Cassandra Voices

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  • Lockdowns: “Thinking in One Dimension”. Podcast Interview with Professor Sunetra Gupta.

    Bonus Episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-ii-100102849

    Or via apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep4-lockdowns-thinking-in-one-dimension-with-guest/id1728086643?i=1000648655188

    In early 2020, Sunetra Gupta was quietly working on a universal influenza vaccine as Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, while finishing her sixth novel. By then, a new coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan, China. In response, she and her group produced a paper suggesting, among other scenarios, as much as 50% of the U.K. population had already been infected.

    This was in stark contrast to the assessment of Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, whose modelling assumed Covid-19 had just arrived in the West and that we had no cross-immunity from other coronaviruses against it, meaning it would kill almost one in a hundred of those who contracted it. For reasons still inadequately explored, the U.K., Irish and most Western governments – along with many in the Global South – followed Ferguson’s (and others’) doomsday prediction and chose untested lockdowns in anticipation of a vaccine – a containment strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, as opposed to a (Chinese-style) elimination strategy.

    Sunetra Gupta has been vindicated in her assessment that Covid 19 had been circulating far longer than initially understood, and also that it had a much lower fatality rate than Ferguson and others assumed from limited data. Moreover, it was obvious that this social experiment would cause serious harms, while its inability to contain the virus was unknown.

    Sunetra Gupta did not take lockdown lying down. She and a number of academic colleagues authored the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, advocating for an end to lockdowns, and promoting the targeted protection of the elderly – who were by far the most susceptible to death from the virus.

    What followed was not, as she hoped, a civilised discussion weighing the costs and benefits of each strategy, but abuse and even an attempt to have her silenced.

    Sunetra Gupta argues that what we experienced with lockdowns represented a distortion of the precautionary principle, arguing:

    I think that people were incorrectly assuming that they were applying the precautionary principle to all of this. So they were thinking, okay, well, you know, the worst case scenario is what we should be going by. And that’s because they were thinking in one dimension, which is we’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop this pandemic from unfolding, because it is compatible with the idea that 1% of the population will die if it just unfurls. What they were missing was the fact that these very measures that they were seeking to employ to stop the spread were ones that came at a very huge cost – and that was known at the time – what we didn’t know is whether those measures would stop the spread. And even if they did, what effect that would actually have eventually on the final death toll. But what we absolutely knew for certain – because it was happening in front of our eyes – is that these lockdowns would cause people to die. People were already dying from not being able to sell toys in the pavement in Delhi and being told to go back home to their villages, so the costs of lockdown were known, the benefits of lockdown were completely unknown. And under those circumstances, what you should be doing if you’re adopting the precautionary principle is to not go with lockdowns, but think of other solutions.

    Image: Andrea Piacquadio

    Universal Influenza Vaccine

    Some years ago, Sunetra Gupta and colleagues theorized that parts of the influenza virus ‘targeted by the immune system are, in fact, limited in variability and acts as a constraint on its evolution.’

    The current, relatively ineffective, vaccines against it, have to be updated every year to catch up with changes in that virus. She reveals to Cassandra Voices that ‘we now have the ingredients to make this [universal] vaccine.’ This will mainly address endemic influenza which kills almost half a million people, including a high proportion of infant babies, every year.

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta argues here that the possibility of an influenza pandemic was ‘actually eliminated a long time.’ She bases this assessment on how until 1918: ‘we experienced influenza only in pandemic form, just because of the demographic characteristics of the time. But since 1918, we’ve had influenza as a seasonal, regular endemic occurrence.’

    Today, she says, we are ‘all regularly exposed to influenza,’ giving us protection against severe disease.’ She further argues:

    What happened in 1918 was that, in my opinion, there had been no flu around for thirty years. So when the virus arrived, people under the age of thirty were extremely vulnerable. And that’s why you saw such high death rates in young people. People over the age of thirty were more protected.

    She says it’s true, to an extent, that international travel predisposes us to pandemics, but, paradoxically, ‘we are regularly exposed to different viruses, which gives us a wall of immunity against these emerging threats.’ She assumes that without regular exposure to the other seasonal coronaviruses ‘we would have been more susceptible’ to COVID-19.

    Based on her evolutionary theory, she had predicted the Swine Flu pandemic (that generated unwarranted hysteria) of 2009 two years before it hit. She says she ‘wasn’t the least bit worried in 2009 because, first of all, I thought even if it weren’t basically identical to the 1918 flu, that most of us would have a considerable degree of immunity against severe disease.’

    Contrary to Bill Gates, who claims the world must create ‘a fire department for pandemics’ to avoid catastrophic outbreaks, Sunetra Gupta says ‘we don’t need to panic to the degree that we do about new pandemics; what we need to do is to be clear headed and rational and try and think about ways of protecting those who might die or might be severely ill and hospitalised from these pandemics or these events.’

    The Role of the Epidemiologist

    The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum wrote in Pandemic Century – One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris (2019) that ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as risky, it is medical science, and the science of epidemiology in particular, that is often the source of irrational and often prejudicial judgments’. Then in 2020, the Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt claimed that epidemiologists see their function ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore, if they say it is one hundred times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s okay.’

    Sunetra Gupta argues:

    the role of epidemiology is to provide a conceptual framework within which you can understand what is happening and, rather than preventing pandemics or epidemics, which I’ve always been skeptical about, what you want to prevent is the death or the consequences of these events.

    She reckons: ‘it’s a hubris, really, as we saw to think that you can stop the spread of a virus like SARS-CoV-2.’ However, ‘where you can intervene is to try and prevent the consequences of that spread, in that you can protect the vulnerable, or at least try to. But the idea that you could stop the spread was, I think, extremely misguided.’

    She calls for greater resilience in the health system, pointing to the nefarious influence of neoliberal capitalism on public health.

    If you’re trying to maximize what they call efficiency, you end up with these big hospitals instead of sort of more local, smaller units. And that creates the conditions for vulnerable people to be exposed more easily to the virus.

    Professor Neil Ferguson.

    SIR Model

    Unlike Neil Ferguson, Sunetra Gupta’s team made no assumptions about the infection fatality rate in March 2020. She now says:

    The purpose of that paper was to show that you can take a simple model, an epidemic model, which applies to coronavirus or any virus that gives you some level of immunity for a certain period of time, at least in the case of coronavirus. Of course, that would be short. Measles would be long. But any such model, which is called an SIR model – simply because people go from being susceptible to being infected and then recovering – you can fit a model like that to the available data under a very wide range of infection fatality rates.

