Cassandra Voices

Tag: Food

  • The Release of Love

    Todo lo que vemos o nos parece, no es sino un ensueño en un ensueño!
    ‘Everything we see or seem to see is nothing but a dream within a dream’
    – Ruben Dario

    My father was cremated in Dublin, but he belonged to the heat. In Ireland, he carried Nicaragua on his shoulders—low, heavy, as if the land itself rode with him. He spoke in a voice that never lost the edge of elsewhere –somewhere tropical, somewhere distant. He loved it here, but never lost fully his unique Latin American flair, which, as you can imagine, stood out in a place like Dublin. He wasn’t like the other Irish dads. I used to think he sounded like a story half-told. Now I wish I had asked for the remainder of that story. However, when we wish, it is always too late.

    As I stood there, the street, Calle Cuba, was quieter than I remembered it. After many years, I had returned to Central America, my father’s land –  the land of my origins and where half of my blood line lies. I wondered what I was going to do. I was now twenty-five, no longer a child, and no longer accompanied by my mother – or, by my father. Having decided to go back to Nicaragua with a backpack, a grief-stricken heart, and many unanswered questions, I was now present in the liminal space of my father’s past. This was where his roots lie. Where he grew up, worked hard. Where he looked to escape from. This particular neighbourhood in Managua now seemed dusty and desolate, with only the curious eyes of the odd passerby and the noise of distant traffic from the main street. The fragments that remained in my memory from when I saw it last seemed louder– brighter. I had come here when I was twelve years old, too young to know the meaning of what was rooted in this land, or the meaning of what it is to be of mixed nationality. Or the meaning of anything, really. No one at home in Ireland ever talked about this side of my heritage. But dad, he ensured I made the journey with him across the wild Atlantic to see the little house that he was building – for me. He always spoke with a quiet pride about what home was to him, or about relatives that I didn’t know. There were a multitude of them. I knew names and names knew me. But that was about it. Even then I felt like a guest in my own story – always listening intently – yet thinking that the stories seemed too hot, too loud, and too far away.

    Memory plays funnily in soft focus. Sun-drenched and half-formed, Nicaragua, until I returned, lived more in feeling than in reality. Both he and the past were never truly mine to hold. Learning to count to ten in Spanish when I was twelve was the closest I ever got to it. Jumping up the staircase in the family home with a cousin, one step at a time. Uno, dos, tres. The numbers slipped easily off my tongue, like butter. They were always there, but never had the chance to emerge. Little me was so estranged. Happily Irish, but unaware of this other world that ran through my blood. I remembered the mango tree that grew above this unfinished house, and eating the fruit that would drop lazily onto the roof. I would suck the tropical, flesh-like yellow goodness, right down to the seed, and eat it with salt. I recall the noise of the streets and the colourful birds—how alive everything felt. Even the pavement was breathing, or shimmering rather in the hot sun my mother could not handle.

    I remembered the bitter, cacao smell of the coffee plantations we would visit, the sun-lit bamboo, the verdant palm trees and the wild dogs whose bones protruded like knives. I remembered the distant relatives that embraced me with besos and amor. How loved I felt – as the big brown eyed, curly-haired Anita, who had come all the way from Ireland. I felt almost like a prize that my dad had brought to showcase from that far away, capitalistic land in the Western world. And mostly I remembered how, over there, my father was central to it all. The magnet that connected the pieces. His energy was magnetic – too powerful at times – causing friends and family to flock to him. Fast forward sixteen years, and things had changed. He was no longer there to protect me, and the stillness that I felt when I stepped out onto the street reflected exactly that. 

    Rivas, Nicaragua. Image: Fabian Wiktor.

    Perhaps a part of the reason for my going there again amidst a backpacking trip throughout Central America was to gain some sense of closure. I thought that by being in this foreign and mystical land far from home, I would feel a noteworthy connection and something within me would stir. This, I suppose, was ultimately the goal of my trip, having travelled down through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and finally, five months later, to Nicaragua. When we arrived on a night bus from El Salvador, the air was hot and heavy as everyone unloaded from the van. There were no presents under a tree, no jingle bells, and certainly no partridge in a pear tree. But this is where I chose to spend this Christmas. A year and a half after my father’s funeral, I guessed being there would allow the unresolved within me to resolve itself. Untangle the threads of grief gently full of quiet resolve, like loosening a knot in silk– carefully, slowly, so nothing tears. Perhaps this was all I thought I had left to reach my father again. And when it didn’t, when it wouldn’t budge, I felt the stillness, the nothingness, that comes after death. The quiet whisper in the dark that tells you ‘there are no more chances’. No more years to resolve the distance or work on a relationship that, just maybe, could have been better. I discovered then, that with death comes release. And instead of idealising and imagining the place in my mind from afar, I saw it in its true colours, miles and miles across the rough Atlantic.

     

    I lost him in a physical sense in June of 2023. Though we hadn’t always been close, his absence tore something open in me—something I hadn’t known was holding me together. It felt like I had lost a layer of myself, the kind that only one who has lost a parent can conceive of. Grief quickly arrived as a hole in my heart that I thought could never be filled again. It’s funny how time works, it plays tricks. Now I feel guilty that I am not sad enough. At first, the sadness was all-consuming. Now, it feels insufficient. When I think back to the weeks following his death, the loss seemed unconquerable- almost like an impassable landscape. Tears would come as I drove to work, causing me to pull over. A song would play, and sadness would follow, my mental state undone by a single lyric. I thought then that this hole could never be filled, that this experience, or the dark shadow of it, would shape me forever more. Now I know that, although this hole can never be truly filled, light can filter in. It can come streaming gracefully in hues of gold, through love, people and moments, and slowly allow me to come back together.

     

    I found out he was sick in spring, and he died in summer. The sun was beginning to slip behind the terracotta rooftop of my home in Central Valencia, Spain, when my phone began vibrating. I had finished teaching English for the evening and my feet were outstretched on the terrace, as I took in the honeyed light that makes you forget that the world can be cruel. When the phone rang I picked up right away, delighted to practice my now fluid Spanish with my father.

    He spoke, ‘the doctor says my cancer is terminal, and that I only have months to live’.

    I paused. I questioned. The soft breeze blew.

    ‘What do you mean?’

    ‘The cancer has spread- to my skin, my lungs, all over.’

    I drew in a breath.

    And with that, came the kind of loud silence that hangs, the only kind that follows the word terminal.

    Dublin. Image: Mark Dalton

    Dirty Old Town

    With that I made a return to Ireland, heading straight to my dad’s apartment in a heavy mist, the grey weather cloaking the city like a shroud. It was a stark contrast from sunny Valencia. Dublin was the same as it always was, red brick and grey, the dirty old town I had grown up in. I loved it and hated it at the same time. I sensed that there was a storm coming. The car radio had said so.

    When I arrived at his building, I paused before knocking. He opened the door, and immediately I could see the physical decline. In just a matter of months, the cancer had begun to eat him alive. Inglorious sickness, and soon to be untimely death. Through cigarette smoke, he pulled me into a hug, but the strong and macho man that I knew him to be was fading. He had grown more fragile, and instead of muscle I felt bone. His face had lost some of its colour. It was still my father’s embrace, but it carried the unmistakable weight of what had begun to slip, slip away. The potential to build on our relationship, get closer again – slipping and scattering like sand through open fingers.

    I saw in him, the fading light of a slow dying star.

    In the following weeks, I came to understand that there is no substance to time. Like light or air, it is ever present but cannot be grasped; even if you know it is running out. I also learned that there are limitations to language, and that sometimes more than words are needed to express meaning. Words cannot fill the void which follows such a loss. I did not want to believe that the doctor’s words were real when a fresh afternoon in April brought us to the GP. Sitting in a cold room in the practice in Phibsborough, she repeated the words again: ‘Months, or weeks, to live’. The words were loud, flying off her lips and into my consciousness. My father laughed when she said them, but I saw the pain in his eyes. He didn’t want me to hear them either.

    How can one possibly process this information? Did his life, or what it had been until this moment, flash before his eyes? Did the unfinished house in Managua, far, far away, rise like a mirage in his mind?

    But the doctor didn’t laugh, she was dead serious in fact. She furrowed her brow.

    ‘You’ll need to consider making funeral arrangements’, she said. I didn’t respond, and neither did he.

    Her words hung in the air and we allowed them to sit there for a while.

    Outside, cars whizzed by and people went about their daily lives, chatting about this, that, and the weather.

    The Hospice

    In the months that followed I was consumed by hospice visits, surrounded by illness.

    I was very much alive, and a regular attender in a space filled with dying people. His room was at the back, and had a view over the beautiful garden where flowers were in bloom. Pink hydrangeas, mostly, and potted plants that were scattered all around. On good days, we spent afternoons outside in the sunshine.  I would bring him out in a wheelchair, as by then, walking left him breathless. We sat together in the sunshine and shared cigarettes. It felt like a quiet rebellion on his part. No chemotherapy, no quitting smoking. The killing object between his lips had, perhaps, lost its power to kill. Without saying so, he knew the damage was done. Ordinary instants passed uneventfully as I waited for the world to shift beneath my feet. But the days were normal. We did not speak much about death. In fact, we spoke about everything other than what was actually happening. Denial and avoidance echoed – loud, and strangely comforting. Family came from overseas – Nicaragua and Atlanta – to visit. We took pictures, shared meals, and still, I could not cry. I felt as if I was a character in Dali’s Dreamscape, ever present to witness his melting clock and the unraveling of time. Reality danced and played and all we could do was wait for him to become the photograph on the mantelpiece.

    Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931.

    They say that people choose their time to die. When it happened I was the only one in the hospice room with him. It was a sunny day in mid June, in St Francis Hospice, Raheny. The head nurse, Anne, an angel complete with white hair and a heart of gold, had called me out of work to say that his condition had grown weaker; he was slipping. I got there as soon as I could, and once I ran into the room, his frail body reached out to me. The flip had officially switched, I was now the strength that my father needed, just as I had, my whole life, needed his. Although he could not speak properly, he saw me. There was still life in his eyes although the rest of him had given up. I think he knew that it was his time. Over the course of an hour or so, nurses came and went from the room. Outside, I could hear the soft clatter of trolleys and the low murmur of them exchanging life updates. They attended to us as they attended to other patients. His condition was notably weaker, but nothing unusual – they still thought he had weeks. Every noise from outside or notification on my phone was a terrifying reminder that time hadn’t stopped. But, to me, it had.

    We were approaching the summer solstice and the clouds outside drifted and resembled white silk on a canvas of deep blue. As the light in the room changed, my dad’s breathing did too—long, deep, and laboured breaths. He was slipping like smoke from a fire no longer burning. My heart racing, I panicked, rang the bell. Anne came to help. I spoke to him, telling him everything would be okay. He looked at me; a helpless look that still haunts me. Anne began to speak, words of comfort and affirmation. Softly she said ‘yes, nice and easy, that’s it, it’s happening’. I just held his hand. He gasped. And gasped again. Looked at me with those shining brown eyes. Fixed his gaze. And suddenly they were glazed. A glazed look that I will never forget. His hand slipped from mine, and went cold. Silence. Anne walked over, gently took his silver bracelet off and placed it on my wrist. The room was still. But of course, it was filled with pain and release. She closed his eyes.

