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  • Who is my Neighbour? On the Death of Renee Good

    It’s very possible that Renee Nicole Good reasoned, as I would’ve, that her whiteness would protect her when she put her Honda Pilot, dog in tow, in the path of ICE vehicles on a Minneapolis street less than a mile from where George Floyd’s last words were, just six years before, “I can’t breathe.” Unfortunately for Renee—a poet, wife, and mother of three—neither the historically privileged color of her skin nor her citizenship were sufficient to shield her from three shots fired at point blank range by an ICE officer after a brief and startling confrontation. The officer was briefly hospitalized and released the same day.

    Ordinary Americans can add this outrageous bloodshed to a growing list of Orwellian events prompted by the Trump administration, which includes both the killing itself and subsequent state-propagated lies seeking to style Good as a ‘domestic terrorist’ and ‘professional agitator.’ Today, I woke to news of a flurry of resignations from top prosecutors: four senior leaders in the division that investigates police killings have resigned in protest, and six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have jumped ship, not to mention the FBI denying local MN authorities any access to their investigation.

    Our times (and our enforcement officers) are trigger-happy, and the socio-political hot buttons have long since boiled over. There is palpable temptation—on all sides of the American partisan spectrum—to give into violence, or despair, or both. Reaching into an exhausted rattle-bag of the faith in which I was raised, “love thy neighbor as thyself” – a Levitical commandment echoed by Jesus of Nazareth—sits like a cold stone in my palm.

    Christ was an effective radical because he knew when to flip a table and when to restore a sword-shorn ear lopped off in protest of his own arrest. Angry Americans flip tables with zeal. It’s the cathartic part, the part that soothes our sense of wounded moral dignity and our desire to see immediate justice. But I fear that until we understand the counterintuitive nature of this rattle-bag text – counterintuitive because we do not get to pick and choose the identities of our neighbors, and because we are completely entrenched as a society in ‘othering’ those outside our given and (especially) our chosen ‘tribes’ – we will continue to see blood in the streets and lies on the screen.

    POTUS is set on besmirching the name and legacy of Renee Nicole Good—who died standing up for her neighbors. I’m certain we will not see these calumnies retracted any time soon. A closeted melancholiac, I’m left mourning Renee, a fellow artist, and imagining what it means to bring up my young son in such turbulent, hate-stricken times. I know I’m not the only one.

    We might finally start living when we learn to kill each other with kindness. Until then, we seem doomed to proceed without the last two words and suffer the consequences.


    SOMETHING GOOD
    by Haley Hodges

    Sky, road, rain, one great
    grey. Into this toothless homogeny
    come fanged questions—
    must we raise our children
    in a police state? Was the grey,
    say, two generations back
    (grand grey to this grey)
    softer, somehow? Fault fate
    if you must. How to return
    to iridescence—to joy—
    despite this—despite all—
    before we return to dust:
    that’s our operation, our
    immutable mandate. Let
    slates be wiped and crammed
    with this endeavor. Light,
    it’s time. Come like cream
    to the top. Crown each
    seeking life, lives going
    to the lengths men with guns
    and covered faces go—
    but oh, finally gently. And
    for something good.

    Feature Image: Uniformed HSI SRT agents in Los Angeles

     

     

  • Free Public Transport is Public Good Deliverable for Dublin (2019)

    In contrast to other major European cities, Dublin has few rail- or tram- lines. Instead, public transport users mainly rely on an extensive but complicated bus network. This is, however, slow and unreliable, owing to Dublin’s appalling traffic congestion. Moreover, for several key destinations outside the centre, notably Dublin Airport, buses are the only available public transport option.

    Dublin’s traffic congestion suffocates key transport corridors: from Stillorgan to St Stephen’s Green; Blanchardstown to Stoneybatter; Terenure to the Liberties; and Coolock to the Docklands. These arteries are so gummed up that drivers last year spent, on average, two-hundred and fifty hours in traffic – making Dublin the third worst city in the world for time spent sitting in traffic.[i]

    The effect of spending the equivalent of more than ten full days in a car each year, can only have negative health, psychological and social impacts, leading to isolation, stress, anger and weight gain. And how do many drivers compensate for time lost in traffic? By using smart phones to ‘connect’ – illegally of course – with the world outside.

    Regrettably, however, the authorities seem unwilling to contemplate a gradual retreat of the motor car from the centre. In contrast, across Europe, bicycle (and scooter) rental schemes, allowing residents to beat the traffic, have multiplied. Networks of cycle paths are mushrooming: for example Paris’s cycle lane infrastructure will, by 2020 have been expanded by 50% in the space of just five years.[ii] Elsewhere, city councils are lowering speed limits, introducing car bans and car-free days, pedestrianising streets and replacing car with bike parks.