    She says Ferguson and his colleagues fitted the available data based an IFR of almost 1% because: ‘They were using data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and a few other bits of data from Wuhan.’ In such a model as this the two variables, she says, ‘are the infection fatality rate and when the epidemic occurred … So what we showed is what we were seeing could easily be the result of an epidemic that had already occurred [that] had a very small infection fatality rate. Or as Neil proposed, there was an epidemic that was just taking off and had a high infection fatality rate.’

    Later she was asked a guess about what the infection fatality rate might be. What she said, she stands by, that it was definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably close to 1 in 10,000. She adds, in hindsight, however:

    What I probably shouldn’t have done is given any answer at all, because the infection fatality rate is not really a number that you can think of in terms of the average across the population. So there will be parts of the world where, because there is [a high proportion of] elderly or people with comorbidities… [there is greater] vulnerability to death … So it is actually somewhat meaningless to think of the IFR as an average number, but it’s certainly not 1%.

    ‘What I was trying to do with that paper’ she says ‘is just to say, you can’t have that level of certainty in this situation.’ She agrees that ‘at the time you wouldn’t be able to discriminate between lockdown and the build-up of immunity and the contributions of seasonality. But now, because we have more data, you can and so it’s much more likely that we had built up what’s known as herd immunity in certain pockets or substantially it had accrued in certain areas.’

    She adds:

    We couldn’t tell then because we hadn’t done the experiment of lifting lockdown and seeing what would happen. But we did do that experiment a year later. And at that point you could discriminate between those two hypotheses. And I think what now I will say is that you can explain what happened almost anywhere in the world, using a simple model in which you accumulate immunity, but you also lose it quickly, which is known for all coronaviruses combined with the effects of seasonality. And that simple model … will explain qualitatively all patterns that we see.

    Gold Standard

    On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle wrote in The New York Times. ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s W.H.O. ties, the authors noted ‘Imperial was treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’

    Not long afterwards on March 24th, a report appeared in the Financial Times, quoting Sunetra Gupta to the effect that perhaps as much as half the UK population had already contracted Covid-19. However, the author of that article added that her group’s modelling was ‘controversial; and ‘its assumptions were have been contested by other scientists.’

    Despite their differences, Sunetra Gupta speaks of a respectful relationship with Ferguson, with whom she had ‘friendly chats’ during the period. There was ‘no disagreement’ about ‘the basic ideas and assumptions.’ It’s just that he said ‘he thought that their worst case scenario was more likely than what I was saying, which is that we didn’t know, and perhaps veering more towards [that there had already been] substantial waves in areas like London … But we both acknowledged there were a spectrum of possibilities. And until we had the full data, we wouldn’t know where we were.’

    She acknowledges, nonetheless, that ‘it’s hard not to have emotion about these things. But you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to think about whether an intervention is achieving its purpose and whether the collateral damage is too great or not.’

    ‘Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    Interestingly, Sunetra Gupta says she had ‘a great time’ during lockdowns as she lives in ‘a nice house with a big garden, and my daughters, who were in their early twenties, came back home for six months.’ She now wonders whether ‘at some point someone should write a play called Oh, What a Lovely lockdown!’

    She says that’s the point: ‘the lockdowns … were put in place by those of us who are privileged; [what] Martin Kulldorff called them the laptop classes … while throwing the poor and the young under the bus.’

    Regarding an extraordinary article in The Guardian by George Monbiot calling for ‘a time delimited outright ban’ on lies that endanger people’s lives, referring to people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta ‘who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic,’ she says she was ‘absolutely shocked that someone like Monbiot would claim to know more [than me] about how the pathogen spreads, about epidemic behavior and control measures.’

    She wonders, ‘why would someone with … no qualifications to speak of these things accuse me of spreading lies and misinformation … Why would he do that? I mean, it’s shocking.’

    She says she tried:

    to ask common friends to tell him. You know what? Pick up the phone to me. I’ll explain to you. I mean, that’s what he should have done. He should have said, oh, why is she saying this? Maybe I should just pick up the phone to ask for an interview and get her opinion. And then … he’s free to disagree with it. Although from a position of someone who is not precisely qualified to make those judgments. So I find that kind of behavior absolutely shocking.

    ‘They Should Apologise’

    Sunetra Gupta says she has repeatedly called for debates, for example, with Neil [Ferguson] with whom she has only ‘ever had a respectful engagement.’ She expresses surprise ‘that places like the Royal Society didn’t put on more debates and instead ‘just toed the line on this and just went with the consensus.’

    She says:

    I have not been approached with an apology from any of [her critics at the time]. An apology on account of how they behaved, but nor, indeed an apology on having got a lot of things wrong … So they criticised me for wrong reasons, and they should now come and say to me, we are sorry. We now see that lockdowns are indeed very harmful and that school closures didn’t prevent transmission, or that vaccines don’t block infection. They should apologize to me, but they haven’t.

    She also has some harsh criticism for the way in which academia now operates:

    I think the circumstances now under which academia is expected to operate are ones that are conducive to people … forming these sorts of groups, consensus groups, because that’s how they fund their research … by reviewing each other’s grants and just generally agreeing with each other. And of course … some of these funds are coming through some form of philanthro-capitalism. Those are all features of the system which lend themselves to this kind of aggravation of an idea of a risk. And … there’s also the … huge temptation of putting yourself in the middle of it being the saviour … “I had to get a burner phone because I’m so important.” And, you know, “I was the one who delivered the world of this scourge.” Those are the sort of rather more simple … reasons why we saw what we saw, rather than some huge conspiracy.

    Reflecting on the period where she earned such publicity she says:

    I’d always hoped [it would be] through my writing, through my novels, not necessarily through science. So I know it’s not something I particularly find to be that gratifying because this is just sort of my job and … it’s caused nothing but distress to me and to my family; for my daughters, it’s been a difficult period to have to deal with this fame, notoriety, that I achieved.

    However, she doesn’t buy into the idea that the role of a scientist is simply to deliver the science:

    because I think that one can always hide behind one’s profession. I mean, the best example … I often talk about [is from] the film Mephisto [1981, directed by István Szabó], where the central character, the actor … has kind of accepted the patronage of the Nazis at one point [and] when he’s accused of that, just says, “please leave me alone. I’m just an actor,” … nobody is just an actor or just a scientist. It’s not good enough to say, “I’m just a scientist. I just do mathematical modelling and you know, whether lockdowns work or don’t work or harm other people, it’s none of my business.” That’s not acceptable to me.

