When writing about JobPath in 2016 I attempted to articulate something disturbing I had seen when the DSP appeared to collude with private companies to deceive welfare recipients into entering into contracts with the private companies, contracted by the DSP to deliver the JobPath “service”.
I never quite articulated the more general problem of privatisation, and ended up ghettoised really in arguments about welfare and “willingness to work”, exactly as the propaganda of the time was designed to frame the problem. Interestingly, Ken Loach’s film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, which is concerned with the same anomalies in the employment activation system, also ended up similarly ghettoised in the welfare question.
Corner-Cutting for Profit
But during my research I noticed something even more sinister than state collusion with private entities duping the citizenry: for instance, certain private prisons in the United States – which were run by the same companies who ran JobPath – were shut down by the Obama administration when it was discovered that prisoners were suffering malnutrition and dying: due primarily to severe cost-cutting for profit on the part of the private companies.
Similar scandals have emerged here with regard to the Direct Provision service, where services to the “clients” are cost-cut to boost company profits. As I write, a similar scandal is emerging with reports from Ukrainian refugees of inedible food in a migrant centre somewhere in the south of the country.
Similarly, the cervical smear scandal is essentially also a result of cost-cutting as a result of privatisation, cost-cutting that has cost some people their lives, most recently Vicky Phelan, whose final message to us was to always ask questions, the very thing our mainstream media often fail to do.
🇺🇦 Nasc CEO, Fiona Hurley discussing lack of standardised accommodation for Ukrainian people who are in Ireland under Temporary Protection: 💬 "[T]he vast majority are afraid to make official complaints, citing their fear of retaliation or being moved."https://t.co/8ccbGrrZp4
— Nasc, the Migrant & Refugee Rights Centre (@NascIreland) February 17, 2023
Privatised Armies
Meanwhile, it has come to light that the Russian state is using private military companies to conduct the war in Ukraine. The arrangement is similar to all other privatisation deals, where a private company inserts itself between public money and the people in return for providing a “service”, depleting the quality of the original service to siphon off as much as it can for its share-holders.
The difference in Russia is that the “clients” – in this case conscripts – are being used as cannon fodder. The US of course has labelled one of these companies, Wagner, a transnational criminal entity. But in a world of transnational corporate bodies that’s just the pot calling the kettle black.
In the YouTube video by Johnny Harris, ‘Who got rich off the war in Afghanistan’, Harris reveals a system of military privatisation in the US that becomes a free-for-all of public-money-siphoning, under the pretext of war, for a plethora of private government contractors, with members of Congress even holding shares in some of the companies receiving the contracts.
And as is often the case with such things, all the shady dealing is hidden and obscured behind innocent-seeming terminology. Like the old song, you say tomayto and I say tomato, it’s a case of you say security and I say mercenary.
Harris’s video shows most clearly the manner in which corporate privatisation of state services is often little more than a system by which private entities, in collusion with rogue government representatives, conspire to basically ransack tax-payer generated public funds for the benefit of private investors.
Put simply, why should millions of poor people have education, health and welfare benefits when a small gang of wealthy people could just as easily have all that money for their yachts, private planes and nose jobs? Hm? Makes sense to me.
Pardoned to Death
In Russia, to find recruits for the war in Ukraine the Russian government offered pardons to prisoners in the prison system who were then contracted as soldiers to the private military company Wagner, becoming the very essence of cannon fodder.
For instance, it is a routine tactic on the front, according to captured Russian soldiers, for commanders to deploy troops of conscripted convicts into conflict areas in order to identify gun emplacements and other targets for their artillery. They achieve this by the simple expedient of allowing the conscripts to be gunned down, giving the commanders the opportunity to see where the gun emplacements are and relaying this information to their artillery.
The point is, like the prisoners in the US private prison system, or the migrants wasting away in Direct Provision, or the people on trolleys in hospital corridors, or the sincere young men pedalling furiously through traffic as delivery “companies” to make a buck that won’t even pay a rent, while the parent company grows fat and rich; the Russian prisoners on the Ukraine front, having made a pact with the devil in the hope of amnesty, are nothing and no one in the greater game of profit and loss. A great game being conducted by governments and those private interests, often the buddies of government officials, insinuating themselves between public expenditure and the people this expenditure was intended for.
As for the platforms extended by the Irish Times to commentators like Fintan O'Toole and Una Mullally, @frankarmstrong2 explains the illusive function their presence on the paper's commentary line-up serves here: https://t.co/1ufczB11d9pic.twitter.com/qthP0IwkeP
Politics has moved far beyond the old simplicities of left and right, and is now firmly established as corporation versus the individual. This is perhaps why mainstream media in general seems so oblivious to the insidious creeping nature of privatisation into all corners of the culture, since big media is itself corporate.
This is why privatisation is the enemy, because the traditional protector of democratic freedoms, the so-called serious mainstream media, is itself already corporate and privatised. Even when it emerged that the private companies contracted to deliver JobPath were slyly attempting to blur the lines between welfare and criminality, it was reported only by one rag tabloid, while the serious media looked away.
Like that old movie ‘The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers’, privatisation invites you to surrender and conform, softly crooning that it’s the end of all anxiety and worry to simply give up on yourself and just get in line with the company’s needs.
As Barbara Ehrenreich showed in her book Smile or Die, How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World corporate propaganda designed to disarm workers is knowingly implanted by the use of positive thinking and the concept of team-work. In work situations where precarity is the reality the worker is advised to be upbeat at all times.
This insanity-inducing expectation has the effect of controlling potential worker dissatisfaction at source, saving the company the problem of individual grumbling that might lead to unionisation. This allows companies to lay-off workers by the thousand for profit, depending on market fluctuations, without any blowback. Such a culture sends workers the message that they are worthless.
The only way out of this is to find a company to surrender to and hope that you get lucky enough to be kept, a situation that ultimately devours the human qualities of independence that make a culture healthy and productive and generous, the workers under the privatisation cosh of corporations becoming resentful of those dependent on welfare.
In this way the systems of privatisation consume all the good in society and in people. All the virtues that created the society becoming little more than the raw materials the corporations feed off.
Feature Image: Direct Provision centre at Lissywollen, Athlone, in 2013.
Twenty years ago the UN General Assembly made the 20th of June World Refugee Day in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Convention of 1951, the international treaty giving rights to people to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. Every year around this date myriads articles about refugees and their stories are published all over the world. Most of them are well-intentioned, but they can sometimes still be harmful and damaging for the people in need of international protection.