    The ‘slow’ Dublin city centre, in tandem with the legacy of inept and corrupt planning for the suburbs, along with high car insurance and ancillary costs, present Dublin with severe challenges in terms of retaining both Irish and International business.

    Indeed, a 2018 study by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce found 73% of companies were finding traffic was having an increasingly negative impact on their businesses.[iii] In addition, heavy car reliance pollutes, causing both smog detrimental to human health, especially from diesel engines, as well as CO2 emissions generating climate chaos.

    One obvious way of addressing these problems would be to develop more extensive, comfortable and efficient public transport for Dublin; especially as without implementation of a pragmatic, but innovative, public transport infrastructure, any hope of expanding business and employment in the capital should be set aside.

    Dublin’s public transport network can be improved by diminishing distances between stops. Denser public transport can be delivered to the city (and the rest of the country too) swiftly, and without incurring vast additional infrastructure and capital costs. Importantly, adverse environmental and social impacts – such as we are witnessing with the BusConnects ‘mega-project’ – can easily have be avoided by liaising with community groups and other interested parties.

    The important question to address is how Dublin’s public transport network will alleviate traffic congestion. And after half a dozen incomplete Bus Network improvement plans (anyone remember the ‘Quality Bus Corridors Network’ and the ‘Swiftway BRT’ plans?) pompously rolled out over the last fifteen years  – all of them expensive and requiring costly compulsory purchase orders – it is high time to think outside the box.

    A Public Good

    The problem is that all previous bus network improvement plans – with BusConnects only the latest – accept the accommodation of other types of road users as axiomatic, including, of course, motorists. This, unavoidably, demands road-widening: usually requiring land acquisitions to establish minimal widths of twenty metres, i.e. a two-metre-wide footpath, a two-metre-wide cycle track, a three-metre-wide bus lane and a three-metre-wide traffic lane, on both sides of the road.

    If brought to fruition, twenty-metre-wide BusConnects corridors will, unavoidably, split neighbourhoods apart. Pedestrians will be channelled into designated ‘safe’ crossing points with communities separated by concrete corridors – what transport planners refer to as ‘pipelines’.

    But what if there were less cars on the streets? Would this really reduce the need for additional space and infrastructure, and diminish impacts?

    This brings us to the idea of recognising the use of public transport as a Public Good which should become free for passengers, thereby encouraging people out of their cars. Yes free – why not?

    Access to public transport might become viewed as a fundamental human right, akin to the provision of healthcare and education. Indeed, in more than a hundred cities in the world it is possible to ride on a tram, metro or bus for free – and without having to evade an inspector!

    From the buses of Porto Real in Portugal, to the Miami Metro in Florida, and from Noyon in France and Chengdu in China, free public transport is a successful urban mobility option for mitigating both the environmental and sociological impacts of transport. The latest place to embrace the concept is Luxembourg  – it will soon be the first country with all public transport free.[iv]

    There are a number of powerful arguments for making public transport free – or at least below the cost of operation and maintenance – provided either by government directly or through the private sector.

    For starters, private cars impose numerous costs on society that drivers do not pay for. Every time we start our diesel, petrol, hybrid engines – or even electric, as long as fossil fuels power stations – we generate air pollution, and clog up roads for other users. These costs are measurable in environmental damage, health care costs, and wasted time, which non-motorists pay for indirectly, through taxation.

    Economists and planners have long advocated that motorists should pay these costs directly, allowing people to make rational choices. Well-designed congestion pricing schemes, such as those found in Singapore, London, Stockholm and Milan, ensure that private vehicle drivers pay more if they choose a congested road – just as Dublin’s Port Tunnel has different rates depending on the time of day.

    A variation on a congestion pricing scheme for Dublin would be an additional levy on fossil fuels, which could be dedicated to relieving air pollution thereby raising respiratory health.

    In the absence of a congestion pricing plan for Dublin, however, and powerful opposition to it, subsidising public transport, which gets people to drive less than they might otherwise, is an feasible alternative – albeit, the combination of both measures would be optimal.

    Everyone benefits when people can travel around more safely and freely

    Making public transport freely available for all should create greater labour flexibility, with companies potentially choosing from a larger pool of employees, as well as accessing more suppliers who might not be deterred by high transport costs. Moreover, people would be more inclined to take more impromptu, and safer, outings for shopping, leisure or social purposes. It might save many rural pubs.

    Naturally, removing the financial cost of public transport to users would not make it ‘free’, as someone would have to foot the bill. It can be demonstrated, however, that using taxation revenue to pay for public transport would make everyone wealthier, in the wider sense of the word.