    Childhood Covid-19 Vaccination

    Regarding the vaccination of children against Covid-19 she says:

    from the outset that there should never have been given to people who were effectively at zero risk of dying from Covid, particularly because it was never likely to prevent transmission for any more than a few weeks … so there was no logic. Again, if we talk about logic rather than anything else, there is no logic to vaccinating people who are not at risk if the vaccine does not prevent transmission.

    She links this policy failure to recent measles outbreaks in the U.K., and Ireland:

    we warned against this early on by saying one of the reasons not to vaccinate young children, even if it is completely safe, is because it doesn’t prevent infection. So it will create vaccine hesitancy against vaccines that actually people do need … we have limited resources, so it has an opportunity cost. And what we’re seeing in this country and across the world is … the diversion of funds that are meant to tackle these serious endemic diseases … And it’s very, very sad because it’s causing deaths and particularly in places, not so much the UK and Ireland, but … in sub-Saharan Africa or India, I mean, the infection control programmes and vaccination programmes have collapsed in many places, and this is going to lead to many more deaths than Covid, particularly in children, not to mention starvation and other issues.

    She does not, however, believe that the excess deaths we have witnessed in recent times should be attributed to Covid-19 vaccines, pointing to the example of Sweden ‘which doesn’t have many excess deaths, but did vaccinate its population.’

  • ‘Devil in the Hills’: Jim Sheridan on the Sophie Toscan du Plantier Murder

    Listen to the second half of this podcast on Patreon.

    Jim Sheridan condemns the Irish government for handing over the file on the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case to the French authorities, wondering whether we are ‘still an independent country.’ He argues that this should never have been done ‘over the head of the Director of Public Prosecutions’ who concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring Ian Bailey to trial in the wake of the murder, or subsequently.

    Sheridan says:

    So okay, let’s just send it to France where they won’t allow Maureen Farrell [the witness who retracted her earlier claim that she had seen Ian Bailey with Sophie before the murder] to appear and say that she lied … And we have Francois Macron coming on the television speaking about this murder. Has he nothing better to do? I know the French family probably are trying their hardest … But there needs to be an intake of breath now and stop all this. It’s just too insane.

    Sheridan nevertheless claims to have ‘a soft spot’ for Sophie’s son, and ‘his pursuit of justice’, which he describes as ‘heroic’:

    But he was on the Late Late Show … and he said Bailey burned his coat on Christmas Day. But even the slightest perusal of the facts shows you that on the Christmas Day Bailey was on the Christmas swim, which is the only piece of video evidence we have.

    Jim Sheridan maintains that branding Ian Bailey a murderer, despite no criminal charge ever being made against him in an Irish court, brings shame on Ireland. But he argues there is no shame on West Cork.

    Sheridan also refers disparagingly to a 2000 New Yorker Magazine article by John Montague entitled ‘A Devil in the Hills’ – ‘Which meant the murderer had to be in West Cork because of a ludicrous idea that the only a local could know where she lived.’

    He believes, ‘we have to look at ourselves and grow up a bit … We can’t replace the French with the British.’

    Final Meeting

    Sheridan met Bailey two days before Christmas, ‘ostensibly to do an interview, but really just to see him.’ He adds that

    an interview with Ian was never of much value because he said the same thing over and over in the same way. He was almost like a child who wanted attention … his height, six four and big bearing and big voice … but when you got past that, there was a little child still there … He was like a big child. So I began to see him as a kid who thought he was in charge of everything … He was the admiral and I was the captain of his ship … he was crazy in a way … But it wasn’t a bad crazy.

    In the podcast, Sheridan explores what made Bailey the perfect fall guy or scapegoat:

    In that valley where Sophie lived. In 1845 there were probably twenty-seven hamlets. In 1848, there were probably none. So the tribal memory of West Cork is of a disastrous famine.

    He reveals how, remarkably, the name of the landlord at that time was Bailey:

    It’s almost like the Sophie’s murder in its appearance mirrors the events of the Famine with a body left exposed. And I think it hit a tribal memory of shame and devastation, and somebody had to be responsible. And who’s responsible for the famine? It’s not the potatoes. It’s not a blight. It’s the English … whether they were or not. To name an Englishman was almost perfect, as they say in darts: 180.

    He adds that

    The Englishman they named was very eccentric and had a sergeant major accent, and he used words and phrases in a very ironic and sarcastic way, almost like a military man.

    Sheridan insists:

    The only way you can understand sarcasm and irony is in a power structure where even though somebody is saying something you understand, that doesn’t mean what it says. For instance.. [if] the Queen saying to the servants, “I love your shoes this morning,” means he hasn’t polished them. But the servant is so troubled in the power structure he knows exactly that the compliment is the opposite. That produces a dissociation with people in the way we speak and act. And Bailey was English perfection in sarcasm and irony. So, when he’s first asked, when he’s first told that he’s going to be sacked. Like anybody. He’s angry. And like anybody, he’s trying to rationalize it and he asks why. And they say, well, people are saying you’re the killer. At which point Bailey is probably the only journalist who’s really pointing the finger at France, at the husband … correctly or incorrectly, we don’t know. Probably incorrectly, but we leave that aside. [Then to the] editor who is firing him he says people are saying, you did it. And he says: “of course I did it to get a good story” … Which actually means nothing like: “I killed her” It means: “if my objective was to write stories about the murder. And that’s the reason I killed her. It’s not working, is it? I’m being fired.” That’s what it means.

    Jim Sheridan is unsure whether the new documentary he has made will blow the case open, but contends that ‘some of the information that I’ve got is very, very interesting … Some of which I got too late to include in the Sky documentary, and some of which I’ve got subsequently.’

  • Interview On The Liffey

    Jonathan O’Brien of City Kayaking says they began taking litter out of the River Liffey ten years ago. In that time he’s seen a change in the river.

    City Kayaking was launched in order to offer people access to water activities in Dublin, but in the beginning there was a lot of what we used to call ‘legacy litter’ in the Liffey. It would have wildlife underneath it, or bottles would be full of barnacles. We don’t get that anymore. All the litter now comes out pretty clean, quite new. In the summer we take it out so quickly because we’re on the river so often. A McDonald’s bag will blow into the river and we’ll get it out before it’s even wet.  Whereas ten years ago people got used to looking at a lot of trash when they saw the Liffey.

