realise that it is not in need of much of the medicine it is all-too-frequently prescribed.

    To honestly ameliorate child abuse (or any kind of abuse), one must come to understand and accept the conditions that made it possible, or even inevitable. In my opinion to accomplish this, RTE would first have to be dismantled, and the looking glass would have to be repaired. News must not be subject to the censorship of the market. Unpleasant truths are unpopular truths. They just don’t sell. RTE (like all advertisement dependent media) are compelled to tell us what we want to hear, not what we might need to hear. Scandals must therefore wait until they become marketable before they can actually become scandals.

    The gullible nature of Irish society; our collective willingness to elevate sacred institutions and afford them the blind faith they demand needs to be explored. As a consequence of this blind faith, the only institution capable of exposing abuse whilst the abuse is unfolding; is the abusing institution itself. Neither paedophile nor neonaticide scandals caused the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Those scandals were common knowledge, they were well known and delicately concealed within the vernacular of the day. They only became scandals because (in the 1980s) the Church had already begun to collapse in the face of increasing capitalism. RTE became free to flog a dying horse; a space in the consumer market had been opened for criticism of the once infallible Church. Those stories could be sold once they had inadvertently received the sanction of the market.

    The market and the multinational are the ultimate arbiters of ‘news’ and how it is to be portrayed in the media. For example, look at the invasion of a highly organised and sophisticated Israeli army into a Third World shantytown, deprived of an infrastructure or organised defence forces; this obscenity is invariably referred to as Israel’s ‘war’ against Hamas. Similarly, the low-wage crisis in Ireland and abroad that permits the rich to get richer, is almost invariably referred to as the: ‘cost of living crisis.’ Media sells ‘news’ to the market and sells advertising pages to the corporations. These two institutions are the moderators of language and subsequently of thought itself.

    Israeli military during ground operations in the Gaza Strip on 31 October

    The Contract

    I suspect my own parents’ along with other generations of parents since Irish independence were locked into a kind of unspoken contract with the Church. One wherein they sublimated the signs and symptoms of systemic child abuse in return for a sense of belonging, and a right to participate in our newly won independence. Having been deprived of that for several centuries perhaps the price was considered to be minimal. Children were not as valued then as they are, at least ostensibly, today.

    By the 1980s in Ireland, Church and state were practically indistinguishable. Being on the outside can (in many ways) be equated to life in a tent on the Grand Canal as an ‘unwanted immigrant sponger.’ Back then, Catholic identity was a fundamental prerequisite for belonging; for education, social mobility; for salvation and all the trimmings. Perhaps it is only now since we have become less dependent upon the Church that we can read the terms upon which the bargain was concluded. Those sick and vile terms make it difficult to determine whether or not the new landlords are any less unsavoury than the one who had been so recently deposed.

    I often wonder who the whistleblowers were over the decades of systemic child abuse in Ireland? I’m sure there were many of them. How were they treated by the authorities? How many were shunned by RTE, and sanctimoniously smeared in the broadsheets like the ‘right-wing loonies’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ of today?

    Did a significant number of people know what was happening to children, and simply turn a blind eye? What kind of human beings are they? Who were the doctors and officials who visited the laundries or the mother and baby homes, and saw what was happening with their own eyes? Who treated the women and delivered the 796 babies that were dumped into a cesspit in Tuam over a period of thirty-six years? These types of crimes are not perpetrated by a particular priest, a nun, an order, or even a Church. They require a formal bureaucracy and a veritable army of participants. They are crimes that are not perpetrated on society, but rather by society itself.

    I cannot help but wonder if the same silent contract exists today between the mainstream media and our ostensibly more liberal and progressive society? As long as they avoid fixing the cracks in the looking glass, we remain unreservedly committed to buying whatever it’s selling, whether news, vaccines or Renault cars. In a broader sense that same contract defines the type of news we receive, and the type of Ireland we quietly choose to live in.

    ‘Dad!’ I replied to my father in that firm but ineffectual tone that I sometimes effect to inform my kids that I’m being serious. ‘As I’m sure you remember, I was kicked out of boarding school and labelled a ‘bousy’ and a ‘gurrier,’ I said.

