This piece is not intended to provoke. It is more a look at the way people’s minds are shaped, how people think, and how that is articulated towards others.
I realized something was ‘ratten’ in the state of ‘Norn Ireland’ when I was about four. My half-brother of about six or so and I were walking the street just on the periphery of our Nationalist Catholic housing estate, whereupon a teenager brandished a samurai sword, and with a twist of anger in his face said to us: ‘Youse are Fenian bastards.’
I was perplexed even at that young age. We would venture around the estate pretty often so it was nothing new being out on our own during the day but this situation was … as I would grasp later, characterised by something that I would often hear in the rising and vitriolic anger during my life
‘Dirty Fenian bastard!’ and, ‘Fucking black bastard!’
These sectarian epithets, ‘terms,’ are learned from family members, from the local community, whether it be friends, etc., and were reinforced in those communities when I was growing up. Handed down. Indeed, I have repeated some sectarian hatred and bad language myself to tarnish ‘the other side’ i.e., the hated, and much-vaunted, enemy.
They are known in psychological terms as Interjections – or interjects. Which can be defined as the unconscious acceptance of terms, ideas, and personality traits of parents, guardians, and others we are close to when developing.
This language of physical revulsion, termed ‘the Sartrean Other,’ is purely tribal; a visceral reaction to ‘difference.’ The anatomy of disgust – physical revulsion. One is revolted by this other person, who does not worship the same way and that is to be feared, ridiculed and mistrusted – whole-heartedly.
Bigotry came swarming from the pulpit, the soapbox, and the barstool from fervent rhetoricians stoking tensions. Revisionism is a strong pill that many swallow. Leafing out the hurts and wrongs of the past from the blood-soaked history of the place. Darkness lies there amongst the weeds where goblins live and thrive. The goblins of fear-mongering suspicion – like you have an aura around you defining you as a being from a particular community, and once confirmed that aura becomes a symbolic role: to hate, to destroy, and to kill.
I have witnessed the teeth-binding, red-faced fury of hatred during a riot in Belfast when the two tribes were pitted against each other – the furore of two communities each on one side of the road separated by the police.
The din was deafening. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What circle or balcony of Dante’s Hell is this?’
Reinforced bigotry, non-capitulation, and plaintive victim-hood have been the two imposing forces that have fitted so succinctly into a certain kind of joint which once forged is forged into eternity in a union of unrest and hatred.
I once worked in a factory setting in East Belfast and while on a break went over to the table in the canteen. A colleague pulled out a chair, put the book he was reading down into an open holdall – a Noam Chomsky work by the way – and smiled. His arms were swathed in tattoos. He was stocky but friendly with me. I cannot recall if we chatted much or not but I did wonder if this fella was a Loyalist paramilitary. By the look of him, I’d opt for, yes, but looks can be deceiving. One thing is for sure, he looked like a tough individual.
Afterwards I wondered about the Chomsky book and thought to myself, ‘Fairplay, you’re reading Chomsky of all folk. For East Belfast, that’s a brave step in self-education.’ I smiled to myself at this autodidact. It was Chomsky’s Who Rules The World?
I told these guys like him, and guys from East Belfast during my shift and on the assembly line, that I was in recovery from alcoholism and do you know what? They listened and nodded their heads and some said, ‘Yeah, my Da was an alcoholic. A terrible alcoholic. Fairplay to you that you are working on it.’ I replied, ‘Sorry to hear that, and, thanks.’ It was gracious. Maybe God was looking over me. Who knows?
I was never queried if I was ‘A taig?’ I have no idea if they thought it. I surmise that it was because I was quiet, well-mannered, and honest with them: ‘I am from Ballymena and I am in recovery from addictions.’ Which is true. I was, and I am.
I worked late a couple of nights and through the night, a few shifts, at the factory and was never, ever questioned or challenged. I worked hard, and in many regards, was silently respected for my hard work.
Then a couple of years ago, I was working with a few guys from the Shankill and, again, do you know what? We became rather friendly.
After our shift(s), they gave me lifts up home to a Nationalist area. Maybe seeing where I lived. Possibly. But that’s the cynic in me, maybe, showing some caution too.
Don’t get me wrong, thirty-odd years ago I could have been taken to a quiet area say, up further than Ballysillan, made to get out and down on my knees and blasted in the back of the head with a gun – a couple of shots for good measure. ‘There goes another Fenian bastard.’ The supposed killers may have said. Blasted into eternity. Like the other victims of sectarian violence. Boom. Gone.
But sectarianism doesn’t just hold a grip on the minds of people back home, from working-class ‘sectarian’ communities. Indeed it can apply to people who refer to themselves as ‘Christian’, and who can be just as evil as the balaclava-clad gunman.
I know because when I was homeless, and in a homeless hostel, in Belfast. I was harassed by a naïve, and arrogant member of staff who would profess themselves to be a ‘Christian’. Their harassment was down to pure green-eyed jealousy. Their religious ethics, and morals, were overtaken by the temper of ‘Getting one over on another human being.’ Because they felt inferior.
Basically, I was getting some attention from a female member of staff, who was to be my ‘link worker.’, This other member of staff did not like this and wanted to put an end to it. There was nothing going on, we just got on, but people noticed. Nothing would happen, nevertheless, this person glowered and bristled in their own way. It was selfish and clearly jealousy.
That’s a pretty bad situation to be in if you feel you have to harass a homeless person in a hostel just because you wanted other staff members in the hostel to worship you.
If you ask me, that was a disgusting way to act toward someone who was going through a difficult, and vulnerable, situation – someone without a familial home or any support. I was coming to terms with my alcoholism, but still in the early stages of accepting the reality and had not hopped on the wagon by that stage. I was struggling.
I also remember working with a young woman from Loyalist Tiger’s Bay on a project, in Belfast. We were chatting together and she said, ‘You know, Neil, there’s no difference between us, this sectarian and religious stuff.’ And I replied, ‘You know, you are 100% right.’ Her conversation released me from the infinity of it, and I knew things would be different from then on; meaning I would have to leave in order to move on with my own life, and be free of it.
People in power, usually part of some particular establishment have a vested interest in preserving the statelet and write about it – with bias. As in, our side, our argument is more legitimate than yours. Hogwash.
Things can be different. As I have outlined my experiences in that factory and with those guys from the Shankill. I simply listened to their story. They listened to mine.
It would be great if you could challenge yourself and listen too. You may learn something. I know I did.
To celebrate International Women’s Week, The New Theatre is presenting ‘Feathers for Rosa’ by Noël O’Callaghan and Douglas Henderson—an unusual tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. Centring on the poem ‘Du liegst | You lie’ by German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, it consists of a thirty-minute performance interspersed by three original songs. There is also an exhibition of paintings, an installation of a basket of white feathers from the Berlin canal swans, and a nine-minute experimental film and music video.
The following dialogue is based on the film script: Speakers are Noël (N) and Douglas (D).
N: I was once chased by an angry swan twice my size…
Years and years of painting swans… this flock lives on the banks of the Berlin canal—the same waterway where the body of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown on January 15th, 1919 and lay for four months undiscovered…or was it?
Did the swans floating above, perhaps the ancestors of this flock, discover it under the ice?
Did the moorhens and ducks spread the news up and down the banks… there’s something in the weeds… something in the weeds… something’s caught.
One day, he brought a poem into the studio…to set to music. It was called ‘Du liegst – You lie’ a poem by Paul Celan… about the murder… and about the body in the canal.
The Flock.
D: I found this poem in an email from my friend Alex. Its vividness and incantational drive seemed to drag me along in its wake. I was a bit surprised, since I associated this German-Jewish poet with poetry of the Holocaust and thought of him as somewhat impenetrable. Had complexity and interpretation veiled an evidently deep political commitment? Could it make a song?
Du liegst im großen gelausche, umbuscht, umflockt
You lie in the great listening, ambushed, flaked round
N. A strange and powerful song emerged and, as we played it night after night, a vision projected itself onto the dark, studio walls… a drowned Luxemburg, disembodied, upside-down, surrounded, Ophelia-like by bushes and waterbirds (umbuscht, umflockt), manifested itself as a sort of stained-glass window… and I made the painting ‘Du liegst’. Was I thinking of Harry Clarke? Yes, I think Rosa should have a stain-glass window. Was I also thinking of Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia or of Georg Basiliz’s upside-down portraits?
D: The poem is a retelling of the brutal murder of Rosa Luxemburg and her political ally Karl Liebknecht… at times mimicking the sadistic language of her killers…Rosa’s body thrown into the Landwehr Canal… her political ally, Karl Liebknecht, riddled with bullets in the Tiergarten…
der man ward zum Sieb, die Frau müßte schwimmen, die Sau
the man became a sieve, the woman had to swim, the pig
Sieve – screen grab from film.
N: The poem is also an account of Celan’s last trip to Berlin just before Christmas 1967…the city in a state of political turmoil following the murder by police of the student Benno Ohnesorg during protests against the visit of the Shah of Iran. During his visit, Celan walked the banks of the Spree and Havel rivers and along the Landwehr Canal past the site of Luxemburg’s death. Further along the canal from here you reach the Hercules Bridge, and in a park nearby, there’s a statue of Hercules fighting a boar… a pig.
geh zu den Fleischerhaken, zu den roten Äppelstaken
go to the meat hooks,
to the red apple candlesticks from Sweden
… the Nazi meat-hooks of Plötzensee prison, the Fleischerhaken… the apple candlesticks from Sweden seen by Celan at a Christmas market in Berlin, the Äppelstaken.
Es kommt der Tisch mit den Gaben er biegt um ein Eden
Here comes the gift-laden table, it turns around an Eden
…Hotel Eden, where Luxemburg was held and tortured before her murder.
D: Candles were important for the Roman Saturnalia, the feast of Saturn, the precursor of Christmas. Hercules offered candles to Saturn in place of human sacrifices…honouring Saturn’s altar not by slaughtering a man, but by kindling lights… Sweden – the refuge of Willy Brandt, the architect of détente in Europe, who once said peace isn’t everything, but nothing is possible without it.