    There is a fine line between life and death, and in that moment I experienced it. I left the room and went into an adjacent one; a reading room overlooking the garden, intended just for visitors. I cried out louder than I ever had before. Everyone around heard me scream. Finally, the emotion had surfaced. The tears had come.

    Or should I say: the release of love.

    There is no proper way to grieve, just as there is no overarching meaning to be found to life. Letting go feels like a betrayal. But perhaps it is essential for the living to stay living, while the dead remain close to our hearts, forever. Just maybe this is how we keep living—carrying our loved ones; not in the past, but in the breath between ordinary moments.

  • The Comics of Yesteryear

    Most people whose Irish childhood was spent between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s wistfully remember the comics then available. They were mostly published by the DC Thomson company based in Aberdeen, Scotland. The Beano and The Dandy were read by boys and girls, and girls’ comics like Bunty and the School Friend (this for older girls) had wide appeal. For older Boys there were masculine comics like Hotspur, Tiger and Eagle, choc-a-bloc with soccer and World War II action stories. Brothers and sisters took an occasional peek at each other’s favourites out of curiosity.

    Nowadays I sometimes buy The Beano weekly or the Dandy Annual and give them to a woman I know who passes them on to her nieces and nephews. I notice that Lord Snooty and his Pals are still around; Desperate Dan still enjoys monster cow pies with an oxtail protruding through the side; the Bash Street Kids are up to their madcap antics, but they don’t get whacked nowadays by angry teacher because caning has been outlawed. Minny the Minx, tomboy forever, still enjoys smashing things with her home-made catapult, but is not smacked with her parent’s slipper. Multicultural Britain is deftly integrated into The Beano with Asian girls from Hindu and Muslim homes. Afro-Caribbean ethnicity is also given a place. There is no discussion as such about religious beliefs, but festive events like Christmas and Diwali are featured.

    Cultural Self-Confidence and Irish Comics

    Some efforts were made from the 1950s onwards to produce Irish comics that promoted the cultural norms and references of a state that broke from the values of the British Empire after 1922. These entrepreneurial efforts had limited success. Economies of scale was one limiting factor. The Irish population was either stagnant or only slowly increasing. The Irish comics had no income from advertising.

    In the 1950s there was a monthly Irish comic called The Leprechaun. In the 1960s and 1970s a comic titled Our Boys appeared, and one called An Gael Ōg which was for young readers learning Irish. These latter titles were produced by the Christian Brothers. Since the 1970s the educational Folens company has published Christmas annuals with titles like Súgra, Siamsa and Spraoi for parents to place beneath Christmas trees. Some Celtic themes, some aspects of contemporary life and some Irish language fun are included in the titles. These only appear once a year. Irish children still go to shops and newsagents to buy The Beano, Spiderman and a few American publications.

    Perhaps there’s a market for an Irish-produced monthly childrens’ comic? We have many illustrators of stimulating children’s books in Irish and English who could surely be attracted to such an enterprise. The movie animation industry in Ireland has contributed to films that were nominated for Bafta and Oscar awards. I hope some of this artistic talent can be garnered for the launch of a comic or two that Irish children and their parents would gladly read.

    Continental Comics

    Since the early twentieth century Italian children’s comics called fumetti (smoke puffs – the bubbles with cartoon dialogue) have appeared. During the turbulent 1930s and ‘40s chauvinism and fascism were extolled unfortunately, but contemporary Italy has happy-go-lucky children’s comics that appeal to nonpolitical tastes. In France and francophone Belgium since the early twentieth century there has been a plentiful supply of bandes dessinées comics. Astérix comic stories have portrayed ancient France to the delight of children and adults around the world for many decades.

    Incidentally, comics with lots of bubble dialogue are published by language teaching companies for people learning French and other foreign languages. The TEFL teaching English as a foreign language industry in Ireland could follow suit.

    A Zambian Comic

    While living in Zambia I occasionally read a comic called Orbit – the magazine for young Zambians, which was subsidised by the Ministry of Education. The magazine could be read by children from aged twelve upwards and promoted science, technology, nature study and fun within an African context. See this link for sample pages: Discovering “Orbit” – Zambia’s unique science and comic magazine – downthetubes.net.

    I recall posting copies of the comic to youthful Irish relatives and hope they absorbed positive impressions of African life.

    Indeed, at the Carnsore anti-nuclear rally in 1980 I sold specially imported copies of Orbit along with modern African novels and collections of proverbs.

    Perhaps, if kids today were to read more comics they might be less attracted to the dark world of the internet, and their imaginations might roam more freely. Finally, a comprehensive history of Irish comics might assist our understanding of the cultural formation of the children of yesteryear.

  • The Carbon Tax Scapegoat

    We are regularly presented with press releases from government departments that express empathy for those struggling to make ends meet while facing exorbitant day-to-day living costs—not least among them the price of petrol, diesel, and home heating fuel. Yet, in the next breath, government bureaucracies issue statements justifying the ‘need’ to raise Carbon Taxes so that we can ‘do our bit’ for the environment and society. These contradictory messages serve only to exacerbate the hardship felt by those who, day in and day out, live under the weight of economic and political pressure.

    We regularly hear about problems and disasters attributed to climate change. There are, we are told, endless challenges stemming from this phenomenon—and as responsible citizens, we must be willing to pay the price for its effects.

    As of May 2025, nearly 50% of the price of petrol and diesel at the pump is made up of various taxes, with the Carbon Tax accounting for almost 10%. It is worth remembering that motorists are paying VAT not only on the fuel but also on the tax applied to the fuel. Those using natural gas to heat their homes are paying close to €130 a year in Carbon Tax, while those using home-heating oil are paying €63.50 per tonne of CO₂ emitted in the same tax. With all these sources of Carbon Tax, the State’s revenue from this ‘green initiative’ reached €1 billion for the first time in 2024.

    Unravelling the Hysteria

    The seemingly endless chorus of climate change consequences can leave one feeling helpless, subservient to an invisible, unquestionable force beyond comprehension.

    But just as the old saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, perhaps understanding the burden of the consequences of this unchallengeable doctrine begins with asking the most basic questions.

    Are the repeated justifications for never-ending increases in Carbon Tax truly the result of the general population’s failure to make sufficient sacrifices to combat climate change, or could they stem from other factors—politically inconvenient ones—that are more easily scapegoated as climate issues? Climate change has become a topic so shielded from scrutiny that questioning anything presented as its direct result is rare, for fear of being labeled a climate change denier.

    Just as Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s novel 1984, began to question the scapegoating ritual of the “Two Minutes Hate”, a daily exercise designed to convince citizens that society’s problems stemmed from disloyal citizens rather than a deeply flawed system, we, too, might benefit from stepping back. Perhaps some of our societal and economic struggles are rooted in deeper, overlooked issues that are being ignored or glossed over due to the incessant rhetoric of climate change effects, paradigm blindness and groupthink.

    Take, for example, the recent introduction of water usage restrictions in areas of Ireland that experience some of the wettest spring months in Europe. Just recently, a hosepipe ban was announced for Mullingar in Co. Westmeath, Milford in Co. Donegal, and Kells-Oldcastle in Co. Meath, set to last for six weeks due to yet another climate change-attributable factor. The official stated reason?

    “Below average rainfall over the last seven months.”

    According to the Uisce Éireann website:

    “Climate change is leading to more frequent and intense weather events, such as flooding and dry spells. This impacts our water resources, which can mean we need to put restrictions in place.”

    And who must pay the price for this catastrophe? Why, each and every one of us, of course—as good comrade citizens, all for the common good!

    But is the need for the hosepipe ban—and the accompanying Carbon Taxes supposedly meant to remedy the ‘harms done by carbon’, truly the result of the general population’s ‘carbon greed’? Or is it, at least in part, a form of scapegoating used to avoid answering some rather politically awkward questions?

    Let’s, without venturing down the well-worn road of climate change denial, consider an alternative to the familiar mantra that supposedly justifies yet another increase in Carbon Tax to solve yet another ‘climate problem’.

    Since its foundation in 2013 as a state-owned water utility company, Uisce Éireann has promised to revitalise Ireland’s water infrastructure. Despite having a multi-billion euro budget, the utility has faced significant criticism for massive overspending and making unrealistic claims about fixing leaking pipes and upgrading infrastructure—largely due to its lack of transparency, particularly regarding how funds are allocated for operational costs and repairs.

    Considering the lavish funding allocated to this company—€16.9 billion from 2025 to 2029, including €10.3 billion for infrastructure and €6.6 billion for operating costs, one might reasonably expect that leaking pipes and inefficiencies would no longer be an issue. Yet, even in the month of May, water shortages persist even in some of the wettest areas of Europe raising serious questions about where this investment is going.

    Multi-million euro contracts are regularly awarded by Uisce Éireann as part of a massive overhaul of Ireland’s long-neglected water infrastructure. However, there is little to no scrutiny or transparency when it comes to assessing value for money or the efficiency of the work carried out. When water shortages do occur, it becomes all too easy to deflect the hard questions by reinforcing the idea in the public’s mind that the fault lies not with the state, but with the ever-looming spectre of climate change.

    At the implementation of the Government’s Climate Action Plan in 2019, the people of Ireland were told:

    “Climate disruption is already having diverse and wide ranging impacts on Ireland’s environment, society, economic and natural resources. The Climate Action Plan sets out an ambitious course of action over the coming years to address this issue”.

    This same plan told the burden carriers

    “For most areas of environmental damage, a key problem is that those inflicting the damage do not pay the cost of the damage they inflict. This is the rationale for charging a carbon price for carbon emissions which reflects the growing damage that they are inflicting. This serves to discourage emissions and to make carbon abatement more profitable.“

    The Flaccid Fourth Estate

    Ireland’s media, one would assume, should challenge the government on its climate policies should there ever be any possibility of it dodging responsibility. But alas, as history has proven time and time again—especially with the specific example of the Irish Banking Inquiry of 2011 into the causes and impact of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and the housing market crash of 2008. it has been clearly shown that Ireland’s established media has repeatedly failed to question the sustainability of government policy, lacked investigative reporting, and played a role in normalizing risk to the general populace. The established media in Ireland, therefore, simply does not criticise government policy in any meaningful way.

    Let’s take a step back and analyse the broader picture. If, by chance, the water shortages in Ireland are at least partly due to operational inefficiencies of a multi-billion-euro state company responsible for ensuring there are no shortages, perhaps many other problems regularly used to justify a crippling carbon tax are also, at least in part, the result of systemic issues within government operations and not solely the fault of climate change.

    If this is the case, wouldn’t it make a lot more economic and political sense to reform the system rather than continue to tax the burdened?

    Of course, one can argue that taxes are essential for the government to fund the functioning of the country, and that point is not being disputed here. However, when additional taxes are introduced in the name of improving society, while transparency, accountability, and efficiency in government spending and state operations continue to decline, and the number of exposed instances of public fund wastage continues to rise, this does little to benefit either society or the economy.

    Is it not time to press the pause button on the ever-increasing rates of ‘green’ taxes on the people of Ireland and to begin a thorough investigation into how public money is spent on projects—from the Irish Water scandal, with millions wasted on the setup of this monolith, to the National Children’s Hospital cost overruns, making it the most expensive hospital in the world, to the bicycle shed in Dáil Éireann, and so on and so on?

