Cassandra Voices

Tag: economics

  • Voyaging the Kerribrasilian Sea

    this is tropical truth
    this is celtic truth
    this is Hy Brasil
    in the Kerribrasilian sea

    for Joan, Bríd, Ezimar and Tereza

    Sometimes the dead do not die. Those of us alive can fall into shadow until we learn how to listen to the voices of the dead, and the hermetic messages they transmit. The signs are here and there, although with each passing decade in this paradoxical age of amnesia, they become harder to access. Yes, it is so, the present is absent until we penetrate the absence that is present.

    In 2020, I made a journey, travelling thousands of kilometres to reach the town of Iguatu in the interior of northeast Brazil, known as the sertão [a hinterland or backcountry] in the Caatinga biome. This was where I would find out more about my cousin Patrick. I arrived in Fortaleza, the capital city in the state of Ceará on 3rd February. I was still dressed in white after attending a celebration of Iemanjá, the spirit of rivers and queen of oceans, in Salvador da Bahia the previous day, which was also the birthday of James Joyce, author of the great river-book Finnegans Wake. There are no coincidences when we allow ourselves to be entangled with places, temporalities and creative practices.

    Saying aloud the word ‘Brazil’, and dreaming about what that vast land may be, has resonated in me ever since I was a boy. For my first school project at eight years of age, I decided to dedicate my time to drawing and writing about the Amazon Jungle, as my young imagination was dazzled, from afar, by the overflowing matter that all seemed so alarmingly alive. In the books I found everything seemed to be flourishing and decaying along the moving floors and rustling canopies of that great forest of the earth through which many rivers flowed.

    My drawing of the Amazon jungle from a school project as an 8-year-old.

    Much of the area along the enormous coastline of Brazil was once called Pindorama (‘land of the palm trees’) by the Tupi-Guarani indigenous peoples. When Portuguese navigators landed, accidentally, on the shores of Bahia in 1500, they called it Ilha da Vera Cruz (‘island of the true cross’). Today, the country is referred to as Brazil, named after a dye wood called ‘brazilwood’ or pau-brasil, which once grew in abundance along that coastline. The word ‘brasil’ probably derives from the Latin brasa which means ‘ember’ (with the suffix ‘-il’), as the wood was red like embers.

    But there is another story: the name may have a connection with the lost island of Hy Brasil, which once upon a time was located off the west coast of Ireland and appeared on European Medieval and Renaissance maps.

    The word probably comes from the Old Irish Uí Breasail, which means descendants (Úí) of the island (il) of beauty, worth or might (bres). With the arrival of the Age of Reason, the age of magic faded into song and oblivion and into the earth, or transferred into science, and Hy Brasil disappeared off all maps to become an obscure myth. But I follow the trail of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote: “myth is the nothing that is everything”.

    Hy Brasil were on my mind when I took the seven-hour bus journey from Fortaleza to Iguatu through a prehistoric landscape of uncanny rock formations jutting out of the earth. I found out much later these were the Quixadá monoliths. My great capixaba friend Fabricio, who had roadtripped with me by land from Vitória to Salvador, called this ‘profundo Brasil’. As we got nearer to Iguatu, the landscape began to remind me of the west of Ireland. I was getting closer to the heart of the story, and to an encounter with my cousin.

    The Quixadá monoliths.

    ‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’

    Let me tell you a little of what I know of Patrick and his story, which is what stirred me to write this text. This story shows the effect the land can have on us and the effect we can have on each other. It reverberates through my own inner and outer journeys to Brazil over the years, and resonates emotionally and spiritually. This story is a way into an absence that has become vibrantly present.

    Patrick was born in Scart House in Castlecove in Kerry, on the south-west coast of Ireland. He was the son of Maurice Fitzgerald and my grandfather’s sister Lil O’Sullivan. My grandfather (my namesake), known as Batt, was born at home in Caherdaniel, six kilometres from Castlecove.

    Patrick had three older sisters – Mary, Joan and Bríd. Mary, the oldest, died in 2007, and Joan and Bríd are alive and well in Kerry today. He also had two younger siblings: Maurice – born in 1949, and Eilis – born in 1951. Both died very young: Maurice in 1951 of pneumonia after a small surgery; and Eilis in 1953 of spina bifida and hydrocheplus. Born on 8th June 1945, Patrick was remembered as a joyful, gleaming boy, much loved by all, who went on to be ordained as a Redemptorist priest on 5th July 1970. Patrick left Ireland in 1972 (a year that began with Bloody Sunday and had the highest death toll of the Troubles in the north of Ireland) and arrived in Brasilia with his luggage and guitar.

    Patrick’s sister Joan Rayle, in Castlecove, in front of Scart house where all the six children were born.

    Brasilia had been founded twelve years previously and, like so often in Brazil, the mystical and ancient fused with extreme modernism in the new capital. Something similar can be seen in the astonishing novel by João Guimarães Rosa called Grande sertão: veredas, which was published in 1956, the same year Brasilia was proposed as the new capital by Brazil’s new president Juscelino Kubitschek. This visionary masterpiece begins with the word ‘Nonada’ [which can mean ‘into the nothing’ or ‘it is nothing’], and ends with the word ‘Travessia’ [‘crossing’ or ‘passage’], and whose protagonist’s name is ‘Riobaldo’ (literally river [Rio] deficient [baldo]. After three months in Brasilia to learn something of Brazil’s language, history and culture, Patrick was sent to Iguatu in the summer of 1972. Iguatu derives from the Tupi-Guarani words ‘ig’ or ‘i’ – meaning ‘water’; and ‘catu’ – meaning ‘good’. In a landscape so dry for much of the year, its name indicates an inviting location. It seems by all accounts that he fell in love with the place instantly. At a congregation, he said to his superior Padre José: ‘Sempre quero ficar em Iguatu’ [I always want to stay in Iguatu]. His wish would be granted.

    Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s was for the most part a closed-in space. There was no electricity in parts of Kerry, and there was extremely high emigration. To suddenly be in Iguatu must have felt like being transported into another dimension. What was going through Patrick’s mind as he made his way across the Atlantic and crossed over to the Southern Hemisphere? What was it like for him taking the same journey I made through the Quixadá landscape? Such exhilaration and wonder must have filled the soul of this ebullient man. Everything around him would have seeped into his outlook and inner thoughts: the extreme weather conditions from Biblical rainfall to drought; the cacophonic sounds of all the bichos [creatures] throughout the night; the electric energies in the earth and air so close to the Equator; the rapid sunrises and sunsets; the mixed communities of indigenous peoples, Africans and Europeans. At this time, the music of bossa nova, MPB and Tropicalia, which would seduce the world, were exploding, not only down south in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but also in the northeast in Bahia and Pernambuco. And the Brazilian football team, with Pelé as the poster boy, had won the World Cup in Mexico for the third time in 1970. All these elements would have dazzled any visitor.

    But there was also a very disturbing current running through Brazil at the time (which continues to this day). A military dictatorship had ruled Brazil since 1964, and people opposed to the government were being tortured. There was an aggressive vision to quickly modernise Brazil, which meant cutting down the Amazon Jungle at a relentlessly accelerated rate. The population was starting to increase rapidly but lacked access to material resources, and there was a massive disparity in monetary wealth, which resulted in huge poverty across the country. This was Brazil: dance and music everywhere; a military dictatorship; mass poverty; Catholic beliefs fusing with Candomblé and Umbanda; indigenous communities (many still uncontacted) living profoundly with the land; and the beginning of the Christian evangelical movement. And then there were the distinct landscapes of the vast Amazon rainforest, the interior of the sertão regions, what remained of the Mata Atlântica, the endless coastline of golden and white sandy beaches, and the Pantanal wetlands to the west. I heard someone say that the US didn’t really have a name but it had a country while Brazil had a name but didn’t really have a country. When Tom Jobim (co-writer of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and one of the pioneers of bossa nova) was asked about the differences between living in New York and Rio do Janeiro, his response was: ‘Morar em Nova Iorque é bom, mas é uma merda; morar no Rio é uma merda, mas é bommmmm’ [living in New York is good, but it sucks (literally ‘it’s a shit’]; living in Rio sucks, but it’s so good].

    In Iguatu, the youth were immediately drawn to Patrick. He was energetic and exotic; he wore funky shirts and loved to crack jokes. He sang folk songs on his guitar. He got to know a kid who had a band and they become great buddies. Endearing himself naturally to the people and culture, he listened avidly to singers such as Dalila and Roberto Carlos (another capixaba)- known as ‘o Rei’ [the King] (who has the same birthday as my brother, though he was born thirty-four years before him). Patrick was soon playing Carlos’s song ‘Jesus Cristo’, which was released in 1970, and he was always listening to another religious rock classic called ‘A Montanha’, which came out the year he arrived. Roberto Carlos was at his peak, having found God and adapting brilliantly to the grittier sound of the 70s – a perfect combination for a new generation of Brazilians.

    Before visiting Iguatu, Patrick’s sister Bríd gave me the number of Father Dick Rooney, who was living in Dundalk after spending decades in the northeast of Brazil. Over the phone, Father Rooney fondly remembered Patrick and recounted how he used to be always singing an Irish folksong called ‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’ whose chorus tells of the devil supposedly buried down in Kerry, and who then rose from the dead and joined the British army. Whether unconsciously or not, I felt that Patrick had tapped into something of the soul of Brazil through this song: in the proximity of humanity with God and the devil in the land; of the displacement and mixing of influences and peoples; and of the ever-present reality of vivid death and life residing side by side.

    On the afternoon of 16th April 1973, at the end of a two-day retreat with more than fifty kids from the Iguatu area, Patrick decided to take a plunge in the Jaguaribe River, which runs alongside the town. It was to be his first and last swim in the volatile river. It was the beginning of Easter Week, the day after Palm Sunday or Domingo de Ramos. His body was found by fishermen three days later further down the river. He was twenty-seven years of age.

    Fourteen years later, Bríd came to Iguatu, thinking to bring his remains back to Ireland. Sister Bríd was a trained nurse and member of the Mercy Order in Trujillo and Lima in Peru from 1984 to 1990, and made the visit to Iguatu during this time, staying in the same room as Patrick. She decided that he should stay where he was in Iguatu, as that is what he had requested. Some of Patrick’s nephews and nieces also visited Iguatu later on backpacking trips.

    Patrick in funky shirt standing by the river.

    Amhdhorchacht

    Years later, it was my turn to go to Iguatu. I also sauntered there with a guitar, and could speak Portuguese after living in Lisbon for almost a decade. A few years previously, Bríd had sent me a bunch of phone numbers for priests from the Redemptorist order out in the sertão who had known Patrick. I had gone to Brazil in 2017 with the idea that I might investigate this old family story, but after teaching for a few weeks at the federal university, I ended up following the trail of the humanitarian and Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, which took me down 3000 kilometres of the Amazon River. I only rang the numbers Sister Bríd had given me in 2019, from Lisbon, which led me to Tereza Cavalcante, the current parish secretary. She had never met Patrick, but offered to introduce me to the people in Iguatu who had known him.

    My drawing of northeast Brazil. The Jaguaribe can be seen running into the sea at Fortaleza on the top right of the map.

    Tereza sent a taxi driver to pick me up at Iguatu bus station and take me to the Diocesano Hotel. The taxi driver’s name was Ishmael. ‘God hears’. Nomen est omen. Every name carries a message. Call me Ishmael. The human protagonist of that great wandering American novel Moby Dick that begins with the word ‘Call’ and ends with the word ‘orphan’. Ishmael didn’t speak to me. His company and silence were calming. I said goodbye, got out of the car, and checked into the hotel. I will never forget the sounds I heard that first night. The dark damp air was emphatically awake to me, the noises and rhythms were weaving in and out of each other in call and response, sounds that I had never heard in my life. I suddenly felt the urge to say aloud a favourite Irish word – amhdhorchacht – which can be translated as raw darkness, gloaming or dusk. Although the sun sets very quickly in this part of the world, the sound and meaning of this word at that moment invoked another way of seeing and hearing. Forty-seven years after the death of Patrick, arriving and sleeping here with all those intensified sounds closing in, I felt a sort of homecoming. The spirits in the trees and in the water had heard me coming.

    The next morning, Tereza picked me up and took me to the parish office in the centre of the town. Three people were waiting for me there: a young parish priest called Padre João Batista, an older priest called Mons. Queiroga, and a woman called Ezimar Araújo. Ezimar was the former secretary of the parish. She had fourteen brothers and sisters and was the daughter of Mãe dos Padres [‘mother of the priests’] (I will return to her later). She was just a few years younger than Patrick and had spent a lot of time with him during his brief time in Iguatu. She could remember so much – dates, places and what people had said. We immediately began talking in Portuguese about Patrick – or Padre Patrício, as he was known. Our mutual enthusiasm helped us understand each other despite my thick Irish-Portuguese accent and her regional Ceará accent. Ezimar and Mons. Queiroga told me stories. They talked about Patrick’s joy and youthful vigor, and how he looked like Elvis with his big mop of hair. They had lovingly kept a photo album full of black and white photographs. To me, these were precious illuminations, time-travelling portals into the past.

    There was even a photograph of two of Patrick’s nieces, twins Hilda and Colette, now 56 years of age as I write these words. I had met two more of his nieces, Siobhan and Bridget, by chance on Derrynane Beach in Kerry only a few months before going to Iguatu (Patrick’s sister Joan had six children: four girls and two boys). Patrick must have travelled with this photograph, or it had been sent to him.

    There was also a photo of Patrick in priestly attire, holding up the chalice:

    A photo of Patrick and Ezimar where they were clearly unaware they were being photographed:

    And another of Patrick sitting by the Jaguaribe River with a bunch of people. Squinting and laughing heartily, he is wearing one of his colourful shirts and his sideburns are long and shaggy. He is the only one looking at the photographer.

    Ezimar recalled a Christmas party that Patrick had organised in 1972. It was his first and only Christmas outside Ireland, so it must have been a big occasion for him and he obviously wanted to show his new friends in Brazil how it was celebrated back home. He decorated a tree, wrapped up presents, and sang songs. They ended up listening to Roberto Carlos for the rest of the night. Ezimar gave a big warm smile after finishing the story, and then looked at me directly as if trying to see who I really was. I saw determination and hardship in her eyes, a will to live and to give. I listened and recorded Ezimar and Mons. Queiroga. Tereza and Padre João Batista made sure we were all comfortable.

    The plan was to take me to the church, Igreja Nossa Senhora do Perpétuo Socorro-Prado-Iguatu, then down to the river, but as we were leaving the parish office, I noticed Patrick’s portrait on the wall. I was stopped dead in my tracks. It was the only portrait on display, and here he was staring out at me with a good old Kerry glint in his eye. I was struck by a resemblance to my nephew Barra and for a second I saw myself in the image. It suddenly seemed very right that I was here now. Ezimar placed her hand on my shoulder. Then we left the building and walked together to the church.