N: Weisestraße in the Neukölln district of Berlin is a ten-minute walk from where we’ve both lived for many years. It’s a typical street for this area… many apartment buildings dating from the end of the 1800s… really nothing to distinguish it from other similar streets in the area… nothing that alerts you to the weight of history. It was here at house number 8 that Rosa Luxemburg, together with her political ally Karl Liebknecht, spent some of their last days before their brutal murder… hiding from fascist militias in the apartment of supporters. Here they held political meetings to discuss the failed January uprising, even read bedtime-stories to their hosts’ children, until, fearing discovery, they had to leave…
D: We did some filming there one day in late December. There was a police raid on a nearby café because of an Instagram post supporting left-wing Palestinian resistance. We met some activists from the feminist anti-capitalist Zora collective who had been targeted there. They asked about our project and were delighted to hear that their name would be travelling to Ireland.
N: Banks of feathers like snow (umflockt)… I started collecting them… apropos of nothing, really, other than their beauty… then thoughts of Emmeline Pankhurst intruded. Her hateful White Feather campaign to send men to their deaths in World War 1. To turn a thing of such beauty into shame… it’s evil. Luxemburg was so different. She urged soldiers to lay down their weapons, to desert… and to know their real enemy. She paid for this with her life…
für sich, für keinen, für jeden
for herself, for no one, for everyone
The time has come to reclaim the White feather, to honour the Deserter…
‘I see them walking,
walking back,
back from the front,
The walking wounded,
The walking dead.’
(from Woman of the Rubble’s speech – ‘Feathers for Rosa’ performance).
Der Landwehrkanal wird nicht rauschen Nichts stockt.
The Landwehr Canal won’t rush. Nothing stops.
‘Feathers for Rosa’ is funded by donations through our gofundme campaign. Donors receive original watercolour sketches of swans made on the banks of the Landwehr Canal.
In a seminal scene at the end of the film Joker (2019) the eponymous character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is being interviewed by Robert de Niro’s character, the TV talk show host Murray Franklin. The Joker asks: “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fucking deserve!” before he shoots Murray Franklin in the head.
My question is this: ‘What do you get when you belittle someone’s work ethic, demean their professionalism, turn it into a tick-box exercise, and laugh at their idealism. “You get a whistleblower.”
After it ended, in May 2023, I received one or two messages from former colleagues who referred to me as “brave” or indeed “very brave”. Honestly, I do not consider myself brave. Pig-headed, stubborn and naively idealistic would be a more accurate assessment; and it’s the ideals that sank me.
Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker.
Origins
This story begins back in 2015 when I accepted a challenge from the daa’s (the commercial semi-state airport company that operates Dublin Airport formerly known as Aer Rianta) then CEO. As an employee of the daa I had been very critical of the behaviour of senior managers, especially the lack of value being accorded to employees. It was during one of these conversations that he challenged me to be part of the solution, rather than continuously carping. He asked me to help reform the organisation’s values.
Having accepted the challenge, I worked with the newly formed values team/committee. A lot of engagement was undertaken to identify what staff valued and were looking for as values in the organisation.
I now suspect it was all done for optics. This is because values only seem important for the daa as long as they do not impact on the bottom line. It is an organisation that seems to be run by accountants, who tend to be fixated on the budget statement at the end of each month. If they did consider values important they would surely have published their last substantive staff survey, conducted with Tower Watson in 2021/2022. That has been buried like it never happened.
I felt that values in the workplace would improve with a more joined-up approach, where people understood how each department worked and that each was reliant on the other.
The daa is a large organisation, reflecting the developing and existing culture of the wider Irish society. What the idealist in me failed to understand was that many people appear content this culture.
There were other impact factors, including the Irish Airlines Superannuation Scheme, long monopolised by Aer Lingus retirees, employees, and executives. I ran for election for one of four places on the Superannuation Committee in October 2008, receiving 1211 votes, 370 short of the last candidate elected, an Aer Lingus Representative.
By this stage the issue of not paying enough into a defined Benefit Scheme had come to a head. This meant that we, as daa employees, like Aer Lingus employees, would become deferred members and enter into separate, defined contribution schemes. A pension product, unlike a defined benefit pension scheme, provides no guarantees.
New entrants into this scheme received (or in some cases had not received) a financial contribution made by the company based on age and role. One such role was being a member of the Airport Fire Service. A medical waiver was required for firemen to benefit from the company’s individual contribution into the new defined contribution scheme.
Having to sign this waiver did not sit well with some of the firemen. A handful refused to sign, and were very poorly treated by daa HR over their principled stance.
Coincidentally, it was around this time that the introduction of the company’s new values initiative was to take place. Two of the values ambassadors were asked to present a short snippet to the fire crew, with the CEO and CFO in attendance. One worked in the daa internal communications team, and I was the other person asked to present.
Sadly, to complicate matters, a senior fire officer rang across on the morning of the presentation to say that the crew were deeply hostile to this presentation and advised that the values ambassadors should not attend.
I was then told that the communications team member would not attend due to this hostility, and was asked, would I? By this stage I had been an Airport Police Fire Officer for about sixteen years and had only recently taken up a full-time role in police training. I understood their anger, but to my mind that pension deal was done, and I was looking towards the future of an organisation aiming to become an aviation security and safety leader. That, at least, was the organisation I envisioned.
So, I went ahead and gave my five-minute presentation. Before I spoke, however, one of the firemen muttered to me that “I would get lackery for this.” I never did, at least to my face anyway.
I bumped into that individual recently, a few months before I was dismissed by the daa, in a coffee shop near Dublin Airport. He had just retired, and not in the manner he had wanted. He looked and sounded broken by the way it had ended. Worst of all, after so many years of spending time with his colleagues, he now had so very few people to talk to.
As part of my values’ journey, I had been asked to attend a company seminar in the Radisson Hotel at Dublin Airport. The then head of airport security and I were interviewed on a stage in front of at least eighty staff, many of them management. I spoke about being ill and conducting a review of myself. I described it as like holding a mirror up to my face and being unhappy with what I saw.
I compared this to the introduction of the organisation’s values assessment – holding up a mirror to the face of the organisation. None of us, I said, could be proud of how the daa had previously behaved, and this was an opportunity to move forward more positively.
Sometime after this I was stopped by a HR manager who told me they loved my speech and analogy about the mirror. They said they had acquired a small mirror and placed at the edge of their desk so that people could see their reflections whenever they were in her office: “to make them look at themselves”, when she was dealing with them.
Image: Daniele Idini.
COVID-19
2020 arrived bringing us COVID-19. Mentally, I was very stretched, having been separated for about a year, back living with my parents, and halfway through my first year studying for a Diploma in Legal Studies in the King’s Inns, which required attendance four evenings per week.
As the country and aviation industry effectively closed down for the first lockdown at the end of March, 2020, I had just managed to get myself through a twenty-four-day course with four other police instructors in Tai Jitsu, conflict management, coaching/teaching, control and restraint and handcuffing techniques.
I had had to book a room in the local airport sports complex – as the daa still has no dedicated facility for many of their aviation training requirements – in order to deliver the course and host the instructor from the UK. On another occasion our room had been double booked and we had to conduct this physical course on half of the usual floor space, as the rest had been set up for a wedding!
When the lockdown led, inevitably, to a voluntary severance scheme, the atmosphere at work darkened. Only months before, staff had voted to reject a management proposal called ‘New Ways of Working’. Many of these conditions were now being foisted on us.
It annoys me that people who want to benefit from a severance scheme get to vote on the terms and conditions of those who wish to remain at work. It was not, however, my fight. I was trying to look beyond COVID-19, having assessed it would take longer than six months.
With that in mind, I asked my brother, a budding artist, to offer an artist’s impression based on what I had told him in a rough sketch. I wrote a one-page business idea, or hook as we call it in training, and argued that now was the time to build for the future of aviation.
I sent these watercolours and the idea to the Chief People Officer in May 2020. The daa head office was based in the Old Central Terminal Building. I left the art work and letter with reception and waited. By this stage, many of the office-based staff had begun to work from home. Understandably, it took him two weeks to get back to me.
He got back to me by email regarding my Aviation Training Centre proposal. I recall he said I had put a lot of thought into the idea and said he had asked one of his team to contact me to discuss it further.
Marqette Food Hall and Bar, Terminal 1, Dublin Airport.
“Oh that”
I never heard back from that team member. A couple of months later, however, I bumped into her while she was queuing for a coffee in Marqette Café in Arrivals in Terminal 1. I said hello and she just about managed to say “Hi” in return. I brought up the idea for a training centre and asked whether she had been asked to speak to me regarding the proposal.
“Oh that” was the response. With that she collected her coffee and walked away. “Oh that”. After all my effort.
By this time I had decided I had had enough, and made a complaint of bullying against the Airport Security Manager. It was based on a number of incidents, which I regarded as an attempt to isolate me as the Police Training Manager.
This complaint was brought to the attention of the daa’s Equality Officer, as my own HR business support felt unable to deal with it. She and the Chief People Officer pushed for an informal meeting to address my complaint after the Chief People Officer had first met with the Airport Security Manager. I agreed. No room was booked, instead a meeting was arranged over a cup of coffee at the AMT Coffee Dock on February 17, 2021. No coffee was bought.
The Airport Security Manager attempted to dissuade me – in what I felt was an intimidating manner – from making the complaint. He stated that he would respond with compliance findings against me. In response, I said I would be continuing to pursue the formal complaint.
I left the table and as I walked away he caught up with me. I felt something pushing into my side, which turned out to be his left elbow. I came to a stop and told him to “get his fucking elbow out of my side”.
I let him pass across to my left and started to walk away. I heard him calling after me “bye Matt, see ya Matt”.
I reported the incident to An Garda Siochana and a file was sent to the DPP. Sadly, I had no witness, and it was not caught on CCTV.
I kept pushing the formal complaint, however, and the company hired an external HR consultant. We agreed terms of reference, one being that the investigator would circulate the completed report back to the Equality Officer, and that a full copy would be circulated to the respondents.
The report confirmed there had been an affront to my dignity at work, although the allegation of bullying was not upheld. It also made three recommendations. However, the first recommendation was redacted by the daa in violation of the terms of reference.
On March 15, 2023, while I was still an employee of the daa, the Chief People Officer sent three daa HR managers into the Workplace Relations Commission to have my referral over the complaint of bullying thrown out on a technicality. The adjudicator did not accept their argument and asked all three what was in the partly redacted report. All three claimed they did not know. The adjudicator requested a two week adjournment, and for the Chief People Officer, the Equality Officer and the Airport Security Manager to appear at the next hearing. That hearing has still not taken place. It has been included in my claim for unfair dismissal and penalisation in the workplace over my Protected Disclosures.