    The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
    ― George Orwell, 1984

  • Emotional Regimes of the Pandemic

    This Mortal Coil

    The Covid pandemic brought a public health emergency, political and legal challenges, intense media coverage, social divisions, and intense debates among scientists. Yet, in public commentaries, attention fell almost exclusively on a single cause of suffering: the virus itself.

    This framing of the crisis contributed to an atmosphere of extreme danger, a sense that disease and death lurked around every street corner. Public messaging, media reports and daily statistics reinforced the idea of omnipresent risk. News cycles focused relentlessly on case numbers, hospitalizations and fatalities, making the threat feel immediate and inescapable.

    Five years on, we can collate how the pandemic sparked a surge of research across many fields: medicine, public health, economics, education, and sociology all responded. This burst of academic activity was not, however, spread evenly. Bibliometric studies show that, at first, research focused mainly on clinical medicine, immunology, biology, genetics, and pharmacology; the social sciences, psychiatry, and economics received less attention (Funada et al., 2023). Within the social sciences, early research looked at wellbeing, the plight of healthcare workers, vaccines, and inequalities. Emotions were also studied, but far less often, ranking only as the twenty-fourth most common keyword in published papers (Hamdan & Alsuqaih, 2024).

    Nevertheless, a closer look at emotion-related research reveals a problematic focus. Most of these studies examine mental health issues and depression, fatigue, sleep, fear, anxiety, coping strategies, resilience, and attitudes toward vaccines. They treat emotions as individual reactions to a threatening situation, mainly, the risk of illness or death. From this almost exclusive perspective, emotions are considered as disruptions to psychological balance, responses to a biological danger separate from society or culture. They are private experiences, signs of mental strain when facing mortality. Fear, grief, and anxiety are viewed as symptoms of danger and of risk, highlighting the personal impact of living through a threatening time.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Moving Beyond Reaction: Constructing the Emotional Field

    This framing of emotions overlooks a crucial point: emotions are not simply automatic, hard-wired biological responses to external situations or threats. Rather, they are often actively produced and shaped within particular moral, cultural, and political frameworks. How people come to fear, endure, or worry is continually influenced by the signals and expectations set by public discourse, media narratives, institutional practices and prevailing social norms.

    The news media do obviously more than report mere facts; they select, emphasize, and dramatize certain aspects of events, contributing and even constructing the emotional climate of crisis according to preconceived judgments. Hence, the emotional atmosphere of the pandemic, marked by vigilance, anxiety, and collective tension, was not just a consequence of the virus, but the result of ongoing processes that shaped how people understood and responded to the unfolding situation.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    ‘Be a hero, wear a mask’

    Several notable examples illustrate how governments and media employed rhetorical and psychological techniques to shape public emotions.

    In the UK, the slogan “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives” became one of the most widely disseminated and emotionally charged messages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Designed to evoke both communal duty and existential fear, it mobilised public sentiment around the act of staying at home, not simply as a health measure, but as a moral obligation to shield others, particularly frontline healthcare workers. Ubiquitous across television, newspapers, and social media, the slogan fostered an emotional climate of collective responsibility and latent anxiety about overwhelming the national health system.

    Rhetorically, the slogan is striking: its simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence render it both memorable and persuasive. It appeals simultaneously to national solidarity, civic duty, and the highest ethical imperative, saving lives, thus activating a complex affective mix of fear, guilt, and altruism.

    This emotional construct was neither accidental nor incidental. A report by the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, dated 22 March 2020 and titled “Options for Increasing Adherence to Social Distancing Measures” (SPI-B, 2020), explicitly recommended the use of emotionally charged messaging. It advised that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,” and further emphasized the need to frame compliance as a duty to protect others. Public messaging was a deliberate instrument of affective governance.

    In France, the famous “Nous sommes en guerre”, “we are at war” slogan, pronounced by French President Emmanuel Macron recruited the French citizens for “general mobilisation” against an “enemy […] invisible and elusive”. This phrase, repeated six times during a single televised address, anchored the pandemic within a wartime imaginary, framing the virus as an invisible enemy and the French population as combatants in a national struggle (Lemarié, A., & Pietralunga, C. 2020).

    The affective environment in France was thus shaped around sacrifice and mobilisation. Staying at home became not merely a health directive, but an act of national resistance, evoking allusive memories of the World War II. This rhetorical strategy, deeply embedded in French republican traditions of unity and state authority, reactivated symbolic repertoires associated with past national emergencies.

    Perhaps the most disquieting illustration of planned disciplinary and emotional control during the Covid-19 crisis in Europe was to be found in a leaked strategy document from Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior. Widely referred to (ironically yet revealingly) as the “panic paper”, this internal memorandum, drafted in March 2020, exposes the deliberate mobilisation of fear and terror as legitimate political tools. The paper explicitly recommends heightening the population’s sense of threat to ensure compliance with lockdown measures, even proposing emotionally manipulative narratives targeted at children.

    The document’s authors do not hesitate to make emotionally manipulative claims, unanchored to any scientific or empirical evidence. One of the more disturbing passages reads: “Children will easily become infected, even with restrictions on leaving the house […] If they then infect their parents, and one of them dies in agony at home, they will feel guilty because, for example, they forgot to wash their hands after playing. It is the most terrible thing a child can ever experience.” (Bundespapier, 2020)

    Under the guise of public health strategy, the experts thus suggest that the state should conjure worst-case scenarios to shock citizens into obedience. This weaponisation of fear, particularly the psychological targeting of children, marks a disconcerting threshold where public communication slips into psychological coercion. It represents a calculated use of terror to engineer behaviour.

    Surprisingly enough, this narrative was not limited to governments or the media. Even prominent intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading voices in the theory of deliberative democracy, perceived democracy as having ground to a halt. Under the threat to “the life and health of members of the species Homo sapiens across the globe,” Habermas declared in 2021, in strikingly dramatic terms, that humanity found itself in a truly existing Hobbesian state of nature, engaged in a metaphysical and biological war for the survival of the species. In such a situation, Habermas thought, the “legally mandated acts of solidarity” required by the authority of the state must override individual rights and liberties without exception (Habermas, 2021). In other words, the recourse to a temporary dictatorship is defended as a legitimate means of safeguarding democracy itself.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Reframing the emotional pandemic

    Such tactics reflect a biopolitical logic in which emotions are instrumentalised, manipulated, and weaponised in the name of security. As the American historian William Reddy’s notion of ‘emotional regimes’ reminds us, the state not only regulates action but prescribes feeling. What the “panic paper” reveals is an attempt to institutionalise anxiety and guilt as tools of governance, undermining democratic trust and ethical responsibility in the process.

    Insights from the history and anthropology of emotions, particularly the work of Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy, invite us to rethink this framing of emotions. Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’ (2006) highlights how emotions are shaped, valued, and regulated within particular social groups, each with their own norms and expressive codes. From this standpoint, emotions during the pandemic cannot be reduced to individual reactions but must be understood as patterned and normative, reflecting the affective economies of distinct communities: communities of fear, of denial, of moral indignation, or of solidarity.

    Similarly, Reddy’s theory of ‘emotives’ (2001) emphasises the performative and world-shaping nature of emotional expression. Emotions are not merely responses to a given reality; they participate in shaping that reality by enacting or challenging dominant scripts.

    Shaping the emotional landscape of the pandemic through these theoretical lenses allows us to move beyond the medical paradigm and to interrogate the normative, political, and cultural scripts that governed which emotions were considered legitimate, intelligible, or deviant. It also opens the way to analyse how emotions were mobilised to sustain or contest public policies, shape collective identities, and articulate forms of belonging or exclusion.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    How to do emotions with words

    Although traditional theories of public relations and propaganda from Bernays and Adorno to Ellul have long emphasized the central role of emotions in shaping public opinion, the American historian William Reddy offers a strikingly original lens through which to examine how speech, when instrumentalised, not only conveys but actively produces emotional states. The framework he developed in his book The Navigation of Feeling (2001) allows us to reconsider emotional expression not as a by-product of persuasion, but as a form of action in its own right.

    The expressions and formulae he calls “emotives” work at the same time as expressions and speech-acts that do not merely reflect a feeling but also act upon the feelings expressed.

    Let us consider one of the slogans widely used in the UK during Covid: “Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re helping by staying at home?” The formula obviously expresses sentiments of moral urgency, it purveys a sense of guilt, and it evokes a feeling of shared suffering. By mobilising emotional responses in its audience, the message not only seeks compliance but also helps produce an imagined community of responsibility, what Benedict Anderson might describe as a politically constructed sense of belonging forged through shared affect and narrative. “Not staying at home” not only becomes a morally shameful act, but it also transforms those who do not abide by the rules into antisocial or even dangerous outsiders.

    As such, the formula is not simply descriptive (“you are harming people”), nor purely persuasive (“please help us”), but it performs a moral-emotional judgment that invites internalisation: “You are failing us, your community, unless you feel what we want you to feel.” In this sense, that emotives express and reshape emotional experience by realigning the narrative sense of oneself and the expected moral position of the community.

    The same analysis applies to Macrons “war”. The expression declares a collective crisis state, it evokes gravity, calls out a clear and present danger and warns about an existential threat. Thus, it installs an emotional climate of wartime unity, emergency discipline, and patriotic mobilisation. Unlike the English moral community, French citizens are summoned in the guise of soldiers and patriots, enlisted in the defence of the state.

    The German example seems politically the most unsettling. The consultants emphasise horrific imagery (death by suffocation) in order to induce “primal fears” and uncontrollable panic. They instrumentalise guilt in children to heighten family responsibility by evoking a nightmarish parricide that results from disobeying.

    -Germany’s response corresponds in function (if not in scale) to Jacobin emotional regimes analysed by Reddy in the period of French Terror (September 1793–July 1794). Emotional authenticity is measured by conformity to the collective fear. In the context of post-Revolutionary France, not fearing enough becomes a sign of counter-revolutionary disloyalty. Similarly, in 2020 Germany, not appearing afraid (or questioning the panic narrative) could make one suspected of being reckless, not acting in solidarity, or worse, of being a right-wing-extremist-enemy of the state.

    To push things even further, Germany’s federal domestic intelligence service – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – established, in 2021, a new ‘phenomenon area’ for verbal “delegitimisation of the state” as part of a broader affective disciplining.  Much like the East German state’s attention to emotional attitudes and moral tone (Brauer, 2011), pandemic-era Germany began to police not only what people did or said, but how they felt, or more precisely, which emotions they were publicly permitted to express. The result, in Reddy’s terms, was the emergence of a strict emotional regime, wherein fear, trust, and compliance became not just encouraged but expected, while scepticism, defiance, and even calm detachment were marked as dangerous deviations from normative feeling.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    The Touched and the Untouchable

    As Reddy shows, emotives do not exist in isolation but operate within broader emotional styles that can transform into hegemonic “emotional regimes”. These regimes then constitute the officially sanctioned or dominant norms governing which emotions are deemed appropriate or required. An emotional regime may be conceptualised as the emotional dimension of a culture’s ideological structure.

    This perspective helps explain how distinct emotional regimes were deliberately constructed within varying national and cultural settings. The aim was to cultivate specific emotional landscapes which, according to political figures, scientific experts and media outlets were perceived as the most effective means to encourage, persuade, or even compel populations towards the desired attitudes and behaviours. This was to be achieved, in large part, by aligning public sentiment with state goals and framing non-compliance as morally reprehensible.