For thousands of years of human culture and history, personal and collective stories have been the most influential sources of information that ensured societal changes and development. More recently, people who have had a chance to voice their life histories made real change through familiarising various audiences with their unusual or – on the contrary – trivial, but nevertheless important, narratives. The same is true for the stories of different communities shared under a common umbrella.
For centuries only certain people could share their stories. They were those occupying positions of power: men, for example, as opposed to women. Feminist methodologies made it very clear that having one’s voice heard is essential to having a societal impact. Since women’s voices were counted, our societies have changed. Following this logic, other communities made their voices heard through various forms of storytelling: they were LGBTQI communities, disabled people, ethnic and racial minorities, working class people and many other groups. Hearing each and every one of these stories has brought our societies closer to real equality.
This storytelling comes in different forms: from mythological chronicles that depict experiences in starry-eyed fashion (like in the Bible), to fiction that is based on real people’s concerns (as in Joyce’s Ulysses), to video and photo images that talk to their viewers through visual means using new tools provided by technologies and social media. So the mediums of storytelling may vary, but it is the stories themselves that make the difference. Personal stories help audiences to relate their own experiences to those shared in the media landscape. No de-humanised statistical data can do better than storytelling.
In the current environment, big numbers through the prism of Big Data are taken to signify important societal impact. We tend to see statistical calculations as evidence of interest. However, only qualitative data such as life histories, observations and biographies actually make sense of any calculations. Interpretations of statistical data always depend on understanding people, but understanding is the task of qualitative methodologies in social science. Statistical data comes only as a set of distant numbers that register something that needs qualitative interpretation. This is why storytelling is so important for gaining an appreciation of what is actually going on.
Stories may also generate quantifiable impact: the number of people exposed to a particular story is visible in the numbers of website visitors where that story is published or the size of an audience of a particular media. Even though these numbers are identifiable, they still speak very little about empathy that viewers and readership may develop in response or about the emotional circulation that results. It is important to learn about such an interest, but the real measure of impact is still located in the hearts of people exposed to storytelling narratives – a quantity that stays invisible, but that is so important for societal solidarity.
Storytelling is an essential form that drives societal transformations. From the ancient ages when people told their stories in person to our current age when people share their stories via digital mediums, stories have always had an impact. Sometimes one’s face tells a story and makes that impact. The important thing is to find the means of communication to deliver the stories straight to people’s hearts.
Considering how powerful storytelling is, we cannot pretend that the infrastructure built around it by media and researchers is always ethical and respectful towards those who constitute those stories. As an LGBT person who has been granted international protection in Ireland and a quite visible activist, I have been asked for interviews and other types of storytelling. I tend to agree but it’s getting harder all the time.
One journalist told me that I was wearing a good shirt and didn’t look like as an asylum seeker. Another asked how much I paid to smugglers to get me out. Quite recently another journalist was looking for someone ‘from Direct Provision’ at a conference. She approached me and started to ask questions. But once she heard that I had already moved out of Direct Provision, she interrupted me and said that she wanted someone who was currently there, otherwise she was not interested. What a devaluation of my life experience.
In other words, journalists were rude to me, disrespectful and abusive. Using my words or ideas without quotes, giving erroneous interpretations and false promises. Trans and non-binary people, homeless people, other migrants, people of colour, people with disabilities and a lot of others who I shared my concerns with, told me that they often experienced similar treatment from journalists, but also from artists, researchers and other ‘supporters’. It is called ‘cognitive exploitation’, and this is exactly the opposite to the idea of the empowerment of the community through storytelling.
The problem is that after such an interaction most people retreat into their closet and don’t want to tell their stories anymore, despite those stories being so important to tell, as I pointed out. I want us to keep telling our stories as long we have the energy and courage to do so. I also want to encourage everyone to keep trying to use their own voices, to write using available media to tell the stories so that cynical intermediaries cannot intervene. As for the journalists, they perhaps need to discuss professional ethics regarding dealing with precarious groups.
Hence, what is really needed is an open critical discussion with the affected people about what we feel as unacceptable when sharing our stories with others. Let new ethical standards be dictated by unwritten concerns around the precariousness and not by outdated rules and norms. These unwritten rules should come about through debate and generate a deeper understanding of people’s experiences. This seems to be another role for comprehensive storytelling.
You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.
From the opening shot where the proud young boy reels off the complex theological dictates of the Catholic catechism in a machine-like patter, beaming with pride at his own parroting, oblivious to the meaning of the words he is reciting by rote; the film not only captures a moment in Ireland’s time, but achieves something far more profound: it captures the Irish sensibility, a quality slower to date than many would like to believe, and one which still informs how we do business even today.
For instance, in the opening summary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the commentator (Peter Lennon) says that one of the goals of the leaders of the rising was to ‘awaken a lethargic and indifferent Irish population to an ideal of freedom.’
To awaken to an ideal of freedom. What does that even mean? Not just freedom in the context of colonial Ireland, but freedom itself? What would it mean to be awakened to an ideal of freedom?
Vulgar Chancers
In a 1916 essay – the perhaps over-dramatically titled ‘The Murder Machine’[i] – Patrick Pearse critiques the British education system as it was applied in Ireland, arguing that it was deliberately creating lesser people; people for service, and people, in times of war, to be wasted on battlefields, as was happening in France at that time.
His point was that an ideal of freedom entailed having a say over your own education system, which would then be designed to enhance natural gifts, rather than designed essentially for enslavement to the requirements of a greater, indifferent power.
In the essay he recounts a wonderful story, which we would now recognize as a foundational argument for arts subsidy. A farmer comes to him (Pearse was a teacher) complaining about a ‘lazy’ son who chose to do nothing all day except play the tin whistle. ‘What am I to do with him?’ says the farmer. ‘Buy him a tin whistle’, says Pearse.
But is our education system any better equipped now? It seems to have been designed, like the British education system of Pearse’s time, to facilitate powerful institutions. Even at the top end, the universities often seem like dispensers of tickets for corporate jobs. In Ireland today the bulk of jobs are to be found in retail and ‘hospitality’. The modern equivalent of service.