A new date had not been agreed before daa HR seized on my email to the board on April 14 2023, expressing frustration at daa HR’s behaviour, claiming incorrectly that it was a letter of resignation.
My frustration was based on the fact that a potential new employer had sought a reference from the Chief People Officer, which was not forthcoming. What did occur, however, was an attempt to file a disciplinary charge against me.
Protected Disclosure
On June 18, 2022, I wrote a letter which constituted a Protected Disclosure to the Minister for Transport Minister, Eamon Ryan. The primary issue was the security culture fostered by the Airport Security Manager and another senior security manager, which, I contended, was leading to a decline in security training standards.
For twenty years, if a newly hired ASU (Officer with the Airport Search Unit) failed any of the screening exams twice they would not be allowed a third re-sit. Now, however, because of staff shortages, ASU trainees were being put forward – with the Airport Security Manager’s approval – for resits after two fails.
This Protected Disclosure was handed to the Minister in the Dáil Chamber by Deputy Duncan Smith of Labour on the June 29, 2022.
For a long time, I had observed the attitude within the daa deteriorate towards aviation security and safety. In my view, it had become a tick-box exercise, and led to a very toxic workplace.
By this stage, in 2022, I had been with the organisation for twenty-four years, having joined the Airport Police in 1998. To remain working any longer in that environment would have killed me, as I had got nowhere with reforming the values of the organisation.
I was to be left to rot, having been unjustly stripped of the rank of Inspector by another senior security manager. This happened, I was told by someone in the organisation because “I did not manage the people above me”. In other words, I did not tell them what they wanted to hear.
For months I heard nothing from the Minister’s office. Then, on October 6, 2022, I emailed the office directly and received a reply from an official saying that although they did have my name, they had no way of contacting me and had decided the Protected Disclosure did not warrant further investigation.
I challenged this and asked to see the initial review and to be provided with further evidence. I still have not seen that review.
Department of Transport officials informed me on October 19, 2022 that the company secretary of the IAA was the prescribed person under SI 367/2020 who I should be dealing with regarding my Protected Disclosure.
Dublin Airport.
Landside Patrolling Risk
Finally, on January 10, 2023, the Aviation Security Manager with the IAA emailed and we spoke. She and a colleague had been tasked with conducting the initial assessment into my Protected Disclosure. After agreeing terms, I met with them on January 30, 2023, and was interviewed for just over an hour.
At this meeting I also provided and highlighted my concerns regarding the daa’s management of the Airport Security Programme, and how I felt that the failure to risk assess landside areas was a mistake. The landside area of an airport is where non-travelling members of the public have unrestricted access, i.e. before security screening. I provided the IAA with a landside risk assessment that I had provided to police management on November 22, 2022. Although acknowledged, it was ignored by the daa security team.
On Friday, March 24, 2023, the head of policy and compliance for the Airport Police circulated an email to police management and sergeants stating that the IAA had issued an update to the National Risk Assessment for Dublin Airport and Airport Police patrolling, which specifically referred to the landside areas.
I now know, thanks to Senator Tom Clonan, that the IAA commenced their investigation in response to my Protected Disclosure into daa security on March 23, 2023, the day before this email was sent.
Image: Daniele Idini
New Role
As I have said, I planned to move on and had been under consideration for a job in a different organisation since January 2023. This role required an enhanced background security check, which in this State can take over fourteen weeks. And so the wait began.
Senior management seemed to think that COVID-19 would give them the flexibility they were always arguing for when it came to regulation. I recall meeting a senior manager during that period in the Arrival’s Hall of Terminal 1. We were both looking at a very empty Arrivals’ screen, and I brought up the CAR (Commission for Aviation Regulation) thirty-minute queue requirement. I said now would be a good time to look at this – prior to re-opening.
“That’s all gone Matt” was the reply. I asked him did he really think so, and he was adamant that it was gone. It hadn’t gone away, aviation safety and security regulatory requirements remained consistent, but the daa had simply stuck its head in the sand.
I should add that I posted a number of thought-provoking pieces on the daa’s company social network, Yammer. One, on May 1, 2022, about leadership, elicited a query from the then CEO. I posted in exasperation at how I had been asked to step up to the mark on values, but had received no support; and another about how, in my view, the organisation had become so very fake, with employees viewed as the problem by an elitist management team.
My last post was in response to the publication of an official report into the culture of the Irish Army. I posted it on Yammer on March 29: ‘Truly dreadful report published today regarding the degrading behaviour of Irish army officers. Thankfully we don’t have that culture or any of those traits in the daa.’ It included a hand on chin emoji, confused or pensive emoji, depending on how you interpret it.
At around 9:30am, on April 12, I received a phone call from my former chief. He requested that I meet him in his office at 10:15am, and strongly advised I bring a work colleague or union official along with me.
I asked what it was about, and he said my Yammer post of March 29. This was the morning that US President Joe Biden was arriving at Dublin Airport. I thought he would have better things to do and responded that it was very short notice; he replied: “I just need to get this done today.”
As a friend put it: “someone else was blowing up his tyres.” I ended the conversation and emailed back, saying that it was too short notice as I could get no one suitable to attend with me. He rang back at 10:30 and apologised for any confusion, saying that it was not necessary for me to bring someone along, and that he only needed to speak with me for a minute. I asked then whether it was an informal chat. He would not admit that but insisted it would only take a minute.
I felt I had done nothing wrong and called to his office. When I arrived he informed me that he was referring to my Yammer post of March 29 to HR. I asked why. He informed me that “it was offensive.” I asked, “to whom?” He informed me after a pause that he found it offensive. I said “you’re the manager, why don’t you deal with it.’
He refused, saying it was going to HR. I replied, “well that is disappointing,” to which he relied “well people can be disappointed.”
About twenty minutes later my prospective new employer emailed to say I had just cleared the enhanced background security check, and requested permission to contact the daa for a reference. Happy about this, I replied I would do so, giving them the Chief Police Officer’s contact details. I thought I was days away from securing the new position.
The next day, the Head of Security HR, emailed to inform me that I was being brought before an investigative disciplinary meeting regarding my Yammer post. The post about the culture in the Army report must have really hit a nerve with daa senior management. Perhaps it was because the Airport Security Manager was a former Irish Army Officer?
The following day, Friday, April 14, I hit back. I emailed the board of the daa, stating that after twenty-four years I intended to move on, but could not do so without a reference, which HR had not provided.
I also stated that I was the one who had made the Protected Disclosure to the Minister, and that I had also been assaulted in the workplace by the Airport Security Manager. I further stated that in my view the daa HR team were untrustworthy and had acted maliciously. I also offered an exit interview as I wished to offer further insights into the daa.
Before emailing the board, I read the company’s exit policy. It states very clearly that an employee resigns to his or her line manager, or HR business support, and is given a notice period based on their employment contract. I had specifically excluded HR or any local management from my email to the board on April 14.
On Monday morning, April 17, 2023 my line manager arrived at my Office. “I hear you’re leaving,” he said. I asked him where he had heard that. “HR told me,” he replied. I asked him who told them. He replied that he did not know. I then held up a copy of the exit policy that I had printed off and said, “someone has jumped the gun here because I have not resigned, my emails to the board specifically excluded you and HR.”
By then, HR had still not provided a reference. From April 12, until May 12 when I received an email from the Chief People Officer instructing me not to report for duty the following Monday, I, along with the SIPTU Sectorial Organiser, had repeatedly emailed to say I had not formally resigned.
It was the company secretary who had taken my email from the daa board and provided it directly to HR. She informed me herself in an email.
It is important to note that in or around October 2022, the company secretary had been handed a copy of the Protected Disclosure, my anonymity removed, by a worker-director and was directly involved with me on another internal Protected Disclosure which she was overseeing.
Since 2019 I have been a student of law at the Honourable Society of Kings Inns. I am in my final year as a candidate for the barrister-at-law degree. It is both an education and a professional qualification. The majority of tutorials take place in the Philpott-Curran Room located at the top of their building on Henrietta Street. John Philpott Curran (1750-1817) was a lawyer, orator and stateman who defended Irish liberties. He also defended United Irishmen, including Wolf Tone.
As I sit and write, a portrait of Wolf Tone, painted by my mother back in 1991 taken from a secondary school history book hangs on the wall behind me. Life is a long and winding road and if you follow your heart you find steppingstones that put you on the right path. There are many famous sayings attributed to John Philpot Curran, one being: ‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.’
I wonder whether it falls to whistleblowers in modern Irish society to maintain that eternal vigilance – crucial to preserving liberty and democracy.
Fact-checking is also surely part of that role. On July 27, 2023, the Irish Times published an article quoting daa sources to the effect that they had been found innocent of any wrongdoing by the IAA, and its subsequent investigation in response to the Protected Disclosure.
This is inaccurate as the IAA amended the National Risk Assessment, in response to issues I raised in my Protected Disclosure, provided to the IAA on January 30, 2023 the day after they commenced their investigation. That issue is now the subject of another Protected Disclosure, one involving the Dáil Transport Committee and the IAA themselves.
The second, partial at least, inaccuracy in that article is the claim that the whistleblower was unhappy over a pay claim. It does not provide context to this. I made the Protected Disclosure on June 22, 2022, and was in receipt of my first negative pay review in twenty-four years on July 26, 2022.
Sadly, most Irish media outlets seem to have no interest in whistleblowers’ accounts. Perhaps they are the victims of bullying by vested interests themselves?
The first Cassandra Voices Podcast, hosted by Luke Sheahan, features a long form interview with the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn. Patrick’s father Claud, a leading British Communist member and journalist fought in the Spanish Civil War and eventually settled in Ireland. Patrick says of his father:
He used to say the big battalion commanders want to convince the small battalions, the weaker, the less wealthy that there’s absolutely no point in resisting the big powers, they might as well give up. Claude believed exactly the opposite, the big powers are always more fragile, that they had points of vulnerability and you can attack them, and that’s why I have just published this book, which will be published later this year which is a biography of my father which is called Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied.’
Following in his father’s footsteps, for fifty years Patrick Cockburn has been practicing the art of journalism with integrity and persistence: a specialist on the Middle East, he has written extensively on wars and political machinations from Beirut to Belfast and Baghdad.
Within books like The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (2002) (written with his brother Andrew), Patrick Cockburn has revealed the workings of Arab dictatorships and Western Imperialism alike. Over the last decade, he has also created a separate, no less distinguished profile as a memoirist: The Broken Boy (2022) describes his survival of a Polio epidemic in 1950s Cork, while Henry’s Demons (2011) co-authored with his son, immerses the reader into the pain of psychosis.