    By dictating appropriate feelings such as patriotism, calm obedience, compliance, solidarity, anxiety or even panic, while discouraging dissent, critique, lack of fear or apathy, the Covid responses installed what Reddy calls a “strict” emotional regime. In strict regimes – as was the case in most Western democracies – authorities heavily dictate emotional responses (e.g. demanding constant displays of patriotic fear or fervour), whereas a “looser” regimes (like Sweden) allowed more individual emotional freedom.

    The construction of a strict emotional regime evidently leaves little room for individual “emotional navigation”. Emotional navigation, in Reddy’s theory, is the process through which individuals explore and reorient their feelings, often by attempting to name or express them using available emotional descriptions. Hence, within strict regimes, the mandated emotions and suppression of others are always at risk of creating a conflict with individuals’ authentic feelings. Pressure to conform reduces our autonomy to explore and articulate genuine emotional experiences.

    Reddy’s work suggests that strict regimes inevitably inflict “psychological pains”. This psychological pain arises from the discrepancy between one’s internal emotional state and the external expectation of how one should feel or express emotions. The deliberate heightening of threat and weaponisation of fear, as seen in the aforementioned pandemic policies, lead to significant emotional suffering.

    This approach mirrors what the German memo proposed (making individuals, even children, feel accountable for tragic outcomes) and what SPI-B had called “shame” by conflating compliance with virtue and non-compliance with deviance (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).

    Indeed, psychologists reported a rise in what they dubbed “COVID-19 Anxiety Syndrome,” where individuals became obsessively fearful (avoiding public spaces, constant symptom-checking, etc.), effectively locked into a state of chronic anxiety (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022). Professor of psychology Marcantonio Spada, who studied this phenomenon, warned that by “deliberately inflat[ing] the threat and perceived fear of Covid-19 (in combination with lockdowns)”, the government made it likely “that a significant proportion of the population would develop psychopathological responses and end up locked into their fear or develop related forms of anxiety such as health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviours” (All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2022).

    As a consequence, when people find an emotional regime oppressive or alienating, they seek “emotional refuges”, that is, social spaces or subcultures that permit the free expression of forbidden feelings. These refuges (such as the historic salons, Masonic lodges, cafés in Reddy’s research) let individuals “breathe” emotionally and share sentiments that the dominant discourse suppresses.

    In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms played a crucial role as digital emotional refuges, allowing individuals to articulate forms of scepticism, frustration, irony, or grief that were often unwelcome or delegitimised in mainstream public discourse. Whether through Telegram groups, Facebook forums, YouTube comments, or encrypted chat channels, these online spaces became vital arenas not only for a delegitimized critique, but also for affective expression, especially for those who rejected the emotional scripts of fear, compliance, or trust in government authority.

    Here, alternative emotional narratives could circulate: defiance against confinement, sarcasm toward official slogans, or empathy with marginalised voices such as vaccine sceptics, small business owners, or distressed adolescents. It was these spaces that functioned as emotional counter-publics: informal communities where dissonant emotions could be shared, validated, and amplified outside the normative emotional regime that attempted to monopolise the emotional field.

    Yet even these emotional counter-publics did not remain untouched. As expressions of dissent or ambivalence became increasingly vilified and pathologised, many of these refuges were themselves subjected to forms of surveillance, content moderation, public denunciation and censorship. Social media platforms intensified their control of discourse through algorithmic filtering and deplatforming, while governments and media denounced certain emotional expressions, especially those critical of official policy, as irrational, dangerous, or politically subversive. In this way, the emotional regime extended its reach, constraining the very spaces where alternative affective orientations could emerge, intensifying emotional suffering and narrowing the horizon of legitimate emotional life.

    Bibliography

  • Ностальгия

    ‘I confess I do not believe in time.’
    Vladimir Nabokov

    On a hostel rooftop in Morocco, I met a Russian man who had not been home since the war broke out. I was there to catch the last of the sun and read my book in peace so when he first introduced himself I made no effort to be friendly. It soon became clear that he wasn’t motivated by any particular attraction to me, as I had immediately and arrogantly presumed, but because he had seen that I was reading Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Some mingled instinct of nostalgia and boredom had led him to overcome his aversion to intruding on strangers, he explained.

    I invited him to sit and the conversation roamed freely. He described late spring in St Petersburg and the peculiar sense of dissolution that comes with moving through endless bars and the sun never setting. I told him about the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin and people in green hats strewn on the bridges at dawn. We spoke about the war and about La Rochefoucauld and about rap. We agreed that Tolstoy was better than Dostoevsky; we disagreed about Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Soon it was dark so we got a six pack of Casablanca beers and sat by the pool. We shared a pack of Marlboro Golds and began to talk about heartbreak, naturally. He said that in Russian there are more specific words for sadness: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I gave him my pen so he could write them in the back of my book. When we finished all the beers he retrieved a half bottle of vodka from his room. We made light of our romantic humiliations. You can speak most openly with people you know you’ll never see again.

    I didn’t think about him again until recently, in a bookshop in Dublin, when I came across a copy of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, which had come up that night. He’d urged me to give it another go, insisting it was worth it, even going so far as to say it was his best work, which isn’t an opinion you hear much. Even Nabakov said it was a dismal flop, and he wasn’t known for his humility.

    I should get it out of the way that I read Lolita at a formative age, close to Lolita’s age, in fact, and that I loved it completely without understanding it in the slightest. (I used to think this was a unique experience but over the years I’ve met many women like me.) Lolita is the book I’ve returned to most and my love for it has only deepened, though now I understand its awfulness. So, as a long time fan of Nabokov, I’m disposed to forgive his more unlikeable traits, which I admit are unlikeable in the extreme: his aristocratic disdain, his insistence on his own brilliance, his exhausting multilingual wordplay, his obsessive control over interpretation, his stylised indifference. Updike put it best: ‘I don’t like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ All Nabokov’s vices are displayed most opulently in Speak, Memory.

    It’s less of an autobiography than a record of personality. He sets down a few of his passions, such as lepidopterology, but more importantly, he catalogs his many hatreds. They range from small gripes with Freud’s theories or disagreements with ignorant critics to the amazingly vague, such as music (‘an arbitrary succession of more or less annoying sounds’), or sleep (‘I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of genius…the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.’) Every time I’ve attempted to read Speak, Memory I’ve gone in with good intentions and every time I’ve been thoroughly defeated.

    This time, however, the book seemed to speak directly into the conversation with the Russian man on the hostel rooftop in Morocco. I saw it as a story about exile and nostalgia, and I wondered if he had urged me to reread it because he understood that neither of us had been home for years, though his reasons were far graver and sadder than mine. The word nostalgia, as you may already know, comes from the Greek νόστος, ‘return home’, and ἄλγος, ‘ache’.

    Speak, Memory tells the story of the author’s aristocratic childhood in Russia at the turn of the century, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that forced him to flee, and his attempts to build a new life in America. Early on, Nabokov makes it clear that his project is not political but sentimental, addressing a brief chapter to ‘the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.’ ‘My contempt for the emigre who hates the Reds because they stole his money and land is complete,’ he explains. ‘The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.’

    Out of that childhood he creates something mythical and shadowless. He elevates to epic proportions something that is, in fact, very ordinary. He misses his beautiful mother and the garden where he used to play. He wishes he could go back. But he can’t admit it so straightforwardly so he invokes the Muse, like Homer. The Muse steps in and the past rushes back, intact. ‘I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.’ The motivating impulse is against oblivion. Like with the butterflies he pins to a board, he wants to take the moment in all its impossible detail, to fix and immortalise it. The enemy is time, which pulls you away from everything you love. Memory is a tool for defeating time.

    Nabokov’s exile isn’t just a matter of geography or politics; it’s a spiritual condition marked by the loss of a world that no longer exists. Speak, Memory doesn’t progress logically, it circles back on itself, drawing connections through motif and image rather than sequence. Its structure mimics the strange, folding logic of memory, where one detail can suddenly trigger a whole Proustian journey of the mind.

    This associative structure is how diasporic cultures preserve history. It is encoded in fragments, in music, in idioms, in rituals that seem personal but are weighted with collective meaning. The longing for return, or for a wholeness that never fully existed, becomes formal rather than simply emotional. Nostalgia is a structural feature. It organizes the past via symbols. In such contexts, the ache of memory is not a flaw. It is how identity endures across distance.

    In the back pages of my book, I still have the man’s careful, looping words in Cyrillic: Тоска, Надрыв, Грусть, Ностальгия. I’ve forgotten the precise differences between these shades of sadness, but the point remains: not all nostalgia is the same. There is the soft kind, the sentimental kind that sells postcards and heritage tours. But there is also a harder kind: nostalgia as mnemonic, as survival instinct.

    Feature Image: Walter Mori

  • We Must Begin with the Land

    Review: We Must Begin with the Land: Seeking Abundance and Liberation through Social Ecology by Stephen E. Hunt (Zer0 books, 2025)

    Environmentalists find themselves in the paradoxical situation of living in a golden age of radical ecological thinking – even as our global economic system blasts through one climactic tipping-point after another, more or less guaranteeing the extinction of planetary life as we know it at present. A rich field of research and intellectual inquiry has sprung up from between the fault-lines of the emerging climate crisis, along with concomitant movements centred (among other aims) on food sovereignty, habitat protection, the democratization of land holdings, and anti-extractivist resistance. Joining in this spirit of stewardship and challenge, Stephen E. Hunt has produced a prospectus for what might be described as eco-socialist change, in an attempt to measure and mitigate “the profound reengineering of life on Earth” that capitalist food systems have wrought. In place of monopolistic land-hoarding and ever-expanding “agri-business” – which trace their roots to the era of settler colonialism – he makes the case for a not-for-profit, “circular economy”, based on the principle that “nutritious food” is “an essential human need.”

    If Hunt draws inspiration from “utopian” ideas – the notion, say, that local commoning could provide a vital food source for significant numbers of people in the U.K. (where he lives), in place of the corporate or commodified provisions they currently rely on – he is nothing if not clear-eyed about the scale and extremity of the climate catastrophe predicted to engulf our already warming world. The vitality of his analysis might be said to stem from its symbiotic pairing of transformative hopes with a deep-running awareness of natural necessities. It is simply not possible, he states, to reach or maintain “ecological integrity within planetary boundaries” without simultaneously “addressing profound social problems embedded in deep history.” Far from being inevitable, he argues in a similar vein, famine is “primarily a social problem that demands solutions founded on social justice.”

    If Hunt often focuses on the practicalities of ecological action – how to grow wholesome food, and nurture communal practices, in a durable way – he nevertheless situates his proposals within an internationalist horizon. His book draws as much on the lessons of the Kurdish revolutionaries in Rojava, say, or the grassroots agricultural labourers comprising La Via Campesina, as on the experience of local campaigners in Bristol, his home. We Must Begin with the Land is anything but parochial. In fact, by arguing for the radicalism of community gardening, foraging, the conversion of waste grounds into allotments, and the like, Hunt may find himself in the vanguard of progressive thinking. Some commentators – not without reason – have attempted to hitch the cause of ecological adaptation exclusively to the wagon of the nation-state, essentially envisaging climate adaptation as a matter of enlightened technocratic adjustments from on high. Hunt’s contrasting emphasis is on the importance of localised, grassroots environmentalism, with an anti-capitalistic edge – aligning him politically with the late Grace Lee Boggs, for example, whose campaigns for community-led ecological regeneration in Detroit offered a new model of labour agitation in that industrialised city.