President Michael D. Higgins recently criticised Universities for being too focused on market outcomes where they should be places to provide a ‘moral space’ for discussion. He said that this was due to a perception in academia that there was ‘magic happening in the marketplace… when in fact actually what you had was a whole series of vulgar chancers.’[ii]
In this brave new republic we now occupy, where neo-liberalism informs the values of everything, the arts appear to be regarded as something of an anomaly. Talented people are flung into dead-end jobs with the same casual disregard that they were once thrown into gunfire. The unions are weakened, landlords are murdering people, economically speaking, with killing rents; workers are over-worked and underpaid; the government is in thrall to big business; and people at the bottom are now going hungry and homeless. No matter how you might like to dress this up with figures for job creation and GDP percentages, I doubt that any of it adds up to anyone’s notion of an ideal of freedom, except perhaps the small percentage at the top, benefitting economically from the enslavement of the rest.
Silence and Gratitude
The sense I have after watching ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ is that little has changed. The place has been repainted and the furniture moved around, but it all seems eerily similar, with one set of sacred cows replaced by another. The ‘economy’, that eternally needy abstract entity, serves as a replacement deity to whom we now must all pay homage, or face dire consequence.
Thus in 2011 Enda Kenny endowed his government’s austerity budget with a penitential quality: “The budget will be tough, it has to be,” he said, adding it will be the “first step” on the road to recovery.”[iii] Cut-backs to vital services appeared to be punishment for the ‘sins’ of excessive spending during the boom era.
The point is, people’s relationship to power in today’s Ireland is more or less the same as that portrayed in ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’. They are just now focused on a different God and a different set of authoritative ‘priests’, but the relationship to authority seems essentially the same, and a similar apathy still prevails.
As for an ideal of freedom; this has neither been articulated nor discussed in the state’s short history. It is not an ideal that informs the cultural life of the country. If anything, it is understood in the negative. Freedom from, rather than freedom to.
In the Rocky Road the question after independence becomes: what to do with your revolution once it has been achieved? The idealists hoped for the emergence of a true republic of equality, fraternity and so on.
Instead, as the writer Sean O’Faolain says in the film:
The kind of society that actually grew up was what I called urbanized peasants…A society which was without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence, never speaking in moments of crisis, and in constant alliance with a completely obscurantist, repressive, regressive and uncultivated church. The result of all this was…a society utterly alien to the ideals of republicanism…a society in which there are blatant inequalities…the republic is not going to come slowly, it will be the creation of a whole generation, perhaps two generations… who will have the courage to speak and who won’t be afraid of those sanctions that are continually imposed on them if they do so.
Those sanctions of silence are still imposed on people who speak against the prevailing orthodoxies. And often those sanctions are most strenuously imposed by those who are themselves victims of structural inequalities.
The role of Irish people, mainly born in the 1930s, as identified in the film was to be ‘one of gratitude, well-behaved gratitude’, says Peter Lennon. The understanding being that freedom had been won; now, simply, shut up.
Criticism was regarded as betrayal. But whose freedom was it? What was being asked of Irish people now by the revolutionary generation, or those who had ended up in power, was a ‘new kind of heroism. Heroic obedience.’ In essence, to wait patiently while those in power created the republic.
That, to my ears, sounded exactly like what was asked of Irish people after the banking collapse. Heroic obedience and gratitude. It seems to be the same bargain struck in the name of austerity. And again, criticism is seen as betrayal. Your duty is to be patient while those in power rebuild the republic; to demonstrate allegiance with obedient silence.
But who betrayed who this time around? Did Fine Gael in power care for the people targeted by vulture investors? No. They let them fall into homelessness and left them there. It would be dull to go through the litany of Fine Gael betrayals since austerity. Everyone knows what they are. Besides, this isn’t about Fine Gael. It’s about Irish people and their reaction to being lumbered with yet another, self-serving authoritarian clique, supposedly building or rebuilding the republic.
Participation
How do you build a republic anyway? What does it need? I suppose you could say that a century of heroic obedience and silence – while the big boys build the thing – hasn’t really worked. And there is a very good reason for that. Submissive silence in a people is the antithesis of a participative republic.
A republic presupposes participation. But as the documentary about the reaction to ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ shows, Irish people seem to guard jealously the silence that acts as cover for the powerful, more than they aspire to the necessary participative nature of a functioning republic.
Put simply, it is not up to powerful vested interests to build a republic – they’ll never do it anyway, because, as Mel Brooks once observed, ‘It’s good to be the king.’ Who in power is going to spoil their own party by introducing policies that reflect true equality and fraternity?
It’s up to people, by being participative, to build a republic. You don’t even have to do anything dramatic. In the Irish case a way forward might be to simply quit ridiculing those who speak out, as was the fate of Patrick Pearse when reading the Proclamation outside the GPO; and is the metaphorical fate of most anyone who speaks against the prevailing orthodoxies in Ireland.
This above all is what the Rocky Road reveals, the Irish penchant for keeping itself enslaved by imposing on itself heroic obedience and silence. By shutting itself up.
Peter Lennon’s film was widely denounced in Ireland, characterized as a betrayal of a people. The usual rubbish when Ireland is looked at critically by an Irish person. This was in 1968.
In contrast, the film became a huge hit in Paris – a place where they build and maintain republics. It served as inspiration for many French students for what happens to a people when they agree to the pact of heroic obedience and silence.
Interestingly, when Peter Lennon came back to Ireland in the mid-sixties he still saw the glaring power of the church everywhere. But people in Ireland, he found, genuinely believed that all that church stuff was now in the past.
They were enchanted and duped by the ‘modernising’ trend – more-yah in the guise of crooning, finger-snapping, condescending Fr Michael Cleary, singing acapella to new mothers in a maternity ward, of all places.
The young people of the time assured Lennon that Ireland was changing, that the grip of the church’s power was broken, that the grey 30s, 40s and 50s had been consigned to the past. And yet, Lennon’s film, shot with the unerring gaze of Raouel Coutard’s artist’s eye, showed a country still hopelessly in thrall to power; and, most tellingly, in total denial of its own condition. Unquestioning, obedient, silent. Until, that is, they saw Lennon’s film and found something to turn their mute hatred on.
How To Build A Republic
There is in the attitude of the ‘great little country’ – ‘the Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business’ according to Enda Kenny’[iv] – to its own myths and legends, a sense of the magical mirror that only flatters. And when you critique any of it, you bring down upon yourself the wrath that surges angrily from denial revealed as delusion.
But that, unfortunately, is how you build a republic: by questioning its precious presumptions. This may explain why it has taken so long to even frame the question: how do you build a republic, without getting yourself killed?
The Ireland we dare not look at is decked out with cruel inequities everywhere you care to look, particularly in relation to the low paid, the unemployed, Travellers and Direct Provision tenants.
More recently we were reminded again in the RTÉ documentary ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’[v] that state officials, in their cumbersome way to make right, actually had the effect of re-traumatising the victims by way, really, of imposing on them an old authoritarian relationship.