    There on the altar was Patrick’s gravestone for all to see. I had no idea that he would be so present. Real absence. Each step of the way on this day seemed like a natural unfolding with Patrick as our host. Ezimar, Mons. Queiroga, Tereza and I are captured in a photograph, showing us embracing, looking down at the gravestone on the altar.  For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether this magnanimous memorial to Patrick was a kind of post-colonial gesture, a bowing down before a European visitor. But looking around, feeling the atmosphere, and hearing Ezimar speak, this thought quickly dissipated: I knew this was much more. It was a tragedy for the town and for Patrick; and now it was a joy and healing for Iguatu, for Patrick, and, ultimately, for me. We had crossed the Kerribrasilian sea. It was time to go down to the river.

    At the gravestone on the altar. From left to right: Mons. Queiroga, Tereza, myself and Ezimar.

    The Jaguaribe River is the largest dry river in Brazil. But as Patrick’s sister Joan said to me down on Derrynane Beach six months before I arrived in Iguatu: ‘there was nothing dry about it that day’. For half of the year there is no water, and then suddenly the rains come down and the river rises and rises, usually bursting its banks and flooding the town, before swerving and flowing east into the Atlantic Ocean. River of Jaguars. The word Jaguar derives from yaguara in Tupi-Guarani, meaning ‘wild beast that overcomes its prey at a bound’. But jaguars and onças have not been seen in this region for a long time.

    At the river that afternoon in April 1973, along with the young kids and teenagers, there were three men, all Irish: Father Anthony Branagan (Padre Antonio), Father Michael Lavery (Padre Marcelo) and Patrick Fitzgerald (Padre Patrício). Both Anthony and Patrick went in for a swim. Some of the children were already in the water and warned them of the danger. Antony assured them that Patrick was a champion swimmer. But that was in a swimming pool. This was a river in Brazil. Minutes later he was caught in a whirlpool. Father Anthony and the children thought he was play acting as his head bobbed up and down and then down again, then up and down. Then he disappeared. The third of the three men watched helplessly from the shore.

    Father Michael Lavery worked at Iguatu and then later went to work in Fortaleza. In January of this year he died in Fortaleza aged about eighty-seven. Father Anthony Branagan was in Brazil (in Ceará and then Goiás)  from 1963 to 1995, and then went to work in Siberia (in the region of Kemerovo Oblast)  from 1996 to 2020. With the breakout of Covid-19, he returned to Ireland to live in Clonard Monastery in Belfast. As I write, Father Anthony is eighty-eight years old. There were others who came to work in the parish during the 1970s, a generation of Irish missionary priests and volunteers. Ezimar vividly recalled more details with each passing moment I spent in her company. She told me that there was another man called Father Brendan Callanan who arrived in Iguatu a few months after Patrick’s death. They called him Padre Brandão. She said that Brandão was now living in Ireland, working in a parish somewhere but she didn’t know the name of the place. She also knew Father Dick Rooney; and there was a priest called Brian Holmes (known as Bernardo in Iguatu) who had been a close friend of Patrick’s. They had studied together back in Ireland. He is now living in Mozambique. Father Holmes, originally from Cork, was travelling from Fortaleza to Iguatu to visit Patrick on the day he died.

    One of my drawings imitating an image from The Books of Kells, an Irish illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin from ca. 800 AD, now kept in the Trinity College Library in Dublin.

    Four of us got into a car – Ezimar, Tereza, Mons. Queiroga and I – and we drove out of town for about ten minutes, following a road with shrubs, or mata, and buriti palm trees on either side. Raindrops began to fall for the first time in eight months. We stopped the car and walked the rest of the way along a dusty path littered with plastic waste with a rotting wooden fence on one side. Patches of mata were everywhere until we came to a wide-open treeless space where the Jaguaribe would soon be filling up again. No one spoke. I walked lightly out onto the cracked earth where Patrick had gone swimming. Each of us was in our own space, each of us dwelling on the same subject. After a while, I walked over to Ezimar. And then she broke the silence by telling me that the people of the Iguatu pray to Patrick and ask grace from him, like one does with the saints. She came close and said: ‘I pray; I ask things of him, and he intercedes. I receive my wishes in my prayers, thanks to him.’ [Eu peço; eu faço pedidos a ele, e ele intercede. Alcanço, graças por ele]. Then she said wistfully: ‘he always wanted to live here [ele queria sempre morando aqui] … He played guitar and he was happy’.

    Dona Laurenise Araújo and I.

    We drove back into town to visit Dona Laurenise Araújo, mother of fifteen children including Ezimar, and known in the town as Mãe dos Padres and mother of Brazil. She served me some snacks and coffee. Radiant and welcoming, with dyed purple hair, she must have been in her late eighties, and we laughed and flirted with each other. She told me that Patrick was beautiful. She was too, with her enormous hospitality, and the way she carried the weight of her ancestors with lightness and joy.

    Lunch is served at the parish centre.

    Then the four of us walked back to the parish office where volunteers were serving food for nearly one hundred people from the community – volunteers from the parish prepare a meal every day for those who need it. I was struck again by the kindness and tough life here. The words of the writer Jan Morris echoed in my head: ‘kindness, the ruling power of nowhere’. This is a region that has been abandoned by the Brazilian establishment, a place where liberation theology would be welcome. A proponent of this movement from Ceará, Padre Hélder Pessoa Câmara, once said: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.’ Here lies a deep tragedy in attitudes in Brazil and the world.

    The volunteers who prepared lunch.

    That night, Padre João Batista held a mass in the church. At the end of the sermon, he invited me up to the altar to face the full congregation and everyone stood up and gave a long round of applause. Later, when it was already pitch dark, I walked the quiet streets and passed by a gym filled with sweating human bodies working in motion with the exercise machines. I stared through the large window and watched. Most people were on running machines, half of them had earphones in, and some commercial pop music was blaring out into the street. I moved along. Ten minutes later, I was already at the edge of town. There were mounds of rubble and dirt on either side of the road, and only a few streetlights working. A cow was munching on the last tufts of grass available. In the middle of the dirt, there stood a sign that read “Vende-se Este Terreno” [This land is for sale] . After keeping the cow company for a few minutes, I briskly made my way back to my lodgings, longing to hear nature’s night orchestra once more. Outside my room I listened again to the sounds out there in the dark. Was that the spirit of the long gone jaguar growling into the night sky and through the trees? Calling out to me through Patrick?

    “Vende-se Este Terreno” [This land is for sale]
    The next morning, Tereza arranged for another taxi driver to take me to the bus station to return to Fortaleza. His name was Joaquim and we immediately began chatting. As soon as I told him why I was there, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. He was only nine years old at the time but he vividly remembered the day Patrick faleceu, and when fishermen found his body further down the river a few days later. There was silence for almost a minute as I listened to the hum of the taxi’s idling engine. Then Joaquim spoke again, this time to say that he wanted to show me something. He took me to an area of Iguatu called Vila Centenário, which was mostly constructed in 1974. We drove down one of its main streets. This street is named Rua Padre Patrício. I got out of the car and touched the street sign and smiled. Joaquim then took me to the station, and I was back in Fortaleza that night.

    The Retirantes – from Ceará to Curitiba to Espírito Santo

    Time for one more intermezzo before I conclude this tale. It is another shock, a rupture of real absence, showing me perhaps how I was on the right caminho, beyond trained knowledge or logical articulations. As the Irish saying puts it: Éist le fuaim na habhann agus gheobhaidh tú breac [Listen to the sound of the river and you will get trout]. In 2017, I was invited to teach philosophy and literature at the federal university of Espírito Santo in the capital city Vitória by Professor Jorge Viesenteiner who was a good friend of my friend and colleague Marta in Lisbon. They had met while studying in Germany during their doctoral studies. Marta was meant to go to Vitória but she had to cancel and suggested that maybe I would like to go in her place. So off I went, landing in Brazil for the third time.

    The state of Espírito Santo is wedged between Bahia to the north, Rio do Janeiro to the south, and Minas Gerais to the west. Anyone from Espírito Santo is called a capixaba. It is a Tupi-Guarani word meaning ‘cleared land for planting’ [upi caá and pixaba]. The indigenous peoples who lived in Espírito Santo called their corn and manioc plantations capixaba. The name stuck. During the time I spent in Vitória, I became good friends with Jorge. We stayed in contact afterwards and happily saw each other again in 2019 in Lisbon. When I released my solo album in March 2022, which was written in Brazil, I sent it to Jorge, and told him a little bit about the final song called ‘Iguatu’. On 12th March, I received a voice message from Jorge. He had listened to the album, and was particularly drawn to ‘Iguatu’, as his mother had been born there, which was news to me. He said he couldn’t understand some of the details and words of the song but that it moved him profoundly. He decided to share the song on his WhatsApp family group, saying it was a friend’s song about a cousin who was a priest who had drowned there. His mother – who didn’t understand any English – wrote back to say that she remembered a priest who had drowned in the river Jaguaribe a long time ago. Jorge was amazed. ‘You knew this priest?’ he asked her. ‘Of course I knew him!’ she said. ‘Padre Patrício. I worked with him in Cáritas.’

    Jorge’s mother, Francisca Iranilda de Lima, was born in Iguatu in 1951 only five years after Patrick was born. She told Jorge that Patrick was young and beautiful (‘jovem e bonito’). In the voice message, I could hear Jorge laughing. His mother remembered so many details from what seemed so long ago. They had had formed a close relationship working together in the parish. She recounted to Jorge that on the day Patrick arrived in Iguatu, he was taken to the parochial centre, where a reception and lunch awaited him. Jorge’s mother and her superior Expedita Alcântara (affectionately called ‘nenzinha’) had prepared potato puré with peas and stuffed turkey, which was served with malt beer. After drinking the beer, Patrick suddenly felt very sick. It  may have been an allergic reaction, and he had to be taken to hospital. Francisca Iranilda remembered that day very clearly. Jorge said that his mother began to cry softly as memories flooded back of the land she had left a long time ago. A life before another life.

    At the end of 1974, Francisca Iranilda left the northeast, like so many others at that time, for the south of Brazil. Curitiba is the city that Francisca Iranilda moved to, where Jorge was born, and also where a girl I fell in love with is from; the town’s name is said to come from old Guarani ‘kur’-‘ity’-‘ba’. ‘Ty-ba’ is a suffix for ‘many’, and ‘kur y’ refers to the pine tree, which points to the large number of Araucaria brasiliensis pine trees in the region. Francisca Iranilda still has cousins in Iguatu, but the majority of her family left. They were part of the so-called Retirantes – a large movement of peoples who came down from the sertão regions because of drought, and extreme poverty. Iguatu was just another small town in the sertão, a land of forgotten people in Brazil. After teaching in Vitória, I voyaged down the Amazon River, and I came to understand why the Amazon represents the lungs of Brazil (and maybe the world). But now I understand that the sertão is the heart.

    I could feel and hear in the audio message that Jorge was getting emotional. How was any of this possible? Had some strange energy called me to Espírito Santo in 2017 so we could become friends? Did Jorge know unconsciously something else was going on? To whom am I speaking? Jorge began and ended his audio message by repeating words I had said to him from the marvellous poem ‘Le souffle des ancêtres’ by Senegalese poet Birago Diop: Os mortos não morrem. Les Morts ne sont pas morts. The dead do not die.

    Jaguaribe River, 5 February 2020.

    Riverrun

    Language is like a river: starting with a stutter, springing up, then moving under and over stones, building up speed and increasing volume, meandering and digressing, curving and slowing down, gathering and carrying dirt and grime and rubbish, becoming stagnant, getting wider, then picking up rhythm again before emptying out into the open sea. ‘The water of the face has flowed’, as Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake. Rivers and languages are states of wandering. I am a wanderer too. Iguatu – that ‘good water’ – becomes a song of call and response, where singing is existing, and where the jaguar’s breathing rises and falls in the night.

    I hear the Minas Gerais poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s words: A ausência é um estar em mim [Absence is a presence in me].
    I hear Patrick on the streets of Iguatu.
    I hear him in the voices of Ezimar, Francisca Iranilda, Joan and Sister Bríd.
    I hear him in the stones of the church where he is buried.
    I hear him in the hum of the taxi and its drivers Ishmael and Joaquim taking me home.
    I hear him in the children playing and laughing together by the dirty, dusty roadside.
    I hear him in Roberto Carlos’s pop songs of salvation from 1972.
    I hear him in the bichos’ sounds in the amhdhorchacht.
    I hear him in the rivers, an ever-changing space of whirlpools, deep as a human soul.

    Jaguaribe River, 18 March 2020 at the bottom left corner is Djalma, the sacristan of the Prado-Iguatu church.

    Zagreb, October, 2022.

    Many thanks to Tomica Bajsić and Croatian PEN Centre for supporting me and giving the space and time to write this text.

    Listen to Bartholomew Ryan’s song: ‘Iguatu’ on bandcamp.

  • Donal Fallon’s Burning Question

    Deities or daimons held strong associations with the cities of Classical Rome and Greece, projecting how freemen, and sometimes women, wished to represent their civic virtues. Thus Athena, the patron god of Athens, combined an association with crafts such as weaving and valour on the battlefield.

    The gods of Antiquity yielded to saints or angels in Europe in the Christian era. The twelfth century, Archbishop Lorcán Ó Tuathail is the patron saint of Dublin. He began the construction, in stone, of Christchurch Cathedral and was renowned for making peace between warring groups. Mediating between competing factions to produce lasting building stock might not be the worst attribute to find in a contemporary civic champion.

    Architects are the most obvious authors of cities. The skyline of Dublin is indebted – or otherwise depending on your view – to the varied talents of Gandon, Scott and Stephenson. Craftsmen and builders are generally forgotten, although some see the hidden patterns of freemasonry, while street names still bear the names of the first developers – notwithstanding post-independence re-branding.

    At a deeper level it has been writers, musicians and visual artists that have forged a distinctive consciousness among the inhabitants of the bricks and mortar of Dublin city. Historians, too, have helped impart an essence of place, by joining past and present, lest we forget…

    Donal Fallon is a very modern historian who has used new technology to excellent effect throughout his career, while retaining a commitment to the craft: engagement with sources primary and secondary, and reflections on the role of history and historians. Unusually among his peers, he approaches a mainstream audience without indifference.

    His latest work, Three Castles Burning: A History of Dublin in Twelve Streets (New Island Books, 2022) cleverly uses twelve street as a window on an array of historical episodes, and personalities, which touch on contemporary concerns, notably a housing crisis.