    Hunt also invokes the “social ecology” of Murray Bookchin, a multi-faceted philosophy that advances a critique of “the historic turn towards hierarchy and patriarchy” within radical movements – often hampered, ironically, by rigid structures and internal power imbalances – as well as a diagnosis of the “statism” and “capitalism” that define wider social structures, particularly in the global north. By re-examining our conceptions of urban and rural, of agricultural production and consumption, Hunt observes (via Bookchin), reformers can “ensure that human and ecological well-being are at the heart of democratic initiatives”, bringing the grand ideals of socialist transformation down to earth – and into an actionable zone inhabited by actual communities. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, he recalls (perhaps with a tinge of nostalgic over-statement), the occupiers’ “self-managed food provision” merged into something of an improvised welfare service. The movement exposed the degree of social isolation in the twenty-first century’s metropolitan centres. One of the chief benefits of communal eating is to help to address alienation.

    Such schemes, of course, are driven as much by physiology as by psychological or socio-econonmic factors. Our ability not only to think beyond the present infrastructre of a capitalistic economy, but physically to survive, is directly connected to the attitudes we hold and the measures we take regarding food and the land it grows from. It was hunger, after all, and not just a spirit of experimentation and progressivism, that inspired the rebellious denizens of Kronstadt to cultivate the waste grounds of their city in 1921 – instituting a “horticultural commune”, according to the historian Voline, that the Bolsheviks, intent on centralization, were zealous in repressing, even after the famous mass of striking sailors there had been executed or dispersed. Then as now, democracy and ecology may be thought of as connected strands of any authentically revolutionary endeavour. As Kristin Ross has written:

    Land and the way it is worked is the most important factor in an alternative ecological society. Capital’s real war is against subsistence, because subsistence means a qualitatively different economy; it means people actually living differently, according to a different conception of what constitutes wealth and what constitutes deprivation.

    Such issues take on a palpable urgency in the age of climate change, as extreme weather events merge with the predicted decimation of habitats and food-chains. Whether or not we realise it, how we feed ourselves (and learn to live with one another) is a crucial question for communities everywhere – a question likely to turn into an existential dilemma if left unanswered. In Hunt’s words,

    as the food crisis worsens, it will be increasingly necessary to make productive use of urban or “peri-urban” land for local self-provisioning… it is wise to activate urban gardening as a collective form of commoning that transcends the atomisation of communities into clusters of individuals.

    Noting the explosion of factory farming and other for-profit models of meat production globally, he wonders: “Can the straight trajectory of relentless economic growth be bent into the spiralling plenty of truly regenerative production?” For readers in Ireland, these speculations hold special resonance. A nation-wide campaign centred on community-organised green spaces and vegetable allotments – such as Hunt envisions – could serve as an original, effective response to the expanding epidemic of dereliction afflicting Irish towns and cities (itself in part a symptom of the housing and cost-of-living crises that have caused concomitantly high levels of emigration and homelessness). As to the issue of food sovereignty, despite inspiring efforts by networks such as Talamh Beo to implement sustainable models of “agro-ecology” across the country, successive Irish governments seem to have remained in thrall to a meat (and dairy) industry operating on a commercial model hostile to workers’ rights and favouring large-scale operations that are emissions-intensive. Meanwhile, the goal of reaching even the minimum requirements for decarbonising our farming practices seems as illusory as it’s ever been. A dramatic re-set in local and national policy is needed – and soon.

    Among other things, there is arguably a risk of hubris in a progressive politics that centres its aims and actions solely on the state and its traditional organs of power. As Hunt suggests, in an era of drastic ecological and economic ruptures, a consumerist society that simultaneously “does not know how to feed and dress itself”, that destroys abundant eco-systems to make way for industrial-scale farming and vast monocultures, can hardly be taken as the sanest or safest of socio-environmental paradigms. We must begin with the land, he declares – and re-build our agricultural economy from the grassroots up. The change we need starts here and now.

  • Does Dublin Require 3 Railway Systems?

    The future of urban transport policy lies not in expansion but in the intelligent use of existing traffic areas.  The objective of ensuring mobility for people travelling to work and shopping and during leisure time requires urban traffic management based on modern information technology.
    Ernst Joos, Deputy Director of Zurich Transport. ‘Lessons in Transportation Planning from Zurich.  Economy and Ecology are not contradictions.’ (Lecture, Dublin Transportation Office, Embassy of Switzerland, Dublin, June 10 1999)

    Over the past twenty-five years, those responsible for managing Dublin have failed to draw any lessons from Zurich, one of the most desirable cities in the world in which to live. If they had, they would not now be seriously proposing to add yet another railway system to the two already existing. The proposed MetroLink is a completely different system to the existing LUAS (light rail) and DART/Commuter services (heavy rail). LUAS trams will be unable to run on the MetroLink rail, and vice versa (see About, Frequently Asked Questions, MetroLink – The Basics, par 6).

    Resources committed to MetroLink (€500m to date) have crowded out the development of other, less costly, options which would, by now, have made it easier to move around our capital city region.

    Place-making – an approach to urban planning and design that focuses on the people who use a space, rather than just the physical structures or buildings. The idea is to create places that are not just functional, but also beautiful and meaningful to the people who live, work, and play there. This has long been overlooked by the governing networks of politicians, senior public servants, policy makers, as well as the relevant planners, engineers, economists, architects, property developers and builders. Focusing on competitiveness alone will not make our capital city a pleasant place to live, work and linger.

    For some time, there has been a deliberate policy of removing through traffic from a small part of Dublin city centre. MetroLink is the most recent iteration by insiders/incumbents who did not follow through on the 1998 government decision to build a mainly on-street light rail system for Dublin.

    As proposed, MetroLink (costing anywhere from €12bn to €23bn) again fails to ensure that place-making objectives are applied consistently, and with equal force, throughout our capital city.

    Ballymun provides an excellent example of this failure. When the 1960s-built-suburb was regenerated during the 1990s, the main street of this residential area became a six-lane highway for through traffic. Such traffic is a major form of community severance.

    The proposed MetroLink will be in a tunnel, under the main street which will still have through traffic. National and local politicians, policymakers and interest groups support this. Yet the same people are actively restricting such through traffic from the city centre.

    The Government decision to extend LUAS to Finglas is an opportunity to reset the go-stop-go practices of the past twenty-five years. Our public authorities can use this to keep the experienced staff and supply chains needed to build LUAS networks serving other parts of Dublin (e.g. Drumcondra, Santry, Ballymun, Beaumont, Coolock, Edenmore, Lucan, Clondalkin, Ballyfermot, the south city centre, Harold’s Cross, Terenure, Rathfarnham, Dundrum). People in Cork and Galway would also benefit from this focus as they too adopt LUAS-type services.

    Sustaining urban areas requires the application of mutually reinforcing measures consistently over decades. Instead of being focused on the creation and maintenance of places which raise the quality of life, development in Dublin has been reduced to a very limited form of building control on a project-by-project basis.

    We can enhance our cities by adopting stable policies and continuous investment. But we cannot rely on what emerges from different programmes for government, each drawn up for a single electoral cycle of no more than five years. Rapid decision-making on arbitrary projects has not worked to make housing affordable, or available, in the Dublin area. Nor will similar incoherence deliver an attractive public transport network.

    LUAS Disconnect

    This perpetuates a lack of insight that resulted in two disconnected LUAS lines. There are no plans to remedy this lack of joined up thinking.

    On April 8, 2025 the Government approved the Revised National Planning Framework. This recognises the issue of Sustainable Mobility (National Strategic Outcome 5 p.161-2). Dublin and other Irish cities and major urban areas are heavily dependent on road and private, mainly car-based, transport with the result that there is more and more congestion.

    The National Development Plan makes provision for transformational investment in public transport and sustainable mobility solutions in the main urban centres that will progressively put in place a more sustainable alternative. For example, major public transport infrastructure projects identified in the Transport Strategy for the Greater Dublin Area to 2042 – such as the MetroLink and DART+ as well as the Luas and Bus Connects investment programmes – will keep our capital and other key urban areas competitive.

    In the Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy 2022 –2042, the National Transport Authority (NTA) continues to spin the idea that LUAS is networked, when our experience is otherwise (‘Greater Dublin Area Transport Strategy 2022-2042’ asserts that ‘in conjunction with Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), in December 2017 we opened Luas Cross City, linking the Red and Green lines and providing an interchange between commuter rail and Luas at Broombridge.’ p.11).

    What is worse, NTA persists with this bluster despite their own strategy showing clearly that they propose more lines which are not interlinked.

    Figure 1. Dublin Light Rail (now LUAS) as proposed.

    In 1997, Dublin’s light rail was proposed as one interconnected system (see Figure 1). However, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce opposed on street LUAS. In May 1998, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrat government decided to develop Dublin’s light rail system (now LUAS) as follows

    1. Phase 1 – Line A from Tallaght to Middle Abbey Street;
    2. Phase 2- Line B from Sandyford to Sr. Stephen’s Green;
    3. Phase 3 – an eastward extension of Line A from Middle Abbey Street to Connolly and perhaps then on to the Docklands;
    4. Phase 4 – an underground extension of Line A to Broadstone then continuing with surface running to Finglas and the Dublin Airport.

    This bizarre decision meant that another depot (for maintenance etc.) had to be built for Line B (now the Green Line), as the Red Cow depot (now on the Red line) could not service trams, although it was designed and built for three LUAS lines!

    At the time, I estimated that the cost of connecting the two lines was about the same as the cost of acquiring a site and building another depot. The only remaining green space next to the Sandyford Business district became the depot. Recently Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council re-zoned an existing brownfield site to create public open spaces.  This was a belated response to the growth of offices and residences in that area.

    Nothing was done to build the Phase 4 short tunnel under the city centre, as decided in 1998. Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Government had an opportunity to correct its basic error when ‘A Platform for Change. Final Report An integrated transportation strategy for the Greater Dublin Area 2000 to 2016’ was published.

    Figure 2. LUAS-on-street light rail.

    This proposed an on-street LUAS network (see Figure 2) as one of a set of mutually reinforcing measures designed to make it easier to move around the Greater Dublin Area. Note that this report proposed, inter alia:

    1. A LUAS line through Drumcondra to Dublin Airport with a spur line to Howth Junction, which has DART and commuter rail services;
    2. A Docklands loop across a then proposed bridge at Macken Street– now the Samuel Beckett Bridge.
    3. The LUAS Green line was to be upgraded to Metro.
    Figure 3. METRO segregated light rail.

    The Metro then proposed is radically different to MetroLink. The decision to extend the Green LUAS line through Broadstone to Broombridge on-street foreclosed the possibility of having a short tunnel between Ranelagh and Broadstone, as the Government decided in 1998.

    To see what a mutually-reinforcing set of rail-based options for the Dublin looks like see Figure 4. Bus services were supposed to be designed to complement this.

    Figure 4 Integrated rail transport for Greater Dublin Area

    Back to the Future

    It is time for a reset for MetroLink, which it is projected will cost up to a staggering €23 billion, which is two or three times the original estimate, especially given the economic uncertainty that has arisen since Donald Trump became President in January 2025.