For our conversation with Patrick Cockburn, we sought to sketch out the lives and work of two independent-minded writers: both himself and his father, Claud. As indicated, Claud’s fifty-year career brought him around the world, from Civil War Spain to Wall Street during the crash of 1929, back to 1930s London, where his newsletter The Week both documented and fought the rise of Fascism. It was only after WW2 that Claud moved to Ireland, where Patrick and his siblings would be born from the 50s onwards.
Making use of unclassified MI5 files, and an abundance of material directly remembered from his late father, Patrick spoke to Cassandra Voices as he was preparing the final manuscript of a new memoir, covering Claud’s life.
Patrick also spoke out passionately about coverage of the war in Gaza:
Evil becomes normalised … and a lot of the governments don’t want to recognise and the papers and those outlets that support the governments don’t want to go on about it. So it’s perfectly reasonable that we should have a big story about the Russians firing some rockets into a city in Ukraine and half a dozen people are killed and others injured. That is wrong and that gets a lot of publicity. Then several hundred people are killed in Gaza and that’s on the bottom of the page now, if it’s mentioned at all.
The first part of the podcast is freely available. You can listen to part two by subscribing on Apple podcasts. We will also be sending the second half of the show to our loyal Patreon supporters in the next few days. The decision to charge for the second half comes from our determination to maintain our independence.
The intense green colour of much of the landscape of Ireland – the so-called “Emerald Isle” – bears testimony to Garrett Hardin’s assessment that ‘As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain’[i]. The predominance of highly verdant grassland across most of Ireland is not a natural phenomenon. In most regions hazel and oak are the summit vegetation. The synthetic fertiliser used on the abundant pastures creates an artificial glow. An outsider might assume that the absence of a ‘strong state’ is to blame for an unwieldy agricultural system dedicated to the production of meat and dairy for export, but this is not necessarily the case. This essay argues that state intervention, in the form of a land tax, could provide an important means of ameliorating a system that rewards a shrinking number of farmers, at a high environmental cost. The state can also facilitate the development of ‘alternative agriculture’, involving more sustainable environmental practices, higher employment, improved health outcomes and a reduction in the cost of living for the wider population, but this must allow farmers as Silke Helfrich puts it ‘to act like entrepreneurs on a local scale’[ii].
On the climatic periphery of grain cultivation, and with a wet climate, over millennia farmers, mainly seeking new grazing land, steadily removed most of Ireland’s native tree cover. Thus, according to Mitchell and Ryan in Reading the Irish Landscape: ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape’[iii]. This left a mere twelve per cent of native woodland by the 1400s. An intensive period of British colonisation from the seventeenth century removed much of what was left, leading to the extinction of native fauna, includingthe wolf. The loss of access to woodland also presented enormous difficulties to a native population subjected to land seizure and discriminatory colonial laws. By the eighteenth century the poet Aodhagan Ó Rathaille asks “cad a dhéanfaifimd feasta gan adhmaid / tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár” (Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?). Today, despite ideal conditions, Ireland still has the third lowest coverage of forestry in the EU after Malta and the Netherlands, and much of that is in the form of non-native Sitka Spruce plantations that do further damage to the ecology.
Contemporary Irish agriculture is dedicated to the production of food commodities for export, principally beef and dairy that fuel climate change (the Irish agriculture sector was directly responsible for 38.4% of national Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emissions in 2022). Despite excellent growing conditions, largescale horticulture is rare – and small-scale allotments are few in number – while public health authorities contend with a host of ‘lifestyle diseases’, linked to obesity and sedentarism. Irish agriculture is far from being the result of a free market. The system is underpinned by EU subsidies, and other regulations, which often do more harm than good.
An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847
Thus far we have not referred to the (non-native) staple crop most identified with Ireland, which appears to serve as a vivid illustration of the tragedy of the commons, and the pessimistic view of Thomas Malthus that food production fails to keep pace with population growth over time. Ireland was the first European country to adopt the potato (solanum tuberosum) as a widespread staple. This was an inauspicious development, according to John Reader, as ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated’[iv]. The catalyst for the potato’s successful adoption was the traumatic wars of the seventeenth century especially Oliver Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland (1649-53) since ‘the potato could both be cultivated and stored in a manner which might intuit the spirit of destruction, and the malevolence of the enemy’[v]. However, Henry Hobhouse argues that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazybed, was in the end the most damaging’[vi]. Another author, A. T. Lucas denigrated the ‘dark reign of the potato’ for ‘banishing’ most other foods from the table.[vii]
For the Irish peasant farmer the advantages of the potato far outweighed its disadvantages. The remarkable growth of the population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from approximately two million to over eight million is unlikely to have occurred without the availability of a subsistence crop whose yield exceeds that of wheat, and which was suited to Ireland’s moist, friable soil. The potato has a nutritional profile that allows for almost exclusive long-term consumption unlike most cereals, which lack the essential amino acid lysine; although the tuber has the drawback of a high glycaemic load. At the start of the nineteenth century Irishmen’s heights were greater than those of equivalent Englishmen in a variety of occupations and situations, and life expectancy was higher than most Europeans of that time. Daly has described it as ‘a wonder crop the only subsistence foodstuff which provides a nearly perfect diet, a crop which would feed a family on very little land, in almost all types of Irish soil, irrespective of rain or lack of sunshine’[viii].
As any student of Irish history knows the story ended in tragedy with the Great Famine of 1845-51. The potato blight (phytophthora infestans) proved devastating for the three million out of a population of eight million almost exclusively dependent on it. According to Sen: ‘In no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famine of the 1840s’[ix]. This was because by the eve of the Great Famine three million (out of a population of eight) were living on just one million acres of land which represented a mere five per cent of the total acreage of twenty million. Crotty argues that ‘with twenty million, instead of one million, acres of land available for the production of the population’s food requirements even with the worst conceivable crop failures, an abundance of food could have been grown to feed eight or more millions of people’[x]. This view is endorsed by Mokyr who argues that Ireland was not overpopulated on the eve of the Great Famine.[xi] Perhaps uniquely in the world, the population of Ireland has never scaled similar heights.
Over generations, peasant proprietors would have noticed that holdings were being continuously sub-divided, and that sustenance was increasing dependent on the unpalatable but prolific Lumper variety of potato. Yet the pattern of early marriage and large families endured; gynaecological brakes were not applied as seems to have occurred in other European peasant societies at that time. Importantly, during these decades of unprecedented fecundity, political activism was lacking, even in the face of the continued injustices of the Penal Laws. Notably, most of the leadership of the first republican independence movement, the United Irishmen, were from Protestant and Dissenter minorities in Dublin and, in particular, Ulster, the northern province. A Catholic society denuded of its native leadership (the Earls flew in 1607 and ‘the Wild Geese’ in 1691) failed to mobilise politically.
Surprisingly, Crotty laments the tenant land purchase schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as: ‘[t]he abandonment of competitive rent in favour of a system of peasant proprietorship naturally introduces an element of immobility into the allocation of land among farmers’. He argues that: ‘[t]here are reasons to believe that under Irish conditions this immobility is likely to be particularly severe, leading in turn to serious misallocation of land’.[xii] Thus, between 1850 and 1900 the number of cattle on Irish farms increased by over 60% and the number of sheep more than doubled. The area under tillage declined from 4.3 to 2.4 million acres, but the rural population fell from 5.3 to 3 million. The revolutionary socialist James Connolly identified the effect on rural Ireland: ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places’[xiii]. Crotty argues that:
concentration on cattle and sheep . . . has had an extremely harmful effect on Irish agriculture and on the whole Irish economy. While on the one hand is has led to the enrichment of the numerically small landed interest, on the other it has given rise first to famine and subsequently to chronic emigration and to very slow economic progress for the numerically much greater non-land-owning section of the population’[xiv].
The successful movement for land reform in the late nineteenth century created a society with a preponderance of peasant proprietors who maintained a model of production that offered few employment or investment opportunities.
According to Crotty: ‘The structure of the agriculture, characterized by the predominance of beef-cattle and sheep, provided little opportunity for the employment of labour or capital and with a static volume of output these opportunities did not improve’. He further contends that the interests of farmers, or landowners, and the nation ‘are essentially conflicting’; because: ‘[t]he scope for intensifying grassland beef production is very limited. The profitability of the system depends on a low rate of expenditure’[xv]. Thus, the Irish population continued to decline after independence, while the price of food tended to be at least as high as in Britain, despite far lower population density, and greater possibilities for local production.
Patrick Hogan 1891-1936.
Independence brought little change in agricultural priorities with Ireland remaining a primary producer of livestock products and cattle often exported ‘on the hoof’ to Britain. This was driven by the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan (1922-32) whose sympathy lay with large cattle farmers. The early commercialisation of agriculture has cast a long shadow as farmers have continued to produce commodities for the international market, and purchase their own food from the same anonymous source. In an address to Macra na Feirme in 1974, the psychiatrist Ivor Browne observed the irrational scenario of: ‘a small farmer in Mayo taking his calf to the town to sell and his wife asking him to pick up a chicken for dinner in the supermarket while he is there; he manages to sell his calf for £1 and pays £1.50 for the chicken for dinner’[xvi]. Similarly, writing in 1968, Fennell bemoaned the demise of country markets and how a ‘frequent complaint in Ireland is the lack of variety of in vegetables for sale and the high prices charged’[xvii].
From 1972 the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) perpetuated this pastoral model, generating further specialisation and reducing the unprotected horticultural sector which struggled, as a result, to compete with cheap, often subsidised, imports after the removal of trade barriers. Farm supports did allow large farmers to earn incomes comparable often to urban dwellers but generated further imbalance: a miniscule proportion of Irish farmland is devoted to tillage, much of it used as animal feed; there are over seven million cattle and almost six million sheep in the country.
The adoption of agricultural alternatives from a variety of international ‘toolkits’ could confer significant advantages through reduced dependency on imported food, and increased employment in more labour-intensive tillage and horticulture as well as raising the health of a population that is beset by lifestyle diseases linked to a stunted food culture. One challenge for alternative agriculture is the historic inflexibility in the land market which thwarts diversification. It remains the case, as Mitchell and Ryan observed that ‘In Ireland it is still next to impossible to rent land on a lease of sufficient length to make improvements and where land can be bought it is often in small parcels at too high a price’[xviii]. The CAP subsidy regime maintains the high cost of land, as farmers are guaranteed incomes from privileged pastoral farming.