This time the concern was whether the victims were fibbing for monetary gain. For the victims it was just another cold authority disbelieving them.
The authoritarianism that truly informs Irish culture peeks out in all its judgmental cocksureness everywhere you look. It’s there in the house rules for Direct Provision tenants, ‘No excuses!!’ it says. It’s in the jokey management sign at the expense of workers, describing them as animals: ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ It’s in the contempt for the jobseeker as ‘welfare cheat’. It’s in the greedy landlord hinting that payment through sex might be acceptable. It’s in the look-at-me-publican hushing almost the entire county because he feels an urge to sing a song and the world must stop to listen because he’s the man who controls the drink tap. It’s in the bus-driver’s contempt for the social housing passengers who ‘should’ have cars. It’s in the anti-intellectualism that seeks always to control through ridicule.
How do you build a republic? By participating. By speaking up and speaking out. By taking responsibility for the thing that needs to be said, and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it. Or by simply deciding not to ridicule and demean the speaker, because you’re proud of the fact that as a salt-of-the-Earth Irish person that it’s considered clever to broadcast your ignorance and affect a pose of being unable to tell the difference between art, intellectualism and insanity. Even valiantly locking your jaw in that context would be a small contribution in the right direction to the development of a wiser republic.
[i] ‘The Murder Machine’ (1916) by P.H. Pearse: https://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf
[ii] Jack Horgan-Jones, ‘Universities do not exist ‘to produce students who are useful’, President says’, Irish Times, March 2nd 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/universities-do-not-exist-to-produce-students-who-are-useful-president-says-1.4190859
[iii] Mary Regan, ‘Living Beyond Our Means’, Irish Examiner, December 5th, 2011, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/living-beyond-our-means-176062.html
[iv] Peter Bodkin, ‘s Ireland the ‘Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business™?’ Not any more…’, TheJournal.ie, December 9th, 2014, https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-ranking-for-business-1844047-Dec2014/
[v] RTÉ ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’ https://www.rte.ie/player/series/redress-breaking-the-silence/SI0000006787?epguid=IH000390934&seasonguid=127629864186
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’ (1931)
With proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies, Irish elections tend to be colourful affairs. Debate rarely rises above the clamour of claim and counter-claim as candidates seemingly festoon every available lamppost the length and breadth of the country with posters. In rural constituencies especially, local causes tend to trump national concerns, while questions of global import rarely register.
But times are changing as cosmopolitan younger voters gravitate towards parties from beyond the political establishment. Until the 1990s Fianna Fáil (‘soldiers of destiny’), Fine Gael (‘family of the Irish’), and Labour – which historically assumed the role of minor coalition partner to Fine Gael – enjoyed near total domination of Dáil Éireann, the national parliament. Today no single party expects to command an overall majority, and coalitions are the norm.
The ruling Fine Gael party, having spent four years in an unprecedented ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with its old foe Fianna Fáil, called a snap election on January 14th, seemingly hoping to be rewarded for its competent handling of Brexit negotiations, and to avoid losing a no confidence motion over the performance of the Minister for Health Simon Harris.[i]
Unexpectedly, however, a political earthquake is on the cards as an array of left-leaning parties, especially the increasingly popular Sinn Féin (‘ourselves’), the Green Party, Labour, People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, and even an unheralded socially conservative newcomer Aontú (‘consent’), have made social justice the central issue of the campaign.
For the moment opposition to the centre-right mainstream of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is coming from the left, responding in particular to an ongoing Housing Crisis. But Ireland is not immune from the wave of identity politics sweeping far-right Populists into power elsewhere.
Another recession might easily trigger far-right Populism within the existing framework, bringing together an unholy trinity, seen elsewhere, of xenophobia – including opposition to E.U. membership – climate change denial and opposition to abortion services.
Who me?
Identities are hotly contested on the island of Ireland. Thus the Fine Gael-led government’s recent proposal to rehabilitate the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) – the British Crown’s police force prior to independence in 1921 – brought a veritable Twitter storm of anger and bewilderment.
In its wake, the rousing Wolf Tone 1972 rebel song ‘Come out ye Black and Tans’ topped the iTunes charts in Ireland, and the U.K.,[ii] before being ripped off by Kerry independent candidate Michael Healy-Rae for his election campaign song.
The bizarre decision perhaps explains Fine Gael’s steep decline in support, as revealed in recent opinion polls. Although a wave of violent crime, including the horrifying murder of a Drogheda teenager,[iii] and the story of a homeless man receiving ‘life-changing’ injuries after a tent, with him inside, was forcibly removed by heavy machinery from the side of one of Dublin’s canals,[iv] contributed to widespread unease with the orientation of Irish society under the current administration.
Identity politics vary from country to country, and from epoch to epoch. In the U.S. race has long been a divisive issue. In the U.K. incipient (so-called ‘Little-Englander’) nationalism is the new clarion call, with the shattering of transnational working class identity emphasised by the implosion of the Labour Party in Scotland.
Historic cleavages in Ireland have tended to be religious rather than ethno-linguistic or racial, pitting Catholics against Protestants and Dissenters (or Presbyterians), at least since the failure of the United Irishman project in the 1790s; although, in the South at least, divisions have also recently emerged along familiar liberal versus conservative lines – especially over reproductive rights and marriage equality.
Identity politics tend to shred solidarities based on economic status both within countries and internationally, often involving deference to aristocracy or accumulated wealth. Developing a political movement based on social class, however, can also be problematic, as for example where a person’s ‘bourgeois’ speech or mannerism is stigmatised. The great diversity within any class formation is also easily overlooked.
The success of the Populist far-right in both the U.S. and U.K. has been achieved by combining working class disaffection – including resentment towards the kind of educated middle-class ‘elites’ generally at the helm of socialist parties – with ‘primordial’ racial or national identification.
As with the racism exhibited by poor Irish-Americans against former African-American slaves who migrated North after the U.S. Civil War (1860-65), the lowest income strata is often most resistant to new arrivals, who may be seen, and are often depicted in the media, as competitors for jobs, housing and other government services.
Brexit Effect
Whether, and for how long, Irish politics avoids the gravitational pull of far-right Populism is unclear. Certainly Brexit stoked identity politics in Ireland by amplifying latent anti-English prejudices.