    These terms are not in common parlance today, but they are descriptive nouns that were often applied at parent teacher meetings in the seventies and eighties. They are terms that my parents are quite familiar with.

    ‘I imagine,’ I continued, ‘that being a gurrier or a troublemaker offered some protection from the perverts. It was probably the meek and vulnerable kids who were preyed upon. The ones who did well, and did what they were told.’ He digested this for a moment as I’d hoped he would. ‘There might be something in that son, but it wasn’t always the case, the bousies wouldn’t have been believed if they told anyone,’ he said. It then occurred to me that back then whilst my father sent us up to mass on Sundays he rarely attended himself. ‘You were always getting in trouble with your cheek and your big mouth,’ he continued, ‘maybe in a way it kept you safe,’ he sounded somewhat relieved by my reassurance.

    I have never told my Dad, but when I was at boarding school in Moate in the eighties, there was a particular priest or ‘brother’ who acted as a kind of bursar. He would issue small loans to the tune of five pounds (a princely sum in those days), but there was a catch. One had to sit on his knee and have him slip his hand under your shirt and rub your back for five long minutes, before you got the loan. As the end of the month approached, myself and my smoking companions were often reduced to some tobacco dust in the arse of an Old Holborn pouch: lots were drawn and straws were pulled. As far as I can remember I only had to endure one back rub, hardly grounds for complaint when I consider the horrors that so many others have endured.

    As kids, my siblings and I were sent to mass, but I think it was more to keep the neighbours happy and let my parents have some peace on Sunday mornings. It was a half hour walk from our house, through the valley of squinting windows, to the church in Lusk village where I grew up.

    Recently I asked my Dad if there was much known about paedophilia in the Church when he was a boy? He said: ‘there was plenty known about it!’ That he and his pals knew of the priests to be ‘avoided like the plague’. He went as far as to tell me what one Father used to do in the dark of the confessional box whilst questioning boys about their wet dreams and sexual fantasies.

    I write these words not out of a desire to kick at the old bones of Irish Catholicism. Surprisingly perhaps, I feel a kind of sadness at the departure of the Church from Irish society. Just because the Church/State experiment has failed (again), it doesn’t mean that it was entirely devoid of good ideas. For a short time, there were parallels that might be drawn between Plato’s Republic and Catholic Ireland; a society run by saintly philosopher kings disinterested in power, sex and money.

    Perhaps a separate Church and state, antagonistic and fearful of each other might be the next variant of that age-old experiment? It is not unreasonable to argue that without some spiritual compass, a society like ours – one that does not even teach philosophy in its schools – is more vulnerable and prone to the extremes of advanced capitalism that are ravaging the Earth and perhaps also, the soul of humanity as well.

    I recall being fined for attending Mass in Cavan during the Lockdowns. A defiant priest in Mullahoran continued to say mass and refused to lock the doors of his Church. He was repeatedly fined and vilified in the broadsheets. He persisted defiantly for a time even refusing to pay the fines, (as I initially refused to pay mine); but in the end they broke him, (and me), and many others. That courageous priest reminded me of the ones who said mass in the hedges and the ditches at the time of the Penal Laws. What was it the then Taoiseach said about heroes, during one of his televised fear mongering addresses? ‘Not all of them wear capes!’

    Christian philosophy is of course as distinct from priestly messengers, as good health is distinct from doctors. Personally, I enjoy attending mass nowadays; the ceremony, the costumes, the acoustics, the aromas, frankincense and two thousand years of flatulent history. In Joyce’s Ulysses Leopold Bloom expressed a similar kind of reverence for the iconography and the theatre as he sat in a vacant pew in St. Andrew’s Church on Westland Row:

    Letters on his back: I. N. R. I?
    No! I. H. S.
    Molly told me one time I asked her.
    I have sinned: or no:
    I have suffered, it is.
    And the other one?
    Iron nails ran in.

    Ulysses: 5.372-4

    I try to go on those Sundays when I’m not working in the out of hours. Mass is much safer now, it’s like flying with an airline that has just endured a terrible crash, in fact it’s even nicer without the bustle and the crowds. Should they return, I will have to travel to the Buddhist temple at Jampa Ling on the border between Leitrim and Cavan; a calm serene setting for healing and meditation. Naturally there’s a different ethos there; vegetarianism, karma, reincarnation and a different type of magic. For me, however, the basic principles are practically the same. If Christ had been a bit fatter and less confrontational, he could just as easily have been the Buddha.