Any alternative agriculture should involve far wider direct participation than is the case today. Farmers and farm workers could work on a part-time or seasonal basis. The hinterland of cities would be especially important. Crotty argued that: ‘A land-tax offers the only means of reconciling future increases in cattle and sheep prices, relative to those of other farm products, with the general welfare’[xix]. This would involve the broadening of the property tax to encompass agricultural land. Taxation revenue emanating from any land tax could be redistributed in the form of low-interest loans, allowing enterprising individuals or cooperatives to acquire land. However, the involvement of government agencies should be restricted as according to Thirsk:
[T]he strong assumption of our age that omniscient governments will lead the way out of economic problems will not in practice serve. The solutions are more likely to come from below, from the initiatives of individuals, singly or in groups, groping their way, after many trials and errors, towards fresh undertakings. They will follow their own hunches, ideals and inspirations, and obsessions, and along the way some will even be dismissed as harmless lunatics. The state may help indirectly, but it is unlikely to initiate, or select for support the best strategies; and, out of ignorance or lack of imagination, it may positively hinder.[xx]
Thus, it will be important for farmers to “act like entrepreneurs on a local scale”.
A relatively sparsely populated island such as Ireland ought to be equipped for self-sufficiency as we enter a turbulent era in human history. Above all, for this to occur, we require a political leadership representing the interests of the people in alignment with entrepreneurial opportunities and environmental constraints. The introduction of a land tax could allow for a more equitable distribution of land, revenues from which could be used to allow individuals or cooperatives to acquire land. Any government should be mindful, however, that over-regulation may hinder development. The role of the state should be to provide access to land. Thereafter, farmers should be allowed to experiment. The history of Irish agriculture prior to the Famine, when three million were subsisting off just one million acres without artificial fertilisers or machinery, demonstrates how fertile Ireland can be. It will be necessary, however, for farmers to avoid dependence on a single staple, and for the state to insist on an increase in the coverage of native trees which provide additional ‘services’, including clean water and air.
[i] Hardin G. (1968): The tragedy of the commons. Science, New Series, 162 (3859), S.1243-1248, doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1724745
[ii] Helfrich S. (2009): Gemeingüter sind nicht, sie werden gemacht. In: Ostrom E. (2009): Was mehr wird, wenn wir teilen. München: oekom, S.11-19. (Helfrich 2009, p.13)
[iii] Mitchell, F. and Ryan, M., Reading the Irish landscape (Dublin, 1997), p.8.
[iv] Reader, J., The untold history of the potato (London, 2009). p.14
[v] Salaman, R., The history and social influence of the potato (Cambridge, 1949). p.215
[vi] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..
[vii] Lucas, A. T., ‘Irish food before the Famine’, Gwerin 3 (1962)
[viii]Daly, M. ‘Farming and the Famine’, in O´ Grada, Famine 150 commemorative lecture series., p.39.
[ix] Sen, A., Identity and violence: the delusions of destiny (New York, 2006), p.105.
[x] Crotty, R., Irish agricultural production (Cork, 1966), p.63.
[xi] Mokyr, J., Why Ireland starved: an analytical and quantitative history of the Irish economy 18401850 (New York, 1985), p.291.
[xvi] Brown, I., The writings of Ivor Browne: steps along the road: the evolution of a slow learner (Cork, 2013), p 90.
[xvii] Fennell, R. ‘The domestic market for Irish agricultural produce’, in Baillie and Sheehy, Irish agriculture in a changing world, (Dublin, 1968). p. 106.
Editor’s Note: Readers of a sensitive disposition may find aspects of this account of drug-taking and sex difficult to stomach, but we believe this is a story worth telling. Our mission is to provide a home for independent voices that inspire new thinking.
*****
I awake, into my usual morning of panic but today might be different. My first non-family Christmas. However festive, starting it is with booze first thing in Ireland, to pang off the alcoholism beyond in the making, it’s amazing in Northern California. I am so fortunate of the micro-climate of the Mission District here in San Francisco, and its extension to my locale of Bernal Heights. The tourist map doesn’t stretch as far as here, somewhat making me more of an authentic character in my adopted city,
It is the ideal temperature for walking off a hangover.
Third fag in the sun, having skulled a coffee, a beer, and sipping another of the latter in the pre-spring morning sunshine – I’m feeling pretty good all in all. It’s amazing how well you learn to ride out the cocaine heart failure in the making. I’m a lot tougher than I give myself credit for.
Even that it gives you a nameable blight for these wretched feelings helps: you can blame it all on something rather than the general suffering of existence.
A quick reboot of last night’s misadventure: the fuck buddy of sorts with odd strings dumped me again last night. She’s no doubt an attractive lady to anyone, but she’s more man than I’ll ever be. She’d mentioned the week or so previous, having a heavy period. I asked, “Are your hangovers not so much worse?” Legs spread, practically scratching her nuts, drinking neat whiskey, she cackled, cartoon-like fag hanging out of her mouth, ‘’Women are pussy’s’’.
Our relationship, in its fast and loose umbrella, has more basis in a Jerry Springer omnibus than anything resembling love or how it’s sold. We’re short on domestic violence, as long as you don’t count hers on me, and I promise you, I bring it on myself. An uncivilized drinking partner that eats cunt like me is probably not without its charm.
But don’t ever sit on my chest, rub one out till I break through the straps to devour the offerings, and expect me not to crack jokes. Assessment of the night before damage concludes with only Evelyn rightfully popping the dive bar lovers’ bubble.
Until this morning, Christmas meant a tense mother slaving in the kitchen far too much, but refusing all help till she’s screaming, “No one helps her!” Similar to any bigger family meal, only exasperated by a dead god on this occasion. For reasons that make no sense to us secular, but we get dragged, come leap in, all the same.
This is not isolated to this home economic task either. In all my youth and my on-and-off living with my parents, an always state of arrested development, I was never ever permitted to use the washing machine, even for my own clothes.
Absorbing all this tension from my mother, about decades of meal times is likely where I have some flecks of an eating disorder to this day, which must be a riot to hear for anyone who can see my midriff.
The walk to the house we were celebrating in was brief. I’d been primed along the quiet streets that Christmas, for the most part, doesn’t really happen here, something I was fairly excited about.
I’d some brain fog to match the city fog that late morning. Or early afternoon for the non-living for the weekend types.
This winter was some of the hottest San Francisco gets, but today I was feeling the icy fog it’s known for, outside of the Mission District. Cooling my perspiration compared to my morning ritual, all the seasons in a day here are much more pleasant than in Ireland.
All folk present had a mostly infectious festivity, likely though, was that none of us had work to go to for at least a day. Before I know it, it’s dinner time with my adopted family of ragtag heroes. Each one of them seems to be plucked out of a collection of good guys, the wild aces that could have gone the other way and sometimes ended up villains.
This food is so far beyond my class. There’s cheese in front of me that retails for fifty dollars, and it’s only the size of the coked-up wank wad I’d be creating right now were not I here.
I finally get the don’t cut the cheese joke but my initial thought is: “This smells like anal and I’m not convinced I want to be a part of it.”
The crackers alone cost more than I’d spend on food in a given day.
I got a great cop-out of what to bring to dinner, myself, and my primary guide-come shaman of the whole adventure, split the cost of the prime rib along with his brother, another home economically challenged come-lazy soul.
With it’s roasting someone else’s responsibility, my sole responsibility to myself or anyone was not to drink so much that I couldn’t eat sufficiently. And I failed.
I ate, sure, I even didn’t start the morning wrenching from alcohol poisoning – that being the common way to spoil this day, but I didn’t sufficiently consume my favourite meal of the year all the same.
Me and Evelyn, the cheesy proprietor, exchange many an awkwardness in the run-up to our first chat of the day. I felt her pity for me made it challenging to tell me to feck off as harshly as I needed to hear, or her say it. I am like a puppy who needs a boot, but we don’t because of compassionate society and all that wank that will lead to China ruling us all.
The booze pours festively and rapidly it becomes a whiter Christmas than I’ve ever known. I had nearly no experience with Peruvian powders two months ago now I’m hitting it with the power and comedy of a staged drunk on reality TV.
You know you’ve a problem when the most degenerate drug user you’ve known the Christian name of says: “Jesus, O’Dowd! Go easy on the sneachta!”
All my co-workers, and even suppliers, were Mexican so maybe I was Jeh-sus O Dowd
***BLACK***
Around 18 hours later my investigative skills found me suddenly in a bad, bad dive bar. A menacing, not affectionately labelled dive. My resurface into consciousness is like coming up on psychedelics. But I’m by no means psychotic.
I’ve an odd if valuable ability to for the most part know what’s real and isn’t, even when experiencing lots of unreal. Things here have a melted quality. Fortunate of my previous jaunts to this bar, I knew already it had a Lynchian, “between dream and nightmare” feeling to it mostly caused by how fucked up you have to be called to the district’s only 6 am opening bar.
Cheese trader Evelyn is back and forth at the bar with a dealer trying to work herself up to the purchase. Women like foreplay. Men like a job done.
I smack my glass hard on the bar, spilling it down to my hands about the base making a mess: “Mr barman sir, who sells sneachta in here?”, stressing a H sound like my Sligonian heritage demands of me.
He smiles, like one does at a moron, and nods to some gentlemen playing pool. Remember those red and blue gangs who were all the rage in the 90s? Well, these were the reds, or at least pretending to be.
The meaner looking of the two with the facial artwork brought me into the toilets, then the cubicle for the exchange. This was commonplace. I believe there must be a legality in no one actually witnessing the exchange.
Even if everyone knows exactly what’s happening behind 35mm of chipboard, flashed with hospital baby blue laminate, certainly bought for a bargain. I request, with a combination of question, statement, and just general Celtic mangling of Germanic sentence structure: “Does he do 50 bags?”
He appears amused by the utter shambles before him. He has the sorely required zip lock, out in a moment, while I’m pulling fistfuls of every denomination of US dollar out of every crevice I am aware of having on my person. I must flash 300 plus dollars in front of him.
You’d be wrong to assume I was flush. This had to last me almost another month till my flight home. Why the hell didn’t he rob me? What sort of opportunist, outside the law, is he?
He’s the reason China is our future dominant global power but bless his tear-drop tattoo heart all the same. Or maybe he cherishes this date more traditionally than I do. As I step out my dear friend Fionn steps right in. Evelyn looks rather peeved at this.