Notably, over the course of protracted negotiations, the Irish media lampooned English nostalgia – emanating from ‘swivel-eyed loons’ – for a bygone, imperial age. The Irish Times leading columnist Fintan O’Toole even boasted that for the first time in history Ireland, with a population of under five million, was now a more powerful State than the U.K.,[v] which has a population of almost seventy million.
At least Irish nationalism tends to oppose unsavoury outlooks identified with English nationalism, including a xenophobia previously directed against Irish living there. Sinn Féin has also tempered historic anti-E.U. sentiment in the wake of Brexit, perhaps on the basis that ‘my enemies enemy is my friend.’
Moreover, Ireland’s openness to foreign investment, and low corporation taxation, means Steve Bannon – and presumably Donald Trump who owns a golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, County Clare – see little reason to interfere in Irish politics, with U.S. armed service personel permitted to use Shannon Airport as a stopover. But this might change if the rise of the left, especially Sinn Féin, continues unabated.
Arch-Imperialist Mike Pence was today greeting American troops in Shannon Airport
It is a continuing disgrace to the Irish people that American Imperialism should be allowed to use any part of Ireland as a military staging ground
— Anti Imperialist Action Ireland (@AIAIreland) January 25, 2020
Radical Redistribution
The absence of a legacy of heavy industry in the shape of rust-belt towns denies far-right Populists in Ireland the ‘blue-collar’ support base relied on by Trump, and Tory Brexiteers. On mainland Europe too, far-right Populists have successfully appealed to these working class former supporters of social democratic parties.
Most of what passes for a working class in Ireland, historically, are really petit-bourgeois pastoralists, many of whose sons became publicans, auctioneers and shopkeepers, selling commodities on the international market, and in recent times relying on grant aid from the European Union. These farmers have tended to vote overwhelmingly for one or other of the centre-right parties. But Irish society, and politics, is in a period of significant flux.
The two main centre-right parties are now struggling to retain the support of an aging, and shrinking, livestock farming cohort. That sector is in crisis owing to a slump in beef prices and existential fears around climate chaos and Brexit. Over the course of the past year, supermarkets and processing plants have been blockaded, as a schism grows between better-off dairy farmers and beef farmers, overwhelmingly reliant on subsidies.
Meanwhile, with a population approaching two million that dwarfs the other main urban centres of Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway that barely register half a million between them, the capital Dublin is the economic engine of the country. But chronic under-investment in transport infrastructure and social housing has brought spiralling rents[viii] in the capital, affecting the young disproportionately. Therefore, calls for a radical redistribution of wealth, along with action on climate change, are growing louder.
Across the country, the rising cost of living, from property to health and childcare, since recovery from the Economic Crash of 2008 and subsequent EU/IMF bailout is disrupting the centre-right consensus, dominant since the state’s foundation.
Riding high in the polls, Sinn Féin only emerged after the end of the Northern Ireland Troubles in 1999 as a serious force in the South. It has successfully twinned the objective of achieving Irish unity with radical (at least for Ireland) redistribution, pledging to enshrine the right to a home in the Irish Constitution. Its manifesto also promises to pay back €1,500 to renters, a three-year rent freeze, and the largest public housing funding scheme the state has ever seen.[ix]
Sinn Féin MPs, MLAs & TDs gather ahead of the Dáil100 event.
On the centre-right Fianna Fáil appears to be regaining pre-eminence, after riding pillion passenger with the minority Fine Gael administration. A formal coalition of these two is the most likely outcome of the election. Nevertheless, for their combined share of the vote to drop significantly below 50% is unprecedented.
As in the last U.K. election, there is a huge divergence between the voting intentions of the young and the old, with the former despairing at the failure of successive administrations to deliver affordable housing, public transport, address the climate and biodiversity emergency or further the cause of Irish unity. Similarly to the U.K. too, the left in Ireland suffers from a factionalism that makes a grand coalition unlikely.
Labour leader Brendan Howlin said he is hopeful of a progressive alliance after the #GE2020. He said there are “very serious barriers” to working with Sinn Féin. He said, “There are fundamental issues of trust about who runs SF.” pic.twitter.com/0KvTLlmbdY
Over the course of Irish history neither of the two dominant centre-right parties have been over-burdened by ideology, although Fine Gael’s ‘Just Society’-wing endeavoured to forge a social democratic party in the late 1960s.[x] Today, predictably, Fianna Fáil lays claim to more centrist policies with campaign literature proclaiming ‘an Ireland for all.’
Extended periods in opposition have tended to witness greater emphasis on left-wing causes by both parties. Once a government is formed, however, the ‘realities’ of power, often enunciated by a stubborn legion of Sir Humphreys in the civil service, brings business as usual.
Famously, in 1987 after hounding Fine Gael for its attempts to curb government expenditure in order to reduce the national debt, Fianna Fáil under Charlie Haughey introduced a series of its own swingeing cut backs.
In Ireland, substantive reforms arrive pitifully slowly as manifold Quangos, persistent Nimbyism and entrenched property interests inhibit infrastructural schemes, with the notable exception of motorways in a car-centric country. Tellingly, Dublin is the third worst city in the world for traffic congestion[xi] due to long term failures in delivering public transport, and historic corruption in land rezoning that brought a judicial tribunal lasting for fifteen years due to constant legal challenges.
On the other hand, the Irish economy has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s – reversing long-term emigration trends and attracting signification immigration for the first time – notwithstanding the catastrophic EU/IMF Bailout of 2010.
The Progressive Democrats (popularly referred to as the PDs), a breakaway party from Fianna Fáil that first enjoyed success in the 1987 election, played an important role in laying the foundations for the sustained economic growth and high employment that ensued from the mid-1990s.
Under the leadership of Desmond O’Malley, Mary Harney and Michael McDowell, the party sought to modernise the country, preferring the private sector to assume the role of an often inefficient (and corrupt) State. Despite its Fianna Fáil origins, the PD’s economically liberal agenda appealed to business-minded Fine Gael supporters, despairing at that party’s handling of the economy.
Although the party reached a high water mark in the 1987 election and steadily declined thereafter, before disappearing entirely in 2009, it left an indelible mark on successive governments. This helped created the so-called Celtic Tiger, with Ireland moving ‘closer to Boston than Berlin’, in the words of Mary Harney in 2000.[xii]
The PDs were coalition partner to Fianna Fáil over the course of four administrations (1989-92, 1997-2002, 2002-2007, and 2007-2009), securing Ireland’s position as a low tax haven for foreign multinationals. But the delivery of social and affordable housing was left in the hands of the private sector, which yielded insufficient units throughout the boom years. Moreover, the State, including local authorities, lost its capacity to construct social housing, from which it has been slow to recover.