    Numerous themes are explored throughout the book, perhaps most evident is an enduring tension between preservation and development: ‘All cities must develop and grow’, he writes, ‘The balance of development is key’ (p.2). This extends to reconciling an alluring multiculturalism with the cultural distinctiveness of the native-born population.

    Housing

    The first street Fallon surveys is Henrietta Street, the impressive early Georgian terrace that was reduced to squalid tenement-dwellings over the course of the nineteenth century. It found an unlikely champion in the shape of a veteran Republican architect and planner Uinseann MacEoin (1920-2007), who unlike many of his comrades, admired the city’s Anglo-Irish architectural inheritance.

    Henrietta Street also offers a vantage on nearby Henrietta House, one of a number of schemes designed by Dublin Corporation Housing Architect Herbert George Simms (1898-1948). His signature rounded corners and communal courtyards demonstrate that social housing need not necessarily succumb to brutalist functionality.

    In the following chapter on Watling Street, Fallon recalls a 1939 speech by Simms before a Housing Enquiry in City Hall: ‘housing of the working classes would have to be accepted sooner or later as a permanent service, like water or other municipal services.(p.36)’ Simms would surely have despaired at the subsequent financialisation of property led by his countrywoman Margaret Thatcher. Sadly, overwork drove him to suicide.

    Watling Street also allows Fallon to explore the origins of the Liffey Swim, immortalised in the painting of that name by Jack B. Yeats, ‘a piece of work … ingrained in the mind of the city’(p.49).

    Remarkably, women were only permitted to compete for the first time in 1991, seemingly in response to the demands of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973), who maintained that ‘mixed athletics and all cognate immodesties are abuses that right-minded people reprobate, wherever and whenever they exist(p.50).’

    ‘Disturbed Pits’

    A wander down Fishamble Street allows Fallon to transport us to Viking Dublin and also to the controversy over the development of Wood Quay, which became the site for the Dublin City Council offices. As the poet and campaigner against the development Thomas Kinsella put it: ‘Disturbed pits and drains trickled with unease.’

    Fallon takes a characteristically measured stance, arguing that Sam Stephenson’s buildings ‘are an important part of the built heritage of the city … Alas, if only they had been built at less contested sites, we could appreciate them more fully(p.71).’

    Rathmines Road Lower brings Fallon to the affluent suburbs beyond the canals. Rathmines became a staunchly Unionist enclave after becoming a township through an Act of Parliament in the early nineteenth century.

    One contrarian resident of Rathmines prior to independence was Francis Sheehy Skeffington, who was murdered by a deranged British Officer during the 1916 Rising. The social campaigner and pacifist adopted the label of crank with pride. ‘A crank, according to Skeffy, was a small instrument that makes revolutions(p.87).’

    A look at South William Street allows Fallon to enter the legendary hostelry of Grogan’s or The Castle Lounge, which he commends as ‘one of the few pubs in the city continuing to shun unwanted modernity in the lives of drinkers and conversationalists(p.111).’ The pub also holds the distinction for being one of the few in the city during the 1960s to serve unaccompanied women.

    Fallon seems less than impressed with Lovin’ Dublin proclaiming the street to be at the heart of ‘the Hipster Triangle’ and christening it ‘without doubt the hippest street in the city. P.115)’ ‘Such hollow titles can change quickly’ Fallon acerbically notes. Perhaps he would like to see this occur sooner rather than later, which might make it easier to secure a seat in the aforementioned hostelry.

    Next up on Fallon’s tour is Parnell Street East, described as Chinatown on Google Maps. Fallon appears to bridle at the suggestion that the Tech giant should be bestowing the title. He seems more inclined to the Vietnamese food on offer, allowing him to recall the arrival of Vietnamese Boat people in Dublin from 1979 onwards.

    Up to Monto

    Fallon points to ‘a special irony in the renaming of James Joyce Street, formerly Mabbot Street … after a client of Monto (p.137).’ Monto – an area to the east of what is now O’Connell Street – which was Dublin’s notorious red light district, where prostitution was on very public display.

    The city’s notoriety was perhaps deserved. Fallon reveals that in 1870 there were 3,255 arrests for prostitution in the city, compared to just 38 in Belfast, while in London the figure stood at 2,163 (p.141).

    However, the religiously-inspired clearances after independence did little to ameliorate the situation, as Ronan Sheehan recalls In Dublin: The Heart of the City, ‘The unfortunate women did not have reputations to lose. They simply moved elsewhere.’

    Ship (a corruption of Sheep) Street, leads Fallon to engage with the suffragette protests on that street in 1912, when ‘windows belonging to the Castle at Ship Street were smashed by members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (p.163).’

    Also, a nineteenth century resident Giuseppe Cervi ‘is widely credited with opening Dublin’s first fish and chip shop (p.171)’ emphasising the long history of immigrants broadening Dubliners’ paletes, and perhaps their waistlines.

    Divisions

    Church Street was the site of a tenement collapsing in 1913 – inspiring such an incident in Joseph Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City – as well as Dublin’s worst industrial accident in 1878, which claimed fourteen lives.

    Fallon also explores class divisions in Dublin, where ‘traditionally the Liffey itself has been thought of, rightly or wrongly, as a dividing line.’ However, he recalls that ‘there was a time when East-West was a better way of thinking of such things’, adding, in parenthesis, ‘and perhaps it is once more (p.181).’

    At least progress was made after independence with housing. The 1911 census revealed that some 63% of the city were working class, of whom 45% lived in tenement accommodation. It was estimated that some 37,500 Dubliners were ‘housed in dwellings so decayed as to be on the borderline of unfitness for human habitation.’

    Eustace Street in Temple Bar is a notable flash point in terms of the balance of development and preservation. Indeed, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern once declared that this could be Ireland’s answer to the West Bank.

    More prosaically, the former Dublin City Council planner Paul Kearns argued ‘Dublin has, for far too long, favoured the temporary, often fleeting visitor, over the local urban resident(p.204).’

    Before getting its touristic makeover, Temple Bar was slated for destruction, to be replaced with a bus station. ‘In acquiring the property with the eventual aim of demolition, the bus company began leasing out units at low rents,(p.204)’ which brought a host of artist studios, cutting edge music venues and off-beat retailers.

    Fallon observes that ‘Temple Bar today may not bring ‘neo-bohemian’ to mind, but a surprising array of institutions from that moment of great optimism remain in the district.’ He also lauds ‘the brilliant Meeting House Square(p.205).’

    The penultimate street Fallon considers is Pearse Street (to Westland Row), site of Pearse Street Garda Station, once home to the counter-revolutionary G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Fallon reveals that the name ‘G’ is simply ‘the seventh letter of the alphabet and these men formed the seventh division(p.226)’ of the DMP.

    Pearse Street was formerly known as Great Brunswick Street, before being re-named in honour of Patrick Pearse the leader of the 1916 Rising, who was born on 27 Great Brunswick Street.

    James Pearse, Patrick’s father, was ‘a Unitarian raised in England [who] … specialised in ecclesiastical and architectural sculptures.’ Patrick fondly wrote of his father’s work, which can be seen in churches across the city: ‘If ever in an Irish church you find, amid a wilderness of bad sculpture, something good and true and lovingly finished you may be sure that it was carved by my father or by one of his pupils.(p.242)’

    Finally, to Moore Street, where Fallon again explores the competing aspiration of breathing new life into an impoverished area and preserving the famous open-air market, along with sites of the 1916 Rising. Fallon wonders whether some kind of ‘proper market’ could prosper on the street in future (p.269).

    Outsiders

    From its foundation as a slave market by Viking raiders Dublin has had a fraught relationship with the rest of the island. The nickname Jackeen is a term of derision applied to ‘West Brit’ Dubliners, who enthusiastically welcomed Queen Victoria with the Union Jack.

    Donal Fallon’s account reminds us that Dublin has long been subject to the ebb and flow of migration, whether Norman, English, Huguenot, Italian, Vietnamese or Chinese. As capital and main entrepot it became an important political, commercial and cultural hub from the seventeenth century. This engendered enduring civic pride, that can spill into arrogance, breeding resentment in rural Ireland, a sentiment which often persists even among those who have made it their long-term home.

    The stereotype of a true Dub is one who regards a cow pat with horror, and any beverage other than a pint of plain with deep suspicion. But such rare specimens now generally feel a profound alienation in a city increasingly dominated by office blocks, hotels and cafes. Dublin is a city of outsiders.

    Today most long- and short-term residents of Dublin don’t live in the city proper – generally considered to be the area between the canals –  but in the sprawling suburbs. Many of us who grew up there are never quite sure where we fit in. Perhaps Donal Fallon will deign to explore this unglamorous hinterland in a subsequent work.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Guglielmo Marconi’s Irish Connections

    The life of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, has been celebrated on two primary occasions in Ireland. First, in 1997 at the centenary of his first wireless transmissions, and also in 2007 at the centenary of his first commercial TransAtlantic wireless transmissions between Ireland and Canada.

    Both anniversaries were celebrated in Clifden, Connemara, where, in a rural site at Derrigimlagh, Marconi had built his most powerful radio station fit for the purpose.

    For the 2007 celebrations, I produced a twenty minute documentary on the life and achievements of Marconi. This was presented at the Italian Institute of Culture in the presence of a select audience, which included Marconi’s daughter Princess Elettra, and her son Gugliemo.

    The documentary entitled “Marcon’s Legacy in Ireland” is a comprehensive, somewhat emotional profile of Marconi that engages with him as a man and father, as well as his profound scientific achievements.

    Tracing the path of his life from birth in 1874 to death in 1937, it shows how, as a young boy, he showed a passion for constructing rudimentary gadgets that drew on the filed of electromagnetism, for which he and developed a deep fascination.

    This culminated in him developing the capacity to transmit wireless messages to his brother in the perimeter of his garden in Villa Griffone, his family home near Bologna.

    That was only the beginning of a distinguished career as an inventor which led to the invention of radio, as we know it today.

    Marconi’s many links with Ireland are highlighted in the documentary, including a connection with the RTÉ grounds where Montrose House stands, which was inhabited for some time by Marconi’s mother, Annie Jameson who was a member of the famous family of distillers.

    Indeed, his first wife Beatrice O’Brien, was the daughter of Lord Inchiquin of Dromoland Castle, Co Clare; although he eventually, amicably divorced her to marry an Italian countess Cristina Bezzi Scali.

    His surviving daughter Princess Elettra, was the guest of honour at the presentation of the documentary at the Italian Institute of Culture in Dublin in 2007.

    She said: “I love Ireland and I know Ireland was very important to my father, I’m very grateful because Annie Jameson was the only one who believed in my father when he was very young.”

    In 1909, Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their “contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy” (radio communications).

    Feature Image: Marconi demonstrating apparatus he used in his first long-distance radio transmissions in the 1890s. The transmitter is at right, the receiver with paper tape recorder at left.

  • The Barrington Disconnect

    Winifred Barrington, only daughter of Sir Charles Barrington, led a charmed life – far removed from the political and economic struggles of the general population in the 1920s.

    The Barrington family, who lived in what was then known as Glenstal Castle, were landed gentry and enjoyed the associated trappings. However, they were well respected as decent landlords, good employers and were not blind to the needs of the community.  

    For example, they founded Barrington’s Hospital in Limerick City – with the proviso that it be situated in the working area of the community.

    The inscription on the foundation plaque reads: This hospital was founded and erected by Joseph Barrington and his sons, Matthew, Daniel, Croker and Samuel, for the relief of the poor of their native city A.D. 1829.

    They funded many other community projects, Church of Ireland and Catholic, and in a noble gesture, supplied the site and the building stone for the erection of a new Catholic Church in the nearby village of Murroe.

    On a May afternoon in 1921, Winifred, or Winnie as she was known locally, saddled her favourite white pony and rode across the Limerick border to Newport in Co. Tipperary – accompanied, on bicycle, by Miss Coverdale – who was a house guest at Glenstal.

    On arrival in Newport, Winnie and Miss Coverdale parked their respective modes of transport and climbed aboard a military vehicle for the final leg of their fishing trip to the Mulcair River at Cimalta House, near Killascully – a few miles from Newport. They were joined in the vehicle by Major Gabbett, who was a friend of the Barrington family, Lieutenant Trengrouse and District Inspector Harry Biggs.

    Winifred (Winnie) Barrington.

    D.I. Biggs, who was stationed in Newport, was ruthless in the pursuit of his duties and employed some bizarre tactics in hunting down the Volunteers. On one occasion, after morning Mass in the village of Silvermines, he rounded up the congregation and insisted they sing ‘God Save the King’ while shots were fired over their heads. As a result of all this, he was a marked man and a prime target for the Volunteers.

    Following the fishing, and after some tea and pleasantries, the party decided to make their way back to Newport. However, their journey came to a sudden and sad finale when their vehicle was ambushed at Coolboreen. When the dust settled and the firing ceased, D.I. Biggs lay dead on the road and Winnie Barrington, who had been a front seat passenger, lay fatally wounded in the ditch.

    There were few tears shed for D.I. Biggs, but there was an enormous outpouring of grief for Winnie. Her warmth and friendliness had endeared her to the local community, and she was not averse to dancing at the crossroads in Abington.

    Her body was laid out in the castle, surrounded by flowers of the fairest and she was buried in the Church of Ireland Cemetery, Abington on Wednesday, May 16, 1921. The inscription on her headstone reads:  “Here lies all that could die of Winifred Frances Barrington, loved and only daughter of Sir Charles Barrington.”

    The tragedy cast an air of sadness over the village of Murroe. Every door remained closed with the blinds firmly shut. The bells of the Catholic Church tolled mournfully until the funeral procession passed out of sight.

    My maternal grandmother would probably have tolled the bells for Winnie’s funeral as she was clerk of the Catholic Church in Murroe – a task that would later pass to my mother. My paternal grandfather and granduncles were members of the North Tipperary IRA unit. To date, I’ve been unable to ascertain if any of them were involved in the ambush.

    The IRA Volunteers in North Tipperary regretted the tragic event, and the condolences of the ambush party were accepted, with quiet dignity, by Winnie’s parents.

    After the truce, the parish priest of Murroe refused to re-inter the bodies of two volunteers who had been killed in action and had been interred elsewhere. On hearing of the impasse, Sir Charles Barrington offered his own grave for the burial, at which point, the priest relented, and the request was granted. When the graves were opened in the church grounds they were decorated with mosses and flowers provided by the gardeners of Glenstal – on the instructions of Sir Charles.

    In 1925, he offered Glenstal Castle to the Irish Free State as an official residence for any future head of state. He was finally saying good-bye to Ireland and his splendid castle. The proposal was given serious consideration, but the Viceregal lodge at Phoenix Park was chosen instead. The Benedictine order of monks later acquired the castle – where it still remains in their good care and is now known as Glenstal Abbey.