    Permitting ‘car sprawl’, i.e. unrestricted growth in car sales and road infrastructure with scant regard for urban planning, makes no economic sense, as profits generated by millions of generally single-occupant vehicles come with significant costs. The waste of resources, and other social costs are ‘conveyed’ from the calculation of these profits, and passed on to the taxpayer, future generations, and sometimes other countries.

    Implementation Challenges

    The concept of free public transport poses several implementation challenges. Amongst the arguments potentially adduced against it are as follows:

    1. It would require more public transport units to accommodate increased demand, which harms the environment, just as cars do.

    Indeed, if everyone used public transport, more, polluting buses would be required. In addition, upgrading our public transport infrastructure is energy-intensive, drawing largely on coal and other fossil fuels. But it would take many cars off the road and reduce the overall impact in the short term, while bus manufacturers could be incentivised to produce cleaner, more comfortable, and ‘smarter’ vehicles.

    1. With our level of public debt we cannot afford to spend money on frivolous projects like this.

    In fact public transport is the opposite of debt: when carefully and strategically planned it brings tangible rewards, and more importantly reduces carbon emissions; especially important with the Irish state facing hundreds of millions in fines for failure to reduce emissions that are the third highest in the EU.[v]

    1. Car sales would drop significantly.

    Indeed they would if public transport was free for everyone to get to work. Families would no longer feel the need for two or more cars. This would likely hurt the (non-indigenous) car industry, but manufacturing resources could be redeployed into making buses, or even bicycles.

    1. Some of our public transport is terrible – this would just increase the pressure.

    Regrettably, much of Dublin’s transport network is currently over-crowded and unreliable, and this is precisely why government investment is required to accommodate demand and increase capacity.

    1. Public transport service providers cannot be expected to provide a reliable service without a financial incentive.

    This argument rests on the assumption that when we pay nothing, and heaps of people are using the service, we cannot expect top-notch customer service. The ultimate client, however, in this case is the state and a simple clause in each public transport services contract could require all services to achieve a minimum standard of quality, based on the users expectations.

    1. Many people dislike public transport and would never use it.

    There are of course people who will stick to their cars whenever possible, but they would at least start bearing the real cost of using them.

    Combating Climate Chaos

    Introducing free public transport would reduce the number of cars on the road. A moderately loaded bus can carry approximately eighty passengers during a typical commuting hour. Compared to the typical car occupancy of a maximum average of two passengers at peak hour, it is a straightforward calculation that a single bus would remove up to forty cars from the road.

    A strategically designed and free bus-based city public transport system with, say, a fleet of five hundred buses could thus potentially take twenty-thousand cars off the road; almost half the number of cars currently dominating Dublin city’s centre.

    In all likelihood many of us would choose not to own a private car – perhaps renting where the need arose – thereby reducing the volume on the road. Repeated across dozens of cities in a country and thousands worldwide, free public transport could be a game changer in terms of transport emissions.

    Any government’s job is to provide services for the people. Free public transport is an example of a great service available to all. Taxation is already devoted to healthcare, education and road maintenance, so why not make provision for a service conferring such wide-ranging benefits? Moreover, it should go without saying that any government should  be taking care of the environment we pass on to our children.

    By making free public transport an aspect of the social contract, the government would be compelled to bring about improvements as required. With more users – especially vocal ones – deficiencies would be exposed. Reducing the number of cars on the road would also yield space for footpath and cycle track improvements.

    If public transport were offered for free more people would surely avail of it. Indeed, more of us would already be using public transport if it did not cost so much; ridiculously, driving into town is often ‘cheaper’ once you own a car and paid insurance.

    Enhanced Wellbeing

    A study conducted by the city of Copenhagen linked regular public transport use to a lower mortality rate, a happier disposition, and greater labour productivity. Public transport users take up to three times the amount of exercise per day compared to drivers, simply from walking between stops and their destinations.[vi]

    Public transport also brings financial benefits to communities: not only directly by providing jobs in the industry itself, but also by creating a key component to a healthy business ecosystem, and by increasing mobility options for both commuters and customers.

    It can assist in shaping a more active society, where people accept and respect each other, interact more, learning how to live together – the core elements of a healthy polity – all for free!

    Such an idea may seem revolutionary for a car-dominated city such as Dublin, but actually it’s more like a reversion to how it operated in the past. The city existed for at least a millennium before the motor car arrived on the scene. Its city centre was built around pedestrian traffic, which had to be forcefully adjusted as car ownership expanded. Cars never made sense in Dublin, but they found a way in and have become part of the urban tissue. Now that must change.