    On the Sunday following the documentary that had so rattled my father, the parish priest at the little Church in Annagassan (where I live now), almost cried as he spoke about the ‘new’ revelations. To the small gathering of mostly elderly stalwarts, the anguish and hurt in his voice was palpable as he apologised on behalf of the Church. As one of our living literary legends: John Boyne reminds us in his History of Loneliness: the good priest (and nun) have also become a certain kind of victim; one who’s vocational isolation is compounded and who’s suffering is invariably overlooked.

    During the Covid years, at the height of the engineered panic, when my colleagues were being bribed to embrace bizarre draconian policies and an experimental vaccine, several doctors were forced to resign from our posts or be fired. My faith in the medical establishment and much of the enjoyment I once took from my role as a GP, evaporated at that time. Presently I work as a locum, confining myself to immediate medical problems and short-term fixes. Unlike most of my colleagues, I’m no longer contractually engaged by the State to keep people ill. To keep them ‘chronically managed’, maintained, and terminally dependent upon an expensive cocktail of iatrogenic pharmaceuticals.

    Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.

    Christian Heroics

    Last week the ‘relics’ of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes went on display at St Patrick’s in Dundalk. (I can hear the yawns). The impressive Gothic cathedral contains some of the most beautiful mosaic walls in Ireland, and is hardly in need of saintly bones to big it up. Nonetheless, a crowd of several thousand showed up to view the macabre display of desiccated body parts. Had those bones arrived from Lourdes in the eighties, they would have made national headlines. There might have been a day off work for everyone, and an entirely different type of Taoiseach would have been compelled to be represented; to lick ice-creams and hug someone’s grandmother.

    In the late eighties and at the turn of the century many things in Ireland were changing; travel, entertainment, contraception, a shift from varied forms of self-sufficiency to consumption as a national pastime. It was an era of televised heroics; the A-Team, Star Trek, The Dukes of Hazzard, the Incredible Hulk, and a hundred more heroes. As we became wealthier and more overtly American, the old Catholic virtues associated with restraint and frugality were being shed in favour of a new skin. Shopping malls and concert venues were usurping the cathedral in size and scale, and became the new loci for pyrotechnics and Sunday worship.

    The present day is very different from how I imagined it would be when I was a teenager. Back then my friends and I had a saying that helped us explain the uncertainties of life: ‘the plan that you don’t plan is the one that always works out!’ Few in the Catholic hierarchy could have foreseen the changes, even fewer could have imagined they would culminate in the collapse of the Church itself.

    In his Pulitzer prize-winning book: The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker proposes that one of the main drivers behind human behaviour is our desire to go beyond the painful reality of our mortality. We accomplish this by seeking to do something ‘heroic’ with our lives. By becoming heroes; hero Dads, hero Mums, hero criminals, hero Journalists, empire builders etc., we can (in some small measure) cheat death and be present in the world or in people’s minds, after we are gone. The problem with the Church (Becker argues) is that it no longer affords an opportunity for the heroic. It had failed to compete with Magnum PI or Charlie’s Angels.

    The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age is that the youth have sensed – for better or worse – a great social historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany, or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterises whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet. And the crisis of society is the crisis of organised religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it.
    (From The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker: Souvenir Press, 1973 p.197)

    Notwithstanding Father P. J. Hughes in Cavan, today’s Catholic ‘heroes’ are invariably presented in the antithetical form of; fundamentalists holding vigils outside abortion clinics, homophobic protestors, or teachers who embrace prison rather than accept that someone has changed or wishes to change their gender. The rather unchristian unwillingness to see the pain behind the woman presenting for an abortion, or the person desperately struggling with their identity, deprives either activist of any possible heroism. The real heroes of Catholicism are hard to find, the media doesn’t look for them anymore. Neither do they tend to seek public recognition. Many (if not most of them) are passing away; alone, demented, childless in the convents and seminaries that have lately been transformed into nursing homes. Another scandal perhaps? If so then like the others, it too must await the sanction of the market.