    Today Jonathan pulls cans, plastic bottles and a few take away containers from the water while motoring up the river. ‘Small amounts of effort every day go a long way,’ he says.

    The presence of Styrofoam is a recurring issue. Jonathan doesn’t know where it comes from, but he says it is as common as the seagulls: ‘there’s no pattern to it. It’s just there.’

    Jonathan reckons most of the litter comes from the city itself, from along the quays, the boardwalk and new Dockland developments:

    We can very easily predict where rubbish is going to be. Daily cleanups are just part of our routine now when guiding kayaking tours. For us, removing litter is a small step to leave the river cleaner than we found it. We’re also chipping away at negative perceptions people may have of the Liffey.


    Sadly, Jonathan has encountered little expertise in Dublin City Council for managing this waterway: ‘I don’t see a department in there who are getting their teeth stuck in.’

     

    Jonathan and his colleague Jamie have also been conducting tests on behalf of Dublin City University to monitor water quality. Over the past few years they have measured elevated levels of phosphate and nitrate, which washes downstream from farms and comes locally from urban runoff.

    This nitrate and phosphate residue is invisible to people walking Dublin’s quays but Jonathan sees its effect on the river’s flora: ‘effectively it fertilises the river. Those blooms of algae grow. They grow very fast, and then they die off. And the secondary effect is that the ecosystem gets hammered.’ This he thinks is ‘a ticking bomb.’

    Nonetheless, ‘ Ireland has never had heavy industry. We’ve never had coal or steel in any significant quantities, so we’ve never had the slag and the downstream problems with that.’

    Thus, unlike major rivers in other European countries, such as the Thames the Rhine or the Seine, which have had heavy industry situated along them for centuries, the Liffey doesn’t have a long-term legacy of heavy metals or arsenic.

    Originally Jonathan’s business found it far easier to get tourists onto their kayaks than to get Dubliners on board.

    He now recognises that ‘Dubliners were always looking at the river and thinking it was filthy.’

    But drawing attention to the problem of litter was a double-edged sword:

    The last thing we needed to do was reinforce the bad reputation the Liffey had as a dirty river. There was a lot of litter, but litter in itself doesn’t make for bad water quality. It’s just litter. It’s like saying that the soil is bad because there’s rubbish on the surface. It doesn’t necessarily make sense. So we never spoke about it. We never tweeted about it. We never put pictures of it out. It’s only recently we’re kind of confident enough that the city’s attitude has changed to the water, that we can say, you know what, collectively we can clean it up.

    The COVID-19 pandemic caused an abrupt drop in tourism and City Kayaking’s business, but this period also sparked Dubliners into rediscovering the Liffey and their local green spaces. Jonathan says they’ve seen more locals showing up to go paddling and it’s a trend he wants to continue. He finds the global attitude has changed:

    The average Joe is much more environmentally aware than they used to be. They might not know exactly how to help, but they are still supportive of the idea of a sustainable environment. Floating the Liffey is an experience that brings things into focus — the beauty of nature alongside a few stray bits of litter, and our capacity to improve things. We’re not just kayaking, we’re opening minds.

    In September 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report demonstrating that water quality declined nationally between 2016-2021. This included a downgrade in the ecological status of the Liffey estuary from “satisfactory” to “moderate” due to phytoplankton, or algae blooms. 

    With thanks to Jamie Brunkow for editorial assistance.

  • Interview with Concetto La Malfa

    This week Cassandra Voices editor Frank Armstrong sat down for a chat with veteran Italian journalist Concetto La Malfa, who has been living in Ireland for almost sixty years.

    He initially arrived for a two month work placement with Aer Lingus, before embarking on a chequered career that includes founding a magazine for the Italian community, which he edited for almost thirty years, acting as the Irish correspondent for the Corriere dello Sport, and teaching Italian in UCD.

    He continues to work as a journalist, principally throught the site he runs: http://italvideonewstv.net/, where he mainly broadcasts short videos discussing important international events.

    Concetto explains how he came to Ireland at a time when the country was still relatively poor, and he says, a little depressing, compared to his native Sicily at least. At that time, Dublin was he says: “a poor capital in a poor country”.

    Indeed, he was slightly disturbed to find that there were only five Italian restaurants – four run by the same brothers – and he struggled to adapt to the Irish lifestyle, missing his native cuisine in particular.

    Since then, Ireland has developed considerably, economically at least, although Concetto likens the country to a dwarf with a giant heart, given the disproportionate size of Dublin’s c. 1.5 million population compared to the c. 3.5 million in the rest of the country.

    Dublin he argues, ‘is a capital city that has grown in a hurry’ and that many things should work better, pointing to the state of the streets and, in particular, the prevalence of street crime.

    In terms of Sicily, he asserts that the mafia is as visible as the IRA was to the ordinary Joe Soap in Ireland. Although he acknowledges that organised crime has has hindered development on the island.

    He keeps away from the intricacies of Italian politics, preferring to concentrate on the big picture, but cites a telling statistic that there have been 67 governments in just 74 years. He wonders whether this is a sign of a democracy that goes too far.

    During his period as correspondent for Corriera dello Sport he became acquainted with Giovanni Trappatoni and Liam Brady, who spent seven seasons in Italy playing for Juventus and Inter Milan.

    Finally, Concetto has formed the view that the West is conducting a war by proxy in Ukraine, with the blood of the Ukrainian people, and that every single weapon sent from the West makes the possibility of a diplomatic resolution more distant.

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  • Interview: Father Peter McVerry

    Father Peter McVerry has been working with homeless people for over forty years. When he started there were about a thousand homeless in Ireland. Now, there are officially about eight thousand, with many others unofficially so. Last week, Daniele Idini caught up with the legendary social justice campaigner.

    Daniele Idini (DI): You have seen different types of crises related to housing in Ireland, but what are the constants?

    Fr McVerry (McV): What has been constant over the forty years is the attitude of decision makers to those who are homeless. When I started, the big issue was fourteen and fifteen year old kids living on the streets. When I opened my first hostel for those kids, the attitude was that these kids who kept running away from home were bad kids, and the solution was to call the police, pick them up and bring them back home again. The idea that there was huge abuse and violence and neglect hadn’t registered yet. So, the attitude was that we shouldn’t be reaching out and helping these kids. They’re just bad kids. Then the problem shifted to young adults with drug problems and again – the same attitude. Well, these are people that started using drugs. It was their fault. So, we shouldn’t really have too much sympathy for them. Then the issue became homeless families, and again, there’s a stigma attached to being homeless, and that stigma is accepted by some decision makers. What has been constant is this negative stigma that is attached to homeless people, and affects some decision makers’ thinking.