    Will we ever have free public transport in Ireland? Not anytime soon I fear. It would take considerable campaigning for this to occur. But we must do something to alleviate the insane traffic congestion in our city, and awaken to the responsibility of addressing the climate chaos afflicting the planet.

    [i] Fergal O’Brien, Dublin third worst city for time spent sitting in traffic – survey, RTÉ, February `13th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2019/0213/1029375-dublin-traffic-survey/.

    [ii] Sarah Barth, ‘Paris’s 5 year cycling revolution: Twice the cycle lanes and three times the cyclists by 2020’, road.cc – peddled-powered, April 4th, 2015, https://road.cc/content/news/147613-pariss-5-year-cycling-revolution-twice-cycle-lanes-and-three-times-cyclists-2020.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Traffic congestion hitting Dublin companies – Dublin Chamber’, RTÉ, 15th of March, 2018, https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/0316/948010-dublin-chamber-traffic/.

    [iv] Daniel Boffey, ‘Luxembourg to become first country to make all public transport free’, The Guardian, December 5th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/luxembourg-to-become-first-country-to-make-all-public-transport-free.

    [v] Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Ireland has third highest emissions of greenhouse gas in EU’, Irish Times, 26th of August, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/ireland-has-third-highest-emissions-of-greenhouse-gas-in-eu-1.3998041.

    [vi] Sarah Boseley, ‘How do you build a healthy city? Copenhagen reveals its secrets’ February 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/11/how-build-healthy-city-copenhagen-reveals-its-secrets-happiness

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  • It Is Good We Are Dreaming

    ‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming –
    It would hurt us – were we awake –
    But since it is playing – kill us,
    And we are playing – shriek –‘
    ‘We dream – it is good we are dreaming’
    Emily Dickinson

    There are quite a few things in life which I deem to be frankly repulsive – cancer, world hunger, terrible Twitter takes, right wing politics, capitalism et cetera but truly the worst thing of all is when a writer writes about their own work. So please forgive me, dear wonderful reader, because I’m about to do just that.

    It Is Good We Are Dreaming runs from May 31st – June 11th in the New Theatre here in Dublin. It’s the first in person play from a new emerging queer theatre company called LemonSoap (yes, we’re James Joyce fans) of which I am delighted to be a member.

    The play explores the relationship between two estranged siblings, Fionn and Fiadh. Unexpectedly one morning Fionn arrives at his elder sister Fiadh’s house and over the course of a morning they end up discussing everything from the man made of rock their mother fell in love with, the nature of inheritance, the ecological collapse of our world, Just Dance on the Wii and their respective love lives.

    It’s a strange little play about family and Irish mythology and how difficult it is to live in Dublin city and I’ve realised over the course of writing and rehearsing this piece that there were three impulses behind it’s creation. Three thoughts I wanted to think through in a play and of course being a writer of an utmost writerly disposition I find I do my best thinking while pretending to be someone else inside a literary framework of my own creation and so a play was born. See! Writers writing about their own work is horrific!

    Existence

    I have been thinking a lot recently (while pretending to be someone else, obviously) about living at a time when it feels like the world is ending. I can’t put my finger on when it became a part of my daily existence to wonder about these things – worlds ending, civilisation collapsing and the like.

    Maybe the pandemic, the recession, the wars or too much time during lockdown to bake brownies and stare at myself. But I think about them, the end of the world as we’ve known it, a lot now. Probably to an unhealthy amount really but then I am a writer so hopefully people (you) won’t call me crazy but rather contemporary or finger on the pulse or some such and I’m not a fan of doomsday talk in general really but my god how can you avoid it at this rate?

    I’m always it would seem thinking about Mary Robinson’s righteous anger and tears at COP26 or the rise in anti-LGBT hate across the globe or how there’s months left to avoid mass extinction events or how it seems the slow march towards oblivion for us doesn’t seem like it can be avoided anymore and I’ll tell you a secret: I lied earlier.

    I can put my finger on when Armageddon thoughts became daily daydreaming for me and it was while writing this play. Which is hilarious! But true. Existential despair caused by playwriting. I betya Beckett and Caryl Churchill would say the same thing. Well, I hope they’d say it anyway because that would make me feel better.

    With this show, I wanted to write about a brother and sister who have a frank and honest conversation about how to continue to exist in the world right now, how to push on and live and love despite the creeping sense that the life we’ve been sold, the life our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were able to afford, more than likely may never come true for us.

    Our two characters, Fionn and Fiadh, find very different ways to deal or not to deal with the dying of the light. Fiadh’s decided to learn to actually like oatmilk, to buy a pair of wellies and a gas mask too.