    The application to extend the Green Line LUAS to Finglas is an opportunity to extend that project to Dublin Airport, as Cathal Daughton pointed out in a recent article. While welcome, the extension of the LUAS Green Line from Broombridge in Cabra to Charlestown in Finglas should have continued the additional 3km to Dublin Airport to create a city centre-airport rail link while the Metro is being built.

    TII estimate that the 4km LUAS Finglas project will cost between €420 and €720 million. Getting to the Airport could be done by extending LUAS through Ballymun to the old airport road at Santry (see Figures 14 and 15). That route would avoid the cost of going over or under the M50, in addition to serving more residential and business areas.

    Is journey time between Dublin City Centre and the Airport an issue?

    NTA published a number of Dublin Airport passenger surveys over the past twenty-five years .  These reports show that most passengers: take less than one hour to get to the Airport (see Figure 5); are travelling for holiday/leisure/visiting family friends (see Figure 6); and are not going to Dublin City Centre (see Figure 7).

    Figure 5. Journey Times to Dublin Airport 2001-2022.
    Figure 6. Trip purpose Dublin Airport passengers 1998 – 2022.

    The NTA reports show the purpose of passenger travel has scarcely changed over the past twenty-five years. This suggests that most passengers are not pressed for time.

    As regards the landside origin/destination of these passengers, NTA collected the data in surveys done in 2001, 2011, 2016 and 2022. The published reports do not, however, contain summary data for the years 2016 and 2022. The reports of the 2016 and 2022 surveys do not contain any explanation for this omission. The published data from the 2001 and 2011 reports show that less than one-quarter were going to/coming from Dublin City Centre (See Figure 7).  Any passengers that need faster journey times between Dublin Airport and the city centre have the options of getting taxis which can go through the Port Tunnel and use bus lanes.

    Why has the National Transport Authority (NTA) stopped publishing data on the landside origins/destinations of Dublin Airport passengers? Without such data, how can trends be assessed as a basis for investment?

    This does not correspond with what Robert Watt (then Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform) wrote in 2017. Among the outputs in 2014 from these economists is the Comprehensive Expenditure Report 2015-2017, a review of agri-taxation measures, and an evidence-based Strategic Framework for Investment in Land Transport. This work is high-quality economic analysis undertaken by Irish Civil Servants [my emphasis].

    Figure 7. Dublin Airport Passengers landside origin 2001, 2011.

    Arrival times for passengers departing Dublin Airport

    TII claim that MetroLink will result in morning peak journey time savings of fourteen minutes from St. Stephen’s Green to Dublin Airport. During weekdays, the morning peak (mainly into Dublin) is from 07.00-10.00 with an evening peak from 16.00–19.00 (mainly out of Dublin).

    NTA reported on the departure times of departing passengers. The reports for 2001 and 2011 did not contain this data aligned with peak hour travel times, see Figure 8. However, the 2016 and 2022 reports did, see Figure 9.

    Figure 8. Time of Arrival at Dublin Airport for Departing Passengers 2001, 2011.

    The 2016 and 2022 results offers insight on the impact of airport travel at peak commuting times. Note that the fourteen minute time saving is on a journey that is in the opposite direction to the normal city-centre inbound traffic we hear about in traffic bulletins covering the 07.00-10.00 morning peak.

    For 2022 (see Figure 9), over 70% of departing passengers travelled to Dublin Airport outside the peak commuting times of 07.00-10.00 and 16.00-19.00. This is up from the 60% reported on for 2016. This lack of fit between peak commuting times and the times when most people travel between the Airport and the city centre is not a robust basis for offering a cost-benefit of this MetroLink project.

    Figure 9  Time of Arrival at Dublin Airport for Departing Passengers 2016, 2022

    Commuting in the Dublin area

    Census 2016 maps (Figures 10 and 11) suggest that most commuting within the Greater Dublin Area within the M50; along corridors; to the North West (Blanchardstown N3/M3 corridor); the west (north/south of the N4/M4 Lucan Clondalkin area); the south-west (N7 Naas Road, N82 Tallaght).

    Neither Dublin Airport nor Swords stand out as places which call for exceptional investment to enhance public transport for people who live and/or work in those locations.

    The reports of the latest Census do not reproduce these maps. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) did not give any reason for dropping these maps from the Census 2022 report on commuting.

    Figure 10. Feeder Towns into each Dublin Census 2016.
    Figure 11. Catchment area of major workplace locations.

    North Dublin Compared to other parts of Dublin

    More people live in the north part of Dublin City than in any other part the Dublin area (see Figures 12 and 13). This has been the case for the past thirty years.

    Why is this area getting less attention for enhancing public transport than the route to Swords?

    Figure 12 Dublin City North population compared to other areas in Dublin 1991-2022.
    Figure 13. Dublin City North population compared to Fingal 1991-2022.

    Fingal East and Fingal West are based on the study area used for the NTA/AECOM Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study. These areas do not correspond to the new Dáil constituencies, which replaced Dublin North for the 2024 General Election.

    Comparing the North part of Dublin City to Cork is revealing. Earlier this month, the NTA began public consultation on the Emerging Preferred Route (EPR) for an eighteen kilometre twenty-station LUAS line for Cork. This is to support the objective of Cork becoming the fastest-growing city in Ireland over the next twenty years, with a targeted growth in population of 50 to 60 percent.

    In 2022, Cork City had a population of just 224,000. Growing by 50% (to 336,000) would mean that Cork’s population would still be less than the 346,000 people now living in the north part of Dublin city in 2022.

    A LUAS loop for Dublin North City

    In 2015, I commissioned two maps from the All-Island Regional Observatory (AIRO). These showed the then existing and proposed rail-based commuter services superimposed on, firstly Dublin’s Economic Core were measured as having more than seven hundred jobs per square kilometre; and secondly population density in the Dublin area, based on the then most recent Census 2011.

    In March 2024, I recommissioned an update based on the 2022 Census and the proposed MetroLink. On these, I superimposed a proposal for a North City LUAS Loop (see Figures 14 and 15)

    This North City LUAS loop would better serve the over one and a half million people in the Greater Dublin Area than the proposed MetroLink, as it recognises that most commuting takes place within the M50.

    This forms a network with the existing LUAS system, unlike the proposed MetroLink. It also serves parts of Dublin in which most people live. Furthermore, it would cost about €7 billion, i.e. less than a third of the estimated €23 billion MetroLink is projected to cost, and extends the proposed Finglas LUAS to sustain a programme of experience and supply chains required for LUAS in other urban areas, such as Cork and Galway.

    Ever since the 1998 decision to build LUAS, siloed thinking has prevailed. The public authorities did not follow through on the decisions taken then. MetroLink is just the latest example of that kind of ‘ad-hocery.’

    They have misdirected investment, as is clear by the failure to create a single integrated LUAS network as the key element of a series of mutually -reinforcing measures to enhance our capital city region.

    Figure 14. LUAS Loop North Dublin’s Core Economic Area Census 2022.
    Figure 15. LUAS Loop North Dublin Population Density Census 2022.

    Firstly, this proposed North City LUAS loop serves the northern part of Dublin’s Core Economic Area and the populated areas comprehensively, taking in Phibsboro’, Cabra, Finglas; Poppintree, Charlestown, Ballymun, Northwood; Santry, Dublin Airport, Swords, Drumcondra; Coolock, Beaumont, Kilmore, Edenmore, Donaghmede;

    Secondly it is integrated with LUAS and could link with a Docklands (North and South) LUAS loop using the Samuel Becket Bridge which is designed to carry LUAS.

    Thirdly, it offers two rail-based links between the Central Business District and Dublin Airport in addition to transport services which use the Port Tunnel, i.e. a direct link on LUAS via either Drumcondra or LUAS CrossCity; an indirect using DART/Commuter services at Howth Junction. There are also links with heavy rail services on the Maynooth/Mullingar/Longford line at both Drumcondra and Broombridge.

    It would also serve important trip attractors/generators including Mater/Cappagh/Beaumont/UPMC medical centres, Croke and Tolka Parks, all the DCU campuses, the Marino Institute of Education in addition to industrial areas at Coolock/Clonshaugh and Santry Finally it offers services to more areas experiencing social deprivation than the proposed MetroLink route.

    It would also serve important landmarks including Mater/Cappagh/Beaumont hospitals, Croke and Tolka Parks, all of the DCU campuses, the Marino Institute of Education. Finally it offers services to more areas experiencing social deprivation than the proposed MetroLink route.

    In its January 2025 Annual Review AECOM – an international consultancy company – called for programmatic thinking as a basis for investment in our future:

    As the world of infrastructure evolves, programmatic thinking is reshaping how organisations across the world approach planning and delivery. This shift to a cohesive, programme-based perspective is also gaining traction across the island of Ireland  It requires not only consistent, multi-annual funding but also a cultural change within individual delivery organisations in how projects are planned, prioritised, and executed.

    As proposed, MetroLink is the polar opposite of this kind of thinking. It reflects the politics of grand gestures more than quiet competence applied consistently over many election cycles.

    Ten years ago, NTA summarised the case for light rail in Dublin see Figure 16.  Despite the population growth, this still makes sense.

    Figure 16. Extract from NTA/AECOM Fingal/North Dublin Transport Study First Appraisal ReportNovember 2014.

  • Review: The Occupant by Jennifer Maier

    How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world?

    This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, and pieces together with feeling and skill. A deft mingling of prose and traditional poems offer pathos, wit, and vulnerable, costly wisdom as 30-odd objects speak from the vantage point of their respective individual existences alongside the titular “occupant,” – an unnamed woman living alone to whom they belong; and whose point of view is also poetically inhabited.

    Maier is at her best in these moving poems, which deliberately rely on the rhythms of one person’s quotidian existence and ‘stuff’ to raise urgent, profound questions about human life and experience. Take, for instance, the goosebump-inducing rebuke of “Alarm Clock” –

    –                       How like you not to see

    that even I, untouched by time, can’t keep it.
                –           Some days I want to drop my hands

    in futility at the way you equate passing with
                –           dissolution: each tick a small erasure,

    like the beat of your own heart: one less,
    –           one less. And have you ever stopped to think
    not even you can spend a thing you can’t possess?

    The wonderful tonal panoply of this collection—which moves with the poet’s characteristically fluid grace through everything from wry humor (Think opposites attract?//Ix-nay on that) to loneliness (The woman wonders if she has taken up knitting because she has no children) to existential angst—is enabled by the dynamic marriage of Maier’s own prolific emotive range with the metaphysical conceit at play throughout The Occupant; which includes in its opening pages Paul Éluard’s words—“There is another world, but it is in this one” –a marvelous and discreet key unlocking the pages that follow.

    In penning this review, I found I couldn’t waste my privileged position as Jennifer Maier’s MFA student-advisee. She was good enough to tell me (following the careful consideration with which she approaches even the smallest endeavor) what inanimate object she would herself elect to become for eternity. (I told her I’d be a gargoyle, which is accurate, if mildly out-of-pocket) She went with a rather more elegant selection—

    ‘As ever, I would be torn between beauty (my French Empire walnut bookcase) and utility (a whisk, or a pair of scissors).  But if I had to be a single object for eternity, I think I would be a mirror – a beautiful one, to be sure.  As a mirror, I could encounter a wide variety of faces and objects and reflect them back, neutrally, without preconceptions. And I would certainly enjoy observing the private responses—satisfaction, dismay–of those searching my reaches for “what they really are,” or believe themselves to be.’