Not only did PD ideology influence Fianna Fáil – with Minister for Finance (1997-2004) Charlie McCreevy once flirting with membership – but also Fine Gael. Thus, the former leader and Minister for Health (2004-11) Mary Harney is recorded as a confidant of Taoiseach Varadkar, who rose to prominence as a staunch critic of his own party’s social democratic tendencies.[xiii]
Under neo-liberal policies, in particular the low corporation tax regime of 12.5%, Ireland attracted significant foreign direct investment, with global technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple establishing European headquarters, along with pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer.
Google HQ, Dublin, Ireland
Low interest rates after joining the euro also contributed to runaway inflation in house prices until the bubble burst after 2008, leading to negative equity that ruined hundreds of thousands. Many workers, especially in the construction sector, were forced to leave Ireland for good. But consistent tax returns from the employees of multinationals in particular, allowed the exchequer finances to recover more rapidly than expected.
The EU/IMF Bailout stabilised property values, and the low taxation regime continued to attract investment into the Irish market, resulting in a bonanza for the surviving indigenous landlords. But the restoration is now working to the detriment of much of the indigenous population, with salaries failing to keep pace with rental costs.[xiv]
New Ireland
Away from the economy, over the course of the last decade, a new species of identity politics took centre stage, dividing upholders of ‘traditional’ Catholic values and ‘modern’ liberals, mainly of a younger vintage. Battles lines were drawn over marriage equality and reproductive rights, with liberal values emerging triumphant in two referendums.
Dublin Castle after 8th Referendum results declared.
Similar to ‘One Nation’ Tories led by David Cameron, Fine Gael under first Enda Kenny and then Leo Varadkar embraced a liberal social agenda, with the gay half-Indian Varadkar’s accession to power a symbol of widespread tolerance, and acceptance of diversity.
Indeed, although the country has experienced an unprecedented surge in immigration since the turn of the millennium, with the number of non-national inhabitants now almost 13% of the total,[xv] there is little sing of a far-right Populist insurgency.
Brexit also provided the Irish government with an opportunity to play a card generally monopolised by more nationalistic political rivals – with Varadkar speculating on the possibility of a united Ireland in his lifetime[xvi] – although the bizarre decision to commemorate the RIC seems to have used up that political capital.
The other side of Fine Gael’s liberal coin has been a conservative reluctance to interfere in the economy, particularly where provision of social housing has been concerned. In part at least, this stems from Leo Varadkar’s apparent aversion to anything hinting at socialism. Thus he complained in a 2018 speech about those who wanted ‘to divide our society into people who live in different areas, with some people paying for everything.’[xvii]
Real Estate Investment Trusts
The scale of an unfolding Housing Crisis, however, of unaffordable rents, homelessness and under-supply is now even attracting criticism from former PD leader, Michael McDowell, who recently wrote:
There is an ideological problem here. The private sector cannot solve the issue. The State must intervene to boost housing supply – social and owner-occupied. Even the term “private sector” is mutating before our eyes. When Reits [real estate investment trusts] buy entire developments to let at high rents – a new phenomenon – that has become the new meaning of the “private sector”.
Allegiance to the centre-right has previously been secured by an expectation among property owners that mortgages will ultimately yield capital appreciation. This requires consistent economic growth, which without adequate rent control measures has brought the rental inflation driving younger voters into the arms of Sinn Féin, and other left-wing parties.
Younger buyers are still assisted by inter-generational transfers, but this is a single step on a steep ladder. Decades of mortgage repayments await, alongside spiralling childcare and healthcare costs. Although Leo Varadkar claims to represent early rising workers, in fact his government’s laissez faire policies are to the advantage of substantial rentier property owners.
I am a champion for the self-employed & people who get up early in the morning and nobody gets up earlier than the Irish farmer! As long as I am around self employed people will never be taken for granted #IFAAGM
As the 2008 Crash proved, a fairy tale of Irish economic growth-without-end cannot endure – quite aside from ecological constraints – given the inherent volatility of the capitalist system itself. As David Graeber explains: ‘Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has, yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity.’[xxiii]
With steady U.S. economic growth the Irish economy is likely to continue to grow in tandem, as has been the case since the 1990s, but another U.S. recession could see a Populist far-right emerge from out of the long grass in Ireland.
Direct Provision
September’s well-organised protests in the small town of Oughterard in County Galway,[xxiv] along with demonstrations against other proposed Direct Provision accommodation centres for refugee and asylum seekers, indicates a new anti-immigrant mood in rural Ireland. But unless, or until, one of the three main nationalists parties embraces such an outlook it is likely to remain marginal.
The Irish ‘Blueshirts’
With origins in the ‘Blueshirt’ fascist movement of the 1930s, Fine Gael has occasionally accommodated far-right views throughout its history. One prominent anti-Semite of the 1940s was Oliver J. Flanagan, ironically the late father of the current Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan, who has promised to introduce anti-hate crime legislation; much to the chagrin of far-right vloggers, such as the journalist-turned-far-right-politician Gemma O’Doherty.
Varadkar appears to assume that a half-Indian background insulates him from accusations of racism. Thus, in response to People Before Profit’s Bríd Smith’s criticism in the Dáil of Fine Gael’s recent by-election candidate Verona Murphy – who had claimed asylum seekers as young as three years-of-age could be influenced by ISIS – he claimed to know ‘a little more about experiencing racism than perhaps you do.’[xxvii]
Fine Gael has since de-selected the Wexford woman, who is standing as an independent in the forthcoming election. Yet even Danny Healy-Rae (the brother of the aforementioned Michael) was able to expose the hypocrisy of Varadkar’s criticism of Noel Grealish’s inflammatory (and erroneous) Dáil speech on Nigerians sending home remittances.[xxviii]
Fine Gael’s overriding focus, however, is to deliver the elixir of economic growth, rising rents, and well-remunerated jobs, through foreign direct investment, while embracing further integration with the European Union. Anti-immigration rhetoric jeopardises that political and economic formula.
Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Aontú
Given a nationalist background in Northern Irish politics, and historic advocacy of protectionist economic policies outside the E.U., Sinn Féin might seem a likely candidate for adopting a nativist agenda. But the Party has remained faithful to its anti-colonial principles and avoids Populist anti-immigrant messaging. Moreover, many of Sinn Féin’s new cohort of young supporters would be alienated by such an approach.