  • A Variety of Voices

    ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’
    Vincent Mercier on his editor at The Bell Sean O’Faoláin.

    In this second and final instalment, Frank Armstrong reviews Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices edited by Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin this year.

    It follows his review of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    This book delves deeper into the canon of dissenting Irish journalism and weighs up the consequences of the arrival of the internet for critical journalism in this country.

    Digital Flood

    John Horgan observes in Great Irish Reportage (Random House, Penguin, London, 2013) that ‘Writing about current events will have been transformed by the rise of digital media in ways we can only guess at.’ This may seem an obvious statement, but we can surely hazard a guess as to some consequences for journalism that goes against the grain, in particular.

    If the invention of the printing press in Europe in 1450 germinated a diverse range of ideologies and religions, signs are a distracted and smart-phone-addicted civilisation arising out of the technological rupture of the Internet is inclining towards homogeneity and conformity – not least in terms of the sub-Americana patois increasingly mouthed in the Podcast-verse.

    Thus, we have just witnessed widespread uniformity in the response of governments around the world to Covid-19, as dominant – group-thinking – academic scientists, doctors, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies harnessed traditional and social media to manufacture consent for unprecedented curbs on civil liberties to contend with a contagious respiratory pathogen.

    We may argue into the night over whether the response was right or wrong, proportionate or disproportionate, motivated by mamon or otherwise, but no one can now doubt the global reach of digital power, controlled especially from Silicon Valley. A latter-day Napoleon would not consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets. Rather he would surely recognise the capacity of social media to mould opinions and frame political choices: concluding the algorithm to be mightier than the best opinion writer.

    Moreover, the profound challenges legacy publications contend with pale in comparison to that faced by dissenting journalism that in Ireland has generally appeared in the marginal periodicals explored in these reviews.

    Thus, the editors of A Variety of Voices find it ‘hard to envisage that it will be possible – or profitable, in intellectual or any other terms – for historians of the future to compile two volumes on twenty-first century Irish periodicals like we have done on the twentieth-century ones.’

    Contemporary dissenting journalism that is not dependent on the financial largesse – and whims – of wealthy institutions and individuals faces extinction. This point is driven home by the recent demise of www.broadsheet.ie, a resolutely independent news and satirical website, representing no fixed political abode, apart from exhibiting a deep suspicion of state and corporate institutions that left it subject to charges of being informed by conspiracy theories, but which on a number of occasions displayed a willingness to publish purportedly defamatory material that mainstream publishers shied away from.

    Revealingly, the recently published Tolka – ‘a journal of formally promiscuous non-fiction’ – displays the logo of the Arts Council. A first edition lacks any obvious political intent, and hosts among other contributions a whimsical essay by Irish Times funny man Patrick Freyne on the origins of his attachment to list-making. It contains no advertising, so we may safely assume it will last as long as its annual grant applications proves successful.

    Other magazines funded by Arts Council in 2022 include: Banshee, €75,000; Comhar Teoranta, €46,800; Crannog Magazine, €18,000; Cyphers Magazine, €13,000; Dublin Review of Books, €25,000; The Dublin Review, €75,000; The Journal of Music, €75,000. Such magazines are not necessarily apolitical, but generally do not directly address political questions or engage in investigative journalism.

    The huge problem attendant to the public-private RTÉ model, emphasises the difficulty with the State directly funding political journalism and investigative reporting. With readers generally unwilling to pay for content, however, publishers are increasingly beholden to advertisers, including the state. This insulates powerful institutions and individuals from investigative journalism and critical commentary.

    Finding a Voice

    According to the editors A Variety of Voices the periodicals featured in their second volume ‘are mainly organs of important communities within Irish society – not always mainstream, but significant communities nonetheless that would not otherwise have a voice in Irish media.’ The authors acquaint us with important titles representing a feminist outlook that has remained distinctly marginalised until recent times, as well as publications emanating from a gay community whose sex lives were only decriminalised in 1993.

    There is also a strong analysis of myriad religious periodicals representing the full spectrum of views on the political, social and economic questions of their times. This includes the Catholic Bulletin (1911-1939) under firebrand editor Timothy Corcoran SJ as editor, who, according to Patrick Maume, considered the leader of the Blueshirts General Eoin O’Duffy insufficiently fascist.

    There are also accounts of other Jesuit publications from Declan O’Keefe that challenged the illiberalism associated with the Catholic Church in Ireland, under Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid especially; and an analysis of the shifting outlook of the Church of Ireland Gazette from Ian d’Alton.

    This volume also finds room for more contemporary publications such as the resilient Phoenix and In Dublin, although it is disappointing to find no entry for the literary and intellectual publication The Crane Bag (1979-1983) edited by Richard Kearney, and others including Ronan Sheahan; or for that matter, Envoy Magazine (1949-51) edited by the late John Ryan; although there is a passing reference to his correspondence with J.P. Donleavy, discussing the prohibitive cost of publishing.

    Ryan went on to become the author of a wonderful memoir celebrating Baggatonia, entitled Remembering How We Stood (1975). It provides intimate accounts of writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien, and a memorable description of the first Bloomsday in 1954, organised by Ryan himself along with Flann O’Brien. He was, coincidentally, the father of his namesake former editor of www.broadsheet.ie.

    In eschewing self-consciously literary publications, the authors perhaps draw too firm a line between the political and the poetic. It might suggest to a contemporary editor that the two do not mix easily, but Irish history suggests that an emulsification of forms – especially evident during the Irish Revival at the turn of the last century – animate political action. Empiricism or strictly factual journalism has its limitation, if we acknowledge as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

     

    The Fourth Estate

    This volume draws attention to a remarkable series of articles (1944-5) in The Bell by Vincent Mercier and Conor Cruise-O’Brien (under the nom de plume ‘Donat O’Donnell’) assessing the Fourth Estate in Ireland, including dominant titles the Irish Independent, Irish Times and Irish Press. Mercier also attempted to define the timeless nature of Irish humour in his assessment of Dublin Opinion.

    In his account Felix M. Larkin describes it as a ‘dramatic intervention’ for a series of articles to critically assess fellow newspapers and periodicals, including itself.’ Recalling a contemporary reluctance on the part of Irish journalists to criticise directly one another, Larkin argues that

    to dig deeper into the affairs of other organs might delegitimize the status of the press generally, diminish its influence and give ammunition to those wishing to circumscribe its freedom. There was also a certain esprit de corps within the press, notwithstanding often fierce competition between individual newspapers and periodicals – a sense of ‘dog doesn’t eat dog.

    He further opines that ‘The idea linking all six articles is that the Fourth Estate was accordingly complicit in the stagnation that followed the revolution.’

    Mercier identified the Irish Times as the newspaper of the Protestant professional classes rather than of landowners ‘the true ‘people of Burke and of Grattan’, but observed how ‘slowly but surely it is becoming the organ of the entire professional class, Protestant and Catholic.’ He characterized the politics of the Irish Times as ‘on the left’ but qualified this by intimating it had ‘its own particular brand of conservative progressivism’. He nonetheless regarded its journalism as ‘ten times more alive than its rivals in the newspaper world.’

    O’Brien argued that the Irish Independent was first and foremost a business undertaking. He observed how: ‘Middle class Catholic families who were reading the Independent ten years ago are reading the Irish Times today’. He anticipated that it might react by using ‘its commanding financial position to get better features that other papers could afford.’ One such contributor would be Cruise-O’Brien himself!

    The now defunct Irish Press – of which then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera was still the principal shareholder – was also analysed by Mercier. According to its first editorial in 1931 the publication stood ‘for independence, for the greatest temporal blessing a nation may enjoy, the full liberty of all its people … Our ideal, culturally is an Irish Ireland.’

    By the mid-1940s, however, Mercier believed ‘it could justifiably be described as ‘the Government organ’ and that it was ‘almost as closely linked with the new Big Business of Ireland as the other two daily papers’. Nonetheless, he conceded that it is ‘mainly read on its merits as a newspaper rather than on any political count.’

    The same writer also analysed the Bell itself under Sean O’Faoláin as editor. Among O’Faoláin’s uncompromising articles was one entitled ‘The Stuffed Shirts’, where he fumed: ‘[T]he final stage of the Revolution was – and is to this day – a middle-class putsch. It was not a society that came out of the maelstrom. It was a class.’

    In a refreshingly iconoclastic piece Mercier wrote of Sean O’Faoláin: ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’; but asserted that he ‘is not just a figurehead, he is the magazine.’

    In his essay ‘The Parnellism of Seán O’Faoláin’ O’Brien described O’Faoláin as ‘parochial’

    He [O’Faoláin] neither affirms nor denies anything of universal importance… His stories are illuminating about Ireland; an anthropological entertainment to the curious foreigner, an annoyance and a stimulus to the native. To Ireland, the stimulus is of great value; in a time of sleepy stimulation Mr O’Faoláin’s irascible and dissenting temperament has struggled, not without success, to preserve some honest intellectual life among his people.

    It is hard to imagine a contemporary Irish publication subjecting its own editor to such stern critical analysis.

    Irish Humour

    According to Larkin, Vincent Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition (Dublin, 1962) asserts that ‘comedy is the central tradition of Irish and Anglo-Irish literature and can be traced back to oral Gaelic roots in the ninth century.’ Mercier identified apparently timeless elements of this tradition as ‘a bent for wild humour [and] a delight in witty world play.’

    His article: ‘Dublin Opinion’s Six Jokes’ represented a foretaste of later scholarly work. These include the Civil Service Joke, which is also the Cork Joke: ‘if you took away the Corkmen, where would the civil service be? And if you took away the Civil Service, where would the Corkmen be?’

    There was also the Where Were You in 1916 Joke, the Irish Navy Joke’, emphasising its miniscule size, the ‘New Ireland Joke’, a ‘back-handed cut at the more absurd manifestations of the Gaelic Revival’; the Ourselves-As-Others-See-Us Joke, ‘usually located in Hollywood, and pigs in the kitchen generally figure in it somewhere.’

    And finally, The Farmer Joke, depicting the archetypal Irish farmer ‘filling up forms, submitting to inspection, resisting inspectors, selling his cattle, giving them away the price goes to hell etc.’

    Mercier regarded Dublin Opinion as ‘one of the most political funny papers in existence’. ‘The real secret’ he argued was its impartiality. He believed that ‘its sympathies were with the losing side [in the Civil War]’, but that it could not ‘attack those in power, who then had the majority of the people behind them. At least … if it wished to keep its circulation, or even, perhaps, some freedom of speech. On the other hand, it had no desire to persecute the unhappy Republicans.’

    However, he criticized the magazine for ‘failing to address such issues as unemployment and the Dublin slums’, at least since the end of Arthur Booth’s Cassandra-like prophecies of war and famine.’

    Fortnight

    Another important contemporary magazine covered in this edition is Fortnight, which emerged as an important voice of moderation during the Northern Ireland Troubles under the stewardship of an academic lawyer Tom Hadden in 1970. The article in A Variety of Voices was written by a former editor Andy Pollack, who reveals how he valued the opportunities it gave him to use controversial material he could not publish in ‘a more risk-averse national broadsheet newspaper’. This included accounts from the notorious Kincora boys home in east Belfast.

    At times the magazine experienced embedded resistance to its human rights advocacy, as when staunchly Unionist Lurgan printers made it clear that they did not want to continue to print it after an issue came out strongly against internment.

    Fortnight also contained one prescient critique of the Northern Ireland Peace Process from David Guelke who warned that that – unlike its South African equivalent – by concentrating on securing and sustaining ‘ceasefires by paramilitary actors at the margins’, it could actually make the situation more difficult by freezing in place ‘a Cyprus-type bloodless conflict’, where there would be ‘no incentives for cross-community collaboration’

    The publication received ‘substantial grants from the British charity the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.’ However, according to Pollack the advent of a social media – which spelt ‘the death knell for small, radical print publications everywhere’ – led to its demise. It did, however, resume publishing in September, 2020.

    Phoenix

    In his article on Phoenix Magazine Joe Breen cites a warning from Tony Harcup’s Journalism: Principle and Practice (London, 2009)] to the effect that investigative journalism, while achieving notable results might be seen as ‘perpetuating a myth that society is divided into a large number of fundamentally good people and a smaller number of fundamentally bad people’.

    Harcup asks where the investigative journalism is into structural forces in society answering: ‘Largely notable for its absence. Instead, particularly on television, we tend to have personalised stories of goodies, baddies and heroic reporters’.

    Nonetheless, the achievements of The Phoenix under the control of John Mulcahy and with Paddy Prendevilll as editor (a bulldog quality, untainted by ideology is also attributed to deputy editor Paul Farrell) in this vital sphere are arguably unsurpassed in the history Irish journalism.

    Fittingly, an Irish Times obituary describes John Mulcahy as ‘one of the most significant journalists and publishers of the last half century in this country’. Phoenix’s major scoops have included: Charles Haughey receiving £1 million from Ben Dunne; the pension of £27.6 million paid to Michael Fingleton; Father Michael Cleary fathering a child with his housekeeper; and Anglo-Irish bank being technically bankrupt

    In October 1991, Dick Spring quoted a Phoenix article at length in the Dáil. It had been pulled from the magazine when Smurfit Web Press refused to print it.

    The magazine’s investigations are still accompanied by a Private Eye-infused humour, where Breen argues ‘laddish sexual innuendos were a staple’: as with the cartoon: ‘How’s the queen?’ Queen Elizabeth: ‘Edward’s fine, thank you’. The magazine has also displayed an unusual sympathy – in an Irish journalistic context at least – for the Republican cause in Northern Ireland.

    Despite its achievements, Breen warns that that ‘it is notable that with the rise of social media, where people play fast and loose with facts, rumours and innuendo, The Phoenix has lost some of its traction.’

    Second row: Far left: Hilda Tweedy

    The Irish Housewife

    The origins of the unradical-sounding The Irish Housewife magazine can be traced to a public ‘Memorandum on the Food and Fuel Emergency’ authored by Hilda Tweedy, Andreé Sheehy Skeffington; Marguerite Skelton and Nancy Simmons in 1941. According to Sonja Tiernan they ‘drew up an economic plan urging the government to ration all essential foodstuff, control prices and supress black-market sales.’

    In response it was denigrated by journalists as ‘a housewives’ petition’. The authors appear to have inverted these prejudices by using ‘housewife’ in the title of the Association they founded, which went on to publish the magazine.

    It is instructive that after Hilda Tweedy ‘applied for a teaching job in a Protestant girls’ school, she was told that as a married woman she was unsuitable; the headmistress said it would not be nice for girls if their teacher became pregnant.’

    Importantly, according to Tiernan the Irish Housewives Association ‘had made a rather astute business deal with an advertising agency: The agency printed and distributed the magazine and in return they kept all of the advertising income.’ As articles were contributed for free it was kept at an affordable price.