    Because of the immense and obvious thematic consistency, I wondered if Jennifer had encountered a recent, fascinating-if-head-scratching development in philosophy. I shot her an email:

    Are you familiar with the (quite new!!) trend in metaphysics called Object-oriented Ontology?? There’s SO much natural overlap with your book that I think I’ll have to highlight the connection.

    In brief:

    Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.

    She replied—

    I was not aware per se of Object-oriented Ontology, but the objects in my home – or in the Occupant’s, for that matter – may well be “ontologically exhausted,”

    especially today, when I’m trying to get everything back in order after last week’s renovations and painting (I decided to do the same color in the living room—Farrow & Ball’s “Elephant’s Breath,” partly for the name, and partly because I love how it slouches between gray and lavender, depending on light and time of day)

    Ontological exhaustion is no joke—person or saucer or spider—and the remedies seem few and far between. Even so, The Occupant’s occupant appears to find a strange, imprecise respite in Maier’s closing poem; in the character of the light, which may be instructive for us all:

    –             Time is flowing forward again; sunlight gilding
    this still room in the house of the mind that deplores a vacancy as, then and
    now, the Occupant looks up from her writing to trace particles of dust drifting
    everywhere in the air, alighting on every surface.

    Jennifer Maier’s work has appeared in Poetry, American Poet, The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, The Writer’s Almanac, and in many other print, online, and media venues. Her debut collection, Dark Alphabet, was named one of “Ten Remarkable Books of 2006” by the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her second book, Now, Now, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. She serves as writer in residence and professor of modern poetry and creative writing at Seattle Pacific Universit

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • The Inscrutable Mr. Scruton

    At the end of Roger Scruton’s short book On Hunting, an out-of-print memoir about the British conservative philosopher’s discovery and participation in fox hunting during middle age, Scruton focuses on the final days of his cob Bob. Shorn of the energy needed to gallop in herd-like fashion through the landscape as a part of the hunt, B cuts a forlorn figure. Like a boxer no longer fit for the ring, he appears to live a half-life, waiting ominously for the end to come:

    The time came when he could no longer hunt; nor could he stay in the field, where he would overeat and become bloated and hobbling. Nor could he be ridden, since deprived of hunting, he became increasingly curmudgeonly and depressed, shying at every flutter in the hedgerow (p.131).

    Scruton’s memoir is a defence of country life as it manifests in the sport of fox hunting, a sport banned in the UK on animal rights grounds. Some call the text polemic. Others a rant. Disillusioned with life, the ‘post-modern’ as he calls the contemporary age, Scruton takes refuge in the Cotswolds where he begins riding a pony called Dumbo. Slowly, like a magnet pulling him in, he discovers the hunt. He is soon a true believer. His life changes dramatically through this discovery, as an obsession takes him in its grip. At one point, having taken up a US academic post, Scruton flies home every Friday to hunt at the weekend. He finds in the hunt the essence of an England he academically locates as the springboard of conservatism, a melting point of class interest that pushes against the prevailing accusation that fox hunting is the domain of the posh. Scruton claims fox hunting is an alliance of country folk across class barriers, the trace of an older community life that respects nature as Other to the human realm.

    But he doesn’t stop there. A sentimental urge to dismiss fox hunting as a sport, Scruton argues, lends it cruel and barbarous as an activity, lacking modern sophistication. The fox is invested with piety. Animals are rendered redundant rejoinders of pity and sentiment. Nature, Scruton believes, has little room for pity: the wild takes root in the multiple forces of the herd. Scruton writes of Bob’s impending retirement as a lament to the cob’s lack of purpose when he has been removed from the expenditure of hunting – the ‘flourishing’ of the horse in a multi-species environment.  He turns to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence by way of defending the practice of fox hunting as a sport that requires the eternal recurrence of the individual fox to protect the general species. The traditions of country life depend on renewing the species to maintain the hunter-gatherer on the land. This, ultimately, accounts for an attachment to the natural world.

    To read and engage with Scruton’s writing is not to necessarily agree. One of his critics Jeanette Winterson, appears on the sleeve lauding the book as brilliant and horrible in equal measure. Scruton’s father lamented Old England’s vanishing but had little truck with countryside traditions his son was drawn to. My father, in contrast, was a hunt master and a GP heavily invested in the family planning movement in the West of Ireland (he was involved in legalising family planning as a medical resource). He saw little contradiction in sitting atop nature’s totem as a progressive modern. His interest in tradition did not extend to the Church, its hierarchy or the power it yielded. Like Scruton, my father was drawn to the cross-class dalliance of a sport I was introduced to as a child, a multispecies environment made up of horses, hounds and humans that left a considerable mark as a source of moral debate. The impact of my own involvement with the sport was not just experiential. It was philosophical to the point of ontological. For in the throes of the hunt, horse and human give up their singularity, adrenaline mounts and the normal limits of everyday life are transgressed. The horse jumps fences it would not ordinarily entertain, outside of the collective embroglio of the hunt. An energy pulsates through the collective, as Scruton notes, that engenders the primeval, pre-modern, pushing the group beyond the boundaries of a day to day ‘identity’ that takes root as a singularising force. Like Winterson, I find Scruton’s text both fascinating in parts and deeply problematic in others.

    Scruton’s distaste for modern culture is prevalent across his memoir. He has a disdain for New Labour and Blair’s alliance with Britpop: a regressive force he finds wrapped up in the trimmings of progress. He fails to look outside the official corridors of power, at the parallel culture that rose in the late 80s amidst the slack spaces of recession England. Rave was banned and supressed like fox hunting in the 90s. Scruton hardly mentions a phenomenon that shares many of the melting pot properties he finds in fox hunting, albeit settling in rural spaces after its suppression. Rave culture, as Simon Reynolds and Jeremy Deller respectively argue, loosened the class divide so that tradesmen meshed with students, hooligans with new age travellers, and a culture evolved that transmutes the becoming-animal of the herd into the collective imbroglio of the dance. Scruton does, funnily enough, equate hunting with dancing at one point in his text. The point of intersection, however, lies in class dissolution, de-individuating properties of the collective and an energy manipulated by the adrenaline-fuelled order of the huntsman qua DJ. Hunting and raving manifest in collectives, the chaos of the herd managed and given unity by the totemic figure of the huntsman and the DJ. Both forms of congress are marked by slow tempos succumbing to the impetus of insistent speed: the beat line that affects the dancers, the scent that regales the horse and hound moving, pack-like, across terrain humans follow in suit.

    Does Scruton miss these cultural outlets? Outlets that generate the same collective spirit Scruton finds in hunting? Scruton laments the erosion of rural practices that bind people in labour. Profound alienation comes with modernity, a symptom of a society Scruton feels increasingly enframes nature as instruments. Animals that roamed the land as fellow beings across a multitude of species are readily encountered as instruments with no recourse to the broader collective challenges of the species. One does not have to agree with Scruton, or indeed agree with his support of fox hunting, even his turn to Heidegger, to feel some kind of affinity with the malaise that drives him from the city. I felt a similar malaise. I became disillusioned with suburban city life. Like Scruton, I was fed up with middle class suburbs and customs. I moved to the country in 2017 to get close to a more organic life.

    Scruton leaves London to embrace the last vestiges of old England. Later this year, I will publish a memoir A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love and Companionship in Rural Ireland with Dopplehouse Press in the US about moving to the country like Scruton from the perspective of a sheepdog I found on a desolate farm. I discover the old of Ireland. For many years, I disliked Scruton. I saw him as a toff philosopher who represented everything I disliked about toffs in general. I read his book on hunting out of curiosity, and although far from seduced by his argument, valued his reflections on the old. I began to recalibrate my memories of riding horseback in the West of Ireland. One of my abiding memories, and one triggered by Scruton’s text, is jumping stone walls pushed on by the adrenaline that seemed to lift me out of myself. The ‘I’ of individuated self-trappings seemed to momentarily evaporate in time. I resisted the lure of the hunt as a sign of moral decay and spent a lifetime exploring the collective dissolution of the ‘I’ in other transcultural forms. Two events occurred that led me to reflect on this earlier time in my life as part of a book that pressed my own interest in an old vanishing Ireland. First, my father died in a car crash. He was travelling home from a point-to-point in Ballingary in County Tipperary when he collided with another car (Scruton mentions point-to-points as social extensions of the hunting community in his book). I missed a call the evening before, when I was driving from Ballybunnion with kids in tow. My father was doing something he always did, I thought. He could wait. He left behind horses, cats and dogs, and acres of land.

    The second event is captured in the memoir title. It concerns finding a sheepdog named Oscar on a rundown farm, part of an old ascendency listed estate in the wild of East Clare. Oscar was living there alone, and little is known about his early life. He was undoubtedly bred to work sheep and cattle. His demeanour, long-haired and a little bigger than a typical border collie, has been described as a collie and working sheepdog. An animal that is not a pet. The book tells of rehabilitation against the rhetorical ‘where are you?’ that aggravated the mind of a son dizzy with loss. Over the four years explored in the book, a rabbit hole is travelled similar to the hole Scruton discovers in middle age. Scruton absconded to the countryside from London, took refuge in age-old traditions of the land. I too, absconded and took refuge. Unlike Scruton, however, who found in nature the mantra of the herd, the hole pulled me back into an Ireland I had lost touch with over decades of city living, rooted in the symbiotic cultivation of care between a sheepdog and me. Simply, I had to understand a ‘companion animal’ that beyond all consideration of creatures and pets I had encountered before seemed to live on my timeline alone. I wanted to understand symbiosis between species as an ontological foundation of life.

    I began the text as a project. A story that would tell of finding and rehabilitating Oscar in words and illustrations, against the realisation that my father was really gone, during the Covid 19 lockdown. I had extra time on my hands due to the restrictions and sought to make hay while I could. The story starts in 2017 in East Clare, on an abandoned farm and ascendency estate before coming full circle in the summer of 2020. By writing a book about a companion dog that led me to the inscrutable Mr. Scruton, along with many of those who sit on the opposite side of the animal rights debate – Nobel Laureates such as J.M Coetzee and Olga Tokarczuk – I was able to find solace, away from the debilitating lockdown, in a world of thought and action.

    The book focuses on symbiosis and companionship. How does symbiosis manifest between a dog and handler? How important are interspecies relations based on work? Unlike nimble short haired dogs running at break net speed, spitting their fire at sheep beckoned to move at the command, subject to a master’s whistle, Oscar is a slow and meticulous mover. Everything happens through his eyes. To understand his behaviour, a being that arrived when the reality of my father’s death was beginning to hit home, I did a Scruton and turned my focus on working animals – went down a rabbit hole of all consuming proportions. But unlike Scruton, I returned to the surface with one unanswered question. I was propelled by a more obtuse problem. Is it possible, I ask, for a nonhuman animal, a dog, to care for a human? For Scruton, the animal fascinates in its instinct, coming alive in the multispecies hunt, like a sheepdog running the galley in line with the farmer’s commands. Symbiosis between nonhuman and human brings benefits. But the question that propels my focus in A Sheepdog Named Oscar is another: can nonhuman animals really care for humans? Is to care a transaction that brings more than utility?