    Former St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack.

    Child Protection?

    It is impossible to see into the future and as such many, or most, of the ills that beset our children today, were not anticipated by the most anxious, or even by the best of parents. My own, having come from the ‘lower’ classes, directly (and indirectly) instilled into me an inflated respect for the ‘class system’. When I left home in my late teens, I was determined to become a ‘somebody’ within that same system; as opposed to becoming self-sufficient and capable of thinking beyond it.

    My generation’s preoccupation with class may have come at the cost of an appreciation for the arts and for nature; the tools that might help us navigate an ubiquitous sense of inadequacy, an obsession with status and material consumption. We may have compounded the ambivalence towards nature and philosophy with an overemphasis on the importance of a certain kind of education for our own kids. Pushing them into universities, eschewing the arts and the ‘lowly’ trades for the ‘white collar’ of a college degree.

    For most young people a university degree (so valued by their parents) amounts to little more than a piece of paper and a pathway to barista work. Many of these young graduates have grown up surrounded by creature comforts. They remain oblivious or disinclined to ascend through the class system their parents have prioritised so much. Today their aspirations are often confined to the digital space; they are beset on all sides by addiction, depression, anxiety, identity, and a precarious social media image. Ills their parents could never have predicted.

    It seems as though each generation of parents is condemned to a similar fate of protecting their children from the wrong sorts of evils. Today’s school lunch scheme is a telling example; disempowering children, removing them from an engagement with their food and from the discipline and time needed to prepare and understand what a nutritious meal really is. There is no attention given to disempowerment, environmental impact, or even nutrition itself! Yet most parents seem to love the recently established ‘free lunch’ programme. My own kids get a hot ‘free lunch’ at their primary school in Annagassan, outside of which there is neither a footpath nor a speed bump.

    Today, across the country some 455 schools are teaching children in rented prefab accommodation. This comes in at a yearly cost to the state of some 23 million euro. At least this winter, one hopes that the chicken nuggets and pizza slices will be easier to heat than the prefabs.

    Had I known then what I know now I would have raised my older children differently. I might have pushed them into carpentry, and would have educated them daily on the twin evils of social media and drug dependence. On top of that I would have taught them how to lift a shovel, turn a sod and plant a seed, as I do now. I did try to teach them to read good literature, and where possible to think independently of the herd.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Whistleblowers

    Shortly before the economic crash in 2007 economists, most notably David McWilliams and several others were critical of government economic policy and tried to blow the whistle. In 2007 the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern dismissed the naysayers at a speech in Donegal saying:

    Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide, because frankly the only thing that motivates me is being able to actively change something.

    When I think of a whistleblower, I think of an official who stands on the platform and informs people if and when it’s safe to get off the train. During the pandemic one such whistleblower was Dr Martin Feeley.

    A former Olympian and clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, Martin was part of a small cohort of physicians in Ireland who were critical of Covid policies, including nursing home deaths. He recognised from the outset that only the elderly and the very vulnerable needed protection, and that much of what was going on was not motivated by an interest in public health. Dr Feely was a physician and a gentleman, above and beyond anything the cliche might describe.

    We met each other many times and corresponded throughout the years of madness, I feel honoured to have known him. Having been compelled to resign his post as clinical director in 2020, Martin endured a torrid time as a consequence of speaking the truth and adhering to medical and scientific principles. Like the rest of our small group of naysayers, he was stunned and shunned by former ‘friends’ and colleagues. It was reported that Martin ‘died suddenly at his home’ in December 2023. Whilst I would not wish to burden his family with any speculations on his departure from this world, I have no doubt, (and personal experience informs) that the vitriol and invective he endured from within the medical profession, was a contributing factor to his untimely death.