Under the steadying hand of Micheál Martin, Fianna Fáil stands on the brink of power, either in coalition with Fine Gael or perhaps a combination of other parties. Under his guidance the party is highly unlikely to embrace any form of far-right Populism. But another recession, and a further leftward surge, could tear up that playbook, with a different outlook emerging under new leadership.
Although Martin advocated for a ‘Yes’ vote in the abortion referendum, a majority within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party opposed repeal of the Eighth Amendment.[xxix] Notwithstanding its crushing defeat in the 2018 referendum, there exists in Ireland a substantial and well-organised anti-abortion movement, prompted by journalists and vloggers,[xxx] which might easily fall in behind a large party such as Fianna Fáil, as occurred with the Brexiter takeover of the Tories in the U.K..
Opposition to abortion services does not necessarily connote adherence to a broad spectrum of far-right ideas, but nor is it a stand-alone issue. Far-right ideologues around the world, including in Ireland, speak of a Great Replacement conspiracy theory wherein the native population is replaced by immigrants. Abortion is considered a means of diminishing the indigenous population.
Undeniably, Peader Tóibín, the leader of the newcomer Aontú represents the views of many in ‘middle’ or ‘forgotten’ Ireland. It will be intriguing to see how this conservative party performs in the forthcoming election.
There is no doubt there is a growing unease and concern among many people in Ireland around the issue of immigration. Our view is very simple, there needs to be sustainable levels of immigration in this country, it needs to be managed. There needs to be some link between the capacity of the country and the numbers of people coming in if there’s not there’s going to be hardship for indigenous and newcomers alike.[xxxi]
Should Aontú achieve electoral success on the issue of immigration in a future election, it would not require a great leap of imagination to envision ‘soul-searching’ in Fianna Fáil that leads to a ‘harder line’ being taken on immigration, and perhaps the embrace of other far-right platforms. Aontú may not survive long, but like PDs they could leave an indelible imprint on Irish politics.
Climate change denial would also appeal to farmers under pressure to reduce emissions from a sector contributing 34% of the national total; as well as a motor car-lobby resistant to carbon taxes and public transport.
Cognitive Dissonance
Thankfully, it requires a degree of cognitive dissonance for the far-right in Ireland to adopt the anti-immigrant rhetoric employed in the U.S. and U.K..
First and foremost, Irish people have emigrated in extraordinary numbers over the course of the past two centuries. Secondly, it can hardly be argued that the country lacks space given the population density was greater in the 1840s than today. Indeed, stemming a decline in rural Ireland’s population is an ongoing challenge.
The furore over Direct Provision is better assessed in terms of a housing crisis in the greater Dublin region. This led to the State securing cheap properties elsewhere; perhaps in an attempt to avoid the accusation that it looks after refugees, while failing to provide accommodation for homeless in the capital.
Finally, anyone appraised of Irish history will be aware that the Irish ‘nation’ is a composite of many waves of migration and conquests. The medieval Book of Invasion (Lebor Gabála Érenn) tells of the land being taken over six times by six different peoples. Thus James Joyce argued: ‘What race or language … can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland.’[xxxii]
James Joyce: ‘What race or language … can nowadays claim to be pure?’
With the institutions of the Irish state ill-equipped for a significant influx, however, friction with an indigenous population confronting a housing and homelessness crisis, if unchecked, seems inevitable.
Island Nation
Operating as an offshore member of the European Union, located between the two most populous (and powerful!) English-speaking nations brings significant advantages to an Irish State that struggled to hold its people for the first eighty years of independence. The Industrial Development Authority, established in the late 1940s, has played a crucial role in attracting some of the largest companies in the world, providing secure employment for indigenous and foreign workers under a low corporation taxation regime that infuriates many of Ireland’s E.U. partners.
The EU/IMF Bailout, however – through which the State consented to take on the debts owing to unsecured bond holders – is a Faustian Pact mandating economic-growth-without-end to prevent another debt crisis. It has restored the price of property, and rents, to levels seen during the Celtic Tiger era.
A low corporation taxation regime and lack of significant property taxes attracted the interest real estate investment trusts (Reits) that have brought the boom back with a vengeance. This works to the benefit of an ever-shrinking proportion of the population, with the young in particular struggling to live in a capital ill-served by public transport.
Long term, to address the extraordinary wealth tied-up in property meaningful land taxes ought to be introduced. Here, unfortunately, Sinn Féin has evinced reluctance to introduce what might prove unpopular measures in the short term; proposing instead to phase out unpopular local property taxes, and only to tax the earnings of Reits.[xxxiii]
But land taxes[xxxiv] could bring more land into productive use by penalising land-hording, permitting young people to buy homes at more affordable prices from empty-nesting elders, who should be accommodated in smaller, climate-friendly units. A reduction in the cost of agricultural would also encourage the development of alternative, climate-friendly, agriculture.
In the wake of Brexit, Ireland may re-assess its relationship with an E.U. (including the euro) struggling to contain atavistic forces in many countries. In the event of another global recession, the Stability and Growth Pact, requiring deficits to stay within 3%, should not impede the State from responding with Keynesian measures. Otherwise austerity policies could lead to a Populist far-right gaining traction.
The Irish general election of 2020 may prove a watershed, with the duopoly of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael being knocked off their seemingly unassailable perch, and a more conventional left-right division developing. But the politics of identity may derail ambitious social programmes, with the question of the border unresolved.
A ongoing challenge for the left, and Irish progressives more broadly, is to develop a fair distribution of resources, and sustainability, in a State still bearing the wounds of colonisation.
Featured Image (c) Daniele Idini.