    Among its contributions, Katherine Watson recorded her experiences of visiting female prisoners in Mountjoy, while George Yeats (the daughter of W.B.) published an article entitled ‘Can Your Child Draw’ in which she warned: ‘don’t be too cautious! Beware of all that restricts a child’s boldness of hand and of imagination. More is at stake than his future as an artist.’

    The advertising market began to slow down in the 1960s and by 1966 it was no longer viable for the agency to print the magazine. Nonetheless, it had provided an important outlet, and Tweedy later mused: ‘Who would have thought in 1942 that women would move from the kitchen to Áras an Uachtaráin.’

    75th Anniversary of the Easter Rising, O’Connell Street, President Mary Robinson. Source: Dublin City Library Archive.

    Status

    Signs of the rise of future President Mary Robinson’s generation of successful and ambitious women can be identified in Status Magazine, a short-lived feminist news magazine from 1981.

    Its origins lie in in the gathering of about 1,000 women and several men at a conference in Liberty Hall, which led to the founding of the magazine with Marian Finucane as editor. She was already a well-known Irish media personality. 31,500 copies of the first issue of Status were printed and these sold out quickly; yet curiously ten months later Status closed down.

    The decision to launch a magazine squarely focused on women’s rights had come from the proprietor of Magill Magazine Vincent Browne’ who said: ‘News coverage and investigative journalism from a woman’s perspective is what we are aiming for.’

    Cutting-edge reportage included Nell McCafferty writing from inside one of the mother and baby homes where single, pregnant women effectively went into hiding until their babies were born.

    One regular feature that scared advertisers was a page headed ‘No Comment’, which reproduced snippets of sexist nonsense sent in by readers including advertisements and articles from national newspaper. This included one from the Irish Times, which observed that ‘sitting TDs, Mr Eddie Collins and Mr Austin Deasy, are regarded as “Garret men”, though not fanatically so: the young and pretty Mrs Bulbulia is taken for a dedicated “Garret woman”’.

    Without adequate advertising revenue it was, however, doomed. Vincent Browne felt from the start the magazine was ‘gratuitously offensive to advertisers … There was too much sniping which antagonises people to no purpose.’ He noted that ‘marketing managers are male dominated and – dare I say it – some of them maybe, a little frightened’. Status was, he felt, a ‘bit too aggressively women’s lib’.

    According to Tiernan: ‘The usual rules did not apply: Those controlling these decisions did not want to see their advertisements in Status no matter how many educated women were buying the magazine.’ Eventually, even those stalwarts of magazine advertising – cigarette companies – abandoned ship.

    A Future for Hard Copy Journalism?

    A final word goes to John S. Doyle the former editor of In Dublin, which was inspired by Pariscope, the New Yorker and London’s Time Out. It remained largely removed from the cut and thrust of national politics, apart from assessing the planning decisions of Dublin Corporation, and then providing an outlet for the campaign against the development of Wood Quay.

    Intriguingly, Doyle revealed that

    none of the people who started In Dublin, or who came to in the first few years, considered themselves to be journalists, or had thought of that as a career. They were people who, in their different ways, wanted to write, and one of the strengths of the magazine was that it attracted so many of them.

    It may be that through some such formula – involving those with a desire and even need to write – we may revive dissenting journalism.

    The challenge may be to find a broad-based platform that is not dependent on an increasingly commercialised and censorious social media for citizen journalists to publish. In this respect we mourn the demise of www.broadsheet.ie, which showed an usual willingness to court controversy, even if this occasionally placed them in the company of characters who apparently set out to cause offense.

    A future for dissenting hard copy journalism that is not funded by an emanation of the state or philanthropy is difficult to identify, but it may be – just as music connoisseurs are now purchasing vinyl which was once considered obsolete – that readers will revert to a tangible format as the promblems with the digital medium become increasingly apparent.

     

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  • Writing Against the Grain

    This is the first of two articles occasioned by the recent publication of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices, edited by Mark O’Brien & Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin. Here, Frank Armstrong reviews the first instalment in this illuminating study, Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    In their introduction to the first volume the editors stress the importance of what were often minority publications – generally with brief lifespans – to cultural and political developments in the Irish State and beyond; describing them as ‘the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.’ Their contents often anticipated ideas and movements that would go on to gain greater popular adherence, and their varied approaches remain an inspiration to contemporary journalists.

    Movable Type.

    “More formidable than a thousand bayonets”

    Most of those living through a Print Revolution in Europe after 1450 were unlikely to have been awake to seismic changes occurring in how information was being distributed and absorbed. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention, the first of its kind in Europe, as well as increased availability of paper, foregrounded the Renaissance and Reformation; increasing literacy levels and consolidating a few dominant vernacular languages through new literary forms, especially the novel and then, increasingly, newspapers, magazines and periodicals.

    From as early as the seventeenth century newspapers, magazines and periodicals were being published. A newspaper is printed matter acknowledging – unlike haughty books – its obsolescence ‘on the morrow of its publication’[i], as Benedict Anderson put it. Ireland’s first newspaper, devoted to foreign affairs and political intelligence, The News-Letter was published in Dublin in 1685.

    By the early nineteenth, Napoleon described a journalist as ‘a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations,’ concluding that ‘four hostile newspapers are more formidable than a thousand bayonets.’ Newspapers were crucial to directing or even forging collective identities such as the nation.

    Unsurprisingly, therefore, the powerful – whether state bureaucracies or dominant corporations – have long sought to control their offerings, and by extension journalism itself, through the carrot of patronage and advertising, and the stick of censorship and outright suppression.

    Traditional newspapers are also tangible products to be sold. Thus, proprietors stimulate demand especially through headlines demanding attention. The daily cry of the newspaper boy summoned a new scare or disaster – yellow journalism has long antecedents – downplaying or ignoring certain facts, while amplifying or even inventing others; often preying on fears and prejudices, just as click bait does today.

    Becoming a Thing

    Alongside meretriciousness and outright propaganda journalism provides an opportunity for visionary – or delusional depending on your outlook – editors and writers who believe in the capacity of collections of regularly published print materials – generally containing short form articles aimed at the general public – ‘to speak truth to power’, ‘move hearts and minds’ and expose hypocrisy and corruption.

    This form of idealistic journalism most frequently appears in magazines or periodicals that may succeed in eschewing obsolescence, even if it is ‘printed on lavatory paper with ink made of soot’, as Sean O’Faolain the former editor of the Bell memorably described the low-cost approach of his publishers.

    With a longer shelf life, the magazine or periodical falls somewhere between the immediacy of the contents of newspapers and the greater durability of ideas contained within books. As Joe Breen puts in his article on Hot Press: ‘One of the great strengths of periodicals is that by operating outside the routines and demands of 24/7 news-flow, they are afforded the space and grace to react thoughtfully to events.’

    To succeed, such publications usually require the guiding hand of a charismatic, single-minded and tireless personality as editor. The social historian Edward Hyams once observed how:

    When a journal is started, a number of minds combine under the dominion of one, the editor’s, to bring it into existence … What the editor and his colleagues have to do is contrive to make such disparate materials as news, views, fiction, criticism, poetry, even competitive word-games, jell into coherence … if this be done successfully then, after… a certain number of issues, the new paper takes on a quality, which is indefinable, and which is apparent, for example, in a work of art or well-designed machine … At that point the paper, to exaggerate a little, becomes a thing…

    Thus, in their introduction to the first volume of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland the editors observe of their subject matters covered: ‘The most obvious common feature is the omnipresence within each of them of a dominant personality, or two – as editor and/or proprietor.’ The problem with such an approach is that if the guiding hand is lost these publications may struggle to endure.

    A Docile Lot

    Michael O’Toole observed that up to the 1960s in Ireland journalists had been ‘a docile lot, anxious to please the proprietor, the advertiser, the prelate, the statesman’. This era was, he argued, characterised by ‘an unhealthy willingness to accept the prepared statement, the prepared speech, and the handout without demanding the opportunity of asking any searching questions by way of follow-up.’ The fundamental defect of Irish journalism during this time was, he noted, ‘its failure to apply critical analysis to practically any aspect of Irish life.’

    Terence Brown was harsher still, noting that ‘almost all Irish journalism in the period had contented itself with the reportage of events and the propagandist reiteration of the familiar terms of Irish political and cultural debate until these categories became mere counters and slogans often remote from actualities’. While in 1935, the novelist Frank O’Connor declared that Irish daily newspapers were ‘intolerably dull’, were ‘not trying to educate the public’, and ‘trying to camouflage reality.’

    The editors of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland, however, assemble those rare, eccentric, publications ‘providing an outlet for those writing against the grain of mainstream Irish society’, who ‘made freedom of expression a reality’ and created a ‘space for diversity of opinion’.

    Importantly, they argue that ‘the influence they had via that readership was entirely disproportionate to their circulation levels and profits, if any. They were the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.’

    Prior to the Irish Revolution ultimately led, as Kevin O’Higgins memorably put it by ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’ an ideological ferment was articulated through a variety of seminal publications. Certain contemporary political strands can be traced to the twilight of the British administration in Ireland. At that point journalism was characterised by anything but the grey philistinism of the post-independence era.

    Articles by Colum Kenny, Regina Uí Chollatáin, Patrick Maume, Sonja Tiernan, James Curry and Ian Kenneally in this volume consider Sinn Féin, the United Irishman and others under Arthur Griffith’s editorship, Irish language publications such An Claidheamh Soluis edited by Eoin MacNeill, D.P. Moran’s The Leader that lasted until the early 1970s, the suffragette Irish Citizen, primarily edited by Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and James Connolly’s The Worker.

    Finally, there is The Irish Bulletin, a publication produced by the first Dáil, offering what might be described as well-intentioned propaganda – insofar as its (truthful) contents was aimed at a particular readership and served a clear strategic purpose.

    Arthur Griffith (right) with Michael Collins.

    Arthur Griffith

    James Joyce ‘said that the United Irishman was the only paper in Dublin worth reading, and in fact, he used to read it every week.’ Griffith, according to Joyce:

    was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines … A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life in Ireland … what I object to most of all in the paper [Sinn Féin] is it is educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly

    Mischievously, Joyce had a character in Ulysses claim that Bloom ‘gave the idea for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper.

    Undoubtedly, Griffith was a formative influence on Irish nationalism, and it is indicative that his paper incubated the most enduring political movement – Sinn Féin (ourselves) – on this island. This combined, at times uneasily – hence the splits – a somewhat fuzzy ethnic nationalism with a go-it-alone petit-bourgeois mentality, alongside a visceral anti-colonialism that eschewed strict ideology.

    Griffith was a bundle of contradictions. A great writer – ‘an inspired journalist who combined style and temper in a way no one else could match’ according to F.S.L. Lyons – disinterested in literature that did not strengthen the nationalist outlook. Thus, he disdained Synge’s Playboy of the Western World that dared to question certain nationalist orthodoxies.

    Moreover, Griffith wrote sympathetically about the plight of colonised Africans, while excusing his hero John Mitchel’s reactionary views on slavery. His anti-Jewish statements leave him open to a charge of antisemitism, and even proto-fascism, yet he argued in favour of a Zionist state in Israel.

    Despite highlighting poverty, Griffith was antagonistic towards international socialism, suspecting British trade unions of weakening nationalist statements. If he had lived into the 1920s, however, it is questionable whether he would have supported the free trade policies of the first Cumann na nGhaedhal administration.

    James Connolly

    Challenging Authority

    The more radical political strains that emerged at this time were less evident in the post-independence period. Nonetheless, they provided a lasting body of opinions that served as an inspiration for future movements: the fulcrums “on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.”

    According to Sonja Tiernan the suffragist Irish Citizen was ‘edited by men [notably Francis Sheehy-Skeffington] so that women could devote their energies to political campaigns’. It combined feminism with a radical pacifism that put it at odds with, among others, Emmeline Pankhurst (though not her daughter Sylvia) who supported the British government’s recruitment drive.

    Francis’s wife Hannah pointed to the sacrifice of mothers who had to ‘deliver up the sons they bore in agony to a bloody death in a quarrel of which they know not the why or the wherefore, on the particular side their Government has chosen for the moment.’

    Francis organised anti-military meetings in Dublin, at which he argued that the leader of the main nationalist party in Westminster, John Redmond, simply ‘sold Irish people to the British army for nothing’ Recalling the old nationalist cry of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity, on 23 May 1915 he declared ‘Anything that smashes and weakens England’s domination of the seas is good for Ireland. Germany has never done us any harm. The only power that has ever done us any harm is England.’

    He would be arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act, and was ultimately murdered by a deranged British officer during the 1916 Rising.

    Another revolutionary editor of this period was one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising itself, James Connolly, who would later rage about how he had been the editor of ‘the only paper in the United Kingdom to suffer an invasion of a military party with fixed bayonets and to have the essential parts of its printing machine stolen in defence of freedom and civilisation.

    According to James Curry his ‘Irish Worker was a crusading paper of vitality that adopted a forcefully direct journalistic style to ensure readers understood its stance at all times’.

    The industrialist William Martin Murphy – apparently ‘the most foul and viscous blackguard that ever polluted any country’ – was regularly in its crosshairs.

    In response to alleged German atrocities, Connolly instead concerned himself with those perpetrated by ‘capitalist barbarians’ closer to home, arguing that the Dublin housing crisis was destined to be forgotten ‘amid the clash of arms, and the spectacular magnificence of international war’.

    In his article ‘The Huns in Ireland’, which led to the paper’s suppression, he argued:

    The steadily increasing cost of the necessaries of life since the war began brings home to the mind of even the most unreflective amongst us, the utterly heartless nature of the capitalist class … The enemy is within our gates. We need fear no Hun from across the waters of the North Sea.

    It is notable that James Connolly’s anti-war rhetoric is recalled by Irish activists today.

    A group of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries outside the London and North Western Hotel in Dublin following an attack by the IRA, April 1921

    The Irish Bulletin

    To achieve independence the government of the first Dáil dedicated significant efforts to garnering sympathy from an international, including moderate British, audience by highlighting the atrocities committed by British forces: the dreaded Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. This was achieved primarily through an underground publication: The Irish Bulletin, 1919-21, which apparently caused consternation in British government ranks. Thus, in Parliament, the chief secretary for Ireland, Hamar Greenwood, claimed that ‘critics were being duped by a mendacious Irish periodical’

    Unsurprisingly perhaps, Arthur Griffith was active in its early days, but Desmond FitzGerald became a guiding influence thereafter. Its power lay in its credibility. Ernest Blythe recalled how FitzGerald:

    resisted the pressure to which he was constantly subjected from most quarters in favour of painting outrages by British forces in a blacker hue than was justified by the facts …. The result of this attitude and the personal impression that he made was that independent foreign pressmen who admired and trusted him did ten times as much to make Ireland’s case known throughout the world as would have been done if the advocates of heavy expenditure had their way or if a less transparently honest man had been in charge of propaganda.