    Ironically most of those medics who publicly contradicted Covid policy or questioned the administration of the vaccine to children or pregnant women, were either fired or placed under investigation by the regulator? In some cases, they were both fired and placed under investigation. The ongoing inquiries are now in their fourth year, at this stage they must be some of the longest investigations on record at the Irish Medical Council. One colleague, critical of NPHET policy, received his summons for investigation shortly after being discharged from hospital. Another colleague GP who refused to administer the vaccine, was summarily suspended from the register. In September of this year Dr Neville Wilson, a GP with a busy practice in Kilcock Co Kildare, was brought before a Fitness to Practise Hearing at the Medical Council for allegedly ‘making comments disapproving of the use of Covid Vaccines.’ He is presently awaiting a decision in respect of sanctions against him. Two weeks ago, another colleague (and a good friend), a GP with a busy practice in Adare was ordered (as part of his ongoing investigation) to travel to Dublin to attend an occupational health assessment, which includes an assessment of his mental health! In 2020 this same respected GP who runs a thriving and busy clinic in Adare, was compelled to resign from his role as Chairman of Shannon Doc (the out of hours service for the Midwest); after he publicly criticised Covid policy.

    Myself and several other GPs have yet to receive a date for our fitness to practise hearings. The purpose of these interminable prosecutions has an obvious historical precedent. It is a process little different to what those that contradicted the presiding dogma of the day experienced some fifty years ago. Then, as now, the collective injustice endured by Covid policy critics is largely ignored by the media because a majority were complicit in the embrace and execution of those policies. Not one of the doctors presently under investigation have caused harm to a single patient, instead, all are guilty, to a greater or lesser degree, of simply disagreeing with Covid policy, in a manner more benign than the prominent politicians and RTE presenters who publicly flouted the rules with impunity. Of course, there is an element of punishment in all of this, a punishment most acutely felt by the families of those who remain under investigation.

    Adverse Events

    Had I been inclined to inform someone of the harm that was being done by the bursar at my boarding school; where, or to whom could I have reported these adverse events? How would they have been received?

    Today, in order to record or report the adverse consequence or side effects of a Covid vaccine, one’s only recourse is to fill out a seven-page complaint form, obscurely buried on the HPRA website. If you don’t have a Medical Card, it will cost you sixty or seventy euro to bring a suspected side effect to the attention of your GP. If you do manage to get an appointment, he or she will probably dismiss your side effect as: ‘coincidental’ or ‘all in your head’.

    I suspect that Irish GPs are as ill-informed about potential side effects from Covid vaccines as they are (and were) ill-informed about the mechanism and mode of action of these novel genetic ‘vaccines.’ There are no posters in the waiting rooms, no mention of side effects anywhere, outside of some inaccessible small print on the back of a leaflet in the bottom of a box. Thus, one must complain about the medicine to the same people who are being handsomely paid to administer it.

    It is all easy to fall into the trap of becoming a conspiracy theorist or far-right supporter in Ireland. It is within these circles that criticism of almost all kinds is embraced.  The doctors who criticised Covid policy were described as ‘right-wing, anti-vaxxers’, a slur that has not yet lost its resonance. Today the man who was Minister for Health over much of the period of the Covid fiasco – including the period of the nursing home deaths – is presently Taoiseach. That observation alone should be enough to make the most reluctant conspiracy theorist pause and wonder: ‘Who are the king makers?’

    Those who objected during Harris’s term as Minister for Health are presently being prosecuted by the Regulator, or are deceased. To impressionable minds it might read like an episode from the HBO series Succession? Or a pulp fiction drama where behind an entertaining puppetry of politics, a few multinational corporations are in control of state and government. In Ireland truth is no stranger to fiction.

    My dad was reassured by my denial of being abused by the priests or the unchristian brothers at my boarding school in Moate. My abuse was to come in my adult life in a form I could never have predicted. It came not at the hands of the old priests, but at the hands of the new ones: my ‘colleagues’, and from a hopelessly failed and politically controlled Regulator.

    For less than obvious reasons, I fear many people in Ireland don’t want to look back on the Covid period. They would rather move forward towards a hopefully brighter future.  Perhaps the lack of a public outcry for a meaningful Covid inquiry reflects a deeper truth about the Irish public; one that suggests a broader culpability, beyond the pharmaceutical companies, the medical establishment and the political puppetry?

    I have no doubt, however, that a future generation will look back on the Covid years with the same level of disgust and anger that is readily applied today to those clergy that abused children.

    I desperately hope that history does not repeat itself. That fathers will not one day be nervously phone their sons and daughters, apologising for the consequences of decisions that for a time were coerced, mandated and unquestioningly endorsed by the medical hierarchy of today.