    DI: Where do you think this stigma comes from?

    McV: It permeates the whole of society. The only homeless people who are visible are the ones who are sleeping on the street and begging, and who generally do have a drug problem. This leads to a perception among the public that homeless people must have a problem, and that’s why they’re homeless. But the vast majority of homeless people don’t have a drink or a drug problem. The vast majority becoming homeless today are being evicted from the private rented sector, either because they can’t pay the rents, or because the landlord says they’re selling the flat.

    DI: Can we draw a connection between this and the economic policies that have been implemented in the last few decades?

    McV: Well, at an immediate level, when families become homeless, having been evicted from the private rented sector, there is no social housing to move into. In 1975, this country built 8,500 council houses. In 1985, and we were in a recession in the 80s, we still built 6,900 council houses. By contrast, in 2015 this country built seventy-five council houses. So the immediate effect is that there is no housing for those families to move into. They have only got one problem and it’s not drugs and it’s not drink. They don’t have enough money to be able to go out and afford alternative accommodation. 

    Now, why did that happen? It happened because of an ideology. The ideology that the private sector is supposed to solve all our problems. And so, low income families were pushed into the private rented sector, which no longer can cope. But it was that ideology. We’ve privatized everything. We’ve privatized childcare, and that’s in a bit of a mess at the moment. We’ve privatized care for the elderly. Most private nursing homes are privately run. We have privatized much of the health system and now we have privatized the housing system and it simply doesn’t work.

    The private market might build lots and lots and lots of houses, but only for people who can afford them. They’re in the business of making a profit. They’re not going to build housing for low income families. And so it’s the State that has to do that. The State has been very reluctant, over the last twenty years or so, to invest in social housing, and therefore they’re pushed people into the private rented sector. That wouldn’t be too bad, if we didn’t have a crisis in the private market where there aren’t even enough houses for people who can afford to buy them. It is estimated that we need between thirty-five and fifty thousand new houses every year just to keep up with the increase in population. Yet we’re only building in the region of twenty to twenty-five thousand. So there are lots of people who could buy a house, but can’t find a house to buy, and they’re being pushed into the private rented sector. So, everybody is being pushed into the private rented sector, and it can’t cope. Rents are going through the roof.

    DI: In Ireland, we still have relatively high home-ownership, but, especially after the crisis, there’s a rush into the new model of renting for life. This is a bit of a paradox, however, in terms of a neoliberal ideology which aims at protecting the right to private property; yet, in Ireland, owning private property has become out of reach for a significant percentage of the population. 

    McV: Absolutely, yes. So over the last twenty years, the State has failed in its responsibility to build social housing, pushing people into the private rented sector. They had to create a culture for that to happen. The State did two things. First of all, it looked at the continent. It looked at the rest of Europe and said: Well, most people rent. So, any progressive democracy and an economy which is growing must have a lot more people renting. The mistake there is that the rental market in the rest of Europe is totally different from the rental market in Ireland. Most rental markets in Europe are highly regulated: prices and rents are controlled, and you can become a lifelong tenant. Here, you can’t. You get a tenancy for maybe twelve months, or at most four or five years. You’re living with high insecurity, and the rents are increasingly way beyond your means. It’s a totally different rental market to the rest of Europe. But if you read the last government’s housing strategy, there is so much ideology in it trying to persuade us that the rental market is the way we have to go. The rental market has all of these advantages, and it is the only way for a progressive economy to go.

    DI: According to a recent Irish time article Ireland has the 10th highest rate of vacant homes in the world, with 183,312 homes classified as vacant. We have a society that does not regard it’s housing stock as a basic national infrastructure like ports, rail network, airports or the electricity grid.  

    How might the public become more aware of the benefits of a more distributed housing stock?

    McV: Well, I think the public are well aware of the empty homes that exist in every town and village. Ireland is blighted by empty properties lying derelict, often being used for antisocial or drug using young people. But there is very little political will to go after those properties. There is a lot of work involved in trying to identify the owners of some of those properties and trying to sort out any legal problems that may exist with relation to that. But we ought to be promoting compulsory purchase orders on properties that are left idle for longer than one or two years. It is a scandal. 1830,000, you mentioned. One of the issues was the Fair Deal Scheme, where if you go into a nursing home, the value of your home will be taken by the State when you die. Eighty percent of the value of your home will be taken by the State when you die to pay for your care in the nursing home. That meant that people in nursing homes couldn’t rent out the empty house they had been living in, even though they’re never going to go back to it.

    They can’t rent it out because most of the rent would be simply taken up by the nursing home to pay for their care. So, you had empty houses there that couldn’t be used. You had empty houses where we couldn’t find out who the owner was. 

    The government did make a couple of schemes such as a Repair and Leasing Scheme where the owner can benefit from a grant of, I think it’s now €60,000 to bring the empty building back into use and then lease it to the State for a period of up to twenty years. And there was a Buy and Renew Scheme where the State could buy the property and then repair it. But there was very little uptake of those two schemes. So yeah the amount of empty properties is a scandal.

    DI: What other measures would you suggest should be put in place to deal with the situation?

    McV: There are two problems at the moment. One is housing those people who are waiting for social housing. There’s an even more urgent problem, and that is preventing more and more people from coming into homelessness and needing housing. That’s the more urgent problem, and that can be solved overnight. 

    During the pandemic, there was a ban on evictions and there was a ban on a rent increase and the number of homeless people and families dropped by almost two thousand. We should extend that to a ban on rent increases and a ban on evictions for at least three years in order to try and get a grip on the problem. The counterargument will be that it’s against the right to private property. But I don’t buy that argument. I don’t think the Supreme Court would uphold that argument.

    So the solution involves passing a law banning evictions and rent increases and sending it to the President to sign. The President can send it to the Supreme Court and fast track a decision. Let’s do that. Let’s find out if it’s against the Constitution. If it is, you bring in a constitutional referendum on the right to housing and make that right at least place level with the right to private property, because every argument we present to try and address the housing-homeless crisis comes up against the argument that it is against the right to private property in the Constitution. Now, that right to private property was established in the 1930s at a time when Communism was expanding around the globe. And one of the tenets of communism was that you could not own private property. So, the idea behind it was to prevent Ireland ever having a Communist government. But now it’s being used to prevent Irish people getting their own home, which is absolutely absurd.