    It goes to show that facts can speak for themselves, and that exaggeration may only diminishes a publication’s credibility.

    Taste for Comedy

    Dublin Opinion (1922-68) styled its humour the ‘safety vale of a nation’. Its relative success attests to an enduring appetite for humorous takes on serious political events, such as we still see today most obviously in publications such as Waterford Whisperers. This apparently timeless Irish tendency to laugh at absurdities on the political stage is, however, often to the exclusion of more serious assessments. Thus, Felix M. Larkin argues that Dublin Opinion‘s humour ‘concentrated on the political to the detriment of the social and economic.’

    Nevertheless, there is some truth to the couplet carried in early issues: ‘Not seldom lurks the sage’s cap and gown / Beneath the motley costume of the clown’.

    Dublin Opinion played an important role in puncturing the reputation of Eamon de Valera, scorning his ‘professed belief that he had a unique insight into what the people of Ireland wanted.’

    Larkin argues that the publication ‘probably saved proportional representation in 1959, and it inspired T.K. Whitaker to write his seminal ‘Grey Book.’

    The renowned civil servant T.K. Whitaker said that he was impelled to undertake his famous white paper the First Programme for Economic Expansion in response to the cover cartoon in the September 1957 edition of Dublin Opinion in which the young female figure of Ireland instructs a fortune teller, peering into a crystal ball: ‘Get to work! They’re saying I have no future.’

    It also, arguably, exhibited a healthy suspicion of farmers, who are ‘seen filling out forms for grants… duping government inspectors, joining myriad associations to protect their interests, smuggling cattle across the border with Northern Ireland and constantly complaining.’

    The Bell

    Probably the most important publication of the post-War period in terms of its inspiration to future journalists was The Bell, under Sean O’Faolain as editor.

    Ironically funded in part by an investment by sweepstakes millionaire Joe McGrath, it was inspired by leftist UK publications that emphasised the importance of factual reporting. O’Faolain opined that ‘Generalisation (to make one) is like prophecy, the most egregious form of error, and abstractions are the luxury of people who enjoy befuddling themselves methodically’. Contemporary editors are still inclined to advise journalists “to show it, don’t tell it.”

    Covering generally overlooked themes such as the ongoing challenge of tuberculosis, many of its articles were created, according to O’Faolain, by ‘somebody [who] had to out with a notebook and listen, and encourage and make a record. The poor would for ever remain silent if people did not, in this way, wrench speech out of them’

    O’Faolain also bemoaned an enduring disconnect between academia and the general public: ‘with only one or two honourable exceptions our professors never open their mouths in public.’

    Mark O’Brien concludes that it ‘played a central role in prompting journalism to develop beyond the confines of party affiliation’, an endeavour ‘taken up with gusto by the Irish Times  in the early 1960s’, especially through Michael Viney.

    Sean O’Faolain

    Hibernia

    According to Brian Trench under John Mulcahy Hibernia, became a strong presence in Irish media as an independent, frequently dissenting voice. Indeed, ‘by 1973 it was already carrying articles alleging conflicts of interest and possible corruption in relation to the activities of local politicians in the Greater Dublin area.

    The magazine became a platform for dissenters such as Raymond Crotty, Desmond Fennell, Ernest Blythe and Proinsias Mac Aonghusa.

    Terry Kelleher a Hibernia journalist between 1970-75 recalls Mulchay’s ‘questioning approach to everything and everyone, but especially towards those in a position of authority. Every institution, whether it be a political party or financial grouping, artistic clique or academic ivory tower, all must be challenged, their continued existence questioned.’

    The magazine gave particular attention to stories of’ bad planning, illegal property development, councillors’ conflicts of interests and related issues,’ as well as the mistreatment of prisoners by the Royal Ulster Constabulary at a point when an anti-Republican Revisionism was increasingly prevalent in Irish intellectual circles.

    Hibernia went where most newspapers dared not go, at one point revealing that a sitting member of the Special Criminal Court was falling asleep on the job. According to Trench, ‘Irish Times journalists Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce later dealt with this incident … though they omitted to mention that their own newspaper – like the other dailies – chose not to refer to what was happening in front of them.’

    Mulcahy’s unschooled approach of relying on tip offs brought criticism. Vincent Browne claimed the publication had ‘a style that may lack the investigative edge required by a serious paper.’

    However, when the publication closed after one libel action too many, Pat Smyllie wrote in the Irish Times that ‘whether you liked it some weeks or not, it was brave, searching, cheeky outrageous but … essential to many of us’. He noted that it sometimes had to pay the price in court for uncovering ‘double dealing’.

    According to Niall Kiely the magazine was a ‘must-read’ for journalists in the mainstream media: it was a source of information and perspective not found elsewhere.’

    Another legacy, argues Trench is the ‘almost universally cynical tone of the anonymous journalism in The Phoenix may be considered an unfortunate and partial legacy of Hibernia.’ However, given the endemic corruption of the period, and beyond, and an apparent acquiescence to this in the mainstream media, such cynicism might be forgiven.

    Hot Press Magazine

    Rock n’ Roll

    Jon Street notes that ‘music plays a part in our constitution as moral beings and in our constitution as political ones. In responding to and in evaluating music we do not just give expression to our tastes, but to our political values and ideas. Music is, to this extent, part of the way we think politically.’

    According to Diarmuid Ferriter the value of Hot Press lay in ‘its value lies in the extent to which it highlighted the burgeoning youth culture of the era as well as new musical departures and a determination to embrace international influences.’

    Its remarkably durable editor, Niall Stokes acknowledged that 1977 – according to Jon Savage the ‘moment of high punk’ – was ‘not the most healthy climate in which to launch a newspaper.’ He championed a liberal social agenda – which was very much in the minority at that point – along with his editorial partner (and wife) Máirín Sheehy and brother Dermot Stokes.

    Stokes said: ‘We felt in particular that the deference shown to the Roman Catholic Church in all areas of Irish life, including the media, was entirely inappropriate.’

    The U2 connection is central to the story of Hot Press, while John Waters, a young aspiring journalist then living in remote Roscommon, was an important recruit. According to Stokes: ‘Back then, John, I think it is fair to say, saw himself as a leftist’. For his own part Waters reckons: ‘I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be writing today were it not for [Stokes].’

    An important feature was the Hot Press interview, where according to Waters: ‘The idea was to ‘get under the skin’ of people who were known in a certain context.’

    An interview with Charles Haughey ‘caused a huge reaction in the mainstream media as the Fianna Fáil leader’s use of expletives and colourful descriptions of opponents broke with convention.’

    Vincent Browne.

    Magill

    In 1986 The Guardian newspaper recorded that ‘Magill has gained a political influence that has no parallel in British or indeed European magazine publishing,’ while the Sunday Times credited it with ‘dragging Irish journalism out of its largely comfortable, unquestioning dullness’.

    According to Kevin Rater it was ‘shaped by the particular interests of its proprietor and founding editor, Vincent Browne’, who wrote in 1969: ‘In terms of its wealth, Ireland cares less for the weaker and poorer sections of its community than any other country in Europe with the exception of Portugal. Yet the popular myth is that there is no poverty in Ireland.’ Party politics, the redistribution of wealth and Northern Ireland would be its primary focus.

    Browne shared editorial responsibilities with Mary Holland, who later claimed Browne: ‘could be very cruel to people and didn’t seem to expect them to take it personally.’

    According to another journalist, Paddy Agnew: ‘the cover was the most talked about, and the most agonising thing, every month. It was torture.’ Britan Trench recalled: ‘He would snort and sniff at content ideas. And then his view of the would emerge’.

    At the end of Browne’s tenure as editor Colm Tóibín was appointed to the role. He was influenced by the ‘new journalism’ in the work of American writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Telese and Hunter S Thompson’. Another editor, Fintan O’Toole brought ‘an extraordinary range and depth of interests.’

    Ultimately, according to Rafter ‘It was outflanked on one side by The Phoenix with its mix of business and political gossip and on the other by the national newspapers that had adapted their editorial offerings to include longer articles, many by names who had first emerged in Magill.’

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Granular Analysis

    Magazines and periodicals share certain features with independent restaurants, insofar as neither tend to last very long, and are often dependent on a dominant personality, who regularly loses their shirts. Like independent restaurants they perform vital roles for a cultural avant-garde, incubating new tastes and literary styles, which the fast or convenience daily newspaper purveyors often appropriate.

    Moreover, it remains the case in Ireland that most investigative journalism occurs at a remove from mainstream daily publications.

    As adverted to, a second review of the latest volume in this series provides a more granular assessment of these publications, including magazines representing feminism and gay rights, and focuses on particularly illuminating stories, such as the nature of Irish humour and the state of the press. It will also afford a chance to reflect on the challenges of publishing in our contemporary digital environment.

    [i] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, New York, 2006), pp. 34-35

    Featured Image: Dublin, 1916, prior to the Rising.

  • Lessons from the Great Depression III

    Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’ ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What Ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I could not have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. ‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin…Those eyes…And, for the matter of that, that moustache. When you say “shorts,” you mean “shirts,” of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul.
    P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).

    The above quote may offer a certain hope for those of us who see in each crisis a foretaste of worse to come; that hope is that Fascism can be undermined by ridicule – even while it is gaining traction – as long as a Dworkinian right to freedom of speech abides.

    But I next turn to a writer not noted for his sense of humour, George Orwell, who is central to our understanding the Great Depression, at least from a British vantage. His 1946 essay ‘How the Poor Die’ is a also crucial text for this austerity period, when social supports are being steadily withdrawn and a public health crisis looms large. Such are the consequences, unintended or otherwise, of an awful ideology that has put the NHS into freefall, and the Irish health service into near collapse.

    Animal Farm and 1984, with their simplification of language and distortion of truth from 2 =2 =5 to Newspeak – or in present parlance News International – are curiously prescient for our age. The Communist dystopia Orwell envisaged is not what we have now. Our own is of a different character altogether.

    Lowry, Laurence Stephen; Coming from the Mill; The L. S. Lowry Collection; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/coming-from-the-mill-162324

    Army of Managers

    The great painter of the Depression-era L.S. Lowry once remarked:

    A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

    This is the kind of Stockholm Syndrome that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic, when even left wing parties previously noted for their resistance to corporate authority, rolled over to have their bellies tickled, as the one percent almost doubled their wealth.

    Lowry, as much as Grosz and Dix, chronicled working-class existences in painting, but as a prose artist he also captured the era beautifully in Coming From the Mill (1930). ‘As I left [Pendlebury] station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill,’ Lowry would later recall. Describing:

    The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched, black figures, heads bent down. I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.

    His matchstick men and women are best seen in the Lowry Gallery in Salford near Manchester, an area much gentrified now but still recognisably working class. And if you turn away from the main paintings, one still finds the bitter fruits of economic depressions: drunken brawls and young children in virtual rags.

    Brave New World!

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a core text of our time. The soma-induced compliance replicates our non-critical consensus of disinformation. Bernard the anti-hero wishes to leave for Iceland, a psychological state many of us wish to flee to now. Like Wittgenstein, I have a preference for a good Fjord.

    In mainland Europe the contradictions of the European Depression are well etched by the greatest of all American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was an incurable alcoholic by the time he penned his second masterpiece Tender Is the Night, to mixed reviews, in 1934. The lead character Diver is redolent of a lost parvenu generation, a parable for how many of a certain class lose their way on the French Riviera.

    It is cautionary tale of a loss of relevance, context and credibility. In a way, we all must resist a decadent urge to act like Tory grandees on the fiddle amidst the booze at Number 10.

    And what about other European literature for those who want us to “stay safe by staying apart”? Well, the antisemitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline is responsible for at least two prose masterpieces of the Great Depression that lay bay his own hypocrisy.

    His 1932 Journey to The End of Night is a phantasmatic horror story chronicling the Great Depression. It contains a piquant quote that goes some way towards explaining his own moral descent: ‘I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.’ We ought to be wary of artists that achieve great success in their own time, or journalists for that matter.

    He also refers to the “necessary” distance the rich must develop from the sufferings of the poor:

    I hadn’t found out, yet that humankind consists of two quite different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

    Jean Renoir

    More than Céline, along with Albert Camus, the greatest French intellectual artist of that period was the film director Jean Renoir. His most significant film ‘La Règle du jeu’ is situated at the precipice of collapse.

    Set in an aristocratic milieu just before the outbreak of the Second World War, it is decidedly jittery, with a real sense of fin de siècle. We find attractive though silly people on the brink of a calamity. It seems now quite relevant as we face unprecedented times, where chaos and uncertainty rule.

    Renoir views the characters sympathetically with Octavia – the voice of moderation – central to the film. Renoir was acutely conscious of being on the brink of disaster, and expressed  an objective humanism with the famous line ‘that everyone has his reasons.’

    In the subjectivity of our time that quote remains a clarion call for a heightened perception of danger, especially as moral relativism gains traction.

    Renoir elaborated in commentary on the film that all cultures are cliquish and have their own rules and protocols of dealing with those who do not observe the rules of the game, or the rule of law. But that is prior to seismic change where brute force supersedes civility.

    Renoir touched a raw nerve. When it opened a right-wing French audience went berserk, in a way similar to the reception in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of The Western World in 1907.

    Renoir’s acid comment was in effect that these people were doomed, and that the audience reaction showed that ‘people who commit suicide do not do so in front of witnesses.’

    The film has an astute sense that class or poverty more than race or ethnicity is the ultimate determinant of social division. That idea remains vitally important in these absurd politically correct times, and indeed victimhood or assumed victimhood as it is now. Our priorities should be to maintain access to housing, health care and legal representation.

    Welles and Buñuel

    Another of the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century toured around Ireland at the end of the Depression, before taking a job at The Gate Theatre. Later, in ‘The Third Man’ (1949) he made a guest appearance as Harry Lime. One, less celebrated speech. captures the existential dilemma of our time

    If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

    This is a logic that appears to have been adopted by pharmaceutical companies in recent times.

     

    The great surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel was another of the great anti-fascist artist of the Depression-era.  He attacked the prevailing mores of clerics, sexual repression and state authoritarianism with utter clarity and savage wit. This led, unsurprisingly, to periods of exile from Spain and a final hideaway for eighteen years in Mexico.

    The stunning and very brave 1950 film about poverty and child criminality in Mexico ‘Los Olvidados’ (the Forgotten Ones) caused a sensation at the time. Its theme reflects a drift into criminality among the youth in many parts of London and Dublin. Today’s child poverty, exploitation, crime and even slavery were also a feature of the Great Depression era.

    Tell Me Why?