    Feature Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

  • The Myth of the Spiritual Contract

    According to Western medical science I suffer from a condition called depression. And from my perspective, I suffer. The conditions of my reality are such that sometimes no matter the environment – with loved ones, by myself, in mediation or not, eating or fasting, sleeping or awake – I feel a sense of dissociation, dread and low energy levels in my body. It comes and it goes and the time it stays can never be predicted. It’s not a comfortable existence.

    Practicing yoga has been a wonderful way to help with depression. Lonely and isolating thoughts can’t intrude when those thoughts have been stilled: yogas chitta vritta nirodha [trans: yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind].

    When I told a good friend recently that my yoga practice didn’t seem to be helping with the symptoms of my depressions, as it had in the past, she said, “maybe it’s not working? Maybe you should try something else? Like a hobby?”

    My instant reaction was, “how dare you question my practice?” I got defensive. She didn’t understand. She’s not a yogi. These practices are fundamental to my life. Yoga has helped me overcome substance abuse, break ups, a mid-life crisis, and poor work/life balance. What do you mean “it’s not working”?

    Right and Wrong

    As it turns out, she was both right and wrong. She was right: the yoga wasn’t working. She was also wrong: yoga always works.

    My yoga practice wasn’t working because I was expecting it to alleviate my suffering like a drug alleviates the symptoms of disease. I practice and I stop suffering. Like buying a salad at a restaurant. Like purchasing a bicycle. A contract.

    I was offering my dedication and daily practice and expected to receive something (bliss, freedom, insight) in return of equal or greater value. And the harder and longer I practice, the more and more rewards I receive. In this case, I expected to be delivered from my depression in return for my yoga practice: daily meditation, kriya and pranayama, and Japa practices.

    So, my friend was right: yoga wasn’t working because that is not the way yoga works. In a spiritual practice, the investment is the return. The discipline, the devotion, the surrender, these are the practices AND the results. And this includes surrendering any expectation that your suffering will end just because you practice yoga.

    Our daily lives are comprised of contracts or agreements. We aren’t aware of this most of the time. We work to make money. We use money to pay for food and shelter. These are transactional agreements we make many times a day.

    I use money to buy a thing and I expect a thing in return for payment.  The expectation is of something foreseeable with pretty good accuracy: I see an orange, I pay money, I go home with the orange.

    Let’s go further. The dentist says if I brush my teeth, I won’t get cavities. Doctor says If I eat a healthy diet, I’ll avoid heart disease. I shower to keep my body free of germs. I eat to nourish my body. My friend and I agree to meet for lunch at 12:30pm.

    These are what we might call causal agreements: I do one act and expect a certain result or effect in the future in return. The expectation is foreseeable based on past experience and current knowledge with reasonable accuracy: if I brush my teeth, it is reasonable to expect that I will get fewer cavities than if I did not.

    The Wrong Dressing…

    Sometimes the orange you buy isn’t ripe, or the salad you purchase doesn’t have the right dressing. You can bring it back and get a refund or buy another orange or salad. Sometimes no matter how much you brush your teeth, you get a cavity. And sometimes your friend texts you a half hour before lunch to cancels.

    In the manifest world, events are sometimes out of our control and agreements are broken. That’s why we have contracts: to incentivize performance and provide a reasonable expectation of performance in the future. With incentive (cause) the seemingly chaotic world develops a certain stability (effect).

    I was seeing my yoga practice as just another transaction. As with buying an orange, I assume that if I practiced hard and consistently enough, I would see a change in my mood, my health, and my overall happiness would improve. As if there were some sort of Rewards program that grants more freedom and happiness the more we meditate, perform religious rituals, and/or bend ourselves into pretzels.

    This contract is made with our egos, “I” want to avoid suffering so I will practice āsana.  I want to achieve enlightenment so I will meditate every day. If I practice this kriyā long enough I’ll feel refreshed when I am done.

    Spiritual (not religious) work is done internally. By definition, it should always be under our control. So why is there no guarantee that the spiritual work you do today will pay off tomorrow? Because spiritual work is not transactional: if it were, we’d always have a return because we are the only ones that need to perform.