    Fionn’s taken to railing against the world and struggles to come to terms with the gross unfairness of it all and throughout the play we see these two siblings clash up against eachother as they attempt to navigate and explore their own relationship and the world around them.

    This is a play with two characters under the age of thirty at its heart and I’m excited and terrified to see how people, particularly older people, respond to the conversations these two are having. Conversations which firmly reflect the ones I am having with my peers, us much maligned Generation Zs.

    Questions about existence and living and climate collapse and how we emerge into and are meant to thrive when the notions of thriving we’ve been force fed are actually literally contributing to the world’s dying.

    While I don’t think literature can solve the climate crisis or housing crisis or stem the rising tides of inequality, I do think what it can do is provide voice and space to those concerns and provide some much needed catharsis for those of us who need it. That’s what, amongst other great things like funny and riveting and not boring, I hope this play is. A rumination on existing.

    Inheritance

    I am always and forever fascinated by how we as people are defined by what we inherit. How it’s written in our bones really from birth some things about us that we maybe in ways can’t really escape.

    There are countless studies out there about how traumas can be inherited from our forefathers and they all are eminently debatable and fascinating and so with It Is Good We Are Dreaming I set out to try and explore what can be inherited in many little ways. In the play we hear whispers from Fionn and Fiadh’s mother coming from the walls. She whispers bed time stories which the two siblings would have heard growing up, each of them with a decidedly Irish mythological bent to them.

    Their mother, played in a voice over role so mercurially by Fionnuala Murphy, is a complex enigmatic figure who spent her life chasing after the ghost of a man made of rock. She’s someone who in very many ways slips in and out of our known world and into another and the play explores the myriad ways in which that’s defined and repulsed her two children.

    Fionn and Fiadh too are half siblings, joined together in life by the mother they share. They were raised separate to one another, Fiadh raised by her father and Fionn by both his Mam and Dad. Because of that they come from very different material backgrounds. Fiadh was raised in a wealthy suburb and went to a private school while Fionn was raised in a working class environment and has had to work to put himself through college.

    I wanted to see in this play what happens when you place two people, two siblings, born into very different material circumstances together and how their difference in circumstance and class would manifest itself throughout.

    Class is something I don’t think is often represented enough or interrogated on Irish stages. We either see families falling apart in wealthy suburbs or peasant farmers from Donegal or Kerry fighting over land, rarely in Irish theatre do we see examinations of the material reality of class and how it impacts us today.

    With this play, I wanted to explore the subtle ways in which our class defines and differentiates us. These are two characters bashing up against each other who have inherited many different things from their families and the world around them. Their socio-economic status or a mother who dreams of another world or a planet riddled and rank with issues near even beyond their comprehension.

    The weight of history and family and their inheritance sits in this room with these two siblings and in ways they escape, subvert and succumb to that which they’ve had no choice in being given.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that we are all boats, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I’d like to think we are more than what came before us or at least that if we want to we can escape it. But I don’t know really and so I felt wrestling with the role of inheritance in our lives would be worthwhile subject for a play and I hope you’ll think so too.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Myths and Legends

    In case you haven’t noticed by now I am really fascinated by intergenerational trauma and the ecological collapse of our world. But what really and truly set me off on writing this play was the idea that it would in its way explore the vast array of rich and crazily original Irish mythological stories, legends and fairy tales which underpin this island we live on. We know the stories, we’ve read many of them as kids.

    The Children of Lir, Tir Na nOg, The Giants Causeway and The Fianna. We know of them as children’s stories but when you begin to discover just how rich and detailed and earthy and ethereal these Irish legends are you won’t be able to get enough of them. I wanted to capture the essence of the mythology of our Island and infuse it with this play and so it became about a mother who lives in the mythological realm and her two children who sit in the mundane one reaching out for the mythological, reaching out for her.

    It became a play about two siblings puzzling through the enigmatic myths and legends their mother told them. Stories of the man made of rock she fell in love with. The crystal fish that float in the sky. The person in the attic saying prayers late at night. The four swans taking flight.

    I think sometimes we are afraid in this country of the stories our ancestors told. I think that’s probably colonial and also the fault of the church who stole a lot of those stories to make saints.

    Yeats and Lady Gregory however brought our stories and our mythologies so vibrantly onto the stage with their Celtic revival in the early 20th century and today Marina Carr with her extraordinary body of work explores Irish and Greek mythologies with startling insights. But by and large we shy away from our legends, we leave them as stories to be told to kids and that’s it. I think they are too rich, too complex, too full to the rafters with brilliance to be hidden away because of some post-colonial theocratic embarrassment.