[i] Fiachra Ó Cionnaith, ‘TD calling for no-confidence vote in Simon Harris’, RTÉ, January 9th, 2020, https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2020/0109/1105248-politics-no-confidence-motion/
[ii] Michael Staines, ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans tops Charts in the UK and Ireland after RIC controversy’, Newstalk, January 9th, 2020, https://www.newstalk.com/news/wolfe-tones-come-out-black-and-tans-947680
[iii] Paul Reynolds, ‘Drogheda feud reaches new level of barbarity with teenager’s murder’, RTÉ, 18th of January, 2020, https://www.rte.ie/news/crime/2020/0117/1108136-mulready-woods-drogheda/
[iv] Conrad Duncan, ‘‘Absolutely disgusting’: Homeless man suffers ‘life-changing’ injuries after tent cleared away by Dublin city council’, Independent, January 15th, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/homeless-man-life-changing-injuries-dublin-city-council-ireland-varadkar-a9284936.html
[v] Fintan O’Toole, ‘Fintan O’Toole: For the first time since 1171, Ireland is more powerful than Britain’, September 14th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-for-the-first-time-since-1171-ireland-is-more-powerful-than-britain-1.4014922?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-for-the-first-time-since-1171-ireland-is-more-powerful-than-britain-1.4014922
[vi] Finn McRedmond, ‘Finn McRedmond: Like Tories, Corbyn has failed Ireland’, August 24th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/finn-mcredmond-like-tories-corbyn-has-failed-ireland-1.3995334
[vii] Press Association, ‘Sinn Féin pledges to secure border poll within five years’, Breaking News¸ January 28th, 2020, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/sinn-fein-pledges-to-secure-border-poll-within-five-years-978299.html
[viii] Sorcha Pollak, ‘Dublin rents to rise 17% by 2021 due to lack of supply, report finds’, Irish Times April 8th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/dublin-rents-to-rise-17-by-2021-due-to-lack-of-supply-report-finds-1.3853074?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Feconomy%2Fdublin-rents-to-rise-17-by-2021-due-to-lack-of-supply-report-finds-1.3853074
[ix] Roisin Agnew, ‘Can Sinn Féin’s young voters finally pull Ireland to the left?’ The Guardian, January 31st, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/31/sinn-fein-ireland-left-election-ira
[x] Rhona McCord, ‘Book Review, ‘A Just Society for Ireland?’’ The Irish Story, December 16th, 2013, https://www.theirishstory.com/2013/12/16/book-review-a-just-society-for-ireland/#.Xjg8giPLdPY
[xi] Fergal O’Brien, Dublin third worst city for time spent sitting in traffic – survey, RTÉ, February `13th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2019/0213/1029375-dublin-traffic-survey/.
[xii] Dan White, ‘Dan White: Harney was right — we are closer to Boston than Berlin’, Herald.ie, May 24th, 2011, https://www.herald.ie/opinion/columnists/dan-white/dan-white-harney-was-right-we-are-closer-to-boston-than-berlin-27980646.html
[xiii] Frank Armstrong, ‘Leo-Liberal’, Cassandra Voices, October 5th, 2019, https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/politics/leo-liberal/
[xiv] Sean Murray, ‘Dublin now in top 5 most expensive places to rent in Europe, research finds’, The Journal, March 13th, 2019, https://www.thejournal.ie/dublin-rent-europe-4538856-Mar2019/
[xv] Kevin O’Neill, ‘Irish Population rises by 64,500 bringing it to almost 5m’, Irish Examiner, August 28th, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/irish-population-rises-by-64500-bringing-it-to-almost-5m-946672.html
[xvi] Untitled, ‘Varadkar says he would like to see a united Ireland in his lifetime’, Irish Times, October 25th, 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/varadkar-says-he-would-like-to-see-a-united-ireland-in-his-lifetime-1.4062543
[xviii] Untitled, ‘The Irish Times view on property investment funds: Doing the Reit thing’, October 10th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/the-irish-times-view-on-property-investment-funds-doing-the-reit-thing-1.4045602?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Feditorial%2Fthe-irish-times-view-on-property-investment-funds-doing-the-reit-thing-1.4045602
[xix] Untitled, ‘Bibby: Irish SMEs struggling with rising costs’, Shelf Life, October 15th, 2019, https://www.shelflife.ie/bibby-irish-smes-struggling-with-rising-costs/
[xx] Untitled, ‘Massive IKEA store approved for Dublin’, BreakingNews.ie, June 13th, 2007, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/massive-ikea-store-approved-for-dublin-314846.html
[xxi] Brian Mahon ‘Show Vendors, ‘Election 2020: Fine Gael promises end to ‘boom and bust’’, The Times, January 17th, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/election-2020-fine-gael-promises-end-to-boom-and-bust-9dk70kjdj
[xxii] Dan Mitchell, ‘These Were the 6 Major American Economic Crises of the Last Century’, Time Magazine, July 16, 2015, https://time.com/3957499/american-economic-crises-history/
[xxiii] David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.357
[xxiv] Eileen Magnier, ‘Protest in Oughterard over possible direct provision centre’, RTÉ, September 28th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2019/0928/1078800-oughterard-direct-provision/
[xxv] Kevin Doyle, ‘Taoiseach says direct provision ‘better than using tents’’ Irish Independent, October 31st, 2019, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/taoiseach-says-direct-provision-better-than-using-tents-38647784.html
[xxvi] Untitled, ‘Leo Varadkar says Georgia and Albania driving rise in asylum-seeker numbers’, BreakingNews.ie, November 3rd, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/leo-varadkar-says-georgia-and-albania-driving-rise-in-asylum-seeker-numbers-961488.html
[xxvii] Pat Leahy, ‘Taoiseach stands by Verona Murphy despite further controversial remarks’, November 19th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/taoiseach-stands-by-verona-murphy-despite-further-controversial-remarks-1.4088124?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Ftaoiseach-stands-by-verona-murphy-despite-further-controversial-remarks-1.4088124
[xxviii] Vivienne Clarke, ‘Danny Healy-Rae defends Noel Grealish for comments about Nigeria’, Irish Examiner, November 13th, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/danny-healy-rae-defends-noel-grealish-for-comments-about-nigeria-963665.html
[xxix] Philip Ryan, ‘More than half of Fianna Fáil parliamentary party backing ‘no’ vote in referendum’, Irish Independent, May 3rd, 2018, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/abortion-referendum/more-than-half-of-fianna-fail-parliamentary-party-backing-no-vote-in-referendum-36870462.html
[xxx] For example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT9D87j5W7PtE7NHOR5DUOQ
[xxxi] Fiach Kelly, ‘Peadar Tóibín’s immigration remarks spark heavy criticism’, Irish Times, April 8th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/peadar-t%C3%B3ib%C3%ADn-s-immigration-remarks-spark-heavy-criticism-1.3853813
[xxxii] James Joyce, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.118.
[xxxiii] Pat Leahy, ‘Sinn Féin unveils plans for dramatic increase in public spending’, Irish Times, January 29th, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn-f%C3%A9in-unveils-plans-for-dramatic-increase-in-public-spending-1.4154513?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fsinn-f%25C3%25A9in-unveils-plans-for-dramatic-increase-in-public-spending-1.4154513
[xxxiv] Dr Frank Crowley, ‘How a land value tax could solve many economic headaches’, RTÉ Brainstorm, October 18th, 2017, https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2017/1017/912913-how-a-land-value-tax-could-solve-many-economic-headaches/.