    How does Fascism come about? Well it’s a product of inequality and poverty. You could say: “It’s the economy dummy!” In the period we can find evidence of this emerging among the workers in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the disenfranchised on the streets of Weimar, or the representations of Orwell and Céline who suffer most due to the naked expropriation “adults in the room.”

    Economic depressions create conditions for fascism, or even the new-fangled corporate fascism of our age which represents a triumph of demagoguery and disinformation. So be wary of manipulation and stay flexible, if not unsafe. Facebook and the mass media augment Orwellian tendencies and a campaign of compliance and of induced consent is creating serf capitalism and a potential Malthusian population cull.

    Alas, there is no New Deal or Marshall Plan on the horizon. World leadership is lacking and often far from benign and corporate-led. Apart from resisting manipulation, what all of us at the sharp end of the stick can do is protest to avoid obliteration and not be participants in our own self-abnegation.

    Resist decadence if you can. Survive the new depression: this Great Reset Depression. It will require optimum coping skills not to be culled. And if all else fails, poke fun at the fascists and observe how uncomfortable they become.

  • The Brick Wall: Access to Justice

    I’m living in cloud cuckoo land
    And this just feels like
    Spinning plates
    Radiohead, Like Spinning Plates, Amnesiac 2001.

    Ten years on from the Irish Banking Crisis and the subsequent taxpayer funded bailouts, how are we faring in term of regulating the financial sector?

    In view of the possibility of another property bubble, it is surely vital to ensure appropriate access to justice, especially for those with limited resources.

    Prior to the Crash, banks through their own internal regulatory mechanisms – including risk management and third party auditing firms – were, essentially, allowed to regulate their own affairs, which unfortunately permitted a lax regime.

    On a rare occasion that a risk manager signalled grave breaches of conduct to the Central Bank of Ireland – as in the case of whistle-blower Jonathan Sugarman – he was largely ignored. And, even though thanks to his revelations we know a great deal more than we would otherwise about widespread banking mis-conducts, Sugarman subsequently had his professional and personal life destroyed. That message is surely not lost on colleagues intending to pursue a similar course.

    Back then, inadequate regulatory frameworks allowed underestimation of risk and outright profiteering in the banking sector. Yet there are reasons to believe that, despite the successes boasted of by the regulators, thousands of people are still being failed by the State.

    Despite concerns being raised in February, 2021 by Sinn Fein deputy Pearse Doherty that “2,865 complaints to the Financial Ombudsman remain unsolved for over 12 months” very little attention has been paid in the media to enduring dysfunctions in consumer protection frameworks, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of consumers of financial services.

    Regulatory Capture

    Regulators come in two types: smart and dumb. The latter are more likely to make mistakes, and the market will learn about mistakes when firms squawk.
    Ernesto Dal Bó in the Oxford review of economic policy, Vol.22, NO.2

    Could this be a subtle example of so-called ‘regulatory capture’, which is said to occur when a particular industry holds an excessive level of influence over a statutory agency designed  to monitor and regulate it?

    Ernesto Dal Bó offers two interpretation of the phrase:

    According to the broad interpretation, regulatory capture is the process through which special interests affect state intervention in any of its forms, which can include areas as diverse as the setting of taxes, the choice of foreign or monetary policy, or the legislation affecting R&D.

    According to the narrow interpretation, regulatory capture is specifically the process through which regulated monopolies end up manipulating the state agencies that are supposed to control them.

    Either of these descriptions could easily be used to describe successive Irish government’s cosy relationship with foreign multinationals. Witness how in 2016 then Taoiseach Enda Kenny unashamedly set out Ireland’s stall as ‘the best small country to do business in’. Attracting financial service companies to a friendly, relatively unregulated, environment appears to remain high on the government’s agenda.

    But insofar as this is a legitimate goal, the way it is achieved, for example, by perpetuating dysfunctions in regulatory mechanisms, have grave consequences for the public at large, especially in terms of access to justice.

    Ombudsman

    One mechanism to provide access to justice is embodied in the role of the Ombudsman.

    This word come from Sweden where its first use is recorded in the 19th century. Meaning “Commission Man”, it involved oversight over the abuse of power by public administration. The position evolved with changing times and industries, to become globally adopted, assuming the part of an impartial mediator between individual complainants and large, well-resourced organizations.

    To give a simple example with a bit more context: what if you have a complaint against the misbehaviour of a credit institution with which you have a resulting outstanding debt?

    In Ireland, anyone in such a predicament can avail first of internal complaint procedures within the credit/insurance/pension providers. If this proves futile, as often seems to be the case, you can either go to the Financial Services and Pension Ombudsman (FSPO), or for the better-resourced, proceed directly to the courts.

    The FSPO was established in order to provide “an impartial, accessible, and responsive complaint resolution service that delivers fair, transparent and timely outcomes for all our customers, and enhances the financial services and pension environment.”

    It’s role is crucial in ensuring basic standards of consumer protection especially in a sector such as financial services, which bears significant responsibility for a dysfunctional property market

    This article is not disputing that the Office has fullfilled aspects of it’s responsabilities to date, and recognises the challanges of the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Office’s results are well presented in their annual digests of decisions, and were compellingly illustrated by the current Head of the FSPO, Ger Deering, in his Opening Statement to the Oireachtas Petitions Committee the 25th May 2021.

    What we are interrogating is why a large number of complaints, seem to have been closed in preliminary scrutiny on a narrow, legal interpretation of the Act. It is also unclear whether the FSPO is sufficiently staffed and organized to make use of the necessary banking knowledge in order to fulfil all its statutory duties.

    Boasting Figures

    Ben Hoey, an experienced ex-banker who founded Quartech services, a mortgage mis-selling advisory firm, has been assisting individuals with the filings of such complaints and has made us aware of some of the challenges encountered.

    Having submitted over fifty complaints over the last two year to the FSPO, as well as two FOI requests in June 2021 and most recently a judicial review, he also raises serious concerns over the ability of FSPO to carry out its duties.

    In an Opening Statement to the Oireachtas Petitions Committee, Mr Deering boasted: “In 2020, I am happy to report that, despite the challenges of the pandemic and remote working, we closed 6,193 complaints, an increase of 35% on 2019.”

    But thanks to Hoey’s FOI requests, we now know that 2,110 of these cases never entered the dispute resolution or investigation processes.

    Those numbers also slightly differ from the ones found in the annual report of 2020, and are presented in a way suggesting that 1,401 cases were actually sorted within a very short time frame.

    There are, undoubtedly, cases that were legitimately rejected as indicated in the Act. But in order to gain more detailed explanations for preliminary decisions, made in the first registration and assessment phase, the FOI requested documentation and records in relation to reasons for closure. Unfortunately, in this case the answer was ‘no records exist.’

    This is just the first stage of the complaint; the staff needs to interpret the Act and establish if the newly arrived complaint falls within the FSPO jurisdiction.

    It relies on training and guidance materials, which have also been released, and from this we see that when issues of jurisdiction arise, there is an over-reliance on the legal profession and a marked absence of the necessary banking expertise.

    In general, we know that if a complainant does not accept the preliminary rejection, and responds in writing, he or she receives a letter issued by the legal department. But in order to interpret and respond to this one would likely require legal advice.

    This doesn’t come cheap as the FSPO is well aware, since it spent €1.8m (46% of staff costs) on “Legal Fees” according to their 2020 accounts. By comparison the equivalent UK body filed no such expenses. Recall that the role of an Ombudsman is to be an impartial mediator between individual complainant and large, well-resourced organizations.

    Some of Ben Hoey’s clients received letters up to twenty-two pages long, containing dense legal terminology, supporting FSPO arguments not to investigate; rather than a professional financial analysis of the issue in question.

    Others have seen their complaints dragged out for years, stuck in the earliest phase of the “statutory complaints procedure”; which was established in order ‘to afford complainants an informal, expeditious and independent mechanism for the resolution of complaints.’

    From the point of view of some complainants, it feels as if the process of adjudication has been designed to keep their case out of the FSPO jurisdiction, thus keeping the number of cases that the Office investigates to a minimum.

    When the Financial and Pension Ombudsman positions were merged into their current form in 2018, the new organisation should have been structured, and staffed, to handle a increasing number of annual complaints. It appear from the latest annual report that this has been achieved, but when we get into the granular detail, we see that up to a third of these may have been inadequately handled.

    Given that a significant percentage of such disputes are in relation to mortgages and to a dysfunctional housing market, we can surely appreciate the importance of such an institution.

    The stigma attached to debt is a deep scar that afflicts many in an apparently prosperous country. Given that a level of responsibility lies with the lending industry, we should expect the Department of Finance to ensure that the relevant agencies such as the CBI and the FSPO that protect such individuals are adequately resourced.

    Yet the total count of full time employees of the FSPO is just 85 as of the end of 2021. That amounts to roughly twenty staff per million inhabitants in Ireland. By comparison, its counterpart in the UK employs double that with 3,000 staff, or approximately forty-four per million.

    A Stairway to Heaven

    Since Ger Deering was recently nominated by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Michael McGrath, to become Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, we expect that the position of Head of the FSPO will soon become vacant.

    We now have access to another FOI request providing insights into the recruitment of Ger Deering to the office in 2015/16, at a point when the Financial Services Ombudsman FSO and Pension Ombudsman were still separate bodies.

    A series of interviews were carried out with eight candidates on February 17-18, 2015 for the first round, and on February, 27, 2015 there were final interviews with the remaining three candidates, the “Board Members Guidelines” resembling a basic template for corporate hiring.

    All of the interviewers had impressive CV’s and expertise, including Mr John Hogan, then Head of Banking Policy for the Department of Finance and recently appointed as Secretary General.

    Revealingly, Hogan contributed to the “The Keane” Report on Residential Mortgage Arrears, which was criticised by Deputy Luke “Ming“ Flanaghan in 2011. The Report rules out the introduction of any scheme involving blanket debt forgiveness.

    Notably, the majority of complaints received by the FSPO pertained to financial and banking issues.  One would expect that any individual considered for that role – with powers to make legally binding decisions – would have extensive experience within the banking sector.

    By analogy, if one looks at the skills required of managers and other positions with supervisory roles, employed in the banking and insurance sectors that are imposed by the EU Single Supervisory Mechanism, we find clear guidelines in regard to required banking knowledge or one can even look up the job description for an FSPO Case Manager in PTSB.

    Yet in the advertised job description for The Financial and Pension Ombudsman we see theoretical banking or financial knowledge being “desirable” instead of “essential”, nor is there an examination process, beyond a standard interview.

    This is not to question Ger Deering’s managerial skills, nor his ability to adapt and learn, but when the job requires him to lead an oversight body over the banking, insurance and pension industries, his work experience is not what one would expect for the appointment.

    We know that the Office contains some banking expertise thanks to the qualifications of less senior staff, who have to deal with an enormous workload. But an appointment process for the top job focused on legal and managerial skills may perpetuate the current imbalance between the private and public sectors.

    In the forthcoming recruitment process for a position such as the FSPO, it is surely in the interest of the Department of Finance to appoint a person with more than generic managerial skills, and for some form of competitive examination to occur. Otherwise, it will be difficult to convince an increasingly sceptical Irish public that the government is genuinely intent on levelling the playing field between ordinary citizens and “too big to fail” corporations.

    Shared Responsibility

    One might say that appointing an ex-banker to the position creates a dangerous revolving door between banks and regulators, and is itself a recipe for regulatory capture. That argument is right to a point, but does not take into account that the necessary banking expertise might be found outside the banking industry itself, such as in auditing and accountancy firms; or by casting the net internationally to guarantee a greater degree of separation between the regulator and the regulated, especially in a small country such as Ireland.

    And, insofar as it is important to have sound legal advice, it is important that this is not set out in such a way as to intimidate complainants, and that the Office receives the same level of financial consultancy as the banks themselves.

    When we talk about consumer protection in the financial industry, we are really talking about the level field that the government promises, in relation to an industry administering one of the most powerful means of control, which is the complex socio-psychological phenomenon of debt.

    While some are celebrating that ‘The Boom is Back’, a significant proportion of the population is still struggling to overcome the effects that the previous boom and subsequent financial collapse actually brought; and, as in the period of austerity, the burden of bad choices is still carried almost exclusively by the most vulnerable and least resourced.

  • Lessons from the Great Depression (II)

    Ger-mania…

    Extraordinarily, Germany appears on the brink of following the lead of Austria in mandating a vaccination against COVID-19, as segregation of the unvaccinated continues. We seem to have entered what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia, as all history is forgotten. So let us cast our mind back.

    I maintain the German Weimar Republic (1919-1933), more than even the U.S. Great Depression, remains the emblem of our age. The comparison is not exact of course, as all analogies break down through the shifting sands of time, but it is useful to review the literature of that period and draw parallels.

    After World War I, when misguided reparations, and a war guilt clause, were inflicted by the victors – with the French and Clemenceau in particular in the driving seat – Germany was crippled with war debts, but crept along until the banking collapse. The period up to 1929 and shortly afterwards was a triumph against great odds of a fledgling social democracy: the Weimar Republic.

    The period is associated with great creativity, and indeed became a synonym for decadence and sexual libertarianism, which made it a soft target for Nazi thuggery. The bonfire of the vanities and the burning of the books was the fascist exhalation of degenerate art.

    Likewise our own Age of Austerity in the wake of the Financial Crisis of 08 has destablised the social and economic structures. We also have had a period of relative freedom, despite the economic pain, but now operate in most countries under a grinding authoritarianism in the face of collapsing health care systems corroded by decades of neoliberalism.

    A begging disabled WW I veteran (Berlin, 1923).

    Tomorrow Belongs to Me

    The Bob Fosse film ‘Cabaret’ (1972) has the fictionally represented Christopher Isherwood in Weimar times represented as leaving Berlin after he hears the Nazi youth sing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, one of the most chilling songs in a popular film ever recorded; an even more sinister version of the Horst Wessel Song.

    In fact, in the book Goodbye to Berlin (1939) nothing quite as dramatic as that epiphany occurs, just the sense of the persecution of the Jewish community, Communists, dissidents and degenerate races in a sedulous and incremental fashion. This was a fascist authoritarian creep as economic destruction creates victims, but also the externalisation of hatred. The demonisation and demonetisation of the other, crucial also in our own age of unfettered rage and lack of moderation.

    Bertolt Brecht

    The Aesthetics of Resistance

    Peter Weiss made a similar point in his after the event masterpiece, The Aesthetics of Resistance, where in cold retrospect he saw how those with idealism were destroyed.  His masterpiece of memory ends with the execution of his comrades in the Frankfurt Trials; executed and left to hang on fishhooks.