***BLACK***
It’s suddenly many hours later, I’m in an Irish bar I know, but not this messed up. Certainly when I’m pretty sure there’s daylight out those windows. In all the years of it, I’ve never felt as scummy as being really impaired during daylight.
There’s possibly latent Catholic guilt that I shouldn’t enjoy myself till all childer are in bed. Everyone present is new excluding Evelyn.Everyone including Evelyn is knee-slapping at whatever I am uttering.
I can surmise she is her variant of back into me again, a token nod of hand deep in my inner thigh. It, however, would be a Christmas miracle for me to make any use of that scenario with the Colombian blizzard I have been battling through.
***BLACK***
Some incalculable time later. We’re as naked as the bed, with no sheets, pillows, duvet, or comforter (when in Rome), about us. Illuminated by street lights coming in the window like a synthetic moon, all of our phones are dead, including my burner brick which I thought was immortal till now.
Even the clock is dead. Is this a nightmare? She is freaked. You ought to be in your own gaff in this confusion, let alone next to me again. Why is the hair dryer broken in this room rather than working in the bathroom? Why does the house smell of piss? Why are our clothes all over the flat? Why is the shower broken?
All I can do is offer to look at the shower and realise. I am not a man. I masquerade as a man, but I am no man. The last thing I fixed was a VCR which must have been in the 90s.
She’s overdone now. This is too much for anyone without a lashing of “Mother’s Little Helper” to counter whatever chemicals we’re out of. She takes charge.
“My folks are away,” she states, “we’ll go there and watch cable till we can handle the situation.”
Pack up and go down the stairs to realise, she doesn’t have her keys, and she doesn’t know whose she has instead. We’re too distraught to deal with any of this. She’s going to have to replace both hers and her folk’s locks. For the second time. This winter.
But these others obtained along the way are really getting her briefs in a braid. We decided to order a Chinese and survive one more day. This was the first, truly, deeply, menacing come-down I had experienced here. The first that mirrored true depression to the point I feared I might actually be depressed.
Many friends, come-corrupted acquaintances, have asked me how I can hit, and hard, the class A narcotics when I suffer from a “medication for the rest of my days”, mood disorder. It’s nothing on real depression.
You still have enough introspection, even after the unholiest binge, to know that this too shall pass. You don’t get that luxury with the real thing.
With the genuine darkness reigning down on you, the best bargaining you can do with yourself is “this too shall pass.” With a firmer, maybe, “you fight”, entering your head. But even with manageable bouts of the garden varieties of utter despair, it will come back again. And again. Like Terminator sequels.
It never truly goes away, it just leaves you for a holiday. This experience was that traumatic, we should have been soul mates after this. Alas, we’re not even friends who share memes
I meet Fionn, the big spender, soon after for drinks. He seemed plenty chirpy till we began to converse in our cubby. I tell him how little I remember in a jovial way. His gate takes a shift downward. Around his eyes grows black, and baggy, skin turning jaundiced in pigmentation, losing elasticity.
His voice cackles with a poor handle on his life. “You don’t remember, do you? Fuck you don’t!”
Once we purchased our narcotics in the twisted dive bar, sometime the morning after Xmas dinner, we’re not so sure, we went out on the somewhat busy street to consume them with pinches and keys. Away in our world together we are shot back into the real world where the war on drugs is very, scarily, real.
And suddenly, I too recall at least this brief window of time. Siren’s tear through the, I wish, night. Blue and red bounce about the nearer buildings Fionn pelts back into the bar in fits of internal shrieking. Chucks his big spender 100 bag under a stool, and hops on a chair in the farthest corner, knees to chest rocking and now audibly panicking.
“Oh fuck I’m going to prison, I’ll never meet my daughter!”
“Oh fuck, Brian is definitely going to prison, they’ll never stop raping him!”
And I return to the busy bar to loudly proclaim,
“FUCK ME THAT’S GOOD SNEACHTA!”
Later that very night I got home and Evelyn called to fill me in on her recovered memories since we parted ways after the Chinese.
Kenneth had rung her to apologise and tell her he was paying for a new mattress and whatever else, and it had all flooded back to her. More of a trickle for me.
Deep in the darkness, engulfed in the memory bank, a mini party kicked off at hers at some stage, and Kenneth was put to bed as we went off gallivanting into whatever time of day it was. When we returned sometime later, Kenneth had pissed her bed and was trying to dry his jeans with the hair dryer. He burnt it out, trying to hurry through our giggles.
When he left we had a deep meaningful conversation, which she thought would be better not to bring up, stated with a tone that meant never. I performed an act of great kindness on her there in the living area before bed, like the gentleman I am, and off to bed we go. But she can’t relax in the piss-soaked sheets, so we strip the bed and proceed to have sex in the shower
Naturally, we break the shower, in what could only be awful, uncoordinated, glamourless, aqua-bonking. And the mystery of the keys is solved. Kenneth’s wife and Evelyn were powdering their noses in the deviant little girl’s room, and each of their keys wound up in the others’ bags. No need to change security systems after all!
Nollaig bán shona dhaoibh
Feature Image: Swing near the top of Bernal Heights Park, looking east.
Imaginative fiction offers invaluable insights into everything from national characteristics to institutional malaise and pathological violence. The musings of psychologists, philosophers and historians often appear clumsy and verbose beside the epiphanies that flow from the creative hand. Thus, the visions of long dead novelists continue to colour our understanding of who we are, and where we’re heading.
We can draw a distinction between imaginative fiction and the fantasy genre. The latter according to Iain McGilchrist ‘merely recombines what we are already familiar with in a new way,’[i] (p.340) whereas works of imagination bring new experiences into being. ‘A defining quality of the artistic process’ he argues ‘is its implacable opposition to the inauthentic.’[ii]
Authenticity should be distinguished from realism. Mythology and indeed allegory – as in the The Lord of the Rings – are distinct from fantasy. A myth is not a lie, as many, including our Taoiseach, seem to assume. Rather, as Northrop Frye put it: ‘It is obvious that the world we want to live in is mythological. That is, the world we construct is built to the model of a common social vision produced by the imagination.’[iii]
Besides a lack of authenticity, fantasy does not reveal a common social vision. Usually, it aims at entertainment – a gripping thriller for example – often featuring cardboard cut-out characters representing a particular virtue or vice. At worst, we find simplistic manifestations of good and evil in a synthetic world.
This review explores whether Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song (One World, London, 2023) belongs to the genre of fantasy. My motivation is to assess the artistic value of a recipient of a prestigious prize, and further examine why such an accolade might have been bestowed.
Successively Increasing Violence
The novel charts the struggles of a middle-class Irish family – seen mostly through the eyes of the mother Eilish – living under a far-right, fascist and, according to the headline writer in the Irish Times, totalitarian regime inhabiting what is recognisably Dublin. Here, constitutional rights no longer apply, and a malevolent Garda Síochana are imprisoning, without trial, opponents of a government we learn little about.
Members of the family are subjected to successively increasing levels of violence perpetrated by agents of the state, beginning with the arrest of the father of the house Larry, a mild-mannered trade unionist. It is certainly not fantastical to assume that a trade unionist would be targeted by a fascist regime. During the 1930s many were imprisoned and sent to Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, but especially under Mussolini in Italy ‘many even held key posts.’
A more subtle, and perhaps credible, account could have explored how a fascist regime co-opts individuals in positions such as that occupied by Larry – or even Eilish, a scientist working for a bio-tech firm. Larry does not appear to hold particularly radical views. He comes from the same background as an interrogating Garda, who he claims to have played GAA against while in UCD (p.9). Foregrounding the character of a trade unionist seems like a device allowing the author to proceed with his gory account.
Thus, we find police with batons ‘beating the marchers into grovelling shapes’ (p.30); ‘talk of internment camps in the Curragh (p.36); journalists being imprisoned (p.36); government control of the judiciary (p.58); and unmarked cars pulling up silently to lift people off the street (p.76).
What is seriously lacking in the novel, however, is any attempt to portray the insidious soft power of a fascist regime, which historically appealed to a bourgeois desire for stability and prosperity. Subtle forms of this were evident under Salazar in Portugal, who demanded that literary works observe ‘certain limitations,’ and embrace guidelines defined by the New State’s ‘moral and patriotic principle.’
Further, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels saw maintaining a feel-good factor as the essential role of propaganda. He did not want even der Fuhrer to appear in cinema news reels, believing that a subservient people should not be over-exposed to politics. Although conditions did worsen dramatically in Nazi Germany after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, throughout much of their rule the Nazis maintained high living standards, only inflicting extreme cruelty on minorities and ideological opponents among the German people.
In contrast, Prophet Song portrays a cascade of violence carried out by agents of the state in public spaces, alongside a rapidly failing economy, where food commodities run scarce. This culminates in what seems to be the wanton murder of the adolescent child Bailey: ‘The skin before her clouded with bruising, the missing and broken teeth… nails torn from his hands and feet … a drill through the front of his knee… the cigarette burns along the torso’ (p.272). The purpose of this horrifying sequence is unclear. Perhaps it reflects the author’s dark broodings on the latent malevolence of the human condition. Later, revealingly, we are informed that insurgents are ‘just as bad as the regime. (p.206)’
True believers, such as Mrs Stamp (the wife of the nominatively determined Garda Stamp), are colourless stooges, while Eilish’s new boss, the Teutonic-sounding Paul Feisner speaks ‘not the company speak but the cant of the party, about an age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading into expansion.’ (p.71) These are formulaic utterances, anachronistically recalling the 1930s. However, we find none of the magnetic charisma we might expect in a fascist leader, or the stored-up resentment and scapegoating that fuel their rise.
At best, we have Larry telling Eilish that ‘the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and say it enough times, then it must be so (p.20). But we can only wonder why anyone would accept such lies. There is no evidence of the infectious cynicism that Hannah Arendt observes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951):
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their tactical cleverness.
Ignorant Savages
Supporters of the regime are portrayed as ignorant savages: ‘tattoos emblazoning arms and throat … the man bringing down a bat upon the windscreen … [he] takes out his sex and urinates on the car, the apish laughing teeth as the man zips up and jumps down the gravel (p.139); who are barely literate: ‘the word TRAITER sprayed again and again in red paint.’