    So I’ve stuffed this play to the gills with obscure references. To the Children of Lir, the Fianna, Diarmuid and Grainne. To the Gods we worshipped once and the peoples our ancestors would say came to this land before us. In It Is Good We Are Dreaming the mythological joins us at the kitchen sink. It whispers from the walls in stories told by a mother who has always had one foot in either world.

    The image of Ben Bulben looms large over this play, which in our mythology is said could act as a gateway to the other side. The third and final impulse for this piece was that it must be epic yet tiny in scope, it must be a naturalistic drama where the mythic bleeds in to warp and distort, it must pay tribute to the legends our ancestors gave to us while forging new ones that Fionn and Fiadh tell one another. It must be a play that in many ways is hard to define.

    A slippery complex piece about family and myth and climate change and more. And I think, dear reader, you probably have most of all gotten the impression that this play is hard to define after all of my ramblings. But that’s why you should come see it. To define it for yourself.

    One last thing. The title of this play, as you’ve probably noticed, is taken from the above quoted Emily Dickinson poem. I chose the title because I believe it’s a perfect encapsulation of in the end what this play is aiming to be. Because despite the many horrors of life right now, despite the inheritance that defines us or haunts us or the crises that besiege us, we continue to dream. We have to.

    To hope for better. To hope for change and for beauty and for joy. To dream so that all the future generations can too. It is good we are dreaming. And despite all that awaits us and the portents of doom ahead we can’t lose it, we mustn’t. Because even if everything else leaves us, we’ll always have and we always will be dreaming. And despite everything, I think that’s really beautiful.

    Feature Image: Laoise Murray as Fiadh and Luke Dalton as Fionn. Photo by Owen Clarke

  • The Good Terrorist

    Even if these operations are shocking revelations to those who have a romantic notion of the past then the risk of their disillusionment is worth the price of finally exposing the hypocrisy of those in the establishment who rest self-righteously on the rewards of those who in yesteryear’s freedom struggle made the supreme sacrifice.
    Sinn Féin Pamphlet, The Good Old IRA, 1985.

    It’s fair to say we shouldn’t apply the same judgment to people of the past as we do to our contemporaries. Throughout history, men and women have been conditioned to live and think in ways quite alien to prevailing sensibilities. Looking back into pre-history, we find infanticide commonly practised by hunter-gatherer communities, probably to ensure collective survival.

    Many Irish people in the 1930s supported either Fascism in Italy and Germany, or Communist Russia, without being acutely aware of what was happening under those regimes; let alone what would happen during World War II, and beyond.

    At that point democracy seemed in global retreat, as a civilisation-defining war loomed between two rival systems, while the surviving democracies contended with a Great Depression that suggested an inherently dysfunctional capitalist system. A person might reasonably be attracted to a radical alternative, however horrifying these totalitarian systems may appear to us now.

    Arguably the best did not lose their moral scruples – or democratic values – albeit they may have lost ‘all conviction,’ as Yeats anticipated in ‘The Second Coming’; indeed, he has been described as a fascist ‘fellow-traveller’ himself.

    It begs the question: when does the past become a foreign country, where they do things differently? When do we stop judging people by the standards of today? At what point does a new era begin? Can a person even straddle two epochs?

    For example, the Sinn Féin party that now stands on the brink of power in Ireland are commonly castigated for the conduct of the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yet few, if any, members of that party in Dáil Eireann actively participated in the Provisional IRA.

    In contrast, the origin of Fine Gael, which emerged as a combination of Cumann na nGhaedhal, the Irish Centre Party and the National Guard, better known as the Blueshirts, in 1933, tends to be ignored, or even qualified.

    O’Duffy leading a salute with the Blueshirts, December 1934.

    Thus, Irish Times columnist Stephen Collins defines the Blueshirts as ‘best understood as para-fascists,’ which according to one source is ‘a larger category of regimes that adapted or aped ‘fascist’ formal and organizational features, but did not share the revolutionary ideological vision of genuine fascism.’

    Such nuance might have been lost on General Eoin O’Duffy and his more earnest acolytes; albeit my own great-grandfather, John A. Costello – whose commitment to human rights made him an acceptable Taoiseach to former IRA chief of staff and leader of Clann na Poblachta Sean MacBride in the First Interparty Government of 1948 – injudiciously declared in 1934: ‘the Blackshirts were victorious in Italy and … the Hitler Shirts were victorious in Germany, as … the Blueshirts will be victorious in the Irish Free State.’

    During periods of crisis even decent people can be carried along by waves of hysteria that cause civil liberties and common decency to be cast aside. A famous 2003 documentary ‘The Fog of War’ features former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara attempting to rationalise the U.S. bombing campaign in South-East Asia. Our present era where we witness a Populist clamour for mandatory vaccination may, in time, be viewed as one such illiberal period.