    DI: Isn’t it a paradox that a good percentage of the population does not have access to private property because we have to defend the right to private property?

    McV: Yeah, it is a total paradox. The Catholic Church, for example, supports the right to private property, but what is meant by that is that everybody should have access to private property because that’s our little security. That’s their little fallback if things go wrong. But the right to private property has been hijacked by the wealthy to hold on to what they have already acquired. And that was never, never the intention, certainly of the Catholic Church in supporting private property.

    DI: Is there space here for a discussion of morality? Is it morally right to continue pursuing economic policies which, as experience is showing, are causing unnecessary pain and suffering to a growing percentage of the population? How do indicators such as GDP relate to the percentage of homelessness? 

    McV: Firstly, GDP is a very ineffective criterion for the wealth of a country. Every time there’s a car accident, the GDP goes up because the cost of repairing the car and the cost of treating the victims all adds to GDP. And the more serious the car accident, the further GDP goes up. So, GDP is not a reflection of the wellbeing of a society. We can never agree on what is moral. If you own a big house in a nice area with a nice car what is moral is your right to protect those assets. But if you’re homeless on the street, your concept of morality is going to be very, very different. So, I don’t think we’ll ever agree on what is moral. This is a political question. This only way it is going to be solved is politically. We have to ask the question: who benefits from rising rents and rising house prices? The answer is three groups.

    One, the banks. The banks benefit because as house prices go up, they can lend more and more money out as mortgages and make more profit. And if they repossess a house, they will get more money for that house. They have an interest in a house and rent goes up. 

    Second, the big international investment funds. They also have an interest in rents going up. And indeed, many of them are leaving some of their properties empty rather than reducing the rents to what people can afford. 

    Third, the Landlords.

    But who doesn’t benefit? Almost all Irish people don’t benefit from rising house prices and rising rents. For most people it is a huge disadvantage. 

    The second question we have to ask is which side is the government on? The government is on the side of the banks, the big international investment funds, which they attracted in with extraordinary tax concessions, and it’s on the side of landlords. 

    In one episode Simon Coveney brought in a rent cap of four percent. Where did that four percent come from? Simon Coveney wanted to bring in a rent cap in line with inflation, which was hovering around zero at that time. The big international investment funds held a number of meetings with the Minister for Finance and told him that four percent was the minimum they would accept if he wanted them to continue being involved in this country. 

    So four percent it was, and since then the rents have gone up far more than that. In those five years, the rents have potentially gone up by twenty percent. At the same time the HAP payment which you received from the government if you’re on a low income hasn’t gone up in those five years. So now the rents are on average twenty percent higher than they were when the payment was introduced, and lots of people are having to pay top ups to the landlords. Anything between €125 and €200 is what I’m coming across. And you have a single person on social welfare who’s getting €204 or €205 a week, and they have one week in a month where they have to pay €200 to a landlord as a top up because the HAP payment hasn’t increased sufficiently. 

    People on low incomes are just being screwed, screwed by landlords, screwed by investment funds, screwed by banks, and the government is on their side, not on the side of renters or people paying a mortgage who are struggling to try and keep their heads above the water.

    DI: The inability of successive governments in dealing with this issue is more and more being perceived by the public as the result of either State corruption or pure negligence. 

    McV: I wouldn’t call it either of those. We have had conservative governments. Conservative governments are on the side of those who own capital because it’s the capital that develops the economy. So they’re on the side of capital, of the capital owners, which are the banks, and the large investment funds. And they don’t want to do anything which would frighten any of those away, anything which would make Ireland a less attractive place for them to operate. So I think there’s a conservative mindset which I totally disagree with. It’s not a mindset I would put down to malice or corruption or anything like that. I would put it down to what I would consider a very, very mistaken perspective on what’s happening in the country.

    For example, in Germany they have passed a rent freeze for the next five years on rental properties, and in Berlin, they introduced a referendum to take back from the big international investment funds all the apartments and buildings that they had built. Now, it probably won’t pass, but that’s the sort of thinking we need to do. That sort of thinking is totally absent in Ireland.

    The people who make the decisions here are doing very well. They’re on good salaries. They live in nice houses and nice parts of the town. Their children are going to third level education and in a few years time they’ll live in a nice house in a nice part of town. So they have a different perspective from somebody who’s struggling to pay the rent. They don’t understand somebody who is struggling to pay the rent. They say they do, but they don’t. For them the housing problem the problem of people on low incomes struggling to pay rents and mortgages. That’s a problem in a file on their desk. It’s not a personal problem for them, and it’s not a problem anybody they know is facing. 

    So for them it’s more theoretical. For me it’s real. It’s real because I’m meeting them every day and I’m frustrated and I’m angry. I want to see somebody with a passion for dealing with this. I want to see a decision maker who has a passion for dealing with this, who’s angry about what’s happening and who’s prepared to put their neck on the line. That’s what I want to see. I don’t see it at the moment.

    DI: And as we are coming slowly out of a pandemic, what lessons can be drawn in regard to emergency accommodation and homelessness? 

    McV: The pandemic actually had one positive feature for homeless people. They were able to get accommodation because a lot of Airbnbs came back into use as private residential accommodation. And because there was a pandemic, you didn’t have queues of people outside wanting to view them. So landlords were ringing us and saying, You have anybody that needs a place? And they knew we wouldn’t put in somebody who was going to wreck the place. They knew we would support that person. And if difficulties arose, we’d have to step in. So it was a Win-Win for everybody. 

    Now is the time to regulate and demand that Airbnb’s get planning permission and to regulate, inspect and ensure that those planning permission and regulations are enforced. That would bring a lot of Airbnb’s back into private residential properties and would be a big addition in helping the housing crisis. It could be a condition that anybody who wants to advertise their property on one of the sites, like Airbnb, must produce evidence of planning permission. That would get rid of a lot of Airbnbs and bring them back into residential use.

    DI: With tourism opening up again have you noticed any effects on homeless people, who were housed in hotels and hostels during the pandemic, and are now, again having to rely on shelters?