Thus, we find support for the regime emanating from unfortunate people at the bottom of the social ladder: ‘Two civilians are helping to build the checkpoint and she knows one of them, an odd-jobs man from the flats nearby, an ex-junkie with hardly a tooth in his mouth.’ (p.187)
There are suggestions that those in power are targeting minorities – such as when we learn that a certain Rohit Singh has been arrested – but no account is offered from the perspective of any minority group. A novel should not be an exercise in empowerment, but the prevailing cultural homogeneity in Prophet Song hardly diminishes the deadness of this account.
There are also apparent endorsements of an Irish economic model that produces galloping growth rates amidst a housing crisis and rampant homelessness. A sign, therefore, of the country’s decline in the novel is where ‘every day another international firm closes its doors and makes its excuses’. (p.124) We must assume the presence of multinational corporations in Ireland is ipso facto a good thing, rather than underlying the development of a two-tier society, now generating serious social cleavages.
There are nods to contemporary concerns, such as when Larry points to the ceiling and warns his wife to keep her voice down (p.5), but the characters rarely appear concerned about creeping surveillance, as violence is largely inflicted in random fashion.
Raqqa, Syria.
Depicting Another Country?
Prophet Song is a novel that seems better suited to the depiction of a post-colonial country, where a distinct ethnic or religious group has assumed control over the levers of power and monopolises violence in a divided society. It might have been written about Syria, where army and state have long been dominated by a distinct religious group.
It provides no insight into the insidious means by which a fascist government could take power in Ireland. The regime is a resident evil inflicting at times wanton suffering. Any such government would surely only appeal to the most base or desperate. This may reflect the author’s assessment of the human condition, but even if we accept there is a murderer in us all, it is surely incumbent on a fictional account to demonstrate how any diabolic metamorphosis occurs. Here the main characters are simply victims. In the absence of authenticity or a common social vision it should be consigned to the fantasy genre.
I do wonder why the novel has received critical acclaim, and the accolade of a Booker Prize? Aside from a general neoliberal degeneracy now infecting most cultural organisations that place a higher premium on sales potential than artistic expression, the best explanation I can think of is that it reflects, and arguably exploits, the anxieties of the British cultural establishment in the wake of Brexit and Trump, making it ‘crucial reading’ according to the The Guardian.
Essentially, it is a politically correct thriller ungrounded in political reality. Contrary to the feverish headlines, the November Dublin riot can be traced to decades of government neglect of the inner city; sporadic attacks on refugee housing do not reveal a broad-based political movement on the brink of power in Ireland. Perhaps the panel of Booker judges are oblivious to how – unlike many European countries – Ireland has not seen an upsurge in support for far-right parties. Even to suggest that we face the prospect of fascist, totalitarian governments across Europe stretches credulity.
With shifts in technology, contemporary forms of totalitarianism may be very different to what we have witnessed in the past, which is not to dismiss the relevance of dystopian prophecies such as Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). Sadly, Prophet Song offers no such timeless lessons.
Why does any of this matter? In an interview in 1994 Harold Bloom argued that what he described as a school of resentment had destroyed the art of reading, marginalising three thousand years of imaginative literature. He added ominously that if shallow authors are promoted for political reasons you will not augment memory or cause the mind to grow and that ultimately this would impoverish our imaginations.
[i] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary (Yale, 2009), p.341
The light and the wind on the water these wild winter days are breath of it
The cardinal sun below cumulus flaring up skybeams a pulse
Gathers the gloom but high in the east celestial moon unhides behind heart-racing clouds
All in the arms of physics and this is heaven we are blessed to happen in
I sat for a while by the gap in the wall
Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
Heard the cards being dealt and the rosary called
And a fiddle playing “Sean Dun Na Ngall” lyrics from ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ by Shane MacGowan.
I wasn’t close to Shane – celebrity brings an understandable reserve – but he was someone I hung out with in latter years, travelled alongside, and helped take care for a short time.
I have also been told he gave a typically back-handed compliment to an article I wrote describing his last trip to London for the launch of an exhibition of his art work: “God he’s a windbag, but then so was James Joyce.” Needless to say, I am still chuffed. Alas, he was rather less enamoured by my amateurish songwriting – which I recall later in this piece. This at least provides some reassurance that he wouldn’t give a compliment unless he meant it.
Shane MacGowan‘s funeral mass on Friday, December 8 might have re-awakened a Catholic faith in its most ardent opponents, while conservatives regard it as scandalous. Who else could have summoned leading mourners into dancing joyously before the altar, after a sublime ceremony that merged tradition with frivolity, and formality with raucousness? In death, as in life…
Holy Mary Mother of God / pray for us sinners / now until the hour of our death…
In Shane’s mind, Mary was a powerful female icon. A warrior woman, ‘Calming her people’. He was capable of reconciling – as only a poet can – anger at the Church over covering up paedophilia, and what he viewed as a betrayal of the Irish Revolution, with a simple Catholic faith.
As with many second-generation Irish emigrants, Catholicism seemed intrinsic to his identity. Importantly, this was a choice rather than an imposition. However, while his heart throbbed with a paradoxically profane Catholicism, this was not to the exclusion of other faiths and traditions. The array of deities, daemons and angels festooning his mantlepiece suggested syncretic beliefs. Spiritual nourishment was maintained by a steady supply of pre-blessed Eucharists, ferried up from Nenagh. Shane could always get his hands on the best stuff.
Importantly, once the wild touring years with The Pogues had drawn to a close, he decided to move to Ireland to take up residence in his mother Therese’s (née Lynch) ancestral cottage in Carney Commons, County Tipperary.
Having been born in Kent, he could easily have lived out his days in England, mournfully recalling the old country, but Shane remained ‘Loyal, true and faithful’; coming home like a Fenian prisoner ‘From dying in foreign nations’. Even the demise of The Pogues can partly be attributed to his insistent Irishness: creative differences emerged when others in the band, many of them with no Irish background, proposed moving beyond an Irish sound, as the documentary If I Should Fall From the Grace of God – The Shane MacGowan Story reveals.
He returned, as he saw it, to Ireland when the Celtic Tiger was in full roar, restricting the pre-modern society he had encountered as a youth to the margins. It’s fair to say he struggled to reconcile himself to a brash, individualistic and increasingly homogenous society, but never departed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfEuXYpMIYc
Patrician and Spailpín
The Romantic poet W.B. Yeats and the Punk singer Shane MacGowan might be viewed as being at opposite points on a spectrum of Irishness: one epitomising a patrician Anglo-Irish literary tradition; the other a performer representing what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’
Thus, when declaring his will in ‘The Tower‘ (1928), Yeats portentously claimed to be one of the ‘people of [Edmund] Burke and of [Henry] Grattan’. He also scorned ‘Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter’ and the ‘base born products of base beds’ in his valedictory ‘Under Ben Bulben‘ (1928).
In contrast, Shane MacGowan explicitly portrays ‘the slaves that were spat on’ from the Tower in his song – based on personal experience – about rent boys, ‘The Old Main Drag’ where the protagonist is ‘spat on, and shat on and raped and abused’. His oeuvre positively celebrates intoxication and fornication, although he was in many respects even more of a romantic, as tracks such as ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘The Song with No Name’ attest.
I heard Shane express his dislike of the Anglo-Irish poet – although he did record a version of Yeats’s anti-war poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. He preferred the aesthetic of Brendan Behan in particular.
There is, nonetheless, a striking parallel. Both poets while living in London a century apart, consciously embraced their Irishness, which helped each of them develop distinctive voices. Yeats would no longer simply be a Romantic poet in the mould of Wordsworth: he forged a distinctively Irish Romantic tradition. Likewise, MacGowan would no longer be another Punk singer in the shadow of Johnny Rotten: he became an Irish Punk balladeer, and an inspiration to a rising generation of distinctively Irish song-writers.
In his autobiography, Yeats describes walking homesick through Fleet Street in the 1880s and hearing a little tinkle of water, whereupon he saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball on its jet that reminded him of lake water. ‘From that sudden remembrance’, he wrote, ‘came my poem “Inisfree,” my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.’
A body of water provides the title for perhaps MacGowan’s most poetic song, ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, which features an aging Irishman dwelling on his youth in County Tipperary after many years of living in London. The rusty tin can and the old hurley ball is Shane recalling his own childhood. It’s a song that also conveys homesickness, joining Shane MacGowan’s soul to the great river of Ireland flowing through Tipperary – where his ashes are to be scattered – just as places in Sligo will forever be identified with Yeats.
Perhaps one day tourists will flock to The MacGowan county, just as they travel from far and wide to The Yeats County.
Protest Song
A few years ago a good friend of Shane’s and I took a song we had composed to him. It was a naive protest song about the government’s inaction on public transport that appropriated a melody from another song about trains popularised by Johnny Cash, called City of New Orleans. I added a few verses in a different key and thought perhaps it could work.
I continue to maintain that my friend’s decision to bellow it a capela was fatal to its reception. A little guitar might have taken the edge off it. In any case, Shane became apoplectic, demanding he stop singing, and immediately identified the source of the melody.
I guess you don’t become one of the leading lyricists in the world without having finely honed critical faculties. Having trawled my hard drive I can find no evidence of the recording I made of it, which is probably for the best!
It would have been nice to sing more songs with Shane, but he seemed depressed a lot of the time, and expressed frustration at a writer’s block that was inhibiting him. At least when we were travelling to London there were a few sing-songs, but it was clear then that the isolation and inactivity of the Covid years had taken a toll.
The scene before the funeral mass of Shane MacGowan in Nenagh.
Regrets
I hung on Shane’s every word, but he wasn’t the easiest of company. At times, I felt awkward about not being able to make out exactly what he was saying. A self-preservation instinct may also have inhibited me from being drawn too closely into his orbit. The atmosphere could be heavy and a bit self-destructive if you weren’t careful.
It wasn’t that he was drunk all the time. As he once put it, tongue-in-cheek, on the Late Late Show when he was interviewed by Pat Kenny: “in England I’d be regarded as an alcoholic but in Ireland I am a sissy drinker”.
He always seemed to have a drink in front of him, but was a sipper, abiding by certain rules agreed with Victoria. As she alluded to in her remarkable eulogy at the funeral, there are lessons on addiction to be drawn from Shane’s example.
Being drunk – playing the fool – might also have been part of Shane’s public persona. Exhibiting intoxication could also mask the insecurities of a savant or autodidact, who was expelled from school in his early teens. His reading and creativity were haphazard and unsystematic, and worn lightly. I suspect he would have been intimidated by haughty scholars interrogating his work.