    A youth growing up in a Catholic, or Protestant, working class neighbourhood in Belfast during the 1970s might easily, and perhaps reasonably, have become involved in what we now define as terrorist organisations. That individual might even have committed awful terrible crimes in the Fog of War.

    It is a very delicate question as to what point we should let bygones be bygones and allow even participants in a sectarian, or post-colonial, struggle to participate in government without being constantly reminded of their past. Fine Gael certainly had no problem going into government with Clann na Poblachta in 1948, despite the latter’s association with the Republican cause.

    Belfast, 1969, Bob Quinn.

    The Northern Ireland power-sharing executive represents an imperfect attempt to move on from the Troubles. It has at least diminished the level of politically motivated violence in that society.

    This process was actively encouraged by successive Irish governments, especially through the mechanism of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, culminating in the participation of Sinn Féin in government.

    Yet what we hear today in Ireland from the likes of Fintan O’Toole is that Sinn Féin somehow has a flawed pedigree, and must apologise, again and again. Frankly, it’s boring and inconsistent.

    There is a larger question around how we represent political violence in an Era of Centenaries. The decision of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to enter into a coalition might be viewed favourably in terms of a definitive end to ‘tribal’ Civil War politics.

    But what of the use of historical figures associated with those parties? In particular, is it appropriate for Fine Gael to remind the public of its association with Michael Collins, one of the great exponents of what supporters define as urban guerrilla warfare and detractors terrorism, or at least extra-judicial assassination?

    Moreover, Collins participated in the Easter Rising led by Pádraig Pearse who said in 1913: ‘Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood … There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them.’

    The shell of the G.P.O. on Sackville Street (later O’Connell Street), Dublin in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising.

    Political violence was intrinsic to Pearse’s, and arguably Collins’s, approach to the birthing of the nation. They were men of their time, but were a faction within a faction that enjoyed less popular support than the Provisional IRA during the Northern Troubles.

    Besides, while the British authorities in Ireland prior to independence were hardly a model of good government, they had at least distributed much of the land among peasant proprietors and developed reasonable infrastructure. Home Rule was on the statute book. It might be argued that 1916 made Partitition inevitable.

    In contrast, the sectarian Unionist government – ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’ – in Northern Ireland was denying civil rights to Catholics, gerrymandering constituency boundaries and sponsoring the B Specials, a sectarian, quasi-military reserve special constable police force.

    The Northern Troubles was a dark period in the history of the island, but to suggest those involved were, and are, inherently evil rather than, in most cases, products of historical forces, is lazy reasoning. Let’s put to bed the idea the Troubles disqualifies Sinn Féin’s participation in government for ever more, and move on to scrutinising the detail of their policies, in particular a failure to adopt a discernible position on the optimum response to COVID-19 in Ireland.

    Featured Image: Michael Collins by John Lavery, 1922.

  • A Few Good Men and Women

    In the wake of the murder by a police officer of the unfortunate Sarah Everard, and the ensuing justified anger, many media people were calling for “good” men to act more visibly in opposing violence against women. While I back 100% the calls made for “good” men to speak up, I am also concerned that the more general ideas of social equality are fast becoming reduced to a gender-specific proposition, having the potential knock-on effect of splitting the Left.

    This is not to diminish the seriousness of violence against women, but only to attempt to bring to light how the focus on gender equality may be impacting our perception of more general inequality, and how this apparent narrowing of focus risks being manipulated by those whose interests are not necessarily best served by social equality.

    While many women are exploited by many men, in the wider culture there are those still looking to keep wages low; rents and the cost of living high, while reneging on any social housing provision, who will look to spin the fact of female exploitation in order to capture the female vote to the service of their own particular brand of social exploitation.

    Spin

    In a recent tweet, Una Mullally, responding to Josepha Madigan’s dig at the Kerryman newspaper, suggesting the paper be renamed the Kerryperson, called this out for the cynical political ploy it was. Referencing her own Irish Times article of March 8th which predicted this type of play, Mullally described Madigan’s move as an awkward Fine Gael grab for the female vote, which, as things stand, may decide the next government, as it decided the referendum in 2015.

    But the main talking point in the past week has not been Fine Gael attempts to capture the female vote, but the more immediate mystery as to why “good” men don’t speak out against violence against women.

    Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times on March 16th said that in order for men to make a more overt stand against violence against women they must first learn to be shocked by that violence. At the moment, he argues, such violence all seems routine to most men. I wonder about that, since it seems to suggest that silence equals complacency equals broad approval.