    A refined spiritual practice transcends the ego and the deal-making we engage in with it. Part of that transcendence is letting go of expectations and the ego incentives that feed them. All of the practices and the effects of yoga happen only if I commit totally and let go of “I.” And the practice of letting go of “I” never ends.

    In moments of union or yoga we experience totality. There is no lack. There is no restriction. We are liberated, filled with vast silence. This can last seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months or years depending on the effort involved, if we can let go of the ego and its tendencies.

    And so there is no need for a contract in the first place; there is no lack to be fulfilled. But to do that there must be constant effort and a discipline that becomes devotion. Resistance that arises from conditioning must become love.  So that the act becomes the gift itself in the present instead of something to be had in the future.

    Hunger

    If I am hungry, I need food to satisfy hunger. This is a basic function of the body. As long as the body is alive we must eat to keep it nourished. Hunger will always arise though, and needs to be dealt with (food is but one option, actually). There is no such biological prerequisite for the ego, however.  And yet most of us feel there is, and this is one source of suffering.

    The ego will never be satisfied, no matter how much you feed it. Ego hunger, like actual hunger, will never go away unless we transcend it through practice.

    There is no causal/transactional link between the practice and the state of union or state of “no lack”.  The practice is the state, and the state is the practice.

    Transcendence as a result of practice involves moving past the perceived separation between cause and effect, between past and present, and present and future. A strong spiritual practice never ceases, there is no past and now and future. There is only now. And now. And now. And now.

    We are humans and it is human nature to suffer, to make mistakes, to lie, to steal, to cheat, to hurt others just as it is human nature to tell the truth, give to others, to love and to forgive.

    We have a great capacity for growth as well as destruction. That will never change. The gift of a spiritual practice is not the removal of depression, lying, cheating or suffering from your experience but the transcendence of how you perceive them.

    As long as I perceive my yoga practice as something to be bartered with it will forever be one half of a transaction with my ego, and my suffering will only increase.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Separateness

    One need not be a Hindu or even a yogi to have a spiritual practice. Many faiths lead to a transcendence of the ego and cause and effect in the material world. Prayer, service, devotion and keen insight require total commitment of your being and isn’t just an intellectual exercise.

    Much of the modern world is based on an intellectual concept – the presumed individuality of existence.  Each of our bodies are a thing with a brain that controls it and heart that sustains it.

    One aspect of this view is actually the contract: by definition, there must be two parties to a contract. So, we view each other as separate and separate ourselves on a daily basis, many times a day. This point of view will always lead to internal and external conflict because conflict requires two parties as well.

    Separateness is one of the great illusions of the modern world. It is a belief that is reinforced again and again. A belief is an intellectual understanding based on assumptions. You see this everywhere. People “believe” in lots of “things.”

    Again, two parties must exist: me and the concept. This is totally different to Faith. Faith is a knowingness, a surrender to what is: that there is no separation.

    In a state of Oneness there is no contract. There is no conflict. It takes discipline to overcome the feeling of separateness created by our conditioning and our ego. That constant discipline is devotion. In that state of constant effort, we are free from the suffering of separateness.

    And so my friend was also wrong. It was the practice which led me to these insights about my condition. All the benefits of a spiritual practice happen now, not sometime in the future as a return on the investment of your practice.

    The promise of yoga IS the sustained practice: be that pranayama, meditation, yamas and niyamas, āsana or puja.  Yes, you may reach an enlightened state sometime in your life.

    Yes, it may happen in the future. Yes, daily practice can make enlightenment more likely to happen. Yes, sometimes your friend cancels and you are disappointed. Yes, sometimes you will feel like you want a spiritual refund. But that’s not the point. A spiritual practice, once started, never ends. It is action, not passively waiting for suffering to end.

  • Covid-19: A New Irish Social Contract?

    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.

    Times of War

    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 Arendt put 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 against protest and civil disobedience, apparently aimed at movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

    Recovery Position

    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 Varadkar promptly 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.

    Leprechaun Economics

    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.

    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.

    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?’

    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.’

    https://twitter.com/SunTimesIreland/status/1383791062846562307

    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.’

    We need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about long Covid

    A New Social Contract?

    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