    Bertolt Brecht also saw in genesis and with mystical precision the bloodletting to come in The Threepenny Opera:

    When the shark bites with his teeth dear
    Scarlet billows start to spread
    Fancy gloves though wears Macbeth dear
    So there is not a trace of red

    Now again many want no trace of red. Just bright blue colours. No shades of grey just sanctimonious conservatism.

    The sense of unfolding chaos at the effects of the Great Depression in Germany is well documented in Victor Klemperer’s diary Let Us Bear Witness dating from 1933. He was peculiarly well placed with a protected Christian wife and a Jewish convert to Christianity. Dismissed from his job; furloughed but not sent to a Concentration Camp.

    The rise of fascism was a consequence, then and now, of economic collapse and that is the difference between the American Depression and the German equivalent, but it was a narrow escape for America.

    Roosevelt as a social democrat saved America. but as Philip Roth’s excursus in counter-factual history amply demonstrates there was no shortage of fascist demagogues who could have unseated him, including the folk hero Charles Lindberg. Such is The Plot Against America, where a fascist becomes President. Not then of course, but now?

    But that is getting ahead of ourselves to the endgame. Let us at least anticipate and make plans in the light of a project endgame called The Great Reset, a phrase unerring close to the great leap forward as we enter Chinese corporate feudal times.

    The sense of impending chaos in the Weimar Republic is also well documented by caricaturists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and others, many of whose greatest paintings hang as a reminder in Berlin.

    If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926), with the subtitle Shit for Brains, you will see one of the paragons of virtue. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapsed, and the Nazi judges and commissars who would work hand in glove with their jackboot associates.

    Ripe for Collapse

    On its current trajectory, the EU, as Varoufakis recently indicated, is likely to collapse, sooner rather than later, with a pan-Germanic latter day Hanseatic League altready taking its place. Few should mourn it in Ireland and Greece where the social structure has been destroyed through the impoverishment of large cohorts of the population who have falled into homelessness. Ireland is now controlled by hedge funds as a kind of sub-Indonesian corporate client state.

    And what do corporate judges, bankers, lawyers, and politicians do? Well, enforce further austerity in the shape of lockdowns on a docile and far too accepting population. Socially distanced and self-isolated for the near future without a prospect of stability, a sustainable living structure, or affordable rent or housing.

    And what does Weimar art reveal about intellectuals? That they are useless panderers. The paintings of Otto Dix perfectly captures bohemian delirium and ineffectiveness.

    In effect our contemporary consensus neoliberal spouters are spectators on a society falling apart; the collective fiddling as Rome burns. McWilliams in his wine bar.

    So, hand in glove with economic collapse we witness the destruction of the very concept of human rights. The seepage of emergency powers and executive action, documented in the eariler period by the great jurist Carl Schmidt, with disproportionate and excessive measures. Just as the Reichstag fire was used to end democracy in Germany.

    As far as social and economic rights and Weimar was a disaster. Banknote were printed in billion increments with which you could barely buy a loaf of bread.

    Berlin Alexanderplatz

    Perhaps the greatest German novel of the Depression era is Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, although his neglected earlier novel Mountains Oceans Giants also presages our times, with its harbingers of environmental collapse.

    Döblin also utilises other 1920s anxieties — Malthus, Suffragettes, miscegenation, decolonization — onto the 27th century where Europe is under siege from “hordes” of migrants “flooding” from the Global South. “India-China-Japan” rises as a rival bloc to the New York-London “Anglo-Saxon Imperium,” while fierce clans of women find success in an “unending struggle against patriarchy,” even preferring “taboo” relationships with the alien migrants.

    Science fiction then but becoming recognisable today. The demonisation and demonetisation of others and the migrant. Not one of us.

    Berlin Alexanderplatz was dramatized by Werner Fassbinder in the peritectic chronicle of its everyman German Franz Bide Kopf, convict, pimp, worker; through the swathes of the Weimar republic.

    It is at one level a chronicle of our own time. Dubious associations, flirting with fascism and in passages most relevant and redolent, a panegyric against erstwhile Communist friends, which shows how the everyman is seduced by Utopian ideals:

    We’ve got to have order, order, I’m telling you, order—and put that in your pipes and smoke it, order and nothing else . . . and if anybody comes and starts a revolution now and don’t leave us in peace, they ought to be strung up all along the street . . . then they’ll get theirs, when they swing, yes, sir. You might remember that whatever you do, you criminals.

    Law and Order the totalitarian clarion call. The most important passages are the slaughterhouse and abattoir scenes, which are most unsettling and relevant to our times. Equating the costing of microscopic slaughter of the animals with human slaughter. The expiration of man and beast, or cost-benefit analysis of life. Compulsory vaccination for the herd.

    The Weimar Republic echoes through the ages. and Germany is reverting primitively and Gothically. Atavistic tendencies can be seen with the arrival of compulsory vaccination and vaccine segregation. Austerity unleased dark forces, and there is no genuine social democratic corrective in sight. The Weimar republic ripples through the ages.

    Feature Image: Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

  • The Grandfather Clause

    ‘Where DID we come from?’

    Coincidence?

    The Sahara was not always a desert.

    As evidenced by fossilized pollen, it was once covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, It was green, verdant, populated by antelopes, giraffes, rhinoceros, supporting all life forms including settled human beings. Cave drawings in southern Algeria (Tassili) testify to this lifestyle.

    Disaster came in the year 3,440 B.C..

    According to carbon-14 dating of cores from the Atlantic coast of Senegal as well as from Lake Koa in Chad, Summer temperatures increased sharply in the Sahara region and precipitation decreased. This event devastated the people and their socio-economic systems. The recently-introduced farming techniques no longer supported life.

    It was a case of global warming in a specific place.

    According to climate theoretician, Dr. Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institue, the disaster was partially initiated by one of the regular changes in the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis (earth wobble). July happened in January!

    The ensuing warming and feedback effects on Vegetation and Atmosphere in this particular area combined to produce a sudden, localised desertification which resulted in the Sahara.

    This transition to the Sahara’s present arid climate was not gradual, but occurred in two specific episodes. The first, which was less severe, occurred between 6,700 and 5,500 years ago (4,700 B.C. and 3,500 B.C.). The second, which was brutal, lasted from 2,000 B.C.to 1,600 years ago.

    What has this to do with Ireland?

    Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne)

    Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne), the finest and greatest Megalithic structure (earlier than Stonehenge) in Europe,  was built by ‘unknown farmers’ in approx. 3000 B.C.

    At the same time the first Egyptian dynasties were founded.

    It is my thesis that Newgrange and the Egyptian dynasties were developed by a long-civilised and cultured people whose origins were in the Sahel of North Africa.

    Where to?

    Once their lifestyle was destroyed, where did the people of the Sahara go? Many escaped northwards to the still fertile coasts of North Africa and eastwards to the Nile. This sudden incursion created extreme pressure on the existing inhabitants of the thin North African coastal littoral. Something had to give. What did they do?

    In approx. 3000 B.C. they took to the sea. Their DNA traces (E1b1b1- Y) are to be found in the southern regions of most Mediterranean countries. Far from being a far-fetched idea, a North African Berber DNA haplotype is shared by, among others, people as faraway as the the Pasiegos of Cantabria in Northern Spain and the Saami people of Finland!.

    Newgrange in Ireland is the oldest and finest example of a megalithic culture that spread along the Atlantic coast from North Africa to the Baltic.

    Newgrange has been dated to 3000 B.C. and is slightly older than the Pyramids of Egypt. It and Ireland’s impressive megalithic heritage were built in about the same period as the desertification of the Sahara. The megalithic culture spread up the Atlantic coasts from North Africa where similar structures proliferate.

    Thirty years ago this writer found the equivalent of Newgrange in Larache, Morocco – which was also colonised by Phoenicians after 800 B.C. – and indicates a continuity of Atlantic coastal movement.

    Medina of Larache, Morrocco.

    The Sea is Key

    Professor John T. Koch of the University of Aberystwith wrote the following in Celtic from the West:

    No one has taken the possibility of Celtic coming from ‘Hispania’ to the other Celtic countries seriously since we stopped taking Lebor Gabála Érenn seriously, but it is now at least worth pausing to review what it is we think we know that makes that impossible.

    Professor Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) co-editor of the same collection of essays, repeats his long-held advocacy of the reality of an Atlantic coastal trading community, active at least as long ago as the Bronze Age – and probably much earlier – along which people moved and shared languages and cultures. The area in question stretches from Scandinavia as far south as Mogador – which was once a Phoenician colony. The sea is, as always, the key to such perspectives. The sea connects, does not divide.

    Linguists such as Heinrich Wagner, Pokorny, Orin Gensler, Vennemann et alia have long held that there is a substratum of North African languages (Hamito-Semitic) underneath the first official language of Ireland – Gaelic.

    Dara Beag O Fatharta.

    Sub plot

    The Grandfather Clause is a legal entity in Western Law. It is an exemption in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations. Sometimes, the exemption is limited; it may extend for a set period of time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances.

    It means that traditional customs and rights cannot be arbitrarily abolished by new legislation.

    The simplest example is a claim to a traditional right-of-way through private property. The courts often entertain such claims.

    Suppose that a North African appeals for asylum in Ireland, is refused and threatened with deportation. Might he/she invoke the Grandfather Clause?

    He/she might perhaps claim that when the ice melted his/her ancestors were the first tentative inhabitants of  Northern Europe – including Ireland – 10,000 years ago and that in Ireland there exists physical, linguistic and literary evidence of a continuity of such seaborne immigration and occupation by his/her ancestors down the years – seven thousand years!  This continuity would embrace the first Neolithic farmers, then the Phoenicians, then the Algerian Corsairs of the seventeenth century.  Could it be recognised as a legal, or at least a moral, precedent?

    The science of genetics i.e. evidence from the human genome project would support such a proposition.

    The argument would be that his/her ancestors arrived here long before we were the ‘Irish’ and took possession of the island. Therefore he/she, as a putative descendant of, say, the Fomorians, the Fir Bolg’s or the De Dannan, the Phoenicians, had a right to stay here! The fact that their occupation predated the concept of Land Deeds is relevant. (Of course the abused rights of native American Indians – who also had no land deeds – are also relevant to the case.)

    he Irish Gaelic chieftain receives the priest’s blessing before departing to fight the English.

    A More Recent Analogy

    In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Elizabethan and Cromwellian soldiers came to Ireland and were paid off with stolen tracts of Irish land. Nevertheless, after four centuries of such (often absentee) ownership no one could realistically take a case challenging the rights of the Anglo-Irish descendants of those soldiers. The suggestion that the Irish State might repossess such lands and forcibly deport the descendants without compensation would be treated as absurd – as well as inciting violence! It would be a stretching of the Grandfather Clause which only a despairing defense lawyer might use as a persuasive metaphor.

    However, the rehearsal of the above asylum seeker’s argument – before being laughed out of court – would be an opportunity to reveal the complex background of colonialism and racism that has resulted in attitudes to immigrants of colour. In Ireland, native biodiversity is considered sacrosanct. Foreigners (esp. black) are considered an invasive and basically threatening species.

    The ancient Europa is now Fortress Europe!

    Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet (Beirut, Lebanon).

    The Phoenicians

    The Phoenicians were a classic case of a such a blackguarded culture and people. Although prominent in the Bible, they were written out of history by Greek and Roman authors. However, an ancient and deep-rooted anti-semitism also informed the historical prejudice against those Canaanite pioneers whom some accounts say reached these northern islands in the late Bronze Age – approx. 600 B.C.  An extensive tin trade with Cornwall is widely believed.

    Examining the Phoenicians can be an illuminating approach to Irish identity as well as European attitudes and racism in general.

    Irish passports have in the recent past been doled out for cash, thereby entitling rich Saudis and their families to come and go as they please. This is not an unusual practice. At one time the Cypriot president Präsident Nikos Anastasiades is offering citizenship as compensation to rich foreign (i.e Russian) investors.  In modern usage, Irish international sports teams liberally use the ‘granny rule’ to acquire talented non-Irish players.

    There is nothing immutably sacred about Irish or any national citizenship. The arguments for excluding or including certain ethnic types are implacably economic but can raise questions of discrimination on ethnic grounds.

    After working and living in Ireland for a certain number of years many ‘non-nationals’ are granted Irish citizenship. What is the essential difference between these favoured ones and those asylum-seekers who may have endured living for three/four/five years in prison-like circumstances on this island? Those who are forbidden to work, who are given pocket money of €19.10 per week?

    A court hearing as hypothetical as the above might reveal the shaky grounds on which our historical assumptions of identity are based.

    Suppose the old, once-sacred, Irish legends of immigration from Africa and Spain, the Fomorians from Africa, the Milesians from Spain, the De Danaan, the Fir Bolg are not entirely mythical?

    Suppose that seventeenth and eighteenth century Irish scholars who believed in the literal truth of those legends were not entirely mistaken?

    Suppose that modern Irish writers (Heaney, McGuinness, Friel, Durkan et al) were not entirely taking artistic license or imagining things when they invoked the Carthaginians as an anti-colonial metaphor?

    Tradition is never entirely true but never entirely false.

    Rabbit Beach in the southern part of the island of Lampedusa.

    In recent years the island of Lampedusa and the ancient island of Ireland have had this in common: the incursion of desperate people from the other side of the Mediterranean, particularly from North Africa.

    Note

    The changes in Earth’s orbit occurred gradually, whereas the evolution of North Africa’s climate and vegetation were abrupt. Martin Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth’s climate system amplified and modified the effects touched off by the orbital changes. By modelling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that oceans played only a minor role in the Sahara’s desertification. The earths axis wobbled. The desertification of North Africa began abruptly 5,440 years ago (+/- 30 years). Before that time, the Sahara was covered by annual grasses and low shrubs, as evidenced by fossilized pollen.

    The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south, having a semi-arid climate. It stretches across the north of the African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. In Arabic the word Sahel means  ‘a coastline’ which delimits the sand of the Sahara.

    The Sahel covers parts of (from west to east) Senegal, southern Mauritania, central Mali, southern Algeria and Niger, central Chad, southern Sudan, northern South Sudan and Eritrea.

    In the history of this planet geologists say there have been five major Ice Ages, each lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. There have been periods when this entire planet was covered in ice. At other periods the tectonic plates supporting continents were all jammed together in the southern hemisphere and Ireland was located below the equator – beside the African tropical zone. We were all neighbours once.

    An ice age is defined as when both polar caps are covered in ice. We are presently in an ‘ice age’.

    There have been hundreds of ‘inter-glacials’ or global warmings. During one of the interglacial periods – perhaps fifty million years ago – conditions favoured the emergence of the first primitive life forms.

    In another, more recent, period the sudden desertification of the Sahara occurred. This event had a dramatic and long-lasting effect on population movements around the Mediterranean.

    Featured Image: Landscape of the Erg Chebbi, Morrocco.