Shane spent most of his final months in hospital, but I didn’t feel up to visiting him as my own father had passed away in the same hospital the year before. Anyway, I had the impression that a steady stream of friends and admirers were at hand.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland of the 50’s. Behan, Kavanagh, O’Brien. Roaring Boys all. Drunken, rackety, genius bores. And Shane could be as drunk and boring and rackety or he could write as beautifully as any of them. Bob Geldof, Waiting for Herb, 2004.
Night Crossing
As the ferry lurched out of Dublin port we reminisced on crossings of yore. In response to regretful talk about the withdrawal of the service out of Dun Laoghaire – which at least had a rail connection – Shane MacGowan recalled, with typical belligerence, “Dun Laoghaire was there before a fucking DART line,” before hissing reassuring laughter.
He then spoke wistfully of his grandfather telling him about how ‘lower order’ passengers would have to share decks with the livestock on board. It seemed a very different world to a Stena Lounge bereft of passengers on this night crossing, but at least the wine was complimentary, and Tina didn’t mind a fewmessers on board.
Indeed, the aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of the Pogues was a throwback to a bygone Ireland – and Irish – often scorned by ‘respectable’ people. In particular, those compelled by economic circumstances to take up jobs ‘across the water’.
Shane MacGowan was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent in 1957 to Irish immigrant parents, but spent his early youth living with maternal aunts and uncles in Puckane, Co. Tipperary. Formative teenage years were spent in 1970s London.
For the emerging poet, rural Ireland – for all its faults – seemed a fairy realm, enlivened by song and alcoholic excess, compared to the industrial decay and entrenched class system of England at that time. Having dabbled in punk with The Nipple Erectors he returned to his musical roots, forming the Pogues (from the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning ‘kiss my arse’) in 1982.
He previously described the ‘Irish look’ the band self-consciously adopted:
The suits, black suits with white shirts which we wore, were Brendan Behan uniform and that’s why we chose them, not to look smart, but to look as if we could have come from any decade … We could have looked like people from the fifties, sixties, or seventies … we just looked like classic Paddies.[i]
Extended Fairground
As the night wore on, in particularly good cheer, Shane began humming a medley, beginning with the ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’, “When off Holyhead wished meself was dead / Or better far instead”, culminating in a vision of Irish inclusivity – at least before the men in the mohair suits moved in – at the ‘Galway Races’:
There were half a million people there
Of all denominations
The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew,
The Presbyterian
Yet not animosity
No matter what the persuasion
But failte hospitality
Inducing fresh acquaintance
With me wack fol do fol
The diddle idle day
This evocation of carnival wherein social hierarchies disappear in joyful Bacchanalia helps understand what Shane MacGowan engendered with the Pogues during the 1980s: a two-fingered reaction to Thatcherism that helped define our Irish identity.
As the cultural critic Joe Cleary put it in Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day, 2007) in the music of the Pogues: ‘The [Irish] nation is imagined as a kind of extended fairground.’[ii]
He adds, however, that with the Pogues: ‘this version of carnival is never allowed to become cosily celebratory because it is always shot through with sentiments of anger and aggression, sometimes strident, sometimes more muted.’[iii]
Hooliganism
The word hooligan derives from the surname of a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song from the 1890s. Later, applied to the antics of English football fans, steeped in post-imperial hubris, it took on angry connotations.
But the Pogues were all about the hoolie – a big noisy party – and unashamedly “Up the RA”, when it was still risqué to be so. Their song ‘Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six ‘refers to the plight of the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four and was censored by the BBC.
Their old school, rumbunctious hooliganism, fused elements of punk and traditional Irish music with the incantations that arouse from Shane MacGowan’s errant soul.
As Cleary puts it the Pogues, ‘merged the ‘modernist’- and ‘avant-garde’-coded aesthetics of punk with the ‘romantically’-coded idioms of the Irish musical forms.’
He argues:
For the Pogues to yoke together … the avant-garde future-orientated metropolitan aesthetics of punk, with the retro aesthetics of céilí and the broadly political edginess of the pub-ballad scene was an inspired act not only of musical synthesis but of semantic sabotage as well.[iv]
Alongside self-destructive excess there was something serious going on, ‘saving folk from the folkies’ as Elvis Costello put it[v], while asserting a brash, yet accommodating Irish identity – after all, many of the band were not even Irish – notwithstanding an unashamed approval of violent Republicanism, based on a long historical memory of famine, torture and resistance.
The success of the Pogues and Shane MacGowan – who transcended traditional Irish music to become a rockstar celebrity – may go some way to explaining an enduring, relative openness among Irish people to new cultural encounters – even multiculturalism – at least by comparison with erstwhile colonisers.
Like it or not, any witness to an average Saturday night in Dublin can testify to the presence of a carnival of sexual deviancy, donnybrooks and nonsensical pranks. This has become a generally inclusive ritual for Irish self-expression.
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London, 2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest ‘[t]he really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.’[vi] That just about sums up the Pogues’ contribution to Irish culture.
After the Pogues, along with their precursors and followers, we would wear a distinctively wild Irishness as a badge of honour, invite everyone to the party, then regale each other with far-fetched stories of nights that should have ended sooner, at least before the cops turned up, when the fun really started.
The Big Red Fun Bus
With the Irish Sea bathed in pale moonlight on a blissfully calm night, conversation turned to Westerns. With a glint in his eye Shane reeled off his favourites – ‘The Life and Times of Judge Roy Beans’ (1972), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), “with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne competing for the same girl”, and ‘The Searchers’ (1956).
But fittingly for a bard whose songs are steeped in tales of underdogs – like the navigators who ‘died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where / Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur’ – his favourite was the more recent ‘Geronimo: An American Legend’ (1993), in which, unusually, a Native American victim is the hero.
By now the rest of our posse seemed to be asleep – it must have been passed 4am – but Shane’s mind was racing in this liminal phase. The high life of London beckoned and the rockstar in him was growing giddy.
We had another Brendan to thank for the drive to London. He and Shane’s full-time carer Elizabeth provide vital assistance and crucially, a sense of humour, in support of Victoria, Shane’s loving wife.
Once installed in the hotel room there was a chance for more songs, including a few Percy French ditties. Then an overlooked classic from his underrated period with the Popes: a homage to the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan: ‘The Snake with Eyes of Garnett.’
It begins fittingly:
Last night as I lay dreaming
My way across the sea
James Mangan brought me comfort
With laudnum and poitin
The vision moves to the scene of a public execution being held on Stephen’s Green in 1819, before another crossing
If you miss me on the harbour
For the boat, it leaves at three
Take this snake with eyes of garnet
My mother gave to me!
The snake is a symbol of renewal, and for Shane perhaps the republican ideal. It also reveals his engagement with the literary canon. After all, he did once earn a scholarship to the exclusive Westminster public school.
He chimed in:
This snake cannot be captured
This snake cannot be tied
This snake cannot be tortured, or
Hung or crucified
It came down through the ages
It belongs to you and me
So pass it on and pass it on
‘Till all mankind is free
Contrary to the association of the snake with deceit and temptation – a phallic devil – according to Chevalier and Gheerbant’s Dictionary of Symbols, the serpent is ‘a continuation of the infinite materialization which is none other than primordial formlessness, the storehouse of latency which underlies the manifest world.’
It is an archetype representing ‘an “Old God”, the first god to be found at the start of all cosmogenesis, before religions of the spirit dethroned him.’[vii]
This becomes the moving spirit of another vagabond poet, James Clarence Mangan who as a Young Irelander renews the spirt of the nation, suffers and dies, apparently of malnutrition at the height of a cholera epidemic, but re-appears in spectral form.
He swung, his face went purple
A roar came from the crowd
But Mangan laughed and pushed me
And we got back on the cloud
He dropped me off in London
Back in this dying land
But my eyes were filled with wonder
At the ring still in my hand
‘this dying land’
Arriving in central London I am struck by the imperial grandeur. The scale and ambition of the architecture makes Dublin seem like a provincial town, but there’s a cold reserve that used to send a shiver down my spine when I lived here.
So many buildings appear uninhabited; unimaginably grand hotels seem more like fortresses with concierge-sentries posted outside to keep the hoi poloi at bay; uttering “can I help you sir,” with a snarl. We’d have to make our own fun.
The launch of Shane MacGowans’s art exhibition ‘The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold’ took place at the boutique Andipa gallery in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, where his art resides alongside that of Banksy’s.
Walking in I pass Bob Geldof, an unlikely presence, given his aversion to Irish nationalism, but he has credited Shane and the Pogues with awakening an interest in traditional Irish musical forms that he had previously disparaged.
In the relatively narrow confines of the gallery, with the king sitting contentedly on his throne, a carnival atmosphere asserts itself. He had escaped from all this, but that night he was enjoying a return to the crazy celebrity madness, which in England is built on a bedrock of aristocracy.
The champagne flowed, as minor celebrities converged – “he’s Liam Gallagher’s brother you know” – when the ocean parted before the eternal beauty of Kate Moss. A face to launch a thousand camera phones, and sell a few paintings.
Then on to Soho, where the weather at least remained dry. The police were even called. It took seven of them to take old Tom down, or so they say: never let the truth get in the way of a good yearn…
Critics
Acording to Joe Cleary:
Ever since the Great Famine and the Devotional Revolution, and especially when they came to power after the establishment of the Free State, the traditionalists had been concerned to make Irish culture more refined and respectable by filtering out, as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘degraded’, all its more licentious and anarchic or uncouth elements – those very elements that were to make such a whoopingly triumphant return of the repressed in the Pogues’ music.[viii]
In many respects, the unapologetic Shane MacGowan remains an embarrassment to the Official Ireland narrative, now principally articulated in the Irish Times, which inculcates a new breed of conformity that brooks no divergence.
Previously, Irish Times journalist Joe Breen suggested that his distaste for the Pogues resembled the attitude of contemporary African-Americans who preferred contemporary music to a musical tradition obsessed with the miseries of slavery and Jim Crow.
Breen’s reference to American culture betrays the apparent objective of many Irish neoliberal cheerleaders to establish a deracinated Americana in Hibernia, a tax haven for multinationals where the atmosphere of the carnival is strictly commodified. Here, Irish history is reduced to the struggle of modernisers against religious authority – with nothing in between – and where celebration of the national struggle is associated with Populism, or even an exclusive ‘white’ nationalism.
The art of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues offer a rowdy alternative to a creeping homogenisation. He endures, seemingly just to spite them, and even in the dying land he can still revive the spirit of the carnival.