    When you remove the particular instance O’Toole is referring to, that is, the emotive and highly charged question of violence against women, and replace it with say, general social inequality; you immediately already have an answer as to why “good” men appear to do nothing in the face of violence against women. The truth is, the majority of good men, and good women too, tend to remain strategically schtum on a wide range of problematical social issues until they see which way the political winds are blowing.

    Good Men

    Edmund Burke is reputed to have said that ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.‘

    Burke wrote the line in a letter in 1770, which is more than a little while ago. The point being, the good men idea is far from being new. In fact, Burke’s quote needs updating, since at the time of his writing the realization of women’s suffrage was a long way in the future. An updated version would read: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and good women to do nothing.‘’

    So instead of posing the question, Why do good men do nothing, in such a way as to refer to a specific issue – in this case male violence against women – it is perhaps clearer to ask why do good people, regardless of gender, not raise their voices in say, situations where right-wing policy creates homelessness and subsequent deaths from exposure; or privatisation results in poor services and deaths due to cut corners and profit-conscious oversights? Why do good people not raise their voices en masse on these issues too?

    By the strict criteria of the “good” men concept as framed by Edmund Burke and others, we are all responsible, good men and good women alike, for homeless deaths, for direct provision deaths, for deaths caused as a result of medical privatisation, for domestic violence in all its guises and so on. Since this is a democracy, we all, strictly speaking, bear equal responsibility for the failings of democracy to deliver equal treatment to all. But these are difficult questions when applied to the real world.

    For instance, if you were an arts practitioner cosying up to Josepha Madigan when she was Minister for Arts, with a view to gaining favour and financial support for some project you had planned, are you complicit in Madigan’s rallying support to oppose Traveller accommodation? Or are the two issues compartmentalised? One being her political position and the other being her apparent social and class intolerance. Do you sacrifice your project to make a point, or do you compromise?

    Herds

    Along with such moral quandaries you also have the problem of the behaviour of crowds, which tend to behave like herds. Even politicians don’t really lead, they too follow the herd in the form of the public mood glimpsed in polls. Most people are spectators, going with the flow of the herd. We stand and watch the game until some critical mass is reached and then we raise our voices in support of whatever new majority appears to be on the rise. This works for every growing gang, from commies to fascists. A critical mass is reached and the herd follows. History shows that the herd will follow any old idea once this critical mass is achieved.

    Søren Kierkegaard, writing on this phenomenon, noted that an individual is worth more than a crowd of individuals, because an individual has personal agency, whereas a crowd tends to go with the flow of the herd. As a result, Kierkegaard comes to the conclusion that truth always belongs to the minority, since the majority tend towards unthinking obedience to the movement of the herd.

    It could be that now is the time where the issue of violence against women is to be embraced by the herd as an issue whose time has come. An issue for which good men are expected to speak up. But the point is, that apart from the particular issue, the question as to why do good people do nothing might be more properly considered in relation to a wider sense of social equality, encompassing all issues of social inequality.

    This applies equally to the politician allowing the market to decide the fates of those seeking housing, as it does to the person turning a blind eye to white collar corruption, or a man turning a blind eye to violence against women.

    Good Men and Good Women

    In this regard, for Fintan O’Toole to suggest that the evil of violence against women is exacerbated by good men doing nothing, is disingenuous at best, or is simply more political gamesmanship.

    Because the Irish Times also plays politics with notions of equality, quietly supporting right-wing Fine Gael policy through the manner in which it shapes and pitches stories, while always being first up with the property supplements when the market shifts, eager supporters of the housing Ponzi scheme, where the wealthy business class figuratively eat our young by selling them over-priced houses, while their political cronies refuse to enter into any believable form of social housing policy.

    Which begs the question, that when Fintan O’Toole is calling on “good” men to be more vociferous in condemning violence against women, is he referring to the same “good” men who remain silent in the face of social inequality on a more general level, keeping strategically schtum on a range of social equality issues, in order to ensure the perpetuation of a neoliberal status quo that is giving rise to social inequality in the first place?

    Conclusion

    All of this is not to suggest that the call for “good” men to raise their voices on the subject of violence against women is a wasted exercise; but only to point out that such a call to “good” men is not new; and furthermore, that by repackaging that call as an issue-specific moral imperative, while ignoring the same demand across a more general range of social equality issues, is to have the effect, whether knowingly or not, of splitting the Left by narrowing the imperative of social equality to a divisive gender issue, in such a way as to assist the project of the establishment parties and the elite they appear to represent.

    This will doubtless remain the situation until such time as good men and good women of all classes speak out against social inequality in all its guises.