    McV: That’s already happening. The lease is now up on a number of hotels that were taken over as accommodation for homeless people, and they have been returned to the owners to be used as hotels. And it’s a real pity because homeless people love the hotels. You have your own en suite room. And now some of them are getting thrown back into hostile situations, and it’s very depressing for them. So yes, that was a feature of the pandemic that’s now disappearing. And it won’t come back.

    One option is to buy those hotels, buy them back, buy them from the owners and use them as accommodation for families and that, but that’s very expensive. They’re not going to do that. 

    One of my ideas for homeless hostels is that everybody should have their own room. Homeless hostels are often unsafe. Many people get assaulted. People’s belongings get robbed. I’m arguing that every homeless person should have their own room all the time that provides security and safety for their belongings. 

    That’s expensive, and they’re not going to do it. It’s much cheaper to get a house and put four people into a room with bunk beds than to provide four separate spaces for homeless people. So, they’re not going to invest the money in that. But to my mind, what we offer to homeless people sends a message to them, and the message is, this is how society values you. This is what society thinks you’re worth. So when you cram them into rooms and bunk beds, some rooms without even a window in it, they’re getting the message. And that message is very negative. But that is the message that many of our decision makers don’t mind giving to homeless people because that’s the attitude that they’re coming from. This is good enough for them. I heard one person ringing up the free phone number to try and get a bed for the night, and he was offered a bed in a hostel. And he said, I can’t go to that hostel. It’s full of drugs. I don’t use drugs. And the answer I overheard was “beggars can’t be choosers.” And that’s the attitude I think that many people have towards homeless people.

    It is an attitude that has political ramifications. Why else would we have reduced our building of social housing? Whenever the state tries to build social housing, you’re going to have huge objections from all the neighbours. And the local councillors who have to approve of social housing in that area are looking to the next election. And if they are alienating the people in the area where the social housing is going to be built, they are not going to approve that social housing for fear that they will lose out in the next election. So, we have this attitude that anybody in social housing is undesirable. Anybody in social housing is a problem, has a problem and therefore we don’t want to be anywhere near them. And the political system has to go along with that because of our democracy.

    With editorial from Ben Pantrey.

    Featured Image by Gareth Curtis

  • Interview: Belfast on the Twelfth

    In interview with Daniele Idini, photographer Graham Martin reveals he was drawn to cover the Twelfth in Northern Ireland after developing an interest in geopolitical events while living in Brazil. Before his trip North he expected trouble, but encountered a surprisingly welcoming atmosphere, even in hardcore Loyalist areas, although much of the iconography remains disconcerting to any visitor from the South.

    Daniele Idini: Are you a regular visitor to Northern Ireland?

    Graham Martin: No not really, and that’s part of why I wanted to go with a camera. As you know, photography is a great tool for attempting to explain things to others, but also to yourself. It’s a great way of coming to terms with things, understanding things and I, like many in the South am aware of all the stigmas attached to the North. Having been born in the 1980s I do remember going up with my parents as a kid and although already relatively peaceful, there was still a physical border and I can remember passing through the checkpoints, seeing the walls and turrets without fully understanding what it all meant. Since then, any visit I made up there and over the border was for a shopping trip or for touring the Giants Causeway and Antrim coastline. My initial impression crossing the border was how good the quality of the roads were compared to the South, the red letterboxes, or the Union Jack painted on the curbs. Later, when I had a cell phone, there was the network switching over; it always felt slightly surreal. It was only in later years, when I started to orientate my photography more towards photojournalism that I started taking an interest in geopolitical events. Mostly abroad at first (I really began to take photography seriously when I emigrated to live In São Paulo, Brazil from 2012 to 2016), but then, you start to become curious about your own backyard; which you mainly ignore at first, because it always seems like it’s something that you want to get away from. So, for me, this recent trip was the first time I went up looking at it in a new light, and that was because of photography.

    A child adds to the pyre before the Eleventh Night bonfire at Mountview Street estate off the Crumlin Road

    Daniele Idini: In a previous article, which included interviews with a number of influential actors, we reported on rising tensions. We encountered a delicate situation, with a multitude of factors are at play. A combination of a Covid-19-related crisis; the effect of Brexit negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement, which was implemented in the context of the UK being a part of the European Union. What did you expect to happen on the Twelfth this year, and did it transpire?

    Graham Martin: I genuinely thought it could go either way. There was all this talk of it potentially being heated, and I did reach out to some contacts who are originally from the North, and from the Protestant community, to ask advice on where would be interesting for me to go to see the parades and what bonfires would be accessible to outsiders. They gave their advice and warned that it looks like it’s going to be quite a heated Twelfth this year, because of everything that is going on at the moment. The advice I received was generally like “So, you know, keep your distance, keep your accent down, be sharp, keep your wits about you”, that kind of thing. When you get that kind of advice from people who are from there and who know the place, that colours your perspective and perception of things. I still went with an open mind, but like with everything, whenever there’s a lot of discussion, build-up and anticipation, quite often it doesn’t quite end up amounting to much at all, which ended up kind of being the case. There were some contentious bonfires built close to peace walls and talk of the PSNI forcibly removing some, which ultimately they didn’t.

    Smoke rising in the Sandy Row area on July 10th indicates a pyre has been set alight a night early perhaps by Nationalists saboteurs…

    Some of the bonfires were set alight the night before and I think there was one youngster, of maybe fourteen years-of-age, who got badly burned, which is a separate issue, but that was kind of the extent of any major incidents or outbursts and I actually felt warmly welcomed there. Any kind of feeling of apprehension was ultimately my own based on preconceptions. I arrived there with my guard up and found that there was no real need for that. I could walk around freely, could photograph in any neighborhood, could approach and talk to people on the streets. Even on the Shankill, which is notoriously Loyalist, I was taking pictures of people openly and they would want me to send them to them by email.

    Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.

    There was a little bit of bemusement and surprise when they realised that I was from the South, but perhaps they respected that. So I got comments like “fair play to you” . You could say that that general calm I experienced was very much a planned thing, in light of everything in the news and I think there was a marked intention to keep things civil and peaceful.

    Spectators at the Sandy Row bonfire on July 12th night.

    On seeing my camera one guy at the bonfire on Sandy Row came up to me  and said, “don’t go making this look like something it’s not. Nobody’s fighting here. Everybody’s happy. You know, everybody’s peaceful. There’s going to be no violence here. Don’t go back reporting something that it isn’t, like the papers tend to do.” They notice that this big night of the year for them is always marked with negative press, with criticism, and I think there was an intention overall to show people that the Twelfth could pass off peacefully, and there was going to be no tension.