    Perhaps a rhetorical question. A question, or plural, destined for the never-ending to and fro of analysis. But in asking this question I was delving into a minefield that encompassed so much of what is real. By standing on this minefield, I was peering into another world. For years I tried to get Oscar to swim in some way. At the beach, when the tide had come in, I would run into crashing waves in the pretence that I was engulfed by water, the froth of the ocean spinning around in all directions. And though he became visibly frustrated, agitated, dipping his toes in, he refused to swim. He never made it past first base. Sometimes, when crossing a stream near the woods around the corner from our house, I motioned to push him in. I hoped instinct would kick off and he would overcome his fear. But it was too difficult. I could not entrust myself to do it. He trusts me not to hurt him. And I worry that pushing him into the water will hurt him. He looks at me, like he knows things are awry, and his drooping and begging face seems to say so. Scruton criticises animals’ rights activism that, he believes, confuses nonhuman and human. He believes a kind of confusion satiates the impulse to do good (the Disnifying process, as he calls it). Perhaps, in not pushing Oscar, I am not shielding him. Maybe he wants to fall in and swim, and I inevitably hold him back? Walt Disney writes the script and draws the animation. Or something like that. But this argument doesn’t convince me entirely. Too much runs counter.

    Anecdotes rush in. There’s one about swimming, from Sunday of the August Bank Holiday, in 2021. We are driving across county lines to collect our son Anton from a friend’s house in Kilkee and decide to make a family day out. It is high summer, perfect for a picnic and swim. We stop off in Kilrush after seeing, from the car, groups of people picnicking and sunbathing beside water. Then we wander down to the rocks, lay our towels out and keep Oscar on a leash. There are kids and dogs on the beach and people might start to get uppity about him wandering.

    I decide to cool off and tell the gang to mind my stuff. I release Oscar from the leash and let him sit at the rock. I am of the impression he will wait on the sand while I swim, his concentration fixated on my body descending into the water. I make my way further, submerging myself in water shallow for a considerable distance. To swim I need to walk out at least a hundred meters, where there is only one person whose body is fully submerged in water. I push through the water, making incremental advances until the water reaches my waist and then I dive through the water, swimming as best I can in the shallow terrain. The water deepens until eventually I am swimming freely, the silver rays of sunlight bouncing off the surface.

    ‘Get him out. He’s filthy. Dogs aren’t allowed to swim in the estuary,’ the other guy swimming beside me shouts over in my direction. I remember realising it was the estuary we were in, and it was why the water was so shallow for so far, but not really taking in what he meant about a dog. Then I turned to face in towards the beach, where the other swimmers were looking. About one hundred and fifty metres from the shore, Oscar was swimming towards me.

    His head was just above the water line, but I could see that his legs were working in overdrive beneath. I told the other guy swimming who began remonstrating about Oscar swimming like a war had broken out to take a hike. The ‘F’ word might even have been used. I made the point that Oscar was probably a lot cleaner than most of the humans happily swimming in the estuary.

    Oscar swam around my back, circling me until I could hold him, my feet touching the ground. In the moment of touch, the two hearts of two species rubbing against one another, I thought of many times I tried to coax him into water and failed. What had changed? Why did he leave the others and act, pushing against whatever sensation is made manifest in language as ‘fear,’ to be by my side. What was he doing when pushing himself into an experience so foreign to his nervy nature? He was not a swimmer. He hated water. He was a sheepdog bred for land.

    Few sights have overwhelmed me to a point of astonishment, as the one of Oscar swimming in the estuary so far from the beach, an astonishment that captivated my wife and son to the same degree as they watched him swim towards me. In Jason Molina’s ‘Lioness,’ the artist sings of two lions who fall in love. One is on one side of the Nile, the other lives across the river. Their attraction compels them to risk their lives to swim out into the river so that they can meet each other eventually. At a pivotal moment, Molina sings the critical refrain on repeat ‘I will swim to you, I will SWIM TO YOU.’ The song is not really about a lioness. It is about burning rocks of love, that makes two hearts beat as one. It is, for me, about an animal too afraid to swim until a friend and master is in danger. A Sheepdog Named Oscar is an attempt to understand these burning rocks, as expressed in Molina’s refrain ‘I will swim to you.’ These lines manifest as a kind of love that evolves from the blood of a sheepdog and touches a human. Care that emits from a human and touches the life of the nonhuman who swims to him. The sheepdog who watches another fall into water and who leaps into action. What compels Oscar to swim through the cold and alien water, so that ‘I’ and ‘you’ can melt into the temporal plane of ‘we?’ Is it simply love, designed to show humans it exists outside the limitations of the human realm?

  • Electronic Music: ‘stepping into a space of anticipation’

    I play electronic music, experimental ambient sets or hypnotic techno sets. It’s exciting to begin a set, stepping into a space of anticipation. The audience doesn’t know what’s to come, nor do I. I start with something and if I’m lucky, I catch them – they follow me. Together, we create a journey in the very moment. I feel the concentration in the room, the energy shifting, and I adapt, choosing the next track, deciding when to layer it on the other, manipulating the tonality, intensity and speed of the track, laying the foundation stones for the subsequent trip…

    It needs a little while to let go of the rest of life, of everyday thoughts, to feel into yourself with your eyes closed and then – finally to dissolve in the darkness accompanied by flashes of coloured light, immersed in the mass of moving bodies. You become part of the whole, swaying as one, moving uniformly, like a vast, flowing, breathing organism – connected here on the dancefloor where identity dissolves and perception reshapes itself: time blurs, bodies merge, the individual dissipates into the collective.

    It can be truly spiritual. In this experience, you forget yourself entirely, your body, your thoughts, your presence. You let go of everything. You don’t think, you just feel, you follow, you become. Like water you adapt, you yield, you move with the currents, faster, slower, dissolving into rhythm, merging with vibration. Water is fluid, like identity, layered, ever-changing, in a constant process of becoming. It carries both clarity and ambiguity, flowing freely yet shaped by its surroundings, suspended between movement and stillness. Boundaries shift, the line between self and environment blurs. You are neither fixed nor defined; you are in motion, open to change. Everything is allowed, everything can happen.

    Image: Olena Goldman

    These are transitional moments, where structure dissolves and individuals arrive at a threshold where identity is fluid and communal experience transcends social hierarchies. This is how Victor Turner describes rituals (1969). The dancefloor, much like a ritual space where music dictates movement, where sound sculpts space, is where a new kind of freedom emerges. It is a place outside of everyday roles, outside of expectations, where for a moment, nothing is fixed. Turner speaks of liminality, of states in which the usual order is suspended, and something new can take shape. That is exactly what happens here: identities blur, connections form in ways they wouldn’t elsewhere, and everything feels open, undefined, possible.

    It is rare to be carried away like that. It’s magical. Unpredictable and each time original. Both the DJ and the audience are surprised, overwhelmed, grateful for this truly sacred moment of presence and synchronization. A fleeting peace of mind.

    This dissolving is in the purest sense meditative – also for the DJ. A set is never just their own, it is co-created, woven together in the moment, unique, ephemeral, unrepeatable. The DJ is not a solitary figure but a responsive entity, deeply intertwined with the audience. They do not dictate the atmosphere, they translate and amplify it and therefore have to be deeply concentrated. The energy in the room is never the same, it is dependent on the sound system, the light, the composition of people, their level of awareness of the fact that everything contributes to the situation, the experience. And it depends on the kind of space that is given. Can people trust, do they feel safe, are they open, do they respect? The energy changes constantly and the DJ has to sense these shifts, adapting to them in real-time, building, withholding, intensifying, releasing. DJs are looked at as in charge, they are in a power position but it is much more a collaborative, spontaneous cooperation of the delicate, symbiotic relationship between the DJ and the crowd. Everything is a shared responsibility: every time searching for a new balance.

    Image: Francesco Paggiaro.

    We shape everything by the way we interact. And all is based on the shared possession and experience of our senses at this very moment; overlaying everything: the music we all hear.

    Techno is a pulse, a steady bum bum bum bum, as Underdog Electronic Music School puts it in words in their YouTube Video “The Ten Rules of Techno“. The kick, four-on-the-floor or broken-up, lays the foundation, a force that grounds everything in 1, 2, 3, 4… But this is not rigid. Techno moves, it steers, it teases. The drum machine drives the sweat, bouncing off rumbles, basslines, toms, syncopations pull against, making you want to move while acid synths carve out liquid, geometrically branching paths that make you follow in unknown heights and depths. It is simultaneity, the parallel pursuit of different sequences, complexly layered, sometimes offset, mixed up, chaotic. Then there is the play between fullness and emptiness, it’s a game of tension and release, build things, fill things, scoop it up, scoop it up and then drop it: release back into simplicity or – into silence. Suddenly.

    It is an adventure, fluid, unpredictable. The presence becomes an experience: to dive into the sound, to let it carry you, beyond thought, into the here and now, into somewhere in space, into a dark forest deep within yourself, and then back into this room where you stand among others, feeling their presence, their nearness. You sense they are on the same journey. Your breathing synchronizes, heartbeats align. You are connected, finally, existing together, in this fleeting moment of peace. Finally.

    The British anthropologist and music journalist Simon Reynolds explores this idea in Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (1998), where he describes techno not as a genre built on melody or lyrics, but as something far more primal: a textural experience, a hypnotic layering of sound that dissolves the listener into a state of flow. He argues that techno’s essence lies in its ability to bypass conventional musical structures and instead operate on a deeply physical and neurological level – music that is felt rather than merely heard – an architecture of sound where basslines function like heartbeats, where synth waves stretch and contract like breath, where the absence of words opens space for unfiltered emotion.

    Music moves us, sooner or later, inevitably. We cannot resist, it happens naturally, subconsciously. It affects us on a fundamental level. It is human to be touched by music. And it is not just emotional, it is also physical. The sound waves go through our bodies, we shiver. The beat carries us forward, makes us move, quickening our breath, accelerating our heartbeats, making us sweat. We are hypnotized by the repetitive patterns, captivated, entranced, seized, our entire brain capacity taken up by it. It is uncontrollable. And it is so, so sweet to surrender to the power of sound, to let go, to dissolve into the collective moment, open and unguarded. This shared experience, this mutual surrender, this collective awareness of the here and now, it unites. It brings people together. It is a purely human experience, perhaps the most human experience. In that moment, you are stripped back to your essence, reduced to your body, to sensation, to togetherness, regardless of age, origin, social background, gender, or religion, it is unity, and that is incredibly valuable. It brings peace. It is gratitude, fulfillment. It reminds you that you are enough – all of us, together, each of us individually, free from pressure, from expectations, from obligations, from time, from fear. You do not have to do anything. You just are. And you are part of something vast, something beautiful.

    Image: Mark Angelo Sampan,

    Techno pulses through bodies, vibrating between structure and chaos, identity and anonymity, self and collective. Its relentless repetition, its resistance to narrative, creates an experience that is both deeply personal and entirely communal. A space where bodies are freed from definition, where identity becomes a shifting echo of sound and sensation. Here, structure collapses not into chaos, but into something more elusive: a moment outside of time, a fleeting immersion into something beyond the self. You follow the music, and you do not know where it will take you. That is trust. To listen to, to dance to, to experience techno is to let go, to be carried, to become rhythm. It is freedom.

    Feature Image of the author by Saskia Schramm