    Orangemen march down the Shankill Road on July 12th.

    Daniele Idini: We can say then that there was an effort to keep the tension to a minimum. Yet, as I see from your pictures, there were some controversial messages and flag burning. What do these provocations, if we can call them this, really mean in this context?

    Graham Martin: Every year the same flags and slogans are burnt on the fires. The Irish tricolour is burnt. You have effigies of Bobby Sands burnt, the gay flag, the Palestinian flag. You have pro-Israel graffiti around on the walls, which is just as provocative. It seems paradoxical that they identify themselves with Israel as a kind of a small nation that has the right to be in that particular territory. It’s just very confusing to see the Tricolor and the Palestine flag up in flames, and yet the people are warmly welcoming. They’re quite civil in person, but at the same time you see graffiti around stating K.A.T. (“Kill All Taigs”). Taigs is what they call Catholic nationalists, the Irish. You’re walking around meeting people, photographing people, and to your left, there’s K.A.T. graffiti, to your right, there’s a big, multi-storey bonfire with your nation’s flag on!

    Bonfire Pyres on July 10th ready for The Eleventh Night celebrations at Sandy Row, Shore Road, Tigers Bay and Donegal Pass.

    They’re demonstrating that they hate you and at the same time, they’re willing to open up and talk to you and shake your hands, so what’s the true feeling there? It’s very jarring. On the other side, when you walk through Catholic neighbourhoods like Ardoyne, not too far from the Shankill, in peace time, although IRA murals still exist, most of the more aggressive ones have been decommissioned. Many now are promoting sports and social community activities, environmental issues, and there are little or no flags. The odd tricolor maybe, but when you cross over onto the Shankill the murals feel more aggressive, more provocative. You’ve got those kind (such as the U.V.F murals and graffiti) up around the Shore Road, that would make you weary to enter into such areas. I walked up to one pyre as it was being built, the one that commenting on the Irish News (see image in grid “Fuck the Irish News”)* and there were a few guys hanging around finalising it’s construction. They basically told me to get the fuck out of there, so not such an open vibe. That’s the thing though; they put up these things, huge pyres with large signs and slogans that are clearly intended to seek attention, but then if you go and try and document it, you’re quickly warned to get the fuck out, so it’s quite challenging .

    A line of PSNI Land Rover Tangis approach passing a conflagration in the Sandy Row area.

    Daniele Idini: I guess it would depend on who is the intended audience for these displays. Some might include the press, but some, might be predominately intended for the community itself, and the aversion toward media is actually part of the message.

    Graham Martin: Essentially, you know, you’re seeing slogans that are saying ‘Kill Catholics’. It’s beyond provocation. They can say it’s their culture and “let us let us have our night”, but there has also been homophobic and other racist graffiti on the Protestant side, denouncing the Black Lives Matter campaign for example. There a lot of topical issues that they are intentionally taking a side on. So this seems to me like a statement and not just aimed at their own community. There are paralells with the global push to a more Populist, right-wing ideology, you’ve seen pre-Brexit with Nigel Farage, and with ethnic nationalism in the U.K.

    Spectator at the Sandy Row bonfire on the Twelfth.

    Daniele Idini: The discontent in Loyalist communities, still focused on the Partition question, now seems to be directed equally towards Westminster. There’s a feeling of betrayal aimed at the likes of Boris Johnson, a Conservative. It has created an identity crisis, wherein there’s a feeling of abandonment from the rest of the United Kingdom; which brings a sense of fragility.

    Graham Martin: It’s been building for years, I suppose. You’re talking about communities there that are really marginalised, under-developed and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see why they would be jumping on that kind of thing, and out of frustration picking on the Black Lives Matter campaign, Climate Change, or adopting the anti-masks / anti-vax campaigning. It’s really masquerading as something else. It’s a kind of rhetoric that it’s normalised that it doesn’t even get questioned anymore. The burning of flags, for example, could be seen as a form of hate crime, yet it’s completely normalised and permitted. Also, the bonfires aren’t regulated at all. There’s nobody in an official capacity to make sure they’re safe. If one falls over, which happens from time to time, it’s the size of a building falling, and on fire, It’s kind of surreal that it’s allowed to proceed as it does.

    Rex Bar, a well-known UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group) meeting place on on the Shankill Road, July 12th.

    Daniele Idini: I guess there is a level of negotiation going on with the authorities to try to keep the tensions to a minimum. To go back to the wider issues, Northern Ireland finds itself for the first time facing the possibility of a United Ireland that is being seen as not too remote of an option, and the result of Brexit’s negotiations is perceived by some as incompatible with the Good Friday agreement. It could be a treacherous path to save a peace treaty.

    Graham Martin: There needs to be good faith and efforts from both sides, and a period where controversies aren’t dug up from the past. The difficult thing for sure is that the Troubles are within living memory for many people still; it’s not ancient history. And it’s going to take a long time for people to forgive and forget. Now it’s the Sea Border that’s causing fresh tension, and the announcement of the Statute of Limitations on investigation into the Bloody Sunday Massacre. Who knows what it will be next. It seems like it’s such a consistently fractious and volatile situation.

    ‘Summer of ’69’ mural on Hopewell Avenue in the Loyalist Shankill Road area, referencing the August 1969 violence which helped spark the Troubles.

    And it’s not about religion, of course, but the symbolism of the churches, and the ephemera surrounding the divided beliefs remains ever present in the murals, tattoos, and the wearing of either the Catholic Celtic or Protestant Rangers football shirts. I think it’s harmful to be carrying that around as a constant reminder of superficial dividing lines between communities. But I don’t think young people are really identifying with their own faith any more, or their religion they’re born into quite as much as they used to. I think there’s a move away from labelling people based on their beliefs. That might sound naively optimistic, but I think that’s going to help things there. People can inform themselves better with the Internet and the global exchange of information, and question ingrained fears or hatred of their neighbours. You’ve seen how such a turnaround can happen in Southern Ireland over the last twenty years, where the power of the Church has waned, and all positives that have come out of that with marriage equality and Repeal the 8th. That is happening in the North also: an easing of hardline traditions which are loaded with sectarianism. And I think it’s going to hopefully have positive knock-on effects in time.

    Graham Martin’s work is available below:

    www.grahammartinphotography.com

    https://www.instagram.com/graham.martin.photo/?hl=en